Nine Inch Nails presses the disc pedal to the bottom and I do the same with the attack button. Eye to eye, or rather eye to LED light with my first boss. First simple cleaning robots, then full-fledged war machines and finally I'm standing there. All the while with a constant beat in the background, which increases in intensity as I hand out a brutal beating at just the right moment so that gears, batteries and thermal paste rain down from the sky. Together we set off into a vibrant world, filled with platforming, puzzle-solving and, of course, battles. If you do that, you will soon be invincible. It's important to hit it right, keep the pace all the time. In his fist, a V-shaped death guitar made of scrap metal and at his side, a high-tech kitty cat, who is actually a woman named Peppermint. Anyway, one thing leads to another and Chai suddenly has a robotic arm and an MP3 player in his belly. To smash Vandelay, an evil conglomerate led by the unsympathetic Kale and his motley crew of henchmen, all in rhythm to the music (those of us who have been around for a while does, of course, know that Vandelay is a latex import & export company run by George Costanza of Seinfeld and nothing else). It's not long before the whole game world starts vibrating to sweet riffs and we have a mission. At first I think the lad is a terribly annoying and whiny zoomer who should grow up and stop living in a fantasy world, where you can title yourself a rock star, but that quickly passes and soon we're smiling and love each other. We don't click right away, that's for sure. To the tune of The Black Key's swinging hit song, Lonely Boy, I get to know my character, Chai, with whom I'll spend about nine hours with from now on. It starts straight away, with an intro that throws me into a world of colour, creativity and tongue-in-cheek humour. Once the game is launched, it's not uncommon for it to be broken and lifeless and come with a promise from the developers that "we'll fix it later." Then when the bugs persist year-after-year, there's a "we hear you" and shortly after, a shutdown of the servers and straight on to the next host body to suck the life out of. You may even have booked a holiday to play, told the family you won't be available for a month and cancelled all get-togethers. For many, it's the highlight of the year and something to plan for. It doesn't matter if the reason is a pandemic, arguments over rights, or creative opinions divided, the feeling in a gamer's chest when a long-awaited game is delayed is brutal. How, with trembling fingers, you made your pre-order and then followed trailers, leaked images, and obscure Twitter accounts that progressively raised your pulse to unhealthy levels, only to crushingly deliver a blow so hard before release that you saw stars. Remember what life was like as a modern gamer before Hi-Fi Rush? How you had to sit at home, hyped to the max, counting down the days until the release of a game that some guy in a trendy jacket, T-shirt with a big logo and colourful sneakers announced a year ago on stage at an event, complete with a rock-solid release date.
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