I’m OK with dense narratives presented by cryptic, unreliable narrators. Even worse, it makes a habit of falling back on that very same complexity as an excuse to avoid arranging its tangled plot threads into an appreciable canvas.

What I encountered, however, was an overly convoluted, MacGuffin-heavy story dead set on explaining nothing. Heck, I thought I’d be lucky to grasp even half of the proper nouns treated with reverence by the largely foreign-to-me lore. The cavalier way in which Remnant 2 borrows merely serves to remind me of all the more competent games I could be playing insteadĪs someone who neglected Remnant: From the Ashes three years ago, I didn’t go into Remnant 2 expecting to understand everything from the jump.

You run, you gun, you dodge, you roll ad infinitum, sometimes even breaking up the action with special powers depending on your chosen archetype. In each of these areas, you partake in third-person shooting mixed with the evasive tactics popularized by FromSoftware in games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. While the game’s post-apocalyptic adventure also takes you to less despondent locales - including ornate palaces, lush forests, brutalist labyrinths, and fiery slums - every world you visit in Remnant 2 contains an example of societal downfall via humankind’s hubris. Remnant 2, the sequel to 2019 sleeper hit Remnant: From the Ashes, was the irradiated straw that broke the two-headed camel’s back. I’m over sepia tones and dusty streets and overgrown vines and corrugated steel shelters and tales of civilization-ending greed passed down from generation to generation. I’m over jaded urban explorers born after the disaster du jour joking about dilapidated billboard advertisements from the Before Times as if they don’t know what coffee is. I’m over scrappy survivors scavenging supplies in abandoned car parks and office buildings.

Remnant from the ashes revolver