Before getting into Butterfly Soup - one of my favorite gaming and narrative experiences this year - I want to loosely define a few phrases:

Slice-of-life Slice-of-life, as an idiom, is sort of quaintly useless. Life is broad, and the slices can be generous. Ironically, in gaming, we use the term “vertical slice” to delineate the most exciting parts of a video game.

YA Yesterday on the Chicago L I saw a 50-something-year-old woman with a giant Hunger Games mocking jay tattoo on her neck. She probably wasn’t Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins. I know that for industry/genre enthusiasts YA is a useful term, but it’s also a dumb one.

Visual novel Visual novels are popular in Japan, but not living in Japan I haven’t spent much time with them. I did play the grossly overwritten 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It didn’t exactly leave me wanting more.

In visual novels, the player/reader reads text (mostly dialogue), looks at character portraits and makes occasional choices. Some visual novels include slightly more gamified systems, like inventories or stats, but generally they’re even less dynamic than choose-your-own-adventure books.

Okay, now Butterfly Soup:

The first time you play God Hand, you will either hate it or think it's 'okay'. The second time you play it, you will probably have a similar opinion. Somewhere between the second or third time you experience the game, however, a switch will flip in your brain and you'll need to cope with a disturbing reality: As an opportunity to press buttons and see things occur on a screen, this game is perfect. On every other level, it's an indecent example of everything shameful about video games.

Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

There is a time and a place for Uncharted video games; it’s somewhere between 2001 and 2010. Americans needed escapism, heroic gunfights, and they could be forgiven for seeing exotic locales as playgrounds. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007) was an exercise in Indiana Jones fan fiction and photo-realism. The follow-up, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009) is generally regarded as the pinnacle of the series. A rare sophomore effort that outstrips the first project without over-reaching. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (2011) was a lot like Among Thieves but somehow dumb, boring, and poorly titled.

Then, from the same studio, came The Last of Us (2013), an astounding video game. Serious, clever, grounded, powerful - a game that probably made Naughty Dog finally feel weird about being called Naughty Dog. The Last of Us was Uncharted with a tight camera, an appropriate feeling of wonder brought on by the contrast of desperation, and guns that felt like guns.

When my parents bought me a fat grey Game Boy in 1991, it came with Tetris (1984). I played a lot of Tetris then, and I’ve played a lot since. Tetris may be the platonic ideal of “video game,” insofar as something so absurdly subjective can be said at all. Safer at least, would be to say...

Part One: The first hour of Prey

The week before Prey (2017) came out, I played a free downloadable Playstation 4 demo of the game with Zero Stars co-host and EIC, Bob. The demo takes you through the first hour and a half or so of the game. It’s a very good demo. I’m sure the developers at Arkane know that their game’s opening is strong - probably to a fault.

(And in fact, Prey itself is a good game, just to get that out there.)

Supergiant Games, a video game development company, was founded in 2009. In 2011, Supergiant put out its first game, Bastion, an isometric action-RPG. In 2014, Supergiant published it’s second game, Transistor, an isometric strategy-action-RPG. Starting in September of 2015, Supergiant (probably) played a lot of NBA 2K16’s MyCareer mode, as directed by renowned filmmaker Spike Lee.

At this time, Supergiant thought to itself, “We are not Spike Lee. But we could do better than this.”

And they did. They made Pyre.

If Tacoma, the new game from Fullbright, had come out ten years ago, it would have engendered three hot takes on the Internet. As someone who lived through the past decade, I can enumerate these possible opinions with perfect accuracy.

1. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma is not a video game.
2. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma proves conclusively that games can be art.
3. Tacoma does not feature running, jumping, or shooting people/monsters in the face, and is about two hours long. Therefore, Tacoma is not worth its $20 price.

It's 2017, and I have played Tacoma. Here’s what we know:

1. Tacoma is a video game.
2. Tacoma is art.
3. Tacoma is too expensive.

Let's talk about it.

My 2013 MacBook Air can’t run much, but it can run Anatomy. If I had to choose one game for my Mac to run, it might be Anatomy. Anatomy contains so much in so little.

You know what’s fun? Walking. People don’t talk about how joyous simply moving around is, but you’d be a fool to deny it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. You don’t think about inherent happiness in walking because it’s something that you do every day. As I write this, I am 29 years old. That means I’ve been walking for something like 28 years. That’s 10220 days. It’s practically impossible for something repetitive like walking to remain fresh for that long. Over time, the novelty of movement wears off and walking becomes something that just ‘happens’.

The first Zelda game I ever purchased was The Adventure of Link. It was 1992 and I found a $20 bill on the asphalt of a consignment store parking lot. I was six, and my mom let me keep it. It was the first $20 bill I’d ever held. The gold NES cart, no box, was sitting in a wicker basket near the register of the consignment shop. I had no idea what Zelda was, but Nintendo was Nintendo. I bought it. I think it was $5.