House of Nettles: #backloggd

Marathon - ★★★★★

2026-08-17T06:50:01Z

I've never seriously played an MMORPG. I played maybe an hour of World of Warcraft during its heyday at a friend's urging, but found it immediately boring. Nor am I much for shooters, especially in a competitive context; I played a bit of Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer when they were the biggest thing in video games, and enjoyed myself, but I never got good and I certainly didn't feel the drive to hone my skills on the grindstone of Xbox Live.

But I've been playing Marathon. I'm still playing Marathon. I would have written this very review months earlier, except that I was too busy playing Marathon.

It's a surprise that I like this so much. Even my girlfriend who loves trying to push me out of my video game comfort zone almost as much as she loves Marathon (both the 90s and 2020s incarnations) didn't bother encouraging me to play it. But I had a gap in my gaming schedule and an itch to play something with a sense of both action and progression, so I gave it a shot and was blown away by what I found.

Marathon clearly isn't an MMO. There's no persistent game world, even in the Destiny "shared-world" sense, and the game progression is entirely based on the items you bring back from short-lived runs. But my more controversial contention is that Marathon isn't entirely a shooter, either.

Certainly, for those drawn to FPS team fights, this game delivers in spades. I'm told by aficionados of the genre that the guns have "the Bungie sauce". The character-shooter-style shells all play distinctly while remaining balanced among each other. The level design allows for hugely diverse engagements with lots of opportunities to play the map for advantage rather than relying on raw aim fundamentals.

But even here I'm betraying my own biases, because my aim fundamentals are still weak. This game has been driving me to get better, because no part of it is fully separable from the whole, but I've got a lot of practice to do before I can go toe-to-toe with people who have been playing Overwatch and Fortnite and Apex for years. The places I make up the difference, and which keep drawing me into the game even 800 hours in, are those in which you can shift the focus away from raw shooting and towards the rest of the game.

Here is Marathon's fundamental brilliance (and possibly that of the nascent extraction shooter genre as a whole): by making the fundamental goal retaining and accumulating loot, which is distinct from but in dialog with fighting other people, it produces complex and intense emergent experiences of a sort I rarely see in games.

As an example, Marathon is the most effective survival horror game I've ever played in terms of making me actually emotionally afraid. As much as I love the mechanical genius of Resident Evil or the writing of Silent Hill 2, neither of them made me feel terror. Playing Marathon, hiding in the tunnels with the loot I stole from a real human team, listening to their footsteps over my head as they search for me, knowing that all that stood between me and my demise was my own ability to outthink and outmaneuver them—then, I felt terror.

As another example, Marathon is a game about knowing the terrain. I was in a firefight through a doorway, accompanied by two teammates who were no more confident at raw gunplay than I. We'd fought to a standstill, and I told them to hold the door and keep the enemy's attention. I crept through a vent, knowing it would lead me to a platform just above the other team, where I rained gunfire upon them, breaking the stalemate and yielding us a victory against superior fighters with better gear. This is a game about playing smart, and on my best days, I can be smart.

To play Marathon is to play a hundred different games at once. It's an FPS, sure, but it's also survival horror, it's stealth action, it's a puzzle game, it's a game about navigation, it's a game about psychogeography, and on rare occasions it's even a game about making friends. The game is carefully structured so that stories unfold as part of the play, and I find that as fascinating to witness as an art form as it is fun to engage in as a player.

I don't know how much longer this game will be around. The industry doesn't seem to be doing well, Bungie is certainly not thriving under its Sony overlords, and Marathon will never be the money fountain that Destiny was in its heyday (even Destiny for all its success is now officially over). I'm just glad I'm getting to experience this while it's here, while the lobbies are still filled with players, before this beautiful moment fades into memory and lore.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour - ★★★★

2025-06-06T08:48:39Z

Let me begin by saying: fuck Nintendo. Their insistence on ruining the lives of people who do anything they disapprove of with the products they sell, regardless of whether that thing is illegal let alone harmful to them, is despicable. It creates a chilling effect on vital efforts towards digital preservation that extends far beyond their own products, on top of just being a heinous thing to do to fans of their games. The regard in which they consistently hold their back catalog as assets on which they could one day collect rent speaks to a deep-rooted capitalistic mindset among the businessmen who run the company that is in no way outweighed by the positive things written below.

All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.

The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.

And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is.

Lies of P - ★★

2024-10-06T03:01:31Z

People told me this was "the good one", the non-FromSoftware game to finally execute well on the formula, and I was ready to believe them. I found the "gritty steampunk fairy tale" theme a little tired but I was ready to give it another chance. I really was open to this game being good.

This game is not good.

The bitter irony is that the thing that's maybe hardest about aping Dark Souls is having a collection of fun, compelling, and distinctive boss fights, and that's the only thing this game does right. There are a few boring bosses and one that I think is actively bad, but the majority of the roster are legitimately very fun. The combat's emphasis on perfect guarding and limited support for dodging (including some moves that simply ignore iframes) means they lean pretty heavily towards rhythm memorization, but that's my preferred style anyway. And it's certainly not the only thing going on—the best fights are also about positioning and learning when you can get in what sort of attacks.

But as fun as the boss fights can be, the game surely makes you suffer between (and sometimes during!) them. The first, most egregious sin is the writing. The game is from a Korean dev, so it's tempting to lay the blame at the feet of the localizer, but I'm confident that the underlying writing is terrible. That's not to say that the localization is good—more on that below—but it's very clear that even if the prose were marvelous the concepts being conveyed are insipid, boring, and deeply unsubtle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of Gemini (pronounced like "Jiminy", get it), whose entire role in the narrative is to explicitly describe things that were already completely clear from subtext in gratingly unskippable voice lines. But truly, nearly every line of dialog or lore writing in the game ranges from ham-fisted to outright nonsensical, so that even the lore and character moments that are compelling (and there aren't zero of those!) fall completely flat without any kind of supporting structure.

The writing isn't helped by one of the worst localizations I've ever seen that doesn't straight up break rules of spelling and grammar. Descriptions of the same thing use inconsistent wording, and descriptions of different things overlap. Idioms are misused or overused like someone cribbed writing notes from an 80s sitcom. Major mechanics have descriptions that are flat-out inaccurate to how the game behaves. If you want to understand how the game works, you need a wiki not because the game's descriptions are oblique and left to the player to explore, but because they're untrustworthy.

If you're thinking, "well if it's fun to play I can deal with skipping through the text", think again. Outside of boss fights (and even in them to a degree), the design sensibilities of this game are frequently thoughtless and haphazard. While the core combat mostly works for fighting large, strong enemies, it falls apart entirely for weaker mobs, which die in one or two hits without any resistance throughout the entire game. For a combat system built around the idea that you can essentially parry any attack, parrying is irrelevant to 90% of the respawning enemies. Compare to Sekiro, where even very early mobs won't let you just walk up and hit them until they die without blocking you and forcing you to engage in a microcosm of the mechanics used by the bosses.

The game is just full of blunders like that. The "fable meter", which is used for special weapon-specific attacks, becomes completely irrelevant two or three bosses in once you get an amulet that gives you a huge across-the-board damage boost when it's maxed out and so motivates you never to use your fable attacks. This is one of not two but three different equipment meters you have to keep track of during combat, all three of which are mostly irrelevant. There are some interesting ideas here, but they're all fumbled or half-assed.

So don't play Lies of P. If you must, find a mod that just throws you at the bosses with nothing in between but maybe some build management. And please pray that when there finally is a worthy disciple of FromSoftware's teachings I won't be so burnt out on these failed pretenders that I don't even bother to give it a glance.