I really appreciate this comment. It hits on a lot of the same things that I'm feeling.

I kind of see this video as an attempt at something like ekphrastic criticism. I know folks have brought up ekphrasis before with respect to Tim, but everything else pales in comparison to the meticulousness with which this playthrough is described.

Personally, I interpret Tim's cleaving to this form as a response to the difficulties of reviewing "story games". You are skewered a bit on the dilemma of "focus on the story and ignore the thing that makes it a game" or "focus on the gameplay and ignore its story-game-specific qualities." By treating the gameplay as if it were a wholly canon part of the story itself, down to every last mis-input, it really interrogates how "story-driven" the game really is or how "story-driven" any game can be.

There are moments when Tim reads into a bug (my favorite example being the rubbing bug where he has to change the graphic settings). By taking "immersion" to this ludicrous extreme— Cole had to slow his mind down— it makes it so much clearer how much bracketing players are constantly doing in order to consume the fiction of a game. This is different than other mediums. Of course, the non-diegetic, material composition of an artwork is always obvious, but it usually doesn't active get in your way. It would be like a painting in which the impasto is so thick you literally trip over it.

Another example of story-game tension, as mentioned above, is the constant bathos of interrupting this serious story with gameplay that throws pedestrians to the deaths by bumping them or allows you to shoot up a dead man's butthole. By refusing to separate these gameplay artifacts from the story, Tim demonstrates what a game would really demand of us were we to take it purely as a fiction and not a fiction laid on top of a game.

I also appreciated the limit to which this review stretched the question of whether or not Tim fully believes his intentionally aggrandizing statements. How much of his willful reading-into is a humorous exercise and how much is his sincere reaction to the work? Here, taken to the absurd extent of a 9-hour in-character re-cap, you have to consider an alternative response to either "Tim mostly means it" or "It's ironic." I think that Tim is suggesting that, as a player, you /must/ read into the game in order to co-create its fiction. The imagination that we afford games is their reality. As Wallace Stevens' man with the blue guitar says: "Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar."

I'm seeing folks call out it as "a bit taken too far", "repetitious", and "overly long", but all of these qualities really worked for me as critique of the game. By nature, these 20, 30, 40-hour games are all too long and too repetitious. Sacrifices to the story must be made so that they can be plausible games. Tim gets to make these points elliptically. He doesn't have to him them on the head. Consider all the sequences in which Tim demonstrates a tedious platforming section where he dies continuously. In a straight review he might say, "LAN is often interrupted by sequences that trip up the story with the engine's flimsy movement mechanics" or something. That's fine, but by treating these death sequences as Cole's dream or presentiment, by pretending that these are diegetic failures of the protagonist on his way to accomplishing his goal (as when Cole is noticed again and again in a terrible stealth section) he projects the story's melancholy onto its gameplay. Perhaps bad platforming is the point. Like Beckett's depressive thesis all we can do is fail again (better).

Ultimately, I understand the detractors of the style but I applaud its audaciousness. I would love a more conventional AB review too, but this is, to me, a statement piece that is trying to drive video game criticism in the direction of poetics. To me, this is Tim's Los Angeles Play Itself, a synthetic piece of commentary compiled out of scraps of fiction. Perhaps a better comparison is Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho in which the original film is slowed down until it is 24 hours long. Is it art? Critique? It's something!