Video games

Grade: A– He may not know how to make a drinkable martini, but James Bond makes a great videogame. GoldenEye on the Nintento 64 was the first; but there’s always been potential there for more. After all, the character has all the stuff that the medium excels at. He has car chases, he fights, he shoots people, he blows things up, and he appeals strongly to adolescent boys. In 007: First Light, he gets ample opportunity to do all those things, sometimes in very quick succession. Our man here is not yet a wintry Daniel Craig, a suave Sean Connery or a campy Roger Moore: when we first encounter him in the mandatory pre-credits sequence he’s not even a spy.

Grade: B– It’s a duck, except he’s a detective. Or a detective, except he’s a duck. Anyway he wears a fedora, seems depressed, quacks wise, and eats too much bread – so we can leave the rest to the philosophers. In this sequel to Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (who knew the world needed two such games?) this pleasingly drawn cartoon hero navigates a series of locations solving puzzles. Reminded me a lot of the 1990s. Fancy the funny-animal thing still going strong all these years after Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters I was about to write, but then I remembered Aesop. Likewise old-school point-and-click adventures, though now they’re swipe-and-tap adventures, so that’s progress of a sort. Anyway, it’s set on a campsite, or glampsite if you will.

Slavoj Zizek        Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from the East to the West. Something similar happened at the beginning of the 21st century: the world spirit passed from cinema, the art of the 20th century, to the TV series.

Grade: B+ Tony Hawk is an old guy these days. The most famous sk8r boi ever to have lived is now 57. A sk8r geezer, if you will; and the video games celebrating his glory days are of an age too. Gamer-geezers who remember losing hours to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will welcome this pacy, fast-moving, graphically lavish remake. The Sex Pistols and Run-DMC and suchlike blare in your ears as you guide your skater around any number of wildernesses of kneecap-imperilling concrete. (Gen-Z players will probably be mystified by the floating VHS tapes that you need to pick up as you skate.) You can do ollies and kickflips and medusas and acid drops, grinds and spine transfers and skitches, and manuals and reverts and wallplants.

Grade: A In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they called it the First-Person Shooter, and lo, they gave up leaving their bedrooms altogether. The original Doom (1993) really was the genesis of a genre: dark, intense, relentless, addictive. The latest iteration of the game – which plunks our space marine and his demon hordes in a medieval world rather than a space station – stays true to its vibe, while using all the processing grunt available in next-gen consoles to tune that vibe up.

Grade: A– For this winning little narrative adventure we are in the South – all gris-gris gumbo yaya, decaying mansions and ghosts of the underground railway – and it is a bit midnighty, what with the sinister otherworldly beings you fight.  Our protagonist is sassy, cornrowed Hazel, a mixed-race Lara Croft, who sets out to rescue her social-worker mother after her mobile home is swept downriver in a hurricane. Her snooty grandma Bunny, rotting in her vast plantation house, is no help whatever. But Hazel does manage to half-inch some magic hooks from granny’s ottoman, which allow her to manipulate glowing magic strands in the air and use them to unravel ‘haints’, the ropey-looking demon-things that pop up from time to time to attack her.

Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just want to sink into some thumping AAA franchise that’s thrown all the time, design talent and VC megabucks in the world at the screen. The new Assassin’s Creed has you covered there. Irresistibly, it’s set in a richly detailed and (kinda) historically accurate 16th-century Japan – which means, as all teenage boys will know, ninjas and samurais. Be warned, though: I downloaded the PC version, but the screen appeared to announce that I don’t have an STD so my new game wouldn’t run. Talk about a mixed blessing. Turns out it meant an SSD, or solid-state drive – me neither – and they’re harder to catch than theother thing. The PS5 version worked just fine.

Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at work. You’ve both grown up. Prepare to lose very many hours to its attractive blend of diplomacy, resource management, city-building and strategic ultraviolence.  Your path through history comes in three linked chunks: you’ll play through the ancient world, then carry forward some of your progress into the age of exploration, and then do the same again in modernity. What’s more, your leaders no longer have to be historically or geographically appropriate.

Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated a mournful little stick princess. It made wonderfully clever use of isometric perspective: knobs and handles allowed you to rotate the playspace and slide structures together or apart. As you fiddled with the architecture, Escher-like perspectival tricks would open fresh paths or surfaces for Ida to walk on. The atmosphere was absorbing and the puzzles were great.

Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience. Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards. Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you lots of choices.

Grade: A- There’s a very faint echo of Jeff VanderMeer’s unheimlich Southern Reach Series in the new indie side-scroller Neva. You’re plonked at the start of the game into a pleasant dreamlike landscape of pastel foliage, benign fauna and the gentle twitter of birds. But as you progress you start to encounter something darker – literally. An unexplained corruption is infecting the land. Black patches on the ground send up spooky alien tendrils. Birds fall out of the sky.  Soon you’re guiding the story’s protagonist, Alba – a little-red-riding-hood figure with a darning-needle blade – through a deepening nightmare. Patches of black petals spawn demons whom you must dodge and dispatch with your sword. You’ll find yourself running before a giant black beetle.