Mafia III is a game that’s held back by its conventional anchors. It wants to be game about the South but remains content to use its setting rarely as little more than a local color curiosity. It proposes a radical representation of race but falls prey to the conventional chores of open-world banality. Though it initially seems eager to “Tell about the South,” Mafia III does not have the patience or interest to do so. Its violence and exploitation-style racial politics, however, make the trip to New Bordeaux worth effort—as long as the person heading down South isn’t looking for anything more than a sightseeing tour.
The suburbanization, the cartoonish aesthetic, and the “one more turn” addictiveness are still recognizable parts of the core experience people keep coming back for. It is still a full, massive, joyous videogame, even if I have to squint to find the joy beneath mere wit—but the two extremes are now growing wider and wider apart. How long before the fabric of the game snaps under the strain?
Owlboy is itself as joyful and powerful an example of such art as I can recall. That it also happens to be an exceptionally well-crafted and tasteful videogame made by a very small group of people may not entirely be a coincidence.
It also places that desire for discovery within another person’s mind, just like Conrad, and keeps its player, like Conrad’s reader, at a critical remove. It lets you see a bigger picture than the grid of hexagons it depicts; it lets you see the mindset that creates the grid, and what that way of thinking inevitably ends up doing.
Masquerada declines as the plot slows down. The herky-jerky pace gets more grating, the mania for proper nouns more distracting. What looked like a scrappy little underdog RPG turns out to be a collection of worn-out ideas.
A good game, like any good work of art, should make you wonder; it should give you a reason to care about what happens, just as it should give you reasons to enjoy what it asks you do. Aragami feels only half-invested in doing both of those things, so it does neither. By failing to follow through on its own best ideas, it leaves us with nothing but a shadow of the game that could have been.
I will likely return to Pavilion to get lost in its digital labyrinths, to discover how objects can be rearranged to play with the narrative of a faceless man in a suit. When I return to Pavilion’s twisty little passages in Chapter 2 next year, I hope recall that feeling of blissful disorientation I felt in the dizzying corridors of Borges’ prose.
