Category: Games

Please notice me, Warden-senpai

Soul Hackers is an odd game. Originally released for the Sega Saturn in 1997 for Japan only. In the early 2010s — around when I was active in the MegaTen community — it had garnered a reputation as something of a hidden gem. Unlike the mainline games’ bombastic storylines about cosmic conflict and worldending events, the Devil Summoner line of games were more grounded and less shallow. Soul Hackers even had a charming 90s Hackers aesthetic alongside a well-rounded cast of characters, long before that got common for the series.

For a time it was the quintessential “good taste” pick. The kind of title you brought up in conversation to signal that you were indeed a pretty cool guy. When Atlus finally brought Soul Hackers to the west in a snazzy 3DS rerelease in 2013, it seemed like us non-Japanese speakers were finally invited to the cool kids table. See, there was just one issue.

The game was not that good.

Alright, do not crucify me just yet. Yes, the game is cool and interesting and definitely worth checking out. But it is also an old school dungeon crawler with wonky mechanics and a limited narrative. Mind you, this was at the height of the Persona 4 craze. Press turn and its variants were king and we were just coming off high of a great run of Atlus portable titles such as the Devil Survivor games.

Hallmark mechanics such as demon fusion and significant elemental weaknesses were still very rudimentary. And while the story feels pretty thin by modern standards (even for 2013) it was still a narrative game at its core. Strange Journey had released a couple of years earlier and had also had the same oldschool dungeon crawler gameplay. But unlike Soul Hackers, Strange Journey had a lot of meat to its dungeons. Hidden areas, optional quests and thrilling exploration. Soul Hackers was a game that used the (at the time well-worn) dungeon crawler format as a medium for a Hollywood-esque plot. An odd combination of elements that could probably only happen in 1997.

I will go out on a limb and say that the vibe is the most interesting thing about Soul Hackers and you do not really need to actually play the game to appreciate that. So when the 3DS version finally hit the west, I remember everyone on the boards being excited, only for the conversation to quickly die off when people actually got their hands on the game itself. As it often happens with Japan Only titles, the hype probably outgrew the game itself.

Hack You!

So I have been playing Soul Hackers recently. It is a neat game, one of the few MegaTen games with a western release that I never really got around to beating. It has been on my backlog since, well, 2013 when I bought it on release. I got a sudden urge to play some oldschool MegaTen, so on a whim I decided to pick it up again.

I began looking up emulators almost out of habit, before it hit me. “Wait a minute” I thought. “I own this game. Why am I fiddling around with emulator settings”. So I dusted off my old 3DS (and panicked a bit about finding the charger) and got Soul Hackers loaded up on the SD card. That should have been the end of it. I could finally play the game. But there is an issue.

See, I do not play games like I did back in 2011. I comment on them — sometimes I write about them. I take screenshots, I record footage and make small video clips. It is not even that hard. Most modern consoles have built-in capture modes and setting up OBS on a PC is trivial. But the 3DS has none of these features.

What if I stumble on a funny piece of dialog and want to share it? Do you expect me to reiterate it like some medieval peasant who has seen a big shadow in the woods? What is the point of playing this decades old JRPG, if I can’t share my experience?

You do not need to have to have studied Social Science to be familiar with the French philosopher, Michel Foucault ,and his liken of post-modern society to the Panopticon. A (mostly theoretical) prison, designed to allow a single guard to observe any prisoner at any time. The point of the panoptic prison is that the possibility of surveillance would always be present for the inmates. Thus they would always act under the presumption that they were under observation, even if it was physically impossible for the warden to surveil every inmate at the same time.

It is an apt metaphor for society in the 21st century. Not because of surveillance per say (although mass-surveillance has arguably become shockingly normalized), but because the barrier between our public and private spheres of life have been completely eroded. It is probably unnecessary to point out how the rise of modern communication technology has facilitated instant access to the civil sphere and how that has warped our mindset. You can yell at strangers about tax policies while physically being at your niece’s birthday party. And conversely, we willingly invite the public into our private life when we post and share both mundane and intimate moments from our lives.

Chat, are we alone right now?

What shocked me was realizing that this had even infected how I personally approach playing games. I play with a commentators mindset. What do I think about this? Do I have some unique observation or perspective? If you like to talk and discuss video games, the primary exponent of that are streamers and big internet personalities. But they engage with media in a different way from me. Or do they? I have realized that I play stuff as if I have a big following.

The people gotta know what I think of Soul Hackers. The bells are ringing out in London. Hear ye, hear ye! VOKAL does not like managing MAG! It is embarrassing.

One of my favourite sociological concepts is the disembedding of social relations, as described by the English sociologist, Anthony Giddens. As per Giddens’ theory of structuration, social relations (e.g. teacher-student) affect how we move about the world. A teacher is in a position of authority over a student and has the right to determine who speaks at any given moment. But that status is constantly produced and reproduced by continuous actions. The teacher stands in front of the class and the student sits in a row of desks and chairs. That is how we determine who is who.

Anthony Giddens

Georg Herbert Mead

Masahiro Sakurai

What Giddens remarked was that these social relations were embedded in a specific time and space. The teacher is a teacher, because of the classroom. In an almost ritualistic fashion, the student comes to the classroom at certain times in order to reaffirm the teacher’s role over them. Even if the teacher-student relation still influences them outside of school, it would slowly weaken and shrink away without the concrete space and time of classes.

However, Giddens observed that social relations in the late-modern society, were increasingly disembedded from specific locales or occasions. Disembedding is my favourite concept, because I am not sure if I can adequately explain it today. I am old enough to remember a time where friendships could consist of “let us meet in the field behind school at 7 and kick a ball around for a bit every Wednesday”. Or acquaintances you only knew because they frequented the same LARP joint as you.

Today it is hard to imagine having a friend where you do not know their contact information, home address or at least their last name. On the internet you can have ephemeral pals where you do not even know what they look like, let alone their legal name. I can tune into my favourite actor’s show regardless of where I am or when it was broadcast. While the old world was a rigid structure of places, times and names, the current one is a big soup with nothing to hold on to.

Let’s start a podcast

What I am trying to convey is that I do not know where to go in order to talk about Soul Hackers. There is no local game club I can saunter down to, with a friendly crowd of regulars who I can relay my experiences to. We can talk about digital spaces that have similar properties as physical ones. Traditional internet forums certainly had a sense of place. Most of the current internet just does have that. Bluesky, Youtube, Discord. It is all soup. Still, the only avenue left for me is to ape the formats and expressions I am presented with.

One thing is how these structures shape our actions, but I am actually more interested in how it morphs our way of thinking. A old interviewer trick, is listening to how people talk about others. If you are trying to gleam some insights about how someone feels about say, dress codes at a workplace, you can listen to how they frame other people’s judgements. If they say something like “If I showed up to work dressed like that, my colleagues would think lesser of me” it is often a sign that they would judge others on that account. This is what Georg Herbert Mead referred to as “the generalized other”. We talk about some “other” person, but in reality it is a reflection of ourself.

Mead would probably be amused to learn that in today’s parlance, we have taken this a step further. For maybe the first time in human history, people now naturally talk from a fourth person perspective. Streamer vernacular has entered into the public lexicon to an extent where people will reflexively refer to “chat” in an audienceless setting. Even if there is an ironic twang to it, we talk as if we always expect someone to be listening in. As Mead might put it, we have developed a generalized audience. Chat, are we cooked?

You can turn off the stream, but can you also turn off the audience in your head? Can you play Soul Hackers on your own?

2026-10-12
Blaming the Cat

When I look at how other people play video games, I sometimes feel like Seneca the Younger seeing the great city of Rome go up in flames. Like geez, chill out guys.

There is a passion on display that I could never replicate even if I tried to. And I am not talking about Gamers™ getting irrationally mad over pronouns or vagina bones. Completely regular folk have an ability to summon emotional attachment to the act of playing video games that is completely foreign to me.

There are many reasons to play games, but I will take a wild shot and guess that most people play for fun. When you do something to be entertained, you do not want to be irritated. I get that. But I simply do not understand getting annoyed at arbitrary things outside of one’s control.

I recently saw a benign post on Bluesky where the poster asked what small, inoffensive pet peeve people had in video games. The premise of the post was jovial, not something meant for greater scrutiny. But I cannot help myself.

Even in this context — even when we have removed all stakes from the conversation — can I get annoyed at something so inconsequential. As much as they might appear so, games are not simulations. They are games. And games have rules and restrictions. Yeah, in real life you might have been able to climb that waist high fence, but this is not real life. The fence might as well have been a sign that says »Not part of the level«.

»Why can I not do X?« Because it would break the game. If you could actually climb over the fence what then? Congratulations, you bypassed the carefully designed level layout. Would it be cool if the level had included the section behind the fence? Sure, you can always extend the limits of the play area, but at some point there needs to be a limit and some fence, locked door or wall to signal it. Where this limit is placed will always — in some fashion — be arbitrary. There are no natural limits to a digital space. A designer has to decide »this is it«.

This apparent annoyance at limitations stabs at something greater for me. A mystifying curiosity about why people get mad at the arbitrary nature of games. I have dubbed this phenomenon blaming the cat based on the most prominent example in my experience.

If you are familiar with the Persona series, you know it is a JRPG — wrapped inside of a life sim. When you are not delving into supernatural dungeons, you are navigating a regular teen life. These sections require a lot of context, since it is not always readily apparent what interactions are available to you or what their consequences will be. This led to a lot of dry text to the tone of »I should go home for today« or »Should I commit time to do X?«.

It is necessary as a game function, but hardly exhilarating as prose. One of the many ways Persona 5 improved on the format was to personify this game system voice. The game added Morgana — a companion character that follows you around and comments on what you are doing. So instead of some omniscient narrator telling you it is bedtime, it is an actual character in the game.

So for me, this added a lot of warmth and charm to the more rote parts of Persona 5. It is such an obvious way to deal with the shortcomings of a silent protagonist, that Zelda has already made it a stable since Ocarina of Time in 1998. It has just not been as common for JRPGs, for reasons I cannot entirely grasp.

But here is the thing. A lot of people hate Morgana. Some of this is because of his role in the story specifically, but for a lot of people it is because he makes you go to bed. A shocking amount of people do not see Morgana as a charming way to spice up stock text, but as a foreign entity that limits your actions. I do not know how to adequately describe their thoughts as anything other than they believe that if it was not for this cartoon cat, they did not have to go to bed.

And I can honestly only laugh. The game is meticulously designed around the player having access to a certain amount of time to spend on activities. This amount is arbitrary. It could be X or it could be Y. It does not matter, beyond the limits the designers have built the experience around. When you finish a major encounter in Persona 5, you are not allowed to take any actions afterwards. Does this make sense? Probably not, but those are the rules.

So I laugh when people think this in-game cat is taking away precious time they could spend on completing objectives. There is nothing outside the bedroom if the designer did not intend it to be. Getting mad because the game limits you is like getting mad at Monopoly for not allowing you to skip spaces. Those are the rules, man.

People rejoiced when the updated rerelease of Persona 5 allowed you to bypass this former restriction. Like it salvaged the game from being crap for some. But nothing has actually changed. A value that used to be X is now Y instead. Completely arbitrary.

To be clear, I find it completely valid to criticize game design. It is a hassle to navigate the inventory, the jump feels floaty, the value on this card is unbalanced etc. Plenty of stuff can be annoying because it leads to a worse experience as a player.

But invisible walls or waist high barriers? Those are just necessary limits that have been arbitrarily placed somewhere.

You gain nothing from blaming the cat. Those are just the rules of the game.

2026-04-07
How much disco is too much?

Esoteric Ebb is a highly enjoyable narrative-heavy RPG — the type of game that has become colloquially known as a »discolike«. The main creator of Ebb — the Swedish solo dev Christoffer Bodegård — has happily invoked the term himself, as a descriptor for the style of his game. As a massive fan of Disco Elysium, I’ll admit that it was this comparison that initially drew my attention to Ebb. Despite actively being on the lookout for a successor to the 2019 hit RPG, this had not been on my radar at all until a demo dropped with good word of mouth.

And Esoteric Ebb makes a great first impression. The art style is charming and the elevator pitch for the plot is sleek and enticing:

»The first ever election is in five days and a tea house has just blown up. The city is sending its worst cleric to find the cause. They send you. «

It is a great setup and the promise of an esoteric adventure about political intrigue in a kitsch fantasy setting got me stoked.

But here is the thing about Ebb. There is a steep drop-off from the first to the second impression. When you hit New Game you’re hit with a character creation screen where the standard D&D attribute array has been restyled as figments of your personality. Okay sure — your skills speaking to you in their own voices was a highly recognizable part of Disco Elysium. No harm in giving that another spin.

Then the game starts properly in a dark void with a disembodied voice. You wake up in a morgue with no clue on how you got there — gotta pay your dues to Planescape Torment. The locals are mad at you for being late and you’re handed a straight-faced partner because of jurisdictional issues. This is all eerily familiar, because it is beat-for-beat Disco Elysium. You have even lost your gu- erhm spellbook. The early hours of Ebb has a liminal quality where this prior game has been superimposed over a Dungeons & Dragons session. Throughout my time with Ebb I kept mentally cataloguing all the elements that felt lifted from Disco Elysium. The player character’s unresolved trauma related to women. My dexterity stat trying to convince me to be a libertarian. The reoccurring option of introducing yourself with a self-made title. It just kept coming.

Was this a conductive state of mind? Not really, no. I was actually pretty self-conscious about how silly I was for deducting points from Ebb, when the thing that had explicitly grabbed my attention was its nature as a disco successor. Early on a lot of the hallmark traits were indeed kinda reassuring. The distinct UI and sound design, the skill checks and snappy writing. I instantly felt in good hands — because this game was clearly made by someone who loved Disco Elysium as much as I. But then it just kept on washing over me, like a tidal wave of inspirational baggage. And at that point I couldn’t help but think:

How much disco is too much?

For what it is worth, I do think that after a while the obvious references blend into the background and the unique quirks of Bodegårds setting — The Esoteric Coast — eventually pulled me in. When I got genuinely moved by an ancient snailman wizard vowing to save his wife from eternal torment, I knew that Ebb was more than just a knock-off. But in a similar vein I also knew that the plot failed to quite stick the landing — for the simple reason that it did not match up to the masterful climax of Disco Elysium.

Of course this is unfair. Every piece of media falls flat if you constantly compare it to your literal favorite. But Ebb invites that comparison so freely that it becomes exceedingly hard to ignore. I cannot help but notice that the general response to the game has been a »Well, it’s not as good as Disco Elysium, but…«. What comes after that then depends on whether you could see past the metaphoric forest.

The main question for me is: would I have played this game if not for the disco-styled wrappings? I am honestly not sure. The sheer amount of narrative heavy RPGs I do not play is evidence of that. As much as I hate to admit it — the real reason I picked up Esoteric Ebb was because of its reputation as a disco-successor. But still, during my adventures in the city of Norvik the best moments were when the game deviated from the formula. The new encounter system is a great innovation — if a sleight bit undercooked. I ended up surprisingly invested in the esoteric lore of the setting. And the Discworld x European comicbook style aesthetic was captivating. I did not miss the avant garde Estonian flair that worked so well for Elysium. I liked this bumbling homebrewed D&D campaign made by my new favorite DM.

The answer to my question is that I probably would not have played a non-disco Ebb. But paradoxically, there can in fact be too much disco and Ebb is arguably over that limit.

I think of myself as a fairly typical disco fan: obsessed with Elysium, but found peace with the fact that it will never be continued by its original creators. Instead, I put my faith in the neigh mythic birth of a new genre. The fabled discolike — the term Bodegård used to describe his game.

There have been plenty of games that has taken inspiration from Disco Elysium, without being discolikes proper. Obsidian’s Pentiment (2022) and the two Citizen Sleeper games (2022 & 2025) immediately spring to mind. But — while good in their own right — they never quite scratched that disco itch the same way Ebb did. While clearly derivative, it is still the only game that has really succeeded in capturing that magic. So, if we want discolikes as a proper genre, then Ebb is arguably a necessary steppingstone. In the event of an Esoteric 2 (please please), then I am certain that Bodegård will not need to pay such clear homages again. He has proven the viability of a 1:1 disco game that is not Elysium.

My hope is that we will look back at Ebb in the future and see it as a weird, nascent attempt at a genre piece. Because — Urht Be Blessed — I sincerely hope this will be the first of many.

2026-03-10

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