For years, we’ve squabbled over yellow paint. It’s not always egregious, and it’s not always yellow. Sometimes it’s colored chalk splashed on a ledge to make a climbable route stand out, or to highlight an important path. Games are a lot more complex than their low-poly forebears, with far more visual noise, so it makes sense to highlight the interactables. But then came games like the Resident Evil 4 remake that handed every single Las Plagas villager a paint brush and unleashed them on the crates and barrels of Valdelobos with reckless abandon. Capcom clearly learned its lesson and dialed things back, but Insomniac takes things even further with Marvel’s Wolverine.
I’m not just talking about the white paint splashed across linear paths. Marvel’s Wolverine has drawn flak over the last 24 hours because of the already-infamous “fart cloud,” a term coined by Washington Post reporter Gene Park in response to the discourse around Skill Up’s review. Skill Up criticized the game’s constant hand-holding, specifically the luminescent blue trail that guides you along obvious paths, serving as little more than a patronizing distraction. But then people claimed that it could be disabled, so Park—review copy in hand—investigated. Not only...
