I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

This is an absolute masterclass in how you shouldn’t make a game, and that’s a tragedy because thematically and narratively it is genuinely fascinating. An advanced computer is torturing four people for all time, breaking them down and building them back up to explore the nature of torment. That’s territory rarely explored in video games. There is no other game I can think of where there’s a puzzle loop about performing unconscionable surgeries on holocaust victims. And the thing is – the story is so well framed that it doesn’t come across as anything other than thoughtful. It’s remarkable, really. The whole thing is super dark.

And I like that a lot, not just because it’s ineffectively drawn from a Harlan Ellison story. I don’t even like his work. As someone once said of him, ‘The stories aren’t poor because he uses bad words. It’s because he uses words badly’. And that pretty much nails my thinking on everything of his I have read. But this thematic framing is just so unusual in a video game. It never shies from genuine horror – the kind that gets under your skin, rather than merely plays on your nerves.

The thing is though its design is more like that of a five-year old who has been told how point and click adventure games worked but never quite understood what was involved. As such it is almost a perfect example of what to avoid in their construction. Leaving aside its bugginess and clunkiness (the latter of which we can forgive given the age of the game), it’s just riven with design flaws that even at the time were known traps.

1. You can easily put the game in an unsolvable state. Which is, by the way, what happened to me. Or rather, I took a path through the game that meant my only ending was to kill all the characters. Which was fine because I think that may have sliced a good hour or two off of the time I spent playing.
2. The puzzles are obtuse and badly signposted, with no clear communication of motivation. As in – you can do X and Y but are never really sure why you are doing X and Y until you’ve done it and observed the consequences.
3. You’re constantly forced into situations where obvious solutions to problems are prevented through clearly artificial means. One character, for example, is so hungry he won’t pick up anything but food… even if picking up something would be an intermediate step in him getting
4. The only meaningful approach in a lot of circumstances is ‘rub everything against everything’.

Essentially everything Ron Gilbert said you should do in his 1989 article ‘Why Adventure Games Suck’ – this game doesn’t do it.

So, it is notable for having genuinely adult themes delivered in a way that is thought-provoking. It’s a game best experienced through a Let’s Play though than risking going anywhere near it. It is a game which is somehow less fun than the eternal torture experienced by its protagonists.

Injustice – Gods Among Us

Fighting games really aren’t my bag. I’ve found every game more complicated than Streetfighter 2 to be baffling. As far as they go though, Injustice felt pretty approachable. And it’s also fun – a beat ‘em up where you’re playing the part of DC superheroes beating several shades of shite out of each other. If you want to drive the Batmobile right into Superman, or have the Flash deliver a kinetic nuke of a punch to Wonder Woman, this is your dream gig right here.

And attached to it all is an actual narrative – I guess that’s not new in fighting games, to be fair. But what marks this out that it’s a superhero narrative more satisfying than anything that happens in 95% of Marvel movies. They should have filmed this instead of Captain America: Civil War. It feels fast and kinetic, with some truly phenomenally over-the-top special movies that lends a likeable extravagance to the procceedings.

Still, I’m not really qualified to talk too deeply on games of this nature. I’ll just say ‘This was a lot of fun and I enjoyed my time with it’.

Inside

I don’t have a lot to say about Inside. It’s an enjoyable game, although very simple. I didn’t like Limbo (its older brother) much but I really got a lot out of Inside. Really though the thing that strikes me most about the game is that it perhaps has the single creepiest aesthetic of any game I have played. Every part of it works wonders to create an overpowering sense of malice in the world you’re forced to explore. It may not offer much in the way of puzzles, but it does come together in a remarkable experience.

I really enjoyed it.

Well.

Again, enjoy may not be the right word.

I really appreciated it.

Jenny LeClue Detectivu

This had a lot of promise – some nice voice acting and some interesting early puzzle design. It’s Nancy Drew filtered through the sensibilities of Thimbeweed Park and scored by the Oxenfree crew. It’s got a lot of heart, a lot of charm, and a lot going for it. It even channels a bit of the Stanley Parable by adding in a narrator with whom the titular Jenny has a vaguely combative relationship. And it looks absolutely lovely. It’s a nice package.

At least, as a ‘baby’s first point and click’ game.

I thought I was on to a winner early on when the first exposure to the deduction system came along. You get presented with people and have to examine them closely to determine clues about them and their recent history. It’s very Sherlock Holmes, for example deducing someone’s state of mind by the breakfast they ate. And then this later leads into a kind of quiz where you need to solve a case by linking these clues together. It’s neat, in theory.

In practise though the clues are so obvious and the range so parsimonious that it’s mostly a case of filtering out the obvious red herrings. Most mysteries revolve around five clues, two of which will be obviously irrelevant and the other three are the answer to the question you’ll be posed. It’s like the game doesn’t actually want you to feel bad for making a mistake, so it keeps the training wheels on at all times. You’ll see that philosophy emphasized everywhere – many of the other ‘puzzles’ in the game are solved by asking the same simple question – ‘what items in the immediate environment let me interact with them’. If you can’t interact with it, it’s not part of the puzzle. There’s no need for thought or consideration – it’s all basically ‘click X to solve Y’.

And that’s not enough to spoil it entirely – the story is pretty nicely offbeat and the aesthetic is awesome. And the guy who plays the crazy conspiracy theorist sounded so much like Christopher Lloyd that I had to look it up to see if it was genuinely him. It’s not, but it’s just a sign of how good some of the voice acting is. But this cleaves closer to a visual novel than it does a genuine adventure game – your choices feel entirely weightless. There’s a sneaking section for example which has zero consequences for getting caught, which makes you wonder ‘why even bother?’

Much of the game, in other words, feels like padding. Like activity rather than engagement. There is a puzzle later on that involves switching valves to influence water flow. Sounds great, yeah? Like the old game Pipemania. Nope. There’s only one position each valve can be in when it comes to permitting the water to flow and thus the only thing you have to do is go to each valve and turn it. No thought required. And that’s how every puzzle goes. You do the only thing you’re able to do, like a drinking bird idly dipping its beak onto a mouse button.

That’s why I think of it as ‘baby’s first point and click’ game. It’s not bad by any means, but it has a challenge level that I think is aimed squarely at children. Maybe that should have been obvious from the start, but video games don’t come with a recommended age rating and I had seen the game get glowing reviews from other supposed grown-ups.

I think it would probably be a very nice game for those that didn’t grow up on the chain gangs of the Lucasarts mines. People that didn’t break moon logic in the hot sun every day for hours at a time. It’s as gentle an introduction as you could hope to get to the genre, and a pleasant way to spend some time. It’s just not a good game, not an interesting adventure, and not something I can recommend your way.

But, if this had some teeth and it was willing to pose you genuine puzzles and mysteries… then yeah, I’d be willing to play more in the Jenny LeClue series.

Journey to the Savage Planet

Ah, this one was a bit of a shame because it starts out with such great promise. You’re stranded on an alien planet with an excitingly vibrant ecosystem. You need to collect raw materials to craft upgrades which give you access to ever more sophisticated ways to move around the environment. Each new toy is guarded by a boss of some kind, so it’s kind of an open-world with gate-keeping. Really it’s an exploration game with only a vague plot attached – it’s a collectathon. A bit like No Man’s Sky meets Castlevania meets The Muppets. And it’s really, really good. The rewards are frequent and often require interesting strategies for collecting. The environment is pleasingly vertical. Movement is generally satisfying. And the game is threaded through with a very enjoyable, quirky sense of humour.

To begin with.

The problem though is that, much like the ship that crashed on the planet, it runs out of fuel very quickly. Once you’ve experienced the visual treats of new areas, you get stuck in a kind of gathering loop that is neither fun nor inherently satisfying. It’s just frustrating. So frustrating in fact that the game offers you regular upgrades that unlock modes that strip the exploration right out of the experience. That’s always a bad sign in a game – that the developers know that you’ll want to opt-out of their core gameplay.

What they do to stop that though is tie upgrade levels to bizarre challenges in the environment. ‘Kick ten animals and shoot them in the air’. ‘Survive a fall from 500 feet’. And so on. The first tier of these is basically fine (if a little on the annoying side), but the next tier is malicious in that it makes real progress indistinguishable from gambling in a casino. ‘ Hit two creatures with the acid burst from a single dying Prime Jellywaft’. That requires you to find a clump that meets that specific criteria and very carefully stage manage an assassination. To be fair, there are parts of the map where these things are easier to accomplish than elsewhere, but you’re still rolling the dice that things will align they way you want. If they don’t… well, I hope you enjoy hanging around with nothing else to do.

I just got the first tier of upgrades and decided against the rest. I’m not a completionist anyway – I don’t care about hitting 100%.

The other big flaw in the game is that the boss battles, which are tied to the narrative, are just awful. The laziest kind of ‘shoot the glowing spot’ boss design. While all your various cool movement options help in these battles, it’s only occasionally that the design is clever enough to use them in an interesting way. And even when that does happen (such as when you’re shooting a tower of goo by laser-whipping yourself up a mess of high platforms) the rest of the encounter is designed for maximum frustration. Basically if your only idea is ‘This, but with lots of little monsters that get regularly added into the battle’ you need to go back home. Pick up your A-Gam, because you forgot it and had to make do with the dirty C-Game you left in your work office.

And that humour, so appealing at the start, becomes annoyingly repetitive after you hear the same sarky ‘Oh look, you died’ joke for the tenth unskippable resurrection animation..

So, it started off as a 4.5 star game and gradually over time became a 3 star game. I couldn’t recommend it to you on that basis, but I’d say if you can pick it up at a sale there’s a lot in here that is genuinely enjoyable for a while.

Jurassic World: Evolution

I played this for, I don’t know, about fifteen hours or so. I never saw the credits roll but I did see everything that the game has to offer. The winning condition for the game, at the point when you’ve got nothing else to do except grind, is to get five stars on each island and/or complete the faction missions that require you to, well, pretty much get five stars on each island. I was going to persevere with it to the bitter end and then realised ‘Hey, you’ve completed your challenge. You don’t have to do that to yourself’. So I didn’t. Added it to the spreadsheet anyway, because it feels completed. All the juice has been drained.

So, if you’ve never heard of this game – and I hadn’t before it came up in a Humble Choice bundle – it’s like Rollercoaster Tycoon, except with Dino DNA. That’s literally all you need to know. It adds some strategic heft to the task by forcing you to separate dinosaurs out by preferred diet, environment, and population sizes. It adds a lot of levers you get to push, and a lot of dials you get to turn. It adds some risk by letting dinosaurs escape their pens and start eating and trampling all of the guests at your park, with the consequential damage to your park rating.

Yeah, I’d leave a bad Yelp review too. ‘Was having a lovely day until my aunt was carried off into the trees by velociraptors’

It’s gently absorbing fun, well worth the (psychological) nothing I paid for it. It does though have a design philosophy that seems laser-focused on making you eke every last moment of playability out of it. Like many games of this type, it has a hard time saying goodbye to its players. And that’s a problem because it doesn’t excel in the end-game. It just lacks the sophistication, the depth, the nuance that something like this needs to survive the death of its own novelty.

Park rating is made up of two things – your dinosaur rating (the variety of dinosaurs you have, how cool they are, how well you treat them, and how many you have) and your park rating (the amenities you have on offer, how easy it is to get around, whether there’s a safe place to have a piss without being eaten by a T-Rex, the usual stuff). Balancing those is tricky because as you increase the quality of your exhibits, you also put pressure on the park by making it ever more attractive to tourists. You get only a little usable terrain to work with and need to somehow fit all your operational headquarters, power stations, and fun into the constraints you get. It’s genuinely challenging in a nerdy kind of way. You add a brontosaurus to your park and it’s such a hit there suddenly there’s no room at the hotels and no room for you to build another one without making some serious choices about the supply of meat in the local restaurants.

The problem is that there comes a tipping point where you’re no longer solving those kind of puzzles but rather doing chores of mini-maxed optimisation. You’re having to minutely expand enclosures so you can shove another tree in so the Brachiosaurii will quit their god-damn whining. You’re demolishing restaurants so you can build them a nanometer closer to the toilets, because you need to fit in a new power relay. You’re micromanaging your rangers, who will sit in the staff room playing poker if you don’t tell them to go medicate the dying dinosaurs out in the paddocks. You’re panickedly arranging the rota for repair crews after a storm rips all the fences away from your T-Rex enclosure. Getting to five stars in those circumstances is difficult because you have five fires and only four buckets. But none of those buckets take an awful lot of skill to use – you’re endlessly firefighting not because you’re Red Adair but because you seem to be the only sucker that turned up to work.

At that point, achieving five stars becomes an act of masochism, not a test of skill. And that’s at the point where I said ‘You know what? Let’s call this one done and move on to something else’.

It’s not a waste of your time by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that the fun curve that rises enjoyably up to the point you get about three and a half stars on any island. It then plummets like the helicopter in that one scene in Jurassic World. It’s worth playing, just not worth enduring beyond that pivot point.

Just Cause 4

My super early review of Just Cause 4 was ‘What if Far Cry, but fun?’, because boy – this is an amazing six-hour long game.

It’s just a shame it drags on for over twenty miserable hours.

I had played Just Cause 3 and I remembered it being fun enough but pretty samey when you get into the main story. And I thought maybe JC4 was the same and I was just perhaps a little more patient than I was when I was younger. And to be fair, it is never not funny to attach a rocket to a goat and send it Catherine-wheeling off into the air. There’s a kinetic anarchy to Just Cause 4 that is genuinely very appealing for the first few hours you play it.

The problem is – the game never gets better than the first, say, three hours of play and then the final three hours of the main campaign. And sadly everything else is exactly like I hated about Just Cause 3 – repetitive filler bullshit with absolutely garbage design.

I mean, imagine this – you spend twenty minutes immaculately clearing out an outpost so you can hack the conspicuously uncovered terminal in the middle of an obnoxiously open area. And then when you do, fifty billion guys teleport in. Instantly.

‘HELLO, WE NEED YOU TO SIGN FOR THIS DELIVERY. IT IS TEN SNIPERS, FOUR GUYS WITH GRENADE LAUNCHERS, AND TWO HELICOPTERS. PLUS A BUNCH OF GUYS WITH ASSAULT RIFLES.’

‘I guess I can try to manoeuvre my way to…’

‘ALSO STAY WITHIN SIX INCHES OF THE TERMINAL OR YOU FAIL. GOOD LUCK, ASSHOLE’

At least when Just Cause 5 is released I know the game absolutely isn’t for me.

Part of the problem is that it just feels like it will never end but by then they’ve got you by the Sunk Cost fallacy. Every time you think you’re getting towards the finale, it injects a whole extra Lord of the Rings ending your way. And worse, the main missions that lead to the conclusion are absolutely miserable. One chain of quests for example adds, to the usual eleventy-billion soldiers, lightning strikes that violently throw you from side to side and stun you. Yeah, great fun when I’m trying to precision shot snipers and rocket launchers just to get through the same tedious mission I’ve already done a dozen times.

It’s like they said in the office ‘Hey, we’ve coded a ragdoll system. Let’s show it off. Yeah, like that. No, don’t stop. Keep going. Keep going until they hate us and everyone we have ever loved’.

And on top of this, you’re getting irritating advice from your teammates like ‘Move fast’

Let me tell you how fast I’m moving, Mira. I’m moving VERY FAST. It is my alternative to moving precisely because I’m apparently not allowed to do that. When there are twenty snipers all capable of insta-gibbing me you better believe I’m moving fast. My destination is an afterthought.

Urgh, it’s just… a tiresome slog sandwiched between two thin slices of fun. And that’s a shame because I found myself generally invested in the narrative. Rico is a fun protagonist, and he deserves to be in a more consistently enjoyable game.

Anyway in conclusion, Just Cause 4 is a game of contrasts.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

I don’t believe, for a second, anyone that says they enjoyed this game. They have made some kind of mistake. I’m not judging them for it. Just – they’re wrong if they believe they had a good time. They didn’t.

Everything in this is amazing, except for the actual game. The story is interesting and well told. The aesthetic is compelling. The attention to detail is remarkable. The problem is they forgot to make a good game upon which to hang all of that. Instead, what we get is something that is so unfun that I am low-key convinced they never even playtested it. They just slapped a bunch of systems into an installer and said ‘It’s probably fine’, and out the door it went.

However, I don’t recommend you try to research the community’s feeling on this – admittedly not-universal – viewpoint. The community is toxic. Even the slightest requests for some assistance in managing the absolute bullshit of the ‘gameplay’ is met with a solid wall of ‘git gud’ assholes. ‘All you need to master the combat is to devote eight hours of your day to it the way you would fighting with an actual sword, lol scrub’.

Back off buddy, if I’m going to invest hours of my life into mastering a useless skill that highlights my lack of personality, it’s going to be understanding what people mean by the word ‘blockchain’.

Let’s look at the combat as an example – a potentially thrilling design of angles, attacks and counterattacks that gets lost in the slow, clunky flow and the immersion breaking animations. Often you’re stabbing a thing you can’t see at a target you can’t reach. You press a button and it’s approximately a weekend before anything starts to animate. Since it’s all in first person, you have no idea why everything takes so long. It’s way more frustrating than it is challenging And of course, the AI suffers from none of these indignities. It’s playable in one versus one combats, but the game persistently discards that idea and throws you into pitched multi-participant melees. And the community responds, ‘Yeah, but in real life if you were jumped by four random yahoos with clubs even a trained knight would be killed’

Awesome, now if someone could just make a game about my daily commute and struggling to get my phone to recognise my fingerprint when I need access to it at speed… that’d be awesome. Nothing is more enjoyably playable than real life, that’s why I spend literally years immersed in video games. The level of masochism to which people will submit themselves in the name of being the kind of person that plays ‘difficult games’ is staggering

The game actually reminds me a lot of Discworld MUD and MUD development in general – a whole range of systems of inconsistent fidelity and abstraction, very few of them genuinely as interesting in practice as they might seem on paper. It feels like a game put together by enthusiastic hobbyists where nobody had anything as gauche as a design document holding them back. Thus, you have some systems that are so abstracted from the details of reality that they are comical, and others cleave so tightly to the real world that they are infuriating. Realism is always an awful justification for anything, especially when it is so erratically applied. Can’t step over a bush, but all my equipment has different values for noise and visibility.

Yeah, I don’t know what to say to anyone that tells me they had fun, other than to gently correct their mistake. ‘No, no you didn’t’.

Last Day in June

The Last Day in June is an interesting game for how centrally it features disability and age. It’s not so much an adventure game as it is a kind of interactive story with light gameplay elements. After a tragic accident in which Carl loses his wife (June), he finds himself in a wheelchair spending most of his time mourning the loss of the life he once had. A truly fantastic art style – one that reminded me viscerally of 11-11 -11 – provides the player with a melancholy glimpse into grief and survivors guilt. But, as the game goes on, you find the situation is not quite what it was – you’re stuck in a kind of Groundhog Day where by altering the lives of the people around you, you can change the way in which the past unfolds. This you do by traveling through portals created by the paintings June left behind.

‘What would you do to save the one you love?’, asks the game. And that premise enchanted me because what I was imagining here was a kind of moral tale of compromise and calculation. Essentially a trolley problem in a game – how much would I twist the world to my favour to keep June alive, and at what point does the cost become so great that Carl and June are broken in the process of paying it?

Sadly, no – it’s a pretty linear adventure with no real opportunities to consider the question it poses in its own blurb. That’s not to say it’s bad – it’s just far more limited in scope and imagination than I had thought.

It’s definitely worth watching someone do a Let’s Play though. If you wanted something that has the same ‘mouth feel’ as Last Day in June but is actually a banging game, I recommend The Sexy Brutale. In fact, even if you don’t fancy playing Last Day in June, go give The Sexy Brutale a playthrough anyway.

Late Shift

Buy on Humble

This is Bandersnatch meets Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It’s not as well executed as Bandersnatch since it seems to completely discard your will most of the time. ‘Keep pepper spray’ is an option I chose which resulted 5 seconds later in me throwing it away. I choose to run away from someone with a gun so I don’t have to get in a car. Guess what I have to do seconds later? At least gun me down in the street if I don’t so it feels like my input actually matters.

The lack of a skip button for scenes you’ve already seen before is a baffling omission that meant I no longer had any interest, once the game was completed, in exploring any of the other branches. It’s basically just an okay movie with the barest skeleton of a game and its lack of consideration for that latter part broadly makes it a failure. It’s like they think their pound shop Layer Cake nonsense will stand up to as many repeated viewings as something like, say, Star Wars. It’s astonishingly arrogant when you think about it. I’ll never know just how meaningful my choices really were because I won’t watch the same scenes over and over again just to find out.

Life is Strange 2

I tackled Life is Strange 2. I love this series, even with its flaws. The writing in has never been exactly subtle, but hoo-boy it’s as nuanced as a brick here. I’m in no way opposed to politicized content in a game but it’s just so… on the nose and anvilicious. A police shooting, racist shopkeepers. Trump election. The whole thing is a caricature. Timely, under the circumstances, but no less adolescent in the sophistication of its outlook.

The dynamic within feels a bit like The Walking Dead, but it’s considerably less effective. TWD made me care about Clementine, but this game forces you to be stupid and with the effect that I found myself frustrated rather than protective of both brothers. It’s easily the fourth best instalment in the series, but since there are only four instalments in the series that’s not the world’s greatest review. Number of times I wept at my desk – zero. That’s the worst tear-counter yet for one of these games. I cried more at the end of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag – but I’ll leave that discussion for next month.

It’s not… bad. It honestly isn’t. It’s a far cry though from the design and sophistication of Before the Storm. I rate BTS as an eleven out of ten game and honestly I had decided before playing it that I wasn’t even going to like it. In LIS2 I felt pretty bad for Sean, the main protagonist… I wouldn’t have really cared if Daniel (the kid) was carried off into the wilderness by wolves. I spent most of my time yearning for a dialog option that was ‘Say you’re going out to buy cigarettes and then lure a bear back to your camp’. It turns out that babysitting a believable nine-year old while you’re on the run isn’t a lot of fun. Amazing.

I wouldn’t recommend it at full price. Or even half price. But if it ever drops down to, say, £5 for the whole five episodes I’d maybe say it’s worth it at that point. I will say this though in its favour – it’s absolutely gorgeous. The landscapes are beautiful and haunting. The soundtrack, when there is one, is just as great as in any of the games. Before the Storm though is a hard act to follow and this didn’t succeed in its own right or as a followup. Very disappointing.

Life is Strange: True Colors

What can I say, really? Deck Nine make the best Life is Strange games and True Colors is no exception. Here’s my current ranking of the LiS franchise and which are the best:

1. Life is Strange: Before the Storm (Deck Nine)
2. Life is Strange: True Colors (Deck Nine)
3. Life is Strange (Dontnod)
4. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (Dontnod)
5. Life is Strange 2 (Dontnod)

The fact that True Colors is #2 is only a testament to the fact Before the Storm is so exceptional and it has a remaster that further cements its position. True Colours is still a 5/5 game and a wonderful entry into the Life is Strange series. Alex Chen is such a likeable character, and so well voiced, that she instantly overcame my innate hostility to new characters. And the town of Haven Springs, where we spend almost the entire game, is so beautiful that I’d like to retire there. Really the whole of True Colors shows a quantum leap in the quality of the art and, importantly, the art design.  No matter where you look, something astoundingly gorgeous is happening.

It really is one of the prettiest games I’ve ever seen.

As usual I won’t spoil the plot, but like every game in the series it’s more about forming relationships with characters than it is exploring a story of sorts. And True Colors accomplished the only thing I really ask of a LiS game – it made me cry, a lot. Not just because of what happened or happens to Alex, but because of how the game’s main conceit connects you to the characters around you. It manages to emotionally resonate through nothing more than a few flickering colours. Those colours are used masterfully. The end of Episode 2, for example, blew me away through nothing more than the shifting of one colour into another. That’s some genius game design right there.

But there’s a lot more than that to like in Life is Strange. Steph is back! Steph, who DMs an RPG for Chloe in Before the Storm, is now running the local record shop and radio station. And she’s exactly as awesome as she always was. When the camera pans around to reveal her, I actually gasped ‘Steph!’ like I was meeting a genuine long lost friend in real life. She even gets her own (excellent) episode as DLC where you get to live through her life in Haven Springs before Alex arrives. Deck Nine, you are too kind to us.

There is a problem though…

The thing is that the Life is Strange formula is now calcified to the point of it being set in stone. You know the happy moments in the game are only there as an extended knuckle for the fist later to be punched into your heart. You know that happiness in the game is something you are only borrowing, and it will need to be repaid later with interest. And so it tinges every heart-warming moment of joy with a suspicion. ‘When will this balance become due?’. And if you’ve played enough of the games, you probably already know yourself. You can predict the timing in the same way you can an outgoing mortgage payment. Let’s just say that – knowing nothing about True Colors going in – I had predicted the end of episode one and the end of episode four long before the events got set in motion. To the point that I was even predicting the absence of dialog options.

But weirdly, there’s also a subversion here. This isn’t a spoiler, but I’d still understand if you wanted to look away before I discuss (in abstract) the ending.

Life is Strange, Before the Storm, and Life is Strange 2 all have one feature they share in common – there are no good endings. You just get to choose the nature of the bad. Life is Strange, the original, has one ending that I found so traumatic that every time its song comes on Spotify I need to skip on to the next or risk bursting into tears. Life is Strange 2 is only bearable because in the end I didn’t care about either of the brothers and would have happily abandoned the younger one in a forest to be eaten by wolves. And Before the Storm is actually vicious in that it gives you a happy, cheerful montage right up until the point it stabs you in the back while whispering ‘Deck Nine send their regards’.

But True Colors… it has at least one happy ending! I can’t guarantee that it would have one for you – the ending depends on the choices you make throughout and a lot of the ‘maximal’ ones aren’t necessarily the most intuitive in the moment. But the possibility of a happy ending for Alex was something I wasn’t expecting given the absolute shitshow of her life. I didn’t realise until it had happened how much I was dreading the game concluding with its usual character flagellation. And it turned out, no – there is hope in the Life is Strange universe. Not much, and it’s fragile… but hope can survive.

And then Steph’s DLC came around and absolutely wrecked me for my decision at the end of my first (and thus canonical) playthrough of the original Life is Strange.

God damn you, Deck Nine. You are beautiful monsters and I can’t wait for the next LiS game you make.

Limbo

I guess I was too late to really jump on the Limbo bandwagon because coming to it in 2022 (when I finally got around to playing it) revealed one key truth – it’s not very good.

For sure, the aesthetic is striking – a kind of gloomy monochrome that saps all hope from the screen. But beyond that, it’s almost nothing. A cobweb of a game, blown away by the lightest breeze. It’s best understood as an artefact from a time capsule when the mere fact of its alien art style was enough to propel it into the cultural discourse about gaming. But when you play it now, divorced from its context, it’s just… dull. Playing it feels like fulfilling a tiresome obligation, which is rendered bearable only by how short the game is.

Not a game that stood the test of time.

Mario Golf: Super Rush

I do like an occasional golf game even if you’d need to put a gun to my head to get me to play it in real life. And Mario Golf is… a pretty decent effort all told. It’s approachable enough that you can get good at it easily while being challenging enough that you can’t simply roller-coaster your way through the various courses.

I mark myself as having completed it after going through its somewhat emaciated single player campaign, which ended at about 75% of the way through what I was expecting. I had thought the final boss fight was a mid-way boss, but no. It wasn’t very challenging, or very interesting, but it did mean I opened up all the courses for free play.

Mrs Meeple likes golf more than I do, and so actually really likes Mario Golf. We’ve been playing it quite a lot on the couch, passing a single controller between us as our turn comes around. It’s very gently engaging in a way that permits for a sedate, relaxing form of video game competition. That’s why its approachability is so important. While it doesn’t have the simulationist credentials of a more serious game, it definitely doesn’t discourage experimentation for those that have no truck with games like PGA Tour.

However, if you were looking for a golf game for the Switch I’d definitely recommend Golf Story over this. It’s 2D but it’s also incredibly funny and clever with its UI aesthetic in a way that Mario Golf doesn’t even try to be. Mario Golf feels low effort from Nintendo – nothing that would rock the boat made its way into the final cut. It feels like a game largely made on autopilot, constructed from mostly store-bought parts. Golf Story on the other hand is full of whimsy and if you only get one golf game it’s the one I’d choose for you.

Mark of the Ninja

Mark of the Ninja is a game that stood the test of time. First published in 2012, it remains an extremely enjoyable and fluid stealth experience with just enough violence to spice it up. Everything about it is just fun. Your character moves well, has an interesting range of tools and sneaking options, and the story is very serviceable.

Perhaps the word most appropriate here is kinetic – the game has a momentum that comes across in every twitch of the controller and it just feels really satisfying. Mixing things up with grappling hooks and stealth takedowns makes it feel like a kind of 2D Arkham Asylum – especially when your lightning fast attacks and retreats leave NPCs panicking and firing at shadows.

It’s nothing exceptional in its design or its art or anything, but it comes together as a very satisfying experience. I played the original, but I’m sure the remastered edition does everything this does and more.

Mass Effect 3: Legendary Edition

Just the one this month, but it’s a doozy. Mass Effect 3 remains, in my view, the standout title in the franchise. And the Legendary Edition version is no different in that respect. It’s the best mechanically, it’s the best narratively (despite a few convenient ‘deus ex machina’ elements), and it’s the best in terms of integrating the character arcs that spread out over the whole series. For me, it’s the latter part that has always been the heart of Mass Effect. The broader story is interesting and compelling but so vast in scale and abstract in scope that it lacks heart. It lacks viscerality. The little stories though of your companions and how you have interacted with them through the trilogy – now that’s what gets me going.

Going from ME2 to ME3 is revelatory in really showing just how the game evolved. The enemies are smarter and more interesting – you’re no longer dealing with shooting galleries of mindless mooks. You’re dealing with squad based AI and a mix of foes that stress all kinds of skills and weapon upgrades. The addition of enemies with riot shields for example creates a pressure on fixed positions that acts like a multiplier on the risk factor of everything else. It’s just so much fun to play through – weighty and with momentum where ME2 feels a bit lighter and flightier.

A lot of people said that Mass Effect 3 has a bad ending. I never agreed with that even at the time. And I think the reason for my contrarian stance is that I feel like the whole of Mass Effect 3 was the ending and it absolutely nails most of the things I wanted. It gives me a sense of continuity and then closure for every single crewmate I have come to care about. And with the Citadel DLC it gives the single most perfect example of ‘how to let people say goodbye’ of any game ever.

I do understand where people are coming from though. The game uses a system of ‘War Assets’ to abstract many of the things you have done in the past and as far as the story goes it doesn’t matter if five points are ‘That Cerberus team you saved’ or ‘A weird bit of alien tech’. And in the end mostly what you do is plop that summed number into an equation and then pick a ‘vend a conclusion’ option from a set of glowing lights. It’s all just entries in a spreadsheet and I appreciate that might feel soulless in a series that has for so long focused on the intricacy of relationships.

I guess though that my thing is I don’t believe ‘10 points – Grunt the Krogan Supersoldier’ feels the same as ‘10 points – An algorithmic improvement to manufacturing’. Some people see the accounting and skip over the rest. For me, it’s a way of codifying the impact of my memories. Sure, Grunt may just be a line item in my spreadsheet… but it’s how he got on the spreadsheet that matters. It would have been great if those things had some narrative impact beyond their contribution to a ‘if this > that then success’ calculation but realistically that isn’t possible. Instead what you get here is the representation of a kind of philosophical shift. You are no longer just a guy running a spaceship. You’re an important wartime general and you need to be thinking about things strategically rather than just tactically.

That theme is reinforced in a few places, but to me it’s most effective in the little story fragments you get when you wander around the citadel. One of the vignettes that always haunts me (and has for years) is a young teen girl talking to a citadel guard. ‘My parents put me on this shuttle and they said they’d be on the one right after me. Have you seen them?’. Reapers have been devastating every planet they can, and so we as the players know that ‘the next shuttle’ was more than likely destroyed in the evacuation.

ME3 Citadel Conversations: Refugee Teen and Citadel Guard

That little story progresses each time you visit the citadel, with the guard becoming increasingly sympathetic and supportive as the girl likewise grows increasingly worried and pessimistic. But she never loses her hopeful optimism. She was told to wait for her parents, and so wait she does. They’ll come, right? They said they would.

But here’s the thing…

In any other Bioware game of the era that would have been the start of a side quest. You’d go find the parents, bring them back, and get your reward. You can’t do that here though. There’s no payoff. There’s no gameplay attached. There’s just a sad story of loss that you get to experience but not change. There’s a lot of content like that.

In a similar vein they also really nailed the sense of an escalating calamity.

You visit the hospital early on and it’s busy but no more than a normal hospital. Doctors are vaguely alarmed but not panicking. Then a few hours later into the game it’s absolutely crammed full of people in every spare room and crevice. Doctors are scared, patients are scared, receptionists are fending off ever more desperate queries from ever more desperate people. 

The refugees in the docks start being a few scattered unfortunates with nowhere to go, and eventually the war becomes so brutal that you can’t move for them. 

That’s important to the feel of Mass Effect 3 because it underlines the key, important lesson. You can’t save everyone.  And in order for that lesson to be properly underscored, it’s necessary to start thinking of things in terms of quantity rather than quality. You do need to think arithmetically about decisions. Do you let the Geth destroy the Quarians because their fleet is superior? What about if the cost of that is the death of your romantic interest? And what if you’re forced into making that decision because of something you did way back in Mass Effect 1?

For me, seeing ‘Geth Fleet – 2000 points’ meant more than just a number. It was a painful reminder of a sacrifice I had to make. The storytelling isn’t in the number, it’s the absence of another number. The fact it doesn’t say ‘Quarian Fleet – 1200 points’ is where the meaning lies.

I guess from this what I’m saying is ‘I think the storytelling in Mass Effect 3, even when it comes to the war assets, is better than the contemporary consensus may have suggested’.

My final review of the Legendary Edition is that it isn’t really worth the money if you’re looking for the remaster. But if you were looking for an opportunity to play this series for the first time… my god, there are few better uses of your money than slapping down some cash for this genuinely extraordinary cycle of games.

Max Payne 3

Man, Max Payne 3. I have never played a game that tries so hard to stop you playing it.

It’s genuinely a lot of fun when you get into it, but its designers obviously wish they were making less interactive entertainment. Every two minutes you’re snapped out of the action into an unnecessary cutscene, at which point it resets all the loadout choices you have made and slaps a pistol into your hand. So you’re all mentally prepared to exit the annoyingly ‘cinematic’ cutscene with the shotgun you were using and then find you’re trying to clear out rooms of enemies with the equivalent of a nerf gun. It is… infuriating.

Worse, Max has a tendency to completely disregard all your work in tooling up. You’ll enter a cutscene only for him to discard all your weapons for no reason. Not even plot specific reasons like ‘Oh god, the shotgun detector will detect my shotgun’. It’s just like he’s been carrying home some heavy shopping and decides ‘Screw it, I don’t need this five kilo bag of laundry detergent at all’. Like – I get it man, I don’t like carrying stuff either but then I’m not in the middle of a god-damn warzone.

So, you’re constantly thrown into flow-breaking cutscenes, which then become game-changing loadouts. That’s bad. But also, the game is so wilfully insistent that you watch the damn things even though in 90% of the cases they are just dull and boring. This one kills me – it pretends you can skip the cutscenes. Except it doesn’t actually let you. It says instead ‘The game is still loading’.

Now, Max Payne 3 is from 2012. It’s unlikely you’d be running a super-fast SSD for your games at that point. But I am. And there is no way that a drive as fast as mine is ‘still loading’ a cutscene from a ten year old game. And there is also no way that it finishes loading that cutscene at the exact time the ‘narrative’ ends. So in this little pantomime the developers have acknowledged two things:

1. Their cut-scenes are dull enough that people will want to skip them.
2. They don’t care, and they are just going to pretend that it’s possible so you’re forced to watch them anyway.

And then, as an additional punishment, it’ll occasionally with no warning add quicktime events into the tiresomely drawn out cutscenes. I know of no other game that is so resentful of your audacity in wanting to skip the third-rate storytelling so as to get into the second-rate gameplay.

Actually, that’s not fair. When you get to play it Max Payne 3 is a lot of fun. It just spends most of its time sacrificing your fun to protect the self-esteem of the writers.

I can’t recommend it – I find it difficult to say to someone ‘You should watch this cool game’.

Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain

This game is a journey, let me tell you. I played it a long, long time beyond what I needed to ‘complete’ it.

The first hour is almost unbearable – an agency-free coma-simulator. I had thought it was a tutorial to begin with, but no – it’s a whole prologue constructed from solid A-Grade farm bullshit. Here’s what happens in the prologue – you spend ten minutes panicking and falling into unconsciousness. Then someone slowly kills the nurse in full sight of you during which you make zero attempt to inform the doctor attending you that that this represents, one could say, atypical recovery protocol.

You spend ten minutes very slowly crawling after a guy who keeps telling you to hurry up while making zero effort to assist. Plus you can see his bum through the hospital gown and the game occasionally unaccountably zooms in the camera to make sure you don’t miss it. They went to the trouble of rendering that crack, so you better appreciate it.

A creepy child in a gas mask floats around. An elevator full of fire incinerates the kill team that is hunting you. Satan walks out and is evaporated by the sprinklers. Someone drives a tank into a hospital. A guy who looks like Geralt of Rivia rides up to rescue you as Satan wanders around incinerating everyone. A whale on fire flies out of dry land and eats a helicopter. Satan chases you on a Pegasus. I’m guessing all of this makes sense if you read ‘the lore’, but having ‘the lore’ explained to me feels like I’m falling into a fever dream.

Eventually it all ends and you get dropped into a completely different game perhaps best described as Red Dead Mujahideen. At that point the game becomes not just better (that’s not hard), but actually good. And as time goes by and you unlock more of the game, it becomes excellent. As a friend of mine said, it’s like they made the prologue for an entirely different game and just grafted it on to a rock solid open world espionage game. At no point in the open world, for example, is ‘falling back into a coma’ a game mechanic that you can employ. That first hour is something I found you really need to push through, but it’s absolutely worth it.

But the game is also tonally incoherent in a way that is disorienting. Technology is baffling, for example. I have a robotic arm that is so precise I can use it to smoke cigars in a cool way. And a Sony Walkman. I have a horse I use to get around Afghanistan, and a hologramic display on an advanced personal computer called an ‘iDroid’. But you know – a whale ate a helicopter so let’s just go with it.

All the game mechanics just feel snappy and responsive and empowering. The interface may be baffling (as in, more than once I ended up failing a mission because I unexpectedly stood up in the middle of sneaking) but when you gel with it there’s a lot of fluidity in play. The freedom offered by things like supply drops, vehicle drops, and extractions is stunning. Artillery bombardments and air support are all available – I rarely used them but having them as something you can use makes you feel like the elite agent you’re supposed to be. And it also strikes a kind of ‘collegiate’ note – sure, you’re an angel of death out on the hunt but you can only do that because you have a team of people behind you. That’s something emphasized by the way in which you recruit staff while out in the world – it feels like talent spotting and seeing a good prospect makes you think ‘That will really make my team sing’.

It is a properly awesome game. It really is. But it is also absolutely reeking with the Kojima stank that makes so many of his games unbearable.

First of all – every single mission begins and ends with a credit sequence. Simply turning up to the first mission seems like it qualifies for an any% run. This is something true in a lot of Kojima games – he comes across as impossibly needy. He’s a thirsty boi who wants your attention. As much as I think too much about games for a living – some games are just instantly off-putting because they seem to be trying too hard to make me think about them. Death Stranding for example… it wants me to be fascinated by it. Whereas I would prefer to write a paper on the deep lore of the interconnected Manic Miner universe.

Quiet – the sniper who wanders around basically topless – is astonishingly misogynist as a character. The worst and weirdest kind of ‘erotic’ fan service. Why do so many Japanese games have this cringe-worthy nonsense in them? It’s regular too. At one point you encounter the Skulls – terrifyingly ominous super soldiers that are as hard as nails. They appear as bad-ass borg women. You see them head on, and think ‘Oh no, shit got real’. You see them side on, and they look alarmingly dangerous. You then get a lingering ass shot of them in their battle-thongs and the whole setup becomes ‘Come on, man’.

‘Chapter two’ is really disjointed, which is a shame because this is where it actually starts to move from ‘Quiet is some hot nonsense’ to ‘Quiet actually has a compelling, touching backstory’. It never rises to the point it justifies the ‘breathe through her skin’ bullshit but it certainly puts an interesting twist on her silence. But, like all Kojima stuff, it doesn’t stand up to even the lightest rational scrutiny. But even so, it makes the final reveal of the final mission effective and low-key moving. It would have been so much more effective though in the hands of a less aggressively weird writing team.

All of this said, It’s almost flawless once you wipe that aforementioned Kojima stank off of it. But as smoothly as it plays it also has zero interest in helping you with some of its more arcane systems. Like – you can mail yourself to enemy bases. Just sit in a cardboard box on a loading platform. As far as I know it never tells you that. There’s a lot hidden in its emergent systems.

It took about forty hours to complete. At the time when I uninstalled it to force myself onto new games, I’d racked up 110 hours. And if you go deep on the multiplayer, I think you could spend a reasonable portion of a human lifetime submersed in this intricate little masterpiece.

Missed Messages

You know, it’s hard to say that you have a ‘favourite video game developer’ because games are such collaborative enterprises that even strongly auteur titles (like Death Stranding) are still the production of multitudes. It’s one of the reasons why I play so many little indie games – they let you have a more intimate connection with the person, or persons, making them. With that in mind, I’m going to say now that I will play anything Angela He puts out because she has a gift for simple, stark and beautiful game experiences. I wrote about A New Life in a previous newsletter, and I sat down with Missed Messages (her earlier work) to see if it was similarly wonderful. On the down side it’s a lot shorter with fewer branching points of narrative. On the up side, it still reaches deep into your chest and squeezes your heart until it hurts.

At its core it’s a simple choose your own adventure game about the power of connection, and the consequences of simply ‘being there’. It’s a game that comes with a content warning, and for good reason. It bills itself as ‘a romance / horror story about life, death, and memes.’ but I think that fails to communicate the stakes of the experience. It’s kind of a time-loop game – an Indigo Girls version of Groundhog Day. Given how each playthrough is only about fifteen minutes long and it has only four possible endings I’m hugely limited in what I can say without spoiling everything. Each of those minutes is beautiful though – the art, the understated writing, the sparse music. It’s all pitch perfect for what the game is.

And it’s free, except for the emotional toll it asks of you.

I loved it.