Hypocrite's Haunt

First posted on Medium in 2024 In the oversaturated field of live-service games, it’s rare to find something worth playing. Having dedicated over 500 hours of my life to trekking through the damp, muddy swamps of Louisiana in Hunt: Showdown , I knew it would be difficult to stumble on a game of such quality. At the same time, my friends and I had had quite enough of its unforgiving combat, punishing difficulty, and its sewage-water colored color palette. Hunt was simultaneously intensely cerebral, yet also incredibly frustrating when you get shot in the head from half a kilometer away 20 minutes into a map. We wanted to play something where we would be guaranteed at least a half-decent gunfight within the first five minutes of joining a game. Luckily for us, a new squad-based PVP shooter was just coming onto the market: The Finals . Based on the premise that players were participating in a virtual combat arena to compete for money and glory, The Finals sets teams of players against ...

"Demonschool," developed by Necrosoft Games, looks like old-school Persona but plays differently from almost everything I've ever seen. But however refreshing Demonschool's presentation and interactions may be, its strengths wear thin as its repetitive nature and threadbare narrative loses steam. Demonschool does not hold back its punches. The main character, Faye, is already talking about demons and the end of the world within her first lines of dialogue - and her freshman year at university takes a supernatural turn soon after. Its just a few minutes later that you are smacking gangsters and demons around in a turn-based, puzzle-like format. It's definitely fun - there's no pussy-footing around the weird stuff happening at Hemsk Island, and so you and your pals are launched straight into a plot with murdered students, possessed gangs, and cult rituals.  To deal with all these strange happenings, you maneuver your characters around in a grid to kick, punch, a...

Victoria 3 , in my opinion, has succeeded in bringing a vision of the industrial revolution and its human dimension to life. By modernizing the gameplay elements of the previous games in the series, and taking several radical steps to make mechanics match the vision, they have created a robust and unique foundation to build upon. Unfortunately, these changes inevitably made some people very upset and angry. A few were entirely unwilling to understand the creative vision behind the overhaul of mechanics such as warfare, and insisted that nothing less than a simple graphically updated version of Victoria 2 will satisfy them. Nevertheless, the development team were brave enough to hold strong (while taking into consideration constructive feedback) and ultimately delivered an innovative experience that was thematically and mechanically cohesive. This is why I was so disappointed when I woke up to see the most recent Dev Diary , which covers the issue of autonomous construction . In Victor...

  I believe it was my first year at university that I found myself, for the first time, rethinking the word “realistic.” It was during an introductory art history course, and the teacher (a graduate student) was presenting some of the artwork from the Renaissance. When compared to the medieval art we were previously shown, the most obvious point of comparison would be its “realism”; this was an opinion shared by most of the class.   Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights , c. 1490-1510 Raphael, School of Athens , 1509-1511 Clearly, Rafael’s fresco bears more resemblance to the “reality” we experience, especially when juxtaposed with the flat, surreal figures that populate Bosch’s painting. Or at least, this was what I thought before the teacher pushed back against it. Does Rafael’s painting, the teacher asked, truly capture the actual experience of reality?   Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol , 1875 J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship , 1840 Being a vis...

  Paradise Killer was a good game. Although the mechanics were not groundbreaking, the central mystery and setting was compelling enough that the superb aesthetic and audio design carried the day, leaving me satisfied after the five or so hours it took me to complete the game. The good: Paradise Killer ’s sound design deserves a standing ovation. First: the music. The funky jazzpunk soundtrack was excellent, leaving me bopping and swaying to its hypnotic beats and sweet solos. It was also a neat touch to make some of the game’s music diegetic; the volume of the music depends on your distance to the nearest loudspeaker that peppers the landscape. This meant that some areas were left entirely silence aside from ambient audio and your own character (and sometimes the high-pitch giggle of the resident demon), making these spaces eerie and disturbing. Combined with area-specific music, this gives each region a unique feel, making it distinctive and fun to navigate the island. The ...

So. Battlefield 2042 . So many terrible things to say, so few things that haven’t already been said thousands of times on Reddit. Everything from the gunplay to the bugs to the lack of a campaign – there are plenty of things to hate here. So, am I here to contribute to this unending flood of criticism? Well, yes, a little, but perhaps with a little bit of a different perspective. See, I didn’t play the game. Nor do I play many Battlefield games (the last one I appreciated must have been the Bad Company 2 , which is positively ancient at this point). Why am I writing about it then, you might ask? Well, I think as a bit of an outsider, I am uniquely positioned to simply not care about much of the more minute details of actually playing the game. After watching a few reviews (and more than a few angry rants on Reddit), I believe I understand where Dice, the studio behind the series, is coming from, and how they failed so miserably. So, here I go: the core issue behind Battlefield 2042 i...