Winter is a lot harder for me in Wisconsin than it was in Georgia. Feeling okay overall, but I definitely notice it. Been somewhat miserable in that I feel too exhausted by daily activities to further my research, too exhausted by daily activities to really give myself over to the hobbies I once loved, and guilty at the thought of sitting down and really sinking into something aesthetic of whatever medium if it doesn’t have some kind of direct bearing on my research.

Anyway, I’ve had this one on the backlog and on my Switch for a while and I finally played it after seeing the thumbnail in my YouTube recs. Has the kind of haunted media quality I found really compelling when I was younger while also having a brevity that never lets its depiction of mental health struggles wade in the muck of morbid spectacle.

I’m reminded of why I spent quarantine watching fucked up movies back to back to back. The intensity at once gives me some kind of emotional prompting that other media doesn’t and at the same time aestheticizes that negativity and intensity in a way that keeps it at a safe distance, at arms length, always with the formal reminder that the person feeling this way mustered enough strength to make and design this object in spite of those feelings.

I feel a lot better after playing this. Glad I took the short time out of my day to do so. Looking forward to the sequel.

Continuing my Marvel gaming kick with this one. I got the game for the PS4 years ago and never got very far into it. Ended up upgrading for the remastered version and played through the main story's platinum trophy and the remaining DLC stuff. I'm a real sucker for an open-world superhero game in a city, particularly after playing Arkham City at a formative age in which I'd already grown quite fond of superhero media. I think this one learns from the mistakes of the Arkham games in terms of just how densely the world should be populated (viz. no Riddler trophy items here, which I didn't hate that much in Arkham but which I know I would've found run-killingly tedious here) while still adding little secret collectables and extras to stock up on. Combat here felt streamlined in a way that I never really felt with the Arkham games and their brawling style, and I think the way that suit upgrading was integrated into the main gameplay felt a lot more fun.

What I will say Arkham has over this is in its setting as an integral part of the game's worldbuilding. Arkham City has a kind of character that Spider-Man's New York City does not, or at least does not have as wholly expressionistic of its central character, who embodies its ideals rather than sees his own reflected in it. That's nonunique to this game, as its present in the source material for both of these (and perhaps such a strict comparison is uncharitable), but I think Arkham managed to cram in some very fun referential content in so much of the space it took up in a way that I don't see as much here. While the Riddler trophies are the negative charge of that density, the positive is in the use of advertisements, dialogue, tableaux, and completely missable set pieces that index a more developed fabula behind this syuzhet. We get these in a few places (the Sanctum Sanctorum, Oscorp, the Avengers Tower), but they don't feel substantive or particular enough to feel like the kind of knowing Easter eggs that made Arkham City feel less like a hermetically sealed experiment than its own narrative might have it.

That said, traversal and mechanics here really iterate greatly upon Arkham in part because of the technological affordances of the PS5. I'm particularly fond of the haptic feedback and sound effects (not to mention the sound design and lovely score while playing with headphones) in how they make this iteration of Spider-Man feel like it's in sharper focus than the muddy ensemble we get in the MCU. The whole experience was an addictive, delightful time, and I'm excited to go to Miles Morales next.

Spent a lot longer with this one than I was expecting to. I picked it up and put it down months and months ago but ended up giving it another try and burning away a good amount of time with it; it ended up being the first game I've ever sat through to unlock all achievements and get a platinum trophy. I grew up on the first two Ultimate Alliance games and a good amount of Marvel cartoons growing up, so I've got a real soft spot for superhero content when it's done right, where "done right" here does not mean the "grown-up" variety that equates defamiliarizing violence or shocking stakes for a work's overall quality.

The game is really buggy and janky in a lot of ways, and the social link system does very little beyond making each hero grow to realize that you are indeed their best friend and closest confidant. Certain hero writing makes this feel more or less earned, particularly with the titular Midnight Suns like Magik or Nico, but less so with the more static characterization of some Avengers characters. In part this is made worse by the disjunction between the friendship leveling and the binary alignment system, where a more complex system might see your alignment ease, hinder, or even foreclose high friendship rankings with certain heroes. A system of this kind of complexity would be something that would have meant more upfront labor in writing for characters and even with branching endings, but would have made the New Game+ content feel more more rewarding and less like a place to grind through that full dark alignment achievement. Because of the high preponderance of negative friendship reactions to dark dialogue options, there's a heavy railroading of your choices towards the positive or neutral options that lack such negative sanctions.

This speaks too to the facile quality of your player character, a really good off-support in the light balance build or a high-offense damage option in the dark build. To make an engaging story (which I, for the most part, enjoyed), this game mandates a bit less customization of your player character in terms of things like powers, build, or other elements that might tip the scale towards RPG in a way far too unruly for such an inchoate project.

That inchoate quality is what makes the commercial failure of the game so sad to me. It's got very fun gameplay in its main mission sections, and the complexity that I found lacking in narrative and character design was made up for in the fairly balanced game design and gently sloping difficulty options. Such an exquisite, satisfying system (my first playthrough found the gameplay loop of developing, modifying, and refining cards and builds addicting in a way no single-player game has been for me in years) warrants the kinds of improvements and iterations that a sequel would provide, something that seems dubious in the wake of the game's underwhelming commercial performance.

There are many rough edges—bugs that permanently lock you out of unlocking a certain suit for your character, bugs that soft-lock you in a certain mission type if you play it at too low a difficulty, janky textures upscaling too slowly to hide that the cool runes on the suits in the cover art are badly pixelated most of the time in the Abbey sections, Morbius or Hydra goons running infinitely and then teleporting to their marked locations, seeing Hunter drop from midair every time you fast travel, just a lot of unpolished and disappointing elements that show the seams throughout—that would be first in line for improvements in a second installment, but I was charmed by a few tonal, narrative, UI, and quality of life elements that evinced a real engagement from Firaxis. Dialogue subtitling options included the option for tone indicators (!), the Hunter is always canonically referred to with they/them pronouns no matter your build, characters will randomly go for a swim (you get customization of bathing suit options, which feels equal parts like ogling and just chilling) and hang out in a way that feels legitimately leisurely in a way that no MCU work has been able to capture, and the millennial-ish pop therapeutic and at times melodramatically trauma-informed minor dialogue options and character writing feel gentle and humane in a way that toes the line with being corny but at times manages to either pull up at the last minute or diffuse such concentrated sentimentality through its crunchy little gameplay loop in a way that prevents it from being grating.

Midnight Suns is buggy and janky and overly simple in areas, but I will remember it fondly as the most innovative and sincere Marvel IP moving-image media exploit I've experienced in a long time. I will look back on it fondly and I don't regret any minute of my time playing it.