On the List - Monster Hunter World

My first attempt to take down the mighty Anjanath did not end in success. After managing to stay on my feet for a few solid minutes—thanks to some nimble rolls and dodges, punctuated by a handful of rapid-fire volleys from my bow and arrow—it took little more than a few untimely movements to mess it all up. Having placed myself in front of the giant beast with little stamina left to evade its next attack, the creature lunged forward with its massive hindquarters (crossing a considerable horizontal distance in the process) and crushed me. It only went downhill from there.

For the uninitiated, Anjanath is but one in a long succession of increasingly fearsome wyvern creatures Monster Hunter World places along your journey towards the end credits scene and beyond. The goal, as always, is to track down each monster and subdue it—either by slaughter or capture. This particular creature, made to resemble a fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex with splotches of pinkish fur and a pair of stunted wings that unfurl when enraged, serves as an early challenge spike and a gateway to the game's next environment. It's a test of mettle and readiness. Whereas players might have skated by against previous monsters, the Anjanath is less forgiving of your bad habits and sloppy mistakes.

The next day, after consulting with a coworker who was a Monster Hunter veteran, I returned to the mission with a plan of attack. First, I saw to upgrading my gear, starting with a full set of furry, luminous armor courtesy of a few slayed Tobi-Kadachi (a silvery lightning-charged beast that glides through the environment like a gigantic flying squirrel) that I quickly dispatched with the help of some fellow online hunters. Satisfied with my new duds, I packed my inventory with a checklist of special crafted items and set off.

The strategy paid off. After inducing the beast into a drowsy slumber with some fully-charged shots of my sleep-coated arrows, I set up two gunpowder-filled barrels on either side of Anjanath's enormous jaws. I stepped back, charged up my powerful "Dragon Piercer" special attack, and woke the bastard up in the most violent way possible. It worked so well the first time I tried it again. Through caution and focus, I defeated the monster without a single feint (Monster Hunter fights are typically a three-strikes-and-you're-out affair). While the entire hunt lasted over 40 minutes, hardly an impressive accomplishment, for me it was a validation that my skills were improving.

It was this and hundreds of victories to follow that made me fall in love with Monster Hunter World, a game that never fails to entice me with some new goal or challenge—a new armor set to craft, a new weapon type to master, a new monster to topple just to prove to myself, once again, I've got what it takes.

While the core loop remains the same—fight tougher monsters, use their remains to craft better gear, repeat—it's hard to overstate the endless variety of nuanced expression the game affords. Playing solo is like a throwback to action games of yore, an endless string of boss fights in which each encounter becomes a thrilling display of mano a mano combat. Playing with others, in teams of two to four, is something different but equally rewarding. At worst, it's a clash of uncoordinated attacks and untrained players causing unintentional grief. At best, it's a magical synergy resulting from asymmetrical play styles and strategies coming together in spectacular harmony and efficiency. The hammer wielder stuns the monster with a well-timed blow to the side of the head, the long swordsman severs the downed monster's tail with a vaulting vertical slash, and the gunlance hunter steps up to deliver a killing blast of energy to the face.

None of this even gets to the matter of singing the praises of what makes Monster Hunter World in particular such a modern masterpiece. We're talking major quality-of-life improvements for the long-running series that now lets you access your inventory in the field, gather plants and mushrooms on the fly, and track your targets without hassle. And the visuals—my God! You've never traversed such gorgeous fantasy environments—forests filled to the brim with lush flora and scampering fauna, festering natural graveyards, and so much more. This is brilliant design from every angle.

---

"On the List" is a series where I talk about games that could conceivably appear on a best-games-of-all-time list.

On the List - Fallout 4

Let me tell you about my trek through the Glowing Sea. It's bad enough wandering around the post-apocalyptic ruins of the Commonwealth—formerly known as the greater metropolitan area of Boston, Massachusetts—what with the roving bandits, braindead ghoul packs, and other mutated nightmares stalking about. The Glowing Sea gives true meaning to the word "wasteland," a place where nothing grows and you don't need a Geiger counter to tell you the radiation levels are off the charts. And yet it's deep inside this no-man's land, beyond the square boundaries of the mapped territory shown on your Pip-Boy 3000 portable computer, where you—the protagonist of Fallout 4—must venture at least once in order to find a genius scientist who can help you locate your kidnapped son.

It wasn't so much the journey there that proved nigh impossible, notwithstanding my close encounter with some automobile-sized radscorpions hiding out near an abandoned Red Rocket gas station. The real trouble was the journey back. I had crouched about almost the entire way, sniping or avoiding what creatures I happened to see and trying not to be noticed. I'll never forget the moment when, finally close to a save point, I crested a small hilltop. In my attempt to steer clear of the roaming monsters I'd spotted off in the distance, I inadvertently stumbled upon a legendary deathclaw. I heard the creature's snarling scream before I even saw its towering form lurch toward me. One swipe from the bipedal mutant would have ended me, exposed as I was without any armor, dressed only in a hazmat suit so as to protect me from the aforementioned radiation. I had just enough time to switch on my Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) and blast the bastard with two explosive rounds from my pipe pistol—hitting it not quite at point-blank range but close enough to suffer near-fatal blowback as its corpse toppled right to my feet. I'd survived.

When discussing Fallout 4, it's important to distinguish which version of the game we're talking about, because there's Fallout 4 and then there's Fallout 4 on survival mode, a hardcore difficulty setting that was added to the game shortly after launch. I've only played the latter version of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Fallout 4's survival mode introduces much more than just tougher and hardier enemies, although it certainly does that. It also switches on a number of game-changing features that enhance the simulative aspects of the game and heighten the tension throughout. Fast travel is disabled, turning large stretches of the game into a high-stakes walking simulator. The player's carrying capacity is severely reduced, and the game adds weight volume to all forms of ammunition. It becomes essential both to eat and drink regularly as a means to stave off stat-altering thirst and hunger statuses. Not only that, most food and water will increase your radiation level and susceptibility to disease. Most challenging of all, the player can only save their game by sleeping, and the only way to sleep is to find a bed, mattress, or sleeping bag—hence the epic challenge of surviving the Glowing Sea, where no such save points exist.

As a huge fan of the pre-Bethesda Fallout games of the late 1990s, there's simply no getting around the fact that the series is not what it used to be. While it retains many of the classic Fallout trappings we know and love—the Nuka Cola bottles, the underground vaults, the power armor, the whole 1950s retro-future aesthetic, and so much more—it lacks the wit, imagination, and basic writing chops of the original games, which owe a huge debt to the ideas set forth by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson.

And yet that still takes almost nothing away from the incredible world Bethesda has crafted in Fallout 4. It's a game to which I've lost hundreds of hours trekking back and forth, exploring and scavenging its beautifully decrepit cities and buildings, cleansing the ruined wastes of the creatures and marauders who inhabit them, and slowly working to remake the world into a more habitable place by way of the game's clunky but robust settlement system—a new mode for the series that lets you craft and manage your own shantytown villages. It might be Bethesda's finest offering yet.

---

"On the List" is a series where I talk about games that could conceivably appear on a best-games-of-all-time list.

The 10 Best Games of the Decade (2010-2019)

In typical fashion for this blog, I waited until the very last day of the decade to write up a top-games-of-the-decade list. It should go without saying that I'm only one person with limited time and budget. Try as I might, I certainly haven't played every single critically acclaimed game of the last 10 years—not even close. That might be why you’re not going to see something like a Breath of the Wild or The Last of Us make an appearance. It might just be that I haven’t had the pleasure of playing one of your most cherished top-10 games. Or maybe I think your favorite game sucks. At any rate, here’s what I picked as the top 10 games from 2010 to 2019. I hope you enjoy!

10. Fallout 4 (2015)

This might be the most contentious game on my list, and I can understand why Fallout 4 falls short for a lot of people. The main story is a little sub-par. Some of the choices you have to make toward the end of the game feel forced (Just because I’m siding with this faction means I have to wipe out all the members of this other faction? Really?). It’s also built on a proprietary Bethesda game engine that seems to be showing its age and limitations. I could go on, but none of that really matters, because I would continue playing this game until the end of time, for all I care. What really makes all the difference for me is that I play the game exclusively in survival mode, which wasn’t even an option upon the game’s release—it was patched in a few months later. What may have launched as a so-so RPG can now be experienced as a one-of-a-kind immersive sim, one filled with thousands of moment-to-moment choices that give you the feeling of an actual struggle for existence amidst a hostile, devastated environment. What will I eat and drink to stave off hunger and thirst? How can I best avoid exposure to disease and radiation that comes from eating and drinking? Where is the nearest bed, so I can save my progress? Survival mode is absolutely punishing for the first several hours. You are a weak and fragile human, and the odds are severely stacked against you. You simply cannot take any wasteland encounter for granted, and you’ll probably need to stealth crouch everywhere you go. But by the time you level up and really start to have some stopping power against the horrors that surround you, you’ll really feel like you’ve earned it, because you have.

9. Monster Hunter World (2018)

Nice game, you might say, but is it really a top-10 game of the decade? Absolutely! I’m not sure why Capcom relegated this franchise to handheld systems for the better part of a decade, but the fact that they did so made Monster Hunter World all the more jaw-dropping upon its eventual release in 2018 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. To explore the game’s lush natural environments, to watch its imaginative wyvern creatures twist and fly and writhe about in full HD glory—it was a visual treat well worth waiting for. So yeah, it’s a good-looking game. That hardly secures it a spot in the best-games-of-the-decade list. What puts it over the top is how it feels to play. Monster Hunter games have always been notoriously difficult for new players to grasp, and while that probably remains true for Monster Hunter World, it certainly inches much closer into friendlier territory thanks to its many quality-of-life improvements. At some point, every player must select from one of 14 weapon types to try and master as they hunt down and topple an increasingly difficult roster of monsters, from flying bird-like wyverns with poisonous talons to lava-dwelling monsters to behemoth elder dragons that can one-shot destroy an entire party with a blast of energy. I personally started out down the path of a bow user, and it still remains my go-to weapon in most cases. It’s one that rewards an aggressive but slightly keep-your-distance play style—forcing me to constantly monitor my stamina, range, and aim. But I’ve had just about as much enjoyment dabbling in some of the other weapons, including the slow-but-devastating great sword, the K.O.-inducing hammer, and its quirky cousin, the hunting horn—which you can use as a musical instrument to grant temporary buffs to you and the members of your online hunting party. Like anything with a steep learning curve, it may take a while before everything clicks, so to speak. Once it does, however, you might find yourself addicted to the rush of intensity that comes from putting your best foot forward and plunging into the fray of battle against the toughest creatures Capcom throws your way.

8. The Witness (2016)

I’m surprised I ended up liking The Witness as much as I did, given the rather dull-sounding premise: Walk around a virtual 3D island littered with 2D line puzzles; solve the puzzles to unlock more areas on the island. It was a slow game to get into, but once I crossed some invisible threshold, it became like a book that I couldn’t put down. Jonathan Blow, the game's creator, deserves a ton of credit for the time and care he put into designing not only the individual puzzles but also the way in which those individual puzzles fit together to form a much larger, intricate whole. The world itself is a giant puzzle box that tantalizes and pushes the player further and further into its hidden areas. Never before has the solving of puzzles felt so intrinsically rewarding. Never before have I felt such a strangely tangible yet invisible bond of trust between the player (me) and designer (Blow). If it all sounds like a bunch of highfalutin nonsense, I don’t blame you. But playing through The Witness immediately goes down as one of the most gratifying video game experiences in recent memory.

7. Super Meat Boy (2010)

The smoothest, tightest movement mechanics of any 2D platformer ever made—that’s what you get when you play Super Meat Boy. That and a chance to feel like a “golden god” should you manage to thread the needle through its 300-plus levels of fiendish navigational challenges. With their 2010 indie masterpiece, Team Meat demonstrated to the world that by keeping the scope small and refining your core mechanics to a state of near perfection, even small games could be stretched to great heights. Super Meat Boy doesn’t distract you with bombastic visuals or superfluous controls. It doesn’t overwhelm you with new sets of verbs or button prompts to learn and master with each new set of levels. You don’t need to worry about collecting coins or power ups. All you ever need to do is run, jump, and change direction—and it never ceases to be fun. For one of the toughest games around, it’s also surprisingly free of frustration—and that’s saying something! The levels are all bite-sized challenges, meaning even if you die for the hundredth time on a given stage, it’s not like you’ve lost hours or even minutes of progress on any given attempt. Without so much as a shrug, Super Meat Boy jettisons decades of vestigial baggage from video gaming’s arcade roots. For starters, you have unlimited lives to play with, and the waiting time between death and restart is instantaneous. These sound like simple changes to the old-school formula, but they contribute leaps and bounds toward making the game the timeless classic that it is. Other platformers such as 2018’s Celeste have taken their cue from this 2010 trendsetter, sometimes to great effect, but nothing I’ve played has yet to surpass it.

6. Alan Wake (2010)

My wife and I both share a real fondness for Alan Wake, a game modeled after the tone and episodic structure of a binge-worthy television show. As much as it’s generally held up as a critical success, I still think it’s an underrated classic that transcends the boundaries of what might otherwise be a generic third-person shooter—thanks largely to its clever premise and intriguing, supernatural storyline. The titular protagonist is a best-selling author who, upon vacationing to a secluded lake cabin near the fictional town of Bright Falls, Washington, finds himself pulled into a strange nightmare reality in which his wife has disappeared and the pages of his latest manuscript—which he doesn’t remember writing––are coming to life. The fact that the game is set in a beautiful Pacific Northwest environment probably elevates my opinion of it, seeing as that’s the corner of the world in which I grew up. But seriously, I love the places this game takes you to—woodland parks and campgrounds, logging mills, an old fire lookout tower. Against these gorgeous backdrops, you'll be fighting off hordes of dark-enshrouded entities with a combination of light and firearms. While I’m sad that we’ve not yet received a proper full-blown sequel to Alan Wake, I’m happy to see the recent acclaim developer Remedy is receiving for its 2019 release, Control. I haven’t played it yet, but it certainly looks fantastic and just as inventive in concept as Alan Wake. Here’s to hoping we’ll get something more out of the franchise in the next decade, whether an actual TV show or another game. Maybe both? (Check out my initial Alan Wake review.)

5. Minecraft (2011)

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game’s infinite depths, and I say that as someone who once jumped through all the bizarre hoops, traipsing back and forth into the deadly nether world in order to defeat the mysterious Ender Dragon. Depending on your personality and play style, it can be overwhelming to be dropped into a newly fabricated sandbox world—its unexplored blocky terrain expanding out in all directions—with no objective and little guidance given. But that’s the beautiful thing about freedom. There’s virtually nothing to stop you from making your mark however you see fit. You could decide to venture out and map out that surface terrain, like a virtual cartographer. You could start building a simple farm and homestead, an enormous castle, or a sprawling underground bunker. You could play solo. You could play it online with friends. If I’m being frank, Minecraft isn’t really a top-10 personal favorite of mine. I’ve probably started over from scratch too many times and gotten a bit worn out by the tedium that comes with slowly going through my unwritten checklist of mining for iron, gold, diamonds, and other hard-to-find resources. But that’s likely because I approach the game as a self-limiting adult, circling back to my own self-imposed routines. At its heart, Minecraft is a game for children—whether in body or only in spirit. I can’t think of another game that has made as large or as positive an impact this decade.

4. Inside (2016)

After the incredible success of their first game, Limbo, the developers at Danish studio Playdead could have done anything they wanted. That they chose to create a follow-up that bears so many striking similarities to their first outing was a surprise, but that’s not the half of it. That it managed to completely eclipse its already great predecessor was simply remarkable. Just as with Limbo, Inside is a linear 2D puzzle platformer in which you must guide a little boy through a surreal and dangerous world. The game has a very “cinematic” quality that at moments feels very resonant of something like a Stephen Spielberg thriller, where your sense of wonder is slowly subsumed into a pervasive feeling of terror, time and again. To borrow from something I posted last March on the Cane and Rinse website forum: “It nails the element of suspense, not only because of the timing of the action—think of the panic that ensues from the sound of barking dogs before you even see the pack arrive on the screen, or how the relief of a narrow getaway is almost immediately supplanted by the realization that you’re not out of harm’s way just yet. The dread you feel in so many parts of the game is almost always heightened due to the simple fact that you have no idea who or what you’re even up against.” Even scarier, you can't be sure if you're escaping the danger or running ever headlong toward it.

3. Spelunky (2012)

For all of its hair-pulling moments of inevitable failure and despair, this game is simply too much fun, and I would play it more often than I do if it wasn’t for the fact that I know once I start I’ll get pulled into its never-ending cycle of death and reload. It’s still one of my life goals to one day beat this game “the hard way,” which involves triggering a series of events that extends the game beyond its standard 16 levels of mines, jungle, ice caves, and temple to include a secret black market level, a City of Gold level, and four brutally difficult levels of Hell that can only be accessed by getting through those other challenges and then defeating the main game's (not-so-final) boss in a specific manner. I think if I manage to pull off that optional challenge, I might finally be able to hang up my gamer hat and retire a happy man. At any rate, you can see what I wrote about this game back in 2012. It was great then. It’s still great now. Game designer Derek Yu was among the earliest to discover the brilliant formula for endless replayability when he mashed together the genres of roguelike and 2D action platformer to create the original version of Spelunky in 2008. The 2012 remake is the version that cemented its legacy as an all-time video game classic, and I can’t wait to see what Yu has in store for us next year with Spelunky 2.

2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015)

I don’t think you’ll find a better example of well-written dialogue, character acting, and general storytelling in all of video games. The Witcher 3 is a high-fantasy epic that never goes off the rails. Every story beat is grounded in the drama of complex characters that feel real and human (even when they’re not, technically, human), starting with the game’s protagonist, Geralt of Rivia. This is largely thanks to the rich source material of Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, but even that would have been all for nought if it wasn’t for the care and talent of the entire creative development team at CD Projekt Red, who used that material to create an entire trilogy of original storytelling. All three games are an achievement in their own right, and in some ways I actually appreciate the smaller, more linear nature of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. But with The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red essentially threw down the gauntlet to the entire AAA game industry with this groundbreaking testament to what an open-world game can be. I’ve played a lot of content-heavy open-world games since 2010 onward. None of them have felt as rich as this one. Even the side quests are almost always terrific, as Geralt finds himself constantly entangled in all manner of feuds and conflicts—from the politics of warring nations to heartbreaking episodes of love and betrayal that befall the lives of everyday people tucked away amidst the most isolated villages. While Geralt always manages to slay the monster—it is his trade, after all—the game rarely offers happy endings, let alone clear delineations of right and wrong behavior. If one of the great values of literature is the ability to conjure empathy in the reader for the struggles of other people, be they real or fictional, then The Witcher 3 represents one of the best current examples of this phenomenon carried over into video game form.

1. Dark Souls (2011)

I wrote about my fascination with this game back in 2014, and I still struggle to find the words to explain it. Every now and then, someone will try to write off the notion that this game is only popular or highly regarded for its brutal difficulty, and ... sure—there’s certainly more to it than just that. But it is an essential ingredient. Take away the challenge and what would be the point? And yet, there have been difficult video games since the very beginning of video games. Why does this one happen to resonate with so many people? I can only assume it’s because it taps into some primordial aspect of our human nature, a part of us that yearns for validation and the chance to prove our mettle against the forces of darkness that would otherwise cripple us if we lacked the strength or courage to face them head-on. If the modern-day comforts and conveniences of the developed world have all but eliminated the most sinister forms of hardship and adversity faced by our ancestors, then why not invent a few imaginary epic struggles to act as a no-stakes substitute? Nine years after From Software gave us the original Dark Souls, it’s still a game unmatched—saved maybe by its successors—in terms of its absolute starkness of visual aesthetics and overall presentation. It just feels more like an authentic journey into the heart of darkness and less like your run-of-the-mill video game, at least in comparison to so many of its contemporaries that constantly invade your field of view with distracting text prompts and tutorials and signposting—all of which tends to pull you away rather than draw you in.

Michael Thomsen famously wrote about Dark Souls back in 2012, asking whether the 100-hour game was ever worth such an investment of time. In the case of Dark Souls, his answer was no. It was a well-written piece, and this was one of his ultimate conclusions: “There is real beauty in Dark Souls. It reveals that life is more suffering than pleasure, more failure than success, and that even the momentary relief of achievement is wiped away by new levels of difficulty. It is also a testament to our persistence in the face of that suffering, and it offers the comfort of a community of other players all stuck in the same hellish quagmire. Those are good qualities. That is art. And you can get all of that from the first five hours of Dark Souls. The remaining 90 or so offer nothing but an increasingly nonsensical variation on that experience.” It’s that last part that probably strikes the nerve for most Dark Souls apologists. Can you really get the essence of the Dark Souls experience in the first five hours, to the point that you’re only playing further toward your own personal detriment? I certainly hope not. I can never really blame someone for choosing to spend their valuable free time in pursuit of other experiences, but all I know is that Dark Souls is still the only game of its kind (the 100-hour kind) in which I conquered through to the very end and immediately rolled a new character to start it all over again. I’ve never read War and Peace, but I have read a few hefty novels from cover to cover: Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre (twice), Bleak House, just to rattle off a few. Personally, I value the time I spent with those works just as much as the time I’ve spent playing Dark Souls, or any of the games on this list for that matter. Some games out there are certainly not worth your time, but speaking only from my own experience, for anyone who loves video games and wants to experience the very best of the medium, Dark Souls might be the one video game most worth your investment.

System Shock: Enhanced Edition – All the Cyberpunk You Can (or Can't) Handle

The above image is a screenshot from the ending cinematic of System Shock, a 1994 computer game developed by the legendary team once known as Looking Glass Technologies. It's one of the more resonant depictions of a protagonist at the end of a video game adventure I can recall seeing.

For anyone with sight impairment—and don't worry, this is some blurry-looking mid-1990s CG we’re talking about—it's a picture of a man in a tattered uniform looking haggard, bloodied, and spent. As he leans against the wall, covering his eyes and catching his breath, his mind comes to terms with the fact that his long night of waking terror has finally ended.

What, you ask, has caused this man to be so bruised and battered? Well, he's just spent the last 10 or so hours battling hordes of deadly robots, cybernetic assassins, and other mutated horrors untold across 10 vertical levels of an overrun space station. You'd be lucky to look half as good as this guy had you just gone through the same ordeal.

System Shock must have been one hell of a game for 1994. I only finished playing it in August, by way of the more recent System Shock: Enhanced Edition, developed by Nightdive Studios and released in 2015. Getting through the game in 2019 was as memorable and engrossing as it was at times a chore.

The game itself is a first-person action-adventure game—one filled with plenty of shooting but also exploration, puzzle-solving, inventory management, and other non-combat activities. It's even got some amusing, straight-out-of-the-90s virtual reality hacking mini-games in which you fly through wireframe 3D tunnels and fire at abstract colored shapes. We have a word for this particular kind of genre mashup that wasn't available at the time of the game's release but is nowadays used to describe an entire host of games that sprang from the seeds that System Shock sowed—everything from Deus Ex (2000) to BioShock (2007) to Dishonored (2012) to Prey (2017) to Void Bastards (2019). Today, we refer to this genre as the immersive sim, and it's often characterized by things like:

• Nonlinear, first-person exploration in a 3D environment.
• The complex interplay of gameplay systems, designed as a means of allowing players to solve problems and achieve story progress in a freeform, spontaneous manner.

Those are my words, and—really—it's a verbose way of saying that these games are all about player choice and freedom. I'll talk more about this aspect of System Shock in a little bit.

If you couldn’t already tell, the story and setting are pure cyberpunk. You play as a hacker who, prior to the events of the game, attempts to access a cache of files from the space station Citadel, owned by the TriOptimum megacorporation. Upon being caught, apprehended, and whisked away to said space station, a TriOptimum executive named Edward Diego cuts the protagonist a sweetheart deal: Hack into the station's A.I. security apparatus—a system known as SHODAN—in exchange for some military-grade hacking gear and a clean record. With the deed accomplished, the hacker receives his promised surgical upgrades and goes into a six-month cryogenic slumber to recover from the operation. The game begins as the hacker awakens in the station's deserted medical lab to find everything gone to hell.

The station's robots are all in attack mode. The rooms and corridors are littered with human remains in various stages of decomposition and even a few shambling corpses. SHODAN, it seems, has been busy, and not in a good way. Piecing together the events of what happened during your coma is mostly a secondary objective. Your real priority is to survive the onslaught of free-roaming cyborg enemies that have taken over every inch of Citadel.

This is the kind of 'in media res' narrative setup that we've seen across so many games, the aforementioned BioShock being perhaps the most famous. As in BioShock, the player character receives communications from an outside party that provides the player with background and objectives that point the way forward. There are scattered logs from the station's dead crew members, who recount in journal form the various events leading up to and after SHODAN's takeover. It's one thing to be told for years about the inspirational lineage from System Shock (and its sequel) to BioShock and another to see it firsthand, albeit in reverse, many years after the fact. I don't know how you could play System Shock and not think to yourself, at least once, 'You know what? This game really was ahead of its time.' And, yes, maybe eventually I'll have to go back even further and play Ultima Underworld.

From the in-game HUD interface to the architectural layout of the space station itself, everything in System Shock is a bit of a labyrinth—hard to understand and easy to get lost in. It's an asymmetry lover's dream. Even the elevator system is a bit convoluted. The first elevator you encounter travels between levels 1 and 2. You then access a different elevator on level 2 to get to levels R (energy systems level) and 3. On level 3, there are two additional lifts, one which takes you to level 6 and another that travels to levels 4 and 5. You get the idea. It's as if the design profession ceases to exist in the distant future. Or maybe the world of System Shock resides in some alternate reality in which Apple never revolutionizes the tech industry with its "user-friendly" innovations, and some version of DOS continues to reign as the dominant computer operating system into the 2070s. Depending on your level of patience, the game's general messiness either becomes a part of its overall charm or one of the main reasons you walk away.

Even the way in which the game communicates to the player what they need to do next—well, it barely does this at all. Even early on, I had to pay fairly close attention to the data logs and email communications I'd been collecting in order to locate the relevant details. For the most part, I was able to piece things together fairly well, and there was a satisfying feeling—akin to puzzle solving—in figuring things out on my own. Even I hit a wall from time to time, however, and I was unable to remember or decipher what exactly I was supposed to be doing. At one point, about two thirds through the game, I had to consult an online guide to figure out my current objective. I didn't feel bad about it.


The plot ultimately guides you through the maze of Citadel in a serpentine fashion as you continue to thwart each of SHODAN's doomsday scenarios. First, you have to deactivate an onboard mining laser SHODAN plans to use to destroy earth's major cities. Then, after you manage to preemptively destroy the laser, you have to prevent SHODAN from infecting the planet with a secretly developed super virus that transforms humans into mutants. Eventually, it becomes clear that your only option is to get to SHODAN directly. The game actually does a pretty good job of building up the stakes and the tension over time. There are even a few memorable boss-type encounters.

At each stage of the overall plot, you encounter various obstacles that complicate your original objective and force you to backtrack to other areas of the station. To get an idea how crazy this game's order of operations is, just take a look at this handy walkthrough guide. And keep in mind that list doesn't even factor in the many dead ends a normal player is going to encounter in trying to figure things out through the normal processes of exploration or trial and error.

I remember at one point my player character's next immediate goal was to fix some kind of broken relay. In order to do so, I had to use a computer terminal to diagnose which numbered relay needed to be fixed. Then I had to walk through four maintenance corridor mazes, blasting away deadly cyborgs around just about every corner, looking for that specific relay in order to apply a manual repair item. The relay I was looking for was literally, by sheer coincidence, in the last spot of the last room that I checked. It sounds tedious, but there was a workmanlike quality to the task that made it strangely pleasurable. If you've ever had to manually troubleshoot something on your automobile, flipping through the pages of a bulky owner's manual with grease-covered fingers while outside in the freezing cold, that's the kind of real-life experience this game recalls. With the entire crew of Citadel wiped out, it now falls solely upon your shoulders to perform each and every maintenance operation on each and every deck of the station.

Ultimately, the qualities that make System Shock an early immersive sim are not quite as pronounced as in later games like Deus Ex. Unlike in Deus Ex, you're not choosing whether to hack the door lock, blow it up, find the password, or crawl through the nearby air duct instead. If there's a door that's password protected, you typically just have to find the password. Rather, it seems that most of the game's variability of play style is concentrated in the combat, which—although it makes up a huge portion of the game—is extremely primitive and unwieldy by modern standards. Here, your minute-to-minute choices might boil down to: Which gun and ammo type should I use for this specific encounter, or should I lean around the corner and lob a grenade instead?

While there are a handful of neuro-interface hardware modifications (i.e. special abilities) the player can accumulate and upgrade through the course of the game, including jet boots that let you (sort of) fly upward, I barely noticed they were there and rarely relied on them. I can think of one interesting section of the game that requires you to navigate a series of particularly claustrophobic corridors, all of which are crawling with seemingly hundreds of these small proximity-mine drone robots that quietly sneak toward the player and explode. At one point, I realized this was a place where one special power, which gives you the ability to turn on a rear-view camera and see what's behind you, might come in handy. It was a clever mechanic, but it didn't really make much of a difference in terms of making that section easier to survive, seeing as there was still no option to actually shoot in the opposite direction. Once again, Deus Ex would turn this type of upgrade system into something much more immediately practical and robust six years later with that game's augmentation upgrade system.

Until 2015, System Shock was something of a lost classic, so we definitely owe a huge debt of gratitude to Nightdive Studios for not only acquiring the rights to the game but making it even plausibly playable for modern audiences with their Enhanced Edition upgrades. These enhancements include beefed up texture resolutions and a control scheme that allows you to play the game more like a modern shooter—namely, you now have the ability to smoothly control the camera aim with the mouse. I can't even comprehend how anyone managed to play through the original 1994 versions of this game (there was, famously, a floppy disk version that preceded the CD ROM version), which required you to use the 'R,' 'F,' and 'V' keys in order to tilt your aiming perspective either up or down. In the Nightdive remaster, by hitting the 'E' button (think 'E' for 'Enhanced'), you are able to toggle back and forth between the original cursor control scheme and the new, modern movement scheme. It's still a little clunky having to constantly toggle between the two, but the fact the option is there is a lifesaver.

I think what I'll take away from System Shock more than anything else is the pleasurable, geeky weirdness of it all. This is a game where you can literally click on any pixel of any environmental texture and the HUD will display a short name description for what it is. These are just a few of examples of the many unique descriptors that make up the walls, floors, and ceilings: quartz light fixture, duralloy panelling (sic), cable access port, industrial tile, medical diagnostic tools, molybdenum panelling (sic), halogen lighting, energy conduits. That's an odd detail I've never seen in another game, and it's one that helps make the world feel purposeful and utilitarian. The art direction itself a lot of fun, and each floor of Citadel has its own visual aesthetic. The old-school CG animation used in the game's intro and ending animations looks fantastic. The music and sound was fairly advanced for its time as well. While the soundtrack initially grated, it definitely grew on me over time as I heard more of its synth-based tracks through playing.

All that said, I understand why people still talk about DOOM and Half-Life all the time and only rarely talk about System Shock or even System Shock 2. You can have all the brilliant ideas in the world, but unless you manage to present them in a user-friendly package, you're only going to reach so many people. The unfortunate setbacks of System Shock's unwieldy interface and control input is probably part and parcel of why it's only remembered as a cult classic and not an all-time great. But for any true cyberpunk fans with a nostalgia for old-school PC gaming, it might be worth checking out.

(Alternatively, you could wait for the crowdfunded System Shock reboot, also being developed by Nightdive Studios. The most recent gameplay footage looks promising.)

A Look Back at Perfect Dark, the Next Big Thing of 2000

I was 17 years old when I first played Perfect Dark. A few months ago, at age 35, I finally finished it. Perfect Dark occupies a strange place in the pantheon of games. Some people swear by its greatness. I could never help but feel mostly disappointed.

Developed by Rare and released for the aging Nintendo 64 in May of 2000, Perfect Dark was a massively hyped game in the years leading up to its completion. I remember following that hype. Rare, a well-regarded U.K. studio, had already made a string of hits on Nintendo's third home console, ranging from quirky 3D platformers to quirky cart racers to a quirky game about demolishing buildings.

Perhaps their greatest N64 hit, however, was GoldenEye 007, a breakthrough first-person shooter (FPS) based on the 1995 James Bond film. It wasn't overly quirky. Lauded not only as one of the few good games from that era based on a film license, GoldenEye marked a huge step forward for the console-based FPS when it arrived in 1997. Here was a game that seemed to have a semi-coherent control scheme—thanks in part to the N64 controller's analog thumb stick—that also offered, quite unexpectedly, a fresh new take on the entire genre.

The Reign of Bond

Unlike most movie tie-in games, GoldenEye 007 was no rush job or paint-by-numbers DOOM clone slapped together with a few James Bond art assets and character skins. This was a game built from the ground up, one that actually revolved around the concept of being a super spy. You had to sneakily infiltrate hostile areas, complete tricky mission objectives like disabling security cameras and stealing computer data, as well as fight your way out of sticky situations when you were eventually compromised. There was an actual stealth component to the moving and shooting, as in you needed to move and shoot either very quickly or very cautiously, so as not to alert other nearby guards and be swarmed with gunfire. It was the first game I remember playing that let me pick up a sniper rifle—in the first level, no less—and pick off unsuspecting guards from a ridiculous distance. Oh, the twisted pleasure of instant-kill headshots!

And while the game (out of necessity) added a number of story beats that departed from the film, it also went out of its way to faithfully replicate other parts of the source material. I remember going back at one point and watching the beginning of the GoldenEye film when it aired on TV and being delighted when I recognized the exact level design from the game's second mission, "Facility," right there within the film's intro sequence.

Despite all of that, however, the game's most lasting legacy was not its single-player campaign (we didn't actually use that term back then) but rather its split-screen multiplayer component. If you didn't grow up in the 1990s and never experienced staying up all night with a group of friends playing GoldenEye on some crappy old-school television set, you missed out on a small piece of video game history. (It's OK if you did. I've missed out on more of these moments than I care to count.) Whereas the game offered a handful of play modes that mixed up the rules and weapon selections, the beauty of the game was its absolute simplicity. You and three of your buddies would run around a level and shoot at anyone else you encountered. The person with the most kills at the end of a round was the winner. The game even awarded players with a range of flattering or embarrassing titles, such as "Most Cowardly" for someone who ran away from gunfights or "Most Professional," the latter for the player with the most accurate shooting.

It's not like GoldenEye was ever a perfect game. Some of the ideas it played with didn't always pan out. There were funky ways to fail a given mission, like accidentally placing an explosive or a gadget on the wrong target. Instead of letting you pick up that object to try again, it was an instant fail for the entire mission. It seemed to me that the single-player game was really only so fun and interesting up to a certain point. As a part of its constant need to mix things up in terms of setting and scenario, some of its ideas just fell a bit flat. I remember a terrible escort mission that saw you trying to prevent an A.I.-controlled non-player character from being killed by a hail of bullets, as well as one mission set at night with a bunch of shipping containers where the enemies were hard to see.

When word got out that Rare was working on a spiritual successor to GoldenEye, it got a lot of people's attention—mine included. While on the one hand it was sad to see the developer abandoning the 007 license for the follow-up game, the prospect of an original IP was exciting in its own right. I think the title of the game was announced from the get go, as was the name and identity of the game's protagonist, Joanna Dark. She was presented as a Bond-like spy character in her own right, but the game was set to take place in more of a futuristic, sci-fi universe. Some of the promotional screenshots hinted at something of a cyberpunk theme. This was enough to get anyone excited.

I don't know all that much about the game's development history, but it was clear the team was aiming high in terms of technical innovation. And the game did push the Nintendo 64 hardware to its limits. In order to play the single-player campaign, players had to get their hands on a Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak, which was used to double the console's memory capacity from 2 MB to 4 MB. It was something that had been previously bundled in one of Rare's prior games, Donkey Kong 64, but it was also sold separately. At one point, there was a planned feature that would have allowed players to scan in their own faces by way of the Game Boy Camera accessory and slap them onto the in-game character models. You'd be able to shoot your friends' faces in the game, an intriguing idea that immediately triggered some ethical questions, which may explain that feature's ultimate cancellation.

It's hard to go back and remember exactly what I was thinking and feeling at the time of its eventual release. I was a junior in high school, and I think I managed to have my mom pick me up a copy of the game on the day of its release—if not shortly thereafter. In those days I was always on the lookout for something new and amazing that I could play with my friends—something that wasn't GoldenEye 007. As much as I had enjoyed the reign of Bond, what I really wanted was to impress my small group of friends with something even better.

It wasn't an easy task. I had tried to accomplish the same feat two year's earlier with my purchase of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, a game that—according to the review I read on IGN—was supposed to have dethroned GoldenEye's status as the premiere N64 FPS multiplayer game. We played it once at my friend's house, and everyone else thought it sucked. Back to GoldenEye.

Into The Dark Age

With the release of Perfect Dark, I had hoped once again that we would finally have a game that would recapture that GoldenEye magic from years before. How could you even argue against the fact that this was an objectively better game? It looked and controlled almost exactly like its spiritual predecessor. It had some of the very same levels available in the multiplayer mode. The aforementioned "Facility" level was reintroduced with a new coat of paint and cutely renamed "Felicity." And there was so much more. More new levels. More new weapons, like a gun that could see and shoot through walls! You could add A.I.-controlled bots into the multiplayer matches. You could customize your own game modes down to the finest details. In fact, the multiplayer mode was no longer called a multiplayer mode; it was part of the "Combat Simulator" mode.

Once again, my friends didn't care. They didn't like it. The characters looked stupid. The opening menu was needlessly cinematic. They didn't understand what the new weapons were about. Setting up a game was too time-consuming, and the overabundance of customization options was actually unappealing—nothing at all like the quick-and-easy Goldeneye setup! It was another non-starter.

Because of that, I would have to enjoy Perfect Dark on my own if I was to enjoy it at all. And for a little while I did have fun replicating the multiplayer experience by playing against the A.I. bots. But it was kind of an empty thrill. I tried playing through the game's Challenge mode—basically a series of pre-set Combat Simulator scenarios. But I soon got stuck on Challenge 18, which pits the player against a bunch of tiny grey aliens that were too quick and too small (as in you couldn't you couldn't target them in your crosshairs without aiming downward) for me to kill.

All that was left was the single-player campaign (or "Solo Mode" as the game called it), the part of the game that—as far as I'm concerned, both then and now—had the greatest opportunity to shine.

Even by the time Perfect Dark hit store shelves, no one really had much of a clue as to what the game's story was about. This was the pre-YouTube era, when there was no such thing as a "launch trailer" or "Let's Play" video. The N64 was a cartridge-based system, so there were no demo disks for Perfect Dark. If you didn't outright buy or rent the game, you would have probably relied on whatever vague plot summaries you could read from an online or magazine review. It was basically a learn-the-story-as-you-play kind of experience.

To try and explain the plot is probably a waste of time—believe me, I've been typing and deleting a lot of ridiculous-sounding paragraphs. Suffice to say, it has to do with an alien conspiracy involving a sinister technology corporation, a kidnapped U.S. president, warring extraterrestrial factions, and the hunt for an underwater superweapon. The story culminates with you assassinating a warmongering religious reptile king on a distant planet.

I don't know if that sounds cool or fun to you, but it's really just a hot mess. None of it really resonates. The animation in cutscenes—while fine for conveying action—is too clumsy for emoting, and the voice acting is amateur at best. The story itself is too ludicrous to be taken seriously but not funny enough to be camp.

That said, the game actually starts out fairly strong. The first mission has you infiltrating the headquarters of what turns out to be an evil technology corporation in order to extract a captive scientist who has sent out a distress signal to your employing organization, the Carrington Institute. After landing on the rooftop of an urban skyscraper, you have to make your way downward through a series of offices and stairwells all the way down to the underground research and development labs—killing lots of guards along the way. The environments are sleek, bright, and it plays like a fairly straightforward James Bond spiritual sequel. After a combination of sneaking and (mostly) blasting your way through the building's security, you eventually reach the room where your target is being held.

In a short cinematic cutscene, the captive scientist is revealed to be an A.I. construct, embodied in what appears to be a drone-flying laptop computer—a big pair of eyes textured over the display screen. It greets you in a goofy British accent. The game pulls off almost the exact same stunt a few levels later when you rescue a short gray alien (who goes by the name Elvis) inside Area 51, and his voice sounds like Grover from Sesame Street.

Meanwhile, as you can probably ascertain from the above descriptions, the game keeps hightailing it from one tonally distinct sci-fi setting to another. One mission you're running through what looks like a private Mediterranean villa, the next mission you're on the streets of a Blade Runner-inspired downtown Chicago. One mission has you sneaking aboard Air Force One; a couple story beats later you're on a heavily-guarded deep-sea submarine. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The GoldenEye missions followed their own mishmash trajectory, and even the recent Call of Duty games seem to be built around a similar pattern of haphazard, globetrotting missions where the story is constructed to serve the action and not the other way around. The problem, I suppose, is that there's never any clear sense of progression or perceivable direction. Each change of scenery is accompanied by a jarring plot twist that feels as if it had little to nothing to do with anything that came before.

Perfect Dark also has the unfortunate tendency of saving its most unappealing levels and environments to its latter half. Again, the idea is always better than the execution, such as with the game's penultimate level that begins with Joanna Dark being taken captive by the bad alien faction and stolen aboard a giant space cruiser. Fighting your way from jail cell to command bridge of said space cruiser may sound great on paper, but with the limited capabilities of the Nintendo 64 hardware, the resulting experience was less than stellar. The spaceship itself was a maze of bland corridors and a few open arenas, all of them plastered over with dark green, muddy surface textures—a real eyesore.

My point in all of this isn't to needlessly lambast an 18-year-old game for its 18-year-old graphics, nor is it to measure Perfect Dark against a set of 2018 standards. But these were all part and parcel of the things that disappointed my 17-year-old self at the time of its release as well.

But it was neither the graphics nor the lame story that prevented me from finishing the game. It was also just really, really hard—at least on the most difficult "Perfect Agent" setting. One botched gunfight encounter on a mission run can wreck the entire attempt. Maybe you slightly miss your target, but your target doesn't miss you. You're suddenly knocked down from full health to a measly 25 percent, barely enough to sustain even a few errant gunshots for the rest of the level. Oh yeah, there's no way to regain your lost health mid-level, and also no mid-level saves or checkpoints. Some levels are just tough as nails, and all you can do is try again and again and again until you basically memorize a path that best gets you through the level geometry and the scripted (and sometimes slightly randomized) enemy encounters while completing the necessary objectives. But even when you figure out a path that seems to work, you still have to get lucky or skilled enough to make it through without dying at any number of challenging choke points.

The good news is that you can still play the game on either of the two lower difficulty settings. The bad news is that it ends up being a lesser experience overall, because you don't get to take part in all of the mission objectives—all those little things that give the game its high-tech spy thriller flavor. The easiest difficulty is frankly too easy, little more than a bland, breezy shoot 'em up with just the most basic objectives or occasional requirement to go fetch something within the level or press some button to activate a door. You don't get to, say, shoot down an attack hover-copter in the third mission with a rocket launcher.

Try as I might, back in the day I could never get past the fifth or sixth mission, which was an Area 51 infiltration level. There was always a point near the very end where—if I was even lucky enough to have made it that far—I would open some kind of elevator door and immediately die by the hands of a suiciding enemy soldier who would immediately use his machine gun as a proximity mine. At least that's what seemed to be the cause of death. It was always so sudden and confusing.

I did breeze my way through the majority of the easy mode, but it was so dull and nonsensical that by the time I hit a roadblock and couldn’t figure out how to complete the main objectives in one of the final levels, I didn't even bother to look up the solution. I didn't care. And so it lingered in my personal catalog of games that were started but never finished.

A Rare Replay

Then, in 2010, a number of years after being acquired by Microsoft, Rare released a remastered version of the game, one developed by 4J Studios for Xbox 360. That same version was later bundled alongside 29 other games in the 2015 Rare Replay compilation for Xbox One. It's a very nice remaster that improves upon the original by introducing much sharper graphical textures, improved control options (which take advantage of dual analog control sticks), as well as a crisp and steady 60-frames-per-second refresh rate.

Seeing as my Xbox One came bundled with Rare Replay when I purchased the new console a few years ago, I was soon burdened with the nagging feeling that I should give Perfect Dark another try. So I did. And it was even harder than I remembered. In my mind, I knew I had to finish the game on "Perfect Agent" or not at all. The first mission, it turns out, wasn't too bad. The second mission was a pain in the butt, not so much because the moment-to-moment shooting was overly difficult but because it took so long to manage all of the confusing objectives, which if you went about them wrong could result in instant failure. And one failed attempt for that particular mission could be more than 15 or 20 minutes in the making.

It was the third mission, however, that really made me question my ability to see the game through. While it takes place in the same space as the first level, the one where you have to infiltrate a corporate building from the top floor downward, this time you must escape from the basement up—only everywhere you go there are barricades and security guards who are already alert to your presence. In addition to all of the regular gunfight challenges, the mission contains a couple of heightened challenges toward the end of the mission. The first challenge comes in the form of the aforementioned hover-copter that flies in a strafing pattern around the building and shoots a stream of bullets whenever you happen to be in its line of sight. While the copter's individual gunfire hits don't necessarily cause a lot of damage in their own right, it's just one other thing that contributes to the steady attrition of health that makes the final confrontation so much harder to survive. The only way to successfully complete the level is to destroy the flying vehicle, and the most logical way to do that is to use a rocket launcher set up on one of the top floors and take it out with one direct hit. I don't know how many times I had a good run going, only to botch and miss the rocket shot, but it might easily have tallied higher than the number of digits I have on both hands.

But what truly caps off a frustrating mission is the final gunfight that immediately follows the taking down of the gun copter. As you make your way up the final stairwell to the building rooftop, you're thrust into a partial cutscene that shows you ambushed by one of the game's primary villains and her entourage of shotgun-toting bodyguards. Again, I can't tell you how many times I got to this point only to fail miserably and near instantaneously. The only thing that seemed to give me anything more than a Hail Mary's chance of surviving involved taking advantage of a quirky secret whereby you have to kill all of the level's first 10 guards in night-vision mode before the building lights come back on. Doing so, which takes a little bit of skill in itself, spawns a later guard who drops a keycard that gives you access to a special locked office that has a single grenade on a desk. That grenade, in turn, would buy me a little extra space and time during the final ambush.

Unfortunately, the missions only got harder, and I still had a bit of work to do just to get back to the same spot where I'd gotten stuck almost 18 years earlier on my Nintendo 64. It was only when I managed to beat that infamous Area 51 level that I even let myself believe it was possible to make it all the way through, but I still had much tougher obstacles to overcome.

The hardest level, for my money, is a mission called "Carrington Institute: Defense." It's the third to the last of the non-bonus missions, and it takes place in the headquarters of the organization that Joanna Dark works for. It's a relatively brief mission, but that's only because you essentially have to speed-run the entire darn thing, particularly the first minute. If you don't immediately rush down to the basement of the level and activate a series of gun sentry turrets, you'll immediately lose the mission when the invading enemies start spawning and kill off one of the essential non-player characters. In order to get around quickly enough, however, you can't even rely on the normal method of movement. Normal movement is too slow. You actually have to learn how to move your character in a slightly skewed, diagonally-facing orientation, which is just ridiculous, but it does get you around faster. And maybe you don't "have to" do it this way, but because there is almost zero margin of error I found it practically essential for completing the first objective and avoiding as many enemy encounters as humanly possible. Avoiding encounters is important, because the enemies in this mission are among the deadliest in the game, protected as they are by energy shields that require almost a full clip of ammo to pierce through. And they carry guns that can easily kill you with just a few rapid-fire hits. There are plenty of difficult games that still get made these days, but rarely is a game difficult in the same way as this—such that it feels like it was never properly playtested on an outside audience.

The Carrington Institute mission on Perfect Agent difficulty is very much a thread-the-needle type of challenge, much like I described in my previous post—only in this case I can't really say it was all that pleasurable. It was a chore, a real test of patience and endurance, and that goes for much of the game. I'm happy it's over.

In the end, there's actually a lot to admire about Perfect Dark. It still boasts some of the finest reactive animations you'll ever see. Far from being mere bullet sponges who unflinching soak up your ammunition until they die, enemies behave more like actual human beings. Shoot an enemy in his gun-toting hand and he's likely to drop the weapon and grab the wound with his other while crying out in pain. It's fairly convincing, both in 2000 and today.

Whereas most modern shooters are fairly homogenous experiences from beginning to end, I appreciate Perfect Dark for its variety and experimentation. Different levels emphasize different challenges, such as killing a multitude of guards before they can set off nearby alarms in the submarine level or dealing with cloaked enemies in another. Some levels take on a puzzle-like quality as you learn to devise the most efficient and practical order of operations in how you tackle the different objectives.

To this day, it feels like an aberration, a first-person shooter that forged its own path in a promising direction that other games (aside from a 2005 sequel that I'm not going to get into here) never followed.

A Tale of Two Shooters

Here's the thing. Perfect Dark arrived at a very interesting point in the timeline of first-person shooters. For starters, this was less than two years after Sierra Studios first published Valve's seminal Half-Life for the PC. That was a game that, while impossible to replicate on concurrent home consoles, proved what careful attention to methodical pacing and detailed environmental storytelling could accomplish.

Less than two years after Perfect Dark, Bungie set the new standard for console-based first-person shooters with Halo: Combat Evolved, a game that weaved a more tightly-focused sci-fi tale against the backdrop of a captivating alien world that was—at times—as open and expansive as it was easy on the eyes. It was essentially an on-rails, down-the-corridor experience, but it hid that linearity with its careful placement of tense, scripted firefights.

This, however, is one of the most interesting timeline details, at least as it relates to my own gaming history: Perfect Dark hit North American store shelves on May 22, 2000. Less than four weeks later, on June 17, Deus Ex from developer Ion Storm released for the PC. That game would—by strange chance—quickly become one of my favorite games of all time and forever change my perception of the medium and its possibilities.

To be fair, Deus Ex is a much different beast than Perfect Dark. Perfect Dark is essentially an arcade, action adventure with a real emphasis on speed and efficiency. Each level ends with a screen that displays, among other things, your time of completion, number of kills, and shooting accuracy percentage. Deus Ex isn't about any of that. It has just as much dialogue as it does combat, and it can technically be completed without the player killing anyone whatsoever. Many to this day consider Deus Ex to be more role-playing game than standard first-person shooter, and I agree.

So why compare the two games at all? Only because, to me, they represented two radically different trajectories in the FPS timeline that nevertheless shared some interesting points of commonality in terms of story and setting, not to mention their close proximity in age. Both games take place in a dystopian, vaguely cyberpunk future and revolve around aliens, A.I., and classic conspiracy theories. They both have levels that take place in Area 51.

But whereas the story in Perfect Dark was largely forgettable, Deus Ex felt deeply clever and entangling. This dichotomy was most clearly felt while replaying the Chicago level of Perfect Dark, and all the pangs of disappointment I had felt as an 11th grader 18 years prior came flooding back like an emotional déjà vu. The level, which starts out in a grimy alley and features civilian non-player characters who walk around and greet the player, gives off a very enticing first impression. It's the kind of place you want to quietly explore and take in. Being another stealth mission, you get the idea that you're supposed to be keeping a low profile. But that's not the case at all. Mere seconds into the level, the moment you turn a narrow corner and onto one of the main streets, one of the non-player characters immediately recognizes you as a threat and attacks. And for the rest of the mission you're more or less just slaughtering waves of street cops who shoot on sight. From a world-building perspective, it's almost completely immersion breaking. It feels like just another brainless arcade experience.

By the time I got my hands on Deus Ex just a few weeks after the release of Perfect Dark, it was … well, perfect timing. Up to that point I'd always been a console gamer, with some occasional diversions into the world of adventure games on our family's (usually out-of-date) Macintosh computers. That summer, as I turned 18 and entered my final year of high school, I was ready for something more sophisticated and mature. It just so happened that my dad purchased a PC computer, an event that opened up for me a whole new catalog of games just in time for summer. Deus Ex was one of the first new games I got my hands on, and I couldn't have picked a better title (finally a glowing IGN review that didn't disappoint). It was a gripping cyberpunk adventure built entirely around the kind of concept I had only imagined from the first promising seconds of that Chicago mission in Perfect Dark, one that relied on story and exploration punctuated by sequences of combat rather than the other way around. Perfect Dark was the game I had long waited for only to quickly put aside. Deus Ex was the game that came out of nowhere and stuck with me. It's also the one that made a more lasting impact on the video game landscape.

Future Perfect

As this year's E3 approached, I kept wondering about the possibility that we might see the announcement of another game in Rare's Perfect Dark universe—a proper follow-up to the disappointing Perfect Dark Zero of 2005. (I haven't actually played beyond the first mission of Perfect Dark Zero, and I don't plan to venture further anytime soon) With Microsoft desperately in need of more big-name console exclusives to compete with Sony and Nintendo's crushing first-party output, this is one pre-existing IP in their stable of properties that could potentially generate interest for the Xbox platform once again. Despite my own mixed feelings, it's hard to shake the feeling that the series still has potential to do something really special if given another chance.

But what would a modern-day Perfect Dark game even look like? Would it keep to the same three-tier-difficulty formula dating back to GoldenEye 007 or scrap it for something more akin to other shooters? Would it aim for a more grounded story? Would today's Rare even have the resources and expertise needed to develop a blockbuster FPS, or would it need the support of a more experienced development team?

These and many other questions would undoubtedly surface in the wake of such a hypothetical announcement, but as we all know now, there is no such announcement—at least not this year. Instead, there's the promised resurgence of a different Rare property; a new Battletoads game is in the works. And honestly, that makes a lot more sense. It's probably a much cheaper undertaking to make an old-school beat 'em up game than a first-person shooter. I don't expect the new game to be anything more than a kind of basic side-scrolling nostalgia fest. It'll probably be difficult but nothing like the Nintendo original.

I've always had a hard time getting over unfinished experiences, whether they're books, games, or songs on the car stereo that you have to pause midway through when you arrive at your destination. For a long time, Perfect Dark was near the top of my list of regretful unfinished games. Rare's Banjo Kazooie was another one, despite being only a one-time rental back in early high school and not a game I actually owned. So I'm very happy that Rare Replay and 4J Studio's excellent remastered versions of both games gave me a chance to revisit both without having to dig my old Nintendo 64 out of storage.

But I'm even more grateful for the chance to look back and realize how far the medium has progressed. Where once it was commonplace for developers like Rare to push the available technology to its outer limits—dreaming and building at a scale and pace that the existing hardware couldn't really support—it seems today's problems are of a different sort. With powerful PCs—and consoles not too far behind—it's as if developers have arrived in an age where anything is technically achievable. It's more the massive quantities of time, budget, and human resources required to make those grand ideas a functional reality that limit a triple-A game's potential these days.

Clearly, some things don't change. The industry is still driven largely by hype and constant heightened expectations for the next big thing. This year's E3 will probably go down as the year we all started to get really excited for Cyberpunk 2077. But if you want to go back and see what the next big thing looked like almost two decades ago, go ahead and revisit Perfect Dark. Turns out they really don't make 'em like they used to.

The Transcendent Pleasure of Lines and Doors in Jonathan Blow's The Witness

It seems like it wasn't that long ago when a lot of people were grappling with the question of what constitutes intrinsic versus extrinsic value. How do we create games with a greater measure of intrinsic value, games that reward players with feelings of satisfaction and gratification through the mere act of playing the game? And how do we—at the same time—avoid the ethical pitfalls of extrinsic motivation as it relates to psychological or behavioral manipulation?

It's a topic that a lot of much smarter people than I (as well as, I assume, a few amateurs and pretenders) pondered and theorized about in books, blog posts, and maybe a few TED Talks. It also coincided, strangely enough, with a corresponding movement in business culture, as major companies were beginning to hire game design and "gamification" experts in the hopes of creating new tools and methods by which to capture audience attention and engagement for their products and services. It turned out there was money to be made not just in games but in their DNA.

This is all based on my own outsider impressions. Just some vague recollections of a time when the field of game studies seemed to be gaining newfound momentum, shifting in the direction of a more enlightened territory of understanding and public appreciation. I'm sure these types of discussions are still being had in their various spheres and corners of the internet and the academic world at large, but it feels like a lot has changed in just a few short years. Maybe the great Gamergate dumpster fire of 2014 caused the game luminaries to retreat from the public spotlight. Maybe cultural criticism all but suffocated our collective appetite for other forms of discourse. Maybe nothing so drastic changed at all, and I just stopped following the right people on Twitter.

Whatever the case, I find it a little bit unfortunate that The Witness came out in 2016, because I think it's a game that feels so ripe for examination in terms of those fundamental questions of what actually compels us to play games at all.

Best known as the follow-up to Braid, the highly influential 2D puzzle platformer developed by Jonathan Blow (one of the primary subjects of the popular Indie Game: The Movie), it was a game that came with high expectations. Many people were curious to see if Blow would live up to his reputation—deserved or not—as one of gaming's most thoughtful and introspective figures. Admire him or hate him, it was hard to deny Braid's status as a landmark title.

I myself was neither all that hot nor cold in my reception to Braid when I played it in 2012, a good chunk of time after its initial 2008 release on the Xbox 360. At times it felt like a somewhat clumsy mashup of experimental game mechanics and ill-conceived narrative framework, the latter of which manifested in a series of prose snippets that players could read in between levels. While they seemed to convey a narrative of sorts, it was a purposefully opaque one, intended (it seems) to color the player's interpretation of the game's ultimate meaning, as well as the meaning of its various elements.

I found that part of the game—the quasi-narrative part—too cryptic and uninteresting to really care. And the rest of Braid? It was OK. The ideas were certainly impressive, but it felt at times like a chore to collect all of the various puzzle pieces that would unlock the final stages. Some of the puzzles I solved through brute force tactics—weaving the player character through slightly different patterns of movement until the solution clicked—leaving me with only a partial understanding of how I had managed to spring the lock. I did a lot of thinking and experimenting without necessarily feeling as if I'd learned anything worthwhile in the end.


As such, I came to The Witness at the end of 2017 not with great hopes or anticipation but simply out of curiosity. Similar to a lot of high-profile games, it enjoyed a pretty warm and favorable reception upon its initial release, later tempered by a greater volume of more sober and critical takes after the fact. Having recently finished the main game, I find it to be something quite special indeed. But it's a game that didn't hook me right away.

I enjoyed the first few hours, managing to solve a few sets of puzzles as I poked my way around the game's open-world setting. That setting was intriguing with its winding paths and grand architecture but also cold and intimidating with its abundance of gated-off sections, locked away behind so many inscrutable puzzles. For every puzzle I managed to solve, I probably stumbled on three or four others bearing symbols or solutions that made no apparent sense.

At the time I thought it might be a game I would tackle in short bursts over a longer span of time, something I could come back to in between other games. But then I sort of ignored it. The prospect of playing and not making progress made it something of a nonstarter. That was the case for quite a few months until I talked my wife into playing it. Much in the same way as I had done, she wandered around for a couple hours, managed to turn on one of the game's 11 laser beams, but then got completely turned off after stumbling across a handful of hidden audio logs and video clips. I think she had begun to sense a rotten ethos at the core of The Witness, that the game was being pretentious and manipulative in its conveyance of pseudo-spiritual/philosophical ideas. More on that later.

It's not easy to talk about The Witness without—to some extent—spoiling a portion of the experience. The moment you start playing, you start learning. If you know anything about it, you probably recall it as that game where you walk around a pretty island and draw lines on touchscreens to solve puzzles. And that would be an accurate description.

It all takes place on a small island, densely packed with various biomes, buildings, and landmarks. There's a town, a desert, a bamboo jungle to name just a few of the locales. There are sculptures, trees, gardens, buildings, and … touchscreen maze puzzles throughout. Each location is littered with sets of daisy-chained touch panels that, when activated and solved, typically grant access to new areas altogether.

Most of these maze puzzles take the form of a rectangular line grid, with one starting location (denoted by a circle) and one ending point. The most basic rule is that the line you draw cannot intersect itself. It must instead run its course in serpentine fashion from beginning to end. But it's usually not enough to simply draw any line from start to end. The puzzle is only solved by drawing the correct path. And that path can only be determined either by deciphering a series of symbols denoted on the screen itself or by finding other clues contained within the surrounding environment. It all depends on the particular puzzle.

It's an unusual mechanic for a 3D open-world game, and it's one that Blow manages to stretch out and explore in so many different ways. There are puzzles with multiple starting points and multiple ending points. Puzzles that use multiple sets of symbols that create new combinations of rules to untangle. Puzzles that rely on sound and color. Puzzles that abandon the grids and squares altogether in favor of other visual motifs. Puzzles that must be activated by traversing weight-sensitive walkways. The conceptual mileage is extensive.

What constitutes a rule or solution in one puzzle, however, may not be true in the very next iteration. It may require a new type of discovery. And that's where a lot of people probably lose patience, because the pattern of having to learn new rules and patterns never really ends.

But whereas some people encounter those obstacles and project a sense of unfairness or cruelty onto the part of Blow, I don't really see it that way myself. I never really viewed the relationship between Blow (the designer) and me (the player) as being hostile or antagonistic. The reason I say that is because I've played enough games that do feel cruel and unfair, but even then it typically has more to do with a lack of polish and attention to detail than with sinister motives on behalf of the developers. I'm thinking of games like old 2D platformers with their stubborn, weighty controls and their limited numbers of lives and continues—both of those things being products of their time. Or old point-and-click adventure games that hide their interactive components amid a clutter of pixels on the screen. They both can feel "unfair" at times, but really—I would argue—they mostly just lack a level of sophistication that justifies their difficulty, be it mental, physical, or otherwise.

Everything in The Witness exudes such a staggering level of care and intention, a stark contrast to most open-world games that feel sprawling and populated with cookie-cutter art assets and building types. The clarity of the art direction ensures that there is always enough visual information (sometimes just enough information) made available to the player. If a symbol on a panel doesn't make sense, there's a place on the island where it provides you a basic tutorial. If the puzzle's solution is based on observation, the perspective you require is always in the immediate vicinity. Even the trickiest or most eye-straining puzzle can be ironed out with a little bit of trial and error. I guess what I'm saying is The Witness is not as cruel as it seems, even if the frustration is by design.

On the contrary, my experience with playing through The Witness was one of growing trust and confidence in the game's design (and its designer). As I began to make steady progress on my to-do list of activating the 11 scattered laser beams—any seven of which are required to unlock the game's final endgame sequence—I felt a sense of momentum and empowerment foreign to so many of the triple-A games we so often refer to as "power fantasies." As challenging as the next puzzle might be, I knew in my gut that I would be able to solve the puzzle eventually. And that confidence proved true.

About as soon as my wife all but swore off the game entirely, I decided to jump back in. And this time I was addicted. Having activated two of the 11 lasers during my first couple of play sessions, I spent about a weekend straight making my way through the rest of the main game. As slow and painstaking as it felt to work through the individual puzzles on the micro level, it felt like I was blazing through the game at the macro level. Another laser activated here. Another one here. Then another one. And another one.

All the while, each of those micro moments felt like a small triumph. If you had an audio recording of my entire playing experience, my most common recurring utterance would probably be: "This is impossible." Because even once you have learned the language of a new symbol type—an incredible "Eureka!" moment in its own right—it still doesn't detract from the challenge that comes with using your knowledge to solve the game's individual puzzles. It still takes an incredible amount of mental gymnastics, and at times it feels like building a bridge out of spare parts. It's like that sequence from Apollo 13 where the astronauts have to use a limited supply of junk and electric capacity to return their spaceship to planet Earth. Only in this case there's a guaranteed solution.

The best video game analog I can think of is 2010's Super Meat Boy. It's the only other game in recent memory that imparted such a similar feeling of overcoming the impossible time and again, of threading the needle through a series of increasingly labyrinthine puzzles. In Super Meat Boy, it was a feeling made manifest in a pattern of death and repetition, each failed attempt getting me steadily closer to achieving victory. The challenge in Super Meat Boy, of course, was one of reflex, timing, and physical dexterity. In The Witness, the challenge is based on logic and observation. Nonetheless, each failed attempt was like its own death, but with a penalty no harsher than the simple visual/auditory feedback that let me know I had not given the correct input. (Yes, there are a small handful of puzzles that require you to redo the previous puzzle upon failure, but these are very limited and usually meant to wean you away from your reliance on brute-force techniques.)

The reality is that, like with Super Meat Boy, there's probably a certain threshold that is going to limit a player's individual progress. It's twofold really. Some people simply don't have the patience to keep trying and failing. Other people may be at a different disadvantage. Just as Super Meat Boy's Dark World levels may as well be inaccessible to senior citizens or people with certain physical handicaps, I can only assume The Witness is not the friendliest game for people with color blindness or other visual impairments. Not to mention some people are just quicker at solving puzzles than other people. Are these things problematic? It probably depends on who you ask.

But let's go back, for a moment, to that idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. In certain interviews, Blow readily admits his game is lacking in the kinds of flashy rewards that typically come with a lot of other games—the music and fireworks, say, of completing a level in a mobile puzzle game. I think what he's implying is that The Witness relies on that sense of intrinsic motivation that comes with solving puzzles for its own sake.

First off, I'm not totally convinced this is entirely the case. There are environmental rewards that come with solving puzzles in The Witness. It's in the cable glowing with fluorescent light that leads to the next activated puzzle screen. It's in the rusty, mechanical stirring of a motorized bridge that springs to life, the laser device that slowly emerges from its encased metal box at the conclusion of a long series of puzzles. These are all visual/auditory rewards that the game doles out at specific moments, and to me they offer far more satisfaction than the three-star completion of a level in Angry Birds. It's as if the world itself slowly bows in recognition to your ingenuity, tantalizes you with new views and vantages to its intricate, secret spaces. So there's that. But even these moments only reinforce what's already there.

If we're being honest, the whole notion of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation might be little more than a reskinning of the nature versus nurture debate. You probably just have to accept the fact that there's no easy way to distinguish between the two. We obviously have genes that predispose us toward certain kinds of enjoyment, and there are things and systems and other humans in the world that move us to act on those predispositions.

At the very least, I do appreciate how The Witness trusts enough in the value of its puzzle solving that it isn't compelled to shoehorn in those other bells and whistles—not even a traditional narrative!—that you're likely to see in other modern games. 

I'll begin the long conclusion of this essay by confessing that I have no idea how The Witness derives its name. I was so caught up (obsessed, you could say) with just "finishing" the game that I paid very little attention to the deeper layer of puzzles that littered the virtual landscape. As soon as I had activated the 11th laser beam, I made my way to the top of the mountain where the lasers all converged. In my naivety, I had hoped the work was finished. In reality, it was simply yet another case of puzzles unlocking even more puzzles.

The endgame challenges proved to be just as exasperating as anything else—arguably more so in a few spots. It was here more than anywhere else where it felt like Blow was resorting to some fairly cheap tactics to make the puzzles a bit more challenging. My head hurt when I went to bed late Sunday night, only one last series of puzzles to go (although I didn't realize it until the next day). It could just as easily have been the result of staring at a TV screen all weekend as the mental exercise I'd been engaging in, but the feeling was undeniable. I had binged on the game too hard.

Having now completed what I consider to be the main game, I can still recall at least five touchscreen puzzles I encountered that have yet to be solved. Those are tangible items I could add to my completion checklist if I so choose to pursue more within the game. Then there's a whole load of puzzles of another sort altogether that I know are out there as well. After jumping online and reading more about the game, I see hints of a post-endgame puzzle series referred to as "The Challenge." Maybe it's the puzzle equivalent to Super Meat Boy's Dark World levels, or the anti-cube puzzles in Fez. Yes, it's all intriguing, but I don't think I'll be ready to dive back in for a while.

The thing is, I'm sure there's even more to this game than meets the eye. Exploring that layer of meaning, however, is just as optional as anything else in the game. I described earlier how my wife got turned off by the aforementioned audio and video clips. I told her it was possible to completely ignore that stuff and still enjoy the game. It was true for me. Maybe it's not the case for her.

I have a feeling there is some deeper narrative at the heart of The Witness and that there are hints to be found within the environment, maybe within the puzzles I've yet to solve. I'm not convinced it's worth my time to try and investigate. At the end of the day, my suspicion is that Jonathan Blow is still a more capable game designer than storyteller.

Are the intellectual musings found in the audio and video clips reflective of a worldview that Blow is espousing to the player, or are they rather the imagined philosophies of a fictional character? Just who is the architect of this strange, sterile island anyway? Is it all a simulation?

Part of the reason why I don't concern myself too deeply with these questions is that there's a perfectly satisfying real-world explanation for all of that. There is an architect of the island, and it is Jonathan Blow himself, along with his team of engineers, artists, architects, and designers. The experience was made for us. The same goes for every mysterious video game world in existence, from the multidimensional universe of Fez to the sinister and ridiculous puzzle mansions of Resident Evil. It's one of the beauties of video games—that these fantastically envisioned places can become tangible experiences at all! And if you think of The Witness as one elaborate, virtual installation piece (and there's really no good reason not to), it should only heighten your appreciation of the game's artistic merit.

Regardless of whatever narrative or philosophical meaning can be construed from the world of The Witness, the mere puzzle-solving experience does make it worth the time investment. For people like me who don't have much of an outlet in their daily lives for certain types of left-brain activity—processes that rely more heavily on logic, mathematics, and linear thinking—there is a lot of enjoyment to be had in playing The Witness. At the same time, there is plenty in the game that depends just as much on one's right-brain faculties, those more associated with intuition, holistic thinking, and nonverbal cues.

If anything, this seems to speak to one of the game's central tenets. If there are deep answers to be found in the universe in which we reside, we can't simply depend on one methodology alone. Our existence is informed by the tension and trajectory of facts and intuitions alike. We ignore one or the other at our own peril—or at least our own ignorance.

It's hard to say what the general consensus of The Witness will be in 10 or 30 years' time. There's little doubt there will be a lot more games competing for our attention, fighting for their inclusion in the proverbial canon. But I wouldn't be surprised if this is a game whose value appreciates over time.