I just finished this now.
My favourite video game story of the year.
Brilliant deconstruction and critique of the modern shooter genre - especially games like Call of Duty which reward players for violent action.
I felt uncomfortable, guilty, and disgusted at some of the things I partook in as the player behind Walker's actions. Great use of the medium - only interactive art such as video games can make a person complicit in the actions of the narrative, rather than being a merely a passive observer. The metanarrative around complicity of player choice in video games is indeed provocative.
But I think the thematic centrepiece of the game is the way foreign ethnicities are rendered as "other" by media and therefore less than human, making killing them a guilt-free act. If the idea of killing rogue American soldiers makes you uncomfortable, why don't you even think twice when gunning down Arabs or Russians? After all, they are both entirely virtual constructs. Why is one virtual life somehow more valuable than another - is it because you value one over the other in real life? And if so, what caused this belief?
Great environments and art direction and voice acting, and extremely well done presentation around Walker's mental state and how it degrades over the course of the game. One of the great examples of gameplay telling the story. Even the little touches like the slow-mo headshots and the snarky loading screen "tips" put question marks into the player's head - are you enjoying this? Should you be?
The game isn't "fun" in the traditional sense of gaming. Like Requiem for a Dream, it's meant to make you feel uncomfortable, it's meant to be brutal and harrowing. And it's also meant to be thought provoking and stay in your head after the credits roll. And it is, because I'm typing this post right now.
Mission accomplished, Yager. I've grown up. Games have grown up alongside me, and it's nice to see a title like this deliver more than what I expect from today's mindless, hyperviolent and juvenile modern shooters.
. I absolutely loved all the attention to the little design details this game has, should've taken notes, there were so many times that I went 'oh that's clever!', even above the ones already mentioned in the articles posted previously, but now I can't remember any but the most obvious.
