The thing is that moments like these are recurring, you can create this EXACT SAME TYPE of visual with a Troll near the approach to Stormveil that is waiting to jump down in ambush in Elden Ring. I know that Akiman is referring specifically to how the designers frame shots or compose where player agency isn’t necessarily being accounted for, but I’d say that it’s an overdetermined (in the literary or interpretive sense) element of the games themselves.

When you speak to certain NPCs, the camera angle is often assumed to be from the back and it’s to create the illusion of various interactions. That’s the “interpretive” gap filling that Akiman is alluding to. If you don’t move the camera when talking to Ema in Sekiro, one interaction has her state, in exposition, that she wants to examine Wolf’s face. If you never move the camera, it seems like she puts her hand to your cheek, but if you move it, her model is only gesturing.

That’s cinematography. It’s a novelty of sorts when you don’t have the language to describe it, but From Software’s design incorporates and understands utilizing this kind of visual illusion. It’s not as if we don’t have creators such as Shinji Mikami or Hideo Kojima, but separating it from an auteur and just saying “this is the technique”, you see a lot of games sort of shy away from incorporating this as a conscious element of design, iterating on and developing it into a frequently used language.

It feels like, again, an accident or “novelty” to observers, “Critics”, but it’s something I think gives the various Souls games a distinct kind of identity. Framing shots, enemy composition, even interactions and bouts of dialogue gain elements of intimacy, danger, suspense… “comedy” lol. That’s what is being leveraged and what makes the games so evocative.

It’s something you can uncouple from the arguments that the games are “References and abject suffering.”