Where I live, the leaves are falling in droves and the Glasgow rain is turning them into slippery mulch that makes every trip to the shops an obstacle course. But one hallmark of autumn is missing: a promising run of new video games to cosy up with as the nights lengthen. Usually this is when the end-of-year rush starts, but not in 2022. It's as if the video games industry is giving us a little extra time to watch the absolute circus that UK politics has become in recent months. The actual reasons for this relative drought are manifold, boiling down to the delayed effects of Covid-era development and, well, money.

Video games are nothing without their main characters. Unlike movies or TV, video games are a place where fans get to play the protagonist--help save the world, their friends, and themselves. It's not essential that players agree with every move their character makes. But it's generally key that they have some kind of emotional connection with the character. It's true that video game heroes frequently fit into a narrow set of molds, but generally their cookie-cutter personalities are at least not grating. In other words, no one wants to play the asshole.

In an industry now in its mid-to-late 30s, and still with a predominantly male workforce, the glut of recent blockbuster video games featuring father-child relationships surely reflects the preoccupations of the men who make them. God of War is the latest specimen: a game in which a monosyllabic muscleman is on a journey to scatter his late wife's ashes on the tallest mountain in Norse myth, while accompanied by his young son. Previously the God of War series, which debuted in 2005, had little time to explore the emotional landscape of its testosterone-pumped protagonist Kratos, whose only downtime from tearing the balls from mythological monsters was spent gruffly shagging mute slave girls. God of War was always something akin to Marvel does Greek mythology (which, to be fair, was pretty much how Homer did Greek mythology): all brutal set-pieces that, with their lingering camera angles and splattering money shots, treated violence as pornography. It was a peculiarly American vision for the mid-2000s video game action blockbuster, one that has aged quicker than its protagonist's tribal tattoos.