psychbomb
BACKER
A waste.
I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.
It's worse.
I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.
While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.
I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.
The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.
Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.
Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.
There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.
Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.
The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.
Great photo mode, though.
I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.
It's worse.
I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.
While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.
I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.
The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.
Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.
Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.
There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.
Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.
The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.
Great photo mode, though.
2019
JESUS SAVES.
Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.
Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.
I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.
I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.
Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.
Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.
Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.
I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.
I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.
Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.
Forgive me for letting you down.
Phantom Liberty just can’t keep the 2077 heat up, which is all the more surprising when you consider that it’s an expansion to an already (allegedly) finished game, and not at all held back by being a wholly original work. Phantom Liberty’s linear gameplay is pushed forward by boring writing, and is then packed into a tiny slice of Night City that’s remarkably dense and remarkably shallow. Never has this world felt so artificial, barring back when the base game ran so poorly that Sony pulled it from their storefronts. Speaking of, this is the perfect place for your thirty dollars to go if you’ve missed those days of poor performance; even on a brand-new rig, Dogtown still chugs when trying to draw rays. Maybe this is like Crysis and they designed this tiny piece of Pacifica for a computer that’ll exist in the future.
Anyone who’s played tabletop games for long enough knows the dangers of letting a campaign go on for too long. Unless the DM has made some pretty solid plans — and assuming that the players haven’t gone too far off of the rails — properly handling escalation tends to be difficult. Ramp up the stakes too slowly, and your players will get bored; ramp them up too quickly, and you’ll have nowhere left to go. 2077 ends with an assault on Arasaka Tower, ensuring that V gets to be remembered as one of Night City’s legends. As Silverhand before them, as Blackhand before them, as Spider Murphy before them, as Rogue before them; V leads a charge against one of the deadliest corps in the setting to defeat Adam Smasher, destroy Mikoshi (unless you pick the obvious bad ending), and separate their mind from Johnny’s once and for all. It’s a strong ending, giving you an unequivocal victory in a world where you aren’t meant to get those. Phantom Liberty seems to assume (and reasonably for a $30 expansion) that you’ve seen this ending before. As such, it needs to escalate. It’s placed right in the middle of V’s story, but it needs to wow returning players who have seen everything that the original game built up to, and it does this by turning into a cartoon.
V gets contacted via their Relic by the world’s greatest netrunner, who’s currently working for the New United States of America. She informs you that she’s onboard the Space Force One alongside the president of the country, they’re going to crash, and they need your help. V swoops in, rescues the president of the NUSA, agrees to be a spy for the government, and then goes on little James Bond adventures with Idris Elba for the promise of a cure. The netrunner, Songbird, is also so fucking good at what she does that she’s managed to harness the power of the Blackwall. There’s a part at the end of her path where V jacks into her and gets to use the Blackwall powers for themselves, letting you click your fire button to UNLEASH BLACKWALL and glitch an entire army of secret service supersoldiers to death. Reed’s (Idris Elba’s) path features you directly taking on MAXTAC in order to pull Songbird out of their grasp. All of this happens immediately after V deals with the Voodoo Boys in Act 2. V goes from some snotnose merc who’s still on the come-up to an NUSA super spy, capable of harnessing the Blackwall like a magic spell and slaughtering a full squad of MAXTAC soldiers before they’ve even heard the name “Anders Hellman”. It’s far too much, far too quickly. V is the strongest fucking person who has ever lived and it isn't close. It’s silly.
Not helping matters is how synthetic this setting is, made all the worse by the story structure. Most of what you’ll be doing in Dogtown amounts to little more than going to a place and then going back. You might even get to kill someone if you’re really lucky, but it’s not something you should expect to be doing much of. It’s more like a little treat. A lot of these meetings could have been holocalls. You'll drive to Alex's bar, drive to Mr. Hands's hotel, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to an airdrop, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a Voodoo Boys hideout, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a radio tower, drive back to Alex's bar. Dogtown itself is mercifully small, so these to-and-fro drives don't take especially long, but they serve only to illustrate how fake this world really is; the same NPCs will be shaken down by the same goons every time you pass by the same street corners, likely in pursuit of one of the same airdrops that's landed in the same spot to be picked up by the same set of guards. This was a problem in the base game, but nowhere near to this extent; Dogtown being so tiny and so dense reveals only that these characters are like actors in a play. They de-materialize the second they're no longer needed. Night City being fucking massive — despite having very little to do within it — at the very least provided some level of obfuscation for how surface level the NPC routines and placements were. Even then, there were some NPCs that would stand around in the same spots and actually have dialog that advanced as you progressed through the story. I remember there being a corrupt cop who always talked to the same two Tyger Claws on a street corner in Kabuki, and he would tell them about different schemes he had cooked up whenever you drove past. Not so in Dogtown. Everyone gets one line, one routine, one action, and they do it over and over again in the hopes that you won't be paying attention long enough to see them repeat themselves.
Regardless, it's the missions themselves that show just how far CDPR's level design chops have slipped. These are some of the most aggressively linear levels I've seen in any modern game, and they're easily on par with the worst Call of Duty campaigns. Most offensive of the lot is You Know My Name, where V is tasked with infiltrating a cocktail party. The game has a very clear idea of how it wants this to go — you enter through the sewers, silently take out the few guards they have posted, snipe everyone blocking Reed's path, schmooze your way through the party, find Songbird, download personality profiles of two hackers hired by Kurt Hansen, and then get out. The problem with this, to go back to the DM analogy, lies in how on-rails this entire mission is. There is so little room for player expression, and taking it on any other way feels like you're going off-script in a way that the game isn't equipped to handle. The building you're breaking into has some of the tightest security in all of Dogtown, patrolled by dozens upon dozens of BARGHEST guards, and V is reminded over and over again how key it is to remain stealthy. If you go guns blazing, and get caught at every single opportunity provided to you, the only thing that actually changes is whether or not Reed gets a black eye when you're escorted out of the building at the end. Something like thirty guards all get mowed down by you and your superspy friend who doesn't understand how cover works when you're guiding him around, and nobody bats an eye. You just walk about, do exactly what the game tells you to, and your actions are ignored if you try to do anything else. Even some of the most basic gigs in the base game offered more player expression than this. Being locked in place on a stationary sniper rifle and telling an NPC where to go for ten minutes is not what I play Cyberpunk 2077 for.
For as high as the stakes are, this is a remarkably boring narrative. Setting aside the bog-standard secret agent man schlock — which was already done and better in the base game — these might be some of the most same-y characters I've seen in a long time. Between Reed, Myers, Songbird, and Alex, every single one of them has the base, singular trait of "competent", and all later develop the secondary trait of "backstabber". Songbird backstabs Myers who backstabs V who backstabs Reed who backstabbed Alex who backstabs V and Songbird who backstabs V. They go through all of this with the excitement and fervor of Sam and Ralph clocking in. They're fucking bored by the entire narrative. Everyone seems like they'd rather just go home and be done with it. Johnny isn't even allowed to be wrong about anything anymore; he's been reduced to a voice in your head who mugs the camera and glibly recaps everything that happened every ten minutes to make sure that you're still paying attention. Base game Johnny had a lot of moments where he was an abject moron too blinded by his ego to see obvious answers, but none of that exists here. It doesn't even make sense in the timeline: he can give you that whole teary speech about how Songbird must have just wanted her freedom more than he did and that's why she got a happy ending instead of him, and then slip right back into his dipshit asshole persona the second you get back to base game. Again, CDPR is writing Johnny under the assumption that you've already seen him go through his character arc, but that doesn't work when you willingly set the events of your follow-up story before the point where his arc actually happens.
All of this just makes me wonder if CDPR ever actually had a clue what they were doing with Cyberpunk, or if it was just luck and a lot of outside consulting that got them where they are. V being able to take on MAXTAC in a 2v4 and coming out not just alive but victorious is so fucking stupid that it actually annoys me. I know I'm being a lore freak, but it's ridiculous. V may as well have recruited Bugs Bunny for the mission. There's no sense in pretending as though this is still a fairly normal story operating within the bounds of reality when you're so willing to break the hard rules of your own setting so easily. This goes double for the idea of harnessing the Blackwall and using it like a Bioshock plasmid. I'd call it pure fanfiction, but most fanfiction coming out these days has more restraint. Beating Adam Smasher was similarly pretty out there in the base game, but it at least had some narrative heft; two Night City legends taking down the last of the old guard, and it was one of the last things V ever did. You can canonically wipe a MAXTAC squad or shoot the Blackwall out of your fingers in this and the game just keeps on going as if V isn't a fucking god. Again, this is placed chronologically right after V deals with the Voodoo Boys, and there's still a lot of base game left after that. How the fuck are the Tyger Claws meant to be considered a serious threat after this? The Raffens? Kang Tao? Arasaka? You can't set your character to a level of strength and ability this fucking high and then bring the stakes back down afterwards. At least Reed's route has the good grace to offer ending your playthrough; finish the expansion by sending Songbird into space and you're dropped right back into Night City to go and get yourself a different ending.
Phantom Liberty is a massive disappointment. The opening section — while roughly about as linear as the game means to go on — at least manages to promise some interesting developments that ultimately never come. I think I'd like to stop offering so many chances to this studio, now. Thank goodness CDPR is taking a breaking from the Cyberpunk universe, and is instead shifting gears to beat some more life out of The Witcher horse. There is still supposed to be a sequel game coming out at some point in the future; if this is what we can expect moving forward, count me out.
They yassified Mr. Hands.
Phantom Liberty just can’t keep the 2077 heat up, which is all the more surprising when you consider that it’s an expansion to an already (allegedly) finished game, and not at all held back by being a wholly original work. Phantom Liberty’s linear gameplay is pushed forward by boring writing, and is then packed into a tiny slice of Night City that’s remarkably dense and remarkably shallow. Never has this world felt so artificial, barring back when the base game ran so poorly that Sony pulled it from their storefronts. Speaking of, this is the perfect place for your thirty dollars to go if you’ve missed those days of poor performance; even on a brand-new rig, Dogtown still chugs when trying to draw rays. Maybe this is like Crysis and they designed this tiny piece of Pacifica for a computer that’ll exist in the future.
Anyone who’s played tabletop games for long enough knows the dangers of letting a campaign go on for too long. Unless the DM has made some pretty solid plans — and assuming that the players haven’t gone too far off of the rails — properly handling escalation tends to be difficult. Ramp up the stakes too slowly, and your players will get bored; ramp them up too quickly, and you’ll have nowhere left to go. 2077 ends with an assault on Arasaka Tower, ensuring that V gets to be remembered as one of Night City’s legends. As Silverhand before them, as Blackhand before them, as Spider Murphy before them, as Rogue before them; V leads a charge against one of the deadliest corps in the setting to defeat Adam Smasher, destroy Mikoshi (unless you pick the obvious bad ending), and separate their mind from Johnny’s once and for all. It’s a strong ending, giving you an unequivocal victory in a world where you aren’t meant to get those. Phantom Liberty seems to assume (and reasonably for a $30 expansion) that you’ve seen this ending before. As such, it needs to escalate. It’s placed right in the middle of V’s story, but it needs to wow returning players who have seen everything that the original game built up to, and it does this by turning into a cartoon.
V gets contacted via their Relic by the world’s greatest netrunner, who’s currently working for the New United States of America. She informs you that she’s onboard the Space Force One alongside the president of the country, they’re going to crash, and they need your help. V swoops in, rescues the president of the NUSA, agrees to be a spy for the government, and then goes on little James Bond adventures with Idris Elba for the promise of a cure. The netrunner, Songbird, is also so fucking good at what she does that she’s managed to harness the power of the Blackwall. There’s a part at the end of her path where V jacks into her and gets to use the Blackwall powers for themselves, letting you click your fire button to UNLEASH BLACKWALL and glitch an entire army of secret service supersoldiers to death. Reed’s (Idris Elba’s) path features you directly taking on MAXTAC in order to pull Songbird out of their grasp. All of this happens immediately after V deals with the Voodoo Boys in Act 2. V goes from some snotnose merc who’s still on the come-up to an NUSA super spy, capable of harnessing the Blackwall like a magic spell and slaughtering a full squad of MAXTAC soldiers before they’ve even heard the name “Anders Hellman”. It’s far too much, far too quickly. V is the strongest fucking person who has ever lived and it isn't close. It’s silly.
Not helping matters is how synthetic this setting is, made all the worse by the story structure. Most of what you’ll be doing in Dogtown amounts to little more than going to a place and then going back. You might even get to kill someone if you’re really lucky, but it’s not something you should expect to be doing much of. It’s more like a little treat. A lot of these meetings could have been holocalls. You'll drive to Alex's bar, drive to Mr. Hands's hotel, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to an airdrop, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a Voodoo Boys hideout, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a radio tower, drive back to Alex's bar. Dogtown itself is mercifully small, so these to-and-fro drives don't take especially long, but they serve only to illustrate how fake this world really is; the same NPCs will be shaken down by the same goons every time you pass by the same street corners, likely in pursuit of one of the same airdrops that's landed in the same spot to be picked up by the same set of guards. This was a problem in the base game, but nowhere near to this extent; Dogtown being so tiny and so dense reveals only that these characters are like actors in a play. They de-materialize the second they're no longer needed. Night City being fucking massive — despite having very little to do within it — at the very least provided some level of obfuscation for how surface level the NPC routines and placements were. Even then, there were some NPCs that would stand around in the same spots and actually have dialog that advanced as you progressed through the story. I remember there being a corrupt cop who always talked to the same two Tyger Claws on a street corner in Kabuki, and he would tell them about different schemes he had cooked up whenever you drove past. Not so in Dogtown. Everyone gets one line, one routine, one action, and they do it over and over again in the hopes that you won't be paying attention long enough to see them repeat themselves.
Regardless, it's the missions themselves that show just how far CDPR's level design chops have slipped. These are some of the most aggressively linear levels I've seen in any modern game, and they're easily on par with the worst Call of Duty campaigns. Most offensive of the lot is You Know My Name, where V is tasked with infiltrating a cocktail party. The game has a very clear idea of how it wants this to go — you enter through the sewers, silently take out the few guards they have posted, snipe everyone blocking Reed's path, schmooze your way through the party, find Songbird, download personality profiles of two hackers hired by Kurt Hansen, and then get out. The problem with this, to go back to the DM analogy, lies in how on-rails this entire mission is. There is so little room for player expression, and taking it on any other way feels like you're going off-script in a way that the game isn't equipped to handle. The building you're breaking into has some of the tightest security in all of Dogtown, patrolled by dozens upon dozens of BARGHEST guards, and V is reminded over and over again how key it is to remain stealthy. If you go guns blazing, and get caught at every single opportunity provided to you, the only thing that actually changes is whether or not Reed gets a black eye when you're escorted out of the building at the end. Something like thirty guards all get mowed down by you and your superspy friend who doesn't understand how cover works when you're guiding him around, and nobody bats an eye. You just walk about, do exactly what the game tells you to, and your actions are ignored if you try to do anything else. Even some of the most basic gigs in the base game offered more player expression than this. Being locked in place on a stationary sniper rifle and telling an NPC where to go for ten minutes is not what I play Cyberpunk 2077 for.
For as high as the stakes are, this is a remarkably boring narrative. Setting aside the bog-standard secret agent man schlock — which was already done and better in the base game — these might be some of the most same-y characters I've seen in a long time. Between Reed, Myers, Songbird, and Alex, every single one of them has the base, singular trait of "competent", and all later develop the secondary trait of "backstabber". Songbird backstabs Myers who backstabs V who backstabs Reed who backstabbed Alex who backstabs V and Songbird who backstabs V. They go through all of this with the excitement and fervor of Sam and Ralph clocking in. They're fucking bored by the entire narrative. Everyone seems like they'd rather just go home and be done with it. Johnny isn't even allowed to be wrong about anything anymore; he's been reduced to a voice in your head who mugs the camera and glibly recaps everything that happened every ten minutes to make sure that you're still paying attention. Base game Johnny had a lot of moments where he was an abject moron too blinded by his ego to see obvious answers, but none of that exists here. It doesn't even make sense in the timeline: he can give you that whole teary speech about how Songbird must have just wanted her freedom more than he did and that's why she got a happy ending instead of him, and then slip right back into his dipshit asshole persona the second you get back to base game. Again, CDPR is writing Johnny under the assumption that you've already seen him go through his character arc, but that doesn't work when you willingly set the events of your follow-up story before the point where his arc actually happens.
All of this just makes me wonder if CDPR ever actually had a clue what they were doing with Cyberpunk, or if it was just luck and a lot of outside consulting that got them where they are. V being able to take on MAXTAC in a 2v4 and coming out not just alive but victorious is so fucking stupid that it actually annoys me. I know I'm being a lore freak, but it's ridiculous. V may as well have recruited Bugs Bunny for the mission. There's no sense in pretending as though this is still a fairly normal story operating within the bounds of reality when you're so willing to break the hard rules of your own setting so easily. This goes double for the idea of harnessing the Blackwall and using it like a Bioshock plasmid. I'd call it pure fanfiction, but most fanfiction coming out these days has more restraint. Beating Adam Smasher was similarly pretty out there in the base game, but it at least had some narrative heft; two Night City legends taking down the last of the old guard, and it was one of the last things V ever did. You can canonically wipe a MAXTAC squad or shoot the Blackwall out of your fingers in this and the game just keeps on going as if V isn't a fucking god. Again, this is placed chronologically right after V deals with the Voodoo Boys, and there's still a lot of base game left after that. How the fuck are the Tyger Claws meant to be considered a serious threat after this? The Raffens? Kang Tao? Arasaka? You can't set your character to a level of strength and ability this fucking high and then bring the stakes back down afterwards. At least Reed's route has the good grace to offer ending your playthrough; finish the expansion by sending Songbird into space and you're dropped right back into Night City to go and get yourself a different ending.
Phantom Liberty is a massive disappointment. The opening section — while roughly about as linear as the game means to go on — at least manages to promise some interesting developments that ultimately never come. I think I'd like to stop offering so many chances to this studio, now. Thank goodness CDPR is taking a breaking from the Cyberpunk universe, and is instead shifting gears to beat some more life out of The Witcher horse. There is still supposed to be a sequel game coming out at some point in the future; if this is what we can expect moving forward, count me out.
They yassified Mr. Hands.
2020
Where were you when cyberpunk became escapism?
Look around discussions of Cyberpunk 2077 and keep track of how long it takes before someone says that they wish they could live in Night City. Watch these conversations as they turn to screenshots of scenic views and vistas, with all involved waxing poetic about getting lost in the world. See the rising glut of "comfy" cyberpunk games — DYSTOPIKA, Skid Cities, Nivalis — and remember the genre's origins, written in blood and broken teeth from beneath the heel of a corporate boot. Cyberpunk has not been a genre where hope exists. It has not been a place for people to want to be. Cyberpunk media is a warning more than anything else. Despite this, more people than ever don't just see places like Night City as an acceptable alternative, but as something to yearn for. What they have now pales to what the genre's founders threatened would come to be. It isn't difficult to understand; I spent four years in Toronto, and that city has been a fucking shithole longer than I've been alive. This is a common opinion for extant cities and towns all around the globe. But what once existed as the worst-case scenario of a dark future has since emerged as more favorable to the world we occupy today.
There's an honesty to cyberpunk media that isn't there for much else. To pull an idea from Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, our world doesn't make sense. It's all abstraction. There are no roots, no sensible causes, just an ideological superstructure over everything that never seems to be shaped by its base despite all theory suggesting that it must. The bank owns a home owned by a landlord whose mortgage you pay. Your work is dictated by a boss who is dictated by a stock market which is dictated by investors, all so far removed from what you do that they couldn't ever comprehend it, yet they remain in charge of shaping it. Your country sends locals to other countries to kill other locals and nothing ever seems to come of it besides more people being dead sooner than they would have been otherwise. Cyberpunk media offers an escape from the absurd; it puts a gun in your hand and tells you to go and blow someone's fucking head off. The cops won't stop you, you'll get paid to do it, people will celebrate you. It's brutal, and barbaric, and it'll eventually leave you with more lead in your body than blood, but it's honest. It makes sense. There's no abstraction. There's you, there's a gun, there's a computer, there's a target, there's a legend. If it doesn't change much, it'll feel good to do it. Adventurism can't even promise you that in real life.
The greatest triumph of Cyberpunk 2077 is almost inarguably in its world design, doubtless thanks to the many decades of effort put in by creator Mike Pondsmith. Whether or not CDPR did a great job in translating all of that background lore into gameplay — in empty, clean streets, packed with inaccessible buildings and linear pathways — the design of everything borders on flawless. Night City is an urban planning nightmare, all twisted highways and too-dense housing. Drive a few miles out of town, though, and it starts looking like LA suburbs; drive a bit further than that, and you hit desert. While this alone is nothing new — Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos is effectively the same thing — I feel that this is pretty rare for a lot of cyberpunk media, especially in the ones that break into the mainstream. People online will talk about that “eating noodles while wearing a trenchcoat in the rain” joke a lot when it comes to their ideal cyberpunk setting, but really take a second to think about how painfully generic cyberpunk media tends to be. Everyone wears stupid clothes, lives in permanently-raining cities with neon lights running 24/7, they all listen to nothing but darksynth, they’re all either corporate goosesteppers or chromed-out hackermen. People in cyberpunk settings are almost universally treated as set dressing, as indistinct and universal as the fucking wind. There’s some real diversity to both Night City and to the people that make it up, and it goes a long, long way in making it feel like a possible outcome for the real world rather than yet another piece of computer-anarchist wish fulfillment.
The characters themselves play a large part in why players seem so desperate to live here. Night City, as presented here, is kind of just filled with decent people. Now, we can’t talk about 2077 without talking about the Edgerunners anime, so I’ll be brief. What people liked about Edgerunners, I hope, is that it did a good job of establishing how someone can slip into a street gang. Not just a cyberpunk-themed one, but in general. David’s life fucking sucks from minute one, and it doesn’t stop sucking until the day he dies. His life is dog-eared by the deaths or betrayals or both of just about every person he’s ever cared about. He starts out with no money, no opportunities, and no future. Finding his crew is a release from that, but it’s short, and it’s painful. V, by contrast, has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth. The most stark difference you’ll notice happens right at the beginning, when Viktor Vektor gives you a free 21,000 eddies worth of cyberware that you never have to pay back. This is a strong line to draw between the two works. 2077’s Night City is nice, and forgiving. Edgerunners’s Night City will swallow you whole. It makes it really kind of difficult to believe that this is such a terrible world to occupy when V never really struggles for much, due in no small part to how strong of a support structure they both start out with and discover as the game goes on.
While nowhere near as cutthroat as they perhaps ought to be, considering that the way they act runs counter to how bad you’re told the setting is, 2077 has a strong supporting cast. What helps is that most of them are flawed in fairly believable ways: Judy is an idealist in a situation where it won’t work; Panam is so emotionally stunted that nearly every conversation she has ends with her blowing up on the other party; Jackie doesn’t know when to quit; River is here. Everyone’s favorite wholesome chungus Keanu Reeves is here as Johnny Silverhand, too, and he does a good enough job playing his character that you might forget that Silverhand is supposed to look like Bowie. Something I really do love about Silverhand is that it would have been so easy to make him fall on one extreme or the other — always right or always wrong — but he straddles that line exceptionally well. Johnny spends most of the game as an insufferable asshole, but when he’s right about something, he’s very right about it. By contrast, there’s a lot of time spent on him being wrong, and there’s really nothing to ought to say to him beyond telling him to go fuck himself. It’s a nice balance, and one that CDPR couldn’t keep up through Phantom Liberty, but that’s a review for another time.
The writing, broadly speaking, is good. I think a lot of the best stuff gets tucked away in the side jobs where you can actually dig into who these characters are and what they’re about, rather than just using them as a point of contact to get more “go here and kill a guy” missions from. I’m not completely sold on this being a masterpiece once you start poking away at specific details; I remain very surprised by people who both got attached to Jackie and then were surprised to see him die. The guy is throwing death flags from the very first mission. “Mama Welles is worried about me because all of her other sons died doing exactly what I’m doing, but it’s okay, because I’m never going to die. I love being alive. Hey, bartender who works at the place where they name drinks after dead people, here’s what my drink would be.” It doesn’t help that CDPR apparently ran out of time and money and stuffed the majority of Jackie’s character development and V’s start in Night City into a montage. I don’t know for certain how much it would have helped, but I have to imagine that Jackie’s death might have hit a bit harder if the guy wasn’t gone after a grand total of two gigs.
V lives a remarkably untragic life when you really zoom out. Aside from Jackie’s death, basically everyone that V knows or cares about either continues living their lives just fine or straight up moves out of Night City to go someplace else. Evelyn’s suicide is barely felt because she’s barely known, a couple of Aldecados can bite it, some dolls die in a Tyger Claws raid, and that’s about it. When you see how easy it is for Judy to leave Night City, for Panam to leave Night City, for V to leave Night City, for River to go on the run, for Kerry to go on tour — it makes you wonder why the fuck anyone actually stays in Night City. It doesn’t really seem that hard to just bounce. Of course, this is where something like the core books or Edgerunners come in to demonstrate why people can’t leave, so I’d say CDPR just did kind of a bad job in conveying this.
2077 does manage to be a decent immersive sim released in the year 2020, and that’s something of a feat. While some missions are incredible railroads that essentially force you down a set of tight hallways, there are significantly more of them that allow for quite a bit of player expression. Far from your usual dichotomy of “guns blazing” or “rear-naked choke fanatic” — though that certainly still exists here — 2077 likes to play around with the idea of your skills allowing you to break a mission in half. These are usually relegated to your mobility options, as most characters can walk out of the first couple hours of the game with a double jump and an airdash that’ll allow them to soar like a majestic, sequence-breaking eagle. It’s like a more limited Cruelty Squad, as the closest comparison; there’s no gunk booster jetpacks or intestine grappling hooks, but you can instead kill people with your brain or get Gorilla Arms to punch them in half as a trade-off. These are what you should be prioritizing when it comes to killing people, because firing guns feels pretty bad. The best thing you can do with regards to firearms is get the biggest shotgun you can find and stuff it in someone’s chest, or get smart guns that don’t require you to aim. Peering down your sights and taking potshots at approaching enemies from anything more than ten meters may as well just subtract the ammo from your gun without all of the sound effects and visual flair that would suggest it would ever do anything. Of course, this is all moot when you consider that the most optimal and most fun way to play this is to activate your berserk implant and just smash everyone’s face in with a baseball bat like you’re the Babe Ruth of the dark future.
It’s still kind of a buggy piece of shit. I do like 2077, but this is not the absolute slam-dunk comeback that it’s been hailed as. Granted, it’s certainly a lot better now than it was — back when it was so bad that Sony pulled it from digital storefronts and issued no-questions-asked refunds — but you don’t get points for getting your game to day-one launch stability three years after you released it. The opening nomad lifepath at one point flung me a kilometer in the opposite direction from my car for seemingly no reason, and I had to walk all the way back to it. This is in the introduction mission, before you’ve done anything. This is not the point where things should be breaking yet.
More and more of these bugs will continue to rear their ugly heads the further into the game you get and the more things 2077 needs to keep track of, and it’s clear that it’s a juggler with too many balls. Cops stopped spawning entirely at one point, allowing me to massacre civilians with no penalty; calls for new missions stopped coming in, so I couldn’t progress the side stories; the game engine would forget a fundamental law of reality and drop me through the map, or launch me hundreds of feet into the air, or make it so my guns just wouldn’t fire when I pulled the trigger. These come infrequently, but popped up enough throughout my 25-hour playthrough to bother me. I’m playing this on a brand-new computer off of an M.2 drive and V’s dick is still out whenever he gets on a motorcycle for a few seconds before his clothes load in. Something’s fucked up behind the curtain.
2077 is good, but given how much of a moment it was intended to be, it falls more than a little flat. CDPR still made a fucking gajillion dollars before it even released, so it isn’t as if they’re going to learn anything from this. As The Witcher 3, as Cyberpunk 2077, so The Witcher 4. Expect their next title to also be a barely-working mess that takes years to patch to an acceptable state. This is good, but it’s only good. It's a lot of missed opportunities rolled into a single work.
In Night City, you can be cum.
Look around discussions of Cyberpunk 2077 and keep track of how long it takes before someone says that they wish they could live in Night City. Watch these conversations as they turn to screenshots of scenic views and vistas, with all involved waxing poetic about getting lost in the world. See the rising glut of "comfy" cyberpunk games — DYSTOPIKA, Skid Cities, Nivalis — and remember the genre's origins, written in blood and broken teeth from beneath the heel of a corporate boot. Cyberpunk has not been a genre where hope exists. It has not been a place for people to want to be. Cyberpunk media is a warning more than anything else. Despite this, more people than ever don't just see places like Night City as an acceptable alternative, but as something to yearn for. What they have now pales to what the genre's founders threatened would come to be. It isn't difficult to understand; I spent four years in Toronto, and that city has been a fucking shithole longer than I've been alive. This is a common opinion for extant cities and towns all around the globe. But what once existed as the worst-case scenario of a dark future has since emerged as more favorable to the world we occupy today.
There's an honesty to cyberpunk media that isn't there for much else. To pull an idea from Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, our world doesn't make sense. It's all abstraction. There are no roots, no sensible causes, just an ideological superstructure over everything that never seems to be shaped by its base despite all theory suggesting that it must. The bank owns a home owned by a landlord whose mortgage you pay. Your work is dictated by a boss who is dictated by a stock market which is dictated by investors, all so far removed from what you do that they couldn't ever comprehend it, yet they remain in charge of shaping it. Your country sends locals to other countries to kill other locals and nothing ever seems to come of it besides more people being dead sooner than they would have been otherwise. Cyberpunk media offers an escape from the absurd; it puts a gun in your hand and tells you to go and blow someone's fucking head off. The cops won't stop you, you'll get paid to do it, people will celebrate you. It's brutal, and barbaric, and it'll eventually leave you with more lead in your body than blood, but it's honest. It makes sense. There's no abstraction. There's you, there's a gun, there's a computer, there's a target, there's a legend. If it doesn't change much, it'll feel good to do it. Adventurism can't even promise you that in real life.
The greatest triumph of Cyberpunk 2077 is almost inarguably in its world design, doubtless thanks to the many decades of effort put in by creator Mike Pondsmith. Whether or not CDPR did a great job in translating all of that background lore into gameplay — in empty, clean streets, packed with inaccessible buildings and linear pathways — the design of everything borders on flawless. Night City is an urban planning nightmare, all twisted highways and too-dense housing. Drive a few miles out of town, though, and it starts looking like LA suburbs; drive a bit further than that, and you hit desert. While this alone is nothing new — Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos is effectively the same thing — I feel that this is pretty rare for a lot of cyberpunk media, especially in the ones that break into the mainstream. People online will talk about that “eating noodles while wearing a trenchcoat in the rain” joke a lot when it comes to their ideal cyberpunk setting, but really take a second to think about how painfully generic cyberpunk media tends to be. Everyone wears stupid clothes, lives in permanently-raining cities with neon lights running 24/7, they all listen to nothing but darksynth, they’re all either corporate goosesteppers or chromed-out hackermen. People in cyberpunk settings are almost universally treated as set dressing, as indistinct and universal as the fucking wind. There’s some real diversity to both Night City and to the people that make it up, and it goes a long, long way in making it feel like a possible outcome for the real world rather than yet another piece of computer-anarchist wish fulfillment.
The characters themselves play a large part in why players seem so desperate to live here. Night City, as presented here, is kind of just filled with decent people. Now, we can’t talk about 2077 without talking about the Edgerunners anime, so I’ll be brief. What people liked about Edgerunners, I hope, is that it did a good job of establishing how someone can slip into a street gang. Not just a cyberpunk-themed one, but in general. David’s life fucking sucks from minute one, and it doesn’t stop sucking until the day he dies. His life is dog-eared by the deaths or betrayals or both of just about every person he’s ever cared about. He starts out with no money, no opportunities, and no future. Finding his crew is a release from that, but it’s short, and it’s painful. V, by contrast, has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth. The most stark difference you’ll notice happens right at the beginning, when Viktor Vektor gives you a free 21,000 eddies worth of cyberware that you never have to pay back. This is a strong line to draw between the two works. 2077’s Night City is nice, and forgiving. Edgerunners’s Night City will swallow you whole. It makes it really kind of difficult to believe that this is such a terrible world to occupy when V never really struggles for much, due in no small part to how strong of a support structure they both start out with and discover as the game goes on.
While nowhere near as cutthroat as they perhaps ought to be, considering that the way they act runs counter to how bad you’re told the setting is, 2077 has a strong supporting cast. What helps is that most of them are flawed in fairly believable ways: Judy is an idealist in a situation where it won’t work; Panam is so emotionally stunted that nearly every conversation she has ends with her blowing up on the other party; Jackie doesn’t know when to quit; River is here. Everyone’s favorite wholesome chungus Keanu Reeves is here as Johnny Silverhand, too, and he does a good enough job playing his character that you might forget that Silverhand is supposed to look like Bowie. Something I really do love about Silverhand is that it would have been so easy to make him fall on one extreme or the other — always right or always wrong — but he straddles that line exceptionally well. Johnny spends most of the game as an insufferable asshole, but when he’s right about something, he’s very right about it. By contrast, there’s a lot of time spent on him being wrong, and there’s really nothing to ought to say to him beyond telling him to go fuck himself. It’s a nice balance, and one that CDPR couldn’t keep up through Phantom Liberty, but that’s a review for another time.
The writing, broadly speaking, is good. I think a lot of the best stuff gets tucked away in the side jobs where you can actually dig into who these characters are and what they’re about, rather than just using them as a point of contact to get more “go here and kill a guy” missions from. I’m not completely sold on this being a masterpiece once you start poking away at specific details; I remain very surprised by people who both got attached to Jackie and then were surprised to see him die. The guy is throwing death flags from the very first mission. “Mama Welles is worried about me because all of her other sons died doing exactly what I’m doing, but it’s okay, because I’m never going to die. I love being alive. Hey, bartender who works at the place where they name drinks after dead people, here’s what my drink would be.” It doesn’t help that CDPR apparently ran out of time and money and stuffed the majority of Jackie’s character development and V’s start in Night City into a montage. I don’t know for certain how much it would have helped, but I have to imagine that Jackie’s death might have hit a bit harder if the guy wasn’t gone after a grand total of two gigs.
V lives a remarkably untragic life when you really zoom out. Aside from Jackie’s death, basically everyone that V knows or cares about either continues living their lives just fine or straight up moves out of Night City to go someplace else. Evelyn’s suicide is barely felt because she’s barely known, a couple of Aldecados can bite it, some dolls die in a Tyger Claws raid, and that’s about it. When you see how easy it is for Judy to leave Night City, for Panam to leave Night City, for V to leave Night City, for River to go on the run, for Kerry to go on tour — it makes you wonder why the fuck anyone actually stays in Night City. It doesn’t really seem that hard to just bounce. Of course, this is where something like the core books or Edgerunners come in to demonstrate why people can’t leave, so I’d say CDPR just did kind of a bad job in conveying this.
2077 does manage to be a decent immersive sim released in the year 2020, and that’s something of a feat. While some missions are incredible railroads that essentially force you down a set of tight hallways, there are significantly more of them that allow for quite a bit of player expression. Far from your usual dichotomy of “guns blazing” or “rear-naked choke fanatic” — though that certainly still exists here — 2077 likes to play around with the idea of your skills allowing you to break a mission in half. These are usually relegated to your mobility options, as most characters can walk out of the first couple hours of the game with a double jump and an airdash that’ll allow them to soar like a majestic, sequence-breaking eagle. It’s like a more limited Cruelty Squad, as the closest comparison; there’s no gunk booster jetpacks or intestine grappling hooks, but you can instead kill people with your brain or get Gorilla Arms to punch them in half as a trade-off. These are what you should be prioritizing when it comes to killing people, because firing guns feels pretty bad. The best thing you can do with regards to firearms is get the biggest shotgun you can find and stuff it in someone’s chest, or get smart guns that don’t require you to aim. Peering down your sights and taking potshots at approaching enemies from anything more than ten meters may as well just subtract the ammo from your gun without all of the sound effects and visual flair that would suggest it would ever do anything. Of course, this is all moot when you consider that the most optimal and most fun way to play this is to activate your berserk implant and just smash everyone’s face in with a baseball bat like you’re the Babe Ruth of the dark future.
It’s still kind of a buggy piece of shit. I do like 2077, but this is not the absolute slam-dunk comeback that it’s been hailed as. Granted, it’s certainly a lot better now than it was — back when it was so bad that Sony pulled it from digital storefronts and issued no-questions-asked refunds — but you don’t get points for getting your game to day-one launch stability three years after you released it. The opening nomad lifepath at one point flung me a kilometer in the opposite direction from my car for seemingly no reason, and I had to walk all the way back to it. This is in the introduction mission, before you’ve done anything. This is not the point where things should be breaking yet.
More and more of these bugs will continue to rear their ugly heads the further into the game you get and the more things 2077 needs to keep track of, and it’s clear that it’s a juggler with too many balls. Cops stopped spawning entirely at one point, allowing me to massacre civilians with no penalty; calls for new missions stopped coming in, so I couldn’t progress the side stories; the game engine would forget a fundamental law of reality and drop me through the map, or launch me hundreds of feet into the air, or make it so my guns just wouldn’t fire when I pulled the trigger. These come infrequently, but popped up enough throughout my 25-hour playthrough to bother me. I’m playing this on a brand-new computer off of an M.2 drive and V’s dick is still out whenever he gets on a motorcycle for a few seconds before his clothes load in. Something’s fucked up behind the curtain.
2077 is good, but given how much of a moment it was intended to be, it falls more than a little flat. CDPR still made a fucking gajillion dollars before it even released, so it isn’t as if they’re going to learn anything from this. As The Witcher 3, as Cyberpunk 2077, so The Witcher 4. Expect their next title to also be a barely-working mess that takes years to patch to an acceptable state. This is good, but it’s only good. It's a lot of missed opportunities rolled into a single work.
In Night City, you can be cum.
2021
To be a copy of a copy.
I'd like to apologize to Mothered, a game that I discounted as being shovelware garbage due solely to me confusing it as an entry in the Remothered series. Mothered has nothing to do with Remothered. They are very distinct games, namely in the fact that Mothered is good and Remothered sucks ass. I'm going to stop typing out these titles now before they lose all meaning. This work, contrary to what I was mistaking it as being a part of, is a well-written and stylish look at parental neglect and the definition of the self. While it certainly stumbles a bit as a game — a lot of tension-free wandering around and clicking everything to see what will advance the plot in the latter half — what is here works, and works well.
I suppose the only way to pull apart this story is by sharing some personal anecdotes. Growing up, I never felt particularly wanted by my parents. This is, broadly speaking, because I wasn't; they weren't ready for the responsibility of taking care of themselves, let alone a child, and they wound up retreating into some bad habits to cope with the loss of the little freedom they had. My mother parentified me, making it my sole responsibility to act as her therapist, saddling me with the responsibility of deciding what she should do about her problems at an age where I didn't have a clue about the world outside of elementary school; my father drank, and smoked, and snorted what he could find, and then he would turn a release valve and let off all of his built-up rage with yelling, and beatings, and by breaking whatever was in his path. I learned quickly that the best thing to be in this situation was useful, and the next best thing after that was to be quiet. Liana, the player character of Mothered, seems to have internalized this same lesson. Her mother remarks with genuine horror at one moment near the finale that Liana won't stop coming after them unless she has an objective. Liana needs busywork. Liana needs to be useful. Liana needs something to keep her quiet. I begin to notice some similarities.
It’s clear from the outset that something is very wrong, though what exactly that something is takes a while before you’re able to start deciphering it. There’s a grand linchpin of the plot that’s hinted to throughout the runtime of the game — error logs being printed to a console, strange commands that come in a voice that doesn’t belong to any character, ambiguity in places where there shouldn’t be any — but I ultimately don’t feel as though the ultimate revelation is the important bit. What Liana is matters less than what Liana isn’t, which is loved. The game, of course, agrees with me in this; the true ending of the game comes to the same conclusion where all is (mostly) made well. Where a sour taste is left in my mouth is in the sense that it’s up to Liana to become deserving of love rather than have it given to her unconditionally, based in no small part due to her family refusing to accept what she is. Then again, nobody ever said horror was supposed to be fair. Sometimes the scariest thing is not to be believed. I still have nightmares rooted in the fear of people not believing me, of thinking that I’m hysterical, all while some lurching evil grows closer with every passing moment.
That would suggest that this game is really only scary in a narrative sense, which would be incorrect. While I like to fashion myself as a big tough man who doesn't scare easily, there are a select few horror games that tend to make me curl up. This is one of those. While the daytime sections are very open, with these beautiful rays of orange light glittering though the autumn leaves, the same cannot be said for when it gets dark. Everything gets more wrong the more the sun sets. Your brother, tucked away so deep in his bedroom that you can’t ever see him, will start to tell you how your mother has been lying to you. Your mother will stand stark still at the far end of a pitch-black hallway, waiting for you in complete silence. You’ll try to sleep and get a warning that you can’t sleep with someone else in the room, and it’s not until you go to turn on the light that you find your mother shrouded in darkness, almost as though she was hoping you wouldn’t notice her there. Sometimes mother's animations are smooth, other times they're jittery, other times they don't happen at all. There are places that you're forbidden from going under threat (at least, implied threat) of death. Your father lies about talking on the phone with you to his co-workers, pretending that you're his wife rather than his daughter. This house is not a home. More importantly, it isn't your home.
The greatest twist underlying all of this is, in actuality, the fact that this all ties into a series of games that Enigma Studio are putting out. It's not just an anthology, either; all of these titles are connected and part of a greater ARG that links all of them together, with info being locked behind entirely different games and requiring certain registry files to access a secret portion of Haunted PS1's Demo Disk: Spectral Mall. I don't especially care about any of this, and the good news is that it doesn't detract from the base game of Mothered in the slightest. The pseudo-sequel, Mothered: Home, does require heavy investment in the broader idea of the Enigma Machine universe, so I wouldn't recommend getting into it unless you're one of either desperate for more of this or curious to dig your fingers into an ARG. It's ignorable, though, and ignoring it is what I'm going to continue doing.
My gripes are minimal. I do think that spots like the barn and the end of the road tend to be placed a bit too far away relative to how fast your character's maximum run speed is. The slow character speed works great for building up tension when you're inside the house, but when you're in a big, open field during the daytime and there's nothing going on, it serves only as a pace killer. People have complained about the apple collecting section enough for me to know there isn't much juice left in the discussion, but it does take too long and the apples are too hard to spot. None of this is terrible, but in a game that's so tightly paced everywhere else, these little missteps stick out all the more obviously.
Aside from that, this is a strong showing. I'm not certain if I'll dig too much deeper into the creator's related games — I don't really think that what's being advertised in those is going to be what I came to this for — but I'm very glad to have played this all the same. As a standalone project, this is impressive. It's in the Palestinian Relief Bundle if you've already bought that, and it'll be going for about another week from the date of posting if you haven't.
Be with mother.
I'd like to apologize to Mothered, a game that I discounted as being shovelware garbage due solely to me confusing it as an entry in the Remothered series. Mothered has nothing to do with Remothered. They are very distinct games, namely in the fact that Mothered is good and Remothered sucks ass. I'm going to stop typing out these titles now before they lose all meaning. This work, contrary to what I was mistaking it as being a part of, is a well-written and stylish look at parental neglect and the definition of the self. While it certainly stumbles a bit as a game — a lot of tension-free wandering around and clicking everything to see what will advance the plot in the latter half — what is here works, and works well.
I suppose the only way to pull apart this story is by sharing some personal anecdotes. Growing up, I never felt particularly wanted by my parents. This is, broadly speaking, because I wasn't; they weren't ready for the responsibility of taking care of themselves, let alone a child, and they wound up retreating into some bad habits to cope with the loss of the little freedom they had. My mother parentified me, making it my sole responsibility to act as her therapist, saddling me with the responsibility of deciding what she should do about her problems at an age where I didn't have a clue about the world outside of elementary school; my father drank, and smoked, and snorted what he could find, and then he would turn a release valve and let off all of his built-up rage with yelling, and beatings, and by breaking whatever was in his path. I learned quickly that the best thing to be in this situation was useful, and the next best thing after that was to be quiet. Liana, the player character of Mothered, seems to have internalized this same lesson. Her mother remarks with genuine horror at one moment near the finale that Liana won't stop coming after them unless she has an objective. Liana needs busywork. Liana needs to be useful. Liana needs something to keep her quiet. I begin to notice some similarities.
It’s clear from the outset that something is very wrong, though what exactly that something is takes a while before you’re able to start deciphering it. There’s a grand linchpin of the plot that’s hinted to throughout the runtime of the game — error logs being printed to a console, strange commands that come in a voice that doesn’t belong to any character, ambiguity in places where there shouldn’t be any — but I ultimately don’t feel as though the ultimate revelation is the important bit. What Liana is matters less than what Liana isn’t, which is loved. The game, of course, agrees with me in this; the true ending of the game comes to the same conclusion where all is (mostly) made well. Where a sour taste is left in my mouth is in the sense that it’s up to Liana to become deserving of love rather than have it given to her unconditionally, based in no small part due to her family refusing to accept what she is. Then again, nobody ever said horror was supposed to be fair. Sometimes the scariest thing is not to be believed. I still have nightmares rooted in the fear of people not believing me, of thinking that I’m hysterical, all while some lurching evil grows closer with every passing moment.
That would suggest that this game is really only scary in a narrative sense, which would be incorrect. While I like to fashion myself as a big tough man who doesn't scare easily, there are a select few horror games that tend to make me curl up. This is one of those. While the daytime sections are very open, with these beautiful rays of orange light glittering though the autumn leaves, the same cannot be said for when it gets dark. Everything gets more wrong the more the sun sets. Your brother, tucked away so deep in his bedroom that you can’t ever see him, will start to tell you how your mother has been lying to you. Your mother will stand stark still at the far end of a pitch-black hallway, waiting for you in complete silence. You’ll try to sleep and get a warning that you can’t sleep with someone else in the room, and it’s not until you go to turn on the light that you find your mother shrouded in darkness, almost as though she was hoping you wouldn’t notice her there. Sometimes mother's animations are smooth, other times they're jittery, other times they don't happen at all. There are places that you're forbidden from going under threat (at least, implied threat) of death. Your father lies about talking on the phone with you to his co-workers, pretending that you're his wife rather than his daughter. This house is not a home. More importantly, it isn't your home.
The greatest twist underlying all of this is, in actuality, the fact that this all ties into a series of games that Enigma Studio are putting out. It's not just an anthology, either; all of these titles are connected and part of a greater ARG that links all of them together, with info being locked behind entirely different games and requiring certain registry files to access a secret portion of Haunted PS1's Demo Disk: Spectral Mall. I don't especially care about any of this, and the good news is that it doesn't detract from the base game of Mothered in the slightest. The pseudo-sequel, Mothered: Home, does require heavy investment in the broader idea of the Enigma Machine universe, so I wouldn't recommend getting into it unless you're one of either desperate for more of this or curious to dig your fingers into an ARG. It's ignorable, though, and ignoring it is what I'm going to continue doing.
My gripes are minimal. I do think that spots like the barn and the end of the road tend to be placed a bit too far away relative to how fast your character's maximum run speed is. The slow character speed works great for building up tension when you're inside the house, but when you're in a big, open field during the daytime and there's nothing going on, it serves only as a pace killer. People have complained about the apple collecting section enough for me to know there isn't much juice left in the discussion, but it does take too long and the apples are too hard to spot. None of this is terrible, but in a game that's so tightly paced everywhere else, these little missteps stick out all the more obviously.
Aside from that, this is a strong showing. I'm not certain if I'll dig too much deeper into the creator's related games — I don't really think that what's being advertised in those is going to be what I came to this for — but I'm very glad to have played this all the same. As a standalone project, this is impressive. It's in the Palestinian Relief Bundle if you've already bought that, and it'll be going for about another week from the date of posting if you haven't.
Be with mother.
Take “boomer shooter” out of your vocabulary; the term has been rendered meaningless.
I knew this entire little sub-genre of first-person shooters was cooked the second that the joint advertising teams of Games Workshop and Focus Entertainment all came to the conclusion that “boomer shooter” is a marketable enough selling point to tie your multi-million dollar IP to. If, indeed, it ever did mean something, it doesn’t anymore. What a boomer shooter is, in a post-Boltgun world, is “a shooter with pixel graphics”. That’s all. And if that’s all that it was — just a Doom Eternal demake — that would be forgivable. But the reality is that Boltgun is a completely miserable experience made by people who have zero fucking clue what they’re doing, chasing after trends without so much as an inkling of understanding as to why those trends are popular in the first place. Sure, fuck it. The new Doom games are gory shooters. Throwback games made popular by studios like New Blood seem to sell well. All we need to do is put the two together, boom! Free money! Paint it all in space marines and warp and chaos and we’ll be billionaires before breakfast tomorrow. How hard could it be?
I can’t fucking stand Boltgun. For some ungodly reason, someone in charge decided that the best people to put to work on a first-person shooter would be a crack team of board game and strategy developers from Auroch Digital, all of them completely unqualified to get to work on a project such as this. Consider this your first warning sign, long before you even boot up the game; why would Focus hire out to the studio behind Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics and Beermaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to make what’s intended to be a fast, brutal, tightly-paced shooter? Is it because they genuinely believed that these were the best people for the job, or was it because some tiny management-game studio from Bristol wasn’t asking for as much money as the next guys who knew what they were doing? I don’t blame Auroch, necessarily; I know what it’s like to be way in over my head under the guidance of a boss who doesn’t know enough to understand how badly I’m fucking up.
Boltgun is a game of numbers, and not of much else. “Suit your weapon’s strength to an enemy’s toughness rating,” reads one particularly cheery loading screen tip. As requested, I take aim at a Level 3 Nurgling with my STR 5 Boltgun, and the taste of bile in the back of my throat gets harder to ignore. Locking your reticle on an enemy will give you every detail about them you could ever want to know: their name, their level, total health, current health, social security number, bank password, browser history, the works. You swap between the weapons on your hotbar and each of them tells you the exact strength and name of the equipped gun: STR 4 Boltgun, STR 3 Meltagun, STR 7 Plasma Gun. Poke around levels for long enough and you’ll find secret pickups that’ll boost the power of your weapons, adding all sorts of little tags like “Kraken Round Magazine” and “Dragonfire Round Magazine” or “Machine Spirit Upgrade”. Your HUD gets flooded with all of these details, paradoxically taking up so much space on the screen that it’s near-impossible to read any of it. One pressing question remains, throughout all of this:
Why?
What do we gain from having all of this worthless fucking information on the screen at all times? Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I don’t need to know the enemy’s level. I don’t need to know exactly how much health they have. I don’t need to know a numerical value for how strong my weapons are. I don’t need to know what type of ammo I’ve got loaded into my boltgun. I don’t need to know the maximum amount of health that an enemy could theoretically have. I don’t fucking need any of this. How are you getting lapped in your UI design by the original Doom, a game that came out three fucking decades ago and realized then that you didn’t need to tell the player all of this completely fucking worthless information? If you didn’t know before playing that Auroch were strategy game developers and not people who make shooters, this is what gives it away; such a fucking obsession with showing numbers to the player in a situation where they’re worse than useless.
And none of this would matter, really, if the game were fun. If this was all just pointless, ignorable set-dressing for a game that otherwise works fine, then I could forgive it. I can’t, though, because Boltgun commits the mortal sin of being abjectly fucking boring. This might be one of the most pathetically easy games I’ve ever played, even with the difficulty cranked as high as it can go. Enemies feel like they’re shooting at you only as a formality, firing projectiles that move in slow-motion across the screen that’ll land in a different zip code so long as you strafe left. This is true for just about every enemy that can fire something at you. All of them are so sluggish that it’s as if they’re only pulling the trigger at you because they’d get fired and lose their health insurance if they didn’t. The flamers might be one of the most unintentionally hilarious monsters I’ve ever seen in a game like this; I think doctors test for brain activity by whether or not you’ve ever taken a hit from a fireball a flamer has thrown at you. You could only ever get clipped if you were comatose. Exterminatus difficulty does seem to make projectiles go a bit faster, and spawns more numerous and more powerful enemies, but I imagine most people who have played a game before could do most of this in their sleep. Not because they’re god gamers, but because Boltgun never stops drowning the player in goodies.
Pickups are peppered fucking everywhere in all of these over-long levels, littering the floor with every single type of ammo, every single grenade, and more health and armor kits than anyone could ever possibly need. There’s a section on the right side of the screen dedicated to telling you which pickups you got, and you should get used to seeing it be filled with nothing but “Boltgun ammo full, Boltgun ammo full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Krak grenade full, Health full, Health full, Health full, Boltgun ammo full, Plasma gun ammo full, Health full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Shotgun ammo full, Health full”. Outside of Exterminatus difficulty, I don’t think you ever even need to switch weapons; you get so much ammo for every single gun that you’ll never get so much as an opportunity to run a weapon dry. Armor needs to drain to zero before enemies can start dealing direct health damage, and armor caps out at 300(!!!!!), meaning you’ll always have plenty of +100 health kits to backtrack for in the unlikely situation that your foes manage to break through your 300 armor and get to your 200 health. I walked out of every stage with more supplies than I walked into them with, even after certain stages would force me into a minimum of four purges before I was allowed to move on.
In addition to your usually loop of finding color-coded keys and unlocking color-coded doors, Boltgun takes a page from the new Doom titles with the purge mechanic, where all of the doors lock and you aren’t allowed to progress until you’ve killed everything inside. New enemies will constantly spawn in, so it’s mostly just an exercise in strafing around and firing at the teleport particle effects. Enemies spawn in slowly, and the purge arenas are often big enough that you’ll be running around trying to find where the fucking enemies actually are so you can shoot them and progress. A big part of what makes these encounters so slow is that enemies spawn in waves, where more of them refuse to teleport in until you’ve killed everything from the first wave; there’ll be some shit gunner who dies in three shots from the Boltgun meandering around two continents away, and it’s up to you to go and find him so that you can get the momentum going again. There’s no challenge, there’s no pressure, it’s just blindly wandering through these enormous arenas trying to figure out if everyone else went home and didn’t tell you.
A part of me is grateful that this is on Game Pass, because it means that I didn’t need to spend a cent of my own money beyond what I was already paying to find out how atrocious this really is. The other part of me is annoyed, because I never would have bothered trying this out had it not been offered to me as part of a package deal. The only thing it cost me was my time; the one resource I can never get more of. What a complete and utter waste. You know a game is really bad when it ignites the flames of existential dread. There were so many better things I could have done with my time, and I instead allowed this game made and marketed by clueless people to suck it all away and leave me with a taste in my mouth like I ate two servings of dirt. The bar for Warhammer games is on the fucking floor. Do yourself a favor and try to forget that this even exists. I’m sorry for writing this review and reminding you of it if you’d gotten it out of your mind.
I can offer no greater condemnation than by stating that this is a sprite-based game with vertical mouselook.
I knew this entire little sub-genre of first-person shooters was cooked the second that the joint advertising teams of Games Workshop and Focus Entertainment all came to the conclusion that “boomer shooter” is a marketable enough selling point to tie your multi-million dollar IP to. If, indeed, it ever did mean something, it doesn’t anymore. What a boomer shooter is, in a post-Boltgun world, is “a shooter with pixel graphics”. That’s all. And if that’s all that it was — just a Doom Eternal demake — that would be forgivable. But the reality is that Boltgun is a completely miserable experience made by people who have zero fucking clue what they’re doing, chasing after trends without so much as an inkling of understanding as to why those trends are popular in the first place. Sure, fuck it. The new Doom games are gory shooters. Throwback games made popular by studios like New Blood seem to sell well. All we need to do is put the two together, boom! Free money! Paint it all in space marines and warp and chaos and we’ll be billionaires before breakfast tomorrow. How hard could it be?
I can’t fucking stand Boltgun. For some ungodly reason, someone in charge decided that the best people to put to work on a first-person shooter would be a crack team of board game and strategy developers from Auroch Digital, all of them completely unqualified to get to work on a project such as this. Consider this your first warning sign, long before you even boot up the game; why would Focus hire out to the studio behind Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics and Beermaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to make what’s intended to be a fast, brutal, tightly-paced shooter? Is it because they genuinely believed that these were the best people for the job, or was it because some tiny management-game studio from Bristol wasn’t asking for as much money as the next guys who knew what they were doing? I don’t blame Auroch, necessarily; I know what it’s like to be way in over my head under the guidance of a boss who doesn’t know enough to understand how badly I’m fucking up.
Boltgun is a game of numbers, and not of much else. “Suit your weapon’s strength to an enemy’s toughness rating,” reads one particularly cheery loading screen tip. As requested, I take aim at a Level 3 Nurgling with my STR 5 Boltgun, and the taste of bile in the back of my throat gets harder to ignore. Locking your reticle on an enemy will give you every detail about them you could ever want to know: their name, their level, total health, current health, social security number, bank password, browser history, the works. You swap between the weapons on your hotbar and each of them tells you the exact strength and name of the equipped gun: STR 4 Boltgun, STR 3 Meltagun, STR 7 Plasma Gun. Poke around levels for long enough and you’ll find secret pickups that’ll boost the power of your weapons, adding all sorts of little tags like “Kraken Round Magazine” and “Dragonfire Round Magazine” or “Machine Spirit Upgrade”. Your HUD gets flooded with all of these details, paradoxically taking up so much space on the screen that it’s near-impossible to read any of it. One pressing question remains, throughout all of this:
Why?
What do we gain from having all of this worthless fucking information on the screen at all times? Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I don’t need to know the enemy’s level. I don’t need to know exactly how much health they have. I don’t need to know a numerical value for how strong my weapons are. I don’t need to know what type of ammo I’ve got loaded into my boltgun. I don’t need to know the maximum amount of health that an enemy could theoretically have. I don’t fucking need any of this. How are you getting lapped in your UI design by the original Doom, a game that came out three fucking decades ago and realized then that you didn’t need to tell the player all of this completely fucking worthless information? If you didn’t know before playing that Auroch were strategy game developers and not people who make shooters, this is what gives it away; such a fucking obsession with showing numbers to the player in a situation where they’re worse than useless.
And none of this would matter, really, if the game were fun. If this was all just pointless, ignorable set-dressing for a game that otherwise works fine, then I could forgive it. I can’t, though, because Boltgun commits the mortal sin of being abjectly fucking boring. This might be one of the most pathetically easy games I’ve ever played, even with the difficulty cranked as high as it can go. Enemies feel like they’re shooting at you only as a formality, firing projectiles that move in slow-motion across the screen that’ll land in a different zip code so long as you strafe left. This is true for just about every enemy that can fire something at you. All of them are so sluggish that it’s as if they’re only pulling the trigger at you because they’d get fired and lose their health insurance if they didn’t. The flamers might be one of the most unintentionally hilarious monsters I’ve ever seen in a game like this; I think doctors test for brain activity by whether or not you’ve ever taken a hit from a fireball a flamer has thrown at you. You could only ever get clipped if you were comatose. Exterminatus difficulty does seem to make projectiles go a bit faster, and spawns more numerous and more powerful enemies, but I imagine most people who have played a game before could do most of this in their sleep. Not because they’re god gamers, but because Boltgun never stops drowning the player in goodies.
Pickups are peppered fucking everywhere in all of these over-long levels, littering the floor with every single type of ammo, every single grenade, and more health and armor kits than anyone could ever possibly need. There’s a section on the right side of the screen dedicated to telling you which pickups you got, and you should get used to seeing it be filled with nothing but “Boltgun ammo full, Boltgun ammo full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Krak grenade full, Health full, Health full, Health full, Boltgun ammo full, Plasma gun ammo full, Health full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Shotgun ammo full, Health full”. Outside of Exterminatus difficulty, I don’t think you ever even need to switch weapons; you get so much ammo for every single gun that you’ll never get so much as an opportunity to run a weapon dry. Armor needs to drain to zero before enemies can start dealing direct health damage, and armor caps out at 300(!!!!!), meaning you’ll always have plenty of +100 health kits to backtrack for in the unlikely situation that your foes manage to break through your 300 armor and get to your 200 health. I walked out of every stage with more supplies than I walked into them with, even after certain stages would force me into a minimum of four purges before I was allowed to move on.
In addition to your usually loop of finding color-coded keys and unlocking color-coded doors, Boltgun takes a page from the new Doom titles with the purge mechanic, where all of the doors lock and you aren’t allowed to progress until you’ve killed everything inside. New enemies will constantly spawn in, so it’s mostly just an exercise in strafing around and firing at the teleport particle effects. Enemies spawn in slowly, and the purge arenas are often big enough that you’ll be running around trying to find where the fucking enemies actually are so you can shoot them and progress. A big part of what makes these encounters so slow is that enemies spawn in waves, where more of them refuse to teleport in until you’ve killed everything from the first wave; there’ll be some shit gunner who dies in three shots from the Boltgun meandering around two continents away, and it’s up to you to go and find him so that you can get the momentum going again. There’s no challenge, there’s no pressure, it’s just blindly wandering through these enormous arenas trying to figure out if everyone else went home and didn’t tell you.
A part of me is grateful that this is on Game Pass, because it means that I didn’t need to spend a cent of my own money beyond what I was already paying to find out how atrocious this really is. The other part of me is annoyed, because I never would have bothered trying this out had it not been offered to me as part of a package deal. The only thing it cost me was my time; the one resource I can never get more of. What a complete and utter waste. You know a game is really bad when it ignites the flames of existential dread. There were so many better things I could have done with my time, and I instead allowed this game made and marketed by clueless people to suck it all away and leave me with a taste in my mouth like I ate two servings of dirt. The bar for Warhammer games is on the fucking floor. Do yourself a favor and try to forget that this even exists. I’m sorry for writing this review and reminding you of it if you’d gotten it out of your mind.
I can offer no greater condemnation than by stating that this is a sprite-based game with vertical mouselook.
2017
"Some horror compilation. Trash."
Oh, man. I said in my earlier review for Observation that I thought No Code had a serious shot at making a good Silent Hill game, and I meant it. After playing Stories Untold, I'm not so confident. The only saving grace here is that this is the older of the two works — Observation came out three years after Stories Untold, and it remains the most recent title they have out — but this is really bad. This is the psychological horror equivalent of when someone tries to guess what you're about to say before you've finished saying it, and they guess wrong. And that first wrong guess doesn't shame them enough for them to shut the fuck up, so they keep interrupting you with more guesses, and they keep getting it wrong. They don't have a clue what they're doing, like human autocomplete. The protagonist's repressed guilt over the murder of a loved one causes them to spiral deep into torment, going through a series of nightmarish trials where they — hold on a second, what did you say the protagonist's name was? James? Oh, No Code, Silent Hill 2 already handed me this assignment back in 2001. You copied off of Team Silent's homework, didn't you? No wonder Konami gave you the license; who better to hire for their long-running franchise than fangame developers?
It's not especially clear until you've got the benefit of hindsight from the following chapters, but the first act of the game started out as a standalone piece. It was not original to this, nor was it intended to be the start of the compilation; it was made for a Ludum Dare as its own self-contained work, and then forced into this as act one of the compilation. It's...not great, mechanically, but it spends most of its time setting up a story that promises to be interesting. The entire sequence is done as a text adventure, where the actual "text adventure" part is happening through an in-universe computer. The text parser is kind of shit. This section — the whole game, with its obvious Stranger Things trappings — is going for this late-80s style, yet the parser itself is dumber than anything that was coming out around that time. Forcing you to type "look around" rather than just "look" to get the layout of an area is a fairly obvious misfire, as is the obscenely slow crawling text that you have to re-read every single time you visit a room you've already been to. It's got a pretty limp ending, but everything up until then is at least neat. The lights flickering when you turn on the generator in the text adventure, the alarm clock blaring, the door swinging open; it's all very neat.
Act two kicks off with something that almost always engages me — fiddling around with unfamiliar machines — but every function of every device is given to you from the outset, along with their exact positions in the stack. You don't need to find anything nor experiment at all because it's all very clearly labeled and set out, and you're just following instructions as written. Turn the dial to 10, punch in a few numbers on this keypad, flip this switch. It all plays itself, which is an exceptionally boring way to handle a gameplay concept that I usually enjoy. I've played this exact game but better in Nauticrawl, in Unsorted Horror — this is just boring. It isn't long before the object you're experimenting on breaks free and starts strobing a red light in your face that you have to keep looking at to solve the final puzzle of the section. You just stare at it and it strobes a light at you with symbols in it and you reenter the symbols into a computer. I don't have epilepsy, but this seriously fucking hurt my eyes; I think anyone with photosensitivity might actually have a seizure off the back of this. It's ridiculous.
The third section is where things really take a headfirst dive into an empty swimming pool. What you're meant to be doing is simple — turn in to a radio frequency, get a code, cite the manual to find out what you do with that code — but the manual itself is provided on microfilm. Not an inherent issue, but Stories Untold refuses to ever give you a straight look at any of the computer monitors in the game, which means the monitor with the microfilm on it only takes up about a third of the screen. You can manually look closer in by holding down right mouse, but this doesn't help much. You can get the monitor to (mostly) fill the screen, but the actual important text is written in an incredibly tiny, smudgy font that makes it near impossible to tell what the fuck the actual instruction is. If you manage to accidentally stumble into the microfilm monitor's additional zoom function, your reward is that you can now tell what you're meant to be typing into the terminal without needing to squint at your screen. The tiny text serves as the only barrier for execution, and what's left serves instead to be pure, rote copying; punch in the not-Unix commands as written and hit enter. Repeat until credits. You're doing data entry while poorly-acted characters fake-shout in your ear about how confused they are in a tone like they're afraid they might wake their parents in the next room. This isn't tense. This is a day at the office. Actually, a day at the office is more tense, because it has stakes and isn't all just a coma dream.
Of course the final act reveal is that it was all a fucking dream. Jesus. What else could it be? What more were you expecting? James was in a coma all along because he got drunk, crashed his car, killed his sister, and then planted a whiskey bottle on the cop he crashed into. It's one of those reveals where they walk you back through every single hint they ever gave, and yeah, I suppose it makes sense, but that doesn't make it a satisfying conclusion. You know what I like in my horror stories? When they're all completely rational, completely based in reality, and completely justified to the audience before they end. I've long been an advocate for films inserting a ten-minute ENDING EXPLAINED video between the last shot of the movie and the credits, so I'm glad that No Code decided to oblige me and adopt this framework for their game.
When the credits roll, the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer refers to this game as a "motion picture" rather than a game. I thought this was playing into the reveal that Stories Untold is meant to be a TV show in-universe, but the final credits of the game after our protagonist comes back to reality still call this a motion picture. It's literally the final paragraph of text before you're kicked back to the main menu. Mr. Cage is on the phone, and he's fucking pissed. He says someone's trying to tread on his territory.
The only real redeeming factor of this project is that it isn't the newest thing they've done. If I had played this before Observation, there isn't a chance I would have ever played that game. Let's just hope this is a single misstep in what's otherwise going to be a fruitful company history from here on out; if Observation was just a lucky fluke, Silent Hill Townfall will be an especially brutal failure.
Shooting for the Stranger Things aesthetic made this dated from the exact second it dropped.
Oh, man. I said in my earlier review for Observation that I thought No Code had a serious shot at making a good Silent Hill game, and I meant it. After playing Stories Untold, I'm not so confident. The only saving grace here is that this is the older of the two works — Observation came out three years after Stories Untold, and it remains the most recent title they have out — but this is really bad. This is the psychological horror equivalent of when someone tries to guess what you're about to say before you've finished saying it, and they guess wrong. And that first wrong guess doesn't shame them enough for them to shut the fuck up, so they keep interrupting you with more guesses, and they keep getting it wrong. They don't have a clue what they're doing, like human autocomplete. The protagonist's repressed guilt over the murder of a loved one causes them to spiral deep into torment, going through a series of nightmarish trials where they — hold on a second, what did you say the protagonist's name was? James? Oh, No Code, Silent Hill 2 already handed me this assignment back in 2001. You copied off of Team Silent's homework, didn't you? No wonder Konami gave you the license; who better to hire for their long-running franchise than fangame developers?
It's not especially clear until you've got the benefit of hindsight from the following chapters, but the first act of the game started out as a standalone piece. It was not original to this, nor was it intended to be the start of the compilation; it was made for a Ludum Dare as its own self-contained work, and then forced into this as act one of the compilation. It's...not great, mechanically, but it spends most of its time setting up a story that promises to be interesting. The entire sequence is done as a text adventure, where the actual "text adventure" part is happening through an in-universe computer. The text parser is kind of shit. This section — the whole game, with its obvious Stranger Things trappings — is going for this late-80s style, yet the parser itself is dumber than anything that was coming out around that time. Forcing you to type "look around" rather than just "look" to get the layout of an area is a fairly obvious misfire, as is the obscenely slow crawling text that you have to re-read every single time you visit a room you've already been to. It's got a pretty limp ending, but everything up until then is at least neat. The lights flickering when you turn on the generator in the text adventure, the alarm clock blaring, the door swinging open; it's all very neat.
Act two kicks off with something that almost always engages me — fiddling around with unfamiliar machines — but every function of every device is given to you from the outset, along with their exact positions in the stack. You don't need to find anything nor experiment at all because it's all very clearly labeled and set out, and you're just following instructions as written. Turn the dial to 10, punch in a few numbers on this keypad, flip this switch. It all plays itself, which is an exceptionally boring way to handle a gameplay concept that I usually enjoy. I've played this exact game but better in Nauticrawl, in Unsorted Horror — this is just boring. It isn't long before the object you're experimenting on breaks free and starts strobing a red light in your face that you have to keep looking at to solve the final puzzle of the section. You just stare at it and it strobes a light at you with symbols in it and you reenter the symbols into a computer. I don't have epilepsy, but this seriously fucking hurt my eyes; I think anyone with photosensitivity might actually have a seizure off the back of this. It's ridiculous.
The third section is where things really take a headfirst dive into an empty swimming pool. What you're meant to be doing is simple — turn in to a radio frequency, get a code, cite the manual to find out what you do with that code — but the manual itself is provided on microfilm. Not an inherent issue, but Stories Untold refuses to ever give you a straight look at any of the computer monitors in the game, which means the monitor with the microfilm on it only takes up about a third of the screen. You can manually look closer in by holding down right mouse, but this doesn't help much. You can get the monitor to (mostly) fill the screen, but the actual important text is written in an incredibly tiny, smudgy font that makes it near impossible to tell what the fuck the actual instruction is. If you manage to accidentally stumble into the microfilm monitor's additional zoom function, your reward is that you can now tell what you're meant to be typing into the terminal without needing to squint at your screen. The tiny text serves as the only barrier for execution, and what's left serves instead to be pure, rote copying; punch in the not-Unix commands as written and hit enter. Repeat until credits. You're doing data entry while poorly-acted characters fake-shout in your ear about how confused they are in a tone like they're afraid they might wake their parents in the next room. This isn't tense. This is a day at the office. Actually, a day at the office is more tense, because it has stakes and isn't all just a coma dream.
Of course the final act reveal is that it was all a fucking dream. Jesus. What else could it be? What more were you expecting? James was in a coma all along because he got drunk, crashed his car, killed his sister, and then planted a whiskey bottle on the cop he crashed into. It's one of those reveals where they walk you back through every single hint they ever gave, and yeah, I suppose it makes sense, but that doesn't make it a satisfying conclusion. You know what I like in my horror stories? When they're all completely rational, completely based in reality, and completely justified to the audience before they end. I've long been an advocate for films inserting a ten-minute ENDING EXPLAINED video between the last shot of the movie and the credits, so I'm glad that No Code decided to oblige me and adopt this framework for their game.
When the credits roll, the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer refers to this game as a "motion picture" rather than a game. I thought this was playing into the reveal that Stories Untold is meant to be a TV show in-universe, but the final credits of the game after our protagonist comes back to reality still call this a motion picture. It's literally the final paragraph of text before you're kicked back to the main menu. Mr. Cage is on the phone, and he's fucking pissed. He says someone's trying to tread on his territory.
The only real redeeming factor of this project is that it isn't the newest thing they've done. If I had played this before Observation, there isn't a chance I would have ever played that game. Let's just hope this is a single misstep in what's otherwise going to be a fruitful company history from here on out; if Observation was just a lucky fluke, Silent Hill Townfall will be an especially brutal failure.
Shooting for the Stranger Things aesthetic made this dated from the exact second it dropped.
2021
Unattended toddler gaming.
This is what they were crunching for?
The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.
We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.
What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.
This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.
So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.
But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.
Actually, I really liked it.
Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.
Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.
In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.
Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.
You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.
Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.
But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.
There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.
Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.
The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.
We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.
What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.
This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.
So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.
But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.
Actually, I really liked it.
Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.
Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.
In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.
Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.
You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.
Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.
But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.
There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.
Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.
2023
They’ve got the sauce!
It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.
What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.
The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.
The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.
Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.
Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.
And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.
It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.
What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.
The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.
The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.
Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.
Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.
And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.
2024
Like watching a car crash.
Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.
Open Roads fucking sucks.
It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.
Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.
The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.
Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.
Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.
I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.
Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.
Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.
Hey, mom!
Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.
Open Roads fucking sucks.
It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.
Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.
The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.
Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.
Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.
I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.
Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.
Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.
Hey, mom!
Computer, generate a niche game.
If you've ever played one of those "make-your-own-game" games like Game Dev Story or Game Dev Tycoon or Mad Games Tycoon or any of the millions of fucking Kairosoft knock-offs out there, you're familiar with how the real-world game design process tends to be abstracted into gameplay. In order to keep things from getting too complicated, these tycoon games usually have a design pipeline which asks the player to combine a "genre" tag with a "theme" tag. The more "appropriate" the combination of tags, the better your fictional game tends to sell. Mixing "action" with "shooter" is almost universally a safe pick, as is something like "simulation" with "motorsports". Where you'll fall into the weeds, however, is when you decide to get experimental; making an "action farming" game or an "extreme sports RPG" tends to guarantee little more than poor sales and middling reviews. I played Game Dev Story a lot growing up, and it always annoyed me that what I thought were the most interesting and unique combinations always resulted in something that capped out around mediocre. I had game dev aspirations of my own — among other ideas, like being an astronaut or a lawyer — and I vowed that on the day that I could start running a studio of my own, I would never turn down even the wildest of ideas. I would play them, and support them, and make sure that everybody knew how good they truly were.
And I don't especially enjoy this horse-racing solitaire game.
My biggest gripe just comes down to the fact that what we have here is a fairly uninteresting horse racing game standing alongside a fairly uninteresting solitaire game, and the two exist in distinct and separate layers like how oil sits on water. Racing the horse seems to be the primary gameplay element — you can fail to full-clear the solitaire minigame and it doesn't count as a loss, with wins and losses instead coming down to the result of the actual race — but the horse's performance being abstracted into the solitaire minigame really doesn't feel as though it accomplishes much. There's no harmony between these systems. You do solitaire to make the horse run faster and more efficiently, but you could slot any sort of minigame in here and nothing would change. If this was Pocket Sudoku Racer or Pocket Slide Puzzle Racer, the core of racing the horses would remain wholly untouched. How close you got to finishing the minigame before the timer runs out or your deck empties gives you a boost or a penalty, but there are a dozen different games you could substitute in here without noticing a difference. The solitaire game and the horse racing game are hardly reliant on the other, nor does one make the other shine; they just exist together, each acting as an interruption of whatever the last mode of gameplay was.
Of course, Pocket Card Racer isn’t bad, but I don’t believe it to be especially good. The solitaire minigame is decent enough for an hour or two, and the raising of the horses implies that there’s going to be a lot more depth to the racing than there actually is, and it’s all okay. It’s a vehicle to play solitaire as filtered through the lens of being a jockey who’s whipping a horse named Nintendo Biggs on the final stretch of the track. There are far better and far worse ways to play golf solitaire. Grab a deck and imagine a horse running in your mind while you do it. Put on one of the tracks from the game to really immerse yourself, because they’re bangers. You’d get a comparable experience and save yourself some cash.
This is the kind of game that’s going to hit at an exact intersection of what an incredibly small group of people have been begging for all of their lives.
If you've ever played one of those "make-your-own-game" games like Game Dev Story or Game Dev Tycoon or Mad Games Tycoon or any of the millions of fucking Kairosoft knock-offs out there, you're familiar with how the real-world game design process tends to be abstracted into gameplay. In order to keep things from getting too complicated, these tycoon games usually have a design pipeline which asks the player to combine a "genre" tag with a "theme" tag. The more "appropriate" the combination of tags, the better your fictional game tends to sell. Mixing "action" with "shooter" is almost universally a safe pick, as is something like "simulation" with "motorsports". Where you'll fall into the weeds, however, is when you decide to get experimental; making an "action farming" game or an "extreme sports RPG" tends to guarantee little more than poor sales and middling reviews. I played Game Dev Story a lot growing up, and it always annoyed me that what I thought were the most interesting and unique combinations always resulted in something that capped out around mediocre. I had game dev aspirations of my own — among other ideas, like being an astronaut or a lawyer — and I vowed that on the day that I could start running a studio of my own, I would never turn down even the wildest of ideas. I would play them, and support them, and make sure that everybody knew how good they truly were.
And I don't especially enjoy this horse-racing solitaire game.
My biggest gripe just comes down to the fact that what we have here is a fairly uninteresting horse racing game standing alongside a fairly uninteresting solitaire game, and the two exist in distinct and separate layers like how oil sits on water. Racing the horse seems to be the primary gameplay element — you can fail to full-clear the solitaire minigame and it doesn't count as a loss, with wins and losses instead coming down to the result of the actual race — but the horse's performance being abstracted into the solitaire minigame really doesn't feel as though it accomplishes much. There's no harmony between these systems. You do solitaire to make the horse run faster and more efficiently, but you could slot any sort of minigame in here and nothing would change. If this was Pocket Sudoku Racer or Pocket Slide Puzzle Racer, the core of racing the horses would remain wholly untouched. How close you got to finishing the minigame before the timer runs out or your deck empties gives you a boost or a penalty, but there are a dozen different games you could substitute in here without noticing a difference. The solitaire game and the horse racing game are hardly reliant on the other, nor does one make the other shine; they just exist together, each acting as an interruption of whatever the last mode of gameplay was.
Of course, Pocket Card Racer isn’t bad, but I don’t believe it to be especially good. The solitaire minigame is decent enough for an hour or two, and the raising of the horses implies that there’s going to be a lot more depth to the racing than there actually is, and it’s all okay. It’s a vehicle to play solitaire as filtered through the lens of being a jockey who’s whipping a horse named Nintendo Biggs on the final stretch of the track. There are far better and far worse ways to play golf solitaire. Grab a deck and imagine a horse running in your mind while you do it. Put on one of the tracks from the game to really immerse yourself, because they’re bangers. You’d get a comparable experience and save yourself some cash.
This is the kind of game that’s going to hit at an exact intersection of what an incredibly small group of people have been begging for all of their lives.
2019
Not quite perfect, but a few adjustments away from it.
Man, 2024 really has been the year of the four star review for me. I promise that I’m not losing my epic caustic critic touch and am instead simply playing games that I expect to like. I’ve long heard mixed opinions on Observation ever since it released, but they’ve often trended towards the negative. All I really knew going in was that you controlled the HAL 9000 on a spaceship and that people who played it didn’t especially love it. That might be the ideal way to experience anything: clean slate, low expectations.
What’s fortunate for me, then, is the fact that I really enjoyed Observation. With some caveats, of course, but the broader experience was one that I had a lot of fun with. It’s nice getting to relive that Space Station 13 gameplay loop of playing as the ship’s AI and getting yelled at by the /tg/station HoS for not opening doors quickly enough. That's really not much of an exaggeration, either; the bulk of what you'll be doing is opening doors, getting subsystems back online, and helping the onboard personnel attempt to figure out what's going on. Hell, you even get the Ion Laws that'll pop up out of nowhere and rewrite parts of your code, influencing you to act in strange and novel ways. All of this is processed through a lens of cassette-futurist panels and knobs and lossy tape compression, which is an aesthetic that I don't find often hits, but really hits when it does. It's certainly given a bit more of a modern spin than something like Alien in terms of its visual flair; it's shooting for more of a "here's what the ISS would look like if it was launched in 1972". My Alien comparison isn't coming from nowhere either, because the co-founder of No Code was actually the lead UI designer for Alien: Isolation before moving on to this. Go figure. Best to stick with what you know.
I do enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of flicking between stationary cameras, pulling up the map to figure out where certain hubs are located, interfacing with panels and decryption tools to access locked files, and then threading them all together to break through a cipher or gain access to a new subsystem. It can be a pit pixel hunt-y sometimes in a way that I really dislike, and the parts of the game where you're forced to control the camera drone without any map access are so disorienting as to actively make me want to stop playing. I understand that the confusion when you're controlling the drone is kind of the point, but there's far too much taken away from the player that would help to compensate me blindly flying around and hoping that I accidentally stumble into progression. Maps don't work in space, and maps don't work when your core is offline; given that these individual rooms on the ship feel designed to be viewed through the angles given by the static cameras, making me fly through them in first person broadly leaves me with no fucking idea where I actually am. The yaw seems to work as expected, but applying pitch or roll feel like they add extra movement that you didn't ask for. Pitch your camera upwards and get confused as to what you're looking at until you realize that pitching upward also applied a 90-degree roll, for some reason. This came up often enough for it to be a problem, but I could never figure out how or why it kept happening. I'm mostly just attributing it to "bad controls" and moving on. That might be a dishonest read, and the actual problem lies between screen and chair, but it's my review and its real purpose is to aggrandize myself.
Of course, the gameplay is more of a vehicle by which the story progresses than it is anything else. What's here narratively isn't anything all that new; an AI onboard a spaceship in the near future goes rogue, there's an obvious doppelganger twist that thankfully reveals the conclusion almost as soon as its hinted at, there's a corrupting alien force that seems malicious but might not be. It's hardly anything you haven't seen before. Granted, it's rare for all of these elements to come together at once like this — 2001: A Space Odyssey crashing into Coherence crashing into Arrival — but it's not hard to pick at these elements like toppings off a pizza and see the base story components for what they are. It's all very steadily rolled out, often resolving one plot hook before launching the next, and the real meat is in trying to figure out what the mysterious floating black hexagon a) is, and b) is trying to make you do. "BRING HER" serve as your arc words to latch onto, and while the "HER" in question is obviously the woman who wakes you up at the beginning of the game, the purpose of "BRING"ing her is left in the air from the opening moments until the credits.
I realize as I'm writing this that I haven't really said anything kind about Observation, and that makes me wonder what it is about the game that made me like it so much. No, it's not a novel story, and it's a bit of a headache to play, but it might just be the definition of a work that's more than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of little moments that really make up the bulk of what I enjoy, and they’re peppered throughout at just enough of a regular pace to keep me locked in while also giving me just enough downtime to let them simmer. They’re such small things, too; there’s one sequence where you’re poking around the Russian arm of the ship to find some cameras, and the room you need to go into is suddenly marked with a tag that says “MOVEMENT DETECTED”. There’s basically no attention brought to this aside from a tiny text box sitting next to the room’s icon. There’s no blaring sounds, there’s no glitchy UI, it just tells you that something is moving in there when it was empty just moments before. It’s really good. It’s nice to play a game with horror elements that understands when to let the player scare themselves. The gleaming white walls eventually give way to meat-striped grunge, you’re tasked with locking all of the exits and shutting off life support to kill the captain, someone who definitely died inexplicably comes back, and it all starts to feel like reality is crumbling away. I dig it, especially as a major escalation of what started as a fairly grounded sci-fi plot. SAM sprouts tentacles from his core to kill a human and says “I have changed” in his robot voice and I popped off because it was just so goddamn cool. Observation understands creepy robots.
There’s not much to say about Observation besides the fact that it’s good at getting across big moments and small moments with equal amounts of finesse, but it struggles a bit to stick them all together. The gameplay is the glue holding it all in place, so more than a handful of segments being clunky to navigate through hurts the final experience. What’s frustrating — and encouraging, honestly — is that it’s shockingly close to a higher score. Just get rid of the probe. That’s really it. I’d forgive the occasional pixel hunt if they just excised the probe from the game. There’s nothing that the probe does that couldn’t be accomplished with the extant camera fixtures, and it might actually be better for the atmosphere; having something slink around the edge of the frame that gets away before you can move your view to see it would have been a lot better than blindly bonking the probe into every wall of the ship because I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Still, I really do like Observation, and I’m going to have to check out Stories Untold purely off of the momentum from this. This studio seems to know what they’re doing.
No Code might actually make a decent Silent Hill game.
Man, 2024 really has been the year of the four star review for me. I promise that I’m not losing my epic caustic critic touch and am instead simply playing games that I expect to like. I’ve long heard mixed opinions on Observation ever since it released, but they’ve often trended towards the negative. All I really knew going in was that you controlled the HAL 9000 on a spaceship and that people who played it didn’t especially love it. That might be the ideal way to experience anything: clean slate, low expectations.
What’s fortunate for me, then, is the fact that I really enjoyed Observation. With some caveats, of course, but the broader experience was one that I had a lot of fun with. It’s nice getting to relive that Space Station 13 gameplay loop of playing as the ship’s AI and getting yelled at by the /tg/station HoS for not opening doors quickly enough. That's really not much of an exaggeration, either; the bulk of what you'll be doing is opening doors, getting subsystems back online, and helping the onboard personnel attempt to figure out what's going on. Hell, you even get the Ion Laws that'll pop up out of nowhere and rewrite parts of your code, influencing you to act in strange and novel ways. All of this is processed through a lens of cassette-futurist panels and knobs and lossy tape compression, which is an aesthetic that I don't find often hits, but really hits when it does. It's certainly given a bit more of a modern spin than something like Alien in terms of its visual flair; it's shooting for more of a "here's what the ISS would look like if it was launched in 1972". My Alien comparison isn't coming from nowhere either, because the co-founder of No Code was actually the lead UI designer for Alien: Isolation before moving on to this. Go figure. Best to stick with what you know.
I do enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of flicking between stationary cameras, pulling up the map to figure out where certain hubs are located, interfacing with panels and decryption tools to access locked files, and then threading them all together to break through a cipher or gain access to a new subsystem. It can be a pit pixel hunt-y sometimes in a way that I really dislike, and the parts of the game where you're forced to control the camera drone without any map access are so disorienting as to actively make me want to stop playing. I understand that the confusion when you're controlling the drone is kind of the point, but there's far too much taken away from the player that would help to compensate me blindly flying around and hoping that I accidentally stumble into progression. Maps don't work in space, and maps don't work when your core is offline; given that these individual rooms on the ship feel designed to be viewed through the angles given by the static cameras, making me fly through them in first person broadly leaves me with no fucking idea where I actually am. The yaw seems to work as expected, but applying pitch or roll feel like they add extra movement that you didn't ask for. Pitch your camera upwards and get confused as to what you're looking at until you realize that pitching upward also applied a 90-degree roll, for some reason. This came up often enough for it to be a problem, but I could never figure out how or why it kept happening. I'm mostly just attributing it to "bad controls" and moving on. That might be a dishonest read, and the actual problem lies between screen and chair, but it's my review and its real purpose is to aggrandize myself.
Of course, the gameplay is more of a vehicle by which the story progresses than it is anything else. What's here narratively isn't anything all that new; an AI onboard a spaceship in the near future goes rogue, there's an obvious doppelganger twist that thankfully reveals the conclusion almost as soon as its hinted at, there's a corrupting alien force that seems malicious but might not be. It's hardly anything you haven't seen before. Granted, it's rare for all of these elements to come together at once like this — 2001: A Space Odyssey crashing into Coherence crashing into Arrival — but it's not hard to pick at these elements like toppings off a pizza and see the base story components for what they are. It's all very steadily rolled out, often resolving one plot hook before launching the next, and the real meat is in trying to figure out what the mysterious floating black hexagon a) is, and b) is trying to make you do. "BRING HER" serve as your arc words to latch onto, and while the "HER" in question is obviously the woman who wakes you up at the beginning of the game, the purpose of "BRING"ing her is left in the air from the opening moments until the credits.
I realize as I'm writing this that I haven't really said anything kind about Observation, and that makes me wonder what it is about the game that made me like it so much. No, it's not a novel story, and it's a bit of a headache to play, but it might just be the definition of a work that's more than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of little moments that really make up the bulk of what I enjoy, and they’re peppered throughout at just enough of a regular pace to keep me locked in while also giving me just enough downtime to let them simmer. They’re such small things, too; there’s one sequence where you’re poking around the Russian arm of the ship to find some cameras, and the room you need to go into is suddenly marked with a tag that says “MOVEMENT DETECTED”. There’s basically no attention brought to this aside from a tiny text box sitting next to the room’s icon. There’s no blaring sounds, there’s no glitchy UI, it just tells you that something is moving in there when it was empty just moments before. It’s really good. It’s nice to play a game with horror elements that understands when to let the player scare themselves. The gleaming white walls eventually give way to meat-striped grunge, you’re tasked with locking all of the exits and shutting off life support to kill the captain, someone who definitely died inexplicably comes back, and it all starts to feel like reality is crumbling away. I dig it, especially as a major escalation of what started as a fairly grounded sci-fi plot. SAM sprouts tentacles from his core to kill a human and says “I have changed” in his robot voice and I popped off because it was just so goddamn cool. Observation understands creepy robots.
There’s not much to say about Observation besides the fact that it’s good at getting across big moments and small moments with equal amounts of finesse, but it struggles a bit to stick them all together. The gameplay is the glue holding it all in place, so more than a handful of segments being clunky to navigate through hurts the final experience. What’s frustrating — and encouraging, honestly — is that it’s shockingly close to a higher score. Just get rid of the probe. That’s really it. I’d forgive the occasional pixel hunt if they just excised the probe from the game. There’s nothing that the probe does that couldn’t be accomplished with the extant camera fixtures, and it might actually be better for the atmosphere; having something slink around the edge of the frame that gets away before you can move your view to see it would have been a lot better than blindly bonking the probe into every wall of the ship because I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Still, I really do like Observation, and I’m going to have to check out Stories Untold purely off of the momentum from this. This studio seems to know what they’re doing.
No Code might actually make a decent Silent Hill game.
2021
Deeply embarrassing.
Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.
Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.
This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.
The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.
The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.
Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.
Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.
What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.
If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.
Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.
Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.
This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.
The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.
The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.
Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.
Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.
What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.
If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.
Now you too can win the coveted CIA Award for Excellence in Journalism!
A Hand With Many Fingers excels at a difficult task, which is establishing a strong tone and sticking with it for the entire runtime. There's the little paranoia that digs at you from the beginning, dog-eared by a sense of intrigue — ooh, uncovering a CIA conspiracy, what fun! — that gradually starts to erode at you as the mystery gets harder to keep track of and sudden phone calls provide nothing but dead air on the other end. Fluorescent lights crack, pop, and flicker as you walk through the long corridors of the basement archives, waiting for something to inevitably be waiting for you around a corner; the sounds of footsteps and clattering boxes draw you upstairs only to find that there's nothing there; lights across the street turn off when you look at them; cars park and peel away moments later, making it impossible to tell if they're staking you out. These are all little twists of the screw that compound the (intentional) frustration that'll start eroding from your ankles up as you flick back and forth between your real-world notes and the articles pinned to the corkboard. I know Michael Hand was in 'Nam in 1965, but the archives don't go back that far, and even if they did, Paul Helliwell's Washington accounts that should be in OS 267/4 are all missing, and the other boxes are all marked to be destroyed. These little facts pile up on you — Bernie Houghton was in both the Middle East and Africa with Ed Wilson, who was in Hong Kong back in '77 with Michael Hand, and Hand was in both Sydney and Southeast Asia with Frank Nugan — and none of it really adds up beyond the fact that all of these men are involved in a great and terrible gunrunning scheme between the CIA and the Contras. The broad strokes are there, the general gist of things is there, but it's the exact details that elude you beyond the game and into reality once you look up the Nugan Hand Bank and realize that all of this shit really happened.
Allegedly. I want to stress that this shit all actually happened allegedly. There's no proof that the CIA was involved in the criminal dealings of the Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan's suicide is only allegedly suspicious, given that the gun he shot himself with was wiped clean of fingerprints. William Colby's business card was found in Nugan's pocket when he died, and Colby was at one time the Director of the CIA, which raised some questions. Just some questions, though! Questions which were asked by people who, at the time, were incredibly shocked that the New South Wales investigatory commission ruled out American involvement without really even looking into it. This is the same New South Wales government body who are, as it is commonly known today, ridiculously corrupt and — allegedly! — propped up by the Alameddine crime family. Oh, and Ferdinand Marcos worked with the Nugan Hand Bank, too. Why would the president of the Philippines launder his gold buillion through an Australian bank that had $80 in liquid assets and was only able to run because Nugan took out a loan against himself? We may never know. Let's not forget to mention that Nugan transferred over two million dollars to the Liberal Party of Australia to oust then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who was opposed to the Vietnam War, began decolonization efforts in Australia and abroad, and broadly told the United States to go fuck itself with regards to the Cold War. Whitlam was only kicked out due to then-Governor General John Kerr's efforts, who the CIA went on record as calling "our man". That last part isn't even speculation, it's all documented. Anyway, that's unrelated. Any CIA involvement in this story is just a baseless conspiracy theory. Allegedly.
Regardless, it does feel a bit like the game is playing itself. Names, locations, and years are all highlighted in unique colors so that you never really have to look too hard to find the next bit of progression. Even code names for people or locations are underlined with an explanation scribbled onto the same slips of paper, meaning that there's very little for the player to actually need to suss out. Location data and the card catalogs don't seem to update unless you specifically zoom in on an article while holding it, meaning that you can get stuck because you pinned a message to the corkboard and read it there rather than reading it while it was in your hand. This is kind of an inherent danger when it comes to puzzle games, because I guarantee that there are quite a few people out there who would say that, even with all of the help, the game is too hard. Still, it's certainly a shade too easy for me.
The ending is abrupt, but I'm honestly not sure what else it could be. You kind of get the feeling from the outset that you're not going to be going home after your research has wrapped up. There are so many details about the Nugan Hand Bank and the subsequent fallout that are left out of this — luckily, they're easy to find with a few simple searches online — but I would have liked to have gone through them in the game rather than through JSTOR articles. Again, this is less that I think the author failed at what they were trying to do, and more that they succeeded at doing something that doesn't wholly work for me. A Hand With Many Fingers is still a wonderful game that I had a great time with, and I'll always value something that's less than an hour long that gives me more material to wig out my relatives with at family dinners.
The Americans who were indicted or convicted due to their participation in the Iran-Contra affair were ultimately pardoned by George H.W. Bush in January of 1993, two days before Bill Clinton took office.
A Hand With Many Fingers excels at a difficult task, which is establishing a strong tone and sticking with it for the entire runtime. There's the little paranoia that digs at you from the beginning, dog-eared by a sense of intrigue — ooh, uncovering a CIA conspiracy, what fun! — that gradually starts to erode at you as the mystery gets harder to keep track of and sudden phone calls provide nothing but dead air on the other end. Fluorescent lights crack, pop, and flicker as you walk through the long corridors of the basement archives, waiting for something to inevitably be waiting for you around a corner; the sounds of footsteps and clattering boxes draw you upstairs only to find that there's nothing there; lights across the street turn off when you look at them; cars park and peel away moments later, making it impossible to tell if they're staking you out. These are all little twists of the screw that compound the (intentional) frustration that'll start eroding from your ankles up as you flick back and forth between your real-world notes and the articles pinned to the corkboard. I know Michael Hand was in 'Nam in 1965, but the archives don't go back that far, and even if they did, Paul Helliwell's Washington accounts that should be in OS 267/4 are all missing, and the other boxes are all marked to be destroyed. These little facts pile up on you — Bernie Houghton was in both the Middle East and Africa with Ed Wilson, who was in Hong Kong back in '77 with Michael Hand, and Hand was in both Sydney and Southeast Asia with Frank Nugan — and none of it really adds up beyond the fact that all of these men are involved in a great and terrible gunrunning scheme between the CIA and the Contras. The broad strokes are there, the general gist of things is there, but it's the exact details that elude you beyond the game and into reality once you look up the Nugan Hand Bank and realize that all of this shit really happened.
Allegedly. I want to stress that this shit all actually happened allegedly. There's no proof that the CIA was involved in the criminal dealings of the Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan's suicide is only allegedly suspicious, given that the gun he shot himself with was wiped clean of fingerprints. William Colby's business card was found in Nugan's pocket when he died, and Colby was at one time the Director of the CIA, which raised some questions. Just some questions, though! Questions which were asked by people who, at the time, were incredibly shocked that the New South Wales investigatory commission ruled out American involvement without really even looking into it. This is the same New South Wales government body who are, as it is commonly known today, ridiculously corrupt and — allegedly! — propped up by the Alameddine crime family. Oh, and Ferdinand Marcos worked with the Nugan Hand Bank, too. Why would the president of the Philippines launder his gold buillion through an Australian bank that had $80 in liquid assets and was only able to run because Nugan took out a loan against himself? We may never know. Let's not forget to mention that Nugan transferred over two million dollars to the Liberal Party of Australia to oust then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who was opposed to the Vietnam War, began decolonization efforts in Australia and abroad, and broadly told the United States to go fuck itself with regards to the Cold War. Whitlam was only kicked out due to then-Governor General John Kerr's efforts, who the CIA went on record as calling "our man". That last part isn't even speculation, it's all documented. Anyway, that's unrelated. Any CIA involvement in this story is just a baseless conspiracy theory. Allegedly.
Regardless, it does feel a bit like the game is playing itself. Names, locations, and years are all highlighted in unique colors so that you never really have to look too hard to find the next bit of progression. Even code names for people or locations are underlined with an explanation scribbled onto the same slips of paper, meaning that there's very little for the player to actually need to suss out. Location data and the card catalogs don't seem to update unless you specifically zoom in on an article while holding it, meaning that you can get stuck because you pinned a message to the corkboard and read it there rather than reading it while it was in your hand. This is kind of an inherent danger when it comes to puzzle games, because I guarantee that there are quite a few people out there who would say that, even with all of the help, the game is too hard. Still, it's certainly a shade too easy for me.
The ending is abrupt, but I'm honestly not sure what else it could be. You kind of get the feeling from the outset that you're not going to be going home after your research has wrapped up. There are so many details about the Nugan Hand Bank and the subsequent fallout that are left out of this — luckily, they're easy to find with a few simple searches online — but I would have liked to have gone through them in the game rather than through JSTOR articles. Again, this is less that I think the author failed at what they were trying to do, and more that they succeeded at doing something that doesn't wholly work for me. A Hand With Many Fingers is still a wonderful game that I had a great time with, and I'll always value something that's less than an hour long that gives me more material to wig out my relatives with at family dinners.
The Americans who were indicted or convicted due to their participation in the Iran-Contra affair were ultimately pardoned by George H.W. Bush in January of 1993, two days before Bill Clinton took office.