GoredByAntlers
10 reviews liked by GoredByAntlers
Preaching to me about how violence is bad? Fucking loser
Tim Rogers - the translator of this game - often advocates for the concept of an 'I get it' button. The idea is that a good video game should always include a mechanic that allows the player to decisively prove that they understand a challenge that the designer has put in front of them and swiftly move on to the next thing. A skill-based fast-forward is something I can really get on board with, especially in the modern age of gaming where publishers feel the need to make even the most unremarkable gameplay last for 50 or more hours. Games are a little too fond of wasting our time.
It's ironic, then, that Moon is completely antithetical to the the idea of the almighty 'I get it' button. It's an experience that thrives on slow repetitions of the same concepts over and over and over... and over... again. By the eighth or ninth time I'd slowly trudged back to bed, the game's resplendent charm had worn thin and I began to feel friction building between myself and the world. The game feels all too much like a very cute child tugging on my sleeve every couple of minutes to show me another love-hearted doodle they've made, and it hurts to get annoyed at something that only has love in its heart.
Maybe the game takes some deeper turns or dives in its latter half, but after six hours or so I just couldn't stand to hear that little ghost kid's feet shuffle across grass any longer - it had become the softest nails I've ever heard dragged across a chalkboard. Sure, I get that this is all a deconstructive takedown metanarrative remix anti-adventure or whatever, but if you're gonna critique the flaws of a genre, at least try to make the game as fun as your intended target!
I definitely lost Love Points for posting this, but I have to live with honesty in my heart...
It's ironic, then, that Moon is completely antithetical to the the idea of the almighty 'I get it' button. It's an experience that thrives on slow repetitions of the same concepts over and over and over... and over... again. By the eighth or ninth time I'd slowly trudged back to bed, the game's resplendent charm had worn thin and I began to feel friction building between myself and the world. The game feels all too much like a very cute child tugging on my sleeve every couple of minutes to show me another love-hearted doodle they've made, and it hurts to get annoyed at something that only has love in its heart.
Maybe the game takes some deeper turns or dives in its latter half, but after six hours or so I just couldn't stand to hear that little ghost kid's feet shuffle across grass any longer - it had become the softest nails I've ever heard dragged across a chalkboard. Sure, I get that this is all a deconstructive takedown metanarrative remix anti-adventure or whatever, but if you're gonna critique the flaws of a genre, at least try to make the game as fun as your intended target!
I definitely lost Love Points for posting this, but I have to live with honesty in my heart...
The Banner Saga
2014
There are three common explanations for beginner’s luck. The first is how novices feel no pressure when going up against experts, but experts overthink their strategy to avoid losing to a newcomer. The second is centered around problem spaces: novices don’t know what actions are typically ineffective, so they’re open to more possibilities than the limited set internalized by a veteran. Finally, the most common of the bunch is that experts try to predict what the other player is doing, and when a novice breaks their heuristics, the game plan begins to break down. At the root of all these explanations is an asymmetry between mindsets, where the ordered thinking that comes with experience clashes against chaos, which can lead to some amazing upsets. You might expect I’m trying to explain how I got through a difficult game with no trouble, but instead, my goal is the reverse: explaining how this game used asymmetry to beat me.
So, how is luck possible when a game is a machine with set rules? Well, consider this scenario the game presents you with: a poetry competition breaks out in your little journeying caravan and you have the option to either join in with a verse of your own, just cheer from the crowd, ignore it and listen for danger, or break it up and tell everyone they should be on guard. If you’re concerned about the safety and morale of your people, the best compromise is probably ignoring it and staying vigilant. However, that’s the second worst decision you can make. The actual best possible decision is joining in with a verse of your own. Now consider a second scenario: you encounter wild fruit that no one recognizes and apparently tastes funny, but people want to collect it for the food supplies. Do you just start eating it anyway, or discourage people from doing so? If you thought it might be best to exercise caution, you’ve picked the worst option. Admittedly, not even the majority of the game’s events work with such questionable logic, but the inconsistency is high enough to disrupt informed decision making regardless. The developers were able to construct events with full knowledge of what would motivate me as a player, but the inconsistent results give me no comparable understanding of how they're thinking. It creates the sort of asymmetrical mindset that makes me feel like the game is just getting lucky shots against me, with the ordered approach failing against a chaotic system. The counterargument might be that the entire point of the game is overcoming a harsh situation, and how real-life choice and consequence is never cut-and-dry. However, I think a good response to this comes from another game about leading a wagon through the dangerous wilderness: The Oregon Trail. When reaching a river crossing, the choices would be to ford straight through, caulk the wagon, hire a ferry, or wait for conditions to change. All these options carry their own risks and tradeoffs, but as a player, I understand all of them. If I decide to go straight through and lose many of my supplies, it feels completely justified. When hiring a ferry, I fully understand that the loss of cash could impact me later. The Banner Saga succeeds in creation of a bleak tone with its chaos, but how am I supposed to feel connected to my decisions, when the decisions themselves aren’t consistently connected to certain consequences?
The combat has the same sort of asymmetrical chaos that makes it hard for me to connect. With its turn-based grid combat one might recognize from Fire Emblem, some restarts and failures are expected, but the logic behind the enemy behavior is a tactical black box. Enemies might completely ignore a powerful caster one shot from death to go target someone at full health, turning their imminent victory into a defeat. Sometimes they do the opposite, immediately focusing their fury on a single strong hero and crippling my strategy in the first few turns. Fire Emblem may seem random with its percent chances to hit, but enemies will reliably chase down the hero they would be most effective against, and that’s something I can at least plan around. Meanwhile, in The Banner Saga, sometimes it feels like I’m the AI and the game is the player. I’m making consistent decisions based on which enemy unit moves next and what they’re weak against, but the AI follows a logic known only to itself, breaking my heuristics and creating chaos. Sometimes I beat difficult fights with ease, sometimes the AI would happen upon genius tactical gambits, and another disconnect begins to form as a result. How am I supposed to feel connected to these battles, when my tactical choices don’t have consistent results?
As questions like these kept recurring to me, the best answer I could come up with was to just… let go. Let the AI occasionally get lucky upsets. Let some events play out in ways that seem illogical. I forced myself to fully embrace it as a set-character RPG, where I simply made the choices I thought the player character might make, even if they seemed wrong. The art and well-constructed drama still made that a pleasant enough way to play, but it’s disappointing how the potential for sharing the journey with the characters was lost thanks to chaotic rules and inconsistency. The question I’m left asking myself after that ruling though is whether I’ll go on to play The Banner Saga 2 and 3, since this first game isn’t a self-contained story; the plot is far from resolved and many decisions only pay off in subsequent games. If each of them were unrelated stories, I would probably skip out, but the promise of refinement and a payoff to the drama is a concept that interests me. The Banner Saga was a Kickstarter game from an entirely new studio, so I can understand some of its floundering when trying to establish something as complex as a choice-focused trilogy of RPG's. Beginners may not always be lucky, but I have some faith that their skill will shine through in the end.
Note: This was another game taken from my recommendations list, from user Ninjabunny. I’m sorry that this review came out sounding so negative! I hope there’s consolation in the fact that I enjoyed it enough to mentally commit to the sequel, and that I already owned the game anyway, but had never gotten around to it. Like you mentioned in the recommendation, the aesthetic was incredible, and I loved a couple characters like Oddleif and Iver. Maybe now that I have my bearings, the sequels will be much more pleasant.
So, how is luck possible when a game is a machine with set rules? Well, consider this scenario the game presents you with: a poetry competition breaks out in your little journeying caravan and you have the option to either join in with a verse of your own, just cheer from the crowd, ignore it and listen for danger, or break it up and tell everyone they should be on guard. If you’re concerned about the safety and morale of your people, the best compromise is probably ignoring it and staying vigilant. However, that’s the second worst decision you can make. The actual best possible decision is joining in with a verse of your own. Now consider a second scenario: you encounter wild fruit that no one recognizes and apparently tastes funny, but people want to collect it for the food supplies. Do you just start eating it anyway, or discourage people from doing so? If you thought it might be best to exercise caution, you’ve picked the worst option. Admittedly, not even the majority of the game’s events work with such questionable logic, but the inconsistency is high enough to disrupt informed decision making regardless. The developers were able to construct events with full knowledge of what would motivate me as a player, but the inconsistent results give me no comparable understanding of how they're thinking. It creates the sort of asymmetrical mindset that makes me feel like the game is just getting lucky shots against me, with the ordered approach failing against a chaotic system. The counterargument might be that the entire point of the game is overcoming a harsh situation, and how real-life choice and consequence is never cut-and-dry. However, I think a good response to this comes from another game about leading a wagon through the dangerous wilderness: The Oregon Trail. When reaching a river crossing, the choices would be to ford straight through, caulk the wagon, hire a ferry, or wait for conditions to change. All these options carry their own risks and tradeoffs, but as a player, I understand all of them. If I decide to go straight through and lose many of my supplies, it feels completely justified. When hiring a ferry, I fully understand that the loss of cash could impact me later. The Banner Saga succeeds in creation of a bleak tone with its chaos, but how am I supposed to feel connected to my decisions, when the decisions themselves aren’t consistently connected to certain consequences?
The combat has the same sort of asymmetrical chaos that makes it hard for me to connect. With its turn-based grid combat one might recognize from Fire Emblem, some restarts and failures are expected, but the logic behind the enemy behavior is a tactical black box. Enemies might completely ignore a powerful caster one shot from death to go target someone at full health, turning their imminent victory into a defeat. Sometimes they do the opposite, immediately focusing their fury on a single strong hero and crippling my strategy in the first few turns. Fire Emblem may seem random with its percent chances to hit, but enemies will reliably chase down the hero they would be most effective against, and that’s something I can at least plan around. Meanwhile, in The Banner Saga, sometimes it feels like I’m the AI and the game is the player. I’m making consistent decisions based on which enemy unit moves next and what they’re weak against, but the AI follows a logic known only to itself, breaking my heuristics and creating chaos. Sometimes I beat difficult fights with ease, sometimes the AI would happen upon genius tactical gambits, and another disconnect begins to form as a result. How am I supposed to feel connected to these battles, when my tactical choices don’t have consistent results?
As questions like these kept recurring to me, the best answer I could come up with was to just… let go. Let the AI occasionally get lucky upsets. Let some events play out in ways that seem illogical. I forced myself to fully embrace it as a set-character RPG, where I simply made the choices I thought the player character might make, even if they seemed wrong. The art and well-constructed drama still made that a pleasant enough way to play, but it’s disappointing how the potential for sharing the journey with the characters was lost thanks to chaotic rules and inconsistency. The question I’m left asking myself after that ruling though is whether I’ll go on to play The Banner Saga 2 and 3, since this first game isn’t a self-contained story; the plot is far from resolved and many decisions only pay off in subsequent games. If each of them were unrelated stories, I would probably skip out, but the promise of refinement and a payoff to the drama is a concept that interests me. The Banner Saga was a Kickstarter game from an entirely new studio, so I can understand some of its floundering when trying to establish something as complex as a choice-focused trilogy of RPG's. Beginners may not always be lucky, but I have some faith that their skill will shine through in the end.
Note: This was another game taken from my recommendations list, from user Ninjabunny. I’m sorry that this review came out sounding so negative! I hope there’s consolation in the fact that I enjoyed it enough to mentally commit to the sequel, and that I already owned the game anyway, but had never gotten around to it. Like you mentioned in the recommendation, the aesthetic was incredible, and I loved a couple characters like Oddleif and Iver. Maybe now that I have my bearings, the sequels will be much more pleasant.
Slay the Spire
2019
It's telling that most people describe this as a roguelike first and a deck-builder second. "Roguelike", as a concept, has a tendency to dominate whatever core gameplay loop it provides for - and this is no exception. I really liked working out my deck and watching it play out in practice, but the game's insistence on taking my cards away from me every time I made a single serious mistake was, in short, a real fucking pain in the arse.
Really proud of a deck that allows you to summon ten zero-cost swords that stack multiplied damage on top of each other? Too bad, because you came up against the hard counter to that deck and now you are back at square one and must spend twenty minutes gambling your way back to whatever new build the algorithm's dice deem probable for you. Frustrating, time-consuming, and ultimately mindless in a way that invites "one more go" addiction rather than thoughtful pondering of cards. It's a wonder that no one has harnessed roguelikes and real-money gambling yet...
Wouldn't it be more fun to experience the failure of a hard deck-counter and then spend time reconstructing your cards in a way that allows you to overcome that specific scenario, rather than forgetting about the loss and moving on to something else entirely? That's the fundamental fatal flaw with roguelikes, I think - you rarely have to reflect on losses or challenges because your next run is going to go a totally different way. You're passing time until you get the right sword with the right boon against the right enemy.
I beat this after a dozen or so tries - not because I gained mastery of its systems, but simply because I eventually rolled a deterministic environment where I had good cards and the enemy did not have the right skills to counter those cards. No reflection or growth necessary! I would love a version of Slay the Spire that actually disciplined players into learning its intricacies - even a simple stone-set RPG of intentional design would probably trump the computed 52-card pickup that the game offers at the moment. Despite my natural inclination against the nature of traditional RPGs, I still want an overworld and towns and dungeons that I can use to explore Spire's cards and their interplay... They are so well-crafted, but the game offers surprisingly few incentives or avenues for exploring their depth. Let's break free from the roguelike legacy!!
Really proud of a deck that allows you to summon ten zero-cost swords that stack multiplied damage on top of each other? Too bad, because you came up against the hard counter to that deck and now you are back at square one and must spend twenty minutes gambling your way back to whatever new build the algorithm's dice deem probable for you. Frustrating, time-consuming, and ultimately mindless in a way that invites "one more go" addiction rather than thoughtful pondering of cards. It's a wonder that no one has harnessed roguelikes and real-money gambling yet...
Wouldn't it be more fun to experience the failure of a hard deck-counter and then spend time reconstructing your cards in a way that allows you to overcome that specific scenario, rather than forgetting about the loss and moving on to something else entirely? That's the fundamental fatal flaw with roguelikes, I think - you rarely have to reflect on losses or challenges because your next run is going to go a totally different way. You're passing time until you get the right sword with the right boon against the right enemy.
I beat this after a dozen or so tries - not because I gained mastery of its systems, but simply because I eventually rolled a deterministic environment where I had good cards and the enemy did not have the right skills to counter those cards. No reflection or growth necessary! I would love a version of Slay the Spire that actually disciplined players into learning its intricacies - even a simple stone-set RPG of intentional design would probably trump the computed 52-card pickup that the game offers at the moment. Despite my natural inclination against the nature of traditional RPGs, I still want an overworld and towns and dungeons that I can use to explore Spire's cards and their interplay... They are so well-crafted, but the game offers surprisingly few incentives or avenues for exploring their depth. Let's break free from the roguelike legacy!!
Virginia
2016
Review before watching Twin Peaks
I really wanted to like this game, but I think without dialogue, this weird multi-layered story is far too vague and underdeveloped. It ended up not only being confusing, but also just not very interesting. There’s so much going on between real-time, dream sequences, flashbacks, and flash forwards that it’s very easy to lose track of what’s happening and more importantly; why it’s happening. There seems to be some interesting themes and ideas here, but they get buried under all the random storylines the game throws at you. And even when I can follow along with the threads, the game just plain drops the ball on telling a story. For example, there's some clear moments showcasing a character’s underlying guilt throughout the game. For the most part, it’s left vague as hell, until the very end of the game when they reveal… literally nothing because the game can’t even be fucked to actually show us anything. Just more extraordinarily vague images that tell us nothing about the backstory or the character themselves. It just left me thinking, what was the point of taking us through all these weird sequences if the payoff was literally nothing? And unfortunately that’s a sentiment I could use for a lot of the game.
Yet at the same time, the game has moments where they feel the need to flash back to the same scene 3 times, as if we somehow missed the very obvious slow-motion sequence the first time. I really think this should have been a more direct story with a focused theme or singular idea. Because instead we got a mashup of like 5, super thin stories told as vaguely as possible through a series of increasingly insane fever dreams. Damn shame, this game could have been pretty cool. I like the presentation, and I genuinely think they do a great job with the lighting and colors. But that’s about all the game has going for it. Oh and the music is also pretty good, though it is certainly far more dramatic than the actual events in the game. 5.5/10
Updated review after watching Twin Peaks Lol. Lmao. Rofl even. 4/10
I really wanted to like this game, but I think without dialogue, this weird multi-layered story is far too vague and underdeveloped. It ended up not only being confusing, but also just not very interesting. There’s so much going on between real-time, dream sequences, flashbacks, and flash forwards that it’s very easy to lose track of what’s happening and more importantly; why it’s happening. There seems to be some interesting themes and ideas here, but they get buried under all the random storylines the game throws at you. And even when I can follow along with the threads, the game just plain drops the ball on telling a story. For example, there's some clear moments showcasing a character’s underlying guilt throughout the game. For the most part, it’s left vague as hell, until the very end of the game when they reveal… literally nothing because the game can’t even be fucked to actually show us anything. Just more extraordinarily vague images that tell us nothing about the backstory or the character themselves. It just left me thinking, what was the point of taking us through all these weird sequences if the payoff was literally nothing? And unfortunately that’s a sentiment I could use for a lot of the game.
Yet at the same time, the game has moments where they feel the need to flash back to the same scene 3 times, as if we somehow missed the very obvious slow-motion sequence the first time. I really think this should have been a more direct story with a focused theme or singular idea. Because instead we got a mashup of like 5, super thin stories told as vaguely as possible through a series of increasingly insane fever dreams. Damn shame, this game could have been pretty cool. I like the presentation, and I genuinely think they do a great job with the lighting and colors. But that’s about all the game has going for it. Oh and the music is also pretty good, though it is certainly far more dramatic than the actual events in the game. 5.5/10
Updated review after watching Twin Peaks Lol. Lmao. Rofl even. 4/10
Stories Untold
2017
This is an absolute disgrace to the anthology genre and it's Devolver Digital's version of Twelve Minutes.
First of all, I wouldn't even call this an anthology to begin with. That's being generous. When making a short story collection, you need to make sure all the stories can be enjoyed on their own. Even if your collection has a framing device to escort you from story to story or even a theme for the collection at large, the actual tales within have to be fully standalone to be enjoyed on their own.
With that said, Stories Untold fails at its premise with having "stories" that are near non-existent outside of their premise, with the exception of The Lab Conduct, that are a front for a final story with the worst trope in all of fiction that makes you feel like you wasted your time and your patience getting through this "collection."
The House Abandon: You go home to find another person in your house. That's it. There is literally nothing else to this story once the premise is in the air and it ends before any interesting conflict can happen. We Never Left from Dread X Collection 5 is an infinitely better version of this and that was made by a collage student in comparison.
The Lab Conduct: The only interesting story in this game. You're a scientist conducting an experiment that goes wrong. Unlike the rest of the stories in this collection, this actually feels like a standalone short. The only issue I have with this one is that it ends abruptly.
The Station Process: You're a radio guy talking to two other stations as the rest of the world dies. That sounds like a great idea for a story, but guess what? There is barely any story in this one where literally nothing happens most of the time and the story ends before anything worthwhile can happen.
The Last Session: The worst offender and the reason why I call this game a disgrace to the genre. All three stories are intentionally designed to be as one note as possible so this story can happen. And what happens in this story? A PSA on why you shouldn't do [INSERT BAD THING HERE] while the entire anthology is rendered worthless. As soon as you realize what is going on from minute one, all of your investment in this collection is thrown out the window and it doesn't even have a conclusion to end the narrative. Nothing ends, nothing begins, and nothing matters. What is the point of doing an anthology if it's obvious you don't want to put in the effort to do one?
Now for the gameplay. It can be whatever, it can be fine, it can be repetitive, and it can be so boring that it would make you want to uninstall the game. Especially in the third episode. There's nothing more I can say about the gameplay other than I was bored with it mostly.
Overall, Stories Untold is a perfect example of how to not do a short story collection. The three shorts feel like a last minute addition compared to what the writer really wanted to do and so we got this as the result. A game that lures players in with the promise of interesting stories, only to pull the rug out of all of them with the worst storytelling cliche in history. At least V/H/S: Viral understood the concept of the genre it was set in.
First of all, I wouldn't even call this an anthology to begin with. That's being generous. When making a short story collection, you need to make sure all the stories can be enjoyed on their own. Even if your collection has a framing device to escort you from story to story or even a theme for the collection at large, the actual tales within have to be fully standalone to be enjoyed on their own.
With that said, Stories Untold fails at its premise with having "stories" that are near non-existent outside of their premise, with the exception of The Lab Conduct, that are a front for a final story with the worst trope in all of fiction that makes you feel like you wasted your time and your patience getting through this "collection."
The House Abandon: You go home to find another person in your house. That's it. There is literally nothing else to this story once the premise is in the air and it ends before any interesting conflict can happen. We Never Left from Dread X Collection 5 is an infinitely better version of this and that was made by a collage student in comparison.
The Lab Conduct: The only interesting story in this game. You're a scientist conducting an experiment that goes wrong. Unlike the rest of the stories in this collection, this actually feels like a standalone short. The only issue I have with this one is that it ends abruptly.
The Station Process: You're a radio guy talking to two other stations as the rest of the world dies. That sounds like a great idea for a story, but guess what? There is barely any story in this one where literally nothing happens most of the time and the story ends before anything worthwhile can happen.
The Last Session: The worst offender and the reason why I call this game a disgrace to the genre. All three stories are intentionally designed to be as one note as possible so this story can happen. And what happens in this story? A PSA on why you shouldn't do [INSERT BAD THING HERE] while the entire anthology is rendered worthless. As soon as you realize what is going on from minute one, all of your investment in this collection is thrown out the window and it doesn't even have a conclusion to end the narrative. Nothing ends, nothing begins, and nothing matters. What is the point of doing an anthology if it's obvious you don't want to put in the effort to do one?
Now for the gameplay. It can be whatever, it can be fine, it can be repetitive, and it can be so boring that it would make you want to uninstall the game. Especially in the third episode. There's nothing more I can say about the gameplay other than I was bored with it mostly.
Overall, Stories Untold is a perfect example of how to not do a short story collection. The three shorts feel like a last minute addition compared to what the writer really wanted to do and so we got this as the result. A game that lures players in with the promise of interesting stories, only to pull the rug out of all of them with the worst storytelling cliche in history. At least V/H/S: Viral understood the concept of the genre it was set in.
Pentiment
2022
Sat on this for a while, but despite its charms and fantastic ideas, I think I'd much rather just pick up and reread the many books I've read or was taught about from the period rather than force myself to find something more in Pentiment.
I have the benefit of being somewhat familiar with the setting, so much of that time period was taught to us at school. It is a big part of my country's history, it was our golden age after all. Name of the Rose comes up a lot when discussing Pentiment, one of the many books we had to read surrounding that period of time, and it is definitely very inspired by it, but there's also clearly a great deal of research that went into creating believable and exciting scenarios for the game to remain interesting throughout its entire runtime. I love the way this game looks and that strive for an enjoyable mystery within the framework it set for itself. For most I assume it would be the feeling of something unique and exciting, but for me it was the old, comforting familiar feeling that drew me into Pentiment.
The way you explore the gameworld is through a set of predetermined interactions that are available to you at a given time, you are supposed to select which one you want to spend your limited time on. Some interactions do not pass time, and it is usually indicated by a character specifically asking whether you want to spend it on this particular action. The game sets up these rules to make passage of time a very important narrative and gameplay element, making the most of the time and chances given, dealing with the consequences of the choices made under its constraints, etc.
So when any cracks start to show within the logic of the gameplay or the narrative, or when one begins to clash with another, the believability and investment begin to dwindle. Unfortunately, my playthrough led me to a few too many. The game taught me that walking and exchanging simple words with certain people isn't a time-consuming action, but when I needed one character to be outside in a certain time of day, not an unreasonable one like the middle of the night or anything, I was simply unable to. Said character knew we were supposed to meet and was supposed to pass me a cure for a person that was dying, who was unable to come and get it themselves. But I couldn't do that, the game blocked me from following up on that, even though I was promised earlier that I could come pick it up the same day. I couldn't save the life of a character I really enjoyed interacting with due to an artificial reason, not a narrative one or one that was necessarily the consequence of my actions. This situation arose because it was ultimately a game and didn't set up a proper trigger for me to interact with. What's worse, a completely unrelated trigger with a different character in the same area caused the character I needed to appear to join in this activity, but afterwards they were gone once more and I could not interact with them!
Plenty of other, similar moments began popping up. I uncover a lead that I could undoubtedly confront a person with, but the game didn't set up a trigger for me to do that. I walk up to a person, their family and loved ones and they cheerfully go "Hello!" and that's that, even though I have in my posession a damning piece of evidence that would undoubtedly end up with a death sentence. Pentiment too often clashes with any idea that might pop up in a player's head because its systems are so rigid. This ultimately ties to the story it tries to tell in a way, but it is done so artificially that I simply could not find enough investment or emotion in it.
Nothing but disappointment really sticks with me from my own playthrough, yet when I take a look at it I find it difficult to not feel generally positive towards Pentiment. A clear labor of love only made possible thanks to the GamePass, beautiful art, so many stories of other people going through it and having these fantastic realizations. I know that somewhere where I haven't gone myself there is a potential for an enthralling story, and that it is entirely possible to avoid the trappings I fell into. There are some profound moments that, should enough investment be built, I think will stick with others for a long time. I would lie if the praise it gets didn't bug me somewhat, I experienced a far different game than most, but even I find it to be very charming, so I understand what an amazing feeling a perfect run of this game must feel like. I, too, loved the early moments, when I was fully invested in the history of Tassing.
I have the benefit of being somewhat familiar with the setting, so much of that time period was taught to us at school. It is a big part of my country's history, it was our golden age after all. Name of the Rose comes up a lot when discussing Pentiment, one of the many books we had to read surrounding that period of time, and it is definitely very inspired by it, but there's also clearly a great deal of research that went into creating believable and exciting scenarios for the game to remain interesting throughout its entire runtime. I love the way this game looks and that strive for an enjoyable mystery within the framework it set for itself. For most I assume it would be the feeling of something unique and exciting, but for me it was the old, comforting familiar feeling that drew me into Pentiment.
The way you explore the gameworld is through a set of predetermined interactions that are available to you at a given time, you are supposed to select which one you want to spend your limited time on. Some interactions do not pass time, and it is usually indicated by a character specifically asking whether you want to spend it on this particular action. The game sets up these rules to make passage of time a very important narrative and gameplay element, making the most of the time and chances given, dealing with the consequences of the choices made under its constraints, etc.
So when any cracks start to show within the logic of the gameplay or the narrative, or when one begins to clash with another, the believability and investment begin to dwindle. Unfortunately, my playthrough led me to a few too many. The game taught me that walking and exchanging simple words with certain people isn't a time-consuming action, but when I needed one character to be outside in a certain time of day, not an unreasonable one like the middle of the night or anything, I was simply unable to. Said character knew we were supposed to meet and was supposed to pass me a cure for a person that was dying, who was unable to come and get it themselves. But I couldn't do that, the game blocked me from following up on that, even though I was promised earlier that I could come pick it up the same day. I couldn't save the life of a character I really enjoyed interacting with due to an artificial reason, not a narrative one or one that was necessarily the consequence of my actions. This situation arose because it was ultimately a game and didn't set up a proper trigger for me to interact with. What's worse, a completely unrelated trigger with a different character in the same area caused the character I needed to appear to join in this activity, but afterwards they were gone once more and I could not interact with them!
Plenty of other, similar moments began popping up. I uncover a lead that I could undoubtedly confront a person with, but the game didn't set up a trigger for me to do that. I walk up to a person, their family and loved ones and they cheerfully go "Hello!" and that's that, even though I have in my posession a damning piece of evidence that would undoubtedly end up with a death sentence. Pentiment too often clashes with any idea that might pop up in a player's head because its systems are so rigid. This ultimately ties to the story it tries to tell in a way, but it is done so artificially that I simply could not find enough investment or emotion in it.
Nothing but disappointment really sticks with me from my own playthrough, yet when I take a look at it I find it difficult to not feel generally positive towards Pentiment. A clear labor of love only made possible thanks to the GamePass, beautiful art, so many stories of other people going through it and having these fantastic realizations. I know that somewhere where I haven't gone myself there is a potential for an enthralling story, and that it is entirely possible to avoid the trappings I fell into. There are some profound moments that, should enough investment be built, I think will stick with others for a long time. I would lie if the praise it gets didn't bug me somewhat, I experienced a far different game than most, but even I find it to be very charming, so I understand what an amazing feeling a perfect run of this game must feel like. I, too, loved the early moments, when I was fully invested in the history of Tassing.
Citizen Sleeper
2022
I will not mention Disco Elysium in this post.
Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.
This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.
In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.
This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.
You can give it back to him.
You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.
There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.
I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.
Uh. Why?
No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?
I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.
Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.
But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.
The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.
Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.
This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.
In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.
This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.
You can give it back to him.
You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.
There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.
I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.
Uh. Why?
No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?
I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.
Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.
But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.
The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.
Echo
2015
It's just Higurashi for furries.
I've played one route and that's really all I'm willing to give this game. It's not very good. I'm not super familiar with furry culture or media, but the sense that I got from all the main characters is that they're probably popular Archetypes for furry characters -- they're very recognizably written like Archetypes with tweaks. It's a very anime style of writing, and one I generally think is bad, because people (or animals, in the case of this game? not sure on the preferred nominative conventions here) are not just variations on themes, even if we often group ourselves together that way on the internet.
I didn't particularly like any of the main cast, which isn't really a dealbreaker -- you can have a cast of shitty characters and be engaging and entertaining all the same. Unfortunately, I didn't really find the main characters compelling at all either. I don't know why they were so poorly constructed, given that the secondary characters were vastly more interesting -- clearly the authors of this VN are capable of good character writing.
As it so happens, this is not the only indie western VN set in a small town with a quirky and diverse ensemble cast that quickly turns to psychological horror that I've played. Scarlet Hollow does the same thing (admittedly, without the furry romance, so that might be a dealbreaker for the target audience here) far more competently, which is probably why my feelings towards this game are so negative. I know this game could have been great! I've seen another game just like it pull it off!
Despite my disappointment, I'm glad I gave this a shot. It had a couple of legitimately strong bits, one of the songs sounds straight out of 999 (/pos), and it was fairly quick to go through a single route, so I don't feel like my time was substantially wasted.
I've played one route and that's really all I'm willing to give this game. It's not very good. I'm not super familiar with furry culture or media, but the sense that I got from all the main characters is that they're probably popular Archetypes for furry characters -- they're very recognizably written like Archetypes with tweaks. It's a very anime style of writing, and one I generally think is bad, because people (or animals, in the case of this game? not sure on the preferred nominative conventions here) are not just variations on themes, even if we often group ourselves together that way on the internet.
I didn't particularly like any of the main cast, which isn't really a dealbreaker -- you can have a cast of shitty characters and be engaging and entertaining all the same. Unfortunately, I didn't really find the main characters compelling at all either. I don't know why they were so poorly constructed, given that the secondary characters were vastly more interesting -- clearly the authors of this VN are capable of good character writing.
As it so happens, this is not the only indie western VN set in a small town with a quirky and diverse ensemble cast that quickly turns to psychological horror that I've played. Scarlet Hollow does the same thing (admittedly, without the furry romance, so that might be a dealbreaker for the target audience here) far more competently, which is probably why my feelings towards this game are so negative. I know this game could have been great! I've seen another game just like it pull it off!
Despite my disappointment, I'm glad I gave this a shot. It had a couple of legitimately strong bits, one of the songs sounds straight out of 999 (/pos), and it was fairly quick to go through a single route, so I don't feel like my time was substantially wasted.
Norco
2022
This review contains spoilers
A great premise and stellar art design act as solid foundation to prop up an absolutely rickety mess of narrative and gameplay execution.
In Norco I saw something I rarely see in games: an exploration of places like home. Hailing from one of the poorest states in the American South (although Oklahoma's inclusion on that list is sometimes contentious), I've seen firsthand how economic evolution has slowly eroded the communities, homes, and spirits that once defined the great American Heartland.
Hell, as someone from these parts who's got an interest in art...these types of narratives have always fascinated me: the Southern Gothic of O'Connor or Faulkner, the Modernist treatments by Steinbeck and Ellison, etc. These stories take symbols familiar to us--family, faith, perseverance, community, fear, redemption, isolation, etc. and allow us to see alien groups (poor southern blacks, "Okies," American Indians, etc.) through understandable and sympathetic eyes. It allows us to see beyond the thick accents and rudimentary lifestyles and recognize the real human lives, struggles, and emotions behind it all.
So here we have Norco, which first appeared to me via a Tribeca Games Spotlight in 2021 next to other greats like 12 Minutes. The premise was perfect: Norco was one of those places many couldn't believe was real--one of those 'on the nose' symbols that you'd probably think came out of a bad book. But, like with much of the industrial south (as well as the northern Rust Belt), Norco is a sad fact of reality--one begging for artistic exploration. That might sound harsh, a sort of 'culture vulture' thing, but I mean it without a shred of irony. Just as Steinbeck had used the amalgam plight of real Okies escaping to California for The Grapes of Wrath, I think plenty of towns like Norco deserve to have stories told that push awareness to the greater public.
What's in an Opening?
But alas, within literal seconds of pressing start, Norco has already blown it. It's opening montage is perhaps the worst opening I have ever seen to a game--at least in terms of establishing mood, tone, and setting.
First, the game forces players to make narrative choices involving characters we have no understanding of. I don't know or care how well Kay slept based on their proximity to oil fields--I don't even know who the hell Kay is yet. I understand Kay is supposed to be a proxy for me, but I've just goddamn showed up here. I haven't absorbed the mood or tone of the game. I've got no attachment to anything yet and no headspace with which I can make a decision I give two shits about. In fact, I would say that even asking these of the player so quickly serves as a lazy cheat for the writers to avoid writing an actual mood setting hook. They instead rely on a basic player choice to invest you when you've got no reason or incentive to actually make choices yet.
Second, the game's godawful prose attempts to lure you in with some Mccarthy-esque delivery but bats your attention away with the same overwritten, over-precious exposition and framing that plague all beginner 'art' writers. Lines like
The war was a meme that set Albuquerque on fire.
Should make anyone roll their eyes (or laugh their ass off) as hard as the newest YA books should. Especially when literally moments later you're being forced to answer if you tried to fucking pray, sleep, or "forget" while hiding in a freightliner escaping the 'foot soldiers of a pop up junta.'
Remember: we're 35 seconds into this game.
To Point? Or Click?
Keeping in line with the laughably sophomoric opening, Norco decides to take so much influence from the most obvious sources that it destroys what little impact the game could have had left. Its point and click nature means that LucasArts (primarily Ron Gilbert's trademark blend of off-kilter black comedy) is front and center the entire journey. Combine this with Norco's bleak premise and you have a cocktail mix as good as Toothpaste and OJ.
Moments that are meant to highlight the impoverished lifestyles of NPCs are always undercut by the stupidest Glibertian shit. People starving, living life under the freeway? How about a funny puppet show that also happens there? Abandoned malls and burnt out youth with nowhere to go? How about a teenage cult that uses a fucking iPhone app to convert teens so they enter a dead mall and build a fucking rocket ship? So much stupid shit happens in this game that I can say a statement like
"Sorry your mom died of cancer, if only she didn't need QuackCoin and didn't go see the SuperDuck then it would have all been okay!"
Without lying about a single goddamn thing that happens in Norco.
The game's willingness to undercut and serious plot beats with unrelatable goofy content indicates a lack of clear and consistent narrative direction. If it's trying to be surreal, it's not doing much beyond some cheap sight gags. If it's trying to be serious, then the whole damn thing's a clown show.
This isn't to say that narratives need to have one consistent tone to be effective--look at my favorite game for Christ sake. But what a great narrative needs is effective use of tone. If you're going to be wacky, do something interesting with it. If you're just going to make some basic and derivative Ron Gilbert gags, then I could have just spent my time playing Monkey Island. The greatest of games, will use moments of comedy and levity to disarm the player and endear them to the characters of the world in realistic ways. Think your Disco Elysium or Mother 2 types of games. Norco, by contrast, fails to do either. Instead I'm usually left scratching my head wondering just how funny do they think the 10 week old hot dog gag is. It understands Southern Gothic as much as any fourteen year old who just read A Good Man Is Hard To Find for the first time does.
Cyberpunk Hell
On the other end of that spectrum is the rest of Norco's tired influences, the cyberpunk dystopias of Blade Runner and Final Fantasy VII's Midgar. At this point, discussion of Blade Runner is itself so banal that I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader. But several visual motifs are directly ripped from the film, so it shouldn't take you long to see the comparisons line up. Norco, in its desperate attempts to strip everything from the kitchen cabinets, even shoves some half-baked Replicant theming into the game during its final moments.
As for Midgar...well I'm starting to feel the same as I do about Blade Runner. It seems creatives and fans point at Midgar as a cheap shorthand for dystopian influence far too often these days. Not to say that Midgar is a shoddily crafted locale--the place is great! But as with most great works, the devil is really in the details as to why its great. The PS1 original stunned the world with some of the best atmosphere, direction, and writing gaming had seen up to that point. Moreover, Midgar left players wanting more, as the short time spent there left a lot to the imagination. But with Norco, as with Final Fantasy VII: Remake, the finer details are all sacrificed in the name of some basic stylization and theming.
Which is a shame, Norco's art direction could have set the game up for serious success in the hands of the right writer/director. When the game isn't busy ripping motifs from Blade Runner it concocts some genuinely great atmospheres and visuals that do emphasize the setting well. It's just unfortunate that the settings also have to involve puppet shows and mall cults. It's unfortunately just another reminder that Norco was creatively reaching towards the bottom of the ideas barrel when building its world and narrative.
Is There Life In Norco?
Which brings me back to Norco's most important failing: relatability and authenticity. The world and characters of Norco are as foreign to me as those in Maniac Mansion or Beneath a Steel Sky. They're just too damn quirky and flat for their own good. Any time I genuinely try to get wrapped up in what's happening to Kay or her mom I have to deal with characters who end every sentence with bruh or have names like ditch man. I have to deal with characters who are hunting after crypto coins or are all named fucking Garrett for comedy purposes. I have to attend parties where characters dress like they're in Eyes Wide Shut or scale rocket ships designed like Byzantine fortresses because...that would be cool.
The real tragedy is the fact that any real point that could be made about Norco--you know the real city is left totally dead in the water. Any sort of authenticity to the real people of Louisiana or the American South as a whole gets washed away under a mountain of the brain-dead metaphors, bad ideas, and unfunny jokes that plague nearly all quirky indie games. It's doubly sad considering that the guy who made the game is himself from Norco. It's a reminder that simply being from a place doesn't mean you're always the best equipped to tell its story. I don't feel like I've learned fuck all about Louisiana, and I live just a couple of hours away from Norco.
I spent more time chasing cryptocurrency and cults than experiencing the true effects of life in the town. I spent more time driving a motorcycle with my (admittedly sick) robot companion than I did getting to really understand the people who lived there. I spent more time figuring out that I'm the fucking descendant of Christ himself than letting anything actually meaningful about Norco soak in. Virtually every environment, puzzle, and interaction was in service of either a dumb gag or a trite narrative twist that served no point beyond elevating a tired narrative that had nowhere to go.
And so, Norco leaves Norco to rot.
More than anything else, Norco feels like it uses the aesthetics of poverty for cheap indie game gravitas. It feels like the writers and fans are more into Canadian Post-Rock bands with run-on sentence names (that are actually cool references to 50s Japanese films you don't know) than they are into Dixieland or Swamp Rock. It feels like the last place on earth they'd actually want to be is Norco, LA. And in this sense, I truly hate this game. In trying to create something that gave players a taste of the modern southern condition, Norco utterly failed. Instead it gave them an amalgam of hyper-derivative influences and half-baked 'art' literature with cheap Christ symbology.
What really digs me is how many players will feel 'enlightened' after this when they might as well have been playing Red Alert 3 for their cold war history. I guess I'll still be looking for the game that Norco was supposed to be.
In Norco I saw something I rarely see in games: an exploration of places like home. Hailing from one of the poorest states in the American South (although Oklahoma's inclusion on that list is sometimes contentious), I've seen firsthand how economic evolution has slowly eroded the communities, homes, and spirits that once defined the great American Heartland.
Hell, as someone from these parts who's got an interest in art...these types of narratives have always fascinated me: the Southern Gothic of O'Connor or Faulkner, the Modernist treatments by Steinbeck and Ellison, etc. These stories take symbols familiar to us--family, faith, perseverance, community, fear, redemption, isolation, etc. and allow us to see alien groups (poor southern blacks, "Okies," American Indians, etc.) through understandable and sympathetic eyes. It allows us to see beyond the thick accents and rudimentary lifestyles and recognize the real human lives, struggles, and emotions behind it all.
So here we have Norco, which first appeared to me via a Tribeca Games Spotlight in 2021 next to other greats like 12 Minutes. The premise was perfect: Norco was one of those places many couldn't believe was real--one of those 'on the nose' symbols that you'd probably think came out of a bad book. But, like with much of the industrial south (as well as the northern Rust Belt), Norco is a sad fact of reality--one begging for artistic exploration. That might sound harsh, a sort of 'culture vulture' thing, but I mean it without a shred of irony. Just as Steinbeck had used the amalgam plight of real Okies escaping to California for The Grapes of Wrath, I think plenty of towns like Norco deserve to have stories told that push awareness to the greater public.
What's in an Opening?
But alas, within literal seconds of pressing start, Norco has already blown it. It's opening montage is perhaps the worst opening I have ever seen to a game--at least in terms of establishing mood, tone, and setting.
First, the game forces players to make narrative choices involving characters we have no understanding of. I don't know or care how well Kay slept based on their proximity to oil fields--I don't even know who the hell Kay is yet. I understand Kay is supposed to be a proxy for me, but I've just goddamn showed up here. I haven't absorbed the mood or tone of the game. I've got no attachment to anything yet and no headspace with which I can make a decision I give two shits about. In fact, I would say that even asking these of the player so quickly serves as a lazy cheat for the writers to avoid writing an actual mood setting hook. They instead rely on a basic player choice to invest you when you've got no reason or incentive to actually make choices yet.
Second, the game's godawful prose attempts to lure you in with some Mccarthy-esque delivery but bats your attention away with the same overwritten, over-precious exposition and framing that plague all beginner 'art' writers. Lines like
The war was a meme that set Albuquerque on fire.
Should make anyone roll their eyes (or laugh their ass off) as hard as the newest YA books should. Especially when literally moments later you're being forced to answer if you tried to fucking pray, sleep, or "forget" while hiding in a freightliner escaping the 'foot soldiers of a pop up junta.'
Remember: we're 35 seconds into this game.
To Point? Or Click?
Keeping in line with the laughably sophomoric opening, Norco decides to take so much influence from the most obvious sources that it destroys what little impact the game could have had left. Its point and click nature means that LucasArts (primarily Ron Gilbert's trademark blend of off-kilter black comedy) is front and center the entire journey. Combine this with Norco's bleak premise and you have a cocktail mix as good as Toothpaste and OJ.
Moments that are meant to highlight the impoverished lifestyles of NPCs are always undercut by the stupidest Glibertian shit. People starving, living life under the freeway? How about a funny puppet show that also happens there? Abandoned malls and burnt out youth with nowhere to go? How about a teenage cult that uses a fucking iPhone app to convert teens so they enter a dead mall and build a fucking rocket ship? So much stupid shit happens in this game that I can say a statement like
"Sorry your mom died of cancer, if only she didn't need QuackCoin and didn't go see the SuperDuck then it would have all been okay!"
Without lying about a single goddamn thing that happens in Norco.
The game's willingness to undercut and serious plot beats with unrelatable goofy content indicates a lack of clear and consistent narrative direction. If it's trying to be surreal, it's not doing much beyond some cheap sight gags. If it's trying to be serious, then the whole damn thing's a clown show.
This isn't to say that narratives need to have one consistent tone to be effective--look at my favorite game for Christ sake. But what a great narrative needs is effective use of tone. If you're going to be wacky, do something interesting with it. If you're just going to make some basic and derivative Ron Gilbert gags, then I could have just spent my time playing Monkey Island. The greatest of games, will use moments of comedy and levity to disarm the player and endear them to the characters of the world in realistic ways. Think your Disco Elysium or Mother 2 types of games. Norco, by contrast, fails to do either. Instead I'm usually left scratching my head wondering just how funny do they think the 10 week old hot dog gag is. It understands Southern Gothic as much as any fourteen year old who just read A Good Man Is Hard To Find for the first time does.
Cyberpunk Hell
On the other end of that spectrum is the rest of Norco's tired influences, the cyberpunk dystopias of Blade Runner and Final Fantasy VII's Midgar. At this point, discussion of Blade Runner is itself so banal that I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader. But several visual motifs are directly ripped from the film, so it shouldn't take you long to see the comparisons line up. Norco, in its desperate attempts to strip everything from the kitchen cabinets, even shoves some half-baked Replicant theming into the game during its final moments.
As for Midgar...well I'm starting to feel the same as I do about Blade Runner. It seems creatives and fans point at Midgar as a cheap shorthand for dystopian influence far too often these days. Not to say that Midgar is a shoddily crafted locale--the place is great! But as with most great works, the devil is really in the details as to why its great. The PS1 original stunned the world with some of the best atmosphere, direction, and writing gaming had seen up to that point. Moreover, Midgar left players wanting more, as the short time spent there left a lot to the imagination. But with Norco, as with Final Fantasy VII: Remake, the finer details are all sacrificed in the name of some basic stylization and theming.
Which is a shame, Norco's art direction could have set the game up for serious success in the hands of the right writer/director. When the game isn't busy ripping motifs from Blade Runner it concocts some genuinely great atmospheres and visuals that do emphasize the setting well. It's just unfortunate that the settings also have to involve puppet shows and mall cults. It's unfortunately just another reminder that Norco was creatively reaching towards the bottom of the ideas barrel when building its world and narrative.
Is There Life In Norco?
Which brings me back to Norco's most important failing: relatability and authenticity. The world and characters of Norco are as foreign to me as those in Maniac Mansion or Beneath a Steel Sky. They're just too damn quirky and flat for their own good. Any time I genuinely try to get wrapped up in what's happening to Kay or her mom I have to deal with characters who end every sentence with bruh or have names like ditch man. I have to deal with characters who are hunting after crypto coins or are all named fucking Garrett for comedy purposes. I have to attend parties where characters dress like they're in Eyes Wide Shut or scale rocket ships designed like Byzantine fortresses because...that would be cool.
The real tragedy is the fact that any real point that could be made about Norco--you know the real city is left totally dead in the water. Any sort of authenticity to the real people of Louisiana or the American South as a whole gets washed away under a mountain of the brain-dead metaphors, bad ideas, and unfunny jokes that plague nearly all quirky indie games. It's doubly sad considering that the guy who made the game is himself from Norco. It's a reminder that simply being from a place doesn't mean you're always the best equipped to tell its story. I don't feel like I've learned fuck all about Louisiana, and I live just a couple of hours away from Norco.
I spent more time chasing cryptocurrency and cults than experiencing the true effects of life in the town. I spent more time driving a motorcycle with my (admittedly sick) robot companion than I did getting to really understand the people who lived there. I spent more time figuring out that I'm the fucking descendant of Christ himself than letting anything actually meaningful about Norco soak in. Virtually every environment, puzzle, and interaction was in service of either a dumb gag or a trite narrative twist that served no point beyond elevating a tired narrative that had nowhere to go.
And so, Norco leaves Norco to rot.
More than anything else, Norco feels like it uses the aesthetics of poverty for cheap indie game gravitas. It feels like the writers and fans are more into Canadian Post-Rock bands with run-on sentence names (that are actually cool references to 50s Japanese films you don't know) than they are into Dixieland or Swamp Rock. It feels like the last place on earth they'd actually want to be is Norco, LA. And in this sense, I truly hate this game. In trying to create something that gave players a taste of the modern southern condition, Norco utterly failed. Instead it gave them an amalgam of hyper-derivative influences and half-baked 'art' literature with cheap Christ symbology.
What really digs me is how many players will feel 'enlightened' after this when they might as well have been playing Red Alert 3 for their cold war history. I guess I'll still be looking for the game that Norco was supposed to be.
