writing on video games, by chuck sebian-lander

wrap on 2024

assorted non-review-y thoughts on some games I didn’t otherwise discuss here but that I did play in 2024:

MOUTHWASHING

I think the best horror has a sense of humor, because humor is human. I don’t mean that the best horror is comedy-horror; I mean that horror works best when the moments of relief work, too.

mouthwashing is a disgusting, harrowing, bleak short story about trauma and narcissism and violation, but when it wants to be it is also nastily, cracklingly funny, in ways that usually double back and fuck you up worse for remembering that you were once laughing.

the lo-fi aesthetics help with this, but the same tools the game uses to great psychological horror effect also land a few punchlines brilliantly. the main supporting pillar here, that works regardless of the tone the game wants to strike, is shockingly strong characterization and writing.

video games just don’t do this well; they usually don’t have to. this is my bias, perhaps, for not playing games as close to the “visual novel” genre as this, but I was consistently floored by how well-articulated each character is in mouthwashing, how well the POV segments hew to the, well, point of view of their characters, and how brilliantly you can see the characters in the periphery of their views, even when they’re trying on purpose not to see those people at all.

PATH OF EXILE 2

i don’t know what i want out of this genre anymore. this year alone i played nearly a dozen “diablo clone” ARPGs of varying budgets, vintage, and mechanical uniqueness, including but not limited to diablo 4’s expansion, last epoch, ravenswatch, torchlight 2, chronicon, and of course path of exile 2, currently in an early-access release.

none of these have caught fire in my mind as eternally as diablo 2, an impossible thing to ask of these games I’m not ever going to have played on a CRT monitor in my teenage years at 2 AM. but even past that there’s some combination of unsatisfying aspects to them, like i’m eating a conveyer belt of bears’ porridges that are all too hot, too cold, too wrong.

itemization is too sparse; itemization is too generous. leveling mechanics are too linear, or too obtuse. aesthetics are too bare or too derivative. either the game looks like it was made for Newgrounds or it barely hits 15 FPS on my steam deck.

what I really want from these games is for them to hit the perfect sweet spot of “engaging, but not too engaging” that allows me to, like, listen to a podcast while still feeling a sense of progression and control. diablo 3 was probably the last game to really nail that, but only after it ditched its campaign entirely. diablo 4’s campaign is beautiful to behold but not actually very good and certainly not good enough to want to play through twice, but what’s left once you skip it feels so nakedly predatory and gacha-adjacent that I can’t get excited about it.

meanwhile path of exile 2 feels as good as one of these games has ever felt to me, looks gorgeous, has the goth-horror vibes that diablo taught me to want in this genre, but it plays like dogshit on the steam deck and its systems for progression are (despite being toned down from its predecessor) unreasonably hard to grasp at even a long glance.

maybe I just need to accept that this genre isn’t actually for me anymore, and the thing I want is to just play diablo 2 again, and then I can just go do that for a while?

UFO 50

more collections like this, please. retro-inspired games have the problem these days of being straws of hay in a haystack: there are infinity of them, and they’re probably at least fine if not actually good or worth X dollars when the emulation handheld is right over there.

UFO 50 happens to have many of the best retro-styled games I’ve ever played in it, but it also has a wonderful pitch and framing that places those games in a specific context, giving them more meaning and cultural cache than would be possible if you just stumbled on to BARBUTA as an individual Steam listing for a $5 game with 8 positive reviews.

it is retro not just in aesthetic but in philosophy, and utilizes its fictional conceit as an architectural challenge: build games that feel good, using what you know as a modern game designer, but using the toolset of 1986. the ultimate application of “limitation breeds creativity.” this could have worked nearly as well if it were, say, a collection of custom GBA ROMs; certainly those homebrew scenes have produced new games with similar levels of shocking polish and ingenuity applied to outdated tech.

YAKUZA KIWAMI

kiryu is a beautiful idiot, and if someone had told me beforehand that this was a christmas game the same way die hard is a christmas movie, i probably would have played it a lot sooner. still glad i did, eventually, though the idea of getting through the whole franchise remains impossibly daunting. at least one yakuza a year and i’ll probably be caught up with the latest releases by, i dunno, 2045 or something!