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Short, smart, potentially a gamble: with Mafia: The Old Country, Take-Two grapples with the past and future of video games
Will Mafia: The Old Country usher in a new era of punchier, shorter, single-player titles from the major publishers?
The artists and programmers at Hangar 13 have crafted an evocative and unflinching rendering of Sicily at the turn of the twentieth century: dappled lemon groves; vineyards snaking down steep hills; mines filled with indentured slaves, every face and fruit bowl lit with the exquisite, high-drama flair of a Caravaggio painting. I play the latter game marveling (in admittedly haughty fashion), at what I deem to be the novelistic detail of its sixteenth-century Japan setting: the knotty factional politics, aching poetry of the natural world, and deftly depicted socio-economic dynamics. Their sheer massiveness is the point, an attempt to hold our attention in a digital world constantly baying for it: short-form video on TikTok; the endless algorithm of Netflix; free-to-play gacha titles like Genshin Impact.
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