Lately, whenever I tune into an event like Summer Game Fest or the recent Gamescom, it leads to a minor existential crisis.

While watching these, I feel a profound lack of enthusiasm for about 95% of the trailers that are shown, and I actively have to wonder whether this is me aging out of a hobby where I’m not the target audience anymore.

It’s often said that the older you get, the more all music starts to sound the same. Maybe something similar happens with games? Where every upcoming release these days seems to be a Soulslike, a gacha fever dream, a third person action game set in East Asia, a PUGB/Fortnite hybrid, or a combination of all of these.

There’s no denying that the industry right now is following trends, but this has always been the case. I remember the early 2010s, when every other major release wanted to be either Call of Duty or Gears of War, which meant that color palettes were banned wholesale until further notice.

To make things worse, the indie scene back then was still too firmly in its ‘subversive 2D platformer about depression and abuse created by a blowhard dev’ phase to be able to provide any meaningful alternative.

So in short: yes, gaming today kind of sucks, but as an industry it has always kind of sucked. As gamers, we just have to salvage worthwhile games from a deluge of trend-chasing nonsense, and that’s never really been any different.

Still, over the past years, the overall climate in the video game industry has felt more harsh. And it’s not just because of the unending waves of lay-offs, price hikes and GenAI-fueled scandals sullying every bit of gaming news that comes out these days.

Ultimately, those are just symptoms of an industry that has undergone intense commercialization, to a point where every new ‘AAA’ game carries the burden of tens or even hundreds of millions dollars worth of investment hinging on its success.

Suffice it to say, such an environment is not always conducive to creativity and innovation.

Unlike many other persistent ailments of the gaming industry, this wasn’t always the case.

While I was latently aware that the gaming industry had grown exponentially in the late 2000s, I realized the full weight of how much this medium had changed when researching Perfect Dark for last week’s Agent 64 article.

‘Research’ may sound pretentious given the best part of my studies consisted of me simply enjoying the game, but I also consumed a good chunk of developer interviews and documentaries on the conception of Perfect Dark and its spiritual predecessor Goldeneye.1

Perfect Dark was released in the year 2000 for the Nintendo 64 and was a so-called second-party game. Its creator Rare was—on paper—an independent company, but with Nintendo holding a significant minority stake at the time, these British gamesmiths developed exclusively for Nintendo consoles during that era.

As a result of this constellation, Rare was something of a powerhouse back then. They benefited from Nintendo’s support and even got access to some of their properties while also retaining a large degree of freedom in how they approached development.

So whenever Rare put out a new game, it was the ‘90s (and early ‘00s) equivalent of an AAA release. Now, the term ‘AAA’ is itself little more than a dumb marketing buzzword tied to ballooning production costs the following decade, so I realize that this is an anachronistic way of putting it.

My point is that these were some of the biggest, most advanced games of their day, with Perfect Dark’s release—as the de facto sequel to the massively popular Goldeneye—perhaps being the most anticipated on the platform.

Of course, none of the hype back then even came close to the hallucinatory hysteria that currently surrounds Grand Theft Auto VI2, but it’s a good representation of what the AAA space, mainstream gaming or however you want to call it, looked like during that console generation.

With all that in mind, I was shocked to notice upon revisiting the game how amateuristic Perfect Dark really is.

I’m aware that ‘amateur’ in French roughly translates as someone who loves, and I deliberately chose this wording as to include that element of passion in what would otherwise seem a negative way of qualifying one’s work. But I’m also not going to jump into said etymological escape hatch and conclude the article with the astute observation that the people who made Perfect Dark really loved video games.

No—when you play through Perfect Dark with a modern eye and learn more about its development, this does paint the picture of a team that got away with a lot of things that these days would not be considered acceptable in a professional production.

With Perfect Dark being over a quarter of a century old by now, many things will naturally stick out as archaic or dated based on technology alone, but I remember that even back then, the animation was seen as wonky. I was surprised to learn more recently that the game did in fact have motion capture.

However, those imagining the captivating full-body performances by seasoned professionals that we’ve grown so used to in recent years can put those images out of their head.

Rather, Perfect Dark’s character animation process entailed game designer Duncan Botwood getting strapped into a prehistoric motion capture machine, after which he was subjected to being “tortured” by one of the game’s artists—the late and great Brett Jones—who poked him with a broomstick to indicate where to pretend to have been shot. An arduous process that reportedly took its toll on Botwood’s sanity as much as it did on the plausibility of the animations.

Another aspect in which Rare’s freewheeling approach really shines through is the voice-acting. From what I could track, all of the acting in Perfect Dark’s fully voiced campaign was handled by in-house Rare employees.

Aforementioned artist and broomstick handler Brett Jones apparently possessed the ability to project an evil diva, and as such got to voice antagonist Cassandra de Vries3. Steve Malpass handled several characters, including Elvis, the alien companion who is with you throughout the second half of the campaign. A substantial role that was based on nothing more than a pitched-up Yoda imitation courtesy of the actor.

Even the lead role of Joanna Dark went to Eveline Novakovic4 on the basis of her being part of the music department (that has something to do with sound, right?) and sharing the protagonist’s gender. (These same circumstances had landed her the role of Pipsy in Diddy Kong Racing a few years prior. Talk about range!)

The very concept of paying someone specifically to do voice work was not even considered at the time, which seems strange when these days even purported indie games such as Mouse P.I. can apparently hire Hollywood actors to deliver dodgy dialogue with Shakespearian conviction.

It is of course important to realize that Perfect Dark is from a different era. Voicing only started to become more commonplace in video games during that generation. Especially on the Nintendo 64, games having voiced dialogue at all was still rare—let alone those with a script the size of Perfect Dark’s.

To be sure, Perfect Dark’s peculiarities here are not unique, but it says a lot that several crucial aspects of the game were realized by a handful of Rare’s employees basically just winging it.

By now, the idiosyncratic animation and some of the curious voice acting have become intertwined with Perfect Dark’s legend, and if anything, seeing them replaced with anything more slick would likely ruin that magic.

Moving beyond such obvious nostalgic endearment, I’m also convinced that this more carefree approach is ultimately what made Perfect Dark so damn good. As reported by its developers, many of the game’s features, such as multiplayer modes and specific weapons, were added on the primary basis of what the people working on them thought would be cool. No spreadsheet jockey nor focus group need apply.

That’s not to say that game balancing and marketability weren’t carefully considered, but almost every aspect of Perfect Dark’s extensive features can be traced back to that central question of what would make the game a positive and enjoyable experience, which is simply not always the case in modern productions.

In retrospect, we can conclude that Rare losing the precious Bond license that had allowed them to create Goldeneye proved the ultimate blessing, since it allowed the company to create its own universe, and experiment with more modern themes, such as alien life and artificial intelligence.

We also mustn’t forget that the introduction of a female protagonist was—and pardon the poor choice of words here—a ballsy move for that time. This certainly wasn’t unheard of, and the existence of Dana Scully in The X-Files—one of Perfect Dark’s chief thematic inspirators—would’ve made the business case for Joanna Dark stronger. Yet if we compare her to almost any lead in a first-person shooter at the time, Perfect Dark seems to have been far ahead of that particular curve.

It’s also an indicator of significant creative freedom rooted in the fact that game production teams back then were much smaller, and the overall stakes were a lot lower. Even huge games like Perfect Dark weren’t billion-dollar, make-or-break leaps of faith. They were serious products made by seriously talented people, yes, but also people who seemed to have full faith in their own creativity and—crucially—were allowed to express that.

When I look at modern gaming by way of events such as Gamescom, it’s not that I don’t see developers who share this same passion for their work. I’m convinced that most devs are as in love with their art as the people were back then.

But at the same time, the margin to slip up has become so astronomically small that the environment that had allowed Perfect Dark—and games like it—to happen no longer exists. If even a successful release is no longer a guarantee for your studio’s survival, any aspect of your game that is not up to the industry’s increasingly professional standards is a life-threatening liability. That doesn’t just apply to wacky motion capture capers, but also to off-beat yet risky ideas that you believe might genuinely improve your game.

Recently, in a discussion that went viral for the wrong reasons5, former Halo/Bungie dev Jaime Griesemer stated that he did not believe that, even if given the chance, the old development team could create something like the original Halo trilogy, as it would immediately be crushed by Microsoft’s corporate structure.

This is also why—while I do feel sorry for the poor devs working on it—I never had any interest in the Perfect Dark reboot. Why should I trust Microsoft with the stewardship of the franchise when this iteration of the company would never have allowed the original game to exist? How fitting it was then, that the project got unceremoniously cancelled.

When faced with this harrowing commercial reality of AAA gaming, it is always tempting to point to the indie scene as a sort of pastoral dream dimension where games are still created free of corporate taint, but this illusion has never held up to serious scrutiny and never will.

Our issues already begin when we try to pin the term ‘indie’ to any fixed definition, as it no longer appears to simply mean ‘independent,’ but rather anything released by a small enough publisher. What constitutes ‘small’ in this context is up to your personal imagination and agenda.

In any case, many games passed off as indie today still display a degree of professional standards and market savvyness that sets them leagues apart from what most major publishers were putting out a few decades ago.

Indeed, you don’t have to be an oracle to look at a game like Mixtape and conclude that, with its high production values and licensed soundtrack, it sits further away from the mom-and-pop-store vibes that its ‘indie’ label evokes than did some of the biggest blockbuster video game productions of the ‘90s and ‘00s.

Passion projects fortunately still exist, and I’m not among those cynics who consider every big release to be artistically worthless just because a big and therefore evil company is involved. I would even say that I am more optimistic about the quality of recent games than most.

But when I’d finished watching the Gamescom presentation and booted up my Switch for a quick round of Perfect Dark’s multiplayer, I immediately felt a sense of joy that’d been alien to me throughout the entire presentation.

Perfect Dark was made by amateurs, and that’s a compliment. Even today, it is obvious that the people who created this game were a talented, cultured and often incredibly humorous bunch. Some of them apparently born to create video games; others rolling into the industry by complete happenstance.

For sure, their workplace would also have been home to plenty of friction, miscommunication, vendettas and unpaid grind. But it’s that creative liberty under which they operated—a mere byproduct of the lower stakes tied to a still nascent industry—that I sorely miss in video games today.

So no, I am not held hostage by some delusion that everything was better in the good old days. Or that great games are no longer being released. I hope that my work on here thus far has been enough testament to the contrary.

I do hope, though, that we’ll be able to weather the firestorm that is currently sweeping through the video game industry with infernal hunger and come out the other end a little wiser. Maybe then we can once more reserve some room for carefree creativity. Or dare I say, amateurism.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with doing something for the love of the game.

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

Agent 64 is a derivative game.

This is a statement of fact rather than a complaint, and I can affirm that I do not mean this in a negative manner.

In fact, the entire first-person shooter scene, of which Agent 64 is a part, while among my favorite genres in gaming, is also one of its most derivative. New ideas typically evolve over the course of years until they become staples of FPS design, and a game’s novelty often arises from a unique combination of in themselves familiar ideas.

This only becomes a problem when the developer making something derivative is unaware that they are doing so, or when they don’t fully understand the product that inspired their purported ‘tribute.’ I wrote an entire article on how such design inbreeding has led to the collapse of the single player FPS multiple times and will likely do so again, so give that a read if you’d like to know exactly what I mean by this.

The point is, letting past titles inspire you to the point of imitation has been an integral part of first-person shooters as a genre, and Agent 64 is no different.

Agent 64 is the title of a recently released indie game that aims to replicate the gameplay of pioneering console shooters, most notably Rare’s iconic Nintendo 64 hits Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark. Agent 64’s desire to associate with these classics is declared with explicit intent through its very title.

The game’s own ambitions as a throwback to a very specific era of shooters provide us with a clear context within which we can discuss its merit, but this does present us with the issue that we cannot go further without first familiarizing ourselves with said context. It is only by learning what made Goldeneye and Perfect Dark stand out from not only the games that came before, but also from pretty much everything that was released after, that we can know exactly what Agent 64 is trying to recreate here.

So what was initially going to be a simple review of a fun new indie release grew into something much larger, and now includes a complete overview of both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark as they appeared within their respective historical context. The result is a text that is more dense than what you might expect from a review, but also more rich in information. Even if you know nothing about today’s topic, you can hopefully walk away from this article with a full understanding of Agent 64 and the degree to which it succeeds in replicating a niche style of first-person shooters that seemed lost to time. Alternatively, you can skip ahead to the sections about Agent 64 if you just want to hear my opinion on that game.

On a different note, choosing this exhaustive (or exhausting, if you will) approach comes with the added benefit of allowing me to right a previous wrong, since the FPS history lesson contained within the article linked above all but snubbed Goldeneye, to the rightful dismay of one commenter. Me avoiding Rare’s Nintendo 64 masterpiece—outsold on that console only by Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64—was however by design, since it is so unusual even relative to those shooters chronologically close to it, that it demands its own discussion. And seeing as Agent 64 was so adamant on being a part of Goldeneye’s lineage, it gets to share this stage with both that game and Perfect Dark.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to Agent 64 eventually.

Licence to Thrill

Goldeneye was released in 1997, which means that the discourse about first-person shooters only working on PCs was still very much alive. The game’s exclusivity to the Nintendo 64 was however no coincidence, with the Japanese console giant at the time owning a significant stock in British developer Rare—it was also Nintendo who had secured the rights to the James Bond IP in the first place.1

That Goldeneye felt unlike any other FPS at the time—and we’ll get to what that entails in a moment—was equally uncoincidental, since in its initial stages it was not supposed to be an actual first-person shooter at all, but rather an on-rails shooter in the vein of Time Crisis. Nintendo of America representative Ken Lobb tried for a while to make the case that the player ought to be able to move around freely, but it wasn’t until an early trailer at a convention which made the audience assume it was going to be a first-person shooter that Rare pivoted away from its on-rails inclinations.

The team working on Goldeneye was relatively small, and to some it was even their first big video game project. Perhaps it was this healthy naivety that allowed for a fresh perspective to emerge, and the Goldeneye team didn’t end up just copying Doom like so many other studios working in the genre were doing at the time.

As a result, Goldeneye differed from Doom’s classic FPS formula in several key ways.

Rather than solving levels through finding keys and unlocking new sections, Goldeneye’s levels were all mission-based, tapping into the rich James Bond IP with level objectives including such activities as hacking a computer, freeing hostages, photographing secret equipment and blowing up a helicopter. Selecting higher difficulties would often come with having to complete additional, more perilous objectives.2

Though Goldeneye’s levels were all short—none should take you more than 10 minutes to complete on a first try—they also lacked any checkpoints or save states. This one-and-done design was where the main challenge could be found, and also where its replayability came from. The levels allowed for different strategies and playstyles, even featuring basic stealth mechanics. It is no coincidence that Goldeneye has been able to maintain a strong speedrunning community for decades.

For its time, Goldeneye also had more complex enemy AI than had been seen in the genre before. By today’s standards, it may seem at times laughable, with the primitive motion capture translating into the characters performing slow, elaborate movements that leave them wide open to being filled with lead by the player. But there was some sense, modest though it may have been, that the enemies were reacting to what you were doing as a player. This was a significant evolution of the enemy design in games like Doom and Duke Nukem, where foes were programmed to attack you with no regard for their own safety, looping through the same few animations until either you or they were dead.3

What Goldeneye’s enemies reacted to in particular was where you shot them. A headshot would cause them to tumble lifelessly over as you’d expect. But hit them in other parts of their body, and it would soak red with blood, with your opponent then grabbing it in pain—groin shots looked particularly painful to those with overactive mirror neurons. In the post-level stat screen, you could even see where you had hit your enemies and how many times.

Getting a ton of hits in was easy too, since Goldeneye featured a liberal auto-aim system that made the precise aiming—which was delegated to a specific button—unnecessary to engage with outside of a few specific scenarios that required higher accuracy. This auto-aim feature was a large part of what made the game at all playable, since the Nintendo 64’s boomerang controller was really not made with meticulous aiming in mind, and it would take a few more years before game developers at large finally settled on a standard method for controlling a first-person shooter with a gamepad.

On a technical level, Goldeneye looked, shall we say, interesting. Characters were rendered in full 3D instead of using sprites, yet the game didn’t hold back from littering your screen with enemies, which could lead to the game’s infamous single-digit framerate dips.

These character models appear especially rough to modern eyes, with for example hands looking like squares decorated with crude skin-color textures. Also iconic are the low-res face-scans of the actual actors from the Goldeneye movie that were plastered over the models of their corresponding characters in the game.4

Like most early 3D games, Goldeneye hasn’t aged all too well in the visual department, and even at the time of its release there was a certain janky charm to the character models in particular, but this did give Goldeneye a recognizable look, unique to this game and its spiritual successors.

What’s important to note here is that few of the things I’ve described—apart from maybe the elaborate, context-sensitive hit points—were outright invented by Goldeneye. Its no-checkpoint, mission-based structure was already present in the 1995 Star Wars FPS Dark Forces. Full polygonal 3D character models and environments had been seen a year before before in Quake, as well as in a few other games that predate Goldeneye. The gunplay could be compared to Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, which had been released a few months prior.

However, in the FPS genre and video games in general, it is not necessarily about whether you have pioneered all aspects of your product, but how you bring them together into a cohesive and distinctive experience.

And that is exactly what Goldeneye did. With the help of the James Bond IP, Rare was able to produce a first-person shooter that felt both cinematic and deeply interactive, delivering something that played like no game that had come before it. There’s a strong argument to be made that Goldeneye represents the first time an essential first-person shooting experience was exclusive to a home console. Something that has since become more normalized but seemed as contradictory back then as a Dark Souls game with an easy mode.

It was its reliance on the Nintendo 64 that also gave birth to perhaps the one thing that people now remember most about Goldeneye: the multiplayer mode.

Of course, multiplayer was already well-integrated into the genre by then, with games like Doom and Quake leading the way, but those deathmatches would normally take place through rudimentary network connections, meaning one player per screen, and a set-up that required a degree of technological savviness that not every player possessed.

Goldeneye, meanwhile, offered four-player splitscreen, leading to many hours of jovial on-screen gun violence—a social form of multiplayer that has no real analog in the modern age, since in those days local multiplayer benefited from the time-sensitive fact that online matches were still much more difficult to set up.

What is curious about Goldeneye’s multiplayer is that it was almost an afterthought, being developed and implemented in the final months of production. Along with the initial on-rails concept, the possibility of multiplayer never making it into the game confirms that the Goldeneye that ended up on store shelves came from a best-case scenario, where in all critical moments, the right decisions were made—a twist of fate that secured Goldeneye’s status as video game legend.

Something that’s harder to convey through text is that Goldeneye as a whole felt like few other shooters. Yes, the game was hugely influential5 and beat the living daylights out of its competition commercially, proving the viability of a console-exclusive first-person shooter and helping popularize streamlined, objective-based level design for the genre. But with its clumsy-yet-immersive enemy behavior, ambitious movie-inspired locales and accessible action—assisted by overly generous auto-aim—it was also sort of a one-off in FPS history.

You Only Rule Twice

Well, maybe a two-off is a better way of putting it.

A successful game naturally creates demand for a sequel, but for Rare, this wasn’t so straightforward.

Goldeneye’s massive success as both a movie and a game ensured that the value of the James Bond IP soared in the years following, which is likely what made Nintendo not want to retain the rights.

And so, due in part to their own stellar work, Rare’s inevitable follow-up to Goldeneye 007 was to be their own, original IP.

What they came up with was Perfect Dark, a sci-fi FPS set in the distant year of 2023. The semi-eponymous protagonist, agent Joanna Dark emerges as the feminine answer to James Bond, and she must fight her way through many missions as she navigates a complex web of conspiracies with both global and alien implications, no doubt tapping into the then massively popular X-Files series as a major source of inspiration.

Even though Goldeneye is rightfully hailed for carving out a space for the first-person shooter genre on home consoles, I have always held the stance that Perfect Dark blows its spiritual predecessor out of the water in all those facets that aren’t a mouth-wateringly expensive IP.

Perfect Dark’s campaign featured more refined, complex missions set in diverse locales, ranging from skyscrapers to the bottom of the ocean to an alien world.

Having been released in the year 2000, at the tail-end of the Nintendo 64’s lifespan, Perfect Dark made ample use of the Expansion Pak and was able to achieve a crisper look and a much larger variety of content than Goldeneye (though retaining the dodgy framerate), while also adding in more a more essential feature with voice acting—something which Goldeneye lacked due to concerns over hardware limitations at the time.

Perfect Dark also delivered what might well be the definitive multiplayer experience of the Nintendo 64. It used Goldeneye’s multiplayer mode as a basis and added layers upon layers of depth, with more maps, modes, weapons and even highly customizable bots, which I already praised at length in a previous article.

In terms of its core gameplay, Perfect Dark stayed true to the principles laid out by Goldeneye, with generous auto-aim, as well as enemies with endearingly elaborate combat animations who react depending on where they are hit.

On the merit of it being a second game in a series that was never really a series to begin with, and being released so close to the end of its platform’s life cycle, Perfect Dark did not have the impact that Goldeneye had. Professional reviewers and a good chunk of the players received both games with comparable enthusiasm. But by the time that Perfect Dark was released in the summer of 2000, there was also a sense that first-person shooters had already moved on as a genre, with the likes of Half-Life and Unreal having become household names in the years following Goldeneye’s release.

As such, Perfect Dark may not have quite the glowing legacy that still enshrouds Goldeneye to this day, but it still deserves to be mentioned here since it is the Goldeneye formula taken to its logical conclusion, and some of its influences are clearly visible in Agent 64.

The Spy Who Cloned Me

By the time the existence of Agent 64 was revealed in 2021, there had not been a new release like it for many years.

While we’ve established that Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were both stellar games in their own right, the subsequent generation of consoles saw the rise of franchises such as Halo and Call of Duty, which would help move the genre in a different direction defined by more straightforward single player action and an increasing focus on online multiplayer.

Developer Free Radical, home to a number of former Rare employees, did create something of a next-gen iteration of the Goldeneye philosophy with their TimeSplitters franchise. But with the last of that series’ three games having been released in 2005, much time passed before fans of that particular approach to FPS design would once again have something to cheer about.

Agent 64, while somewhat unique in its aim to replicate Goldeneye’s gameplay, does fit a much larger trend of throwback shooters invading the market in the late 2010s and early 2020s. This doesn’t mean that Agent 64 is a so-called ‘boomer shooter,’ since—much like Goldeneye in 1997—it clearly departs from the Doom formula. The game does however benefit from that same sentiment of single player first-person shooters having turned into visually spectacular but otherwise shallow shooting galleries across the past two decades.

Even though a single player demo was available for a while, further information on Agent 64 only came out sporadically, to a point where the fate of the project remained uncertain for some years. Until earlier in 2026, when a multiplayer beta test was launched. Then, a few months later, the full game was released rather suddenly on Steam.

From the very first moments in the campaign, it is clear that Agent 64 succeeds in replicating that elusive, idiosyncratic gameplay that had made Goldeneye and Perfect Dark feel so distinct. Crude character models, elaborate animations, generous auto-aim: it’s all there.

While the protagonist is not quite James Bond, John Walter is a spy who draws heavily on 007’s legacy, sporting a look not unlike a senior Sean Connery. His pursuit of Bond-like villain Dom Pulp makes for a story that is by no means spectacular, but suffices to set the stage for an action-heavy challenge that requires both weapons and gadgets to overcome, just like in the good old days.

Fortunately, Agent 64 does come with some quality-of-life improvements that make the experience fit for the modern era, such as HD resolutions and (thankfully) a conventional control scheme.

These enhancements do have an impact on how the game looks and feels compared to its inspirations.

The sharper, cleaner view of the environments exposes their relative lack of clutter, often making them feel a bit too clinical and lifeless. Part of this can be remedied through an in-built CRT filter that you can toggle on or off, but even with that retro mask on, some areas and objects come off as extremely bare-bones.

More complex is the implementation of modern controls. Players can choose between mouse & keyboard and modern controllers as you’d expect. Realize that, if you were to play Goldeneye or Perfect Dark with such precise controls, it would trivialize their difficulty, since those games were balanced around the far less intuitive Nintendo 64 controller, which is also where the generous auto-aim system came into play. The sole developer of Agent 64—an individual known simply as Replicant D6—seemed to have realized this, and took a few measures to counterbalance this advantage.

One thing I noticed while replaying Goldeneye in preparation for this review is that the par times in most of its levels were rather generous when compared to Agent 64. In the latter, beating the par time may in some levels require near-perfect play, where even a moment of hesitation can add those few seconds to your time that put you over the benchmark. Don’t worry: like in the classics, beating the par times is an optional feat needed only to unlock some customizability options and cheats, but this does mean that there’s challenge in the game for those who seek it.

This level of challenge extends to some of the missions themselves. Like in Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, there are three difficulty settings for each mission: Agent, Special Agent and 64 Agent. Each one adds tougher opponents and (in most cases) more objectives, recreating what Goldeneye developer David Doak once referred to as ‘toybox’ design, where levels reveal themselves as higher difficulties are explored.

While Agent difficulty is a breeze, the game takes its gloves off in subsequent difficulty settings. In line with its inspirators, the game will reward knowledge of the map, enemy placement and awareness of the enemy AI. On top of that, these higher difficulties also seem crafted with the knowledge that the player has the advantage of more accurate controls and might even possess ample experience with the games that Agent 64’s concept is based on. In line with the classic design philosophy, these levels have no checkpoints, and quicksaves aren’t allowed, meaning that Agent 64 is a tough nut to crack on the highest difficulty, even with the advantage of mouse and keyboard.

Bronzefinger

Agent 64’s first problems come to light when you examine the levels themselves more closely. Where the challenge has evolved to meet the demands of the modern era, the missions themselves can at times fall below the standards set by the N64 classics.

As I’ve already pointed out, the environments and models themselves can appear a touch basic or simplistic. We might conclude that this is simply the result of Agent 64 copying more technologically primitive games. Yet while replaying Goldeneye, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that Rare’s classic did more within the hardware limitations it was forced to deal with than Agent 64 did within the restrictions it imposed on itself. In Goldeneye, there appears to be a more focused effort—with varying degrees of success, mind—to make the mission locations come across as real-life areas, whereas in Agent 64, some levels—such as Tower or Temple—seem crafted more from the perspective of being able to house set pieces that are interesting from a gameplay point of view.

This unfavorable contrast becomes even more noticeable when you throw Perfect Dark into the mix for comparison, which took Goldeneye’s environmental design to another level.

Now, I understand that constantly holding a one-man indie project against what Rare achieved at the height of that company’s success may seem unfair, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong in thinking so. But understand that it is Agent 64 itself which constantly invites such comparisons, often referencing sections and even entire levels from Goldeneye in particular.

The bathroom in Agent 64’s Tower is a direct nod to Goldeneye’s Facility. One objective in Castle plays out like in Control. The entirety of the Mountain level draws heavy inspiration from Surface. I could go on. And while most of the gameplay ideas seem to reference Goldeneye, the visual flair is more evocative of Perfect Dark’s ‘late ‘90s idea of what the future looked like’ aesthetic, but again Agent 64 does not sell this vision quite as convincingly as did its muse.

That’s not to say Agent 64’s levels are bad or uninteresting to play through—the issues I raise have more to do with the weight of the project’s heritage than with the game itself, so make of it what you will.

Fortunately, there are levels that do stand out irrespective of said burden. One of these stages sees you shoot your way through a nightclub—a location so natural to a classic spy story that it’s retroactively shocking it didn’t appear in Goldeneye. Another highlight is the museum, brought to life with abundant enemy guards as well as civilians, forcing you to employ a more covert approach in completing your objectives. Then there’s the otherworldly finale which, though brief, delivers some of the game’s crunchiest action.

Across the campaign, there are these nuggets of brilliance that have the potential to lift up the experience, but at no point did the dry world of Agent 64 fully enthrall me.

Indeed, Agent 64’s vanilla presentation resists immersion. Part of that blame falls to those levels that feel both too referential and too empty, but the real culprit is an overarching lack of cohesion.

To see what I’m talking about here, play the first three levels (i.e. the first act) of Perfect Dark if that option is available to you. In the first level, you fight your way from the rooftop all the way to the ground level of a skyscraper belonging to the malevolent dataDyne corporation. Then the second level has you explore an underground laboratory to rescue Dr. Caroll—who turns out to be an AI whose corporeal form can best be described as a floating laptop. In the closing level of this opening act, you have to fight your way back up the skyscraper while escorting Dr. Caroll, culminating in a daring helicopter escape from the building’s rooftop.

Within these three missions, each of which can be completed in a few minutes, you already get a sense of both scale and purpose, as well as the plot’s overarching themes: even if you ignore the story exposition laid out within each mission’s briefing, just playing through these levels gives clear context to what you are doing and why.

From the moment you start playing it, Perfect Dark feels alive.

This where Perfect Dark and also Goldeneye shone: for their time, and within their limitations, they managed to make you believe that there was so much more to their respective game worlds than met the eye. Cinematic depth conveyed through the continuity of in themselves simple gameplay actions.

By contrast, Agent 64’s levels and acts are connected by a loose thread that snaps every time the story jumps ahead, or you fail to register that the starting area of the current level is the last section of the previous level. This feeling that the levels are disjointed is somewhat remedied in the last two acts of the game, but Agent 64 never drew me in quite as much as did Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on my recent playthroughs of those games.

Cyphers Are Forever

It may start to sound like I dislike Agent 64—trust me, I don’t—but I’ll have to keep digging here, since the lacking campaign continuity is reinforced through the wider design, with the player’s experience potentially suffering from what I can only describe as a glaring pacing issue in the game’s story mode.

As said, there are three difficulty settings in Agent 64, and as such my initial plan was to play the game like I had played the classics: go through the campaign on the easy Agent difficulty for a first playthrough to familiarize myself with the story, the setting and the objectives, before going back in on higher difficulties to explore the additional challenges.

In Agent 64, this is not possible.

There are four acts in which the story missions take place, and you must unlock each subsequent act with a currency called Cyphers. Cyphers are earned by completing levels on different difficulty settings, and by beating challenge scenarios that you can unlock along the way. If your plan is to only stick to Agent difficulty on your first playthrough, you will not earn enough Cyphers to unlock any of the other acts, forcing you to replay levels on higher difficulties before you can move forward in the story.

In itself, this is not a huge deal, since there are plenty of possibilities to farm extra Cyphers without the experience becoming massively frustrating, but it still massively interrupts the flow for those who wanted to go through the game playing on what they presumed to be the default difficulty.

(NOTE: Take into consideration that the game is still being updated regularly, and that the Cypher system was already rebalanced once as I was playing through the game. Therefore, information in this section may become outdated over time. See the footnote for details on which versions of the game I played.6)

The best theory I’ve heard regarding this system—which by the way has no equivalent in Goldeneye nor Perfect Dark—is that it is simply a way to pad out the play time enough to make it more challenging to complete the game within Steam’s two-hour refund window.

In order to test this, once I’d unlocked everything, I went through the campaign from start to finish on Agent difficulty just to see how much gatekeeping the experience needed if it wanted to be safe from players who’d planned to beat it once and apply for a refund. At a casual pace, I reached the final credits in 57 minutes, making this hypothesis about the Cyphers’ true purpose a plausible scenario.

Assuming this was the motivation behind the Cypher system, I can sympathize to a degree. Ultimately it’s a flaw in Steam’s blanket refund policy that leaves developers of shorter games vulnerable to exploitation. Still, that does not make the Cypher system enjoyable to interact with from a gameplay point of view, and I imagine it might scare off some potential buyers.

That’s not to say that Agent 64’s brief campaign length is itself a problem.7 With the additional objectives on the higher difficulties, as well as the challenges and par times, the levels remain highly replayable even after multiple successful runs.

After you’re done with those levels, there’s also Arena mode, which is the game’s multiplayer. This mode in itself is fine, as it gives you a taste of what Goldeneye multiplayer felt like, even going as far as to add four-player local splitscreen as an option, though that might be better suited for when this game is hopefully ported to home consoles.

Worthy of mention here is that Agent 64 uses Easy Anti-Cheat for its online component—which I know to be a dealbreaker for some players—but at least the game does give you the option to not install it if you only want to play offline.

Those who won’t go online but would still like to sample the multiplayer by themselves will be glad to know that the Arena also comes with the option to add bots. This functions much the same as it did in Perfect Dark, where computer-controlled players with adjustable levels of skill and character models could likewise take up slots in the multiplayer mode. For now, though, Agent 64 lacks the depth and customizability to approach the lasting appeal of Perfect Dark’s offline multiplayer, and as such I cannot promote this part of the game as being enough in isolation to justify a purchase.

As a consequence, the central draw of Agent 64 remains its story mode, as it best displays the game’s ability to deliver gameplay that is faithful to the mannerisms which briefly defined the home console FPS experience during the late nineties. Even if this game does not quite reach that same level of appeal at any point in its campaign.

Yesterday Never Dies (Conclusion)

Agent 64 deserves praise and admiration for how well it manages to recreate an archaic gameplay style almost three decades later, and on completely different technology.

The developer’s passion radiates from the beating heart of its core design, yet it is the game built on top of this solid foundation that ultimately prevents Agent 64 from reaching the heights it alludes to in its many references to the N64 glory days.

When we look at other prominent FPS games that faithfully replicate gaming experiences from the past, we can see that the best of those throwback shooters have something that Agent 64 lacks.

Retro games such as Ion Fury and Supplice manage to strike a difficult balance: on one hand, they far exceed the intricacy and ambition of their archaic inspirators, while on the other, they retain the illusion that these could be lost releases from the era on which they draw. So they offer something new—albeit in terms of scope and execution rather than design—while remaining close enough to the source material to still feel authentic and nostalgic.

This circles back to what I said in the beginning: derivation in first-person shooters is not a problem. The fact that titles within the genre were called ‘Doom clones’ for the first few years should tell you that the liberal ‘borrowing’ of ideas has been a part of this branch of gaming since the very start.

But if your aim is to stand out within that forgivably derivative framework, it is important to observe the stellar execution of familiar tropes and ideas.

Yet while replaying Goldeneye and Perfect Dark for the purpose of this review, most direct comparison with Agent 64 cast the latter in an unfavorable light. Whether it’s Agent 64’s small weapon roster, its serviceable but by no means amazing soundtrack. or more pressing issues such as the visible seams weakening its campaign, the game just struggles to reach the standards set by that which it imitates.

Again, the constant parallels drawn between this game and its sources of inspiration may seem unfair given the scale of its development, but these assessments are necessitated by Agent 64’s very nature. The game presents itself as a tribute, and it’s through this closeness to its idols that Agent 64 also exposes itself to direct comparison.

As we’ve seen, this is not the first time a game has so directly recreated the core gameplay of an older release. But where Ion Fury and Supplice overcame their respective forebears to deliver a superior experience, Agent 64 never quite manages to wash off its proof-of-concept stench.

Agent 64 is the pretender to a long vacant throne, but it commands no air of royalty.

Perhaps I’m coming off as more negative than I intend to, because I do like the game, and for most of you I would recommend that you buy and play it. But I take indie games very seriously, which compels me to hold them to a high standard. It’s the same standard by which I judged games like Cultic and Wizordum, and the same one that I will use for upcoming throwback shooters.

Just to be clear, Agent 64 is a fun game that faithfully reproduces the gameplay of Rare’s hallowed Nintendo 64 shooters. At the same time, the only thing it truly holds over those games is its optimization for modern machines and controls.

So if you’re either someone who has never played first-person shooters from the N64 era, or you desire a quick retro fix, then Agent 64 grants you a rare (no pun intended) but cursory look into what that era was all about.

If what you’re looking for is a more substantial experience, then perhaps it is best to find a comfortable way to play Goldeneye and especially Perfect Dark. Mind you, these games did not age gracefully due in large part to their control schemes feeling unintuitive to the modern hand. But if you can overcome that hurdle, you’ll find that these are foundational releases in the first-person shooter genre, while Agent 64 is more of a reflection of past glory, and it never quite ups the ante from there.

Agent 64 is a derivative game. This is still not the issue. But as it appears now, it has too little meat on its bones to truly stand toe-to-toe with the giants that inspired it. The game does however do one thing right: it nails the core gameplay of a style of first-person shooters that many—myself included—thought dead, buried and forgotten. That is a true achievement, and I do hope that Replicant D6’s work here proves fruitful enough to pave the way for more such projects to follow in the future.

Once at the cutting edge of first-person shooter design, Rare’s work became the hallmark of a particular time in the genre’s history. An age of discovery, rife with exciting new ideas, but also technological restrictions and growing pains. Over time, the industry moved on, with Goldeneye and Perfect Dark ending up like so many classics do as they age—venerated names of days gone by. It is through releases like Agent 64, imperfect though they may be, that we can preserve their legacy for new generations of gamers.

Yesterday never dies.

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

Sources for particular bits of information are linked to in their respective sections and/or footnotes.

For the purpose of this article, Agent 64 was played on a PC with a mouse & keyboard, and both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were played through official NSO emulation using a wireless N64 controller replica.

It was after several years of playing an MMO that I learned what a live service game was.

Live service or ‘live as a service’ was often used in a negative context when angry gamers on your social media platform of choice were complaining about a particular release or developer moving into a direction they didn’t like, so its actual meaning never truly registered with me.

My blissful ignorance continued until one day the term seemed to have become so ubiquitous that I felt compelled to do some cursory research. Not only did I find out that it refers to games that receive continuous support and updates, but I also discovered that I’d been playing one for years through my adventures in Elder Scrolls Online.

That doesn’t mean that all live service games are MMOs, which easily fit the definition because they rely on a steady supply of new things to do online. It could also be argued that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is—or was—a live service game to an extent, as it received regular updates in the form of tweaks, balancing patches and new content across multiple years.

Indeed, one of the difficult things about writing an article on this topic is that the parameters of live service aren’t absolute. It can at times be tricky to determine the exact point at which live service transforms into what we could call light service—when a game has simply had a lot of DLC and/or a prominent online component in need of regular balancing and bug-fixing updates. So just to be clear, I am writing about all of these things, wanting to discuss the broader phenomenon of continued support for games—paid or not—becoming baked into the way we experience them.

Semantic discussions aside, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe—a reputable racing game with mostly high-quality DLC additions—is not the title people think of when they use live service as a dirty word. Nor is it the game that executives wish to emulate when they pour unwise amounts of money into live service projects that to normal people appear doomed from the start.

Concord, Redfall and Highguard are but a few of the names that decorate the tombstones littered across the live service graveyard—warning signs destined to be ignored by all future inhabitants of this ever-increasing resting place for ill-fated products.

And “good riddance!” we can proudly declare, because gamers don’t want this megalomaniacal, perma-online slop that charges us up our ass for a few crumbs of extra content. We want games that we only have to buy once. Releases that are good out-of-the-box and don’t need a laundry list of updates and paid DLC to keep us entertained for more than a week.

…Maybe there was once a time where I would’ve actually believed that. Hook, line and base-game sinker.

But if I’m honest, I don’t think it really holds true. Not anymore, at least.

It was Harrison Polites’ recent article that got me thinking about this. Among other things, it discusses the current state of Mario Kart World, which has compared to its aforementioned predecessor received just a small amount of post-launch content in the first year following its release.

Harrison makes the case that Mario Kart World’s meager supply of new content—consisting of a new Battle mode and two extra courses for the Knockout Tour—represents a huge missed opportunity for Nintendo.

Even though my gut reaction was to fall back onto my old-school gamer sentiment of ‘a game should not require DLC to be good or remain interesting,’ at least the business case for Mario Kart World’s continued support is undeniable.

With well over half of the Switch 2 owners also having a copy of the latest Mario Kart, there are tremendous advantages to either selling DLC and/or a season pass to a huge potential audience. Even outside of direct monetization, it could prove beneficial to draw players back to the platform with more substantial free updates.

Mario Kart has been Nintendo’s cash cow for a few consecutive console generations now, and there’s all the reason to assume that this latest installment will once again get rewarded for said status with years of updates and content.

However, in addition to this business-oriented reasoning, I’m also warming up to the idea of continued support from my own perspective as a player.

Even though Nintendo is perhaps being a bit slow to add substantial chunks of content to Mario Kart World, its aforementioned success mandates that DLC will come, and I’m honestly looking forward to it.

You see, there is another recent game—in some ways a direct competitor to Mario Kart World—that was made according to the noble ‘one-and-done’ philosophy. Its director announced ahead of release that the game would receive no paid DLC, and he even ruled out the possibility of a sequel. His reasoning was that he had already put everything he could think of into this game.

This game is Kirby Air Riders.

Refreshing as this sentiment may be in an industry that at one point openly contemplated charging players per ammo clip, we are starting to see the consequences of such an old-school approach to this kind of game.

Director Masahiro Sakurai’s promise has thus far remained true: while Kirby Air Riders does to this day receive some free support in the form of small tweaks and online events that unlock minor in-game rewards (following a model similar to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, also directed by Sakurai), there are no microtransactions or DLC. Virtually all the content that’s in the game today was also there at launch.

Commendable to be sure, but it does come with the apparent consequence that the game is sort of dead. It’s more difficult now to find online matches, and the sales data doesn’t give us much hope that large swathes of new players are about to arrive.

As of December 31, 2025—so about five weeks into its release—Kirby Air Riders had sold 1.76 million copies. Today, a whopping nine months after its release, the most recent sales figures (dating back to June 30th) show undeniable stagnation, putting the total at 1.9 million.1

While people with agendas flocked to social media to identify the game’s €/$70 price as the culprit, this does not match the reality of a game that experienced solid sales at first and then took a nosedive right after Christmas.

What such a pattern could correlate to—and note that I am speculating here—is people knowing that the game will not be receiving the live service-esque support that’s become customary in the racing genre, prompting them to go for a different option.

Because on the Switch 2, there are many viable alternatives in the mascot racer subgenre.

Mario Kart World—despite its disappointing amount of new content—does come with the promise of more stuff being added over time, and its much larger userbase should be able to keep the online part of the game populated until then.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the previous installment in the series and will as such not be getting more DLC, but years of continued development and support in combination with frankly ridiculous sales figures—the game is outselling Mario Kart World in some places!—have cultivated a healthy basis for this 12-year-old kart racer2 to stay alive until Nintendo themselves decide to pull the plug on the servers.3

There’s even Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, which in spite of considerable online noise surrounding its supposed superiority actually sold worse than Kirby Air Riders, yet has a more healthy future prospect with new content still being added regularly.

That a good chunk of said content consists of unimaginative, low-effort crossovers (‘honey, it’s 4PM, time for your daily TMNT tie-in!’) accompanied by mediocre tracks is beside the point, since there appears to be value in the mere perception of Crossworlds being ‘alive.’

So that puts us in a situation where what I consider to be the best mascot racer of 2025 is also the one people are the least likely to still want to buy one year later.

This is a strong indication that, in the minds of many gamers, a live service-esque model now comes with the territory of a racing game—at least one that has a prominent online component.

And tempting though it may be to chastise modern gamers for being spoiled and favoring quantity over quality, I cannot help but notice that I too struggle to turn on Kirby Air Riders these days because I’ve simply done most of the things that are to be done within the game—often multiple times over.

Despite valuing Sakurai’s pre-launch pledge, I would not mind if he broke it for some welcome new content.

It should be said that this desire to engage in fresh content does vary per game.

When I play a solid single player FPS campaign, I attach much more value to consistent pacing and quality.

Earlier this year, I criticized Mouse: PI For Hire precisely for featuring too much content—or rather, for too much of its 15-hour campaign surfing the gentle waves of flavorless mediocrity.

In Mouse PI’s case, I felt relief when I reached the end credits, and I have no intent to revisit it, nor do I want to play its promised DLC outside of feeling some weird obligation to review it when that dreaded time comes.

So in the case of a single player FPS, I get much more value from a polished, finished product that is infinitely replayable, even if the actual content there is a mere six-hour ordeal.

We might then conclude that the desire for continued support hinges on a game’s (online) multiplayer component, and that ‘live service single player’ ought to be a contradictio in terminis that we should hide from smooth-brained gaming executives on the prowl for more terrible ideas.

But here too, I caught myself astray from such virtuous reasoning.

There was another Switch 2 exclusive released around the same time as Kirby Air Riders, and it’s this release that was my GOTY of 2025: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment.

Age of Imprisonment is a Zelda spin-off that relies on the love-it-or-hate-it musou combat for its main gameplay loop while telling what might well be the series’ best story to date.

After getting it at launch—the attentive reader will rightfully conclude that November 2025 was a really expensive month for me—I played Age of Imprisonment several hours every night for two weeks straight.

I had a great time, ended up reaching 100% completion, engaged in all of its gameplay systems, and even got to go back in for more action when developer Koei Tecmo dropped a handful of free content updates throughout December.

After completing everything, replaying all of the main story and a few other missions, I’d gotten 90 hours of fun out of Age of Imprisonment before running completely dry of reasons to boot it back up again.

So just to summarize, Age of Imprisonment gave me dozens of hours of great gameplay, some free content updates to boot, and enough quality to be my personal GOTY of 2025. It sounds just about perfect.

Except now I find myself anxiously waiting and hoping for any new content to be announced—paid or otherwise. Apparently, that small taste of ‘light service’ support in the month following its release was enough to warm me up to the idea of Hyrule Warriors—a single player game—remaining a steady fixture across 2026 through continued updates.

So far, this has not been the case, and with there being a real possibility that Age of Imprisonment has already seen its final update, I can’t help but taste a dash of disappointment whenever I think about the game—a game that I otherwise have no real complaints about and count among my favorites.

Maybe the gaming landscape did change enough for it to also have affected me. Where the prospect of a beloved game remaining ‘alive’ through regular updates has become too attractive to be overruled by the traditional notion that a game needs to deliver all its content upon launch.

There are a lot of things to consider here. An army of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that complicate the question of whether continued support ultimately leads to better gaming experiences.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, live service has long had negative connotations, and not without reason.

The term can be employed as a euphemistic veil for a business model promoting games that hinge on continued financial investment from loyal customers to even remain playable. Subscriptions, paid expansions and/or battle passes are on offer, and if not enough players buy The New Thing, the threat of maintenance mode or even server death appears on the horizon. Having been dizzied by the choppy waters of Elder Scrolls Online’s current predicament, the stress this sort of system generates should have no place in a hobby.

Granted, such scenarios are mainly a concern when the entire game takes place online. An MMO without active servers is literally unplayable, but a racing game that stops receiving updates will often still be playable, even if it’s just through single player and local multiplayer.

Still, games that don’t fit the traditional understanding of live service yet have expanded through steady post-launch content may also face problems. For instance when it comes to game preservation.

If you buy a game on a cart or disc, but you no longer have access to post-launch updates, do you really have the full game? Can we still consider GTA 5 a preserved game when its sequel releases later this year and 5’s substantial online component inevitably has to make place for something new?

As we’ve observed, there now appear to be entire genres that come with the implicit expectation of some form of continued support—be it live service or something smaller in scale—if they want to achieve any form of long-term success.

On the other hand, is it really that bad to want more of a good thing? As long as publishers don’t remove features from games during development to later sell them separately—which is a genuine risk—I do like the idea of having an excuse to return to some of my favorite games after experiencing all of their initial content.

Ultimately, a lot does depend on the game itself. Releases that have a strong, repetitive gameplay loop—such as racing games or certain action games like Hyrule Warriors—benefit more from additional content than adventure games that already offer many hours worth of exploration, leading to a wider variety of gameplay experiences with each session.

At the end of the day, most I can do is chronicle my own change in position towards regular support for the games I love and notice the emergent disappointment when those hopes aren’t always met.

And of course I can ask you. Do you want to see your favorite games go through regular content cycles, or do developers need to put more trust in their end product and let it live its own ‘life’ on the market, come what may?

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Notes:
Nintendo’s own website was consulted for sales figures, as was this tweet to confirm their sales data as of December 31st, 2025.

It feels like gaming has officially entered its doom and gloom era.

I can’t remember a point in my life where the discourse surrounding video games was as bleak as it is now.

One particular concern during the modern age of gaming is historic preservation within the medium. Some 20 years ago, we could scarcely have imagined this to be the issue it is now.

Short of all copies of certain games being destroyed in an all-out nuclear war, the prevalence of physical media for the longest time ensured that most games would remain available, even if sometimes against eBay prices that border on extortion.

MMOs were already a thing in the early 2000s, and the thought of ‘what if the servers shut down’ would surely have crossed the minds of some World of Warcraft’s early adapters. Still, there was not yet an industry-wide obsession with live service, and we’d only see the definitive rise of anti-consumerist DRMs in the years following.

Games For Windows Live, anyone?

There were already releases whose obscurity put them on the verge of being lost media, but those cases had more to do with up-front cancellations or extremely limited supply.

Star Fox 2 was known to exist but remained unavailable to the public until 2017, and the NES game Cheetahmen II was supposedly unreleased but can somehow be found for sale on auction sites for idiotic prices.

But a game that would outright stop being available for purchase because the owner of its digital storefront decided to flip a switch? Not too long ago, that was hardly thinkable, yet it has since become an increasingly common occurrence as the market share of digital-only games soared.

As I am sure you may have noticed if you follow my work here, I’m currently on a quest to play and finish every Kirby game before the end of 2026, and for this endeavor I’m restricting myself to the mainline entries. Part of this is born from convenience because the series has a rather large volume of quirky proof-of-concept titles that hinge on a singular gimmick and come in varying degrees of playability. But it’s also a necessity due to some of these games having been exclusive to digital storefronts that no longer exist.

With Sony recently announcing that it would cease publishing physical copies of Playstation games from 2028 onward—I’m sure this is the first time you’ve read about this on Substack—we’re only heading further in that direction, with the feared end result being that a few major gaming companies will curate what we are allowed to buy or even own.

Now that the industry’s future fast approaches with dystopian tread, I do feel vindicated in never getting rid of my game-related possessions.

Just this week I finally started giving my 3DS a proper spin. I’d bought the console all the way back in 2015 for Mario Kart 7, and it had been sitting idle ever since I finished that game. I even had to think real hard about which moving box my 3DS was hibernating in, but I eventually unearthed it and discovered that my neglected handheld is still in top shape, with its near-mint condition—to my great surprise—even extending to its battery.

Consider for a moment the potential here: I have an as-new console I’ve barely touched with a broad library of games ready for me to explore, including high-profile releases belonging to my favorite IPs. If the prospect of an overpriced new Playstation that only runs digital games was by itself not enough to kill my excitement for it, then this surely is.

Beyond the practical reality of tapping a rich vein of new games to try—new in the sense that I have never played them—there is also the sentimental value of gaming-related objects.

I know this is a more muddy topic because it is all too easy to regress into a state of syrup-drenched romanticism when discussing one’s personal attachment to physical media, and while I’m fully capable of indulging such materialist impulses, I also realize it may not make for the most enticing prose within the context of this issue.

So what I’ll do instead is highlight one single object from my collection, and I’d be genuinely curious to hear how many of you are familiar with it, even if just by name.

Introducing the 1997 PC game Sub Culture.

If the low-effort pun in the game’s title is not enough to betray its age, then surely its status as a ‘3D Action Adventure’ being listed as a unique selling point on the front of the box will give it away.

Oh, and maybe it coming in an unwieldy-yet-charming PC big box is by itself a bit of a clue.

In Sub Culture, you control a submarine and must navigate, fight and trade your way across the ocean, with the game’s title referring to the underwater society that populates the sea bedding.

This 1997 PC game was published by Ubisoft—then still adorably stylized as Ubi Soft—and developed by Criterion Studios. Criterion was a young studio back then, but would go on to make a name for itself, first by developing the terrific Burnout series before getting entangled in a semi-successful attempt to revive the Need For Speed IP. As of 2026, the studio appears to be serving a life sentence developing for Battlefield games along with a half dozen other subsidiaries of prolific Saudi video game publisher Electronic Arts.

Despite the involvement of some would-be famous studios, Sub Culture itself never reached fame nor infamy. What little online data I can find teaches me that the total North American sales amounted to just a few thousand copies.

The combination of the game’s title, age and obscurity rendered my search queries into its European sales data fruitless, but given that my physical copy comes with some unprompted environmental storytelling in the form of a big, ugly, orange discount sticker that I haven’t ever dared tear off, it is safe to say that the odds of Sub Culture having been a massive success in my country are as firmly below sea level as the game’s setting.

As it happens, that pompous, bright sticker—that by the way manages to put a writing error in a two-letter word—is likely the reason I even got to play Sub Culture.

It was my mother who bought me the game, and that wasn’t a common occurrence. Our family wasn’t poor, but we weren’t exactly rich either, so the limited household budget combined with her perpetual concern over me playing hyperviolent video games behind her back (guilty) kind of narrowed down the range of suitable games in an age where Blood, Mortal Kombat and Carmageddon dominated store shelves.

But a game about exploring the ocean that featured beautiful cover art and came at a discount price?1 It fit the bill perfectly, and even though I don’t remember ever asking her, I’m convinced she bought this game based purely on vibes—a family tradition I’m proud to continue to this day.

Sub Culture turned out to be one of those games that captured me from the first second I was let loose into its world. The beauty of its 3D-rendered ocean may long have been eclipsed by the likes of Subnautica, Endless Ocean and Abzû, but back then, there was absolutely nothing like it.

And so I spent most of my time with Sub Culture simply exploring its vast underwater world. Since I am operating entirely on decades-old memories, I have no idea whether this game’s map was as big as it felt (probably not), but with the sandbox/open world hype still being several years away, it was remarkable in itself that a full 3D game allowed you to go wherever you pleased without being forced to progress from level to level.

In this sense, my experience with Sub Culture was most similar to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. That game also felt bigger than it really was, but it seemed grand not because of its map size, but through its ability to draw in the player and make them want to be a part of its universe. Hyrule was a world that I was content to exist in to a point where, for the longest time, it suppressed my urge to actually complete its quests.

In this regard, Sub Culture was much the same. From what I can recall, most of the map was open for exploration from the very start, even if it prevented me from upgrading my vessel. I remember spending entire evenings steering my puny submersible through dim-lit underwater cave systems, carefully passing by bandit bases, and finding respite among the peaceful elements of the local wildlife. Along with its fittingly tranquil ambient soundtrack, the whole experience made for hours of feel-good gaming at a time.

The big box promised me a 3D Action Adventure and that is exactly what I got, even if I valued the ‘Adventure’ a lot more than the ‘Action.’

I did on occasions try to engage with Sub Culture’s actual gameplay, which I remember to be surprisingly modern for its time, what with it being an open world game where you could complete missions to gain the favor of different factions.

By today’s standards, such game design may not seem all that original, and it is in fact this very structure that has been robbed of all excitement through its presence in every major Ubi space Soft title in the ongoing Far Cryification of their every franchise, but this is a modern perspective.

Realize that Sub Culture came out a good four years before Grand Theft Auto’s first 3D outing. It didn’t just look, but also played like it was from the future.

Perhaps it being so ahead of the curve proved to be the game’s undoing.

Not content to let you off the hook with just the exploration of a beautiful underwater environment, Sub Culture tried to do many more things. We got an open world mission structure that the more casual gamers of the time—who had perhaps also bought the game based purely on its box art—might not have cared for.

On top of that design was a rather complex trading system with fluctuating, region-based prices, which served as the game’s main money-making loop. It was this aspect that always made me abandon my half-hearted attempts to engage with Sub Culture’s deeper mechanics. As can be predicted, such game systems were not well suited for a child whose first language wasn’t even English.2

Having had experience with other 3D games thanks to my Nintendo 64, I was a lot better at dealing with the characteristic jank of early 3D movement, but I can’t imagine this compounded complexity to have helped Sub Culture’s case as a low-stakes experience for burgeoning gamers.

In retrospect, Sub Culture appears to have been a game that appealed to casual players, but was designed for tryhards. It featured mechanics that could only hope to be grasped by gamers who were already ‘in on it,’ but those already had their Quakes, their Super Mario 64s and their Final Fantasy 7s to play.

It then fell upon my slender shoulders to turn the game into a success. A kid enamored with digital exploration, who was content to ignore a large part of a game’s systems as long as the freedom to roam was there. But going by how much my questing-averse gaming habits annoyed my peers at the time, I can’t imagine this demographic to have been all that large.

And so, Sub Culture turned into a forgotten gem, or rather a sunken treasure, destined to never be unearthed again.

To my knowledge, it never received a remaster, a re-release, let alone a sequel, and even though I still own the original game disc, I’d be hard-pressed to find hardware that’s able to run this ancient video game without me having to invoke some arcane tech ritual.

And yet, it exists. It’s right here in my home.

Because of this, the memory lives on. A memory of a game that was brought into my life courtesy of a garish discount sticker.

It’s a memory that I relive fondly every time I walk past the shelf where it’s been sitting all this time. Like my 3DS, Sub Culture also arrived to my current apartment by way of cardboard box, yet its sentimental connotations compelled me to give it a prominent place in my home before most of the furniture had even been unpacked.

You might now wonder—as do people after long monologues in badly written movies—why are you telling me all this?

Well, because I can.

Had Sub Culture come to me in the form of a download code, I would not have had constant reminders of my experience with its world, and any memory of it would long since have been reduced to the fleeting thought of ‘oh hey, I think I played that game once’ when some random ‘90s nostalgia account mentions it by chance.

It seems that we might one day reach a point where we’ll have to keep our fond gaming memories alive all by ourselves, no longer aided by physical relics and perhaps even unable to play these games ever again because a digital store owner got out the wrong side of bed that day.

I think it’s important to keep storing these memories in spite of all setbacks, because if there is one thing I’m thankful for when the future of this medium seems so bleak, it’s that I am still able to look back and rediscover the joy that this hobby is supposed to bring.

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Notes:
All photos taken and edited by me.

Wikipedia was consulted for basic info on Sub Culture, such as its year of release and North American sales data. All other information came from my own, quite old memories, so apologies for any inaccuracies resulting from such a dubious source as the human mind.

Earlier this week I completed Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush. If you live outside of PAL areas, you would know this game instead as Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. Or if you cherish particular contempt for the Wii U control scheme, you may simply refer to it as Kirby and the Cursed Stylus.

I finished the game in about three evenings, and I can say that my overall impression of it is very positive. Its claymation art style—an optical illusion achieved through creative 3D modelling and a lowered framerate rather than actual clay models—makes Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush one of the most uniquely beautiful games I’ve played to date. In fact, I was shocked to learn that it barely got nominations for best art direction in 2015, the year of its release.

It’s the title’s omission from such end-of-year lists that prompted me to dig a little deeper to see how this game was received back in its day.

During my ‘research’—admittedly a bit of a pompous way of describing the act of typing a game’s name into the YouTube search bar—I came across Gamespot’s video review. In it, the editor spends most of the five-minute runtime lamenting the game’s supposed difficulty. She ends up classifying the entire experience as unfair, frustrating and brutally punishing.

Having just beaten the game myself, this was a baffling angle. Even with the occasional lag spikes on my aging Wii U touchpad and the ever-present burden of my legendary clumsiness, I barely struggled at any point in the game. I’d qualify its hardest sections as decent but manageable challenges.

My pointing out of this isn’t some thinly-veiled scheme to portray myself as a godlike gamer. For how much I love platformers and talk about them here on a regular basis, I’ll be the first to admit that I am actually quite bad at them. I am impatient, easily distracted and I crumble under pressure. An ideal cocktail for a long career embarrassing platforming performances.

Rest assured, I am no stranger to getting humbled by games that are reputed to be easy—people who say that New Super Mario Bros. U has no challenge whatsoever are probably lying anyway.

Still, the only potential difficulty of Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush lies in its rather unusual control scheme, an evolution of its spiritual predecessor, the DS title Kirby: Power Paintbrush.1 Like in that game, rather than controlling Kirby directly, you use your stylus to draw out paths for him on your touchscreen as he rolls and dashes through each level. This adds an element of momentum management that is completely absent from regular Kirby games, which instead feature snappy, responsive controls that are the main source of the series’ reputed approachability.

As such, the control scheme of Rainbow Paintbrush takes a little getting used to even for fans of the series. When it clicks, it becomes a fluid and satisfying experience that sees Kirby move up ledges and past hazards smoothly.

But when it doesn’t click, I can well imagine how it’d devolve into an infuriating experience where Kirby keeps falling off the screen or perishing to damage because you didn’t draw out the correct paths in time.

The latter is definitely what happened in Gamespot’s case. If you focus on the b-roll in their video review, it will reveal someone who is locked in a desperate struggle with the game’s control scheme and losing. If that represents their experience with Rainbow Paintbrush, it’s no wonder they gave it a measly 5/10.

Now, the point here is not to disparage the reviewer for being bad at a Kirby game. It’s very likely that she just so happened to be someone with no particular feel for and affinity with the Wii U touchpad, yet got tasked with reviewing a game that relies on it exclusively, no doubt operating under a strict deadline.

In the end, this likely emerged from a flaw in Gamespot’s operation as a whole rather than it being the fault of an individual reviewer given a thankless task.

I use such wording because I do see said review being published in the way that it has as an editorial blunder. When a reviewer allows their personal struggles with a control scheme to shape their judgment, they or someone above them should at least entertain the possibility that, maybe, this experience is not representative for the average player—especially if we are talking about Wii U owners who might’ve been anxious for a game to finally exploit the maligned console’s gimmick and justify that unwieldy Fisher Price iPad of a controller.

It was this ‘incident’ that made me realize how often a reviewer’s personal perception of a game’s difficulty might define their opinion of the game as a whole.

If the level of challenge in a given game doesn’t meet the reviewer’s expectations of what they think it should be, it’s likely to be held against said release.

Let us not forget that Demon’s Souls caught flak in some early reviews for its punishing difficulty, as it had not yet been established that this brand of action title—which would even be named after this game and its more famous spiritual successor Dark Souls—hinges on a steep difficulty curve to make it so engaging and rewarding.

So can the reverse happen? Can a game lose marks for being too easy when the reviewer expected more of a challenge?

Why, yes. In fact, this is funnily enough what the Kirby series—outside of Gamespot’s aforementioned takedown of Kirby and the Alleged Challenge—has to put up with.

Go to the Wikipedia page of any other Kirby game and in the overview text it’ll feature a line like ‘it was met with generally positive reviews but was criticized for its lack of difficulty.’

The prevalence of this type of criticism is curious to me now that there’s an unwritten rule that, as a reviewer, you can no longer get away with docking points off of a Souls title with the blanket statement of ‘it’s too hard mate’—you would at least have to explain why you felt like the difficulty wasn’t earned and provide concrete examples of the balancing going against the game’s philosophy.

Most of us have by now accepted—albeit with the help of some truly obnoxious internet discourse—that there’s a difference between sucking at a game and a game being poorly designed.

Yet when we are presented the opposite situation, we are not so vigilant.

When there’s a new entry in a series that has always been known for its accessibility and (initial) lack of difficulty, it is still routine for professional reviewers to point to this forgiving nature and present it as a matter-of-fact design flaw.

Since the very first entry and with few exceptions since, HAL Laboratory has designed Kirby games around the philosophy that everyone should have a decent shot at seeing the credits. In these games, there often is challenge, sometimes even challenge of the brutal variety, but it tends to be locked behind optional post-game content that is there to cater to the more hardcore segment of the playerbase.

While this approach is not exclusive to Kirby (modern Mario games have adopted a similar structure), it is part of the series’ core identity as much as the steep difficulty is part of Dark Souls’ DNA.

But where few professional reviewers would still dare call a Soulsborne game bad because of its high difficulty (lest their own skill as a gamer come into question), it remains a common talking point in reviews of Kirby games that they are ‘too easy.’

I like to approach this aspect of Kirby more positively by just labeling the franchise ‘comfy.’

Because that is exactly what I enjoy about Kirby games. They are typically platformers with a great sense of flow—games that allow you to experiment and play in your own way without being punished for having the nerve to value creativity over optimization. You are constantly moving forward, and even when that momentum is briefly interrupted, the punishment tends to be negligible.

They are also games that never betray you. Difficulty escalates gradually in Kirby’s adventures, but never to a point where you are suddenly hit with a boss fight that requires frame-perfect inputs, or a puzzle that’s such a brain-breaker that it stops you dead in your tracks for 15 minutes.

There’s a good argument to made that the lack of such moments is what makes Kirby good. For all the complaints about Kirby being too ‘easy,’ I’ve seen very few critics formulate concrete ideas of what an increase in challenge should look like and how this would improve the overall experience for the majority of the players.

Personally, I’d hate it if these games were to become more punishing before the optional post-game modes.

When I start up a Kirby game, I know that I can just relax and find joy in finding my way through a set of playful, creative levels without running into constant skill checks that interrupt my flow. I don’t even have to worry about difficulty spikes coming out of left field, which is actually quite rare in the genre.

Such a forgiving experience is not something that everybody will look for in a platformer. It is not something that I look for at all times.

But when casting judgment on a game, it is not valid criticism to point out that it’s doing the thing that—by design—you should expect it to do.

When I play one of the classic Sonic games or even their modern reinterpretations—such as Sonic Mania—I know what I’m signing up for. Cruel enemy placement, traps that are impossible to avoid the first time you come across them and an avalanche of other potential momentum killers.

I do not always like these design choices and I admit to loudly cursing whenever a particular section in a Sonic game is testing my patience. And yet the personal though fleeting disdain I might feel for the entire franchise in such moments is not something I’d cite as a genuine point of criticism, were I tasked with reviewing one of these games.

Why? Perspective.

When I zoom out, I know that the classic Sonic games and their offspring weren’t made for players like me—tourists who mostly just hop from game to game, play until the credits roll, and move on to the next release.

Instead, they were designed for players who spend months, years, perhaps even decades with these games, memorizing level layouts and perfecting their techniques.

Even players who fall outside of such a dedicated fanbase may still be attracted to Sega’s arcade sensibilities—that gameplay loop built around failing and trying again, until you at one point succeed.

Kirby should be played and evaluated with a similar understanding—that the games are designed for players who don’t want to lose minutes worth of progress because they mistimed a jump.

This demographic may include younger and more inexperienced players, but also those who simply find enjoyment screwing around with different copy abilities without immediately getting punished for choosing the wrong ability for that particular section of the level.

Kirby’s design is even suited for players who do enjoy the spicy difficulty of some of the series’ ultimate boss rushes and other tough post-game challenges, but are okay with the soft landing provided by main story mode.

With all this in mind, I have far fewer issues with Gamespot’s dismissal of Rainbow Paintbrush than I did with IGN’s review of the fantastic Triple Deluxe game for 3DS, where the main complaint was ‘I had to play through an easy story mode until I reached the more challenging bits,’ resulting in a 6/10 score for what is commonly accepted as one of the best modern Kirby games.

One of these reviews emerged from a legitimate issue that marred the editor’s enjoyment of the game. Her only mistake was that she pitched her struggle with the control scheme as the average user experience when, from what I can find online, this is pretty far from the truth.

The other review dismisses a release for doing what its respective IP has been doing since its inception in 1992.

For years, anyone who makes general complaints about the difficulty of Souls games gets told to ‘git gud.’

But what about reviewers who keep complaining about the lack of challenge in Kirby games?

Well, maybe it’s time we start telling them to git comfy.

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

So I started writing this article when I passed the 50 subscriber mark. Since I haven’t really had much time to dedicate to writing outside of my weekly Saturday post, a few weeks passed, and by then I already had over 100 subscribers!

Naturally, my first order of business was to call my high school economy teacher to inform him that I finally grasp the workings of exponential growth.

Anyway, since many of my articles are long-form essays that unpack a central thesis across numerous paragraphs, I thought it’d be fun to write something different for this celebratory post.

Listed below are my biggest video game hot takes. Some of these I’m pretty confident about, while others I know to be fringe opinions based on my personal biases. Either way, fun for the whole family!

Before we get to the good stuff, I’d once again like to thank every one of you for following me.

Subscribing to someone’s posts on Substack feels like a much bigger deal than following a YouTube channel, so I’m really glad that there are over a hundred of you who have taken the time to hit the ‘subscribe’ button once and the ‘skip’ button four times on the screens Substack likes to throw at you right after (seriously, what is that all about?).

I began posting on this platform at the start of 2026 as a sort of New Year’s resolution to get back into writing regularly again. I didn’t know anyone here, and I had no preconceived notion of what—if anything—would happen. And here we are!

So in we go. Feel free to give me some hot takes of your own, or tell me just how wrong I am in the comment section!

Crysis is one of the best shooters of its generation

Even almost two decades after its release, Crysis is still remembered by many. But where most games become legend by either being very good or very bad, Crysis entered the pantheon of video game history by being super demanding for PCs.

It offered hands-down the best, most advanced graphics in a video game seen up until that point, while also featuring large, sandbox-like levels that each felt like they were larger than Skyrim.

This of course came at the cost of only being feasible to run on the most powerful computers of its day. “But can it run Crysis?” was a true benchmark for every high-end PC and the phrase lives on in meme form to this day. As such, many people recall Crysis as a glorified tech demo, but few remember that it was actually an extremely good game as well.

The open-ended level design of the first two-thirds of the game allowed for a large amount of player expression and was made all the more fun by a suit with such powers as invisibility and superhuman speed, as well as real-time weapon customization. Basically think of Crysis as an FPS where you are the Predator.

In an era that became increasingly dominated by restrictive, cinematic experiences, Crysis and its magnificent standalone expansion Warhead stood out as shooters that still dared set the player free—provided they had the hardware to handle them.

Halo: CE had some terrible level design

Hooray! We’ve been treated to yet another remake/remaster/rewhatever of the first Halo game. Since this time it’s been remade in the messy Unreal Engine 5—ill repute and dishonor be upon its cursed name—I was already going to give this one a miss, but at this point I also have no desire to replay Combat Evolved in any form.

When I initially played Halo on the original Xbox (yes I am that old), I liked the open-ended design the game was seemingly going for with its first proper level, also titled Halo. Rolling plains on an alien planet with several structures where battles took place.

It was beautiful, and it was new.

This was well before an open world approach had become a staple of FPS design, and I’d wager that this eponymous level is what most people still think of whenever someone brings up the first Halo game.

How sad it then was to find out that the game would devolve into the seemingly endless slog that was The Library, repeat an entire level backwards with Two Betrayals, and generally just come to rely on copy-pasted hallways for level layouts.

Back in those days it was almost a rule for first-person shooters to run out of ideas about halfway through the campaign, but the way that Halo failed to deliver on the implicit promise of its first two hours has never stopped stinging.

Most video games aren’t art

Now, before you lynch me, I have never considered the question of games being art or not to be a matter of their inherent value or validity. I simply do not think they fit the definition.

Yes, the definition of art is ultimately subjective, and that’s a big part of the reason why the ‘are video games art’ debate hasn’t had a definitive answer and will continue to pop up every so often.

My personal definition of art is as follows: The creative expression of a person (or people) that aspires to be aesthetically evocative and is able to lend us insight into the human condition and/or the world around us. A lot of games meet the former requirement, very few meet the latter.

To reiterate, this does not say anything about my appreciation of video games nor the artistic merit of the people creating them. To me, games are the best and most engaging entertainment medium, and there’s also no shortage of shitty art to disprove the notion that something being art automatically grants it value.

And it’s exactly that idea that I take issue with—that many gamers simply want games to be seen as art so that they’ll gain prestige.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to suffer through enough wanky literary analysis in my life to know that not being on the radar of the art world can be a very good thing.

Parry mechanics should go to hell

I am naturally twitchy and impatient. I also have a lousy reaction time, so I always mess up parries. I am bad at them and they make me sad. Yes, this is a skill issue. Yes, I want them gone from any game that has them. Please fix.

Niko Bellic is a laughable excuse of a protagonist

GTA 4’s Niko Bellic often finds himself at the top of lists with the series’ best protagonists. A big reason for this is that Bellic starred in the first ‘HD era’ GTA game, where the series took a turn for more serious, layered storytelling.

Bellic, as the star of this immigrant rags-to-riches crime story, was praised for having more depth of personality and character development than some of the psychopathic maniacs that had come before, like Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti.

Personally, I never bought Niko Bellic as a character, as I felt a huge disconnect whenever he’d vomit out a monologue filled with melodramatic exposition about war trauma during a car ride to a mission where the objective was to blow up yet another few dozen nameless enemies.

GTA 4 still contained the series’ arcade-like action and the over-the-top violence that came with it, and the writers’ attempts to subvert that with the same baseline ‘war is bad innit’ messaging that was shoehorned in by every contemporary game in need of a morally gray antihero always felt cheap—like a half-hearted attempt to get rid of the series’ stigma of being a violence simulator.

I also had some more anal nitpicks about the game’s lacking verisimilitude, like how someone from the former Yugoslavia would never pronounce the (already misspelled) surname ‘Bellic’ like ‘Bellick,’ which I am convinced anyone with some basic education should pick up on, but I digress.

It’s been 15 years since I played GTA 4, and I’m sure that somewhere out there waiting for me is a 5-hour video essay with the word ‘TRAGIC’ in the thumbnail to explain how wrong I am about Niko Bellic, but I remember finding the whole attempt at character depth to be so ham-fisted that I ended up wondering whether it was itself a parody.

Boss fights kind of suck

Boss fights emerged in games as both an emotional climax to a story and a final test of the player’s skills.

At least, that is what common wisdom dictates, but I’m going to have to call bullshit on the second half of that statement.

In many cases, boss fights don’t really test any skills that you accrue during the rest of the game. Whether it’s in RAGE or New Super Lucky’s Tale, two vastly different games that I discussed in recent articles, boss fights tend to follow their own set of tropes and rules, separate from their respective main games. Pattern recognition, dodging ground AOE damage and figuring out the attack window to damage the boss. That describes the recipe for way too many boss fights, including games where such skills will not carry over in the moment-to-moment gameplay of regular levels.

There are of course exceptions like the Souls games, where boss fights serve as valuable skill checks to make sure you have what it takes to progress to the next area.

But despite the prevalence of From Software imitators, the vast majority of games aren’t so-called soulslikes—not yet anyway—and in many of those ‘regular’ games, boss fights can feel as an annoying interruption of the regular gameplay’s flow.

A recent example of a campaign where bosses felt massively out of place was—of all games—Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. These boss encounters were pretty easy (like the rest of the game), but it still felt awkward to go from a puzzle platformer based entirely around observational and timing skills to the same old ‘dodge AOE and hit the boss when it is idle’ dance that we’ve been doing since the dawn of video games.

Captain Toad had bosses because every platformer must have bosses. Not because it actually helped make the game more fun or engaging.

Unlike a lot of people, I’m actually a big fan of the way final bosses are handled in recent Zelda games, where they are simply cinematic spectacles that allow you to end the game on an emotional high. Much preferable over a grueling assault on your patience that subjects you to a test of skills you hadn’t needed to cultivate in the rest of the game.

I can even respect it when titles like Selaco omit boss fights entirely as they are content to rely on the continued escalation of a rock solid core combat loop.

Difficulty and challenge are overrated

If there is one trend I’ve been noticing in professional reviews (other than every other damn retro-inspired game being described as ‘a love letter to [x]’) it’s that a lack of challenge or difficulty is often presented as an inherently bad thing.

I suspect that this is the result of From Software games coming to the forefront of the industry—and don’t worry, I fully understand how the challenge is a core ingredient of those games and I’m not about to die on the very game journalisty hill of calling for an easy mode.

What I don’t get, though, is how in the case of a given platformer, the observation that the reviewer barely saw a game over screen during their playthrough is presented as objectively negative.

There is an argument to be made that navigating a three-dimensional space with consistent pace and flow can be a joy of itself, and that being forced to perform frame-perfect jumps along the way would do nothing to improve this experience.

And look, I do get the entire concept of overcoming something that at first seemed impossible. I’ve experienced the highs of conquering those monumental challenges and they make for some of the most memorable moments of my gaming ‘career.’

But what I don’t understand is why that has to be the default, to a point where ‘it only took me three tries to beat the final boss’ is presented as a design oversight.

Sometimes, there’s enough fun to be had with a game’s mechanics that being forced to fail at them countless times does not really add anything but frustration.

Timelines and canon are a disease for interesting game worlds and stories

If there is one thing I could send to gaming hell forever it would be the Zelda timeline and all discussion surrounding it.

Since the ‘90s, fans have been speculating about how the stories of the different entries in the series might fit together chronologically. In those days, this mainly manifested itself in the form of light-hearted discussions based on speculation and what might be.

As the number of Zelda games and fans grew along the 2000s and 2010s, so did the prevalence and seriousness of such debates, until Nintendo itself even saw fit to release an official timeline in 2011.

I’ve personally always seen Nintendo’s engagement with the timeline as being—from their perspective—a fun way to engage with fans and encourage them to keep talking about their games. But as tends to happen, such marketing-savvy gestures have since been misinterpreted by many as a sign that timeline and lore questions are now central to the development of every new Zelda game.

The whole timeline itself is one of those ‘it unravels the more you think about it’ kind of ordeals, as it is rather obvious that Legend of Zelda games are primarily intended to function in isolation.

I’m probably not the first smartass to point out that a legend is a story containing unchanging core truths and messages retold in a variety of ways over time, but I’ve always found this way of engaging with the Zelda stories to be more rewarding than the consideration of which timeline I’m in.

In one interview, director of the recent Backrooms movie Kane Parsons discussed the pitfalls of what he called ‘lore bloat.’ He wanted to prioritize writing a good, self-contained story over constructing a complex constellation of lore nuggets that’d exist solely to satisfy a vocal but relatively small online community of hardcore theorists.

While I can understand how it’s fun to turn a given IP’s stories into a puzzle that may or may not fit together, too much emphasis on wanting it all to make sense can distract from what I see as more important things.

Ocarina of Time, for instance, tells an interesting story about the loss of innocence, the challenges of growing up and the burden of memory. Is that message really aided by establishing in which timeline the Zora evolved into the Rito?

My answer to that question is ‘no,’ and I would even argue that too much theorizing about such lorebeard minutiae causes people to lose track entirely of the core message of the story.

I could be wrong here, but having had some limited interaction with Japanese fans of the series, it’s possible that this whole phenomenon mostly is a Western habit, where the Marvelization of media has conditioned audiences to expect that everything within a company’s portfolio is in some way interconnected.

Of course, everyone can enjoy media in the way they see fit, but when I see video essays pop up from disgruntled Zelda fans who refuse to play a new entry in the series because it ‘doesn’t fit the timeline,’ it feels like a lot of us are missing the point of storytelling as a whole.

Zelda is just one example of a franchise where lore and timelines have come to ill-deservedly dominate The Discourse™, but it’s becoming a problem in more games and even media as a whole.

As you can probably tell by now, this needs to be its own article at one point.

Half-Life 2 aged poorly

Half-Life 2 is still perfectly playable.

More than that, actually. You probably own it if you have a Steam account, and it can run in just about any resolution and on any system. For a game from 2004, it doesn’t look bad at all.

And even then, I only ever beat the entire thing once.

Nearly every subsequent playthrough has stranded in the first few hours, usually around the time a certain waterboat becomes involved.

I respect Half-Life 2 for its innovation, its technological accomplishments and its non-intrusive cinematic storytelling.

But boy is it an absolute slog to play through.

Part of Half-Life 2’s problem is that it—much like one American DJ who can’t eat spicy food—is suffering from success. The game pushed the industry forward and so the industry went forward, to a point where I am now more inclined to simply thank Half-Life 2 for its service than to re-engage with what it has to offer.

It doesn’t help that the game just goes on and on—I think I beat it in 14-15 hours—and exactly 0 of the guns that aren’t the Gravity Gun are fun to use.

In a first-person shooter, relying on one gimmick weapon to carry the entire experience is a bit of an ask.

Look, I’m not going to diss Half-Life 2. It more than deserves its place among the all-time greats of gaming.

But I’m tired of seeing it brought up as an exponent of the ‘games that are still awesome in [current year]’ category when there are a dozen other legacy games in the first-person shooter genre alone that are more fun to play through now.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is better than Super Mario Odyssey

Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Super Mario Odyssey both have an excellent reputation. Both are seen as potentially the best games in their respective series. But only Odyssey is frequently named as the best 3D platformer overall.

Having played both games for the first time this year, alongside a slew of other platformers, I think Forgotten Land at the very least deserves to be in that conversation.

Old collectathon platformers died in part because gamers were no longer prepared to roam big open levels looking for things to do when sandbox games like GTA offered that same freedom with much more moment-to-moment action.

Odyssey solved this by littering every level with a borderline obnoxious amount of Power Moons and other collectables, whereas Forgotten Land went for a more curated, linear approach, with additional engagement coming from the optional objectives and challenges along the way.

Both are excellent at what they do, and I’d give both games a 10 out of 10 if I was a score-giving kind of person, but to me, Forgotten Land edges it slightly.

The depth of each copy ability adds more potential for player expression than the more context-sensitive transformations in Odyssey, and I’ve always found the smooth, precise maneuverability of Kirby more satisfying to play with than Mario’s momentum-based moveset.

So while I think both games are fully deserving of the accolades they’ve received, I feel that Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the best 3D platformer I’ve played to date, and I lament the fact that it is so underrepresented in these discussions.

Conclusion

That’s enough hot takes for now, I should think!

As said, feel free to tell me your hot takes, or why you disagree with some of mine.

In any case, thanks for subscribing to my work, and I hope to see you for the 250 subscriber celebration not too far into the future!

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

Owning a Nintendo 64 in the late nineties allowed me to experience first-hand the golden age of 3D platforming.

Of course, anyone who’s somewhat into the genre will be able to list off classics such as Super Mario 64, the Banjo games, Rayman 2 and Donkey Kong 64—the latter of which was considered great until modern internet discourse sealed its reputation as a bloated mess.

Since I had friends who had—in my eyes, unwisely—chosen the way of Playstation, I also got to experience some of that console’s exclusive platformers, including the Crash Bandicoot trilogy and Spyro.

Even as a kid, I realized that these were all amazing games. I may have had no way to articulate that opinion beyond ‘these games are fun and I feel good while playing them,’ but even with my infantile intuition I could notice that these were well-crafted products.

Something that aided me greatly in realizing this was the fact I didn’t just stick to what you could call the S-tier games. For starters, there weren’t actually that many of them, and an added problem was that these stand-out games didn’t come cheap. Anything published by Nintendo cost a fortune to a child getting by on allowance and birthday money.

And so, I’d often sift through the bargain bins at toy stores to see if there was anything else that looked like it suited my tastes and could be exchanged for what little I had in my wallet. That is how I ended up familiarizing myself with some of the lesser gods of the platforming genre, playing games such as Gex 64, Glover and Tonic Trouble—titles of varying quality that demonstrated just how difficult it was for developers to get 3D movement right in the generation that had made it the standard.

Even juggernauts such as Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie wrestled with the camera, let alone games made by less experienced developers on tighter budgets. Despite such constraints, these smaller studios often tried to match the ambitious scope of the genre’s big dogs, which were for the most part expansive, non-linear collectathons1 that are tricky to get right even to this day.

As a result, these first-generation, third-party 3D platformers were often janky, even by the more forgiving standards of the era. Whether it’s the floaty controls of Glover, the poor navigation in Gex 64, or the atrocious camera in both, it was obvious that the genre as a whole needed some more time to rid itself of these growing pains.

Still, those games were worth playing, as they were often competent enough products with plenty of character, and if anything they underlined the mastery of a game like Banjo-Kazooie, which featured levels that were bigger and more open-ended, yet felt more navigable.

In short, if all you play is peak, you will have a limited understanding of just what an achievement it is to create a monumental game.

I was reminded of this lesson recently as I’ve been curating something of a second golden age of platforming on my own shelves. If you’ve read my work over the past few months, you’ll have noticed platformers being brought up multiple times, and that is indeed the main flavor of games I’ve been focusing on since the start of 2026.

This new obsession—in essence a rediscovery of my old favorite genre—was in part inspired by the realization of how much I’d missed out on.

At the start of the year, I first played Kirby and the Forgotten Land and it became my new favorite 3D platformer. More recently, I finally finished Super Mario Odyssey (better embarrassingly late than never, huh?), which completely lived up to its reputation of being perhaps the strongest entry in an already legendary series of platformers. Currently I’m playing through Donkey Kong Bananza, and it’s also showing a lot of promise.

But at the risk of sounding like I’m complaining about my steak being too juicy and my lobster too buttery, these encounters with near perfection needed to be interspersed with something a little more... grounded. I felt that playing platformers more modest in scope and ambition helped me process these grand journeys that I’d been on.

This is something I didn’t do when catching up with the Zelda series in 2025, and I ended up playing Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom back-to-back. Two of the best games I’ve ever played, yet I still struggle to remember what thing happened in which title, because it all registered in my mind as one long trek through Hyrule.

Clearly, I should set some time apart to process a generational game after finishing it.

In regard to platformers, I’ve been pretty diligent about this. Even between my replays of classics such as the Super Mario Galaxy games, I went for something more bite-sized and whimsical.

Concrete examples of such ‘wind-down’ titles are Yooka-Replaylee—the remaster of the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie—and even the aforementioned Gex and Glover games, which have both been released on Switch (and other platforms) with varying degrees of merit.2

More recently, right after witnessing the end credits of Super Mario Odyssey for the first time, I started playing New Super Lucky’s Tale. This 2019 release is an evolution of a game that started its life as a VR platformer called Lucky’s Tale and then became somewhat of an ill-fated Xbox One X launch title named Super Lucky’s Tale. It reached its presumed final form as New Super Lucky’s Tale, releasing for all major platforms including Switch, which seems to be a more natural home for a cutesy throwback platformer than Xbox ever was.

From the first level, it’s apparent that the developers—a Texas studio called Playful Studios—draw from a big pool of classic platforming inspirations.

The design of Lucky the Fox himself was clearly inspired by the look of Conker the Squirrel as he appeared in the cancelled Twelve Tales project for the Nintendo 64.

While the game as a whole has been described as a collectathon in the vein of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, that is only partially true. The way the ‘collecting’ works in each level is more akin to Crash Bandicoot, and each world also has 2D stages that draw inspiration from Donkey Kong Country.

I need to invoke all of these classics precisely because New Super Lucky’s Tale doesn’t really do anything that hasn’t been done before. And that is fine.

Even Odyssey’s defining mechanic—the ‘possession’ system with Cappy—was a clear evolution of the transformation system in the Banjo games (right down to the T-Rex), which was itself based on various implementations of such copy systems in earlier platformers, such as Kirby.

Platforming is in the same boat as first-person shooters in that it has effectively been ‘solved’ as a genre, and the main way for games to distinguish themselves now is by the stellar execution of existing ideas rather than reinventing the concept wholesale.

The developers of New Super Lucky’s Tale seem to have realized this, as they went shopping for ideas in the pantheon of platformers, and tried to turn those loose components into a fun and coherent experience.

They succeeded for the most part.

To start with, New Super Lucky’s Tale covers the basics of 3D platforming: responsive controls, clear navigability and a mostly non-intrusive camera.3 We’ve come a long way since the wobbly N64 days, as ‘off-brand’ platforming heroes such as Lucky control much better than first-generation counterparts like Gex and Glover.

Another difference with the budget platformers of yore is that New Super Lucky’s Tale does not rely on a single idiosyncratic mechanic to carry the entire experience.

The more open-ended levels are kept fun throughout the game because each one introduces a mission gimmick that helps shape its identity. In one farm-themed level, you have to find the missing members of a band of redneck worms, with the level culminating in what I am pretty sure is the only reference to O Brother Where Art Thou in a mascot platformer. Another highlight is a carnival ran by ghosts, where completing the level requires you to win at several minigames in exchange for tickets that you can then use to buy the game’s regular collectables.

Then there are the 2D levels and the puzzle rooms, which are themselves welcome variations to the more non-linear 3D work, but start to repeat ideas long before the final boss appears.

When putting it all into perspective, New Super Lucky’s Tale fulfills the exact role of those old budget platformers whose names I have invoked numerous times: it helps platform-obsessed gamers such as myself breathe by providing an accessible, straightforward gaming experience.

At the same time, playing a game like this enhances my understanding of just how brilliant you have to be as a developer to leave a lasting impression in this genre.

As mentioned earlier, even the best platformers don’t necessarily do much that has never been done before. Games like Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Super Mario Odyssey and Astro Bot built upon their predecessors, but they became memorable by constantly surprising the player. They achieved this by continuing to introduce new mechanics and variations of familiar tropes, and retiring them right before they grew stale.

Now, the main ‘campaign’ of each of these games is about eight to ten hours in length, so it may not sound like that big a deal to keep things fresh for what is—by modern gaming standards—not a huge amount of play time.

Yet if you play almost any platformer not created by a big, reputable studio, you’ll quickly see how common it is for such games to run out of new ideas before even hitting the halfway mark.

This is something I would not have been able to understand nor appreciate, had I limited myself to the big hitters since the dawn of the 3D platformer.

I had a co-worker who’d only watch movies and shows if they had an IMDB score of 8 or higher. Even beyond the issue of letting the consensus dictate your taste in visual media, I never understood the reasoning behind this. How would you even know what is good about these movies if you never witness a director fumble once in a while? Or if you never watch a good 7 out of 10 movie made on a shoestring budget?

Personally, I would not have been able to write many of my articles on this website had I never explored beyond the safe railings of—if you permit me a vague, anachronistic term—the AAA space.

My nine or so hours with New Super Lucky’s Tale were enjoyable by themselves, and they also helped me put into context the sheer brilliance of some of the other platformers I’d been playing. Since finishing my foxy adventure, I’ve actually gone back to my 100% save of Kirby and the Forgotten Land for little other reason than to just marvel at it.

And even if you don’t feel the need to go on some soul-searching quest trying to pinpoint why you love your favorite games, something like New Super Lucky’s Tale is still worth playing.

Because in an age when the industry is on fire, rife with anti-consumer practices and the mistreatment of gamedev talent, is there anything more freeing than enjoying a simple $25 game made by people who love their craft?

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

I enjoy playing games that I think are good.

Not a controversial statement, provided you aren’t a masochist or a playtester of F2P rug pull MMOs.

But to add to my brave proclamation, I also enjoy playing games that I don’t think are all that great. To be more precise, it’s this combination of playing good games and lousy ones that help me better understand their design. What works and what doesn’t.

When a developer absolutely nails a given genre, I feel like I cannot recognize and appreciate this effort in full until I also watch someone fumble in their attempt.

Perhaps the most interesting games though are the ones that fall somewhere in the middle. Games that show potential, perhaps even soul, yet don’t quite succeed at what they’re trying to do. As if they are stuck in design purgatory, aspiring to heaven but still lacking the conviction required to get there.

In that light, I’d like to explore an older game that I’ve recently replayed—one that falls into this exact category.

That game is RAGE, a first-person shooter conceived in the 2000s. You can tell this from the fact that its name is stylized in all caps, so that you scream it inside your head whenever you come across it in marketing copy. RAGE! At the very least we must commend developer id Software for not turning it into some ham-fisted acronym, like Rugged Anarchy Grit Exposure. That must’ve taken a lot of restraint.

Anyway, RAGE was in development for a few years until it was released in 2011. By that time, first-person shooters as a whole were going through a rough patch at least as far as single player campaigns were concerned.

Industry suits had gaslighted themselves into thinking you could only be successful if you copied Call of Duty, ideally if you did it in a blatant and lackluster fashion, leading—for example—to the collapse of the franchise F.E.A.R. (see what I mean?), as discussed here previously.

Concurrently, it was also the generation that saw the rise of open-world shooters, with games such as Crysis, Far Cry 2 & 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (I rest my case) providing alternatives to the ultra-linear whack-a-mole shooters that had taken over the industry.

An oft-forgotten storyline though is the failed attempts at reviving the old-school design of first-person shooters from the ‘90s.

By the early 2010s, some publishers and developers were already well aware that there was a segment of the market that was growing more than a little tired of the ‘cinematic’ approach to FPS design and the faux-realism that came with it. Being able to carry just two or three weapons might’ve worked for immersion, but there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a shotgun + assault rifle combo before every new FPS campaign starts feeling like Call of Ground Hog Day.

And so it happened that a few FPS games started being marketed as being ‘like in the good old days,’ with even monstrosities such as Duke Nukem Forever carrying that promise. Duke Nukem Forever is also a great example of how empty such vows often were, as it wasn’t the only time a studio used an older IP to appeal to retro sensibilities, only to then deliver some of the most milquetoast, trend-chasing gameplay of its day.

While RAGE can be seen within this context of classic design elements trying and failing to look for a way out, the final product holds a lot more merit than Duke Nukem’s notorious blunder.

Set in a Mad Max-like world where the main currencies are fuel and ammo, RAGE takes a stab at open world design while also trying to draw on id Software’s ample experience with classic FPS design.

I personally recall RAGE being one of the first games of that era where I could carry a full arsenal of weapons without having to worry about weight, carry limits and other such mechanics that feel like they should never have left milsim containment.

This may not seem like much in a world that has witnessed the rise of the nu-Doom trilogy and the related boomshoot craze, but back in those days, this was an unusual design choice that went against conventional wisdom. RAGE wasn’t the only game to do this, but it was unusual enough for it to stand out at the time.

I first played through RAGE in 2012, so about a year after its release. Even back then, the core structure of the game felt wonky.

It did the thing where it gave you the promise of an open world, but then every mission area—where 90% of the game’s action took place—was a linear series of corridors, not unlike the cinematic shooters that were, uhhh, all the rage back then.

Still, the game had moments. Moments where you’d be in a well-designed combat arena with multiple entry points slaughtering your opponents, being encouraged to switch your weapons to counter different enemy types who in turn forced you to stay mobile.

At the time, this felt much closer to what I imagined a modern Duke Nukem or Doom would feel like than did Duke Nukem Forever. When I replayed the entire game recently, it felt more like a rough prototype of the kind of action that would go on to form the core of Doom 2016 and its successors. Combat that relied on movement and weapon-switching, but with the added modern touch of verticality.

Looking back, RAGE could have impacted the FPS scene in the way that Doom 2016 ended up doing. Sure, the combat is not nearly as refined as it would be in the Doom reboot, but had the design of the levels themselves been centered around the labyrinthine key hunts through semi-open areas, it would have been enough to signal to the industry that this was a viable design path.

Yet it’s almost as if id Software saw this opening and then flinched at the sight of greatness, instead taking RAGE into a supposedly more modern direction, with an open world concept that never really comes off the ground.

The game suffers from what I’d like to call the St. Anger effect—if you chase trends to try and appear modern, you are conforming to what is cool in that moment, and your product will seem all the more dated a few years down the line.

In the case of RAGE, its open world has always struck me as being there for the mere sake of it having an open world, as this was becoming a more popular design choice for FPS games in those days.

When replaying the game recently, this ‘open world’ felt all the more tacked-on, since it is essentially just a hub that takes you to different, self-contained areas where you must complete basic objectives that on paper say things like ‘reactivate the pumps’ or ‘liberate the distillery’ but in practice boil down to ‘kill everything that moves until you reach the end.’

Going to and from these cordoned-off sections—let’s be bold and call them ‘levels’—is just some extra travel time interspersed with car combat that loses its appeal after experiencing it exactly once.

RAGE often gets unfavorably compared to Borderlands 2, which was released a year later. This comparison isn’t entirely fair since I do think they are fundamentally different games that get lumped together because of the similarity of their respective settings.

Still, it is easy to see why Borderlands 2 did stick the landing and is regarded as somewhat of a classic today. It saw the concept of a zany post-apocalyptic open world shooter and committed to it in full, whereas RAGE added just enough fashionable design elements to the mix for the developers to feel comfortable sneaking some of its more old-school inclinations by a modern audience.

Gamers tend to pick up on that sort of insincerity—or lack of confidence—even if they can’t always put their finger on it.

Now, 15 years after its initial release, RAGE seems like an odd stepping stone in id Software’s history. Already carrying that desire to return to the glory days of excessive carnage with a bloated, at times ridiculous arsenal, but seemingly afraid to commit to the ‘modern classic’ design that would a few years later lift the Doom franchise to new heights.

As such, RAGE emerges as one of those flawed titles that is fascinating to play exactly because it shows how difficult it is to get everything right when designing a game. Playing RAGE made me realize just how lucky we are to have experienced a successful Doom revival at all.

In fact, the footage of that cancelled Doom 4 prototype looks a lot closer to RAGE than the reboot we ended up getting.

Who knows, maybe in a different timeline, we would’ve been treated to a gray military shooter called D.O.O.M. and Doomguy would now have occupied a forgotten patch of dirt next to the hole they threw Duke Nukem in post-2011.

As I said in the beginning, an experience with a flawed game can be valuable as it may help you formulate why you like the games that do get things right.

Based on what we know about RAGE—a game that is deeply flawed rather than outright bad—its creation must have been a learning experience for the developers as well. Like they needed to fumble before once again nailing the genre they’d helped create.

Wouldn’t it be a terrible shame if such experience and insight, accrued over decades of success and failure, were to all be thrown out of the window in one fell swoop?

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Fox 2026 follows this exact formula.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes:
All screenshots taken and edited by me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was unbalanced as hell.

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

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

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

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

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

He usually won.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not bad for a casual kart racing game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No sponsored Mercedes tie-in, either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now tell me about your favorite mascot racer!

Notes:
All screenshots were taken and edited by me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positivity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wizordum - Because classic Doom is too modern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultic - Not directed by Hideo Kojima

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supplice - A marathon of a development cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silverman do what idon’t, or something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selaco - The baroque FPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes:
All screenshots were taken and edited by me.

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

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

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

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

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

I promise it will all make sense in the end.

The silly mouse game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On sigma males and verisimilar cheddar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come to think of it...

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

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

Painfully unfunny? My point exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House of Cheese

At its core, Mouse PI is a modern shooter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes:
Review based on game version 1.0.6.

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

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

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

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

With the Switch 2, this dynamic changed somewhat.

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

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

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

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

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

Pricing and distribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Launch titles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first year of games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacy console

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My personal verdict on one year of Switch 2?

It feels good to be back.

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

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

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

The CoD delusion

I still remember the first time I became a snob.

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

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

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

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

I had become a snob.

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

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

The rise of the Doom clone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Boomer shooters”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hype train created in Build

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dilution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, time to do some gatekeeping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take metal music, for instance.

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

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

A return to snobbery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the end of their childhood.

They might never see each other again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed, this is a common reaction against such complaints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet I am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The result?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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