Note: This article contains major spoilers for Her Story and Telling Lies and minor spoilers for Rashomon.

As a rule, surveillance is invasive. It doesn't feel like it should be because surveillance is observation, and what could be more passive than sitting and watching? Yet, the activity typically involves inserting yourself into a social context you were not invited into. For example, using security cameras to force yourself into a workplace or onto a high street, or corraling subjects into a location like a police station or a security checkpoint. You then extract information that targets haven't chosen to communicate or only surrender under duress. Surveillance hoovers up information as personal as where a person has been, what they're carrying, who they've talked to, what they were saying, and anything else you could log with a recording device. There's a reason that being watched feels like someone's eyes drilling into you.

You're probably reading this from an ostensibly free and democratic country. It is worth considering that it is also probably the case that in your country, the state and private interests routinely record the actions of individuals without their express consent or the decision of the community. Surveillance is almost always thrust upon us. At its extreme, it involves someone interrogating us about the most intimate aspects of our lives or having an undercover spy gather dirt on us. 2015's Her Story and 2019's Telling Lies detail these violations, respectively. Both directed by Sam Barlow, these are also games in which characters try to turn surveillance systems back against the surveiller.

A camera has a definite limit to what it can capture; its dominion stops at the edge of the frame, outside of which it's unable to say anything about the world. Yet, that doesn't mean that when a person or event falls within the frame, we perceive them or it accurately. By obscuring everything beyond its boundary, the camera allows for fiction to be constructed within it. This is neatly summarised in one shot from Telling Lies featuring the character of Max. Max is a camgirl who we first see posing on a plush purple bed flanked by lamps draped in coloured fabric, but this isn't a bedroom. Late in the timeline, Max pulls the camera back from her extravagant furniture to reveal it's a set constructed against one wall of a basement. Outside that fantasy of soft violet, there is a blinding white, undecorated reality. But Max doesn't need to worry about her viewers recoiling from the unsexy truth because she knows where the frame ends. She only needs to worry about what they see inside it.

However, once we've seen outside the frame, we can't recognise anything within it the same. When we subsequently watch scenes of Max sitting on her sheets, sweet-talking customers, we cannot view her as a woman making an honest, romantic connection in her bedroom; we see an actor on a set. To reframe is to recontextualise, and none of Barlow's characters embodies that idea better than Her Story's Hannah. Max is intoxicating a bunch of thirsty guys on the internet, but Hannah is going to do something more dangerous with the camera. She's going to deceive law enforcement.

Hannah Smith arrives at a police station in Portsmouth on 18th June 1994 to report her husband, Simon Smith, missing. Soon, it will transpire that Simon is dead and Hannah is the prime suspect in his murder. Beyond that, there's no linear or conclusive plot for Her Story because the game does not have a fixed order in which its scenes occur or a definitive canon. We play a shadow of a protagonist who has elbowed their way into a database of police interviews with Hannah. At least, it always looks like Hannah is the one in the interviews. Our only method of navigating the database is a search engine. On each search, we receive the first five files whose transcript contains the word we've typed into the text field. So, if I type in "parents", I get five videos in which the word "parents" is spoken. We progress by listening to testimony and learning names, places, and other proper nouns which pertain to the investigation, then seeking them out in the files.

Although we don't experience Her Story in chronological order, over its run, Hannah does relay a narrative you can fit to a timeline. After initially protesting her innocence, she describes an identical twin sister called Eve, who may be filling in for her in some interviews. According to her or them, when the sisters were born, a midwife named Florence delivered them. Florence lived in the house opposite Hannah's parents and had seen her husband leave for war. The couple agreed to have a child on his return, but they would never get the chance because he died in action. When Hannah's mother gave birth, it was to twins, but one of them appeared to be stillborn. Florence quickly removed the second child, Eve, leaving their Mum with only Hannah. Unbeknownst to her mother, Eve was still alive.

Florence raised Eve as her own but passed on during her adopted daughter's childhood. Hannah took Eve into her household, where the twins began living a double life under Hannah's identity, a charade they'd keep up well into adulthood without their parents catching on. While one went out into the world, the other would hide in the attic. In their antics, they became obsessed with the story of Rapunzel: the fairy tale in which the blonde princess is trapped in a tower but lets down a rope of her hair for a fair knight to climb. Then, the spiteful Mother Godel cuts off Rapunzel's hair, and the knight plunges to his death.

Eventually, Hannah fell in love with Simon, a glazier who specialises in mirrors. They moved into his family's house, separating the sisters for the first time, which was emotionally agonising for Eve. When Simon and Hannah tried for a baby, Hannah miscarried, and a doctor declared her infertile. Meanwhile, Eve started her own life, disguising herself with a blonde wig, and Simon found her singing at a local bar. The two began an affair, leading to Eve becoming pregnant with a girl she'd later name Sarah. With one twin pregnant and the other apparently unable to conceive, they could no longer pass for each other. Yet, Hannah remained unaware of the affair. The two came clean to Simon, who appeared unconcerned with the contrived tryst he'd found himself in.

When Eve revealed the affair to Hannah, the two had a falling out and Eve drove to Glasgow to get away from the couple. Always the worse motorist of the two, Eve got into a minor car accident in the city, but under the Hannah persona. On Hannah and Simon's eleventh anniversary, Hannah approached Simon, using Eve's wig to disguise herself as her sister. Thinking she was Eve, Simon professed his love to her, gifting her a mirror. Hannah smashed the mirror in a fit of rage and waved a shard of it about in an attempt to scare Simon off. Instead, she slit his throat. When Eve returned to the house, the two agreed to cover up the crime. Hannah went to the police, saying that she didn't know the whereabouts of her husband, with an alibi for his killing: she was in Glasgow at the time of his disappearance. Eve and Hannah believed this excuse, along with Hannah's cooperativeness with the investigation, would exonerate her. At least, that's her story.

Because players uncover footage through word association, each experiences a unique zig-zag through the database. A traditional film can be edited by a creator conscious of pacing and the optimal distribution of information. In Her Story, that role is taken on by your search engine in all its pseudo-random fallibility. The rhythm and novelty of the game suffer for it. I'd sometimes find myself so close to a revelation I could smell it, only to have the excitement extinguished by a bucket of videos re-confirming information I already knew.

Despite its shortcomings, Her Story's search system empowers it to do something no other game did before. It combines its navigation tools with its single-camera cinematography to pull off Max's recontextualisation trick multiple times. It's common for popular fiction to include twists and turns. Still, most storytelling spends more time adding onto what it's already told us than changing our perspective on what we've discovered. When absorbing a story, we expect A to happen, then B, then C, and so on. But Hannah's history is amorphous. We learn of new events, but A is liable not to stay A; it turns into B, and then C, and then D before our very eyes.

For example, near the start of the game, I learned that the police found blonde, synthetic hairs at the murder scene. That evidence suggested to me that Hannah tried to disguise herself when she killed Simon. But then I learned about the existence of Helen, a blonde bartender Simon was infatuated with. Suddenly, I thought there was a strong possibility that she was the culprit, not Hannah. Then, I decided that Helen was a cover identity for Eve, who had been wearing a blonde wig. This pegged Eve as the perpetrator until I heard from her that Hannah was wearing her wig at the time of Simon's murder.

I'll give you another example. Upon seeing the first clip, I did not know whether or not Hannah offed her husband. Then, I learned about her jealousy of Helen and heard about an incident in her childhood in which she held Eve's head underwater. In one excerpt from an interview, Hannah sings a song about one sister killing another, and suddenly, it seemed more likely that I was staring down a murderer. Then, I discovered that it was actually Eve singing the song, that Eve was envious of Hannah's relationship with Simon, and that their parents died of fungus poisoning when Eve was in the house, even though her father was a mushroom expert. After that, it felt much more likely that Eve was the villain, before my perspective switched once more upon Eve telling the camera that Hannah swung the blade that killed her husband.

You can access scenes late in the game's chronology from the start, but you can't spoil it as we'd conventionally think of spoiling. Because, at the beginning of the game, we don't have the necessary context to interpret those final scenes. Her Story makes certainty shortlived, and Rashomon-style eschews the idea of a fixed history. That might seem like an act it can't keep up forever because, eventually, a player has to have viewed all of the clips and composed the entire timeline. Yet, while you can watch more videos to build a fuller picture of Hannah's version of events, that same process can erode trust in Hannah.

At times, she appears to slip up and forget she's meant to have a sister before correcting herself. And Hannah's account is incredibly far-fetched. Eve's adoptive mother managed to kidnap a child from the hospital and raise it as her own without anyone stepping in. She happened to bring up Eve in the house opposite her identical twin. Then Eve and Hannah lived a double life so successfully that Hannah's parents didn't notice that their daughter kept swapping out for a clone or that a girl was living in their attic for years. The twins also manage to live out the plot of Rapunzel after being obsessed with it as children: The dark-haired woman takes the light-haired woman's locks and murders the man smitten with her. Eve(?) ends her last interview by labelling everything she told the police as "just stories". Her ostensible confessions feel like a continuation of her childhood obsession with fairy tales.

But if this story is a fabrication, is that deliberate on Hannah's part, or does she have an alternate personality? Was there ever an Eve, and if so, did Hannah drown her? And if Hannah's story is inaccurate, then what bits of it? And what about the evidence for Hannah's version of events? Simon appeared to be murdered when "Eve" was in Glasgow. There was another set of prints besides Hannah's at the scene. We can see Eve has a tattoo Hannah doesn't. And there are counterarguments to these points and counterarguments to those counterarguments, and so on. However, there is no version of events in which Hannah doesn't manipulate the viewer and create significant confusion about the case.

One constant in the game is a reflection of the viewer in the in-world PC monitor. Their image becomes more pronounced in the moments after they dig up vital information. The game is wall-to-wall mirror metaphors, to the point it gets patronising. Hannah calls Eve her "reflection", her husband is a mirror-maker killed with a shard of one of his creations, Hannah and Eve's names are palindromes, the time-waster on the computer is called "Mirror Game", etc.

These references foreshadow the viewer character being ripped from the drama on screen: exhaust the database, and you'll find out that you've been playing a present-day Sarah, Eve's (or Hannah's) daughter. But the mention of mirrors also speaks to the interaction between you and the videos. There is not an airtight wall between the audience and the footage. After all, people perform surveillance so that anyone accessing the collected data can assimilate it into their understanding of the world. Some part of the data becomes part of you. But then we also process future data based on what data we've already read, and that material we've read can be unreliable. A general lack of context or outright duplicity on Hannah's part warps how we see the other clips in the database, potentially leading to a cascade of misunderstandings.

The term "video evidence" has become synonymous with incontrovertible proof in legal cases. It's the detail inherent in the medium that makes it ubiquitous in modern surveillance. In Her Story, the police attempt to drag a suspect's marriage, sex life, work, travel, home, family and childhood kicking and screaming in front of the probing gaze of the all-seeing camera. But still, Her Story's filthy CRT remains an imperfect mirror of reality. Literally and via the game's graphics, it shows that we project onto film as much as we study from it. And it's all because of where the monitor ends.

If we could see into Hannah and Eve's attic as they grew up or the Smith home at the time of the murder, there'd be no open questions, but the whole database is a camera pointed at a woman in one of two interview rooms. That leaves the rest of the world as a big, fat question mark, and that's why Her Story works as a mystery game. This myopia is also what allows Hannah to tell such colourful stories about her life. We have very little world to check them against. The game does not preclude the possibility of more expansive surveillance or of attaining objectively accurate information from footage. What it does is suggest both that the video evidence the state leverages against a person can be misleading and also that the limitations of surveillance might be limitations of the state. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Spiritfarer.

Video games are no strangers to death. In fact, death might rear its morbid head here more than in any other medium. Because games are for people, agents in gameplay systems get anthropomorphised. When those agents are removed from the play space, it's intuitive to narratively contextualise it as them dying because death is when people are removed from the world. And many video games are action empowerment fantasies. To decide whether someone lives or dies is the most control you can have over them: the ultimate empowerment fantasy. That control applies not just to enemies but also to the helpless we may be meant to save. There is nothing wrong with empowerment fantasies, but two of the purposes that art serves are to depict the real world and guide us in our lives. And you can't always describe death as a fate we can evade or pull innocents from the path of because eventually, we must all meet it head-on.

In many historical mythologies, the dead were accompanied to the afterlife by escorts: "Psychopomps". Think Anubis in Ancient Egypt or Charon for the Greeks. That these characters recur so frequently in unconnected religions reflects a common desire for company in our final moments. In Thunder Lotus's 2020 game Spiritfairer, Charon hangs up his robe and lays down his paddle. He bequeaths his ship to our fresh-faced protagonist, Stella. Stella perceives spirits ready to make their journey to the end as animals, usually with some human features, and each arrives with a different personality and life story.

There's Summer the snake, the former fossil fuel suit turned spiritualist who reveres inner peace and self-reflection. There's the big-hearted Atul who loves nothing better in the world than feeding his friends and lending them a webbed hand. There's the erudite owl Gustav who goes weak at the knees appreciating a fine piece of art, and many more. Stella wants to be more than a ferryman to these deceased. She intends to house these passengers, feed them, listen to them, and help them resolve their unfinished business before delivering them to an ambiguous future behind "the Everdoor". You pursue these ambitions through fetch quests, crafting, resource gathering, or now and then, just giving people space. In co-op mode, the accompanying player can become Daffodil, the fluffy feline who sticks at Stella's side through thick and thin.

While Spiritfairer costumes itself as fantasy, there's nothing fictional about the type of care it depicts. Stella's mothering of her crew is something happening on hospital wards and in hospice beds in the real world every day. There's a hallucinatory sequence in the game's back half where we learn Stella works on one such ward, but Spiritfairer doesn't need that scene. If a metaphor lands, you don't have to explain it. And though Thunder Lotus romanticises its subject matter, their work's emotional component is solidly realised.

Spiritfairer can facilitate altruism where many other systemically-driven games can't because it dares to not make the player character the centre of the universe. Giving to others is definitionally providing them objects or services when you won't receive anything of equal value in return. However, games that have us step into a hero's shoes are also often games that try to ply us with rewards, especially material rewards, equivalent to the work we perform. Defeat the crazed PMC leader and steal his epic SMG, save the town and have a local cross your palm with gold. Even the easygoing Animal Crossing: New Horizons makes donating presents impossible because every time you hand a fuzzy sweater or an antique table to an adorable villager, they pass something back. That's not gifting, that's trading, and there are totally different social connotations between gifting and trading. The gap between the two is the gap between kindness and business.

Honestly, this retributive dynamic pops up all over media. A lot of action has traditionally promised its protagonist "save the world, get the girl," or else, the main character has a good chance of earning money or being elevated to legend in their community by performing some valorous deed. Romances often reward the main character with their dream partner if they commit to brave acts that prove the extent of their love. Spiritfairer's universe is not so reciprocal.

When you organise a meeting between Astrid and her ex, you do not receive 500XP. When you discover Jackie's favourite food, he does not pay for you to set up a zipline on your ship. In this title, care is not an activity that helps you achieve your objective; it is your objective. In this hobby, we're often used to wearing personal attributes like a level and stats that we expect other characters to help us upgrade. Stella doesn't have those metrics embedded in her. Nor does she own an extensive equipment set. So, the designers don't have to think about bumping up those figures and dropping loot every time she finishes a job.

Some quests reward resources, but many don't, especially those you complete for your passengers. If you can keep a soul on board the ship content, they'll occasionally throw you a token of their appreciation. However, they're not doing it in direct response to you completing any one goal, so it doesn't come across as transactional. When the animals do give you a substantial reward, they don't opt for the coldly utilitarian but something sentimental or experiential. Maybe it's a crayon drawing or a lesson in woodworking.

One gentle touch that vividly realises your connections to the crew is the hugging. If you've not cuddled one of your passengers in a while, you can walk up to them, press a button to hold them, and have their "happiness" variable increase. It's not difficult to hug someone, but that's not the point. The verb is written into the game because it can bring you close to the characters and make them feel wanted, challenge be damned. Spiritfairer also shows that it thinks highly of these embraces by giving every character a distinct and detailed hug animation, a choice which further helps pin down how they vibe with other people. The jovial Atul wraps his arms around us in a bear hug while the excitable child Stanley throws himself at our torso. Alice is loving but needs plenty of support and leans on us as she holds us. Daria, who lives in a hallucinatory demi-dream, sinks into our grasp. Honestly, I could write one of these for every character.

Spiritfairer also shifts our gaze from nourishing meals and warm beds to expand our definition of care. We typically take "care" to entail giving an ear to peoples' pain and putting food on their plate, and as discussed, you do do that. We also take care of livestock and tend gardens which mirrors Stella's nurturing of her tenants. But there's something more than that going on. Manufactured goods are indispensable to our mission; a character might request glass ornaments in their quarters, or you may need alloys to expand the land on which they can live. Therefore, forging and glassworking become as important to giving someone a home as cooking them stew or proffering life advice. Even when you're preparing meals, you need to farm for ingredients. To construct buildings, including bedrooms, you need to mine minerals and chop wood. The game opines that a carer can be a sympathetic friend or a cook, but they could also be a lumberjack, a blacksmith, or an angler.

With its reverence for manual labour and practical products, you might expect Spiritfairer to fall into the trap of dismissing service workers, artists, emotional labourers, and people unable to work. Nothing could be further from the case. Not only does it show Stella's companionship to be integral to the wellbeing of the dying, but lodgers like the elderly Beverly or the hospitalised Daria can't contribute labour. Yet, the game considers them no less worthy of love. Then you have non-manual workers such as the teacher Elena or the critic Gustav whose jobs it treats as just as legitimate as anyone else's. Gustav, it also notes, is productive in his writings and respectable in that he has a profound appreciation for art: creation by other people.

Unfortunately, the game's conceptions of labour and its consequences get it into trouble in a couple of other ways. Spiritfairer calculates the happiness of a passenger by adding up a list of negative and positive mood modifiers. A negative modifier might be having been bullied by a neighbour, while a positive modifier could be having just eaten their favourite food. What's atypical about this system is that you won't always be able to control what modifiers are applied to a character. Sometimes a spirit receives a haircut to their joy because of a messy breakup or the loud banging of another passenger, and there's nothing you can do to change that.

Most games let you determine everything about a character under your supervision because control means empowerment. However, an independent person needs their own highs and lows that aren't all about you. In the real world, sometimes you can't cheer up a friend, no matter how much you want to, and Spiritfairer internalises that. Where this system comes off the rails is it doesn't lend its modifiers the correct weights for the life events they embody. A character might suffer a tragic loss and tell you they're torn apart inside, but you can hug them, throw them some popcorn, and their stat sheet will report they're walking on cloud nine. You'd also think these characters' imminent demises might bug them a little more than they do. Their impending deaths don't get a mood modifier associated with them at all. It's not that you can't remain content while comprehending your own mortality, but it should realistically be a bummer for some of the characters some of the time, right?

There's a juxtaposing oversight in the mechanics. As you set out in your career as a psychopomp, you supervise a small tribe that request goods you can cobble together with few materials. So, you're spending a little time gathering and processing resources every day and plenty of time on completing characters' mainline quests, thereby advancing their narrative arcs and indulging in authentic interactions with them. But as the game sails ahead, your ship takes on more wayward souls, and your projects require materials that take more steps to manufacture.

In the early days, you might fell some trees, cut the wood from them into planks, and then hammer those planks into a home. But deep into the game, you might have the shipwright slap a new prow on your vessel so you can sail to an island with a new type of ore. Then, you mine that ore, smelt it into ingots, and press those ingots into sheet metal, and that sheet could easily be one of three components you need to craft a single building or decoration. You're spending less time by any one character's side and more time guiding other passengers or off in the foundry smashing rocks. It's not a de facto flaw to have your characters become distanced like this. The problem is that this piece of media is about empathy but seems oblivious to the impacts of neglecting a relationship. Your animals will be ecstatic, even if you spend all day working yourself to the bone, then show up in the evening to hastily toss them a dinner and make brief physical contact.

By the time you're done with a spirit, you'll be able to recite the same two or three prebaked lines they throw out every time you extend them a meal or a hug. A friend can temporarily fade into a box-ticking exercise, merging into the ship's machinery. Without a more personal link to your dependents, feeding coal into a furnace becomes only aesthetically distinguishable from feeding pizza to an eagle.

It's a shame because the setting and the story quests are otherwise humanising and poignant. Your passengers have left their life on land but have not yet docked with death, and similarly, you spend extensive periods sailing the ocean, unmoored between origin and destination. This sojourn before passing also provides characters with the ideal interim in which to study their life. The ritual of rowing characters to the Everdoor, in particular, aids retrospection.

The home stretches for the characters are analogous to funerals, but in Spiritfairer, it's the dying who give the eulogy. They are in a unique and knowledgeable position: it's only after they have lived all their life that they or anyone else can summarise it and extract lessons from it as a whole. The glossy waters beneath the Everdoor provide a literal reflection to match the metaphysical one, and Stella hugs every voyager before they pass through the portal. This final embrace not only reinforces Stella's caring nature but shows how people can find a human connection in dying and being supported in that transition.

After an animal leaves, a constellation forms in the stars representing them, and we usually get a platforming section that extends up into the night sky. On those platforms, we see murals snatched from key moments in their biography. There's an insinuation that in passing their memories to Stella (whose name and hat shape represent the stars), they have found a form of immortality. I developed a couple of rituals of my own out of respect for crew members. If I knew their favourite meals, I'd feed them to them before I said goodbye. I'd procrastinate before taking them to the Everdoor because I didn't want to lose them.

You might think that with fifteen different spirits to comfort and transport that you'd begin to see patterns develop in their stories. Yet, no two of them lived the same life, so no two of them die the same. The variance between the characters is a reminder that death does not discriminate; it comes for the single, the partnered, the compassionate, the selfish, the manual labourer, the thinker. It comes for us all. It also allows the game to communicate a range of lessons about death and make plenty of excruciatingly accurate observations about peoples' final days.

The demise of Gwen was the first, and for me, one of the saddest. She shows you the ropes of play, like seafaring and weaving. So, when she passed away, I kept seeing her in the starting islands she acquainted me with, the loom she taught me how to craft with, and plenty of other places. The game is right: people who've died seep into places and objects. Gwen's exit feels like an appropriately wounding loss, given that she was an old friend of Stella.

Then there's Atul, another fixture of Stella's family life who lights up any room he enters with his hearty laugh and gregarious demeanour. Atul takes a nice long stay in your lodgings, and then one night, spontaneously disappears, leaving behind the same flower all the other characters do when they die. His story gets at that how, when you become used to someone's presence, it feels like they'll be around forever, and when they do leave, it doesn't seem real. Atul's journey also feels deliberately inconclusive and drives home the point that sometimes there's no indication that a person is going to die, nor does everyone receive the dignity of a burial. We don't always get the chance to say goodbye because, all too often, people just drift off.

As Stanley is a dying child, his subplot could feel emotionally manipulative. However, the game avoids any cheapness by making the psychology of a child factor into how he processes death. As you paddle him to the Everdoor, there are moments where he thinks his end must be his fault, regrets the times he acted out, and strains to tell Stella that he attempted to behave. It's heartbreaking because there's no way you could make him fully understand that his death is not a punishment for his actions and that he was a wonderful person. It could be difficult enough for an adult to grasp these concepts, but Stanley is a kid; he doesn't have the mental toolkit for this. That makes him all the more amazing when he finds a silver lining at the last second.

Bruce and Mickey arrive late in the day when you might assume you can overcome any tragedy, no matter how sorrowful, but these two challenge you in a new way. The duo are hard-nosed thieves, which the script sometimes spins with a corny West Side Story cadence, and it is fun to tag along for their last big score, but they are genuinely horrible too. They steal from whoever they want, threaten us if we don't bring them meals to their taste, bark orders, and bully every other passenger on the ship, dragging down their mood. With the game's bittersweet optimism, you might assume that these lifelong criminals will see the error of their ways and reform before they travel to the Everdoor, but when the time comes, they don't indicate one shred of remorse.

Being assholes is all Bruce and Mickey have ever known; it's how they've survived. They don't believe in change, and you're not going to undo a lifetime of selfishness in the scant days before they expire. I've never encountered a test like this in a video game before: we are asked to care for people who don't and won't care for anyone else. While I don't think Bruce and Mickey's comfort should come at the expense of other visitors, in the end, I did feel that they deserved a proper send-off.

While those thieves were unable to get on the straight and narrow, Summer has the opposite problem. She made her income ransacking the Earth and pumping its veins full of poison. She tries to atone for those sins and reconcile with the demons of her past, but she can't. Some people go to their graves unable to make peace with who they've been in life. Summer is one of them.

The elderly Alice also falls apart at the eleventh hour. It's common for characters to request services or a change of accommodation from us, so when Alice started doing that, it didn't ring alarm bells for me. It's also not rare for characters to enter a slump from which they later emerge. Alice was my first contact with a spirit who didn't. Initially, she asked me to move her bedroom to the bottom floor so it was easier for her to get about; then she started losing her memory; then she needed me to hold her arm as we went to the deck and back every day. She never recovered from that. Her mind and body give out on her, and that's how she goes because that's how a lot of people go. Almost all the main characters in the game end up dead, but Alice is the only one who physically feels like she's dying.

Two of Spiritfairer's most closely-held beliefs about death are that there's not necessarily justice in it and that not everyone accepts it. Sometimes characters are able to tie up their loose ends before leaving, like Gwen, who squares away her estate, or Buck, who earns the title of Master Adventurer at Crow's End Inc. You can also get a Beverly, who has experienced both pain and pleasure in her life but doesn't have a conflict to be resolved. Yet, for every contented consciousness, there's an Atul, Summer, Stanley, or Alice. Not only can you not always brighten a friend's mood, but you can't always make sure the world does right by them either.

Spiritfairer gets grim, and games that want to drag you into the pits of despair frequently make their worlds as hostile as possible. Yet, when characters are subject to constant attacks, they do not have the safety net to be emotionally vulnerable. It's in that emotional vulnerability that people can spill their guts and come face to face with their darkest feelings. In Spiritfairer, there's at least as much happiness to be found as there is anguish. Still, by providing emotional nourishment, Stella gives people a supportive environment in which to unravel their pain and in which to have someone recognise and soothe it.

Contrary to what you might expect, it's a more solemn game for having a more forgiving world. And while your crew don't always get what they deserve, they do all get seen. When we find them on land, they are a bundle of robes with a pair of eyes peeking out. Yet, when we bring them aboard Stella's ship, they take on a unique and lovingly crafted character design that acknowledges who they are inside, from the curious owl to the stubborn bull. Even if they can disappear into the ship's gears and pistons along the way, every passenger gets two arms around them in the end. I hope that when my time comes, I have someone like Stella around to give me that love. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

We tend to be more attached to the things we create rather than the things we're given. They say you enjoy the meal you prepare yourself over the one you're served. People who practice art, woodwork, or gardening see value in the objects they brought to life with their own two hands. Our affinity for the products of our work can explain the recent movement of games which emphasise player-created objectives and items over those simply assigned to the user.

Crafting systems exploded in popularity among developers in the 2010s and star in varied and acclaimed gameplay experiences like The Witcher 3, Far Cry 5, Subnautica, and ARK: Survival Evolved. And some games empower us to construct the mechanisms or buildings we'd like to see in the world, such as Rust or Besiege. Entertainment software is also increasingly enabling players to pick their goals, from the survival and engineering games above to titles like Outer Wilds, Stardew Valley, Dark Souls, and plenty of others.

But you may notice patterns in how the above games incorporate player creation. We can divide the titles into two camps:

1. Those that tightly restrict what the player gets to make or set. These are usually architected for a general audience (e.g. The Witcher or Far Cry).
2. Games that allow the player a lot of freedom but are inscrutable to plenty of audiences because they are ruthlessly demanding (e.g. Rust or Outer Wilds).

Video game systems tend to be highly complex, especially in multi-faceted genres like survival, MMORPGs, and action-adventures. If the player is to fix their own goals and manufacture their own inventory, they need to take on part of the designer's traditional role. That entails understanding those complex systems, which comes with a high cognitive load. Developers of such titles can avoid overwhelming the player with that complexity by allocating them items and goals, as opposed to forcing the player to work out what resources and objectives it would be enjoyable and efficacious to pursue.

Before 2017, The Legend of Zelda series was the picture of designer-directed play. It was sherpaing players up a linear trail of quests, often dragging them into dungeons where carefully placed prize boxes decided which goodies they'd next get their paws on. The landmark progress gates in the campaigns were locks that audiences had to open with specific items: items only awarded at the conclusion of mainline missions. 2017's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild starts by giving you the low-down on some of its rules. And once you make it beyond its doorstep, you might expect to encounter the numbered dungeons and explicit instructions of old. Instead, Nintendo abandons you in a sprawling, open garden with just that smidgen of advice to guide you.

You know that you must gear up to defeat the monstrous Ganon and recover orbs from holy shrines to enhance your stats, but you are left to figure out where those shrines are and what other items may aid you. You soon learn that you can improve your chances against the villain by rehabilitating the four "Divine Beasts", but no one hands you a map of Hyrule, let alone draws on the nests of these demigods. Over the following hours, you'll earn a couple of pieces of equipment from mainline quests. Besides those, your success at all challenges rests on your skills, knowledge, and the items you have discovered and crafted on your travels.

Breath of the Wild is perhaps the game of the last few years to catapult user-created goals and a heavy emphasis on player-made tools into the mainstream. While BotW is liable to be intimidating to a casual audience, it's nowhere near as burdensome on them as an ARK or Outer Wilds. Breath of the Wild manages a balance of approachability and room for audience creation unrivalled in the medium. Its purposeful side-tasks also constitute a stunning counter-punch to the rest of the open-world genre.

Time and time again, I see games with huge possibility spaces that are less than the sum of their parts. Games where I know I can climb more towers, liberate more strongholds, or guard more VIPs, but in which I recognise those activities won't produce any rewards that feel necessary for my future successes. AAA games want to court big audiences to make big bank, but in a wide enough sample of gamers, you'll find a lot of different tastes for how often you repeat tasks, types of chores, and the length of the experience.

The go-to solution has long been including both compulsory and optional objectives, allowing the player to jigsaw together the game they want. The snag is that if the game is to remain accessible, the rewards from the mainline jobs have to be considerable enough that the player can complete the game using them without any fretful struggle. That means that if the side objectives also offer substantial rewards, the player who invests more time in the game may find themselves overpowered for the difficulty they're playing on. The designers can shrink the prizes for completing optional tasks to subvert that issue, but who wants to be underpaid for their work?

In plenty of cases, I also don't feel excited about running on the same hamster wheels indefinitely. Marketers and some gamers place quantity of content on a pedestal. However, I think many of us feel that a plurality of options in a game is pointless if you're not motivated to engage with them. Breath of the Wild provides that motivation, towards and through its self-guided play, but also via consistently useful rewards. The systems it uses to get us exploring and fabricating often aren't unique to this title. Still, its execution of them and its thoughtful intersection of its mechanics allow Nintendo to deliver a meaningful experience.

Let's get a little friendlier with Breath of the Wild by looking at how it makes loot worthwhile to collect without causing a hyperinflation of our power. Enemies always pack a punch; you're typically only a few hits from death, even with some extra hearts under your belt. And the cliffs you need to climb and plains you need to trek across are often a drain on your stamina meter. In certain climates, you need to protect yourself against searing hot or freezing cold, and when sneaking up on or evading some creatures, you benefit from a stealth or speed boost. Further, various enemies come at you with elemental claws drawn.

Lengthening your heart and stamina meters with orbs sharpens your combat prowess or improves your endurance when clambering or running, but that process is slow and has limited returns. For example, you can exchange four orbs for one heart container, but it's typical that collecting one orb requires finding a shrine and then completing about three puzzles inside it. And outside of health and stamina, you don't have upgradable stats. There's no "Cold Resistance" to boost if you want to brave the biting blizzards of the Hebra Mountains. If your sword doesn't strike a Hylix hard enough, you can't solve that problem by dumping points into "Attack".

Some advantages, like reinforced defence or increased warmth, you can earn from clothing, but it can take a long time to obtain that layer of protection. Even when you have it, each garment will only convey a slight advantage in one area. You will never find a set that lets you climb faster and insulates against electric shocks. There's no outfit you can coordinate to receive ninja-silent stealth and invulnerability against sweltering heat. When you cannot wholly rely on your clothing or permanent stats to support you, you must turn to the only other source possible: your consumables.

Meals and potions can recover your stamina and temporarily increase your maximum health, stamina, elemental resistances, speed, quietness, attack, or defence. Even weapons and shields are consumables. Once they reach their capacity for dealing and absorbing hits, they shatter in a blaze of light. Arguably, Breath of the Wild employs the much-reviled "durability" mechanic, and yet, it doesn't seem to offend users in this adventure the way it has in so many others. Some gamers don't mind their equipment wearing down with use. Still, when players do become frustrated with it, it's often because durability systems ask for micromanagement from the player. They also dig resource sinks without providing emotional or material rewards for filling those sinks.

There's not a lot of strategy or depth in preventing your gear from failing; you're just checking whether a number is approaching 0. And when your work tools give out, you may have to interrupt enjoyable hunts or quests to do the fantasy equivalent of renewing your driving license. Not exactly thrilling stuff. Where players reasonably expect to be able to spend the resources they earned and find some new empowerment from it, repairing equipment has always been an unrewarding transaction that just gives you back the items you already won.

This revolutionary Zelda does things a little differently. Firstly, when your items shatter, they deliver a critical hit and knock back an enemy: a consolation that takes the edge off of losing a weighty club or a hardy shield. Your implement disintegrating doesn't need to be a cause for disappointment; it can lead to a celebratory burst of gratification. Secondly, you can never fix your weapons or shields; you can only find replacements for those that break. So, you'll never spend any significant chunk of change on the same equipment you already own. All your rupees go to new items. Crucially, you can't buy weapons or shields from shops. You can sometimes find elixirs and food among their wares, but these can be a struggle to seek out and only come in limited amounts and types, meaning you have to go out and find or make these things yourself. The play gives you more purpose in the world and a sense of self-investment in the items you use.

Another classic video game problem that BotW solves is players stockpiling goods. You have limited inventory space, and weapons, food, and drinks of the same type generally do not stack. This inhibits you from making one run in which you hoard all the Royal Shields or Stamina Elixirs you need and then never returning to the task of fetching them. Hunts stay varied, and most items remain valuable because you must periodically collect more of them. By association, most monsters and areas long remain worth engaging. Note also that you have different inventories for weapons, shields, and edibles. You can't, say, forgo meal prep to make more room for more swords. So, the developers can keep you filling out each area of your field kit at regular intervals.

You can pay for increases in the size of each inventory pocket, but these are modest and provide a reason to try your hand at another task. If you solve the Koroks' ambient puzzles, you can win their seeds which you can exchange for more room in your pack. You'll observe that you can't buy your way into more inventory space by performing a non-Korok task. So, these environmental riddles aren't interchangeable with other jobs and merit unique attention.

While we're on the topic of stocking your inventory, we can recognise that some merchants will sell you ingredients for your cooking. Yet, they have a humble variety of products on offer, only carry a handful of the valuable items, and exhibit lengthy pauses before resupplying. The net result is that you won't be able to buy everything you need for a single recipe from the market, and what you do purchase acts as a starter pack. You're probably more likely to go out and fetch the constituents of a meal if you've already got one-third of them rather than if you've got none. You can buy bundles of arrows directly from traders, but again, this is an invitation to gather assets rather than an alternative to doing so. If you're holding arrows, you're halfway to an attack method, but you'll need a bow.

Some quests give you everything you need for a single dinner and even tell you what foods to combine to make it. However, you can only complete a quest once, and therefore, only earn its rewards once. Thus, these kitchen missions function as lessons that likely make you more likely to saute, boil, and BBQ in the future because now you know what meat and veg you require to sizzle up something special. The need to uncover new recipes also keeps you invading buildings and reading books. It's surprising how many games have diegetic text documents that don't use them to impart information useful in the play. To obtain the armaments or ingredients we've discussed, you may need to battle fearsome enemies, weather adverse temperatures, or step silently. Therefore, you have another reason to prepare and loot items and another application for them.

Of course, because you're foraging or crafting your supplies instead of paying vendors for them, BotW can't tax your income as many other releases in its field do. When developers don't regularly garnish player salaries, they can risk their audiences making runaway profits and dominating their opposition. This title avoids overpowering Link via an abundance of expensive items for players to empty their wallets on. Particularly practical for the economy is the Akkala Tech Lab, which offers high-cost consumables suited for squaring off against some of the most lethal enemies, creating a potentially infinite money sink.

Floating pricy items to stop players from overstuffing their bank accounts can introduce new complications. If a high price tag is balanced against cutting effectiveness, players can become overpowered and incentivised towards repetitive behaviour. All they need to do is grind for cash, and soon they'll be walking out of the store with equipment meant for someone far beyond their level of progression. Yet, setting the power level of expensive items low means players can feel short-changed and as though their investments are disrespected. BotW subverts these extremes by starting the player with a very modest capacity for damage and defence, meaning that comparatively powerful new items don't put Link over the edge and make him a one-man army.

Users being so liable to take damage could make the game prohibitively difficult for many. However, BotW offsets your fragility with a low cost for dying, the ability to warp away from any encounter, and ready access to the basics you'll need for combat and exploration. Shields, weapons, and resources are plentiful; you just need to do the work of finding and collecting the right ones. Note also that this is not a pure numbers game; if this was an RPG where Link and Hyrule's monsters bashed statistics to statistics, muscular equipment would be essential. But Breath of the Wild uses this very Dark Souls logic where it has some leeway to let you get walloped hard because fights rely on your hand-eye coordination and not just automation. If you can dodge out of the way of a nasty lunge or uppercut, it's not unreasonable for the game to leave you with insufficient food or armour to take a volley of injuries.

Nintendo also often makes items valuable and prevents them from becoming too beneficial by designing them to be incomparable. The implements you can collect are not necessarily better or worse than each other but different in function. As ever, items become purposeful when they have purposeful applications. Make one weapon strictly superior to another, and the player will only wield the higher-ranking one. Make one weapon preferable in some circumstances and the other preferable in different situations, and the player will have a reason to seek out and retain both. So, what different purposes does Breath of the Wild find for its items?

It relies on the classic game design paradigm of finding elemental niches for items to fill. For example, the Iceblade and Flameblade don't relate in terms of a strict hierarchy; the former is devastating against fire enemies, and the latter against ice. The same applies for all other equipment with a natural effect. But even if a developer has different accessories conveying different elemental advantages, those commodities may still operate by the same mechanics. Whether you're carrying a Flame Staff to melt Wyerds or finding Zap doesn't even scuff a Mudraker, you're still interacting with monsters under the marquee of type-matching systems. It's a similar story if you're using your own elemental resistances to block their attacks. What changes between using your poison resistance and ground resistance is not the structures you're playing with; it's the types placed into those structures. Breath of the Wild's tools don't just employ elemental damage dynamics but hook into all sorts of other systems and status effects to radically expand their potential applications.

An electrical attack is not just "for water enemies"; it makes a character drop what they're holding. Ice isn't just painful for fiery foes to tolerate; it freezes anyone who has the misfortune to come into contact with it. Fire simultaneously damages and disables, boomerangs will return when thrown, long-handled weapons allow you to attack at a distance, hammers send objects flying, and some spears and swords sail further when hurled. That you can throw melee weapons gives them another function past prodding baddies. You can ignite wooden weapons, and any blazing weapons do more than lend another dimension to the combat. They allow you to clear thorns to clear your path, melt items and enemies out of ice blocks, uncover nooks hidden behind foliage, generate updrafts you can glide on, break open crates without exhausting your weapon's durability, or light fires to cook or sleep by. Bladed weapons can fell trees for lumber, and Korok Leaves can propel rafts across water.

Some bows may fire faster or further than others or shoot multiple arrows simultaneously, and the different arrow types mean any bow can be used to generate any elemental effect. Weapons can be one-handed or two-handed, which is really three different properties in one. It determines their speed, their knockback, and whether you can hold them alongside a shield. Then you have unique unicorn weapons like the Windcleaver, which can literally blow an opponent off their feet or the Master Sword, which doesn't break at all, recharging when exhausted and growing more powerful in and around Hyrule Castle. Chu-Chu Jellies unleash blasts of elemental energy when you shoot them with arrows, and elements will turn Blue Jelly into other forms of jelly, giving a further purpose to fire, ice, and electric items. Even ineffectual weapons have their place because when foes like Keese and Undead go down in one hit, you probably don't want to waste the big guns on them. It's much more economical to swat them away with a rusty claymore or wooden club. They're your medieval rolled-up newspapers.

In another action-adventure, an axe or a mushroom might become vendor trash because you have superior alternatives. In Breath of the Wild, the non-hierarchical positioning of the items means they retain their distinct utilities. There's nothing wrong with some vendor trash, but when that's most of what you're picking up, it can feel like you're effectively collecting the same object over and over, just reskinned. Some games have armouries that approach the systemic flexibility of Breath of the Wild's, but I'm not sure I know another that matches it. And when other games allow their weapons the range of properties that this 2017 Zelda does, they usually come with walls of stats to consider. This information rush can be repulsive to the casual player and runs counter to the minimalist aesthetics that encase a title like BotW. Hyrule avoids shipping items with arm-length stat cards through a union of reservedness and simplicity.

Loquacious UI tooltips are typically necessary because many of the variables RPG items possess exist on a sliding scale. That is, you might have a game where the damage your rifle can do ranges from 0-1,000 and could stop at any number in between. So, for the player to make actionable comparisons between guns, the firearms all have to report their precise damage values. Repeat for every other number that goes into the weapon, from fire rate to magazine size to sell value. In BotW, many attributes of weapons are boolean rather than granular. That is, a weapon is never 7.6 long or 9.1 long; it's just long or short. A weapon either returns when thrown or it doesn't; it can't return 50% or 33%.

Zelda's implements also don't possess many exceptional traits simultaneously. You won't find a weapon that freezes enemies, and has high durability, and can be thrown further than others, and increases your attack. So, Zelda can get by with short weapon descriptions that only appear when you dive into a menu. In many cases, those descriptions only need mention when a weapon property deviates from an assumed default, and otherwise, don't need to state that property. Beyond those descriptions, the UI slaps a name and maybe an icon on a tool and leaves it at that. This minimalist approach reduces visual clutter and makes the weapon systems easy to understand overall. That means it's easier to pick an implement you want to retrieve.

In some cases, this game can introduce more types of armour and elixirs than its competition because it considers more of the values in its systems up for debate. In most games where you walk a player avatar around a world, metrics like sprint velocity, climbing speed, stealthiness, or swim speed are fixed. BotW opens up new avenues for its items by making these variable figures that the player can modify with the right clothes or consumables. There are greens that will temporarily reduce the noise you make when you move, armour that ups your swim speed, etc. The design further finds applications for its items by having environmental factors contextualise their operation.

Igniting red barrels causes explosions that burn nearby enemies, but you can also spread fire to monsters by torching grass. You can shock them by placing metallic items near them during lightning storms or having electricity carry through a body of water. If there's a cliff nearby, you might be able to send an assailant flying off of it. Of course, they can turn the same effects back on you. You may also notice how rain extinguishes fires and makes rocks too slippery to climb or how you can use shields to surf down inclines. And then there's nighttime during which the Undead spawn, but if you have the Dark Link set, you will also benefit from a bump to your speed while the Sun is down.

Remember, more applications for items means more reasons for the player to seek out or manufacture them. You can even use some ingredients as bait to catch animals which become ingredients themselves. This complex network of relationships between entities and environments could baffle and irritate the average player. However, Nintendo, ever-aware of the user experience, makes mechanics intuitive by having them mimic real-world interactions. Plenty of games have arbitrary rules like "Bald Bull will spontaneously throw a left hook" or "If you roll a 7, it activates the Robber". "Axes cut down trees" or "Fire melts ice" are not original arbitrary rules participants must learn to play the game but principles from the outside world they're already familiar with.

As you may have already realised, giving the player lots of types of items to collect doesn't necessarily mean giving them variation in the tasks that award those items. It's not uncommon to see a game with a zoo of resource-based upgrade trees and crafting systems in which you win all your resources through combat. That flatness in item-gathering isn't objectively sloppy game design. Still, it is refreshing to see an action-adventure in which you have many different tasks to produce various valuables. Appropriating equipment and ingredients in Breath of the Wild can involve combat. Yet, it might also mean sneaking up on skittish critters, hunting wildlife that will flee upon being struck, baiting animals, solving puzzles, blasting open rocks, devising clear routes to climb walls, and employing your powers of observation.

We're not under any doubt by now that BotW has numerous pegs to fill countless holes. But all those holes and pegs need to live somewhere. Hyrule must be vast to accommodate them, but given that items are small and Hyrule is big, the designers are now asking you to retrieve needles from a haystack. In addition to objects and creatures, there are still those sacred shrines to track down, and we need to find a bunch of them. The obvious solution would be for the studio to mark what we need on our maps, but that doesn't make for much of a game. It negates any puzzle element by revealing the solution out of the gate and denies any exploration by setting a direct line to our target.

BotW splits the difference between painting a target on the location of objects and leaving us totally in the dark. Players can locate shrines, creatures, monsters, treasure chests, and items using a radar. The player may select one entity at a time, and if it's nearby, the radar will tell them they're facing it and roughly how close they are, but nothing else. The person holding the joycons plays Marco Polo with the dungeon entrance, deer, or whatever else they're looking for. The radar is only for homing in on an item once you're relatively close, though. To get within the ballpark of these entities, you need to siphon rumours from the NPC gossip mill, or, as long as you're not locating a shrine, you can check the compendium in your magic phone. Because you're picking what your scanner detects, you're explicitly setting a goal.

To get an entry in your phone for an organism or object, or to detect it with your sensors, you first need to take a picture of it. You also can't know where a location listed in your compendium is until you've: A. Visited it, and B. Climbed the tower for its region. So, a functioning radar and an informative encyclopaedia can both carry sentimental value as the products of your hard work. In a Ubisoft game, reaching an observation point to unlock more map is usually a predictable exercise in platforming. BotW shocks the idea back to life by making you struggle a path through tar pits, goblin-filled castles, and more, to reach the skyscrapers. Each tower is not just unique in its construction as a climbing wall but also in the mechanics you have to contend with to reach its apex. Additionally, as you search for one place or item, you're bound to run into other interests in the world. It's one of those concepts that has made it into plenty of open-world titles, but few have as many meaningful encounters out in their environments as BotW. In other works, you typically don't have the reasons to explore nearly as much, so you're not going to make the same volume of discoveries.

There is one more reason that Breath of the Wild's activities feel so purposeful, and it's nothing like anything we've discussed so far. It's standard practice for developers of open-world excursions to pack every square inch of them with a problem to solve. By comparison, Breath of the Wild lets its problems breathe. Hyrule is a land of empty, open space, with points of interest situated relatively far apart. You're not overstimulated by discovering another trinket or task in every cloister, so when you do find a job or item of worth, it's something to cherish.

Breath of the Wild's philosophy in which you're making more instead of having it dumped in your lap is consonant with a broader vision Nintendo had for this game. In almost every Zelda, there's a comfortingly predictable narrative to fall back on: Ganon kidnaps Zelda, Link defeats Ganon, Link saves Hyrule. Every facet of Breath of the Wild is inseparable from its future in which the opposite happened. Ganon emerged victorious and destroyed Hyrule. This spirit of the fallen nation swallows the new design. With most of the towns in the kingdom reduced to dust, there's not a broad enough infrastructure and economy to sell Link everything he needs and direct him to the next dungeon every time. So, he must take it upon himself to create what's missing. He won't find wall-to-wall monsters and treasure chests because most of them were wiped away in the tide of a demon's wrath. So, he must make do with what he has.

Where Zelda was once cooled in the climate of western fantasy, Breath of the Wild is a warm wind blowing in from the east. The series sheds the constant rousing action of European and US media for the discipline and slow burn of traditional Japanese storytelling. It's not Peter Jackson; it's Kurosawa. And in the dead space between its unassuming villages, in the serene vacuum of its endless plains, we learn that if a hero isn't given the means to achieve their destiny, they can still find empowerment in creating it. Thanks for reading.

Wherever you think the blame lies, Halo Infinite has had a rough time of it. After a much-publicised delay, this living shooter burst onto the scene in late 2021 with original, balanced, and energising action at its core. Yet, it also attracted vocal criticism for its technical instability, copious network latency, and impoverishment of features and unlockables. A particular weak spot was its shallow box of cosmetics. Enthusiasts sucked the Battle Pass dry long before the end of the first season, and then they lost interest in the game or kept playing but firmly demanded more from 343 in future updates. Battle Passes ended up with this short shelf life because the studio almost doubled the length of seasons and bulked up the XP rewards. Increasing players' experience salary was necessary because the game was originally stingy when distributing points.

A tectonic shift has taken place in multiplayer gaming. Where fans once played purely for the immediate joy of the competition, they now have their hearts set on a continuous stream of persistent prizes for their efforts. I generally think you'll be happier if you appreciate a game for what it is in the here and now instead of getting too hung up on the next bauble. It's also worth remembering that filling out wardrobes of armour only has so much utility when you're limited to one piece of clothing per body part. Yet, I can't tell players that they're wrong for expecting greater output from a game for their input. Public-facing unlocks are virtual fashion and badges of honour. They're also little "well done"s from the designers, and in Season One, you soon stopped hearing those "well done"s.

It's not a huge surprise that this eighth mainline Halo struggled to retain players throughout its first season. When its open beta activated in November, 103,000 Steam users flocked to it daily, but the following month, only half that number were playing. By April, the end of the kick-off season, that figure had plummeted to 5,000. Now, the Steam numbers can't tell the whole story; Microsoft positions Halo as an Xbox game first and foremost. Even on the PC, you don't have to boot Infinite through Steam; you can use the dedicated Xbox app. Microsoft also doesn't release exact player figures for their platforms. However, the Xbox website reveals that by April, Infinite had fallen to being the sixteenth most-played game on its US consoles just behind Rocket League, a game from 2015.

It was around April that I began encountering teams with people of wildly different skill levels in the game; a common sign of diminishing player bases. When audiences shrink, matchmaking algorithms have fewer players of equal capability to work with. So, they start roping in participants who don't quite match the requirements to make up the numbers. Keep in mind, Halo is free-to-play, and is a live service game meant to keep its party going for years on end.

Aware of growing unrest among players, the hands at 343 have rallied to revamp and refine their game. And they've seen some success, washing Infinite clean of many of its glitches. Players can now enter Big Team Battles reliably, and the game no longer locks up during BTB matches. It shouldn't have taken seven weeks for the fix to come in, but the gametype ultimately got repaired. There are fewer visual hiccups, and the program almost never crashes to the dashboard. Search times feel generally lower, and when players can slip into a skirmish faster, teams don't have to rely on messy bots for as long.

Still, the errors haven't been fully purged, and sometimes waiting to hook a match still tests my patience. Ping appears to have decreased, but players continue to report lag. I've noticed some of it in my own stand-offs. This is infuriating during melee scuffles and in Tactical Slayer where the difference between gaining or giving up a point is your timing. When you start the program, it still takes an eternity to load your Challenges and avatar. That's a drag when the Challenges you are assigned often determine what playlists you must queue for. Infinite usually opens not with you jumping feet-first into hell but with a trip to the virtual waiting room as you wait for the backend to get itself dressed.

Yet, what most angered the fandom coming out of Season One was that the long wait for the Co-op Campaign only dragged on. After announcing that the feature wouldn't be bundled with the game at launch, 343 said it was targeting March, the start of Season Two, for its addition. Then, when Season One got extended, the new bookmarked date became early May. The studio blew right past May and now expects to hand over online Co-Op in late August and the local version of the mode sometime after October.

I didn't think the multiplayer Campaign was the most grievous omission from Infinite because the story mode was underbaked to begin with. But Co-op Campaign matters to a lot of people. It doesn't help that the operation on the Zeta installation feels designed to be tackled by squads that the players can't form. Most Halo vehicles, like the Warthog, are intended for soldiers acting in synchronicity, and the Forsaken bases are often a slog to tackle alone. However, multiple infiltrators could secure all the objectives in them within a reasonable timeframe. The season inflation also meant that Forge went from a potential release month of June to a soft ship date of November. Although, now 343 are only saying that we'll see a beta for Forge in Season Three, so expect the full mode to drop significantly far into 2023.

With 343's plan of action spotty, communication from them counts for a lot, but the quality of that communication resists cursory summary. Sometimes, the company seems to be on top of keeping its followers informed. They've been exhaustively documenting the gameplay tweaks for Season Two, posted deep dives into their matchmaking and cheat-busting logic, and maintaining a public list of known issues and workarounds. Yet, other times, we've been met with an uneasy silence on the state of Infinite. Creative Director Joe Staten declared a project roadmap would drop in January, but it did not materialise until late April and the developers failed to publish the big update on Infinite within the month it was promised. Certain players feel that responding to potholes in the game with a lack of transparency is adding insult to injury. On this issue, community manager Brian Jarrard wrote, "We understand the community is simply out of patience and frankly, I think understandably tired of words".

One of my optimistic hopes for the first couple of seasons was that the developers might rethink the Challenge system. Currently, these goals incentivise playing gametypes you hate and taking tactical decisions that sandbag you or your team. Another improvement I was looking for was the level cap being removed from Battle Passes, giving you some meta-reward for playing past Level 100. Unfortunately, we've received no such rectifications. On the sunnier side, 343 has been slashing prices for paid cosmetics. And with Season Two, we've gotten a fresh Battle Pass, two new maps, and a couple of original gametypes. This Pass includes some free credits you can spend in the store. This isn't the trick Fortnite pulls where it awards you about half the currency you need to buy an item, hoping you'll purchase the rest. Halo Infinite will provide you with enough cash to nab a whole cosmetics bundle.

The first gametype introduced in Season Two was Last Spartan Standing, which many people have branded the Halo battle royale. Although, it breaks various definitions of the genre. You won't get 100 Master Chiefs parachuting onto an island. The player capacity for a match is 12, and you don't go down in one kill either; you have a pool of lives. While loot does drop around the map, it's now all armour abilities instead of weapons. You start with a humble/crappy Disruptor, but as you rack up kills and assists, you trade in your peashooters for something with a little more oomph.

Arguably, other battle royales have a criminal flaw in that instead of forcing you to throw yourself into the frying pan of combat, they reward you for sitting back and letting players pick each other off. Last Spartan Standing makes cowardly play impractical by tying loadout to score. If you're not slaying from the moment the match starts, then you could find yourself bringing a Magnum to a Commando fight. You can also improve your equipment via XP orbs that drop from eliminated players. They can accelerate you up the ranks, but only if you suspend your movement and shooting for a few seconds. Matches are full of meaningful risk-reward choices in which you must decide whether it's worth getting into a boxing match for the chance at higher survivability.

Unfortunately, when 343 pushed this mode into the hoppers, low connection speeds were rampant, and bugs reverberated throughout the game as a whole. Sometimes you wouldn't be able to collect XP spheres, Challenge progress would fail to register, guns jammed, announcer barks repeated, and grenade animations looped many times over. Randomly dropping power weapons onto maps without marking them also caused unfair imbalances in player firepower, and initially, everyone was consigned to playing on the spaceship graveyard map Breaker.

Breaker offers a unique sight: UNSC vessels ripped open and thrown away like crisp packets. However, its brown monochrome is oppressively drab, and it quickly outwore its welcome, given that it isn't a fraction as spacious as the maps of other battle royales. Remember, this level was designed to accommodate no more than 12 players. Soon enough, though, the glitches got the boot, and the engineers at 343 expanded LSS so that you could play it on any BTB map. Still, the whole debacle left me thinking that you might want to wait a few weeks after a landmark update before engaging Infinite again.

The worse news is that LSS also lets players down the same way that Lone Wolves does: a crucial factor in your kills and deaths is where other players happen to be in relation to you, but you don't have any control over their positioning. It's not unusual to find yourself stuck between two Spartans with no escape route or managing to get the drop on an opponent by sheer happenstance. The issue is not nearly as prevalent in team gametypes in which fewer players on the map are enemies, and you have protectors you can coordinate with. That coordination is more vital in Infinite than in any other Halo due to the speed with which players can mow each other down. The paper-like fragility of any one warrior encourages them to watch each other's backs, but in a free-for-all format like this one, that can't happen.

Sometimes, you also spend the first few minutes of a game looking for competitors and finding no one. Without kills, you don't have the opportunity to upgrade your weapons, and other players overtake you. Matches like to end in anti-climax, ejecting a text popup telling you to quit rather than displaying a score. LSS is also uneasy bedfellows with the Challenge system, as you must wait for everyone to finish the match before you can bank your progress towards the next milestone. When you can only have four active Challenges at a time, it means that the most efficient method for playing the game involves yet more sitting around doing nothing.

Infinite's foray into battle royale isn't a total write-off; it still pulls you in with that seductive possibility that you can always climb the rankings just that bit higher. And kills and deaths matter all the more when lives are an expendable resource. But not every FPS is configured to work in this format. With more robust and well-maintained alternatives like Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone, LSS becomes surplus to requirements. I'm left wishing 343 spent more time fixing up the modes they already have rather than introducing a big new one that only gets halfway to achieving its goals.

We did also see the return of King of the Hill, which is still plenty of madcap fun but requires little explanation. The unexpected hero of the new season is Land Grab. At first, this capture the points mode might appear to be a rote tweak of Strongholds, but a small change in rules can make a big difference in play. Its matches begin with the UI outlining three zones both teams will try to control. When they secure one, it disappears. Only once all those volumes are removed from the map does the computer spawn more, this time in different and unpredictable locations. The first team to secure 11 areas wins.

The reactive nature of Land Grab means that forethought and planning have less of a place here than they do in Strongholds. The priority is on quick thinking and improvisation. A single map can tease out innumerable different strategies because the hotspots on that map are in constant flux. The volatile demands of the play are constantly pulling on the cohesion of your team, begging you to split even the most tight-knit group to cope with unexpected new objective layouts. However, the mode avoids the random chaos of LSS or Lone Wolves by marking territory locations long before they spawn.

You can play Land Grab and a bushel of other modes on the new map Catalyst. For Catalyst, there is no such thing as too many entrances into one area. It balances that access against a jumble of columns and ramps, which rewards the spatially aware player by letting them break line of sight at the first sign of danger. At least, that's what happens if you're on the outskirts of the environment. The setting attempts to occasionally bait you into the open by dispensing a power-up on or near a long and exposed ground-level walkway.

Another concourse bridges the upper floor, providing an express line to the enemy base. The downside of taking that shortcut is that you walk a tightrope on which you become an easy target for anyone in the opposite HQ. Visually, Catalyst is a Forerunner facility gently daubed with foliage. Its metal ramps, neat automatic doors, and coat of moss summon nostalgia for the installation interiors from Halo: Combat Evolved and Guardian, a memorable map from Halo 3.

So, TL;DR, should you play Halo Infinite? Well, if you aren't, it depends on why you're not already doing so. For me, entertaining shooter play is about the guns feeling weighty without being immovable, there always being plenty of tactical options available, and those options being distinct and meaningful. If that's what you're looking for, that's still Halo Infinite, and the game remains familiar enough to be recognisable without resting on its laurels. If you were scared off by Infinite's technical teething pains, know that it's over the worst of them. But if it's a deal-breaker to wait through long matchmaking queues or encounter some imbalanced playlists, I can't recommend going into business with Infinite. Furthermore, if you were waiting for an overhaul of the Challenge or Battle Pass systems or for Halo to fully stock its feature set, keep waiting.

I hate to point it out, but this isn't the first time we've been left twisting in the wind by 343 Industries. I say this as someone who thought Halo 4 was an acute tuning of the series' multiplayer and who was a loud defender of Halo 5, wearing out my disc well into its old age. Yet, I remember looking at Halo 4 in 2012 and thinking, "this is technically well-produced, but 343 hasn't found its voice yet". I remember in 2014 when The Master Chief Collection shambled on for weeks without a functioning multiplayer. I remember in 2020 when 343 announced that they were delaying Infinite for a year because it still wasn't up to scratch. I remember in 2021 when the game launched, and they said that stable networking and classic modes were still in the pipeline. Now, it's mid-2022, and there's still no definite date when the developer will close on their promises.

At the risk of plagiarising Jeff Gerstmann, now and then, I stand back from all the booming grenades and ear-splitting rifle fire and remember this is Halo. Flagship console games don't exist today the way they did when the Pillar of Autumn took its maiden voyage in 2001. Platform holders are dividing their eggs between a greater quantity of baskets. They're attempting to cater to more audiences, and therefore, more wallets than ever. But the Master Chief is still the closest thing Microsoft has to a mascot. Whether you're a series veteran or someone who just knows they like shooting targets on a computer, Halo is meant to be the game you can boot up on your Xbox to feel elated and dazzled and in awe of the system's technical power. This is the first product that perhaps the most famous software company in the world wants you to see when you walk through its platform's door. It is made by an expert team with more than a decade of experience, and nine months in, it's still meandering and sputtering and hesitating its way towards being a finished package.

Watching Infinite's awkward growth spurts, I get the sense that 343 is spread too thin. I'm not sure there's a game that is expected to be as many things to as many different people as Halo. That is partly because the series has grown countless heads over the years. In an age when most new shooter games have no Campaign component, many players fondly remember blasting their way through Winter Contingency or The Ark with friends, and they want Halo Infinite to house a story mode to compete with that. They expect that mode to amaze them whether they play it with one person or four, in split-screen or online.

Many others want Halo to incorporate not just the classic multiplayer but also the ability to edit maps for that mode with no modding experience. Others want it to have a built-in video editor. More still wish to see the Halo that pioneered Firefight and a dev team that was always forthcoming with fans. At the same time, modern video game story modes implement vast open worlds teeming with optional content, and Halo is expected to keep up with them. Then there's popular PvP play which increasingly rests on battle royales, snappy, immediate action, and new content every few months. That's a lot to ask of one studio. Possibly more than any one studio knows how to answer to.

To meet these lofty expectations, 343 had to take the series apart, but the better part of a year later, still hasn't finished putting it back together. Like most projects that shoot for the Moon, Infinite is coming together piece by piece, month by month, and maybe one day, all its components will find their place, and the Halo fans want will emerge. But that day is not today. I'm not confident it even falls within this year. Thanks for reading.

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Genesis Noir and specifically discusses the Astronomy Update version of the game.

"Perhaps there is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there, waiting for us".

-William Gibson, Dead Man Sings

The topics of cosmology, physics, and chemistry cut to the core of who we are, at least in a material sense. They charismatically detail the origin of everything we've ever seen or will see and may even hold the clues to our ultimate fates. Yet, as fundamental as these topics are to us and the reality we inhabit, they are often regarded as passionless and technical, disconnected from the human experience. Genesis Noir is a point-and-click adventure showing where the physics of the universe and the anthropological intermingle.

We study Genesis Noir from under the wide-brimmed hat of No Man. No Man is the forlorn occupant of a clock tower which holds its head high above an insomniac urban sprawl. In his professional life, he hawks watches, but his leisure time is a haze of bubbling alcohol and jazz lounges. This salesman is infatuated with the voluptuous singer Miss Mass, but when he drops by her apartment one night for a sexual liaison, he finds her bandmate, Golden Boy, there. Golden Boy fires a handgun at Miss Mass, and the big bang explodes out of its barrel. Time slows, and No Man sees all of history laid out in front of him, from the pistol on the right side of the room to his lover on the left. He delves into the timeline, watching the universe from its initial cooling after the big bang right past humanity's departure from Earth.

Each chapter of Genesis Noir kicks off with a brief introduction to a concept from physics and continues into an interactive sequence that lets you see, hear, and feel that concept. It couches those sequences within No Man's larger story of heartache and heroism. For example, the first level, Seeding, begins with a crash course on the universe's drastic drop in temperature 10^-37 seconds after its birth. This cooling occurred unevenly, baking hotter regions of the universe that would fizz with stars and galaxies and cold spots that would remain mostly void.

The game symbolises the priming of the universe through No Man planting seeds and configuring the resonances of various fields as if tuning a radio. Among other activities, he also prunes a tree, amputating some potential futures so that others might grow. However, this gardening doesn't just stand in for the balancing of the universe's energy levels. It's also a dramatisation of No Man hatching a plan to save Miss Mass. He witnesses Golden Boy spin a loose spring from his watch into a black hole and devises his own use for the black holes.

The second chapter, Starstruck, is frontloaded with a description of light elements condensing into the first stars and gas giants. It claims that the cores of gas giants are "failed stars", which is not quite correct but sets the table for a metaphor. In the stage proper, No Man follows a breadcrumb trail of matter into a gargantuan gas planet where he finds Golden Boy. He also flashes back in time to see Miss Mass perform in front of an audience. So, the narrative strongly hints that Golden Boy is a failed star, and Miss Mass is a successfully formed star. After all, she does have a lot of mass, and you need that for stellar formation. That Miss Mass professionally leapfrogged Golden Boy might be the cause of his jealousy of her, giving us a motive for his crime. The saxophonist may also have sought to kill her because he held a grudge after No Man was able to win Miss Mass's heart when he couldn't.

Most media speaking on science is either educational or rock-hard science-fiction. Genesis Noir is an outlier in that it pores through cosmological textbooks but relays their contents to us in a jumbled milieu of clattering chords and characters that fall and morph from one frame into the next. Besides the chapter titles and the opening text crawls, there are no words in most of the levels, making this a sensory collage. It's less like a lecture on astrophysics and more like an improvisational jazz piece about it. It outright states its subtext, and when a piece of media does that, it can drain the subtlety out of itself, leaving it a dry and lifeless exercise. However, Genesis Noir ends up with a uniquely hypnotising mystique through its enigmatic plot and subtlety in how its analogies present in its fiction.

The overall framing device in its fiction is a bit wonky; it's unclear how the creation of the universe threatens mass. Sometimes the game also passes off unproven speculations as truths or at least doesn't call attention to the fact that they're not part of the accepted science. This is true, for example, when the opening says that there are higher dimensions we can't perceive, or when, in its third act, it introduces bubble theory which posits multiple other universes beyond our own. There is no empirical evidence supporting either claim.

However, Genesis Noir is more scientifically rigorous than most pop culture works, and its choice of protagonist resounds with its subject matter. The watch salesman, the man who lives behind a clock, is himself a time traveller. He is "No Man" in that he does not represent a single person from history: he exists outside of the history of our species, and his name is also quite close to "Nomad"; he is a wanderer in the spacetime continuum. Note that his local hangout is "The Hopper", a reference to painter Edward Hopper, but also to No Man's propensity to "hop" through time. See also the rabbits he will later find in a research facility. A time traveller is a necessary escort for a story which aims to capture a history billions of years longer than any human life.

The transitory nature of No Man informs his character. Our galactic gumshoe is repeatedly jolted back to moments of romance and pain in his relationship with Miss Mass. In this time-hopping, he is not purposefully seeking out his destination. He is dragged into the darkest recesses of his mind against his will, dangling in mid-air or swaying through a drunken stupor. Memory is a form of time travel, and grief keeps people returning to the same times and places. Often, No Man will see his past self replicated many times over in front of him as he not only enters Miss Mass's home or drinks at her lounge but observes himself doing so. And he will observe himself observing himself, and observe himself observing himself observing himself, and so on.

Mass has a gravitational pull, and No Man is adrift via the attractive force Miss Mass exerts on him. This is particularly well-demonstrated in the chapter Orbiting, as multiple No Mans fall into a black hole (an area of concentrated mass) with the femme fatale at the centre. As more No Mans drop below its event horizon, it grows in size, adding his mass to its mass, amplifying its pull. As No Man commits himself to his relationship with and the memory of his lover, she takes up a larger portion of his being. This increases her influence on him, causing him to commit further, and creating a feedback loop, as any black hole, regularly fed, will. The chapter, Collision, explores the probable hypothesis that a planet called Theia impacted the Earth's surface 4.5 billion years ago, slanting our world onto its 23-degree axial tilt and ejecting the rock that would consolidate into the Moon. It compares Miss Mass's effect on No Man to this planetary car crash.

While Miss Mass is inescapable, Golden Boy is elusive. Our foil represents the mathematics that catapulted the universe into existence and continue to determine its structures. We can infer this from Golden Boy bringing matter into being, us seeing his face in the stars, and him playing in the "Divine Jazz Section" alongside Miss Mass. His mathematical role is also present in his connection to the golden ratio. To refresh your memory, the golden ratio is a ratio of approximately 1 to 1.618033. In other words, it appears when one number is 1.618 times larger or smaller than another. It is often referenced as part of a series in which each number is 1.618 times larger or smaller than the previous. These sequences can be purely abstract but may also encode anything from the sizes of shapes to the frequencies of sounds.

The rectangles above, for example, follow the golden ratio in that the "a" section is bigger than the "b" section by a factor of 1.618. The golden ratio is sometimes called "the divine proportion" (like Golden Boy's Divine Jazz Section) and exists in various natural and human-made phenomena. In actuality, a lot of purported "golden ratio" objects don't have quite the required proportions. Still, there are plenty of real approximations of the pattern, for example, in Salvador Dali's Sacrament of the Last Supper or in the "golden" spirals of pine cones. In the real world, as in jazz, the notes are sometimes a few notches off the mark.

In Genesis Noir, Golden Boy takes the name of the mathematical refrain, and the golden spiral is present in his coif. While most objects in the game appear in black and white, those important to its cosmology or play are often coloured gold, including the watch springs No Man is collecting, which also follow the golden spiral. We can see the golden spiral in the antlers of a stag and the face paint of a hunter. A sunflower we light up in Seeding also references it.

As we see in the chapter Surveil, Golden Boy is a musician composing the universe. There's a logic to it: maths underpins the universe in its constants, in the formulas for resolving physical interactions, and in the numbers representing physical quantities of objects like temperature and volume. Maths is also the bedrock of music: its time signatures, its tempo, the frequency of each note, etc. Like Golden Boy, maths is everywhere, and yet you can't grab ahold of it. It is intangible, even if it exists in everything tangible.

In Golden Boy's arithmetic symphony, the golden ratio is his harmonic motif: the signature he leaves on everything from plants to animals. It is not necessarily the game saying everything revolves around this particular quantity. Remember, it tends to be highly interpretive. However, it is Genesis Noir describing the recursion of mathematical patterns throughout our universe.

So far, we have discussed material and symbolic dynamics between maths, astrophysics, and Genesis Noir's fantastical characters. However, Genesis Noir begins its crawl towards detailing the literal and societal impact of the cosmos with the levels Reflection and Hunt, in which the elements forged in stars coalesce in Earth's oceans to form life. That life evolves into the stag and the Hunter that tracks it. As we can see from her cave paintings, the Hunter considers the stag culturally dear to her, even as she slays it and its chemicals return to the Earth. In the game's final level, Exodus, the Hunter narrates herself lying under the night sky. In the stars, she sees her ancestors and the stag and bison she slew.

Hunt and Exodus remind us that space was part of the ambient nature early humans experienced. Space is everything above the nighttime horizon. It was a feature of the scenery for many ancient people as much as mountains or rivers. In some cases, more so. Countless societies drew symbols out of the stars they saw, and the Hunter's identification of her ancestors in the sky echoes the interpretations of plenty of ancient civilisations. Plato wrote that a good soul goes back to its "companion star" when its body dies. The Skidi Pawnee thought that they descended from the stars.

The chapter Gather sees No Man galavant through early civilisation and includes snapshots of the pyramids at Giza and the eruption of Vesuvius. While the stage doesn't make any particular allusions to archaic religion, the Egyptians believed that their Pharaohs could join with stars in the northern sky after death, and the Romans inherited the Ancient Greek astronomy. The Greeks thought their Gods created the constellations as lessons to humanity.

The level Reveal peers over the shoulder of an ancient priest as he tethers together points in the sky into new shapes. He exercises humanity's penchant for pareidolia: the propensity to see patterns in random data. What's particularly insightful about this section is that after each phase of astrologising, we zoom out and see the civilisation around the Priest is a little more fleshed out. His fellow worshippers construct a henge and huddle together in groups as the stars are connected. It's as though knitting these blisters of light into heroes and beasts is also threading together people. The interface for weaving together the stars is much like Reflection's UI for uniting atoms as organic molecules. The metaphor is that creating constellations is constructive to life.

In the chapter Voyage, we see a darker side of astrophysics's intrusion into our day-to-day. A particle collider on Mars creates a black hole in Earth's periphery, forcing humans to evacuate. To be clear, the developers are imagining things particle accelerators could do in the future. There's no reason to believe that one of these machines could currently suck the planet into oblivion. Still, humanity may face existential threats from outside our atmosphere. We could one day be subject to a catastrophic meteor impact, and climate collapse stands to leave us exceptionally vulnerable to heat from the Sun.

Moreover, with spacecraft as our vehicles, astrophysics would become our concern the same way that everyday physics concerns us when driving a car. And as a road becomes your surroundings when in an automobile, the humans that leave Earth find space their new backdrop. However, I think the level that best marries the cosmological to a human experience is Thaw. Thaw plays out in a feudal Japanese winter. It starts with the observation that the seasons are a product of our planet's axial tilt. When one side of the Earth leans towards the Sun, and the other away from it, one face spends a lot more time in the heat than its opposite. So, whether it's hot or cold outside, sunny or snowing, whether life is hibernating for the winter or up and active, and even what we've depicted in art is down to something as astronomical as the angular positioning of Earth.

During the course of Thaw, No Man fetches an ancient Ronin the accoutrements necessary for a tea ceremony. The steamy drink provides a welcome respite from the chill outside. When an inferior accidentally shatters the Ronin's cup of tea, he draws his blade on him. Probably because in the barren winter, a hot beverage is a precious comfort. So, the collision of the Earth with another planet 4.5 billion years ago can play a role in one man trying to kill another in the relative now. When No Man mends the warrior's vessel, he does so with the gold forged in a star. Cosmology can't get much more personal than that.

While such ideas about the dilution of space into human culture are engrossing, and as smooth-flowing and vibrant Genesis Noir's audiovisuals can be, its interactive delivery of these ideas can be faulty. Sometimes No Man resists your input like a fish trying to free itself from your hook. On paper, you have the most open environment possible: the vacuum of space. Yet, the game places down all these guard rails for you to bump up against, creating an inappropriate narrowness of movement. Other systems fail too.

Reveal is ostensibly about creating constellations in accordance with the values of your culture. But the mechanics don't let you project shapes onto the stars. Instead, you have to divine an objectively correct gallery of forms, finding the constellations rather than free-hand drawing them. The play does not support the personal and subjective notions present in the activity. This is an egregious error because Reveal is a chapter essential to Genesis Noir's central argument: that humans paper over mysteries with their experience and imagination, and that the legends they create to describe the unknown become indelible epigrams on the slate of history. The game formulates this concept with a few different phrasings, but here's an excerpt from the prologue that encapsulates it:

"Imagination embodies the dark unknown in myth. [...] A world emerges wrapped in unfamiliar forms. Your mind transforms the wisps of preternatural smoke into bodies and steel and concrete. Your experience reshapes this world and makes this form eternal".

An understanding of astrophysics is unobtainable for the Hunter. Still, she does have a conception of her family history and the game she hunts, so she imposes a legend of ancestors, stag, and bison on the heavens. The Priest doesn't know what a star looks like up close but is familiar with lyres and wedding rings, and so sews them from stars, his fellow storytellers dreaming up lore for each constellation. The Ronin doesn't carry in his head a theory of thermodynamics but can see the outlines of people in the fronds of steam from his tea.

In the chapter Improvisations, No Man collaborates with a cellist on a jazz piece. The Musician can't understand his creative partner's true form as a force on the universe but recognises that universal force as artistic inspiration. In Collision, No Man aids an experimental physicist operating a particle accelerator. With his help, she makes a scientific breakthrough. His assistance seals the legend of a time traveller. A future civilisation erects a gold statue in his image, protectively watching down over their space station. Others have their own idea of who No Man is: the Ancestral Spirit or the Eternal Demon. Even the use of the terms "Genesis" and "Exodus" in this story hint at Christianity or religion being attempts to cohere a mysterious universe into something comprehensible. Imagination embodies the dark unknown in myth.

There are four myth-makers the game returns to over its runtime: the Hunter, the Ronin, the Musician, and the Scientist. Holy Trinity-style, they also constitute a single character. In the chapter Singularity, No Man finally enacts his gambit to stop the murder of Miss Mass. Golden Boy faded into the wallpaper a while ago, but by using his watch springs to create a garden of black holes, No Man hopes to pull in the entire universe. He is abusing the mathematics of the cosmos to end it in a "big crunch" before it can impact his love. What No Man doesn't realise is that astrophysicists discarded the big crunch as a plausible end for the universe long ago; his gravity trap isn't going to work.

As he prepares to suck Earth into a black hole, an androgynous white being emerges from a gateway to a futuristic city and tells him to stop what he's doing. This person then splits into four figures: the Hunter, the Ronin, the Musician, and the Scientist. Behind them, the colour spectrum stretches out, with each person shaded in a single hue. Just as white light is a combination of every wavelength of light, this alien: The Constant, is an individual, but is also a combination of these four characters.

The Constant traps No Man in a black hole, an inescapable prison where he is forced to meditate on his actions. The black hole evaporates, as they all eventually do without a steady supply of new mass, but it takes the protagonist's arm with it. When No Man meets The Constant again, his anger at them quickly sublimates into love. He explains his predicament to the alien, complete with his discovery that he can't save Miss Mass. However, through The Constant, he again, experiences the lives of the people he's met and dances in perfect synchronicity with each of them. The dance number includes the following lyrics:

"Hold me and choose,

Choose to be free,

Free from all else,

Embraced by We".

At the start of the chapter Exodus, each character gets a turn to speak, and the end of one character's monologue becomes the start of the next's. The final line of that passage about the "dark unknown in myth" is "You give it a name. You call it The Constant". The Constant is the chain of myths about the universe which carry from generation to generation across our species. Their name is a statement that they are as persistent and indestructible a part of the universe as its mathematical constants, such as the speed of light or the golden ratio. This character flushes space with passionate tones in an otherwise trichromic reality and is the first person we hear speak out loud.

The expressive magic of this composite character is a metaphor for love: they are a rainbow in a black and white world, and you don't feel like you've heard anyone's voice until you've heard theirs. No Man's love of The Constant is of a deeper sort than his lust for Miss Mass. He is not magnetised to them by a base physical infatuation but by a conscious human interest. The Constant's high-resolution existence and their teleportation onto the scene are also symbolic of their transcendental nature. The Constant is more than any one place and time in the universe, and through their inclusion of people from across the aeons, they emit a vibrancy you won't find during any one era. No Man's attachment to The Constant, his appreciation for the collective meaning found in the cosmos, prevents him from destroying Earth. While that initially results in him resenting the continuum of stories told about the universe, and the people who told them, he quickly finds himself falling for those tales and those people.

There's another read on No Man's name we've not discussed yet. In John Donne's 1624 book, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, he writes that "no man is an island". It's one of the most famous lines in poetry. With it, Donne was saying that no person is walled off from the rest of the world. We are all threads in a social fabric. No Man begins his arc isolated, and like the protagonist in Devotions, he hears the bell toll for him. Like Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Genesis Noir is about confronting death and embracing something larger than yourself. For Donne, that was God, and for No Man, that is The Constant.

As romantic as No Man and The Constant's union is, we need a quick reality check. See, the game talks a lot about myth, but the further it travels down the timeline, the less that the characters seem to be mythmaking or even remembering the stories of old. The cellist makes abstract compositions as opposed to cosmic fiction, and the physicist, in particular, stands as the antithesis of fictionalising the universe. Sometimes, scientists have ended up imagining when they meant to describe and have consciously created myths to help us intuit facts about reality. Think about Einstein stating God doesn't play dice or George Gamow describing the nature of the atom as a "liquid drop".

However, mythologising was only the prevailing method for interpreting the universe up to a certain point in history. We then switched to a philosophy which was able to decode many unknowns. Even when it couldn't explain certain observations, it said that it didn't know the answer or that it only knew the answer down to a certain level of accuracy rather than making up a story. This mode of thinking, the scientific method, at least partially negated the need for tall tales. So maybe mythmaking and its products aren't as constant as the game makes them sound. Instead of an eternal loyalty to legend, we are left with a divide between at least some of the current crop of humans and those in the pre-scientific world.

Genesis Noir's opening argues that we need myths because there are unanswerable questions about the universe. For example, "what caused the big bang?" or "what are the natures of higher dimensions?". But how would you prove that we can't answer these questions? History is full of predictions about the stifling limits of science that now look ridiculous.

Philosopher of science Auguste Comte thought we would never be able to tell the composition of stars. Einstein thought we would never split the atom. Astronomer Simon Newcomb believed his field was reaching the end of its development in the late 19th century. All of these men were wrong. And that doesn't guarantee that all the blanks in science will eventually be filled in, but it should give us some pause before we start puffing out our chest and talking confidently about "the unknowable". Genesis Noir is a myth about how the Big Bang started, but that myth might one day be unnecessary to board up a hole in our understanding.

No Man faces his own intimidating decisions about what to leave behind and what to carry into the future. Not long before our terminus, in the chapter Exodus, a tract describes the "Penrose process". The Penrose process is a hypothetical technique for accelerating spaceships. The craft drops a section of itself into a black hole, and the remaining portion of the vehicle receives a speed boost in return. Moving on from a person is not just breaking from them; it's also leaving a chunk of yourself behind. No Man's journey has already taken a toll on him; he has one less arm than when he started. But by sacrificing a portion of himself, he may finally be able to rocket out of Miss Mass's orbit and regain his life.

Exodus is a chapter about potentially exiting the universe for another one, and Exodus is the second book of the Bible; it would have us leaving Genesis (Noir). But as No Man's universe revolves around Miss Mass, this stage also contains an analogy for him moving on from his attachment and grief. The Constant enables him to travel back in time and either court Miss Mass again or turn his back on her. As it's likely that Golden Boy killed Mass partly because of his jealousy of No Man, shunning Mass could save her life. But it's a catch-22: not only will the protagonist recoiling from Miss Mass erase their whirlwind romance; it also means that No Man will never meet The Constant.

In a story about leaving a dead partner, there is no conclusively happy ending, but the one in which No Man joins hands with his alien lover feels considerably less lonely. It's the difference between intimacy with four people and intimacy with none. In the scene in which No Man returns to The Constant after leaving the black hole, they levitate a patch of flowers to fill in for his lost arm for just a moment. It's the loose possibility that The Constant could replace what No Man has lost and make him whole again. As The Constant's song says, choosing them will make him free.

I've already voiced some of my doubts about Genesis Noir's argument for the endurance of myth. Still, I do think the game is correct that a lot of what has happened and is happening in the universe is difficult or impossible to picture. That being the case, visualisations of the universe's mathematical jazz are vitally important. Art like Genesis Noir can put a face to the faceless and give a voice to the golden silence.

Its writers are further correct that humans always told and still tell narratives about the universe. A narrative doesn't have to be fiction; there are true stories, and we can identify a lineage of humans spinning yarns about the cosmos that they believe to be fact. Even if few us now think our soul will return to its companion star or that we can glimpse warriors in the sky, we can still remember the sacred myths of history. We are connected to ancient people by the very human acts of storytelling and trying to decipher the reality before us, and in that connection, there is something worth loving. Thanks for reading.

Lo-Fi Plays is a series of blogs that aims to highlight the smaller, minimal-budget titles that often fall under the radar. It's me finding the positives in the most obscure class of indies out there. Keeping with the theme of my last couple of articles, the picks for this week will be games about physics and space exploration. Enjoy.

Gravity Trails

Gravity Trails is a 2D platformer that has you hopping from one planet to another, their gravitational pull holding you in place. You might recognise this mechanic for its brief appearance in Super Mario Odyssey. The movement in these games rewires your brain because where you might expect the controls to translate your character relative to your screen or real-world body, here they move your avatar relative to their position. So, pressing the left arrow might slide your character left in some contexts, but in others, it could move them right or even up or down.

As bizarre as the circular magnetism of Gravity Trails feels, this is how planets work. If someone on the opposite side of Earth from you drops a book right now, relative to you, it will fall upwards. We just never notice because we don't see the other side of the planet, except in a platformer like this. Gravity Trails has the one-hit kills, spike strips, and flat pixel art of VVVVVV. However, regular checkpoints on these rocks keep you motivated because the next victory is only a skip and a jump away. If you were driven away from VVVVVV by its high player expectations, Gravity Trails might be a welcome alternative.

Gravity Trails on itch.io

AFTER SUN

Like Gravity Trails, AFTER SUN employs physics that stick you to the surface of a curving planet, but they're not the main focus. The point of AFTER SUN is to load the doomed meeples of a dying world into your spaceship and rocket them to refuge. It's more of a physics toy than a complete game. Yet, with a technically minimalist depiction of space and the floaty thrust of its vehicle, it's reminiscent of spacefaring arcade treats like Asteroids.

However, the bigger draw of AFTER SUN is its visual and sound design. A booster sound like the one blaring out of this game's rocket occupies a much chunkier range of the sonic spectrum than retro audio hardware could support. The outcome is a wonderfully harsh "whoosh" every time you propel yourself forwards. The environments also show how layering foregrounds and backgrounds can fill a space out, and the monochrome thruster animation on the rocket looks like a blade of fire cutting the screen in two.

AFTER SUN on itch.io

UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN

In this interactive poem, space is a metaphor for the idea the developer really wants to talk about: grief. Being stuck on a space station symbolises the loneliness that we feel after a death. Being stuck on a space station symbolises a gap between you and a love that's impossible to bridge. If you've experienced a death and all you have is the dull routine of subsistence, you might feel like you're doing your daily rounds hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface.

The isolation is there, too, in the graphical style. We often describe pixel art as a single look, but there's a lot of range within the medium. UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN looks like an Atari 2600 release if the pixels were equilateral instead of all stretched out. This minimalism creates the impression of a world that's so much less now that the person you care about is gone. Meanwhile, you've got this wistful, blippy soundtrack that reminds of me FTL. The game aches with an authentic representation of loss. A work like this is not just made with assets and code; it's made with pain.

UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN on itch.io

ROCKETPULT

ROCKETPULT is the rare rocketry game that doesn't take place in space. It's far too silly for that. Each run of ROCKETPULT starts with a rotating mechanical arm holding a rocket, and your three potential actions are to fire the rocket's thruster, slow down time, and release the robot hand's grip. Your projectile will fly through the air, colliding with targets, dislodging bonuses and scores that could be text messages from the spirit of physics itself. ROCKETPULT is moreish like an endless runner and so chocked full of explosions and absurdity that even a false start can be fun.

The constant spray of bonuses might jog memories of Ridiculous Fishing. Yet, there's another type of game Rocketpult reminds me of. With its cool, crunchy synth soundtrack, and bombastic, one-shot play, this is the exact type of timewaster I would have played with on Newgrounds when I was a teenager. The internet is lousy with games that are nostalgic for the 8-bit era, but I think Flash deserves its turn in the spotlight too.

ROCKETPULT on itch.io

SHRUBNAUT

SHRUBNAUT's setting has a strong sense of identity. With a saturated palette of greens, blues, and purples, it paints an extraterrestrial hedge maze for to you solve. You explore that maze as an adorable astronaut, collecting crystals that open up new areas. The quite literal hook of the game is a grapple. Games introducing equipment to free up your movement usually have to counteract that sizeable advantage. In SHRUBNAUT, the catch is that you can only fire the grapple at 90-degree angles. Some surfaces, it rebounds off of entirely.

With its spooky but charming chiptune, its vivid pixel art graphics, and lots of items that don't offer new abilities, SHRUBNAUT would be right at home alongside the brilliant Celeste. And as in Celeste, pressing the right controls in the right order at speed is a non-trivial challenge. SHRUBNAUT also has a small but wonderful design detail I'd appreciate seeing in more puzzle games: it lets you use the grapple to pull cubes towards you. No more wasting time walking about the level to pick up a weight for a pressure plate.

SHRUBNAUT on itch.io

Quantum Splitter

Atoms are particles composed of smaller particles, and when you split one, its constituent parts can fly into other atoms, causing them to shatter. It's possible to create a sustained chain reaction of these divisions, which is the principle a fission reactor runs on. It's also roughly the phenomenon on display in Quantum Splitter. In its puzzles, we can click one atom and watch its particles fly off in the direction they're facing, and we want to use the knock-on effects of that release to crack all its atoms in one click.

This is mostly an "order of operations" challenge, where you're thinking "If I do W, X will happen, which will cause Y to happen, which will cause Z to happen", and so on. In this sense, the game captures both the essence of chain reactions and building complex machines. Programmers eat your heart out. To get the most out of Quantum Splitter, I'd advise solving early levels in your head instead of brute forcing them, but the stages do become confounding before too long. It's impressive that a game this tiny manages to introduce a new mechanic with each world. Chapter 2 lets us reposition the atoms, Chapter 3 has us make multiple reactions in one level, etc.

Quantum Splitter on itch.io

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That's another edition of Lo-Fi Plays. I hope you found something here that looks tempting, and once again, thanks for reading.

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Outer Wilds.

Last week, I talked about Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds and how it gets players implementing the scientific method. What I didn't discuss as much were the physical discoveries that the game incorporates into its universe. Scientists get accused of being closed-minded because they exclude the supernatural from their worldview, but this caricature of the profession is at odds with its history. Physics is full of concepts weirder than fiction, and its researchers have often overturned their long-held claims about the universe because new information came to light. Many of their peculiar discoveries are exhibited in the museum of Outer Wilds. The game borrows some phenomena from cosmology: the study of the magnificently large, and others from quantum physics: the science of the unfathomably small. In this article, we're going to look at both.

Black Holes

The curious Outer Wilds player will be no stranger to the black hole. For example, they'll have found the Nomai-engineered black hole in the centre of the planet Brittle Hollow and the one in the Ash Twin Project: the database of Nomai memories. The real-world conception of black holes began with the general theory of relativity, introduced by Einstein in 1915. General relativity forms the basis for our current understanding of gravity and came with a collection of "field equations": equations that can describe the folding of the fabric of our universe and the resultant gravity that folding creates. The first person to produce a solution for these equations was the German physicist Karl Schwarzschild, who made his publication soon after Einstein's.^[1]

The Schwarzschild Solution described a singular point in space with astronomically high density.^[2] The gravitational pull an object exerts depends on that density; the more matter in one spot, the stronger the gravity. A black hole is a lot of mass in one location, so its gravitational force would be so potent that it would drag in even the light around it.^[3] With no light emanating from the black hole, you couldn't see it, which is why it would be a "black" hole.^[2]

That hypothetical vortex was far-fetched enough that it was first thought to be a quirk of the mathematics; a concept that existed on paper but not in reality. Yet slowly, the scientific community came to see black holes' existence as a physical possibility.^[1] Then, in 1964, they found one: Cygnus X-1; they just couldn't confirm it was a black hole yet. It took the most esteemed physicists almost three decades to agree that Cygnus X-1 was the unicorn they'd been chasing. Today, estimates for the number of black holes in our galaxy start at an eye-watering ten million.^[3]

Outer Wilds simulates the pull of the black hole. Like the real deal, the game's gravity wells have an "event horizon": a definite point of no return for anything that falls in.^[2] In the game, the force of the singularity is tempered, perhaps a result of the Nomai being able to put a leash on it so that it doesn't tear apart their structures or bodies. The gravity of a real black hole can stretch any object or being into thin strings of matter in a process that physicists call "spaghettification". Really. In Outer Wilds, we can also see the true-to-life effect of light bending around black holes. The premise of using these objects to power technology may further have some grounding in solid physics.

Black holes emit a kind of radiation called "Hawking radiation". As radiation is just energy moving through space, that makes black holes a potential energy source. Other ideas for black hole power stations involve sapping energy from particle disintegration in them or leeching off of the fast-moving plasma orbiting them. Although, I can't stress enough that we're a long way from being able to implement any of these inventions.

The Schwarzchild black hole has another surprise that's also depicted in Outer Wilds. Any object or event that you can use Einstein's field equations to describe moving forwards in time, you can also calculate to be running backwards.^[2] So, what if we run the maths of the black hole in reverse? We get a white hole; a mathematical discovery first made by Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm.^[4] Where no light can escape the black hole, and nothing will return from past its event horizon, light only exits the white hole, and nothing can enter its event horizon.^[2] In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen imagined white holes as the point of exit for anything that falls into black holes. They envisioned instances of the two objects connected by funnels that would later be called "Einstein-Rosen bridges" or "wormholes".^[4]

Einstein-Rosen bridges are the Nomais' universal expressway. You can see black and white holes contained in their teleporter entrances and exits, respectively. There's also an interface on the planet Ember Twin that lets you experiment with these passages. When you insert two warp cores into the machine, its interface resembles a Penrose diagram in the shape physicists use to describe the relationship between a white hole and black hole.^[2] Unfortunately, in the real world, we've never observed a wormhole or a white hole. Even on paper, there are enormous complications that would seem to prevent the possibility of a stable white hole or a wormhole you can traverse.^[4] Not least of which that white holes are posited as counterparts to black holes that have existed forever, and nothing in our universe has existed forever.^[2] In Outer Wilds' representation of them, it is engaging in speculation about what science could look like in the future rather than replicating a vision of the universe as we now understand it.

While the Nomai used wormholes to travel through time, they didn't leave an explanation of how they did it. Yet, some physicists have proposed that if you could move a wormhole exit at high speed relative to a wormhole entrance, that would allow you a shortcut through history.^[5] It's also worth noting that general relativity tells us that the closer you are to a black hole, the slower you move relative to people outside its influence. Because space and time are a single fabric, when the black hole drastically distorts space, it also distorts time. The gravity is stronger closer to the singularity, so the time distortion is too.

Meanwhile, special relativity shows that if you are moving faster than someone else through space, you also move faster than them through time. So, there are hypothetically ways we might use high-speed travel and enormous gravitational force to mess with the fourth dimension. We should, however, note that the temporal transportation we see in Outer Wilds is based on a totally speculative idea of how time works and that there's no current reason to believe wormholes are viable time machines, if they even exist.^[4][5]

Quantum Mechanics

From quantum mechanics, Outer Wilds takes the concept of superposition. The game's Quantum Moon can orbit any one of the six planets in its solar system but jumps between those planets when you're not observing it. Similarly, rocks that have broken off from this moon also teleport between a limited set of fixed locations when out of sight.

In opposition to classical physics, many measurements in quantum physics come with a heavy dose of uncertainty. For any property of a quantum particle, there are a number of different states we could find it in when we measure it. Prior to that measurement, we say that that property of the particle is in a "superposition" of each possible measurement; this means that various outcomes of measurement are possible, each with its own probability. So, before measurement, a photon could be in a superposition of lots of different velocities, but when we measure it, we find it moving at a specific velocity.

In Outer Wilds, we act like a physicist investigating a photon or other fundamental particle. We can narrow down a potential range of positions for the quantum rocks, but won't know exactly where they are until we check them. This effective teleportation of these stones becomes a hindrance to landing on the Quantum Moon. Its surface is shrouded by grey gas, which means that you cannot see most of the planetoid upon entering its atmosphere, giving it the chance to teleport out from under you. One way or another, you can eventually surmise that if you snap a photo of the moon with your scout and stare at it as you enter its atmosphere, you'll be able to continuously observe it as you land, keeping it in a single position.

The quantum rocks of Outer Wilds take these fuzzy effects that are so small as to be invisible and blow them up to a scale where we can see them and intuit their logic. I want to emphasise that some of the ways the Quantum Moon works are more interpretive than set in cold, hard facts. You could be forgiven for thinking that conscious observation affects quantum objects. This myth gets repeated all the time in popsci media, and some of the foremost minds in quantum mechanics, like Werner Heisenberg and John Wheeler believed it. Still, there's no experimental evidence to back up that claim. Additionally, there's no reason that looking at a photograph of something would affect the behaviour of the thing itself. An image of matter is not that matter.

Outer Wilds also has us play with a rule it calls quantum entanglement, but it has little to do with the actual phenomenon. In Outer Wilds, if you are touching a quantum object when it teleports, you teleport along with it. The game uses the term "entanglement" to refer to that coupling. In actual quantum mechanics, one particle can decay into two entangled particles. After this entanglement, you can measure a property of one of the particles and work out a certain statistical probability of finding the particle it is linked with in a certain and alternate state based on that measurement. For example, quantum particles have a property called "spin", and electrons can either be in a spin "up" state or a spin "down" state. So, if you entangle two electrons, and then you measure one and find it's spin "up", you know the other has a 100% chance of being spin "down" and vice-versa. As you can see, Outer Wilds borrows the name of this concept but not much else.

Supernovae

The black holes and quantum mechanics of Outer Wilds are often empowering to toy with, but there is a more apocalyptic and restrictive force at play in its solar system. At the end of every twenty-two-minute run, the star holding the system's planets in place goes supernova. Stars have a lot of mass compacted into a relatively tiny area. 99.8% of the matter in Earth's solar system is just the Sun. As was the case with black holes, a lot of mass in a tiny space means a hefty gravitational pull. So, the star is primed to collapse under its own gravity, but for most of its life, it doesn't.^[6]

Main sequences stars conduct nuclear fusion, literally the fusion of the nuclei of atoms. Fusion generates heat, and therefore, pressure. That pressure pushes outwards to the surface of the star, counteracting the gravity and preventing collapse. But eventually, the star burns through all its fuel and has nothing left to fuse. As fusion wanes, the heat reduces, which means the outward pressure lets up, and gravity wins out. A massive enough star in this state implodes, matter smashing into matter, generating an immense shockwave that can demolish entire planets.^[6] Although, I couldn't tell you whether the Outer Wilds star is large enough to undergo that catastrophic collapse.

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In most cases, I don't think criticising media as a 1:1 simulation of reality is helpful. That is not what media is. But art and entertainment do inevitably invoke and comment on some aspects of the universe we live in. As such, they have the potential to lead us towards certain conclusions, whether we're conscious of their pull on us or not, and I wouldn't want to mislead anyone by mindlessly parroting the observations of a game without any scepticism. I also think tangential learning can be a force for good, as long as we keep in mind that we are using the media as a jumping-off point to talk about another topic and not necessarily analysing the media itself. This earnest inquiry into the truth of the universe is the philosophy at the heart of Outer Wilds. Thanks for reading.

Sources

1. A Brief History of Black Holes by Sabine Hossenfelder (May 9, 2020), YouTube.
2. White Holes by PBS Space Time (August 30, 2017), YouTube.
3. Black Holes by NASA Staff (2010), NASA.
4. What is wormhole theory? by Nola Taylor Tillman and Ailsa Harvey (January 13, 2022), Space.com.
5. Is Time Travel Impossible? by PBS Space Time (October 21, 2019), YouTube.
6. What is a Supernova? by NASA Staff (July 23, 2021), NASA SpacePlace.

All other sources are linked at relevant points in the article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Outer Wilds.

When media portrays science, it's often as an aesthetic. The on-screen face of the discipline is laboratories and white coats, beakers and robots. Which is fine for entertainment purposes, but if you want to boil science down to its essence, you can't treat it as stylisation. Sometimes, fiction depicts science as a body of knowledge, as everything we know about physics, chemistry, and biology. That's part of the picture, but we're still missing a crucial component. Science is not just a library of information; it's also the method through which we fill that library. It is starting from a position of total scepticism and using only logic and experiment to confirm or deny hypotheses. I'm not sure I've ever seen a piece of media as cognizant of that methodology as 2019's Outer Wilds.

Outer Wilds' player character is one of a fish-like humanoid species called the Hearthians, who live in a solar system substantially different to ours. The game begins on the day of the protagonist's inaugural flight in this society's thriving space program. Their home planet of Timber Hearth is ramshackle, and its astronautics improvisational and foolhardy. Its history is full of reckless rocketeers who half blew themselves up trying to touch the heavens. But the Hearthians are also intelligent and inquisitive. They've discovered that the universe is expanding and have translated the language of the long-dead Nomai race. The Nomai are a point of fixation of the Hearthians. Furry, four-eyed travellers who entered the solar system long ago, the Nomais' fate remains a mystery. However, as we prepare for blast-off, one of the statues the Nomai left behind opens its eyes and stares right into our main character's soul. Then, it's off to the stars.

The game confidently eschews a prescribed order in which to complete most of its tasks, instead letting you galavant about the solar system as you please. You venture where you want, when you want, surveying ancient alien ruins and reconstructing their exploits one stone tablet at a time. Although, the lessons you glean from one expedition may help you access information on another. You can also visit fellow Hearthians on neighbouring planets, where you'll find them warming themselves by crackling campfires and jamming on their twangy instruments.

And then there's the big twist, the one for which Outer Wilds is famous. If twenty-two minutes pass during any one of your runs, your planet's sun goes supernova. When that happens, or if you fatally wound yourself before then, you see a sped-up, reversed replay of the whole session up to that moment. Then, you wake up where you started: standing in front of a campfire on Timber Hearth, ready for lift-off. No one remembers the events of each time loop except you, your ship's computer, and an unflappable Hearthian called Gabbro. If you can commit to hours of experimentation and exploration across these cycles, you can feast on Nomai culture and learn of its deep roots in science and engineering.

Here's the abridged version of Nomai history: They travelled to the solar system, tracking the signal of a stellar object called "The Eye of the Universe". When the Eye stopped transmitting its siren call, they were left at a loss, but were able to bootstrap a "Probe Cannon" to locate the Eye. Central to their research was the "Ash Twin Project", a data storage technology which used a Nomai "warp core" to send information back in time and save it. This miraculous computing required the energy of a supernova to function. However, a comet called "The Interloper" soon soared into the Nomai's stellar neighbourhood, releasing a cascade of deadly matter that wiped them out before they could complete their work. But we're getting ahead of ourselves because to discover any of the universe's history, we must first master its physics.

Most fundamentally, some grasp on Outer Wilds' physics is necessary because if we want to explore ancient settlements, we have to be able to reach them in one piece. Crossing the distances across and between planets requires the use of a newfangled jetpack and a spaceship that's like an outhouse with a propane tank strapped to the underside. The acceleration, braking, and course correction of both happen on a delay, meaning we must be able to predict where our momentum will carry us long before we get there and counteract that force accordingly. Accidentally slamming your craft into the ground at full speed or boosting out of a planet's gravity are part of your initiation. You walk in the footprints of the real humans who had to tame rocketry and aeronautics to travel beyond Earth's atmosphere. Outer Wilds comments that any extraterrestrial anthropology or archaeology would have to begin as an application of physics.

When we say "physics" with reference to computer games, we're often talking about only a subset of the real subject. In gaming lingo, physics is how our avatar responds to inputs and how the game resolves kinetic interactions between entities. In the real world, physics does include the maths of everyday objects pushing and pulling against each other, e.g. the velocity of a barrel rolling down a hill or how high a ball will bounce when you drop it. However, in our world, physics is also the word for the rules everything material in the universe follows, as well as the frameworks in which we place those rules. It's the phenomenon of opposite charges attracting, it's the definition of a black hole, it's what radioactive decay produces which particles. And in Outer Wilds, it's these kinds of laws that players need to internalise as much as the swaying and rebounding of objects.

You must be able to identify that strange matter appears near green crystals, know what the power source of the Ash Twin Project is, and recognise how quantum objects move. Outer Wilds forces us to acquire and apply knowledge to overcome problems rather than using superior tools to strong-arm through them. It does that by rarely upgrading our character. Our protagonist doesn't come with a stat sheet or talent tree enclosed, and the single equipment augmentation they get is a modest patch to their radio scanner. So, almost all progress requires us not to return to an area with a keener blade or more developed skills but with new ideas on how to mine their secrets.

For example, once you know what an entrance teleporter looks like, you can start blinking yourself into buildings you were previously shut out of. Once you know jellyfish can insulate you, you can piggyback on one to safely pass through an electrical field. Just as getting a feel for your ship is a process of trial-and-error, you tease many of these rules out of the universe through experimentation. The only way to be sure that jellyfish can protect you from shocks is to try and use one as a shield. In a lab on Ember Twin, you can employ purple warp cores to create black holes and white warp cores to create white holes. You're also able to shoot your probe into a black hole there and watch it emerge from a white hole. It's possible to infer from those experiments that when you see a purple warp core in a teleporter, you can enter it, and when you see a white module in the same mechanism, you can exit it.

This hold on physics is not just our key to the solar system's secrets. On each of the planets and space stations, the developers toy with motion and interaction in a different way. So, to grasp the physics of Outer Wilds is to understand its setting.

• Timber Hearth is mostly a neutral entranceway into space but also has geysers that can send you soaring into the air.
• Ash Twin and Ember Twin orbit each other in addition to circling the sun. They also exhibit an effect in which sand flows from one onto the other, revealing ruins on Ash Twin as Ember Twin's are buried.
• Nested in the centre of Brittle Hollow is a black hole. The Hollow is bombarded by volcanic rocks from its moon, which cause its surface to fall into the vortex chunk by chunk. Areas of the planet can also become accessible or inaccessible over time due to this disintegration, while its core teleports us to the Nomai's "White Hole Station".
• Giant's Deep is an oceanic sphere dominated by tornadoes. Those twisters can lift islands into the upper atmosphere before they fall back into the sea.
• Dark Bramble is a series of nested spaces that are bigger on the inside than the outside and where predators float in the atmosphere itself.
• We can slide about on the icy surface of The Interloper, the comet having become stuck in the sun's orbit. When it approaches the star, part of its surface melts away for a brief moment, allowing us passage to an interior of cavernous slides and hazardous materials.
• The Quantum Moon is a devious trickster which changes the planet it's orbiting when we look away. To land on the moon, we must stare at a photo of it on entry, and we can only reach its mythical North Pole through a teleporting temple on its soil.

Gravity on any of these bodies is also proportional to their mass, as in reality. So, you can float like a feather on The Interloper or the Hourglass Twins, but you feel like you're wearing lead boots stomping around Giant's Deep. The non-euclidean maze of Dark Bramble and the various space stations are without gravity entirely.

Schools generally teach us to sift out Earth sciences from abstracted physics. Yet, the specifics of any physical process on a planet are down to the rules that govern its matter, its energy, and their interactions. That is true whether we're talking about the quantity of rainfall, the evolution of birds' wings, or the polarity of the magnetic field. Outer Wilds represents this relationship between the physical nature of a planet and what happens on it through mechanics that are easily understood. The physics of the worlds are also memorable both because they are interactively tangible and because we must work around them to make headway. If you're liable to get flattened by a meteoroid or hurled into the upper atmosphere, you'll pay a heavy cost for not knowing about it.

To internalise the physics of Outer Wilds is also to be conscious of the culture and life's work of the Hearthians and the Nomai. It says a lot that the most advanced building on Timber Hearth is the observatory. That they don't have theatres or stadiums or even brick houses, but they do have a space program. That judging by their anecdotes, they risk life and limb trying to blast themselves into space on a ton of rocket fuel. The game depicts the Hearthians as loveable pioneers, complete with banjo and roasted marshmallows. They're goofy in their proneness to accidents but noble in stopping at nothing to press their boots into the clay of distant planets. When we find other members of our species off-world, they're content despite being hundreds of miles from home because they're the chosen ones who got to explore regions of their domain others might never see. Even Riebeck, who quivers in his boots at the prospect of spaceflight, considers it worth pushing beyond his terror to spelunk the ruins of a long-forgotten city.

By comparison, the Nomai know a lot more than the Hearthians about the principles that control the universe. They also more capably concentrate those principles into new technologies. Still, the two peoples hold the same incandescent enthusiasm for scientific inquiry. For the Nomai, the Eye of the Universe is a secular Holy Land. There's a common opinion that science cheapens the natural world by demystifying it, but that's not how these fuzzy extraterrestrials see it. To them, theories that objectively describe the universe put them more closely in touch with a divine celestial. And without a working knowledge of physics and engineering, there is no pilgrimage for them. So, standing around a blackboard, prototyping power sources is as culturally gainful for the Nomai as reading scripture might be for a society steeped in the supernatural.

As a Hearthian, our missions and values align with those of the Nomai, making it easy to empathise with them. The game wishes to impress on us the awe that fills them as they behold the universe, not just as a wishy-washy "out there" space but also as an environment of overlapping physical mechanisms. The one surviving Nomai we can meet, Solanum, has a name that suggests her species illuminates the unknown. Eyes are also a recurring motif in Outer Wilds. The Hearthians have three eyes, and the more advanced Nomai have four, symbolising their clear-headed perception of reality. The Nomai questing for the Eye of the Universe is a metaphor for their goal of gazing at the cosmos as it truly exists. The Nomais' wonderment at nature leads them to research it studiously, and that research produces life-changing technologies.

The crowning accomplishment of the species is their manipulation of black holes. We can just about imagine one translating our spatial coordinates, but the Nomai have been able to use them to alter their temporal locations too. When teleporting each other around the system, the Nomai discovered that commuters would reach their destination a fraction of a second before leaving their point of origin. This is the time travel; the teleporting passenger was able to jump a fraction of a second forward in time to arrive just before they should have.

Outer Wilds' real stroke of genius is understanding that time travel, at least within the particular rules of this fiction, is not just a transportation technology but also an information technology. That is, it doesn't just allow us to change our acceleration along the timeline or reverse our direction; it also has the potential to transform what we know. The Nomai are able to exaggerate the teleportation delay they observed up to a period of twenty-two minutes. This trick becomes the crux of their search for the Eye of the Universe. A computer fires a probe in a random direction, and that probe then uploads its data to the Ash Twin Project. The Ash Twin Project then sends the data back in time to before the craft launched. At that point, either the probe has found the Eye, or it hasn't. If it has not, the Probe Cannon knows not to check that direction again and fires in another random one, again sending the data back to the moment before the firing.

Sequentially, the system builds a list of "wrong" locations, and the process continues until the Probe Cannon gets a positive hit. Assuming that you can send information back in time and that acting on that information does not erase any portion of history, you effectively have a means to know the result of any future experiment immediately, no matter how long it takes. Such technology would obviously be of immeasurable value to any scientist and is symbolic of the trial-and-error science relies on. This data recursion is also how the "time loop" of Outer Wilds' universe works. We can think of the Ash Twin Project as a mainframe and the Nomai's statues as terminals. Both Gabbro and we were lucky enough to "link" with these statues. Now, anything we find out in one run gets uploaded to its cloud, and then the "us" twenty-two seconds in the past downloads that information and can act on it. The same rule applies to our ship's database.

While repetition is Outer Wilds' greatest strength, it's also its most humbling weakness. The low points in this sci-fi are the no man's lands in which the eureka moments of discovery give way to experimental grind. It might seem hard to believe that you could get stuck in a rut because most of the solar system is empty void, meaning there are initially few obstacles between us and our target planets. This free ticket to go anywhere we want is closely linked to the wide potential for discovery in the game. A real scientist isn't born with a laundry list of objectives to complete; they must decide which goals are meaningful for them to pursue and what experiments are necessary for their pursuit. Likewise, Outer Wilds has a solar system unfold in front of us like intricate origami, and there's no primary mission weighing on our minds; there's only the destination we pick and the activities we think are worthwhile to perform there.

At first, the time loop mechanic greases the wheels of exploration and discovery because now you're not just seeing what exists at different locations but also times. The game engages you in all four dimensions. Early on, the resets also provide a safety net enabling experimentation. If one of your bright ideas goes down in flames, you can just rewind the universe's tape back to the start and try again. So why not see what trouble you can get into and take a few chances? Jetting off into three-dimensional, mostly empty space further means that we don't have to backtrack through areas to get to a planet; we can fly right to our destination. That's a huge relief when we get set back to the starting area at regular intervals. Initially, having our bungee cord routinely snap us back to Timber Hearth also encourages us to pick new headings and not spend too long poking about where we're unlikely to make swift progress.

But once we tick off all the quick and effortless jobs, the ones left generally require delving right into the heart of worlds and staring at the same puzzles for minutes on end. Here, the time loop goes from sweetening the explorative pot to souring it, as we're jolted back to the very beginning of the game every twenty-two minutes (max). Then, we have to retake the journey, often a long journey, to the site of our experimentation. When we get to those sites, we often find other time sinks.

On Ember Twin, you crawl dark caverns which look highly similar whatever way you turn. Some objects within them can teleport, and in one area, your path is blocked by a deep pit you must patiently wait to fill with sand. On Ash Twin, you have the opposite problem as you may need to wait minutes for the wind to carry away the desert facade, excavating its towers. On The Interloper, there's only a narrow period in which its icy shell cracks, and you can slip inside. You have to determine when that is by trial-and-error. In Dark Bramble, you need to sneak past the Anglerfish without an exact concept of what volumes they can hear at. Make an engine burst fractionally too strong, and you'll be fish food in seconds.

For each of these time-sensitive locks, you can arrive too early to the scene and waste minutes standing around or overshoot the window and have your time wasted by cycling back around to it. At its worst, the loop throws you off the scent of answers because it becomes so arduous to keep reinvestigating the same spots that it feels like the game is trying to tell you you're barking up the wrong tree. And it's boring to keep hitting restart. Therefore, you can lose interest in the experiments.

Look, a lot of scientific work is laborious. It's the "Aha!" moments that get romanticised, but physics is not all jumping out of the bathtub screaming, or running across the university courtyard, papers in hand. Diligent researchers may also stay up all night double-checking calculations, or their job might be testing lab samples eight hours a day. There's room for a game that depicts that steady and mechanical expansion of knowledge, but not in an otherwise optimistic and revelatory sci-fi epic. With its starry-eyed trail-blazers and anthemic soundtrack, Outer Wilds isn't trying to be a mundanity simulator like The Longing or Presentable Liberty. It wants to be the video game Carl Sagan would make. When Outer Wilds does get monotonous, it's also not true to the tedium of STEM labour. It feels less like robotically running through batteries of lab tests and more like having to drive home and then back to the lab every twenty minutes for some reason.

We could also attack Outer Wilds on the basis that it fails to capture the collaborative side of science. Real scientists decode the world by gathering into research teams, publishing in journals, reading other experts' papers, and working together in the same organisations. All of them start by digesting previous generations' findings, and they orient their careers in response to earlier theories. While we might recognise a comparative few people who made exceptional contributions to the field (e.g. Newton, Mendeleev, Darwin), science is not a pantheon; it's a network. So, when you're strapping yourself into your one-seater ship in Outer Wilds and building a private database of geography and anthropology, maybe the play isn't capturing the essence of scientific discovery.

But the title does represent cooperation in its own way. As the protagonist, you're not inventing the wheel. The Hearthians already know a thing or two about the Nomai and the nature of the universe by the time you've earned your interplanetary wings. They've developed a map of the solar system, a space program, and a translator for the Nomai language. When you talk to other people of your species, they freely reference former astronauts and engineers from the tribe, and the Nomai are a font of knowledge who provide most of the information we absorb. We're not inventing cosmology or archaeology from scratch; we're standing on the shoulders of giants.

The Nomai texts are also histories of collegiate endeavours. Even the structure of their writing lends itself to discussion. The way humans and Hearthians do it, you position text in straight lines, shelving one tract above another. If someone else wants to comment on your paragraphs, they usually have to create a spacially independent series of characters next to or after yours. The Nomai begin their documents by writing in a spiral, spinning out from the centre of a stone screen. If anyone wants to comment on that initial statement, they write their text in a swirl pattern that branches off from the initial, which other people can branch off of, and so on. The geometry of Nomai writing makes room for more voices in the same space, which is conducive to the exhaustive dialogues which drive science. The time loop, too, reflects the education of a scientist. On each expedition after the initial run, you are always building atop the knowledge of the Hearthian that came before you.

However, the game's most beautiful ode to scientific cooperation is in its ending. With the Nomai rearranging countless pieces of the Hearthian solar system, it's easy to imagine that the supernova is another synthetic event pushed into motion by their hand. In reality, your sun is just at the end of its natural life cycle. Every main-sequence star is a nuclear inferno, and the Hearthian sun's atomic fuel supply has dried up. All that's left now is for it to make one last, glorious implosion. The Nomai never saw the Ash Twin Project up and running, but it's looping memories now because it finally has the supernova it needs to power it. As it turns out, the Hearthian sun is not alone in its criticality. The universe's stars are one-by-one dying out, and the Nomai have migrated outwards from their home to cling to the few that remain. For all of their space-age technology, the Nomai of the past were not much more prosperous than the Hearthians of the present. Like our amphibians sheltered by their campfires, the Nomai were huddled around dying embers staring out at the infinite darkness.

By the late game, the Nomai ruins have given up countless theoretical treasures, but a clamp on the supernova remains unattainable. It's not in the crashed ship in Dark Bramble with its broken warp core or in the technological marvel of the Ash Twin Project. It's not inside the Hanging City of Brittle Hollow, the probe module of the Orbital Cannon, or even on the North Pole of the Quantum Moon. We can't prevent the death of the sun, let alone the demise of the universe, but we might be able to do something better.

All puzzle games have us transfer knowledge from one challenge to the next, but they generally switch out the objects and environments we operate on as we go. Scientists don't see the same environmental volatility when they try to unravel the universe; they're always describing and engineering the same reality. From a material perspective, humans 20,000 years ago were capable of building spaceships, nuclear reactors, and supercomputers. Everything they'd need to do so already existed on Earth; the limitation was their knowledge.

Representing that scholarly philosophy, Outer Wilds's universe is not just a linear gallery of puzzles. It's also one big puzzle that we are capable of solving from the moment we enter the game. However, we're not going to crack that riddle on the first run because we don't have the intellectual toolkit we'd need to know there is an ultimate puzzle, let alone find its solution. We must take the slow road, gaining the answer through reading and exploration. It is imperative that we understand the problem, recognise how people smarter than us have solved problems before, and then devise a new solution that combines elements of preexisting theories.

If we master the classical physics of piloting our ship, the spooky mechanics of the Quantum Moon, and the general relativity of the black holes, we can put the pieces together and do what the Nomai never could. In one last courageous run, we can take a route to reach the Eye of the Universe. We hop over to Ash Twin, teleport into the Ash Twin Project, and remove its warp core. We then take that power source to Dark Bramble, install it into the Nomai ship there, and input the Eye coordinates from the Orbital Cannon's probe module.

The Eye's entranceway is a stormy wasteland of marbled blue rock, shrouded in darkness, and with a murky concept of "up". Whenever natural philosophers have broken the seal on new branches of physics, they've come upon aspects of the universe that challenged their basic precepts of reality. At various times, that's meant accepting that the conservation of energy can be violated or that the universe is expanding even though it's not expanding into anything, or that one person can travel through time faster than another. I think if we'd discovered any of these phenomena ourselves, we would have felt like reality was breaking down. It, therefore, feels only fitting that that's what happens at the end of Outer Wilds when we make our landmark discovery.

Passing into the Eye's pupil, we find ourselves in a forest where miniaturised galaxies hover before us and then blink out like fireflies. Eventually, we come across a campfire reminiscent of the one at the start of the loop. Nearby, Esker, a Hearthian from a lunar outpost, pops into existence. If we ramble around a bit, we can find a Nomai home with a banjo inside, and picking it up summons Riebeck to the camp. Riebeck is that space-fearing adventurer we met on Britte Hollow, and the banjo is the instrument we found him playing, which he dutifully returns to doing. Next, we find a harmonica to summon Feldspar and a bongo to call Chert, and before you know it, all the Hearthian explorers we found scattered around the system are sitting by the same campfire, playing their music. If you sought the Nomai Solanum out, she joins the party too.

The melodies that you heard each of the Hearthians playing while camping out on distant planets coalesce. They sing a single tune, and shapes begin to form in the smoke above the fire. Then the world goes black, and you are left alone with nothing. And then there is everything at once. You see a blinding white light and hear an immense and godly version of the explorers' song. After the credits, the screen displays a new universe in which hollow, DayGlo planets riddled with holes have formed around stars, and if Solanum was with us, we see a campfire light on one of the new worlds.

After reading about scientific cooperation and performing it indirectly for the entire game, in the finale, we get to see it occur before our eyes. It is the zenith of applied physics. As people gain knowledge, they gain new abilities. As sentient beings' understanding of mechanics has evolved, we've become able to cook, to fly, to make thinking machines, and in Outer Wilds' world, even to teleport or overcome quantum limitations. These advances were achieved through not just surfacing information but sharing it, and as such, the campfire is the most important image to Outer Wilds. It represents one of the earliest and most influential examples of human discovery in physics, an application of that discovery, and the distribution of the involved knowledge.

Mastering fire is often seen as the breakthrough development of prehistoric man, and that ability to cook, light spaces, and stay warm became essential to our dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom. All worldly and technological development since has its heritage in these early revelations, even science as advanced as general relativity and quantum mechanics. Fire literally illuminates, embodying the ability to see what was invisible before, integrating with the symbology of the Eye. It also serves as a cultural totem that people gather around to communicate over and is synonymous with storytelling.

So, when we see the Hearthians, irrepressible explorers, sitting around separate campfires and then uniting around a single one, it's a metaphor for them taking their individual scientific discoveries and combining them. Their lone songs, otherwise lost in the night, harmonise into a collective orchestral, and at that point, the smoke that floated free and wispy from chemical reactions conforms to structure. It's nature guided by the scientists reshaping it hand in hand with each other. Like every one of them has their own instrument, they each bring some knowledge to the scientific table that the others can't. And the concentration of energy that is the campfire gives rise to another compact space of extreme energy density: a universe undergoing a big bang.

Just as understanding combustion let us create the combustion engine and understanding electricity let us create electronics, Outer Wilds proposes that understanding the universe could let us birth a new universe. For the first time, we wouldn't be slaloming around the existing laws of physics to achieve some result; we could write new laws. The way that planets form is a result of the physics of gravity, and the planets forming differently in the second universe tells us there are new protocols of physics. With the right conditions, a new universe could even give rise to new explorers. So, by placing the campfire at the end of the adventure, Mobius Digital aren't just connecting it to the start of the loop. They're drawing a line from intelligent life's first great discovery to their ultimate discovery. In spirit, the cavepeople striking a spark in dry wood are doing the same thing as the astronauts sculpting a new universe.

I am convinced that Outer Wilds is important to games as an art form because its message is inseparable from its medium. A film or a novel can show you a character applying scientific principles, but it's one thing to observe someone else doing it and another thing entirely to do it yourself. Only through a systemic, reactive experience like Outer Wilds can we make a little corner of the cosmos into our own laboratory, to imagine a world outside our current understanding, and to use our raw creativity and smarts to test whether that world exists. And if you keep prodding all the bricks in the universe's wall, just now and then, you'll push through into a reality that previously seemed inconceivable. That is the scientific enlightenment that Outer Wilds so knowingly captures. Thanks for reading.

This is the end of the line. With the breadth of Summer Game Fest conferences and demos, I only have so much fuel in me to show you what I think is interesting. For our terminus, I've picked two final showcases: one nice, one nasty, but before we get there, I promised a little surprise.

Sonic Frontiers

Just when I thought I knew what Sonic was, Sega told us it now includes a Breath of the Wild-inspired sandbox world. Their preview was met with widespread backlash. Among other criticisms, viewers described Frontiers' backdrop as empty and lifeless. I don't think that it's a sin to have an environment that is barren or still. Whether it's mechanics or scenery, more is not necessarily better. Games like Sea of Solitude and even Breath of the Wild itself created serene atmospheres and measured pacing by subduing their wildlife and leaving large gaps between encounters. The placidness in these settings was the catalyst for reflection on the enormous loss suffered there. But the idea of doing the same thing for Sonic is a terrific gag. You have this barbed, irreverent 90s mascot who slows down for no one, and you're dumping him into the kind of world optimised for bittersweet meditation. If Sega are to be believed, they're making Tarvoksky's Bubsy.

But what really pushes Frontiers over the edge into absolute "are you seeing this?" territory are the statements made by the project's director, Morio Kishimoto. Maybe you think that the micro-stages present in Sonic Frontiers' hub world are a staple of 3D platforming going all the way back to Mario 64 in 1996. Prepare to think again because Kishimoto tells us, "A playable world map that includes stage-like elements is something that hasn't really been done before". Maybe you, naive reader, think that Sonic Frontiers is the product of ongoing iteration on the open-world platformer style. Fool that you are, you've not realised that games have been using the same map system since 1988 until Frontiers came along to revolutionise it.

"The [world map] system has been used by countless platformers since [Super Mario Bros. 3], even to this day [...] A true evolution of this structure is what we see as the essence of Sonic Frontiers' field".

Maybe something has been lost in translation here, but if so, it slipped past everyone at Sega involved in this interview, as well as the crew at IGN, which is effectively unveiling the game for them. There's nothing wrong with having your project be a reworking of previous releases. That is what every game is in some sense. But to see the director of Frontiers, which is clearly inspired by the last thirty years of platformers, go "Hub worlds? Never heard of them" is truly mind-bending.

The Wholesome Games Showcase

For those of us yearning for more gameplay in our video games event, the Wholesome Showcase has always had a place set for us. The more humble game developers don't have the budget for fancy pre-rendered trailers and copious cutscenes, so they must exhibit their gameplay in its raw, authentic state. During Wholesome Direct, that simplicity and honesty crests atop the heartfelt charm of these adorable applications to create something human and upfront.

Terra Nil is a management game where we're not growing a business or a settlement; we're rewilding the Earth. Even in supposedly environmentally-progressive sims, we often consume the landscape with our structures, sucking down ever more resources. This was a significant weakness of Civilization: Beyond Earth. Terra Nil's tech appears minimally intrusive, and when we're done covering the ground in luscious flora, we pack up and ship off. Much like Lumbearjack, which appeared later in the lineup, Terra Nil looks to be a vitally optimistic game in an age of climate pessimism.

Games are defined, in large part, by what challenge they ask us to overcome. Little Bear Chef, like Chibi-Robo and Little Nightmares before it, give us the task of doing big things even while tiny. Being a small part of a huge world can be intimidating, but many thumb-sized characters are also squeezably cute.

Sometimes developers want players to stop and smell the roses instead of rushing to the exit. One way to slow a game's speed is to ensure it only advances as the days, weeks, and months of the real world do. It worked for Animal Crossing, and it could work for The Garden Path. Real-time seasonal changes can help a game respond to the world the player inhabits and put them in touch with nature. They're also a fist raised against the idea of a game being a product to "binge" over the weekend and then throw away.

2D games typically contain their own self-consistent worlds. However, a developer can also contrast two-dimensional planes against full 3D environments. Doing so emphasises the flatness of the 2D screen and makes it a subspace in a larger setting. You can see 30 Birds and The Plucky Squire both toying with that idea, becoming the playable equivalent of a rug hanging in a marketplace or a poster on a dorm wall. When I first drafted this article, I thought the game was called "Bobirds" based on the logo.

Games deconstructing systems like theme parks or cars often try to simulate their mechanisms in scintillating detail. Yet, it's also possible to represent an industry or object by reinterpreting its themes and concepts rather than recreating them. That latter technique can be especially useful when you're trying to depict something too complex or unsatisfying to provide an empowerment fantasy. The Last Clockwinder shows this method in motion. A timepiece is a bafflingly intricate mechanism, but the game isn't trying to model it literally. Instead, it has you set up a network of physical interactions to capture the essence of a clock. It could be a wonderful way to see your efforts persistently and materially recognised in a puzzle game.

Dating apps have their operators trying to discover the correct inputs to achieve their desired output, feeding them goals and rewards, both big and little, along the way. In that sense, these services already feel like games, so it makes sense to transform them into one, as Lovebirb does.

Ooblets asks what if you didn't just catch the Pokémon? What if you grew them? It also has the bright idea of using a card-based battle system, which prevents players from spamming the same move endlessly. When you can only play each item in your hand once, you can't sleepwalk your way to victory. You must carefully consider what actions to take when, even if each of those actions has easily understood consequences.

SkateBIRD was a game with such irresistible curb appeal that people who'd never otherwise watch Wholesome Direct took interest. With the snappy physicality of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and the precocious cuteness of its avian cast, SkateBIRD looked both novel and nostalgic. I was so ready to love it, but every one of its features was just that little bit misaligned. The camera range was too myopic to make the ambitious leaps you needed to, the setpieces were often just centimetres too far apart, and tricks often felt fractionally out of step with their animations. Still, it's easy to root for the devs when you can see the care and heart baked right into the project. Hopefully, the content update to SkateBIRD is proof that Glass Bottom's game found its audience.

We talk a certain amount about having the right moderation tools and policies to prevent online abuse. Still, we can't forget that a sympathetic approach to toxicity also involves providing emotional support to the victims. Wholesome Direct plugged the Games and Online Harassment Hotline, so I'm going to do the same here, on the off-chance that it might help someone having a shitty time on the internet.

Lastly, snacko.land joins wizards.cool as one of the most delightful video game websites advertised at the Summer Games Fest.

Devolver Direct

Devolver's games devolve you, taking you from the organised and hopefully considerate person you have to be in your everyday life and reducing you to an animal driven by its amygdala, baring its teeth at anything that moves. That attitude also translated well to parodies of game publisher conferences because capitalism is violence. It speaks to the forceful energy and lavish production of Devolver's briefings that they maintain such a cultural hold even when the company only has a few games to trot out each year. Their presentation is the diametric opposite of the Future Games Show: a professional affair that, nonetheless, lacked chemistry between its presenters. Its coldness gave it the corporate sensibility that Devolver's showcases mercilessly disembowel.

Much of Devolver's satire has taken aim at the dubious practices game publishers get into when they have mind-boggling quantities of capital at their disposal. For 2022 specifically, they set their sights on the ridiculousness of pre-shows for video game conferences, adverts made to frontend other adverts. They also spoke to the cynical branding exercise of trying to mash all the franchises and characters up into one prison loaf metaverse, a la Fortnite, and had a starring role for cult auteur Goichi Suda. There would have been a time when immersing yourself deep in video game discourse meant you learned who Suda51 was through cultural osmosis, but that's no longer the case. The dang kids these days don't know the classics, so anyone who is flying Suda's flag in 2022 is cool in my book. Perhaps the most ridiculous dimension of Devolver's comedy sci-fi was that the scene in which Nina Struthers offered Suda omnipotence was actually kind of beautiful.

There would have been an obvious storyboard for the Cult of the Lamb trailer that involved having the twee cartoon animals murdered by Satanic minions. However, I think it's far funnier and more interesting to let these barnyard critters accept slaughter and dark magicks as part of their reality. Cult of the Lamb comes down halfway between Peppa Pig and The Binding of Isaac. I only hope that having so much lively on-screen activity at once doesn't make the game visually difficult to parse.

I highlighted an older version of Anger Foot in one of my Lo-Fi Play blogs, so I'm feeling very vindicated that it's being spun out into a full-length orgy of punting gangsters into walls. If this trend continues, expect to see the $60 release of Death Flush announced next year.

Post-Tony Hawk, skateboarding games have scoured far and wide for identities to supplant the converses and pop-punk of the genre's giant. OlliOlli found a sense of self in chillstep, the aforementioned SkateBIRD threw some anthropomorphism and household objects into the mix. Yet, Skate Story may be the apple that's fallen farthest from the tree, landing in a 3 a.m. blur of smothering darkness and extra-dimensional objects. There's a sense of forward movement and pursuit in this trailer that is rare to see in the format; an athlete is pulled through an alternate reality by the guiding light of a beguiling lantern.

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Given that there is still uncertainty about E3's future, I want to take this opportunity to say that I hope this carousel keeps coming back around. I'm not going to stop being critical of the industry's more boring tendencies or sceptical of the commercialism at the heart of E3. However, when so many aspects of the industry are changing beyond recognition, this expo is a constant. It's something you can rely on, and it's a good excuse to read and engage in discussion about the hobby we love so much. I hope we can keep doing that for many more years to come. Thanks for reading.

There is a story about games marketing and reporting that would be very easy for me to tell here. One that would say that with publishers' budgets growing like bamboo and the internet acting as the distribution network for ever-more media, the games industry has outgrown the need for a glut of summer showcases. You no longer have to gather people on the ground in one location to have eyeballs on your product, so you don't need to set up a booth or a live stage in California during the month of June. You could stream out a reel of trailers in spring, autumn, or whenever else works for you. Despite the common-sense logic of that argument, there is still an oasis of games briefings sat out here in the summer heat.

E3 is taking a bye for 2022. Yet, even during this hiatus, we still got the Microsoft conference, Sony's State of Play, the Summer Game Fest opening, the Day of the Devs, the PC Gaming Show, Devolver Direct, Netflix Geeked Week, the Tribeca Games Spotlight, Sonic Central, the Guerilla Collective, Wholesome Games Direct, the Future Games Show, the Capcom Showcase, and whatever you could find whirring away on the festival floor. People are still eagerly awaiting a deluge of new game announcements every summer, and this outpouring of demos and trailers makes sense in the context of the modern web. More distribution channels for your game news also means a more crowded field. Therefore, it becomes difficult to be heard above the din, and the best bet that many smaller developers and publishers have to be recognised is to band together, joining their voices into one booming choir. Each of the smaller showcases in this meta-E3 also serves to market the others, penetrating the public consciousness with a potency none of them could achieve alone.

However, because there's this rabble of games yelling at you from so many directions, it feels impossible to absorb them all. If I burned the midnight oil, I could describe every game at Keigh3 to you, but eventually, the part of my brain that produces meaningful observations shuts off. I go from telling you that "F1 Manager is proof that you don't always have to use the same mechanics to explore the same subject matter" to farting out "I dunno, this game has cubes in it". I never try to cover every game, but for the sake of quality, I can't try to cover every show, either. So, I've whittled my focus down to the headline acts and a few of the attractions around the edges. This time, we're going to be looking at the Summer Game Fest Opening and PC Gamer's PC Gaming Show.

The Summer Game Fest Opening

Outside of Sony and Microsoft's steams, this kickoff was easily the most blockbuster of all the briefings. Its Modern Warfare II demo was one of the most tragically unimaginative sequences at these previews. No one needed ten minutes to understand a game where you use iron sights firing and grenades to snuff out opponents. The stream ending on The Last of Us Remake also suggested a misplaced confidence from Sony. The financial downside of making one of the most graphically accomplished games of its generation is that there's not much room for visual improvement. The premise of a remaster and then a full-priced remake within the same decade as an original would be greedy for any game but carries a particular redundancy for this technical tour de force. I keep looking at those "Before and after" shots and feeling like I must be losing my mind because neither set looks better than the other to me. They're just different.

I also can't help but feel that the Rock has burnt through most of his goodwill by this point. When he first entered the cinematic arena, watching the wrestling guy tackle goofy and even slightly self-deprecating roles was pleasantly unexpected. But it doesn't have the same charm when he's in every other family film under the sun, and he's sending out pre-recorded adverts for his movie and his energy drink.

Highwater depicts a believable future on a planet of rising sea levels. The bread and butter of the post-apocalyptic genre is characters trying to jury rig together the scraps of civilisation to get by. Highwater, on the other hand, imagines a world where some people foresaw the collapse and developed some solutions to living without the comforts of the old world. Comforts like the ground.

The original Goat Simulator didn't click with me. Its novelty felt like inappropriate compensation for its jank, and we were lousy with joke "simulator" games at the time. I was also put off by it being the go-to entertainment product for a lot of those late 00s YouTube guys who made a living by shouting into the camera. But in retrospect, maybe I was a little hard on Goat Simulator. It makes sense that a game about absurd destruction might also be falling apart itself. I'd definitely grab the sequel by the horns and give it another go-around.

It wasn't the most memorable of product spots, but the Samsung TVs shown at this event make a scary amount of sense. In my Sony recap, I mentioned how companies have been dismantling hardware as a barrier to access media. In music, you no longer need a dedicated CD or MP3 player because you can subscribe to Spotify or Last.fm right on your PC or phone. Film no longer needs to be seen in theatre or even via a Blu-Ray player when you can stream Netflix or Hulu directly into your monitor. And for a while, we've been talking about Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Game Catalog as video game equivalents to those subscription services. Yet, to make full use of those video game libraries, you still need dedicated hardware: the very thing that the other media industries have phased out. For a true equivalent of Apple TV or Spotify, the media pipeline has to come straight into the display, and that's what Samsung is working on. That's not to say that, in their current state, those computer game subscription services are full replacements for a games console, especially not for us aficionados. Still, the erasure of the console is a plausible future, and Samsung's products are another step towards it.

Metal: Hellsinger scans for me in that shooter games often have a rhythm already, just not one the player must adhere to as stringently as they do in a music game. Metal is staking much of its success on tracks made by established artists specifically for some entertainment software. That's a gamble because such donated songs aren't usually bangers. Not to say that Hellsinger couldn't break the pattern, but there are very few people who perk up at the mention of Paul McCartney's contribution to the Destiny OST or who have Skrillex's Kingdom Hearts song on repeat. Yet, I suspect that the more sizeable challenge for Metal's devs will have been ensuring that the music and shooting complement each other rather than struggling against each other. Songs and non-rhythm games often don't dance to the same beat, but then experiences like Crypt of the Necrodancer have worked out how to have the two meet in the middle.

Saint's Row showed up looking a little muddy but remained in touch with its fans by reestablishing the series' legendary character creator. One of Gat Out of Hell's biggest blunders was robbing the player of the ability to cosmetically customise their avatar. If you've got a game about spreading your wings and acting as cool and goofy as possible in the story, traversal, and combat, that agency should extend to your fashion. From a business perspective, releasing the character creator ahead of time is a devilishly clever move. It's free to make your hero, so why not jump in? However, you're probably going to be dumping a lot of time and personal investment into that model, which gives you a reason to buy the game proper.

The PC Gaming Show

While the PC Gaming Show has traditionally been home to more technical and specialist media than we've seen at other briefings, it's also the most commercial of the set. It's chock full of adverts for PC components and accessories, and that's probably because the show's organisers can't dip into the deep pockets of an affluent publisher. When a Capcom or a Nintendo are carnival barking for their games, they're happy to foot the bill because they'll make the money back when people buy those products. But at an event like the PC Gaming Show, you have many independent developers who can't pay the exhibitor costs, so hardware firms like Corsair and Razor do instead.

Guerilla Collective and the Tribeca Games Festival are also reliant on private sponsors. Wholesome Direct is classy about it, but even they need to sell some goods to stay afloat. It's just that the exhibitors are going to try and tailor the products to the audience. Where PC Gamer figures its viewers would be happier with some new sticks of RAM, Wholesome Games' speed is more t-shirts covered in gleeful little critters.

I do, however, think the PC Gaming Show is much improved for cutting out the sci-fi comedy plotlines and getting straight to the meat. A speculative thriller shell worked for Devolver Digital, but where that show felt a little more like a spoof of Terminator and Network, the PC Gaming Show resembled the ever-cringy Final Space. That's all over now, giving more time to get down to business with a title like Tactical Breach Wizards.

One effective way to get people excited about your game is to show them a move that they can immediately understand and always looks cool to perform. Anger Foot has kicking doors into gangsters, Rumbleverse has elbow-dropping wrestlers off of buildings, and Tactical Breach Wizards has shunting enemies off of the edge of the map. Floating island grids are usually assumed to be framing devices for the purposes of play. This strategy title turns them into diegetic realities where tension ramps up as units approach the precipitous edge.

The Invincible wants to draw players in with a central mystery and some restrained pacing. However, a narrative still needs some payoff for the people who stick with that mystery and sink into that pacing. For the life of me, I can't tell you what the payoff in this trailer was. Basic questions about characters like "What do they want?" or "How do they achieve their goals?" usually get answered even in a bad book or film, but it's surprising how often video games don't provide a response to them. The Invincible's demo was a prime example.

Game developers often create expansive worlds full of many different kinds of people. But how much does that mean for an interactive medium if we can only play a small subset of those people? Potion Craft imagines us not as a chosen one, taking our blade or staff to the neck of an evil villain, but as an industrious apothecary, providing patrons with any drink or draught they could need. I would like to slurp that shit down.

Picture Junji Ito drawing the art for Habbo Hotel, and that's about as close as you're going to get to Decarnation. Pixel art often impresses me because while the techniques behind painting and sculpting can seem inscrutable, it's easier to see the bones of pixel art, to understand how the creator went from a blank canvas to a rich and evocative image. Decarnation has that artistic richness in spades.

We also saw System Shock, as in, I'm System Shocked there aren't more people talking about this. While the original game's assertive coloured lighting was a deft display of the era's shaders, it's a little overbearing in a modern context. This RGB overdrive is too colourful to conjure the atmosphere of sterile hostility that SHODAN's world is meant to represent. It was also corny to hear Spector and Plott do the "the world is like SHODAN with everyone on their phones" bit. To be fair, I think narratives of isolation and threat from AI still resonate because we're all used to being trapped in impersonal systems, adversarial to us. Toxic tech in the real world often pretends to be our best friend, which gives SHODAN an almost comforting honesty.

When I discussed As Dusk Falls, I mentioned how its combination of higher and lower fidelity animation was unsettling. However, unseating the player isn't a bad approach for every game. One aspect that draws me towards the horror genre is that a lot of creative decisions that would be "against the rules" in other circumstances fly in this darker tonal context. Demonschool contrasts pointillist low framerate characters against smooth-moving high-detail monsters. It gives the abominations that Jason & the Argonauts claymation creepiness and also effectively communicates that these are creatures from a higher plane. Demonschool is not in the Lovecraft aesthetic but, nonetheless, captures one of Lovecraft's most essential themes.

You wouldn't know it from watching the Microsoft conference, but the representatives at the PC Gaming Show were clear: Scorn is not a shooter. Hearing about the cautiousness required to play and the graveyard of a setting, I'm not even sure Scorn is an action game, and that seems like something more prospective players should be aware of. A title like The Wandering Village represents the positive version of symbiosis: the comforting idea that we exist in sync with the land we live off of, and so we're nurturing each other and part of something greater than ourselves. Scorn is the disturbing side of symbiosis: the need to connect yourself to whatever world you exist in, to have its products flow in and out of you, even if that world disgusts and repels you. You become another mechanism. Another lever, another switch, and as Scorn lacks any dialogue, we shouldn't expect to be humanised by our speech either.

At a time when hulking, plodding protagonists in shooters were associated with keeping your head down and slowly moving up the battlefield, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine dropped its pod into the scene with a very different idea. Now, your bulky super soldier was expected to react aggressively, ripping and tearing a path through the battlefield. In its spot at the PC Gaming Show, Tim Willits himself implied that the foot-forward abandon of Space Marine inspired Doom (2016). Space Marine II looks to resolve its father's aching eleven-year cliffhanger and provide a wall of flesh to shoot where its predecessor was all about individual targets. The brutish morons of the Ork army are swapped out for the atavistic beasts of the Tyranids.

New Blood is a publisher with one of the most distinctive voices on the indie circuit right now. Where Devolver made their name with fast-paced synthwave action games, New Blood is forging a similar path for throwbacks to 90s FPSs. Gloomwood, just one of the titles loaded into their magazine here, looks like if Doom had taken place in a medieval village instead of moon hell.

You don't have a mature creative form until you're seeing fan art in it, so consider it a rite of passage that the PC Gaming Show closed on a mod for Half-Life: Alyx. I'm honestly surprised that Valve is letting the team behind Half-Life: Alyx: Levitation move ahead with their expansion to their 2020 industrial thriller. It is proof that if you're a video game publisher with more money than God, you don't have to snipe down every use of your IP outside of your control. Levitation captures the spirit of the existing Half-Life games by setting its action in raw, utilitarian environments, but finds some locations that have thus far gone unused or little used in the Half-Life canon. You can see a dingy building site and a yellow-garbed quarantine area, not unlike some of the apartment interiors in The Division. Even if it didn't come from inside an established studio, Levitation looks to be approaching professional grade.

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That is two more Keigh3 presentations down, but we're not done yet. Next time, I'll be tackling Wholesome Direct, Devolver's show, and a little extra surprise. Thanks for reading.