Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order didn't launch in the best of states - or at least not if you were playing on the base versions of the PS4 and Xbox One. There were a few jitters here and there, a few crashes, and for me a couple of especially memorable, minutes-long hangs on those weird, Sonic-style slip-n-slides where I could genuinely get up and make a cup of tea and come back to the game just unfreezing itself again. But as much as the tea-break freeze was a novel feature, those things really aren't what stuck in the memory for me.
What stuck for me was the slides themselves, strange level design relics caught slightly out of time. And Oggdo Bogdo, the exceptionally-named, wild difficulty spike of a bog frog mini boss. And the byzantine, multi-layered holomaps. And all the weirdly edgy finishing moves Cal Kestis, a baby faced, good-to-the-core Jedi, would pull off when taking those mini bosses down. There is a word for this stuff, this scuzzy, late noughties not-retro vibe, but I can't find it. The lazy part of me thinks it's just "PlayStation 3", which makes sense when you realise much of the Jedi team at developer Respawn have PS3 action game pedigree with the original God of War series, including game director Stig Asmussen and design director Jason de Heras.
I imagine a developer reading the word "PS3" might feel a certain kind of pain, though, ahead of their new game's release for the Series S/X and PS5, but that's a fault of how we talk about games. Last-gen is an insult. Two generations ago cruelty. Three generations ago, and suddenly it's an all-time classic that you just don't get these days. Jedi: Fallen Order and now, I think, Jedi: Survivor too, are games that you rarely seem to get anymore - they're just of the kind that doesn't seem quite old enough to have become cool again yet.