Welcome back to Pushing Buttons – this is Keza, back with you after a period of convalescence. As I was lying in bed with Covid, watching what felt like 4,000 trailers from the live-streamed summer video-game showcases, I struggled to tell the difference between a lot of them. Every shooter seemed to be set in space. Every wholesome indie seemed to feature frogs or bears. Admittedly I was quite ill, but also, as our games correspondent Keith Stuart explored in last week’s newsletter, we’ve reached a point where a lot of mainstream culture, including games, is starting to feel as if it’s folding in on itself.
Remakes, homages and expansions of old ideas and franchises are continually repackaging our nostalgia and selling it back to us. As big-budget games become more expensive and risky to make, they have also gotten more similar. And if a game is successful, then its ideas proliferate until they’re everywhere. (Think of scalable watchtowers in open-world games – their absence now feels quite novel.)
