MOONAGE DAYDREAM

I did not expect to root for Guardians of the Galaxy this much. The game was weighed down by so many stagnant vibes during its pre-release cycle. The shadow of Marvel’s Avengers, Square Enix’s 2020 attempt to transmute the total media superiority of the MCU into a living co-op videogame, loomed particularly large. That game’s cast of Hollywood facsimiles left customers ice cold, and while the core narrative was solid, nobody enjoyed the meaningless currency grind.

Guardians comes from the same publisher, and appears to be made of the same stock, except that this time, it’s a singleplayer only campaign, and the player is restricted to the least interesting member of the troupe, Star-Lord. There is a pervasive focus-tested coldness that corrodes so many products that bear the Marvel name in 2021, and I wasn’t optimistic that Eidos Montreal would be capable of overcoming the taint.

That is until I solved a puzzle involving a psychedelic is full of sequences that capture the odder, funnier, lighter side of Marvel’s cosmic expanse. I ran into a Soviet test-flight golden retriever blessed with celestial hyper-intelligence, and in a moment of weakness, he admitted to me how much he missed his former puny dog-intellect, those endless afternoons chasing tennis balls in the front lawn. There’s a fourth-wall-breaking left-hook, taken right out of the playbook, tied to an amazing twist that caught me hilariously off-guard. Hell, deep into the game’s final acts, I watched as the permanently chaffed Rocket Raccoon faced his one lingering trauma thanks to the encouragement and support of his teammates. The scene worked as a better emotional payoff than anything I’ve seen the character do on film. has its heart in the right place… if only the game itself weren’t constantly sabotaging those efforts with exhausting technical jank.