It's parry season
If you like games with parrying, there are two great new ways to get your fix: Doom: The Dark Ages and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 . These very different games — one is a fast-paced first-person shooter, the other a turn-based fantasy RPG — approach the mechanic in very different ways.
Let's start with Doom . One of the big new additions to the game is a giant shield for the Doom Slayer, and you can use it to block projectiles or enemy attacks. The game helpfully signals anything that you can parry in a bright neon green that's easy to see as you're rushing around and destroying hordes of demons.
When a green projectile gets within range or an enemy does a green attack, you can press the parry button at the right time to deflect the danger with a huge reverberation of your shield and an action-movie-like moment of slow motion. Like most of modern Doom 's action, it all looks, feels, and sounds very satisfying. But parries are also critical for fights, as they can open up an opportunity to hit the enemy with a punch or a few shots from whatever monstrous gun you're wielding.
Stay keen for something green
In intense battles, I'm always hunting for green glints to find things to parry to potentially gain an advantage. When an enemy shoots a spread of bullets with some green interspersed, I'll even run toward the danger to get in a good deflection. Some weapon upgrades have perks tied to parries, too, giving you many incentives to stay keen for something green. Read More Bobby Kotick to depart Activision before the end of the month
Doom , very helpfully, has a setting that lets you change the timing for the parry window whenever you want. I have no shame in admitting that I've occasionally made the parry window as wide as the game allows; yes, it lowers the difficulty, but I like parrying every chance I can.
Image: Kepler Interactive
Expedition 33 's parrying system is just as thrilling and impactful, but shifts from fast-paced action to turn-based battles. When it's an enemy's turn in a battle, they'll often wind up their giant swords, axes, or fists for flashy, multistep attack combos, and you can parry each hit if you time things right.
Every successful parry regains one AP, which you'll spend during your turn to use skills. More powerful skills typically have higher AP costs, so the more blows you parry, the better equipped you'll be on your next turn. Parry all of an enemy's attacks on their turn and you'll do a counter (which also has an action-movie-like slow-motion effect) that can be a very helpful way to chip away at a health bar.
That's not easy, though: Expedition 33 's gives you a very tight window to press the parry button in time to block a hit, and if you miss the window, you'll take some damage. Missing multiple parries on a single turn might drain your health bar from full to empty, and given how tricky the game's enemies can get with staggering their hits or faking you out, that will probably happen often.
The game lets you dodge enemy attacks, which has a much wider timing window, but you don't gain AP and you won't get a chance to counter. I found myself leaning toward parries far more than dodges: despite the risks, landing a successful series of parries, especially in a high-stakes battle, was usually worth the trial and error because of how cool it looked and how much it helped in a fight.
I do wish Expedition 33 had a setting to adjust the parrying windows just slightly (and if you're on PC, there's a mod that can help with that). But I also get why the timing is so tough: the rewards are high, but so are the costs.
Parrying can be a divisive mechanic, especially when it's challenging. That's why people bounce off of games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Nine Sols . But Doom and Expedition 33 both offer new and interesting takes on the idea that show just how rewarding a good parry can be.
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If a name is destiny, Niklas Bildstein Zaar has more than lived up to his. It could belong to a scion of House Harkonnen, an impression that is consolidated by his ascetic appearance — ghostly pale, shaven-headed, invariably swathed in voluminous black — and doubly underscored by the work his Berlin-based architecture and design studio Sub produces. Sub enthralls and unhinges with its otherworldly fusions of the monumental and the intimate, all scale and shadow, light and smoke, blaring sound and startling silence. It's easy to see how Sub's stark, sensual hybrids have insinuated themselves into popular culture. Their fearlessness is kind of overwhelming — and kind of omnipresent. On March 3, Bildstein was helping Anne Imhof launch 'Doom,' the artist's latest immersive extravaganza, in New York. Two days later in Paris, when Haider Ackermann debuted his first collection for Tom Ford, it was against a hermetically erotic backdrop created in tandem with Bildstein. Four days after that, Sub was responsible for Balenciaga's labyrinthine staging. A month later, Bildstein was working with Bill Kouligas of the Berlin record label PAN on an installation to debut their reworked Nike Air Max 180 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and then his latest collab with Travis Scott launched at Coachella. It suspended twitching human forms like puppets on string while plumes of fire roared around them. Bildstein (the Zaar is apparently negotiable) and I have been talking since last October, when we met in Iceland where he 'designed' Ackermann's mindboggling journey to the centre of the earth for Canada Goose. That particular exercise threw a spotlight on Bildstein's very timely specialty. He is helping realise the creative visions of his fashion, art and music collaborators by designing experiences for them in novel ways, resulting in highly scrollable spectacles for the audience following along on social media. Canada Goose's excursion in Iceland in 2024. (Thibaut Grevet) He's also his own best ambassador. Bildstein is one of those conversationalists where it is really just a pleasure to shut up and listen. One thing I instantly gravitate towards is his idea of world-building. The planet is cursed with fools attempting their own versions of the same thing, but there is a seductive scale to Sub's output, even when it's as contained as it was for Ackermann's Tom Ford debut. So let's start there. Start small. 'Orchestrating feeling,' Bildstein calls it. He and the designer were in perfect sync, keen to combine then and now. 'Tom Ford is really pornographic,' he says, 'so we wanted something raunchy but also dreamy and ephemeral and light.' How many people in the audience took full note of the backdrop, the mirrors smeared with the phone numbers, the messages, the graffiti of the hookers Ackermann remembered from his old job at a nightclub in Antwerp? Who would have grasped that in the moment? It didn't matter to Bildstein if it wasn't seen for what it really was, if the details got blurred. 'If things get over-proscribed or too literal, the magic gets lost,' he insists. 'The space sets the tone with a sense of immediacy, but people are still projecting their own desires. You need to project yourself onto something.' Bildstein calls this 'sensory filler.' 'In memory, things are not clear,' he claims. 'You think you know in great detail what you've experienced, but people have a very loose idea of what they are.' Tom Ford Autumn 2025 show set. (Stéphane Aït Ouarab) I could ride that train of thought to the end of our conversation. Right now, Bildstein is on the phone from Venice, where Sub has designed the main exhibition at this year's Architecture Biennale. The very opposite of starting small, it marks a new degree of professional application and appreciation, acknowledged by a profile of Bildstein in The New York Times. 'Apocalypse Chic' the headline brayed. He wasn't best-pleased. The single word that has occurred more often than any other in coverage of Sub is 'dystopian.' Maybe that's inevitable when your longtime collaborators are people like Anne Imhof and Demna, or when they get the kind of coverage that Travis Scott and Ye, for whom he has also designed elaborate stage sets, have attracted of late. 'But that trope is looking lazy now,' Bildstein says, especially after Biennale curator Carlo Ratti's declaration that he'd chosen Sub because of the studio's proven ability to connect with a wider audience through its work in fashion and music. He will acknowledge, however, that in Sub's formative years, it felt important to talk about bleakness, and that is what really connected with the audience Ratti wants to speak to now. 'The thematics that were interesting to me were showing the hypocrisy of how the world was operating,' Bildstein explains. 'Everything was very 'imagine a space that is built with the intention of not providing any kind of comfort to people.' That's really the financial model a lot of real estate developers have. I wanted to respond to that so spaces of abandon, spaces that were comprised of generic elements, generic materials, galvanized steel, plaster board, simple concrete textures, all became part of a vocabulary of materials of the undecorated and valueless. The surprising thing, though, was that in the way that we deconstructed them or reassembled them, what remained was a kind of an attitude. Some would have it as a nihilistic, dystopian attitude, but it was clearly an attitude through space that people were responding to. The kids loved it.' I think that's because there's always a convincing sense of grandeur in everything Bildstein has done. However dark or nihilistic, it's been huge. Anne Imhof has taken over whole museums. Balenciaga has made and unmade worlds. 'I think it needs that, to have some authority in its proposition,' Bildstein offers. But, in a way, it's the grandeur of ruins. The artful decay of the Balenciaga salon in Paris and the frayed edges of the brand's shop on London's Bond Street speak to the end of days, a failed human touch. It is storytelling at its finest, its most subtle. And maybe its most dystopian, however much he's tired of the notion. In one of his rare early interviews, Bildstein suggested, 'We're ridding ourselves of previously accepted forms of an idealist mindset.' That hinted at a significant degree of cynicism, bordering even on despair. Now he counters, 'People want some of their primary needs fulfilled, people don't want to feel embarrassed, they don't want to feel guilt, they don't want to feel shame, they don't want to feel fear. And so if someone has a compelling enough vision that reduces these primary emotional attributes, then that will be a really appealing mode to adopt. I think we're experiencing that really very well in this very moment.' (At which point, I would advise everyone to run, not walk, to find a reprint of the visionary psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's 'Escape from Freedom,' originally published in 1941, which succinctly outlines the contrary and irresistible allure of authoritarianism.) When I ask Bildstein how important despair has been to him as a motivator, he answers, 'Definitely with the work I did for Balenciaga, but actually across the board… chronicling trauma as a design response has been something that people have been addressing in my work as dystopian. It's a reoccurring word that I hear to the detriment of Balenciaga, for sure. 'Can you just make it a little bit more cheerful…?'' Balenciaga's Summer 2020 show set. (Courtesy Balenciaga) Balenciaga has been Bildstein's defining client relationship to date. He claims he was essentially a nobody until Demna invited him into his world in 2019 with the show that simulated the parliament of the European Union in the aftermath of Brexit, an act of wilful economic suicide on the part of the UK government. But if Brexit was the unmentionable elephant in the room, Demna kept his design focus on literal power dressing. 'You omit the primary sentiment, but obviously, if you're able to design all the consequential things around it, it's a very powerful way to mediate ideas,' Bildstein acknowledges. 'And to see the work I'd been thinking about for so long suddenly being given a forum to express itself, and to see people responding to it in such huge numbers, was scary but also thrilling.' It's doubtful that many people in the audience considered the seating, but Bildstein had, in an early testament to his incredible eye for detail. Blue conference chairs, the chairs you sit on in parliament. 'The seating wasn't by chance. You become sort of entrapped in this role play by doing just one single action of sitting down. And I like the idea of entrapment. The reason why fashion shows are so good is the audience only need to do one thing. Enter, take a seat, see what's in front of them, and then it's over. Then, of course, you can play with lighting and sound and all the rest. But if we orchestrate that properly, the act of taking a seat actually turns you as an audience member into a protagonist.' The notion of audience complicity is always compelling. True, the vastness and occasional fury of Bildstein's concepts for Balenciaga shows have loaned them an inescapable intensity. Autumn/Winter 2022, to select just one controversial instance, was widely interpreted as a comment on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Every seat had a t-shirt in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, the massive catwalk circled what looked like a bomb crater, and at show's end, the 'horizon' that ringed that catwalk was illuminated with random flashes as a distant war grew closer. But according to Bildstein, that wasn't at all the original intent (the t-shirt was a last minute addition). 'I would never try to do something that speaks to violence in that way, that would be obscene,' he insists now. 'It was more about the idea of a crescendo, a Wagnerian thunderstorm.' He claims the set — white ceiling, black glass — was supposed to be an architectural representation of all things Apple, with the steadily escalating sound and fury of the show an analogue for how we digest the turmoil of the world through the screen of our devices. It wasn't a warzone we were in, it was an iPhone. Balenciaga's Winter 2022 show set. (Courtesy Balenciaga) It's testament, at the very least, to the power of ambiguity, which isn't a negative in Bildstein's eyes. 'I think that's the powerful thing,' he says, 'especially when you're using space as a kind of narrative device. It should be immediate in its feeling, but not over-proscribed in terms of what it is. As soon as you tell the full story, when it becomes literal, you lose engagement.' In other words, there has never been a 'full story' with Balenciaga's shows, only loaded and elliptical spectaculars that stimulate conjecture like no one else's fashion week presentations. And presumably, tantalizingly, that will continue as Demna moves on to Gucci. Bildstein is already working with him on concepts for his debut. 'A new visual language, a new tone of voice,' he teases. Born and raised deep in Sweden's Arctic territory, Bildstein dropped out of school at 16. By dislocating himself from the conventional academic route, he closed off one set of opportunities but opened up another, where insatiable curiosity would be his teacher. 'That's why the notion of working transdisciplinary — which might seem like a kind of buzz word — is really just a consequence of how I've accumulated my knowledge over my life. The older I get, the more I discover. But as I take on different types of projects, or integrate layers into projects, I learn that everybody else is not prone to understanding how to weave these different threads from architecture, technology, storytelling, visual communication into some type of whole. They're not different categories. To me, they're really just different modes of communication. I'm finding it a little bit challenging as I get older to hold these conversations. But I think that's also my purpose, to try to give a bit of clarity, to showcase that things actually do connect.' That was the mission that became a manifesto for Sub. Bildstein and business partner Andrea Faraguna created Sub in 2017 as something between a research institute and a design studio with the metaverse as its playground. 'By the early 2020s, there was this general idea that there was a digital twin of the world that we could all interact with. Virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality. These were the kind of conversations that were held at that time. But the metaverse became a little bit simplified because the term got really unsexy, due to Facebook, I think. Today, there's less talk of metaverse. It feels like a dying terminology. What's emerging is something else.' Along with that shift, Sub is changing. If Bildstein and Faraguna originally presented an inseparable front in their rare appearances in the press (he describes them as 'a phenomenal combination'), they've recently drawn apart a little. He acknowledges that architecture is the umbrella under which Sub operates and that is Faraguna's bailiwick, while his work is more within a framework he calls entertainment. 'It's a bit of a random thing, and it sounds a little corny in a way because it doesn't have any kind of intellectual proposition tied to it. But I think it's important to call it what it is. So that would be, for instance, when we collaborate with musicians and fashion. And then we have this digital and strategy side, and that's really where we will be focusing moving forward. A lot of innovation can come out of that, and I'm really excited with what's on the horizon.' That's where the 'something else' comes in. 'We don't really know what that is,' Bildstein says. 'We don't even have the terminology for it. But the point might be that we don't really need to be embedded in these high-fidelity visual graphics. There's another type of mixed reality which is much more intriguing. Be okay with reality as it is for now, but let's embed a lot of other tools within it that are maybe not so visually dominant. What's happening now is, with the development of discriminative computer vision or object recognition, we have these algorithms that can actually understand the reality around us. Instead of trying to build a synthetic, three-dimensional replica, or digital twin of a world, we can let the world be what it is.' It's been a while since he told a journalist that he felt like an obsolete life form. 'We're just not equipped for what technology is throwing at us,' Bildstein said then. Now, he has a plateful of AI. Is he positive? 'It's a sticky thing,' he says. 'A really sticky thing. But what I do know for a fact is the only way to harness it towards something good is actually to engage with it and understand how it operates instead of being, like, here is this opaque, powerful new mode. It's a responsibility to understand how to break it down into smaller elements so we can generate something of our preference.' Travis Scott's stage set for Coachella in 2025. (Courtesy) The way we consume imagery is an unsurprising obsession for Bildstein, especially with the emergence of AI image generators. 'Images used to hold a lot of meaning, because there used to be a kind of sampling of something that took place and you felt historically that it transmitted something to you. It doesn't work like that anymore. You don't really know what is synthetic or what is real. And with the frequency and abundance of imagery over our phones, we don't actually lend ourselves to it to absorb any kind of emotional meaning. It doesn't transmit anything. It just becomes a vibe. And vibe is such a complicated word, because it's so profound, but it's also so hollow.' He might have found the perfect paradigm for that sentiment in the set of Demna's last ready-to-wear show for Balenciaga in March. It was clearly a labyrinth in the livestream's aerial shots. 'It's a shame the actual physical audience never got that,' Bildstein says ruefully. The show meant a lot to him personally, given that it was informed by the work of the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, one of his biggest youthful inspirations. Borges was blind, but he conjured worlds out of his darkness. 'A lot of that world-building is maybe what we're trying to replicate,' Bildstein suggests. Borges's best-known collection of stories is named Labyrinths, and one of the most famous stories in it is 'Funes the Memorious.' After suffering a head injury, Funes remembers everything. As one thing comes to mind, it instantly triggers a memory of another association. Bildstein considers Funes' situation 'maybe one of the most beautiful literary metaphors in terms of living in an information-heavy society. Imagine feeding the journal of an entire life into a context window to make a magnum opus. It's quite a Borgesian idea.' But is it a blessing or a curse? Funes chooses to live in darkness, a kind of voluntary blindness. When Bildstein describes his own living situation, it sounds similarly cerebral, stripped to monkish basics, bar his pit bull mix Diablo who goes everywhere with him. As another touchstone, he mentions Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, with its poetic tale of astronauts who travel to the end of the known universe only to discover their own shadow. 'We need to look inwards to look outwards,' he proposes. 'We need to understand or investigate our own biases in order to be more open.' Bildstein himself has clearly been doing a little self-scrutiny. 'It is so much more profitable to be deceptive or act as a defector. That said, I think deep down inside I'm a little bit sinister and I'm trying to overcome that. I'm being a little bit more hopeful now, and I also realize that what you create mirrors the future to come.' Anne Imhof's 'Doom' at the Park Avenue Armory in 2025. (Matt Grub) Maybe he's even fallen a little out of love with tech. 'The way we choose to utilise some of these emerging technologies is not actually improving our lives,' Bildstein concedes. 'Isn't it absurd that with social media in general, instead of being this gateway into this kind of Shared Photo Album which is a beautiful thing as a journal of what we're doing, it becomes a kind of doom-scrolling, dopamine-addictive, gamified slot machine. It's like we're living in an infinite feedback loop of negativity, and it's easy to go down the sensationalistic route. I feel a responsibility to take a step back, to try and prompt myself to look at things from multiple points of view, and to allow an audience to feel free.' 'I've been propagating a sort of dystopian visual output in my work, that's already established now,' Bildstein continues. 'So what am I interested in coming up with next? I keep on thinking about intimacy and connection and how that is something I want to explore a little bit further.' He's even floating the idea of permanence, maybe a home, as an antidote to the fiercely nomadic nature of his life to date. That's pretty radical for him. We're both fascinated by the incredible estate the artist Anselm Kiefer has created for himself near Barjac in the South of France. It is an aesthetic magnum opus given monumental physical form. But Bildstein finds that hard to imagine at his age. He is, after all, only 36, nowhere near the end of his life as Kiefer is. 'Permanence for me doesn't have to mean there's a kind of a monument that is transmitted to the next generation,' he muses. 'I don't think I've really defined that to myself yet, but there's definitely a kind of acknowledgement that human needs are very simple — food, clothing, shelter — and it could be a home. It's just a suggestion.'
