“Yesterday’s good might be tomorrow’s evil.”

Go ahead and make yourself some popcorn, because you won’t have any reason to touch your controller for the first half an hour of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. At that point, the game tasks you with climbing a tree to retrieve a backpack that had gotten snagged there during Snake’s HALO jump into Russian territory to investigate a secret military project—a thrilling action sequence conveyed entirely through cinematic cutscenes. This little assignment takes about thirty seconds, including the time it takes to wipe your buttery hands on the couch. Then it’s another fifteen minutes of chatter and cinematics before the player once again assumes control of the character for a few minutes of gameplay. Rinse, repeat.

In theory, Snake Eater is an improvement on the previous entry in the series, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. A Cold War era storyline explaining the origins of numerous characters (and Metal Gear itself) delivers all sorts of gimcrack absurdity; new jungle environments and derelict military outposts replace the sterile confines of earlier titles; a lack of high-tech gadgetry means that camouflage and manual surveying are paramount; new survival mechanics such as removing bullets, applying sutures, and snaring wildlife for sustenance introduce a level of realism.

While very stylishly presented and a step up in terms of its cornball comic book storytelling technique, its actual gameplay (the only reason for someone to play this in the Year of our Lord 2023 instead of just watching a supercut of its cinematics on Youtube) suffers from many of the same problems that plagued the first two games. Namely, unintuitive controls, constant menu management, and a weird cover system. It’s constantly forcing the player to stop the game to tinker with this or that, which is diametrically opposed to the idea that they’re involved in a high pressure situation. Worse yet, by the time the player adjusts themselves to the game’s expectations and esoteric control scheme, they’ve completed the whole thing! There were certainly a handful of instances where I found myself totally engaged in my mission, only for the scenario to be a one-off.

There’s just so little to it once you remove its cutscenes and codec conversations, as if this janky, elaborate stealth and survival system was designed for a single use of each of its facets. Overall it took me about fifteen hours to finish the game, approximately four of which were spent actually playing, with three precious minutes spent climbing a single ladder. (Some people think this endless ladder is extremely profound; don’t trust these people.) At least the remastered version of the game allows the player to switch from the fixed camera of the previous games to a 3D frame controlled by the player.

Of course, those comments just reiterate the oft-made point that Hideo Kojima really should have just made animated movies to tell his highfalutin superhero spy story. Snake Eater, like previous titles, promises “tactical espionage action.” Intellectually, I understand that the game delivers something akin to that description. But too often it feels like everything the player does is abstracted out, merely symbolic suggestions of a pulse-pounding spy game. Imagine the thrill of hunkering down into a prone position (for some reason you cannot move around while crouched), savagely eviscerating a frog with a few thrusts of a bowie knife, then seeing its body disintegrate just as a floating, rotating container labeled “FROG B” bloops into existence. Then phoning a friend to see if it’s safe to eat or not, then going into a completely different menu to eat it. Or how about being caught off guard by the presence of a sentry, only to solve the problem by spending two minutes in the pause menu equipping the correct shade of camo. And what about trying to save your game during (what you hope is) a short lull between intense sequences only to have Para-Medic talk to you for five minutes about some obscure B movie? Or realizing you did indeed mess up a section and trying to revert to your last save point, only to realize the only way to do that is to quit to the main menu?