Imagine you’re 8 weeks in to the grimmest siege action in the Xenowars, low on ammo and exhausted from burying the acid-scarred corpse of your platoon commander, and this little wee guy goes trotting past you towards the front line.

Classic Murdoch Crabtree interaction

Yeah, I’d watch Muppets Lord of the Rings

(gordon ramsay on star trek) oh what the hell? the gagh is fucking dead! look at this! it’s not moving. it’s feasting with its fucking ancestors in sto’vo’kor! excuse me, darling, how fresh is this gagh? they’re what? fucking hell. thank you. my god, it’s fucking replicated. wow, fuck me.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (PS4)

A gripping couple of weeks ruminating on Death of the Outsider’s elaborate sandbox worlds comes to a close with unholy stop motion nightmares and an aptly human scale grand finale.

Spoilers within:

Lurk’s small palette of abilities favour planning and close-up engagement in - very character-appropriate fashion. I leant a bit too much on my usual approach of carefully reading everything in the level and knocking out everyone who moved, but the face swap ability is the most fun I’ve had in this series outside of infiltrating a party. And the big aesthetic swerve when you touch the eye in the last level is as shocking as the first time you slip through A Crack in the Slab.

My highlight must be the night time bank heist level, both for its commitment to the premise and its creative repurposing of a level you have just finished exploring/sizing up in the daytime. The opening is a close second though, I’ve rarely felt such licence to experiment.

Heartbroken there probably won’t be an other one of these. The vibes! Karnaca would be so great to just chill in. Big clockwork robot buddy. Nice stuff.

If Dishonored 1's element is water, Dishonored 2's element is air. Karnaca is described as a city "at the edge of the world", and is defined by its elevation, its towering trees, and the wind currents that provide the city its power. Almost every map in the game has you climbing upward, away from the water that is your home and haven, until you reach the Dust District where the clouds blowing through obscure it completely. Bloodflies are the game's primary environmental hazard, replacing the river krusts and rats of Dishonored 1.

The wind is a double-edged thing in the story. It brings prosperity, allowing Karnaca to escape the need for whale oil in the face of rationing. But that prosperity does not extend to those facing the brunt of its effects; those condemned to toil in the silver mines and live in the district poisoned by their exploitation. The wind powers homes; it also powers the devices used to exert control over the city's population. In short, the wind is like the Empire - as easily put to harm as it is to good. All it took was one Empress deposed by another, and those forces shifted with all the fickleness of a breeze.

Even the Void changes from the serene, underwater-like place in Dishonored 1. It becomes a wasteland of howling emptiness and tall, jagged spires. Shindaerey Peak is the place where the Void meets the world, and the gulley connecting it to Karnaca is where the city's wind currents originate. It is a city at the edge of the world not just in the physical sense - it also lies at the boundary between this world and the Void.

When you leap from Coldridge Prison at the beginning of Dishonored 1, the water is there to greet you. But in Dishonored 2, the water is withheld. When you fall, there is only empty, unforgiving air. Which makes it all the more compelling when the Outsider reaches out to catch you.

(Also, I should point out that there are two more Isles yet to be featured in a game and two more elements yet to be thematically implemented...)

The Ratcheteer (Playdate)

I recognised Shaun Inman’s name on this but it took me ages to place him - he’s been showing up in my iPhone music player since I bought the The Last Rocket’s soundtrack over a decade ago! The Ratcheteer has similar vibes of chunky, GBC-era pixel art, tight retro level design, and earworm music, this time from collaborator 8bitmatt. I’ve been thinking about friction in games a lot lately, and the way The Ratcheteer makes you switch gadgets constantly to efficiently navigate its stages gives it bags of character. There’s a wonderful sense of place and a sweet little storyline tying it all together to make a little snow globe of adventure. The archetypal Playdate game - I can’t imagine this being anywhere else.

It doesn’t deserve talking about in any serious way, but the Alan Wake aspect of the “consultants are woking our games” conspiracy theory tickles me. Yes, fake gamer boys, please convince me that this character - given anything we know about Remedy, its meta-narratives, its relationships with its actors, and the plot of the game itself - was always really meant to be white.

A little of my favourite writing in Paradise Killer:

Paradise Killer (Nintendo Switch)

A systems based murder mystery visual novel in a vaporwave Lovecraftian u/dys/topia. Lady Love Dies is summoned from exile to solve the murder of the leaders of the Syndicate, immortal humans who meddle with banished gods in their mission to create an island Paradise. In the search for answers you re-establish connections to old friends and feel out the new state of affairs. Who would stand to benefit? Who had the opportunity? And - whisper it - did the Council have it coming?

Island Sequence 24 is as densely structured a setting as anything in the Metroid Prime series. Backtracking between suspects and crime scenes soon encourages a bit of off-path first-person platforming, which the game is surprisingly well attuned to. Like Samus, Lady Love Dies moves with presence and is immune to fall damage, and the compact setting makes accidental detours tolerable. It’s a pleasure to simply explore this place for its own sake, soaking up the lush audio and juicy-crunchy visual design, but these excursions yield lost objects which offer an insight in to the millennia-long history of the Syndicate, or advance your investigation.

For a game with no prescribed structure, major revelations arrive at a steady rhythm, inconsistencies implying alternative explanations that hint at motives that must be investigated further. Your crime solving computer Starlight organises evidence and testimony but the assembly of these facts in to the truth of the crime occurs entirely in the player’s head - to the point that, famously, there is no prescribed answer.

The pull of the central mystery and the cryptic setting grow as you attune yourself. A full sense of the Island and its occupants arrives as the mystery behind the murders becomes clear, leading to a dramatic and satisfying trial sequence where Lady Love Dies doesn’t so much build her case as bury her chosen suspects under it.

Holding the truth is a unique kind of power, and power is this game’s main preoccupation. There’s nowhere you can’t go, nothing you can’t say, and by the coda, nothing you can’t do in pursuit of justice. And it feels good.

Carrion (Switch)

An engagingly tactile game where you play one tonne of angry beef sausages escaping a research facility. Even basic movement becomes fascinatingly weird as your alien body expands in mass and the game forces you to reckon with the fact that you don’t have a well-defined front and back, and therefore can’t do nimbly fit through narrow gaps.

There’s some gear gating here but it’s not a Metroidvania. There’s a propulsive momentum to the level design and a linearity the game enforces with one-way doors, which suits the slinking and eventually thundering momentum of the monster. The downside is that the levels seldom feel understandable, as with little reason to backtrack or risk of getting lost, there’s little opportunity to build up a mental map. The handful of optional collectibles, mostly accessible via backtracking, feel a bit redundant, although the little puzzles they’re locked behind are enjoyable in their own right.

I was pleasantly surprised by the sparse storytelling here. There is no dialogue and little text but it suggests a great deal and manages to land some fun twists.

🎶Now I have taken Control🎶

This was a first rate goof and I will not be told otherwise.

stanford era vibes