For an activity that ought to be about escapism, fun and relaxation, gaming is starting to feel mentally taxing. A negative trend that started emerging over the past few years is now kicking into overdrive, with seemingly every other day delivering us more news about price hikes, AI controversies and mass lay-offs.

One of the latest victims of this perpetual news cycle of doom is Zenimax and its subsidiary Bethesda, who like many other Microsoft/Xbox properties got hit with another round of firings.

While the prospect of hundreds of people losing their jobs in the volatile gaming industry is always a reason for concern, what made this news hit close to home is that I now actually recognized a lot of the names of the people affected.

Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS) was forced to part ways with a large number of artists, writers and designers, many of them senior developers who had been with the company for years, working on the Elder Scrolls Online (ESO).

ESO is an MMORPG that has been around since 2014, and anyone who’s been invested in the game since will likely recognize names such as principal creator engagement manager Gina Bruno, lead dungeon designer Mike Finnigan and studio game director Rich Lambert.

These are a few of the forward-facing people who have represented ZOS on many streams and at in-person events throughout the years. Behind them are literally dozens of other people, most of whom held key roles in developing content for ESO.

Even though these events seem to have become a steady fixture in the video game industry, this round of impactful lay-offs did come as a bit of a surprise.

Over the past few years, Elder Scrolls Online did struggle with user retention. It may not be fair to expect a live service game to reach the peaks it did during the COVID pandemic, but also compared to other MMOs, ESO seemed stuck in no man’s land. On the one hand, it stood firmly above less stable competitors such as the now-cancelled MMO New World, but it also never quite seemed to reach the heights of World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.

The reasons for this are manyfold and would require their own series of articles to fully explain, but in a previous piece I already explored one recurring issue: the discrepancy between ESO’s identity as an MMO while also being marketed to solo players who come in through Oblivion and Skyrim—Bethesda marketeers even avoid the term ‘MMO’ in favor of ‘Online RPG.’

Other issues added to ESO’s struggles, such as the perceived lack of communication between the developers and the playerbase, as well as most new content feeling predictable, and either laughably easy or too niche. For years, this made it difficult to draw old players back in. Why should you come back to a game if the new content is just more of the same but in a different setting?

Still, 2026 felt like the first time in years where things were looking up instead of down for Zenimax’s MMO. The developers changed the way content is added, opting for a battle pass model with some free options for everyone who owns the game. This came with a new system that gives players ample rewards to choose from for simply playing the game—a lack of in-game rewards was one of the biggest player complaints about ESO for a large part of its existence.

Another long-held dream of many players also came true this summer, when three additional difficulty options made everyday overland content such as questing and resource-gathering challenging again.

As I covered in my aforementioned article, the implementation of some of this new content was still rough around the edges, since development remained stuck in this awkward balancing act of providing the challenging content that many active players craved versus keeping the game accessible for people who have never touched an MMO before. But a rusty start to a new idea does not have to be a huge problem when you’re building a new, healthy system of content delivery that has the potential to carry the game for years to come.

With the addition of new content such as the challenging group zone the Night Market, as well as the availability of more in-game rewards and actual challenge, the vibes surrounding ESO finally felt good again in the past few months. Friends I hadn’t seen in ages were returning to the game, and I started getting questions about ESO from people who knew I was still playing. After the dire year that was 2025, 2026 appeared to be the end of the game’s woes for the considerable future.

So when the news broke that so many of the developers actively working on ESO got the sack, it was a punch to the gut of everyone who still has warm feelings for the game.

I’m no industry analyst, so I cannot vouch for the veracity of the suspicion that this move has more to do with Microsoft’s desire to leave the gaming space than anything to do specifically with Elder Scrolls Online.

What I can say is that I know enough about the game—and the industry it’s a part of—that there are wrong yet popular ways to frame this.

Perhaps in an effort to cope with the grim future of the game, some players have put forward the idea that this latest act by Microsoft fits into a larger plan of keeping the game healthy by losing ‘dead weight’ and firing people who have been there for ‘too long.’ In explaining this point of view, even corpo-speak such as trimming the fat has been adopted by some gamers, under the misconception that such euphemistic prose holds any real meaning.

In MMOs, there also tends to be a build-up of resentment across the years of people who have seen the game move in what they perceived to be the wrong direction. ESO is no different in that regard, with veteran endgame communities having struggled to attract a steady flow of interested players for years due to questionable decisions by the game’s stewards. Add a fair number of public fumbles by ZOS figureheads as well as the lack of communication mentioned earlier, and you can see how some could see the forced departure of some of these public figures as a healthy move for the game.

Yet, looking at the list of those fired and their roles, it does appear that the vast majority of them were involved in actually creating the content and systems that were helping the game bounce back. And now that they are gone, maintenance mode or even AI-generated content seem likely destinations on ESO’s path forward.

This decision was not made in the best interest of Elder Scrolls Online—that much is clear.

At the very least, the news of the lay-offs has destroyed the emergent positive narrative surrounding ESO and replaced it with the all-too-familiar doom and gloom. Such negative sentiment is killing for a live service game, as it relies on a constant stream of people who have enough faith in the product to start or keep dedicating their time to it.

When the bad news hit, it impacted me deeply. Of course because people losing their jobs in such a difficult industry is in itself a tragedy. And also because ESO’s unlikely climb out of the danger zone seems to have ended by the game getting kicked down the ladder again.

As lawyer Ken Rosenberg says at the start of GTA: Vice City: “I poke my head outta the gutter for one freakin’ second and fate shovels shit in my face!”

For all its faults, I have dedicated much of my time to Elder Scrolls Online in the past, built great memories and even made real-life friends through the game. I may only have played occasionally and casually as of late, but it still felt like a comfortable game I could return to at any given time to just relax for a while.

With all that in mind, I can only wish for this game to have the very best future—a desire that as of this week appears to balance on the verge of delusion.

Looking at the bigger picture, this has been but yet another bad news day for gaming. With hardware prices rising, the end of physical media in sight and studios being closed down left and right, it’s becoming increasingly ambitious to refer to gaming as a form of escapism.

I realize this may sound dramatic, or even perverse. There are more important things in the world than video games. Much more important things.

But that is exactly why it’s important to keep having access to the simple things that keep us entertained and hopeful in dire times.

A few years ago, I was in one of the worst periods of my life, when I was a full-time caretaker for my aging mother. A grueling 24/7 job with no end in sight that I did out of love and a sense of duty rather than any form of monetary compensation. It was during those days that I was most active in Elder Scrolls Online, as it gave me a digital microcosm to briefly escape to when the real world had little joy to offer me.

It’s the same reason why ESO—like a lot of multiplayer games—was so popular during the pandemic. During such times, everyday normalcy becomes what keeps you sane. Especially if it comes with a bit of good old human interaction.

So with yet another safe haven under threat of withering away or ceasing to exist entirely, it becomes yet more difficult to find some brief, fleeting but much-needed respite from the big problems of our age.

For the sake of those small oases of sanity, I hope—perhaps against better judgment—that ESO will still find a way to bounce back, as it so often has in the past. Even if this task now seems more Sisyphean than ever before.

And to anyone who has worked on Elder Scrolls Online who might be reading this, thank you for your hard work on the game across the years. It’s been real.

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me. Illustration by Anne Wild Arts.

A week ago, Nintendo released the Switch 2 remake of Star Fox 64 simply called Star Fox, not to be confused with Star Fox from 1993, nor with the Star Fox 64 remake for 3DS, nor with the Wii U reimagining of Star Fox 64 called Star Fox Zero.

Deep breath.

As is tradition, no new Star Fox game can be discussed without addressing the elephant in the room—or the floating monkey head in the sky—that the long-running on-rail shooter series is rather self-referential, to say the least. Even Star Fox 64 itself—the game that has formed the basis for three subsequent releases—was itself heavily influenced by the original Star Fox for Super Nintendo.

Another Star Fox tradition is that, as a fan, you’re never quite sure whether to be happy or disappointed. After almost a decade, we finally have a new sign of life, but lo and behold, it’s yet another stab at a Nintendo 64 game from 1997. A fantastic, legendary game in its own right, sure, but one that’s been the source material for so many remakes and re-whatever-elses that Star Fox is becoming the video game equivalent of a moldy glam rock band that’s been juggling goodbye concerts and comeback tours for three decades, all while playing those same dozen-or-so songs that everyone’s heard a hundred times.

Since I pre-ordered the game and have been playing since launch, I guess that makes me the fan who buys an overpriced ticket every single time.

However, if we throw all that baggage overboard for a minute, it quickly becomes clear that this 2026 Star Fox reboot is the best a game in the series has felt in a long time—possibly ever.

For those who have never played Star Fox 64 or any of the installments it inspired, the game is for the most part an on-rail shooter, meaning that your futuristic fighter jet—the Arwing—moves forward automatically as you progress through each level, shooting enemies and dodging incoming fire.

If you allow me a gross oversimplification, think Space Invaders, but on a z-axis.

Some levels then include sections with the so-called all-range mode, where you can move freely in an open arena, making for some more intricate plane combat in a full 3D space.

Each level lasts about 5-10 minutes, and depending on how you perform, you’re able to choose from different paths towards the final boss encounter. It’s a game that you can beat in one sitting, and the story is rather basic: you are the leader of the Star Fox team, a group of pilot mercenaries hired to take down the evil scientist Andross.

Star Fox 2026 follows this exact formula.

To start with, Star Fox is a full remake rather than a remaster. From what I was able to see, there are no legacy assets in the game. Everything has been redone, with an orchestral soundtrack, new voice recordings and some of the best graphics displayed on the Switch 2 so far.

American developer Velan Studios, who have been commissioned by Nintendo to handle this project, even went so far as to develop their own custom engine for the project. This is no doubt a decisive factor in the game’s ability to remain running at a solid 60fps while maintaining as much graphical fidelity as the console hardware allows.

It is by any standard a premium, dare I say AAA experience.

Hiding beneath all this flashy new paint, though, is essentially the same game that many of us have already played through dozens of times.

It’s the same characters, the same script, the same levels, the same routes.

This lack of new content—as far as the main campaign is concerned—is what invited many to call the Star Fox reboot lazy and unnecessary.

Such skepticism is both healthy and inevitable. The sales pitch for a €/$50 remake of an old game (add an extra 10 for a physical copy) is an uphill battle by itself, let alone when it comes from Nintendo, a company that has—deservedly or not—a reputation of being forever stuck in the past.

All that said, it only took me a few missions to conclude that this iteration of Star Fox feels really, really good. Despite the game’s—by Switch 2 standards—spectacular new visuals, the controls are snappy and the on-screen information is clean and readable. And apart from the hit confirmation on boss enemies being a little harder to gauge this time, I ran into no issues worth mentioning during my multiple campaigns.

What’s clear is that Velan really went the extra mile and then some. Despite using the original level lay-outs and aesthetics, the developers have added a lot more buildings, structures and other ‘clutter.’

This environmental enrichment was for sure a necessary move: sticking to the 64’s ‘objects-per-square-meter’ would’ve made for a rather empty game in HD. Still, pulling this off without compromising the art direction is no easy feat, and the developers here have passed with flying colors.

Even bolder was their decision to add fully new cutscenes inbetween missions. These scenes see the Star Fox team interact and plot their next move, with most of these in-engine videos even taking into account the player’s path and success.

The new cutscenes may not fundamentally alter the feel of the campaign, but they reinforce the notion that the original game did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to the series’ world-building.

At its root, Star Fox 64 was a short and simple arcade shooter, but within that limited time, the way the setting and fights were contextualized helped sell the illusion of a grand battle for the fate of the galaxy. I feel that this has always been the core of Star Fox’s apeal. With this reboot adding new cutscenes to naturally expand upon this allure was in a sense a logical choice, but not one that every developer would have made or even thought of.

The aforementioned extra mile doesn’t stop at the presentation. There is some extra content here, in the form of a surprisingly addictive 4v4 multiplayer mode that can be played online or against bots (the latter of which I really appreciate). This multiplayer set-up is completely different from Star Fox 64’s original mode and I dare say much more substantial.

That said, my only complaint with the new multiplayer is the lack of maps, with only three of them currently available, each coming with their own, separate game mode. There are some customization options that help amplify the variety, but presumably not enough to keep most players hooked. This is a shame, because the available content feels like a proof-of-concept for a surprise multiplayer hit.

An area that does harbor a wide range of options is the controls. Both regular analog sticks controls and the Switch 2’s built in mouse aim are available, but when I learned that the game was also optimized for the Nintendo 64 replica controller, I knew that this would be my way to play the game.

Nintendo 64’s plastic boomerang gamepad has become a target of ridicule over the years, but in some games, it really did shine. Star Fox 64 was one of those games, since the controller felt more like a joystick than the by now traditional dual analog models, making it ideal for flight-based games. The Switch-compatible replica also has a built-in rumble feature that feels more in line with modern standards than the slightly awkward Rumble Pack accessory that was available for the N64 version.

So with the old-school control scheme still etched into my brain, I took to the skies with the trusted gray trident in my hands.

Making the reboot fully compatible with this legacy controller is yet another example of something the developers didn’t have to do in order to produce a perfectly serviceable remake. But they did it anyway.

Putting all these things together, it is a bit perplexing to see Star Fox 2026 being labeled as ‘slop.’ It’s a fashionable word whose original meaning was lost quicker than that of ‘boomer shooter’, but the main condition of something being slop is that it is low effort.

And sure, Nintendo giving us a remake of an old entry into the series after a decade-long wait does in itself feel lazy, but by no definition is the resulting product a low-effort ordeal. It is without a shred of doubt the best way to play Star Fox 64, and with that still being the franchise’s most popular installment, there is a strong argument to be made that this reboot is the best that Star Fox has ever played, felt and looked.

Indeed, the main argument against Star Fox is a deeper problem with the prevalence of remakes and remasters, and the pricing practices surrounding them.

If that is your argument against buying this reboot or even wanting it to exist, that is a valid stance.

But when I look at the game itself, I can only conclude that Star Fox 2026 sets a new gold standard for how to handle a remake. Preserve what was good, add what makes it better and end up with a product that’s capable of pleasing veterans just as much as pulling in new fans.

The cherry on top here is a custom, in-house engine that gets the job done and allows us to steer clear of the bloated, stuttery Unreal Engine 5 jank that is sadly the basis for many other modern remakes of classic games.

We can only hope that Velan Studios is allowed to follow the Grezzo route and, after proving themselves worthy through a remake, gets the green light to finally produce a brand-new Star Fox game.

Until then, we’re going to have to make do with a couple of more duels with a floating monkey head.

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Notes:
All screenshots and photos have been taken and edited by me.

When you grow up, you learn that thinking of history as a constant, upward trajectory of progress towards the future is rather naive.

Our understanding and development of technology may grow because it builds upon knowledge gained by previous generations, but there’s no guarantee that it’ll lead us to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

As we speak, the AI revolution is reminding us of that lost lesson from the fin-de-siècle: that advancements in technology can make us go backwards in other areas.

We can observe a similar effect—albeit much less of an existential threat—in video game development.

With developers having more tools than ever to create grand, crisp-looking games with infinitely big worlds, we are starting to see that unlimited possibilities don’t always lead to great outcomes.

Optimization increasingly seems to be a thing of the past, with many a big production coming out as a bloated, stuttery mess—their technological complexity having produced a thick layer of ray-traced Unreal Engine 5 jank that does its best to hide the great game that may or may not be hiding underneath.

Conclusion: better technology doesn’t always make for a better experience.

This principle can also be applied to the gameplay side of things, where a bigger array of possibilities may cause the disappearance of mechanics now deemed archaic. Yet, upon closer inspection, it may sometimes turn out that the thing we got in their stead is not an actual substitute for what we lost.

This is why, today, I would like to plea for the return of an increasingly rare species in multiplayer-oriented games:

The bot.

Given that games have mostly evolved away from bots, I feel obligated to explain what I even mean with the term: computer-driven characters (opponents or allies) that serve as a stand-in for real players in the multiplayer mode of a game.

Admittedly, the line between a bot and a regular NPC is a bit vague—we can consider non-human opponents in a game like Mario Kart bots, and those are still commonplace in that genre.

Still, when the concept of multiplayer became popular on home consoles in particular, developers were for a time almost almost forced to put an option for bots in multiplayer-oriented modes and games to make them viable for prolonged enjoyment.

In the mid-to-late nineties, we had not yet reached the point where having a high-end internet connection was standard for the average household. Likewise, consoles did not yet ship with full online functionality—the 1998 Sega Dreamcast is considered the first to have such capabilities, and in hindsight, even at that stage the market might not have been ready for it.

So if you wanted to play multiplayer on a console in the ‘90s, it’d generally have to be local. When people reminisce about the heyday of Goldeneye multiplayer, they’re talking about four people on a couch all sharing the same minuscule television screen.

Then what did you do if your friends weren’t available, your friends were sick of losing to you, or you didn’t have any friends that were interested in video games?

In the case of Goldeneye’s multiplayer, you did nothing and you went back to the excellent single player campaign.

But for many other games in the late ‘90s to mid 2000s, it became common to offer you the option to play against bots.

Of course, bots are no replacement for a human player. They typically don’t have the same skills, they don’t react to psychological pressure, and there’s no sense of urgency there because beating Bot_04 just isn’t the same as beating your brother so hard that he starts putting you in a chokehold.1

And yet, there’s something distinctively beautiful about playing against bots. Rather than replacing gaming sessions with your friends, it becomes its own, unique experience.

Take Perfect Dark, Rare’s spiritual successor to Goldeneye. In the game, released in the dying days of the Nintendo 64 in 2000, there were about two dozen different types of bots—called sims in the game; no relation—all fully customizable in looks and skill, and coming with their own, idiosyncratic behaviors.

FeudSim would choose one opponent to focus for the entire match, whereas JudgeSim would single out whoever was in the lead during a match to take them down. CowardSim just tried to run away from the player, and the supremely annoying FistSim had a knack for just punching you in the face, which in Perfect Dark would disarm you and put a temporary dizzying effect on your screen.

Due to their unique, tinker-friendly nature, the use of these bots wasn’t restricted to glorified ‘replacement friends’ for lonely teens. Rather, they became a core part of the overall multiplayer experience.

When I played Perfect Dark with friends, we’d play almost no match without bots. It was way too entertaining to come up with fiendish bot set-ups for us to fight against.

We must’ve spent hours on the bots’ custom looks alone, with our pièce de résistance being a highly effective JudgeSim that looked like Shigeru Miyamoto dressed in a catsuit fit for a Bond Girl.

Of course, we could just as well have played against each other with no bots involved. On paper, playing against human opponents is much more fun. Especially when those opponents happen to be sitting right next to you.

And still, the botless Goldeneye got stale eventually. It’d only really be worth starting a match if there were four of us, and even then the whole experience started losing its charm once a clear hierarchy of skill emerged from our group.

By contrast, the only thing that got us to quit playing Perfect Dark was the advent of a new console generation. There were just so many optional challenges we could create for ourselves using the Combat Simulator—the game’s own name for its multiplayer mode—that it never truly got old.

That’s not to say you need to be able to tweak each bot to make it a worthwhile addition to a multiplayer game.

I remember playing Battlefield 1942 with friends, where instead of joining some big lobby full of human players, we’d try to hold back a literal army of bots with just the four of us.

One map was a small island with a few outposts facing the enemies’ initial spawn points in the sea. Each of us would man one of these outposts and individually hold back dozens of enemies in a rampage equal to that ridiculous final fight in Commando.

It was intense, competitive, stressful, and above all, heaps of fun as we’d desperately try to maintain control over our respective strongholds until we inevitably started collapsing one by one.

Again, it felt like its own game mode: a WW2-spinoff of Left 4 Dead that we just happened to come up with as we were thinking of fun new ways of playing the game.

Needless to say, our Pacific Thermopylae scenario could never have worked had all those bots been replaced by actual humans.

There are even multiplayer games that I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into without ever facing another player. The underappreciated Conker: Live & Reloaded for the original Xbox had a fantastic multiplayer mode that I played with bots simply because kid me couldn’t afford an Xbox Live subscription.

And despite having the option to go online on PC, I chose to play Star Wars: Battlefront I & II (the originals) with bots, because it turned the battles from simple deathmatch skirmishes into Dynasty Warriors-like grand strategy ordeals where I’d have to manage the battlefield from the perspective of a ground soldier, often being forced to embark on a desperate solo raid on a key strategic point in order to force a breakthrough.

As time went on, and online multiplayer became more integrated in gaming, developers felt like there was no real need to put bots in the game, and many players probably felt the same. What was the use for boring computer-controlled opponents when even people with no gaming friends could access random online lobbies full of human players?

Indeed, many modern first-person shooters, third-person shooters and other action games no longer offer the ability to play with bots, or restrict their use to a few isolated training scenarios. Far gone are the days when bots were actually core to multiplayer design, as we once witnessed in Perfect Dark.

While this may be understandable to a degree, a case for preserving bots is easily made. Many people dislike the stress that comes with the social aspect of gaming, and nowadays that can often mean having to lock yourself out of a major part of a game. And with more people becoming conscious of the importance of preserving video games, bots are a way—albeit an imperfect one—of ensuring that all content in a game remains playable even when the servers go down and no user-made alternatives are offered in their place.

A sound, socially conscious perspective for sure. But perhaps also painfully sensible and therefore boring.

My own perspective is more selfish. I miss the days of bots because they could give such a unique spin to the way I played the games that prominently featured them. They could turn a run-of-the-mill frag match into a horde shooter, or a capture-the-flag match into a real-time strategy campaign. Game modes that revolved around precise aiming and reaction time would tap into entirely different skillsets, such as crowd control, resource management and task prioritization.

The fading relevance of bots at the hands of faster internet connections led to the loss of an experience that—though it may seem obscure—was core to how I played video games growing up, and I reckon I’m not the only one.

Fortunately, bots haven’t fully died out. Just this week, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Star Fox remake for Switch 2 features a fully new multiplayer mode that comes with bot support. But for every such case, there is a long-standing series that ditched bots somewhere along the way, or even a remaster like Nightdive’s Turok 3 revival that just cut the entire bot-supported multiplayer mode from the game, presumably because “nobody plays that anyway.”

Therefore I would like to close this piece with a plea for the glorious return of the bot as a multiplayer staple.

Customizable, fun bots that feel like they were part of the developer’s vision rather than a barely fleshed out afterthought.

If you are a developer, this is a golden opportunity to be wildly original in 2026 by simply reviving a mechanic that may not quite be dead, but is definitely on life support.

So if you’re looking for a relatively simple way of adding a ton of depth and replay value to your game—bring back bots!

If nothing else, these days there are worse ways of replacing humans with computers…

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

As my recent slew of articles on first-person shooters may have hinted at, I really enjoy talking about genres with a tight formula where two or three changes to the design can drastically alter the feel of a game.

To a casual player, the respective games Supplice and Warhammer 40K Boltgun may seem almost interchangeable due to how similar they look. Both employ the same archaic, pixelated visual style, and both claim to be inspired by the same handful of iconic ‘90s FPS classics.

And yet, at the time of writing this I have logged 40+ hours in Supplice, while I gave up on Boltgun after a meager 51 minutes.

True to the title of this publication, I enjoy analyzing game design, which includes going over the minutia that can somehow have a seismic effect on my enjoyment of a given video game.

Perhaps it’s this obsessive eye for detail that has always drawn me to mascot racers, which is why this week’s topic is a casual, meandering exploration of these cutesy racing games, analyzing all the things big and small that have driven their success over the years.

Mascot racers—also referred to as kart racers—form one of the more formulaic subgenres, with every game that belongs to it featuring a roster of recognizable (and marketable) characters, tracks based on the IP it’s drawing from, and accessible gameplay with an optional skill curve.

Ever since Super Mario Kart started the trend in 1992, many a self-respecting platforming hero has starred in their own mascot racer.

And whether it’s early ‘clones’ such as Sonic Drift and Crash Team Racing or the more recent Mario Kart World, the base concept as it’s described above has barely changed over the past 34 years.

There have, of course, been innovations along the way: Rare’s 1997 release Diddy Kong Racing added an adventure mode,1 and almost every Mario Kart installment has had its own respective gimmick, ranging from motion controls to anti-gravity racing.2

However, the enjoyment of a mascot racers mostly hinges on its core gameplay and systems rather than its gimmicks. Minor tweaks to those primary mechanics can indeed turn an okay kart racer into a great one and vice versa.

After all, a marketable USP does not win races—great driving does.

For me, Diddy Kong Racing remained the golden standard of mascot racers for the longest time because it blended skill-based gameplay with a wider array of options than had been seen before—even something as simple as custom track selection for single player races was absent from the first three Mario Kart installments on home consoles.

It wasn’t until Mario Kart DS (2005) and Wii (2008) that I felt the series which pioneered the genre was once again getting ahead of the competition it had spawned. Both games had much tighter, more predictable controls than the previous iterations, and they added a lot more activities for players who got sick of doing the same few Grands Prix over and over, yet did not want to treat Mario Kart as purely a multiplayer experience.

Personally, I enjoyed Mario Kart Wii the most and came to see it as the new golden standard for the subgenre. Not just because of its richness in options, but also because it came with an idiosyncrasy that Nintendo has since actively worked to remove from the series in its entirety.

It was unbalanced as hell.

Apart from its (thankfully optional) motion controls, Mario Kart Wii’s other gimmick was that it expanded the vehicle selection, adding in bikes alongside the traditional karts and other four-wheeled contraptions. Most people who have played this game will remember how bikes were vastly superior to karts, sometimes being seconds per lap faster with barely any downsides.

This became all the more obvious if you went online—which I happened to do in Mario Kart Wii more than any other Nintendo game to date—where most players would resort to the meta of Funky Kong riding a Bowser Bike. This character and vehicle combination was statistically superior to everything else on the vast majority of tracks, hence there was no reason not to use it.

Unless, of course, you wanted to be a little contrarian.

And so it was that I took a steady fix of bragging rights out of defeating hordes of Funky Kongs with my trusted Bowser, who I’d picked for the noble reason of him being my favorite Mario character.

There was even a player in the Mario Kart Wii community (yes, there was a community) who had made it his entire persona to challenge these bikers to duel races while riding a purportedly slower kart.

He usually won.

Later Mario Kart games still had metas that people flocked to—and with the power of regular updates, these metas even shifted over time. Still, the gap in speed between the best combo and the worst one would never again be as far apart as it was Mario Kart Wii. During one pre-release showcase, the developers of Mario Kart 8 even proudly demonstrated this by driving near identical lap times with different combinations of vehicles.

All of this illustrates that what makes a mascot racer work—this elusive ‘x factor’—can sometimes boil down to a minor detail, a single quirk.

In the case of Mario Kart Wii, a lot of gameplay value emerged from what appears to be a design oversight, and the game just happened to be released during an era when Nintendo did not yet concern itself with balance patches. This allowed more skilled players to challenge themselves in ways the developers had probably never thought of.

Mario Kart’s more successful competitors also relied on seemingly minor mechanics that would go on to define the racing experience, carrying it to new levels.

Both Crash Team Racing and its next-gen successor Crash Nitro Kart had an amazing boosting system that allowed skilled players to maintain boost power for an entire race.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing—released in the same generation as Mario Kart Wii—distinguished itself with long, complex tracks and a sense of speed befitting the franchise it was named after.

That said, from Mario Kart DS onward, it became harder to beat the plumber at his own game.

Even if Mario Kart wouldn’t receive a fully new installment in the Switch era—with Mario Kart 8 simply being ported from the Wii U—the ongoing support for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in the form of tracks, characters and balance updates meant that the series reached new heights. Not just in terms of its staggering sales—for which it also had a Switch console bundle to thank—but in player reception.

Social media channels that discussed the meta, mechanics and new techniques sometimes accrued millions of views per video.

Not bad for a casual kart racing game.

Of course, Mario’s old rivals Sonic and Crash Bandicoot also kept their foot on the pedal, with especially Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled—a combined remake of both Crash Team Racing and Crash Nitro Kart—offering an excellent alternative for those who did not own a Switch console.

Even with this competition, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was very well respected across the board, with many considering it the series’ best entry to date.

How different things then were in 2025, when Mario Kart World marked the first release of a fully new installment in the series in over a decade.3

It’s not that Mario Kart World wasn’t a success. On the contrary—its bundling with Switch 2 consoles on launch inevitably made it yet another bestseller, and the critical acclaim is there as usual.

However, World is the first new Mario Kart game to be released into what I’d like to refer to as ‘the discourse era,’ where opinions on video games are increasingly driven by streamers, Youtubers and other influencers to such a point where a select few voices can start to dominate the narrative surrounding a particular game.

Depending on which parts of the internet you visit, you can walk away with the impression that Mario Kart World is the most disliked game in the series, due in large part to a few design choices relating to its open world format.

In addition to traditional circuits, Mario Kart World also features courses lifted from said open world, where you travel from one track to another. These tour tracks are notably unpopular with the more hardcore players, and an update that made online players unable to filter them from the random track selection process added fuel to the fire.

Of course, when I bring up its ‘bad’ reputation—and the reasons behind it—to friends who play Mario Kart World, yet don’t spend all day on the internet, they look at me like I’m speaking in tongues.

Still, the online narrative of Mario Kart World being a disappointment opened the door for another, more amusing debate: what was the best mascot racer of 2025?

A few months after Mario Kart World released, Sega returned with the all-new Sonic Racing: Crossworlds.

Fans immediately hailed it as the best Sonic racing game to date, soon followed by claims that it was outright better than Mario Kart World—Crossworlds was to be the game for real racing fans, malcontent with Nintendo’s as of yet unsated obsession with open world design.

While not quite gaming’s answer to Barbenheimer, this new rivalrly between Mario and Sonic sparked fierce debate online on who had the better mascot racer—with all nuance being left behind in the pitlane as usual.

This online scrap reached terminal velocity when both games were nominated in the same category (Sports/Racing) at the 2025 Game Awards, with Mario Kart World taking the trophy home in the end.

Having played both games on the Switch 2 myself, I can say that I still find Mario Kart World to be the better game by a decent margin. Its open world design may not be picture perfect, but I respect the game for evolving through innovation.

With Mario Kart 8 Deluxe having been supplemented by an avalanche of new content across the years, the series was in danger of falling victim to what I’d like to call the Super Smash Bros. Paradox, where the only apparent way of improving the previous game is to include even more content (characters and stages) in your next game, which in turn gives you an even bigger headache for the game you make after that.4

Instead, Mario Kart World shifted down, offering an open world, as well as tracks that are fewer in number but have more depth and variation to them than the typical Mario Kart 8 course. World also returns to a character roster that consists only of Mario-related characters, resisting the emergent multiverse tendencies of its predecessor.

No sponsored Mercedes tie-in, either.

Also relevant is that Mario Kart World arguably has the best and most responsive controls in the series to date, with lots of room for skill expression, making for a very enjoyable core racing experience.

Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, meanwhile, is still a great mascot racer, with the moment-to-moment racing action being pretty much on par with Mario Kart World.

It also features some unique mechanics, such as a rival system that ensures one of the CPU-controlled racers stays on your toes throughout a Grand Prix.5 There’s also the eponymous Crossworlds system, where the second lap of each race takes you to a different course, feeding into the spin-off series’ tendency toward more variation per race.

However, I have yet to see the game pull off anything that makes it Mario Kart World’s outright superior. The aforementioned systems are eye-catching the first few times, but their spectacle soon wears off, making them feel more like gimmicks than substantial gameplay enhancements.

Even the vehicle customization doesn’t feel like it adds as much as it appears to promise—I had little motivation to change things up once I’d settled on a combination of car parts that I liked.

Then surely, nothing stood in the way of Mario Kart World to claim total victory in the Great Mascot Racer Battle of 2025.

That is, until November arrived and we saw the release of Kirby Air Riders.

It was in this game—a sort of reboot of the obscure Gamecube title Kirby Air Ride—that I found this ‘x factor’ to help make it a mainstay in my console for the months following.

The entire game is tinged by Masahiro Sakurai’s delicious maximalism—the same philosophy that came to define the developer’s other baby, Super Smash Bros.

It’s not a stretch to say that Kirby Air Riders is as similar to Super Smash Bros. as it is to Mario Kart, and its unusual nature is the main reason I chose to talk about ‘mascot racers’ rather than the more narrow label ‘kart racers.’

Kirby Air Riders showers you with rewards for completing random challenges much like in SSB, and includes other Smash-coded features such as customizable track music, individual difficulty settings for computer-controlled players and a chunky amount of minigames.

Since this is a Kirby game, there’s also a deceivingly deep combat system, which comes into play in the addictive City Trial mode, where you spend a few minutes battling other players for power-ups on a small free roam map, before fighting for victory in an all-or-nothing minigame—where the ‘route’ you took with your power-ups can have a large, oftentimes decisive influence on your performance in said contest.

The racing itself is also quite different from other games in the genre, with acceleration happening automatically and most of the actions being tied to a single button. It takes some getting used to, but makes for a hectic, lightning-fast racing experience that feels like a highly caffeinated version of Sonic and Mario’s efforts.

If you look past the vastly different aesthetics, this might be the closest we’ve been in a while to a new F-Zero game.

Great as these things are, Kirby Air Riders’ best part is Road Trip, a single player mode that sees you move through several branching levels chock-full of challenge scenarios, such as taking out a rival racer, surviving a missile barrage or fighting in one of the many boss battles.

It’s an adventure of 2 to 3 hours, complete with cinematic cutscenes, a surprisingly moving story,6 New Game+ and even a true ending.

While the rest of the game is already very strong, it’s Road Trip that definitively lifts it above its rivals, making Kirby Air Riders—in my eyes—the unlikely winner of the 2025 mascot racer face-off. When two dogs fight for a bone…

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Sometimes you need an isolated design quirk to make a mascot racer succeed. At other times, it’s the chunky new game mode that contains the special sauce.

In the end, mascot racers are much like FPS games in that a casual onlooker might see them as barely distinguishable variations of the same theme, implying that they’re more or less equally as enjoyable.

Yet the more you play them, the more you realize that these little twists to the core formula are what makes some racers take pole, while others are left biting the dust.

As it appears now, the next mascot racer face-off is still a few years away, but we can at least look forward to the recently announced Super Yooka-Laylee Kart.

In a video that followed the announcement of the game, developer Playtonic singled out its emphasis on skill over luck, a little nod to the idea that Mario Kart’s races are too often decided by powerful items rather than driving skill.7

While design based around ample skill expression can be a solid foundation for a kart-racing experience, there’s one other thing Playtonic should remember.

When it comes to mascot racers, the devil’s in the details.

Now tell me about your favorite mascot racer!

Notes:
All screenshots were taken and edited by me.

Wikipedia has been consulted to confirm release years for some of the games mentioned in this article. The rest of the information was revealed to me in a dream.

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about retro first-person shooters. I find them endlessly fascinating since many of these games are trying to recreate an experience I remember from my own childhood.

Games like Doom, Blood and Shadow Warrior were imprinted into my brain at what was probably way too early an age. I still have fond memories of those days, like watching my dad save-scum his way through Wolfenstein 3D, and my mother banning me from playing Duke Nukem 3D specifically after she saw a news report on how the game featured low-res, pixelated tits.

Apart from being a source of amusing anecdotes, my many hours with these games have also proven formative—I still use classic ‘90s shooters as reference points when trying out new FPS titles in the year of our good Lord 2026.

It’s within the technological confines of 1990s hardware that legendary developers such as John Romero and John Carmack used their brilliance to come up with all kinds of creative and technological solutions, resulting in gameplay that in many ways still holds up today.

My ample experience with the initial generation of first-person shooters is what allowed me to write so extensively about the genre at large in three of my recent pieces:

• In ‘To Kill A Franchise,’ I told the story of FEAR 3, and how it sacrificed its own identity in a failed effort to emulate Call of Duty’s success.

• In ‘A Doomed Genre,’ I summarized how technological advancement and the resulting push towards more cinematic experiences led to FPS design becoming more simplified. And how the ‘boomer shooter’ craze temporarily revived ‘90s design philosophy once thought lost, before dissipating under the influence of cultural inbreeding.

• In ‘Throwing Cheese At The Wall To See What Sticks,’ I analyzed how Mouse: P.I. For Hire—hailed as the next big retro FPS—succumbs under the weight of its poor direction.

While I was quite satisfied with how these posts turned out, one element was missing in all of them:

Positivity.

When I talk about first-person shooters, I like to get in deep, but when beholding a genre that’s had some ups and mostly downs, it seems near inevitable that I end up bearing the mantle of the jaded cynic who’s seen it all and is unable to experience joy.

This cannot stand, hence why this week I’d like to recommend to you my five favorite retro-inspired indie FPS games to date.

The titles I’ve selected are all games that, in a variety of ways, overrode my sour predisposition and genuinely amazed me. To me, they represent the pinnacle of what the indie scene is capable of when it comes to delivering first-person shooters that feel like a continuation of the old-school design philosophy.

Just to be clear: these games all stand on their own two feet, and they can be enjoyed as-is, regardless of any foreknowledge of the classics that inspired them.

In fact, if you were to play all five of these games (and why wouldn’t you!) you’d actually get a pretty decent idea of what early first-person shooters were like even if you never played them. As we’ll see, their respective inspirations together cover the better part of ‘90s and early ‘00s FPS history.

To properly map this out, I’ll list the foremost influences of each game as a little bonus. Maybe recognizing some of those old titles will help you decide which game is for you.

Before we get started, I’ll do as the developers of these games did and establish a few self-imposed limitations:

• All featured games are indie titles or otherwise small productions. There is no real point in me trying to convince you that Doom 2016 is great (it is great, by the way).

• Some of the titles featured on here are still in Early Access, but I recommend them in their current state. Take this into account if you’d rather wait for the full experience, but I’d still play these even if development were to cease tomorrow.

• I’ll only list commercial releases consisting of original content. Mods, wads and total conversions are their own rabbit hole—one that I may or may not explore in the future.

• I avoid saying ‘boomer shooter’ because, as I argued recently, that term has been rendered meaningless. Hence the more generic but useful term retro FPS.

Alright, that’s enough of a preamble to start a waffle factory, so let’s get to it!

Wizordum - Because classic Doom is too modern

If you have never played one of the classic first-person shooters, or it’s just been a really long time, Wizordum is a great place to start.

By playing this game, you’ll get familiar with all of the trusted tropes: a big roster of weapons, a large variety of enemies, and big-ass, maze-like levels.

These being the standard features of a ‘90s FPS, they’re not what makes Wizordum stand out: rather, it’s how damn chill this game is.

Most throwback shooters are aimed at a hardcore audience. They cater to gamers who have spent decades playing custom Doom and Quake maps, and whose synapses won’t fire unless there are at least 200 enemies on screen at any given time.

Not this game, though. Despite drawing buckets worth of inspiration from masochistic vintage shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D and Hexen, Wizordum is much more forgiving, granting you plenty of ammo and even offering such modern conveniences as a map marker.

That’s not to say Wizordum doesn’t have any bite to it. You will get punished if you allow yourself to get swarmed by melee enemies or you pick the wrong weapon for a given combat scenario. You are encouraged to learn to move around combat arenas and be versatile with your choice of weapons, both of which are skills that will serve you well if you play more games belonging to the same niche.1

Another unique aspect of Wizordum is its setting. The pixelated fantasy levels invite non-linear exploration and wouldn’t look out of place in a ‘90s-style RPG. The color palette used throughout the 21 levels is rich, varied and saturated, which contrasts the more grim vibe that other fantasy-themed FPS games tend to go for.

One thing to realize about Wizordum is that it is mainly inspired by games that predate even classic Doom. So you can forget about jumping, crawling or even going down a simple ledge.

In short, Wizordum is an extremely traditional FPS made presentable and accessible for a larger audience. If you want to try a game to see if the retro style is for you, Wizordum is your #1 gateway drug.

Wizordum’s inspirations: Catacomb 3-D/Abyss, Wolfenstein 3D, Heretic and Hexen.

Cultic - Not directed by Hideo Kojima

Unlike many games that are unjustly attributed to a solitary genius, Cultic’s first chapter was actually created by one developer, Jason Smith, who operates under the name Jasozz Games.

Through Cultic, he displays total mastery of old-school level design and atmosphere. Like Wizordum, Cultic was developed using the modern Unity engine, but made to emulate the low-res, pixelated look you would expect from a ‘90s game.

Unlike Wizordum, however, Cultic is a dark game, both in its themes and aesthetics. True to its name, most of the campaign sees you fight a demonic cult, and it is in this capacity of a dedicated nutjob hunter that you encounter sinister experiments, mass graves and hordes of murderous zealots.

While Cultic is strong in each individual area (gunplay, music, suspense), it is the S-tier level design that makes it stand out. Many Cultic levels combine the classic premise of a labyrinthine key hunt with mission-based objectives. This helps imbue what would otherwise be an abstract fetch quest with the sense of purpose and place that was sometimes lacking in games like Doom and Quake.

At face value, Cultic is most reminiscent of 1997’s Blood—itself part of the tradition of Build engine classics that were already pushing the genre towards more grounded environments. But beyond the obvious thematic overlap of Cultic and Blood, there are also influences from Resident Evil 4 and other horror properties outside of the video game medium.

I should note that I have not yet gotten around to sampling Cultic Chapter Two, which dropped in 2025, so I cannot cast any judgment on that content one way or the other.

Cultic Chapter One, however, is already one of the strongest, most impressive campaigns in any retro FPS, so based on that alone, I would highly recommend it.

Cultic’s inspirations: Blood, Resident Evil 4 and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2.2

Supplice - A marathon of a development cycle

Supplice has followed a trajectory that is not unique among retro shooters. The project started many years ago as a Doom Megawad3 and eventually grew into a standalone game.

As a result of this origin story, Supplice is a game that features completely original art and assets, but still runs on an enhanced source port of the old Doom engine.4

Even the core gameplay of Supplice is still quite similar to the philosophy of the original Doom: fast-paced shooting, increasingly complex levels and—of course—no jump button.

Indeed, Supplice’s surface-level similarity to the source material sometimes invites accusations of it being little more than a ‘paid Doom mod,’ but there is so much more to the game.

Every episode has its own aesthetic, wonderfully brought to life with high-quality art and sprites, a proggy soundtrack and... a captivating story?

So, early FPS games were not exactly known for their plot, but Supplice tells a multi-layered story about an alien invasion, rogue AI, time travel and the (un)creation of life itself—an approach that is heavily inspired by the plot of the original Marathon, Bungie’s 1994 ‘Doom killer’ for Apple devices.

Although the narrative techniques used in Supplice are rudimentary at best—with each story beat explored through in-game terminals and select environmental storytelling—this world-building successfully establishes a universe that feels unique, and much grander than the confines of the game.

In terms of its gameplay, Supplice is probably the most hardcore out of all the titles listed here, committing to the technological minimalism of the early ‘90s while also offering enormous, puzzlebox-like levels filled with hundreds of enemies who all have their own, unique methods of trying to kill you dead, fatally.

Currently, Supplice’s presentation is still rough around the edges, with for example the menus mostly retaining the standard GZDoom look.

As a consequence, Supplice might not be the best place to start if you’ve never played this sort of game before. Yet for those who are curious to see what happens when you take a few of the most experienced Doom modders out there and set them loose in their own IP, this game is one hell of a journey.

I should also mention here that Supplice is currently in Early Access, offering four playable episodes that each take around 4-6 hours to beat. The remaining two chapters are set to be released later in 2026, with the developers planning to finally leave Early Access in December.

For me, the first four episodes have been more than sufficient to make me fall in love with Supplice’s unique world and godlike weapon roster, so I’m comfortable putting it on this list in its current state.

Supplice’s inspirations: Doom (classic) and Marathon (classic).

Ion Fury (& Aftershock) - The Sonic Mania of shooters

With the frequent invocations of Doom and Quake as the main inspirators of throwback shooters, one could almost forget about an important fork in the road of early FPS design: Build.

The Build engine was developed by Ken Silverman and did several things that Doom and its clones couldn’t, such as allowing for sloped surfaces and more verticality to be incorporated into the level design.

Silverman do what idon’t, or something.

Build was quickly outpaced by other engines, so it’s been host to only a handful of games, the most famous of which are Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood.

2019’s Ion Fury was marketed as the first commercial release on Build in over 20 years5 and it can be seen as the closest thing we’ll ever get to a true sequel to Duke Nukem 3D.

It was created by the indie studio Voidpoint, making Ion Fury a sort of ‘Sonic Mania’ situation, where fans and modders of the source material were commissioned by the publisher6 to create an arguably even better spiritual successor.

The game is set in a dystopian future, with the beefy 8-hour campaign taking you on a journey across the Cyberpunkesque city of Neo D.C. and its surroundings.

In terms of its combat, movement and general feel, it is a fully authentic experience that seems like it could be passed off as a lost Build engine game from the late ‘90s, found on a random floppy disk obtained at some retired programmer’s garage sale.

Of course, Ion Fury does betray its modern origins through some aspects of its design. The enormous scope of the game, the large open areas and an interconnected level structure reminiscent of Half-Life would’ve been enough to make any 386 blow up the entire house.

Still, if you want to know what it was like to play these games in the 1990s, Ion Fury is without a doubt the closest approximation of that feeling. It is so authentic, in fact, that it even commits the common classic FPS sin of running out of ideas halfway through the campaign, with the latter levels feeling like a bit of a slog.

A few years after its initial release, Ion Fury would fortunately get a DLC in the form of Aftershock. It features a new, more focused chapter of around 5 hours, and to me it stands as one of the best campaigns offered by a throwback shooter.

All things considered, Ion Fury is nothing short of a modern classic. In respecting the source material, it quietly surpasses it.

Ion Fury’s inspirations: Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior (classic) and Blood.

Selaco - The baroque FPS

When I finished Ion Fury: Aftershock in the fall of 2023, I was convinced that there was no better retro shooter experience. Only a day later, I installed the demo of Selaco, and on the basis of that first level alone, I had to admit that I was utterly, disgustingly wrong.7

The encounter design, the combat and the pacing of Selaco were already on a level that I hadn’t encountered before—not in an indie game at least.

Like Supplice, Selaco started as a Doom mod that eventually grew into a standalone game running on (a by now heavily modified version of) GZDoom.

Still, Selaco is quite different from Supplice and the other games on this list, in that it plays more like shooters from the early 2000s. It has the merciless enemy AI of FEAR, the atmospheric design of Doom 3 and the pacing of Half-Life.

Selaco is currently still in Early Access, though that status is owing more to the developers’ perfectionism than a lack of content or polish.

The game’s first chapter is fully playable already, which amounts to about 12+ hours of action on a first playthrough. While it’s still being worked on—with the absence of a lot of the promised storytelling being the most notable omission—I would easily rank this among the best FPS campaigns of the past decade.

Although there are plenty of environmental puzzles and other moments of quiet during the campaign, the main draw of Selaco is its combat. Enemies may not come in the quantities that you’d see in the average ‘boomer shooter,’ but their tactical intelligence and ability to overwhelm the player make for a combat loop that is hectic, tough and addictive as hell.

The combat looks all the more spectacular thanks to the interactive and destructible environments, allowing you to weave a chaotic tapestry of mayhem across this sprawling sci-fi world.

Selaco also stands out in its efforts to sculpt a player-friendly experience. There are tons of options for accessibility, customization and quality of life tweaks that allow for an experience that can be adjusted to fit the player’s preferences.

In going that extra mile, Selaco put me in a position where I’ll actively miss its player-centric design and rigorous optimization when playing other games.

Two additional chapters of Selaco will still be added before the game leaves Early Access, with the first one being slated for release later this year.

If you’re looking for an authentic retro experience, Selaco might not be the game—despite the old-school mindset driving this project, it very much feels like its own, new thing.

But if the game clicks, you’ll soon be lamenting the fact that there aren’t any ‘Selaco-likes’ out there.

Selaco’s inspirations: FEAR, Doom 3 and Half-Life.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end!

I’ve thought long and hard about which titles to include on this list, but I can confidently say that this is the pantheon of old-school shooters as I currently envision it. Moreover, the large array of inspirations that fueled the respective developers of these projects make for a comprehensive—and really fun—history lesson in FPS design.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of other titles also worth your time and consideration.

For instance, Dusk is still an amazing FPS, and its success is probably the reason half these games were able to see a successful release in the first place.

Then there are amazing projects such as Ashes 2063 and myhouse.wad, which I’ve had to cut from this list simply because I chose not to include mods of any kind.

In short, there’s a world of great, retro-informed FPS projects waiting for you. And even if my cynicism compels me to complain from time to time, I do love this genre dearly.

So pick a game you like, have fun with it, and be sure tell me what you think of it when you’re done.

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Notes:
All screenshots were taken and edited by me.

In one episode of the Dutch comedy show Rundfunk, there is a random shot of a horse standing in a hallway.

Though this may seem like one of the cult show’s many acts of hit-and-run absurdity, it’s actually a reference to a famous song by Dutch comedian André van Duin, the title of which translates as “There Is A Horse In The Hallway.”

In their commentary, Rundfunk’s creators noted that, during the shoot, the horse at one point also defecated while the camera was already running. Naturally, they thought this unforeseen ‘gift’ was amusing and even considered adding the shot to the episode. In the end, though, they decided against it, citing the following reason: “The joke is that there is a horse in the hallway. Not that there is a horse in the hallway and he’s also taking a shit.”

In short, they resisted going for a scene that would—in isolation—have been more likely to elicit laughter from the viewer, but would’ve gone to the detriment of the bigger picture.

You might now wonder—what does any of this have to do with Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the subject of today’s article?

I promise it will all make sense in the end.

The silly mouse game

Even if you’re not that into first-person shooters, there is a good chance you’ll have seen footage of Mouse PI at one point.

Its 1920s and ‘30s cartoon style—also called ‘rubber hose’ animation—made it stand out in 2023, when the first teaser was dropped. It showcased a rudimentary version of the game, with the apparent pitch being ‘what if Steamboat Willie, but FPS?’

Since then, Mouse PI steadily gained momentum, with Polish developer Fumi Games turning the zany premise into a fully functional game.

It also helped that, around this time, we could observe the rise of the so-called boomer shooters, a new wave of first-person shooters inspired by the craftsmanship of 1990s classics such as Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. While Mouse PI’s gameplay has in reality little to do with such design—a point we will get to in due time—its otherwise ill-informed association with this trend meant that the developers were striking the big cartoon anvil while it was hot.

The game was released in May of 2026, delivering what seems—at least at first glance —a fully fleshed-out product that commanded a signature presentation, as well as high-end production values and many hours of content.

To add another dimension to its setting, Mouse PI blends the rubber hose animation with an elaborate spoof of film noir, starring Jack Pepper as the gritty, cynical private eye that the latter genre is stereotypically associated with.

Pepper, like all of the other major characters in this game, is an anthropomorphized mouse. It’s this contrast of a serious, straight-faced detective story and cartoonish, cheese-obsessed mice that’s the main source of the game’s abundant comedy. And while film noir and rubber hose cartoons are two different sources of inspiration, their shared association with old-timey black-and-white aesthetics helps sell this as a logical combo.

With its big amount of content and unique presentation, Mouse PI was generally praised by critics. But, as tends to be a pattern as of late, it was IGN who once again delivered the most controversial review, awarding the game a meager 6 out 10—a false note among the many songs of praise directed at Mouse PI.

Without regurgitating his entire review, IGN’s Will Borger argued that the game’s film noir parody lacked focus, as many of Jack Pepper’s actions—such as mowing down dozens of corrupt police officers in a single mission—supposedly require too much suspend disbelief to work within that genre’s framework.

If that argument by itself was not out there enough, Borger’s lamentation about the game’s many cheese puns burst open the floodgates of ridicule, to a point where this particular complaint is referenced in many joke comments under every major review of Mouse PI.

On the superficies, it does indeed seem a tinge ridiculous to levy such criticisms against ‘the silly mouse game.’ I would also agree that, at the very least, the point was poorly argued and supported by the wrong examples—the over-the-top violence is an unavoidable staple of the actual video game genre we’re in and it can easily be taken for granted once you realize that.

And yet, at the risk of inviting ridicule at my doorstep, I will say that Borger did in fact have a point in his broader observation that Mouse PI does a subpar job at selling its own premise and setting to the player. Something that does actually hurt the gameplay experience as a whole.

Now, Mouse PI is a cartoony game about anthropomorphic mice, so what could such an unserious concept possibly do to lose its goodwill once the bonkers base premise has been accepted? In order to understand this, we must first explore how this setting is presented to the player throughout the main story.

On sigma males and verisimilar cheddar

After a brief prologue, we are dropped in the city of Mouseburg. Taking place in 1934, we play as Jack Pepper, a war veteran turned private investigator who, across a beefy campaign, takes on several cases involving assassination attempts, disappearances and corruption.

It immediately sticks out just how much effort the developers spent on bringing this fictional mouse metropolis to life.

The hand-drawn art of the characters and many of the in-game items is consistent in its high quality, and blends in well with the 3D backgrounds rendered in black and white.

These professional, polished visuals are matched by the music, consisting of a sizable repertoire of big band swing and jazz tracks specifically written and performed for the game, as well as a handful of classical passages by composers such as Antonín Dvorák.

The high production standard extends to the voice acting, with Troy Baker—a certified A-lister in this industry—cast as Jack Pepper. Most of the side characters, too, are voiced by prolific actors.

Mouseburg features a wide array of locations, including the central hub with Jack’s office, as well as a movie studio, a river boat, a world fair and (of course) a sewer.

Together, they host a gameplay loop that remains consistent throughout most of the campaign: pursue a lead in one of the levels, shoot a host of bad guys while doing so, and come back to the hub to go over your findings, both by yourself and with some of the prominent side characters.

Early on in the game, there are several moments where these elements all come together nicely.

There’s one scene where you make your way through a subway station, its platforms crowded with clusters of mouse-citizens dressed in fancy 1930s suits waiting for the next train and going about their day.

Another mission sees you make your way into an opera house by sneaking in through its kitchen, where nervous cooks are laboring to get food ready for the esteemed guests and performers, with the no-doubt underpaid workmen seeing Jack Pepper’s presence as little more than an annoying interruption of their work.

It’s during such sequences that Mouse PI is at its strongest—cheese slices of life that help sell the illusion of a rugged new world city teeming with life. One that continues to exist outside of the player’s point of view.

These scenes succeed exactly because they are played straight. Sure, the infamous cheese puns abound from the game’s very start, but the underlying humor mostly comes from the characters taking for granted that strange pitch of animated mouse people starring in a high-stakes crime drama.

It is no exaggeration to say that the story and setting are the focal point of the entire game just as much as the action itself. Between missions and even during them, you spend a lot of time talking to NPCs to gather information. These fully voiced conversations can sometimes swallow up minutes of your time, and they provide important context to what you are doing and who you are fighting, further reinforcing the notion that the story is intended to be central to the experience and should not be treated as incidental window-dressing.

Indeed, such elaborate world-building comes with the implicit expectation that the player goes along with it and engages with the game world with some degree of sincerity. Aware of its humorous, satirical nature, but not prepared to disregard every fissure in this silly framework as “who cares because it’s all a big joke anyway.”

And of fissures, there are many. So many, in fact, that the game’s foundation becomes more wobbly the longer you play.

As we’ve seen, the charm of Mouseburg comes from its dedication to portraying culture from the Interbellum era through the lens of a whimsical cartoon world. This whimsy helps take the sharp edges off of some of the more grim topic material, with the game containing mouse-themed analogs for such themes as the illegal alcohol trade, police brutality and even the rise of national-socialism.

The result is a fickle balance—like a vulnerable shell of a building that the game itself then begins to knock over with misplaced and pointless references that fall out of tune with the rest of the game world.

And no, we are not here referring to the dreaded cheese puns. Those can at times be funny, and they help remind us that Mouseburg is this warped reality where rodents rule the world. While the many turns-of-phrase mentioning gouda, mozzarella and cheddar may be grating to some, they are in line with Mouse PI’s universe.

Rather, it’s the references to movies and memes that will take you out of the moment countless times throughout the campaign.

During one encounter, the boss flies a plane over Jack Pepper and throws references at him almost at the same rate as bombs—and they are arguably more painful.

His proclamation of “I have the high ground now,” already sounds crass due to its overuse in contemporary culture, but at least it somewhat makes sense in the context of the boss being in the air. The same applies to the Matrix quote “Dodge this,” which accompanies the projectiles launched at us. More difficult to swallow is the recital of M. Bison’s infamous quip “For you, it was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.” In isolation, this statement makes no sense since there is no traumatic incident between this boss and Jack Pepper that it could possibly be referring to. And just in case we didn’t catch one of the other references, Jack Pepper reminds the boss that he was “the chosen one,” which again sounds nonsensical unless you know the source of that quote, as the game provides no direct context to ‘catch’ the reference.

In short, even people who do not know any of these quotes are likely to recognize them as being references to other media for how out of tune they are with the rest of the game world.

If the previous section seems belabored and overbearing, it’s because that is how the game feels all the damn time. Collectively, these examples also raise the question of why a game that is explicitly written as a spoof of culture from the first half of the 20th Century is referencing movies that were released many decades later. It’s exemplary of Mouse PI’s constant failure to commit to the bit.

The almost compulsive nature of these references is laid bare even further when the game starts quoting memes. An example that’s been doing the rounds on social media is Jack Pepper quoting part of the ‘potion seller’ dialogue, but changing it to “ticket seller, sell me your strongest tickets,” because, you know, he is exploring a subway station.

Come to think of it...

“Website, I’m going on a perilous journey, so I need your strongest fonts.”

“You can’t handle my fonts. They’re too strong for you.”

Painfully unfunny? My point exactly.

However, the worst example by far occurs later in the game, when you can accept a side mission for an NPC to expose the suspected infidelity of his wife. To explain why he cannot simply take on this task himself, he utters what might genuinely be the worst line of dialogue that I’ve ever heard in a video game:

“Now me? I’m a proud sigma, see? It’s beneath me to go around looking for her.”

This line is delivered apropos of nothing and therefore sticks out like a sore thumb. It references the ‘sigma male’ meme, a manosphere-adjacent term for masculine stoicism whose use is mostly ironic in nature.

By using such a specific, modern and memetic term within an archaic setting, it absorbs all the attention in the scene to the point of tonal whiplash, emerging as an ugly rupture in Mouseburg’s carefully crafted illusion. And all that just for the presumed objective of a writer flexing his ‘meme knowledge.’

Indeed, the ‘sigma incident’ illustrates how these strident references are often delivered with ill-deserved prominence. These are not just random, throwaway gags relegated to in-game graffiti for the careful observer—they are central to the mission dialogue and in this case even character motivation. They become impossible to ignore.

Mouse PI goes to great lengths to define the contours within which the entire game world is to be composed—hand-drawn animation, a colorless noir look, expertly played swing music—only to then start wildly painting outside of those self-imposed parameters.

The defense that Mouse PI is a spoof is no excuse for these poor choices, since the developers themselves chose to put so much emphasis on the story and setting, going more than the extra mile to make it all work in unison. This isn’t a late ‘90s Build shooter, where the protagonists were stand-ins for cheesy action heroes, delivering lines that referenced the type of movies they were taking the piss out of.

Every fictional setting, no matter how ridiculous, has a certain range of dialogue that feels like it would be plausible within that universe. As I explained in a previous article about off-putting video game dialogue, the limits of what sounds natural differ per setting, but they are always there. Mouse PI’s many cheese puns fall within those limits, yet the poorly chosen references do not. The result is a sense of disconnect between the player and the setting.

Of course, anachronistic jokes can work to great effect when there is a purpose or punchline to them. The communist peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are amusing exactly because the use of Marxist dialogue within a feudal, medieval society is absurd—and because the rules of said society would in turn be absurd to a Marxist.

Randomly littering modern pop culture references in an otherwise well-defined pseudo-historical setting—parodic or not—does not have a point to it beyond “hey, remember this?” Hence, these callbacks fall flat every single time.

And yet, these many sins against good writing could have been forgiven if, at the very least, the gameplay had been subject to a better, more focused execution of the developer’s vision.

Sadly, the game design itself only confirms the lack of direction that already emerged from the writing, dragging the entire product down even further.

House of Cheese

At its core, Mouse PI is a modern shooter.

That may sound strange given its association with the retro ‘boomer shooter’ tag, but when you take a closer look at the way the game is designed, it sits closer to modern re-interpretations of classics than the classics themselves.

In a recent article, I explained how the FPS games carrying the boomer shooter label keep drifting further away from the term’s original premise. Mouse PI is a prime example of this—it is not a boomer shooter if (and that is a huge if) we want to pretend said term has any meaning left in 2026. While in itself this fact did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for Mouse PI either which way, it is worth looking at other games in the genre that seem to have informed much of Fumi’s design choices.

Doom 2016 and Eternal in particular appear to have been a major sources of inspiration for the moment-to-moment gameplay, with Jack Pepper’s moveset being reminiscent of that of the Doom Slayer1 and the combat flow following Eternal’s lock the player in a room until everyone’s dead template.

For its encounter design, Mouse PI’s offers an almost literal interpretation of the clown closet school of thought. In every combat arena—of which there are about a dozen per level or more—mobs of enemies spawn out of specifically designated doors. The objective is then to move around the confined arena, taking out each wave of enemies until there are none left and you are free to advance.

On its own, the arena design is decent enough to ape the ‘jungle gym’ gameplay of Doom Eternal, even if the lack of both variety and challenge will likely chip away at your enjoyment of these sequences the more you progress.

With some exceptions and barring numerous reskins, the game stops introducing new enemies fairly early on, leaving you to fight the same handful of enemy types for large chunks of the game. That means fighting your typical mix of riflemen, brawlers, tanks, flying enemies and snipers.

Not every first-person shooter needs a giant enemy roster, but in Mouse PI, this recipe wears out its welcome for various reasons.

The first and most important of these is the sheer length of the campaign. Mouse PI took me no less than 16 hours to beat, which included some side content and optional dialogue but was an otherwise normal run.

Initially, it might seem like great value to get so much content out of a €30 game, but realize that, for a single player FPS, this is extremely long. Even Halo: Combat Evolved had to start copy-pasting hallways and entire levels to just barely crawl past the 10-hour mark.

These days, most single player FPS campaigns take 6-8 hours, and there are indeed many games that, within this frame, manage to add more variety to the gameplay than Mouse PI does in double that time.

Even more damaging to the continued appeal of the combat is the lackluster weapon roster. One thing that modern classics such as Doom 2016 have in common with the more traditional boomer shooters is the large selection of weapons. These are vital to the ‘classic’ FPS gameplay experience, since each weapon has its own use and is effective against different types of enemies. This makes it so that success in combat hinges less on the exact memorization of enemy placement, and more on the ability to swap to the most optimal weapon for each enemy.

In Mouse PI, though, you will probably find yourself going through about 95% of the campaign relying on the same two weapons: a tommy gun—hilariously called a James Gun in this game—and a toxic goo cannon called the ‘Devanisher.’

Sure, there are two separate shotguns in the game, but even at close range they are often worse at getting rid of enemies than the aforementioned ‘premium’ options. I tried to force myself to use these shotguns for variety’s sake, but the only scenario where I actually found them useful was when I had run out of ammunition for the other two guns—a rarity with the more-than-generous ammo pick-ups. In any other situation, either the James Gun and the Devanisher would’ve gotten the job done faster and more efficiently than either shotgun or any of the other weapons for that matter.

Compounding the issue with the unbalanced weapon roster is an upgrade system whose complete removal from the game would be a net benefit.

Nearly every weapon has up to three different upgrades available, for which you need to collect blueprints that can be found throughout the game’s many levels. Even with full upgrades, half the weapon roster is already useless, meaning that the vanilla version of every single weapon feels cumbersome to use.

It feels as if the fully upgraded weapons were designed first, and then just had features stripped away from them to create their respective vanilla renditions and allow for a sense of progression.

As a result, whenever I found a new weapon, I refrained from even trying it until I got the chance to install some upgrades, as I knew there would be zero point in using the vanilla form of any weapon over the souped up version of another.

What makes this especially irksome is that Mouse PI does not need an upgrade system at all. In some games, weapon upgrades are a way of making sure the player remains competitive as they progress through the game and the challenge escalates, offering them more firepower or niche modifications to deal with particular late-game threats.

But as we have already established, Mouse PI throws the exact same enemies at you for the better part of the game, so there is no such ‘arms race’ taking place behind the scenes, and therefore zero need for an upgrade system that does nothing but further complicate the already poor weapon balancing.

Over the course of the campaign, I got the strong impression that many of the gameplay mechanics were added solely because the developers observed them in modern Doom and its acolytes, and copied them without comprehending why these systems were there in the first place.

In addition to the weapon upgrades, there is a full moveset that also seems to exist primarily because it’s the current thing in FPS games. We have our dashing, our double jumping, hovering, grappling, wall running and ledge grabbing—the latter half of which could be removed from the game entirely at no great consequence to the level design. Hell, ledge grabbing is introduced with maybe an hour of gameplay left and is used maybe five times total.

I can keep hammering away at Mouse PI’s many half-baked systems all day.

I’ve yet to touch upon the largely useless currency system, the inability to backtrack or revisit levels for missable collectibles, post-combat armor pick-ups that cannot be carried over to the next level, the confusion caused by inconsistent and poorly hidden invisible walls, a clue-finding system that adds nothing because it auto-completes every time, a dialogue selection system that appears twice and then disappears forever, the continued use of money as a reward at a point in the game where you can literally no longer spend it, and much, much more.

However, to prevent this article from becoming as bloated as the game it describes, it suffices to say that, had the cutting room floor of Fumi Games been more crowded, it would’ve made for a better, more focused game.

Conclusion

If there is one impression that emerges from Mouse PI as a whole, it is that of a potentially magnificent game dragged down by a lack of direction.

Some might grant Mouse PI leniency on the basis of its comical premise, but I’d stress that the game itself communicates in no uncertain terms that the story is meant to be taken in with the experience as much as the action is. Dismissing criticism of the setting and world-building because ‘it’s just a silly mouse game’ is an injustice to that effort.

In short bursts, Mouse PI can be quite fun and charming, and it’s precisely its unique setting that does a lot to wash away the blemishes. But with so many hours of gameplay and so little variation to justify most of them, the only feeling that remains after a while is that of exhaustion.

After the initial punch of the presentation wears off—and there is more than enough time for that to happen—what we are left with is a host of promising ideas that all suffer from the developers’ inability to self-edit.

The setting is in part brilliant, yet marred by an avalanche of ham-fisted references that carefully chip away at any immersion you might’ve felt.

The story is ambitious and partially kept afloat by some fantastic voice acting, but darts off into too many directions at once to fully deliver on its promise of an engaging detective tale.

The gameplay is a messy amalgamation of familiar FPS tropes whose sloppy execution is cleverly concealed by the game’s unusual aesthetics.

What unites all of these shortcomings is the overbearing presence of a maximalist design philosophy. It drives the creators of this game to try and do everything at once, inadvertently ending up with a product that is less than the sum of its parts.

The developers gleefully seize every opportunity to squeeze in another level, another mechanic, another meme reference, another movie quip. Even if it goes to the detriment of the bigger picture.

The joke is that this is a film noir story starring cartoon mice.

The joke is that there is a horse in the hallway.

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Notes:
Review based on game version 1.0.6.

The coming week, a year will have passed since the release of the Switch 2. Hence, an apt milestone to look back and evaluate how Nintendo’s latest console has fared during this first phase of its existence.

We are firmly in the ‘influencer rhetoric’ era of gaming discourse, with algorithm-driven hot takes dominating much of the talk surrounding this console—and pretty much every other aspect of gaming.

It has been interesting to see the conversation surrounding the Switch 2—as well as its games and Nintendo’s decisions along the way—unfold from my perspective as someone who owns the console, yet feels no profound, sentimentally driven fealty to the Nintendo brand.

My connection with Nintendo’s products fluctuates: I may have grown up a Nintendo kid, but as an adult, my role morphed into more of an interested onlooker. I’ve mostly stuck to PC gaming while occasionally checking in on what Nintendo has been up to. During such observations, there always comes a point where I get their latest console a few years after its release in order to binge the games I’d been missing.

With the Switch 2, this dynamic changed somewhat.

Realizing just how many good games I’d missed in the Switch era—Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate—I was busy playing catch-up on the original Switch in early 2025, when its successor, the Switch 2, was announced.

Since some of the more recent Switch 1 games had been exposing that console’s age by means of poor, inconsistent performance, the prospect of a ‘Switch, but stronger,’ while itself no sign of prime creativity, was enough motivation for me to do something I’d never done before: I bought the console at launch.

And so it happens that coming up on one year of Switch 2 also means the imminent celebration of my first year with this piece of hardware.

As such, my experience with the Switch 2 is by now more than substantial to justify a review, but I deemed it relevant to mention my background because, as we’ll discover across this article, your appreciation of the console will depend on how you approach it.

This week’s piece is then perhaps more reflective and less analytical than is custom on my page, but it will hopefully still provide you with some helpful insights.

Pricing and distribution

With a launch price of $450 or €470,1 Switch 2 is Nintendo’s most expensive console at launch, but not in the way that most think.

It is true that, with the Gamecube and Wii in particular, Nintendo has on multiple occasions marketed itself as the price-savvy option for a prime gaming experience. The Switch 2, then, seems to do away with that notion.

However, when we take into account inflation and purchasing power, as well as the state of the industry contemporary to each of Nintendo’s previous consoles, the Switch 2 is not the outright anomaly that some make it out to be.

In 2012, the 32GB Wii U had a price of $/€350, and when adjusting for inflation and purchasing power, this would place it upwards of $/€500 in current-day money.2 Even when using more conservative calculations, we could put the console at around the Switch 2’s current price. Of course, an important caveat here is that the Switch 2 (for now) lacks the budget option that the Wii U did offer, and the Wii U Premium package cited here also came with the Nintendo Land game included.

Still, tech prices are soaring across the board. With Valve recently announcing that they would be raising the price of the available Steam Deck models—to which Switch 1 and 2 are oft compared—by a whopping $240 to $300 in the US, this does establish an industry-wide struggle to keep hardware prices affordable. Such developments also lend less credibility to the notion that Nintendo’s latest console is uniquely expensive due to idiosyncratic greed woven into that company’s fiber.

Speaking of which, there has also been a lot of controversy surrounding Nintendo’s choice to charge $/€80 for physical copies of its most high-end games, with their corresponding digital prices usually capping at $/€70.3

I also find such prices a bit hard to swallow, especially in this economy, but again I do not see this as a total outlier.

Even foregoing those same observations about inflation—which is making quite literally everything in our lives more expensive by the day—the video game industry has for years been moving towards charging more per game, whether it is for special editions, pre-release availability, season passes, in-game currency, day 1 DLC or Nintendo’s very own Amiibo functionality. Indeed, there is a true arsenal of methods to get more money out of gamers’ pockets than the standard $/€50-60 that had been common since the 1990s.

Of course, many of those methods are optional, but their prevalence and success have conditioned gamers into accepting that—frequently—those 50-60 bucks are just the admission fee, and they are expected to pony up a lot more to get the complete experience. Publishers, for their part, have learned that enough consumers put up with this to mark it a viable strategy.

Within that context, Nintendo’s pricey games are a nuisance, but one that is more easily circumvented by waiting for an opportune bargain. At least in my country, physical copies of games like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza can occasionally be picked up for around €55-60 in retail stores.

If you want to own every first party game at launch, though, then being a Switch 2 owner can turn into a pricey affair.

One thing that’s noticeably better about Switch 2 than its predecessor is its availability. Console distribution was such that it may have proven difficult to find a console in the first 1-2 weeks after launch (provided you didn’t pre-order), but it has since become easy to find Switch 2 units in most places. Scalpers who speculated on another months-long shortage, as had plagued the first Switch, fortunately did not get what they wanted.

Launch titles

Of course, a console is nothing without a strong library of games.

Day 1 buyers got to choose from a decent line-up consisting of Mario Kart World, some Switch 2 upgrades for assorted Switch 1 Nintendo games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and a handful of Switch 2 ports of existing games, the most notable of which being Cyberpunk 2077.

Of course, the biggest launch title by some margin was Mario Kart World. It’s easy to forget that it was the first new Mario Kart game in well over a decade, since Switch’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was a port of a 2014 Wii U game—though the Switch version added a new Battle mode and tracks.

Rather than trying to further outbid Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s expansive—some might say bloated—range of content, Mario Kart World pivoted towards a more open world-oriented concept, as tends to be the trend with major Nintendo IPs for a while now.

Though both its open world concept and other design choices continue to be controversial among some of the more hardcore players, Mario Kart World remains a very good racing game and is a worthy addition to Mario’s most prominent spin-off series.

Should you not be interested in Mario Kart, though, there was very little reason for you to get a Switch 2 at launch.

Likewise, while it was important for the console to have launched with some strong ports of third party games, by itself this wouldn’t have motivated many people to pre-order a console purely for games that had already been available on other platforms.

Is the Switch 2’s launch line-up particularly poor, then? Not by any stretch. At least not relative to Nintendo’s previous efforts.

Comparing launch line-ups across generations comes with some obstacles, since the phenomenon of global console releases over region-based ones is relatively new for Nintendo.

For instance, when we look at the Nintendo 64, the only games for months were Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings. The Gamecube, meanwhile, launched with Luigi’s Mansion, WaveRace: Blue Storm and Super Monkey Ball—all great games, but none of them a heavy hitter like a new Mario Kart in 2025.

Even the first Switch, which of course had the magnificent Breath of the Wild as a launch title, did not have much else to offer on launch day that would’ve made the console an absolute priority for gamers. Breath of the Wild itself was also available on Nintendo’s old Wii U platform.

So whereas the Switch 2’s launch line-up could have been stronger, it appears to be fairly in line with Nintendo’s track record: a big exclusive joined by a handful of third party curiosities.

The first year of games

Whether the Switch 2 has become more attractive a proposition across its first year depends largely on your personal tastes.

The most wobbly part of the console’s foundation remains the absence of—and silence on—a new mainline Mario or Zelda title, series which tend to be what keeps drawing the more traditional gaming demographics to Nintendo. This is what most people refer to when they accuse the Switch 2 of lacking a ‘killer app.’

As it turns out, that horrid, 2011 techspeak term appears to be more open to interpretation than would seem.

March 2026 saw the release of Pokémon-themed building/lifesim game Pokopia, co-developed by Game Freak and Koei Tecmo studio Omega Force. It turned out a huge success.

At the time of writing, Pokopia’s only concrete, total sales data is the figure of 2.2 million sold copies within the first 4 days, but it has since continued to dominate different sales charts for weeks while also maintaining somewhat of a viral presence on social media.

There is little doubt that Pokopia would’ve been the game that convinced many to purchase a Switch 2, even if that demographic of Pokémon fans and ‘cozy gamers’ might not overlap entirely with those letting their decision to ‘upgrade’ to a new console hinge on a new Mario or Zelda game.

We’ve also seen plenty of releases outside of the cozysphere, including the fantastic Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, the insane mascot racer Kirby Air Riders, and even Donkey Kong Bananza—the first new 3D platformer in that franchise in over a quarter of a century.

Metroid Prime 4 was slated to be Nintendo’s big holiday release of 2025, but it underperformed both critically and commercially.

Next month, a new Star Fox 64 remake sees another prominent Nintendo franchise come to life on the Switch 2.

These first party releases are again complemented by—by Nintendo standards—impressive third party support, with companies like SEGA, Ubisoft and Bethesda releasing mostly high-effort ports for the new console.

In the end, whether the game library up until this point constitutes a disappointment or not is entirely subjective.

As a huge Hyrule Warriors fan myself, I was more enthusiastic about a new entry into this Zelda spin-off series than I would’ve been about another Mario 3D platformer. Kirby Air Riders, meanwhile, came out of nowhere for me, but quickly overtook both Mario Kart World and Sonic Racing Crossworlds as my favorite mascot racer of 2025.

This already hints towards my conclusion for this piece, namely that your personal expectations of and experience with Nintendo’s products will determine your appreciation of the Switch 2 one year in.

Legacy console

For me, getting the Switch 2 was a no-brainer. I really wanted to play a fully new Mario Kart after years of waiting, and I knew that the new Hyrule Warriors game would be a day 1 purchase for me later in the year.

Another huge factor in my decision to bite the €470 bullet was that the Switch 2 was to be fully backwards compatible with Switch 1 games. This was important to me, since I was (and still am) in the process of catching up with a vast backlog of Nintendo games that I’d missed out on in my years as a PC gamer. On the Switch 2, I could continue that process while also keeping up-to-date with the company’s current output.

It was on the Switch 2 that I first played games such as Super Mario 3D World and Captain Toad—both Switch 1 ports of Wii U originals. I also got to enjoy Switch 2-enhanced versions of games such as Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom and Kirby and the Forgotten Land, the latter of which even received Switch 2-exclusive DLC.

This perspective has allowed me to treat the Switch 2 as my main gaming platform for the better part of the year, even if there’s not a new, AAA-tier Switch 2 exclusive being released every month.

To give you a concrete example, over the past year I’ve collected a frankly obscene amount of platformers on Switch 2. Some are actual Switch 2 games, others Switch 1 releases. Some are retro, some are brand-new. Some are exclusives, others can be bought on Steam or other consoles.

The point is that I all have them in one place, turning my Switch 2 into a physical, playable museum of 3 decades of (3D) platformer design. From Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro all the way up to Super Mario Odyssey and the aforementioned Kirby and the Forgotten Land. With even some detours to ‘90s obscurities such as Gex and Glover, or a modern throwback like Yooka-Replaylee. It’s possibilities like these that have inspired me to write articles such as the one on collectathon platformers a few months back.

To add to the retro potential of the console, wireless replica controllers of previous generations of Nintendo consoles also remain available for members of NSO+, Nintendo’s online subscription service. NES, SNES and N64 controllers that worked for Switch can also be paired with a Switch 2 console. Switch 2-exclusive Gamecube controllers and even a Virtual Boy peripheral have also been launched.

Of course, none of these things will be much relevant for the many players whose exclusive interest lies in new games. An alleged lack of focus on the future is even a common criticism directed at Nintendo. But as someone with a fascination for retro games and the evolution of game design, being able to enjoy such sizable chunks of video game history on one machine adds a lot of value to the console.

Conclusions

One year into the Switch 2’s lifespan, I am still happy with my atypical decision to get the console at launch.

The hybrid console concept—home console and handheld in one—remains enjoyable while seemingly not adding an extra layer of difficulty for third party developers to the extend that the Wii and Wii U did.

A host of peripherals and controllers also makes the Switch 2 an interesting ‘toy’ rather than the robust multimedia devices that some consoles try to be.

In terms of pricing, Nintendo may not be the reliable budget option it once was—especially when you take into account the pricey first party games—but this ‘price hike ailment’ isn’t as exclusive to Nintendo as it is made out to be by the company’s many critics.

In the end, the potential value of this console depends on your personal circumstances. If you kept up with Nintendo throughout the Wii U and Switch 1 years, then you will need to see if any of the current Switch 2 exclusives tickle you enough to make the upgrade worth it. But if you missed Nintendo’s work over the past decade—in part or in full—then the Switch 2 will allow you to cover a lot of ground and get sucked back into their pocket universe of exclusive IPs.

It’s why I refer to the Switch 2 as the ‘Your Mileage May Vary console.’ I’m so far loving mine, but I can also fully understand people who feel little urge to cough up around $/€500 for a new console and a game.

This ambivalence might not be an ideal state of being for a gaming console, with its desirability being so dependent on personal factors, and with that ‘must-have’ status still firmly out of reach. More information on new Mario, Zelda and/or Super Smash Bros. titles could go a long way towards remedying this issue, but Nintendo’s characteristic radio silence has so far condemned such musings to the realm of pure speculation.

So until then, put in some cursory consumer research to see if the Switch 2’s current pitch is enough to persuade you.

My personal verdict on one year of Switch 2?

It feels good to be back.

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Notes:
All photos and screenshots used in this article were taken and touched up by me.

Wikipedia was consulted to confirm specific release dates, and to look up the launch prices of the other consoles mentioned in this article.

Altar of Gaming was consulted for some information on Nintendo’s launch titles for different consoles, supplemented with my own research and memory.

The CoD delusion

I still remember the first time I became a snob.

By the second half of the 2000s, Call of Duty had completely taken over the video game industry. The war-themed first-person shooter series had redefined what people expected from that genre, and its resultant omnipresence thence reshaped the medium of video games as a whole.

With its short and linear campaigns, an ever-increasing focus on multiplayer, and a penchant for cinematic realism, entries like the first two Modern Warfare titles (from 2007 and 2009) helped underline what gaming was now: a medium that had broken out of its niche and was, by most metrics, outpacing cinema in profitability.

Call of Duty was at the vanguard of this tectonic shift in the entertainment industry: it was shiny, grand and audiovisually impressive.

The only issue was... I hated what it was doing to FPS games. I did try many Call of Duty titles and even enjoyed some of them, but in the end I saw them as shallow and generic manifestations of a genre I once loved. Most of all, it frustrated me to see how audience and press alike stood in awe at the illusion of a cinematic experience with each new installment.

I had become a snob.

Even though being a contrarian and disliking the popular thing is a phase that many young people go through, there was genuine frustration behind my teenage facade.

To help you understand that, I’ll need to clarify my own history with the genre.

The rise of the Doom clone

First-person shooters had been among my favorite games ever since my dad and older brother introduced me to classics such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

Initially known simply as Doom clones due to the dominant influence of that iconic game, first-person shooters grew into a proper genre across the second half of the 1990s, going from faux-3D to full polygonal glory with Quake, proving their worth on consoles through Goldeneye, and displaying hitherto unseen storytelling prowess with Half-Life.

In a sense, the genre grew with the technology that hosted it, so when true 3D graphics1 became the standard, so grew the cinematic storytelling ambitions of game developers.

Stories that had previously been relegated to game manuals or sparing on-screen text were increasingly being acted out as you were playing the game, either in cutscenes or during actual gameplay.

First-person shooters certainly weren’t alone in riding this industry-wide trend, but with series like Halo and Medal of Honor, we can find quite a few shooters among its most iconic examples.

It was Call of Duty in particular that took this cinematic approach—made possible by the ever-advancing technology—to extreme heights, seeking to mimic that larger-than-life blockbuster feel which also defined many Hollywood productions at the time.

It was in pursuit of this filmic bombast that Call of Duty brought the cinematic approach to its logical conclusion, resulting in obnoxiously linear and restrictive levels with accessible, simplistic gameplay. Player freedom had the annoying habit of not meshing too well with scripted set pieces, leading the developers to restrict the former, treating such creativity as a problem in need of a workaround.

So while first-person shooters now looked more realistic and more spectacular than ever before, something was also lost along the way.

Back in the ‘90s, first-person shooter level design was something of an art form. The different stages in games such as Doom, Heretic and Blood were defined by a degree of non-linearity and modest amounts of backtracking.

As the player, you were typically tasked with finding keys—or some stylized equivalent more befitting of the game’s particular theme—to unlock different parts of each level. This meant that, in addition to blasting all the enemies in your way, you were expected to do some exploration, navigating to and through different parts of the map as the size of this ‘playground’ grew alongside your progress.

It was also a staple for levels to include many alternate paths, hidden rooms and secret exits that stimulated the player’s resourcefulness and observational skills.

Often, such level design reached a point where it could be described as labyrinthine, testing not only the player’s combat skills and resource management, but also their ability to mentally map their surroundings and keep track of their own progression in a fashion that could almost be described as Metroidvania Lite.

In these classic ‘90s shooters, you conquered the enemies as much as you did the levels containing them.

As first-person shooters adopted a more cinematic sense of progression, such level design became less compatible with the storytelling vision of developers. They instead favored to send the player from point to point along a narrow and pre-determined path, making sure they were strapped in for the Hollywoodesque spectacle that had been crafted for them, no expenses spared.

By the early 2010s, this was simply how most FPS games were made. The genre had become CoDified.

Some franchises even sacrificed their entire identity in pursuit of aping Call of Duty, hoping to emulate not just its style but also its obscene revenue streams. Many such attempts proved fruitless: in a previous article, I already described how FEAR 3 spelled the end of that series by adhering to the make it more like Call of Duty approach to FPS design.

Complaints about the restrictive nature of such games were also present back in those days, and it’s no coincidence that, along with the rise of the cinematic shooter, we also witnessed the advent of open world shooters.

FPS games such as Crysis and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (both from 2007) gave the player more freedom to express themselves than the genre had ever done before, but they were still a far cry from the puzzlebox design of the ‘90s classics. By and large, the latter design formula was seen as an archaic relic born from technological restrictions rather than possessing any inherent value.

Still, it was at the height of the popularity of Call of Duty in the early 2010s that we saw the rising promise of a new type of game. Or rather an old one.

“Boomer shooters”

Aware of the frustrations that some more hardcore fans of the genre started to air with the linearity and realism of the modern FPS, a handful of developers started to experiment with a more retro approach to design. This often came with the hopeful promise of the resulting game being ‘a throwback to the good old days.’

Games like Hard Reset (2011) and the 2013 Rise of the Triad remake pivoted, each in their own way, away from the dominant design philosophy of the age. The former did so by taking inspiration from ‘90s titles such as Quake, and the latter by simply creating a modern rendition of an actual ‘90s shooter.

Neither Hard Reset nor RoTT 2013 made by themselves much of a ripple in the water; rather than milestones, they were stepping stones towards the gradual resurgence of the old-school FPS.

Then, Doom was released in 2016. As alluded to by its bare-bones title, Doom constituted a reboot of the series.

Rather than trying to ride the trends of its day, the game was heavily inspired by the first two Doom games. Once again, the emphasis was on killing tons of enemies, with many of the levels being open-ended and fit for exploration as you searched for door keys to progress. Health was not replenished automatically like in most modern FPS games, but by health pick-ups that were laid out in the world or could drop from slain enemies.

Doom 2016 wasn’t a full throwback, though. It featured plenty of modern design elements, such as an emphasis on verticality and the addition of glory kills. The game nonetheless primed a modern audience for design that hinged on classic ideas, even if many players would not have fully realized this.

With its ‘modern retro’ design, Doom 2016 re-established the franchise at the forefront of AAA gaming. This was the spark that indie developers needed to extrapolate on the notion that classic design could still work in modern times, both commercially and creatively.

David Szymanski’s 20182 indie title Dusk then delivered one of the first throwback shooters that accurately captured the spirit of the ‘90s. The game featured graphics, gameplay and design that could have believably passed it off as a lost FPS from that era. So remarkable was this total dedication to the semi-open design of old that a new term was born to describe this archaic style: boomer shooter.

A hype train created in Build

With Doom having re-established itself as an FPS institution and Dusk rapidly becoming something of an underground hit, it had become undeniable that there was a market for people who craved a return to the classic design tropes. Complex levels, fast movement, an inhumanly huge arsenal, and no regenerating health: the old had become the new.

Further spurring the momentum of this emerging boomer shooter trend were two other important games.

Developed by indie studio Indefatigable, Amid Evil was released episodically along 2018 and 2019. It featured both aesthetics and gameplay that revealed its main inspirations to be Heretic and Hexen, two other short-lived yet recognizable IPs from the mid-‘90s.

Also in 2019 we saw the release of Ion Fury, which can best be described as a spiritual successor to Duke Nukem 3D, mirroring that game’s cartoon realism,3 talkative protagonist and abundance of pop culture references.

Something that ties all of the aforementioned games together is that they were created by people who possessed a deep understanding of the design legacy of first-person shooters—they had accrued many years of experience building levels adhering to the classic design philosophy that their modern reinterpretations then built upon.

Since this information is pertinent to our understanding of the nascent boomer shooter craze, we’ll need to dig a little deeper here.

• Amid Evil was made by two friends with a history in creating custom maps dating back to the ‘90s, and the pair had also worked on the Rise of the Triad reboot mentioned earlier.4

• Ion Fury, meanwhile, was created using EDuke32—a source port of the original Build engine. Build had formed the technological backbone of Duke Nukem 3D and a handful of other iconic shooters from the era. In fact, Richard “TerminX” Gobeille, director of Ion Fury and CEO of its developer Voidpoint, was also the creator of EDuke32 and is known as one of the most influential figures in the Duke Nukem community. Needless to say, his familiarity with classic FPS design would have become second nature well before development on Ion Fury commenced.

• Even Dusk, which was made by sole developer David Szymanski, shows clear inspiration from Quake, Doom and the more recent STALKER. Contrary to the people from the previous examples, Szymanski’s interest appears to lie in horror more than first-person shooters specifically. Still, the accurate retro design of Dusk, as well as some of his other games like Butcher’s Creek and Iron Lung, display the creator’s undeniable knowledge and versatility when it comes to video game development.

The point here is that these games arrived at the tail-end of a learning process that consisted of years, even decades, of immersion in first-person shooters and creation within their associated community spaces. The result of this process was a high degree of design literacy—an awareness of the genre’s history and what had made those old games work, as well as the creative instinct to exploit modern technology and meaningfully expand upon that old formula without betraying its principles.

Unintentionally, these games together also covered a lot of ground, invoking memories of Doom, Quake, Heretic and the Build classics, granting anyone who played all three modern reinterpretations a comprehensive overview of old-school FPS design.

In the early days of this retro renaissance, the term “boomer shooter,” while itself a tongue-in-cheek jab at archaic design, specifically referred to these games—ones that rejected nearly all modern genre innovations and adhered to this non-linear, old-school design philosophy.

It did not take long for the waters to become muddied.

Dilution

Even though their sales performance would’ve been nowhere near AAA territory, and they could at best be described as moderately successful indie titles, the triumvirate of Dusk, Ion Fury and Amid Evil built some tangible cultural momentum.

It was during this period—the late 2010s—that we saw the rise of content creators who covered this new underground trend in FPS design, with most notably YouTuber Civvie11 becoming a curator and cultural guide of both these new boomshoots and their spiritual forebears.

With this growing relevance also came more developers, frequently emerging from the Doom modding scene, who felt emboldened enough to launch their own commercial products.

Examples of high-quality boomer shooters include the ambitious Supplice, which had started as a TC (Total Conversion5) for Doom and since grew into a standalone game that is currently in Early Access. Or the brilliant Cultic, an intricately designed old-school FPS whose second chapter was released in the fall of 2025.

These are but two examples of the many games that made it to commercial release after Dusk and its fellow pioneers had paved the way, loyal to those same design principles of the oft-invoked ‘90s classics.

Curiously, as the number of boomer shooters grew, so did the array of different games that this term came to be applied to. While boomer shooters originally referred specifically to the modern reinterpretations of classic design, the term quickly grew to include those actual classics, as well.

Once this distinction between old and new had faded, the meaning of ‘boomer shooter’ continued to expand—or rather disintegrate—growing into a catch-all term to describe any FPS game that looked vaguely retro or simply differed from mainstream design conventions.

This is apparent from the way that games like Ultrakill, Turbokill and Mullet Mad Jack are often used as prime examples of boomer shooters—they are in some cases even referred to as such by their own developers—while none of them actually have much in common with the design philosophy for which the term was invented.

On its own, ‘boomer shooter’ becoming an umbrella term might not have seemed like a big deal, especially when the games it was being associated with happened to be great shooters in their own right.

Still, the loss of clear meaning was indicative of a more consequential trend, that being a worsening understanding of what ‘90s FPS games were actually like, and what made them good.

Okay, time to do some gatekeeping

In one of my first articles on this platform, I already covered Hellbound, just one of many examples of a game that claims ‘90s design heritage without actually understanding it. As it turns out, Hellbound was just the tip of the iceberg.

When you look at ‘boomer shooter’ communities today, for example the popular subreddit dedicated to these games, every other post is a new developer pitching their new ‘boomer shooter,’ which increasingly often boils down to an extremely generic, bare-bones FPS that does nothing new or interesting while also lacking those core elements that would put it in the design lineage of the original Doom and its clones.

Though this may seem harsh on those developers—I don’t fault them for using their creativity and having the actual courage to put something out there—it is the inevitable result of a process of cultural dilution.

In the case of boomer shooters, it works as follows:

1. The initial wave of boomer shooters is created by developers with long track records in classic game development, and who therefore possess a deep understanding of the design history of first-person shooters. As such, they know which design elements to extract from the classic games to generate a retro feel that blends well with modern playability without hurting authenticity. Of equal importance is them knowing what not to include.

2. Initially, this new trend spawns other creators who are cut from the same cloth, emerging from various modding scenes and possessing that same knowledge which allows them to develop ambitious new spins on classic FPS design.

3. As the trend continues to grow, it also begins to attract developers who may not necessarily have played the ‘90s games that the boomer shooters were based on, but who really enjoy these modern re-interpretations and want to expand upon them. Thus, their frame of reference is already smaller and their work becomes a distillation of classic design.

4. New games hit the scene that in some cases retain the quality, but not the spirit of the boomer shooters that paved the way for them. This then generates a snowball effect, where an increasingly broader array of FPS games is tagged ‘boomer shooter’, confusing both audiences and subsequent developers on what the term actually means, resulting in subsequent ‘boomer shooters’ straying even further away from the original premise.

5. As a result of the gamedev telephone game described above, the term ‘boomer shooter’ is rendered meaningless beyond describing any FPS that even vaguely looks retro.

This process might still not seem like much of a problem as long as it continues to generate good games, but the true problem is that this cultural mimesis nearly always leads to staleness and a loss of creativity. You can easily see this by looking at analogous occurrences in other parts of popular culture.

Take metal music, for instance.

Initially, metal was a singular form of music that, across the 1980s, branched off into different subgenres. The pioneers of these subgenres still possessed a wide range of musical influences. For instance, the trailblazers of American thrash metal were influenced by pop and rock music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, which can clearly be heard in the surprising melodic variety that emerges from this otherwise loud and aggressive form of music. Subsequent generations of thrash metal bands then became increasingly influenced by the thrashers that had come before them, leading to creative stagnation as the reference pool for subsequent artists became more narrow, and the knowledge of what thrash metal was and where it had come from faded from public consciousness.

The increasing staleness of recent boomer shooter releases is a product of this same incestuous dynamic, its deterioration sped up by the presence of the internet and the increased accessibility of basic game design tools.

A return to snobbery

The thing that actually prompted me to write this lengthy exploration of the FPS genre was the recent release of Mouse: PI For Hire.

While that game is widely being referred to as a boomer shooter,6 it has in fact drifted closer to the same design choices that throwback games such as Dusk and Ion Fury tried to escape from.

Bouts of extreme linearity, invisible walls that would make Call of Duty blush, a stamina bar, closed off arena-based encounters—if it weren’t for its rubberhose cartoon presentation, this would simply be seen as a modern shooter.

Naturally, though, the question of which subgenre a game belongs to has no inherent bearing on its quality.

After all, one of my favorite all-time FPS games is Selaco, whose creators have since the beginning rejected the boomer shooter label, as they rightfully pointed out that the design was inspired by Half-Life, Doom 3 and FEAR, all titles that had already diverged from the original premise of first-person shooters.

Still, with ‘boomer shooters’ once being a specific term for games that filled a specific void left by modern gaming, its complete disintegration does strike me as somewhat of a tragedy.

To be sure, one cannot fault small-time developers for wanting to latch on to a trendy term to try and find an audience for their game. It has however been disappointing to see critics—who ought to act as curators—in large part go along with the dilution of the term, their liberal use of the boomer shooter tag quickly rendering it useless to describe a game with any degree of accuracy. In doing so, they also helped remove the label’s function as a safeguard against the trends of modern FPS design that some of us had grown so tired back when Call of Duty still reigned supreme.

So, I once again find myself in the same position as all those years ago. Frustrated at how audience and press alike stand in awe at the illusion of an authentic experience, as each new ‘boomer shooter’ continues to clutter the idea of what the original FPS games were actually like.

It is a comforting thought, then, that at the very least, snobbery does not dilute over time.

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Notes:
Sources include those linked throughout the article. Wikipedia was consulted for basic data like release dates of the games mentioned, and for some extra information and sources on Amid Evil.

All screenshots taken by me, except for the Doom 2016 one, which was taken by my friend Premek.

When several of my friends contact me about the same new game, that’s when I know the hype is real. Not that I’m the arbiter of what’s hot and happening. But since I keep up with the industry so poorly, if even I can’t escape a new release, it must be something big.

Such was the case with Mixtape, which I’d already added to my overcrowded wishlist when it first popped up on my Steam feed. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one whose interest was instantly piqued by the prospect of a new narrative game coated in coming-of-age nostalgia.

With its gameplay focus on exploration and character interaction, Mixtape seems heavily inspired by the Life is Strange series, which happens to include some of my favorite games (as well as a few less than stellar entries).

Of course, the re-emergence of this type of game has, as if bound by contract, spawned a concurrent resurgence of those same talking points that have been making the rounds since titles like Dear Esther and Gone Home were released in the early 2010s.

These games, colloquially and often pejoratively referred to as ‘walking simulators,’ are light on actual gameplay, which leads some to conclude that they aren’t games at all, but rather interactive movies.

Personally, I do not subscribe to the antiquated notion that games should all be cleverly concealed tests of hand-eye coordination, but to each their own.

For Mixtape specifically, the fiery online discourse didn’t limit itself to regurgitated dunks on Telltale’s The Walking Dead, with its status as an indie game also coming under scrutiny.

As the title implies, Mixtape has a heavy focus on music, and with its licensed soundtrack including such big hitters as Iggy Pop, The Smashing Pumpkins and Joy Division, suspicions arose that the production costs of such a game would be beyond the scope of what we could reasonably categorize under the ‘indie’ label.

Look up anything about the game right now and you’ll need to exert little effort to stumble into discussions about this release being an ‘industry plant,’ or speculation about the publisher’s lavish care packages (which reportedly included a working CD player) having been an important factor in many official review sites showering Mixtape with rare 9/10 and 10/10 scores.

Between all this tiringly heated discourse, my own interest remained a simple one: the question of whether or not this is actually a good game.

At first glance, Mixtape seemed right down my alley. As mentioned, I had already been primed to appreciate ‘walking simulators’ through the Life is Strange series, and was therefore immune to complaints about the game from that particular angle.

And unlike the Life is Strange games—which mostly take place in the same era as their real-life release dates—Mixtape is set in the 1990s.

It was music to my ears: where most men are said to think about the Roman Empire at least once a day, I spend alarming amounts of time longing back to the ‘90s.

I suppose that a quiet homesickness for the years of one’s youth is a common experience, but there was something particular about that decade—those final years of the analog age before the internet definitively took over our lives—that makes it an apt host for the desire to return to a simpler time.

So if a game offers to take my hand and transport me back to those carefree days, let’s do it. Indie skinwalker or not, Mixtape was firmly in “shut up and take my money” territory with its premise alone, and so my playthrough started with high hopes and sick slopes.

The very first thing that stuck out to me about Mixtape was that... actually, it has a fair bit of gameplay. From the very first scene where you skate down a hill (or mountain—I’m Dutch, I can’t tell the difference) to an interactive French-kissing sequence(!), the game does throw quite the array of interactivity at you from the very start.

Sure, none of Mixtape’s gameplay qualifies as profound player interaction—depending on how charitable you are, you might either categorize these moments as quirky minigames or glorified quick-time events. Even still, such variety already puts Mixtape above any other narrative-driven adventure game I’ve played, as in such games, player input is oft limited to walking, inspecting objects and navigating dialogue trees.

Mixtape’s core narrative premise, too, shows promising originality. Rather than starting as a chronological story told from the protagonist’s perspective, the game explores scenes themed around the music that is purported to befit them—the eponymous mixtape. This sometimes makes said segments play out as interactive music videos rather than conventional storytelling scenes.

The songs are chosen in-universe by Stacey Rockford, whom we play as. She serves as not just Mixtape’s protagonist, but also its storyteller, often breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the player.

Stacey is set to leave the fictional town of Blue Moon Lagoon in Northern California behind for greener pastures, pursuing a career as a music supervisor in New York. Mixtape then shows us Stacey’s final day in her hometown, which she intends to spend with her best friends, Cassandra Morino, the rebellious daughter of a local police officer, and Van Slater, who fits the metalhead and stoner archetypes. Stacey has the entire thing planned out, both in terms of what they’ll do together on this bittersweet day, and the soundtrack that is to accompany their last hurray.

Such is the classic set-up for a moving coming-of-age story. Along with the characters, we revel in the warm embrace of our childhood cocoon, knowing that this will not last. Our friendships—bonds that once seemed unbreakable—will inevitably fade, as will that adolescent illusion of immortality and omnipotence when we get caught up in the banality of the every-day responsibilities that imprison us in adulthood.

Mixtape hits those opening notes well and sets itself up for a journey that holds considerable emotional weight. Its pre-digital1 1990s setting even wields the potential to add another layer to this transitional phase in the characters’ lives, taking us from something less advanced but sincere, to something more mature yet cynical.

Sadly, this promise of the premise doesn’t take long to become unraveled.

The main narrative tool that Mixtape employs for its exposition and general storytelling is the flashback. Typically, you will be placed in a room or other closed-off area, within which you can explore and inspect different objects. Some of these objects will trigger flashbacks to one of Stacey’s memories, and most of these also involve her friends Cass and Slater.

As the player, you then jump back in time to relive these memories, which are often tinged with amusing teenage embellishment, such as the trio escaping from the police in a shopping cart or Slater’s drunk walk through a video rental store where he knocks over all the display racks.

Most of these flashback segments are a few minutes in length and show how the three friends strengthened their bonds. As can be expected in a coming-of-age story, these memories are themselves light-hearted, with their emotional weight supposedly coming from the bittersweet realization that these glory days are to come to an end.

However, many of these memories have little bearing on the plot at large. The story is by itself already light on tension and character motivation, so with most memories adding little to raise the stakes, they appear more as random cutaway gags from Family Guy than something that has any chance of summoning an underlying emotion.

“Hey Lois, remember that time we escaped from the police in a shopping cart?”

Whenever a plot’s structure relies on flashbacks, the purpose of those flashbacks is to use past experiences to inform the present. Beautiful memories often come to carry an air of melancholy in the light of the present day, since we know those dear recollections to be forever stuck in the past, growing more distant with each passing year.

Whether it’s Stand By Me, Life is Strange or even Ocarina of Time, this is the core sentiment that nearly every coming-of-age work hinges on. “You can’t go home again,” as American novelist Thomas Wolfe once posed.

Mixtape instead points to such memories and goes: “Hey look, this was cool, huh?” It then cuts back to the present without lending us any further insight, seemingly content with the matter-of-fact recollection of a random moment in these teenagers’ lives. It’s this type of writing that invites accusations of ‘nostalgia bait.’

Presumably, the simple reason that the memories don’t feed into the main story as much as they should is that there isn’t much of a story to begin with. The entire game is written around the notion of this being Stacey’s last day in her hometown, and that is really all you get as far as the main narrative thread goes.

The only tension in the story involves deuteragonist Cassandra, who accuses her friend Stacey of abandoning her and Slater by moving to New York instead of going on their promised road trip together. Cassandra is also treated to the only potential nugget of character development throughout the entire story, emerging from her rebellion against her authoritarian father.

Meanwhile, Stacey reserves her most strong emotions for when an unexpected turn of events renders inappropriate the soundtrack she had in mind for the near future.

And... that’s pretty much it, as far as the plot is concerned. You navigate the aforementioned tensions from time to time, but the rest of the game is just Stacey, Cass and Slater vibing on their last day together, with the whole process never aspiring towards any insight more profound than ‘it can be hard being a teenager.’

It might be argued that this nonchalant approach suffices to render Mixtape a straightforward feel-good experience, but every scenario writer in the world ought to know that, at the very least, a story should have stakes and character motivation, and Mixtape’s narrative is starving in both departments.

Also worth mentioning here is that the game clearly doesn’t set out to merely be a mellow, good vibes only slice-of-life ordeal.

Throughout the whole game, the characters point out that this is the last day.

This will be the last time they hang out in Stacey’s room together.

This is the end of their childhood.

They might never see each other again.

Putting these realizations into words rather than leaving them unsaid shows that, not only is the tragic coming-of-age undertone undeniably intended by the writers, but they saw no other way of communicating this to the player than unceremoniously spelling it out for them.

So the intent for a deeper sentiment to take hold of the player is there, but remains impotent.

Even on a moment-to-moment basis, the roughly 3-hour story seldom managed to capture me in any sort of emotional state. Whereas the potential to do so is there for the taking, it’s the writing itself that undermines these magical, transcendental moments before they can flourish.

For instance, when walking across an abandoned railroad in a quiet forest, you can feel something brewing. The characters’ tone becomes more reserved, more serious, and something ethereal begins to arise. Could this be the point the game finally dares ride its melancholic undercurrent? Then, the very moment that a dreamy ambient track swells up, the topic of conversation switches to hidden porn magazines and boners, killing all of the scene’s momentum.

This is not an isolated incident, either. It happens again when Stacey and Slater retreat to the latter’s room because of a set-back involving Cassandra. Stacey begins to show some rare, genuine emotion (albeit through the lens of her mixtape being ruined, as per), giving the scene some contemplative texture. But before we’re even allowed to process this much-needed tonal shift, Slater’s mom offers the kids some cocktails—a throwaway gag that deflates the entire scene in what seems like a deliberate move.

I do realize that this type of writing—the detrimental overuse of comic relief—appears to be rather ‘in vogue,’ with shows like Stranger Things doing this constantly. Much to my chagrin but also, it must be said, great commercial success.

When writing a coming-of-age story like this, however, you have to at one point embrace the maudlin, mushy angst of your characters if you want any sort of emotional pay-off at the end. Sure, you’ll risk copping the usual ‘cringe’ allegations, but if as a writer you are not prepared to be sincere about the very nature of your story, then neither can you expect players to meet you at the game’s conclusion with any heart-felt sentimentality.

Where the first Life is Strange game just went for it and got away with an ample rap sheet of clunky dialogue and poorly directed line reads by simply being honest, Mixtape keeps flinching in the face of any raw emotion because it desperately wants to be liked by the cool kids in class. The unfortunate result is the lingering promise of a sentimental last day constantly being at odds with the he’s right behind me, isn’t he ass dialogue.

For a plot set in the ‘90s, Mixtape’s writing is foremost defined by the exhausting irony of present-day media.

And as befits a game so self-aware, the fourth wall is also broken at regular intervals.2 In most instances, this is done so that Stacey can tell the player about the artist and song which are to be used in the present scene.

It’s an interesting stylistic choice indeed, although I can’t help but suspect that its primary purpose is to make us aware of the game’s ample soundtrack budget.

My gut feeling also tells me that Stacey’s artist info drops have been inspired by similar such monologues from Patrick Bateman in the movie adaptation of American Psycho.3 I do hope that the writers are aware that those scenes were intended to portray Bateman as a superficial, culturally mundane douchebag, but I digress.

Taking into account my many complaints about Mixtape’s story, or rather the lack thereof, it might seem like I hated my time with the game. However, this is not the case.

Truly, the overall production of the game is a marvel. The cinematic direction is the most creative and forward-thinking in a video game that I’ve seen in a while. It’s fast, snappy and varied—more akin to a high-end animated movie than anything you’d expect in a game. This is complimented by the voice actors, who do a great job at making the most of the script they were given.

Of course, the licensed music is an integral part of the experience since it’s woven into the very plot. They might not necessarily be tracks that I would expect from a ‘90s music snob (they all listened to The Doors without exception, trust me on this one), but Mixtape does a good job at making the selected tracks part of the actual experience, which is not something you too often see outside of rhythm games, and for this the developers deserve their due credit.

In the end, Mixtape is an interesting audiovisual experience, but all throughout, you can see the promise of something so much more than that. And that is where I take issue with the game. Clearly visible are the contours of a more grand ambition on the developer’s behalf.

It would not make sense for a studio to take so much overt inspiration from games such as Life is Strange and Lost Records, only to deliver a series of sexy Unreal Engine 5 set pieces with not much else going on. It’s this discrepancy between intention and execution that brings down the experience as a whole.

In a way, though, I am still happy that Mixtape exists. There are many who have in fact enjoyed the game—some of you might even be angrily reading this article—and I am genuinely happy that these people proved able to find something in the game that I hoped but failed to encounter.

Furthermore, Mixtape could serve as a perfect example of how difficult it is to get the narrative-driven adventure genre right. Where a regular game might become a masterpiece even with an abysmal story, these ‘walking simulators’ can nail every aspect of production and still fall flat because the story is too shallow, insincere or otherwise lacking to do the heavy lifting.

It is an unfortunate occurrence, then, that such observations will be drowned out by moldy discourse about a supposed lack of gameplay, outrage about publisher care packages, semantic discussions about what constitutes an indie game, or the sheer disbelief over IGN’s hallucinatory panegyric of this game.

For me, the bigger takeaway is that Mixtape had a golden opportunity to revitalize the narrative-driven adventure for a new generation of gamers, but squandered it by opting for style over substance.

Mixtape feels like a Happy Meal of a game. It’s compact, somewhat tasty, and if you’re a professional reviewer it apparently even comes with a free toy. But after you finish it, you’re soon hungry for a proper meal.

Let’s hope we’re not left starving for too long.

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On the last day of April, MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) received its latest update. With it came a brand-new piece of content, titled the Night Market.

The Night Market is a PVE zone (Player vs. Environment; so fighting against hordes of computer-controlled enemies) where players quest through a mysterious, otherworldly realm all the while taking on powerful monsters.

Within minutes of the Night Market going live, complaints flooded the official forums, Reddit and Discord communities. Many players were complaining that the difficulty of fights taking place in the eponymous realm were too difficult.

So difficult, in fact, that people couldn’t seem to win them by themselves. They were forced to group with other players in order to achieve success.

With ESO being an MMO, a genre whose name includes the word ‘Multiplayer’, you might wonder why on Earth people would wail about being forced to play alongside others. Wouldn’t this be like showing up to a Smash Bros. tournament and being annoyed that you are not the only contestant?

“You’re playing an MMO, so if you don’t enjoy playing with others, maybe this isn’t your genre.”

Indeed, this is a common reaction against such complaints.

The thing is, as someone who’s happy with the increased difficulty of this new piece of content, which I’ve been playing near daily since it has come out, I understand the backlash.

In fact, not only do I understand it, but I see it as the inevitable result of years of marketing and development skewing the game away from its MMO origins.

To see how and why this all happened, we’ll need to start with ESO’s conception.

An online version of the popular Elder Scrolls series has been a topic of speculation ever since MMORPGs - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games - rose to the mainstream in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Especially when World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and grew into a pop-cultural phenomenon in the years following, it became easier to envision a similar game in the Elder Scrolls series.

Indeed, development on what would become The Elder Scrolls Online started but a few years later, when Zenimax took the project upon them in 2007.

Apart from a few landmarks, footage from the early stages of development is barely recognizable as being related to the game as we know it today.

Blatantly put, it looked more like a World of Warcraft clone than anything else. The obvious reason for this being that, at the time, World of Warcraft was what people thought of when they heard the word MMO.

There’s also the secondary influence of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, being the most recent installment in the series at the time. Out of all the Elder Scrolls games to date, Oblivion sits closest to the traditional high fantasy setting an aesthetic that also happens to define the Warcraft series.

ESO got its more gritty, realistic look because of Skyrim. Released in 2011, this fifth mainline game in the Elder Scrolls series became a massive success. With its Nordic theme, Skyrim had a frigid and dark aesthetic, tapping into the realistic grit that dominated the aesthetics of AAA games back in the day.

If ESO wanted to capitalize on the main series’ success, the devs felt like they had to make the game instantly recognizable for the many Skyrim fans around the world. This realization led to a massive pivot away from its initial conception as a Warcraft-adjacent fantasy game.

When ESO finally came out in 2014, it sported Skyrim’s faux-realism, and it featured several locations from that game. Even its control scheme was closer to Skyrim than traditional MMOs, and ESO also adopted the easy transition between first and third person, which had been a staple of the Elder Scrolls series for many years.

However, while relatively successful in marketing itself as an online alternative to Skyrim, ESO was still an MMO. And MMOs do not necessarily appeal to the same demographic as do solitary adventures such as Skyrim.

This exposes the core paradox in ESO’s design: it is an MMO that in many ways doesn’t really want to be one, which in turn clarifies most of the game’s by now 12-year history.

Especially in the early years, ESO did try its best to be what the general public expected of an MMO. Much of the content required grouping, and even the story content posed a pretty sizeable challenge to solo players. Levelling up was an integral part of progressing through the game’s main questlines. Furthermore, the game’s faction system determined much of the player experience; initially, players from different factions were separated from one another until very late into the game.

ESO’s first piece of new post-launch content also reflected this traditional approach. In September of 2014, the zone of Craglorn was added as a veteran adventure zone suited only for groups. This new area featured some of the toughest enemies in the game and - initially - it was a practical impossibility to complete the zone’s story without a few friends to aid you.

Craglorn wasn’t a success. It turns out that many players disliked having to group up with others to enjoy the new content.

It may baffle some to encounter this attitude within an MMO playerbase, but as it turns out, many of ESO’s early adapters were not so much MMO fans as they were Elder Scrolls fans who had sunk hundreds of hours into Skyrim and were just looking for a new adventure.

In short, players appeared to want a game experience more adjacent to the traditional single player entries into the series. This realization led Zenimax to alter their course considerably.

In 2016, they released the One Tamriel update, which removed a lot of the faction restrictions and changed the levelling system. In practice, they opened up the entire game world for exploration; newer players could see/do almost everything from the moment they left the tutorial area.

One Tamriel proved a success, and it gave rise to a model where players were treated to four major updates per year. A new zone would be added twice a year, featuring new quests and much other content fit for solo players, while the remaining two major updates would each introduce a duo of new four-player dungeons.

In the following years, Zenimax also tweaked the game in such a way that it became more and more solo player friendly.

Much sought-after rewards stopped being locked behind difficult group content and instead began to appear in the cash shop. Furthermore, the grindy mechanics typically identified as a major part of the MMO gameplay loop were toned down. Items were even added specifically to accommodate solo players and help out those players who didn’t have the time, energy or knowledge to make complex builds. In 2021, ESO introduced its first NPC player Companions, further reducing the need to dive into your next adventure with another person.

Many of the zone expansions added and sold after One Tamriel more explicitly tapped into The Elder Scrolls’ fame.

The 2017 Morrowind chapter was obviously inspired by the 2002 Elder Scrolls game of the same name, followed by Greymoor (2020) taking place in Skyrim, and both Blackwood (2021) and Gold Road (2024) featuring areas previously seen in Oblivion. All of this indicates a patent awareness of the appeal ESO might hold to Elder Scrolls fans who have spent 15 years (!) waiting for a new single player entry.

That at least part of the MMO’s demographic is meant to include fans of the old single player games becomes all the more obvious when we take a look at the actual marketing that is meant to sell ESO to new players.

In their promotional copy, ESO publisher Bethesda has for the longest time avoided using the word ‘MMO’ when describing the game. They instead favor ‘Online RPG,’ no doubt because the latter term is more likely to pique the interest of fans of Skyrim, a game whose popularity endures to this day.

Another common turn-of-phrase in ESO’s marketing is “play the way you want,” which refers to the freedom the player has to come up with their own playstyle, being able to select from an obscene amount of possible combinations between armor sets, skills, weapons and classes.

Personally, I have always disliked this phrase, because it implies that all content can be cleared regardless of a player’s build, which is pertinently untrue when it comes to high-end PVP or PVE. Veteran players might have to inform a player that they must change their build to run certain content, while the game’s marketing department has been telling said player for years that they can do whatever they want and win. As can be imagined, this is a common source of friction.

However, it must also be said that, due to both intentional quality-of-life additions and not-so-intentional powercreep, player build or skill did stop mattering for overland content. Overland content consists of questing and exploration, and it’s the part of the game that most new players will interact with. And it’s easy. Not easy as in ‘doable,’ but more ‘you have to actively sabotage yourself to fail.’

This complete lack of difficulty or challenge seems to be intentional, at least in part, as a means to not intimidate - and potentially chase off - new players.

Still, such design is a double-edged sword. Yes, new players siphoned from the Skyrim fanbase can explore freely without having to suffer the hardships of the traditional MMO environment. But the flipside is that these players will also not be confronted with the consequences of their own failure during the, by now, hundreds of hours of story content.

Failing to complete a quest because you can’t beat a certain enemy might suck in the moment, but it can also inspire you to look up more information about how the game works and what you can do to improve. All the sweeter will be the victory that waits at the end of this process.

Yet, since ESO has effectively removed the possibility of failure from the average player experience, this has allowed for a considerable gap in skill between veteran players and casual ones.

The contours of this gap become visible whenever the game has an event where players are required to participate in content that demands any degree of skill and/or coordination. Like clockwork, the official ESO forums become host to an array of complaints and litanies from players who are offended by the prospect of being ‘forced’ to step out of their comfort zone in order to get the full game experience.

Enter the Night Market. This tough PVE challenge is to be this year’s main piece of content, meaning that a lot of developer time and in-game rewards alike are tied to it. Contrary to the easy-going zone expansions of old, the Night Market punishes those who enter it without proper preparation. This applies to veteran players, let alone those who have thus far never felt the need to bother making a build or learn about the game’s more intricate mechanics.

As we’ve established across this article, ESO has spent years effectively gaslighting both itself and the players into thinking it’s not actually an MMO, but simply an Online RPG. You know, like Skyrim, but you can run into other people. This isn’t exactly a lie, either - it has been the gameplay reality for I want to say the majority of the playerbase.

Is it then fair to turn to these indignant players and tell them “it’s an MMO, get used to it,” when even Bethesda themselves actively avoids using that word? I should think not.

Even the promotional material in which the Night Market was announced and discussed, its lacking feasibility as solo content was heavily undersold. It was said to be ‘difficult’ or ‘tricky’ for those who ventured in alone, while the reality is that a good chunk of the content is downright impossible to tackle alone, perhaps outside of a small group of extremely dedicated players.

The Night Market then exposes this long-standing identity crisis that has taken hold of ESO. But it also offers opportunities.

Since this content has launched, I’ve witnessed a sharp increase in cooperation and coordination between random players. People are finally using the game’s Group Finder tool to put together teams to steamroll the market. Guilds are organizing regular events to run through the area and reap its rewards together. And after years of it getting worse, the gap between casual players and veterans finally appears to shrink again, if only a little.

The Night Market content still has plenty of issues which fall out of the scope of this piece, but with ESO being a live service game, this room for improvement may actually be filled over time.

An update in June will also add higher (though optional) difficulty levels to the old overland content, which in due time may weaken the Night Market’s current status as a rude awakening for casual players.

When we zoom out, there’s also an actual moral to the story for all of those of you who do not necessarily care about Elder Scrolls Online or any of its content.

The marketing of a game can have a lasting impact on the expectations of the playerbase, even shaping how they interact with DLC or other new content years down the line. This applies to live service games, but also to Early Access titles or even just regular, one-and-done AAA releases.

Player satisfaction is not just driven by the quality of the product, but also by them knowing in advance what the game is, and isn’t.

After all, on a platform such as Steam, the games with the best user ratings aren’t always the outright best titles available, but those games that do exactly as advertised.

Tired though PR jargon such as ‘expectation management’ may be, it is a large contributing factor to the success of a game. So if you’re planning to pitch your game to your intended audience, make sure that you can deliver on every promise.

And with that, I’m off to the Night Market again.

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Notes:
Cover image created by Senkai. Screenshots by me.

While everyone - myself included - was focused on the possibility of an Ocarina of Time remaster, Nintendo threw us a curveball and instead announced a remake of Star Fox 64, to be released for Switch 2 in just over a month.

Still, this news shouldn’t come as a total shock. Series protagonist Fox McCloud’s cameo in the recent Super Mario Galaxy movie already caused a surge speculation about a new Star Fox game being on the horizon. With the most recent addition to the series - Star Fox Zero - having been released over 10 years ago,1 a new space adventure was long overdue.

It’s also not the first time that Star Fox 64 has re-emerged on Nintendo’s release roster.

Originally released in 1997 - of course for the Nintendo 64 - the game was already remade for the 3DS back in 2011. The aforementioned Star Fox Zero, while technically a whole new game, was presented as a reimagining of Star Fox 64. And with Star Fox 64 itself being sort of a reimagining of the original Star Fox game for the Super Nintendo, it doesn’t seem like the series has covered a lot of ground across its 33-year existence.

In fact, the only Star Fox games that were notably different from the all-too-trusted formula have thus far been Star Fox Adventures, a Zelda-like adventure game that had the Star Fox IP slapped onto it pretty late in development,2 and Star Fox Assault, which featured on-foot segments that were met with lukewarm reception.

So in a sense, the Switch 2 remake of Star Fox 64 shows what the series is at its core: a mostly on-rails, arcade-like sci-fi shooter featuring anthropomorphic animals.

I shouldn’t then be enthused by the prospect of yet another remake that will not expand on the series with all-new content.

Yet I am.

As a long-time player of Nintendo games, I’ve learned not to get my hopes up when it comes to the company honoring its own games. They’ve demonstrated with F-Zero that they’ll gladly leave an IP to gather dust for decades without imbuing it with any new life (no, F-Zero 99 doesn’t count). For a while, it looked like Star Fox had met that same fate.

With the new game being in fact an old game, we’re not quite out of the woods yet, but even something as relatively straightforward as a remake is more than most Star Fox fans would’ve expected at this point.

More importantly, it is possible that the remake will prove a stepping stone towards a completely new Star Fox title. Should it be well-received, it would of course prove the series’ potential for still producing commercially and/or critically successful games, which wasn’t a given after the mild reactions to both Star Fox Assault and Star Fox Zero.

Beyond gauging audience response, the Star Fox 64 remake may also pave the way for a new installment on a more technical level. In remaking the game, the developers are able to focus on the technological possibilities for such a title on Switch 2 hardware, as well as exploring the cinematic potential of the series as seen in the official Direct. So they are expanding their understanding of Star Fox in the current era all the while developing new, potentially reusable assets, yet without having to divert attention to a new story and new levels.

A similar mechanism was at play with the 2023 Metroid Prime remaster, where Retro Studios’ remarkable technological feats achieved on Switch 1 hardware would no doubt have facilitated their subsequent game Metroid Prime 4’s appearance on that same platform, despite the Switch 2 era having already dawned.

Or take Japanese developer Grezzo, who were first tasked with developing a remake of Link’s Awakening for Switch, before then creating a brand-new Zelda game in the same style: Echoes of Wisdom.

It will therefore also be interesting to see who actually develops Star Fox - Nintendo EPD themselves, Grezzo or even a third party such as Koei Tecmo.3

These questions come to mind because, on some level, one cannot imagine Nintendo investing so much in all this new technology without getting the most out of it - and ‘the most’ would include an all-new game. And yet, it is Nintendo, meaning that such an approach is well within the realm of possibility.

Of course, we are just speculating, and we would still be justified in asking why Nintendo didn’t just go ahead and make this into another ‘reimagining,’ following the familiar Star Fox format but featuring all-new levels.

Meanwhile, online reactions seem to focus on the redesign of the game’s characters, which in itself is a curious rabbit hole. The design of characters such as Fox, Falco and Pigma appears to lean a little more into the animalistic than the anthropomorphic side. As seems to be par for the course now, this has prompted some people to go off on wild tangents online.

As my own initial reaction to these redesigns was a mere “Hey, that looks pretty cool,” I had to think of the point recently put forward by Fallout designer Tim Cain, who posed that people these days are too easily influenced by online discourse and ‘influencers’ instead of making up their own minds about games.

Time shall tell whether narratives regarding the game’s art direction choices endure as much as (justifiably) did the controversy surrounding the Marvellized writing of some of Metroid Prime 4’s NPCs.

Another thing that remains to be seen is whether - even if an all-new Star Fox title were to at one point materialize - Nintendo will finally be able to move the series’ design forward in a meaningful way.

Alas, even if that question will one day be met with an answer, we shouldn’t expect it for at least another few years.

For now, I am taking the daring stance that I am actually rather optimistic about this remake. If nothing else, it will allow for a new generation to be introduced to the series’ simple, smooth gameplay and unique setting without having to suffer the original’s framerates from hell and other assorted ‘90s jank.

It’s good to see you again, Fox. I was worried for a moment.

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It is difficult to survive in the modern video game industry. Studios are being axed by the droves, and even making a successful game is no longer a guarantee for survival or continued employment.

While the current situation is extreme, the industry has not been all that forgiving in any era. Historically, even popular franchises are usually just one or two disappointing installments away from getting left behind in the past. As someone whose favorite IPs growing up included Jazz Jackrabbit, Banjo-Kazooie and Conker, I understand this all too well.

Today I want to take a closer look at one of these franchise killers. A game that was released in 2011 as the third main entry into its respective series and - 15 years onward - remains its most recent sign of life.

That game is FEAR 3. Or, if we want to be more precise, F.E.A.R. 3. And if we want to be obnoxiously precise, F.3.A.R.

Now, the first FEAR from 2005 remains somewhat of a marvel. It was a linear first-person shooter that focused on intense, tactical combat interspersed with moments of horror that drew from movies such as The Ring.

While its main gameplay gimmick was a Max Paynesque bullet time mechanic where you could manually slow down time to shoot your foes more easily, it is best remembered for its enemy AI.

For programming the enemy combatants, FEAR’s developer Monolith Productions used a technique called Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) and incorporated a wide array of enemy voice lines, as squads of replicant soldiers would report to each other while hunting you down.

As explaining the technological underpinnings of GOAP would require a lot of space and also happens to fall outside my area of expertise, it suffices to summarize its net effects on the player experience.

FEAR’s clever combination of adaptive enemy AI and intra-team chatter created the illusion of hyper-intelligent enemy soldiers who were coordinating to take you out. It was the closest the FPS genre had come to making it feel like you were fighting human-controlled opponents without it requiring any actual humans.

As such, the enemy AI in FEAR felt revolutionary back in 2005, and it sort of still does. Its approach to programming the player’s opponents never quite seemed to catch on for various reasons, with the main takeaway being that this type of enemy only shines when the rest of the game - combat arenas, pacing - is carefully crafted around them.

Still, FEAR was itself a big enough success to turn into a franchise, which first of all resulted in two standalone expansion packs (this is before we started calling all additional content DLC), namely the excellent Extraction Point and the not-quite-so-excellent Perseus Mandate.

Then, in 2009, the game received a full-blown sequel, titled FEAR 2: Project Origin.

At the time, FEAR’s sophomore entry was already divisive. For one, it amped up the horror aspect - never the strongest part of the original game. To its dubious credit, FEAR 2’s horror is legit stomach-churning at times, the ending still being one of the most visceral scenes in a major video game to date. Look it up at your own peril.

Still, the biggest complaints hurled at the game concerned the gameplay proper. FEAR 2 felt more modern for its day. This is not necessarily a good thing when you consider that the first installment is one of those titles that is still beloved by genre purists today - perhaps the very last FPS that can be considered a true old-school classic rather than a retro call-back. The sequel already started to stray from that modern vintage sweet spot.

True to the trends of the day, FEAR 2 introduced a cover system - one that did not always cooperate, at that - replacing the first game’s more traditional lean mechanic.

Though FEAR 2 did not yet introduce fully regenerating health to the series* (here’s your foreboding), it did reserve a bigger role for body armor to dampen incoming damage, thereby putting less emphasis on the tactical hoarding of medkits, as was prominent the first game.

Generally speaking, it was still unmistakably a FEAR game. Intense gun fights against smart enemies with an emphasis on bullet time... the vibes were still there, albeit in more modest measure.

At the same time, the writing was already on the wall, as some subtle tweaks applied in this sequel had exposed its undeniable push towards being a - for its day - modern FPS that showed hints of preferring to chase trends over setting them.

That leads us to FEAR 3. It’s the one fans prefer not to talk about, but given my self-imposed topic, I have little choice.

Where FEAR 1 and 2 were made by Monolith Productions, the third game was instead made by Day 1 Studios, whose previous involvement with the franchise had been limited to porting the first FEAR to consoles.

More importantly, the publisher was now Warner Bros., who appeared to have a firmer grip on the direction of the game.

This new constellation of creators and funders for the series explains how it had by its third installment completely pivoted away from its classic FPS roots, and instead became the umpteenth shooter to try and fail to ride the Call of Duty hype wave.

Back in the early 2010s, the dominant Call of Duty franchise represented what a modern shooter was. Its blueprint was largely adopted for the design of FEAR 3.

Gone were the medkits from the first two games, with the player now having to rely on fully regenerating health.

By itself, this may not seem like a big deal. Even back then, the argument in opposition to a regenerating health system for first-person shooters was in part driven by knee-jerk reactions against the rapid modernization of the genre.

However, FEAR 3 is the perfect example of how deeply such a system alters the moment-to-moment gameplay experience.

In FEAR 1, the encounter design was gradually built up. Throughout the first few levels, you would encounter small numbers of enemies from time to time. Their aforementioned ‘intelligence’ made these fights exciting and tactical, but with good use of the bullet time mechanic, they were very much winnable. As you became stronger through experience and some modest upgrades, so grew the challenge of each subsequent skirmish.

Between the encounters, you scavenged for ammo and armor, as well as medkits. These health packs could be stored in your inventory (up to 10 at a time) and you could choose when to use them.

These breathing moments between fights were also used for story exposition and horror sequences that set the atmosphere. It was a consistent rhythm of moments of fight or fright that fed off of each other.

The quieter sequences also served a gameplay purpose. Because you relied on pick-ups, the game could not anticipate exactly how strong you were at a given moment. Where one player might’ve made it through a combat encounter without a scratch by playing patiently, another maybe ate through their entire medkit supply as they went in all guns blazing.

FEAR’s level and encounter design had to account for this, both by scattering enough pick-ups and upgrades between fights, and by making sure that each scrap remained, by itself, possible to overcome.

Moving on to FEAR 3, this entire rhythm was no longer needed.

As with its main inspirator, Call of Duty, the combat in FEAR 3 was a constant chain of intense action. After all, with the player being able to regenerate back to full health by crawling behind cover for a few seconds, the encounter designers no longer had to hold back and could just throw wave after wave of dumbed-down enemies at the player.

In a sense, the player themselves ceased to exist as a variable.

As a result, the game became a more generic, exhausting experience. When you include a regenerating health system, you have to keep challenging the player with constant incoming fire, overly aggressive horde-based enemies and high-damage cheap shots (i.e. an abundance of snipers and grenades) to prevent the ordeal from becoming a cakewalk.

The addition of regenerating health had almost single-handedly changed the combat from a thrilling cat-and-mouse game like no other to a generic shooting gallery - like whack-a-mole with a gun.

And yet, perhaps the most puzzling design decision of FEAR 3 was its heavy focus on co-op.

The first two installments had both been single player-oriented games, but FEAR 3 appears to have been designed primarily around co-op, even if the campaign is also playable solo.

While there is plenty to be said for and against the co-op campaign and its impact on the single player mode, the main takeaway is that it’s just another step further away from what had made the franchise popular a mere six years prior.

Even if neither of the game’s predecessors had been overly frightening, the horror part of the equation had been core to the series’ identity from day one (it’s in the IP’s damn name, for crying out loud), and here it just fell flat on its face from the start of the campaign. In part because the nature of co-op just makes everything inherently less scary, but also due to many of the levels themselves seeming like they were ripped out of the maligned military shooter it had copied its homework from - its favela level being an obvious example of how blatant this ‘inspiration’ at times was.

Looking at stories from the FEAR 3 development cycle, one gets the impression of an overbearing publisher who insisted on replicating the popular gameplay gimmicks of the moment without any respect for the franchise’s heritage.

Most illustrative is an anecdote** where one of the Warner Bros. representatives saw his kids playing Call of Duty, and walked into the office the next day, telling the FEAR 3 developers to “make it more like Call of Duty” without specifying what exactly that should entail.

From this curious approach to game direction we can draw a lesson so painfully obvious that it feels almost redundant to point it out.

The moment a publisher or developer tries to emulate the success of a rival by just trying to visually repackage their product and sell it under a different name, they are playing a very dangerous game.

At one point, the smash hit series that took over the industry or conquered the hearts of gamers on a grassroots level did so because it was different from what was already out there.

Call of Duty itself, while its single player campaigns have always been woefully simple on a gameplay level, rose to prominence because its unprecedented feel for Hollywood-inspired cinematics spoke to the imaginations of gamers who at the time simply weren’t used to such production values in their medium.

This doesn’t mean that every successful game should then reinvent the wheel and offer a completely novel experience. Nor that every game should be this artistically immaculate passion project developed without any commercial considerations in mind.

The reality of a for-profit industry is that you should always consider whether something will resonate with your target audience, which in turn largely determines whether development will be viable on an economic level. But in doing so, you can still produce something that you - as an individual developer and a company - believe in.

Spectacular failures such as Concord and Highguard have recently demonstrated that gamers are quite apt at sniffing out products that came out of the board’s desire to get a piece of the live service pie rather than a coherent approach to game design. It’s this phoniness - this desperate attempt to ride the coattails of an industry leader - that can kill games and even franchises.

In the case of FEAR 3, this final installment saw the young franchise sacrifice its entire identity in an effort - equal parts desperate and confused - to benefit from another game’s success.

The result?

A poorly sold game with a bad reputation. The sad final chapter of a franchise that started out as something unique, but compromised its own principles along the way for the dubious reward of becoming yet another generic shooter that went straight to the bargain bin.

FEAR sits then half-forgotten. A long-dormant series that is remembered by some for its amazing first entry but never really reached those heights again.

And while there is little hope that the IP will ever be brought back to life, let alone in a way that satisfies its few remaining fans, it is a small consolation that there are projects which have honored FEAR’s legacy better than the actual last installment of the series had done.

Trepang2 takes heavy inspiration from FEAR, copying its bullet time mechanic and looking stylistically similar. Though a very respectable side quest for fans of the old FEAR, I personally disliked the encounter design, as it leaned too much into the ‘clown closet’ approach of spawning enemies into the arena, which deviated too much for my taste from the smaller-scale skirmishes that had made the original FEAR so unforgettable.

The Early Access indie shooter Selaco comes much closer to replicating FEAR’s concept of duking it out against intelligent enemies, where you feel like you have to fight for every kill, and player mistakes are duly punished. Selaco’s level design is more reminiscent of Doom 3 and Half-Life, but the FEAR inspiration is unmistakable, and makes for some of the best FPS combat seen to date.

Maybe this is the silver lining of it all. That no matter how poorly a franchise is treated, there will always be developers waiting on the sidelines who, in lieu of saving the IP itself, preserve and evolve those ideas that had made the gameplay work, allowing old fans and new generations alike to enjoy them in the modern age.

We needn’t wait for F.E.4.R. after all.

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Notes:
*There are two interesting things to note here. First, the developers did apparently intend to include fully regenerating health but cut it mid-development, explaining some of FEAR 2’s weirder balancing.

Second, FEAR 2 did include partial regeneration in the form of a mercy system, where your health would always regenerate up to 30 if you were really low. The game’s Wikipedia incorrectly mentions that FEAR 2 introduced this mechanic, when in fact FEAR 1 already had something similar, but it was slower and only went up to 25, making it perhaps less noticeable to the player.

**Despite my best efforts, I cannot find the source of this story, as I came upon it many years ago, so apologies for that. Its sentiment still corresponds with the many stories about the game’s rough development process that have since come out, and so I decided to still include it for its easy-to-grasp and illustrative nature.

So Substack recently added auto-translation to the feed, which in my case meant notes from a lot of familiar faces suddenly appearing in Dutch.

This felt like a linguistic flashbang. As if I’d entered a room full of people without first having put on some clothes.

I felt seen.

It may be difficult to convey this emotion to people who grew up speaking one language, or whose first language is so ubiquitous that encountering it in the wild should never come as a surprise.

Yet with English being my second language, it can be strange stumbling upon either Dutch or English in the ‘wrong’ context. For me, Substack is an English environment, so suddenly seeing everyone’s posts translated into Dutch was quite jarring.

Another environment that to me is firmly English, is video games.

I remember when I bought a copy of Crash Tag Team Racing way back when. It wasn’t the most amazing game to begin with, but I had to quit playing it because the language - both text and voice - was set to Dutch.

Now, I’m a native speaker of Dutch. I don’t dislike my own language at all (as is a bit of a trend among younger Western Europeans*) and yet this experience became unbearable enough for me to abandon the game in its entirety.

So what’s going on here?

A base level explanation is that I’d simply gotten used to playing video games in English. Dutch localization was rare in the early 2000s, and as a result, many of us grew up playing the English versions of games instead.

It makes sense, too. There are relatively few native speakers of Dutch when compared to other European languages such as English, Spanish or French. This means there is not only a smaller pool of capable translators, voice actors and writers, but also a smaller potential audience to justify the cost of a drawn-out localization process.

For the longest time, this had an effect on not just video games, but all of media.

When I grew up, channels such as Cartoon Network used subtitles instead of voice dubbing. Big productions aimed at children, e.g. The Land Before Time**, did have Dutch voice dubs available, but at the cinema, parents were still able to choose whether to take their kids to the dubbed version or the subtitled one.

Likewise, video games - a much more niche medium than television at the time - were primarily available in English.

This has actually had a significant effect on the linguistic aptitude of our population. The Netherlands still ranks among the world’s best when it comes to the average English proficiency of the population. That our nation’s children grow up with the language all around them in the form of movies, games and music probably has a lot to do with that.

A conclusion you could draw is that Dutch localization in games is unwanted because, quite simply, we don’t need it. If we grew up learning English from Ocarina of Time, why would we want to play Tears of the Kingdom in Dutch?

Still, this doesn’t quite explain the visceral reaction some of us have when we have a surprise encounter with our own language in a game, so we’ll need to peel away at this question a little more.

When discussing the difficulties he encountered while translating his work into English for the first time, Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen remarked that “when we speak another language, our personality changes a bit.”

While most bilinguals can probably relate to this on an instinctive level, there appears to be actual science behind it.

Reduced emotional resonance of language refers to the phenomenon where many bilinguals appear to feel less emotional intensity when speaking in their second language. This has the curious effect of actually making them feel more comfortable touching upon emotional or otherwise sensitive topics in their second language, and they’re also more likely to swear.

While I’m not sure if ‘emotionally less intense’ fully applies to myself when I speak English, I do notice a subtle difference. I feel like I am slightly more extraverted in English because I feel less vulnerable. Perhaps it’s because I’ve learned to choose my words and shape my speech patterns more consciously in English that I paradoxically feel more secure in this language than I do in my native tongue.

On a related note, it is my (I should add - completely unresearched and therefore scientifically unfounded) hypothesis that, with video games typically being an escapist medium, playing them in a different language can facilitate immersion.

By detaching you from your immediate surroundings even just linguistically, it becomes easier to forget that you’re ‘just’ playing a video game.

Therefore, a game throwing a Dutch dub in your face out of left field can feel like a rude awakening. “Damn, I’m still stuck here with you guys.”

To make things even more complicated, both culture and the actual quality of the dub also come into play.

The Nintendo Treehouse is an internal division that, among other things, handles the (American) English localization of the company’s Japanese games. They don’t simply translate the words from one language into the next. They also make sure that jokes or cultural references aren’t lost on English-speaking audiences, and they even come up with original names for characters, places and items.

In essence, they’ve been creating an entire language around Nintendo’s IPs that conveys both the intended meaning and - crucially - the vibe to non-Japanese audiences.

It exemplifies what localization entails: the translation of in-game dialogue is certainly a part of it, but ideally, it is almost a cultural overhaul of the product as a whole.

But of course, Nintendo is an industry titan with multiple international divisions and decades of tradition. Their thorough localization process is outright unavailable to most other developers.

Many other studios outsource localization to external parties who may or may not be in actual contact with the writers of the game. This is where things can get a bit iffy.

Especially in the early days, translators didn’t always have experience with video game lingo, which could result in translations that were technically correct, but came across as archaic or dissonant to experienced gamers.

Literal translations can end up sounding awkward because they just don’t correspond with what anyone would actually say. This was illustrated masterfully by Doom Youtuber decino when he uploaded a video for April Fools in which he commented on his playthrough of a custom Doom map in his native Dutch, using literal translations for every single enemy, item and mechanic in the game.

His video inadvertently laid bare the difficulty of localizing such a game, because while I was laughing at all the ridiculous terms he was using, I couldn’t help but wonder: how would one properly translate these terms?

Then there’s the cultural aspect.

In a previous piece, I wrote about the importance of verisimilitude in more story-heavy games in order to keep the dialogue flowing naturally.

If you haven’t read that article - you rebel - the short version is that verisimilitude refers to the plausibility of the dialogue (and other aspects of the story) within the context of the respective fiction. To put it simply, it’s the question of “would this character choose these particular words in this particular situation?”

What makes this all the more difficult to achieve is that verisimilitude can morph as the language changes. You can produce a perfect translation of a piece of dialogue, capturing the exact meaning of the original line, and it may still end up feeling off.

Take the phrase: “So what’s your story?” This is a question I hear pretty often in movies when Character A is trying to get Character B to talk about themselves. I could be wrong (and feel free to correct me if I am), but it seems like, in the US, this is an acceptable question to ask someone you’ve just met.

However, if I were to translate this question into Dutch and ask a compatriot “Wat is jouw verhaal?” I would at best get a weird look, if not a crude “Leave me alone, weirdo.”

This is because, within Dutch culture, it is not encouraged to talk about yourself. Our society may by now be highly secularized, but it is rooted in Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism that values piousness, hard work and humility.

So when you ask us to narrate the story of our own life as if it were a Hollywood movie starring ourselves, chances are it’ll make us feel deeply uncomfortable.

It goes against our very being.

A specific example though it may seem, such cultural dissonance is a factor of why I and so many of my countrymen cringe when listening to a Dutch dub of a game. Even if it’s just a little too boisterous, too expressive or too poetic, it starts to feel unnatural.

In such a case, even an imperfect English dub would give us much more room to tap into that sweet, sweet suspend disbelief and lose ourselves in the experience.

Just to be clear, I don’t oppose the availability of different dubs, since they can be excellent accessibility features.

Speaking for myself, though, I’ll always prefer to either play a game in its original language with English subtitles, or just in English. There are just so many things that can go wrong in localization that, to me, it’s not worth the risk of turning an otherwise grappling experience into a bad joke.

As for Substack’s new auto-translation... Well, I suppose it’s a nice feature, but I’m glad that I was able to turn it off.

Although it was fun seeing all of you speak Dutch for five minutes.

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Notes:
*For years I’ve noticed not just fellow Dutch people but also young people from countries such as Portugal and Norway express a certain distaste for their respective native languages. They will often even claim that they are better at English than their own language, but this is never actually the case.

**I just want to use this opportunity to point out that, in the Dutch dub of The Land Before Time, the voice of Littlefoot was provided by one Willem Rebergen, who would later become one of the most respected hardstyle DJs in the world under the name Headhunterz. This factoid serves no purpose but it absolutely blew my mind when I found out about this, since I was a fan of both. So here you go.

A man once stated that Aldous Huxley’s famous and universally acclaimed novel Brave New World was unfelt, false, unacceptable and a pile of trash.*

Firm words to be sure, and ones that we could’ve dismissed as ignorant slander had they not been uttered by one Ferdinand Bordewijk, a brilliant author in his own right, and one who has himself dabbled in dystopian fiction more than once.

Bordewijk (1884-1965) is considered a core part of the Dutch literary canon and several of his works are still taught in our schools, but he is virtually unknown beyond our borders.

It has always fascinated me that he held such a strong opinion of Brave New World, seeing as at the time he occupied a similar literary niche.

Where did such a firm dismissal come from?

With Bordewijk having made the comment in a personal letter without much elaboration, most we can do is engage in some educated speculation based on what we know about the author and his work.**

One possible angle emerges from one of Bordewijk’s most famous books.

His novella Blokken (Blocks) was published a year before Brave New World in 1931 and is often compared to it. It speaks of a technologically advanced society that has successfully erased every trace of individuality and privacy.

Blokken is remarkable for how it was written. The language employed by Bordewijk is clinical, impersonable. Events are described without emotion, and individual characters are only mentioned sparingly - almost reluctantly.

After all, if the society portrayed in the novella lacks all warmth, emotion or any trace of individuality, then why should the writing be imbued with those privileges?

A similar approach was chosen for Bordewijk’s 1934 novella Bint. In that story, the eponymous Bint is the principal of a high school that has since several years striven to instill ‘an iron discipline’ in its students.

The story follows a new teacher, simply known by his surname De Bree, who fully buys into Bint’s philosophy and is tasked with teaching a notorious class full of bullies and other assorted troublemakers.

Where in a Hollywood script, this would’ve led to a book-long journey toward mutual understanding and reconciliation, De Bree gets the class under control within a few pages, dishing out Bint’s iron discipline without mirth or mercy.

In Bint, too, the writing itself is part of the system that it portrays. The writing is short, compact, to the point. Almost ugly.

It is exemplary of Bordewijk’s New-Objectivist style, and along with Blokken, Bint is its most zealous disciple. Often described in Dutch as reinforced concrete style (‘gewapend-betonstijl’), the writing is indeed nigh impenetrable.

So too the characters within the book are described with a drabness that reflects the cold nature of the system. Their teeth are said to be ‘brown,’ and the imperfections in their faces are highlighted as if illuminated by the bleakest striplight.

Even their names appear as strange mutations of reality. These are often bastardized versions of names of public figures and shops that were prominent in Bordewijk’s time.

Klotterbooke, Kiekertak, Te Wigchel, Van der Kabargenbok.

To a native speaker such as myself, these read like a glossary of monstrous names that wear the skin of my language, but seem mere imitators. They offer no comfort - no hope that there are real people with real human emotions hiding behind these mutated names.

All apart from one Jérôme Fléaux, a student from one of De Bree’s other classes and the only character whose first name is even mentioned in the book. In accordance with his flowery French name, he is depicted as being beautiful, even feminine. And as such, De Bree - adept of a system of iron discipline - abhors him instinctively.

Bint is a fascinating novella because it goes to the absolute extreme to display the principal’s soulless system.

Like Blokken, Bint has been described as a thought experiment, since it is not a traditional cautionary tale about a totalitarian system.

The novella presents its system as-is. You can see its benefits: the rowdy class from the story’s beginning is swiftly tamed, to a point where any disorder in the school is brought under control without the teachers even having to intervene anymore.

But throughout it all, you can also feel its inhumanity, as the immense emotional cost of this system begins to emerge. The suicide of the student Van Beek, inspired by the lack of empathy he received from the teachers, is followed by the eventual resignation of Bint himself.

De Bree speculates that Bint’s system worked so perfectly and ruthlessly that the man himself could not even even withstand its immense pressure as he got older.

The novella’s conclusion is ambiguous. There is no moral lesson, no resolution, no clear takeaway. It was simply a literary exploration of an oppressive system brought to its natural conclusion and then retired.

Given the time of its publication in the mid-thirties, the most obvious interpretation of Bint is that it is an allegory for Fascism.

Since the book refuses to offer the reader respite by means of a clear moral instruction, Bint was initially interpreted by some contemporaries as being pro-Fascist, though it is now difficult to see how anyone who has actually read the story could fall in love with the system it describes.

Bint’s heartless discipline remains a thoroughly unattractive proposal when one taxes the damage it does and takes into account that its uncompromising frigidity likely consumed its very inventor.

In Blokken, too, the perfect totalitarian system is described almost passively, the conclusion of that book arriving just as the inevitability of its eventual collapse becomes visible like a speck on the horizon.

No respite, no relief, no message, little to even ruminate on.

It is perhaps in the nature of this approach that we can trace part of Bordewijk’s distaste for Brave New World.

Brave New World is not overtly moralistic either, but it does inspire some more poignant questions. What value lies in the absence of suffering if it goes at the cost of genuine human expression? How much are we willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of mindless pleasure? What is an acceptable price of stability when the alternative is boundless chaos?

Whether it was the original point of the book or not, Brave New World continues to be discussed as a warning against where we are headed as a society, and in some cases as a condemnation of where we already are. A prophecy of sorts.

Bordewijk’s work, meanwhile, does not appear to be interested in being used as a guide towards or away from anything.

It is an unusual perspective that appears lost in this day and age, where most works of fiction tend to be written, filmed, produced or otherwise presented with a baked-in message or moral lesson. Whether coated in metaphor or laid out in the open, it can be exhausting, for example, to continue watching a movie if in the first 10 minutes one can already grasp the point it is going to make across the remaining 90.

In the grand scheme of things, video games are still a nascent storytelling medium. The stories featured in games tend to still follow the Hollywood formula - straightforward renditions of the Hero’s Journey where the moral lessons will emerge from the price the protagonist has to pay to reach their triumph.

This is by no means a complaint against said formula - it is functionally sound - but rather an observation that the messaging in most games is rather on the nose.

One of the most famous video game dystopias is shown to us in BioShock, which makes a point out of disclosing to us the philosophical underpinnings of Rapture while sharply contrasting them with the society’s practical failure.

Bordewijk would probably have hated it.

This made me try to envision a game that adheres to the literary philosophies of Bordewijk. One that merely shows us a heartless system in which everyone and everything has to participate - the player included.

A game where everything from the dialogue to the UI, the in-game architecture and the gameplay itself obeys the laws - written and unwritten - of the dystopia it chooses to present. Yet resisting the urge to reward you, the insignificant player, with a cathartic lesson at the end.

An ultimate exercise in show, don’t tell.

It may be hard to imagine that, with the current state of the industry and people’s media preferences, such a product has any chance of materializing.

Yet there are examples of video game projects that were bold enough to indulge in similar artistic expression and experimentation.

MyHouse.wad was in part inspired by Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, and manages to employ the unusual medium of a custom Doom map to tell a story in a literary, artistically provocative way while at no point ceasing to be an actual game.

Sadly, much of Bordewijk’s work - including the novellas discussed here - does not appear to even have been translated into English. Perhaps because the language itself is so strongly tied to these impenetrable stories, Blokken and Bint are in a way untranslatable.

Any hope that their literary structure will be implemented in another medium may therefore be futile.

If nothing else, though, it’s a fascinating thought experiment.

Notes:
*The original quote is: “ondoorleefd, valsch, onaanvaardbaar en een enorm prul.” (source) I took some liberty with the translation to convey the tone of the writing.

The word ‘ondoorleefd’ by itself is almost impossible to translate properly. Its most literal meaning would be ‘not lived through’ and it appears to speak to a certain naivety on Huxley’s behalf for believing that the system he depicts would play out the way that it does in his book. ‘Unfelt’ is the closest word I could find (thanks Merriam-Webster) but it still doesn’t quite cover it.

Meanwhile, ‘enorm prul’ could variably be translated as ‘giant trash,’ ‘huge nonsense,’ ‘a piece of junk’ and other such flattering qualifications. The formulation itself is archaic in Dutch, so I just went with a translation that conveys Bordewijk’s explicit dismissal of the book’s value.

**The most exhaustive of these interpretations that I could find comes from Emile Smits. Writing for Cimedart, he poses that analyzing Bordewijk’s own dystopian novella, Blokken, reveals that the Dutch author had a fundamentally different understanding of the human spirit than did Huxley.

In Brave New World, the characters are no longer able to relate to anything in their world in a way that carries meaning. This contrasts the world of Blokken, where even within the perfect order of the collective state, the inherent unpredictability of man makes disorder inevitable and natural.

I’m probably butchering Smits’ thorough work with my summary. The article is in Dutch, but if you’re interested, consult your translator of choice.

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re playing a game, and one of the characters says something that just makes you go: “Pff, they would never say it like that.”

So what is that? That feeling that something’s not quite right. Being convinced that we know just how this figment of someone else’s imagination would’ve reacted to a particular situation.

I must’ve been around six years old when I managed to make my dad angry with just a few words.

He told me to do some basic task, probably something like putting plates on the table, and I excitedly retorted: “Ah, give me a break!”

The thing is, at the time I didn’t know what that turn of phrase even meant. I had heard a character say it in a movie and it just sounded like a cool thing to say.

Now, “give me a break” is not a thing a six-year-old would normally say. And so my dad found the source of this phrase following a brief cross-examination.

Unsurprisingly, television privileges were revoked until further notice.

That was probably the first time I realized that there are different rules for children and adults when it comes to choosing their words.

In that movie,* the adult character said “give me a break” to a kid, and it was considered acceptable. But when I said it to my dad, it didn’t go down so well.

Of course, adults and children have different speech patterns, as well as different standards for what’s acceptable. Parents will routinely tell their small children not to say words that they themselves use on a daily basis.

This realization that, as a kid, I and the adults in my life spoke differently would grow into a lifelong obsession.

When people speak, I’m not just interested in what they say, but how they say it. It’s not that I care about how appropriate they are, but I believe that their choice of words by itself can convey a lot of meaning.

Many people assume that how you think dictates how you speak, but the reverse is just as true, if not more. Maybe it’s why we’re so obsessed with how our children speak - if their language is bad, maybe that has a negative effect on their thoughts and their behavior going forward?

This fascination I have with the way people speak has had a big influence on my life. For one, it probably nudged me towards linguistics and literature when the time had come to pick an academic path.

But it also continues to have an impact on my daily life, specifically when consuming any form of fiction.

When I was a teenager, my mother watched a lot of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show that’s a true smorgasbord of curious fictional dialogue. Some lines are snappy, while others can be awkward, misplaced, artificial or delightfully ridiculous.

Often, when the detectives in that show were interviewing a child, it made me roll my eyes and say things like “a child would never say that.” This was always in response to a young child having said something that was too poignant, too profound or too witty. Something, perhaps, like “Ah, give me a break.”

It’s the most noticeable with children, because children have a particular, often more limited way of expressing themselves, yet in fiction their dialogue is nearly always written by adults. And since most of the audience also consists of adults, it tends to go unnoticed.

Even people who don’t share my fixation on language will take notice when something feels too off, though.

In SVU, the character Fin Tutuola (Ice-T) is often used by the writers to give exposition on lesser known topics. He explains things to the audience, but these explanations are woven into his conversations with other detectives as not to break the fourth wall. However, the intention of the writers to spell things out to dim-witted viewers is often hidden so poorly that none of the dialogue feels natural.

You’ve probably seen the memes.

“The kids are calling it razzle-dazzle. They sniff diesel generators because they think it’ll give ‘em a high.”

Video games being a relatively young medium, they too have often struggled with giving us dialogue that feels natural. That feels like something those characters would actually say.

In Heavy Rain, private investigator Scott Shelby sees a man force his way into a woman’s hotel room, and as her desperate screams can already be heard down the hallway, Shelby calmly states:

“Sounds like the hotel room’s gettin’ rearranged, and not in a good way...”

In the moment, this line feels ridiculous because it contains zero sense of urgency, and a real person would not stop to make a bad quip to themselves a few seconds before trying to save a woman’s life and possibly risking their own. As such, it feels off.

But again, what does ‘off’ mean?

Here, you could use the term ‘realistic.’ Indeed, it is not realistic that a regular person would react like that in such a high-stakes situation.

However, ‘realistic’ comes with its own set of problems.

When characters in Mass Effect talk about Faster Than Light travel, advanced spaceships and highly intelligent synthetic lifeforms, such dialogue is - strictly speaking - unrealistic because this kind of technology does not exist in the real world. Yet it doesn’t feel off.

Hence why we have to resort to a more academic term: verisimilitude.

Within literature and storytelling, verisimilitude refers to realism as it pertains to a certain context. So while FTL travel in Mass Effect is unrealistic because it doesn’t actually exist, it is verisimilar because this technology does exist within that fictional universe; its origins are explained in the game, and those are consistent with the sci-fi setting.

Here we can easily draw a line between something that doesn’t exist in the real world, yet does in a fictional one, but I would like to go further and apply the concept to the nature of dialogue itself.

Verisimilar dialogue is dialogue that corresponds to that character’s state of mind - to their specific reality within a fictional world.

Someone in a life-or-death struggle probably wouldn’t be inclined to make casual remarks that make light of the situation, so this in itself would not be verisimilar.

Still, the context matters too: if that character has been established to be a superhero, then maybe their supreme, unnatural levels of confidence would make such observations more likely and therefore verisimilar.

It’s a quality that morphs depending on the context, and once you start paying attention to this aspect of the writing, it can transform the way you look at fiction in general.

I can notice myself that the more dialogue-heavy a game is, the more I actively pay attention to the verisimilitude of the dialogue. Perhaps not even consciously, but instinctively.

It’s why, as I stated in my previous article, I am one of the relatively few people who prefers Life is Strange: Before the Storm to the original game it’s a prequel to.

In the original, I could often ‘hear’ the writers speak through the dialogue, breaking the illusion as I sensed the emanating cultural dissonance.** Before the Storm’s dialogue, meanwhile, felt more grounded and in line with what its characters would actually say.

Sure, protagonist Chloe Price could oftentimes be cringy, edgy or plain unreasonable, but in that game she’s a 16-year-old wearing studded armbands. How was she - realistically - not going to be all of those things?

Point being, dialogue being verisimilar doesn’t mean that it has to sound sophisticated or aesthetically pleasing. This quality depends entirely on the context of who utters it and in what situation.

It’s not just story-driven games that benefit from having verisimilar dialogue. In fact, the writers of any game that has dialogue should at least be aware of this quality, even when they then choose to ignore it.

I mention games in particular, not just because that’s where my personal interest lies, but also because video game dialogue, more than any other medium, has a natural inclination to not be verisimilar.

This is due to video games being full of dialogue that serves an ulterior goal:

• In a tutorial level, a character might explain to you how the gameplay works while desperately trying to maintain the illusion that these are in-universe instructions.

• In many open world games, conversations often take place when travelling toward a mission. Such dialogue will last just long enough to cover the travel time and liven up what would otherwise be a boring drive.

• In some games, there is not much room for dialogue at all, since it may hurt the flow of the gameplay. Hence, the writing may feel like it was tweaked for efficiency rather than a natural flow.

Fortunately, my argument is not that all video game dialogue has to be verisimilar. Sometimes, the best option is to just tell the player to press A to jump, and any attempt to conceal that within an in-universe training program will likely feel contrived and clumsy.

It can even be a stylistic choice to break verisimilitude.

A character such Principal Wells in the aforementioned Before the Storm uses unnaturally formal, technical language that sounds like it’d come from the Terms & Conditions of a software license rather than the mouth of an actual person. Still, this works as an expository tool, as it emphasizes the distance between this character and his students. This is what a principal sounded like to us when we were in high school.

Indeed, while the dialogue here isn’t verisimilar, it serves a clear purpose that verisimilitude by itself could not have achieved.

There are entire literary genres where verisimilitude is not a relevant quality. In Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels), the characters talk with a precision and eloquence that is never found in spoken language. This is a choice, because the characters are used as vessels for commentary on several moral, philosophical and theological issues, rather than fleshed-out, lifelike people with their own agency.

Whether they speak with the cadence of a normal person was never relevant to the author or this work.

So ultimately, my wish is merely for more writers to consciously think about why a character chooses a particular set of words to say something.

It’s the very simple question of would a real person in this situation actually say this?

But also, does it matter that they would?

If the purpose of the dialogue is to draw the player further into the illusion of an authentic, living world, verisimilitude is a useful quality to have.

To be sure, writing dialogue that is conscious of such questions is not easy. It requires one to have a deep psychological understanding of the character(s), of their socio-cultural background and of the lore that drives the universe they inhabit.

Even by itself, writing down words that are only supposed to be spoken can be an arduous process. I once had to write doctor-patient conversations for a language training software program, and despite my best efforts, I still have to cringe a bit every time I hear them.

Still, the more dialogue a game has, the more beneficial it will be to consider verisimilitude in spite of any other challenges.

Verisimilitude is also a good concept to be aware of when playing games.

Sure, it may be an obscure academic term, but it can help explain why an interaction between two characters felt off. Or why an interaction left such a deep impression on you.

This is important because the continued improvement of writing in video games does not just rely on writers honing their craft, but also on players who can point out what does and does not work, and are able to articulate why.

If nothing else, if your kid is being a bit too much of a smart-ass for their age, just tell them they’re not being verisimilar and send them to their room.

It’ll be a learning moment.

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Notes:
*This anecdote happened to me in its entirety. But since I spoke Dutch at home, the phrase was also in Dutch. The exact phrase was: ‘doe me een lol,’ whose literal translation is closer to ‘humor me,’ however in practice it has the same dismissive tone and intended meaning as ‘give me a break.’ The movie was a Dutch dub of Free Willy, and I don’t know whether such a phrase appears at all in the English original, so I didn’t want to mention it in the article itself. I did want to specify all of this lest I come across as one of those people who just makes up convenient anecdotes that just so happen to underline a bigger point.

**I didn’t elaborate on this for the sake of brevity, but I do want to give some context to those who are interested. Also, even though it’s a giant diversion from my actual point, I’ve been looking to include this somewhere since I’ve never seen anyone else point it out over the past 11 years.

While the original Life is Strange is a fascinating game that I love a lot, the dialogue could oftentimes pull me out of the experience. I’m not even talking about famous examples such as the overuse of “hella” or the infamous line “ready for the moshpit, shaka brah,” because those are pretty defensible in their own right.

In the game, Max will often make observations in which she gratuitously namedrops photographers, painters and other artists in her own internal monologue. This happens consistently throughout the game and I have always interpreted this as a remnant of the developer team being French. LiS was written by a French studio but then adjusted for American culture since the story is set in Oregon. These adjustments included things like parking spaces in the game needing to be bigger and replacing kisses between platonic friends with hugs.

The constant high-cultural signalling of Max strikes me as having flown under the radar during this process. In France - especially in intellectual/academic circles - it is customary to signal your perceived ‘good taste’ as a mark of social prestige.

I’ve had a lot of Southern-European and American friends over the course of my life, and my French and Spanish friends would engage in this cultural signalling pretty routinely while Americans would only bring up such topics if the context demanded it, if they even did so at all. So when Max was throwing around names in Life is Strange, it felt instead like one of the writers trying to flex their academic prowess to me through her. Hence, cultural dissonance.

Life is Strange, isn’t that the game with all the hipsters and teenage girls talking about their feelings?

Okay, that might not be the most elegant way to put it, but it’s not entirely wrong either.

The first Life is Strange game was released in episodic form across 2015. Well before the last of its five episodes was released, the hype had caught on.

A wise man once said that the most exciting games to get into are the ones that come out of nowhere and are awesome. That description certainly befits the original Life is Strange.

It’s not like narrative-driven games centered around player choice hadn’t been done before, and Life is Strange certainly wasn’t a perfect execution of the concept. Yet, with its high school setting and a knack for nostalgia that bordered on the melodramatic, the game had that x-factor which allowed it to become somewhat of a cultural sensation.

With its critical and financial success, Life is Strange became destined to grow into a franchise. Much has happened since then.

Now, in 2026, we are celebrating the release of Life is Strange: Reunion. A celebration that however comes with little fanfare, since it is likely that Reunion will be the last game in the series.

For reasons I will get into soon, Life is Strange’s expansion into a franchise hasn’t always been smooth sailing, to a point where - much like the game that started it all - Life is Strange: Reunion too felt like it came out of nowhere.

But is it awesome?

In order to answer that question and give the proper context to my views on Reunion, I will need to go deep. Like, full series retrospective deep. Don’t worry - we’ll get to the thorough review of the game itself, as promised in the title. But leading up to that I’ll need to take quite a bit of space to show you the long road that led to Reunion.

The purpose of this approach is to help you understand why Life is Strange has become an impactful series, yet was long plagued by the implications of its initial success. It is nigh impossible to discuss Reunion without first seeing where it fits into that equation. Only within that context can we fully appreciate what the game is and isn’t.

In choosing this structure, I hope to give those who haven’t played these games some much-needed context, while those of you who have will get a better idea of what I value in these games, since this can at times be highly subjective.

This might also be the last time I get the opportunity to write about a new Life is Strange release, so I want to answer the series’ presumed swan song with the eulogy it deserves.

(If you want some company on this journey, a while ago I made a LiS-inspired playlist, downloadable here.)

Back to Arcadia Bay - How we got here

Life is Strange: Reunion is named such because it reunites the main characters from the first Life is Strange game (henceforth referred to as Life is Strange 1): Max Caulfield and Chloe Price.

So to understand their role in Reunion, we have to go back to their debut from over a decade ago.

To summarize, in Life is Strange 1 we were introduced to protagonist Max as she reconnects with her old childhood friend Chloe. They join forces to solve the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Chloe’s friend and implied lover, Rachel Amber. In doing so, they make use of Max’s newfound power to rewind time, which of course comes with its own slew of moral questions and unforeseen consequences.

Given the success of Life is Strange 1 and the enduring popularity of both Max and Chloe, it might seem odd that it took us 11 years and four other installments to see them side-by-side again. But there is a good reason.

Life is Strange 1 ended with a major player choice. Playing as Max, you had the option to save your close friend Chloe, which came at the cost of letting a huge storm ravage the entire town of Arcadia Bay, killing many of its inhabitants. The alternative was the inverse of this dilemma: save the town, but let Chloe die. Bae or Bay, as it became known.

Obviously, a direct sequel would have to address the first game’s conclusion, essentially forcing the writers to canonize one of the endings. A move that would likely have pissed off all the players who went with the other option.

It was exactly this problem that would come back to haunt the series throughout much of its existence.

While Life is Strange was intended to be an anthology franchise, focusing on a different cast and setting with each installment, the success of the first game exposed the risk of that vision.

Clearly, the writers had struck gold with their setting - the mystical Oregon town of Arcadia Bay - as well as the characters who inhabited it. Max and Chloe became the subjects of much fan art and fan fiction, and even many of the secondary characters have their own sets of dedicated fans to this very day.

For the developers of the game, French studio Dontnod, to try and create an equally enchanting setting and collection of characters would be like trying to make lightning strike in the same place twice.

Even so, Dontnod made it clear on multiple occasions that, for as far as they were concerned, the story of Max and Chloe had run its course after Life is Strange 1. They had no desire to revisit these characters, commercially tempting though it may have been.

Still, we would soon see more of the characters - Chloe in particular.

In spite of Dontnod’s intentions, publisher Square Enix (which owns the rights to the IP) was able to delay the inevitable by tasking a Colorado studio called Deck Nine with the creation of a prequel, featuring the same setting and many of the same characters.

This prequel would become 2017’s Before the Storm and featured a 16-year-old Chloe Price as the protagonist, whom we follow during her tumultuous first days hanging out with the enigmatic Rachel Amber.

Initially, Before the Storm was met with suspicion. Rachel Amber was clearly not intended to be an actual character in the original game. Hence, this prequel was seen as an attempt to double dip in a setting that was always meant to be a one-off.

Blatant fan service, in the eyes of some.

Justified though such concerns may have been, Before the Storm proved both a sincere and successful tribute to the beloved setting, and to Chloe and Rachel in particular.

Its success was informed by Deck Nine’s ability to identify what had made Life is Strange 1 so unforgettable. It wasn’t the mystery, nor the superpower or the spectacle of the storm.

The essence of Life is Strange was and always would be the cosmic bond between two kindred spirits.

In Life is Strange 1, Max and Chloe.

In Before the Storm, Chloe and Rachel.

Though in both games, the conspiratorial intrigue and implications of the supernatural were both necessary to drive forth the plot and underline its more philosophical tones, they were - at least in my view - never quite the point.

It’s the very reason people latched onto these characters from the start. You’d either had a friendship that reminded you of them, or you wished you did.

Playing these games felt like being a part of these characters’ world. They tapped into this very basic desire that people have - to make a connection that matters.

A mundane notion at first glance. Though ultimately, nothing is quite as enchanting, magical powers be damned.

Sadly, this lesson would be forgotten over time.

Road out of Oregon

After the Arcadia Bay arc seemed to have nothing more to give, the series moved on in multiple directions.

Across 2018 and 2019, Dontnod followed through with their anthology vision and delivered Life is Strange 2, creating a whole new cast and opting for a road trip format rather than sticking to a single setting.

Before the Storm developers Deck Nine got their shot at a new game with True Colors, released in 2021. This installment also featured a new setting, but its idyllic Colorado town Haven Springs seemed like a more conscious effort to recapture that ethereal spark of Arcadia Bay.

That Square Enix essentially pulled a Sonic 2 and let two different studios work out their own follow-up to the original Life is Strange arc was already an omen. An indication that the series was indeed condemned to an identity crisis following its eviction from Arcadia Bay.

Curiously enough, the most defining aspects of these respective successors also laid bare their weaknesses.

Life is Strange 2 is almost an antithesis to the original Life is Strange, not only getting rid of the cozy setting that everyone had grown to love, but refusing to replace it with anything, courtesy of its road trip format. The result is mixed, with the game asking players to reinvest emotionally from scratch, but crucially offering just novelty and variation where series’ fans were desperate for something more stable to latch onto.

With its picturesque setting, True Colors did offer some solace in that regard. However, with Haven Springs drawing such clear inspiration from what had made Arcadia Bay so beloved, it also facilitated direct comparison. And Haven Springs just wasn’t quite the Oregon fishing town’s equal.

The release of these two games put us in an interesting position. True to Dontnod’s original vision, Life is Strange had branched out into a proper series that told a different story each time. Both Life is Strange 2 and True Colors accrued dedicated fans, but neither managed to replicate the impact of the game that had given the series its name.

It should be noted that these games can still be considered successes in their own right. They built upon what was already there and delivered products that had more ambition, higher production value and a more ‘AAA’ feel than the first game. (Deck Nine’s mocap work in particular has always been insane.)

This just goes to show that even two solid follow-ups were not quite enough to collectively charm us quite like the original saga had.

Had either Life is Strange 2 or True Colors matched or even eclipsed the success of the original, any discussion about a possible new story with Max or Chloe would likely have fizzled out.

But since neither did, that door remained open in the minds of many. What if?

In fact, if leaks are to be believed - and that is a big if, mind you - the reason Dontnod would go on to disassociate from the Life is Strange IP following their second game was that very question.

It is said that Square Enix tried to get them to make more games about Max and/or Chloe, and the French studio simply wasn’t interested.

If true, it would explain why the next installment, 2024’s Double Exposure, was a Deck Nine production that finally brought back Max Caulfield as the protagonist.

It almost felt like a reboot - an attempt return to the glory days.

Indeed, there was a bit of magic to seeing Max again, all grown up now as a photography teacher and artist-in-residence at Caledon, a Vermont university.

Sadly, just bringing back a beloved protagonist proved far from sufficient. While Hannah Telle reprising Max was a definite highlight, the game’s script let her down.

Double Exposure focused heavily on the supernatural powers that had been present in the series since day 1. But in addition to Max now being able to hop between two realities/timelines, the game also revealed her new best friend Safi being a shapeshifter, and featured the implication of yet more powers.

A series first, Double Exposure’s story concludes with a cliffhanger. One that promises to lean even more in a direction that, in a moment of frustration, I began to refer to as Marvel from Temu.

Not for the first time, it seemed like the latest Life is Strange game was missing an aspect of what had allowed those first games to reach into our soul.

And this time, they had missed the mark by such a margin that the future of the series seemed at stake. A dire notion, given that the talent and dedication of the people involved in making these games was never in question, and I never subscribed to the opinion that only Dontnod should make Life is Strange titles.

To me personally, though, Double Exposure was a tough pill to swallow. Even with Max’s return, the series had drifted so far from what I wanted to see, that I lost all confidence in it then and there.

Life is Strange was so special because it could make the mundane feel like magic. Instead, Double Exposure made the magical feel mundane.

Were these games really going to be just about superpowers now?

Looking back, one of the most memorable scenes of Life is Strange 1 is one where Chloe and Max simply lie on a bed listening to music. In Before the Storm, it’s Chloe and Rachel performing together in the school play. In True Colors, it’s Alex Chen singing Radiohead’s Freak by herself in her room.

If all the future had to add to this legacy was an ill-advised Avengers plot, I was out.

Reunion

And the moment I’m out, they pull me back in.

Life is Strange Reunion was announced just this January, and its major selling point was that it would bring back Chloe Price, the deuteragonist of Life is Strange 1 and the protagonist of Before the Storm.

At first, I didn’t know how to feel about this.

At no point did Double Exposure feel like it was building up to Chloe’s return. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that one of its main narrative threads is Max moving on from Chloe.

Furthermore, Double Exposure, more than any other game in the series, assumed that it would be getting a direct sequel, leaving us with no doubt that its intended direction was the aforementioned Marvel at home ordeal.

Chloe’s only superpower, meanwhile, was talking shit.

So Chloe’s return wasn’t just unexpected, it actively clashed with what we’d been led to believe this game would be about.

It felt desperate. People rightfully didn’t like where the series was headed, so now Chloe was just thrown into the mix to keep them happy?

And yet...

Despite my skepticism, I was also intrigued.

Chloe was, without a shadow of doubt, my favorite character in the Life is Strange universe, and one of my all-time favorite video game characters.

Especially her role in Before the Storm stands out, since that game features one of the best, most accurate depictions of trauma and complicated grief in all of media.

(Lest I go on an endless tangent about this game, if you want to know more about what I’m talking about here, I can highly recommend this video on Before the Storm. In it, I explore the game’s psychology, symbolism and themes, as well as Chloe’s character, I dare say more in-depth than any other such attempt I’ve seen.)

What piqued my interest further was that Chloe would be played by Rhianna DeVries, who had also been her voice and motion cap actor in Before the Storm.

This wasn’t a given, since Chloe was originally voiced by Ashly Burch. While I respect both actors, it was Rhianna’s performance (and the writing behind it) that had resonated with me the most.

It almost felt as if this new game was aimed at me. An enticing offer meant to lower my defenses and allow the series one more chance to recapture my heart.

I’m definitely into the idea of the gaming industry tracking me - a random video game rambler from Holland - to create games that fit my specific tastes. Heavy Rain never would’ve happened, I can tell you that much.

Merriment aside, it seems probable that either Square Enix or Deck Nine (or both) saw the writing on the wall, and seeing no other refuge, they decided to give the fans what had once been sworn off so vehemently: a new Max & Chloe game.

Not a simple endeavor, given half the player base had let Chloe die at the end of Life is Strange 1, but we’ll get to that conundrum in due time.

Infernal inferno

For all the hoops that Deck Nine has to jump through to make Chloe return, the base premise of Reunion is mercifully simple.

After a business trip, our soon-to-be-famous photographer Max is on her way back to Caledon University when she receives a worrying message from her friend, astrophysicist Moses Murphy.

As she hurries back to campus, she finds that much of the university building is on fire. Try as she might to help, the fire consumes the building, with Moses and many others trapped inside and about to perish in the inferno.

In a callback to her power in Life is Strange 1, Max ‘jumps’ into a polaroid photo she took before the weekend and travels back in time, giving her and Moses a precious few days to try and prevent the fire before it happens.

This sets up the mystery that every Life is Strange game is wont to have, with the main gameplay loop consisting of collecting evidence on where the fire will start and who might become involved in causing it.

What stands out immediately is that Reunion carefully picks the more successful elements from Double Exposure and recycles them.

Caledon University and the Snapping Turtle bar return as the locations for various scenes, and a good chunk of the characters introduced in Double Exposure also return in some fashion.

Unsurprisingly, with the exception of Moses - who helps the protagonists throughout the game - these returning characters do have to settle for lesser roles in the wake of Chloe’s return.

Lest we forget - this is the reunion of Max and Chloe, the duo that started the entire Life is Strange craze to begin with.

It was this very realization that also made me feel nervous when I started playing this game. With Chloe being such an important character to me, a disappointing return would feel like a punch to the gut.

To make matters worse, apart from a short prologue, it takes like 2 hours of gameplay before Chloe truly enters the scene. This allowed tension and slight paranoia to build in my head, wondering whether her presence would indeed bring the salvation that this series so desperately needed, or it’d all be a massive letdown.

But then, Chloe arrives.

There she was, the mature version of a character whose mind I’d delved into countless times. A fictional character that felt yet so real.

It may sound strange, sad or even corny if you’ve never played these games, nor had a similar experience through another piece of fiction. But I can assure you that reuniting with a beloved real-life friend would barely have felt different than what I felt in that very moment.

It was cathartic. Like I had finally found what I was looking for in all these other Life is Strange games.

You see, it’s easy to dismiss Reunion as fan service. But it was the same complaint levied against Before the Storm, and I’ve already expressed how much I liked the way that game turned out. Hell, even Double Exposure was an attempt at fan service - it just didn’t yet dare go all the way.

I’ll fully admit it was a fear of mine in the weeks leading up to release. That this would just be some cash grab. Something wearing the skin of a Life is Strange classic but with nothing of value beneath its superficies.

But during that time, something else dawned upon me.

In all those years since leaving Arcadia Bay and playing the other Life is Strange games, my mind kept wandering back to that place and its people.

For instance, when I think of Life is Strange 2, the first scene that comes to mind is when I drove past the destroyed town of Arcadia Bay*, an otherwise inconsequential easter egg for players of the first game.

True Colors, meanwhile, prominently features Steph Gingrich, a fan favorite side character from Before the Storm. During my playthrough, I would always try to get her to talk about Arcadia Bay.

Point being, no matter how far the developers moved away from the original setting, I couldn’t get enough of it. Even the slightest reference, the mere acknowledgement that it was part of this universe: it meant everything to me.

So when I saw Chloe get out of her car, shittalk some preppy-looking kids and get kicked out of a bar before even setting one foot in the door, it hit me.

All those moments, all those tiny nuggets of information, they had all built up to this moment.

We’ve come full circle.

This didn’t mean I’d rid myself of all doubts and reservations on a whim. There were still many hours of gameplay ahead of me. I hadn’t read a single review - professional or user-generated - and I had looked up no further info as soon as I knew the base premise.

There was still plenty of room for this to fly off the rails in spectacular fashion. For it to be the same letdown that Double Exposure’s final hours had been.

But damnit, that’s a grown-up Chloe Price portrayed by Rhianna DeVries, and that’s already a win in my book.

Dual shock

Even though I was unable to fully let go of my reservations throughout most of my first playthrough, one conclusion I did draw pretty early on was that, if nothing else, Chloe’s presence was a net benefit for the moment-to-moment storytelling and gameplay.

In Reunion, both Max and Chloe are playable characters, with the game swapping control back and forth depending on the scene.

Since she reappeared in Double Exposure, Max did become more assertive, but retains her shy and introverted inclination. She therefore benefits greatly from her more confident friend being there to stick up for her when needed.

In my playthrough, I realized this when Max was talking to Chloe about her friend Safi.

Max felt bad because, in the previous scene, Safi had tried to guilt-trip Max about her powers - which she had used to prevent Safi’s death - messing with reality and creating a huge mess. When telling this to Chloe, she simply responds: “So she blamed you for bringing her back to life, and you agreed with her? That’s such bullshit.”

This sentiment closely resonated with my own feelings on the subject, but even beyond my own bias, it’s exactly this kind of down-to-earth pushback that simply would not have been on the table without Chloe.

In fact, the two playable protagonists formula works so well that I am surprised this was the first Life is Strange game to even try it.

With much of Reunion’s gameplay consisting of gathering evidence about the fire, having both Max and Chloe at their disposal as makeshift detectives grants Deck Nine double the possibilities for coming up with different investigative scenarios.

Max of course uses her time rewind powers to be very effective at extracting information from places or people without anyone knowing she was even there, whereas Chloe bluffs her way through various scenarios in order to get the info she needs.

In one of the subplots, Chloe tries to infiltrate a group of angry townsfolk who are planning a possibly violent protest at the campus. Here we get to see the full extent of Chloe’s arsenal, as she uses her charisma and turns up her ‘fuck the power’ persona in order to gain the trust of this group of - as Chloe puts it - resentful dicks.

Such a thread would simply not have been possible had it just been Max responding to our controller’s every command.

As with most Life is Strange games, though, this whole find out who’ll start the fire mystery ultimately only serves as a necessary piece of character motivation; that carrot at the end of the stick that ensures our heroes have a reason to keep pushing forward.

As befits its title, the most powerful moments in Life is Strange: Reunion happen when Chloe and Max are together. The chemistry between the two characters and their actors is tangible, to a point where you’d be forgiven for forgetting that this is the first time Hannah Telle and Rhianna DeVries star opposite each other. I certainly did.

The conversations between the two main characters cover a wide range of emotions. With them reconnecting after such a long time, there are equal parts surprise, joy, sadness and regret. These interactions are the lifeblood of the game.

Writing verisimilar dialogue tends to be the bane of video game and television writers alike, but most lines here feel natural, like you’d expect real people to react. This leads to moments like the aforementioned ‘post-Safi’ conversation between Max and Chloe, where the latter almost took the words out of my mouth.

The mystery at hand does occasionally get in the way of things when it soaks up a little too much continuous game time. But in general, the writers intersperse the sleuthing with enough Max & Chloe moments to keep scratching that decade-old itch.

Each new interaction feels like a reward in itself.

It just goes to show what Double Exposure was lacking this entire time: a strong co-star.

Both Life is Strange 1 and Before the Storm benefited from each having a secondary character that felt almost equal in importance to the respective protagonist. The interactions with these deuteragonists were the main driving force behind many of the more exciting, high-stakes scenarios featured in those games.

In retrospect, this is where subsequent Life is Strange games had struggled to replicate that almost spiritual connection. Characters like Steph (True Colors) and Safi (Double Exposure) were great in their own right, but never quite reached that ‘cosmically entwined’ level of Chloe or Rachel.

It makes one wonder why Chloe wasn’t brought back sooner.

Well, remember half the player base killing her off in Life is Strange 1?

Yeah, about that...

Don’t kill your darlings

Chloe’s return to the series can primarily be understood in the wider context of Reunion being a salvaging operation of sorts.

As discussed earlier, Double Exposure headed into a clear direction with its focus on superpowers, and even showed an active disinterest in bringing back Chloe. It’s only by fault of the game’s critical and commercial setbacks that this did not materialize further.

With its very premise, Reunion already walks back a lot of Double Exposure’s vision. Chloe is brought back, and as a consequence, other characters must make room.

This friction is sometimes tangible in the game, where some of the characters give you the feeling that they were destined for a bigger role before said course correction came into effect.

Double Exposure’s romance options, Amanda and Vinh, get to spend noticeably less time with Max regardless of whether or not you choose to carry over either romance into Reunion. Film student Diamond Washington makes no on-screen appearance at all, despite a bigger role for her being hinted at near the end of Double Exposure.

Even certain elements of the plot - such as the many references to witchery - seem like they may have been selectively cannibalized from earlier scripts or pitches where they would’ve had a more central role.

While Chloe is the biggest benefactor of these changes, her return was also the biggest walk-back of them all.

With players having had the option to let her die at the end of Life is Strange 1, a solution had to be found that would guarantee Chloe’s survival without it outright dismissing that fatal outcome as ever having been an option.

Fortunately, an opening was found in Double Exposure.

In that game’s climax, Max is seemingly faced with a choice that mirrors Bay or Bae, this time having to choose between the survival of her friend Safi or preventing the destruction of her university. However, Max refuses and instead finds a way to merge two realities together, guaranteeing the survival of both.

Reunion uses this merging of realities to also weld together the two endings of the original Life is Strange, resulting in the survival of both Bay and Bae.

At first, Max is not aware of this rather significant side-effect, so depending on your choice, she is shocked to discover that either Arcadia Bay or Chloe has survived. And of course, Chloe herself gets an existential crisis when she finds out that either her hometown’s continued existence or her entire life over the past decade has effectively been an illusion.

Is all of this a convoluted and deterministic plot twist whose sole purpose it is to make Chloe come back?

Unequivocally, yes.

But it was also a necessary move, and out of all the options on the table, it would’ve been among the more elegant ones. At the very least, the game has the guts to address this apparent paradox at length, and even manages to weave it into an interesting narrative thread involving Chloe and Safi being partially stuck in limbo.

As someone who enjoys writing, I’m well familiar with the adage of kill your darlings. And there would’ve been a time where I agreed that it was probably best to leave both Chloe and Max in the past.

Yet after once again witnessing this irresistible duo - a little older and a little wiser - it’s undeniable that they still had at least one good story left in them.

Odds are stacked against us

So, will this entire operation result in Life is Strange slipping out of niche territory and re-establishing itself as a prime franchise?

No, but that was never quite the point.

Dark clouds were already visible following the disappointing release of Double Exposure. Anyone who knows anything about the deplorable state of the video game industry will be aware that even one underperforming game can mean the end of a studio.

Indeed, Deck Nine seems to be close to the edge, with its number of employees drastically reduced in the months leading up to the release and most of the Reunion team already having dissolved. The developer’s official website still plays the Double Exposure trailer and only lists Reunion in a news article.

Sharing his release day thoughts, Reunion’s narrative lead Jonathan Zimmerman called Reunion “a game about miracles,” and implies that the very existence of the game may be the biggest miracle of them all.

Given the short development time since Double Exposure and the entire game appearing to be a massive pivot away from its original direction, the development team covered an extraordinary amount of ground before dissolving.

The result is a game that feels like it has been crafted for a specific audience. Long-time fans of the series who wanted nothing more than to go on one last adventure with the characters they grew up with.

Life is Strange: Reunion fully lives up to this goal.

Sure, the stitches of the rescue operation are still visible. Chloe is there because the narrative demands it, and Max’s powers have evolved just enough to facilitate both this comeback and the resolution of the main campus fire plot. Some characters don’t get the growth they deserve because Max and Chloe hog the stage.

All valid criticisms, but they remind me of another game.

The first Life is Strange.

In that game, didn’t Max’s powers play fast and loose with their own rules as the plot demanded it? Can we honestly say that anyone other than Chloe and Max got a modicum of their character development? Didn’t a catastrophe happen in every chapter purely because it’d keep the players hooked for the next one?

Nostalgia is a gentle force that covers up the blemishes of all the things we hold dear. Since its inception, Life is Strange has been host to convoluted stories, a lack of internally driven character growth** and things that happen in a specific way purely because plot demands them to.

There were plenty of people who, based on these grounds, dismissed Life is Strange from the very beginning. Too lame. Too cringey.

Too sincere, one could say.

But some of us saw past such blemishes and stuck around, because we realized that - as the cliché dictates - the game was more than the sum of its parts. There was just something there. A connection with the characters that felt more real than in any other game.

All you needed was a bit of goodwill and patience to see it all come together.

This makes Reunion such a fitting end to the series. Not because it is a perfect game, but because it’s every bit as honest and disarming as the game that started it all.

Conclusion

At its surface, Reunion may seem like a cash grab. An attempt to win back disillusioned fans with yet another familiar face.

But I dare say that anyone who plays this game will soon see that it’s closer to a passion project. A game willed into existence simply because the writers, actors, designers, animators and other developers felt that the fans - and even the studio itself - deserved a worthy ending.

Those who play Reunion will also see that, despite its at times Frankensteinian nature, the game feels more focused than some of its predecessors.

Perhaps it is because of that very rush to get this project out the door, that a lot of fat was trimmed and the developers were able to prioritize those parts that truly mattered.

In addition to the interactions between Chloe and Max offering some of the best scenes that the series has seen, the mystery plot is surprisingly fun in its relative simplicity.

In its challenge to figure out whodunnit, the game doesn’t throw too many curve balls at you. So as a player, you’re rewarded for simply paying attention. While none of it is rocket science, I was quite proud of myself when I had largely figured out the who and what of the mystery before it was all revealed to me.

Reunion also features some great visual and cinematic work, with Max tripping balls at a student party being just one of many highlights that’s etched into my brain after just one playthrough. Add a killer soundtrack for those immaculate vibes, and it’s actually just a good game, even divorced of the context of the entire franchise.

That said, that context does add another layer to the game.

Life is Strange: Reunion was made with the clear purpose of offering closure to the fans. The game itself is very aware of this.

The game reflects as it moves forward. Its essence restored, the circle complete, the only difference perhaps being that it’s now a game about adult women talking about their feelings.

As the credits roll, we see photos of Max and Chloe. They’re not even doing anything special in these images. Just living life. After so much suffering, loss and trauma, they have found happiness.

And with them, so have we.

When I reached this credit sequence for the first time, I could finally let my guard down. My fears hadn’t come true. The game didn’t fly off the rails in a spectacular fashion. No superheroes, no cliffhangers. Just two characters whom I love, being okay.

Up until this point, nearly every Life is Strange game had ended in a bittersweet manner. Even if you got the ‘good’ ending, there was always a catch. Something that would eat away at you every time you thought back on the game.

Not this time. The conclusion that I got was an actual happy ending with no catch. Nothing to summon that bittersweet feeling.

Nothing, except maybe one small thing.

This might the end of Life is Strange. The last story that was allowed to find its way to the fans.

It’s been real.

Closing thoughts

If somehow you read all or even part of this, thank you very much! This piece took many hours to write, redact and revise, and even though the final version is still super long, I feel like it reflects what I wanted it to be: a culmination of all my thoughts on the series. An anthology of my every observation, theory and opinion that has helped make my experience with these games into something truly unforgettable.

And if this piece somehow finds its way to anyone who’s worked on this game: thank you for going more than the extra mile to give us such a satisfying finale. Whatever happens next, ya did well.

Notes:
*This scene plays out differently depending on your final choice in Life is Strange 1.
**I had no place to elaborate on what I mean by this without massively derailing an already giant article. But just in case you are curious, what I’m referring to here is that in the Dontnod games (Life is Strange 1 and 2), character growth only happens in extreme increments as the result of anomalous external factors. For example: Character A is being vile to Character B. Character B attempts to kill herself. Character A is now instantly filled with regret and empathy. If you want to see what the opposite of this looks like, look at Chloe and to an extent her stepdad David Madsen as they are portrayed in Before the Storm. People like to dog on Deck Nine for Double Exposure, but they have always understood character development better than Dontnod, and I will die on that hill.

It’s been three months into 2026 already, and with that, three months into me posting my game-related musings here!

I reckoned that it would be fun to do something different once in a while, so every quarter I want to briefly write about the games that I didn’t get to talk about enough or at all in one of my regular articles.

So that’s why I hereby present my first big quarterly video game round-up!

Note that, while some of the games that I’m about to discuss have indeed been released in Q1 2026, that is not a prerequisite for them to make it on here: rather, this is about the games I’ve played during Q1.

I’ll start of with the games that also happen to have been released during this period, in case you were expecting something different and don’t want to leave all disappointed.

So let’s get the show going!

Pokémon Pokopia

Pokopia is the surprise hit of early 2026, becoming the highest-rated Pokémon game of all time on Metacritic and selling millions of copies across the first few days of March.

All it took for me was one gameplay demonstration of the developers showing just how deep Pokopia’s building mechanics go, and I believed the hype.

It actually took me a lot of effort to track down a physical copy, but since I did, I’ve been putting some solid hours into the game.

I’ve still barely scratched the surface, but so far I would say that Pokopia definitely lives up to the surrounding buzz. It’s cozy, cute and incredibly deep.

I hope I’m creative and dedicated enough to get the most out of the insanely profound building and landscaping options this game offers, but so far I would say that Pokopia has what it takes to be that Switch 2 system seller that Nintendo was hoping for.

Life is Strange: Reunion

And now for something completely different. If you’re reading this article on its day of publication, Life is Strange: Reunion was released only two days ago.

I’ve lost count as to how many Life is Strange games it’s been, but Reunion is significant since it promises to wrap up the arc that started with the original Life is Strange.

In that game, you play as young photographer Max Caulfield, who returns to her idyllic Oregon hometown of Arcadia Bay to attend a prestigious high school and gets wrapped up in a mystery involving her childhood friend Chloe Price.

Since then, the original Life is Strange has received a brilliant prequel in Before the Storm and a lackluster direct sequel with Double Exposure, with Reunion being slated as the end of the Arcadia Bay arc.

I already wrote quite a bit on the aforementioned prequel Before the Storm in an earlier article, and readers of that piece will know that I absolutely adore that particular installment. It still stands as a masterclass in ludonarrative storytelling: so a story that works in tandem with the gameplay rather than simply existing alongside it. There is also a lot of subtext and symbolism at play, all of which is unusually coherent for a video game.

With Double Exposure being just about the inverse - a shallow attempt at a spectacle - Reunion has me both excited and worried. Do the devs still have the magic spark?

Having played the first few hours, it’s too early to tell, but I can say that it has been surreal seeing series favorite Chloe Price return as not just a prominent character, but a co-protagonist.

To me, Chloe’s portrayal in Before the Storm remains one of the best-written characters in a video game, period.

So getting to see her live out a new phase in her life is almost like a dream come true, but I am in equal parts worried that what’s yet to follow might hurt her legacy more than it reinforces it. Given the nature of this story-driven franchise, there are a lot of narrative wrong turns left to take.

That being said, I’m cautiously optimistic so far, and you can look forward to a full report once I’ve finished the game!

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

One of the more amusing narratives of the gaming year 2025 was who’d take the crown of the best mascot racer.

After all, it was an unusually stacked year for Mario Kart and its adepts.

The Italian plumber himself of course starred in his latest smash hit racing game, Mario Kart World.

His old foe also had a strong showing on the race track, however, with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

Seemingly coming out of nowhere, Kirby Air Riders provided a different spin on the kart racing subgenre, making this a three-way battle.

While Mario Kart World is, on its surface, once again an extremely solid entry into the series and even adopts an open world concept for the first time, it also faced some criticism from fans. These criticisms focused on rather specific parts of the game, such as its online track selection mechanics and the composition of the open world.

So while the new Mario Kart was a resounding success in terms of its sales, it also left some space for another game to fill that more hardcore, traditional kart racing niche.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is that game, offering an extremely polished and fast-paced racing experience that may not do as much to drive the genre forward, but provides that streamlined pick-up-and-play experience for people who might’ve felt a bit lost in Mario Kart World.

Many were even calling it better than Mario Kart World, but it’s always difficult to judge whether such opinions are representative of the broader sentiment or just the result of noisy online discourse.

Since the physical edition Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds for Switch 2 was released on March 26, I was finally able to try it for myself.

Again, if you’re reading this article on publication day, it’s only been two days, so I can’t quite call it yet, but so far Sonic Racing: Crossworlds is promising, and I can definitely see why it has such a dedicated fanbase.

The racing experience is smooth and seems quite a bit faster than Mario Kart World. It just feels good, making for a rather addictive experience.

Having completed all the Grands Prix in the game, I’ll have to wait and see if I’ll be returning to the game as much as I have to the past few Mario Kart installments, so the jury’s still out.

So far, though, Kirby Air Riders might still secretly be my favorite mascot racer of the current era. But that’s a topic for a different article.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Speaking of the pink puffball, I’ve been playing a ton of Kirby so far this year. One might say an unhealthy amount, but we all know that Kirby reduces cortisol levels.

I already touched on the design of Kirby and the Forgotten Land before, but I just kept playing the game since then.

I’ve since completed all of the content in both the base game and the Star-Crossed World DLC, and I can say in earnest that it ranks up there as perhaps my favorite 3D platforming experience of them all.

What makes Kirby and the Forgotten Land so good is that it’s one of the few 3D platformers - perhaps even the only one - to have such a deep movement set for its protagonist.

Every copy ability comes in multiple forms and has its own, fleshed-out moveset. There is even a dodge mechanic that feels like it was ripped straight out of Dark Souls.

Of course, this is nothing new for the Kirby series, but to see it executed so well in 3D for the first time does make the experience feel novel, with certain parts feeling more like a 3D action game than a traditional platformer.

I’ve played about 20 different platformers so far this year, but I can say with confidence that Kirby and the Forgotten Land has left the biggest impression on me.

Super Mario 64

My overindulgence in platformers in 2026 came after a long break from the genre. So in addition to trying new ones, I’m also revisiting some of my favorites from days gone by, which of course has to include one of the most important games of all time: Super Mario 64.

Yes, Mario was a well-established platforming icon by the mid to late ‘80s, but Super Mario 64 from 1996 changed everything because it was the first 3D entry into the series.

While this installment wasn’t the first 3D platformer overall, it was arguably the first one that was good. And I mean really good.

Its more open-ended structure instantly became the template for 3D platformers everywhere, and indeed most of them followed to a tee. Games like Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Gex: Enter the Gecko were almost direct copies of Super Mario 64 design-wise, whereas Spyro the Dragon, Croc and Glover gave more of a unique spin to the formula while still being influenced heavily by it.

In other words, it’s hard to imagine what the late ‘90s 3D platforming craze would’ve looked like without this one iconic game. Along with Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64 even did a lot of legwork to shape 3D open world design, as I elaborated on in an earlier article.

All that being said, is Super Mario 64 still fun today? Well, yes.

Given that it was the first 3D platformer to display this level of ambition, it comes with its fair share of quirks. Like most 3D platformers of that generation, its camera is rather atrocious, and this was released in an era when developers would still put overbearing water levels in every game to show off the technical prowess of their respective game system.

But, in spite of these sins, Super Mario 64 still feels surprisingly playable, making it not so difficult to achieve that flow state of platforming where the movement almost feels like you are dancing with the environment.

I can recommend giving this game a go if you never have, as it’ll reveal a lot about why 3D platformers are the way they are, even to this day.

Just prepare to put up with a moderate amount of crap once in a while.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

With Pokopia being the latest cozy sensation on a Nintendo console, Animal Crossing will be taking a bit of a backseat in most people’s libraries.

Personally, I still find myself checking in on my island almost daily.

I don’t really do a lot, nor is my island close to where I would present it to others with a modicum of confidence, but I just enjoy checking in on my villagers with some regularity.

Even after all this time, I find the game to be absolutely endearing.

Gex: Enter the Gecko

Also known as Gex 64, I am playing this 1998 3D platformer for the first time since... well, 1999 probably.

I spent some effort tracking down a physical edition of the Gex Trilogy collection on the Switch, as part of my recent efforts to build a comprehensive library of platforming games on my backwards compatible Switch 2.

Even if you’d never heard of Enter the Gecko, about 2-3 minutes of gameplay footage would probably be enough to date it to a high degree of accuracy.

As mentioned before, it’s one of many games that was made to cash in on the 3D platforming hype started by Super Mario 64.

As is typical of most pretenders to Mario’s throne, Gex doesn’t quite reach the quality standard set by Nintendo, with simpler level design and a camera that I distinctively remember to be atrocious even by the much lower standards of the day.

Add in a bunch of by now ancient pop culture references voiced by Dana Gould - consisting mostly of one-liners I didn’t get at the time and I don’t care for now that I do - and you have an obviously flawed experience.

Still, the movement itself is a lot better than I’d remembered, and I do have a fair bit of nostalgia for this game, so I am glad that this piece of slightly awkward platforming history is sitting on my shelf in full, playable form.

Conclusion

And that’s it for my Q1 video game wrap-up! I’ve played many more games, but I either don’t have much interesting to say about those, or so many interesting things that a fully fledged article on these games is the better option.

Be sure to let me know which game you’ve enjoyed playing the most so far this year.

Also, if you like my insights and you haven’t subscribed to my posts yet, don’t forget to do so! It’s completely free and there will be a fresh article in your mailbox every Saturday.

When you’re active in gaming communities on the internet, it’s easy to see narratives form surrounding certain titles.

Especially with established franchises, a consensus develops over time, where some installments are regarded as the pinnacle of their series while others become the designated black sheep of the family.

You’d be hard-pressed to find many people who consider Halo 4 to be the best in the series, whereas hardcore Elder Scrolls fans will not let you off easily if you have anything bad to say about Morrowind.

That’s not to say that you can’t go against the grain. Entire careers have been built around subverting the accepted opinion on games. Claim that a game everyone loves is actually not that great, or valiantly defend that one entry in a franchise that all the fans loathe, and you’re sure to attract a lot of attention.

However, in rare cases, the consensus on certain games actually does flip. Games are re-evaluated all the time, and if enough people change their mind on a specific title, its reputation may tank or soar as enough time passes and new narratives gain momentum.

The Legend of Zelda is actually a franchise where this happens all the time, and I want to look at some of the more interesting examples of paradigm shifts that happened within the Zelda fandom.

These evolving consensuses can teach us a lot about how games are sometimes ahead of their time, yearning for a more forward-thinking audience to finally be understood and appreciated. At other times, a lack of awareness about the historical context of a game may lead to revisionism, or genuine flaws may become more apparent over time.

The Zelda series is particularly suited for the analysis of this type of consensus evolution, because it’s a long-running franchise that has touched multiple generations of gamers. During this time, it has maintained a consistently high standard of quality in spite of some radical changes in design over the years.

First, let’s take a look at the ‘universal truths’ that are still upheld within the Zelda fandom to this day to get a taste of how fans evaluate their favorite series.

Well over three decades later, Zelda’s 1991 SNES entry A Link to the Past is still seen as the pinnacle of the series’ 2D era. Purely in terms of its design, it was probably the most influential entry in terms of what people would come to expect from a Zelda game’s structure.

Rather than going with the free-form go in any direction format of the original Zelda, or the side-scrolling RPG concept of its sequel, A Link to the Past introduced the more cinematic pacing that would define the series for the subsequent 20 years.

Another ‘untouchable’ in the series is Ocarina of Time. The first 3D Zelda game, it took the structure of A Link to the Past and reimagined it within a 3D space, and in doing so redefined what 3D gaming looked, felt and played like.

Ocarina of Time is still considered one of the best games of all time in general, and since every Zelda game up until Skyward Sword was built upon template, its position in the series’ legacy is wholly uncontroversial.

Earlier this month, I wrote a full article on why this game was (and is) such a big deal, so give that a read if you’d like me to go more in-depth on that.

The more we venture beyond these two beloved classics - A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time - the more division and debate we can see among the fanbase, but the interesting part is that the generally accepted outcome of these debates has shifted over time.

Starting with a classic, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has seen its reputation go through highs and lows since it was initially released in 1987-1988.*

Initially met with praise from critics and players alike, the game later turned out to be rather unusual and thus controversial for a Zelda entry.

Neither its side-scrolling perspective nor the fleshed-out RPG elements would grow out to become series mainstays, with future 2D titles favoring the first Zelda’s top-down perspective instead, and focusing on action, adventure and puzzling as the core of the gameplay experience.

This dubious ‘uniqueness’ as well as the game’s uncharacteristically punishing difficulty made Zelda II the black sheep. It became known as that Zelda game to avoid unless you were a diehard fan willing to play them all.

This reputation endured for decades, until in recent years, people rediscovered the game and began to appreciate its intricacy, challenge and contributions towards the franchise at large.

It’s an example of how retrospectives can help rehabilitate a game long after it’s been released.

An even more remarkable example of the reputation transformation of certain Zelda games is the 2002-2003 installment The Wind Waker,* released for the Nintendo Gamecube.

Only the third 3D title in the series, Wind Waker distinguished itself not by reinventing the formula but by its aesthetics. Whereas the previous 3D Zelda games had an art style that aimed for realism, Wind Waker did almost the exact opposite and had a cartoony, cel-shaded look.

If you look at present-day discourse on the game, Wind Waker appears to be quite a popular Zelda game. Many praise its art style, which has indeed aged gracefully, as well as its more open-ended world design.

At the same time, many accept that Wind Waker feels rushed in places. It shows glaring pacing issues, with entire dungeons seemingly cut late in development. Even some excessive padding in the adventure’s latter stages could not prevent it from being rather short for a Zelda game.

The interesting thing here is that this narrative is almost the inverse of what people were saying about Wind Waker initially.

You see, Wind Waker was released during the edgiest era in the history of popular culture.

Gaming was affected as well, with many Nintendo fans now being unruly teens who wanted something dark, violent and ‘mature’ from their hobby. It was the age of GTA and Halo.

During that time, Nintendo was already struggling with its image of being a company for kids. So the one-two tandem of putting out a console that resembled a purple lunchbox and a Zelda game that looked like a Saturday morning cartoon was a sobering reminder that the Japanese manufacturer, for all its brilliance, could still horribly misjudge the needs of Western markets.

It didn’t help that Nintendo had put out a teaser at Spaceworld 2000 showcasing a fight between Link and Ganondorf, using a realistic art style that felt more like an evolution of Ocarina of Time’s aesthetics.

The tonal whiplash of Wind Waker’s cuteness was simply too much for Nintendo’s maturing audience to handle, with many of them ‘converting’ to Playstation or Xbox.

I vividly remember a heated discussion with someone on Wind Waker in the year following its release, with me saying it was simply a cutesy version of Ocarina of Time, and them saying I was just angry because the game didn’t look like Ocarina of Time.

This makes it all the more interesting to me that the prime argument in favor of Wind Waker these days is its distinct and timeless art style, while most people accept that the game has some rather obvious blemishes in terms of its pacing and structure.

I guess we were both right, in our own way.

Having witnessed this perfect 180 on Wind Waker’s reputation, I view the changing narrative surrounding Skyward Sword with great interest.

Skyward Sword was released in the final stages of the Wii’s lifetime, in 2011. As a Zelda game, it was remarkable in multiple ways.

While reputed for its focus on motion controls, it was also the Zelda game that started putting more emphasis on cinematic storytelling, as well as taking more overt inspirations from Japanese culture rather than Western myth and fantasy tropes.

In terms of its design, Skyward Sword turned out to be the last mainline Zelda game to date to use what became known as the classic Zelda formula. This formula was the one introduced in A Link to the Past and refined for 3D with Ocarina of Time. It had since been the core structure of most of the subsequent Zelda games.

Rather than going for a fully open world, these Zelda games were semi-open, featuring a linear sense of progression from dungeon to dungeon, with the inbetween moments being spent in a hub world that mostly served as a setting for mini-games, restocking and general respite.

It was exactly this formula that became the focal point of criticism levied at Skyward Sword. Oft-heard complaints were that the game had become predictable and boring, playing out more or less the same as most previous entries into the Zelda series.

Of all the ways to insult Nintendo, calling them predictable is perhaps the one that hurts them the most.

And so, for the subsequent Zelda title, 2017’s Breath of the Wild, they upended the classic formula, opting instead for a completely open-ended experience that takes inspiration from both the original Legend of Zelda and industry-defining open world games such as Skyrim.

Breath of the Wild became a smash hit and the best-selling Zelda game to date. It received a direct sequel in Tears of the Kingdom, which expanded upon Breath of the Wild’s open-ended design. Series director Eiji Aonuma has since stated that this design would also form the basis for subsequent Zelda games.

It was exactly this new reality that is now inspiring the first, modest steps towards the rehabilitation of Skyward Sword. With Skyward Sword HD - a remastered edition for the Switch - still being widely available, it is likely to be the first contact point for newer players with the classic Zelda formula.

Said formula does have its drawbacks, such as the aforementioned predictability, but it also offers the advantage of having a much clearer sense of where to go next. With open world games becoming ever more abundant, more gamers have come to appreciate the fact that they don’t need to stress about where to go next, since a game like Skyward Sword just tells them.

So, over the past months, I’ve seen more and more posts on social media and in Zelda-centered communities that are treading the waters of a possible re-evaluation of Skyward Sword.

Whether these attempts will succeed remains to be seen, since it can be argued that Skyward Sword is one of the less stellar executions of the traditional formula. Even those Zelda fans desiring a more streamlined experience yet again might be better off choosing Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess as the champions of their cause.

Will Skyward Sword ever receive the adoration that befell Wind Waker so many years after its release? Only time will tell.

What stands out, though, is that the respective reputations of these high-profile games are subject to change.

So if you ever find yourself in a position where you just don’t get the hype for a certain game, or you love a game that everyone seems to dismiss, don’t be dismayed. Instead, try to build a case for it, and maybe you’ll be at the forefront of a changing narrative.

It is this type of independent thinking that defines good video game content.

After all, today’s fringe opinion might be tomorrow’s consensus.

Notes:
*The release of both Zelda II and Wind Waker varies based on regions, so exact release dates are hard to pinpoint when discussing the games and the global discourse surrounding them.

Sources for this article used were the Wikipedia pages of some of the games, merely to confirm basic data such as release dates for different regions. Part of the Wind Waker discussion was inspired by a Manley Reviews video.

Years ago, I was a part of a small group of friends from some gaming forum who occasionally played together on Steam. One day, we noticed that one of our members had logged over 1500 hours in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Since a truck simulator is not among the flashiest of video games, this led to some light-hearted ridicule. Several others - me included - owned this game, but none of us even had a fraction of his play time.

When we asked him about this habit, he responded calmly that he considered it his therapy. This led to more ribbing. Just how many hours of therapy did this guy need?

Now, many years later, I’m still quite far away from that 1500-hour mark, but I’ve spent over 500 hours in the game’s North American counterpart, the aptly titled American Truck Simulator.

It would go a bit far for me to call this gaming habit actual therapy, but I cannot deny that, on some level, it does feel therapeutic.

And of course, I now tend to find myself on the other side of that conversation, where people are mystified as to why I’ve put so many hours into a game that just consists of driving around and making deliveries.

Well, allow me to explain.

Over the years, playing this truck simulator has allowed me to experience something rare: how powerful places and landscapes in media can be, and how they can blend together with our dearest memories and deepest sentiments.

I already touched on this in my discussion of Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, and how its ruins allowed me to interact with childhood memories in an almost tangible form.

Of course, such a concept would be a convoluted reason to simply try out a video game, and indeed my initial motivation to start playing American Truck Simulator was a lot more mundane.

If you’ve been gaming for many years, you might have figured that, not only do different games fit different moods, but your general preference also shifts as you reach new stages in your life.

When I was young, I used to enjoy games that had violence and spectacle, as well as ones that offered a substantial challenge. My desire for both of these qualities dampened as I grew older. Not just because the novelty of video game violence wore off, but because I was getting enough of a challenge from real life to lose the desire to seek it out in video games all that much.

It’s not that I started to avoid these challenges altogether. Until recently, I still did a lot of competitive, ego-driven online gaming, leading to more cortisol spikes than my doctor would be happy with.

While I do like excitement, I personally cannot enjoy a hobby if it’s all intensity with no respite. The more I played these high-stakes games, the more I started to feel the need for an antidote. A nice, calming gaming experience to wind down for the weekend.

And so, Sunday became American Truck Simulator day.

The ritual is simple. I set up my driving wheel and pedals, fire up a good podcast and/or background music, and drive through the western United States with a drink by my side. Just 1-2 hours of such activity in the evening is enough for me to wind down from the accumulated stress of work and other challenges.

So no, it’s not therapy in the sense that I’m processing all my existential troubles and becoming a better person by driving over some virtual roads, but the soothing, positive mental effect is very real.

If I had to put a quirky label on it, ASMR on wheels might be the most accurate description of this particular experience.

However, there’s much more to my experience with American Truck Simulator than a cozy, low-stress gaming experience: this was ultimately just the circumstance that allowed me to find yet more value in my exploration of the map.

American Truck Simulator takes place in a sized-down version of the United States, with the developers using geographical data and on-site reconnaissance to recreate the country’s many iconic landmarks, cityscapes and biomes.

When the game was first released in 2016, it only contained the western states of California, Nevada and Arizona. Since then, new maps have been added as DLC, with most of the west of the country now being complete and a future DLC even venturing into the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Still, no matter how much land was added to the map, I noticed that my discovery of these new zones was being halted by a peculiar factor.

I kept finding myself going back to the Pacific Northwest, consisting of the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. There was just something about this part of the country (and the game’s representation of it) that made me return there after every delivery.

There are already plenty of logical, surface-level reasons for making Cascadia my home base. This part of the map is rich with dense forests, scenic coastal roads and picturesque fishing towns.

All of those things make me happy, and cross-referencing certain areas with Google Maps confirmed that the designers did a very good job at recreating real-world locations in the game.

And yet, that explanation fails to tell the entire story.

Something about it felt magical. More magical than a truck simulator has any right to feel.

The key to wrapping my head around this was realizing that American Truck Simulator is an unwitting part of a lineage of media that has had a huge impact on me across my life.

And that mellow, nostalgic tingling I felt in my stomach every time I drove into the Pacific Northwest confirmed this game’s unlikely place in that lineage.

From what I recall, this lineage started with Stand By Me, a film adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body. Filmed primarily in Oregon, the movie follows a group of young children walking for two days through the state’s enchanting wilderness.

Their aim is to reach the rumored spot of the dead body of a missing child, but this is simply a plot device to justify the kids’ transformative journey.

I saw Stand By Me when I was still very young, and it had a profound impact on me.

Even when I was barely old enough to understand the deeper layers of this movie, I was in awe of the scenery. That beautiful American nature that seemed so infinitely more grand and untamed than what I was used to at home.

Stand By Me itself was about the carelessness of youth slipping through your fingers. About the fading of friendships that you thought would last a lifetime. Being still young and impressionable, the interaction between this coming-of-age theme and its almost mythical backdrop left a profound and lasting impression on me.

For the first time in my life, I experienced nostalgia - that bittersweet longing for something which no longer is. Even if I had no life experience or other references to draw on.

I was primed to experience these feelings of bittersweet longing, and I subconsciously linked them to that faraway place that seemed so beautiful yet so unknowable.

A seed was planted.

It did not take long for more media to start pushing those same buttons.

Soon after Stand By Me came The X-Files, whose early seasons were all shot in British Columbia, the Canadian extension of the Pacific Northwest. True to its supernatural themes, the show helped reinforce this mental connection between the region’s natural beauty and a mysterious aura.

Later came the first Life is Strange game and its prequel Before the Storm, both set in a fictional Oregon coastal town. At least the first game is partially inspired by Stand By Me, sharing not just its setting but also its nostalgic coming-of-age theme. And so, this experience reawakened my fascination with the region and reinforced one of my deepest media-related childhood memories.

So, how does American Truck Simulator fit into this equation?

While its more mundane nature sets it apart from the aforementioned productions, the game is able to expand on this emotional fundament.

The driving experience itself may be straightforward and lack all of the elements of mystery and storytelling that for example Stand By Me offers, but there is still something surrealistic about being able to freely explore a space that has been cultivated across different media all these years.

If all this sounds vague, perhaps the best way I can describe it is that it’s like having vivid dream featuring a beautiful location - one of those dreams where you’re sad once you wake up. Then imagine if you one day fire up a game, and that place from your dream is actually there, waiting for you to explore it.

When driving through Oregon and Washington, it’s almost like I recognize and remember all the locales, from the lonely beaches to the sleeping villages I drive by during my journeys.

And yes, these ‘memories’ are tied to fictional media, so this is ultimately just romantic projection, but this matters little for the emotional impact of it all.

At this point, it may not surprise you to learn that I am a sentimentalist.

For my entire life, I’ve been extremely sensitive to the overall atmosphere of a place. Whenever I go somewhere, my mind makes a split-second decision on whether the vibes are good or bad. And once that judgment has been cast, it’s almost impossible to change my mind.

This applies to both the real world and virtual ones.

In my daily life, I prefer to take certain routes while traveling because they simply feel better, even if this preference increases my travel time.

That same sensibility means that I’m able to enjoy a game much better if the world it presents is one I enjoy existing in. I may even keep traveling back to a certain town in a game not for gameplay reasons, but simply because it feels good to be there.

Likewise, American Truck Simulator turned into such a mentally soothing game not just because of its low-stakes gameplay objectives and overall freedom, but because it allows me inhabit a very specific comfort zone that I subconsciously created for myself from an early age.

It’s part of what makes these Sunday evening trucking sessions the ideal wind-down for me. Even if I don’t do the amount of hardcore gaming I used to, my time in the simulator still neatly counteracts much of the real-life stress I experience from time to time.

I would not quite call it therapy as that old friend did, but I do see how something as seemingly mundane as a truck simulator can occupy an emotional space for someone like me who is deeply attracted to certain landscapes and specific vibes.

As the game’s map keeps expanding into the east with each new DLC, I find myself returning to this neat little area where the vibes are just right.

Of course, many of my hours in the game are simply spent having fun as I drive and listen to a cool song or funny podcast.

But once every so often, I get a taste of that vibrant energy that used to be so abundant when I was a child. Just a hint, like a pleasant smell carried by the wind.

If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Much has already been said in praise of Breath of the Wild. As the first 3D game in the Legend of Zelda series to be truly open world, it immediately redefined what that term even meant.

Once you break out of the confines of a small tutorial zone, you are set loose into the world, free to go and do as you please.

You can in fact run straight to the final boss in your starter gear if you are either skilled or suicidal enough, which is something that sets Breath of the Wild apart from other open world games such as Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption.

In those games, completing the game still requires you to indulge in hours and hours of story-driven quests until you get to see the credits.

Not so in Breath of the Wild, where even the story is largely optional.

In this sense, Breath of the Wild is a deconstruction of decades of game design evolution, with its strongest inspiration in fact being the very first Zelda game, which was released 40 years ago(!) and featured a similar ‘pick-any-direction’ premise.

However, today we are not going to untangle the game’s open-ended structure nor even the implications of such design for the storytelling - the latter of which has already been done thoroughly by over at Late to the LAN Party.

Rather, I want to zoom out and observe an aspect of the game’s presentation that goes unspoken. It has to do with the land of Hyrule itself and it taps into the way Breath of the Wild ties the entire series together.

Hyrule, in this game’s iteration, is presented as a sort of post-apocalyptic limbo. The premise of the game is that you wake up 100 years after the king died, and the fallen kingdom is now effectively waiting to be devoured by the evil of Calamity Ganon.

It’s exactly this fickle and foreboding stasis that makes Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule feel unlike any post-apocalyptic setting I’ve experienced before.

Sure, there are monsters roaming the land now - rather intimidating ones at that - and you can see the massive spectral shadow of Calamity Ganon circling around Hyrule Castle from almost any point in the map.

But apart from that, it is actually serene.

Hyrule, even after its fall, remains a land of unmatched beauty.

Endless rolling plains, dense forests, desert oases and unbridled rivers stretch across the land, interspersed with small settlements - tiny sparks of hope on the vast canvas of the Hyrulean wilds.

It’s a world that invites introspection as much as it does exploration, and it’s no coincidence therefore that Breath of the Wild leans more heavily than its predecessors into Eastern philosophies and aesthetics.

You traverse Hyrule mostly alone, meaning that there is no one around to attribute your success or failure to but yourself.

This also means that your journey is a deeply personal one. It goes without saying that the open-ended nature of the game makes it so that no playthrough is the same, but it operates on a much deeper level than just the sandbox game design.

I noticed this myself soon after starting my own playthrough.

Upon leaving the cave where the story begins, I was greeted with a familiar sight: the Temple of Time.

This hallowed place recurs often in Zelda games, its shape and purpose morphing with each new iteration.

In Twilight Princess it was a fully fledged dungeon, while its Tears of the Kingdom rendition would turn out to be a sacred place harkening back to the very origin of Hyrule’s royal dynasty.

Yet, this temple was different.

It wasn’t just another story location carrying that familiar name. Rather, this looked exactly like the Temple of Time I knew from Ocarina of Time.

In that game, the temple was pivotal to the events of its story, it being the location where Link finds the Master Sword and travels through time in order to defeat Ganondorf.

It’s a place that will carry weight and meaning to anyone who has played Ocarina of Time, and here it was again, standing before me, sharing that same distinct medieval cathedral design and mystical aura.

Only one thing was different: it was now a ruin. Its roof had been partially caved in and the brickwork was damaged, no doubt a result of those same catastrophic events that had led to the fall of the kingdom.

To some, it might be tempting to try and see this through the lens of timeline consistency.

For decades, a segment of the Zelda fandom has debated over how all the games in the series fit together, with Nintendo even publishing an official (yet controversial) timeline along the way.

Could the presence of this iconic building be a clue to that end?

To me, it cuts much deeper than such ruminations.

This depiction of the Temple of Time represents a memory of days gone by. The decaying ruin of a game that had defined my childhood.

On a surface level, this notion may sound depressing, but much like the game as a whole, this scene felt instead calming, reflective.

Gentle music plays, almost indistinguishable from the wind and birdsong ambiance unless you focus on it.

All is at peace here.

True, the presence of tree branches within the structure suggests that it is in the process of being reclaimed by nature, destined to disappear forever. Yet therein also resides something liberating.

In Japanese culture, there is a concept known as mono no aware, which refers to the beauty of things that are not permanent, or in a state of transience.

It’s this exact feeling - this blend of appreciation and mild sadness - that I felt when I first saw this structure appear.

This was a place that I had grown to know well during my youth, visiting it more times than I could count. But as with most things from your childhood that you return to, they never appear to be quite the same as before.

You can’t go home again, after all.

More such phantoms of the past can be found throughout Breath of the Wild.

My primary instinct when playing Breath of the Wild was therefore not to defeat the final boss and save the princess, but to go on a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting these locations and reminiscing.

I saw what remained of Lon Lon Ranch and I stood by the lonely shores of Lake Hylia, but instead of the sense of adventure those locations had once imbued me with, I just found silence. A harmonious, yet somewhat melancholic quiet.

It was this experience that helped me realize what Ocarina of Time - that iconic game from my childhood - was truly about.

Here is where I need to ask you to permit me a prolonged detour, and we will eventually circle back to what these ruins in Breath of the Wild truly represent. It will be worth the journey, I promise.

When I played Ocarina of Time as a kid, it was just an adventure game. A stellar, epic one, but at its core still a simple story about defeating an evil usurper.

The reality is that, even back then, the Temple of Time represented something greater, even if I did not know it at the time.

As a kid, my favorite place in the game was Hyrule Castle Town, a populous market square adjacent to the Temple of Time.

I loved this town because its hustle and bustle was the perfect respite from the grand adventure that awaited me every time I stepped outside its gates. Its unthreatening rowdiness filled me with a sense of safety, and I’d spend hours conversing with the townspeople and just taking in the atmosphere.

Then, as I progressed through the story, I reached the turning point of the game, where I first took the Master Sword from its pedestal in the Temple of Time and traveled seven years into the future.

It took me just one step outside the temple to realize something was horribly, horribly wrong.

The wind sang a haunting tune across the dark, suffocating air. Death Mountain loomed ominously in the back. The serenity I knew had transformed into a feeling of intense dread.

Then I stepped into my beloved Castle Town...

Gone were the people. Gone too was the laughter, the music and the shouting of tradesmen. All that remained was the howling of the wind, the screeching of crows, and the somber moans of zombies who were now the town’s sole occupants.

As I ventured out into the world beyond the castle gates, it became apparent that this cloak of darkness now covered most of the land, uprooting entire peoples and corrupting nature.

The subtext of this lurid transformation may have eluded me as a child, but when I replayed Ocarina of Time a few months ago, it struck me how much this moment reminded me of the general experience of growing up.

As you become older, things stop hitting you with the same intensity. A lot of music starts to sound formulaic and the logic of many movies begins to fall apart.

Even returning to your childhood home might make you realize that this microcosm of joy that you remember was in fact just another street in a random neighborhood.

With Ocarina of Time itself, this same sensation crept up on me from time to time.

The grandeur of Ocarina of Time’s rendition of Hyrule begins to disintegrate once you realize it is in essence just a small field with passages to the game’s several quest hubs.

Don’t get me wrong: the game still has some immaculate dungeon design and is an overall joy to play. But I have to invoke memories of my childhood to get a taste of that magic I felt when I’d originally played it.

In other words, the entire experience could at times feel eerily similar to that moment all those years ago when I first stepped out of the Temple of Time as adult Link, realizing the world I had felt so safe in no longer existed.

There is little doubt that this subtext was put there by the developers consciously.

During the events of the game, the mysterious character Sheik comments thus:

“The flow of time is always cruel. Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it. A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days.”

This quote shows that the writers were aware that one does not reach adulthood without losing some things along the way, but also that the potency of our most beloved childhood memories seldom fades.

The emotions we feel when we look back on such memories may also change with time. Those same memories might seem endearing, sad or triumphant at different stages in our lives.

At the very end of Ocarina of Time, Link is sent back to his original timeline in order to live out the childhood that he had missed.

In the final sequence, young Link approaches princess Zelda in Hyrule Castle. This scene is identical to the one early in the game, when you as the player are first introduced to Zelda.

Yet, this time it feels different.

Link carries with him the memory of his entire adventure. He walks with the knowledge of how the flow of time can transform all things we hold dear, to a point where we barely recognize them.

Worst of all, he has no one to share this burden with.

What was originally the conclusion to a brief and whimsical stealth section has now become the conclusion of a grueling and lonely adventure.

As the image freezes and the game’s vibrant colors turn to sepia, it dawns upon us.

Link can’t go home again. And nor can we.

Understanding this subtext is key to fully appreciating the world of Hyrule as it is presented in Breath of the Wild.

As we’ve established, the game’s terrain contains several memories from the era of Ocarina of Time. You can also find geographic references to Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword and other Zelda installments.

On the surface, these might seem like fun easter eggs or implicit lore nuggets, but they represent something far greater than that: they embody the very essence of the series.

Between all the discussion about timelines and continuity - which can be fun in their own right - we sometimes lose track of the fact that these stories are meant to be legend.

The more you try to pick apart a legend, the more mundane and less magical it will seem.

Should you compare the geography of Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule to its remaining landmarks in Breath of the Wild, you would not have to exert much effort to find a plethora of inconsistencies.

But on a meta level, the continuity between the two games is undeniable.

As time flowed so cruelly forward, Ocarina of Time and indeed many other Zelda titles became their eponymous legends. Legends whose shards we can find scattered across the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild. Vague, ambiguous and imperfectly recollected.

Yet such is the strength of any alluring legend.

And rather than having to feel sad about these fading memories, we can find comfort in the idea that, right now, we are constructing new legends on top of the crumbling ruins of our old adventures.

It’s mono no aware in its purest form.

Being a more experienced player returning to these ancient places, I keep thinking of the words of Sheik.

Indeed, the flow of time has been cruel for these locales, with many of them having been reduced to rubble and ruin.

Yet, at the same time, something beautiful resides within them. Something that doesn’t change with time.

A memory of younger days.