3D shooters are a genre long and particularly afflicted with 'just so' game design; Half-Life popularized a reload mechanic where you tap a button and wait to have your gun refilled from a pool, and this became a defacto standard for no particular reason over not having reloading, or reloading that actually has gun magazine management, or dozens of other one off systems meant to represent a games ethos. Halo introduced a two-weapon system that, along side a nuanced weapon selection forced you to always accept a trade off, games without nuanced weapon selections copied it wholesale, usually resulting in defacto one weapon system because you really need to carry the M16 at all times to get anything done. Halo Infinite in turn has a sprint button with so little effect that you need a stopwatch to tell if it makes you faster- because Halo doesn't benefit from a sprint mechanic but Shooters Have Sprint. Helldivers is perhaps the only studio published 3D shooter in half a decade if not more where there is no 'just so' game design, from meat and potato mechanics like your gun's recoil being semi-deterministic to help you avoid the regular concern of friendly fire, and your gun being loaded from a small pool of disposable magazines, to fun details like running out of spawns but completing the mission objective still constituting a victory.

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

Forget about the whole narrative of "Death Stranding is unique because no other developer would make a game about just walking across open world and doing deliveries." Anyone who thinks like that don't know a single thing about video games (also somehow doesn't know games like Euro Truck exists). The achievement of this game has nothing to do with how "novel" it is with its core theme or some bullshit.

Death Stranding is great because gameplay mechanics supporting the idea of doing deliveries are thoroughly and meticulously systematized and game-ified that their feedback loops are incredibly addicting, while also buttressing the core conceptual themes of connection, being alone and altruism. Kojima and his team made sure that fetch quests are fun not just because of the instant gratification of achieving grades at the end and people giving you likes, but because of your own planning before making the delivery and making sure you are going through your routes while in full understanding of your current resources. Once you begin to see the larger picture and build network of roads and ziplines, the game now becomes something else, testing you to be as efficient as possible, and rewarding you for being smart.

Kojima has always loved systemic gameplay, but he always understood how to balance it out to make sure it's manageable, localized and most importantly, exploitable. Death Stranding is no exception. The game's focus is in the systemic exploration, but unlike other emergent open world games and "immersive sims," Death Stranding is not about emergent experiences; it's about constantly dangling the carrot of "you can be even more efficient here." And it's damn good at amplifying that gameplay loop. But instead of the pursuit of efficiency diminishing the humanity of the narrative and the world, it makes it stronger because you are creating these "strands" tighter and tighter.

I put 400 hours into this so I'll cut to the chase to let new players know what they're in for.

You'll grind to get new gear to grind to get new gear.
That's the entire game.

The combat and movement are smooth enough that you'll mindlessly keep doing it but sooner or later you'll find out how soul-sucking and vapid this game actually is.

I’d rather have the 366 hours I’ve spent on Warframe to be curtailed off my remaining lifespan than showing on my Steam profile.

Never seen a game with such a disproportionate ratio of potentially cool tools : content where any of them matter for shit.
40+ characters, each having three skills and one ultimate. A robust card customization system that lets you change their attributes directly so the same healer can be played as a burst white mage on a long cooldown, a wide range party buffer or any other combination of strength vs range vs cost vs duration. Sixteen different elements to attach to your weapons, pretty shallow as they are simple colored bullets that will depleted the bad guys’s bars faster or slower, but they are there. Two firearms and one melee weapon. Absolute fuck all to use all of this in.

You suffer through an inane story for weird people really into reading codex entries for an entire solar system worth of missions where enemies ramp up from “easily one shot with a level 3 weapon” to “the same, but maybe you need to slap some cards on it”, and that’s the baseline of everything you’ll face with your level 1000 robot ninja. No dungeons, no raids, no bosses built around the power level of a midgame player who finished the story, let alone a well specced endgame one. Seriously, imagine a moba where you can only play 5v3 against bots in a single lane.

Okay, I’m only being 98% truthful. There’s a daily mission consisting of a random story quest with tacked on multipliers that resembles something a high level character may face; if you are lucky enough that the winner of the lottery is a boss battle, instead of a stealth mission for the fifth consecutive day, the game suddenly turns out pretty fun. To me, it happened exactly once.
There’s also a never-ending(?) arena, which they put in the game shortly before I dropped it,
where you need to beat a floor before the clock ticks 0 to progress and difficulty ramps up very fast, a genuinely good step in the right direction although these characters SCREAM team based synergies and MMO roles, a difficult DPS check may be appreciated but it will make me wonder what’s the point of Frames like Oberon nonetheless. This game has a weird fascination with infinitely scaling horde fights, before the aforementioned mode got in the generally accepted “endgame build showoff” mode was to sit in the basic Survival mission type, which doesn’t end until you physically exit the map, and sit there for LITERAL HOURS with a near immortal Frame like Inaros until enemies strong enough to put a dent on you popped up. Pure insanity.

At least this grind is alleviated by the much celebrated parkour system, it’s cute but it’s quickly solved by cycling through your three main forms of ground movements of jump, slide, and roll until you hit a slope, jump again pointing your crosshair towards the desired height, and activating your air thrusters to glide robo Max Payne style. Complex enough for a good chunk of the playerbase to get stuck at the “mission required to level up your account you can only attempt once a day” that made you high jump in place lol. What I’m saying is, it could’ve been worse, it could’ve been a cover shooter.

If you walk into any Warframe discussion the fanbase will be super fast to point at the very generous free to play formula as a sign of goodwill from the developers, and it’s admittedly very true: a 15 bucks expense turns you into a millionaire who can snatch any vaulted piece of gear that pops up in trade chat for a good while, and you are only a few good deals away to becoming an oil baron. It doesn’t balance the -10000 points lost from the insane Forma system, a craftable item necessary for high level weapon customization that is locked to a 24(real life)h timer. Either you have the foresight to always have your lab churning them out ever since your first day, in preparation for the endgame where you will burn through them, or 200 hours later you’ll bang your head against the wall as the two hours process of taking a new gun from zero to hero just became a five days endeavor.

Sad game for soccer dads who get excited when the post office rolls the number on the electronic billboards, happy to throw their ticket in the trashcan and go home when their turn is up rather than use the opportunity to make something of that wasted time. I don’t like it.

in the commonly mmo-shaped idea of them as endgame hardcore content, technically there’s bosses and every single mission is an instanced dungeon, but they’re still part of the dozing nightmare that is the main quest

"Oh, hello! Don't mind me, I'm just recording my thoughts about Dark Souls 2. But please, stay! You're not a bother, and I promise my completed work will be of interest to you. Now if only I could remember where to start..."

Perhaps you've seen it, maybe in a dream
A murky, forgotten land

Dark Souls 2 does most of what I appreciate from the first game, but it also makes a huge, immediately obvious change to the original's structure. The first Dark Souls up until Anor Londo is almost more impossibly layered diorama than representation of a physical place, full of gestures toward a larger world and details hidden in whatever nooks and crannies could fit them. While not necessarily always to scale, an outside observer could understand all of a little slice of the real Lordran by studying Dark Souls' diorama of it.

But in Dark Souls 2, the diorama's layers have been scattered into dew drops on the joints of a much larger spiderweb that we've fallen into. The geography of the world is continuous but never straightforward or comprehensive. There are two different routes to the same island jail, a dead end for both inlets. Branches flow out cleanly from Majula only to lose coherence as they spiral over top of themselves. Up is down, forward is backward. We cannot comprehend Drangleic because we're trapped in it, flailing to get out.

Without really knowing why
Like a moth drawn to a flame

Flesh in Drangleic is soft and heavy. Even the smallest bodies move with a lumbering, lurching heft and respond to each blow they take with a wet thump. Death is a weighty thud into the floor and stillness thereafter. Even the cursed eventually don't have the strength required to lift themselves back up, instead simply dissolving into nothing.

Flesh in Drangleic is also highly adaptable. The curse makes dramatic changes to your appearance that can be just as easily reversed in an infinite tug of war. Lying in a coffin can reshape your entire physique. Heads and bodies live on separate from each other. People frozen in stone for ages can be thawed, emerging unharmed.

Your past, your future, your very light
None will have meaning and you won't even care

But the mind is not so lucky. Dark Souls 2 reimagines what it means to go hollow. Hollowing is not a sudden flip to the other state of a binary system, it's a slow descent where you're painfully aware of how much you're losing with each step. Characters work tirelessly toward goals even as they forget their motives. The seeming inevitability of it all is terrifying. Even the king, for all his power, could not escape becoming a shell of himself.

For that is your fate
The fate of the cursed

You can fight this of course, while you're able. The variety of weapons and spells offers something for everyone to find and latch onto for safety. Magic is at its most expressive and flexible in the series here, with mountains of sorceries, hexes, miracles, and pyromancies to choose from. Powerstancing is fun, and dual wielding in general just clicks in this game in a way that it never really does in the others.

And if you do fight on, some of the most evocative areas in games await you. Almost every new location makes me stop in my tracks to soak it in when I arrive, even on repeat playthroughs. Drangleic Castle is blanketed by an everlasting thunderstorm not for inscrutable lore reasons, but just because it's a super cool looking backdrop for the Looking Glass Knight fight and the turning point in the story. I love the unpretentious honesty of that.

Long ago, in a walled off land far to the North, a great king built a great kindgom
I believe they called it Drangleic...

I wish Dark Souls 2's attitude that prior games were not sacred carried on into FromSoft's future Souls/Souls-adjacent games. But alas, it was not to be. Dark Souls 2 is the Bad One, the one that screwed up so bad we needed 3 to "fix" the series as the real sequel. The first Dark Souls (itself a heavily divergent follow up to Demon's Souls) is now holy doctrine that must be followed to the letter. We would rather stagnate in the ever more dilapidated ruins of the past until we can't even remember why we came here in the first place than commit to a change that might be wrong.

And could there be a more fitting fate for the series after Dark Souls 2's reception than that?

A layered cocktail that needs some shaking and stirring of its components.

The process of learning a new roguelite is one that, with enough experience, boils down to determining what works with what. This goes doubly for an engine-builder where the composition of the engine is just as important as its execution. Your Isaacs and Gungeons can be finished with poor items and pure skill, but when constructing a deck the parts need to work in harmony.

Peglin wants to have it both ways with its appropriation of Peggle's adaptation of pachinko machines. Whereas Peggle largely removed the element of luck in all but name (the Zen Ball making it most apparent that this is a game of skill), Peglin has done away with the possibility of winning with skill. Everything is down to RNG in one way or another, and the worst part is that Peglin refuses to admit this to the player. In this sense, Peglin is no different from its pachinko machine grandfather, the specific tuning of the latter's pins betraying the simple proposition of getting a ball to its goal.

The crux of the issue is that the player has no way of changing their odds in a meaningful way. Like other engine-builders, you are presented a few random choices for what passive items or balls you want to take. After battle you can upgrade your orbs if you wish. While other engine-builder roguelites like Slay the Spire and Monster Train offer the choice of card for free, Peglin assigns a cost to this and grants shockingly few opportunities to remove balls from the deck. Each shop does let you remove one ball for a fee, but you're going to have to bounce your way over there and thus structure your play in service of those spare few chances.

Building an engine is itself troublesome due to the nature of play. For starters, balls can have their own gravity which is further affected by bouncy pegs, bombs, gravity wells, slime bubbles, and other hazards. On top of this, the ball does not necessarily go to where the pointer is -- Peggle's balls always went straight to the pointer. Coupled with a paltry shot preview, each shot is a skewed gamble, a vague gesture of intent that is rarely realised. The game's confusion status which rapidly rotates your aim might as well be on by default, the end result is nearly identical. Even ignoring the inefficacy of aiming, without a way to meaningfully affect your luck, you can end up with a build that shoots itself in the foot. Whether due to my own (un)luck of the game's internal weighting, nearly every run of mine has been focused on increasing non-critical damage to ludicrous levels. That feels fun, but it is made instantly worthless if my ball hits a crit modifier, my damage cut down tenfold if not more. With a proper ability to aim my shots that would be fine, I would simply aim away from my Achilles' heel, but a refreshing of the board, an errant moving peg, a black hole, any number of possibilities will ensure my ball is heading straight for the one thing I don't want to have happen. That does not feel like I played poorly, it feels like the rug was pulled out from under me.

Most damning of all is that Peglin lacks the aesthetic, dopaminergic je ne sais quoi that makes Peggle so ultra-satisfying. Hitting a peg is a flaccid act without whimsy, the visual feedback a nothingburger of a number, the audio presented as effective white noise. The labouriously slow traversal of the ball makes each shot a tedium, something the developers are clearly aware of as there is a prevalent fast forward button which can knock the speed up to 300%. I am never on the edge of my seat, gnawing my nails hoping my shot was planned correctly, that I will hit that last peg with my final shot, the world holding its breath. I never feel my aptitude increasing. I only feel my time is being wasted, just as Peglin's potential is.