Games – T

Talos Principle, the

Oh wow, what a game. It’s not quite as good as Portal, but it’s not far off in any category you might choose to mention. It’s got an absorbing story told in fragments of text-files on random computers you find around the environment. That might seem like a cop-out but there’s a poignancy to this method of narrative building as a result of the framing of the setup. It looks lovely, with detailed and interesting environments with enough variety of styles to stop you from getting tired of the scenery. It’s got some top-notch narration of a style and quality that put me in mind of the Stanley Parable.

Oh, and I guess it’s got some puzzles in it.

Some fantastic, beautiful puzzles.

(And some that are pretty badly designed and sloppy, but hey – there are one hundred and twenty of them. They’re not all going to be winners).

I complained a bit in the past about games like Thomas Was Alone and the Turing Test lacking any real teeth to the puzzle design. They were just too easy with very few head-scratchers. While the Talos Principle does have a mix of difficulties, at least early on, when it says ‘a hard puzzle’ it’s usually not kidding. There are a couple of dozen that I would have sworn were impossible until I spent a good ten or fifteen minutes puzzling out my options. Some seemed impossible even after that until my brain eventually clicked on the right approach, largely without my conscious involvement. The last ‘proper’ area of the game is difficult ‘red’ puzzles all the way down and it absolutely does not hold your hand for a second.

And yet with the exception of one genuinely bullshit level that is solved by what is basically an environment exploit (Weathertop, if anyone is curious) once you crack them there’s a pleasing inevitability to the solution. Admittedly with a few I scraped by on ‘I’m not sure that was the real solution’ but in every case there was a logical inevitability to the conclusion. That’s really rare in a puzzle game with proper challenging puzzles. But, in that, there are also a few levels where the challenge is in the sheer fiddliness of what you have to do – often involving distant line of sight and pixel perfect positioning. Every so often I’d find my solution didn’t work purely because of a matter of leaving a tool in the wrong place five minutes ago in the leadup to the conclusion. Sometimes to undo those mistakes you need to painstakingly wind your way back through a whole range of complex interactions. Not unfair, but a little frustrating.

Fairness is a big feature in the Talos Principle. The levels here are often hard but they’re always reasonable about their difficulty. If they don’t seem fair, it’s because you’re not thinking it through properly. And yeah, I did that a few times in some of the levels only to stumble upon the real solution by accident. Then I’d realise ‘Oh wow, this is actually really elegant and not at all a luck-based reaction-fest’. One level I was inching a box painstakingly from one side of a minigun death alley to the other, jamming each of the guns in turn to eke out every last inch of progress. I got it about two thirds of the way there before I slipped up and got gunned down. It turned out that ‘dodging bullets while relying on razor-sharp reflexes you totally don’t have any more’ was not the approved solution. When I worked it out I said ‘Doh’ out loud and then neatly solved the level in about twenty seconds. That’s great – it’s exactly what I want from a game of this nature.

There is a weird design decision though to every so often gate part of the content behind a different kind of puzzle – a literal Tetris challenge where you need to fit collected sigils into a set square or rectangle. The small ones are fine. The larger ones are so egregiously tedious that they completely throw off the flow of play. There aren’t a huge number of them, but every single time I encountered one I emitted a sigh that went all the way down to my socks. And the final level of the game has a good half dozen of them of escalating levels of aggravation.

Last point of interest is that the game has a fascinating appreciation for the complexity of moral decision making. At various points in the story you get into some quite intricate conversations about duty, responsibility, rights and privileges. It gets reasonably deep (for a video game) into issues of sentience, consciousness and what it means to be a person. It’s not completely effective in this regard, as the conversational deck is slanted towards whatever straw-men the developers want to force you into defending. It’s more like having an argument with Eliza than it is anything more profound. More often than not my actual response to a query posed would be ‘We need to get into definitions before I can answer that in any meaningful sense’, but that was rarely an option. Still, as an extra layer of things to think about while you reason out the clever puzzles, it’s an effective accompaniment.

An absolute gem of a game, and if you’ve been keeping up with Epic Game Store freebies you might have it in your library already. And if you’re on Xbox Game Pass, it’s there too.

Thomas Was Alone

This is a game that, at least for me, seems like it skates by primarily on its charm and narration because it certainly doesn’t achieve stirring heights when viewed as a puzzle platformer. Maybe the fact it’s eight years old diminishes its charm – it’s hard to say really what the intervening years has robbed from it. It’s a bit like Super Meat Boy in that respect – undoubtedly a genuinely brutal platformer at its time, but after making my way through both Ori games and Celeste it just didn’t really have a lot of crunch. Thomas Was Alone may be in the same category of games that were challenging in context but have been made routine through the simple passage of time.

I liked a lot of its design – the focus on simple geometric shapes with physics properties is a really strong premise. And in the last level of the game, where shapes acquire mutable abilities based on passing through certain portions of the environment, it has moments of genuine inspiration. The problem is – that’s about 10% of the game and it’s the only time where Thomas Was Alone starts to show any signs of being more than simply competent.

Really the problem is that the puzzles that lead up to the last level are, fundamentally, impossible to be interesting. They’re almost mathematically solvable with a kind of logical triviality that undercuts anything other than cheap-trick tension. There are timed sections that are aggravating. Pixel perfect jumps that are infuriating given the imprecise controls. Lots of required leaps of faith towards uncertain destinations. Spikes and toxic water that ensure if you twitch the control a tiny bit too far you leave the game in an uncompletable state and need to restart the level. All of that is needed because otherwise the simple properties of geometry make every level utterly unchallenging. It’s all about using small, agile shapes to ramp up larger, more cumbersome shapes. And using larger, cumbersome shapes to ferry small, agile shapes from place to place. And that means the puzzles repeat like you’re inside a kind of Groundhog Day arithmetic textbook. That’s not great for a game of this type – it’s like having a crossword puzzle where you need to write the same answer a half dozen times before it takes.

Aside from the final stretch towards the end, there wasn’t a single level that I didn’t instantly see how to make it to the end, provided I knew where the end actually was. The whole game is, as they say, a simple act of implementation. And boy, do they make you implement the same solution again and again and again. It’s not enough to show you can get up a staircase. You need to show you can get up it six times, with exactly the same solution each iteration. The challenge in Thomas is Alone is almost always one of micromanagement – shuffling shapes around until they’re in the order you need. It’s like someone looked at the Tower of Hanoi and said ‘You know what this needs? Ninety nine variations on this same theme’.

What it lacks in challenge though it makes up with in the narration. It’s got a nice, albeit simple, story of evolving AI threaded through it and it’s impressive the way it imbues characterisation into shapes and colours. It’s also reasonably funny in places, although with a kind of awkward Englishness about the humour that absolutely won’t land with everyone. That’s really what carries you through to the end and it’s enough for its short play-length but absolutely only just.

It’s probably not fair to compare a small budget Indie game to something like Portal, but what I want in a game like this is great puzzles *and* a great story. Really Thomas was Alone needed to be the last ten levels of the game, expanded and iterated on to make it the full focus. What’s there is otherwise is just… soulless. I played it through to the end because, well, it’s only three hours long and by the time you’ve got an hour in you may as well just knuckle under. That’s not a great endorsement, but then I didn’t have a huge amount of fun with it so…

Timelie

You should get this game. It is a wee gem.

Timelie puts you in the position of playing a little girl with time-bending powers. She can essentially remix temporality. If Not for Broadcast makes you a ‘news DJ’, Timelie puts you in the position of DJing a party back on Gallifrey for young Timelords. You treat time like the controls on a media player – fast forward, rewind, pause – all the biggies. And you use those powers to avoid the robots that are trying to stop you escaping from… I’m not sure, some kind of science lab. Later you get joined by a cat (!) and you control the two of them together to solve the puzzles. Your cat will meow to distract a robot so you can slip past to flick a switch to close the door that traps an enemy and so on. But later it takes this relatively simple concept and goes bananas with it. I won’t spoil it but there is a part of the game that was so clever it actually made me gasp out loud.

The puzzles are all supremely fair, occasionally devious, and satisfying to solve. The music is great. The art is great. You get to play a cat (!). And like all great puzzle games you will be impressed by your own cleverness as you progress.

The game itself is quite short (about six hours) but there’s a free DLC that apparently adds in a whole bunch of new puzzles. I can’t get it yet because – you know – depth year. But I found those six hours extremely enjoyable so I can’t imagine why having a whole mess of puzzles – especially puzzles these good – could possibly be bad.

Seriously, get it.

Torment: Tides of Numenara

I have more time on my hands now that I’m not spending hours flicking between the same apps over and over again until it’s time to sleep. So it means I’m finally able to make a stab at a number of games that have been weighing on me. This is one of them, because I backed it on Kickstarter and never gave it more than about twenty minutes attention. This Unplug process is letting me deal with that kind of neglect.

So, the quick review here is that it’s good but not quite as good as I was hoping. For those that don’t know, Torment is an old-school style party-based RPG in the vein of things like Baldur’s Gate and Pillars of Eternity. The real inspiration it draws from though is a game called Planescape Torment, which is widely considered to be the best written of all the classic RPGs from the mid-nineties. For my part I got about half the way through Planescape before the overpowering mediocrity of its gameplay crushed the spirit out of me. More on that though in a future newsletter. I concede though it is an astonishingly well written game with a great aesthetic and concept. It’s just a shame that it’s used to smuggle a whole pile of unwelcome elements in via the trojan horse of its story.

The good news is that Torment: Tides of Numenera is a better game. The bad news is that it’s nowhere near the scope, range or ambition of Planescape. I wish someone would do an ill-conceived experiment where they took the Planescape story and implemented it in the Numenera system. That’s the game I want to play. Nonetheless, Numenera has an interesting skill mechanic, a strong focus on dialog and conversation, and a satisfying levelling curve. It has some nice set-piece elements and a good, if limited, equipment-based buff system. Satisfying, if not anything exceptional.

Where it falls down though is in the story, and that’s a shame because it’s clearly not from a lack of talent. The first area of the game is great – it’s full of implication and mystery as you try to work your way through a city built on the graveyard of an ancient civilization. Ancient technological devices are everywhere, and you yourself are a character of great intrigue. You’re a ‘castoff’ – a temporary skin worn by ‘the Changing God’ before he grew tired and threw you off in favour of something new. You can see the Planescape influences everywhere and to begin with the game is full of promise.

It comes dramatically off the rails as it goes on though, because the first chapter is luxurious and languid, with so much to do and see. It’s pretty linear but it doesn’t feel linear because you’re so immersed in side-quests and the like. But the pace of the game resembles that I recognise from giving a lecture to an unfamiliar time-limit. It starts off fine and you spend a lot of time going down little rabbit-holes of rhetoric. Then you look at the time and realise you’re 33% way through the lecture and 50% of your time is gone. So you speed up. You start focusing only on that which is core. You skip whole slides. The last few slides are delivered in a confusing blur and yet you’re still ten minutes late to let people leave for the lunch that is occupying every cycle of their attention.

I mean, I’ve never done that.

But that’s how Torment feels. It feels incredibly rushed to the point that the finale is a largely baffling piece of random nonsense. And while I was told again and again that the game lasts anything from twenty to thirty hours, I was surprised to find myself at the final conflict within twelve. And it’s not like I skipped all the dialog. Just the bits where you say ‘Excuse me, where can I find the toilets’ and get a mini-novella detailing the interesting history of lavatorial innovations over the past three centuries. That’s great for those that are interested, but I just need to deal with this immense pressure in my bladder and that’s really my key focus here.

There is just so much text forced into everything and so little of it is necessary. Some of it is very good and interesting. Lots of it though is because someone was clearly being paid by the word-count to write largely undirected ‘backstory’. It puts you in the position of feeling like you’re supposed to read everything because someone took the opportunity to shove their multi-cycle fan-novel into the conversation system. As almost nobody ever says – ‘there’s nothing I like better than reading a good game’. If you’re going down that route, you better be Disco Elysium or equivalent.

Torment is not a bad game, and if you own it already it’s worth playing. It’s just not really worth going out of your way for if you don’t have it languishing in your collection already.

Vampire Survivors

Yeah, I played this. I played it a lot. Every so often I load it up again and play it a lot more. This a ridiculous amount of entertainment for such a reasonable price. I played it for 7 hours, beat all the stages and the bosses. Thought ‘That’s it’. Then I played it for another forty hours – to the point that I got 100% of the achievements, and I never do that. At last check I have 185 hours logged.

It’s a great example of game that excels without a major budget backing it. The core loop is the kind of thing any diligent game student could knock up in a weekend. But they didn’t, and the developer of this did. It’s great.

The basic pitch is this – imagine a bullet hell shooter, except you’re the bullet and you’re the hell. You wander around a map, building a loadout suitable for the challenges ahead. As you level up your weapons and accessories you become increasingly powerful until you are literally filling the screen with your ordinance. You’re a walking blue screen of death. An epilepsy inducing strobe effect of murderous ruination. Enemies melt away, each delivering unto you a bounty of experience you can invest to become even more genocidally effective.

It’s very simple, but on top of this they’ve added several intermeshing systems of unlocks that work together to create an especially moreish flavour of digital crack. You get new weapons as you go on, you learn new combinations for ‘evolved’ weapons through experimentation. You find magic spells that unlock . You unlock with achievements. You unlock through secrets. There’s a lot to find in here.

It’s the core game loop you play this for though, and it is absolutely great. Thoroughly unimaginably simple but the fun comes from experimenting with impossibly tough level modifiers and ever more esoteric loadouts. My favourite loadout involves the use of a rotating bible that spins increasingly faster and faster with upgrades. Eventually it’s more like a buzzsaw than a tome of catechisms. Pair that with the garlic that damages any enemy that manages to get pass them and you have a combination that turns your proximity into something akin to the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark where everyone melts just by looking at you.

Seriously, a truly extraordinary ratio of cost to fun. 100% recommended.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York

Coteries of New York plays like a short visual novel, because that’s exactly what it is. It’s a shame it isn’t more though because it is beautifully written, powerfully atmospheric, and absolutely dripping with a laconic confidence in its own presentation. It’s still in the end though just a story without a game. Your decisions, by and large, are with regards to which subplot to follow during the limited time between your embrace as a vampire and the final conclusion of the finale. There’s a light element of balancing your need to feed versus retaining your humanity, but it’s really light. Things happen to you in Coteries of New York, you don’t happen to them. All you do is choose the order in which they occur.

And yet it’s weird to see a game like this feel more meaningful than, say, AI: The Somnium Files. You do more here than simply click through the narrative, even if you don’t do much more. Coteries of New York is an example of how powerful the illusion of choice is. Its branching design is clever in that a second play-through would almost certainly focus on different characters, different stories, and different ‘questlines’. Much like the idea of the Masquerade itself, it knows what’s important is how things are perceived as opposed to how they are. If you return to the story to investigate further there will be other things that draw your attention and so you’ll never truly examine just how thin that illusion was.

You spend most of your time, at least the first time through, like a new employee in a complicated business in an endeavour of which you’re only vaguely aware. People reference rules you haven’t encountered, people you don’t know, schedules that are not of your making. They expect you to make sensible, clever decisions because they don’t realise just how hopelessly at sea you are. Your first few nights as a vampire are mystifying, at least in how they’re framed, because in the end this is not a society that coheres together. It’s made up of divided loyalties, ancient feuds, and monolithic confederacies forged in antiquity… and you don’t know how any of them fit together. Or, importantly, when you’re violating some intensely important obscurity of etiquette that will cause you, or your sire, political problems. Sure, the story won’t let you colour outside the guide-lines, but it makes you feel like you could if you weren’t careful. It wields your ignorance against you like a scalpel.

Maybe that’s not true of everyone but I don’t know much about the setting, it has to be said. This was a tempting enough taste to make me think I should probably investigate more. Its RPG roots are such that I know it’s a system I would enjoy playing within if I had the time and people to make it so.

I got Coteries of New York as part of a Humble Choice bundle so I didn’t have to pay the £14 it costs. If I had, I would have probably felt cheated – while I only explored maybe half of the game’s content, I did that in a brisk three hours. It’s a very tightly written, evocative story… but really if I’m going for that I would probably rather pick up a novel. The thing about branching narratives is that if you want to go back and explore the path not taken, it basically invalidates the meaning of any decision you did make. You no longer weigh up right versus wrong or risk versus reward. You weigh up ‘new’ versus ‘old’. I find this approach to storytelling in general leaves me cold. And a little angsty in my existentials. It’s cosmic absurdity in narrative form – that nothing we do matters so all we can do is find meaning in the preposterous. A story like this, I tend to feel, shouldn’t be written in a way that keeps underlining the fact it expects you to come back and repeat the process. Some stories should only be told once. Especially stories that are told in blood.

Waking Mars

Waking Mars is genuinely a fascinating game – not fun, but unlike almost anything else I’ve played before. The short pitch is that it’s a game of terraforming – or actually, of reinvigorating an ecosystem that predates your arrival. You turn the barren, desolate soil of Mars into something living and vibrant, and in the process create your complex and interlocking environment. It genuinely is an absorbing, innovative approach. It’s like a puzzle game crossed with an engine builder that arrives at your screen via a detour through Lucasarts’ The Dig.

What’s most interesting about it though is that it’s a game about creation, rather than destroying. Various parts of the world are locked away from you behind gates of biodiversity – you can only progress when your world is vibrant enough to unlock its promise. It’s more than just planting seeds in the obvious places – it’s about creating relationships between synergistic systems. You cause acid to drop onto poisonous grass, to fertilise it for the plants that spit the organic matter that you can then ferry to darker soil. It’s a game about gardening, without feeling like it’s anything less than a game about being a scientist.

However, despite being interesting it’s not actually all that much fun once you get over that first – admittedly absorbing – gimmick. There’s a lot of backtracking to load up on seeds with necessary special powers and I never really felt that was particularly enjoyable or challenging. The premise – excellent. The mechanisms – innovative and worth your time. The actual game in which they are embedded? Something perhaps best enjoyed for a few glorious hours and then abandoned.

Walking Dead: A New Frontier

This is an oddly pitched game for the third in a franchise like this. My relationship with Clementine through the previous titles has strongly influenced how I react to her as a character, and then I’m put in the shoes of Some Dude who has no connection to her or the story that came before. You see Clementine here as an NPC that just happened to appear in your life.

So how am I supposed to respond? As me, who doesn’t care about the rando family he suddenly has to look after? Or as the character, who has no reason to side with a strange fourteen-year old girl about anything? It’s an odd and I think unsuccessful direction to take the series. It could have been amazing though if the Clementine you encounter was meaningfully shaped by her experiences with you piloting her through the first two games. She’s not though. She’s a fixed plot device, with your choices in S2 doing little more than changing a few cutscenes. But imagine if the Clementine you met was kind if you’d been kind with her, and ruthless if you’d been ruthless with her. If she forgave because she was shown forgiveness, or killed because you’d showed her the efficiency of murder. That would have been so powerfully effective that it might have sent me back through the first two games in the hope I could do better by her. Her trajectory though is fixed, and it feels like an abandonment of your role in her development. Given that these are games about relationships, that’s a brave, if foolish, design choice.

Otherwise it’s – more The Walking Dead with less meat and some regressive design decisions. An example:

No spoilers, but there’s a portion of the game where you can continue an argument or back down. Given I thought the aggressor was a bit of a dick, I opted for continuing it only to have my character reveal incredibly damaging information about someone else, given to him in confidence. That’s such a poor way to handle dialog in a game that it almost made me quit right there. Maybe that’s my hang-up – I consider personal confidences to be inviolable. But man, making me implicate someone else because I chose to continue an argument, with no hint that would happen? That’s bad game design and bad writing. It didn’t even make sense as an escalation of an argument.

The whole game is riddled with things like that – narrative induced cowardice, indelicacy, judgement or selfishness. I’m not saying I always wanted to play the knight-errant but it would have been good if I had the choice and I felt like my wishes were being honoured. There’s a bit where I picked an option that seemed the only one to spare the embarrassment of someone else and then, yep, I go and blurt out the truth against my will.

I’ve made the point elsewhere that video games, structurally, can only offer a utilitarian view on morality – that you are judged by actions and not intentions. That’s fine – it’s not the philosophy to which I ascribe but I can make my peace with its limitations within a game. The problem here, and it’s not unique to the Walking Dead, is that it becomes worse when you are judged on actions that come with an explanatory commentary that’s at odds with your own way of viewing the game and your choices. It’s a common theme. At one point in a flashback you talk to your brother about a big decision he wants to make. I chose one option which I believed was supportive but the way it came out was judgemental and confrontational. If it seemed that was an intentional gameplay system I might even like this – it’s a great way of simulating how meaning is collaborative and that what sounds great in our heads doesn’t necessarily come out that way. It’s not how it works here though. It’s just – frustrating. It just feels like you’re vaguely steering someone rather than driving them.

As a branching game system, it tries to get you to feel things mainly through passive aggression. The game has a heavy reliance on saying ‘We’ll never know now’ when you justify your decisions, and man that becomes incredibly annoying as time goes on. You’re right, we’ll never know. That’s what life is – a series of decisions where you never get to know if any of them were optimal, or even right. It’s not insightful to say that. It’s like a tic in the storytelling that, by attempting to ramp up the self-reflection, only imbues everything with a kind of hopeless fatalism. ‘You don’t know that’s what would happen’ has, as the other side of its coin, ‘You don’t know that’s what wouldn’t happen’. It’s a kind of hail-mary pass of consequence and it really doesn’t succeed because of its own half-heartedness.

Narratively too it’s all over the place. I don’t think this is a spoiler but I’ll rot13 it anyway just in case.

Gurer’f n cbvag va gur sbhegu rcvfbqr jurer lbh’er frg hc jvgu n zbeny qvyrzzn gung vf ybtvpnyyl naq fgehpghenyyl vapburerag. Rffragvnyyl lbh jnag vasbezngvba sebz K, naq gur bayl jnl gb trg vg vf gb xvyy gurz. Rkprcg, vg’f ernyyl abg. Guvf vfa’g jung lbh raq hc jvgu nsgre rkunhfgvat nyy lbhe bcgvbaf naq raqvat hc ng gur svany punapr. Guvf vf jung lbh ner bssrerq nsgre qbvat gur rdhvinyrag bs unys-urnegrqyl ybbxvat va n qenjre. Gung’f abg n zbeny qrpvfvba. Gung’f n cflpubcngu grfg. Gurer ner n tbbq srj bs gurfr xvaq bs hapbaivapvat pubvprf chg va sebag bs lbh. Vg qbrfa’g srry yvxr gurl jrer ernyyl oevatvat gurve N grnz gb gur qrfvta urer, pregnvayl jura lbh pbzcner vg gb jung unf pbzr orsber. Va gur frpbaq frnfba bs gur GJQ gurer jrer fbzr pubvprf V ntbavfrq bire orpnhfr Xraal jnf jvgu zr nyy gur jnl guebhtu gur svefg frnfba naq gung chg n pbzcyrkvba ba pregnva qrpvfvbaf gung unq n cbjreshy uvfgbevpny pbzcbarag. Gurer’f ab ntbal urer. Whfg, ‘juvpu bs gurfr nffubyrf qb V qvfyvxr gur yrnfg’, be ‘Juvpu bcgvba frrzf gb trg zr zber gvzr jvgu Pyrz?’

Anyway, it all just emphasizes just how good the first season of The Walking Dead game was. It’s the only game I’ve ever played where I wouldn’t take the ‘Abandon the kid in the woods to be eaten by wolves’ option. The affection I developed for Clementine is the only thing that has carried me through this game. It survives only because of her presence. And it’s not terrible on that basis. It was worth me playing through to the end to see this perspective on her story. The New Frontier is just much, much less than it could have been.

Walking Dead: The Final Season

I rolled pretty much straight into this one from the previous one. Just, you know, for closure. It starts off well enough by putting me back in control of Clementine, albeit in a forced ‘full circle’ context where she takes on the role that Lee occupied in the first season. And then it instantly goes off the rails with a moral choice that, in the context of every single thing in the world and in the story, is utterly ludicrous. And I know it’s a kind of ‘training scenario’ but even so. I will spoil this one because it’s the very first one you encounter, but I’ll put it in rot13 as usual.

Lbhe pubvpr vf guvf – chfu n sevtugrarq yvggyr obl guebhtu n gvpxrg obbgu jvaqbj vagb n qnex ebbz cbgragvnyyl shyy bs jnyxref, be xvyy gjb gvrq hc jnyxref gung yrsg n abgr fnlvat ‘Jr’q engure or yrsg nybar vs lbh qba’g zvaq’ fb lbh pna trg gurve xrl. V zrna – jung? V jbhyq unir xvyyrq gurz jvgubhg na vapragvir whfg orpnhfr vg znxrf gur wbhearl bs gur arkg crefba gb pbzr nybat n yvggyr fnsre. Nyfb gurl pna’g nggenpg nggragvba zl jnl vs gurl pna’g zbna. Naq, V’yy erzvaq lbh, V unir yvgrenyyl xvyyrq uhaqerqf bs mbzovrf naq zber guna n srj crbcyr ng guvf fgntr va gur fgbel. Fb jung nz V fhccbfrq gb guvax bire urer orsber znxvat n qrpvfvba? Gur snpg gung n xvq jvyy frr zr qb vg? Gung xvq orggre or xvyyvat rirel mbzovr ur frrf vs ur jnagf gb fheivir ybatre guna gur nirentr Tnzr bs Guebarf punenpgre.

That said, the actual story and writing are a lot more involving than in New Frontier, and that’s undoubtedly because it’s a chance for Clem to begin making sense of the relationships she’s formed over the course of the four games. I felt myself becoming emotionally involved more in the first couple of hours than I did in almost the entirety of A New Frontier. This is my Clem, who I have raised in various virtual guises, confronting a future that is bleaker than any humanity has ever known. And she does it by thinking on those that protected her along the way (me again) and the lessons she learned as a result. It’s really compelling… if you’ve spent the time making the connection with her as a character. As a stand-alone game? Nah.

There are a lot of subtle refinements in the game itself. There’s actually a tactical element to combat now and that’s always been missing. I mean, it’s not great but it’s noticeable. The art style walks a tricky line between being consistent with what’s gone before and also being somewhat more stylistic and more mature. The themes are probably darker than anything previous, and that’s some accomplishment given what the games represent. There’s also some regression though in that it felt weirdly unresponsive at odd times – when button clicks didn’t register or stick movement wasn’t recognised. It gets frustrating because these action sequences have never been the series’ best qualities even when they work flawlessly, so being forced to repeat them through no fault of my own was unwelcome.

The game is also the latest data point in trend within these sort of storytelling adventures to create conflict through enforced foolishness. As time has gone by the choices you are given have become less nuanced and more weirdly unconvincing – but worse, increasingly you’re given nothing except linear railroads through bad decision making. When you the player can think of a dozen better ways to resolve an issue, and the game gives you the one that would have been number thirteen on your list, then it’s aggravating. It decouples your choices from the responsibility you feel about the outcome. And these games are all about feeling like you’re responsible for what happens.

I’m not talking here about time pressure events where you could realistically say that panic might make you behave irrationally. Instead these are intentional, considered acts that you can’t simply choose to ignore. I understand branches in a game are expensive to produce, but the solution to that isn’t ‘Force everyone to be a bad person so that it pushes the story along’. Or, ‘make a completely unworkable, bad plan into the only path through the game’. You know that bit in any movie where a character explains a plan and someone says ‘That’s crazy!’? That someone, in a game like this, absolutely shouldn’t be the player. ‘We’re going to do this by making a hard problem a bit easier, and we’ll do that by making all the simple problems incredibly hard in a way that you already know is going to feature heavily, with tragic and utterly predictable consequences, in the next hour of play’.

That in turn leads into the issue I had with the previous game, which is that gamifying big, sweeping moral questions is unsatisfying if I’m only permitted to express justification through a set of narrow and largely cartoonish lenses. It becomes a flattening of ‘It’s never okay to kill’ and ‘It’s always okay to kill’ and it doesn’t give room for the many different textures of real moral decision making. That’s always more complex than simple slogans can encapsulate. ‘It’s never okay to kill unless X except Y and in circumstances where Z’. I’m following a moral code when I decide to kill in TWD, and it doesn’t fit into a dialog option. I do resent the game characters for judging me by their own unsophisticated extremes and pollyannaish philosophies.. It’s too much like Twitter in that respect. But then, I don’t think many games have come close to getting ‘morality’ right. Papers Please, Spec Ops: The Line and to a lesser degree The Turing Test are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head that get close. TWD absolutely doesn’t.

The game also has some kind of emotional cheap shots where it tries to make you think back to the first game and whether Lee would be proud of what Clementine does. That’d be really effective, I guess, if I wasn’t Lee. Let me tell you Clementine – Lee is totally behind the choices you make in this game, because I’m also you. It’s such a weird tic in the narrative that I wonder if they just expect that people that got this far through the series didn’t play the first one. I guess it’s possible but I honestly don’t think S2 or S3 are strong enough to have kept me playing if I hadn’t been here from the start.

Overall though, having finished it, I’d place it second in the canon of the entire series, and that’s not something I expected from the start. I expected it to feel rushed, half-complete, and perfunctory – a full stop on a story brought to a close by financial ruin. It’s not though. It’s sharp, it’s sweet, and it’s satisfying. And I am going to miss you Clementine.

Warhammer 40000: Gladius

This is another odd one to mark as completed given that it’s a Civ-style 4X game. I did though spend about twelve hours with it, played several games through to the end, and passably enjoyed about half an hour in total. I think I’ve earned the notch on my controller.

It’s such an unfortunate game because it has the potential to be absolutely great. 4X WH40K? Yes please. An endless battle of Space Marines versus Orks versus Necrons versus Astra Militarum? Don‘t mind if I doodle. A tech tree that unlocks progressively impressive war machines? Absolutely. Conquering, claiming and defending rare resources that you need to engage in the total war within you find yourself? Oh my.

This is a very seductive song that you are singing.

The problem is – it’s all… well, rubbish. It’s just not fun to play. There are a lot of well chosen ingredients, but they’ve been mixed so inelegantly and in such baffling proportions that the whole thing collapses on itself like a poorly made cake.

Combat, for example, is a feast or famine proposition. You might get absolutely bodied by a single shot from a single enemy, or you might spend six turns pounding away at them to little or no effect – especially if they have any kind of healing. Even random wildlife on the planet can completely destroy a trained Space Marine squadron. You need to inch around the landscape in mass formations, and there are no tools to handle that cleanly. I found my first… I don’t know, six or so games, mostly resulted in me being completely torn apart by enemy forces that far outstripped my ability to even withstand an assault. Mostly because I’d had to spend so long fighting off scorpions and laser wielding faeries that I was treading water. By the time my enemy found me, I was too militarily compromised to put up any fight at all.

I thought the game was unfairly, incredibly difficult even at its lowest difficulty levels and nobody on the Internet agreed with me. It was weird.

And then I found out why – there is only one remotely effective strategy in Gladius and it is ‘Pump out military units to the exclusion of all other activities’. Every single other thing the game seems to offer in terms of interlocking mechanisms is a god-damn mirage. The production of resources, the positioning of buildings, the claiming of rare goods, the managing of civil infrastructure – you only need to worry about any of it insofar as your income is greater than your outgoings. At that point you can forget about it completely.

When you’ve got enough energy, influence and requisition points it all becomes a trivial exercise of military micromanagement. To be fair, it captures the ethos of the setting perfectly. It is the flawless expression of the Imperium’s philosophy – there’s no point wasting effort learning how to solve a problem intelligently when you can just keep throwing millions of people at it until their blood greases the wheels. You are not rewarded for sound strategy or deployment in Gladius. You’re rewarded for sheer mass of numbers, and that reward is just ‘you get to keep playing’. My eventual victory over the Orks and the Necrons came with no catharsis. Just relief it was over.

It turns out then Gladius is lying to you. It’s not a 4X game. It’s a 1X game with 3 withered and largely vestigial Xs that don’t really work. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only eXterminate. It’s an empty experience.

But that’s such a shame because this is a concept that’s just crying out to be done well. We already have dozens of WH40K games that are all about military dominance. It makes sense, thematically, that it should be the dominant focus of the franchise. But it’s not all the franchise has to offer. All Gladius provides over a more honest and transparent game like Dawn of War is the pacing. The core of the experience – the hollow emptiness of endless, thoughtless destruction – is identical.

Give me a real 4X game where I have to wrestle an ossified Adeptus Administratum to enact policy across a domain so mind-bogglingly large that simply getting a memo through can take centuries. Give me hive cities filled with trillions of people, so riven through with corruption and poverty that all they can give me is flesh and trouble in abundance. Give me a fanatically fascistic religion that interrogates all my actions for heresy and then randomly destroys planets because someone found a weird mole on their arm. Give me all of that to contend with while also trying to keep the tattered fragments of humanity alive in the face of overwhelming, untenable corruption on all sides. Gladius is not that game, even if it does contain seedlings that suggest it could have been in more competent hands.

It’s not recommended.

Wasteland 3

Man, Wasteland 3 is an awesome game… to get as part of the monthly Game Pass subscription. If I had paid the £55 that Steam charges I would have been enraged to the point of a heart attack. It’s a good game – a worthy successor to Wasteland 2. An enjoyable romp through a world that is Fallout, but not really Fallout (because Fallout was Wasteland but not really Wasteland). But it’s not in a fit state for release – at least not with anything approaching a straight face.

The UI for one thing needs remodelled with a sledgehammer. It lacks some of the most basic quality of life improvements like being able to sort through your inventory and swap between team-mates without shooting them directly in the face. That’s not hyperbole. You will shoot, and incapacitate, your team-mates with distressing regularity.

The game is colossally buggy – quests that don’t complete, enemies that don’t die, dialog that doesn’t trigger, graphics that don’t update, and so on and so on. Many of these bugs are huge problems for the player. Occasionally they manifest as game-breaking exploits. There’s a perk that you get when playing that’s supposed to occasionally give you 50x the price of a piece of vendor trash you sell. Well, when it triggers it doesn’t trigger for that item, but for the whole stack of what you’re selling. I was disposing of about $5000 worth of junk at one point and ended up with $100,000 in my wallet. That’s the kind of money that makes everything affordable – and this is a game that is all about scarcity.

The worst problems though are performance related – the game suffers appalling slowdown at regular intervals. Slowdown so bad it actually impacts on the rest of your computer – slowdown so bad that it can bring down even a well specified PC like mine. Everything, from Wasteland 3 to whatever video file you might have on in the background, starts to move like your entire view on reality has been rendered down to 10 frames per second. The only way to fix it, as best I can tell, is by restarting the game. And this is a game that has astonishingly poor load times and absolutely reprehensible level design that requires constant loading. I don’t understand how a game with levels this small, with graphics this mediocre, can make me wait sixty seconds to load just so I can walk through it to the next loading screen.

Awful, right?

Well, yeah. But I did persevere with it through forty hours (I think) of mostly very enjoyable tactical role playing. I say ‘I think’ because game pass, for reasons that escape any kind of sensible comprehension, has no way of tracking how long you’ve spent in a game. At least, it doesn’t on PC. No idea about other platforms.

I’ve complained a lot about Wasteland 3’s problems, so let’s talk about some of its strengths. The story is actually very good, with some real consequential design in the quest system. There aren’t a lot of factions to keep happy but the decisions you make will have ramifications – significant ones – later on. Significant enough, for example, for you to lose some of your best party members thanks to their divided loyalties. Significant enough that you might end up having to kill them. I’m a little bitter about that because one character that had been merrily going along with my plans decided, at the last minute, to abandon my group and take an expensive set of power armour with him. What a dick. And when I hunted him down and killed him… I didn’t get to take my armour back.

The writing that underlines the story too is high quality – vintage Wasteland zaniness but kept mostly in-check by the seriousness of what’s going on. Make no mistake, this is a dark trek through the nastier kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland and it’s one where the realpolitik of survival makes your decisions a lot tougher than you might think. You might not believe ‘choosing to spare a violently psychopathic torturer’ might be a compelling option, but it will be. You might not believe that you’ll want to side with a slaver whose only goal is to get back to people trafficking, but there are reasons you might go down that route. It’s all good, tightly interwoven stuff and it’s enjoyable to explore.

The incidental music is… fine. But when you get to the big set-piece battles you get treated to some souped up renditions of old-timey American songs of patriotism and it is awesome. Here’s an example of one:

Wasteland 3 – America the Beautiful (Gipper Battle Version)

And here’s another:

Wasteland 3 – Down In The Valley To Pray (Includes Lyrics)

That latter one I have only heard Alison Krauss sing and I wouldn’t have believed a song of simple spiritual purity could sound so god-damn menacing.

Down To The River To Pray – Alison Krauss

The songs themselves might not be extraordinary but when you experience them in context, impeccably timed to the climax of an encounter, it fair sends chills down your spine.

The actual gameplay too, which is kind of an XCOM-lite tactical battle game, is full of subtlety. There are a lot of interconnecting statuses and effects. While it does make the game a little tedious in the micromanagement of health and remedies, it also gives you a lot of scope for experimentation. One thing I would recommend to anyone thinking of giving the game a try is that you definitely want a couple of melee characters, if only to save yourself on ammunition.

Ah yes, ammunition. As I mentioned above this is a dark take on the post-apocalypse, and it’s also something of a cynical commentary on the modern gig economy. A lot of the time you end up being paid in bullets for your work, and never in the quantities you expended in order to get them. It’s a bit like being an Uber driver and never making enough money to pay for your petrol. That forces you to experiment, to diversify character skill sets, and to explore the different loadout options available. And it works really well in that respect, encouraging you to weigh up the convenience of gunplay versus the cost in ordinance. Sometimes you make nice with someone unpleasant simply because you don’t have any shotgun shells left. You really feel the scarcity of the setting – until that overpayment bug kicks in and you find yourself rich enough to be able to buy out every vendor’s supply. Sure, you don’t have to do that but the bug triggers so often that you can’t really avoid it if you have the perk.

You could say ‘Well, I’ll avoid the perk’ but one of the game’s real structural weaknesses is that levelling lacks much in the way of options. I’d regularly have characters stockpiling perk points for winter simply because there was nothing worth getting them. Perks are locked to character skill levels, but those skill levels work for several things. You don’t specialise in submachine guns versus assault rifles – one skill works for both. But, the perks never apply to both. If you’ve got an assault rifle build, a good half of the perks in your skill-tree will only apply to the SMGs you never use. So when you find a perk that actually gives you something, you take it because otherwise you’ll have nothing. It’s a bit of a shame.

If you have Game Pass, definitely check it out. If you have £55 burning a hole in your pocket, spend it on something else right now. The technical problems that plague the game make it a very poor investment of money, even if it’s a pretty good investment of your time

A recommended game, even if it’s not a recommended purchase.

Watch Dogs 2

Buy on Humble

Weirdly this is canonically set in the same universe as Assassin’s Creed, so I guess this is my fifth AC game in a row.

Watch Dogs 2 pitches itself as a kind of fun, counter-cultural open-world sandbox game of hacking. Really it’s a horror story about the Internet of Thing. II honestly think it could have really doubled down on that to make an astounding game. As it is, it’s definitely fun and frantic. It’s like a GTA with a social conscience – not quite as po-faced as the mainline GTA franchise and not as self-consciously zany as the Saints Row games.

It did though put an enormous amount of ‘social media’ pressure on me in a way that made me feel genuinely a little overwhelmed – that I had so many fake online pressures that they started to impact negatively on my enjoyment. It’s like having a small taste of ADHD mainlined into your brain.

There are lots of real world references hidden behind a coded facade, but much like with GTA it feels a little cowardly in how it presents them – like it’s dealing in implication rather than satire or social commentary.

Structurally it suffers from bad checkpointing and I’m not a fan of the way that it occasionally forces you into violent confrontation as the optimal path. I’d much prefer stunning be the only way combat works, because it is hugely tonally inconsistent to shoot someone in the head and then make jokes with your buddies on the chat channels. Suffers from feeling like it doesn’t really give you enough tools in your toolkit other than shooty gun and sneaky. Lots of missions where the key gameplay mechanic seems to be ‘Wait for a while and try not to be found’. Assault rifles – the low tech solution to high tech problems’. A point and click adventure game where every puzzle is solved the same way.

Levelling is a bit of a bummer – none of your choices are exciting and much of it is locked behind optional challenges. Later on the puzzles become ‘use police on man’, which is somewhat fitting in this day and age. And then ‘use gang on man’. Never quite lives up to its promise as a Hack ‘Em Up – shooting and stealthing are too deep in its DNA and it should be willing to shake them out. The result is a mix that doesn’t quite work.

I love the little voyeuristic touches you get by hacking into conversations and text messages, but they didn’t put in enough of them in for a game of this length. Aside from that story wise it’s pretty weak. The characters are unbearable, pretentiously hip. And weirdly morally inconsistent. I get it’s trying to be a commentary on modern social networks, but it really doesn’t work well. A few weeks later and I don’t even remember what the plot was.

A perfectly okay game to pick up for less than £5, which is what I did.

Wings: Remastered Edition

Wings is one of my favourite ever games, sitting at #7 in my top 100 even these many years since I used to obsess about it on the Amiga. When they announced a remaster on Kickstarter back in, I think, 2012 – well, I was in. And I took delivery of the installer a couple of years later and never got around to playing it. Well, the makers went bust and various HDD crises later meant I thought I had lost the installer and thus my chance to revisit the game. But lo and behold, it was in a random directory on a random drive. So I thought ‘Yes, now is my chance to revisit a genuine stone cold classic’. It’s also available on Steam, I guess, but I was less interested in paying for it twice.

Wings was an arcade ‘simulation’ of life as a fighter pilot in World War I, but what really made it exceptional was its peerless atmosphere. It was from Cinemaware, and it made an effort to genuinely be cinematic. There was a story threaded through via the flight journal your character was keeping, and all these wonderful little moments where the fights you had got contextualised with drama and tension. I was really keen to try it out again.

Alas.

This is a woeful remaster. Sure, the graphics look fine and the narration is probably okay (I muted it pretty much instantly) but it has lost so much of what made Wings… well, Wings. The AI is truly horrendous. Your flight wing can’t shoot for shit, which is just as well because the enemy won’t do anything much to avoid being shot down. The pathing that the planes use is beyond frustrating, with enemy planes simply ramming into you rather than making an effort to shoot you down. I don’t know what proportion of air deaths in World War I were due to collisions but if I extrapolate from my own experience… all but one of them.

It’s a shambles, really. In the original the cinematic cards that say things like ‘We caught the Hun napping, two triplanes beneath us had no idea of our presence!’ would mean something in game terms. You’d be above the enemy. There would be two triplanes. They wouldn’t be expecting you. Or maybe you’d be told ‘You find yourself in the sights of an ambush as planes fall from the clouds behind you’. And guess what! You’d start the game under the gun as planes behind you tried to shoot you down. It was all really evocative and lent every aerial battle its own unique profile. It felt like playing through an action movie where every new mission came with a sense of real peril and occasional unexpected triumph. It felt, in other words, like a classic action movie of the silver screen.

Not so in the remaster. Every battle begins the same, regardless of what the cinematic card says. And more than that, there’s often no resemblance between the outlined text and what happens. ‘We came upon two unescorted balloons’, the card might say. And yet when you begin the game there are a dozen defenders. It’s weird and the fact every fight begins with you slowly flying towards an enemy flying towards you… it’s boring. As if the complete lack of challenge (other than avoiding being rammed) wasn’t enough. It’s like aerial dogfighting on an assembly line. ‘Plane comes. Shoot. Blow it up. Next plane. Shoot. Blow it up’.

Ye-gods this whole remaster is criminally disappointing. The original isn’t. The original was exciting. This joyless husk of a thing on the other hand is tedious beyond my ability to express it.

And it’s also buggy as hell, with every reprimand I received in the entire war being down to the fact a mission failed to correct register I had been successful. Enemy hitboxes are badly aligned, and some hitboxes don’t work at all. That makes certain strafing missions genuinely impossible, which adds nothing but frustration to the experience.

What a sad little monster of a thing. I do not recommend. I’d even say ‘learn how to use an Amiga emulator’ rather than pointing you this way.

World Ends With You, The

I first played (and completed) The World Ends With You (TWENY) in around 2008 on a Nintendo DS. I would have been… thirty. Young enough to still be open minded about JRPGs, because I can’t imagine any other reason I would have played it. Everything about it is like Michael Kryptonite. Vaguely anorexic, half-dressed schoolchildren. Check. An overwrought, ultra-emo protagonist. Check. A game where your ability to navigate fashion trends is an impactful game system. Double check. Nothing about it, save for the banging soundtrack, really appealed then and to be honest it doesn’t really appeal now.

And yet I have now completed this game twice.

There’s something about it that just… works. It’s not the writing, which is dreadful. It could be the art-style if you can look past the fact everyone seems to have styled their hair with a mop and a bucket of Dulux paint. It could be the battle system, which bucks trends by being real-time and based on gestural interaction. It could be a lot of things, but I can’t pin it down to any in particular.

The battle system is probably the most significant thing about the game – on the DS it was a mind-blowing puzzle of working across two separate screens with a stylus. On the Switch it is a genuinely frustrating touch-screen experience that left me physically pained at times. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had chronic shoulder pain for decades, and playing TWENY at times felt like I was shaving literal years off of the functional lifespan of my muscles. It’s a frantic mess of swipes, taps, scrapes and scratches. You get to configure a load-out of special psychic powers that are all triggered in particular ways, and then you use them to destroy the Noise that plagues the city. The problem there is that it is so imprecise on the Switch. The stylus of the DS had the benefit of being a high-fidelity mapping of intention to outcome, and even then it was a flip of the coin whether psychs would trigger when they were supposed to. With the Switch you may as well just flail at the screen like an angry monkey for all the control it gives you over the battles.

And yet, I have now completed this game. Twice.

Perhaps it’s how well paced the various game chapters are. There are about 21 of them and they can be completed in anything from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. Or more, if you want to take in the sights of Shibuya. So it’s an easy fit for the Switch (and the DS) because you can pick it up in a few idle minutes and make real progress. Sure, none of those minutes are particularly great fun but they do slot neatly into your day.

The thing I can be more positive about is the game’s story. Not its writing, which is like it was lifted out of the diary of an especially mopey twelve year old. But the story itself – about a mystical occult game where the recently deceased can have one final chance at restoration before they are erased from existence. The mythology they weave around that is pretty effective, and some of the characters you encounter along the way (particularly the more interesting Reapers – essentially the antagonists) are fun and interesting even if they are also infuriatingly disaffected and hipsterish.

I don’t know. I didn’t really enjoy it much. And yet, I have now completed this game. Twice.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

It’s clear going right into the sequel just how much of an improvement it is in every possible way. The mechanics are more satisfying and the character upgrades are more impactful. Importantly for my style of play, the expanded customisation options mean that not only can you name soldiers after your friends… you can even make them look a bit like them! Add to that the propaganda centre that lets you make inspirational posters of your escapades and it’s nigh on ideal.

But really it’s the War of the Chosen expansion that elevates the sequel to something approaching perfection, even with its performance bugs. XCOM, like many of my favourite games, employs the ‘five fires, four buckets’ model. What War of the Chosen does is carve a hole in the bottom of two of those buckets and then starts new fires every time things feel like they’re getting too manageable. If it wasn’t for the fact that defeating the Chosen gives you such ridiculously overpowered rewards it would make the game nigh on impossible. Instead what it does is add ridiculous tension to the first half of the game before releasing it in a manner akin to sexual relief. It’s an astonishingly good sequel.

The last time I completed it it placed a deep hunger in my gut for XCOM 3. However, having seen Chimera Squad and the ‘Saturday Morning Cartoon’ approach they took to the premise… maybe I should make my peace with the fact that XCOM has gotten as good as it’s ever going to get.

You often find this deeply discounted because of its age – if you get a chance, I cannot possibly recommend it your way strongly enough. All I ask in return is you name a character after me and tell me how he died.

XCOM: Enemy Within

Given that I’m not on a ‘complete a game a week’ challenge in 2021, and given that my backlog got comprehensively pared down in 2020… I thought I’d return to one of my GOAT favourites. But before I did that, I decided to try its progenitor. The last time I played XCOM 2 was a few years ago, which meant I’d forgotten pretty much all the Quality of Life Improvements it made over XCOM 1. Most of them, anyway.

When I start an XCOM playthrough, one of the things I always do is rename my characters after people I know in real life, and then I tag them into their adventures on Facebook. I play Iron Man mode, so it’s usually a bloodbath. It wasn’t this time though – sure, we had a few deaths but not as many as I expected. You can tell that by a vaguely disappointed early-campaign update:

So far, no deaths although you’ve all taken a hell of a beating. Sgt. Pauline ‘Demon’ Belford is becoming a crack sniper with 6 kills to her name. Sgt. Palle ‘Boom Boom’ Dahlstedt has ten kills but a lot of that is down to his rocket launcher. Sgt Bryony ‘Whiskey’ King has already saved more lives than the introduction of the seatbelt. Cpl Staffan Bjork is gravely wounded in the hospital after being invaded by a shocking number of alien tentacle monsters, and we hope he makes a full recovery.

And a couple of days later:

So, this has been less murdery than I expected. Not a single death yet even on iron man. Everyone is just annoyingly competent. I will say though that you all spend more time in hospitals than a staph infection.

Bryony King- ‘Whiskey’ – a dead eye shot and my best medic. A colonel now so really if she dies, taking with her the super med-kits she has, that’s us all completely screwed.

Palle Dahlstedt- ‘Boom Boom’. A major who would have been a colonel if he hadn’t spent, cumulatively, six hundred years being grievously wounded.

Pauline Helen Belford- ‘Demon’. A major now, and my best sniper. Can shoot a coin out of your hand, except I wish she’d stop doing that and would shoot more aliens.

Staffan Björk- ‘Atlas’ – is now a great medic who has specced deep into smoke grenades. He can’t shoot for shit though, even though he’s a Major.

Nithya Thevadasan – ‘Pitbull’ – is genuinely terrifying with her laser shotgun and specializes in crowd control. Which is to say ‘Controlling the crowd by turning them into atoms’. Captain on the fast track to major.

John Isaacs – ‘Loki’ – A damn fine sniper except that I specced him away from the ‘can shoot after moving’ ability. So most of the time he sits where he is until someone points an enemy his way. Lazy. Excellent candidate for becoming a Major.

Mafalda Samuelsson-Gamboa- ‘Cairo’ – will fire a rocket at every wall she sees just in case there are aliens inside the building. Not so much a soldier as a pinyata addict looking for a fix. Just a lieutenant for now.

Lisa Maynard- ‘Pixie’ – Has come closest to dying each time because, for some reason, she is almost always the first one to find aliens in a map. Spends most of her life precariously on a single point of health. Also a lieutenant.

Nick Howe- ‘Bonus’. Spends most of his time fiddling with alien boxes. Title of his sex tape. A lowly sergeant.

Michele Ong hasn’t had enough experience to get a nickname, but she has reached the rank of corporal which means that she’s officially ‘on the squad’ but also so junior that she has to make the tea for everyone.

I was expecting a more vigorous turnover in XCOM Incorporated so that more of the people on my benches would see some action. Not so far though. The good news for them though is that they’re next up if someone dies, at which point they’ll be so under-leveled for the encounters that they’ll die instantly.

That didn’t pertain to the whole game though:

Bad news for Major Lisa Maynard. Pixie bought it in an assault on an incredibly dangerous alien base. She was beaten into something approximating jam by a massive berserker. The good news is – she actually survived. If we’d had even one bandaid left she would have lived. We didn’t, so we had to just watch her bleed out on the floor. Except we didn’t really, we just pressed on and assumed she died somewhere behind us.

Sadly, the run ended in disaster as the terrible bugs that plague the game made themselves known. And it reminded me why Iron Man in XCOM is always best handled as a disciplined state of mind rather than a game-enforced single save file.

So! We stormed the final alien base and won! Sort of!

Or rather, the game bugged out and since I’m on Iron Man it means I only have one save file. But we did beat the final boss so let’s chalk it up as a win anyway.

Alas, it did not come without a cost.

About ten turns into the final mission, I sent Michele Ong in her grapple suit up into the rafters of the base. A perfect position for a skilled sniper. Alas though that’s not where the game sent her. The game sent her deep inside a wall on a broken part of the map. She clean teleported from a shooting position to the undercarriage of the ship. Not, I suspect, working as intended.

But that’s a big problem, because the final mission is challenging enough without losing a full sixth of my team. I can’t restart though – Iron Man. One save file, it’s all you get. So I think ‘I’ll push on. Maybe we can blow up the walls imprisoning her when we finally get there. If we get there’

So we push on, and it’s tough. I build my XCOM teams around snipers. They are the lynchpin of the way I approach the game. So going from two to one is a bigger deal than it seems.

But we make it. Bruised and battered but hey – at least I’ll have a completely fresh soldier when we can bust her out of the scenery.

But no! The walls around her weren’t destructible. And by this point, even if I could restart it wasn’t going to happen. So we left her, probably screaming in alien agony, melted into the weird alloys of the extraterrestial space-ship. Just put a couple of fingers against the wall and said ‘See you on the flip side, but please stop screaming because it’s putting us all off’

Facing the final encounter without one of my snipers was painful, but we managed it. Just. And then… the game bugs out. No more aliens. No more progress. I suspect Michele being stuck in the wall was what stopped it, at which point I decided ‘Nah, we won and that’s canon’

An unedifying end to the adventure, alas.

The thing I love about these games is exactly what I’ve shown above – the fact that they let you tell a story about your friends. Like dispatches from an alternate reality in which they’re all incredibly cool bad-asses. It was a shame that they never got the closure their heroism deserved.

Yakuza (zero, kiwami and kiwami 2)

I played three of the Yakuza games pretty much back to back. And that was probably a mistake because every single one is basically exactly the same game with at best half a lick of new paint. And I really enjoyed a lot of my time with these, except I couldn’t possibly tell you why.

For one thing – what is it with Japanese games and their weirdly regressive sense of sexuality? You spend a lot of time beating up like… a lot of guys in very exciting and interesting ways. And then you find yourself in a questline where you’re trying to stop a schoolgirl selling her worn panties to businessmen. You make your way through some of the most ludicrously intense cutscenes to then find yourself encouraged to watch softcore pornography of the girls you meet in the streets.

And here’s the thing – I don’t have a problem with this in a dark, gritty game. But if you’re going to go down this alleyway, commit to it. The half-heartedness with which the game approaches this kind of content feels like it was written by a bunch of tittering schoolboys. Add in as much prostitution and porn as you like, but keep your tone consistent otherwise it is eternally jarring. If the violence is hyper-realistic, so should the sex.

Weird objection, I know, but come on. The tiptoeing around the ‘erotic’ content is just embarrassing. You seamlessly segue from picking up a bike and beating up a bunch of toughs to having a conversation with a guy in his underwear, named ‘Walking Erection’, where he’s talking about the best girls to which he should jack off. Come on, man. I don’t want to be doing that. It’s not cheeky, it’s not thematic, and worse it’s not funny.

The games are basically three fifths hardcore Japanese mafia simulator full of angst and ‘MY BROTHER, I LOVE YOU AND MUST NOW KILL YOU’ speeches. It’s a sweeping epic of betrayal and violence wrapped up in a whole Game of Thrones style rotating villain structure. And the other two fifths are a schoolyard smut simulator. Imagine the same game that makes you talk to ‘The Walking Erection’ that also includes a story-line about a repentant Yakuza who uses the name of a former abuse victim to protect phone-sex workers from pimps and predators. It’s not that they can’t use the sexual content well. It’s just that, by and large, they don’t. It’s as goofy as hell, but attached to a serious, po-faced story.

And even beyond that, the games are weird as balls. Imagine a game where one of the martial arts styles you learn is ‘breakdancing’ and the game also has a comprehensive real-estate simulator built into it.

The tonal inconsistency though isn’t just in the mechanics and in the sex. It’s in the basic conception of the game. It’s like Kazuma (one of our main characters) joined the Yakuza without anyone actually telling him what they do. He seems to have forgotten ‘do crimes’ is a big part of his job. So you have this weird situation where you’re obviously a ‘good guy’ pirouetting from shocking beatings to protecting people from muggings. Don’t do that Kazuma – the guys you just beat up might well work for you. The result is weird angst. Kazuma seems to have gone to the same school for martial arts as Batman, as he refuses to kill people. You fight one dude like… five times. Each time I was thinking ‘Come on man, just kill him and free up your next few evenings’.

I just don’t get it. But maybe it’s my inner psycho speaking. I honestly think I could kill someone and not really think about it again. It’s only the threat of prison that stops me carving my way through long supermarket queues. I just don’t relate.

And then it’s basically the same thing again and again. Yakuza Zero is Yakuza Kiwami is Yakuza Kiwami 2. They all go on for too long and have more endings than Lord of the Goddamn Rings. And the story of each is as grim as a German arthouse movie even if the day to day experience of play is more like if Benny Hill made a movie about the mafia.

They’re good games. I liked playing them.

I don’t know why.

Oh also in one of the later games you abandon a dog you rescued. You just dump it on the street so ‘It can find its mommy’. And that ruined the whole series for me. Remember how I complained about the cat in Divinity: Original Sin 2? It’s like that.

STOP MAKING ME BE MEAN TO ANIMALS. I don’t want any sad puppies around me while I leather the hell out of these guys that accidentally bumped into me on their way to church.