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Each Month, we invite élite art critic Braithwaite Merriweather to appraise the box art of the latest game releases. In between his time spent wandering the corridors of culture, Merriweather writes on a freelance basis for various publications, including Snitters and Nuneaton à la Carte. If you are unaware of his prowess, rest assured; he’s on a crusade to educate the unwashed. Put simply, he’s a man that needs no introduction.
Resident Evil 2
Indecision is, for me, sublime. Does one opt for the single malt or the Bordeaux? The brie or the stilton? The crème brûlée or the Christmas pudding? My answer, over the last two weeks, has been not to opt at all – rather, simply answer in the affirmative! Like an invigoratingly post modern update of a Roman vomiting between courses during a feast, simply gulp down some Rennies and commence with the next course! As such, I have begun the new year in rather slow-moving fashion, revelling in the glory of being a large mammal.
However, I have never been able to bear indecision in art, and it seems that this labile condition is going around – rather like flu, or modernism. Take Resident Evil 2, for instance, which arrives as something of a two-hander: a man and woman take up arms against a sea of upright corpses, the entire thing bathed in blue. Fine. But wait. What’s this? An orange cityscape burns at the bottom, as if the artist couldn’t decide between portraits and landscapes.
It recalls the time I combined high culture – a sojourn through the Saatchi – with more earthly pleasures, in the form of a bottle of Glen’s (‘the exciting vodka,’ indeed). Such hedging of bets didn’t serve me, or the floor of the new Philip Colbert exhibition, very well at all – though one could argue my emesis provided a piece of similar colour, form, and meaning to Mr Colbert’s. Anyway, given the game is a remake, it’s both something old and something new; it seems with its ill-fitting landscape crammed into frame, it’s got something borrowed and something blue as well. An unhappy marriage. (A feeling I’m all too familiar with.)
Tropico 6
While we’re on the subject of Philip Colbert, there’s something of his sickly, acrylic brightness in the artwork for Tropico 6. From the looks of things, it seems to be about the entire world, or, at least, how the world might look through the enterprising eyes of a bastard: a monopoly board, ready to pilfer and pillage. (Rather like the approach of my ex-wife's solicitor toward my financial dignity.)
There’s the clamour of a Colbert about this one, too: the same needy longing (shades of my ex-wife again), emerging from a very modern brand of chaos. But, oh no! Here it comes again – the ambivalence! Another stale clash of portrait and landscape, this one presided over by a grinning dictator. At least, in something like Duck Hunt, Colbert muddles his subjects into the terrain. Here, this unpleasant beast just explodes upward from the landscape, like the vile eruption from a burst spot (shades of my ex-wife’s solicitor again).
Kingdom Hearts 3
Now then, this is how one combines a love of subject with a love of landscape. The art for Kingdom Hearts 3 is the artistic equivalent of the Rennie routine I laid out earlier. The menagerie of models atop the skyscraper is spliced with mice, ducks, and dogs, and, rather than crowd the scene, the barmy mix elicits a smirk. My usual response to Disney is – rather like the dean of admissions at St Martin's college – to seek a restraining order. But here, I am roused from my January lethargy.
And then there’s the matter of the skyline to contend with: a bleeding wound of ecstatic colour, which conjures the abstract forms of Zlata Jaanimägi's The Skyscrapers – which I noticed lunging for my attention in the Saatchi, as I reeled past after my ‘contribution’ to the Colbert exhibition. There is something of the irresistible mix of high and low culture here, too. The mash of delirious city landscape painting with the cultural vermin, fowl, and mongrel churned out by the dreaded House of Mouse.
Kingdom Hearts 3 is proof that you can have it all, then, but then, given the malformations of Resident Evil 2 and Tropico 6, maybe you shouldn’t chase after it. It’s a lesson worth learning in life. For any budding young critics, looking ahead at the winking promise of 2019, I have a kernel of advice: don’t model yourself on me, dear reader. Achieving greatness in the spheres of both art and critique is a near unattainable goal, and something I was thrust upon the Earth to do. Happy New Year, one and all!
