[Game Review] Kentucky Route Zero

Describing Kentucky Route Zero feels like doing it some injustice.  Kentucky Route Zero is much closer to a post-modern novel than it is a video game, but doesn't let the fact that its story is being told in an interactive medium go to waste.  Kentucky is built around the idea that you will never totally capture every given route and story, because the point is to make impressions, to feel for characters whose lives you may only see snippets of.  Describing any of these stories and characters becomes like capturing smoke in a net because most of what happens in the story is ephemeral, once again: impressions.  I think that my description so far can be scary to some, or otherwise repulsive to those who associate descriptors like "post-modern" and "impressions" with pretentious art games that are more concerned with being smart and vague than being fun.  In one sense, this is true: this is a pretentious art game, difficult in form and structure, and with so many characters that you are likely to forget some of them even when you see them again until they say some key phrase or reference that jogs your memory.  But more accurately, the game is meant to be an emotional ride, one of longing and nostalgia, and a reassessment on what is lost, what we want, and the death and rebirth of the American folk spirit.  Much like Twin Peaks, you don't have to be overly literate to find something enjoyable and moving in what is here because of its focus on emotional impressions and relatability even in an absurd execution, so I strongly urge you to ignore your impulse against this game and give it a shot, because you will feel something, and you won't regret it.

Kentucky Route Zero is a point and click Adventure game, roughly, and follows a group of people who each have some sense of longing toward something they seem unable to find, or even describe to themselves.  All they seem to know is that something is missing in their lives, and they want to find it.  You start as Conway, a man delivering some antiques to 5 Dogwood Dr., an address he can't seem to find.  It's the last delivery for his friend and boss' business before she finally calls it quits, and he wants to get it over with even as he has no idea where his life will go after this.  You pull over at a gas station and ask the owner there where to find the address, who tells you in order to get there you must go on the Zero, an underground highway that travels through the caverns underneath Kentucky which doesn't seem to obey the general rules of physics.  Traveling the Zero leads Conway to collect a group of people each looking for something themselves.   It's like The Odyssey only through American folk beliefs instead of Greek mythology.  Notably it isn't American folklore, but rather a general ethos of rustic America.  Stories begin to weave in and out about struggling blue collar workers and their plight for a good life, about debt and the way it ensnares people, corporate entities that cut corners and pressured people into a compromised life, and of academics who have abandoned the city in favor of chasing metaphysics, artistic expression, paranormal research, and a general excavation of the unknown.  It is a game that desires to wander, its people want meaning, and they want to passionately tail that meaning without concern for how that meaning is contextualized by some governing entity.  They want something pure, real, and torturous if it must be as long as it is free of artificial restraint and that it is theirs. 

The story also finds itself antagonistic to restraint in its telling.  There are five acts throughout, but more accurately, there are five acts and five shorts between each that are equally important to the world we are traversing.  I found all but maybe one or two of these between-acts to be incredibly poignant, and sometimes even act as Rosetta Stone to the game's bizarre execution.  In the first of these between-acts, you control Emily as she and her friends explore an art installation at a museum (Emily is one of those characters you've met already, but may not notice at first).  The different exhibits are exceptionally strange and, to be honest, impossible in real life, and has a distinct David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon vibe of going beyond reality to create an impression rather than to convince you of realism.  The absurdity of these art pieces prompt Emily's dialogue box, and you can either attempt to interpret the art (usually rather pretentiously), give a general but less intellectual sounding opinion, or be dismissive.  The game is trying to get you thinking about why the game's story is being told so unconventionally, about what different approaches could mean, and that it doesn't really matter so much that you need to over-analyze it.  You are free to take the game's oddities seriously or not, all that matters is you play it and you feel something.  But importantly, the game asks that you allow any way of looking at it with some respect, like there are no wrong answers.  Giving you the choice allows you to express your perspective on it in game in a bit of meta fiction, but also implies that there were other choices that others could take, and that they have equal validity.  This also introduces us to several characters we will meet later in the game, although it would be no shame if you didn't notice later when you meet them, since this sort of thing happens multiple times, and after awhile it can become overwhelming.  These side episodes will often introduce or mention characters you will meet later or have met before, but may not have seen in awhile.  They are meant to wet your lips before the next big swig comes along, especially since the game most certainly has some sharp turns to make in whichever Act is upcoming.  They act as palate cleansers with a lead off, warming you up for what is coming to some degree or another.  After the first between-act section, the artist whose art you were viewing shows up, and you now have some frame of reference as to who she is, and some context as to why she is here in this office building so deep under ground.  The game is always easing you into things, even while a certain sense of reality begins to fray at the edges.

Acts are divided into scenes, of which each has a location.  These locations act as sets, and as the story develops you may become more and more aware that this game feels more like an interactive play than it does a game, book, or movie.  Sets will peel away walls or rotate around flaming spires, but they still feel distinctly like sets, albeit sets that could never work on any stage in the world.  Likewise, dialog dictates most of what goes on in a scene.  What people have to say and the potential contrast to what they think is important to how the story plays out.  Often times you will find yourself controlling Conway or another character like Shannon, and the dialog options you have to say all mostly feel like canon.  It feels like you are sifting through their thoughts and choosing which is the most appropriate or most interesting for the given situation, but you will never pick the choice that feels as though you are saying everything.  There are moments where this meta-storytelling gives way to actual choice, where you can make decisions for people or where you can dictate their past, and these have an even bigger impact as a piece of meta-storytelling.  Obviously, games are usually about choice, and thus are more akin to choose your own adventure novels than novels themselves, but the approach of Kentucky Route Zero to choice is interesting in how it defines characters you meet.  By being able to choose form a handful of responses that illuminate intention, desire, and past, you are essentially being given the job of co-writer, albeit in a very limited way.  By including you in the creative output of the game, the game is smartly engaging you in a way most games, books, or movies try but rarely achieve with a general populace.  Nothing is static in the art world, it is always participatory.  You have to give into a given work what you get out of it, and a lot of even the most pretentious of media foodies seem to miss this most important point.

Video games have the luxury of requiring user input and so heavily implying or requiring audience participation, but rarely is it so encouraged on a creative level.  When we interpret art, if you will allow me this slight digression, it isn't that one interpretation (or even method of interpretation, as can be found all over YouTube) is correct, but rather that it is a set of rules with a particular, artistic meaning as its outcome.  Each interpretation is both rules and execution of those rules, and when we debate interpretation we either debate the rules or the other's ability in following those rules with a given work.  We can have preference for particular methodology, but that does not make it inherently right because there is no inherently right way of doing so.  We can assume or intuit an author's preferred methodology (such as when I ignored poor controls in Evoland knowing they weren't really important to the work's perspective on the point), but even that does not give it a concrete preference as to how we should view a given work.  Kentucky Route Zero addresses this time and again.

The game reflects on its odd presentation, reflects on the way it constructs its characters, reflects on reflection, and within this miasma of how do we understand art, how do we apply art, how do we live with art that reminds us of the urgency we feel to better our lives and the lives of others is a story of that same longing, of that wish to understand, of a need for some rubric for interpretation and the desperation for some meaning in it all.  But most of all it is a ghost story.  It is a remembrance of what is dead, and that if we are to find meaning and we are to find some solace in this wicked storm we will have to build it ourselves.  Reflection is paramount to this, where we see the error of the past, where desperation and longing lead to easy answers that bit their participants in the ass and subjugated them the way we feel subjugated now.  History repeats itself, but so long as we keep history in our mind we may have a clearer path forward.  Do we start over or do we try somewhere else, look for new stimuli to help us along?  Ultimately it is your choice, but regardless of how you decide to go, we all share the reflection and we all share the search, and so long as we see that in one another there is a community to be had, and a eulogy to be said, one of sadness and one of hope.



10

[Game Review] Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies

PopCap games was created in 2000, and generally focused on the yet-to-burgeon "casual game" market.  Up to this point, "casual games" were things like Microsoft Solitaire, Elf Bowling, and other, trendy simple games that someone could idle-play while on their computer at home or in the office.  They generally had lenient hardware requirements, and could be either consumed in small, occasional bites or in one long, chained binge.  Casual gaming wasn't really a thing in 2000, by traditional means.  In 2001, PopCap games came out with Bejeweled, and it felt like the ball had started rolling.  Two things happened that acted as a catalyst: the release of Xbox Live Arcade and, earlier than that, the release of the Wii.  Gaming for most of its existence had been aimed at young men, how young decreasing over the years as those children raised in the NES or SNES era grew up.  The entire idea of a casual gaming console in the 7th generation of consoles was absurd to just about everybody, but Nintendo had other ideas.  By creating a console that could be picked up by anyone, whose controls were intuitive to even those who have never held a controller, an entirely new market opened up wide.  PopCap games at this point had been pushing out releases for as wide a market as possible, usually colorful puzzle games released on PC and Mac.  While the Wii was garnering PopCap's market, another, more interesting platform popped up.  The Xbox Live Arcade is an odd, early step in the online market place dynamic that now permeates the entire gaming world (so prevalent now that consumers are tearing themselves apart bouncing between markets, and pledging silly allegiances to what is, technically, video game Walmarts competing with one another).  Odd mostly because it was early in attempting to publish smaller games, but also in how insanely influential it was.  The Indie gaming boom started here.  Games like Braid and Spelunky can partially thank Xbox Live Arcade and their heavy marketing behind the "Summer of Arcade" for their success and subsequent filing in the video game cannon.  And while the Indie game boom has been talked about to death (and I'm guilty of this too), what is less talked about is in how it influenced casual gaming, as this is where Peggle first blew up.

Peggle was released on PC, but it was on the Xbox that it became an immediate cult classic.  Peggle, for all of its renown and compulsory fun, is really just patchinko.  You shoot a ball down into an array of pegs and paddles with a limited amount of balls.  The goal is to hit every one of the orange pegs and get the highest score you can manage before you run out of balls.  When a peg or paddle is hit, they will disappear after your ball has fallen through the void at the bottom of the screen.  The twist on the patchinko machine, so to speak, is that you can aim where the ball shoots, and hitting a green peg unlocks your special.  Your special depends on the character you selected before starting play, and there will only be two green pegs on the board.  Specials can be as diverse as showing the trajectory of your ball for a certain length, or auto-adjusting your shot to one worth more points.  The special moves are generally a matter of taste for the main campaign, with the only exception being the challenge missions which can be made easier by choosing a special that will help you around the more difficult arrangement of pegs.  While that implies a skill based system, the skill ceiling (or floor, really) is rather small.  For the most part, Peggle works on a load of chance and only a bit of skill unless you are willing to commit a large amount of time towards high scores.  No level in the game - even the challenge levels - really require much skill, which is partially why it caught on like fire back in 2007.  It was essentially arcade style gambling.  The skill required to make a play dependably was unlikely to occur in most who played it, since the game played into that gambling aspect so well.  Peggle is the perfect example of reward systems in games being mostly aesthetic and design rather than substantial reward through gameplay.  When you shoot a peg it gives off a satisfying "bong" sound, and getting several in a row ramps up the pitch with each subsequent peg.  It's exciting, feeling the points ramping up so immediately.  When your ball comes close to the last orange peg, the game will slow down, the camera will zoom in, and you will hear a drum roll ramping up.  If you hit the peg, an explosion of music and fireworks will blow all over the board, while your score is aggressively smashed into the screen.  It's an explosive moment, one that hits all of those dopamine buttons in your brain and screams you done good kid.  It feels predatory looking back, after years of manipulative game design and issues with addiction among the gaming landscape as we are aware of it now, but at the time it was exactly what a lot of people wanted.  They wanted to be addicted.

The casual gaming world continued to develop, with Wii Sports Resort coming out a mere month after PopCap released maybe its biggest hit: Plants vs. Zombies.  Plants vs. Zombies was a twist on the tower defense game.  Flash games (the torchbearer of casual gaming between the age of the arcade and the 7th generation of consoles) at the time were full of tower defense games, but largely they had a winding path with nodes along them that could hold towers, walls, etc. that you could buy at the level end store.  PvZ looked to streamline this, while at the same time giving you control over you currency ramp up.  Instead of buying towers and other defensive items, you use sunlight to grow plants.  Sunlight occurs naturally during the day, but you can also plant sunflowers for a marginal but not insubstantial fee in order to increase the frequency in which you gain sunlight.  One of the key design choices that makes PvZ so fun to play is in giving you this control over your in game currency.  Now, you need to not only manage your defenses and offenses, you also need to manage the frequency in which you can update or replace those defenses and offenses.  It becomes much more strategic, not just in covering your weak spots, but in a more economic way, closer in tune with an RTS where resource management is paramount to the proper ramp up of power.  Things get more complicated when you get onto a level that takes place at night and you are suddenly reliant on sunflowers entirely for your sunlight.  Plants vs. Zombies has a different take on the casual game, moving away from simple input with massive reward and instead making simple strategy feel complex.  It feels like you are doing a lot, mounting up defenses, layering in sunflowers to afford your heavier stock pea-shooters, or laying a cherry bomb to clear a large group of zombies.  In reality, the game is rather simple.  Getting in your sunlight ramp up is really the key to winning the game, because you are unlikely to need an excessive amount to the point you need to plan ahead with more strategy than just "heavy and affordable".  So long as you keep up your spending and gaining, you're probably fine.  Some strategy comes in later, when you have more types of plants than you can "party" for a level, and night levels require some tweaking by including free or cheap but low damage mushroom plants in your planning, but it won't ever kick your butt unless you aren't on top of you sunlight.

Although Plant vs Zombies has more involved gameplay, it still utilizes addictive design.  When sunlight falls from the sky or pops out of your sunflowers, it becomes a little object on your screen that needs to be clicked on or tapped.  Plants vs. Zombies was released on PC and several consoles, but where it really took off was on touch iPods and the relatively new smart phone (remember when we had to differentiate types of phone this way?).  This tapping felt its most natural on this platform.  Later, you will be able to collect coins from zombies that will allow you to buy stuff from the store, which again utilizes clicking or tapping on coins when they are dropped.  In your brain, its similar to collecting loot.  Seeing things pop up on your screen with increasing frequency is intoxicating in a lot of ways, as tapping or clicking a bunch of sunlight equates to feeling incredibly powerful.  Doing so with money is less addictive because of the high costs of anything useful in the store, but never so low that I didn't get that little dopamine bump whenever I had to click them.

None of this is to say that addictive gameplay, or casual design in general, is inherently bad.  Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies aren't trying to suck money from you in order to keep up the rush, but they do make wasting time far more rewarding than it probably needs to be.  It takes quite awhile for the mist of excitement to dissipate after playing these games, but when they do your fondness for them is more than likely in the thrill, not really in the fun.  Playing them is rather simple, it's the reward you more than likely have fondness for.  This, largely, is what separates casual design from the more general game design, or other specific game design archetypes.  Casual game design is about reward, about getting people in to the realm of games and game design, and showering them in reward.  Casual gaming doesn't work as an actual rewarding experience in and of themselves, but they work as a simple and fun education on how games mostly work.  It's easy to say that playing games are rewarding, but if you are a person that doesn't play games, especially someone older who has a lot of "folk knowledge" so to speak to learn on game design, you've never had that reward reinforced.  Casual games allow people to get the feeling of reward from a game, often for the first time (hence the odd demographics on games like Wii Sports or FarmVille).  Wiring up this understanding of seeing a game through to that reward creates associations that could encourage people to delve deeper into gaming as a medium, especially if they would have never considered doing so before.  This is the good of casual gaming, but the problem is that their focus on high reward for little effort can create a black hole instead of encouraging exploration.  People can become fixated on that one game they first started with, with little reason to move on.  Again, this isn't bad, but the best good casual gaming can provide can easily become moot by its own design.  One of the reasons I like games like Plants vs. Zombies is because they act as a stepping stone.  While strategy is rather simple for most of the game, those inexperienced with games or energy preservation/utilization will still have trouble as they need to learn this in order to proceed.  The little addictive touches make the game feel rewarding, but can also help you learn the game.  Getting sunlight feels really good, because you feel empowered by it, thus you will focus on trying to get as much as you can early on, which is a good strategy for the first half of the game.  It utilizes that rewarding design in order to teach the player how to play without asking them to think about it too much, which can feel simple to those with more experience with similar games but doesn't stop it from still being fun.  When you get to about the half way point, the game puts more pressure on you, allowing you less time where you can get away with sunlight ramp up before starting to throw zombies at you, causing a new balance of ramp up and defensive/offensive placement.  This balance is where Plants vs. Zombies feels like a game that could pose a challenge, but for the casual gamer it comes as the final challenge, where the game's subtle and easy to digest lessons are being confronted, and you have to think for yourself what in your strategy needs to be modified.

More people in gaming is a good thing, because a more diverse audience means a more diverse selection of games.  The irony is that casual gaming is often criticized for not appealing to a more challenging sensibility.  While I understand that they mean challenging through gameplay, I can't help but see this as ironic when generally gamers don't want thematic or narrative challenge that isn't within their small nook of interests.  The reason casual gaming is interesting is in the way it can appeal to those who generally wouldn't find an interest in games, a dynamic gamers should be more open to because trying new and inventive games with different perspectives and challenges is precisely the type of growth the culture at large needs.  The difficult balance between healthy and unhealthy design is a bane to the casual gaming market, and if it hasn't already, I feel as though eventually things will tip heavily into the unhealthy realm (most mobile gaming is deeply on this side of design), but that small bonus makes me think that the genre has a sincere hope.



Peggle
 7.0

Plants vs. Zombies
7.5

[Game Review] Silent Hill 4: The Room

Note: This review contains minor spoilers.


One of the reason I love the Silent Hill series is because of its attention to subtext.  Subtext, for those who don't know, is the implied text within a given work of art.  In Silent Hill 2, the design of the creatures having thematic significance would be considered subtext, or at the least participating in an overarching subtext.  Subtext is downright exciting in video games because of the wealth of subtextual wells in every nook and cranny of the world, menus, and mechanics.  Video games often have explorable areas, inspectible items, etc. that give numerous routes toward more story.  Dark Souls has been my go-to for talking about great video game subtext, but likewise Breath of the Wild succeeds with, say, its abandoned battlefields covered in old, rusted swords and shields.

Silent Hill 4: The Room either went too far with subtext in some places, or has a lot to say, I'm not really sure.  Silent Hill 4 is the black sheep of the Team Silent entries in the Silent Hill franchise.  It was made partially side-by-side with Silent Hill 3, and where Silent Hill 3 felt like it was in a tug of war between an extremely traditional Silent Hill game and something new and interesting, Silent Hill 4 feels like something very different altogether.  First of all, it only has one area near Silent Hill, and it's across the lake from the infamous town.  Dhalia Gillespie is mentioned to have visited this area, which houses a cult-funded orphanage, and that's about as many references as we get to Silent Hill (two characters recognize it as well, but to no significance to the story).  Secondly, the game takes a new approach to your inventory system, where now what you can hold on to is limited and you have to go back to your apartment to trade items in and out of your stash box like Resident Evil (stacking items is also severely limited, being virtually none at all unless you are bullets, and even then only in groups of 10 and 6 for the two types of ammunition).  Silent Hill 4 also abandons the (relatively) fixed camera work of the first three for a fully free camera, and, when you are in the apartment, a first person view (to great, claustrophobic effect).  Silent Hill as a series has, up to this point, been more or less a classic adventure game with a slightly unwieldable combat system.  The game's are usually about solving riddles and checking every door on the map to see where you can go and what you can interact with.  While that exploration still exists to some extent, the riddles have instead been integrated with the story.  Instead of solving riddles about flying birds and translating it to the keys of a piano, now you are learning about Walter Sullivan, his murder spree, and a weird cult ritual he has been attempting to complete over the course of roughly a decade in order to progress.

The story of Silent Hill 4 is both traditional and weird.  It follows the cult from Silent Hill we are all so familiar with (even if I'd rather they drop that plot element already) and an everyman exploring abandoned, creepy areas in order to progress.  But Silent Hill's iconic fog is nowhere to be found in what may be the only game in the series (Disclaimer: this isn't completely true, but it's true enough that we'd be arguing about semantics if we were to discuss it).  Likewise, there is an intense focus on the titular Room.  That room is your apartment.  You are Henry Townsend, and you live in apartment 302 in some nondescript city not far out from Silent Hill (I wonder if this is where Cybil from the first Silent Hill was from).  At some point before the start of the game, you woke to find that most of your appliances don't work (such as the phone and the TV), and a web of chains and locks across your front door.  Written in red just below the eye hole says: "Don't go out! -Walter".  The windows don't open but you can look out of them and watch your neighbors in their day to day, or the cars pass by the subway station nearby.  Eerily, you can move a dresser and peek into your neighbor Eileen's bedroom, a young woman who you will hear throughout the game wondering what is up with that guy in 302, and why hasn't he been around lately?

Silent Hill 4 plays heavily with voyeurism themes.  You are always on the outside looking in, with little to no other action possible while in the room.  At some point, a hole appears in your bathroom, and crawling through it dumps you out in the subway not far from your house.  There are monsters here, though, and a woman named Cynthia who says she will "make it worth your while" if you help her find the way out of this creepy, alternate-subway.  As you progress, you will see more holes, all of which lead you back to the room.  The only place to save in this game is in your room, and doing so will tell you which "world" you are returning from.  Here, it looks like: "Returning from Subway World".  This was something odd to me for most of the game: was this satire of Mario levels, a video-gamey joke, or was there actual subtext to it?  The voyeurism theme seems to pull through here.  You see the world through holes, and you enter worlds through holes.  They are pocketed "worlds" because of the nature of being a voyeur, of looking in to a place you can't fully explore.  Granted, levels are larger than any voyeur hole could ever hope to see, but I think the symbolism is intentional.

Either way, Cynthia doesn't have much time left in this world.  It turns out that the Walter who left that message on your door is also the Walter who killed ten people, took their hearts out of their bodies, scratched a number code into their flesh, and then finally killed himself in prison.  Since his death, there have been four others - five including Cynthia - all for the means of some ritual called the 21 Sacraments.  As you progress through the game, you go from the subway to the forest outside Silent Hill where an orphanage sits, and then a panopticon type water prison, a mall across the street from your apartment, and then an alternate version of your own apartment building.  Each of these will have a new victim for Walter, as well as shedding some light on who he is and why he's doing this.  Very quickly you realize that his final victim's are to be you and Eileen, your neighbor.  It turns out Walter is trying to bring his mother back, a woman who supposedly died (although it feels as though it implies she isn't dead so much as having abandoned him as a baby with his abusive father who didn't want him), a fixation he developed as a child.  This early developed obsession has split Walter, and you will occasionally see adult Walter or child Walter depending on where you are in the game, where child Walter is committing the murders while adult Walter is pushing the victims in the right direction to be killed.  The two don't seem to get along, and the younger Walter is scared of the older Walter.  This duality is captured in the guise of the Twin Victim enemy, conjoined twin baby heads on a body draped in some feathered cloak that will point and whisper at you until you get close enough to aggro them (terrifying as fuck, just by the way).  Younger Walter and, to an extent, adult Walter, believe that room 302 is their mother, as they were born and abandoned there.  You are also not the first tenant of room 302 to be going through this horror.  A journalist named Joseph was investigating Walter after being trapped in the room.  Somehow he entered the alternate-apartment and remains there, able to send you his old journal entries to help illuminate the horror befalling you.  In order to bring his mother back according to the 21 Sacraments, Walter must use the hearts of ten sinners and then kill himself.  After killing himself, his ghost must kill ten more people each based on a particular trait: "Temptation", "Wisdom", etc.  You are the "Wisdom" kill, having been shown every detail of the ritual through the game, and Eileen is the "Mother Reborn", who will vessel as Walter's mother.

In the Apartment world (easily my favorite level, with several mini-plots going on and a good deal of exploration), Eileen is severely injured and sent to the hospital.  Your hole is destroyed, and you must make another and enter the hospital world.  You find Eileen, and from here on out you have to retrace your steps through the levels, starting with the subway and up to the apartment world again, with Eileen in tow.  Eileen can't die, but she can become cursed if hit too much or abandoned for too long, and when cursed will hurt you periodically.  As far as escort missions go, Eileen isn't the worst person to have lugging around behind you, but as the levels become more and more compact and complex, she can be a serious chore to keep up with, especially when unkillable ghosts block her from following you.  But what really sets off this last half of the game is that your apartment no longer heals you.  Up to this point, you could either use a health item or you could go back to your apartment and let it heal you.  Now, not only does your apartment not heal, but it will periodically become "cursed" with ghost possessions where it will hurt you if you get too close to the cursed object.  These curses can be as docile as the windows banging or your peep hole bleeding, or as creepy as demon babies pressing through the wall in a nauseating mold pattern.  In order to get rid of these possessions, you have to use a holy candle in front of them, which are relatively uncommon (though there are more than you will need for all possessions) and with your limited inventory and its inability to stack can be a chore to lug back to the room.

Taking away your safe area is maybe a mark of genius, despite how annoying it can be late in the game.  Suddenly, everything feels that much more tense where you may have been a bit more risky.  Not only are you worried about leaving Eileen for too long to go back to the room lest she become more cursed, but now going back to save comes at the risk of you getting hurt.  Luckily, health items are far more plentiful in the last half, but never enough to make you feel as though you are safe.

Silent Hill games have always been good at stress.  While Silent Hill 1 and 2 where mildly stressful here and there, you probably never felt like you weren't going to finish the game.  Silent Hill 3 wasn't particularly hard, but it did pile on the enemies and conservatively dole out the health items, making that question a bit less certain.  Silent Hill 4 goes full tilt, putting so much stress in the latter half that you could be convinced to just drop the whole thing if you hadn't already come this far.  That is to say, I'm not entirely sure Silent Hill 4 would be called fun for the latter half of its run time.  I'm not sure if fun is exactly the point.  I'm a strong proponent that games don't always have to be fun to be good - after all, Schindler's List isn't a fun movie, but it is great - and I think Silent Hill 4 fits into that category.  If the gameplay itself didn't have you tied up in stress knots, the imagery more than likely will.  Rather than the demonic horrors of past games (the ghostly enemies still remain), Silent Hill 4 has a lot of mold imagery.  There are mold enemies that grow out the floor and make disgusting squelching noises.  As a matter of fact, mold seems to be a major thematic element.  Stagnation to the point of perversion, of a lack of care and being taken over by a foreign colony of filth and disease.  It feels gross, but it fits the themes.  The voyeurism themes feel kin to this mold imagery, of disregard for self for that which is outside, of planting yourself somewhere and perverting the people and areas around you with your silent interaction with them.  It never feels right when you are looking in on Eileen, even if it is in trying to make sure she's safe.  It doesn't feel altruistic at all, but selfish and perverse, of control somehow.

But the voyeurism themes sort of melt away by the end.  Like other Silent Hill games, there are multiple endings, and few of them seem to play off of the voyeur themes throughout.  Most play in to the voyeurism as a good thing, as something that did sort of save Eileen.  In the two endings where this isn't the case, the only tip towards voyeurism is in your inability to stop the horror from befalling others.  It could be that voyeurism was a byproduct, that you weren't some creep invading others' personal lives, but someone incapable of fighting your way out of a stagnant life.  Walter is more the voyeur, someone confused as to what and who he wants, and uses what he has observed in others' supposed 'sins' in order to meet his own selfish and violent means.  In this case, you are forced into a sickening state of voyeurism, and it becomes a way of life, a tethering between you and the awful works of Walter.  You see what he wants you to see, like being trapped in a box with a hole in it while someone directs that box in particular directions.  There is one odd image that keeps me on to the voyeurism vibe, which is in the hospital level.  There is a room where Eileen's head fills up the entire back of the room.  She looks disturbed and hurt, but her eyes are wild and follow you as you move around the room.  You were the small eye touching every inch of her and her room with your eyes, and now you are being drenched in her horrific vision.  It is an inverse of power, and one meant to make us feel uncomfortable.

The thing with Silent Hill 4: The Room is that it feels like a lot of stuff in one, ideas threading over one another without a clear way to tie them all off.  The themes are there, and impossible to overlook even when considering endings that don't quite play into them.  As with all Silent Hill games, there is an obvious David Lynch influence throughout, so perhaps it could be the point that none of this ties together, that it is a series of impressions layering over one another into a thick cloudiness preventing anything from being more coherent than mere shadow.  However we sum it up, Silent Hill 4 is one of the most effectively unsettling stories in the Silent Hill cannon, a horror both inside and out, as participant and victim.  It isn't a relaxing play by any means, and can feel like work by the end, but for those looking for something different, thematically challenging, and with a respect to the modes and methods in which stories can be explored in the medium, I can't help but give Silent Hill 4 some credit and regard.  It is extremely memorable, even as it left a bad taste in my mouth.  I never want to play it again, but I'll never forget it either.



7.5

[Game Review] Desert Child

I almost couldn't see the finish line through the dirt kicked up behind my competitor's hover bike.  I'd taken a lot of damage, and I was starving.  Losing the race didn't do me any favors, because now I'm strapped for cash.  I decide that fixing my bike is more important than eating, and then I walk around the city looking for work.  There's a pizza delivery job, a tutoring gig, or a bounty I could chase down, but my hunger is going to make doing any of that more than a little difficult.  I think for a second, chill beats thicker than the rain around me, and I decide its time to start making some sacrifices.  I don't have any power cells to sell, so I go to the music store and sell back enough records and tapes to eat.  I can always buy them back later, once things start to look better.  I'll buy the whole store, once I win the Grand Prix.  Words are easy, though.  Now it's time to put action to them.

The story arch of Desert Child comes out naturally, almost entirely through gameplay with little in the way of dialogue or guidance.  Outside of one character who suggests you get to Mars, there isn't any direction or tutorial.  You have your goal, and now you head towards it.  Everything else plot-wise - who your character is, his struggles, and what it means to win - comes from your experience with him, your choices.  Does he lift a part from this bike off the street and risk attention from the cops, or does he deliver pizzas and make an honest wage to buy the part himself?  It makes you feel as though the character is being build in your head, in the ludonarrative, and it feels all the more real and immersive for it.

You start as some kid with a hover bike and barely enough money in his pocket for food, and eventually become a well off competitor in the Grand Prix on Mars.  You start on Earth, and must save up for a ticket to Mars while balancing out life costs like food and repairs on your bike.  Once you get your ticket off this rock, you find yourself in a city with a wealth to do and one goal in mind: save up $10,000 for the entry fee to the Grand Prix.  The city is where you can truly get lost.  There are odd jobs here and there, some legal - tutoring other racers, testing out an experimental gun for a mechanic, delivering pizzas - and some that are illegal - throwing a race, hacking a bank, etc.  All that matters is scraping up the cash so you can mod or fix your bike, feed yourself, and maybe buy a couple tunes to bop as you walk the streets and beat against the daily grind.  Watch out for some of those beans in the market, though.  They can have . . . odd effects.

The game being gameplay focused for story means that fail states are cannon, which excited me when I lost my first attempt at the Grand Prix but had made more than enough money in the competition to buy another entry ticket.  Sure, the game gets easier once you've made it to the Grand Prix because of this, but it feels realistic and consistent with the world.  I'm not a winner yet, but I am a competitor, and I've gone from struggling at the fringes of underground racing circles to a mainstay with an honest to God profession.  It was a unique frustration.  I no longer felt like an underdog, but that didn't dissuade me from wanting that Grand Prize. I felt like I'd entered a new chapter in this character's story.

Succinctly, Desert Child mixes racing games (with quite a lot of shooting) with a miniature life sim connecting the different pieces together.  This life sim is one of the two major features that really ties this game together into a narrative experience as well as a game in a natural way.  The other is the style.  Desert Child oozes style, and is easily summed up as: cool af.  TripHop- and Vaporwave-inspired beats fill out the game's soundtrack (as well as a couple satiric tapes of radio talk, such as an Alex Jones show and an Alan Watts style speech about racing bikes), and the animation and pixel art gives the game a feel like it was yanked out of the early 90s and modified for modern gaming similar to how the bike's are in the story.  It is a stylistic triumph, utilizing pretty tired tropes at this point to their maximum potential, and getting away with it anyway.  It's hard not to feel so fucking cool while playing this game.

It's incredibly immersive, and not due to a sense of realism in terms of graphics, but because of it's commitment to world context and complete canonizing of all actions.  You can feel the struggle of every inch gained, and the weight of every dollar wasted.  It feels like a Russian Doll of games that all interact and rely on one another, along the lines of the Persona series (although not nearly as long or complicated -- Desert Child is 3 hours).  That struggle, however, comes at a cost.  Desert Child is grindy, and that generally goes without saying as the life sim aspect is meant to give meaning to grinding, but even so the game is grindy beyond even what its presentation and gameplay context can cover up or justify.  Saving up for the Grand Prix can be a little exhausting, both because your payouts don't grow as you get better, and because races and jobs only get harder, making the struggle just as you're toeing the finish line that much more stressful, and frustrating.  It's only a small complaint, but it dampens a nearly perfect experience.  As we continue to talk about game stories and how we blend cinematic elements with gameplay storytelling, and as we learn the rules and limits to what we are willing to overlook when it comes to ludonarrative dissonance, Desert Child stands proudly as uncinematic in execution and yet more cinematic in feel than most games, and with virtually no ludonarrative dissonance to speak of.  Storytelling in gameplay alone is alive and well here, and it will probably go down as one of my top 10 games of the year.



9.0

[Game Review] Evoland

One of my primary criticisms of The Outer Worlds (and Bethesda RPGs in general) was in how it felt a lot more like an amusement park ride than it did an RPG.  Part of this comes from the general ethos of the genre.  RPGs are meant to give you people, cultures, places, and stories to explore and sink yourself into, and that immersion is easily broken when the machinery is showing.  What makes Evoland so fun and interesting is that it is an amusement park ride rather than an RPG.  You aren't being immersed in a world (the story and characters are intentionally trite, referencing a wealth of RPG plots and mcguffins) as a sense of place so much as a museum of style, technology, and loving references to games of the past.

Evoland's gimmick is in using chests to unlock newer technology as the game progresses.  Starting with GameBoy era graphics and sound, you eventually move up to the 16-bit stylings of the SNES, early PSX/N64 graphics (although, without my favorite lack of anti-aliasing and wobbly polygons), and upwards to about PS2 quality (with one, Diablo III referencing level briefly bumping us up a generation or two).  Likewise, gameplay pings between early Zelda to SNES era Final Fantasy to mid-era Zelda to eventually something like . . . God of War? I'm not sure exactly what you would call the final boss.  Unlocking the newer graphical interfaces and renderings is one of those nostalgia baiting things that could easily be criticized, but I found myself charmed by Evoland's skipping through memory lane, and partially that was due to wondering exactly how far they were going to go.
The issue with Evoland is that it is only the bare minimum of a game.  You do have to confront bosses, use potions, level up, and interact with NPCs, but it's more suggestive of a game than a challenge.  I died quite a few times through Evoland, but a large part of that was because of a slight lack of comfortable game feel (attacking feels a bit finicky, as does moving, but I'm not judging it too harshly as this is plainly not where the game was trying to focus my attention).  Since combat and mechanics keep changing, there isn't much time to really explore anything, so the mechanics introduced are pretty much always the simplest, most boiled down feel of an old system (like a Final Fantasy type party system) without any of what made those systems interesting.  It's like a flavor platter, a taste test through history perfect for those who know a lot about the history of RPGs and those who want to learn (although the context to each style and mechanic won't be given to you, you can still get a brief, simple feel for what they are meant to invoke or ask of you).  All of this makes it that much more frustrating when they introduced an actually interesting mechanic late in the game where you are able to switch between eras of game in order to solve one puzzle.  Knowing there is an Evoland II and that it is much longer helps weaken my annoyance, but even then that's a shitty cop-out to what is an underdeveloped mechanic, and one that seems more exciting than anything else in the game.

Evoland is a novelty, and that isn't always a bad thing.  It's sweet, it's reaffirming to those with our hobby, and while all of that can be a severe criticism, Evoland has managed to slip by with just the right amount of charm and brevity.  Sometimes a love letter is a pandering experience, but once in awhile it feels as though those who composed it have as much love as those who received it.



7.0