[Game Review] Halo 2

 

 

 

 

 

Halo 3 made the biggest mainstream ripples of the series with its release, but only because of how massive Halo 2 was three years earlier.  Halo 2 defined online multiplayer on consoles for an entire generation, even finding a place in the next with the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility.  Halo's reign as the multiplayer king on consoles wouldn't be challenged until Call of Duty 4 well into 2007, months after the release of Halo 3, and wouldn't feel dethroned until Call of Duty racked up a couple more sequels.   Halo 2 is, more than any other game in the original Halo trilogy, a monster with two heads.  The original Halo was a flawed but incredibly fun single player with a shockingly addictive multiplayer, with minor bumps in the road in the form of no online play and some imbalanced maps.  Halo 3 we will discuss another time.  Halo 2 had a somewhat notoriously difficult development, and for half of the game it really shows.  

Halo 2's campaign is a frustrating beast.  It's obvious when playing it that they took several criticisms from the first game seriously.  The almighty Halo pistol was neutered and replaced with the iconic Battle Rifle as the go-to precision weapon, the story let go somewhat from its roots in Aliens in favor of telling a more original story, and they went out of their way to avoid the repeating rooms issue with Halo 1.  That latter bit, however, came at quite a cost.  Rather than having you enter identical rooms over and over, Halo 2 uses the "waves of enemies" design, where you will, almost once per level, be locked to a particular area and forced to fight waves of enemies.  It certainly feels different than Halo's limited design, but it hardly feels any better.  Making things worse is how the AI in Halo 2 feels shifted rather than improved.  Enemies don't seem as good at ducking and weaving, dodging my grenades and bullets while routing me out of a stationary position, but in its place their accuracy has improved.  The difficulty in being able to dodge enemy fire is also why Heroic and Legendary difficulty in Halo 2 feels significantly more difficult than in Halo or Halo 3.  Fighting waves of enemies no longer has that hectic, firefight feel, rather a duck and cover system similar in shape to Call of Duty, but not nearly so pronounced.  Jumping around and actively engaging with the enemy is still viable most of the time, but you'd be hard pressed to keep it up throughout the campaign the way you could with either of the other two games, which is a shame because the new approach to your health feels like it was designed for more engaged fights.  Health has been removed, and in its place your shields now both deplete and regenerate faster, making you still rather vulnerable, but with a quicker turn around time.  Playing through Halo 2's revamped AI makes you realize this change was definitely necessary rather than a tasteful choice to keep you in the fight when the enemies seem so precise. 

Just about the only place Halo 2's campaign comes close to excelling is in its story, but even that comes with some pretty heavy caveats.  The covenant have found earth, and start an all out attack that Master Chief must now defend before following them out to another halo ring.  It turns out there are several of these things, and for the first time we are allowed into the covenant perspective to understand their position on the Forerunner relics.  The covenant, it turns out, are being led by a species of alien simply called The Prophets, who tell that the rings are meant to lead them to some sort of holy land, a transition from this mortal world to some hereafter.  With our knowledge that the rings are actually weapons meant to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy in order to starve out the parasitic life called The Flood, their error is apparent.  

 

 Spoilers for the plot of Halo 2.

 

The game opens surprisingly, showing us the Elite responsible for the halo in the first game.  With the sacred ring being destroyed at the end of Halo, this elite is sentenced to death.  Secretly, however, he is to become the Arbiter, an honorary title for a sort of holy knighthood, and sent on a mission to kill the rebellion within the covenant.  Master Chief's story and the Arbiter's story are told simultaneously, with us playing as both of them in turn.  The Master Chief's levels are notably better, usually having more open level design (such as the excellent bridge sequence), while the Arbiter has more restrictive levels reminiscent of the original Halo's levels inside of the Forerunner ruins.  The enclosed spaces do little in favor of the new system in Halo 2, usually making these levels more difficult than they should be, and making them the primary levels you fight the Flood, easily the worst enemy in the Halo games, doesn't do it any favors.  The parallel plots try to show us that the Elites, the squid-faced race of aliens that were the Big Baddies in the first game, are being phased out in favor of the gorilla like race called the Brutes.  The internal politics on show are interesting, if a little surface level.  The Arbiter takes the entire game to realize that the Prophets have been lying or are otherwise horribly, tragically mislead.  Meanwhile, Master Chief goes from one slaughtering to another, in search of some of the Prophets so he can, what else, kill them.  The game comes together finally in its last three or so levels, where the Master Chief and the Arbiter come face to face with the Gravemind, the hivemind leader of the Flood who realizes, smartly, that they all have at least one goal in common: stop the activation of the halo rings.  This temporary alliance leads to thwarting the covenant's plans and leading to the infamous cliffhanger where Chief plummets to earth stating he is going to "finish this fight".

 

Halo 2's plot is a lot better than its reputation would have you believe.  The stakes are made apparent early on, and there is a Shakespearean weight and dramatic depth to the covenant that wasn't there in Halo 1.  The plot's execution and lack of final act is primarily where it falters.  The world building comes in densely, often too dense to properly sparse between the minute-to-minute action that is the actual gameplay.  The context it provides helps give the game a strength it didn't have before, but it's a weight difficult to properly hold in your head.  Halo 2 has one of the most difficult plots to remember, even as you are playing it, and largely this is due to the execution and the lack of particularly interesting set pieces for most of the game.  The scarab fight is memorable, but hardly interesting to play.  The big set piece that seems to stick out as a particularly inspired bite of quality is the bridge sequence, where you are given a tank and must travel it along an exceptionally long bridge shooting down enemies as you go.  The set pieces do little to reinforce the plot, outside of some dull boss fights.  I'd forgotten that you killed a prophet in this game, even as I was playing.  It feels more like you are being read the significance of things during loading screens more than you are actively playing through them, which is a shame since the cut scenes are of a particularly higher quality.  

But Halo 2 isn't remembered, at least fondly, because of its campaign.  Halo 2's multiplayer is something to behold.  It's the odd case of a nearly perfect multiplayer coming out of something with severe flaws.  Halo 2 was fast paced, well balanced, and extremely addictive.  Some of the greatest maps in multiplayer come from Halo 2: Lockout, Zanzibar, Ivory Tower (maybe, depending on the gametypes you like), and Midship.  Halo 2 also boasted some incredibly fun yet incredibly flawed maps in Ascension and Terminal.  Halo 2's multiplayer gameplay certainly had its flaws, however.  The BR cancel allowed some quick and dirty kills due to a glitch that became a mainstay in the meta, and for the cheaper, fun-ruining player you could always pull off a superjump glitch out of the map, sniping players from your safe place where no one could get you.  Halo 2's rough development showed on just about every inch of the game, but it left the least substantial mark on its multiplayer, which is still lauded over today.  Halo 3 would slow multiplayer down some, while also adding nearly superfluous equipment that seemed to detract from the primary core gameplay rather than enhance it.  Halo 2 wouldn't have the most featured multiplayer, but it would have the tightest rendition in the series.

 

And so we come to the controversial crossroads, where we need to asses a game with a 10/10 multiplayer (9.5 if you want to be stingy) and a 6/10 campaign.  The sheer impact of the multiplayer gives the edge to the game in my opinion, but my rating will be controversial nonetheless since the multiplayer component has snuggly situated Halo 2 as many fans' favorite game in the series.  Taken as a whole, however, Halo 2 was a flawed game with a particularly weighty contribution to the series.  The plot thickened, the multiplayer nearly perfected, and while the series would see some steps back in the later entries (eventually some serious leaps back), Halo 2 doesn't quite muster the sheer joy I have playing either of the other two titles.  I'll concede this is the best the multiplayer would ever be, but it was far from the best game. 

 

 

 

8.5 

[Game Review] A Plague Tale: Innocence

A decade after The Last of Us, there is now a microgenre of imitators to pick from if that game spoke to some sort of game design you had been pining for.  Imitators is perhaps not the correct diction to go with, but it is the impression you are likely to feel first whenever you pick any of these games up.  The one exception may be God of War (2018), which, being a part of a series and being closer to the action/brawler genre, can somewhat obscure its true lineage.  The Last of Us did a lot of things right to overcome some of the few things it did, if not wrong, less than stellar.  The Last of Us certainly deserves its status, but it also cemented the Naughty Dog way of design that puts story and character over player agency.  It's more of a small talking point than it is a criticism, but it is a talking point not likely to go away as the discussion on games as an art and how they should or can proceed continues on. 

A Plague Tale: Innocence doesn't follow in the path laid ahead by The Last of Us, so much as it follows directly in that game's shadow.  And this isn't entirely a bad thing, as games like this should probably still be made, if at the very least as a sort of baptism for those not used to games who can feel overwhelmed by all the mechanics and expectation suddenly directed at them when they still have to look down at the controller to tell what button they are pressing.  In Plague Tale, you play as Amecia in the late 1300s France, where you live with your father, a local Lord, just as the black plague is starting to ravage France.  The Inquisition, come over from England, has ravaged your home looking for your five-year-old brother whose illness is somehow tied with their interest in the plague.  You escape your home and have to survive with your brother as the country is torn and burned, and plagued rats swarm the countryside. 

The setting of A Plague Tale may strike you as more immediately interesting, as it did me.  While The Last of Us had to convince me that the apocalypse - particularly one spurred by zombies, of all things - could still be interesting, Plague Tale had me in its world pretty much from the very beginning.  Item descriptions will contextualize their significance or symbolism within the time frame, and taking from what would eventually lead to the Hundreds Year War is a great time and place for a video game.  The historical side of things falls away as you progress, but it was an enticing set up, nonetheless.

A Plague Tale is a stealth game, with some puzzle elements.  One side of this coin is far superior to the other, unfortunately, and stealthing through the game quickly becomes a slog.  Your weapon of choice is a sling, which can utilize rocks or alchemical mixtures to do various things such as lighting fires, causing a caustic reaction with iron forcing soldiers to take their helmets off, or attract the hordes of rats to a location or person.  The mechanics are sound enough, but rarely go past a heavily guided path where there is one or two solutions to any fight until you reach the latter part of the game, when you become so overpowered it is rather easy to simply kill almost everyone you meet.  The game attempts to make up for this lack of mechanical depth by giving you multiple ways through stealth sections, but they usually amount to hiding in one patch of tall grass rather than another.  The puzzle elements are far more fun and interesting, forcing you to use light to get through the rats that seem to hate the stuff.  Sometimes this means lighting fires to make a path, other times quickly traversing over an area with a stick that will burn out quickly.  The most inventive parts of the game have you directing beams of light and moving machines with fires on them, but they almost always have a single solution rather than giving you the mechanics and allowing yourself to make your own way.

This lack of mechanical depth is only a minor criticism, as these sorts of games certainly have their place.  A Plague Tale: Innocence is also less preoccupied with gameplay as it is with environment and story.  The environments in Plague Tale aren't just some of the most gorgeous environments I've ever seen in a game, they also do an extraordinary job at completing the story being told.  Walking through mounds of dead bodies, or running through towns that have been aggressively quarantined fully justifies this being a game over a movie, and has so many tiny details it can be hard to take it all in on just one playthrough.  The story itself is almost great, with touches here and there that may justify the more inconsistent points if you are a forgiving player.  Watching as Amecia and her younger brother Hugo not only survive in such a harsh reality, but also join up with likewise displaced youths from different backgrounds is engaging to a point, and has you rooting not just for the protagonists, but for the group of misfits that make up this unconventional family of those left behind.

There are multiple themes running through Plague Tale, which makes it all the more disappointing that the game fails at several points in its story.  The most obvious one is of innocence, of a generation being torn from their youth too early and forced to reckon with the havoc bestowed upon them, notably from an older generation, and mostly for religious reasoning.  The plague itself has multiple sides to it, showing an intention that mimics those in power.  Amecia and Hugo come from the family of a Lord, striking a harsh line between them and the rest of the group.  Arthur and his sister Emelia are runaways and thieves, used to living on the streets.  Roderic is a blacksmith's apprentice, under his father.  Lucas is an alchemist's apprentice, pivotal to helping Hugo through his illness.  The class lines drawn between them are made early on and obviously, which makes it striking when some people later in the story, of the lower class, die for the betterment of these upperclassmen.  I don't think this was an intentional bit of symbolism, but it is one I couldn't help but read in the proceeds, especially when at least one of these deaths was frustratingly avoidable. 

That death, in particular, was the death nail when it came to the dreaded "ludonarrative dissonance" in this game.  In my last mentioning of The Last of Us, it was one of the things that game got particularly right, roping in the proposed ludonarrative dissonance into a defining character flaw, something to consider once the ending closed the story.  A Plague Tale has heaps, to the point of no longer being ignorable in service of the game getting on with itself.  Leaving torches behind, not grabbing torches available, or otherwise narrowing your choices in an obviously false way chip away at the believability of this world, and provoking more and more labor from you to make excuses for it all.  It becomes cumbersome by the end of it all, frustrating yourself trying to go with the linearity of the game when the linear path is so contrived.  There's even a moment like Atrius' turn in God of War here that is somehow less believable.  The game is a minor headache, wrapped in what could have been a truly great game. 

None of this is to outright vilify A Plague Tale: Innocence, a generally good game with a good story and nice characters (even if all of the side characters, save for Lucas, are rather thin).  The game has been pretty wildly praised, albeit with caveats similar to mine.  Your mileage will vary as to what you are willing to put up with, but A Plague Tale has enough going for it to recommend it soundly to anyone for at least a try.  There are several incredible accomplishments here, most notably in its environmental design, but there is enough here to drop it down from the greatness it could have been.  My last piece of advice is to play it in french, which I felt better let the world thrive.  The game could use a little more help, anyway.

7.0

[Game Review] Halo: Combat Evolved

Picture this: it's 2001, the PS2 is about a year old, and Microsoft is finally releasing its first console.  Launch titles are minimal, but there is one that seems to follow up on trends with some big games of recent years.  The late 90s PC gaming landscape was in a post-Doom world.  The Doom engine had been modified more times than it is worth counting, and it wasn't until id Software released their spiritual follow up, Quake, that Doom and its engine's reign had ended.  Quake brought the FPS into true 3D, but the FPS didn't garner a serious, adult eye until the release of 1998's Half-Life, a bona fide classic upon release whose markings can still be seen on gaming today.  While PC was enjoying this increase in quality for the FPS genre (not to mention a shot in the arm as far as multiplayer is concerned with the release of Half-Life fan mod Counter-Strike in 2000 along side Quake III and Unreal Tournament the year before), consoles were still somewhat lagging.  Goldeneye and Perfect Dark had proven that FPS games could work on consoles extremely well, but they still felt lacking in the world building provided by Half-Life, or the intense fun of Quake and severe skill of Counter-Strike.  There was a gap in the console world that needed to be filled. 

Halo: Combat Evolved is an obviously important game, starting an IP that has permeated out past the gaming sphere and into the culture far more broadly.  Its sequels would break records, out sell films, and even garner prime advertising time during the biggest advertising event of the year.  It was one of the biggest gaming franchises to ever exist, heralding in the AAA marketplace that exploded during the seventh generation of consoles.  But during the sixth generation of consoles, it was something else.  It was a sort of revelation.

Halo did a couple of things out of the ordinary, even in the PC landscape.  It limited your guns to only two, rather than the veritable armory of most FPSs, requiring you to often find discarded guns on the battlefield, looted from the corpses you made.  It also had a focus on cinematic language, a distinct contrast with PC heavyweight Half-Life, which told its story entirely from a game-centric point of view.  Halo wanted camera angles, a cinematic soundtrack (and still one of the best in video games), and an epic story similar to those you'd see in dramatic action films.  It also introduced the idea of time based recovering health, something the series wouldn't completely commit to until its sequels.  Here, it comes in the form of shields that will drop as you get shot, but recover if you go a certain amount of time without being hit.  A health bar beneath this shield's covering kept with the classic game design for FPS games, but the first innovative steps had been made.  Halo was a game about moment-to-moment play, about knowing when to duck into and out of cover, never allowing you to feel too fragile.  You were a super soldier, after all, and no matter your health or ammo count, you should always be able to pull a win out if you just played well enough.

In Halo, you play as Master Chief, a Spartan super soldier made by the UNSC, a sort of United Nations navy that explored space.  You are on a ship that has just barely made a lightspeed jump out of danger (a story of which you have to read the manual to know, until the release of Halo: Reach in 2010), and find yourself floating in uncharted space, with an odd structure in the shape of a ring nearby, apply called Halo.  It has the topography of a planet on the inner side of the ring, and you realize your foes, the alien group called the Covenant, are already on the surface.  The plot from here is not far from the plot of Aliens, an obvious inspiration.  The Covenant want to do something with the halo, and you find the halo was holding a great scourge deep in its facilities beneath the surface.  There is a parasitic race called The Flood trapped within, and through the Covenant's actions (and a little of your own), they have been released, threatening the universe.  Halo's plot is pretty simple, all in all.  You have two foes you must face on an odd alien ring in the middle of space, and you have to shoot your way through.  The plot is played with a downright campy amount of conviction, a campiness that is only exaggerated in the sequels. The military is always correct, noble, and in the pursuit of the greater good in all three of the main trilogy, and there is little ambiguity anywhere.  There is a finesse to how the baddies will play out in the sequels, but that's as complicated as things get.  The gung-ho military attitude is laughable today, but if you look at it through a pulp lens, it can be pretty enjoyable.

Halo is incredibly cinematic in its execution.  Camera angles, ambient lighting, and a stellar soundtrack elevate the corny script to something far more dramatic than it has any right to be.  Taking notes from the likes of Metal Gear Solid, the absurdity of the plot is given an odd weight by simply giving the execution a serious eye.  Halo isn't innovative in this approach, but it is somewhat ahead of things as other games were either going to attempt something similar in the future once the style had sunk in, or would go the route of Half-Life, Halo's counter in many ways.  It is not incorrect to consider Halo the console's answer to Half-Life, a criticism I am not the first to lay its way.  Halo takes a different approach, one far less concerned with a mature, focused output than action movie antics and conflict, but in essence it is still that Half-Life approach to level design, attempting to give FPS shooting galleries and brawl pits a world context.  Where Half-Life used it to make you feel as though you were discovering routes out of Black Mesa yourself through your own cunning, Halo uses it to tie together a world full of abstract architecture into something that feels almost believable.

The aesthetic of Halo's world design will probably split some people.  The outside sections, where you are on the surface of Halo, are pretty well universally praised, and for good reason.  Instead of making the planet look alien, they went for making it feel alien.  The usual aesthetic of green grass, pine trees, and lazily flowing rivers are contrasted by truly alien ruins scattered across the installation, reminding you this is not, actually, earth, but rather a large construct of unknown design and purpose.  It has its own weather and biomes on the surface, where green valleys will give way to snowy, mountainous regions, where the one constant is the odd architecture found in all things built on its surface.  The ruins, and the halo itself, are built by a long extinct race called the Forerunners, who were also the ones to trap the flood centuries ago (thousands of years ago, if my memory of the lore is intact).  Their ruins can often feel monolithic, and their architecture seems to serve little purpose, and repeats itself so much it can make even the most straightforward levels feel confusing.  That's the in world perspective, but when taken as a game with levels designed by game designers, its easy to start sharpening your critical eye upon playing through the game.  The innards of the halo look like they were made with a level design tool, with simple, basically matte grey textures over most things with oddly placed lights for aesthetic emphasis.  The matte looking textures are given a hint of character by using some early bitmapping, but it's hard to ignore the fact that these are sort of lazy looking.  For me, this design is extremely nostalgic, and though I can see how simple and blocky the design looks, I also see something foreboding, reflected from my younger eye.  It feels as though the context of the maps within this world acted as justification for what was, essentially, some relatively primitive looking 3D level art. 

This is more efficiently masked by the tone and texture of each level.  Halo, in the original graphics, looks dark and foreboding (as a side note: the remastered graphics are gaudy, neon disasters in my opinion).  Shadows are everywhere, opaque and dangerous, with shapes cutting into them through sparse lighting and the odd panel or screen.  It isn't pretty, but it is ominous and effective, exactly the mood you would want when exploring an alien ruin.  The Covenant architecture gets a little more criticism in my book, with its pink and purple color scheme and bitmapping that stands out as far more obtrusive in the garish lighting here.  The aesthetics of Halo are oddly unique, despite their simplicity or overcompensating complexity and rhythm depending on the race responsible, and they stand out with an odd starkness when compared to the sequels, which all keep a relatively similar aesthetic.  As said before, this aesthetic can be repetitive in a lot of the levels, where you could be tasked with clearing a series of exact replica rooms, where the designers had to put arrows on the floor to help guide you through them, which may be why they were changed.

Halo is probably most famous for its gameplay loop, the notoriously titled "30 seconds of fun" by one of the developers.  Shooters are generally about routing enemy AI, pumping them full of lead (or plasma) while taking notice of your health.  With the regenerative health, weaving in and out of the hot spot of battle is much easier, encouraging a level of aggression usually only reserved for the best of the best in most shooters up to this point, such as Doom and Quake.  Halo makes you feel good at the game, even when you aren't necessarily.  The skill ceiling is certainly still there on higher difficulties, where your shields can only take a couple hits before popping and leaving you vulnerable, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that Halo was a tad bit easier than its contemporaries, with the exception being maybe Half-Life.  The two weapon limit means balancing your loadout for multiple scenarios, often having to change on the fly.  It adds a level of strategy that, while mild, is still a core part of what is so enjoyable about Halo.  Having to switch from the assault rifle over to a plasma rifle means having to contend with different strengths and weaknesses suddenly, sometimes in the middle of a fight.  The assault rifle is better at shooting bodies than shields, while the plasma rifle is better against shields than bodies, meaning an up close melee may be the better option once you've pumped their shields full of plasma.  Likewise, I always found the shotgun to be far superior against the flood than the covenant, and so I may flirt with the idea of switching the weapon out once the flood had been dealt with and I was up against more covenant.  Making this juggling of loudouts even more fun is the famous AI of Halo, which is still some of the best AI around, and particularly of this generation.  Elite enemies will duck and weave around grenades and shots, evading your reticle on your sniper as you try to line up a clean headshot, and sometimes even learning your dodging patterns and leading their shots to where you are going to be.  It requires working on your feet, changing up your approach as you go, and is surprisingly still a lot of fun today.  I had no plans of replaying Halo for the umpteenth time this week, but fell into it when a played a one-off level for the hell of it and got sucked in.  The simple, minute-to-minute skirmishes are still quite a bit of fun, even if elements such as a weak melee and a seemingly unfair amount of enemies with rocket launchers in the latter levels try to dampen the experience.

A discussion about Halo is remiss without mentioning its mutliplayer, however.  While Halo 2 may be responsible for bolstering the presence of Xbox Live and all of its features the service innovated on, Halo was not online.  It required a LAN connection, with up to 16 allowed in a match.  It seems ludicrous today to think that four Xboxs would be connected via ethernet in one place, but it did actually happen, as I can attest.  Halo's multiplayer was simply one of the most addictive and easy to pick up multiplayer options available at the time.  Partly, this was due to Halo's great control scheme, which the whole game seemed to be built around.  Switching weapons was a single button press, rather than a spamming to cycle through your cache of weapons.  The twin stick approach is still used today for shooters, something that was more than likely an inevitability, but Halo was there very early on in this design concept's prepubescent days.  Playing Halo was intuitive, it was getting good at it that was hard.  The multiplayer maps on show here had their clunkers, such as Boarding Action or Chiron TL-34, but even these at least showcased interesting design ideas.  Boarding Action has two muli-layered levels facing one another, allowing you to snipe those on the other side, or enter a teleporter to go there yourself and put the beat down on would-be snipers.  Chiron TL-34 . . . well, it was confusing and about teleporting between small rooms, so not particularly good anyway you slice it.  But Halo also had notable multiplayer classics, such as Sidewinder, a large, two-base map notorious for stalemates in Capture-the-Flag, and Wizards, a small map with two levels that inevitably led to chaotic gunfights and quick evasive maneuvers.  There was a map for every type of play, be it team based or free-for-all, objective or "slayer".  Halo simply had some of the best multiplayer out there.

Talking about the Halo series can be a bit odd, because taken together (particularly the first five or so, depending on if you count Halo 3: ODST or not) they are a 10/10 in a bundle, but taken apart you can see weaknesses in one made up for in another.  Halo has a tone to it missed in other games, whereas Halo: Reach probably has the best campaign.  Halo 2 and Halo 3 both have some of the best multiplayer in the entire series, but Halo 2 probably has more classic maps and Halo 3 has the cinema mode and Forge.  Talking about the original Halo on its own makes obvious some of its flaws that would otherwise garner exceptions when taken with its brethren.  The level design has serious problems, and the multiplayer would be innovated on later, but as far as firsts go in a series, Halo: Combat Evolved is a monumental achievement.  Not perfect, but not particularly dated in the gameplay department.  The rabid fanbase can make the series less than appealing at times, but there is a reason Halo has garnered that fanbase over time, and it isn't just because of its cultural status.  It is neither the most innovative, nor best shooter of its generation, even, but it is a landmark worthy of consideration in the annals of gaming history.

9.0

[Game Review] Return of the Obra Dinn

Lucas Pope is one of the leading 'auteurs' of the games industry, particularly in the indie scene.  His debut was the classic Papers, Please that got everyone talking about proper ludonarrative, and became one of the go-to examples of what the aspirational academics in the gaming world wish to see.  His follow up was hotly anticipated, and he decided to attack a gameplay style that many had attempted before, but never quite got right: the detective game.

The issue with detective games is that it is hard to solve a mystery when game mechanics generally limit you to a small set of choices.  It is easy, for example, to not have a clue as to how to solve a particular crime, but when interviewing a suspect, your choices as to what to say will inherently telegraph a solution.  Games are not quite robust enough to handle complex, variant choices, and so often get around this by assuming you are on the right track, accidentally maneuvering you to the correct conclusion whether you've pieced things together or not.  Return of the Obra Dinn tasks you with investigating the fates of the sixty individuals who set sail on the Obra Dinn, a ship that had been missing for four years.  The time period is the early 1800s, and before you set off to the titular boat you receive a package with a book and a stopwatch from one Henry Evans.  Mr. Evans writes in the opening of the book that he wanted to fill its contents out himself, but due to a sudden illness, requests you to do it in his stead.  The book is divided into ten chapters, each with a particular event that determined the fates of several people on board the ship, and it is your job to figure out who they were, when they were last seen, and what befell them, with the exception of chapter eight which he says the events that transpired then he would like to keep to himself for now.  The stop watch he gives you allows you to hear the sounds that transpired before a given person's death, and allows you to see the death itself frozen in time.  You can explore the nearby area where they died and see who else was present at the death.  How a person died, it turns out, is the easiest mystery to solve.  To figure out what happened to everyone on the Obra Dinn, you will need to figure out who a person was,  how they died (or if they disappeared), and, if applicable, who it was that killed them.  The book will tell you correct deductions in groups of three, meaning you could have the correct information put into the book, but won't find out until three are correct.

Return of the Obra Dinn wants you to deduce who everyone is and what their fate was, using a long roster of sixty individuals as well as a couple sketches of the crew and the floor plan of the boat in order to identify everyone.  The game is rather clever in how it approaches giving you the information, sometimes requiring you to see other people's deaths in order to see the blow that caused a previous death, or requiring attention to people communicating or coming and going from particular rooms in order to, at the very least, figure their job on the boat.  There is hard evidence to everyone's identity on the ship, but finding that evidence isn't always required.  One of the minor slip-ups to Obra Dinn's system is that the validating groups of three, as much of an endorphin rush as it may be when they finally click into place, allows for guess work to overcome the deduction or induction the game wants you to go for.  For example, if you already have two you know for sure about, and one you have a few guesses on, it is easy to cycle through your guesses until they click, essentially robbing you of having discovered it yourself.  It's a minor complaint, but one that will almost inevitably rob someone of discovering a particular identity, especially when you get closer to the end, and there are few choices to go between.

There's another undercurrent, this time to the game's design, that muddies the game's greatness.  The game must be played like a game, over it being played like a mystery.  What I mean is, in order to solve certain identities, and even a few deaths, you have to go with what makes likely sense rather than what is definite by the evidence.  If the game says someone is from Persia, for example, then you can expect the game will somehow make this obvious, even if in real life this sort of detail can be much more ambiguous.  There are no tricks in Obra Dinn, meaning if you are given information, you should expect this information to be expressed literally, rather than as a red herring or detail.  What's frustrating about this may not be immediately apparent to someone who hasn't played the game, or for someone not accustomed to mystery stories in general.  It takes some of the magic of discovering something for yourself when the answer is telegraphed in a gameified way rather than a realistic one.  Another example is that there are three women on board, and so you can deduce who these women are partially by the way in which they are named on the roster.  A woman with 'Miss' in front of her name is obviously going to be the younger of them, as 'Miss' generally designates an unwed woman in her youth.  If you are saying to yourself that it doesn't have to mean that, then that is my point.  The game expects you to think of it that way, that no information is wasted and whatever is presented to you will be used to deduce their identity.  There is a man on the boat with tattoos over his shoulder, and through some of the death memories, I was lead to believe they were a french mate of another, but I was incorrect, because I was looking for subversion.  The answer is much more obvious, so obvious it took me nearly half the game to get it right because I was expecting something more than identifying a man by his stereotype.  It is another minor problem of the game, but one that feels, if more games where to copy Obra Dinn's design, that it will date poorly.

The aesthetic of the game is inspiring in a lot of ways, once again showcasing that great graphics are not nearly as impressive as great style.  The dithered, old school look to the game is not meant to convince you this is playing at an older style, as the game is still fully 3D rendered, but meant to invoke a feeling that implies an older aesthetic.  Essentially, it is invoking a multi-part emotional connection with past aesthetics and design.  The dotted graphical style is meant to invoke older computers, something antiquated and, if you've ever played an older game like that, much more dry than modern games.  This style in relation to a modern style has a feeling akin to an older art style from around the time Obra Dinn is set, that would have the artist carve a detailed stamp of lines and press it into paper, much like old sea art.  It is remarkable that it was able to overlap an emotional resonance from two different styles, and invoke the emotion without any effort on the part of the player, but the art style tends to obfuscate some of the answers, particularly the deaths.  There are numerous times when certain deaths may look to have an ambiguous, or multiple choice, answer to them.  There is one death in particular that looks as though it could be stabbed (by one of two different sources, at that) or burned, and there is little to indicate one deduction over the other.  Likewise, as the most minor of spoilers, there are two burning deaths that are hard to define as such due to the odd nature in which these people were burned.  It's an extremely minor complaint, but it is there nonetheless.

Return of the Obra Dinn feels like it should be a classic.  It has a unique aesthetic, a unique approach to a game mechanic just about everyone I can think of would love to be more common, and seems to innovate where others have failed.  But there are a few things holding it back.  The story, for one, is entertaining but hardly of any artistic significance, another minor complaint you can file away as being less important than it is nagging.  The biggest criticism the game gets, one I'm not sure I'm on board with, is that the game can only truly be played once since every subsequent playthrough cannot have the same discovery you had on the first.  To be honest, single-play games aren't such a bad thing.  It isn't like I won't play Obra Dinn again, just that you only have one chance to truly experience it.  It gives the game a mystical, ephemeral feel from an analytical standpoint, a weird oxymoron of a phrase, but one that feels true nonetheless once you've played it.  Return of the Obra Dinn is magical in multiple ways, executed with a flair that makes it forever stand out among other games on the market.  It stands tall next to contemporaries because it doesn't have many to truly contend with.  Just about everything in this game feels unique, from its presentation, systems, to its astounding music that I didn't even find place to mention in the bulk of my review.  Return of the Obra Dinn is a category of classic, one that garners its status through creating its own lane rather than perfecting or expanding on a lane that already exists.  It feels like an exception, more than it feels exceptional, though that it isn't to say that it isn't.  It's the kind of game I want more of, knowing full well that more means diluting what we have.  Return of the Obra Dinn is going to be a major part of Lucas Pope's gameography, if you'll allow me to create a phrase, but its place in gaming history is more than likely going to be one of cult status, with remarks along the line of discussion for the classics.



9.0