(Autumn, from the Ranged Touch Discord, encouraged people to play snowy games in January and February and write about them. I used this opportunity to motivate my return to Mafia II, a game whose snowy beginnings have stuck with me for nearly 15 years).
Second Snowuary 2025 post, on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
What I remembered was the light – that bluish tint that reflected daylight gives to snowy shadows. It’s still there, upscaled on my Series X’s downloaded copy of the game. The quality of urban light at night in the snow and the rain. It’s good.
The game is also, yknow, hella racist. Partly because this is playable mediated-organized-crime: people and behaviors codified by their work and their ancestry (be that Italian, Sicilian, or Chinese). Part of it is “realism” of the 1940s/50s setting. Part of it is “hey, this character shouting racial slurs is a shithead”. And part of it exists in the game-product itself (The Gaylord’s “Chow Mein” playing on the radio after a mission where you assault a Chinese restaurant full of gang members).
“Mafia II limits all the character’s positive experiences to cut-scene montages, leaving you to play the bullshit work and think, ‘Boy, they really didn’t do a good job of changing mechanics/mission designs up as Vito climbs the family ladder’ and then realize that’s the point, that he’s still just the sucker moving someone else’s crates at the dock.”
I wrote the above for Kill Screen’s 2010 High Scores end-of-year best-of poll. I had forgotten that the argument is made in the game itself, when the final boss monologues about how much of a pawn Vito has been.