IRON MAN MODE

MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS successfully morphs XCOM into social simulation, somehow

- Jeremy Peel

The team behind XCOM has given me my next mission objective. It’s not to destroy an alien relay, extract a VIP from a hot zone, or board a crashed UFO. Instead, I’m to watch a movie with a friend in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. It’s a western, if the Eastwood-esque figure flashing across the television set is anything to go by, though the particulars of the film’s plot turn out to be entirely unimportant.

Movie night is merely a pretext to have a deep conversation with a new teammate, named Nico. We bond over our evil moms: hers a philanthropist sorceress who murdered children, mine a demonic goddess who banished me to a cold grave in the late 17th century. Nico, whose superpower appears to be cheeriness in the face of trauma, resolves to catch me up on the entire history of motion pictures: “The first thing you need to know – the glowing briefcase is a metaphor.”

So goes my first night in the Abbey, the picturesque fortress around which all the action of