We all demise the lament of the Movie Tie-In game in videogames; here was a golden age of Computer Software. Scrappy tie-ins, real, true videogames made by the kind of teams that would have to suffer in indignity making corporate shovelware until they got their chance to make The Mighty Thor on the Gameboy Advanced, or The Amazing Spider-Man on the Sony Playstation 2. Every videogame is discretely a movie tie-in game, now, and there are only two genres: collect number stat boosts, or Open World City Game.

I can see a trailer from a hundred miles away and know in my heart it will be a fully-3D realized adventure with a stock character controller where every piece of fabric moves and jostles in real time. Pressing the R2 button will release a bolt of energy, fire a gun, swing a sword. One of the other trigger buttons will either open a radial menu of available abilities or else wise activate some kind of shield.

“Like many, I’ve been waiting for a truly excellent Harry Potter game since I was in the third grade. In that time, we’ve gotten some respectable LEGO Potter games, an underwhelming EA Sports Quidditch game for some reason, and even suffered through the fevered nightmare that is Harry Potter Kinect. But none of these has come close to fulfilling that fantasy of receiving a Hogwarts admission letter that opens the door to a secret world. With Hogwarts Legacy, I’m happy to say that we finally got a Harry Potter game that captures some of that magic. Its open world map absolutely nails the vibe of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it has spellcasting combat that’s stupefyingly good, the characters that inhabit it are charming and unforgettable, and it is positively brimming with countless diversions to soak up dozens of hours of your time. It may not be the most impressive technical achievement and it is certainly cursed with a lack of enemy variety, but none of Hogwarts Legacy’s issues can cast a Descendo charm on this triumphant visit to the Wizarding World.” – IGN.COM

Over a grey chiaroscuro haze, a Wizard floats wordless in a type of purgatory. They’ve never been truly in control of their life, and here, someone fucks with their entire outfit and sense of style to find the piece of equipment that offers the most realized of all of the 2% buffs they can get. Incremental boosts, treasure hoards of gold that must be left behind (but don’t worry there’s always More). At a certain point your harlequinn of character design will stratify with every other player in the game as all of them reach a kind of delineated line of stat boosts and character aesthetic. The harsh truth of the world is that it is a treadmill pushing you towards one final confrontation and then a New Game+ where abilities and equipment are carried over, or an endgame elysian field of constant raids and boss-refreshes. Fight the world boss until the corners of your eyes fill with the crust of sleep deprivation.

All videogames are meant to be played in a weekend, and the weekend is someone’s life. A helpful escape. A reprieve from adulthood that lets you slink into the childhood fantasy of being a Space Marine or a Wizard or a Superhero. Countless numb fingered reviews trickle down from the mouths and hands of internet writers into the mouths and hands of the game playing public. What product do II buy? Where do I go next? What store carries the thing that will give me the most Fulfillment for the most amount of Hours but can still be Talked about with my friends over the Watercooler? In our ever darkening future of software stratification and fidelity, can a small incremental, a 2% increase in foliage density or cloth physics be equipped right into my fucking brain and get me to buy The Witcher 3 again?

Would someone die if a previous generation videogame got released on the PS5 with no buffs? Would you kill over it? Would I?

IGN has Done It Again, this Time For Real. A writer has released from their platform a dense and wordy review of JK. Rowling is a Fucking Transphobe and Bigot And The Purchase of This Videogame Goes Directly to her Bank Account’s Harry Potter: The Official Videogame. A rousing 9/10 that claims broadly and pointedly and like brandishing a gun right in our face but let’s be honest they’re so keenly and tokenly first a Harry Potter fan that it would probably be a fucking Wand, if they didn’t take some part of their review to let us know they have a Bisexual Tattoo next to their Harry Potter tattoo: sensible adults might have had one or the other covered up in opposition out of some misbegotten sense of tribalism, but I digress.

Do I need to spare a Paragraph here for the innumerable ways J.K. Rowling has professed she will use every cent garnered in her life of creating stories for children to cause the suffering of trans people or any queers with pronouns she doesn’t like? Is the acceptable literary mechanic to turn every word into links that spiral off into their own worlds, each one a catalogue and record of the authors hateful, scornful heart of pure misery.

In almost every way Hogwarts: Legacy is the Harry Potter Game I’ve Always Wanted to Play embellishes a headline next to klaxon-red 9 ensorceled in a wizards hexagon. It casts an immediate spell over everyone who sees it: the handy UI of IGN’s website tells the prospective reader to click the bold, underlined headline. Most people wont: come on. The reason METACRITIC has a huge green or red badge with a number in it when you look up any videogame is because games as product are sold as a personal inventory item that makes something go up. Whether you’re in the category that that thing is Taste or Life Enjoyment. The red color bleeds through the eyes of the prospective reader: it wears the wizard’s hexagon, two sides away from saying: “Go no further.” Who the fuck would read this? It’s certainly coming off to me like it was never meant for human eyeballs, but to catch the listless algorithm of Google’s SEO cralwerbots.

I hinge on the authors admission that no Potter Product comes close to the absolute enrapturement they would feel if a real life Hogwarts Letter ended up on the door: not a letter that so much says that you’re a special savant but a letter claiming there’s a place reserved for you at the top of society, and power too – power no one else in the world can lay claim to. After a brief four year correspondence course, there’s an upper echelon of other people just like you with that power. If the wizard books were American, they would be about a kid who goes to Columbia for the CIA.

Further down in the review, after multiple paragraphs that make Harry Potter: The Videogame, sound like every videogame but uses so many words to say “There’s a little something for everyone here.” is the barbed IGN blurb – an oval stretched through the center of this Please Buy Harry Potter Essay that tells us the tone and consideration of how the giant gaming website feels towards the series’ author absolute contempt and hatred for queer identities: they should not, and cannot, affect the way we want to sell this product to you.

“As critics our job is to answer the question of wether or not Hogwarts Legacy is fun to play.” That’s it: right there, buried in that line is the effusive face of videogame criticism coming to rear its ugly head in a way it rarely does. There is – despite statements from journalists who were previously employed by IGN stating otherwise: a simple decleration that any videogame passing through their hall must be given an honest statement. There are no reviews on IGN.com of Honey Select or Sword and Tower of Succubus. There are no reviews of He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me or Robert Yang’s The Tearoom. Horny pervert games, true independent violence, queer storytelling and personal histories are left somewhere on the cutting room floor so someone can tell readers they need feel like they’re missing something if they don’t play JK ROWLING IS A TRANSPHOBE’s Harry Potter: Legacy.

I dip into the well of combat navigation the author is stuck with and fuck me I’ve played this – it’s right there in the first paragraph. Press R2 to throw Captain Ameria’s Shield and L1 to stagger an enemy with a quick dash attack. Fire your blaster. Swing your sword. It’s all headed to a place where we aren’t so much playing videogames anymore, but rapidly deciding which flavor of identical live service we’d like to enjoy.

“You’ll also be forced to change up your tactics regularly, since many enemies have color-coded shields that can only be broken by spells of a particular type. For example, enemies with a red shield won’t be damaged until you hit them with a fire-based spell, which means you’ll need to keep a few of those handy. “

Ninja Theory did this in DmC: Devil May Cry and we had sense enough to know as reviewers and game playing public that it was rote and the only time it really worked was in a semi-famous Dreamcast game, here, the sentences before read into the revelation that certain enemies require color coded damage like it’s a goddamned revelation. Is this the future? Am I living it now?

“However, if you’re as much of a loot hoarder as I am and were hoping to gather up all the treasures in the world and dump them in a closet like in Skyrim you’ll be painfully disappointed by Legacy’s abysmal inventory space, which only lets you hold a couple dozen items and aggravatingly fills up in no time at all. This means you’ll miss out on tons of items early on unless you go to your menu and decide which precious treasure to throw overboard every time you open a chest. “

The tone of pure admiration for the world of Hogwarts: Legacy carries on throughout the review. Who’s fantasy is this now, as an adult? Who is so trapped in the world of nine to five jobs and daily tasks and lists and planner apps that they’re waiting for a letter to a fantasy castle? They say comfort makes cowards of us all, but I know adults who relish the challenge of chasing new comforts that bring them closer to who they are and discarding the ones tying them more and more to childhood. Hogwarts, not the videogame, but the setting carries with it a type of lingering wish in the souls of the people addicted to its source material that can never be grown out of or passed. I am special. There is a letter waiting for me. I will have power over everyone I’ve ever considered beneath me – spectacularly rooted in the fears and fervor of the desiccated and dying British Ruling Class. Abigail Thorne once said that every English person wanted to Fuck The Queen in a youtube video, and I am here to say the sole power of Harry Potter is translating that slavering drooling wish for monarchical power to the hands of every other country the world over. Grab your wand, Wizard. There’s a special world waiting for you.

Is that what’s special about the review? A glowing spell circle, the harsh light of the hard edges of a high number tied to another piece of shovelware that will be dead in one season and some DLC. Is it that the writer has taken to twitter to Decry The Haters and force themselves upon the masses, insisting that just because the fantasies of their childhood drive them to supporting a hateful bigot, they can still be their friend?

Is it meandering blurb in the center telling us in no uncertain words that the future of game reviews is here now, and it looks like an industry suffering enough to prop itself up that it will review every videogame that is pitched to it with no critical asides, no delving under the surface skin, lest they fail to adequately sell a product enough that it can get at least two seasons of DLC? The bearer of responsibility in the online world can only settle for less, settling only for oatmeal-mouthed statements on twitter as the public life crosses into the professional one. In their avatar for IGN dot com, the review writer wears a tight-necked black tie and dress shirt. Well, the future of games press is here: and we’re all fucking used car salesmen.

Bereft of any responsibility to the other queers around them, the author looks with a scornful gaze into a bright solar flare. Nothing matters more than childhood, as an author pledges to spend her money on ruining as many trans and queer lives that she can. And with this, at least they’ve been given a videogame they wanted since childhood. Developers not responsible, buyers not responsible, authors. Will they look around now, and wonder where their trans friends went?