SKAGOLOCIAL

Borderlands 3 is a game with long, earnest quests about how darn good coffee is punctuated by gore and gun violence. Borderlands 3 walks by dog poo, laughs at it, and then sets it ablaze. Borderlands 3 stays up until 11.30pm drinking soda and looking up crass Flash animations, taking notes. It’s stuck in the late 2000s, when basic vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy. Borderlands 3 is seriously obsessed with turds.

It’s stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humour was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest bit abnormal or gross and call it a joke. Simpler times, not necessarily better times.

I help a guy escape from a porta-potty for a poo-spewing rocket launcher

feels like a retro shooter rather than alive and present in modern humour and pop culture. It’s simultaneously repulsive and compulsive, an FPS RPG that excels when its weapon generation system spits