Corridors of Time

A note on Titanium Court

2026-05-12T00:00:00Z

Hi gang! Hope you're doing well. This is the inaugural edition of the Ghost version of Corridors of Time, available at blog.theodoraward.com. The website is very much a work-in-progress, but it contains all the posts I made on Substack, too, as well as a couple of pieces I wrote and didn't send out. Anyway, this is a critical review of the interesting new game Titanium Court*. More soon! <3*

Titanium Court is a witty, clever, interesting, well-written game. It looks and sounds gorgeous: the tiles are lovely, and the way it handles “cinematic” animations is genuinely unique. The actual gameplay — the match-3 strategy game at the its center — took a moment to click, but wound up feeling brilliant. The part I didn’t like was structural and narrative, and it ruined the game for me. Explaining this will require spoilers; consider this the spoiler warning.

I also want to mention at the top an excellent review of the game which focuses on the same thematic stuff, but from someone who really enjoyed it: Rebekah Valentine's review for Kotaku.

Titanium Court is a brilliantly original game, so it’s kind of hard to describe. The short version is that you play as a woman who has been mysteriously transported to a world populated by “faeries.” The faeries are extremely funny: inscrutable immortals, they are usually dressed in businesswear, and their business is a daily bout of war: these are the wonderfully strange match-3 tower-defense sequences. After the war concludes each evening, you hang out and explore the court for a while, chatting with funny little guys and developing the story. At the end of the evening, you can ask the mysterious central NPC, the puckish “Puck,” exactly one question about what this place is. (There’s a lot of Shakespeare in this game, specifically A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s interesting to think about — world’s a stage, merely players, etc. — but the allusions didn’t really affect my overall interpretation very much.)

I admit that I may have been primed in the wrong direction by the comparisons to Blue Prince, a tricky, thorny, occasionally-cruel-feeling game which ultimately opens out onto a deeply moving generosity. But it’s apropos in some ways: Titanium Court is a game in which something is going on beneath the surface. Why are you here? Why does everyone talk like this? Why is Puck avoiding you? There are hints of a great evil who may or may not be the player character’s twin. It’s all very interest-piquing.

Keep playing and the situation, as situations are wont to do, begins to deteriorate. You start to get the sense that this is somehow your fault, or at least a result of your being in the Court. This is largely conveyed by a specific narrative mechanic — what’s referred to in the game as faeries becoming “stale,” or repeating one dialogue line over and over again. Going stale is regarded as a mysterious and terrible fate, one whose cause is unknown; it’s upsetting and sad to see a character go stale.

But as the game progresses, you realize there's a metafictional point here: a character goes stale when they run out of written dialogue. Your curiosity and enjoyment, it seems, are coming at the direct expense of the world you’re curious about.

Other things like this start to happen. There’s a wonderful cat who wants you to build a tower up to the top of a shelf in the cellar, which requires a very clever and playful implementation of the Match-3 mechanics. A few days after you complete this, the cat dies. This scene is genuinely moving in its writing and implementation; it’s one of the best-written scenes I’ve seen in a game in a while. But considered in light of the overall narrative, it serves to reinforce the central point the game insists, again and again, on making: it’s bad that you’re here. The things you’re doing for this world are bad. You spending time here at all is bad. As Puck says many times, you should never have come; you should leave immediately.

The great evil in the world of Titanium Court, it turns out, is you, the player. This isn't a matter of interpretation: Puck breaks the fourth wall and says as much. Your desire to play the game is actively deleterious to the characters in the game, who are written in such a way as to inspire you to want to protect them from harm. They began to be hurt from the moment you entered, and the only thing that will save them is leaving. In fact, talking with them and learning about them is precisely what puts them at danger. Put glibly, the central argument of Titanium Court seems to be that liking it makes you bad, or at least makes you want to do bad things.

This zero-sum attitude is reinforced by the endings. After a certain point, you gain the capacity to leave. The game warns you that this is the point of no return, and it is. Your save is locked to one save-file; when you leave, this save is locked, and when you load it, you’re just sitting at a bus station.

I’d finally hit my stride with the game when I reached the possibility of leaving. I’d begun to understand some of the systems, and I was enjoying getting to the bottom of the mystery, so I decided not to leave and kept poking around for a few in-game days. Eventually, I looked up what the point of no return entailed.

It was only then that I began to put the pieces together. I’ve read a few different accounts of people’s endings. As best as I can tell, you can leave the Court in a wide number of different states, but you can’t get any “better” or “worse” endings; it’s just a matter of how much damage you do before you leave. The meticulous, genuinely spectacular effort Thomson put into making it fun, good to look at, nice to play — it’s nothing more than an elaborate temptation. It’s bad for the world of the game to play the game. As far as I can tell, the game is unequivocal about this. All the fun you have is at the expense of the characters’ suffering. It’s brutal. Recognizing the game’s overarching structure — “the Point,” as the game puts it — made me feel like an idiot and a jerk in a way I’ve never quite felt from media. It actually kind of hurt my feelings, in the way a mean prank might.

As is probably clear by now, I don’t understand this game. Am I missing something? It’s a genuine question. I don’t understand why a game designer would put so much effort into crafting something whose entire structuring narrative conceit is that playing it is bad. I want to keep playing it, because Thomson is a brilliant developer who has made a really good video game, but doing so will hurt the characters, and I don’t want to see that happen — not because I think they’re actually real, but because they are written well, and I am attached to them in the way one gets attached to good characters in good narrative art.

The weirdest twist of the knife is that Thomson themself is a major presence in the game. It’s clear from the title screen that the game is a solo effort by them, and they make a few cameos. This makes the central insult of the game feel oddly personal. The autobiographical insertions serve to make clear who precisely set this world up this way, who it is that’s getting the last laugh. Gags that felt playful in the moment (the cameos largely come in the form of interminable, unskippable songs performed by Thomson themself, which you can occasionally choose to watch in lieu of fighting a given war’s final boss) started to feel like jokes I hadn’t realized in the moment were actually at my expense.

Extrapolated outwards, the “lesson” of Titanium Court rhymes with one of the lies of depressive thinking: your continued existence is actually hurting the people to whom you are attached; if they express attachment to you, this is either a lie or a mistake. Perceiving the game’s narrative as a depiction of what it feels like to be depressed is the closest I can get to appreciating it. But if it is a depiction how it feels to believe that the world would be better off without you, it should’ve given us some counterpoint to hold onto, because that’s a horrible, cruel feeling. Besides, the person who made the game is right here! We can see the strings being pulled; this is the person who’s pulling them. We know that Titanium Court a constructed object, not a structure of reality, because the god who made it so cruel is right there. It could’ve been made differently, but it wasn’t. (Maybe it’s a depiction of being a depressed Gnostic.)

I suppose the game is making an “anti-completionist” point — one ought to feel comfortable leaving things unresolved, etc. — but that feels patronizing and misguided to me. I really don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with wanting to experience everything a cultural object has to offer. I love rereading books and rewatching movies. Games, especially service games, frequently exploit players’ fear of missing out their and addictive tendencies, but they do this through time-limited events and gacha pulls and so on — mechanics and incentives that games like Titanium Court as a rule do not have. There’s a discussion to be had about whether a game like Balatro is “addictive” in a deleterious way, but the integration of gambling mechanics into single-player games isn’t the object of *Titanium Court’*s critique. Some single-player games add busy work to pad “completionist” playtime, but that’s just bad design, I think. You should know when to give up on something because you’ve stopped having fun, but I was still having fun with Titanium Court when I realized I was being asked to stop.(Compare the anti-completionist philosophy here to the curiosity-friendly Blue Prince, where the player’s desire for “completionism” is used as an invitation to a rich, hidden world, one full of wonderful and moving secrets.)

Is it just a game about how videogames are bad? I’m sorry, but I like videogames. Sometimes I genuinely am sorry I like them — I feel guilty and ashamed sometimes about how much I like them, a guilt and shame this game tapped into. I think videogames as they presently exist cause a lot of pain, but I don’t think they’re intrinsically harmful. I don’t think being curious is intrinsically hurtful. I think it’s actually a good impulse to want to experience a work of art to the fullest.

Maybe the point is that endings are often disappointing and anticlimactic. There’s an argument to be made that pretty much any satisfying ending in a work of narrative art is unrealistically neat, that satisfying endings in stories train us to want something from life than life is incapable of giving. And there’s value in the partial experience, the incomplete one. It’s a good point, but it’s a different point than Titanium Court’s, I think, which is not merely that real experiences might lack satisfying endings. It’s that the desire to play the game at all — especially when that desire dovetails with curiosity about others — is actively harmful.

I suppose Thomson wanted to create a distinctive experience. I hope — if they meant well with this game, which I assume they did — that they’d regard this reaction as within the range of legitimate responses. It’s certainly been a singular experience for me. I just wish I’d understood more quickly, so I could’ve followed the game’s argument to its logical conclusion and refunded it.

Hades 2

2025-12-16T00:00:00Z

This is just my Steam review from this game. I wanted to write something more thoughtful and still might. But it seemed silly to let it languish on that platform, so here you go.

It’s fun. There’s a lot of game in this game. We heard you like Hades so we put Hades in your Hades so you could, etc. Level design, enemy design, environment design—impeccable. The whole thing is a 9/10 at least.

But I don’t know, man. It’s pristine to the point that it almost feels somehow a little precious or something. (The whole thing is twee in a way that makes me feel nervously nostalgic for 2018 or whatever, when the arc of history seemed, in the face of everything, still stubbornly and slowly drifting wokeward, though this feeling diminished once the game’s narrative began to drift into incoherence.)

As for this game, “Hades II: More Hades,” I muddled my way through and then unlocked an insane weapon and just sort of won. Did I get better at it? I guess. The enemy design is incredibly satisfying to learn. But it’s still a lot of, like, “Oh ok I guess I got bonkers boons this run time to not screw it up.” I “100%ed” it which I’ve only ever done for one other game, the Boltgun typing game—and then I kept playing it, which is bizarre.

Has anyone commented on how the characters are sexy hott in this game? It’s like they knew I was a person who occasionally finds other people attractive on some visceral level! They really thought of everything when they made this thing, didn’t they? The phrase “fan service” popped into my head a lot. You literally take baths with everyone (unfortunately not all at once). To be fair, I find Mel’s, uh, bathtime portrait movingly vulnerable in a way that punches way above its character-development weight.

It’s honestly a lot. The whole thing is a lot, like so much, but it’s also sort of not a lot, like not quite enough. The writing is excellent on the sentence-by-sentence level but the plot, as others have said, rides powerful witch vibes for a while then just kind of flops around for a while. I thought it was kind of silly how the first one is so committed to remedying the tragedies of ancient Greek myth—what a hilariously American project!—but this one opts for justifying their injustice (in at least a few cases) in a way that I found genuinely maddening.

I love the witchy witch stuff in here. I am a gay woman. I love the Crossroads and I like Mel, whose name I’m not typing out not because we’re pals but because I don’t want to look up “umlaut e” on the internet, more than Zagreus. ⊕ hello I laughed out loud dozens of times at a few of the characters’ dialogue. Skelly and Dora are both exceptionally funny characters. Every character is overflowing with personality. It’s a genuine achievement.

But there’s something conservative about the gestalt of this game, something willfully unadventurous, that makes me feel like the adulation for it—which is, on its merits, entirely deserved—comes at the expense of something more daring, or evinces something unhappily zero-sum about “modern games.” This is not Supergiant’s fault! They did a tremendous job making seemingly exactly the game they wanted to. There’s so much love in this game. It is moving to experience. Thinking about how good it feels to play makes me a little emotional: like, that was so nice of them to make me feel this good in my hands and eyeballs.

The “lite” part of Hades has always kind of felt like when they make a “healthy” version of junk food, like high-protein organic Pop Tarts, except the original is, like, free-to-play numbers-go-up endless-checklist Cookie Clicker-type shit. To be clear, like 90% of my diet is that weird protein stuff, because I don’t know how to live. But when you’re eating it, you’re unusually aware of what it’s not. I’m trying to stop putting on podcasts or audiobooks when I play games and this game was good for being a “podcast game” that gave me enough to resist that impulse. I really enjoyed my time with this video game and will probably keep playing it, though I hope it makes me want to play more games that are nothing like it, instead of games that are lesser versions of it.

I will conclude with an ironic ‘90s game magazine-style breakdown of the game’s components: GAMEPLAY: TEN OUT OF TEN! STORY: SIX OUT OF TEN....CHARACTERS: NINE OUT OF TEN! MUSIC: EIGHT POINT FIVE OUT OF TEN. GRAPHICS: FIVE OUT OF TEN—THEY’RE GOOD FOR WHAT THEY ARE BUT THEY’RE NO “AVATAR: FRONTIERS OF PANDORA.” OVERALL: NO ONE KNOWS

Outtakes from the WoW letter

2025-11-29T00:00:00Z

—a white kid whose name was, hilariously, identical to that of a very very famous Black actor; I won’t tell you what it was, but imagine a pasty, freckly, very muscular 5’8” seventh-grade starting fullback named, like, Chris Rock or something—
Mechanics in the Age of Artistic Reproduction
Video games, for the most part, document adventures.
As frightening as it is, one must move on. This is often hard to do.
A year or so later, I entered middle school. In baseball terms, I’d call this a forced error.
that wanting something is worthy of thinking through, even if we ultimately hope to slip free of our desire.
To play an MMO is
Mass media provides the illusion of perfect reproducibility.
The first novel I tried to write in college centered on a fictional massively multiplayer video game; I spent hours and hours laboring over several scenes outside a fictional stand-in for the video game store I hung out at sometimes.
Art, frequently, imitates life, but since art is inside of life, art is also a part of life. One part of life is imitating another. What this means is that the existence of art, or at least art that's mimetic in some way, is predicated on life being internally divided: not integral. [ed. - I wrote this high on an edible and really felt like I’d figured out the entire thing. Was this an accurate judgement? Well, dear reader,]
Life doesn’t need to be perfectly integral—though I think the world can do better than this—
Briefly, for context: the process of habit formation is often divided into three parts. First, there’s a trigger; second, the trigger motivates a behavior; third, the behavior is rewarded. All three parts are essential. All of this is neither here nor there, in a way. This just the way things work. It’s value-neutral.
Freud was deeply mystified by the human animal’s compulsion to repeat. If, as the saying goes, a functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, it might not be a stretch to say that human beings are fundamentally insane.
More generally, I do not know how to metabolize ephemerality. I do not find the art of losing easy to master.
The problem is not that it is a Warcraft game; the problem is that it is, as it purports to be, a world.
My sort-of friend
weird older guy who worked there sold kids cigarettes

The Tower of Druaga

2025-08-18T00:00:00Z

Hello! I have made many declarations on this website in this part of the blog post before and followed up on very few of them, so who knows what’s going to happen. Life is strange, and full of surprises. But my current thinking is that I am going to attempt to write short and less-ambitious posts about individual games I am playing, and also to write them more frequently. Okay see you soon!

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The Tower of Druaga has a reputation: famously opaque, obscure in the old, brutal way (not the subtle modern way, where an elegant trail of breadcrumbs leads to aesthetically precise secrets). The game was always described as linked intrinsically to the social dimension of Japanese arcade culture, the kind of collaboration only possible in a public setting. I’d heard of it, but as something that made a cameo in Jeremy Parish's videos, not like a game it was worth actually playing.

But I came across this list of game recommendations from the developer Sylvie the other day, upon which *Druaga *conspicuously appears…and curiosity got the better of me. There are a few versions, but the one I settled on was the Turbografx game, recently given a fan translation by Garrett Greenwalt.

The Tower of Druaga is simply and elegantly structured. You control Gil (short, wonderfully, for “Gilgamesh”). You are trying to get to the top floor to rescue your girlfriend (I think), Ki, who has been captured by the demon Druaga. Each floor is a level, each level is a maze, and each maze contains a secret or two, some monsters, a door to the next floor, and a key for the door. I forgot to take screenshots myself and the only ones I can find online are very small. Sorry! (source: RetroAchievements) The twist is that if you just get the key and open the door, at some point you will get stuck and become unable to progress. This is because, while most of these secrets are technically optional, a small handful are required to progress past certain chokepoints. More than anything else, the game is about finding these secrets.

What this means is that *Druaga *is actually something of a puzzle game. What’s tricky is the feeling that the terms of the puzzles go largely undefined. Sometimes all you have to do is kill the monsters, but more often the clues are esoteric: step on these mysterious circles on the floor in a particular order; hit the unbreakable external wall with your weapon; use a spell to turn the lights off for five seconds. This is where the social dimension of the game came in: allegedly, players of the original Japanese arcade version would leave a notebook tied to the arcade machine, filled with the handful of clues they'd been able to puzzle out.

It strikes me that Druaga's transition to home consoles probably came as something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, players now had the time to experiment: it's hard to walk around a level bonking every wall or whatever when game-overs cost money. On the other hand, stripping the game from its social context (especially before the internet, I imagine) must have made collaboration harder.

Enter the Turbografx version. There are a few tweaks this version makes, but the most essential one—the one that seems to me to transform the game entirely—is the addition of a hint at the beginning of each level. It's such a simple change, really: the kidnapped princess is given a single line of dialogue before each level begins. Screens like this teach you valuable lessons, like the lesson that The power of Druaga protects the outer walls from Pickax. (source: Giant Bomb) Especially on the easier difficulties offered by the Turbografx edition, this change turns Druaga from being a hopelessly cryptic cypher to an energetic little puzzle game, a sequence of connected riddles. There's something really satisfying about how clear and discrete each level feels. The combat is enough to keep you on your toes, and the mazes themselves, while never approaching genuine difficulty, are both elegantly straightforward and just convoluted enough to add flavor to navigation.

It took a while for me to understand the game's idiosyncratic (and definitely older-school) terms. It was only after looking up what I was supposed to do a few times that I even realized I was actually getting hints—like, directly applicable hints. But with this in mind, the language of the game, while still occasionally frustratingly obtuse, clarifies. You start to realize, for example, that the weird circles on the floor of every level occasionally (though importantly not always) serve a mechanical function: you can sometimes unlock a secret by stepping on them in the right order, pausing on them for a set time, standing on them and swinging your sword. The specific attacks of enemies become relevant: one level's secret might require that you equip a fire-resist shield and resist five fire attacks, for example. Every aspect of the simple environment—the torches on the walls, the placement of the doorway—starts to glow with potential mechanical relevance.

It's a wonderful effect, one that winds up feeling surprisingly fresh, even contemporary, an expression of a recognizable but happily and imaginatively off-kilter puzzle game setup. (Another feature which nicely rhymes with modern indies was the length: it took me about four-and-a-half hours to beat on the easy mode, which gives unlimited lives.) Despite its substantial influence, *Druaga *wound up feeling to me like a transmission from a slightly alternate history, an oddball, wordy alternative to the adventure-game paradigm set by The Legend of Zelda, one which trades the original Zelda’s emphasis on the tricky and diffuse role-player’s pleasures of “immersion” and A Link to the Past's complexly interlocking dungeons for a satisfying sequence of problems. It feels like the kind of thing ripe for a System Erasure-esque modernist take on, if there isn't one already. There probably is! I'll let you know if I find it. Goodbye!

Sixteen notes on “Blue Prince”

2025-04-21T00:00:00Z

Hi! The part where I’m actually talking about the game starts at #6. The rest is more “meta” (ew) stuff that might or might not interest you. Okay, later!

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A COUPLE OF NOTES ON TALKING ABOUT THE GAME

Here is a warning: I am on board with 100% of the hype. Recency bias and all that, but this game feels like one of the best things I’ve ever played in my entire life. As a result, this letter runs the risk of feeling comically hyperbolic.
So it is worth noting at the top that I do believe the consensus is somewhat deceptive, because it’s definitely a bristlier and more niche game than it lets on. It’s ultimately a roguelike, I think, which means that solving a puzzle intellectually does not mean you have the immediate capacity to implement that solution, which can be annoying. (More on stuff being annoying later.) It’s also a classic give it 20 hours/the game *really *starts after the credits type of game which, you know. I mean, it’s true—but you know. For my part, it took me fifteen or twenty hours to hit credits; I’ve now sunk about sixty hours into the game—not counting the time I’ve spent staring at notes and screenshots—and I don’t feel particularly close to being “done.”
Why would the consensus be deceptive? In the most general terms, I think that Blue Prince is a game in a strange little sort-of-subgenre I am very fond of, one that is uniquely difficult to review. These are games where the process of discovering the mechanics is an intrinsic part of the game experience. Two games like this I think I’ve talked about here are Animal Well and *Void Stranger *(which is, as far as I can tell, maybe the closest spiritual relative to Blue Prince, though the experience and gameplay and overall vibes are very, very different); NieR: Automata is another, less severe example. In an important sense, it is a “spoiler” to describe how you literally play these games. But because the way a game works is an intrinsic part of whether or not it is “fun”—that is, because enjoying a game is (usually) beholden to whether or not you enjoy actually engaging in the mechanics—this means that a review which avoids properly describing a game in order to preserve the integrity of an experience cannot fully serve the function of guiding the consumer. And while guiding the consumer is a “lower” function than other kinds of review, maybe, given that they just announced that the new Mario Kart is gonna be eighty freaking smackeroos, I can’t but think it’s still kind of important. (Though will anyone not buy Mario Kart World because the reviews said it wasn’t good? In what world would the reviews even say that? Who knows! Not me.)
I don’t have a solution to this! Nor does there necessarily need to be one, especially given the ease of returning a game on Steam or whatever. Maybe the only real lesson is the perennial one that Metacritic sucks and is bad; whatever the case, I think this problem is interesting. Luckily, I do not consider any of the information in any of these letters to be advice, because why on Earth would you take advice from someone like me, so it’s not my problem. Good luck!

IMPLICATION OF ABOVE NOTES

In order to talk about *Blue Prince *meaningfully, there might be what you would consider spoilers in here. If you’re in early days with the game, enjoying it, and want to completely avoid these, ignore the e-mail, maybe. Or maybe not! I talk about it all in pretty broad terms—most of what I’m talking about is either basic mechanics or capable of being inferred from a handful of documents in rooms you’ll see in the first few hours of gameplay. (At least, I hope and think that’s the case!! Forgive me if it’s not!!!) But it’s worth noting I don’t think you should be *too *worried about leaving the experience 100% Perfectly Uncontaminated. There’s so much in the game that anything in here that could be a spoiler probably won’t make any sense anyway, and there are five thousand other things to learn in the meantime. I do talk about basic narrative stuff; and while I have only figured most of this out in the last dozen or so hours, this is not because it is gated in any particularly difficult or interesting way, but because I am stupid. Anyway, the video game:

BLUE PRINCE (2025)

Blue Prince thematizes the lonely, magical experience of single-player video games. It is about what is sorrowful and gorgeous in the experience of you and the strange glowing screen, the visual and physical interface which transmutes occulted and abstracted textual-numerical codes into a kind of private synesthetic reality. It’s a game about one person wandering empty hallways over and over again, but the deeper you go, the closer proximity you feel to the spirit of the creators and the world they’ve built. Each person’s progress through the game is, in my experience of talking to people about it, wildly different—your progress through Blue Prince will not be the same as anyone else’s, and this feels special and beautiful.

Like* Elden Ring*, it is a game built around the sorrow and grandeur of ruins. It’s legitimately shocking how rich and well-realized and *buried *the narrative is. There’s a genuinely unbelievable level of confidence oozing from this game’s design. That the narrative you are uncovering happens to connect the pedagogical process by which you learn how to play a roguelike to the experience of sifting through the spiritual and material ruins of authoritarianism is extremely wild to me. (More on that soon.)

Warning: I was taking these screenshots just for myself so I didn’t turn off the annoying Steam UI shit. It feels almost sacrilegious to have that garbage in there but just know that e.g. the frame counter/screenshot notification are NOT in the regular UI lol

It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful to look at. It’s beautiful to listen to. For a game obsessed with depth, the surfaces sure are beautiful. I’ve never seen video game art quite like it: the dark-outlined, almost cel-shaded shapes; the meticulously intricate maps and symbols. The sound design is minimal and accurate and thoroughly persuasive. The music is great. Great woodwind writing in particular. Sonorities, timbres, etc. It’s a very cohesive aesthetic vision. The spaces you’re in are good spaces to hang out in.

Because I’ve wanted to talk with people about this game because it’s driving me insane (in a good way), I’ve wound up arguing on the internet about it way more than I usually do these days. Though I’m extremely careful to hedge all my comments, because I am very nice or whatever, it is a uniquely maddening game to argue about—and I’m sure it’s equally uniquely maddening on the other side of the argument, the “why does this thing everyone likes actually suck” side of it—because the complaints people have about it are complaints about the design decisions that not only make the game great to play, but serve as the backbone of what I feel to be the game’s genuine existential wisdom.

1. The most common complaint I’ve seen is that the randomized roguelike nature of the game does not allow you to solve the puzzles it seems to want you to solve. This is true; it does this. If I were more attached to conventional environmental puzzle games (though I’ve do enjoy them), or if I didn’t like roguelikes so much (though I’ve only been really into them for a few months), I would potentially be disappointed by this. 2. Blue Prince, I’d argue, is actually very well-balanced game. Like all good roguelikes, it feels, at first, like it’s all random. Unless you get the jetpack in Spelunky, you’ll never get to the end; unless you get materials for a specific build early in Slay the Spire, you’ll never get past Act 2. But like both of those games, the more you learn, the more you learn this isn’t true. Besides, like both of those games, runs are quick and easy to start over; unlike conventional roguelikes, Blue Prince is actually quite generous with its permanent upgrades.1 Your task feels impossible at first but it isn’t, and not for any twitch-skill reasons. It’s trying to teach you how to see something that was there all along.

In any case, *Blue Prince *is *not *a conventional puzzle game, though it has puzzles in it, and it builds on the legacy of puzzle games. It has the scaffolding and structure of a roguelike—is, I’d say, a roguelike. But it’s not a conventional roguelike, either. It’s a new kind of game, I’d say, one which uses the friction between the two genres it draws upon not merely to generate excitement and pleasure for the player—though it does do this—but in order to make a statement about the relationship between desire and reality.

The game, like most games, frames itself as something to be beaten. The goal, established in the beginning, is to get to the secret room in the big house. When you get there, you win! This, like so much in the game, is intentionally deceptive, a carefully-laid red herring: a trick. But it’s not a mean trick, one that gets you for no reason. The game’s setup is a trick because the game is telling a story about the falsity of grand, dominating narratives; moreover, realizing that the game’s setup is a trick facilitates an epiphany, and the game wants you to have epiphanies, because it is also about the nature of epiphanies.

The game is tutorialized oddly—information often comes later than you’d expect. But the game will also just straight-up tell you the answers to puzzles if you wait long enough and keep poking around. It will instruct you, step-by-step, how to get places you’d like to get. Not everything, and not quickly, but it’ll give you so much. It is generous, but through a door you weren’t expecting. This, too, is on purpose, and of a piece with the broader design. 2. There are dozens and dozens of mysteries buried in Blue Prince; the miracle of the game is that they all fold back into the game’s essential unity. Each and every room has something to give you. And while it’s fun and satisfying to try to get to Room 46—and you have to pursue this goal in order to get to a lot of other stuff—it’s through the other mysteries offered by the game that it becomes genuinely profound. 3. What do we leave behind? The forces that purport to control reality would have us believe our legacies are nothing but expressions of allegiance or accidental testimonies to the futility of resistance. But this isn’t true. That the house is ephemeral, that each room and synergy and tool is a fleeting gift, and we don’t know when they’ll come back—this can be annoying and frustrating, sure. But it’s a necessary expression of the game’s central concerns: time, and loss, and repetition, and the tragic, beautiful endlessness of struggle. In a literal way, the game’s occasion is grief: the house is your inheritance, accessible to you only because the Baron has died. And there’s so much more to grieve that you, the player, will learn about as the game progresses. But what frustrates and brutalizes us about the passage of time—the flaw in the fabric of reality that gives us the most miserable, meaningless pain we will feel in our agonizingly short lives—is also what allows us the only chances we will ever have. These chances, too, are fleeting, impossible to grasp in ways that are often annoying, or disappointing, or devastating; but they are real. Time occasions grief, but it’s also why the future is unpredictable, and this unpredictability is the ground and foundation of all of our hope. Fascism is built on the nightmarish assumption of immortality—we can bring the past back, exactly as you remember it, better than ever, forever—but it can’t erase the unavoidable reality that there are surprises yet to come, and that no force on Earth, no matter how materially or ideologically powerful, can really, truly, perfectly predict the future. Maybe most of the surprises yet to come will be bad; maybe almost all of them will be. But some of them, hard as this can be to believe, won’t. We don’t know what we’ll learn in advance of when we learn it, and what we learn has the possibility to change our lives. We will turn some corner and a vista we hadn’t expected will present itself, bearing forth a grandeur that instantly becomes a part of us, for as long as we are here. It might even be true, really true, that what will survive of us is love.

Before you get mad at me—I mean, nobody here ever gets mad at me; thanks everyone—but before, for the first time ever, you get mad at me: I know this makes it more of a “roguelite” than a “roguelike.” I just don’t like looking at the word “roguelite” very much. Diet Roguelike. JV Roguelike? *Blue Prince *is kind of a Roguelike, Jr. ↩

Some games of 2024

2025-02-09T00:00:00Z

Greetings, dear readers! I hope you are doing well, or as well as can currently be done!

2024 was probably the first year of my life where I “kept up with new releases” in any aesthetic medium. The medium, of course, was VIDEO GAMES. It was pretty fun, if expensive, and intermittently unsatisfying; I beat fewer games than I usually do, which is fine, I guess, but also annoying. Frustrating, too, to miss many surely delightful entries, or to be exactly one hour into them. Still! It is always nice to have a project. In any case, my computer broke, so I am probably going to miss some of 2025’s shinier upcoming delights, but you know. There’s lots of stuff to do. Or so I’m told.

In any case, here are some of my favorites that came out last year. This will probably comprise a little series, unless I forget to write the other ones. See you later!

Dragon’s Dogma 2

This game is one of several from the year that feels like it exploded into consciousness and then disappeared. It sold hilariously well, considering it is a sequel to a famously off-kilter PS3 game; I don’t necessarily know why it dropped off the map, because I think it reviewed pretty well, too, and it seems, to me at least, like it kind of rules. Perhaps it was I who dropped off the map. It’s happened before (as you, dear reader, know better than anyone).

I like this game a lot. Some of this, perhaps too much of it, is because I like the idea of it. Capcom did some wacky stuff this year (more on Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess later), which I admire, and this game is deeply wacky. It feels meticulously crafted, even modern, in some regards (beautiful environments, many ways to approach things, a focus on “emergent gameplay”), but there are also, like, four enemy types, and you basically have to walk everywhere. The first mode of fast-travel that exists is this horse-drawn carriage situation, and more likely than not you’ll get mugged by a massive monster en route. I could not tell you a thing about the story, though I remember an elaborate stealth sequence culminating in a chat with a brothel mistress, or something? That was cool.

In any case, I am aware that this is not a compelling pitch. Nearly everyone I know who gave it a try hated it; it certainly takes a while to open up. But, for me at least, it did indeed began to add up to something strange and genuinely surprising: handsomely uncanny. Open-world exploration felt rewarding in a way it hadn’t for me since Elden Ring, and maybe never had before that. It really does look very good! At least it did before my computer broke. But don’t go into it expecting anything like that, really. Most of the joy I derived from my 40 hours (I never completed it, unfortunately) in Dragons Dogma 2 emerged from a kind of amused awe that this was a thing I could buy and play on my computer. You spend most of the game accompanied by “pawns” – custom-made NPCs (well, you make one pawn, and the rest are others’) who function as your party and say the same ten things over and over and over again. These absurdly obsequious, hilariously repetitive companions began to feel like a riff on the very idea of an RPG party – like, if the insight of the post-Final Fantasy IV JRPG is an understanding of the party as narrative engine and core, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the opposite of that. It takes as its center the thing that’s unrealistic about any narrative where you’re the chosen one, and then builds this mythos and mechanical structure around that, one that feels somehow both profound and totally half-assed.

This is an overreading, I know, and it’s certainly not one which will convert any skeptics. Many have said it feels out of time in a funny way – the comparison point I most often hear is the PS3 (probably not incidentally, the first Dragon’s Dogma came out on PS3). It feels like the surreality and crunchiness of Dark Souls (sorry!!) extended laterally into the world itself. What is hard and rewarding about moving through Sen’s Fortress or whatever is now almost conceptually hard. It’s just a weird fucking time. I want to finish my playthrough, but I’ve heard the ending sucks, but this seems appropriate, somehow. The magic trick of making it so it owns when something sucks is probably evidence of a personal problem rather than a quality inherent to a work of art; however, smoke ’em, as I always say, if you got ’em. When you cook a steak in camp a video of a real life cooking steak plays, and when they asked the director why he said a real steak looks more realistic than an animated steak, and that’s why Dragons Dogma 2 is one of my favorite games of 2024.

Balatro lol

Animal Well

I’ve heard it said by a few different people (including someone on Friday: if you’re reading this, hello!) that a good puzzle game sort of tricks you into feeling smart—it leads you right up to the answer, way closer than you think you are, and then leaves just enough room for you to make the leap and receive a happy click of insight. By this metric, I think Animal Well is a great puzzle game. But there’s something else going on here, too. I was reminded while playing of this bit from designer Derek Yu’s book about the making of Spelunky (my actual game of the year of 2024, but more on that later), written by a judge describing Spelunky’s appeal:

With Spelunky, you are never learning a “piece” of music… It’s still a game about repetition and learning, but what you are learning is the overall composition, understanding the overall system and how it works, and becoming fluent in that [...] Spelunky looks like a game of execution, but it’s really a game about information and decision-making. How good are you at looking at a situation and understanding what it means? [...] You must rely on your literacy of the system, and this is a kind of holistic knowledge that feels great in my brain, a wonderful new flavor for a single-player game, and a deeply promising direction for further exploration.

One of the organizing premises of Spelunky (adopted from earlier roguelikes, as the book explains) is the idea that every object in the game follows the same rules as all the others. Everything can bump into everything else. A yeti can pick up and throw you just like you can pick up and throw a bomb. The altar on which you sacrifice incapacitated enemies (and allies) kills you if you find yourself incapacitated on it. The manic comedy of dying in Spelunky emerges from the sheer quantity of unanticipated outcomes a closed system with shockingly few variables can generate; the process of interpreting and negotiating endlessly new iterations of this system is both mechanically and cognitively satisfying.

Unlike Spelunky, Animal Well’s is world is thoroughly bespoke—it’s maybe the most meticulously, rigorously designed video game world I’ve ever engaged with. And to be sure, there’s a lot of carefully concealed hand-holding; you are closer at all times to the solutions than you feel yourself to be, and your sense that you are God’s biggest genius after you figure something out is certainly an illusion, if a happy one. The best genre of game is “the world is fucked up. You’re a little guy” But the pleasure of Animal Well is related to Spelunky’s insofar as it both games cut you loose into a world which methodically teaches you how to interpret it. You’ll stumble into a corner that opens onto a secret passageway; and then you’ll step back and realize that the dangling vines did look a little off, didn’t they; and then when you return to an earlier room, you’ll notice that the vines look off in the same way, in a corner you haven’t explored.

This learning is in constant dialogue with the game’s progression, which consists almost exclusively in gaining new tools. You’ll face an obstacle a thousand times, laboriously learning to navigate your way around it, and then you’ll get an object that will let you bypass the obstacle entirely. The pacing of the game is as meticulous as anything else about it.

And the surprises! Really crazy stuff is constantly happening! When my mother visited me, I showed it to her because I figured she’d like how cool it looked; while her interest in video games is generally limited to Animal Crossing (though she very kindly indulges me when I babble about them), so much weird, surprising shit happened basically immediately that we wound up playing for a while and just cackling at everything. (Developers and marketers take note: if you’re trying to appeal to a wider demographic, try starting your game title with the word Animal.)

The pixel art is gorgeous, but it also serves the game’s fundamental design in a way I haven’t quite seen before: often the “tell” will be a difference of a pixel or two, in a way that feels both legible and subtle; a less rigorous aesthetic would not convey this balance as gracefully or satisfyingly. The geometry of the game is itself expressive in a way that draws out the player’s sense that they’re interacting with something not only built but built on purpose, according to a logic you can learn. It’s really good!

On taste

2024-08-02T00:00:00Z

One of the personal ironies of this “newsletter” is that I’m historically kind of reticent to talk about my tastes, at least in person. For example: it came to my attention recently that I had a reputation in college as someone who was mysterious and enigmatic about my interests. I learned this because a couple of years ago, I found out that a new friend had known before meeting me that I was someone who, a decade earlier, refused on principle to talk about what I was reading. This was funny not just because it forced me to remember that I had gone to college, though that is more “weird funny” than “haha funny,” but also because I had been like that on purpose, and I thought I’d gotten away with it.

I don’t think I was reticent because I was afraid that the stuff I liked was trashy, or pretentious, or whatever. I just didn’t understand what liking things meant, or whether I was doing it right. I interacted with a lot of socially-minded people, people who had strong and interesting thoughts about American Culture and the State of Things, and I felt then, as I feel now, completely devoid of insight on that front. I have no idea what’s going on, ever, and can be convinced of nearly anything. My sense of self is too vague, my experience too inchoate, to plant my feet in the whitewater of Takes and not fall over and bonk my head on a rock. How did you guys get all these opinions? Where did you find them? Are they right? Should I have them? I find myself invariably agreeing with the last person who spoke. In the years since, I have come better to understand why I appreciate the things I do, but at the time I felt that if I talked about something I was into I would probably be talked out of liking it, and that I’d ever liked it in the first place proved, for the nth time, that I had pink insulation fluff in my head instead of a brain. (More on that later.) Brain surgery I’ve thought about this a lot since, and I’ve identified a few more hangups I’ve had over the years about the idea of aesthetic taste. Here is one: I am frightened by the thought of having particular taste, because I’m not sure, conceptually, how to draw the line between having a sensibility and unfairly wanting things to conform to my preconceptions. For a long time, this primarily manifested as a kind of existential sadness that I don’t enjoy every object in the world exactly as much as their creators enjoyed them. That people create things is strange and sacred; it seems, on some level, like a disservice to what is holy in human experience not to appreciate them all equally. Each thing I disliked was an occasion for (a very small) grief, because it marked an impassible barricade between others and myself.

On some level I still believe this, I suppose, but I’ve come to a better understanding of the strange contingency of the creative process. For better and for worse, there are only a finite quantity of expressive forms; that someone cannot persuasively squeeze their experience into one or another has no bearing on the value of that experience. Art is a way of loving what is, of returning the world to itself, and there are lots of ways of doing that. Modes of expression that cannot be squeezed into one or another commodified aesthetic form are as, if not more, worthwhile than those which can. Communication isn’t always successful, but it’s certainly possible. (Concomitantly, things resonate or don’t with people for all sorts of reasons. Obviously this is like, “talking with other people 101”; but on the other hand, hast thou never taken with fear and trembling the aux cord, dreading the psychic decimation attendant upon an indifferent response to your beloved tunes?)

So. Another mostly bygone expression of this personal problem (and here we return to the insulation fluff) was my belief that if I enjoyed something, and someone else disliked it, I probably only enjoyed it because my head was, as I’d suspected, busted, and I should give up on everything and live in a box.

In any case, none of this shit should’ve really gotten to me, because so what if I had bad taste? What are the stakes? Oh no, you like something bad. You loser! I think it stressed me out so much for two reasons. For one, my brain *was *busted, but not like I thought. The other is that for the last decade-and-a-half or so, I have found myself invested, for reasons that elude me, in the prospect of creating something “good”—and how could I make something good if I couldn’t tell the difference between bad and good?

I think recognizing the power of beholders to transform a work of art, to locate unique meaning within it, basically solves this problem. I didn’t like something bad, because the thing wasn’t bad or good; I saw something good inside of the thing, a good someone else didn’t see. (This doesn’t get all the way there for me—it’s missing something—but the concept of an objective good or bad misses more.)

This specific perplexity is one of the reasons I find myself interested in criticism in the first place. Writing is a means of inventing a language commensurate with subjective experience. I began writing this letter because I wanted to find a style suitable for explaining why certain cultural objects possess a hold on me—especially objects I never expected to be invested in. I wanted to find a way to talk about stuff I appreciated, stuff that might be weird or bad or dumb or silly in some ways, without falling into “guilty pleasure” style shame and justification, overdetermined 1960s-ish theories of high vs. low culture, clickbait-academic “actually x is Really Important, and here’s why,” etc. Those modes are well and good, sincerely, but they never quite capture what it is I find interesting in my experience of these things.

But—and this is probably my most recent problem on the taste front—does this mean negative criticism is bad? Isn’t that kind of positive-mindedness a concession to power? There’s rotten stuff out there, and doesn’t negative critical judgement not serve a necessary function in maintaining and sustaining the health of the cultural sphere? When trash reigns, oughtn’t we hire a trash collector?

Look, man: I am a clinically depressed socialist living in the United States of America; of course doctrinaire positivity rubs me the wrong way. But I’m simply not usually confident enough in my my own negative judgements to really trust them. I love trash talk sometimes, sure, but most times I’ve tried to devote a letter to trash-talking, I’ll go back and read a couple positive reviews to test my argument, and it will feel like I’m missing something, like I should go back and review everything I’m mad at more closely, and then I have to, you know, add all those things to my Notebook Full of Lists of Media I Want to Get to Someday, and then three months have passed and I haven’t written another letter, and here we are. I bet you thought I was kidding about the lists. Well, we do things serious here at Corridors HQ In any case, realizing that what I thought was a cultural dilemma was merely a personal problem mostly dissolved this concern. (This is a useful theoretical maneuver, honestly, and I recommend giving it a try, especially if you post about things on the internet.) But my last letter, which was unusually negative (or at least ambivalent), got me interested in thinking about it all again. While I am predominantly interested in the phenomenon of “liking” (which, for the record, I understand even less than its negative), I am also interested, at least theoretically, in “disliking.” What is happening when you don’t like something? It is towards this end, dear reader, that we present the preliminary results of our investigation.

Seven Kinds of Disliking

It’s been done before. This is interesting to me because it’s probably the most context-dependent. Barring some sort of extreme and probably-unethical pedagogical experimentation, our personal encounters with art do not start at the chronological beginning of culture and move forward. Completionism is, strictly speaking, impossible. Moreover, saying something has been done before is always a matter of degree, not kind: everything references the past, but no one person is aware of the entire past. I suppose the clearest way of formulating this in ordinary language is when someone says something like, “it just makes me want to listen to [x].” It seems like *x *is trying to do y, when *y *already did y, and perfectly. The order in which someone in particular encounters things matters a lot here.

*It’s technically incompetent. *This is a tricky one. 20th-century visual art and music in particular have done a lot to deepen and complicate our understanding of what “technical competence” is. A limited notion of technical competence will really limit your capacity to have the genuine good time available in, like, a modern art museum, or with a Ramones album. And people have also commented on the problem of a kind of general overcompetence: expressive, meaningful idiosyncrasies getting ironed out by means of technology and so on. But it’s undeniably the case that I have disliked certain books because I feel like the writers aren’t using the language very well. The noise outweighs the meaning; as in a cluttered room, I cannot find what I am looking for.

*It doesn’t cohere. *If you held a gun to my head and told me to establish a single criterion for determining aesthetic quality objectively—well, hopefully I’d have both time and presence of mind to linger for a moment in awe of the places life can take a person—and then, assuming I could think of it in time, I’d say that the most important criterion for determining aesthetic quality was internal coherence. Does the thing hang together? There are many ways a thing can fail to hang together: the parts aren’t made of the same stuff; the proportions are off; etc. Many of the other modes of disliking could be subsumed into this one, I think. I could write a lot more about this but I’d like to complete one of these stupid letters before December or whatever.

*It evinces bigotry. *This is probably both the most obvious and the most controversial kind of disliking. One can usually cast this criticism in terms of the others: a racist caricature can’t be a good character in a novel, because one of the generally-accepted criteria for novelistic characters is the perception of psychological depth, and stereotyping flattens. Still, bigotry on its own is at least as valid a reason to dislike something as any of these others. Sometimes people think terrible things about whole types of people, and it’s rotten; the end.

*The creator did something bad. *Sometimes this doesn’t bug me, and sometimes it does. I distrust almost all general pronouncements on “the art and the artist” beyond that. It’s a matter of context and circumstance and our disastrous historical moment and previous disastrous historical moments and myriad specific qualities of the works of art in question and the many varieties of life experience and material conditions and blah blah blah so like, maybe don’t pay money to some Nazi black metal label or whatever, but beyond that I’ve got nothing for you. Good luck!

*It’s implausible. *This is an interesting one. I guess I mean it in a couple of senses.

It violates its own sense of reality. “Realism” comes to mind, but it means a few too many things for it to be useful here. Hopefully obviously, I don’t mean that something is bad when it violates the conventions of “literary realism,” though there are people who do indeed dislike when these conventions are violated. What I mean is that “believability” is often, I think, another word for coherence. The end should feel as though it emerges from the same world as the beginning. Deus ex machina, etc.

The initial conditions are uninteresting/unpersuasive. This is a more subjective variation, but it’s quite common, and I experience it a lot. I often struggle with dystopian fiction because adding more made-up bad things to the world, which has lots and lots of bad things in it already, often does not grab my interest. This is hardly a rule—what is a novel but a bunch of bad stuff someone made up for some reason—but you know. In practice, it happens.

*It gives me nothing to hold onto. *There’s some overlap with 5b here. Still, I think this collects a few common objections.

I didn’t like any of the characters (so to speak). The discourse about “likeability” has likely been rehearsed to death, and I’ve understood precisely none of it. I truly just don’t know what people want. Which is fine! God loves us equally, even when we’re clueless. I confess that this issue in particular sort of wigs me out—it’s the need for an identificatory function that makes me fear that aesthetic taste is fundamentally solipsistic. But I’ve also had that nice feeling of being “seen” in some specific way by art, and I think that’s obviously good, you know! Ultimately, I think the solution lies in the two-way nature of identification: identification not only connects the outside to you, but it connects you back to the outside. To see yourself in another is to see another in yourself. In any case, I think one of the things people mean when they say that “none of the characters in [book] were likeable” is that the work gave them no purchase or investment in its world; given that the novelistic tradition is deeply bound up in the exploration of psychology and character, liking a character is perhaps the most common way to get invested in a book.

*It’s boring. *This is a good one. I know the word “interesting” gets a lot of flak, but it’s one of my favorite critical terms, honestly, because it points to the thing that’s really magical about art: it can pull your attention out of yourself, into a whole other thing. Another meaning of “interests” refers to things that benefit you: it’s “in your best interest,” etc. It is wonderful to me that a work of art can generate this! Anyway, stuff is boring when it doesn’t. Again, more to say here, but I’d like to get something written ever.

There are others, I’m sure, but this is a preliminary study. Blessings on you all! Bye!

On rhythm

2024-06-18T00:00:00Z

From the ages of 12 to 17 or so, I thought I wanted to be a professional percussionist. In high school, I joined every rock band and school ensemble that would have me; I practiced an amount that I find, in retrospect, honestly impressive. Still, when I began to look into what going to college for percussion would entail, I realized that I just didn’t love it enough to practice as much as I’d need to.

It was something of a surprise, then, that I wound up playing drums in a touring band after college. The leader of this band did not write or record drum parts playable by a single drummer, so I had to adapt them, a practice which really forced me to consider what it is a good drummer does. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the drummer’s role (the drumroll?!) in a band is structural.

In big band-style jazz drumming, the drummer exists in large part to “set up” hits: to ensure big moments are well-articulated by playing a fill that rhythmically synchronizes the band. Usually this means making the moment before the hit clear, so everyone knows where to put the hit. It’s hard to discuss without getting a bit technical, but syncopation—rhythms that aren’t quite where you’d expect them—is fundamental to jazz music. The drummer helps coordinate and scaffold this syncopation, ensuring these counterintuitive or unexpected moments land with precision and feel. You have to play in a way that makes the logic of the composition clear both to the musicians and the listeners. Get yourself together, man. Move to NYC. Rent a loft. Join your conservatory big band. Shed rudiments. Get an extremely mean guy to teach you. Have an Oedipal rivalry with him. Only play really conservative standards from the twenties or whatever, but play them Very Brashly. Go insane. Take a fat solo This concept doesn’t translate perfectly to rock music, but the central insight is the same. The drummer is kind of like the conductor—their goal is to ensure that the music is legible to both musicians and audience. This usually happens behind-the-scenes and takes a lot of subtle forms: the feel of a given fill; changing the way you’re playing the cymbals in order to sustain the build of momentum; dragging or pushing the snare respective to the rest of the kit depending on the desired feel. These are things listeners might not consciously notice, but they serve an important functional role. They make the song make sense. I was never the most technically accomplished drummer, nor the best timekeeper (see the old joke: how can you tell a drummer is knocking at your door? The knock speeds up), but I like to think I was capable of grasping the songs as a whole, understanding how to fold my playing under and around the song to focus energy and attention where they ought to be.

Rhythm serves this function across all art forms, I think, most clearly art forms which progress in time, such as narrative art. It orients and focus attention, like good architecture. And it does this by acting directly on our bodies. Rhythm is deeply somatic, maybe the most fundamentally somatic dimension of aesthetic experience. The heartbeat, the breath, sleeping and waking: our lives are conducted in and through rhythm, and art makes rhythm, like other dimensions of experience, formally approachable.

Rhythm, then, is a scaffolding—a framework; a syntax. It’s rhythm that makes dance music danceable. Comedy is fundamentally rhythmic—if the timing is off, a good joke will fail. A horror movie jump scare is a rhythmic incursion, an unexpected disruption of anticipated continuity. It’s like a contract drawn up when we weren’t looking, directly between the work of art and the unconscious mind. We usually only notice when the contract has been violated (“the climax was rushed”; “the beginning was slow”). Figure 2: a jump-scare Like form in general, rhythm facilitates art: it is art’s precondition. It lays the foundation for the attention that comprises our experience. If the rhythm is off, the whole thing collapses.

I’ve said this many times before, but in early 2021 I played three video games in rapid succession that made me realize I found the medium deeply compelling: Dark Souls, Persona 5 Royal, and NieR: Automata. In retrospect, it’s probably not a coincidence that all of these games are acutely, specifically rhythmic. Dark Souls’s combat requires you attune yourself both to your character’s attack rhythms and to the rhythms articulated by enemies’ animations; at its best, it feels like an odd, stuttering dance, demanding careful attention to the push and pull of every encounter. *Persona 5 Royal *is a game which aestheticizes the rhythms of daily life: the interplay between work, school, leisure, sleep, and sociality are simplified and clarified, building methodically towards emotional and mechanical climaxes. And *NieR, *without getting too spoiler-y, thematizes the rhythm of completing and replaying a video game, the oddly Sisyphean nature of the “gameplay loop,” making the unconscious rhythms of the action RPG into material for thematic development and dramatic tension. (Not coincidentally, the music for all three is also real good.) Yeah I know how to drive…a rock and roll song Like rhythm in general, games are also intensely, uniquely somatic. Designers and programmers go to immense lengths to dissolve the perceived boundary between the player’s body and the action on the screen. A good game feels good. It establishes a connection that, like rhythm, bypasses the conscious mind, connecting the player’s hands directly to the fiction of the game’s world. Good games leverage this connection in a towards aesthetic expression. Bad games usually wind up doing something else.

I play a whole lot of video games, but I typically don’t “binge” them. Generally, I dip in and out of a bunch of stuff at once, playing a particular game for between twenty minutes and a couple of hours, pausing when it feels natural to stop, leaving most of them unfinished. I wish I were a little less scattered, but I try to prioritize curiosity over completionism, and I often get more interested in a series or genre than a specific game. It is, as they say, what it is.

I did not play Diablo IV this way. I began on a whim after work on Friday—the expansion pack had just been announced, and it was on Xbox Game Pass, which I was about to cancel, so why not—and continued until very, very late at night. Then I woke up too early on Saturday and played all day, pausing only to discharge a small handful of absolutely necessary obligations, continuing, again, until very very late at night. I finished at some point on Sunday evening. All told, I had spent a little more than thirty of the prior seventy-two hours playing Diablo IV.

This did not feel very good, but I didn’t really feel I had an alternative. The game did the thing some games do where it posts right the hell up in the living room of my mind, forcibly displacing all long-term occupants, and the only thing I’ve found that consistently works when this happens is to smoke all the cigarettes in the pack as fast as I can: to trust I’ll get sick of it and pray it doesn’t take too long to work its way out of my system.

Without getting moralistic about it—and bracketing, for now, the awful ways game designers, very much including those at Blizzard, exploit human behavioral vulnerabilities for profit—I have found that some obsessive experiences like this leave me feeling fulfilled, and others leave me feeling disjointed and alienated. I do often feel guilty for “wasting time,” but I don’t think what I’m describing is reducible to that. Some of the games that get their teeth in me like this leave me feeling like I’ve had had a great experience. I’ve written before about 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim; I played that game in a similar three-day “binge,” but I remember that whole thing very fondly, because the game was gripping and engaging to me on every level. Or I played, like, 200 hours of Balatro, but it was genuinely enjoyable to try to wring as much as I could out of that game’s clever mechanics, and my time with it did draw pretty naturally to a close. (It helped that I could just have it on the screen while I was doing work.)

*Diablo IV *is a stunningly crafted and presented game. It feels, in pretty much every way, like a kazillion dollars. At their best, Blizzard is just such a force. I’m new to the *Diablo *series (though, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve played many, many, many hours of World of Warcraft), but playing *Diablo IV *reminds me of watching the second Villeneuve Dune movie in theaters: here is a supremely confident artistic team blowing an apocalyptic quantity of money in service of a coherent, surprisingly specific vision. Just look at this freaking UI! I want to polish it and keep it in my driveway Diablo IV has a story. It is a big, goofy, meticulous, ridiculous story. I really liked it! Given that it was my first Diablo game, I had very little idea what anyone was talking about (I Googled “Horadrim” at least twice), but it was still a great time. Like the presentation in general, the narrative parts of the game felt like peak blockbuster genre entertainment. The cutscenes are, in typical Blizzard fashion, lavish and spectacular, but even the moment-to-moment dialogue is generally well-wrought and involving, and the voice acting is wonderful.

I was struck in particular by the cinematography: most in-engine cutscenes in Diablo IV do this cool thing where the camera kind of dislodges from its isometric vantage and zooms in a bit, floating around the scene like an airborne observer. Other isometric games have done this, but it feels especially fluid and artful here, especially when it cuts against what I understand to be common-sense theatrical and cinematic scene blocking. A whole cutscene might go by and we’ll only see characters’ backs, but it doesn’t matter, because Diablo IV knows that it’s not a play or a movie—it’s a video game, and these scenes do exactly what an in-engine video game cutscene is supposed to do: take the reins from the player while preserving immersion.

Here, however, we get to what I regard as the game’s biggest problem. There is a fatal contradiction in the rhythms of Diablo IV. The story is pulpy and garish, yes, but it is patient, too, doled out methodically over the course of twenty or thirty hours. The gameplay, on the other hand, is viciously snappy, so fast-moving that that the experience begins to blur into an odd sort of trance, a permanent present of smashing and grabbing. If you bracket the problem of financial exploitation and microtransactions—a massive bracket, but bear with me—there’s no problem per se with the way the combat is built. It’s not exactly for me, but it’s nice to futz around with while listening to a podcast or whatever.

The problem emerges in the balance between gameplay and narrative. Even when the story was doing things I thought were cool, I found it difficult to engage with, because I was still in the Diablo Combat Zone, physiologically speaking: that weird, tired feeling behind my eyes, impatient to get back to crushing enemies in my avatar’s werebear paws and snagging treats to sift through back at camp. Interesting, emotionally compelling narrative beats approached, and I watched them pass like trucks from the side of the highway. What I’m talking about is of course a variety of good old “ludonarrative dissonance.” But instead of a conflict between the verbs of a game and the game’s thematic and narrative material, the dissonance was inside of me, like, physically: a bodily tension, somewhere near the back of my silly primate skull. I bet you thought loot was dead. You sucker Here’s another iteration of the problem. Diablo IV takes place in a big, handsome open world. One of the fundamental appeals of the open world format is that the environment design allows the player to determine the rhythm of their gameplay in a freer, more improvisatory way. You can hang out, do a bunch of side quests, and poke around in caves—or you can bulldoze through the main quest and backtrack afterwards; or you can never do the side quests at all. A good open-world is both a focused experience and a meandering one: both fifteen and 150 hours.

*Diablo IV *seems to want to be this, but it’s hamstrung by its own design. I watched Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s excellent video retrospective of the *Diablo *series before playing the game (much of this review is indebted to it), so I’d heard that Diablo IV’s power curve discourages side questing by gating mechanical progression behind completing the campaign. Naively, I thought that was the kind of error they’d have patched out by the time I picked the game up.

The thing is, it’s not an error. By doing maybe 60% of the side quests in the first couple of zones, I leveled to the point where most of the back half of the game became trivial, even on the hardest difficulty available to me. (There are harder difficulties, but you don’t even unlock them until you finish the campaign.) I guess I could’ve, like, only used crappy gear or something, allowing myself to stay intentionally underpowered, but that felt silly: if a game gives me a tool, I’m going to use it. And besides, I liked screwing around with builds and gear; I’m not against that dimension of the game by any means. What this particular imbalance did, though, is prevent me from paying the kind of attention to the game that I felt it deserved.

Difficulty modes are so game-specific and subjective that I usually look them up beforehand, just to see what people say. When I looked up Diablo IV’s, consensus held that the higher difficulty “wasn’t worth it,” so I started on the easier mode. What I didn’t realize was that people weren’t saying the second difficulty tier “wasn’t worth it” because it wasn’t fairly tuned, or because it was frustrating in a way that felt pointless. What they were saying is that the second tier wasn’t worth it in terms of the rewards it provided.

Getting rewards is fun! No beef with rewards. But I wanted the game to be more difficult not so it would spit out differently-colored items, but because I wanted the gameplay to feel rhythmically and thematically of a piece with the narrative. I’m not that good at video games, and I don’t care that much about mastering them, but it really felt to me like Diablo IV’s story and pacing demanded some level of friction. You’re fighting some of the most powerful entities in the universe! Besides, dungeons and exploring occupy so much gameplay time, and I wanted that time to keep me engaged. The first time I accidentally brought this screen up it I audibly gasped at how ugly it is Again: I’m new to Diablo, and I’ve never knowingly bought a season pass for a game in my life, so I’m probably just not the target audience. But Blizzard has been a part of my life for nearly as long as I can remember—since playing *Warcraft II *as a kid at my uncle’s house, then *Starcraft *and Warcraft III on my family’s kitchen desktop, then *World of Warcraft *on and off for literally twenty years, in what is still probably my most intense engagement with any cultural object ever. As reprehensible and ridiculous a company as they are, as checkered as my past with them has been, I’m fully prepared to consume and enjoy the products they create.

Diablo IV doesn’t frustrate me because it’s “mindless.” I put sixty hours into Vampire Survivors, a game without an action button in which the end goal is being able to just stand there while everything around you explodes. If anything is “mindless,” it’s Vampire Survivors—but *Vampire Survivors *rules, in large part because it is exactly itself: a coding exercise built from a royalty-free Castlevania asset pack; nothing more, nothing less. Diablo IV frustrates me because the rhythm and pacing of its gameplay made me physiologically unable to access the rhythm of its narrative and world.

There’s a sense, I think, in which Diablo IV is fundamentally unplayable—not because it’s hard to play (I could, and did, play it literally all day), but because it sabotages itself on a structural level. The game presented me with great story beats it had made me completely unreceptive to, in a wonderful world I wasn’t actually supposed to engage with.

I have avoided discussing the microtransactional elements of the game because I didn’t pay any attention to them. They’re not necessary at all for the main campaign. But it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that Blizzard built the game this way so we’d hurry along to the endgame, where microtransactions begin to matter. I’m sure the endgame is fun! I’m definitely going to keep noodling around in the game at some point. It’s a very fun game! It’s just not quite a great one. There’s a great game inside there, somewhere. But that game is not for us. Something something offspring of angels and devils, etc.

Void Stranger

2024-05-17T00:00:00Z

*The following will contain light spoilers for what you might consider “Act 1” of the video game *Void Stranger—roughly the first 5-10 hours of play. Nothing I say here would “ruin” it, I don’t think, but if the description on itch.io or Steam appeals to you, I’d consider playing it; and if you do decide to play it, I really do recommend playing it knowing as little as possible. I will also mention here that I have put 45 hours into it but have not finished it, so I guess it’s possible that what I will write here will be somehow negated by the final act? I doubt it, but maybe worth mentioning.

I will also mention that I got it because I was so intrigued by System Erasure’s equally excellent and surprising shoot-em-up, ZeroRanger, which I played as part of itch.io’s ludicrously inexpensive Palestine Relief Bundle. This bundle also has a bunch of other stuff I’ve heard is good, like A Short Hike and Coffee Talk, and a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard anything about but I’m sure is also really good, all for like $8 minimum or something. I recommend it! So there you go. Bye!

There is a sense in which the psyche, or at least my psyche, sometimes feels like a series of puzzles. Taken on an instance-by-instance basis, these puzzles are often fairly straightforward: I’m more upset than I think I should be because this reminds me of something in my past; I’m actually worried about y, even though it feels like I’m worried about x. These puzzles are discrete and, even if I can’t actually solve them, I can untighten the screw a bit through understanding them: oh, so* that’s *why I feel bad.

But these manifestations are secondary, epiphenomenal. Selfhood, I think, also encodes a deeper, darker mystery, one I can’t even formulate the terms for. That we experience anything at all is a strange and haunting thing; how much stranger and more haunting that this experience is so malleable, contingent, and incomprehensible. We are bound to histories and bodies, wants and needs, that we did not choose and can barely understand. It’s all pretty weird. Tfw you introspect for like five seconds This strangeness stays, for the most part, at the margins of conscious experience. Grief and illness draw the weird independence of the body to the fore; reactionary politics and conspiracy theories weaponize the frightening unknown towards repressive ends; religion renders the cosmic approachable and communal through systems of ritual; trauma encodes and reiterates the literally nightmarish dimension of both personal and shared histories; art often attempts to articulate these strangenesses in a way we can wrestle with more actively. Still, the fact that things are elementally weird—often in a way that’s, well, kind of scary—doesn’t have anything to do with most of the tasks that make up most of our days unless we’re paying a particular kind of attention, and even then it tends to slip from view.

Void Stranger is a puzzle game. You control a character known as Grey. She appears to you primarily as a squished, low-detail Game Boy-style sprite, though she also is given a few wonderful pixel portraits. After a short, cryptic cutscene, you are dumped into a dungeon; when you go down the stairs and open a box, you receive a strange rod that allows you to lift and move floor tiles, one at a time. This is the main way you interact with the game: lift, move; lift, move.

But, as the game tells you in its first moments, “something is wrong.” It’s wrong One classic way of aesthetically treating the Weirdness of Things is what we call “Lovecraftian” horror. This refers, I think, to a particular figurative sensibility: a way of narratively and imagistically encoding existential dread. Non-Euclidean architecture; squidly nightmare gods under the sea; books that contain things we oughtn’t learn—this is the vocabulary of Lovecraftian horror, and it has proven surprisingly enduring. (As is always worth noting, Lovecraft was also a fellow who was at least as scared of miscegenation as he was of the cosmic void; whether his figurative vocabulary is inextricable from his racism is a very good question.)

The vibes of *Void Stranger *definitely tend at times towards the eldritch: the visual aesthetics in particular sometimes resonate with this tradition. But Lovecraft’s fiction in particular usually takes ultimate recourse to the unspeakable—to negative space. A story will build to a point that words can’t capture, and then the story will say that words can’t capture them, and then the narrator entrusts his manuscript to an unfortunate assistant and goes to live in a hospital or something. The momentum of the stories often lend weight to these climactic, apophatic epiphanies, but the stories are wrought more in shadow than in anything explicit.

The unknowable in Void Stranger, on the other hand, is a constant, inescapable *presence, *a frightening light shining through the cracks. Weird stuff is everywhere. Why did I have to enter a 6x6 tile “brand” at the beginning of the game? Why do I have a magic Sokoban rod, and why does it make me feel so bad? Why does every treasure chest contain only a dead locust?

The first real formal joke of the game arrives when you hit a resting point. “This seems like a nice place to rest,” it says. If you choose to rest, the game just…quits. As in, it actually kicks you back to your desktop. You have to go back and boot it up again. (I can’t, off the top of my head, recall another game which does this—maybe Doki Doki Literature Club? which I haven’t played—though NieR: Automata’s joke endings come close to the same feeling.) When you do start it back up, you are instantly greeted with an out-of-context…vision? Flashback? Tricks like this, equal parts frightening and funny, are everywhere. Void…friend…? More than a few games perform this kind of metafictional fucking-around, and I do think the medium wears that tendency pretty well; conceits that might come across as silly in film or books can often hit harder in a game. Still, this register only really works for me when it’s deployed in service of something bigger. It’s undeniably mechanically thrilling to “break the rules” in The Stanley Parable, for example, and I enjoyed the feeling that the game had anticipated the stupid bullshit I was trying to do; ultimately, however, I didn’t exit the game with a positive impression, because I found its philosophizing perfunctory and hollow. Are video games art? Buddy, a toilet is art. Did you know you are not acting freely, but are playing a video game that someone made? Yes, because I bought it on Steam, a service for distributing video games. (Some of this is just my bias against the question of determinism as it’s usually formulated, which seems to have no bearing on the very real experiential problem of agency: getting out of bed, etc. But whatever.) These are thought-provoking conceits; unfortunately, they provoke exactly one thought—“whoa, man”—and then terminate, satisfied. I forgot to include this screenshot after the throwaway bit about a toilet being a video game from that “are games art” letter and it’s irritated me ever since so I’m putting it here Or, to take a less mechanics-focused example, I do not feel that Hotline Miami, a game I played this year and think is a genuine achievement, has anything interesting to say about violence as such. Do you like hurting other people? I do not. I don’t even play that many shooters, because they kind of gross me out. Moreover, while this is, tragically, a letter about a much cornier hobby than BDSM, if you do like hurting other people, it’s hardly the end of the world; I’m sure there’s someone in your area you could hit up for consent training or whatever.

In any case, one cool thing about video games is that they are not real. More to the point, I didn’t make Hotline Miami—you guys did! If you were actually worried, you could’ve made it about, like, laser tag. It’s a callous, insulting bait-and-switch: isn’t it fascinating, philosophically speaking, that you’re hitting yourself? (Luckily, *Hotline Miami *is not, whatever its creators might’ve thought, a game about the appeal of violence; it is, like the movie Oppenheimer, about the danger of becoming too deeply immersed in something you’re enjoying, and it conveys this quite well.)

NieR: Automata, on the other hand—the video game, alongside Dark Souls and Persona 5 Royal, which made me realize I love this stupid medium—is famously metafictional, but its trickery is all in service of its narrative, and that narrative is not merely about how wacky video games are, but is one of the most emotionally resonant science fiction stories I’ve ever experienced. (That said, it is indeed also a video game about how wacky video games are, but it treats this topic far more tenderly and intelligently, in my opinion, than the cynical dorm-room skepticism of The Stanley Parable.) It takes the conventions and limitations of video games and folds them into the story it is telling, achieving a kind of aesthetic integrity I sincerely hadn’t thought possible before playing it.

Void Stranger is firmly on the side of NieR, I’d say. It is a game which loves video games, and it wants to use them to show you something you haven’t seen before. It uses every available convention and mechanic to tell its story, the camera panning suddenly back to show that what you’ve been taking for granted is itself significant. It is a puzzle game all the way down, in every way it can be.

The plot, which is revealed masterfully and gradually, is well-crafted, haunting, surprising, and emotionally charged; at no point have I been disappointed. I confess, however, that as some of the pressure of unknowing has let up, my experience of it has gotten a bit less intense. (For now! I haven’t achieved the “true ending,” because about 45 hours in I was getting impatient and started looking stuff up, and then realized I didn’t want to actually “ruin” the game for myself that way. In any case, I have heard that the ending is superb, and I believe it.)

This is the way art like this usually goes, I think—which is itself sort of comforting. The confusion of the journey, fucked-up as it is, has a thrill and beauty that nearly any resolution can’t match. Frustrating aesthetically, maybe, but given how unresolved life tends to be, one hopes this might sometimes be the case. (The formalist outsider horror masterpiece Higurashi When They Cry, a visual novel I’ve wanted to address here but like too much to know how to write about, is perhaps the greatest exception I can think of to this principle.)

But especially in the thickest weeds of Void Stranger’s mystery—after I realized how deep the questions went, but before answers began to concretize—I felt like I was beholding an uncannily cutting representation of the darker side of psychic life. This is the feeling that Void Stranger captures: the feeling of doing the busy work that needs to be done, tending to our small garden of comprehensible, rational needs and wants, solving the silly little puzzles that make up our days—moving blocks from here to there, avoiding predictable-but-still-tricky obstructions—trying, and failing, not to feel that these are just small oases of necessary sense-making in a vast desert of bewildering hostility. It’s got everything: diamonds, boulders, stairs, pyramids, electric stovetop burners, What is moving about the vision of the game, though, is that, for all its meticulous opacity and genuine difficulty, at no point does it feel genuinely impossible. Unlike a game like Baba is You, for example, where you really have to mentally grasp the solution to the puzzle before implementing it, if you’re stuck in* Void Stranger *you can often just kind of noodle around until something works. I’ve looked stuff up here and there, but in my experience with the game thus far, there has only been one truly opaque mechanic, though it makes sense in hindsight, and only one truly opaque puzzle, which I think might have gone a little overboard. (I looked up the solution but, hilariously, I’m genuinely not sure what solving it did.)

Art is founded on the rhythmic generation and satisfaction of desire: we want to see something new and beautiful; in the middle of a story, we want to know what happens; after the song is over, we want to hear it again. Many of Void Stranger’s more gnomic utterances concern hunger and need. I genuinely could not recount to you any of the contexts in which the phrase occurs, but Void Stranger repeats this mantra throughout: “We have no hope and yet we live in longing.”

But crucially, for all the grief and unfulfillment the game depicts, it’s a very fulfilling game to play. It’s really fun! It’s very difficult at times, but it’s really fun. If you like this kind of puzzle—and unfortunately you probably do, I think, have to like this kind of puzzle to enjoy the game—it will reward you, over and over again. The basic design is extremely solid. The floors of the dungeon are wonderfully paced: systematically introducing mechanics, bringing them to a head, cooling down, then dropping in strange, wonderful, well-timed narrative beats. NPCs drop hints that make no sense at first but wind up being clear and helpful when considered from the right angle. The more time you spend proceeding through the dungeon, the more generous the game becomes—the more tedious dimensions of navigating the dungeon get much easier surprisingly quickly. The story it unfurls is a deep, rich, satisfying one. The soundtrack is really good. There’s one song that sounds kind of like a poignant take on the “Underground Castle” theme from Soul Blazer, and both rule extremely hard.

Here, ultimately, is one story that Void Stranger tells. The world doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the work you do adds up. It is worth it to try. The developers (whose company is wonderfully named System Erasure) give the following “tips” in the storefront game description:

The game autosaves between each room, so take it easyIf a puzzle seems impossible, get some restIf that doesn’t help, try asking someone for helpGood luck!

Pretty good advice in general! Okay, see ya!

“Quality of Life” (Dragon Warrior VII / Dragon’s Dogma 2)

2024-04-10T00:00:00Z

*Hi! I was going to send out a big mopey pseudo-cultural-critical explanation of why I took a break, but that’s boring and who cares! This is a quick thing in response to scurrilous commentary I heard the other day from sources I shan’t name impugning the quality of *Dragon Warrior VII for PS1. I might’ve talked about this a bit before, but never at quite such length. Okay cya!!

In the wake of the release of Dragon’s Dogma 2 (a game I’m working on a longer thing about; the tl;dr there is that it’s really cool and I like it a lot), there’s been a lot of discussion about “quality of life” features in games. I’ve always found this a slightly funny term—like, I’m sitting here playing video games or whatever; the quality of my life right now is pretty solid—but I take the point. It’s unquestionably annoying, in most circumstances, to lose progress, wade through slow turn-based combat animations, not be able to travel quickly, etc.

In any case, the term seems, on its face, to brook no objection. Who doesn’t want a higher-quality life? The data are in: apparently, a lot of people do indeed want worse lives, given that many of the Biggest Games of the last few years intentionally strip back quality of life (QoL (lol)) features. While FromSoftware’s Elden Ring had a ton of nice QoL stuff that their earlier “Soulsbourne” games had lacked, it was still a tricky, difficult game, and earlier Soulsbourne games—including, of course, Dark Souls, arguably the most influential game of the 2010s—were notorious for the QoL stuff they lacked (fast travel, the ability to pause gameplay, quicksaves, difficulty modes, etc.).

Or, to take maybe an even higher-profile example: in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo doubled down on their controversial decision to have items fall apart as you use them; though I haven’t played much of *TotK *yet, I’ve been led to understand that the things which fall apart are even bigger and higher-effort, such as trebuchets (?) and helicopters (?!). This was the first image result for the Google search “crazy thing totk” I am bringing this all up because I recently heard repeated the received wisdom that the PlayStation 1 version of Dragon Quest VII, localized as Dragon Warrior VII, is a uniquely poor entry in the legendary series. This reputation stems largely from not only its length, which is admittedly enormous (using emulator speed-up liberally, it took me about sixty hours, easily the longest game I’d played in that version of RetroArch; howlongtobeat.com puts a main quest playthrough at 109 hours on average), but also from its opening hours, about which I have either written about or thought about writing about before.

*Dragon Warrior VII *does not, as has been reported, “look like an SNES game,” though the squished character sprites took me some getting used to. It looks, if anything, like the precursor to the well-received DS remakes of IV, V, and VI—lushly chunky polygonal environments populated by expressive two-dimensional sprites depicting characters from multiple angles. (See also: the recent Star Ocean: The Second Story R—itself, to my eyes at least, the most disappointing iteration of the “HD-2D” style perfected in the wonderful Octopath Traveler II. Despite the similarities, Dragon Quest VII looks way, way better than Second Story R, which weirdly makes me kind of want to vomit. Sorry!!! I really wanted to like it!!!!) Look how good this looks. It looks good Infamously “slow,” you don’t fight an enemy in *Dragon Warrior VII *until at least four hours into the game. You’re mostly just chilling out on your little island—apparently the only island in the entire world1—hanging out with your pals, chipping away at a big weird puzzle in the basement of some mysterious ruins, trying to get various important items from your drunk uncle.

The game’s 3DS remake (created after Square merged with *Dragon Quest *creators Enix; localized this time around, in the style the games would continue to adopt, as Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past) abbreviates the introductory hours, reducing its big slow puzzle to a zippy, perfunctory fetch quest. This was—and here we reach the relevant point—widely lauded as a QoL improvement. (Dragon Quest VIII, released long before the VII remake,chucks a slime at you within seconds of opening the game, as if snarkily appeasing those who complained about the *VII *introduction. It’s not as good of an opening!)

While I can’t say that *Dragon Warrior VII *for the PlayStation is the best in the series, or even my favorite (the first two acts of *Dragon Quest V *invent or perfect like, ~85% of what I love about video games), the official *Corridors of Time *position is that *Dragon Warrior VII *for the PlayStation totally owns. Firstly: RIP Akira Toriyama. Secondly: I am grateful to this box art for definitively answering the long-standing question: In the world, other islands are? For what it is worth, I have since played the first few hours of the 3DS version; it seems, apart from the changes we are here discussing, really great. The PS1 version also lacks some quality of life features I do miss quite badly—specifically, the game doesn’t let give you any clues to the obnoxiously obscure locations of the (latterly titular) fragments, which are essential to progress the narrative. I also confess that, as most readers of Corridors of Time have probably inferred, I am predisposed to opinions like “the PS1 version of *Dragon Quest VII *is good” (what if the boring thing were actually interesting? What if the bad thing were actually good???), because I am annoying. (I have a fucking Substack2, for God’s sake.)

In any case, on the heels of the runaway financial and critical success of Dragon’s Dogma 2, we here at *Corridors *HQ have elected to more deeply indulge our petty contrarianism. The introduction to *Dragon Warrior VII *is, we argue, not only Actually Good—but prescient. In about 109 hours (297 for completionists) Reviewers and commentators seemed to quickly settle on a vocabulary for speaking about why and how Dragon’s Dogma 2 is good. The consensus goes like this: by stripping away quality-of-life features, reviewers say, DD2 forces you to immerse yourself in its meticulous, remarkable world. “There’s no fast travel! The quests are just ‘go over here and talk to a guy!’” Well, yes, but that’s because they’re red herrings: they are designed to get you into out and about, stumbling onto surreal emergent experiences; by the time you loop back around to the cities, quests, etc., they’ve begun to feel momentous, the digital landscape shimmering with reality.

(At this point, each review, it seems, is contractually obliged to include one (1) anecdote of such an experience. For my part, I was riding an oxcart to the mysterious “Checkpoint Rest Town” when an ogre and a bunch of hobgoblins started fighting in the middle of the road; the ogre drop-kicked a hobgoblin through the oxcart, shattering it, and proceeded to fly straight off of a cliff, rewarding me with experience for both itself and the dead hobgoblin, and forcing me to walk the rest of the way to a campsite. I laughed at this for like, five minutes.)

There’s more to say about Dragon’s Dogma 2 (hopefully, or else my next letter is pointless), but the implicit economy outlined here is worth pausing on. “Immersion,” perhaps the most elusive of game-critical terms, and “quality of life” are, according to this unspoken conceptual framework, inversely proportional. To some extent, then, the lower the quality of your life, the higher the quality of your experience. (In video games, that is. For what it is worth, we here at Corridors of Time HQ have tried this “IRL,” and can confirm this formula does not apply.)

As I’m sure all the reviewers would acknowledge, the actual calculus is more complicated than this. *Dragon’s Dogma 2 *is replete with quality-of-life features earlier video games lacked—you can save the game pretty easily before quitting, to take one example. Moreover, a lot of the big-ticket deprivations are a bit overblown (intentionally, I think). Some quests aren’t marked on the map, but a lot of them are. The oxcarts work pretty well for fast-travel purposes! Sometimes you get attacked or whatever, but the higher your level, the easier these assaults get to take care of. The terrifying “dragonsplague,” rumored to soft-lock your save file, doesn’t perma-kill vital NPCs; they apparently respawn after about a week of in-game time.

It is worth noting that this is a register of experience particularly susceptible to differences in circumstance and tastes. While it may increase my “immersion” in a game at this point to have to redo half an hour of gameplay (I almost wrote “work”—a slippage which itself could constitute a topic for another letter), it might not’ve made me feel particularly good when I was still driving delivery at night and teaching during the day—a half an hour of leisure time was harder to come by. (I’m not sure what would’ve made me feel “particularly good” during that time in my life, but that story is, again, for another letter.)

In its introductory hours, Dragon Warrior VII completely cashes out on the idea that subtracting crucial gameplay elements can lead to immersion. Combat, of course, isn’t a QoL feature—as Dragon Warrior VII progresses, I am sad to report it starts to feel like the opposite—but it’s far more essential to the series’s formula than, say, fast travel is to the ordinary open-world RPG. Putting your first battle off that long was a highly intentional design decision. (It is akin to what Ueda Fumito, the director of *Ico—*agame FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki said “awakened [him] to the possibilities of the medium”—called “design by subtraction.”) Pictured: a fully awakened Hidetaka Miyazaki And that gameplay decision perfectly concords with the game’s narrative design. Everyone thinks, at the beginning of the game, that your island is the only island in the entire world. By the end of the introduction, you have so settled into the terrain that (spoilers, though not really) when you finally do get to leave, it’s momentous. The island itself is an elegantly microcosmic world—a small town, a big town, a castle; some overworld stuff, some underground stuff, some big old ruins—and its mysteries are as profound as those of much larger game worlds. Strange tunnels trail downwards to locked doors; those doors open onto massive caverns, revealing intricate, rewarding puzzles. (I’d argue the sense of place established in the opening hours of Dragon Warrior VII approaches that of something like… that’s right…Final Fantasy VII.)

All art relies on the rhythm of tension and release. Perhaps most obvious in music (and thrillers), art establishes expectations in the beholder, then satisfies or subverts them. Plots build, then resolve; even visual art is predicated on the idea that you can capture both moments in the same image. Dragon Warrior VII does this with a mechanical convention—the combat encounter. It’s not perfect or anything, but it’s kind of thrilling, and in a way that parallels what reviewers are finding so revelatory about Dragon’s Dogma 2. Press F to Find the Game Revelatory The history of video games suffers, perhaps more than the histories of other art forms, from being seen as straightforwardly progressive. This narrative indeed might have a bit more explanatory power than it does with other art forms, given how entirely games are bound up with rapidly developing technologies. But as is always the case, these advances come at something of a cost. Independent designers have long specialized in spelunking forgotten historical depths. At its least interesting, this tendency leads to what I think of as “love letter syndrome”—nostalgia can dampen the capacity for genuine engagement with artistic history. On the other hand, so much of this stuff is incredible. It’s neat, then, to see games like *Dragon’s Dogma 2 *take a similar approach from the big-budget side of things, especially as the development cycle for “cutting-edge” games approaches wide-scale untenability. (For its part, *Dragons’s Dogma 2 *has some pretty bad performance issues; while they don’t bug me, I’m not quite ready to argue they’re aesthetically integral.)

In any case, my advice to all the AAA developers reading this? If you want your game to sell three million copies or whatever, cut a bunch of shit that people think they want out of it. The end!

A conceit which, I feel obliged to note, never fails to remind me, perhaps a bit non sequiturishly, of the concluding lines of one of my favorite poems, George Oppen’s “Ballad.” Turns out a lot of people are out there thinking about “the idea of going to an island”! ↩

I also feel obliged to note this: it has recently come to my renewed attention that the Substack internet corporation is even more unchill than I remember them being. I’m going to stick with it for now because, opinions aside, I am presently in a psychospiritual position where I am unable to think logistical matters like this through, let alone act on them. On the off chance I ever intentionally make this thing paid again—which is to say, if our letter-mailing overlords begin snatching away a percentage of my hard-earned posting dollars—I will be actively considering my options. I’d love a pay-what-you-want option for Premium Content anyway; I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do with their lives. ↩