By Toussaint Egan & Kambole Campbell

As the grind truly never stops for freelancers (and even with writers with more permanent positions) this Tuesday send is a scattering of reflections on how animation has impacted us over the weekend. Since I've mostly been at wrestling shows and family events the last three days my interaction with the art has been a little bit minimal outside of work. But there are still ways in which animation has been informing the ways I've been killing time between those moments, even on a scale as minor as texture in a video game. So in that spirit, here are some things which have caught mine and Toussaint's eye. – KC

Hello darkness, my old friend

Ruiner 2 is this year’s “Break glass in case of emergency” sequel

Last week Reikon Games announced Ruiner 2, the long-awaited follow-up to their breakout 2017 cyberpunk top-down shooter. The sequel is set to reimagine the formula of the original as a “deep, systems-driven action RPG,” allowing players to swap in and out of several cybernetically enhanced combat bodies referred to as “Shells” (stares blankly at Masamune Shirow) as they take up arms (and metal pipes) once again to wrest themselves from the clutches of Heaven Corp’s control. It’s been an embattled past couple of years for the Warsaw-based studio, with (allegedly) massive layoffs in 2024, a tepid critical reception to their 2025 sci-fi FPS Metal Eden, and the recent departure of their long-time creative director Benedykt Szneider. The trailer leans heavily on the iconography of the first game, with a 3D render of Ruiner’s pseudonymous protagonist “Puppy” posing with a futuristic rifle and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of “Her,” the game’s sinister control freak deuteragonist who’s (probably) a rogue AI posing as a vengeful freelance hacker. As someone who counts themselves as a fan of Reikon’s work, warts and all, I’m hoping they can pull off a much-needed win when the game launches in early-access sometime in the near-future. – TE

I'm a fan(try) of _gantry

Anything you want brother, glory to MIDA

I've been playing a lot of Marathon. Bungie's new PvPvE (player vs player vs enemy, aka the CPU) shooter is a shotgun blast of self-described "graphic realist" art amidst a bleak sci-fi dystopian setting – it's exciting, it's punishing and dark, it's fun and most of all it's pretty cool. The game as a whole has been a little bit of a flashpoint for nonsensical gamer "discourse" but if one thing has been (mostly) agreed upon it's that the production design and art direction is incredibly compelling. My favorite instance of this is Gantry (styled as ‘_gantry’), one of the game's 'vendors' (he gives you quests and rewards), and a representative of the revolutionary faction MIDA. Most of the Marathon quest givers (who have already been shouted out for the visual punch they add when compared with Marathon's peers) are shrouded in some layer of abstraction, obscurity or anonymity – corporate AIs appear as disembodied heads or blurred images, or a regal figure with a pet lion – but they are fixed images. But Gantry stands out even more because of a specific visual touch. Befitting someone who thrives on creating disorder, he is constantly shifting, with graffiti-like textures flickering across his mannequin-like figure. 

It calls to mind a couple of figures: one being the shifting mask of Watchmen's Rorschach, The other is the similarly anarchic appearance of Spider-Punk from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, who appears different to his peers due to looking as though he was ripped from a newsprint zine and taped together with torn up fragments of an album cover. He's also animated on a combination of 2s, 3s and as little as 4s, his timing is different across his body and clothing. In both cases it's an exciting shock to an already vivid design ethos crammed with visual reference to the interfaces of the 90s (when the original Marathon games were released) and a cocktail of references to cyberpunk anime like Ghost in the Shell, motorsport and other video games like Mirror's Edge and Wipeout.

As well as those, art director Joseph Cross notes the work of Alberto Mielgo, the director of the first Marathon short, as well as Into the Spider-Verse as inspirations for the overall ambitions of the project – _gantry is the latter made manifest. The impact of this choice of imagery is part of why the game's drip-feed delivery of story has a lot more mileage, especially when compared to a similar delivery of narrative via quest vendors in Destiny 2. Even when static, Marathon feels like it's on the move.  – KC

Quick gang! To the Mystery Machine

Alec Lang’s Mystery Kid is a delight

I love this 6-minute short Youtube animator Alec Lang posted to his channel late last month. Produced over the course of a few months, “Mystery Kid” follows a genius kid sleuth who teams up with a mysterious ghost pal while investigating some shady supernatural business in an abandoned building. It’s a lot of fun, with breakout quotes like “He called me a derogatory ghost word,” and I can definitely see the potential for more episodes in the future. Keep at it, Mr. Lang! – TE

/out of frame

🙏Rollin: I am out at GDC all week and that's basically all I am doing this week. Pray for Rollin.

👽Kambole: Pixar has been washed for a while, especially following a series of brutal layoffs its hard to feel anything positive towards the studio at the moment, and CCO and director Pete Docter recently went on record to display why. Many have already pointed out the hypocrisy of the director of Inside Out balking at the idea of "millions of dollars of therapy" in response to questions about any queer identity being removed from Elio. An article by Eli Cugini at The Baffler astutely diagnoses that the hollowing out of Elio is part of the company's trend towards conservatism (which as Cugini points out, was also seen in company leadership's cowardly approach to Win or Lose). Former animators from Pixar have also been seen to have a bone to pick with Docter's framing of this issue as well as leadership's other failures.

🤖Toussaint: Not much else on my end! I would be playing Marathon right now, but it turns out sweaty, frantic extraction shooters and newborn fatherhood don’t quite mix 😅 So instead, lately I’ve just been slowly making my way through Resident Evil Requiem (love it) and rewatching GITS: SAC (classic) on Criterion Channel.