I’ve commonly heard the world of Dark Souls described as a form of purgatory. This is not accurate. Purgatory is a condition of temporary judgement, a holding cell before final placement in heaven or hell. The condition in Dark Souls is nothing of the sort. After the final encounter is finished and the inauspicious credits roll, you awaken back in your cell.

That’s the real quandary here. You see, Rocketbirds lacks heart. It’s a stale representation based on a textbook definition of what games should be.

In video games, there’s good hard and there’s bad hard. Good hard can be seen in titles such as Demon Souls, Catherine and Castlevania. The challenges found here are tough, yet consistently fair. For example, in Demon’s Souls, an enemy’s attack pattern may be extremely complex, but there’s always a way around it. Through trial, error, and practice, it’s possibleto learn the pattern and defeat any enemy without taking a single point of damage. If a blow is taken, it’s most likely because the player flubbed a button combination or missed the timing. In other words, it’s not cheap. That’s good hard. BloodRayne: Betrayal, from developer WayForward Games is not good hard.

Make no mistake, Catherine is mindfully quirky, tragically dark and one of the most difficult games I’ve played in recent memory. It also happens to be wonderfully enthralling and all-together matchless. Trying to explain why I was left with these sensations is another matter, kind of like attempting to describe what a summer day feels like as a kid. It’s not so much about the words, but what’s in between them; the joy of exploration or the possibility that anything could happen. You see, Catherine is a feeling.

There’s this nagging fear I’ve had lately, an itch that’s just out of reach. It’s a constant feeling I keep getting that the video game industry is getting too big for its fuzzy little britches. And not just too big necessarily, too big too fast. In the grand scheme of things this outfit is juvenile at best as far as unique mediums go. It’s barely throwing up on the carpet you just vacuumed and tearing up your collection of Will “the Thrill” Clark baseball cards with its budding incisors.

Choices in video games are too often used as a gameplay mechanic to try and make the player feel as though they’ve crafted the world, as though they had a say in the outcome; that you, my little dove, do in fact matter.

Give me a break.