What is the Cool Movie Star Uncle? He’s very different from Movie Star Dad, who has to have gravitas on screen but also pick fun projects — one of which has to be a blockbuster. Tom Hanks was the indisputable Movie Star Dad for most of the ’90s, for example. Now, I’m not sure who it is. Oscar Isaac had it for a bit around the time Dune came out, but with Fantastic Four on the horizon, I think Pedro Pascal is hot on his heels.

Movie Star Uncle is more fun than reliable. They probably have lots of Oscar nominations but no wins, like Willem Defoe. You get to know him through his blockbusters and follow him to his smaller projects, like Matt Damon, who is more of a Movie Star Dad these days. Mark Ruffalo could make a case for Movie Star Uncle, but like a lot of the Avengers, he can’t escape the gravity of the MCU. 

This is why Ryan Gosling is in the best spot to be our Cool Movie Star Uncle. He, somehow, completely avoided the superhero boom. Despite being in the public eye for most of his life—he started as a Mouseketeer in the ’90s—he doesn’t have any big bombs, or at-the-time hits that are now kind of embarrassing, or public gaffes. He’s been in a stable relationship with Eva Mendes for years—they have two kids—and they met making The Place Beyond The Pines, one of the many cool indie crime movies he’s starred in over the years. 

Gosling arrived in Hollywood with The Notebook, so many people have a 20-year relationship with him. Only two years later, he proved his acting chops with his Obligatory Drug Addiction Movie Half Nelson. He settled into a comfortable routine of making weird indie movies like Lars and the Real Girl until he starred in Drive in 2011.

Drive shouldn’t be cool — it’s trying very hard to be cool — but it is. The soundtrack, the colors, the twisty 1970s thriller plot, the acting, the jacket. That jacket should be stupid. That jacket is stupid. But in this movie, it works. Drive represents a major change in how audiences thought about Gosling. He wasn’t just a sensitive boy. He was the kind of actor who could have a romantic kiss in an elevator right before kicking someone to death.

It should have gone off the rails for him right there. 2011 was when the MCU hit the afterburner. It’s easy to imagine a world where Gosling is cast as Star-Lord, Doctor Strange, or Ant-Man. He’s expressed interest in playing Ghost Rider, but casting him in the MCU now is very different from 15 years ago.

Gosling spent the 2010s doing what he does best: picking great projects. Well, mostly — the less said about Gangster Squad the better — but he managed to escape his duds more easily than most. The Nice Guys, First Man, and Blade Runner 2049 are all incredibly well-made movies by unique directors, and his performances in them are all so different. The fact he seemed destined to coast along, raise his kids, and occasionally act in one of the best movies of the year seemed like a pretty great career to settle on.

And then Barbie happened. Greta Gerwig has said that Gosling was the only choice for the part, “Who else could do this?” She told Rolling Stone, “It’s some combination of Marlon Brando meets Gene Wilder meets John Barrymore meets John Travolta.” Gosling was reluctant to take the part, but it’s obvious he made the right decision, and he’s used the success of Barbie to catapult himself to the position of Cool Uncle Movie Star. I mean, have you seen his Oscar’s performance?

Directed by John Wick co-creator and former stunt man David Leitch, The Fall Guy is a love letter to stunt performers—”stunties,” as they’re called in the film. There is a line in the movie where Gosling’s stuntman character Colt is asked if they give out Oscars for stunts — he says no, and the movie is part of a years-long effort to change that.

Just as Gosling used his star power to elevate Gerwig and Margot Robbie while promoting Barbie, he’s spent the last few months pushing his own stunt performers into the spotlight. He seems more interested in his peers winning Oscars than winning one himself: when Robbie and Gerwig were both snubbed for individual nominations, he wrote an open letter about it. 

It’s a very Cool Uncle thing to do to downplay his own success and rise up the people around him — anyone who’s been tossed a wink and a pat on the back can attest to this. That’s how it feels to watch The Fall Guy, it’s like a home movie made by your Dad’s Brother’s friend celebrating their recent frisbee golf tournament win. 

It’s the opposite of Drive: it’s not trying to be cool. It’s just showing you cool stuff and being like, “See?” with a big grin on its face. It’s so sincere and boisterous and, yes, just a little bit lame, but the celebratory cringe is infectious. If you don’t like it, whatever! The Fall Guy will just slap you on the back, laugh a little too loud, and crack open another beer. 

(The Fall Guy was shot in Australia and has a chaotic energy that anyone who’s spent any time around Australians will immediately recognize. The movie’s tagline should have been, “Get over yourself, mate.”)

With The Fall Guy, Gosling gets to kick ass, jump off stuff, and be funny. He’s not trying to be cool, and that effortlessness is what makes him cool. He’ll chide you when you’re being a dumbass, like when he told Simu Liu not to touch him on the red carpet, but he’s not gonna ground you like your dad would. He’s too old to be your friend and too young to be your boss. He’s your cool uncle. And he’s also a movie star.

Luca Guadagnino makes the most beautiful trash. I mean that as the highest compliment. Here are the plots of his last 3 movies:

• A 17-year-old boy falls in love with an older man on vacation
• An American girl goes to a modern dance school run by witches
• Two young cannibals fall in love

I doubt just reading those you’d expect any of them to be some of the most beautiful films you’ve ever seen, but they are! And now, with Challengers, we have “Tennis Love Triangle,” which is, somehow, on track to be one of the biggest movies of the year.

How does he do it? On paper, it’s pretty simple: he’s a very capable director — all his films are gorgeously shot — and he picks cool scripts. Then he loads them with really, really good actors.

Challengers is the story of the life-long friendship/rivalry between three young tennis stars: Tashi (Zendaya), set to become the next women’s tennis superstar, and former boarding school bunk mates and current doubles partners Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Conner.) The movie opens in 2019 at the finals of a challenger tournament — sort of the minor leagues of pro tennis — where Art and Patrick square off while Tashi watches from the stands. As their 2019 match moves forward, we flash back to key moments in their lives, the tension building. 

Using the natural structure of sport to frame your movie isn’t anything new, but every jump backward in time is smartly used to give us maximum story and emotional impact. Guadagnino isn’t above using basic tricks to get the momentum going. Whenever the pace starts to lag, he drops Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ banger of a theme song, often playing it over whole scenes. It works every time.

It’s not that the scenes are boring without the music. All three leads are incredible actors who play believable tennis stars. The two men’s theatre background is obvious, and the big scenes of the film feel like a play, but this is a work by a master filmmaker. 

Guadagnino packs every frame of Challengers with these beautiful people, often using long lenses to make them seem even closer together than they are. Nothing is out of place; no element is an accident. Early on, he makes a point of showing not just their beauty, but their scars. These people are driven, intense, and focused—and they pay for it. But just when you think this is going to be some heady, pretentious art house film, there’s a scene where the two guys eat each other’s churros, or one of them slaps the other in the dick. This is glorious, celebratory trash served in a crystal chalice.

The art house sheen of everything is deliberate. I think Luca Guadagnino is making a play to be the art house director of The Youths and Challengers is his pitch: “See,” He seems to say, “movies can be pretty and stupid. Great film doesn’t have to be boring.” I can see this being an awakening for budding young cinephiles the way Blade Runner was for me.

If you think of it like that, of course he put Zendaya at the front of Challengers. The movie is obsessed with Zendaya. There is an early shot, synced to one of those needle drops, where the camera zooms to her while Art and Patrick trade blows across the court. This message, too, is blunt: all this yelling and smashing is in service to her. We’re all here for her.

It’s easy to say that Zendaya is having a moment, but the truth is she’s been having a moment for half a decade. In 2024, she is not only the star but the focal point of two of the biggest and best movies of the year, made by two of the most interesting directors on the planet. For any other actor, this would be an arrival (like my guy Glen Powell with the double impact of Hit Man and Twisters later this year) but for Zendaya it feels like something more: an ascension.

She’s not just “good” in Challengers, Zendaya is Challengers, and I can’t think of anyone in her cohort of young actors who could carry this part. Sydney Sweeney and Jenna Ortega are too innocent, Florence Pugh and Saoirse Ronan too adult. Only Zendaya can carry both the cocky drive of a young athlete and the brittle perfectionism of an ultra-rich business owner with the ribbon of movie star charm to make us root for her. 

She is in control of every atom. She knows exactly how she looks and when and how to manipulate these two boys (and us) into thinking and feeling exactly what she wants. The last time I was this captivated by an actor was Cate Blanchette in Tár.

It’s not just that she’s a Disney kid who’s been on camera for most of her life — Ryan Gosling wasn’t this good at 27 — it’s her familiarity with herself as a brand that she, by some magic, manages to balance while also being a grounded, emotional, believable actor.

Zendaya is also a producer on Challengers, and I think that, more than her performance, is a sign of things to come. As a movie star, she’s thoroughly made it. Sure, she hasn’t won an Oscar, but it’s hard to imagine her even wanting to. The acting business seems small-time for her now. She’s in the empire-building business. 

Don’t believe me? The poster for Challengers is a close-up of her face; one of the first things you see her do in the movie is write notes on a poster of her face. Just like everything else in Challengers, this is not an accident. This is a story of a woman completely in control, even when she’s not.

This is one of the most deliberately pleasing movies I’ve ever seen. Every frame, every music note, every action is carefully calculated to squeeze the maximum possible juice from your id. Even the product placement is funny! In a less capable film, this kind of naked manipulation would feel, well, manipulative, but the whole enterprise is just too damn fun to be offensive. 

A team of four journalists—a hardened, famous photographer (Kirst Dunst), an ambitious on-camera personality (a distractingly hot Wagner Moura), a past-his-prime New York Times writer (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and a young, inexperienced photographer trying to break into the life (Cailee Speany)—get word the war between the US Government and a loose coalition of secessionist states is in its last days. They race to get from NYC to Washington, DC to interview the President before the end of the war. 

Audiences expecting Call of Duty: The Movie will be disappointed, and the movie knows this. So what is Civil War, other than the most comprehensively terrifying horror movie of the year?

Garland has been kicking around Hollywood since the late ’90s. As a screenwriter, he crafted nightmares with Danny Boyle as diverse as The Beach, 28 Days Later, and Sunshine. He wrote the sci-fi Die Hard riff Dredd—and according to star Karl Urban, actually directed it. He spent the 2010s crafting thought-provoking, high-concept sci-fi horror with Ex Machina, Annihilation, and the criminally underseen FX series Devs.

There is a lot of science fiction in Garland’s resume, and Civil War, with its too-tall NYC skyline, has clues that it’s set in the near future. But all of Garland’s work has a hefty amount of horror in it. He creates stories about power, destruction, and the people caught up in both, which often end on a note of brutal cynicism.

Civil War has been marketed as a war movie, and while there is a lot of authentic-feeling military combat in it, I wouldn’t call these scenes “action.” The gunshots are terribly loud and frequent, and you never see the bullet that kills you. People who are shot just drop and bleed out while our characters snap photos, and Garland uses these photos to linger on the horror for a few extra seconds.

All four of our main characters are at different stages of the war-correspondent life: Jessie (Speany) is intrigued but ignorant of the danger. We see her begin to transform into Joel (Moura), a thrill-seeking maniac who buries his fear under booze, pot, cigarettes, and cathartic screaming. Joel is about 10 years away from evolving into Lee (Dunst), who believes she is desensitised to horror but slowly cracks under the pressure as they get closer and closer to D.C., transforming into wise and sentimental Sammy (Henderson), who is protective of his younger colleagues and yearns for the old days when he could physically do what it took to get the story.

This is not a movie about what an American civil war would actually be like. I’ve read people (mostly Americans) saying Garland is a coward for not taking a political stand, that he’s “stripped” this movie of its politics, and how dare a man from the UK release a movie about this in an election year! 

The truth is, this movie isn’t about America at all. The words “Democrat” and “Republican” are never said once, and the few clues we get about how the war started seem to boil down to “The President illegally gave himself a third term,” which is as plausible an explanation for this as any. And if you need a movie to tell you that some of the things that happen in it are Not Good, you’ve got problems a movie isn’t going to solve.

Civil War is about tribalism. It’s about the unstoppable frenzy of war. It’s about the gnawing feeling in the back of every journalist’s mind that what they’re doing is futile, that the truth is an illusion, and that they’re risking their lives for nothing. 

But mostly, Civil War is about witnessing. We watch these journalists snap pictures, Garland shows us these pictures, and sometimes the characters stare right back at us. But there’s no judgment in Cailee Speany’s eyes when she stares down the barrel of Garland’s camera right through the screen at us. She’s not saying, “Isn’t this horrible?” All she’s saying is, “See?” 

This is exemplified in the movie’s closing shot, an astonishing piece of photography, which slowly develops before our eyes as the credits roll. In a single image, it recalls decades of U.S. foreign policy on both sides of 9/11, Abu Ghraib, the CNNification of war, racial tensions, and the role Call of Duty has played in shaping the minds of our soldiers. 

Most of the people in my theater waited until that image left the screen to grab their coats and leave. I think the people in my audience—presumably all Canadians, considering the dry chuckle most of us gave an early joke about the value of the US dollar—didn’t really know what to do with ourselves.

A few hours after the movie ended, while reading in bed, I thought about the city streets, village roads, and golf resort fairways soaked in blood and rimmed with fire in Civil War. I thought about a running gun battle outside my bedroom window, of Humvees and Abrams tanks rolling down my street.

In my pretentious downtown townhouse in my oil-money city, I felt uneasy. An unease I don’t feel when I think about Gaza or Kiev, those faraway places where people like Lee and Jessie are, right now, capturing horrific images and sending them back to us as a warning. Images that are often met with disinterest, or ignorance, or disdain, or glee.

Garland knows his movie is going to piss people off, not because of the sacrilege of shooting a missile at the Lincoln Memorial, but because we’re too ashamed to admit that this really could happen here, that America is not different from those faraway places. If it did happen here, it would be as much our fault as it was for the people of Mariupol.

That’s the meal Garland prepares with Civil War: a continent-sized order of shame, served cold.

It really seems like the Star Wars franchise is split in two. On one hand, we get the odd original, high-quality story, like Andor and the Jedi video game series. On the other, we get a steady stream of poorly constructed nostalgia plays, like Ahsoka, The Bad Batch, and now this new Battlefront collection.

This fragmentation isn’t new. Actually, it’s always been like this, even in the 90s, when Star Wars was kept on life support through novels and computer games. There was a Crystal Star for every Thrawn trilogy, and for every TIE Fighter, there was a Rebel Assault. These products all existed in balance, like some kind of unseen energy force.

When Star Wars slammed back into the mainstream with the prequel trilogy, the balance was maintained, and this era produced two of the best games ever made: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel. You can play those games right now, and you should, but you have to be careful how you play them. 

Aspyr Media is a video game developer that specializes in updating classic games for modern systems. The quality of their output is inconsistent—they just put out a really great remaster of the original Tomb Raider trilogy—but their track record with Star Wars games isn’t great.

Aspyr is responsible for the Switch release of my beloved Knights of the Old Republic. It’s fine, I guess, but it has some bizarre problems, like a giant COMBAT MODE ENGAGED text box at the top of the screen. The Knights of the Old Republic 2 re-release had a game-breaking bug that made it impossible to finish, and while Aspyr initially promised to release some cut content as DLC, that never happened. 

This was around the same time Aspyr was removed from the long-gestating KOTOR reboot project, which honestly is for the best. I’m not sure I want KOTOR to be rebooted at all; it’s perfectly playable right now, but if it has to happen, I’d prefer it to be in more capable hands. Basically, I want something closer to Final Fantasy VII Remake than Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

I don’t want to dump on Aspyr. Employee reviews on Glassdoor point the finger at management, who seem to be more focused on growth than quality. After all, Aspyr is owned by Embracer Group, a megacorp that has bought up a lot of game developers in the last five years and then closed them or laid off a ton of their staff. 

Why hasn’t Embracer closed Aspyr if it keeps releasing bad products people hate? Embracer is one of the more baldly capitalist companies in video games—which is really saying something—so someone must be buying their stuff. The question is, why do we keep paying for our nostalgia? And why is Star Wars such a consistently lucrative target?

It’s not like we’re starved for Star Wars content. A Disney+ subscription gets you access to all 11 major movies, 5 live-action TV series, 9 animated shows, a game show, vehicle flythroughs, biomes, soundscapes, 16 Lego Star Wars things, and some kind of Baby Yoda / Studio Ghibli crossover short. That’s got nothing on the literally hundreds of comics and novels, both canon and non-canon, cluttering comic shops and used bookstores, or the dozens of video games out there.

Nostalgia is also baked right into the product. Star Wars was originally created as a celebration of the adventure serials George Lucas loved as a kid. The original trilogy has nostalgia for the long-gone days of the Republic, and the sequel trilogy has nostalgia not only for the days of the Rebellion but also for the original trilogy itself, a capitalist ouroboros if there ever was one.

I’m not saying we’re responsible for what a company does, but we are responsible for what we spend our money on. And I’m definitely not saying that remakes or re-releases are valueless or that Star Wars games should stay in the past—Nightdive, the king of remasters, released a Star Wars Dark Forces remaster like two weeks ago and it’s amazing!

What we need to do is believe in our taste and respect our time. If we don’t, who will?

Love Lies Bleeding is the new movie from director Rose Glass and stars Kristen Stewart as burnt-out gym manager Lou and Katy M. O’Brian as a drifting body builder with dreams of being a Vegas champion. Love Lies Bleeding doesn’t just showcase female muscles – it’s obsessed with them. Set in the 1980s, Glass’ camera voyages across O’Brian’s ripped body like it’s Stallone’s as he hosed down Soviets with a machine gun – one character even calls Jackie “Rambo.” But those muscley movies were made for dudes, and the fetishization of their stars’ physiques was always countered by violence, lest they be accused of the most common playground insult of the ’80s and ’90s.

Well, Love Lies Bleeding is both brutally violent and gay as hell, but the violence isn’t used to hide the movie’s sexuality. As someone who gets emotional just thinking about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it’s gratifying to see a movie about a lesbian couple who don’t have to hide who they are from the audience. These girls get intimate in increasingly explicit sex scenes that have no time for the steamy eroticism of the ’80s and ’90s.

If Love Lies Bleeding were nothing more than a story of two gym enthusiasts hooking up in the ’80s, it would still be worth checking out, but there’s so much more to it than that. This is, and the marketing material hasn’t properly conveyed this, a Cohen Brothers-esque crime movie with low stakes but high emotion. The characters are loveable but ridiculous enough that you don’t mind too much when their jaws are ripped off. This might be one of the more successful riffs on Fargo I’ve seen because it manages to be funny, shocking, and surprisingly profound, all in the space of a single scene.

Related: Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith Is So Much More Than a Remake

For all the poppy trailers and interviews about how hot Stewart and O’Brian are, this is directed by the woman who made Saint Maude, a harrowing tale about how loneliness and ego can metastasize into mental illness. I was not expecting a movie that features Dave Franco in a truly horrific mullet to make me reflect on codependency and the cycle of abuse, but here we are.

Some of the abuse in the movie is represented by Ed Harris, here playing Lou’s dad as a walking skull with a mullet. Harris has portrayed sinister but oddly likable villains since The Rock, and his voice is getting scarier as he ages. Glass knows that even a brief shot of his face bathed in red light is enough to remind us how dangerous he is. And if we forget, Stewart is there to remind us.

Stewart is one of the great “reactors” of her generation, and Glass loves to watch her watch people. The first time Jackie and Lou see each other across the gym is a meet-cute for the ages, and Stewart communicates as much with a lip bite or sardonic laugh as a monologue. There’s no denying Stewart is an ace project picker – Love Lies sits on the same pedestal of weird and well-made films as Personal Shopper, Crimes of the Future, and Spencer.

But you can’t take your eyes off O’Brian. Not only is her body breathtaking, but she’s taken notes from Stewart in communicating a ton through her eyes and how she breathes. Her performance of the bodybuilding routine late in the film is as thrilling as any action sequence. Glass even plays with perspective a few times to skewer superhero imagery, one of the many ways she plays with pop culture expectations.

There’s so much in Love Lies Bleeding that is surprising, funny, and entertaining. A unique vision executed this well is what the movies are all about.

Love Lies Bleeding hits theaters on Mar. 12.

Unfortunately, that earned momentum doesn’t last long. After the intriguing opening, you’re forced into a glacially-paced flashback/tutorial. Here, you flip back and forth between awkwardly climbing cliff faces and *checks notes* dragging a big vacuum around and getting your ass handed to you by the game’s complex combat system. It’s here the game’s biggest sin first appears: during exploration or combat, you are constantly interrupted by text tutorials, forced camera movement, and the chatter of your companions—often happening all at once!

The flashback/tutorial ends with Cloud limping through a burning village, and I cannot emphasize how slow and boring this sequence is. The chaos of the fire and the bombastic music—not to mention the liberal use of slow motion—try so hard to hammer how important and epic this moment is, but what’s actually happening is completely drama-less. It’s the Zack Snyder-fication of video game storytelling: big moments, no feeling.

Finally released from the tutorial’s clutches, we catch up with our party in the present day, on the run but free of Midgar. But wait, didn’t we see them all incapacitated and captured by Shinra? I’m currently 12 hours into the game, and this alternate universe/timeline/whatever has not been explained.

After another hour of forced tutorials and a stealth sequence, the party escapes into the wilderness, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth actually starts in earnest. The wide world of the planet is ahead of you, villainous hotboy Sephiroth is somewhere out there, and the evil forces of Shinra are in pursuit. What kind of new adventure does the immortal Final Fantasy have in store for us?

It’s a goddamned open-world game. There are little clusters of monsters to fight, and sidequests to complete, and crafting materials to gather. They even have towers. Towers! That reveal more icons on the map! It’s 2024!

Needless to say—which is part of the problem—dumping you into an open world sequence completely kills the game’s momentum. Despite narrowly evading Shinra forces in the town of Kalm, you can just… go back there to play a useless card game, take on a photo mode challenge, or accept a sidequest where you repair a pipeline. Didn’t we spend the entirety of the last game trying to blow those up? Who cares! Numbers go up!

This is Rebirth‘s biggest problem: it wants to be the only video game. Not just the only game you are playing, the only game, period. Members of the development team have said a few times that Rebirth is a great starting point for the series. Which is ridiculous! This is a sequel to a remake of a portion of a game that came out in 1997! 

The characters and environments are lovingly recreated based on our memories of the original Final Fantasy 7. The story assumes familiarity with both the original and Remake, and the combat system basically requires some affinity with other action games, but all the tutorials and handholding treat the player like it’s the first time they’ve ever picked up a controller. Who is the audience for Rebirth other than “PS5 owners?”

Let’s get real basic for a second: What are the motivations of this story? Why is Cloud pursuing Sephiroth? Vengeance, I guess—we see in the first scene that Sephiroth killed Cloud’s mom—except, because of the weird glitchy video thing, maybe he didn’t. Why is Aerith following Cloud? Because she has a crush on him? What about Red XIII? He seems to want revenge for what Shinra did to him, but he’s also pretty chill about it. In fact, everyone is pretty chill about everything, because any sort of driving force might distract the player from visiting all the little icons on the map.

Do you ever notice how, in a book series like Harry Potter, the books get longer as the series continues? As writers become more successful, the role of the editor falls away so that “the fans”—that nebulous, angry, wallet-burning glob of Twitter usernames—don’t feel robbed of the divine genius of their current favorite creative. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is in desperate need of an editor, someone who can evaluate the project as a whole and say, hey, maybe we don’t need a crappy Mario Kart ripoff in the middle of our 100-hour-long melodrama. It’s like the entire development process of this game was just that webcomic of that guy getting chucked out a window over and over again for 6 years. 

It’s an interesting time to release something as bloated and directionless as Rebirth. Entertainment is in a weird place: the gaming industry has seen a brutal wave of mass layoffs and streaming services keep upping their prices while pumping out more and more mediocre content, and both have impossibly high standards of profitability that are only getting higher. 

On the other hand, the movie industry is thriving: 2023 was one of the best years for movies ever, with big movies by big directors that lived up to the hype critically and made a ton of money. 2024 has already seen the release of Dune Part Two, a thoughtful and intelligent blockbuster that also happens to totally kick ass. Hopefully, video games take the right lessons from this era of high-budget films with art house souls—before we’re all buried in the content sludge.

Storycraft is a column by Colin Munch that dives into storytelling in video games and other media. You can read his other work here.

The game is Outcast, made by French developer Appeal. I have a massive soft spot for foreign games made to appeal to American audiences, and Outcast makes a strong impression by featuring a story set up worthy of Hollywood. See, in the distant future of 2007, NASA sends a probe to a parallel universe. It arrives on the planet Adelpha, where it is immediately destroyed by an indigenous alien, and, uh oh, the destruction of the probe creates a black hole that threatens the entire Earth! 

The US military sends a team of four, a U.S. Navy SEAL and three scientists, who are promptly separated. Players take control of the SEAL as he attempts to find the three scientists and stop the black hole while fighting the soldiers of the tyrannical overlord Fae Rahn.

And what is the name of the wise-cracking, tough-as-nails Navy SEAL that leads this direct-to-video plot? Cutter Slade. Go ahead and read that name again, really savor it. It’s perfect.

Don’t let the silly setup fool you – it’s pretty obvious the writers were fans of the movie Stargate – Outcast has some genuinely funny writing and a clever time travel wrinkle that keeps things moving. With this hokey foundation, Appeal created the blueprint for open-world games that developers are still following.

To defeat Fae Rahn, Cutter — I’m sorry, one more time, this guy’s name is Cutter. Slade. — travels through five zones, each representing a different local tribe, and disrupts the enemy’s war machine. You do this by chatting with and doing quests for the local aliens, fighting soldiers, and waging a one-man guerilla war. Completing each region hurts the enemy soldiers — by stopping food production, for example — and the game keeps track of your overall progress. Resistance gets stiffer, however, the closer you get to Fae Rahn’s palace.

Sound familiar? Outcast plays very much like a proto-Far Cry, just one with a wild sci-fi premise and a sense of humor that is extremely, and I don’t know how else to say this, French.

Related: The Original Silent Hill Still Haunts Me After 25 Years

See, Cutter isn’t doing this all on his own. Adelpha is filled with friendly, sarcastic aliens who are all too eager to help and aren’t above poking fun at the world-saving stakes the game throws at you. Outcast is very aware it’s a video game: one of the items you receive is a green crystal that, when squeezed, makes a copy of your essence that your spirit will return to if you die. It’s called a “gaamsav.” Nobody at Appeal thought they were writing the next Dune.

Outcast was famous for its visuals, especially its water. If your PC could run it, it presented a lush, open world full of personality. It also has an outstanding live orchestral soundtrack recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The shooting mechanics weren’t great, especially considering Unreal Tournament came out the same year, but taking down an overwhelming military force with nothing but guts and guns was just as fun in 1999 as it is now.

So why doesn’t anyone give Outcast any credit? Well, it sold terribly in the US, selling less than 15,000 copies despite tons of critical acclaim. It did have a following in France and Germany, and there were plans for a sequel that never materialized. Appeal went bankrupt, and the game went quiet until THQ Nordic released a remaster in 2011 and a sort of half-remaster/half-remake in 2017. 

That brings us to today, with Outcast: A New Beginning, a full-on sequel, coming out on March 15. Why are they making a sequel to this game now? I have no idea, but after a year of widespread layoffs and a general sense in the video game industry that big companies are crushing smaller developers, seeing a sequel to a beloved, underappreciated trailblazer is pretty awesome.

It’s easier than ever to get into Outcast. The remaster of the original game, Outcast 1.1, is available on GOG and Steam. The remake, Outcast: Second Contact, is included with PlayStation Plus (and is currently on sale on PS5 for $2) and retails for about $15 on Xbox and Steam. 

A demo for the sequel is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox, which gives you three different tastes of the game: a chunk of the open world, a combat section, and a town where you can talk to aliens and try to wrap your head around the game’s innovative quest system. Outcast: A New Beginning looks pretty good – Avatar has obviously beaten out Stargate as the biggest influence – and while the combat isn’t as slick as Helldivers 2, the whole thing has a charm that is trés magnifique!

Obsidian Entertainment game director Carrie Patel recently told IGN that the upcoming RPG Avowed won’t have romance options for its characters. That’s good.

Patel explained that implementing romances in video games is a lot of work: extra voice lines, animation, and writing that many players may never see. Multiply that by however many characters a game has, then cram all that content in alongside quests, storylines, combat, menus, and all the other things stuffed into video games. It’s a lot to juggle. 

It’s too much to juggle, and the medium can’t handle it. Video game romances condense the experience of falling in love into logic-driven and/or statements that only move forward to one of two conclusions: sex or nothing. 

Of course, I’m generalizing. Not all video games are so binary or confused, and not all game romances lead to sex, but many of them do — especially famous examples like Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate 3. In Mass Effect, your romance questline ends in sex the night before the big battle — three times if you play your cards right, one for every game in the trilogy.

And who do you get to romance in Mass Effect? Well, there’s a boy, a girl, and an alien who looks and sounds like a human girl. The boy only kisses girls, the girl only kisses boys, but the alien will kiss boys or girls because why not other bisexuals while we’re creating our heteronormative macho space fantasy?

I’m picking on Mass Effect because it’s an example of what bothers me the most about game romances: appropriateness. In the first Mass Effect, you’re the commanding officer of a starship. All three people you can romance work for you, either as subordinate officers or a scientist coded as young and inexperienced. In the modern US Navy, from which Mass Effect takes a lot of inspiration, the CO of a ship fraternizing with a junior officer over whom they have direct command is a major no-no, not the least of which because it makes it impossible to guarantee objectiveness in combat.

Mass Effect puts this test right in front of the player. One of the game’s most infamous choices is to let one crew member die. And guess who your options are? I wonder how many people sacrificed the character they were planning to bang? 

(In a win for bisexuals everywhere, the femme-coded alien who swings both ways is not eligible for death.)

Mass Effect‘s view on sex and relationships is clear: these are not people. They are dialogue trees that exist to be seduced, rejected and even killed. Be persistent and pick the correct choice enough times, and anyone will bone you.

I’ll lay off Mass Effect and its developers at BioWare for a bit. To be fair, their representation got better as the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series went on, but they still have a fundamental issue: score points; win prize.

Naughty Dog doesn’t do this. Naughty Dog’s modern franchises, Uncharted and The Last of Us, weave relationships into their stories from the beginning. Nate and Elena’s relationship starts as action movie blockbuster “guy gets the girl” BS, but it evolves over four Uncharted games. Uncharted 4 is a soulful, challenging exploration of what happens when two people don’t fit together as well as they thought and how much damage selfishness and nostalgia can do to a romantic partnership. The character of Chloe Frazer, introduced in Uncharted 2, is an obvious “other woman” stereotype: a street-smart, sexy, seductive thief with an implied sexual history with Nate. 

The trope isn’t subtle and even comes across in Chloe and Elena’s design: Chloe is dark-haired and dressed in dark tones and reds, like a succubus, whereas Elena is blonde, fair-skinned, and wears light-coloured clothing. Thank god there’s no “branching path” option where Nate can choose between those two women. “Forcing” the player to choose Elena allowed Naughty Dog to create a sophisticated story about relationship resilience.

Every decision in both The Last of Us Part 1 and 2 is driven by character relationships. The quality of the storytelling in these games isn’t simply due to excellent writing and performances (lots of games have those) because Naughty Dog understands that good stories aren’t quality ingredients tossed in a blender to make blitzed-out story smoothies, but Michelin-starred feasts where every component adds to a greater experience. When your story is so driven by relationships, there’s no room for player choice that could diminish the power of those relationships.

Imagine The Last of Us Part 2 with a BioWare-style romance system. In the cutscene at the end of Seattle Day One, Dina reveals to Ellie that she’s pregnant and the two have a big fight. The player regains control of Ellie and immediately showers Dina with gifts they’ve found, pushing Ellie and Dina’s “relationship score” past a certain threshold. In the face of all that math, Dina tearfully apologizes and all that dramatic tastiness is liquified in the name of player agency.

Dramatic potency isn’t the only thing we lose when we gamify romance. Video games are no longer sold exclusively as violence-fuelled power fantasies for men, but that legacy remains. Video game romances remain buffets of sexual partners offered to the player to accept or discard as they see fit. The player selects a lover the same way they choose a weapon, for aesthetic pleasure or simply a stat bonus: increase your relationship value past a threshold and unlock special powers or other benefits.

I couldn’t find an academic paper on the connection between the incel movement and video game romance systems specifically, but online gaming communities have long been breeding grounds for misogyny. The infamous GamerGate movement was unmasked as an attack on feminism in game development and criticism, demanding that women stick to their place in the stats and sex buffet.

When we break relationships down into value systems, we’re trying to force human behaviour into something it’s not: predictable. People aren’t stats, and how we interact can’t be charted on a spreadsheet. There is no code to unlock someone’s romantic interest in you, and trying to exploit someone’s personality to sleep with them is predatory and disgusting. Plus, people have a lot going on! Especially people facing annihilation from an extra-galactic alien race or any of the wild shit video games throw at you. Trust me: you don’t want to date someone who ignores everything they’ve got going on while they wait for you to ask them about their past and give them little presents.

Many headlines were written about how Baldur’s Gate 3, one of last year’s biggest games, was “thirsty,” but the reality is a lot more complex than that. The game’s characters all have one thing in common, which makes their thirstiness easier to swallow. Each party member is escaping from an abusive relationship: with their lover, their god, or sometimes both. The idea of hurt people coming together romantically or physically in the high-stress plot of Baldur’s Gate 3 makes some sense — at least there was an attempt to justify it — and BG3 has a lot of space for queer and non-monogamous relationships.

Of course, it’s not only big-budget RPGs that have romance options, but I’ve never come across one that captures the intoxicating combination of uncertainty, risk, and joy that comes from falling in love. It’s not like games can’t create that feeling in other ways — the entire Battle Royale genre is based on those same three feelings — I guess it’s just easier to communicate tension through the barrel of a gun than in the face of a potential lover.

Are you looking for a game that does a decent job of representing realistic relationships? Try Gone Home, Firewatch, Oxenfree, Haven, or Florence. These games have no weapons, gear, or stats, just heart and an appreciation for the messy, confusing, frustrating, and wonderful complexities of being human.

You’re probably sick of “Best of” lists by now, but as The Escapist’s resident story enthusiast, I can’t properly start 2024 without acknowledging what a truly ridiculous year it was for interactive fiction, especially expensive blockbuster games by big studios.

At the top of the heap is Baldur’s Gate 3, which carried extremely high expectations due to its studio’s pedigree, the series’ legacy, and four years of early access. Still, I don’t think anyone was prepared for just how good Baldur’s Gate 3 turned out. Sure, the main game’s plot isn’t all that original, but sometimes plot is just a structure to hang great stories on, and BG3 has that in spades. Every companion is interesting, loveable, and fun to use in combat, with writing and performances that bring out a ton of personality without being annoying or undercutting the story’s drama – a common pitfall of a lot of modern genre fiction.

I said in my write-up of Best PS5 Games that I wasn’t ready to write about Alan Wake 2 and that I may never be. The ambition, the audacity, the sheer joy at work in all of Remedy’s titles is unleashed in Alan Wake 2, delivering one of the most creative stories ever told in a video game. That it’s genuinely scary on top of that is like a gift addressed to me personally. Someday, someone is going to write a book about this era of gaming, and Alan Wake 2 deserves its own chapter. It probably deserves its own book – fitting for a game about the horror of the creative process. I don’t know if I’ll be the one to write it, but this is one story I’m comfortable leaving un-analyzed for now, letting it sit in its weirdo tower on top of a pile of weirdo money.

2023 was a year of great sequels, and Spider-Man 2 is the platonic ideal of a great sequel. Insomniac went bigger in scale and storytelling ambition but never lost sight of the original’s tight controls and charming characters. It’s not easy to tell a compelling Spider-Man story in 2023, especially not one featuring Venom, but Insomniac uses the sheer volume of a videogame to transport us into the everyday struggles of Peter Parker, Miles Morales, and the loved ones caught in their orbit. I advocate for quality over quantity, but Spider-Man 2 is the rare game that excels at both. This is a tight, emotional story and a sprawling open-world collect-a-thon, but the balance is so perfect neither one overstays its welcome. I’m not crazy about some of the changes made to the combat, but, moment-to-moment, this might be the best-designed game of 2023.

Despite my love of Spider-Man 2, for my money, nothing touched Jedi: Survivor last year. While still rough around the edges – aren’t the best Star Wars often a little shaggy? – Jedi: Survivor takes the Dark Souls-inspired bones of Jedi: Fallen Order and goes full Elden Ring, with a big open world broken up into discrete zones that you revisit and unpack multiple times in your journey. Smart updates to the combat system, the welcome addition of fast travel, and truly generous customization options make this game a ton of fun to play, but the story is dynamite. Jedi: Fallen Order told a pretty standard story about resilience in the face of trauma, but Survivor goes deeper with an honest and mature examination of what it means to really live with deep scars in a hostile world. It’s way more complex than most game stories allow – it’s way more complex than most Star Wars stories allow – all told by great actors and great writing. The High Republic stuff falls a little flat and is a worrying sign of the larger Star Wars IP starting to creep into the Jedi series, but there’s so much good stuff in the foundation that I’ll forgive a shaky attic. Survivor proves there’s still plenty of life, energy, and creativity in Star Wars, even as we descend into the post-Ahsoka Filoni era.

Big studios had a lot of success in 2023, but I have to give some recognition to a few smaller titles that also carved out space for themselves. Thirsty Suitors and Venba are two games that take radically different approaches to the same objective: breaking through the white male focus of most games to tell stories about the immigrant experience from the perspective of a young woman. Thirsty Suitors attacks traditional Indian values about relationships through a wildly entertaining, constantly shifting gameplay loop that is sort of a dating sim, a skateboarding game, and a fighting game all at once. It’s wild and as close to the vibe of Scott Pilgrim as I’ve seen a game get.

Where Thirsty Suitors has this loud, Bollywood punk rock energy, Venba is a sweet, gentle journey through the immigrant experience by way of a cooking game. It uses the cooking of Tamil cuisine as a skeleton to tackle the difficulty of instilling your culture into your child even as they’re immersed in Western influences. It’s also set in Toronto; more games should take place in Canada.

The first big narrative game of 2024 is Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the follow-up to the reboot of the Yakuza series. Speaking of quantity over quality, this series has both, with dozens of hours of written dialogue covering everything from minor, everyday inconveniences to operatic crime stories. Somehow, the wild swings in tone always work out, and these are some of the best story-driven games you can get. Ryu No Gotoku Studios has pretty much never made a bad game, so I expect Infinite Wealth will continue the trend, even though I probably won’t finish it – I usually burn out on the Yakuza games long before the credits roll.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is like when a small indie movie is given the budget of a Marvel movie for the sequel. An intimate action-adventure game that encouraged users to wear headphones to simulate living with schizophrenia has ballooned into a full-on AAA blockbuster and one of the biggest releases for Xbox in 2024. The trailers are breathtaking and terrifying. If they can maintain the first game’s storytelling quality, this could be one of the year’s best titles, but I’m concerned that Microsoft is chasing God of War a bit too hard with this one. 

Star Wars: Outlaws is coming from Massive Entertainment, who released Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora at the end of 2023. It’s weird that this is the first time Star Wars has tried to do an Assassin’s Creed, with a massive open world full of things to do, but Massive has plenty of experience in the genre, having made the two Division games. Outlaws lets you play out your space rogue fantasies with a focus on the seedy side of the Star Wars universe. While I love a Jedi-free Star Wars story, telling a cohesive narrative in a massive open-world game is almost impossible, and Massive’s storytelling is usually pretty bad – I started skipping Avatar‘s dialogue before the end of the prologue.          

Probably the biggest game of the year is the second installment of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, Rebirth, out in February. I was blown away by Remake, both in its transformation into an action-adventure game and in the super smart way it played with the very nature of a remake. I’m looking forward to seeing more of the world outside the city of Midgar, including that cute seaside beach town and the giant casino. Even if they pull back on the more esoteric stuff in the sequel, I’m all in on these characters, and I’m excited to see how they spin things the second time around. 

Just like the movies, 2023 was a great year for stories in gaming. But also like the movies, 2024 isn’t looking like as much of a slamdunk. Maybe the lack of big-budget games will make more space for smaller stories like Venba to shine. Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to the stories we get to experience this year.

Making a list of “best PS5 games” is tricky, as there were few titles exclusive to the system this year. We think of the PS5 as the home for these blockbuster single-player experiences, the kinds of games people often complain “they don’t make anymore,” thanks to the system’s ace-in-the-hole: the astonishing DualSense controller. If immersion is your thing, nothing beats the feedback you get from that little white-and-black Batarang. 

The Escapist staff tried to limit ourselves to five picks, but I threw in some honorable mentions for the best PS5 games of 2023 at the end. I mostly played Baldur’s Gate 3 on PS5, but it feels like a PC game, you know?

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Is there anything better than a good Star Wars sequel? Jedi: Fallen Order was a wonderful riff on the Dark Souls formula with a strong emphasis on storytelling led by great characters. It told a surprisingly intimate story about a small family struggling to find joy during suffocating oppression. Even with its narrow scope, Fallen Order has its issues, and many people hoped the sequel would get the time and money needed to live up to the promise of the first game.

Jedi: Survivor is the result of that time and money. As expected, it’s bigger and more complex than Fallen Order, but what’s surprising is its story is even more focused, and its characters are even better developed. As modern Star Wars on screen suffers from overlong slogs stuffed with boring characters and weightless action, Survivor tells a low-stakes story with good writing and performances. There are still some technical issues, even on PS5, but the exploration and combat loop is so much fun, and the story is so engaging that it’s worth enduring some fuzzy visuals. Now, where’s the animated Turgle spin-off we all deserve?

Best moment: No spoilers, but getting to indulge in the full Jedi Master power fantasy midway through the game is awesome — especially how it ends.

Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil has been on one hell of a tear the last few years. After returning to its horror roots with the terrifying, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired seventh installment, Capcom surprised again with a ridiculously high-quality remake of Resident Evil 2. When they released a remake of RE3, gaming culture was equally excited and nervous: was Capcom really going to remake one of the best games of all time? 

Well, they did, and it rules. The remake of Resident Evil 4 keeps what works, throws out what doesn’t, and updates the story and characters for 2023 while maintaining the midnight madness cheese of the original. Some smart gameplay improvements and a fresh coat of graphics make this the definitive way to play a classic.

Best moment: The opening battle in the village is still an all-timer.

Spider-Man 2

If anything beats a good Star Wars sequel, it’s a good superhero sequel. Spider-Man, in particular, has a legacy of great sequels: Spider-Man 2, Far From Home, and Across the Spider-verse (damn, what a year to be a spider-fan) expand on the timeless story of our beloved sticky boys. Hell, even Amazing Spider-Man 2 has its moments!

The PS4 Spider-Man (which I think I’m technically supposed to call Marvel’s Spider-Man, but I’m not gonna) was such a triumph of design, narrative, and performance that there was no way Insomniac Games was going to botch the sequel completely — but no one saw this big an improvement coming. Spider-Man 2 has a bigger world and tells a broader, smarter story, but what I can’t get over is the sheer technical skill on display. Insomniac is the true master of the PS5, and every game it puts out, from Ratchet and Clank to Miles Morales, is better than the last. Of course, Spider-Man 2 has hyper-detailed character models and brilliant effects, but the near-instantaneous loading times and smart use of the PS5’s controller features make this another Insomniac game that feels truly “next-gen.” 

Best moment: Couple’s therapy.

Sea of Stars

One of my favorite things about following video games as closely as I do is when a developer levels up. The Messenger was a fun riff on Ninja Gaiden with a cool mid-game twist, the kind of game you boot up on GamePass and maybe spend a weekend on. I never would have imagined Sabotage Studio had something like Sea of Stars waiting in the wings.

Sea of Stars isn’t groundbreaking, but as a modern riff on Chrono Trigger, one of the best games of all time and arguably the best Super Nintendo game, it’s sublime. The story is basic, and the characters thin, but the gorgeous pixel art, great music, and fun gameplay make this a great diversion when you need a break from all the incredibly high-quality AAA blockbusters we had this year.

Best moment: The smooth end-of-battle music transition to the level-up music hits every time.

Alan Wake 2

Honestly, I’m not sure I’m ready to write about this game — and part of me hopes I never will be. The game industry may have a lot of problems, but it’s very special that one of the most successful, resilient studios in the business is based out of Finland, of all places! The expert game developers at Remedy Entertainment have been making technically impressive, narratively complex games since the original Max Payne way back in 2001 — and they’re all super fun! How do they do it?

Alan Wake 2 marries tense, methodical survival horror gameplay with a twisting story about stories and asks us to question the overlap between lies, memory, heritage, and legacy. It’s like Inception with a weird, distinctively Eastern European sense of humor. Remedy continues its experiments, blending live-action FMV and cutting-edge graphics to blur the lines between the artificial and the real in a way I haven’t seen since Blade Runner 2049. What’s even more astonishing is that it uses Alan Wake 2 to officially kick off a shared universe, where all prior Remedy games exist in the same reality. The studio even addresses the fact that it doesn’t have the rights to Max Payne anymore! 

Alan Wake 2 isn’t just another game developer trying to stretch a TV series’ skin over a video game skeleton — it’s a group of experts in their field pushing the medium forward.

Best moment: I’m a sucker for a good opening. The first hour of this game is elite.

Best PS5 Games of 2023 Honorable Mentions: Season: A Letter to the Future, Final Fantasy 16, Dead Space, Cocoon, Diablo 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, Lies of P, Street Fighter 6.

For more of our Best of lists for 2023, check out the following:

Best Action-Adventure Games of 2023

Best Fighting Games of 2023

Best RPGs of 2023

Best Nintendo Switch Games of 2023

Best Soulslike Games of 2023

Best VR Games of 2023

Best Shooters of 2023

Best Co-Op Games of 2023

Best Apple Arcade Games for 2023

Best Indie Games of 2023

Best JRPGs of 2023

Best Horror Games of 2023

Best Xbox Series X/S Games of 2023

There’s a lot of entertainment out there. Eleven major streaming services, over 400 movies a year, and hundreds of video games across three major consoles and PC — and that’s not counting sports, music, dance, theater, Christmas markets, D&D live playthroughs, and wasting the time of the guys who cold call you offering to clean your air ducts.

All of this *shudder* content doesn’t just sit there — there are millions of dollars of advertising directing you to it all, and it isn’t just a matter of keeping up with the times. Did you watch both Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day? Congratulations, you participated in an event that was not only culturally significant but also marked you as both a feminist and a historian and someone interested in interrogating the stories we’re told about our culture, our history, and ourselves. Wow! All that in 5 hours!

It’s not just exhausting — it’s deafening. And it’s a tough cycle to break. What you watch is part of your identity, and brands have seized on this to keep you paying, playing, and complaining. 

So, here, I’m gonna give you a gift:

It’s okay to stop caring about stuff that doesn’t make you happy anymore.

Here’s how.

Step 1: Pick the TV shows or video games you’re not enthusiastically enjoying and drop them. TV shows change writers, actors get bored, and executives push for bigger and more dramatic storylines. All these things are out of your control; no amount of whining about it online will change that. 

Video games change, too. Characters get rebalanced, patches screw things up, and scopes change. I play Destiny exclusively single-player, something the game hasn’t been built for in years. We broke up. It’s fine.

Step 2: Admit you’re a victim of marketing. I thought Tears of the Kingdom looked like a boring rehash of Breath of the Wild. I bought it anyway because it’s The New Zelda, and I’m supposed to care about The New Zelda. After eight hours, despite all the cool new stuff, it felt like a boring rehash of Breath of the Wild. I just played too much of the first one to enjoy it. That’s a me problem, and that’s okay. Trust your instincts.

Step 3: Cancel your streaming services. Limit your options to improve your sanity. My wife and I keep Prime Video because we order enough stuff from Amazon to make it worth it. We also have Shudder because we watch a lot of horror, and it’s like $6/month. A few times a year, I’ll pay for the Criterion Channel for a month, especially when they do something cool like the Japanese Noir showcase they did last year. Supporting Shudder and Criterion feels like helping a small business. Rotating your subs between the Big 3 is elite behavior.

Again, this applies to video games. Do you need both GamePass and PlayStation Plus? How often are you actually using these? Do you require all three Mafia games to be accessible to you at a moment’s notice?

Step 4: Acknowledge that characters aren’t real. I hear it all the time. “I stuck with Game of Thrones because I needed to see what happened!” Reader, nothing happened. None of this is real. Those people don’t exist. And, hey, you get to give a friend the experience of telling you what happened at Clegane Bowl. Remember Clegane Bowl?!

Step 5: Watch the first episodes of TV shows like they’re movies. Watching Season 1, Episode 1 of a show is a commitment to anywhere from 6 to a hundred hours. Watching a 60-minute movie called Reacher is easy and fun. Plus, if you really like that movie, they made like 12 more of them! Wow!

Step 6: Ignore stuff. Do you know what the most powerful words in the English language are? I don’t care about that. Next time a Starfield NPC asks you to scan a bunch of trees or whatever, you don’t have to do that. If someone asks you what you think about the state of the MCU, just shrug. You’ll get some resistance at first — we are supposed to care about everything — but you don’t have to. Care more about fewer things.

If you follow these steps, you’ll gradually, consciously uncouple yourself from the pop culture morass. Now what? Reader, it’s time to start healing.

Step 7: Follow creators, not brands. Disney isn’t Star Wars, DC isn’t Batman, and the people making the new Dragon Age game aren’t the same people who made Dragon Age: Origins. The reason Andor was so good wasn’t because it was a “darker” Star Wars story – it’s because it was made by the guy who wrote The Bourne Identity. 

Step 8: Watch, read, and play what those creators do. One of the few good things about social media is the access you get to writers, directors, and actors. Nobody creates in a vacuum, and all art is a conversation. Did you love The Batman? You should watch Se7en. Did you like Se7en? You should watch The French Connection. Most creators don’t “rip people off” — they learn how to apply what they like to their own work. Martin Scorcese is an awesome resource for this.

Step 9: Find critics you trust. If you read a review online that you agree with, go to the top of the page and see who wrote it, then follow them on social media. For the love of God, ignore Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and anyone obsessed with box office numbers or other sales metrics. Once you let go of caring what “the majority” thinks, you’ll be truly free.

One last thing: do not feel shame about what you fill your brain with. As the great philosopher Sheryl Crow said, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” Just don’t forget the next line of that song, “If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”

Storycraft is a monthly column by Colin Munch that focuses on the stories we love. You can check out all his previous work here.

Sci-fi horror is my jam. I’m pretty sure the first movie I ever saw was E.T., and it scared the absolute crap out of me. Ever since I was a kid, the wonder of space exploration has been married to the fear of the unknown. I’m not alone. Some of our greatest stories are about the unfathomable terror lurking in the cosmos. The movie executive pitch of “What about this existing movie but in space??” is such a cliche that I’ve already used it twice in this article. There is no Dead Space without Event Horizon — a movie about a starship that goes to Hell (and it rules) — and there is no Event Horizon without Alien, literally pitched to executives as “Jaws in space.”  

Dead Space is part of the sci-fi horror conversation, but it’s also part of the video game conversation. Initially released in 2008, it was the first game I remember that successfully recreated the feeling of Resident Evil 4. The tight, over-the-shoulder camera angle was claustrophobic yet allowed for precise aiming, which the developers twisted by focusing on slicing off limbs rather than racking up headshots.

But I already wrote about what the Dead Space remake does well. Why did I stop playing it?

A funny thing happened in late 2022/early 2023: three highly anticipated video games came out one after the other that were all fundamentally the same. Developers on The Callisto Protocol, some of whom made the original Dead Space, crunched to get their game out before the remake. CP didn’t make much of a splash, leaving things wide open for Dead Space to carve out an audience before the remake of the game that inspired it, Resident Evil 4, arrived in March.

It was a funny case of trends colliding, these three titles scrambling to make a name for themselves. Based on Capcom’s recent track record, there was a good chance the RE4 remake was going to be pretty good and expand on the original in interesting ways. Part of what I love about the original Dead Space is its focus, and I was worried that new features would crowd what I remember as a tight, terrifying experience.

I could have used a little more crowding. 

I dropped the Dead Space remake about 60% of the way through the story, right before the military ship arrives. The new game is slick, pretty, and scary, and it has made big improvements to the writing and performances, but there isn’t enough meat on the bones. The gameplay loop runs out of steam, no matter how many tough enemies or fleshy walls the game throws at you.

One of the best things about Resident Evil 4 is its variety and how it surprises you with entirely new enemy types late into the run time. Dead Space introduces mutated soldiers that can phase through time but fighting them isn’t fundamentally different from the other monsters. 

The game’s weapon upgrade system requires you to focus on only a few weapons at a time, and shooting a ricocheting saw blade at your enemies isn’t cool forever. Even the flamethrower’s new alt-fire, which drops a wall of flame that enemies are stupid enough to wander into, loses its spark by the endgame (sorry).

And speaking of the endgame, I’d forgotten how long the final mission down on Aegis VII is. What could be a nice change of scenery — from cramped, gothic corridors to wide open spaces — is just more gothic corridors. The final boss fight is kind of whatever, but the game commits an egregious sin: it puts a long, unskippable cutscene right before it. If you die fighting the game’s last boss, you have to watch the whole thing again.

I dropped Dead Space in March because I was losing interest and didn’t want to jump right from one third-person survival horror game to another with RE4. While I finished Dead Space this time, the last few hours were a slog. It’s obvious this remake was greenlit so they could remake the game’s far superior sequel — and maybe even try to redeem its extremely flawed third installment. Here’s hoping they get that chance — and take even more of their own — next time.

The above article is part of a series from Colin Munch on the video games he’s dropped this year. Here’s a list of the others, so far:

Why I Dropped Resident Evil 4