[Game Review] Resident Evil 3 (2020)

The Resident Evil series has something that always brings me back, no matter what people are saying about it.  I haven't played every game, but it's fair to say that, generally, I love the series.  That said, my love for the series has always been closer to the crazy puzzle box survival entries like Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, or Resident Evil 7, rather than the more action oriented entries like Resident Evil 5.  Resident Evil 4 was the only time it ever worked for me, partially due it not forgoing the tension the series was known for, and partially because the plot and writing was so campy and lovable it makes the game hard to dislike (although, if I had a criticism for the game, it would be that it was too long).  All of this is to say that Resident Evil 3, the remake of the PS1 sequel sans subtitle, was probably not going to appeal to me in the first place.

One of my regrets in my past reviews was that I was a bit too harsh on Resident Evil 2 (2019).  The game was unlucky enough to be released around the time I had decided to bulldoze my way through multiple installments of the franchise, and thus was the third game I played in a row, with the others being the masterful Resident Evil remake and the spectacular new direction of Resident Evil 7.  When Resident Evil 3 was announced and said to be developed by the same team and in the same engine as Resident Evil 2, I was pretty excited.  The original PS1 games aren't the easiest to play these days, and though I've never beaten any of the originals, of what I played Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was always my least favorite.  The action focus, brisk runtime, and lack of parallel campaigns was always a turn off for me.  The story choice mechanic in the original was always neat, but hardly enough to sell me on what was essentially a lesser sequel to two classics.

Resident Evil 3 drops the story choices, but keeps the action focus.  Talking about the story is sort of a waste of time, because Resident Evil stories are all ridiculous, and you either have fun with them or you don't.  The gameplay is where a Resident Evil game lives or dies, and Resident Evil 3 did try, for what it's worth, but just couldn't quite cut it.  The gameplay is largely the same as in Resident Evil 2, albeit with minimal exploration and its resource management at odds with the way it siphons you through conflict.  Resident Evil 2 worked because choosing how to limit or kill zombies (and which you chose for either option) was tactical.  It was thinking ahead to where you were going to need to go later, and what could potentially pose a problem if, say, Mr. X showed up surprisingly.  Given the linear nature of Resident Evil 3, this conceit is no longer applicable in the first place.  To add insult to injury, however, there are several sections where you are so swamped with enemies you have no choice but to mow them down, limiting supplies be damned (at one point even equipping you with a machine gun and plenty of ammo).  It takes a lot of the fun out of the game.  Resident Evil 3 still has those basic mechanics that Resident Evil 2 had, but the sentiment is different.  Nothing exemplifies this better than the fact that Jill is given a dodge move, and Carlos a melee move.  I don't dislike these moves, but it does feel they could have been better utilized if they were a part of parallel campaigns rather than different sections of a single, linear campaign.  

While the linearity and mediocre combat are definitely the worst offenses in Resident Evil 3, what contributes the final death nail is Nemesis himself.  Mr. X was one of the coolest and most tension building mechanics in Resident Evil 2, adding a layer of caution to all of the proceedings in that game.  Nemesis is a scripted creature, only appearing when he needs to in the plot.  In fairness, this was also true of the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, but I didn't much care for it there, either.  He acts as a boss fight when you need one (so, every boss fight is him), and a bullet sponge or quicktime event otherwise, meaning dodging him or pressing the prompted button are just about all you have when it comes to interaction with the dude.  I'm surprised they didn't enhance his role any more, as the only time he gave an inkling of the Mr. X magic was when he pursued me in the city blocks that make up the first level of the game.

The city blocks are easily the most enjoyable parts of the whole game.  Part of this is because it gets closest to the puzzle mansion design of the earlier titles, but also because every subsequent place is the boring parts of any Resident Evil game: sewers, hospital, lab.  I was warming up to the game nicely during the city section after being slightly annoyed at the "run in one direction from scripted event" introduction, but when I cut three chains with the bolt cutters and the game told me I could throw them away since I wouldn't need them again, the game deflated for me and never picked back up.

Much like the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, this game feels like it was made to fill a quota rather than for any good reason.  The game mostly feels like a slim mod of Resident Evil 2, which wouldn't be such a bad thing if it didn't take everything out of that game that was good.  And it isn't that Resident Evil 3 is an awful game, because it isn't.  It is just annoyingly mediocre, but I'm not sure that was totally the developer's fault.  They were working with weak source material, no matter what anyone says about their days as a child playing that demo disc that came with Dino Crisis.  As I said in my last Resident Evil review, I sincerely hope they keep with the remakes, especially since Resident Evil 4 could be the next one up (Code: Veronica would not be a terrible choice, either, or Dino Crisis, which could use a second try).  If there was any other game in the series that would almost definitely benefit from this sort of remake process, it would be Resident Evil 4.  Until then, however, I might just be cautious.  Here's hoping Resident Evil VIII: Village doesn't disappoint.



6.0

[Game Review] The Last of Us Part II

I can't think of a game that has had a more contentious release than The Last of Us Part II.  What's worse about it all is the contents of this contentiousness.  The conflicts that permeate the discourse about this game are high caliber toxicity on the part of the gaming public, and a reductionist take on the part of some particular people in the critical sphere.  This isn't to say The Last of Us Part II isn't incredibly flawed, because it is, but the discourse that has begun to bloom like the rafflesia arnoldii, the corpse lily of the amazon, has taken things into uncomfortable political waters that are only of some minor merit, a far cry from the types of conversations we are likely to have in the future about this game.  Make no mistake, regardless of opinions currently tracking their muddy, bloody foot prints through the media currently (July 1st, 2020, as of this writing), this is an important game.  In a word, The Last of Us Part II is unflinchingly ambitious, not just on what it tries to do (as some have pointed out there are elements that are far below original, nearing cliche) but in what it asks of its players, regardless of whether it is successful.

We will get into spoilers later, but let us start in an openly accessible way so you can see if maybe you want to try this game for yourself.  The Last of Us Part II is essentially a stealth shooter, with a surprising amount of exploration.  Like the first game, you will find yourself in post-apocalypse buildings looking through so many drawers scavenging supplies you'll be doing it in your sleep.  There are well over a hundred collectibles in the game, from trading cards to coins to scraps of paper left by the dead, all hoping for either a better world or vengeance on those who took them to their bitter end.  Also like the first game, you will need to balance resources and stealth with cover based combat, oscillating between human combatants with excellent (and I mean some of the best in any game ever) AI and the zombies that brought the world to its knees (with less than stellar AI).
 The gameplay of The Last of Us Part II is essentially an expanded and tightened version of the first, and while the original game's gameplay was never my favorite aspect, in Part II it excelled past my expectations.

The first half of the game has some of the best stealth I've ever played, and that is largely due to the impeccable level design in this section of the game and the abilities given to Ellie in which you execute hastily formed plans.  Ellie's weapon loadout is just about pitch perfect, allowing equal measure stealth and aggression, depending on what the situation needs.  Likewise, your crafting will start out simple to the point of having excess in most supplies (especially on normal, although this gets more challenging on harder difficulties), but will begin to take shape as the resource management it needs to be, allowing for useful tools like noise makers, silencers, and arrows for your bow whose components overlap one another.  Sneaking around is no small feat, either.  You're given a myriad of paths you can take, from slipping between holes in the wall to try and circumvent people hunting for you, to going prone in long grass to try and crawl your way around a battlefield.  You always have verbs to take advantage of, meaning the tried-and-true and, honestly, annoying mechanic in stealth games of "wait, wait, move, wait" is virtually done away with except in particularly tense circumstances.  You feel as though you are coming up with stuff on the fly, and on the fly you will need to concoct plans because the AI is relentless at times.  The AI doesn't make the same move twice, hardly, even when reloading a checkpoint.  They will investigate sounds, see you lining up a shot (albeit with just a tad too much leniency in how long it actually takes them to notice you there), and will sometimes patrol with dogs that will track your scent, requiring both quick thinking and covert action if you don't want to be mauled and found out.  It is almost unending tension throughout, which can begin to wear on you after awhile.

The Last of Us Part II is a grueling, violent, oppressive game.  You will be in equal measure having fun and misery, and its absurdly long playtime only furthers how exhausting this game is.  If you're quick, you can get through the game in about 20 hours.  I took 35 hours to get through, and 35 hours here is not equivocal to an RPG of equal length, necessarily.  An RPG will often let you explore, relax, and goof off in minigames to pad out that 20 hour game into a 100 hour game.  There is no fluff in The Last of Us Part II (and yes, those of you getting mad, we will get to that).  It is tight, tension filled misery through its entire run.  I've never felt so tired playing a game in my life, and I'm over 60 hours into Persona 4 Golden as we speak, another busy-as-hell game with no reprieve.  But I'd argue this is a good thing, and that has to do with the ending, which I won't spoil just yet.  Know going in that if you begin to feel exhausted, then that emotion is going to service you in the end.

Graphically, The Last of Us Part II is one of the most astounding achievements I've ever seen in gaming.  I live in Seattle, so seeing this city brought to life with such clarity (and quite a bit of geographical shifting, but it is a game after all) was a fun experience.  As well, the lighting, particle effects, and all the details have a lush character to them that shows these guys are at the top of their craft here.  No matter the response to this game, they should absolutely be proud of what they've done here, because it is astounding how good this game looks.    

I strongly recommend The Last of Us Part II to those of you who find this interesting, even if you haven't played the first game (and if you have, stick with it regardless of what happens).  I will not guarantee you will like all of it, or that you will come away thinking the game is great, but that it will be an experience you will absolutely not forget.

Spoilers below, and I strongly suggest not reading further if you haven't played the game, as going in blind makes the game that much better.

I want to get into the most contentious points of the game, but first let's run through what this game is from a spoiler filled point of view.  The Last of Us Part II's plot follows Ellie for a majority of it, the girl immune to the fungal infection that took out most of the human race.  She is rare in her condition, and the first game had Joel, the grizzled, violent man with more than a little trauma twisting up his worldview, taking her across the US as cargo to a faction called the Fireflies who believe they can make a vaccine if they research her, only for him to find a surrogate daughter in the charming teen.  When Joel realizes that Ellie would need to die in order to research a vaccine, he kills the doctors that could do the procedure (and many, many more), takes her out of the facility, and lies to her saying that there were dozens who were immune, and that there was no cure.  Ellie has doubts about his claim, and although we don't realize it until about the halfway point of the game, Ellie actually figured out the truth, confronted Joel, and told him she essentially wanted nothing to do with him ever again.  When Joel is brutally murdered in front of here by vengeance seeking ex-fireflies, lead by a girl named Abby, Ellie sets out to kill them all, especially their leader.  This brings her to Seattle for three days, where she and her girlfriend, Dina, look for clues and follow Joel's brother, who set out the day before them without telling anyone.  Ellie descends into more and more violence as she gets closer, and the fact that her girlfriend is pregnant with her previous boyfriend's baby and needs medical attention doesn't stop her from carrying on.  After killing just about everyone except Abby, Ellie meets up with Joel's brother Tommy, who tells them it's time to head home.  They did what they could, for now, and they need to call it.  That's when Abby breaks into where they are staying, and points a gun at them.  Just before it looks like she is going to shoot, we are thrust into a flashback, starting on day 1 when Ellie got to Seattle, but from Abby's point of view.

The contentious dialogue over this game comes in many, many flavors, with only a few feeling as though they have merit, and fewer still that seems to talk about something in the game without ignoring many of the themes and consequences throughout.  The game was swamped upon release over the death of Joel, which many people thought was overly callous and, more importantly, was an unfitting end to one of their favorite characters.  The conversation here is almost not worth talking about, as anyone who thought Joel was a good person that didn't deserve what he got or at the least brought this upon himself wasn't paying much attention.  The moral struggle of the first game was to get you to empathize with an awful man, to understand why he was awful, what twisted him that way, and to understand that it was something born of trauma, survival, and generational divide.  We aren't asked to forgive or apologize for Joel, we are asked to understand, so that when we don't like him we get a full picture of who he is.  It is like hate without catharsis, asking you to reckon with not just what you think is right, but also what you hate with what you think is wrong.  That ending did not sit correctly with some of the players, who still thought Joel did the right thing.  It never felt to me like this was a valid interpretation of the first game, as though that was an extremely cherry picked interpretation of the events that transpired.  But nevertheless, people were mad when Joel was killed early in the second game, a plot point I think was one of the smartest (albeit most expected) the game pulls.  A redemption arch for Joel does sort of exist in The Last of Us Part II, where we see how Joel spent his remaining days trying to be a better father to Ellie, and failing about as often as he succeeded.  It doesn't forgive his past actions, but it shows he still had growth to be had, and that he had an important effect on other people.

Two of the other arguments against this game are rooted in bigotry, plain and simple.  People hate that Ellie is openly gay, that there is a trans character in this game, and that they've apparently never been to a gym in their lives because they think Abby's physique is "unrealistic" for a woman to have.  It's trite hate at this point from a group of people that stunted their growth at fourteen, and I can't say with enough emphasis fuck them and leave them behind.  Their discourse isn't worth listening to.  They can go on about virtue signalling or that this is mere politics and nothing to do with story, but that obviously ignores the fact that LGBTQ+ individuals exist.  For their part to be normalized in media, it means they need to be put in media.  If you don't like their inclusion in media because you think it's the developers or writers trying to hard to be inclusionary, then you obviously don't know what you are talking about.  The only reason it seems strange is because it isn't normalized, and the only reason it isn't normalized is because people get mad when they are included.  It is circular logic rooted in hate, worthy only of being buried as deep as it will go.

The last two points of contention have to do with the game's pacing and with the themes of violence and revenge.  And here is where we start getting into an interesting discussion.  On the first part, I have to wholeheartedly agree.  This game's pacing is brutal.  The first quarter or so is a slow, plotless walk around Seattle with a few skirmishes here and there, and Ellie and Dina sort of tastelessly one-upping each other on the brutalities they've faced in their youth.  It isn't bad, but it isn't a very good start post-prologue.  But that isn't really what people are talking about when they talk about the pacing of this game.  What everyone refers to is Abby's story, which takes up half of the game's runtime.

Abby's story has several flaws with it, and they revolve around several plot flaws of the game entire.  Abby is obviously not nearly as interesting as Ellie or Joel, despite the excellent work of her voice actress.  She is a militaristic character, who was once a Firefly and now belongs to WLF, an army with a plan.  Militarized factions are extremely common in games in this day and age, and they grow tired quick.  Fighting them was enough for me to be over it already, so when I was forced to play as one for ten hours it worked against my getting to like Abby.  Likewise, Abby is so strict with her beliefs, she doesn't come close to the complexity that Joel or Ellie had.  Her motivation is sound, as we learn her father was the surgeon Joel unceremoniously kills at the end of the first game, and I had no difficulty empathizing with her.  But the point was made relatively early on. The first day in Seattle as Abby is a drag, one that kills the pace immediately as the tension of Ellie's story had ratcheted up to an almost unbearable degree.  I know of at least one person that quit once the narrative switched to Abby, feeling it wasn't worth feeling like starting over in order to earn his ending.  I can't fault him too much for that, but after pushing through Abby's story I did end up liking it.  The character of Lev that Abby meets along the way was more interesting than Abby herself, having been raised in the local cult derogatorily called Scars.  Likewise, characters we meet in Ellie's section like Owen and Mel had their own emotional archs that were interesting, although I found myself liking Owen then disliking Owen by the end of it.  Whether that was a plus is up for debate, but I lean towards yes.  The issue here isn't just or mostly the story itself, so much as the fact that Abby's story feels like a second rate version of Ellie's story, even though structurally it should work.  Ellie's arch is about enacting vengeance, and Abby's arch is about overcoming vengeance, learning to live with what you did in its name, and learning to be compassionate again.  There is a running theme in both of The Last of Us games that people are more empathetic than groups, and that continues here as Abby is forced to go AWOL to help two Scars runaways, against here better, indoctrinated judgement.  She risks life and limb (and not only her own) in order to selfishly save these two, and it is worth remarking that we agree more with Abby's selfish selflessness than Ellie's selfishness.  Both run their friends and loved ones into trouble, but one side has a sliver of hope and redemption in it, a promise of something else other than this horror we have been subjected to thus far.

There has been talk among my friends that they should have just ping-ponged between Ellie and Abby throughout the story rather than running them through one at a time, and I partially agree with this.  I think Ellie should have had a day one, then Abby a day one, then Ellie can go through part of day two, and then Abby can go all the way through part of day three, and we could have this imbalanced swinging affect going on so the plot doesn't start to feel too obvious in its parallels.  But saying this is easy, and I can just about guarantee you that different plot organization was tried during development, and for whatever reason this seemed like the best choice.  I think their ambitions, not just to tell a complete story in this odd sequencing, but also to follow a collective of people running over one another and show a condition rather than characters, is great.  Although people want to root for characters, in real life finding characters to root for is becoming increasingly difficult due to social media and the darker side of some of these public figures being easier and easier to expose.  Idol worship is flawed inherently, because it implies some idyllic example that cannot exist.  People are messy, and they are messy in part because of the context they are thrust in.  I think this is the right type of story to tell, just not told to its absolute best.

On the topic of vengeance and violence, I find the same thing repeated throughout conversations: this game beats you over the head with how bad violence is, this game is about revenge, but no one learns their lesson.  The issue I have with this argument lies partially in interpretation, and partially in media literacy.  The violence is obvious.  It was stated in the last game, and to nix it here would be disingenuous.  It is an axiom to the story, a thematic backbone not the theme itself.  Vengeance, likewise, ignores Abby's story entirely, as well as the ending.  Abby does not die.  Abby fights Ellie, but gives up at the behest of Lev, and they go to Santa Barbara to try and find a reorganized Fireflies who are rumored to be stationed there.  Ellie goes back with Dina, who has her baby, and they live on a farm for what seems like an epilogue, but is really a stop-gap.  Ellie has PTSD flashbacks that debilitate her and won't let her rest.  When Tommy, injured by Abby and now with a limp and only one eye, finds out where Abby might be, he tells Ellie to Dina's anger.  But Ellie can't let go, and she leaves to exact her revenge.  When she finally gets to Abby, she finds her crucified but alive on a beach, emaciated and her hair cut ragged.  Still, in this weakened state, Ellie can't let it go.  She won't kill Abby outright, either, though.  They need to fight.  Abby says she won't, that she's done with all that, but Ellie threatens Lev, who isn't even conscious.  After an exhausting, brutal fight in which Ellie loses two fingers, Ellie pins her under the water and begins to drown her.  But she can't go through with it.  She breaks down into weeping, clutching her wounded side, and tells them to leave. When Ellie returns to the farm, Dina has moved out.  Ellie picks up here guitar and tries to play, but the elegance of her playing is lost because of her fingers.  The strings buzz or mute in an ugly, unrefined way.  She has lost a lot, and she leaves the guitar behind as she leaves the farm.

One argument popularly repeated on the internet is that no one learns their lesson, and I cannot understand how anyone can make this argument at all.  You can argue Ellie didn't learn her lesson, but so what?  I did.  I saw it, I experienced it through her eyes, and I felt the loss.  If she didn't, then I get the burden of her actions, and that is one of the greatest, most unique aspects to art that isn't often talked about.  In Shadow of the Colossus, Wander doesn't reflect on whether what he did was right.  I do that.  The contrast between player and playable character is a powerful tool games have to put us into a contentious place with someone, and there is a richness there that I love.  And even saying that, I cannot believe Ellie felt nothing about what she did when she stops short while playing that guitar in her final moments.  I cannot believe that when Abby tells Ellie she's done fighting, that she didn't reflect on vengeance.  Vengeance is outright attacked throughout the game, being shown to be an empty, ego and grief led piece of selfishness that permeates the misery the world is already wrought with.  Vengeance isn't the point either.  It's cruelty and it's many forms, and how cruelty always feels justified by those who enact it. It was cruelty that made the Scars gut trespassers, cruelty that led the WLF to genocide the Scars, cruelty that led to Joel's death, that led to Joel's survival, that led Ellie into a lonely life without anyone with her.  Joel learned the hard way that he can't be alone.  Ellie missed that lesson, and only learned that cruelty is the language the whole world knows how to speak.




9.0                      

[Game Review] Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee

Sometimes the historical games you "need to play" aren't perfect.  Sometimes classics aren't perfect, either.  That last statement can be a point of contention with many who like to analyze media and art and try to, somehow, quantify their existence within the canon of their respective medium or in popular culture.  Even the most staunch of critics, opposed to any sort of objectivity (a sentiment I believe in as art is inherently subjective), and opposed to the use of numbering systems to rank games usually come to some sort of quantification with regards to the use of the word "classic".  Generally, classic is reserved for those works that seem to excel beyond the greatness of the medium towards something that seems nearly criticism proof, or, at the very least, aged with grace.  This assessment of classic is plainly subjective, since what "grace" means in this context relies on what you are willing to put up with for the time.  Super Mario Bros. 3, a bona-fide classic, can be seen by some to have aged gracefully in its iconic art style, but there are graphical glitches galore and the limited color pallet does stop short of the true wonder the Mario series could reach, as made apparent by Super Mario World.  The point is, classic has subjective clearance in its margins, and to accept that is to accept that classics do not have to be perfect.  To accept that classics do not have to be perfect, we should also accept that what defines a classic must be some other measure.

My measure for a classic is something that feels largely original, that feels self contained despite its influences, and that executes on its concept with an amount of grace or skill that it feels worth more than the sum of its parts.  And yes, that is a subjective assessment, and I think there is no other way of measuring it.  Take Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, the game that you know I'm going to talk about because of the title of this post.  It is heavily flawed, with many annoyances that will turn players off early in the game (as it threatened to do with me), but with enough going for it, with a fun and unique idea that felt independent on the original Playstation (and PC) that it stands up in a crowd still as one of those gaming gems that few have played, but those who have love to talk about.

The first Oddworld game is a major component of the atmospheric platformer genre, a genre I've been playing a lot lately (and am just about sick of at this point).  The idea to the genre is simple. Take the Mario gameplay and slow it way down.  Let you think about your platforming, make it into a puzzle, and give the game a coat of paint that contextualizes what you're doing into something higher than what its gameplay allows. The original Prince of Persia gets often credited this way, but that game didn't have much in the way of plot importance or ambience.  It's aesthetic felt like a neat excuse for platforming.  Its with games like Another World that the genre feels like it had made its mark in the medium, where we had the design principles laid out for others to follow.

Abe's Oddysee contextualizes its puzzle-platforming with story, character, and world.  And that's largely where the game succeeds.  The world of the mudokons, the fish-like race of the titular Abe, are cute and slapstick, but they have a history.  They code as (a potentially problematic rendition of) Native Americans, subjugated by a big corporation that has ravaged the world.  When dopey Abe accidentally hears that they plan on using mudokons for their next food product, he sets out to escape the factory.  Once away, he falls into the homeland of his people, who tell him he was destined to save his race from enslavement by the evil corporation, and must pass a series of trials and then return to the factory to set as many mudokons free.  The set up here is admirable, even if it is obvious, even for 90s standards.  The relatively overdone plot is executed with character, giving unique designs to every creature in the game, as well as injecting it with a healthy dose of humor.  It's hard not to love the mudokons, and you even get some kind of respect for the scrags or slogs as the game progresses, realizing they are wild animals rather than monsters set to kill you.  Mechanically, they are 'puzzle hazards'.  The trials you are asked to perform requires you to understand the quirks of two of the different creatures, realizing that one will run away from you unless they have the number advantage while the other will come after you unless contested by another of its species.  The game provides a mechanical example of these creatures' behavior.

The platforming is pretty standard from where we are today, and it wasn't exactly innovative at the time, but it still boasts some good puzzles to get your head around.  Learning your movement speed doing different actions, as well as the way actions can be combined to execute certain tasks, is the general core to gameplay.  You're supposed to get down timings and read your environment carefully in order to proceed.  The plot sets you up rather well in contextualizing the gameplay: you must escape the factory first by getting through security measures put in place to kill mudokons trying to escape, and then you must face trials before returning to get past the enhanced security once they realized you left.  It isn't any more than it needs to be, but that's fine because the contextualizing is where the heart of the game is, and that is what creates something relatively seamless out of the whole.

I say relatively because there are a handful of caveats to be had.  The game is old, plainly enough.  It feels old.  The movement is based on an invisible grid, one you will get the hang of as you play but will lead to more deaths than you are bound to find fair.  When precision jumping - often while being pursued or otherwise timed - is core to your gameplay, controls are extremely important.  The muddiness of this game's controls are a sore spot.  Because of the grid-based design, that means loading your jump early on the grid space you want to jump out of.  Eyeballing it as you would in a modern platformer just isn't going to cut it.  You learn to load your verbs early, but that adjustment will always feel awkward.  More than half of my deaths during my most recent playthrough were to muddy controls, and I won't convince you this is fair play.  Likewise, the checkpoint system can often be too far apart.  The idea is that this game wants to not only challenge you with its puzzles and platforming, but also in your ability to maintain that over a certain sequence.  This is relatively fine in practice under good conditions, but with the control issues above it can feel taxing throughout a playthrough.  The save feature doesn't fair much better.  You don't save your game overall, rather saving the location.  This means if you are going through the Zulag 3 level, for example, the first area you are in is called Zulag 3 P14.  The next area, however, is called Zulag 3 P12, meaning you have to keep track of the level name in order to load.  Hitting the load button shows you the list of levels you've unlocked in alphabetical order, rather than sequence, and some of this is do to some nonlinear sections, but that obviously isn't true throughout the game.  Struggling with the basic aspects of Abe's Oddysee is a test of patience, but as I started out this review saying, I think that it is a test worth pushing through.

Gaming has rarely seen a world that feels like Oddworld, and the series only managed four games of differing types before it shut its doors (although with the recent announcement of a new game, there is a chance the series could be reborn, but I have my doubts given its relatively strange appeal).  It stands uniquely on its own, as well as within its rather bloated genre, and informed a lot of the games that would come after it.  If you don't notice a touch of Oddworld in the likes of Little Nightmares or Inside, I'm not sure you're paying attention.  It is a severely flawed experience, but one that largely comes with age rather than  incompetence.  Art grows through the years, and it is important to watch the rings change color because that is usually where the magic lies.



8.5

[Game Review} VVVVVV

Hard as nails platformers aren't anything new.  They're old as consoles, with early renditions like Pitfall leading us to Super Mario Bros. to Donkey Kong Country to more modern outputs like Super Meat Boy.  It's a classic genre among classics, and as such saying anything about the subject is saying something about gaming history.  Standing out in the genre is a matter of alchemy, usually, or at the very least a blending of genres.  VVVVVV is no exception to the latter, adding in a slight metroidvania tinge to how it lays its levels out, but is otherwise so traditional as to be unremarkable on its surface.  But it's made with so much love, how could I not recommend it?

VVVVVV makes one odd turn with the genre in that it doesn't have traditional jump button.  Instead, it uses a "flip", where hitting the action button inverts gravity, making you plummet to the opposite side of the screen.  In essence, this is more or less a jump button, but with a few more obstacles to overcome.  you need to be thinking about what is above you as well as below, and with the addition of lasers that flip you when you touch them, platforming can be a test of patience, speed, and pitch-perfect timing.  Luckily, respawning is no big hassle.  Unlike in the older games this one is a loving homage to, there is no lives system, and respawning is instantaneous to the most recent checkpoint marker.  Checkpoint markers are liberally placed as well, making clear the game is testing you in sequences, not in how well you can master multiple challenges at once, a welcome change to things I've been playing recently.

Coating the frustration is an aesthetic similar to that of a Commodore 64, albeit with some variance here and there.  Colors splash and change going from screen to screen, gloriously recreating what was cool about the older graphics without the flickering issues or extreme restrictions the original hardware had.  The soundtrack pulses and pounds with unending energy, like one long boss fight.  It's easily one of my favorite of these old school type soundtracks, capturing what was so good about them without belaboring the classic feel, rather wanting to be good music in its own right.

If there was criticism to be had that couldn't be glossed over out of sheer joy this game brings, it would be that the screen changing mechanic - a requirement for older games being referenced here - can be infuriatingly disorienting.  For the most part, this will feel par for the course, adding a fair challenge to the already challenging gameplay, but on occasion it virtually requires memorization in order to accomplish.  In particular, having to flip up a screen and land on a particularly small platform between spikes is more of a suggested guess than it is skill because the black background gives you little reference in which to right yourself before the next screen has loaded.  Your speed is a major plus to the game and it's kinetic feel, but is a hindrance when getting your bearings becomes nigh impossible without a moment of transition.  Let's not forget that most of these older games that used transitions like this had a delay, a technical limitation that affected play nonetheless.  The fast paced nature of VVVVVV doesn't do these moments favors, but it isn't game breaking.

The only real thing to say is that VVVVVV is a stylish, fun throwback that circumvents the nostalgia overload that is today's indie market (and, just for the sake of clarifications, this game is ten years old at this point) by referencing something even older, and by doing it with style.  It won't stick out as original, but it will scratch the itch it was meant to without your more critical mind to get in the way.  It was made for the fun it, not for a statement.  It does what it does well - not perfectly - and satisfies anyone who loves the genre.  At least for a little bit.



8.0    

[Game Review] Antichamber

Antichamber released to almost overwhelming praise in 2013, and to some degree it was warranted.  It was a stylish puzzle game with some interesting mechanics, an unpredictable explorable world (if you could call it that), and a neat hook.  The game capitalized on non-euclidean space, a concept that had gotten some buzz only a few years before when it was rumored to be the "F-Stop" feature deleted from Portal 2.  Antichamber had been in development for longer than that, however, and so its release was just fortunate timing.  Non-euclidean space essentially means that space does not have to obey proper rules of physics.  You can fall a mile, but climb your way back up with a 2 foot ladder, for instance.  You could walk down a hall, realize you went the wrong way, only to turn around and realize that an entirely new hallway has appeared behind you.  It's pretty well the definition of trippy shit, and Antichamber rode that reputation in the year or so following release.

Antichamber's real problem is that it is only occasionally a good puzzle game.  The early third of the game is essentially built around its non-euclidean gimmick.  A few of these trials are neat gimmicks, such as the puzzle with the two staircases that is (nearly) impossible not to solve, but the rest are usually thin tricks rather than puzzles.  A bridge can disappear below you, causing you to plummet down a pit and find a cartoon picture, your indicator throughout the game that you've solved a puzzle.  Except there was no puzzle solved, you simply fell for their trap.  This happens multiple times, and usually the trick to it is that you have to fail once in order to succeed, or to gain progress while not reaching the point you wanted to, now having to find a new way around to the point you intended.  Most of these are totally harmless, and I'd say none of them are actually anything negative in their own right, but they comprise of nearly all of the non-euclidean puzzles in the game.  The rest of the game, and where the game actually turns itself into a rather good puzzler, is with the guns.

The gun sections have a big problem, but before that problem rears its head, they start out rather good.  The guns each give you a new way of manipulating colored squares that you'll find.  These squares are usually used to solve puzzles, and differently colored squares can have different features (although this is mostly only true to non-blue squares, as all non-blue squares inherit the previous square color's mechanic).  Solving the different functions of these squares puzzles was the most rewarding the game got, and I thoroughly enjoyed trying to find and then utilize the new mechanics as the problems were proposed.  Often, there could be a few solutions, depending on what I knew.  At times, however, solutions could be paramount to basically cheating the game and cheating myself, making me feel not like I solved anything, but that I had somehow gotten around the game's puzzle and devalued the reward at the same time.  An early cheat you can do is build bridges and towers in order to reach things that you, ideally, would have to solve a puzzle to get to.  Later, these functions are actually used once the proper guns make them far more usable (particularly in "Climbing the Tower"), but they can sometimes be accomplished earlier.  The greatest issue, however, is in how the red gun, the final mechanic you unlock, can completely break many of the earlier puzzles.  It has an ability I won't spoil here that makes a lot of the issues of earlier levels completely pointless.  Likewise, the green gun, the second gun you find, can break puzzles around blue squares.  It is disappointing that the mechanics aren't better tightly controlled, or that perhaps certain guns are only available in certain areas so that puzzles don't become ruined if you progress too far, but as it is you could find yourself accidentally solving a puzzle with the red gun before you've even understood what it was asking of you.

The thing about Antichamber that left me the most conflicted was with its cartoon panels that signify you've completed a puzzle.  When the cartoon panels are clicked, they display a platitude, something like "Sometimes the only way to move forward is to go back".  At first these really annoyed me, as I thought it was a cheap way to try and squeeze some depth out the game that it hadn't really earned, but after awhile I came to actually like them.  For one, they appear only after a puzzle is complete, so rather than being riddles to help you solve a puzzle (or, worse, an outright spoiler), they're more or less a funny reflection on what you tried in order to solve your problem, worded in a way that could apply to something in the real world.  It's admirable, but it does feel a little cheap overall, like there could have been something tying these panels together into something like a thesis.  As is, the thesis of the game is more than likely just calmly think about your problems, and attempt multiple approaches.

Antichamber's praise is a bit overblown, considering its Overwhelmingly Positive status on Steam, but that isn't to say it is a bad game.  It's an admirable game, one that certainly sticks out in the mind after playing it, even if it doesn't quite linger the way better puzzles do.  I enjoyed learning the mechanics in the game, but never felt like they were ever all that clever.  Antichamber is worth recommending, but more as a solid puzzler than anything overly inspiring.




7.0     

[Game Review] Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy

The problem that faced the wunderkinds at Naughty Dog, as well as their contemporaries, was one that gaming has yet to see again.  A new dimension had come into the mix, and no one was quite sure how to approach a 3D rendered game.  Super Mario 64, which would beat the original Crash Bandicoot by a few months in Japan, and follow by a few days in America, had made its own statement.  Controlled cameras - even in such a rudimentary state - was the preferred way to go.  That was because, and entirely because, Super Mario 64 went for open(ish) world exploration to great results.  Crash Bandicoot tried something different, something that wouldn't really be tried again to any such success: why not keep doing what works, but with a twist?

Crash Bandicoot took the classic sidescroller and modified it for the third dimension.  You could run forward, backward, or sideways, but with one direction in focus at a time.  This solved one of the most notorious questions of early 3D game design, which was what to do with the camera.  Crash decided to use an "on rails" design, where the camera would move on a programmed track depending on where Crash was along the path.  What was left now was how Crash played.

Crash's success, for all three of the original games by Naughty Dog, was in their platforming gauntlets and the simple pleasure of smashing stuff.  Much like his name, Crash likes to break into crates, giving the game a secondary objective.  If you break every crate on a level (without dying in the first game, making it much harder), you earn a grey gem, used to unlock the secret ending of any given game.  Likewise, you can find colored gems on certain levels to unlock secret paths to other gems on other levels.  The general goal of the original Crash was just to beat the levels in their linear sequence until getting to the final boss, with other bosses marking significant chapters along the way.  For the two followups, Crash had pockets of five or so levels to tackle in any order, each with a purple crystal to collect somewhere along the main path.  Collecting all of the crystals for a given section would unlock the boss, and the boss would unlock the next section.  The purple crystals were a meaningless addition, since they required no effort other than making it to the halfway point of the level, but the nonlinear approach to the latter games was much appreciated.

Crash's moveset also saw improvement across the games.  The second game added a slide and belly flop, the former of which adds some much needed verbs to Crash's repertoire, the latter of which doesn't really add that much except for a new type of box.  The third game introduces unlockable moves, attained after beating a boss, and they are largely a waste.  Double jump, super slam, and the extra spin attack are rarely tested throughout the game, and do little else except make the game easier superficially.   

Crash Bandicoot 3 in particular seems to be a step down from the other two in a lot of ways, an opinion that can be easily obfuscated by the many visual and environmental improvements on the game.  The new plot device that allows a level to be set all across time is a great idea, one that lets us play levels in interesting and varied locales, far more so than any other Crash game.  But with that came another kind of variety: the "gimmick" level.  Crash has always had levels that intentionally deviated from the normal walk-and-jump levels, whether it be a level where you ride a warthog or polar bear, or a level where you run away from a giant boulder.  In Crash 3, they turn this up to an annoying degree.  Racing levels never quite feel as good as you think they are supposed to, usually halting the pace once they become the bottleneck required to reach the stage's boss.  Naughty Dog would later prove their chops at racing games with Crash Team Racing, the Bandicoot rendition of Mario Kart, and maybe the best Mario Kart rip-off you can find, but here it feels undercooked.  The swimming levels suffer a bit as well from pacing, but control fine and are above average on the whole for water levels in a platformer.  Crash Bandicoot 3is particularly disappointing because of how much it feels they were trying to prove something, when the formula had largely been perfected in Crash Bandicoot 2.

The Playstation's roster of platformers is rather good, and even among great company such as the Spyro series or Rayman, Crash stands rather tall.  But that fact may be a bit hard to swallow if you are experiencing these games for the first time in the N Sane Trilogy.  The remasters have received a lot of flak since release, and though I went in with a skeptical mind toward some of these criticisms (the internet loves to complain, especially the gaming culture), it is unfortunately true.  Hit boxes are wrong, and although I cannot prove myself the "pill shape" hit box theory, it makes sense both in that 3D game engines default to this usually (Unity, for example, uses a pill shaped hit boxes, even when a square one is selected when making a 2D game, requiring programmed raycasting in order to properly simulate a square hit box - from experience), and in my experience with the game.  You seem to slip off of objects you shouldn't, especially in the first game, which has bouncing turtles required for some levels that never feel like you can hit it square on consistently.  The hit box, however, I can almost live with.  What killed me more than any other thing was the particle effects system.  It looked pretty good overall, but I found it obscured the hit boxes more often than not.  Lasers on the ground would bloom, but the edge of their hit boxes wouldn't be accurate to how they looked.  The same could be said for Cortex's phaser-gun, which would look as though it was passing by me but I'd still be turned to ash.  Problems like these did exist in the original, but not nearly to this difficult to discern degree.  The game as it is is a poor representation of one of the tightest platformers on the original Playstation, one of the primary reasons the game is so well thought of today.  The point of a remaster, not to belabor the point, should be to at least preserve what made the original great, it's core elements, but here the remaster falls flat.

N Sane Trilogy is a good looking game, though.  With the exception of some of the bosses' fur effects, which looked a bit sloppy, the game looks good.  There are moments here and there, annoyances more than criticisms, where the games have been made a little cartoonier, and they can build up over a playthrough.  One notable example would be the monitors of Dr. Cortex near the middle of the original Crash, which would look ominous and eerie in the original game, but now look like an almost nondescript loop of Dr. Cortex moving his hands.  There's the impression that perhaps the developers were trying to create consistency throughout the games that wasn't there in the original, as Dr. Cortex is more of a comedic foil than anything intimidating in the latter two games, but it may be giving the developers too much credit.  There was a lot of work put into this remaster, but it was work with a somewhat shallow goal.  The games do not retain the magic the original games put forth, mostly because of mechanical issues throughout that make the games far more frustrating and unresponsive than they used to be.  It did its job allowing me to play Crash on Steam, but sometimes I think I can stomach a lot of my grievances more than most in order to play a game where I want to (as proof: I have 40 plus hours of Ark on Switch, debatably the worst port I've ever played).  It may not be worth it to you.



Crash Bandicoot
8.5

Crash Bandicoot 2: Wrath of Cortex
9.0

Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
7.5

Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy
6.0              

[Game Review] Bendy and the Ink Machine

While the horror genre has made interesting strides in recent years with the likes of Resident Evil VII, it likewise has a darker side.  Five Nights at Freddy's proved to the world that simple, jump-scare horror games could be big sellers for minimal budget, much like the J-horror remakes of the 00s did in film, and just like that trend, it more often than not leads to trash.

I don't dislike Five Nights at Freddy's as a lot of people do, although I'll say it isn't what I would call high caliber.  It was a trendy game made cheaply, with an interesting hook built around one of the most hated tropes in horror, games or otherwise, and it worked for what it was.  It was short, cheap, and, outside of a myriad of cheap imitators, harmless.  Similarly could be said of Amnesia: the Dark Descent, a game released to great amount of praise and fanfare, but a game that has equally lead to a reproachful trend in the horror game landscape.  It was novel for a time, being weaponless and having to sneak around monsters that made disgusting noises, but it quickly wore out its welcome as the gameplay reached its limit to what could be innovated within its bounds.  Even Frictional Games' follow up to Amnesia, SOMA, suffered from dull gameplay, albeit just barely staying afloat with its interesting and well executed story.  Yet here we are, with yet another sneaky game following a trend with Bendy and the Ink Machine.

That isn't to say that I outright disliked Bendy.  Bendy's art style, as has been said by just about everyone who has played it, is very well done.  It captures that odd style of a 20s or 30s cartoon, and does so in a way that covers up for an obvious lack of either skill or budget.  It's a smart decision, one that also paid off with Cuphead a year after chapter one of Bendy released, although with much better execution on gameplay.  Bendy does a few things competently, such as providing an atmosphere that was so near to Bioshock I was left impressed once I'd given myself time to reflect on it, but therein lies the crux.  Because at the time, it was a massive turn off.

Bendy is, perhaps not so succinctly, a rip-off blend of Amnesia, Bioshock, and the gimmicky tone of Five Nights at Freddy's.  There is a conflict sensed throughout Bendy that the developers had an apparent passion for those works it takes inspiration, but an inability to understand what made them great.  It wasn't just the character of Andrew Ryan or the dystopian world of Rapture that made Bioshock great, it was also the subtly, the symbolism, and the mechanics that made it shine.  In Bendy, Andrew Ryan is replaced with a Walt Disney stand-in with an unconvincing voice actor, and a plot that just doesn't make sense.  Sander Cohen's section was great in the original Bioshock, easily one of the stand out moments, but ripping it off wholesale for chapter three of your game does you no favors.  The RPG style gameplay invoking the sim-PGs like Deus Ex and System Shock from Bioshock is gone in place of a rudimentary and unresponsive combat system, and Amnesia type stealth that is far more grating and patience testing than it is rewarding or effective.  And while there is a point to Bendy as there was with Bioshock, it is stiffly given with little to ruminate on, simply stating "this is bad" and moving on, because that's not really what Bendy is about.  What Bendy is about is trying to appeal to those preteens that still conflate dark and cool with scary.  It's a Hot Topic game, through-and-through.

I'm not confident Bendy really tried to be scary past a certain point.  Enemies are the farthest thing from scary, usually looking more like the kind of monsters a kid would draw on their notebook.  All of them are 90% ink blob, usually with one feature that differs between them, such as having a film projector as a head.  This isn't scary.  It isn't even interesting, as it was one of the major criticisms leveled at Resident Evil VII's monster designs outside of the family.  Blobby monsters, no matter how much you make them writhe or gurgle, are just silly.  And to the game's credit, they began moving more into a funny or action based tone towards the end, but let the credit be rather shallow.  The game mechanics didn't allow for action gameplay to really be utilized in any sort of satisfying way.  It's stiffer than Silent Hill, and that game at least deigned to imply a reason for it.

Much of this could be forgiven, as in SOMA, if the story was interesting, but that isn't the case.  The story has you walking through your former employment, an animation studio turned into a carnival of horrors full of odd experiments and absurdly deep, bunker-like facilities.  By the time it reaches the end, there is a distinct air of sloppy fanfiction as the game tries to tie up its loose ends into something symbolizing a meaning to all those spooky images it threw at you.  The game feels extremely amateur throughout, most evidently with regards to story, but also when considering the puzzles.

Every puzzle in this game is "retrace your steps to find the objects".  Every single one.  It's dull padding for any other game, but to direct that particular claim on Bendy is to say that Bendy is nothing more than a stylish hallway, and I don't think that is fair.  Bendy wants to involve you in its world, it just doesn't have the skill or artistry to pull it off.  Instead it leaves you with an aesthetic cheapened more and more as you go on.  Every object required for a puzzle is plainly obvious when you first encounter it, but it isn't until the puzzle is triggered you are allowed to pick them up (something also in Bioshock, but that's a game six or so years older).  Walking back and forth between hallways may be a good way to elicit jump scares, but a poor way of keeping your style and environment fresh.

There is virtually nothing to recommend in Bendy once you know it is all a waste of time, but I won't pretend that while I played, not knowing the story would lead to such a trite conclusion, I didn't want to see what all of this was leading to.  I was sure there would be one of a couple twist endings that seemed so obvious at the start, but it turned out they weren't exactly true.  Instead I was left with a game I felt tricked into playing, but credit where credit is due.  I was the fool, not them.



4.0