[Game Review] Dino Crisis

Dino Crisis is an easy sell on paper: what if Resident Evil had dinosaurs instead of zombies?  To sweeten the deal, what if it was created by the same team that made Resident Evil?  Fans will balk at this simple description that has (debatably) plagued Dino Crisis since its inception, but its more true than it isn't.

Dino Crisis got its start as an alternate take to Resident Evil's "survival horror" genre.  For Dino Crisis, the team at Capcom wanted to make something called "panic horror", where instead of the terrifying, lumbering zombies that compartmentalized Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion, you were constantly being hunted by aggressive, intelligent dinosaurs.  Mechanically, the difference is that when you are injured you would bleed on the ground if you didn't use a specific health item to stop it.  Bleeding on the ground would allow dinosaurs to find you if they were in an adjacent room.  Certain dinosaurs, such as the raptors, could open doors, making running through rooms quickly avoiding enemies no longer as safe as it was in Resident Evil.  When played, it isn't really all that different.  Dinosaur AI and health is certainly more intimidating than Resident Evil's zombie enemies, but that doesn't mean it is enough for all-new genre classification.

The most notable thing about Dino Crisis outside of its kinship with Resident Evil, is in how good it looks.  Rather than using prerendered graphics like its sister series, Dino Crisis boasts actual polygonal environments and some rather impressive lighting for a game from 1999.  Because of the live rendered nature of the environments, Dino Crisis also boasts panning or dollyed camera shots that further the impact of certain set pieces, such as an extremely intense scene where you are tasked with running away from a lumbering T-Rex while on a roof.  On a technological level, Dino Crisis is impressive, although I found insubstantial visual glitches to be relatively common.

Mechanically the game works well for a survival horror game.  Ammunition and health is relatively scarce throughout, making every dinosaur encounter incredibly tense.  Dino Crisis introduces a mixing mechanic, where you will find blue items that are useless on their own, but can be mixed together to produce things like knockout darts and health packs of varying strengths.  In a way, this can make the game a bit too easy, but since your inventory is so limited (not as much as Resident Evil, thank God), this ease is mostly dependent on how close you are to a given lockbox with what you want at any given time.  The game introduces lockboxes that are unlocked using plugs, which can be found in the environment (almost always behind some moveable shelf).  The lockboxes are replacements for the dimensionally inconsistent save room box from Resident Evil.  Where as in Resident Evil the save room box was accessible from any save point, lockboxes are independent of one another, meaning you have to find the one with what you want in it.  Likewise, these are rarely in save rooms, meaning you may be accessing them with raptors hot on your tail (an intense situation if what you are trying to grab is ammunition or health).  Another complexity to them is that they are color coded: green for health items, red for ammunition, and yellow for a mix of the two.  While this doesn't wildly change the game from Resident Evil, it did make me feel a bit more spread out and stressed, unsure of what items I had access to across the various lock boxes and worried I had wasted too many resources to continue with the game.  It is to the game's credit that this never seems to be true, but the feeling was there nonetheless.  That said, if I did know of something I wanted from a particular box, getting there could be a chore.

The environment in Dino Crisis is pretty dull.  The story goes you are Regina, part of a covert military team sent out to an island to retrieve a researcher who has been labeled deceased.  Your team has intelligence saying that his death was faked, and that the island is host to a secret military facility experimenting on a new form of energy.  How this leads to dinosaurs I'll let you figure out yourself, as it and the story as a whole is not very interesting or good (but it is serviceable enough).  Thus, you spend the entire game in a research facility.  Resident Evil's final area - a research facility - is debatably that game's worst.  Likewise this is true for Resident Evil 2, and likewise the location theme fairs as well here.  There just isn't much enjoyment in looking around the research facility the way there was in the Spencer Mansion, which in turn makes several of the puzzles much less interesting to figure out.  So much of the location is just random computers and desks that don't really invoke anything outside of banality, with the occasional super computer that feels standard by the late PS1 era.  My theory here is that Dino Crisis was intended as a blend of several popular things from the late 90s: Resident Evil, Jurassic Park, and Metal Gear Solid.  There is a cinematic quality to Dino Crisis that reminds me of a much less skilled version of Metal Gear Solid, and its location feels like it speaks to that.  It is admirable in a lot of ways, but in execution it feels like it gets in the way.  Puzzles require a lot of backtracking, reading files and interacting with computers, some of which look no different from the computers you can't do anything with.  Without an interesting space to explore, backtracking feels much more of a chore than it should have, and while there is at least one puzzle I thought was rather inventive that has you rewriting an ID card early in the game, most puzzles virtually require you to find a room with a file in it and remember the code written within.  To be totally fair, the game has other puzzles like the DDK discs which are fun, but finding these discs can at times require backtracking, or solving puzzles that themselves require backtracking.

The thing is, I love survival horror games, and so I enjoyed my brief time with Dino Crisis.  That said, I don't necissarily write these reviews to my own bias, and I know that if I were given a pick of survival horror games to play, this just wouldn't rate very high.  I understand the appeal of this game's approach to the genre, dinosaurs being a fun and often underappreciated idea in games these days, and I would most certainly buy a remake in the style of Resident Evil 2 (2019), but an idea can only get you so far - especially one that's silly like this one - and the game just doesn't quite hold up its end of the bargain.  It is firmly worth a play if you are a fan of this sort of thing, and it is impressive in its own technical right, but it pales in comparison to other heavyweights in the genre.



6.5

[Game Review] Riven

Myst was a massive success when it was released. It was a major influence in the adoption of the CD-ROM drive, and would keep its status as greatest selling PC game until The Sims passed it in 2002.  The game was frustratingly difficult and slow paced, but atmospheric and mature in its expectation of patience and attention to detail out of the player.  Its pre-rendered backgrounds were technologically impressive for the time, helping to give the game an immersion that most other games weren't accomplishing with adults.  Naturally, a sequel was well anticipated.

Riven took what Myst did well and improved on it in just about every way.  The story was improved to give the world of Riven a better sense of place and weight, something accentuated by the massive improvement in soundtrack and pre-rendered visuals.  The puzzles were significantly more difficult, but given better tip-offs to their various components than in the original (anyone remember the submarine sound puzzle from Myst).  With this expanded difficulty, however, comes a far lower finish rate for this much improved sequel, which may be a con more than a pro depending on how well you liked the original Myst.

Riven is one of my favorite games of all time, and my favorite of the Myst series.  The pre-rendered backgrounds of the original felt like very early computer graphics, with a hodgepodge of different styles littering the island in a way that may have looked nice for the time, but was ridiculous if you were trying to consider this a believable world.  Riven is so much more impressive on this front that it could be more of a spiritual successor if it didn't continue off from the first game.  There are games that have an atmosphere all their own, where that game feels distinctly their own (think Halo, Metal Gear Solid, or Bioshock), and one of the forgotten masters of unique atmosphere must be Riven.  The world is absolutely dripping with this abandoned wonder, a world of icons and religious significance, mysterious mechanisms, and haunting visuals.  I have yet to find a game that has quite the same feeling of isolation and history that Riven does.  In all of my favorite worlds, there is usually a hint of this: Breath of the Wild, Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls.  Yet still, there is something invoked out of that meeting place where Riven's soundtrack, visuals, and world construction cross into one another that has yet to be replicated.

But Riven isn't just atmosphere, as much as I would pretty well be satisfied with that.  Riven has devilishly tough puzzles, but of a certain type.  Rather than the spacial complexity of Stephen's Sausage Rolls or physicality of Portal, puzzles that probably better fit the "puzzle" genre than any of the Myst games, Riven requires you to learn the world's iconography and sense of space in order to proceed.  Riven often requires you to go down a path to find one part of a puzzle, only then to ask you to backtrack and pay attention to doors opened, levers pulled, or lamps lit or unlit in order to recognize that, more than likely, multiple paths exist where only one was obvious.  Riven's puzzle structure is aligned with the puzzles' complexity.  Your first task, despite the presence of puzzle pieces scattered around before you on the starting island, is to find the multiple paths from island to island.  There are five islands in total, four of which are interconnected whose connections must be found or unlocked.  As you solve the puzzles required to open up these pathways, each of the islands present their own island-centric puzzles.  These can sometimes require traveling to other islands in order to find the missing information connecting the independent parts of the puzzle (such as the number-ball puzzle on the village island, which requires in part going to two different islands for two small pieces of information nearly required to solve the puzzle).  When these are completed, you enter the final stretch where you must solve an island-spanning puzzle, pieces of which you've picked up in or through the other puzzles.  The game comes together incredibly well, even if these puzzles can be somewhat demanding.  The ball puzzle of the village island, for example, not only requires remembering the sounds of animals that you may only see once in the game, but also learning a new base-5 numbering system that the people of Riven use (disclaimer: I love having to learn a minor language or numbering system if its done well, as it is here).  And once you've gotten that under your belt, there is still one of the balls that requires going to another island to find the ball which has been taken out of its slot, and then going to another island to get the proper perspective on where the ball is in order to finally solve it.  It's the only puzzle in the game I felt might have been a bit too opaque, although I wouldn't say it was unfair.

Riven has dated, for sure, but it is surprisingly immersive and challenging today, and more than a worthwhile play.  I can't think of any game of this type that is as challenging or patient as Riven, and if the Myst series or Myst-like genre is a gap in your classic PC gaming history, then you owe it to yourself to play the reigning classic of the genre.



10

[Game Review] Myst

I think I've played through the original Myst at least 5 times now.  While it doesn't stack well against its sequel, the challenging Riven, Myst still stands up in its own right as that classic that captured PC players in the early 90s.  Well, maybe not perfectly.

For me, Myst's strengths were always in how it utilizes its world and mechanics in exploration and puzzle solving.  The world doesn't feel believable in even the most generous of perspectives, but it does feel intentional, and not immediately apparent in how it all works.  Myst is the kind of game that will have you searching for that lever, or button, and when you've found it leaves you wondering what the hell that just did.  Looking at the mechanism you just interacted with usually holds the hint, and checking out where the cables, pipes, or other parts of whatever it is you just interacted with goes to can usually lead you to the solution.  Myst and the rest of its series has gained infamy for occasionally opaque puzzle design.  Replaying the original Myst for the 5th time probably doesn't put me in the best position to comment on a first timer's difficulty, but to my understanding there only seemed a couple puzzles that truly felt misleading or otherwise painful to deduce.  The issue here is much less that the puzzles are difficult, but that each of these puzzles were required in order to leave the stage you were on, called "Ages".

Myst comprises of a hub world, the Myst Island, and four Ages, each with usually a handful of puzzles.  When first starting Myst, your first task is to figure out how to unlock the other ages.  Once that is done, entering any of these Ages will have you stuck until you solve the puzzle that leads you back to Myst.  This means if you land in an Age and can't figure it out - like, perhaps, the Age has a notoriously difficult puzzle to get back - you were stuck until you figured it out.  There wasn't any going back and trying another Age so you could return with a fresh mind.  You either figured it out or you quit.  Likewise, each of the Ages are usually just two or three interlocking puzzles, meaning on several of the Ages finding your way back to Myst requires solving the entire Age.  This is incredibly bad design for a puzzle game, since puzzles are usually less frustrating to tackle if you are allowed to try multiple simultaneously, allowing you to refresh before re-approaching the puzzle less frustrated and perhaps with a better understanding of how the puzzles' underlying logic is designed.  There are two cases off the top of my head that are likely to get you stuck, one of which has you flowing water through pipes (with little indication water is actually flowing or not outside of the sound of flowing water, which is extremely difficult to discern in the low quality mono soundtrack), and the other is the infamous submarine puzzle.  The submarine puzzle, in hindsight, makes sense but is tedious if you make a mistake, or while you are troubleshooting your ideas for solutions.

Myst has dated poorly, but it is more than playable, and as a matter of fact is still a hell of a lot of fun to play today.  The atmosphere is great, the puzzles are short but head-scratching.  Myst's most damning drawback is that it is outclassed in just about every way by its sequel Riven.  If you want to dive in to a classic for the sake of history, Myst isn't too painful and incredibly fun, but if you are trying to get into this very specific type of puzzler then you are much better off checking out Riven.



 9.0

[Game Review] Obduction

Myst clones aren't exactly common, but some twenty years on since Cyan's classic was originally released has seen a handful of people give their hand at their own version of the atmospheric puzzler.  But Myst and its sequels had something distinct that many of these copies didn't have, and a lot of it has to do with atmosphere, and some of it has to do with the mechanical nature of puzzles.  A common trick Myst games like to pull is where when you open a door and walk through it, hidden behind the newly opened door is a lever or a button.  The idea expressed here is to check your surroundings, to remember and be aware of what you've changed and remember what neutral states those mechanics have.  It is actually so common that I couldn't believe I missed it when playing Cyan's kickstarted spiritual successor to Myst, Obduction.

Obduction gets those two things that Myst get right and others seem to fall short of most of the time.  Solving puzzles requires realizing what the mechanisms the puzzle consists of and where they are wired up to, following pistons through walls or cables hung overhead.  That's because puzzles are tied to environment.  Where you can go is also equal to how many puzzles can be solved, sometimes unlocking new mechanics for puzzles you may have already thought you were done with.  Therefore, one of the most intoxicating aspects of Myst-likes and Obduction is in trying to get around in its mysterious world and exploring.  Acting as lubricant for this sensation is the mythical aspect to the world.  Obduction, this time, has you teleported to a piece of Arizona desert . . . only it's captured in a bubble on an alien planet.  As to why you or anything is there, the game slowly doles out story shaping a bizarre story about second chances and making due with what you have.  It doesn't quite have the mythological, totally-foreign world edge that the original Myst series does, but as a more modern (and culturally identifiable) analog to that same concept, Obduction does a pretty good job.

There isn't much Obduction doesn't do a good job in.  The game is essentially divided into three worlds including the main "hub" type world (there is another, but it is so brief it hardly needs mentioning), and each will require you teleporting back and forth between them in order to solve puzzles.  Puzzles range from traditional "get the power on" tropes to "what does this lever do?" or "what does this code go to?"  There is absolutely nothing innovative about Obduction, but then again I wouldn't particularly ask that of the game.  It feels like something meant to live up to the spirit of something, while giving it a new take, and largely that is what Obduction does, even if it feels overly beholden to the Myst series.

The issues with Obduction are twofold, and one of them is a matter of taste.  Obduction is slow, and walking from end to end of one of the three maps can take a little more time than you are probably wanting to give it, especially towards the end when puzzles start dwindling and trekking becomes more and more common.  Even Myst didn't quite have this type of tedium since you moved by clicking, and could get incredibly efficient clicking quickly from one end of the map to the either.  Obduction isn't overly patience testing, but it is enough to turn off those who not accustomed to a slow paced puzzler.  The other issue, however, is most definitely an issue.  Loading screens in this game are obnoxious, although only just crossing that threshold.  Every time you switch worlds, a loading screen will take you there lasting upwards of 20 seconds or so.  This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for that fact that one of the puzzles requires you to teleport back and forth some 10 times.  To call out this one puzzle alone may even be too nice, since there was a simpler puzzle just before which also required about 5 transitions.  This block of puzzles felt like it was great in concept, but the execution was severely hurt by the limitations of how this game was made.  Granted, it was more than likely a cost for the game's beautiful visuals, something I certainly wouldn't trade, but the section is trying on your patience regardless.

If you are a fan of Myst and those inspired by, then Obduction is more than likely something you can't miss.  For those trying to get into Myst, Obduction is not quite so obtuse as Myst and its sequels can get, and so may be the best entry point in this type of game.  As for everyone else, your mileage will vary.  For me, it was wonderfully fun, and a type of game I'd been hankering to have again for years.



7.5

[Game Review] The Outer Worlds

Note: This review contains mild spoilers, if you're sensitive to it -- but nothing major.


Part of me really wants to rip in to The Outer Worlds.  The Bethesda-type RPG has seen a severe fall in quality since the heyday of Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas (sure, and Skyrim, but Skyrim always felt like an amazing game that exemplified everything wrong with the Bethesda RPG, but maybe that's just me).  Fallout 4 may have sucked 60+ hours from me, but failed to be anything but a mildly enjoyable shade of some of my favorite RPGs of the past 15 years.  And while Fallout 4 certainly has an important place in this narrative, it is the travesty that is Fallout 76 that really makes The Outer Worlds shine in the public eye.  And truly, The Outer Worlds feels far more the successor to Fallout: New Vegas than either of those missteps, but I think that the context of the game's release has out shown the actual quality of the game.  I'm getting ahead of myself here, because despite my reserved tone thus far I actually really enjoyed The Outer Worlds.  The Outer Worlds boasts an interesting world, fun and unique characters, and a rather skillful threading of multiple genres and styles (thematically that is, not so much gameplay-wise).

The basic plot has crazy scientist Phineas Welles finding you adrift in space on a ship full of thousands of frozen would-be colonists from Earth, traveling towards the Halcyon colony, a corporate run solar system, as reinforcements of scientists, engineers, etc.  You are one of these would-be colonists, but, as Phineas explains, something happened to your ship (called the Hope) en route to the Halcyon colony, and by the time the Halcyon corporation found you the colonists where well past their unfreezing date.  If they were to unfreeze any of you, you'd turn to jelly, and to invest in the technology to unfreeze you all safely is considered a waste of resources by Halcyon.  Phineas plainly disagrees with this sentiment, deciding to defect from Halcyon and research how to unfreeze the colonists himself.  But he only had enough of some McGuffin liquid to save you, and now you must find out where more is located and then how to get it in order to save the colonists and thus save the colony.

Much like Fallout before it, The Outer Worlds is dripping with satire, this time replacing U.S. government MKULTRA type experimentation and cold war era ultra patriotism with corporate structure gone wild.  The Halcyon colony is owned by the Halcyon corporation, a holdings corporation made up of ten smaller corporations, and every facet of the colonists' lives are controlled by The Board, which is exactly what it sounds like.  The game immediately makes this apparent by dropping you onto the planet Terra 2, specifically in a little factory town called Edgewater.  The first person you meet here is a young man who has been severely wounded, and when you try to help him out with some of your medicine, he quickly rejects your offer stating that he works for Spacer's Choice, and that his contract only allows him to receive Spacer's Choice branded medical treatment, of which your healing goods are not.  You can choose to ignore him, which he will thank you for, but ask you not to mention it to his superior.  So yeah, this is the game you are in for.  The satire in The Outer Worlds ranges from wildly funny (such as the absurdity of how grave costs and collections are done, and how they are doled out) to being over the top and heavy handed, like choosing whether to reroute power to the defectors from the local factory, or the obviously evil corporation -- with little knowledge about the history of this place. Basically, it's a shitty version of the Megaton nuke from Fallout 3, but with the heavy impression that what you are doing is something morally ambiguous, even though the game screams at you what is and isn't moral and likewise makes you the chooser of this town's destiny despite having arrived not but maybe a couple days earlier.  Overall, I'd give The Outer Worlds more of a positive score than negative on its satire, although part of my issue is an issue I have with the game as a whole.

The Outer Worlds feels frustratingly shallow despite how hard it is trying.  Its subject is ripe for parody, and its world has the potential to be a believable and complicated world, but the game does just enough to give the impression of these things without truly digging into them.  The closest it gets is with the planet Monarch, which takes up a bulk of the game.  Monarch was abandoned by the Halcyon corporation after one of its cities on the planet was overrun by space pirates.  It didn't hurt that the planet's air is thick with sulfur (which was wearing down all the machines on the planet) and the land full of extremely dangerous and hostile creatures.  The whole planet was just rather unwelcome.  Two individuals, working for the Monarch corporation, found a loophole where if all other corporations left the planet then they could claim it for their own, and would have to be recognized by the board as an independent corporate planet.  Their reasoning was twofold, where one, named Graham, wanted to start a cult of sorts that focuses on the individual and what the individual wants, and the other, named Sanjay, wants something like workers rights, allowing weekends, paid time off, and limits on working hours per week.  Either way you want to cut it, The Board doesn't much like these ideas coming out of Monarch, and thus demonizes the entire planet through propaganda and restricts the distribution of travel passes. Inevitably, the two radicalists on the planet have separated and each have their own towns.  You can help either of them, but there are also several other encampments and towns that complicate the synergy of the planet's economy you can participate in.  Monarch is the greatest example of promise The Outer Worlds' premise has.  The internal complexity of the different communities, their beliefs, and their reliance on one another told a story not just through questing, but by the mechanics of the relationships between characters, place, and culture.  In subject and in themes, I found Monarch both the most interesting and most immersive of the planets (Monarch is actually the least realistic looking planet, however, looking far too strange and with unrealistic lighting (particularly at night) to be convincing as anything other than a videogame level.  Granted, I get it is an alien planet, but I couldn't help but feel a bit unimmersed by the wilds when I was there.)  Unfortunately, there isn't anything else close to the complexity Monarch shows.

Mechanically, the game also suffers from being unfortunately shallow.  Skill point allocation has some fun secrets hidden within (try a playthrough with the lowest intelligence possible, for a Fallout throw back), but in general isn't very substantial.  Putting points in anything outside of the Tech, Stealth, and Dialog sets of skills is virtually useless on normal difficulty because combat is painfully easy throughout.  Until the very last boss of the game, I was able to loot the battlegrounds while my companions aggro'd the enemy (or I ate bullets) before killing everyone in mere moments.  The only time I had any trouble during the middle section of the game was before I realized what gun type is good against what enemy.  Once realizing that, the game became a cakewalk.  Skill points in Tech will increase your damage for Science guns, increase healing abilities, and allows for some neat dialogue options.  Stealth points will get you into locked computer terminals or doors for neat loot or quirky side-story stuff, but its the Dialog points that really give you the most bang for your buck.  And that is because this is where The Outer Worlds really shines.

The Outer Worlds knows that when playing an RPG you are usually doing one of three things: trying to become an all-powerful God character, exploring a wild world full of adventure and sandbox-type play, or to follow a story as a participant.  The Outer Worlds tries all three, but really only succeeds to any great degree in the latter.  The story itself, as I said, is unfortunately shallow, but it is so well written and with such interesting characters that the game's shallowness is disappointing, but far from defeating.  Talking to characters, getting to know them, and sometimes digging in too deep into their secrets is where the game and the world really start to come together.  Zara, right hand woman to Graham on Monarch, has ties to an abandoned factory, and learning this can help with brokering a deal between Graham's people and Sanjay.  Likewise, talking to Sanjay can give you insight into how he may have not been the favorite employee of Monarche's old leaders.  These little plot details are unearthed through the character's charismatic quirks and personality.  Zara is a tough but focused worker, whereas Sanjay is obsessed with structure in and of itself, regardless of how structure can be used.  The dialog really shines when talking to your companions.  To be honest, your companions are as much a criticism as they are a praise.  Characters like Felix are absolutely awful, annoying, shit-head cliche's with no redeeming qualities and too shallow a quest line to even get close to making something of their waste of a companion slot.   I'm not trying to get a bit to . . . impassioned here, but when insanely, insultingly boring Felix is allowed the same category as Parvati, one of the best side characters of the decade, I have issues.  Parvati is smart, awkward, shy, and full of romantic problems.  She feels real, relatable, and like the type of person who would realistically exist in this world.  She is also debatably the best representation for asexuality in a game, or any medium really.  It's believable, and taking her out for a beer to discuss it and her love life problems is a highlight of the gaming year.  Her side quest is sweet, as much of it as I was able to play since the quest is bugged and failed for me halfway through (I'm not knocking the game points for this since it will most definitely be patched, but its easily the most devastating part of my entire playthrough).  Several of the other characters read as dull at first but became much more interesting over time.  Nyoka had a sad story that surprised me in how it affected me, given it isn't much outside of the cliche.  Ellie, although cartoonish in her side quest, became the character closest to my play style over time, and my second favorite companion in the game.  Max, the Vicar, was complicated, a man I didn't like but for well written character reasons, not due to poor writing like Felix.  All-in-all, the companion characters were incredibly successful in giving me that Firefly-esque feeling of a makeshift family trying to make their way in the universe.  I wish the side quests with these characters were much longer, more involved, and maybe even a couple of them folding into the main plot or the local plots of various places, but I know that asking so much of a developer isn't really a proper criticism.  The only companion I didn't spend any time with was SAM, the robot, and that was because of the flaw system.

The flaw system is an interesting mechanic that feels a bit undercooked.  On occasion, you will be offered a flaw to your character which basically results in a slight debuff to a few stats under certain conditions in exchange for a new perk.  These conditions are things like fear of certain enemies giving you a damage debuff.  One of these conditions I accepted was a fear of robots, which locked me out of SAM's side missions.  If you think I'm about to criticize this, I'm absolutely not.  This is actually what I would rather the flaw system be, a way of giving your person that you are roleplaying as an issue that you have to work around, making a playthrough dynamic and interesting.  Maybe one flaw can be that you have a likeness to a famous criminal, giving you issue with authorities.  Or you lost an arm and so you must repair your robot arm for better crits and accuracy than normal, but it will break down over time, making you below average.  Instead, the flaw system is almost always a mild debuff, of about -1 points for up to 3 skills under conditions that are usually "you are around enemy X".  It is still a neat mechanic, just one that could use more tooling around with.

My real concern with The Outer Worlds, funny enough, isn't really a problem with The Outer Worlds so much as it is with the Bethesda RPG as a genre.  The mechanical, amusement park style of RPG world layout is no longer novel, and works against your immersion in the game.  While I understand studios can't be expected to have Rockstar style of animation or world programming, having a character stand in place, looping animation for days on end feels extremely unreal.  Oddly enough, this was something handled much better back in Oblivion which famously gave each character a daily schedule.  Likewise, dialog allowing me to be cruel one minute, then nice the next without repercussion is frustrating.  Look at Divinity: Original Sin II, which has characters remembering what you've said and locking you out of certain dialog threads.  I think the issue here may be more my own relationship with this genre of game.  They are games I love to play, but always feel somewhat cheated by.  Games as a medium are developing more and more in their approaches to communicating themes, story, and character, and this style of design feels far more narrow.  It is game designed to work around the player's possibility for choice, rather than as reaction to player choice, and I find that more frustrating than I do empowering.  Empowerment means nothing if fucking up doesn't set me back.

Still, The Outer Worlds was very fun, and its brief runtime for a game of this type (about 40 hours for completionists, 25 hours for a simple run through) is extremely welcome in a time of long game fatigue.  Most importantly, The Outer Worlds feels like a promising first step into a new franchise, establishing ideas and a sense of place that I'm excited to see expanded on in the future.  I don't know how much more patience I have for this type of RPG as it is without considerable development, but if this ends up being my goodbye, it was a good way to go out.



7.5

[Game Review] flOw

flOw was designed as an example of dynamic difficulty adjustment, where the player was subtly given control of their own difficulty.  In it you play as a simple organism made of shapes in a water environment.  You can grow by eating other organisms, and . . . that's about it really.  Segments of your body will glow and act as your health bar of sorts, and when it is depleted your little creature is sent back to the previous level.  Levels act as ocean depth here, where the deeper you go the more dangerous the creatures found there.  You can choose when you want to descend to a harder level or ascend back to someplace easier.  You can make it through each of these levels without consuming anybody, but that will make progressing lower more difficult.  Get to a low enough level and you will find an egg-like object that when eaten will unlock a new organism to play as and you are returned to the topmost level.  With each new creature comes newer monsters and your sense of attack will change, such as a spin attack that sucks in smaller organisms to be eaten or slowing your movement to a crawl but "poisoning" enemies that come in contact with you.  Outside of these minor changes in gameplay, the game is largely the same.

As an experiment, flOw is a soothing, pretty game that lets you play at your own pace.  The game was meant to work with the concept of the "flow state", where a game tries to keep a level of engagement between frustrating and boring.  The game partially fails on this, since the flow state requires a certain amount of engagement and difficulty in order to work.  Growing can be engaging briefly, but only so much as a clicker game or similarly structured passive game.  The game wants to lull you into something rather than truly engage you with any given mechanic, story, or even feeling since it's feeling is largely ambient, and as an often stated experiment rather than true game I can't really criticize it much.  flOw exists more as a pretty oddity, an hour long diversion worthwhile for how it shaped the studio that would later give us the acclaimed Journey.  It is no waste of time to play, but it also has little to offer other than novelty.  While I stand by my rating below, note that I mean it more as a scale of how much I recommend the game rather than to its true quality, because the game was upfront about what it wanted to do and it was alright at doing it.  That said, its a game that wants to exist more than it wants to be played.



5.0

[Game Review] Catherine

The idea anyone would make a "horror-romance-comedy" game, let alone the titans at Atlus, is so excitingly original I'm honestly surprised it took me this long to check into Catherine from the Persona alum.  Unfortunately, there may be a good reason for why such a genre is so unique in the gaming sphere.  That isn't to say Catherine is bad by any means, but rather that its concept and execution have a queasy relationship with one another that only partially works.

Catherine, despite what you might have thought given the game's marketing material, is primarily a puzzle game with visual novel elements between grouped series of stages.  The game essentially boils down to pushing and pulling blocks in order to climb.  The mechanics of your pushing and pulling is surprisingly well developed, something you may not realize relatively early in the game as new mechanics are thrown at you quicker than what the game calls "techniques" are revealed to you.  Techniques amount to different strategies you can approach given block configurations, many of which would be extremely helpful earlier in the game, although it risks making the game a bit too easy too early.  To complicate things, you are timed on all but the easiest difficulty while solving the puzzles.  While effectively stressful, there is something about being timed while solving a puzzle that feels inherently unfair.  Likewise, the later levels include random blocks that won't set to a specific block type until being stepped on, which can screw up your plans through a section.  While an undue button does alleviate a lot of the frustration of being unfairly screwed out solving a puzzle (or at least solving it efficiently, which is paramount in a timed puzzle), it also allows you to spam it until the random block becomes what you want it to be.  Boss battles and enemies also have an air of unfairness to them, but are more so just annoying.  Again, when you are solving a puzzle, having an enemy stand on the block you need to climb stopping you from progressing until they move isn't fun.  It just feels like the game is arbitrarily wasting your time.  Bosses are even more tightly timed, and while their puzzles are almost always significantly easier than the main stage's, having blocks destroyed or targeted by projectiles while trying to ascend at an even quicker pace lead to more than once having to restart or checkpoint because of RNG.  Fortunately, this isn't nearly as bad as it could be because the puzzles are actually fun, and the game is throwing new things at you to play with relatively quickly.  There are special blocks and concepts being introduced with every level, from things as simple as an ice block or bomb block to the more complex conceptual stuff such as how to easily ascend a flat wall of blocks three wide.  Learning these concepts is rewarding, but more often than not you will feel as though you've learned how to properly approach these challenges a level or two late.

Part of this may be because the game strongly encourages you to replay it.  Catherine's story follows Vincent, a low-ambition bachelor whose girlfriend of 5 years, named Katherine, begins pressuring him into marriage.  Vincent, not sure if he's ready for any kind of commitment (or even anything resembling passion), is extremely hesitant and hangs out at the bar the Stray Sheep with his buddies.  After a particularly drunken night, he wakes the next day to find a young, sexy blonde named Catherine in his bed, naked.  Despite the titillating marketing, the game is relatively tame compared to the likes of Grand Theft Auto or The Witcher (you wouldn't be out of place to have assumed this was basically softcore porn, by the looks of the cover).  There is no nudity, no graphic sex, and outside of several "fucks" barely earns its M-rating.  This is something relieving, allowing the sexual tension and maturity to come from the plot, not from something easily exploitable.  After finding Catherine in his bed, Vincent is thrown into a tizzy over whether he should stay with his current, dull girlfriend or whether he should go for the chaotic nymph he's accidentally found himself bedding every night, despite no memory of ever having invited her over.  To make matters extremely worse, a couple nights before waking in bed with Catherine, he started having these dreams where he and a group of sheep - all men - attempt to climb walls of blocks (the puzzles that make up the main gameplay).  It is rumored the men have been cursed for being unfaithful to the women in their life, but things get complicated the further in the game you go.  Several of the men in the game haven't cheated at all, but are instead either reluctant towards their significant others or are incredibly misogynistic.  Those who do not make it to the top every night in an 8 night sequence will die, something attributed to the mysterious deaths that have been happening around the city (an unnamed city, but if I were a betting man I'd say it were meant to be San Francisco).  It becomes quickly apparent that several of the patrons of the Stray Sheep are the sheep in your dreams, and helping them out in their personal lives while at the bar is paramount to their success or death by the end of the game.

The game's social, visual novel aspect is the most immediately rewarding, especially on your first playthrough where you are still feeling like you are playing catch up with the puzzle mechanics of the other part of the game.  You can talk to friends, drink, practice your puzzle skills with an arcade version of the puzzle sections (meant as a practice, but incredibly long in its own right and with its own unique challenges), and most importantly for the story read and answer texts.  How you answer texts from the two C/Katherines affects your morality meter.  This morality meter isn't meant to be good and evil, but its hard to make a strong argument for that.  The game attempts to make the morality meter about freedom and order, chaos and law, but when "freedom" means "immoral behavior" and deceit, it is kind of hard to make that argument.  If you think I'm being prudish or limiting my scope to monogamous relationships, the game doubles down on this good and evil iconography in the different endings, of which I won't spoil here.  The game gives you no choice in transparency, so the polyamorous option isn't available, making that counterpoint a bit moot.  Within the structure of the game and the narrative, it is strictly expressed as good and evil, faithful or anchor-less wildcard.  Frustratingly, all of this moralizing does little outside of give you a different ending (of which there are 8 in the classic version of the game).  Your choice of Catherine or Katherine won't affect your path much to the end, outside of some specific scenes where Vincent has to come up with a response by himself where your morality meter will pop up on screen to indicate which response you've earned by your choices up to this point.  There is a part late game where Vincent will make a decision and break up with one of them, and that choice is always the same regardless of how you've played (despite the fact that you can get endings with either girl, here he will always break up with the same girl).  As fun as it is to try and find different parts of the story by playing the bar scenes correctly and texting the two C/Katherines, it has very little actual affect on the story.

The game's story is very overtly thematic, to the point that some of the themes are directly told to you after the game's end.  The whole chaotic vs. order approach to romance is framed within misogyny and toxic masculinity.  The first half of the game's plot can be frustrating or downright gross depending on your stomach for these themes, but the game doesn't squander them.  It belittles women as nags, as restrictive forces in men's sense of masculinity, and considers them conquerable objects all so the game can stress that this is an unsustainable system, one that directly contradicts the human need for compassion and relationships with their fellow (wo)man.  The people trapped in these sexist mentalities and male insecurities are constantly trapped and hounded by them, unable to confront them and wishing to outrun or otherwise brutalize them so they can continue in their delusional sense of self.  Catherine is decidedly for a a male audience.  It is meant to appeal to a particularly less appealing group within that male audience and try and force them into feeling the futility of their ways.  Its success in this is more than likely mixed given the game's endings don't really help build on the themes, rather patronizing you with cliche or fantasy.  It feels like the game hoped the journey would suffice - of which the journey is really well executed - and gave an ending it hoped would leave you satisfied.  The idea of choice in this game feels contrary to the themes, anyway.  Catherine is a sex object, and Katherine is dull and pushy.  Vincent has no chemistry with either, and they both feel rather objectified in their own way.  Your choice between the two doesn't really help the themes the game does well wrestling with.  As is, your choices are sexual objectification or the need for a not-so-loving motherly figure, each of which feels far more Freudian than it does any kind of poignant commentary.  It feels impressed on me by way of the rest of the story and themes that what they were trying for was an open, sexual respect without the need for total commitment or control of your significant other, or someone motherly helpful, and generally meant as a fully committed partner you work out life with.  The game plainly does not execute on this, but it is really hard to give the game too much flak for it because of how unique the concept is and how fun the game is throughout.

Catherine is a sincerely flawed game, one I recommend highly despite how imperfect it is.  It is unique, it is funny, it is well acted and even though its characters aren't particularly great or well defined, they are still somewhat compelling for the same reason Larry David is (albeit less masterfully than him).  Even though its themes are largely mishandled when considered as a whole, the parts where it deftly executes them are still better than most everything else trying similarly to attack these subjects.  It gives me hope that these themes will eventually get the attention they deserve in an interesting matter, rather than used in simple, condescending way for easy moralizing.



7.0

[Game Review] What Remains of Edith Finch

What is important to note when going into What Remains of Edith Finch, one of the most acclaimed walking simulators ever made, is that there are technically two Edith Finchs within the game.  The first and most obvious is the protagonist you play as through a majority of the game, and, without venturing too far into spoiler territory just yet, there is a good reason to think the title refers to her.  The second, however, is the great-grandmother matriarch who goes by Edie by her family, the direct descendant of Odin Finch who moved his family to the bizarre house where the game takes place.  Edie's father moved his house onto a boat and sailed from Norway to Orcas Island in the Pugent Sound near Seattle.  As he got to the beach, however, his boat wrecked, and his daughter, son in law, and granddaughter take the lifeboat to shore as he goes down with the house.  There near the beach Edie and her family built the Finch home, overlooking the Sound and, at low tide, the wrecked peaks of the house Odin attempted to sail across the sea can be seen jutting out of the water.  The reason for Odin's taking his family from Norway was to escape the infamous family curse, which causes most of the Finch family to die in sometimes odd accidents, and often very, very young.  If Odin's death before landing in Washington state wasn't enough to tip you off, he was unsuccessful.

Over the course of three generations, the mythology of the Finch curse drenches the home young Edith visits in What Remains of Edith Finch.  Every member of the family from Edie on to the youngest Edith have their own rooms, including those dead, each of them left nearly as they were when their inhabitants were alive.  Edith's mother Dawn, fed up with the family curse story, seals each of the rooms up so that her youngest doesn't venture in and learn too much about something she feels is a dark, polluting fantasy.  Edie, who seems to value the family curse and created virtual museums of the Finchs with their rooms, attempts to undermine the skeptical Dawn by making peepholes in each of the bedroom doors, which is Edith's only experience with most of these rooms until the game begins.  Edith, now 17 and recently inheriting a key from your mother after her recent death, ventures back to Orcas Island as the last living Finch to discover her family history, and the supposed curse that her mother tried so hard to hide from her.  If this sounds interesting so far, I strongly recommend you stop reading now and play the game, as it is best experienced knowing as little as possible.  The game is a total of two hours, which may feel a bit short for the price, but if you think of this as being one of the most interactactive films/books you'll experience, it may alleviate any anxieties you have about price.  I also strongly recommend playing it all in one sitting.  You absolutely won't regret it.

Spoilers from here on out.

The reason I bring your attention to the title in reference to two characters in the game is because the game is attempting to make an important dichotomy between the Finchs as Edie sees them and the Finchs as Edith will now perceive them.  Edie loves the family curse, even though it took her husband and four of her five kids.  In Edie's room, as a matter of fact, she has a small shrine to her late husband that is largely focused on his death by a collapsing dragon slide he was building (the remnants of which you can find in a little pond in front of the house).  Notably, Edie is said to tell everyone her husband was killed by a dragon.  Edie has an obsession with mythologizing the deaths of her family, and this becomes less surprising as the story develops.  Going from room to room learning of each of the family members death you will soon realize most of the family members have a passionate feel for artistic expression, or at least some sort of hobby (as with Sam, the only child of Edie to have kids himself and the father of Dawn, and his hunting and survival skills).  Edie herself takes slices of tree trunks and paints the faces of her dead family members, one for each room.  Edie's primary artistic expression seems to be the furthering of their family's death mythology, and there are several moments when this crosses over to negligence.

In each person's room, there is either something that tells you the death of that family member (such as Edith's older brother and middle child of Dawn, named Milton, and his flip book before he went missing).  In most, however, there is some writing that ports you to a mini-section where you relive that character's death, almost always spun into some optimistic, dream-like surrealism.  First comes Molly, Edie's youngest daughter.  You wake as her sometime in December, having been sent to bed without dinner and incredibly hungry.  You get out of bed and attempt to look for food.  Notably, if you try the bedroom door, you will find it locked, and Molly will call to her mother to let her out to which Edie will reply she should just go to bed.  Instead, Molly will eat a dried carrot originally meant for her pet hamster, a whole tube of toothpaste, and berries off of mistletoe hung on a windowsill in her bathroom.  Mistletoe doesn't kill people, but it is poisonous, and it seems obvious here that it is meant as the realistic explanation for Molly's death (there are also notes from the game creators that this is the case).  Instead, this dream-like scene has Molly opening the window a crack (the window is chained shut), and the game plays with the idea that her true death will be falling out of this window.  What happens instead is Molly is transformed into a cat, and you must chase a bird through trees until you transform again into an owl, again into a shark, and finally into a tentacle monster that kills the entire crew on a boat off the shore of Orcas Island, and then crawling your way through the sewers, out of Molly's toilet, and underneath her bed.  This story comes from Molly's final diary entry on the night she died, and Edith makes note that while she doesn't believe it, she is sure Edie did.  What should immediately give you pause is how Molly's room was locked, something that could easily have prevented this death as Molly could have gone downstairs to get something to eat.  This horrifying realization, though relatively subtle here, is something that will continue throughout the game.  In the game's most horrifying sequence, you play as a baby left alone in a bath, where your imagination turns the baby being drowned into a fantastic water-ballet to Sam's narration, the baby's father.  This narration comes from a note Sam wrote on his divorce papers, where he tells his wife it wasn't her fault the baby died, and that he believed their baby boy saw the world as a place of wonder, and that the baby was happier now.  It is a sickening, fantasy excuse for what is apparent negligence.  While this story specifically isn't from Edie, it is in her style of mythologizing, and furthers one of the main narrative threads, that Edie's mythologizing created a fantastic belief among her children in the curse, and in the beauty in death.

Edie doesn't just give negligence an excuse with her mythologizing, but directly exploits it.  Her longest living son, Walter, saw his older sister Barbara, younger sister of Molly, murdered when he was a kid.  Walter was around 10, and from there on he locks himself in a hidden bunker underneath the house, a secret so well hidden that Edith didn't know he was there, even when his death happened while she was 6 years old and living in the house.  Walter dies when he gets sick of locking himself away for 30 years, and decides to sledgehammer his way out of one of the walls into a train tunnel, where he is subsequently run over by a train.  Notably, Walter could have just gone up into the house and left, but instead he broke his way out, directly leading to his death.  Before this, however, Edie had talked to a tabloid about a mole-man living underneath the Finch house, directly exploiting Walter's miserable existence to further mythologize the strangeness of her family's legacy.  Each story in this game can either be seen as negligence or tragic self destruction.  This comes to a head with one of the final deaths in the game, the death of Edith's eldest brother Lewis.  Lewis never managed to accomplish anything with his life, something we could partially see as being a product of trauma due to his younger bother having gone missing, and the inability of his mother to accept Milton may be dead.  No matter the reason, Dawn attempts to give Lewis something normal and gets him a job at a cannery chopping the heads off fish and throwing them down a shoot onto a conveyor belt.  Marijuana is found in his room, the walls are covered in blacklight posters and there is a gaming rig in the corner, making it easy to apply a stoner-gamer archetype to Lewis that I think is completely intentional.  Fantasy seems incredibly important to Lewis, and Lewis' death scene/level is provoked by a letter form his therapist to his mother, where his therapist talks about encouraging Lewis into sobriety, and how this led to Lewis fantasizing while at work.  This is easily the best sequence in the game, where you are required to do your job cutting fish heads off with one of the sticks, while you play through Lewis' fantasy with the other.  The fantasy starts as something in the corner, non-obstructive and easily managed, but quickly grows to eventually take over the entire screen to the point where the conveyor belt at Lewis' job is now obscured.  This fantasy develops in complexity until finally, as the fantasy version of Lewis, you walk through the door of your castle and find yourself no longer in the fantasy, but rather at the cannery.  you walk through the drab factory, see another Lewis miming his work, but not actually performing it, and walk yourself up the conveyor belt into another room that magnificently transforms into your fantasy once again.  It is important to note here that to cut the fishes heads off, Lewis used a mini guillotine style chopping device, something meant to give you tension as you play through the sequence since it seems to allude to a serious injury surely coming.  Instead, when you get to the end of your fantasy you must bend down to receive your crown - bend down into what is explicitly a guillotine.  There is a graphic sound of slicing before the therapist's words are shown on screen, simply stating "I think you know the rest."  Lewis' fantasy wasn't a delusion of death, it was a delusion of reality, something he could not come to terms with, and it lead to his suicide, the only death explicitly said to be a suicide.  The fact that this is the last death fully experienced in the game is no coincidence, as it is the culmination of Edie's negligent fantasy.  Rather than the death mythology explaining away the horror of what happens to the poor Finch kids, a different mythology lead to the self infliction of death.  It is the art imitates life, life imitates art dichotomy.

Edith is 22 weeks pregnant.  The game ends with her son being born, it heavily implied that Edith died in childbirth, and her son Christopher laying flowers at her grave at the Finch residence you've spent the whole game exploring.  Throughout the game, Edith ruminates on whether it is worthwhile writing this book for her unborn son about their family history, about whether it would be better forgotten, realizing eventually that more than likely the only way her child would ever read it would be if she was already dead.  The title What Remains of Edith Finch wants you to believe that this son is what it is referring to, but more accurately it is the senior Edith Finch in my opinion.  Edie Finch's mythologizing more than likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what remains of her is this dark legacy that her decedents fear to pass on.  They want to forget it, and the curse, but the family tradition of appreciating a fantastical story lives on, and so with Edith as with Edie, she can't quite let a good story die.  What Remains of Edith Finch is an incredibly engrossing narrative, one that utilizes the interactive medium more than it does games in order to tell a provocative story about death, about stories, and about powerful but sometimes dangerous use of mythologizing reality.  The game wants you to confront and find out what really happened, what lies between the myths to what is really there, and in doing so creates something fantastical that finds a direct line to something incredibly real.



9.5

[Game Review] Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Note: This review contains spoilers.


If Dragon Quest V is anything to go by, I think I will sincerely enjoy the Dragon Quest series.  Dragon Quest V is my first of the series, and as such this review is more than likely going to be a bit different.  My easiest comparison is going to be Final Fantasy and Pokemon, the two JRPG series' with turn-based mechanics I have the greatest amount of time in.  As such, forgive me if I sound incredibly ignorant to things like deeper mechanics or series trends, but I've attempted to do my research, and at the very least should be in the ballpark of all things.

All of that said, the reason I picked Dragon Quest V as my first game in the series when I had made the decision to play one (other games considered were Dragon Quest XI, Dragon Quest VIII, and Dragon Quest III) was the gimmick with its story.  Dragon Quest V takes place over three generations, starting when you are a child following your father on his quest to find the legendary hero in order to save his wife, then moving into your adulthood where you continue your father's quest and get married, and finally becoming a father yourself to two kids that become your party members in the latter third, finally finishing your father's quest and defeating the big baddie attempting to take over the world.  The story itself underneath this generational structure is your basic hero's journey stuff, of which you will predict every last step as you play, but the execution of the story was generally quick and fun, a swashbuckling adventure story that feels as epic as the 18 years that makes up its timeline.  So long as you aren't expecting the philosophical toying that, say, Final Fantasy generally plays with, you are bound to enjoy this game's story the way you would a fun adventure novel.

What surprised me was that the story wasn't really what kept me around as I played.  Despite the interesting premise, the family-as-party dynamic was severely underused (props where props are due though for a pre-Chrono Trigger JRPG on the SNES: it is incredibly unique plot-wise), and the aspect I was least thrilled about became what sucked me in, despite some of its less appealing aspects.  You see, Dragon Quest games are well known for not changing up the formula of the JRPG turn-based combat system, as opposed to its peers in Final Fantasy.  You cannot see your party in combat, you can't pick enemies to attack (instead picking groups of enemies, which sometimes feels arbitrary in how it groups them), and you have a basic party of four (in the re-release versions of Dragon Quest V).  What Dragon Quest does well, however, is it keeps these basic mechanics incredibly tight.  Dragon Quest as a series has quite the reputation of being grindy in parts, and Dragon Quest V is no exception.  The last 15% of the game took just as long for me to get through as the first 85%, and that could turn a lot of people off the game.  I generally made it through the game somewhat underleveled (as I like to do, because it gives a stronger focus on mechanics rather than leveled power), so this is partially my own fault.  Likewise, one of the coolest mechanics (which we will get to soon) was something I had somehow breezed past without much experimentation.  If you have a good sense of JRPG mechanics (not just experience with these systems, but a relatively tight understanding of buffs, debuffs, and party dynamics) then you will do much better than I did.  The game averages out at around 30-35 hours, and it took me a little over 40 to complete, largely because of my approach.  That said, no matter your skill level, there is still quite a few parts of the game where at least some grinding will become mandatory.  These grindy bits, however, end up playing an interesting tight rope that I've never felt was well executed until Dragon Quest V.  Generally speaking, grinding in an RPG should be a dis-incentivizing mechanic.  It should be a red flag that there are some mechanics you aren't quite up to snuff on.  The issue here is that sometimes you are underleveled, and figuring out which is which can often be a crapshoot.  For the most part, Dragon Quest V does a fantastic job of upping the difficulty - particularly with boss battles - to force you into exploring its mechanics.  Buffing, debuffing, and balancing out item usage for healing, MP regeneration, etc. is absolutely required in the latter part of the game.  Bosses quickly start using buff and debuff spells, screaming at you that you should be doing the same.   Likewise, later bosses use the Bounce spell heavily, which means any spells thrown their way will bounce back to the caster, requiring you to be aware of just what type of attack you are using and when, and to tailor your party accordingly.  I've always felt that turn-based combat was a bit of a means to an end rather than an outright fun in and of itself (despite valiant efforts from Final Fantasy VII's materia system, or Chrono Trigger's group attacks), but Dragon Quest V squeezes out the most strategy it can from the base mechanics, and I found myself re-strategizing constantly as newer and more difficult bosses reared their wonderfully cartoony heads.  (As an aside: the iOS and Android port, which is what I played, is one of the best mobile ports I've ever played, and I strongly recommend it if you are on a budget and don't want to splurge for the DS version, which is identical).

Of all of Dragon Quest V's tight-if-trite mechanical design, they innovated in one spectacular way: they included recruitable monsters.  One of the Dragon Quest mechanical staples started its life here, and it is this game that heavily influenced the creation of the Pokemon games.  Recruiting monsters takes quite a bit of trial and error, but it becomes one of the most fun and unique aspects of the game.  Monsters can be added just like party members, and the best healers (and some of the best tanks) in the game are monsters, thus investing time into capturing and training monsters can give you a serious leg up, as well as opening up the customizable options for your party.  As well, when you are in the overworld map (or facing certain endgame bosses), you have a bench of four party members that can be switched out at the beginning of a turn, giving you even more customization and strategic options.  At the final boss, just before I beat him, I had lost my entire first lineup and was relying on my severely underleveled 2nd string, of which I had virtually no healers, only one who could buff and debuff, and one who was virtually useless in attack and defense.  I won by the skin of my teeth because of them, and it was one of the most exciting moments I had in a game in recent memory.

Dragon Quest V is by-the-numbers in so many ways, but it is tight in how it utilizes the usual.  It challenges subtly, rarely to the point of being hard (unless you made some serious error along the way, of which you only have about an hour of grinding or re-structuring before you're caught up again), and feels about the correct length for its content.  Understandably, it doesn't innovate the way many other SNES RPGs did (one of the most competitive categories for a JRPG), but it is so incredibly solid I have to recommend it to anyone who loves the genre.  Your mileage will certainly vary, but never so much as to regret playing it.  All future Dragon Quest games have some serious heights to live up to, but I'm excited to check out them all.



9.0

[Game Review] The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

Note: This review contains spoilers.


When I was a teen, I played Link's Awakening by accident.  Having grown up playing A Link to the Past years before, I got the itch to replay the game and relive my youth in a bout of early nostalgia.  At some point I confused myself, and thought my friend's copy of Link's Awakening was the game from my youth.  At the time it was a somewhat surreal experience, something very fitting for what Link's Awakening is.  I'd played through A Link to the Past very young, so most of my memory was of specific bosses and an overall art style more than any sense of place (outside of the castle and Link's home early in the game - a section a six year old me was stuck on for days until my cousin pointed me towards the bush leading to the castle dungeons).  So when I picked up Link's Awakening, it wasn't immediately apparent I had started the wrong game.  After all, the game looked relatively right, if a little simplified which I credited to it being ported to the Gameboy Color (making this the DX version of the game).  I wasn't one for text boxes when I was younger, preferring instead to jump into the action, so I missed several key exchanges with Marin, this game's analogue to Zelda.  I was pretty sure something was off while I played, but every once in awhile pieces of A Link to the Past would filter through, such as some of the enemies, or the worm boss that you have to hit the tail to defeat.  It was mostly due to remembering so little about the SNES classic that it took until I got the jump feather (the same dungeon as the tailed boss) that I decided to look the game up and realized my error.

This first play through Link's Awakening is something I cherish because of how the accident played so well into what the game is trying to do.  Very early on, it is easy to notice some things are off.  There is a chain-chomp, for one, sitting outside of a house.  The dotting of Mario enemies (and Kirby) throughout give a very bendy sense of reality that only enhanced my confusion as a teen.  Link's Awakening was said to be influenced by Twin Peaks, which isn't particularly strange given the game's dream-centric plot.  In the Zelda canon, it is Link's Awakening that started the pattern of surreal side-games outside of Hyrule that Majora's Mask would eventually follow.  Started as a straight port of  A Link to the Past for the Gameboy by some bored Nintendo employees, the game eventually found a life of its own as the programmers became more and more invested in programming Zelda for the little handheld.  The somewhat relaxed atmosphere of playing with a game's construction rather than the serious, impassioned work of a traditional "product" games certainly played into the game's surrealism.  It's aloof.  Link's Awakening to date feels the breeziest of all the Zelda games (unless we are searching for a Wind Waker pun), relaxed mostly in pace and whimsical in tone.  The game doesn't have a serious villain, only an abstract: a nightmare is terrorizing the Wind Fish, a giant whale slumbering in an egg on top of a mountain.  Your task is to travel the eight dungeons (as you do), collect the eight instruments, and play the song of awakening to wake the Wind Fish from his nightmare and free him.  The whole island you are on, however, is within the dream of the Wind Fish, and doing so will destroy the entire island as well as all of its charismatic, and downright adorable inhabitants.  There is a tragedy in this, and somewhat of an irony in that the villains of the game are the ones trying to keep this world alive.  Granted, these nightmares want to rule this world, but the sense of preservation over that world is something kind of unique to a Zelda game, and most games in the RPG genre (funnily enough, the only other game I can think of is the awful Fable III, but there it is a gimmick and here it seems to be more of a tonal theme).

Link's conflict of needing to save the Wind Fish but lose all of his newfound friends is one of the more unique and somewhat postmodern themes in a Zelda game.  While postmodernism is lauded in later games like Bioshock or Braid, many of the similar themes there are echoed here, nearly a decade earlier.  In particular, the central conflict is a reflection on the game's own game-ness.  During the final boss battle, the boss takes the form of Agahnim, the wizard from A Link to the Past, and he must be defeated the same way as in that game.  The game is very aware that this is most likely not your first Zelda game, and that, if you are interested in a handheld port, you must have played the previous, larger-selling entry in the series.  This boss phase plays exactly like that of the SNES classic, and though it doesn't directly require your knowledge of another game in order to beat, it is enhanced by it.  More so than these little additions of mechanics and characters, however, is in how the game wants you to beat it while self consciously knowing that to do so means you can no longer live in this world.  It reminds me of how in Dark Souls your ultimate goal is the right to die and not come back.  It is the game recognizing that its win condition is something happy, but also in ending itself.  It wants you to stop playing, but it wants you to earn that ability to stop playing, it wants you to feel a conclusion.  Here they don't mince words about this, and call the game a dream.  David Lean, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanley Kubrick all explained in one interview or another that a film was like a day dream, that it allowed you to live through a world and characters without that explicit feeling of consciousness, that you didn't have to feel personally morally at odds, but could live through or with a character that was without the guilt or ethical burden.  It allowed us to explore concepts, people, and situations we otherwise couldn't in real life, and that this ability could be used for escapism or for confrontation on what we were too worried or closed off from to confront.  Likewise, games are like that, as are books if we really want to get into it.  Link's Awakening takes this seriously, telling you to enjoy the dream as it goes, to miss it when it's gone, but to never forget it.  All games are daydreams, and there is a beauty in acknowledging them as so.

The Switch remake has done a near perfect job recreating this experience, even if the game isn't so perfect.  The new toy-like style perfectly realizes this sense of unreality in a twee package that never ceases to be cute.  Though it may feel like a glossy coating on a rather old game (the layout still uses an archaeic tile based system for an open world RPG), I think Link's Awakening holds up incredibly well on its own merits to not warrant an overhaul, as interesting as that prospect may be.  On a technical side, frame dropping is incredibly annoying and far more frequent than in Breath of the Wild, a much more intensely technical game.  Some of this may be because the game largely discards the "scene" like loading of areas outside of dungeons as is usual in 2D Zelda games in favor of a free moving world, without requiring the camera to swing to the next scene when you reached the previous scene's edge.  This change makes the map feel much more open, but wouldn't have been a hindrance if the game ran smoother the original way.  The base Link's Awakening can at times be opaque in what it wants you to do, partially because of a game-spanning trade quest that can sometimes be downright senseless, but usually has some sense of consistent logic to it.  Being gated out of areas of the map without a required tool is something I hadn't realized was out of Zelda for so long until confronted with it here, and it has its pluses and minuses.  Mostly pluses, as it makes gaining a new item exciting on an exploratory level, but occasionally it can feel like you are out of places to go without a new item when in reality it just takes some experimentation.  Overlap such as the Hookshot and the combination of Roc's Feather and Pegasus Boots in getting over gaps was particularly annoying, as sometimes I would either pass up areas I could access or try at areas I couldn't.  The game also loses steam item-wise by the end of the game, giving you the flame rod and mirror shield towards the end, neither of which change the game except in virtually arbitrary ways.  Luckily, there is a built in hint system to help you through if you are sick of wandering around.  Going into one of the phone huts allows you to call one of the in game characters and ask for a hint, which is usually not overly spelled out and can generally relieve some frustration when the game's world seems to not be giving you any sense of where to go next.

As far as Zelda games go, Link's Awakening is still one of my favorites, even if it falls at the bottom of the list of Zelda greats.  It is an entry in the series that could have easily been overlooked, but instead it has been lovingly rendered again with a distinct artistic style that compliments the themes of the game.  Here's hoping Nintendo is excited by this game's reception, because there is nothing I would love more than a similar port of the Capcom Zelda's as soon as possible.



8.5

[Game Review] ICO and Untitled Goose Game

There is always a baseline of joy in video games.  Interacting with our avatar, learning the controls and the rules, reading the level to know where to go and what to try -- playing video games is fun.  But a baseline of fun can be found anywhere.  It isn't to video games specifically that we go for fun, we want something more that only that medium can provide.  Granted, a lot of times this comes to a feeling of accomplishment, of overcoming odds and besting a system you've learned inside and out.  Some of the most lingering experiences in the medium, however, are those that give you a sense of existing in their world.  I don't just mean like how Red Dead Redemption 2 makes you exist in its world by swamping you with chores and minor, inconvenient manners of "play" that do little to actually make the game more fun or engaging.  Rather, it's the minor aspects of play, it's the the desperate gripping on the back of a colossi in Shadow of the Colossus, or holding princess Yorda's hand in Ico, or . . . untying a boy's shoes as the most annoying goose to ever exist.

You've seen the title, so you know I'm attempting to co-review Team Ico's influential classic Ico, predecessor to one of the most classic games in the video game canon Shadow of the Colossus, and the more recent Untitled Goose Game, the Switch's weird, pseudo-stealth puzzler.  This may seem incredibly strange (or even blasphemy, if you haven't played Goose Game), but I think that these two games have one particular core part that collects them in a particular design perspective: gameplay as something akin to avatar manipulation.  Specifically, Ico's button to hold Yorda's hand so you can guide her through levels, and Untitled Goose Game's buttons to duck your head, quack, grab with your mouth, or spread your wings.  There is the feeling while playing these games that you are a physical character, which in turn impresses on you a feeling of role playing.  Games like Grand Theft Auto, great as they are, give you a very loose sense of character allowing you to essentially break the fourth wall by engaging with it as a game rather than as a story with characters.  There isn't anything wrong with this, but that lingering feeling of place and person that Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Untitled Goose Game give you is something I find more and more attractive as a play more and more games.

Part of the reason I want to harp on about this is because of how it creates a unique engagement with the game in question.  Untitled Goose Game has a physicality and a whimsical art style that envelops you in its experience.  The waddle of your goose feels rather realistic, as well as the rest of the goose's detailed and expressive animations.  Whether it is spreading your wings as you run away from a broom wielding shopkeeper or the way you strain your neck in order to try and steal that rake from the gardener, the physicality of the animation feels very much like a convincing performance by an actor, something keyed in on subtly but so consistently it becomes a convincing conduit toward a more full and fulfilling engagement.  You don't feel like you are playing a game, you feel like you are a goose.  The game itself plays out like a stealth game, where your job is to sneak around a complete a to-do list of annoyances to the townspeople of this small, English village.  There is little in the way of fail states outside of having to set up your plan again in order to complete a particular entry in your to-do list.  The puzzle elements I mentioned before are in how you go about planning this.  At one point in the game, you find a little road with a shop with all of its wares out on tables and shelves, with an attentive shopkeeper wielding a broom to shoo you away if you come to close.  One of your to-do list tasks, however, is to collect a series of items and put it into a basket.  There are multiple ways of completing this, including taking items out of trash cans rather than the store itself, but one of the more effective ways I found was to grab a near by walky-talky and use it to lure the shopkeeper away.  Other methods include stealing or messing up displays to distract her while I made off with what I wanted.  The game's freeform allows you to express your inner goosey-ness to your hearts content.  Feeling so much like a goose, I would often find myself acting like a goose just to entertain myself or for a quick laugh, totally distracting myself from any of the game's tasks.  I did things like hid in a bush, give a little quack, and ducked my head out of sight when an alarmed gardener turned to see where the sound came from.  I cannot recall a game that made me so consistently giggle at my own absurdity while keeping that self conscious feeling of playing a game so far from my mind.  I've used the word engagement probably far too many times in this review as is, but it is the perfect descriptor for what I'm trying to talk about here.  It is a sense that the distance between you, the actions in the game, and the character you play as is so small it is nigh unnoticeable.  In this way, Untitled Goose Game is a master of form, even if, artistically speaking, it has virtually null to say.  And it doesn't need to say anything.

On the other hand, Ico feels as though it is saying quite a bit, even if it is far more impressionistic.  In Ico, you play as the titular character, a boy who was born with horns on his head, considered an omen by his tribesmen.  Ico is taken to a remote castle where he is placed in a jar, presumably to be tortured or to otherwise die and relieve the tribe or village he was born in from whatever misfortune he could cause them.  There is an impression of tradition here, partially in how this is mentioned to have been done before, and in that the jar you are imprisoned in is in a room lined with others.  There is a fault in your jar, however, and you are able to escape.  Knocking your head on the ground after crashing your jar, you have a quick vision of a cage dripping in dark shadow, giving you your first indication of what to look for next.  This cage turns out to be in the next room, risen high in a hollowed tower by a thick chain, containing not a darkness but a young girl.  This is Yorda, who seems older than you but not by much.  You release her from her cage and find she does not speak a language you can understand.  shadow creatures rise out of the ground and attempt to take her away from you, but you fight them off with a stick and begin the game proper.  The game, in summation, has you venturing through the castle, solving puzzles and using the games physics to climb and explore.  Your ultimate goal is to get Yorda out of this castle prison, as well as yourself.  Every area is essentially two puzzles: how do you get from point A to point B, and then how do you get Yorda from Point A to Point B, given her limited traversal skills.  What sounds like a glorified, full length escort mission is much closer to a combination of Myst and the original Tomb Raider.  Exploration, puzzle solving, and platforming are the core gameplay loops, but cinching these together into something cohesively meaningful is the affect of Yorda.  A button is dedicated to calling her over to you, and when she is close enough this button holds her hand.  Having this physicality between yourself and a virtual character is a unique connection that gives Yorda a kind of compassionate weight many other escort characters do not have.  Early on, it becomes obvious that Yorda cannot make it far without your help to boost her up a ledge, or catch her hand during a long jump and pull her up the other side.  The fact you cannot die outside of great falls also makes you far more gun-ho about jumping into coded danger in order to save her, the truly vulnerable one.  All of these little affects cause an emotional resonance between you and Yorda.  Likewise, little details throughout make her more personable.  Things like save points being glowing couches you two can relax on together add a fourth wall breaking surrealism that feeds into something rather nostalgic and vulnerable.  With all of its mystery and mythological implications, Ico feels primarily about a boy and girl slightly older than him, about how the boy tries to pull this girl through an adventure she isn't equipped to handle, and how the two build a connection.  The imagery of these two sitting on a couch together immediately made me think of myself sitting on a couch, and doing that then made me feel something very personal toward Yorda, not like I was literally sitting on the couch with her, but that there was a time and place, sometime younger where perhaps I fancied someone and wanted to share some piece of media with them, and while we were on this grand adventure together in reality we were simply sitting on a couch, sharing a moment.  These touches don't build towards any concise meaning, but I don't think that that matters much.  Art does not have to be hammering down some specific political or moral point in order to be meaningful, sometimes it can impress the nonverbal minutia between moments, the subtle, ephemeral connections that exists in slivers of timelessness and the echoing affect those can have on the subconscious.  In the end, Yorda saves Ico, and experiencing that predictable switch in dynamics isn't so much expected because it was basic, but because it was an echo of something felt.  We don't feel Yorda to be so helpless as to have no autonomy, but as someone we want to see express that autonomy, and she does when we are in trouble.  It is the punctuation on a series of impressions on connection, on companionship, and the importance therein.

There is a valley between the artistic significance between these two games, but the feeling of connection between player and avatar are incredibly similar, even if they are applied to divergent effects.  While it is easy to set Ico on a pedestal for its emotional impact and artful execution, Untitled Goose Game utilizes similar theory towards its design in order to elevate something small and simple into something fun and memorable.  In the search for greater and more useful theories on game design and their affect on the player, my money is largely on this sense of interaction, that it is one aspect of game design form that has the most impact, and the most versatility, because it is part most game-like, most impressionistic, most lingering, and the aspect most likely to affect those well traveled in artistic abstracts and those equally just looking for a game to play.  Stanley Kubrick talked of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove that there were only a few people who directly identified with abstracts in such a way that they would have an effect on them, that what truly affected most people was their emotional reaction or impression of a film or work of art.  He said that the truck driver and the Cambridge student were vastly different in education and intellectual integrity, but that emotionally they were far more alike, and that it was here he wanted to strike.  He wanted people who never thought of science, the evolution of man, the possibilities of the cosmos, and the concept of God to consider these concepts and their interplay through 2001, and he wanted people to think of the true horror of what people being in charge of nuclear weapons really consisted of with Dr. Strangelove, and he wanted to do it in a way that was understood by everyone on an immediate, emotional level.  So too could games be expressed, and while film used primarily shot composition, mise en scène, and music to create these impressions, games can utilize control and avatar-player relationships (although I cannot stress that framing, music, and mise en scène are also incredibly important to games)  to create impressions, one that affects the intellectuals and hobbyists alike.


Untitled Goose Game
 8.5


ICO
9.5