Emily Is Away Too

If you’re paying any attention to these video game thoughts at all you’ve probably noticed that the theme is ‘wildly inconsistent’ when it comes to game choice. It spins violently from ‘stuff out this year’ to ‘stuff released in the early 2010s’, off to ‘Big AAA titles’ and down into ‘weird obscure indies’. They span long, sprawling monsters and the shortest and tightest frivolities. There’s no real rhyme and reason to it other than I want to make sure I don’t get stuck in a mental local optima – I always want to be in a position where I’m sampling enough things outside my comfort zone that I won’t miss out on unexpected gems.

Emily Is Away Too isn’t a rare gem, but it’s a really interesting design that straddles the fourth-wall in a way that seems incredibly uncomfortable. Your interface to the game is an old timey AOL style messenger app, and it will regularly dump artefacts from the virtual conversation on to your actual desktop. You’ll get links to social media in the game, and be directed to the website which, in turn, draws in media from other sites. It’s clever, and a convincing facsimile of a social life, but it’s also very fragile. A few times all I got for my efforts was a ‘The copyright owner has blocked access to this video’ notice because the source is now gone. Games like this are a preservationist’s nightmare because they require not just the saving of the game, but the freezing of its context in a kind of time amber. Twenty years from now, Emily Is Away Too will likely be all but unplayable.

As to the game itself, it’s kind of like what would happen if you crossed an Eliza chatbot with horny teenagers. It’s a friend-zone simulator. Or, I guess, a ‘Nice Guy’ simulator where you use your privileged position of trust to steer the lives of your close female friends in a direction that benefits you. Yeah, it’s pretty creepy and I don’t think it’s intended to be so.

The conceit is this – you’re engaged in simultaneous IM chats with two girls. One is the punk loving Evelyn and the other is the indie-rock enthusiast Emily. They ask you questions about yourself – your experiences, your preferences, your favourite things in life. And then later on you find yourself quizzed and cross-referenced as to the integrity of the persona you’ve constructed. Maybe you say you love the Foo Fighters to Emily because you know that’ll get her on your side. Maybe you say you love… I don’t know, some punk band… to Evelyn. Maybe later she and Emily compare notes. The overriding message of the game seems to be ‘Be honest, be true to yourself’ and I like that. Authenticity is a seldom-emphasised trait in fictive worlds, because it’s hard to say ‘be yourself’ when you’re simultaneously being told to ‘be a master assassin’. Well, it’s hard for most people to reconcile that conflict.

Really I suspect my issues with Emily Is Away Too are simply chronological. I do remember what it was like being young with ICQ as my only real window on the world. But in the same way I wouldn’t want to find my old message logs from there I don’t really want to look through this window into the painfully earnest chat logs of younger people. I just want to scream ‘UNTIL YOU’RE SADDLED WITH A MORTGAGE AND A LIFE YOU CAN’T ESCAPE WITHOUT A BLOOD-PROOF SMOCK AND A POWERFUL WOODCHIPPER, SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS’. I just can’t relate to youthful innocence. It makes me feel old and withered in a way that I only truly realize when playing games or looking in a mirror. But also, I find these games frustrating because sometimes every narrative choice is constructed from a list of forced errors.

There’s a piece of the story where Emily is breaking up with her boyfriend (oh, you need a shoulder to cry on sweetheart? I’m always here for you, but you should ditch him and by the way what are you plans for the prom?). She tells how she went to his house and told him it was over, and he said ‘no’, and now she’s all confused about where they stand as a relationship. He sends her a text ‘I’m so glad that we decided not to break up, I literally could not live without you’.

While you do get to carefully point out healthy ways to deal with the situation, at no point do you get to say ‘Okay, this guy is a textbook abuser. He’s gaslighting you, and emotionally manipulating you through threats of self harm. You’re not responsible for the injury he may do to himself, nobody can place that burden upon your shoulders unless you pick the weight up yourself.’. You don’t get to lay it out like that, you have to dance around it and hope that the dialog system aligns with what you want to say – and it doesn’t always. Sure, that level of insight probably isn’t something you can expect from a love-struck teen. The disconnect between me and my character is too deep to reconcile though. The cynical old man that sees the worst in everyone cannot easily inhabit the persona of a teen that hasn’t seen anything of the worst contours of the human psyche. The game suffers as a result, because I can’t ever truly relate.

It’s an interesting experiment in game design. It’s not hugely successful beyond that.

Fights in Tight Spaces

This was an unexpected treat! I regularly exchange ‘Christmas games’ with an Australian friend of mine and our shared philosophy is ‘I don’t care what you want to play, here’s a game I want you to play’. I sent him Sayonara Wild Hearts, Celeste and West of Loathing. He sent me Fights in Tight Spaces.

It’s a game I sort of knew about but all I had read was that it was a kind of rogue-like deck-builder of the kind that these days can be generated through the autosuggestion feature of your phone. It had an interesting Superhot-esque aesthetic. And I thought ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a try just so I’m not an ungrateful receiver of a gift’.

And I played it a bit and thought ‘Yeah, that was interesting so I’ll give it another go’

And the next thing I knew I’d spent twenty-six hours playing the game despite having completed it in about eight.

So, it’s very good. Best in class, I think. I enjoyed Slay the Spire passably, but always felt that it wasn’t quite as entertaining as it could be due to the shallow combat system. Fights in Tight Spaces (FITS) solves that by making the combat system positional and by curating a truly exceptional philosophy of card design. There are no weak cards in any deck, but your job is to build them together in ways that work with your playstyle and the environments in which you fight. It’s more than just balancing movement and attack – cards synergise in sets that form emergent martial art schools. My style is heavy on control – grapples, shoves, pushes meld into shifts and slips so I can move freely around the battlefield and trick enemies into attacking each other. If I take a point of damage, I consider it a failed run. To that end, my deck tends to involve attacks at a distance, and attacks that move people around (kicks will push an enemy, for example). In a replay, a level of FITS looks like a ballet. It look choreographed, like someone spent days building elegance into a beat ‘em up.

But if you wanted to go straight toe-to-toe, there are lots of brutally damaging moves that can be wedded to blocks, stuns, and throws. You can win fights by simply absorbing punishment and bringing foes to you for devastating power-blows. Movement undoes your combo counter, so if you play a slippery eel character like I do you’ll find that very few of your blows have real impact. It’s all about the right kick at the right time. But if you focus on combo building, you can unleash one-hit kills on even the toughest bosses.

It’s a deck-builder in other words that contains within it a seed of real creativity. Optimal deck composition is a matter of individual flair rather than mathematical optimisation. And that’s only possible because of the love and attention that’s gone into the design of each of those cards.

FITS also draws a lot of inspiration from Into the Breach in that every enemy move is telegraphed in advance, and your job is to weave their attacks into an outcome that leaves them unconscious and you still standing. You know exactly where the safe parts of the grid are, but timing constraints and the special powers of enemy attacks mean you will still often find yourself being penned in. Everything is always in balance and it makes each level not just a satisfying explosion of violence but also a beautifully designed fractal puzzle of brutal smackdowns.

So, that’s FITS. Slay the Spire meets Into the Breach meets Superhot in a combination that is much better than any individual game in its direct ancestry. Definitely check it out!

Finding Paradise

Finding Paradise is the sequel to a game called To The Moon, which I spoke about last year. Two games that barely deserve the description – really they’re just visual novels with delusions of grandeur. RPG Maker level graphics and systems with the mereset veneer of gameplay to differentiate them from a powerpoint slideshow.

But my god, what slideshows. Impossibly lovely stories, beautifully told. Heartwarming, funny, sad, heartbreaking, poignant and hopeful all at the same time. Meditations on life and loss and meaning that seem lighthearted and comic right until they explode in your gut. I honestly can’t recommend them enough.

Florence

Heading into familiar territory here with an ’emotionally heartfelt not-game’. Florence is the video game equivalent of a mopey song from an emo college band. Or maybe it’s not even that since you are very hard-pressed to find a game in here. And yet, I found it endearing as I often do with these kind of vaguely experimental indies.

Actually, the emo-band connection is unfair. Florence reminds me of nothing so much as it does the Dylan album Blood on the Tracks. This is, objectively, his best work and anyone who thinks it’s Blonde on Blonde should have a word with themselves. It’s okay to be wrong, but you need to do something about it.

Blood on the Tracks is a nigh-on perfect piece of musicianship because it is the absolute perfect break-up album. It is cyclic, beginning with heartache, moving on to depression, acceptance, and a misguided optimism before the whole thing repeats. And Florence feels like your first playthrough of Blood on the Tracks. It resonates.

You are Florence, and you are alone. You are unhappy in your job, and unsatisfied in your wider life. Then you meet someone, and he gives your life meaning and purpose. He’s a musician, and you both encourage each other to achieve your dreams. Him, music. You – art. You move in together. You’re happy. You fight. You’re unhappy. You fight more. You break-up. Your life loses its purpose and colour until you find the ability to accept yourself through the encouragement he once gave you. Bitterness evolves into melancholy, and then into a kind of benign fondness. It begins with sadness and ends with hope. It’s Blood on the Tracks.

The gameplay is symbolic of all this. Nowhere is it best expressed than in the first date. You have to put together these simple but awkward jigsaws, and their completion represents the abstract idea of ‘a contribution to the conversation’. To begin with there are six in awkward shapes and sizes. Then four. Then two. It gets easier and easier to put these jigsaws together because the conversation is gelling. They’re compatible. And then later when that system is co-opted for an argument, the puzzle pieces are jagged and they need to be constructed at speed to make sure the fight doesn’t become balanced against you. It’s all very good ‘storytelling through game mechanics’ even if there’s no place for ‘fun’ to hide in these systems.

Anyway, it’s only an hour long and I found it very endearing. It might be the kind of artsy game-nonsense that appeals to critics and hardly anyone else, but I would still recommend you check it out if you get a chance.

Also, I’m serious about Blood on the Tracks. Have a word with yourselves.

Forager

Much as with when I said I had ‘completed’ Stellaris, Forager is a somewhat strange one to mark as being finished given how it’s a game of making big numbers go bigger ever faster and numbers don’t have an end point. I have completed it in the same way someone ‘completes’ a calculation of pi – I got to the stage that it just seemed pointless to go on.

So, Forager is basically an idle clicker game except with a great deal more activity built around its core. You dig up trees and rocks to get you materials that let you create fish traps and quarries. You use those fish to make meals that give you the energy you need to turn the gold you mined into banks that let you buy new lands. Those new lands open up new resources and puzzles that give you access to greater numbers of increasingly effective tools. Really it’s like Stardew Valley and Cookie Clicker had a baby. The problem for me is – for reasons I can’t adequately parse – I love this sort of game. I fell into Cookie Clicker deeply, played Adventure Capitalist to a point far in excess of its design merits, and ventured far too long within Clicker Heroes. So despite deciding three hours in that Forager was not for me, I still played it solidly for four whole days.

There isn’t a lot happening in Forager really despite the number of moving parts it exhibits. It has a levelling system that primarily serves to open up new ways to make big numbers. It’s got a combat system with all the depth of a shallow puddle. It’s got a gradually unlockable map that contains riddles and mazes of spectacularly uninspiring design. None of it particularly sparkles. It’s not an impressive game in any sense.

What it does do well though is distracting you with enough chores that you don’t really have time to notice. By the time you’ve gotten things set up to the point you can breath you’ve been given access to some spectacularly abusable buildings that keep you playing through a kind of horrified experimentation. There’s a building called a lighthouse that multiplies your gains from raw resources, as an example. A rock that may have given you a couple of bits of iron suddenly gives you four. But if you build a second lighthouse, it’ll give you eight. A third will give you sixteen, and so on. And it does this for all resources within a generous radius. Power plants do similarly for production speed, and putting enough of them around a factory will have it spitting out advanced components like a tommy gun. By the time you get to this stage, you’ve long moved past the point where raw resources are your limit and you move into a phase that is mostly about breaking the game as hard as you can to meet the ever increasing requirement for complex processed goods. The entire map becomes a dystopian hellscape of endless factories, pollution spewing power plants, carelessly discarded nuclear fuel, and the wholesale slaughter of every beast and animal that made the mistake of thinking a peaceful life was possible under your regime.

I’d say it was surprisingly engaging if I hadn’t already explained the cracks in my personality that these games somehow fill. I’m an unreliable narrator on this score. What I will say though is that a design based around gamifying exploits is actually interesting territory. Create enough broken systems, pair them up to deeply unfair game goals, and let the player sort it out. I don’t know if that was an intentional part of Forager’s design or whether it’s just a happy circumstance that its excessive demands on the player are matched by abusable systems. In any case, I got thirty-four engaging hours out of it and that’s more than a lot of immaculately tailored and balanced games have managed. Chaos really is a ladder, I guess.

Frostpunk

Frostpunk is, in technical terms, ‘a massive downer’ of a game. It’s an interesting take on a standard base-builder because of the way it shapes the experience curve. Most games of this nature give you an easy start before ramping up the difficulty to horror levels. Frostpunk instead gives you a U-shaped difficulty curve – to begin with you’re struggling to even keep people alive, and then you hit a (brief) period where it feels like you might be getting a handle on things, and then it keeps ratchetting up the pressure until you are either crushed into oil or compressed into a diamond. And you do this again and again and again in increasingly awkward situations.

The premise is that the world has undergone a cataclysmic climate event and everything and (almost) everyone has frozen to death. All that exists now is the generator – a skyscraper sized power-plant that works so hard that it heats everyone in the vicinity. But it requires a constant supply of fuel, and fuel is an ever-diminishing resource. So you must build up the infrastructure needed to constantly harvest the resources you need – not to thrive, but simply to survive. But it’s not enough to just throw people into the mines, you need to feed them. You need to keep them warm as the city you build grows out from the safety of the reactor. You need to make sure they’re treated medically. You need to expand your tech to take on greater challenges. And every single thing you do will increase the drain on the reactor. The real starving beast that you need to satisfy, always, is the power-plant. Before too long you’ve got a city that would work like a dream if only you could gather enough coal quickly enough to keep it running.

So instead, Frostpunk constantly forces you to make harsh decisions. Maybe tonight everyone is going to go hungry so that you can power the medical tents. Or maybe you’re going to sacrifice progress until you can work out how to redistribute resources in a more sustainable way. But don’t think too long, because as the game progresses you’ll start to see the end-game approach. Here the temperatures plummet even further. A ten degree drop you weren’t expected will result in illness and amputations, so imagine what a drop to negative 150 degrees might end up doing. Nobody can work. Nobody can gather food. And nobody can go into the mines to gather the fuel that is so vital to running the life-preserving heaters.

Frostpunk is a grim game where you are constantly working out your own personal calculus of survival – and none of the equations can be balanced.

Adding a little spice into the mix here is that you also get faced with regular moral challenges. Should children be educated, or should they be in the workforce? If they’re in the workforce, should they be kept only in safe jobs or is it okay to risk them? When new people arrive, do you accept them or turn them away? How do you deal with industrial disputes? What should your scouting party do when finding resources that might cost them lives to retrieve?

It’s all very good – it’s a genuinely worthwhile game – but it’s also a game where it caps out in terms of the experience quite early. It’s only two or three runs into it before you start seeing the same things cropping up again and again, showing that it’s not drawing any of its content from a deep well. The scenarios certainly shake things up, but not enough to really make them feel novel. In the end, Frostpunk is kind of a metaphor for its own reactor – you, the player, are a hungry beast that it must constantly fill full of nutrition and before long it will noticeably struggle before shutting down entirely.

Still worth your time if you have it or can get it cheap enough. I’ll be interested to see what they do with Frostpunk 2.

Full Throttle – Remastered

[ buy it on the humble store ]

Be honest with me here – were classic point and click adventure games ever any good? I have no fewer than three of them in my personal top 25 (Monkey Island 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Zak McKracken). The boxes of all three have at one point or another been framed on my walls, and two of them are still on my walls having been brought all the way to Sweden. I love these games, or at least the memory I have of playing them when I was young. I love them. I played and completed loads of them, even the truly wacky ones from developers that had no idea what they were doing. Lure of the Temptress? Yep, completed it. Simon the Sorcerer? Nailed it. Maniac Mansion? Yep.

But…

I have made several attempts over the past few months to return to the genre and I always find myself disappointed. Full Throttle is no exception, offering an interestingly distinctive setting for a traditionally disappointing game experience. I moved on to this after abandoning The Cave as a truly tedious piece of time-wasting nonsense, and I found many of the systemic flaws were present here – almost twenty years previous. It makes me scared to track the evidence back farther in time to games I genuinely do hold very dear to my heart. The idea of it feels like going back in time to assassinate the only wholesome parts of me that still exist after over forty years of living in this world.

Anyway, Full Throttle has one thing going for it – it is mercifully short in comparison to many point and click games of the 90s. It took me four hours to complete, and I’d say at least 25% of that was spent waiting for the character to crawl across the screen to some interactable piece of scenery only to say ‘Hrm’ and ‘No’ any time I tried to get him to do anything with it. There’s a lot of painfully tiresome backtracking, some true moon logic puzzles, and a story that does nothing to thrive in its setting. It’s got some of the most awkwardly unenjoyable action sequences I’ve seen in any game. This is combined with a whole pile of scenarios where every attempt to explore the environment to find solutions results in you being chased to another room so you can slowly crawl your character back to where he needs to be. It has some of the most unintuitive map design imaginable, combined with a dark aesthetic that makes many exits impossible to see. As a result, many of the solutions to the puzzles are completely intractable because you didn’t five the nine pixel spot where a new location revealed itself.

I guess the thing about point and click adventure games is that they really did get obsoleted – aside from the occasional experiment in cheerful nostalgia like Thimbleweed Park (which I actually genuinely did enjoy a lot) mostly they’ve been straight up driven out of their niche by games like Telltale’s many offerings, or the wonderful Life is Strange. And that’s weird because game genres very rarely truly die. I mean, even text adventures still exist in some form. Think of 80 Days or Sunless Skies – nothing but Zork with a fancier interface. Maybe point and clicks are mechanically broken – that it’s impossible, or at least exceptionally difficult, to make a point and click adventure game that is also genuinely fun. Maybe Thimbleweed is the outlier? Maybe they always sucked? Maybe they were only ever good for their time. I’m not inclined to test that hypothesis any more deeply than I have. I don’t want to lose my affection for Guybrush Threepwood or Zak McKracken.

I’m not basing this theory only on Full Throttle by the way. Day of the Tentacle suffered similarly when viewed in the mental rear view mirror, as did Beneath a Steel Sky – two other games I revisited quite recently. Grim Fandango has been a constant disappointment every time I have bought it for a new system. Three times in the past few years. Broken Age, a modern attempt to revisit the genre, was something I abandoned about two hours in and then never thought of again. The Cave, mentioned above and helmed by Tim Schaefer, is so obtusely dislikeable that I abandoned it about thirty minutes from the end.  The Dig managed to do better because it has a genuinely cool story but in the end it’s still a whole pile of moon logic and backtracking. Loom remains mesmerising as a game aesthetic and a game interface, but borderline unplayable as an actual game. I’ve sampled them all, and more, in the past five years. None have been enjoyable. Few have even been legitimately bearable.

So tell me honestly – were point and click adventure games ever any good? Full Throttle, in case you didn’t get the message, absolutely isn’t.

Gemini Rue

The Blackwell series was strong enough for me to be willing to check out more Wadjet Eye stuff, and the real surprise was that I had a pile of them already. I guess that’s the benefit of an addiction to game bundles – you often think ‘I should buy that’ and then find ‘wow, I already have’.

So, Gemini Rue has a few key things that bothered me – mainly that the interface is beyond obtuse. What sad reject from a game design clown college decided that ‘foot’ was a sensible action? I was half way through the game, stuck simultaneously on three puzzles at once, before I realised you could look at things in your inventory. There’s a puzzle where you need to use an item in your inventory on another item in your inventory. To do that you need to find a random interactable object in your environment and pretend you want to do something to it just so you get access to your pockets. It’s properly shocking in a genre where I think people had pretty much nailed the vocabulary and conventions decades previously.

Persevere past that though and you encounter the god-awful combat system. Look, real-time combat in a point and click game is a horrible idea. It’s always been a horrible idea, and even in games where it’s not terrible (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for example) it’s still by far the weakest part of the experience.

Get past that though and you have to bang your head against some spectacularly poor puzzles.

BUT GET PAST ALL OF THAT AND…

Past all of that and Gemini Rue reveals itself as a game that – if remastered with modern sensibilities – could genuinely be best in class. It’s amazingly atmospheric. The story is great, if a little predictable. And it’s filled with some pitch perfect voice acting. It’s a worthwhile game let down by its own attempts at innovation. Not all progress is good, after all.

Check it out if you’re a point and click fan and have been starved of sustenance for a while. Skip it otherwise. There are better Wadjet Eye games out there.

God of War

I missed out on much of the God of War series because I never owned a Playstation, and so this is the first of them I have ever played, and I only did that because of the PC port. I do remember it being lavished with praise at the time, and yeah – it’s very good. It looks pretty. It has some wonderful moments of characterisation and you do get to murder a fair number of Norse gods. It was very enjoyable.

But I didn’t love it. Largely because, in the end, it felt like a dozen other games out there. I wonder if there’s a touch of the Nintendo Nostalgia about the response it got. Having also never owned a Nintendo console (except for a lightly used DS), I don’t have any deep childhood affection for Mario, or Zelda, or any of the other gaming icons that get the Internet all giddy with anticipation. I thought Super Mario Odyssey was basically fine. Breath of the Wild was a beautiful game I only somewhat cared about. God of War falls into that same category for me – maybe if I had grown up with Kratos I’d care more, but really this is just an enjoyable axe-murdery rampage through Norse mythology with some genuinely visceral combat and an irritating child companion. I liked it enough to complete it, but not enough to pick up Ragnarok. God of War then is exactly good enough to warrant buying its sequel on a deep discount at some point in the future.

Gorogoa

This was an unexpected little treat! Not a long game by any stretch of the imagination, but Gorogoa is spectacularly lovely in almost every respect. It reminded me a lot of games like The Room, which marry a kind of otherworldly spookiness to some thoughtful positional puzzles. It also reminded me a lot of Superliminal, because it lets you play about with perspective in some very appealing and challenging ways.

It’s basically a kind of magical storybook where you have four panels of a visual novel, each permitting you to zoom in and scroll around through certain aspects of the imagery. When panels intersect, they might influence each other… perhaps the right hand side of one panel has a path that is level with the left hand side of another. Connect them up and perhaps a character walks from one side of the book over into the next. Perhaps a railroad line in one panel matches up to a ladder in another, and so the character climbs. Zoom out on their destination, and they have magically changed position and size. Mayhaps a rolling cartwheel has a cog with teeth of just the right size to fit a hole in another panel. You connect them together and as the cog spins, so too does the image to which it is attached, which lets you change orientation in a way that might then let you overlay onto yet another panel to progress.

It’s all very clever in a way that is only occasionally frustrating. The standard to which I hold almost every puzzle game that solution should make me think ‘Oh wow, that was actually very cool’ even if I may have been swearing at it seconds before. Gorogoa is, I’d say, around 95% in that camp.

It’s also got a story that is really nice. Told entirely in symbolism and visual iconography, it presents a lovely tale of adventure, regret, and acceptance of fate in the face of horror. In effect the entire game is one extended trip through the fragmented memories of an old man as he reflects on the path that took him to where he is now. It’s absolutely full of genuinely insightful story beats, told entirely through the whimsical puzzle design. I’m enchanted by how tightly it integrates the story within the solutions, and mechanisms, of its puzzles. I’m not sure I can think of any game that has accomplished that quite as well as Gorogoa.

It’s a hard recommendation from me, y’all.

Grim Fandango: Remastered

Grim Fandango was a game I played pretty much entirely because of a friend of mine’s endless, undignified whining that I wouldn’t complete it when I was completing so many other games. This was during the attempt I made to make a serious tent in my backlog. I have a history, you see, with Grim Fandango. I’ve bought at least six times. Tried to play it at least 20. I loathed it every single time purely because of its controls and camera even while I wanted to love it. It has a wonderful aesthetic and a mesmerising premise.

Given how much I hated the experience in my early days, it’s clear that past Michael is a discerning judge of quality. My experience with Grim Fandango is much like the one I had with Planescape: Torment in that it was a chore to play at the time and it hasn’t aged well from that.

The interface is so old fashioned and baroque it is vaguely traumatic to play, at least from a UX perspective. It sits unfortunately in the ‘shitty valley’ transition period of ‘we have no idea what we’re doing’ of 2D moving to o 3D in point and click games. I think the shift to 3D was basically the game equivalent of when ‘talkies’ became a thing. You couldn’t say ‘no’ to the shift because then you were basically consigning yourself to commercial irrelevance. But also, that shift killed a lot of studios that couldn’t survive the transition. We see the same thing here, with forced camera angles that make room navigation a problem, but also in terms of the tank style controls that are thankfully optional in the remastered version but never replaced with anything genuinely usable.

Even putting that aside there’s so much inelegance here that makes the game flow poorly. Such as how you can’t even look at items in the environment when you have something from your inventory selected. Or how the distinction between ‘use’ and ‘pick up’ is erratic and inconsistent. Or how the inventory selection screen is so cumbersome and constantly resets to the first in the list rather than the last selected – frustrating when you need to keep reusing the same item.

The real problem though is that the game itself, as defined by its puzzle space, is genuinely awful. If I hadn’t also played I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream I’d say it was the worst point and click I have ever seen in terms of its design. Because of bugs that remain even in the remastered version I eventually ended up playing with a walkthrough and at best I can say that was intermittently helpful. That’s how bad the puzzles are – they are just as intractable with the solution in hand as they are without. The mark of a good P\&C game is that when you solve something you go ‘That makes perfect sense, in hindsight’. Grim Fandango just makes you say ‘Wait, what?’. And then after a few moments reflection it becomes ‘No seriously – what the hell?’.

It’s a game defined not so much by moon logic as Mars logic, where the experimentation that is integral to point and click games is punished through the need for lengthy, and often time based, preparation. An early puzzle for example requires you to go to a sarcastic clown, get two unblown ‘balloon animals’, fill them full of two different packing materials, go to your office, put those down the vacuum tube, and then go down to the basement to lock a door before someone can close it. But you don’t know why you’re doing anything because there is no intuitive link between puzzle and solution and outcome. So instead of coming up with a plan and executing on it, you instead rub everything against everything else until the dumbass solution presents itself. And in this case if you leave the basement before that dumbass solution presents itself, you have to do all the balloon stuff again. And I didn’t realise until the second or third time that I had to lock the door before it got closed, because that’s a dumbass solution to a dumbass puzzle.

There’s no clear guidance as to what you should be doing at many points, leaving you to exhaustively iterate over all your options before you give up and find out you can’t even solve certain puzzles if you’re using the click to move system that the remastered system presents you. At least three puzzles are like that – the forklift puzzle (timed and unsolvable with click to move) and the lantern puzzle (timed and unsolvable with click to move, and also breaks the convention of the game by making you interact with a thing someone else is holding) and the Salvatore’s body puzzle. And worst of all for the timed puzzles, they often come with long animation transitions to initiate the interaction, such as slowly clambering on to a forklift so you can manoeuvre it into place during the one second window you have to act. Slowly puffing on a cigarette before it lets you knock an ashtray away from another character. Even if the puzzles were well designed – which they’re not – they’d be infuriating. Which they are.

However, it’s not all bad! The ambiance of the game is extraordinary and I think that’s what’s buoyed it up in terms of player nostalgia. The voice acting is excellent, the setting is wonderfully weird and original, and the dialog is beautifully written to have this marvellous Film Noir / Dia de los Muertos mashup that is wonderfully effective. It would have been a joy as, say, a Pixar movie. The story is – fine – but the writing is genuinely very high quality.

Sadly though I loathe it as a Lucasarts game. It’s a shame all its best qualities have been squandered on this piece of absolute shite. Glottis is literally the worst sidekick character I have ever encountered in any game ever. He’s the Batman of the game in that he makes everything he’s in worse. Screams and shouts the same five lines of dialog when you’re trying to think your way through the corkscrew logic of the design. It’s like the point and click equivalent of CIA noise torture.

The poorly communicated room transitions often obscure puzzle solutions too. There’s no hint when you can move around rooms to get different camera perspectives other than checking every corner of every screen, and sometimes a single room has multiple ‘viewpoints’ where you can see different parts of the area. Items will be hiding in these different viewpoints too, so it’s a big problem. It’s just really, really bad puzzle design. Less a Lucasarts game and more a reflection of the worst output of inferior game studios – more than anything else it reminds me of the intentionally obtuse text adventures that Infocom would occasionally put out. The ones designed specifically for masochists.

So, while this is a game remembered fondly by a number of people, I can only say that they have made some kind of mistake in the allocation of their affections. Watch a Let’s Play of it, because there’s a lot to like in how it presents itself thematically. Don’t subject yourself to a playthrough.

Grindstone

Grindstone on the other hand I really did enjoy. For a while. It’s essentially a match three game where you have a position from which you can start in the grid. You chain together as many matching colours as you can, and then your little barbarian character slices through them. If you chain together ten or more you get a grindstone, and if you pass through that you can change colours. Each level is ‘kill a certain number of creeps’, with escalating challenges to unlock treasure chests and kill boss creeps.

And it’s really, really good… for about fifty levels.

The thing is that Grindstone basically has the design of a mobile game, but without any of the predatory monetization. You buy the game and you can play it as often as you like. But it still has the heart and soul of something like Candy Crush. So it feels fresh and freeing because nowhere are you fighting a timer or being arm-twisted into buying some premium currency to unlock more game attempts.

But after a while it starts to forget what the key fun of the experience is – making long, interesting chains that you can use to bypass obstacles in the level. The environments start to become so complex that you simply can’t accomplish satisfying chains, and so you need to rely ever more on the equipment you can get. But what that equipment mostly does is reveal – once again – the arbitrary randomness at the core of play.

To kill a boss creep you need to attack it from a creep of the same colour, or from a grindstone that lets you attack a different colour upon leaving it. So what happens if there are none of those around it?

One obvious option is ‘arrange the circumstances so that there are’, but that relies on there being creeps in a column that can fall into an adjacent location, there being creeps adjacent to that, and to that one, until there’s a path back to you. And if you don’t have that, then again you need to engineer those circumstances. It’s a puzzle, yeah?

But every turn, the game becomes more dangerous because the creeps start hitting you back and there are fewer places that you can safely stop a chain. And in a lot of cases, you simply can’t solve the puzzle because the colour of a spawned creep isn’t predictable. So a lot of the time you’re just stalling against a random number generator that has to give you a certain colour by a certain time.

Grindstone gradually morphs, then, into a spatially explicit, time-limited puzzle game where the puzzle has randomised elements. A solution will eventually cohere out of the randomness, and you need that solution to appear before too much time has passed. Or you can bail out at any time by just killing the required number of creeps and escaping.

At about level 60 or so, I found that’s what I was doing. I just didn’t care any more about solving quantum puzzles with solutions that only collapsed upon observing the waveform at the right time. And when I realised I was doing that, I realised I just wasn’t having fun any more. And when I checked and found out there were ‘200+ levels’ I decided that I had gotten everything I could out of the game.

It’s a shame because it is so satisfying to begin with before it gives up on the gratifying slaughter of little creeps and cedes all its important design decisions to the random number generator. It’s built like a prayer to an arbitrary God – ‘oh Lord, please allow structure to emerge from this randomness’. And it often does. But not in a way that I found fun in the long term. Actually designed static levels would have gone a long way towards fixing this, but while the environments are designed the eventual puzzles you’re presented aren’t. And in the end, that’s not what I want out of a puzzle game – that the puzzles are solveable only when luck smiles your way.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy is an aggressively mediocre game with a massive budget. It’s way too long, largely being made up of copy-and-paste battles within its tiresomely repetitive combat system. It’s not particularly well written, not particularly well plotted. It’s buggy as hell. It is a chore to play, certainly for the last few hours.

But also I don’t know of any other game that will let you pair Wham’s ‘Wake Me Up Before you Go Go’ to a frantic battle scene. Or will occasionally segue into ‘Don’t Worry, be Happy’ in a boss fight. That sole charm – which, along with the sunk cost fallacy – was all that pushed me through the turgid experience of play. That charm, it turns out, is incredibly charming. It’s not a surprise – some of my favourite moments in games come from ludicrous action juxtaposed against incongruent music. Saints Row 4 and the over-the-top introduction which terminates in riding a nuclear missile into the horizon to the strains of Aerosmith’s ‘Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’. The Inkspots ‘I don’t want to set the world on fire’ layered against the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Fallout. Or even congruent music, like Life is Strange Before the Storm’s inspired use of ‘Burn it Down’ by Daughter. Or the hauntingly alien strains of Midge Ure’s cover of ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ in Metal Gear Solid 5. Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t the first game to be remarkable for its truly banging soundtrack. Vice City predates it by quite a long way.

It is though the first (and hopefully last) game I’ve played that felt as if it relies entirely on it to drive the game. A game which is comfortably six hours longer than it should be, especially given how much of those six hours is made up of the exact same gameplay loop. You’ll spend an unfathomable amount of time in Guardians of the Galaxy sliding down slanted passageways to emerge in a room full of waiting enemies. It’s like someone coded a simple system of steering a character at speed and a producer said ‘Congratulations kiddo, this is strong enough to sustain our whole game’. And you know what, in some circumstances it could be. Sayonara Wild Hearts, my favourite game ever, is basically that… it’s just done with immaculate care and grace. In Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s the gaming equivalent of a filler word between two sentences you didn’t really want to hear anyway.

And on top of this, it’s clear the money in the budget mostly went to licencing songs because it is appallingly buggy. To the point that I am going to be referencing it in my Game Engine Architecture course. The physics are so ropey that simply taking an elevator results in everyone vibrating in place like they’re being deconstructed at the atomic level. You regularly fall through scenery. Subtitles simply refuse to appear. In one particularly egregious moment (given how important the music is) the soundtrack starts again when a cutscene transition happens. ‘Rebel Yell’ starts to play and you feel yourself getting pumped up, and then 30s later the song restarts in time with the cutscene. So instead of being carried through by the music, you get brought abruptly back to earth as if someone had just hit ‘back’ on their Spotify playlist.

I played it through to the end, but I resent the hell out of the fact I did that. So just go listen to the soundtrack.

Headliner: NoviNews

This game has an absolutely fantastic concept, but it’s paired with an unfortunately ineffective implementation. The hook is this – you play the role of a ‘Headliner’ that is responsible for setting the news agenda. Every day you pick stories to emphasise and others to bury. As you walk home after the day’s exertions you see the impact your choices have had on the city around you.

Amazing, right? Well, not quite.

It really is an awesome little concept, but it suffers immensely from a number of systemic problems that make it an interesting experiment rather than anything actually satisfying or profound.

The first issue is – you get very few real choices in a day’s news cycle. You’ll be given quotas, and a dribble of articles. Three or four, maybe. You do get to make significant decisions but within a very narrow range of possibilities. The Overton window of the Novistan newsroom is depressingly small. The consequence of that is that you don’t really have as much influence over things as the game would like to pretend. I can choose a story that is pro-government or anti-government, but there is absolutely no subtlety there and it would have been a lot more effective if I had a greater range of options.

The second issue is that the setting is just cartoonish in the way it presents the controversies of the day. In the space of two weeks you can go from the country being ‘basically fine’ to ‘completely on fire’ because apparently that’s just how influential the news is. Perhaps it’s not surprising given the binary nature of most of your choices. The consequences of your reporting are so immediate, and so extreme, that it undercuts any real insight the premise could have explored. The nature of news as propaganda is subtle, that’s what makes it dangerous. ‘We know how we are supposed to interpret Praha’, Russians under Communism used to say. ‘Do you know how you are supposed to interpret the New York Times?’. Your newspaper supports universal healthcare, and so it happens, and it happens immediately. The only people that think the media has that kind of power are lunatic conspiracy theorists. Headliner feels like it was designed by someone with a degree in Media Studies from a university where all the professors are QAnon activists.

So let’s talk about those lunatic conspiracy theorists. The third issue here is that your understanding of events is as shallow as it possibly can be. At one point you’re slipped an unsubstantiated anti-governmental screed to publish. If I was a real editor, I’d say ‘no’ because of course I would. But here… maybe it’s true? How am I supposed to know one way or the other? I can’t interrogate a report. I can’t do my own research. I can’t ask my writers for a more in-depth analysis. I have no sources. I can’t even Google. Those things would have been incredibly powerful mechanisms… forcing me to confront my own role in the construction of propaganda. ‘Yeah boss, this report is nonsense but boy is it good for our current agenda’. None of that though, so I’m left basically deciding on the basis of what feels right. I publish the conspiracy, because it seems like the game is trying to make me think it’s accurate. I don’t want to guess though. Or rather, I want to guess with access to a wider range of factors to consider.

Headliner: NoviNews desperately wants to be Papers Please – you can tell that by how it approaches every aspect of its design. What it missed in its analysis of that masterpiece though is the subtlety that drives the systems of Soviet era bureaucracy. Headliner is anvilicious in its outlook and unsophisticated in its messaging and as such it really fails to succeed in the things it attempts.

It did though inspire a neat board game design for me, so there is that to say in its favour.

Heaven’s Vault

This damn game.

As the old football cliché goes, ‘it’s a game of two halves’. One half is borderline genius -a fascinating exploration of translation where your job is to gradually interpret and re-interpret alien writing based on context and a shaky grasp of chronology. You see three weird squiggles beside a dried up river. Do the squiggles mean ‘Danger?’. Do they mean ‘Water?’. Do they mean ‘Drought’? Do they mean ‘Kilroy was here’? Who knows – one data point isn’t enough. But if you see similar squiggles beside a fountain, and then similar squiggles by a waterfall then you might say ‘Ah, this is actually two words and that collection of squiggles has a semantic link to ‘water’’. So you sketch in that description and refine it constantly as you go along. Heaven’s Vault, in this aspect of its design, is amazing. Translation as a puzzle mechanism – it’s real good y’all.

So it’s baffling that they took this compelling, clever and literate system and embedded it in a framework of absolute bullshit.

I get what they were going for – what could be a better companion to a game of translation than a game of archaeological exploration? And it turns out… literally anything when your exploration is as drearily boring and actively unpleasant as in Heaven’s Vault. And a lot of it is intentional frustration that someone went out of their way to implement. It rubs extra salt in the wounds to know that someone spent effort in making their own game less fun to play.

There is a lot of backtracking in Heaven’s Vault, which would have been fine if the game was enjoyable to explore. But every new location you visit comes with very long transitions (a technical flaw) and every ponderous exploration of the environment comes with aggressively slow animations (a design flaw). But also, it employs a degree of path-finding in the movement that couples all of this together. One time I misclicked by a fraction of an inch – I wanted to go to a nearby gate and transition through it so I could wander through the six separate transitions needed to talk to an NPC for one single line before making the tedious journey back. However because of my misclick I had to watch the character meander over to the spaceship at the other side of the map (it was nowhere near where I clicked) and then wait for that transition before getting out so I could go where I wanted.

In most games you can cancel an action like this, but Heaven’s Vault is so in love with its own aesthetic that it thinks you should be absolutely immersed in it every second. It’s a game that comes across as impossibly smug.

Do you want to go to a different world? Well, I hope you enjoy following GPS instructions because that’s what exploration is. Press left and right at the correct times to take the correct path in the ugly miasma of colours that represents the ‘rivers’ that connect places. A cool idea – a shitty gameplay experience.

And there’s no god-damned run button.

But… dem translations.

Heaven’s Vault might well have been one of the best games I’d ever played if it was just me in my office being handed artefacts to translate, with occasional dialogs to unlock new ideas and interpretations. ‘Here’s the ancient tablet, and some photos of where we discovered it’. A Papers Please style thing where I just get to sit down and enjoy the puzzle. But no. It’s not. I hope someone makes that game, because I’d recommend it to you in a heartbeat.

Heaven’s Vault on the other hand – the developers really need to understand that a game should be fun for its players, not just for its developers. Sorry folks, but you’re not all that. I did have long period in which I enjoyed what I was doing, but I always got the impression I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t recommend you buy it. Or even play it. But if someone else was playing it and you were passing by, I’d certainly recommend you join in on the fascinating fun of translating an alien language into comprehensible structures.

Hitman

of the many Humble games that had slunk into my library was Hitman and I decided to give it a go. It was a depressing lesson in how shit I would be as a real-life assassin.

‘Ah, that’s Agent Heron, a legend in the field’

‘What’s his preferred mode of assassination?’

‘Precedence would suggest he favours being mown down in a hail of bullets with the expectation that retributative Karmic justice will step in at some point in the future’

This is though a world where trained security operatives are constantly alarmed to the point of panic by the sound of a coin clinking in a public area… so maybe I shouldn’t read too much into it.

I made it successfully through the various episodes albeit with a bodycount that suggests my agent may have zoned out a little during the briefing.

‘Don’t kill innocent targets’.

‘Kill innocent targets, got it’

‘Wait, I said…’

‘It’s too late Karen, he’s gone’

A large part of my Hitman brand is clearly a focus on bulk discounting. But One Get One Free, except it’s more like buy one get ten free. The game is a lot of fun, really creative in how it structures the environment, how it scaffolds the tasks, and how it encourages creativity. Absolute pitch-perfect example of level design too, which is only something that they double down on in the sequel, Hitman 2. I rolled right out of the first one into the second.

I’ll probably go back at some point and play around with a few levels, but honestly Hitman + Hitman 2 feels like a full game, and I probably would have been a bit pissed if I’d paid full price for either of them on their own. Together? They’re super fun. Since I got them from Humble though, they were well worth the money.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

[ buy it on the humble store ]

Never having owned a Playstation, I’m used to certain games just being unavailable to me. I tend to glaze over when they’re mentioned because otherwise it’s just a little bit sad. There’s everyone enjoying themselves in the No Michaels club, and I’m stuck with my nose against the window waiting for Michael Fassbender to make his excuses and leave. But occasionally – rarely, but occasionally – those games come to PC. Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of them and I bought it on release day and completed it within 48 hours.

Before I get into it though I’m going to address some of the criticism I’ve heard of the port. I’m running a reasonably high-end gaming rig so that’s probably a factor but I didn’t have a single crash, didn’t encounter any serious bugs. Aside from a little bit of performance stuttering at a few late stages of the game I didn’t see any performance issues either. It was rock solid for me, but I do know it’s been a problem for a lot of people. Some might want to wait for the first few patches before picking it up.

Here’s the negative portion of the mini-review. Horizon: Zero Dawn doesn’t have a single original idea in its head as far as gameplay systems go. It steals wantonly from other games, and integrates their innovation, Borg-like, into its own design. It has the tracking system of The Witcher 3, along with the Witcher 3’s option to liberate villages from the baddies that claimed them. It steals a lot of Tomb Raider, fuses it with a vast amount of Assassin’s Creed, throws some Far Cry into the mix. Adds a pinch of Batman’s detective mode and just stirs and stirs and stirs. Or perhaps – it liberally samples music from a hundred different popular songs and then layers them all together into an album comprised entirely of the creativity of others.

The risk of that approach is that the result could come out with all the charisma of an inferior tribute band. It doesn’t though. The good news is that HZD plays instead like a Greatest Hits album.

Game mechanics wise it has little to really set it apart except for the clever combat system which uses combos on enemy specific weak-spots to create some truly wonderfully frantic and kinetic encounters. Aside from that, though? Nah. Seen it all before. Even its combat system is an iteration on designs you’d encounter in Monster Hunter.

In its aesthetic it borrows liberally from other sources. Mentally I think of it as Assassin’s Creed: Merida meets the Dinobots and honestly if you held that in mind you’d be 90% of the way towards having a full understanding of what it’s going to offer in the way it presents its theme.

But…

See, the gameplay experience here is satisfying even if it’s not at all innovative. Where HZD really shines though is in the writing, which is often outstanding (even if it is occasionally goofy). And, more notably, in the story. Horizon Zero Dawn might have the best story in any game I’ve ever played – I don’t want to be too definitive because I’d need to sit down with a spreadsheet and a calculator to really be certain. It’s not just a great story for a video game, because lol like that’s a hard bar to clear. It’s a great story that just so happens to be in a video game. You think the story is leading you down one somewhat routine and predictable direction and then it just pirouettes into something far greater, far grander, and far more moving. Something with a sweep to it that is just astounding. I talked about Nier: Automata as being like an inferior Isaac Asimov novel. Horizon Zero Dawn is more like an outstanding Alistair Reynolds novel. And I love Alistair Reynolds.

You come to HZD thinking ‘Shooting robot animals with a bow. Yep, got it. Climb walls and gather crafting material? Open World Gaming 101. Magic protagonist with a mystical calling? My phone’s autogenerate could have come up with that’. Stick with it though and it becomes richer, denser, and so well executed that from the point of the first real revelation I didn’t stop playing until the end of the campaign. It’s done that well.

Aloy as a main character too is very interesting, reacting not as the stoic personality-free tabula rasa that open world games pretty much mandate. She has a wonderful arc to her character as well, and such an endearing perspective (aside from all the mega-murder) that you can’t help but admire and like her. There’s a bit of the game very early on where she – a six-year old orphan girl from a technologically regressed tribe – encounters a hologram of a man remotely wishing his son a happy birthday. She reacts with such genuine glee to someone expressing that sentiment in her general proximity, even when it’s not actually aimed at her, that it’s simultaneously adorable and heartbreaking. There’s a lot of those sort of moments in the story. I am not the kind of guy to go all gooey and protective when I see a child being treated unkindly in a movie or a game. But there are moments of such casual cruelty inflicted upon Aloy in her upbringing that I found myself instantly rooting for her. Come on, Aloy, we’re going to teach these assholes exactly what you’re made of.

You’ve probably played Horizon: Zero Dawn before even if you’ve never heard of it. What you haven’t done though is play a game this competent with a story this good with a protagonist this textured.  HZD’s sole real innovation is in how maturely it integrates a moving, effective story into workaday game mechanics. It enriches them through an osmosis of narrative, and I found the entire package to be extremely compelling.

This is a game that is very much recommended. The DLC is pretty great too, although it does stretch out an excellent game a little beyond the point where I would be 100% enthused to be playing.