More people have walked on the moon than have beat Takeshi’s Castle [1986-1990], the TV game show which involved about 100 people attempting to win every single episode, for 131 episodes. Rumor has it that this game show was directly inspired by Super Mario Bros [1985], which I cannot find a reliable and direct source for, but which seems extremely plausible just from looking at how the show works. It’s all physical challenges of the kind Mario faces all the time, jumping over walls, swinging on ropes, clearing gaps, et cetera. (Because it was an international success in export, it was the show responsible for the anglophone world’s idea of a generic wacky madcap Japanese game show and may or may not have either originated or codified and popularized the concept, though the fad it began seems to have ended in Japan around the 2000s, while its influence kept percolating elsewhere around the world in shows like Wipeout [2008-2014/2021-2022].) The hundred contestants must get through this obstacle course without failing once or they will be disqualified, showing a conceptualization of the lives system not as like, the same Mario across alternate timelines, but as separate individuals making their own attempts, slowly filtering out until statistically someone is finally good or lucky enough to succeed against these obstacles which are extremely difficult but not quite impossible.

I see it said a lot, as basically a truism, that most or all video games are a “power fantasy.” I’ve been thinking about it and I very much disagree. There are surprisingly few games that offer up little-to-no resistance to the player enacting their will and therefore having maximal power over the game world. Rather, conventional game design is always throwing caltrops and obstacles and restrictions in front of the player. They are disempowerment fantasies, offering surmountable challenges to stimulate the player like a predator in a zoo hunting a pumpkin full of ground beef.

In Super Mario Bros, Bowser is the level designer. Takeshi Kitano cast himself as Bowser, as the villain, the bad guy in the castle. Takeshi Kitano played a lot of bad guys in movies in the 1980s (a serial killer, a cult leader, hitmen,) as his way of bucking against the unhappy confines of his newfound celebrity as a comedian and fairly ubiquitous TV light entertainment presenter type and establish himself as a serious artist, though this strategy of his would only pay off for him in the 1990s. In Takeshi’s Castle, the oppositional relationship between hero and villain is all just transparent kayfabe, it’s just for fun and really for the benefit of the hero. Really, it’s the obstacle course itself that gets to be the star of Takeshi’s Castle, it simply has more screentime than Takeshi, his castle, or any given contestant or cast member. Each anonymous contestant primarily expresses and defines their on-screen character through their relationships to the castle and how each unique approach contrasts with the ones we’ve already seen. They’re always reacting.

There’s 2 different stories of how Takeshi Kitano came by his showbiz success. There’s the short version, where it was all a fluke and he was incidentally working as a busboy and then got thrust up on stage, and the longer less-abridged version where he dedicates himself to a career in comedy through hard work and apprenticeship, deliberately working as a busboy in a particular circumstance in order to create his own luck. These stories are technically not contradictory, but they paint very different pictures and accordingly get deployed in different rhetorical circumstances. This slipperiness of mythology both allows the public character of Takeshi Kitano to be different things as the situation demands, and also suits his brand of being a multifaceted chameleon and jack-of-all-trades. It does make my life hard, though, because I’m not a very good researcher and can’t read Japanese, so the most I can do is skeptically position rumors and legends. As best as I can tell, Takeshi Kitano has written at least four autobiographies, none of which have been translated to English and most of which seem to focus on his life before fame, with various spins, such as Takeshi-Kun, Ha! [1985], which is a lighthearted children’s book about getting up to kiddie hi-jinks, or Akasuka Kid [1988], the aforementioned long version of his rise-to-fame tale, both of which got adapted to TV miniseries.

Takeshi Kitano got that start in showbiz as a “manzai” comedian in the 1970s, in the group The Two Beats (hence his nickname Beat Takeshi.) Manzai is a kind of stand-up comedy with two comedians, a funny guy and a straight man ala Abbot and Costello or a vaudeville routine or a Socratic dialogue. Usually in this sort of set-up, both participants get punchlines one way or another, but not in The Two Beats. Beat Takeshi’s routine was to be a verbal steamroller, going up there and essentially doing a solo stand-up set where he took all the punchlines and happened to be standing next to another guy. Beat Kiyoshi could never get much of a word in edgewise against Beat Takeshi’s rapid-fire onslaught of ridiculous statements, only eking out semantically-empty obvious statements as set-up, unacknowledged rhetorical questions, and ignored chastisements. He didn’t do nothing, though. He pulled big faces with bugged-out eyes, restlessly moving around from one foot to the other, getting increasingly frustrated, expressively playing the part of the audience like a horror game streamer with a facecam. He was always reacting.

The other important thing to note about The Two Beats for my purposes is that they were, reportedly, edgy. They needled society in some manner and rode controversy over their offensiveness to greater fame. 1986 was a big year for Beat Takeshi in that department, too. In December — right around the same time his video game was being released — a tabloid magazine called Friday published something about him having an affair with a college student. Angry, he got together with 11 members of his “Gundan” group of hangers-on and broke into their offices after hours to vandalize it, spray fire extinguishers around, and ultimately get arrested. It’s not clear to me if he did actual jail time for this or just got banned from TV, but regardless, they made episodes of Takeshi’s Castle with a big paper-mache Takeshi head for a while and then held a poll to see if they should bring him back that revealed that that after this whole scandal he was more popular than ever. Takeshi Kitano has remained a prickly curmudgeon in interviews his whole life, someone with perhaps a slight conservative bent who doesn’t like modern society, its phoniness and its media and its technology… such as, famously, video games.

------ MUSICAL INTERMISSION: Killdozer - Hamburger Martyr [1986] -------

Takeshi’s Challenge [1986] was not actually made by Takeshi Kitano, though, despite the title and the way people talk about it. We humans like to think of artworks as having authors regardless of how accurate a proposition that is or isn’t, largely in my view as a way of anthropomorphizing artworks because it’s awkward to speak or even think of inert objects as having intentions and acting on the world. The authorship function here is being absorbed by the celebrity tie-in branding; we want to believe that Takeshi left his fingerprints on the work as the driving auteur. The concept of the celebrity auteur game designer, contrary to belief that it is a recent development, was already well-established by 1986 and Beat Takeshi is being slotted into that archetype.

The legend goes that Kitano found out there was to be a licensed game based on himself, injected himself into the process, got super drunk over one long night, came up with all the ideas for the whole game, and the programmers dutifully took notes on every ridiculous thing he said and tried their darndest to implement it all. The original public source for this tale is the first episode of GameCenter CX [2003-2022], where it is a rumor proffered by an employee who was entirely unrelated to producing Takeshi’s Challenge, and he does say it was multiple nights unless that was a translation error. I also have heard second-hand that Takeshi himself claims to have done it over one dinner but stone-cold sober, though I don’t know the source for that claim at all. Indeed, I can’t surface any instance of Takeshi Kitano talking about this game ever at all, at least in English. I can’t even find direct support for the commonly-circulated claim that he hates video games (which I deployed right before the musical intermission,) which seems to be a key part of this whole creation myth, but which sits weirdly up against the keen-eyed enthusiasm with the novelty of Super Mario Bros implied by the design of Takeshi’s Castle. Although I did find him saying “I hate anime, and Hayao Miyazaki most of all,” for whatever that’s worth to you.

Implementation of ideas does not simply happen, and details that Takeshi Kitano could scarcely have come up with himself over dinner matter. Takeshi’s Challenge is obviously not the work of a first-time outsider to the video game form taking their first swing at it. The bulk of the game was actually made by anonymous designers and programmers at Taito, the company that brought us Space Invaders [1978] and a gaggle of other acclaimed classics clear up through and beyond 1986. It is professionally crafted, with no more in the way of bugs than Super Mario Bros, and its design shows a fairly sophisticated knowledge of video gaming as it has hitherto existed in the 80s. My best guess is that Takeshi came up with some broad strokes and the most off-the-wall bits, and the rest was made by a team that knew video games well and realized the most suitable schema at-hand in which to coherently contain those ideas was the adventure game.

A good point of comparison for Takeshi’s Challenge is The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy [1984]. They’re both high-profile collaborations with a creative celebrity author figure and industry insiders. They’re both adventure games with a notably open structure that find their own heightened and frustrating obtuseness fun and funny. They keep the punchlines to themselves but invite the player to be the frustrated comedy partner reacting to their onslaught of nonsense.

However, Hitchhiker’s is made with love for adventure games… while Takeshi’s Challenge seems to boil with something like hatred for the player, itself, and games that resemble itself. Takeshi’s Challenge is a cornerstone example in the world of “bad games.” It fits strangely in with its companions, because most infamous bad games get that regard through some kind of failure of implementation. Takeshi’s Challenge, by contrast, is an unambigious unqualified success on its own terms. It’s just that those terms are alien, grotesque, and hostile. It’s tweaking the nose of video games as an established medium, riffing on conventions, and its understanding of what it thinks “normal” video games are can be partially reverse-engineered. It is a funhouse mirror portrait of a genre I hold dear in a diseased, deranged, and almost necrotic state. It is an indictment.

Let’s review a history of adventure games in Japan. It starts with Mystery House [1980] because the focus on big pictures and minimal text made it easier to translate. (More specifically, it starts with a Japanese clone called Mystery House 1 [1982].) This is unfortunate, because Mystery House is a terrible game. Its parser is lousy, its world and story is incoherent, and half of the things the player does don’t really make sense even after you do them, nevermind reasoning things out beforehand! It’s hard to imagine that translating to another language improves this condition.

By the time we get to The Portopia Serial Murder Case [1983/1985], the manual explicitly and directly tells the player that they are going to have to systematically brute force solutions to progress sometimes. This is plainly just the expectation people have for how these types of games work, and it’s certainly not exclusive to Japan. It’s not brute force 100% of the time, but often in Portopia you gotta do everything you can everywhere you can do it, and then do it AGAIN multiple times in case you need to do it multiple times for it to have any effect at all, and AGAIN every time you accomplish anything on the off chance it might have silently advanced the game state one tick forward. Or sometimes, when you don’t have any reason to think you’ve accomplished anything because there’s no feedback. Slowly, you gather information and produce an idea of the optimal run through, learning from failures as late as the last frame of the game and gladly reloading from scratch. “Save scumming” is fully expected. You don’t just need to learn to play like this, you need to learn to LIKE doing this.

There’s a shift away from this sort of design for large games just now beginning in the late 80s, with Japanese adventure games in particular just about to take as hard a pivot away from this sort of thing as can be imagined. I believe this creates for the moment a bit of a generation gap between the adult designers of games for the Famicom/NES and their still-in-childhood players, leaving this an era of transitional pubescence that means the likes of Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest [1987], a game that strongly resembles Takeshi’s Challenge at least on a surface level, will not “age well”. (Sarcastic quote marks because I hate that thinking.) But it’s this design paradigm that Takeshi’s Challenge sees and extends to absurd lengths.

There’s actually a rocky escalation from a pretty normal baseline of confusion to batshit bullshit. A good example of reasonably-traditional design of an adventure game puzzle is the one involving the shamisen (a Japanese musical instrument kinda like a banjo.) Towards the end of the game, once you’ve passed through two and a half one-way gates that you need to optimize your run around, you need to play the shamisen to convince someone not to kill you. You’re given 5 choices and that’s the only one that works. It also requires a two-step process in the early game to get and learn to use, which makes it look more signifigant for appearing in two menus, but then again, all of that also goes for the shakuhachi (a Japanese musical instrument kinda like a flute,) but then again, you can bring both and reload to try them one after the other. It’s still trial-and-error where you have to return back to the beginning if you’re not luckily prepared for, but it’s not total guesswork because you have an enumerated list of everything to try. This stuff isn’t a nose-tweak, it’s just normal game stuff.

It’s not just the shakuhachi, this game is actually mostly red herring by weight. The first half of the game is the part that often gets it comparisons to the 3D Grand Theft Autos, because what you do is wander aimlessly and behave more badly than you could get away with in real life though the down-to-earth setting of urban city that serves as a comedic foil for jokey signs, vulgar people, and comically incongruous but extremely video gamey violence with gangsters and cops. There’s tons of things to do and places to be, but most of it is completely irrelevant to the critical path and exists for flavor, like the candy store or barber shop. They exist seemingly mainly for the sake of their own existence, to flesh things out into a better approximation of a real city center. They also mean that you can play Takeshi’s Challenge just by poking around and existing in its space for a while instead of doing anything to progress.

But there is a plot to this game, a narrow path to follow to the end of the game. At the beginning, your boss is chewing you out for not performing well at your job, and you are absolutely not on a mission to perform better as a salaryman. While technically you shouldn’t quit right away for optimization reasons, the whole game to follow has big “freshly unemployed and at loose ends” energy. To progress, the player character has to become a complete derelict, divorcing his wife and closing out his bank account and quitting his job and leaving his kids behind, and a loud drunken hooligan regularly making such an ass of himself that he incites bar brawls. At least he pays his alimony and gets himself some adult education at the culture center. Otherwise, you’re consistently encouraged to command him to act anti-socially. There’s literally no mechanical reason not to set his speech to “threatening” at all times because that’s how you get most of the in-game hints. Binge-drinking tequila heals his. It’s progression-vital to impotently wail at pachinko to annoy people and thereby attract them in to kill ’em and steal their stuff, like a siren but more pathetic.

Unless there’s something in the manual (which is likely,) it’s only the two-time reoccurence of a treasure map in the bookstore and pachinko parlor menus that clues you in to your eventual goal. Getting this map is where the game really shows its teeth for the first time. I’ll fully outline the process: You have to do karaoke, but if you try, you are told that the machine is broken. You’re not to fix it, though. You are to do the causally unrelated action of getting a little drunk off two drinks at the bar before you will be invited to do karaoke. Then, you need to select one of five particular possible songs. You can figure out which song it is by talking to random people anywhere in town, and they’ll sing it. But not only do you need to pick the song, you need to nail it. In real life, to the game’s satisfaction. You have to sing it into the Famicom microphone on the controller, and even the microphone-free alternative which seems like a debugging tool is finicky. But not only do you need to nail the song, you need to nail it three times in a row. Nothing at all suggests this course of behavior, just sheer bloody-minded determination about how this song seems significant. Once you do that, you’ll summon a bunch of yakuza to beat down. Do that and an old man with a robe and long mustache will give you a treasure map that is blank. You have a few options for what to do with it, and some options instantly fail. Oh, and by the way, when you do fail at revealing the treasure map, the earliest you can rewind to with the password save system brings you all the way back to the very beginning of this sequence to do it all over again. But it’s not as simple as just trying every option. You also have to wait. There’s two viable options: #1, you can soak the paper in water, wait more than 5 minutes but less than 10, then shout at it through the microphone to clear it up. How are you supposed to figure out the timing without a guide? Why does shouting at paper dry it up? Beats me. You just gotta be psychic. Or, #2, you have to expose it to the sun and then wait a real-life hour without touching the controller. Your only hint to do this is that you don’t immediately fail, but if you press any button, at which point you get a failure message where the old man chastises you for wasting your chance. Same thing happens if you choose to merely stare at the map, but without the possibility of success. Once you have revealed the treasure map, you must kill the old man who gave it to you, otherwise he will show up at the very end of the game having used the map to beat you to the treasure. I’ve seen that part get flack, but it’s honestly the easiest thing to figure out what to do next about out of this whole entire sequence.

That’s not a fucking puzzle! That’s absolute god damn nonsense! It’s not even something you can brute force, it’s just so open-ended and arbitrary! I’m not even sure how the person who figured out that’s what you have to do and passed it down to us figured it out. And yet… and yet… go read a strategy guide for Tower Of Druaga [1984] or read the way Jason Dyer beat Time Zone [1982]. This sort of rigamarole was barely exaggerating the way games around it actually were, and Takeshi’s Challenge thinks that’s miserable and ridiculous. Takeshi’s Challenge isn’t setting up quite-difficult-but-surmountable challenges, it quite seriously wants you to not to persist but to give up and stop playing. When you beat it, a tiny little floating Takeshi Kitano head tells you:

"YOU ACTUALLY BOTHERED TO FINISH THIS CRAPPY GAME? SUCKER. DON'T TAKE IT SO SERIOUSLY."

And it’s snotty, but he’s right. If you played this game without a guide it must have been a full-time job for you. Even with a guide it’s many stupid hours. Getting the map’s not even the hardest part of the game, it’s just the bottleneck. There’s the infamous hang-gliding, where you have to dodge and shoot birds while not being able to move up for 2 and a half minutes. It’s not actually that hard — it’s an easier side-scrolling shooter section than Gradius [1985] or Taito’s own Darius [1987]. But it’s a totally different kind of game difficulty, going from a test of persistence to one of reflexes. I suppose that’s what makes it Takeshi’s Challenge and not Takeshi’s Patience Test. It’s almost a tautology that any hard swap from one mode of gameplay to another is a sudden switch-up of required player skills, and you’re going to filter out players who are good at the main mode of gameplay and not the other type. Here that’s exactly what Takeshi’s Challenge wants, but other developers who do this will think they’ll somehow attract both types of players by doing it. Believe me, this kind of thing is gonna be all over the likes of Manhunter: New York [1988].

The grand finale manages to ESCALATE on the level of inscrutability of the map quest. You have to essentially comb through 3 large caves pixel hunting for random completely unsignalled hotspots and then duck there to get to the next lower level. While you do that, you’re gonna be constantly swarmed by beasties. This part is even more Tower Of Druaga. It’s undoubtedly expected that you use a guide or some other community resource to get through here, but either somebody has to have actually done it the hard way at some point, unless the creators themselves told people how to do it. Famously, though this doesn’t tell us about how it was made one way or the other, the original strategy guide for this game was incomplete and had to be republished.

Here in the back half of the game, where you’re actually embarking on the treasure hunt, the game turns from a goofy version of daily life more and more into a video game-ass video game. You cross a threshold into a fantasyland, first passing through a brief waystation of tourist amenities that rub in the well-trod manicured artificiality of your journey and its destination. In fact, if you haven’t completely divested your player character of attachments and obligations to the everyday world, you will get forcibly dragged back into it and lose the game after the hang glider segment. The plot to this game is actually itself a bit of an allegory for turning your back on real life to disappear into a video game. You’re not just a derelict of your responsibilities and a piece of shit, but you’re doing it to go seek a place where platforming and violence and optimization actually matters, where there’s fake buried treasure to be found at the end of the rainbow.

Dedicating the only two buttons you get to “jump” and “attack” were, in the first half, essentially a diffuse joke about how those aren’t things that you do very often in real life but do constantly in a video game, where situations like being attacked by like 5 yakuza members and fighting them all off have to be transparently manufactured. Now, those once-odd manufactured situations are normalized to the point where you legitimately gotta use the trick where you despawn every enemy on screen by checking your inventory just to get by. You’re getting attacked by snakes and armadillos and monkeys dropping coconuts from above. You have to jump to get to places you need to be. All of a sudden, the game looks less like an adventure game and more like Adventure Island [1986]. The timeline works out such that it might literally be a parody of Adventure Island specifically, since both it and the back half of Takeshi’s Challenge both take place on fictional islands in the South Pacific.

One thing I’m downright shocked that I’ve never heard anyone say, probably because so few people make it very far into the end game, is that the back half of Takeshi’s Challenge is obviously racist. On the tourist island, the hostile mobs you learn to recognize as inherently violent on sight aren’t wearing blue-and-green costumes but instead are the only ones in the whole game that are brown-skinned. The island with the treasure is heartily littered with classic ooga-booga tribal caricatures: bones in the noses, big cannibal cooking pot, grass skirts, the works. This is extremely well-trod territory for games in the 1980s, to the point where it’s basically luck I haven’t run into quite so blatant an act of racist caricature yet. It even threatened to show up in A Mind Forever Voyaging [1985], where it doesn’t reasonably belong at all! And no, I don’t think it’s part of the parody and satire here, not that that would be an excuse but it would be something. It’s not particularly heightened or subverted or critiqued, it’s just there. Like the shamisen puzzle and such, it’s played exactly as straight and thoughtlessly as you’d find in a normal game. But just because it doesn’t mean to doesn’t mean it doesn’t still damn the grotesque ugliness of things common in video games by making itself the ugliest version.

It’s a common and intuitive thing to marry the common treasure-hunt gameplay with the classic treasure-hunt theming and plot. When we enter the back half our salaryman character even dresses up with a classic ’40s pike hat outfit just so you really know how traditionally colonialist this is about to get. You are here to steal the natives’ treasure to claim it as your own. To do so, you must first impress their spiritual and political leaders with worthless trinkets and stupid tricks in exchange for their holy item. Colonialism is such a common thing that gets circled around that I ran out of fresh things to say about how bad I think it is the last time I wrote about an infamous bad game.

So here’s the too-cute counter-reading for this one: the first half of the game is actually the more colonialist one. You, the player, are colonizing the salaryman character’s life. He’s not a blank slate, he’s got a whole life with a career and savings and a wife and kids. And then you possess him, like a demon. You destroy every way that he relates to his community: his family, his career that may give him purpose and a sense of structure and role, you even destroy pro-social behavioral norms in general. You map out his whole society and determine for him what’s worthless (books, candy, flowers, personal grooming) and what’s not (like drinking.) You plunder his life for all it’s worth, liquidating all his hard-earned assets for maximum short-term extraction, and then set him down the path of getting even more money far beyond what’s useful for him. It’s significant that the player character is a salaryman at a loan office, because the whole plot ultimately comes down not to video game metacommentary but to greed, a bottomless greed that ultimately consumes and destroys all other possible meaning there is to be found in life.

(Originally posted on my blog, Arcade Idea. I was wary to do this sort of cross-posting, because my critical style is orthogonal to the star ratings and I always feel weird about anything that smacks of self-promotion. I think some of the people I like to read here would like this, though. If my anxieties are founded and this sort of thing is not welcome here on Backloggd, please let me know!)

in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.

anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.

this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.

i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.

pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.

when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.

pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.

to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.

while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.

while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.

i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.

one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.

frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.

it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.

Sheu mynds on than that even a comet

is rived by the weyght o whit hid passes,
an whan hid's fired ootower the starns,
the starns is tirled by thir awn wheel,
an that wheel tirled in anither wheel,

til ivry escaep is anither orbit,
an ivry orbit anither still,
an ivry still aye makkan the promiese
that wi a tirl thoo'll win tae free.

-Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles

I thought of Giles' novel in verse often while playing this. It's an easy contender for my best book of 2022 and, like this game, I reached a point where I wished it would never end.

He went over to the map and studied the northern part of the city, with his back to his visitor.

"Being a policeman," said Szluka, "is not a profession. And it's certainly not a vocation either. It's a curse."

A little later, he turned around and said:

"Of course, I don't mean that. Only think it sometimes. Are you married?"

"Yes."

"Then you know."

-The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo

The Name of This Club Is DISCO ELYSIUM

Can't in good conscience give five stars to a work that went out of its way to airlift in the chapo cunts to do ironic/tenuously deniable racist impressions and reserves a special thanks for chrs avll*ne in the end credits, but...did kind of love it nonetheless, in spite of itself - bourgeois indulgences and all.

EDIT: They actually got rid of the chapos and Dasha for the final cut I was wrong, bumped up a half star lol

Despite my fondness for world-focused crpgs of its lineage and the pleasure I take in kitschy 80s fantasy settings, I had never completed Baldur’s Gate before. I’d given it a few earnest tries, a couple of them hours long, but it wasn’t until now that I was properly tuned to be comfortable with older PC gaming interfaces after a lifetime of console comforts, or probably interested in the slow rhythms of this particular chunk of faerun countryside.

I think a lot of people get to the character creator and see that there’s no active auto-level tool for your party members once you recruit them and get intimidated by poorly explained, unintuitive mechanics and the sheer depth of choice on display across your up to six guys, probably not helped by how actively you’ll be juggling them during combat if you want to keep your mages and ranged people alive especially early on. I know this had happened to me. The fact of the matter, though, is that all of the dice rolling and calculations and rules lawyering being handled behind the scenes by the computer smooths that stuff over considerably, at least on the normal difficulty setting. Perhaps my familiarity with tabletop games and rpgs gives me something of a skewed perspective but I feel like as long as you pick a lane and slap your points into it consistently, it’s hard to go wrong permanently here, and it almost never puts you in situations you can’t back out of to prep or re-prep for.

And the reality is that combat in AD&D at low level, where this game spends most of its time, is a pretty simple affair. There’s an interesting curve to it all here you start out SO unbelievably weak that there is an interesting tactical challenge to just getting through fights with like, Two Healthy Wolves or That Include A Mage At All, because you have SIX HIT POINTS and Imoen has FOUR and you’re both specced to be thief adjacent and this is NOT an ideal setup we gotta get some friends FAST dude. Then towards the endgame they’re confident enough that you know what you’re doing and have a wide enough toolset and the beef on your guys to work through stuff that encounters can be constructed in more interesting ways through combinations of monsters and enemies and mages with varying skills and abilities, and those encounters swing the combat back to really cool shit. The Problem then, is the very long middle stretch of the game, levels like 3 – 6 (in a game where you start at 1 and the cap is either 8 or 9, I ended at 7 and saw conflicting sources) where you are mostly just fighting groups of really boring identical enemies; a room full of kobolds leads to a room with MORE kobolds in it leads to a room with a few kobolds and a mage. Then it’s onto the spider area. Then it’s onto the bandits and hobgoblins area. There’s not much spice to 90% of the game’s encounters, at least on the normal difficulty, especially because you can rest to refill health and magic almost anywhere and at any time, and the only tax on that is random interruption by small groups of enemies before you can try again. There are a small handful of timed quests in the game but outside of those very brief windows there’s no reason to ever be caught with your pants down. The only thing you’re ever sacrificing is time. So after a while I just flipped it to easy difficulty because making these fights go a little fast just seemed more appealing for the level of engagement I was at. Based on my final playtime vs other peoples’ and the shock of my friend when I told them how long it took me to finish, I would estimate this move shaved literally like fifteen hours off the game. And I don’t regret it! I flipped it back every now and again for big fights and felt satisfied. I’m sure there’s more depth to the hardest difficulties but that’s just not who I am.

Busting the game down to Easy doesn’t feel like much of a compromise because as much as the culture around this game and its sequel is based around crunching numbers and debating party composition and class balance and shit like that, I always also got the impression that the real tactics-fiend dungeon crawler’s games were in this one’s sister series Icewind Dale, which as I understand it are way less focused on narrative and way more focused on cutting guys. The interesting thing about Baldur’s Gate, then, is that I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly story heavy experience either? What this feels like is a robust mechanical simulation of what it’s like to play second edition D&D, and it’s hugely successful at that, but while it’s really good at setting the table for adventure and providing little vignettes for your party to wander through, there’s not much substance to these characters themselves, or much depth to the choices you’re allowed to make throughout these scenarios. Which would be completely fine if you transplanted everything in this game onto a table with a real DM who could react more naturalistically to stuff you say and do than the restrictive options you’re given here, and a party of real friends who could fill out these characters with responses to events as they happen, rather than “hey here’s a paragraph of what I’m about when you recruit me and I will never speak again outside of my combat barks.” So despite the wonderfully goofy writing of the rest of the game, the characters at the heart and souls of it – your player character and their companions – feel really hollow compared to everyone they interact with.

Despite my complaints this is both forgivable and completely fine. Forgivable because this is not only Bioware’s first game but rather famously the first game anyone at the company had ever worked on, and with that in mind the scope on display and success of implementation within that scope is outrageously impressive. And it’s fine because the game is so much more about vibing than it is about the actual plot or characters, even if I think the plot itself is rather good, but we’ll get around to that. If 90% of the combat in this game is boring low stakes encounters where you mostly just mob guys until they’re dead as long as they don’t have a caster, then 90% of the Story Content in the game is just walking around the muddy countryside talking to anyone you run into, and sometimes they ask you to do something and sometimes they just have one dialogue box of information or colorful dialogue or sometimes they have nothing really at all. Maybe you find a weird circus to fuck around in full of sinister games. Maybe you’ll get pickpocketed. Maybe you’ll meet somebody famous on the road and give them a hand with a group of bandits. Maybe you’ll lie your way past an assassin sent to kill you. Many, many times, you will swiftly and immediately be hit with a game over death you could not possibly have seen coming and it will be funny every single time. It’s hard to really talk about this meat of the game even though it’s the stuff I look back on the most fondly because it’s all so ephemeral. Brief encounters that come and go with the wind as you trek through relatively anonymous fields and woods and hills. Individually all of this stuff is extremely shallow, but it overwhelms by sheer volume, and it is sublimated into the game’s overall relaxed, rural atmosphere.

This pleasantly languid pace works in favor of the main quest as well, where after some rumblings of great prophecy you’re cast into the world to futz around doing essentially whatever you want at largely your own pace as your party slowly uncovers the world’s most patient and economically specific evil murder god conspiracy. While the ultimate roots of the game do trace back to a shadowy evil cult manipulating city-states behind the scenes to start a bloody war whose corpses will power their arcane ritual and bring glorious hopeful purpose to their child of prophecy, Baldur’s Gate is a game where you go from level 1 to level 8 so that stuff really barely comes up at all in this game and instead, perhaps uniquely among all video games of this ilk, you REALLY get into the nitty gritty of investigating the cult’s front operations. The way they’re taking over all of the mines in the countrysides surrounding the city of Baldur’s Gate, their conspiracy to monopolize and short all of the iron production in the region, how that links to the political machinations of multiple trade organizations and WHY this child of evil prophecy would want to do all this shit when if he was just after power there are other, easier ways to get it. He is already powerful, surely there’s more to it, and there is! But for most of the game this simply doesn’t concern you. What DOES concern you is tracking down guys who are like eight rungs down the ladder from the top, managing hired bandit gangs that harass people and tracking down the dudes who might know the dudes who might know where the guy who operates the mines are. THIS is the good shit.

Which is not to say that the game can’t do full on RPG ass intrigue shit either, even if the scale is smaller than gamers might be accustomed to. It hits pretty hard when, after 75% of the game is over, you actually do have to go to Baldur’s Gate itself for the first time and it’s massive, a city nine screens big when no town has ever been more than one until now, full of multiple skyscraping businesses and mansions, merchants and taverns. It’s overwhelming, a little bit even after you realize there isn’t actually that much to do here outside of the main quest stuff. Unlike the rest of the game, npcs here react to events in the plot too, there are times where the status quo changes radically and people have new things to say. Towards the end of the game, going around town and gathering intel from townspeople is essential to finishing the game and it feels more organic than similar interactions in any game that inherits this one’s will. I don’t think it 100% nails the writing on all of the big stuff but it’s entirely unassailable when it comes to characterizing the world, maybe the best to ever do it.

A big part of what makes the Big Story Beats of the game fall a little flat is your place in it, and the way Bioware is still clearly getting their sea legs on how to handle player choice and consequences here. There are often only options to express that you are a Nice Person or a Mean Person and no matter what you do or say most interactions end in a fight. It’s not universal but it’s a large enough majority to feel disappointing compared to the complexity of interaction in some later infinity engine games, or even some moments in early 3D Bioware games, which the dialogue in this has more in common with.

Big spoiler for the big twist in Baldur’s Gate incoming! Okay here it is: They do try to paper over this inevitable violence with the script in that, as is mentioned in the most comically nonchalant reveal I’ve ever seen in a game, your character is the child of Bhaal, the previous god of murder, who for reasons only known to people who cared about the larger lore of d&d in the 90s, lost to time, is dead and whose essence now seeks to ascend in one of his many many mortal children. So there is some implication by the game that you get into all of these fights because on some level, liquid snake voice you enjoy all the killing. Or if not that explicitly, then at least the killing is an intrinsic part of your being in a way that is abnormal, and the amount of murder you find yourself doing is unusual even by the standards of a D&D adventurer. This COULD suck shit and indeed is a Stock Video Game Twist that will be annoyingly deployed in countless games including Baldur’s Gate’s own loose descendent KOTOR 2.

I’ll say though, that I think it works here, really well even, not just because Baldur’s Gate was deploying this twist, if not on the ground floor then at least on floor two or three, but also because the WAY it’s deployed is gracefully fit into the world the game has constructed. Rather than a crude gotcha on the player, it’s used here to characterize their avatar and introduce the philosophical underpinnings that the EXTREMELY FUNNY FREDERICH NIETZCHE QUOTE THAT OPENS THE GAME EVERY TIME YOU BOOT IT UP suggests is the ultimate theme of the series. Because while you do get the choice to play however you want and the game does seem like it will accommodate your play, I do get the vibe that it’s designed with a Good-Aligned Player Character in mind, and if you do play that way than this twist introduces a really great conundrum. It’s your nature to be a murderer. You have spent your entire free life doing a LOT of murders. How do you turn that into a defiance against the idea that your fate is to be someone overtaken by the essence of cruelty, as the villain of the game (your brother) has? It’s something that only gets to be touched on lightly here because the god stuff all comes in right at the end of this one, which ends super abruptly right afterward, but I really really hope BG2 and Throne of Bhaal follow through on this idea because it has the potential to be a lot more than a justification for shallow writing.

Since I finished the game I’ve gone back and reloaded a few saves and poked around in the expansion area, been extremely unimpressed with Drulag’s Tower (sorry everybody I just don’t care about this combat, even though the xpac stuff is mostly endgame tuned and is comprised of a lot of cool fights; the narrative hooks aren’t there). Even though I felt like I got a complete experience with my original playthrough, I was happy to keep poking around the areas I hadn’t seen, the stuff I hadn’t fully explored. This little game with like 30 map screens is stuffed with so much interesting, innocuous shit that I feel like I could keep going back forever, finding all these weird little encounters and never get bored with them, even as I’m bored with a lot of the individual elements of the work. It’s pretty magical; even though I’m really excited to see how the second game can flesh out the writing and deepen the characters and complicate the quest design, I know from experience with all of the games inspired by this one that there’s nothing else out there that emulates The Vibes on display here. A truly remarkable, singular work .

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Disappointed by how the genuinely impressive specificity of place, atmosphere of dread, and the sharply observed details re: class and encroaching capital are left entirely by the wayside around the halfway point (maybe even earlier?) in favor of it's ok-but-not-revelatory plot, which I found significantly less interesting than the place and context and small glimpses of community around which it initially revolves. Unlike KR0 it is to some extent actually about the region its ostensibly about, at least at first, but also unlike KR0 its formalist and structuralist swings feel...not half-baked but maybe a bit of an afterthought, or at least not consistent enough in implementation to fully land. The 4ch/proud boys/Q analogue stuff is just restrained enough to avoid being embarrassing and is generally p funny but ultimately feels pretty toothless idk.

All that said, the first few hours absolutely transfixed me, and I got more genuine laughs out of the jokes here than I have from any game I can think of in recent memory, and that Thou end credits track fucking shreds so this still gets a rec from me! Extremely keen to see what Geography of Robots do next, they've definitely Got Something here.

i did not really feel like i was embodying the role of the AI construct the kind of bland narrative and the Y/N, "hey are you paying attention?" interactions with vas (also whats with...all the ellipses...) try to make the player out to be. but i DID feel more like an AI from the minimal ui and the specific control style that turns everything you do into a strict procedure, with split second decisions taking excruciating--in a good way--seconds longer to execute. it actually made me hear a computerized voice in my head that said "harvesting sample", or "sending signal", or "deploying nest weavers", with every action i took.

this methodical mindset the game makes you have, along with marine xenobiology studies you do, is really really nice. unfortunately the fiction part of the interactive fiction is not interesting enough for me to see it through, which is a shame.

with winter having arrived and snow on the ground, i've been stricken with an urge to play a bunch of skyrim... largely to try some mods i've long been curious about, like the fully voiced and uniquely smart and funny khajiit companion, inigo. my character is one with a background in thievery and a curiosity for the arcane, now become a full-on wizard complimented by magic of stealth: silencing illusion spells and conjured bows... having long thought of skyrim as the most restrictive of the elder scrolls especially with regard to magical creativity, i'm discovering there's more to it than i'd known. naturally, this brings about a need to talk about one of my favorite games:

morrowind.

actually, i really want to talk about both. i want to talk about the nature of roleplay in these games, and what it means to inhabit these characters of our own making and imagining. see, there's been plenty of debate as to whether bethesda care any longer about making 'true' rpgs, having in many ways simplified the experience on a granular level, depriving the player more and more of their options and ownership over the experience of playing their games. i do think there's a lot of truth to this, though i feel there's more to be said.

getting to the point... before considering all the differences in the systems—how you build your character and develop their skills, defining their nature through mechanics and so forth—we have to consider the very concept of these characters, the intentions at work before we get involved. i'm setting oblivion aside here because it's a bit of an outlier in that you fill the shoes of an interloper, while the "real hero" of the story (the one who'll be remembered in the history books) is martin. in skyrim, you're meant to be the dragonborn, undeniably enjoying the favor of the gods unless you deliberately avoid the main quest (perhaps even going as far as installing an alternate start mod so you can just be a bandit in the wilderness or a fisherman or whatever). in my current run through the game (more like run around, given how these work) i've decided to embrace this blessing and use it to better the situation in skyrim as much as i can. my traveling companions are a vampire princess (my gay wife) and a recovering skooma fiend. (the latter is entirely a mod creation, while the former is augmented by several mods and they interact with voiced dialogue and radiant ai conversations and everything!) so, getting to morrowind: things are considerably more ambiguous and complicated, here. i'm going to keep it somewhat short because i'd prefer not to ruin the experience for anyone interested in giving the game a try—suffice to say the whole matter of whether you're any kind of chosen one is up for debate, and the range and options you have in the course of defining who your character is are considerably... more. or, well. at least it seems to be that way. it largely is... but it's also just different.

your choices in skyrim are essentially reduced to yes or no: yes, i will explore this destiny as dragonborn. no, i will not. yes, i will go to the college of winterhold and become arch-mage, or no, i'd rather not do that and perhaps instead become a nightingale, master of thieves. of course, you can choose to do all of these things—or to do none of them. and it sometimes does go further than that, such as when faced with the matter of joining the dark brotherhood. (i'm going to spoil some things here, so skip to the next paragraph if you'd rather avoid that.) having taken it upon yourself to murder the terrible, abusive matron of the orphanage in riften at the request of a young boy calling upon the infamous death cult, their leader eventually abducts you and locks you in a cabin with three blindfolded strangers, tells you that one of them has a contract on their head, and forces you into deciding which one to kill. a cruel initiation. (an interesting note is that the clairvoyance spell points toward one of them, though there's no other indication of which would be the correct choice, if any.) you have one alternative: kill your captor, free the others, and set about laying waste to the entire dark brotherhood. this is an actual questline, its availability as a path of action not readily apparent given the gravity of the situation—a bit of thinking on your feet is required to discover this. it's not always easy to stumble into these sort of options given the nature of questing in skyrim, where you're typically pulled along by quest markers... but they are there, and it's always refreshing.

morrowind is another beast entirely. beyond acceptance or denial, the matter of how you proceed is dramatically more self-driven. there are no quest markers. rarely will an npc tell you exactly where to go, and even when they do it's up to you to find your way. and then there's the question of how you'll go about accomplishing whatever task, left entirely up to you. you're not just an adventurer or a mercenary—you're an investigator. you keep a journal describing most of your interactions and observations in the game itself, and it's never a bad idea to keep notes of your own outside of the game. i've seen plenty of others describe dialogue as a bunch of wiki pages or whatever, entirely boring and so forth, but holy shit do i feel the exact opposite. i don't think there's any other game that fills me with such a desire to delve into its world and learn everything i can to understand its nature, its history, its people, and my role among them. reincarnation of a legend or not—and it's up to you to decide, not just via yes or no, but in the text, in your imagination, your headcanon, in the details. my favorite nerevarine is an iconoclastic wanderer who feels empowered by her otherwise bewildering involvement with the blades and, as an outlander to native dunmer 'culture', places the eradication of the enslavement of the khajiit and argonian races high on her list of motivations. becoming a demigod through her own efforts (albeit guided by prophecy) is just the icing on the cake. you could play through (in, around) morrowind a dozen times and find a new path, deepen the path(s) you've previously found interesting or exciting... it's just a game that makes me dream like no other.

also, you can (if you so choose) eventually craft spells that let you jump across the entire island of vvardenfell. or simply fly. you can't levitate at all in these other games! (well... without mods.)

i'm really enjoying my time with skyrim right now, and i think i've found a way to play a role i find fulfilling and comfortable with my own personality... but these games always lead back to morrowind, for me. it won't be long before i feel the pull back to vvardenfell once more.

This is the first time I found myself glad it wasn’t a ghost. This is the first irony of Shadow at the Water’s Edge: considering this might be tit for tat the most explicitly and effectively frightening game Her Interactive has done, and my usual clamor for the supernatural to appear in earnest in these games that, scooby-doo-like, are constantly teetering on the cliff of indulging in it. But for once I was happy for one of these games to give me what I got, which in this case is easily the best writing in the series to date, a quietly unfolding story that first seems to be one of the failures of deep-seated cultural structuration and generational trauma that slowly reveals itself to be, while not NOT that, also one of deep and mundane inability for a small group of people to work through their own shortcomings, both to themselves as individuals and to each other as family. It’s a dark, fresh situation that Nancy walks in on, unusual for this series, where it’s much more common to parallel the modern day mystery with something in the distant past. Here, the supposed ghost that’s ruining the ryokan’s business is the mother/daughter of the main characters of the game; that wound is fresh, and open, and frankly none of Nancy’s business, and picking at it is a genuinely uncomfortable affair. There’s a real sense that Nancy is kind of out of her depth in this game, that she’s stepped in something a little bit over her ability to emotionally handle. No one has hired her, no one asked her to do this, she just kind of stumbles into somebody’s ugly past while she’s on vacation and she kind of brute forces it into the shape of one of her mysteries – seriously this might be the most unintentionally ghoulish Nancy has ever been she’s a fuckin sociopath in this game - but things can’t and don’t really resolve as cleanly or happily or whimsically as they always do for her.

This marks a moment of maturation for these games. In the past, even when we’ve tackled really difficult and sober subject matters, difficult questions tend to go unacknowledged and the themes of the work tend to get swept aside in the name of wrapping everything up in a bow (I think about the Mexican government official arm in arm with the American museum employees at the end of Scarlet Hand despite the situation of the violent robbery and exploitation of Mexico’s cultural artifacts not being even slightly different than it was at the start of the game all the time). Here there are gestures towards healing and Nancy certainly forces some wheels to turn, but nothing like the sunny rejection of any backbone the story might have had.

The second irony, then, is that all of the above is true while this game indulges in a not unexpected but certainly disappointing amount of LOL JAPAN SO WACKY racism of I guess you might, for lack of a better word, call a more “subtle” variety, coupled with overt racism like having three of the four Japanese characters in the game be voiced by white Nancy Drew Series Regulars who are all doing deeply offensive fake Asian accents. It does muddle things a bit, when you’re trying to tell an actually affecting story about how the strict social mores of traditionalist Japanese conservative politics have effectively destroyed three generations of a family, resulted in one actual death, and twenty years later almost a murder, when one of the characters driving the conflict sometimes borders on cruel stereotype. I don’t think it’s QUITE there, and it’s not as bad as some other depictions of other cultures have been, but I think that there is also a lack of care here that points to Her Interactive’s general lack of understanding of the responsibilities of the storyteller, especially in an educational role. Yes, this is a better depiction of Japan and its culture than, say, the outrageous caricatures of Ireland and its people in Castle Malloy, but the United States have done incalculable material harm to the Japanese people over the last 80 years and I think that in the context of a game like this with the kind of interests these games have, the bar for how they depict some cultures is higher than others, and if you ask me this game doesn’t QUITE clear it even as it’s not nearly AS fucked as others have been in the past.

That said it IS pretty funny that “taking the subway” is by far the most difficult puzzle in the game. That’s a solid goof, you got me there.

NANCY DREW CUCK WATCH: It’s been a minute but since she can’t namedrop him to ward off all the GAY TEENS at boarding school I do think it’s worth noting that Nancy just DOES NOT EVEN MENTION Ned he doesn’t even COME UP idk dude if I was going on a vacation of indeterminate length with my best buds I would maybe invite my boyfriend who is the fourth member of our friendgroup and is also best friends with my other two friends. Seems suspicious lol.

PREVIOUSLY: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER
NEXT TIME: THE CAPTIVE CURSE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

something about playing this game on virtual console non-stop for 24 hours straight during the summer of 2009 as a sixteen year-old taught me a valuable life lesson.

i learned how to scam the exhaustion system in the game. if you work late enough in the day, time will eventually stop in the early morning (i believe 5am to be exact).

once you reach this point, the only limiting factor you have is your stamina, which can be continually increased by visiting the hot springs in the mountains outside your farm or eating specific foods. by doing this repeatedly, you can lock into this cycle: tend to your farm until your virtual self collapses, go to the hot springs and wade around for a few seconds, and then repeat this cycle until you complete everything you need to.

i did this for two in-game years, until i had what i considered to be the ultimate farm. however, my farm required too much upkeep every day to keep everything happy. i had so much money that it became meaningless. i had spent so much time each day farming that i had NEVER ONCE EVEN TALKED TO ONE OF THE BACHELORETTES.

i couldn't garner the affection of one of the girls in a measly six months. it had to be earned over time. i would be alone in a decaying farm when my father showed up to evaluate me six in-game months later. i supposedly had everything that i thought i had wanted, only to see it crumble before me. i cried and turned off the console. in this moment i realized that capitalism makes fools of us all.

five stars.