In some ways, this is the exact same game we’ve been playing in different forms for years. You fight bad guys and learn new ways to fight bad guys; you jump around and try not to fall to your death; you avoid traps. It’s Double Dragon II plus Prince of Persia, but the spin kick has been replaced by your spinning swords, and the spike pit has … well, it’s still a spike pit. But now with mangled corpses! Now we finally have the graphical capabilities to throw in some bare breasts and vivid, fetishized violence (which quickly veers off the deep end from “disturbing” into “ridiculous”). Fortunately, that’s not all the game’s developers use that graphical capability for. The attention to aesthetics ranges from fascinatingly detailed to (very occasionally) damn near breathtaking. It’s not quite retelling the story of the Odyssey, as people have suggested in court to stave off regulators—heck, the bonus material reveals that they designed the character and gameplay before they even had a narrative—but I’d argue that it’s worth considering as art on its own merits. Oh, and speaking of bonus material: some of the most interesting I’ve ever seen on a DVD, game or otherwise.