The appeal of soulslike games is one I'd somehow avoided. Then the other morning I was mindlessly scrolling TikTok instead of falling asleep and came across a short video. I watched a small crab get fed up with dodging, blocking, and occasionally getting a hit in against a big boss crab, give up, and pop a cap in his face. It just pulled out a gun and blew him away. That game was Another Crab's Treasure by Aggro Crab which currently has a limited time demo up on Steam as part of this year's Next Fest.
The John Wick movies have always lived by video game rules
22.09.2023 - 17:07 / polygon.com / John Wick
Hollywood has gotten hot for video games in 2023, with live-action television adaptations of The Last of Us and Twisted Metal debuting on major streaming services and the animated Super Mario Bros. Movie banking over $1 billion in theaters. Hell, there was even a movie about Tetris this year.
And yet, few direct adaptations of video game properties preserve the bizarre and specific ways video game worlds differ from our own, or how the psychology of playing through a story differs from that of watching one. For that, you often need to look at films that are not specifically based on video games, but are inspired by their form or aesthetic.
That inspiration may be obvious, as in the pixels and power-ups of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or subtextual, as in the grinding repetition of Edge of Tomorrow. As the generations who grew up with games as part of their regular narrative diet become filmmakers, the influence of video games becomes so pervasive it may not even be a conscious creative decision. Throughout behind-the-scenes featurettes included with its home video release, John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad describes his intention to build a pulpy comic book world of gangsters and assassins. Whether he meant to or not, what he actually created was cinema’s most perfect representation of a video game world, a surreal space governed by a set of clear, often unspoken rules.
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The John Wick series follows the eponymous hitman (Keanu Reeves) as he’s drawn out of retirement by the senseless killing of his beloved dog, a parting gift from his late wife, Helen. John himself is a textbook video game player character, a man of few words and little emotional growth but incredible, superhuman skill and a single, iconic look. Once John reenters the secret world of international assassins, neither he nor the audience ever step outside of it again. The world under the High Table has its own economy and social structures that exist alongside the real world but essentially do not interact with it. The vendettas and political power struggles that take place under the Table have grave repercussions within their world, but appear to have no visible impact upon anyone outside of it, even when logic would dictate they would.
Apart from Helen, who appears only in recordings and in John’s memory, nearly every single character with a name or a line of dialogue across all four John Wick films is a part of this secret society. Like a player character in an RPG, John only interacts with people who are part of the game. The streets are full of people going about their days, but, as seen during John’s frantic escape from the city in the first act of Chapter 3, approximately one in five New Yorkers is secretly an
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