IGN comments complaining

I swear to God, I am one minor inconvenience away from putting my fist straight through my monitor.

I wanted to read the review for the new Shovel Knight game—the one that isn’t even fucking called Shovel Knight, because it’s actually a completely different type of game apparently—on IGN.. I scroll down to the comment section. Simple task, right? Normal human behavior.

And what do I see? Is anyone talking about the game? No. Every single top-rated comment is some variant of: “Wow, why is everyone complaining in the comments?” or “Man, the comments here are so weird today.”

WHAT COMMENTS? WHICH COMPLAINTS? Are they “weird” because every single one of you braindead organic bots is commenting about how weird it is, or are you all hallucinating a completely different reality? It drives me absolutely, psychotically insane. It is the exact same digital brainrot you see on Instagram when a video of a person with Down syndrome pops up. You click the comments expecting, I don’t know, actual thoughts, and instead it’s a solid wall of: “Wow, I can’t believe these comments” and “These comments do not pass the vibe check.”

Listen to me, you absolute NPCs: WHAT VIBE CHECK? Are you saying that because every other comment is saying it doesn’t pass the vibe check, creating this infinite, recursive loop of meta-signaling? Because if you aren’t, your comment makes zero logical sense. You are reacting to a ghost. It only exists in a 2+ layer deep meta-void of pure stupidity. And then, after scrolling through five hundred of these self-righteous, empty-headed gatekeepers, you finally find the one actual comment they were crying about, and it’s some guy saying, “This woman with Down syndrome is hotter than my wife,” with fifty replies using that Shaq timeout reaction image.

Anyway, back to this IGN cesspool. I finally find a comment with a shred of substance, and it’s spinning this massive, conspiratorial web. They’re claiming IGN had to give this non-Shovel Knight game a 10/10 because they previously gave a 10/10 to that game Mixtape.

You know Mixtape? The game that everyone apparently loathes because it’s a two-hour interactive tech-demo where you just tap a button—or don’t tap a button, it doesn’t matter, nothing happens anyway. It’s barely a video game. People got so utterly butthurt about IGN giving Mixtape a perfect score that now, according to the comment section, IGN is forced to hand out a 10 to Shovel Knight 2 just to balance the scales. Why? Because if they don’t, the internet will scream: “You only gave Mixtape a 10 because it was created by Megan Ellison, the daughter of Larry Ellison!”

You know, Larry Ellison? The guy who owns Oracle and openly boasts about how he looks forward to a utopia of constant surveillance and automated AI drone-strike policing? The guy who basically wants to torture humanity with machine-gun robot dogs? Yeah, him.

So I look up Mixtape. I watch the trailer. And let me tell you, the stop-motion animation style filled me with a deep, dark, primordial rage that I cannot fully articulate. What is it about low-framerate, jittery claymation-style movement that evokes such intense, hateful hostility in my soul? I don’t know. But then I see the part where the character starts flying through the air and doing flips—which someone pointed out was completely ripped off from a Verizon commercial.

I don’t care that it’s ripped off from a commercial. Actually, you know what? I looked it up. It wasn’t a Verizon commercial. It was a Burberry commercial. I don’t know why my brain defaulted to Verizon—honestly, it could have been an ad for 5 Gum. Like, if you made a game about people getting vibrated to death on a giant speaker covered in metallic beads, would everyone scream, “Wow, nice 5 Gum rip-off, bro!”? No! Nobody actually gives a shit about the corporate lineage of a mid-air spin!

Of course they ripped off a Burberry commercial. I don’t even know what the hell Burberry is, but I know it’s the kind of brand that sells $5,000 bags to people who buy them, look at them, and then throw them out the window of a moving sports car because they decided the leather wasn’t premium enough. It’s pure, out-of-touch, diamond-encrusted Birkin bag energy. Anything less than absolute excess disgusts them. So that is your artistic inspiration? A commercial for an elite fashion house? It’s pathetic.

And the way the character runs in this game? Don’t even get me fucking started. There is something so intensely, uniquely irritating about the specific cadence of that animation. I didn’t know it was scientifically possible for a digital skeleton’s gait to radiate this much smug, obnoxious energy, but here we are. It makes me want to claw my eyes out.

And the absolute most tier-1, mega-cringe part of this entire cosmic joke? IGN.

Look at them desperately running damage control! They look at the massive, radioactive crater of public backlash from giving Mixtape a perfect score, and they panic. “Oh god, oh no, the peasants are revolting! Quick, hand out another 10/10 to this new game that isn’t called Shovel Knight! If we give everything a 10, maybe they’ll forget we’re shills! Maybe we’ll look a little less pathetic!”

It is so profoundly embarrassing. It’s a circle-jerk of elite tech-billionaire nepotism and corrupt games journalism, and I am just sitting here, staring at a comment section full of people asking “why are the comments so weird,” wondering if I am the only sane person left on this miserable, doomed planet.

And you want to know who is actually flying through the air backwards in real life? You want to know who is experiencing that exact, low-framerate aerial trajectory?

The poor bastards getting hit by the autonomous drone bombs that were probably financed, manufactured, or algorithmically optimized by Larry Ellison. The literal father of the person who made Mixtape.

Maybe the IGN journalists aren’t actually corrupt. Maybe they’re just terrified. Maybe they’re so incredibly, galaxy-brain smart that they inferred the direct correlation between a bad review and an inbound airstrike. They looked at the review submission box and realized that if they didn’t hand out a flawless, pristine 10/10, a precision-guided corporate missile would come crashing through their office ceiling.

“Whoops! Looks like Oracle just dropped a tactical MOAB onto my apartment building because I dared to suggest the pacing in act two was a little sluggish! And wow, look at that, now my entire reality feels like it’s rendering at a choppy 12 frames per second because I have severe, catastrophic brain damage from the concussive blast force!”

It is so deeply exhausting. The whole industry is just a pathetic, sniveling joke. You have billionaire tech-oligarchs funding indie-darling vanity projects about rich-kid existential dread, while the rest of us are just trying to survive the impending automated dystopia. But no, please, tell me more about how the “vibe” in the comment section isn’t passing your arbitrary check. Tell me more about how groundbreaking it is to press ‘X’ to watch a stop-motion teenager contemplate their own privilege.

And who even reads IGN anymore anyway?! Like, what kind of lobotomized sub-human is actually going to IGN to get their gaming news? Me, apparently! I’m the idiot! I’m the one standing in the digital splash zone getting sprayed with the liquid diarrhea of the internet’s most generic, echo-chamber brain-rot!

It makes me want to rip my own hair out by the roots. It is the exact same, mind-numbing, two-plus-layers-of-meta garbage that makes me want to throw my phone into traffic. It’s an entire website populated by people whose brains have been completely fried by algorithms, to the point where they can’t even look at a video game review without turning it into a virtue-signaling feedback loop. No one is talking about the game. No one is talking about the 10/10. No one is even talking about Larry Ellison’s terrifying murder-drones anymore! They’re just standing around in a circle, pointing at each other, screaming about the “vibe,” while the world burns down around them at 12 frames per second! I can’t take it anymore! I literally cannot exist on the same internet as these people!

And that is exactly what makes this whole performance so utterly pathetic.

Watching an outlet like IGN scramble to do damage control with this kind of transparent, hand-waving PR spin is enough to fill anyone with an intense, burning rage. It is pure, unadulterated cringe. They get caught dead-rights pushing a completely fabricated, ideologically sanitized version of history, and instead of just owning the absolute failure of their editorial standards, they pivot to this defensive, overly wordy corporate backpedaling.

You sit there staring at the jarring, staggered frames, and your mind drifts to the sheer, terrifying brilliance of the natural world—how the eye didn’t just happen once by some fluke of cosmic luck, but evolved independently at least six separate times across the tree of life. From the complex compound structures of arthropods to the camera-lens eyes of cephalopods and vertebrates, nature kept inventing vision because the universe demanded to be seen with absolute, fluid clarity. Light hitting photoreceptors is a continuous, unbroken torrent of data, a seamless evolutionary masterpiece perfected over five hundred million years.

And then you look back at this screen.

This low-frame-rate, staggered atrocity feels like a literal affront to the mechanics of sight, a violent tear in the fabric of sensory reality. It’s as if the universe itself has glitched out, dropping packets of existence into a cold, empty vacuum of horror. Your optic nerve is firing in frantic, confused bursts, trying to stitch together a broken sequence that was never meant to exist in a rational cosmos. It makes you actively resent the gift of sight. You find yourself contemplating the quiet, unthinking bliss of a clam—deep in the silt, entirely devoid of eyes, living a life of pure, tactile oblivion. You imagine the profound, unbothered peace of being literally happy as a clam, insulated from the visual noise of a failing culture.

The thought mutates into a darker, more surreal nightmare: imagine taking that pristine, primitive creature out of the mud. Imagine grafting fully functioning, evolutionary advanced eyes onto a clam, forcing it to look upon this specific, stuttering, low-frame-rate sequence. The sheer, unnatural wrongness of the motion would short-circuit its simple nervous system. The creature wouldn’t just be confused; it would be utterly crushed by the sudden, horrific weight of visual existentialism, dying right there on the seabed from a pure, concentrated dose of sadness.