Neo Cab
Neo Cab is a super stylish and interesting game that plays a bit like a conversational roleplaying game had a baby with the taxi minigame of GTA. You go to locations. You pick up people that want to go places. You chat with them about their lives, their wants, their opinions. And then eventually they give you a star rating and a chunk of money. In between you have to fuel up your car, sleep, and navigate a story of corporate espionage and betrayed friendships.
I actually liked it quite a lot. My main issue with it is that I felt the constraints put on the conversation system subtracted quite a lot from the expression of the main character. You have an emotional state and you can’t say some things if you are in, or out, of particular emotional ranges. Sometimes it will say ‘I am too angry to say that’ or some such, and thus you are forced down a conversational path you don’t want to follow. Actually manipulating your emotions is quite an interesting subsystem of play, but in the end I much would have preferred if emotions flavoured responses rather than restrict (or enable) them. For a number of important conversations I just felt like I was following a script because the thing I really wanted to say wasn’t available. Bear in mind that games like this are always only offering you a small peep through the Overton Window at the best of times. It was annoying to have it then draw the curtains too.
But despite that, I found it quietly engrossing. The characters are interesting and reasonably well fleshed out in terms of motivation and background. You get to make some real choices based on who you pick up and the relationships you forge. And I personally found myself becoming very aggrieved at anyone who didn’t give me a five star rating at the end of the journey. ‘Five to survive’ is the mantra of those working for the Neo Cab organisation.
The game also throws up an interesting set of ethical questions about everything from automation, to virtual relationships, to political targeting to the corporate-police complex. It’s genuinely sinister in some of the ways the city functions. At one point I was pulled over by a heavily armed and armoured police office for briefly leaving my car in the designated parking spot of a rival corporation, and it’s actually unpleasantly tense. Every reasonable part of you is saying ‘It’s not your job to enforce corporate policy’, but also… your livelihood is on the line here. The police here don’t just issue citations. They take the money directly out of your bank account. When you have a cop in what is essentially power armour pulling you over so you can make a ‘voluntary’ donation to the police charity… yeah. It feels transgressive.
It’s not a deep or complex game, but it is an interesting game that is worth your attention. And I think you can get it on Xbox Game Pass.
Nier: Automata
Look, I don’t know if I need an asterisk beside Nier Automata or not – I made it through to a credits screen and then it said ‘Hey, you really should play this through again to see all the various endings’. There would be more chance of me agreeing to something that said ‘Hey, would you like to pay us for the privilege of being violently beaten to death on national television’. I have never hated a game more while still completing it (twice, this month). I very rarely say this of any game, but it sucks. It is criminally boring and frustrating. And I mean that literally. Someone needs to go to jail for this god-damn game.
I kept playing though because I had heard from so many sources that it had a wonderful story in between what can charitably be described as ‘mediocre gameplay’. I am not one to say that people are wrong for enjoying what they enjoy, so I will instead just end this paragraph here.
Okay, where to begin with its flaws. Let’s start with the obvious stuff.
For a game released in 2017 it looks like something from the early days of the PS3. The graphics are straight up ugly, the textures are unbelievably lazy, and the environments are aggressively boring in both visual and game design. There’s some interesting enemy design in the boss fights, but it’s not interesting enough. The first battle you have with a robot the size of an oil-rig is a fair jolt to the system – enough to make you think you might be in for something special. That jolt doesn’t last though.
You have only limited control over the camera, and so occasionally it will pivot wildly to change your perspective and also change the meaning of directions. What was once ‘forward’ becomes ‘backwards’. Ups become downs. It rubber-bands some of the movement too so you just can’t move enough to hit some of your targets. And while you can change the speed at which the camera does this I found no way to simply switch it off. In an unacceptably large number of encounters I simply couldn’t see any of the enemies I was supposedly battling. If the graphics are PS3 era, the camera code seems like it was copied and pasted from a PS2 Tomb Raider game and put in the hands of someone that didn’t actually want you to enjoy yourself.
The combat is unbearably tedious. These are the people that made Bayonetta, how could they possibly make such an endlessly indifferent button-mashing nightmare like this? Combat is neither energetic or elegant, and is marked more by flow-breaking nonsense than anything else. Imagine fighting endless waves of robots that all can switch on a shield, at any time, that knocks you back and stuns you for a few seconds. And then imagine that almost all of the combos in the game thrive on multiple attacks on multiple enemies without precision targeting. It’s like nobody even bothered to play the game before they released it. There are bullet hell shooting sections you can win by just staying in the same place. There are boss encounters so overladen with particles and bullets that you can’t at all see what’s happening.
I switched the game down to easy about six hours in, not because it was hard (because it really isn’t) but because easy is the only way you get autofire on your drone and I was actually in physical pain trying to juggle between firing the gun, dodging attacks, and hitting combos. It left my hands uncomfortably cramped. There’s no skill in this by the way – hold down the trigger and you shoot. That’s all it is. But it’s just one thing more than my hands could comfortably do. But in addition to the autofire option, you also get the option to auto-dodge and auto-attack. Basically in easy mode it’s like the designers said ‘Yeah, we know the game is dull so why not get it to play itself while you watch?’. So close to a usable epiphany. I never used any of that, and I wouldn’t have used easy difficulty either. I just thought I might do myself a physical injury through having to hold the controller like I’m perpetually executing an obscure Mortal Kombat finishing move.
I have no idea why you’d think you could walk through an open space and beyond it. Enjoy your invisible walls.
Everything about the game is obnoxious. Every cutscene, huge semi-transparent black bars come in and add a distracting visual layer to everything. It’s just ugly. The environment is littered with invisible walls, and there’s no clear direction as to where you can go and where you can’t… and occasionally bits you couldn’t go open up simply because of some otherwise unrelated story element. The plus side there is that there is no real point in exploring because all the environments have the same bland cookie-cutter design that doesn’t reward it. It honestly feels like a student Unity project. I mean – a good student, but a student project nonetheless. Something that drew heavily from the free offerings on the Asset store. At least you have a map system that adds more confusion than clarity to accompany you as you have to work out how to get to previously inaccessible parts of the map since the obvious routes don’t work even though they look like they should.
And then there’s the story which, at best, is okay with some slightly interesting takes on artificial intelligence. But when I say ‘okay’ I mean it – sitting down with an inferior Isaac Asimov novel would still be more worthwhile.
And then it says ‘Hey, play this through another two times to see the whole thing?’. I checked a walkthrough and it said ‘Yeah, it’s basically largely the same for the second time except you can open some chests you couldn’t before and there are a lot more hacking mini-games’. And then I saw some Reddit threads that talked about having to grind your way up to level 99 for the final boss. I ended the first playthrough at about level 28.
Seriously, am I being pranked here? Is this an elaborate experiment in seeing how much people will endure for the promise of a satisfying ending? Is the whole of Nier: Automata really an elaborate art project in the limits of human perseverance?
Definitely practical battlewear.
The third playthrough, apparently, involves completely different characters and completely different events… so you need to endure an awful game, twice, to get to see the rest of the content in the game. It’s not like the first playthrough is brimming over with things you missed the first time either. The abandoned factory (which I’m sure you can imagine, just from its name) is a fascinating level filled with amazingly interesting barbed wire fences and corrugated iron. It’s also a location which you revisit, for plot reasons, no fewer than FIFTY BILLION TIMES over the course of the ten hours of your first ending. And some of the things that happen in that third playthrough, because of course I checked… I’d guessed them a few hours into the first.
The music in the game, however, is absolutely banging. And the aesthetic of the main character is lovely although I suspect they may have been leftover concept drawings from the design of a futuristic sex robot. Lingerie doesn’t seem like appropriate battle-wear regardless of how tough your androids are.
So here’s my advice. Grab a copy of ‘I Robot’ from your local library. Stick the Nier: Automata soundtrack on Spotify. Maybe do some Rule 34 searching for your favourite Futurama robot. You have now had the optimal experience of the game without being so frustrated that you’re on the verge of fury tears. I added it to my stats for completed games for 2020, but there is no way in hell I am going through that ridiculous nonsense two more times to get the ‘real ending’. I resent every minute that I spent getting this one.
Oh, actually…
There’s a ‘fakeout’ ending that occurs about half-way through the game where you head out to the location it tells you to go, but it turns out you take the wrong route so you’re classed as a deserter. I wish I had taken that as my genuine ending because it would have saved me six hours of my life.
This game absolutely sucks.
Night Call
Night Call is basically Neo Cab (which we spoke about months ago) except with a vaguely Noir twist. The games are spookily similar in their design – you drive a cab and pick up passengers before interrogating them about aspects of their life. Where Neo Cab was a very ‘right on’ exploration of politics in a cyberpunk context, Night Call is more like a murder mystery in a car. It’s more grim and gritty, which makes its occasional moments of absolute lunacy all the more jarring. You can pick up Father Christmas. You can find a the ghost of a Victorian orphan boy. At times it is earnestly trying to be a parallel universe version of the sitcom Taxi – one where the showrunner is Ingmar Bergman. At other times it is unabashedly goofy – like the actual sitcom Taxi. It threads a difficult needle and not entirely successfully.
I think part of the problem is that the characters you meet don’t quite entertain in the way they do in Neo Cab. They’re just a little too self absorbed, fulfilling the mystery trope that they were designed to implement. The refugee from Brexit Britain, for example, just seems too much like they’re reading from a script rather than engaging in an honest conversation. I think that’s in the end what makes Neo Cab the better of the two games – the authenticity that underscores the cohesiveness of the ambiance.
Not a bad game, but get Neo Cab instead if you fancy something in this vein.
Not for Broadcast
The worst thing I can say about Not for Broadcast is that it is very crashy – to the point that I can’t really recommend it at the moment. Although to be fair, I played it a couple of months ago and the situation may have improved. That’s annoying, because this is the first FMV game I have ever played that qualifies as a) being a game, and b) being really, really good.
When I found it floating around my Steam recommendations I made a note to add it to my wishlist for 2023 when Depth Year 2022 concludes. And yet, lo and behold, I already owned it. Apparently I was given this as part of a Humble Choice last year in early access form. That was a stroke of luck, and I took it as a sign. I started it up pretty much right away and fell into a game that instantly mesmerised me.
Here’s the quick pitch – you’re in the editing booth of a major news show. You have multiple camera feeds streaming footage into your monitors, and you need to mix – in real time – the footage in a way that is interesting to the viewers and also in a way that helps to address whatever agenda you are most interested in pursuing. You get to choose adverts, headlines, and all that kind of stuff – essentially it’s like you’re a news DJ and you’ll get a chance to make the world of current affairs dance to your tune. Add in a few shots of the new prime minister looking a bit befuddled to lower confidence in the party. Place the advertising for the company in which you own shares more prominently in the break. Switch between talking heads to make sure nobody gets bored. And, occasionally, make genuinely impactful moral choices. There’s one mid-game decision about which camera to choose and it’s probably the hardest one I’ve had to make in a game.
A couple of years ago I wrote about a game called Headliner: Novinews which I said was a great concept but lacked any sense of meaningful impact in what you do. Not For Broadcast is the exact opposite – you make so many micro-decisions in the course of a broadcast that it occasionally feels overwhelming (in the good way). The fact that you’re doing this live means that you are often struck reeling at unexpected twists and turns. You’re also responsible, you see, for censoring footage and for dealing with external interference. To be honest though, I found that interference part so annoying that I switched it off in the difficulty menu. For me – the news was more than enough to keep my interest.
But there are a few other things that contribute to the feel of the game. The first is that it is, in places, genuinely funny. There’s one sequence in particular that had me laughing so hard I could barely perform my duties. It’s really well written even when it’s not being funny. It is bitingly satirical to go along with it, and weirdly even-handed in how it presents the narrative – at least, over the long term.
The narrative itself – that a populist political party takes over and gradually starts to revel in totalitarianism – is also surprisingly sophisticated. And in how it presents that scenario, it’s very creative. It’s not the usual ‘Nazis take over’, but rather ‘People with a seeming genuine interest in making the world a better place take over’. They’re wealth redistributors, fulfilling the agenda that many keyboard activists on Twitter espouse. Basically that’s what they are – The Twitter Party, full of seeming good intentions and limited capability for acting on them. But even when they act comically badly, there’s a nuance there that’s hard to dismiss. Sure, those that were rich and comfortable are dissatisfied but there’s a story segment towards the end that almost had me in tears, looking at how the party changed things for the underclass.
Also, it’s really interesting to be in a scenario where ‘the revolution’ is actually run by the 1%ers trying to get their privilege back – so which horse do you back in that fight?
One final thing I’ll say though is that the news segments are all very long and it could have benefited I think from packaging them up into smaller, less exhausting units of time. That has an impact on replayability – there are a lot of different endings but I suspect it’ll be a long time before I have the energy to explore any of the others.
That aside, this is just a super game that – when it works properly in a few patches time – I think you’d really enjoy.
Old Man’s Journey
I don’t really have much to say about this one except I found it intensely irritating from start to finish. It’s basically a terraforming puzzle game except the terraforming is exceptionally shallow and rubbery, and the game seems terrified about giving you anything as genuinely challenging as a puzzle. So really it becomes little more than an ‘occasionally paw your screen to do the obvious thing’ fidget spinner. The art is really nice, I’ll give it that. Everything else just rubbed me up the wrong way. Like most of my games this month it is very short. It still managed to fit quite a bit of filler into its runtime.
One Night Stand
This was a game I picked idly out of the big Itch.io racism bundle because I quite liked the sound of the premise. Essentially it’s a kind of Groundhog Day style choose your own adventure where you iterate over the morning following an awkward sexual encounter. It’s an interesting, nicely self-contained idea except that in order to explore the different scenarios you basically need to become the worst kind of invasive creep – looking through her wallet, checking her laptop, and so on. It made me feel vaguely sleazy. I noodled with it for a bit and then put it away forever – the uncomfortable intimacy of the whole thing was well observed but ultimately not something I really found rich enough to spend more time with than I did.
Ori and the Blind Forest
Boy, I sure hated Ori and the Blind Forest for the first hour and a bit. It came incredibly close to hitting my threshold of ‘I’ve played this enough to cross it off the list’. At that point a game goes into my Steam Purgatory where I never think about it again unless future events intervene. Everything felt – too slippery to be fun. Wall jumping was unsatisfying, platforming frustratingly inelegant, and while it was stunning to look at it just felt a bit – vapid.
Well, all of that changed when I unlocked the double jump ability. If that had happened five minutes later I wouldn’t have ever actually have played the game. Ori before the double jump is a vastly inferior game to Ori after the double jump. It transforms at that point. Ori goes from a wooden lump to a ballet dancer. Platforming becomes incredibly fluid and satisfying. The puzzles become lateral thinking because the terrain opens up so many opportunities. Ori transforms from being an exercise in unenjoyable prettiness to actually being good.
Then you unlock the bash ability which lets you leapfrog off of enemies and their projectiles, and then Ori becomes great.
And then you get a proper wall climb that lets your little spriti buddy scamper up walls and Ori actually becomes spectacular. Every part of the game meshes together beautifully to give you opportunities for genuine creativity in how you approach the landscape. Every new tool integrates with the others to create a set of mechanisms that have exponential opportunities – they are all at their most interesting in combination. The synergy is extraordinary – and really, it has to be because Ori is also punishingly difficult at times. There’s so much going on, and such intricacy in the level design, that you’re going to need to think in terms of ‘solution patterns’ rather than simply ‘Use this ability to do this thing’. And you’ll die… a lot. It would be frustrating if it didn’t always feel so fair.
Well. I say always.
There are two things that keep Ori out the highest echelons of my affection.
The first is the ropey introduction to the game where you don’t have any of your interesting powers so you’re left with an unsatisfying platforming shoot ‘em up. Not a fan at all.
The second thing is – I really didn’t like the chase sections that follow each significant piece of story progress. They’re so complex, with such precision timing, and such bullshit pacing that ultimately I endured them rather than enjoyed them. I say the pacing is bullshit because it doesn’t really matter how well you perform here – the timing constraints are the same. You can’t get ahead of your pursuer, even if you get off to a flying start. Progress is gated so that at position X, pursuer is Y behind you. That’s great in creating a sense of almost unbearable tension at a point that should be exciting. I won’t deny these sections are intense and memorable. In that respect, mission is clearly accomplished.
However, I really detest the school of level design that requires you to constantly grind over known sequences just so you can fail on the unseen challenge that follows. Every second that a chase lasts in that respect is a horrible violation of your mastery of the previous moments. I didn’t like it in Celeste either, but Celeste benefited from a more tightly constrained set of skills that made future unseen twists a bit more predictable. It thus permitted a bit more reaction rather than repetition. Ori has so much more going on in its mechanisms. Essentially the first time you overcome a previously insurmountable obstacle you’re left with the ‘Well, now what?’ moment of sizing up an unfamiliar environment against a pressing timescale that doesn’t allow reflection.
But really these sections in total are about six minutes of gameplay so while they take a bit of a shine off the experience, they don’t meaningfully undermine the rest which is glorious. I loved Ori and the Blind Forest and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out before, take this as an opportunity to check it out now. Just… give it a bit of time to settle in, because that first hour is a bad introduction to an amazing game.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
I consider myself to largely be a patient gamer. I only occasionally buy games in the year of their release, because honestly I have so much on my backlog that there’s rarely a true sense of urgency. My ‘three out, one in’ rule is helping ease that, but there’s still far more in the ‘unplayed’ than ‘played’ column. I enjoyed Ori and the Blind Forest enough though to skip the usual waiting period, and I’m really glad I did. In almost every respect it’s a much more enjoyable game than the original, and Ori and the Blind Forest had already leapt way up into the upper half of my personal top 100. Still, it improves upon those remarkably solid bones.
The Blind Forest suffered from a pretty bad introductory hour or two, and Will of the Wisps doesn’t. You get wall jumping pretty much right away, and the double jump, wall climb and other fun abilities are introduced rapidly and with great effect. I’d say actually it solves this problem to a fault – you get so many abilities, and so few button slots to which you can assign them – that the natural synergies that emerged in Blind Forest are a lot clunkier now. Ori has a loadout of sorts and that means you need to choose three of your skills at a time, and it’s an awkward trip to a menu to change them. That means if you really want to explore the way you can chain things together you end up with a flow-breaking reliance on the UI. I guess Blind Forest required you to remember a lot more in terms of your button combinations, but I’m not convinced this is a better approach. Also though, I’m not convinced it’s worse given the much improved flow of ability acquisition.
Where Will of the Wisps improves dramatically though, with one notable and unbearably rage-inducing exception, is in the chase sequences. They’re shorter, less mechanically complex, and generally feel considerably fairer than in the original. And by that I mean – I didn’t end up hating them quite so much. There is one chase though that is so aggravating that it dwarfs the frustration I had with anything in Blind Forest. If you play the game, you’ll know it when you encounter it. The excessive chases have been improved in any respect by bringing boss battles into contention and those really add a dose of innovation into the mechanics of Ori and the narrative pacing of achieving a key milestone in play. They’re fun, kinetic, and offer a lot of opportunities for you to use your panoply of skills and upgrades to bring your foes down. The slight problem with that is that Will of the Wisps is a much more combat oriented experience and I didn’t really feel like that’s what Ori needed. It’s at its best as a game where enemies are tools in the terrain to be exploited rather than foes to be defeated. The combat is satisfying, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed every moment of my exploring the rich environments of the richly interweaving levels and killing the things within. It’s just – I didn’t at all need the combat to do that and denser movement puzzles probably would have been better for me.
Will of the Wisps also noticeably ups the production values graphically and musically, and really I’m not sure I would have believed that was realistically possible. Ori and the Blind Forest was already the most visually stunning game I’d ever played, and yet Will of the Wisps takes that high watermark and bashes off of it to air-dash into even higher reaches. It is stunning. Every single level is full of backgrounds I would happily hang on my wall, and the animations baked into the terrain really push it over the top. It’s like a moving painting haunted by the soul of an orchestra that reacts in emotional and visceral ways to the gorgeous movements of Ori and it is a real treat. Those colours – spectacular.
And the ending… hoo boy. Beautiful, bittersweet, and emotionally cathartic in a way that I didn’t at all expect.
So, the TLDR bit – most of Will of the Wisps is phenomenal even as the emphasis in gameplay has changed, but it still suffers from obnoxious chases and now a toolbox of abilities that are hamstrung by the fact they’re hidden behind a UI.
Wonderful game overall though.
Peaky Blinders: Mastermind
The Peaky Blinders television show is genuinely great and it’s a shame that it hasn’t had more success being transplanted to the gaming market. Mastermind is all there is (at the moment) and it’s absolutely fine but not nearly fine enough to recommend.
Remember that I spoke to you all about Timelie some months ago? I raved about it – a chamber based puzzle game where the hook was that you had multiple protagonists and could rewind/fast forward time like you were watching the world through Winamp.
Do the kids still use Winamp? Man, even I don’t use Winamp.
Anyway, I loved Timelie for many reasons and its clever puzzle system was the biggest one. Peaky Blinders: Mastermind is basically Timelie, again, but with two key changes:
- There are many more characters and thus it becomes overwhelming towards the end where five of the Peaky Blinders are simultaneously working towards different goals, each of which requires exactly the right character to be at the right place at the right time.
- It’s not nearly as good.
Now, I’m not saying for a moment that Mastermind stole the idea from Timelie. Timelie came out in May of 2020 and Mastermind came out in August. Either they both borrowed the idea from earlier sources or it’s a case of divergent evolution. But it’s fascinating to see how the same concept can either fly or fall based on two competent executions of a design.
Timelie benefits from its smaller number of characters which paradoxically make the game more challenging and interesting. You have fewer tools and more uncertainty over how they should be deployed. The nature of the levels is likewise far more interesting because of how it leverages the simplicity of its surroundings.
Peaky Blinders: Mastermind by contrast suffers by having each character with its own unique ability, and a puzzle design that makes it abundantly clear which character needs to do what to who in order to progress. As such, instead of its large cast making puzzles open and mystifying it creates a network of associations that is constantly filtering you down a successful path. There is a lever behind a door, guarded by a worker in a factory. Literally the only solution to that constantly recurring problem is ‘Tommy pays the worker to pull the lever’. If there’s a crack in the wall, it means Finn is supposed to climb through it. Every puzzle presents its own solution in how it is structured. It doesn’t need a lot of thought to play Mastermind, but it does need an awful lot of micromanagement.
That said, I think it’s a good game especially if you like the show. But it’s a good Peaky Blinders game rather than being a good game about the Peaky Blinders. If you’re more interested in stellar game design, Timelie is by far the stronger game. If you want to see Arthur and John beating up a bunch of people while Ada sweet-talks a young man long enough for Tommy to sneak past him… well, you can only get that from Mastermind.
Persona 4 Golden
I don’t get on well with JRPGs. At all. I think the only one I’ve ever completed is The World Ends With You way back in the days of the Nintendo DS. I’ve played a few since and my bailout point is approximately an hour or two into it. Octopath Traveller was the last one and I found myself pretty much hating every minute of the combat – and there were lots of minutes. I only picked up Persona 4 Golden because a couple of friends of mine absolutely rave about Persona 5, and that’s not available yet on a platform I own. I thought ‘Try it out, see what it’s like’. I looked at playtime estimates in the 70hr range and immediately said ‘Nope, no way – I’ll try it out for a bit to get a feel for it and then bail’. But no, I kept on playing. Right to the end.
There are a lot of problems with it, as you might expect from a game released in 2012 on the PS Vita. It looks absolutely fine for the period, but the UI conventions are problematic in a modern context. There’s nothing that ruins it, but there are things in the interface and the design that just feel antiquated. Investigation for example is made especially frustrating by the fact not all characters are available on all days, so you might go to an area thinking you’ve checked up all leads only to find out later that you needed to go there on a Monday, or a Thursday. Others will appear in areas you’ve already investigated in response to questions you ask of people elsewhere. This doesn’t make the game feel more dynamic because these are just incidental flourishes against a largely static backdrop.
I’d also occasionally spend time socialising with someone just because I knew it would autoadvance the day and save me a few menu clicks.
It all just makes the game feel more annoying than it has to be.
I enjoyed the combat for about 25 hrs and then decided ‘Yeah, I get it’ and moved it down to the lowest difficulty – to the point it essentially became a school life simulator with occasional quicktime events. 25 hours is ‘a full game’s worth’ in my view.
But then it turns out, the life sim bit by itself would have been more than enough for me. It’s like a weird psychedelic reboot of the Skool Daze franchise. I really like most of the characters and how they interact, and while it’s not super-deep in terms of the social aspects I do enjoy how each character gradually reveals more and more aspects that make even the initially dislikable ones more sympathetic. But oh my god, this game does have some tone problems in the narrative, and some pretty regressive tropes in the plot. There’s homophobia baked so deeply into the game that you basically, spoilers, end up beating up a closeted kid’s psyche until he’s straight and then you have friends that make fun of him for the rest of the game. The teachers are super creepy, and the dynamic at home is – at least initially – pretty alarming.
There’s a lot to take issue with as you go through and more than once I found myself mumbling ‘What the f*ck?’ to something happening on screen.
Alongside this though it manages (mostly) successfully to offer some thoughtful mediations on obligation, adolescence and identity, family, and what it means to be ‘home’.
It has a combination of great (albeit incredibly repetitive) music, a nice graphical style, engaging (if one dimensional) characters and a persona experimentation system that works more like a chemistry lab than a fighting mechanism. I liked the music enough that I added some of it to Spotify, but I’m not 100% sure that isn’t a form of Stockholm Syndrome because there aren’t nearly enough musical pieces in there for a game this long. It’s all very catchy though in a bubbly J-Pop kind of way. In that respect it reminds me a lot of The World Ends With You which also had a great soundtrack that ran counter to my usual tastes.
Persona 4 Golden hasn’t turned me into a devotee of the genre, but I’m pretty sure now I’d enjoy Persona 5 if and when it comes my way. Having said that it’s a bit like Return of the King in that you think it’s about to end and then bam, another chunk of content. It really out-stays its welcome towards the final quarter, but reading around suggests that had I been playing Persona 4 vanilla it would have ended at that point. I don’t think I actually got the ‘best ending’, but I got an ending that gave me Feels and that was enough for me. I mean, it’s hilariously passive aggressive in certain respects but still. Persona 4 Golden is a very good experience that perhaps doesn’t really warrant all of the forty hours I poured into it.
Persona 5 Royal
For quite some time – a few years at least, I was planning to buy myself a PlayStation but it was never quite the right time. I’d upgraded my gaming PC, for example, so I should wait. And then I was moving. And then it was the end of the PS4 generation and so I should wait. And then you couldn’t buy a PS5 for love nor money. Then I was moving again. Always a reason, but the main thing really was the sense that buying a platform for its exclusives was an odd thing to do when I already had plenty of games on my hard-drive I hadn’t even started up. And underneath that was the sense that very few PlayStation games felt like things I absolutely had to play. Sure, God of War looked great. Ghost of Tsushima looked like the Assassin’s Creed game that Ubisoft have historically been too cowardly to make. But there weren’t any that felt like they were necessary.
That is, except for Persona 5 Royal which was – for a good part of the early 2020s – the only reason I really had for buying a PlayStation. But then they released Persona 4 Golden on PC and a voice in my head added a new reason not to buy the hardware… ‘Royal’ll be released on PC soon’. And my patience was rewarded – out it came! Even during my two depth year projects, Persona 5 Royal was always an exception – I could buy it, regardless of no-buy pledges, because I had wanted it so badly for so long.
And yes, I bought it day one, and on the weekend of its release I managed to invest a full 24 hours plus into playing it. And I kept going. It took about eight days of basically doing nothing but playing it every spare hour I got, but I finished it in 77 hours. That may count as ‘rushing it’ – at least when I talked to some people – but I suspect that was mainly clicking through dialog as fast as I could read it rather than as fast as the voice actors go. I mainlined this game like a junkie in need of a fix.
Was it worth it, then?
Yes, it sure was. But it is, in the end, a game of nuances. The game is exceptionally, unremittingly stylish in a way that is genuinely remarkable. Every part of the UI, every part of the aesthetic, is almost painfully chic. And this enchanting user experience is paired to a game engine which feels like a blowback from an earlier era – which to be fair, it is. The overworld sections feel under polished in comparison to the menus. It’s like someone layered a game from the future onto a game from the 90s.
I’d say that Persona 4 Golden does a better job of giving you characters you feel engaged with, but Persona 5 Royal is a better game with a better overall story. But both games are linked in design by the presence of a Marmite character – in P4G it’s Teddie, who is an oversexed reject from Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Restaurant. In P5R it’s Morgana, a self-absorbed chore in the form of an anthropomorphic cat. And really, he is fine as a character but an overbearing, infuriating scold of a UI system. He’s constantly telling you not to go out, not to do certain things, stopping you from doing stuff. He’s a constant barrier. A lot of the frustration I had with the gating in the game coruscated through an electric circuit in which Morgana was the ground. As such, I get the hate that Morgana elicits – he’s the path of least resistance through which your irritation can find its way to its genuine source.
Maybe this is just a feature of Persona games – that you have to have an irritating side character. But the railroading of your options in the evening (when you have time to open up the throttle and see what this baby can do) feels both unnecessary and patronising. When I want to go out and do something, I get a chiding ‘Hey, aren’t you tired?’ from Morgana like he’s an overly attentive step-father. Clearly not, Morgana. Let me go phone my teacher to explore this weird inappropriate master/servant relationship we’ve got going on.
Related to that last sentence – Persona 5 Royal feels a little less pervy than many games in this style and genre but it’s still full of super weird repressed bullshit. I don’t think the female characters in this entourage would feel as safe around the male characters as the narrative implies given how often each of them acts like a sex pest. One character, before becoming a companion, basically threatens another that he’ll turn her over the police for breaking and entering unless she poses nude for him. It’s all brushed off as a joke, but that’s part of the problem with games of this style. It’s no coincidence I didn’t even bother building the social relationship with that character. Honestly, it was almost a deal-breaker when he was forced into the roster. Get off my team, you creepy shit. For a game that focuses on the predatory behaviour of your enemies, it’s remarkably willing to forgive the predatory behaviour of your allies.
I guess in that respect it’s an almost perfect game for Twitter.
The palaces, which make up much of the gameplay, are much improved over P4G’s random dungeons. Those palaces are essentially the mixed up minds of the bosses you face in each section – you enter their heads and face down their demons and insecurities. Each of them is an obviously designed and coherently plotted environment in comparison to the endless, procedurally generated ones of P4G. However, they do tend to drag on a bit especially in the puzzle design – that starts off quite clever and just becomes a chore as it gets recycled repeatedly within each environment. But still, there’s a lot of imagination that’s put into this, and it’s a welcome change. Dungeons feel thoughtful and challenging and part of the narrative and I feel like you learn a lot about your enemies simply by being in their heads. Of course, being a JRPG Persona 5 is not willing to let you come to your own conclusions regarding the moral implications of the actions of your foes and will hammer home any character insight with a sledgehammer.
With that in mind, the energy of background conversation is super weird. Your party members all chat about what they’re doing and what they’ve done and it’s really nice and cozy (right up until the point it gets annoying and repetitive. ‘You’re so gorgeous, Panther’ – SHUT UP MORGANA). But also it’s tonally inconsistent, with none of the characters seeming to realise how far you’ve come from the early hours when everything was dangerous.
‘Joker, there’s a shadow! What are we going to do?’?.
I don’t know, Ann – maybe we’ll steamroller it like the trash mob it is and like we have now done a few thousand times? For a game this long I think they needed to broaden the amount of dialog (like… by a lot) and also make it more appropriately contextual.
The characters don’t feel as ‘fun’ as in P4G. The whole thing feels a lot less like hanging out with your friends and a lot more like slack chats with work colleagues. One thing that P4G had in spades was the sense that you were making meaningful connections with people who cared about each other. That said, a lot of the P5R royal team start out as dislikeable before having a moment of redemption that resets the context of their dislikability – at which point I felt a real rush of affection. For most of them. So maybe my objection is that the group dynamic as a whole is weaker even if the characters themselves aren’t. That extends to the relationship building system which seems out of sync with the story beats. There’s one quest where you need max level ‘Kindness’ to unlock it, at which point all future kindness bequeathments are worthless. You know what the reward is for completing that quest? Yep – a bunch of kindness points. Bits of the game feel a little slapdash – you get the sense occasionally that that glorious joie-de-vivre is doing a lot of the work in directing your attention away from the cracks in the design.
That said, I do love a game where ‘kindness’ is a goal to aim for. It’s very shallow in how you earn kindness (actual acts of kindness tend to award fewer points than, for example, watching a movie about kind people) but I like that it provides it as a meaningful goal to aim for. Kindness and its other characteristics feel like an underused system though – some things are soft-locked behind having achieved having certain social stats, but it’s infrequent and the reward (story and otherwise) never really feels proportionate to the effort required.
The combat is genuinely beautifully designed, feeling less like a turn-based game and more like a kind of super-slick combo-based brawler. There’s not a lot of need for slow, complex thinking and you can instead get by with muscle memory and building up a tempo of intersecting powers. When you have a good group composition, you can genuinely demolish enemies in an extremely satisfying way. It doesn’t at all feel clunky the way most JRPGs do (to me).
Structurally, the narrative has some neat elements. One of the really interesting themes in P5R is the toxicity of fandom, and that’s something that weighs heavily on you as the game progresses – when it goes from the buzz of seeing your approval rating go up and turns into something darker as the motivations of the protagonists seem to shift in line with the pressure of their public… personas. Again, while I don’t think the game is an intentional commentary on social media it’s certainly prescient.
The Royal version comes with some hilariously broken bonus content, to the point that you can steamroller the game with an upgrade that costs you absolutely nothing to purchase. On the one hand, that seems like a massive oversight. On the other, at 55 hours in and at level 55 for my characters (when I decided that ‘yeah, okay – I get it’) I sort of felt like I’d seen everything the combat system, outside of the bosses, had to offer. I started at that point really making use of the overpowered personas. It reminded me a bit of the forgiveness built into Persona 4 Golden which basically lets you switch off the need to grind. In that respect, perhaps this is an intentional feature of the package. With the right buffs and tweaks you can basically level up constantly by doing little more than driving a car into trash mobs.
But again, that slapdash element comes in here too. I was lucky enough to unlock the Persona 5 Royal content just by playing the game, but by chance I found out that in order to unlock the ‘best’ ending I needed to be pursuing relationships I simply didn’t care about, and I’d already passed the deadline to grind them out – pardon the expression. It’s definitely a flaw in the design that you need what is essentially precognition (or a walkthrough, which I don’t like to use) to know which social engagements you need to be prioritising. That may be something they want to deal with in New Game+, but this is an eighty-hour game. The chances of me doing a New Game Plus any time soon are very low. Especially how it went on way too long at the end, but really that’s my own fault for shot-gunning the game in the space of about a week.
The end of that week left me wrung out, because one thing all of the Persona games I have played have in common is that they make me feel almost inescapably lonely at the end. I’ve played three, four and five now. Three has the saddest ending, but they all have such a transient framing that there is no real happiness to be had at the end. Every Persona game is about building up relationships only for that accumulated camaraderie to slip through your fingers. Is an ending that feels like a transition into permeance too much to ask for?
Anyway, Persona 5 Royal was worth the wait and now it’s out on PC I don’t ever need to buy a PlayStation. Perhaps Persona 6 will reignite the desire, but it’s also possible I’m all Persona’d out at this point. I’ve played about 250 hours across the three games and that kind of feels like plenty for one lifetime.
Pistol Whip
Pistol whip is another VR game, and it’s another banger. Operation Wolf as delivered through a synthwave mescalin trip in which you John Wick your way through a fever dream. It is exhausting to play but also very, very satisfying when it works well. It’s a fun game, but really mis advertised as a rhythm game. Supposedly you get bonus multipliers by keeping to the beat of play, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out how. It turns out that there’s an underlying formula that is only a hair’s width away from a thesis on calculus. Realistically, if you need to read a complex article about how to find ‘the beat’ the game has failed in its basic duty to communicate gameplay systems to the player. Scoring is indistinguishable from randomness, so you have to rely on the simple visceral joy of shooting bullets into the people until they die.
It’s a great casual game. It’s less good as a game that you consciously try to get better at (as opposed to, say, Beat Saber). The higher levels of difficulty are frantic, but often extremely unbalanced. The only real way to excel, it seems, is through rote memorization and that’s very at odds with the game itself which is most fun when you’re simply reacting to peril. Frantic ducking and dodging is where the excitement is. It loses something when you’re executing enemies with all the intuitive flair of working your way through a checklist of chores.
The game is a lot of fun though, except I’m not 100% sure why. The levels are very samey, the range of enemies is very limited, and there’s almost no weapon choice. I guess it really is the whole fantasy of gun-fuing your way through a level and there is a viscerality to gameplay that is very enjoyable. But much like with Beat Saber the fun of the game wears out quite quickly because of how samey it is.
The campaigns are kind of promising but they too suffer from being very samey experiences. They do though throw the occasional new innovation your way – boss fights at the end, exploding barrels, and that kind of thing. But there doesn’t seem like a lot of thought or care has gone into the gameplay design, trusting the sheer physical catharsis to carry the whole experience. But it is a very worthwhile thing to have available if you have a VR headset.
Planescape Torment
Planescape is an excellent example of the kind of absolute bullshit we used to put up with for a good story in a game. In the modern era, it’s little more than a practical joke. The combat is dreadful. The aesthetic is confusing. The mechanisms dull beyond the telling of it. And yet we still talk about it as the gold standard of early CRPGs.
Basically the whole thing hinges on two factors. One is the spellbinding setting of the Planescape D\&D campaign. You begin in the city of Sigil, where every single thing you find out about it is weird and mesmerising and fascinating. It’s full of oddly named factions and characters and larger than life personalities. And in that, it hooks right into the part of your brain that is trying to work out ‘what’s going on’. There’s a richness in here that is so at odds with how most people think of Dungeons and Dragons. Here you don’t have the requisite orcs and elves. Instead you have a race of clockwork people – a kind of living cog – that come from the realm of the Mechanus where order above all things is prized. You meet up with a floating, talking skull and a chaste succubus and maybe join up with an animated suit of armour. You might make friends with a man who is perpetually on fire. Those are characters of a richness and sophistication and originality that are transcendent and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
And the city in which they are embedded – equally fascinating. There’s the creepy ‘Society of Sensation’ who encode memory and feeling into a form that allows others to experience them later. You might imagine some of what that might be – sex and success and more. But there are darker sensations, such as what it might feel like to experience the moment of death or the moment of killing. That’s only one of the factions you might encounter. There’s a lot of implied horror in this setting, and the horror is especially delicious because of how alien its context reveals it to be.
And the story itself is both well written and compelling. While it’s delivered almost entirely in dialog, it’s still rich and interesting enough to keep you playing. And that’s important, because there is literally no other reason to keep on playing. You play this for the world and the story or you don’t play it at all because the game is hot garbage. Planescape Torment is a game I have bought, at last count, six times. Each time I have played it for a few hours and stopped – frustrated by the achingly slow pace or the horrendous, dull combat. But if you go limp to that you’ll find there’s a genuinely compelling narrative woven into this deep and innovative setting.
But also you could just find a wiki and read through it yourself, and honestly that’s preferable.
Planescape definitely showed that you could tell a deep and resonant story in a game engine. It was less convincing in arguing that you could blend a game and a story into a satisfying whole. It would take some time before a game came around that did what Planescape intended and did it well.
So go play Disco Elysium.
Psychonauts
Psychonauts is a game I have tried to play, repeatedly, for many years. I managed to finally get it done during my big backlog clearing project of 2022, but man – it wasn’t a lot of fun at the time and it has aged badly. It plays like an absolute pig.
What saves it though is that it is probably more densely packed with wonderful ideas than any ten random games you might choose to mention. It’s just that those ideas are executed with all the grace of a concrete elephant being hurled from a malfunctioning rollercoaster. I wouldn’t say the game is no fun to play, but it can certainly see the shores of ‘anti fun’ in the distance. I didn’t enjoy much of my time with it, but constantly felt as if I was exploring the rough shape of a much smarter game than its implementation was able to extract. It’s funny, and clever, in a way that few games have managed – at the time, or since. Thematically it’s extraordinary. Narratively it’s… well, it’s got heart. Mechanically it’s a tiresome chore with nothing to recommend it – nowhere is that more apparent than in its last excruciating level.
For my backlog clearing project, I only added a game once it had been completed. Technically speaking I never completed Psychonauts because its finale is the game equivalent of a war crime. Its often noted as being one of the most difficult levels in games, but that’s not the problem. Sure, it’s challenging and finnicky and annoying but it’s wrapped up in the greater sin of being boring. I struggled with it for a while, until after several failed attempts I got to the half way point of the level and the game crashed, putting me back to the start. At that point I calmly put down my controller and said ‘I believe that is enough’.
Nah, just kidding. I swore like a trooper and uninstalled the damn thing.
I would describe Psychonauts as being fascinating up until the point it becomes infuriating, and then there’s a much longer period of thinking to yourself ‘Boy, this game just will not end, will it?’
There’s a lot to recommend though in terms of its sheer inventiveness and I will give its sequel a try in the hope they put someone in charge who understands what fun is supposed to look like.
Quantum Break
This is a pretty weird one – a third person shooter from Remedy before they broke through with Control. I enjoyed it quite a lot, although some of its choices did dull the impact a bit. What makes it especially noteworthy is that it’s a self-aware mix of live action TV and gameplay, with story elements incorporated into a surprisingly high-budget television show that then kicks off the video game part. It’s kind of a precursor to Black Mirror’s version of Bandersnatch actually, although I am dubious as to how much your choices really matter. The TV show is better than some I’ve seen but the whole thing is odd. I said it’s surprisingly high budget, and it is. You can see plenty of money on the screen. And yet it feels distinctly low-budget in its sensibilities. There’s an excellent cast, including Lance Riddick and Littlefinger from Game of Thrones and they do a creditable job of pushing forward the fun, if somewhat goofy story concerning the corporate malfeasance of the global Monarch group. It’s told with sufficient earnestness that you can look past some of its more excessive traits (like Monarch seemingly having full power to gun people down in the streets).
The game itself is pretty fun – you can see pretty clearly the DNA that would eventually evolve into Control. Technically though the optimisation is shocking – FPS drops, aggressive pop-in, subtitles out of sync with the audio, stutters in cut-scenes and in gameplay (and not the narrative kind of stutter) all kinds of performance flaws. That detracts considerably from the fun if uninspired gunplay. What does make it more interesting though is the interplay of the time control powers. You get a whole bunch of weird and wacky abilities that mesh together fluidly and with a great deal of cathartic satisfaction. Unfortunately you don’t get much time to really sink into any one of them – they get frontloaded in bulk in a way that does limit the joy of discovering new combos. They are genuinely very fun though – again, Control’s inspiration comes through clearly.
The environments are as typically rich as you’d expect in a Remedy game, but stuffed to the gunnels with so much backstory that it can can be flow breaking. It seems weird that a game that has given up on integrating narrative and gameplay should still feel the need to cram so much lore into the background elements of the levels. Come on, buddies – you make us watch a 30 minute movie at the end of each act, that’s where you can do your lore dumping. Don’t get greedy and steal time away from the actual game. The result has a really deleterious impact on gameplay with sound files, TVs and dialog all overlapping in a way that makes it impossible to pick out any of it. The expectation seems to be that you stop and listen or read, sometimes hundreds of words, before you get back into the action. I don’t work that way and so instead the environment becomes reminiscent of what happens when you leave a toddler alone with all the laptops and phones available in the house.
And that jars especially because – there’s just not enough action. That may be because I played on the lowest difficulty level (I needed a break after a bunch of challenging, demanding games) but I assume that just made conflicts easier rather than less frequent. You get such a fun toolkit of powers that it’s weird you spend whole acts doing nothing but moving places and pressing buttons.
Seriously though people, you have a TV show episode at the end of each act for all your exposition. Imagine having that and then thinking ‘You know what this game needs? Much more exposition’. And it’s not like it’s just extra information – bits of the main plot make zero sense without some of this content.
It’s a weird jumble – good when it’s at its best, frustrating when it’s not, but it’s also an experiment I’m glad didn’t actually succeed. It’s bad enough having so many Marvel movies without also needing to watch ‘Marvel Midnight Suns, the Sitcom’ to understand why I’m punching one bunch of baddies as opposed to some others.
Q.U.B.E. 2
QUBE 2 (I won’t put the dots in every time because boy is that a tedious name to type) is a first person puzzle game in the vein of Portal, The Talos Principle, Superliminal and so on. In fact, it so much like The Turning Test (which I spoke about in a newsletter last year) that I was surprised to find out it was a different studio that developed it. If a lot of this mini-review sounds like it was cribbed from my review of that, it’s only because the games feel eerily similar.
QUBE 2 is a game about finding blank squares in a map and applying one of three special effects to them. You can apply an orange effect which lets you extrude a platform. A blue effect that lets cubes bounce off of them. And a green effect which generates cubes. You apply those within an environment that includes oil (to make things slippery), fire (to let you burn down doors), magnets, cranes, and some other stuff. The task, as always, is to ‘solve the chamber’.
So, easy part out of the way first – it’s fine. It’s about five or so hours long, doesn’t quite overstay its welcome (although you might find your eyes straying to the clock occasionally) and it’s reasonably enjoyable. I know I sound like an unbearable asshole when I say stuff like this, but… it’s just way too easy. No puzzle took me more than about five minutes at most to work out, and the ones that did take that length of time were the ones built on the shonky physics. There are a few occasions in this game where I abandoned a solution because it didn’t work, only to find that it was because of some unknowable spasm in the game engine. I had to look up two solutions, and found that ‘No, you did solve this but the game decided to act like you hadn’t’. That is super frustrating.
And this isn’t an issue of poor execution of a good idea (on the part of the player). Portal is full of things where timing is everything and you can know what to do without being able to do it. Most of QUBE 2 is on rails – it’s blocks moving in straight trajectories. But it’s also a game where occasionally blocks hit other blocks, and at angles. When the game properly ‘locks’ on to what happened it does a kind of snap effect – if you’re just outside the region where a special effect should occur, the cube will move into the centre of it so the effect can be cleanly applied. But that doesn’t always work the way it should. Forces too are inconsistently applied, and there’s one puzzle where ‘hoping the physics system does what it logically should despite all your abundant experience to the contrary’ is the solution. It’s not a game-breaking problem, but it’s a weakness in a puzzle game.
When something doesn’t work in a game like this, you should think ‘Oh, wow – yeah, let’s try something else’. You shouldn’t think ‘Let’s do this exact same thing another three times and take the average result’. There’s usually an observable ‘messiness’ to these kind of results that suggests ‘Maybe the physics system didn’t work exactly correctly there’, but resetting for another try can be a chore and the occasionally recalcitrant interface doesn’t help.
Ah yeah, the interface. It’s mostly fine but every so often you highlight an environmental feature in a way that is completely unambiguous and instead of getting the response you want you get a buzzing noise instead. And since some of these puzzles are reflex dependant and locked to your accuracy, that’s also a real frustration. It’s also just… so slow. I didn’t find a run option which means your character, even in situations of real urgency, plods around like she’s making a listless trip to an uninspiring supermarket. Especially annoying is the slow five second ‘recovery’ animation that shows when you jump down from something high. It adds nothing except execution lag to the game and I have no idea why they added it.
The narrative is – fine. But it’s delivered in the style of the Turing Test which means that you get it based on successful completion of chambers. So your character will cry out in anguish at the end of one mini-scoop of the story and then be silent for five minutes before continuing in exactly the same intonation. It’s very jarring and not at all the way people speak. After five minutes, rage should become simmering anger. You don’t go from rage to silence to rage without any intervening stimuli. The whole thing gives you whiplash.
But really, it’s the easiness of the puzzles that’s my main problem. They’re absolutely functional, but they aren’t remotely inspiring. The Talos Principle is full of puzzles that, at the end, made me think ‘Wow, that was clever’. QUBE 2 has a puzzle design that needs maybe two or three steps of added obfuscation to make it satisfying. The first time you see two squares atop each other, you’re delighted to realise a green cube atop a blue cube creates a catapult. A mere ten minutes later you’ve seen that so often that you’ve just been given part of the solution simply by parsing the layout of the chamber. The fact most of it is represented as a linear path implies relationships between cube effects, and once you’ve gone over all the combinations (not many), you’ve got your answer. It’s a puzzle game you could play while doing your taxes, that’s how little conscious effort it asks of you on average.
To be fair, as you progress towards the end it does throw some good chambers your way. But the best chamber in QUBE 2 is only fractionally as satisfying as the average chamber in the Talos Principle.
The weird thing is though I’d probably recommend QUBE 2 to more people than I would the Talos Principle (which I think is the best of them) purely because it’s a first person puzzler with the training wheels on. There’s a kind of puzzle literacy you build over time when you play these games, and I’ve played a lot of them. I enjoyed the Talos Principle because it stretched me. QUBE 2 was unchallenging, but probably only because of how often I’d seen these kind of puzzles before.
I’d probably say ‘Pick it up if you see it on a deal somewhere’.