A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

There’s a long-standing marketing technique in games. I think it’s in other, it’s in games, and it goes like this. Fool me once…no, wait. It’s the idea of marketing a game as putting you in the place of your favorite character. “Become the Bat!” “You are Daredevil!” (Once I get to the thesis, this would be the cheapest game in the world to make…) “Wowie Zowie, you cal almost FEEL Wolvie’s claws come out!” WRONG.

No game you have ever enjoyed has made you feel like the character. They’ve made YOU feel like what YOU think YOU’D feel like if you suddenly had all of that character’s abilities and were thrown into a world made of bowling bumpers. Feeling like the character is horrible. Tedious. Not fun in any way. The opposite of ‘free.’ And you know it. Search your whatever you et cetera. You probably kissed your sister. Gross.

And that’s a GOOD thing. If you’re a comic fan, you’ve caught on and are now nodding and probably making a little side smirk about how heavy handed this allegory is becoming. If you’re scratching your head at what I’m getting at, read on.

Being a super hero sucks in almost any interesting situation

The common marketing trope of promising ‘putting you inside the mind of your favorite character’ is inherently flawed and is the core of why we never get Superman outside of Mortal Kombat reskins. Let’s lay out how a Superman game that made you really feel what it was like to be Superman would play out. Not a game made to be a game; a game to simulate feeling like Superman. First, 1/3rd of 5 days a week would be spent doing absolutely tedious office work. Keeping up your secret identity is non-negotiable. You’re a mid-level reporter at a big newspaper who won’t work overtime. You’re ALWAYS on thin ice. You’re also in an office romance and there are like 50 HR guidelines you need to dodge. It’s not fun, like Papers Please. You have to deep dive into microfiche to fact check stories. You have to get legal to sign off on verbiage. You’re basically God and you have to do your election paperwork for benefits enrollment because turning down health insurance would be a red flag. You, Superman, have to find ways to come up with leaving the office to save people or straight up listen to them die.

You punch out and head out to job 2. Saving the world. Oh, look! A filthy poor stealing food at a MegaMart! Better apprehend him! I hope you are able to squeeze the right trigger at exactly 0.01% of its travel path. Any more and you crush him into a fine paste. In front of kids, no less! You used your X-Ray vision to see if he was armed. The lady an aisle over lost her baby! Best of luck pushing that thumbstick within a range that doesn’t spin the world backwards and cause a car to rise out of the ground, but somehow not cause Lois to not have dirt in her lungs. It’s a good movie, but don’t fuck with time. It never works out.

OK, well, how about a Flash game? No, not NewGrounds. Wally and Barry and all their bullshit. We’ll stick to comic physics, otherwise he basically couldn’t see and would anhillate anything he touched with the energy of a trillion suns, igniting our atmosphere and killing us all by taking a step. What are you left with? The slowest point and click adventure you’ve ever played. It would take days to get to your front door, just to leave. You’d have to spend a year every 16 years eating. Your great-great-great-grandchildren will finally turn in the first quest, knowing nothing of how the game began or why the family insisted they take up this ancient suffering. You do not want to play a game that makes you feel like the Flash.

I can hear the batarangs being sharpened and the smear campaign payoff envelope being mailed by Alfred now. Surely, the Arkham games - which place you in a character that’s human and not beholden to all that pseudo-magic nonsense - does succeed in making you feel like The Bat. Haha! I’ve been got! Except not even a little bit. If this were character accurate, you wouldn’t be out there very much murdering people (And real talk, you ARE murdering people. Lucius told BatGPT to show you dead bodies as ‘unconscious’ but they haven’t moved for 6 hours and aren’t breathing, Bruce. Bruce…you know what you did, Bruce), you’d be PLANNING. The game would be a goddamned RTS if it were accurate. Hours and hours of pouring over databases and looking through schematics, all while a little video of pearls dropping on the cold ground plays in the corner of your screen. The last level would be one fight with one big-bad who you hand over to the cops, knowing full well that there’s no legal system in this country even now that wouldn’t immediately release them. A job well … well. A job anyway. At best, the Arkham games are an exercise, but BatFans know, feeling like Batman would require therapy.

Spider-Man, or Spiders-Men…s, comes the closest to making you feel like the superhero simply by taking $150-$300 bucks out of your pocket in total. That’s the most on-brand a single one of these games has been. The fact you have to jump back and forth between your work and the work adds a lot to the realism. But it’s still mostly the good with nearly none of the bad. It makes you feel like Spider-Man feels in a moment, and that’s saying something. The first game, in particular. It FEELS lonely a lot of the time. Getting the Iron-Spider gadgetry diminishes it and I’d love to see a mode where you don’t get tracking and all the bells and whistles, but even letting that slide, the thing you DO get that immediately makes it an escapist fantasy for Peter, were it offered to him, is time. You literally don’t start the clock until you want to. Peter’s character is built on not being able to stop everything. His character growth comes from realizing that while it destroys him that he knows he couldn’t be two places at once, being in one place mattered to someone. And that’s something. But in the games, you are free to leisurely take photos, high-five fans, solve silly NPC mysteries, visit your uncle’s grave, or see a marriage proposal that didn’t go so well. And it’s another game where you’d have to La Croix-touch the button to do a punch that doesn’t turn Otto’s brain to a thin soup the second it contacts. This is NOT an authentic Peter Parker Perspective.

None of this is to say this is a bad thing. Not at all! Every one of these games has been played and utterly enjoyed by me, your humble, totally reliable narrator. Spider-Man has a feeling of freedom that is unmatched by anything but maybe Forza Horizon, and you can’t web swing in that (Get the fuck ON this, Playground Games!). The Arkhams created an entire subgenre to brawlers because their flow was almost a dance and they were absolutely genre defining. Before the franchise became a weird bumpercar game. Even (one of) the old Hulk games had merits, mostly directly related to NOT making you feel like The Hulk. That would suck. The control would be taken away from you and you’d just be watching Hardcore Henry but way uglier? No thanks. See where I was going with the Daredevil thing in the opener? Or, rather, don’t see?

Insomniac has, however, gotten closer to putting you into the actual experience of a superhero with Wolverine. It’s still a long way off. You don’t feel the sting when your claws come out. Your camera isn’t three apples above the ground. Smell-o-vision hasn’t been invented yet, so you don’t smell all of the piss and feces and bile from the people you’ve shredded. And pennies. Don’t forget pennies. But you are constantly bombarded with sensory information. It tells you where to go in a way that’s very realistic to what Wolverine’s experience would be like. Too intense to ignore. Getting in the way of his rationality. Always on. From that perspective, it’s one of the very few games to actually succeed in the marketing promise to make you feel like you ARE a character. And it sucks. You can’t connect with Logan the way you can connect with Spider-Man simply because, in making the experience accurate in one vector, they’ve removed the negative feedback loop that acts as an analog for some of the impossible-to-translate negatives the character has to deal with. That’s a very long-winded way to say this very long-winded thing: “Taking away confusion and discovery, while accurate to what the hero would experience, takes it away in absence of the accurate negative experiences the character is having.” You need the negatives to appreciate the positives in praxis. Taking away the smell trails, or even just making them optional like Detective Mode, would have better served the game than accuracy to the experience of the character. You can make Wolverine invulnerable but still have a decent story reason that you ‘die’ in a fight. Insomniac’s ludonarrative dissonance-omancy is legendary, so surely weaving a small series of game-over cut scenes with non-death reasons you’re out of the action would have not been out of their wheelhouse. And it would have been more interesting than having three Phoenix Downs on auto in your inventory. QTEs having consequences validates them. But it would have been less accurate to the character. So all they do is waste a tiny bit less of your time if you engage. And that feels hollow. What’s making it hard for Wolverine is the constant, screaming voice in his head, the constant pain he’s in as his body never stops healing and feeling, every bone still screaming like the day it was infused with a metal that is eating him alive. Capturing super powered characters’ actual struggles is not what anyone is signing up for when they play a game. And I’m tired of pretending like it is.

What most people enjoy when they say that a game made them feel like a superhero is a feeling like you have all of the tools to solve a problem in a style that matches the character you know and love, while still having some stakes and failure conditions to keep it interesting for your normal, mortal self. Classically, that has been what marketing meant when it boasted a game “put you into” a character. But it seems Insomniac has done just that, and what could have been a fun experience (and likely will be if someone with sense gets approval to let us shut off a few of the forced tracking options in a future update) feels like an insult and plays worse for its accuracy. This isn’t touching on some of the other mechanics choices that are questionable - I feel like those were all made with intent and probably solved a problem we don’t know about. But the constant sensory bombardment? Sure, our Canadian Danzig Impersonator is acccurately represented here. But it makes the final product worse.

One more datapoint on this thesis. One other game has done this, in my experience. There are probably a few more, but one stands out to me as the most relevant expression of this phenomenon. The Animated Adventures of Superman/Superman 64. The controls were twitchy but the puzzles were precise. The time limit was always your biggest enemy. And apart from Lex? You were alone. Solitary, in a world of flat, cardboard people. In a world of cars that explode if you grab them wrong. A world where if you don’t precisely navigate the obstacles, the city is lost. Superman 64 is, in my opinion, the most accurate branded Superhero simulator ever made. And it’s as fun as eating salted sand. Lex Wins.

❗The following overview contains SPOILERS for Hades. Reader discretion is advised.❗

Gaming is Hell. From the AI slop and asset flips that pollute low-bar eshops like (checks notes) Switch and PS5 to the ever-climbing dev cycles making 300 hour experiences that demand 100% of your time for the better part of a year. Gaming is Hell.

But sometimes it can be nirvana. In the case of Rock Band, literally.

I’ve never been a fan of -like as a game description. Shorthand can express a ton of information quickly, so it’s useful for conveying a description in an elevator. But it becomes useless as a descriptor in long form reviews or in marketing material. Metroidvania is -like’s granduncle and lost every ounce of meaning the moment it was uttered. What is a Metroidvania? Not Castlevania or Metroid. Castlevania 2 is closer to the modern ideal than the first. Metroid fits the bill, but so do dozens of games that preceded it. And today it’s diluted to the point of kind of meaning any platformer where you back track with upgraded abilities. Almost always 2D, despite Metroid stepping onto the Z axis with GameCube. What’s a Rogue-Like? Rogue certainly isn’t. The concept of dying being part of gameplay is such a minor building block to a complete game, making a genre out of it seems limiting and very, very stupid.

Cards on the table. I hate cards. But I also hate ‘Rogue-likes.’ That doesn’t mean I hate games with the mechanics associated with that shorthand. But I have yet to find a game which has made that phrase a central part of their release push that does much of anything for me. Super Mario Bros. gives you information which makes your next play go a bit further. Just because its buff is your own memory, why isn’t that a Rogue-Like? You must die to get the intel to improve your next run. See what I mean? The whole concept is meaningless due to oversaturation, wibbly-wobbly edges, and mostly, the reductive boxing-in of defining a genre around a single mechanic. I roll my eyes at the term being used in reveals. Or being spat out by denizens of camp GitGud. Or, most egregious of all, on the goddamned box text.

I bring up this annoyance because often - well more often than never, which is too many times - Hades discussions will include the incantation as a way to quickly signal those GG campers to perk up their ears, while the less coordinated, but often more story-hungry of us will tune out. Rogue-like almost had me sleeping on what turned into one of my favorite games of the past 10 years. I almost looked back and watched my love vanish from my vision into the depths of the Underworld. Liam Gallagher would have been so disappointed.

I’ve played a fair number of games carrying the stupid, connotative weight of Rogue-Like and have disliked them all in some fundamental way. At best, with a game like Rogue Legacy, it was an afternoon-waster that didn’t stain my soul, but that wasn’t about to live in my head any longer than it took to see a few level styles. At worst, it was Returnal or similar fare - games that turn progress into a burden because the fall is so far on death that you can’t enjoy the game. You’re watching every step. You’re meticulously scrubbing the entire room for health. You’re not taking any risks and trying to color inside the lines to the point it stops being a game and just becomes Operation Solitaire.

Hades is not that. What Hades is is a game deserving of more than a two word hyphenate. First and foremost, Hades is grounded in its own mythology. Which is Greek mythology by way of a very liberal license. In the best way, I must add. Hades follows Zagreus via the Gantzian theory of Zag’s - his friends call him Zag. It’s cool - lineage; being the child of Hades and Persephone. This diverges a tiny bit from his myth of being reborn after being Stretch Armstronged by some Titans having a bit of a play in the yard, but the bones remain. He desires to escape the Underworld his father has built for the souls of humanity and to join the gods on Olympus. To escape, he must traverse always-changing rooms of scaling difficulty, get random boons from gods and goddesses, and frequently give 1/3rd of a very good boy many, many pets.

The mythology of Zagreus makes him a fantastic vessel for the gameplay mechanic and oxymoron of progressive death. He doesn’t die. Progress is achieved because death is, by his own myth’s telling, just a reset. Additionally, failure does not result in so massive a setback as to feel like lost time. Death (which is what we’ll call it, but not what it is) is progress. Every run gives you a little something. Longer runs become equally rewarding to succeed or to fail. Rooms nearly always contain some helpful item you can take with you after defeat, and as you make it through more rooms, the run becomes more and more valuable upon expiration. It feels like part of the game because it is part of the game, rather than being a harsh punishment. You are also rewarded with unique dialog and grounding story segments between runs, keeping you engaged. You have multiple collectable buckets that fuel multiple progression systems. Some can be used to power up the character. Some can be used to add more boons to the labyrinthine halls of the Underworld. Some are just trinkets or tokens you can give to characters to get additional permanent modifiers for future runs. The dialog is witty, impeccably acted, and very cohesive. There is a whole game upon which the mechanic of progressive death is hung, along side other equally rewarding mechanics. And that, as some poetist once penned, made all the difference.

Beyond the progression mechanics, the game is rich in playstyle choices. A number of weapons become available very quickly and allow for varied options for defeating the wandering horrors in the catacombs of the damned. Ranged, melee, bull in a china shop…whatever your preferred method of dispatching foes, you’re not too far off from unlocking a weapon that allows you to express your desire to re-kill the dead in your own way. The game does not lock you into classes - you can swap at any time. You can play your current mood and mix things up if the wind changes. You never feel stuck in a choice for very long and that makes the experience much more personal and rewarding.

The graphics are beautiful, hand-drawn, thoughtful representations of the core story. Every character is uniquely represented by their art. Yet they are all fully cohesive with every other. The game is unapologetically horny (complimentary). Gods are sex. They are manifestations of the ego interpreting the drives of the id. Hades makes that statement well, without making it gross or skeevy. The game has an absolute lust to it without being a brown paper bag Switch title where Honeys are Popped or Gals are Gunned.

The sound and music are absolute delights. Ambrosia in every word spoken. Thundering beats in time with your attacks give the game a rhythm, intended or otherwise, that really amplifies the experience. The satisfying sound of Zagreus’ dashes, slashes, bashes, and lobs are all tied so well to the animation that even as you’re playing it, the battles seem choreographed. The acting is, as mentioned, top tier. The entire audio experience is truly wonderful and utterly deserving of their many, many award nominations and wins. It’s a soundtrack you’ll want to pick up and put into rotation immediately.

Hades is not an exception to my rule of dismissing rogue-likes. It’s proof that the label bares almost no value in describing a game that has more depth than a teaspoon. To draw the breath to say it, you’ve already given yourself enough runway to accurately depict any game you’re about to besmirch. The jargon does not serve a purpose. It actively diminishes nearly any game to which it’s applied. The fact that Hades and Returnal can both be brought up in the category is enough to disprove it’s worth. But there’s no stuffing that Barbara Eden back into the Michelob tallboy. So, despite my hatred, my message is more for those of us who feel the label is off-putting. If someone voice-vomits that phrase about a new game, wipe it off your shoes and do a little research online before discounting it. While it’s true that usually you’ll find a cheese grater with the words ‘for genital use only’ etched on the side in shaking script at the end of the painbow, sometimes you may find your next favorite game.