[Game Review] Gone Home

Note: This review contains spoilers!


The walking simulator is a contentious game genre.  Descendants of the Adventure game, walking simulators usually create a narrow path for you to follow as the environment lays out plot details obvious as billboards or a voice over spells out someone's internal crisis or some such thing.  For most, it isn't a game, it's a ride.  Games such as Jazzpunk play with this formula to give you at least some interactivity or to wallpaper the level with jokes and references, but if there is no objective or system to play, then there is no game and therefore no reason for it to exist for a lot of people.  Objective seems to be the opportune word here: what counts as an objective and what doesn't?  After all, the objective of a walking simulator is to get to the end, to find the notes that tell the story, and to experience the story.  There are many shooters that virtually disallow death on normal difficulty by making it insanely easy to recover, implying the whole objective of the game is to walk to the end of various hallways and experience the set pieces.  When you consider some people think Gone Home isn't a game but Uncharted (great game series in its own right) gets to count themselves in, you realize that the inclusion of the death state and a couple easy targets to click at are all a game needs to be considered a game.  Basically, can you fail?  But then there are also puzzle games.  Myst is the game most like the modern walking simulator, in my opinion, and Myst is a puzzle game with no fail state other than to stop playing.  In Myst, however, the game gives you an indication that the puzzle has been solved.  The game tells you you've done right, unlike any personal real life puzzle you'll ever find.  In Gone Home, the puzzle is solved in your head.  Walking simulators are games where the objective is to present you with an artistic shape of things: to follow a character's struggle, or their relationship to someone else, or to otherwise explore some story or conflict through environment alone.  Done wrong, and this can be one of the most boring genres of games out there.  Done correctly, however, and the unique experiences only games can provide come together to create something interactive, but not in the traditional sense.

In Gone Home, you play as Katie Greenbriar, home from traveling abroad after college or between semesters.  Only, home isn't exactly right.  Your family - father Terrance, mother Janice, and sister Sam - have moved into your great uncle's old house in Oregon.  When you arrive at the foreign abode, you see a note taped to the door from your sister Sam, apologizing she couldn't see you, and that one day you will see her again.  She tells you not to tell mom and dad what you find inside.  This ominous beginning starts the personal journey of Sam, your younger sister who comes to terms with her sexuality with a girl named Lonnie, and the struggles she faces as she tries not to make sense of how she feels, so much as how she can express how she feels in the ways all teenagers do.  Sam isn't the only one with stories to uncover, as documents, letters, and objects swollen with meaning and implication begin to shape a household of people each dealing with their own issues of growth and connection.  Terrance is a failed author, having written two failed books about a time traveling agent who must stop the assassination of JFK, and is getting tired of his job as a stereo reviewer for an audiophile magazine.  Terrance's detachment from his work has gotten him in trouble with his editor, in trouble with his alcohol consumption, and has alienated his wife Janice.  Janice is doing well at her job as a forest ranger in Oregon, but the distance between her and Terrance is beginning to take its toll, especially as a new ranger, the studly Rick, has transferred to her station to help with a controlled burn project.  Janice exchanges letters with a friend of hers, talking about her percieved connection to Rick, a conflict that mirrors with her many failed attempts at engaging with her husband.  Even the story of Terrance's Uncle, whose house they've just moved into, comes into focus, implying a dark past that involved Terrance and may be contributing to his sudden sinking away from his family.  Sam's story is the central pull to Gone Home, but the periphery stories create layers and overlap that both enhance and contextualize it.

Sam's story shares two traits that mirror that of her parents': her falling in love with Lonnie and her apparent gift at writing.  Sam's writings litter the house, underneath couches, in folders, or hidden away in closeted Lisa Frank-styled binders that provoke a more feminine image now left behind.  She can be sardonic, such as her bloated essay on sexual reproduction (Katie's from her high school years, by contrast, is the model essay, with only pertinent information and dry style), or they can be deeply expressive, such as her reoccurring story about a pirate captain and her first mate, a man turned to a woman who is her best friend.  The most prominent writing of Sam's is her journal, left for you at the end of the game.  Throughout, however, in a non-linear twist, you will hear excerpts from the journal directed at you when interacting with objects, letters, and pictures scattered around the house.  She remembers moments where she felt fear and tension over wanting to overflow with expression, of wanting to say something but never being able to, or moments of deep connection and the marvel of feeling it for the first time.  It's powerful coming-of-age stuff, and it creates an immediately relatable tether between you and Sam, regardless of who you are or your orientation.  I'm a straight male and I knew exactly those feelings she expressed, regardless of their context.  Sam's father is the opposite.  He is a failed writer, and his writings are decidedly strange, not so expressive, but rather repressive.  In Terrance's novels, the protagonist goes back in time to stop a horrible event, something with much darker connotations as you learn of his Uncle and what his actions could be.  While the game never outright says so, it is heavily implied that the Uncle molested Terrance.  The Uncle was the owner of a local pharmacy, one that is said to have been popular with kids for its soda fountain.  The Uncle also sold the pharmacy to his assistant for an extremely low sum, which the assistant said was between him and the Uncle.  The Uncle also writes to Terrance's mother about "staying away from my temptations", but wishing to see his heir (Terrance) again, as a man, and to apologize.  So, it doesn't exactly give much wiggle room for interpretation, and more importantly, it shows Terrance with a past he may be less than prepared to confront.  Terrance does get a redemption, however, his books being republished by an outsider art publisher that inspires him to return to the book series, only this time the subject being about the protagonist confronting himself rather than being the hero saving the day.  Terrance's struggle with writing is an odd contrast to Sam's seemingly effortless creativity and expression.  Terrence has notes littered around for his various books, criticisms from publishers and his father, where Sam has pieces of easily understood (if unfinished) writings all over the place.

Sam may be more immediately able to express herself, but it doesn't seem to help her any.  She struggles with person-to-person expression, second guessing what Lonnie may be feeling and hating herself for not saying enough when Lonnie is absolutely clear with her.  When Lonnie and Sam do finally get together, it becomes this blissful haze for a moment before Lonnie reveals that she wants to join the military after high school, following in the footsteps of her family.  Interestingly, Lonnie is anti-authority and a fan of riot grrrl bands and 'zines, about the harshest contrast to military life as possible.  Sam feels the same, and realizing that this amazing person she's fallen in love with will be gone for years fills her with dread and melancholy.  Janice is in a much different, yet structurally similar arch.  With her husband becoming more and more distant, she's trying to spark any kind of fire with him best she can.  Her planner shows cooking classes, ballroom dancing events, and other couples engagements - always canceled.  Terrance just won't take, and she laments over it to her friend, who encourages fantasies about Rick until Terrance can come back around.  Rick has the same interests as Janice  - even taking her to the Earth, Wind, and Fire concert when his out-of-town girlfriend says she doesn't want to go - and Janice is implied to have taken a flirty stance with the whole dynamic.  Janice acknowledges Rick has a girlfriend she's never met, but seems to marginalize her position between them more and more.  That is, until she gets the invite to his wedding.  The calendar has written in red that they are going to have to miss it, so she can go on a couples counseling trip with Terrance.  The timing was more than likely hastily chosen, because it overlapped with your coming home - something you wouldn't have thought would be forgotten.  Janice may not have gotten quite the redemptive ending she needed, but she is taking the healthy steps towards coping and improving things, something Terrance may be more receptive to now that he has returned to writing novels.  Sam, on the other hand, is in the difficult position of dealing with her first major loss, something she is not at all well equipped at doing.  Sam is lucky (or unlucky, as it may turn out), because Lonnie decides last minute not to join the military, and the two run off together, with just Sam's notebook left behind for you as a confession.

Gone Home accomplishes the above story - and much more - with a very simple mechanic: walk, read, and examine objects.  It's the walking simulator basics, but in a game where exploring the history of the house's inhabitants is the focus, anything else would be a distraction for the sake of being "gamey".  The game is about environment as storyteller, allowing objects to give you the necessary information in order to piece things together.  Books on how to revitalize your sex life as a couple can be found in the parent's room; a painting with Terrance's father is missing a cutout where the face is; pins, cassette tapes, and 'zines made by Lonnie and Sam can be found strewn about in hidden rooms and hallways behind secret doors, places they made their refuge; objects imply and contrast, creating character and place all at once.  Gone Home isn't what some people traditionally call a game, but to consider game's as something other than participatory art with a series of qualifiers is starting to draw lines that really don't need to exist, especially when it means marginalizing something so expressive as this. 




9.0

[Game Review] Resident Evil 2 (2019)

Note: This review contains spoilers.


Resident Evil 2 is an incredibly well executed game.  Animations are smooth, acting is solid, lighting is spectacular, and there is a sense of tension and dread throughout.  I haven't played much of the original Resident Evil 2 outside of a few measly hours, but I do remember hating the tank controls (my opinion these days is decidedly mixed on tank controls) but loving the feel of the game.  Largely, the sense of open hostility and horror from the original remains in the remake.  Succinctly, Resident Evil 2 is probably what a remake should be.  It feels incredibly modern, and is easy to pick up, yet challenging to beat and recaptures key aspects of what I remember and what I've seen played from the original.  So, then, why didn't I love this game?

To be fair, I'm not in the least bit nostalgic for the original, but I wouldn't consider that much of a hindrance.  I loved my recent play through of the original Resident Evil HD, so much so I gave it a 10 in my review, but this strikes me as altogether different.  The story of Resident Evil 2 goes you are either Leon Kennedy, newbie at the Raccoon City police department who had his first day postponed and he wants to know why, or Claire Redfield, sister of Chris Redfield from Resident Evil looking for her brother, who find themselves in the middle of an all out zombie outbreak in Raccoon City and must take refuge in the Raccoon City Police Department.  The amount of variance between the two campaigns is worth playing through the game twice, but I found that they didn't always line up with one another, and felt sometimes sloppily thrown together.  The two bump into each other multiple times throughout the game, always with an awkward exchange of flirty pleasantries that always felt socially inept when draped with the zombie apocalypse literally gnawing at their ankles, but it is a Resident Evil game, after all.  Regardless of who you choose to play as, you will first have to find the three medallions in order to take the underground passage to the parking garage, where you can enter the other wing of the police department.  From there, you will need to find a way to get the key card (which is different for each of the campaigns) in order to exit the police station, and make your way either to the sewer opening (Leon) or the orphanage (Claire).  From there, you will both end up in the sewer where you will learn of Umbrella housing a secret lab underneath the city where they experimented on the horrific G-Virus, the thing that created the horrible creature at the end of the first game.  In either campaign you must go to the lab where either you are looking for the G-Virus (Leon) or an antidote (Claire), before escaping the facility before it self destructs.  It's as standard as a plot can get with a Resident Evil game, but there are some nice unique bits depending on who you are playing as.  As Leon, you will bump into FBI agent Ada Wong (who is really a secret agent for a rival corporation to Umbrella) looking for a way into the lab to retrieve the G-Virus.  As Claire, you bump into Sherry, daughter of William Burken, the creator of the G-Virus, who becomes infected with it and must be cured by the one antidote deep in the Umbrella labs.  Each version of the campaign has subtle differences in how each of the events develops, and also has unique set pieces, such as hacking with Ada Wong or stealthily avoiding the corrupt chief of police as Sherry.  It's enough to keep each play through fresh and interesting, but if you're paying even a bit of attention, you'll realize that these two campaigns cannot canonically work together.  In Claire's campaign, you see Sherry's mom die before she shoots Ada Wong in Leon's campaign, and both campaigns have you fighting William's various G-Virus infected forms in the same place, with the same destruction at hand.  It may seem like nit picking to say this comes off as sloppy, but the game heavily incentivizes you to play through both campaigns to get the full story, even going so far as to give you an extra ending and final boss.  It's a weird design choice having several major and obvious contradictions, favoring recycled gameplay over narrative cohesiveness, and it pulls you out of the game, which is a shame because the game has an incredible sense of immersive atmosphere.

None of the environments are nearly as interesting to explore as the Spencer Mansion, but they are far more detailed and consistent.  The mansion was a labyrinth of secrets, traps, and puzzles, where as the Raccoon City police department just isn't.  There are a few puzzles here and there, keys to find and supplies to scavenge, but it felt a lot more redundant than the mansion felt in the previous game.  That said, I liked the police department better than all the secondary areas of Resident Evil.  I enjoyed returning to it to unlock a new couple of areas after finding a key outside the station, and I especially liked that there were exclusive areas depending on which character you chose to play as or which play through you were on.  On average, Resident Evil 2 had a more consistent quality between its various areas, outside of the Sewers, which I found far more obnoxious than fun or tense.  The Labs had a fun sense of exploration in the late game, and the orphanage, however short, was eerie and had one of the most terrifying set pieces in the game with Sherry's brief playable section.  The sewers had two things going for it: the Ada Wong section of Leon's story, and the chess piece puzzle.  The Ada Wong section sees you hacking panels to unlock doors, break ventilation fans, and escaping an incinerator before it burns you alive.  The chess piece puzzle has you finding chess-shaped electrical plugs around the sewers and having to arrange them based on a riddle on the wall, whose solution changes depending on which play through you are on.  Everything else was pretty awful.  The enemies in this area are far more the bullet sponges than in any other area.  The zombies throughout the game can take clips of ammunition, but the trade off is that they can occasionally be averted or you can shoot off their legs making them far less mobile.  Even the lickers, who can do an insane amount of damage, can be snuck past since they are blind.  The G-Virus monstrosities in the sewer, however, are large and often take up the entire width of whatever hallway you are trying to get through, and in at least one section, you have to face four of them in a row.  It feels like the game is deliberately trying to suck ammo from you, and just before a boss fight as well.  For both play throughs of the game, I entered the sewers boss fight with minimal health and very little ammunition because of having to deal with the rest of the sewers.  It doesn't help that the sewers are largely long corridors of (literal and figurative) waste that, while they don't slow you down too much, take far too long to traverse.  It's a slog.

Enemy variety is pretty scant here, but it didn't feel like more enemies would really enhance the game.  You've your basic zombies, your atrocious G-Virus things, the quick zombie dogs, and the formidable lickers hindering your path at every turn, adding tension and survival horror supply management on who is worthy of taking out, and who can be avoided.  It's pretty tense stuff, but none so tense as Tyrant, or Mr. X.  Tyrant, without hyperbole, is not only one of the best parts of the game, but one of the scariest, most intense mechanics in any game I've played.  Tyrant appears at roughly the half way point of the game, a massive mutant that cannot be killed.  Much like Daddy in Resident Evil 7, Tyrant can be taken out temporarily by exchange of a considerably weight in ammunition, or you can attempt to avoid him.  Unlike Daddy, however, Tyrant doesn't stay down long.  Gunshots and running attract him to your place, and wherever he is in the station, you can hear his massive, thundering footsteps.  Some of my fondest memories of this game have me hiding out in a save room, waiting for those thumps to quiet down, peaking out the door only to see him lumbering right outside, waiting for me.  At one point as Clair, I set off some C4 to grab one of the medallions, which causes a zombie to drop down from the ceiling and attracted a licker I had slipped by earlier.  I quickly switch over to some heavier weaponry to try and take out the licker, but before I even have him down, let alone the zombie just behind him, the door slams open and Tyrant makes a b-line straight to me.  It was a frantic hail of fire rounds from my grenade launcher and some quick - snorting? smoking? - of red and green herb mixture while ducking through the nearest door, thundering footsteps following me down three flights of stairs until I had scrambled into the safe room, just in the nick of time.  That kind of improvised set piece is the magic of playing video games, and Tyrant was built for it.  I've heard quite a bit of grumbling about how annoying Tyrant can get after awhile, but I never had that happen during my two play throughs.  Tyrant is, for the most part, used sparingly, only showing up when you're almost done with the police department and at other key moments.  The lone exception to this is in the second play through, where he is roaming around from the moment you enter the police department main hall.  Understandably, Tyrant may not be to everyone's taste.  He's a menacing, terrifying inconvenience if you just want to solve puzzles and scavenge, but I found his presence invigorating in a game I was starting to feel was a bit too much like a lighter version of better games before it. 

Resident Evil 2 is frustrating in that it is fun but not particularly satisfying, dramatic but not exactly put together, and all-in-all a good game that falls short of being truly great.  All the pieces that could make this game on par with the fantastic Resident Evil 7 are there, you can see them and their moving around, occasionally interlocking with one another, but they always miss something - some move or placement that would give a sense of fulfilled potential.  They made it look great, they made it fun, but they didn't make it memorable outside of a solid game with some great ideas that deserved a somewhat better game.  Maybe there's too much history to this series, or maybe I shouldn't have played it so soon after Resident Evil 7, but Resident Evil 2 made me excited for the prospect of a Resident Evil 3 remake, but also made me want to take a break from the series for awhile. 



7.5

[Film Review] The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Note: this review contains spoilers!


They say that the Vietnam War was the first "televised war".  For the first time ever, the violence and chaos that war brought had suddenly disquieted the sanctity of American homes, and with the counter culture movement in full swing - of which Vietnam had a huge part in - American culture was thrown off of its usual sense of balance.  Vietnam came at and influenced a time when America was going through one of its most rapid and full-bodied changes in culture.  Suddenly, even though we were going through the peace and love movements of the late 60s (and the fallout of the early 70s), America was consuming more violence than ever.

It is hard to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre without this gnawing at the back of your mind.  The rural family that terrorizes the teenage hippies are literally eating the people they kill, consuming their own violence.  But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of teens-or-twenty-somethings (who can ever tell?) traveling across the country, specifically in Texas to look for two of the group, Sally and her paraplegic brother Frank's grandfather's grave.  Things quickly turn sour when they pick up a hitchhiker from outside the local slaughterhouse, who promptly freaks everyone out.  They kick him out of the van, carry on until they run out of gas and decide to spend the night in the dilapidated house Sally and Frank's grandfather used to live in.  Things get rather by-the-numbers, plot-wise, as each of the kids (save for Sally) are slaughtered at the hands of mentally challenged butcher Leatherface.  It is worth noting that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the first slasher flicks ever made.  Black Christmas and Psycho were both around either before or at the same time as this film, but the genre was still finding its legs.  A lot of what would later do so well in films like Halloween are done here: faceless, tall monstrosity hunts sexually promiscuous teenagers.  And much like Halloween, there is more than meets the eye here.

Leatherface is a part of a rural family that spend their time digging up graves, making odd furniture out of skeletons, and butchering and eating people.  The patriarch of the family, simply credited as "Old Man",  runs a gas station not far from the family home (which is also situated next door to the house the teens decide to spend the night in).  "I don't take pleasure in killing", he says.  "But sometimes you gotta do things that you don't like!"  So, instead of killing himself, he gets his two sons to do it for him.  Leatherface kills, butchers, and cooks the people, and "hitchhiker", the unnamed brother of Leatherface, tortures and digs up graves.  The final member of the family is the grandfather, who "was the best there ever was" at butchering people, as told to us by the hitchhiker.  Both Leatherface and the hitchhiker both show evidence of mental deficiency, something exploited by the Old Man to abuse and shame them.  It is an absurdity that the Old Man would think that cannibalism would be something you had to do.  There is a certain quality to it, much like the rural stagnation that would prefer to withstand suffering in favor of nothing ever changing.  Violence to these people is the new standard, and just something we should accept.  Sally screams at him "You can tell him to stop!" to which the hitchhiker mocks back "No he can't!" before cackling madly.  This is just The Way Things Are. 

The teens, by contrast, seem to be aware of the violence but oblivious as to its proximity to them.  They read horoscopes in the van which all tell of trying times ahead, horrors just around the bend but not here yet.  Their every action tells us that they don't actually believe these predictions.  They pick up a hitchhiker and withstand a lot of discomfort before finally kicking him out, they separate and invade someone's house looking for gas, and they seem unphased by the help of the gas attendant who warns them of the danger they face (ironic, as he is the Old Man of the family, but his unheeded warnings are valid all the same).  They're just looking for some fun, unaware of the horror happening and developing around them. 

It is no surprise that Leatherface wears a mask made of human faces.  As the iconic monster from the film, his stitched together visage is wearing the true horror the film wants to get at: humanity themselves.  Sally is the only one to survive the film, and she doesn't do it by any kind of wit or strength, but rather by sheer luck, wriggling free of the bickering brothers and blocking an incoming truck on the highway, quickly jumping into the bed.  She laughs madly as the car speeds away, looking back at Leatherface as he angrily swipes his chainsaw around in the middle of the road, looking almost like a grotesque ballet dancer.  It is a cacophony of art, horror, and absurdity, all things key aspects of what many people would say makes humans human.  The film isn't a commentary on the violence obsessed post-60s America, so much as it is an absurd, horrific, gaped jaw at what we have become.   



10

[Game Review] Jazzpunk (Director's Cut)

Note: there are some spoilers here, although I don't think this game has any real plot to spoil.  Still, discretion advised.

Jazzpunk is one of the most indirectly, aptly titled games ever made.  The title creates a supposition of combining incompatible genres: the complex, smooth, theory-adjacent Jazz and the simple, anyone-can-play-it ferocity of Punk.  The thought feels like a Kafkaesque joke, even if one can sort of conceive how it might sound.  The game, likewise, is chock full of these little contradictory or otherwise pun-like jokes.  And by chock full, I mean a cacophony of them drowning out anything even remotely like substance.  But substance isn't anything, and a game can just be fun for being what it is.  For the most part, Jazzpunk fulfills this end of the bargain, being a chaotically silly romp with little point and a winking glance towards the absurdity that any task a game could give you was ever something meaningful anyway.  Where it fails, however, is being anything other than a brief distraction.

The basic summation of Jazzpunk, as much as one could give, is that it is an adventure game where you play as a human-or-robot named Polyblank, who is a secret agent tasked with several missions, each one absurd and hardly what you'll spend most of your time on.  It's a MacGuffin in the most video game way, giving you a simple yet silly task that can be ignored indefinitely in favor of exploring the crazy worlds the game plops you down into.  Interaction with the game is mostly walking around, clicking on things that look like they may react, and occasionally tripping over a minigame or two.  In the most honest sense, Jazzpunk is an Easter egg hunt for small jokes, references, and random triggers for absurd scripted events.  And that is about it, just shy of a walking simulator but with out any semblance of a story or point to hold it together. 

The game was published by Adult Swim, and their trademark absurdity runs rampant throughout.  The game is pretty funny, but never as funny as it thinks it is.  You start missions by taking a pill, the secret agency you work for is outfitted in an abandoned subway station, and you beat the baddie by inflating his ego until he can be popped like a balloon with a needle.  Its silly stuff, but not really "haha" funny, if you know what I mean.  In the third mission, you go on vacation to a tropical resort where you can bump into several stand ins for Hunter S. Thompson.  His zany side seems to have been an inspiration for Jazzpunk, but it lacks any of his insight or interesting interaction with his subjects.  It all feels like hollow references with little to tie it together.  The game is creative, I'll give it that.  I was never sure of what I was going to find next, and it did occasionally have me laughing out loud (such as a sequence where you have a Street Fighter styled fight with a Nissan, with a picture of the bloody, damaged Nissan if you beat it), but more often than not had me rolling my eyes (like when one secret agent asks you "Do you have the MacGuffin?", or the minigame Wedding Cake, a Quake clone made seemingly around a lame pun).

It can be hard to judge, since this may be a matter of taste when it comes to the humor.  The Quake clone, after all, was mostly just a harmless joke.  But for me, it was how many of these lame jokes mounted up by the end of it.  Unfortunately, whether you find it funny or not, you won't find it particularly fun.  Most of the game has you exploring the various levels looking for Easter eggs, but, forgetting what made exploration fun in the first place, most of these eggs are little more than lame puns or meaningless dressing.  Exploration is one of my favorite aspects of video games, and while little jokes are often a fun reward for thorough exploration in most games, an entire game made up of nothing but is tiring really quick.  And that is the crux of it really.  When I was younger, I bought a DVD of all the Mr. Bill shorts from Saturday Night Live.  Watching them sequentially without the body of SNL to contextualize the the shorts - which were really a sort of pallet cleanser more than anything - made them more irritating and meaningless rather than fun.  It wasn't them themselves that were interesting or funny, it was how they were situated in something else and provided a much needed moment of change to help the pacing along.  That's what Jazzpunk is in a nutshell.  It's a collection of all the Mr. Bill shorts in a row, for 2 hours, and it gets mighty tiring by the end of it.



6.5

[Film Review] Jacob's Ladder

Note: This review contains spoilers. If you haven't watched the film, don't read this review!


 Jacob's Ladder likes to look as though it is playing a little trick on you.  It is a psychological horror film about Jake, a Vietnam vet seeing visions of demons everywhere he goes in 80s New York City, while suffering quick flashes to a time in the war where he was stabbed by a bayonet.  The stabbing occurred during a firefight, the kind full of grotesque horrors living up to the mantra "war is hell".  Jake, in the modern day, doesn't want to remember.  He wants to live with his girlfriend, Jezzy (short for Jezebel), work his mailman job, and just carry on the best he can.  Unfortunately, Jake's mental state seems to be unraveling as he sees demons and grotesqueries in everyday life.  He thinks he is losing his mind until he gets a call from another vet, Paul, who was there during that horrific firefight, and he's been seeing the same shit.  Slowly, it becomes clear to Jake that the government is hiding something, something they did, and it is ruining his life and everyone else's who survived that day.  But what is clear to Jake isn't so clear to us: is it truly the product of some government conspiracy, or is Jake actually just going crazy, or, worse, is he already dead?  The film leans pretty heavily into the government conspiracy angle, so it may be a surprise to some that, in the end, the entire film is inside Jake's mind during his final death throes.  This may sound condemning to those who loath the "it's all in his head" framing devices, but Jacob's Ladder is a textbook example of how to use it right.

The film is a trick, but not the trick it is trying to sell you.  It wants you to question what is real and what is really happening, so it can land effectively on its ending where Jake ascends to heaven with his deceased son Gabe.  The real trick is convincing you that it matters what is real and what isn't in the first place, since it all builds on top of itself as a whole.  In reality, Jacob's Ladder is an interweaving of several plot threads, each with different thematic significance: Jake living with his girlfriend seeing demons, the government conspiracy, and the brief flashes of Jake dying in Vietnam after being mortally wounded.  These three threads create an overarching theme as well.

The one best out of the way first is the government conspiracy angle, as it is a good foundation for the overarching themes.  Near the end of the film Jake learns that, during that fateful firefight, his outfit was dosed with an experimental drug called The Ladder, meant to increase aggression and combat effectiveness in soldiers.  It goes horribly wrong, and leads Jake and co. to kill each other.  Throughout the film, various people Jake knows are killed (notably by car bombing, which seems pretty obviously a hit, but, then again, this is all in his head).  Jake is almost run over and later harassed and threatened by government agents to just drop it and live his life.  Jake's pursuit of this truth acts as one of the major tensions throughout the film: is the government behind this, and what are we going to do if they are?  The film's demonic imagery and Jake's unraveling throughout the film mimics an extreme version of PTSD, and any pride he could have from having served in the military is taken from him by this conspiracy.  Vietnam was not a "proud" war, and Jake's horror at the U.S. government reflects this.  When Jake meets Paul at the bar and learns he is seeing demons too, Paul laments "I'm going to Hell, and don't try to tell me I'm crazy, because I'm not."  The film uses Vietnam and the repercussions the soldiers live with as the conductive surface between themes.

On the topside of that conductive surface is the thread about Jake and his girlfriend Jezzy.  Jake is back home after Vietnam, and he has a lot of baggage from before he ever went to war.  His youngest son, Gabe, died after being run over by a car while they were at the park, and his wife divorced him.  Every memory of Gabe locks Jake up.  He hasn't gotten over it, and most likely never will.  Jezzy doesn't like this.  Jezzy and Jake's relationship is superficial.  He confides in her some of the things that bother him or that he has seen, and she's somewhat receptive, but regularly tries to convince him to drop it and move on (even as she sees it eating away at his sanity).  She cares about him, but you get the impression it is somewhat conditional.  When Jake sees a picture of Gabe at the beginning of the film, he begins to cry.  Jezzy attempts to crumple all of the pictures of his kids and family from before the war, stating: "I don't like things that make you cry."  When Jake isn't around, Jezzy incinerates them.  It is easy to write Jezzy off as a heartless bitch, or a true life demon (in one notable scene, she grows demonic features briefly when confronting Jake about his obsession in demonology), but there are several instances of compassion, at least on some level, between her and Jake.  She worries he works too much.  She wants him to stop looking into the government conspiracy because she sees him growing more erratic.  In what is the most memorable and intense scene in the film, she frantically forces Jake (with the help of several neighbors) into an ice bath as his temperature climbs to a dangerous 106 degrees.  It isn't that she doesn't care for Jake, it is that she wants him a certain way, and that is important to her character and how we interpret her.  Jezzy, to my eyes, is very much the Devil, but not the torturous, Christian Devil.  In Jacob's Ladder, Hell isn't a place of damnation, it is a place of loss and unforgettable past horrors.  Jake's chiropractor tells him at one point: "The only parts of you that burn in Hell are the parts of your life you're holding on to . . . they're freeing your soul. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth."  Jezzy wants him free of his past, and to live in the moment, but Jake can't let go.  He knows where he was happiest, and it was with his wife and kids before the war.  When Jezzy shoves Jake into that ice bath, Jake sees a flash of being in Vietnam, being attended to by soldiers for his wounds, before flashing again into his and his wife, Sarah's bedroom.  He tells her he is cold, and that they should shut the window.  He then starts telling her of his dream, a nightmare he was having: he was dating that girl Jezzy from the mailroom, and it was awful.  His son Gabe wakes up from all the commotion, and Jake tucks him into bed, telling his three kids he loves them.  He crawls back into bed with Sarah, starts to drift back asleep, when suddenly another flash and he is lying in a bathtub, Jezzy and a doctor looming over him, telling him he is lucky to be alive.  Jake doesn't feel lucky, though.  He was happy there, and tears well up in his eyes as he silently stares up at the ceiling.  In my eyes, it is the most horrifying thing in the entire film.  Sure, the demons and his mental instability are horrific, but his mere presence in this existence is also horrifying.  Even if he rights himself again, it will never bring back what he has lost.  There is no coming back from it.

The final thread is also the shortest:  Jake in Vietnam.  Jake sees flashes throughout the film, but only for seconds at a time.  He is stabbed, wakes suddenly to it being night, unable to scream for help, and is eventually found and treated by other soldiers.  Jake succumbs to his wounds at the end of the film in a medical tent, a peaceful look on his face.  It is unclear if The Ladder was actually ever dosed to the unit or not, but the ending title card stating something about BZ, a real world experimental drug the U.S. government worked on during the time of Vietnam, strongly suggests that it is canonical.  The Ladder has a few interpretations, along with the title of the film itself.  In the biblical sense, it is a ladder to heaven, but it is also a pun, played off of The Ladder drug that caused the unit to kill its own men (named for it taking them "straight to the primal fear zone", something you would experience if you were aware you were dying), and the supposed ladder Jake is either ascending or descending throughout the film to Hell or Heaven. Assuming they were really killed by the government's failed experiment does little to enhance the themes of the film.  It more or less just doubles down on what is already there and already effective.  The importance of this thread is for framing.  Jake succumbing to death creates a series of issues he must work through in order to finally allow himself to die, and for him to understand his death, to a degree.  We see Jake pine, even if he won't admit it much to himself, for the time before the war, for a time before Gabe died.  That was when he was happy, and it is something he cannot let go of.  We see Jake living in a post-war tragedy, where horrors prevent him from living and threaten him with the death he is unknowingly experiencing.  The tethering point, the conduit between the threads is the Vietnam war, and its affect on a person.  Jake can't take it back, he can't live past it, and he needs to accept that.  Jake's projection of life after the war is Hell, before his Heaven, and his death during the war almost a godsend, a prevention of the Hell he could have lived trying to let go of a past that would forever haunt him.  The film almost envies those lost during the war to those who survived it, and gives Jake and ending he can be peaceful with, allowing him to ascend the stairs of his old home in Brooklyn with his son Gabe, who he missed so much.

Jacob's Ladder is an imperfect film that threads together fear of death, PTSD, and grief into a parable about Vietnam and its horrific affect on those who fought it.  It is a personal and surprisingly complex film, one that could have easily hid behind a twist ending like a gimmicky thrill ride.  It is confrontational, occasionally brilliantly so, but often a bit on the nose with its imagery and dialogue.  It spells certain thematic elements out to an almost unmistakable degree, making the film feel somewhat unconfident in its own execution.  Despite this, the film is passionate and multi-themed, worthy of exploration. 
 



8.0

[Game Review] Resident Evil 7

Note: this review contains spoilers!


The first half of Resident Evil 7 is the scariest game I have ever played.  After the horribly received Resident Evil 6, Capcom have pulled the once-in-a-decade trick of completely throwing out whatever we knew about how a Resident Evil game is played and starting over.  Well, that isn't completely honest.  Resident Evil 7 is the closest the series has ever been to the first one in setting and gameplay.  Like in the original classic, almost the entire game takes place on one piece of property and focuses on inventory management, keys, and exploration.  But Resident Evil 7 isn't a retread.  As a matter of fact, I'd hesitate to say anything in the first half of the game feels like Resident Evil at all.  Rather, the game feels more akin to the likes of Amnesia or Outlast with its first person perspective, use of harsh shadows and creepy sounds that really compliment a pair of headphones (just try not to throw them when you are inevitably scared).  If that comparison weirds you Resident Evil or horror fans out, don't leave just yet.  Full disclosure: I was never that big of a fan of Amnesia or Outlast.  These types of "crouch and hide" games always felt a lot more tedious than scary to me (Soma gets a pass for its incredible story).  Fortunately, Resident Evil 7 has the solution.  Simply put: guns.  Not a lot of them, and with very little ammo, but guns nonetheless.

Resident Evil 7 takes place in the Baker residence in Louisiana, an abandoned house that has been proximate to a series of disappearances over the last three years.  You play as Ethan, whose girlfriend Mia has not-so-coincidentally been missing for the exact same three years, and has sent you an email out of the blue telling you to pick her up at the Louisiana residence, well after you thought she was dead.  Of course, the Baker residence isn't abandoned, and of course there is a lot more than meets the eye.  Resident Evil 7 feels like a disturbing hybrid of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Blaire Witch Project, with all of their most unsettling properties. The Baker family are the most nightmare versions of the hostile redneck trope, made up of the determined patriarch Jack who wants you to call him "daddy" and join his family, Marguerite, his wife, and her horrific insect hoard, and Lucas, an intelligent sadist who designs elaborate Jigsaw-like torture games for you to run through.  The house itself is grimy, full of trash and rotting things, and in general disarray.  Your viewpoint throughout the whole thing is from first person - a first for the series - and it gives the experience a seriously unsettling vérité feeling, even going so far as to have the flashlight cause focusing issues.  It can be somewhat nauseating, which (for better or worse) adds to the experience.

The early part of the game will have you exploring the Baker residence before finally finding Mia, who is alive in a cell.  She immediately freaks out, confronting you as to why or how you are there, telling you she never sent you any kind of email and that you both need to leave now.  While attempting to escape, Mia changes (her eyes going black and the veins in her face sticking out, all very J-horror in aesthetic) and begins to attack you, forcing you to lodge a hatchet into her neck.  You receive a phone call from within the house of another of the Baker family, Zoe, who wants to get off the residence as much as you.  But your fight with Mia isn't over.  Like the rest of the Baker clan, she can regenerate, and she quickly takes a chainsaw to your left hand.  This seems as good a time as any to mention: this game is grisly with its violence.  I can't think of many games that are as violent as Resident Evil 7.  After this sequence, you run around with a profusely bleeding stump for quite some time before Jack finds you and knocks you out.  As an introduction, it works great, full of scares, ample tension, and several shocking moments.  Having to kill Mia (or, think I was killing Mia) moments after rescuing her (knowing she was the entire reason I came to this hellscape in the first place) was a moment of serious pause for me.  It wasn't just that I found her dead in her cell in the basement - something I honestly thought was going to happen - I was shown she was alive and that my plight might not be for naught, only to put me in the position of taking that away from myself.  It's something games do best, by forcing you into a decision that forces reflection.  It doesn't invoke something particularly deep about the plot or themes, but it sets a standard of unpredictability the game would follow for most of its playtime.

After this, the game starts proper.  You were captured by the Bakers, who have stapled your hand back on and poured some incredible healing liquid over the wound that somehow reconnects it.  There is actually a sequence you can get here where Jack cuts your leg off and makes you crawl to the other side of the room for the health bottle in order to reattach it.  But soon after waking from being knocked out, you quickly escape, and are allowed to explore the house as you want, so long as you have the keys to do so.  Throughout the main house, you will periodically bump into Jack, who can be taken out at the cost of a large portion of your ammo reserves, but he will regenerate after awhile.  Likewise, the old house has Marguerite, who can sick a swarm of mutated insects at you.  Much like Outlast, you can creep around Jack (and at at least one part, you will have to), but giving you the ability to fight - at quite the cost, but fight nonetheless - gives Resident Evil 7 a better sense of agency.  Early in the game, I was afraid of getting sick of the Jack mechanic, but to my surprise he doesn't show up that often.  It made the few times he did appear all the more scary.  I would be roaming the house looking for supplies or where certain keys went while this palpable timer incremented in the back of my mind from the last Jack sighting.  It was always a mounting tension between Jack sightings, a palpable gnawing at my sense of safety.

The game slides into more Resident Evil 4 type territory as you enter the latter half.  The final boss battles Marguerite and Jack feel very much like something Leon Kennedy fought in that Spanish town, and while I've read several complaints about this section I really liked the change of pace.  Jack, in particular, was really fun as I cathartically shot out each of his many eyeballs. The final sections of the Baker property are much more gamey as apposed to the atmospheric frightfest that inhabited the early half, but I enjoyed the pacing this created and, as I was getting more and more familiar with the shadow drenched dilapidation, it was getting harder and harder for the game to remain scary.  When you get off the Baker residence, however, is where the game starts to suffer.

The final section of the game finds you at a wrecked ship and a secret lab in the nearby salt mines.  In the ship, you will play as Mia for a little while, where you learn exactly what all is going on.  The story is pretty simple:  Mia is a covert operative working for The Connections, an Umbrella competitor working on a psychoactive mold with biological warfare potential.  She was on the boat transporting a little girl named Eveline, genetically modified with the mold in her genome as a bioweapon capable of controlling peoples minds and infecting them with the mold.  Eveline, however, had other plans.  Desiring a family (of which there is a lot of theories posited in the game, none of them particularly interesting), she decides to outright attack the ship to stop it from reaching yet another lab for her to live in.  She tries to convince Mia to become her mother, of which Mia agrees if just to calm her down, but it doesn't stop her.  Eveline can vomit the mold beyond her body weight, and this mold can form into these black, mold creatures.  Using these and mind control she is able to wreck the ship in a Louisiana swamp, where the Bakers unfortunately rescue Mia and Eveline.  Eveline, then, has been controlling the Bakers the whole time (although there is some evidence that at least Lucas is fucking nuts all on his own, having written about killing a peer of his when he was a child by locking him in the attic for days), making her the real baddie. 

I don't really like this plot.  It is pretty standard Resident Evil bioweapon stuff, so I suppose I won't complain too much about that, but the scary, black haired girl is straight out of take-your-pick J-horror.  It is a an incredible unoriginal concept, executed pretty much by the standard rules, and, maybe worst of all, was done quite a bit better in the F.E.A.R. series (at least the first two...).  Thematically, it does provoke imagery that is particularly interesting, but doesn't quite go anywhere.  The plot, summed up by its predominant moving parts and not its underlying mythos, is about a redneck family possessed by some hateful entity that are trying to "indoctrinate" (really: infect with the mold) people into their family.  For the cherry on top: the mold looks like oil.  It seems the game is playing with some modern political imagery, talking of a possessed impoverished group led astray into believing in a family unit, but it obviously doesn't really go anywhere.  If I was being generous, I could say that Eveline is a weapon created by a corporate entity, and thus fulfills some complete theme - one of the horror of our time - but I'm not convinced.  I don't think it works as a complete thematic whole, but I do thing the imagery works in its own right to provoke something truly frightening and relevant, even if it does so a bit loose on the landing.  The plot isn't great, but the pieces are.

Those before mentioned mold creatures are the weakest part of the game by far, and they populate this entire latter section.  The mechanic is good enough:  shoot their limbs off the kill them, but they do massive amounts of damage if you don't kill them fast enough.  Add to this that the creatures are bullet sponges most of the time (I could never tell when they would take a few shots or a few clips, outward appearance indicating nothing), and you have an enemy that is trying to tell you not to kill it.  Shoot the legs off and run.  I like this, if it weren't for the fact the things are so ugly and, damning enough, not scary.  They are comical looking humanoids with wide, cartoonish mouths that I assume where going for the uncanny look, but missed by a significant margin.  They were more frustrating than anything, and severely dampened the ending of the game for me.  Luckily for us, the game quickly ties up loose ends and it ends.  You have a couple hours, max, in this section and then roll credits.

Taking the game as a whole, I personally loved what Resident Evil 7 did.  It was precisely the kind of horror game I'd wanted for a long time, and didn't know it.  It was unsettling, grisly, and unpredictable with an excellent setting, memorable enemies, and that exploration mechanic that keeps you engaged between the scares.  Now lets see how Capcom fucks it up again.




8.5

[Game Review] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Note: I've kept largely away from spoilers this time, but if you're sensitive to even the smallest of spoilers, don't read this, PLAY IT! You won't regret it.

Contrary to what you may infer if you've never played the original Legend of Zelda, it is not a flawless masterpiece.  The game is rife with translation errors, opaque solutions, and odd difficulty spikes.  You are guaranteed to at some point (more than likely at several points) require a guide.  It is one of the most important games ever created, and started a franchise that is as beloved as it is contentious amongst its disciples, but Christ is it flawed.  One of the most important things it did was create a sense of wonder and exploration rarely (if ever) seen in games at the time.  It was easy to get lost in the game's Hyrule Kingdom, now plagued with monsters and formidable dungeons.  There was a non-linearity to how the game progressed, allowing for dungeons to be attacked in a different order (although there is some sense of an intended order).  The wonder and openness of the original Zelda is something still rarely seen in games (even in the age of open world fatigue), and it wouldn't be seen truly in another Zelda title until Breath of the Wild.

The game starts with Link waking up after a century long sleep in an abandoned tomb of ancient technology where he was healed of lethal wounds sustained in his and Zelda's first attempts at ridding the kingdom of Gannon.  In his century long slumber, Hyrule has gone to a near post-apocalyptic standard before finally starting to see some kind of recovery.  When Link exits the tomb, he finds himself on the Great Plateau.  It has been talked about at length, but I have to agree: the Great Plateau is one of the greatest starting areas of any game, ever.  The area acts as a microscopic version of the entire game, with frosty mountains, forest, ruins, and plains.  The plateau is populated with wild boar, squirrels, pig-like enemies called bokoblins, and the formidable guardians who are extremely difficult to kill this early in the game.  You are given the chance to learn about different enemy types, hunting, and the temperature system in a nice, pocketed area before being let go in the expansive wilds of Hyrule (and I do mean expansive).  Here, you bump into an old man who directs you to the four shrines on the plateau and tells you if you complete them he will give you his glider so you can survive the massive drop on the plateau's edge, where you're free to explore the massive map of Hyrule.  Going through these shrines gives you one of four tools and a spirit orb.  The spirit orb acts as your level up currency, where four can be traded in to a Hylia goddess statue for either a health upgrade or a stamina upgrade.  The four tools are all of your tools for the entire game.  Zelda, like Metroid, has traditionally locked areas and content behind the acquisition of more tools.  Breath of the Wild's largest breaking of the Zelda mold is by doing away with this structuring, something arguably key to the Zelda series and its identity.  I won't pretend I don't miss the Zelda progression structure, but getting rid of it is absolutely imperative to why this game is so freeing and open.

Found in the four shrines you get a magnesis tool which allows you to pick up and move metal objects, a stasis tool that allows you to freeze things in time temporarily and allowing you to hit the object and stack hits to rocket the object away, bombs in both round and square variations (finally no longer a collected item and regenerating after a few seconds), and cryonis which allows you to create a pillar of ice out of any water source.  Because of this, dungeons are largely nonexistent and instead replaced with shrines.  Shrines act as small puzzles - usually having to do with the physics systems - or combat trials that reward you with a spirit orb once completed.  There are 120 shrines in the game, sometimes hidden behind puzzles themselves.  There are dungeons in the traditional sense, but only four of them and much smaller than previous games and with a similar theme.  This becomes the trade off for the entire game: tradition for openness and flexibility.  To be sure, this is not going to rub all players the right way, but Breath of the Wild creates such a unique experience I can't help but think it is justified.  Using magnesis to create a seesaw or a bridge to a blocked off area when the game wasn't intending me to do so was incredibly rewarding.  Stasis could be abused by freezing a climbable object, hitting it several times, jumping onto it, and rocketing yourself away.  These tools allowed for a sandbox feel akin to the gravity gun in Half-Life 2.  

Particularly, these tools allow you to play with the so called "chemistry system".  The chemistry system is a way in which all different rules of the game are allowed to interact with each other.  For example, steel objects create sparks when hit against flint, and also conduct electricity.  This means starting a fire is as easy as dropping some firewood next to some flint and hitting it with your steel sword.  It also means that you can utilize your steel sword in a lightening storm by using magnesis to throw it into a crowd of enemies to attract a lightening strike.  In one of the shrines, instead of solving the electric puzzle by finding and collecting all of the different metal objects, I simply threw down a large portion of my steel weapons in my inventory and chained them together to unlock the door.  This freedom of creativity is amazing.  Sure, the game can be virtually broken by these systems, but that is part of the intoxicating fun of the whole experience.  Another feature in the chemistry system is temperature.  When things get too hot or too cold (such as in the desert or mountains, respectively), there are multiple ways of dealing with the debuffs (mostly taking damage over time).  You can cook a meal with particular buffs, drink an elixir, change your clothing, or hold a fire enchanted weapon or ice enchanted weapon to heat you up or cool you down.  You can even take a wooden sword, swipe it through fire, and take your homemade torch as a portable heater.  Your glider can get in on the action as well by utilizing updrafts from burning fires which can change the way a battle plays out if you or your enemy has been using copious amounts of explosives or fire arrows.  A quick jump over the fire and you can take out your glider, be thrust in the air, and utilize your vantage point for a quick succession of arrows.  I never felt like I ran out of options to try in the entire 70+ hours I played.

One of the most impressive mechanics in the game is the climbing mechanic.  Link can climb nearly any surface so long as he has the stamina to manage it, which can be leveled up to ludicrous degrees.  The game, again, is nearly broken with this mechanic, but it never gets in the way of the fun.  There were numerous times through my play through where, if I was making my way through a ravine full of enemies, I'd climb the stone walls and circumvent particularly dense clusters of enemies (maybe shooting a few cheeky bomb arrows down to create some disarray).  Being able to look along the horizon and know that anything on it can be climbed over is one of the most liberating feelings I've ever felt in a video game, and indulging that desire is so often rewarded with strange sights, odd secrets, or even just the tame puzzle or two that it never gets old or feels like a promise the game isn't ready to keep.

It is becoming trite to keep saying this, so let's call the game what it is and get it over with: the game is a near masterpiece.  Of recent games, I cannot think of many I would categorize the same.  To be sure, it isn't without its faults.  The plot, for instance, leaves a lot to be desired.  The set up is great: waking to find the ruins of Hyrule, your only real objective is to find Zelda (who is holding Gannon at bay in Hyrule castle) and finish the beast off.  You are able to find several memories by going to locations in which they happened, where you are told the nonlinear and incomplete story of princess Zelda's pathos with her destiny, something she hasn't lived up to nearly as well as Link.  The dissonance between the two (and Zelda's harbored resentment towards Link) is palpable, and an interesting dynamic I wish had been fleshed out more.

But ambiguity in this game also lends it an air of realism and of excavation.  You are piecing together fragments of a world a hundred years gone at this point, trying to remember people you've forgotten and whose legacy has been distorted following your perceived demise.  And it isn't just you piecing things together: the world is rebuilding before your eyes.  It's actually something contradictory in the story that, while you are trying to end the apocalyptic reign of Gannon (more like "presence" as he isn't really reigning over anything), the people of Hyrule are rebuilding and communities are beginning to prosper.  You hear about a lot of despair walking around Hyrule, but you rarely actually see it.  I struggled to properly understand this, because it really does seem like an oversight, but considering the work as a whole work that is saying something regardless of true intention, we can conclude something quite uplifting: the world was never waiting for Link.  Sure, Gannon could at any moment come and end the world as they know it, and that is a definite fear they feel, but it doesn't bring life to a halt.  People progress, societies continue to grow, and you get to witness it first hand.  My favorite quest in the entire game is the side quest for Tarrey Town.  In this quest, you are tasked with gathering supplies, workers, and different people of each of the cultures around Hyrule so a small town in one of the eastern regions can be built.  The town is the only town in the game evenly made up of the different sentient species of the kingdom, and acts as a symbolic microcosm of the entire plot and themes of the game: those of a world in disarray and segregation learning to accept outside cultures and unite as a single people.  It was fulfilling, and it left me awed.

There is an insane amount of stuff to talk about in this game, from the horse taming system to the cooking system, the breakable items to the korok seeds - I can't possibly cover them all concisely, and I shouldn't.  I've largely kept away from spoilers this entire review because no matter your opinions on Zelda, you need to play this game.  It is one of the greatest of the decade, and maybe the greatest Zelda game ever made.     


10

[Game Review] Resident Evil HD

Note: This review contains spoilers.


The genre of survival horror is largely thanks to two fallen dynasties.  While the history of the genre dates back to classics like Alone in the Dark, it didn't take off until the original Playstation hosted two games that established the baseline for (many) others to follow: Resident Evil and Silent Hill.  While Silent Hill kept its focus on story, puzzles, and psychological toying, Resident Evil wanted more focus on combat, inventory management, and the general "survival" aspect of survival horror.

I'd never played the original Resident Evil before now, and was surprised at how well the game translated to the modern age.  The game focuses largely on exploration and inventory management, giving you minimal space for things like ammo health, and keys, while you explore the Spencer Mansion and its surrounding property.  Exploration is one of my favorite aspects of video games as a medium, an attraction I've retained since first playing Riven as a child.  Resident Evil (at least when it sticks to the mansion) is full of exploreable nooks and crannies, full of secret keys, puzzles, and monsters. One of the final areas of the game is underneath the staircase in the first room you enter, locked behind a door that requires two items picked up at the first third and end of the game.  The game teases you with initially unsolvable puzzles and locked areas in order to pull you through the game and give an air of mystery to the experience.

"Mystery" is simultaneously one of the most important aspects of the game, and a rather misleading implication of the plot.  Resident Evil's plot is serviceable, and sometimes even good, but it's really just horror schlock to act as dressing and reason for you to be exploring a zombie infested mansion.  The broad strokes of the plot are thus: You are either Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, a member of S.T.A.R.S., a special forces unit underneath the jurisdiction of the Raccoon City Police Department.  You and your fellow S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team members are investigating the whereabouts of Bravo Team, who in turn were investigating a series of murders on the outskirts of Raccoon City.  Your team finds their crashed chopper and makes a landing, only to be ambushed by zombie dogs and forced into the mansion nearby (your coward of a helicopter pilot deciding not to wait for the team before taking off).  This is the Spencer Mansion, the site where the Umbrella Corporation is experimenting to create a biological weapon that can create a super being.  The tests result in a zombie-creating virus called the T-Virus, which, after years of experimentation, the mansion and its inhabitants are accidentally exposed to.  The residents and workers of the mansion and the labs underneath are suddenly infected, evidence of which you pick along the way through journal entries and final words written down for loved ones.  The plot culminates in you finding out that Wesker, your leader in the S.T.A.R.S., is an Umbrella employee and totally aware that he is sacrificing his men in order to save the Tyrant, the successful fruits of Umbrella's labors towards an advanced super creature, and that the S.T.A.R.S. themselves were a pet project of Umbrella the whole time.  

The game's plot is fine.  It doesn't have any particular symbolic depth, but it is entertainingly genre-like.  This isn't to say the plot doesn't have its moments of greatness.  The Lisa Trevor plotline, about an indestructible enemy encountered several times throughout the game, is a particular standout.  Lisa was a little girl when Umbrella started experimenting on her with the T-Virus.  Her father was the architect of the elaborate mansion you explore, who was lured into one of his own traps and left for dead by Spencer, the man responsible for the mansion's creation.  When Lisa and her mother Jessica came to see her father for the celebratory completion of the mansion, they were instead detained by Spencer's men.  Jessica was killed, and Spencer, in an effort to calm Lisa, sent an assistant dressed and masked as Jessica to sooth her.  Lisa saw through the disguise, and promptly cut the woman's face off and began wearing it, a habit she would retain for further victims.  Lisa wasn't just an example of the T-Virus, however.  She was also experimented on with the G-Virus (which allows for biological regeneration in its host), and fundamental to its creation.  The story is a horrifying tale of personal anguish you get from multiple perspectives as you find letters of regret and desperation from Jessica, Lisa's father, and even the mentally degrading Lisa herself.  The story is heartbreaking, and acts as great set up for the inhumanity of the Umbrella Corporation, as well as setting up the possibility for a serious, psychological plot akin to Silent Hill, but the game never follows up.  The game isn't any worse for it, but the story of Lisa is a very interesting mystery through the middle of the game that feels a bit more weighted in plot than the rest of the game.

The mystery of what has been going on in the Spencer Mansion would be disappointing if the game cared much about the plot.  Fortunately, the game knows where its strengths are.  The real mystery you're exploring, and the one driving the whole experience, is along the lines of "What does this key unlock?", or "What is this riddle asking?".  Puzzles aren't Resident Evil's strength, exactly, as all of them are pretty well spelled out for you immediately.  However, when you finally collect the Armor Key after seeing half a dozen locked doors with that symbol on them, the sudden rush of remembering new wings of the mansion to explore is absolutely intoxicating.  The mansion's layout is incredibly well designed.  You'll find yourself bouncing back and forth between the West and East wings, and finding new shortcuts between the first and second floors as you progress.  The layout of the mansion quickly becomes second nature to you because of this design philosophy, where locked doors and their corresponding keys are always a significant ways away.  Hallways snake between nonsensically designed and sized rooms, and often the quickest way to get to a room a few feet from you will require you to ascend floors, make three room transitions, and descend again.  It's labyrinthine design, but rarely to a cumbersome degree.  

One of the strengths to this floor plan is in how Resident Evil does monster placement.  Main hallways for travel have their dynamics changed throughout depending on what creatures are there.  Early in the game you will mostly only have to contend with the basic zombie enemy.  You can shoot them dead, blow their head off, or burn them once they are on the ground.  Burning the bodies isn't immediately useful, seeing as they never seem to get up after leaving the room.  Later in the game, however, any zombie that hasn't been decapitated or burnt will come back as the extremely lethal and fast crimson head zombies, making them a far bigger problem.  With the addition of several new crimson head zombies roaming previously empty hallways, if you didn't properly deal with these zombies early in the game you could have made the mid-part of the game more difficult for yourself.  Its never overwhelming by any means, but it adds a fun bit of tension as you realize how you could have prevented this, and how thankful you are the few times you did.  It's a fun dynamic between previous you and present you, and one I think works far better than most systems in games that try to give you superficial examples of your influence on the environment.  Other enemies include the formidable zombie dogs which are difficult to kill given how fast they are and how easily they can pin you to the ground and rip your throat out, the Hunters which have deadly claws and can jump up to you, acid spewing spiders, mutated sharks, a giant snake, and these insect looking things that I honestly can't bother to look up the name for because they are easy to take care of and, other than looking disgusting, aren't particularly memorable or impactful.  

These monsters wouldn't be so bad if they didn't take half a clip at least to take out (with the exception of those insect things).  Half a clip is a lot for Resident Evil.  In keeping tradition with the "survival" aspect of survival horror, ammo is rather scarce throughout (health is generally as well, but after a certain point in the game I had more health items than I knew what to do with).  This means that felling a zombie takes with it quite a dent in your reserves, and must be balanced out in case you get stuck in a room with 3 of the bastards, because that knife of yours is more than likely not going to do you a lot of good without full health to take some hits for you (unless you're an experienced player, I assume; I am not).  Likewise on the survival front, one of the more controversial aspects to Resident Evil's design is the use of Ink Ribbons as a non-infinite item required to save.  This means you can only save sparingly, and each save has to count so you don't run risk of having a larger than comfortable gap between you and the end of the game with no saves left.  I'm sincerely mixed on this feature.  It added such a thick layer of tension throughout my play through, something I weighed my progress and session time against in order to gauge whether I had earned a confident use of a save, but at the same time, knowing that you could essentially blow your entire game hours in by overusing this item isn't something I think is good game design.  The truth of the matter is that there are quite a lot of save ribbons throughout the game, depending on difficult and version of the game.  You don't know this going in, and the game does a great job slowly dripping them in as you explore so you never feel too confident.  There's a sincere bit of tension in the beginning of the game as you get close to venturing through each part of the mansion before being siphoned out to the other bits of the game, and you realize that you're running low on ribbons and have no clue where another could be found any time soon, and I will forever be appreciative of it.  It was a unique thrill I genuinely enjoyed, even if it could have gone so horribly wrong.  

The main issues I have with the game have to do with the non-mansion areas and some of the more obtuse key items.  Other than the mansion, there is the courtyard, residence (for Spencer's security), the caves, and the labs.  None of them are outright bad, and I would say I definitely enjoyed the residence which acts as a smaller, alternate version of the mansion with fewer doors and ugly giant spiders to contend with.  The caves were rather small and felt a bit like fluff, and the labs felt like they were just there to gear us up for the end of the game with a little too much exposition and not enough story, but the part of the game I liked the least was the courtyard.  Resident Evil's level design shines when it is labyrinthine and dense, but the courtyard area is largely hallways from a level design perspective, moving you narrowly down a path through woods or connecting areas such as the caves and Lisa Trevor's house.  There's nothing overtly bad about any of it, but it definitely made me wish to get on with finding the helmet key so I could go back to the mansion and explore the last few rooms.  The other major issue I have has to do, particularly, with the Eagle and Wolf medallions.  Both were found in books you collected throughout your play through.  The issue I have is with how you remove them from the books themselves.  You can examine any item in your inventory, and if you are looking at the right part (like, say, a side of a jewelry box that has a concealed switch to press), you can interact with it.  Most of the time this is obvious, such as when you look at a key to see a sigil of sword or helmet on it to identify it.  For these two medallions, you had to look directly at the page side of the book, and then you could open it to reveal the hidden items inside.  I had already figured out where these medallions went, and I knew it had something to do with he two books in my inventory since they literally said the solution to the puzzle on the cover, but couldn't for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do with these books to solve the puzzle itself.  Angrily, I had to look it up.  There are several instances of things like this, such as with a jewelry box that has a small, circular hole in the front that acts as a lock which apparently requires a red gem that looks the size of my fist and isn't particularly round to unlock it.  The most annoying and detrimental was the first aid kits.  I had collected a rather large amount of these before I figured out with each one you had to look at the latch in order to open them and get their contents.  Silly me for thinking I could just select them and hit "use".  

These bits of the game are more an instance of the game being dated than anything substantial.  Despite these minor trips, Resident Evil is an extremely strong experience that I easily and willingly spent 15 hours in.  Usually from older games, I expect something flawed and clunky like Silent Hill 3 that can be appreciated, albeit through a particular critical lens.  But occasionally, you come across a Silent Hill 2, which stands the test of time as something thrilling and memorable, and lives up to everything you've heard about it.  I'm honestly surprised we haven't gotten indie nostalgic throwbacks to the archaic systems here, because they still work fundamentally well.  Resident Evil is still a classic, and I feel foolish for having expected otherwise.



10

[Game Review] Katamari Damacy REROLL

The mid 00's saw a slew of experimental games trying something new and exciting with the medium.  You probably see where this is going.  I can go into detail about the games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Killer7, etc., but you know what game I'm going to talk about.   

Katamari Damacy was a whole new brand of weird, even for the times.  Releasing in 2004 on the Playstation 2, the game made you the Prince of All Cosmos, and your job was to roll up all the shit you could on earth into a ball that could be turned into a star.  Your father, the King of All Cosmos, drunkenly lost the stars one night and it is your job to pick up the pieces while he sardonically judges you for not living up to his expectations.  You use a little ball device called a katamari to roll junk up, starting small with tacks, batteries, and the like before getting into skyscrapers, islands, and whole continents. 

Controls are weird and awkward, which only adds to the mayhem and fun.  You use both analog sticks in order to move.  Lean them both left to turn left, right to turn right, one up and one down to turn around, etc.  They make sense, with each stick in place of one of your tiny arms, while also allowing for you to awkwardly bump into things, get stuck, and generally add to the chaos on screen.  Your katamari can only grab things roughly the same size, meaning if you ran into something bigger than you (or it ran into you), a couple items will become detached from your katamari and you'd be sent flying across the level.  Most levels have you starting out small, in a living room or garden or some such smaller place, only by the end of the level to have you rolling up the neighborhood, taking out people and traffic lights.  There is a sincere cathartic pleasure coming back to the start of a level and being able to roll up its surround gates or fences that gave you trouble earlier, or, in later levels, noticing the entire house you started in jutting from the surface of your katamari like a pimple.

Your general goal is to reach the set size by the allotted time.  The game is often very generous about its time restraints, allowing replayability in just how large you can get your katamari.  It does make the game a bit easy, however.  There are special stages, such as when you make particular constellations and they give you an objective like "roll up as many swans as possible" or "roll up the largest bear you can find".  These are much more arcadey, since they don't really seem to have a fail state at all.  They do, however, have a playful sense of humor about it.  For example, in the bear level, in order to get the biggest bear you can find you must roll up copious amounts of junk and reach the proper size.  The level, however, is filled to the brim with bears or bear-like objects, and the kooky King of All Cosmos isn't particularly picky when it comes to what he considers a bear.  Roll up a teddy bear?  That counts.  A billboard?  That counts.  The most ridiculous case I found was for the constellation Taurus, where you have to roll up the largest cow you can find.  Coming out the starting gate, I took a left and immediately picked up a carton of milk, which the King accepted as a job horribly done, but done none the less.

Katamari Damacy has been ported numerous times at this point, and the series has seen a fair share of sequels and spin offs.  Reroll, the most recent incarnation, is a solid repackaging of the original game, but it is a bit ridiculous for the price of $30.  Given the game is so short, it is also surprising the game didn't come packaged with We Love Katamari or Beautiful Katamari, the two major follow up games that are both over a decade old at this point.  The game itself isn't much changed, and only lasts 4 hours or so.  It's a unique, author-driven experience that's as ridiculous as it is fun, even if it is brief for its price.


8.5

[Game Review] Celeste

Note: this review contains spoilers.


I first played Celeste a few months ago when the hype for it was at its peak.  It was being praised for its inspiring story, hard-as-nails platforming, gorgeous pixel art, and effective soundtrack.  The game follows Madeline as she decides to climb Mount Celeste, which has been said to have supernatural powers that cause one to reflect on oneself.  Sure enough, it doesn't take long before a mirror version of Madeline appears and berates her with doubt, telling her she'll never make it to the top and insisting that Madeline needs her.  As the plot develops, you are challenged with tight platforming levels, each layering in a new level mechanic before moving on to the next, allowing scenes of doubt and perseverance until finally you reach the summit and Madeline learns to accept her anxious doppelganger as an integral part of her person.

How uninteresting does that sound?  I'm not trying to be an outright contrarian here, but I delayed playing this game for quite some time by how dissonant the game's praise and the game's log line sounded.  And to be sure, the game is surely worth almost all of the praise it has gotten  - except where the story is concerned.  Before getting to that rant, though, let's talk about what really works in this game. 

Firstly, the art design is magnificent.  Madeline's hair, despite being entirely undefined pixel art, has a smooth flowing animation to it.  The colors are vibrant, the game world varied, and overall picking a nice compromise between the classic pixel art and the more modern camera zooms, particle effects, etc.  Celeste is delightful to look at, and listen to.  The music is superb, to the point I've caught myself listening to it on the bus quite a lot.  It deftly pivots from a sense of melancholic urgency to melancholic ambience (just about the only thing about this game that is truly melancholic is the music).

Likewise, the gameplay is amazing.  The thing least exaggerated thing in the critical consensus is definitely the gameplay.  Controls are tight, platforming challenges are incredibly challenging, and there is enough side content to basically double your playtime.  For gamplay alone, this game is more than worth your time.  The mechanics are pretty basic: jump, climb, dash.  And that's all you get for the whole game.  At one point, you'll be able to do a double dash when the plot finally catches up to where you know it is going to go, but that isn't until the final leg of the game.  Levels play with these mechanics well by introducing platforms that only move when you dash, walls that turn into hazards after you've touched them, and blobs that can only be dashed through but often empty out into spike pits or other hazards.  The game introduces new mechanics and teases as much as they can out of them before moving on to the next.  Again, I'd like to stress that for gameplay alone, this game is worth your time and money.  Because what follows is my biggest problems with the praise this game has gotten more than the game itself.

Celeste is the most by-the-numbers indie title you could ever ask for.  It follows every trend to a 'T', and as such it is very boring conceptually, thematically, and in style.  The game is executed to near perfection on all fronts (except thematically), so it largely gets a pass, but on paper this game is so trite that it should have sunk into the wallpaper pattern of the indie game landscape.  The irony here, is that one of the things the game is getting so heavily praised for is the thing it plays into cliche the most: the story.  Mental health and overcoming adversity (especially when that adversity is you) is a great theme to develop a game on, but this game does absolutely nothing knew with it.  The game is incredibly twee throughout, completely devoid of much self awareness or reflection.  Its sincerity would be fine if it had any place to go with it, but the most complex it gets is by creating a plainly obvious comparison between overcoming the challenges of a difficult game and overcoming the issues with your doubts, fears, and feelings of inferiority.  The game doesn't even develop this much outside of obviously pointing it out, saying things like "You can do it!" after Madeline says she can't after defeating the previous level.  I don't want to be misunderstood here:  the themes themselves are good, but when they are plainly told to you the affect is pretty much lost.  Sure, I can see how you telling me that me beating this game is like how I should continue on to bettering my mental health state, but you've given me no freedom to explore the issue, to understand the particulars of how these two could interrelate.

The biggest sin the game makes is not allowing the player to interact on an intellectual level with the themes.  Instead, the themes act as wallpaper to an otherwise excellent game.  Silent Hill 2, which I recently reviewed, allowed for this intellectual participation and it's over a decade old.  Even Silent Hill 3, which was a mess of a game, did as well.  I think the effort put into this game is spectacular, and the gameplay itself the best 2D platformer I've played since Super Meat Boy (and it may even be better than that), but thematically it is as shallow as those inspirational quotes given on twitter.  Its great for a quick pick-me-up, but in an hour or so you'll forget its affect and be back in whatever state you were before.  The game has told you "you can do it!" without giving you the tools to really look at "how".



8.5