Brendan Caldwell

Apologies to all fans of Harry from Disco Elysium, but the best alcoholic in all of videogames is a hamburger-gutted spaceship engineer who spends most of his time looking simply furious. Swansea is the low-poly blue collar spaceship mechanic in sci-fi horror game Mouthwashing. He is drunk for most of the game and even becomes - at one point - a mortal threat to your life. 

Yet as all other male members of the ship's crew flail around during disaster with denial, paralysis or naivety, Swansea attains a form of grim enlightenment. He is darkly honest about himself at the very end. It's the cold honesty of his alcoholism that makes him stand out among the crew.

If you don't know Mouthwashing, consider those opening paragraphs my recommendation to go play it. It's one of Jank's best games of the decade for a good reason. It takes two or three hours to play and another two or three weeks to stop thinking about. Longer, clearly, if you're an underemployed games journalist. Spoilers ahead, et cetera.

Let's sum it up for anyone who needs a reminder. You're a crew making a delivery across space. The captain, for unknown reasons, appears

"There's nothing WRONG with the brakes on this thing, you fucker!"

I raise a car on the pneumatic lift and ignore Jonty's angry outbursts from across the garage. He has been working on that ancient red banger for a while now, swearing to himself the whole time. I raise my own four-wheeled task a little higher on the lift, pop off the oil cap and drain all the dark car bile into a funnel. Simple. Car Service Together is a good old-fashioned early access co-op jankfest, and even better when you have a car-obsessed friend to do all the hard jobs.

"This customer is getting charged 200 bucks for wasting my time," mutters Jonty.

I patiently change an oil filter.

"It's absolute bullshit that you have to take the spacer and the caliper out to change brake pads."

I lower the car on my lift and fill it up with new oil. My job is done. I saunter over to Jonty, who's still struggling with the rusty bolts on the wreck in front of him. If there was a button in Car Service Together that let me arrogantly wipe

Last week a blitz of articles asserted that live servicey shooter Overwatch 2 was making a comeback, a conclusion that presumes the hero blaster had ever "gone" anywhere in the first place. PC Gamer called it a long-in-the-works "glow-up", a fairer assessment than Kotaku's grandiose statement: "While you weren't looking, Overwatch put its crown back on". Neither article examined the hero shooter and how it plays today from the position of a long-lost player, instead providing a summary of changes and dramas over the years. The recent influx of press has more to do with a PR push developers Blizzard have been making to bring attention to an (admittedly large) update that adds five new heroes in one day. The silliest part of this update is the decision to rebrand Overwatch 2 to simply Overwatch, a walking back of the sequel's grand intentions so clownish that it resulted in some more fun headlines. 

So, the natural question arises: is Overwatch actually good again? Was it ever even "bad"? Maybe if someone - I dunno - replayed it and wrote about it, we can find out. So let's do that.

For context, I loved Overwatch but stopped playing in 2018