IN SEPTEMBER, A small group of friends convinced me to join them in my first few rounds of Among Us. Developer Innersloth’s game had been virtually inescapable at that point, clogging up every newsfeed on all of my social media apps with fan art, memes, and jokes about the cute little space beans. At a time when social distancing is absolutely necessary for survival, we had all created our own Friday-night tradition of turning to games as the connective tissue that binds us together. Among Us felt like the next natural step in that journey.
The concept of the game is simple. You and other crewmembers must work together to complete menial tasks aboard a spaceship or on a space station, but there’s one caveat: One or more of you is an imposter working to sabotage all of our hard work by putting the ship in crisis or killing us off one by one. Through brief deliberation meetings, it’s our job to deduce who are the villains among us and evict them out of the airlock before they’re able to kill us all—or, worse—before they can convince the group at large to eliminate our innocent bean compadres in their place.
My first few rounds were maddening in the best way. The thrill of discovering the imposter’s identity increased exponentially every time someone found a body or called for an emergency meeting. Who could get away with all this mayhem and with such ease? And why were we so quick to point fingers at each other during deliberation when we had very little evidence to go off of? With each round, my obsession over figuring out the identity of the imposter grew to the extent that all I wanted was a shot at being the imposter myself.
I wanted to betray my friends and feel good about getting away with it. I wanted that next-level power, to be in control of the fate of my crew. I wanted to be at the center of their attention by pulling the strings. But when it was my turn to be the imposter, I choked: In all my excitement, I accidentally hit my kill button, slaughtering one of my crewmembers in front of too many witnesses. My time as an imposter ended before it even began. And then, we played another round.
TEN YEARS AFTER its initial release—and four years
after it inexplicably vanished from distribution platforms— Scott
Pilgrim vs the World: The Game - Complete Edition launched earlier
this month on basically every platform imaginable, opening up a
subspace door back to the vibrant, bohemian world of Canada, where
every half-hearted hipster’s life is gently going awry.
The 2010 classic was a warmly celebrated, side-scrolling beat-'em-up
game highly reminiscent of River City Ransom. Scott Pilgrim
charmingly gamified the narrative beats of legendary Canadian
cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley’s treasured comic book, which charts
the fraught path to maturity of “loser-hero” Scott Pilgrim.
First published in 2004, the Scott Pilgrim comic is set in an age of attack hugs, flip phones, and the achingly slow death of grunge. A time when dumb and mediocre yet well-meaning boyfriends were more forgivable, and the lasting infamy of Ready Player One hadn’t made floods of references kind of lame. Over its six-year run, the Scott Pilgrim comic built the foundations of a die-hard fan base, which the movie and game adaptations would multiply many times over. Now the game’s back to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.
talks of including a “Montreal DLC” featuring a playable Gideon Graves alongside Envy Adams and the other members of the Clash at Demonhead, which was originally planned for the 2010 release—along with a slew of other concepts—although this was tragically re-canceled for reasons unexplained.
POSTERS ARE CENTRAL to the player’s experience in Night City, the dystopian setting of Cyberpunk 2077. I always believed they would be the most telling piece of the game’s world-building, the biggest indicator of the game’s underlying ideas. For better or for worse, I was right.
Even before the game launched, the posters were a key feature of the game’s marketing. In particular, one for the fictional energy drink Chromanticore, which features a feminine character with a huge, bulging crotch and the tagline “Mix it up.” The poster, and the toxic marketing campaign that developers CD Projekt Red built around it, have been discussed many times, including by myself. By examining Cyberpunk’s posters, we can begin to see the issues—not only with the game’s themes—but with the direction of the AAA scene over the past decade or so.
When we think of world-building in games, we tend to think of it on a more macro level. By this metric, there are some things Cyberpunk 2077 gets right—from the fantastic, entirely original soundtrack to the supporting characters like Panam Palmer. There’s also a lot it gets wrong, however, such as the mixed messages about the police’s role in perpetuating dystopia, endless movie references that undercut the game’s ability to tell stories, and most of the characters that aren’t closely linked to the narrative feeling underdeveloped and empty.
