Matthewmatosis

Matthewmatosis is one of the legendary video game critics. Some of his critiques and reviews are so solid, like the Bioshock Infinite Critique, that even over a decade later…nobody has been able to prove him wrong. At least to my knowledge.

His first two videos are his most controversial (alongside the Bioshock Infinite Critique) as those are not quite to his same standards. Those were reviews of Portal 2 and Catherine. I actually (mostly) agree with him on Portal 2, though.
While I don’t have direct proof of this, I’m about half-certain The Gaming Brit has taken inspiration from him, as he uses a similar method of classification and even gives videos similar-looking thumbnails.
I am a particular fan of his Zelda, Mario and Metal Gear Solid reviews, which I think showcase his peak.
More recently, Matthewmatosis has fallen into the pretentious trap, where his newer videos tend to take a less blunt approach to reviewing/critique and…well, the language just comes off as pretentious to me, it’s really hard to describe. His Last of Us Part 2 Review came off as fence-sitting to me, or a bit dismissive of story issues.^A) The two more recent videos on Context Sensitivity and Extrinsic Motivation also focus a lot on semantics…which is fine, I guess, but it does take a while to get to the point of the video.

• matthewmatosis
• I had mentioned the Bioshock Infinite Critique in the opening text - and it really is a great critique of the game - but I should elaborate a bit on it.
  • When the video came out, Bioshock Infinite was basically showered with praise by professional journalists and gamers alike…so he released a video that was incredibly critical of it. This is basically the only video from that era that is critical of it, though.
  • More recently (maybe starting around 2020), people starting turning against Bioshock Infinite (coinciding with more favorable views on Bioshock 2). This entire thing has been dismissed as some ‘hate trend’, with this (now) 12-year-old video being lumped in with this trend, which is absurd.
  • Many of the critiques of this video that I’ve heard/read^B) completely miss some of the arguments that Matthewmatosis makes. The one I’m referring to in particular has to do with the portrayal of racism in the game, which Matthewmatosis argues is poor. Counter-arguments usually dismiss this outright by either calling him racist (ironically) or saying that wanting to hear more slurs is a weird critique. The argument is that the portrayal isn’t historically authentic and that it lacks bite, whilst the game wants to be taken seriously. The slur is used as an example of the game flip-flopping between being Politically Correct and ‘serious business’.
• A similar ‘the point is missed’ in The Stanley Parable Review, where Matthewmatosis explicitly points out that counter-argument. I’ll want to write a dedicated article on this at some point, but the ‘that’s the point’ or ‘it’s bad on purpose’ argument is logically unsound in the first place. I’m mostly noting it here because I happened to re-watch his review.