Red Dead Redemption 2
There’s no point pretending otherwise – Red Dead Redemption 2 is every bit as great as the majority have said. Given how I found Red Dead Redemption, the original, something of a snoozefest I was hoping I could be contrarian. I like being contrarian. I can’t be though. I loved it. It’s magnificent. And it’s magnificent in ways that I’m surprised about.
Last month I complained bitterly about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla being just way too damn long. Red Dead Redemption is forty hours in its main campaign, if you hold largely true to the course, and at the end of it I felt like I could happily haved played another twenty. There’s a lot to learn I think in the comparison between the two games, because broadly speaking they’re the same basic thing – open-world sandboxes which exist around rich, complicated mythos of storytelling and history. And yet, RDR2 succeeds where Valhalla fails and I think it’s all to do with the way it handles missions and characters. But more than that, how it hands prepping you psychologically for its pacing.
Make no mistake, this is a slow, ponderous story. It’s a rambling, wild tale that rises and falls and takes its time. It stops you from rushing, putting a hand out any time you want things to go faster. Its stingy with fast travel, penny-pinching with running and galloping. It’s full of long, meditative conversations on the trail. I’ve complained a lot in many reviews about games where the missions are ‘Walk slowly to this place, do a thing, and then we’re done’. And yet that’s RDR2 all over.
It works here though. It works beautifully. And I have some theories about why.
The first is that by denying you convenient fast travel, it forces you into a more contemplative frame of mind. You weigh up your journeys. You consider whether to ride the trail or go to a nearby town to take a stagecoach. Ironically, in forcing you to spend time it makes you value time, and as such it makes you value journeys. It says, ‘Woah cowboy, there’s no need to be rushing off. Enjoy the scenery’. And then it fills your journeys with some of the most gorgeously lit environments I’ve seen in any game ever. The whole game is like guided meditation with guns. You don’t experience America by teleporting everywhere. You experience it from the back of your horse on long, sun-drenched journeys. I think a lot of it evokes what people get out of Euro Truck Simulator or games of that ilk – it gives you time for thinking on the trail. It’s a throwback to a time where the pace of life was slower. When you might schedule appointments by the day rather than by the half hour. I found it very appealing.
What really elevates that as a game design choice though is in how it handles that sense of pacing while also making you care about the conversations you’re often required to have. You don’t have mission hubs in RDR2, not really. Sure, you have a camp where most of your missions will start but that’s just the place where the characters live. You don’t get sent to the house of Billy Placeholder, the \ of \ and told to go shoot up some bandits. Instead it’s your buddy Charles, riding up and saying ‘Hey Arthur, I really need your help’. And because Charles is your buddy, someone you spent time with in previous missions, you go ‘Sure Charles, let’s ride’. I even did a whole pile of optional missions on the basis of who asked me to do them. When Sadie Adler turns up and says she needs my help, damn right Sadie Adler is going to get my help even if I have a main mission that needs doing.
And as you ride off to some godforsaken point on the map, you bond with the people that are sending you there. That’s a risky choice in any game, because it’s rare that the writing and dialog is strong enough to carry it. But the writing here is impeccable. It’s poetic in the pragmatic way of the more thoughtful kind of Western, full of regret and longing and the fatalistic realisation that all roads lead to the grave. ‘You and me, we’re mostly ghosts’, remarks Arthur to one of his most brutally broken companions. ‘But John? And Abigail? They’re still people. And we can help them get out’.
Lines like that land, because you spend so much time with all of them that they’re not just quest markers. You grow fond, or not, of who is in your camp. And it makes the time you have with them – time you know is limited – something to enjoy. And that time is limited in a way that is so well integrated into the theme of the game. This is an age where individualism is permanently in tension with civilization, and the corners of the world where people could live free are being slowly ground away. It doesn’t romanticise this – Arthur and his gang know they’re bad people doing bad things. But it does contextualise it. You feel the era passing by in almost every conversation, even if only by implication. In the final reckoning, this is a story that is about things ending.
I can’t overstate how much the writing elevates RDR2, because the missions are – to be honest – nothing special. Ride here, shoot some baddies, get out before the law comes. They mix it up a bit in the design, but essentially most missions are ‘here’s your shooting gallery, have fun’. Whether it’s robbing a train, assaulting a military compound, or rescuing a character from torturers, it all could feel incredibly samey. Samey in the way it felt like in Valhalla. It doesn’t though because every single mission is framed in a compelling way and the mechanisms are all very satisfying if a little bit inconsistent as far as the UX goes. No mission is truly alike, even if they are all built from a small set of modular bricks. Again, this is game design through story-telling. It all feels hand-crafted. Nothing feels copy and pasted.
One of the things I liked the most about the framing of missions is that it gives you points where you can opt-out after the ‘fun’ part. You don’t get forced into going fishing with some tedious boy-king as part of the main trunk of the campaign. You’ll get asked ‘Hey Arthur, do you still want to go fishing with us after we shot up all these police officers?’ and you can choose the bail-out point. Where Valhalla feels contemptuous of your time, RDR2 feels like it respects it intensely. It takes almost two days to tell this story because that’s how long, give or take a few hours, the story needs. When the game seems to digress, as it does violently in the epilogue, I was willing to trust it would reward me for my patience. And it honestly does.
I mentioned a bit earlier about the framing, and games like this often run the risk of coming across as you going through a laundry list of someone else’s chores. ‘Go gather me six clumps of hemlock’, and off you go. Here though if someone gives you a mission, they’ll almost always be involved in it. They’ll ride with you, rob banks with you, get into gun-fights with you. You don’t feel like an errand boy, you feel like a badass troubleshooter. You feel like the guy people call when they just need some serious shit done because they literally can’t do it alone. Your quest-givers are hands-on in a way that is narratively satisfying, and that’s also something that really dials up the sense of connection you feel as the story progresses. You never feel used. You feel valued. That’s rare in games like this. One of the narratively jarring things that a lot of games do is make you, the grand and powerful hero, go do busywork for supposedly lesser individuals. In Warcraft you might be bedecked in glorious, legendary armour still wet from the blood of freshly slain ancient dragons and cosmic horrors. You’ll still be sent off by the local mayor of Shitsville, Nowheretown to gather twenty fresh bear asses from the local forest. There is no mission in RDR2 that made me feel that way. Even some missions that seemed like they might (an early one involving taking a gang-member to a saloon is an example) turned out to be amazingly fun.
That sense of being someone that matters gets wielded too in some very effective ways. One of the flaws in Valhalla was that you’re basically told ‘Kill these people because they’re bad people’. You never have cause to hate them. They’re just names on the worst list Santa ever wrote for bad little boys and girls. RDR2 never tells you to hate anyone. It makes you hate them. And boy, did it make me hate a lot of people. But it also made me like a lot of people, and it wasn’t afraid to take them away from me when the story needed it.
What it also isn’t afraid to take away is your sense of belonging. You’re constantly on the move, forced onto the run, and as such every time a mission starts there’s a great sense of claustrophobia and tension. You never know what you’re coming back to. I’m not sure I’ve ever played another game that made me so… nostalgic for the earlier stages of my own playthrough. As times get tougher, as relationships get strained, I sometimes found myself remembering earlier parts of the game when everyone was in much higher spirits. It presses down on you somewhat and it’s a sign of how well the game manages to make your feel like part of something that it can also make you feel its loss.
And oh my god, the music. It borrows the Breath of the Wild convention of only having wisps of sound for most of the game. It differs through by occasionally throwing in an actual song at moments of particular drama and it is spot on perfect.
As usual, I have some minor issues with the game. I’ll leave out specific spoilers, but basically it boils down to the fact that it’s obvious quite early on that Dutch, the leader of the gang, is a grade-A idiot and is making it all up as he goes along. ‘Just have some goddamn faith’, he keeps yelling as everyone around him is carved down by the enemies on all sides in a way that was utterly predictable before a gun got drawn. He repeats that mantra like he’s a bewildered monk during a viking raid. And yet he is so incompetent, and so incapable, that it’s not obvious why most of the gang don’t cut and run. Mitigating factors do become apparent as the game goes on, but they appear long beyond the point where a reasonable outlaw would say ‘You know what? I’m done here’.
I found the UI to be very frustrating at times because of how sometimes you hold left trigger to aim, sometimes you hold right trigger, and it’s not very clear which is which at times. You press X to pick things up off your horse, but Y to pick them off bodies. That kind of thing is common, where the logical link between semantic concepts isn’t mirrored in the controls. I especially didn’t like how easy it was to mistakenly shoot some poor asshole in the face. I found the legal system to be somewhat slanted against careless misdemeanours like ‘brushing someone with your horse’, at which point you get a bounty of $20 and the entire state police mobilised to kill you. I once got beaten to death by police officers for not ‘moving along’ quickly enough for their liking. Small issues like that cropped up during play, as they always will in a game of this size and complexity. There are occasional bugs, sometimes badly spaced checkpoints, and frustrating glitches that stop you, for example, getting to where you need to be in a time-sensitive mission. Inventory management is an issue. Horse riding is occasionally frustrating. None of that took the shine off the game.
Five stars. A masterpiece. So good it makes me think about checking out the original to see if it’s actually better than I recalled.
Red Strings Club, the
There’s a lot to like in the Red Strings Club. For one thing it’s full to the brim of well-written introspection and philosophical consequence. It’s rare that I see a game where I’d describe the writing as ‘poetic’ but there’s more than a few examples of elegant expression through the course of play. Admittedly some of it is poetic in the worst possible manner – as in, like you’d find in the notebooks of a precocious teenager. Not all of it though, and it expresses some complex, challenging ideas well. At least, well for the context. We’ll get to that.
It’s mostly a kind of conversation simulator. You play several roles during the game but the most substantive one is as a bartender mixing chemically reactive drinks that act upon the emotional centres of your customers. You essentially stimulate them into a receptive state and then probe them for information. A vain character may be willing to disclose more than he might like if you downplay his accomplishments, a lustful character may let personal attraction override their discretion. That sort of thing. As the bartender character you’re looking to extract key bits of useful intel from everyone that comes by your club, and then use that information later to uncover the machinations of the plot and the sinister conspiracy that you find yourself investigating.
It’s really neat, mainly because conversations are very limited and the game constantly saves its state so you can’t easily go back and use hindsight to substitute for your own lack of charisma. Choose the wrong emotion and the wrong question and all you’ll get is a big, fat goose-egg.
And those conversations are genuinely interesting because they touch on some important topics in a subtle way. Imagine there was a computer algorithm that could stop you feeling despair. A piece of software that could eliminate rape and murder. Imagine there was a benevolent AI that honestly cared about humanity and wanted to ensure its happiness. Imagine if the all loving God that’s promised in the New Testament was available as an .exe file.
Now imagine that you need to convince other people as to the acceptable parameters of that project. Does your algorithm permit rape but not murder? Murder but not rape? Both? Neither? What extent can you regulate free-will without it being mind control? Are societal problems solvable through individual agency, and if not should individual agency get a bit of help? There are more than a few conversations in the Red Strings Club that had me scratching my chin while thinking of what to choose as the best option.
But, as usual, let’s not overstate this – all systems like this are essentially shoved into an Overton window shaped to the designer’s worldview. You don’t get to equivocate or drill down into nuance. You don’t get to challenge definitions or defy the presented premise. That’s always going to be true in narrative games. The Talos Principle, for all its lofty intellectualism, has the same core issue. You are presented with a handful of choices, but in the process it flattens all disagreement into a set of dialog choices not of your making. It makes for a very playable game but an unconvincing philosophical treatise. And in the end I’m not really entirely sure which of those is more important to the Red Strings Club. The ideas, while challenging in the context of a game, are sophomoric in the context of more substantive thoughtful literature. And yet, as a game, it never really explores the interactivity of persuasion in a way that would make a meaningful statement beyond the ideas with which it flirts.
Later on you take control of a hacker character and engage in an absolutely wonderful section of phone-based social engineering. You fake voices of prominent characters to unlock access to the systems and resources you need, using their biometric data to widen your roster of impersonations. Here, the Red Strings Club pretty much sheds all the introspection and becomes a wildly fascinating game about leveraging relationships to achieve nefarious goals. This is an effective gameplay system and it makes me wish the sections that preceded it had sacrificed some of their ideological agenda for more agency and flexibility on the part of the player.
I did like the Red Strings Club – quite a lot as it happens. It’s just a game where it never really seems to put a harness on the two competing horses that make up its nature and just ends up being pulled in contrary directions as a result. I certainly recommend you check it out though.
Resonance
Resonance, like the Blackwell Series I have spoken about before, is from Wadjet Eye and it really does show why they are considered the modern masters of what is a somewhat outdated genre. It’s clunky as hell – like many games built from its engine – but it feels authentically 90s and that’s enough to endear it to me. Adventure Game Studio may not have the sophistication of SCUMM (the engine used by Lucasfilm for most of their point and clicks) but it does the job and keeps a certain tradition of adventure game design alive. Resonance has got pretty good writing, some lovely visuals, and an interesting story that manages to be over-the-top without being goofy. It doesn’t have the surety of touch of – say – a Monkey Island but it’s certainly up there with the B-Tier of nineties adventure games. It’s easily the match of a Maniac Mansion or a Day of the Tentacle. More so, perhaps.
Like all games of this nature, it’s intensely tied up in its narrative so I can’t say a lot without spoiling it. But certainly if you wanted to explore the Wadjet Eye catalog this would be a pretty good place to start to see if you like what you see.
Saints Row Four
I had long dismissed the Saints Row games as Grand Theft Auto knock-offs. To be fair, that’s what they originally were. I sat down with Saints Row IV though and I’ve completely revised my opinion because at least at this stage in their development they are something very different. You can still see the design lineage but what’s changed is the design philosophy. This isn’t about fidelity to the real world – this is Grand Theft Auto as it would be filtered through the sensibilities of the Marx Brothers. It’s a chaos simulator, where joyful anarchy takes the place of GTA’s self-important and dreary sense of ‘narrative’. The jokes in GTA are mostly in terms of reference or satire. The game takes itself very seriously, because it’s clear the writers would rather be writing serious movie scripts.
Saints Row IV though begins with you climbing an ICBM to defuse it before it hits Washington, and then you leap off to safety with a knowing wink at the camera while Aerosmith’s ‘Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ plays. It sets its stall out very early that this is a game about excess. And in its missions, it consistently keeps raising the bar in ludicrous ways. Right from the very start, you begin as the President as the United States defending the Earth from an alien invasion. You’re defeated, and thrown into a Matrix style simulation where the laws of physics can be broken by hacking the code. Before too long you’re gliding through the air, running up the sides of buildings, and throwing terrified police officers at marauding aliens. It’s gleeful, madcap, and an awful lot of fun.
But it’s also very flawed.
For one thing, it’s very crashy – several times an hour on average, and that can be galling in difficult missions. You might think ‘Hey, difficult missions? How is that even possible if you’re an actual superhero?’. Well, it’s because the game lacks the courage of its convictions – it is very eager to take away your superpowers whenever they get in the way of story missions. Rather than build upon your capabilities, they keep taking them away and that’s super frustrating when you’ve spent so long working on acquiring them. It’s like the developers asked themselves ‘How do we balance a game in which we have let the player become too powerful?’. They arrived at the wrong answer, which is ‘Take the fun away’.
It’s also way too happy to send you pinballing from one part of the city to another during quests, which is especially annoying when those quests are packages of the mini-games you wouldn’t have done without being compelled. The mini-games are fun, but they’re not fun enough to keep repeating again and again. So once more, the developers asked ‘How do we get players to engage with our content in a way that justifies the development cost’, and come up with the wrong answer. There the answer is ‘Make them do it to complete quests’.
Its jokes too, which are in general genuinely great, do occasionally go on for too long. And, paradoxically, not long enough. There’s a kind of ‘Uncanny Valley’ in comedy where a joke stops being funny the longer it goes on, but if you keep it going long enough beyond that point it’ll become funny again as a result of the sheer audacity. Saints Row IV often drives its jokes right into the nadir of the valley and then parks them there.
But for all of that, the game is absolutely great and I thoroughly recommend it to your attention. If it’s still great despite the flaws I’ve outlined, you know how good the rest of it must be.
Sleeping Dogs
Oh boy, this game was a hit for me and it didn’t even take long for me to love it. Imagine Grand Theft Auto except it’s been co-designed by John Woo. And imagine they put an actual enjoyable combat system in place, building it on the flow and flexibility of Arkham Asylum. Imagine they took a sophisticated crime story about an undercover cop in a labyrinth of shifting allegiances and bureaucratic conspiracies and set it in the rich and sophisticated byways of modern day Hong Kong.
Then imagine they added in a massive number of environmental takedowns that mean you could grab someone by the lapels, run them into a shop shutter, and then bring that shutter down on their throat. Seriously how can you not love a game where you pick someone up, punch them twice in the face then break their arm before running them head-first into a telephone box so you can beat the shit out of them with the receiver?
Man, reading that back makes me sound like a proper psychopath. But you know – the magic circle and all that.
I mean, games are nice and all but have you ever held a man as a human shield against his own bodyguards and then shot each with a slow-motion Max Payne style takedown before stuffing your hostage in the back of a trunk? Have you then driven that car to a restaurant while shooting pursuing guards off of their motorbikes just so you can deliver the guy to a vengeful mother that then cooks your victim in a stew?
That’s Sleeping Dogs, baybe.
But it’s not just the excessive violence (which, don’t get me wrong, is great). It’s not just the tense ‘who is hunting who’ narrative. It’s not just the spot-on voice acting or the enjoyable missions. Everything about Sleeping Dogs is done well, even things that other games turn into tedious chores. One of the best things about it is how it handles collectibles for example – you don’t get a ‘good job, nerd’ achievement. Instead you get things like… new martial arts moves.
‘Thanks for returning this statue, now let me teach you how to kick a man’s spleen right out of his rectum’
‘We appreciate you joining a SWAT team to bring down these random bad guys. Have 20,000 dollars and a SWAT truck of your own you can keep in a garage’
‘I’m an undercover cop though, don’t you think a SWAT truck would blow my cov…’
‘ENJOY YOUR SWAT TRUCK, BYE’
It’s just… great. Now, it’s not perfect or anything. It’s a little too fond of missions where you ram a car off the road, and the controls for that are occasionally a little sluggish. It has those tedious ‘chase a man down on foot until he stops and fights you’ missions that were such a chore in Assassin’s Creed but it does at least rubber band the enemies so they can’t actually lose you. But aside from those relatively minor complaints – it’s GTA but written by grown ups. All the anarchic fun in a serious, adult story… and yet it doesn’t feel po-faced or overly stuck up its own backside. It’s wonderful.
An astonishingly good game, often available for an absolute song. Do yourselves a favour and check it out!
Sniper Elite 3
You know folks, I think video games have gone too far with this one. And I assume with every game that follows – I only currently own Sniper Elite 3. But wow – every time you shoot someone, to death, the camera swaps to a bullet cam. That cam shows, in excruciating slow motion, what your high calibre sniper bullet just did to a soft, yielding human body.
With an accompanying X-Ray.
It’s what I imagine Quentin Tarantino would watch instead of hardcore pornography. It is… explicit in a way that is genuinely unsettling. It’s like a cartoon parody of a violent video game that they’d show on the news of a movie about the dystopian future.
Also, it’s a very good game.
Through the sniper scope of this game, I have shot men through every part of the body that can have a bullet shot through it. And a few parts that really shouldn’t accept a bullet. And thanks to that, I now have the same working knowledge of the human body that a forensic pathologist has. At least, assuming that pathologist has given up on a scalpel and works exclusively in the medium of upsetting violence. And I’ve done it while developing stealth skills on par with your average ninja. At least until the last level where my patience finally ran out and I treated the game like it was a reboot of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It turns out that it’s satisfying to find a perfect sniper post to shoot someone before moving to another location. But it’s also satisfying to headshot Nazis from a run.
I have to say though, I find the game quite stressful enough with it occasionally deciding that sending me in is the best option when it comes to taking down a battalion of tanks. ‘You know what would really deal with that heavily armoured piece of machinery? Just… some guy with a rifle’
It’d be laughable if I didn’t know as much as I do about the chain of command during the real world war 2. I mean, for one thing they put me – a man legendarily poor at stealth games – in the role of assassin infiltration. It’s like they didn’t even read my CV. This is another failing in the chain of command.
‘Why did you come back with all your sniper rifle, in an unopened package – look, it still has the shrink wrap? And why are you dual wielding scavenged German assault rifles?’
‘Look, things didn’t go quite as well as you may have anticipated’
I suspect the game feels a lot more tactical if you deeply engage with the ‘observe and execute’ parts of the game. My strategy however was to just find somewhere high and immediately start shooting. I don’t think I ever truly got the hang of it in the end. You’re supposed to sync up your shots to noises so nobody can pinpoint where you are, and then move to a new location to trap the ever-living Bejesus out of it. I didn’t do that, but I still had a lot of fun.
But I have to say, I switched off the kill cam about half-way in. I guess I’m just becoming old and conservative but it just felt gratuitous. Shocking the first few times. Funny the next few. Unnecessary from that point onwards.
Sojourn, the
This has easily been my least favourite ‘solve puzzles in a chamber’ game. I spoke last month about QUBE 2 and how I found its puzzle design to be a little bit too easy for the game to be satisfying. The Sojourn has a number of puzzles that were genuinely difficult – at least towards the end – but it was so uneven that it could trigger vertigo. I’d literally spend ten minutes on a puzzle in one room and then thirty seconds on a puzzle in the next. But the issue is that the difficult puzzles weren’t logically complex or creative – they were just awkward.
The Sojourn’s gimmick is that the puzzles involve items that can be activated only when you’re in ‘the dark world’, unless an object is powered by a one-use relic. And many of those puzzles involve teleportation, where you take the place of a statue and it takes your place. You’d charge up your dark vision on certain platforms, and you could for example place a statue on that charging platform and later swap position with it to recharge. And then teleport back to get where you were when you were running low.
That’s not a puzzle. That’s just padding.
Other difficult puzzles had similar things to this where you were just fine-tuning positioning to move things around by a few blocks. A statue blocks a radiation ray that you need to be touching you, so you swap position with that statue so it is suddenly behind you. You need to hold a magic eye to walk over a temporary platform so you can turn an aerial 45 degrees to the left. It’s all so… bitty. And, to be honest, very boring. I realised there was something off about an hour into the game, and I thought ‘Nah, that’s plenty’. But then I decided I wouldn’t be beaten by a game of this nature and saw it through to the end. Boy, that was a mistake because the boredom gets intense pretty quickly. There’s no coherent storyline to speak of, and the dialog in the game consists of Tesco-Value brand platitudes that hide their utter insipid mundanity behind a façade of pretentiousness. Imagine your friend from high school who did a first year Philosophy course and thought he was the Buddha. Then imagine he went on to write a derivative chamber-based first person puzzler and encoded all his ‘wisdom’ into ‘rewards’ for the player. That’s The Sojourn.
On top of all this, even if the puzzles were interesting they still wouldn’t work in a lot of cases because the mechanisms feel spongy. There are any number of puzzles I solved and thought ‘That surely wasn’t the correct answer’. These almost always involved camera angles. There’s a special kind of ‘eye’ in the game that when you look at it, it places you in the dark world as long as you maintain its position in the centre of your view. So if you move backwards away from it and at an angle you can keep certain things in place in a way that feels like it’s a cheat. But it’s hard to know for sure without checking a walkthrough, and honestly at the end of The Sojourn I was so tired of the whole thing that I didn’t really care.
Perhaps part of that is because it really outstays its welcome. When you get to the final chapter you face several levels which are all bound together in a geography that is cut and paste from earlier geography. Each has four puzzle chambers, and every time you solve them you’d find another four chambers waiting for you in the same boring landscape. It’s like a slog through a personal purgatory.
The best I can say is it looks kind of nice, but it occupies the absolute bottom rung of my affection for games of this type.
Spiritfarer
I did not get on with Spiritfarer quite as well as other people did. It’s supposed to be deeply moving and deeply meaningful. I honestly didn’t really find it was deeply anything. I don’t hate it, by any stretch of the imagination. I was though not transported the way I was led to believe I would.
So, here’s the quick pitch. You play Stella, who is taking over for Charon on the River Styx. You will collect lost souls in the various towns, mountains, lighthouses and villages that are to be found surrounding ‘The Everdoor’ – which is to say, the portal beyond life. You find them, you bring them on your boat. You cater to their every whim until they feel like they’re ready to move on. And then you take them to the Everdoor and they pass beyond this world. Insofar as it has game mechanics, they are mostly minigames and resource management. You build up your boat so it has houses, and foundries and mills and so on. And you make the things people ask of you by hunting down materials and processing them. And while doing this, you need to keep everyone fed with their favourite meals.
If all of this sounds like a chore, then guess what – it is!
The idea behind the game, as best I understand it, is that you should feel a need to nurture those in your care. That by engaging with them you unlock little personal vignettes that reveal more about Stella. And so the incentive to know your passengers is really that it is about learning yourself. Spiritfarer in the end is a game about making peace with your own sense of loss so that you can let go of other people. It’s a game about meaningful goodbyes.
And I’m sure I would have been profoundly enchanted by this if I wasn’t spending 90% of my time thinking ‘I wish I could get this dick off my boat’. There are a few genuinely likeable characters, but mostly they are so dismissive, so demanding, or so judgemental that I would have been perfectly happy to dump them overboard and yell ‘You can swim to the god-damn Everdoor from here’.
In order to have a meaningful goodbye, I think you need to have mixed feelings about the fact of it. In a game like this, you need to be thankful for their passing but hurt by their departure. Glad that they’ve found peace, but sad that it’s in a place you can’t go. In other words, it needs to be bittersweet. I never got that from 80% of the spirits. Characters would say ‘I think I’m ready to move on, can you take me to the Ever…’. I’d already be saying ‘I’LL GET YOUR COAT’ and performing the nautical equivalent of a handbrake turn.
The writing is nice, the aesthetic is lovely, and the concept is clever. And apparently all the characters on the boat were based on the relatives of the development team. So I feel a bit of an asshole saying ‘Your family members were terrible’. But they were.
‘I don’t beg for food’, says one character at lunch-time. ‘Don’t make me tell you again’
Or what, asshole?
I actually left that one to starve and then he went around bullying all my other passengers. And seriously, I’m supposed to feel sorry when this asshole decides it’s time for him to move on? Row yourself there, I’m busy.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sure some people found joy in the act of service to the departing, but I didn’t sign up to be a chambermaid for the entitled. There are a couple of spirits that are optional, and there was one so unpleasantly vindictive that I basically abandoned her forever on a boat by herself. She’s probably still there, shouting for me to come fix her a meal as she wanders around gardens and orchards absolutely full to the brim of fresh food.
That said, the characters that do land were enough to keep me playing. And I did have a few tears in my eyes at the end. But for a game that took a full twenty four hours to complete, I felt short-changed by the amount of genuine fun in the experience. That’s not a deal-breaker – I have loved many games that are not, strictly speaking, fun. But I also think the emotional resonance in Spiritfarer is too discordant for it to fulfil the promises it makes to its players.
Lovely looking thing though.
Star Wars Squadrons
This one is frustrating because it is so close to the game I was hoping I was getting when I backed Star Citizen a million years ago.
All I really want from a game like this is to be put in a spaceship, have someone else make the difficult large-scale strategic decisions, and let me focus on carving up Kilrathi… I mean, Imperial TIEs… like a specially designed space-ship cutting kitchen knife. In short, what I really want is to see the Wing Commander series of games, again, updated for modern design sensibilities. And Squadrons is so close to that. It’s so close.
What it suffers from though is what I’m going to call the ‘Chimera Squadification’ of the premise. Chimera Squad is kind of an XCOM 2.5 where you have a Kid’s TV style troupe of Colourful Characters that take on strongly story-focused missions. A good idea I guess, but unfortunately one that comes with a cost to consequences. You can’t have these Saturday Morning Cartoon style game framings while also making it possible to carry the weight of your mistakes with you.
In Squadrons, you either win a checkpoint or you lose it, but there’s no surviving and carrying on. The whole thing keeps you so tightly leashed that you don’t even have full control over your ship systems. You can’t be proactive, you only get to access mission objectives when The Parent decides. It will occasionally pause the game to force you to configure your system in a particular way, and every time it does it destroys whatever groove you were in. The game seems terrified of you having any kind of organic fun without its explicit permission. It’s good, scripted, wholesome enjoyment or nothing. It’s a helicopter parent sitting behind you in the cockpit.
Strict adherence to a story premise though was never what made Wing Commander style games so great. It might seem like a weird criticism to levy since Squadrons isn’t a Wing Commander game. It so obviously wants to be though and I think it has entirely missed the point.
Wing Commander was defined primarily by short, snappy small-scale missions where the intimacy of the dogfighting was so visceral and personal that you couldn’t help but be drawn in. It was you and your wing-mate, facing off against single-digit groups of foes in the largely featureless blackness of the void. When you had an enemy on your tail, it was a big deal. If someone had a missile lock, that was suddenly your number one priority to deal with. In Squadrons I honestly stopped caring about tails, missile locks and even mission objectives because it was all so generically interchangeable. The size of your squadron meant that someone would solve any pressing problem for you. Either they’d deal with your pursuer or they’d fill you full of freshly repaired hull (somehow?) to deal with the damage. The irony here is that the high-stakes, huge-scale nature of Squadrons reduces you to little more than a cog in the overall scenario. You could stop playing Squadrons and I’m not sure the game would even notice. It certainly didn’t seem to care that for most of the missions I was listlessly checking off my obligations like doing a dull weekly shop for an overly picky household. Squadrons made me feel like a card-puncher just doing my assigned duties in the job that fate stuck me with.
And yet, despite the game mechanics reinforcing this idea of you being a mere instrument of the Imperium/Rebellion… everyone talks to you in the between-mission scenes like you’re the goddamn messiah. ‘Wow, our squadron wouldn’t be the same without you’, says your squadron leader.
‘Really?’, you can’t help but think. ‘I think you could have replaced me with a drinking board attached to the controls with string and lost nothing of value’.
The Wing Commander comparison extends right down into these parts of the game where you wander between your crewmates and chat to them for a while. It even works the same way, with individuals triggering cutscenes in different ways and in different configurations. And, like Chimera Squad, it’s almost cringeworthy in its lack of real energy or enthusiasm. Every character has all the personality of a dialog vending machine.
But that’s natural because of the way Squadrons doesn’t permit you to, canonically, fail in the campaign.
Here’s one of the amazing things about Wing Commander – the war against the Kilrathi had a branching narrative. You’d go to a sector to complete a set of missions, and the extent to which you succeeded or failed determined the path of the war. Do badly too often and you might end up in a suicide mission – a ‘last protector of earth’ style thing where you alone stand against literally endless waves of enemies while they try to evacuate the planet. You can fail your way to the death of your civilization and it’s not even down an unlikely branch of the narrative.
Do well in Wing Commander and you get rewarded with promotions and medals. Do poorly and those medals will hang heavily on your chest while you watch the funeral of a fellow pilot. In other words, if you don’t fly well you might not understand the full implication until the end of the campaign but you’ll certainly feel an emotional consequence.
Chatter with your squad mates in Wing Commander revolved around that. It was reflective of the ebb and flow of the war, and of fallen comrades. It could be intense. It could be moving. It was never dull, even given the lacklustre style of writing that was so prevalent at the time.
Squadrons just feels vapid in that department, full of shallow pep-talks and Forer statements of intent. Nobody gets to die in Squadrons. Nobody gets to fail. Your little team of cartoon characters will live to fight another day. There are no heroic sacrifices. No weight to the war. Any time someone dies, it’s a nameless civilian on a ship somewhere. The Disneyfication of Star Wars progresses. You don’t even gt a kill-board to track your scalps.
I also hate the school of game design that thinks forcing you to play two interests in conflict is a good idea. It’s such a weird quirk of some game systems and all it does is force you to average out your opinions. Why do I need to be driven to love a character in one mission and hate them the next? There aren’t two people playing these games, there’s just me and all this approach does is make me disinterested in forming any opinion. The one-note character design sort of saves Squadrons in this respect, but at what cost?
YES SOL I KNOW YOU WANT A NEW IMPERIAL SENATE DO YOU HAVE A PERSONALITY THAT ISN’T BASED ENTIRELY AROUND ONE SEMI-EDGY OPINION?
If the Disneyfication of Star Wars is evident in the lack of consequence in design, your squadmates seem to be the apotheosis of the Twitterficiation of character. Consistency to a potentially memetic fanatically single-minded talking point is the alternative to actually being interesting. Also, Star Wars is a boring franchise to use for a game like this. Give me this game, in the Battlestar Galactica universe.
Game-wise it’s… fine. The mechanisms are solid and the shooting is good if repetitive to the point of tedium as a consequence of the ‘vast anonymous waves’ school of battle design. It’s nice to get to fly a range of ships with customisable loadouts, and they do feel different to fly. I enjoyed it a lot more towards the beginning than I did towards the end though and that’s absolutely because of what I outlined above. I felt uninvested in the story as it progressed purely because I had no role in shaping it. But it is very fun for the first half-dozen missions to get to fly the space-ships of my youthful obsessions. In a game that is a mere fourteen missions long though it is ludicrous to be in a position where I have to say it outstayed its welcome.
Depending on where future support for the game goes, I’d say it represents a promising start but nothing close to a must-have game.
I bet it absolutely blows the roof off though if you play in VR because even if you play on PC like I did it is absolutely lovely to look at.
Stardew Valley
I’ve fallen off the wagon hard here, returning to Stardew Valley after a few years of going cold turkey. It’s worse than before though because I’m working on two farms simultaneously. One is a solo farm, which I have worked through from the start to the ‘end’ (which I define as the point that the ghost of your Grandfather arrives and tells you how bad you are as a farmer). The other is a co-op farm I’m playing with Mrs Meeple in an effort to convince her that Animal Crossing isn’t worth wasting her time on. And that’s a battle I think I’m slowly winning.
The trick here has been the recent release of patch 1.5 which introduced, for the first time, split-screen co-op. Working together on a farm has gotten her to sit down with it and power through its admittedly clunky UI. She’s invested in the farm-work itself – planting, gathering, and making gold through agriculture. I, in the meantime, am down in the mines carving my way through oozes and slimes to get the materials needed to make the sprinklers that drive our crop growth. It’s a good combination – I’ve never before been in the position of having a greenhouse in time for the first winter but we accomplished that with time to spare. Our finances are actually ahead of where the best unlockable items appear in the calendar.
Honestly, it’s just such a magical game. It’s as relaxing or as busy as you want it to be. The music has become so entwined in my neurons that merely hearing the overture is enough to measurably improve my mood. When I have a day full of boring chores ahead of me, I’ll put the soundtrack on Spotify and everything just seems – better. And with the new patch, I’m finding that I don’t even recognise the end-game any more – that’s an amazing feeling given how long I’ve invested into playing it in previous years. There’s even a board game adaptation coming out! But alas, only for those in the USA so I will simply have to do without it.
I don’t think there’s a game on the market that comes close to the sheer density of merit possessed by this one. And the developer, ConcernedApe, is doing exactly what I’d like to think I would do in his situation. I’d like to believe that having made my dream game and earned enough that I never had to work again… well, I’d spend my life just giving away my time and effort to intensify the reasons people had to love the world I made.
I’d like to believe that, although I know what I’d really do is say ‘Thanks for confirming this is a great game’ and then prevent anyone from playing it ever again.
Anyway, the fact I’m so deeply rooted into Stardew Valley is the reason I didn’t get a single other game completed this month. I’m not doing a ‘game a week’ challenge this year – I don’t have enough interesting unplayed games to sustain that. That doesn’t mean I won’t end up accomplishing it anyway even with only one notch on the bedpost this month. I’ve got six games completed at the end of February in 2021. In 2020, with its final tally of 76, I’d only managed three.
Steamworld Dig 2
Steamworld Dig is not very good, is my review. The sequel Steamworld Dig 2 on the other hand is good. It’s about digging, deep, to recover treasures and secrets that can be used to access other treasures and secrets that you couldn’t access earlier. A classic Metroidvania in other words. It’s not an exceptional game by any means – for one thing, Ori and the Blind Forest (or Ori and the Will of the Wisps) feel very similar and exceed Steamworld Dig in every capacity you can mention. But it’s a fun distraction and since I got it very cheap I thought I got my money’s worth.
Stellaris
[ buy it on the humble store ]
This is something of a weird one to mark as ‘completed’, but you never really complete these games. You just play them enough to say you did. I’m at that point now, and it marks the fifty second game I’ve completed in 2020. One a week, considerably ahead of schedule. May I never play another video game for as long as I live.
Stellaris is a very good game that I didn’t really enjoy playing all that much. It’s phenomenally detailed and gives you a universe of options to tweak to mould your society in the way you like. It’s full of cool and interesting technologies and rivalries, alien precursor civilizations and looming existential threats. It lets you drill down right into the minute details of your empire in a way that is genuinely absorbing. It’s got everything I should like in it but it suffers from being ever so slightly out of sync with my preferences. That’s not a failing on its part, merely an incompatibility between what I want and the experience it offers.
My favourite way to play games like this is through the kind of delegation that I find impossible to do in real life. I like to be able to set broad policies and parameters and have The Game handle the trivialities of making stuff happen. Stellaris is a game for micromanagers, and that’s not really me. I want to be the one architecting policy and strategy. I don’t want to be the one directing each individual scientist to a remote point of interest. I found within Stellaris it gave me a world of potential automation, none of which worked remotely the way I wanted. I found that while it let me tweak a lot of things, it never let me tweak the things I really wanted. It’s not a critical problem – I played it through to completion several times after all. I just found the whole experience more tiring than uplifting. In that respect it reminds me a lot of Civilization 6 which is probably the most successfully ‘designed’ version of Civ but it’s unbearably exhausting with its constant dialogs and demands. It’s like babysitting a bored toddler.
I spend a lot of my time in Stellaris either clicking on busywork or waiting for the interminably slow transit of ships between the stars. Nothing happens for a long time and then everything happens all at once. The sense of scale which makes it so grand in its ambitions is actually weirdly disincentivising. There are always too many stars, too many planets, too many factions, too many ships and too many tasks. It’s hard to care about any of it and yet you have to obsess about all of it. And obsess you do – a small screwup in your economy can leave you hemorrhaging resources in a way that might take decades to fix.
I think the best of these games understand the optimal distance of decision making – that there are certain things with which you don’t bother your galactic overlord. If I’m sitting in the big laser chair, fretting over the war of ideology the neighbouring federation of militaristic xenophobes declared against me, I don’t want to be looking over scientist CVs to see who to put in charge of a random science ship. I don’t want to be working out the timetables for colonization or specifying which constructor ship should build which station in which system. And yet, I have to do all of that. It’s the bulk of the game.
There’s a weird quirk of the interface that you need to research a technology before you can give survey ships the authority to automatically explore, and it’s such an odd design decision that it’s left me thinking about it constantly from my first hour with the game. It’s a major quality of life improvement because you’ll have four or five of these ships and literally hundreds or thousands of stars they can explore. ‘Boldly go’, is an instruction I could have given over an email but it requires the development of some exceptionally advanced tech – the game starts 200 years into our future.
Okay though, fine. But that’s all you ever research to enable automation options. You can’t, for example, research an instruction that says ‘your job is to go do science whenever science presents itself’. ‘Hire the most suitable captain for this ship if the previous one dies’, ‘keep building new mines in the nearest system we own’. Those are all the kind of hand-waving instructions I would have loved to have given so I didn’t need to spend so much of my time in spacey spreadsheets. I never get to do that. I’m perpetually presented the dilemmas of a middle-manager while being saddled with the stresses of a galactic Donald Trump. The result is a game that doesn’t quite manage to really be what I want. Where it does let me divest myself of some responsibility, it has done so in a way that leaves me feeling more put upon than before. I’ve never appointed a planetary automator for example that didn’t instantly start complaining to me about stockpiled resources. I’ve never set up a market trade that didn’t leave me with one wary eye constantly on the bottom line. Automation in Stellaris often doesn’t reduce the workload, it just changes the flavour of the shit in your sandwich.
Looking beyond that though, Stellaris is genuinely full of amazingly cool systems. Everything from genetic modification of a widely diverse empire to factional infighting that drives your governmental ethics. It’s all there. There’s a ship builder that lets you design your dream battleships and stock them with your dream arsenals. There’s real versatility in how you approach the game. Enough levers in the economy and the social systems that you can genuinely control the whole pipeline of your ambitions and feel like things went well, or badly, because of what you decided. It’s got complex diplomacy, engaging warfare, interesting social dilemmas and more. Technically it’s something of a masterpiece, something I could be more full-throated about if only I had time to breathe when playing. When I say I don’t really enjoy it, it’s entirely because of that – I am forced to make too many minor decisions I don’t care about and it gets in the way of thinking about the ones that I do.
All of this said – there’s a world of mods out there and the base game out of the box is fascinating enough to warrant some experimentation to see if someone out there has solved my problems for me. A bit more hands-off in the trivial details and I honestly think Stellaris could capture me the same way Sid Meier once did.
Stray
I’m on the record – in number of places, as saying that cats are just the Lidl own-brand version of dogs. A cat is what you buy when you can’t get a real pet. If a cat could, it would kill you in your sleep.
And yet, I never get a lot of agreement when I say this in a lecture. What gives?
Anyway, Stray is an extremely mediocre game that lives and dies on its main premise, which is ‘what if you were a cat?’. It seems a little churlish to say ‘If it wasn’t for the game’s primary innovation, nobody would want to play it’ but it feels true. Stray does have some wonderful aesthetics and a genuinely distinctive ‘vibe’. But also if you weren’t playing as a cat, nobody would have even looked twice at it.
It’s cute, I guess, if you like that kind of thing. But it’s also as frustrating as actual cats in the way it handles. Your character is forever climbing up and down things you don’t want, and while I’m sure it is ‘totally adorbs’ the way you can put a bag on its head only for it to reverse the controls, I just found it… pandering.
The Internet has a love affair with cats – even with their dumb messed up faces. I found this game to be almost unforgivably cynical in the end. Like Untitled Goose Game, it feels like it has been transparently manufactured not in service of a good game but in the hope that the Internet will behave like the Internet is supposed to – propelling mediocrity to viral fame.
Stray is – fine. But that’s all it is.
Superhot VR
This may be the perfect video game for VR. It’s a good video game in general, but VR elevates it into something spectacular.
I played this during what was both a ‘defeat the backlog’ challenge and a ‘no new games’ challenge. As such it’s a bit of a cheat I played it at all – I bought a Quest 2, thinking that it would be best to do that before inflation whacked another 10-20% onto the price. The headset came with Beat Saber, which was nice and since I didn’t buy it (it was a freebie), it didn’t really count as breaking my depth year.
I bought Superhot on the grounds of it being a kind of ‘format shifting’, which is something I have an ongoing exemption for in the depth year rules. I’m allowed to buy games if I already own them in a different format. And I thought that’s what I was doing here, even if you could argue (fairly) that this is considerably more than a mere format shift. It’s a interaction metaphor switch too. But you know – it’s close enough, right?
Look, I’m not on trial here.
The thing is – this isn’t Superhot. It’s not Superhot-Control-Delete either. It’s a completely new game using the Superhot sensibilities. I shouldn’t have bought it, but I plead a mistake rather than a violation of my rules.
Anyway, whether or not it was a fair acquisition I have to say it’s a game that shows why VR is its own meaningful gameplay medium. Superhot on PC is a good game. The most innovative shooter I’ve played in years. But Superhot VR is a quantum leap ahead of that. It feels… it just feels supergood. You click to grab a pistol into your right hand, and then a glowing red bad guy appears in front of you. You pull the trigger on the controller and he falls away. You look to the side to see two more coming towards you. The gun the first guy had is pinwheeling your way as it flies out of his dead fingers. You reach for it with your left. You grab it from the air in front of you. You bring the two guns to bear in a graceful arc and elegantly execute your foes like you’re John Wick on his way into the office. It all feels so seamless. So fluid. So… satisfying.
I made a joke to someone that VR is a recruiting ground for the alt-right, and it’s mainly because of this experience. Suddenly, viscerally, I understand the satisfaction that comes from shooting a gun into a whole mess of people. The violence that you are so disconnected with when you’re using a controller is now viscerally inserting itself into your synapses. Merely picking up a gun, knowing it maps neatly onto the handle of your controller, feels… it feels good.
Yeah, Superhot VR makes me worry about myself.
A great game. An amazing experience. Maybe though it might be a good idea to have a close friend observe you for dangerous tendencies for a while once you take off the headset.
Superhot
Superhot is another really short game, but it’s actually very, very good. It’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years. It’s a game where time moves when you move. Sort of – really it’s always moving just very slowly, speeding up alarmingly as you move around the levels. The result is that you’re in a perpetual bullet-time of rich tactical analysis, able to make reasoned, logical decisions about how to prioritise and deal with your enemies. Instead of meatball surgery, this is a deductive triage of finely honed brutality.
The effect is really quite entrancing, turning what would be undisciplined carnage-fests into almost balletic, elegant dances. Punch the guard to grab his gun out of the air, two, three, four. Pirouette to avoid the shotgun, two, three, four. Throw the gun at the guy with a finger on the trigger of his assault rifle, two, three, four. Scoop a pool ball off the table, two, throw, four, duck behind cover, two, grab the sword, four…
All of these movements then get played forward in real-time when you defeat a level, and it’s like what I see whenever I watch a competent youtuber playing a game I’ve already finished. ‘Oh, that’s what it’s all supposed to look like? I had no idea, my frantic flailing got in the way of anything that looks remotely disciplined’. It turns your panicky gunplay into what I imagine John Wick sees when he enters a room full of the people that killed his dog.
It’s a game that has languished for a long time in the ass-end of my ‘to play’ list, but I decided to finally give it a proper playthrough and I was compelled forward right to the end. The sheer number and aggressiveness of the enemies in the levels mean that it’s not easy, but it is always something you can reason out and I found that a compelling addition to the standard FPS formula. It’s a puzzle shooter more than anything else, and I’m not sure I’ve played anything quite like it before. Recommended, although I concede its aggressively minimalistic graphic style might put people off.
Superliminal
I’ve had my eye on this for a long time – ever since I first saw the tech demo they released under the name ‘Pillow Castle’s Game’. It was such a beautiful idea – using fixed perspective as a gameplay mechanism. It promised to revolutionize the idea of perception in video games the same way that Portal redefined physics and movement. The basic idea is that you pick up items from one perspective, and move yourself around and drop them – the moving around retains the perspective from the origin and translates it to the destination. Pick up something very small, move yourself so it’s very far away, and it becomes massive. It’s essentially gamifying the ‘these cows are small, but those cows are far away’ video from Father Ted. And it’s an incredibly strong pitch.
Superliminal is the eventual form the game released in, and… well, it’s a mixed bag. I will say that the last two levels are some of the best I’ve seen in any puzzle game. I spent a lot of time saying ‘oh wow’ as they really stretched what the idea could do. It cheats a little in terms of purity of the concept by also stealing Portal’s best ideas but the end result is spectacular. You use doors to become smaller, which let you fit through gaps to access other objects that you need to reach the puzzle doors. You create objects in the environment by lining up their distorted pieces until they look physically real, and then you can grab them. You can move outside the puzzle you’re presented to see things from different angles. You can use light and shadow and they mean different things at different times. Things become real, or not, as you create situations in the game world that imply a certain logical conclusion. Maybe you can’t go through a door because it’s just painted on the wall, but if you position an item so that it’s through the door then obviously it must really exist. It’s a puzzle game as designed, in parts, by Wile E Coyote. I absolutely loved the last two levels. They were so genuinely, refreshingly clever that it redeemed a game that I had otherwise cast in my mind as ‘a waste of a great idea’.
The problem really is that the core, key idea of Superliminal is only superficially clever as a game mechanism. As a technical accomplishment I think it’s extraordinary, but puzzle wise it reminded me forcefully of Thomas Was Alone in that there’s only so much you can do with the idea that you can change the size of objects in an environment.
‘There’s a thing high up in the wall, how do I get to it?’
‘Oh yes, I make something big so I can climb up it’
Realising this early, the game obscures its mechanisms behind something I thought had died along with the point and click adventure genre – pixel hunting for the interactable object that you can ‘make big’ to get to the door. And in this I felt it was being incredibly lazy because only certain objects in the environment are interactable and they’re not consistent. Maybe you could grab an industrial light in one part of the game, but that doesn’t mean you can grab the next one. A chess piece might have been critical in the last level, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything with the board in front of you. It’s just a cheap shot really – to be fair, in almost every level the real object you need to use is smeared somewhere across the textures, but it was a while because I realised that they became physical once you aligned them properly. Presumably I missed some important tutorial element for that. Perhaps because, as I say, pretty much every puzzle is the same and when every problem looks like a nail…
You get a sardonic narration of everything that’s going on like someone was trying to do a cosplay of GladOS despite never playing Portal. It lacks the wit and sophisticated bite that characterises much of Portal’s backstory, but you can tell how much of an influence it was for Superliminal. You also get some very Stanley Parable style sections where your path through the environments is a critical element of how the environment responds. Seriously if someone had told me this was The Stanley Parable 2 – absent any other information I probably would have believed them and been a little bit disappointed by the result. Much of Superliminal feels like the performance of a genre-defining song by an inferior tribute band.
My honest takeaway from this was that they used up all their great ideas in the last two levels (which, I remind you, are spectacular) and then struggled to find some filler puzzles and narrative for the rest. And, given the game is only about three hours long… that’s not a great sign that the premise had much meat on its bones in the end. The game struggles valiantly to make you interested in some pedestrian puzzle design. It tries its darndest to make the actuality of fixed perspective as cool as the promise. It just couldn’t squeeze much blood from that stone until they decided ‘To hell with it, let’s add portals’.
Right at the point they start focusing on that, you can see the game start to cohere in fascinating ways because what you get then is a kind of Alice in Wonderland fanfic set in the world of Aperture Science. And yeah – I liked that game. I liked that game a lot. I can understand why they wanted to frontload their own innovative mechanism so as to not be waved off as a Portal ripoff. The cost of that though was that I found myself bored at the majority of puzzles and annoyed at the unsatisfying solution to others.
So, there is an amazing game here but it is very short and you need to play through a similar but much more mediocre game to get to it. If you’re in the market for an amazing puzzle game that really stretches your ability to think laterally, I’d still recommend Portal or the Talos Principle as the better use of your time.
Those last two levels though.
Swapper, the
I’ve been pretty burned out on chamber-based puzzle games, mainly because once you get passed the truly great ones (Mainly Portal and the Talos Principle) the ingenuity kind of falls off a cliff. They all revolve, in the end, around a single mechanical ‘hook’ that has to be strong enough to carry the experience. And when you’ve already had one game that absolutely nailed the best one (portals), all you really have left is a mediocre mechanic. The Talos Principle solved this problem with some genuinely inspired puzzle design, to which it attached a great story and world. No other game has really managed the trick. As an ecological design niche, it seems like invasive species can’t really get a foothold.
So imagine how pleased I was to discover The Swapper, which provides two novelties! One is that it’s a side-on 2D chamber puzzler, which was interesting. The second was that its puzzle mechanic is just as interesting and rich as portals. It works on the basis of cloning. You have a gun that you can use to make copies of yourself, and they all work in unison. You move left, they move left. You jump, they jump. Your gun can create a clone anywhere, and that’s where half of its puzzle design comes from.
The rest is implied by the title – you get to swap your consciousness into any of these clones. Normally when they die they just disappear, but the primary source of the clones must be protected. But sometimes where you are is as important as where all the clones are. If you need a chain of clones to walk into a fiery death trap then you want to be the one that’s at the safer end. If you need to stand on a button to open a door, then you want to make sure that you still have full range of motion when you get there.
It’s super neat and I enjoyed the game a lot. There’s quite a litany of ‘basically okay’ chamber based first person puzzle games I’ve played in the past few years. The Turing Test. Sojurn. QUBE 2. Superliminal. Antichamber. Blah, blah, blah. The Swapper is the only one that I’d put into the same category as the greats. Definitely worth checking out if you enjoy this kind of game, although I accept that the audience is somewhat niche.
Oh wait, Timelie. That was also great.