Marvel's Spider-Man 2

The first minutes of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 don't let you settle into a single identity. During the opening fight against Sandman, the game passes control back and forth between Peter Parker and Miles Morales on its own schedule: you're Peter, then Miles, then Peter again, as if it were dealing cards. A few missions later, it gives you the switch. Open the in-game app, hold a button, and you become the other Spider-Man, picked up wherever he happened to be in the city. Each has his own suits, his own skill tree, his own rhythm in the air. But the name never changes. That small design choice may be the most philosophically interesting thing a blockbuster game has done in years. It makes plain something superhero fiction has always quietly known and rarely admitted: there is no Spider-Man. There is only the doing of Spider-Man, the swing, the quip, the catch, the mask pulled down, repeated often enough and convincingly enough that a name congeals around it.

This is performativity in its purest pop form. The old intuition about identity is that a stable inner essence comes first and actions express it. The game inverts this. "Spider-Man" is a role made of citations, each performance referring back to earlier ones. Neither Peter nor Miles is the original, and the two wardrobes of unlockable suits only sharpen the point. Every suit is a costume, including the one that came "first." What matters is the iteration, and iteration always allows for drift. Miles doesn't copy Peter. He cites him imperfectly, with bioelectric "venom" punches, a different tempo, and a Harlem rather than Queens sense of what a neighborhood hero owes his neighborhood. The citation carries the name forward while changing what the name can mean. That gap between a norm and its repetition is where identity becomes livable, and the game is built inside that gap. It even teaches you this in the right order: first the switching is something done to you, then something you do.

Then the symbiote arrives, and it is worth being precise about how. It doesn't first appear as temptation. It appears as rescue. Kraven drives a blade into Peter, and as he fades in Mary Jane's arms, the suit that had been keeping the dying Harry Osborn alive slides off Harry and onto him. The symbiote's first act is care. That matters, because the fantasy of the sovereign self rarely announces itself as aggression. It usually begins as a response to real injury, a wound that needs closing. The trouble starts when the thing that closed the wound offers more than survival. It promises Peter that underneath the quips, the overextended schedule, and the guilt, there is a stronger, truer self waiting to be released. Strip away the doubt and you'll finally be who you really are.

What the game shows, with real unease, is that this "true self" is just another performance, and an especially brittle one: a hard, sealed, isolated masculinity that mistakes dominance for integrity. Black-suit Peter is faster and crueler. He loses his patience with Mary Jane and his deference to Miles, because the fantasy of the sovereign subject requires that nothing outside it can wound it. The suit's violence isn't really a corruption of Peter. It is what invulnerability looks like when someone actually tries to live it.

That makes the symbiote arc a sharp allegory for a familiar contemporary pathology. When a self or a nation feels its vulnerability exposed, it is tempted to answer injury by restoring an imagined sovereignty through force rather than reckon with the fact that it was never sovereign to begin with. Peter is grieving May, behind on his mortgage, out of a job, and terrified of losing Harry. The suit sealed his wound, but it couldn't touch his grief. It only armored over it, and the armor needs enemies to keep its shape.

Kraven is the game's most explicit portrait of this logic, and its most quietly tragic. He is dying of cancer, a fact the game lets you discover in fragments, through dialogue and the logs scattered around his bases, where his longing for a death worthy of him is nearly plaintive. He turns New York into a game preserve, and his masculinity is entirely performative and entirely dependent on an audience of prey. He is made coherent only by repeatedly proving he can kill. Illness threatens that coherence by making him merely mortal, merely vulnerable, merely someone who needs care, so he tries to outrun it with an escalating series of trophies. The game gives his despair just enough room to register, then lets Venom end him in a few savage seconds. It reads less like a twist than a punchline the character has been setting up his whole life.

The Venom arc is the game's sharpest stroke, and its subtlest, because it is not quite Harry's story. Harry came back into Peter's life full of idealism, wanting to change the world with his oldest friend through the foundation they had dreamed up together. The symbiote takes that desire and bends it. "Heal the world" becomes "absorb the world," a plan to spread the symbiote across the city so that no one is ever weak again. The horror is that it still sounds like Harry. "We are Venom" has always been a strange line, and here it becomes precise. It describes not mutual recognition but the colonization of one being's wish by another. The symbiote doesn't erase Harry's longing to help people. It speaks in its voice and turns care into conquest. Harry is not the author of the fantasy of a world without precarity; he is its first casualty, a sick man whose most generous impulse has been made into a weapon. The game makes that distinction explicit at the end, when the real Harry resurfaces long enough to insist that Peter finish it, and his last words to his friend are "I love you." The answer to Venom was never going to be a better cure. It was separating a person's desire from what had captured it, and accepting that being bound to others means being exposed to them.

Which brings us to Miles, and to the most quietly radical thread in this sprawling game: his college application essay.

Miles spends much of the story unable to write it. It is easy to read this as a teen-drama subplot, but it is the game's philosophical core. To give an account of oneself is never a purely solo act. We are formed by relationships, losses, and histories we didn't choose and can't fully see, so any story we tell about ourselves is partial and borrowed and addressed to someone. Miles can't write the essay because the self such essays seem to demand, coherent and self-authored, doesn't exist. What exists is a kid shaped by his father's murder, his mother's endurance, Ganke's loyalty, Hailey's art, Peter's mentorship, and the anger he has been carrying toward Martin Li.

That anger is where the game makes its boldest choice. Kraven captures Miles and forces him into an arena with Li, a fight to the death with the man who killed his father, staged as the perfect revenge. The genre practically demands that Miles take it. Instead he saves Li, hurls him out of the arena, and sends him to find Spider-Man. This isn't weakness or naïveté. It is a recognition that Li's life is entangled with his own, and that the vengeance he has been rehearsing would turn him into Kraven, someone who needs a death to feel complete. Nonviolence here isn't passivity. It is the hardest action in the game: refusing the script that tells you who you have to become. Fittingly, it is Li's power, the thing Miles chose not to destroy, that later drives the last of the symbiote out of Peter and transforms it into the white Anti-Venom suit that helps end the crisis. Mercy turns out to be the precondition for the world surviving, and Peter later admits that Miles managed something he never could, which was to reform an enemy.

The game extends this attention to reworking roles beyond its two heroes. Mary Jane's missions were the most criticized part of the first game, slow stealth sequences that cast her as the girlfriend in need of rescue. Here Insomniac rebuilt her. She has a stun gun, she handles takedowns on her own, and by the end she's carrying a sonic weapon that tears through symbiotes. That is a gendered script being reiterated differently, which is how scripts change. Yet the symbiote finds her too. When Venom turns her into Scream, what it weaponizes is her accumulated frustration and anger, the same lesson the black suit taught: the symbiote doesn't invent violence, it harvests injury. Then there is "Graffiti Trouble," an optional mission played as Hailey Cooper, a deaf street artist voiced and performed by deaf actor Natasha Ofili. The world's sound is muffled to nearly nothing, and communication runs through signing, texting, and paint. For a few minutes the frame shifts, and a different way of perceiving the city becomes legible on its own terms rather than as a deficit.

It is precisely because the game is so attentive to whose life gets framed as precious that its blind spot is impossible to ignore. The losses it wants you to feel, Harry's illness, May's absence, Jefferson's murder, are staged with enormous care. Meanwhile the city is full of hunters, gangsters, and symbiote-infected bodies whom you web to walls and pummel by the thousands, with no inner lives, no names, and no grief. Even Kraven, whose despair the game takes the trouble to document, dies as spectacle rather than as loss. The game's ethics of grievability are sincere, but they run out at the edge of the combat system. This isn't unique to Spider-Man 2; it is the structural compromise of nearly every action game ever made. But a story this invested in the moral weight of each loss invites the question, and it can't quite answer it. The frame that makes Harry's suffering visible is the same frame that makes the henchmen disappear.

The ending, though, earns a great deal, partly by refusing the image you might expect. Harry survives but lies in a coma he may never wake from, and the person keeping vigil is Norman. He rages at his son's bedside, blames the Spider-Men, and calls for the G-serum. It is the essay's whole argument condensed into one father: grief that cannot bear its own helplessness, converted into a demand for power and an enemy to aim it at. Peter and Mary Jane leave him to it.

What Peter does instead is the quiet counterpoint. He doesn't defeat his grief by becoming more powerful, and he doesn't quit in disgust. He steps back. He moves in with Mary Jane, cooks breakfast for Miles and his family, and starts rebuilding the foundation he and Harry dreamed of, small-scale, in his garage. When an alert pings on his phone, he lets it go, and Miles swings off as the city's only Spider-Man. It is a striking way to close a power fantasy: the hero choosing an ordinary, entangled life over the role, trusting someone else to carry the name. And Miles, by the end, has finally finished his essay, not by discovering a hidden essential self but by accepting that the self he has is made of other people.

That is the game's real argument, and it is surprisingly radical for a franchise built on merch and spectacle. Identity isn't something you possess and defend. It is something you do, again and again, with and through others, imperfectly and never alone. The symbiote offers you a self that can't be hurt, and Norman, in the final scenes, is reaching for the same offer in a different bottle. Spider-Man, the role passed between two bodies and owned by neither, offers something better: a self that can be.