1-11 Memories Retold

If you play this, it is almost certainly going to be for the Monet style impressionism of the art. Everything is rendered in a kind of soft, indistinct aesthetic that is simultaneously striking and intensely annoying. But you’ll get over that and eventually find yourself melting into the style. You’ll start to see it not as obfuscation but instead as a way to convey a kind of deeper message about the fogginess of memory. It grows on you.

But if you keep playing it’s probably going to be for the subtle, understated story. It’s about camaraderie in a world in which two men from wildly different backgrounds and fighting on two different sides of a war meet in unexpected circumstances. Men that should be enemies – unable to communicate with each other because of a language difference – find themselves forging a connection in adversity which spans the rest of the war. Neither of them joined to fight, and yet they both know that’s what they should do. In a brief moment of reconciliation – misinterpreted and misunderstood – they find common cause and even a degree of affection.

It’s an odd game though. Not quite a walking simulator, not quite an adventure, not quite a visual novel. Not quite anything. It’s its own distinct thing – a kind of platonic relationship simulator where navigating the stress and unpleasantness of war is the only real challenge. I won’t say more because if you’re going to play I think you’ll know at this point and since it’s a game that’s all about the story any more details are just going to be spoilers. It is well worth checking out though.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Wow, this game is basically the complete apotheosis of Weeb culture. Here’s the quick pitch – you play a bunch of magical teenagers who have the ability to control the Sentinels – building sized mechanical war machines that are in a pitched battle across time and space against the Kaiju – otherworldly alien killing machines intent of the eradication of humanity. Persona style, the game inter-cuts action sequences with the banality of real life. Visual Novel style, you don’t get any choice in how any of it unfolds. You, much like the sentinels, are being driven by another force. But the game has reviewed extremely well and generated a lot of love in the ‘critical’ community.

As usual, I think the ‘discourse’ around this game massively over-promises. It’s somewhat creative in how it tells its story, but the idea that ‘this is a story that could only be told in a video game’ (genuine quote) shows a shocking lack of media literacy. For those that haven’t played it, 13 Sentinels tells most of its story through little character vignettes that intersect and interleave in the order the player chooses. It’s nice, it’s creative, but it’s not unique or even particularly original. Non-chronological storytelling has been done successfully in hundreds of properties. Even Pulp Fiction, widely credited with reigniting interest in non-linear narratives, was far from the first.

The most ‘video gamey’ aspect of the story is that you get to choose the order in which these vignettes happen. And yes, that could have been genuinely innovative but the problem is that every single one of those vignettes is linear. The only thing you can really say is unique to videogames is that every single person will explore the vignettes in their own order. But you could say that of someone who flicked through a novel and read the chapters at random. Or, you know, B.S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates which was a bunch of loose pages in a box. There’s no branching to the choices (something that genuinely only video games could do in this context), and even when the game presents a branch it’s a lie. You get an option early on to forge an agreement with another character. You get to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’. But if you reject, as I did, what happens is that you go to walk away and then your character says ‘Maybe I just need more time to think about it’ and puts you back in the same dialog loop. So you can’t accept or reject. You can accept or accept or stop playing.

Really the storytelling in 13 Sentinels is more like taking a novel, chopping it up, and then scattering the paragraphs around. Again, like the Unfortunates. The story itself is still completely linear. The choices are of the level of a visual novel in that they maybe reveal more of a particular part of the lore but they never impact on the story. And since the game basically absolves itself of the need to enforce comprehensibility, it can leave you confused or baffled for the first two thirds without having to worry about anything else. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fun way of delivering what is a fundamentally passive experience. It’s just not the amazing, revolutionary way of telling game stories that some people have argue it to be.

And as far as the story itself goes – it’s fine. A smorgasboard of tired cliches that still manages to be engaging – perhaps entirely by virtue of its kitchen sink approach. There really is something for everyone in here.

Also yeah, this is a Japanese game with weirdly repressed views on sexuality merged with weirdly sexualised storytelling choices. On one hand – you play a bunch of teenagers – it makes sense they all massively over-react when anything vaguely romantic or erotic comes into play. On the other, this is a game presumably made by adults and there was no need to, for example, require all the characters to be naked when they enter their massive war mechs. (Actually, there is a good reason given right at the end of the game – surprisingly this isn’t a ‘Quiet breathes through her skin moment’). There’s no need for the school nurse to have such massive tits that she needs to brace them with her arms as she walks. I’ve given up on hoping for more from games in this genre, if I’m honest.

Anyway, on to the game itself. It’s fun! The battles are interesting (if quite easy) and you really do feel like you’re commanding something genuinely bad-ass as you carve away dozens of enemies with each of your ridiculously overpowered attacks. Every enemy explodes in a satisfying spray of particles, and there are lots and lots of them. There’s a fair amount of heft to the fighting too, with different kinds of enemies coming at you from all directions in a range of waves. Some are armoured, requiring heavy duty single attacks. Some are shielded, needing EMP blasts to take them out. Some fly, in a way that makes ground based attacks useless. Each sentinel has a particular generation it’s from, and each generation has strengths and weaknesses. The melee sentinels for example are great against armoured single target foes, but if they don’t also pack some EMP they’ll be helpless against enemies above them. Managing all of this is relatively complex, but you can also make good progress simply choosing your best attack against your nearest foe – there’s a lot in here for people to optimise, but it’s not so unforgiving that it locks you out if you don’t. Much of that complexity, in other words, is an illusion. But I found the combat enjoyable.

Much like with the nudity of each of the teen Sentinel pilots, it’s typically weirdly suggestive that they all need to stroke themselves to activate their sentinel link. The boys may need to stroke an ankle or the back of their head. The girls – well, it varies. One has to hitch up her top in order to reach the ‘switch’ on her stomach, another hitches up her skirt to stroke her thigh. A third still has to pull down her top to swipe across her chest. But the guys have their own weirdnesses too, like the ‘tough’ who looks and behaves like a Lidl own-brand version of Kinnicky from Grease.

So, a mixed bag – but I had a lot of fun with it and it’s regularly on sale in its physical edition. So – worth it, maybe?

A New Life

Every so often I dig something out of the Itch.io Racial Justice bundle just to see what’s in there. Some of it is dreary and awful. Lots of it is amateurish. More than a trivial percentage is borderline unplayable. It’s a very high noise to signal ratio. There are games in here though that you’ll almost never see getting mainstream attention even though they deserve it. A New Life is a very short game – more of a brief Choose Your Own Adventure than anything else. It’s lovely though.

Imagine if the Indigo Girls wrote an album about Coronavirus, and collaborated on the last few tracks with Albert Camus. That’s what you’re getting with A New Life – an incredibly bittersweet love story told, retold and repeatedly recontextualised through the question of ‘what if?’. ‘What if I had said this rather than that’, ‘what if we had done this instead’. ‘What if our lives had gone a different route?’. And specifically… ‘Could I have prevented tragedy if only I had said something different that one time?’

Live life long enough and you’ll already be aware that the answer is always ‘no’. The best we can do is defer tragedy. And sometimes, maybe that’s enough if you can defer it often enough and long enough. If you can defer it in ways that emphasize the positive spaces that the brief lack of tragedy can create. That’s the message of A New Life. It’s a meditation on the small moments that lead to big dramatic conclusions, and perhaps an exhortation to spend more time on what actually matters.

One of my favourite lines that has ever been written into any song is ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’, which is something John Lennon threw into the song he wrote for his son. I think about that lyric more than you might believe. A New Life is like an extended jazz riff on the sentiment and if you picked up the Itch bundle at any point I’d certainly recommend you try it out.

A Plague Tale: Innocence

I have a friend called Hugo, which was quite the thing when playing A Plague Tale. In the game you take on the role of Amicia, a teenage girl who is forced into the role of taking care of her irritating little shit of a brother. His name is Hugo, and let me tell you – he’s an absolute chore.  It’s always a risk when you make a game that is essentially a full-time escort quest, and that’s what we have here. It’s a courageous design decision to really lean into how irritating it is to have to shepherd a liability from checkpoint to checkpoint. I disliked Hugo so much that I liked my friend less by the end of the game.

Imagine you’re hiding from psycho villagers who want to set you and your brother on fire. And imagine your brother is loudly slamming a mallet against the floor because he wants to see his mother, who is dead, and he keeps on doing it regardless of how much you say ‘Look, buddy, we’re about to literally die – as in, be killed to death – so can you maybe lay off the mallet for a bit?’.

Actually, don’t imagine it – just play A Plague Tale for a bit and you’ll experience it.

Hugo is unbearable in the way that only little children you don’t have a blood bond with can be. And maybe this would be bearable if he was from some massively poor family and this was just One More Thing to deal with for him. Nope. He’s from a noble family, as is Amicia (a poor, long-suffering angel who I hope is sanctified in the sequel). He’s just endlessly entitled. And yet, the game is over if you let the villagers set him on fire. How is that fair?

As I say it’s always risky to make a game that is basically one big long escort mission because fundamentally the escort mission is a difficult thing to get right. Your escortee must, by definition, be a burden or there’s no challenge. When the game says ‘When you leave Hugo alone he will bitch and whine until he attracts enemies’, to paraphrase the in-game text, what it’s basically saying is ‘We use annoyance as a gameplay mechanism’. It’s hard to do it right, and those few games that do (for example, The Walking Dead) tend to focus less on action and more on storytelling. And even then it can backfire, as in Life is Strange 2.

Coupled to that, I don’t get on well with stealth games. I don’t have the patience for watching patrol routes and timing my movement to slip between the gaps of attention. They always, when I play them, become games in which I discretely ‘create’ gaps by killing the people occupying them. I often say that if I’m a highly paid assassin in Hitman it’s because I’m working to bulk rates. I have lasted perhaps five minutes in Deus Ex when I occasionally laughably decide to ‘do a stealth run’. Sadly A Plague Tale is a game that focuses a lot more on stealth than I like.

I was surprised then that I enjoyed A Plague Tale: Innocence a lot.  It has a great story, some likable characters (not Hugo), and a pleasing number of sequences in which I can just bypass the tedious sneaking around by just leathering guards in the noggin with a slingshot stone. But I think the real reason I enjoyed it is that it turns out it’s not really a stealth game. It’s more like a puzzle game with stealth sections. Most of the game is about how you use your growing arsenal of special abilities to navigate the rat-infested hellholes in which you find yourself adrift. And I do like a good puzzle game.

That said, I don’t think this is a good puzzle game – the puzzles are too easy for that. And it’s not a good stealth game. The stealth is too linear for that. But for whatever reason the different pieces of the game just fit together in a satisfying way. The stealth makes the puzzles more interesting by setting them in a wider context of remaining quiet. And the puzzles make the stealth more forgiving because once you’ve worked out the correct combination of distractions, you never have to worry about millisecond perfect timing. There’s enough ‘give’ in both parts of the game to make you feel – most of the time – like you’re having fun.

All of that said, the game does get noticeably rougher in the last couple of chapters as it starts to veer away from what it’s been teaching you so far. For example, there’s one part of the game where you need to move in time with a thing, while also beaning guards in the bonce as they run towards you. There’s no opportunity to use your stealth, so it becomes more like a first-person slingshot simulator. And it’s no fun, because if you move too far in the wrong direction you’ll end up pin-cushioned with arrows. And if you don’t move enough you’ll be slit open from arse to breakfast by a bunch of soldiers. A lot of the last few chapters are frustrating in this kind of way.

Nowhere is that more in evidence than in the two boss battles at the end. I’m not going to say they’re bad, because they’re fine from a design perspective. The mechanisms you use to best them are interesting and you have been adequately schooled in the tools needed to take advantage of those mechanisms. However, you’d also be hard-pressed to call them fun because of how tediously fiddly everything is. This isn’t a game with a UI that works well at speed so when you need to target a thing, switch to a particular kind of ammo, hit the thing, hit another thing with a different ammo, hide from the boss undoing all the things you hit, then hit the boss in his weak spot before switching to a different kind of attack and doing it all again… well, it’s not the fight that’s the problem. It’s the fact the game suddenly forces you to play a thoughtful rat simulator like it was Doom. Similarly with the final boss fight – the design is perfectly okay but it’s just not a fit for the game as you’ve been taught it.

Overall though, I’d say this is a very good medieval rat ’em up. Ratisfaction guaranteed.

A Short Hike

They’re not kidding with the name of A Short Hike – it’s about an hour of playtime all told to play it from start to finish – at least, it was for me and I wasn’t really rushing. It’s kind of like a lab experiment cross between Animal Crossing, Breath of the Wild and Dear Esther. I get what it’s going for – a kind of exploration based game with light puzzle elements, but it’s mostly about ‘the friends you made along the way’. But, and this is something I find very often in games of this nature – the connections you make with each character are so shallow that all you’re ever doing is interacting with a stereotype. Or perhaps, if I was being a little more charitable, all you do is interact with a set of archetypes. And they’re fine, they really are – but I’ve met these characters a million times before in a million different settings and I didn’t really feel like A Short Hike did anything new in how it presented them to me. It’s cute, it’s endearing, and it’s something I needed to commit to text right away before its ephemeral nature resulted in me forgetting it forever.

AI: The Somnium Files

Playing AI: The Somnium Files makes me feel like I was a bit harsh on Detroit: Become Human for its railroady branching. This game here really doubles down on what it means to have no meaningful agency in a story – it’s basically a fancy visual novel. The sole points at which you are involved in what happens relate to trivial flavour details and big moments during what are called ‘Somnium’ events. Essentially in each of these you go into the dreams of another person and try to resolve their mental locks so as to open up deductive paths through the story in which you are indolently floating. In the process you’ll often (ish) choose between two or more branches that direct the direction of the rest of the story. I say ‘often’ but there are only four significant ones and they all take you down a different subset of the story so as to explore the five different main narrative lines. Once you’ve gone down one, you generally follow it to the end until you reach the finale and then the game says ‘Hey, maybe go back and see what happens down the other legs of the trousers of time’.

Urgh. It comes across really as what happens when someone isn’t committed enough to the storytelling to think through the pacing and interlinks themselves. It essentially makes all choices pointless, all decisions futile. Once you’ve gone through one story once, you then realise that you need to go back and choose differently just to see what happens. What an empty incentive for working your way through the plot – it’s like being Bill Murray trapped in Groundhog Day, able to shrug off all consequences because in the end you’re just iterating over your set menu of obligations. In the Somnium Files, you make decisions because you haven’t made those decisions before, not because you’re motivated otherwise.

This may be another game that needs an asterisk beside its name on my list of completions, because much like Nier: Automata I just don’t care enough to spend six hours on each of the branching paths. I’m counting ‘seeing credits roll’ as a completion. All I do when ‘playing’ is click a button to progress through dialog, very occasionally contribute to a tedious quick time event, and rub things against other things in the Somnium puzzles in much the same way I would in an inferior text adventure. There’s some vaguely interesting time management in that, but you get so many special time adjusting bonuses throughout that the actual impact of the constraints are negligible. Every puzzle is simply continually ‘Use weird thing on weird thing’ until you find the magic combination that progresses the scenario. The player simply doesn’t matter here – I’m just a receptacle for story. A pair of semi-willing eyeballs into which exposition can be poured.

If the story was actually good I might be willing to go on, but at the end of a playthrough I’m basically only aware of 20% of what’s happened and I have no real investment in the other 80%. I literally don’t care who killed who and why The only thing between me and finding out everything is time – simply click through the half-hearted dialog and all will be revealed without me needing to do anything as alarming as ‘think’. It’s not like the journey to the conclusions is richly layered or anything. I have been incentivised, thus far, to contemplate nothing because what’s the point?

But you know, even if it wasn’t a pound-shop version of the movie Se7en crossed over with a Lidl counterfeit of Persona, I still wouldn’t want to see it through because it makes me feel grubby for playing. I made a joke when I reviewed Doki Doki Literature Club (a similar kind of game except much better) that I would continually look over my shoulder so I never had to explain to Mrs Meeple why I was playing an anime dating sim. There are certain games a man of my age just shouldn’t be playing – it’s creepy. And AI: The Somnium Files is clearly made by someone that is sexually repressed to the point of being dangerous. I’m sure everyone that reviewed it at eight out of ten or more (seemingly almost everyone) is a twelve year old. Slight spoiler here:

There’s a part in the game where you are engaged in actual gunplay with some hooded figures hired to kill \. You know how you get past them? You throw a porn magazine at one group and cause a laundry line to deposit a bra in front of another group. They stop their shooting to grope at the bra because that’s a completely normal and believable thing that adult assassins would do. The high-school Internet idol you spend a lot of the story protecting (in my branch) won’t stop talking about her tits, and unfortunately neither will your character. At one point a middle-aged Yakuza boss shouts out how much he wants to see her panties. An older cross-dressing gentleman inquires pointedly about her virginity. She innocently promises to do anything you like if you win a game against her and your *forty two year old character* starts salivating.

This is within the 20% of the game that a single playthrough represents.

Seriously, what the hell is going on in the writing teams for these games? None of it is funny, none of it is necessary, and none of it contributes anything other than sleaze to the experience. I’m absolutely not a prude in any way, shape or form. I don’t though want to have my grimdark murder mystery interrupted by jokes that the cast of the Carry On films discarded on the grounds of them being too low-brow. I don’t want to play a game that sexualizes minors and I don’t think that’s really a ‘weird hangup’ on my part.

So, I consider this game completed in that I got through to a closing credits section. And I’m pretty content with my relationship with the game to end here before I end up on some kind of watch list for having played it at all.

Not recommended at the £19.99 for which I bought it, and that was at a hefty discount. The full price game is £50 and you’d be better off spending that money on some decent novels. At least turning the pages counts as interactivity.

Among the Sleep

Among the Sleep is a sort of psychological horror game, except that it’s not very scary and barely really embraces the psychological. You play the role of a small child, asleep in a world of nightmares, where you must follow the instructions of your ambulatory teddy bear to find your mother within the nightmare world of your own psyche.

That’s a strong premise, really – the imagination of children is, of course, legendarily terrifying. The change in visual perspective enforced by a child’s physical frame is slightly disorienting, lending everything a vaguely alien feel. The environmental design of nightmares is fertile ground for inspiration – I don’t think I’ve really seen a game since Weird Dreams back in the 80s that has embraced the idea so wholeheartedly. The problem though is that it never really manages to wield this potent combination in any compelling way. It’s all jump scares, but without the scares. Environmental storytelling that lacks a story.

It’s an interesting design, but sadly one that fails to really inspire.

Among Us

Like a lot of the Internet this month I’ve been playing Among Us. As with Forager, it’s an odd one about which to say ‘completed’ but my standard for this is ‘I’ve seen everything the game has to offer’. I’ve played it in full groups, and in small groups. I’ve played it with randos online and people I know and like. I’ve been the imposter and I’ve been the crewmate. I’ve won, and I’ve lost. And I’ve spent approximately six hours doing all that. Given any one game might last only five or ten minutes I think that’s plenty.

For those that don’t know, Among Us is kind of like One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Instead of having a night phase where everyone closes their eyes, you do tiny minigames to keep a ship running while hoping the person that just entered your room isn’t going to kill you. It’s a very serviceable hidden traitor game that you just so happen to play online rather than with people in the same room. It’s The Resistance for the Corona age.

So, here’s the review – it’s a great way to spend time with your friends, but an aggravating way to spend time with strangers. Online play is marked by literal cheating (people using mods to instantly kill), massive groupthink (one person says it’s you, so everyone votes for you), and unsporting behaviour with backchannel friend groups. It’s the latter that’s most aggravating. In one game I pulled off a perfect murder only for someone to say ‘It was MLU, he killed my friend and my friend texted me’. I instantly quit at that point – not because I was caught, but because that’s a betrayal of the entire premise. Ghosts stay silent, that’s enforced by the rules. If you have an entire group communicating murder details behind the scenes, the game has no integrity. The problem with playing with randoms is the same about playing any game on the Internet – people suck. You cannot have fun with this game if some subgroup of players are engaging in a surreptitious seance every time a murder occurs.

With friends though, it’s wonderful. Funny, interestingly tactical, and full of emergent metagaming that creates a thick miasma of legalese around your interactions. For example, the group with which I have been playing will almost always assume someone reporting a dead body is the murderer trying to cover it up. But if you know that’s what they usually do you can weave that into your argument. ‘This report of a murder’, you might say, ‘Should not be regarded as evidence of guilt. I know that’s what we assume, so why would I report if I wasn’t a loyal crew member?’. Every session of the game adds a brick of case-law and precedent, and it’s a lovely way to spend time with people you like. Eventually, like many games of this nature, the rules largely become only a foundation for a tall, sturdy edifice of historical implication.

I wouldn’t say though it’s a patch on playing a hidden traitor game with people you like and that are also in the same room.  It’s a good half-way house, but it doesn’t go any real way towards obsoleting tabletop games of this nature. Its selling point is the ease of assembly, although even zero barriers might be a challenge for some people. If I had known that it would be so hard to get friends together for a game of Among Us I probably wouldn’t have spent the last forty years alienating everyone I ever knew.

If you have people you want to play it with, definitely pick it up. If your expectation is playing online with strangers, give it the widest of all berths.

Assassin’s Creed III: Remastered

I came so close to abandoning this at about the six hour mark. The first two hours are pretty good – you take control of Haytham Kenway and he’s a suave, charming man with a penchant for swashbuckling. Since he’s the son of Edward Kenway – assassin and master pirate from Black Flag – that’s not surprising. He’s a Templar though, and aside from the memorable detour that Assassin’s Creed Rogue takes us through, Templars are the Baddies and they’re altogether too much fun to play for us to be allowed to do it often.

Before too long you take on the role of Connor, his son. And Connor is the single least charismatic protagonist of any Assassin’s Creed game ever. He has no passion, no enthusiasm, no interesting character quirks or motivations. He’s just Generically Angry in a way that never really gets fully articulated. He is Generically Defiant in a way that never coheres with the rest of the story. He is the game hero your phone’s autosuggest would have generated and he makes this game a god-damn chore to finish.

At its best it is boring. At its worst, controller-bitingly frustrating. It’s never exciting, never thrilling. 80% of your missions are ‘slowly go over there’ and ‘slowly come back’. Most of them involve passively walking beside another NPC who adds nothing but tiresome exposition. The other 20% of your missions are ‘Force you to take ridiculously bad tactical decisions so as to escalate conflict so as to bring an army down upon you’. In one mission it made me walk very slowly up to an assassination target and his entire entourage so I could be beaten up and forced to fight my way back through waves of bodyguards. The game forces you to be a tactical trainwreck.

Perhaps its worst sin though is that it seems resentful of the idea that you might, in an Assassin’s Creed game, want to stealthily assassinate people rather than charge in with your tomahawk flailing. It gives you almost no cover, almost no stealth options. And even if you want to play it covertly by whistling guards to their death, the implementation here is comically bad. In every other AC game, whistle attracts a single guard to your location. In this one, it attracts all guards in range. Your stealth option, in other words, is ‘lure every guard in a 50m radius to a chaotic punch up’. Even your silent weapons – like your bow – seem to have explosive warheads because they alert everyone in a city block whenever you off a guard.

And then, when it does let you be an assassin – a good portion of the time it saves the good stuff for cutscenes. The final encounter with the final boss – a man you spend multiple levels tracking down – doesn’t even let you kill him. You don’t even get to press a button. Just bam – end of game boss dead and screw you for thinking you’d get the catharsis of actually savouring his assasination at your hand. So much of the coolest stuff in general happens in cutscenes, which is a shame because there is a dearth of cool stuff in the game itself.

Despite this being a remastered version, it is absolutely riddled with bugs. I kept passing enemies that were pressed against invisible walls like they’re each pretending to be a mime. Pop-in and pop-out is extraordinary – literally things disappear as you try to kill them. Sound keeps overlaying so that Connor’s boring voice-over bleeds into Achiles’ boring teaching. And ‘break defence’ as best as I can tell, does less than nothing. Sound cuts out without warning. Enemies that you weren’t fighting drop dead. Quests continue to tell you about their objectives long after they are completed. If you make the mistake of buying stuff from the Ubisoft Club Rewards system (hey, I had spare points) then it might be literal days before you actually get them. Oh, and every so often (usually in the middle of a chase, or a fight) the game will freeze solidly for a good five seconds ensuring you lose flow in whatever you were doing.

The game is absolutely full of infuriating mission design where you run 500 meters or whatever to an objective only to be sent back to exactly where you started after a cutscene. You could always climb on a horse to speed things up, except the slowest way to get anywhere in this game is by horseback because it drives like someone replaced its back legs with badly aligned trike wheels. It has a crafting system so incomprehensibly byzantine and complicated that I was still just using my starting equipment at the end. It has controls so unreliable that I once sauntered my way into an exploding frigate because the run button decided not to function. In the middle of chases Connor will stop running and start walking – clearly to time his motion with the explosions on all sides, but the effect is that it comes across like he’s bored of the hunt.

I feel you, buddy.

I get stuck on rocks. I get stuck on walls. I once got stuck on a chicken while Redcoats stabbed me with bayonets on all sides.

There’s some truly god-awful voice acting paired up with cringeworthy dialog. Every time I heard a Scottish or English accent it was like dragging nails across a chalkboard. It has a story so incoherently disjointed it might well be impossible to make sense of. I’m pretty sure that it’s full of narrative ordering bugs too – I got into a fight with George Washington for what he did to Connor at \ and I’m sure I had never been there. At the end, Connor returns to his village to find it gone. Then he goes away. And then he comes back to be completely amazed once more that everyone was gone. He does take a fair few knocks to the head through the course of the game so maybe that’s forgivable.

Here’s how bad the main story is – the real world sections are a highlight of the game. Usually they’re the weakest part of any AC narrative, but here they’re actually more interesting than the mainline game. However, the problem there is that the game seems to have assumed that not only did I play all the games leading up to this, I remember the layout of all levels. There are aggravating moments where Desmond (your real world character) says something like ‘It’s okay, I know where to go’ and that’s all the guidance you get. Look buddy, I don’t live inside your head – I don’t know where the god-damn hell to go, so you’d best be more forthcoming before I switch you off for good.

I kept on with this purely because of my ‘three out, one in’ rule. It was the last ‘credit’ I needed to be able to buy Cyberpunk 2077 when it’s released. The best I can say is that it gets a shade better as it goes on, but it’s still by a long way the worst AC game I’ve played. And I completed Unity.

Very disappointing, but at least I got it for free when I picked up the Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey DLC on the cheap. I can say with some certainty though that this is as far back as I go with the series.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Buy on Humble

This is a game that made me resent the hell out of the main campaign for a long time.

On land there are dull, boring tailing quests where you need to slowly creep around not being seen, and in order to get to those tiresome monstrosities of gameplay you leap aboard your pirate ship and ram hot cannonballs up the downspout of half the Caribbean. In no other game would I say I have an order of magnitude more fun on the commute.

It’s let down a little, on PC, by being an outrageously poor technical port – screen tearing, frame-rate lags, stuttering performance – and all on a PC that is sufficiently high spec that it should be able to render God himself in 4K. This is a game that is over seven years old, and it still struggles on my system.

The whole experience would be unconscionable if the piracy in the game wasn’t so much fun. Otherwise it’s very uneven, with most of the tedium front-loaded before it begins to evolve into the most affecting story I’ve encountered in the whole Assassin’s Creed franchise. Half of the missions are great, the other half so dull and frustrating that it makes me want to tie the development team to the underside of a Galleon.

But when it gets going, man – it really gets going. It becomes a beautifully melancholy exploration of the ‘short but merry life’, and the passing of an age of scoundrels and legends. Pirates may have been nothing more than thieves and bandits in the main, but they lived a life of romance and the names of the past still have a deep resonance.

It gets much better as it goes on, culminating in an astonishingly strong and moving ending. It’s not the best epilogue I’ve ever seen in a game but it wouldn’t look ridiculous on a short-list of contenders. The whole experience then becomes something that attains a real value only in retrospect. The final main sequence before the credits, no joke, left me in bits. Proper weeping at the desk. That’s not much of a feat, to be fair, but even just thinking about it now makes me well up. It’s the In My Life of video game conclusions.

In the end Black Flag tells a powerful story, obscured by uneven game design. It’s not a redemption arc, but something much more relatable. How many of us truly experience redemption? Instead Edward’s story is a forgiveness arc where he comes to terms with who he is, what h’se lost, and how he can make peace with it while giving himself room to make amends for his actions. It’s surprisingly lovely, and deep, given all I wanted from Black Flag was a pirate vessel and plenty of ships to plunder. It has stayed with me longer than I would have imagined.

Assassin’s Creed:Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Finally we come to what were easily the two biggest game time sinks of the month.

The first was Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and let me tell you – this game is a project and a half. It took me fifty-three hours from start to end. The fact I saw it through shows though that it’s actually a really good game – a grand epic through ancient Greece, with islands full of mythological beasts and monstrous humans to slay. I’d give it an 8/10 overall, with moments where it rises to a nine, but if there was one lesson I’d hope the makers would take away from it is that 20 good hours are better than 20 good hours plus 30 mediocre ones. You average the experience, you don’t add to it.

Some of the quest-lines are filled with the worst kind of tedious, busy-work padding and they absolutely didn’t have to be. I was ready for it to be over about half way through and while I enjoyed the experience of playing I found myself skipping through the dialogue more often than not as it went on. I would have had much more fun if a lot of the mainline content was side quest content. There’s so much going on anyway that it doesn’t need to be forcing me to engage in triviality.

I don’t know enough to say if this is a good Assassin’s Creed game. I think I’ve played maybe two hours of AC games before this. I will say though it’s a very good game in general and I enjoyed the time I spent with it, even the bits that I wish had been more streamlined. I returned to it intermittently once I was done too, because it’s just satisfying to play. Absolutely beautiful too.

It was such a good game that I took a step back into Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is the game that preceded it. This is the game I almost bought for £30 when I had it already given to me for free. So, here’s the main points about Assassin’s Creed: Origins:

• As a *game*, it’s not quite as good as Odyssey. Combat is a little more one-dimensional and levelling a good deal less satisfying. Quite grindy in places too, without enough interesting level-appropriate side quests to make it feel satisfying.
• As a setting, I was originally a little disappointing it was Ptolemaic Egypt rather than Ancient Egypt, but it’s still a rich environment and I enjoyed exploring it.
• As a narrative, it’s actually fantastic. I have no great affection for the Assassin’s Creed franchise. As I said above – never played one for more than a couple of hours before Odyssey. But the ending of this one actually gave me chills. Sad and satisfying and empowering and just generally badass. I know a lot of people thought it felt rushed in comparison to the main story, but in my view that’s because the ending is actually properly paced and the bulk of the game is far too drawn out.
• Bayek is a more interesting character than the protagonist of Odyssey. You think he’s going to be Generic Brooding Antihero but he turns out to be surprisingly kind for someone that spends his life killing people. Aya, his wife, is an even better character. Bayek, like the ending of the game, is badass. You get introduced to him crossing the tattoo of someone’s name off of his arm with an arrow and it’s a pretty powerful way to get you in the mood for the vengeance quest that follows.

I preferred Odyssey to Origins, but not by as much as I expected at the start of the latter. Either of them would be a great game to play and buy. Again, no idea if they’re good *Assassin’s Creed* games, but they’re definitely great games in their own right and I’m now enthused for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in a way that I wasn’t before. Which is to say, I now have some enthusiasm.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue

I think Assassin’s Creed: Rogue is a largely underappreciated gem. A lot of people have written it off as a reskin of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and I sort of see why… but really it feels like Black Flag done right in a lot of respects. Of all the AC games I have played now, and it’s like… six… Black Flag is the one I enjoyed the least from a gameplay perspective, but also the one I loved most from a story perspective. It was just so riddled with aggravating tailing and tackling missions that I found a lot of it more frustrating than entertaining. And yet I pushed on because while I didn’t have a lot of fun for most of the plot missions, I did find myself enveloped in a beautifully sad story about the passing of an age of legends.

Rogue solves that by getting rid of almost all of the worst mission types that permeated Black Flag and replacing them with all the best kinds of missions. It adds in some interesting new systems like constantly having to watch your back for people looking to shiv you in a dark alleyway. And while it doesn’t reach the heights of Black Flag in the story stakes, it lets you see the world through Templar eyes for a while and that’s a very welcome change. Especially since, in all honesty, if this was real life I’d be more likely to be on the side of the Templars than the Assassins. Sure, I like freedom. Who doesn’t like freedom? I’ll tell you who – people that need to live alongside other people with freedom. Look at all the people that are merrily spreading Covid around their communities through their indifference or ignorance. I mean, I love your hustle Assassins but I wouldn’t trust the world in their hands. I wouldn’t trust a puppy in their hands. Maybe humanity does need to be led for its own damn good.

Rogue does well too in texturing the Templars as more than the moustache-twirling villains they are in other entries in the series. They have complex motivations and generally noble aims. They don’t seem like monsters that throw children into the industrial machinery to earn a profit (as in Syndicate) or warmongering psychopaths with a grudge and a guillotine (as in Unity). They are morally ambiguous in a compelling way and I think that has a benefit in providing texture to every game in the franchise. I’d like to see more of that.

The story in Rogue is enjoyably dark, but also wistful. Unusually for an Assassin’s Creed game too I’d say it’s actually a bit on the short side. It doesn’t really give itself time to really follow through with all the interesting narrative beats it sows before you. Like Black Flag, this is a story about saying goodbye to the people that mattered in your past. Unlike Black Flag, it’s because you’re the one putting knives through them. It has a similar problem that we’d see later in Unity though – you never really get enough time with the characters to really care very much. You go through a few tutorial lessons with them, get sent on a few missions by them, but in the end you’ve never really grown attached to them to the point that their deaths land with any emotional impact. It’s just ‘Yeah, there’s another name I can cross off of my rolodex, onto the next one’. It feels like the game needed its opening act extended by a few hours to really bring home the tragedy. I’d have liked to have seen Shay happy and integrated amongst his adopted family before he started to carve it apart. I’d like to see him gradually, regretfully, break from his people as he became disillusioned and distrustful of their plans. The game is lacking weight without that slow simmering of character relationship. Shay doesn’t feel like a tragic antihero because you never feel the tragedy in your bones.

But man, a version of Black Flag without its unbearable missions? Turns out that’s a really good game. The sea battles remain the best thing that’s ever happened in an Assassin’s Creed game. The fort conquests are more interesting now because they’re all about stealthy infiltration rather than slice and dice mayhem. Plus, being on the side of the British (urgh) gives you something to work towards other than a sense of piratical freedom. You’re changing the new world with every conquest. It feels like Sid Meier’s Pirates in that respect – you can take ownership in your mind of a world you’re instrumental in shaping.

The game does suffer from the usual infuriating Assassin’s Creed bugs though. I once lost out on capturing a man o’ war (a super tough ship that can really change the nature of your fleet when it’s commandeered). That was because Shay decided that instead of assassinating a sniper he should instead agitate through the crow’s nest perch until he landed with a thump on the deck below. Once during a boarding event everyone on the enemy crew decided to just… stand still and silently watch as I cut through them all, at which point the game crashed and robbed me of an otherwise hard-won victory against a relentless and endless wave of bounty hunters and French frigates. The drama of the final battle was somewhat undercut by my foe half-falling off of a cliff and then floating in mid-air firing bullets at me while also intermittently yelling like he was falling. You get used to that if you play these games though.

Despite all of that, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue is a very fine game that stands up well in these, the final days of humanity’s rule over the planet.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

Buy on Humble

Some awful performance issues, and a lot of really weird and terrible bugs. Examples:

• Getting stuck in a tree
• Getting teleported to an ambush at a different part of the city
• An assasination that failed, leaving the target like a zombie until I escaped to a different part of the complex and then got rubber banded back
• An usher who was supposed to lead me on a covert tour into a theatre and spent the entire time trying to walk into the back of two like she was a malfunctioning Star Wars droid.
• A machinist I had to free twice (and unlock an already unlocked door) to unlock a special kill that didn’t even work.

There is also some *god-awful* writing in the NPC barks. Writing that shows literal contempt for the player. Particular lowlights:

• ‘Nobody pays any attention to me, I’m a bleedin’ urchin’.
• ‘Call that running?’,
• ‘Bankers, that should be rhyming slang mate. You bunch of bankers . As in, wankers’.

Thanks to the writers for the clarity in the last one. I’ve always found a joke becomes funnier the more you explain it.

There’s a lot of very repetitive dialog too in some sections, particularly kidnaps. The addition of bystander dialog is exceptionally unwelcome. It really breaks immersion to have some rando point out that everyone can see me in stealth. It’s so loud, so overbearing and so utterly infuriating that it’s like they spent a massive amount of effort to make the game measurably worse.

But!

Other than that – I thought it was a really strong game. The grappling gun is joyous, the Frye twins are wonderful, and it’s nice to play an Assassin’s Creed game where I think ‘Hey, I’ve been there’ when I kill people. It’s definitely the easiest AC game I’ve played, but I don’t think that’s to its detriment. It has an Arkham Asylum vibe to it where the most terrifying thing in any encounter is me. The grappling gun adds such a fluidity to assassination that I found it genuinely mesmerising, more like dancing than the brutal takedowns of Black Flag, Origins and Odyssey. A lot of people seem to be down on Syndicate because stealth isn’t much of a tool in your arsenal – honestly I find stealth to be at its most fun when it’s fast and frantic rather than slow paced and methodical. Syndicate works well for me in that respect.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Against a doctor’s advice… I bought, played and completed Assassin’s Creed: Unity. I can’t say what state it was in at launch. Historical records that far in the past are spotty at best. I will say though that now, in the cold light of 2020 and after who knows how many patches and fixes this is a game that reached the highest levels of being aggressively okayish.  Definitely the weakest of the AC games I’ve played, which at this point is a tally of five. The technical issues in the graphics are atrocious as they often are in AC games, but no worse than in either Black Flag or Syndicate. The usual broad church of ridiculous bugs and defects is present as expected. The characters are… certainly fulfilling a narrative role. The story is – absolutely in there. The gameplay is – well, it’s mostly just more Assassin’s Creed, notable only for the fact the main character controls like a cow on roller skates. But it is noticeably an Assassin’s Creed game and I had a passable amount of fun for it given that I bought it for about £8 in the Ubi Forward sale.

What it really suffers from though is the abyss between what was possible and what was accomplished. Revolutionary France is a much richer time and location than the game ever conveys. In terms of intrigues wrapped up in intrigues, you’d expect it to be brimming over with awesomeness here. It’s not though – it’s the usual ‘vaguely maverick Assassin does vaguely maverick Assassiny things until he’s killed enough Templars that the final boss unlocks’. More than in any other game I’ve played of Assassin’s Creed, here the historical characters feel the most tacked on. The least integrated. The most cursory. If you left their names out of the dialog, I don’t think you’d ever meaningfully realise you’d met them.

And the story itself never gets enough time to develop, which is weird given how standard its progression is. You never get the time, or the exposure, to the characters in your life to give their fates any meaning. They’re just not integrated, again, into what you do. There’s nothing here like rushing to the futile defence of Blackbeard as he yells ‘In a world without gold, we could have been heroes’. There’s no playful and then spiteful sibling rivalry like you see in Syndicate. No marital affection and disaffection wrapped up in Egyptian politics like in Origins. There’s just a bunch of lone wolves going out doing lone wolf stuff. Spoilers, I suppose, but come on the game is six years old. At one point you’re stripped of your standing as an Assassin and what should be a monumental severing just feels like a vaguely inconvenient footnote. I’m really sorry I’m no longer part of this tight Brotherhood of people that I only vaguely recognise. I will miss the camaraderie of occasionally sitting in on a board meeting before I get to go kill someone.

It does though at least have some evolutions of the gameplay formula that address some of the issues I had with Black Flag. Tailing for example is now a good deal more forgiving, as are the chase sequences. It’s more fun to play, with the exception of Arno’s handling, than its predecessor. Not nearly as fun to play as Syndicate. It suffers from some terrible AI and a smoke bomb system that isn’t overpowered so much as it is an instawin button. I didn’t even bother unlocking the other options, given that the paucity of progression severely constrained me in any case. Why bother paying for a money bomb when a) I’m saving up for a health upgrade, and b) throwing a smoke bomb is enough to instagib a final boss.

So, it’s passably entertaining but far from the overlooked masterpiece some have claimed it to be.

Paris sure is pretty though, but I already knew that.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

Oh boy, do I have opinions on this one. They are all though I suspect a variation on the theme of ‘This game is way, way, way, way, too damn long’. I finished what I’m pretty sure is the main questline at about 58 hours and I hadn’t done everything in the game. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was, I concede, a touch on the bloated side. It also weighed in at 55 hours in total in the end. Even its most fillery of filler quests never felt quite as… unnecessary as a good thirty to forty percent of Valhalla. It feels like a game that is so terrified of making you feel like you wasted your money that it will instead gleefully waste your time. There are altogether far too many questlines, and each of them should be a third shorter than they are. I actually charted my enjoyment throughout the course of the game, breaking it down into chunks of five hours. This is what it looks like:

Bottom axis is hours spent, left axis is ‘rating out of five’. They could have carved hours 25 to 50 out of this bloated monstrosity and it would have made it a measurably better game even before you take into account I wouldn’t be heading into the finale in a bad mood.

And that’s a massive shame, because Valhalla has a lot going for it. Mechanically it’s probably about as much fun as Odyssey and I rate that very highly as you know. Storywise it is dark, brooding and ominous – threaded through with myth and legend and a really articulate take on the usually tedious real-world plot thread. I found its conclusion genuinely moving. I found some of its characters genuinely enthralling. As a friend of mine said, it’s rare that you encounter a character in a game that you hate enough that you will spitefully deny them entry into heaven. It starts well, it ends well, but most of the middle is a tedious slog through an endless parade of repetitive grinding. There’s a really good game in here, stretched paper-thin over the runtime of three to four mediocre games. It’s cut and paste creativity – you’ll see the same set-pieces, the same plot-points, the same recycled cutscenes. Over and over and over again. It is utterly baffling that so much work went into making an inferior game.

Much of the criticism I’d level at Valhalla could be repeated verbatim about Odyssey, so let me try to explain the specific reasons why I found myself frustrated when previously I found myself endeared.

1. Eivor is a boring protagonist. She (because I played a female Eivor) reminds me so much of Connor from AC3 that it’s spooky. She isn’t quite as dry and humourless, but there’s only so much you can hear someone banging on about their honour before you start tuning it out. Again, if they’d just cut out about twenty to thirty hours of the game it wouldn’t be nearly as jarring. At her best, she’s poetic in a kind of world-weary and battle-hungry way and that’s very effective. The characterisation just isn’t strong enough though to carry her for the game’s duration. Alexios/Kassandra on the other hand… they were a delight.
2. Valhalla is an amazingly good looking game, but you can’t hide the fact that in the end you spend almost your entire playtime in what is essentially a shitty version of England. Even dotted as it is with relics of Old Rome, and infused with a dash of paganism and mysticism… it’s still the same wattle and daub assets repeated ad infinitum across too many technically different but experientially indistinct cities. Everything feels the same, which isn’t something I thought was true of Odyssey.
3. The game is full of weirdly flow-breaking moments. You can’t enjoy sailing because you’re forever being forced into using the oars or lowering your mast. You can’t enjoy the songs or stories because they pause every time you find a raid spot. You can’t get a good rhythm going in combat because the adrenaline system is extremely hit and miss – when you most need it you’ll be actively prevented from getting it. You can’t even get into the flow of treasure hunting because all the loot is hidden behind Fisher Price puzzles of ‘find the angle to shoot the lock’. Sailing in Odyssey was a joy. Exploration a breezy jaunt.
4. The bugs in Valhalla are especially odious given the runtime. I found it freeze in place, forcing a reset, in the middle of about half a dozen quests. So I had to restart them. It crashed outright half a dozen times during quests. Forcing me to restart them. Quests would simply refuse to progress. Forcing me to restart them. When I was already frustrated by the amount of time those quests were asking, that did not endear me to the experience. My ‘favourite’ bug was probably when I spent a good ten minutes playing cat and mouse with a bear that massively overleveled me so I could get to a sync point. The game decided ‘Hey, you seem to be preoccupied by this bear. Let us teleport you directly onto it’.
5. Despite offering you way too much game, it throws you into a number of other regions for no reason other than to pad things out. Oh yes, I absolutely love being deprived of all my hard-won equipment and then forced into an area that is too high level for me. Odyssey also provided you with too much game, but what you saw was what you got and many of the areas ended up being essentially optional content. You have to play through all of them here.
6. The skill-tree is utterly baffling, impossible to navigate, and full of such titchy, marginal improvements that it’s not worth your attention until you have five or six levels worth of points to spend. And you can do that, because I ended the main quest at about level 120. Plus, it hides a massive portion of its layout from you until you unlock certain abilities, meaning you can’t coherently plan out a character build.
7. Every questline is like the last of the Lord of the Rings movie. You think it’s over. You hope it’s over. You’re absolutely ready for it to be over. But no, here’s another god-damn epilogue. The plot twists aren’t exciting. They’re predictable. It doesn’t improve my temper to have these little pellets of intrigue doled out in such a manner.

So really that’s Valhalla – a game with great moments stretched far too thinly so it averages out to ‘Good overall, I suppose’.

It could have been so great.

It isn’t.

In the end only one thing saw me through to the conclusion (where it genuinely does begin to pick up before falling off a cliff again by never acknowledging you had finished the storyline). It was the sunk cost effect. If a scientist had billions of dollars to invest and wanted to build a game to study the phenomenon, it would look very much like this.

I’ll probably still end up pottering about with it to mop up all the loose ends though. I’ve spent sixty hours on Valhalla, I can’t give up now…