[Game Review] Home

Home had been a game I wanted to play for nearly 7 years.  The idea of a 2D horror game that reads your actions as you play it in order to determine its ending was exciting to early-20s me.  If the game had been released today, my reaction would be far more skeptical of what it means by "read my actions" for an ending.  Not that games hadn't done it before, but more often than not the endings were determined by difficult to decipher criteria, such as in the Silent Hill games, and I had no reason to expect otherwise here.  Multiple endings aren't something I find nearly as attractive nowadays as they aren't usually as interesting as an intentional story with an intended ending.  Home, to modern me, sounds like a bad trick, the way a lot of randomly generated levels often feel now: toothless and without reason.  And I'm not wrong, exactly, but I was being optimistic.

Home is a side scrolling horror game that is most simply described as "Silent Hill in 2D, but only the exploratory parts with no enemies", which is to say its primary gameplay loop has you checking every door in your vicinity, exploring each room, and looking for keys (sorry, no riddles here).  The "horror" verbiage then comes from spooky sound effects and dead bodies, while you just walk knowing there isn't anything out there to get you.  Or, at least, the game says they are dead bodies.  The pixelated style doesn't do the horror aspect any favors, particularly.  It's not that pixel art can't be used for horror, its that it doesn't particularly feel effective in how it's done here.  Everything looks like a cartoon, and at worst like a pile of squares, as many of the "corpses" are.  The way the game translates what is or is not a corpse is by narration.  The narrator is you and, unfortunately, isn't giving you much autonomy.  When something eerie is inspected, the narrator is quick to mention how scared he is, or how heavy X weapon feels in his hand when he finds it, because the game has no way of conveying this fear with its art style.  As to why you have weapons in a game with no combat, well, they are murder weapons, you see.  Turns out that a large number of people around town have been murdered, something you will discover on your long journey home in the dead of night.  You start by waking up in an unknown house with no memory of how you got there, and a dead body in one of the rooms.  Your goal is to make your way back home so you can get back to your wife, Rachel.  As you explore, you are repeatedly given evidence that a serial killer is about, and it seems the killer has been killing often and recently.  Not only this, but it seems that Rachel was one of his targets, and your journey home becomes desperate as you begin to wonder if you're too late to save her.  At times it feels as though you may be hot on the heels of the killer, as you find abandoned weapons, notebooks of crossed out names, and dead bodies on your route home through the sewers, factory, abandoned train station, etc.  Finding objects and clues along the way helps determine the ending you get, and, most notably, who the killer is.

And here is where the problem lies, largely.  Spoilers ahead, but you should really be aware that in a game where the killer is determined at the end, any spoiler here is really rather moot.  I'll avoid spoiling particular details of any ending, though, especially when interesting.

As surprisingly fun as exploring various 2D environments and locked doors is, the ending the game wants you to choose feels as though it is staring you in the face.  Never mind the fact that quite a bit of time has apparently passed since these murders have happened, and never mind the fact that no one has discovered the bodies all around town, or the absolutely copious amount of evidence in literally every nook and cranny.  (As a side annoyance: how did your laptop battery get to nearly dead since last you'd been home, but it had been long enough for your credit cards to be canceled from lack of payment?)  The game reeks of half-baked.  And to emphasize this, keen readers may have noticed a player verb I used earlier: you choose the ending you want.  Granted, there are some caveats.  For example, you would had to have found certain items, or inspected certain areas or bodies in order to have options for your ending, but it doesn't change the fact that instead of earning endings, you are implied to express yourself through which ending you choose.  The problem with this is in how it contradicts the basic principles of storytelling.  Laying out events in a sequence is meant to imply an ending.  For an ending choice to matter, the events and plot elements leading up to this point should have some significant thematic interpretations so your ending feels like it is expressing your interpretation, but instead the game gives you boiler plate murder elements (often with contradictory evidence and an inconsistent sense of time) where all endings feel pretty valid.  My interpretation feels vapid because the game remains as relatively vague as possible so as to be open to multiple endings.  Everything in this game has already happened, which means I have no choice in how I affect the story.  Instead, my "choices" that traditionally earn you endings are in how thorough I am at exploring.  Given the entire gameplay loop is exploration, it's basically a test for how long I played the game.  I get more endings the more I explored, and the more I explored the more vague the story feels because too many options start to open up in favor of more choices in endings.  It feels loose, and subsequently devalues any interpretation I could have as to what transpired. 

Which is a shame, because there is a kernel of an alright story here.  The story points heavily at two characters, and depending on your interpretation, there is an interesting conflict between these two potential killers.  Information is doled out at a good pace with drips here and there with a lot of thoughtful travel as you attempt to piece it all together.  Likewise, atmosphere usually works even with the cartoonish art style.  Exploration was something I resented in the opening moments while I was getting my bearings and wondering why I was supposed to care about all the spooky sounds randomly firing off around me, but it became something that almost saved it for me.  I started to get rather excited as to how all of this was going to be interpreted at the end, and excited to see what was going to be in the next room or building, even as I sort of dreaded the multiple endings thing since all of my choices throughout were whether I was going to pick an item up (and why wouldn't I pick up everything since the game's endings are determined by how many you interact with).  And there are interesting endings to this game, which is even more frustrating because if it had been given to me it would have been interesting.  If the endings hadn't literally asked me which I wanted, this game would have had a slightly above mediocre rating for its brevity and basic level of fun.  As is, there's not much to recommend here.  



4.0

[Game Review] A Short Hike

On the surface, A Short Hike is the same as a lot of indie games made by millennials attempting to undermine the cacophony of twitch shooters and ultraviolent, ultra-male power fantasies in the gaming world.  It follows a 20-something girl who is represented as an animal, who must go out in the woods, talk to people enjoying their day, and just learn to slow down man.  I pretty much just described Night in the Woods and Celeste, and in a lot of ways that's very much what A Short Hike is.  Where as Night in the Woods draped the indie twee dressing on cinematic platformers, and Celeste on hard-as-nails platformers (both really good in their own right), A Short Hike attempts to hybrid the exploration of Breath of the Wild with the stay-awhile, chores-turned-fun structure of Animal Crossing.  Here, we play as Claire, who needs to make a phone call while out on an island with her park ranger Aunt, who informs her the only place with service is on top of Hawk Peak, a rather difficult climb infamous for being a tourist attraction that rarely anyone succeeds in climbing.  To climb requires golden feathers, a collectible that acts like Breath of the Wild's stamina meter.  Everything is climbable on this little island, so long as you have the feathers to make it.  When you get closer to the peak, things get tougher as the cold temperatures stop your feathers from regenerating until you huddle next to a fire or take a dip in some hot springs.  But first, you need to get those feathers.

Getting feathers is the real purpose of the game, and is where the twee disposition that I'm so sick of  doesn't so much melt away as become relevant.  (Full disclosure: I'm getting sick of that bleak, decrepit tone to all the horror games I've been playing lately as well, lest I get called out as biased).  Rather than just lecturing me to slow down and drop the phone for a second, the game actually makes me slow down and enjoy my time.  I sincerely don't like being lectured about the greatness and beauty in nature, mostly because I grew up in a small town in tornado alley and I am firmly acquainted with why nature is so awesome.  A reminder is very nice (most RPGs do this with their vast forests and rolling hills), but as the thematic pin to a work it comes off as being...well, at best not for me, at worst condescending.  I don't think there is much of anyone out there in the modern world who hasn't had somebody lecture them on how great it is to hike X trail, or camp in X national park.  Most of what these games end up doing is telling me why this stuff is so great while not actually providing an experience that truly captures it.  A Short Hike slows you down, makes you explore, allows you to revel in its fun climbing and gliding mechanics, giving you money and feathers to collect, people to help, and conversations that make the place feel alive with people just enjoying The Now.  And, despite your best efforts, you come to love just being here too.  When I started A Short Hike, I was in sort of a rush.  My day had a lot of stuff to get done - get substantially farther in Silent Hill 4, go to the grocery store, clean my apartment, edit my Paratopic write up I didn't really like - and it took all of 15 minutes in the game to feel all of that mostly melt away.  The game's short run time (about 1 1/2 hours) helped, because I knew it wouldn't take me all that long to get through.  But I found myself wondering what was around the island, slowly sketching a map in my head as to where different things were, and trying to help as many people as I could.  Eventually, the world came calling, and I had to cut my time a bit short, but even then I wasn't disappointed.  Claire's phone call turned out to important after all, and though it wasn't revelatory, it was a nice moment nonetheless.

A Short Hike doesn't totally outclass its twee disposition, however.  There are still moments, such as where Claire learns how to fish and struggles with the patience for it, where the game seems to give in to cliche.  Claire is basically ignorant to most things outdoors, and while that isn't unrealistic, it isn't an interesting character to play as.  As relatable as this character may be to some, she feels incredibly basic in a way that threatens to take Night in the Woods May's agency as a well developed character and reduce her to an early incarnation of a soon-to-be-tired archetype.  Likewise, some of the different little Animal Crossing type characters you run in to have that lackadaisical tone that doesn't engage you in what they are saying.  A lot of "umm.."s and single-word text boxes making you smash the X button hoping to get to the point of all this.  Granted, this can be seen as a pro by engaging you with a system that requires patience, but if the game is meant to make me enjoy slowing down, it might want to approach it from an angle that doesn't sound so samey to other games like Night in the Woods which has a much better story and characters to fill out the torrent of "umm.."s and ellipses and make them feel like actual character traits.  It's small stuff to complain about, especially when what is good about this game is so sweet natured and relaxing.  A Short Hike is going to blow nobody's mind, but it's a fun, diverting experience worth the time, and then some.  Maybe next weekend I'll give it a completionist's run, and fill out another 1 1/2 hours out in the mountains.  Until then, at least I got a brief vacation from it all.



8.0

[Game Review] Paratopic

There's no easy way to start a review on Paratopic, so lets just get into this: this game is weird, this game is cheap, this game is short, and you should absolutely play it.  Paratopic follows 3 characters in a Half-Life styled, nearly dystopian world, although you more than likely won't even realize you play as 3 characters until you are deep within the game.  The style isn't the only Half-Life aspect to this game: you are rooted strictly in first person the entire time, with a similar FOV and feel to Half-Life, although I'm not sure I could explicitly explain why.  The game follows an unnamed killer, a smuggler, and a hiker in three different threads that intertwine, all revolving around a destroyed electrical facility, possible aliens, and VHS tapes that have become an addictive drug to much of the populace.  The reason you might not know who you are playing as for most of the game is because of the game's smart use of cuts, a very filmic tool that cuts between scenes and characters in a quick, disorienting way.  Basically, it's like a level transition without so much as a black screen.  One second you will be receiving instructions as to what your mission is while staring out the window of a diner, and the next will be a cut to a diner booth where you are getting instructions on a job smuggling tapes across the boarder.  This cut, in particular, both contains a hint that you are playing as multiple characters (you can see someone in the booth you will cut to from the window) and a reason for you to think you aren't (you are both in the same diner, and at the same time, so it could be misconstrued as a time jump).  That said, if you are a keen player, you may notice the soundtrack changes when your character changes most of the time.  The game is capital "W" Weird, but it's also a game that respects your intelligence, dripping informative puzzle pieces without explicitly telling you too much.  As to why all this is happening, you'll have to judge for yourself as the game is scant on answers, but I can give you my theories.

Spoilers from here on out.  I highly recommend you play the game before reading further.

You start the game at the border, having been incarcerated by border control for smuggling tapes.  This conversation with the border control agent does not go well, before cutting to a diner, where you are now the assassin, getting your orders to kill a distributor of tapes.  You don't know who you work for, but they sound incredibly scummy if this conversation is anything to go by.  You may even be addicted to the tapes, since the language here sounds like you are strung out and it's your dealer using your need for his own gain, but I may be misreading this here (even after two playthroughs, there is quite a few questions that I can't answer).  At another booth nearby is someone working for the tape distributors who own this diner, and they task you with smuggling tapes across the border.  This takes place before the first scene, which means you are eventually caught.  The game cuts to your apartment as the smuggler, and you check on the suitcase full of tapes given to you to smuggle.  Your neighbor tries to convince you to give her a tape, because she is jonesing for another after the last you gave her.  If you give one to her, you can watch her watching it, which ends in her head ripping open.  There is a cut, and you are driving the tapes down the road to the boarder, until cutting again to a convenience store where you can have a conversation about the electrical company whose plant blew up 14 years earlier, and the clerk's opinion that aliens are behind it.  Up to this point, there have been several instances where aliens can actually be seen walking around.  You may think that this was an impressionist thing, where they put humanoid, undetailed models so as not to distract you, or to imply your character is unconcerned with them.  After the next cut, you are a hiker walking through the woods taking pictures of birds and making your way between the old electrical power plant and a place affectionately called the concrete mansion.  You pass a no trespassing sign and are gutted by an alien.

The three plots go in very different directions.  Linearly, the first event is the hiker and her death.  The assassin, then, finds her out in the woods and takes her camera (the one part of this story I cannot figure out is why the assassin is out in the woods in the first place).  Afterwards, the assassin is at the diner where and while the smuggler is getting their job.  The assassin then loads her gun and kicks down the back door and shoots the man back there.  She then watches several of the tapes lying all over the place, and that's the last we hear of her (I'd imagine she died).  As the smuggler, you drive down to the boarder and you interact with the convenience store clerk learning backstory to this world. Finally, you are caught at the boarder and the boarder agent is subsequently killed after watching the tapes, and we linger on a final shot from the perspective of the dead hiker's camera in the woods, while a surveillance camera turns to film her dead body.

So here is my theory.  The tapes are a commentary on media consumption, where everyone is addicted to media in a world where media is scarce and dangerous, and thus a commodity of the black market.  They are a danger to the populace because they are lethal when over exposed to them.  These systems of dystopia started with the destruction of the electrical plant, which is implied to have happened because they where attempting to contact aliens, and where then invaded.  The tapes themselves, a theory I have due to that final shot of the game, are the CCTV feeds of the aliens at the electrical plant.  These aliens aren't acknowledged throughout (two sit at the bar in the diner), except by the clerk who plainly believes in them (although does not, ironically, notice the man he is pointing out is indeed an alien).  Even your character, when confronted about a man filling up her car, does not seem to know what the clerk is talking about when the odd figure is pointed out, barely illuminated by the gas station fluorescents.  The aliens seem to have a purpose, perhaps in either observance or outright hostility and subjugation, but the game never really takes more than a glance in that direction.

The themes are odd, and potentially impenetrable to a satisfying degree.  The game doesn't make a concise point on media, on speculation about the absurd and horrific, or on potential gender themes which felt flirted with on one or two occasions.  What it does is create a puzzle, a series of questions with a few gears and belts, but not quite the schematic of how it all goes together.  It's an experiment of style, but style for a thematic purpose.  It's a David Lynch game, essentially, with a distinct '98 vibe that wants to confound you and keep you thinking.  And it is incredibly successful.

Be seeing you.    



9.0 

[Game Review] Pony Island

After Undertale sort of blew up the indie gaming world with a meta game wishing to challenge your preconceived notion of player-game relationships, a slew of imitators came out.  Most notably for me was Doki Doki Literature Club, an alright free game on Steam that intentionally combated the player's desire for romance visual novels, and their unhealthy implication.  It could feel a bit lecture-y and edgy at times, and it was fast and loose about remaining tactful when talking about self harm and suicide, but the messaging itself was interesting and directed at the core audience most likely to be affected by it.  Pony Island does something similar with small-scale arcade-y indie games.  Indie games have been swamping Steam for a decade now, and the Humble Indie Bundle and anything else from Humble has most likely filled your library with more run-of-the-mill indie games than you could ever hope to play (and a lot of hidden gems, to be fair).  BIT.TRIP RUNNER is a cool game and all, but do I need three sequels and a dozen imitators?  Pony Island generally plays exactly like BIT.TRIP RUNNER, where you play as the titular pony and must jump over fences.  After a few tries of this, you will more than likely attempt to back out, at which point the game itself - implied to be the game developer - will ask if the game is too easy for you.  He will then make it impossibly difficult to beat.  In order to bypass this, you will have to go into the options menu and hack the game to allow you to shoot lasers in order to beat the "impossible" level.  The developer isn't particularly happy about this.

And so starts your journey into Pony Island, where you will bounce back and forth from playing a runner to rummaging through menus, fake files in a fake operating system, and hacking through a puzzle mini game.  The game cabinet for Pony Island, it turns out, was created by Satan, and he is trying to convince you to offer up your soul in order to play better versions of the game.  Luckily for you, there is another lost soul (called LostSoul, roughly - at least that's how I'm going to refer to them) who wants you to take down the game and free yourself by finding and deleting the three core files of the game.  Hacking the game, on the occasions you do it, amounts to you placing nodes along a series of code looking paths in order to get a digital key to its lock.  You get nodes like moving a key left or right, down, portals that will jump the key to another portal in order to create a loop, and a splitter that creates two keys.  The hacking mini game got harder than I was expecting out of a 2 1/2 hour game, but never so challenging as to be deep mechanically.  That said, I'm a sucker for games that require you to rummage through fake files in game and mess around, so the hacking mini game, fun as it was on its own, felt more than serviceable as a mechanic to act as analogue to what I was supposed to be doing.

The plot feels like a framework for themes and gameplay to play out, more than anything interesting itself.  Undermine Satan and free your soul are your only objectives, and everything vaguely serves that purpose, although the real money seems to be in making interesting, subversive scenes.  Having Satan mock you for wanting a harder game reads as vaguely commenting on gamer attitudes toward modern gaming, something further reinforced as the game reboots halfway through to dump you into an over tutorialized, polished version of Pony Island to play as you watch it slowly corrupt again (smartly, this sarcastic tone helps cover up the fact that it is actually teaching a new hacking mechanic that becomes necessary later, which is how to use the splitter).  There are other minor commentaries on the player-developer relationship as well, such as when you are forced to XP grind in order to continue, and the game gives you laughably small XP points while simultaneously requiring a wealth of them.  To continue, you hack the game in order to rack up enough XP to level up and continue with the game.  Little Inferno attempted to comment on games wasting your time, but followed up by sort of wasting your time.  Pony Island only spends enough time to make its point before moving on, subverting the thing it is being satirical of.  There was one particularly inspired subversive moment while fighting the final of the three core file bosses that absolutely had me, but I won't spoil it here.

Pony Island doesn't quite escape its niche, however, and loses some momentum as it goes despite its short length.  It's smart, but not as smart as it thinks, coming up with clever ideas without really doing much with them aside from a sly wink.  It is, however, able to play around with the player and with information drip the way walking simulators often do, while at the same time being, well, something you actively play.  I had fun for most of its length, even if it didn't quite wow me, nor did it really break new ground.  Coming out a year after the release of Undertale might make it the second in an indie game genre that might not have a genre name yet (Undertale being a motherlike notwithstanding, since it seems to have created a school of thought only vaguely connected to the odd-ball self awareness the Mother games employ).  As such, a lot of Pony Island's critical acclaim on Steam probably has to do with the genre not being nearly as diluted at time of release as it feels now.  I'm not sure how well I am at displacing myself from having seen a lot of this before, but regardless, I liked the game and think it's a worthwhile play.



7.0    

[Game Review] September 1999

This review contains spoilers - as much as you can call it that.


98Demake's September 1999 blurs the line between game and tech demo, mood and meaning.  I can't tell if I think it's brilliant or just an interesting idea with potential.  The game lasts exactly 5 minutes and 30 seconds, and consists solely of a small, shabby bedroom and a small, shabby hallway.  It's a pocket of horror meant to be a flash of something horrific, a lead for your brain to naturally take the game's events and run with it looking for meaning or context.  But there really isn't any, and I couldn't tell you if that's a good thing or not.  At the absolute least, it was interesting and, P.T. influence notwithstanding, rather original.

The game's true star is its execution.  The game feels as though you are a camera man, filming with a commercial camcorder from the 90s, with VHS horizontal distortions, color misalignment, and an iconic date stamped in the lower third.  You film what you see, and as a player, you want to see everything.  This is rather clever, using your nature as a projection of character.  You look at details - empty alcohol containers strewn about, the bible and crosses populating the hallway, the boarded up windows, the odd pictures of budgerigar, the locked doors - and find yourself as documentarian without even thinking about it.  It feels like awful lost footage, forbidden stuff that should be locked away in some drawer at the police station.  On a timer, every once in awhile the "tape" will cut out to a black screen, and then cut back in a day or so later, the environment changed.  More alcohol bottles lie on the floor, and the lamp next to the bed is going out.  There are footsteps somewhere else in the house, but you have no way of inspecting them.  Again, the game puts you in a character without you realizing, because as players we realize we can't go anywhere quickly, but as a character - who would be so disinterested in odd movement in the building they were in?  The game shifts time again, a day or so later, and the lights are all out.  The window next to the front door is boarded up now whereas it was the only window that wasn't before.  You can see cop lights peaking through the boards, and you can hear them knocking on the door, radios squawking.  You don't hang around the hallway long though since there is nothing to see.  You go back to the bedroom, also dark, and lying on the bed is a body, wrapped in a plastic blue tarp.  The body is wheezing, like the tarp is suffocating them.  The tape shifts again, a day or so later.  The lights are on in the hallway, but the floor is covered in blood.  At the opposite end of the hall from the bedroom, a man can be heard weeping, banging against the other side of a locked door.  There is blood leaking from the other side.  There is blood everywhere.  You go to the bedroom, and find a clear plastic tarp laid out across the room's floor and walls.  Underneath the tarp, leaning against the wall is the mattress, stained heavily with blood.  On the ground are body parts, wrapped in plastic bags.  The tape shifts again, this time to the end of September, and you no longer have control of the camera.  It lays on the ground in the hallway, staring out of focus at some floor trim.  You hear the sound of a chainsaw being revved up, and then cutting.  And the game ends.

Placing you as snuff filmmaker in such a natural way is inspired, but I worry whether the game's ideas may outweigh the game's content.  It feels as though it was made as a proof of concept for 98Demake's experimentation with old video aesthetic more than it does anything cohesive, but even if that was his intention, my attention is on the details.  There is something odd at the core of this game, a weird displacement from self and a focus on fragmented horror to give our brains something to run away with, even though with such paltry servings we really don't have far to go.  The game is free on Steam, and as long as a song, so I can't really give it too much flak.  It's a horror oddity worth checking out, and I'm excited to see more from 98Demake, even if he only ever releases oddware like this. 



 6.0

[Game Review] OK/NORMAL

Youtuber 98Demake has seen quite a bit of success making animated shorts that reimagine modern games as PSX classics.  I've been a fan of his for some time, so when I found out he had made a few games also utilizing the PSX aesthetic, I didn't hesitate to pick a couple of them up.  I did hesitate, however, in getting around to playing any of them, because for a long time I couldn't really tell what I was in for by pictures and description alone.  OK/NORMAL, it turns out, is a hallucinatory PSX styled game that lasts 45 minutes.  The basic premise, if you can call it that, is that you are a marble statue walking around platforms of checkerboard patterns.  It invokes vaporwave style without any of its tone.  For the most part, you are tasked with collecting food and pills, then pills and syringes, then keys, and then the game decides to fuck off and do what it wants for the final 15 minutes or so.  What you do in the game is pretty uninteresting, being an impression of PSX platformers until it gives way to a couple mazes at the end.  The game seems more interested in being a technical and stylistic experiment, although there does seem to be some thematic throughline.  The PSX had a few notorious graphical issues that have since become rather iconic.  Anti aliasing was nonexistent, giving polygons a jagged look to them, and the way the PSX rendered the polygon's vectors was inconsistent, leading to the ground and walls becoming "wavy" as you moved.  These little graphical ripples are used to great effect in OK/NORMAL, stretching and warping to disorient your movement or sense of space.  Your checkerboard platforms are falnked by floating fetuses, glaring skulls, and abstract imagery, draped in low resolution psychedelic vomit (not necessarily a criticism, as much as a feeling).  As you progress through the game, the visual style becomes more and more antagonistic, making it more and more difficult to tell what is going on let alone complete your goal of  "find the end of the level".  One of the final levels in particular, a red, warping labyrinth with slow moving walls with little to no indication as to where to go, was particularly patience testing. 

If I were to stretch a bit, I could read this game's themes as an expression of depression, where you collect food and drugs to overeat and get high in order to deal with what is apparently some sort of severe mental instability.  You are followed by a little rain cloud companion, who teaches you how to play, tells you your goal, and occasionally doubts your competency.  Not particularly subtle.  Each level requires you to collect more and more food/drugs, which is a traditional difficulty curve in theory, but in execution feels like a commentary.  At some point, the number of collectibles needed to end the level becomes unreasonably large, even growing as you progress the level until it spits out an error message and the level ends.  There is certainly a theme of substance abuse, of self destruction, and of looming dread or rag dolling into disorientation at play here.  But considering this game as being overtly thematic is virtually pornographic, because the only value of thematically analyzing such a game is in fetishizing how much meaning I can make out of plainly abstract material.  There is intention in there, but even as an impressionist look it feels too abstract to mean anything substantial.  OK/NORMAL is outsider art, through-and-through, meant as a shotgun blast of barely held together experimentation for effect but not purpose, and it largely succeeds at this.

In my summation of Little Inferno I said I had fun with the game, but disliked its thematic inconsistencies and shallowness.  For OK/NORMAL, I feel almost the opposite.  Themes don't matter here in a valuable way, and the game isn't anything close to what I would describe as "fun", but its brief run time helps it to be appreciated as the technical and stylistic experiment it is.  Much like Little Inferno, I can't outright recommend OK/NORMAL without some caveats.  Picking the game up on sale is more than likely just shy of free, and if you are into outsider art or short games like I am, then it is an interesting diversion, albeit one with little else outside of its oddity appeal.  As excited as I am to try out 98Demake's other game, September 1999, this game has me wondering if it is even much of a game at all.  OK/NORMAL feels like an idea of how to say something, but not what to say.  It's like an inflection without the words.



5.5

[Game Review] Sagebrush

Lately I've been having a lot of fun playing shorter games.  While the longer game format has come to dominate the gaming sphere, stories have come to encapsulate entire towns, cities or continents and their citizens, and gameplay has become about developing new mechanics as they are unlocked, either behind story milestones or a leveling system.  They are multi-day or even multi-week investments, and when they are good they are great, but the magic of smaller games has usually been in sharply focusing on one thing that would become tired if lingered on too long.  Stories Untold, despite my criticism of that game's plot, was sharply focused on a handful of mechanical ideas and the ways in which they can be stretched narratively.  Little Inferno, likewise, emulated a long form time sink game in a relatively short amount of time, encapsulating its mechanics and making fun of them.  It's in shorter games where passion projects can come out, where you can experiment a little and not worry too much at scaling it to a whole game, because things will be over in only a couple of hours.  Low time investment means an easier time playing into the payer's patience.  One such genre that has come out of this short game renaissance in the indie gaming world is the much maligned walking simulator, a genre I've defended staunchly before, but must admit feeling my enthusiasm waning with each subsequent game I play.  There is only so much you can do in a game where walking and inspecting are the mechanics.  As much as I love storytelling through exploration, it certainly has its limits as the focal point of a game.  Sagebrush takes a similar sense of exploration and the "figuring out what happened" approach that Gone Home had, but wraps it in a sense of haunting tension and retro style that the original Silent Hill had, and it is in this tension, this immense pressure from the sense of place that the game does something interesting with the genre.

Sagebrush is named after Black Sagebrush, a compound somewhere in a Texas-like setting where a cult lived and operated.  In the game, we are years (a decade? it's hard to tell exactly when this game takes place) after the mass suicide on the compound.  Things start with us breaking into the compound at dusk of all times, and venturing around the abandoned buildings that made up this cult's home.  The gameplay loop is really just a key quest, where finding one key leads you to another location on the compound, where you can then find another key.  There are some ways to sequence break the game, but it isn't valuable to do so.  Some of these keys are somewhat out of the way, and if you were to miss one, my biggest criticism is in that trying to find out where in this vague path the game has laid out for you you must have taken a misstep could be patience testing.  This game screeches to a halt when you have to spend too much time figuring out where it wants you to go next.  Luckily, the game does a relatively good job at pointing out when you should be looking for a key.  While looking around the various buildings, you'll read notes, letters, and journals left behind by the inhabitants, and piece together the experience of living here as a member.  The cult itself isn't particularly interesting, being a hodgepodge of different real-life cults and thus throwing nothing particularly original your way in its internal machinations.  It's the people's lives, the way they react and are reinforce by the cult's cultural movement underneath their spirited leader James Israel, a.k.a. Father, even when he starts to rapidly change the rules, that takes center stage.  Minor stories start to make themselves known, stories of a perceived 'rat' in the cult giving information to the outside that is breathing down the Father's neck and making him act less and less consistently, of people with doubts, and others that believe his doctrine to violent ends.  It feels like an excavation, and the sense of place is thick.

Exploring empty buildings is always creepy, but rarely has it been done with so much tension.  I couldn't explain it, but there was something much more unnerving about Sagebrush than most any other horror game I've ever played, and I wouldn't strictly categorize Sagebrush as a horror game.  I found it hard to sleep afterwards.  Exploring a place where people lived and, essentially, tortured themselves for a fanatical leader is unnerving in and of itself, but knowing from the outset that the chapel, looming over the compound from its hilltop perch to the east, despite looking so docile, was also their grave, creates a thick layer of foreboding.  You know already where this game is going to end, and as you go on through the 2 hours that it takes to beat this game, you begin to wonder if you're quite ready to confront that horror.  This displacement of time that the compound's emptiness permeates is only compounded by the graphical style.  Stylistically, the game uses a PSX approach to anti aliasing and polygonal count, which is to say "none" and "low".  The only thing that feels particularly modern is the lighting, which is rather modern standard technically, but perhaps a bit annoying in execution. As eerie as the sun setting is as the course of the game plays out, walking around a compound at night with a measly flashlight with PSX graphics can be frustrating.  It was dark when I finally got around to the trailer park in the lower left corner of the compound, and trying to find my way around looking for the trailers that belonged to the significant members of the cult was more difficult than it probably ever needed to be.  The sun doesn't set in a gradient over time, but in steps.  These steps are tied to the tapes strewn about the compound.

The tapes are where the narrative starts to take shape.  Throughout the game, you will stumble across tapes that have a woman explaining to someone - by the sounds of it, FBI - about why she joined the cult, and what life was like there, and this is where the varying story threads of the different people start to swim into view.  If this game sounds interesting to you so far, the game is a measly $7 when not on sale, so do yourself a favor and check it out.  Consider this your spoiler warning.

Spoilers from here on out.

From the get go, you know someone escaped the mass suicide that ended the cult, and you know that someone is a woman, but you aren't sure exactly who it is.  Was it Viola, the school teacher? Lillian, the quiet girl?  Juliet, 11 years old, the young daughter of Viola who was considered a "troublemaker" at the school and required more aggressive indoctrination?  Or could it be Anne, the Father's wife, who slept on a cot in the cupboard of their house, cuckolded by her husband?  As you sift through the notes and journals left behind by the inhabitants, and as the tapes give a sense of framing, you start to learn about what has been happening here.  The Father started this cult under the presumption he was a modern prophet for Christ, that an angel named Sarial came down from on high and told him the new gospel, and that the end times where upon them.  The congregation is made up of people with varying reasons for joining.  Viola wished to escape her abusive husband, and Leonard, an ex-military man with violent tendencies, saw the other Christian sects as full of charlatans, hypocrites, and idol worshipers.  People like Lillian simply wanted a place to belong.  Others like Peyton, Andrew, and Henry are given little background going in, but get some significance in the plot a little later.

In the upper right corner of the compound, between the farm and the old abandoned mines, is a locked barn, flies buzzing around it, and a pool of blood that has escaped from underneath the door.  The barn is called the Cleansing Room, and you are led to believe it was a relatively late addition to the Father's doctrine.  The Father talks about pain in this life buying forgiveness in the next life, and eventually takes this quite literally.  The barn becomes a veritable torture room where you were cut, whipped, or maimed depending on your sins of that week.  When you finally get the keys to the Cleansing Room, you find a rack of knives, saws, and whips in the back.  There are plastic tarps laid out with blood covered alters, like impromptu surgery tables.  Apparently the congregation was very accepting of these new practices.  More controversially, the Father chose a few days out of the week to re-purpose the barn for his newly conceived "Alternate Cleansing".  This is where some people begin to take some notice.  It is a secret cleansing that only the women are allowed to know about, and which amounts to the women having sex with the Father.  A tape is left in his love den where he tells the women "I am the Lord's flag bearer.  Do you not love the Lord more than your husbands?"  What really creeps me out about this is in how the Father has multiple spots for this "Alternate Cleansing" - his locked bedroom on the second floor of his house, a room bathed in red light with a camera and large bed next to his wife's "bedroom" cupboard on the first floor - yet the cleansing room is implied to have been used, with the blood and torture devices.  In the Father's bedroom safe you can find a note written by him with plans for a bunker type building filled with food and ammunition and a king sized bed.  Upping the ante, or simply reading the winds and taking precaution?  Sometime close to when the Father realized there may be a mole in their flock, he prays for what to do with little 11 year old Juliet, who has been causing a problem.  He says he was going to wait until she came of age to put her to Alternate Cleansing, but has read of people engaging in religious sex with girls as young as 3.  So he prays, and he gets the answer he sickeningly wants.

When the mole problem comes to the Father's attention, he sends Viola to user her "femininity" to figure out who it is.  He suspects either Leonard, Andrew, or Peyton.  Viola starts sending them flirty messages, and it is implied at the very least she has slept with Leonard.  But trying to oust the deceiver becomes a balancing act as Viola starts to worry about Lillian and her increasingly anti-social behavior, and with the fact she is sure she is pregnant and doesn't know who the father is.  It is telling that her terror here is unclear as being heavier with the idea it is one of the three possible deceivers, or the Father himself.  She questions what the Father will do when he finds out, and whether what she has done is a sin that is punishable.  The lack of clarity the Father's doctrine seems to have finally reared its head.  A lot of this information about the individual people comes from their trailers, where they keep their journals and letters, and when you finally find your way into Peyton's trailer, you learn that he is a Fed.  He's been keeping tabs on everyone in the compound and wiring them out, learning of their past indiscretions or crimes - especially the Father - and believes the Father has an amphetamine problem (a box with white powder and a glass tube in the Father's bedroom validates his suspicions).  Of all the people in the compound, he finds one person he seems a viable dissenter: Lillian.  So he reaches out to her.  Lillian is alarmed at first, but as she reads the "Are you in a cult?" pamphlet Peyton gave her, she begins to have second thoughts.  She tests the waters with Peyton, but before any action can be taken, Leonard and Henry find out about Peyton.  They break into his house and bash his head in with a shovel, killing him.  Leonard, despite his violent tendencies, is shaken by what he is done, confused whether or not it was a great sin or necessary, and thus forgiven.

After Peyton's murder, Lillian forgets about it.  She continues with the cult and thinks of it as an unsettling diversion from her faith.  But the Father is acting strange, jumpy, scared.  He tells them the time is nigh.  He gathers everyone up in the church and gives them quaaludes.  The father starts a fire in the church, and the congregation helps it spread.  They each lie in their own patch of fire and die as the fire engulfs all.  Except two.  Lillian has a fight or flight response, and realizes she doesn't want to die.  She bolts into the back of the church, where the Father has his secret bunker full of guns, and locks him out.  The Father, unable to get into his secret bunker, runs to the mines, and the game does something clever here.  I've been telling this story mostly in order, up until this paragraph.  You don't go to the church after the trailer park, but the mines.  Throughout the game, there has been this lingering fear that, by the end of this game, you are going to see a pile of corpses, but this fear doesn't make much sense.  The FBI most certainly has taken all of the corpses from the compound after the mass suicide.  Then you enter the mines, and you realize the inside is boarded up.  There is just enough space underneath the boards to believe a person could squeeze through.  You have to chop it down to get in.  You descend the mines, and the power goes out due to the generator running out of gas.  Stuck underground in the dark, you have to find a way to get the generator back on.  The mines are terrifying, because you aren't exactly sure what you are going to find.  There is a blood trail leading to the back of the mine, but you know the FBI hasn't been down here because the mine was boarded up.  There is a shooting range down here, and a hole in the very back, deep in the mine, with a cart in front of it.  You move the cart and are confronted by the corpse of the Father, lying in the fetal position with a gas can.  He looks to have been shot.  He is holding a letter, from Peyton to Lillian, showing he knew the raid was coming soon before the mass suicide.  Despite its plainly low poly appearance, the weight of that corpse's image is palpable because of the build up, and the nonchalance in which it is presented.  It's just a dead corpse, no fan fair, nothing.  Just a dead man.  A dead man who killed a dozen or so people.  It hits like a sledgehammer here in the dark, beneath the compound.  You take the gas can, turn the generator on, and leave for the church.

In the bunker at the back of the church, you get to the room with the bed, guns, and a TV.  Examining the bed gives you an important piece of information: "The sheets are still ruffled from the few nights you slept here."  You learn Lillian came down here and passed out from the quaaludes, and it becomes obvious that you are Lillian.  This reveal, despite being somewhat obvious, was incredibly executed.  Throughout the game, if you are anything like me, you are wondering who this nut is that wants to break in to the cult compound nearly at night.  Who is this person, so obsessed with this awful event, that they would break in and look around with so much effort as you do while you play the game, and in a final reveal that treats the reveal as matter of fact, as though you should have realized this by now, it is effective specifically because it is so seamless.  I had some assumptions, but the game respected me enough to treat it with the proper weight and affect.  It didn't tell me, it showed me, allowed me to realize it naturally, giving me that "a ha!" moment despite the fact it wasn't so shocking.

As you venture deeper into the bunker, things take a hallucinatory turn.  You take a series of stairs down darker and darker hallways, your flashlight flickering out to give way to the near void.  You stop at the first room, where a table, chair, and camera are illuminated, and you hear the voice of Lillian being interrogated by the FBI.  They ask her who started the fire, and she is confused.  Father started it, but everyone helped it spread.  They are try again: okay, but you are here. The implication is clear: they want someone to blame.  You go down another hallway, darker than the last, and into another room.  Apparently the feds couldn't blame you, because now you see an illuminated dinner table with several chairs, and you hear the voice of Lillian arguing with her father.  He asks if maybe it was something he did.  Was he a bad parent?  She tells him not to worry about it.  He gets angry: he just doesn't understand how he could raise someone who would go off and join a cult.  She tells him she has to go.  Another hallway, this one completely black.  You enter a room with what looks like a therapists' set up, and here Lillian tries to defend herself as the therapist asks if her guilt is because she feels she should have died with them, that she had let down her (cult) family.  She tells him she can't do this today, nearly breaking down.  Another hallway, this time the dim lights have turned a hot red, like those in Father's sex room.  The room at the end of the hallway illuminates a bar, and you hear a man talking to Lillian, apparently on a date, asking her how she spent her 20s.  She lies about having traveled abroad.  He mentions something about falling for some scam or another, and she lies saying "I can imagine" when he complains about how silly he was.  Another hallway, red lights brighter, and a door giving way to a room with the car from the beginning of the game, and the sound of the engine revving, drowning out a voicemail from Lillian's boyfriend asking where she is, and saying that he is scared.  The next hallway is vibrantly lit in red, crosses hanging from the walls, down deep until another door, and inside the bunker again, the bedroom, the TV, the guns.  There is nothing left to do now.  You turn around, and make your way out of the bunker and back into the church.  Now you see the church for what it really is: a burnt husk, opened up to the sky where a rising sun hangs low, only just now marking the start of a day.  Lillian calls her boyfriend as she looks out at the sun bathed compound, and tells him she has some things she needs to tell him.

One of my major criticisms of Stories Untold was in its lack of narrative depth, and in its reliance on shocking revelations that felt cliche and tryhard.  In a lot of ways, Sagebrush does something similar.  The cult isn't that interesting itself, so exploring how it works isn't nearly as illuminating as the game's mechanics would imply, and the story largely ties off as a reflective work, of a person who is coming to terms with what it means for them to have been in a cult, but not really illuminating much about why they were there in the first place outside of the cliche.  Likewise, the cult aspect isn't exactly unique narratively (although, I've rarely seen it done in such a way in a game), and can feel tryhard as a subject if improperly handled.  What sets Sagebrush apart from the issues of Stories Untold is in how it is executed, and in what it wants you to feel.  Stories Untold wants you to feel shock and surprise, and that feeling of eeriness that permeates all of the four stories, but it tells you its story, it doesn't show it or let you experience it yourself.  It plays coy with what is obvious, and steals from you your agency to discover the truth yourself.  Sagebrush wants you to seep into the earth here, the same earth Lillian called a home, despite the trauma, despite the zealotry, despite the horror and the violence and the abuse.  We don't get to understand why outside of the superficial - the "family" element, the need to belong, the confusing time that is a person's early 20s when they are still at a loss as to how they should define themselves - but what we get an acute understanding for is in the reverence of that experience, the good and the bad, the inescapable.  It doesn't just haunt her, it breathes through her, its corporal body dead yet in some spirit alive because she exists beyond it.  It's human, it seethes, and she wants to escape from it, but that sense of community is intense, and it had felt so necessary, but it was wrong?  It lead to the deaths of her friends.  It lead to her shame in the grand cultural eye that never really sees but we always feel seen by it.  She was a fool, but she felt like she was important.  It's hard to let go, and in the end we don't really know how she takes it.  Does she accept it?  Is she folding it into who she is?  Has she breathed her last breath of it, and is closing the book on it forever?  We don't really need to know.  What we needed was the confrontation of those questions, and the game executes them smartly, even if it can sometimes be coy with its character depth.  Sagebrush leaves an oddly chilling air as you exit the game, one that hangs onto you like a heavy humidity.  It haunts you.



8.5

[Game Review] Little Inferno

Little Inferno is a satire of exactly the kind of game it is.  What Little Inferno is is a game much like Alchemy, which I mentioned in a recent review, only with free-to-play mechanics.  You find yourself sitting in front of the Little Inferno Entertainment System, which is literally just a fireplace, and the game tasks you with buying all of the items from all of the catalogues and burning them.  Burning stuff gets you money and unlocks more and more stuff to burn.  The goal is technically to burn everything, but as a secondary, much more attractive goal, you are tasked with finding and making all of the combos from the combo list.  The combos are things like "Movie Night", which requires you to burn a TV and a cob of corn at the same time.  There are delivery times with each of the items in the catalogues, with longer times for more expensive stuff.  These delivery times can be upwards of 4 minutes real time, but can be sped up using stamps, which are earned at random or from completing combos.  As you play, you will periodically get letters from the Tomorrow Corporation about new catalogues and from your neighbor, a young girl equally obsessed with staring into the fire (the letters of which you can burn for free moola).  Weather reports will come in giving you the state of things outside of your drab little room with your fireplace.  It seems the world has been suffering from perpetual snow and a long decline in global temperatures, without any sign of stopping or slowing down.  The city, as described by the weatherman, is forest of chimneys and smokestacks emptying into the sky.  The weather reports can be burned.  Your neighbor will occasionally ask for gifts, will occasionally question whether what you are doing is right while simultaneously professing her love for the the warmth of the fireplace and the dazzling destruction therein.

You probably see the satire already.  The game is attempting to criticize the casual game market.  You buy useless stuff to burn inside of your game, you use alternate currencies - currencies that are doled out based on spending money - in order to prevent the game from wasting your time.  It is sardonic, ironic, and a host of other literary devices, but the meaning is moot if the game is what it sets out to satirize.  Sub-par satire is easy to identify because it always makes one key error that takes the air out of its lungs: being a self aware version of what you satirize isn't enough for good satire, and as a matter of fact isn't satire, it just insults your audience.  While it is easy to point out things you want to satirize from within, asking your audience to participate is analogous to making someone a ham sandwich and criticizing them for eating ham.  You served it up as a dirty trick.  Your goal is for me to experience what you created, so telling me that I'm wrong to have done so is not only counter-intuitive, but shows that you aren't interested in saying something meaningful so much as saying something critical of me, the audience.  Satire from inside isn't always a terrible thing, but it needs to avoid or otherwise undermine the primary mechanics or tropes you are wishing to satirize.  Satire provokes, it doesn't lecture.  It creates situations that are absurd to provoke contrasting emotions, to provide a conflict between what is presented and how it is presented.  The issue with Little Inferno is in how it gives you no choice but to play the shitty game they want to satirize.  Your choice is irrelevant, outside of choosing to play the game it wants to criticize you for playing.  If you were somehow able to undermine the game's premise, it might have something to say.  As it is, the game takes on a game incarnation of those edgy, "satiric", and anti-consumerist comic strips splattered all over the walls of Facebook.

The worst part is that I actually found the game fun.  I've said before I like these little "find all the combination" games, and this one is no exception on a basic level.  Most of the combinations were good and well telegraphed with the combo title in the list, it's just that the game really isn't any more than that.  I'm trying to keep this spoiler free, so I don't want to give away the ending, but it does little to tie together the various themes.  You get some brief talk about the corporation and the world at large, but it feels a bit like an attempt at being more than the game actually is without fully succeeding.  It attempts at a fairy tale tone by the end that feels to be justifying the art style more than the plot.  Little Inferno is a fun distraction, and an insulting satire.  It is worth a play if you've nabbed it in a Humble Bundle, but not to go out of your way for.  But nothing can overcome a design that inherently wants you to sort of not like it.



5.5   

[Game Review] Stories Untold

Horror games are probably my favorite genre, even if I don't feel as though I like very many of them.  It's the same as with horror films, where it's incredibly difficult to key in on something that is truly scary, because what is truly scary is something with finesse, a sharp, pinpoint anxiety that must be well executed and effective in its own right.  A lot of my favorite pieces of media in the horror genre generally leave me thinking about a lot of things well after the story is complete.  In film, this would be the likes of Rosemary's Baby and its ability to frustratingly take away Rosemary's agency as the film goes on, her suffering completely preventable if only she could break through the pressures and control of her social and familial circle.  Similarly with The Shining, where we feel as though the whole story is happening on the hinge between sturdy reality and mobile unreality, wildly swinging in the wind, where a man finds himself becoming unwound and threatening toward his family (symbolism of alcoholism abound).  In games, this comes with Silent Hill 2, where James Sunderland's character is developed more and more to our horror, or SOMA to some degree, where, despite some truly dull gameplay outside of some puzzles, the plot itself is a horrifying mix of existentialism and sci-fi (side note: SOMA is a game I never got around to reviewing last year, but would definitely recommend with a rough 8.5/10).  Horror requires a significant psychological weight and a fine tuned execution to properly work, the former of which is precisely what I found so frustrating with Stories Untold.

The spoiler-free summation is this: Stories Untold is four mini-games based around the text adventure genre and more modern takes on adventure games, where reading and analyzing documentation is the main gameplay loop.  All of this is framed in a faux Netflix type show, with each game showing an intro very much like Stranger Things.  The trick with the game, if it isn't too much of a spoiler, is that messing around with these text games, electronics, etc. generally has some twist that is usually pretty surprising, and makes you rethink what you're actually doing in the game.  As vague as that is, if it sounds interesting to you I'd like to give you the chance to try the game out, though my recommendation for the game is mild.  If you like horror games, I'd suggest you try this one out as it lasts about 3 hours, and its greatest strength is in its atmosphere and execution, where its story is by far its weakest point.  It also costs only $10.

Spoilers from here on out.

I was not able to finish any of the three stories without feeling disappointed by the end.  The execution was good and extremely effective most of the time, and to see these ideas squandered for something easy and shallow was frustrating.  The director for the game, Jon McKellan, is a bad writer.  He has some good ideas on game design, but his storytelling tastes of well water.

The first of the four stories has you sitting in a very 80s styled house in front of an old computer (the computer is a fictional brand and model, but it reminds me of a ZX Spectrum +2).  There are pictures of your family on the desk, wood paneled walls, a small desk lamp, and a fictional game called The House Abandon starting up on the screen.  The game then acts as a text adventure like Zork, where you type in commands on the screen and try to finish the game.  The game tells you you've found yourself in your car outside your childhood home, and to check the glove box before going in.  In the glove box is the key to the house and a letter from your dad, telling you to turn on the generator before you go inside, and that he has a present for you in your room.  You turn on the generator, enter the house, and go upstairs to your room and find the present.  It's your old computer, and a game of The House Abandon.  You plug up the computer and start the game.  Outside the game, the power goes out, and the game restarts.  The pictures of your family have black marks over their eyes, and there is something red on the wall.  The game starts up again, but this time the house is described as unpleasant.  The key is still in the glove box, but the note now says some creepy message like "GET OUT" or "RUN AWAY" (the note changes repeatedly over the course of this section).  When you go around back to turn on the generator in the game, you'll notice the light outside the game has flickered back to life.  When you walk through the door in the game, you distinctly hear outside of the game the door open and shut downstairs.  Above the computer, the alarm clock starts going off, and the computer text starts typing out that you hear an alarm upstairs, and that you feel a presence up there.  You must type "turn off alarm" to stop it.  The you in the game notices.  Thus far, the game has done something rather clever, making you feel as though you were playing a nostalgic throwback when in reality you are playing a meta game, where you are both victim and killer.  The effect is eerie, and one I have yet to experience in a game.  Wondering where this is going, I plow on.  The you in the game goes up stairs (under your instruction), and sees you sitting at the computer, breathing heavily over your shoulder.  The game promptly starts to freak out, forcing you to type out "it is my fault" multiple times before the computer says "finally", and the you in the computer apologizes to your mother, father, and younger sister.  Then the story ends.  It was a killer idea that ended in some plain, uneventful guilt narrative that is unclear and largely meaningless.  So I did something to my family, and now I am forced to repent through this game, with its meta horror meant to be a self destructive reflection?  It feels forced, it feels try-hard, and it disappoints a rather effective build up.

But we trudge on.  The second story has you in a medical facility, surrounded by machines and a digital manual on a computer nearby.  You cross check the manual with your equipment in order to complete a series of experiments on an alien organ.  Eventually, this leads to the organ popping, and an orb floating out of the container.  You connect with it psychically to read its memories, where you interact through a text adventure game on the computer.  You attempt to clumsily guess what the alien did in order to progress, but it does feel like guessing.  To the developer's credit, and this goes for all of the text adventure stuff in all four stories, the parser is relatively loose, meaning you generally don't have to run through synonyms trying to find that one key word and phrasing the game is looking for (with a few exceptions).  Once you go through a couple of these memories, you are thrown into a memory that your superiors, who are communicating with you over speaker, realize isn't the memory of this orb, but rather an alien they have in confinement somewhere else in the facility.  As you type out that alien's escape, sirens go off, and your superiors promptly freak out.  The game ends once the alien is able to free its comrades, and you are surrounded by orbs.  This one was never all that interesting, but it was fine enough, and the ending would have been fine if your superior hadn't been given the final line: "You're going to regret this, Mr. Aition".  It's a shallow threat, one you know they can't follow up on, so it feels more like a last ditch effort to make you feel something about this story, when in reality it feels forced.

In the third game we find ourselves at a monitoring station in Greenland, where you are surrounded by a radio, a computer monitor, and a microfilm projector.  There are two other outposts in communication with you, and you must put the correct frequency in the radio to receive a series of numbers, and those numbers must be typed into the computer (at times these numbers are in code, which I found rather inventive).  Once in, you have to type in three commands that look like bash console commands, of which you can find in the microfilm on the proper page that shares the keyword in the frequency.  You do this several times, and are slowly dripped information about New York being destroyed, about "things" out in the winter storm, and slowly different outposts go out.  You're told that "one of them" is on your roof, and you can hear it moving around.  Eventually, one of the transmitters is misaligned, and you are required to go outside to realign it.  On your walk back from the transmitter, out in the distance you can see two cars wrecked in a head long collision.  You hear a voice of one of the people at the other outposts, who tells you you need to come back, that you're almost there, and I began to feel dread in my stomach.  It seemed so obvious, but I kept on, hoping the game was pulling a fast one on me.  Once back, you can clearly see a giant tentacle monster on your roof, and you are confronted with a "To be Concluded" before credits.  Not so scary, but relatively fun and interesting.

The fourth game starts up like the others, with the Stories Untold intro starting up before being unceremoniously paused, and a voice saying "alright, that's enough of that."  It's the voice of your superior from the second game, who tell you you were in a coma recently (that pit in my stomach justified), and he wheels you on a wheel chair through hospital hallways to an interrogation room with a camera and a tape recorder.  You hit record on the tape recorder, and find yourself in the outpost in Greenland again.  The doctor, who was the voice of your superior previously, asks you to go through your memories again, mentioning that last time you had deluded yourself into thinking you were in an outpost in Greenland.  You receive another signal, you type in the code, and you reference your microfilm projector for the proper commands.  But the command manual is gone, and in its place is an incident report, stating that there was a head on collision, where one of the drivers is James Aition (you), and the other a retired police officer.  The police officer died, and reeked of alcohol with an empty bottle of whiskey next to him.  There was a passenger in your car, your sister, but if she was hurt or deceased is blacked out, which I find incredibly condescending that the game doesn't think I can piece together what is happening by now.  To shorten this up, you go through pieces of each of the previous three stories, each slanted a bit toward the true events that you were projecting onto: the outpost was a metaphor for your sense of isolation after your parents stopped talking to you after the crash (can you guess what happened to the sister?), the science experiment used the same equipment the doctor used to recognize and treat an internal hemorrhage in your head, and finally the 80s styled home is where your parents and sister threw you a going away party before you were to travel abroad.  Your dad bought you a bottle of very strong whiskey, and you get very drunk.  Your sister stupidly asks you to drive her home, despite the fact that the text adventure game plainly describes your actions in a drunk way.  This could be reflective and not necessarily accurate to how the events transpired, but there are several moments where your sister is described as "looking at you with concern" that I don't quite believe that interpretation.  You wreck, you freak out about the whiskey, and despite the fact your sister is trapped in the car and you know the car is about to blow, you dump the whiskey bottle out on the police officers car instead of saving her.  The game throws you into the hospital again, that alien orb following you around with your sister's voice, blaming you and chastising you for what you did, until finally you return to the interrogation room, where the doctor says they will inform that police, and the game ends.

The execution of each of these four stories is mostly impressive, with stylish visuals despite the limited camera the nature of the game provides, and does a better job telling its story than I've probably given enough credit for in my quick rundown of the game's flow.  The problem, obviously, is in the story.  From any analytical view outside of maybe technical, as the technical aspect of the game does tell its story, the story is a failure.  For starters, the plot doesn't make much sense.  Why didn't his sister realize he was drunk, when he was impressively drunk?  How did she not notice he was literally driving with an open bottle of whiskey in the car?  How did pouring that whiskey in the other car do anything when, if he was that drunk, he would have reeked of alcohol?  How would the hospital not have tested his blood alcohol level?  It feels like such a ridiculous scenario, and worst of all to serve such a trite point.  Secondly, the plot means little.  It harps on guilt toward the protagonist and gives him little in character development or even meaning in his guilt, just that he did a very bad thing and the game is going to torture you for that.  And don't misunderstand me, because I understand this is very similar to the plot of James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, where his torture is our torture, but that is in service to exploring a character and how they deal with and interpret guilt.  In all of the stories in Stories Untold, each one is trying to fantasize away the trauma, but none of these fantasies are invocative of the themes.  I never felt as though I was experiencing something with a character (or characters, as the game plays it until the end), and thus little development was ever accomplished along the way.  The themes at the end are expressed in the very beginning of the game, and see little to no development as the game progresses.  Information is not given to us, it is repeated.  The conclusion doesn't shock us, it is cliche.  The game wants to wow you with its tragedy, with its flawed protagonist, but it is empty of substance required to give this weight outside of shock value.

I hate this game's story, but it is a credit to the game's execution and entertainment value that it doesn't weigh my rating down too much.  The game is an experience I would recommend, but one that is bound to frustrate anyone pining for those special games that touch on something deeper, that utilize the medium to explore characters and themes.  This feels like a shadow of other, more interesting and promising games.  It feels trendy, it feels fake.  But it is well done, and it was fun, and it was cheap.  Boy, was it cheap.




6.0

[Game Review] Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)

As a rule of thumb, I don't review games I don't complete.  That's why you've never read a review for Divinity Original Sin II, Nier: Automata, Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic, or Europa Universalis IV despite my love for those games over the last year (that latter game doesn't really have a "finish", but I feel compelled to play more before giving it a summation).  For whatever reason, whether life or lack of momentum, those games didn't get finished and added to the pile of games to revisit at a better time.  It never seemed fair to judge a game before knowing the ending or endings, since that can have a profound affect on how you consider the rest of the game (such as Silent Hill 2) or the game may develop interesting mechanics that I would have missed (like the strategizing around the rolling health meter in Earthbound).  But I'm going to make an exception here.

It isn't that I haven't played a lot of Star Wars Battlefront II, the annoyingly titled second entry in Dice's remake series of the original classics.  I've sunk a lot of time into the online multiplayer modes, considerably leveled up multiple classes and unlocked numerous of the game's Star Cards (weapons and buffs like perks from Call of Duty).  I feel more than adequately prepared to criticize the game's multiplayer, which was the whole reason I bought it.  What I didn't finish was the tacked on single player, which was added as a direct response to the first game's criticisms.

To talk about Battlefront II, we first have to unpack some stuff.  Firstly, when Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, Disney inexplicably gave the Star Wars license to EA, which is just about the worst company to give a major license to.  EA has shown time and again that they are not interested in making great games since the release of Mass Effect 3 (although, I am more than willing to give Jedi: Fallen Order a chance, since this seems to have mostly bucked the trend based off of what I have read).  They've butchered The Sims and Sim City, they force developers to produce sub par sequels (Mass Effect: Andromeda, anyone?), and they're major entry into the online shooter ring, Battlefield, hasn't recaptured the magic of Bad Company, and was last more than mediocre with Battlefield 3.  And this isn't just AAA hate, because imagine a Far Cry clone in the Star Wars universe by developer Ubisoft.  That could be really fun (Far Cry 5 was a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine a couple of years ago).  Generic, appeal-to-everyone games aren't my favorite, but given Star Wars is such a huge license, with such an interesting world and some interesting characters, even a generic game could be interesting.  There is some logic behind what Disney has done.  After all, Dice is a good studio that is unfortunately in the fold of a larger, seemingly antagonistic company.  They have the technology, the rather fantastic shooter engine Frostbite, to make Battlefront happen.  The original Battlefront was, after all, a Battlefield rip-off.  But with EA comes unpleasant business practices.  The first Battlefront remake was universally criticized for having few maps (three, if I remember correctly), only taking place in the Galactic Civil War (the original Star Wars trilogy timeline) and after (the sequel trilogy), and without a single player mode whatsoever (single player skirmishes didn't even exist), partially do to it being rushed out to release just before The Force Awakens.  I was alright with most of what the Battlefront remake was (about a 6/10, if I had to conjecture so far removed from the last time I played), but its criticisms were sound.

Secondly, Battlefront II was released with all the different time periods shown in the films (Clone Wars!), and with a new single player campaign as an answer to previous criticisms, but it also released with a trove of micro-transactions that were plainly unfair, almost all of which have been subsequently taken out of the game.  Originally, the game doled out heroes (like Darth Vader and such, easily the thing most likely to turn the tides in battle) and weapons in lootboxes, which should immediately set off alarms.  It was plainly pay-to-win, that structure of some games where dumping money into a game is paramount to being competitive.  This kind of structure is tolerated in certain instances (look at Magic: The Gathering, which is a great card game in its own right, but is technically pay-to-win), but usually only so when the entry price to the game is nearly free.  Battlefront II cost $60 when it came out.  Not only that, but drop rates for these rare but competitive items was insanely low, requiring you to dump more money into lootboxes than you probably spent on the game itself.  The game gave an alternate currency to buy these lootbox items, but they took such an insane amount of grinding in order to attain that it was impractical to accomplish for even one of the items, let alone enough to be truly competitive.  It was an absolute disaster of design, something that was not Dice's fault as they were pressured to do it by their distributor.  While these practices have been long since taken from the game, it is hard to clean away that stain.

Battlefront II is much like its predecessors, both directly and in the series this is remaking.  The primary game mode is Conquest, which has two teams fighting over control of command posts, as well as Assault which has one team escorting a massive weapon through a map while another team attempts to stop them, Flying battles where you dogfight in space ships, and Hero Battles where everyone plays as a hero.  In comparison to the last game, Heroes and vehicles are no longer attained by finding icons on the map, but rather by spending points before spawning that are gained by getting kills, catching command posts, and even dying, making sure that everyone has at least some chance of playing as something with a little more oomph.  As welcome as this change is, it is hard to really say much about anything else since it is largely what we've been playing in Battlefield for about a decade now (and that's really just considering since Battlefield 3, when it became the main competitor to Call of Duty).  The general gameplay is fine enough.  It is rote Battlefield stuff, nothing new or particularly different.  There isn't much tactical strategy outside of "follow the hero characters for a push", or "use shotgun in close quarters", but that isn't why people play these games.  It is about the chaos of playing with 40 or so players on the same map.  The game certainly excels at chaos, and you can lose hours to simply throwing yourself into the grinder and make a lot of fun for yourself (or if you are lucky enough to get a hero, you can be the grinder).  I had a lot of fun doing it, particularly when I wasn't sober, but that kind of gameplay is popcorn fun, and it doesn't last long.  There is only so much of this game you can play without starting to get that distinct feeling of deja vu.  Since strategies are virtually nil outside of getting lucky enough to pick a hero, getting better isn't much of an option outside of basic shooter mechanics, which can be done in any shooter.  That's where the leveling up system comes in.  Each class, hero, and vehicle levels up independently, and as they level up you gain points that can be spent on level-locked perks, which you can equip to your class.  The same is true of weapons.  It feels like more or less a replacement for the feeling of getting better at the game, to give you a sense of progress in a game that is incapable of doing so through gameplay and skill alone.  It's trite, it's time wasting mechanics, it's the most base level of fun meant to burn away your passion for the game and replace it with a sense of familiarity and vague reward.  It's fine, but I hate that it's fine.  It's fine because it is standard, but it's a standard that has lasted far too long with far too little growth.  Heroes and vehicles give some variance in gameplay, but not enough to make up for a lack of depth.

The new single player mode, however, I couldn't finish.  It wasn't difficult, and as a matter of fact it was far, far too easy.  Enemy AI is a joke in this game.  AI will often get caught on level geometry, which would always trigger them to spin around and try and find another path forward, only to take the exact same path into geometry again.  It was just picking off robots that couldn't even properly walk up to me to slap me in the face.  It was dull, it was insulting, and I couldn't be bothered with it gameplay-wise.  If the story was something even remotely interesting, perhaps I would have stomached it to the end, but it wasn't.  The plot follows a military officer in the Galactic Empire, a special ops storm trooper whose devotion to the Empire is comical at best.  She shows no understanding of political context, ethics, or a semblance of a personality.  Her opinions on the Rebels is that they are prone to violence, and virtually inhuman.  She's a recruitment poster come to life, and not in a satirical or critical sense.  She's just slogans and hate for the violent Other.  One could argue that she is meant to be a representation of the brainwashed military of the Empire, but there are attempts at personality far too often for that to be the case.  She tries to be gruff, but feels like a kid attempting to impersonate what she thinks a bad guy would say or act like.  She tries to act like a leader, but often times that amounts to her condescending those beneath her.  Plopping us in the shoes of an Empirical soldier is a great idea for a campaign, and I can tell they meant well by this decision, but it felt like they didn't quite have the time or energy to put enough effort into this character to make her believable.  I want to know why someone feels patriotism for the Empire, what it is about the Empire's ideology that resonates with a person, but what we get is the same flat evil the Empire has always been.  I didn't finish the campaign, so I imagine she has a change of character as the plot develops, but the game never made me feel compelled to see that arch play out.  If the starting point of your arch is cartoonish and without personality, than that arch isn't really much of an arch.  Why would I care to see this person redeemed?  She isn't believable as she is, so seeing her become believable (and I feel that is being overly courteous of me, as most of the rebels in Star Wars outside of Lando and Han are cartoonish good guys) is like climbing a mole hill.  It barely travels.  Maybe I'll have enough guilt in me after posting my first review of an unfinished game that I'll actually complete it, in which case I will make an update review, but I highly doubt it.  I feel completely uncompelled to experience any more of what I considered unbearably dull.

All-in-all, I can't give Battlefront II much of a pass.  It is a competent enough shooter, but I've had just about enough of competent shooters, especially when we've moved on to the battle royale genre, or the team based shooter which, issues as both of those has, at least there is some runway left in them.  After a decade of making the same game, and after a decade of predatory business practices, progression models, and whoring out of licenses with little regard to building anything with them, I think I may just be worn thin.  On occasion I write a review and think to myself, "I should revisit this game, because this opinion doesn't feel finished."  Here, I feel done.  I also feel the least objective I ever have in a review, and that makes me pause, but for now, this is what I think of this game.



4.5

[Game Review] Scribblenauts Unlimited

There was an old MS-DOS game called Alchemy I used to really like as a kid, where you started off with three elements that you would have to combine in order to create objects.  These objects could be combined with each other or the initial elements in order to make more objects.  The objective of the game is to find all the combinations possible and create all of the objects.  This probably sounds familiar, because this type of game has been remade multiple times on any given app store you prefer.   Games like Little Alchemy or Doodle God are all clones of the original Alchemy, and their appeal is in creatively thinking about the objects given and how their definition can be stretched to be considered halves of a possible new object.  For example, a car and a bird could be combined to create an airplane, because the machinery of the car and the behavior of the bird could be combined to create a flying car, aka a plane.  Often, there was more than one solution to an object, such as combining a car with the air element, which would result in the same.  It's silly logic mostly, but it was fun to stretch your identification of objects and their functions in order to make something new and identifiable.  The issue here is that the logic isn't inherently consistent because it takes leaps of logic that are mostly fun rather than logical.  Sometimes, you would have an object in mind that you knew you could get, but couldn't figure out which combination the game wanted from you, trying multiple routes that obey similar logical principles followed thus far that just, for whatever reason, wouldn't work for whatever object you were trying to create.  It's the parser problem from text adventure games like Zork or riddle logic for adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, where the real issue to be overcome is in trying to think like the developer without enough context or in game logic to do so faithfully.

Scribblenauts has a solution for this that is fun, but not remotely challenging.  To be fair, Scribblenauts as a series is for kids, meant to challenge your basic knowledge of things like fire defeats ice, what clothes bandits wear, or what a vampire's weakness is.  It's a test of cultural knowledge, of tropes and some minor physics, accessible for nearly all ages so long as they are able to type.  The fun of Scribblenauts isn't in figuring out the puzzles thrown at you since solutions are maddeningly easy, but rather in how creative you can be in coming up with solutions.

Scribblenauts Unlimited is the third in the series, and the first to be released outside of the Nintendo DS platform.  The plot is nonsensical, and just gives you your primary objective: do good deeds for people who need it.  This amounts to running around different levels, finding people who have an objective, and using your notebook to type in an object to spawn that will solve their problem.  Sometimes, you will be required to click on a person or object and add an adjective with your notebook to change it.  Like Alchemy, the game is asking you to use objects in order to solve problems, but this time looks for object types rather than specific object combinations.  What this means is that if someone says they are hungry, you can pretty much feed them whatever food pops into your head, and perhaps even things that aren't so great, like a bottle of poison or rancid meat.  Whatever the game thinks as edible is fair game, and generally this is where the fun is (in one memorable puzzle, I had to feed a cannibal, and so fed him another cannibal).  If a character asks for a friend, you can spawn a monster that will subsequently eat them, and the puzzle is still solved.  Each puzzle solved gives you a star piece, except for the multi-step puzzles that give you a full star, and the goal of the game is to collect 60 stars a la Super Mario 64. 

Stressing your creative muscle is fun to do because of the wealth of objects supported in the game, but because it is aimed at kids and because of the horror that is copyright law, the hidden list of objects is limited by things that are relatively G-rated and not referencing anything specifically pop culture related.  There was one objective I ran into where a nerd was asking for something related to his cartoons, and I eagerly typed in Goku, thinking at the very least the game would throw in a generic anime character analogue to solve the objective, which would have amused me.  Neither happened, and typing in anime simply spawned a DVD that didn't solve the objective anyway. (I eventually solved it by spawning a cartoonist, which was a boring answer to me).  Obviously, trying to spawn things like marijuana or porn magazines are not allowed, but chainsaws, guns, and other such things are kosher.  After awhile, when my creativity began to wane, I resigned myself to trying to solve as many objectives with a chainsaw as possible, of which I was able to solve quite a few.  Part of the reason for this waning of creativity was because the objectives felt like they had very little wiggle room at least 50% of the time.  There was an objective where you had to make yourself into a superhero by completing three sub-objectives.  The first was to cover your face, so I chose a gasmask.  The second was to give yourself a proper costume, which I attempted with a trench coat (wanting to make the edgiest super hero ever), but the parser seemed to want tights or cape, so I settled on cape.  Lastly, I was to give myself a super power, and I was stumped.  I needed to click on my character, click the notepad button, and then click on adjective and type something in in order to give me some kind of power.  I knew I could have typed strong, or flying, but those weren't fun super powers.  After all, going in to every level I would always type in flying or ghost on my character to give myself flight so I could reach the objectives as quick as possible (sometimes, for kicks, I'd also add giant so I could tower over these small, helpless little goofballs, but eventually I found it too difficult to run around).  But what other super powers where there?  I could type fire or flaming, but that would just kill me, or frozen but then I couldn't move.  I was limited by the objective itself, which sounded creative but in practice really wasn't.  I settled on flying, but the impression was made.  Scribblenauts can be creative, but it feels more like a promise of creativity than an actual expressive medium.  The objectives themselves weren't very creative most of the time, and I got the distinct feeling most of the game's development time and effort was put towards creating a wealth of objects and adjectives to use with the notepad. 

When criticizing a game, I feel it is important to have at least some impression of how the work on the game was doled out, like in my review of Pokemon Sword/Shield, because as much as I'd like this or that feature, there is a practicality to be concerned with.  There is only so much possible from a piece of media, and to ask too much is not only arrogant, but ignorant to what it is that produced it in the first place.  Some of the most creative works were done because of trying to work within certain limitations (look at Silent Hill or Jaws), and so to ignore those limitations is to sometimes ignore the creativity involved in producing it.  For Scribblenauts, its strength is in its objects and adjectives, and what takes a hit is its animation and in its objectives.  In presentation, I am willing to concede that it was the correct choice to skimp a bit.  It isn't paramount to the game or what makes it fun, because immersion isn't that important.  With objectives, however, it is the expression with which the object and adjective list is meant to be components to.  If there was one thing for the developers to focus on, it would have been on objectives that properly utilize their list.  Again, this is a game for kids, but given there are 106 stars and only 60 are needed to complete the game, creating a subset of hard objectives would have been both rewarding to the player and fun to think up for the developer.  It doesn't break the game by any means, but it severely limits the game to being simply a kid game with a mild amount of fun.  It is a good idea not so much squandered as tailored for a particular audience.  For what it is, Scribblenauts Unlimited is a fun, brief time if you need something to wind down with at the end of a hard day, or something you want to creatively play with your child or niece or nephew.  As anything else, it aint much.



6.0