Kratos grabs his son by the shoulders and yells.

He stands over his son and yells. From across the room, from inches away. When commanding his son, he yells. Lording his tremendous heft. Kratos yells. And yells. And yells.

Then he falls silent.

Kratos is silent except when he screams. He is silent as he positions his hands over Atreus’ and makes him finish off a wounded deer, implicating mother and child in this death. He is silent as he tramples his son, repeatedly, in his hurry to finish their task. He is silent as he builds a pyre to render his wife, and Atreus’ mother, into ash.

Kratos screams, because it’s all he has. He is silent, because it’s all he’s allowed.

This was supposed to be the mature turn. The God of War where Kratos settles up with his past and hands over the reigns to his son, who we hope will be better than his father.

But how can he?

God of War divides the world it creates into binaries: Parent, child. Masculine, feminine. Strong, weak. Good, malicious. Living, dead. Gods, mortals. Us and them. Closed and open.

For God of War, there can be no middle ground. No alternative. No lesson save that one is either Dominant or dominated.

Atreus can’t kill the deer without his father’s hand on his mother’s knife. He has trouble murdering during battle. He questions motives and actions repeatedly. He questions his father.

And his father yells, and falls silent.

Kratos, for all the talk about maturity, can’t mature past the toxic masculinity of his past. Even though he can recognize the problem, he only ties it to all the people he’s killed. But with God of War’s issues with a rigid concept of what being a man means, even if Kratos doesn’t pass on the body count, he’ll pass on the exact same mindset.

Atreus begins the game a whole person. It’s downhill from there.

Young, naive, full of doubt and suspicion — he’s a wounded bundle of nerves, but he’s whole. He hasn’t yet internalized the masculinity of his father. He’s in a liminal space where, cut adrift from the mother who raised him, he’s about to experience the fullness of the world. He expresses emotion openly, often, and without a reluctance he’ll learn from his father by the end.

Atreus is vulnerable. And because of that, he can be hurt. And he is, repeatedly, by his father. This is how toxic masculinity is passed down. This is what becoming a man means in this limited and regressive worldview.

It’s a worldview that feels entitled to women’s bodies and labor. But this God of War doesn’t address that aspect of Kratos’ past.

For a game that’s positioned so heavily as about reconciliation, atonement, maturity — it can’t even take time to interrogate its own messages. It can’t see that it spends the entirety of the game using Atreus for Kratos’ own ends, or watching as his father cleaves away pieces until Atreus learns his true nature, and becomes nothing more than a recreation of Kratos’ lessons in rage.

He’s a god now (and in this game, “god” can practically be replaced with “man”). He’s bloodthirsty, combative. Where a boy full of possibility and wonder once cared about the dwarf brothers, now stands a man who can only see them as annoyances, and it is his right to tell them so. It is his right to yell. It is his right to execute Modi for an insult to his mother. The child who once was too sensitive to end the suffering of a deer, is now quick to unleash his vengeful rage on a weakened god. Atreus yells, Atreus kills — because that’s what men do.

Then Kratos grabs him by the shoulders and yells even more.

In a way, he blames his child for his own failings, for being like him, for internalizing those lessons. Atreus becomes the binary vision of masculinity Kratos loathes in himself, but refuses to give up. For all his desire to be open about his past — Kratos and God of War refuse to be open about his emotions. He grieves, but he does so behind a silent, stoneface — like a “real man.”

There is no space, no option for Kratos or Atreus after he passes into manhood to truly grapple with their feelings. To speak to one another as imperfect and equal and open-hearted, as much as the game forces this with an end credits moment of Kratos finally telling a story. But it’s hollow. There’s space for brutality, for accomplishment, but not emotion.

Because to do this, God of War would have to be itself vulnerable. It would have to allow time and space to feel rather than exhibit. God of War can’t though, it’s beholden to the masculinity of it’s predecessors. Rather than talk about its feelings, God of War has to fill all of its considerable downtime with injected mythology from a disembodied head. It has to push aside its moments with lore dumps or chuckles. It has to detach in order to proceed. Because that’s what’s expected of men. Toxic masculinity demands they close their hearts — an impossible task. It’s matured from the brash, sophomoric bro to the grim man taking stock of his life but without the tools or environment to express or interrogate it.

God of War is incapable of offering us, or its father and son, the space to be vulnerable. All it can give us is a man on a boat. Silent. Grim.

Or at the end, a man clutching his child, still afraid to open his heart, lest all that comes out is more screaming.

God of War wants to show the damage of a man like Kratos. To recalibrate and make sense of itself, but all it can offer us is the mantra “close your heart.”

Close your heart so you can kill. Close your heart so you can focus. Close your heart so no one knows your weakness. Close your heart and become a man.

But what good is that kind of man? God of War doesn’t ask. God of War isn’t open to that question.