I played this game in full while a dear friend who loved it very much watched. She was the best part of the experience.

I think more people should just play tabletop games or write books or draw pictures instead of making video games with annoying mechanics that obscure the lovely creativity of individuals- individuals with a genuine desire for agency and resources to imagine something complete and total.

You might think "oh, but what I WANT to make is a video game."
I don't believe you! I believe your parents bought you video games as a kid because it entertained you, and you never read books or had a cigarette after a meaningful experience with sex. You haven't played music live or been to a good show on whatever your buddy let you sniff off their index. I think you'd love the rush monitors caving in your ear drums and making eyes at the guy across the bar who came in with a haircut you like and a shirt with your favorite band's logo. I think you'd like the feeling of drawing a brush in one last stroke along a canvas before finishing the best watercolor you've ever spent time on. I think you'd like a beer with you homie Dylan way more than this.

This shit debases you down to your most bare components, when developers are trying to do fucking behaviorism on you to trick you into playing with toys in a specific way. They dress it up in incredible art and genuinely singular themes and stylings, but you're still just some motherfucking sigma male white guy who kills with a sad style using a skill tree and epic weapons and powers or whatever the fuck.

Game made me feel like a rat in a maze, even when I did cool shit. The chaos mechanic is so ridiculous. Treated women very bad. I appreciated how unafraid the story was with you suspending your disbelief, very unconcerned with explaining itself to you.

Sell your computer, buy a bass, move to a dirty city, join a band, start drinking, play poker with a man who is very old, donate all your money to charity, reckon with death, and then die when it is your time.

I played this with a friend who is usually very on edge during any kind of horror media. He fell asleep.

I could stop my review right here, on this tongue and cheek, but also completely sincere remark of my experience, because it hammers my main point of contempt home. That these games are utterly boring and uninteresting.
Even external things like a drinking game with the homie can't upgrade the experience. The game has a fucking catch phrase (used in the drinking game by us) it constantly spouts in desperation for relatability and as a lacklustre faux identity. The instagram motivational content classic you see at the bottom of your local gym bros workout pics "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". The game tries to evoke Nietzsche, but can't even reach Kelly Clarkson.

I know there is a subset of narrow minded people in high up positions who actively want games to just be interactive films, but it seems to me like no matter how many A's these studios have their attempts fail even at B-Movie level. Made up of mostly cutscenens plagued by over done horror clichés and a term coined millenial writing. The second half consisting of tension robbing quick time events, fixed camera angles that learned nothing beyond superficiality from the original resident evils and choices the game just can't help but remind the player of, right after they were made.

That last one is something that I will never get. How unconfident in the player's ability to understand that they just made a choice is the game? Can they expect me to take it serious if it doesn't take me and the limited opinions of interactivity as such and therefore itself serious? Why try to immerse the player with 'agency' if you then immediately televise to them that this is just a game? Just put it in the logs without the pop up notification. At the same time revealing their cards like this let's the player notice whenever their choices actually meant nothing instead of leaving it out or god forbid up to interpretation. The path I choose was to shelve this game.

Before my friend fell asleep he said something that hit the nail on it's head "if this was a film I would have already closed it."
He is right. Games have this excuse. The novelty of interactivity alone carries way to often completely unoriginal and boring stories. How long till this novelty wears off?

To cleanse my soul and to keep my guilt conscious from feeling the need to review and find the right words for the games I actually love, for at least a little longer, I'll have to give credit where its due.
The scene with the narcissistic girl in which she walks the pier alone while talking to her phone. No other character would be able to have scene like this, but her behaviour up untill this point of the game makes it completely believable that she would just talk to her phone camera and half ironically pretend like she is talking to her followers. But i think the interesting part happens at the end of the scene. Idk if this is optional, but she does some verbal introspection about her actions towards the guy she likes and it humanises her. It was the first and only time i said "damn, this wasn't even bad writing" to my friend who was already asleep, but not yet snoring. Mere seconds later she enters a cabin at the end of her walk and gets killed by one of the things. The game humanised her right before killing her off. They robbed the viewer of the 'satisfaction' from seeing the unlikeable character killed and turned my indifference into sympathy and as result the moment almost into horror in the last second. I say almost, because the scene was still goofy af.

Also graphics so good they'll make you say "thats that dude from the netflix show they cancelled after one season." I don't know why netfilx is catching strays now, but i especially don't know how to end rev

sucks the pen as hard as i can like i know how to*

fuck rusty, marry iguazu, kill walter

i'll fucking kill you

“You live up to your name, Raven. You fight like a bird in flight. You may fly higher.. Beyond Rubicon's scorched skies, to chase the freedom we never knew.”

(Warning! This review is full of spoilers! If you have not completed ACVI in its entirety, I highly recommend that you do that before reading the story segment of this review. Which is the most important part of this review I would say lol. Anyways, take care.)

I feel like most of the entries to this series always fell victim to low budgets and rushed dev time to get in on a console launch, and while they do their best with the time and resources they have, you can see a lot of the jank in the past armored cores. Yet, Armored Core VI is an isolated moment in the series where it looks like the From Soft team has been cooking this for a long time and it shows.

This is the most polished Armored Core I have ever experienced, and don’t get that mistaken as me saying it carries no flaws. No, because perfection isn’t real and not an expectation anyone should have. Its polish comes from a few major factors. One factor being its presentation. This shit is cinema. With the amount that's always happening in this game it’s kinda a miracle it runs as good as it does—on pc at least.

For the next factor let's talk about gameplay. Shit man, what do you want me to say about it? Yes, it does not play like the other armored cores, it’s in its own league. But it absolutely carries the same philosophy that's been developing since AC4/For Answer. They changed the movement and camera for the benefit of the player to feel stronger, to feel like an adequate pilot. But with how diverse the customization is, as well as the amount of movement tech that can be discovered and used for your benefit—this shit is armored core! No matter how hard or “anime” they make a boss fight, it won’t change that.

I’m honest to god bored of the conversation on this game whether it took things from the souls series or not. Listen, here’s what I got to say and then we’re moving on. From Soft has been undergoing the process of refining their formula for a very long time, after iteration and iteration. It comes to no surprise that it would be applied to this game as well. I’m sorry they didn’t just decide to unlearn everything they’ve done for the past decade and make another slow janky PS2 game. I know, it’s a tragedy. But you’ll be okay, we’ll all be okay! If you have to do another playthrough of Last Raven again to cope, that’s okay! I understand and still love you the same.

I’ve seen people say that this game is “shallow” or that it “lacks variety” in its parts and I’m starting to lose my mind! Did they steamline the customization a bit for easier accessibility for players new and old? Yes, absolutely. But each part changes the synergy of a build in a lot of ways— whether that’s to do with movement, your energy gauge, how fast you walk, your aim, etc etc. There’s a lot going on here with plenty of downsides and disadvantages alongside upsides and advantages. Everything has a counter, yes even your duel zimmermans. You’re not safe! You can do so much with this game with patience, experimentation, and skill. (A lot of people haven’t messed around with the parry shields and it shows!). People who think that this game leads you to one build are delusional and think their need for instant gratification is the game’s fault instead of some inner conflict of their own. Hey guys, maybe Vampire Survivors is more your speed?

Anyways, on to the last factor. This one was the most surprising to me! Holy shit, they really did it with the story in this one! Now, I won’t even try to argue how this could be From Soft’s best story because that’s redundant. What I could say is, it may definitely be my favorite story in a From Soft game. This shit hits some emotional high ceilings that I haven’t experienced from them since… Maybe Bloodborne? Don’t get me wrong, Armored Core has had some great stories before. Especially AC4/For Answer—but it’s worth noting how AC VI tells their story in an exceptional way that stands out to me. AC VI is an effective character drama unlike any other. LIKE WHAT EVERY MECHA SHOULD STRIVE TO BE!

Each pilot you encounter in this world is a person that’s self absorbed into their own world and ideals, just gleaming with personality. Rubicon is alive with all the pilots behind these factions going to war against each other. Even Balan’s Redguns are great to be around even if admittedly they are mostly for comedic effect (which isn’t even a bad thing to begin with).

Let’s talk about Handler Walter. The relationship between him and 621 continues to fascinate me. As their relationship develops throughout the game it goes beyond expectation. Because it’s not just a simple slave/master dynamic or employer/employee relationship, no— it’s different. There’s a few interpretations to take it. One being the simple man and his hound (working dog). Another being the father/son relationship.Then there’s the more gayer perspective… How I happened to see it was like Frankenstien’s monster if the monster managed to make a friend after all. Straight from the Story trailer, Walter gives 621 a “reason to exist.” by applying his ideals onto 621, as described as “his legacy”. 621—as an augmented human, isn’t viewed as a human with individuality. 621 is mostly seen as a monster, something inhuman towards the other characters (especially because of their generation). It’s not until 621 is granted an identity as Raven—although it’s a stolen identity—it becomes their identity entirely. Even if Walter calls the pilot 621 throughout the whole story, the pilot is able to practice their will to power through the new self as Raven. After the completion of the third level survey, near the destination of the coral convergence, Walter says to Carla that 621 is going to be the key at the end, which is why he isn’t going to pick which jobs to take. Walter puts all his chips on 621, allowing the pilot to go whichever path in hopes it will lead them to their goal from the beginning—the coral.

Again, there’s many ways you can read this. Walter trusts 621 enough to have them make their own decisions but reminds them there’s a job to do, a legacy to fulfill. Through the lens of a father towards their son, it would explain the references to such familiar concepts like “legacy” that are being used by Walter. This lens comes to connect with the theory that Walter was “the boy” that was referenced in a data log written by one of the RBI researchers before committing the act of the fires of ibs. Through the lens of man and dog, it explains the trust and positive affection Walter expresses towards 621 at times. When Snail refers to 621 as a “mutt” it is nothing but vitriol. It’s demeaning, similar to how people call a dog a mutt in a derogatory way. But with Walter, hound is more affirming—yet it’s a complete misunderstanding of what 621 is and can be.

“Walter told me, you know. Looks like you made a friend of your own. But it’s good to make a choice. Sit on the fence, and you make no enemies…or friends.”

Throughout the game, 621 is met with moments of individuality through the ability of making decisions on their own. The Swineburne mission is a prime example of this! You can first off, not ambush him in the first place and make him think you’re just some grunt for a moment. Then within the fight he surrenders and tries to make a deal with you. You can accept and let him go or refuse and continue the fight. What I did on my first playthrough is accept his deal then blasted him with a pilebunker. The coral friend in your head—Ayre then asks if Walter taught you that. Even Swimeburne was shocked that I could do that. I—myself was a little shocked that it worked. 621 is just as much as a functioning person as anyone else. The whole story is mainly them being able to have a friend for god’s sake.

Back to the paths I’ve mentioned earlier. First playthrough you have two paths. (third playthrough you have another, we’ll get to that.). You either side with Walter and help him achieve his friend’s wishes by destroying the coral or you go with your friend’s wishes and bring down the Xylem, preventing the destruction of coral. On my first playthrough I went with Ayre. The Liberator of Rubicon route quite possibly hits the highest emotional peaks for me. Having to fight Carla and Chatty ripped my heart out. I never wanted to fight those two but it really opened up how emotionally engaging these characters really are. Then you have the Snail fight, then “re-educated” Walter. Walter is a broken man at this point. Walter arguably was never a free man, as he felt what he had to do for his friend was part of some legacy, a torch he attempted to pass on to 621. He saw this as the final job, what would free him and 621—through surgery to make the pilot “normal” again. But as stated before, 621 is just as much a human as anyone else—augmented or not. 621 earns their own freedom through free will, making the Raven name mean something to themselves. Walter is capable of seeing Ayre and upon his defeat he accepts that 621 chose for themself, something that Walter hasn’t done for a very long time.

“Look at you, 621. You found a friend.”

Although it isn’t as emotional as the liberator route, the third playthrough was my favorite. Just because it’s the playthrough that got really into the philosophical and scifi aspects of AC VI. As well as me feeling like the liberator ending feels like a set up to Alea Iacta Est. Together, Ayre and 621 discover how humanity and coral can be one. This playthrough gets into the concept of symbiosis and coral release— crossing to the other side, a point of no return (you see where this is going?). 621 decides that they no longer want to be human. Which is fascinating because through character dialogue the game has explored the big question, what is being human? AI like Chatty provides how individual AI can be in this world. Because of how faceless the characters in Armored Core are like, Chatty is almost no different than a human pilot. Their relationship with Carla is real like anything else. What humanity has that AI or Coral doesn’t is bodily anatomy. From birth, our consciousness has always been mediated through bodily experience. Even if we dream, hallucinate, or dissociate, our conception of consciousness is difficult to untangle from flesh. Even if dualists try to separate the mind from the body (lol), they can’t deny that to be utterly in the body is totally Human.

“My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it–and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign–that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine. My body is like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate.”

So, what is 621’s relationship with their body? Obviously, not necessarily a concept that’s fully explored in ACVI for its reasons of narrative style. What I have to work with is the story trailer. 621’s body is like the status of a cocoon wrapped in some form of bandages or tape, punctured with large metal needles, skin looks burned or flayed, the body just been punctured by metal all around them. They’re an older generation so they’ve been in this augmented state for a long time. An important note is in this setting, coral is a major factor for human augmentation. Basically, 621 already has one foot into coral. With full awareness that this is simply a personal interpretation, I believe 621’s relationship with their body is either negative or non-existent. Especially considering how one even pilots their AC to begin with. I always assumed it was a place of consciousness into the AC to be controlled. But there’s plenty of arguments for ACs being designed for full body pilot use. Simply put, I see some AC frames and I just struggle to imagine how you can fit a cockpit in there. But what do I know? For the sake of the conversation, let's just say that the device that’s removed from 621’s body and is implied to have been inserted into the AC in the story trailer is their mind. But what is a mech, if not another, different, transhuman body? I can then understand the desire to no longer be human, to no longer be tied to such a body. In the third playthrough, 621 is battling against what other people in this world want them to be. They desire to go beyond the duality of human and dog (inhuman), so becoming-Coral is a breakage, an escape for 621.

There’s a classic gamer argument about the third (secret? true?) ending, where humanity is fused with Coral. Is it The Right Thing To Do? Is it… ETHICAL? IS it… MORAL??? Guys, which ending do I choose so I’m not a bad person? :( I would argue that the ending goes beyond the common understanding of morality, the Humanist ethics. What is it like to become a new type of consciousness in the world? Which brings us back to individuality. People have been comparing the ending to NGE’s with its human instrumentality thing. Same thing right? No. With NGE, humanity is homogenized into a single consciousness, or something like that. The ultimate loss of individuality is death, the dissipation of life’s intensities into the great undifferentiated flow of the planet, the world without oneself. Human instrumentality is tantamount to death. To “kill” a world’s worth of people… pretty immoral! But human-coral symbiosis isn’t that. The becoming a new form of consciousness is unprecedented under humanist ethics and can’t be accounted for. A single event that can change everyone in an unimaginable way, neither for good or for ill, but with retention of individuality? It goes beyond human, yeah, truly post-human.

Deleuze + Signalis
This ended up more an essay than a review. Also, I’m not going to cite this properly, but all sources are provided at the end. Sorry! ^w^
CW for suicide/death

Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead are a series of Swiss symbolist paintings, painted through five separate versions of the same scene, produced from 1880 to 1886. It depicts someone rowing to/from a crescent-like island, a second figure stands at the stern, statuesque in white, as if marble. The island is large, foreboding, the figures small, miniature-esque, no matter the medium or year. I’m not particularly enamoured by the piece itself, but the idea of the repetitions and transformations of the same concept has always interested me, the impression of the painting untied, always linked to the ways that they are represented to us. In different variations, the disturbances of the water from the prow shows the boat moving towards or away from the island. Especially interesting is the fact that Böcklin edited the first version – updated, perhaps – to keep it in line with an addition he made to the second. The boat and the figures aboard were not an original fixture in the piece, when now it is what the eye focuses on. The stability of the scene is disrupted through this edit, the rowing man and the standing woman, art made into the white foam off a wave of continuity rather than the stagnant permanence imposed in galleries.

One of the main themes which struck me from SIGNALIS is Die Toteninsel, a reference to the origin of the repeated motif– a semi-hypnotic 5 note pattern, crawling as it changes – from Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, which itself was inspired by a black and white reproduction of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead he saw in 1907. The adaptation of this theme by 1000 Eyes is a tad slower, but rather than seeming lethargic, it allows an emphasis on the ephemeral quality of the original’s opening, sometimes lost even in the best of recordings, such as Pletnev’s hastier version, with the Russian National. It’s the primary reason as to why I far prefer Svetlanov’s recording, with the BBC Symphony, even to Rachmaninoff’s own recording; an unusual pacing allows more creative handling and a far more deliberate and lasting progression towards the Dies Irae – one accentuated by viola tremolo, of all things. These first five notes, however, are the prelude to the scene itself, the point at which the music most embodies the painting: a slow drift over a calm surface, the prow of Charon’s boat only lending to a kind of intense, fixated, stillness. The mist-drenched scene is one inscribed with a sense of dread, gentle movement over slight eddies towards something more, something worse.

The music is one of the main draws of any game for me, and the use of semi-acerbic industrial noises in Riot Control made teeth itch in a way few game soundtracks have. This is a staple of the soundtrack, a kind of grating-ness which puts into harsh relief the relation between the character and environment, rooms hostile even within the apparent human basis of construction. Therefore, the pieces which break from this allow a reprieve from anxiety inducing hallways, leaving the repeated use of the 5/8 motif unusually affecting. It again rears its head in Ewige Wiederkunf – another name verging on pun, eternal return – this time on the organ (an easy way to win my heart), where the haunting quintuplet gives way for a rippling layer, itself only making space for almost sporadic piano notes; the placid sea of noise formed by the organ remains, even as it fades out of understanding.

In a critical but also fundamentally historical turn, Deleuze attempts to peel back the layers of domination representation has secured in his genetic-evaluative principle-thesis, Difference and Repetition. This is primarily done through a dissection of identity and how difference and repetition relate. Importantly, and easily misunderstandable, he explores this through the concept of intensive difference – differences that are fundamentally changed through itself. For example, length – 2 centimetres being divisible into two identical lengths – is extensive, whereas temperature – 2 degrees being divided results in one degrees (0-1) being different from the other (1-2) – is intensive. The entire project is, essentially, following this to the logical conclusions, the real escaping the stability afforded by the Platonic forms, replaced with an embroiling sea of immanence.

The centrality of the focus of pure difference in Deleuze’s philosophy is difficult not to understate: difference not between fixed identities but between expressions of pure movement, alteration between undefined points. This process, of differentiation of Ideas as multiplicities of intensive difference, is attempted in the same way that the dy/dx makes visible the Idea of the curve. The relations of Ideas and the Ideas themselves are ungraspable, where nothing is afforded proper stability, leading to an ontology married to becoming. While Ideas are not actual, Deleuze wants to validate their ontological realness, allowing for the virtual, the realm of pure intensive difference, coming about through the interconnectedness of the series, determining the structural properties through bringing into relation a multiplicity of other undetermined elements, without ascribing predicates to a subject. The virtual is thus alternative to the real-possible distinction, allowing an Idea – something that exists entirely in the virtual – to plague us from outside the world of the actual, but within the real. To make something actualised is therefore not to make something new, but instead merely to realise the virtual via creative process, which in turn reciprocally produces change within the virtual itself. We cannot ever grasp the virtual, only ever feel the effects of it, in the same way that trauma is never itself actualised. With multiple expulsions of a single trauma, the repetition is defined via variation along the difference of each substantiation of it, rather than the trauma itself as singular, separable, identity. As Willliams explains, ‘[Each] walk that you take everyday is different each time and significant each time because it involves variations in intensities with respect to earlier and later ones and changing relations with wider series. You change with the walk and with the sensations and their intensities’. Thus, each walk is made unique, but also reciprocally determined by and determines the subject.

The Swiss modernist Gerard Meier wrote a novel of the same title – Toteninsel – a slow, drifting chat between two aging men, the long speeches of one blurring to the thoughts of the other. In the few rare moments of silence from Baur, Bindshädler considers the plight of the crickets, the ‘philharmonic muscle orchestra’, a background layer of the distant noise of the world, inhabiting and inhibiting the walk. The descriptions emphasise the almost alien nature of it – teeth on wings, ears on legs –exaggerating the etchings the world imprints on us, a blade caressing the lines of the body. The book is intensely occupied with art, past walking alongside present in poorly disguised autobiography, riddled in the spiralling structures of sentences. Art exhibits exactly what Meier is so fascinated by in the face of his twilight years: intensities encroaching, interrupting, yet also furnishing a winding wend.

Death in the sphere of the virtual becomes something extended beyond the death in the actual. It is inspired by Freudian and Heideggerian deaths, where the actual death becomes an event our entire lives become determined by, in relation towards – Freud with the death drive, Heidegger with being-towards-death. In either case, life is defined by its cessation. However, Deleuze’s use of death is more forgetfulness, an amnesia of what we were to allow for the birth of what we are, and what we will be. The small deaths dissolve the self, allowing for a constant state of becoming. These can only be understood as virtual deaths, opposed to the final cessation that the actual death provides us. In order to connect anew, we must relinquish the permanence of any particular self or body, a ritual forgetting. Suicide brings an odd dilemma, in the sense that it appears to try and force the actual death and its double to release together, to be entangled and intertwined in one singularity. The deaths of the virtual and the actual death can never resolve, however, so every suicide is ultimately futile; the deaths in the virtual cannot coalesce with the actual, because the actual suicide creates new intensities even as it cancels older ones. Therefore, the actual and the virtual play a dance, always at arm’s length from one another, following each other’s moves – an unequal one, but so too ballet. Each attempt to force the two only releases new intensities, re-interpreted back into the actual.

Why do I bring Deleuze up in a review ostensibly about SIGNALIS? Perhaps to make use of a philosophy degree of rapidly waning usefulness. But also because I believe that SIGNALIS can only be understood in its obscurities. Instead of dismissing the usage of historical artifacts in the game-space as heavy-handed and ill-construed emphases on the loop-like nature, paratextual instances are instead the basis for understanding the relations of characters; each is formed by and generates its own intensities through disruptions, each one reaffirming and in turn determining the virtual. To understand the game as an intertwinement of transcendent characteristics – a repetition of Elster’s love, or an element of over-arching permanence to Ariane’s identity – completely ignores the lengths to which dominance of a singular, identarian approach is undercut.

SIGNALIS can be most thoroughly felt in impressions from the bones and carcasses of others; the safe rooms and puzzles are eerily (and often frustratingly) similar to older Resident Evil games, the abstracized plot to Silent Hill, the setting to Dead Space, the regurgitation of classic music (Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schubert). Most notably and obviously there are textual references to the King in Yellow (Chambers), Die Toteninsel (Böcklin), and The Shore of Oblivion (Bracht). Each one is thrown at the player, obtuse and pernicious. And yet the lacerating effect of this, the shifting perspectives, the jarring cutscenes allows a recognition of the repeated structures undergirding. A thousand bodies cushioning a landing in an elevator shaft, the game is built out of repetition and parallels. The laboured grasping through metal halls is remade in these disruptions – or perhaps remade because of its disruptiveness – allowing for an art which attempts to shake an understanding of it as whole.

To secure this, the physicality of SIGNALIS’ world dissolves, achieved through flickering in and out of art-styles and aesthetics and location – [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]. Ariane repeats in Alina, intensities re-iterating within a realm of un-actualised existence. Falke and Ariane and Alina, Elster and Elster and Elster; multiplicities from which are differentiated the same principle, each one a terrible death, each one a painful birth. Obvious differences only serve to contour the repetition itself, an incision in the whole. Messages sent, repeated, received through four different languages. Each character is exposed as pure becoming, death encountered in the unconscious of life, a complete destabilisation of the singular identity, reconstructed only through the teeth of each other. Repeated virtualities are present in actualisation, the devotion for one and another, the relationship of each serving to shape an undetermined Idea that exists behind all of them, present through mirrored scenes, and yet all reciprocally entangled; self-referentiality which cannot be severed. The stylistic flare – poses imitated in cuts, traced scenes from Ghost in the Shell, a 5/8 motif seeping in, The Isle of the Dead and The Shore of Oblivion – becomes obvious, each serving not to show similarities between the two but differences in the whole via disruption. And what is this all in service of? Simply put, a-normative Queer love (Queer as other, Queer as wrong).

What is actually gained from this reading, however? What new is formed? It can transubstantiate away confusion to a baseline solidity, explain the impenetrability of the text as ‘actually that’s the whole point’ in a twist which can only be seen as self-righteously hipster-esque. My intent is moreso an understanding of the game as Queer (interfering), first and foremost. Blind devotion entwined with constant undercutting of the Actual challenges our pre-held notion of the Real - all that is solid melts into air. Set-dressing here is made to focus this idea; a vapid gesticulation towards authoritarian systems as shorthand for rigid absoluteness is merely a way for the Queer to break through in fleshy contortion. And, as Elster on the Penrose, perceived wholeness melts away in the exposure of the brutal alterity of art. The shredding of textual membranes within SIGNALIS forces the player to confront the indigestible, to re-align oneself, where one cannot understand it merely by grasping the whole, but instead through tracing the relation between repeated elements. Put simply, the deep-rooted un-intelligibility of disparate, colliding slices allows for a prioritisation of foreign intensities, and thus the encounter with a radical Other.

For this is something I have not touched on. The interminable project of all French philosophers rears its head once again; an absence, an unfinished question within Deleuze’s project. The Self/Other and real interaction with alterity is left absent, or open. Interpretations of Deleuze agree that he tends towards a structure for an ethical system: do not ‘explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other too much'. Express your singularity, replay the events that make and unmake you, experiment with others through creative destruction. SIGNALIS should be understood as an attempt of Deleuzian ethics, between the game and the player, between the relations of art, between the self and its repetitions. Each artifact is thus a fracture of art, tearing the smooth skin of our attention, an attempt to facilitate radical divergences, rekindling relations, forcing them more strange, more obscure, more unsettling. An otherness that always introduces new intensity, that disfigures and removes; Ariane to Elster.

Love driven from/by destructive (creative) need, an otherness which rips apart and claws back together. I miss it.


Works Cited
Böcklin, A. (1880). Isle of the Dead: Basel. Oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.
Böcklin, A. (1880). Isle of the Dead: New York. Oil on board. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Böcklin, A. (1883). Isle of the Dead: Third Version. Oil on board. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Böcklin, A. (1886). Isle of the Dead: Fifth Version. Oil on board. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
Barnard, N., Moore, R., & Lace, I. (2010, March 10). Comparative reviews of 10 unidentified performances of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead by three MusicWeb reviewers. Retrieved from MusicWeb International: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Mar10/Isle_of_the_dead_composite.htm
Bracht, E. (1889). The Shore of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Darmstadt.
Bracht, E. (1911). The Shore of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster.
Chambers, R. W. (2017). The King in Yellow. London: Pushkin Press.
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rose-engine. (2022, October 27). SIGNALIS. Humble Games.
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Cicada Sirens, 1000 Eyes , & Schley, T. (2023). SIGNALIS (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK).
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Tchaikovsky, P. I. (1984). Swan lake, ballet suite, Op 20: I: Lake in the Moonlight [Performed by M. Rostropovich & Berlin Philharmoniker,]. Berlin, Germany.
Williams, J. (2013). Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition a Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sometimes people want to be a part of the thing. Particularly, people want to be a part of the the BIG thing. Even MORE specifically, people want to be part of the CURRENT BIG thing. It is some sort of vital ingrained compulsion that those connected to the internet or larger social circles through whatever vector develop innately. A lot of people call this compulsion FOMO, but I think it's worse than that. I think it's a human colonial impulse to want to stake some kind of ownership on the act of being- to say "this moment in time is mine and I exist. No one can take away this moment that everyone experienced and since this moment is at least partially mine, I am important and relevant and wanted. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be on the same page as your friends or whatever, but I'm talking about something else.

Breath of the Wild felt manufactured with the intent to create vapid marvel movie spectacle and crossbreed it with this "of-the-moment" impermanent obsession; it became a hybridized experiencesociety chimera. You can see this in a lot of the marketing for Tears of the Kingdom: tweets asking "are you ready to join all your friends and play more Tears of the Kingdom after a day away?" posted on a monday morning after the game's weekend release run. They do the thing all too-big-to-fail mega titles do where they put up a screengrab of the world map, the sheer amount of game in the game, and say "here we stand, towering over everything else. Look at all these 10/10s. We are beloved. Come be with us in our belovedness."

Which is all not a criticism of the game as much as it is a consequence of what the market generates. They want you to want them, like Fiona Apple wants you to love her on that one song where she starts making sounds like a gibbon. The difference is that Fiona Apple is a particular human being and BotW is a product and Link doesn't make funny gibbon sounds.

This game does initially feel magical and mystical, widescreen and arresting. It then quickly descends into a directionless IRS collection call job, running the world and ripping up its stones for your precious prizes with no real purpose other than the vague sense of seeing the number go up. Which is my main point of criticism for this game: it is an idle game that requires fantastic amounts of input. The gameplay loop is shallow and one dimensional, recycled challenges ad nauseum with nearly no shift in basic theming or even challenge. Everything is about as hard as everything else, the dungeons are footnotes at best, and the story borders on non-existent. None of these things are damning on their own, but combining them with the now ubiquitous presence of mechanic imitators and the virulent breathless exaltation of the game atop every possible "cool thing" list, and the fact that it seems to have earned this status for simply being unobtrusive, inoffensive and obscenely expansive in its vanilla nothingvoid- it makes me start to wonder if a lot of this weird culture was a deliberately induced by nintendo.

Maybe that's nuts. Maybe it's crazy to assume that Nintendo is happily creating a culture of expensive and time-consuming mediocrity to bring in the largest audience, to create some sort of universal group think that makes the property unassailable and infinitely valuable. Maybe that's nuts.

I think Link should be a girl

Car Companion

One aspect that my own discipline on how I go about reflecting on games on here evades is the fact that I'm kind of a moron. As I eluded mildly in my last post, Minimalist, my relationship to my memories and recall is at best mildly amusing, imitating a real 'whose on first' style of trivia prompting from other people. At its worst though, it feels like early onset dementia. For instance earlier today, somebody liked my post on Magic Vigilante this fantastic horizontal shmup that I poured a strong appraisal in. I don't remember writing this, and I almost don't remember playing the game. If you had asked me 'what did you think of Magic Vigilante' 2 days after I played the game, I would tell you 'what? what are you talking about?'. I do like it now that I remember it, I do want to play it again sometime soon, but I didn't recall it at all until that happened. It's possible part of that is due to the fact there's no point in a SHMUP where you can sit and stare at scene and let it imprint. The sequences of what you see on screen in a SHMUP are by design always moving. There's a terminal rush going on that never slows down. This explains certainly why I can remember what the shop looks like in Oblivion (dusty, some barrels around, croaky music, potion flasks littered around everywhere, a soothing tannish brown plastered on all the objects) yet not remember so well a SHMUP, but this explanation is just that: an explanation. At the end of the day my memory is still painfully jagged and sudden. It's a ball of worms, not an epiphany. This is the norm.

I don't really want to continue endlessly the wistfulness about myself here, I think it can start this slightly obnoxious descent into a panicky attitude about life. It can cause readers to want to bow out because you're no longer focused on the experiences of the game but instead yourself. I don't want to come on here and act like a David Foster Wallace short story on everyone's timeline by any means. So, the point of noting this at all is simply to say that when some of us joke we don't remember what we even had for breakfast yesterday, that's not a joke, we really mean it.

Contrast that with the work of the Pagan series and some of my initial insecurity about intelligence and memory start to make sense. Many other people mention that Pagan: Autogeny leaves the vignette formula of the previous 2 games, and clearly follows up on building a more ambitious world that those 2 games set out. Lost niche MMOs to war, girls that may no longer exist, tarot cards, etc. You're clearly meant to be in a hostile world of knowledge you're behind on. But some more behind than others. The first title, Pagan: Technopolis is stated to be good but constrained in comparison to how 'ambitious' this title is. I disagree. Before you even download the game you're hit with a James Joyce quote, you know the modernist icon of synaptic memory. I've read some Joyce, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which in many ways may be my favorite book, but the thing is that's 19 year old Joyce, one where there's some references to a bygone past but still playful within a limit you can understand. The references aren't overwhelming yet. She quotes from a short story collection Dubliners, in which symbolic objects begin to take on a multiplicity of meaning to such an extent it feels intimidating. I've been a 'fraudulant fan' of Joyce for a good while but the reality is I never could get past the first chapter in any of his other books. I just liked the prose.

Opening the first game in your trilogy with a Joyce quote rings these very specific alarm bells to a player in the know: Pay attention! The 'small scope' of that game, duely populated as it is, makes up plenty in its evocative density. A nuclear processing plant that's just an entire section of town. A weird fox cult. A player piano ringing out in particular a classical tune I straight up cant remember (god save me for this, I hummed it drunk once in a moment of pure suffering about 5 months ago now, at my lowest, and yet I can't remember the name). Finally you're building the statue of Venus. Goddess of love. I don't know, its all very 'considered' in my view. Each symbol is trying to evoke something in reference to everything else. There's a sense of relational distance going on that is surprisingly rare for the medium. I'm behind on my mythological history though, so its all lost on me. Point is that Autogeny is not where it first gets symbolically esoteric, it's just a slightly larger version of the same contemplation.

By this game the textuality of it. In the texture of the world had set in, this game series was clever and mysterious. I was having trouble keeping up so I asked a friend to help me out. @BloodMachine. Very helpful she was, though consternated me rightly for feeling lost and helpless through the world. This was over half a year ago now, but it feels like it happened half a decade ago honestly. I beat one of the endings, and a mystical angel beamed down and broke the world. That's not the real ending, you have to go back in there and do something else. So I did, I tried to.

Then it happened. The dreadful memory of a childhood wasted.

I found what I think is a 'bug'. In Pagan: Autogeny one way in which you can fast travel is via a car. Which takes you there automatically. You can look around in the front seat as its railroads you back and forth between that destination point. Somehow the car sequence looped, and just waited around for it to stop. It never did, so I soaked in it, and lay down for a bit with it running. The soothing reverberation and chaotic anxiety of being trapped in a vehicle outside your modus of control. I was transported back to the misery of my childhood, in a miserable professorial little gender I would later denounce...

My family spent years in my youth traveling by car. Hundreds upon thousands of hours spent in this vehicle. I would always try to read, get sickly and lie down. It was boring but soothing in a bleak way. Many peoples childhoods are made up of playground antics, or daycare entertainment. They reflect fondly on how they spent years of their life like this. Mine was spent listening to shitty rock music, on the highway, quietly closing my eyes or imagining some creature a friend chasing me leaping from tree to tree inspired by the energetic scenes in Code Lyoko...my favourite show as a child which I remember shit all about now. My isolated childhood, a majority car. It came back to me. The alienness of it. No wonder I have such a faulty relationship to memory when burbling down american roads in transit is the highlight of my childhood. Keeping myself entertained through the mild car sickness by doing mental math puzzles at 5. Doing sudokus at 10. Daydreaming at 14. Thinking about anime at 19. Arrested asphalt development.

I'm not sure I will ever understand what the Pagan games are trying to tell me. But the sound effects work here in this way of 'uncovering'. When you leave one area into another there's a loud door slam noise. You swear you've heard it somewhere before. It's all satisfying in this way. You swear you've fought this frog boss somewhere before. A game that feels like a representation of something lost. In choice moments it comes into your vision and then goes vague again. You walk at the perfect speed, its all rightly woozy. This is life, ambiguous and unsatisfying in its complexity, and all you can cling onto is these weird noises that remind you of your childhood. Devs might find this relationship to their work cantankerous and anti intellectual. To me though, the sound design is the alpha and omega to this whole resonance. Trap a player in a room and perform the right sounds at them, and see what happens.

The worlds, the noises they make when you interact in certain ways. Sound design is the 'prose' of videogames. The gameplay don't have to be 'perfect'. You don't have to find the 'ending' or 'get it'. Its just there, its just those noises and that world, the complexity of references only get you so far. When all is done, for me at least, its how it sounds that really matters, and this, for me, one of the best sounding worlds out there.

CN: Shower Thought

Bookshelf Companion

"As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. " - Charles Dickens, Bleak House

About a month ago I moved out of my parents house for the first time, and I just want to say I'm very glad I played this first before I moved out because I absolutely would have done what the text here depicts. In Minimalist (2017) you pick everything up to get rid of it, and then you are left with an empty space afterwards.

For a very short time period in 2018 I fell into a few different rabbit holes. I was out as a girl to most of my online friends but still struggling to convince the rest of the irl population I was (depressingly, I still deal with this). Most of those rabbit holes are rather dark, Otakudom, Scientism, interest in reactionary arguments (ie the peterson religiousity trap, skepticism of NB people, etc.). These are all terrible, there was a lot to like about me in this time and I wasn't some horrific bigot but I was a dumb suburban white girl with no political compass. A seemingly more benign interest was in the Minimalist movement, as a lifestyle and aesthetic. A mixture of literal CEO mindset shit like wearing only 1 shirt, and living space decisions like abandoning as much furniture and extraneous shit in your life as you can. I watched stupid ass movies like Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2016) on netflix. Consume a bunch of youtube videos which were an aggregate of Tiny House glorification, lifestyle aesthetic videos that showed bedrooms as if they were hospital chambers, and a touch of 'minimalist philosophy' like thinking Diogenes of Sinope was the only good philosopher because of his dedication to 'minimalism'. To illustrate here's a genuine excerpt of what I said from around the time to my girlfriend in support of how I have a smaller rating scale:

"Like in my opinion I've started realizing that minimalism is more or less how I already operate

I'm all about trying to focus on 'good' art, 'good' people (though that can be a tad more complex), etc.

Minimalism is all about trying to focus on what you like, what's helping you in life

Trying to enjoy that, and then discarding the clutter"

In retrospect this plays right into the insecurity about having 'good mental hygeine'. You see it all the time in reflexive anti consumerist sentiments. Later that same year I would buy a bunch of 'girly clothes' and throw a good 3/4ths of my boy wardrobe in the trash. 'Thats it, I dont need anymore things'. This seemed like a logical step of maturity from understanding how my family threw away all the gamecube game boxes and put it in a giant CD case. They even threw away the gamecube itself because logically, the Wii can run all that stuff now anyway. While I heavily disagree with doing that now, at the time I thought well thats minimalism isnt it, no need to keep plastic trash around the house. The problem is that logical next step would be to throw away every game disc for the playstation or xbox since the computer can technically run it. Why not take this 'digital nomadism' to its logical extreme? Why have any objects at all?

...

Well, it's not like I had some profound realization from playing Minimalist, by this point a half decade later I already recognized how silly and empty it is to have no furniture. Hell, if anything woke me up to it its probably the opening of Cruelty Squad (2021) which depicts just how pathetic and depressed doing that actually is. However, Minimalist did make me recognize that I probably shouldn't just abandon everything. I brought some books I loved from before I left, I haven't touched them at all because I read most of my books online but its nice to know that they are there just in case. More importantly, I had panicked about how many loads of laundry I have to do and that I should trash 3/4ths of it again, but this jolted me from following up on that.

More broadly, Minimalist is short and small, to the point its almost unsatisfying. These 'one room' bitsy games are, by accident or intentionally in direct commentary with the first ever bitsy game released Where did I put it? (2016) by Patrick Hale. In which you explore your small space to find something abstract you lost in messy home. Here, its inverted to be an attempt to lose everything. To lose the ego attached to 'objects' rather than trying to find it. Here's what I think is clever though, there's an emptiness in BOTH texts due to a lack of an ending. In one you find out what you're missing but never find it properly, theres no end credit loop like in other bitsy games. Here, you lose that, but you also lose the ability to prompt any more dialogue boxes since you just got rid of all the objects by interacting with them. In Where did I put it? you can technically loop the dialogue thoughts forever in an infernal mindtrap, here you have the opposite, the infernal mindtrap in not having mental prompts.

Every time you choose to own or release an object from your home, you're making an implicit decision of 'memory' just as much as of identity. Having an object anchored lets you remember what you had, so the allure of digitizing all of these memories into the computer makes sense in theory but the problem is the complexity of it never quite goes away. In 2020 or so I lost every single piece of memory stored on my computer. The reaction images, pictures of discussions I had with my ex, etc. It was devastating. Made worse by the fact I just broke up at the time with her and found out that my old discussions with her in Skype are lost to time. At least my version of skype, I lost everything. In a way this is privileged, because most people have more serious versions of this that are marginalized. Being kicked out suddenly from their home, having an abuser destroy their objects, having to flee in a war. By that reasoning, I've come into this realization of memory in its relationship to objects a little late.

On the literary level, I always knew it was there. Yet never really wanted to accept it personally, because I'm a 'digital girl'. However as both these texts accurately represent there is no real distinction between physical hoarding and digital hoarding in both how objects can arrest you and in how 'freeing' from them is just as solemn. I could just as easy consider these databases a form of memory hoarding. At any moment I could panic about how I 'dont remember anything' and try to frantically categorize what I played, listened to, and watched. I've experienced so much art at 25 that its running that panic of incoherent clutter, and odds are if you're reading this the same is likely true for you to. I'm failing in for instance movie trivia and constantly feeling I need to play catch up and create flash cards, only to then simplify it. One day I'll spend trying to categorize every 3D platformer I've played and want to play, the next I'll say to myself 'ok fuck it, only 3D mario matters now or whatever'. Do you remember everything? Or do you like me often find yourself checking quietly in a tab to make sure you're getting the information right? How good is your recall? What is really forgettable to you and how do you organize the stuff you want to remember?

Anyway, I could waffle about this all day to no fruition, but instead I want to just point out something. In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) you have long voice acted cinematic conversations with the NPCs to move the story along, they are entertaining and endearing. However when you try to speak to them after they tell you what to do, they simply will not talk to you or repeat themselves. They'll tell you basically to leave them alone and go do this. The first time this happens its surprising, because the norm is that you should be able to talk to the dialogue givers for repeat information whenever you want. Similarly to expectations, a person who has played a lot of early JRPGs and point and click games, are going to find the lack of objects you can look at and get dialogue from in Chrono Trigger equally suprising. Yet in both these games it makes sense to do without even though it leaves behind an 'eeriness' for the player. The player being forced to either remember or recognize that they are bothering is more immersive. These 2 games, Minimalist and Where did I put it are not immersive by comparison, they comment on videogame form itself. It's limitations and how those limitations can reflect onto the player. See, this comment response the author left on the page is in my view the real ending.

"Thanks! I wanted the 'end' of the game to be a time to reflect, since there's literally nothing left to do since you've willingly got rid of everything you own. I felt like explicitly stating the character's reasoning to the player would detract from the player coming to their own conclusion. Yours is totally valid, but others might have thought of something else- maybe the character is going off to become a monk? :)"

The real end game is being so distressed that you try to interact with the creator to find a catharsis for the fiction to make sense. Because the 'ending' of the game in the text is so unreal that you cant ever feel certain its really there. After playing enough bitsy games now I've realized not having an ending is just a running bit between these people, probably a satirical response to the 'looping' thats built into the engine when it does end. You'll have to find closure somewhere else. Yet outside of this we should be comfortable with the prospect that we might just be missing the conclusion, or that there never was one in the first place. Not every memory exists to be recalled evenly, and not every game exists to be concluded upon. It's both the great curse and the benefit of gaming as an art form that it brings with it an ambiguity of intentions and expected results. Sometimes its better to just be at peace with it, for instance there was never any 'conclusive' aspect of Gasters in Undertale, yet its there and in many ways that unknown quality makes the game better. At the same time if it doesn't make sense I feel strongly that its fair to think it may be a sly commentary within genre conventions.

In closing, both these games are 'forgettable' except in rare shower excursions, but to lament or feel shame for the mental clutter they bring is silly. It was an experience that happened so theres no use in drowning it just to try and find the top ten list of all games of all time. One should not be so quick to expunge themselves of all consumption or desperately organize it for ego alone. I think its better to just let it all float out there like the junk it is. I'll keep my wardrobe intact, and my word of advice is that you probably should to.

"Actually you can not forget what has happened to you. So, don't trust your memory" - Negativland, This is Not Normal


* I never finished it. I took a 400 course I failed because I was supposed to read through this and couldn't stand it. However, it sounds appropriate enough and that's what matters. Originally I was gonna quote Trainwrecks being mad at somebody in his chat for calling his house empty but I couldn't find the clip. The only reason I mention this is because it reinforces my point about 'mental clutter'. I watched that clip at some point and now I cant fucking find it, I spent 20 minutes trying to do so before giving up. I don't even like the guy I just thought it was funny but whatever, thats life. "So it goes" - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 'Wrong about the events of Dresden ' Five