\\ 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…

\\ A Tale of Two Roguelikes //

In the month of September, two big roguelikes—games which reset when the player loses and randomizes the layout of levels for the next run—both released to widespread critical acclaim: Mossmouth’s Spelunky 2, the highly anticipated follow-up to Derek Yu’s 2012 opus—which itself was an HD remake of the Game Maker-developed 2008 original—and Supergiant Games’ Hades, the studio’s fourth game which had been available in early access for around two years until its recent 1.0 full release.

The 2013 PC port of Spelunky with the introduction of the Daily Challenge mode arguably helped kickstart the rise of Twitch, so it’s of little surprise to me that Spelunky 2’s release had been highly anticipated since its announcement in 2017. I’ve played over 400 hours of Spelunky HD myself and pretty much lost my mind when the surprise announcement trailer for the sequel first dropped. But it’s intrigued me to see how…little the game has seemed to move the needle within the public consciousness. It’s true that as of the time of this writing, the PC version of Spelunky 2 is still a few days away from releasing. But scrolling through my Twitter feed, and based on the length of time I’ve personally spent playing the game, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something else going on here which is repelling people from getting onboard with this long-anticipated sequel.

It’s no secret that more people than ever are playing games. Discussions on how accessible games are to people of all sorts seem to be spinning up more and more these days, and it’s long overdue. The Last of Us Part II, for all its numerous faults, had such an incredible amount of budget and time allocated to a dizzying amount of accessibility options that it felt like a real watershed moment for accessibility design in gaming. All this is to say that since more and more people are playing games, it stands to reason that more and more people might be looking to actually finish games. Statistics have shown that few people actually finish games for myriad reasons, whether it be time or interest. Difficulty in games is a subject which tends to go hand-in-hand with discussions of accessibility. When a game is hard to conquer, it naturally can extend the amount of time you spend trying to conquer it. And for certain types of players, the constant grind of again, again, just once more when pressed up against a particular pain point can sap any and all desire to try and see the rest of a game through.

By 2011, most developers and publishers had sort of all but gotten away from the punishing nature of games from the ‘retro’ era of gaming. Later that year, the original Dark Souls molted from the PS3-exclusive cocoon of Demon’s Souls and took the world by storm by being so notoriously difficult compared to much of what else was out there in the world that publisher Bandai Namco even decided to lean into it as a marketing gimmick. That same year, The Binding of Isaac, a procedural riff on The Legend of Zelda by Super Meat Boy developer Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, arrived as more or less the first big roguelite game, with the original Rogue Legacy and FTL: Faster Than Light arriving soon thereafter.

The creation of the roguelike subgenre ‘roguelite’ seems to me like it was sort of a concession to players who were perhaps put off by some of the more traditional ‘hardcore’ roguelikes a la Spelunky. What differentiates a ‘roguelite’ from what would traditionally be referred to as a ‘roguelike’ is that roguelites are roguelikes (yeah, I know) which offer players persistent avenues of progression between runs. So, for example, your first run of a roguelite might have you starting off with 100 health points, and then after five runs maybe you find an item which permanently increases this total to 150 health points for each and every run thereafter. Or maybe you start off with a cruddy little knife which only does five damage, but then later on you find a chest in the third world which gives you a sabre which does fifty damage.

Gamers tend to like it when they get more stuff. This is why it was always so interesting to me that the 2012 version of Spelunky was such a runaway success; in that game, the only persistent upgrade one is given is shortcuts to the different worlds. Every other upgrade afforded the player is purely internal; as you play more and more of Spelunky, you start to understand how its myriad enemies, items, and physics systems work independently as well as the numerous intriguing reactions which can stir up when entities acting within the game system push up against each other. It’s hard for me to tell exactly what made the game so popular, but if I had to warrant an albeit pretty wide-spanning guess, I’d say that its appeal in light of its lack of progression mechanics could be summed up by this series of confluences both intentionally designed and naturally reactive to those decisions: a really sharp difficulty curve throughout the arc of a run, the extremely brief time it takes to see through a successful run, the number of and intricacy of its intoxicating secrets, the slapstick comedic nature of its systemic interactions, and the community which naturally spawned out onto the internet as a result of the strength of the previous four pillars.

Almost two weeks into its release, I’ve played quite a bit of Spelunky 2 on PS4. But it’s really failed to draw me in in the way that Hades has, a game which I was extremely skeptical of upon its initial reveal and simultaneous early access release in 2018. On the one hand, I don’t envy Derek Yu and Blitworks having to follow up the original Spelunky (a term which I will hereafter use to refer to the 2012 Spelunky, not the actual original pixel art 2008 original, which, yes, I have also played a substantial amount of). It’s kind of staggering to think how summarily the original game knocked it out of the park in all regards. Consciously or not, the original game established each and every one of those initial core pillars. Each pillar serves as a ballast to the other pillars; in other words, no one pillar can stand on its own. For example, if the game were too difficult, a good run would take too long and could potentially bore the player. If the game were too long, a surprising or shocking death moment would feel tragic instead of comical. While the original game is hard to nail down in terms of its difficulty, if it were too hard and runs made too long it would make the breadcrumb trails left out in the open for some of its alluring mysteries feel completely unattainable and thus many players would feel far less inclined to try and pursue them. The list goes on.

Much has been made of Spelunky 2’s first area, the dwelling. Aesthetically speaking, it closely resembles the mines of the original game…mostly in that it’s not all that much to sneeze at. You’ve got your rocks, your stones, that kind of thing. But set a screenshot of it next to, say, the fourth world in Spelunky 2 (or, rather, the fourth world I’ve gotten to; the game has branching paths and, full disclosure, I haven’t finished a run yet, and we’ll get to why) and there’s simply no comparison. But in the first game, that was sort of okay. While you were certainly likely to die there just learning how the game fundamentally works, the novelty and quality of the procedurally-generated nature of the world, the introduction of the fun and often comedic physics engine, and the breadcrumbing of arcane items like the key, the chest, the Udjat Eye which you get when you open the chest, the sacrificial altar, and others were more than enough to intrigue a player and propel them through. It also was never too difficult of a world. You’re always given a good-sized variety of enemies and traps, and the quantity and distributions of these entities was always perfectly manageable once you get the hang of it.

Spelunky 2’s opening world is much, much harder than Spelunky 1’s. I mentioned before the first game having a really high-quality procedural-generation engine; I would say the second game’s hasn’t struck me as nearly as strong, and it’s often because the numerous additions stapled onto the game’s flow interrupt the stability of the aforementioned core pillars which made the original Spelunky tick. There are more enemy types in addition to the ones which existed in the mines of the first game and these new additions are way more annoying and difficult to deal with, particularly the spasmatic horned lizards and cave moles which often can trap you in an infinite loop of damage, ultimately ensuring your death. The first game was far more consistent about ensuring that you would be given a path from the start to the exit without forcing the usage of bombs and ropes, which if depleted essentially ensure your need to start over; here, you’re much more likely to be led to your demise by a passageway laid out for your by the procedural generation engine. Rooms are larger and so naturally will exponentially increase the length of a run. The music isn’t nearly as strong as the two tracks that could play in the first area of the first Spelunky; this new track just doesn’t buzz with that same sort of refreshing energy to really start you off on the right foot. Putting the treasure chest into a backroom—a new addition to Spelunky 2 which consistently disappoint in terms of room layout and the quality of surprises and loot contained within—while not allowing the player to take the chest out of the back room means that the player has to take the key to the chest room. The previous game allowed you to bring the chest to the key, so if the chest spawned above the key, and since the player always starts at the top of a room and needs to head downward toward the exit, it made this aspect of traversing through a room in the beginning of a Spelunky run feel a lot more dynamic. In Spelunky 2, keys can spawn below chests, so since you need to take keys to chests in this game, it essentially means that in this scenario you’ll be forced to spend bombs and ropes to bring the key to the chest so as to get an item that you’ll be far less likely to even use properly seeing as you’ve had to expend resources to get it, even before taking into account the general difficulty increase which permeates Spelunky 2.

The most bizarre change to Spelunky 2’s opening area is the fact that area 1-4 is always exactly the same. You’ll consistently face off with the quillback porcupine man who you need to goad into rolling through the rock wall (or instead just bomb through the side or the bottom) in order to reach either the left or right back rooms. This miniboss is never spiced up from run to run by, say, the addition of an enemy type bolstering up the encounter, or a trap or two, though if you’re lucky you might find an item box or damsel in the top corners of the room. As such, this encounter always plays out exactly the same and so is easy to quickly master, especially if you’re adequately experienced with the first game, causing this area to quickly grate. Repetitive level layouts are the bane of the roguelike’s existence, so it’s strange to me that this idea wasn’t quickly shooed away before it could serve to muck up the flow of Spelunky 2’s initial impression upon the player.

It’s been eight years since Spelunky HD released. So much has changed about how games are designed and how they’re played, and I’m generally not someone who tends to wax poetic about the way things used to be. Far from it, in fact. If I were to list out some of my favorite games of the last handful of years, a consistent theme threading that list together would be that each game gave me an experience I’d never had before. Even having played some of the original version of Spelunky before its 2012 HD re-release, that new version absolutely still managed to instantly come across to me as a breath of fresh air through its aesthetic redesign (both in terms of the spritework and the approach to music) and through the addition of a ton of new secrets. But that was then.

Roguelikes, too, have changed. As game development becomes more and more accessible, the cost-effective nature of procedural generation has clearly become an attractive prospect for numerous game developers, seeing as a new roguelike/roguelite/whatever seems to release on Steam every five minutes these days. Unsurprisingly, many of these games aren’t very good. Others are, in fact, very good! Whichever the case, as there are thousands of games coming out every day, many of these roguelikes tend to fail to capture an audience. It’s hard to stand out amongst the crowd.

When I first saw footage of Spelunky 2, the thought that struck my mind was, “Wow, that sure looks a whole lot like Spelunky!” When reviews for the game came out the day before the release of its PS4 version, some version of that initial thought proliferated each of the generally positive reactions to the game, so much so that it’s hard not to view this reaction as a general consensus about the game. It’s Spelunky, but a lot harder, and that hasn’t moved me to want to play too much of it all at once as I previously thought I’d be doing every waking minute following its release into the world. The changes to the formula and increase in difficulty brush up against the very foundations of those core pillars. Getting through the initial area has proven to be a consistent chore for me due to its far more punitive difficulty curve and weaker level generation engine, often robbing the play experience of comedic potency. Acknowledging that a successful run through this first area will consistently take me longer than it did in the first game makes me want to play the game in general less and less.

Moreover, to release a Spelunky 2 in 2020, as a veteran player of Spelunky, needs to mean something different to even attempt to recapture that same spirit of unease, of descending into the unknown. This is maybe the only time this sentence will ever be said by anyone ever, but when I think back to that era of games, particularly to independent games such as those being released onto the Xbox Live Arcade platform…to be frank, the spectre of the cancelled Fez II hangs over Spelunky 2 for me. Developer Phil Fish purported Fez II would be so profound a change from its predecessor that it would resemble the jump from the first Legend of Zelda (a top-down action game) to Zelda 2: Adventure of Link (a bizarre side-scrolling anomaly in the Zelda franchise which I love deeply). For a developer so obsessed with toss-ups and creating new experiences (his long-awaited side project UFO 50, a collection of fifty full NES-style games, seems more to fit the bill here), it’s honestly sort of beguiling to me that Spelunky 2 hews so closely to its predecessor.

It might sound kind of ludicrous to bring it up, but I do think it cogent to mention the story of Spelunky 2. What’s on display here is more or less an excuse to put you into very Spelunky-esque scenarios; now, you’re on the moon, which for some reason in the Spelunky world has mines and jungles and hidden Aztec, Mayan, and Egyptian iconography tucked beneath its spherical façade. You play as the daughter of the Spelunky dude from the first game, who was left behind on earth with her dog while her parents were so obsessed with reliving their glory days that they, well, left behind their daughter to fend for herself. She reasonably wonders what was so enthralling that her parents thought it worth leaving her behind for, and so she makes her way to the moon to find them after they fail to return within a reasonable amount of time. Then you just play Spelunky 2 a bunch until maybe you win.

And I never really liked any roguelites, which is where these types of games seem to be trending, which is maybe why I hinging so many of my hopes on it being a game which really provoked me and gave me something I’d never experienced before. The insistence of roguelite games on including persistent progression mechanics always kind of felt like cheating to me, as if the game designers were trying to paper over core design issues with flashy character, ability, and weapon upgrades. Instead of emphasizing to the player the need for players to fully understand and master the core game systems to make progress, these games are content with allowing the player to simply invest raw time and energy so that eventually they’ll power through toward ensuring successful runs.

If I were to try and pin down what’s most changed about my taste in games since the original Spelunky released, a game which as made fairly clear here was such a watershed moment in how I think about games, it would be that great character writing, thoughtful world design, and a compelling story can often pull me through what might otherwise be sort of a humdrum experience, gameplay-wise. It’s why I thought it worthwhile to mention Spelunky 2’s flimsy story hook at all. Had the game contained anything resembling a worthwhile narrative layer stringing the player along from run to run, I could actually see myself sticking with it for a lot longer than I currently do. Instead, in very Nintendo fashion, the characters here are little more than gameplay information dispensers. You can save characters from the mines and bring them back to your home base camp, but I’m sort of confused why this feature was included as nobody seems to do or say anything of interest.

Enter Hades. Supergiant’s latest is undeniably blowing up online, becoming the center of a ton of fan art, character shipping, and armchair game design analysis (unlike what I’m doing). The game legitimately feels like a phenomenon here in this moment, which was so unexpected to me given how long it had been allowed to gestate in the public eye through both its availability on early access and its semi-transparent development cycle by way of Noclip’s Hades behind-the-scenes development series. Its depictions of well-trodden characters of Greek mythos wallowing in stasis about the Underworld are decidedly modern, each of them waxing semi-poetically (but not too poetically) about their often troublesome relationships with parents, ex-lovers, and sordid past lives above ground amongst the Olympians. But the game’s not so modern that it falls into the trap many other games do of feeling like they’re backseat written by eras of internet culture which by the point the game finally makes it out of the door are already outmoded.

And the game is a roguelite, and I really like it! And I’m honestly really surprised that I really like it. Since the runaway success of Supergiant’s debut in Bastion, many have clamored for either a direct sequel or at the very least some sort of follow-up within that universe. Instead, Supergiant bounced back with Transistor (which puzzled many Bastion fans with its sort of actiony, sort of RTS-adjacent combat; a game I strongly disliked) and Pyre (sort of a hybrid of Oregon Trail and NBA Jam which I adore but I always suspected didn’t connect with many as evidenced by its lack of a Switch release and also having come out in 2017, one of the busiest years in gaming ever). I don’t have the numbers in front of me, so I can only speculate, but I’ve always suspected these games were maybe not the hits Supergiant were hoping for. As such, my initial, admittedly overly cynical response to seeing Hades was that it seemed like Supergiant had basically snuck out a Bastion sequel by incorporating and refining that game’s combat mechanics and mixing that in with a trendy roguelite structure which lots of people would be likely to glom onto. I was always a little suspicious of people who liked it during that early access period. From what I could tell, they seemed to like it simply for being a tightly-refined version of a game I’ve already played numerous versions of before, just covered in different coats of paint. As games like that tend to not be much to my liking, even though I overall liked Supergiant, to be completely honest I’d more or less completely written the game off in my head as not for me.

What I didn’t expect was the ways in which Supergiant would use the game’s roguelite (note the ‘t’) structure to tell what is ultimately a series of compelling linear stories, and it’s here where the magic happens. Hades works from the word go because its isometric character action-style gameplay is immediately snappy and engaging, and you, as the player-character Zagreus, son of Hades, are given just enough narrative meat to sink into that you’re able to tell that there’s something going on beneath the surface, so to speak. At the outset of your very first run, you start not in the game’s hub zone but at the beginning of the game’s first area, Tartarus. Though you could theoretically make it to the end and win on your very first run (which I suspect will if it hasn’t already become the theme of many a YouTube Hades challenge video in the future), it’s far more likely you’ll perish to one of the Underworld’s many Shades. Upon death—Hades’ idea of failure—you’re sent back home to the domain of your abusive parent, that eponymous Temple of Hades (a particularly prescient concept for millennials and Gen Z’rs, who I imagine might make up a large portion of the amount of people playing Hades). You’re then left to sort of muck about the place with your fellow malcontents who are all just sort of going nowhere forever while your distant, gruff father figure scribbles who-knows-what into ledgers and Scythian tomes.

I knew early on that I thought Hades was really fun and that it carried with it the usual staples of Supergiant’s oeurvre (killer aesthetic, great music, strong voice acting direction, etc.). But it was still a roguelite, and I just didn’t like roguelites in the same way that I liked the more traditional structure of Spelunky a lot more. I figured my time with the game would end much as did my time with 2018’s Dead Cells, which at first I enjoyed mostly for its snappy controls but quickly got away from as the snarky presentational tone started to grate and the artifice of the gameplay loop became too transparent for me to bear.

Sisi Jiang said something on Twitter which crystalized a jumping-off point for me on why Hades works so well: “i really hope that more indies emulate the hades model of "polish a core gameplay really well and extend the playtime with narrative instead of fetch quests"”. To try and expound upon this: while it’s true that Hades employs the roguelite model making a really enjoyable combat loop which then emphasizes upgrades and unlockables to give the player the sensation of getting better at the game over time, that’s the point. Hades has narrative in spades, and it’s able to do this by narratively functioning much as a linear game would, temporally speaking. Yes, as you play, you accrue more upgrades for your person, but you’re also delivered more and more dialogue exchanges in often surprising ways with characters who are fully fleshed out and thereby made interesting, in addition to informative flavor text which helps ground the player within the sprawling and sometimes confusingly labyrinthine nature of Greek mythology.

Characters you meet out during a run will appear in the Temple of Hades, ready to remark to the player something about their current state. Or maybe they’ll comment on some particular aspect of the player’s previous run in a way which feels like the game is truly listening to you and your playstyle, such as what weapon you brought out on the previous run or whether you frequently chose upgrades from a particular god such as Zeus or Aphrodite. Or maybe they’ll remember that you died to them on the previous run, or maybe instead that you bested them last time, so this time you oughta steel yourself for what’s in store for you! Whereas Spelunky felt alive to me in 2012 because of its intensely physical and granular systemic interactions between acting entities in the gamespace, Hades manages to feel alive because of the sprawling nature of the ways in which it manages to sink its narrative tendrils within the player’s entrails.

One of Hades’ big secrets is that a single successful run is not the end of Hades; in a stroke of genius, it wants you to finish a run so it can get on with the story that happens after your first victory. I’ve heard plenty of talk of a ‘true ending’, the means of reaching this point of which I’m not yet privy to. I haven’t really finished either of these games, despite having a full successful Hades run under my belt, which is to say that I’ve yet to roll credits on the game.

But I know that I’m far more likely to find myself motivated to want to finish Hades than I am Spelunky 2. To finally wrap back around to my earlier discussion about accessibility in games, Hades, despite being pretty low on actual accessibility options, is at the very least far more approachable. Through its fun and well-drawn characters and world, it’s rendered far less cold and calculated than Spelunky 2. Both games are difficult, but when you die in Hades, you don’t tend to feel like your cause of death appeared out of thin air. And unlike in Spelunky 2, that death will be remembered as meaningful, reverberating out to affect the game’s cast in ways both surprising and appropriate. They don’t just lead to menus to be mashed through to get back into the action, and it’s that approach to death and loss which is really connecting with me.

And sure, maybe it’s kind of silly to try and compare them. After all, in a lot of ways, Hades and Spelunky 2 couldn’t be more different. But they came out around the same time. I’m a human. I’m subjective, and I feel stuff. This cosmic coincidence means no matter waht, I can’t not situate these two games side by side in a constant dual for my unwavering affection. As much as developer Derek Yu has in the past espoused his love for surprises and mysteries, particularly in the book about the original game which he himself wrote, to me Spelunky 2 feels too much like its predecessor regardless of any new items and enemy types that it just doesn’t provoke me anymore. It’s a game which is in some ways is reactive to how people engaged with the first game yet which still leaves me feeling like I’m running in place on a patch of ground marked ‘2012’ when I play it. That first game came out eight years ago! Or twelve years if you’re feeling like a pedant.

And I’m getting older! I’m twenty-six years old now. I need new experiences to thrive. We already do so much of the same old stuff over and over and over again in our daily lives, that when a new experience does come around it can truly feel special and like something worth treasuring. In a year for games which has pretty consistently disappointed me, Hades miraculously keeps on doing that magical surprise thing even as it sends me to perform my Sisyphean task (see what I did there?) once more topside. And look, yeah, I paid the twenty bucks asking price for both of these games. I’m me; I’m going to keep playing both of them to try and find what’s waiting for me on the other side. But it’s been a hard, lonely year. So now, eight years later, I don’t want to do it all again by myself. This time, I’ll drag a friend or two along through Hell and back, even if it kills us.

\\ In the Shadow of Greatness: Nick Suttner's Shadow of the Colossus book review //

There are few games in my life which have had a more profound impact than Shadow of the Colossus for the PlayStation 2. I consider it to be my second favorite game of all time - Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Dark Souls tends to take the cake for me but it varies depending on the day. The first time I ever saw the game, I was very young; I couldn’t have been much older than 12 or so. Something about it lightly intrigued me as a couple friends and I watched another friend toil over its many hulking boss battles. Yet still, my innate “gamer” instincts found a way to be repulsed by the game – a game with only boss battles, an immense landscape, and nothing else to do but ride and wait? I vowed never to touch the thing.

About five years later, that same friend lent me a copy of the game. By then, my artistic sensibilities had drastically shifted, my childish allegiance to Nintendo had all but vanished, and my desire to have new experiences was at an all-time high. And I was hooked – Colossus was impossible to let go of. I played it so quickly that it became but a blur in my mind. I went online and read up and watched everything I could find about creator Fumito Ueda’s next game The Last Guardian, and an obsession was born.

As the wait for The Last Guardian increased far longer than I ever imagined it would, the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus HD Collection was released, and my infatuation with the worlds Ueda and his team at Sony’s Japan Studios (christened “Team Ico” by fans) only seemed to grow. I’ve paid much attention to these games, played them multiple times, and have spent countless hours scouring the internet for information on their many secrets (I based my article for Kill Screen about Fez’s black monolith around what I feel is a seminal piece of investigative games writing by Craig Owens at Eurogamer about the year-spanning search for secrets in Colossus).

All this is to say that I stepped into reading Nick Suttner’s new book about Shadow of the Colossus with lofty expectations – I had actually pitched to its publisher, Boss Fight Books, to write it, but Suttner is far more qualified. I left this book feeling mostly satisfied – Suttner paints a picture of the game from start to finish, packing in descriptions of the vistas, forests, and rivers which populate the Forbidden Lands, analyzing controls, the game’s cinematic camera, and more. He documents a playthrough of the game dedicated to the book, which triggers interesting asides of working at EB Games and memories of playing the game for the first time with one of Suttner’s roommates.

The Forbidden Lands lack much in the way of landmarks. They are a place of rocks, biomes, dilapidated stone ruins, caves, a variety of flora and fauna, but differ from the spaces found in many other adventure-style games of the time, where everything is distinct and immediately visually interesting. Colossus’ lands by comparison appear rather drab, yet Suttner does an excellent job of painting them as vivid spaces filled with mysteries to explore and hidden truths to uncover. It’s this intimacy with the reader where Suttner excels as an author. In one section of the book, he recalls spending time as a child in the outdoors, overturning logs to find all kinds of insects living beneath, and connects this experience back to Colossus’ embrace of the mundane to help us to understand that finding something of interest here becomes a genuine event, and thus memorable. Suttner understands that the world here is as much a character as Wander, Agro, Dormin, and Mono.

Personally, the most striking parts of the book are those when Suttner uses his current position at Sony (a job he toiled to obtain after being profoundly shook by Colossus) in order to obtain interviews with other game developers and learn of Team Ico’s influence upon other games. Here we’re shared personal anecdotes from the likes of Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us, Uncharted 4), thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen (Journey, Flower, Flow), Polytron’s Phil Fish (Fez, Super Hypercube), From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne), and many more. As a game designer myself and someone who’s always been a fan of the game design process, both technically and philosophically, it was thrilling to get further insights into Ico and Colossus from developers I respect and through lenses I’d never seen before. Suttner is able to uncover deeply compelling morsels of knowledge from other developers due not only to his status as an employee of Sony PlayStation, but also due to his deep knowledge and respect for games and the wider games culture. Suttner touching on Ico and Colossus’ influence beyond the scope of games would have been nice (director Guillermo del Toro and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood are noted fans of the games, and the game even has a deathcore band named after it), though he does briefly mention Colossus’ inclusion in the Adam Sandler film Reign Over Me, reflecting upon how the game’s meditative and therapeutic qualities help Sandler’s character cope with the loss of family members due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center.

I mentioned how my favorite parts of the book are when Suttner gives broader context to the game through interviews and personal connections to phenomena within the game’s world. Unfortunately, it’s in his description of the game’s main plot and sixteen battles where he starts to lose me a bit. This likely comes down to two factors: one, I’ve already played Shadow of the Colossus multiple times, and thus already know what to expect. I know that you have to charge Cenobia into pillars, I know that you must hit the rocks on top of Pelagia’s head to get it to move in a certain direction, and I know that pillars of light billow out from a colossi’s resting place upon finishing a fight. So in this way I’m not taking much from these sections of the book by default.

But Suttner’s descriptions of the bosses and clashing with them generally cease to match my experiences having fought them time and time again all these years. I often forget how to approach each colossus, as every encounter is a puzzle of sorts to solve. Fighting a colossus is toilsome – it takes a long time, and you will make many mistakes, struggle, probably even give up once in a while. Colossus can certainly be a difficult game, but Suttner’s descriptions of each of these encounters are often short, feeling like throwaway filler that’s there simply because it needs to be to fill a book’s worth of content. It’s ironic that Suttner mentions a part of the way through the book that it’s likely impossible for one to truly understand his connection with Colossus, because I started to get the feeling by his sixth or seventh colossus description that Suttner wasn’t much here to dig into this stuff, more interested is he in the smaller things and the broader context within the past, present and future of gaming culture.  Still, one wonders how one could possibly even do this aspect of Colossus justice. It’s true that everyone has a different experience, but I wish Suttner had tried harder to encapsulate in text those first-time feelings of wonder and awe upon meeting a new beast; he admits upfront that he has a hard time remembering exactly what those emotions felt like, and it shows a bit. For me it’s a shame because, again, Suttner is excellent when describing his muted experiences of stumbling upon a fruit-bestowing tree on the side of a mountain ledge or the joyously natural way fish and turtles swim away from Wander if he steps near them in a small pond or galloping through the lands atop our lifelike sequin companion or pondering that which Ueda referred to as “visual noise” of ruins within the Forbidden Lands or the game’s way of treating death maturely and with reverence.

This lack of emphasis expands to Suttner’s treatment of other areas of the game as well. He ends on a description of climbing the Shrine of Worship, an optional feat many players never partake in, as it requires developing Wander’s stamina far past its initial scope – even I’ve never done it, mostly out of the tedium killing lizards and eating fruit required. This section feels abrupt as an ending, and lacked the descriptive prose I’d gotten used to expecting from Suttner. I asked Suttner about his decision to leave out Ueda’s upcoming The Last Guardian (see, I get the hot interviews too!) and he replied that it didn’t quite fit in the context of the book, but personally I can see mentioning this game in the context of the way people have fallen in love with the idea of it not only due to its obvious qualities, but also because it’s another game by the creator of Colossus, a prospect in and of itself extremely exciting. As well, while he does touch upon the aforementioned Eurogamer article and some aspects of the hunt for the game’s fabled “seventeenth colossus,” I can’t help but feel like there’s further investigative work to be done here.

Colossus is not a perfect game by any means, and I felt that Suttner was a bit less critical than what I was hoping for, a tad too reverent in his feelings for the game. He briefly glosses over the game’s bizarre unlockable items and time attack mode, superfluous elements which for me detract from the strong minimalistic core that the game is known for championing. His idolization of the game’s minimalism sometimes divulges into taking shots at games that are a bit wordier or more discrete in their narratives. There’s a section of the book where he discusses the differences between the more overt worldbuilding of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt juxtaposed against the implied narratives and objectives of Colossus and Dark Souls, but paints one as inherently better than the other for the means in which this information is fed to the player. While I agree that games sometimes borrow too much from anime and literature in their heady exposition, I feel that criticizing The Witcher for its brand of narrative simply because it’s different than Colossus’ is unfounded, especially when Wild Hunt has such excellent writing and depth of character. He writes, “…even for a game that stars a supernatural detective (of sorts), Witcher’s sense of mystery still pales in comparison to even a few minutes of riding around Shadow’s empty expanses.” (Suttner, 144) But aren’t we to assess games on their own terms? If the entire gaming consensus had derivatively compared Colossus to The Legend of Zelda upon launch for having no common fodder enemies to slay, no side quests, so few characters to meet, would we not have balked at the thing and forgot about it?

Still, I do share much of his reverence for Colossus, though perhaps not quite as strongly. For its flaws, the game does so much right, inspiring those innate feelings of magic and wonder. It turns players into aspiring designers, musicians, world builders, artists. One plays it ten years out and can’t help but marvel at the thing, the majesty and peculiarities of its irregular design daring but still bold in 2015. With Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda broke new ground, inspiring a generation of artists to be unafraid to venture out into the dark. And it’s the game’s unique sense of beauty that Suttner successfully taps into with this book. The way the game inspires conversation, garners excitability, has led people to remain interested at any morsel of news for Ueda’s next genre-defining work in the making, The Last Guardian, which only recently was re-unveiled for the PlayStation 4. I hope this book finds game players who haven’t yet been exposed to Colossus and makes new players of them, and thus wholeheartedly recommend it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

\\ Raiders of the Lost Croft: Tomb Raider //

This article contains spoilers of gameplay scenarios and locations in Tomb Raider, developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. Played the Definitive Edition on the PlayStation 4. 

If the new Tomb Raider has done anything, it has given me a deeper appreciation for games with more singular, holistic visions. A complete reboot of a franchise which seemed dated after the release of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, it’s a game that tries several things at once, to varying degrees of effectiveness. With this reboot, developer Crystal Dynamics have gone back to the drawing board for their own franchise, echoing Nintendo’s mantra of constant attempts at revitalization of existing intellectual property, but instead of forging their own path, simply mucking about in the dregs of well-torn ground.

\\ Eulogy of the First Flame: Bloodborne //

This article contains spoilers of gameplay scenarios and locations in Bloodborne, developed by From Software and published by SCE Japan Studio, and Dark Souls, developed by From Software and published by Namco Bandai Games. Bloodborne is exclusively for PlayStation 4, and Dark Souls was played on PlayStation 3.

From Software’s Bloodborne is in many ways an excellent game. When I wrote about their last release, Dark Souls II, I worried that game indicated a future fraught with stagnation and tedium for the Souls franchise. While I still fear that Bandai-Namco will attempt to bring this once-thought dangerous and intimidating series down with aspirations of near-annualization and profitability (perhaps the immediate re-release of the game in Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin confirms my suspicions), I still believe that Souls in the hands of Hidetaka Miyazaki (who saved Demon’s Souls from development hell and shaped it with his obtuse yet forward-thinking vision, and would go on to direct Dark Souls and Bloodborne) has the potential to be a consistently interesting prospect for years to come. Still, I don’t think Bloodborne is a perfect game, and I’m not confident that I would name it the best Souls title. Here, though, I will only be focusing on one aspect of the game, the lamps.