disclaimer: we don’t know why we wrote this

In just a few short weeks, DEEP HELL DOT COM will have been around for three whole years.

Started initially as a creative exercise, the fact that we’re still here and still making things continues to surprise us every day. We started DEEP HELL DOT COM with one, central goal: to hurt videogames as much as humanly possible. We will not stop – in other words – until videogames are dead.

A brief three years into the last decade and a piece of software was released: A piece of software that has a mechanic that makes it all Worth It. It makes it all Worth It in a way that we’re honestly surprised no one has come after. Not with the rendering power of the XBOX ONE or The New Sony Playstation 4.

METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE is a lot of things to a lot of people. If I were writing a review for the game in 2013, the year it was released, I would say that. I would probably open the whole review, with that line. The way videogame reviews went, back then, back in those halcyon days: we didn’t have to talk about the videogame at all. A young bay-area rentee could write something for a gaming magazine like “METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE IS DYNASTY WARRIORS FOR DRUG ADDICTS” and maybe elsewhere say “I DO NOT AGREE WIT HOW THESE POLYGONS LOOK!” and that would be it.

Videogame youtube, websites, twitter, etc; are so Full of deep dives into the last decade already. By halfway through the last decade, we were already mining the first five years for Stuff What Was Missed. Videogame culture is the kind of culture that will allow a 7.1 score review of something to be the absolute last critical consensus. Maybe that is, after all of the pedantry why we’re still writing about videogames the way we do.

META LGEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE is a game where the primary mechanic is an act of bisection. You can slow time and steer the direction of your sword. You can cut through projectiles, cars, robot dogs, arteries and watermelons. The first trailer for the game, before it switched development houses, asked all of us “WHAT WOULD YOU CUT” and the answer is everything.

Those mechanics are tacked onto a character-driven action game with all of the accouterments of that genre. Combat is an explosion of movement that will suddenly come screeching to a halt so the player can perform surgery. That surgery is conducted with a five foot piece of steel and the doctor is a robot man in high-heels. I am trying to take a little piece of someone else for myself.
The game tell you when it’s time for this with a brimming-white picture of the kanji for ZANDATSU.

It is the only game the successfully re-creates the thrill of piloting a freight-train directly into a brick wall and coming out unscathed after.

“ZANDATSU” is a word the developers chose because it means to ‘Cut and Take’ – that the philosophy of METAL GEAR RISING is one that is all encompassing comes as no surprise.
Raidens villains are monomaniacal capitalists, driven by war and green. Their version of Cut and Take is one driven by markets and bodies. A machine that cannot be stopped, pit against a literal one.
Other characters match their philosophies up against Raiden unsuccessfully – at the end of the day the world of this game is one ruled not by physical strength, but a willingness to excise the body.

“They can’t go playing Frankenstein with their own soldiers.” is a sentence used by one character to describe the cyborg soldiers Raiden spends much of the game fighting. If you wanted to take the whole philosophy of Metal Gear: that war is a machine that corrupts the body and apply it here, Raiden really is a doctor. The goal of the game then becomes to see how quickly you can strip the human body of the things that make it into a tool of war. There’s never any statement about how Raiden can put down his sword whenever – but these soldiers can’t.

I realize all of this maybe makes me sound like a violence driven lunatic. That’s why METAL GEAR RISING is getting a late-January award for VIDEOGAME OF THE DECADE. Embark on a fun adventure to understand the human body from the inside out. Learn about yourself – are you a physician or a back alley surgeon? Watch someone else play and learn about them, in this art game about vivisection.

Nothing like the mechanic here may be tried for a long time. As videogame budgets grow increasingly large, the idea of everything having an Inside to be exposed it one that comes with hours of employee crunch time. And people were talking about the stonkingly great budgets of entertainment when this game was released. They have only doubled since then. I have no idea what the development cost of METAL GEAR RISING was: did someone skip the holidays so I could make Raiden plunge his hand into the spinal column of a mercenary? I could look up numbers, but that wouldn’t tell me anything.

If the person writing this article could perform a bit of ‘Cut and Take’ of their own – it may be to wish for entertainment that wasn’t created by such cruel methods. Maybe the developers of this here game would even agree with me. There’s no way of knowing, unless I get the opportunity to ask them.

An experiment; a big budget game. A singular philosophy that encapsulated the story and the mechanics. METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE can tell you about yourself. It can tell you about others. If you have spent a dozen hours getting a platinum trophy – it tells you that there’s not enough blood in the world to make flow.