Alex & Mike discuss bloat in contemporary open world games & the tension they often exhibit between narrative & systems. While survival games & soulslikes convey the intelligible content of the world & plot via the player’s tactile engagement with a virtual space, western open world games with heavy narrative focus put forth an unhappy and contradictory marriage of needlessly dense systems and cinematic storytelling. Also a brief discussion of why Cyberpunk 2077 should have been a walking simulator.