Author: NickNameNick

I know last time I said this would be out in a week but, instead, it’s been…five months?!?!?!

There’re reasons for that, outside of writer’s block: I’ve been dealing with a health issue, which I won’t go into detail about as it’s too personal, but that alone messed with my head and – no thanks to the usual bullshit that comes with changing doctors and medical insurance – I went without anti-depressants for too long and that, obviously, made things worse.

Thankfully, I’m somewhat better now – I still haven’t found a much-needed therapist – and finally got past my creative blockage.

So, yeah, hope you enjoy this piece, and – even if you don’t – thanks for giving it a look!

SHANG-CHI & THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

There’s nothing surprising, in the least, that Shang-Chi manages to have some of the better action scenes of any MCU installment.

When it comes to martial arts in cinema – the choreography is as important as the staging. You can’t just half-ass it and cover it up with a lot of CGI either, because you need incredibly physical performers that can make their engagement in combat seem as natural and effortless to them as breathing or blinking. Each movement must feel fluid, as if purely instinctual, and anything else comes off as stiff and mechanical. It’s all essential.

It’s not perfect, for nothing is truly capable of such, but – as far as the MCU goes – it’s gotten closer to it than most. There are those niggles with plot contrivances and occasional holes, the hat-on-a-hat comic relief (I really wish Ben Kingsley was just a cameo), and a third act that’s a bit of a convoluted CGI clusterfuck – but they’re far more tolerable here than other MCU films. There’re conventions common across the MCU, such as the obligatory love interests, that get on my nerves because they rarely serve any other purpose within the movie they appear in and even rarer they’ll make a return. While I wouldn’t call Shang-Chi “subversive”, they do something unexpectedly creative enough with the tropes of a staid formula that’s oddly refreshing.

Katy/Ruiwen (Awkwafina), for example, is initially framed as a seemingly useless comic-relief sidekick but…she’s not.

Outside her integral role in the final battle with a CGI Cthulhu monster (who’s introduced a little too late), she’s actually the one who pushes an otherwise avoidant titular protagonist (Simu Liu) to directly deal with their situation and really the only person he can confide in about his unusual and utterly fucked-up backstory. She is, in fact, the love interest – but that’s not established until the story’s epilogue. It’s not stated in dialogue but with a small gesture where her and Shang-Chi’s hands clasp around each other. Though it is foreshadowed when one of Katy’s relatives suggests dating Shang-Chi, it is quickly dismissed because, at this point, neither of them see each other as romantic partners but very good friends. Like, of all the romances in the MCU, this is easily the most verisimilitudinous. They started as friends, went through turmoil, and it brought them closer together like many couples in reality. I’d like to see more of that in the MCU instead of all that other tepid shit.

It would be remiss, of course, to not bring up the stand-out performance by a fantastic actor: Tony Leung as Zu Wenwu. I’d go as far as to argue that he’s easily the best villain within the MCU, next to Wilson Fisk and Thanos – they’re layered and empathetic at times but we’re kept aware what they’re doing is still wrong. Like Fisk, he is partly motivated by love. Like Thanos, he’s an abusive father who rationalizes his mistreatment as a form of “building character” or protecting his children.

Wenwu is a particularly interesting case because his comicbook counterpart – The Mandarin – is a product of orientalism and cultural appropriation. Asking Katy for her Chinese name, in a weird way, is about how many notable personalities from China and associated territories use an English first name professionally. I mean, Tony Leung was not named “Tony” – it was Chiu-wai. Much like how Chan Kong-sang became “Jackie Chan” or Li Lianjie became “Jet Li.” It’s a practice that, more or less, is done for the sake of insensitive, overly-entitled Anglophones. English-speakers who, from my experience as such, are often so linguistically lazy that they’ll not bother learning how to pronounce non-English words and names or become childishly petulant when suggested they perhaps should. As Leung said, names are important – and it’s insulting to refer to a man as just being “Oriental”. Well, that or common Chinese cuisine…

With all that said, does that mean Shang-Chi is a good martial arts film than simply a superhero movie with elements of martial arts? Well, like so much of the MCU, it’s the latter. It never reaches the heights of (say) Hero, Tom-Yum-Goong, City of Violence, or even Master of the Flying Guillotine but there’s nothing wrong with that either. Not every martial arts film needs to be a masterpiece, but I wish Disney/Marvel leaned into it mainly being a martial arts film, rather than being another “superhero movie” that lifts tropes and aesthetics from other genres. What made Logan one of the best comicbook adaptations, at least in my opinion, is that it wasn’t a “superhero movie” – it was a neo-western akin to a film like No Country for Old Men or televised series like Breaking Bad. Why not do the same for, perhaps, the sequel to Shang-Chi? We can only hope!

Our next entry, however, comes much closer to achieving such…

HAWKEYE

Apologies, but I need to get this off my chest: I don’t like Clint Barton, both in the comics and MCU. At all. He’s just so…boring, to me.

If you noticed, I said “Clint Barton” and not “Hawkeye”, and there’s a reason for that: I adore Kate Bishop. It’s even better that, when compared to a dull Jeremy Renner, she’s played by an energetic Hailee Steinfeld who manages to make clumsiness ridiculously adorable. Although to be fair, I actually like Clint/Renner in his role here and there’re plenty of reasons for that.

It’s not really a superhero story when considering that the two main leads don’t really partake in the usual costumed crime-fighting antics, nor does the situation involve typical villainous machinations – its scale, much to my delight, is more grounded and personal than the rest of the MCU. It’s more like a Shane Black action-comedy that takes plenty of notes from Die Hard, including being set during Christmas while having nothing to do with the holiday – but, hey, at least New York has snow!

There’s obviously that element of Clint passing the torch to Kate, who is as rich as she is an utter fuck-up, but the inciting incident is almost farcical. Clint is in town to see a terrible (and hilarious) Broadway musical about Steve “Captain America” Rogers and the Battle of New York from The Avengers. Which, like a soldier coming back from Afghanistan and watching Black Hawk Down, gives him post-traumatic flashbacks (more on that, in a bit!). Kate, expelled from her university for an ill-conceived experiment/prank, crashes a secret auction involving the Ronin costume – only to steal it, then wear it, and finally get caught on camera. Given Clint’s worldwide mass murder tour, many disgruntled criminals come out of the woodwork to seek vengeance, including the enigmatic and eclectic Echo (Alaqua Cox) as well as Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, i.e. the best part of Black Widow).

Of the many (and I do mean many) issues I had with Endgame as a film, the plot point involving Clint going on an indiscriminate rampage under the alias of “Ronin” is among the worst. You’d think, with the five-year time gap and what had happened over those years, he’d have a noticeable change in personality but he just…doesn’t. In fact, his old teammates are disturbingly willing to forgive and involve him in a time-traveling heist, though he could easily become a liability and sabotage their whole endeavor. Hell, they don’t even consider locking him up for the psychotic rampage alone. The point is that there’s no sense of consequence for those actions and, akin to WandaVision, feels aggravatingly counter-productive. In fact, it felt downright pointless. Though I’d have preferred to have it happen in the film, the showrunners of Hawkeye actually address this (to a degree).

For whatever reason, I seem to be one of the only people who liked the series and, admittedly, I’m confused by that. In terms of quality, it’s far more consistent than the other MCU series like WandaVision or Loki – it’s not bifurcated by a useless B-plot nor do the episodes feel as if they last longer than necessary. It has a nice sense of momentum where every episode is eventful, rather than having an entire episode based around an info dump or contrived battle, though it starts to spin too many plates by the end and rush significant character arcs. As much as I love Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, he was introduced too late in the story – a similar issue Book of Boba Fett had with Cad Bane – and not particularly necessary to make the narrative work. At least, unlike Cad Bane and Book of Boba Fett, he has a neat fight with Kate. 

Along with Kate’s clumsiness being an endearing trait, the showrunners manage to make Clint interesting as a person by dealing with his various mental and physical traumas caused by superheroics. Which, given how it was completely absent with Natasha Romanova in Black Widow, is refreshing to see in an MCU installment. We all know these stories take place in a heightened reality but it can help when reality (especially in live-action entertainment) is acknowledged, from time to time, and we’re reminded that no normal person could possibly live through such events and, if they did, couldn’t ever recover from it. His hearing loss nicely parallels Echo’s own condition along with the revenge subplot and, even better, the reason for his hearing loss is shown and not simply told. We’re given but a brief montage of moments from the previous films, being knocked around by so many goddamn explosions – it makes perfect sense without any utterance of an explanation. He might be a highly trained government assassin but he’s still a normal human being, and there’s nothing you can do against inevitable physical entropy.

There are a lot of other things I like, especially the Central Park LARPers as well as Clint and Kate just hanging out celebrating Christmas in a safe house, but it ultimately comes down to how it scales back and treats the characters like people. None of the spectacle ever overrides the very human qualities of the cast the way so many MCU films have and, unfortunately, that’s the opposite case with the next entry.

I’ll never comprehend how anyone could’ve possibly enjoyed the film as its very existence is baffling…

ETERNALS

It’s better to ask “why is Eternals?” than “what is Eternals?” Because what Eternals is, as a cinematic narrative, is practically impossible to describe and it’s not worth such consideration unless you already had a personal connection with the source material. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am, for having sat through the entire film and rarely finding a moment of joy.

Admittedly, I’m biased as I’ve always been fond of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, and Eternals felt like a cheap knock-off with the stench of Erich von Däniken attached. Y’see, Däniken is a racist piece of shit and it’s why so many of his “ancient astronaut (totally dubious and unfalsifiable) theories” had aliens who were somehow responsible for the pyramids of Egypt, the Moai statues of Easter Island, or literally any place that both isn’t in Europe and is not Stonehenge. It’s why we have cultural detritus like Ancient Aliens around with a bunch of arrogant, ignorant honky motherfuckers being reductive about and wildly misinterpreting cultures none of them actually understand.

I know I’m being digressive, but I’ve never come across a script as unengaging, over-bloated, and confused as the one for Eternals. It wants to be too many things at once, with too many bland characters, and too much dull exposition for the half-baked mythos. Thinking and writing about it can be painful, at times.

I don’t mind expounding on what the Celestials do, a bit, given their background presence in the MCU but the filmmakers don’t have their priorities in proper order as the monolithic pseudo-deities are treated with more importance than anything else in the narrative. For example; I’d like to know who Sersi (Gemma Chan), Ikaris (Richard Madden), or Sprite (Lia McHugh) are as people but you really can’t when they also have to share screentime with another eight or so characters – which could easily be remedied by cutting out some of them, as their involvement is negligible at best and pointless at worst.

So much of the film are these characters meeting up with one another, constantly bringing up how they’re “family”, which is as unbearable as it was in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the threat they need to deal with, as though the audience must be constantly reminded like easily distracted children. They never act like a familial unit, but a bunch of random people who don’t really like each other, so these proclamations made about their relationship are completely hollow and nakedly manipulative. ‘Cause, y’see, they have to be family because they said they were family! It’s like that bit in Futurama where the Robot Devil chastised an opera because the characters were outright stating how they felt and, yes, it does make me as angry as it did him. I want characters defined by what they do and not simply what they say.

You can’t even enjoy the action sequences because every fight feels like it belongs in a videogame. Its humanoid characters are covered in special effects while battling space dinosaurs that never look organic as much as motile plastic – may as well just show a child smacking action figures together while going “BOOM!” and “POW!” and “WOOSH!” Shang-Chi’s martial arts felt naturalistic because, save for the third act, we mostly have flesh-and-blood people in combat with little use of CGI – there’s a sense of impact to all those punches and kicks.

Is there anything I could compliment? Well, yeah, surprisingly. Kingo’s (Kumail Nanjiani) reappearance in the present day, portraying him as a Bollywood actor shooting an elaborate musical scene, is easily the most lively scene and makes you want to watch that movie-within-a-movie instead of the actual movie. Nanjiani’s presence is also what makes the boring shit afterward more tolerable, until he just leaves the film right before the climax, ‘cause reasons (although, to be honest, that’s every character’s motivation: ‘cause reasons).

The filmmakers, despite the abominable script, know how to make a film look good outside of the CGI; the cinematography does a phenomenal job of capturing landscapes that lends them a level of majesty equal to their grand scale. Despite the inconsistent color-grading, you always know what is happening on-screen due to otherwise good lighting and shot composition. It is, on a purely technical level, well-made. The problem, however, is none of that really matters. It cannot improve or elevate the material, to salvage the unsalvagable.

Much like Erich von Däniken and the insufferable, intellectually lazy UFOlogists he’s inspired, I never want to hear about or speak of Eternals ever again. I want it to go the way of Inhumans, where it gets swept under the rug and only referenced offhanded (and underhandedly) in other installments without any fanfare whatsoever. It certainly doesn’t deserve a sequel because, even though there’s plenty to build off of, the characters were so devoid of personality and the mythos so poorly conceived that I just don’t give a shit. If the film bothered to make me care about the cast first and foremost, especially without their convoluted origin story, then I’d feel more charitable about seeing a follow-up that could improve upon its other issues.

But, again, that’s not going to happen – I refuse to suffer this foolishness any further under the naive presumption the sequel will fix everything…

…Okay, that did end on a very negative note.

However, I can promise that won’t be the case next time – that’s right, I’m going to do another set of MCU mini-reviews! It’s been a while since the first one and other installments came out since then, so it only made sense to make a third set of mini-reviews. If I manage to see Thor: Love & Thunder in theaters, maybe there’ll be a fourth about it and Ms. Marvel soon after.

Sooner than several months and more within a week or two, of course (hopefully)!

Hey there, everyone – I’m back!

Finally got a new laptop (and eventually figured it out, kinda) and have a keyboard to properly write, ’cause my phone’s touchscreen hates me. Originally, prior to my computer troubles, I was planning on doing separate reviews for each Marvel Cinematic Universe series on Disney+ and the films. Except, much like The Falcon & Winter Soldier, I can’t really say enough about any of them alone for an entire piece.

However, I can as mini-reviews! In two sets, actually, and here’s the first…

LOKI

After WandaVision and The Falcon & Winter Soldier, having a series with the strengths of both while lacking the weaknesses of either – well, mostly – was a nice development. Much like WandaVision, it’s partly a character deconstruction of the titular individual but also functions as an adventure akin to The Falcon & Winter Soldier, albeit one of time-travel and parallel timelines than international intrigue and espionage.

The antics with the space-time continuum are far more interesting and meaningful here than in Endgame, as it rarely ever diverts attention away from the protagonist for the sake of plot contrivance and fan service. I mean, why would they, when he’s played by Tom Hiddleston? He’s consistently been my favorite thing about the MCU because, even in something badly-written, he puts a level of dedication into portraying the character that makes him relatable and – despite his godhood – feel incredibly human.

There’s actually very little for me to condemn except for how both Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wunmi Mosaku are essentially playing the same character. The only real difference between them is how they respond to the reveal of the Time Variance Authority’s true nature, but ultimately unnecessary and does little more than pad out the runtime. It’s like Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Wood, and Darcy Lewis in WandaVision all over again. That final episode, however? I’ve never loved and hated something so much simultaneously. It is both an info dump explaining what’s been going on in this series while also another in-house ad for subsequent installments of the MCU and…stop it, Disney. Fucking stop it.

Anyway, what made all that tolerable is Jonathan Majors, who delivers the aforementioned info dump, for his performance is so expressive that he manages to make convoluted and interminable exposition less arduous to endure. I shouldn’t be surprised by this given his role in Lovecraft Country, where he seemed to channel the spirit of Gil Scott–Heron (now that is a biopic I want to see!), with his versatility proven here by feeling like a completely different person to Atticus Freeman. But, more importantly, does this properly stick to landing by the end unlike WandaVision and The Falcon & Winter Soldier? The final scenes actually live up to all that came before, moreso given it isn’t resolved with some big battle (though there is a brief skirmish), and the cliffhanger is enough to make me look forward to the next season.

Seriously, I’m eagerly awaiting it. The next entry? Not so much – I dreaded it.

BLACK WIDOW

Like Black Panther before it, Black Widow feels like the sequel to a nonexistent previous film and suffers greatly for it. The “Budapest Mission” that’s been occasionally referenced in other films should’ve been enough by itself (especially as a prequel) but, for whatever bizarre reason conceived by Disney, we got a film that bewilderingly came out well after Endgame but takes place between Civil War and Infinity War. You could blame it on all the pandemic-based delays but that’s just an excuse when considering this: shouldn’t there have been two Black Widow installments already? One about the “Budapest Mission” and the sequel? And, if we were only getting one of them, why choose the latter?

Bringing up Black Panther once more; that film was full of characters standing around talking about past events which we almost never see, we’re just told about them (‘cause of course), and its aggravating to have so much of the runtime spent on it instead of making the narrative more self-contained and eventful in its own right. Black Widow does the same goddamn thing, and it’s significantly worse for one reason.

Y’see, Taskmaster is the film’s secondary antagonist and there’s a big reveal about their identity, but it doesn’t matter because there’s no set-up and the pay-off would’ve only worked if…we had a previous installment about the “Budapest Mission” to properly introduce and develop them. The filmmakers obviously want us to care about this reveal but, sorry, that’s impossible for a person who has only been mentioned a few times and seen once in a flashback to the nonexistent previous (and likely better) film. It’s a perplexing creative decision, on so many levels, and makes me wonder how it ever got past the pre-production phase.

Although it’s not totally worthless, as long as you just concentrate on all the interactions between Natasha Romanova (Scarlett Johansson) and the surrogate family she formed with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Alexi “Red Guardian” Shostakov (David Harbour), and Melina Vostokova (Rachel Weisz). The dialogue between them is all about characterization with as little exposition as possible, refreshing given the MCU formula’s tell-over-show approach, and it’s impressive how the script is able to capture the Russian mindset of these people. There’s that fatalistic edge in how they perceive and connect with the world around them including a cynical and sarcastic sense of humor, making the film’s comedy more dark than quippy, that’s incredibly amusing to see play out. They’re weirdly functional as a familial unit despite their outwardly dysfunctional behavior and the adversarial friction between each other is simply accepted as a dynamic for catharsis and reconciliation. If misery loves company, then Russians worship misery’s company.

It’s unfortunate, then, that such pleasant moments are sandwiched between dull action sequences with unremarkable choreography and further accentuates an issue I’ve always had with MCU Natasha: she comes off as more invulnerable than Captain America, a superhuman soldier that nonetheless takes a notable amount of damage which leaves a mark. Natasha can fall several floors, hit a bunch of construction scaffolding along the way, and get up with little more than a limp that goes away in minutes. She breaks her nose on a desk and then resets it, wherein the wounds just disappear. She gets into a goddamn mid-air battle straight from Bayonetta, which would work in a comicbook or cartoon or videogame but simply breaks suspension of disbelief in a live-action film. Moreso when it’s clearly established within the setting she’s a normal, albeit expertly-trained, human being. Maybe I would’ve cared about her or felt excited about anything she does if they actually treated her like that…

Now, let’s move on to something very different.

WHAT IF…?

I love anthologies. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Wish there were more – many, many more.

What If…?, loosely based on the comicbook of the same name, is certainly one of those but it suffers from inconsistent quality as well as self-limited by its own premise. There’re some fantastic episodes – “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?” is easily my favorite, followed by “What If… Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark?” – and others that’re amusing, like T’Challa (the late, great Chadwick Boseman) as Star-Lord or Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) as Captain America (“Captain Britain”?) or the globally catastrophic frat party Thor (Chris Hemsworth) throws on Earth, but it’s hard to feel as much enthusiasm for the others. I can’t help but blame this on the fact the setting of each story is just an iteration of the MCU than an entirely separate reality, which is what the comics did. The MCU is relatively young, compared to that of the mainline 616 (a clusterfuck of canon like all superhero comics), and there’re only so many scenarios you can use before the creative well runs dry.

It’s rather puzzling when Loki brings up Variants and they differ greatly from the Loki we’re familiar with – including one who resembles Abomination from The Incredible Hulk, a Gran Prix racer, and even an alligator (all without explanation as to why,  thankfully) – but there’s nothing like that in What If…? I suppose, given it is the first season, they were playing it safe and are leaving their more ambitious material for the next – but I’m annoyed there’s still an aversion to risk at this point, whatsoever. Disney could lose fifty million and it wouldn’t matter. It’s a drop in a bucket worth two hundred and four billion dollars. At least Werner Bros. has been redirecting their DC properties allowing more creative freedom for filmmakers, forsaking the shared universe concept, and telling self-contained stories.

What basically damned the season was extending the eighth episode – “What If…Ultron Won?” – into a two-parter when it worked well enough on its own. The destructiveness on display is downright creative, like Ultron (Ross Marquand) enlarging his head to cosmic proportions and biting down on a solar system as if it were a sandwich, and could’ve ended on a dark note similar to the Dr. Strange episode. If it had to extend into another episode, I’d of just preferred Ultron and Uatu the Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) both going Super-Saiyan while battling across alternate realities – perhaps teasing the audience with what’ll be seen in the next season – but instead decides to be a team-up with all the previous episodes’ protagonists (and a Gamora Variant, voiced by Cynthia Williams, that hadn’t appeared until the finale), which was a terrible idea. Evil Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) should not have been given a redemption arc of any kind, as it lessens the impact of that episode’s bleaker-than-bleak ending, and a potential sequel to Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) and his machinations are now impossible due to the outcome of a battle between a god-like Ultron and the terribly-named Guardians of the Multiverse (um, why not use “The Exiles”? A team made up of multiversal Variants?). None of them should be able to stand any chance against the omni-genocidal robot with all six Infinity Stones, either on their own or as a group, but they’re able to anyway ‘cause of both literal plot armor and deus ex machina.

There’s obviously a lot of untapped potential in the show and am happy it’s getting another season like Loki, but my expectations for it are lower. The talent is definitely there; the animation, even if off-putting at first, quickly grows on you and the voice-acting, save for some bad line readings here and there, is pretty good. Also, despite the contrivances in some episodes – like Ultron bifurcating Thanos effortlessly even when possessing five of the six Infinity Stones – I’m willing to forgive that when it’s to indulge further in the oddity or ambition of an episode’s premise.

I hope for the best yet am still expecting the worst – it’s far less disappointing that way…

Don’t worry, the next set will be less harshly critical (kinda) and, thankfully, you won’t need to wait a month (or three, or six…) – it’ll just be a week!

I’m making it a personal (for there is nothing professional about me) goal to post my work on a weekly basis, starting with the next set of mini-reviews and, after that, my Non-Fan Review of The Clone Wars and an essay on the world-building of Disco Elysium.

See y’all then!

[Edited 4/23/22, for grammatical correction]

I needed me some vidyagames, but not just any vidyagames – ones like Bloodborne!

They’re not other Soulsborne titles but love letters to the various works of H.P. Lovecraft (minus the virulent racism, thankfully!) along with those who followed in his stead, as far back as August Derleth and Robert E. Howard (yes, that one) and as recent as Brian Lumley and Stephen King. Though Lovecraft in videogames is neither uncommon nor recent, when considering Alone in the Dark or the point-and-click adventure Shadow of the Comet, it’s often difficult to gamify the author’s work without cherry-picking elements and creating an original story around them. The fact Dark Corners of the Earth tried to be a first-person shooter where you incinerate Starspawn with a flame-thrower, mow down Deep Ones with a machinegun, blast Dagon in the face with a ship’s cannon, and take on a Flying Polyp with a retro-futuristic blaster is more than enough to prove why faithfully adapting Shadow Over Innsmouth as a videogame is impossible without ruining the source material. Though, even as a videogame, it failed miserably…

These games, on the other hand? It depends – but let’s get the worst out of the way first. May as well start with the bad news before getting to the good stuff.

Sundered

There’s nothing as disappointing as wasting so much talent on something that’s otherwise lacking in quality. One can never fault Sundered‘s developer, Thunder Lotus, for their art direction and design along with the graphical fluidity of its character animations – imagining the painstaking work required to achieve such and how that, by itself, is admirable. Regardless, it’s not enough to carry the rest of the experience.

It is, ostensibly, a Metroidvania title with procedurally-generated dungeons upon each death – which carries no penalty, save for wasted time – and attained abilities for both combat and mobility to proceed. I’ve played enough games that use procedural generation to know that it works best when you can differentiate between each individual run and, if you’re unable to, suggests the developers should’ve used a specific level design instead. It’s done incredibly well in games like Enter the Gungeon where there’re innumerable combinations of rooms and challenges making every iteration feel unique, helped by its fast-paced quarter-munching arcade cabinet vibe, as well as Rogue Legacy with its addition of a procedurally-generated lineage of monster hunters invading a haunted shape-shifting castle (huh, that sounds oddly familiar…). When it doesn’t work, as evidenced in both Let It Die‘s Tower of Barbs and Bloodborne‘s Chalice Dungeons, it feels like the same three or four areas that’re sequenced in a different order each time yet can’t tell the difference after a while. Sundered is in the latter category and worsened by how badly the game already is at directing the player to the next objective.

As if the terrible navigation wasn’t frustrating enough, the frequency and intensity of spawned enemies make it a war of attrition as wave after wave comes after you with no end in sight. This isn’t difficult or challenging combat – it’s just being bombarded at every angle and given little room to react properly. You don’t die numerous times due to a hostile non-player character being smart enough to attack when leaving yourself open, as most of them are little more than cannon-fodder but, from being so over-stimulated by the visual clutter that you give up and let them kill you. The treks through nearly identical-looking procgen’d levels might be boring but, Jesus fuckin’ Christ, at least they weren’t assaulting my eyes and almost giving me a headache.

I regret not heeding George Weidman’s warning about the game and, being unusually gullible (’cause Lovecraftian horror), assumed the problems he brought up would somehow be fixed in future patches – because, unfortunately, that didn’t happen and it only makes me happier over the recent Cyberpunk 2077 controversy. At this point, it’s hard to defend any game with the possibility patches might fix issues when you know that such issues could’ve already been dealt with beforehand. Thunder Lotus, as much effort as they put into their graphics, didn’t put nearly enough effort into polishing the gameplay – they gave us a videogame we can enjoy gazing upon but at the cost of interactivity, and it’s just not worth it.

The next game is proof that you don’t need to be photogenic when you provide a far more fulfilling ludic experience…

Darkest Dungeon

In the cosmicism of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, humanity is not important in the grand scheme of things. How could we be? It’s nearly impossible for us to truly comprehend the vastness of space and time like Yog-Sothoth, with what we do know is infinitesimal in comparison. At best, we’re pawns in their incomprehensible machinations and can’t do much about it besides play along. At worst, we’re completely useless. You can always try to prepare for the worst, to avoid the pain of a severe loss, but they’re inevitable – though, at the same time, it only makes those small victories against overwhelming odds far more meaningful as result.

Darkest Dungeon has this theme woven into its game mechanics and manages to instill a great sense of player disempowerment with its punishing difficulty, something Bloodborne (as good a game as it still is) could not entirely achieve as an action title. Though its endings are fatalistic in nature, as even the player character attaining godhood makes them little more than a monstrous infant, it’s still a game where – with enough might and perseverance, and death rendered a minor inconvenience – you can still attain godhood. None of the player characters featured in Darkest Dungeon will ever reach that level of cosmic power. They will defeat many a beast and have moments of heroism, of course, but they are all nonetheless vulnerable and suffer permadeaths.

You are expected to treat each recruit to your cause, fighting back the otherworldly abominations of an abandoned palatial estate, as expendable. Each class of player character even looks the same, save for a limited selection of palette-swaps, further entrenching their interchangeability and disincentivize attachment to any one individual. There’ll always be another caravan of treasure-hunters and mercenaries with a death wish to send to their doom, yet the longer any of them manage to live – the more attached you become anyway…

They may be the digital simulacrum of people but, as any good ludic experience should, seeing these player characters go on one expedition after another and building them up to become legendary adventurers makes it all the more tragic when they do finally fall. Though some of their personality quirks grant benefits, others can often be detrimental to themselves or their comrades, but – unless you have the means to suppress those bad habits entirely (you usually won’t until later on) – you learn to live with their flaws and work around them, just like you do when interacting with other people in reality. Even those fireside chats, as procedurally generated as the dungeons themselves, make you care for them despite being little more than a proxy of a person made of computer code.

As someone who despises real-time combat in role-playing games and shoehorning stats into otherwise action-heavy titles relying more on hand-eye coordination skills, games like Darkest Dungeon remind me of why I appreciate turn-based combat mechanics in RPGs and utterly thankful when indie developers implement it into their games. Complaints about how it “looks silly” come off as wildly superficial when, honestly, the empty spectacle is just as silly-looking yet far more aggravating (if not just boring) to play. I greatly prefer an element of strategy over having poorly-programmed friendly AIs who only impede my progress or chiseling away at bullet-sponge enemies with an interminable health bar until it finally falls over, instead of making every move matter and where each successful attack hits hard – putting you in situations that cannot simply be won by turning off your brain and mashing buttons.

The row-based combat is similar to that of many Japanese RPGs but each party member’s position is integral as certain actions can only occur in a specific space and it noticeably differs with each character class. An Arbalest or Musketeer, for example, tend to gravitate being last in line as their primary attack focuses on sniping but can also serve as support – like minor healing and debuffing hostiles – while Crusaders and Hellions are best left at the head of the line with their powerful short-range attacks and high defense. Even then, there’re more versatile classes like Jesters and Shieldmaidens, whose attacks involve moving backward or forwards in a line-up and can complicate certain party line-ups when handled poorly.

It really helps the game emphasizes party management over inventory, which cuts down on so much monotonous busywork. There is an inventory system but it’s mostly for optional items, “Trinkets,” that grant bonuses – with more powerful pieces having a downside attached, to balance difficulty – but its most prevalent in the expeditions taken where, due to having a limited inventory space, makes preparation and collection a series of Sophie’s Choice scenarios. You *can* buy more food and torches just in case, but it means there’s less space to pick up valuable objects whether it’s currency, resources, or aforementioned Trinkets.

Said resources go to developing the game’s hub area, the Hamlet, where player characters relax between each expedition – whether it’s relieving stress at the bar or church, curing a pathological disease at the local medical ward, or upgrading the adventurers under your employ. It’s necessary to develop each establishment past their baseline benefits and give player characters a better chance of survival with improved equipment and skills (in a, thankfully, linear five-tier leveling process), so choosing whether to acquire currency or resources during each expedition is an important consideration to take. What good is currency, when you cannot further upgrade the player characters? What good are those resources, when you don’t have the currency to pay for those upgrades? If the inventory system was unlimited in its capacity, so much of what makes this game fulfilling as a challenge would be lost.

There’s very little to complain about Darkest Dungeon without sounding like petty nitpicking. Even if the game’s setting doesn’t actually do much interesting or new with the material that influenced it, its strengths as a videogame overshadow such minor weaknesses. Being derivative isn’t necessarily a bad thing when given the right kind of presentation. The next game, on the other hand, is a game that brings us an interesting take on H.P. Lovecraft’s brand of horror but, Shoggoths be damned, it’s as tedious to play through as it was to read through the man’s worst prose…

Control

Haunted houses are a common trope in horror fiction. It is usually inhabited by a malevolent entity whether it’s a ghost, a demon, or something else entirely who torment the current tenants of the house until they die or run away for their lives. However, in more recent years, there’s this particular iteration of that trope where the house itself is the malevolent entity. I’m not aware of any term describing this sub-trope and decided to give it a name of my own: “The Living Architecture.” There’re obvious examples in videogames: Silent Hill 2 and its sequel, Silent Hill 4: The Room; the various indie projects of Kitty Horrorshow, but notably Anatomy; and, now, we have Remedy’s Control.

The Oldest House is obviously not a house, given its appearance as 33 Thomas Street in New York City, but it’s not a piece of Brutalist architecture either. It’s alive. Even then, it’s not just a living Brutalist building…maybe. It’s connected to an upside-down black pyramid that exists in a pocket dimension appearing as little more than blank space, as well as a group of entities who’re collectively called “The Board of Directors” that occupy it and a Finnish janitor who is not actually a Finnish janitor (played by Martti Suosalo). All of them may, in fact, be the same being taking different forms much like the titular creature from Stephen King’s It where Pennywise the Dancing Clown is but one of the monster’s many avatars. All that we really ever get to know about them, technically, is that they aren’t the two antagonistic forces within the narrative: The Former (exiled from “The Board”) and The Hiss, both of whom are just as inscrutable. Then, it gets more surreal.

This scenario’s wild card takes the form of Jesse Faden (played by Courtney Hope), who acts as the conduit for another entity – one she’s named “Polaris.” Like its namesake, it guides Jesse to the Federal Bureau of Control and, by proxy, her kidnapped twin brother which usually appears as a shimmering fractal spiral to highlight checkpoints and mission objectives. The thing is, though, I honestly can’t determine whether it’s Jesse or Polaris who is the actual player character. There’s something off about Jesse, though that does apply to the rest of the phenomenally characterized cast, with her reactions towards the extraordinary and inexplicable as either slight bemusement or stoicism bordering on apathy. As if she’s not really there, that something else is in the driving seat and she’s providing commentary while watching from a Cartesian theater. Nothing suggests Jesse has any firearms training and each superpower she gets is new to her, but nonetheless uses both rather proficiently upon receiving them. If Jesse Faden is simply a puppet of Polaris, does that make the players themselves Polaris?

I don’t know. They never explain it and, by Cthulhu’s tentacle-beard, I love that!

Too bad playing the game is nowhere near as interesting as the setting, its inhabitants, or any idea explored within the plot. It’s confusing how Remedy can use all these high concepts in their story, yet it’s attached to this third-person shooter format – which made sense with the first two Max Payne games, what with all the homages to John Woo and The Matrix, but feels lazily implemented in a game like Control. You’d think, given all the shape-shifting rooms and Weird Fiction elements, it’d involve more puzzle-solving with aspects of survival horror but, no, you’re just mowing down a bunch of dudes in SWAT gear with firearms like so many other titles but with magic bullets and typical variations of telekinesis. Well, okay, there are other kinds of enemies but they’re incredibly annoying (especially the ones that fly) and, when combined with some environmental effects that overwork the hardware (causing graphical slowdowns or skips) and misleading visual overlays that don’t indicate if you’ve lost health but feel like such, turn battles into as much of a clusterfuck as they were in Sundered. Don’t get me started on the weirdly granular skill tree, resource-gathering for upgrades, and combat mods that’re so specific in their function they’re useless…

What made this unengaging gameplay loop tolerable enough to wade through, if anything, was everything else around it. Each collectible – which comes in a variety of forms – does a fantastic job at world-building; giving you a better understanding of the FBC’s function, those within its weirdly inexhaustible workforce, and what (very) little they know of the Black Pyramid/Oldest House/Astral Plane/etc. If them kidnapping Jesse’s twin brother isn’t enough to indicate their dubious ethics, an FBC psychologist (who clearly does not understand children) conceives the world’s most unnerving kids’ show. Y’know, to both “entertain” and educate the six-year-old orphan they hold captive about all the supernatural nonsense. Seriously, “Threshold Kids” feels like part of [Adult Swim]’s live-action line-up but with the disconcerting oddity amped up to even rival The Eric Andre Show.

There’re also awkward, badly-edited instructional presentations by Casper Darling (played by Matthew Porretta), who seems like a charmingly goofy tinkerer that wouldn’t be out of place in Ghostbusters, but it slowly becomes apparent that he’s actually a…mad scientist. Not akin to a comicbook supervillain or from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, but fugitive Nazis hiding in South America to make clones of Hitler like The Boys from Brazil. Much like ally Emily Pope (played by Antonia Bernath), he seems too nice and that’s more alienating than Jesse’s cold demeanor, and one can’t help but wonder that they must be hiding something unforgivable under this obvious façade of congeniality.

Though their function may be necessary, most of those employed by the FBC aren’t actually good people and more interested in getting the job done than anything else – they’re as if Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “Banality of Evil” physically manifested. Even the FBC’s previous Director, Zachariah Trench (played by James McCaffrey, the voice of Max Payne himself!), is more paranoid and ominously menacing than Joseph fucking McCarthy during the Red Scare, whose obsession with security and safety becomes more of a curse than a blessing as it consumes him. It’s rather depressing the most trustworthy person is the ghost of Alan Wake (yes, that one…also played by Matthew Porretta) and only a little of what he says makes any sense. It’s indicative of how the setting itself, along with the Brutalist architecture, is as atmospherically hostile to the player as Yharnam was in Bloodborne – the Oldest House may tolerate your presence, for its personal benefit, but only begrudgingly…for now.

There’s a lot more I can say about the game, for another nine or so blocks of text – including how the song “Take Control” by Poets of the Fall or Casper Darling’s creepy stalker music video for “Dynamite” is fucking amazing and why – but that’s the ultimate problem with Control: it’s more interesting to think about and discuss than as a ludic experience. That’s unfortunate, for its potential was about as vast as the Astral Plane itself…

The three-month delay is honestly quite shameful, on my end, but I do have a good reason: I’ve recently moved back to Southern California to take care of my dad, who’s recently had shoulder surgery, as well as doing some home improvements for his place – plus, like, I really needed the change in scenery and it was becoming too expensive to live up north. I’m still acclimating to my new environment, which is warmer and dryer than what I’ve gotten used to over the last seven years, but – now that I have a good deal less to worry about and depress me into another writer’s block – I intend to put out more content on regular basis and have a bunch of other pieces current in the works. Oh, and my birthday was eight days ago – so, yeah, happy (belated) birthday to me!

I’ll have a review of WandaVision by next week, or the one after that, as well as a (mostly) freeform rant/op-ed and another installment of Surfing the Netflix: Animation Edition on none other than Thus Spoke Rohan Kishibe, as a follow-up to my Non-Fan Review of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.