\\ You Already Said That //

I don’t mean to pick on anybody in particular, but lately I’ve been noticing a litany of articles subjected around the 2020 game Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer with more or less the same exact thesis: it is a game which is about debt, capital, and the way those things leave people and communities adrift through the lens of magical realism in the literary style of Márquez, Murakami and Borges. And that is a true thing to say about KRZ!

There is a lie somewhere in the paragraph above. I’ll give you time and space to see if you can find it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a significant portion of people who this year played Kentucky Route Zero through its 2020 release on consoles or PC, you may have trouble spotting it: Kentucky Route Zero’s first two acts as well as its interlude Limits and Demonstrations actually debuted all the way back in 2013, which is when I was first introduced to the game. So people have been making that initial observation about the game for over seven years. And that’s fine! The game’s final act only came out in January of this year, and many who had maybe heard about the game back in 2013 or some other time along the way waited to play it until its final, full release. As well, like I said before, it is just a true thing to say about the game. If you get through all 10 hours or so of the game and don’t realize that, I may wonder if you actually played it at all.

In the games space, as in all spaces, a lot has happened over the course of seven years. Studios have been established, studios have been shut down; likewise with a number of publications dedicated to covering games and the arts culture spaces. Individuals have carved out niches for themselves in games, and many have left for a litany of often very good reasons, from labor issues to compensation to toxicity in gaming communities; though for the scope of this piece I’m only interested in one particular reason.

Along with these sorts of departures from a space comes a harsh inevitability: not just the loss of good people, but the loss of institutional knowledge, and the loss of a sort of cultural locus about how we talk about certain works. In other words, it’s great that more people are talking about Kentucky Route Zero. But it’s a work with an incredible level of depth which practically begs for not just one but several critical appraisals in the way that art theorists and historians have done for great books, poems, paintings, sculptures, cave art, etc. Works evolve with us and with the times; KRZ looks different for me as an American in 2020 than it did as an American in 2013, and that’s both because of this moment in history but also a reflection of the changes, advancements, and declines of me as a person over time.

When I look around at the people who are writing about games in 2020, I see more diversity than ever! The work is far from over to encourage more diversity, but that’s great! But what I don’t see much of is people who have been writing about games for over three years. Three years! That’s not a very long time. And there are two reasons for that: one, of course, is the utter lack of money in it. The amount of time it takes to pitch an idea, wait for a hopeful yes back from the editor, and then actually do the work (of course, doing good work inevitably takes more time) is more often than not simply not worth how much that writer will make as compensation for their labor. It’s often a more worthwhile endeavor to spend that time and energy on some effort which potentially will yield a much larger check; this is a huge part of why so many critics often move onto actual game development, if not into marketing or PR whether in games or not.

The other reason for this sort of slow hemorrhaging of talent from the games criticism space which is more directly relevant to the overall topic of this piece is that I don’t feel like critics with more experience in the field are being intellectually rewarded for their tenure within the space. I’m 26; I’m not exactly old. But I’ve been critically engaged with games for about nine years now; I’ve read a lot of editorial pieces about a litany of topics in games, in particular critiques. So often for me, it feels like we’re just trapped having the same discussions. Yes, KRZ is about what capitalism does to people. It’s also about so many other things, from theater to outsider art to perspective to diorama to experimental music to analog technology to interactive fiction to the history of mining in Kentucky to the very notions of American folklore; and how those things are all connected (or disparate!); the list goes on.

Do you really think Cardboard Computer would have spent as long as they did making the game if all it were about was “man the health care situation in this country sure sucks!!!”? And why do we rarely if ever see any negative critiques about the game? It’s not as if Kentucky Route Zero should be above criticism because it looks vaguely like a Great American Novel. The great episode of the Abnormal Mapping podcast about the game as well as bits of Bullet Points Monthly’s coverage of the game come to mind, but that’s about it; unsurprisingly those critiques both come from people who have been writing about games a lot longer than most. I’m not saying no exceptions to my above prescriptions exist; of course they do! I don’t know everything that everybody has ever said. But I feel we largely aren’t able to move on from the most surface level of subjects with regards to the game and what it’s doing.

I don’t mean to keep going on and on with regards to KRZ as my prime example (full disclosure: I’m friendly with Jake Elliott—the writer of the game—on Twitter, not that that matters much). We need to nurture the critical spaces around games of all shapes and sizes by materially investing in independent publications and podcasts with our dollars, by encouraging discussion of new works, by dissecting critiques (kindly and in a way which encourages people vocalizing opinions that might be construed by others as ‘wrong’ without fear of being demonized—within reason, obviously; I’m not talking about encouraging bigotry, here). In doing so, we’ll better be able to keep good thinkers within the spaces of games criticism and game development for longer stretches of time which will pay significant dividends to the future of how we talk about games. If we don’t, the wider culture of games will never evolve and we’ll be doomed to come to the same surface-level conclusions over and over and over again.

I think the onus is on everybody of all ages and levels of experience to try and make this space stronger and more inviting so as to encourage the retention of good, smart people. For young people, that means trying an older game here and there you’ve heard about but never made the time for and then reading what people have said about it not blogged and made video essays about it 2020 but back in 2010, 2005, 1998, and even further back (yes, work like that does exist!). For more experienced critics, that means making your previous work easily accessible for all to engage with, as well as engaging with what younger people are interested in with an open mind and with snide remarks about how better things used to be kept to zero. For everybody, regardless of demographic, that means actively seeking out works from people of cultures and regions of the world different from yours which provide perspectives and conclusions you likely wouldn’t have been able to come to on your own.

Nobody’s perfect, and nobody has time for everything; certainly not me. I love games, but in the grand scheme of culture, they are still absolutely in the nascent stage of their development, despite how popular they have become. I’m going to try my best to not get complacent, to learn new things about the world through games to fill the ignorant gaps in my brain and utilize that information to hopefully try and kindly enrich this space to help it grow. I hope you’ll do so too.

edit (10/25/2020): Sure enough, not 48 hours after I posted this this piece by lotus—who is becoming a favorite critic of mine—came across my Twitter timeline. It does *exactly* what I'm looking for more of: it looks at Kentucky Route Zero from a completely different angle, is written by a writer of a demographic tragically underrepresented in games crit (they identify as azn & nonbinary on twitter), and is rigorously researched with an eye for shining a light on the perspectives of people lotus feels the game doesn't represent too well if at all. I want more of this sort of unique work which shines a light on the aspects of games that tend to be analyzed less; this came to me just today, but another example of the 'KRZ's about debt, whodathunk!' kind of problem I'm talking about is all the myriad pieces about Supergiant Games' Hades which point out how its narrative progresses forward from loss to loss despite being a roguelike, which is similarly a pretty obvious thing to point out. That lotus' piece on KRZ is negative about the game is incidental; me linking it here is relevant more because it's interests are in the game's portrayal or lack thereof of indigenous and Black peoples' history with this country and specifically Mammoth Cave, a topic I have not seen covered much if at all with regards to critical dissections of Kentucky Route Zero. I will say though that it is refreshing to see open negativity about a game which is so often is regarded as unimpeachably 'good'. Open negativity is a topic I plan to cover in a future post, so look forward to that. Whether or not you agreed with me in this piece, I hope you'll still take the time to read lotus' piece on the game.

\\ I Don't Want to Pet the Virtual Dog //

Much of the appeal of video games for me lays in being afforded the access to do things I normally would not be able to do and go places I wouldn’t be able to go. For example, I’ve been playing a lot of Super Mario 64 lately, a game with no shortage of activities to engage in that have no direct analogue to ‘real-life’; successively higher jumps, long jumps, butt stomps, giant dog things chained to wooden posts, dropping baby penguins off a ledge into an infinite abyss, changing the flow of time in a space based on when I walk through a painting, etc. As well, as you get older, this sort of indulgence in fantasy scenarios in games can extend into being afforded access to scenarios which have real-world analogs but which for one usually unfortunate societal or cultural reason or another, the player may never get to experience for themselves: such as being a poor person and playing a game where you have a lot of money to spend while still being able to make your rent on time, or being black and not being discriminated against by police while driving a car or walking down the street, or shopping out in public as a trans person and being treated by other customers and the employee base as an individual worthy of dignity and respect, or even just the ability to walk on Mars for a day. The list goes on.

While I would never say fantasy is the only reason I would play a video game, twenty years on after my first experience with a video game—Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back—I can’t say indulging in fantastical scenarios has lost its luster. Meanwhile, in the last ten years or so, there’s been more and more of an outcry by a subset of video game players to see games which allow them to engage in more mundane, everyday tasks which are far more universal (at least to those privileged enough to have a roof over their heads), like brushing your teeth, starting up a car, grabbing a beer from the fridge, taking a walk…

Or petting the dog.

The Twitter account ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ dates back to last year, 2019, when a person who was upset that you couldn’t pet a dog in Ubisoft’s The Division 2 decided to make a Twitter account documenting whether or not, if a game has a dog, you, the player, were allowed to pet the dog. The account’s anonymous owner soon spread the account’s reach to beyond dogs, cataloging many instances of an animal appearing in a game and whether or not you can press a button to walk up to the dog and pet it.

This isn’t a scientific observation, but I feel like just based off of my memory alone it was always sort of touch-and-go whether or not you would be able to pet dogs in games which came out before the time of ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’. In other words, games absolutely had dogs and cats and pigs and what-have-you before ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’, but it wasn’t often the case that you could interact with them. They might follow you around and bark or meow here and there, but as game development is incredibly expensive and adding a feature as simple as petting a dog requires the collaboration of modelers, riggers, animators, programmers, and quality assurance testers and analysts, and as games get more and more expensive to make due to HD development and larger and larger team sizes, time and resources which could be allocated to ultimately trivial actions like petting dogs were often instead dedicated to more critical tasks necessary to ship a game on time.

As an independent game developer myself, I want creators to have the freedom to do what they want to do. As a critic, I want to be able to freely judge and analyze the work artists release on their own terms on my own terms. And it’s sort of impossible to do that now in a world where ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ can quickly throw together a 280 characters-or-less tweet with a relevant gif about a game which doesn’t let you pet the dog to the account’s 450K followers to instantly write off for not fitting into their preconceived mold of what games should let the players do.

To engage with art is to come to grips with a series of choices made by the artist. In an ideal scenario, the context that art is experienced in is also the one which the artist intended for it, though of course in reality this usually isn’t the case (Doom on a refrigerator, a David Lynch film on a smartphone, etc.). But to play Doom on a refrigerator is still to play some version of Doom as it was originally intended.

Conversely, developer ZeniMax Online Studios did not originally intend to allow you to pet the dog in The Elder Scrolls Online. As of April 18, 2019, you couldn’t. About a month after ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ released a tweet confirming that the dog in The Elder Scrolls Online was not petable, The Elder Scrolls Online Twitter account replied to that tweet to confirm that you now, in fact, could pet the dog.

There have been numerous instances of the ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ account releasing a tweet stating that an animal in a game was not petable, the account’s followers becoming visibly disappointed or even incensed that a developer would dare to put an animal in a game which isn’t petable, and then the account releases a follow-up tweet confirming that you now can pet the animal after the developer/publisher of the game the account was totally not criticizing noticed the tweet and decided they needed to pivot to petable animals through a patch because ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ has a lot of Twitter followers.

And y’all, I fucking hate this shit so much. Like I’ve said in this piece already, I value artists being able to do what they want to do on their own terms. The Dog Problem as I’ll coin it here is a troubling trend to me because it essentially means that game developers—a medium which is already inherently extremely online through the intersection of tech and art in games—may very well have to bend to the whims of wannabe backseat designers armed with a keyboard and monitor who want everything to look exactly like everything else. Games have always had this problem; think back to the days of games being reviewed far more like products, for their adherence to the industry’s current standards of the cutting edge of visual fidelity, smooth controls, high-quality audio, etc. One of the most encouraging trends in games over the last ten years or so which it seems to me has allowed a wider variety of games to shine in the limelight has been a new generation of writers often equipped with influences beyond the pillars of nerd culture like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

Being able to pet the dog may seem like a fairly innocuous realization of the art-for-online world we live in, but I see it as a stepping stone toward other, potentially more insidious trends, chief among these the uniformity of all things. I don’t want to live in a world where everything looks just like some version of everything else, already a major problem in today’s Apple-core minimalist design hellscape planet. Mainstream gaming has this problem a lot of the time already, where every game has an open-world populated with empty calories junk to be consumed and subsequently forgotten, or every game has a battle royale mode, or every game needs to have extra things to purchase to supplement the costs of development, etc. Worst yet, it means that artists will have to perform labor that they very may well not be interested in order to placate insufferable audiences who approach art with a series of preconceived notions of what art fundamentally should be. It’s a perverse, weird sort of gentrification; the death of art, and thereby the death of culture itself.

And I’ve already got cats in real life! Petting the virtual animal will never hold a candle to the real thing. Petting dogs in video games feels like nothing to me. I don’t get it. All this extra work and budget spent on essentially the player-character bending down, petting a dog for two seconds, and returning to their previous animation state. Why do people want this so much? It’s utterly bizarre to me. Y’all do you, I guess, but think about what you’re asking for when you hit follow on ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’.

\\ I Don't Know What to Title This (or rather: It Is What It Is) //

Two weekends ago I played through The Beginner’s Guide, developed by Everything Unlimited, which celebrated its fifth anniversary just a handful of days later. It was the first time I’d touched the game—a short one hour or so experience—since its initial release. It’s a game where you play as you, the player, who is being sherpa’d through a series of short video game vignettes made in Valve’s Source engine by the voice of Davey Wreden, a real person who came into prominence after the success of the 2013 remake of his Half-Life mod The Stanley Parable, a game which playfully poked fun at typical videogamey conventions, and which is sort of being remade again, or something? With new content? In 2021? If that’s a thing you want, I guess?

These tiny games present within The Beginner’s Guide were all seemingly developed by Wreden’s friend who he refers to as ‘Coda’ for the sake of their anonymity. The two met at a game jam after Wreden became transfixed by Coda’s byzantine approach to game design; works where digestible storylines, clear answers, and logical puzzles & riddles have no home. In order to allow the player to see all of the ‘content’ of the games which often in their original, completed forms would either be impossible or would take an irresponsibly lengthy amount of time to see through, Wreden will often teleport the player or unlock doors or move objects out of the player’s way just to move them along as he regales the player with stories about Coda and his interpretations of why Coda made certain design decisions in their games.

By the end of the game, Wreden suffers a sort of nervous breakdown after showing the player the truth (or perhaps the player is somehow discovering it without Wreden’s volition? It’s not super clear.); Coda resented Wreden for his ceaseless prodding into their work, off-put and disturbed by Wreden’s thirst for answers about his friend and by Wreden’s desire to show it all off to the world either against Coda’s wishes or without their consent. Wreden admits to the player having done some version of this; it is, of course, a choice he makes in order to try and fill some gap in his life. Moreover, it’s revealed that Wreden had also been adding visual iconography to Coda’s games to make them feel more like ‘proper’ art, in particular a lamppost which shows up at the conclusion of many of the games you’re shown which Wreden initially insists were placed there by Coda themself as a sort of way of linking the games together either narratively or thematically. The game ends on an ambiguous note; the player walks through a space which is sort of a portmanteau of a train station and some arcane ruins while Wreden admits to his wrongdoings and comes to the conclusion that he needs to go away and work through his various personal failings.

Due to the vague nature of the story being told, the game became the topic of much critical discussion and dissection. Some took it to be a commentary by Wreden—a game developer who after the success of The Stanley Parable had suddenly found himself the target of a ton of new fans and their adulation—on the relationship between fans and creators in an increasingly online world, a world which brought with it heightened amounts of access into the lives of others whether that level of access is necessarily owed or not. Others saw the game as an open speculation on what ‘art’ is and/or should be fundamentally be about, whether that be purely for the artist’s own catharsis or for audience engagement and the subsequent notoriety that might come as a result of opening up those experiences to others, or some mixture of the two.

Coda and Wreden’s relationship with them is of course a fabrication for the sake of the story of The Beginner’s Guide, a fact which is obvious but which didn’t stop some from believing in the veracity of it. Thus, it’s difficult to prescribe any one meaning onto the game as purely canonical, which is sort of the point; but there I go prescribing a single meaning! And that’s sort of the compelling thing about talking about the game, discussions which at the time were both tantalizing and maddening; playing it can feel like following a path laid out before you to reach some conclusion, only that conclusion ends up looking much like where you started, and you’re not quite sure whether at some point along the path you somehow ended up getting turned around in your quixotic attempt at transcending your current level of understanding The Beginner’s Guide to reach some deeper meaning about it and in turn yourself and the world around you, so you end up attempting to follow that same path again, ad infinitum.

A lot has changed about games, how they’re made, and the people who make them since 2015. More and more people are playing games, especially with the dawn of free-to-play games, and there are more free toolsets than ever which allow developers to make games on their own or in small teams. Often, it’s true that games come about as a result of developers being directly inspired by games made by others. They want to make things which allow themselves to more materially see themselves in the works of others, standing squarely on the shoulders of giants.

Genshin Impact by miHoYo cannot be written off as merely a clone of Nintendo’s classic The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game does a lot different, so much so that it ultimately ends up feeling like its own thing. But throughout my time playing it I can’t not think back to my initial experience with Breath of the Wild which, while itself was absolutely a game inspired by previous open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption, instantly dignified itself by fundamentally rethinking so many of the clichés and values of previous open world games, a genre which by 2017 for many had become exhausting and untenable. Many of the design decisions and audiovisual flourishes contained within that game are so hyperspecific that when you see an image or hear a cue from Breath of the Wild, you know it’s Breath of the Wild. And almost all of these specific details are brought forward by miHoYo into Genshin Impact, from the piano-driven direction of its music to the enemy designs to its color palette to the mob encampments to the ability to climb anything to the glider (except now it’s wings because anime), etc.; it makes me wonder what the Breath of the Wild team makes of Genshin Impact. I’m nobody, but if I saw somebody significantly incorporating distinct elements of my work into their own, honestly…just knowing who I am, I might feel a little jipped. But further psychoanalytical probing on me and my problems will have to wait for a different post on my video game blog.

Perhaps this may come off as a bit strained of a comparison to make, but I can’t help but draw a line from how the fictional Wreden treated Coda and their games in The Beginner’s Guide to Genshin Impact developer miHoYo’s relationship to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Both Wreden and miHoYo clearly see some aspect of themselves in the work which they’re elaborating upon. Where Wreden chose to populate Coda’s games with lampposts to add some strained conception of symbolism and in-depth metaphorical meaning, miHoYo of course made their own game which started with the Breath of the Wild formula as a foundation and added to it the trappings of more traditional anime fantasy, gacha mechanics—wherein players can spend money to roll the dice and possibly earn characters to their roster which they may not have earned yet—and a more typical open-world RPG progression structure a la The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt where you earn experience for your overall rank and your individual characters in addition to finding and upgrading weapons, armor, and different items, where talking to characters doesn’t just give you gameplay information but also adds to your internal understanding of the world Genshin Impact lives within. While the scenario presented within The Beginner’s Guide is clearly painted as perverse, there’s something a little bit insidious to me about what Genshin Impact and soon Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising—another game which has made it a point to bite off significant chunks of Breath of the Wild’s core design tenets, this time with Greek mythology and typical Ubisoft open-world clunkery—are doing.

And maybe I’m making the comparison between Genshin Impact and The Beginner’s Guide up because, well, I don’t really like Genshin Impact (and also because I needed something to write about this week). The combat, nuanced as it is through its emphasis on fusing the alchemical elements just doesn’t kinesthetically click with me. The ‘open-air’ structure (a term coined by Nintendo for Breath of the Wild, wherein the player is allowed to go anywhere and do anything more or less from the word go) doesn’t work as well in a game where you’re essentially gated in where you can go by virtue of the leveling system. Breath of the Wild’s implementation of this world design structure worked because since your only ‘stats’ were health, stamina, and inventory slots. As such, you could just find and pick up a level 60 sword or strong piece of armor whenever and hold your own, especially given that you’ll often find them throughout the shrines which you’re encouraged to play through at any time. In Genshin Impact, going off the beaten path might mean finding a mob of enemies that are 10 levels above your adventure rank, and this happens to me so much that I feel pigeonholed into playing it much more like a traditional RPG where I just follow waypoints and focus less on the game’s aesthetics and worldbuilding. Genshin Impact will even sometimes remark upon the player attempting to visit a location they shouldn’t yet and physically turn them around, ensuring they don’t end up in a precarious situation, which is just bananacakes to me. This sort of thing is the stuff of games! I love to transgress, to go beyond the bounds. That, to me, is part of what makes a life worth living, and games by being virtual spaces are so well-equipped to give players those sorts of experiences. And I don’t like how chatty and intellectually condescending it can be when compared to the quiet, reserved Breath of the Wild (your sidekick Paimon is just…beyond the pale), and the gacha stuff is really off-putting to me as someone who’s just never been into microtransactions in games; that stuff just ejects straight out of what otherwise can be beautiful, engaging worlds I want to get lost in.

Genshin Impact at the end of the day is absolutely not a Breath of the Wild clone or fan game. It’s trying to do its own thing, so I do feel bad for judging what it’s doing too harshly as those aspects relate to Breath of the Wild. But at the same time, since it doesn’t really shy away from the fairly obvious influence, I feel like straining myself to not compare the two is sort of a ludicrous premise. And as a person with my own subjectivity…look, Breath of the Wild is my favorite game. If I could snap my fingers and make every game Breath of the Wild, I probably would (and then regret it seconds later, but). So I sort of have this need to compare the two. Am I then, like Davey Wreden in The Beginner’s Guide, trying to mold Genshin Impact into something it looks like but also fundamentally isn’t all to fill some sort of Breath of the Wild-shaped void in my life? Are my best days truly behind me? Does the toothpaste, in fact, not go back in the tube?

Jury’s out, I guess.

In our increasingly interconnected world, I wonder: who owns an idea?

And now, time for a segue!

Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding is a game I’ve weirdly found myself sinking a significant amount of time into lately. For those who’ve found this blog and somehow don’t know what it is, it’s a game directed by notorious Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima where more or less you’re given directives to bring luggage A to location B across a sprawling, Iceland-esque rendition of a post-apocalyptic America, bringing individuals living subterraneously within isolated prepper stashes onto a central distributed network, thus connecting humans both materially and symbolically. But it’s not easy, because player-character Sam Porter Bridges is a stumbling fool who will trip and fall down a mountain face’s worth of crags if your backpack stash dares to lean one whole inch too far to the left, unless of course you, the player hold the L2 and R2 triggers down together. There’s also these ghost-zombie things called BT’s, which stands for ‘Beached Things’, because there’s this place called ‘The Beach’ where they live, which is where you go after you die but before you’re sent to the real afterlife, so within our world are these echoes of people stuck in purgatory, and they’re tethered to these umbilical cords which connect them to the Beach while they’re in the land of the living, because there’s this whole paternal thing going on with Sam having a little baby in a jar full of amniotic fluid strapped to him which lets him see the BT’s, and if you die it’ll cause a voidout, which imprints a massive crater in the landscape like the one in Akira, and you also build these structures like bridges and set down ladders together with other players which will mutually benefit every player in attempting to traverse the hostile world by their lonesome, and there’s this guy with a mask who talks a lot, and this guy with a mask under a mask who doesn’t talk as much, and the president’s name is Samantha America Strand, and—

Yeah, it’s got some stuff. But I’m mostly playing it as a surprisingly calming ‘podcast game’, wherein I play the game while listening to a podcast or with a YouTube video on in the background (shouts out to Jon Bois and Tim Rogers). I actually played the first four chapters and change worth of Death Stranding back when it first came out in November of last year but bounced off of it hard when the narrative elements present within the game were really failing to land with me in a way that (sometimes) they tended to for me with Kojima’s past games, in particular Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, P.T., and Snatcher. I sort of liked the game’s mechanical structures, but at one point fell down a literal cliff and lost all the stuff on my back and was already not at all into the worldbuilding and storytelling the game was engaging in, so I got really mad and returned it to Redbox (the second to last game I rented from Redbox! The last being Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which, uh, yeah…) and then watched the important cutscenes online and thought they seemed dumb as hell so I felt vindicated in my displeasure with the game and yadda yadda yadda.

So why then have I returned to Death Stranding, knocking out each and every one of the impossibly lengthy laundry list (L) of generic standard orders that are being given to me by hologram facsimiles of B-list celebrities like Edgar Wright and Junji Ito within the game’s third chapter, of which there are four-fucking-teen? After all, there’s absolutely no shortage of games which can be played in comfortable accompaniment to a podcast, TV show, or what have you. Is it because the game’s dystopian ecosystems mixed up with a goofy adoration for transportation workers and a general vibe of positivity in community makes it a whole 2020 mood? Or perhaps it’s more the fact that writers I respect like Lewis Gordon, Reid McCarter, Blake Hester, Tim Rogers (shouts out Tim Rogers) and Caty McCarthy constantly sing its praises and I want to feel like I’m in intellectual lockstep with the smart brigade? Or better yet, is it just that I really like how Death Stranding looks a lot and want to stare at it for 800 hours of my life in some sort of ceaseless blinking contest which I absolutely will be winning, no questions asked?

Most likely a combination of those three which both reflects positively on aspects of the game I was too flustered to see last year and also reflects negatively on my vain sense of self-worth has something to do with why it’s clicking. But I also think Death Stranding is resonating more with me lately because in 2020, miles away from the zeitgeist and Sony’s marketing dollars at work, I’m more able to enjoy the game for its own merits instead of how the game holds up next to my pre-conceived notions of what I wanted it to be. No doubt Kojima himself spurred on those expectations both through his past works (I still would have liked it if this game featured some sort of Sons of Liberty-esque twist, but the plot of Death Stranding is actually pretty straightforward once you get down to it) and particularly through the game’s arduous pre-release marketing cycle which just would not quit, where trailers showed off arcane dark science-fiction concepts and imagery and a naked Norman Reedus on a beach and a guy floating upward toward a giant demon’s mouth while stabbing himself because that would be a better way to go than being consumed by the giant demon and yeah you get the point. After all, for the most part Death Stranding just doesn’t have the sort of big-hype blockbuster-but-for-smarties tendencies which could make it the target of shrewd dissecting (not that there’s nothing deeper to be mined from its well of semiotic symbols; see Reid McCarter’s analysis of the game’s overt allusions to historical wars and warcrime atrocities which America has embroiled itself in as a particularly salient example) But I still can’t help but feel as if 2019-me and much of gaming culture is somewhat indicted in having wanted Death Stranding to be anything else than what it is, even as the game’s launch neared and it became more and more clear what you fundamentally do in Death Stranding which in turn revealed more and more about what the game even is.

Death Stranding, unlike Genshin Impact, is not a game which when looked at and played naturally conjures up an immediate analog to some other game. It has shades of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes/The Phantom Pain in the chunky move and feel of its player-character, the user interfaces in both MGSV and Death Stranding are off-puttingly cluttered with greebles and doodads like a college freshman’s dorm room, and…okay, yeah, the MULE encampments (did I forget to talk about the MULE’s? So they’re literally a bunch of dudes dressed in what I guess is supposed to be hazmat suits but they remind me so much of the cleaners from Monster’s Inc. that would clean off the human sauce from the monsters. Okay, now get this: they are physiologically obsessed with the sensation of delivering packages and subsequently receiving ‘likes’ (which you get in this game from other players (but also NPC’s sometimes? So I guess they also get likes. But not from players, because players are all Sam Porter Bridges, and Sam Porter Bridges and MULE’s are enemies. And MULE’s seem objectively speaking pretty bad, so I guess when you think about it, it does sort of reflect negatively on the NPC’s giving the MULE’s likes. Food for thought.))) are basically a much worse version of the outposts from Phantom Pain, worse because let’s be honest, the combat and stealth in Death Stranding are half-baked, if we’re being charitable. The game has also been derisively compared to outside walk-em-up’s like Firewatch and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. But it feels so much closer to the sensation of dragging our shambling, tenuous husks of skin, sinew and tendons up and over a mountain, much wilder, more human than the amusement park-esque strolls of the likes of Firewatch.

Such comparisons are made in an attempt to better understand what Death Stranding is doing through the lens of things we already grok. But the game simply can’t be seen in that light, if my aside-sandwiches haven’t desperately made clear by now. I've also been on-and-off playing Super Mario Bros. 35, which is literally Nintendo taking a fangame they DMCA'd and spinning it out into a free game on the Switch which probably fits into this piece somehow and would have been smart to incorporate to build upon my thesis, but also it's not that interesting of a game at the end of the day and I don't have all that much to say about it. Death Stranding, on the other hand, is a truly unique thing to have emerged from a sea of AAA gaming also-rans. There’s your cultural commentary for the day.

To try and tie up this rambling nonsense with a neat bow: sometimes you just have be in a particular mindset to find and take something from out of a work as it wants to be seen and appreciated. Maybe in a year once Genshin Impact is built upon even further and more deeply entrenches itself into its own corner of the wide landscape of games I’ll be better equipped to simply enjoy it without needlessly contorting myself to think of it as a stepping stone along the way to Breath of the Wild’s impending sequel. Or maybe I’m like the feral beast that absentmindedly leaps toward prey (video games) without a second’s consideration; meaning that I still won’t like it (I think that’s a metaphor?). No, better yet: maybe I’ll end up like Davey Wreden (the fake one) who just wanted to see himself/myself in the things he/I invest time and emotional energy into. Nature, or nurture. Player, or played. I’d like to think that, as a critic, I won’t succumb to narcissistic self-obsessions or the critical apparatus’ Word of the Day in a year or so when I do revisit it. Art should be allowed to breathe on its own says I, the critic. But then again…