Lil' Indie Round-Up 3

Album: Chandelier by Rachael Sage
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: When the whole singer/songwriter thing got really big in the 70s, you could pretty much set your watch to each artist releasing an album at least every two years. And that album would have some obscure, clever object, idea, or word as its title. Also, the cover would typically be said artist posing with the object or making a visual reference to it somehow. So, then, this makes me expect a fairly generic singer/songwriter album. p.s. I don't know why it's showing up all blued out like that. Some quirk of Blogger, I guess.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Tori Amos says "hi." Too pleasant to hate, too cutesy, quirky, and immaculate to like, Chandelier is Sage's 8th (!!) album. All in all, it's piano-driven singer/songwriter pop in the Amos-vein, only less challenging and intense. If I had a girlfriend and she was making this music, I would be touched and proud of her, but secretly have no desire to listen to it, ever.

Album: The Discovery EP by The Discovery
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: OK, you've seen the cover now. Doesn't it scream 'high school art project from the stoner kid in class'?? I would also accept the answer 'fan made cover for almost any Flaming Lips album.' So, I expect something druggy, psychedelic, or cosmic, maaaaan.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: This one took me awhile to sum up, despite being only 4 songs, but I think I've nailed it--acoustic 311. Granted, I haven't listened to any 311 in a good 10 years, but that's the vibe I got off this: reggae/Latin influences married to generic alt. rock. The twist here is that The Discovery have added a cup more acoustic guitar. Oh, and the last song 'In The Air Tonight' lamely lifts most of the chorus to that Phil Collins song and is half as good.
Album: The Revisionists by The Revisionists
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: The Revisionists is such a vague, wants-to-be-cool-but-is-just-kind-of-forgettable name for a band. And the cover reminds me of the similar monikered Editors, which features a skeletal outline of a building. Here, though, we get a scrawl of newspaper clippings in various languages. All of this leads me to believe the band is one of those millions of "back to basics" punk bands that are on the Warped Tour for a year and then completely forgotten.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Well, I don't hate this, so that's already a point in its favor. Also, it's not a "back to basics" punk band. No, it's a "back to basics" post-punk band, only more Clash-y. Literature given with the album reveals that two thirds of the band were in Tonic (they of the mid-90s alt. rock hit "If You Could Only See") and the other third is the guy who directed the Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Anyway, this is the sort of music that marries 90s alt. rock with late 70s post-punk via the Clash, music that I wouldn't flee from if it were played in a bar, but music that is supremely boring to sit down and listen to.
Album: Blackmarket EP by Blackmarket
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Somewhere, somebody listened to a lot of Fugazi and decided to make an album cover that reflected this obsession. Given the band's name, a potently political/economic term, alongside the blur of things going on here visually, I expect Fugazi.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Let me pose a scenario to you. Imagine if, instead of recording the harder, stranger Pinkerton, Rivers Cuomo led Weezer, post-Blue Album, to head off the subsequent pack of mid-to-late 90s rock bands inspired equally by indie rock and arena rock and start churning out crap right away. Instead of doing what he actually did, and going off to college, then coming back to ruin Weezer's good name by, apparently, challenging himself to make a series of albums that are each worse than the one that came before. But I digress. Since this scenario never happened, we get to listen to bands like Blackmarket instead. Blackmarket are terrible.
Album: Siege Mentality by Digital Primate
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Ever since Gorillaz were unleashed unto the world, England has been inundated with bands that mix rock, electronic music, and hip hop, and have silly names or themes around them. The mock 8-bit NES gorilla mask pictured above leads me to believe this particular release leans toward the electronic music realm, since many electronic artists have a similar kitschy appreciation for that visual aesthetic.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: I was pretty close with my guess, except that I hadn't factored in the bizarre political slant of the album. Or all the sexual stuff. Frankly, the song titles alone are pretty embarassing, and that it's apparently a white guy behind all this is even worse. Like most British albums of this type, it's overly long, and reminds you of much better bands that you don't even really like (in this case, I'd say a more electro-hop Gorillaz, or simply a worse Basement Jaxx).
Album: Pigs by The Dirty Hearts
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: In the late 90s, I remember always going to my local Media Play store and wandering the racks of CDs. Every so often I'd come across some album cover that was really disturbing or gross. Usually it had something violent, provocative, or sexual, and it seemed like it was usually on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records label. It also seemed as though they usually had some vague bestiality angle, too. So, then, this cover, which has a human infant gestating inside a pig. It's vaguely disturbing, but it also is a lazy, lazy visual symbol for human beings as "pigs." I expect passable industrial rock.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: I like this album, if only because it reminds one of a time in the early 90s when garage rock made a short lived, under covered comeback. Bands like The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion didn't really fit in with the grunge rock or indie rock of that era, and so existed in this weird place that never really made sense. The Dirty Hearts are of this era, too, despite being a decade and change too late. Even the amateurish back cover, a collage of meat products, reminds me of something, say, Pavement would've had on a pre-Slanted & Enchanted single or EP. As for the music itself, it straddles the lines between grunge rock, indie rock, and garage rock, featuring songs that go on a minute too long and sometimes throw in odd elements like a brass section.
Album: Falcon EP by Falcon
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: Right now, I work at the deli/meat department in a local grocery store. One of the brands of lunch meat and cheese we carry is called Boar's Head. It's a relatively 'premium' brand, which costs a dollar or two more per pound than the competitors, but I much prefer it. Their havarti is delicious. Huh?? Oh, right; this album cover. It's got a bloody boar's head on it, but the band's name is Falcon. Expectation?? Overly clever indie pop, or painful, room clearing metal/noise.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Passable, enjoyable indie rock with an optimistic, anthemic streak. The big deal about this band is that they're slowly recording the songs of a high school classmate who wrote hundreds of tunes over roughly a year's time in the late 80s before being institutionalized. Shades of Daniel Johnston, right?? Unfortunately, this is a band where the concept behind them is more interesting than the music itself. It's not bad by any means, mind you, but I think people are more willing to write genius into a musician because he or she was crazy, and that's unfair. If you hear the songs of Daniel Johnston out of context, they're still amazing because they're so well written, and his voice is so unique. Not so for Falcon. The story is more special than the music, and I'd be more excited to hear the original versions.
Album: The Sound by Mar
What Does The Cover Make Me Expect??: I'm going to be a jerk and say that this cover is terrible, and it's not even ironically terrible. It's got an old timey looking woman with angels exploding out of her head, suggesting that this band's sound is so amazing it caused cherubs to fountain out of her head. Did I just use 'fountain' as a verb?? I did. Anyway, I'm guessing this album sounds like Snow Patrol, one of those bands that tried to combine post-rock and indie rock together and wind up sounding like crap in the process.
What Does It Actually Sound Like??: Wow, I was pretty close. Only the post-rock is more like a string based Sigur Ros, and the indie rock is more like an American guy who likes Radiohead a lot and wishes his voice could go as high and powerful as Thom Yorke. I may sound cynical here, but Mar belong to a raft of bands that try so hard to be unique and interesting but end up sounding like a patchwork of various other bands. I can't hate them for it, because I remember times when I used to ape various writers, but that doesn't mean I like them for it, either.

Video: Genesis- Land of Confusion

I first saw this video as a child, and subsequently convinced myself that it had been a nightmare created by watching one of the Child's Play movies. And not, you know, a real video by a real band in which all the people (and animals, actually) are the most singularly terrifying puppets you'll see this week. Maybe even this decade.

Apparently the goal of the puppeteers was to make Genesis and the then-president Reagan and his wife even uglier to look at. It wouldn't be so bad if not for their eyes...their frightening, frightening eyes.


Still, I have a strange fascination with this video now that I know it was real after all. So, I inflict it on you, and hope you pass it on to others. Otherwise, in a week, demon-puppet Phil Collins will crawl out of your TV set and kill you.

Shadow of the Colossus

I have this problem with videogames sometimes. I become so caught up in the carrot-on-a-string elements of a game that I don't stop to look around and experience the world I've elected to enter. Videogames become something I need to complete or finish (or even play enough of to write a review) instead of something to enjoy and appreciate. This is why I so often don't finish games, and why I initially gave up on Shadow of the Colossus: games start to feel like work, specifically homework. I feel like I have to finish a game in order to competently talk about it. I feel like I have to play certain games because everyone else is, or they games in question are beloved critical classics that didn't sell well but offer something very different and compelling from most other videogames.

So, then, let me just say this: if we really want videogames to be accepted as the new form of art, of expression, that they are, we need more games like Shadow of the Colossus. Though it has a story that could potentially be told in another medium, it couldn't be experienced/told in exactly the same way. And that's the key: the translation of this game to another artform would change it irrevocably.

I keep coming back to the argument that they had on one of the 1UPFM Backlog segments about videogames as a medium, and how the one thing that videogames can do that others can't is interactivity. I absolutely agree with Ryan O'Donnell on this point, because I truly believe videogames as an artistic medium, rather than an entertainment medium, will only continue to evolve if they focus on making the story interactive and embedded in the game world somehow. Not all videogames should do this, of course, because not all videogames are trying to tell a story, or at least are so focused on one. Narrative driven videogames, however, should, in my opinion. I felt such connection to the Shadow of the Colossus world and story because I was the one discovering it all and interacting with it. Moreover, even though there are cutscenes that help tell the story, you can always, at the very least, move the camera around.

As with Ico, I think Shadow of the Colossus quickly divides its audience into people who just want to have fun while a story is spoon fed to them and people who want to experience something and exist in an environment, exploring it, in order to get most of the story. I wouldn't consider this game fun to play, but as an interactive experience, it's one of the best the medium has to offer. Much like Silent Hill 2, I can easily forgive and overlook the shortcomings and awkwardness of the "gameplay" aspect in order to get the fulfilling environmental, atmospheric, and implicit narrative. Speaking of which: that the cutscenes in the game have interactivity, however limited, is a step in the right direction for an artform long reduced to aping other mediums to convey information.

If early RPGs, text adventures, and adventure games represented videogames borrowing from books to be art; if games with gorgeous graphics (2D graphics count, haters) represented borrowing from paintings and visual art to be art; if games like Metal Gear Solid represented borrowing from movies to be art...then games like Shadow of the Colossus represent videogames realizing their potential as an artistic medium on their own unique ground: interactivity. Note that this is not a snobbish way of saying that this automatically makes these kind of games superior. Maybe Shadow of the Colossus (or 'art' games in general) is not a game that you will enjoy. This doesn't mean you're a bad person or that you're stupid. After all, not everyone likes watching art films, reading difficult fiction, or going to museums to look at paintings. It's simply an artistic outgrowth of a form of entertainment, and it's endlessly exciting to see an artform in its infancy produce something so grand.

The two things that this game gets right, that I would argue no other game has gotten right before or since, are a sense of scale and a feeling of utter solitude. Both of these things are tied into exactly what makes Shadow of the Colossus so brilliant, so we'll examine them separately.

Upon encountering most Colossi, your reaction will likely be “wow, how am I going to defeat this thing??” Though your sword will reveal their weak points—a trope of boss battles that have been in videogames for years—it's never immediately obvious how you can get to and assault those weak points. People have criticized Shadow of the Colossus for being “only” a series of 16 boss battles, but that is needlessly reductive. As the common saying about this game goes, the Colossi “are” the levels. Even the ones that aren't towering bipedal creatures are 'levels' in the general sense of the word. They're like a combination of a linear platformer 'level' and a puzzle game. You 'solve' each Colossus fight as much as you 'get to the end of the level.' And given the enormous scale of most of the Colossi in the game, the enormity of your task is directly proportional to how satisfying it feels when you take them down. Seeing the comparatively tiny Wander take down these huge beasts, after being initially intimidated by them, is utterly compelling even though the sneaking suspicion that what you're doing isn't totally “good” quickly becomes a walking and then a running suspicion.

The other half of Shadow of the Colossus's gameplay is getting to the various Colossi. Getting lost in most 3D games of this sort is usually a frustration, but, here, it is a kind of reward. Even discounting the fruit trees and lizards that boost Wander's life and grip meter, respectively, the unforgettable experience of traversing the game's world feels like an optional, but wholly complete, gameplay system. Fighting the Colossi may be the game's big draw, but I would argue moving through the world is equally important. From the brilliantly realistic way that Wander's horse, Agro, acts and is controlled, to the breathtaking but completely barren (note: barren meaning “nobody else is there”, not “wastelands”) scenery you see, Shadow of the Colossus contains one of the most complete and 'natural' worlds in all of videogame history. In most games, when you happen upon a cool looking chunk of architecture, or a clearing in a forest, or some such thing, you have been conditioned to expect that some tangible game reward is there. To get a bit behind the scenes on you, a programmer wouldn't take the time to detail such an area unless there is something there. It's a waste of time and money to do this. Not so for Shadow of the Colossus. As with the behavior of the Colossi themselves—which greatly vary in their aggressiveness and reactive-ness to stimuli, just like animals in real life—everything is put into the game just to be there and to feel natural. There are forests, waterfalls, beaches, and desert expanses that serve no game purpose other than to exist and be discovered.

Shadow of the Colossus is an extraordinarily lonely game on top of all this. By the time you finish the game, you'll have spent hours with just your horse, riding around the world and trying to find paths to the next Colossus. This might sound frustrating on paper, but the game is purposely designed to evoke solitude and loneliness in the player. Though dread quickly supersedes the feeling, your immediate reaction upon seeing a Colossus is one of relief: finally, another living thing!! As someone who enjoys being alone, I found this game to be surprisingly satisfying for the amount of time you go without hearing or seeing anything other than the environment and your horse. Some have compared this feeling to the Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, and I think it's pretty apt, especially when you realize you're personalizing and sympathizing with a horse, albeit probably the most realistic horse in videogame history.

I'd like to close by saying that the story of the game is one of the best the artform has to offer even though there isn't technically that much of it. But due to its minimalist style, less is indeed more. The game, like a good art film, trusts you to fill in the blanks yourself. It's also open to interpretation, as most great works of art are, and once you really start to question and think about the implications of the story line, the motivations of the characters, and the results of your actions in the world, you're left with a lot of things to chew on. If most gamers of my generation entered the artform through Mario, in which you were obviously the good guy, saving the helpless princess love interest, then Shadow of the Colossus is, arguably, the point where everything became a little more complicated, and grew up a lot. In this game, you're maybe not a good guy, doing maybe not good things, to save a girl (we're not sure if she's a princess, a priestess, or just an average person) without really knowing our motivation for doing so (she could be our love interest, or a girl we love from afar, or our sister, or something else entirely).

Well, OK, the motivation of the game is, simply, love. Love is the only thing that could cause what is ostensibly an average guy to try to take on these huge beasts, potentially losing his life in the process. Good or bad, what Wander does is for his love of this girl, and that's something that I don't think we, as the player coming to this world from the outside, need explained to us. We've all been crazy enough due to love to try the impossible. So even if we, as the player, have only a vague idea of our motivation in the game, we understand and sympathize with Wander because we've been there. After awhile, I wasn't questioning whether Wander was doing good or bad; I felt like, he's in love, and I've been in love, and good or bad doesn't come into the issue when he is trying to help the one he loves. It's very rare that a videogame can make me relate to a character on a pretty fundamentally human level while not knowing anything about him or her otherwise. And that, if nothing else, proves to me that Shadow of the Colossus is art, and is one of the best videogames ever made.

Primer: Tortoise Part 1/Album of the Week: Tortoise

It would be impossible to calculate the impact that Tortoise's first two albums had on underground music. Though Millions Now Living Will Never Die frequently, and rightly, gets the nod for being one of the first true masterpieces of the post-rock genre, it came a full two years after Tortoise. There's something to be said for being first, and Tortoise were the first band to take the lessons of post-rock precursors Laughing Stock (by Talk Talk) and Spiderland (by Slint) and spin it all into something strikingly new, taking influences as disparate (yet fairly sympathetic) as dub, jazz, kraut-rock, soundtrack/film music, ambient, psychedelia, and minimalism.

Tortoise is a fascinating album to go back to because of how little it sounds like the Tortoise we know and love. At the time the band were often using two bassists at once; moreover, the album sounds like the monolithic work of a mysterious group of as little as one person but no more than three. Once the "Tortoise sound", as it were, became established on Millions Now Living... and TNT, returning to the sound of this album is interesting because of how simple it is. Tortoise is without a doubt the band's most ambient and minimalist release, with a restraint and sparseness rarely seen in future post-rock. At least for such sustained periods of times, that is.

As with most instrumental music, the greatness of Tortoise lies in the moods it establishes, and the evocative sounds and melodies that spill forth. This album isn't quite as borderline-austere as later Tortoise releases, so you usually get a sense of something other than a museum, where formerly dirty and fascinating pieces of history (swords, paintings, stuffed wild animals, etc.) are given a cleaned up and detached viewing by audiences. Not that Tortoise is noisy or messy. Rather, it simply strikes me as less assured and more willing to take risks than most Tortoise albums. 'Onions Wrapped In Rubber' is nearly seven minutes of very little happening, other than some stray percussion and electronic sounds. 'Ry Cooder' is a classic Tortoise piece that has an addictive bass-and-vibraphone melody as its centerpiece. 'His Second Story Island' is a contemplative tone poem for electric guitar. 'Magnet Pulls Through' is a perfect opener for such a deliberately paced and atmospheric album, threatening to erupt into a chorus or crescendo before collapsing back into taut drumming and rhythmic interplay with guitars.

As both the first album from one of the genre's biggest bands and its first significant release (again, not counting Spiderland and Laughing Stock), Tortoise, today, seems like such a small, unassuming piece of music. Even if later bands pushed this music into huge, majestic crescendos, overwhelming but pretty noise, or borderline-metal instrumental prowess, Tortoise still stands as a testament to how some revolutions start with a whisper instead of a roar.

My Morning Jacket- Evil Urges

My Morning Jacket are many things to many people. Like contemporaries such as Wilco, who crossover between many different crowds (closet music critic/bloggers, jam band followers, too-cool-for-school indie rockers, etc.), the band threatens to lose or neglect fans by changing their sound too much. Wilco overcomes this by not really giving a crap what their fans want, while My Morning Jacket are currently overcoming it by putting something for everyone on their albums. Their Z is a fantastic album, and even though it was the first time those outside the Southern Rock/jam band/classic rock axis took notice of them, it still had enough pure guitar fury to keep the attention of the latter. To put it succinctly, 'Lay Low' tears it up.

Problematically, My Morning Jacket expand their palette even further on Evil Urges, with none of the laser-sharp focus and inspired experimental pop that Z showcased. At 47 minutes, it was the band's shortest album, and while brevity may not be a sign of quality, it was in that case. Evil Urges is scattershot and varied, but it never hangs together as a whole. It's as if every few songs the album restarts--first it's funky, then it's blue eyed country soul, then it's fist pumping rock, then it's spacey and prog rock-y. This is similar to the problem that so many jam bands have: they want to showcase their songs on studio albums, their variety of styles, but also their ability to improvise. Thus they release overly long albums that are too much for newcomers to grasp, and too dry and short for the diehard to love. In My Morning Jacket's case, the problem is that they are now attempting too much on a single album, and none of it is particularly good. Z was 10 tracks, but those 10 tracks pack in a great deal of variety and inventiveness. Evil Urges only has 4 more songs, and 8 more minutes, but feels bloated and unfocused.

Most worryingly of all, the addition of funk to the band's palette is a disaster. 'Highly Suspicious' is quite possibly the worst thing they've ever recorded. It feels like a bald faced attempt by the band to inject some humor and kitsch into their music, which is a fine idea in theory, but in execution is awful. Jim James has one of those "raise the hair on the back of your neck" voices when he sticks to his brisk tenor or his spacey, reverb soaked wolf howls, but when he tries to sound like Prince, it's simply embarrassing. Title track and opening song 'Evil Urges' fares a bit better by combining the band's various musical strands with this new vocal style, but it's such an odd, long winded choice to begin the album I don't know what they were thinking.

Mainly, as I've struggled to get a handle on Evil Urges, the impression that this album is one for the fans takes shape. As it compares so unfavorably to Z, this is the only conclusion I can come to. Assuming you are a hardcore fan of the band, you'll undoubtedly love this. Assuming you're like me, and thought Z was a great album but you're still not sold on the band, then Evil Urges will do nothing to convince you otherwise.

Video: The Replacements- Bastards of Young

It never takes long before any form of expression causes/creates a form of expression that's anti- it. Funny, then, that I usually find myself drawn to that anti- force instead of the original.

Case in point, this anti-music video for a Replacements song. I've yet to get around to listening to this band, sadly, other than 'Answering Machine' which an ex-girlfriend once put on a mixtape for me. That said, you've gotta give it up to the 80s forefathers of modern indie rock like the Replacements every now and then. (Speaking of which, Our Band Could Be Your Life is an awesome book). I find this video absolutely riveting because, though it's a mostly static shot of a stereo system, it speaks to me on a level music videos never do. That level being "stop watching the visuals and pay attention to the song." Interestingly enough, many modern YouTube videos for bands are made by users and consist of just the album cover and the song playing. It's piracy, sure, but it also reminds me of what music listeners did before video killed the radio star: they stared at the album cover, or their stereo, or the ceiling, and that was enough.

Killer7

Killer7 is definitely a game that I would not consider 'fun', but one that demonstrates the potential of videogames as a storytelling medium. You could tell this story as a movie, manga, novel, etc. but it wouldn't be quite the same narrative as it was in this game. The various tools the game uses--the cell shaded graphics, the inspired/unique sound design (the acoustic guitar strum when items appear; the mechanical voice saying "bullet"), the intentionally awkward controls (at first I hated them, but after awhile they seem very deliberate), the mix of anime and CG cutscenes, the interactions in the 'save rooms' (the TV channel idea is charmingly bizarre)--could never be done in any other medium.
I know people are starting to apply the auteur theory to videogame designers, but this is a case where I feel it truly applies. You couldn't get a game like this out of any designer other than Suda51. As the game is a surreal, complex mess that I'm still trying to unravel after the ending, it reminds me a lot of a David Lynch film, open ended meanings and "leave it up to each viewer/player to decide for themselves" and all. In a similar fashion to how you always get the impression Lynch had a hand in everything in his films from the sound scoring to the camera angles to the production design to the dialogue, you get the sense that Killer7 was entirely Suda's vision brought to life.

This isn't to say that Killer7 is a flawless masterpiece. There's a big difference between an 'art' game and a great 'art' game. Just as I've never seen a movie quite like Lost Highway but don't consider it a great movie, I've never played a game like Killer7 but don't consider it a great game. This raises a whole 'nother side debate of why I play certain games, and what I hope to get out of them. Killer7 is a unique, inspired, and utterly memorable experience (experience being the key word here) but playing it is often a frustrating chore. Even though you effectively can't lose because of the Garcian character, who can instantly revive dead characters by recovering their bodies, Killer7 is still a difficult-for-the-wrong reasons gameplay experience. Enemies that can instantly kill you, or that can get off cheap hits on you because you just came through a door, are something the entire medium needs to leave behind if we want more people to stick with 'art' games like this. I don't mean that such games need to be stupidly easy, but they should at least make getting through the narrative as easy as possible.
As it's a mix of a rail shooter, survival horror, and an adventure game, Killer7 doesn't do any of these pieces particularly well, but as a combined package, it's frequently brilliant. This especially comes to a head with the boss battles, which range from unique spins on the tried and true "expose/shoot the weakpoint" to a High Noon-esque duel with a dove as the timer to a predetermined, fighting game-style tournament that you play but have no direct effect on to a "final" boss fight in which you win by letting all your characters die. Kind of.

All the while, the game is playing with the conventions of the above genres, and videogames as a whole. Just as Earthbound could be taken as a parody of RPGs, Killer7 constantly undermines your idea of what a game can be and what's supposed to happen during a plot. Much as Lost Highway starts off as a mystery about the disappearance of a musician's wife before things quickly take a turn for the surreal, Killer7 starts off about a team of assassins assigned to stop a terrorist group before quickly going off the deep end. It is absolutely post-modern, and skirts dangerously close to being a meta-game at certain points. Though it may not make a whole lot of sense to you, but you'll never forget it. The levels you go through--particularly the school and the Japanese-style mansion/house--have a surreal, dream-like atmosphere that matches the ghostly characters who talk to you with their distorted, robotic voices, creepy monologues out of which you can occasionally catch a intelligible word or two.
If you approach Killer7 like you would any other game, trying to overcome the enemies and power your way through to the end, you're missing the point. Even if it is ostensibly a shooter, it's one of those games--like Silent Hill 2, Earthbound, and Shadow of the Colossus--which you're tempted, indeed encouraged, to think about when you're done playing, and to go back to over the years to catch new details. To take your time with the game, linger in its environments, and puzzle at the complicated story (and backstory) as well as the series of endings, is to fully understand what the game was trying to do. To put it succinctly, Killer7 is a game you don't play, it's a game you experience. It has its flaws (after all, it's one of those titles that the same reasons I give for loving it, other people give for hating it) but as an experience it remains one of the best the medium has to offer.