I’ve spent the last week or so, ever since I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, playing Spider-Man: Remastered on the PS5. I’ve already written about it a bit this week, as I rambled and ranted on about how I am finding less joy than ever in what used to be my favorite video game occupation: collectibles and collectible-based challenges. I even wrote about it back in 2018, during my initial run of daily blog posts (and I’m not linking anything that old to a current blog post), but I’ve only ever glossed over my favorite part of the game. I’ve mentioned it, but I don’t know that I’ve ever really talked about what draws me to Spider-Man games and Spider-Man in general. The latter is a bit more complex, though I can probably summarize it by outlining how much of myself I saw in Peter Parker and how much Peter Parker was always present whenever Spider-Man was on the screen or page. That, plus the enormous responsibility placed on this teenager’s shoulders, the grief that overwhelms and informs his early years as a superhero, and the fact that he is almost always fighting an uphill battle no matter what situation he finds himself in. A lot of reasons why I’d identify with this character as a kid and why the stories told through him might resonate with me. When it comes to the games, though, the answer is much more simple.

As a kid who grew up in forests, who was never allowed far from home, and who was constantly tasked with monitoring their younger siblings, I was a fairly risk-averse child. I was not allowed to climb trees and never really developed the skills associated with it. I learned to ride a bike and could swim better than most people I knew, but I was never really encouraged to run or jump or do any of the non-bike wheeled activities. The lack of other kids in my neighborhood and the fact that I was homeschooled meant that I wasn’t really exposed to other ways of life, other forms of activity, or different environments until I was much older and had moved from my spirghtly youth into my anxious, quiet, defensives days of inactivity. By the time I knew skateboards were a thing, I was the wrong sort of shape and weight to learn to skate. By the time I learned of urban exploration and had the thought that cities and tightly-clustered buildings could hide just as much as forests could, I was struggling to survive the various traumas of my childhood and didn’t really have the time or energy (much less the opportunity) to engage in anything but the activities I already had.

Which is where video games came into the picture. I don’t remember how I first played Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, but the forgiving nature of the physics and the fun, traversible environment of the games absolutely captured my interest. It was a perspective shift for me as a child, to suddenly be looking around at the world through the lense of “what could I climb or jump off” when I’d been trained so thoroughly to never even consider those thoughts. The game instilled in me a love of fun traversal mechanics and the sort of unrealistic, bombastic movement of urban manuevuring in video games. When I eventually played a Spider-Man game a few years later, at a friend’s house, I felt that old love reemerge, even if the style of movement was entirely different. Sure, I wasn’t on a skateboard and couldn’t do sick tricks over a helicopter, but I could swing over helicopters and the game encouraged me to think in three dimensions, even if it frequently had trouble dealing with how ready I was to take advantage of those three dimenisons.

THUG2 remained my preferred traversal game for a long time, since several Spider-Man games showed up, made huge promises, and then fell short. I had high hopes for Assassin’s Creed as well, but the way the movement selected targets for jumps and parkour-type maneuvers would up making it difficult to achieve the level of fluidity I desired. Subsequent games in that series improved things, but not enough that I was ever really satisfied. Sunset Overdrive eventually elevated things to the point where I felt the same fluidity and grace I’d felt while virtually skateboarding, but the whole world was more more explorable. There were fewer maps, sure, but that level of movement was so baked into every aspect of the game that it easily supplanted THUG2 as my preferred game when I just wanted to mess around and travel places. Breath of the Wild, a few years later, supplanted that, even though I didn’t get to feel as maneuverable, but it truly was a whole world that was fully explorable, with a fun physics engine that rewarded non-traditional thinking. I got a lot of time out of that and it was only a year later, when I finally played Spider-Man for the first time that I finally felt like I’d gotten the game I’d always wanted.

There’s plenty of Spider-Man that has you planted on the ground, fighting groups of mooks as you try to protect New York City, but so much of the game is about moving around. There’s chasing missions, secrets to find, various little challenges to get to, and enough fun spaces that you spend most of your time playing the game in motion. The game starts you off easy, throwing you down a wide street as you web-swing between buildings. As you move into an eclosed space and need to get around more directly, they slowly introduce more and more movement mechanics, drilling you through prompts and repition of encounters to get these maneuvers down so well that they become second nature. By the time you’re out in the world again, you’re ready to swap between all the movement styles at a moment’s notice. Unforunately, because of the way these maneuvers are presented, it can take a while for a new player to realize just how quickly they can move. The instructions make sense the way they’re given, but they’re not actually the optimal ways to move yourself around the city. Some of those you have to unlock, since there’s a skill that turns the zip jump, a horizontal dash forward to a targeted point, into an aboslute monster of a momentum building. Then, eventually, you learn that you can build up WAY more speed by not jumping at the end of a web swing. Instead, you just let go of the web just after the bottom point of your arc, let yourself get hurled forward, and then throw out another web to swing on. The game prevents you from dropping the last few feet to the ground for a second or two, when you’ve just let go of a web (part of the system that does its best to keep you moving if you mess up a manuever), so you don’t lose any height and just keep hurtling forward.

Sure, there’s a few moments of pain and frustration when the point I’m trying to target with a zip jump changes just as I’m pressing the buttons to do it, but the game is forgiving more often than not, and it’s usually just a sign that you should be targeting things further forward. The only time it really becomes a bother is when you need a perfect chain of zip jumps to get the gold tier reward on one of the Task Master challenges. That can get incredible frustrating, especially because there’s no way to instantly reset one of those chellenges. You have to let enough time pass that you completely fail it and that can take thirty seconds or more. Other than that, where impeccable precision is a must, you have to mess up pretty badly to lose your moment. Which can happen more easily than I’d like to admit, given the nature of the camera and web-swinging controls, but it’s also not difficult to build momentum again, so you’re rarely stopped for long.

It’s just fun to move around. I really enjoy it, even if I’m still struggling to enjoy some of the things I’m moving towards. It’s enough fun that I generally avoid fast traveling unless I’m in a hurry to get something done in the game before I need to stop playing for some reason or another. The layout of the city makes it pretty easy to get around, as do a bunch of the abilities, such that it can take less time to travel moderate distances by web and zip jump than it takes for the game to reload if you fast-travel. You have to be very good at maneuvering, and there’s definitely parts of the city where all your options are bad enough that you’re basically stuck with fast travel or slower traversal, but it still averages out to being the most fun I’ve had moving around a virtual environment.