To those who “get it,” it’s a masterpiece. To those who don’t, it’s been subject to some very violent vitriol and called one of the worst games that came out that year. “Elex is awesome!” “Elex is terrible!”

What makes this game so polarizing?

In order to piece this out, let’s reverse engineer the thought process of a gamer who has just purchased the game. Let’s say you see this game on sale online for around 20 bucks. You check out that it’s open world and you can jetpack everywhere. Looks cool, so you think, eh why not? You pull the trigger and order.

You are as brittle as your are in real life as if your own self had to fight against a giant rat or reptile.

Once you have it set up, you launch the game. After a chilling intro about a comet that struck and shaped the world of Magalan, your character Jax wakes up after being shot from a cliff. You decide whether you want to join up with Duras, the first man who offers you a place to go. You take up his offer.

You decide to go into the ruins, grab some loot, go to Goliet and then attempt to go and fight a the lowliest creature in the game with an iron bar. Being hit by a critter or two, your character dies in 3 hits. You struggle to deal damage. Compared to other games that have you slaying dragons from the beginning, your lack of familiarity with the world and its mechanics is like Jax’s struggle in his situation of having lost his strength.

You are as brittle as your are in real life as if your own self had to fight against a giant rat or reptile.

Once you do get to this point though. . .whoa.

The feeling is as rewarding, if not more rewarding, than Dark souls.

Your Jax can’t fight anything, and you do minor quests until you get Duras do the dirty work. You scramble around trying to do minor quests wondering when you’ll ever get to kill anything. You finish around 4 or 5 quests, level up somewhat, wield a sword or chainsword, but you still get your behind handed to you by anything that has a pulse.

After this, you’ll react in one of two ways.

One is: “Huh, this game is kind of hard. But I see myself slowly getting better and learning the ropes.” That person continues onward and finds a depth and logic to the game, but that’s only after a bit of thought, dedication, and trial and error.

Another way is: “I should be able to kill something within the first four hours. I keep dying when I should be killing things already.” That person goes on to perhaps play a few more hours and then quit out of frustration, maybe even blowing up the game’s faults disproportionately.

Elex might bruise some egos in that easy mode is fairly difficult if you aren’t paying attention.

It’s not difficult for no reason. It’s difficult because you are just another person in an unforgiving world. But it could be the iron gate that keeps people shut out of a great game.

If you were an old school gamer, you wouldn’t mind this level of difficulty at all.

You’ve gone through Baldur’s Gate and realized that you didn’t spec correctly and couldn’t equip certain items. Your party gets continuously destroyed because of your decisions. Or you’ve gone through System Shock 2 and run out of ammo, making it impossible to move on. Maybe even newer generations of gamers who are partial to Dark Souls wouldn’t mind the rewarding triumph after toil.

It’s no mystery that games have gotten less difficult. For most titles, you have to bring it up to the hardest difficulty to even remotely have a challenge. Elex might bruise some egos in that Easy mode is fairly difficult if you aren’t paying attention. It could even be the “Hardcore” mode of some games out today.

If you set the difficulty to Ultra, going through these

futuristic corridors feels as scary as System Shock 2.

It’s not a bad thing that games are easier. It’s just how gaming has evolved. As gaming’s popularity rose over the years, now eclipsing both movies and music combined in terms of revenue, it’s only natural that more casual elements have been implemented to appeal to more people. And who can blame game companies after such massive success?

Let’s take a look at what happened to Bethesda. Morrowind, while a revolutionary game in its own right, was a traditional RPG with dice roll elements, where unless you had certain stats up to par, you wouldn’t even deal damage.

The Morrowind world was strange and original, with giant flees, mushrooms the size of trees, and ashen-colored humanoids as the dominant population. Skyrim, by comparison, is a far more common fantasy setting with architecture and legends based on Norse Mythology. It also took out a lot of the RPG elements and made the game much easier by having the enemies scale to the player level.

Though the graphics are dated, Morrowind captures the imagination like nothing else.

In Morrowind, much like in Elex, the player has to scramble in the beginning to survive, grabbing anything or doing anything just to somehow rise from the bottom of society to become a dominant force.

Skyrim’s commercial success was far greater than that of Morrowind. It has become one of gaming’s biggest influences in the sphere of popular culture. But if you asked someone now which game was more unique and daring in its aesthetic, that would have to be Morrowind. There is simply nothing like that world in gaming.

Piranha Bytes could have easily gone down this road and might have become more successful. But the fact that the company didn’t compromise on their vision speaks volumes. They probably won’t become as successful as the The Witcher 3 or have the fame or positive mainstream reviews, but they will continue to subtly influence RPGs and preserve the old RPG tradition.

. . .like a symphony of darkness, danger, awe, and sublimity.

Once you do a few quests and level up in Elex, after perhaps 8 or so hours into the game, you’ll feel steadily getting stronger and stronger in whichever faction fits the player’s values. That could be the lawless Outlaws, the religious tech fanatics in the Clerics, or the ones who believe in magic and nature in the Berserkers. Magalan begins to unravel. Audio logs and photography are picked up, old remnants of vehicles and buildings of a civilization that once flourished.

Vestiges of a lost world steadily come together to create a beautiful, broken picture of the world that currently exists, like a symphony of darkness, danger, awe, and sublimity.

The wonderful logic that connects it all is awe-inspiring. You aren’t supposed to have infinite stamina to hit a million times. You are supposed to die in a few shots without armor in this unforgiving world. You are supposed to scrounge to survive after being shot. You are supposed to become restricted from other factions after climbing the ranks of another. Though not based on anything real, you feel like you’ve stumbled into a real world where you are just as fragile as the next guy. Until you work yourself up to become a demigod at least.

This is proper roleplay. You are plunged into the world like everyone else and through luck and multiple chances you somehow rose as the victor.

Totally not about to get wrecked. . .

Those who are familiar with traditional RPG models will see the classic model as a breath of fresh air in a world where games need to be modded to have this kind of effect. If you play Skyrim with the Requiem mod, for example, you can replicate the framework of a Piranha Bytes game. To have this in the vanilla version, to put it out there despite the possibility of backlash in the hopes of becoming a cult classic, is a worthy achievement in its own right.

This is why a gamer can feel like he or she has discovered something when playing Elex. If you look at forums discussing Skyrim with the Requiem mod, a common quote is “Skyrim is the mod, Requiem is the game.” Players might even believe that they have higher taste for playing it.

You feel like at the end, you happened upon the best alternate universe where you came out on top.

Though I personally tried to humble myself, oftentimes I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing Skyrim how it should’ve been made in the first place. The monsters were scaled to strength like in the lore. A fireball to the face actually kills you if you’re just a normal person. Defeating a Dragon was a task only reserved to a godlike character who can annihilate cities. Beating Alduin, the World-Eater and apocalypse, was nearly impossible even though you become the strongest entity in Tamriel. It’s consistent with the lore.

It just makes sense.

Getting there in Skyrim: Requiem required endless deaths. You feel like at the end, you happened upon the best alternate universe where you came out on top.

100 hours to slay a Dragon? More realistic than the Vanilla for sure.

Elex is structured around a similar logic. You are just as strong as the characters in the game who have your armor and your skill set. Until you level up in a faction and get access to better gear, you are just like the rest of the free people. You are easily killed by those who have better skills or armor. You are not special. The edge you have over others who are more powerful is your craftiness and the fact that you are able to restart the game an infinite amount of times. Your in-game counterparts don’t have that luxury.

The problem is, to arrive at this special point in the game where everything begins to click, you probably need to spend around 40 hours on the game. Reviewers don’t have that much time and have to judge the game prematurely. They have to review several games as their job. No one should really blame them for not going in depth on the game. They are just trying to make a living.

So when you give a game a shot that has been criticized because of premature misconceptions, finding genius under the rough edges, it’s no wonder why you feel like you’ve unlocked a secret.

That feel when you just discovered hidden items

and you just have to look all philosophical and whatnot

This just doesn’t apply to Skyrim: Requiem or Elex. It can happen in other arts as well. Having spent time in the art scene in New York City, and being friends with a few artists who invited me to gallery shows of their works, you get to discover these hidden gems, and lament a little that others, through no one’s fault really, haven’t given certain modern art pieces a chance.

. . .you get the aching feeling that you’ve arrived at something special.

I am also quite obsessed with poetry. Many will claim that they don’t “understand” poetry. A lot of the reason is that it takes quite a bit of effort to love language in its purist form. The most basic way to appreciate it is just to see the images in your head. And from that basic appreciation, you can branch off to the history of language experimentation where a whole artistic world awaits.

Chess is like this as well. To those who don’t play, you might as well be watching paint dry. To those who do, a rich game, with its own history and literature, awaits.

Before the fall: I may or may not be addicted to jumping from obscene heights.

It’s these types of experiences that can make us feel happy to be part of a world that isn’t given to us on a silver platter. It takes some dedication to let the pieces come together and be magnified when it becomes whole. Elex brings that type of happiness that makes us feel like we have the ability to appreciate the depth of things after dedicating our time, energy, creativity, and intellect to them.

Couple this with the fact that the world is unlike any other open world out there, you get the aching feeling that you’ve arrived at something special.

Near that danger, there is a gorgeousness and the ability to scale that gorgeousness.

You jetpack your way around with the ability to jump from the highest heights, using the jetpack right before you fall. The cities have their own signature architecture and style. There is a culture like the one you experience in the Fallout games, with druggies and dilapidated homes. Another culture that hates technology, believes in nature and magic, and lives in natural wooden structures. Another culture with a fanatical religious belief in technology and the pristine futuristic architecture to support that belief.

And then there’s the triumphant feeling where every encounter that was once fearful and impossible, you can now overcome. With the eerie, chilling music like that of the film Blade Runner 2049, you feel like there’s danger at every corner. But just beyond that danger, there are beautiful crystals, molten lava, forgotten highways that mirror our world. Near that danger, there is a gorgeousness and the ability to scale that gorgeousness.

The fall: I can do this ’cause jetpack.

Elex isn’t the type of game that’ll pull your heartstrings like The Witcher 3 or The Last of Us. It’s more in line with looking at modernist architecture like that of Santiago Calatrava’s structures and marveling at the complex, logical way it was constructed.

And your mouth is left open in awe.

