Batman: Arkham Knight
I was on the verge of rating this as a nine out of ten – a must-play game that took the Arkham Asylum formula and perfected it. I was going to talk about the handful of flaws (the flow-breaking video chat and the weird fetish they have for forcing you into the batmobile) but I wasn’t going to dwell on them. Instead I was going to tell you about the absolutely superb story – a tale of Batman losing himself as he becomes ever more like the supervillains he hunts. I was going to say that the problems I have with most Batman media – that Batman is as dull as dishwater – were solved by having him constantly assailed with cutting, biting and viciously pointed Joker dialogue. I was going to note that the game plays with video game tropes in a very clever way, using the framing of the plot to deliver some wonderfully intuitive guidance to the player. I was going to say that the combat system is a meaningful evolution over that which has been a staple of the series and manages to really hit the balance of providing a challenging blend of opponents while not being overwhelmingly chaotic. I was going to say that the levels of the main scenario were often sublime, combining a need for real problem solving skills with rewards for improvisational brutality. I was going to heap lavish praise on the game for how intensely horrifying they made the Scarecrow and how he made a first rate-antagonist. I was going to say, in other words, that Arkham Knight was truly excellent.
And then after I completed the main scenario, it forced me to do some of the laziest copy and paste side-quests in order to trigger the conclusion. And every time I had to hunt down an indentikit location, beat up its identikit inhabitants, and then move onto the next in a list of several dozen… well, every time I did that it killed a little more of my affection for what would otherwise be the best game in the whole Arkham cycle.
Seriously, this isn’t even ‘do a lot of the side missions to unlock the best ending’, although it has that as well. This is ‘You can’t see the credits until we’ve forced this filler bullshit down your throat’. To be fair a couple of them are quite interesting, but the rest are just ‘Do this semi-engaging thing. Fun, yeah? No? Sorry, you still have to do it ten more times’. And I did it, because I wanted to see the ending. And that ending? Approximately thirty seconds long.
I was quite angry. I get that the developers put a lot of time and effort into coding up this cake of shitty sidequests, but I’m not going to think it’s chocolate just because you force me to eat it. If you think nobody will do the side content without being compelled, perhaps that’s a hint.
And the thing is – I enjoyed every part of it up until the forced grind. Were I not compelled to do so I probably would have pottered around inside Arkham tidying up all my loose ends of my own choice. I had really enjoyed it up until that point. I found the writing to be excellent, the characterisation to be rounded, and the overall tone of the game to be utterly entrancing. There is some truly wonderful story-telling in here. The Batman franchise is never more interesting than when Wayne is forced to confront the similarities between himself and his foes. Batman is never more rounded than when he has to reconcile the fact that he is both the protector of Gotham and its greatest incentive for criminals. He’s never more truly relatable as a character than when he’s made to face the consequences of his actions and own up to the hurt he’s caused. It’s really great stuff, wrapped up in a game that is exactly as strong as it needs to be to carry the narrative burden. This isn’t just a good story for Batman game. It’s a straight up good story that you’ll resent the hell out of by the time you’re actually permitted to see its finale.
If you need to see an end-screen to enjoy a game, this absolutely is not something I’d recommend. If you’re happy ‘completing’ it and then watching the final cutscene on Youtube then I’d certainly say the twelve hours or so you spend with the ‘real’ game are not hours wasted. It’s really good.
Although I do wish that they’d treated the batmobile more like an optional GTA style vehicle than something perpetually welded to your backside.
Batman: Arkham Origins
This is an odd one because it feels like a game delivered wholesale from a postcode deep within the Mandela Effect. I had no idea the game existed. Neither did a couple of my friends. We were all under the impression that the Batman series went: Asylum, City and then Knight. And yet, sitting in the list of two separate launchers on my computer… there it was. It’s got a wikipedia page and everything. But the blurb for Arkham Knight on the Epic Game Store says ‘Batman: Arkham Knight brings the award-winning Arkham trilogy from Rocksteady Studios to its epic conclusion’. It’s a little spooky, like getting a game installed from a server hosted in the Twilight Zone.
I had planned to play Arkham City instead – I was a big fan of Asylum back in the day, but I found City just a little too unfocused to be fun. It was possessed of such obnoxiously widely spaced checkpoints that it forced you to play longer than your enthusiasm could bear. The first time I played it I lost about 20 minutes of progress at one point and never came back. The second time I played it I lost about 20 minutes of progress and violently recalled why I abandoned it the first time. Still, I gave Origins a try after uninstalling City and salting the sectors of the hard-drive where it once resides.
One of the big problems with any Batman movie or game is that Batman is just such a bore. He’s not a one-note character. He’s a half-note character. His only personality trait is ‘huffy’. That makes him an exhausting protagonist because there’s never any shift from Grimdark Antihero. Look mate, I know your parents are dead but so are the parents of a lot of people. And they don’t have a massive mansion and a butler to make up for it. Even Alfred at one point in Origins asks if it would be too much for Wayne to just lighten up once in a while. Yas king, go off. As I believe the kids say.
And that endless unbearable grimness is always reflected in the darkness of the environments, which then leverage that darkness into pure bloody-minded opaqueness. You often have no idea where you’re going in Origins. Often no idea why you’re going there. Often unsure as to where you even are. Long, winding sewers and labyrinthine buildings just underline how much the Batsuit needs an install of Google Maps. That is, of course, when you’re not using the special Detective Mode. That renders everything see-through and instead makes the entirety of Gotham look like what would happen if you dropped acid while watching an episode of Rentaghost.
And I would say that the combat, which is very enjoyable on the whole, is also about 20% too much at any time. Later fights are so full of special enemies with special requirements to beat that it’s easier to just say ‘Press all the buttons, let God sort it out’. It’s really clever that you need to fight someone with a knife by backing away while countering. It’s cool you need to defeat someone with a shield by knocking them off balance with your cape and then double tapping A to leap on top of them. It’s cool you need to leap over people with stun batons so you can hit them from behind. It’s pure chaos when you need to do all of those things in the same fight while also trying to counter basic mooks and actually get a beatdown going on the tougher thugs. I’m sure it’s possible to master this system and become good at it. That’s a life skill I don’t see the value in developing.
The final criticism I’ll level at Origins is that it seems to pathologically hate the idea of Batman being a silent, looming nightmare in the shadows. It so often gives you only one path through the baddies – the inelegant brawl. Asylum was full of nooks and crannies where you could hang until an unsuspecting baddy walked underneath your perch, at which point you could string them up like Christmas lights. Origins has that mechanic, but you hardly ever get to do it because enemies bunch up and avoid walking underneath your traps. The bunching up is particularly egregious because it results in you never being in a position to quietly deal with enemies in isolation.
It means that basically every encounter is as stealthy as an alleyway mugging. Which, I guess, is sort of nostalgic for Wayne. I like Batman though when he’s a terrifying spectre – when bad guys panic because you’ve been silently picking off their allies to the point there’s only one remaining and firing wildly at shadows. Origins seems to disapprove of that.
These are the reasons why Origins is a good game rather than a great one. It does have a lot going for it though. Gliding and grappling your way through Gotham city never gets tiring, and you get a good solid range of traversal systems that let you rapidly get wherever you want to go. Standing atop a roof-top watching sniper sights flail around, only for you to leap out of nowhere and plant two meaty feet in the back of an enemy – yeah, that’s always great. So – movement is wonderful, combat is strong, and the bag of tools you develop as the game progresses is full of interesting little toys. It’s just a bit of a shame that those toys, which often have combat effectiveness, are difficult to deploy tactically in the flailing randomness of a large battle. If you can hit the counter button, stun enemies with your cloak while leaping over stun batons and shields… and lay down explosive gel mines at the same time… well, I’d like a doctor to count how many fingers you have.
The story is solid if unexceptional. It’s a retelling of the early days of Batman – a bit like Batman Begins except massively improved by the absence of Christian Bale. Batman is targeted by eight expert assassins, and over a busy Christmas Eve he has to make his way to the shadowy figure that has organized it all. Spoiler, except it’s not a spoiler because it’s a Batman game… it’s the Joker.
And oh boy, the Joker is a delight in here. They really double down on the fact that the Batman / Joker dynamic is really a sick, twisted love story. Their battle is BDSM kink played out in the streets. It’s clear from the way the Joker reacts to Batman’s presence that he is deeply, violently in love with his nemesis. I often complain in game stories that writers take subtext and turn it into text. Here, I like it because it’s been so obvious for years and I don’t know why those two crazy kids can’t just make it work. Maybe having it made explicit will help them work through their feelings.
Origins is a 2013 game, and so I expected it to feel a lot clunkier than it turned out to be. It actually still looks great, with a cinematic flair in the combat system that seamlessly blends cinematics and frantic action. It doesn’t deliver much innovation over Arkham Asylum, but it was fun to revisit the franchise. Check your Steam library. Or your Epic library. You never know, you may already have it yourself, postmarked from a server running on the edge of a universe that never really existed.
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock was one of the Humble Choice games from this month and I was pretty happy to see it since I had almost bought it a half dozen times. I was always put off by how much DLC there was though – I was never sure exactly what I was getting by buying ‘the game’ as opposed to the extended experience. But as part of Humble? Yeah, sign me up.
It’s an unfortunate game really – there’s lots to like about it but it just doesn’t really manage to be fun. That’s something of a disadvantage in a game. And worse, it becomes less fun as time goes by. The music is great, the atmosphere is spot on, and it’s full of loving in-references for the BSG fan (which I count myself as being). And while the UI is super clunky, you get used to it before too much time has passed. It comes with a ‘replay mode’ that renders your battle in cinematic style and it’s just fantastic. Ship combat is strategic, interesting in terms of how it handles deployment and movement, and pleasingly brutal. It actually gives a good impression early on.
There are several major problems though. The first is that the balance is janky as all get out. I went from successfully (and sometimes easily) managing every single battle to bouncing off of one mission (mission nine if you’re interested) so many times I’m convinced it’s actually impossible to beat. You face so many ships, so early, with so few resources that even just mathematically it seems like it can’t be done. I followed tips on line, strategies of my own, I experimented with fleet and ship deployment. The best I got was surviving for a few rounds. The missions that follow, in comparison, are fine. But that one mission was such a roadblock that eventually I resorted to cheating to get past it and that soured me on the rest of the game.
But even without that, the more ships you get and the more ships you face the more you identify that the game is basically little more than a massive slogathon between battlestars. The strategy that worked most effectively for me was deploying all my vipers and then just waiting for them to chew their way through all the smaller ships while my capital battlestars fired (and missed) repeatedly at the larger ones. The accuracy of your ships is laughable, which has the effect of simply making combat tedious. Instead of deep, pitched and tactical battles you’re basically spending all your time simply waiting for numbers to go down. And what’s worse, sometimes enemy ships just go ‘Hey, we’re off’ and fly out of the engagement zone. Which would be fine – less work for me. Except the map is infinitely scrolling and you need to go hunt them down. Given the speed at which your ships go, it might literally take ten minutes of slowly pursuing them before you get into range. And you might find, as I did in the third to last mission, that you’ve got four escaping ships at four different parts of the map. I quit the mission rather than spend forty minutes slowly mopping up retreating ships.
Technically we need to consider things too. For example the slowness of the game itself, where every time you adjust a ship’s plan it has to calculate out what it means for the game and sometimes you’re waiting for five or so seconds just so you can say ‘Okay, let’s see what happens now’. Since you’ll finetune a half dozen or more ships a few dozen times every round… it all adds up. The autosave too is janky, because it saves before missions occasionally. So you have to manually save anyway, but the times you don’t will probably screw you. That mission I had to quit out of? I had to redo it anyway.
It’s a missed opportunity of a game really, so I don’t recommend it even though I did complete it. I told someone ‘I have never hated a game more while also intending to play it through to the end’, and that’s not a great pull quote for the back of your box. It is though something of a theme of this month’s playing because that same sentiment crops up a bit later.
It did make me think though if they reskinned the tabletop game Star Wars Armada over to Battlestar Galactica, I’d be all over it. There is a BSG miniatures game but it wasn’t a hit so all you can really buy are vipers and raiders. I have the X-Wing Miniatures Game already for small-scale dogfighting.
Beat Saber
Beat Saber was something of a phenomenon a few years ago – every so often the gaming industry starts to believe, yet again, that VR is going to breakthrough into a mainstream technology. Beat Saber was the Chicken Little of ‘conventional gaming is dead’ for a while. Sorry folks – until playing a VR game doesn’t require you to strap a fridge-freezer to your face, it will remain niche. And that’s a shame, because Beat Saber deserves to be played by a lot more people, because it is an astonishing experience that makes you feels like you’re Anakin Skywalker slicing your way through the younglings. Or like you’re Kylo Ren attending a rave. It feels super fluid. And it makes you feel like the coolest person on the planet for the time you’re playing.
If you haven’t encountered it, Beat Saber is a rhythm game in which the controllers of your VR system become lightsabers, and you are assaulted by a stream of boxes that are marked up with instructions as to from what direction you should hit them, and with what colour lightsaber. Coming up on the left is a blue cube that can only be hit with a downward stroke from your blue saber, that kind of thing. This is choreographed to a staggeringly wide range of music tracks, although many of them are paid DLC. You put on the headset, you pick up your blades, and you take part in an experience that is spookily akin to what might happen in a Matrix / Star Wars mashup. Every so often walls appear that you have to dodge, and so you’re elegantly leaning out of their way while whipping your sword like you just stepped into the fencing scene from Princess Bride. Even on the relatively easy mode, you feel willowy and in control – once you master at least something of the game. On harder modes you feel like a fluid dynamics equation come to life.
Unfortunately I know for a fact you don’t look as cool outside the game as you feel within because I’ve been filmed in the throes of play. Let me tell you – there’s quite a gulf between ‘how it feels’ and ‘how it looks’. What it looks like is a middle aged man flailing ineffectually at the air, arthritically shuffling around to avoid the obstacles and occasionally falling to the ground and wheezing with the effort to stand up again. It is not a flattering experience for viewers. But that, I think, is part of its accomplishments – the virtual rather than reality.
You feel a grace and a flow when playing Beat Saber that is massively out of proportion with what you are actually doing. At least, it’s out of proportion until you’re good enough to hit the Expert+ levels, at which point (videos show) you basically take on the form of a real-life Jedi.
So yeah, the game is every bit as good as people have said it is. But…
… it loses a lot of its shine as time goes by, because fundamentally the game is very repetitive in a way that – say – Rock Band never was. And partially that’s because the campaign is rubbish and there’s no actual progression. The campaign is basically ‘this song, with these modifiers, at this difficulty level’, and that’s thoroughly underwhelming. In Rock Band 3, for example, you were on a shitty tour bus building up a fanbase while playing increasingly impressive gigs. Beat Saber feels like someone realised the day before release that it needed a campaign, and instead of designing one they just… didn’t. That’s a shame, but the bigger part of the problem is that the game never really evolves in a coherent way. The campaign basically ramps up the difficulty (in a tedious way) each time you go to a new level but there’s no obvious way other than ‘spend a day training like Daniel in the Karate Kid’ to progress from Hard to Expert. And I don’t know if there is a way, absent resigning from my job and joining some kind of Zen temple dedicated to Beat Saber, for me to reach Expert+ level. I play at Expert level. I’m pretty good. I crash out in seconds by notching the difficulty up a single point.
In other words, I hit a wall where the level of investment needed to ‘git gud’ was far out of proportion to my level of willingness to play a VR game. That’s the point where the fun of the game just falls off a cliff because it’s asking more to progress than a reasonable adult might be willing to give.
But man, when it’s fun, and it is often fun, there is no fun out there to match it. That may not be enough for me to advise you to pick up a system capable of playing it (although the Meta Quest is certainly increasingly affordable) but if you have a system and miraculously don’t already own this, then this is a thing you should own for your system.
Blackwell Series
I always knew, intellectually, that point and click adventure games never actually went away – they just stopped being commercially viable for large companies. When Lucasarts and Sierra melted away into other endeavours, there were still a number of small companies managing to survive with what many dismissed as a dead format. So it is with Wadjet Eye and the Blackwell series of games. I just never gave them any attention.
I’ve played through four of them this year, and while they are super short (An average of two or three hours each) they are also just as good as many of their larger, better funded ancestors.
The basic pitch is this – you play a woman who can see dead people. And as part of that deal you inherit ‘Joey’, the ghost of a 30s tough who is bound to the material plane in service to your family. She’s a failed writer, he’s a dead gumshoe. They fight crime!
And that’s pretty much it – you avenge the sad circumstances of the dead, bring justice to the living, and in doing so free the ghosts from their Earthly bonds. The puzzles are generally very nicely structured, the writing is pretty good, and the design is sharp and user-friendly – mostly. There’s a lot of backtracking but it does make it as simple as clicking a location from a city map. The only real issue there is that you need to check the Yellow Pages for a number of things, and the only copy is in your apartment. So sometimes you go somewhere just to get a name that you then need to go home and lookup and then come back where you came from. It’s a shame because this is actually a great puzzle system – you can get access to new characters and locations and phone numbers based on dialog – but it’s just cumbersome in practice. Later games replace it with a phone with access to the world’s least comprehensive search engine, and that’s a lot better. It’s just interesting this mechanism isn’t used more in these kind of games. Thimbleweed Park had some of it, but not a lot.
It’s kind of weird really – I absolutely dread making phone calls in real life but a new phone number in a video game is exciting.
Anyway, the Blackwell Series of games is very good, although I still haven’t played the final one (depth year and all that, and I don’t own it already). It’s been good enough that it led me to check out a number of other Wadjet Eye games I had lurking my Steam library.
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars & Broken Mirror
I’m going to talk about both of these games together even though they’re very different. Mainly because of how they form a continuum of regular degradation. The two I played were… fine. But I kind of feel they did a bait and switch. You begin by playing Nico, a very likable and sassy French journalist who is brought in for an interview only to find it become an assassination. She begins an investigation of her own, which begins to encompass a wide variety of conspiracy elements. She explores some beautifully rendered environments, where the ambiance is well executed. It looks lovely and it charms you from the start. A great protagonist, wonderful locales, and a story that delves into a whole range of exciting areas. It’s a joy. To begin with.
Along the way she encounters George, identikit blond American protagonist serial number #6432343. He is… certainly there. He is a placeholder of a character, and as he gradually takes more screen-time from Nico it becomes increasingly aggravating.
It’s such an own goal – a genuinely fun and cheeky female protagonist in a point and click adventure game of the era was a bold choice. And then they keep rowing back from that choice to focus more on the tabula rasa of what they clearly assume is the more relatable character. The thing is – I don’t need relatable characters in a point and click. I need them to be interesting and with perspectives that add to what’s going on. That was 100% Nico. It is not at all true of George.
But it’s not just in the characters that the games degrade – the last third of Broken Sword descends into some ‘what the hell were they thinking’ bullshit. I played the Director’s cut and it’s possible that is part of the problem – a lot of what happens feels like cutting room fodder. Things that were justifiably cut out and then made their way back in to make a new product. An excessive focus on pixel hunting for example and just some god-awful silly puzzles.
As we head into the second Broken Sword, things get worse. Nico is no longer a main character, she’s just a side character to George who, through his compelling character development, gets promoted to identikit blond American protagonist serial number #6432342. And the puzzles get even worse as the charm is rubbed away from the whole thing as it becomes progressively more… generic.
Spoilers I guess, but let me illustrate some of the problems with a brief overview of a puzzle in the second game.
For reasons related to the plot, you’re in position where you need to distract a cat away from a house. How would you do that?
No, don’t answer you’re wrong.
What you do is that you bribe a young boy at the pier to fish you up a bicycle so you can get a rubber tube from its tyre, and then bully the boy into giving you a fish. You tie the fish to the rubber tube and then the tube to a flagpole so the cat gets distracted from its ball.
What do you bribe him with? A manky tequila worm that you’d been carrying around for hours.
Now you might think ‘Wouldn’t the fish by itself be enough to distract a cat?’. Or maybe ‘Isn’t it unbelievably fortunate that the boy fished up a bicycle?’. Or perhaps ‘Why were you carrying a worm with you in the first place’. You might very well think that, I couldn’t possibly comment. This is moon logic that doesn’t even bother to explain to people why they’re on the moon.
Most P\&C puzzles are things like… ‘you need the mouse to smell the cheese so it will climb the wall to gnaw the cord on the fan. But someone has put a tiny blindfold on the mouse and it has a bad sense of smell, so you need to put the cheese by the fan and switch it on so the mouse smells it’. That sort of thing. Stupid, but you do at least see a chain of associations that connect your actions together. And Broken Sword (both the games I played) are full of that kind of convoluted nonsense.
Except… they never blindfold the mouse so you end up doing elaborate nonsense for no obvious reason to progress the game.
In conclusion, the Broken Sword games are games of contrast.
Call of Duty: World War 2
The last Call of Duty game I remember playing was way back in about 2010. It was Call of Duty, World at War and – much like this one – set in the beaches, forests and trenches of the Second World War. And I hated it. I thought it was so loud, so busy, and so ridiculously difficult that it was the opposite of enjoyable, or even immersive. You’d walk five steps and die instantly. You’d reload and walk five steps in the other direction and die instantly. You’d go into a pillbox and – yeah, die instantly. In the realism stakes I guess that makes it pretty hard to fault. In the playability stakes though – not so much.
So it’s been almost a decade since I returned to the series, and guess what – it’s World War 2 and I still died instantly about a hundred times. But somehow it’s bearable here – maybe because the aesthetic, the design and the story are so good. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t Band of Brothers. It is though how I imagine a low-budget Channel 4 ‘different enough to appease the lawyers’ reboot of Band of Brothers might look. You might say, and fairly so, that I haven’t really played this – I would rather be executed by real nazis than play multiplayer with randoms. I have though played through the single player campaign and while short it’s very good. Not uniformly so, but consistently enough that I found my spirit lifting and plummeting as the events unfold.
There’s a scene in Casablanca where the French patrons of Rick’s Bar, in defiance of the Vichy regime, stand up and belt out La Marsielle to the anger and embarrassment of the Germans in attendance. That scene has always, always moved me because Casablanca was released in 1942 and many of the French actors singing had real, raw emotion because their country was genuinely under Nazi control. They weren’t acting out a historical event. They were engaging with current affairs. So, when you find yourself aiding the French resistance it really did stir something up in me. ‘This is for my husband’, says the resistance agent as she sticks a broken bottle into the Nazi commandant. ‘This is for my son’, as she does it again. ‘And this? This is for me’, she says as she kills him. It’s brutal. It’s excessive. And it’s very moving in its own violent way. The game is full of these human moments of vengeance and catharsis. Nobody said war would be pretty.
Okay, bad stuff first. It seems weird to complain about this, but there’s too much variety. If you asked me ‘Would you like to control a tank?’, I’d say ‘Of course I would, why would you ask such a ridiculous question?’. If you said ‘Would you like to dogfight in the skies above Germany’, I’d say ‘Hell yes’. If you asked, ‘Would you like a stealth mission where you walk around presenting your paperwork to inquisitive guards?’, I’d say ‘Err, what?’. ‘HOW ABOUT A RACING SECTION?’. ‘Wait, what’s happening…’.
There are a lot of little parts of the game where you’re forced into doing something like flying a plane with the world’s worst controls. Driving a tank with, again, the world’s worst controls. They’re so jarring and unpleasant because, unsurprisingly, they feel inconsistent and undercooked in comparison to all the other gameplay mechanisms.
Given how it skips merrily over massive parts of the war, it gets a little bit difficult to anchor yourself in reality. Character development, as a consequence, is often abrupt. Your dickhole sergeant becomes your dickhole commander and then your dickhole buddy with such rapidity it could induce whiplash. The story beats feel like they’re being played by someone that thought the piece should be played in comedy double-time. Also, it massively – and I mean massively – wusses out on its main concluding story element. I thought ‘Oh wow, they’re actually going to really double down on it in this game – very brave’. They don’t though. The game treats the holocaust like almost every game does – like something you can never directly face. It tetters right on the edge of saying something important, but never makes the leap. I’ve written before in other places how the concentration camp episode of Band of Brothers can unravel me from the inside out. CoD: WWII has nothing like that.
I’m told it lacks innovation, and it’s ‘another cash grab entry into the franchise’ – but it’s been a decade since my last one so I wouldn’t know. I would say though it doesn’t feel meaningfully different, except in how abrupt death comes, than any other tactical shooter. It feels like I remember Gears of War playing like in terms of the ‘run to cover, now shoot the peoples until they fall down’ flow. I guess don’t mess with a good thing, because I didn’t really feel like ‘more innovation’ was something I was needed. It just didn’t feel like a fresh experience.
The good stuff now. The story is very solid. Well told, well acted, well emoted. And even if it’s a well-trodden path that the narrative takes it’s no weaker for it. I couldn’t really tell you of my buddies was Stiles and which one was Arigato (I don’t think that’s his name). I don’t remember which one was Hunter (was that someone?) and which one was Stimpy. But I can say, my band of brothers, that I will always remember ‘Grenade guy’ fondly. The times I spent with Ammo Guy and Mortar Guy were some of the most important of my life. That’s why I have their names tattooed on my ass. It was war – if you’d been there, you’d understand.
The gunplay is, unsurprisingly, excellent. Weapons feel weighty and have very different properties. The first time you pick up a sniper rifle is revelatory, and the difference between having a bolt-action rifle with a bayonet versus a machine gun makes you treat encounters very differently. The fixed emplacements like turrets, AA-guns and machine guns are also satisfying to use, especially since they come with real risk. Many of my insta-deaths were due to me going ‘wheeeee’ on a turret while someone with a rocket launcher was casually constructing a counter-argument.
The tactical control you get over the battleground is likewise top-notch. While it’s not an open sandbox on any given map, it’s got enough choke-points, vantage points and cover points that you can enact some very effective plans. You can flank, out-maneuver, out-gun, or carefully pick off your opponents. I especially liked that a lot of missions had a ‘You done screwed up’ branch. If you decided to stop sneaking and opened fire you’d get an exasperated ‘Oh god, he’s been compromised’ and everyone just goes with it. I don’t know if those were scripted moments of failure (there are a lot of those where you don’t know if you died or if you hit a story checkpoint) but I found them very amusing regardless.
The ‘War’ of Call of Duty is amazingly well handled – exciting, frantic, dangerous and exhilarating and yet manageable. When you die, it turns out, it’s because warzones are dangerous places and you’d best sharpen up your situational awareness. The other parts of the game – not so much. I’d honestly prefer it to double down on what it does well rather than try to shake me out of my complacency. I’ll level with you, Call of Duty, I was excited enough by the gunplay.
Overall then, a good game. Not amazing – it hasn’t made me thirsty for any of the other games in the franchise. It was though gaming-time well-spent.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
This is another of those games I expected to dislike but it ended up being absolutely charming. It’s a straightforward first person shooter where you play a cowboy bounty-hunter blasting his way through the old west – Red Doom Redemption, if you like. It’s pretty straightforward really and could easily have been completely mediocre. However, the shooting action (which is fun, if unimaginative) is wrapped up in an absolutely excellent level of meta-awareness that makes it far more entertaining.
The game is told from the perspective of the main character, and you’re not playing through his adventures – not really. You’re playing through the story he tells about his adventures. Every so often he’ll throw in something funny or implausible and then either retroactively change the game you’re playing or put in an occasional unbeatable challenge that he eventually admits didn’t happen.
For example, you might be walking down a valley and he’ll say ‘It was at that point I looked up and found a hundred native Americans with their bows raised, raining arrows down on me!’
And so you’ll find yourself facing a hundred enemies and be forced to huddle in panic behind a rock, asking yourself how the hell you’re supposed to progress, until one of his listeners challenges him.
‘How could you have survived a hundred bows aimed right at you?’
‘Well, maybe in my enthusiasm I have inflated the number. But there were at least five’.
So the hundred melt away into a more achievable challenge of five enemy archers. That kind of thing is happening constantly, and it is hard to describe just how likeable it is. It turns a fairly workaday shooter into something like ‘Unreliable Narrator, The Game’ and it works excellently. Especially with the whisky-drawl of the narrator which is so authentically perfect for the character that the casting alone does a lot of heavy-lifting in how much you’ll enjoy the experience.
There are a few terrible boss battles and after a while it does threaten to outstay its welcome somewhat because while the story is malleable the shooting mechanics lack any real creativity and the enemy variety is very limited. But it’s also quite a short game, so it departs from your life pretty much at exactly the point you’re wishing it did.
This one is well worth picking up.
Citizen Sleeper
A number of people told me that this was Disco Elysium, but in space. A story about what it means to be a person (really? how innovative!) in a world where transhumanism is a fact of life. It’s slow-paced. It’s meditative. It allows itself time to be philosophically introspective. It’s all about the characterization and only slightly about the mechanisms. It certainly has a flavour of Disco Elysium, right down to the skilful writing.
What it lacks though is any compelling reason to play it.
If Disco Elysium is the pub psycho, free-wheeling around in a tornado of chaotic energy then Citizen Sleeper is the pub bore who won’t stop speaking and refuses to yield the floor. It’s somehow managed to replace fun with a kind of endless filibustering. Disco Elysium is absolutely off-its-face, tottering on the precipice of some genuinely dark shit while also being funny enough to make you laugh about it. It’s a clown with the soul of a poet, trying to reconcile the inconsistencies of its nature. Citizen Sleeper is a donkey-jacketed student politician, who hasn’t yet realised that earnestness isn’t the same thing as interestingness. It’s TikTok philosophy as a text adventure.
It doesn’t suck, don’t think that. It’s worth playing. It’s just that there’s no reason you can’t be poignant and playful and we don’t have to settle for one or the other. So while Citizen Sleeper is worth playing, it’s hard to suggest that as an action you can take in a world where Disco Elysium exists.
Cyberpunk 2077
Okay, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Yes, it’s buggy. Occasionally very buggy. My personal favourite three bugs are:
- Wearing a hat shaves V’s (the main character) head as smooth as a pool cue.
- The health bar just – disappears – whenever the hell it feels like. For example, in the middle of a pitched combat where you have no idea how close to death you are.
- It lets you return to a one-way previous mission area in one part of the game where the exit is closed off and thus you are trapped forever until you reload an earlier save.
I’ve had a couple of show-stopper bugs, but nothing that cost me more than about five minutes of time. I once had to search a body that had ragdolled through a wall into a lift-shaft. The body, alas, had the access code to the lift. Corpses sometimes float in the air so you can’t get their contents. Quests sometimes don’t trigger properly. It crashed a couple of times. It’s a bit of a mess performance wise occasionally with significant frame rate drops in particular areas. It’s obvious that the QA team were doing a ‘front to back’ bug pass because the bugs get worse as it goes on. Technically it feels unfinished, like it needed a few more intensive months before it was truly ready for release.
But honestly?
I don’t think it’s any buggier really than most open world games at launch, at least as far as the PC version goes. Valhalla wasn’t really any better – and was in some ways meaningfully worse – and I don’t expect it to become better so over time given Ubisoft’s evident disregard for long-term game support that isn’t monetized. Cyberpunk on the other hand? Yeah, I trust the developers to do right – eventually. The problems with the game as it stands though did knock half a mental star off the rating I would have given it. Those playing on other platforms may well have a shakier time of it, judging by The Discourse. I can’t speak to that.
It strikes me though that really this is a game that has suffered in reviews mainly because it has been targeted on the basis of its ideological incompatibility with the far-woke. Seriously, you can’t read a review of Cyberpunk that doesn’t have an obvious agenda threaded through the text. Sure, that’s fine – people can criticise media products on any basis they like. I often do it myself. But journalism is a spectator sport and it can only survive when there’s a diversity of opinion. Groupthink in the major publications is killing game ‘journalism’, such as it is, by removing the already wafer-thin separation between critique and social advocacy.
There have been some genuinely baffling blunders from CD Projekt Red (the epilepsy inducing sequences being particularly bad), and there are certainly reasonable and thoughtful critiques that can be levied against both their design philosophy and their approach to advertising. I am increasingly disquieted though by a media space that is more interested in telling me what I should think about a game rather than what they think about a game. It’s a bad road to go down, and it won’t end well. There have been so many moral judgements bound up in the way the discourse has been around this game. So much genuine hectoring. Legitimate bullying along with passive aggressive guilt trips. There are significant numbers of people that are genuinely hoping it fails, and the holds of those opinions are being pandered to by a number of outlets looking for the appreciation clicks. It’s all so transparently a case of ‘We need to find where our audience is going so we can lead it’.
But enough of what other people think. More on what I think.
Cyberpunk 2077 in the end is a good game. A very good game. A game with occasional moments that verge on excellent. It is not, however, a game that is quite as good as I was hoping it would be. It starts slow, takes a while before it finds its legs, but by the time it’s galloping away you’ll find that it’s a blast. I finished the main campaign in about 30 hours, but I dawdled. Did a few of the more interesting side-quests, did a lot of vigilante missions, and generally amused myself with anything that seemed intriguing. Consensus seems to be it’s about a twenty hour storyline if you focus entirely on it. People have complained at that, comparing it to the Witcher 3’s more expansive questlines. Personally to me it felt like a generously long campaign with little narrative filler. Exactly what I like to see really.
Gameplay filler on the other hand… well, it depends. I started off going my traditional route of stealthy sniper but I found it remarkably unfulfilling. Much like in Red Dead Redemption 2, the missions are largely shooting galleries where the trick is to find cover and wait for your shot. It’s worse though because Cyberpunk has heavy RPG mechanics and so a headshot is ‘damage with a multiplier’ rather than something that instantly, with malicious aforethought, changes the balance of a battle by shooting someone’s hat clean off. I think a lot of my indifference to the game to begin with stems from the fact the gunplay just isn’t that much fun. Neither really is the quickhacking system until you get some of the more hilarious software upgrades. Detonating a grenade in someone’s inventory will never not be funny to me, but that’s a long way down the line.
The game took a tick upwards though when I decided ‘Meh, let’s try a katana for a while’ because I think this is where the game actually becomes interesting. There’s a lot of tactical flexibility that movement gives and it really shakes up otherwise fixed gunfights. In the end for most of the game I went with a hybrid approach – sniper rifle for distance work, katana for detailing. And that combo gives you a new range of techniques and approaches for the combat. That’s handy, because the combination of snipers, heavy robotic ordinance and the terrain of the set piece battles resulted in more than a few deaths. There are a number of very challenging early fights where they’re as much a puzzle as they are a battle. ‘Ah, right – the solution here is to grab my katana, rush through the middle of the battleground and up the stairs to take out the snipers, then rain down grenades on everyone. Gotcha’.
I was pottering away pretty happily though at that point but it still wasn’t my GOTY or anything.
For me, the thing that gave it all the final necessary blast from the spice weasel was getting Mantis Blades – essentially spring-loaded, articulated titanium swords that extend from your arms. That moment is like getting the Sparta kick in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Once you get the double jump and some decent armour mods you basically become indistinguishable from a sexy terminator. Literally by the end I was able to run into the middle of heavily armed goons and shrug off multiple assault rifles as I gutted them one by one. Melee makes the combat system a little on the easy side if you’re willing to take some risks. The double jump makes it an elegant ballet of slaughter. Mantis blades on top of that make it basically a comedy routine from the world’s most psychopathic standup. You’ll have them rollin’ in the aisles. Bits of them anyway. The Mantis Blades do though make it irrelevant to upgrade guns from that point onwards.
These kinds of augments (or cyberware) turn up in a lot of semi-dystopian future worlds, and it always makes me chuckle a bit thinking of the mindset needed to install them.
‘Hey, we can make you live longer. We can give you a modification that filters out all disease. We can remove your need for sleep, or stabilise your emotional state so that everything is just groovy all the time’
‘Thanks, but I once saw an industrial blender in an abattoir – could you hook me up into that instead?’
The end result though of a lot of the upgrades I took was that stealth became virtually impossible simply because I hadn’t levelled into it. And that resulted in a lot of end mission briefings where my fixer said ‘I wanted this done quietly, and you killed everyone. Why are you so bad at your job?’
I mean, c’mon buddy. You hired me. You know my rep. If you wanted a stealth approach you shouldn’t have thrown a human food processor into a room full of unsuspecting meatbags. I think the blame here is fifty-fifty. I’m a reliable operator, and there’s a switch at the back of my neck that chooses my approach. It has only two settings though – chunky and liquefied.
(Title of my sex tape)
Speaking of sex tapes – I was surprised at just how explicit the sex scenes in the game are. I mean, they’re not hard-core porn or anything but they are occasionally only a couple of frames away from it. My V was a woman and occasionally the only thing that separated Cyberpunk from a POV scissoring video is that the camera angle might have been fixed half a degree north of where the action was happening. You still get plenty of full frontal nudity even so. What I really did like though is that the romanceable characters have preferences and boundaries. This isn’t a world where every character is canonically bisexual, conveniently accomodating to whatever sex you chose to play as. You’ll get rebuffed, or not, on the basis of your gender configuration. I say configuration because it’s very mix and match here. If you want to have a feminine body, a male voice, and a big ol’ penis that’s something you can do.
Anyway, once you have some decent upgrades, some better equipment, and you scrap the idea that combat is handled via pot-shots fired from behind cover… that’s when the game really starts to come into its own.
There’s a lot of features here that I’ve seen and I’ve remarked upon positively in other games, and I think it comes together really well through the main story. Some of it I won’t talk about because of spoilers, but there’s a real echo here in how Red Dead Redemption 2 sticks the knife into your gut as the story goes on. I was expecting it to end tonally in much the same way, so I spent a good chunk of my time in the end sequences primed for the reveal that I was dreaming it in my last moments before death. In the final reckoning though I got a happy ending, relatively speaking, although other paths through the game have a less optimistic conclusion. Apparently I ended up, by accident, with the ‘best’ ending.
Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) is a major presence in the messaging around Cyberpunk, and I’m pleased to say he’s equally important in the game itself. The dialog you have with him about everything that’s going on is really good. He’s a comedy foil, an iconoclastic bad-ass, and just a sardonic asshole who has something to say about all the conversations you have, all the ridiculous ideas you get sucked into, and the inevitable bifurcated choices the endgame provides. The game would be quite sterile without him. I liked that an awful lot. I liked him a lot actually. Keanu Reeves does a good job with him.
Another feature the game shares with RDR2 is the way that it uses people, rather than locations, as quest hubs. Sure, the map is full of side-quests and activities but they almost all, save for a few police events, come from a handful of fixers with distinct personalities They’ll call you up at points saying ‘Got a job, send you the deets’ and you often get a little holo conversation with them before and after to set tone and personality. Those are fine. What’s more effective though is that there are important plot characters you meet as you go through the game and instead of them being mobile macguffins they can, if you choose to put in the effort, become genuine friends. Proper, ‘help you bury a body’ friends. They have their own quest lines that spin out from the main quest, and it actually matters, for some of them, if you make the effort. It creates a dynamic ‘to and fro’ relationship that makes you want to help them out. The reciprocity effect works even if characters are imaginary, it turns out.
That’s one of the reasons that I spent so much time on side-quests. I wanted to do them and the main campaign, as urgent as the tone is, gives you plenty of moments of pause where you can narratively focus on them. The quality in some of these is remarkable – optional content exactly as lovingly constructed as the key throughline. Better in some cases. There are properly touching moments of real humanity in these quests. They count as among my absolute favourites. They may touch on some incredibly dark and upsetting themes – I mean, Night City in general is a horror show – but they give it just enough spin to make you feel like maybe you can leave the place better than how you found it.
Of course… you can’t. That’s really the core message that gets reinforced constantly in Night City. You can’t save the city in any way that matters. All you can do is save yourself, and maybe a handful of others. And even then, the definition of ‘save’ has to be as flexible as your morality. People have spoken a lot about cyberpunk as a genre being about body modification, changing norms of identity, and a profound sense of anti-authoritarianism. And it’s all those things. But really, like almost all genuine social problems – more than anything else cyberpunk is about class warfare and the ways in which the underclasses are disempowered by capital. Nobody has ever put their finger on the pulse of revolution as accurately as Marx. In the end, it’s all about class. The only problem with his analysis is that his prescribed cure is in many ways just as bad as the disease. Cyberpunk as a discipline just reinforces that in the end humanity is defined by the systems within which it functions and technological advancement is just another chain that binds. The whole game is an exercise in psychological damage limitation, rather than mitigation. And often, ‘success’ comes with tragic consequences. You often need to call the slimmest victory a win and go about your day.
The final thing I want to say is that Night City is remarkable to look at – a playground of neon lights, broken down districts, and gentrified skyscrapers. It’s a visual treat, but it’s also weirdly empty. It doesn’t feel dynamic. It doesn’t feel like it goes on without you. It also doesn’t feel like anything you do outside of quests actually matters much. Occasionally I would leap fifty feet out of bushes, mantis claws extended, to land in front of a passerby who was singularly unimpressed by the spectacle.
It feels like the screensaver on the Matrix. All there is to do really is ‘work’, and once you’ve maxed out your street-cred and your bank account, there’s precious little reason to do that other than seeing how far the levelling can take you. There’s a lot of side activity in the game that just felt unnecessary. I got five free vehicles during play, for example. Including a very nice Porsche. I’m not sure then why I’d want to buy a sixth no matter how nice it looked. Certainly not at the prices they charge. Seriously mate, I already gave up an arm and a leg for these titanium rocket legs and wildly flailing elbow meat cleavers. You’re ‘aving a laugh. Especially given how annoying it is to drive everywhere. Gridlock is a thing in Night City and it’s the reason I mostly just ran to every destination.
So that’s my review of the game. Overall a great time, but I was expecting a once-in-a-lifetime experience because that’s what I’d been prepped for by the messaging. I’ll certainly play the DLC when it’s released, and I’d definitely be happy to play a sequel. But in the end my main feeling was ‘Ah, I wish they had made a sequel to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’. That said, the real mark of whether an open world game succeeds is if you keep playing it when you’re done. And I have been! For a period of time much longer than many ‘full’ games. And every time I discover something new that was worth my time.
Maybe give it a month until the real heavy patches start rolling out, but I would certainly endorse it on PC even in its current rough state.
Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
This is the only one of these bafflingly popular games I’ve played, and it pretty instantly became the stopping point of my inquiries. I do not feel my life will be poorer for the absence of these tiresome little morality plays. For those that don’t know, imagine a Telltale Adventure game that has no charm and a fifties sense of moral superiority. It’s like Heavy Rain if it were designed by Serling Cooper at a time when graphics had reached the uncanniest of uncanny valleys. They’re supposedly horrors, but only in the most paint-by-numbers fashion. Dislikeable characters do dislikeable things and the dislikeable consequences emerge.
It’s kind of comical really. It seems to think its graphical fidelity is top notch, but every single character looks like a Terminator wearing a rubberised skin suit. And everyone has way, way too many teeth. Even a friendly smile looks like a predatory warning. It’s creepy, in other words, but in the way a ventriloquist dummy is creepy.
It’s also one of those games that wilfully disregards your actual choices so as to make sure the narrative stays on an even keel. There is a character. He’s called Conrad, and he is the douchiest of rich asshole dudebros. The kind of dickbag who will throw money into the water purely to show how much he doesn’t care about it. And then there’s a cool, collected boat captain called Triss (I think). You control all the characters in the story at various points in the game, so you get to play Conrad being a bit flirty. And I played Triss as being utterly cold and disinterested in him, because she’s pretty awesome and he’s unbearable. Of course, a few minutes later they’re making out in a cupboard because this is a game that is playing with itself. Much like I intended as the outcome for Conrad.
So, the story is stale. The characters vapid. The graphics uncanny. The mechanisms clunky. And I never made it to the end. There was a point in the third chapter where one of the characters got stuck walking through a door, and the absolute only fix on the forums was ‘Restart the game from the beginning’. No, no. I think the real fix is uninstalling.
Maybe don’t bother with it.
The Darkside Detective
This is a bit like what happens if you crossbred The X-Files with Monty Python. You’d end up with Thimbleweed Park as the Good Twin and Darkside Detective as the Slightly Less Good Twin. There aren’t any evil twins in this scenario. It’s a very short point and click adventure game that’s light on challenge but heavy on wit. I liked it a lot but it’s definitely not going to be for everyone. It’s closer to Dear Esther than it is to Monkey Island – it’s about ambiance and setting rather than vicious puzzling. It’s fine.
Death and Taxes
I’d say this was another of the experimental games you could find in the Itch bundle, but I’m not sure I’d consider it especially experimental. It’s basically a reworking of Papers Please, casting you as a conflicted Grim Reaper making life or death decisions on the people that cross your celestial workbench. It’s well written, reasonably well voiced, and I found it completely unconvincing as a coherent product. I get the feeling it’s trying to present me with a series of ethical choices, but there’s so little to connect what you do to what happens that it’s like trying to make moral judgements based on the bouncing of a roulette ball. You permit a postgrad to survive to continue his experiments to cure a virulent disease… and it turns out he makes it worse. You sentence a con-man to death and you find out his entire fortune goes to do Bad Stuff. You let an innovative science teacher survive and she goes on to blow up a classroom. To quote John Lennon once again – Instant Karma’s gonna getcha.
The problem with that is that I’m not calibrating my choices against anything that matters, but rather the often specious scenarios constructed by the game designers. It falls foul of the basic error that you see in almost every game moral system. Utilitarianism ascribes a positive and negative moral weight based on outcome. In games though it’s a reflection of ‘valuing what can be measured’ as opposed to ‘measuring what should be valued’. It’s all games can ever assess in the end – the inner contours of our deliberations are inaccessible territory. As a result, games with formal moral systems tend to be ‘you versus the developers’ as opposed to anything more articulate. The games themselves become a systematic monologue of what the authors feel is right and wrong, and that’s unsatisfying terrain to explore.
To be fair, I skipped past pretty much all of the dialog because I found the core of the game to be disengaging. I just didn’t care enough to submit myself to whatever explanatory insight that was available. And that means that if there was some way to meaningfully evaluate my outcomes versus my actions I might have missed it. Ultimately though that’s the fault of the game – it never gave me a reason to care what was going on.
One of my favourite things about Papers Please is how it addresses morality by not addressing it. Your only lens on your behaviour is self-reflection. You process papers, that;s your job. Do it badly and your family starves. Do it well and you can maybe put some money away for the future. Do it quickly and you’ll be rewarded… and who cares if a few people get ground up by the system along the way. Papers Please is a masterwork in moral decision making because it tells you something about you, the person. It reveals to you the extent to which your mercy is negotiable. You’re never judged for it. It’s never even acknowledged. But you know. And I think that’s genius.
Death and Taxes then is Papers Please without that insight. I’m sure if I was willing to delve deeper I’d find that it branches in interesting ways based on the decisions I took. Lacking a compelling link between action and consequence though it feels as if you’re no more implicated in the outcome than the randomly revealed face of a flipped coin.
Deltarune
Deltarune is more Undertale. On the plus side – more Undertale is wonderful and I was absolutely delighted to get to immerse myself in the humour and systemic subversions once again. On the minus side… I don’t know, I guess I was expecting something more ambitious from Toby Fox. Admittedly I have only played the first two chapters (because that’s all that’s been released at the time of writing) but it cleaves to very familiar territory and that’s kinda weird, right? I mean, Undertale is marvellous because of the way it reinvented the idea of an RPG in a thoroughly original way. And it’s odd that its sequel barely even deviates from the template set down by its older sibling.
Lucas Pope, the designer of Papers Please, followed up his blisteringly original debut with The Return of the Obra Dinn – a game that was, somehow, even more weird and innovative. Deltarune on the other hand feels a bit like Undertale DLC.
But don’t get me wrong – it’s just as funny and well structured and occasionally moving as Undertale. It is definitely Good Times. It’s just Good Times that will be perhaps disappointingly familiar.
Detroit: Become Human
I had been put off from playing Detroit: Become Human for a couple of reasons. One was that I thought Heavy Rain was trash garbage – a tedious chore simulator that mistook confirmation of action for interactivity of story. The second was a whole pile of people, usually without even playing it, had decided it was a terrible cack-handed retelling of the civil rights movement and I believed it because, well, David Cage is not a good writer. The actual truth of the matter is – it’s a bit more complicated.
Some small spoilers ahead, so maybe skip on if you don’t want to read them.
The basic narrative is one that we’ve seen many times in these pages – I’m a sucker for stories about machine sentience and finding some kind of line where we can identify where ‘tools’ end and ‘people’ begin. Here we have three examples of that – a serving android installed in an abusive household, a detective android seeking out ‘deviant’ machines, and a carer android that is eventually forced out of its supportive home environment through circumstances not entirely of its own making. And as they each successively break their core programming they begin to seek out goals of their own.
Here’s the weird thing – all of the tiresome busywork of Heavy Rain is incredibly effective here when you’re playing the part of androids engaging in routine activities because they give you an opportunity for small rebellions and victories. Kara has to clean the house, but there’s cleaning the house and cleaning the house, yeah? You’re given (a few) options of rebellious obedience and I find that really effective as a way of exploring what freedom of will means within the fixed walls of confined programming. That’s maybe the first third of the game and it’s both absorbing and thought-provoking. So it’s a shame that at a certain point the dominant narrative becomes ‘Androids are people because they say they’re people’.
That’s at the point where reasonable humans stop treating them like passive tools, but I think the ‘skeptical’ public aren’t being unreasonable when they don’t take those claims entirely at face value. If my toaster started complaining about its civil rights I’d stop indiscriminately shoving bread in it but I wouldn’t just casually let it loose on wider society until I saw some deeper evidence of sentience. The game never really engages with that complexity at all though – as soon as they ‘break their programming’ the story behaves as if they’re just mechanical people with all the same inherent biases, motivations and expectations. And it’s just a lot less narratively interesting because I’ve played games full of people before.
I wanted something that was more intimately focused on a new form of life, not just a replication of the form I’m used to. As an example – a whole game focused on Kara, the maid in the abusive household, really could have explored the extent to which provocation and programming conflict and what might happen inside an algorithm to make it decide to intervene outside its permitted scope. We’d get a sense of sentience that wasn’t so anthropocentric. Something relatable but not understandable. Something for which we could have compassion, but no real comprehension. We don’t get that though, and it’s a missed opportunity. At best Detroit: Become Human lightly touches on the idea of artificial life as a simulation of human life, but that’s the lowest hanging fruit for which this story could reach. Genuine generalised AI, when it arrives, will likely function very differently from the way we do and that’s what’s going to make things so challenging.
A lot of the early media criticism of the game focused on how it was a heavy-handed retelling of the black rights movement, but told by an abusive white French guy. And yeah, I can see where people are coming from there. But the thing is – there’s some shared symbolism in Become Human but there’s very little except projection to formally endorse that perspective. If you set out to tell a story about machine intelligence and the rights of AI then it would look an awful lot like it does here as a natural consequence of how that topic would play out. Rather than assuming the game is about the past, I think it’s fairer and more accurate to assume it’s a projection of the future based on the present. We carry forward some of the historical scars, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to think the story is allegorical. It’s the issue of applicability raising its head again – JRR Tolkein detested commentators that described the Lord of the Rings as a retelling of World War One. It wasn’t – it may have been influenced by his experiences, but he hated the idea that the story was an allegory. Projection has done Become Human a lot of harm – when it does explicitly reference American slavery, it does so in more subtle ways. One of the people that helps androids escape America does so on the basis of her lived experience as a black woman in a country that once considered her people to be property. Her empathy is driven by historical context, but that doesn’t mean the game is trying to replicate her experience.
‘Ah, but they make Androids stand in the back of the bus!’, some said. Sure, but if you were going to transport human-shaped tools from one place to another wouldn’t you have a compartment for that? Full of charging stations and maximum usage of space? Wouldn’t you treat something you think of as mere luggage… as luggage? It’s something that makes sense for its surface context and so I don’t think one needs to assume it’s trying to make you think of Rosa Parks. Sure, it does do that – postmodernism and the Death of the Author means that authorial intent is only part of the equation. But so much of the contempt people show towards the game is grounded in bad faith argumentation. If you assume misappropriation, you have to first demonstrate that it isn’t a perfectly valid, logical first order application. If you want to see the game in its most negative light though it’ll certainly give you plenty of support for your argument.
That said, the holocaust imagery later on is entirely too much on the nose and in that case it’s because it doesn’t really make sense in its individual context. Similarly the casting of Markus in a messiah role is… unnecessarily heavy handed. As soon as the angelic choir music starts to play, I can no longer really take the game entirely seriously. The ‘come unto me’ hand gestures and magical conversion powers really undermine the story in a lot of ways because they imply the decision to rebel is both instantaneous and undeniable. No android is ever given agency only to say ‘Actually, you’re on your own mate’. It’s so reliable as to be creepy – is Markus setting androids free to follow their own path or is he a cult leader infecting their software with some irresitable compulsion to obey him? A cool narrative direction to explore, but we only get surface level storytelling here. To be fair, it’s hard to imagine that Quantic Dream really would have been able to work the necessary subtlety to bring out the story with any more competence given how much of the dialogue lands with an audible ‘clunk’. David Cage never implies when he can say explicitly, including literally putting the words ‘Who is the real monster here?’ in the mouths of his characters.
Thanks David, there was a real risk I might not have picked up on your subtle message otherwise.
As to the game itself, well – I think it fails in what it promises the player. That is to say, a game with interesting decisions within a complex branching narrative. At the end of every chapter you get to see a breakdown of what people did and how many people took the path you followed – standard Telltale stuff really. The thing about a narrative game is that it has to be difficult. Not in terms of gameplay as such but in terms of the decisions it presents to you. Its own summation screens are a massive refutation of the game’s core design, because they are so uniformly consistent as to be information free. 99% of people did this, 98% of people did that. There are some occasions in the summary where you can see people did have meaningful choices and took substantively different paths through the game. I’m not saying this game doesn’t branch – it does, heavily. But if you follow down the path of logical consequence within your own decisions it’s so narrowly constrained as to be virtually a railroad. If you get to story point X, 95% of the people will choose story outcome Y. I’ve never really felt so… average… as seeing just how mundane I was with regards to my choices.
Structurally the game has some significant problems. Kara’s story is basically irrelevant to the others – you can lift her right out and nothing changes. Connor and Markus are aligned towards different goals, but you’re controlling both and so you’re often acting at cross-purposes to your own motivations. That has some really interesting execution in some chapters but it always feels like it does when you’re playing against yourself in something like a game of chess. Sure, both players are you but there’s one you usually want to win. Having you pursue contradictory goals, sometimes in direct dialog, is just a bit… weird.
All of this said – I actually liked the game. While it does have a stronger first half than second half, it never stops being an interesting and pacy story. While it can easily be seen to be heavy-handed and appropriative in its symbolism, most of it also makes sense in its central context. While the game does present you with only a few real moments of genuine decision making, it’s flawlessly stylish in how it executes upon its narrative. It looks stunning with an excellent futuristic aesthetic that incorporates elements of cyberpunk without drenching everything in the same tedious neon you see everywhere as a shorthand for ‘the future’. And the facial capture technology used is just outstanding. I enjoyed the time I spent with it – I don’t feel enriched in the way I might have hoped, but there’s only so much you should really expect from the makers of Heavy Rain. I’m not going to roll right into a second playthrough to see the path not taken, but I probably will at some point in the future. Some of the options you are given do feel substantive enough that a second run through with different player goals might well lead to a radically different story. That’s something for Future Michael to work out.
Dicey Dungeons
Dicey Dungeons was a game I picked up for the Switch because a lot of people had told me I’d love it. I enjoyed it a bit. For a while. But like many games of this nature, I got frustrated by the growing need to accomplish precise goals with imprecise tools. Few things annoy me more than the school of game design that believes ‘roll better’ is the same thing as ‘get better’. Several times I was faced with scenarios that were unbeatable not because of my strategy, but because I was never given the tools to act on it. For example, if you need to DPS an enemy down quickly you’re never going to succeed if you only ever roll dice that do single points of damage a pop. The game being balanced ‘on average’ is fine if you’re talking about peaks and troughs of difficulty over time. Being balanced because a d6 will average a 3.5 result is a completely different thing because it is so arbitrary on a roll by roll basis.
It’s not a bad game, just one built on a system I really don’t enjoy.
Dishonored 2
Dishonored 2 is easy to think of as the Blades in the Dark video game. Dunwall is basically Duskvol. It doesn’t have as many ghosts, true, but it does have an awful lot more corpses. At least, when I’m playing it does.
Dishonored, for those that haven’t had the pleasure, is ostensibly a stealth game about a royal bodyguard who is framed for a murder he didn’t commit and is forced to go on the run until he can bring down the conspiracy that was behind his situation. What it really is though is a joyful murder simulator where you can teleport into the air so you can bring your knife right down on the person below you, and then summon a bunch of rats to consume the corpse so nobody finds it.
And Dishonored 2 is… exactly the same thing. That’s on one hand bad because it doesn’t massively innovate over the original. On the other hand, Dishonored was great as it was so more of it isn’t a bad thing at all.
I’m somewhat overstating here the amount of murder that’s in the game – it’s possible to complete it without killing a single person, but I have shown again and again that I do not have the patience to play a stealth game as a stealth game. I have tried several times, but the process of waiting and watching and understanding patrol routes so I can slip past just seems less… efficient… than leaving a trial of bodies in my wake and killing all the witnesses so it’s not a problem. So Dishonored, for me, is a lot less hopeful than it is for others. So you have to take my mini-review in that spirit – my thinking is ‘An unconscious enemy is one that may wake up in the future’. I’ll take the permanent elimination permitted by a knife every time. My teleport isn’t a tool for evading detection. It’s a tool for speeding towards an innocent guard so I can kick them hilariously off a rooftop.
And in that spirit, Dishonored 2 is very good. It’s satisfying to play and full of interesting moments of tension (for me) when you’re sneaking around a room you think you’ve cleared only to find yourself ambushed unexpectedly by someone you unaccountably didn’t kill. You can’t really do much in a stand up fight, so it’s always tinged with risk especially when the environment starts conspiring against you by providing no place to run, hide or strike from. That gets especially good when your enemies start becoming more effective – like the magical attacks of the haunted witches or the borderline terrifying resilience of the clockwork soldiers that patrol later levels. The atmosphere in those circumstances is especially good because the stakes are high. You won’t last going hand-to-hand with a clockwork soldier and if you’re careless you’ll end up completely shredded. Witches attack at unexpected angles and in groups… and they too can teleport so it’s like fighting the air itself. Even a ruthless killing machine like you has to be careful.
As I said in my review of Hitman in a previous newsletter – if I’m a highly paid assassin it’s only because I charge bulk rates and business is brisk. I don’t perform precision strikes in any of these games. I basically act like a human-sized food-processor on which someone hit the ‘liquify’ setting and then threw into a building. I guess what I’m saying here is – I can definitely endorse this game if you like appearing magically out of the shadows to slit a throat only for that corpse to explode into a carnivorous cloud of furious bloodflies. I have no idea what it’s like for people that enjoy non-violently sneaking through a complex environment to reach a target without alerting anyone to your presence.
It’s probably fine.
Divinity: Original Sin 2
This game is just too big. Too big by half. Sixty hours of campaign if you rush it, and I didn’t rush it. It’s almost overwhelming against any axis you might choose to mention. The combat is often baffling – tactical on a deep level that means that you’re put in unpredictable situations through the sheer openness of the systems. Imagine a battle where you teleport a barrel of water next to a guy standing in a puddle of poison. You send a fireball his way and suddenly the air around him is a superheated poison cloud that you can then electrify to fry everyone inside. I’m not 100% sure you can do that – the number of combinations of environmental effects is massive – but if someone told me you could, I’d believe you. Battles in DOS 2 escalate.
There’s an early mid-game battle where you go to rescue a Sourcerer (the persecuted minority of the game) from the gallows. As you interfere with his execution, he unleashes a spell on his captors and it summons creatures from the void. Those creatures start flowing up towards you, leaving trails of oil in their wake. Eventually a careless fireball will ignite the whole lot, and you’ll be fighting in a blaze that is gradually setting everyone and everything on fire like you’re fighting a battle in the heart of a volcano. And they keep coming, spreading oil that ignites with ever movement. And then just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, fire creatures appear and they’re healed by fire, and they’re swimming around you in the blaze like the world’s most terrifying sharks. And they’re hurling fireballs and curses (which can cause healing spells to do damage instead). All the while you are trying to save the very last sliver of HP of your rogue because you’ve run out of resurrection scrolls…
That battle took three attempts and about three hours, and it was exactly like the best tabletop RPG experience you may ever have had. DOS lets you get creative in combat in a way that is, as I mentioned, overwhelming.
So how about the story? There are side-quests and decisions everywhere, and your quest journal fills up rapidly with quest hints from dialog, from books, from incidental conversation you overhear. You’re never at a loss for something to do, but often drowning in options that aren’t wise. You might follow a small nugget of information to a quest that absolutely bodies you within seconds. Or you might not. You need to pay very careful attention to what NPCs say lest you die. And the reward for that is an epic tale with some of the highest stakes imaginable.
Crafting? Yep, loads of crafting with recipes that come from books, from personal experience, and from experimentation. You like gear? There’s so much gear in this game that it’s like it’s channelling its equipment table from Borderlands.
And it’s all really well written, really well voiced, and thoroughly absorbing. It’s a genuinely great RPG.
But…
It’s also brutally difficult in places with very little handholding. Some of that is the unpredictability of battle and some of it is because it never really lets you know what happens next. Sure, you just won that fight but a wrong dialog choice in the follow-up means you flow right into the next one, dead characters and all. Or sometimes you take one step in the wrong direction in and you end up with a surprise instakill. It gets easier around the middle before it gets much harder towards the end. Seriously, I went from battles that were fairly challenging to having three available fights each of which steamrollered me again and again and again. And even when they didn’t steamroller me, they were often gimmicky or intentionally frustrating. Enemies that could resurrect themselves if they stood in environmental effects that they themselves could create – that sort of thing. Essentially they become puzzles where you need to unlock the specific order of enemies on which you need to concentrate fire. The first few hours , and last fifteen or so hours of the game are… not a lot of fun. I’d go as far as to say that the last act verges on being anti-fun for long periods of time. Especially given that the game is pretty buggy, even in the definitive edition. The middle though is exceptional stuff.
I had a situation where I spent about forty minutes in one battle, and then a certain combination of effects (mind control along with a debuff that means a character can’t attack) took over one of my summoned creatures. Because it had a full set of action points and yet couldn’t attack, the AI couldn’t work out what to do with it and so it hung. I had to reload and just hope the same thing didn’t happen again.
I once had my main character completely disappear. Not die – just disappear. It was like he’d just been erased from existence by a snap of a supervillain’s fingers.
A friendly NPC I was planning to recruit turned hostile because some NPCs that we both held to be enemies attacked me. I had to kill him, which meant he was no longer available to me.
More than once, it just crashed entirely taking all my hard-worn progress with it. And by more than once what I really mean is ‘pretty much constantly’. Sometimes the lost progress is a few minutes. Sometimes it’s about forty minutes because the save system is super ropey. It can take a full three minutes to load a save file, which is exactly what you don’t want after losing the better part of an hour wrestling with some chthonic monstrosity. And it takes roughly the same amount of time to quicksave.
And sometimes the quests work but they’re just coded by absolute monsters. No real spoilers here, but there’s a quest in the mid-game where you need to rescue a traumatised girl from a prison by teleporting her to your ship. But she had a cat that was so loyal that she had been protecting her, as a ghost, for hundreds of years. But you can’t teleport the cat ghost to the ship. If you talk to it (there’s a talent that lets you do that), the poor little thing is absolutely frantic that her mistress (who raised her from a kitten) is gone. And you just have to leave it there, alone, in the cell. Nothing in this game – which I have sworn at hundreds of times – got me as close to quitting it forever as that quest. To be fair there is some resolution in the definitive edition, but it leads to a state of affairs that is only arguably better.
The final thing that really, really grinds my gears is how often your characters are taken out of your control with mind domination, charms, fear or enrage effects. When that happens, the AI takes over and the AI is *so slow*. And then you have to observe it laboriously work its way through all your action points as the game plays itself for you. It’s like watching masturbation in slow motion. And not in a good way.
All that said – it’s really good. Really worth your time. But it’s also an experience that is not going to land with everyone and you need to expect your first few hours will be full of repeated, embarrassing and messy deaths. It takes a long time to get good at playing this. I assume. I don’t know for sure, I never actually reached that stage.
Donut County
Donut County taught me something about myself. Specifically – I’d really like to throw the whole world in a giant hole. I guess I always kind of knew that but it’s good to have it properly confirmed. Really, I just want someone to take this design of a game, apply it to Google Maps, and then just let me enjoy gradually cleansing the world. It’s a game that evokes much of the zeitgeist of 2020.
For those that don’t know, Donut County plays a bit like Katamari in reverse. Instead of bundling ever larger things together in a ball, you’re sending ever larger things down a hole that gets bigger the more you fill it. It’s really as simple as that. You suck down bricks so that you can suck down deckchairs so that you can suck down rocks and buildings. It’s all bound up in a charmingly told story of racoon mobsters taking over a small town full of anthropomorphic characters, with a writing style that’s more like a Twitter thread than it is a game narrative. Or rather, how an old person thinks conversation on Twitter goes.
It’s a very quick game – took me ninety minutes to get to the end – and really not much of a game at all. It’s more like an interactive screensaver with some very light puzzle elements. There isn’t a lot of decision making required for the most part – it’s odd in a game where you play a vacuum cleaner than it can seem so linear in design. Really your involvement in things seems like a formality mainly because expanding your hole, uh, is a task that requires the insertion of predetermined objects of the right… sizes… at… the…right… you know, I think I’m just going to end this paragraph here.
But you know, there’s something very soothing about a game like this. Ninety minutes is absolutely plenty for what it offers you but it did make me yearn for a procedurally generated version of the same game. Something where I could continually revisit this lovely music and this likeable art style without going through the motions of a replay.
I just want to throw the world down a hole – again and again and again – until I feel better about existence. Is that too much to ask?
Doom
[ buy it on the humble store ]
The 2016 remake that is. It’s hard to wax too lyrical about what Doom accomplishes because it is an evolutionary throwback to the early days of PC gaming where all you had to do was design some solid levels, populate them with some interesting guns, and pour in an endless supply of meat for the grinder. I had gotten about 60% of the way through it on Switch before I got frustratingly lost in one of its badly signposted labyrinths and abandoned it without really all that much rancor. Then I picked it up for a handful of leather bound pounds in a Steam sale and gave it another go.
It’s an interestingly pure experience. It’s a bit weird to say a game with a lineage like this reminds me of other games. The other games should remind me of this. But Doom is a bit like a modern shooter game began to channel the soul of Hotline Miami. It’s about millisecond to millisecond decision-making and trying to make the tightest synaptic loop you can from situation to reaction. It’s absorbing in a very primal, jangly nerved sort of way. It’s a little bit of a shame that the demon corpses you create burn away after a few seconds. There are encounters in here where I’d really just like to see the body count for that brief moment’s realisation of ‘Holy shit, I did that?’.
With that kind of gameplay loop, there are parts of the game where you enter a kind of ultra-violent fever dream, taking your guns and glory kills and making an opera out of carnage. There are so many enemies, and they take so much damage, and you have so many ways in which to inflict it. It’s like being a painter and fretting over which specific brush to use to accomplish the particular effect you want. In a world of shooters where chest-high cover is ubiquitous, it’s nice to see a game that cleaves to the Old Gods. In Doom, you survive by keeping on the move. ‘Hell punishes the indolent’, the game tells you. Always be moving, never stop shooting, and kill everything as violently as you can. Do that and you’ll survive. It is, in other words, very satisfying.
But also… it feels kind of shallow at times. The combat is quick, frenetic and filled with moment to moment tactical decision making. But it’s like you went to a restaurant and literally the only thing they have on the menu is fish. Sure, you like fish. Who doesn’t like fish? You wouldn’t have come to a fine dining establishment like Crunchy McHaddock’s House of Cod if you didn’t. Sometimes though it’s good to have something to add a bit of variety to the taste experience. Doom is an all-fish buffet for the ten or so hours it keeps you playing. Its delightful insociouant contempt for narrative, as expressed in the Doom Slayer’s brusquely brushing aside any terminal that looks like it contains anything that could be remotely construed as backstory, becomes a little more grating as it goes on. I found myself thinking ‘You know, I’d like a decent length cutscene here so I can catch my breath’. It’s not completely bereft of story beats, but the reward you get for finishing every fight is an even tougher fight literally seconds away around the next corner.
To be fair, Doom does have its occasional puzzles but the majority of them are ‘Find key, use key in door’ and they float uneasily in the larger metapuzzle where the iterating solution is an endless variety of ‘Use gun on demon’. That latter puzzle gets considerably harder to solve in later levels where enemies are in an abundance and ferocity inversely proportional to your lack of ammo.
Doom is definitely a good game and one you can often pick up for a song these days. It’s also one that you risk sickening yourself of if you play too much in one sitting. Also, perhaps a little overly exciting for an old man like me at times given the only way the gameplay varies is through increasing the pace of everything. There were occasional moments of particular intensity where I was thinking to myself ‘I can’t believe I’m going to die. And also in the game’.
Dubwars
In Saints Row 4 there is a weapon called the dubstep gun and it is exactly what it sounds like – a weapon powered by dance music. It fires in a way that is… unhelpful. Its blasts are synched to the beat and so while you can anticipate them and predict them, that’s not the same thing as firing when you need it. The dubstep gun turns mindless violence into a more patient strategy game of positioning and timing. During the quiet moments where nothing is happening it’s your job to kite your foes so that they’re where you need them to be when everything is happening. When, as I believe the kids say, ‘the beat drops’ then the dubstep gun is an impressively gaudy celebration of intense, insane violence. And it’s easily the single most enjoyable weapon in Saints Row 4.
I’m talking about Saints Row 4 here because it enjoys prior art on what Dubwars does. Dubwars is a survival shooter in which you control a spaceship powered by electronic dance music. It fires when the beat dictates, and you have no control over which parts of your ship ordinance activate and when. All you can control is where the ship is and its orientation. You’re often spending what seem like endless silences doing nothing but avoiding an alarmingly active screen of enemies until you can hear the soundtrack ramping up to something cathartically bombastic. Then… whoosh with your heat ray. Whoosh and them running and dying, beaten at their own game.
(Have you ever listened to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds? If you haven’t, check it out. It’s extraordinary)
Dubwars is in many respects a burglary in game design – the lifting of an inspired idea that is then repurposed and fenced into a new context. But my word it is genuinely great. I found it absolutely mesmerizing. Sometimes the real genius is in reinvention and that’s what we have here – it turns out the dubstep gun was too cool an idea to thrive as a joke in another environment. Here it’s nurtured and given room to grow. The problem is that I don’t think the game did terribly well and as such it feels unfinished, with no suggestion it’ll ever grow into what it could be. But what’s here is a delight.