Game Box Art Critique July: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Wolfenstein: Youngblood

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.

If I should die – or indeed if I am, in fact, dead at this very moment – then this will be my last communiqué, sent to the land of the living from the limbo of ‘Nice Côte d’Azur Airport.’ To think that my very salvation, my distant pinprick of hope, is something called ‘Gatwick,’ and that the possibility of ‘Gatwick’ seems so alien and far that I may as well hope to reach Alpha Centauri. At least, this is how it seems to me, sitting on this bench that feels like plastic and metal had met a grapple to the death but decided to team up against my posterior. Life goes on around me – or at least the slow slime that life becomes in a departure lounge, anyway.

This venerable website has sent me my usual package, and I’ve brought it with me to act as a source of comfort in this grey hell. (How could a name like ‘Nice Côte d’Azur Airport’ – which sounds like the sort of light, wondrous wine you would roll around on your tongue – come to represent such a staling of human endeavour? Regardless, as ever, in times of stress, I seek refuge in the art; it is my home, my church, and on dark days my lover. What an odd selection they have sent me this month – just the sort of joyous distraction I need while faced with a day of such inertia. I’ll take a drop of even bad art to relieve the lagged hell of this place.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order

The ten seconds that immediately followed my first glance at this were spent in recovery. The knife-knuckled gentleman in the foreground has the same facial expression my ex-wife used to make when I demonstrated the proper Verdi baritone – a commingling of enlightenment and ecstasy that could be confused for constipation, if one didn’t know better. Immediately above him, there is a gentleman whose eyes, like headlights, seem to betray an empty soul; he makes me think of me, having donned the steel skin so vital for the thriving of the young artist, the better to deflect the slings and arrows of philistine critics. I, of course, had to become a critic in order to demonstrate how it is best carried out – and I like to imagine the faces of this venerable website’s readers in similar grimacing bliss to the cutlery-fingered fellow.

This work is soaked in the lineage of Lichenstein – in particular, the enflamed zest of Blam, Crak, and Bratatat! Lichenstein gathered the cheap detritus of pop culture around him like a recently gorged gourmand lies amidst the litter of a fast food binge. I’m as thrilled as a schoolboy to see his bright lineage of colours, as hot as jets of flame, recycled here for use in exactly the sort of comic book mulch from which the cancer of our current culture has grown. That the artist responsible for this cover for ‘Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order’ – a title as ungainly as a goose on the dancefloor – would slog through such sludgy subject matter for the sake or irony is a delirious coup the likes of which my nerves and heart shall not soon recover.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

There is a man going round the airport in overalls the colour of a Murray Mint – that awful cream the colour of old teeth. (Or, indeed, of teeth after too many Murray Mints.) I don’t know what he’s doing – most likely plumbing of some sort. Suffice to say it’s some sort of airport business, but pondering the prospect of being in this purgatory every day makes me want to hurl myself into a jet engine. I must now dive into the second work for no other reason than to escape the thought of this man, and the first glimpse of this work hurls me back to the Netherlands, about a hundred years ago, and to the work of Piet Mondrian. What a thrilling job this can be sometimes.

To look at this ‘Wolfenstein: Youngblood’ is to see – gazing back at me, like my local hairdresser Judith does, with barely concealed longing – a bruising of colour. Mondrian’s ‘Evening; Red Tree’ is what immediately comes to mind, with its sultry stains of blue, black, red, and yellow. I’ve absolutely no idea what this assemblage of scowling gun-toters are after, but I can assure them that should any of them wish for pain as vivid as these colours suggest, then a trip to ‘Nice Côte d’Azur Airport’ might just be in order! Speaking of which, a voice has come echoing over the speaker system this very moment, informing me of imminent delays. I can’t, in good conscience, assess the third work in a state of anger, and am venturing out to try and find something to calm my flustered temperament.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I’m currently perched, like a fledgling seabird, on top of a toilet (also the colour of a Murray Mint). Failing to gain access to a bar this side of the airport, I took myself off to the nearest lavatory to try and prevent myself from screaming and thus cause some sort of international incident. Endeavouring to the utmost standard of professionalism, I will try and assess this third piece in a stream of consciousness style from my porcelain sanctum. I hate it. The figures to the left and right of the frame are akin to my ex-wife and her solicitor, while the figure above them has been turned upside down – rather like I was, during the unpleasantness of the litigation, in an attempt to jangle as much money from my pockets as possible. Three houses? They might have mustered the one, but my leaky holdings in Tower Hamlets fall rather short of the definition.

The longer I concentrate on this work, the more the initial fury cools and congeals. Why, Mondrian has returned to me! He has found me even here, on this toilet. I notice the organisation of the colours – red, blue, yellow – and can think of nothing but Tableau I, Mondrian’s work from 1921. As ever, it’s a thrill to see any work take flight from a father of the medium, but as I look at this drab ‘Fire Emblem: Three Houses,’ it’s anything but fire that takes root. How a figure such as Mondrian was imprisoned in such rigid blocks is deeply saddening, and this work reminds me of that drabness. Then it hits me: Mondrian made Tableau I not in his native Netherlands but upon his journey here to France. The poor fellow; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was composed on this very toilet.