Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart Brings Joy Back to Big Games

It’s 2004 and it’s Christmas when I spend a day hunched over on a stool I dragged from our dining room table to play Jak 3. I’m unresponsive the whole day, utterly enraptured by this game that feels larger than anything I’ve ever played. My pet bird gets out of its cage in the same room as me and I don’t realize until my mom shakes me from my obsessive state and points out that one of its feathers landed on my head in my daze. I don’t even recall when that could’ve happened. As I dart around an arena, punching out and gunning at seemingly endless waves of foes, nothing else in the world matters but this game, and I think: “This is the coolest game ever.” I’m pretty confident this is the best day I’ll ever spend with a game. Given that I can recall it nearly two decades later, I may have been onto something.

It’s 2007 and I’ve just moved to a new apartment. It’s colder than my last one, but it’ll have to do. Just a few months back, my mom got me my first console in years, a Nintendo Wii, and this Christmas, she buys me Super Mario Galaxy, the game that I can’t let go of when I get my hands on it. It’s a game that informally starts me down a life path that finds me where I am today.  It leads me to discover GamePro and GameTrailers, two largely defunct sites that illustrated to me I could play and talk about games for a living. It’s a stunning game, imagining Mario in a setting I could’ve never dreamed he would reach. As I play it this holiday, my mom’s beside me watching, watching as I stare wide-eyed and slack-jawed at what’s surely one of the best games I’ll ever play. It’s a nice memory and a reminder of simpler times.

It’s 2021 and I’m at my best friend’s house across the country on my biggest trip since the world ended the year prior. It’s a long overdue and necessary salve after what I can only describe as a pretty rough go of life. They’re working on one side of me while their lit fireplace and doofus of a dog is on the other. It’s the warmest I’ve felt in a long while. 

As I’m lying on the couch, I’m playing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, a game that seems impossible. Impossibly big, detailed, cute, fun, vibrant and all the positive adjectives one can root around in a thesaurus in search of. I can’t stop looking over at my friend to share how much this game has surprised and delighted me. I’ve loved games since I played Super Mario Galaxy, but rarely have they felt as purely magical as this one. It isn’t Christmas day, but it sure feels like it. 

It’s no coincidence, I think, that I’m writing about Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, an experience that felt like gaming on Christmas morning all those years ago, with the holidays closing in. Games rarely feel that magical anymore, and I was beginning to doubt if they would again.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a few things. It’s a 3D platformer for one, and one of the last ones standing from an era that’s all but gone now. They used to be incredibly vast, not just in scope but in variety. There were platformer shooters like Ratchet & Clank, while there were stealth platformers like Sly Cooper. The Jak & Daxter games were a mishmash of shooting, platforming and open-world hijinx a la Grand Theft Auto. Nothing looks like Banjo-Kazooie anymore, save for the game that is a direct homage to it. They were all collect-a-thon games but they also keyed in on letting you explore not just different biomes but different worlds. They featured well-defined characters, whether that be through characterization or style. The exploration these games teased always pushed my creativity and ingenuity, long before I knew I had either. 

Playing 3D platformers never fails to bring me back to my youth, when they were all I could play. And what a delightful genre to be caught up in. These were the most imaginative worlds, providing me my basis for how to understand a space and enjoy it. To call 3D platformers like Ratchet & Clank anything less than foundational for myself feels like doing them a disservice. As they’ve faded from popularity, and especially as less dazzling prospects have filled the spaces they’ve left, I think it’s been harder for me to not feel jaded about games. As if to say that if we can’t make room for these pure and joyous experiences, then there’s little to be pure and joyous about. It’s dramatic, sure, but indulge me this once.

Rift Apart is also a shooter and a damn fine one. As I’ve grown older, and likely as many of us have, I’ve branched out from the things I played as a kid. And as the genre responsible for some of the biggest games in the world at the moment, tons of us have probably played a shooter once or twice. There’s fun to be had there and I’ve definitely experienced it, whether it be in set piece-driven spectacles for campaigns or in fierce competition with other players online. We’ve all played these games to death or been exposed to them so much so that we basically know them. You probably haven’t played or seen one like Rift Apart in a long while though, because for as fun as shooters can be, they’re not nearly as delightful.

Rift Apart has a light heart and wonder in spades, which, at least in the traditional AAA field, feels like it’s becoming a growing rarity. By leaning into them, it finds the fun in both genres it speaks to and reminds me that games can be good. Not a boring, qualitative “good” with a score attached to some words and accompanying video either. Like encoded-into-its-DNA good. It is decent, empathetic, uncomplicated and fun. When it railroads you through its platforming levels, it’s while a giant robot tears up a valley and screams about the things he can’t fix. It’s comic and overblown, but still rings sincere. Your enemies aren’t military men, they are cartoonish aliens and ludicrous robot space pirates. The weapons you have include a fungus companion, a laser that pixelates foes, and a sprinkler that turns enemies into shrubbery. Need I say more? 

Viewing the game through the lens of the genres it embodies has only amplified how well Rift Apart raises the bar on both through what it accomplishes outside of them. Platformers are fun (look no further than the Mario series) but with few exceptions, they’ve become largely impersonal affairs. As much as I adored 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey, for example, it was playing with a really familiar set of tools. None of its abilities really stand out all these years later; neither do its levels or environments sans maybe New Donk City, a genuinely refreshing sight in a series that has played with the same themes for decades. Even some of the indie darlings that have emerged in the field since the AAA space dried up have skewed too close to their inspirations to feel novel, like the inoffensive and otherwise good A Hat in Time. 

In a sort of similar boat, shooters treat their characters like weapons; you’re no greater defined in most of those games than by the paint job you choose or a callsign. The characters are never larger than the conflict they’re a part of. Every hallway, street, or alley is just another drab shooting gallery. There’s no sign of life. They’re cold and clinical. A favela in Brazil feels like a Russian military base that feels like a war-torn suburb in Washington D.C which feels like a German zeppelin, etc. It’s like games of either genre forgot what they could be at their fullest potential and settled for something lesser.

So when Rift Apart wrote its characters like well-realized people with goals, worries, and traumas, not to mention humor, it kind of baffled me. This was the kind of stuff I hadn’t seen much of in a platformer since the aughts, in series like the Sly Cooper games. There was the spirit of the games of my youth, the things that made me feel vibrant once. Most recently I found it in Psychonauts and its sequel, yet even the gulf between those games (16 years!) points to how long that essence was lost in this space. In shooters, there’s next to no range in locales, meaning that when Rift Apart takes me to other worlds and dares to dream in something other than the same three colors, it astonishes. When a weapon can be more than a cold killing machine, the results absolutely dazzle. It’s a remarkably simple feat that this game accomplishes, but that’s also exactly the point. In a field dominated by things increasingly obsessing over complexity, whether that be mechanical or thematic, Rift Apart stands apart in how easy it is to get. It’s unmistakable for anything else and I love it for that.

Ultimately, I recognize that a lot of what I’ve found to love in Rift Apart is not new. For better and for worse, Ratchet & Clank has remained a known quantity throughout its run. Always there, always (mostly) charming, it’s comfort food. But it’s comfort food when I was beginning to starve. A bountiful five-course dinner of vibes I thought I’d have to dig to find scraps of. A Christmas morning I didn’t think I’d have again. So yeah maybe it’s largely the same deal all these years later, but in a constantly changing world and life that I’ve zero control over, it’s exactly what I didn’t know I needed. A reminder that things can be good and fun despite it all. That I can still find warmth in people, places and things. That I can be amazed and give in to wonderment still. That I can dare to imagine things a little brighter. That much as things stay the same, there’s always room to grow.