[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