The experience of working through the pandemic was a clarifying one for a lot people, me included. That uneasy sense in the back of my head that my superiors genuinely did not care if I lived or died was validated, as the threshold for my safety in the workplace during COVID was – surprise, surprise – quite a bit lower than it was for my bosses. Like many working-class Americans, after losing team-members and picking up their responsibilities, working through every holiday, accepting low wages, trying and failing to assert boundaries to management from situations as trivial as a day off to situations as important as a funeral for a family friend, along with other abuses from the people who controlled my every day, I quit. I'd finally had enough.
I decided that 2021 was going to be the year I seized the opportunity to re-build my sense of self, to re-discover who I was when I wasn’t working for someone else’s profit. I spent a large portion of the year indulging; indulging in my hobbies, my emotional health, my physical health. I was immensely privileged in that I had a supportive partner who helped enable me to put money away so that I might simply exist for a little while. And ‘simply existing’ fucking rocks when every single day of your life sucked shit for a year.
All of this is to say, as 2021 was my ‘year of indulgence,’ so too is this end of year list, which is not a ranking of video games so much as it's a writing exercise I undertook for my own benefit. Below are a series of indulgent, needlessly wordy, occasionally good miniature essays and blurbs about the video games I played this year, all of which are ordered from my most to least favorite game. I don’t really have much to say about the role video games played in my life, or how the creative output of the industry measured up against previous years. This year I tried to separate myself from mathematical concepts like ‘game feel’ and 'technical iterations,’ and tried to perceive video games on a simpler level, as the product of creative people who built worlds and told stories. Because I was having such a good time, I wrote way, way too much, so if for some reason anyone on Earth has decided to read this, I encourage you to skip around.
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I’ve been a Hitman diehard since Hitman: Contracts on the PS2, so the proliferation of the series since 2016 has been fun to watch. The popular perception of Hitman as pulp or as comedy, though – while understandable and even insightful as an interpretive lens – has obscured some of the series’ other clever narrative tricks. I think this is something that people miss, but IO interactive have been experimenting with a very similar gameplay tool-set for over twenty years now, and have applied that tool-set towards a wide variety of incidental little stories. People often say that the plot doesn’t matter in a Hitman game, and I understand where they’re coming from, but that doesn’t mean *narrative* doesn’t matter in a Hitman game. I feel particularly strongly about this after having read critical perspectives on Hitman III, which refer to the game as a boilerplate spy thriller with sandbox parts - a logical perspective if you’re the kind of player who completes each Hitman level exactly once. There’s nothing wrong with that interpretation, to be clear, but approaching the series as a linear campaign is a bit like eating one course in a five-course meal. Hitman games are miniature libraries of discrete puzzle boxes designed for perpetual re-examination. The format of the puzzle boxes, and the possibilities granted to the player, are not only functional gameplay elements, but also narrative elements. “What will [SPECIFIC NPC] do if I intervene with [SPECIFIC LEVEL ELEMENT]?” is the kind of question the Hitman series rewards in big, objective-completing ways, and in smaller, more personable ways. You can get to know most anyone in a Hitman map – you can hit the gym with some guards in Hokkaido, have a conversation with a stranger about the nature of friendship in Chongqing, do shots with a target in Miami, and sell drugs to the globe-trotting Florida Man in Berlin. In fact, you can even *get to know NPCs’ full names* if you start a level in contracts mode. There are hundreds of miniature stories like these in a Hitman map, many of which have their own little variable states based on the actions of the player. So: allow me to extrapolate some of the 'structural' narrative which I feel was missed from this final game in the World of Assassination trilogy. Here's the thesis: Hitman III is a deconstruction of the entire Hitman series as we‘ve come to know it. It re-casts the player in roles which are increasingly functionally and narratively opposite of the series’ premise to fascinating results, up to and including the generally disliked final chapter. In a series that emphasized story – like, say, the similarly-intentioned Metal Gear Solid 4 – it would be better understood by these merits, and (I think) better appreciated. Here’s a brief level-by-level breakdown. Spoilers below. Dubai, the first map, presents the player with two traditional Hitman targets in a traditional Hitman setting. The player is tasked with eliminating a mega-rich, politically conservative oil baron who abuses service workers in his private suite. The other target is an incompetent, albeit more sympathetic, cog in the machine of the economic elite. The setting is a comically enormous golden tower in Dubai. The set piece kills all emphasize direct action on the player’s part (i.e. there are fewer obvious indirect methods of assassination). The Hitman formula is introduced in its most basic form. Dartmoor is, in some respects, an antithesis to the first level. The Dubai tower is a glistening, grotesque example of wealth hoarding that the player debases, a space occupied by untouchable people too enraptured in their own success to see failure approach. Dartmoor is the introduction of consequence, for both the player and for the player’s targets. The level features a picturesque mansion obscured by permanent fog, and is set a day after the untimely death of one of the mansion’s occupants, who have hired a private investigator to determine which of them committed the murder. Dartmoor’s target, unlike Dubai’s targets, is aware that her time as a power broker is coming to an end and is resigned to her fate. Every element of the map exists under the shadow of a destructive act. While Dartmoor is as flexible a map as Dubai and rewards a variety of play-styles, it heavily emphasizes one approach above all others: the player is able to remove the private investigator from the map and take his place, effectively turning Hitman into a murder mystery adventure game which culminates, itself, in a murder. In a sense, the player is literally tasked with reveling in the aftermath of an event similar to the first mission's assassinations, and the aftermath of every assassination in the series up to this point. To complete the set piece event in the Dartmoor map is to comprehend the immediate consequence of 47’s actions writ large. This is not to say that ‘did you know that when someone dies there are consequences’ is an act of brilliance, but in a series predicated on righteous slaughter, a sudden tonal shift towards the question of death feels meaningful. Berlin, Hitman III’s best and most ingenious level, further subverts the Hitman formula. In the Berlin map, the player is hunted by 11 disguised NPCs who will recognize 47 regardless of his outfit. While Hitman III is the easiest and most friendly Hitman game in the series by quite a wide margin, here it is unusually stringent – mission stories and target highlighting is not available on a first playthrough, meaning the player is forced to act cautiously, as prey rather than predator. All of this happens during a rave, and it’s probably the most singularly thrilling experience in the series so far. The player has gone from killer, to coroner, to potential victim. Our understanding of 47 and his relationship to the world has been compromised. Chongqing, an oddly demure, easily completed challenge compared to Berlin, makes explicit in the narrative what has so far been implicit in the game design. The targets in Chongqing are technobabbling psychopaths, but this time they’re members of the ICA, the agency which directs 47 to his targets. While Chongqing is a straightforward Hitman map from a gameplay perspective, it is anything but from a narrative perspective: the final objective given to the player is to permanently dismantle the ICA, thereby permanently dismantling the fantastical Hitman premise in the process. And then there’s Mendoza: one last old-school Hitman experience before the end, replete with an extravagant 1%-er setting and two transparently complicit tools of the elite to dispatch (although in this case one of the targets is a lot worse than the other). But even here, Hitman III is not straightforward. Mendoza is the culmination of the ‘cause and effect’ theme from the rest of the game, as well as a celebration of the trilogy in miniature. Side characters from other missions in the trilogy re-appear here, alongside discrete set piece assassination options from their respective levels which are re-contextualized for the finale, and they discuss how their lives have changed since the events of their respective missions occurred. Other NPCs explicitly speculate as to the outcomes from past missions. During one particularly gruesome set piece, 47 will casually reference events from Hitman: Blood Money, foreshadowing Hitman III’s forthcoming twist, reinforcing the idea that this last sequence of events is not only consequential for this trilogy, but for the series as we know it. The actions of the player throughout Hitman have culminated here, in a self-referential soiree, and yet the structure which protects the antagonistic elite, the leaders of whom having been mathematically eliminated, still remains intact. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a job to do. You can’t stop the party from being thrown, but you can decide who will be allowed to survive it. Finally, we have Carpathian Mountains, a completely linear level in a game about non-linearity. This level caught most new players by surprise, but it made the entire Hitman III experience click for me. It used to be that Hitman games would climax in one huge, guns-blazing John Wick sequence which would not end until all NPCs were removed from the board – OR, they would end in a final, restrictive sequence like this one. In this sense, the Carpathian Mountains stage is a remix of every Hitman finale up to now. The game goes to great lengths to assert that 47, under the effects of a mind-altering substance, is attempting to retain his self-image on his own terms; perhaps, for the first time in his entire life, he has even bothered to consider that self-image. The player is then presented with either a Nathan Drake-like rampage, in which all of the NPCs are wiped off the board like the good old days back on the PS2, or a slow, carefully-plotted stealth sequence in which everyone, even the main target – in a series first – is spared. The player has been introduced once again to the premise, then forcibly made to observe the outcome for the targets, and then been made aware that the end result stops short of winning a wide-ranging systemic change. Carpathian Mountains gives the player the opportunity, then, to decide what the best next step is, or maybe what it all meant in the first place. Maybe that‘s not the fun toybox we usually get in the new-style Hitman games, sure – but as a narrative conclusion, it allows the player to dictate the meaning of the experience in some way, to “sandbox” the narrative climax, if you will. Hitman III is endlessly fascinating to me this way, and when I play it, I find myself considering it’s broader themes beyond the normal Hitman tropes I’ve come to love over the years. It’s the product of a studio seeking to explore the meaning inherent to their work, even if it leaves lingering unanswered questions, and as a result, it really resonated with me this year, because hey, me too. In this new, transparently awful world we find ourselves in, dictating meaning in art feels aggravatingly abstract, even pointless. IO’s intellectual distance from its own series, its willingness to subvert the premise of its biggest hit, its ambition to depict some level of complexity in its game about mega rich class disparity, a game which has up until now felt so comfortable offering a cartoon catharsis via the cartoon-murder of its various 1%-er analogues, is an evolution for the studio. Considering IO’s next project will be another mass media adaptation in a medium increasingly full of them, I’m grateful IO was so willing to explore its own work from such a complex and oblique angle. Besides ending their best run of games yet on a high-note, they were able to enrich their entire body of work, too.
I’ve been disappointed in the lack of enthusiasm for Mundaun this year by critics. While any deliberately-paced indie horror title is sure to exist within the margins, Mundaun transcends most titles in the genre, even very good ones, and to my mind had the potential to place alongside something like Inscryption on GOTY lists. Most of the write-ups I’ve seen published, though, quibble about tertiary elements of the game that are unimportant compared to the game’s core qualities – I've seen Mundaun, a game which intentionally disempowers the player, dismissed for its ‘poor combat mechanics,’ for example, which would indicate to me that any lessons Silent Hill 2 taught us have since been forgotten. Mundaun possesses two key features which distinguish it from just about every other video game released this year, or any year. One: it’s one of the only video games I’ve ever played that is a tangible product of human hands. Moreso than even the animation industry, video games are alienated from the artists who make them because the spaces in which they exist are brazenly artificial and at a remove from any individual artist, particularly considering the default art style utilized by video game studios is ‘realism.’ Mundaun is subversive in this context. Lead developer/artist Michel Ziegler hand-penciled character designs overtop of the game’s models in a loose sketch style. The results are fascinating, particularly in the late game, because Ziegler’s art adds a complicated layer over top of what might otherwise be familiar folktale tropes. The rougher edges of the art style remind us that when we see, say, a yeti in Mundaun, we’re not only looking at the idea of a yeti, but someone in particular’s idea *of* the idea of a yeti. The aesthetic makes it impossible to consider Mundaun without that interpretive framing device, a thematic conceit which only becomes deeper and more tangled as the game introduces a character who can change aspects of the game world on his art canvas, an abstraction altering an abstraction. If that sounds irritatingly dense, it’s really not – thanks to the human quality of the art style, Mundaun feels familiar and accessible. That artistic remove from literal imagery grants an incidental kind of comfort, at least for me, in that its abstracted quality freed me from the burden of having to possess a comprehensive understanding of every bit of imagery. Two: Mundaun is a distinct expression of a specific world culture, to the extent that its setting, characters, art design and plot cannot (unlike most video games) be abstracted to a certain extent to feel familiar to a western audience. Mundaun’s Swiss setting is essential to much of the plot: characters speak in the Romash language, a language native to Switzerland which has been largely abandoned in favor of the better recognized languages of Swiss-German and French. Large swaths of the plot center around invading exterior forces which are at an initial disadvantage due to Switzerland's towering alps. The supernatural elements of the story, by contrast, exist *within* that key Swiss tactical advantage, which makes this unique geographical feature an ever-present focus. The quiet, hushed conversations and the harsh, crisp environments feel distinctly of a place. You could tell a *similar* story to Mundaun if you, say, set the story in and around Mount Everest or Mount Fuji, but then you’d have a significantly different end result. You wouldn’t have Mundaun. Because I spent so much of the last two years reflecting on why I engage with the stuff I engage with, I’ve discovered that for me, the immediate and visceral appeal of a video game dopamine rush is ultimately interchangeable between video games, and that the games I seek out multiple times I most often return to for reasons *other* than that instant gratification loop. As I’ve further explored my own stupid brain and picked apart what it is that I derive the most pleasure from, I’ve discovered that the line in my head between games I think are great to play around with but ultimately thoughtless about their artistic intent and games that are great to play but compromise their narrative for gameplay purposes is thin. Games like Mundaun are my favorite kinds of projects in the industry for this reason. There is no combat loop that is preferable to an emotional experience – even a flawed one – that sticks around in my head for weeks, months, or years after I put the controller down for the last time. Mundaun is one of those games.
I think the thing that really hit me with Psychonauts 2 – and this is going to sound so lame, but I mean this – is how, in such a simple and perceptive way, it felt like human expression. Maybe I’m too in love with it to see its flaws, but it possesses a confidence and intelligence that other games - even games which appear higher on this list – do not. Every aspect of the design fits perfectly alongside the narrative, and vice-versa, and no aspect of the experience feels unnecessary or unearned. Maybe it’s not as ambitious as AAA titles with photo-realistic graphics and 50-hour campaigns or whatever, but it literally doesn’t matter when every aspect of its design is at this level of quality. I find myself making excuses for games that contain certain regressive video game tropes, even great ones; there’s always some stubborn, old-school mechanic or two which regress an otherwise great project back to ‘well, video games just had to be like this back in the day’ apologism. Despite its traditional platforming mechanics, Psychonauts 2 is as close to a friction-less platforming game as I’ve ever played. There’s no ‘meat circus’ in Psychonauts 2, because a sequence like that would diminish the narrative. Maybe Psychonauts 2 is one of the best games of all time, or maybe it isn’t, but I think it would be hard to argue that it’s not one of the most *flawless* games of all time. Like a lot of Double Fine’s output, Psychonauts 2 is irreverent and approachable, yet their all-ages-friendly stories never prevent them from convincingly depicting empathetic, even moving human drama. A lot of the games the industry puts on a pedestal as great narratives – a lot of the games that *I* think are great narratives – are only great narratives insofar as they’re able to satisfy the needs of an audience who expects roughly 200-500 murders in a video game, minimum, before they consider purchasing it, while *also* delivering a satisfactory story component. I’m sure this is partially due to Psychonauts 2’s semi-comedic tone, but no aspect of the experience feels out of place that way - even the manifestations of genre tropes fit too neatly into the design of the world to be dismissed as unnecessary. It’s phenomenal.
No More Heroes III is a stark reminder that video games can actually be anything we want them to, that we're not, in a literal sense, confined by photorealism, power fantasy, and the demands of a mass market. It's an utter failure of the video game marketplace that there isn't anything else quite like it. Like the first game in the series, No More Heroes III positions itself as satire of the western video game industry/culture status quo; protagonist Travis Touchdown still embodies the pre-assumed ideal of the western gamer as imagined by the world's worst public relatons manager: Travis is still a casually violent, wrestling-obsessed dork who isn't so much japan-curious as a fetishist of Japan's nerd-culture exports. Santa Destroy, No More Heroes' iconic open world cityscape, is this time a series of sequestered areas full of endlessly repeatable minigames, all of which adopt a different familiar aesthetic, ranging from Cyberpunk to a Call of Duty-like battlefield to a garish suburb. Unlike previous games, which used broad character archetypes as end-of-level bosses, No More Heroes III provides a series of 'superheroes' as Travis' new antagonists, although many of them are obliterated before boss fights in favor of a more interesting encounter. That's a particularly mean joke - not only are the primary antagonists in this game evil superheroes, but many of them - nearly all of them - fade away mid-level, rendering them utterly disposable. Santa Destory also features areas where the player can enter physical 'crypto' mines in which the player can literally, physically mine cryptocurrency, as the game now features redundant currencies as part of a needlessly complex upgrade system. More than anything, this upgrade system bit is the one that best illustrates the target of No More Heroes III's ire. The original title portrayed video game open worlds as needlessly large, empty, and filled with interchangeable, useless collectibles, essentially an exercise in futility. The core of that game's criticism still exists within No More Heroes III's world design, but this time Santa Destroy isn't empty so much as it's rotten with interlocking systems, distinct sets of collectibles which all call attention to themselves, and automaton-like NPCs. Somehow, it's a more depressing depiction of the format than before, maybe because this time it took hold of my lizard-brain need to fill out a checkliist. I totally grabbed a bunch of the collectibles in the open world, even knowing they were a joke at my expense. 'Watch the numbers go up' design fuckin' *works*, man. You can convince yourself to do pretty much anything through constant positive reinforcement. Inbetween the depressing open world bits, No More Heroes III is a wildly vibrant bossrush game. In spite of the fact that the game exists to satirize the worst trends in the video game industry, a kind of 'what not to do in video games' video game, it's also filled with the wildest shit imaginable in the main gameplay. I promise you, by the time you hit the 3rd level or so, nearly every level from that moment forward will show you some minigame, character, narrative beat or sequence which will be a complete and total surprise. There's a level centered around musical chairs which is maybe the funniest (and definitely one of the weirdest) sequences I have ever seen in a video game before. No More Heroes III isn't all about the bad shit in video games. It's not all mean-spirited satire or tired jokes about fanboys; it's also a transcendent rollercoaster ride so headstrong and chaotic that it may well convince you video games have a future, too.
One of the coolest aspects of Unpacking is that it got so many people to think about game design as an abstraction of human experience in the same way people treat any other creative pursuit. Its format is so universal that you almost can’t help it. There’s a bit in Tim Rogers’ Last of Us review where he posits that that game’s crafting mechanics could’ve been born from a game developer hurriedly sorting through a backpack while in line for a flight. That’s how that mechanic *feels* in The Last of Us, certainly, but on the surface the game very much wants you to consider the procedural aspects of zombie survival, and so any relatable human experience on that minuscule of a scale has to occur via the proxy of genre. The human experience – the airport backpack sorting - in the Last of Us is used only to enhance the elevated, fictional experience of withstanding a zombie apocalypse. In Unpacking, there is no mechanical layer of abstraction required to enjoy that human quality of the game design. Another thing about Unpacking that makes it so cool is that its relatively modest scale never inhibits the sense of fun or satisfaction you get from completing each level. I think that’s part of why it resonated so much this year. Unpacking is one of those indie games which are sort of perfect, in that you couldn’t add or remove any content in the game to enhance the experience. It has exactly as many moving pieces as it needs to tell its story, and it lasts exactly as long as it needs to in order to convey a sense of change, growth, regret, and joy. It’s also an extremely affecting period piece. As I was sorting through the protagonist’s GameCube games, finding her copy of The Simpsons: Hit and Run flung me back to 2003. I feel like everybody I knew had that game, somehow! Right?
Much ado has been made about The Forgotten City’s use of a time loop and its historical fanaticism, but its most captivating quality is that it’s more or less a philosophy 101 course bound within the blanket of Skyrim’s dialogue trees. The Forgotten City is a game about perfecting a moral framework, in which the player argues (via pre-written dialogue options) for basic ethical attributes foundational to any functioning society, against a variety of people who complicate these attributes via loopholes and technicalities. It is a thoughtful, well-intentioned game that forces the player to rationally consider the concept of wrongdoing. Spoilers below. One of the most frustrating aspects about talking politics in America is that almost every American who argues in favor of the status quo does so with a brazenly ahistorical understanding of their own belief system. It’s much easier to argue that trickledown economics uplifted workers if your only supporting point is to re-assert the definition of trickledown economics, for example, or to argue that communist states always fall apart if you believe any have been allowed to exist, or to argue that Covid restrictions are immoral by making up statistics about the flu. Anytime I’ve gotten trapped in one of these conversations, I find myself wishing I could Final Fantasy-style summon a pure, objective source of information to referee each side. If only there were a way to manifest history then and there, to gaze upon the subject, or a witness of the subject, and finally ‘solve’ the debate. The Forgotten City is hilarious in this respect, and probably true to life. You *get to concretely prove* consequences of action in this game, present them to a sceptic, and yet – still! - people’s belief in outcomes is arbitrarily conditional. The Forgotten City is a game in which you get to debate theism with Catholics in a world in which Hades is a guy you know, for example. The society’s moral framework is also transparently awful. People agree that stealing is wrong but are indifferent to hoarding. Outcomes that result in death are accepted unless they occur via physical violence. The best part is the conversation you have with Khabash, who views the Roman depiction of gods as perversions of the Egyptian gods, and who prevents you from using a stone tablet that (for video game reasons) will lead you to proving either his, or their, or *your* argument true by tossing this essential bit of information in a bottomless pit; his faith demands the answer remain ambiguous. Progress of any kind is limited when the collective understanding of a topic is immutable and irrational. I think if there were any flaw to The Forgotten City, you would probably most likely find it at the conclusion. Like any time loop game, getting The Forgotten City‘s ‘true’ ending means achieving the perfect solution possible, which in this case is achieving the best outcome possible for every living character. In an effort to provide a satisfactory ending, the game contrives a peaceful outcome from the cataclysmically bad structure of its island of collective punishment. In a year as dystopic as this, you know what? I’ll take it. Maybe Hades, after an infinite of human observation, just ‘didn’t think of that’ until I Phoenix Wright-ed my way into salvation. Honestly – why not? Contrivances aside, The Forgotten City is an extremely fun way to explore basic ethics, and the cast of characters do a great job of evoking the problem with lawmaking. In order for a society to reach its maximal outcome, it needs to reach a consensus on what that maximal outcome looks like – and sometimes, doing so means undercutting law-abiding actors who nevertheless make life worse for everyone else for their own benefit. Morality cannot be condensed into a pithy catch phrase, in other words. The ‘Golden Rule’ means little if influential people in the society believe subjugation can be deserved. The conclusions The Forgotten City reaches feel fanciful, sometimes, sure, but other times they feel brutally true. This is a complicated, rewarding game, and highly worth a play.
There’s this urge in the gaming community to showcase new titles as representative of the medium as an artform, and such attempts are often embarrassing for everyone involved. A month ago, people were passing around a specific cutscene from this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy as evidence of Games as Art, a cutscene which featured staid, utilitarian cinematography, MCU-esque colorlessness, and quippy back-and-forth dialogue; a clip that featured, at best, an ever-so-slightly elevated take on the most-known storytelling property on the planet Earth. If I were to try to convince a disinterested non-game-liker to see the potential of the medium, I would choose a game like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. It meets all criteria for the ‘games as art’ argument perfectly: it is a game in which game mechanics are, themselves, an act of satire, the art and sound design substantially differ from every other audio/visual medium, and which features genuinely funny writing through which the intent of the storytelling is evident. Being a video game about navigating menus, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is nevertheless a robust example of how powerful it can be to convey a narrative concept through the abstraction of play. It is a machine with few moving parts, sure, but all of those parts are built with the most exquisite of craftsmanship. And unlike Guardians of the Galaxy, it is able to convey its greater ideas without also, by necessity, catering to an audience of pre-teens who might like to request action figures from their parents for Christmas.
Omori began production before the release of Undertale, but because it's a surreal Earthbound-like with a dark edge, I think it gets wrongly labelled as an Undertale-like. Thing is, Omori is the better game in some specific and important ways. Undertale is ultimately a game which folds video games in on themselves, and like all games which try to deconstruct a genre or a medium, its major concern is ultimately about structure and the interfacing of the audience, leaving its characters largely two-dimensional and undeveloped. Omori is emphatically unlike Undertale in this sense. It is deeply concerned with unpacking trauma using the formative language of video games and of psychological horror. Characters realistically develop over time, and the use of video game aesthetics to explore the protagonist's perspective are more developed than in something like Scott Pilgrim, where the aesthetics of video games are used to demonstrate a character's personality. In Omori, video games are a coping mechanism, one which the player character can either evolve beyond or fall deeper within depending on the player's actions. Omori features two game worlds - the real world and a dreamworld - and the shifting nature of the dreamworld depending on the player's actions in the realworld give the narrative a richness other games in this genre are lacking. This is a game which would be very easy to undermine by spoiling its various plot twists, but save for a pretty ludicrous epilogue, it treats the emotional landscape in which its characters live seriously. It's a heightened narrative, but it's not exploitative. I don't want to say that Omori is, like, a profound narrative about trauma, but I would argue that it's saying something that feels informed or honest about trauma. Omori generates a lot of interesting imagery and metaphorically-framed game design conceits around that concept which are really interesting.
Halo: Infinite is not a soft reboot of the original Halo, but sometimes like one. It ditches the unnecessary mechanics the series began stapling onto itself throughout its many sequels, and sticks to the bare-bones flow of the first title, in which the sorta/kinda rock paper scissors-weaponry and enemy design were married to dynamic, personality-driven A.I. behavior that was emphasized over an expansive feature set. Even so, it’s missing the core components that defined the original title, a game which artfully complicated its gameplay by introducing shifts in level and enemy design that would force the player to constantly re-evaluate their tactics. Halo: Combat Evolved was a bold, genre-defining, planet-trekking experience which quite literally wrote the book on new-school first person shooter design; it was the product of a very talented studio with very little time re-writing an industry-scale formula. Halo: Infinite never complicates the Halo formula the way the original did - in fact, it intentionally makes a statement of *not* complicating the formula. In contrast to its progenitor, Halo: Infinite trims the Halo experience to its barest, most playful form, a less complicated, simpler game than the very first game in the entire series. Halo: Infinite is not a spiritual remake of the original Halo – it is, specifically, a spiritual remake of the *second level* of the original Halo, the level from the original Halo we all remember the most vividly, in which the open level design concept was introduced. I highly recommend anyone playing through Halo: Infinite’s campaign to go back and try the original game’s second level if they can. It contains all of the components of Halo: Infinite: an open space which can be completed non-linearly, marines which can be rescued and recruited, vehicle airdrops, and quick sojourns into alien bunkers. In other words, Halo: Infinite is a remake of the *shared perception* of the original Halo, a remake of what a generation of video game players *felt* when they experienced Halo’s first iconic open space. At its core, Halo: Infinite is a digestible post-modernist reflection on the “need” for a Halo sequel in the same vein as The Matrix: Resurrections, an attempt to trace the thread tying the franchise together in order to reveal meaning in a series doomed to perpetuity. The ‘lore’ of the series – the continuation of plot, even – is of lesser importance within the Halo: Infinite campaign than the question “why do people play Halo?” Throughout the campaign’s many chapters, the protagonist establishes a kind of working relationship with the Banished, one which comes to a satisfactory conclusion in the penultimate chapter. Halo is a series about battling a small variety of personalities, personalities which, unlike other first person shooters, we are encouraged to like. Halo: Infinite discovers that, in some small, convoluted video game way, eradication is the problem, understanding is the solution. The veneer of Halo as a ‘war’ game is stretched to its breaking point as ‘war as an abstraction for play’ is brought closer and closer to the surface of the text, as each of the moving pieces casually assert their role as players in a game and not soldiers in a war; Halo: Infinite casually declines the seriousness of ‘lore’ but not the urge to do *something* with its premise, to say *something* about the experience of playing a video game, and that stubborn urgency of purpose is a refreshing change of pace in a medium defined by lore codexes and regurgitations of masturbatory ‘chosen one’ storylines. Of course, it all comes together thanks to the fact that Halo: Infinite is a fucking *joy* to play for any length of time at all. No game in recent memory which has borrowed the simplified Breath of the Wild-style open world has so thoroughly embraced joy in its moment-to-moment gameplay. As it was in the original Halo, the loose, low-gravity movement style feels stellar. And then there’s the multiplayer suite, the most riveting Halo multiplayer experience since the original trilogy, featuring just enough concessions to post-Call of Duty, post-Fortine game design to feel rewarding but never enough to compromise the simple pleasures of Halo’s high-intensity combat. Halo: Infinite is the real deal. In an age of dystopia, returning to such a fond memory doesn’t feel like regression, but a rejection of misery. We’re all playing Halo and talking about The Matrix again. I’m cynical as shit, but even I have to admit that this newfound sojourn back to the final era in which mass media was not alienated from the human experience has been a blast.
Bowser's Fury Here’s a hot take: I prefer the way Bowser’s Fury adapts the open world formula using Mario’s language to the way Breath of the Wild adapts the open world formula using Zelda’s language. I failed to personally connect to Breath of the Wild, because the world of Zelda and the raw gameplay experience of the series are not unique in the world of video games, making Breath of the Wild a game which thrives very much within the box of video game design continuity. In Breath of the Wild, when I see a shrine or a roaming dungeon in the distance, I already know exactly what to expect, and without much in the way of immersive sim-type dynamism, even the basic function of exploration feels overfamiliar. In other words, Breath of the Wild feels like a Zelda game in which an open world expanse effectively becomes a waiting room the player resides in before the next piece of content appears. The sense of a living, breathing space in which you are only a small part is never achieved. Skyrim, for all of its flaws, achieves that sense of scale. Say what you will about ‘broken’ Bethesda games, but Skyrim’s dynamic encounters with dragons, its set piece enemies, created the possibility of the unexpected in all moments of play. The knowledge that a lurking, high pressure threat could interrupt the flow of gameplay elevated Skyrim’s world from sandbox game to immersive space. The unpredictability and the sense of a space which operates cleanly without the intervention of the player is key. Bowser’s Fury predicates the entire play experience around this concept. While the open world aspect of the game is limited in scope and entirely gameplay-driven, the emergent aspect of a perpetual Bowser set piece boss fight transforms otherwise straightforward Mario obstacle courses into harried, delirious races against the clock. Although it’s simple, it makes the mood of the game transition between gentle and disastrous. Ultimately, I think I prefer Bowser’s Fury for simple reasons. Nearly all open world games cast the player as an elite soldier-type, and it’s a refreshing change of pace to play as a hyper-nimble character in a colorful space. If we have to accept this world in which 75% of AAA video games now come equipped with a commute thanks to the bigger play spaces, at the very least I’d prefer the commute itself to be fun, and roaring down the ocean with Mario’s weird Loch Ness dolphin-giraffe is preferable to me than another hang glider.