Should Critics Be Good at Games?
Sometimes journalists embarrass themselves but I'm not so sure we should care
I sit here, drunkenly staring at a number in the bottom right corner of my screen. The number is 8324. Spelled out in letters that’s eight thousand, three hundred, and twenty four. These digits are a talisman of my shame. These digits- eight, three, two and four- denote my ranking worldwide in Black Bird, a game that I can’t even beat but that I plan on reviewing in the near future.
So it occurred to me that no one but the most incapable scare quote enveloped “journalist” begins an article with “I read this tweet the other night and it got me thinking,” so I wrote a whole integer laden intro that managed to tease a future article in “On Shovelware.” But I did read a tweet the other night and it did get me thinking. The tweet from one @Ajo1322 was about whether or not games journalists should be good at the games they review, and I figured, hey, I haven’t done a poorly-researched, half-baked think piece in a while, and what is “On Shovelware” but a bunch of poorly-researched, half-baked think pieces?
The tweet itself was partly inspired by an incident in which a critic playing Cuphead was barely able to play a tutorial and later repeatedly walked into enemies, subjecting Cuphead to the unpleasant experience of dying over and over.* This is embarrassing and no, you shouldn’t feel bad about enduring a short empathetic cringe or enjoying a chuckle of schadenfreude. But does it matter? Pardon my French, but Cuphead is fucking hard. The average player almost certainly walks into those daisies or trolls or whatever whimsical and murderous twenties cartoon enemy is getting thrown at them. It’s 2020, not 1985, and games don’t need to be excruciatingly difficult to hold our attention. And even in 1985 the average player was walking a straight into a goomba in the first level of Super Mario Bros.
A google search shows that you can find plenty of articles and youtube videos musing on the difficulty of Cuphead, and whether or not it’s too hard. A Forbes article about the controversy notes that Cuphead is “by most rational standards, incredibly difficult to play” and defends the Venturebeat critic who could barely make it out of the tutorial. The journalist behind the article, however, goes on to note that “yes, I got through the tutorial just fine” to make sure that we understand that he isn’t one of those game critics who write purple prose with the best of them but is totally incapable of playing the things they write about. And so Forbes has it both ways- their critic is able to complain that the difficulty of Cuphead might turn some players off but still keeps his street cred.
This is ironic. It’s hard to argue that the difficulty of Cuphead wouldn’t turn some players off. I am one of the many thousands of people who are unable to beat it. I have sunk numerous punishing hours into that candy coloured nightmare of pattern memorisation and have never made it past the fourth boss. But to be fair, I’m not bothered by games like that. I spent a chunk of my autumn getting killed in Gradius before the end of the first level and have now spent the past week piloting a raven’s severed head through four levels of not-quite-Gradius-level hell only to get killed by the final boss in “Black Bird.” Many people are bothered by this annoying level of difficulty, though, and those people also read (and even write) reviews.
I’m a firm believer in the Roger Ebert method of criticism; criticism is written for the people who you think might enjoy the work of art or cultural product that is being written about. Obviously L.O.L. Surprise Remix: We Rule the World is not a game aimed at thirty one year old indie game nerds like me who grew up with Super Mario Bros. Part of what makes a game like Cuphead so interesting is that it’s unclear who exactly it’s aimed at. The beautiful hand drawn art makes it seem like it’s aimed at animated film buffs or even kids who like the brightness. The old school big band arrangements of the soundtrack seem aimed at swing dancers or nerds like me who majored in jazz composition in school. But the difficulty makes it clear that it’s actually aimed at the aforementioned indie game nerds or even Mega Man speedrunners. I got it when it finally launched on switch as a sort of combination of those three, but mainly as someone who thought that the Merry Melodies-inspired art style awash in fake projector grain was something I never knew I needed from a game. And in that sense I was quite happy with it.
But as a critic it would have been imprudent not to mention that as someone who spends a lot of time with platformers I was incapable of making it halfway through the game. This is important information for the average player to hear, but also information that will get you mocked mercilessly on the internet by people who likely also couldn’t get halfway through Cuphead.
And so we come back to the question begged at the beginning of this post. Should critics be good at games? I think they should probably at least be average at them. A video game critic who can’t beat New Super Mario Bros Wii is probably not the person you want opining on the difficulty of the game you’re thinking of throwing down $60 for. But complaining that somebody sucks at Cuphead is like complaining that somebody has no business reviewing mountain climbing gear if they can’t climb Everest. If speedrunners were the only people reviewing games then game reviews would all be written for speedrunners. I am not a speedrunner. I am a schmuck who can’t beat Cuphead, and as far as I can tell that’s fine. I just won’t write a review of it.
*For some reason numerous people on the internet believed that this critic was an employee of IGN although he was in fact an employee of Venturebeat.