A Farewell to Matt Lorrigan

Today is Matt Lorrigan’s last day as a feature writer for Resero Network. At five o’clock, the bells will toll, he will push his chair back from the desk, and bid Goodbye to All That. In theory. The problem is, a feature writer isn’t something one can just stop being. At root, all it really means is that you think a lot, and that you have committed the hours of your days to the taming and pruning of those thoughts. The problem with thoughts, is that they spring up like weeds; feature writing is the practice of working those weeds into unlikely blooms.

If you have read Matt’s work in recent years, you will have noted the ungardened playground of his head. If I were called to sum up his work in a word, it would be: curiosity. Both to pin down his own game-playing habits and to scour the nooks of the industry in effort to discover potential new ones. Take, for example, his piece on Weird West, the action-RPG from WolfEye Studios. That game was spiked with the moonshine of an immersive sim, allowing all manner of chaotic outcomes to brew up – often as things go wrong. “Suddenly, I wasn’t a cool bounty hunter scraping through a firefight by the skin of my teeth,” he notes. “I was a grumpy guy in their late twenties who couldn’t move their thumbs fast enough to avoid yet another death at the end of a bolt-action rifle.”

Far from snobbery or scepticism, the crux of that piece is an elusive sadness: that of someone “desperately panning for a nugget of the joy that so many players find in the immersive sim genre.” The hunt for fun is as noble as any other, and it often leads you not into the depths of games but of yourself. Thus, we find Matt with an iPhone clipped to the top of an Xbox controller, trying out Microsoft’s cloud gaming platform, and forecasting its troubles. These are multiple, as will attest anyone who has streamed Halo on a mobile phone, belted by bandwidth, and seen its firefights crunched and smeared. The truth, however, is deeper still: “Unlike the games I grew up playing on the Game Boy or Nintendo DS, most of the Xbox Cloud Gaming library wasn’t designed with handheld play in mind.”

That hint of personal history is important. “I never thought I’d miss the muddy textures of the Xbox 360, but the grime of the Dead Space remake can look a little too clean,” he wrote, cutting to the warm root of the problem. Behind the scenes, I happen to know that Matt played through the original series in preparation for that remake. The hunger to probe your memories of a cherished game, checking for leaks and cracks in your recollection, is invaluable in this job. So, too, is a fully stocked larder of tastes. For grumpy guys in their late twenties who can’t move their thumbs fast enough, past experience grows ever more vital; in other words, you need the well-remembered nuggets of joy in order to properly assess the new.

Hence, in his review of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, not only the sharp and compressed run-through of that series’ history of technological wizardry, but the revelation that it is “still less of a platformer than most of the mainline Ratchet & Clank games that have come before.” He would know. The platformer is Matt’s parish – steeped in the likes of Jak and Daxter, Spyro the Dragon, and Super Mario. Perhaps that is why his work crackles with the inquiry of a search, hopping from point to point and striving to close the rift. If you want him at his most perceptive, look at the opening of his review of Elden Ring. “I found myself lost in a bizarre, subterranean world,” he starts. “No NPC to guide me, nor any objective marker on my map. The only hint I had was a series of tall monuments, each holding a flame that I could light. So I did.”

His task ends, this being a FromSoftware game, with a hidden boss fight, but it’s the task itself that is most telling: the mission to illuminate. “This is what Elden Ring is all about,” he says. And that, I reckon, is what Matt’s work here is all about. The mark of a good writer is the knack for making a mark, and he leaves the place different than when he first joined, in 2019. His pieces will be missed, of course, but more important is that they will be felt. The place is a little brighter. I hope you will join me in celebrating his time at Resero, and in wishing him the best possible luck as he leaps to his next adventure. I also hope you will indulge with me in a little looking back, at the series of monuments that mark his journey here. When he started, he had a simple brief: to write about games. So he did.