Max Payne

a full-on charm offensive i fear. its pretty stunning how equally the game straddles several seemingly contradictory appeals. only in this period, with this creative team, could a game be, all at once, a genuinely jaw-dropping technical achievement for its time AND a silly (but textured!) amateur b-movie covered in memorably quirky cost saving measures AND an overly ambitious artistic statement from a first-time future Game Auteur that blends genre fatalism with light metatext and norse mythology symbols. and wrapped all around it is just a deliciously fun video game!! the bullet time mechanics are enjoyable but whats almost more important are how the considerations made for them impact the entirety of the gunplay...the physical position of characters arms/guns, as well as the physical air travel of the bullets, give all of the combat a feeling very distinct from shooters of the time. it doesnt measure up in every single way i suppose...in particular, compared to the standard set by half-life, i was a little disappointed how strategically interchangeable a lot of the guns feel. and honestly i would have been curious to see more playing around with ammo scarcity as well....perhaps i was just quickloading through the encounters really efficiently, but even in the chapters where youre meant to be at a bit of a power reset, it felt like it wasnt long before i was carrying around an armory's worth of bullets. these are more quibbles about how the game could theoretically be better tho, whats here is so compulsive and entertaining...the encounter design is still consistently strong in asking numerous different questions of you (some fun little Positioning Puzzles in here), and the physical reality of the bullets + the video game artifice creates something thats tactile and dreamlike in very compelling ways. i'm not sure i have much to say about the artistic ambitions...i really really enjoy them, but more as an appreciation for the raw creativity and energy than anything that really grabs my attention or makes me think about it in startling new ways. but there is much emotional and thematic cogency to be found in the apocalypse framing...max of course loses everything he has to lose, leaving the duration of his time in the game as a kind of ghostly afterlife where he's not truly living (in fact, not living at all....fictional character!). every form of authority is powerful enough to feel like theyre actively making the world worse, but not powerful enough to feel like anyone is actually in control of all the chaos. max leaves the confines of his body and briefly realizes he's a fiction, existing to serve people other than himself, who he cannot meaningfully comprehend the existence of. and ofc fimbulwinter holds the whole city in a chokehold that you never quite forget about, even as it is essentially the ambient noise. personal, political, existential, and natural apocalypse...whether any of it translates to Depth exactly im not rly convinced of lol, but it glues everything together in a way that would have been easy to skimp out on, and would have left the game much weaker and less vivid for it...a good show of Art Instincts on the part of remedy and with all of this strong creative syntax holding the thing together, the surface level is left to just be so charismatic and memorable. i love all the fictional pop culture they made up for this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up little universe, i love the friends-and-family casting in the faux-comic book cutscenes and dorky-ass npc faces, i love the non-jumping puzzle parts of the nightmare sequences, and even tho the script is fairly amateurish its in a personable and effortful way where lake's actual skill hasnt caught up to his raw talent and enthusiasm. its just such a lovingly handmade game...a distinct and self-sufficient piece of art that very naturally suggests a larger personality for the creative voices behind it. im curious what else they have in store!