Pointed Reviews: Games in 2021

The following is a collection of reviews of games I wrote in 2021 that I consider to be “pointed” pieces of criticism. These are reviews that tend to operate with a specific thesis or angle in their critique. Some of them have been edited slightly. I’ve chosen not to include my star ratings, as I don’t think they’re generally particularly relevant. These were all posted on Backloggd, a video game journaling site. You can follow me there to see these reviews and more by clicking here.

As a brief aside, I’ve omitted two reviews that I’m quite chuffed with, so if you’d like to check them out: Hellsinker review, which is more of a comedic review, and my Psycho Dream review, which is more of a word salad.

I mostly write about games, and while I’d like to write more about other things, it’s generally the criticism I’ve written that I’m most proud of right now. If you’d like to read some reviews of music from 2021, click here, and if you’re interested in movie reviews from 2021, click here.

Rez (2001)

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances…” — Oscar Wilde

Rez is, in a word, cool. It’s very cool.

It looks cool. It sounds cool. Its music is cool. It’s a playable screensaver; this is a compliment. Sit back. Relax. Vibe. Let this masterfully crafted psychedelic cyberpunk demo- disc wash over you. It is a beautiful game, but beauty is skin deep. A criticism that will likely be lobbed in the direction of Rez is that its gameplay lacks depth. And this is true. Mechanically, it’s a bit shallow. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t want a bit more going on in the gameplay department. Maybe some kind of rhythm component.

But to say that Rez is “pretty but shallow” is wrong. Rez does not lack depth in spite of its aesthetics; its aesthetics are its depth. It is visually and sonically a delight in every way. That’s not shallowness. That’s what beauty is.

Custer’s Revenge (1982)

I feel within myself often the compulsion to rate and rank things. That’s why I typically rate the games I’ve played. I attempt to rationalize and standardize these ratings, but really, they’re a failed attempt to condense the whole of my experience into a single number. It’s a fraught process, but I’m compelled to do it anyway.

Why do I say this as a preface?

Custer’s Revenge is the worst game I’ve ever played.

In trying to rationalize my ratings, I ask what makes something worthy of the best, and eventually, what’s worthy of the worst. It ultimately comes down to instinct. What makes something good or bad is mostly an attempt to generate a post hoc understanding of my own experience. I have ideas about what all these numbers mean, and doing so means I have to also consider what it means to be worthy of being called the worst. And nothing is more deserving of the label “the worst” than this.

When most games are “bad”, it's because they’re buggy, or messy, or ugly. At the intersection between art and technology, video games are often subject to an assessment based on very concrete qualities, treating it more like software. How does it run, how does it look and sound, is it balanced, does it have extra features, does it crash, is it fun? But there are oh-so-many ways for a game to be “bad”. Because they’re not just programs. In my view, the one way that we can truly assess whether something is “bad” is whether or not it is harmful. There is no question in my mind that Custer’s Revenge is harmful.

I played Custer’s Revenge for maybe about a minute. It was probably not any more than sixty seconds. I regret every single one of those seconds. I feel ashamed to have played this crass, racist, misogynistic trash. Every inch of it is repugnant. Wasting even a fraction of a second on this game makes me a worse person. There are few pieces of art that can invoke within me such self-loathing. I literally felt ill, a turning in my stomach, a flush of shame at what I had done. All from simply playing it for a few moments. I suppose I have myself to blame.

It’s a bad video game, too. Even without its abhorrent subject matter, its gameplay is repetitive, dull, and uninteresting. Avoiding repetitive patterns of arrows and then rapidly pressing the button. That’s all there is to it. This isn’t a matter of it aging poorly, either. There are masterpieces of early game design from this era. Critics hated it at the time, too. It’s not bad because it’s old; it’s bad because it’s bad. There really is no redeeming quality in the slightest.

Even its name is an offense. Imagine taking the rape of an indigenous woman by General Custer, a man who has since become a symbol of the violent colonization of the Western US in the 19th century, and, as such, was once described by Vine Deloria Jr. as “the Adolph Eichmann of the plains”, and then framing that rape as “revenge”.

The developers claimed that it was all in good fun, no offense was intended, that they only sought to entertain. Well, I’m not entertained. I’m not laughing. I’m not smiling. I’m not having a good time. And I have very pointed questions for anyone who is.

Custer’s Revenge is, in its totality, fully deserving of being considered one of the worst games ever made. It has earned every single word of spurn volleyed into its back. Just thinking about what it is, the fact that anyone would put time and effort into making this, makes me angry and disappointed. It is a cruel, racist, misogynistic, and juvenile game. Its mere existence gives pornography a bad name. If only they had taken this abomination and buried it in New Mexico instead.

Colossal Cave Adventure (1977)

What makes Colossal Cave Adventure interesting to this day is its own limitations. It’s a rickety little game, accepting few inputs as valid. It’s often frustrating to convince the game to do what you want it to do. And in being a game entirely in text, the labyrinthine geometry of the caves can be incredibly difficult to envision.

But it is because of these limitations, not in spite of them, that the game is able to capture your imagination. The arcane black box of its outputs makes you constantly wonder just what is possible in the world of this game. The ever-perplexing caves seem fantastical and sometimes impossible, wandering blindly through a maze that seems to elude your understanding. The things that produce these feelings are limitations, and by modern standards would be considered failures. And I can’t say I had a lot of fun playing Colossal Cave Adventure. But these feelings are palpable and memorable and represent a potency in text adventures that makes me want to keep exploring.

Colossal Cave Adventure’s own limitations create a vast negative space in which players can fill with imagination and mystery. That’s a kind of magic that we should harness more in games.

Innsmouth no Yakata (1995)

Survival Horror, as a genre, often feels hard to pin down due to its particular origins in adventure games. The prototype tends to be one of attrition and riddles, a game about navigating a maze of monsters while solving puzzles and unlocking doors. But what if you reduced that down, boiled it down like syrup into its absolute most basic form? I think different people will have different ideas of what that syrup would taste like. But it might taste something like Innsmouth no Yakata (The Mansion of Innsmouth).

The game consists of running around corridors, searching for keys and map orbs, and shooting Lovecraftian beasties that get in your way. Your ammunition is limited, so you also scour for bullets, as well as health pick-ups. It’s almost like a dungeon crawl. But here’s the kicker: there’s a time limit. A short one, too! You never get more than like, 3 minutes to complete a level. Unlike most Survival Horror games, which are slow trudges through corridors of dread, playing through Innsmouth no Yakata is a frantic, desperate sprint through a haunted house.

In a way, Innsmouth no Yakata is almost a precursor to the cult classic Killer7, Grasshopper Manufacture’s own radical reinterpretation of Survival Horror. It’s a unique experience, and I’m curious what it would feel like while jacked into the Virtual Boy headset.

Now, does all this singularity make Innsmouth no Yakata a good game? Not really. It’s too barebones and too repetitive to be much more than a diversion. And I bet there are other games that have figured this style out better. But it’s an interesting piece within the lineage of Survival Horror, showcasing a unique take on just what this genre can be capable of doing, all while draped in that eerie VB red monochrome.

Tender Frog House (2020)

Tender Frog House, a game that’s described by its creator as “a forum post of a game”, is cynical. It’s not that it’s technically wrong about many of its comments on wholesome games. In fact, its responses to wholesome games that view themselves as a unique political statement are incisive in their own way. It offers a criticism of this claim and deconstructs its intellectual failures. It also admirably calls for more forms of “sincerity” to escape the confines of rigid nicecore. These aren’t wholly original ideas, drawing greatly on critical theorists such as Theodor W. Adorno, and the game itself is inspired by a Scott Benson tweet, but they are conveyed with a precision and a bite that calls attention. And they have truth to them. Certainly, being cozy is not a radical act. Those who make this claim are fooling themselves. If this is all the game took aim at, I might not be writing this. But Tender Frog House comes off as taking a very broad swing against not just a particular subset of wholesome game creators, but about all twee art, and eventually the purpose of art itself. And this is where the incisive critique turns into a rat’s nest.

Tender Frog House pre-empts my response by refuting the notion that this perspective is cynical, that this is simply a knee-jerk response that defends a conservative mindset. Well, guess what? It is cynical. But it’s not cynical for the sake of its perspectives on the paradigm of wholesome games, but rather, its perspective on their individual ethos. Tender Frog House more or less explicitly states that those who create so-called “wholesome games” are in fact engaging in what amounts to a deeply conservative pastiche which only serves to perpetuate a fascist capitalist society. Further, those who find joy or pleasure in this art or view it as a means of expressing themselves are in fact experiencing a false consciousness which only furthers that fascist capitalist society.

This is an exemplar of cynicism: calling people phony. I refuse to adopt a worldview where people finding or making art that makes them happy is fascist, even in the most metaphorical sense. Tender Frog House seems to find no room for this; either your art is revolutionary praxis, or it’s reactionary propaganda. Could it simply not be that people make games about cute frogs because it makes them happy? Is that not enough? Why must art only serve the purpose of political action, one of radical transformation? Art serves many purposes, and just because it performs either an ineffective or maybe even ever-so-slight counteraction does not mean it is not ultimately worthy of being enjoyed. Art acts on us in innumerable ways, in the mind and the body. Not all of these experiences are worth politicizing. That which is anodyne may not cure anything, but that doesn’t mean it won’t pair well with some wine. As I stated, I think the notion that coziness, sincerity, and self-care are in-and-of-themselves radical is false. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth having.

Moreover, I haven’t found supposedly more revolutionary “serious games” to be effective on that front, either. Tender Frog House certainly doesn’t inspire me, either as an artist or as a political actor. Its call to action fell flat on its face. Maybe I am projecting, but it seems it instructs me to adopt a realpolitik of aesthetics, where I may only offer affordances to or create that which is unequivocally revolutionary. Well, personally? I have found little of that art enjoyable. I have played the Molle Industria games, and others. These games don’t invite any transformative thought, they’re incredibly didactic, and frankly, they’re not particularly persuasive. I don’t think art is a particularly effective form of praxis, whether it’s cozy or cynical or something else entirely. I’m not convinced any of these serious games bring us any closer to a better society than a cute game about frogs.

Let’s stop pretending art is a uniquely precious vector for political action. I doubt that line of thinking leads anywhere. But who knows. There is a reason Adorno hated jazz. I think time has proven him wrong. We’ll just have to wait for time to pass so we can see about Tender Frog House.

Metroid Dread (2021)

Metroid, in its own way, has always been a series about transformation. Early on, this was only in the most abstract sense, as Samus accumulated power-ups and the morph ball. The second entry begins to make its themes of transformation more literal with the metamorphosis of the metroids. From Super Metroid, to Fusion, to now Dread, Samus’s suit is a protean machine that constantly changes shape, color, and function. The Prime sub-series, too, deals with transformation constantly. Even if you stripped these thematic trappings away, you would still be left with a game that is fundamentally about transformation. It’s a series in which Samus (and thus, the player) constantly change, their abilities constantly expanding and shifting in scope.

So perhaps it’s fitting that Metroid went through its own dramatic transformation over the years.

Metroid Dread was pretty universally considered vaporware until recently. All that was really publicly known about it was that it existed at one point. Now, we know a bit more: it was originally planned for the DS, but the team felt they couldn’t create the game with the technology at the time. And so, Metroid Dread lay in its tomb for nearly two decades, like a dormant torizo, until Mercury Steam, the team behind Samus Returns, came into the picture. That this game even came out is shocking. But here it is, somehow.

Here is my question: where is all the dread in Metroid Dread?

It can be easy to forget, now that we live during a golden age of Metroidvanias, that the Metroid series was pretty radical at the time of its inception. It was a strange hybrid of platformer and exploration that wasn’t really seen before. Super Metroid might seem trite or quaint now that it is recognized as a blueprint for the genre, but it was (and in many ways still is) deeply ambitious. Decades later, select elements of those games’ design were absorbed into the cultural landscape, improved upon, experimented with, and modified. Metroid Dread reflects these changes by adapting to them, but the result is something that feels fundamentally different from its origins.

That isn’t a criticism. If Metroid has taught us anything, it’s that sometimes change can be good. Dread is a slick, visually stunning package, informed by well over a decade of iteration and innovation, designed with precision and intention, never letting you lose forward momentum for a second. Dread is a sublime action game that represents a peak in the 2D series’ combat. It all feels dynamic and sharp in a way fighting as Samus has never felt before. In the early days, though, Metroid wasn’t really ever a game about combat.

Metroid Dread is an action game. Early games were games with action in them. Maybe that seems like an awfully fine distinction, but it represents a long-lasting shift in a design ethos. This isn’t new, either; the series has consistently drifted closer towards action. Prime also showed this change, as the third entry, Corruption, was a far more linear action title than the first venture into 3D. Zero Mission perhaps exemplifies this the most clearly, as a remake of the original NES title that was far more action-heavy and far more directed. The NES game was awkward and janky. Even in the ever-venerated Super Metroid, Samus can feel unwieldy and floaty. This would typically be seen as bad, but it also lends itself to a feeling of spaciness, weirdness, and unwelcomeness that fit the games well.

With the release of Dread, we’ve seen more and more newcomers come to the series, and this is perhaps the perfect entry point for many players. (Speedruns of this game are going to be beautiful.) The game is loaded with affordances and quality-of-life improvements. The whole game is designed to be an almost frictionless exploration experience. While past entries’ attempts to become more approachable had previously been fraught, Dread feels elegant and beautiful in its execution. Zero Mission and particularly Fusion were controversial because their sense of direction felt like hand-holding. Exploration was explicitly guided, and it was overbearing. (Personally, I think this could have been fixed by just providing the option to ask for hints, rather than forcing them onto the player.) Dread has no need for wordy signage, as it’s designed to guide the player silently and subtly through its world, rarely needing to instruct. Following along the critical path is a blissful glide through ZDR. There’s always a ragged edge, another door to open, another room to explore. It’s deeply satisfying and engrossing. Many of Dread’s optional upgrades are also puzzle-like, requiring strategic movement and platforming. This is a far cry from the old days when secrets were often hidden in random blocks with what seemed to be no real care.

Early on, Metroid wasn’t really about a frictionless experience, though. It was often just about getting lost. The original Metroid is filled with friction, with labyrinthine and repetitive corridors and dead ends. Metroid 2, on the other hand, pivoted hard into linearity, while Super established a more concrete formula. In it’s finest moments, Metroid was often about exploring without direction, beating on with uncertainty as the intrepid bounty hunter Samus. They were scary, weird, often incoherent games. For many, this makes the games altogether unapproachable, but it also conjured an enchanting mysteriousness that still affects me to this day.

Of note is also the series’ gradual emphasis on plot. This climaxed in the near-universally maligned Other M, but Metroid had been showing more of its story for years, with dialogue and lore. (Yes, I read the manga, too, don’t @ me.) Dread has a veritable plot, with plot twists and worldbuilding and an antagonist with motives. It’s apparently the end of the so-called Metroid arc, and how it goes about wrapping that up is interesting indeed. Meanwhile, Super Metroid was a masterpiece of wordless narrative, telling a story about very little, but filling it with contemplation and moodiness. (Prime did this well too, while also featuring robust lore in its scan logs.) It didn’t really have characters, and the writing essentially boiled down to an opening monologue. The rest was told by the shape of space and its inhabitants. They were tone pieces, at least for a moment, ever brief. The series has shied away from silent storytelling, despite always being capable of it when it wants to be, and supplements with big dialogue boxes.

The truth is there is very little dreadful in Metroid Dread. After all, it’s designed to be an empowering and engaging experience, not an off-putting one. There is plenty to be seen that is horrific or intense, but there is not much dread, no oppressive weight hovering over your shoulders as you stride into the dark. Even the E.M.M.I, the poster child of Dread, which upon encountering can be heart-pumping and tense, do not feel dreadful. They can instant-kill you and are unkillable (at first), but this design choice means that the generous checkpoint system implemented here was more or less necessary. As a result, the E.M.M.I become more like puzzles, and less like looming threats they seem to be. All of the game’s challenges can be overcome. The game is designed for you to overcome it. Metroid Dread is actually quite welcoming, inviting players both new and old into ZDR to romp through its caverns.

This is, by all accounts, to be recognized as good design. All these affordances, from improved game feel to improved world design, are what is considered in most circles to be good design. I agree. Metroid Dread is impeccably well made. It is the current apex in years of iteration. Cruising through an alien landscape as Samus Aran has never felt so good. But it’s important to recognize that all these improvements end up changing the character of the series significantly. It’s still Metroid, don’t get me wrong. Dread is bursting at the seams with series staples. But it has also taken on a very different tone. It has fundamentally different design goals. The series is allowed to change. It doesn’t need to be ambitious and weird anymore, and in many ways, it can’t be. It’s allowed to just be a great game. And Metroid Dread is not only a great game, but also one of the best in the series. After years and years of waiting, Metroid Dread finally emerged from its cocoon, and while it is fundamentally different, it really is stunning.

But I can’t lie. A part of me longs for the mystery and unease of the past, a past that perhaps barely existed at all. When Metroid was an eerie tone piece haunted by uncertainty and melancholy. When it was a world filled with dread.

Super Punch-Out!! (1994)

Within the vast library of verbs afforded to players in games, “to fight” is almost unilaterally prioritized. There are no doubt exceptions (entire genres of them) but the vast majority of games, as far as I know, expect the player to enact some form of violence within it. My dad routinely asks me, “Why are so many games about killing?” I ask him, “Why are so many movies about killing?” But this is usually an evasive maneuver, because the truth is, even compared to film, video games are dripping with violence. This is not intrinsically bad, obviously, but it does often lead to a want for games that explore a less violent verbset. There are so many things we can do in the world, so why must video games always boil down to fighting?

Super Punch-Out!!, meanwhile, is only about fighting. It’s not about anything else. After all, it’s a boxing game. (Sports video games, coincidentally, are perhaps the most popular non-violent genre.) Most games create elaborate contrivances (also known as “stories”) to justify their universe of violence. Boxing needs no justification, because it is, by definition, bouts of unjustified punching.

I’ll be honest: I’ve never really liked sports. It’s not a matter of disrespect; it’s a combination of personal history and personality. Something in my psychology doesn’t really line up with it. (For the record, this extends to e-sports, too. I would love to be able to grok fighting games, but grok them I do not.) I just don’t seem to have a competitive bone in my body, and if I do, it’s probably broken. Boxing itself can be kind of frightening to me if I think about it too much. Super Punch-Out!! is not only a boxing game, but it’s also themed more like professional wrestling, a hobby which unfortunately I cannot help but have an immediate revulsion towards. Li’l Mac’s opponents are a rogue’s gallery of cartoonish heels themed with mish-mashed stereotypes, ranging widely in degrees of offensiveness and cultural insensitivity.

And yet I love Super Punch-Out!!. Maybe it helps that it’s a single-player game. I had enjoyed the NES Punch-Out!! as a pre-teen, though I don’t think I ever got very far. The series’ combat is unique, functioning almost more like a puzzle game. King Hippo, from the NES, is perhaps the best illustration of this; you deliver a well-timed smack to his gaping gob and punch his stomach when his pants are quite literally down. I think everyone who’s played these games has one or two opponents that was their own mountain to conquer. For me, they were Macho Man, a tanned bodybuilder from Malibu, and Heike Kagero, a kabuki boxer who attacks you with his hair. (Did I mention this game is basically professional wrestling?) It took me days to take them down, Macho Man with his massive one-hit-KO spins, Kagero with his hair whipping across the screen. Every win is hard-fought, and every win is a flush of accomplishment hitting your system.

Again, fighting is literally the only thing you do in this game. Many games, even the most action-heavy, frame their combat within a world-space, full of ancillary systems. Here, there is no exterior world to explore, nowhere to escape to, nowhere to hide. There’s only boxing, only a flurry of fists. As a result, the boxing of Super Punch-Out!! is actually pretty mechanically dense, especially for the time. The NES version was, comparatively, a bit repetitive and a bit flat, but compared to its contemporaries, it was an incredibly complex combat system. The SNES sequel deepens this further, returning to the depth exhibited in the original arcade game. The deck is completely stacked against you. Li’l Mac is a tiny little twink (albeit ripped), and everyone towers over him. You often end up taking chips off their health bars while a single blow across your chin will decimate you. It’s even got a time limit of three minutes, which means every punch pulled is another inch closer to loss. People sometimes talk about games where “every button press counts”, but it really is true here. A single mistimed button press (or even leaving buttons unpressed) by a couple of frames can be the difference between you nailing him with an uppercut, or you finding yourself facedown on the canvas.

Super Punch-Out!! makes me a little embarrassed to be so skeptical of the verb “to fight.” I will never stop looking for new kinds of play, but this game reveals just how dynamic combat can be, not in spite of it being a game exclusively about fighting, but because of it. The fighting game community, I imagine, is already quite aware of this, and maybe this all seems laughably quaint if you’re one of those Platinum game stans, but as a reminder, this game is almost 30 years old, and in the case of the arcade game, 40 years old. Most games, even these days, do not ask for anything close to the amount of mastery and attention Super Punch-Out!! does. It’s a very demanding game where every little thing matters. It matters whether you throw a right hook or a left one. Whether you block high or low. Whether you try to hit their face or their chest. Whether you dodge left or right. You have to watch every move your opponent makes. Learn every tell. Know how to precisely counter each one. Get that download complete. Study all their moves. And after you’ve done all that? Punch them in the face.

killer7 (2005)

I’ve grown to hate the word “weird”. Despite having often been referred to as someone who likes “weird” things, I bristle these days when it’s slung around. When used in discussion about art, it typically flattens work down into a differential equation. Rather than the work being judged on its merits and meanings, it’s framed against its contemporaries and whether it fits within their models of normalcy.

It pains me to say it, but killer7 is weird. Pretty much everything about it is weird. Mechanically, it’s a blend of rail-shooter and survival horror. Solve puzzles. Shoot things. It’s a little rigid and takes some getting used to, but it surprisingly works. Its narrative is utterly all over the place, too (I will elaborate later), and it’s audiovisually singular. Even it’s development seems to be an aberration. It’s surprising that this game even exists.

killer7 is my first Grasshopper game. It won’t be my last, I don’t think. But I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that this game was a lot of people’s introduction to SUDA51 and his milieu. A lot of tonal and narrative flourishes are immediately noticeable: the punkish dialogue, the fragmented storytelling, the love of blood, the esoteric lore. While I think the story might implicitly be its most enduring legacy, it’s also beloved for its ~vibes~, and rightly so; this is simply one of the best looking and sounding games of its generation, steeped in style. But as the credits rolled, both as Garcian comes to his revelation, and as the explosions roared, I struggled to care much at all.

I want to be unambiguous here: I enjoy killer7. It looks and sounds incredible. I like the wild swings it takes both mechanically and narratively. I respect its ambition deeply. But the problem is that this game is in many ways inseparable from its massive cult status. So the question I keep finding myself returning to is: do the majority of these fans love killer7 for its cryptic political themes and psychotropic theatrics? Or do they like it because they think it’s “weird”?

I’m not saying killer7 is “weird for weird’s sake”. Far from it. It’s clear that there’s depth here. But stop: what is meant by depth? Never forget, as Samuel Beckett wrote, that “the danger is in the neatness of identification.” This phrase haunts me still. We can identify what is occurring in the game, who is who, what is what, why is why, but this brings us no closer to interpretation. We can manage to figure out the lore of killer7 but that doesn’t mean we understand it. Even identifying a symbolic framework, say, declaring Harman Smith to be God, and declaring Kun Lan to be the Devil, does not really bring us closer.

To avoid making an ass of myself, I looked to analyses and criticism of killer7 to see if they could shed any light on it. And frankly, I don’t think they did. This at least assuaged my concerns that I’m just an idiot. Well, actually, I am an idiot sometimes, but not because I wasn’t paying attention. This is not to dismiss anyone else’s work as unimportant or bad. There was a lot of enlightening information. Rather, I mean to say that there seemed to be no puzzle pieces I had missing in my understanding of killer7 that would have shattered my overall opinion. Maybe I’ll read Hand in Killer7 and feel differently. I would say the main thing I’ve seen laid out that I didn’t pay as much attention to was the theme of government control and instruction. And that definitely is an important element of its story. Anyway, this game has been analyzed to death and I doubt I can bring anything new to the table. If I wanted to speak broadly and succinctly, I would say killer7 is a game about nations, control, and violence. But there’s so much to say! I could write about cameras, about televisions, about my disinterest in the game’s psychological thriller elements, about violence in video games, about interpellations and ideology, and so on, and so on, and so on. But let me slow down.

My main takeaway from killer7’s themes (particularly it’s political ones) is as a piece about nationalism, democracy, and globalism, but most distinctly as a response to Fukuyama’s “end of history”. Fukuyama theorized that history had reached its end, that events would still occur, but a grand narrative of societal evolution was over. He later ate his hat, and admitted that he was wrong. He pointed to Islamic extremism as something he underestimated. September 11th, 2001 might have been the rebirth of history for Fukuyama. Despite being set in the U.S., killer7 is very much a game about Japan, too. The future of Japan, the nationalist spirit, is at stake. In the game’s alternate history, international conflict has supposedly ended, with nuclear warheads being detonated outside the atmosphere (this would totally work in the real world) being remembered as the symbol of everlasting peace. But then the Heaven Smile appear, an infectious virus that transforms humans into weapons. They throw themselves at you and blow themselves up. Sound familiar? Suicide bombings became a trend in the 2000s. Terrorism, I am told, tends to move in these trends: hostages, mailbombings, mass shootings. Horrible stuff. There’s more. Election manipulation, human trafficking, cults, the list goes on. These are not harbingers of war, but rather the conflict itself. It’s an endless state of disquiet; peace does not exist. Democracy is a facade. Our actions are interpellated. Nations are fragile. The violence continues. This isn’t chaos. This is order. So says Kun Lan.

Suffice to say, I do think there is depth to killer7. Hopefully, I’ve proven I’m not just a moron. It wears the mask of weirdness, but it does have things to say. Whether or not I agree with its propositions is a different conversation. Instead, what I question is whether or not the average killer7 enjoyer is even interested in that. Because it’s not exactly easy to get to. When I first played Hotline Miami, a similarly “weird” game, one that Goichi Suda apparently quite liked, the core themes passed straight over my head. Only years later, seeing others’ criticism, did I begin to understand its critique of violence and media. For me, it was a frenetic stealth-action hybrid with a bumping soundtrack and animal masks. Surely, I wasn’t the only one, and surely, there are people like this with killer7. Maybe if I had played it at the same time as when I played Hotline Miami or some other formative year (lord knows my parents would never have let me play it when it came out), it would have affected me the same way. Make no doubt about it, “weirdness” can be dazzling and enchanting, even if it is superficial.

I want to be perfectly clear: this did not make my enjoyment of Hotline Miami any less valid. Nor of killer7. And if you like killer7 despite being perplexed by it or not delving into its arcane mythology, that’s valid, too. Guess what? I like it, too! Aesthetics and presentation are a part of art, and if you love something for that, and hell, even if you love something just because it’s weird, fucking go for it. Love it all you want. Don’t feel compelled to justify that affection with empty analysis and identification.

I will not give in to astonishment. I will not say, “well, it’s weird, gotta hand it to ‘em”. I know I risk outing myself as a plebeian who doesn’t get it, but I refuse to become Homer Simpson, nodding as he watches Twin Peaks saying, “Brilliant, heh heh! I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.” I suspect killer7 will be a game I like thinking about more than I liked playing. I look forward to thinking about it more; I already feel myself working into a shoot as I ponder it. This was only written in a flurry after finishing it then taking a nap. Who knows? Maybe I’ll grow to love it. But in this moment, I will not accept my lack of “getting it” as an excuse to give into smiling along, because I do get it on some level. And I like it. It’s just that I’m not as excited as everyone else. And that’s okay.

Not Tetris (2011)

There are, generally, two modes of Tetris. There is the methodical mode, a game of precision, planning, and geometry. It’s the beautiful game, the king’s game, where you fit the squares into their rightful place, eliminating line by line, tetromino by tetromino, tetris by tetris, frame by frame, block by block. This is how most of us like to imagine that we play Tetris.

The second mode is a mode of chaos and hubris. A game of failing to spin a single plate. You clumsily misplace a block or, you’re managing your board and — fuck, how are you supposed to fit that piece in here? And from there, you desperately try to dig yourself out of the hole. This is how most of us actually play Tetris.

Tetris tends to ping pong between these two modes of play. Even professional and grandmaster Tetris players will eventually find themselves struggling to manage the eternal avalanche of bricks.

Ostensibly a shitpost, Not Tetris is actually a reinvention of Tetris that highlights its most chaotic mode of play. Instead of the cold precision of a grid, this is the messy physics of rigidbodies. There’s no way to play this game and not fuck up constantly. There is no precision. You press one button trying to rotate your piece, and it immediately begins to spiral. And once you place it, odds are its going to topple over eventually. Try to get these pieces straight, fucking try, I dare you. Eventually, it’s not a tower with a few nooks and crannies, it’s mostly crannies and a few nooks. When you finally manage to clear a line, slices a straight line across the board, with bits and pieces left behind, as you build higher and higher on a mountain of debris. “How did I let it get this bad?”, you ask, knowing full well how and why it got this bad.

It’s a novelty at first, but you get the creeping sensation of familiarity: you made the mess. Now try and clean it up.

Mecha Arena: Robot Showdown (2021)

Depression is often characterized with angst and anhedonia. I’ve heard it described as “a disease that takes away your ability to enjoy sunsets.” It’s parasitic, turning you into a walking vessel. It makes you slow, empty, unhappy, unable to do anything, to want to do anything, to find a reason to do anything. What’s talked about less is how stupid it makes you. Depression also turns your brain into mush. You struggle to muster focus and energy and end up doing awfully embarrassing things. You fall back on old habits, you develop ugly new ones. You sleep poorly and smell worse. There is a sexy and poetic version of depression, sure, but to act as if it is not also composed of skipped showers and junk food wrappers is disingenuous. Depression is just as often languidly writhing in the moonlight like a Caravaggio painting as it is watching a two-hour YouTube video in your underwear as the sun rises.

It perhaps indicates the relative severity of my current darling depressive episode that I was drawn to Mech Arena: Robot Showdown. I don’t like playing games on my phone, I am not competitive, and the context I first heard of this game was during the sycophantic extravaganza that is The Game Awards. But hey. Guess what? It’s got stompy robots. And I love stompy robots. And video games, with their natural talent of alchemizing long stretches of time into a forgotten blink, are a natural fit for a case of melancholy. So I submitted to my most degenerate impulses and hit download.

It’s nothing too shocking. It’s an arena of mechs. Exactly what it says on the tin. You spawn into a level, and fight other players on teams, either with control points or a team deathmatch. This is bog-standard stuff, and it’s immediately clear to me that this game is very interested in being like Overwatch. It’s everywhere, from its end-of-match medal system to the architecture, to the design of its mechs, to the minutiae of its UI elements. Presumably, there was a design document somewhere that said “EVERYONE IS D.VA” that somehow got turned into a game.

There’s maybe a dozen different mechs available at this point, all with different special abilities and stats. There’s also a bunch of different weapons which have some decent variance. The early ones are the most boring: a mech with a sprint, a mech with a jump, a mech with a shield. You know, really exciting mechanical hooks. The mechs have two weapon slots each, which are customizable. Almost all the weapons also have an absurdly long reload period (like, usually over 5 seconds) so combat has this lovely tendency to result in two opposing players circling each other unable to do anything. I presume this could be to encourage teamwork, but uh… it’s a mobile game. Not gonna happen, hoss. (While I’m nitpicking, why can’t I listen to podcasts or music when I’m playing this damn game? That’s the whole point!) Mechs also serve as this kind of lives system; you can only use a given mech once per match/round.

The more interesting mechs take a while to unlock, so the early game is kind of dull until you get them. All you can really do is clomp around and shoot a few rounds off. There's a pretty generous aim assist, which I guess makes sense, but it feels kinda mindless. Apparently, the game is going to be adding pilots in the near future, which maybe can give some much-needed personality to the game. Once you manage to get one of the cool robots, the wackier elements make the game significantly more fun. For example, there’s this mech called Killshot that has a melee charge that does an ungodly amount of damage on a dangerously short cooldown. So I equipped a laser weapon so I can chip enemies down from a distance and then close the distance and kill them with the dash. I cackle pretty much every time I do it. It’s very silly, but silly is a good thing sometimes. I also developed a long-range sniper build paired with homing missiles that erased health bars near-instantly. I have no idea if this is balanced or the rate at which these strategies diminish in efficacy, but I would be lying if I didn’t squeeze every drop of fun I could from it and licked it up like a cat on a dish of warm milk. Because it’s just mindless stompy mech fights. It’s adequate, and at its best, it’s dumb fun. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I got.

Stop. Hold on. You probably thought (and reasonably so) that I was just describing the game that is Mech Arena: Robot Showdown to you. But you’d be sorely mistaken. Because it’s not a game about big stompy robots duking it out and shooting big guns. Mech Arena is a game about making numbers go up by any means necessary.

Stop me if this sounds familiar. Mechs and weapons have star rankings and levels. Lower ranked mechs not only have less health, but less energy, too, and thus can’t equip stronger weapons. Without that firepower, you’ll quickly find that you can’t do a damn thing in a firefight. This isn’t a game of twitch skill where you can perfectly evade and outplay an overpowered enemy. You’re a big lumbering machine, and even the spryest mechs won’t outrun bullets. There’s skill involved, sure. But the numbers game can outpace that quickly.

How do you increase their power? Well, Mech Arena’s version of Overwatch loot crates, rather than being cosmetic-focused, are mostly a way to increase your power. (Even watching these boxes open reminds me of Overwatch.) There are paint-jobs and skins in there, sure, but you’re mostly getting blueprints (which are used to power up specific mechs/weapons) and other currencies (which also help you level up). You can also, of course, cough up some money and just get some of that stuff straight away, or buy a bunch of loot boxes.

You recognize it, don’t you? The creeping sensation? I’ll go on. There are like four or more separate currencies in this game that all do different things. Every time you open the game, you’re bombarded with pop-ups that tell you about a new deal in the store you can snag. Hell, you’ll get bombarded with those offers in between matches, too, forcing you to tap the X button repeatedly before you can get back to playing the damn game. At some point, I discovered that the company that made this game, Plarium Games, are the same folks behind Raid: Shadow Legends, a gacha RPG that has quite literally become a meme because of its horrible monetization and incessant sponsorships. (If you’ve never heard of this game, you’re incredibly lucky and I envy you.) Around this time, it starts coming into focus. This is a storefront with a game attached to it, not the other way around.

Gacha games make my skin crawl. There’s something Machiavellian about them. The first gacha I ever played was Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare, and I hated what it did to my brain. I never spent money and didn’t get obsessive, but even still, I hated feeling how the game sunk its fingers into my life, occupied my thoughts about time. I put a bit of time into World Flipper but lost interest quickly. I have friends who mark out hard for Granblue or Fate, and while I could give them a chance, I have a sneaking suspicion that I would hate those games, too. (I don’t even really like normal VNs…) I have yet to play Genshin Impact and while I suspect I might enjoy it, the very foundation of what gacha games are, which is glorified and overly complex gambling, skeeves me out. While Mech Arena might not technically be a gacha game, the hints of gacha design are everywhere.

Still, in my depressive stupor, I fixated on a simple goal: unlock Arachnos. There was an event in the game with daily missions, essentially functioning as another free Battle Pass. (Oh, by the way, did I mention this game has a Battle Pass, too?) There always seems to be one or two of these events thrown at the player; it’s a great way of driving attachment and daily play, after all. The final prize at the end of this specific event is Arachnos, a big spider mech (four legs instead of eight, though) whose special ability makes a turret. And I’d be lying if I said I don’t love a spidery mech. So I worked to acquire Arachnos, in all her mystique.

But of course, that’s not how this story ends. I will not be seeing Arachnos. See, as I plucked away at these daily quests, I started to notice that there were routinely missions that instructed me to share a referral link. Now, I may have stooped low enough to put time into this damn game, but come on. Is this a pyramid scheme? I would do anything for mechs, but I won’t do that. There are seven days in the event, and five on each day. I don’t need to complete every single mission, just 30 of them. I’ve done the math. But they keep showing up. I know if 6 of these show up, I can’t get Arachnos. It’s day 6, and I see the fifth referral mission, and I know if I see another one tomorrow, my time has been wasted. And then I see the next mission. “Make an in-game purchase.” Fuck. The deal is done. Absolutely not. I’m not getting this fucking mech. The terms are clear. Mech Arena refuses to be contained to an app. It says, “What magic circle?” The game has to expand into your pockets or into your friends list. The sunk cost burrowing in my brain, I feel myself tempted to just put down a dollar or beg a close friend just to download the game for a minute. But I close the game. And I don’t open it again.

It’s at this point that I ask myself: are we gaming, fellas? Is this really what video games are? Am I to accept that what I spend an inordinate amount of time doing is so easily reduced to a frenzied parody of capitalism, embroiled so deeply in it already? That they are so easily full of cruelty and emptiness? Is this really gaming?

And the answer, of course, is absolutely.

You know, in my everlasting snootiness, it’s so tempting to give into pretension. I know I’m not alone. But it’s crucial to never forget how fickle one’s own proclivities are. Fascinations and fixations make bedfellows, leading to grotesque but irresistible obsessions. The natural extent of that, in a way, is a game like Mech Arena, an infinite series of asinine tasks resulting only in incremental advances. After all, what my depression called for was not quality, but a fixation, please, do not leave me alone with myself and my thoughts, give me something to steal time away from me. And for about a week, Mech Arena had me. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. I have to be honest about that.

The never-ending war to establish ~Games As Art~ exposes a deep-seated inferiority complex in the games industry. So defensive, saying some games don’t “count”. But they’re not alone, either. Problematic Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies aren’t cinema, racist Ben Shapiro says rap isn’t music. How many hours are we to spend arguing what is and isn’t “kino”? How many conversations have you had where someone says in derision that something isn’t cinema, isn’t music, isn’t poetry, isn’t literature, isn’t a game, isn’t art? None of these words are assessments of quality. They are flat descriptors. Why should we use them as chance to be condescending and dismissive?

Mech Arena: Robot Showdown is undeniably a video game. I’ve heard people say, outright, that mobile games “don’t count”. Hell, I’ve probably said it too, albeit years ago. But it’s just absurd. Not only are games like Mech Arena games, they are more representative of what games are right now than anything else. I wish I could tell you that the best example of gaming is somewhere on itch.io, but we don’t live in that world. We live in a world of whale-hunters. Freemium skinnerware, multi-level dark patterns, and crypto-games. That’s video games, baby.

I resent Mech Arena, but I can’t deny what it is, because, barring the abolition of money, this is what video games are, and will be for the foreseeable future. As much as I wish gachapon had stayed in the realm of toy dispensers, this is where we are. Nothing about its repulsiveness is unique. It’s a synecdoche of the problems endemic to the industry. I’m thankful I am not easily made prey to these tactics, but I must always remember to recognize it. Games are embedded in our society, they seek to exploit and expand, eroding the magic circle as best they can. Video games are part of capitalism, and Mech Arena is yet another reminder to accept it. This is gaming, whether I like it or not.

All images have been taken from Glitchwave, with the exception of some images from the following: Tender Frog House, Metroid Dread, Not Tetris, killer7, Mech Arena: Robot Showdown, and Super Punch-Out!!.