Games worth discovering

To those who have never experienced Arena: Breakout

303 View2024-03-27

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to date a drop-dead-gorgeous narcissistic sociopath with borderline personality disorder? Well then, my emotionally troubled insecure masochistic friend, have I got a game for you.

Over the course of my life, I've heard the term 'toxic' thrown around in regards to our own well being and who we as people choose to keep around us as friends and partners, and the correlation between the two. Naturally, it makes sense that if we choose to surround ourselves with negative influences then it will, in turn, affect our lives on a day to day basis for the worse. Seems like a pretty clear cut red flag to steer around, right?

Well what if that red flag was insanely attractive, deceptively approachable, and outwardly flirtatious towards you? Still think you could curve it and swerve it with a cool and collected demeanor found only in TikTok videos and your wildest of daydreams? Of course you couldn't. You'd touch that glowing red-hot stove without second thought, the infinite possibilities and hypothetical scenarios of success and happiness filling your head the entire time your hand made that ill-fated journey towards skin grafts, burn cream and the silent judgements of your questionable life choices by your friends and family for a long time to come.

This game is that red flag. It is the embodiment of the age old metaphor of stove burners and appendages. It will make you fall in love, then tear you to shreds before sending you through a wood chipper and catching what's left of you on a velvet pillow soaked in gasoline. And when you finally manage to molecularly reconstruct yourself and go through the arduous process of learning to walk and talk again, this game will be waiting for you in the parking lot of that rehabilitation clinic with a bouquet of flowers and a gallon of your favorite ice cream, gushing over how much they missed your smile, your touch, your caring nature and what they can't wait to do to you once they get you home and out of those clothes. And you'll buy every word of it. I know I did.

It's a perplexingly masochistic merry go round of crushing heartbreak and pure euphoric bliss. The illusion of free will dictates that we can get off the ride at any time, yet we let it take us for another spin, knowing full and well what awaits us on the far end of that rotation. So why do we do it? For me, it's those increasingly sparse moments of the purest kinds of satisfaction that takes up approximately 1% of the time poured into the relationship. It almost makes the other 99% of time spent in a bottomless pit of misery worth it. Almost.

There's just so many aspects of this game that seem to be designed counterintuitively, all the way down to its core premise; what's the point of having identifiable factions, characters, and an overarching storyline if everything boils down to a random chaotic free for all? Even your own squad can, and most definitely will, at any point in time turn you into a statistic over a can of beans. And with the cost of ammo alone, it can set you back HOURS of time spent scraping together a half decent load out, the only purpose of all this work being to prolong the inevitable. Which is your untimely death.

But it's the moments where everything comes together, when you stumble upon an unsuspecting operator while they're elbow deep in a crate or their own backpack, blissfully unaware of the barrel of your rifle tickling their ear, all their hard work and time spent grinding now in your hands to decide whether or not the poor soul will live to see another perfect raid. Not this day, he won't. Landing that perfect one shot kill from hundreds of meters out, to the point where their squad mates can't even tell which direction the shot came from because the sound of your rifle couldn't even reach them before the bullet did... These are the moments I live for in this game. These are the moments that make all the pain and suffering worth it.

In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend you put yourself through this twisting miasma of self loathing and rage, and who knows, maybe it won't even resemble a struggle for you to carve out a living in the dark zone like it does for so many others...

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