There is a fair amount of clickbait and overblown outrage on the AV Club these days, but this isn’t either of those. The article title is not provocative and confrontational, the article is well written and praises things the game does well while questioning how a specific aspect fits in with that. I don’t necessarily…

Look, I get the argument you are trying to make, but you are dying on the wrong hill by choosing this article. That hot take on The Office (which completely ignored that it was satire) was clickbait and steaming hot garbage, and worthy of scorn.

This year’s Nier: Automata, which is to be expected given Yoko Taro’s pedigree of making miserable games that are also extremely interesting from a philosophical perspective. I haven’t gotten that connected to any characters in a long time.

For me, it really comes back to killer7, though I’ll admit that more than a bit of that comes from nostalgia. Reading about it, playing it, sorting through GameFAQs articles working through it was exhilarating. It was the first time in my life I really thought about a game on a critical level, where it could be…

Hotline Miami is probably the best in this regard. In being a violent hyperkinectic game that posits that its story is meaningless, and all that matters is that you had fun with it. Probably because it wasn’t so constantly in your face, though maybe the downside is that it went over a lot of people’s heads.

I feel sad that I pretty much have to agree with Gerardi on this. I can’t not have at least some nostalgia for Suda - killer7 is very much the game that directly led me to becoming a game critic and journalist - but a lot of his aim has always been far more about provoking sentiment than saying anything substantive,…

Games don’t have to be fun, per se, but they do have to be mechanically engaging. A prime example is Hotline Miami, a hypnotically violent game that feels like a 16-bit adaptation of Taxi Driver if that film had been jointly directed by David Lynch and Takashi Miike. You’d be hard pressed to call it a fun experience…

I think it’s easy to oversell how miserable of an experience Spec Ops: The Line is to play. If the mechanics weren’t at least competent and enjoyable (divorced from the narrative context, of course), then the game wouldn’t be as effective. The player has to feel the pull between shooting dudes in the face feeling…

I think the fact that Travis charges his sword with a jacking off motion was also a bit of meta commentary by Suda51. Overall, I didn’t find the game that fun and while it was supposed to the rare ‘good’ implementation of waggle, I realized I’d rather not wave my arms around on my couch. The offensiveness is pretty…

I agree with everything you’re saying, except Suda isn’t really operating in that space either.

His games are more meta commentary than anything else. Flower, Sun, and Rain is one of the most excruciating and tedious games to play, but it’s not out of incompetence or willful difficulty, it’s a deconstruction of game…

Yeah, that move was something very much of its time. A year earlier, Grindhouse did the something similar, with Rodriguez putting a missing reel marker to skip over his protagonist’s backstory and Tarantino pulling the same thing, but using it to skip Vanessa Ferlito’s lapdance scene. I was going to write that…

Suda’s done really great work for game aesthetics and writing. Not just are his games not always interested in being fun. They’re also interested in being incoherent and post-modernist in an explicit way. They’re not for everybody. I don’t even know if his best works are for me, but they ask questions and they engage…

This is an excellent article, and a great dissection of why “it’s satire” is not some panacea to rectify legitimately problematic elements. Lollipop Chainsaw has the same problem. James Gunn actually called me a miserable asshole in the comments section of a James Sterling article about that game. Gunn claimed that…

No More Heroes is memorable for me because it was and is a ballsy sloppy gonzo punk offering from the decidedly un-punk Nintendo, a purposefully scattershot spectacle that makes no bones about the fact it will send up sexualisation and violence in video games and those appreciate it while still intentionally…

I think Suda sometimes gets at an interesting question that’s sporadically hit on by other titles and devs as well- why should a game have to be “fun to play”? Movies, novels, music, etc- all have widely acknowledged masterpieces that are not “fun” or “enjoyable” to engage with, and I think a crucial step in the…

I have never quite understood the Suda51 love-in. I like weirdness, sure, but it seems he might be better suited to a passive medium such as film or animation than video games.

“And while it’s a quick way for the game to get its message across, fast-forwarding through Jeane’s backstory is a disgustingly callous move that minimizes all the horror, much of it sexual, that she went through.”

I’m not sure this is entirely fair. If we were talking about a documentary, then there would be merit to…

“I have seen the Dark Universe, yawning.”
- H.P. Lovecraft reviews The Mummy (2017)

Azathoth!

It is probably good sign that DDLC can handle a multiplicity of interpretations without crumbling under the weight of them or sharply dividing opinion.