Part of my problem is that the Metal Gear Solid series made a seriously disproportionate impact on me as an impressionable young kid, so in memory it feels like it should be able to do more than it really can.

There weren’t very many of them, but I felt like the higher difficulty VR missions in MGS2 were the absolute pinnacle of stealth level design. The interlocking pieces of the guard movements and lines of sight felt like they, and it had to be executed well enough to add tension because if you fucked up a step you were dead. But the levels were also concise enough that this didn’t feel tedious.

I’ve taken a shot at a number of stealth games since then, but nothing has come close to scratching that particular itch. Volume was supposed to be inspired by those VR missions but it was so blindingly obvious at all times how to proceed and the difficulty never ramped up.

What I’ve played of Hitman makes it seem like the point is the sandboxiness of it more than anything else. I don’t want the creativity to be in how to toy with my enemies, but in how to possibly achieve the objective at all.

I tried Thief and Styx and while admittedly I didn’t spend much time on them, it seemed like the idea there was more like “stay in empty rooms that no one else is in as much as possible.”

I tried Shadow Tactics and while it was fun at first and I did get about 9 levels in, it very quickly became way too formulaic. Spot an enemy I can use birdsong to pull out of view, takedown, drag to bushes, and basically rinse and repeat until the area is clear. After identifying the formula it just became tedious to wade through how slow the process of each takedown was.

Is my dream of stealth expressed as tightly designed puzzles where you have to map an area in advance to determine the combination of steps to proceed without any of them landing you in an unwinnable spot, combined with tension built on needing calm execution under growing stress as you approach the objective point, just overblown nostalgia from when MGS hit me as an impressionable kid or are there experiences of this sort I’m still missing out on or haven’t found because I haven’t invested the time and effort in some of these listed games?

The game refers to Aiko as a kunoichi, a word I wasn’t familiar with before but is apparently a female ninja. I don’t know if there’s an actual real-world or pop-cultural difference between a shinobi and a kunoichi, but that’s the distinction they’re making.