Video games, even at their best reviewed and most visible, often feel on the side of power. The big ‘commentary’ game of the year was Mouthwashing, and that game is very intelligent, but still it is a game about the psychology of the oppressor, about how being a shitty guy feels. And how common is that, right? That’s Spec Ops: The Line, that’s Bioshock: Infinite, that’s Hotline Miami, that’s Firewatch, that’s Silent Hill 2, that’s OFF, that’s The Last of Us, that’s Disco Elysium. Introspection and politics from the standpoint of the guy with the gun.
In Noclip’s roundtable best-of-year show, Danny O’Dwyer, the channel’s founder, accuses Anthology of the Killer of having a victim mentality. He says “The reason I like video games is that I see the world as one.” He has the gun. Gaming respects that. Anthology of the Killer does not.
2024 was not the year of the gun. I did not feel, walking humbly into 2025, that I had control over my destiny. Global Warming is not under my control. I am not choosing to make transphobia happen. Anthology of the Killer is about many things, but chief among them is our political reality - that powerful, stupid people are changing our world, that their fears and myopic interests bleed out into our lived experience in ways we can’t realistically change.
It’s a scary situation. It’s a funny situation! Anthology of the Killer has a lot of fun with it. Vengeful ghosts build memorial waterparks. The night college downstairs teaches you how to be a slasher villain. The rich failson of a drinky-bird dynasty starts kidnapping random alt kids he thinks might be serial killers. That zinester you liked now is a consultant/CIA informant.
And yet, at the end of the series, you look back at the totality and just feel terrible. This vision of a future, where the in-group says fuck you and beats down as hard as it can, is succeeding. It is a part of our lives now, online and offline, wherever you are.
I admit these games do lack a vision for a brighter future, but I personally found that refreshing. I did not exit 2024 with hope, but with tenacity. BB does the same. Perhaps both of us have a ‘victim mentality’, but in a year like this one I can’t imagine feeling any other way.
(A short write-up of AOTK for a games of the year list.)
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
2087
titsay
gummygunk
annaxmalina
ellievsbear
blakekathryn
