Overshadowed by a culture war, Shift Up’s action game is an authentic slice of Korean cyberpunk, pretty and absurd.
“Stellar Blade,” published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, is the first big-budget game from South Korean studio Shift Up, known mostly for mobile games featuring scantily clad women. As a Korean American who’s visited South Korea many times, I’m keenly aware of my culture’s obsession with appearances and looking attractive. It’s an ever-present pressure that’s felt even by Korean men. My elementary school reading wasn’t Dr.
“The game is a virtual reality, and I believe we need to have opportunities to see things not so realistic in the virtual space,” Kim said via an interpreter. “We’re already familiar with reality, we live in it. So when you play a game, I want to be able to see something that’s different from what I experience. There are many things more realistic, and that should also be respected. And I feel games like ‘Stellar Blade’ should exist.
The discourse has especially been frustrating because “Stellar Blade” is a fantastic, if flawed, first attempt by the studio to develop a big-budget single-player action game. Kim is unusually direct about citing his inspiration, “,” often described by critics, including myself, as one of the masterpieces of the medium. Kim isn’t out to make a masterpiece, necessarily; he’s simply having fun wearing his influences on his sleeve.
The game stumbles when it tries to be too many other types of games at once, leaving peripheral elements undercooked. It’s littered with mind-numbing, boring puzzles that have appeared in numerous other video games in the last several decades: bouncing laser lights off mirrors, aggravating block-sliding segments and even a “” minigame that does nothing with the formula. This game would’ve been better served as a leaner experience without distracting ideas lifted wholesale from every other game.
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