3 Summer Game Reviews: CHIRK, Cyberpunk 2077 and Lollipop Chainsaw
Think these three reviews represent me at my best as both a critic and at tying art into personal narrative.
CHIRK
Gotta write this while the tears are still fresh enough to parse. In my review of Madotsuki's Closet, I made the general point that the greatest art is always that which most perfectly reflects our current self, but through hearing it from another person, moving closer to this other, becoming this other, we overcome something together, as artist and viewer. Suffice to say this is what I needed right now. Want to listen?
Do you love me?
I don't know.
Throughout my life, I've felt a level of aversion to romantic love. Maybe I was too in my head to care, too lonely to see beyond myself, too dissociated from my body to care about someone elses. I called myself asexual because I didn't know what it felt like to be more than just friends.
What is there to do at the end of history, at the end of hope? It's a question I've been fascinated with lately. Watch these forgotten kingdoms of industry rot, crumble from their peak, spelunking in their corpses. Sit idly by waiting for time itself to pass, filling it with narratives and reveries. Work in banality, paying the bills locked in puer aeturnum, forming hope through security.
At the core of Chirk is the question "Can we find love at the end of history?" I'm an adult. One who, in a way, has still refused the question. I do my fair share of pondering, exploring and drowning in existential conversations. I have my art and my passions. What's it all for? My happiness. It's the only stable thing I can pursue. I see a lot of myself in Fitcher.
Yet, like Fitcher, and unlike my past self, something has changed in my life. I realized it when I travelled to meet a friend. An online friend who lives quite far away. We spent a couple days together then parted again. Just like that. A couple nice days then the rest of my summer. Yet, I sobbed harder than I've ever sobbed the night we split. Didn't eat, didn't leave my room. It's because I felt something deep and devouring and now out of reach again. I loved this person. I loved them so much, yet I never learned to say "I love you."
What is love at the end of history? It's all going to shit and I've given up on hoping. I'll go down with the rotting ship, I guess. I'll always choose to suffer next to those I care about than run and be more at peace, I realized. It's been a sentimental year, and one in which I've vowed to eradicate, to the best of my ability, insincerity from my actions and thoughts. If I'm gonna ford hell, I'm gonna do it as myself.
Love at the end of history is clearing your schedule for them. It's keeping each other fueled through therapeutics. It's untying each other's knots and tying each other's shoes. It's sitting shoulder-to-shoulder making art. It's smoking on a swing set. It's sleeping next to each other just to remind each other you're both needed. It's climbing fire escapes. It's overanalyzing and toying with some mundane piece of infrastructure. It's biking past the city limits to see the storm. It's going halfsies on a sandwich while sitting on the curb. It's people-watching on a bench and encountering some stories to share.
I've forgotten what in that last paragraph is me and what is Fitcher. I think it's all both of us. Yet I've never called it love. I've denied myself going that far. We're just beating boredom together. Shoulder touching shoulder. Then, at one point, there's a flutter in my stomach, a shift in my gaze towards them, and I see it in theirs too. But we were both raised at the end of history. Neither of us learned what it means to say I love you.
But we've done it. We've acted out all these motions of love. Now, I think to the last scene of Chirk. I think of Finch, sitting in a rusted bus stop at the end of the road. "The rapture has been here, claiming all of us ready for it," the blind man said. And the two of them watch the horizon. The sirens blare, the tornado swells, and in the face of such profound force, of such a definitive destruction everpresent in this world we've never seen as anything but dead, we're reinvigorated. Something, in that grand experience, shocks us to our core and moves us to finally know what that dastardly word means.
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. The words my tongue searches for in so many of my relationships but is so reluctant to say. We learn to say it reflexively as kids, as a way to be polite to family and what not. But now I feel it, at once feel the weight of separation with one friend, but more than that, I feel the overwhelming gift that the presence of my other friend is. I love to be around them, I love how our conversations go and I love how our feelings towards each other evolve and mature.
Perhaps Chirk was my tornado. Or perhaps it was the last piece I needed to understand, even in these relationships of the unspoken, the beauty of two bodies creating a bond in a world where all else destroys. Fuck, I'm crying again writing that. Let's meet again soon, okay?
CYBERPUNK 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of, if not the most, compelling, engaging and ambitious games I've ever played, and for such it is a complete failure and active harm to the cyberpunk genre.
A lot of what I want to talk about here is coloured by my Yakuza 0 review from last year, in which I write about the horror and means by which it utterly consumed my life. Same is true here. Took 125 hours to 100%, leaving the entirety of May 2025 in a blurry haze. That's an average of 5-6 hours a day and more time than most people get in a day to spend freely. This is obvious (or maybe amateur and pathetically slow to the most hardened of hardcore gamers), but I want to nail in the point that Night City became a second reality for me during this time. This note of it being "a second life", so jam-packed with worthwhile trinkets and immersive enough to not need to continually motivate itself, is something that's come up with every person I've talked to it about. A friend, further to the point I'm trying to make, said they felt augmented by it, like it lived in their head and beckoned their repeat return in such a way to overwrite other priorities. These are both things I felt myself, of course, so I must ask myself why?
I've been reading a series of books on technology, sci-fi and how they've been co-opted to serve the needs of power. It's what I want to ride into grad school with, so I'm obviously very read and passionate on the topic, but I'll try to keep it concise as to not get called pretentious by referencing academic texts in a fucking game review.
I have first in mind Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which discusses the stage of capitalism proceeding one in which all social needs have been met as one that creates pseudo-needs by bombarding us with constant images, planting our subconscious with desires through implicit and explicit advertising (and in the case of the attention economy, this would be done thru habit forming). A lot of science fiction from the middle of the 20th century is responding, be they aware of it or not, to the impending threat of the world of the image becoming not only ever-present in daily life, but that world of the image becoming more real than reality to us (think of how we understand the world through social media and the news rather than direct sensory interaction with things) to a degree where it becomes flesh (the movie Videodrome is a really good example of this type of sci-fi). As soon as we embody the digital or offload our self onto the digital reality, we adopt less of a need to care for the physical reality and become, to a degree, passive to the causes of it (especially because the mix of information bombardment and isolation of the physical self leaves us utterly powerless and divided amidst our priorities).
Second, to get back to cyberpunk as a genre, I think of Bukatman's Terminal Identity (which I'm only a bit into, so sorry if I misrepresent it's ultimate points!). He describes postmodern sci-fi (something that has irritatingly been appropriated and mangled by tech optimists, billionaires and opportunists) as something that necessarily responds to the technological (and political within that) moment we live in. A lot of sci-fi following the invention of the television is thus a critique or imagined dystopian advance of the spectacle (or utopian if tech is reconfigured in X way), which is why so much of it still feels pressing today. After all, the spectacle has undoubtedly won (through present day, at least, and has consolidated public imagination enough for almost anything else to seem soon feasible). Within prolonged encounters with the television comes the felt reality of the television, which is precisely what cyberpunk specifically responds to. There is, of course, something paradoxical that it's pioneers are best-seller pulps (like Gibson and Dick's early works) and movies that advance the medium of film and celebrate technology (like Tron and Westworld, but keeps repeating through The Matrix and second Blade Runner). Thus, Cyberpunk is something that is only functional in very limited and critical frameworks that intertwine with and acknowledge the theories of the Spectacle amidst other post-modern creations. Point being, "Cyberpunk" is not just a term we should throw around. It is of a political moment, of a punk movement critical of technological realities.
There's so much more meaty, delicious theory here and I've kept in only what's essential to understand the point I'm trying to make, so I suggest checking out the texts if my poor recounting at all compelled you to fully get the points I'm about to make.
I engaged with way too many cyberpunk books and films knowing I'd eventually play this game (if my 20 references in the last two paragraphs didn't make that clear) with the expectation I was going into a reference-abundant culmination of the genre, as was described to me. On all else, I can't say I was disappointed. The moral situations the player is placed in are unrivalled and it takes a considered and generally laudable approach to so much of our current political moment (I don't love how it handles almost anything regarding gender and transness, but that's a separate essay someone else has probably already written). However, to me, and to Debord and Bukatman as well, any who profits from the spectacle who doesn't in some way elucidate or discuss critically it's existence, is ultimately in service to the status quo.
I think I realized this before even playing the game when trying to do research into the core works and theory of the genre and repeatedly being bombarded with Cyberpunk 2077 IGN guides, but 2077 is a game that sucks all the air out of a room it doesn't belong in. It is a schizophrenic rehashing of the tropes of the genre and deploys them in such a way that disarms them or doesn't make sense in a broader framework.
Yeah, cyberpsychosis is bad, but look how much cooler your character is with augments and look how necessary for function they are! The ads are critiquing the psychosexuality of the spectacle paired with a million map icons to keep popping for a month's supply of dopamine and gratification! If the game was just the Peralez quest, or just The Devil ending, I would indeed call it a great work of Cyberpunk. Hell, if it was a lot of singular bits of content reimagined as written text, I would call it cyberpunk. It is the fact all of these texts are floating around in a second reality, each making desire-forming quantities of noise that schizophrenically fragment your brain and subsume your attentiveness to physical reality, that breaks the allusion of punkiness to me.
Nothing in Cyberpunk tells you to stop playing, encourages you once you stop playing to attend to your flesh and local political community. It provides a pseudo-community, in which you can make yourselves the renowned queen of the streets, and forms a pseudo-reality in which you can live out your moral fantasies free of the painful activeness of the physical realm.
This is a bad argument to make on a website of video game players when it seems what I've said would force us to reconsider so much of our relationship with our favourite thing. Video games and computers are something I, for a long time, spared the same ire I passively held for phones, short-form content and television. The latter were stupid and dumb and the former weren't. I thought this even as a kid. I wonder now if it's that video games and computers require a prolonged quantity of inputs, a stream of physical action in order to inform and navigate the digital. I don't think my point in recalling the spectacle is to condemn all video games, as I think the autonomy so many of them grant is an act of actualization, and that, in more narrative forms, they can fill a similar artistic role to imagistic literature (or comics are probably a better example). Ultimately, with how much 2077 colonized my mind and how immersed I've been immersed in critiques of technology, I find it hard to see any game as a more perfect encapsulation of the spectacle:
- It is desire-forming above our basic needs
- It appropriates criticism into it's own justification
- It entices with spectacular set-pieces
- It grants us a degree of agency that is neither consequential or real
- It creates prolonged pacification by means of it's pleasurability, scope and replayability
- It feigns the political while ultimately re-asserting the status quo
Did I love playing it? As anyone who loves the best features of video games would! Did I feel enriched by it? Of course! Was I deeply invested in my relationship and the futurity of so much of it's cast? Yes! Did it make me reconsider how I move about the world and respond to situations? It did. This does not come from a place of malice, but much like the rest of the sci-fi medium, how I might advance my point here is stuck in a paradox here. I know what the late capitalist medium of video games necessitates and what a critique of late capitalism is required to do to not succumb itself. Looking at how commercially successful and popular this game has become and how it brands itself as a work of embodied rebellion, I wonder if it's truly as sinister as I make it sound, or if the mutual relationship between creators and marketers the bulk of this industry is built on inhabits this same paradox too.
LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW
The feminist and camp queen inside me must do battle every Grasshopper title. Perhaps this game is indefensibly disparaging, somehow still making object of it's subject and rational voice of it's dumb jock character amidst a cast of badass bimbos and culturally-reduced members of music subcultures. It's spared the brutal machismo of No More Heroes or Killer is Dead, but lacks the sincerity of the Kill the Past games. Yet, it's so manically funny and unabashedly objectifying that I was enamoured by every insult and innuendo spat out of Juliet's glossy lips.
Only a freak like me would binge this whole game in one sitting, then be compelled to read Susan Sontag, but that's what I did! One definition for "camp" she gives is something so sincere in it's seriousness that it becomes impossible to be taken seriously. Tonal mismatches create absurdity, and while it's an aesthetic that can be created intelligently and self-consciously, it's very difficult because of the sincerity part. I think why I love camp (besides having a gay, unserious brain) is that it's something I could never make myself without mimicking. I love me some Barbarella, some Female Trouble, some Jennifer's Body, but I think I lack the proclivity towards perversion and shock to just go fuckin' nuts on a script. I'm just too damn repressed, they got me good.
Japanese humour sensibilities are really interesting to me cus they kinda straddles the camp line in an entirely separate canon. My tendency towards campiness grew largely from the straight-faced absurdity I'm talking about: shit like Yakuza or Katamari, anything often xenophobically branded as weird or cringe. A lot of it I think arises from the more indie, B-film nature of their film industry as well as how rigid and decorum-centered Japanese society is. A lot of it is also just anime-isms. Some shit though like, trust me, the Sega classics though? Bonafide definitional camp. Sonic is unquestionably a camp icon. Especially Adventure era, peak puerile sincerity. All not to mention Sonic Team's Rub Rabbits and Space Channel 5. Literally fight me on this.
Lollipop Chainsaw is a unique cross-section of Japanese humour and a bastardized imagining of American culture, which so often becomes a breeding ground for campiness, of either sincere fixations on a culture or punching-up stereotyping (think Metal Wolf Chaos, or even NMH). Yet as I played, I found progressively less joy in it's humour. I was caught up on two questions: 1) Is this a sincere adoption of american tropes or a (more mean-spirited, and perhaps insider) ironic one? and 2) Who is it's humour meant to appeal to?
For one, it's marketed by Juliet's body and gives homage to late 2000's high school culture in all it's cliques and epic randomness in a way to irony-poisoned to definitively call either parody or sincere attempt at translation. Second, it's written by James Gunn, apparently, and voice acted by quite a few high profile celebrities who appear throughout his portfolio. Real MCU blockbuster mfs, even if they weren't all then. All the actors give excellent, manic delivery that continually undermines the dire situation and gratuitous violence every scene is entrenched in. But this punk bitch in a miniskirt premise that drives the game, the feminism by way of bimbo doing ultraviolence and punkifying the status quo feels kinda... misguided?
I don't want to risk overanalyzing what's undoubtedly a dumb fun game succeeding at being dumb and fun, and a pornographic gorefest in a medium shaped by selling copies via psychosexualized premises. I just felt a sinking guilt realizing I was deriving an immense amount of pleasure at what was essentially Borderlands reddit humour being processed post-acquiring two new layers of irony. This is why I gave an insecure definition of camp and my history with it. I think it's now starting to lead me to defend things that may be disparaging.
I was reading a copaganda comic the other day, after which the author acknowledged the everpresence of copaganda, and that they were merely parodying it, which let me breathe a sigh of relief. But what of people who didn't read those post-notes. This level of meta-tolerance I have may be giving shitty art that reinforces the status quo too easy a pass. Like, admittedly, I do find a lot of misogynist jokes funny. I know, I know, but Norm Macdonald and Rodney Dangerfield's wife jokes are absurd, not by their relatability, but by the playing into these moronic cultural stereotypes of, on one layer, what a wife is, and on a second, what a man who complains about his wife is. Best part is, neither were married when making these jokes, which makes it way funnier. Point here is, a lot of comedy interpretations and anti-woke demands of media IPs in this deeply uncritical era take these absurdities moronically as a reinforcement of their worldview, thus there is a profound risk to supplying them praise and giving them a pass.
This whole point of flattening and crystallizing nuanced cultural movements and conceptions (something I've been really interested in this week bc of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man) is one issue that I'm not sure artists can do much to address, but I think we also need to be skeptical about creating depth in something that has already adopted this flattened view of the world. What keyed me in to an in-group punkiness was the Joan Jett song, the electropunk, Riotgrrrl-esque soundscape. What I didn't realize is how much disdain it seems to have for the very scenes that created these soundscapes. Each boss you fight, each antagonist, is a stereotype of a member of a music scene. These include punk, goth, metal, disco and a hippie. They're imagistically considered, but also in reverse-experiencing a lot of these subcultures post-mortem in my own music listening, each started as quite radical, even revolutionary. They each sought to destroy the established tradition of music or run as far as they could from it.
Consolidation is an interesting, yet devastating tactic all revolutionary art, as it's markets and the community around it grow, seem to succumb to. The game's soundtrack is actually greatly new wave and pop punk, two similar genres in concept. Wikipedia defines New Wave interestingly as a pop-oriented lighter and more melodic broadening of punk culture. In other words, deriving the sounds of punk dethorned of their abrasiveness and rebellion. Similarly, I really dislike pop punk for how it commercialized post-punk, appropriating the melancholy without the pointedness. In my friends words, it's "performatively disaffected from a position of privilege".
Likewise, this game reduces the music genres and members of their scene to weirdo annoyances, bullies the brooding kid in the corner by letting them realize all their repressed and obviously freakish desires. This is paralleled with the absolute invincibility and flawlessness of the ideal feminine and ideal masculine protagonists. It's so absurd, especially in as nerdy a genre as games, that one might reinforce status quo white privilege as powerful to the point of immunity. It seems to be parody, but I can't point to a single signifier that it is beyond how blatant it is. Notice I use the word "blatant" and not "sincere", as going back to the prior point, I think it does find it funny to make all the dumb jokes it does with spite, irony and the giddiness of traditional media figures being far less censored than usual.
Who the fuck knows though. In fact, how does anyone know. And that's the exact problem. Media that is imprecise in it's function is always going to be swallowed to reinforce the status quo, especially so when it's mired in irony. We tragically live in a monoculture as of the last 15 to 20 years, where everyone is shallowly everything via the continued fracturing of phases and easy access to performative authenticity. Every counterculture in existence has either been moved into the singular culture or is a desperate echo clawing at what once was, and it's fucking sad. If radical artists are ever to escape this brutal, yet interminable cycle of consolidation and indoctrination, beyond minting the bitterest of fruits, we must evade the image, for to be made an image of, to be capturable in some essence, is exactly what leads to the ability for one to rebind a runaway link. But perhaps this is impossible. Perhaps the best we can do is root out of ourselves the images implanted in us, the positive and negative associations of all members of a nation, genders, occupations, cultures, orientations, everything. All group labels are reductions that allow them to be swallowed, digested and crystallized as definitively X in the cultural zeitgeist. Shit, I've sure as hell done it here to people and groups I don't like. Let me skim.... MCU blockbuster mfs... Borderlands reddit humour... see? No one is immune. I might argue punching down is more insidious, as this is about culture and archetypes as a vehicle of domination, of definining and enforcing normal, but it probably is best that we stop being reactionary towards what someone represents or embodies. Fuck do I know though, but thanks for reading what's been on my mind this week as is vaguely correlated to Lollipop Chainsaw lol.