Today’s game is some more OneShot. I binged this game all day today, and honestly i was a little sad at the end. It did a really good job of making me feel connected to the characters, and on a meta level it did its job well.
I was so attached I played through it to get all the achievements. That’s 3 whole playthroughs. One for the First Playthrough, the second for NG+, and the final in Memory Mode too get the last few.
Spoiler
I’m convinced that in a meta way, this game is about us (the player) giving a sort of humanity too the games we play, such as this one. I kind of saw Niko “taming” the World Machine (the process of basically letting a robot in more grow beyond their programming and gain free will) as a sort of reflection of us doing the same. When we start to view these characters as human (the first step in the process) do they break free from their programming and become alive.
And beyond that, in a way, the first playthrough was the player “Taming” Niko. By the end of it we’d sort of developed a bond and connection to him and almost saw him as human. By Solstice this allows him to metaphorically think beyond the capacity of the loops
Of course, this doesn’t work to people without attachment to the game, but that’s at least how I looked at it without any deeper insight.
And after doing a memory mode playthrough, I kind of find this even more reinforced as it’s a “recording” of Niko, not the real thing. Maybe it’s just me, but knowing the real Niko isn’t there made the whole thing feel soulless. This recording isn’t tamed, it basically has no free will and in lore is just destined to repeat the same actions over and over.
The artwork for NG+ was gorgeous too. I’ve honestly considered using it as my wallpaper. The only thing stopping me is a lack of 16:9, so for now I extracted the wallpapers from the built in “PC” and upscaled it instead for use
All of this, kind of points to me being in love with this game if you couldn’t tell. I just can’t bring myself to believe it’s over, and I can’t delete it. It’s hard to believe this game inspired such affection from me. Only a little bit ago I knew little to nothing about it, and now I’d say this game has earned a spot on my top games of all time.
