Dirt 5

Your guess is as good as mine on this one. I don't know where it came from, how it got here, or what weirdo came up with it, but it's on my ps4 somehow so i had to play it. I assume it to have been one of the "free" games at some point, a "perk" offered through Sony's overpriced PS Plus subscriptin that gets more insulting and asinine every month. At least this one delivers what it promises, there are at least 5 dirts in this game, and some muds too. 

If you're wondering when and where Dirt 1-4 manifested into being, join the scores of philosophers and quantum physicists that have driven themselves mad pondering that very question. My brief time with this game was a horrid but also not entirely unenjoyable experience. It was fun in the same way i imagine the first hooker after a bad divorce is fun, a shameful thrill that leaves one feeling lost and... dirty. 

So while i can't accuse Dirt 5 of being mis-titled, i can certainly accuse it of being a mis-take, specifically God's mistake, an evil thing with power that i dare not incur the wrath of by criticizing too harshly. Yet my devotion to truth prevents me from calling this a "video game" when it would be more accurate to call it a "digital demon seed", or some kind of "living stillbirth". 

A Cosmic Calamity? An Exile of Heaven? A Hell-bortion? Perdition's Brown Spew? The Stinking Soup of Satan's Poop? The Burning Bile of Belphagor's Belching Bunghole? Soul-Aids?

What no name, no matter how creatively wretched, could possibly relay is the sheer volume of mental torture brought forth by the aggressively friendly heathen alterna-pop and some other Godless genre of noise i can only describe as "mud-flap" music. 

These sounds of the abyss assault you in tandem with the utterly horrifying in your face-ness of every single visual aspect. From the violently excessive lens flare, to the energy drink portland tattoo parler paint jobs, to the mucky muck flying everywhere this game has more going on than the human mind can process at any given moment.

Supposedly it's a car racing game but my brain could barely hold onto that notion because it felt more like a combination of astronaut training and lsd. Playing this game is like seeing through the eyes of a mantis shrimp while standing on the wing of a fighter jet. The 2019 "Color Out Of Space" movie did an okay job at adapting the unimaginable space color that HP Lovecraft introduced in his writing, but it pales in comparison to the literal interpretation of that cursed text on display in every nausea-inducing frame of this mind-flaying game. 

The thumbnail for this one says "Get Ready" in big friendly letters, but i assure you it's a trick. There is no getting ready for the violent puke of sensation that awaits you. Nothing can prepare you for Dirt 5. It's too goddamn powerful. If you ever see the fabled Dirts 1-4, burn them, bury them, or launch them back into space where they surely came from, because games like this don't belong in this world. The minds of Men are far too weak and prone to madness. 

The best thing i can say about Dirt 5 is it's the closest we're probably gonna get to a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. It's not nearly as good, but it's easily just as unholy, if not more. This game is haunted. More haunted than Luigi's mansion, Majora's Mask, and Zombies Ate My Neighbors combined. I'm gonna have nightmares that i'm being dragged through dog shit in a straight jacket by OK Go's tour bus.