Most people distill 2015 to the year of MGS V vs. Witcher III, but looking at my list it's actually the year of 'popular video game franchise spends a zillion dollars to resemble generic mass budget blockbuster films that last at least 40 hours too long.'
To be added: 2064: Read Only Memories
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There are something like seventeen hundred quadrillion texts about the experience of the Average American Teen, and only like six of them come anywhere near approximating an actual high school experience. There's a reason for this: most young adult authors/screenwriters/developers blossom out of their own post-adolescence with a very specifically framed memory of what it felt like. We all remember the two or three things that were our biggest personal obstacles (be they emotional, physical, financial or social), but when we create texts about them, we leave behind that inescapably raw, utterly pervasive *feeling* that cuts through teenage life like an emo riptide through an estuary, dismissing it as too saccharine and obvious for published work. So time marches on or whatever, and as adults we accept young adult protagonists who are (and I'm speaking broadly here) sub-optimal vessels of vaguely familiar hormonal anti-authoritarians. In a literal sense, Dontond's Life is Strange fits neatly in this pantheon. It would be hard to argue that any character in this game *actually* speaks like a teenager; you might even say, they *hella* don't speak like teenagers. However, Life Is Strange is not a game in which the player simply navigates high school life (ala Butterfly Soup) - it's instead a game that confronts the player with depression, domestic abuse, unemployment, drugs as a coping mechanism, uncertain boundaries, economic anxiety, and other battles too often considered to be waged in the arena of adulthood. Life is Strange's primary antagonist is a character who literally fetishizes adolescence - Life is Strange itself, through crucial elements of its mechanics and narrative, does not. The way I see it, teenage life is generally dominated by four primary experiences regardless of time, place or person: 1. abject uncertainty of self 2. the sudden (or, for some of us, dawning) presence of actionable consequence 3. a widening acuity for empathy and depth of feeling 4. (let's just say it) puberty In this way, Life Is Strange is an excellent text about the (ever-fabled) life of the American teen - even though it was developed by a bunch of French adults. Protagonist Max Caldwell is (for reasons unexplained) granted the gift of rewinding time after stumbling upon and subsequently preventing a school shooting, and the game encourages the player to abuse their newfound power immediately. In the midst of a tough decision? Try saying the combative thing you wish you'd said earlier. Wish you had the self-confidence to talk to the kids too cool to hang out with you? Try throwing out a few openers or points of conversation and see how they land. Watch a guy get hit in the face with a pool noodle over and over forever. The world's your oyster; you can become the Ur Teen, the teen who's everyone's buddy, aces every test and achieves every goal. That is, until you aren't. By granting us the omnipotence necessary to no longer sweat the small stuff - and, speaking personally, sweating the small stuff was the entirety of my life as a teenager so it's kind of a big fictional ask for me - Life Is Strange reminds us of the ways in which this often rose-colored stage of life is more realistically a series of punches to the gut than pats on the back. It's easy enough to tell what the ramifications of your actions are when you're trying to get an in with the kids smoking weed in the parking lot, but what about when you witness an instance of domestic abuse the victim asks you to swear to stay silent about? In Life is Strange's first episode, Max witnesses several abuses of power, the most acute of which occurs in her friend (re: crush) Chloe's bedroom. Chloe's stepfather David storms the room looking for drugs, so Max hides in the closet to prevent Chloe from getting deeper into trouble. After a tense exchange, Max witnesses David backhand Chloe. Afterwards, Chloe tells Max it was best not to have intervened because she's afraid of being kicked out of the house. The player is then given a choice: rewind time and intercede before the situation escalates to violence, or listen to Chloe and stay quiet. Your instinct is likely to come forward and prevent it by using your powers, and it feels good to save the day, but then, things seem to have ended on an ominous note once you're able to exit the conflict. You get the sense that the immediate safety of the victim is granted by your inaction, but can you really live with yourself if you don't step forward in the moment? These are the kinds of awful choices the world begins forcing you to make at you at this age - or, more accurately, this is an age in which cultural and economic privilege become contested by life's greater trials. Speaking personally, this was an era especially ripe with pacing around rooms wandering about the ramifications of whatever just occurred to me, or the ramifications to someone else based on actions I did or didn't take. I luckily was never made to be confronted with the situation I suggested above, but the fact of the matter is a lot of people *are* confronted with situations just like that. And it's these moments in which we define or, usually for the worse, realize fundamental elements of our identities. At the Life is Strange's outset, Max is something of a teenage non-entity. She exists on the outskirts of a casual art school-cool, not so defined in her personality to actually be an authentically moody kid, but not so rounded-out that she fails to resemble the people you knew (or maybe were!) in high school. She's awkward without being graceless, stylish without outwardly exerting confidence, and brave - to a point. She's not wholly without character, but she's something of a blank teenage canvas for the player to color in as they go. In this way, embodying Max means re-contextualizing adolescence through gameplay mechanics. Most people *think* they know what they *should* have done back in the day, but few remember what made teenage-hood so tough in the first place: the mine-field conversations stumbled into without the language necessary to have them, the revelation that adults *super* don't know what they're doing, the inability to dismiss yourself as 'just a kid' when you know you screwed up. In Life is Strange, you're confronted with a situation, and you are - finally! - given the time and space necessary to revise what you did on instinct by what you wish you had done by intellect, and who you were based on what made you comfortable versus who you wish you'd been able to be - and it's still not enough. The game presents you with one of those Big Problems, and your choices are laid out for you, each immediate repercussion of a decision offering only the briefest echo of what's to come: try, and try again, then doubt and doubt some more. Existing in Arcadia Bay does mean swallowing the bitter 'hella cool' pill of obnoxiously off-key youthful dialect, sure. But I can't imagine a clearer abstraction of adolescence than standing at a cross roads between the Men and the Women's locker rooms after school with your maybe (definitely) crush, and then thinking way too much about which one to sneak through.
If you like games that make you press the pause button, stare at the screen, say 'holy shit. really? fuck. shit. that's...wow. Fuck.' upwards of three times in the span of 8 hours, I heartily recommend trudging around Soma. I'm gonna be sitting with that ending for a while. Goddamn.
What fascinates me most about Undertale is its lack of ambiguity. For a game that on its surface seems so intent on charming the player with genre-subverting humor and EXTREME QUIRK, it also has this fascinating, deep well of lore. I would say this makes Undertale a supremely replayable RPG, but truth be told it's not. If there's one thing that stuck with me past Undertale's plot, it's its cast of lovable monsters. I say this earnestly, but I like where I've left things for them. I'm not sure I want to go back and reset that.
Wild Hunt is one of the most fully fledged role playing adventures in video games. It's intimate in spite of its scope, inviting players to truly embody the role of socially conscious (or, maybe not! Your call!) monster hunter in need of cash on a desperate chase for his missing daughter. Unbelievably, the game is *well written*. You start to get *really* familiar with each disparate gameplay loop after a while - smell the footprints, look at the claw marks, make a pun or two about the spilled blood on the grass, kill the monster - but CD Projekt Red's commitment to character and world design above all else mean that even when the player is forced to repeat an action, their reason for doing so always feels necessary, and prescient. Most of the dense politicking of past Witcher games has gone missing in Wild Hunt, but it's really hard to complain when the game is like 80 hours of the greatest fantasy adventure of all time.
Kojima pulled heavily from Moby Dick in The Phantom Pain, but rather than one man's obsession with one object of vengeance, it is every character's individual obsession with a unique object of vengeance. In Moby Dick, the object of vengeance is the white whale (re: nature), and the 'phantom pain' is his missing leg. Spoilers, but: For Miller, the object of vengeance is Skullface, and his phantom pain is literal. For Skullface, the object of vengeance is English and his phantom pain is the pillaging of his native language. For Volgin's reanimated corpse, the object of vengeance is his murderer, Big Boss, and his phantom pain is...his mortal life? Metal Gear is weird. There are other primary characters with wider, looser adherents to MGSV's structure of character motivation. For Eli and his soldiers, the object of vengeance is adulthood, and their phantom pain is the absence of a childhood, or at least a fundamental inability to trust the adult world. For Quiet, a generous read would be that the object of her vengeance is Skullface and the phantom pain is her lost identity, but thanks to Kojima's general inability to handle female protagonists (as well as a few choice quotes about how players would feel "ashamed" when they realized why Quiet was an extremely attractive woman who was always mostly nude regardless of context) the motivation is more likely that the object of vengeance is just generally heterosexual men, who forced her role as a sexual object. Her phantom pain would therefore be her inability to be a fully fledged speaking protagonist. This read may be generous too, but it doesn't matter - either way, this is MGSV's clumsiest and most embarrassing narrative twist. There's no way to attempt an analysis of Quiet and Kojima's direction to Yoji Shinkawa to give her a "sexy" feel without developing a headache. Pointing out disparities in the disproportionate representation of men in video games at the expense of women by repeating that exact mistake and then tut-tutting after hours of some really misguided attempts at titillation is arguably worse than ignorant sexual objectification. The most complicated character to fit into our Moby Dick Revenge/Phantom Pain Mad Lib game is Punished Snake. Well - really, it's Paz, but she's barely a factor in Phantom Pain so we're going to ignore her for now. All of his vengeance is at a misdirected target. Because he's had his memories replaced with Big Boss', he is, in a way, a living embodiment of phantom pain. I think the game even makes direct reference to this concept. He's Big Boss' missing limb - so, would that make his object of vengeance the mirror at the end of the game? Is Punished Snake's object of vengeance his entire broken identity and his phantom pain his life? Answer: Metal Gear is weird.
Bethesda had thoroughly excised any notion of character building from Skyrim, but that game was so complete as an adventure, so full of character and atmospheric and free, that I couldn't care less. The same cannot be said for Fallout 4, which by its nature has the player fill a more grounded role as a defined person who is forced to make big choices. It's almost mind blowing, then, that Fallout 4 features what I believe to be one of the most useless dialogue systems in any video game I've played. It's a role playing game in which your role is either: A. Yes, I'll do that. B. I'll do that later. C. Explain that? D. haha *that,* amiright? Worse yet is the disparity in the quality of environmental storytelling from one space to the next. For every unique space in which you find a mysterious teacher's note about a pink-ish 'nutritional' sludge being added to school lunches before being ambushed a baker's dozen of savage pink monster, you'll find about three dozen mostly empty houses with skeletons - stop me if you've heard this before - *clutching* things. Luckily, taken as a straight up exploratory open world action shooter - a kind of Borderlands meets meaningful narrative space - Fallout 4 has a lot going for it. Weapons feel fantastic for the most part, separate sections of the map feel visually distinct, the game's crafting system is a ton of fun to poke around with and, remaining true to the series, Fallout 4 is a lot of fun to break. That doesn't amount to an overabundance of inspiring, uniquely player-driven stories like every other mainline Fallout title, however. I'm willing to give Fallout 4 praise for its higher qualities, but I wouldn't be exaggerating to call this one of the most personally disappointing games I've ever played.
Until Dawn's bold insistence to *just be* the twisty, genre-y horror movie it wants to be makes past TellTale and Quantic Dream titles look hilariously grim. The narrative adventure game should not be relegated to increasingly indulgent cable-TV storytelling, and I'm thankful for Supermassive Games for utilizing B-movie cheese for their own purposes rather than stumbling into it like a trap.
Likely the best game anthology currently available. It's a shame most of the rare and interesting historical footage from Rare's history is locked behind difficult challenges and achievements, but even purely as a curated collection of classic game, this is a totally wild, loving collection of, like 30+ games from the same studio. It's something else, really. Even as someone who doesn't like more Rare games than not, I had a blast going through the archives.
*Spoilers below.* There is a perpetual debate amongst Yakuza fans as to what the best Ryu Ga Gotokou game is, but it usually comes down to a fight between Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 5. Yakuza 0 is a much smarter game than Yakuza 5, but the comparison makes a lot of sense. If you're playing Yakuza for the story, then Yakuza 5 is a pretty big letdown, but if you're playing Yakuza for the *experience,* so to speak, then there's nothing in the games industry quite like it. Yakuza 5 is Ryu Ga Gotokou's biggest, boldest, wildest version of the ludicrous beat 'em up Japanese tourism simulator that they will likely ever have the opportunity to make. First, let me run through what I consider Yakuza 5's biggest missteps, because they're numerous and significant. Like most Yakuza games, Yakuza 5 follows a series of protagonists who get wrapped up in a conspiracy within Japanese organized crime; unlike most Yakuza games, no one involved in the story's A-plot possesses a rational motive or a means of interfacing with said conspiracy. The Yakuza series plays fast and loose with reality and I don't expect the series to rework itself as a crime procedural, to be clear, but I *do* expect some level of intuitive emotional or intellectual reasoning from its cast. I just can't make sense of this game's characters. Everyone is in a reactionary mode all of the time. Kiryu abandons his children because a woman from the entertainment industry says it would be good for his daughter Haruka's pop idol career, but his entire character arc up to now has been defined entirely by his unwavering support for his children. The woman who trains Haruka to be a pop idol does so because she sees Haruka in a convenience store and fundamentally alters the trajectory of her life on the spot. Haruka, for her part, is subsumed by her drive to be a pop star, but spontaneously decides to give up her career (and her colleagues' careers!) during a crucial concert because she 'loves her Dad too much.' She could've waited until after the concert! And I'm only describing the protagonist's motivations - the antagonists are worse. In one act, we learn about a massive conspiracy in which a bunch of small business tyrants commit wonton murder for the sake of small-scale profits, but their conspiracy to create a fake Yakuza family from scratch also intentionally (accidentally?) creates so much terror in the city that people are afraid to be out at night, which cannot be good news for these people, because they all own nightclubs, bars and sex clubs, *which operate primarily at night.* The secret final antagonist, meanwhile, undermines the Japanese government, a multiplicity of major police departments and nearly all major Japanese crime families so that he can give his only child a top spot at the Yakuza. But his only child was already working his way through the ranks of the biggest Yakuza family as it was - that is an insane amount of effort for such a boring plot twist, anyway. What I'm saying is, I think, from purely a narrative perspective, Yakuza 5 is probably the worst game in the entire series. Every time it has the opportunity to do something with its story, it can't, because it has this central theme of 'achieving your dream' which is laid at the foundation of every single narrative beat. Because every character needs to have the same broad motivation - either achieving their dream, failing to achieve their dream and recalibrating it, or helping someone else achieve their dream - you're left with nothing to chew on in any individual subplot. They're all reducible to the same set of trials and tribulations. Haruka's struggles are materially identical to Taiga's struggles, who are materially identical to Kiryu's story. Sure, one story involves dancing, one involves freedom, one involves starting over, but there are always backstabbing friends who redeem themselves and one-dimensional friends who exist only to support the plot; the details are different but the mode is the same. The thing is, in order to tell this rambling nation-spanning epic, Ryu Ga Gotoku recreated specific districts from five major Japanese cities, all of which feature their own landmarks, activities and side-campaigns. In other words, Yakuza 5 recreates five cities as seen through the eyes of five characters, all of whom find themselves in very different material circumstances. This diversity of locales and perspectives is a joy which succeeds in complete opposition to the central story conceit. Yakuza 5 enables the player to role play as a taxi driver in Nakasu, an escaped convict in Sapporo, a 'nightlife journalist' in Nagoya, and a pop star in Osaka. Whereas the central plot reduces its enormous cast to one broad motivational attribute alongside a series of incidental character details, the rest of the game experience celebrates the unique culture of several major cities through a variety of very specific material lenses. For all my gripes with Yakuza 5's plot, I applaud it for its open world. It *feels different* to walk into a 9-to-5 at the cab depot, saving up money to send to your children, than it does to hit the batting range with the measly 1,500 yen you're able to scrounge together as a freelance journalist. There's something incredibly human and empathetic about that experience, and while I might bristle at Yakuza 5's limited capacity to tell a story, I don't think there's an open world game that ever produced the same simple and human quality of seeing a city through someone else's eyes that this game does. It's an incredible - if frustrating - experience.
Assassin's Creed is wild, man. What started as a languid open world assassination sim with a sci-fi twist has since transmogrified itself into one of the video game industry's most infamous content mills. The series' penchant for using historical hinge points, once a grand simulacra of times and places rarely depicted in media, have since been reduced to the tonal equivalent of a Dr. Who Christmas special, plummeting the series' level of historical analysis along with it. Well - maybe that's a *bit* harsh. Things got a lot more camp, at the least, and the series' core gameplay followed suit, abandoning the pretense of stealth-puzzling and political intrigue in favor of completely linear, parkour-based stab-athons and blockbuster set pieces. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't really like where the Assassin Creed games went. It's not that I dislike them outright, though - more that I'm fatigued by them and what they've done to open world games as a genre. I'll admit that Black Flag is a series high point, but even then, I found Assassin's Creed's godlike power fantasy framework detracted rather than added to that games freewheeling pirate fantasy. All this is to say, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, which was built upon the bones of Assassin's Creed Unity, the series' absolute worst entry, is much better than it should be. It is the platonic ideal of a video game making the best of a bad situation, a better than the sum of its parts experience of the highest order. It does not reverse the broad trends within the Assassin's Creed series, but if Assassin's Creed games *must* be the way that they are, then this is the best possible version of what the series can produce. From a gameplay perspective, I'm fascinated with what the developers were able to achieve using the Unity engine. Unity simplified the series' parkour traversal mechanics by more or less automating movement, which was a huge hassle the first time around because the 'automation' wasn't very smart. See, in Unity and Syndicate, when the player holds the analog stick in a given direction, the game will arbitrarily pick whichever ledge or foothold it feels like to keep you moving in that general direction; as a result, controlling a character in this era of Ass Creed feels more like driving a car than running down the street. Syndicate side-steps this mechanical friction by filling its open world with drive-able carriages and equipping the player with a grappling hook. If getting around the open world on foot is a hassle, and the annual development schedule doesn't give you any time to correct that - why not just remove that problem from the equation? Further, levels and challenges are greatly simplified. The level design favors legibility over immersion by re-using NPCs to communicate enemy types and conspicuously setting usable tools around so that you know your options before tackling a mission. Enemy placements are also much improved over the previous entry, which seemed to consist entirely of levels that could only be tackled perfectly with the help of a co-op partner. Here, the player is given a wealth of tools to avoid NPCs or to re-direct them from their patrol routes entirely. None of Syndicate is particularly immersive, mind you, this isn't Thief - but it almost always *works.* Syndicate's level design and stealth mechanics are shallow in comparison to, say, Hitman or Splinter Cell, but it *works,* and it's fun for what it is. Same thing goes for the narrative. Unity's tone, which adopted a kind of smug, above-it-all centrism in its adaptation of the French Revolution, coasted by on a mish-mash of genre tropes and plot twists that never actually generated a thematic resolution; nothing of material consequence occurs in the story of Assassin's Creed Unity, a fact which any new player will be made painfully aware of by the time the credits roll. Syndicate, perhaps also anchored by the series' sudden swerve from century-spanning sci-fi conspiracy to 'what if you killed mean guys during THIS turbulent era of human history,' at least fills in its consequence-free adventuring with some fun characters. Jacob and Evie Fry, Syndicate's game's leading duo, are one dimensional, but at least they've got big personalities. Evie, in particular, is a high watermark for Assassin's Creed characterization, a Lisa Simpson-type with a hidden blade under her coat. Syndicate doesn't break free of the lowest common denominator-style Assassin's Creed game, sure, but it uses the series' base parts towards a rollicking good time in a gorgeously drawn (if utterly non-dynamic) Victorian England. Not to sound reductive about a game I broadly enjoyed, but it's the best version of a bad formula, and I'm very impressed with how much fun I had with a series I was one bad entry short of abandoning entirely. It's junk food, but it's *good* junk food.