I wept the day our city’s hobby shop closed. In the early 2000s, Hardcastle was Tucson’s premier purveyor of miniature models. This underlit, badly air-conditioned store dwelled in the back alley parking lot of a destitute strip mall on the West Side of town, almost a full hour’s drive from where my family lived. A less auspicious location to play games could hardly be imagined. In my memory there are black bags taped over the windows, and dust shimmers where burning rays of Arizona sun pierce between these makeshift blinds. A Mountain Dew aroma oozes from atop astroturfed tables, while Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers thrum over tinny speakers.

Whether it was quite so dingy as that, I can’t say. But I do remember that it was a marvelous shop. Through its long entry corridor, towers held army after army. Long gunlines of brand-new Tau models welcomed every visitor. Necrons and Chaos Space Marines stood stalwart behind glass. At the counter within the shop, pre-built and painted models were sold, and along the opposite wall, stacks and stacks of Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer 40,000 miniatures hung.

It was, in retrospect, a perfectly average hobby shop. But it was the only one in Tucson at the time. Despite the distance, I went there with my family constantly around the era of 4^th and 5^th edition 40k. I shudder to think of the money my father wasted on expensive plastic spacemen for his sons who lacked the intellectual capacity to make use of them. He was happy to do it though; my father had no interest in miniature wargaming, but he had been obsessed with Warhammer since making the random purchase of second edition Space Hulk in 1996. I own the full contents of that box to this day, and he continues to read nearly every Black Library book that gets released—including every title in the Horus Heresy.

I was infatuated with the oddities Hardcastle sold. In this age, before resin and long prior to Primaris, white metal still reigned. I would always be drawn to the enormous range of metal figures in blister packs on the wall. There were countless strange, unique characters for sale in both Fantasy and 40k, and they fascinated me. Characters like Commander Dante seemed mythological. Their models were older than me. They made 40k seem like an institution, as firm and steadfast as the Earth we walked upon.

I wonder if a boy getting into 40k would look at Guilliman the same way today? His model is almost ten years old. But I doubt it. The mystique of metal, in the dawning era of plastic, was part of the magic spell.

Learning more about Second Edition and the history of 40k today, it’s funny to realize that those miniatures really weren’t so old after all. Dante was released less than two years before I was born, and I was hardly eight. But two years is everything to an eight-year-old.

Hardcastle went out of business shortly after the financial crash. I remember the day I found out vividly. My childhood was very lonely and very troubled, cursed by never-ending medical problems, and there were few places I took comfort in. Though I had never learned 40k’s rules, never assembled an army or really painted anything approaching value, Hardcastle had been a place that mattered to me.

My father broke the news, and I ran to my bunk-bed, literally weeping. I was prone to such outbursts. Where would I go to admire Commander Dante now? How would I get new Warhammer?

The answer was nowhere.

Over the coming years, I developed the habit of scrolling through the Games Workshop webstore, tabbing through their game systems, and gawking at the majesty of the old Forge World’s offerings with some regularity. It became a custom each Christmas for my father to buy me Space Marines. I came into the possession of 5^th edition Sanguinary Guard, Death Company, and Grey Hunters this way, all of which remained unbuilt (partially) until I scavenged them for parts this year.

I did occasionally try to paint. With a local hobby store, I might have kept with it. But without Hardcastle, there was no way to learn the games, no way to explore the model ranges, no magic left for me to find. I remember searching through Tucson with my dad for a replacement store, but there were none at that time, c. 2010-2012. These days there are at least three that carry GW products, and we even have our own official Warhammer store. But things were different back then.

So I gave it up. The last mini I ever bought was the Forge World Krieg Commissar set. I lost them when I moved to college, and I deeply regret that (because they were expensive as hell for a fourteen-year-old: look at this!):

The Context

I am afflicted by something called a “non-verbal learning disorder.” This condition describes a severe visual-spatial incapacity, which was diagnosed once as a child and again more recently as an adult. There is no word in English that can express my coordinational disability. I usually tell people I’m dyspraxic, but this really doesn’t go far enough. It took me many years to learn how to have even vaguely legible handwriting in school—whatsoever—but I still never quite managed it. I was sent to physical therapy as a child for no particular reason other than clumsiness, where I was deemed less athletic than the girl in a leg cast. I get along with sports like a Space Wolf with a Dark Angel. I have never drawn a straight line of any length or made a perfect circle.

Once, when I was in college, the guy at the desk behind me leaned over my shoulder and gestured at my notes:

“I just wanted you to know,” he said, “that you have the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen.”

I am fortunate to live in a digital era where I can spend most of my days pretending to be unburdened by the physical body that has never felt like it really belongs to me. I mention all this now, of course, because when a child whose visual-spatial skills are retarded to the level of an infant sets his mind to miniature painting, the results are predictably calamitous:

I must have been about eight when I “painted” the top marine. I might have been as old as ten when I defiled the Defiler. It was my brother’s model, and he was furious with me for choosing such a creative color scheme. As you can see, I didn’t know about priming (and he didn’t know about isopropyl alcohol). This caused a great deal of consternation when working with white metal minis.

My particular obsession was with kitbashing Tau and Space Marine models together, for some reason, always using disastrous amounts of hot glue. I also had the habit of putting Space Marine shoulder pads on backward, which I did despite having access to codices that would have shown me otherwise. I guess I didn’t care.

For the sake of my own shame I will spare you any further horrors from within the bits box of my youth. There are many more.

This mishandling of expensive plastic miniatures continued well beyond the age it should have. For that I have no defense.

By the time I reached the enlightenment of puberty, I saw painting and Warhammer as an important part of my identity. I had begun reading the novels and often discussed the lore with my family. I played every game available and especially adored Dawn of War 2. But I had also become keenly aware of my utter inability as a painter. This was likewise before the mass availability of painting tutorials online, in YouTube’s earliest days.

It may not be possible for one to have less of an affinity for something than I do for miniature painting. It is like composing poetry in a language one cannot speak. Fine motor control is almost impossible for me. I cannot even comprehend how a person might imagine something and draw it. I can imagine something and describe it, in extreme detail. But the second I put a pencil to paper, nothing makes sense.

It is, according to some, an actual autism spectrum disorder.

So after 2012, I gave up. There was never a conscious decision to stop painting miniatures. There never really is. But it’s difficult to enjoy being so terrible at something, and I didn’t have a mind to improve. So I simply stopped.

I always thought that I’d come back, someday. I just didn’t know when. I missed Finecast. I missed the release of Knights. I completely missed Primaris. It all happened out of view, barely acknowledged. Lore updates were received around the dinner table. That was the extent of my engagement with Warhammer.

The Next Year

At the end of 2023, I was diagnosed with adult onset type 1 diabetes. This diagnosis followed a lifetime of severe, rare medical disorders carried over from childhood and completely changed my life. It stole my love for gaming from me and killed this blog. In the year that followed, struggling badly to cope, I needed something to replace my lifelong passion.

For eight months, I had nothing. I started working out for the first time in my life. I hated it, but there was nothing else that I could stand to do. Games no longer held any joy. I couldn’t even write.

Then Space Marine II was released.

If I had done a good job maintaining this blog, readers would know that Space Marine II has been my obsession for the last year and a half. Instead I’ve never even mentioned it. Let me review it briefly now:

Space Marine II kicks ass. Coming less than a year after Rogue Trader, an RPG I ended up loving more than Baldur’s Gate 3, my passion for Warhammer 40,000 had been thoroughly reignited. The week after SM2 came out, I went to the nearest hobby shop, picked up an Eldar Kill Team, and built my first miniatures in twelve years.

And the experience was so horrific that I gave up halfway.

This was not so dissimilar to what I had gone through trying to get into Blood Bowl several years earlier. But it wasn’t what I remembered as a child. This time, unlike last, I refused to be deterred. I drove forty minutes back to the GW store and bought some Space Marines instead.

That first Primaris kit that I had ever seen or built was not a horrific experience. The models proved irritatingly fiddly and restrictive, unlike they had been in the early 2000s, but they looked great put together, and my reservations over lore changes had mostly melted away after listening to a few newer audiobooks.

My first paintjob looked like I was eight years old again.

For a reason I can’t articulate now, I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought that I had experience. I quickly learned I was mistaken. I didn’t know about thinning my paints, had no understanding of how to pick out materials on the miniature, and had no brush control whatsoever.

And yet though it may seem a horror—I was actually impressed. This was better than I thought I would be able to do. I was expecting another Defiler.

Thus from this beginning, I decided to see how far I could push myself.

This is where I start. A dead-end paintjob on an Ultramarines successor chapter. I realized there was no chance I would ever try painting white again. More importantly, the Blood Angels, my favorite chapter as a kid, were getting a refresh. They were who I would play.

I stripped the models and tried again.

This was some improvement. I had spent hours watching videos. I still didn’t know what I was doing. Brush control felt impossible. Getting a smooth base coat was incredibly challenging for me.

But now I was infected. I was addicted to plastic crack. It was too late to get out.

Though it took a year to find them, my Blood Angels proved to be the thing I needed to replace gaming. They were the distraction from diabetes that I had been desperate for. I do not know what I would be doing or where I would be had I not found Warhammer again. But I’m glad I won’t need to find out.

My life has looked like this for the last fourteen months. In that time, painting has supplanted all other forms of leisure. I have played only one new game this year. I have watched zero films, new or old. I have viewed one reality television series—Clarkson’s Farm—and nothing scripted. I have listened to over fifty books on audio. And I have painted, and painted, and painted.

I’ve played one thousand hours of Classic WoW since 2019. I’ve had a tremendous time with it, and every winter I feel the urge to play it again. But what do I have to show for that time? For seven hundred hours logged on my Fire mage? What evidence exists to prove that I was alive at all for those seven hundred hours?

I don’t even know where my mage lives anymore. I think she’s been swept along to a Classic Legion server. I won’t ever play her again. Her purples earned in Molten Core mean nothing. No one will ever care. I can’t even show them to anyone.

Seven hundred hours spent laboring over a hobby desk with paint and miniature have yielded me a vast army of Blood Angels. Anyone who comes to my house can see it. I could sell it. I can play games of Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition with it. Unless it is stolen or my house burns down, I will always have it. It isn’t going anywhere. My time invested is there, material, before my eyes.

Maybe little plastic soldiers don’t matter. But at least they’re real. This is what I’ve learned, paradoxically, now that every day living in reality is a hundred times harder than it ever was before. I spent all of my life hiding inside video games, and in all that time, I produced nothing real at all. What was the point?

This blog post isn’t about my experience with weight loss or becoming physically active, but the principle is much the same. It’s been two years since I first stepped foot in a gym. My progress isn’t amazing. But after a thousand hours or more lifting weights, I can see the difference. Anyone can.

What would a thousand more hours of Crusader Kings III have earned me?

Not all time spent needs to be productive. An activity isn’t a waste just because it doesn’t scar the materium. I’ve still played some games this year. A bit of WoW. Quite a bit of Space Marine II. But nothing at all compared to last year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was the only new game I played all year, period, and though I meant to review it for this blog, I disliked it so much that I couldn’t be bothered. There were too many minis to paint instead.

Proof in the Materium

So here is the trace that my year of labor with a paintbrush has left in the physical realm. This is a gallery of every model I’ve worked on since I started my collection. I’ve been repainting miniatures steadily as I improve, going back and adding highlights, and so this won’t be a true indicator of progress. These miniatures are way too expensive to stand as living museum pieces. I don’t find any value in that.

Though I was confident in my choice of Legion, I knew early on that I wanted to diverge and make my own color scheme. I spent several months trying to settle on something that both worked and felt unique. It wasn’t until I was browsing the Horus Heresy catalogue and stumbled across the Angel’s Tears units that I had my revelation.

My successor chapter would be descendants of the Angel’s Tears destroyers, and they would be red, silver, and gold.

This is how they stand now. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth companies of the Angel’s Tears, who mostly use normal Blood Angels iconography. Though the challenge of building out a single company of Space Marines has always appealed to me, the scarcity of Blood Angels shoulder decals—and my utter inability to freehand them—meant that I really had no choice but to organize my forces this way. I like it, though. Each group has a different specialty.

No Blood Angels successor would be complete without its own Death Company, of course:

This is the whole of my army. It’s something like three thousand points in 10th Edition, though I’ve only ever played one 500-point game. Many of these models were painted at least twice. Some have been stripped three or more times, including the dreadnought.

My first vehicle, he was a disaster. Building him was miserable, and I utterly failed to layer Khorne Red thin enough over black to create opacity. A horrible texture covered his armor panels, and I had no choice but to strip and start over.

Creating smooth base coats with Khorne Red then and still now proved my greatest struggle. Thin, watery layers flood the details and clog them up. Thick layers inevitably create tide marks, even when careful not to touch up areas already painted. But I decided to try moving over to a red primer, and the results were tremendous. I had an amazing time painting this model. My motor control issues felt basically non-existent when working with such a large sculpt, and for the first time, I had the confidence to try highlighting the edges.

The color I used was much too soft. But he still represents a huge step forward in my skill as a painter. I had thought that highlighting would simply be impossible for me. I didn’t even bother trying. Now, I wondered, if it was something worth practicing.

So I practiced. I went back to old models to clean up messy details and add edge highlights. I learned more about shading and discovered panel lining, mostly thanks to Duncan Rhodes, and started putting it into practice:

Working up to these fairly basic techniques took me about six months. I can barely write my own name. How could I highlight a miniature?

I quickly learned that it isn’t as hard as people make it out to be. With a good brush, acceptance that it might be a bit messy, and a willingness to spend huge amounts of time per mini, acceptable results are achievable by literally anyone. My highlights don’t look anything like what I see people post on Reddit. They’re way too thick and almost never neat enough. But they’re still good enough when you don’t have a camera blowing up the miniature to ten times its real size.

At thirteen, I never would have believed I could have painted to this level. At twenty-seven, I’m frustrated that I still struggle with so many basic principles. Where my collection does look relatively good, what can’t be seen are the countless visits to the isopropyl bath, and the endless hours spent fixing simple mistakes. For me, painting is an exercise in patience. I have to repaint any area five or six times per model. My hands slip constantly. More complicated techniques are effectively off-limits, because if I can’t touch an area up after moving on, there’s really no point. I’ve spent an unbelievable amount of time experimenting with contrast paints; I love them, but the truth is they’re basically impossible for me to use. Mistakes are too hard to correct, and I make too many mistakes.

But over time, I’ve found what works. And the results are good enough.

Along with basing, waterslide transfers were one of the biggest hurdles that I had to get over. I spent months avoiding them, because I remembered being utterly baffled by this strange technology as a child. By the time I dared to try, I used hard Arizona tapwater, and the results were terrible.

With Microset and Microsol, it became trivially easy.

Decals are amazing. I abuse them now. My models are festooned with stickers. I will never be able to freehand an aquila, or a skull, or even draw a numeral to an acceptable standard. Transfers allow me to add that level of verisimilitude to my figures anyway.

My love isn’t just for Space Marines. When I returned to the hobby, it certainly wasn’t foregone that I would be basic enough to collect Primaris marines. I’ve done some experimenting. I finished the new Stealth Suit kill team earlier this month:

I’ve always particularly loved the Guard. Had it not been for the vast expense of collecting an Imperial Guard army, they would have been my first choice. In the end, I didn’t need that many models to get my fill of them. But they sure take up space on the shelf:

I also dabbled in Space Wolves when their refresh released earlier this year. My father always loved Wolves the best. I was skeptical of their aesthetic for a long time, and several old kits lay unbuilt in my closet for over a decade. But I decided to finally make use of them and buy some Grey Hunters, just for fun.

Looking over those new Grey Hunters, I realized that they were some of the best sculpts I’d ever built. I loved painting them. So I got Blood Claws. And a few characters, to build out a custom Angels of Death kill team. And I read through Russ’ books in the Heresy.

It turns out, I actually do like the Space Wolves. Russ might even be my favorite Primarch.

My Wolves are, I think, my best-painted miniatures. Some of the highlights are too soft to make out, but Warpaints Fanatic’s Wolf Grey goes on smoothly despite my mishandling, and though it’s basic, I’m proud of the freehand pack markings on their shoulders and knees.

Maybe the first models I was ever proud of, before returning to repaint much of my Blood Angels, were my Tempestus Aquilons. I probably spent a hundred hours on this squad. It was an agonizing two weeks that drained every moment of my free time and idle thought. But I will always have these figures as proof of that time spent, no matter what the results objectively are:

My final project for the year was the new Deathwatch squad. I do not enjoy painting black, but I repainted my entire Death Company in practice, then used what I’d learned. I challenged myself to finish one mini a night, every night, until the entire squad was done: no matter how good or bad that mini was, I could spend no more than one day on it.

The results were fantastic. I didn’t need more than six hours for any marine. Most took around four. The last two took significantly less. All of them look great, for my level of skill.

I still don’t like painting black.

My crowning achievement for the year must be Miao Ying. She’s my favorite lord in Total War: Warhammer III by far, and her new sculpt for The Old World is among the best GW has ever released—now officially voted the best of their non-40k models for the year. I had intended to start a Grand Cathay army, but I decided that I didn’t want to paint several hundred near-identical peasant levies.

Maybe someday.

I don’t think she came out especially well. The freehand is messy, to say the least, and my drybrushing on the dragon’s scales looks awful. I had to hide it with a gallon of purple wash to salvage the paint job. But she’s still a beautiful model, and she looks great on my shelf.

More than any other skill over the last fourteen months, I have been obsessed with learning how to paint faces. I have watched hundreds of hours of tutorials and scoured the Internet for blog posts explaining how to make model faces look right. Mostly I found the advice totally useless. It always centered around placing highlights, despite never saying where the highlights should go, and almost everyone said not to bother painting eyes or eyebrows—the two details that I quickly found made even the most poorly painted face look incredibly good.

I like unhelmeted heads. Faces give miniatures character. I wanted to be able to paint them well. But it was not easy.

This is one of the first models I did, after sorting out the basics, and is one of the only in my army that I haven’t repainted. At the time I considered his face to be the best I was capable of. Just getting a smooth layer of flesh tone was challenging. I still often struggle with this. I added a wash into his eyes and small lines for the brow, then used a wash and called it.

If this were easily replicable, I would have stayed at this level for a long time. But I found that even this face had basically been a fluke. For the next six months I tried and failed to paint faces that were this good.

Though some came out better than others, nothing I read worked. The flesh tones people said to use always came out too dark. My highlights were always too harsh, creating too much contrast. Washes never looked right. I couldn’t layer detail back onto the faces correctly. My brush control wasn’t good enough to make the shading stand out.

This changed when I painted Saint Celestine to be my Sanguinor proxy. Kitbashed as a custom warp entity called the “Bride of Sanguinius,” I followed a painting guide and simply added white to her eyes, instead of black or shade like I had before.

It was messy. It took three tries, stripping and repriming the head. But it wasn’t as hard as I expected it to be.

It looked good.

If I could paint the whites of the eyes, then I could surely add in dots of black?

For the rest of the year, this became my challenge. I practiced at every opportunity. It was extremely tedious. Constantly the paint wouldn’t flow from my brush when attempting to dot the pupils on my miniatures. I missed about 85% of the time. Success or failure came down to a fluke. When a face did turn out well, I had no idea why. One among a squad of five would look fantastic. The rest would look as bad as the day I’d started.

Imperial Guard gave me room to experiment.

Then, with Space Wolves, I felt like I was making progress:

I decided to ditch black paint and get some .5 mm pens to use for eyes instead. This was the best decision I’d made in the hobby. It’s extremely easy to dot pupils using these pens. Combined with an increased understanding of shading, highlighting, and how to mix paints for a midtone, I’m no longer ashamed to show off the faces I’ve painted.

Almost any time someone online mentions painting faces, they will be given the advice to skip the eyes because it’s too hard. Well, man the fuck up, because if I can do it, you can, too. Get a micron pen or a sharp brush and some Black Legion contrast paint and dot those fucking eyes. It really does make a difference. Faces with eyes look so much better than ones without. They have an entire world more humanity to them.

Eyes are the auspex to the soul. Your Space Marines cannot have souls without them. And add on eyebrows, too.

I still often have no idea what I did to make one face look good and another look bad. I have no intuitive understanding of any of this. Painting does not come naturally to me at all. It is a foreign language, spoken in a foreign country. But it’s starting to feel more like home.

What’s Next?

I don’t plan on stopping. I’d like to learn the rules and play more games as we get ready for 11th Edition, though it’s challenging to find people where I currently am. I’m interested in 2nd Edition and working on a retro army, and I’d also like to step back from 40,000 and descend into the Horus Heresy. After having built a few kits of 30k marines, I’ve found that the more realistic proportions are much more appealing to me. I’m currently preparing to paint a small Isstvan III last stand force of Emperor’s Children. From there, I will go where the winds of my whims carry me.

I fear that I haven’t been improving much over the last several months. Now comfortably highlighting and shading my models, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to move on to more advanced techniques. My brush control simply isn’t good enough to spend hours layering or glazing an armor panel, when there’s such a constant risk of mistakes. Painting in sub-assemblies could mitigate those fears, but building and kitbashing is my favorite part of the hobby. I’d rather not dilute it in that way.

Maybe improvement isn’t necessary. Low as it may be, in a single year I’ve achieved a level of skill I never thought I’d be able to reach. And that is only one year.

Warhammer is ridiculously expensive. It’s time-consuming. It kills my back. I will never be as good at it as most people who have invested the same amount of effort into it that I have. But compared to video games, movies, television, and really all of pop culture—well, I’d rather go paint some more minis. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

One Last Self-Indulgence

For the sake of logging my progress, at the end of 2025, these are my four favorite models in my collection. They aren’t necessarily the best painted. Just the ones I like the best.

I wanted to create a squad of Sanguinary Guard that fit the true “Angel’s Tears” origins of my successor chapter. Using insanely expensive spare Heresy bits, this was the best of their number. I love the custom pose he has, wielding a severed head from an old Grey Knights kit. He looks like a ballerina performing a pirouette of death.

After finding myself with a second spare Blood Angels captain, I decided to turn one of them into an homage to the classic Tycho for my Fifth Company captain. This kitbash was the result. He was one of the first minis who ever received painted eyes, and although it’s extremely basic, I enjoyed the “freehand” of the retro-inspired heraldry I gave him. He’s completely unique. That’s what I find important.

I’d been looking for a Combi-Lieutenant for a long time without luck. One day, at the local game store, there were two for sale.

This model had a rough coat of gray already established and came pre-based. Rather than stripping and starting over, I cut off his left arm and painted directly over what was there. The gray worked well as an undercoat for Khorne Red, and I finished him in a single sitting.

I don’t know why. But I’m extremely satisfied with the result. He just looks awesome.

My favorite model of the year is this humble Reiver sergeant. The highlights on his armor turned out incredibly well. His face is smooth and angelic. The red looks fantastic and is as clean as I will ever be able to paint. But more than anything else, I’m proud of his right shoulderpad. There are no Tenth Company sergeant transfer decals. If I wanted him to look “right” with black pauldrons, I had to freehand my own.

So I did.

It doesn’t get much more basic than a red circle. For me, with my fine motor skill deficiencies, simply drawing that red circle was a tremendous challenge. It was far, far harder than perfectly dotting a thousand Guardsman pupils. And it’s still a little gnarly if you look too close.

I don’t care. I love it anyway. This is by far my favorite figure in my collection. My only hope is that by the end of next year, I’ll love someone new twice as much as him.

When it was announced in 2023 that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater would be the first of the classic 3D Metal Gear games to receive a remake, I and so many other fans of the series rejoiced. The choice to start with the series’ third entry could be questioned only by outsiders. Snake Eater is Metal Gear Solid’s chronological beginning, but also its indisputable height, where its narrative, level, and gameplay design all cohered into the absolute zenith of the franchise. Metal Gear Solid has primitive graphics; Metal Gear Solid 2 has Raiden; Metal Gear Solid 4 has way too many cutscenes; Metal Gear Solid V has no ending and the worst twist of all time: but 3 has no such fundamental flaw. 3 is the Big Boss.

Snake Eater is the best Metal Gear Solid game, by a lot. With the Subsistence upgrade I am of the opinion that it is as close to perfection as any video game can ever be, given the context of when it was released.

Snake Eater also happens to be my favorite Metal Gear Solid, and the entry that holds the most personal significance in my life. Many long days home sick from school were spent skulking through the swamplands of, uh, Siberia. I remember summer afternoons where I returned to Groznyj Grad, eating pizza with my brothers and playing “Guy Savage.” Sleepover nights with my best friend Timothy were whittled away by shooting Major Rykov in the dick with tranq darts. When the HD Collection came out in 2011, it became my Thanksgiving tradition for a decade thence to replay the game while the smells of roasting turkey and simmering stuffing wafted into the living room.

More hours were spent making my own fun in Snake Eater than any other game growing up, aside from Halo 2. When I returned to it at the end of high school and finally beat it on a non-lethal European Extreme run, I rediscovered the story, and became convinced that Hideo Kojima was a genius of our time—even if V had not been all I hoped for. After making some money for the first time working as an actor, I had to talk myself down from blowing it all on a $200 Naked Snake statuette.

All this navel-gazing is to make the point that Snake Eater is a decidedly played-out game for me. I know each line of dialogue and every inch of every level. Though I hadn’t finished it since 2016, and some details of how to beat specific bosses and where to find certain weapons had left my memory, there was nothing new for me to discover while I entered into Δ’s embrace. As I loaded up the first cutscene and heard David Hayter’s familiar voice, already that familiarity was a little too close, like maybe nine years still hadn’t been long enough.

This is the frame of mind I use as I evaluate Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater’s merits as a remake.

After the End of World War 2….

Δ is an exactingly precise remake. There is no reimagining here. It is shot-for-shot, made with tremendous love and care for the original, bringing what could be called outdated graphics and controls into the modern generation. Unlike the The Twin Snakes, the GameCube remake of the original Metal Gear Solid, the style of the cutscenes has been maintained, while the visuals have been updated spectacularly.

The character animations are spectacular. The cutscenes seem unaltered, but I know the faces, the ways in which the bodies move, could not possibly have been so detailed in 2004. It’s a cliche, but I mean it when I say Metal Gear Solid Δ looks how I remember Snake Eater looking in my childhood memory. It is a beautiful game.

Nevertheless there are some questionable visual departures from the original. Snake, Ocelot, and Eva have all received redesigns. More than “liking” or “disliking” their new faces, they were different enough to be distracting. I never found myself getting used to the changes, which wasn’t the case with The Last of Us: Part I several years ago.

But not The Boss. She must be most amazingly rendered character I have ever seen in a video game. I can’t criticize members of the Cobra Unit, or Volgin, either. Still one must question why the main cast was altered so significantly in a remake that otherwise focuses so strongly on fidelity to the original. Those of us who care about fidelity are surely going to notice changes to character appearance more than anything else, no?

For my part, I wouldn’t have lost sleep over Groznyj Grad getting another tunnel or two. But I am annoyed that Snake doesn’t look like Snake.

But the game is otherwise intact. Every level. Every boss fight. Every physics interaction and enemy behavior and sound effect and exploit you remember from Snake Eater. All have been faithfully recreated in Unreal Engine 5, presumably at great effort, to create what should be the perfect remake. Nothing has been removed for being too problematic. You can still see Eva’s history of receiving breast enhancements in the Survival Viewer. The only significant change to the gameplay is that projectile drop has been added to the Mk. 22, thus nerfing non-lethal runs. Everything else feels the same.

One would think that this is good news, given that I began this review with the claim that Snake Eater is and was a perfect game. If nothing is changed from perfection, nothing can be ruined. Certainly I do not trust Konami, nor even Kojima himself, to improve a masterpiece like Snake Eater without damaging it in the process, like a surgeon with sausages for fingers reaching inside your colon in search of something very small.

I commend the developers for restraining themselves for this reason. I would give a strong recommendation to Δ for fans and newcomers alike were this truly the case. Surely we are left with updated, modernized, beautiful perfection as a result?

Alas there are changes after all. Not to the game’s content, but to its systems, and they are not so benign. They introduce flaws where before none were found.

The World Was Split Into Two

The first decision presented in Δ is whether to play the game in “New” or “Legacy” Style. This will affect everything that follows.

New Style controls turn Δ into a facsimile of MGSV. The camera is limited-FoV and always third-person. CQC is performed with the right trigger, while aiming with the left trigger will turn the right trigger into the fire button. Snake cannot shoot without aiming in this scheme. Rolling has been given a dedicated button. Equipment is controlled with the d-pads. The biggest departure from the original is the introduction of crouch walking, which works just as you might expect. Snake had not discovered this technique in Snake Eater and would be forced to crawl if attempting to move while crouched previously. Now he can simply move while half-prone.

I played the entire game in New Style for the sake of experiencing the remake.

The controls in the classic Metal Gear Solid games were not intuitive. They are of their own era and relied on pressure-sensitive button presses to create precision in aiming and leaning, a technology that is both lost to time and completely unheard of on PC when playing with keyboard and mouse. Taking hostages, swapping between first and third person, and simply shooting could require absolutely bizarre contortions of the hand across the controller. It took dozens of hours to get used to these.

Worse, the first three Metal Gear Solid games relied on extraordinarily awkward fixed-perspective overhead cameras. In a 3D game these had the strange quirk of obscuring what often lay just out of sight, so that you might be spotted by a guard three inches from Snake’s nose, simply because the camera was positioned such that he was invisible.

Snake Eater received a re-release in 2005 called Subsistence that addressed this latter problem. It added a true third person camera that the player could swap to at-will. There was no aiming with this camera, like there would be come MGS4, but it completely changed your relationship with the 3D environment. Using these two cameras in tandem always gave an excellent idea of where guards were and where the player needed to go.

The controls were not so easily updated. But they didn’t need to be. I understand that many new players bounce off of Snake Eater’s control scheme today, and I think a remake did have to modernize it somewhat. But while it took an immense dedication to master, it could be mastered. And once a player had mastered corner-leaning, pressure-sensitive aiming, and hostage-taking, the depth was tremendous.

Here we come to Δ’s biggest problem. Where the title says, “the same controls as the original game,” it telling a truth within a lie. Legacy Style does not control anything like the original release of Snake Eater, but it does use its original camera—not that from Subsistence. Legacy Style lacks the true third person camera and forces the player into top-down perspective. You cannot swap between both at-will like you can in Subsistence.

In New Style, you are locked into over-the-shoulder, MGSV-style gameplay. You cannot swap to the top-down camera, ever. You are allowed to go between New and Legacy Style controls without starting a new campaign, but you have to reload from the latest checkpoint when you do. This apparently changes the Mk. 22’s projectile drop-off, and maybe some other things.

Legacy Style is unplayable. You will never be able to see what you are doing or where you are going. I realize that this is what the original version I played with as a kid was like, but I cannot go back to this: it’s awful. But maybe even worse is that Snake’s movement in Δ is tremendously sluggish and awkward compared to the original release. Combined with the top-down camera, it is simply unbearable. I believe the developers wanted Snake to feel “heavier” than he did in Snake Eater due to the improved quality of the animations, but they made a tremendous mistake. After digging out my old Xbox to play some MGS3HD I can safely say that the difference between the two games’ movement controls is like PS1 to PS2.

MGS3 is snappy and precise. Snake goes exactly where you want him to go. Δ is driving a truck by comparison. Positioning along walls is especially unpleasant. There’s no dynamic cover here like in The Last of Us, a feature that this remake badly needed. Snake feels like he’s been superglued to trees whenever you duck against one for cover; they are now an environmental hazard to be carefully avoided. This is nothing like it used to be.

The hour or so I spent replaying the game on European Extreme in Legacy Style was a horrible experience.

This leaves us with New Style. But I’m unhappy to report that, although Snake Eater never felt designed for a top-down camera, it was most certainly not designed for New Style controls.

Nothing has been changed in Δ. Not level layouts. Not enemy design. Not boss mechanics. But being able to move while aiming and crouch while walking has completely revolutionized the gameplay. These new systems feel as though they have been added in because they are expected, because other games in this series and other stealth action titles have them, but not with consideration of the totality of the game.

Consider crouching. Snake Eater is full of places that are accessible only by crawling: narrow passages, crawlspaces, and areas under bridges within trenches. In MGSV there would be similar areas, and one would access them through a combination of crawling and crouching.

Not in Δ. In Δ, these areas are still crawl-only. Because the level design hasn’t been updated in any respect, there are no crouch-accessible locations. Crouching is never necessary, and it really has no effect at all, except as a tool in one’s sneaking arsenal: it’s the same as walking slowly, for the most part.

But it does change the controls significantly. In the boss fight with Volgin, he has a move where Snake must drop to the ground to avoid being shot. In the original game this is a trivial operation. You press the crouch button or roll, then get back up: moving while holding the stand button will make Snake stand, since you can’t move while crouched. If he’s crawling, he’ll soon be standing.

Except now you can move while crouched. Thus instead of standing in this fight, while trying to avoid Volgin’s attacks, Snake will crouch walk. While he’s crouched, instead of standing, he might crawl again.

This happened to me constantly. In places where I simply wanted to crawl or stand, because those were the stages of movement supported by the level, I was instead crouch-walking—moving slowly, for no reason. This was tremendously frustrating, and there was no way around it, no addressing it, and no easy fix. It is a fundamental flaw with how crouch has been implemented in Δ. You will always have to grapple with this issue when you play this remake from now on.

The ability to crouch is a root-level change to movement. A third state of positionality has been introduced that was never meant to be. The entire game had to be re-engineered to support. It wasn’t. The developers grafted it on, and it shows. This was a huge mistake, and it makes Δ much worse than it should have been.

Meanwhile, equipment selection has been moved to the d-pads, to make way for shooting on the triggers. This change has been made with very little thought. Changing weapons quickly is vital in this game; it’s how you reload (yes, really), and it’s necessary on higher difficulties. You need to be able to do it while moving. The game was designed that way.

You cannot walk and use the d-pad at the same time, if that isn’t obvious.

But there is more. In New Style controls, Snake cannot shoot while aiming. This introduces a legion of bizarre issues. Certain boss fights, like the Fear, are now far harder, because every bullet must be manually aimed. Others, like Ocelot, are of course trivially easy—because the aiming challenge has been almost entirely removed. Stun cigarettes are now useless; in the past Snake could strafe past enemies and puff his cigarettes to knock them out, but they’re terrible when you have to aim, slowly walk up to your victim, and deliberately blow smoke into his mouth from point-blank range.

You can’t fire from the hip anymore, and you can’t run through a map screaming while slaughtering guards. You must go slowly and aim.

Control issues come to a head during the Shagohod sequence. The New Style camera is a disaster during the bike chase. Because you can’t swap between New and Legacy styles on the fly, they’ve opted to use the original game’s camera work—with cinematic shots following the bike—that snaps to third person while you aim. But because there’s no spatial relationship between where Snake aims and where the camera points, it is the most tremendously jarring and disorientating sequence of any game I’ve ever played. A GRU soldier will appear beneath a bridge, right in front of Snake, and you will aim to shoot him—and your camera will snap 200 degrees around to face the opposite direction, showing you a wall, and you will have no idea what you’re looking at.

In Subsistence, you could simply use third person mode in this section, and it would cause no problems. Going back and forth between third-person and cinematic cameras felt natural and did not induce vomit. While in the “Legacy” camera mode, you could aim and shoot while on the bike, without having to go into third person at all. The removal of hipfire autoaim is the primary culprit in introducing such a weird, painful incongruence with the original game.

MGS3 was not designed to be played this way. It wanted you to use your infinite ammo to open up on those soldiers with the M63. You were not meant to painstakingly aim in third person mode, fiddling with a camera facing the wrong direction, battling your own disorientation, while being chased by Volgin.

Just like MGS3 wasn’t designed for crouch walking. Just like MGS3 wasn’t designed for equipment select on the d-pad. These features do not belong to this game.

East and West

If you have never played Snake Eater, you won’t be overbothered by quibbles with the camera, and I doubt you’ll feel so compelled to non-lethal takedown Volgin that problems standing up and down while dodging his attacks on Extreme difficulty cause you much grief. If you are young, if you missed Metal Gear Solid, if you have a high tolerance for the Japanese and like stealth games, pick up Δ. It will be a far more palatable experience for you than grappling with Subsistence’s controls and staring down the PS2-era graphics.

But I am not that person. I can review this game only from the perspective of myself. And I am left with a simple question:

Is this a better version of the game than the one I have been playing since 2011?

Its controls are awkward and take a lot of practice. But beyond this much, I don’t have any issues with Subsistence on my old MGS: HD Collection. It’s an amazing game. It is almost perfect. I don’t even think the graphics look dated; despite their age, what Kojima managed on the PS2 is spectacular. His art style holds up very well. (Although I have to admit, the lip syncing is dogshit in English. Δ fixes that, thankfully.)

Δ is not perfect. Not even almost. It has multiple small but foundational issues that will always mar it. The ability to play it as a third person shooter is neat, but it’s not what the game was meant to be. Without a reimagining, it never will be. So it can never be the best way to play this game. It can only ever be neat. It’s not the actual game. It’s not Subsistence. It’s not a replacement for the original.

The graphics could be. The enhancements are amazing. If it wasn’t for the weirdness of Snake’s face and Eva’s hair, maybe they’d be enough to win me over. But these things are two more marks against Δ, and a longing to simply go back to the old version—to play what I know instead.

What’s frustrating about Δ is that it’s so close. If the Legacy Style controls had the Subsistence camera as an option, or if the New Style controls had a toggleable over-the-top view, I would be able to overlook its other control issues much more easily. But this bizarre flaw spoils it badly for me. Δ needed Legacy controls with Subsistence’s camera to be a replacement for the original. Now that I’ve played some of MGS3HD again for reference, it also needed tighter movement that more closely mirrored the original game.

An Era Called the Cold War

Despite all these criticisms, after beating Δ last night in a state of thorough frustration, and despite having had no desire to return to Snake Eater for almost a decade, the first thing I wanted to do this morning was load it up again and keep playing. It still has the mana that Kojima first imbued into the original’s DNA. It still is Snake Eater. I just wish it had been a little better conceived.

There are, of course, severe technical issues. It runs badly on my PC, and Volgin killed me several times due to inexplicable latency and stuttering. I will be charitable and presume that these things are but temporary ailments, soon to be patched. They usually are.

And there are improvements beyond graphics. Savescumming has been trivialized, as you can see above. The new UI is fantastic. Tons more information on a run is available to the player, and you can now New Game+ onto higher difficulties—something that I always longed for as a kid. The additions of quick-codec calls and an instant outfit changer are inspired and make engaging with those systems far less obnoxious.

But is it enough? Do they make up for the terrible new movement, the regressed cameras, and the shitty controls?

No. With these considerations in mind, Δ cannot be the new go-to for Snake Eater. It just isn’t good enough. It’s pretty. And it’s neat. But that’s all it is. Pick it up if you’ve never played it before, but if you’re like me and on a budget, quite honestly, I’d recommend you stay away, or wait until a deep sale.

It hasn’t been ruined. It’s fine, and it’s worth playing at some point. If patches fix Legacy Style controls it might be well worth $70. As it is now, it adds very little. I’m not happy with it overall.

Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater, continuing the long tradition of games in this series having ridiculous names, is available now on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. You can buy it here on Steam.

You may have noticed that I didn’t mention any of the game’s narrative components in this review. The truth is, now that I’m an adult, I hated this game’s story. I feel like I could write a million words tearing out its guts in an autopsy, explaining why Kojima’s writing is a joke, railing against teenage-me for being stupid enough to think a post-credits Ocelot voiceover was profound. But I won’t bother. I don’t really care. You know what you’re getting into with a Metal Gear Solid game. I’d rather pretend I still liked this franchise.

The monsoon came early this year. A storm swept through town in June and besieged the walls of my house, all day and throughout the night. Lashing gales and crashing rain assaulted the storm shutters. The clamor heightened around two in the morning; I was jolted from sleep then, disoriented and tangled in covers, not certain in which bed I lay, halfway between waking and dreaming. The rain smashed against the window just above my head. The gales screamed around me.

That was when I heard the woman. Through the window across the room, calling from the house’s back door:

“Please! Let me in! Let me in!”

In my dazed and unalert state I dismissed the voice as a hallucination. The hourglass of my consciousness drained back into reality, but for a long time I thought, surely, no one could be there.

But I heard the security gate bang. I heard the woman scream again, voice less distinct. I stirred, realizing that someone was surely in the yard, and looked out the window to see.

It was too dark. The rain came down hard, and rain fogged the glass. I went around to the front door and flicked on the lights—to let the woman in, to check if she were real.

No one was outside. The woman was gone.

In that state of half-slumber, roused by the storm, I really had heard a woman begging to be let in. I remember her voice. The sound was “real,” in the sense that any noise descrambled by our minds is “real.” But it is obvious in retrospect that it was an auditory hallucination, caused by a tired mind’s misinterpretation of the keening wind outside my windows.

It was a very dark and very stormy night. Without powerful lights mounted outside the door, I never would have been able to see, without venturing into the rain, that there was no one outside. Perhaps I would not have been brave enough to open the door without the assurance that it was safe to do so. Then how could I have been certain that the woman hadn’t been real?

Consider this same encounter in the year 1800. In the dead of night, during a long storm, a woman screams for help beyond my window. At first I dismiss it for a trick of the mind, but when the screams persist, I investigate.

I see no woman through the glass. But it’s challenging to tell. At most I might have an oil lantern to light my way, but even so much as a candle would be difficult to ignite in the dark without a pre-existing flame. The shadows around me are viscous at night. I am keenly aware that I am a diurnal creature, acting in a time God did not intend for me.

The woman’s screams have stopped. I hear only the wind. But I still cannot be certain she is gone. I do not know that the woman was a hallucination. I am too afraid to open the door, and so return, warily, to bed.

When I relate this story to my friends the next day, each have had similar experiences. They have never seen the woman calling for help during storms, but neither have they seen with some clear source of light that she is false. Over time, as we tell these stories, we propose explanations. Perhaps there really is a woman whose spirit haunts our village. We call her Screaming Susan and speculate that she was a young girl thrown out from her father’s home during a terrible storm. No stranger let her in, and she drowned in the rain. Now she returns at night to relive those final moments. One man says he thinks he caught a glimpse of her once, through his window. New details are added over time.

In this way, a ghost story is born. At its heart is an element of truth, and the need to understand.

This story seems ridiculous in the modern day. Ghosts are not real. They are not a very good explanation for anything. But for almost all of human history, belief in the supernatural has been completely ubiquitous. Today we stand atop a corpus of enlightenment that seeks to deny the existence of the otherworldly, but it is only because I have the language to understand what an “auditory hallucination” is that I can explain away an obvious apparition, rather than to say it was a ghost or a monster or a message from the gods as my ancestors might have.

But I don’t think the Enlightenment is what killed the visceral belief in the paranormal that pervaded the past. Reading folklore today, when I consider what it must have been like to live in the stories of monsters and demons, I think it was humanity’s literal enlightenment that spelled the end for a world of magic and monsters.

For many months, rats infested my ceiling. You would not believe how loud these tiny aberrations were. Anyone who heard them would have sworn homeless men were holding a fiesta in the walls. For weeks I had no clue what they were, until I set up a trail cam and caught the fuckers running around my kitchen late at night.

Without that trail cam, I wouldn’t have thought they were rats. I would have thought my house was haunted.

This ancient house I live in is becursed by strange sounds. A rapping, tapping noise still sometimes comes from the kitchen. Noises bang out from the yard and basement. The walls groan like old men rising from their chairs. More than once I have sworn that a burglar has broken in, because some strange noise pounded from one room or another.

But always I turn the light on, and I see that no one is there. No one and nothing. If I go outside with a flashlight I might realize that the banging from outside has, somehow, despite its volume, been caused by a rabbit stuck in my fence.

The revolution in technology since the end of the 1800s has completely changed how we live. We all know that the Internet didn’t exist before the 1980s, or that people rode horses and drove carriages before 1900. No one forgets that airplanes didn’t exist before the last century. As a Type 1 diabetic, I am keenly aware that I would be dead many times over had I lived any time before 1922.

But how often do you consider that light was a luxury before the invention of matches? It often comes up in my novels. In the book I’m currently writing, the most useful spell any character can know is one of flame or illumination—to have a flashlight powered by your voice, when contesting with the darkness. Yet this is no magic in the modern day. It’s something we take entirely for granted.

But before friction matches, there was no easy way to light your surroundings, even with a candle. A hearth had to be tended constantly. Shadow was the endless enemy. Any task at all at night was challenging. The lightbulb fundamentally changed humanity’s relationship with day and night. In so doing, it also changed our relationship with the supernatural.

We have all had cameras and flashlights in our pockets for twenty years. In that time we have learned that there is nothing hidden in the shadows of Earth. No UFOs, no monsters beyond men, and no ghosts. When something happens in the dark, we can shine light on it. Each ray from a flashlight is a tiny, instantaneous exorcism. We are so numb to this miracle that it has become part of our instinct; when I worked in a haunted house last year, I realized that nearly every visitor would pull out his or her flashlight the moment he entered complete darkness—even voluntarily.

Of course, using your flashlight in a haunted house ruins the experience, as well as blinding the actors. But spoiling the horror is just the point. As light tears the horror from the carnival ride, so too does it tear the horror from life. An illuminated world is one where ghosts and monsters cannot exist.

I don’t believe in ghosts. There are no cryptids I think might be real. But the past was a dark and scary place, full of strange sounds and unknowable mysteries. If I’d had to live there, by the light of candles and lanterns, even in the Age of Enlightenment, I think I would have been just as superstitious as anyone else. And I think you would have been, too.

Maybe the thesis of this post is so obvious it goes without saying, but I couldn’t get it out of my head once it had occurred to me. For some reason, though I never really intended it to be found by anyone, this blog has begun receiving a fairly large number of visitors each month. I’ve been preoccupied with other writing projects and don’t have much interest in pop culture anymore. But I might start updating this blog more regularly, depending on how I feel. No promises.

Suno is an AI tool that lets users generate music in two-minute chunks. Describe the kind of song you want to hear and receive it within seconds. Like most AI services, it can be extensively trialed for free: enter any prompt and make the music happen. I’ve had over 300 tokens since I started using it last year and have come nowhere close to exhausting them, though they appear to have recently locked the more advanced models behind a paywall.

I enjoy music. I listen to a lot of it. But I don’t know anything about how it works. I can’t play any instruments, can’t read sheet music, and can barely sing. I could never write a song.

This makes Suno an arcane and mysterious platform to me. It does something that I cannot do myself. Though AI image generation is functionally similar, I can conceive of myself drawing a picture: I cannot even imagine what it would be like to write a song.

Now I can. It turns out it’s as easy as writing, “A 1980s New Wave hit about buying a houseboat.” Or, “A 1920s musical number, low bass, rhyming chorus, angelic choir background.”

If you are curious what Suno might generate as a response to the latter prompt, you can give it a listen here:

Suno is extraordinary. Audio quality issues aside, which are mostly resolved in newer models I don’t have access to, it seems to understand rhythm as well as most human musicians. What it produces is often legitimately catchy, and it does this in seconds. Perhaps all the world can be reduced to mathematics; and what is music but a mathematical expression of noise? Maybe it’s no surprise that computers can quantify melodies so easily.

I spent the better part of a day turning Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells” into a song. It struck me in college that the poem had an intensely lyrical quality, and I’d wanted a suitably gothic musical arrangement for it ever since. I even considered composing one myself at one point (though I was swiftly defeated).

No longer. Here, in just a few hours, I had something that precisely matched what I had imagined those years ago. It is rhythmically varied, sonically interesting, and matches my taste in music precisely. Though most of what I’ve generated on Suno isn’t very compelling, I’ve had “The Bells” on repeat for the last three days. I like it. It’s a song tailored specifically for me. I like it not just for AI, but as a real song. It could be better—but it’s the closest thing that exists to what I want to listen to. So I listen.

I won’t share “The Bells” here. AI “art” works because it can be tailored for the individual, generated in seconds or hours. It isn’t tailored for you, and you probably won’t appreciate it. This is why posting your Midjourney images or ChatGPT photos to Pinterest is such a waste of time. These things work because they are bespoke, not because they are inherently high quality. Were I to upload “The Bells” here, it would surely be nothing more than cheaply generated slop to most strangers. But to me, it’s the song I’ve always wanted.

The End of Culture

Now imagine a future where everything is “The Bells.” You have an idea for a book you’d like to read. You ask your preferred LLM to generate it. Within moments you have a novel tailored to your every preference, and though it might not be flawless, might not be Literature, it is good enough to read like any book off the shelf at Barnes & Noble. Except it is your favorite book, because it has everything you know you like.

You’re feeling like listening to something new. You could open up Spotify. Or you can have Suno take a look at your preferences and generate a few bangers that match precisely what you’ve had on repeat all month.

You have a game you’d like to play. GameGPT makes it for you instantly. It has read your angry Internet blog and knows exactly what you do and don’t like. It is the best game you have ever played. Its small deficiencies are compensated for by the sheer fun you have seeing your old ideas come to life.

This future has no vision. It is a world in which no one is ever challenged or confronted by anything uncomfortable. Ideas are no longer transmitted between humans, and no one ever experiences anything beyond the filters of their AI tools. You will never be surprised. You will never encounter anything new.

In this world, nothing ties groups together. You have nothing to talk to your coworkers about. There are no metaphors that make sense to your whole family at the dinner table. The bonds of society have broken down. Culture itself has ceased to exist. There is only the Machine, and the Individual.

This is the future of AI entertainment.

“The Bells” is a great song. I legitimately enjoy listening to it. But I can’t help but see the far-reaching consequences of a technology that creates culture fundamentally tailored to people, rather than populations. What will the civilization enamored with these tools produce? What will it be remembered for? And what will happen to the people within it?

For those who insist AI will never raise to a level at which it competes with human-produced art, because the AI lacks a soul or some similar nonsense, I would say that Suno has already, in its infancy, proved you resoundingly wrong. Computers can and do understand what makes music work. They will only get better at it. They do not need a “soul” for this. And if music can be written by the machine, so can books, games, and movies. It’s just a matter of time.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. But I believe this truly could be the end of culture as we know it. We have already experienced the breakdown of society with the decline of broadcast entertainment, the rise of the Internet, and the digital age. AI will kick the process into superoverdrive. Yet what is to be done?

AI is here to stay. There’s no stopping it. The only question is who gets access to it. For my part, I think that’s better you and me than someone else.

Part I

Season 2 of The Last of Us on HBO has been proceeding apace, with its fifth episode airing last night. Having relinquished the hobby of blogging and hating both the first season of the show and, now, its source material, I saw no reason to watch Neil Druckmann’s latest venture into critical acclamation. It would only agitate me.

But I have been following it from a distance, because I was curious on several points. The Last of Us: Part II is a disastrously written game that would have no choice but to be altered in major ways if it were to be adapted successfully into a non-interactive medium. Bella Ramsey is a calamitously cast heroine, who had no chance of playing a sole lead in the series without Pedro Pascal’s companionship. And Abby is an incredulous character, whose presentation would have to be changed if audiences were going to feel anything but hatred toward her.

It still isn’t beyond salvaging. The basic structure of Part II could be saved by a talented writer willing to throw out everything but the characters and the gist of the plot.

Yet doing so would require admitting that the “critical acclaim” that Part II received was, at its core, a lie. It would have taken an acknowledgment that, maybe, the critics had some points after all, and were not simply racists, Nazis, bigots, homophobes, Russian bots (etc.) because they did not like the latest Sony product.

We all could see this already. Neil Druckmann could see it, too. But could his ego take the hit?

The answer is in. Though the critics had their checks clear, the audience is less thrilled:

The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes has been disabled at the time of writing because it dropped too low (shows you who these websites are for, huh?):

Rumors are spreading that viewership has declined steeply. I don’t know what the citations for this are from, but how couldn’t it be true? Killing your lead actor in the first episode usually gets people to tune out.

Though I will forever maintain that Season 1 was a disaster on every level, it’s telling that its audience score, somehow, remains intact. Season 2 must be really bad.

But of course it is. Did you seriously think you could kill off Pedro Pascal and turn Bella Ramsey into a leading woman? Did you think audiences would accept her as the Ellie we see in Part II, which, despite all of its faults, is still carried by a phenomenal performance from Ashley Johnson? Did you think the game that was reviled by at least half of its players and undersold its predecessor by twenty million copies (this link compares only the remaster to Part II, not the original on PS3) would fly on television, because HBO’s audience is so much wiser and more mature than lowly gamers?

Answering yes to any of the above is not rational. Which brings me to the end of my gloating, the point of this essay, and a quote from the cyberneticist Stafford Beer:

[T]he purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

For example if the showrunners were to cast Kaitlyn Dever to represent Abby:

…and Bella Ramsey to represent Ellie:

Then it would be irrational to look for insight into their intentions anywhere other than in the effect that such casting creates. Because the effects are manifold, and the purpose of a show is what it airs.

The Last of Us on HBO is not being made by a few errant writers and actors whose creative intentions might become muddled beneath layers of difficulties working on scripts, on sets, and in an editing room. It is a carefully produced, multi-million dollar television series on one of the world’s largest streaming platforms, wherein no part was created without the review and approval of hundreds of independent minds. Nothing about this series is accidental. Unlike The Last of Us: Part II, which I still believe to be the badly conceived work of an ego-tripping director to whom no one could say no, there is no accidental explanation for this outcome. The Last of Us on HBO was stylistically designed to be this way. The audience reaction is the intended purpose.

The purpose of a system is its what it does. The system created this show.

So what is its purpose?

What It Airs

How might it be possible that the pretty, petite brunette from the game ends up being played by someone with visible Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the TV show, while the ogrish hulk-woman is cast not only by a pretty, petite brunette—but one with a striking resemblance to the character she opposes in the story?

This was no accident. Neil Druckmann (& friends) chose Bella Ramsey for the role of Ellie because she is not suited for it. She is extraordinarily, distractingly unphotogenic and, more vitally, a bad actress. This is not her fault; this is the fault of the people who put her in the role.

So why did they put her in the role?

The purpose of a series is what it airs.

I can’t speak as to the quality of Kaitlyn Dever’s acting. But she is very photogenic. She looks like a leading woman. Using an actress like her in place of Abby, a character universally derided for her unappealing appearance in the game, suggests that the showrunners are aware of this. It is the live action equivalent of drawing a character with big eyes. Audiences are more disposed to like attractive characters, and predisposed to dislike unattractive ones. Nothing is more fundamental to storytelling than this truism.

What can be inferred about Neil Druckmann’s intentions, that he thus cast one of the ugliest women he could find to play Ellie, and an extremely attractive one to play Abby?

The purpose of a series is what it airs. And what has aired tells us that Druckmann and Mazin wanted to put down and humiliate the first game and its fans, while elevating the second—as much as possible. They want you to hate Ellie and side with Abby. Why else would the adaptation of the first game be so rushed and awkward, trimmed down to ten abridged and actionless episodes, while the second gets expanded into three seasons? The whole entertainment industry is being subjected to one man’s psychodrama over the mixed reception of his supposed masterpiece.

But I think there’s more to it than that. Failing to change Part II’s terrible story and forcing Bella Ramsey into a lead role that she cannot fill was not an accident. If the purpose of a series is what it airs, then we must draw the conclusion that The Last of Us Season 2 on HBO is intentionally designed to destroy The Last of Us as a franchise. It isn’t just “bad,” in the lazy and poorly done way that the first season was bad: it is calculated to be bad, in bizarre, pointless, and easily preventable ways.

And if your goal was to eradicate the first game from memory, would there be any better way to do it than this? If censorship wasn’t an option, if the game had to remain on sale: you would have to resort to the complete demolition of that game’s legacy. Right?

I’m not suggesting that this was Neil’s only way of taking the first game away from you. But the purpose of a series is what it airs.

We all know the cliche that those who do not die heroes will live to become villains. No man is infallible enough to endure the long test of time. He will falter eventually. Yet all men do die, and so some lucky ones are spared the indignity of indignity before they might have a chance to blunder away their reputations. Mortality could be a blessing in disguise, from the rearward gaze of future generations.

But what if a man never died? What if he lived forever, his putrefying cadaver still standing upright and making new blockbuster films year after year, decade after decade, century after century? He would surely become a villain; but then, if he survived long enough, if he lived forever, what else might happen to his legacy? His reputation?

Could he be a hero again? Could he salvage glory from the ruins of humiliation?

Ridley Scott intends to find out.

Exactly one year ago, Scott’s last film, the calamitous Napoleon (2023), was released. Napoleon speaks for itself. It is meritless and best left entombed beneath the Flavian Amphitheater. Now comes Gladiator II, a direct sequel to his legendary pseudo-historical epic Gladiator (2000) starring Russel Crowe.

That Scott can follow Napoleon up so quickly with yet another historical epic, at his advanced age, speaks to either remarkable industriousness or a shameless ability to slap his name on the directorial work of other filmmakers.

In either case, the trademarks of his filmmaking hold fast through the eons. The story of Gladiator II begins in Numidia with a young man, an out-of-place Roman wed to a young native. In this version of history, Numidia is a single city, rather than a large geographical area, and it is being invaded by the Romans via sea, even though it should have been an important province for about the last two centuries by the time this story takes place.

You can guess what follows. The young man’s bride is slammed into a refrigerator (thankfully) while he is taken captive and made into a gladiator in Rome. Thus ensues a confusing, sinuous, and vaguely coherent plot, surprisingly intertwined with the first Gladiator film, in which stupid and nonsensical fanfiction about Ancient Rome takes place.

In the wake of Napoleon my expectations could not have been lower. I’m not certain why I went to see this film at all. I anticipated a complete disinterest in historical authenticity, very bad cinematography, poor performances, awful CGI, and casting so bad that the film was unwatchable.

Gladiator II is not that bad. Its first half is not so far off from the Ridley Scott we remember from the year 2000. Though utterly lacking in factual accuracy in terms of events and characters, the film’s the production design is mostly good. Costuming includes several replicas of real armors; among these I spotted this Attic helmet, which is among the only surviving examples from Antiquity:

There are several gorgeous aerial shots of Rome that look stupendous, truly like an empire at its height. Here, more than in any other film or series, I felt like I was gazing into a past that really existed. No doubt the reconstructions were full of errors that I’m too sophomoric to identify—but the atmosphere seemed right. The same effect exists during scenes in the Colosseum, and occasionally elsewhere.

Often, though, the design stumbles in what should be luxurious interiors, with buildings appearing half-ruined, as though no repairs have taken place in millennia. People do not actually like to live in fancy houses with crumbling brick walls. Several shooting locations appear to be ruined, despite the fact that they should be new when the film takes place. If this is an attempt to capture the title scroll’s post-Aurelian decay of Rome, I received no sense of this anywhere else in the city that we saw.

But what bothered me more than anything in the design was that all of the busts and statues we see were left unpainted. It’s now widely accepted that ancient marble was usually painted in Antiquity; the paint has simply worn off over time. Like so much else about Ridley Scott’s filmmaking, the lack of paint on the film’s many statues simply makes me think that no one really cared.

One of my biggest complaints with Napoleon was that it was very badly shot. A horrible filter was applied to everything. The camera was always placed in the wrong position. It is the absolute lowest bar for a film that a viewer must be able to see what is happening; Napoleon does not meet it.

Gladiator 2 does not suffer from this affliction. The cinematography is unobtrusive and effective, with occasional memorable visuals. There is no livid tint over the lens during the fight sequences. There was no point in its 150-minute runtime where I could not see what was unfolding on the screen. This means that it is at least watchable.

Unfortunately I can offer no more praise than this. Everything else is as you would expect from Ridley Scott. As is entirely characteristic, the performances are dry and bad throughout. Pedro Pascal is unsurprisingly terrible; I expected nothing better from him, but it truly takes Ridley to make Denzel Washington seem like a bad actor. Yet he does.

As for the story, the action-packed first half of the film is thin but entertaining, for the viewer without any standards, but when we delve deeply into the characters’ motivations, we glimpse into the mind of a man with a child-like view of storytelling. In the film, the protagonist, identified generally as Hanno, rejects his true Roman identity so thoroughly that one would think he could not remember his origin at all. We are shown flashbacks of him leaving home as a young child. It is later revealed, though, that he was TWELVE when he left home, he does remember his past, and yet, despite this, he energetically shouts down his own mother’s loving embrace when they are finally reunited.

Yet when his mortal enemy, the man who slew his wife, says that he knows who Hanno truly is to his face… he then immediately accepts his old identity back again, and his character changes instantaneously.

For no reason.

Whenever I thought I had begun to understand Hanno’s motivation, the writers seemed to deliberately change everything about his character to pull out the rug beneath my toes. This happens at least three times. It is never justified.

It is ultimately pointless to articulate how poorly written the characters are in this film. They are not really written at all, but almost improvised from scene-to-scene based on the needs of each set piece. It is exactly like it was in Napoleon. Scott has no interest at all in screenwriting, and almost seems to actively detest it as an art form. He rejects its conventions and rebels against them whenever possible. The results are predictably laughable.

And we laughed. The last hour of Gladiator II is driven by bizarre, manic behavior from all characters, and ends with an elderly man being butchered preposterously while his army of six thousand heavily armed guards stands by for no reason. The theater was cacophonous with uproarious cachinnation with every line of dialogue. The man beside me flailed his arms in utter bafflement as no one behaved in any kind of logical or reasonable manner at any point. I have to admit that I was doing the same. There is one scene in which the Praetorian guards, who are actively hunting Hanno at that very moment, actually clear an aisle for him within a deadly mob just so he can give chase to Denzel Washington and arrive at the plot’s conclusion. Earlier he somehow manages to unlock every door within the slave pens of the Colosseum and none of the guards notice, not even as they stand by and stare at the obviously unlocked doors.

It’s all preposterous. I have a low tolerance for this sort of thing in general, but given how much laughter gripped our theater, I’m willing to guess that Scott crossed over the line for most people. There was no attempt at all to tell a well-crafted, logical story within a coherent and consistent world.

Why not? I really can’t say. Millions of dollars were spent on this film; you would think a few extra hours on a good screenplay would be the least to ask. But Ridley has never cared about writing. I’m not surprised.

Gladiator II does not have no plot. There are characters with goals and there is some kind of story. That is more than Napoleon had. But beyond calling off “present” at roll-call, it is earning no participation points today.

As for the film’s spectacle, there are a few moments, such as the naval battle spoiled in the trailers, but it’s mostly let down by the director’s same lack of regard for any kind of real-world logic. In one important scene, the main character is saved by his breastplate; this is cool to see. Armor is always treated as costume by Hollywood! Unfortunately, everywhere else in the film we see armor treated exactly as costume, with lorica segmentata effortlessly pierced by shortbows, cuirasses sliced in half by gladii, and bronze penetrated by the thrusts of spears as though made of cloth. Single characters often take on multiple opponents at once, in ways that are unrealistic and make no sense. The days of The Duelists (1977) are long gone; the fight choreography is dreadful throughout. There are no formations in battle. Characters almost never make use of shields. Soldiers who outnumber their foes stand by and do nothing, waiting their turn to be killed.

I have seen worse fight scenes. Napoleon had much worse fight choreography. But compared to the first movie, and compared to Scott in his first and best historical film, Gladiator II is a D+ at its best.

But I feel like I already have written too much. I could exhaustively sit down and pick this movie apart, as I did for Napoleon, and complain about its countless deficiencies. I could be indignant at anachronisms and rage against the ludicrously stupid video game logic that brings about the film’s conclusion. But there isn’t much of a point.

Gladiator II is bad, but at least it’s shot well enough, and it can be entertaining here and there. It does not inspire indignance like Napoleon did. While Napoleon had no merit whatsoever beyond its budget, Gladiator II does have a few moments of impressive spectacle and amusing Ridley Scott dementia-like charm, like the magical armor holding out just when it needed to (but no other armor ever doing anything in the entire movie).

Ultimately, it is a forgettable Thanksgiving blockbuster. I left the theater three hours ago and it has already almost entirely left my memory. If Napoleon is Scott’s worst movie and a 1/10 moviegoing experience, I would give Gladiator II a 3. You shouldn’t see it, but if you really like Roman history, really like Denzel Washington, and really don’t care about historical inaccuracy, you might not regret watching it.

Maybe. But I doubt it.

As for Scott—I pray that this is his last movie.

While amassing notes on cRPG design for a henceforth unmentionable project, I sat down this week to replay 2019’s Disco Elysium for the first time since its release. Everyone was talking about it back then, especially everyone I knew, and the opinion was universal: this was the best-written and most mature game ever released. Its script made BioWare’s attempt at adult roleplaying games look infantile. Only Fortnite players, high school dropouts, and “traditionalists” could possibly dislike it.

Contesting that premise was and remains folly. Disco Elysium is a supernova of wit; a Roman triumph of originality; a bull through the bleachers of creativity. The setting is gripping enough to strangulate. The characters are vivid and lifelike in every gutter and ditch and stretch of reeds. The political subject matter is handled reasonably well, and the script manages to be incessantly funny while brawling with serious topics.

But my thoughts were nevertheless mixed as I meandered my way through the streets of Martinaise as an ultra-liberal on that first playthrough, collecting tare and preaching the free market as a homosexual hobo-cop. With my thought closet full and the map explored, I found the thinning of the plot increasingly tiring. The midgame of Disco Elysium is blighted by huge stretches of voluminous worldbuilding that are mostly irrelevant to the mystery Harry and Kim have been sent to solve. You walk around, ask people questions about the order of creation, and then do it again. While fascinating in some academic sense, I can’t stand exposition of that kind in games. This is the same criticism I have of Planescape: Torment.

I want motion in my RPGs. I want to find the killer and progress my relationships with the NPCs. I want plot.

The story almost lost me. I got bored. Too much reading. Too slow. Where were things going? Did I even care? Yes, the writing was good; it was hilarious, it was compelling, but it felt too disorganized. Everything was too dense. I wasn’t interested enough in the setting to justify the time the writers wanted me to invest in learning about it. The grinding brakes of apathy screeched my enjoyment to a halt. I started skipping a lot of conversations.

I forced myself to the ending anyway. I stumbled into the fifth day, drunken and directionless.

Then my opinion completely changed.

The magnificent third act of Disco Elysium deserves to be studied alongside the Insulindian Phasmid within a large and virescent nature reserve. Detective Kuuno de Ruyter and I solved the case, unraveled a centuries-old mystery, apprehended a recalcitrant communard, and recovered HDB’s lost memories within what is undoubtedly the most satisfying three-hour stretch of any game I’ve ever played. So much of what I had done—and so much of it optional—came together to create a bespoke climax that I was never going to forget.

I forgave all of my criticisms of pacing and became a preacher of Disco.

In the half-decade since I have continued to identify Disco Elysium as one of the best RPGs ever made, perhaps objectively the best. That is how good I felt the ending to be. But I’ve never counted it among my favorites. Until now I’ve never felt any desire to revisit it. I haven’t been curious about alternate paths. I haven’t been tempted to see what was added in The Final Cut.

But last night, I finished it again. This time I wanted to get every achievement, so I played a centrist-“traditionalist”-communist (at the end of the game Kim chastised me for being both a fascist and a communist, which he claimed made no sense; apparently he doesn’t know about achievements) with a spectacular physique but no intellectual or psychic capacity whatsoever. This was the inverse of my first HDB, who was frail and corporeally disintegrating, yet possessed vast mental faculties.

I had forgotten a surprising amount of the story. Though I still knew the true killer’s identity, the esplanade toward finding him had mostly left my memory. It was almost like unraveling the mystery for the first time all over again.

At fist I found that I was much more forgiving of endless exposition and crushing verbosity than I was during my original playthrough. Armed with the knowledge that the story was going to go somewhere, I put up with much more than I normally would have. I had an excellent time.

But it didn’t last. After ten hours my mood toward DE mirrored my first experience with the game almost exactly. I found the beginning to be transcendent, intoxicating, entrancing; but the middle was tedious. As fun as it can be to hear the stridulations of Harry’s 9mm fingerguns while doing Mr. Claire’s chores, or to quiz the White Pines representative on What Is Reality, or to learn about the complex revolutionary history of Revachol, this section of the game is mostly a structureless morass of huge walls of text, with only occasional glimpses of meaningful character or story interactions between. It becomes extremely tedious, especially if played for more than an hour or so a day.

Disco Elysium is overwritten. I’m sure there are some players who take great delight in sifting through endless question-asking about a fake world that is never going to get another game, and that’s fine, but I’m not one of them. I would much rather learn about Revachol through the natural course of the story, such as you do at the end of the game. Quizzing NPCs about history and geography is not compelling by comparison.

But the ending is still magnificent, and despite having a few rough (and, it must be said, largely optional) stretches, the game is gravid with memorable moments. Disco Elysium is not afraid to let the player have fun. Sing karaoke. Find ridiculous clothes. Say insane things. Do drugs. Meet interesting people. Set things on fire. Most games wouldn’t let you wear the murdered mercenary’s combat armor, because that’s farcical. But this game is different. That is half of its magic, and that holds up.

So I can report that time has not changed my opinion on the story overall. It’s still brilliant, and it’s still too slow (in a few places). But that’s fine. It’s easy enough to know when something will or won’t be relevant, and the spacebar key is extremely effective at skipping through walls of text when you’re getting bored.

But what about its design?

Disco Elysium has no combat. Its mechanics are skill checks and map exploration. Earn XP by completing quests and talking to NPCs. Most dice rolls, which are determined by 2d6 rolls plus modifiers, can be retried by adding another point into the skill in question: there are six per each of the four stats, for a total of twenty-four (though several are mostly or exclusively passive).

I was deep into my tabletop RPG phase in 2019, and I recall being frustrated that simple RNG was the best Disco Elysium’s designers had come up with for conflict resolution. Removing combat served the game well, but nothing took its place; there is no player skill required, not even really reading comprehension, to beat this game. If you exhaust every dialogue tree in order from top to bottom, you will solve the case. That is all it takes.

I thought something more abstract could have been designed to represent social “combat,” or to add skill back in to the equation. Real gameplay could have made a huge difference and turned those dull middle stretches into more than what they are.

I’m not as convinced that it matters anymore. The skill checks are fine for what Disco Elysium is—an exercise in incredible writing. But its greater RPG mechanics leave much to be desired. The white check retry system has bizarre incentives; you should never invest your points into anything until you’ve failed a test. Then you should try it once, exit out, invest a point, try it again, etc. The game is screeching at you to do this, and the huge number of skills necessitates it. In this sense there are no builds in Disco Elysium, but only permanent upgrade-scars left on Harry by his retry tokens.

This is a very strange system. It does everything in its power to encourage savescumming. If you’ve invested three points into Pain Endurance just for this one check, and the odds of success in totality were something like 98.7%, you will probably not accept failure if it comes. The investment of resources was simply too high for that.

I dislike Disco Elysium’s attitude toward failure more generally. When you fail a roll, the game punishes you with damage to your health pools—while also preventing you from getting what you want. The game has no concept of “failing forward.” Surely health should be a resource spent to achieve desired outcomes and mitigate RNG, not simply a way to be punched while down? Either damage me and give me what I came for, or keep it from me and do nothing else. But don’t punish me for trying.

DE always punishes you for trying. A better system of resource management could have eliminated white checks, sped the game up, and eliminated the incentive to reload saves so often. That “failure” equals “you do not get what you want, period” is a D&Dism that had no reason to be carried over into a system like Disco Elysium, which really has more in common with a Powered by the Apocalypse game in its dice engine. Failure should be its own punishment, especially when it can come despite doing everything right.

There are many people online who will argue that the game is “just as fun” if you always accept failure and never reload. They’ll claim it doesn’t matter if your progress is blocked. Things are better sometimes when you don’t get what you want.

This might be true for some games. There are places where it probably is even true in Disco Elysium. But for the most part, I don’t see it. Leaving aside the numerous places where you will instantly be killed for choosing the wrong option or failing the wrong test, there are countless checks that are virtually mandatory for anything resembling a positive outcome, where failure will result in less game, that is less interesting. If you think missing an entire plot-vital reed-related encounter at the game’s climax due to RNG is “just as interesting” as the alternative, I’m not sure what to say to you. It just isn’t. That you can roll snake eyes despite having 99% odds to succeed (like I did last night) is like shit in the wound. Why wouldn’t you reload that? There has to be a better solution than leaving it all up to RNG. Baldur’s Gate 3’s inspiration system is one good way to help mitigate problems like this.

The closest thing to a challenge component that Disco Elysium has is dressing up HDB in the correct wardrobe for the task at hand and making sure his stats are arrayed correctly before engaging in a conversation. Your spec barely matters, because so many bonuses are available through clothes and context and drugs that skills are irrelevant.

There is joy in changing Harry’s hat, but it’s also tedious. By the end of the game, continuously sifting through 40+ articles of clothing whenever the odds are beneath 70% is exhausting.

This all could have been avoided with better design. A system could have been devised to invert the bonuses. Modifiers should have been applied after a roll, not before, so the player could always know whether it was worth spending time climbing through menus before he started doing it. XP could have been turned into a direct resource, because let’s face it: that’s already what it is. This would have eliminated so many of DE’s strange incentives and made for a much better mechanical experience.

But that’s something to ruminate on for future RPGs made in Disco Elysium’s mold. Ultimately, reloading a save only takes a moment. The systems do work adequately for what is effectively a very fancy choose-your-own-adventure game with expensive graphics. Dragon Age: Origins, New Vegas, and Pillars of Eternity 2 also fail colossally in systems design, so it’s not fair to linger overmuch on what are minor demerits to Disco Elysium’s immensely strong overall showing.

So the core systems aren’t stellar, but Martinaise is a fantastic environment. Traversing its streets is sometimes-frustrating, but atmosphere seeps from every gutter like the odor from a hanged man’s eyeballs. There is a strong tactile sense to the interactivity of the world. Picking up coins makes a satisfying clink. Tapping thought bubbles causes a gratifying scribble. You can jog from the eastern Dockyard to the western Lighthouse in two or three minutes, but everything between feels dense, like there’s always more to find if you learn something new. You will never get tired of this map.

Worlds like these, small, refined, and tightly interactable, are what more games should aim for. Density of content is superior to breadth, always. The environment is what makes exploring for clues and traveling between dialogues fun, and it’s why Disco Elysium is, definitively, still a game. The animators, artists, and level designers did an excellent job.

Despite my few reservations, the only people I would not recommend play Disco Elysium are the illiterate. But The Final Cut version now has full voice acting, so even they don’t have that much of an excuse. It’s a toweringly intelligent game, with excellent characters and more than its share of unforgettable moments. It excels precisely because its designers were not afraid to let their creativity go berserk and did not hesitate to include the strange, the surreal, the imaginative, or the challenging.

It’s honestly shocking that it was ever made. That a few guys working with Unity could throw a game like this together in their garage is believable, but Disco Elysium is not that. It’s a high-budget, well-polished AA cRPG. The quality of its writing is vastly superior to any other video game on the market, and in that regard it has held up perfectly over the last five years. Nothing made since has come close. I doubt anything ever will.

You owe it to yourself to give it a try. And if you find it occasionally overwritten, like I do, don’t be afraid to skim and skip the sidequests. No one will ever know.

I received the first Hades for free as a promotion on the Epic Games Store in late 2018. I played some of it, decided to wait until its full release, and returned in 2020 to find one of the best games ever made. Although I don’t play many brawlers and generally dislike Rogue-likes, I thought Supergiant had managed to seamlessly wed narrative and systems design into a brilliant, if slightly tedious, indie-action game.

I’ll never forget the day I reached the true ending. I was at the end of my tenth run, and I was sick of the game. I wanted to see what happened—I found myself deeply caring for Zagreus, rooting for him, desperate to find out what would happen between him and Persephone. But I couldn’t take another clear of Elysium again. It was driving me mad. I prepared to face Hades with Exagryph and told myself, “This is it. Win or lose. I’m done after this. I quit.”

…and that was the run Hades stepped aside, the final cutscene played, and the credits rolled.

That final scene, where Persephone decides to return to Hades, made the toil of so many escapes worth it. Hades found a way to create total harmony between the characters, their arcs, the story, and the gameplay, so that all could exist within the same world, justified for the same reasons, at the same time, and thus come to the same resolution. It was designed in totality: the narrative goal is to reach Persephone, which is to reach the end of the dungeon, which is the player’s goal, which is ever-resetting because Zagreus can never truly escape the Underworld, which facilitates endless gameplay, which focuses everything back in on your home base, because the stakes are so low that your friends (and family) can be the antagonists that you’re facing down. Everything works together to create the ultimate effect. Hades is a truly brilliant game.

So I had to buy Hades II

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to wait. Once everyone started talking about Hades II, I had to pick it up for myself. I heard that it was even better than the previous game. I heard that there was no reason to wait for it to exit Early Access.

Within a week, Supergiant has received infinitely more playtesting and feedback for their game than they ever could have through QA. This inevitably means that, in two years, Hades II will be a better game for Early Access. Unfortunately, the price is that those of us who chose not to wait have received a much worse experience. Hades II is obviously unfinished, lacking in content, and feels very rough around its edges. It is currently without an ending and loaded with placeholder art. I have no way of knowing what will or won’t change, and so I’m reluctant to speak on anything related to the gameplay. Who knows what it will be like by the time the full version comes out. I think it needs refinement, but given Supergiant’s record, I’m confident that it will be improved over the course of development.

But the story is unlikely to be altered at this stage. And while I quickly grew used to changes to the dodge and cast mechanics, I think Hades II represents a major step backward from its predecessor in narrative design. I beat Chronos for the first time yesterday, and I’m extremely disappointed. I’d like to examine a few of the reasons why.

Tone

Hades succeeds on its tone. Zagreus’ quest to find his mother is fundamentally a no-stakes journey that facilitates infinite gameplay. He is an immortal traipsing through the realm of the dead. He has infinite time on his hands. He is harming no one and causing no lasting damage. No matter how many times he succeeds or fails at making it to the surface, every respawn makes sense, and no suffering is being caused (except, perhaps, his own). By having no stakes at all for failure, the dialogue can be a little bit sillier, the characters can be more laid back, and the interactions between Zagreus and the antagonists can be much more intimate.

I love the tone of Hades. It’s cozy. It’s witty. It’s comfortable, and it’s extremely unique. It captures something about what it might really be like to be a bored god. It’s such an important part of the story. No other game has ever done anything like it.

In Hades II, you play as Melinoe, Zagreus’ younger sister. She was born shortly after the first game’s conclusion; and, following her birth, Chronos, Titan of Time, returned. He kidnapped her family, locked them away, usurped the throne of the Underworld, cast the dead back out onto the surface of the Earth, and is now waging a war against the Olympians.

Melinoe was secreted away by Hecate just as Chronos assumed power. As rightful Princess of the Underworld, she is now the gods’ only hope of defeating Time.

I hope you can detect the slight increase in stakes between story and sequel.

Melinoe is not just fighting for herself, or her family. She isn’t just fighting for the Underworld. She isn’t just fighting for the order of the gods, or the Olympians, or humanity. Essentially, all of order and existence rests on her shoulders. The stakes could not possibly be any higher.

We have gone from an edgy teenage god looking for his mom to a chosen one saving all of existence.

The tone has changed.

I hated this immediately and was never soothed. In abstract there is nothing wrong with going in a different direction for a sequel, but as a fan of the first game, it feels like a betrayal. The characters I loved from the first game have been removed, and are not only absent, but are apparently in torment, and every moment of my failure prolongs their suffering. As if death didn’t feel bad enough already!

Melinoe is a goddess, and it’s fine for her to be important. But you can get a story about being a chosen one in any standard fantasy game. Hades was unique in its family-driven mundanity. It is an Olympic long jump backward to turn it into something so gritty in such a generic way. Worse, it turns the story from cozy-and-relaxing to very-very-stressful, and that’s not what I wanted from this series at all.

But there are two more insidious issues with the ludicrous upping of stakes, beyond my personal distaste:

1. It ruins the structure of the dungeon loop;

and,

2. The writers no longer know how to manage the tone of the characters and the setting.

Consider Megaera in the first game. You fight her again, and again, and again, because Hades tells her to stop you every time you go to escape, and usually she fails. She’s just doing her job. She doesn’t have anything against you. Her boss wants you to stay home; you want to get past her. You fight.

Then, afterward, you grab a coffee together. No hard feelings. It’s a great relationship, justified by the story, the setting, and the gameplay.

Now consider Hecate. She plays the role of Meg in Hades II and is the first boss. She claims to be “testing” you, on every single run.

Every.

Single.

Run.

This makes some sense at first, or it would, if Melinoe wasn’t an immortal goddess for whom failure has no real price but time. But once you’ve made it to Chronos, one you’re stuck on his fight and can breeze through the rest of the game, doesn’t it seem rather counterintuitive for Hecate to be draining your valuable resources like Death Defiance when she herself is the one who wants you to defeat Chronos?

“I’m sorry, Headmistress. I would have killed Chronos and saved the universe. I got him down to 3% HP that last time. But you killed me in our first fight and used one of my Death Defiances. Guess we should’ve skipped the duel, huh?”

(this actually happened to me)

Why doesn’t Hecate pick me up and place me at the boss I’ve been struggling with, if killing Chronos is so important? Couldn’t she give me a bit more of a push? The same is true for every god. Why are they only offering boons, when ALL OF ETERNITY is at stake?

The first game never raised this question, because the answer was no one cares. Zagreus’ journey was his own. No one else had a stake in it. The gods threw you their boons because they were bored. But that cannot possibly be the reply when the gates to the Underworld itself are cast open.

The tonal issues seep down into the character and dialogue itself. I think that, for a game that takes itself so seriously, Hades II is bizarrely silly. Let’s look at the boss roster:

In Hades, you fight:

1. The Furies

2. The Lernaean Bone Hydra

3. Theseus and the Bull

4. Hades

These bosses all make sense within the setting and all take themselves relatively seriously. But in Hades II, you fight:

1. Hecate

2. The pop-rock band Scylla and the Sirens

3. Cerberus

4. Chronos himself

Do you notice something out of place?

Scylla and the Sirens are absolutely ridiculous. They’re charming, at least at first, but how do they fit alongside the others? They sing the song “I Am Gonna Claw Out Your Eyes (And Drown You)” and giggle as you do battle. They don’t take themselves seriously. They are, literally, a joke.

I get what they were going for. Someone at Supergiant thought: Sirens are from Greek mythology, in mythology they sing songs, popstars sing songs, so what if we have sirens who are a pop band be our bosses?

It’s a funny joke. But that’s all it is. It makes no sense in the context of the world, and it doesn’t fit within the tone. The first game might have been able to pull off something like this, given that it’s a much less serious game overall, but you’ll notice that it doesn’t try (except, perhaps, with the shades goofing around back at Hades). The bosses take themselves seriously. All of the main characters do. So why doesn’t Scylla? And why are they serving Chronos, anyway? Does this make any sense at all?

This really bothers me.

Besides being bizarrely punctuated, the dialogue in Hades II remains good. But it is tonally disjointed in a way that the first game never was. It was fine before when Poseidon was nothing but a dudebro caricature, because he didn’t need to be anything more than that: he is Poseidon, King of the Brocean. But when the story is so grimdark and serious, this characterization becomes ridiculous. It begins to feel like the gods helping Melinoe aren’t taking her quest seriously, which, in turn, makes it feel like I shouldn’t take it seriously. But when the stakes are so high, if I shouldn’t take the quest seriously, why am I playing at all?

I appreciate that Supergiant mixed up the formula. They didn’t want to do the same thing over again, and I’m glad that they attempted to grow the structure of Hades into something new. But I don’t think they’ve done a good job so far. The tone, one of the first game’s strongest elements, perhaps its strongest element of story, has been taken away, and instead we’ve received something much more generic, with a lot of strange inconsistencies.

Character & Plot

At the start of the story, we learn everything that we need to know about Chronos. Then, run after run after run, we never learn anything new. If, at the moment you sat down to play Hades II, you predicted that you would kill Chronos, and then have to kill him a bunch more times for some reason… you were correct.

I mean literally for some reason. Hecate isn’t sure. But she’s confident that if you keep doing it, maybe, at some point, she’ll figure it out.

I knew that, in order to learn more about Persephone, I had to keep reaching her, over and over again, until she finally caved in. I knew that Hades would try to stop me each time, and so I would have to fight him every time. But what is there to the goal of reaching Chronos? What’s going to change? Why should I care? What do I gain with each successive victory?

Hades II has no sense of narrative progress. At no point in my 16 hours of playing Hades II did I discover anything about the characters or the story. I understood everything at the start, and I had the same understanding at the end. No twist ever came to disrupt what I thought I knew. No revelation ever recontextualized what had come before. No one was ever shown to have been truly behind the scenes. I killed Chronos, and I was told to do it again, for some reason. That was it.

Obviously the game isn’t complete. But really. That’s it?

There’s a ton of dialogue to find with the various characters. There are interactions to be had. But Hades II is plagued with this problem. Time and time again you’ll hear a few lines from a god when receiving his or her boon, and each time there will be some utterly vapid commentary: “Oh, you’re battling Chronos’ minions, eh? I am, too!” Always it will be phrased in some new way, but it’s inevitably the same.

This dialogue tells us nothing. It’s just filler. It says nothing about the story, the relationships, or the world. You could cut it out and lose nothing; and once it stops playing, you’ll actually be relieved.

I had the same problem with the first game. It hasn’t been rectified this time around.

So much of the game suffers from this. I go to camp and see that Nemesis has something new to say:

“You got pretty far last time. Just watch out. I’m better than you.”

“I’m sure you are, Nemesis. But I’m going to kill Chronos first.”

"Huh. Yeah right.”

“Death to Chronos.”

Every conversation is the same. They’re all to this formula. Occasionally there might be some flicker of character buried within the dialogue, but for the most part the interactions are totally vapid. They feel like filler. I found that I quite liked Odysseus, but of all the times I talked to him, he only really said anything when we took a bath together. A long-running gag in the first game is that Charon talks only in groans; here, Melinoe can apparently understand him, and talks back at him like he’s actually saying something worth listening to. But he’s not. It’s just another conversation without any substance.

It’s one thing to experience this in camp. But when it comes to major story beats, it’s unacceptable. You might expect that each encounter with Chronos he reveals more and more of his plans; in fact, he says nothing but some new vapid threat.

And maybe this is just Early Access. Maybe it’s all Early Access. But if Supergiant felt like their game was good enough to sell, then I feel like it should be good enough to play. And this is not good enough.

Hades makes a small reappearance. I’m sure we’ll see more of him down the line. Zagreus and Persephone do not. I find this extremely disappointing and borderline unacceptable. An absence of recurring characters beyond gods and their boons is another major source of disappointment. These things are probably subject to change, but who knows how many more years of EA we can expect before we actually see Zag or Persephone again.

Nemesis is a catastrophe of a character. She has none of Meg’s charm. Despite being an ally, she appears sometimes to steal your rewards, rob your coinpurse, and make your life worse in every way. It’s ironic, and perhaps a lesson in game design, that this has made me loathe her far more than the literal homicidal boss who fights you time and time again in the first game. I cannot stand her, and I wish that I could kill her.

Maybe it’s fitting that Nemesis is my nemesis. But I don’t think it’s what they were going for.

I do not know how I feel about Melinoe herself. I love her voice actress, and in her few moments of relaxation, such as her bath with Odysseus, I found her to be very charming. But she’s mostly edgy, serious, and determined. How can she be anything else? So much rides on her shoulders, she can’t afford to be witty or casual about anything. Her life demands seriousness. It would be bizarre if she were written any other way. The most that I can say is that she lacks Zagreus’ effortless charisma, and it’s hard not to miss his boyish charm. He felt much more human to me, and far more relatable.

But I’m certain that I dislike Chronos as a villain. He comes across like a Boomer who wandered out of the old folks' home in the sky; his spindly, geriatric art is laughable, and his condescending voice would befit a cancer patient, rather than the Lord of Time himself. He is far more grating than intimidating.

Hades was a fantastic antagonist. You understood what he wanted, why he wanted it, and he was always there to talk to after a battle. But Chronos is enigmatic, confusing, and boring. He isn’t fun to hate, and he isn’t interesting to learn about (if there’s anything to learn at all). He is, by far, the game’s weakest link.

Disappointment Is Subjective

Judging by Hades II’s reception so far, I would be willing to guess that many of my complaints are not shared by the playerbase at large. Most players probably don’t spend hours thinking about how this death to Cerberus means that 500 Spartan children will now have to be slaughtered by ghosts in the fields of Thessaly, or how that bath with Odysseus was paid for by Zagreus’ agonized screams.

And in a lot of games, I can put that kind of stuff out of my head, too. But Supergiant has largely built its reputation on ludonarrative consonance. Their games excel at wedding gameplay to narrative. This is why I find it extremely disappointing that they have gone in what I feel to be an ill-conceived direction for Hades II. It isn’t a bad game by any stretch. There is good stuff tucked away within it, and it will get better throughout Early Access. Maybe all of my issues will be resolved—although I doubt it. But it’s undoubtedly a much messier game than its predecessor, which excelled precisely because its narrative design was so tightly focused around the central, personal journey of Zagreus, and not some ridiculously huge high-stakes fantasy world-saving quest.

I’ve uninstalled it already. I don’t want to touch this game again until its full release, although I fear that might be three or four years from now. I’ll reexamine this review then and adjust my thoughts accordingly.

From where I sit now, I’m certain that Hades II will ultimately be a decent, maybe even great, game. But I doubt its story will ever come anywhere near the splendor of the last game.

If I had been asked to list my favorite video games as a young man, my response would have invariably started with Halo: Combat Evolved, The Last of Us, and Fallout: New Vegas, in that order.

Halo. The Last of Us. Fallout. My three favorite franchises. The games I grew up playing.

The last years should have been cause for celebration, then, as these are the first three serious games, in the same order, that have been adapted to television by major Hollywood studios.

Halo on Paramount+ in 2022. The Last of Us on HBO in 2023. And now Fallout on Prime Video in 2024.

It probably goes without restating that I thought both Halo and The Last of Us were without any merit whatsoever. As adaptations they failed thematically, tonally, and spiritually. As standalone television series they failed in dialogue, character, production design, and narrative totality. They were, in other words, utter shit, not least because they appeared to display active contempt toward the games they supposedly adapted (as well as the players who enjoyed them.)

I expected differently from Fallout. Its first trailer captured something about the franchise’s soul that demonstrated its showrunners had at least some modicum of regard for the source material. It also had a real writing team attached to it, with Jonathan Nolan—brother to Christopher, of Westworld fame—at the helm.

These were good signs. I withheld judgment, but I expected something at least better than The Last of Us. A low bar, but a bar nonetheless.

For once, I was right.

It is April 11, 2024, and I have watched all eight episodes of Fallout. While I think the series is flawed, for the first time in my life I can report that, at least, this series actually is an adaptation of the video roleplaying game franchise of the same name.

In Fallout, Ella Purnell stars as Lucy, a plucky vault dweller who leaves her isolated home in search of her kidnapped father. Walton Goggins and Aaron Moten appear in supporting (and occasionally antagonistic) roles, with the former playing “The Ghoul,” a gunslinging cowboy bounty hunter, and the latter portraying Maximums, a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel. Lucy soon finds herself embroiled in wasteland-wide intrigue, with no choice but to transport the severed head of a scientist across California if she wishes to see her father returned home.

This is as absurd as it sounds.

Fallout, like its source material, is a dark comedy/action apocalypse thriller. The choice to embrace the weird wasteland and maintain the tone of the games helps hugely in making it feel like Fallout and not a cheap rip-off, which is one of countless major problems shared by Halo and TLoU. In essence, its story looks like what another Bethesda Fallout game likely would look like: a cliched main story about finding a lost parent (a la Fallout 3) mixed with a dumb McGuffin to keep up the pressure on the protagonists and keep the story going forward, all within an original and compelling retrofuture sci-fi setting.

This should not be taken as a criticism. Many of my problems with this series rest upon the fact that, as an adaptation, it is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout. It uses the same tired tropes of family drama—deftly avoided by Obsidian—and utilizes what is mostly Fallout 4’s aesthetic, in some places very strongly, to construct its world. Ultimately, this means that it’s a hamstrung by its source material, and could never have hoped to be more than good enough as a result.

But as an adaptation of Fallout 4, Fallout on Prime is truly excellent. It is without any question the best video game adaptation ever put to film. Allow me to elucidate:

In the first episode, Lucy is cornered by a raider. She receives what would undoubtedly be a mortal wound from a knife to her ribs. She gazes downward, eyes wide, and the audience is left to believe that she could not possibly survive.

At this moment, I literally wrote in my notes: It would be hilarious if she makes an effortless recovery after giving herself a single stimpack.

Immediately, she retrieves a stimpack, uses it, and the wound is barely mentioned again.

Later on she receives radiation poisoning, just like in the games. In real life this would mean certain death.

But in Fallout, she can take some RadAway and be fine.

So she does. And she is.

In Halo, the showrunners changed everything about the world, setting, and characters, and could barely be bothered give the Master Chief’s iconic armor its energy shields. In The Last of Us, Joel is immediately given the wrong gun at the series’ start, and there is literally not so much as a token reference to a brick or bottle anywhere to be seen (because Mazin clearly never played the games).

But Fallout is oozing Fallout’s things. The guns. The armor. The medicines. The fights. One sequence is shot in such a way to be clearly evocative of VATS from the modern games, with bullets following in on critical hits as they blow apart limbs. The power armor has the UI from Fallout 4. There’s even a brief scene of a character playing Fallout 3’s stupid hacking minigame!

These things bring me immense joy. Nolan could have made a Fallout series that, like The Last of Us, relied solely upon recognizable aesthetic details, but otherwise deviated in every meaningful way from its source material. He could have phoned it in. He could have been lazy.

But he wasn’t. He sat down to adapt Fallout into television, and he asked himself: what is Fallout?

The answer is the world. It’s the tone. It’s the aesthetic. But above all else, it’s the gameplay. Fallout is its gameplay. VATS, stimpacks, grotesque violence, power armor, and stupid minigames: that’s Fallout, and that’s what we see in this television series.

For all of its flaws, Fallout deserves monumental recognition for this accomplishment. The Last of Us (the game) is about beating people to death with bricks and bottles; this is what its show should have been about, if it wanted to adapt the source material. Halo: Combat Evolved is about shooting aliens to death on a hula-hoop in space; the TV show should have replicated this.

Fallout is a choices-matter open world sandbox RPG series about going on quests and exacting horrific violence on Mad Max rejects. That’s what all of the games are fundamentally about.

And that’s what Fallout on Prime is about, too. That is why I am happy to call it an excellent adaptation.

As for the show itself….

Fallout has the most rabid and devoted fans of any game on the Internet. Gamers love Fallout, especially the Black Isle/Obsidian titles, with vitriol that is not matched in any other community that I can think of.

These people are going to be very upset at some of the creative decisions taken in this series. While it deserves praise for setting its story in the same world and timeline as the games, and thus coexists with them without major retcons (something neither Halo nor The Last of Us even attempted), its new additions to the lore are extremely suspect. I won’t spoil them here, but a major faction from the original games is effectively wiped out offscreen, for a dumb reason, and the context of the War itself is altered significantly.

I’m not a member of any deranged Fallout fan community. But I do really like the games. I’m probably one of the few people who has played, finished, and enjoyed every single title in the series nearly equally, including the Black Isle games. I like Bethesda’s Fallout much more than the average Obsidian-enjoyer.

But I have to admit that I find these changes to the world very upsetting. I enjoyed the first four episodes of Fallout, but as more was revealed, I found it harder to overlook the direction things were going in.

This is not Nolan’s fault. I am 100% convinced that the timeline comes from Todd Howard and the rest of Bethesda’s “““writers,””” if they can be called that. In this way the fact that the setting has been taken in such a stupid and obnoxious direction via this show is almost a testament to the writers’ devotion to the games, because they obeyed Todd even when they, presumably, didn’t need to.

So I want to make it clear that I don’t think it’s fair to blame these disappointing changes on the show itself. They’ve manifested because this is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout, and, unfortunately, Bethesda’s Fallout is what Fallout is in 2024. There’s no getting around that. We’re never going back to Chris Avellone’s New Vegas. That’s something we have to accept. Complaining will do no good.

The Good & Bad

But how is Fallout on its own merits? Ultimately, I suppose the answer is “good enough.” I would recommend it to anyone tolerant of graphic violence and post-apocalypses. As a series, it features several excellent action set pieces, good cinematography, and some truly fantastic production design. It only occasionally feels like a fanfilm.

The contrast with Halo and TLoU is stronger nowhere than in action. Both of these series had convoluted and nonsensical action sequences, lazily shot and confusingly edited together. Considering both were adaptations of action games, this was an enormous failing. Neither had any real setpieces, and the best moments from the games were mysteriously absent, despite potentially being awesome for TV (upside down shootout sequence? Warthog run? I guess not; too hard to film).

During Fallout’s action, you understand where the characters are. You’re rooted to individual PoVs. The camera moves realistically. NPCs do have a bad habit of not shooting at the heroes for no reason, or missing comically with huge volleys of bullets, but I can endure this if the overall effect is compelling.

It is. Fallout nails its action and violence. Its gore is straight out of the games. It’s really good stuff.

Most importantly, it isn’t lazy.

The apocalypse looks much better than The Last of Us. It’s also full of mutants and threats, and it teems with conflict. A lack of conflict is the most fundamental flaw of Craig Mazin’s utterly failed adaptation of TLoU. You never receive the same sense that things are just easy in Fallout. The world is vast and largely empty, but it’ll still kill you. Don’t fuck around.

But something doesn’t quite work. Most obvious is that it appears as though the Chinese dropped sand on America instead of nukes. We’re supposedly in California, but there are now vast dried lakes and salt flats between jungle-like oases? What’s with all the sand? Did nuclear bombs do that? And where are the other settlements? What happened to the Hub? Is the Boneyard now Shady Sands? Where are the super mutants? We see radroaches, a yao-gui, some ghouls, and a fishthing; but where are the geckos? No deathclaws, really? And why aren’t there more factions?

The production design is spot-on, but the worldbuilding doesn’t live up to the games. The setting feels empty and confusing. It rarely comes across as a real place. I never managed to construct an internal map of the world in my head upon which I might have followed the characters’ courses. If I had, I doubt it would have made sense.

The story and characters are more and less successful. Walton Goggins’ Ghoul is the standout from the series so far. A great deal of runtime is dedicated to flashbacks of his past in the Old World, and I found these sections to be some of the most engaging in the show’s totality. But he’s in far too little of each episode, being altogether absent from one, and his ultimate contributions to the plot are minimal at best.

Lucy is the series’ real core. I like Purnell’s performance, but her writing misses the mark. Nolan and his team decided to run with the idea that people from the Vaults are Fargo characters: good-natured Midwesterners who are too naive to understand that not everyone is as kind as they are. This is essentially her “thing” throughout the eight episodes, and they even go so far as to have her say things like “okay den,” in case you didn’t get what they were going for.

Survivors from the Vaults should be normal pre-war people. They are how we introduce the audience to the fucked up world of the wasteland. They don’t need to be comically nice Midwesterners; they just need to be normal, while everyone else is batshit insane. She herself becomes the joke.

But I guess they follow through on her silly kindness, and it isn’t that much of a complaint. Lucy is fine.

The story sags significantly as we get to Maximus and the Brotherhood of Steel. I found Maximus’ performance to be very poor, bordering on amateur, and to such an extent that I expected it to be revealed that he was a synth or mutant or something. Between a weak characterization and a plasticky face, he’s never convincing.

He isn’t helped by the writing. His character has been raised by the BoS—a religious cult—but he has apparently metabolized none of its teachings. He betrays his master in their literal first scene together. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything, unlike Lucy who at least believes in being nice. He has no personality, and he doesn’t seem to take himself seriously.

This is a problem for everyone. Much of the comedy originates from the fact that the characters don’t take their own situations seriously enough. They don’t seem to actually believe that the world around them is real.

But of course it should be real, for them. They should treat it with all of the respect that we would treat our own reality. The fact that the setting is so zany and absurd is what creates humor—not the characters themselves. This is ironically why the Ghoul works so well; he is the only character in the show who takes himself seriously. That role needed to be played by Lucy instead, in my opinion. She shouldn’t have been so silly. She should have been played straight.

Liberty Prime isn’t funny because Elder Lyons cracks jokes about how silly Liberty Prime is. Liberty Prime is funny because everyone takes something so ridiculous with a straight face.

I hope they recognize and correct this deficiency for Season 2.

The story massively overrelies on coincidences to drive the plot forward. The characters stumble into each other constantly, even when hugely improbable, and then proceed to act in ways that barely make sense. There are several fight sequences that conclude awkwardly and in contrived ways. In the end, the twist is so predictable—it’s the same twist as Fallout 4, basically—that I thought it surely was impossible that they’d go with it. But they did anyway.

I’m not thrilled about these decisions, but they don’t infuriate me. My biggest criticism on the whole is the dialogue. It’s far too vulgar in places, in a way that feels like tryharding grit. Some of it is legitimately Reddit-tier, with one character unironically referring to another as, “a gentleman and a scholar.” This is worse early on than later, and seems to be the purview of several of the writing team’s least talented members.

There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments throughout the episodes and several excellent visual gags. But the dialogue’s attempts at humor are weak. I found myself cringing in about half of Lucy and Maximus’s conversations. The attempts at zaniness fall totally flat.

But despite these quibbles, the series possesses a strong sense of narrative progress, and has an actual plot with an actual impetus. Flashbacks to the Ghoul’s life feel like an instrumental piece of the overall puzzle—not padding to extract more runtime in an easy conflict-free way. Cutaways to various characters actually matter in building the story toward the conclusion. Stuff mostly makes sense on the whole, at least so far as motivations are concerned.

Contrast this to The Last of Us, with its countless pointless flashbacks and diversions to meaningless NPCs who do not contribute anything, and Fallout begins to look like Shakespeare in comparison.

In Summary

I have to confess that I found Fallout pretty boring, despite decent pacing in the abstract. But I don’t think it’s Nolan’s fault. I’m at a point where my video game-addled Zoomer brain simply cannot endure television without the help of Twitter. It’s not a medium that’s for me anymore. I vastly prefer games and books. TV is just too slow.

As a show of its own merits, Fallout is a mediocre but occasionally excellent series. Its highs are high enough to compensate for its lows, and it would probably be renewed for a second season and attract a cult following, even without the franchise attached. I give it a 6/10.

As an adaptation of the video game franchise of the same name, Fallout is phenomenal. It demonstrates immense care for the source material from Nolan and the others. It is truly an adaptation, not just of the world but also of the mechanics, into a different medium. There is one incredible moment where Lucy discovers an NCR flag and the New Vegas title theme begins to play. It might be fanservice, but it demonstrates the care for the source material taken by every department involved, from writing to music to production design. Except working in more of an “open world” structure to the story, I do not think they could have done a better job (excepting dumb lore developments). I give it a 10/10.

For reference, I’ve come to think of Halo as 1/10, and The Last of Us as a 1.4/10. I actively loathe both.

But I don’t loathe Fallout. I’m glad to have watched it, and I intend to watch more. It’s even made me excited for a possible Fallout 5—formerly thought to be impossible after the shitshow that is Starfield.

If you have Prime, I recommend you give it a try.

All eight episodes of the series are available now on Amazon Prime.

Two years ago, I reviewed the first five episodes of Halo on Paramount+ with righteous indignation. I would have kept going, except for that at this point I gave up. Whatever Halo was, it wasn’t the Halo I grew up with. It had no relation whatsoever to the video game franchise of the same name. I thought it was very lazy, very poorly scripted, and very boring. And also very bad.

But when I heard that the two hacks responsible for Season 1 had been canned, a small flicker of hope wheezed beneath my breast. I read that the new writers wanted to make it “[feel] more Halo.” And I thought, maybe, given the strength of the source material, there was a chance things could be turned around. Perhaps Season 2 would be good, action-focused, and capture some of the majesty of the original two games. Or maybe just the shitty expanded universe books. Even that much would have been acceptable.

As it always seems to be, my optimism was misplaced.

The first thing to notice about Season 2 is the collapse in production value. I was critical of S1’s visual design (and what I felt to be laziness in action scenes especially), but it never looked cheap in the raw sense that Season 2 does.

The beginning of the first episode of S2 is a protracted and confusing action sequence. Nothing has changed from last time in that respect. But I don’t recall the MJOLNIR suits worn by the Spartans looking quite so cheap. As the camera descends on Silver team, every close-up looks like nothing more than a fan film. There is no sense that the Spartans are wearing powered armor relative to the humans around them. Their suits have no lights, nothing that glows, there’s no sound to their movement; if you didn’t know it was powered, you wouldn’t know.

The lighting is flat, and not a single shadow is anywhere to be found. John Halo can’t even stand to turn a flashlight on and breathe some life into the set. Everything is gray and, for some reason, foggy, perhaps to hide the ridiculousness of John Halo’s costume. He looks more like an idiot in a Halloween costume than a supersoldier in the pinnacle of human technology. His armor plating moves like foam.

Energy shields have been nixed. Apparently inflation is hitting ONI as hard as it is the rest of us. I do recall some shield flickering when a Spartan was shot in S1, but no longer. Elites do appear to have some kind of minor shielding, but it looks nothing like it does in the games, and is severely underwhelming. Elites also have invested in energy swords, at the expense of any and all ranged weaponry. It’s one or the other apparently.

The only praise I can offer Season 2 is that the opening fight scene isn’t too bad. It’s much improved over the confusing nonsense seen in the first episode of the last season, wherein a hyperadvanced space navy decided to land its soldiers outside the walls of an open-air fortress bailey. The camera work in S2 shake-heavy but strong, and John Halo does feel relatively super. This one sequence is a vast improvement over any and everything seen in Season 1.

But the rest of the series is unchanged. The sets look cheaper, uglier, and are re-used more often, but the style of writing and structure of the story remain indistinguishable.

That is to say, there still isn’t a structure to the story, and the style of the writing is still terrible.

I gave up on the last season at the episode wherein John Halo digs for buried treasure in the woods with a spade. Yes, that actually happened, although it’s hard to believe.

This season, John Halo eats dinner with Mexicans in space.

These scenes serve the same purpose:

Question: “How do we get to ten episodes in our Halo TV show?”
Answer: “Let’s have John Halo eat dinner with the family of some random soldier he rescued. That’ll use some time up.”

You will be surprised to learn that nothing like this ever appears in the video games.

The entire series is nothing but poorly done padding strung between a few action setpieces. After the initial fight scene in Season 2, Chief and Co. waste the next two episodes hanging out in the locker room on Reach. Occasionally John Halo will go pester the new director of the Spartan program, which is apparently a thing, but their discussions will elucidate nothing. We’re supposed to believe that the Spartans are integral cogs in the UNSC’s war machinery—we are told as much several times—yet one wonders why such valuable assets spend all day doing each other sexual favors in the showers and not, you know, fighting aliens. Occasionally John Halo leads his Spartans out on training exercises; why he does this while aliens are conquering the galaxy, I really can’t say.

There is never any impression that humanity is actually in a war.

Halo is a model of incoherence. It should be studied in laboratories like rare mutant bacteria, because this degree of terribleness can surely only be attained intentionally. At no point in the two hours I watched tonight did there appear anything resembling a plot. Mostly, characters I did not know or care about engaged each other in conversations that had no purpose except to inflate runtime.

I had hoped that the new writers would do a “soft reboot” (as they claimed they would) over the previous season and disregard the countless bad decisions that ruined Season 1. Characters like Soren and Kwan would be ditched. More time would be spent with Cortana and Chief, and they would be more like Cortana and Chief. This was going to be instrumental in my enjoyment of a new season, because there was no way I was going to endure the rest of Season 1 to find out what happened. I find it hard to believe anyone finished it.

But this is not what we received. Kwan and Soren are back, and we find them in media res. What’s going on in their stories? I have no idea; it’s never explained. There is no recap. Apparently Kwan is now an expert in Tai-Kwan-Do and fights some dudes on a space station for some reason; why is she there? I can’t say. No explanation is proffered at any point.

Something happened to John Halo at the end of the last season, apparently, and Cortana is now gone. I don’t know why. No one has told me. I did read online that John and Makee fucked on a Halo ring or something, but this also hasn’t been explained, except that Ritz or Keoai or someone mentioned that she killed Makee—except then Makee shows up again.

This is a continuation of Season 1. The same characters. The same terrible story. The same bad writing.

It’s not usually unreasonable for a show to assume that its audience has caught up on the previous episodes. But given the circumstances, I think assuming anything other than that we hadn’t was lunacy.

It is with some horror that I correspond that Halo Season 2 is the most boring thing I have ever watched. I mean this literally. I’m not exaggerating. It’s mostly discussions between characters I don’t care about, strenuously avoiding any plot progression, without any semblance of story, and without any worldbuilding at all. I have no sense of what this setting is like, no clue how the war is going, and no idea of what the aliens are like or want.

Season 1 was terrible, but it wasn’t all boring. I did infrequently have some sense that things were building toward a resolution, although they never did. There were also occasional glimmers of love for the games sneaked into various places: door opening effects from Halo: CE, recognizable Covenant droppods, and the fan servicey first-person sequences.

So far, Season 2 has nothing like this. It has literally nothing from the games except a few pieces of art direction. The second episode does end with a bizarre Reach reference, but that is the only thing you’ll find from Halo in Halo. There is otherwise no sense at all that we have embarked on a journey that will one day conclude with any kind of climax.

This series serves no purpose except to be jeered at and mocked. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is interesting. It’s like the creative writing homework of a bored jock looking for an easy A in his senior year of high school. While I suspect the action will prove superior overall to Season 1’s—I do think the fight scene we saw was actually written into the screenplay, whereas I’m positive in Season 1 they were all just assembled in post—everything else is as bad or worse, and the production value restrictions make watching this show for the spectacle a much more tenuous prospect.

There also is no spectacle. We’re two episodes deep and there’s been one brief fight scene. The immense boredom you will endure to get to John Halo’s next fencing match with the Arbiter will not be worth if. Even if you intend to read your phone until the energy swords come out, Halo is so unfathomably dull that, like an entertainment vampire, you will still find it impossible to keep on.

I don’t intend to watch any more of this, and you shouldn’t bother trying it. It isn’t even bad. It’s just nothing. It has no substance. Watching Halo Season 2 is no different from staring at your black TV screen. There are more productive ways to waste your free time.

Famously, in the midst of being shit on for taking one of the best games ever made and utterly ruining its sequel, Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann proclaimed, “We don’t use the word ‘fun' [for The Last of Us].”

This would prove to be the rallying cry for The Last of Us: Part II apologists, in essence if not literally. What, you don’t like having your favorite characters murdered by poorly written Mary Sues with no personality? You don’t like watching Ellie get her fingers bit off and her arc from the previous game being erased off-screen? You think everything should work out in the end? You don’t get it. TLoU2 is high art. It isn’t just a video game. It isn’t meant to be fun. It has meaning.

This was the primary justification for the game’s frankly grotesque violence. One of Part II’s innovations was that every NPC was given a name, so that, while you remove the brains of some poor puppy one switchblade stab at a time, you’ll know that he was actually someone’s real pet called Rex. Shoot a bandit in the head, hear another cry, “No! Her name was Susan and she had twelve children! How could you?” (Or something to that effect.)

In this way TLoU2 was trying to tell a meaningful story about how violence is bad, actually, which I never knew before. It attempted to use the intrinsically violent nature of a video game to call attention to the way we apply force to problems (and also to make Ellie seem worse than she was or had to be). Hence why you had to execute people begging for their lives every once in a while, in case you were beginning to suspect they were nothing but pixels rendered on your PS4.

Yet it was Jim Sterling who most memorably pointed out a small problem with critically calling attention to violence in a video game: fictional violence actually is fun, and you won’t ever convince me otherwise.

The quest for ever-more-photorealistic computer graphics has been driven in large part by the desire for more realistic blood splatter, dismemberment, and decapitations in our video games. Series like Doom and Left 4 Dead are quite literally sold on the appeal of their obscene levels of gore. It is an iron rule of interactive media that your average player will prefer larger and more disgusting fountains of viscera at any opportunity, if given the choice.

Yes. Any game. Including Animal Crossing.

Thus I am not shocked or appalled when I see Ellie slowly carve the arm off of a pregnant woman, or witness the screams of the man whose legs I have removed. Instead, I smile.

So Enters The Last of Us: Part II - Remastered

The failure to reconcile the enjoyability of fictional violence with an apparent desire to shock the player is one of countless reasons why The Last of Us: Part II is the video game equivalent of an exploded sewer line. I don’t think there is much need to rehash my opinions on it as a whole here, except to briefly say that my feelings have only sunken lower with the passing years (and any lingering warmth I felt toward Druckmann utterly annihilated by his god-awful writing for The Last of Us on HBO).

But I still load it up to replay Ellie’s sections once a year or so, because I do think the fundamental gameplay design is engaging (and, yes, fun), at least in small doses. It also looks gorgeous and has the best animations of any game ever made. The stealth avoids the “cock-up cascade” problem of similar survival games, while its movement, shooting, and crafting systems are all tight and satisfying.

Also, you get to kill off-leash dogs. What’s not to like?

So when I heard that its remastered edition, released last week, has a new arcade “Roguelike” mode called “No Return,” I can honestly say that I was interested. I’d been cautiously optimistic as I awaited the now-canceled multiplayer version of TLoU2 (lol); and given the fact that the franchise has been completely and utterly destroyed by Druckmann’s mismanagement, this seemed like the only opportunity I would ever get for more The Last of Us gameplay. You could even say that it would be the last of The Last of Us.

I’ve now played “No Return” for a few hours and mostly exhausted its limits. I’ll write more about it below, but for the moment I want to observe how amusing it is that ND has effectively given up the charade about The Last of Us being more than a post-apocalyptic action game.

There is no story in the new “No Return” mode. There is just gameplay. Crafting, stealth, collection, shooting, punching, yes: talking, cutscenes, bad Halley Gross dialogue, and being grabbed from around corners, no. Best of all is that you finally get to play as Joel again!

And guess what? It’s fun. One of the things I find particularly fun is when I use a shotgun to cripple a WLF soldier, and he spends the next thirty seconds screaming in agony while slowly bleeding out and dying. I also find it fun when I blow off a Clicker’s arm, or dismember a Runner, and find him still coming to kill me. Such grotesque violence is pretty much unparalleled in other games, and I have to say, it’s immensely satisfying. A shotgun that can take limbs off really does have weight to it.

So I just want to say thank you Neil for admitting you were wrong. Video game violence is fun after all, and your game’s themes are completely impotent.

By the way, Remastered?

Given that I paid $70 for a graphics DLC on the first The Last of Us last year, I’m both shocked and moderately impressed that the “Remastered” upgrade for Part II only costs $10 (if you own it already for PS4; $50 otherwise). The graphics haven’t actually been remastered at all, but it does run in 4k and 60fps now, and I don’t know what else you could have wanted. It still looks fantastic.

The extra content is probably worth $10. That’s the right price for the “No Return” DLC, and there’s a decent amount more in there, too. You’ll get access to three brief alpha versions of cut levels, a documentary about the making of the most offensive game of the last console generation, dev commentaries from unbearably smug Californians, and a “speedrunning” mode of the main story.

Speedrunning mode? That’s funny; I speedran Abby’s sections already!

For the lunatic who actually thinks TLoU2 is a good game, I can imagine that these additions would be worth the price of admission. For the rest of us—well, stick to “No Return” and you’ll be fine.

Is No Return Actually Good, Though?

In “No Return,” choose any major character from the game and survive through six missions and a boss fight; at the end, your run is over, but you’ve collected new skins, characters, and enemies to use and fight on your next attempt. If you die, you have to start all over.

Each run is procedurally generated. Various stages take place in locations taken from the campaign, and most have some kind of twist or modifier: these range from interesting, like increased enemy speed or no long guns, to horrifically nightmarish, like all enemies being permanently invisible (???) or a photo mode filter that makes the game look like diarrhea.

Some of these modifiers are so bad that you might as well start over the second you get one. But they’re mostly inoffensive otherwise.

It feels cheap and thrown together. There are no new voice lines or environments. As a Jackson-aligned faction, you’ll notice that you can fight alongside Dina, Joel, and Jesse, but not Ellie. This is presumably because Ellie has no companion AI in the game, and no new AI was added. The characters are unnecessarily restricted in their equipment selection, and the designers haven’t even bothered to give a name to the currency you have to collect: it’s not ration cards or supplies, but simply “currency.”

Encounters vacillate between far too challenging, with way too many enemies coming from random directions in too-small arenas, and far too easy, with three or so Runners charging at you at a time down long hallways, while you have infinite ammo. In general I’ve found the arenas to be way too small for the number of bad guys, but this becomes less pronounced as more locations are unlocked.

The character selection is laugh-out-loud comical. Jackson gets Ellie, Dina, Jesse (the Asian guy), Tommy, and Joel—you unlock Joel last, naturally—while Seattle gets Abby, Lev, Mel (not pregnant version), that other dude, and the Mexican guy who calls everyone “pendejos.”

I thought maybe Seattle would get Fat Geralt, or the selection would include characters from the first game.

I thought wrong.

Maybe there are people out there in the world who want to grind out the guy who had anal sex with Abby as a playable character, but I’m fortunate enough to no longer know them. I stuck to Jackson instead.

I do like that Joel and Ellie (really, who else are you playing?) have different mechanics. Joel is sturdier but can’t dodge; Ellie is nimbler and gets more skills, but doesn’t get a flamethrower. Joel also starts with an extremely OP twelve-shot revolver, which I imagine looks something like this:

But I also don’t think the game works very well without dodge. It doesn’t feel like it’s been designed for it as a whole, and Joel isn’t nearly powerful enough otherwise to compensate for this enormous deficiency.

It still feels amazing to be back in Joel’s body again. His running animations are bizarre, but he’s still recognizable as the man from the first game. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for Fake Ellie. I discussed this in my reviews of the base game, but it is extraordinary how gratifying it is in a game like this to simply be able to play as a character you identify with. It’s half the battle.

Similarly, playing as a character you do not identify with is torture. Who would’ve thought?

There are plenty of minor quibbles. Upgrading your weapons requires you to sit through an animation, every single time; this is silly. Runs are too short in general, and there’s no metaprogression scheme beyond characters and cosmetics. I would have liked the ability to risk longer runs for better gear, but the course you take is linear after a certain point, so you can’t choose to risk two more missions before facing the Bloater like you might be able to in a real Roguelike. I also would have liked to see a better character selection, at least including Bill, Tess, and Henry. I mean really—why not? I think they would be more popular than Lev and Abby, personally.

Beyond this much, it’s still The Last of Us: Part II Despite being underbaked, it’s fun for a few hours, and I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it over the coming years. You can edit out the worst types of missions and extend timers using the “Custom Run” feature as well, so if you really don’t want to have invisible clickers instakill you, you don’t have to.

This is a preferable way for spending time with Ellie and Joel than trying to endure the main campaign again.

But its worst flaw is that it isn’t multiplayer. “No Return” would be a phenomenal co-op version of The Last of Us. Playing as Joel and Ellie together, fighting through a procedurally generated Seattle, and beating the shit out of generic bad people would have been thrilling. The lack of any PvE coop was always one of my biggest complaints with the first game’s multiplayer. The Last of Us as a franchise is about cooperation; why not let us play both characters at once?

The missed potential is painful, but then the same can be said for this entire franchise. I guess we should just be happy we got something that isn’t abjectly terrible for a change.

I give it a tentative recommendation. Although TLoU2 is still a crime against humanity, I don’t have any real criticisms of Part II - Remastered. You can buy it here on PSN.

There was a time when I would have called Noah Hawley my favorite writer. The first three seasons of Fargo remain the best television ever produced. They are unrelentingly funny, compelling, and awesome. His novel After the Fall is a very different but similarly excellent exploration of grief and humanity, and his work on other TV series such as Bones is standout among its peers. I eagerly awaited everything he did in college.

Then Fargo Season 4 came out. Fargo Season 4 was not excellent. It was protracted, dull, and pointless. I chalked it up to COVID misfortunes and ridiculous union health rules, and thus was not deterred from my love for the series as a whole. I fully expected Fargo’s next, fifth season to be back up to at least Season 3’s quality.

I have now finished watching the eighth episode of Season 5. I think it’s time I enter my stage of acceptance and say my peace on the series.

Fargo is a Farce

Season 4 was terminally fated because of obvious production limitations and a plot that could charitably be described as moralistic. It was full of monologues and fury, but signified nothing.

Season 5 is much worse. It is still moralistic, but additionally seems to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the world on the part of its writers. It feels like a hallucination by AI. The characters embody political archetypes that Hawley seems to have never met or have any intimate knowledge of. The children act the wrong age and say the wrong things. The year is supposedly 2019, but the technological level seems more indicative of the 1980s. There is no Internet. There is no social media. There are no dashcams or bodycams or security cameras. The battered women characters do not act like real battered women. The cops do not behave anything like cops. The guns and injuries are completely wrong. The institutions depicted behave nothing like they would in real life. The story would be somewhat plausible in 1912, but in 2019, it’s a joke. No one acts like he really would if in the characters’ shoes.

Yet all is presented confidently, as though Hawley had no clue about the real world, no knowledge of how to write any of these places or characters or things outside of his Hollywood bubble, yet thought he could anyway.

Fargo is a farce. Its implausibility is part of its charm. It is filled with magic realism and coincidences that bring about the conclusion. That’s fine; it’s a comedy. It isn’t meant to be realistic.

But it still takes place in the real world. It isn’t a fantasy series. Its violence and drama loses all meaning if the rules of physics are disregarded by the writers at every opportunity. Lorne Malvo in Season 1 doesn’t get away with so many murders because no one cared to check CCTV footage or check for fingerprints; he gets away with it because he’s a ruthless and unflinching liar, and the Midwestern small-town cops are not prepared to face someone like him.

Lorne would not be scary if his success as a hitman were down only to other’s incompetence. The same can be said for the antagonists in Seasons 2 and 3.

Season 5 is not as poorly paced or awkwardly edited as Season 4. But it’s traded feeling rushed for the complete abandonment of any sense that this story takes place in the real world. There may be some merit buried deep within its story for those viewers capable of suppressing all need for verisimilitude, who won’t notice the complete absence of any security cameras or iPhones, or how the characters behave in the most insane ways at every turn in order to delay the climax, but even if you are capable of overlooking any basic consideration of modern technology or human behavior, what are you left with?

Season 5’s story is unsalvageable. Vapid #currentyear monologues on race have been replaced with vapid #currentyear monologues on domestic violence. The political themes are comically underwritten; the characters do not reflect their stated ideologies in any meaningful sense, because Noah Hawley has no idea what a rogue sheriff libertarian militiaman actually believes. Instead he writes what Hollywood thinks that person would believe. You would be surprised to learn the two are quite different.

Season 4 wasn’t woke for a number of reasons, despite its racial focus, but there’s no question that Season 5 is: it’s pointlessly politicized while being from an obvious left-wing viewpoint and being loaded with #MeToo themes. It’s moralistic and shallow, existing more to instruct than entertain.

Why is Fargo political now? I think we all know, but it’s a shame that it’s shaken out this way. Neither the film nor the first three seasons have any remotely political theming. (Except for random Ronald Reagan, but that had more to do with the 1980s setting than political commentary.)

It still might have been done well, if the characters had been written with a tinge more empathy and intelligence. Maybe there could be a crazed right-wing militiaman antagonist in Fargo. Maybe he could be compelling, quoting the Constitution and somehow using Milton Friedman to justify homicide. But turning him into a generic “Christian man bad” cliche is not what this series needed. I’ve said it before and will happily say it again: the South-talking villain who quotes the Bible while doing evil is one of the stalest cliches in the modern writer’s repertoire. I never want to see it again, and I certainly did not want to see it in Fargo.

But even had the characters been written correctly, the plot of Season 5 beyond its themes is non-existent. There are countless diversions to minor side characters who don’t matter. There is no sense of build-up. There are no personalities to care about. No one behaves in truthful ways, and nothing ever makes any sense. Things happen because they’ve been contrived to happen in a certain way, but not because these characters in this situation would actually lead to that outcome.

Whatever this show is—bad, boring, not funny—it certainly isn’t Fargo. Fargo is a series about decent Midwesterners who get caught up in criminal conspiracies, encounter horrific violence, and find themselves facing down Evil itself. That is what Lorne Malvo represents. When Lester Nygaard’s life is touched by Evil, his life changes forever.

All three good seasons follow this basic pattern. The archvillain is Evil incarnate. The characters are normal, decent people who make one mistake and find their lives in the balance. Mistakes pile on top of each other, until finally they all fall down.

Neither Season 4 nor 5 replicates this. They don’t even try. Season 4 is about racism and gang dynamics, and Season 5 is about religion and domestic violence. The characters are not normal people. No one grounds us to reality. There is no Evil force that sets the plot in motion.

Season 5 of Fargo is lazy. Intellectually it has skipped arm day. No care has gone into working out the story so as to mesh with the setting. Locations haven’t been carefully picked. Scenes have not been constructed to drag us further down the plotline. The whole thing comes across like no one writing it cared.

Season 5 of Fargo feels like it was written by AI. If 4 was a tale told by an idiot, full of monologues and fury, signifying nothing, then I suppose Season 5 is a tale told by a coma patient. It’s about as exciting as you would expect.

It pains me to say it, but Hawley, I think we need to break up—and I hope Fargo doesn’t another season.

I try to avoid pointless list-making on this blog and have thus never done an official Player is the Thing Game of the Year award. Normally, if a game is worthy of discussion, it will receive a review; that is sufficient.

But a lot of stuff came out in 2023, and I was busier than normal writing books. Quite a lot went played but unreviewed. So to round out the year, I’ve decided to publish the first Player is the Thing Game IN the Year review ceremony.

I’m going to recap every new game that I played in 2023 (regardless of whether or not it was reviewed at the point of release, as there are several games my opinion has changed on in the months since release). Then, at the end, I’ll summarize with my five best and worst games in the year.

DLCs and expansions do not qualify and will not be mentioned here. Neither do the new WoW seasons; those will be written about elsewhere

I only played new games on PS5 and Steam this year. Those will be the only platforms considered, and I’ve presented the list in two sections accordingly. The order is otherwise based on nothing in particular.

PLAYSTATION 5

Dead Space Remake

To start off: an apology. My review for Dead Space’s 2023 remake was extremely harsh. I had a litany of criticisms regarding story, an overreliance on repetitive jump scares, and pointlessly protracted level design. There was much I liked, but overall, my opinion was hardly positive.

The day after I posted the review, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to start again on New Game+. I didn’t know why. But I needed to play a little bit more before I was done with it for good.

This time, I loved it.

Knowing where the jump scares were, being aware that the story wasn’t very good, and having a sense of what the missions wanted beforehand turned Dead Space from an okay-but-frustrating game to an absolutely fantastic one. I no longer was bored by the length of some levels, but found myself desperate for them to go on even longer. I thought the shooting was much better than I’d given it credit for. I enjoyed every second.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much that, for the first time ever, I regretted how critical I had been.

I debated taking down or editing or rewriting my review. In the end, I let it stay up. I still feel like all of my criticisms are valid. But these things seem much more minor to me now when compared to the joy of dismembering necromorphs and finding new power nodes. Dead Space is simply fun. It is engaging, engrossing, and entertaining. That is the highest praise any game can receive.

So I apologize to Dead Space and its developers. This is an excellent game, if flawed; any sci-fi gamer should pick it up.

Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2, alas, deserves no apology. Since writing my review I have had no desire at all to return to it, and I’ve deleted it from my PlayStation 5. I don’t know whether I dislike this game or the next on this list more, but both are high on the list for my least-favorite AAA games of 2023.

Diablo 4

Shortly after writing my non-review for Diablo 4, I sat down to keep playing. My sorceress became stranded in a jungle. After walking around for two hours, struggling to find the next objective, I made it to the next zone.

There, the quest promptly bugged. I had one enemy left to kill in a zone before proceeding; there were no enemies left. I was locked. The only way to break free would have been to restart the entire quest.

This was more than I was willing to do. I haven’t played since.

I have no praise to offer. Worse than anything else, Diablo 4 is boring. It is tedious and uninspired. It isn’t abjectly unplayable, but it does suck, and you shouldn’t play it.

Hogwarts Legacy

I bought Hogwarts Legacy with the full intention of writing a review for it on my blog. Deranged political screeching aside, I wanted to seriously ask whether or not it was a good game.

I made it five minutes in before an NPC “theyed” me. Despite having obviously made a male character, and despite having chosen a male “gender identity,” no NPC in the universe could tell whether I was a man or a woman.

No one talks like this. I had to turn the sound off and ignore the story thenceforth.

I did end up beating the game, but I didn’t feel like I had much to say. Hogwarts Legacy is a basically fine open world wizard simulator. The spellcasting mechanics do a good job of making the player feel like a powerful magician, and I admire a combat system completely centered around magic—it’s very unique, even if it doesn’t always work. Traversal is fun, on the whole, and there are a few memorable quests.

So it’s fine. It’s a fine game. But it’s also laden with obnoxious and unwelcome crafting and base management mechanics, and it does an unimpressive job capturing the atmosphere of Harry Potter (or its own setting). That’s all I have to say.

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

Yet another game I had intended to review, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor ran poorly on my then brand-new PS5, and I thought it was worse, overall, than the previous game. I did beat it, but the gameplay had me frustrated, the level design was almost always unnecessarily confusing, and the open world elements were tedious. The story continued with all of Fallen Order’s vices and represented a misunderstanding Star Wars, but lacked any of the small glimmers of Chris Avellone brilliance that shone through the first game’s characters.

I didn’t hate Jedi Survivor. I also didn’t like it, and a review at the time would have been scathing. The only thing that excited me was the Blaster + Lightsaber stance unlocked about halfway through, which lived up to my expectations. It’s a microscopic thing, but there are no other action games where the player can use a sword and pistol at the same time. This is obviously a fantastic idea for a game about being a Jedi. I was generally impressed with how Survivor pulled it off.

But I don’t have much else to praise. It’s almost completely left my memory.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Rogue City was a blindside broadside of a game and stands out as one of 2023’s major highlights for games. My review was so gushing in praise that I don’t know what I could possibly add. I don’t have much of an urge to revisit it (yet), but I stand by what I said: games like Rogue City are why I love videogames.

AC: Mirage

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage was supposed to return to the series’ roots. Set in Baghdad during the Golden Age of Islam, it would be a callback it the original game. A more focused experience. It would take fewer than 30 hours to 100%. Assassin’s Creed would finally be good again.

Given the above factors, I was anticipating Mirage with unfounded optimism all year. The resultant game proved nothing like I’d hoped. I knew I was going to hate it after the tutorial, and I only made it an hour or two beyond that.

The story is incoherent even by AC standards. The combat is barebones. The stealth is flourishless. Even the graphics and animations are ugly. It’s just another boring Ubisoft game, although Baghdad is certainly beautiful from up high.

Assassin’s Creed and I may be done with each other permanently after this. It’s not a series that’s for me anymore.

Red Dead Redemption Remastered (Honorable Mention)

I gave in and bought Red Dead Redemption’s PS5 re-release in October after I realized it was the best version of the game that would ever be released, since it could run at 60fps, and no remake would ever come. Growing up, RDR was my favorite game. I adored everything about it. I played it endlessly.

I’ve only beaten it once since 2010. I usually play through the first act, then lose interest.

This time I made it to the third act. Then I lost interest.

RDR looks decent in 4k and feels fantastic at 60fps. But it hasn’t aged very well. As much as I like the story, the Rockstar storytelling structure feels antiquated and artificial in this advanced year of 2023. The horse mechanics are terrible, and the shooting is no better. I never made a conscious decision to give up on it, and I still might finish it before the year is out, but if I do, it will only be through a sense of duty to my 12-year-old self.

Red Dead Redemption will forever remain a keystone development on the road to modern (good) open world game design. But I’m not sure I can recommend it to anyone who’s never played it before.

STEAM

Baldur’s Gate 3

Bugs nearly soured BG3 for me after an amazing time playing Act 1 in Early Access. I went on a legendary binge of this game upon its release in August, and although I liked it a lot, the cracks were hard to ignore—especially when I lost several hours of playtime and nearly my entire 100-hour save.

It seems like most of these issues have been ironed out, and some of my criticisms of the story have also been patched in one way or another. Larian’s support for the game post-release has been extraordinary, and I hope it continues.

But my second playthrough of the full game did not go well. I resolved myself to play a Dark Elf sorcerer, to romance Astarion, to see the game as a non-Origin PC, and to be as evil as possible in every scenario.

I wanted to test the game. I wanted to see its limits. I wanted to see what broke.

The answer was everything. The evil path, a path much less traveled than its counterparts, was broken in almost every way. I encountered an endless cascade of bugs and technical issues. My dialogue options rarely reflected how I was feeling, and the evil companion, who you can only recruit by being horrifically evil, turned out to be a good girl after all—she was just mind controlled! She didn’t want to be bad!

Great. I did. And I only didn’t kill you because I, myself, am evil. So… the writers didn’t think this one through, huh?

In the end, I made it to Act III and quit. My choices did not feel honored. As a custom non-Dark Urge character, the Origin questline was replaced with… nothing. Literally. There was simply less to the game. Sorcerer sucked profoundly compared to Magician at level 11-12, and I was sick of constant combat. But it was the romance with Astarion that pissed me off for good. I made it all the way to the end, and he demanded that become this thrall. If I told him no—which of course I would, because I was playing as an evil dominatrix sorceress dark elf—he broke it off between us.

Uh. That’s the resolution? That’s it? Are you kidding me?

Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe it was bugged and something skipped—this seems probable. But whatever the case, this pissed me off so much that I lost all desire to play. It felt totally wrong for the character and like a violation of how our relationship had proceeded up to this point. I was an hour or two away from getting my “Beat the game on hard” achievement, and I never got it.

In Early Access, I would have rated BG3 at 100/100. After my first playthrough, all bugs considered, it was more like an 85/100. After this third full playthrough, my opinion was about 40/100. BG3’s “evil” path blows. It’s really bad, probably in part due to now-fixed technical issues. I hated almost every minute of it.

I still like BG3. It might be the best game I’ve played this year overall, still. But to say my opinion has plummeted as the months have passed would be an understatement.

Wartales

I played Wartales extensively in Early Access but held off revisiting it until its full release. As a hardcore strategy/tactics game it isn’t the kind of thing I would normally review on this blog, but I did like it a lot, and I was eager for more content.

The ultimate version I ended up playing a few months ago was solid. Not amazing, but good, with a lot of great incentives design and engaging gameplay. I still like Wartales.

In the end, I never finished it. I made it to the final zone before losing interest. I found managing my mercenaries to be increasingly tedious as time went on, and every combat encounter felt very similar. I’d still like to go back and beat it—but honestly, at this point, I doubt I will.

Rogue Trader

Not only did I have every intention of reviewing Rogue Trader as my final official review of 2023, but I had already started drafting that review at the time I decided I wouldn’t be able to do any such thing. A small section of this article will have to suffice instead.

Rogue Trader is brilliant. Its ridiculously crunchy combat is as odious as it is addictive. The depth of the systems is artificially created through complexity, and for the first ten or so hours I found this infuriating. But once I got used to some of its intricacies, I found that I was unable to put it down. Rogue Trader siphoned my life away all week like a genestealer. I stayed up until 5am playing it, three nights in a row.

The story is surprisingly good, too. I mean very surprisingly. The characters are all distinctive and interesting, with one or two exceptions, and the dialogue manages to capture their voices with immaculate ease. But I feel that the writers were too reliant on pet names—“Shereen, Elantach, Lord Captain”—to find the voice of a companion in dialogue. It’s also very overwritten.

I’ve accused other games, like Disco Elysium, of being insufficiently trimmed during the editing process before making it to the final game. But Rogue Trader is about twice as pointlessly verbose as DE, and it’s a much less story-obsessed game.

Being a good writer isn’t just writing lots of good dialogue and prose. At least as important is the ability to know what to cut out—and especially in dialogue, Rogue Trader could have been significantly trimmed down.

Yet even so, I was completely rapt by the story (although I skimmed an awful lot). I was absolutely loving Rogue Trader.

Then I made it to Act IV, and the entire game broke.

I wrote in my Steam review that Rogue Trader is to Warhammer: 40,000 as Knights of the Old Republic 2 is to Star Wars. I can still think of no better way to analogize its predicament. I waited patiently for this game to leave EA for years, but the last third of its campaign appears to be literally unplayable. I had only minor issues leading up to this point, but within an hour in Act IV, I:

• …had a dead character I never recruited give me council on how to manage my colonies;

• …was requested to tend to an emergency on the bridge that never came;

• …went to a planet for a mission that never triggered;

• …discovered that any item that gives +AP didn’t work;

• …realized that half of my abilities were doing nothing;

• …had a conversation between my Eldar GF and my Seneschal that took place within a wall, while both parties were on opposite sides of the ship;

• …had a meaningful meditation session with my Eldar GF where she was absent and had no portrait;

• …had my space marine companion clone himself;

• …saw that half of the building chain pre-requisites did not exist;

• …and started to find countless text errors in dialogue, which was otherwise, up to this point, flawlessly edited in every respect (aside from rare singular “theys”).

I had so much fun in Rogue Trader up to this point that I would normally have pressed on anyway. But I basically can’t. The game is entirely broken. Nothing works. I’m going to get softlocked if I continue. So I’ll wait.

Rogue Trader, if fixed, will be the best 40k game on the market (for those of patient temperament) and one of the best cRPGs ever made. As it is, it’s literally unfinished.

Battlebit: Remastered

Battlebit took the world by storm earlier this year, and as a fan of old school Battlefield games growing up, I knew I had to give it a try. By the time I finally stopped playing I’d logged about 30 hours, and I decided I couldn’t continue.

I don’t play multiplayer games anymore (except WoW). I play multiplayer shooters only on rare occasions. And I am laughably bad at Battlebit. I can barely manage a 1:1 KD, and often do worse. It just isn’t my kind of game. I’m sure I would have liked it as a kid, but I’m not a kid, and I don’t.

It is a good game at its core. But I have a lot of criticisms. I think armor on headshots is insane: you can nail a head with a .50cal at 1000 yards in this game, and your reward will be a blue hitmarker—and no kill. Armor in general pisses me off badly, because it does nothing but punish accuracy and reward respawning. But worse is the progression scheme, which is just oppressively slow. I’m level 30 after playing 30 hours. I need to get to level 200 to unlock the gun I want.

No thanks.

Starship Troopers: Extermination

Although still in Early Access, I want to briefly mention Starship Troopers: Extermination to recognize it as an extremely promising mass co-op PvE shooter. In Extermination, 16 players build a base and/or gather supplies and wipe out bugs across an alien planet, generally coming down to wave-based survival.

It’s still early. Good progress has been made, but I’d like to wait for the next big update before playing much more. But I really like what’s currently there. Bug dismemberment physics will elevate the game from good to great, and I’m hoping we get a few more guns soon.

Aliens: Dark Descent

At the end of my review for Dark Descent I wrote that I intended to immediately restart the game on Hard and see where it took me. I never did end up getting around to playing it again. But that shouldn’t be taken as a criticism. Dark Descent remains every bit as good in my mind as I said it was on release, and is likely much better. The post-launch support has been robust and impressive, and many of my issues will have been fixed by now.

The story is unfixable, alas. But the rest of the game is still worth it.

System Shock (2023)

I strongly disliked System Shock’s remake this year, despite years of anticipation. I had almost forgotten about it, somehow, until I noticed it in my Steam Year in Review statistics.

As of December 2023, I stand by everything I wrote. My opinion hasn’t softened at all. I don’t have much praise to offer. Gloomwood, Blood West, and Amnesia: The Bunker are all much better ImSim-likes for you to spend your time on. System Shock is only good for being an example of what games were like a long, long time ago.

Starfield

Starfield is another game that my non-review didn’t go far enough in chastising. Every time I see an ounce of praise for it, I want to tear out my hair. I can’t stand this game. It’s as bad as anything on this list, but also lacks any soul or inspiration. It’s exactly what I don’t want out of AAA gaming. But I’ll leave my ranting there.

Atomic Heart

At the time of my review, I thought Atomic Heart had about as much going for it as it did against it. But the scales have gradually slipped over the year, as I forget what I disliked more and more with the passing of the months.

Looking back now, considering all of the far worse games that have come out this year, I would say that Atomic Heart is a good—but flawed—game. It’s a decidedly AA Russian BioShock knock-off, and you know what? It’s fine.

Boltgun

The long-awaited Boltgun brought Warhammer 40,000 to boomer shooter territory with this low-grade Doom clone. Despite a critical consumer reception, I deliberately held off from reviewing Boltgun, because I thought it was so unbelievably bad.

I love boomer shooters. I also really like Warhammer. But Boltgun is the worst retro FPS on the market. It has no progression schemes, bad weapon design, ugly art (it’s not “retro”—it’s cheap), terrible boss fights, and without any question the worst level design of any game I’ve ever played. Its fantastic reviews on Steam are almost all from people who played it for an hour or two, gave it a thumbs up because it’s Warhammer, and then never played it again. They certainly never beat it.

But I beat it. I beat the whole thing. Now listen to me when I say: stay far away. Boltgun is a cash-in on WH40k and boomer shooters. It’s nothing more than that.

Kill the Crows

Kill the Crows is not a cash-in. It’s an obscure Korean-developed Western top-down arena shooter, released for $5 on Steam a few months ago. I can’t say that it’s my kind of game overall, but I gave it a try anyway, and I’m glad I did. It nails the Western aesthetic and has a great selection of six-shooters. I 100%ed it in a few hours on release, but a recent update added in a lot more for me to do.

I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m pretty bad at it, so I might not ever. But if you want revolvers to shoot or birds to kill, and you have a podcast to listen to, Kill the Crows is an excellent choice for a game to play.

Amnesia: The Bunker

I’ve never played the original Amnesia, but the moment I read The Bunker’s premise, I was sold. I bought it instantly. I’m not a huge fan of survival games in general, but this seemed to be a World War 1 horror ImSim-like in the style of Aliens: Isolation, and that was enough for me.

I beat it. But I’m still not sure what I think. While I like almost everything that The Bunker is trying to do, it’s an uneven experience, sullied by some poor balance—the revolver sucks and rat combat is annoying—and an unfortunate yet undeniable fact that, for a horror game, it isn’t very scary.

My biggest criticism is the main villain. The Bunker is an obvious Alien: Isolation rip-off (without a motion detector), and everything invented to substitute for the motion detector feels just like that—a substitute. Meanwhile Isolation works precisely because of how frightening the xenomorph is, but the goopy Clifford that we meet here in 1916 France is simply not intimidating. He’s just a dog with a funny face.

But it’s atmospheric, and it has some great, memorable levels. When the player is on the edge, working against the clock, just barely evading death but still making it from one zone to the next, it’s a very compelling game, and tense as hell. The problem is that this only works so long as you aren’t dying. Once you die, it’s tedious, not scary, and you get to see how silly the dog really is.

I recommend The Bunker overall, mostly for how cheap it is, and I’m glad I played it. But it didn’t leave a huge impression on me.

Trepang^2

Trepang^2 is Fear-inspired FPS that I played for the purpose of a review. It seemed like my kind of game: a fast-paced action-heavy shooter with old school sensibilities and dual-wielded shotguns.

But ultimately I found it to be totally uninspired. Its major innovation is that it has bullet time and that you can jump pretty high. These things are okay, I guess, but the rest of the mechanics are copy-and-pasted from a thousand other indistinguishable shooters. Its Crysis-style weapon mod system is bizarre and misplaced, given the two-weapon system and emphasis on running and gunning. Guns are too inaccurate and enemies are too bullet spongey. It’s ridiculously short, even for its low price, and the levels are awful.

Trepang^2 isn’t bad or offensive enough to hate, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, except for a dollar or two. It’s just not that interesting.

En Garde

En Garde is swashbuckling simulator about tickling Spaniards to sleep with a rapier. It’s sort of a third person Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, but with a Renaissance theme and G-rated aesthetics. I have to admire any game with such a strong identity, and although I found it to be pretty short and a tad frustrating in places, it’s the sort of bedrock indie game that keeps the industry afloat these days. I think it would be a good, inoffensive game for young kids. That’s about all there is to say.

THE BEST AND WORST GAMES OF THE YEAR

So that is the complete list of every new game I played this year. But which were the best—and which were the worst? This is really what you’re here for, so I won’t hold back any longer: here are the top five best and worst new games of 2023. Unlike the above, games released from Early Access are eligible for these awards.

I’ve already spoken my peace on each and linked to any relevant reviews, so refer to the above for explanation.

The Worst

5. System Shock

4. Spider-Man 2

3. Diablo 4

2. Boltgun

1. Starfield

The Best

5. Dead Space

4. Rogue Trader

3. Baldur’s Gate 3

2. Aliens: Dark Descent

1. RoboCop: Rogue City

An honorable mention is owed to Blood West, which is disqualified from this list for being an Early Access game released in a confusing way. I likely would have considered it my GotY last year, had I bothered to award one.

I knew straight away that Dark Descent and Rogue City were my two favorite games this year, but it was still a hard list to compile. I haven’t and likely won’t ever play these two as much as I have BG3 and Rogue Trader, yet there’s something about them that towers over my memory. They were fantastic experiences begun with low expectations. They’re what truly stand out to me in 2023.

It's possible that BG3 deserves the #1 place. There’s no question that its first act is the best RPG I’ve ever played. It is excellent on every front. But there are holes in the rest of the experience, and my replaythrough showed how thin the illusion of agency is in most places. For these reasons I’ve demoted it to #3.

As for Rogue Trader, its spot really belongs to Blood West. The technical state of its release is inexcusable. But I’m including it anyway, because it’s a relentlessly addictive game and an excellent cRPG. I like it so much that, much as with Blood West, being fucked over by bugs seems like a small issue.

This isn’t meant to be a list of the games that I thought were literally, objectively best, but the ones I liked the most—and with all said and done, this is that list.

A Final Word On 2023

There’s no doubt that 2023 was an excellent year for games, especially indie and AA. But this was also the first year in gaming where every single game I played had major, game-breaking technical issues. I encountered severe bugs in every game listed above except Dead Space. From performance issues to save file corruption, there has never been a glitchier year for video games—even from major AAA releases like Spider-Man 2, which are usually polished.

This cannot become normal. If games need to be smaller to have fewer issues, so be it. But we cannot have an industry where it is normal to experience crashes, save loss, and to become trapped in walls multiple times per playthrough. That will hold us back far more than having shitty award ceremonies or too many live service MMOs on the market.

Nearly two years ago I reviewed the first chapter and Early Access version of Blood West, a weird Western Immersive Sim-like. I avoid EA games as a general rule and strenuously avoid reviewing anything still in beta, but I made a sole exception for Blood West. That original release in February of 2022 was polished, tight, and glorious; it gave me everything I wanted out of the intersection between my favorite genre of fiction and my favorite style of video game. Chapter 1 alone was my GotY last year.

The full game was supposed to release by October 2022. Instead, only Chapter 2 came out, and on Halloween—they cut it rather close.

Chapter 2 was not my GotY. I made it to the end on three occasions, and every time my save file was corrupted in one way or another. On my first attempt I made it to the chapter’s boss, only to find him stuck in place and invulnerable. When I reloaded, every NPC in the game had disappeared. My second try was thwarted when I marathoned the whole game, both acts, then subsequently crashed a few minutes before summoning the boss. It was at this point that I learned Blood West keeps no autosaves. If you crash or the power cuts off and you haven’t exited the game once during your run, your entire save will be gone.

On my third try, I saved and quit after a few hours of play. Next morning, when I sat down to continue, I realized that the file had been eaten by Humanpedes. It was no longer in my Documents folder.

To say this experience soured me on Blood West would be to say far too little. But Early Access is Early Access, as they say, and while I contemplated venting my frustrations on this blog, I held off. I would wait until the game’s full release and amend my review then.

That was over a year ago. It has taken thirteen months (and a few days) for Chapter 3 to arrive, and with it comes the game’s full release. Now the gloves come off. I no longer will give any benefit of the doubt. It is time to determine whether or not Blood West has lived up to its promise and potential.

What’s Different?

Most of everything written in my pre-review stands. Almost nothing has changed in the map and mechanics, which reflects back on the immense polish with which Blood West first entered Early Access. The skill system has been revamped and safes have been added to the map, but that’s all that I noticed. The biggest difference is narrative; the voice of the protagonist has been replaced with Stephen Russel (he of Thief fame, among many other games).

I praised the original VA extensively last time. His gruff, laconic commentary on the gameplay elevated Blood West from great to excellent. It is very sad to see him go. I love Russel, but he doesn’t compare. His performance is exaggerated and almost gonzo. The lines also seem different, and they play far too often compared to before (although line frequency can be changed in the options menu).

The old actor was much better for the part.

Chapter 1 remains otherwise phenomenal. Every pixel of the map is packed with something to find. The encounters are brilliantly designed, and the atmosphere captures the smell, the scent, and the taste of choking on traildust—plus monsters—as well as any game ever will. Taken on its own, this may be the best Western game ever made, and would make a brilliant stand-alone pocket ImSim. Chapter 1 is worth the $20 price tag.

As for the rest…

One of my concerns in Early Access was how, possibly, an Immersive Sim such as this one would be able to protract its progression schemes to such an extent that it could be tripled in length. That puts it on par with any AAA ImSim, easily. Would there be enough new guns? Enough new artifacts and skills? I wondered if the next two parts of this game could ever match up to what I’d already played.

I was right to be concerned. Chapters 2 and 3 are good, but they are thinly stretched. Neither recaptures what makes Chapter 1 so resplendent.

I criticized Early Access for being too easy near its end. To counterbalance this, the developers have nerfed many of the skills, vastly reduced the player’s upper health limit, and generally increased the game’s difficulty. Chapter 1 still feels fair, but 2 and 3 do not. Death often comes instantly after a small mistake, such as missing a headshot when attacking from stealth. Such deaths rarely feel earned.

I think Blood West was a stronger game overall, even if easier, when the player had access to a larger health pool and could take more hits before dying—and from dying, earn a Soul Flaw.

I was ambivalent on the death mechanics originally, but having now played the full game, I believe Soul Flaws to be completely pointless. Death is its own punishment now that enemies respawn on rest, and the strange way by which the Flaws compound creates bizarre incentives: you can’t get rid of a Flaw until it manifests as a Curse, which requires you to die three times. But each death along the way to the third has some minor detriment, while death otherwise has no consequences (except partial respawns). Thus the logical thing to do upon dying once is to go commit suicide three times, then talk to a totem.

I tried not to do this. Instead I stuck to removing my Flaws with Purple Revival from the traders, which basically makes the whole system trivial anyway.

I like that this system fits into the narrative. But I don’t like anything else about it.

More broadly, the Soul-like respawn system adds nothing to Blood West. Chapters 2 and 3 are both enormous compared to 1, but both only have a single totem. This is bizarre. The game would have been better off with quicksave functionality, like every other ImSim.

Ultimately the real consequence of death is that you have to run back across the map to where you were, killing and evading hordes of the same enemies, just to get to where you had been before making a small mistake—a missed shot, a wrong step, a bad ammo choice. This adds some weight to survival, I suppose, but while I appreciate the need for meaningful challenge in systems-driven games like these, the challenge of Blood West has no rhythm to it. The entire game is the same note: watch the detection meter, stealth kill monsters, aim for the head, repeat. The intensity never goes up or down. It’s always the same. There are no zones where exploration is safe, there are no puzzles, there’s no platforming, there are few environmental hazards: everything is about sneaking and killing.

Later in the game, when the enemies get too big and tanky to stealth kill with your knife, it’s mostly just a shooter—a lot like the recent System Shock.

That was fine when the game was only five hours long. But now, in total, it’s somewhere between twenty and thirty.

Blood West does not have the mechanical complexity of a thirty hour game. It starts to get frustrating somewhere in Chapter 2, and it doesn’t get fun again until late in Chapter 3, once you’ve unlocked the highest tier of weapons and artifacts. Then Blood West becomes a badass Western/horror FPS, and it’s great. But there’s a long slog in the middle that I did not enjoy. This is a classic example of an excellent game that has been stretched too thin.

Take the towns in the second and third chapters. In Chapter 1, there are a handful of locations with a handful of buildings. There’s something interesting everywhere. No building is empty, and when you stumble onto a new structure, you’ll feel a pang of excitement to see what’s inside. You know it will be good—or at least valuable.

The town in Chapter 1 has four or five buildings. That’s it. There’s a rare gun in the inn that almost anyone looking around will find. That’s also perfect.

The town in Chapter 2 has twenty buildings at least. If I found anything memorable in one of them, I can’t remember it. The good loot is all inside the nearby steamboat. You’ll feel compelled to explore every shop and apartment building lest you miss something valuable, but time after time, you won’t find anything at all. If there is real loot within one of those buildings, the chance that you miss it is extremely high.

This gets even worse in Chapter 3. In the various settlements there are rooms with literally nothing inside, except monsters.

If a room has no loot in a game like Blood West, it shouldn’t exist. I wasted hours (and hundreds of bullets) exploring copy-pasted, strangely box-shaped environments for almost no benefit.

Inventory management more broadly is one of the game’s major flaws. It’s inoffensive at first but becomes more murderous with each passing hour. By mid-Chapter 2 it is frustrating, and by the final boss, it is agony. Unlike Weird West, which had no interesting loot at all, Blood West is full of fun stuff to find and steal; this is why the game has such a strong drive to explore. But fumbling around with backpacks inside of satchels inside of backpacks is never fun, in any game. Swapping between weapons, playing inventory Tetris, rotating artifacts, replacing spent molotovs and dynamite in the “accessory” bar, moving ammo around, and fidgeting with the stash back at camp will take up a considerable amount of playtime, and ultimately could have been alleviated with more creative gameplay design.

I’ve played games with much worse inventory systems than Blood West, but what if, instead of 3 accessories, we could press: H for bandage, V for Molotov, G for dynamite, C for healing potions, and let us drink booze and revival mixes directly from the inventory?

The worst part of inventory management is consumables. They take up a lot of space while almost never being useful. Cigars and various alcohols always come, like in a Fallout game, with severe withdrawal symptoms—often so severe that there’s no choice but to stop playing for three minutes while they wear off. But the primary effects are never strong or long-lasting enough to warrant such detriments, and they become less worthwhile as you gain levels.

I really did not need these constantly cluttering the space I’d reserved for monster intestines.

And as for monster intestines, I realize that it’s less immersive, but couldn’t the monsters have simply carried cash instead of intestines that I have to lug back to traders every few minutes?

Small adjustments could have made massive quality of life improvements to the later stages of Blood West’s campaign.

The developers clearly felt like they needed more in each new part of their game. But they didn’t. Chapter 1’s strength is that the map is small and packed with fun stuff to see and kill, as I wrote last year. You walk five feet and you’re in the next area and there’s things to do—and then there’s an entire second map beneath the one you’re standing on!

Chapter 1 epitomizes depth in an open world game.

It wouldn’t be fair to call the rest of the game shallow, but the content is so much less dense. Moving between zones takes longer. The zones have comparable amounts of loot spread out within larger areas. Death is more frustrating. The quest objectives are fewer and farther between, and entire areas are devoid of mission goals (whereas every zone in Chapter 1 has gold to find somewhere—that structure is severely missed in Chapter 2 especially, where the story is extremely weak).

One gets the sense that an influx of cash at their EA release emboldened the developers to make their game bigger than they had first intended. That would explain why it took more than a year longer than first stated for the full release, despite minimal changes to core gameplay in that time. Personally, I wish they’d tried to keep their game small.

It Gets Better

I nearly gave up in early Chapter 3. But I’m glad I didn’t, because the game does get better. The late-game weapons—a revolving rifle, a chain revolver, and a lever action shotgun—are the pinnacle of cowboy violence in gaming. Combined with new artifacts, these weapons become obscenely powerful, and the relative squishiness of the player character becomes less of an issue. Retreading old ground is quicker and less frustrating when major enemies can be instakilled with a headshot and needn’t be sneaked past any longer. The side quests are compelling, and I was excited enough by the promise of new stuff that I endured the inventory systems and thoroughly looted the entire map in search of the best stuff.

I didn’t end up needing it. I had hoped the final boss would be a righteous onslaught of a million undead soldiers; I had hundreds of bullets saved up for this moment.

Instead, I found a purple dragon on a hill. I killed him instantly with two headshot criticals from my rifle.

Oops.

Conclusion

In the end, for what was my most anticipated release of the year, the full version of Blood West has me underwhelmed. It isn’t as good as it could have been. But it’s still a good game overall, and I’ll continue to recommend it far and wide. I haven’t offered much praise in this review, but that’s only because I offered so much in my last article—this is a less starry-eyed look at what is, ultimately, a small and ambitious indie game from Poland.

The game is too long. The chapters didn’t need to be as protracted as they are. I’m still not convinced there needed to be three chapters at all—two, with equal polish, and more time spent on systems, would have been good enough. But it’s doubtless that my experience was significantly sullied by my very bad time with Chapter 2 in Early Access, which caused me a good deal of extra frustration in my return to those same bayous that I don’t think most new players will find.

You should buy Blood West. It’s good, it’s cheap, it’s ridiculously long, and it’s probably the only Western Immersive Sim that will ever be made. It could have been better, but let’s just hope that gives a good excuse for HyperStrange to make a sequel.

Napoleon (2023) begins on the note that will define the rest of the film. In a strange and overly confined arena, uncrowded by an apathetic mob, an unconvincing actress stumbles toward a guillotine in a crude and gratuitous reenactment of Marie Antoinette’s famous execution. When the blade falls, the camera does not cut away; we witness every gory detail—animated digitally, of course—as her head falls from her body and blood sprays in all directions. An executioner holds her head aloft. “Long live the Republic!” we hear him cry, or something to that effect. As we wonder what the purpose, the significance, of this moment is to the plot as a whole, the camera withdraws, and there we see in the audience our leading man: Napoleon himself, played by Joaquin Phoenix at age 50.

Several things stand out:

1. Napoleon was not at Marie Antoinette’s execution. He was at Toulon. This scene is historically erroneous.

2. As a character, Marie Antoinette is barely introduced and immediately done away with. Her relevance to the story of Napoleon and Josephine is not clear. Taken holistically, this scene adds nothing.

3. Her performance is as convincing as a high school play, and the extras around her seem disinterested and sedated. The location does not make sense. The scale is much too small. This scene is not convincing.

4. The year is supposedly 1794. For some reason, Napoleon is a 50-year-old man. This makes the scene comical.

These same four problems will plague the rest of the film. A disinterest in historical accuracy; a lack of exposition or story structure; nonsensical characterization and unconvincing acting; and the horrible miscasting of the leading man.

I love Napoleonic history. Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) is my favorite film, ever. I have watched it dozens of times.

I do not love Ridley Scott. He is pretentious and geriatric, and Alien (1979) is his only truly good movie. But The Last Duel (2021) was a surprisingly decent historical drama, and I had some hope that Scott might have been able to pull it off again with my favorite historical character. Perhaps, in the twilight of his career, in his 80s, he had pulled himself together.

My hope lasted about fifteen seconds into the film. Napoleon is a badly written, badly acted, and very badly directed blunder of an attempt at a historical epic. It is bereft of plot and does not compensate with character or spectacle. As a work of visual art, it is lacking in every respect: dull, ugly, and confusingly shot in every scene. As a piece of entertainment, it is good only for sedation.

I do not recommend it.

Some Elucidation

Ridley Scott’s first feature film was The Duelists (1977), a historical epic about two cavalrymen in Napoleon’s army who fight a series of duels over the course of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Duelists is not a good movie. It demonstrates all of Scott’s characteristic disinterest in people and storytelling, and is mostly just boring. But it is beautifully shot, with fantastic set pieces and glorious fight sequences. In terms of raw aesthetics, there are few films that could be considered its superior. There is a reason why it launched a 50-year directorial career.

Napoleon is not beautifully shot. It is very ugly. The CGI stands out constantly, and everywhere it’s obvious where actors are digital. The scale of the battles is never large enough, likely because animators sitting behind screens have no idea what 60,000 men engaged in combat actually look like. They never capture the enormity of scale required by the setting. While the dialogue sequences are clear and visible, whenever a battle comes around, a dull gray-blue filter falls over the lens, which makes it impossible to distinguish between uniform colors or get a clear sense of what is happening. It’s applied without any sense for the scenes at hand: day or night, light or dark, down comes the filter.

It might be just as well. If we could see the battle sequences clearly, we would be better able to tell how absurd and poorly reenacted they are.

I did not expect much from Scott in this regard. But I had expected some bare minimum of care for basic historic details. For example, the French—very famously—fought battles in columns rather than lines. This defined their tactics in the Napoleonic period.

In Napoleon, the French fight in lines. Exactly as the British do.

At the Battle of Waterloo, trenches were not dug in pitched battles and lines did not utilize fire-by-rank tactics.

In Napoleon, the British dig trenches and use fire-by-rank tactics at Waterloo.

Historically, Talleyrand retired as Napoleon’s foreign minister in 1807.

In Napoleon, Talleyrand is the one who demands Napoleon abdicates in 1815.

Napoleon Bonaparte did not shoot cannons at the pyramids of Gaza.

In Napoleon, Napoleon shoots cannons at the pyramids of Gaza.

Et cetera. The details of the battles themselves are recreated in only the broadest of strokes; here, Napoleon finishes Waterloo by personally leading a cavalry charge and slaying no fewer than two enemies with his own saber. Quite an impressive feat for a man enduring terrible GI pain, who was also, at the time, out of his mind on opium, and was an artillery captain—not a knight.

These inaccuracies could maybe be forgiven if made in the pursuit of some kind of poignant message, or to create a leaner and cleaner dramatic narrative. But there is no leanness or cleanness to Napoleon’s narrative. There may not even be narrative at all. The film suffers immensely from the inevitability that 21 years of complex political and military history cannot be condensed into a single 158-minute long film. The Battle of Waterloo alone takes more than two hours to tell in its entirety, if one is concerned with making it visually and dramatically engaging.

Ridley Scott had no such concerns. We skip from one scene to the next with no logic whatsoever. The core of the story around all which revolves is Napoleon’s romantic relationship with Josephine, but in no actual practical way has this been created through screenwriting. If this is a story about how a great man was created by a great woman, then the battle sequences are totally gratuitous: like Marie Antoinette’s execution, they have been included only for name recognition. The story should have focused solely on Napoleon and Josephine’s relationship and forgotten about irrelevant details, no matter how historically famous. The climax should have been Josephine’s death during the 100 Days.

Napoleon no longer has his driving force. He knows a battle is coming, and he knows that without Josephine, he will not be able to win it. His career as a general is over. The rest is history.

CUT TO CREDITS.

That could have worked, maybe. But it’s not what Scott does. In fact Josephine’s death is barely the start of the third act, and it passes like a drop of blood in an iced-over lake. We still have to endure all of the Waterloo Campaign, despite the fact that the story has no through-line and no plot whatsoever to speak of without Josephine. It doesn’t have one with her either, mind you, but there’s literally nothing after she’s dead. Napoleon after this point is the cinematic equivalent of a putrescent zombie shambling down the street.

It’s written as to make no sense. Apparently Napoleon is happy in exile on Elba, until he realizes that he misses Josephine too much to bear. Thus it is for her, and for her alone, that he travels back to France. It is purely for Josephine that he reclaims his title as Emperor. It is only for her that he ever fought any battles. He would have been nothing without her!

Except if Napoleon is motivated entirely by Josephine, if he is otherwise apathetic and abdicates without argument when Talleyrand (of all people) tells him to, then why does he fight the Battle of Waterloo? Why doesn’t he give up? Why does the movie keep going?

Because it has to, because Napoleon did fight Waterloo. The reason is because he wasn’t driven by Josephine, and his story didn’t end when she died: she was not the animating force in his life. Ambition was. (Or perhaps vanity, or whatever you choose—but certainly not his one-time wife. It’s worth noting that IRL Josephine died before Napoleon’s first exile anyway, which makes this entire contortion of his character erroneous in both literal and metaphorical terms. Scott was not deterred.)

Thus the film Scott wanted to make had to be pigeon-holed into the historical circumstances, despite the fact that his story and history do not align. The result is a film that has no idea at all what it is or what it wants to be, with no story and no message and no plot. No wonder it’s so boring.

Napoleon still might have been decent despite the above issues if his relationship with Josephine was compelling to watch. But it is fumbled in every way. For the first half of the film, Napoleon admits to fucking whores, while Josephine openly has a lover. They fight endlessly. When he touches her, she cringes away in disgust. We never once see any chemistry or adoration between the two, beyond (perhaps) physical attraction.

But after the midpoint, we are apparently to believe that these characters are madly in love—that they are true soulmates. If so, we never see it. I was left wondering until the very end whether or not Josephine cared at all for Napoleon, or if it was all feigned; I thought the latter based on her performance, until she sappily narrates a love letter over slides of the retreat from Moscow. I still have no idea what impression Scott meant for me to receive.

The performances are largely to blame, and it’s ultimately performance that makes Napoleon irredeemable.

Phoenix as Napoleon is utterly miscast. Although he occasionally performs wit, there is no semblance of the historical character of Napoleon Bonaparte in him. He speaks like an awkward spoiled teenager, throwing temper tantrums and knocking holes in walls, but no attempt has been made to de-age him: throughout the entire film, which spans Napoleon’s life from age 26 to 47, Phoenix plays him as 50. He is socially inept and has no charisma; it is impossible to see why anyone ever loved him, or trusted him as a leader. We see no semblance of the character’s intelligence and never are given insight into why he is a good leader. He comes across as medicated and apathetic in every scene, as well as generally incompetent. His only driving force from beginning to end is that he is a cuckolded simp for Josephine.

This is not the impression the real Napoleon has ever given to me.

The choice to make him so old, without any digital de-aging, is simply baffling. A 26-year-old man cannot be played by a 50-year-old. It is comical. But I suppose to Ridley Scott, who is now 85, the difference between 26 and 50 looks rather small. He probably never noticed that anything was amiss.

I never once believed Phoenix on screen, not even for a moment. He is too old, too angry, too awkward, and too stupid to play this part. He was not right for it. Even if he had intended to embody an alternate history version of the character, he fails to ever be convincing as the supposed Emperor of France. What we see in Napoleon is not a great statesman or general. He is not a monarch. He is mostly an obnoxious and awkward simp with anger issues, whose impotent displays of childish rage are nothing like the righteous, quick-witted, scalding fury of Rod Steiger’s Napoleon in Waterloo. There is no way this person we’re watching could be who the characters keep saying he is. It does not compute.

In the end, the story is hopelessly rushed. It comes across more like walking through a museum than as an engaging narrative of itself. Exhibits, vaguely interesting on their own, are smattered here and there—but the connections between them are left entirely for you to determine, and never shown clearly. Far worse, this is a museum where the exhibits are completely wrong in their details, only correct in the abstract portrait they paint as a whole (if even that).

We deserved much better.

Avoid

Contrast Napoleon’s confrontation of the vast army sent to arrest him in Napoleon versus Waterloo. The difference in the time and effort taken to replicate that event, one of the most incredible in history, is stunning.

In Waterloo, thousands of real soldiers point their muskets at Napoleon. Everything is slow. Bondarchuk takes his time. There is tension in the air. Rod Steiger flinches. He isn’t certain his bet will pay off. He takes a deep breath… and the ranks break.

In Napoleon, Napoleon steps in front of an army of about fifteen guys. They immediately start to cheer for him. There is no tension, no uncertainty, and no anxiety. It is, in other words, lazy and rushed, without any sense of vision. Just like the rest of the movie.

The difference between these two is the difference between a genuine historical adaptation of real-life events and a theatrical production put on by twelfth graders. I’ll let you work out which is which.

I do not recommend Napoleon. Those who know their Napoleonic history will be infuriated by endless and pointless historical inaccuracies, of the sort that suggest lack of care and competence rather than any kind of vision. Those who don’t know their Napoleonic history will be hopelessly lost, without any hint of what’s happening at any given time. The plot has no exposition and offers almost no context whatsoever to events or characters. The years avalanche by; in one scene Moscow is burning, and in the next, Napoleon has teleported back to Paris and is abdicating. The characters are wrong in every respect, and the relationships are much too unconvincing to ever be emotionally engaging.

The result is a tedious and unbearably dull film. You will feel every second of those two-and-a-half hours. What we get for spectacle is so inept and historically inaccurate that it does not make up for it. I’m not a Ridley Scott fan, but I would say this is his worst movie. It’s vastly inferior to The Duelists, anyway.

If you like Napoleonic history, go watch Waterloo. It looks better, has a better story, and is far better acted than Napoleon. Bondarchuk even remembered to have the French march in columns! And if you don’t like Napoleonic history, why are you even reading this?

Every year, a long-awaited, highly scored AAA title like Spider-Man 2 (2023) comes out. I play it, and I hate it, and I am forced to ask myself a question:

Why do I still play games?

Despite a tidal wave of critical effulgence, the writing nauseates me. The gameplay bores. The world aggravates. Nothing stands out from the miasma of mediocrity, and I’m left angry and irritated, rather than entertained and excited.

After Hogwarts: Legacy, System Shock, Starfield, and Spider-Man 2 this year, I was beginning to wonder if I had simply aged out of singleplayer games. Why do I keep playing them if they, inevitably, make me annoyed?

Then, on a whim, with no expectations at all, I buy something like Robocop: Rogue City, and I remember why. I remember why I bought a PS5. I remember why I’ve always loved games.

Rogue City

RoboCop: Rogue City is a singleplayer first person shooter/action/investigation roleplaying game where you assume the role Alex Murphy, the RoboCop, as he fights crime on the streets of Detroit. Peter Weller reprises his eponymous role from the original film; despite being the only returning cast member, the story takes place shortly after RoboCop 2, and features the film series’ characters extensively.

Rogue City begins as a shooter. A shooter is more or less all I expected going in. Yet as the game expands, it becomes readily apparent that shooting is only one small part of the experience. RoboCop is, after all, a cop, and cops have plenty of duties beyond violence.

Ticket cars parked in violation of traffic laws. Fine homeless men for public intoxication. Gather clues, take statements, and rescue kittens from burning buildings. And then, once all else is taken care of, break out your Auto 9 and get sweeping.

The parallels between Rogue City and this year’s earlier Aliens: Dark Descent are spooky. Both are European-developed licensed games based on 1980s American action movies; both are startlingly original; and both are best described in the following terms:

Rogue City is like L.A. Noire if Cole Phelps was a SPARTAN super soldier. It combines the hub-based level design of Deus Ex 3 with the more linear mission structure of Wolfenstein: The New Order, where there’s always a story-focused home base to return to after a mission has been completed. Like Deus Ex, it’s a roleplaying game, with an interactive narrative, upgrades, and skill trees, but the primary gameplay loop fundamentally comes down to blasting the shit out of creeps, three bullets at a time, as best analogized to the original Halo games.

And it’s fucking awesome.

I’ve played games “like” Rogue City before. Halo, LA: Noire, the new Wolfensteins, and Deus Ex. It’s highly evocative of Deus Ex 3 in particular, as you play a cyborg cop working for a private company in Detroit. DE3 stole from RoboCop; now RoboCop steals back from Deus Ex.

But much as how Dark Descent created an original game through the fusion of several different genres, RoboCop: Rogue City takes ideas from these franchises and remixes them into something extremely unique. I had played Spider-Man 2 at least twice before I loaded it up on my PS5—but I’ve never played Rogue City before.

Most missions are centered around a hub. Murphy is sent to a neighborhood, a hospital, or an old factory, and there he must Serve the Public Trust while Protecting the Innocent. You’ll have to look for clues regarding your main quest, to take down the New Guy in town, or simply wander around for a while and hope there’s a crime somewhere to interrupt.

Don’t worry. It’s Detroit. You’ll find some rape in progress or armed robbery before long.

I was repeatedly amazed by the level design in the hubs. There are mountains of events and conversations to find, all of which can be easily missed without a bit of police vigilance. Major side quests are always placed at the exact right location on the map so that they are discovered naturally while avoiding backtracking, yet aren’t shown off to such an extent that they feel forced down your throat. This, combined with the feeling that there’s always something out there to find, lends Rogue City a sense of real exploration.

I always wanted to look around, because I knew I would find something worth finding. Meaningful upgrades, engaging narrative, or more parts for my pistol; nothing could be taken for granted. All could be missed.

Please contrast this with Spider-Man 2.

There’s a bit too much wandering around at times, and I think there could’ve been fewer quests in some of the zones. And while open-ended, the hubs are nothing like what you’d find in a Deus Ex or Dishonored game; they’re straightforward and, if not linear, then the next closest thing.

But they fit neatly within the narrative. Its semi-openness enhances and goes alongside the main quest. These two things feel as though they belong together.

Gunplay is what should be expected. RoboCop is a dick-blasting badass, capable of sustaining immense damage from small arms fire. Four unique abilities can be unlocked through the skill trees—an overshield, a charge, a stun, and bullet time—but shooting is mostly as simple as aiming and pulling the trigger.

Uniquely, the weapon systems of the game only allows you to pick up one gun at a time. The other is your Auto 9, which must always stay equipped. The Auto 9 can be upgraded through circuit boards and a small puzzle-ish minigame, which allows it to take on the role of a sniper pistol, a submachine pistol, an assault pistol, or, in the end, a grenade launcher pistol.

I can’t think of another game that’s done its weapon management like this. It’s reminiscent in places of Republic Commando, but really quite different.

The Auto 9 sends enormous jets of blood and gore. It’s reliable, and with infinite ammo, it’s your main weapon for all scenarios. The additional weapons that can be found on corpses are more varied; I found them to be too weak, generally, with a few standouts: the shotguns are worthless, while the Desert Eagle is ludicrously powerful. The assault rifles never had enough ammo, and the snipers are hard to land hits with.

But when the end of the game comes about and you find yourself picking up a Cobra Assault Cannon and getting to work, you’ll be content with how the weapons shake out.

What makes the gunplay stand out despite its simplicity is the visceral feedback of the violence. Shoot a thug in the arm, blow it off. He’ll stand around for a while, screaming, “Oh my god, you shot off my arm!” before eventually collapsing to the ground. Heads pop like balloons filled with blood. Robot enemies, like in Fallout 4, have their heads blown apart and their innards revealed with each bullet. Cover is destructible, and has a habit of blowing to pieces whenever shooting starts; I think Rogue City might have the best destructible environments of any game ever made.

In other words, the violence in this game has exactly what I complained about Starfield lacking: impact. And while there isn’t much to holding down the right trigger and blowing hordes of thugs to pieces, dear God, it’s fucking fun.

I’m a bit less enthusiastic about the investigative gameplay. It’s similar to The Witcher 3, without the real depth of L.A. Noire: run around, look at stuff, press X occasionally, talk to people. It’s impossible to miss anything if you look around for long enough. The conversation system is also about as barebones as they come, but it is functional—I would analogize it to the original Deus Ex, but with more variety in voice lines.

But where Rogue City truly excels is in enemy variety. There are at least two extremely different gangs, multiple robots, and a mercenary company to fight, each with unique special enemies and their own effects and weaponry. This, more than anything else, keeps the gameplay fresh, and forces you to always adapt your strategies to the situation at hand.

Skill trees were not what I expected from this game. These aren’t much as trees, I suppose, since they don’t branch, but they’re close enough to share the word.

The upgrades contained within these trees are significant and gameplay-altering. Each is fun and useful, and the only tree that doesn’t have some utility is Psychology—which, to be frank, I don’t understand the purpose of. Armor and Vitality, as well as Engineering, Focus, and Combat, all are vital to upgrade. I played on Hard, and the power contained within each major node was enough to persuade me that I never wanted to miss out on XP.

Thus the skill tree lends a strong incentive to explore, which then back into the narrative and the primary gameplay loop.

This is what designers should be striving to do.

RoboCop: The RPG

In addition to all it’s doing above, Rogue City somehow manages to also be an excellent roleplaying game.

From the very start, you’ll be expected to make decisions for Murphy. Are you Murphy, or are you RoboCop? Are you a man, or are you a machine? One significant story element concerns which candidate you’ll endorse for mayor, and countless small decisions—about whether to uphold the law or let an offender go—pervade the entire game.

For a first-person shooter, the story is astonishingly reactive to your choices. What you say and do will make an impact by the end. The main narrative doesn’t branch, but the sidequests do, and you have a major say in what shape the people of Detroit are in by the end of the story. The post-game resolution slideshow a la Fallout somehow manages to be infinitely more satisfying than the ending of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the penultimate mission, as Murphy and I said our peace to our friends in the police force, was absolutely resplendent.

Not that the story itself is anything brilliant. RoboCop is one of the best movies ever made, and the love the developers had for the first two movies is apparent everywhere throughout the game. There are constant references, and the environments from the first film especially have been painstakingly recreated digitally. Walking around the police station truly feels like stepping into the original film. From Anne Lewis to the Old Man, you’ll be seeing lots of familiar faces.

But being one of the best movies ever made, RoboCop’s unique Verhoeven style, with its distinctive dialogue, surreal wit, and biting satire, is more or less impossible to replicate.

The writers of Rogue City made a good attempt. They’re Polish, and it shows through the dialogue: some of it is completely unintelligible, despite American VAs voicing every line. Three or four times throughout the game I heard lines that I couldn’t decipher no matter how much thinking I did, and far more frequently I found conversations to be disjointed and confusing.

These constitute a minority of the dialogues. Most of the writing is actually fairly solid, and far above average for a game of this caliber. I’m amazed at how well Murphy, Lewis, and the Old Man were captured in their speech, even if it’s not always quite right. The new original characters like Ulysses Washington are surprisingly compelling, too; I was shocked when I found myself actually caring about what happened to them (and him in particular). This is a major accomplishment for any video game.

Where the writing stumbles most is in humor. The narrative designers weren’t able to replicate Verhoeven’s jokes, and most of the comedy—although not all—falls flat.

Bad humor is usually unbearable. Yet somehow Rogue City’s manages to mostly only be bizarre. The jokes are probably poorly translated from Polish, and they’re often so inept that they can only inspire laughter at the attempt. Given the circumstances, I think this was about as best as could be hoped for.

While the dialogue varies, the performances of the main cast do not. Anne Lewis’ VA—whose name I can’t find, but who I don’t believe is the original actress—is unbelievably good. Every line reading is slick and engaging. It’s some of the best voice work I’ve ever seen in a game. The same is true for the main villain and Ulysses Washington. These actors do a ton of lifting to bring the story up to near-Hollywood standards.

Side characters are more haphazardly acted. Thug enemies especially aren’t much to write about, and I felt like Peter Weller didn’t quite give the role his all—he often sounds disjointed in his responses to the other characters. But where it matters, the developers delivered.

The main storyline itself is doing its best to imitate a hypothetical third RoboCop movie starring Peter Weller. I think something more ambitious would have been better in the long-run, but as a fan of the movies, I would say Rogue City is generally successful. The plot is contrived and frustrating in places, and much of it feels like a retread of the first movie. There’s no real sense that Murphy’s arc of coming to accept his identity as a human has ever happened.

But as a stand-alone story of a robot cop coming to grips with his life and fighting slime, it works. The narrative flows and mostly makes sense, and the ending is absolutely hilarious. I don’t want to spoil anything more than I have already, because I really do think that any fan of the first movie should go out and buy this game right way.

And if you’re not a fan of the first movie, what the fuck is wrong with you? Go watch it and change that fact. It’ll only take you 100 minutes.

It Just Works

2023 has been a decent year for games but a bad year for technology. Every major title I’ve played this year has been marred by significant bugs.

Rogue City has its own share. But I’m happy to report that they aren’t too bad. For the most part.

I experienced no crashes and only got stuck once, after a missile from an ED-209 knocked Murphy halfway inside of a wall and I couldn’t get out. This is better than I can say for Starfield and Spider-Man 2 on both counts.

But audio issues plague the game, especially starting from about halfway through. Voices become robotic and poorly filtered. Sound cuts out and falls out of sync. Voice lines begin skipping themselves, and music overpowers speech.

This is especially notable in the hub areas. There is no ambience whatsoever in the streets of Detroit. No music. No sound. No voices, unless you come up close to an NPC and hear what he has to say. Whether it’s due to a glitch or bad design, I can’t say—but it’s shocking to walk down a dark alley without so much as crickets in the background or a dim ambient track.

A tiny amount of ambient music could have turned Rogue City into a master class of atmosphere, to rival Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Without it, it’s often jarring, and feels cheap.

I desperately hope this is patched, as well as the other audio issues. I have a suspicion it will be.

The graphics themselves vary. I played on PS5, exclusively on performance mode, and often had FPS drops—some down below 30, which is really unacceptable. For the most part it looked good, though, especially with reflections. The environments are detailed and look almost as bad as real-life Detroit, and for what is effectively a AA game, I was satisfied with appearances.

Buy It

Rogue City is excellent. It’s compelling and unique, and despite an outer layer of jank, has had a ton of thought put into its story, quests, and gameplay. Games like this, unpretentious and passionate, are the soul of the industry. They are the rare titles that are not afraid to be fun.

And they are fun. Everywhere you go, Rogue City simply wants to entertain. There’s no tedium. There are no real shitty minigames. There is a lot of talking, but for every word said, five bullets will be fired soon enough. The narrative is fulfilling and never depressing. It’s just fun.

By the time the end of the game comes, and you’re fending off hordes of criminal scum while the classic RoboCop theme blares, it’s impossible not to be smiling. And isn’t that what games are about?

So buy this game. I haven’t decided whether I like it more than Dark Descent yet, but it says a lot that the two are neck-and-neck in my mind for GotY. I guess it turns out that, in my heart, the only thing I love half so much as 80s action cinema is Eurojank. The two together are unstoppable.

I’ve spent days trying to decide where to begin with Spider-Man 2. You can find my thoughts on the last two games in my article on Miles Morales, which was the first new game I ever reviewed on this blog. Despite ample ground for criticism in narrative design, I enjoyed both well enough, and was looking forward to whatever Insomniac put together for the…

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With my next book now available on Amazon, my plan upon Starfield's release was to sit down and play it non-stop all week, then write a mega-review as I had for Baldur's Gate 3 and Aliens: Dark Descent. It has been eight years since the last singleplayer Bethesda RPG; I haven't yet had the opportunity to review one of their games on this blog upon release, although I've written a decent bit about Fallout 3 and 4 over the years. I didn't want my first chance to go to waste.

I do not like Bethesda. Fallout 3 succeeds because the designers inherited Black Isle's Van Buren documents and shamelessly stole its ideas. Fallout 4 succeeds because it's a fun looter-shooter with a good world. Oblivion and Skyrim, though, are boring, poorly designed, buggy pieces of shit, with horrific writing and even worse gameplay. Skyrim in particular is one of my least favorite RPGs.

But despite their myriad flaws, The Elder Scrolls games do have some kind of charm. It lies mostly in their sense of atmosphere. For as much as I dislike TES, I can't hate it as a series. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have a litany of fundamental issues, but each is engrossing for at least a single playthrough of the main quest. The map is worth exploring. The sidequests are worth doing. They are games worth playing once, if not ever again thereafter.

That's why I had some modicum of excitement for Starfield. Indeed the vast improvements in production value and gameplay design reflected in Fallout 4 made me more optimistic than was warranted. There seemed to be a trend of Bethesda's games toward genuine AAA quality from Oblivion to Skyrim to FO4, as the studio moved away from cheap designer-written trash and toward something that actually reflects the quality of other games at a similar price tag.

Starfield is not that.

But I won't be reviewing Starfield, because after seven hours, I've given up. I hear it gets "really good" sixty or eighty hours in, but I'm convinced this is nothing but Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing to "get good" about this latest Bethesda atrocity. It is utterly without any recognizable merit whatsoever. Playing it gives me a headache; I cannot force myself to go on.

It seems worth putting forth the reasons why.

The Outer Worlds 2.0

The Outer Worlds came out the year before I launched this blog. I had so much to say about it at the time, but nowhere to put down my thoughts. I grew up as a devoted Troika and Black Isle fan; the promise of its team--and its premise--made it my most anticipated game of 2019. Over the years since I've often wondered if I should go back and review it, as it fits neatly into the pantheon of RPGs that I often discuss.

But I've never had the stomach. TOW is too earnest to honestly dislike, but it's a dreadful game. The narrative is repetitive, the shooting is poor, and there's no atmosphere. It feels like a Bethesda rip-off, with even lower production value. But my largest complaint at the time was that it had no soul. The world was a shallow attempt at mixing BioShock anti-capitalism, or at least anti-corporatism, with pulpy Flash Gordon-esq Fallout retrofuture. Without really understanding either aesthetic, Tim Cain & Co. made a game that felt like a rip-off of its own developers' previous titles. The attempts at personality and wit fell flat because the writers didn't know what they were trying to do. What do anti-corporate themes have to do with Flash Gordon retrofuture and pulp sci-fi action? How do they fit together?

They don't. The result was an RPG that has been almost entirely forgotten.

This might be a roundabout way of getting to my point, but I can think of no better way to illustrate what Starfield is like. Starfield is The Outer Worlds. If you have played the one, you have already played the other. They suffer from the exact same problems, in all of the same ways. The anti-corporate themes have been replaced with pretentious pseudo-spirituality, while the retrofuture aesthetic has been replaced with that of hard sci-fi, but they feel like the same games.

How does a hard sci-fi aesthetic fit into a game about killing thousands of people, zipping over the galaxy in a personal spaceship, becoming a space god, and instantly teleporting between distant star sectors?

About as well as Flash Gordon pulp fits with satire about megacorporations charging superfluous fees.

Starfield is the The Outer Worlds. Both share a lack of coherence and vision. Both are dull and stale. Both feel like lifeless rip-offs of themselves, and both are agonizing to play. But while I think The Outer Worlds was a bad game overall, I can say that it, at least, tried something. It may have ended up as a dull and incoherent Yojimbo simulator, but it did have an idea of what it wanted to do. It had some personality. It had a tinge of charm, even if that charm was mostly cringe-inducing and lame.

Starfield has no charm. Starfield is simply dreadful. It is as lifeless and confused as Joe Biden, with similarly few redeeming characteristics. Whatever advances were reflected in FO4 have been forgotten. The end result is an exercise in mediocrity, that is not even momentarily enjoyable to play.

Gamebryo? Gamebryno.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has no loading screens. When you encounter a cave in the wilderness, you can enter the cave without the cave needing to load. When you walk into a house, you do not need to wait ten minutes for the new environment to appear around you. And when you transition between states, you simply step over the state lines and find yourself somewhere new--you do not get taken out of the game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out five years ago. It is half a decade and a console generation old.

Starfield has loading screens every fifteen seconds. You must load to leave your ship. You must load to enter buildings. You must load to travel between star systems. You must load to land and you must load to take-off. If you discover a cave while exploring a planet, you will have to load before you can go inside.

In other words, despite having been advertised as a development upon No Man's Sky free-form interstellar exploration, Starfield is actually the same as every other Bethesda game.

Herein lies the root of all its problems. Starfield does not feel like its own game. It feels like a space travel mod for FO3, and I really do mean that in all respects. Encumbrance, randomly generated loot, clunky UIs, overreliance on maps and fast travel, and shoe-horned in skill systems--these don't belong in Starfield. They're not systems for the game Starfield is trying to be. They're the systems of a fantasy aRPG like Oblivion.

Why haven't they been changed? I honestly don't know. I guess because slop is good enough for Bethesda fans, and Todd didn't want to do the hard work of creating something new. But I still don't understand how this game took them so unbelievably long to develop, and at such tremendous costs, when it does absolutely nothing new.

Starfield is priced at $70, but it cannot compete with other, similar games--in any respect. It looks worse, runs worse, and has worse design than any AAA title I've ever reviewed for this blog. It does not feel like it should have come out this year. It would have been outdated in 2014.

That's really all I wanted to say. That's why I won't be finishing it, and that's why I won't be bothering to write a full review.

But Here Are a Few Examples of Why This Game Sucks Anyway

Since we're both here, though, let's point and laugh at a few of Starfield's many astonishing deficiencies.

This "dead rock" Sarah is referring to? Yeah, it's Mars. A major colonized planet. Five inches over that boulder is an entire space city. Good work Bethesda.

"Be anything," Todd said. "Go anywhere."

I decided to be a space pirate. I robbed a store.

The clerk was invulnerable. I shot her in the head; she got right back up.

Literally every single named NPC in Starfield is invulnerable. This sometimes has hilarious side-effects, such as a mission where you have to escort farmers in battle against space pirates: the farmers literally can't die, and so you literally can't lose. Just let them do all the fighting.

Why did they need me in the first place?

Here I met my parents. They were so poorly written that I decided to murder them. Unfortunately that is not allowed. Except they aren't even invulnerable. They are ghosts, phantoms, impossible to harm at all. My bullets phase straight through them.

Did anyone care? Was any effort at all put into this game?

Above you'll see the resurrected speech system from Oblivion. I tried to use sense to convince this woman into helping us, choosing the green option three times.

I failed all three times.

But I decided to reload, to try the red option instead. "Risk your life. It's going to be the adventure of a lifetime!"

*Sigh* is right.

Most children could write better dialogue than this.

Below we see one of the game's many planetary settlements. It is washed out and hideous and lacks any atmosphere whatsoever, just like the rest of the game.

Finally, here is a screenshot of one of the game's many odious crafting mechanics. The engaging gameplay: click on things until you have enough things, then make new things. Brilliant.

But it's the little touches that really make me dislike Starfield. Take, for example, how you move when on a planet with low gravity. You might notice something strange--the animations are exactly like they are anywhere else!

Neil Armstrong worked out that skipping was the best way to travel in low-g environments way back in 1969, but I guess Bethesda has yet to catch up.

Not Even a Looter-Shooter

A lot of critics online are complaining that Starfield is too much looter-shooter, too little RPG. This is true, but I can't criticize it for that alone: FO4 is also a looter-shooter non-RPG, and I've defended it on that basis before. It's my opinion that FO4 has good enough gameplay to make up for its horrible storytelling deficiencies.

Starfield doesn't. Not only does it have far greater storytelling deficiencies, but it also has far worse gameplay. Dozens of "critics" online have said, "Starfield has the best shooting of any Bethesda game yet!" but have provided no explanation of how this is true.

That would be because it isn't true. Starfield is a regression to Fallout 3. Its shooting sucks.

Do you remember fighting Synths in FO4? How their faces would fall off with each headshot? How their armor would disintegrate and get blown to bits with every bullet?

There is no locational damage on enemies in Starfield. Enemies have health bars, but their remaining HP is never indicated by their appearances.

Do you remember how awesome it was to hear the tinkling of bullets against your power armor in FO4? Do you remember how cool you felt, like a walking tank, when clearing out raider encampments?

There is nothing like that in Starfield. Armor is damage padding. Every suit is a spacesuit; there are no exoskeletons (as far as I can tell).

Do you remember how smooth the animations were for reloads in FO4? Do you remember how each gun moved in your hands like you were really holding it?

Starfield's aim-down-sight animations are like Fallout: New Vegas all over again. They feel cheap and ugly. Press RMB and the sights teleport in front of your eyes, snapping instantly into place. Weapon handling is repetitive. There is way too much reloading. Enemies are bullet sponges. And there are only fifteen or so guns in the entire fucking game.

If Starfield is a looter-shooter, it's the worst one on the market. You can't disarm enemies by shooting them in the hands. You can't trip them by shooting them in the legs. You can't blow off limbs and heads will never explode. Its only addition relative to FO4 is that you can lean around corners. Beyond that much, gameplay consists of nothing but standing next to generic spacer enemies, holding down the trigger, and pressing the stimpack button to stay alive.

That's all. There's nothing else. Starfield is a terrible FPS.

Starfield is the Worst Bethesda Game

I don't believe this game has any redeeming qualities. If you like the mindless exploration of space, play No Man's Sky. If you like shooting things with vaguely futuristic guns, play FO4. If you just want a repetitive RPG with a lot of stuff to do, any TES game is a better choice. And if you're desperate to play a space RPG, Mass Effect is always a good option. Mass Effect 1 and 2 do everything Starfield is trying to do, and they do it ten thousand times better.

Starfield is terrible. Starfield is The Outer Worlds, but with even worse storytelling. Don't buy this game. I deeply regret spending money on it.

Today I felt sunlight on my skin for the first time in a week, for today, after seven days of toil, I have at last completed Baldur's Gate 3. At every turn the game conspired to rob me of this victory: twice last night was my save file corrupted on the eve of triumph, yet twice did I troubleshoot and persevere. Crashes and performance issues plagued my every moment, but these were no match for my conviction.

I have won. I have finished Baldur's Gate 3. It took me seventy hours.

^{I am the 0.3%}

My thoughts on a game have never been so conflicted. When I reviewed Aliens: Dark Descent, I knew that, despite its many issues, it was an excellent experience overall. When I reviewed System Shock, I knew that, despite its many virtues, it was a poor experience overall.

Baldur's Gate 3 is not so simple. It is both the most frustrating RPG I've ever played, and one of the best. It is brilliantly written in many places, and horribly written in many others. Its sidequests are among the best in the genre, but a few are undoubtedly among the worst. The faithfully adapted 5E combat far surpasses the Infinity Engine real-time model used by most other cRPGs, yet is also a slog. And while the design of the campaign is an impressive achievement in many respects, it would be no exaggeration to say my playthrough was ruined by technical issues. Not small issues as in Dark Descent, but actual game-breaking, experience-ruining bugs that almost led to my giving up.

My opinion on the game changed wildly day-by-day. Act I is extraordinary. It is perfect. Everything about it is good. Act I alone, which is what Early Access always was, is the best RPG I have ever played. I would have said as much if I'd stopped and written my review then. It would have been the most glowing recommendation I've ever given. I loved Act I.

Act II is not extraordinary. It is uneven and frustrating, with too much combat and the game's worst narrative design. Bugs made progress almost impossible, and my PC's performance was never worse. Had I stopped playing and written my review then, it would have been overwhelmingly negative, with a list of frustrations fifty pages long. I hated Act II.

But Act III is fantastic. It fails to achieve the heights of Act I, but features excellent writing, interesting side quests, and engaging combat encounters. I really liked Act III--and this is where I write my review.

Unpacking my thoughts and setting forth my criticisms will not be concise. There is much to discuss. I have paeans and dirges alike to offer, and I intend to give both. So let us waste no more time with lead-in.

Minor story spoilers should be expected to follow. I simply cannot analyze this game without giving some things away, like character names and locations. Be forewarned.

The Game

First, select your character. Like in the Divinity: Original Sin games, you can either create a custom
PC, or use one of the companions as your protagonist--a so-called 'Origin' character. Origin characters cannot be customized and have different main quests to help guide them through the story. The idea of turning NPCs into protagonists is fascinating, but BG3's strongest elements are in its relationships: if I had opted to play as Shadowheart, rather than as Shadowheart's boyfriend, my experience with the story would have likely been much less satisfying. (More on that later.)

One Origin is customizable, however: the Dark Urge. My impression is that the the Dark Urge is the intended way to play the game. His story is deeply interconnected with the first two games in a way I cannot imagine being the case for any of the other Origin PCs. For that reason, I chose him for my first playthrough.

Customization is comprehensive and malleable, with no class restrictions or racial stat bonuses. You can make any character you like. A charismatic half-orc? A burly gnome? Go right ahead. Appearance options are better than average for a game like this, but still bizarrely lacking in long hairstyles.

As in Cyberpunk 2077, there is also a genital slider. As in Cyberpunk 2077, this does nothing and has no effect on gameplay or sexuality. You can choose if you want a big or small penis, circumcised or uncircumcised, and your body type needn't match your genitalia. You can also take off your underwear at any point in the game, and the underwear of any NPC, if you want to verify anything for yourself.

This is just what Baldur's Gate always needed. I don't know how I'll go back to the old games now.

Removing clothes and underwear aside, you will never actually see genitalia in your playthrough. Of the two sex scenes I received, one carefully managed camera placement so that only the slightest few pixels of my character's groin were visible at any given time. The other was audio-only.

This is, in other words, a gratuitous and pointless feature. Ironically, the genitalia that is always visible and completely uncensored in sex scenes--a woman's breasts--is NOT customizable. Every woman in BG3 has the same cup size. This customization would have actually been welcome; what we receive instead was not.

^{Because what I always wanted in life was to see Minsc's cock. Uncircumcised, BTW.}

With your class and genitals set, you thus awaken on an Illithid spaceship. A "tadpole" has been inserted into your brain by a mindflayer. You have days before you yourself turn into a soulless, squid-faced monstrosity. Your only hope is to band together with the other Origin characters, who have all likewise been infected, to find a cure--as soon as possible.

My character started his life as a half-elf Paladin. His dark urges for murder and mayhem stood in eternal conflict with his oath to uphold goodness and justice and peace (etc.). This quickly revealed itself to be a mistake. Baldur's Gate 3's early game is marked by low attack bonuses and constant misses. I found Paladin to be unbearably frustrating, so I reclassed into Ranger.

Yes, you read that right. At any point in the game, for the pittance of 100 gold, you can respecialize however you see fit. Tired of being a Fighter at level 12? Become a Wizard instead!

This can be done not only for the main character, but also any companion NPC. Here I am at level 12 turning Shadowheart, whose entire storyline is about being a Cleric to Shar, into a Druid. For 100 gold.

^{This does not affect story, as far as I can tell.}

The decision to enable so much flexibility is both bizarre and welcome. BG3 is a colossal game. I had played Early Access, so I skipped and skimmed a significant amount of dialogue, and I knew how to solve many of the quests ahead of time. I also played on Balanced difficulty primarily, rather than Tactician. Had either of these things not been the case, I could have easily spent over 100 hours with my playthrough.

Having to spend 100 hours with a character whose spec is completely fucked up--like I always have, inevitably, in the Pillars of Eternity games--is not good game design. So I support the notion in principle. But it's also strange that the barrier to reclassing is so low. It is basically free, and the NPC who offers it is in camp--so you can do it between fights, instantly, whenever taking a long rest.

It turned out to be for the better. After eight levels of Ranger, I was beginning to feel underpowered relative to the other classes. I respecialized into Ranger/Fighter, planning on going 8 Ranger / 4 Fighter.

As I realized how useless Ranger spells were, however, this quickly morphed into 4 Ranger/8 Fighter. By the end of the game I gave up on Ranger entirely, and played as an archer/dual wielder Dex-based Fighter, with no multiclass. This proved the correct decision, because I was the most tremendously overpowered character in my party. I comfortably soloed two major bosses, in a single turn, with nothing but Haste potions and my bow.

The multiclass rules work easily and intuitively. It might be possible to ruin your character with them if you aren't careful, but the affordability of resetting everything and starting over--without having to replay 90 hours of content--eliminates this risk.

Had it been up to me, I would have removed the ability to change companion NPC classes. It fucks up the story too badly and isn't necessary anyway. But such flexibility does have the advantage of allowing for more dynamic party compositions. If your favorite companions are Karlach and Lae'zel, but you're playing a Barbarian, it is obviously suboptimal to have one or either of these characters in your party. The Dragon Age games have always suffered from this problem. But if you respec Karlach into a Druid, and Lae'zel into a Monk, such a thing makes much more strategic sense.

But it really does fuck up the story.

I don't think including these options was a mistake, but I do wish the barrier had been a bit higher. 1000 gold would have been fair. 100 is too low.

Much like Solasta: Crown of the Magister, an excellent dungeon-delving D&D simulator released in 2021, Baldur's Gate 3 is a faithful adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons: Fifth Edition into video game format. Gone are the days of real-time translations of turn-based games; BG3 is, mercifully, completely turned-based in combat. An emphasis on environmental interactions with hundreds of spells at your disposal, to say nothing of potions and bombs, is reminiscent of Divinity: Original Sin 2, with a stronger focus on RNG.

This was clearly an attempt to capture the imagination-driven nature of a tabletop roleplaying game, and Larian did an excellent job. The openess of encounters in this game is marvelous. Sneak past enemies, ambush them, talk to them, rush in head-first, or prepare a few fireballs to incinerate them before they know you're there: Baldur's Gate 3 is basically an immersive sim.

But it's ultimately still burdened by the mantle of Dungeons & Dragons. The over-reliance on randomness adds nothing except a strong incentive to reload whenever things don't go the wrong way, while severely diluting the player's ability to manage encounters. This is exemplified nowhere better than in initiative.

Like in 5E, initiative is 1d8 + Dexterity + feats. Every entity in combat rolls initiative separately. Usually my Fighter went first while my Cleric went last. Enemies and allies would fall somewhere in the middle. But not always. Sometimes I got unlucky; everyone in my party would roll a 1 on initiative, while every opponent would roll an 8. In a fight where you're supposed to rescue an important NPC before she can be killed, this bad luck made the encounter literally impossible. She would die before I had a chance to act. There was nothing I could do.

When I reloaded an earlier save, I now rolled well on initiative, while the enemy NPCs rolled poorly. The fight was then trivially easy.

This is the case for a huge number of fights throughout the game. Going first instead of last is the difference between sleepwalking to victory and clawing desperately for every inch, especially when friendly NPCs are involved. Larian could have ameliorated this element of 5E, but they didn't: they let RNG reign.

On a more philosophical level of game design, RNG combined with readily available quickload functionality ultimately accomplishes nothing. There's a major story event that required a critical success for me to get the outcome I wanted most. It took fifty or sixty tries before I finally got it, but I wasn't going to give up until I rolled that 20.

This was pointless. If I can spend an hour savescumming the optimal outcome, I probably will. That's just how I play games. Therefore the middleman should be removed. Obsidian made the right decision in New Vegas by removing RNG from skill checks, instead making everything of this sort be threshold based.

^{If you really want that chest opened, be prepared to reload. A lot.}

But the design problems with Dungeons & Dragons run deeper than RNG. I have no qualms saying that Fifth Edition is a bad game. It's messy and contrived and overcomplicated. D20s are a terrible, swingy basis for skill checks, and AC is a ridiculous and antiquated system. But its worst problem, as is perennial in D&D, is its terrible incentive structure. You get XP for killing monsters (or whenever the GM wants to give it out). There are no personal goals or beliefs to play toward like in Torchbearer or Apocalypse Engine games. Your objective is always to kill things: not only because this is the main way to level up, but also because things always have loot.

No real attempt has been made to change this aspect of the rules. Talking your way past a group of guards in Baldur's Gate 3 will never net you experience. Neither will picking locks or disarming traps. XP is solely awarded for mayhem and slaughter, in addition to a pittance for completing quests. There are a number of enemies you can talk down throughout the game, as would be expected, but often these are the same enemies that will have high level equipment: killing them is the sole way to get it. You are thus doubly punished for avoiding combat, and so the designers makes it clear: Baldur's Gate 3 is a game about fighting people. It is not Fallout. You cannot defeat the final boss with Persuasion. If you don't murder the man wearing yellow armor, even if he's friendly, you're playing the game wrong.

I guess the incentive to be a murderhobo does very much reflect the way most people play tabletop D&D. But it is not ideal.

BG3 is filled with combat, and the last ten hours in particular have very little time for diplomacy. For this reason I would say that it is as much of a tactical adventure game as it is a cRPG. Baldur's Gate 3 is about killing things. You cannot play it as a pacifist. There is no such thing.

Not that this is a great crime. I would have preferred more nuance in incentives, but BG3 is 5E. It's a good, direct adaptation of a mediocre ruleset, and the core mechanics are fun. The first 60 hours are tactically engaging and filled with unique opportunities for players to make their own way. That own way just has to include murder, most of the time.

But combat at higher levels becomes a chore. The encounters are too easy and the stakes are too low. My Dark Urge Fighter had 25 AC at level 12, attacked three times per turn (or six with action surge, or NINE with Haste), did 25+ damage with each hit, had 95% chance to hit on every shot, and had more than 100 HP. Even on Tactician, every fight was trivial with this arrangement.

Some attempt was made to mix up the endgame battles and introduce new mechanics for boss fights, but with dubious success. These are more frustrating than they are engaging.

^{By the time you have an entourage of a cambion, a diva, an elemental, and six ghouls, every fight is trivial.}

Ten hours in, you unlock the ability to use special Illithid powers. These add a unique progression element to the game and help give some sense that progress is still being made between the vast gulfs of playtime spent at the same level. But like Divinity: Original Sin 2, BG3 has far too many active abilities. Dozens on a single bar, or more. Most of the brainworm powers do nothing more than add additional abilities that you'll forget to use.

^{I am convinced that no human being is capable of remembering to use all of these abilities, even on the rare occasions where they would be useful.}

By far my biggest frustration with the gameplay is the controls. Unlike the first two Baldur's Gates in the Infinity Engine, the party has no formations or marching order. Instead the three companions will follow the selected character awkwardly and clumsily.

See a trap on the ground? Step forward to disarm it without hitting G first and be prepared for everyone in your party to rush ahead of you, setting it off. Even more commonly, combat will end while a concentration AoE spell like Cloud of Daggers is still active; watch as your entire party kills itself walking through that one danger area. This seems to happen to me after every fight.

But the real problems are in the camera. Despite a heavy emphasis on verticality in different arenas, there is no way to manually change Z-level. This means that whatever plane you're on is decided by the game guessing what you're trying to click on. It will usually guess wrong.

Above see my summoned diva who, while attempting to move a few inches closer to an enemy, decided it made more sense to fly to the roof of the building we were in. The only way for me to get him back down was to zoom in and try to click through that small skylight. A similar scenario saw an imp fly up to a rafter which I literally could not see, no matter what I did, thus making him unclickable.

Here's a screenshot of Shadowheart attempting to enter into a room during the worst quest in the game. The camera has decided that I should go directly to the floor above where I need to enter. If I try to walk her inside, she'll instead think I mean the upper storey, and do nothing out of confusion. It was actually impossible for me to get her where she needed to go without carefully walking her to the threshold, zooming in, and trying to click through the doorway.

Stairs are even more agonizing. You won't see the next Z-level until you're standing on the topmost step. If you attempt to click up to where the next storey should be, you'll actually click through the floor and start going back down the stairs. This is annoying out of combat. In combat it's terminal.

A Tour of Bugs

The camera is really the least of the game's technical issues. BG3 is the most technically deficient game I've played since Fallout: New Vegas. That should be no surprise: the campaign is unbelievably long and girthy, and there's no way that some small bumps and blemishes weren't going to sneak through the fingers.

But these are not small bumps and blemishes. They are major issues. Before moving on to what really matters for a game like this (the story), I thought I would catalogue some of the most amusing and debilitating from my playthrough. The praise I have to offer of the narrative means nothing if the game is unplayable, and for me, it nearly was.

Here we see Wyll killing himself after a Long Rest by standing on top of a candle. The first time it happened, I woke up to find him dead. The second time I was just fast enough to catch his final moments before he went up in flames. This same bug pervades Act III: companion NPCs constantly set themselves on fire in camp.

Here is Halsin the Druid who, after joining my party, transformed into a saber tooth tiger--and stayed transformed in the ensuing cutscene. This would have been fine, were it not for the camera...

...which is not designed...

...with such a thing in mind.

Druids are supposed to transform back into human shape during conversations, just so we're clear.

You may have thought that Mizora turning Wyll into a demon was a horrific punishment for his crimes, but in fact the true punishment was that she stole his arms.

Of all the books in this game, I think this one was my favorite to read. I hope we get a MOO_GloryOfTheAbsolute DLC.

When Halsin died late in my campaign, I could use Speak With Dead on him. Despite having been killed by a demon in Act III, he seemed to think he had been killed in Act I by a goblin.

In this screenshot we see that Gale still has an option concerning the true nature of the "Nightsong." The problem is that this is from Act III, and we already have identified, discovered, and recovered the Nightsong--about forty hours previously.

An interesting name for an area.

Big Huido looks suspiciously like a poorly textured staircase, but not so much as Dolly Dolly Dolly looks like a floorboard:

But these issues are all very minor. This is to be expected on release for a huge game like this, and most don't make any difference.

The same cannot be said for the following error:

At approximately 60 hours played, I received this error. I would fail out of loading any of my recent saves. My file was corrupted.

I managed to get into a quicksave from two hours previously after a bit of fiddling around. It turned out that the use of summons was/is breaking save files in certain zones. But before I figured this out, I thought my entire campaign was gone. Thankfully I practice good save hygiene, but many others on the Steam forums do not, and they have lost everything. Looking back now, all of my endgame saves are corrupted. Thankfully I had foreseen this, so I pressed forward for several hours to make sure I beat the game in a single go. Otherwise I would have lost another night of progress.

This is a horrendous bug. It must be fixed ASAP.

Act II is where the technical problems become very severe. Beyond everything mentioned above, the far more insidious bugs relating to dialogue and quest markers begin. I missed multiple important conversations relating to the plot...because they never played. A major story element is Shadowheart's magic artifact; in Act I, she's jealous enough over guarding it that she will kill anyone who tries to take it away. But later on there's an event where she gives it to the player.

The event never triggered. It simply teleported into my inventory, mysteriously, without explanation.

Romancing Shadowheart, we also experienced our first kiss--twice! The major Act I romance sequence repeated itself, identically, for no reason. This had no further consequences, but I was paralyzed with fear that my romance attempt had been somehow corrupted. At the end of Act II, my allies attacked me for trespassing...in the enemy base I'd just cleared out.

The list goes on.

Finally, the game currently suffers from a memory leak. Despite being above the recommended specs, I endured constant stuttering and endless FPS lag over the course of my playthrough. The latest NVIDIA drivers improved performance yesterday, but it isn't entirely fixed yet.

There is no excuse for Baldur's Gate 3 to be using this much RAM and system power.

The Story

One of the most spectacular features of Act I is that every dead NPC can be spoken to using the "Speak With Dead" spell. Every corpse, no matter how insignificant, will have something to say. They will help you solve puzzles and find treasure and work out where to go next in the quest, or simply add flavor and background to the environment. The same is true for animals; every beast always has something to say.

But it isn't just animals and corpses. Every living NPC has something to say. Every character has a name and is voice acted. The world feels entrancingly alive.

It is no exaggeration to say that the first twenty or thirty hours of Baldur's Gate 3 are among the best in any roleplaying game ever made. I cannot express how much I loved Act I, especially when I first played it in Early Access earlier in April. The characters are fascinating, full of personality, and have rich backstories to uncover.

The quests are best of all. The narrative is as non-linear as a Fallout game. The default path seems to be siding with the Grove of Druids against the Absolute and its goblin hordes, but this is an illusion. You can side with the goblins, if you prefer, and receive a completely different experience. I cannot remember the last time I played a cRPG with this much player reactivity. Pillars of Eternity II comes close, but BG3 is really in its own league.

It doesn't last. Act II sheds reactivity in exchange for a railroad. Corpses, even ones who should have something to say, are mute. Animals fall silent. NPCs each have a single line and nothing more. While I wouldn't call it linear, the outcome feels increasingly forced, and by the time you meet the Absolute at the act's finale, you will be wondering why your entire party is sitting around, allowing the bad guys to get away with their plans, doing nothing when they could be resolving the plot. This happens in two revoltingly egregious locations and is a minor issue in countless others.

The main story is rarely a strong point in cRPGs. Pillars 2 is the only game in this genre where the central plotline is a highlight, rather than a chore. Instead these games excel at companion characters, side quests, and bonus content. I'm usually willing to forgive flaws in the central plot if these other elements are good.

I don't know whether I like Baldur's Gate 3's story or not. Its restricted scope and direct focus is excellent in Act I, but as the story expands, so too do the crutches used by the writers. In Act III, you are regularly ambushed by one of the major antagonists. But if you try to fight her, she says, "Nah bro. ur not rdy yet. we'll fight when I DECIDE."

This is infuriating in a game that is supposedly non-linear and open-ended. The problem only gets worse as time goes on, leading up to the final encounter: there are four checks in a row that require nat 20s to succeed. I decided to savescum my way to victory, only for the game to have me lose anyway--as if winning was impossible and hadn't even been considered. Rolling four 20s in a row resulted in no different an outcome than rolling zero.

That is a railroad.

Act III vastly improves on II's flaws otherwise, however. The story is more engaging and full of great quests with highly variable outcomes, although the uselessness of Speak With dead remains infuriating. Exploring Baldur's Gate (the city) is fascinating and straight out of Dishonored or Deus Ex. As the Dark Urge's true identity is revealed, my investment in the narrative and my main character's fate increased massively, and while it could have been done better, I was supremely satisfied with how everything worked out.

This is a metaphor for the storyline as a whole, I think. I have major problems with how the fight against the Absolute and the Illithids is written. The narrative designers rely heavily on pre-established lore and setting details to resolve and drive their plot, rather than having the plot drive and resolve itself. Act II and III are full of Deus ex machina moments, where victory is subverted or (conversely) failure averted through a last-minute addition of some contrived new detail. Constant reasons are introduced for the plot to continue on, when really it should just end early. Characters at this point often make extreme or insane decision at the face of almost no persuasion or discussion, often in a way that's reminiscent of Bethesda. To say this is a disappointment would be to say too little. There are several scenes highly reminiscent of the above linked from FO4.

I won't lie or pretend that I like Faerun and the Forgotten Realms as a setting. I don't. I can't stand FR. It has no aesthetic sense at all. It's my least favorite of all major mainstream fantasy settings, and I would never consider playing a tabletop D&D campaign in it. But I am moderately familiar with the lore--and even I felt like I was at sea half of the time.

Here is a minor, spoiler-free example from Wyll. This is a line of dialogue where I am expected to know who Tiamat and Zariel are, and understand their relationship with Mizora (a minor character), in order to appreciate what's happening. I don't even know who Tiamat and Zariel are. Throughout the game, and especially toward its conclusion, the narrative is rife with dialogue like this. These details often makes a major difference in the story.

Ultimately, by the conclusion of Act III, the main storyline is so contrived and confusing that the optimal path toward my preferred outcome becomes obscured. This led to immense apathy. Should I side with Illithids, the Gith, the Dream Visitor, or forge my own path? Which option will lead to where I want to end up? I know which ending I want, but I don't know how to get there. This is because the writers have relied so much on awful D&D setting information that the lore, rather than narrative, is driving the outcome of the plot.

Contrast this with a game like Dragon Age: Origins. At the end of Origins, a twist--that the one who kills the Archdemon must himself die--is introduced. It makes sense and is intuitively connected to the lore established in the prologue concerning Gray Wardens. Morrigan then offers a way out, relying on lore, adding in another twist that was also set up at the beginning of the game. You must then make a decision:

• Will I perform the Dark Ritual?

• If I don't, who will die?

  • Loghain

  • Alistair

  • Me

The consequences of any of these decisions is obviously telegraphed. If you sacrifice yourself, you will die. There you have it. It isn't more complicated than that. A good RPG should have player consequences be that obvious.

This is not the case in Baldur's Gate 3.

Yet with all of this said, I ended up getting the best outcome. So I can't complain too much, except to stay that it felt a bit too idyllic in the end.

But still. When the Absolute and its motivations are revealed, they are stunningly contrived and very confusing. I found myself constantly wishing for a pause button so I could parse through the over-complicated dialogue. I'm taking it on good faith that the Absolute's plan actually makes sense, but I don't think it does.

The main story has its highlights, but it is not the strength of this game.

All of this is pretty much a sideshow. The most important question about an attempt at a BioWare-style old school cRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate and KotOR is whether or not the characters are engaging and well-written. Nothing else about BG3 matters to me. Companions are the most important part of a game like this. So are the companions in BG3 good?

Yes. The cast is large, beginning with six (or five if you play as an Origin), and later expands to include at least four more. A number of characters, such as Minsc and Jaheira, return from Baldur's Gate 2, but I found them to be much weaker than the original characters created by Larian. Did we really need to see Minsc again? Did we really need to see his cock? Does he have to be constantly talking about his space hamster?

For me, the answer is definitively no.

But I really like the original cast. They come on strong and lack the charisma of companions in David Gaider's RPGs (KotOR1 and Dragon Age), but they have good, naturalistic dialogue and distinctive personalities, backstories, and motivations, and great voice acting. A lot of players are complaining that they talk too much like Joss Whedon characters, and while this is probably true, it's far preferable to what we normally receive in RPGs these days.

Of course I prefer some more than others. Lae'zel and Karlach are unbearable, in my opinion, while Shadowheart and Gale are great. But this is going to fall down to personal preference. A lot of people like Karlach for some reason, so I won't criticize her characterization.

What's most important to note is that this is the first game since Inquisition nine years ago to feature a companion approval and romance system. It's almost identical to what we see in Origins, with the major exception of gift giving.

I romanced Shadowheart, and the arc she experienced as a result is the best writing I've seen in a video game in a decade. Her story, as she struggles with her identity as a Shar worshipper and tries to figure out who to be, is simply phenomenal. Her characterization completely changes as a result of your actions based on whether you allow her to doom herself to Shar or turn to the light and find redemption--which is clearly what she needs. By the time her arc is resolved, I was immensely satisfied. Every line of party dialogue, where she was no longer gothy and sad but happy and witty, was delicious.

Writing arcs for companion characters in RPGs is extremely challenging. How does a character have a satisfying arc, when every specific detail of her journey is dependent on character actions? Almost no one has ever pulled it off except David Gaider, with Morrigan in Dragon Age: Origins.

Shadowheart isn't as compelling as Morrigan. But she's the closest we've ever come to capturing that same magic. Larian pulled it off.

As for the other companions, I can't say. I thought Gale's story was interesting, but it never went anywhere (I might have missed something). I liked Wyll's psychodrama at first, but it quickly became tiresome; although he's not a bad character in the abstract, and he has wants and desires and flaws, he has no charisma or personality. He is very boring. I was skipping most of my dialogue with him by the end.

I'm saving my interactions with the other companions for my next playthrough. While I would bet that Shadowheart is the best overall, I'm sure the others are still good.

So comparisons back to Dragon Age: Origins are as obvious as they are intentional. I use such comparisons mostly as a form of praise. But this same standard also draws forth my major criticism of how the companions are written: compared to a Dragon Age game, they are shallow.

One of the best things about Inquisition is how your companions seem to have their own lives whenever you return to Skyhold. There's always something going on in camp. The characters fight with each other, they argue, they play, they spar, they dance; Skyhold feels thrillingly alive. Checking in on Cullen is always a reward, because you get some new scene of him struggling with lyrium withdrawl, or filling out his taxes, or whatever else is going on in his life at that moment.

With one very notable exception, BG3 has nothing like this. Companions will occasionally have things to say in camp, but they never interact with each other, and they mostly stay put in their tents. If you check in on them, they will add in one line of dialogue about whatever most recently happened--"That fight with those Illithids sure was tough, eh?"--and nothing more. These single-line comments are often sentimentally identical between everyone in camp, too, so they're more like punishment for clicking on your friends than a reward. I do not need, "So Wyll is a warlock. Cool." to be repeated eight times with slightly different verbiage; I get it.

Shadowheart is not a shallow character. She's complex and interesting. But when I return to camp to speak with her, she never has anything new to say--except when the story is progressing--and she rarely has new dialogue options. Compared to Morrigan, her dialogue trees are feeble and unimpressive.

^{Although you can kiss her while covered in blood. So that's something.}

For such a huge game, with so many different characters to talk to and places to explore, I find this disappointing. Origins had countless small but memorable character moments: when the dog steals Morrigan's underwear, or when Sten has a growling contest with the dog. These are but two small examples. The absence of similar moments in a game so obviously inspired by Origins is severely felt.

I'm also underwhelmed by her and other companions' reactions to significant plot events. The revelation of the Dark Urge's true identity is HEAVY; when you go around telling it to your friends, they have nothing to say except, "That's crazy. Back to the road, then?"

Remember how the party reacts when you discover that you are Revan in KotOR? It's an epic scene that can lead to party member death. BG3 needed much more of that. There are brief moments of introspection after Act I, and a bit after Act II, but it isn't nearly enough.

There are Origins-style party dialogues between companions while exploring, however, and these are excellent (although they're a tad slow on the back-and-forth).

The choice to make every character bisexual, unlike the Dragon Age games, does a lot to undermine the strength of the cast. This doesn't bother me as much as it appears to bother some other people online, but my three bros Gale, Wyll, and Astarion all flirted with me aggressively, as though I'm the one hot chick at a party. This is weird. It's not realistic, and it ruins the bromance we had bubbling.

Dorian is gay in Inquisition. This fact plays into his character and personality. He will flirt with you subtly if you are a male character. If you turn him down, the two of you don't halt the progress of your relationship: you continue to have an epic bromance that rivals anything written in any other game. The friendship between Harold and Dorian is palpable. It's so good.

You can be friends with Gale after you tell him that you don't want to fuck. But there's nothing like that transition to pure friendship. Things seem to stop abruptly. And I hate that my dialogue options don't reflect how I actually feel whenever this happens--which is a problem found throughout the whole of the game.

I'm again reminded of Origins. The relationship between a male Warden and Morrigan is nothing like the relationship between a between a female Warden and Morrigan. Everything changes. The nature of how the characters interact is completely different, and Morrigan grows in very different ways. Both are brilliant, but they are not interchangeable. This is because two women have different kinds of relationships than one hot man and one hot woman can have. That isn't a judgment. That isn't an ideological statement. It's a simple fact of human social dynamics.

BG3 does not seem to care. Gale treats a male Dark Urge the exact same way he treats a female Dark Urge. This is unrealistic and lazy, to be frank, and Larian should have done better.

It isn't a dealbreaker. The companions are still very good. But they aren't as good as in Origins and Inquisition, or perhaps even KotOR, when I feel like they easily could have been.

There's So Much More

Baldur's Gate 3 is like diving into a swimming pool. You find yourself deep underwater with no bottom in sight. The water is cool and refreshing, evoking memories of summer days from childhood. But as you get closer toward the steps, its sides begin to narrow. Soon your toes scrape against the ground. The depth was just an illusion. Most of the pool is far too shallow for any kind of dive, and you don't have all that much room to swim around in after all.

The water is still cool. It's still refreshing. It's still nostalgic. The pool is still nice. But it isn't as deep as you'd hoped.

Act I is the deep end. It is brilliant, thrilling, and very long. But the whole game cannot sustain that level of quality. The rest of the story then vacillates from high highs to low lows, but the depth of the beginning is never found again. The shallower ends of Act II and III are still good. They're still worth playing. Were they any other RPG, I would recommend them. But they're not what Early Access had seemed to promise.

I've barely even started this review. There is so much more to discuss. There's so much more that I like and so much more like I loathe about Baldur's Gate 3. I have serious qualms with the way the player's dialogue options are written, and I strongly dislike the Dark Urge's character quest in Act II. I think that many of the minor annoyances that a player is likely to experience are present for no reason except that Larian was determined to make this game multiplayer, and I haven't even mentioned how much I like the score (I do. It's great.). I had intended to write about all of this and much more when I started taking notes.

But I think I've said enough. You get the idea. Baldur's Gate 3 is a good game. It may even be a great game. It has countless moments of brilliance and phenomenal side characters, who are among the best in the entire genre. I don't know if they match up to BioWare in its prime, but they come very close. No RPG like this has come out since The Witcher 3. It has singlehandedly brought serious cRPGs back into the mainstream. There is no one for whom I would not recommend it.

...or that's what I would say, were it not for the bugs. The bugs nearly ruined my experience. They tested my patience and made me hurried when I should have been relaxed. They led me to dislike this game much more than I would have otherwise. They are what make me the most trepidatious about giving a recommendation.

If you don't mind the risk of having your save corrupted and dialogue sequences skipping themselves, have at it. You will enjoy BG3. But otherwise I strongly urge you to wait. Give it a month. Maybe even give it a year. You will play a significantly better game than I did. And when all of these issues are fixed, anyone who likes RPGs has to give Baldur's Gate 3 a go.

I played the game on PC with a purchase from Steam. Total playtime: 55 hours according to my save file, but 70 hours according to Steam. The difference is probably the result of savescumming and being forced to replay content; I wouldn't be surprised if I lost about 15 hours between the two by the end.

Pick up a copy on Steam or GoG.

Aliens: Dark Descent has too many problems to list. Not small issues, but serious design flaws. The gameplay lacks fundamental features that needed to be included for any game attempting survival horror-tactics like this. The narrative components are poorly written, poorly translated, and poorly paced. The game festers with serious and often progress-impeding bugs, and large amounts of patching will be required over the next few months.

All this together should be disqualifying. These things should make Dark Descent, at best, a mediocre AA game, hardly worth $40. This should not be an experience worth your time.

These are the things Aliens: Dark Descent should be. From a distant vantage point, as I mull over the notes from my playthrough, I can’t imagine any game with so many fundamental issues being more than tedious and aggravating. They should be disqualifying. This should not be a good game.

Yet should isn't is. What Dark Descent is is significantly more than the sum of its parts. What it is is relentlessly engaging and thoroughly unique. What it is is the game I was unable to put down for twenty hours straight, which has consumed my thoughts for the last three days. I still regret that it's over.

Aliens: Dark Descent is not mediocre. Despite so many flaws, it may even be brilliant. It represents the best Alien game since Isolation nine years ago, and enters the pantheon of must-play games for fans of the films (alongside AvP2). But when you sit down to play, be ready to grapple with some frustration, and don’t forget your Raid Bug Spray—for aliens and technical issues both, you’ll be sure to need it.

An X-COM ImSim?

In Aliens: Dark Descent, the player takes control of a small squad of United States Colonial Marines who have crash-landed on the planet Lethe, which is both overrun with xenomorphs and coincidentally looks exactly like LV-426 from Alien and Aliens. Balance resources and the wellbeing of your marines against a doomsday clock as you struggle to repair your ship, the Otago, over the course of eleven persistent-world story missions.

The bird’s-eye perspective of Dark Descent will make it sound like an X-COM clone. A class-based strategy game about managing a clock, customizing and taking care of individual soldiers in and out of the field, while juggling an overworld campaign and the realities of day-to-day military operations.

The metagame might as well be a simplified version of X-COM: Alien Invasion. Managing your soldiers’ health, giving them new names and haircuts, researching gear, buying guns, and investing in equipment: the influence is undeniable.

But the rest isn’t an X-COM clone like WH40k: Daemonhunters at all. Instead it is a pauasable squad-based real-time tactics/stealth game in the vein of the Commandos series or Shadow Tactics: Blade of the Shogun. Dark Descent’s main innovation is that the squad is always controlled as a single entity; an AI system will determine which marine is best suited to perform any individual task when the order is issued. You are never permitted to split the squad otherwise.

Most of any mission is spent sneaking through a colonial facility or space station while attempting to avoid xenomorphs or human enemies. Directly engaging in combat causes each marine to individually generate Stress, which slowly accumulates into debilitating debuffs if not reduced through pills and resting. Of course engaging threats directly also risks death, as xenos will begin Hunting the player down after even a brief encounter with a single drone, leading to raised Hive Alertness.

You can think of this like an alarm in Metal Gear Solid, with a punishing twist: if Hive Alertness gets too high, the aliens on a map will become more aggressive, and special elite xenos—Crushers and Praetorians, which should be familiar to any player of Colonial Marines 13-- will spawn in to track you down.

^{Detected. Hunted. Onslaught incoming. Better find a chokepoint.}

This feeds into the other primary innovation of Dark Descent: each mission is persistent. The scarcity of resources such as medkits, toolkits, and ammunition, as well as the ever-increasing difficulty of the aliens on a map, incentivizes the player to withdraw before completing every objective. Once withdrawn, your squad can rest, recover HP and mental Trauma accrued from Stress damage, refit their gear, or swap out with different marines entirely for a second run. Or third run. Or fourth run.

You can complete missions as quickly or slowly as you see fit. If things get too intense, head back to the APC and bug out; the level will be there tomorrow. The catch is that the Wey-Yu space station in orbit is set to launch nukes at the surface in 28 days: run down that clock, and the only thing that’s going to be left of the Otago is a smear on the side of an asteroid.

Prowling around dark, atmospheric, and persistent levels while staring at your motion detector, evading xenos, looting crates, and searching for text logs is what leads me to describe Dark Descent as a strategy/tactics game take on the Immersive Simulation formula. The levels are open-ended, generally featuring redundant and alternative paths for your marines to take while ducking into cover and avoiding patrolling xenos. The game feels a lot like System Shock or Aliens: Isolation levels as viewed from a security camera's perspective. It could also be viewed as a survival horror game fused with the RTT genre, although the focus on character progression tilts the scale toward ImSim for me.

^{Shortcut unlocked_.}

While sneaking around, you’ll always have support from the APC. With it you’ll be able to extract your squad or redeploy elsewhere on a level, safely rolling past any drones on patrol. The APC can be controlled indirectly from the map screen and sent to various pre-determined positions throughout a level. Its turrets wreck xenos, and watching it light up an approaching horde over the course of a few seconds is immensely satisfying. Using the APC as fire support is one of the most enjoyable features of Dark Descent, and I wish the player had more control over its movement.

But while the primary gameplay loop is both fundamentally solid and a unique fusion of several different types of games, it is far from perfect. The total inability to micromanage individual marines was clearly intentional—there’s a loading screen tip that states this outright—but often creates frustration and pointless confusion. For example, Recon marines can learn to use a sniper, and this sniper can be outfitted with a silencer. This is the only way to take out patrolling xenos without alerting the hive, and is hugely useful during the stealth phase of missions.

But you aren’t even permitted to change the marching order of your squad while deployed, and when ordered to use a special ability, marines won’t path to a location as they would in similar games. This ultimately leads to the bizarre situation where I have to march my entire squad out into the open, allowing myself to be detected, as I maneuver my Recon to a spot where he’ll have line of sight on the target I want neutralized. If the Recon is in the party’s rear, you might have to step your entire squad all the way out in front of an approaching drone until he can take his shot, at which point it will be too late.

^{When you're a world-class special forces xeno killing operative, but can't figure out how to move two inches to the right.}

Marines also are too stupid to aim at xenos with their special weapons. The shotgun, for example, has a widely expanding cone of effect, with two sections to demark different levels of damage. But because of how it expands, and because you cannot target xenos directly but only the ground they’re running across, the shotgun is paradoxically the least accurate weapon at close range—good luck hitting a moving target, after a delay, with two pixels of a shotgun, at point-blank.

This same issue affects every weapon. The RPG seems useful, and can be in a pinch, but your marine will not adjust her aim once the order to fire has been given. So if that Queen moves slightly to the left, you’ll miss. Combined with how awkward maneuvering individual marines is when you can only control the squad as a single entity, I can’t help but think that some amount of autoaim would have been appreciated.

^{For if xenos get close. But not TOO close!}

Beyond the RPG, shotgun, and sniper rifle, special gear consists of mines and flamers. These aren’t weapons the marines will make use of themselves, but special attacks that can be queued up using Command Points, a regenerating resource that is expended on abilities. I found Command Point skills to be useful throughout the entire game, and always satisfying. But, at least on Normal, they were practically infinite. By the time my Squad Leader hit level ten, I could never expend them all in a single fight. Even if I did, they would all be back in the blink of an eye. The balance never seemed right. Some kind of ordinance resource to limit use of mines and grenades would have made sense; as it is, you can spam both infinitely.

Combat itself is not complicated. Once detected, the squad will open fire on any xenos in sight. You can place Suppression cones for a Command Point in a single direction, but the most you’ll be able to do thereafter is choose which direction to walk or run in. Marines will fire while waking backward, which means that kiting xenos while juggling weapon powers is about all there is to going loud. This gives Dark Descent’s combat sections a Dawn of War 2 kind of feel, and I wonder how much the game would change if you were given three or four squads to manage at a single time; I doubt it would be too much to do.

The simple ability to split your squad within a small radius around the Leader via a special ability would do a lot to make the game feel less like a kiting simulator and more like an actual tactics game, and there are places in the campaign--especially when dealing with human enemies--where the lack of such an ability feels less like intentional design and more like an oversight.

^{Some of the strongest sections are about point defense, a bit like last year's Starship Troopers RTS, where you can set up sentry turrets. See Fort Sentry pictured above. But at times like these, the inability to individually position marines for maximum efficiency is the most severely felt. Splitting the squad to opposite sides of a barricade, for example, could help reduce xeno acid splash damage in emergencies--but such a thing is not permitted.}

I similarly feel like the stealth mechanics aren’t developed enough to warrant their overall importance. Avoiding xenos whenever possible is vital to keeping Stress and Hive Alertness low; these are the game’s real killers. But when it comes down to it, there are no stealth mechanics except for monitoring blips on your Motion Detector, keeping out of LoS, and making use of the silenced sniper whenever possible.

That’s it. There’s nothing else to do.

While I appreciate Stress and Alertness as mechanics in theory, they cascade together in the perfectly wrong way for a stealth game. Being spotted leads to combat, which causes Stress; combat leads to being Hunted, which generates Stress until the hive gives up; being Hunted leads back to combat, which leads to Stress; being hunted also generates Hive Alertness, which leads to increasing difficulty and further combat.

In other words, you’d better not get spotted. That would be fine in a stealth game—but is a real-time tactics X-COM clone with two and a half stealth mechanics really a stealth game at its core? Its incentive structures say it is, but the mechanics disagree.

In any case, Hive Alertness is frustrating and overburdening, but Stress can be dealt with easily. The primary method of both saving the game and reducing Stress is through welding your squad into a room that xenos can’t reach, then resting. This costs between one and four toolkits, and reduces between 90 and 150 Stress, depending on the traits your marines have. resting can also regenerate HP and ammo with the right perks.

I’m not sure that chilling out for an hour in a tin can while xenos skitter around inches beyond the door would be the most stress relieving experience, but then I’m not in the USCMC.

^{Let me chill out for a sec in this acid bloodbath. It really hits the spot.}

The resting mechanic makes toolkits vitally important to long-term success and gives a strong structure of play to the game. Get spotted, find tools, weld yourself in a room, repeat. You’ll always be on the lookout for dead-ends and storage closets that will make for good safehouses. This is one of the primary ways the game cultivates its excellent sense of tension.

But the punitiveness of interactions between combat, Stress, and Alertness might make resting too important overall. At one point in the game, when I found myself with plenty of toolkits and five marines near 300% Stress, I simply welded, rested, unwelded, welded, rested, unwelded, welded, and rested again within a single room; I thus found my squad back up to 100% in all respects except armor, which can’t be regenerated mid-mission. There is no penalty in this scenario for causing such a huge delay. Survivors on the map will never be abducted by xenos when you aren't looking and objectives will never time out.

A definite mark in the game’s favor in this regard is that many levels feature human enemies. These encounters turn Dark Descent from kiting simulator to cover shooter, lending much-needed variety. More importantly, humans lack Alertness, and don’t Hunt the marines after a fight. Stress will still be generated when human enemies are engaged, but these occasional firefights break up the monotony of rest spam, and let off some of the game's immense tension. It’s a huge relief when you come onto a room filled with cultists, launch a few grenades, exchange shots from cover, and suffer no further consequences (except, perhaps, a point of damage or two).

I completed the game with nine days remaining, finishing most levels in a single deployment. Without knowing how many missions there were in total, I felt extreme pressure not to waste any time. This ended up wearing out my highest level marines more than was needed, but saved me a few days in the long run. Since each day passed also adds to the hive difficulty by one point, I’d say I made the right choice.

The lack of a manual save feature would seem to suggest that Dark Descent wants to be played ironman, like any X-COM clone should. But I found the imprecise controls and immensely punishing outcomes for high level marine death to make this an impossibility in all but the most minor of circumstances. In X-COM 2, losing one of your best soldiers feels horrible, but improved armor and weapons make catching up underleveled squaddies less daunting than it might otherwise be.

In Dark Descent, gear is also tied to marine level. Only level 10 marines, for example, can make use of the ludicrously overpowered plasma rifle—even after it’s been researched. Since lower level marines also lack important skills for survival, a deployment of five level one marines into mission 11 isn’t much more potent than a deployment of four level one marines in mission 1. They will be using the same gear, with perhaps slightly improved armor from xenotech.

The overall upgrade scheme of weapons is excellent despite this small pacing issue. While the plasma rifle’s destructive capabilities are obscene, the other weapons are never directly better than what precedes them. I made sure at least one marine still had a basic M41-A even in the final mission because of how useful its grenade launcher was. The Heavy Pulse Rifle is better than the M41-A, but is it an upgrade worth your UGL? Hard to say, which makes it a compelling decision to make.

^{We got tactical smart missiles, phase-plasma pulse rifles, RPGs, we got sonic electronic ball breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks...}

The various other weapons aren’t quite as compelling. No more than one marine needs to carry mines, and the flamer is utterly useless (at least, I found it to be). The shotgun remains king throughout the entire game. Sidearms, also, are entirely pointless; I used them three or four times in total. The SMG did not prove worth the 200 Resources I paid for it.

The marines themselves are much like X-COM’s soldiers, with a suite of customization options, classes, and individual perks. Class-specific level benefits are unlocked slowly and require a monetary investment, while general character perks are earned each level. These are things like +HP, +Accuracy, +Crit Chance, or the one-time removal of the marine’s base negative trait.

Yes. Every marine begins the with a single negative personality trait. These range from minor— “minus one HP” or “starts with one fewer magazine”—to unbelievably punishing, such as “steals twenty resources at the end of every mission,” or, “deals one damage to a friendly marine while resting.”

I can appreciate what the developers were going for, but the fact that literally every marine has a negative trait, and that some of these seriously disrupt a mission, I think they went overboard. These traits can be removed upon level up, but only with a degree of luck: the perk options a character receives are random.

This system would have been stronger if the traits changed the ways a marine acted in more ambivalent ways, conferring some advantage while also carrying with them a penalty. As it is, you can guess that the guy who dealt his friends damage never got to go on any missions.

As marines go on deployments, they’ll also accumulate Trauma. Trauma has various effects, but is always negative, and generally works similarly to traits. This works much better in the game overall, because Trauma can be managed through time spent in the Psych Ward. It’s a strong incentive to scatter marine eggs throughout as many different baskets as possible, to make sure that your best characters will always have enough time get back on their feet between important deployments.

The classes are Squad Leader, Recon, Medic, Tecker, and Gunner, and do what you would expect. Each marine is promoted to one of these five roles at third level. I like the customizability of the squad overall, but I would have preferred weapon and armor upgrades more along the lines of X-COM 2: with the exception of the Gunner, every class uses the same main weapons; and with the exception of Recon, they use the same side and heavy weapons, too. Class restricted shotguns, DMRs, and explosives to be used as primary, rather than Command Point-only, weapons would do a lot for variety’s sake over the course of a campaign, and add in some much-needed differentiation between the classes. As it is, they might look different, but they feel mostly the same.

^{Absolutely badasses!}

Dark Descent is trying to do a lot. The designers have combined three separate genres into a single cohesive experience. It features the combat of Dawn of War 2, the stealth of Shadow Tactics, and the campaign management of X-COM 2, and synthesizes them together into something new. It does this remarkably well.

Yet it feels like the game could stand to do even more. More complexity. More resources. More control over individual units. More mechanics for stealth and maneuvering. Sprawling as the experience already is, I want more.

But it’s telling that, despite listing so many gripes with the game, I never was seriously frustrated or annoyed with Dark Descent. If I felt I was unfairly spotted, or that a death wasn’t warranted, or a level’s layout didn’t make sense, an autosave was never more than five minutes back. I wanted so much more out of this game, but what is there works well enough that nothing more is needed. The only real source of aggravation over the course of my playtime was that there's no way to lock doors open--that is the one thing that I think desperately needs to be patched in.

So Dark Descent could be better. I have high hopes for a sequel, and the possibilities seem limitless: a DLC about returning to Hadley’s Hope; a standalone expansion where we play as WY PMCs; a sequel that does everything the same, but works in so much more. As a series, the idea of this game is incredibly exciting.

But even as a standalone game, it works. It’s a tense, engaging, and unique experience. I want more. I want to keep playing, and the moment I’m done here, I’m going to launch a second campaign on Hard.

Aliens: Dark Descent is a must-buy for Alien fans, and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys real-time tactics games and X-COM clones. The campaign is long and stuffed with content; it took me over twenty hours to complete everything, and I could have gone much slower. And while its $40 price tag goes hand-in-hand with AA quality and technical issues, at that price, it’s still more than worth it. So long as you’re willing to grapple with occasional crashes, rough performance, clipping, and graphical glitches, I would absolutely recommend this game for full price.

There is one problem I haven’t yet mentioned, though.

The Story

A bit like Daemonhunters, Dark Descent features a prominent linear narrative. You assume the role of Maeko Hayes, the deputy administrator of a space station around Lethe in orbit, and follow her as a player character throughout the campaign. She’s controlled directly during a handful of missions, as well as the tutorial, but otherwise plays the role of “the Commander” in X-COM.

Maeko’s sections of the game are very weak. Her prologue is borderline awful, and the rest of her missions are even worse. I don’t mind the idea of injecting personality into the Commander character, but her degree of importance in the plot—as a minor administrator—creates dissonance with the gameplay, and leads us to what is Dark Descent’s worst quality: its narrative.

The Last of Us on PS3 is renowned for its story. I launched this blog to complain about its sequel almost three years ago. And if you tally up every pre-rendered cutscene in TLoU, the total runtime comes out to about ninety minutes.

If you do the same for Aliens: Dark Descent, the total runtime is over one hundred minutes.

Aliens: Dark Descent does not have 10% more story than The Last of Us.

An impressive amount of money and effort has gone into the narrative. Every line of dialogue is voice acted, and the cutscenes look incredible for a AA production. Care has been taken. The developers wanted their game to match up to the big leagues.

There’s one thing they didn’t put time and care into, though: the writing.

The developers are French. It shows. The game’s script is riddled with bizarre dialogue that could only have been written by a non-native speaker of English. While the dialogue isn’t as cringe-inducingly unbearable as a Mass Effect: Andromeda or Forespoken, it has a different, uncanny quality that I found impossible to endure, as well as countless cringe-inducing verbal references back to the old movies. In small doses it might have been tolerable, but there’s so much, always in your face, always distracting from the gameplay, that I had to resort to skipping as much of the story as possible. It would have been a dealbreaker if I hadn’t been able to.

^{Beyond endless melodrama, every character refers to the aliens not as "xenos," but "critters." This makes Dark Descent the second Eurojank game I've played this year that endlessly uses this word, despite it being almost never said unironically in the US.}

Beyond being overlong and poorly scripted, the plot is crammed with tired tropes and ridiculous cliches, and ultimately tells a story more reminiscent of Luc Besson than James Cameron. The third act especially is so ridiculous that I was laughing out loud at every line of dialogue, and the final confrontation is almost a parody of the franchise’s creative staleness--ironic, considering Dark Descent's mechanical originality. The story is so ridiculous and poorly done, with such high production values, and it takes itself so seriously, that it borders on “so bad it’s good.”

Unfortunately, that’s not what I wanted from an Alien game. But oh well. A strong narrative would have been a huge boon to Dark Descent, but a bad one is a fairly minor ding. It’s a strategy game at its core, and you should play it for its strategy gameplay—not its story. The atmosphere is otherwise strong, and the designers clearly had a good sense of the property. That is a good thing when it comes to sound and art design, but may just be the problem when it comes to narrative.

I’m hoping they might do a better job with a sequel, or their next entry to the same franchise. Like, maybe they’ll hire someone who speaks English as a first language. Someone like me. I’m available. Hire me to do it. Please. I will write you the most kickass Aliens story you've ever seen.