Mafia: The Old Country (2025)
April 3, 2026
“A jack of all trades is a master of none" - a phrase you see deployed a lot in games criticism. It's obvious why. At times, games have a tendency to throw a lot of different ideas at a player in hopes of keeping them engaged. Recognizing that not everyone will like everything, but also hopeful in the knowledge that each dart has a target, so keep tossing buddy. This type of design is most often seen in open world games, whether it be your Assassin's Creeds, Grand Thefts Auto, or Yakuzas. From this landscape emerges Mafia: The Old County, a game with one simple question, "what if serving a smorgasbord was the point?"
What do I mean by that? Well, instead of making a game with detours, a sprinkling of distractions across an otherwise sparse open world, Mafia: The Old County makes its whole game out of these disparate parts. The narrative is crafted around these set pieces and moments to create a type of casserole of a game. The ingredients are simple: mediocre gun handling, stealth segments ripped from the Playstation 3 era, wooden driving mechanics, sub-par horseback riding, oddly technical knife combat, largely linear level design, and an occasional big cinematic set piece. These different aspects are strung along what appears to be an 'open world' that never really invites you to explore it. The open world isn't really there, but instead something the game teases you with, this makes the world feel larger while shedding a lot of the baggage that would come with a game of that scale.
This quilt work design sounds somewhat chaotic and unpleasant. It certainly could have resulted in a mess. Somehow it does not, somehow I enjoyed it. The game effortlessly weaves between its different threads in a way to keeps each from feeling stale. For instance, the driving--on its own--is not great. A full driving game designed this way would be rightfully slighted. Here the driving segments serve to elevate the story, they play out with stakes, and are just brief enough to facilitate story telling without asking you to master mechanics or frustrate yourself with its shortcomings. Each of the elements is deployed with a similar level of care. The result is a fairly restrained story-first experience that gives the impression of game with much larger ambitions, without actually getting bogged down by those aspirations.
Still, this clever framing only works if the throughline is compelling. So does the story deliver? The narrative is largely run of the mill, a poor Italian boy breaks away from his life of destitution as he dreams for a life of luxury in America. Along the way he gets distracted by love, finds a new way forward, and engages in some introspection along the way. Surprise: he finds himself haunted by some specters of his past as well. Pretty much a run of the mill rags-to-riches story, with some slight subversions on what you may expect. For a story that largely fails to tread new ground, it still comes off as surprisingly heartfelt. To be honest, along the way I didn't think the story was doing a lot for me, but I found myself two-thirds of the way through the game attached to the characters and wondering how all the story would work out for each of them. So, mission accomplished on that front.
Now months removed from completing the game, the story isn't what I look fondly back on, but it was the glue that kept the whole game together. The true strength of the game lies in its larger set pieces. There are cinematic experiences throughout the game in smaller areas where the developers clearly spent the most time crafting the experience. There are slices of the game at a beautiful church, a old-school jail, a oppressive mine, and more, all surrounded by stunning Italian vistas. It's an interesting game, and maybe more so an interesting experiment in what the AA experience can look like these days.
That 'Jack of All Trades' idiom from earlier is sometimes end capped to fully state "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." With games I may dispute how "often" this is the case, but Mafia: The Old Country is absolutely a textbook example.