DrBloodmoney's Super Scientific Ranking of Games!

[Breakingthegreen]

On 03/06/2023 at 9:37 AM, serrated-banner9 said:

Also, off topic, but have you ever heard of the youtuber The Stupendium?

he makes good songs based on video games and i'm going to use his song fro Evil Genius 2 because it's a fantasic songs based on a awesome game (Which you should play, i recommend it)

I love me so Stupendium, (worth noting that they recently came out as Non-binary so goes by "They") Here's my 3 favourites of their songs:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

38 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

3D Dot Game Heroes

 

I've heard legends of how difficult this game is, and you were just sitting on it?

 

I dispute your tag saying "bad at videogames," I have an inkling that you are actually "quite good."

[DrBloodmoney]

5 minutes ago, breakingthegreen said:

I've heard legends of how difficult this game is, and you were just sitting on it?

 

It’s mostly fine - there’s one minigame that is practically broken in how difficult it is - which got patched in the US version, but remained inexplicably unpatched on the EU one which did drive me nuts for a while though!

 

 

5 minutes ago, breakingthegreen said:

I dispute your tag saying "bad at videogames," I have an inkling that you are actually "quite good."

 

The whole quote is really “bad at videogames, good at patience”…

 

…I pretty much get through games via the Rocky Balboa school of thought…

 

…to paraphrase: “It ain’t about how well you play, it’s about how badly you can play and keep moving forward” ?

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Frys and Science-Leelas, as promised (and in some cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

3D Dot Game Heroes

 

Summary: 

 

A 2010, PS3 3D action-adventure RPG developed by Silicon Studio and published by FROM Software, 3D Dot Game Heroes is simultaneously a love letter to, and affectionate parody of, the early Legend of Zelda franchise.

 

The game absolutely wears its influences on its sleeve, however, unlike some of the "true" retro throwbacks to take inspiration from Zelda - and most specifically, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - (for example, the recently reviewed and ranked Airoheart,) 3D Dot Game Heroes doesn't simply ape that era whole-cloth. Instead, it imports all the gameplay elements of the game to which it owes its allegiance, takes its pixel-art aesthetic, and reinterprets that 2D pixel-art in stunningly strange 3D!

 

The visuals aren't usually where I generally start one of these reviews, but in the case of 3D Dot Game Heroes, I feel I almost have to, as the visual stylings of the game are both the most immediate and impactful element of the game, and the most unique, unusual and memorable ones. 

Essentially, the game uses polygonal blocks in a 3D world, to create 3D versions of "2D" sprites. It's a visual style not completely alien at this point - indeed, games like The Touryst, and to some extent, even Traveller's Tale's Lego games have used similar visual styles - but it's notable in the case of 3D Dot Game Heroes both in how unusual it was at the time, how well it manages to recreate - with surprising verisimilitude - the old 2D sprite-based worlds of A Link to the Past in 3D... and just how damned good it looks, and damned how well it works!

The "blocky" style might sound simple, and it is in some sense. It has the benefit of being able to very cleverly and effectively transpose 2D elements of the old games it evokes very well, while also feeling modern - but the ingenious part of that style is not simply the 3D implementation of 2D-style elements. It's also the ways modern technology is used over that to create pretty stunning effects. 

 

The camera is fairly close in on the world, and uses a sort of extreme-focus, "miniaturising" effect - it really feels like rather than simply looking at video game polygons, the player is looking at physical models, which have been constructed, and are animating before their eyes. Visual effects like lens flaring, glowing effects on sword swipes, oddly realistic looking water effects, and the fact that destroyed enemies explode apart into their own bouncing "pixels" are clearly of modern design really add to this too, and are implemented cleverly, but the developer is smart enough to know exactly where to use those effects, and where not to - to make them feel like magic happening on a physically built thing, rather than simple visual effects in a game.

It's a style that not only looks amazing - and really hasn't aged at all, despite the 13 years and two console generations that have come since the game released - but it also has significant benefits in terms of how Silicon Studio implement their elements of nostalgia.

Where a game like Airoheart, which uses the same visual style as A Link to the Past as well as harking back to its gameplay, has to constantly struggle to "once-remove" elements of that original game while still evoking them - working to find a balance between recreation and homage - 3D Dot Game Heroes doesn't really suffer that problem, simply because of its art style. Because it is rendered and styled in such an interesting way, the developer is afforded the opportunity to genuinely copy whole elements of A Link to the Past - to literally evoke them whole-cloth - safe in the knowledge that even elements that are, from a gameplay and design point of view, virtually identical - will still have their own unique flavour, simply  because of the way the game interprets them. 
A Hook shot, for example, doesn't need to be replaced with a "spell that is a hook-shot in all but name"... it can simply be a hook-shot, because the game is unique enough already, by its innate 3D-ness, to not feel like a carbon copy. The map in 3D Dot Game Heroes can afford to be a virtual carbon copy of A Link to the Past's map... because the nature of 3D Dot Game Heroes style will set it apart enough not to feel like development plagiarism.

Starting with the visuals, one might think this review is setting up for the other shoe to drop - I'm perfectly aware that usually when I start out talking about something like visuals or audio, it's because the gameplay is lacking. Luckily, here, that's not the case!

 

The gameplay in 3D Dot Game Heroes is pretty awesome throughout. 

The game absolutely is a recreation and throwback to SNES era action RPGs broadly - and A Link to the Past specifically - and it does that very well. A Link to the Past is an absolute powerhouse of a game - a best of all time contender for a lot of people, myself included! - and 3D Dot Game Heroes doesn't quite live up to that high bar... but few games ever could. I will say, of all the games I've played that attempt to throw back to that game though, and recapture it's magic, 3D Dot Game Heroes is both arguably the most successful, and certainly strikes the best balance between homage and individual personality.

 

The gameplay works in pretty much the exact same way that game did - there is an over world map to be explored, replete with secrets and treasures to find, and with a well crafted and well worked out metroidvania aspect based on collecting tools in dungeons, and those dungeons are broken down into rooms of combat and puzzles, with a final boss, just like in A Link to the Past. 
Those metroidvania elements and tools, the slow increase in health, the mix of little mini-games, villages, NPCs and enemies, the general gameplay loop - if you've played A Link to the Past, you know exactly what you're going to get here... (and if you haven't... well... who are you? Stop reading this and go play A Link to the Past!)

 

Where the game deviates is, primarily, in simple style. There are some other notable elements that are unique, however. 

 

Firstly, the tone.

While A Link to the Past (and most "A Link to the Past-likes") are family friendly, they are generally still fairly self-serious within their own universes. There is little in the way of winking at the audience. 3D Dot Game Heroes, on the other hand, is firmly comedic in nature, and while the game itself has the mechanical chops to take itself seriously if it wanted to, it doesn't. It is distinctly silly and knowing, and that tone really works. Whether it's in the main narrative, with the blocky characters being fascinated by the magical nature of curved edges (only the most rare and magical of items in the game are actual spheres,) or the little easter egg nods to other games (finding "sticky white stuff" for example, in a little Dark Souls joke,) or simply in the way the NPCs talk or engage with the player character, the game has a fun irreverence that really works with the visual style.

 

Secondly, there is one of the strangest gameplay divergences from A Link to the Past - the absurd sword the protagonist uses! 
Rather than getting a progressively more powerful weapon, instead, the character gets a progressively bigger sword... and boy, does it get big! The sword grows in length as the player moves through the game, and when coupled with one of the most curious mechanics - whereby the sword is huge when the player's health is full - it quickly gets to the point where, with one single swipe, the player can cut across the entire game screen in a single go!

 

On paper, this might feel like something that should break the game - and truth be told, it does somewhat in terms of simple mob enemies - but actually, it's a really smart idea. It essentially solves with mechanics, what is often a problem in these kind of games... that in the latter half, dealing with the "easy" mob enemies on the map while exploring or moving from A-to-B becomes simple busy-work - not a threat, but simply an annoyance. 
By having the character's sword end up extending to the point where an entire screen's worth of easy enemies can be dispatched immediately, providing the player is doing well, and is at full health, makes for a clever way to alleviate that issue. For more difficult areas such as later dungeons and bosses, they are well balanced enough to still provide challenge, even accounting for the giant, world-sweeping sword swings.

 

The bosses and enemies are actually quite varied and well done - and some of the more "puzzley" boss fights are cool and well implemented. They feel, if not directly lifted from 2D games, like they could absolutely work in a 2D game, and so even when there is no direct parallel from older games, they still feel of that era, in a strange way. The nostalgia is imbued into the fabric of the game to the extent that even when the element has no obvious corollary in the older games it is aping, they still feel broadly "of that era" anyways. That's a tough thing to nail, and 3D Dot Game Heroes nails it often, and squarely.

The audio in the game is pretty great too. While, again, the game is taking cues from A Link to the Past and doesn't quite hit that high bar, I'd say the music is the area where it comes the closest... both being a nostalgic throwback to those kind of scores, and being a great example of one in its own right. 
The music is upbeat and ear-worming in the extreme - and in some specific areas, even surpasses the Link to the Past score. The overall score doesn't out-do A Link to the Past, but it comes very close, which is a big compliment!

There's no voice work of course - all dialogue is via text only, but audio stings such as sword swipes and enemy deaths all work just fine... and some of the indicator stings, such as opening chests are just right for hitting those nostalgic tingles. 

It's probably worth also mentioning one particularly stand-out element of 3D Dot Game Heroes: the character creation tools. 
Because the characters, (and indeed, everything else in the game,) are made up using single, discrete cubes, ("3D pixels" as it were,) the developer has used the freedom that allows to implement an easy to use, and incredibly cool custom character creator. 

Essentially, the player is simply given a full 3D volume of a set length, breadth and height, and can place coloured blocks anywhere within that. The player can then build up a unique character that looks however they want, then create all the different poses from that, allowing them to make some really strange designs. 

If a player wants to recreate Link perfectly... they can. 
If they want to make Mario... they can. 
If they want a bizarre, epilepsy -inducing character who changes appearance multiple times with every step they take... hell, they can do that too!

 

In fact, the character creator is SO flexible, that if they want, they could make a character who is only a single "pixel"... though the developer does at least have some notion of limitation, in the sense that the "hit-box" for each character remains the same... you can't just make a fly with a sword, who can never be hit!

 

 

Overall, when it comes to interesting takes on nostalgia, and evocation of older games while not being burdened by their drawbacks in the modern era... 3D Dot Game Heroes is really the whole package.

It successfully balances paying homage, and loving parody of those older games, while also looking distinctly different.... and awesome! It sounds great, has a really infectiously charming style and sense of fun and whimsy, and featuring gameplay that draws in all the best elements of those older games, while adding to them with its own distinct flavour in a way that gels better than virtually any other game in that category that I can recall. 

The visuals are certainly the highlight here - but that's not to say the gameplay is lacking... far from it. It's simply that the visuals are so striking, that they will likely be the thing any player remembers the most - and for long after finishing the game. 
Luckily though, when they think a little longer, and recall the actual game experience... that will only bring fond memories too!

 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

There's not too many "Zelda-likes" on the current list - and indeed, not a huge number of "throwback" type games, so while games like Airoheart seem like the obvious starting point for ranking 3D Dot Game Heroes, they aren't really particularly helpful, as 3D Dot Game Heroes comfortably outranks them.

 

The "Zelda-Adjacent" element did stick in my head though, and so while I was looking to narrow down a spot for 3D Dot Game Heroes, the games that came to mind, despite not being particularly similar in style, were the Darksiders games. Those are, of course, taking cues from a much later era of Zelda, but we've got to start somewhere!

 

I do think, despite the high quality of the original Darksiders, and the even higher quality of Darksiders II, 3D Dot Game Heroes has to outrank both of them when the chips are down. The visuals of both those games are nice, but they can't hold a candle to the unique and gorgeous art-style of 3D Dot Game Heroes... and fundamentally, I think the gameplay, tone and audio package of 3D Dot Game Heroes does outdo both of them, when push comes to shove.

 

That puts 3D Dot Game Heroes in a pretty high point already, and looking up the list, I was trying to find games of the PS3 Era that were 3D, very good, and largely family friendly, that I was pretty sure would rank above it, to narrow the field and provide a ceiling. 

 

In the spots above, I think 3D Dot Game Heroes does manage to outdo Beyond Good and Evil HD - that game has a lot of great elements, but is dragged down my some real gameplay clunk in places that 3D Dot Game Heroes never really suffers from...
...but as great as 3D Dot Game Heroes is, I don't see it ranking above the best of the original Ratchet and Clank trilogy - Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando. That game represents one of the best entries is a great franchise... and while it doesn't have the edge on visuals, it does, I think, on gameplay, and on tone and humour - which both games are playing for.

 

That narrows the field to a handful of games, none of which are directly comparable, so it comes down to the old "would I replay 3D Dot Game Heroes before I replayed this?"...
...and while I think the answer is yes for the games up to and including Oxenfree...
...I think Limbo is the game that does finally stop 3D Dot Game Heroes in its tracks.

 

That game has a visual style that is also fantastic, gameplay that is fun and smart, and is also, in some sense, throwing back to an older style of game, while modernising it and adding its own distinct personality. 
It's close, but I think Limbo has to come out the victor by a marginal amount...
...and so 3D Dot Game Heroes finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chime Sharp

 

Summary: 

 

A music-based Arcade Puzzler, and a 2017 follow up to the original 2011 game Chime, Chime Sharp takes the basic premises present in that original game, eschews the multiplayer components, instead adding to and diversifying the single-player offering, and updates the whole game with a much improved, more modern and sleek visual style.

In terms of core gameplay, essentially Chime Sharp (and Chime before it,) somewhat splits the difference between a Tetris, and a Lumines. 

The playfield is flat - an area is filled, rather than a vertical "container", and pieces are not "falling" - they can be placed anywhere on the board in the order they appear.
The goal is to create "quads" - solid blocks of a minimum of 3x3 squares, with no gaps. When a quad is created, it lights up, ready to be removed by the "clear line" - a line constantly moving left to right across the board at a set pace, to the BMP of the particular music track of that level (in probably the game's most overt nod to Lumines.)

Quads do not "lock", however, until they are actually removed - they can be expanded and increased in area, and can be added to, giving the sense of urgency that an Arcade Puzzler requires, without the usual "fit the piece before it drops" element most post-Tetris Arcade Puzzlers employ. The play boils down, at its fundamental level, to creating quads of as big a size as possible within the time afforded by the current BMP, but there is certainly a reasonable skill ceiling and scope for tactical play. Good play at higher levels and for better scores often involves often keeping multiple quads nearly finished, in close proximity, which can then be completed and combined into one enormous quad, within the limited time afforded by one full "swipe" of the clear line.
When a Quad is cleared, the colour of the squares of the playfield for that area changes, giving the player a good indication of where quads have been created and where they haven't... and good play and high scores requires not only creating many quads of large sizes, but doing so on as much of the playfield as possible before the song ends, and the level completes.

Like most Arcade Puzzlers, the core gameplay is pretty simply, and endlessly repeatable, but the scope of the game is really determined by what the game chooses to do with that core gameplay. Chime Sharp has a pretty robust (if not staggering) level of variety baked in, via both its Modes, and its level variation.

There are 16 songs (levels) in the game, 8 of which are available from the outset, with 8 additional unlocked through play. Each of these features a different music track (all within the "ambient EDM" genre of Electronica,) with, obvious, different BMPs, thus varying up the play-style required to maximise points on those levels. 
Each level also has slightly different playfield shape, as one would expect, with more complex, ragged or compartmentalised ones offering increased challenge, but interestingly, unlike most arcade puzzlers of this nature, each level also has different sets of play pieces. The shaped pieces for placement, (the "Tetrominos" for want of a better term... "Chimaminos?"), vary from level to level, meaning each level has quite a bit more variety on top of the norm, and different geometric concerns with placement are constantly presenting.

 

There are 4 main play modes - a Standard mode available from the get-go, and 3 additional modes unlocked through good play. 

"Sharp Mode" is a version where additional tension is created by the inclusion of limited "lives", which the player can lose if they fail to remove "leftover" pieces from cleared quads with a new quad quickly enough.

"Strike Mode" ups the ante further on Sharp Mode, by increasing the speed, limiting the timer, and removing time extensions - essentially creating a pure, more difficult "speed run" style game, where getting very fast, very efficient points is the key. 

"Challenge Mode" is essentially Standard Mode+, there are not as many fundamental rule changes as in "Sharp Mode" or "Strike Mode", but instead, simply more complicated playfield geometry, and more complex, varied piece shapes served up - essentially this is the "hard Mode" for standard play, with the two other modes serving as more "alternative" modes.

These are in addition to "Practice Mode" - which is as one might expect: essentially a more "chill", zen-mode featuring less complex playfields and shape types, used to learn the game... or just relax, keep ones fingers busy,  and listen to some music!

As said, there is no co-op or versus modes in Chime Sharp, (unlike Chime, which, while I have not personally played, I understand did have some,) however, there are online leaderboards, so there is some scope for competition between friends - though this falls more in the court of the players themselves to track.

The gameplay in Chime Sharp is robust, and very fun. It, of course, very much owes allegiance to games like Tetris and Lumines, and is clearly and squarely aimed at the audience for those games, but because Arcade Puzzlers are such a fundamental and specific type of game, and because coming up with new versions of them is quite difficult due to the simplistic and "core" nature of their fundamentals, Chime Sharp deserves some significant plaudits for being able to create a game style that feels directly in that wheelhouse, but also feels quite original and divergent from the most ubiquitous games in the genre: namely Tetris, Lumines and Puyo Puyo.

While I'm not sure I'd argue Chime Sharp is quite as fun and endlessly replayable as those games are, it doesn't fall too far short of that level of addictive gameplay...
...and that is, in and of itself, something of a rare triumph!

 

Audio is the game is very nice - the ambient EDM Music is all pretty good - at worst passable, and at best downright ear-worming.
Ambient EDM isn't a genre I'm hugely knowledgable about beyond popular artists like Aphex Twin, but even not considering myself a particular fan of the genre, I found myself liking the tracks here more often than not.

Audio stings for gameplay mechanics, such as the chimes when clearing quads, or the "thunks" of placing blocks are satisfying, don't trample on the music, and - most importantly - give the player exactly the feedback they need on their play, letting them do what they need to do: concentrate, without having to check on their set pieces.

Visually, the game looks good -  Chime Sharp isn't a visual extravaganza like something like Tetris Effect, or even Lumines, and isn't going for the kind of "explosive psychradelica" that those game often do... but its pastel colour scheme and slightly tilted playfields do look very nice, and do it without ever interfering with the gameplay.

Overall, Chime Sharp is smart, clever, new(ish) take in a genre that can often hurt for new injections of ideas. It doesn't quite reach the level of something like a Tetris (what does?) or even a Lumines... but personally, I do think I enjoy the geometric placement of Chime over the "pattern-planning" gameplay of Puyo Puyo... and for a lesser known, younger take on the Arcade Puzzle genre to be able to compete with one of its titans in that way... to a fan of that genre, is very impressive.

 

Chime Sharp is not a game I expect people would necessarily continue to play indefinitely like Tetris, Lumines or Puyo Puyo, (it's not a game I've returned to at anywhere near the regularity as Tetris, for example,) but it does have a long tail, a high skill ceiling and scope for tactical play and improvement, and it looks and sounds really nice while doing it!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Chime Sharp ended up being a relatively easy one to rank, because the field narrows pretty quickly between two existing games: Puyo Puyo Tetris, and Critter Crunch.

 

I think, despite all the good elements of Chime Sharp, it is simply overwhelmed by the breadth of offering of Puyo Puyo Tetris - that game is far, far better than it should, by rights, be on paper... and while I do enjoy the loop of Chime Sharp more than the loop of pure Puyo Puyo... Puyo Puyo Tetris has a wealth of Puyo Puyo modes, a wealth of Tetris modes, and a bunch of very well done hybrid modes!
The package on offer in Puyo Puyo Tetris is simply so much greater than that of Chime Sharp - including, of course, multiplayer - and so Chime Sharp has to rank lower overall.

 

I do, however, think that as good as "Puyo-Puyo-like" Critter Crunch is, the originality, visuals and neat concept of Chime Sharp does outrank it, as I know I'd be much more likely to replay Chime Sharp over Critter Crunch if forced to chose one or the other.

There's only a few games between those two currently - including 2 non-arcade puzzle games: A Monster’s Expedition through Puzzling Exhibitions and The Last Campfire, and I actually think Chime Sharp most appropriately falls between those two as well.

 

That then only leaves two non-puzzle games: Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing and Ratchet & Clank... and I think, once again, that Chime Sharp falls right between them...
...thus securing it's spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Humanity

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 3D Puzzle game, combining elements of Lemmings, Snake, and occasionally Echochrome, 2023's Humanity, from THA Limited sees the player attempting to guide and recreate humanity through various stages of societal evolution, as personified by metaphorical puzzles, watching them "ascend" as each new one is conquered.

 

The player controls a dog (or, the spirit of a dog,) in a strange, fugue dimension where ethereal entities called "cores" appear to be conducting experiments and tests, designed to replicate (or instil) human elements into shell humans.
These shell humans function like lemmings in the eponymous game. They simply walk in a set direction, without care for their survival. The dog, via various "commands" that can be placed on the ground, can control where they go, how they behave, and how they interact with the obstacles in their paths, as the player tries to guide them to a designated goal.

Puzzle games with narratives generally fall into one of two broad types, as characterised by the prevalence and importance of the narrative in them, vs. the "discreteness" of the individual puzzles. There is the "Portal" model, where the overall narrative is key, and individual, discrete puzzles exist, but are encountered organically, and are seamlessly connected within the narrative framework. 
Then there is the "Hue" model, where an overarching narrative is present, however, it is less the driving force, and individual puzzles are more focussed and singular.

Humanity tends to fall in the latter camp - individual puzzles are chosen from a menu, (broken down into Assassin's Creed style "sequences", complete with "main path" puzzles and optional "side puzzles",) however, within that latter camp, Humanity is probably about as"narrative heavy" a puzzle games as I have seen, while still following that "discrete" model.
Individual puzzles are very much singular - indeed, each puzzle is entered as a separate and individual space, and each is themed and named (often with some subtle clue as to the solution to the puzzle within that name,) but these menus are entered not from a simple list, but from a hub area, wherein the player (and their canine avatar) can walk around, and explore the basic fugue white-space in which the game takes place. 
This area doesn't allow for any real exploration - there isn't much to see here beyond the functional elements relating to the puzzles solved, and the puzzles to be solved - however it is used effectively, to demonstrate some of the games very original and interesting aesthetics. 

Humanity's visuals are very striking. The whole aesthetic of the game is really centred around the concept of "society" or "colony" - of humans as individually weak, but strong in force. 
The aesthetic uses the model humans in such vast quantities, and in such strange, hypnotic masses, that the conglomerate of them stops seeming like a collective of individuals, and instead forms a flowing, sweeping, organic stream. As the dog moves around the hub area, this idea is really leaned into, as the thousands of individual humans ebb and flow and form and re-form like a mass, singular amoebic entity - and it's really hypnotic and strange!

The whole tonal aesthetic of Humanity is notably cool and distinct. While most levels are made of simple geometric shapes - cubes, slopes, some trees and some white indicators, floating in dream-like space high above some vaguely Earthly terrains, (and absolutely allows for the most important past of a puzzle game - the ability for the player to see clearly what they are doing, and solve what they need to solve,) but when combined with the peculiar and unusual movement of the stream of colourful human figures - walking, pushing, jumping... or in later levels, hitting or shooting - it makes for a very unusual and unique visual signature. 
The almost comical lack of self-preservation on the part of the humans is not unique to puzzle games - indeed, it is virtually impossible to see Humanity played, without thinking of Lemmings, and while Lemming's days as a powerhouse puzzle franchise are long past at this point, it still remains a titan of the genre...
... but because these particular "lemmings" look human, and are in such vast quantities, seeing them all splatting to their demise at the bottom of a too-high drop, or jumping uselessly into the gaping void due to a misplaced jump command is really odd and kind of funny!

Lemmings, it's worth noting, is very, very clearly a big influence on the basic design document that leads to Humanity, however, as a fan of that franchise, I also think it's worth giving Humanity some plaudits, as it does in one fell swoop what Lemmings never quite managed to do: it translates the Lemmings model to 3D successfully. 
There were 3D Lemmings games, but none of them ever really hit right, and none ever captured the compulsive and addictive quality of the franchises 2D games. That Humanity manages to achieve that is, I suspect, a much more difficult feat than its confident and well implemented gameplay would suggest.

As for the actual puzzles - they are generally very good.  There is a lot of variety, and quite a lot of changes in the core mechanics over the course of the game... though the game does suffer a little, in the sense that easily the most enjoyable and interesting of the core mechanics are those present in the early game. 
The early sections focus on simply turning, splitting, jumping and floating the humans, and combined with various obstacles and blocks that can be pushed or used in the solution (by the humans themselves, via commands,) this forms some of the best and most interesting puzzles.

Later in the game, new elements begin being introduced - for example, the ability to give the humans weapons, to counter "others" - non-player controlled humans which cause obstructions and kill the player's humans. While some of the puzzles featuring these elements still retain the core gameplay present earlier, there is a tendency for the game to "drift", to almost a more tower-defence style gameplay. 

 

This can work... indeed, at that point, the game still feels largely of the style it established early on, and the addition merely "bends" the gameplay, as opposed to "breaking" it...

...however, as the game continues, a single command is introduced that really does break the gameplay style initially established - the "Follow" command. 

This allows the dog (i.e. the player) to directly move humans, in real time, and combined with the weapons, and the introduction of objects of weaponry in addition to those arming the people themselves (and giving the same elements to the "others") the game really does lose focus on what its original gameplay was.
Puzzles that are almost entirely akin to either Tower Defence, Stealth Action, or even RTS style games become the norm, rather than the exception. 

 

To be clear, a puzzle game that manages to weave between different genres within the framework of its own game mechanics is a laudable thing - that's not something that is easy to do, and Humanity does it pretty well...
...but the fundamental issue is, that while these sections are interesting conceptually, they are markedly less fun to actually engage with than the pure "puzzle" levels. 
By the last few chapters of the game, when a "pure puzzle" level came along, I found myself elated... and then disappointed when the next one after that was back to simply "follow-the-leader" RTS. The fact that some of these "pure puzzle" levels in the later game are still very good, and still layering new mechanics into the game, did give a distinct feeling of missed opportunity: there was clearly still ample "gas in the tank", for the developer to create more puzzles of the best kind... they simply chose not to, in favour of a less interesting model.

That complaint is, of course, one down more to personal tastes of course, but I don't think it can be entirely dismissed as such, for the simple reason that the game itself is what establishes its basic premise early on, then starts to break it. Most puzzle games do this to some extent - and it is often a necessary part of escalating the challenge in a puzzle game - but I think in the case of Humanity, it breaks just a little too far from its core design by the end, and while the later levels feel different, they don't necessarily feel harder. It feels morel like a change in style, than an increase in challenge. 

 

Audio in the game is good - and like the aesthetic - also very unusual. The score is a really, really strange collection of ambient, avant-garde soundscapes, that initially I found considerably off-putting.... until about an hour in, when I started to really appreciate the oddness of it. I guess in some sense, the peculiar narrative and tone of the game warrants an audioscape to match, and once the game established itself and it's strange tone, the music began to feel more at home within it!

The audio stings to indicate player actions work too - the dog gives a satisfying little "bark" when paying down a command, and little audio stings indicating the streams of humans have done something (pushed a block successfully, for example,) work well, feel right, and give the player the indications they need, given that they will not always be in a position to be watching their human wards at all times, while trying to find solutions to further puzzles in a level.

The actual gameplay controls are fine - the dog moves quite well, and placing down commands is easy, and made simple to gauge by the geometric design of the levels. There is a minor annoyance in the form of elevations - the dog can jump fairly high, however, it will not always be able to jump high enough to reach some platforms they need to. There is a mechanic whereby the dog can jump "into" the human stream - and sort of "swim" through the stream of human forms, allowing the player to access higher points, but jumping into the "stream" and riding it "up the waterfall" of climbing humans to higher areas... but there are a couple of puzzles where this problem can be very frustrating, as falling off a higher section essentially requires a restart.

 

Overall, Humanity is a neat concept, and a very well executed one. 
It takes some puzzle elements that existed before, but combines them in an interesting way, and does so while presenting some smart, fun and challenging if never fiendish puzzles. 

There is some issues with the game losing its focus as it progresses, however, that is purely in terms of puzzle design. In terms of narrative, aesthetic, auditory tone and style, the game works very well, remains cohesive, and manages to build its story to a pretty effective and interesting climax. 

 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Another puzzle game ranking - and these are getting easier as there are so many puzzle games on the list now!

 

Looking more at the 3D puzzling and semi-narrative puzzling side of things, the first game to spring to mind was previous "Eye Candy Award" Winner, Manifold Garden!

I think that one provides the ceiling - as fun as Humanity is, I think the general puzzles and gameplay of Manifold Garden has it beat, and even Humanity's strange, cool visual style cannot possibly compete with Manifold Garden's stunning visuals, so it has to fall below it.

I do think, however, that as neat, often fiendish, and plentiful - (oh God, so plentiful!) - as the puzzles in A Monster’s Expedition through Puzzling Exhibitions are, there just isn't the unique hook or compulsive gameplay there to compete with Humanity's... even allowing for Humanity's rather unfocussed drift in game design in the latter half. As such, I still feel comfortable ranking Humanity above it.

That leaves only a few games in between. While I think the impressive elements of Unpacking - especially the curious way it manages to draw serious emotional involvement purely in the unpacking of boxes in rooms! - mean it has to retain its place, I do think that despite being probably Quantic Dream's best game, there are simply too many Quantic-Dream-inherent faults retained in Detroit: Become Human for it to hold onto its spot in the face of Humanity. 

As such, Humanity finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metal: Hellsinger

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2022 hybrid of rhythm game and old-school, DOOM-style, fast-paced shooter, Metal Hellsinger from Sweden-based studio The Outsiders, takes the basic principles of a gore-fest demon-shooter of the 90s - death-metal music included...
...but while most games of that ilk use their metal music trappings as simple flavour, Metal Hellsinger bakes them right into its core gameplay.

Taking the role of a nameless demonic soul - The Unknown - and armed with a growing arsenal of hell-based firepower, a silent grimace, and a talking skull guide by the name of Paz, the player must shoot, rip, blast and tear through the different Hells that make up the underworld, in search of the ruler: The Red Judge, in order to reclaim The Unknown's stolen voice.

 

The story is goofy fun, in the best way for this kind of pulpy action game. While there is little information given to the player about who The Unknown actually is, or the the reasons for her missing voice at the outset (or, really, throughout,) it's largely immaterial - the narrative exists as a function - to get the player into the demon-blasting action as fast as possible, and it serves that function well. In fact, actually getting into deep lore would likely be a detriment to the game. DOOM worked best when we knew nothing about "The DOOM Guy" beyond the fact that he was a compulsive demon-annoyer, and professional silent-type. 
What narrative there is is fine - it's generally delivered by way of motion-comic style cut-scenes, which are clearly necessitated by the lower budget of the game, but are stylish enough to do what they need to do, and have a pretty cool, 80's-vinyl-album-cover art-style to them. There's some voice work that is suitably gravelly and overblown, and again, works for the tone very well, if never particularly standing out.

In terms of hitting the tone the game strives for, let's not mess around here: Metal Hellsinger absolutely nails it. 
The game is, as said, relatively low budget, and that can be seen as a tether or a negative in some areas, but in terms of the visuals and the gameplay fluidity, it is arguably one of the games biggest strengths. 
The game has little in the way of breadth of design aesthetic or of tertiary design elements - menus are fairly bare-bones, levels are relatively simple and rudimentary, and the variety of enemies is a little limited overall... however, given the fact that the game is aiming, (at least to some extent,) to evoke the blisteringly fast, gory, pulpy shooters of the 90s that came in the wake of DOOM and Quake, those aspects do rather help it. There is little  faffing about, or time spent delivering some deep or expansive lore - the player is thrust immediately into the action via some superlative, ripping metal music, and is blasting their way through hordes of demons before they can even catch their breath.

The actual gameplay essentially boils down to basic shooter principles, with the added caveat that damage done by weapons is exponentially increased if that weapon is fired "on beat" - i.e. in rhythm with the pulsing BMP of the particular metal track that accompanies that level. While a shotgun blast will do some damage no matter when it is fired, (as long as it hits, of course,) it does more damage if it is close to "on beat"... and does substantially more if the shot lands perfectly on beat.

As such, the player is massively incentivised to try to find a "flow" within each level - to establish the rhythm of the song playing, and get into a groove of constantly strafing, moving, jumping and kiting enemies in order to allow every shot they take to both be on target, and on beat.

It's a clever concept, and one that pairs very well with the fast-action, strafe-and-blast-style gameplay of those early 90s shooters. When it works, it really works. 

The music chosen for each level is pretty good - primarily by a band I was not previously familiar with - Dark Tranquility - but featuring a smattering of guest artists, some of whom even a Metal Music Novice such as myself was familiar with (Randy Blythe of Lamb of God, Serj Tankian of System of a Down, Matt Heafy of Trivium etc,) and it is used in a cool way. When the player is low on health, or playing poorly, the music fades, and dims to simply a pounding, bassy beat, allowing them to refocus and get their rhythm back, but as they chain together more and more "on-beat" shots, and get into a groove, the elements of each song begin to layer. First, the music kicks in more and more, and once a good chain of combo is built up, and the player hits the maximum "fury" level (a points multiplier increased through good gameplay,) the top level brings in the vocals.

The design of this soundscape really helps to add a feeling of euphoric crescendo to the ebb and flow of the levels - hitting that top level, and hearing the songs kick fully into gear, with the vocals, (which are often diagetic to the narrative happening in that level,) blaring, the game feels at its best - and makes the player want to maintain that level of play, even beyond the simple gameplay and points-based reasons to.

The game is not without issues, however, and once the novelty of the core concept wears off a little, that is when these issues start to show themselves.

 

Firstly, there is that lack of variety. Now, as said, and in fairness, the games Metal Hellsinger is aping were themselves fairly repetitive, and often had little more variety to environment design or enemy types than Metal Hellsinger has... 
...however, those games were of an era. 
In 2023, a game with so little in the way of variety can't help but feel limited, simply due to the escalation of the medium. Metal Hellsinger has around 15 or 16 enemy types... but really, it only has 4 or 5 true "strains". The others are simply variants - more elite or rarer versions of the others - and the methods to fighting them are not really changed between the different "levels" of them, all that changes is the risk.

 

Bosses even, suffer for this concept - arguably more so than the mob enemies. While each boss fight is technically unique in terms of having unique mechanics depending on the level, visually, all the bosses (bar the final one) are pretty much identical designs, and even with the variations of attack type or environmental obstacles in the arena in which they are fought, they do tend to simply feel like fighting different levels of the same core form. 
Because the bosses are also absurd bullet-sponges, and fighting them takes a long time, those fights, no matter how interesting the attack patterns, tend to wear out their welcome before they are over.

The weapons on offer are fun to use - they blast and pop with incredibly satisfying heft and feel - and are relatively varied in play-style, but there are only a small handful of them - 5 or 6 types, and really, two or three of these are vastly more powerful and viable than the others. I'd wager most players will gravitate towards using only those ones, as the lack of enemy variety means there is pretty much no reasonable "use-case" for going back to the less powerful weapons.

 

Level design variety is also an issue. While exploring the different areas of the Hells does allow for some modest changes in environment design, generally this simply manifests as a change in colour palate for the surrounding rocks. Most of the Hells look fairly similar... and because they are populated by pretty much the same enemies, the game - while notably short - does start to feel very repetitive. 
There really isn't anything in the way of unique or interesting puzzle elements to the areas - there are no "hit the switch" or "collect the item" style sections - everything in the game is simply "walk to the next wide open area, fight waves of enemies until a door opens, then do it again."

 

It's odd actually - there are sets of "challenge rooms" that unlock with each completed "main level" - in sets of 3, the mastery of which unlocks powerful buffs that can be used in game - and while these are ostensibly side-activities, I often found myself actually enjoying them significantly more than the main levels.
 The reason?
There are specific challenges associated with them.

Because the main levels have nothing more to them than a string of 5 or 6 wave-based arenas, followed by a boss fight, and there is no tertiary elements involved in success beyond simply survive and get a good score, they often feel less interesting and less focussed than the challenge rooms, which feature only one "arena"... but give the player an active, unique goal to strive for.

All these elements do drag the game down a little, but could be argued to be simply a matter of taste. 
I don't have the kind of FPS nostalgia for games like DOOM and Quake that some folks do, and I have no issue admitting that some of my exhaustion with the lack of variety in the gameplay is exhascerbated by that lack of nostalgic connection to that old genre.

However, there are two elements that really hurt Metal Hellsinger, that I do not think are excusable, or a matter of taste.

 

Firstly: the hit-boxing issues.

Hit-boxing in Metal Hellsinger is... frankly, woeful.
There isn't an issue with the player's shots - they hit when they should, and miss when they should... however, the attach animations of enemies are so poorly hit-boxed that they actually elicited laughs - both from me, and MsBloodmoney who watched some of the game over my shoulder. Sometimes, enemies will claw at the player while right beside them, and hit nothing but air... yet other times, they seem to be swiping from 10 feet away, and somehow connect.
The issue was so bad, in fact, that multiple times I was hit by such an absurd, ludicrously mis-aligned hit-box, that I actually turned, assuming there was another enemy that had managed to flank me and was attacking from behind... so sure was I that the game could not possibly be registering a hit from the guy miles in front of me.
Spoiler Alert: there was no one there!

 

That would be an issue in any game, but it is a particularly bad one in a game like Metal Hellsinger, where maintaining a combo requires not being hit. The problem can be somewhat alleviated later in game, due to the ability to unlock buffs that mitigate a few incoming hits without breaking combos... but still - in a game where not being hit is key to success, having such elastic hit-boxing is a pretty egregious oversight.

The second major issue is the game's "Lag Configuration Tool".

Like most modern rhythm games which will be played on an LCD TV, Metal Hellsinger features a tool designed to configure the game to the users set-up.

Unlike most modern rhythm games which will be played on an LCD TV, Metal Hellsinger's does not work. 

The configuration tool has three stages - a "music lag" configuration stage, a "visual lag" configuration stage, and then a "test" stage, where the settings are applied by the game, and tested, to be confirmed. 

I tried this process upwards of 30 times, and not once was I able to pass the final "test" stage. Whatever the game was doing with the information - whether it was misapplying the information gathered n the first two stages, or failing to apply it before the third stage, it simply couldn't have been right. The game was telling me "this is your lag"... then failing to implement it to allow it to pass its own test!

In the end, the only way I was able to effectively find the correct settings for my set-up, was by manually, painstakingly adjusting each slider in increments of 5ms, then testing in the real game... a painstaking process that took about 20-30 minutes to finally get right. 

This also fed into an additional issue - which I assume to be console specific - the control scheme.

On PC, it would be fine. Hitting a key on a keyboard in time with a beat is, of course, relatively easy - as a key on a keyboard has little "throw". 
Pn PS5, however, the issue is with the L2 trigger. L2, (and even more with an L2 trigger with haptic feedback and applied force feedback,) has a delay simply in the action of pulling it. 

The game itself has multiple control scheme options, however, curiously, all of them use either L2 or R2 as the "fire" button. Even with lag adjustment, I was never able to reliably hit "on-beat" using those... and only really became proficient in the game by using the console-level override "accessibility" features, to remap L2 to the shorter throw L1 trigger.

I'm aware that citing a control scheme might seem like a nit-pick in a game - and in 99% of games, I would agree that such an issue barely warrants a mention - however, in the specific case of Metal Hellsinger, I do think it is an element that has a genuinely detrimental effect on the game to have overlooked such an issue. Yes, the problem can be alleviated easily using the PS5 console features...
...but games should not have to rely on outside factors like those to solve what is a fundamental flaw in the design of their game for that console. Hell, I'd wager many casual players are not even aware the PS5 has console-level remapping options - and games should account for their own mechanics in game. A player having to remap buttons outside the game to simply have a fighting chance at playing it properly, shows a failure on the Dev's part.

 

Overall, Metal Hellsinger is a good game, and a great concept, but it is one that can feel a little flimsy once the initial novelty wears off, and has some pretty unforgivable flaws that need to be overlooked or mitigated in order to really enjoy it.  

It's a game with a lot of personality, and one that really does feel amazing when it's firing on all cylinders... but those moments are fleeting, and even over a short game length, they can start to feel like the exception, rather than the rule.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Metal Hellsinger is a tough one to rank for this list, as I don't really have many rhythm games on the list, and virtually none of the old-school, fast-paced gore-shooters that form the other half of its style.

Unfortunately though, I do have one type of game that Metal Hellsinger falls into the category of:

games with significant promise and very good elements, that are dragged down by real, serious issues.

 

Af first, the game that jumped to mind was My Friend Pedro, but the more I thought about it, I think My Friend Pedro not only beats out Metal Hellsinger, but actually beats it out by quite a fair margin. After all, My Friend Pedro has some issues, but its issues are not as endemic or systematic as Metal Hellsinger's are, and didn't negatively affect the experience to nearly the same extent.

Instead, the games I ended up really looking to to provide a "floor" and "ceiling" were Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and JETT: The Far Shore.

Castlevania: LOS is not a game plagued with issues as serious as those of Metal Hellsinger, but fundamentally, it is a weaker game anyways. Indeed, if both games achieved exactly what they aimed for, without any issues, Metal Hellsinger would rank significantly higher than Castlevania: LOS. As such, even with Metal Hellsinger's worse issues, I still think it has to rank higher. Certainly, I would replay Metal Hellsinger before Castlevania: LOS, and that means something, given that I think the issues in Metal Hellsinger are more detrimental to it.

JETT: The Far Shore, on the other hand, has issues equally as serious as Metal Hellsinger's... however, if the same logic was applied - if neither game had any problems, and both hit what they aimed for, JETT would easily outrank Metal Hellsinger on this list... 
... and so, since both have similar levels of problems, I think that means JETT still has to beat it out in a match-up.

There's only a few games between those two currently, none with much in common with Metal Hellsinger, so it comes down to the old "would I replay Metal Hellsinger before replaying this?"...
...and, working down from JETT: The Far Shore, the first confirmed "yes"...
...is at Cuboid.

 

As such, Metal Hellsinger finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Wake: Remastered

 

Summary: 

 

A narrative focussed, survival horror(ish?) game from Remedy - purveyors of such interesting (if not always successful) fare as Max Payne, Control and Quantum Break - Alan Wake originally released in 2010 as a console exclusive Xbox game, and remained as such for 11 years, until Alan Wake Remastered released in 2021, for PS4 and PS5.

Taking its cues from a litany of pop-culture reference points - most notably Stephen King's novels, Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone and The X Files - Alan Wake is almost inarguably the most "Remedy" game that Remedy have ever put out. 

Remedy, as a developer, have a pretty distinct and specific flavour to their games, and are synonymous with 3 things primarily: unusual, interesting stories, in-game live-action FMV... and gameplay that doesn't quite live up to the promise of the narrative.
Alan Wake has more of all three than any other game they have done!

Suffering from a stretch of writer's block, best-selling crime-fiction author Alan Wake travels with his wife Alice to the mountain retreat of Bright Falls, Washington for a vacation. Unbeknownst to Alan, Bright Falls is home to more than just small town living, however. It is also the home and workplace of a psychiatrist - Dr. Emil Hartman - who specialises in treating artists who are suffering from mental health issues... something Bright Falls seems to have in abundance. Indeed, the town seems to be a magnet for artists, who go mad at an unusually high rate there!

After suffering a nightmare, in which elements of his own stories seem to be coming to life as dark-infested demonic entities, Alan and Alice head to the cabin they have rented on Cauldron Lake... at which point, Alice is apparently kidnapped, and the dark entities from his dreams seem to propagate everywhere. After being visited by an ethereal floating entity in a diving suit, who teaches Alan how to destroy the dark entities using a gun and a flashlight, he sets about descending into a waking nightmare as he seeks to save Alice...
...as the town turns against him and a demonic entity - The Dark Presence - pursues him.

Let's start with the good stuff then.

The narrative elements, in particular the premise, the lore, and the environmental story-telling is, absolutely and unequivocally, the highlight in Alan Wake. There is personal preference playing into my admiration certainly - all those pop-culture reference points referenced above are things I'm a huge fan of -  but even setting that personal preference aside, Remedy do a really great job on that front.

The actual writing of the dialogue is generally pretty good, if a little "on-the-nose" at time. It's clear, even from the writing, that the game originally hails from 2010, as that was a time when "naturalistic" dialogue and performances were still in their infancy in games, and Alan Wake does still retain a lot of more clunky "this thing is happening!" style writing that came before...
...but within that style, the writing is still a pretty effective version. It's considerably helped by the overall plot and premise, which is very good, and the central mystery and narrative through-line help to keep enough forward momentum to gloss over some of the less finessed dialogue that peppers it.

Characters might be relatively "broad strokes" but not to the extent that it hampers the game - and one thing Remedy does very well, is making sure that each character - from main cast to NPC - all have something unusual or unique about them. Whether its the waitress at the diner, who is an obsessive Alan Wake fan, or the trailer park attendant with his limp, or the old, senile Rocker who loves the song "Lime in the Coconut", or the strange old woman known as the "Lamp Lady" who carries a lantern with her at all times (in a pretty obvious nod to the Log Lady from Twin Peaks,) each character encountered usually has something slightly askew or peculiar, that lends them a slightly more memorable quality, and makes up a "patchwork of the unusual" that lends Bright Falls itself a particular, signature oddness.

 

Alan himself is an interesting character, in the sense that while he is on something of a "hero's journey", fighting to save Alice, he is not portrayed particularly flatteringly, and is actually quite an unlikable guy on paper. 
It's not a situation like Kratos in his Greek games, where the developer seems to think the character is cool, but the player simply recognises his as a dick - Alan is actually somewhat the opposite.  The developer goes to some lengths to actively make Alan unlikable - showing flashback scenes of him hung-over and being a bit of a turd to the long-suffering Alice, or appearing on a TV talkshow and acting like a douchebag, or even in the actual narrative, in which Alan seems to consistently treat fans or nice characters with distain...
...but because the fundamental premise of the game is more "plot forward" than "character forward", and because, despite everything, Alan's quest is a (relatively) noble one, we as players never quite seem to dislike him as much as we maybe should (and probably would, were we to meet him in real life, under less supernatural circumstances!)

 

Visually, the game is very good. It takes place all around Bright Falls and the surrounding forrest, and they are all rendered pretty impressively for a 2010 game. A large amount of the game (too much, really,) takes place in the woods, and so there is a certain repetitive nature to the visuals in these areas, (there's only so many ways to make a tree look like a tree,) however, it's helped enormously by some really evocative and effective lighting techniques, and the dark forestry does look good as a result. 

 

Where the game really excels visually though, is in the town, and indoor locations. There's a level of detail and environmental storytelling that - while not on the level of something like The Last of Us - is still markedly impressive, and really sells the reference material. The local Diner, the small-town Police Station, the local bookshop, the trailer park and trailers - these places are designed really well, are detailed nicely, and look right out of something like Twin Peaks. It's virtually impossible to step into the Diner, without thinking of having a slice of cherry pie, and a damn good cup of coffee!

 

All of these elements really work, and are the strengths with which the player is propelled through the elements of Alan Wake that are less well implemented: namely, the moment-to-moment gameplay, and the voice work.

In terms of audio, the actual score is fine (never stand out, but evocative,) and the audio stings and whispering, growling snarls of the demonic possessed are all pretty good... however, the actual voice work is not particularly great... and the biggest culprit in this is Alan himself.

There are characters in Alan Wake who are designed to be deliberately annoying - his manager Barry, for example, who is clearly designed to be in the "Zeke from inFamous" model, of "NPC side-kick who is annoying the player along with the character"... 
...but actually, his voice work is generally far less grating than Alan's is. 

 

The problem is that so much of the game has voice-over from Alan's point of view, and while written, at worst, perfectly adequately, the voice actor - Matthew Porretta - has a tendency to put so much sauce on it that it makes a a pretty good facsimile of pulpy, B-Movie style writing feel C-Grade.
To be clear - I do not believe Porretta to be a poor actor - he demonstrably isn't - however, the direction taken in Alan Wake feels particularly mis-handled. A more naturalistic, less stilted and theatrical reading of the lines would make a lot more sense. The kind of overly-dramatic, "I'm a cool guy" reading used here works for a character like Max Payne, where there is only sporadic dialogue, but hearing so many lines delivered in that tone, tends to start to sound silly rather than effective.

Gameplay is the other weak point - and that, of course, is a pretty big one.

 

The problem with Alan Wake, is that while the narrative is nice and varied, and keeps the momentum the whole way, the gameplay that it supports is extraordinarily limited in scope... and doesn't seem to really be able to decide what genre of game it is trying to be.

 

Essentially, the gameplay boils entirely down to moving from point A to point B, with enemies appearing in waves. Enemies, (whether humanoid, "possessed object", or - the most annoying - birds,) are all dealt with exactly the same way: by shining a torch on them long enough to "burn away" the darkness possessing them. Humanoid enemies then need to be shot with a gun, but this is almost a throw-away activity - the real difficulty and challenge of each encounter is in applying enough light, and managing consumable batteries to do so.

This is a perfectly reasonable mechanic, however, it is not particularly interesting... and never really changes - in either difficulty or play-style - across the entire game. There is only so many types of enemy, and they are repeated as such a consistent and recurring frequency, that the game starts to feel like simply doing exactly the same encounter over and over. 
Which... it kind of is.

 

On the highest difficulties, is can be beneficial to simply run away from enemies, and this can be tense and fun, given that on that higher difficulty, there will not be enough resources to kill everything, and encounters become more a case of using light strategically, to "stall" enemies as Alan runs away to safety. Alan moves a lot slower than most of the enemies - and most game protagonists, (and must be a 100-a-day smoker, given that he runs out of stamina after about 7 steps!)... so managing these more difficult modes can be a little more fun... 
...but it's still pretty invariable in terms of challenge or style over the course of the game. 

 

The gameplay physics and control model are also pretty chunky and imprecise, all told. 

There is a real issue in the sense that aiming a gun also uses the "increase brightness" of the torch mechanic - they are one and the same - so aiming at an enemy who has already had their "darkness" burned off to shoot them, also drains Alan's battery, thus using a valuable resource needed to burn the light off the other enemies. 

Alan also moves pretty stiffly, and the camera can often get hung up on environments when i close quarters - and that is somewhat forgivable and partly a simply quirk of that era of games...
...however, Alan Wake has some much more significant issues, in terms of the physics model, combined with the environment design. 

Because "objects in motion" are deadly - a necessity, given that the Dark Entity can possess objects, and "throw" them at Alan, it gives rise to a particularly irksome issue, where non-possessed objects that are moving simply due to the physics engine and the movement of other surrounding objects, can do damage to Alan when they really shouldn't. 

 

This is a particularly irksome problem in one section of the DLC chapter "The Writer" wherein one of the most interesting and audacious environments - a giant ferris-wheel-style rotating drum, filled with places from Alan's past that he must move through as it spins. This area is super cool to see... but because the whole environment is constantly in motion, and filled with objects, it becomes a nightmare to navigate, as every object can be accidentally imbued with deadly properties, owing to the slight movement they are all subject to!

 

There is also a fairly egregious design error in a few spots, where sets of stairs have been designed too steeply for the physics model, and so Alan can't actually walk up them... he has to "bunny hop" his way up the steps, even as NPC companions happily saunter up them!

 

 

Whether Alan Wake is really a "Survival Horror" game is a little questionable in terms of gameplay too.

Alan has a torch, ( and can find better ones, of various levels of brightnesses,) flares and flash-bang grenades, and essentially, the game boils down to managing those items. That would suggest that the game falls most neatly into the "Survival Horror" genre - managing batteries and light-sources in the same way a Resident Evil player will manage bullets...
... however, there is an odd element to this mechanic in Alan Wake, in the sense that in each chapter, his items are reset. Despite the dangers, Alan apparently never learns to hang onto his gun and flashlight and flares... he seems perfectly happy to leave them behind every time he embarks on a new errand!

As such, there is no sense in the player actually managing these resources effectively - as saving powerful light sources for later tends to result in simply losing them as soon as a chapter ends.
It's certainly closer to a Survival Horror game than any other genre... however, since resource management is such a massive part of those games, it's hard to fathom why the decision was made to do this. 

It's also worth noting, that while I think "Survival Horror" is the broad genre classification most appropriate for Alan Wake... the developer don't seem to agree. Sam Lake, (the always dapperly dressed and absurdly charismatic Joel McHale look-alike, and creative director of Remedy,) has stated that the upcoming Alan Wake II is Remedy's "First Survival Horror game")... 
...though that does raise the question: 
If Alan Wake isn't supposed to be a Survival Horror game... then what exactly is it supposed to be?

 

Overall, Alan Wake is something of a game of two halves - in terms of fun and quality at least. 

The premise, the writing, the environmental design and lighting, and the palpable sense of place, tone and genre are tip-top, and on a level that is impressive - and particularly so, given the era in which it originally released. However, the gameplay variety, the mechanical finesse and some of the voice acting are fairly ropey, and tend to pull down the experience a bit.

 

It's a testament to the positive elements that, even despite the negative elements, I am still particularly interested and excited about the prospect of Alan Wake II coming this year - and that certainly speaks to the particular elements that it does right. 

Tone, premise, narrative, design - these elements are the hard ones to nail, and Alan Wake absolutely does. Gameplay, and mechanics are the ones most likely to be solved by better tech - and that Remedy have demonstrated their improvements on with Control. An Alan Wake game that retains all the good elements, but adds some more gameplay variety, and is mechanically finessed to the level that the premise deserves would be a hell of a game...
...and hopefully, that's exactly what the sequel will bring!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Alan Wake should - one would think - be a super difficult one to rank, given that it is one of those games with extreme positives, and significant negatives to it...

...however, it ended up being one of those rare cases where two fairly unrelated games, linked only by their status as 3D action games of a particular era, just kept bubbling to the top of my mind, and provided a neat spot for Alan Wake simply by their proximity to each other...
...those games being Hitman: Blood Money, and Alice: The Madness Returns.

I think, in spite of how many flaws the newer, better Hitman games have exposed in the ageing Hitman: Blood Money, I do think the core gameplay and the sense of style it has are enough to out-match Alan Wake, even where Alan Wake stomps all over it in terms of visuals and narrative...

...but I do think that, despite the gameplay in Alice: The Madness Returns being a smidge more fun, and a lot more interesting, the positive elements of Alan Wake are enough to fairly resoundingly beat it out in a one-on-one fight.

 

There aren't any games currently ranked between those two, and so Alan Wake immediately finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

Thanks to @grayhammmer & @Copanelefor putting in a request!

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

LA Cops stays as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

 

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

 

[pelagia14]

Wow, your Alan Wake Remastered review was really interesting to read! It was also perfectly timed, as the trailers for Alan Wake II have made me curious about this franchise. 

 

Quote

"Taking its cues from a litany of pop-culture reference points - most notably Stephen King's novels, Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone and The X Files - Alan Wake is almost inarguably the most "Remedy" game that Remedy have ever put out."

 

And there's a Log Lamp Lady?! Wow, most Twin Peaks allusions/references I come across are to either its setting, The Red Room, or Dale Cooper and his love of coffee. It's really rare to see anything that is a nod to people who've actually watched the show, versus just being aware of its existence and impact on pop culture.

 

I was starting to think that maybe I should try to find a decent Let's Play of the game so I could experience the story before Alan Wake II without having to deal with its gameplay issues...

 

Quote

 

Overall, Alan Wake is something of a game of two halves - in terms of fun and quality at least. 

The premise, the writing, the environmental design and lighting, and the palpable sense of place, tone and genre are tip-top, and on a level that is impressive - and particularly so, given the era in which it originally released. However, the gameplay variety, the mechanical finesse and some of the voice acting are fairly ropey, and tend to pull down the experience a bit.

 

It's a testament to the positive elements that, even despite the negative elements, I am still particularly interested and excited about the prospect of Alan Wake II coming this year - and that certainly speaks to the particular elements that it does right. 

Tone, premise, narrative, design - these elements are the hard ones to nail, and Alan Wake absolutely does. Gameplay, and mechanics are the ones most likely to be solved by better tech - and that Remedy have demonstrated their improvements on with Control. An Alan Wake game that retains all the good elements, but adds some more gameplay variety, and is mechanically finessed to the level that the premise deserves would be a hell of a game...

 

 

...And then at the end, you had to applaud the game's sense of place and tone, dang it! I feel like that is sometimes harder to properly appreciate in a Let's Play, which makes me wonder if it is better to experience the game first-hand, instead. Then again, it looks like the game requires a Nightmare Mode completion for platinum. That sometimes is the one trophy that stops me from getting a platinum, and since the gameplay itself isn't amazing, I should probably just go the Let's Play route. Though I was really surprised to see that the PSNP Guide ranks the Platinum as only a 4/10 difficulty! I'm curious if you agree with that assessment or not. 

[DrBloodmoney]

2 minutes ago, pelagia14 said:

 

I was starting to think that maybe I should try to find a decent Let's Play of the game so I could experience the story before Alan Wake II without having to deal with its gameplay issues...

 

 

...And then at the end, you had to applaud the game's sense of place and tone, dang it! I feel like that is sometimes harder to properly appreciate in a Let's Play, which makes me wonder if it is better to experience the game first-hand, instead. Then again, it looks like the game requires a Nightmare Mode completion for platinum. That sometimes is the one trophy that stops me from getting a platinum, and since the gameplay itself isn't amazing, I should probably just go the Let's Play route. Though I was really surprised to see that the PSNP Guide ranks the Platinum as only a 4/10 difficulty! I'm curious if you agree with that assessment or not. 

 

Thanks!

I’m always glad to get a game on someones radar, or help them off the fence if they’re on it!

 

So….TBH, I would always recommend actually playing a game - a good or a bad one - over watching it…

…but even setting that aside, I do think there’s a particular element of Alan Wake that would a bit of a nightmare to watch on a long-play:

 The fact that so much of that narrative is told in voice over, while moving through the forest.

 
As limited as the gameplay might be in those parts, watching it would be waaaay more dull, since so much of it looks like…well… dense forest, and isn’t going to be as particularly exciting to just see…

…but you’d need to see it all, just to catch the narrative elements of it.

 

I will say this: if you are thinking of playing it, don’t worry about Nightmare mode… seriously.

 

That’s not a brag… it’s a reality.

 

The thing is, aside from a bit more limitation on resources, Nightmare is weirdly, unusually similar to Normal Mode. 
Alan seems to take about the same amount of damage, and there’s about the same number of enemies…

…really the ONLY thing different, is those enemies take longer to kill.

But the thing is…there’s no real benefit to killing them on ANY difficulty.
There’s no xp in the game, and enemies don’t drop items or loot - there’s actually no reason to do anything but get past them… so even on Normal and Easy Mode, you basically end up playing exactly the same - stunning, and running.

 

As such, Nightmare ends up literally just feeling the same as Normal mode!

 

[pelagia14]

Thanks for the extra input! It's pretty rare that I watch Let's Plays over playing a game itself, but certain situations like 'awful gameplay but interesting story' or a game only being available on older/other consoles are the main reasons I'll consider doing so. I actually don't mind if a Let's Play is a bit 'dull' to watch, because in those instances I'll watch them while I'm grinding in an RPG or doing chores around the house, since I'm usually there for the story.

 

The beginning of your review made me think this might have been a good candidate for the 'awful gameplay' reason to find a Let's Play, but by the end of your review I was seriously reconsidering that thought, since I *wouldn't* be doing other things when watching it in order to experience all the environmental design and game tone. Now I've definitely decided against it, and I'll be adding Alan Wake Remastered to my list of games to keep an eye out for when they go on sale. Or maybe I'll get lucky and they'll put it as a PS+ Monthly Game a month or two before Alan Wake II releases. ?

 

ETA: I forgot to include this, but I'm glad to hear that Nightmare Mode seems to be more "Nightmare" Mode! It doesn't seem to be drastically more difficult than Normal Mode, meaning that this game wouldn't have to be a "Forever-95% Completion" on my profile. ?

 

Edited June 12, 2023 by pelagia14

[Joe Dubz]

On 6/11/2023 at 0:53 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

The whole quote is really “bad at videogames, good at patience”…

 

…I pretty much get through games via the Rocky Balboa school of thought…

 

…to paraphrase: “It ain’t about how well you play, it’s about how badly you can play and keep moving forward” ?

Man Doc, this seriously resonates with me tho!! It's kinda been my philosophy the last few years and you only just now helped me realize it. Cheers to that! We can suck as bad as we do, as long as we're persistent, right??!

 

Absolutely stellar reviews, I particularly enjoyed 3DDGH!! Man that game was such exquisite splendour in every sense of the phrase ? I've been hoping it might somehow end up on one of the PSPlus lists so I can go back and knock those last 2 trophies out?? Someday maybe, I guess I'll have to wait and see.

 

At any rate, great read as always and keep up the stellar scientific work, my good man ??

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (somewhat) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

 

Legacy

 

Grow Home

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries

Linger in Shadows

 

New

 

The Outer Worlds
Killer Frequency
 

 

 

 

Subject(s) in RED marked for PRIORITY ASSIGNEMENT

[Care of @serrated-banner9 ]

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman 3, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is gaming turdlet LA Cops ever going to lose the title of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

 

 

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Morks and Science-Mindys, as promised (and in some cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

Grow Home

 

Summary: 

 

Initial developed by a small team within Ubisoft's Reflections Studio, as something of a passion project and tech-demo, for internal release within the confines of Ubisoft itself, Grow Home was polished up and given a full release in 2015.

 

In the experimental platformer, the player takes the role of a robot named "B.U.D" (Botanical Unity Droid,) who is sent down to a planet by his M.O.M (the pleasant, nurturing and encouraging onboard ship AI counterpart,) with the task of pollinating and harvesting a giant "star Plant" - a sort of giant beanstalk growing among the floating terrains of the planet.

 

By "growing" the various stalks of the Star Plant, exploring the ever-higher plateaus of the alien planet, and connecting the stalks to "Energy Rocks", kick-starting accelerated growth and oxygenation, B.U.D moves up from the depths of the terrain towards the ubiquitous floating craft from which he originally descended. By collecting one of 8 Star Seeds, and managing to climb back to the ship itself, the player can finish the game, and by collecting all 8, they have effectively "completed" the game. 

 

The basic concept of Grow Home is - as one can probably figure out from the above synopsis - pretty slight, and not complicated.

Essentially, the entire game is a single, large, unified climbing puzzle, with B.U.D slowly, over the course of the (shortish) game, climbing back to the ship. However, what makes it feel like a full experience, is the way this is implemented. 

 

The game is not broken into "levels" or "areas" - indeed, it is possible for B.U.D to fall from the very end of the game, almost fully to the beginning of it - but the game does add some helpful things, such as teleportation pads that can be found along the way - allowing them to move up and down to different parts of the giant world, (or to respawn there, if they die or self-destruct.)

There is also the collect-a-thon element of the game. While the main focus is finding the Star Seeds, there are also energy crystals that can be collected that are scattered all over the planet, and certain items that grant additional abilities, such as jet packs allowing higher boost levels etc. While in the main thrust of the game, these abilities act as simple gates to progress and higher climbing, they also add an element of light metroidvania to the collectable process, as while most energy crystals can be collected with whatever abilities B.U.D naturally has at that point in the game, they can be a lot easier, (and al lot more fun,) to leave until later, then return to a lower section with later-game abilities to find them all.

The actual gameplay of Grow Home is really what turns a relatively simply premise into a game - in that B.U.D is not hampered by "pre-set" handholds or platforms to climb. He is able to grow the aforementioned "Star Shoots", of course, opening up possible paths to different areas in whatever way the player chooses to grow them, but also, B.U.D is actually able to climb virtually any surface in the game. The controls use a tactile "L2-for-left-hand", "R2-for-right-hand" gripping mechanic, which means the actual act of climbing becomes something of a game in itself. 

This is not dissimilar to the control scheme used in games like Heavenly Bodies, or something like Octodad, however, it should be noted that - unlike those games - Grow Home is not intended to be, and never really feels like, a QWOP-adjacent game. 
The unusual control scheme does have the potential to frustrate in the same way those games are designed to, but because of the low-poly look of the game, and the easy-breezy nature and tone, it never really feels frustrating... and actually, makes for quite a peaceful, satisfying, zen-like control feel once a player gets into a groove. There's something very relaxing about slowly climbing up and up the cliff faces or beanstalks one little robot-hand at a time - being able to look down and see the tiny specks of land the player started out in in the distance, and up to see M.O.M in her spacecraft high above, getting closer and closer!

Speaking of the visual style, it's probably the most notable and striking part of Grow Home. It's a throwback style... but not one as commonly used as most.

 

Modern throwbacks to 8-bit and 16-bit eras are very popular - virtually commonplace now. Indeed, the indie scene in particular has produced so many pixel-art games at this point, that it may actually be arguably that there are more "throwback" pixel-art games created in the "modern" era of gaming than there were actual ORIGINAL pixel-art games that those new games are "throwing back" to!

What is far less common though, is modern throwbacks to other specific art-styles of other eras. 
There are some - Return of the Obra Dinn did a marvellous job of aping the 1-bit Apple 2 era visuals, The Case of the Golden Idol does an incredible job with aping the CD-ROM pixel style of early 90's educational games, and games like Grizzland, and even Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery have looked to the early Atari consoles for inspiration... 
...but those non-NES/Master System, or non-SNES/Genesis styles still remain far less ubiquitous than their 16-bit and 8-bit counterparts, and as such, stand out when they appear.

Grow Home is one of those games that stands out due to the less common retro style it employs...
...in its case, that of the early 32-bit, PSOne, early polygon era.

 

It's a cool look, and one that even I - as someone not particularly nostalgic for the early 3D era - find genuinely pleasing to see. It's extremely low-poly, as PSOne games often were, but because of the modern tech on which it runs, it is able to implement "old-school" graphics, with elements like depth of field, and a smoothness that would have been virtually impossible in that era. The result is a game that harkens back to early 3D in all the ways that evoke rose-tinted nostalgia, but without any of the drawbacks - the "heavy-fog anti-aliasing", the ragged edges, the sharp edges, the "3D jank".
Combined with the tonal elements that also seem to be throwing back to the early PSOne days in some sense - the cartoonish, light-hearted fun and upbeat tempo most associated with games of the Banjo Kazooie / Mario 64 / Jak and Daxter / Crash Bandicoot era, it really works well - as the best kind of throwback: nostalgia for the good, with the bad-edges smoothed over.

Audio in the game is a little strange, in that there isn't a lot of it. There is some music on occasion, but it's fairly minimal, and the moment-to-moment gameplay is relatively silent, save for the sound effects of B.U.D moving around and the occasional low "groans" of the planet (or the Star Plant?) itself.
Its an odd decision - possibly made to avoid having a single piece of music repeat so often it becomes grating...
...but I do think the game would benefit - and could easily provide a home for - some nice ambient music to accompany the zen-like structure.

Overall, Grow Home is a distinct oddity in terms of visual design, and quite a winning formula in terms of gameplay. It's not a complicated or long-lasting experience, and not one fraught by danger or "burdened" by complicated nuance or narrative...
...but it's a really fun and simple game, with some very satisfying controls that feel good and natural, a simple, child-friendly and pleasant tone, and a visual style that isn't tapped often, but it more than roves the case for!

 

 

The Ranking:

 

A pretty quick one to rank in the end. 

 

I started out looking at the list for platforming games in the 3D space, and was pretty comfortable stating that while I don't think Grow Home quite has enough going on to beat out Ratchet and Clank: Nexus, I do think I fundamentally enjoyed it more than, was more original than, and it had more meat on it that, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

 

Those two games are relatively close together, so I started thinking about 2D platforming games, or at least, games with platforming in them, and the natural point settled quite quickly, in that I think the cool, unique visual look of Grow Home, and its fun, creative collectible gameplay is enough to beat out the amazing looking, but ultimately too short and too easy Hoa...
...I think Unravel still has to rank above it, due to its own unique looks, and smart puzzle gameplay.

 

As such, Grow Home finds its spot, right in between!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries

 

Summary: 

 

A 2014 Puzzle platform game from Nippon Ichi Software, and brought to the western market by NIS America, the absurdly named  htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is a Vita game through-and-through. One of the few games to really make use of the both the Vita's front and rear touch-pads...
... htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is probably the best possible argument as to why most games relegated the use of these control methods to minor, throwaway elements. 

 

Set on the eve of the year 10,000, a firefly named Hotaru, and his "dark shadow" come upon a young amnesiac girl named Mion abandoned in the ruins of a broken world. Guiding her out, and up through the desolate world, the player controls not Mion, but Hotaru and his "shadow" (in the "light World" and the "Dark world", which exist in parallel), guiding her to safety through various puzzle-platforming dangers, to safety.

Narratively, htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is not exactly a powerhouse, however, I will say, the mystery of who the girl is, and what resulted in her whereabouts at the beginning of the game are, while not particularly fleshed out or original, fairly good. It's not a story that is particularly memorable, but it is somewhat engaging - at least enough for a stubborn player to want to make it through the game.

 

The visuals too, are quite nice. There's noting stand out about them per-se - it's a painterly, part-gothic, part-fairytale look with a slightly paper-craft aesthetic that is fairly well worn territory in games, and has certainly been done with more polish and more aplomb elsewhere... but it does look fine here. 
There's some nice work done in terms of shadows and background/foreground art, and the glowing lights of the two fireflies look quite nice in contrast to the painterly aspects. 
There is a certain "Nippon Ichi" style to their games - best characterised (at least by me,) as "manga-sketchbook" (see Dokuro for better examples,) but here, in combination with the fairytale gothic, it does work.

Unfortunately, the functional narrative and relatively nice visuals are about where any positive words will end in this write up, because let's not fuck around here:
htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is truly one of the worst gaming products I have ever touched - and almost certainly the worst one I have seen come from a usually competent, and professional studio.

The gameplay is - and I chose this word carefully - an absolute ABOMINATION.

The controls are absolutely terrible - atrociously inaccurate, and the movement of the girl interminably slow and cumbersome. In order to move the girl, the player must drag their finger to move the fireflies, and the girl follows on roughly that path. She moves unreasonably slowly however...
...and because simply tapping a location is not enough - the player has to actively hold their finger on the screen for her to keep moving - this means a good chunk of the screen (you know - the part with the nice visuals, and where the puzzles need to be viewed) is obscured at all times.

Not only that, but because of the puzzling nature of the game, the player is often required to make complicated, unnatural movements with their hands, that mean by the time they have found the right angle to hold the vita, and control the character, they are "crab-clawing" the vita precariously. 
Since each of the puzzles, and the world, is filled with traps and obstacles that the girl must avoid - often requiring fairly precise timing or control - it's difficult to properly articulate just how often this means the player will inadvertently cause her to stumble right into a trap, because they can't see what they are supposed to be looking at, due to their lack of foresight in not being born with transparent fingers.

 

It is possible - luckily - to switch to analogue controls, rather than touchscreen ones, however, this has its own issues. The analogue stick controls are, if anything, even less accurate or precise than the touch-screen equivalent. For sure, the player will be able to actually see the thing they are trying to do...
...but the benefit is questionable, since actually executing on the action they want is made even more difficult by the piss-poor accuracy of this alternate control method.

As said, there are two fireflies - Hotaru - the "light" firefly, whom Mion follows, (dimwittedly and without hesitation, as she walks directly under a crusher, or into an endless chasm,) but there is also Hotaru's "dark" shadow. Mion doesn't follow the shadow firefly - instead, it is used to interact with certain objects. The "dark" firefly can only move in the shadows, and so the game allows the player to enter an alternate state, where the action pauses, and the objects in the foreground become silhouettes. the dark firefly can move between silhouetted objects (providing they are touching) and interact with specific objects that have a glowing indicator. 

 

This part of the game is interesting on paper, but becomes something of a painful frustration too - for 2 reasons.

Firstly, because actually reaching the objects tends to require very precise timing on the "switch" from light world to dark, so all objects are lined up perfectly to create a path...
...but secondly, and doubly so, because the highlight to tell you an object is interactable only appears when the "dark" firefly is pretty close to it. As such, there is a constant requirement for the player to keep lining things up, and pausing the action, just to create paths so they can check if an object is interactable or not. 
This completely breaks up what flow the game has, and means the player spends more time interrogating the world to try and figure out what they are supposed to be doing, than actually doing it.

The actual puzzles themselves are not much better. 

 

Having played more than my fair share of puzzle games, and being a big fan of the genre, I feel like I have come to understand some of the things that make for good videogame puzzles... and some of the pitfalls.
There are some minor irritations that can creep into even the best of puzzle game puzzles, but to my mind, there are three "cardinal sins" in the genre. Three ways in which videogame puzzles can doom themselves to failure, and crater any possible enjoyment on the player's part:

 

1. The puzzle is nebulous, or ill-defined, or simply a burden to actually establish the boundaries.
2. The puzzle is simple to solve, but difficult to execute, die to mechanical issues.
3. The puzzle is purely based on Trial-and-Error, without clues as to fail states prior to encountering them.

 

In virtually all cases, even good puzzle games tend to really suffer if even one of these "cardinal sins" creeps into too many of their puzzles.

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries does the near impossible: it has all three issues, in virtually every single one of its puzzles. 

 

Almost without exception, every puzzle in htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries, is overtly simple to actually solve, but is made tiresome, tedious, frustrating and dull by some combination of these elements. 

The camera is always fairly close in on the character, but the puzzles are not designed to work that way. Each one tends to require plodding the interminably slow character back and forth multiple times, to even gain a sense of what the actual parameters of the puzzle being solved is, and what the goal is. 

Interacting with objects, or making "moves" within these puzzles is both tedious, in the sense that they take forever, and are subject to the terrible controls of the game, but made doubly so, because they are often filled with potential failures that could not be predicted prior to stumbling into them... forcing the player to start over again.

Even once the objective of a puzzle is established, and the solution clear in the player's mind, they are still - at best - in for a long, slow trek to make the character actually execute on it (due, again, to the speed the game moves at,) - and at worst, still likely to fluff it up several times, since the controls are.... did I mention... terrible.

 

Audio is a bit of a nothing-burger here.

The music is pretty dull - there's not a lot of it, and what is there is not very memorable or interesting.

There's no voice work, and the sound effects are pretty rote and un-interesting.

Overall, htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is an absolute mess of game, that established a gameplay loop that not even a mother could love.

 

It is, at it's best, boring - that is, when it isn't being  frustrating-and-boring... and it is frustrating-and-boring most of the time.

It is a puzzle game that commits every possible "bad-puzzle-design" sin, wrapped in gameplay that is dismally slow, and nightmarishly unintuitive, with a control scheme (actually, two control schemes,) that are as ill-thought out and as poorly implemented as it is possible to imagine for a game that actually releases.

 

If you feel like spending a few hours watching a fairly indistinct, wide-eyed girl walk very slowly into traps that you either weren't aware of, or saw, but the controls wouldn't let you avoid, while seeing puzzle solutions in 3 minutes, but then spending 30 minutes trying to get the character to do what you tell them to do...
...then htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is the game for you.

 

If you think that sounds like a freakin' nightmare...
...then congratulations. 
You are a human.

 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is absolute bottom-of-the-barrel stuff in terms of gameplay, and frankly, I think it is really a question of whether it is actually worse than the absolute bottom games on the list so far.

 

The first hurdle is the current (and long-standing) last-place entry: LA Cops.

 

At first, in my mind, I was thinking, "well, obviously htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is terrible, but it's not MORE terrible than LA Cops... is it?"...
...but the more I thought about it, the closer a fight it became. 

 

LA Cops is turgid, unoriginal, poorly implemented tat - completely throwaway from start to miserable finish... but I believe that while it certainly was an unashamed, terrible, misunderstood copy of the gameplay of another game (Hotline Miami,) it could at least be argued that it is somewhat more original as a result. There aren't many games of that type, so LA Cops, while easily the worst version of it, is still somewhat interesting in some vague sense.

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries, on the other hand, is a puzzle platformer. There are literally thousands of those... and the fact that it not only doesn't do anything original with that concept, but manages to fail to learn a single thing about them from the thousands of examples of better games is, frankly astonishing. 

LA Cops is the worst game in a genre of only a relative handful of games.
htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is the worst game in a genre of thousands.

 

When I added to that, the fact that LA Cops is rubbish and boring, but htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is rubbish, boring, and deeply frustrating and completely mishandled mechanically... and, to top it off, it managed to make me more angry, while playing in a genre I usually like substantially more and am infinitely more forgiving of...

it paints a rough picture.

 

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries looks better than LA Cops does by a good margin... but again, looks can only count for so much when the gameplay is as bad as it is here - and while LA Cops is crap, htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is crap and virtually impossible to accurately, or even reasonably, control or play.

 

It's almost surreal to say but... if forced to replay one of the two in full... I would play LA Cops.

It's going to frustrate me no end that I'm going to have to see that ridiculous, stupid game title in each of my updates from now on - (this bloody game still managing to frustrate me, even after all these years!)...

...but after 33 rounds as the sewer king... LA Cops has finally met its match!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries is crowned the new "WORST GAME ON THE LIST"!

 

All Hail its Turgid-ness!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linger in Shadows

 

 

Summary: 

 

One of the more unusual gaming products released on PSN, Linger in Shadows - a short, interactive art-piece developed within the "demoscene" and picked up and published by Sony during the infancy of PSN as a downloadable game service. 

 

It's probably worth noting exactly what the "demoscene" is. The demoscene is is essentially a loose programming subculture, devoted to creating small-scope audio-visual presentations, primarily as artistic creations, which are shared at "demoparties" - festivals not dissimilar to indie-movie festivals - where fellow creators can view, judge and appraise demos by others. 

Fundamentally, these "demos" are created and exist simply to "be" - they are artistic works primarily, and while using the same basic building blocks of videogames, they are not generally purporting to be games themselves. 

Some, granted, are used as a means to and end - for new or aspiring game developers to showcase their artistic and creative talents as building blocks to a portfolio, in a similar fashion to how an aspiring filmmaker might create a short film to showcase their talents as a step towards feature-length products - but the fundamental concept of the demoscene is such that the artistic validity of the demos are, themselves, the end product. They are designed such that the development tools are a creative and artistic framework themselves. They are, to a demoscene dev, no different than paint and canvas are to an oil-painter, or marble is to a sculptor. 

The reason I think it's worth noting exactly what the demoscene is, is that there have been incredibly few demoscene-originated products that have made their way to walled-garden console ecosystems such as PSN (Linger in Shadows, and .detuned are the only two I am personally aware of.)

Because the genesis of those products was not particularly well publicised or advertised to potential purchasers of those products, it tended to result in a situation where the end-users were simply unaware of what the product was intended to be.

The reaction to Linger in Shadows, at the time of release, tended - at least on PSN - to be one of either confusion: "What is this thing?"... 
misunderstanding: "this is a demo of something bigger coming later?"... 
or annoyance: "I paid for this thing that is only 7 minutes long!?".

Without that knowledge of the demoscene, what Linger is Shadows is, is... simply an oddity. 

It is best described as an interactive art piece, in which a visually bizarre, amorphous entity "births" a floating black conglomeration of vaguely organic black ooze... which then flies around various city-scapes and mechanical or urban looking environments, gaining power and sentience (and an armoured squid-like body,) while a (really good, and quite exciting,) score plays.

At different points, the player can "pause" the action, or "scrub" back and forth in the timeline, and interact with different elements of the environment on the screen. Doing so at specific point, and with specific objects, can reveal specific images, which correlate to a sort of "bingo-card" of visual elements, that fills in as the player finds them.

That is... pretty much it.

It's a short, only slightly interactable thing, and it is really meant only to be absorbed, at the same level that one might absorb a painting or a piece of abstract art. The "player" takes away from it whatever they feel when they play it, and nothing more. 

 

Now, I will say - I think Linger in Shadows is a cool thing. 

I actually really like the visuals, and I think the score is excellent - and while I might not be able to articulate exactly WHY, I do find playing it to be interesting, evocative and effective as a purely artistic piece. (Certainly more so than I did .detuned.) 

However, I do think it's hard to take issue with people who's complain was "this is not a game"...
Not because it isn't - it is not, and was never intended to be - but simply because Sony themselves never really gave them any clue as to what it actually was.

Not only was there very little precedent for demoscene products appearing on PSN back then, but at the time Linger in Shadows released, PSN was young enough, that there wasn't really any precedent for anything on the service at that point.  No one knew what to expect... but they certainly didn't expect this type of thing, because console gamers had, likely, not ever been exposed to where demoscene products were coming from, nor had they been primed to understand it.

As such, there was a very real possibility, that the first - or at least one of the first - products a newly initiated PSN customer downloaded from the newly christened downloadable store, was a thing that bore virtually no resemblance to "games" as they knew them, and was never even designed to be a game at all. 

I'd make the argument that something like Linger in Shadows would work better now - when PSN is much more mature, and artistic and experimental games are much more widely understood and accepted by console players...
... but TBH, even that feels somewhat immaterial. 
The fact is, that while Sony putting Linger in Shadows on PSN all those years ago may actually have been a useful thing broadly - helping pave the way, and provided the ground work to see more experimental things on their store in the future, by priming the audience to expect more in the way of non-standard quote-unquote "games"... 
it still represents the extreme other end of the spectrum from traditional "games."

 

It didn't really result in further demoscene demos, or art of that nature appearing on PSN. It arguably opened the PSN audience to more experimental games - Games taking some of the "flavour" of the demoscene, but applying it to more palatable or familiar game types - but not necessarily genuine non-game art or demoscene works. As such, I remain doubtful whether there would be a less hostile market for demoscene art on PSN, even now.

 

I'm aware that this write up is more about the circumstances surrounding Linger in Shadows than Linger in Shadows itself - that is pretty much a requirement. The fact is, Linger in Shadows is very short, and is something that only actually playing and experiencing it is going to tell a player whether they would enjoy it. It's a largely abstracted, curious piece of artwork, not a game...
...and if that sounds like something a person would like, I'd say it's worth their time. 

 

Certainly, it is interesting...
...and that counts for something.

I also happen to think it is also evocative and compelling...
...and that counts for something too!

In the end, Linger in Shadows is a pretty odd thing for a console. 
It's an interesting window into the demoscene arena, and probably could have been used as such, but the lack of proper categorising for what it was, and where it came from resulted in a litany of market confusion, and that confusion appears, looking back, to have somewhat salted the earth for future demoscene works on the service.

 

It's a pity, because I think Linger in Shadows is a really cool thing...
but the combination of Sony's requirement for all products to have trophies, (hence, intimating "game" even where the stamp doesn't really apply,) their lack of care in addressing what the product was to an uninitiated audience, and the lack of similar future content to create a "category" in which Linger in Shadows could live, relegates it so simply being a curious PSN oddity. 
A Relic of experimentation long past, and swiftly abandoned. 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

So... Linger is Shadows is a neat, cool little thing, but let's not pretend it's more than it is, on a list of "games". It's small, and lacking in much in the way of gameplay (since, well, it isn't one,) and so it's going to rank fairly low as a result.
A shame perhaps, but this is a list of games primarily, so very experimental or very short game-adjacent things do tend to slip down the ranking by sheer lack of volume.

 

Having said that - I think there is an argument to be made that Linger in Shadows should sit fairly substantially above the only other demoscene game I'm aware of on the current list: .detuned. It is artistically fulsome as compared to .detuned, and does actually stir some emotion in a way that one didn't. .detuned feels like purely a tech demo... Linger in Shadows feels more like actual art... or at least, art to my personal tastes.

 

As such, I looked at another very small, but still technically "game" game on the list - one that wasn't a demoscene demo, but was instead a student project: the short, experimental VR experience You Are Being Followed.

 

You Are Being Followed is also a cool, short thing - and while it did make me violently motion-sick... I can't really hold that against it! Nausea aside, I came out kinda digging You Are Being Followed for what it was... but I think on balance, I like Linger in Shadows more.

 

I did, however, have a look at the placement of You Are Being Followed, and its ranking summary, and I think the reasons it fell below the next game up - Artifex Mundi joint Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink, still apply also to Linger in Shadows.
You Are Being Followed is just about the exact point at which the list changes from generally "decent-but-small" to generally "actively bad"... and as very, very small as Linger in Shadows is, it isn't bad at all...

...and so I think the correct spot for Linger in Shadows is just above You Are Being Followed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Outer Worlds

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2019 WRPG from Obsidian, The Outer Worlds took a familiar gameplay model - that most notably associated with Bethesda's Fallout and Elder Scrolls games (and which Obsidian themselves had already dabbled with in the form of Fallout: New Vegas) - and transposed it to a more contained, much smaller, yet far deeper (and less prone to bugs and jank) setting.

Set in an alternate future of 2355, in a timeline that diverged from ours in 1901, wherein William McKinley was never assassinated, and as a result, Teddy Roosevelt was never elected, and never broke up the "mega-corps" of their day, two colonisation ships - the Hope and the Groundbreaker - were sent to a small, 6-planet star system called Halcyon... funded by "The Board" - a collection of mega-corporations, and  filled with people looking for a fresh start.

 

While the Groundbreaker made it and settled the system, the Hope was lost...
...until eccentric (and possibly full-blown-mad) scientist Phinias Wells discovers it 80 years later. Unthawing a single occupant - the player - he informs them of the reality of life in Halcyon... and how the whole colony is falling to ruin by the incompetence and idiocy of the corporate governance, and sets in motion a plan whereby the player can help him revive the remaining Hope colonists...
...for him and the good of the colony... 
...or for the Board, depending on what the player decides to do!

 

As said above The Outer Worlds is a specific type of game - and one that shares its gameplay loop, visual template and "game feel" with very specific games: namely the Bethesda Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, and Obsidian's own foray into that world - Fallout: New Vegas. A lot of the basic principles of the game are directly analogous to those games, and so the best way to approach a write-up, is to look at the differences, rather than the similarities.

The best way I find to look at The Outer Worlds, is to consider this: if the quality of those games is a finite amount of water... then Fallout and the Elder Scrolls are a vast puddle, and The Outer Worlds is a narrow but deep well. There is about the same amount of "liquid" in both, but one is a mile wide and and inch deep, and the other is a foot wide, but just keeps going down and down.

 

If Fallout and The Elder Scrolls are the "No Man's Sky" of this genre, then The Outer Worlds is the "Outer Wilds".
(Hows that for some name-brand confusion!)

Plot and writing-wise, The Outer Worlds is, with the exception of one other "Bethesda-model" game - the equally "smaller-but-deeper" The Forgotten City - the best written one.

In comparison to those bigger games, The Outer Worlds is, as said, much, much smaller in footprint, however, the actual amount of writing in the game is a significantly smaller drop off by volume than the land-mass or the mission list. Conversations for virtually every encounter and certainly every mission, are distinctly more malleable and significantly longer and more involved than any I can recall from any of the "Big" games of this nature. 

 

Even Fallout: New Vegas - certainly the "wordiest" (and best written) of those bigger games - has a lot of writing, but it is generally functional, rather than flavourful in nature. It exists either as a mechanical function of the game, or to flesh out the lore of the world, or, ideally, both.
Now, don't get me wrong - those things are very important - but in The Other Worlds, the writing rarely feels like an "info dump" in the same way, because the extensive dialogue is not only mechanically functional (affecting the numerous possible outcomes of a quest, virtually every one of which has multiple possible paths,) and giving significant world-building and lore... it is also adding much more flavour, in the sense that it is also much more character-driven... and it is funny. 

 

The world The Outer Worlds takes place in is an absurdist, commercial dystopia, run my mega-corporations, but unlike most cyberpunk style corporate dystopias that share this broad idea, these Mega-corps are demonstrably and overtly stupid. They are run run by overtly stupid and/or unashamedly and transparently evil and maniacal people. It's a world more resembling Brazil (the movie, not the country!) than Bladerunner.

 

This results in a general tone - and specific dialogue - that is overtly funny in its crassness and devaluation of human life, and the use of HR "corporate-speak" taken to the Nth degree, and practically (and in some cases literally) turned into a pseudo-religion, is really cleverly written, and manages to remain pretty funny all the way through. Everyone the player meets is somewhere on the spectrum between insane, evil, and snivelling corporate sell-out, and lives in a world that sees humans as a resource no more (and usually less) important than the cans of Saltuna they produce. 

 

Obsidian do a lot with this - they keep the jokes working far longer than most writing in games would - but do another smart thing in terms of comedy... they let the player be stupid. 
There is an option in the game, if the player makes their character have a below average "intelligence" stat from the start, to open up special "dumb-guy" responses... and I absolutely encourage every player to do this! 
The "Dumb Guy" responses tend to result in some of the funniest lines and reactions in the game - and its actually genuinely impressive that the writers are able to keep the narrative going, and account for these all the way, while keeping the main thread chugging along!

 

The basic gameplay is familiar to anyone who has played a Bethesda game, and as such, I won't go on about how the missions are structured per-se, but instead, concentrate on the biggest differences between the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, and The Outer Worlds. 

 

For starters, the narrative, as said, is far more variable - and more importantly, feels robust in the way it is variable. 

In Skyrim, as a counter-point, a player can guide the narrative, but it often feels rickety and haphazard as a result. Because the design-philosophy of that game is quantity, rather than quality, the way the story varies is generally by simply having so much content, that the players narrative is shaped by which missions they encounter, not necessarily how they approach doing them.
They can choose to simply kill someone, rather than do their mission, but generally, that is the end of it. Some missions will become unavailable, but it doesn't affect too much beyond that. It feels more like the player is "breaking" the narrative, than "shaping" it.

 

In The Outer Worlds, on the other hand, virtually all playthroughs will result in finding the same basic missions... but the way they choose to approach and "solve" them is far more important to how the narrative plays out.  
It doesn't really feel like the player is "breaking" anything, no matter how they choose to approach the game - it feels like because the game is smaller and more contained, Obsidian were able to really drill down on virtually every possible scenario, and write reasonable, smart ways out of every thing the player could do, that still make sense for the overall narrative. 

 

As an example - in one of the two (very good) DLC add-ons to the game, there is a long-running quest involving two principle characters, whom the player can chose to align with, or switch allegiances to, as it develops. If the player kills one of these principle characters before that quest concludes, another character will actually step in, after some time, to take their place...
...but Obsidian don't simply make them a "stand-in". 
In that scenario, the entire premise of the original narrative is recontexualised into something else - the motivations of the original quest-giver are revealed as being different than if they player hadn't killed them... and the game finds a way to keep going, on a whole new level. This isn't "further info" that feeds into the other possible path - it's a different path, where the players past actions and the narrative's past, are retrofitted correctly to account for tier new path. It's schrodinger's narrative - it is neither ne, nor the other, until it needs to be.

It's really smart, and actually, gives the player a real insight into just how malleable the narrative is. There are entire, long, interesting conversations and lore that would almost certainly be missed by the majority of players there... and finding it tends to suddenly make them realise: "Shit, how much stuff is there in the rest of the game, if I start just doing odd shit I hadn't thought of?!"

Another major way the game diverges, is in the lack of an overall map. 
Rather than a single, unified world, the player has multiple smaller locations to visit. These are still "open world" in the broad sense - there are still optional areas to find, to loot, to fight in... but they are much more contained than a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls map, and as such, feel a bit more bespoke and hand-crafted than those bigger game maps do.
These are are "warped to" via use of the player's spacecraft: The Unreliable. The Unreliable acts as a base of operations, a hub for the companions (more on them later!), a mode of travel, and a sort of "regrouping" area, where the player can talk to the Ship's AI, and get information, advice... and a lot of pretty funny back and forths.

The biggest difference in terms of these kind of games, however, is the way companions function... in the sense that they are much closer to how companions work in the Mass Effect series, than in Fallout or the Elder Scrolls franchises. 

Companions in Bethesda games (and Fallout: New Vegas) are always a good source of interesting lore, and here, they are no different. However, in those bigger games, they had a tendency to be relatively useless in combat, and a little unwieldy. They always felt rather superfluous to the actual narrative, and could be as much a curse as a blessing when exploring, due to the increased flimsiness of the game engine when dealing with AI companion' movements etc.

 

Here, however, companions are one of the highlights of the game. 
The player ends up recruiting (if they chose to) 6 different characters, and each is funny, well implemented, have genuine things to say on mission, and are actually useful in a fight. 

Companions are worth taking on every mission - they can fight, of course, but they also add benefits befitting their backgrounds. The Outer Worlds actually surfaces and leans into its "gamified" elements - it is not shy about them, and will show, for example, the exact "perception" requirement to pass a specific speech check, or the exact "lock-pick" requirement to open a safe, or the exact "lie" stat required to... well... tell a lie and get away with it.
Taking specific companions on the players part will give them bonuses to these attributes, and so because they can only take two at a time, it benefits the player to really consider what kind of task they are going to do, or how they want to do it. 
If they are going to be talking their way through things, best to bring someone who boosts their lying skill. 
If they are going to be sneaking, maybe bring someone who boosts hacking, or lock-picking.
 If they are going to be shooting, best bring your friendly, homicidal cleaning robot, who douses enemies in toxic detergent!

 

These companions also provide a lot of good comedy, in the form of flavour dialogue on regular missions, of their specific character missions (essentially, the "loyalty" missions from the Mass Effect series)... 
...as well as a lot of great back and forth between each-other, particularly on board the Unreliable. 
Their quarters are right next to each-other, and they need to share a kitchen and a bathroom... and you're going to hear exactly how much trouble that causes!

 

Gameplay in The Outer Worlds could, of course, feel shallow, given that it is using a design and gameplay model usually associated with huge, open-world games, and applying it to a smaller area, but it works, primarily because of the almost complete eradication of the biggest drawback those massive worlds entail: bugs and "open-world-jank".

Fallout and The Elder Scrolls are - let's face it - riddled with bugs, and while most are non game breaking, and simply result is some chuckles, The Outer Worlds manages to basically appear big-free, because the size is small enough that the game doesn't groan under the weight of itself... and because the comedic tone means that even where some "jank" does creep in, which would result in unintentional comedy in the other games, it feels fine, because the overall tone here is deliberate comedy.

In some sense, Obsidian seem to have realised early on, that these kind of game, made in these kind of engines, have a tendency to become inherently funny, whether they want them to be or not...
...so they lean into it. 
And, it works.

 

In terms of visuals - and world-building aesthetic specifically - the fact that The Outer Worlds is set in the distant future of and alternate past makes it virtually impossible to avoid being immediately struck by comparisons to Fallout. 
Fallout, after all, is also set in the future of an alternate past, and as such has a somewhat similar design ethos. Both are amalgams of futuristic tech, but with strong allusions to specific periods of design history. In Fallout's case, the 50's, and in The Outer World's case, the 1900's. 

 

Both lean heavily into the "future-but-retro" feel, but both are drawing from different eras, and to The Outer World's credit, they do a pretty good job of keeping all 50's-style, Mad-Men-era advertisement art well away from their own aesthetic, to try not to step on Fallout's turf. 
Having said that though, because the "future-retro" aesthetic is quite striking and relatively un-worn territory outwith a few select games, and because 1900's advertisement art is not massively different in scope to its 50's equivalent, there are some areas where it becomes impossible not to draw direct comparisons. 

Remember when Bioshock Infinite was drawing from a different era of design than Bioshock, but they were still clearly "of a type"? Well, the same does somewhat apply to Fallout and The Outer Worlds. 

 

I do, however, think The Outer Worlds looks significantly better than Fallout - or even any of the Elder Scrolls games - primarily because of the reduced scope. The lack of requirement for re-using assets ad-nauseum over a massive world, means individual areas can be much more distinct. The lack of requirement to look like any facsimile of Earth helps too. 
While there is no over-arching world, the game still allows quite a bit of exploration on the smaller individual planets the player visits, and while there aren't a huge number of them, the are all distinct looking,  have unique and divergent flora and fauna, and make for a cool universe to explore. At no point during Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls, did I ever find myself simply looking at a vista, or a sky-box, and thinking "wow, that looks cool". In The Outer Worlds, that happened quite a few times.

Character models look good - and more than that, different armours and outfits are fun - it's a curiously fun thing to see the companions - who feel more aligned with Mass Effect than with Fallout - still be able to be fully kitted out with any combination of armours and weapons, and to see them looking that way wherever they go. 

Design of things like the ships and the technological elements are fun and distinct, and suit the "haphazardly thrown together" world that Halcyon is.

Audio is good in The Outer Worlds too. The score is fine - not superlative, but at worst functional, and in spots, very stirring and evocative, and the sound effects are decent.

Where it excels though, is in the voice work.
There is a huge amount of dialogue, and while it's not exactly on par with a straight, simple narrative game - this is no Last of Us - the voice work and acting in the game is a considerable cut above all the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.

It's closer to the other Fallout / Elder Scrolls adjacent-but-smaller game: The Forgotten City. The voice work is clearly "of a game" - it's not naturalistic, as it would be basically impossible to make some of the huge conversations in the game sound naturalistic, given that player is in complete control of every response...
...but it does a much better job with its smaller scope than any of the "bigger boy" games playing in the same turf could hope to achieve.

 

In terms of voice work, I'd liken it closest to something like a comedic Mass Effect... and given my own love for Mass Effect, I think that's high praise. Certainly there is less scope for rousing, goos-pimply speeches - The Outer Worlds is funny, and decidedly non-serious - but the quality is there... and actually, hitting those comedic lines properly is something not all that easy, and the actors here do it fairly well.

 

Overall, the thing about The Outer Worlds that really comes through, is that while inarguably the "smallest" of the Bethesda/ Obsidian style WRPGs to still maintain the full suite of gameplay those games afford, "small" is not really the word that best fits. 
The best fitting term is "compact".

 

The experience of playing the game is certainly much faster and much less sprawling than a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls - the player is levelling up once every half hour, rather than every 5 hours, for example -  but in reality, very little of the best experiences of those games is actually lost. 
It doesn't feel like any important section or segment of those style of games has been excised, but rather, that the gaps between the important parts have. 

Fundamentally, playing something like Skyrim, the player is enjoying the freeform aspect of picking up quests, choosing how to approach them, levelling up their character, getting better and better weapons and armour, meeting new people, getting to new places, and crafting their own version of a broad narrative. 
In virtually every one of these aspects, The Outer Worlds is not only doing the same thing... but it is often doing it better... and all it is "missing" from that gameplay cycle, is the "downtime"... the portions of those games between all those parts, where the player is simply doing fetch quests to get to the next level up, or cleaning up inventory, or doing another dungeon that looks remarkably like every other dungeon.

 

The Outer Worlds doesn't have a massive open world, and it doesn't have even close to the same level of exploratory "I've never been here... let's just go!" aspect to it...
...but what it replaces it with is far, far more depth in terms of variability of the main narrative, far more depth in terms of individual conversations, far more variety in terms of environments and mission type, and a much more robust feeling, deeper involvement with NPC companions.

It's not a game where the player wants to play a single, massive playthrough, in which they do everything... instead, it is designed to be so malleable, that it is far more fun (and much more viable,) to play multiple playthroughs, seeing the same narrative play out in different ways - and the fact that it takes 10-15 hours to get to that point, rather than 100-150 really helps to make that work.

It's a really smart, really fun changing up of the existing Bethesda/Obsidian formula, and one that works very, very well in all the areas in which those games are good...
...and, it does it all, while being genuinely funny and charming.

 
There are folks who are upset because the next "big" Bethesda game of this type - Starfield - will not be appearing on PS5. 
I'm a fan of Bethesda's big, open-world games... but having played Skyrim and The Outer Worlds both in the recent past, I can state comfortably that Starfield won't be the one I'm sad to see locked out of my console of choice...
...it'll be The Outer Worlds 2.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

The comparison points for The Outer Worlds are pretty obvious from the above - all 3 Fallout games and Skyrim are already ranked, as is the other smaller-scope "Bethesda-adjacent" game, The Forgotten City.

The Fallout games are a little odd in their rankings tough, as fundamentally, their placements all represent some kind of balance between game quality and the technical issues that often plague them. 
Probably the actual "best" game in terms of writing, narrative and gameplay (Fallout: New Vegas) is also the most plagued by technical issues on console, and ends up ranking lowest of the three overall as a result. Fallout 4, arguably marginally weaker in terms of narrative than Fallout 3, ranks slightly higher due to its relative lack of glitches and bugs, and its increased mechanical prowess. Curiously, the only Bethesda-style game on the list that really holds its ranking purely based on the quality of the game and the writing, unaffected as it is by technical issues, is The Forgotten City.

 

The Outer Worlds is, essentially, bug-free, and glitch-free - certainly as compared to the bigger games in that style. Because I think the trade off made in The Outer Worlds - sacrificing the large open world, for smaller ones, and the giant scope for a more compact one - is not only counterbalanced by the benefits of deeper variation, smarter writing, better dialogue, and far greater mechanical finesse, but a trade well worth making, and one that is a great net-benefit to the game type, I feel it is a virtual requirement that The Outer Worlds rank higher than even the highest ranked Fallout game - Fallout 4. 
I really do love the Fallout games, but The Outer Worlds proves to me - absolutely and unequivocally, that a much smaller scoped Fallout, with more focus on deeper, more malleable narratives than on sheer size, is really what I would want of the series going forward. 

Really, it comes down to the question: "does The Outer Worlds rank higher than The Forgotten City?"

 

I pondered this one a while, but while I think The Outer Worlds does beat it out in some significant areas - it is a longer game, while retaining most of the deepness and richness of the lore...
...I do think the writing of The Forgotten City remains a cut above, even accounting for the fact that The Outer Worlds is being funny, where the Forgotten City is being serious.

I also think the central through-line - the mystery and the premise - of The Forgotten City is more original and more absorbing than The Outer Worlds' is. The gameplay in The Outer Worlds is more varied for sure - there are no companions, and very little "action" in The Forgotten City...
...but it makes up for it with its philosophical and historical conversations and moral discussions, which are both smart, and interesting... and made very fun to play out.

It's not a massive defeat, but I do think on balance, The Outer Worlds is bested by The Forgotten City.

"Between Fallout 4 and The Forgotten City" still leaves The Outer Worlds in loft company, however - the games between them are all very, very good ones, and not really particularly similar for 1-to-1 comparison.

 

It came down to simply picking games in the field, working down, and asking the old "is it overall more awesome than The Outer Worlds?".

 

For Dishonoured: Death of the Outsider, the answer I think is "Yes"...
For Resident Evil 2 Remake, the answer is "yes"...
For Dead Nation, it was a close call, but I think the answer is a very marginal "yes"...

...but for Far Cry 4, I think the answer is the first "no" - The Outer Worlds is more awesome than it.

 

As such, The Outer Worlds finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

Killer Frequency

 

Summary: 

 

A curious game from Team 17, Killer Frequency operates as something of an odd hybrid between Adventure Game, Puzzle Game and interactive Radio Play.

 

The player takes the role, over the course of a single midnight-4am radio broadcast, of Forrest Nash - a former "big-time" radio host, who's career has hit the skids for some undisclosed reasons, and has found himself knocked down to running a Call-In Talk Show on the graveyard shift for KFAM - the local radio station in the small, Podunk town of Gallows Creek.

 

Near the beginning of one of his broadcasts in his first few weeks on the job, a call is received from the local 9-1-1 operator, who informs him that she has found the town Sheriff dead and the only active police deputy unconscious. After Forrest, (and his endearingly cheerful producer, Peggy,) talk her through a dangerous run-in with an assailant - who appears to be a reincarnated serial killer and local legend, who terrorised the town 30 years prior - the operator informs them that she has to drive to the neighbouring town to get help... which will take several hours. 

As the only other facility with multiple phone lines and personnel with experience manning them, she asks the station to take over her duties - routing 9-1-1 emergencies to the show in her absence. 
As such, Forrest and Peggy - as the only two personnel at the station during the graveyard slot - must continue running their broadcast, all the while fielding the (many) emergencies that come up, owing to the return of the phantom "Whistling Man"... all the while, still running their show!

 

Let's just address this right at the start: It's a really, really silly premise.
However... it's one that just about works with the "spooks and comedy" tone of the game. 

Once the player (and Forrest and Peggy) get over the absurdity of it, and are willing to just go with it, it makes for a really odd, and kind of winning, gameplay loop.
The tone is spooky chills, rather than scares - sort of an R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" as opposed to Stephen King or Clive Barker - and it does manage to hit that pretty well. 

The narrative is helped a lot by the fact that the voice work in the game is fairly heightened and theatrical, as opposed to naturalistic. Even when in mortal danger, the performances are more like one would hear in a well produced daytime radio-play or a fictional narrative podcast than aiming for genuinely frightening. 

This voice work is very good too - the nature of the game means occasionally there are rather abrupt swings in tone - where Peggy and Forrest must swing back to lightness after a particularly unsuccessful attempt to save someone, for example - but the fact that the writing does a pretty good job of bridging all possible outcomes back into the main narrative helps in that regard... as does the odd premise. Forrest and Peggy are, after all, still hosting an entertainment show at the same time as dealing with the horrifying events of the night, so there would probably be some pretty awkward shifts in tone as they try to keep that train on the tracks if such a bizarre event were to happen in real life!

Essentially, the gameplay boils down to relatively discrete, individual puzzles, as different people call in with their emergencies or Whistling Man encounters, and Forrest and Peggy use what information they can glean from the calls, and from items around the station, to help the people through them alive. 
In one case, it might be looking through a car manual, to find how to hot-wire a specific model of vehicle, in another, it might be using a town map and bits of information to figure out which take-out food provider would be able to deliver to them, and how to get a message to them using that. 
Finding a map of the town's "Maize Maze" to help a lost person in one scenario, or figuring out which code to put into an entry-gate security system to avoid the alarm sounding in another.

The puzzles are never particularly difficult, however, there is often quite a tight time requirement for answering caller questions - so while figuring out what the concept of a puzzle is might be fairly simple, actually solving it under pressure can be quite fraught and fun.

The game has no "Game-Over" state either - the story and narrative is designed to continue no matter the outcome for any individual character, and it actually stitches these together pretty seamlessly. Playing the game multiple times, I was actually quite impressed with how variable the dialogue is - there have been lines designed for a lot of combinations of outcomes, and for different player actions, and they work well for the most part. 

Where the game does miss a bit of a trick, however, is in the puzzle answers themselves. The puzzles are fine to solve, but once they are solved once, they don't change between playthroughs. Despite clearly being designed in such a way that the game could have worked by varying these up - making, for example, the car's serial number be different each time, requiring different methods from the manual to be used, they are actually static. The answers are always the same, which feels a bit of a wasted opportunity, and tends to sap the game of the replay value that the variable story deserves. 
In fact, I can't speak to the development, but I feel confident in guessing that the original intention WAS to have these puzzles be dynamic and changeable - as so many of the solutions are clearly designed in such a way as facilitate that kind of implementation - so it's possible that simple budgets and scheduling required the developer to abandon such a design, in favour of single, static solutions. 

 

The game does certainly justify repeat playthroughs in terms of narrative (indeed, for Trophy Hunters, the game requires a minimum of 2 playthroughs - an "everyone dies" and an "everyone lives"... and will probably have 3, since most blind playthroughs will result in a "some survive, some don't", as mine did!)
The variable lines and non-critical choices result in some decent variation...
...but the puzzles themselves become rather throwaway once solved a single time.

The visuals of the game are actually very nice. There isn't much required to be rendered really - virtually all the "action" of the game is purely in audio, (obviously,) but thats not to say the KFAM radio station isn't nice to look at. 95% of the game will take place in a single location - behind the DJ desk (so much so, in fact, that the developer adds a completely optional and non-critical activity - a stack of paper balls, and a basketball hoop above the trash, that they can tinker with while listening to calls) - but as the game progresses, the player gets access to more and more areas of the station they can explore in search of clues to help the hapless potential victims, and doing so is fun. 

The whole visual style is somewhat cartoonish - it's not exactly cell-shaded, but objects have a think black outline getting somewhere close to cell-shaded style, and it works nicely in a game like Killer Frequency, which is aiming for some light chills, but keeping things fairly light, and never overtly scary.

 

There are never any fully visible humans. Even Peggy, the player's producer, (serving as tutorial, confidante, friend and helper,) is only partially visible - seen throughout the whole game through muted glass, making her not much more than a silhouette in practice. Some credit should be paid though, to the fact that while Peggy is only seen in this form, there are a pretty good selection of body movements from her, which in combination with the voice work, go further than one might expect to giving her a distinct personality, and making the player feel less "alone" in a game virtually devoid of visible people. 

 

That brings us to audio, and here, the game does very well.

 

As said, the voice work is pretty heightened and similar in tone to old-timey radio-plays, or radio broadcast narratives, and within that context, it works. There are quite a lot of characters in the story over the course of the night, and some are better than others, but characters are distinct and specific enough that when they recur, the player can identify them clearly. 

The two most prominent voices are the player character - Forrest Nash, who has the bulk of the voice work - and Peggy, and both work pretty well. Forrest's rather lethargic and downtrodden persona when off-mic, and his "game-face" audio when on-air both work, and Peggy's infectious optimism makes her a genuinely winning character that helps to make a game who's format could easily become grating or stale stay fun throughout.

 

Foley work is very good too - because the game requires all "action" to be off-screen, and because in some instances, hearing the background noise of an audio "scene" is a requirement for solving the particular puzzle, there is a level of specificity required of the foley work, on which it pretty much always delivers.

 

The score is fine - it's mostly brooding tones, with some 80's-style synth rock underpinnings, none of which is hugely memorable, but al of which feels appropriate for the game.

 

The one area that is perhaps a little disappointing - or at least, tends to betray the limited budget of the game - is in the diagetic music though. 
Because Forrest is producing a call-in talk and music show, he (and therefore, the player,) is often putting on records to cap scenes, or to fill time as he and Peggy take calls or talk off-air. There is a selection of records available (including some collectible additions found throughout the station,) and most of these are perfectly fine music...
...but they are not real, licensed tracks, and in most cases, are simply instrumental music, done in the STYLE of the 80's but don't really represent a VERSION of 80's pop or rock tracks. 

Were the game higher budget, with the kind of money available to licence real 80's tracks, or simply to commission 80's revival bands to record real tracks for these, I suspect the game would benefit from the increased verisimilitude, but as it stands, the music that plays feels more like a placeholder - it is representing the IDEA of specific types of music, rather than actually BEING them.

 

On the other hand, the one song that does seem to be a legitimate, commissioned "rock track" in the game is not actually diagetic - it's the song "Killer Frequency" which plays over the closing credits...
...and I do have to admit, it's pretty bad, and probably the single piece of music in the game I actively disliked... so maybe the answer is: we didn't have the budget, so didn't try to pretend we did!

 

 

Overall, Killer Frequency is a pretty unusual game - not one that is likely to be gracing any "best of the year" type lists, and isn't necessarily the kind of game that one would replay for years to come...
...but it's a small, fairly charming thing, that takes an unusual concept and a pretty bizarre premise, and turns it into something genuinely good fun, does far more things right than wrong, and for a lower budget game, is genuinely impressive in some visual and audio elements.

 

The voice work is good, most of the humour lands pretty well, and actually, the central mystery which Forrest and Peggy are solving throughout the night is interesting, and fairly well worked out and executed.

 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Killer Frequency is a tough one to figure out how to approach ranking, because it's an unusual game, so obvious comparisons are hard to come by.

Essentially, I looked at the two most prominent elements of the game - puzzle-mystery, and comedy, and started looking for games that might fall somewhere in that crossover...
...and the first one to pop out was the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy.

 

Those games are mysteries also, and pretty funny and comedic in their own rights, (and for what it's worth, they also have the same issue, in that the solutions are static, and therefore, only really playable as a "mystery" the first time.)

While I think Killer frequency is the better looking game, and has a more engaging overall single narrative, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is probably the better written game, and certainly has the more involving puzzles and complex mysteries over it's long length and episodic format. Killer Frequency has voice acting, which helps it, but Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is much longer and fundamentally, has better ongoing characters. 

While Killer Frequency has some good wins in that fight, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy still comes out the clear victor.

Looking lower then, another game with some puzzle-solving and mystery is Backbone. Backbone is a great looking pixel-art game - I'd say it wins on visuals, and the mystery itself is more engaging for the most part... but I think the characters and dialogue in Killer Frequency beat it. Backbone wins on tone... but Killer Frequency wins on puzzles... and on the variation of the narrative over multiple playthroughs. 

 

It's close, but I think Backbone does manage to retain its place - but only just.
It's a marginal win, and the game right below Backbone currently - pure puzzle game Shady Part of Me, I think should rank below the odd mix of comedy and horror that Killer Frequency offers...

 

...and so Killer Frequency finds its spot, just below Backbone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

Thanks to @serrated-banner9 for putting in a request!

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally beats out LA Cops as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'!

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

 

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

 

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[pelagia14]

On 6/21/2023 at 3:38 AM, DrBloodmoney said:

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman 3, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is gaming turdlet LA Cops ever going to lose the title of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

How will I recognize your "Newest Test Subjects" posts without LA Cops being mentioned in them?! ? 

[DrBloodmoney]

23 minutes ago, pelagia14 said:

 

How will I recognize your "Newest Test Subjects" posts without LA Cops being mentioned in them?!  

 

Tell me about it - as the king of the shit-pile for over a year, it's practically a reflex for me to type that one...

 

...and now I have to type out the most awkward, stupid game title in history every time instead ?

[grayhammmer]

8 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

Tell me about it - as the king of the shit-pile for over a year, it's practically a reflex for me to type that one...

 

...and now I have to type out the most awkward, stupid game title in history every time instead 

I'm not sure if your integrity will allow it, but what if you just type "The Firefly Diaries" and leave off the letter vomit from the title?

[grayhammmer]

Sorry for posting twice in a row, but I would like to put in a request for Minit, a game that I just platinumed and found decent if not a bit short.

[DrBloodmoney]

15 minutes ago, grayhammmer said:

Sorry for posting twice in a row, but I would like to put in a request for Minit, a game that I just platinumed and found decent if not a bit short.

 

flagged with your name in the Priority List! ?

[Breakingthegreen]

 

 

On 22/06/2023 at 11:18 AM, DrBloodmoney said:

All Hail its Turgid-ness!

We stan htoL#NiQ in my house, best game I never played, question is though, would it have remain the worst if it was the PC version given the controls are apparently better?

 

Also...

 

Harmony is coming out in a few days on Playstation, and it's got me in a DontNod mood, and their most interesting title in my opinion, especially for the time it was released, It's Me! Remember? Wait not me... Remember Me! Sorry forgot the name ironically. I'm nominating that game for the ranking.

[DrBloodmoney]

14 hours ago, breakingthegreen said:

We stan htoL#NiQ in my house, best game I never played, question is though, would it have remain the worst if it was the PC version given the controls are apparently better?

 

I doubt it - it would be more playable, but it would also be even more generic.... it would be less infuriating and broken, but fundamentally, all you'd be left with is a sub-par puzzle platformer with no ideas, no legit challenge, plenty of bullshit, and a ten-a-penny feel to it!

 

14 hours ago, breakingthegreen said:

Also...

 

Harmony is coming out in a few days on Playstation, and it's got me in a DontNod mood, and their most interesting title in my opinion, especially for the time it was released, It's Me! Remember? Wait not me... Remember Me! Sorry forgot the name ironically. I'm nominating that game for the ranking.

 

added to the priority list, with your name ?

 

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (somewhat) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

New

 

A Plague Tale: Requiem
Dante’s Inferno
Fights in Tight Spaces
Endling
Viewfinder

 

 

 

No Priority Rankings this time, as there's no Legacy games - during the school summer holidays, it's hard enough for me to keep on top of the new games, let alone dip into the Legacy ones!

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman 3, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is newly crowned gaming-poopsicle-supreme htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary going to keep the title of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Samanthas and Science-Darrins, as promised (and in some cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

 

A Plague Tale: Requiem

 

Summary: 

 

Released in 2022, Asobo Studio's sequel to their surprise cult-favourite-come-succesful-B-Game A Plague Tale: Innocence, A Plague Tale: Requiem continues the story of Amicia De Rune and her cursed younger brother Hugo.

 

Taking place around six months after the original game, the player finds themselves - along with the sibling's mother and her apprentice Lucas, seeking a new life in Provence. The plague that still ravishes the nation is remains at large, but is relatively benign in that region (or so they believe), and a group of religious medics known as The Order, who have long studied the Prima Macula - the infection Hugo carries, which is inexorably tied to the rats and the plague - are ready to study Hugo.
After a chance encounter with some nefarious bee-keepers results in aggressive action, waking the Macula in Hugo's blood, the family become increasingly aware that The Order will be of no use, and that the spread of the plague cannot be contained, and will follow Hugo forever, and they set out to try and follow the only possible "cure" that they can... 
...in the form of a vague dream Hugo himself has had, leading them on a perilous trek across France in search of a mysterious island and the healing waters Hugo is convinced it is home to.

The narrative elements of A Plague Tale: Requiem are. as they were in the original game, front and centre here, but while the original game's narrative was certainly a highlight, I think it's worth noting just how much of a considerable step-up the story-telling gets with this sequel. 

I am deliberately being vague (as I often do) about the narrative elements, and only touching lightly on the set-up, and that is deliberate - but suffice to say, the overall narrative is not only a good story, but more importantly - and more unusually - it is a particularly well told, and maturely told one. 

Characters in  A Plague Tale: Requiem are not black and white. Each has significant strengths and character traits... and significant weaknesses and foibles. That's an accolade that can be handed to a fair number of modern narrative-based games, granted, but something that A Plague Tale: Requiem manages to do, that is significantly more difficult to thread the needle on, is that not only are the characters interesting enough and flawed enough to come off as well-rounded, but their motivations in individual scenes and their reasons for doing the things they do always seem to genuinely serve those character flaws, and feed from them. It is one thing to write characters that have conflicted or flawed emotive reasoning, but it is quite another to consistently drive an interesting plot that feels genuinely driven and affected by those flaws... and in A Plague Tale: Requiem's case, I think that is done particularly well.

 

The primary relationship in the game is between Amicia and Hugo - Hugo serving as a near constant companion throughout, while other characters flit in and out of the fairly winding plot - and this relationship works well, and serves as the backbone to the entire story. 
Hugo is a child... and relationships with children can be some of the hardest to get right in a videogame. Children can be irritating or unreasonable, or overly sentimental, or foolhardy - that is the nature of childhood - and games have a significant problem in that regard, simply because they are so much longer than, for example, a film. 

 

Game developers and writers are stuck in a particularly difficult spot handling relationships with children - they can lean into those elements, and risk annoying the player... or they can avoid them, and risk turning the relationship into something that feels false, or simply doesn't "feel" at all. A child companion can't simply work like an adult companion - they cannot be as capable as a fully fledged adult - either physically, or mentally - or else the narrative doesn't work... but if they are too incapable, or too unlikeable, the game risks being cumbersome to the point of diminishing the fun of the gameplay.

Hugo feels like a real child. His innocence and fears, and his reliance and affection for his sister feels well done, and the relationship between Amicia and Hugo feels genuine in a way game relationships seldom do. Hugo is sad, or angry, or depressed or vulnerable at various times in the story, and Amicia's reaction to this seems always to work. She is annoyed as the player is annoyed at annoying behaviour, but is also patent and cognisant of Hugo's feelings. She appears to genuinely love her brother, and genuinely want to protect him...
...and that feeling translates across to the player. we want to protect him too - not simply because the gameplay mechanics require us to, but because the performances of the two characters make it so.

 

That dynamic is actually used to fairly painful and pointed effect throughout the game too... via the slow, dark creep of dramatic irony. There comes a point - it is never explicitly hammered home, so that point will come at different times for different players - but there will come a point, where the inevitability of the "true end" of this narrative becomes clear. As the characters continue struggling valiantly against the tides of fate, and more and more of the in-game characters begin to see where this is going... the player does too. 
One by one, characters start to treat Hugo and Amicia differently, as they realise the inevitability and inescapability of the only real way out... and we see it too... but the last person to see it, (or at least, to face it, and admit they see it,) is Amicia herself. 
The game does a particularly good job, and a particularly painful job, of forcing the player to keep going with Amicia, long past the point where she is the only one with any false hope remaining...
...and then of being the one to force her hand, when the inevitable horror of it finally becomes clear to her.

As said, the narrative elements are a significant step up from the previous game, but that is not the only area - or even the primary area - of improvement in A Plague Tale: Requiem. 

 

Visually, the step up from the previous game is pretty astounding. The original game was one that looked fairly nice - certainly for a modestly budgeted game, it was one that made its visual mark, and certain technical achievements (particularly good lighting and fire-tech, and the curious and grotesque movement of the swarms of rats,) helped to elevate the visual signature of the game... but the actual environments were fairly standard looking. Never bad, but generally not stunning or hugely stand-out. 

A Plague Tale: Requiem, on the other hand, has some of the most beautiful vistas and environmental design I have seen in games. It helps, of course, that A Plague Tale: Requiem takes place over a much wider spectrum of environments, and that unlike A Plague Tale: Innocence, A Plague Tale: Requiem has significant scope for playing in "nice" environments - ones not yet laid waste to by the plague - but even taking that into account, it's genuinely difficult for me to recall a game franchise that has seen such a major step up in graphics within such a short timeframe between two entries. I rarely get caught up in using in game "photo modes", taking snaps of the environments I'm in, but in the case of this game, I ended up taking loads of them... for simply the same reason that one takes photos while on holiday. Because I saw a thing that looked beautiful, and wanted to preserve it!

 

The actual art-style of A Plague Tale: Requiem is simply "realistic" - there isn't a major stylistic focus here, the developers simply electing to show things "as they would be"... but the result is still quite unusual, simply because of the setting. There are other games that take place in Europe during this approximate timeframe - some Assassin's Creed games, and games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance spring to mind - but actually, the game that A Plague Tale: Requiem most often reminded me of was actually one not set in our world at all... it was Dark Souls. 
The world of Dark Souls is, of course, a fantasy realm, and A Plague Tale: Requiem is aiming to recreate France in the 14th century... but because the stylistic inspiration for Dark Souls is, primarily, medieval Europe, they end up in an unusually similar space - one by approximation fiction and one by recreation of fact.

 

Gameplay-wise, A Plague Tale: Requiem is also a step up from its predecessor - though it's worth noting that while the differences are, I think, a net benefit to A Plague Tale: Requiem, the broadening of the gameplay does introduce a few new issues not present in its predecessor. 

A Plague Tale: Requiem remains primarily a stealth game, and  probably its closest analogue in terms of combat / action areas is the Arkham Batman games' predator areas. Amicia is not a capable fighter - she is not capable of going one-on-one with an armoured soldier, for example, but she is a very capable predator. She is able to dispatch enemies with brutal precision from a distance and from the shadows, but uses tools that she crafts and her sling to do it. Essentially, she is the apex predator in any encounter she is in while she remains unseen... but becomes the prey if the enemies become aware of her position. 

This can result in some frustrating elements. Because Amicia requires finding elements to craft her arsenal of weapons, and because (certainly at the outset, but still broadly throughout,) she has specific tools to deal with specific enemies, there is little room for variation in terms of actual methods of dispatching enemies. She certainly has the choice of whether to engage at all, but if forced to engage, she needs the right tool for the right job... and if she doesn't have it, is pretty much toast. 

 

The result can mean that, on occasion, the player will deal with multiple enemies, get through a significant portion of an encounter, then alert an enemy... and simply not have the capacity to deal with it. She can run and hide, but often times that results in alerting more enemies, which can quickly compound into an unwinable situation.  
There can also be an issue - since the game introduces quite a lot of additional tools - where Amicia does, in fact,  have the tools available to her... but the rather cumbersome weapon wheel, and the lengthly animations required to, for example, ready her sling, mean she simply cannot effectively deal with an enemy who is already aware of her fast enough. 

 

What this means, is that the game really needs to function as a stealth game - but it feels like a rather "old-style" of stealth - a harkening back to a more antiquated style of stealth game, where a single mistake results in repeating entire sections, and there is little scope for course-correction after a mis-step. 
That is not the worst accusation that can be levelled at a game - there is still room in the world, I think, for the more brutal, unforgiving style of stealth that was the purview of games like Thief and Tenchu and Splinter Cell... but I'm not sure a primarily narrative game is that place in 2023. 
When playing in a world that includes games like The Last of Us, or Dishonoured or Wolfenstein - games which focus on stealth initially, but give viable options for when things "go loud" - it can make a gameplay style like A Plague Tale: Requiem's feel quite dated by comparison.

The areas that combat encounters take place are generally well designed - they look gorgeous, and generally have a lot of scope for variety of approach, however, if the player decides to go for the "less aggressive" approach, this has its own issues... namely, guidance. 
Stealth sections in A Plague Tale: Requiem can become irksome, due to the lack of clarity of where the player is actually trying to go. Sneaking past a group of enemies is difficult... and it is very deflating to do so successfully.... then realise that the door or path you made it to after all that was not, in fact, where the game wanted you to aim for! 
That does happen relatively often too - the game keeps it's UI pretty minimal, which is a good thing generally, as the game certainly feels more rich and immersive without a bunch of Call of Duty-style "GO HERE" or "FOLLOW" markers... but I do admit, a little more of a "We're trying to go to there!" in the dialogue at the outset of a stealth section, to give some broad indication, would have been welcome on more than one occasion!

The Puzzle elements of the game - generally focussing, like in A Plague Tale: Innocence, on crossing dangerous areas filled with rats - remain fairy simple, though the game does a better job than the original of allowing for more choice in approach. 
Rather than a single “solution” often, the player can chose to use single use, or consumable items in place of the obvious ones for faster or smarter routes, and this makes the puzzle solving feel more dynamic than it did previously. There are significantly more tools available to Amicia in these areas too - and here, it's only a boon. Since there is less focus on quick-access, the more cumbersome nature of the "weapon wheel" is not a problem, and the increased variety of tools make for much more interesting puzzles generally. 

Audio is excellent in the game.
The original score is good - like the original, it uses modern movie score elements, but via period-appropriate instrumentation, resulting in quite an original audioscape. The “screech” of violins when rats are present is unnerving and effective, and the overall score, using choral chants and sombre tones works really well.

Voice work is particularly well done - I played the game (as I did the original) entirely in French audio with English subtitles, but this time, it was not simply due to a desire for increased immersion. 
I did try the game with the English audio, and found it to simply be lesser. 
That is not really a slight on the English voice actors per-se - there was nothing that stood out as bad - but rather, a praise to put upon the french voice actors. I thought the performance given to Hugo, and particularly that of Amicia, to add significant characterisation and nuance in the French version that was missing in the English one. I found their relationship and back-and-forth much more natural and endearing, and so opted to play both of my playthroughs that way. 

That's usually the last point I make on games - I've covered the narrative, the gameplay, the visuals and the audio - but there is one element I do want to highlight here outside of those technical elements that I think is particularly noteworthy here: The use of the PS5 Duelsense haptics!

The haptics in the controller are great - the pitter-patter of rats nearby, or the cool “swinging” effect for aiming the sling, and the “whoosh” via the controller microphone when a rock is released from it are among the best uses of the Duelsense I’ve seen so far, putting A Plague Tale Requiem up there with Returnal and Astrobot.

While the haptics are, in my opinion, one of the coolest additions to the PS5, and a significant pillar of its step-up from the PS4 Pro, few games have really made proper use of it - so when one does, it still really stands out, and in the case of A Plague Tale: Requiem, they really stand out!

 

Overall, A Plague Tale: Requiem is quite the package. It does exactly what a sequel should - expands without detracting (for the most part), it continues the narrative in a way that feels both additional, and expansive, and on the technical elements like visuals, it makes a jump that most franchises take several sequels to make, in a single bound. 

 

It's a lengthly and often quite maudlin story, with a particularly dark ending, but the writing and the performances manage to counter any "depression malaise" by offering a really winning relationship between likeable characters, a plot that drums along without feeling rushed, and has enough variety in the gameplay to stave off any exhaustion.

 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

A Plague Tale: Requiem is a significant step up from A Plague Tale: Innocence - a game I already liked a fair bit, and so the starting point was that.

 

Looking at 3D narrative action games above it, I think it comfortably shifts above something like Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, primarily on the strength of visuals and story-telling, and the mature narrative and engaging characters are enough to propel it above the great visuals and gameplay of Kena: Bridge of Spirits...

... but I can't realistically argue that it should place higher than God of War: Ragnarok, which has a lot of the same strengths, but is even stronger in most cases.

 

Slightly below that though, is Darksiders, and I do think the overall package of A Plague Tale: Requiem beats out that original Darksiders.

The only game between those two on the current list is Matterfall - a very different kind of game! - but I think on balance, I'd likely replay A Plague Tale: Requiem before I replayed Matterfall, and given that it is a longer game, that has to be the clincher. 

 

As such, A Plague Tale: Requiem finds it's spot, just below God of War: Ragnarok!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dante's Inferno

 

 

Summary: 

 

Developed by EA Interactive and Visceral Games as part of one of EA's occasional pushes for new IP to simultaneously bolster their stable, and ward off some of the consumer accusations of stale or by-the-numbers product lines that are the inevitable consequence of the rampant sequelisation that comes from being the steward of so many annual sports franchises; Dante's Inferno was, in theory, supposed to represent, alongside games like Mirror's Edge, an injection of originality into EA's line-up.
Unfortunately, it seems, no one told the developers.

Taking (very loose and palpably stupid) inspiration from Dante Alighieri's 14th century poem The Divine Comedy, the player takes the role of Dante - a member of the religious zealots The Crusades, who after committing numerous sins during his time in the Middle East, and being promised by a priest that those sins would be absolved, is killed. 

When the Grim Reaper informs him that he is to be judged, and that the Bishop was full of shit, he refuses to accept his fate, and flees from the Crusades (and Death himself), back to his home, whereupon he discovers his father and his lover Beatrice murdered. After seeing a vision of Beatrice's soul being dragged to Hell by Lucifer, he blesses his Holy Cross, imbues it with the spectres of all his past sins, and descends into Hell, on a perilous quest to rescue Beatrice from Lucifer.

Long-term readers of this checklist might recall, in the review of an infamous little game called LA Cops, my near unparalleled confusion and dumbfoundedness that that game managed, somehow, to be an utter, complete and thoroughly shameless copy-cat of a much better game, (in its case, Hotline Miami,) yet somehow, inexplicably, fail to capture even a modicum of its goodness. To be such a pale, soulless, vacuous, inconsequential and thoroughly misguided copy, that it simultaneously felt exactly the same in design... yet completely different in quality. 
It was a game that managed the near impossible task of being slavishly, obsequiously plagiaristic... and be so utterly devoid of the "real" game's good qualities, that it begged only one question: 
"how did they even manage that?!"

 

It's a feat - copying a great game exactly, yet somehow squeezing every last drop of goodness out of it, and retaining only the husk - that is so astoundingly difficult to do, that no other game I've reviewed had managed it...
...until now.

Welcome to the fold, Dante's Inferno!

Dante's Inferno is an utterly shameless rip-off of Santa Monica Studio's original God of War...
...but in virtually every way in which  God of War is good, Dante's Inferno goes the opposite way. 

 

Where God of War is well balanced, Dante's Inferno is absurdly weighted in favour of the player. 
Where God of War's enemies are varied and interesting, Dante's enemies are rote and uninteresting, seeming to stand out only in their absurdly on-the-nose, "look at this" type of edge-lord repugnance. 
Where Kratos's story is interesting, Dante's is boring. 
Where the environment design of God of War is a curious and interesting take on Greek Mythology, Dante's environments feel like a 13-year-old Metal Fan's idea of Hell, carved on a school desk between hunks of stale chewing gum.

 

The fact that the game feels closest to the original God of War, yet somehow manages to be worse in every conceivable way is compounded - and particularly of note - when one considers that.... God of War was released in 2005, for the PS2. Dante's Inferno was a 2010 release, for the next generation of console,... and still can't manage to reach the modest height it aimed for in terms of gameplay, even accounting for that. A one-to-one comparison between the two games should, in reality, be absurd. 
It turns out it is... but in the wrong direction!

Gameplay-wise, the actual fundamentals - the gameplay the developer was aiming for - are relatively easy to summarise: They made a God of War clone. 
Every element of the core gameplay, from the fixed camera paths, to the feel of the movement, to the 3D Brawler action, to the mob-enemies and bosses are all pale imitations of God of War, to the extent that I don't see a lot of merit in getting deep into them here. Suffice to say, that in any context where I am comparing the game to any other game, that "other game" is always God of War.

Instead, it's more relevant (and something of a necessity, given the sheer volume of them,) to simply discuss the faults.  
Dante's Inferno is riddled with them. 

In terms of raw gameplay, Dante's Inferno cannot hold a candle to God of War... or even lesser God of War clones like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

 

The fixed camera pathing is pretty awful, and consistently obscures the action, or leads the player to falling off cliffs and edges they either couldn't see, or couldn't accurately gauge their proximity to. (A fact compounded by the addition of large "leaps" incorporated into Dante's combo moves, which often lock the player into movements that will inevitable send him plummeting over a cliff-edge... or the complete disconnection between Dante's shadow, and the environment, meaning that the one thing 3D games with platforming can usually gift the player to gauge Z-Axis positioning is either absent, or actively misleading.)

 

The combo system is inflexible and invariable... and largely redundant, given that certain combos are so ludicrously over-powered as compared to others, that is is barely worth learning mare than a couple of them. 

 

There is a skill tree, but again, it is largely redundant beyond learning certain core abilities, because even once everything is learned, the entire game essentially only requires three moves: 
The heavy combo which is absurdly over-powered, the "Cross Shotgun" which is simultaneously and AEO attack, a "push" move, and a heavy ranged attack that doesn't even require aiming, and can push every enemy off the cliffs... and the "Divine Armour" which makes the player invincible for a strangely long time. 

 

The player could choose to use some other moves in the game... but that would only be to break up the palpable monotony as they slog from one bland area to the next. They are not required to... as the entire game can easily be finished on even the highest difficulties with just those three things... and they barely need to ever even glance at the screen while doing them. 
(Which is handy. 
Since the camera probably won't bother to position itself so the can actually... y'know... see what they're doing.)

 

All of those mechanical problems pale in comparison to one fundamental problem though:

the game is stupefyingly dull.

 

That is almost a feat in and of itself, given that it is absurdly action-heavy, and is predicated almost entirely on "shocking" the player.

The design is a basic version of literal Christian Hell, and boy-oh-boy, are the devs desperate to hammer that home. Virtually every enemy in the game has been created with "ewww... gross!" in mind. 
From the gluttons who stomp and fart around, vomiting on the player and trying to eat them, to the grotesque lustful women who flip onto spider-back and fire what appear to be male genitalia at the player... to the scores of "unbaptised babies" who scuttle around with knives on their hands snipping and slicing at the player's ankles, every enemy design is clearly designed to invoke a gut response... 
...but the problems with that, are threefold.

 

Firstly, the tech wasn't quite at that place yet. Everything is gross in theory, but a little muddy and unclear in practice. The reaction should be "oh God, she hit me with a dick!".... but what it actually is, is "Oh... was that meant to be a dick?".

 

Secondly, there are far too many of them, with far too little consequence. 
God of War made its impact by having general mob enemies be relatively throw-away, but having the bosses be a sight to behold. Dante's Inferno does the opposite - its bosses are generally the least interestingly designed of its enemies, and the mob enemies are where the visceral or distasteful "gut-punches" lie... but because there are so many, they lose that impact very, very quickly. 

 

Thirdly, the most fundamental issue - this isn't the 14th century. 

The concept of an "unbaptised baby" going to hell and being damned is not something most people thing is realistically scary in this day and age. The notion that not dunking a kids head in some water means eternal damnation is a source of hilarity to the modern age, not horror. The idea that over-eating results in eternal damnation, rather than simply health problems and possible dating droughts is not the common consensus.

Moreover, Dante's is presented as someone we are supposed to root for, and every other person in Hell is presented as a deserving sinner... 
...yet in the 21st century, the Crusades are recognised near universally as historic religious terrorists and truly terrible people. They didn't fight demons... they armoured up and slaughtered brown people, to appease their imaginary White God, and to steal their stuff. 

 

Now, to be fair, Kratos - certainly in the original God of War games, and certainly in 2010 when Dante's Inferno released - was also a bad guy - we were not supposed to "like" him per-se, and those games also had some issues with presenting him as "cool" despite being a bit of a whiney bitch who got what was coming to him...
...but Dante's Inferno doubles down on that problem tenfold.

 

Dante is an abhorrent  character - a mass murdering psychopath with no redeeming features - arguably, the only character in the fiction to actually deserve the Hell it presents - and yet he is presented in the fiction of the game as someone with some minor negative traits that he has washed his hands of - someone who's past should not matter, and who we should unequivocally like and root for. 
That is ridiculous. 
It was a bit of a problem in The Divine Comedy... but that poem is read, nowadays, in context. It didn't release in 2010, without crib notes, and in the irony-free way this game does.

 

The fundamental problem with Dante's Inferno's entire design ethos, is that while the developer seems to think that simply invoking a putrid, bleak and edgy version of the literal Christian Hell that Alighieri wrote in The Divine Comedy is enough...
...they seem to have forgotten that, by 2010, nearly every other game even hinting at "hell" or the "hellish" had been doing the same. 
Videogame players are no strangers to visions of Christian Hell - we've been dipping in and out of the place since God (or our older siblings) placed a controller in our hands - and The Divine Comedy is the playbook. 

Every version of Hell on screen or in fiction since Alighieri, has in some way cribbed from that hymn sheet - and they do it as condiment, not as the main course. "Hell", as Alighieri wrote it, is so well understood and baseline at this point, that it is cannot function as primary. There isn't enough meat there to sustain an entire game anymore, because it peppers everything else, and doesn't have the nourishment to feed anyone as stand-alone.

Even the actual source materials - The Divine Comedy - is not really sustained simply by the vision it presents. The poem has not remained and endured as a tentpole of literature simple by being the "edgy", horrific vision of Hell that it is... it survives because of the way it is presented. It is the writing and the poetry of it that endures, not the content necessarily. 

 

Heck - one only has to look at filmic output to see that problem... and how to solve it. 
Take, if you will, the Lars Von trier movie The House that Jack Built. 
That film takes place, for a fair portion of its run time, in literal Christian Hell (and with Virgil, no less,) but even that movie understands that in order to be shocking, it can't do it via Hell itself. 
Von Trier is arguably the most shocking film-maker of the modern age - he is only happy when he is either making his audience the saddest they have ever been, the most revolted they have ever been, or the most uncomfortable they have ever been - and he understands that he can't use literal Christian Hell to do that. All the horror of that film comes from the flashbacks - the "real world" horror of Jack's past deeds, not the place he found himself as a result of them. 

The reason why a game like Dante's Inferno is so fundamentally misguided is - it does the same thing with its plot and its literary source material (The Divine Comedy) that it does with its gameplay and its game-design inspiration (God of War)...
...it recognises that those things it wants to emulate are good, but fundamentally misunderstands why they are good, and what makes them good. As a result, it wrings every last drop of merit from them, then presents only the vapid, dull, stale or uninteresting parts for our consumption. 

Playing Dante's Inferno is like ordering a chicken dinner, then being presented with a plate of only the dry bones. Yes, it is "chicken" in the technical sense... but they threw away the tasty part, and only gave us the inedible chaff. 
You get the same feeling playing it, as when someone says "I loved Mad Men - Don Draper is so cool!" or "I loved Switchblade, that Billy Bob character is hilarious!"
You go:

"Okay... I like those things too... 
but we like them for VERY different reasons."

 

Audio in the game is a pretty dull affair - the score is not terrible, but largely forgettable, and the voice acting is adequate, but never more than that. Foley work is sub-par though - the player spends 90% of their time in endless brawls, which are meant to feel visceral and bloody and gruesome... 
...but the combination of very flat audio, and the fact that the game only ever gets "harder" by simply making enemies take longer to kill, with no real escalation of actual requirements or skill, means these fights simply feel like slowly pushing a boulder up a hill... to get to the next hill.

Generally I won't specifically mention DLC, but I do think that - since the Trials of St Lucia DLC is the entire reason this review is getting done now, (that is the part it took me 13 years to summon the will to actually plow through!) - I should at least touch on it.

 

These are a set of tools allowing the player to create their own combat encounters, or sets of encounters, which other players can then play and rate. The toolset is pretty neat, and the concept is well executed. Realistically, in a game with better core mechanics, I think this DLC could be a very good one. 
However, it does have some serious issues, which are made most apparent when playing the "EA Trials" - a set of 25 single-player, and 15 two-player trials.

 

What becomes clear in these trials, is how remarkably unbalanced they are, even on top of the ridiculously unbalanced core gameplay. 

 

Each trial has a broad "combat difficulty" ranking, (essentially a measure of how long it takes to kill the same enemies by doing the same moves over and over,) however, these rankings are largely immaterial, since virtually every element of an individual trial - the amount of health or MP given back to the player after killing something, the MP cost of abilities, the enemy health, the enemy attack damage etc. - are all governed by sliders... and these are not visible to the player playing the trial. 

It is therefore impossible to gauge, except through trial and error, exactly what the game is actually throwing at you. In a single trial, (which might consist of up to 80 individual combat encounters,) the difference between, say, incoming damage, might swing wildly - the same vampire bat attack that did minimal damage to the player in one combat encounter, might DECIMATE them in the very next one... and there is no way to know that until it happens. 

In a game mode in which each trial is about survival and endurance, that is an absurd oversight... and one that really does seem baffling from a player stand-point. They simply don't have any notion of what they are actually dealing with from encounter to encounter... and have no way to adequately align their play to the enemies presented.

 

The core problems of the game are compounded in the 2-player trials also, simply because the game was clearly never designed with two players in mind. These instances have a tendency to break under the strain of two players on the field - things like "homing" magics get squirrelly, as the homing magic which is supposed to target the nearest enemy, gets confused between the enemy closest to the player firing it, and the enemy closest to the other player, and the camera's get very wonky, as they flit around, trying to follow the wrong person. 
The screens have a tendency to get very busy in these encounters, as the enemy distribution is doubled to account for two active players... and the solution - in a baffling decision - was to put a "highlighting halo" on one character... the other one. 
Yes, you read that right - the game actively highlights the other player, but not the one you are actually controlling... resulting in the player always knowing where their partner is... but routinely losing track of where they themselves are! 

 

Overall, Dante's Inferno is a piss poor game, and a staggeringly stupid and misguided attempt at copying both the gameplay of God of War, and the plot of The Divine Comedy. It fails on every level - as a game, as a narrative, as a design and as a copy...
...and really should embarrass everyone who worked on it.

 

It shows that not only do they not understand why the games they like are good... but they also don't understand why the literature they like is good...
...and make them look pretty damned stupid trying to emulate them. 

 

I feel dumber having played it.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Incase it's not evident already, we're looking at the bottom of the barrel with Dante's Inferno!

 

Looking at the handful of "real" big(ish) budget games that exist in the cement foundations of the basement level of the current list, there isn't a huge amount of crossover, beyond simple mishandling of gameplay, and rampant stupidity...
...but we have to start somewhere.

The fact is, that as bad as Dante's Inferno is on virtually all levels, it is not quite as actively turgid as something like Sniper Ghost Warrior. 
As unoriginal and uninspired as it is, it isn't quite as boring as Terminator Salvation.

 

What it is though, is a dull, pale imitation of another game, with a distastefully implemented misfire of a tone... and there is another game that fits that description: Jak II.

Jak II is a deeply uninteresting clone-of-a-clone-of-a-clone-of-GTA, and sours the previously established tone of it's predecessor completely...
...and because of that, I'd argue it's completely un-fun, un-interesting, flawed gameplay is actually worse than Dante's Inferno. 

 

Dante's Inferno was shite... but at least its taking its smelly dump on a new IP. Jak II took a dump on an established, previously good one, and ruined it.

 

As such, I think Dante's Inferno does outrank Jak II... but only just. The fact of the matter is, as garbage as Fear Effect: Sedna is, I'd rather replay it than replay Dante's Inferno...
...and that, Science Chums, is saying something!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fights in Tight Spaces

 

 

Summary: 

 

A rogue-like combination of small-scale, tactical turn-based combat and deck-builder, Fights in Tight Spaces - from British developer Ground Shatter, (developers of previous games RICO and Sky Scrappers) - takes two seemingly incompatible genres, and combines them with a stylish visual palate and an addictive electronica soundtrack, to extremely winning effect, recreating the feel of visceral close-quarters combat in the style of James Bond, or Jason Bourne, or John Wick.

"Deck Builder" is quite a powerful flavour on its own. Games like Slay the Spire and Monster Slayers make use of it as a singular vision, and as they (or, at least, Slay the Spire,) prove, it is a genre that can work entirely solo.

 

Slay the Spire (arguably the most popular and "base-line" of Deck Builders, providing the most comprehensive and broad marker for the genre to console players,) is a hell of a game, and one that introduced a slew of new players to the genre - myself included!  Like Rogue Legacy did for the modern Rogue-like, it established the "standard" parameters for expectation from the genre - the basic "deck-Builder-flavour" without adding any additional elements to the mix, and the game worked so well, that it proved unequivocally the validity of that genre.

 

In terms of my own foray into Deck Building, examples are still - admittedly - relatively scarce. There is the aforementioned Slay the Spire and Monster Slayers - the "pure" deck-builders - then there is the small cadre of games mixing Deck Building with other genres. 
Griftlands is primarily a Deck Builder, but peppers in elements of RPG and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style dialogue trees. 
There is Inscryption, which uses Deck Building as the primary "step-off-point", but because a multitude of other genres, feeding into it's broad pastiche of unsettling horror and mystery. 
There is even - arguably - the Voice of Cards games, which nod and lean towards Deck Building, but still keep both feet firmly in the "JRPG" camp. 

 

Fights in Tight Spaces is the first game I've played that combines in elements of Tactical Turn-Based Strategy...
...and despite the on-paper hesitation one might feel considering a combination of those two genres, it is such a winning combination, that it genuinely has me questioning why I have not seen it done elsewhere!

Essentially, the game works as and almost 50-50 split between small-scale TBS in the vein of Into the Breach, and Deck Building a-la Slay the Spire. The rogue-like elements of moving through each of the 5 distinct areas of the game will be very familiar to anyone versed in rogue-likes: the player moves through a somewhat randomised "tree" of possible encounters, featuring individual fights, special "events", areas where the player, or their deck can be healed or modified, and move towards a single "boss" encounter at the end. 

Each encounter consists of a single, tight-quarters arena, featuring a specific layout (split into a grid of squares,) with specific objects and elements - walls, bars, cars, toilet stalls etc - which can be used in combination with certain cards to work to the players (or the enemy) advantage, as well as openings - the edges of roofs, or windows, or open doors etc - which are also of note in the specific fight.
The "rules" of fights in Fights in Tight Spaces are essentially the same ones as in bar-brawls in an old western movie... if a combatant is throws "out of the ring" as it were - chucked out of the swinging bar doors, or kicked through a window, they are gone from the fight... so knowing which spots the player can use to their advantage to instantly remove a particularly irksome or tough enemy with a well-placed throw is a huge element of the tactical play... 
...as is ensuring the player themself does not end their turn in a position to be thrown out of the fight, ending their run unceremoniously!

In each run, the player takes control of an agent - female or male - and can either choose one of several themed starter decks (based around different styles of play,) or build themselves a starter deck from randomised offerings -  and is dispatched across 5 distinct areas to deal with different threats. 
With each completed fight, they are awarded with - at a minimum - the chance to add a single card to their deck from a randomly selected pool, and throughout a run, can chop, change, upgrade, discard or modify that deck based on their choices of which paths to take through each area, and their ability to fulfil additional "bonus" requirements in each encounter. 
An encounter may, for example, award additional health regeneration or an additional card choice for finishing in a under a set number of turns, another might give awards for throwing a certain number of enemies from the fight rather than knocking them out, or for having a certain number of enemies killed by each other, rather than the player themself. Each is different, and thus feeds further into the requirement for the player to analyse each fight on an independent basis, and plan and move accordingly.

Each turn acts like a single second of a feverish, fast-paced fight, with the player functioning - at their own pace - as a version of the agent's split-second decision-making. Each turn sees the player playing cards from their deck, which fall into either "attack", "defence" or "movement" categories, and each of which costs a specific amount of "momentum", and must do whatever damage their deck (in combination with the situation and environment) will allow, while avoiding incoming damage from the enemies that they will do on their turn.

 

The tactical element comes into play heavily, because using nothing but "attack" cards will inevitably result in the player either taking a very long time to dispatch the enemies, or simply having their own health whittled down - and given that the player has relatively limited opportunities to regain health between fights, this is of paramount importance.
Rather than simply punching enemies until they are knocked out, the player has to make use of the fact that these fights that they are seemingly stilted and turn-based, are actually happening at break-neck speed. If an enemy has a pistol trained on their position, and they doge out of the way, that's great...
...but if they can grab another enemy, and shove them into the path of that bullet, that's even better - as using enemies against one another is the real key to success.

As such, each individual fight becomes something of a dance - the good player will stick and move, hitting where they can, slipping past where they cant, and shoving and re-directing each incoming attack, to effectively force the dastardly enemies - be they ninjas, racist bikers, mafia goons or even rogue Agents - to kill one another in the hectic fray!

 

As in most good rogue-likes, the reason Fights in Tight Spaces works as well as it does, is because of the way in which it compounds problem-solving. At any given time, the player is being asked to solve a litany of different micro and macro puzzles. They are individually assessing and solving the problem of the individual turn they are in, the specific fight, the overall area, and the overall run - all the while, managing their character's health, their deck, their cross-encounter abilities, their in-fight buffs and debuffs, and their readiness for future fights.

 

Games that are the most successful in the rogue-like genre (I'm thinking of Dead Cells, Curse of the Dead Gods, Hades, Slay the Spire, Griftlands, Invisible Inc, Rogue Legacy etc) belong to many different broad genres, but they all share one thing in common: they are very difficult to put down! The pull for "one more encounter" or "one more run" is incredibly strong...
...and the reason for this are two-fold, and common to all. 

 

Firstly, it is because while failure in these games is common, it is rarely punitive. While in terms of "character levelling" or actual "game progress" failure in a rogue-like can feel like stalling, in reality, there is rarely a moment in a good rogue-like, where failing gives the player nothing. Generally, they know exactly why they failed, how it was their own fault, and learn something they can take into the next run. More than any other genre, the feeling of self-improvement and of learning is something that is evident... and humans like to learn. Our brains are wired that way. We don't mind failure, IF that failure offers hints as to the path to success.

 

Secondly, because we like solving puzzles, and rogue-likes are the most puzzle-heavy of games - even more so, ironically, than actual puzzle games. 
In a puzzle game, the player is generally solving a single puzzle at any one time - and so feeling unable to solve it results in a dead-lock. It can be quite exhausting playing a puzzle game, as there can be a level of frustration to feeling unable to solve a puzzle which forms a hard "gate" to progress. In Rogue-likes, however, the individual puzzles are not "hard gates" - the player is not blocked by their inability to reason out a single difficult puzzle... but instead, they are subject to a constant, compounding, multitude of "micro-puzzles" which they are solving as they go. 

"Should I take a card that looks good, but will expand my deck, lowering the odds of any single card being in play?"
"Should I head to the hospital to heal, or head to the gym to improve a card?"
"Should I delete a card, to increase the synergy of my other cards?"
"Do I fully destroy this enemy, but leave myself open to attack from this other one?"
"Retreat, or Advance?"
"Buy or Sell?"

They player is managing such a litany of spinning plates, and having to consider such a wealth of different factors, that the "puzzle-centres" in their brains are constantly firing on all levels...
...yet they are doing it in a way that never feels overtly like "A Puzzle."

Readers of my stuff might remember reviews of games like Invisible Inc or Curse of the Dead Gods, wherein I lauded those games for managing to have an enormous breadth of variability and a litany of different systems in play, yet manage to almost fully disguise just how complex they are in the immediate sense, because everything in the game just works together.
There might be 20 or 30 different stats and factors and elements that the player is having to manage during any single run, but because each one works with each other one effectively, the "push-pull" between different factors allows for synergistic play that is intuitive, rather than feeling as complex as it actually is.

 

Fights in Tight Spaces - to be clear - does not, I think quite have the level of balanced synergy in its compounding elements as the true highlights of the genre do (Invisible Inc and Curse of the Dead Gods.) There are some minor elements that hold it back from those lofty heights. 
For one thing, after playing the game for upwards of 200 hours, I can confirm: certain deck types are more powerful than others. They just are. As fun as a "Trickster" style deck is to play (one using the environmental factors like wall placements and positioning and re-direction of enemies,) and it can be incredibly powerful... the fact is, a straight "Glass Canon" attack deck, or a DPS "Bleed" deck, or a smartly tuned ground-game "Grappler" deck is the easier option to secure that final win.

 

Those kind of minor discrepancies do stop it from landing in the very top echelon of the genre for me... 
... however, they are minor. The fact is, that while Fights in Tight Spaces does have some irksome factors (it is entirely possible in FitS, for example, to have a very good, very well-build agent and deck simply land in an unwinable situation due to extraordinary bad luck,) these are really only evident at the top end of play, and on the very top difficulty level. In terms of general play, I think FitS does actually belong in that top level - as those issues will only be apparent to a player who is wringing every last drop of juice from the game... and for a player to even want to do that, they have to be pretty well fully bought in by the excellent gameplay required to get them there!

The reason why these issues are only made apparent very late in the play cycle, is the (very good) variety of difficulty levels. Most games have multiple difficulties, but few I have seen are as measured and granular in their method of implementation. There are 5 distinct difficulties to Fights in Tight Spaces, but interestingly, none of them affect either player health, player attack strength, enemy attack strength, or enemy health. 
The usual ways in which difficulty is added or subtracted from games are absent here.

Instead, what the game does, is granularly change the way the actual rules of the game work around those factors. 

 

For example, in all fights, the ability to move at least one square in each turn is paramount. Indeed, virtually every time a player can be caught in a completely unwinable situation, is because they find themselves at the edge of the area, poised to be thrown out, with no way to get out of the way, and no way to defend against that throw.

On the easier difficulties, however, the game deliberately "fudges" its RNG card selection, in the sense that, no matter what RNJesus says, it will always put at least 1 movement card from their deck into the player's hand in every turn. Even if they have technically exhausted them all in this shuffle, it will seamlessly pull one form the discard pile.

On the more "medium" difficulties, this "fudging" is softened a little. Instead of pulling one of the players own movement cards, the deck is played as per the rules of the RNG.... however, if a hand is drawn without a single movement card, a temporary "move a single tile" card is artificially added - one that can only be played as the first card, but will at least offer a slight chance at escape from truly bad-luck placement.

It is only on the most difficult setting - Purity - where these helping hands are fully removed from the player, and they are left completely to the mercy of RNJesus... and they have to be really, really careful about keeping enough movement cards in their deck, and their deck small enough, to stack the odds in their own favour. 

Another element of the granular difficulty scaling, is "rollback". Like Invisible Inc, Fights in Tight Spaces allows the player to "rewind" a turn if they do something stupid... though it's not to the same level as Invisible Inc. A player is not ever allowed to roll back a completed turn... but they are allowed a certain number of in-turn rollbacks on lower difficulties, and that number is governed by the difficulty itself.

 

The difficulties aren not pure sliding scale. On the hardest difficulty, there is no rollback, and no "deck fudging"... and on the easiest, there is plenty of "rollback" and copious "fudging"...
...but the middle tiers are different splits. Some have lots of rollback, but limited "fudging", others have no rollback, but a lot of "fudging". This allows a very natural way for the player to ease into different elements of the gameplay loop, without feeling like they are having their hand held... select a point that feels challenging, but not punitive, at which they can learn and improve. 

Visually, Fights in Tight Spaces is really something else. It uses a stark, clean, black-on-white palate that looks, frankly, brilliant. If you've never seen it, imagine, if you will, that the main character from the enigmatic intro to Mad Men was no longer falling through 50's billboards, but was instead kicking-ass, John Wick style. The agent is silhouette black on nearly-pure white, and enemies are varying shades of solid colour and white, (the colour denoting both their faction allegiance, and power level,) and virtually every move and every hit looks super cool. It's a visual palate that is reminiscent of a few other games - most notably, another representation of lightning-fast close-quarters fights: Superhot - but I'd argue it actually looks better here than there, simply because the aesthetic is so heavily stylised, and limited in scale, that it really gets to shine.

 

Audio is brilliant too. There is no voice work, but foley sounds of the impacts and smashes as the player punches enemies, or smashes them into objects (or each-other) are impactful and visceral...
...but the reason for the season in terms of audio is not the foley, but the score.

The original score for the game is all provided by an artist I was not previously aware of - Nervous Testpilot - and is fucking awesome! It's a broadly electronica score, very reminiscent of the work of The Crystal Method, and it landed so hard in my Spotify rotation that it almost left a crater!
Even after plowing hundreds of hours into the game itself, I have not been able to stop myself incessantly listening to it in my car like some kind of unstoppable moron for weeks, and it has pretty much been providing my entire soundtrack for summer!

There is one thing worth noting for the trophy-hungry among us, and it is a negative unfortunately... and that is the almost absurdly top-heavy balancing of the overall card unlocks.

 

Fights in Tight Spaces uses an "overall" XP level as its method of unlocking cards for play in the game - as the way of opening them up for possible inclusion in the RNG runs - and the balancing of this is, quite simply, ludicrous.

Max level (the level at which all possible cards are open for use) is Character Lv.30. Reaching level 20 requires very minimal grinding - indeed, a "good" run, even on one of the lower difficulties, will net around 10,000 - 20,000 XP, which is more than enough to advance a full level for each one below the 20th, and the majority of players will reach lv.20 without even noticing, as they play naturally through the rest of the trophy list...
...however, then the logarithmic escalation of XP requirements kicks in.

 

I did not note down every level's XP requirement, but at most, each level prior to 20 requires around 10,000. Reaching lv.27, requires 500,000. 
Reaching lv.30, requires 1,000,000. 
Yes, you read that right. One MILLION.
The amount of XP required to move up the last 3 levels, is the same amount required to get to that point in total.

Even were a player to be fully aware of this, and to play every run on the very hardest difficulty level (netting the highest bonus multiplier for score,) and to be successful in every run... they would still require upwards of 70 complete runs (at around 2 hours each) to reach that level. 

Since that is not a realistic proposition in the slightest (on the highest difficulty, where the decks are brutally "fair" and no assistance or "cheesing" is given, and there are no rollbacks, my personal success rate for full completion was around 5%) I'll put it another way:
I had all trophies bar the lv.30 requirement done in around 60 hours, and with approximately 200,000 XP on the clock... and finished the platinum ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY game-hours later.

That is such a brutal escalation of requirement, that it borders on broken!

Overall though, Fights in Tight Spaces is a hell of a game. Gameplay is the main focus here, of course, and it's blisteringly good - a Deck Builder with arms and legs, that has honed its mechanics to a very high level, and works incredibly well... 
...but what really sets it apart is the finesse of the aesthetic and the audio. 

Most Deck Builders do not, in reality, have to rely on aesthetics or audio - Slay the Spire is (rightly) considered an amazing game, and it's offerings in terms of visuals and sound are mediocre at best - but when a game comes along like Fights in Tight Spaces, that has the gameplay chops to compete, and covers those tertiary bases with such aplomb, it is really worth taking notice of!

 

It's a game that is absurdly under-played on Playstation - at the time of writing, it boasts a paltry 33 game owners, to Slay the Spire's 47,000... and that is ridiculous. 
I simply cannot conceive of a player who enjoyed Slay the Spire not finding much of the same fun in Fights in Tight Spaces...
...so do yourself a favour, and get this one played!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

A tough one to rank, but the markers to begin are all on the list already, consisting of other rogue-likes and other deck-builders.

 

In terms of Deck Builders, I think that, despite Slay the Spire taking it on balancing at the extreme end (and on not having crazy-ass XP requirements!,) the fact that Fights in Tight Spaces is great, combines interesting genres, and looks and sounds so much better, means it has to rank above Slay the Spire.

I do, however, think that as great as Fights in Tight Spaces is, and as winning a combination as the genre's it plays in are, it simply can't compete with Inscryption, as it has the looks and the gameplay, but Inscryption has those too... and also manages to have story, mystery, and "wow" factor that is in the upper end of gaming, period!

That puts us somewhere between those two, and the three most appropriate comparisons in that field are Curse of the Dead Gods, Hades, and Griftlands.

 

Fights in Tight Spaces vs Hades is a very strange competition - they both have strengths, and they are virtually opposite - Hades wins handily on story and writing, and probably just takes it on visuals... but Fights in Tight Spaces wins easily on gameplay, and even on Audio -  though it's a close fight there!

 

I actually think the same factors also mean Fights in Tight Spaces has to rank above Griftlands too - it's currently only one spot above Hades, and basically is so because it has a lot of the same strengths, loses to Hades of writing and audio, but beats it on gameplay. Since the gameplay is a fight I think Fights in Tight Spaces wins against Griftlands, ipso facto, Fights in Tight Spaces must beat Griftlands too.

I do not, however, think Fights in Tight Spaces is quite able to topple Curse of the Dead Gods. The core gameplay is great, but not quite as great as CotDG feels - and while the visuals I think are more stylish, and the audio infinitely better... 
...in this kind of game, gameplay is king. 
Both games required an absurd grind, but I felt the weight of that grind more in Fights in Tight Spaces than CotDG, simply because fundamentally CotDG is even more fun to play.

There's only a small handful of great games between CotDG and Griftlands, and it comes down to "which would I replay first?"

For Life is Strange: True Colours, Bastion, Mark of the Ninja and Little Nightmares, the answer is "Fights in Tight Spaces"... but for Returnal, I think the answer is "Returnal"...

...and so Fights in Tight Spaces finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Endling

 

 

Summary: 

 

Describing itself as an "Indie Survival Adventure Game" Endling: Extinction is Forever - the debut game from Spanish developer Herobeat Studios - sees the player take the role of a rather adorable Mama Fox, and her outrageously adorable litter of pups, as they struggle for survival - and hunt for a kidnapped one of their own - in the harsh landscape of a post-apocalyptic (and post-forrest fire ravished) landscape.

 

After controlling the Mama Fox as she flees a forrest fire, rushing to escape and find a burrow wherein she can give birth, the player begins the game proper, raising her litter of four. The game is split up into cyclical days and nights, with the fox (a nocturnal animal) sleeping during the day, and foraging for food at night. At the outset, the cubs remain in the relative safety of the burrow, with the player simply finding food to bring back, but after several nights, tragedy comes a-callin' in the form of a human, who lures one of the cubs out while the Mama is sleeping, and steals him.

From that point, the game settles into what will form its core loop - with the Mama leading her cubs around, finding food, teaching them skills, exploring the changing landscape, avoiding the dangers (including owls, badgers, furriers, hunters and whatnot,)  and seeking her missing cub.

The game is a good concept, and has glimmers of interesting gameplay... but unfortunately, the actual execution on those concepts is really something of a mess.

 

There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is this: The gameplay loop is, simply, not fun to engage with. 

 

The nights are short.
Very short.
So short, in fact, that the player learns very early on, that from the second they leave the den, they need to always be thinking "okay, but I need to get back soon".
There is a constant timer ticking down the hours until daybreak, but because the world is so astonishingly difficult to actually navigate (more on this later,) and because blockages in paths are random (trappers / owls / gunmen move around) it becomes an endless trial-and-error of figuring how to get home - and feeling like they are under the gun doing so. 
That is a distinct problem. 

The world that Endling takes place in is interesting to explore, and actually, it looks quite nice and it relatively varied in its environments, but the game really does seem to go out of its way to force the playing into feeling (sometimes falsely - more on that later too!) that they shouldn't be enjoying themselves, as they need to be getting back to safety.

 

Essentially, the gameplay loop boils down to one of two possibilities:

 

The first is, it is a night were nothing important is happening, and the player just needs to find enough food to feed the cubs, then get home. This can be either very easy, or very irksome, depending on the random ways in which the obstacles happen to fall. The cubs have a constant "full" meter, telling the player if they need food, and how quickly... but it goes down the more they move around. If the cubs are starving, and desperately need some food to stave off starvation... the player has no choice but to sprint around looking for it... which, in turn, exhascerbates the issue. 
If/ when they FIND said food, that might fill them up... but of course, they have to travel all the way back to the den to sleep - and if that return journey ends up requiring multiple backtracks or deviations (as it often will, particularly in the later game, when there are more and more varied pathing enemies,) it can result in ending up using as much energy as the food actually gave them in the first place.

 

The second possibility, is that it is a "special" night - i.e. one were some "main-plot" story happens. 
On these nights, the Mama fox will, immediately upon leaving the den, catch a scent of her missing cub. This results in a relatively uninteresting trek, where she follows the scent, to find a little thread of three objects - always 3 - each of which she can smell, and get an "afterimage" of what happened with them. These essentially form the "main narrative" - wherein the fate of the cub, the man who took it, and his daughter, are told through still, silent "screenshots".

On these nights, (which happen at fixed intervals,) the player does, at least, feel like some forward progress is being made in terms of the overall game...
...however, they tend to also be a back-step in terms of the survival elements, as seeing one of these little three-shot plays play out takes time away from foraging, and means inevitably the Mama and her cubs are far from the den, and haven't yet looked for food... and day is approaching.

So, on that day/night cycle... as said, the feeling is always that it is approaching, and there is danger coming... though having played the game twice now, I'm relatively sure this is actually a false mechanic. 
After the first time I found myself "trapped" - unable to get home in time, and being out and about well after daybreak, it became apparent that, actually, there appeared to be no fail-state in this regard. After experimenting with it, I can comfortably say that while there might be an eventual fail state for staying awake too far past daybreak, it must be incredibly loose in reality, because you can actually be up without penalty for at least double the length of the actual "night cycle" beyond daybreak, and still never actually fail, or see any consequence.
This makes the decision to have the constant pressure of a perceived time constraint doubly baffling... as it appears to have no actual in-game bearing...

... yet the perception of it is ruinous to the fun of exploring the nice environment the devs created. 

The navigation in the world is a constant issue in Endling. 
The game is designed in such a way, that the fox is always moving perpendicular to the camera. If the fox turns towards or away from the camera, the camera swings around, so they are always moving left-to-right. This is fine for an aesthetic consideration - the world is designed to look good "side-on"...
...but it makes the fact that the world is 3D, and the map is top-down an absolute slog to follow. 

Literally every time I turned a corner, or took a fork in the road, I found myself having to consult the map, to ensure I was heading where I thought I was heading...
...and this becomes even more of an issue once multiple elevations get involved. 

There are certain areas, (like a chicken processing plant, and a factory,) where the fox and her cubs are moving up and down as well as north, south, east and west, criss-crossing different paths, and following the map is an unholy nightmare in these areas. When combined with the (perceived) time constraints, and the numerous unmarked obstacles, it simply becomes not fun. There is nothing inherently sour about having a difficult map to follow (just ask Firewatch)... but when you are being forced to criss-cross and backtrack and retread areas to find the single way out of an unmarked maze, all under time-duress, and with one-shot-kill enemies that lurk around corners, and result in restarting the whole night... it becomes fraught in a bad way, rather than a good one.

That method of swinging the camera so the fox mama is always travelling on a left-right plane is a serious problem - not only in terms of orienteering and following the map, but also even more fundamentally than that - in allowing the player to get a sense of the scope of the surroundings. 
Despite exploring the more complex areas a fair bit, I never got any kind of real sense of the layout of of the scope or size of them, because the nature of the camera and the map means that the player never has much of a sense of where they are now in relation to where they were 30 seconds ago, or where they will be 30 seconds from now. 
The camera is always turning, and not in a uniform way, so as soon as they have made 3 or 4 turns in any direction, it's anyones guess how they are oriented in relation to where they started. 

That also raises a strange, rather nit-picky issue, but it's one I did bump on... when the player dies - probably by being shot by a hunter who's light they didn't see until it was too late, or by straying onto the radius of a rabid dog,) - a black screen comes up, and says "You died, your cubs will not survive... EXTINCTION IS FOREVER"...
...and then that night restarts.

Thus demonstrating "Extinction" is, in this game, at least, very much not forever.
It's a really strange thing - it almost feels like the developers intended the game to be a rogue-like, with permadeath, but then decided against it... but forgot to tell the game-over screen!

 

Visually, the game is pretty nice. The Fox Mama is cute, the cubs are absolutely adorable, and the animations of things like petting them, or teaching them are very nice and emotive. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that actually teaching the cubs skills is entirely dependent on happening to encounter specific events in specific spots on specific nights, that whole mechanic would be quite cool...
...but unfortunately, that's just another in a long line of issues.

 

The world design is quite evocative, and well implemented, and while the game is certainly cartoonish in style, it is able to be quite scary at time - certainly, the forrest fire section in the intro is exciting and plays out dramatically, which helps quite a bit in a game that is essentially a semi-randomised collectible quest with set story intervals, and in which the biggest interaction is pressing X several times to "dig"...
...but in combination with the lighting effects (which again, look quite nice,) it does mean that problems like the inability to properly see that a hunter with a gun is patrolling are rendered that much worse.

Audio is fine - the score is perfectly adequate, if never outstanding, and what "vocal" work there is works. (There is no voice work, even for human characters, but there is some animal noises for the foxes and other animals, and they are quite good - evoking emotion well, and working hand-in-hand with the nice animations.)

Overall, Endling is a neat idea on paper, but one that fumbles its execution with remarkable frequency, and in a surprisingly abundant myriad of ways. 

It's a game that does an interesting, if simplified, job of conveying the hardship of an animal life, and of telling a wordless story that resonates...
... but it does it at the cost of extreme issues with its gameplay, that are simply too taxing and irksome to ignore, or to be compensated for by the good elements.

 

You can't really be sure of what you're doing, or of where to do it, or of why you need to do it, or of when you need to do it... and the game alleviates that issue in the least interesting way imaginable...
...by simply having the narrative play itself out, regardless of what the player is doing. 
It almost feels like a good game is being played, that you get to dip into and watch...
...and the rest of the time, you are just treading water, hoping not to drown.

 

The whole gameplay experience, and the incompatibility of its systems, can be summarised by its fundamental flaw:

The player has two choices - Run fast, so you can do what you need to in the limited time, and risk running right into a rifle-bullet from a hunter you couldn't see... or go slow and careful, don't get shot... and watch your cubs starve to death because you were too slow.

 

That might be realistic for the plight of a fox in a post-apocalyptic and harsh world...
...but it's not much fun to actually do.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Endling is a tough one, because while it has good elements, it's a game that feels fundamentally flawed in concept, as well as deeply flawed in execution... but all those flaws don't completely negate the few good elements it does capitalise on.

That had me really stumped when looking at the list, and had to just do quick hit "better or worse" cases on some other games I recall having their hearts in the right place... and not much else.

I think Endling fails the competition between it and unusual but rough Deer God, and again against well-meaning but dull Flower... however, it easily still holds out for victory against rough and dull Claire, and well-meaning but very rough Tetragon.

 

That was enough to narrow the field to allow two games, currently side-by-side, to make themselves known - one of which I think Endling definitely beats, and one it (just) doesn't: Lost Ember, and Uncanny Valley.

I think, as rough as some of the gameplay in Endling is, I'd still easily choose to replay it before replaying Uncanny Valley, which fumbles it's execution immediately...
...but I do think that, push-come-to-shove, I would replay the unusual and oddly soothing Lost Ember, despite it's significant flaws, before replaying Endling. 

 

As such, Endling finds it's little fox den!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Viewfinder

 

Summary: 

 

A first Person Puzzle game - the first from Sad Owl Studio - Viewfinder sees the player traversing an idyllic and unusual series of puzzles in the historic, virtual workspace and experimental laboratories of a group of brilliant scientists, who's life's work was devoted to solving a global ecological disaster, the effects of which the protagonist (and their unseen vocal guide) now live through.

By exploring the spaces and discovering the work of these scientists- through recordings and messages and experiments left by them, and via an odd, ethereal cat named Cait, whom they appear to have created within the simulation and who follows the player around, offering encouraging words as they progress - they follow the trials and tribulations and interactions of those long-gone experimentors, in an effort to discover what they eventually found. 

Let's just get this out of the way right up front:
Viewfinder is an absolutely excellent puzzle game. 

 

I consider myself a big fan of the first-person puzzle genre, and while I wouldn't necessarily place Viewfinder in the absolute top echelon of the genre - among the Portal 2's or the The Witnesses of it all...
... I think Viewfinder is the most original, most interesting and most well implemented puzzle mechanic I have seen, certainly since Superliminal... and arguably since the mack-Daddy itself: Portal.

 

All the best puzzle games operate by using a single, simple core mechanic, and expanding its use rather than its scope over time.

Over complication of the basic premise is not, generally, a good thing. 

The Witness uses single line puzzle mazes.
Portal uses the Portal Gun.
The Entropy Centre uses Time Rewinding.
Superliminal uses perspective.
Quantum Conundrum uses discrete "world-shifting".

 

There are good puzzle games that use multiple types of puzzle "core" of course - some very good ones - but the best puzzle games have one special thing in common:
If you see a single puzzle being solved - even a puzzle you haven't ever seen before - you know, immediately, exactly which game it is.

 

Viewfinder has that, for sure!

 

The core of the game essentially boils down to this: 2D pictures become 3D when placed...
...and they can be placed anywhere. 

A picture of an archway can be placed anywhere in the environment, and will become an archway through which the player can walk... but it can also be spun, and placed to form a bridge, or placed directly below them, to cut a hole in the world through which they can fall... or placed directly above them, forming a floating platform... from which any loose objects in that photo it will fall into the "real" (pre-existing) world.

That mechanic, essentially, serves the player the entire way through the game, but the number of ways it is used is myriad.

 

If three batteries are required to power a teleporter (the end point to each puzzle,) and the player only has one, and two camera films, they can take two photos of the existing one, place them, then retrieve the new ones.

If 4 are required, they can take a photo of the existing one, place the new one next to the existing one, then take another photo of both... and well... you get the idea.

 

If there is a cage through which the player cannot pass, they can take a photo of the sky, then place it across one wall... "cutting" that wall out of reality, and replacing it with clear blue sky so they can pass.

 

I won't even get into the ways in which the mechanics get compounded, once the player is able to take photos that include themselves...
...as these kind of "Oh, wow, can I do THIS?" experimentation are what the game really trades in, and they are done to such remarkable effect, that I won't risk further spoilers...
...except to say, the answer to "can I do X?" is invariably "YES!"

Indeed, while there is some mystery involving the narrative, really, the game trades in mechanical reveals, rather than narrative ones, and while some of these are fixed, there is plenty of room in Viewfinder for that rarest, most difficult to create, and most celebrated (at least, in this checklist of mine!) of all gaming feats: 
The "OMG moment".

 

I've mentioned these before, though given how rare they are to come across, it's been a little while! 

"OMG Moments" are that thing that games are seldom able to pull off, but where the player not only has an amazing, recontextualising moment of clarity - surprise, coupled with eureka - but more than simply having the game force it, they have it on their own. 
The game might coax them towards a moment, but it happens organically enough, and the player themself feels like they discovered it, rather than were shown it.

 

The Witness had one. The Swapper had one. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had one. Superliminal had a few minor ones... but they are extraordinarily difficult things to achieve.

 

Viewfinder has several. 

In fact, the entire game design feels somewhat predicated on them. 
In many ways, my personal definition of what constitutes an "OMG Moment" is the entire design ethos of Viewfinder. It feels like "OMG Moment: The Game".

There are, it should be noted, a few genuine, fixed-point expansions in the core mechanic encountered throughout the game - the initial introduction of the "rewind" mechanic, or most notably the early-game transition from finding pictures to taking pictures, as well as the late-game addition of fixed cameras with time-activated mechanisms, allowing the player to take photographs they themselves are in...
...but for the most part, the "leaps" in mechanic variation and in the ability set available to the player are not fixed by gating points in the game, but by their own curiosity, and by some puzzle coaxing. 

 

The core gameplay mechanic - that 2D pictures can be made 3D - never really changes throughout the game... however, the ways in which the game makes use of that mechanic, and the number of different ways that core mechanic can be applied, are pretty astounding in their variation. 

The wonder and amazement at how well the transition from 2D to 3D works - the way a picture can be placed anywhere, and will work - slicing into the existing world at whatever strange angle the player did so, and can be manipulated is so seamless and well integrated that it already allows for quite a "wow"...
...but it is only as the player begins to progress, and to poke and prod at the mechanics that they begin to discover some of the strange and magical ways these elements can be affected.

I won't get specific here, so as to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but virtually anything that one can think to try, will not only work... but will work in such a way that it becomes immediately clear that not only did the developer account for it, and they probably made a puzzle that can makes use of it!

 

Indeed, what is shocking and surprising in Viewfinder, is how tight and trimmed the overall game feels. There are "only" somewhere between 60-80 distinct puzzles in the game, and while most can be solved in a number of different ways, the game is not shy about having one that requires a specific, unique use of one aspect of that mechanic, provides its "eureka" moment... and then never requires that same particular method to be repeated.

 

In fact, there are even clear moments where mechanics that the developer figured out, or realised could form specific puzzles, are almost tossed off with simply side-activities. There are multiple spots in existing puzzles, where elements that could very easily have formed distinct puzzles themselves, are thrown in for no real reason other than to let the player toy with them and have fun - experiment for the sake of simply seeing what happens - yet are not a real part of the puzzle... and are never re-used. 

It's a curious thing, because it feels clear that the developer has a lot more "juice in the tank" - they could, clearly, have created many, many more puzzles than are present in the game... yet they obviously have simply elected to be ruthless - to only create perfect, un-repeating, genuinely varied and interested solutions, and let the mechanics simply breathe around the outskirts of those. 

(There are, it should be noted, quite a few trophies tied to these little experimental play aspects... and they work a charm, in the sense that while I never so much as looked at the trophy list during my first playthrough, I was constantly unlocking trophies for doing silly little things... to the extent that I ended up seeing things, and going "I bet there's a trophy for doing X".... and 9 times out of 10, there actually was!)

On the one hand, a part of me really regrets "puzzle brevity" - part of me wishes they had simply made the game longer, with more puzzles and more repetition - I certainly finished the game wanting more - but I cannot deny that the simply fact that the game is so trimmed of fat is the reason for that. 
Puzzle games can often feel a little over-stuffed - as if the developer falls in love with one type of puzzle, and ends up doing so many variations on it, that it loses its magic by the end...
...whereas here, literally every single puzzle I solved felt like a victory, and required no more use of that idea. I solved that one, so the next one is always something at least partly - and often fully - new.

 

The narrative, I will say, is never astounding. 
It's fine - well enough acted in the voice work, and the mystery of what the scientists were doing and working on, and what the player eventually discovers is all perfectly good, but it isn't the draw here. In fact, that is another way in which I would liken Viewfinder to Superliminal - in that the narrative elements are welcome, perfectly adequate, perfectly well implemented, and perfectly well performed... but they do tend to fade into the background, simply because the puzzles themselves are so much the stars of the show.

I'd argue the narrative here is a little more interesting than Superliminal's - primarily because Viewfinder has more characters, and a bit more in the way of true mystery, rather than the simple exploration of the meditative nature of sleep, and the fact that it has multiple characters and interactions to explore beyond the player themself - but it's not getting close to Portal 2 territory, and isn't trying to.
I can't say I truly blame it - few FPP games go for the really "cinematic" or "driving" narrative, and that's for a good reason - most of them fail at it. Pacing a narrative over a puzzle game - where the player might be stuck at any point for a while - must be extraordinarily difficult. Portal 2 is an anomaly in how well it worked, and so expecting that from other puzzlers is an unreasonably tall order. Setting Portal 2 aside though, I'd say Viewfinder is in the upper half of FPP narratives, but probably only just, truth be told.

 

Visually, Viewfinder is a slightly odd one to talk about, as its a game that is very visually impressive... but not in the traditional way games are. To be clear, it doesn't look bad - in fact, it looks very nice, but the basic building blocks of its visuals are not astounding in any way. It is a clean, relatively simple pastel colour palate, with a geometric design, and relatively sparse decoration... however, it is only when the mechanics are actually used, that the visuals begin to show as being as impressive as they are. 

The simple environments are not amazing on their own, but once the player begins to take photos of them, manipulate them, cut into them with new pictures (through all sorts of different filters,) slice and dice the environment, and generally play... that they come to see just how robust that visual palate is. 
A simple, nice white tiled floor is fine - perfunctory but not impressive - at least on paper...
... but when you can photograph it with a sepia filter, turn that image on its side, then slice it into reality before your eyes and see the objects fall from one visual style to the other, it becomes impressive in practice. 

Audio is good in the game - the score is pretty much just a soft, ambient background - not particularly driving or thumping, but keeps out of the way during the puzzle solving, and allows the voice work (both the voice over from the guides for the character, who speaks through answered phones, or the recordings of the scientists, heard thorough gramophone audio-logs,) to carry nicely. 
There can be an occasional annoyance, where the only (semi) corporeal creature the player sees - Cait - is talking to them, and this can sometimes overlap audio recordings playing, if the player happens to cross his "audio-cue markers" while still listening to a recording... but those moments are not a deal-breaker, as the audio recordings (and indeed, the puzzle) can be rewound and re-listened to. 

Voice work on the characters are pretty good - the scientists interactions between their own group being the highlight - and while I never felt I really got to "know" any of them, I did at least come to recognise and understand their relationships to each other over the course of the game. That is helped by the smart decision to have each one be of a different nationality, allowing accents to become familiar... and I'm always going to be happy to hear what I'm pretty sure was a Glaswegian accent in a game!

 

Overall, Viewfinder is that rarest of beasts: a game that feels both truly original, and so simple and smart that one wonders how it hasn't been done before. 
Viewfinder is something of a special case within that rarified category though, in the sense that while the premise IS simple enough and ingenious enough to beg the question "why wasn't this a thing already?"... 
... the answer is just as self-evident as the question: "because it's probably FUCKING HARD to do!"

 

It's a puzzle game with an amazingly simple, and super effective core mechanic, that is implemented to an absurdly well honed level, never ever loses its magic or its lustre over the course of its run-time, and almost never repeats a puzzle solution, constantly finding new, smart ways to riff on it's basic building blocks.

 

It's never incredibly challenging - indeed, I completed it without any guidance in only a handful of hours...
...but its a game that I would buy DLC or a sequel to, sight unseen, in a heartbeat - and am looking forward to forgetting, just so I can play it all over again!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Viewfinder might feel like an odd one when ranking, because reading the above, the tendency might be to think it would rank below Portal 2, and somewhere close to Superliminal. 

However, while it certainly does still rank below Portal 2, I actually think it is likely to rank significantly higher than Superliminal. Not because the fundamental core concept is better (though it is, marginally,) but because of the execution... and the robustness of that execution.

The fact is, Superliminal is great, but once the solution to a puzzle is found, there is little scope for experimentation - there is a "set" solution to 90% of the puzzles. Viewfinder's concept is more malleable, in the sense that puzzles can often be solved multiple ways... and that gives it longevity and replayability that dwarfs Superliminal - and that is a rarer and more valuable thing in a puzzle game!

There is a puzzle game that falls almost equidistant between Portal 2 and Superliminal - and that is Return of the Obra Dinn. That is an amazing game, one that is quite different, and one that I think stylistically and auditorially is superior to Viewfinder... 
...however, I cannot deny that my awe and amazement at how well viewfinder works, and the fun I had playing it eclipsed even Return of the Obra Dinn!

 

That puts Viewfinder in a very high placement already, and the games above Obra Dinn (and, honestly, quite far below it!) are all amazing, and all quite different. 
I hummed and hawed for a while, and I don't want the glow of recent completion to force an overstatement of the game, and as such, I think I do have to accept that as good as Viewfinder is, the slightly throw-away nature of the narrative means it has a tough time competing with the next game above Obra Dinn - Doki Doki Literature Club+.

 

Therefore, while I'd happily replay both in a heartbeat, I do think that Doki Doki manages (just) to hang onto its spot in a one-to-one fight.

 

As such, Viewfinder finds its (well deserved) very high spot on the ranking!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally remains as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'!

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

 

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

Edited July 25, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[Copanele]

AHA, FINALLY! A game that I recognize!

Quote

Dante's Inferno

Quote

Dante's Inferno is an utterly shameless rip-off of Santa Monica Studio's original God of War...
...but in virtually every way in which  God of War is good, Dante's Inferno goes the opposite way. 

No way...you didn't LIKE Dante's Inferno?

 

I played this game as one of the "introductions" in the wonderful world of Playstation and...yeah, it was one of the first games that made me wonder if people who praised this game actually know what good games are  

I think I kinda (kinda?) enjoyed the game abit more, or rather laughed my ass off whenever I was shotgunning Lucifer's schlong with my semi automatic shotgun cross (DEUS VULT), but my god the rest of the game felt like an actual sermon in terms of boredom. 

Also...in some weird way...Dante felt more of an awful person than Kratos, despite Kratos decimating an entire civilization? At least Kratos didn't use God as his moral compass for the whole pillaging/raping/cheating that he did. And he wasn't lame.

 

The DLCs, while fun (always yelling SANTA LUCIA every time I was blasting the forces of evil), made me sell the disc so I won't  be able to help others in co-op. Heathen moment, I know  

 

Big congrats regardless, it took 13 years to complete and review this wonderful piece of work. Definitely worth it, I laughed my ass off once more!

 

ALSO big congrats for being the first AND only one to get the platinum in "Fights in Tight Spaces". That one was exciting to follow!

[DrBloodmoney]

3 minutes ago, Copanele said:

t my god the rest of the game felt like an actual sermon in terms of boredom. 

 

Dude - how they managed to take a trip through Literal Christian Hell, and make it about as interesting as a TED Talk on the colour Beige, is truly beyond me....

 

3 minutes ago, Copanele said:

Also...in some weird way...Dante felt more of an awful person than Kratos, despite Kratos decimating an entire civilization? At least Kratos didn't use God as his moral compass for the whole pillaging/raping/cheating that he did. And he wasn't lame.

 

Thank you!

 

3 minutes ago, Copanele said:

ALSO big congrats for being the first AND only one to get the platinum in "Fights in Tight Spaces". That one was exciting to follow!

 

Also, thank you - though it is now my life mission to get this awesome game more play, and usurp myself as that only plat holder - I don't care if the rarity drops to 100% - I just want people to see how coooooool! ?

[Platinum_Vice]

Congrats on being the first to complete FiTS. A trendsetter! You had me at 'hello' with it about a month back, then lost me during a discussion outside of this thread, and now you've pulled me back in again. Hokey-pokeyed like the agents at the will of your cards! 

 

... And boy oh boy, get me some of that Viewfinder YESTERDAY. I was reading that with a grimaced face and a singular cyclops eye scrolling your review as if that was protecting me from noticing a potential spoiler at *just* the right moment. Though, it seems that you walked us along a tightrope, and I made it with just enough information to tell me that this game MUST be played this year. Thank you!

 

[DrBloodmoney]

6 minutes ago, Platinum_Vice said:

Congrats on being the first to complete FiTS. A trendsetter! You had me at 'hello' with it about a month back, then lost me during a discussion outside of this thread, and now you've pulled me back in again. Hokey-pokeyed like the agents at the will of your cards! 

 

Oh man, it's so good. It's a pity that ridiculous levelling trophy will - I have no doubt - limit its audience on this site... but it really shouldn't. To be honest, now that I know what the plat journey is like, I can totally endorse it as one of those games you just dip in and out of in the "post game" - picking up a few hours here and there, and eventually get the plat - like a Tetris or a CotDG or something. 

 

Quote

... And boy oh boy, get me some of that Viewfinder YESTERDAY. I was reading that with a grimaced face and a singular cyclops eye scrolling your review as if that was protecting me from noticing a potential spoiler at *just* the right moment. Though, it seems that you walked us along a tightrope, and I made it with just enough information to tell me that this game MUST be played this year. Thank you!

 

 

Dude - you'll love Viewfinder. It's tailor made for our tastes!

Definitely on the easier side of the genre, and relatively short, but I'd highly recommend finding a free afternoon, and just sinking into it, as it has a habit of just melting through time like a picture cutting through the world!

Edited July 26, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (somewhat) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

New

 

Far Cry 6
Arcade Archives: Tetris the Grand Master
Arcade Archives: Tetris the Absolute the Grand Master 2 Plus
Star Trek: Resurgence
The Cave

 

 

No Priority Rankings this time, as there's no Legacy games - still busy with real life, and, it's hard enough for me to keep on top of the new games, let alone dip into the Legacy ones!

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman 3, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is newly crowned gaming-poopsicle-supreme htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary going to keep the title of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Franks and Science-Monicas, as promised (and in some cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

Far Cry 6

 

Summary: 

 

The sixth mainline entry in the Far Cry franchise - and the fourth numbered one under Ubisofts stewardship - once again transports the franchise staple mix of open-world shooter-stealth, light-RPG, and cookie-cutter mission-based chaos to a new outdoor setting... this time, the Caribbean, via the fictional Caribbean island of Yara.

 

The player takes control of a local resistance fighter (a female or a male - Dani or Dani) who is embroiled in a guerrilla struggle to topple the dictatorial Antón Castillo - the charismatic ruler who is grooming his young son Diego to replace him - and free the local Yarans, who are trapped in an industrial cycle of production of "Viviro" - a drug produced from Yaran tobacco plants, which secured the country's collapsing economy and cemented Castillo's rule... with devastating health consequences to the population.

In terms of the actual setting and story, Far Cry 6 had an interesting problem to solve. 
Far Cry 5 was a bit of a mis-step, after the success of Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4. The basic "core" premise of the franchise - of having a lone wolf character dropped in a wild and unfamiliar territory, and fighting an occupying force - was retained in Far Cry 5, but the setting, and general story was more bespoke. Rather than being a "foreign" locale (at least, to the primarily western audience,) it was Montana in the US, and the "occupying force" was a cult, rather than a governmental military force. 

 

It was an interesting deviation from the franchise norm, but unfortunately, it was not one that worked particularly well, primarily due to Ubisoft's failure to capitalise on it.
The developer had leaned heavily into the idea of the cult and of the slightly different tone of the game in pre-release marketing, using the deviation as a way to inject renewed interest in a franchise that had run the risk of running stale with so many main and side entries - but the primary problem, was that most - if not all - of the really interesting potential avenues of exploration that deviation would allow for, were squandered. It released at at time where the notion of a cult, run by a charismatic, egomaniacal and sociopathic leader warping the minds of his followers in western culture was never more prescient... but in their fervour to avoid any potential blow-back, Ubisoft almost obstinately refused to actually SAY anything with that premise. They picked up the bat, but were to scared to swing it.

 

Ubisoft had the idea, but failed to ever actually use that idea to do anything meaningful or interesting. Instead, they simply made a game that was, in reality, exactly the same as all their previous Far Cry games, but without a lot of the elements that made those games successful or stand-out. They abandoned the core ideas for new, more unique seeming ones, but hesitated in actually doing anything different. The result, was a game that felt simply "the next in a chain", without anything new or interesting, but also without many of the staples people liked about the earlier entires.

What is dismaying, is that Far Cry 5's lukewarm reception seems to have taught Ubisoft a lesson...
...but it wasn't necessarily the right lesson. 
By head-faking towards doing something interesting, but failing to follow through, the game resulted in being rather flat... but instead of taking the lesson "we shouldn't hold back when doing something new", instead, they seem to have taken the lesson "we shouldn't do anything new."

Far Cry 6 is a return to basics for Far Cry as a franchise...
...but it feels less like a glorious return, and more like a skulking retreat.

Far Cry 6 feels like Far Cry. 
It feels exactly like Far Cry... without a single new or interesting element.

 

There is much to be said for a franchise knowing what it is, and sticking to it, but there is a serious problem with sticking to a well worn formula for too long...
...you are relying on outdoing your predecessors in specific, quantifiable areas, and if you don't manage to outdo them in any of those, your game suffers greatly.

 

Far Cry, as a franchise, really has 3 pillars that make it what it is:

• A lush, visually appealing and varied, outdoor, open-world setting.
• Good shooting mechanics.
• A charismatic bad guy and an interesting protagonist.

Far Cry 6 has all three of those pillars covered...
...but none of them stand taller than they did in previous entries in the series, and because the game has nothing else - nothing unique or interesting in addition to those pillars, it simply shrinks into looking like a pale shadow of former glory.

In terms of the setting, this is arguably the area Far Cry 6 comes closest to a genuine victory. Yara is a gorgeous looking environment to explore - rich, varied, interesting and massive - and while I think the Sri Lankan-inspired Kyrat in Far Cry 4 is still the most interesting and beautiful location the series has had, the Cuban-inspired Yara is probably a close second. 
Certainly, in terms of visuals, the graphical flair on show in Yara is the best the series has seen (as it should be, given this is the first game on the new console generation,) but even without that, the layout and design of the island works very well. There are city and village areas, hills and waterfalls, ocean beaches and rivers and foliage, and it all looks magnificent and is fun to be in. It is a landmass that would absolutely allow for true joy in simply exploring...
...but unfortunately, there is a significant problem with this, and that is rooted in Ubisofts apparent fear of the player ever feeling "bored". 

 

Yara is enormous - indeed, even after 100 or so hours of exploration, the map still had significant areas of "darkness" where I had not ventured - however, it never really gets a chance to feel enormous, due to the way the "encounter" mechanics work.
The game seemingly never wants the player to ever feel like they are lost in the wilderness, or far from the action. No matter where the player ventures - even if they "air-drop" to the most deserted solitary rock in the middle of an unpopulated ocean, as far from civilisation as they could possibly get - they will likely be there for all of 10 seconds, before an entire fleet of boats filled with Yaran soldiers, and a posse of Guerrilla fighters seem to materialise out of nowhere, and start waging all out war with one another 10 feet from the player. 

 

It is virtually impossible to go anywhere in the game, without chaos following the player at all times. So fearful of silence is the developer, that the game will artificially generate chaos around them constantly, no matter where they are or what they are doing... which has the curious effect of making the landmass actually feel much smaller than it is. If you cannot move 15 feet without stepping into a fire-fight, or a car crash, or a hail of bullets, then what is the point of having a huge landmass? You never feel like you are in a wilderness, if the furthest reaches of the jungle always seem as populated with chaos as the city streets.

 

 

The gameplay mechanics - for example, the shooting - remain sound. Far Cry has always had a nice shooting model, with punchy, fun weapons, and good, crisp explosions and combat. These remain as solid as ever, however, there is something of an issue, in the sense that while every game has "upped the ante" in terms of the arsenal of weaponry given to the player, there has not really been a correlating "upping of the ante" in terms of challenge. 

 

As an example, take Far Cry's most fundamental "core" gameplay mechanics: The taking of territory.

In all Far Cry games, one of the most fun side activities to do, is to try to - generally through stealth, or force - take over an occupied piece of territory, and "claim" it from the occupying force, for the player's faction. These have gotten progressively easier to do in each Far Cry game, as the mechanics of the enemies remain stagnant, while the arsenal of weaponry the player gets increases...
...but in Far Cry 6, the shark feels well and truly jumped. 

One of the earliest side missions the player has access to has, as its prize for completion, a special, supernatural rifle. This rifle is not only so absurdly powerful that it can kill enemies with one shot, but has the added effect of highlighting all enemies for miles, and CAN SHOOT THEM THROUGH MULTIPLE WALLS.

As such, literally ANY piece of occupied territory, can be taken over, completely silently, and with every special bonus, without the player even setting foot in it. They can simply walk to one spot outside it, hit the "see everyone through the walls" button, then shoot everyone inside without them even knowing where the player is. This is - to be clear - not some "Accessibility setting" - it is simply one of the main weapons in the game...
...and does seem to illustrate, in microcosm, Ubisoft's apparent position...
...they have simply given up on the idea of Far Cry being anything but a checklist.

 

This might seem like nit-picking one OP weapon in the game, but I do this as a way to highlight the overall feel the game has. While that is the most egregious example, the game feels littered with examples of this same problem, to different levels. It really feels, in virtually all instances, like the developer created all the elements of a Far Cry game, but in an effort to ensure that no one ever feel frustrated, they give the player so many over-powered tools, that the actual game becomes trivialised. 
To be clear, I take no issue with a game being easy - some of my favourite games have been relatively challenge-free - however, when a game has a narrative as thin as Far Cry 6's, and where the fun of the gameplay is the primary selling point, I do take issue with the game actively negating the fun parts.

It feels like a game unwilling to take itself seriously as anything but a game... and specifically, as a "Checklist" game.

NPCs who give side missions do not speak to the player character in game, instead, the player character approaches them, and is presented with a  mission screen, where the NPC stands in a fugue background, and talks... seemingly to the PLAYER... telling them what they need. Dani - the character - seems trivial and uninvolved.

 

This extends to the missions too. While in mission, Dani will constantly pass comment on how boring or cookie-cutter the mission she is doing is. "Oh, we're doing this now?", "Oh, now this is happening?", "I can't believe I'm doing X"...
...which is likely supposed to work as a slightly 4th-wall-breaking wink to the audience...
...but having a bunch of missions that are boring to play, or make no narrative sense, or are fundamentally stupid is not made better by the developer telling the player that they are aware of that.

The only response is "Yes, this IS stupid... so WHY DO YOU KEEP MAKING ME DO IT?!"

 

Every Far Cry has had some side content that veers towards funny, rather than serious, but in Far Cry 6, the combination of the weakness of the "serious" missions and side of the story, the weakness and clear stupidity and ineptitude of the "good guy" factions, and the absurd over-abundance of "comedy" side-content, makes it feel less like a "serious" game with some comedy side-stuff, and more like a circus of "comedy", that occasionally tries to play serious.
This has the effect that on the rare occasion the game actually hits the mark on the "serious" side, and has a scene that might have - in another game, with a more consistent tone - worked to draw some player engagement or emotion, even those moment can't possible function.
The player simply cannot feel emotionally engaged with a story about conflicting loyalties and emotional connections to a child caught in a situation he cannot fathom or comprehend, in a world where he is both feared and despised...
...when the character he is supposed to be emoting with spent the last 3 hours in a Stranger Things-themed funhouse, playing music in a makeshift outdoor festival, and as the comedy side-kick to a homicidal rooster as it trashes melon stands and blows up cars.

The final "pillar" - the protagonist and the antagonist - are some of the weakest points in Far Cry 6, and represent a nadir for the franchise... none more so than the "Big Bad".

 

Horror fans will no doubt be familiar with a particular problem that happens with long running film franchises, where continual sequelisation, devoid of significant stylistic or narrative development, ends up falling into the "villain trap".  Because each entry remains largely cookie-cutter, and the only significant differences are setting or window-dressing elements, the focus shifts from the "good guy" characters, to the villain... to the franchises inevitable detriment.

In the Nightmare on Elm Street films, for example, the first film is excellent, following a cast of memorable characters, being hunted by a malevolent and charismatic villain in Freddie. As the films continue though, and the formula becomes cemented, the ability for the main characters, the setting, the premise or the style to be memorable fades, and the focus - and selling point - of the films shifts from the rotating "good guy" characters, to the staple villain - Freddie himself...
...to the detriment of both the franchise, and of Freddie.
Without a Nancy Thompson, Freddie is given too much screen time with too little threat, and shifts from malevolent, terrifying, mysterious entity, to simple self-parody. Without a Laurie Strode to battle, Michael Myers stops being really scary, and becomes simply funny.Without decent characterisation of the Crystal Camp councillors, Jason Voorhees simply becomes too saturated, and the films too one-sided to really work.
 
The franchises become so reliant on the charisma of their evil characters, and the "good guys" and premises become so paper-thin and throw-away, that the villains are forced to carry far more screen-time and far more lore than they were ever originally designed to... and inevitably, across a long enough franchise timeline, devolve into self-parody, losing all the menace they once had to simple over-exposure, audience exhaustion... and stagnation.

That is the fundamental problem with modern Far Cry - and the root of the issue can be traced right back to Ubisofts first entry in the franchise - Far Cry 3. Far Cry 3 was a great game. It was an injection of fun into a franchise, and a reboot of what was, prior to it, a hardcore, more niche franchise, re-branding it as a popular and populist, fun open-world shooter. 
Where it hamstrung its own franchise, however, was with the Vaas character. 

Vaas was a charismatic, interesting and genuinely unnerving character - so over-the-top and larger than life, and characterised so well. Not only was he more interesting than the main character of that game, but also, because the main character (Jason Brody) was also a (deliberately) distasteful, unlikeable character, whom the player was never supposed to particularly like - the success of that game placed the franchise, forever, into a "villain-first" position.

 

That position is not one that is immediately a negative, of course. The franchise, in fact, played into it again in Far Cry 4, to arguably even stronger results, with the really interesting and charismatic Pagan Min... but it doesn't change the fact that "villain-first" is a difficult wave for a developer to surf - and one prone to disaster. It is an "all-eggs-in-one-basket" method. Having the villain be the draw only works as long as the villain is interesting, and without good protagonists for that villain to play the antagonist to, their toolbox is severely limited.

By the time Far Cry made it to Far Cry 6, they have such a paper thin, unpunctuated and uninteresting protagonist and set of "good guys", that all they could possibly hang on to for personality was their villain...
...and in Far Cry 6, the evidence that they have run out of ways to make the villain "villainous" in a vacuum has never been more apparent. 

 

Casting Giancarlo Esposito as the malevolent dictator of Yara might seem smart on paper, but it is, in reality, a white flag of surrender. 
Clearly, the writers had so little in the way of ideas, that the only way they could find to try to imbue their villain character with some unique personality was by importing some via a big-name actor...
...but Esposito isn't a cure-all. He is a fine actor, but not a miracle worker. Even the best chef in the world cannot make a gourmet meal out of cardboard food. Esposito does the best he can with the material he has - injecting menace and as much nuance as he likely could... but the writing is the writing, and the writing is not there.
There is simply nothing about Esposito's Castillo that feels anything but a cookie-cutter, B-Movie amalgam of real world dictators, and nothing he does or says that feels genuinely menacing outside of the level of a lesser Disney villain. 
Giving him a son, who's loyalties are in question, and who is struggling with his place in the world - caught between family ties, fear, love and morals - is arguably the only really interesting concept injected into the narrative...
...but even that plot line is absurdly mishandled, with the character seemingly flitting between loyalties erratically and without clear motivation, and ending up having a rather tiresome personal connection to the protagonist character that, while the game struggles valiantly to bludgeon some player emotion into, falls flat at every point.

I am very aware, as I write this, that this review seems more interested in talking about the general aspects of Far Cry 6, where is features in the franchise, and what it represents to that franchise, and that is unavoidable.

The fact is, that while Far Cry 6 has good elements - it looks great, it has very fun shooting, it the foley and sound design is good...
...every single element that it has in its favour are notable good points about Far Cry as a franchise, not about Far Cry 6 as a game. 

It has a baseline of fun and quality that is inherited from its predecessors, and many of those elements that it inherits  do make it fun to engage with...
...but the fact of the matter is, all of those elements have already been discussed in previous games. Far Cry 6 does literally nothing new, and in the very, very few areas where it introduces any kind of original element, it is almost always to the game's detriment, rather than its benefit.

It is a strange situation, where, for the Far Cry fan (a camp I still consider myself to be part of,) there is nothing wildly objectionable or actively off-putting in Far Cry 6...
...but neither is there a single element that I could say would give them anything they haven't gotten before, and better.
The game is functional, and visually appealing; acceptable to play, and even good fun...
...but it takes all the elements of Far Cry, and wraps them up in easily the weakest story the franchise has seen, with easily the weakest protagonist the franchise has seen, against one of the weakest "Big Bads" the franchise has seen...
...and seems at all times to do its level best to both remind the player of the earlier, better games, and marginalise the gameplay elements that made them better games.

 

The lack of faith Ubisoft has in Far Cry 6, and certainly the lack of ideas, is never more apparent than when one looks at the DLC offerings the game has. These are numerous in number, but astonishingly slight in terms of variation.

 

There are a set of "Special Operations" - these consist of single, small(ish) bespoke maps, and require the player to first infiltrate a base, steal a special item, then exfiltrate, then wait for extraction while waves of enemies attack them, all the while continually "cooling" the dangerous item they stole, lest it explode.

These missions are somewhat good fun - they certainly capitalise on the solid gameplay of the franchise better than anything in the main story does - however, they are extraordinarily one note, and repetitive. Not only does each one need to be completed a minimum of 4 times, with the mission remaining the same, and escalating only in difficulty...
...but all 5 variants of the "Operations" are the same. The same item to be stolen, the same loop, the same everything.

 

It's the fundamental Ubisoft problem - they realised they had a fun thing... so they made the player do it so often, that the wrung it dry of that fun... then make them keep doing it.

The more interesting DLCs are three mini, slightly rogue-lite campaigns, each themed around one of the "Big Bads" from the previous 3 numbered games. These are, actually, quite smart little campaigns fleshing out the villains from those games (Vaas from Far Cry 3, Pagan Min from Far Cry 4, and Joseph Seed from Far Cry 5,) and give the developer the opportunity to render some of the environmental biomes of those older games using the Far Cry 6 engine...

...but again, these not only suffer from the same "Ubisoft problem" - in that each is essentially a palate swap of the previous, and so they become repetitious...
...but they also highlight the near rock-bottom level of faith Ubisoft has in this game... given that the one villain they don't represent, is Castillo!

Ubisoft seems desperate, wherever possible, to remind the player of Far Cry 6, how much they enjoyed Far Cry's 3,4 & 5. They clearly know that Far Cry 6 is doing nothing new, and so want to constantly hammer home the idea of it as "the next entry in your favourite Far Cry franchise", rather than letting it stand on its own two feet...
...as they know it would fall down if they did.

The final DLC is a ridiculous Sci-Fi add on, that was likely born out of nostalgia for the much more interesting Far Cry 3 spin off, Blood Dragon, awkwardly mashing together silly Sci Fi with Far Cry...
...but the less said about it the better. 

 

 

Overall, Far Cry 6 is not a terrible game - it can't be, because Far Cry is, fundamentally, a relatively fun franchise, and Far Cry 6 is, absolutely slavishly and without salt or seasoning, one of those - but at a certain point, simply redoing the same thing to lesser and lesser effect starts to wear on a franchises ability to engage...
...and Far Cry 6 is that point.

 

It is a perfectly standard, mostly adequate entry in a formulaic franchise...
...but that is a franchise now, more than ever, stuck in a perpetual state of looking backwards.

It spends so much time relentlessly trying to both invoke nostalgia for past glories, and to white-wash and re-litigate past failures by treating them like past glories, that it gets interminably bogged down, and feels unable - or unwilling - to ever break free and do anything of its own.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

In relation to Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4, there is no comparison. While Far Cry 6 looks better, and has some superior elements, those are entirely due to the passage of time and advancement in tech. They are not down to design or fun or writing, and as such, Far Cry 6 cannot possibly hope to best either of them on the rankings.

The more interesting fight is with Far Cry 5.
Comparing Far Cry 5 and Far Cry 6 really begs the question: "Is failed capitalisation on new ideas better or worse than simply not having any new ideas?"

The fact is, as much as the virtual absence of originality, or even effort towards originality, in Far Cry 6 pained me... the fundamental fact is that the baseline from which Far Cry 6 is refusing to step even one millimetre from - Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4, are still good games. Far Cry 5 tried to do something more original at least at the outset, but squandered it, and the end result is that Far Cry 5 ends up being a worse game than Far Cry 6, as it does deviate, but not enough to help. Only enough to harm.

 

As such, as much as I dislike rewarding tepid timidness, in this particular instance, the end result of their lack of ambition, is less detrimental than faking ambition, then shying away from it at the last moment.

That places Far Cry 6 above Far Cry 5, but it isn't dramatically different enough, and fumbles enough elements of even the well worn formula in terms of writing, tone and mission variety, to come nowhere near the two previous good Far Cry games. 

That had me looking up from Far Cry 5, looking for other games that felt competent, but "by-the-numbers" or unoriginal as a first look... 
...and that quickly led me to PS Vita 3rd person action shooter Unit 13. 

Unit 13 does nothing really interesting - it's a pretty by-the-numbers game. Largely competent, but never exemplary, and often plagued by a lack of engagement due to lacklustre narrative or engagement.

I do think that the positive elements of Far Cry 6 - the visuals, the variety (at least, as compared to Unit 13,) and the gunplay have to elevate it above Unit 13, (despite the extra points Unit 13 gets for being a large(ish) shooter on a system not well catered to by that genre,)...

...but the game right above it is Rainbow Moon.

 

Rainbow Moon is a game I personally never gelled too well with, however, it is undoubtedly a more original game than Far Cry 6, has more engagement, looks really nice in its own way, and certainly has its own sense of style and a smattering of new (or at least, less common) gameplay concepts and ideas.

As such, I cannot imagine a world in which a lacklustre version of a well worn formula shooter can best it on the rankings...

...and so Far Cry 6 finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arcade Archives: Tetris: The Gand Master

 

 

Summary: 

 

One of the more notable games to come to Hamster's stable of Arcade Archives releases, Tetris The Grand Master is the first in a series of Arcade Tetris releases, previously exclusive to Japan.

Released in 1998 in arcades, prior to this release, Tetris The Grand Master was very difficult to find, and arcade boards sold for thousands of pounds.

 

It is considered a very good Tetris release by the community, though in many ways, the most notable element of TTGM (and the second game, TTATGM2) via Hamster, is that good sales may eventually lead to a port of TTGM4 - roundly considered to me the best arcade version of Tetris, period.

 

Tetris The Grand Master, as compared to something like Tetris Effect, is, of course, relatively slight in terms of game offerings, featuring as it does, 3 basic modes:

"Original" Mode - The original Arcade version, allowing for drop-in local 2 player.

"Caravan" mode - a variant requiring a High Score in a set 5-minute game.

"High Score Mode" - A version similar to "Original" Mode, but featuring Ranked scores, playable in "standard" mode or 20G Mode.

 

That 20G mode is notable here, as (as far as I understand,) Tetris The Grand Master represents the first introduction of 20G play in Tetris. 20G, for anyone not in the know, is Tetris of the most brutal style - pieces have no visible "fall" - they appear instantly at the bottom of the stack, already fallen, and the only time the player has to chose placement is that afforded by the "Lock Delay" - the brief moment between the piece connecting with another piece, and it locking in place.

 

That 20G was introduced in Tetris The Grand Master does go hand in hand with its variant of the "lock delay" mechanic. Tetris The Grand Master  has what feels like a slightly strange, loose "lock delay". Blocks feel quite "slippery" when the first connect, allowing for fairly free movement for a beat of time, followed by a quick, sticky, snappy lock accompanied by a fairly loud "crunching" sound effect to confirm placement.

It's a lock delay that can feel a little odd to get used to at first, particularly for players used to other Tetris variants, however, it comes to feel pretty good quite quickly. While it's not an implementation I would necessarily welcome in more modern Tetris versions, as it can make the pice placement feel a little too loose and make solid placement a little finicky due to the pieces feeling oddly "light", I think it works well for this particular game.
 

In regular, non-20G modes, Tetris The Grand Master is interesting too.
There is a very wide delta between speeds - the game works on a "Rank" rather than a straight "speed" acceleration, and so the smooth gradient of speed increase that most Tetris variants use is abandoned, in favour of a more "stepping" approach. Moving up a rank changes speed quite significantly and is accompanied by a speed increase equivalent to 3 or 4 speed increases in standard Tetris. The speed with which the player accelerates towards the highest speeds is magnified, and the game becomes very chaotic very quickly!

On the other hand, however, speeds are not purely in "one direction" in Tetris The Grand Master, but rather, in "waves". While the game gets brutally fast very quickly, it them slows back down at different intervals, giving a more "ebbing and flowing" relationship to the gravity than a straight ramp. It's a very unusual mechanic to get used to, but does certainly create some cool situations. Where the mediocre player (like myself!) will be desperately trying to handle the extreme speed, that is not simply to add a few additional points before an inevitable game-over. Rather, it is to "surf that wave" and try to hold on until the speed slows again, and they can get their bearings, and play some down-game to correct errors they have probably made!

 

There is an extremely fast left/right piece movement on display here - pieces can be shunted form one side of the field to the other almost instantaneously, and this allows the player to deal with the frantic, frenetic high speeds far more comfortably that they could in, for example, Classic Rules NES Tetris. However, this comes with some issues . Because the slide form left to right or right to left is so speedy, the player needs to be really on top of placement - any muscle memory they have of how long to hold left or right to accelerate to specific spots from other Tetris variants will be out the window, and they need to re-learn these timings, or be much more careful about using discrete, single-square "bumps" to place pieces at high speeds!

In terms of randomisation of pieces, Tetris The Grand Master is very curious. It is pre 7-Bag, (the randomising smoother that all Modern Tetris releases use,)...
... but not as brutally unforgiving as NES Classic Tetris.

It's essentially non-7-Bag, but with a buffer randomiser filter of 4 pieces. 
Pieces are chosen at random in the background, however, each randomly chosen piece is checked against the last 4 drawn pieces, and if that piece is found, it randomises again... but only a set number of times. If the same piece is randomly chosen multiple times, it will still present it, but only after at least attempting to smooth the piece dispersement.

In effect, while this does smooth the randomiser somewhat - encouraging a smoother distribution of pieces - it is more effective at preventing piece gluts, than alleviating piece droughts. 

While this 4-check system can help to break the back of truly spiteful randomness, it is not predictable in the same way 7-bag is, and therefore requires more "Classic" Tetris style building than "Modern" Style, and many "modern" Tetris tactical builds (T-Spin Factory, for example,) are not viable here.

 

Visually, Tetris The Grand Master is, of course, pretty rudimentary, given that it is a faithful port of a 1998 variant, but it does what it needs to do. The playfield is clear, and the piece colours are the standard colour scheme (that of Sega's 1988 release, which have become the defacto standard in virtually all releases since.) 
The visual effects on line clears and tetrises are nice and simple - but effective.

 

One notable visual signature Tetris The Grand Master uses, is placing a thick, dynamic white outline around the placed pieces, which reshapes and moulds around all locked pieces. This makes it very easy to see, without having to focus, exactly where any errors have left gaps in the build, and exactly where the well the player has built begins and ends. 
It is is a kinda cool effect - if there was any element of TGS I think the mack-daddy release of Tetris - Tetris Effect - could do well to introduce, it would be this - adding the option to have the same dynamic white line outline on the build playfield.

Audio is simple - the game sounds pretty good - faithfully recreating (I assume) the arcade feel, and the background music is suitably frenetic and exciting. 
Sound effects on gameplay elements are fine, and do what they need to do...
...though of course, judging Tetris visuals and audio for older releases in an age where Tetris Effect - with its auditory and visual stylings and cornucopia of lights and sounds - exists, leaves all previous releases looking a bit drab by comparison!

Overall, Tetris The Grand Master is never going to be the Tetris Release that draws the non Tetris player into the game - it is slight in offering as compared to fully fleshed out console versions, and features little in the way of "easier" modes for the novice to practice on - but it is a very welcome release of a much loved, and previously very difficult to find, version of the game.

Hamster's entire philosophy is faithful recreations of games that were previously difficult to find - particularly in the West - and Tetris The Grand Master is a perfect addition to that. It's a version that will not likely be appreciated for what it is to the majority of players...
...but for those with an interest in the Tetris scene, or in Tetris history, Tetris The Grand Master is a significant link in the chain, and having a way to experience it for the pice of a couple of cups of coffee is something of tremendous value.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

As far as ranking Tetris The Grand Master, I think it's relatively simple to narrow. There are a few Tetris releases on the list already, and while I do think this faithful re-release of a cool, interesting variant of Tetris places it higher than the tepid, rather dull release by EA with their simply titled "Tetris", the slight offering and limited nature does mean I have difficulty seeing it beat out Puyo Puyo Tetris 2.

 

While I probably would chose to play a few games of Tetris The Grand Master over the same few games of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2... 
...that argument is rather semantic in the age of Tetris Effect, and so it comes down to other factors like breadth of offering and visuals - and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 has a lot more going for it on both fronts - not to mention an entire other game in Puyo Puyo in there too!

That places Tetris The Grand Master somewhere between.

 

In terms of what games lie in that field, I think Tetris The Grand Master has to rank above another action puzzler - Metropolis: Lux Obscura, as it's more repeatable, and Tetris is a fundamentally better game, and I think that, as a console offering, it also beats out similarly arcade-style-action-puzzler Bejeweled 2.

 

Of the three games left in that delta, I think Tetris The Grand Master does beat out Batman: The Telltale Series and Twin Mirror in terms of fun, but while the core game of Tetris The Grand Master is better, I think the good elements (and sheer size) of Assassin's Creed III means it still gets to retain its place.

 

As Such, Tetris The Grand Master finds its spot!
 

 

 

 

 

 

Arcade Archives: Tetris: The Absolute: The Gand Master 2 Plus

 

 

Summary: 

 

Hamster continues its faithful re-releasing of near forgotten Arcade classics, with the 2000 released sequel to Tetris The Grand Master... the absurdly titled Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus.

Like the previous game, Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus was an Arcade-only release of Tetris, released only in Japan, and uses much of the same core fundamental variants of the game that the original used, with a few new flourishes.

The core gameplay is very similar to the predecessor. The game features the same "lock delay" parameters, with a particularly "slippery' feeling upon initial contact, followed by a crisp, quick lock that feels quite good once gotten used to. 

 

The game retains the "rank" system, as opposed to the more standard "smooth curve" gravity increase, resulting in a much faster, (and certainly more Arcade-friendly and feeling,) ramp up to chaotic fast Tetris play, as well as the "ebbing and flowing" dynamic changes is speed, where the speed increases and decreases dramatically at different intervals. 

 

The game also introduces something that was lacking in the original Tetris The Grand Master game - player-driven insta-drop (activated, here, via "up" on the D-Pad) - a mechanic that virtually all modern Tetris games have, the absence of which was felt in the original for any player coming to it with more modern Tetris sensibilities...
...(which is almost certainly the majority of the audience for this release, given the rarity of the original game prior to this release!)

 

The game also still uses the non 7-Bag, but 4-piece-check system debuted in Tetris The Grand Master (see that review for details of that.)

This release features 3 main modes:

 

"Normal" Mode, wherein the game is largely familiar to players of Tetris generally, and of Tetris The Grand Master specifically. 
There are a couple of notable twists, however. Every so often, the game will slow and present a special piece. If at least one line is cleared using this piece, a bonus effect is granted - Either "shaking" the board (wherein all "floating" pieces left by mis-placements are "shunted" downwards, re-aligning a smoother, less fragmented stack, or and clearing random lines from the stack.

"Master" Mode is the more "expert" level Tetris mode. 
This mode abandons the special bonus pieces, and instead, plays morel like classic Tetris.... but features a massive acceleration after 500 lines. As lines are cleared, a countdown timer ticks down, and the speed increases exponentially, with an accompanying intensifying of the music... and of the background pulsing and warping!

The final mode is something genuinely terrifying, even to the Tetris competent... the aptly named "T.A. Death Mode"!

This is a mode so brutally ridiculous, that it is considered one of the hardest challenges in Tetris... and to the average player, simply looks impossible! 

 

It features immediate high speeds (which only get faster,) 20G from the start, (meaning there is no drop, and all pieces simply "warp" to the bottom of the playfield instantly,) and requires 999 lines to be cleared to complete!

Believe me when I tell you, if you ever feel like seeing what masterful Tetris looks like, I recommend taking 3 minutes to seek out Youtube footage of this mode being completed. That a human being is playing this, and not simply the CPU playing itself is incredible... as I consider myself at least somewhat Tetris proficient... yet I cannot even follow what pieces are coming, let alone have time to think about where one should put them!

Visually and auditorially, Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus retains much from Tetris The Grand Master.

The sound effects upon line clears and Tetrises are identical, as is the majority of the actual "in-play" visuals - the playfield, the colour scheme and the majority of the UI elements.
It does, however, introduce two new elements visually - one of which I see as a positive, and one, unfortunately, as a negative.

 

The positive is the dynamic visualiser backgrounds. As said, the actual playfield and in-play elements remain largely the same, however, the game has a series of quite nice looking (for 2000) dynamic backgrounds around the playfield, and these, while sometimes distracting, do look good.

 

The negative though, is the omnipresence of the second player playfield. 
In Tetris The Grand Master, playing in Single Player mode showed only the player's playfield, and the second playfield was only visible when a second player actually joined the game. In Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus, however, the second player's playfield is on screen all the time - and while this does make some sense as an Arcade "splash screen" (and this game is fundamentally designed to be an arcade game,) in a console port such as this one, that isn't really a positive, since the majority of players will likely play single player primarily. A lot of on-screen real estate is taken up with an element they are not using, and this limits the size of their own playfield, and can provide a distraction.

 

Overall Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus is, like its predecessor, a very nice release from Hamster - featuring all the bells and whistles that they apply to their ports, and it is certainly welcome to have another historic Tetris release available to play easily for anyone interested in the history of the series, or of games generally.

 

I personally don't find quite as much fun in Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus than I did with Tetris The Grand Master, that is really down to my own playing sensibilities - there isn't anyone in my home who likes Tetris other than myself, so I'd generally gravitate to a Tetris that doesn't waste half its screen with a "Join Second Player" field that I won't ever really use. 

Having said that though, I always welcome a somewhat forgotten classic getting a new lease of life, and I remain hopeful that Hamster will continue, and port the remaining 2 Tetris The Grand Master games...
...if for no other reason, than I have heard nothing but good things about that game, and know it is the most well regarded of the series among the Tetris fanbase!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

As was the case with Tetris: The Gand Master, I think Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus, while limited in the breadth of offering, does have the historical significance, and the more unusual stylings that make it a more interesting flavour of Tetris than EA's lacklustre and simple "Tetris".

EAs version is all but completely obliterated from any value by something like Tetris Effect, whereas these ports of the Tetris The Grand Master series were unique enough that they still have value, even in a world where Tetris Effect exists, as there are some elements of these games not covered by Tetris Effect's gargantuan offering.

As such, despite not being quite as enamoured of Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus as I was of Tetris: The Grand Master, I think it falls neatly somewhere below that game, but above EA's Tetris.

Aside from that, most of the same arguments made for that game apply here... but with one difference. While Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus is still fundamentally a good Tetris game, I do think the real lack of a reasonable "entry level" in it, makes it harder to compete with Bejeweled 2, even on console, with Bejeweled 2's slightly awkward conversion to controller.

 

It was a tough call, as, all things being equal, I do love Tetris more than Match-3...
...but I think in this instance, I have to give the slight edge to Bejeweled 2 in a one on one fight, looking holistically at the offerings and the drawbacks.

As such, Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus finds its spot, right below Bejeweled 2!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Star Trek: Resurgence

 

 

Summary: 

 

A Telltale-style Narrative Adventure game from Dramatic Labs - the new studio run by former Telltale CEO Kevin Bruner, and employing a significant strain of Telltale alumni - Star Trek: Resurgence takes the rough mould of the post-The Walking Dead Telltale gameplay model, eschews the 5-part episodic structure, adds significantly more in the way of interactive sections, and crafts a tale set in the Star Trek universe.

 

Taking control of two principal characters on the Science Vessel the U.S.S Resolute - Jara Rydek, the new First Officer, and lower-decks engineer Carter Diaz - the player sets off on a peace-keeping diplomatic mission to non-federation space, with a view to brokering a peace between two worlds on the brink of all out war over mining territory. 
When it becomes clear that there is far more alarming and cataclysmic events surrounding the conflict, that may lead to devastating consequences for both factions, the Resolute and the larger universe, both become quickly embroiled in a race against time - and a powerful adversary - to avert a potential invasion that could threaten the Federation, and the entire quadrant.

The most important factor in a Telltale style narrative game is, of course, the plot and writing, and happily, both these elements are good here. 
The game is actually quite long - the run-time of the game is about on par with the full run time of a 5-episode arc in one of the old Telltale games, but here, the feel is much more of a single, long movie, than of episodic television. That the pace is maintained, and the narrative flows well through that much longer format is commendable, as is the fact that while the game feels tonally similar to the Star Trek television series, it feels plotted more like one of the better Trek films.
Indeed, the game actually has that curious thing, where, as a player, several times in the late game, the plot reminded me of where this all began, and I was struck by how seamlessly the game's plot had managed to funnel me from one small mission to something much more, without ever really feeling like it was changing gears. that "Wow, how did we get here" factor works - and in the good way.

I will say this now, as it needs to be said somewhere: my personal Star Trek credentials are not enormous.
 
I have certainly not seen all that the universe has to offer. I have seen all of the Original Series, all of The Next Generation, the first 7 or so movies, and several seasons of DS9 and Voyager - and can confirm that, to my mind, the narrative of Star Trek: Resurgence feels closest to the Next Generation / Deep Space 9 era...
...and the plot and beats of it could stand toe-to-toe with some of the episodes of that era. 

I don't claim to have incredibly deep knowledge of the broader Trek universe, but every time I was aware of an element of that universe being referenced or incorporated into the narrative or world-building of Star Trek: Resurgence, it felt well done, and at no point did the game ever make use of or reference anything from the broader fiction that my limited knowledge actively bumped on, or that felt out of place.

The game actually does a commendable job of what is probably a relatively difficult thing to balance - integrating broader Trek lore, without becoming impenetrable to those without any of the background knowledge. 

While there are certainly specific episodes of the series that would provide enriching background to the story - and one specific episode of The Next Generation (the early episode titled "The Last Outpost"), which forms a basis for a large element of the story - none of these are required in order to follow the intricacies of the plot - and that is to the games credit.

Knowing, for example, some background on the Kobliad (the race to which main character Jara Rydek belongs,) or the relationship between the Trill and Symbionts, or being able to recognise a Bajoran by their signature sinus ridges, certainly helps to understand the background of certain characters...
... but that knowledge is not a prerequisite. 
The game does a good job of rewarding prior knowledge, but not excluding those without it, and what specific pieces of information from the greater Trek universe are a requirement, and explained well enough within the game itself to the level required to follow it perfectly well.

Characters and facial animations are decent, but not cutting edge by any means. Graphically, the game is a step up from Telltale for sure, but not even close to the level of things like Supermassive or Quantic Dream, and the limited budget as compared to those kind of games is apparent.
Probably the closest analogue in terms of visuals would be to the original Life is Strange - as said, certainly a step up from the old Telltale models... however... the more "realistic" style means less technical hitches / uncanny valley elements can be disguised via stylistic flourishes, and that can mean the game looks a little dated or lower-budget in 2023.

 

Animations are decent, though character reactions can be a little over-the-top at times - the game has eschewed the old Telltale "This Person will remember that" cliché  "tooltip", opting instead to show the characters actively reacting, in-world, to the decisions made by the player. 
These work, but can feel a little heavy-handed in places. NPCs will smile, or frown, depending on their reactions to the player, but partly due to the slightly exaggerated facial features, and partly due to the slightly clunky effect the pause between loading scenes can have, (where NPC reactions can be lingered on a few beats too long for comfort,) some of these reactions feel a little more pantomime than they should. Occasionally, a decision by the player about a course of action that is simply a choice between two perfectly feasible options presented by two different deck officers, can result in an exaggerated frown from one and an over-the-top smile from the other that borders on Kabuki theatre!

 

These moments are fleeting, however, and while they can feel comical in a vacuum, they do still do what they need to from a gameplay point of view - the player is always aware that the decisions they made are having an effect on their ongoing relationship with those characters. The fact is, that while the facial animations can feel pantomime, the actual line DELIVERY doesn't, and the overall plot is well worked out and interesting, helps to keep the whole game from tipping over into comical realms.

Actual line delivery is, as said, good, though the slight hitching that can happen between lines does sometimes add to a slightly robotic quality. What's debatable though, is how much these issues are helped - or hurt - by the actual content of the game. 

Unlike something like, say, The Walking Dead or Life is Strange, Star Trek Resurgence is working within a universe where dialogue is already slightly stilted, and less naturalistic inherently. 
Starfleet is a pseudo military organisation (or at the least, one using military ranks and hierarchy,) and starships are, primarily, a place of work. The characters naturally speak to one another in a more formal way, and because Trek dialogue often contains significant amounts of techno-babble and hard-pseudo-scientific language, that tends to make its dialogue more stilted as a matter of course. It's a world and a television series where the audience expects the dialogue to sound a little more formal. 

That aspect means that when the slightly robotic nature of a lower-budgeted narrative videogame creeps in, it IS accented and accentuated...
...yet it is also somewhat excused. 
Watching a scene from Resurgence in a vacuum, in comparison to a scene from Life is Strange, certainly Resurgence would seem more amateurish as a game... but in context, I tend to feel they actually work on about the same level, as there is a built-in expectation of some more formal, more stiff interactions in the Trek universe. In fact, were the characters to talk to one another in a very naturalistic, flowing way, I tend to think it might actually harm the verisimilitude to the universe to which the fiction belongs!

The characters do feel, very much, like they "belong" in the Trek universe - and that's a testament to the writing, and the performances. There are two characters from the greater Trek lore who make appearances - one voiced by their regular actor, and one voiced by an (extremely good) substitute (for obvious reasons) and in both cases, they sound perfectly at home in the game... and feel true to the long-standing characters they are.

The gameplay is something of a mix here - the deviations from the Telltale model are clear - and broadly welcomed - but they do have some drawbacks. There is significantly more interaction with the game on a mechanical level than the old TellTale games had - numerous different mini games, action set pieces, stealth sections, interactions with Trek technology... and while these do serve to keep the player engaged, and break up the flow of the game, they are, it must be said, all pretty ropey and stilted in terms of actual gameplay.

 

Shooting sections feel particularly mishandled - the engine the game is running on is perfect for narrative, choice-based gameplay, but clearly not designed for action, and so a lot of these mini game sections that involve action or stealth feel either so simple that they are merely dressing, and throw-away, or irksomely, stubbornly frustrating. None will actively challenge the player for any length of time, but to be honest, since the only punishment for failure is repeating the exact same section, the lack of genuine challenge is not really something to lament - or welcome on the rare occasion it comes.
 No player is buying this game for the shooting, and shooting sections are simply there to serve a narrative. They do that... but I question if anything is really gained by making these sections marginally interactive, rather than simply dealing with them in a cut-scene, given that there is no actual narrative deviation at these point. They are "pass/fail" to continue, not path deviations as they would be in a Quantic Dream or a Supermassive game. The game cannot continue with one character dead... they simply repeat until that character survives.  

The mini-games involving the use of Trek staple technology are also very simple, however, these I think work much better within the game.

While the actual interactions with these technologies are - as gameplay mechanics - incredibly rudimentary, comprising simple small "mini-games" that offer no real challenge - that isn't really to the game's detriment... and in fact, in some ways, feels stylistically appropriate.

The Trek universe is rooted in fun techno-babble and sci-fi technology as little more than plot-critical explanations of what is essentially space-magic. Trek posits a world of high technology that is so advanced that it allows for virtually any plot device to work, while couching it in a fun, well developed and engaging blanket of high-concept technical (borderline) feasibility. 
That is - I should be clear - a strength of Trek, not a flaw.

 

Things like tricorders (the ubiquitous catch-all analysis device used by Star Fleet,) phasers, warp technology, replicators, etc - these are considered ubiquitous technology in that universe, and as common and simply to Star Fleet personnel as a pencil or a calculator are to us. Using them comes naturally to the characters. The action of using these pieces of Trek lore in game are subsequently simple for the player, as it would make no narrative sense for the character they are controlling to struggle... 
...but that doesn't mean there isn't a cheap thrill to being the one doing it!

There is something quite alluring about being the one using a tricorder - about flipping from Alpha to Beta to Gamma analysis, and focussing in on pieces of Trek-staple tech like a cracked warp coil - even if the actual gameplay to do so is as basic as it comes. 
It may be very simple, and the gameplay elements merely skin deep... but the fact of the matter is, the fun is in the narratives that facilitate their use, not in the actual use of them - and getting to be the one facilitating that is the fun of a game like Star Trek: Resurgence.

Visuals, as said, are not on the level of a AAA, big-budget title, but the art style chosen works well for the story and universe, and the attention to detail in getting everything in the game looking correct for the Trek Universe (and specifically, the Trek universe of the 90s era,) is admirable, and well done. Environments look good, and things like skyboxes and effects on warping all look right for the lore, and fun to see, if never hugely "wowing" from a game technology point of view.

In addition to the good voice work, the audio is pretty good too - the score is nice and fits the universe, and foley work all feels rooted in the 90s era Trek. The sounds of a tricorder beep, or a Red Alert alarm, or a matter transference are all Trek staples, and are all recreated well.
(The only thing I did bump slightly on, was the voice of the computer on the Reliant - Majel Barrett's vocal stylings for the computer in virtually all pre 2000 Trek is such a staple of the franchise, that I'm a little surprised the voice cast here wasn't a direct soundalike (as the game did for the one main character from the greater Trek lore who appears after the death of his actor,) however, I suppose not every computer on every starship would have the same voice, so it's not the end of the world!)

Audio mixing can be a little strange, unfortunately. 
Occasionally, the music is mixed a little too loud against the voice work, and that means some scenes where music is being used to set a tone can feel a little over-wrought, though this can be alleviated by changing the audio-mix manually.

 

 

Overall, Star Trek: Resurgence is a very good narrative game, set in an interesting universe, that has clearly been made with a lot of love and care in relation to its source material. 
It is a game unashamedly and unabashedly Star Trek - as it absolutely should be - but it does a very good job of catering to both the Star Trek fan, and the Trek agnostic. 

 

For the fan, there is plenty of fun to be had in shaping a well told and well plotted tale within that universe, that integrates elements (and characters) from the wider fiction without trampling on them or mishandling them, and sticks to the tone of the series' that the fans remember...
...and for the newcomer - those fans of Telltale, without the background Trek knowledge - it still provides a ripping yarn that can be followed, understood, and enjoyed.
 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

The most obvious comparison for Star Trek: Resurgence would appear, initially, to be the Telltale games, as those are, of course, the direct lineage of game development that lead to them...
...however, that isn't entirely helpful.

Yes, it can narrow the field somewhat - I think, for example, that Star Trek: Resurgence has to fall somewhere below The Walking Dead, and somewhere above Batman: The Telltale Series...
...but that still leaves a very wide gulf.

 

Instead, I turned to other interactive, choose-your-own-adventure fiction games - those of Quantic Dream.  

The Quantic Dream games have, visually, an enormous lead over Star Trek: Resurgence. Even Heavy Rain - the earliest Quantic Dream game on the list - does outdo Star Trek: Resurgence on the graphical front, which is to be expected, given its much higher budget, and much greater focus on visuals above all else.

However, I do think the narrative elements, the interactivity and the basic plot of Heavy Rain all fail in a one-on-one fight with Star Trek: Resurgence. 

 

With the later, higher ranked Quantic Dream game - Detroit: Become Human - however, I do think that while Star Trek: Resurgence still has the better overall plot, Detroit's is certainly better than Heavy Rain's, and puts up more of a fight. Detroit: Become Human isn't a perfect game by any stretch, but it is a very good looking, quite engaging, and well put together one - and I think its overall package does have to beat out Star Trek: Resurgence in the aggregate.

 

That places Star Trek: Resurgence somewhere between Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, without obvious direct comparisons. There are a few narrative-first games in there though, and so it came down to simply looking holistically, and asking "did this have more impact on me overall, than Star Trek: Resurgence?"

For Killer Frequency, the answer was "no"...
...for Backbone (recently re-christened "Tails Noir") however, the answer was a marginal "yes"...

...and since those games currently sit side by side, Star Trek: Resurgence finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cave

 

Summary: 

 

A 2013 Puzzle Platformer / Adventure Game hybrid from Ron Gilbert, and released by DoubleFine, The Cave sees the player take control of any combination of 3 protagonists, (from a pool of 7 unique ones,)  each seeking some personal item in a mystical, mysterious cave.

Each character - the Knight, the Time Traveller, the creepy Twins, the Monk, the Adventurer, the Hillbilly and the Scientist - seek some specific object unique to them - the "object of their desire" - and the mysterious, sentient (and rather sarcastic!) Cave will shape and mould itself to suit each one...
...to provide them the object they seek, and the dastardly means to obtain it...
...and to potentially teach them a lesson in the process.

The fact that The Cave comes from Ron Gilbert - one of a handful of recognised titans of the LucasArts era Adventure Games scene - is very apparent in The Cave, and it is interesting and notable that during the creation of The Cave, he was working at Double Fine, under the stewardship of fellow LucasArts alumni, Tim Schafer.

 

This era was a curious time for these developers. The straight Adventure Games with which Schafer and Gilbert had made their names had largely faded from the zeitgeist, but the tendrils to those games were still fresh, and the fanbase, while smaller, was still largely present, and looking for a fix. 
Different games were experimenting with ways to incorporate the design elements of the old, with the stylings of the new.

 

The Cave represent one such experiment, and in much the same way that Tim Schafer's Psychonauts took elements of the LucasArts-style Adventure Games and incorporated them into the 3D Mascot Platformer, The Cave bakes them into the 2.5D Puzzle Platformer.

 

In fact, the Adventure Game elements are, if anything, even more on show in The Cave than in Psychonauts. Indeed, while Psychonauts felt like a 3D Mascot Platformer with Adventure Game elements, The Cave feels closer to an actual Adventure Game presented in the guise of a Puzzle Platformer.
Certainly some of the more complicated elements of Adventure games - the verb lists, or the sheer volume of items or things they can be used on is streamlined significantly, and the "inventory" is eschewed, in favour of characters simply being able to carry one item at a time - but the actual methods of "solving" each individual puzzle element of The Cave's various biomes is very much a direct implementation of Adventure Game notions...
...and with Gilbert at the helm, that brings with it his specific sensibilities, and sense of humour. 

The Cave is a dynamic game, in the sense that there are 7 playable characters, which can be played in any combination of 3, and taking each individual one of these characters on the spelunking adventure opens up a different character-specific area within it. 
It's not exactly a reshaping - the geometry of the cave does, I'm relatively certain, remain mostly static, and all 7 unique areas are technically there, in their allotted place, alongside the several "non-specific", baseline areas that all characters see, but because each character has a different unique ability allowing bespoke methods of traversal, each unique location is gated in a sort of "metroidvania-esque" manner, with only occasional additional walls or doors added to avoid players getting stuck in areas they could not traverse without a specific absent character.

 

Every combination of characters will, for example, pass the entrance to a castle... but only the Knight, (who's character story that castle houses,) has the invincibility ability allowing him access to it through the fiery chimney. 
While every character will see the entrance to the Twin's creepy house, only their ghostly ability to hold a switch while also walking through the gate will allow them to go inside, then let the others in after them.

 

This allows the developer to craft a game that feels markedly different across different playthroughs, without requiring much actual change to the geometry of the level, beyond some simple gating. 

Each one of these unique biomes essentially houses a short (1-2 hour upon first playthrough,) Adventure Game style set of puzzles to solve, with the characters finding items, using them on other items, outwitting or outsmarting nefarious NPCs... and causing wanton calamity as they go!

While the actual interaction of the game is clearly in the Puzzle Platformer mould - (it's of note that while playing, MsBloodmoney asked "what are you playing?" - with a suspicious glare! - several times, as from a passing glance, she assumed it was a Trine game, and wanted to ensure I wasn't playing one of those without her!) - however, the method of solving the puzzles presented is 100% in the Adventure Game mould. 

 

When a carnival barker at a rigged "guess your weight" machine must be outsmarted, the player must visit the "amazing magician" stand, get him to temporarily "vanish" a dumbbell stolen from the "man of average strength" exhibit, then pick it up, stand on the "guess your weight machine" holding he invisible dumbbell.

When a monster hunter must be distracted from a hotdog machine so the player can steal one to lure a monster to a trap, the key is finding a battery for a tape recorder, charging it via an electric eel, then recording the monsters roar, and playing it near them.

This types of "logical absurdity" puzzle solving are part-and-parcel of Adventure games of the 90's (and no doubt sound entirely familiar in style to fans of Gilbert's Monkey Island games,) and while the presentation and method of accessing them is different here, there can be no mistaking the fact that they ARE Adventure Game puzzles.

 

The layout of the game is clever, and allows for a fair bit of repetition. Each playthrough consists of 4 areas that are "set" and common to all playthroughs, and 3 "bespoke" areas, that are contingent on playing as specific characters. Each character also has two possible "endings" to their personal story (told through comic-style panels, found in-game via cave paintings.) As such, in order to see everything the game has to offer, a minimum of 5 playthroughs are required.
That might seem excessive on paper, however, it really becomes far less repetitive than it might seem, since the player will still be seeing genuine new content for at least the first 3 playthroughs, and even in the "common" areas, the unique abilities of the different characters allows for some diversity in the methods of traversing them.

In terms of visuals, The Cave is relatively nice, though not without its technical issues. The character models are fun, and the art-style of the game feels particularly "DoubleFine" - cartoonish and exaggerated in a good way, and goofy and silly. Characters move in fun, jaunty ways, and the animations of the characters, while slightly crude, are fun, and aide the silliness of the tone.

They move nicely, and the physics model is quite loose and floaty - a good thing in a game like this one - however, there are some drawbacks that are accentuated when playing in 2023. 

There is some hitching of the game as the player moves through areas quickly, and some minor screen tearing. It's not enough to ruin the experience, but it is noticeable and a little irksome at times - in a few specific areas in particular. 
The worst example is during a section where the player must catch sticks of dynamite being thrown their way in a bucket of water (Adventure Games, yo!) This section can become far more difficult than it should be, as the screen tearing and momentary hitching can often cause the player to have difficulty lining up the catch correctly...
...but these are isolated spots, and for the most part, the game runs well enough to never really harm the experience. 

 

Audio is good - the music is fine - tonally appropriate and silly, and fits the particular biome - and the voice work is good. The most prevalent voice by far is the sentient cave itself, which provides the direct-to-player sardonic narration - and a lot of the jokes, many of which are quite funny - and this performance is excellent. 
The foley work is simple but perfectly functional, and on the occasions that a comedic beat requires the foley to hammer it home, it generally delivers. 

The actual puzzle design is the highlight here though, of course - and solving each of the individual biomes, is genuinely fun, and with enough of a diversity of engagement - swinging broadly between Adventure Game puzzle and Puzzle-Platformer elements - to make each feel quite unique.

 

 

Overall, The Cave is very much a game of its particular time and era - and one very obviously aiming to translate the goofy fun of 90s-style Adventure Games to a more modern (in 2013) style of game...
...and on that front, I think it is a home-run success. 

Along with the original Psychonauts, I would argue strongly that The Cave is the best example of how a non-Adventure-Game Adventure Game can work very well - importing all the best elements of the old LucasArts style, in a package more palatable to a 2010's audience.

It still retains a lot of the LucasArts mentality - both in its gameplay, and in its humour, and as such, I think, requires a certain innate love of those games in its audience...
...but there is no shortage of gamers who recall that era with huge fondness...
...and I'm one of them.

If you are too, then I think The Cave will more than satisfy that itch - one that doesn't get scratched often these days!

 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

There's a good few DoubleFine games on the list already, so fir first-pass narrowing of the rankings, there's more than ample games to pick from.

 

I think that, as much as Psychonauts was in my mind while playing The Cave, I don't think The Cave can really seriously expect to best it. 2D Puzzle Platformer is absolutely a genre I generally enjoy farm ore than 3D Mascot platformer, and so the mere fact that I think both games are great speaks more highly to Psychonauts...
...it managed to entice and seduce me even despite being a genre I don't often enjoy as much!

I think a lot of the sections of The Cave are very good, and I like the game design a lot, but there is quite a bit more to Psychonauts, and as good as many individual sections of The Cave are (I am particularly fond of the Scientist and the Hillbilly sections), there is no single part that I think reaches the highlight of Psychonauts - The Milkman Conspiracy.

 

Looking at other DoubleFine games then, the next one down is Headlander - and that game has a far bit in common with The Cave. They are both Puzzle Platformers with goofy senses of humour, though Headlander is much more a "straight" action Puzzle Platformer and Metroidvania than The Cave.

I actually think that, while Headlander would win on technical graphics, I like the look of The Cave more, and while Headlander does win on music, the jokes and voice work in The Cave beat it out. I also just fundamentally enjoy the more puzzle-focused gameplay of The Cave - and think it works better within its genre - than the Action Shooter gameplay of Headlander.

That places The Cave somewhere between the two. Looking at puzzle or puzzle-adjacent games with a lot of humour in that delta, presents an obvious comparison: Afterparty.

 

That's an interesting fight. 
Afterparty is, I think, the better game in terms of narrative, and in terms of visuals, but The Cave wins on puzzles and gameplay. Afterparty takes the (slight) edge on jokes, and on voice work, but The Cave takes it on repeatability and variety.

It's actually a very close one this - and I swung back and forth a couple of times...
...but in the end, I think, in 2023, I have to give the marginal win to Afterparty.

 

The Cave has just a couple too many issues with its screen tearing and hitching, whereas Afterparty runs smooth as butter... and I since I feel like I pretty much laughed about the same amount, and enjoyed the narrative equally, that means Afterparty can squeak out the victory!

 

It's such a close fight, however, that I am inclined to place The Cave right below Afterparty...
...and when I consider all elements of the game, in comparison to the next game down - Super Time Force Ultra...
...I conclude that that is the right call.

 

Fundamentally, I think I would re-play The Cave before replaying STFU...
...and given that The Cave required 5 full playthroughs already, that statement does mean something!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally remains as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'!

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

 

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

[Neef-GT5]

I was scrolling down this thread to request you share your views on The Cave on PS3 while it’s still fresh in your mind - and there it already is. That must be what they call talent! 🙃

 

Thanks for keeping this topic alive and active, that’s quite a pleasure to read your thorough reviews 👍

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by Neef-GT5