As with the rest of the game, outside of the more focussed platform sequences, I was boosted through by the breezy mood more than anything else. Skelattack is a masterpiece in the art of the pleasant.
The chief pleasures on offer are those of the power fantasy and of the newly burgeoning subgenre that we might call the zoological misadventure.
John Wick Hex could have been a number of different games, none of them as strange and satisfying as this.
Does it succeed? Well, I don't know—I'm not an astronaut—but I can report that it has a pleasing gravity.
In the beauty stakes and beyond, there are very few, in the rarefied realms of indie or AAA, who can challenge it.
Those intoxicated by the game's dreamy brew may argue that there are no detours—that, like the Zero, you're either on it or you're not. If you're anything like me and Conway, however, you'll be somewhere in-between.
The mood wafts above it all, overpowering any laughable suggestions of plot or character—neither of which fuels Zombie Army 4.
It's a game of MacGuffins, so to speak—what you're doing and why you're doing it is inessential to the joys and the juice on offer.
Wattam should be played, if for no other reason than to see a designer expressing ambivalence about his own ideas.
It isn't that we miss the mists of Arcadia Bay specifically, or that we long to retread old ground; it's the slow etching of stories, scattered with care.