tgrfawcett
2023
Redfall at this point is an anomaly. Critical and public reception has been abysmal marking it as the first big miss for Arkane. Failure seems to bring out the worst folks and has drawn away from more important conversations to be had. Redfall is not the game I wanted it to be. It is not the game that the downbeat zeitgeist has made it out to be. It is a mess, but at the end of a twenty-hour playtime it was a mostly good time leaving one question, am I so out of touch?
It isn’t that hard to make excuses when you can see the stumbling blocks a mile away. No studio can change their engine or design, let alone both, without facing hurdles. Add to that some early mandates for a game as a service, a pandemic, staff attrition, and an acquisition and you just get the sense that Redfall was built on an insecure foundation.
There are plenty who will say that there is nothing here. A rotten package at the core. An exaggeration at best and certainly a byproduct of the greater fervor surrounding the game. The core is respectable enough. It is simply that there are asterisks attached to a lot of the compliments you might be able to give the game. Take for instance combat. It feels good and there is enough variety in the characters to have something good here, but the enemy design and placement is so poor that there is hardly ever a real engaging combat loop. To make things worse, any trademark complex level design of Arkane is gone too. Most buildings are empty—one way in or out. It is a game of simple environments and simple enemies to shoot at.
The real shame is a small town during the fall harvest caught up in spooky shenanigans is the setting of most great Halloween stories, but the town must have people in it to feel real and Redfall is barren. there are no people to connect with out in the open world. There just isn’t any real connection between the player and Redfall. NPC interaction is limited to the safe houses and itself is limited. Where most games rely on game loops or engaging characters Redfall can’t even provide proper cutscenes. After an initial animated cutscene and a proper in-game cinematic setting up the scenario the entire rest of the game is poorly color graded still images with vague narration. This is not effective storytelling. Arkane is capable of great diegetic and cinematic storytelling. Redfall has glimmers of an interesting story within the game world hinting at something more than the still image slog ever does. You have to really dig for that, and it is just so disheartening.
Playing through the game it felt as though some adjustments to the enemy design—placement, AI, variety, and consistent difficulty—would do wonders in setting the game right. Is it ever going to be a masterpiece with just some general improvements? No, but that doesn’t mean people should hold this over Arkane and the industry at-large for the rest of time. There are some real issues here. Some not so easily fixed. You can’t just make cutscenes for an entire game for free. You can’t just populate the world with neat things to find. You can’t just make the characters feel more present with a few weeks of dev time from a reduced team. Hell, even if the team does tweak its enemy design that won’t fix the games greater structural weaknesses. It is no exaggeration to say that Redfall has one of the worst final boss encounters in a game. Honest, the final boss is just holding X at three points, and you win. There is no fighting if you are quick enough. Twenty hours later and the bottom falls out and you just have to hold X.
Still, even after everything I can’t say Redfall is wholly a failure. Sure, the game is a mess, but it is an enjoyable mess. There is a good time here and I honestly wouldn’t mind playing more of it, even if they don’t fix it. It would be a wonderful Halloween game, but what will really captivate anyone back to this by October?
Arkane is just stuck at a crossroads. Either they pump more money in for a course correction and after a few years the game has its cult audience that never really justifies the cost but maybe makes folks more kind to Arkane for doing right by the final product or it is dropped and left to haunt the memories of the people who hold onto this stuff as ammunition in any gamer debate for years to come. A dire fate for any game.
I don’t think Arkane wanted to release Redfall like this. There clearly is a story here that echoes the halls of famous “game development is hard” stories because game development is hard. It remains a miracle that any game ever ships and sometimes a developer just ships a bad game.
It isn’t that hard to make excuses when you can see the stumbling blocks a mile away. No studio can change their engine or design, let alone both, without facing hurdles. Add to that some early mandates for a game as a service, a pandemic, staff attrition, and an acquisition and you just get the sense that Redfall was built on an insecure foundation.
There are plenty who will say that there is nothing here. A rotten package at the core. An exaggeration at best and certainly a byproduct of the greater fervor surrounding the game. The core is respectable enough. It is simply that there are asterisks attached to a lot of the compliments you might be able to give the game. Take for instance combat. It feels good and there is enough variety in the characters to have something good here, but the enemy design and placement is so poor that there is hardly ever a real engaging combat loop. To make things worse, any trademark complex level design of Arkane is gone too. Most buildings are empty—one way in or out. It is a game of simple environments and simple enemies to shoot at.
The real shame is a small town during the fall harvest caught up in spooky shenanigans is the setting of most great Halloween stories, but the town must have people in it to feel real and Redfall is barren. there are no people to connect with out in the open world. There just isn’t any real connection between the player and Redfall. NPC interaction is limited to the safe houses and itself is limited. Where most games rely on game loops or engaging characters Redfall can’t even provide proper cutscenes. After an initial animated cutscene and a proper in-game cinematic setting up the scenario the entire rest of the game is poorly color graded still images with vague narration. This is not effective storytelling. Arkane is capable of great diegetic and cinematic storytelling. Redfall has glimmers of an interesting story within the game world hinting at something more than the still image slog ever does. You have to really dig for that, and it is just so disheartening.
Playing through the game it felt as though some adjustments to the enemy design—placement, AI, variety, and consistent difficulty—would do wonders in setting the game right. Is it ever going to be a masterpiece with just some general improvements? No, but that doesn’t mean people should hold this over Arkane and the industry at-large for the rest of time. There are some real issues here. Some not so easily fixed. You can’t just make cutscenes for an entire game for free. You can’t just populate the world with neat things to find. You can’t just make the characters feel more present with a few weeks of dev time from a reduced team. Hell, even if the team does tweak its enemy design that won’t fix the games greater structural weaknesses. It is no exaggeration to say that Redfall has one of the worst final boss encounters in a game. Honest, the final boss is just holding X at three points, and you win. There is no fighting if you are quick enough. Twenty hours later and the bottom falls out and you just have to hold X.
Still, even after everything I can’t say Redfall is wholly a failure. Sure, the game is a mess, but it is an enjoyable mess. There is a good time here and I honestly wouldn’t mind playing more of it, even if they don’t fix it. It would be a wonderful Halloween game, but what will really captivate anyone back to this by October?
Arkane is just stuck at a crossroads. Either they pump more money in for a course correction and after a few years the game has its cult audience that never really justifies the cost but maybe makes folks more kind to Arkane for doing right by the final product or it is dropped and left to haunt the memories of the people who hold onto this stuff as ammunition in any gamer debate for years to come. A dire fate for any game.
I don’t think Arkane wanted to release Redfall like this. There clearly is a story here that echoes the halls of famous “game development is hard” stories because game development is hard. It remains a miracle that any game ever ships and sometimes a developer just ships a bad game.
2023
This is going to be a brief one. After years of hearing about Resident Evil 4 as a genre defining title—not simply for survival horror but all third person shooters—expectations were set high for the remake, and it did not disappoint. What more can I really add to twenty years of praise? It echoes all the things that have been great about recent Resi games and brings the camp and charm in full.
There is just something inherently satisfying about the gameplay loop of Resident Evil that fulfills the tension of a horror game while fueling a power fantasy that any monster can be overcome. The level design mixes tight corridors with semi-open spaces that you can really learn every corner of. Your power growth isn’t just weapon enhancements, but the knowledge you are gathering of the world and the gameplay elements. Each puzzle another opportunity to feel smart. Each fight another opportunity to prove mastery. It is just a really smart game design.
Capcom has perfected the pairing of narrative camp and charm with the grim tone of the world that just offers a really accomplished product overall. The characters can be goofy caricatures (one-liners and all) in this dire scenario because at no point does the sincerity of the presentation wear thin.
Resident Evil 4—like near every other Resi game I have played—is one of the strongest titles in the genre. Even when this series wavers, the games are always able to hold onto their charm to compensate. Resident Evil 4 is no misstep though, it brings a genre definer to a modern audience who can still embrace it as an all-timer.
There is just something inherently satisfying about the gameplay loop of Resident Evil that fulfills the tension of a horror game while fueling a power fantasy that any monster can be overcome. The level design mixes tight corridors with semi-open spaces that you can really learn every corner of. Your power growth isn’t just weapon enhancements, but the knowledge you are gathering of the world and the gameplay elements. Each puzzle another opportunity to feel smart. Each fight another opportunity to prove mastery. It is just a really smart game design.
Capcom has perfected the pairing of narrative camp and charm with the grim tone of the world that just offers a really accomplished product overall. The characters can be goofy caricatures (one-liners and all) in this dire scenario because at no point does the sincerity of the presentation wear thin.
Resident Evil 4—like near every other Resi game I have played—is one of the strongest titles in the genre. Even when this series wavers, the games are always able to hold onto their charm to compensate. Resident Evil 4 is no misstep though, it brings a genre definer to a modern audience who can still embrace it as an all-timer.
This review contains spoilers
There is a lot to like about Spider-Man 2. It is wonderful to play, looks visually stunning, and carries on with wonderfully realized versions of Spider-Man and company. Still, there is also something missing at the core of Spider-Man 2 that weakens it on the whole. It is a game bursting with ambition, but without the space to let that ambition hit new heights.
From the top-down Spider-Man 2’s narrative is juggling three major narratives. First is Harry and Peter’s friendship, second is Kraven’s last hunt, and third is the symbiote. While they all do come together none are given the time they deserve. That lack of time tears away at the core of what made Insomniac’s previous Spider-Man games work so well—their sincerity.
Peter and Miles are at this inflection point struggling with their personal troubles while also being Spider-Man. Peter’s arc is focused on his own personal fulfillment. He is struggling to make the mortgage, to keep a job, to find that purpose outside of being Spider-Man. Yet, he is never really on the ground long enough to face those struggles. Instead, they seem to resolve unnaturally around him by the credits. Big ideas like the Emily-May Foundation are wonderful in concept, but in practice they are fully formed off screen. By the time Peter comes to interact with them there isn’t really anything for him to really do. His arc, about setting aside his heroics, doesn’t land because we don’t see the weight of his personal life on him.
Miles gets more of a chance to see his arc through as it is all about his grief and hatred of Mister Negative which ties directly into play time as Spider-Man. His personal struggles are directly about his life as a hero. It works much better and makes Miles a much more compelling character in a game where he is still “in training”. His supporting cast and ties to the city work better because they seem more earnest. Peter is caught up in the messy main story while Miles is allowed to be a real person in the side content. The problem comes in that it is all still off to the side. Miles is supposed to be the Spider-Man by the end of the game, but the runway to that moment is brief at best.
There are so many strong points to Insomniac’s approach, but at the heart of its Spider-Man 2 doesn’t give its characters the airtime they need. Kraven is a fantastic villain, but the dangers he poses aren’t delivered well. He kills Scorpion early on and then at some unspecified other point kills Shocker, Vulture, and Electro off-screen. By the time the story has started to elaborate on his purpose he is already shuffled off to the side in favor of the symbiote. And well, the symbiote stuff is not good. It transforms Peter (and later Harry) into these insufferable people who hurt those they love without a second thought. It is so out of character for Peter especially because there is no natural friction between him and his loved ones otherwise. He is so kind and affable that the black suit’s bitterness feels completely inorganic to who he has shown us to be in this title.
In 2018’s Spider-Man Peter has a moment where he wants to be selfish, he wants to save Aunt May and forsake the city. But he can’t. That’s who Peter Parker is. He is a man struggling between his personal responsibilities and his heroics. Spider-Man 2 seems to want to forget that those personal struggles need to be made manifest throughout the story for that selfishness to mean anything. The heroic struggle should mean something to the personal one. It does for Miles, but for Peter by the time the black suit is off it is all water under the bridge. Now it’s time to fight black ooze monsters. It is dramatic and grand in scope, but it feels so off the rails that it is difficult to meaningfully connect back to these characters as people.
At the end of this title Peter is in his garage starting the Emily-May foundation over again. (Norman must have pulled funding on the multi-billion-dollar facility.) There is an FNSM alert, and he hesitates, but Miles steps in to save the day. He lets Peter be Peter for once. It is a nice moment, but far from earned and undercut by moments later being dropped back into the world as Peter in his suit ready to swing off into the city. Spider-Man 2 hints at the personal struggle, but it is secondary this time around to the bombast of being Spider-Man.
Don’t mistake this as a fully negative teardown. Spider-Man 2 does a lot right. Spider-Man 2 does well to highlight a wide variety of peoples and centers a message about service throughout. Hailey Cooper’s FNSM mission in particular is a great start towards making strides in highlighting the deaf community through gameplay in the AAA space. Acts of service–like those from the FNSM app and beyond–feel important. Spider-Man 2 (and its predecessors) do well to highlight that helping one person helps everyone. Further, the time given to highlighting the cultural legacy of Black musicians from Harlem is wonderful. It fleshes out history, this world, and gives Miles a deeper emotional core.
The story does a lot well too. Harry and Peter’s relationship starts strong. The scenes of them and Mary Jane at the carnival are wonderful. It is a moment that allows you to see how good of friends these three used to be. Peter’s later rejection of the black suit and his efforts to save Harry from it are genuine because of these early scenes. The efforts to save Kurt Connors are also nice because they reflect Miles’ ability to see the best in people as he does with Mysterio and later Martin Lee. The fundamental idea of the Emily-May foundation is great. It allows Peter to be the scientist and I hope to see it really grounded as something he built in the next game.
These are still great renditions of these characters. Peter, Miles, Mary Jane, Rio, Ganke, and so on feel right. They echo the best versions of these characters. More than anything they also earnestly push for positivity. Each of these characters expresses some doubts throughout the story, but at the end of the day they still push for a positive outlook. They think about others and try to lift others up. It can be easy to forget that those kinds of things are still virtues that need to be on display whenever possible.
Gameplay additions are also great. Fighting is quick and weighty with new abilities that make it more fluid than previously. The wingsuit adds a speedy traversal option on top of the already excellent swinging mechanics. Plus, the city is stunning and full of life. It is a better realization of New York than I have seen anywhere else. You could spend a lot of time in this New York and as long as the characters are strong the game will be as well.
No, Spider-Man 2 is not a bad game. It is far from it. It is an ambitious title that seeks to share this version of Spidey canon. It just doesn’t do what it can with a weaker narrative that amounts to a weaker experience than Insomniac’s previous goes with these characters. Spider-Man 2 won’t stay with me like 2018 or Miles Morales. It also is hard for me to see where they take characters like Venom, Peter, Harry, or Norman after this. There is a lot to like about Spider-Man 2, but with great ambition comes great risk. Spider-Man 2 doesn’t hit the homerun it is aiming for, but it doesn’t miss completely either.
From the top-down Spider-Man 2’s narrative is juggling three major narratives. First is Harry and Peter’s friendship, second is Kraven’s last hunt, and third is the symbiote. While they all do come together none are given the time they deserve. That lack of time tears away at the core of what made Insomniac’s previous Spider-Man games work so well—their sincerity.
Peter and Miles are at this inflection point struggling with their personal troubles while also being Spider-Man. Peter’s arc is focused on his own personal fulfillment. He is struggling to make the mortgage, to keep a job, to find that purpose outside of being Spider-Man. Yet, he is never really on the ground long enough to face those struggles. Instead, they seem to resolve unnaturally around him by the credits. Big ideas like the Emily-May Foundation are wonderful in concept, but in practice they are fully formed off screen. By the time Peter comes to interact with them there isn’t really anything for him to really do. His arc, about setting aside his heroics, doesn’t land because we don’t see the weight of his personal life on him.
Miles gets more of a chance to see his arc through as it is all about his grief and hatred of Mister Negative which ties directly into play time as Spider-Man. His personal struggles are directly about his life as a hero. It works much better and makes Miles a much more compelling character in a game where he is still “in training”. His supporting cast and ties to the city work better because they seem more earnest. Peter is caught up in the messy main story while Miles is allowed to be a real person in the side content. The problem comes in that it is all still off to the side. Miles is supposed to be the Spider-Man by the end of the game, but the runway to that moment is brief at best.
There are so many strong points to Insomniac’s approach, but at the heart of its Spider-Man 2 doesn’t give its characters the airtime they need. Kraven is a fantastic villain, but the dangers he poses aren’t delivered well. He kills Scorpion early on and then at some unspecified other point kills Shocker, Vulture, and Electro off-screen. By the time the story has started to elaborate on his purpose he is already shuffled off to the side in favor of the symbiote. And well, the symbiote stuff is not good. It transforms Peter (and later Harry) into these insufferable people who hurt those they love without a second thought. It is so out of character for Peter especially because there is no natural friction between him and his loved ones otherwise. He is so kind and affable that the black suit’s bitterness feels completely inorganic to who he has shown us to be in this title.
In 2018’s Spider-Man Peter has a moment where he wants to be selfish, he wants to save Aunt May and forsake the city. But he can’t. That’s who Peter Parker is. He is a man struggling between his personal responsibilities and his heroics. Spider-Man 2 seems to want to forget that those personal struggles need to be made manifest throughout the story for that selfishness to mean anything. The heroic struggle should mean something to the personal one. It does for Miles, but for Peter by the time the black suit is off it is all water under the bridge. Now it’s time to fight black ooze monsters. It is dramatic and grand in scope, but it feels so off the rails that it is difficult to meaningfully connect back to these characters as people.
At the end of this title Peter is in his garage starting the Emily-May foundation over again. (Norman must have pulled funding on the multi-billion-dollar facility.) There is an FNSM alert, and he hesitates, but Miles steps in to save the day. He lets Peter be Peter for once. It is a nice moment, but far from earned and undercut by moments later being dropped back into the world as Peter in his suit ready to swing off into the city. Spider-Man 2 hints at the personal struggle, but it is secondary this time around to the bombast of being Spider-Man.
Don’t mistake this as a fully negative teardown. Spider-Man 2 does a lot right. Spider-Man 2 does well to highlight a wide variety of peoples and centers a message about service throughout. Hailey Cooper’s FNSM mission in particular is a great start towards making strides in highlighting the deaf community through gameplay in the AAA space. Acts of service–like those from the FNSM app and beyond–feel important. Spider-Man 2 (and its predecessors) do well to highlight that helping one person helps everyone. Further, the time given to highlighting the cultural legacy of Black musicians from Harlem is wonderful. It fleshes out history, this world, and gives Miles a deeper emotional core.
The story does a lot well too. Harry and Peter’s relationship starts strong. The scenes of them and Mary Jane at the carnival are wonderful. It is a moment that allows you to see how good of friends these three used to be. Peter’s later rejection of the black suit and his efforts to save Harry from it are genuine because of these early scenes. The efforts to save Kurt Connors are also nice because they reflect Miles’ ability to see the best in people as he does with Mysterio and later Martin Lee. The fundamental idea of the Emily-May foundation is great. It allows Peter to be the scientist and I hope to see it really grounded as something he built in the next game.
These are still great renditions of these characters. Peter, Miles, Mary Jane, Rio, Ganke, and so on feel right. They echo the best versions of these characters. More than anything they also earnestly push for positivity. Each of these characters expresses some doubts throughout the story, but at the end of the day they still push for a positive outlook. They think about others and try to lift others up. It can be easy to forget that those kinds of things are still virtues that need to be on display whenever possible.
Gameplay additions are also great. Fighting is quick and weighty with new abilities that make it more fluid than previously. The wingsuit adds a speedy traversal option on top of the already excellent swinging mechanics. Plus, the city is stunning and full of life. It is a better realization of New York than I have seen anywhere else. You could spend a lot of time in this New York and as long as the characters are strong the game will be as well.
No, Spider-Man 2 is not a bad game. It is far from it. It is an ambitious title that seeks to share this version of Spidey canon. It just doesn’t do what it can with a weaker narrative that amounts to a weaker experience than Insomniac’s previous goes with these characters. Spider-Man 2 won’t stay with me like 2018 or Miles Morales. It also is hard for me to see where they take characters like Venom, Peter, Harry, or Norman after this. There is a lot to like about Spider-Man 2, but with great ambition comes great risk. Spider-Man 2 doesn’t hit the homerun it is aiming for, but it doesn’t miss completely either.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Starfield is the first game in a very long time that has just wholly enraptured me. It is a game defined by contradictions. Full of dated design language that undermines its ambition it still somehow lives up to the promise of a grand space adventure unlike any other.
Bethesda just build these simulated worlds that feel so comfortable. There is still something homely to them even as they push past the uncanny and the systems break down. Starfield is no exception to this. Each location has its own charm and spirit that brings it to life. The city of Neon is drenched in smoke and neon light with twisting steel halls to get lost in. The towering skyscrapers of New Atlantis are surrounded by pristine streets of a supposed utopia that cover up the paupers’ quarters in the maintenance halls below. These curated places are great, although not without issue. They don’t fully commit to their individual premise and are few and far between (literally and figuratively). Don’t mistake it among the seventeen hundred planets there are bound to be a few that capture your imagination with creatures and terrain that are truly alien. But space is vast and empty and there is a lot of nothing too.
Visually, Starfield is stunning. Bethesda embraces a distinct visual identity tying into NASA’s golden age of space exploration through the 1960s and 70s. It has been called sterile by some, but the amount of detail you can find in some of the environments makes them feel well lived in. The Nove Galactic spaceship habs, in particular, evoke the sense of early space travel and are full of life. Each world, each place you go, can bring that sense of beauty and discovery as you find worlds with stunning vistas and brilliant night skies. These areas are further bolstered by a soundtrack brimming with majestic and melancholic music that makes this universe feel incredible. The soundtrack can make even the simplest of environments feel closer. It can make even the simplest of moments more powerful.
Before getting into the narrative it is also worth talking about the gameplay. In short, it is really quite fun to play. Loading screens aside, it is probably the cleanest playing of Bethesda’s games. Everything just fits together well and it was technically stable throughout my 160 hour playtime. Combat, gunplay and later on the starborn powers, feels great with more weapon variation than expected. Although enemy variety is lacking, that weapon variety with punchy shotguns, zippy rifles, and more can alter how you fight or approach encounters. The powers are nifty and really do shake up some combat encounters for the better. And while the first-person perspective is preferable in combat, the third-person perspective became my default for everything else. It gave a great sense of space and enhanced exploration planet side or otherwise. Whether it’s a high gravity planet or a low gravity moon or a place with no gravity at all the worlds here just feel right to move around in. In space, the starship combat is finnicky, but it works well enough. The real highlight of starships was building them. Starship building consumed countless hours throughout the game as I built out a ship that felt cozy and practical. It wasn’t the most stylish, but it was my home in the starfield.
–Quests and Narrative—
There is a lot to say on the stories told in Starfield, both good, bad, and in between. Exploring is so quest driven that you really have to hand yourself over to the world fully. But, with so much of the history spread thin across the stars it asks a lot of the player. The narrative is at times threadbare, it gives you these breadcrumbs that don’t always amount to a grand conclusion. Some stories just come to an end, while others end with true narrative bombast.
Further, quest design in Starfield is hardly revolutionary. Most of the missions in Starfield follow a pretty safe structure or fully commit to Bethesda’s ambient quest design. But there are several that aim to be grander and stick in your mind through the rest of your adventure.
The main mission is slow to start with an opening set-up that isn’t great. It forces you, just starting your career as a miner, to join Constellation, a group searching the galaxy for “answers,” for no good reason at all. Justification for your mission is weak–as is your individual purpose–through the early stretch of your time with Constellation. The artifacts are puzzling and feel like a piece of a puzzle greater than what the game eventually offers you. Even so, for the first two acts of the game there is a building tension, building mystery, that fully kicks off in act 3 with the death of a companion. It ups the stakes and sets up a far more intriguing final stretch of the game where you start to get some answers and get some of the most interesting missions in the game.
The final goal, The Unity, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The promise of the multiverse, of knowledge beyond what you can imagine, seemed a high price to pay to say goodbye to everyone and everything you knew in “your” universe. At the end, the best decision is to simply walk away. In the unending pursuit of knowledge there still comes a time where you know enough and are satisfied with what you have done. The multiverse is out there, but that adventure is for another day. While the new game + multiverse shenanigans are quirky and fun they are a gimmick nonetheless.
The companion quests vary. Sarah Morgan’s feels like a real standout with high emotional stakes and a great payoff that sees you add a new member to Constellation. Andreja’s is messier but features an emotional ending (that doesn’t mean much for now at least) that sees her exiled from her home. Andreja’s romance plot is more earnest and heartfelt with her warming up and letting you in to her life and know her greatest secrets. Barrett’s quest sees most of the major action happen off-screen with you jumping in to help Barrett process his grief and clear his husbands name twenty years after his death. Sam Coe’s mission is a revealing story that shows that this space cowboy was once a criminal who almost threw his life away to crime and addiction until his wife and daughter gave him renewed purpose.
The four main companions are great characters, but there remains a good dozen or more other named companions who have little to no characterization. Hadrian Sanon feels like she should be a significant companion, but when she does finally join you, she has nothing more to say. And while I really need someone like the Adoring Fan in my life the majority of these companions are pack mules and nothing more.
The Ryujin Industries questline is notably the weakest of the four faction questlines. It isn’t five minutes after filling out a job application that you are being instructed by the board of directors to do corporate espionage to help the mega-conglomerate defeat their rivals. It is a mighty ask and not one I was particularly eager to engage in. Any resistance to their methods or goals is met with a shrug. If you help Ryujin you are a corpo stooge with little room to be anything else. But hey, at least you can prevent them from developing mind-control.
The Freestar Rangers questline has its flaws, but to serve frontier justice on a group of thinly veiled “lost cause” mercenaries and their CEO financier is fine with me. The overall plot is a bit disjointed, feeling like a truncated mystery that never really commits to letting you be an investigator. What begins as a call to help a farmer spirals into a strange cacophony of fascist mercenaries taking any job that pays and a rich asshole who doesn’t care what he has to do to stay rich. Ron Hope is space Henry Ford acting publicly as an advocate for his employees while secretly killing farmers to extract the resources from their land for himself. It definitely could say more with what it has going on, but it’s short and simple which is hardly a crime in and of itself.
The Crimson Fleet questline is perhaps the brightest star among the four factions. As a double agent for the UC SysDef there is a moral dilemma created early that runs through the whole story. Be the lawless pirate, but also don’t cause too much damage. Work closely with the pirate fleet, but be ready to betray them. Indeed, the missions offer plenty of support for this dynamic with the star liner heist a particular bright spot. The depth offered in most of these missions just makes them more compelling to play. The hunt for Kryx’s Legacy is a fun one, and the benefits of being a member of the Fleet make it a difficult choice to finally take them out. A choice that carried an odd feeling of guilt given that the Fleet are not great people.
The UC Vangaurd is similarly interesting for its excellent narrative and set pieces. You enlist to help the UC with supply runs and quickly get thrown into a conflict concerning the rapid spread of the Terrormorph’s–big scary monsters who invade the minds of their prey. Which, by the by, are the best enemies in the game by far. The voices in your head as you fight them are brilliant and the game needs more of that creativity. That aside, the UC Vangaurd questline seems to be a great onboarding into what the history of Starfield is about. There is so much here that details the past conflicts, war crimes, and destruction that has taken place in the not-too-distant past. These civilizations are built on the back of broken systems, but they are just trying to make it work. The UC Vanguard just lets you be a part of figuring out how people at the highest levels of that system start to move on.
Other notable side quests include a Running Man style bar, a ship with fluctuating gravity, a planet being attacked by Spacers forcing the UC and Freestar to unite briefly against them, and a quest where you get to design an impractical ship for your rich friend. There is some fun with all of them but there are three that really stand out.
First, The Mantis mission which asks you to seek out the Mantis cave and discover what became of Space-Batman. Good environmental design sets up the hideaway of a reclusive hero. The Mantis cave is a great combat gauntlet with some tragic environmental storytelling and some great rewards. I used the Mantis ship for the entire game and enjoyed hearing attackers flee in terror as the mere name of The Mantis struck fear into the hearts and minds of Spacers everywhere.
Next up is the mission to make contact with the ECS Constant. It is a ship full of people who fled earth in an old ship without a grav drive. Having traveled for multiple generations their hopes of colonizing a planet are dashed by the fact that they were beaten by a luxury resort. The resort executives want you to either make the passengers of the ECS Constant slaves, murder all of them, or force them to find a new planet. As you are expressly forbidden from murdering the executives, helping the Constant becomes a task in making the best of a bad situation. I like the ECS Constant and its story, but it does fall a little short of people suddenly learning that the human race surpassed them and conquered the galaxy 200 years ago.
Finally, Operation Starseed introduces the most baffling scenario in the game with a small settlement of clones. Franklin Delano Roosevelt invites you to hear of the conflict between himself, Genghis Kahn, and Queen Amanirenas. Meanwhile Amelia Earhart and Ada Lovelace are just trying to navigate the conflict while Wyatt Earp is trying to hide that he is actually H.H. Holmes. Wild stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a clear explanation of “Why?” But, I’d be lying if ‘Vault Tec’ didn’t come to mind. It is a bit shallow given the concept’s potential, but it is still a good questline that lets you travel the stars with Amelia Earhart afterwards.
–The Big Picture–
There is something to appreciate about the main theme of Starfield–the pursuit of knowledge and adventure. It ties in nicely with the game design of a Bethesda RPG. But as noted, that theme is ambitious and requires a driving force behind it. The driving force in most Bethesda titles can be vacuous. Starfield, without their established IP to springboard off of, should have done more to enhance their writing team. It is the single largest complaint I have about Starfield. The final product simply falls short of some great conceptual work.
What is here is a fantastic foundation, but maybe not more than that. Decent character writing (with good performances behind them) helps for the most part. Andreja and Sam Coe are standouts among the rather small main cast. Beyond that, the scenario writing could always be sharpened. Bethesda makes interesting worlds, but they need to dig deeper into the philosophies that guide their world design. As it is, Starfield leaves quite a lot of room for your own interpretations and your own stories of how this world fits together. Something that can be a weakness or a strength depending on the person.
Exploring what had become of humanity since the destruction of Earth was a rewarding experience. Driven to the brink of extinction they scattered across the stars evoking images of the frontier once again. They established cities and waged wars and kept on. You get to step into a world that continues to fight and struggles to push forward. While it doesn’t do as much as it could with its setting it does enough, for me at least.
Starfield’s greatest weakness for most seems to be centered on scale and how small Starfield can feel. In the vastness of space there being just four major cities, four faction questlines, four main companions, and so on make the game seem so much smaller than its galaxy is. Over 100 star systems and only eight or so really matter to the bulk of the stories told here. The lack of intelligent aliens is a big disappointment. But given the game doesn’t even fully delve into the various organizations and peoples in the game various alien species may have been a lot of work that Bethesda didn’t have time for.
Starfield’s procedural scope is so vast that the curated stuff seems paltry in comparison. This is not a game that needs a sequel that goes bigger. Rather it would be best served by diving deeper into what is already there. Plus, maybe they can use the multiversal shenanigans to bring in intelligent aliens and deepen the mysteries of the universe.
Starfield has made a lot of folks challenge what Bethesda magic is for them. If it’s exploration or deep role-playing mechanics Starfield is going to be a letdown in a few regards. But if that magic is just a world to lose yourself in, Starfield is it. Constantly I found myself in a new corner of space finding a story to engross myself in. Whether those stories were head cannon or hand crafted there was always something beckoning me onwards. Is it lacking at times? Yeah, it is. Still, at its core Starfield feels sincere in what it has set out to be. I am attached to the galaxy Bethesda has built. In the years to come I am hopeful Bethesda will develop what’s here into a deeper and more complex setting. In the meantime, I am happy to get lost in the starfield.
Bethesda just build these simulated worlds that feel so comfortable. There is still something homely to them even as they push past the uncanny and the systems break down. Starfield is no exception to this. Each location has its own charm and spirit that brings it to life. The city of Neon is drenched in smoke and neon light with twisting steel halls to get lost in. The towering skyscrapers of New Atlantis are surrounded by pristine streets of a supposed utopia that cover up the paupers’ quarters in the maintenance halls below. These curated places are great, although not without issue. They don’t fully commit to their individual premise and are few and far between (literally and figuratively). Don’t mistake it among the seventeen hundred planets there are bound to be a few that capture your imagination with creatures and terrain that are truly alien. But space is vast and empty and there is a lot of nothing too.
Visually, Starfield is stunning. Bethesda embraces a distinct visual identity tying into NASA’s golden age of space exploration through the 1960s and 70s. It has been called sterile by some, but the amount of detail you can find in some of the environments makes them feel well lived in. The Nove Galactic spaceship habs, in particular, evoke the sense of early space travel and are full of life. Each world, each place you go, can bring that sense of beauty and discovery as you find worlds with stunning vistas and brilliant night skies. These areas are further bolstered by a soundtrack brimming with majestic and melancholic music that makes this universe feel incredible. The soundtrack can make even the simplest of environments feel closer. It can make even the simplest of moments more powerful.
Before getting into the narrative it is also worth talking about the gameplay. In short, it is really quite fun to play. Loading screens aside, it is probably the cleanest playing of Bethesda’s games. Everything just fits together well and it was technically stable throughout my 160 hour playtime. Combat, gunplay and later on the starborn powers, feels great with more weapon variation than expected. Although enemy variety is lacking, that weapon variety with punchy shotguns, zippy rifles, and more can alter how you fight or approach encounters. The powers are nifty and really do shake up some combat encounters for the better. And while the first-person perspective is preferable in combat, the third-person perspective became my default for everything else. It gave a great sense of space and enhanced exploration planet side or otherwise. Whether it’s a high gravity planet or a low gravity moon or a place with no gravity at all the worlds here just feel right to move around in. In space, the starship combat is finnicky, but it works well enough. The real highlight of starships was building them. Starship building consumed countless hours throughout the game as I built out a ship that felt cozy and practical. It wasn’t the most stylish, but it was my home in the starfield.
–Quests and Narrative—
There is a lot to say on the stories told in Starfield, both good, bad, and in between. Exploring is so quest driven that you really have to hand yourself over to the world fully. But, with so much of the history spread thin across the stars it asks a lot of the player. The narrative is at times threadbare, it gives you these breadcrumbs that don’t always amount to a grand conclusion. Some stories just come to an end, while others end with true narrative bombast.
Further, quest design in Starfield is hardly revolutionary. Most of the missions in Starfield follow a pretty safe structure or fully commit to Bethesda’s ambient quest design. But there are several that aim to be grander and stick in your mind through the rest of your adventure.
The main mission is slow to start with an opening set-up that isn’t great. It forces you, just starting your career as a miner, to join Constellation, a group searching the galaxy for “answers,” for no good reason at all. Justification for your mission is weak–as is your individual purpose–through the early stretch of your time with Constellation. The artifacts are puzzling and feel like a piece of a puzzle greater than what the game eventually offers you. Even so, for the first two acts of the game there is a building tension, building mystery, that fully kicks off in act 3 with the death of a companion. It ups the stakes and sets up a far more intriguing final stretch of the game where you start to get some answers and get some of the most interesting missions in the game.
The final goal, The Unity, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The promise of the multiverse, of knowledge beyond what you can imagine, seemed a high price to pay to say goodbye to everyone and everything you knew in “your” universe. At the end, the best decision is to simply walk away. In the unending pursuit of knowledge there still comes a time where you know enough and are satisfied with what you have done. The multiverse is out there, but that adventure is for another day. While the new game + multiverse shenanigans are quirky and fun they are a gimmick nonetheless.
The companion quests vary. Sarah Morgan’s feels like a real standout with high emotional stakes and a great payoff that sees you add a new member to Constellation. Andreja’s is messier but features an emotional ending (that doesn’t mean much for now at least) that sees her exiled from her home. Andreja’s romance plot is more earnest and heartfelt with her warming up and letting you in to her life and know her greatest secrets. Barrett’s quest sees most of the major action happen off-screen with you jumping in to help Barrett process his grief and clear his husbands name twenty years after his death. Sam Coe’s mission is a revealing story that shows that this space cowboy was once a criminal who almost threw his life away to crime and addiction until his wife and daughter gave him renewed purpose.
The four main companions are great characters, but there remains a good dozen or more other named companions who have little to no characterization. Hadrian Sanon feels like she should be a significant companion, but when she does finally join you, she has nothing more to say. And while I really need someone like the Adoring Fan in my life the majority of these companions are pack mules and nothing more.
The Ryujin Industries questline is notably the weakest of the four faction questlines. It isn’t five minutes after filling out a job application that you are being instructed by the board of directors to do corporate espionage to help the mega-conglomerate defeat their rivals. It is a mighty ask and not one I was particularly eager to engage in. Any resistance to their methods or goals is met with a shrug. If you help Ryujin you are a corpo stooge with little room to be anything else. But hey, at least you can prevent them from developing mind-control.
The Freestar Rangers questline has its flaws, but to serve frontier justice on a group of thinly veiled “lost cause” mercenaries and their CEO financier is fine with me. The overall plot is a bit disjointed, feeling like a truncated mystery that never really commits to letting you be an investigator. What begins as a call to help a farmer spirals into a strange cacophony of fascist mercenaries taking any job that pays and a rich asshole who doesn’t care what he has to do to stay rich. Ron Hope is space Henry Ford acting publicly as an advocate for his employees while secretly killing farmers to extract the resources from their land for himself. It definitely could say more with what it has going on, but it’s short and simple which is hardly a crime in and of itself.
The Crimson Fleet questline is perhaps the brightest star among the four factions. As a double agent for the UC SysDef there is a moral dilemma created early that runs through the whole story. Be the lawless pirate, but also don’t cause too much damage. Work closely with the pirate fleet, but be ready to betray them. Indeed, the missions offer plenty of support for this dynamic with the star liner heist a particular bright spot. The depth offered in most of these missions just makes them more compelling to play. The hunt for Kryx’s Legacy is a fun one, and the benefits of being a member of the Fleet make it a difficult choice to finally take them out. A choice that carried an odd feeling of guilt given that the Fleet are not great people.
The UC Vangaurd is similarly interesting for its excellent narrative and set pieces. You enlist to help the UC with supply runs and quickly get thrown into a conflict concerning the rapid spread of the Terrormorph’s–big scary monsters who invade the minds of their prey. Which, by the by, are the best enemies in the game by far. The voices in your head as you fight them are brilliant and the game needs more of that creativity. That aside, the UC Vangaurd questline seems to be a great onboarding into what the history of Starfield is about. There is so much here that details the past conflicts, war crimes, and destruction that has taken place in the not-too-distant past. These civilizations are built on the back of broken systems, but they are just trying to make it work. The UC Vanguard just lets you be a part of figuring out how people at the highest levels of that system start to move on.
Other notable side quests include a Running Man style bar, a ship with fluctuating gravity, a planet being attacked by Spacers forcing the UC and Freestar to unite briefly against them, and a quest where you get to design an impractical ship for your rich friend. There is some fun with all of them but there are three that really stand out.
First, The Mantis mission which asks you to seek out the Mantis cave and discover what became of Space-Batman. Good environmental design sets up the hideaway of a reclusive hero. The Mantis cave is a great combat gauntlet with some tragic environmental storytelling and some great rewards. I used the Mantis ship for the entire game and enjoyed hearing attackers flee in terror as the mere name of The Mantis struck fear into the hearts and minds of Spacers everywhere.
Next up is the mission to make contact with the ECS Constant. It is a ship full of people who fled earth in an old ship without a grav drive. Having traveled for multiple generations their hopes of colonizing a planet are dashed by the fact that they were beaten by a luxury resort. The resort executives want you to either make the passengers of the ECS Constant slaves, murder all of them, or force them to find a new planet. As you are expressly forbidden from murdering the executives, helping the Constant becomes a task in making the best of a bad situation. I like the ECS Constant and its story, but it does fall a little short of people suddenly learning that the human race surpassed them and conquered the galaxy 200 years ago.
Finally, Operation Starseed introduces the most baffling scenario in the game with a small settlement of clones. Franklin Delano Roosevelt invites you to hear of the conflict between himself, Genghis Kahn, and Queen Amanirenas. Meanwhile Amelia Earhart and Ada Lovelace are just trying to navigate the conflict while Wyatt Earp is trying to hide that he is actually H.H. Holmes. Wild stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a clear explanation of “Why?” But, I’d be lying if ‘Vault Tec’ didn’t come to mind. It is a bit shallow given the concept’s potential, but it is still a good questline that lets you travel the stars with Amelia Earhart afterwards.
–The Big Picture–
There is something to appreciate about the main theme of Starfield–the pursuit of knowledge and adventure. It ties in nicely with the game design of a Bethesda RPG. But as noted, that theme is ambitious and requires a driving force behind it. The driving force in most Bethesda titles can be vacuous. Starfield, without their established IP to springboard off of, should have done more to enhance their writing team. It is the single largest complaint I have about Starfield. The final product simply falls short of some great conceptual work.
What is here is a fantastic foundation, but maybe not more than that. Decent character writing (with good performances behind them) helps for the most part. Andreja and Sam Coe are standouts among the rather small main cast. Beyond that, the scenario writing could always be sharpened. Bethesda makes interesting worlds, but they need to dig deeper into the philosophies that guide their world design. As it is, Starfield leaves quite a lot of room for your own interpretations and your own stories of how this world fits together. Something that can be a weakness or a strength depending on the person.
Exploring what had become of humanity since the destruction of Earth was a rewarding experience. Driven to the brink of extinction they scattered across the stars evoking images of the frontier once again. They established cities and waged wars and kept on. You get to step into a world that continues to fight and struggles to push forward. While it doesn’t do as much as it could with its setting it does enough, for me at least.
Starfield’s greatest weakness for most seems to be centered on scale and how small Starfield can feel. In the vastness of space there being just four major cities, four faction questlines, four main companions, and so on make the game seem so much smaller than its galaxy is. Over 100 star systems and only eight or so really matter to the bulk of the stories told here. The lack of intelligent aliens is a big disappointment. But given the game doesn’t even fully delve into the various organizations and peoples in the game various alien species may have been a lot of work that Bethesda didn’t have time for.
Starfield’s procedural scope is so vast that the curated stuff seems paltry in comparison. This is not a game that needs a sequel that goes bigger. Rather it would be best served by diving deeper into what is already there. Plus, maybe they can use the multiversal shenanigans to bring in intelligent aliens and deepen the mysteries of the universe.
Starfield has made a lot of folks challenge what Bethesda magic is for them. If it’s exploration or deep role-playing mechanics Starfield is going to be a letdown in a few regards. But if that magic is just a world to lose yourself in, Starfield is it. Constantly I found myself in a new corner of space finding a story to engross myself in. Whether those stories were head cannon or hand crafted there was always something beckoning me onwards. Is it lacking at times? Yeah, it is. Still, at its core Starfield feels sincere in what it has set out to be. I am attached to the galaxy Bethesda has built. In the years to come I am hopeful Bethesda will develop what’s here into a deeper and more complex setting. In the meantime, I am happy to get lost in the starfield.
This review contains spoilers
“Disco Elysium is an extremely unlikely object: a full-length RPG built not by a software company, but by a cultural organization.” Robert Kurvitz, lead designer/lead writer of Disco Elysium, started telling stories in the world of Elysium in his late teenage years for tabletop role-playing games with friends before writing a novel set in the world in ‘05. The novel was a commercial failure, it would be another ten years before Kurvitz began another project to bring the world to life. This backstory serves as the basis to say Kurvitz has been involved in Elysium for a while. That time has allowed care in building Elysium, with a world that feels well lived in by the time we arrive in Revachol in a game that does seem truly unlikely.
Putting a pin momentarily in Disco’s artistic achievements, let's get into the politics. Communism, fascism, and centrism are implemented throughout as tools to communicate the state of Elysium and the place the characters occupy therein. Disco understands that the politics are inherent to being. The world of Elysium is fueled by a history steeped in political conflict. Everything Disco has to say is influenced by socialist roots and critique. Kurvitz and others at ZA/UM offer clear criticism of fascism as a contradictory mass of fools, centrism as a cowardly obstruction to progress, and socialism as a disorganized collective more focused on the theory than the practice. Each group is rightfully critiqued, and quite directly so. These writers get it and they infuse those critiques into the worlds characters.
The communist revolution has long been ended by capitalist invaders who continue to rule even as the cities slip further into decay. Martinaise is a city whose best days are long behind it. Even the central conflict to which the amnesiac police lieutenant, Harrier Du Bois, acts as audience surrogate is steeped in political strife. With the death of a strike breaker our boy Harry is on the case, having drunken himself into a stupor we step in to solve the case. Harry is a fuck up, that much is clear from the jump. Man lost his badge, gun, notebook, and mind in a three-day bender failing to impress upon any character that he has any clue what he is doing. This setup is great. It offers classic RPG paths for players who want to (re)define Harry, while also introducing that this bleak world has a humor sewn in. Harry’s mess is an opportunity for the player to feel free to experiment and oftentimes screw up without fear that it will impact their character's image. Meaning there is option to prove you can jump a gap or be cool without feeling like you are messing up some hero status Harry has obtained prior to you assuming direct control. In nearly every instance this humor is integrated with considerate skill as to never truly undermine the tragedy surrounding you. For as strong as the drama is written in Disco, it was the levity that brings a vast amount of heart to it. Harry can be a goofball and that makes him all the more human. He has had his dark days, with more to come, but in the end, he is just one man and so long as his methods work folks like Kim can respect his intention.
Speaking of intention, player action in Disco is wholly made up of walking around and interacting with people and objects then letting the thoughts in our head influence our understanding of the object, person, or world. It might be too much for you, but far more likely is that the game’s strong writing will carry you through–more on that later. There is some further depth to systems, mostly in the menus, but besides moving skill points around you can expect to find more dialogue here as well. The thought cabinet is a unique addition to the skill point system as it offers a very niche risk/reward system unlike other RPGs. The question of whether a thought will be beneficial to you long term–some that are excellent during the processing time can become albatrosses and vice versa–means you have to take a gamble (or google) to choose what you are dedicating precious space in Harry’s brain to think about. Further unlocking these thoughts, as well as doing general character building, incentivizes exploration and engagement with the worlds and the many checklist assignments you can volunteer for along the way. Harry is all too eager to jump headfirst into solving people’s problems, even those people who don’t think they have problems but really their husband is dead, and you have to break the news. Again, there is a humor built into some very morbid reality that blurs the line between comedy and tragedy in a way not many games are capable of doing well.
Disco is all about focusing on the journey not the destination. I was told this going into the game, but it is damn near irrelevant who killed the strikebreaker. Each piece of the puzzle opens up larger perspectives on the world and its conflicts. Harry, meanwhile, acts as a bystander, often challenging himself (i.e., the player) into forming quick stances on complicated issues. You can stand aside or listen as his internal monologue offers a pantheon of distinct characters trying to put their thumb on the scale for your next dialogue choice. It sounds a bit hammy, but it works, and it works incredibly well. The voice acting alone sells the internal dialogue. Hell all of the voice acting is top notch as well and adds depth on already excellent dialogue. Each character’s voice serves well encapsulating the character from the second you hear them. Cuno’s high pitched delivery tells you quickly this boy will tell you nothing that doesn’t accompany an insult. The Union gang leader, Titus Hardie, has a deep gruff delivery that quickly communicates the wall he is between Harry and the truth of the strikebreaker's death. It is hard to imagine the game without the voice acting, but full voice acting was only added in the Final Cut. These actors really add something substantial to a game like this that is driven by the quality of its writing.
You spend most of the early game learning, along with Harry, the state of the world. An amnesiac allows for very clear excuses for exposition and Disco utilizes this excuse at every opportunity. The writing therein is precise telling the player as much as it can without giving up too much of the mystery. And this goes beyond the main storyline. Some side stories, whether told through multiple encounters or through the ledger (even some cut from the game entirely) have a foreboding that stuck with me long after completing the title. Each scene drives Harry forward as the intrigue builds and releases in fragments. Although the greatest point of conflict comes from a standoff in the town square, I found the slow pace of most other revelations more satisfying as a form of storytelling. Not to say the standoff was without merit, it stands alone as the single moment in the game where the stakes are highest, and the player is under the most pressure to get it right. Regardless, it also stands as the singular moment the game focuses more on combat rather than dialogue. You can talk your way out of this one, but I lacked the character build to do so and had to fight it out. The Union gang got mostly wiped out, while Titus and Kim were saved by two good dice rolls. Even as the final act slows down, the writing remains sharp.
Strictly speaking, the map you are exploring here is small. It is two small areas with a dozen interior spaces between them. Nonetheless, the district of Martinaise like the rest of Elysium feels lived in. It has a history and walking through the streets and houses you get a sense of the decline this place has been through. The scale of Martinaise means you learn its pathways and building well before the credits roll. You learn about the people, their lives, and the relationships they have shared long before you arrived. It allows Martinaise, and by extension all of Revachol, to feel much larger than it is. By the time you have found the Deserter, most of your questions have already been answered through your exploration and consideration of Martinaise. On the Deserter, you only meet him once, but he is just as real as any character in Elysium. He has lost his life to the revolution–as most men would–and all that is left is a bitter defiance. You can expand on his situation by rolling the dice to perceive the Insulindian Phasmid, a stick bug with some ethereal qualities that has had an influence on keeping the Deserter alive and healthy for this long. His fervor fueled by the unreal. When the phasmid departs the Deserter’s will departs with it and he is rendered catatonic. Harry and Kim depart to arrange his arrest, knowing that he cannot muster the strength to flee.
There the game ends, with a suggestion that Harry has been renewed and his partnership with Kim will continue. The destination is simple, almost plain, but something greater is to be said about the revolution that is yet to come. One clear message of Disco is that all of this philosophy and political theater put on by the powerful is little more than kindling waiting to be lit. The sparks of change do not come from one era, but in moments that reshape the dynamics of power for the next era. Like Kentucky Route Zero, Disco Elysium is an exploration of being human in a difficult world. Capitalists brought ruination to Revachol and now its people are left to pick up the pieces. Disco provides a lens for its audience to understand the cause of tragedies, to fight injustice so that tragedy may not happen again, and if all else fails to find humor in this life.
Putting a pin momentarily in Disco’s artistic achievements, let's get into the politics. Communism, fascism, and centrism are implemented throughout as tools to communicate the state of Elysium and the place the characters occupy therein. Disco understands that the politics are inherent to being. The world of Elysium is fueled by a history steeped in political conflict. Everything Disco has to say is influenced by socialist roots and critique. Kurvitz and others at ZA/UM offer clear criticism of fascism as a contradictory mass of fools, centrism as a cowardly obstruction to progress, and socialism as a disorganized collective more focused on the theory than the practice. Each group is rightfully critiqued, and quite directly so. These writers get it and they infuse those critiques into the worlds characters.
The communist revolution has long been ended by capitalist invaders who continue to rule even as the cities slip further into decay. Martinaise is a city whose best days are long behind it. Even the central conflict to which the amnesiac police lieutenant, Harrier Du Bois, acts as audience surrogate is steeped in political strife. With the death of a strike breaker our boy Harry is on the case, having drunken himself into a stupor we step in to solve the case. Harry is a fuck up, that much is clear from the jump. Man lost his badge, gun, notebook, and mind in a three-day bender failing to impress upon any character that he has any clue what he is doing. This setup is great. It offers classic RPG paths for players who want to (re)define Harry, while also introducing that this bleak world has a humor sewn in. Harry’s mess is an opportunity for the player to feel free to experiment and oftentimes screw up without fear that it will impact their character's image. Meaning there is option to prove you can jump a gap or be cool without feeling like you are messing up some hero status Harry has obtained prior to you assuming direct control. In nearly every instance this humor is integrated with considerate skill as to never truly undermine the tragedy surrounding you. For as strong as the drama is written in Disco, it was the levity that brings a vast amount of heart to it. Harry can be a goofball and that makes him all the more human. He has had his dark days, with more to come, but in the end, he is just one man and so long as his methods work folks like Kim can respect his intention.
Speaking of intention, player action in Disco is wholly made up of walking around and interacting with people and objects then letting the thoughts in our head influence our understanding of the object, person, or world. It might be too much for you, but far more likely is that the game’s strong writing will carry you through–more on that later. There is some further depth to systems, mostly in the menus, but besides moving skill points around you can expect to find more dialogue here as well. The thought cabinet is a unique addition to the skill point system as it offers a very niche risk/reward system unlike other RPGs. The question of whether a thought will be beneficial to you long term–some that are excellent during the processing time can become albatrosses and vice versa–means you have to take a gamble (or google) to choose what you are dedicating precious space in Harry’s brain to think about. Further unlocking these thoughts, as well as doing general character building, incentivizes exploration and engagement with the worlds and the many checklist assignments you can volunteer for along the way. Harry is all too eager to jump headfirst into solving people’s problems, even those people who don’t think they have problems but really their husband is dead, and you have to break the news. Again, there is a humor built into some very morbid reality that blurs the line between comedy and tragedy in a way not many games are capable of doing well.
Disco is all about focusing on the journey not the destination. I was told this going into the game, but it is damn near irrelevant who killed the strikebreaker. Each piece of the puzzle opens up larger perspectives on the world and its conflicts. Harry, meanwhile, acts as a bystander, often challenging himself (i.e., the player) into forming quick stances on complicated issues. You can stand aside or listen as his internal monologue offers a pantheon of distinct characters trying to put their thumb on the scale for your next dialogue choice. It sounds a bit hammy, but it works, and it works incredibly well. The voice acting alone sells the internal dialogue. Hell all of the voice acting is top notch as well and adds depth on already excellent dialogue. Each character’s voice serves well encapsulating the character from the second you hear them. Cuno’s high pitched delivery tells you quickly this boy will tell you nothing that doesn’t accompany an insult. The Union gang leader, Titus Hardie, has a deep gruff delivery that quickly communicates the wall he is between Harry and the truth of the strikebreaker's death. It is hard to imagine the game without the voice acting, but full voice acting was only added in the Final Cut. These actors really add something substantial to a game like this that is driven by the quality of its writing.
You spend most of the early game learning, along with Harry, the state of the world. An amnesiac allows for very clear excuses for exposition and Disco utilizes this excuse at every opportunity. The writing therein is precise telling the player as much as it can without giving up too much of the mystery. And this goes beyond the main storyline. Some side stories, whether told through multiple encounters or through the ledger (even some cut from the game entirely) have a foreboding that stuck with me long after completing the title. Each scene drives Harry forward as the intrigue builds and releases in fragments. Although the greatest point of conflict comes from a standoff in the town square, I found the slow pace of most other revelations more satisfying as a form of storytelling. Not to say the standoff was without merit, it stands alone as the single moment in the game where the stakes are highest, and the player is under the most pressure to get it right. Regardless, it also stands as the singular moment the game focuses more on combat rather than dialogue. You can talk your way out of this one, but I lacked the character build to do so and had to fight it out. The Union gang got mostly wiped out, while Titus and Kim were saved by two good dice rolls. Even as the final act slows down, the writing remains sharp.
Strictly speaking, the map you are exploring here is small. It is two small areas with a dozen interior spaces between them. Nonetheless, the district of Martinaise like the rest of Elysium feels lived in. It has a history and walking through the streets and houses you get a sense of the decline this place has been through. The scale of Martinaise means you learn its pathways and building well before the credits roll. You learn about the people, their lives, and the relationships they have shared long before you arrived. It allows Martinaise, and by extension all of Revachol, to feel much larger than it is. By the time you have found the Deserter, most of your questions have already been answered through your exploration and consideration of Martinaise. On the Deserter, you only meet him once, but he is just as real as any character in Elysium. He has lost his life to the revolution–as most men would–and all that is left is a bitter defiance. You can expand on his situation by rolling the dice to perceive the Insulindian Phasmid, a stick bug with some ethereal qualities that has had an influence on keeping the Deserter alive and healthy for this long. His fervor fueled by the unreal. When the phasmid departs the Deserter’s will departs with it and he is rendered catatonic. Harry and Kim depart to arrange his arrest, knowing that he cannot muster the strength to flee.
There the game ends, with a suggestion that Harry has been renewed and his partnership with Kim will continue. The destination is simple, almost plain, but something greater is to be said about the revolution that is yet to come. One clear message of Disco is that all of this philosophy and political theater put on by the powerful is little more than kindling waiting to be lit. The sparks of change do not come from one era, but in moments that reshape the dynamics of power for the next era. Like Kentucky Route Zero, Disco Elysium is an exploration of being human in a difficult world. Capitalists brought ruination to Revachol and now its people are left to pick up the pieces. Disco provides a lens for its audience to understand the cause of tragedies, to fight injustice so that tragedy may not happen again, and if all else fails to find humor in this life.
This review contains spoilers
Life is Strange: True Colors has stuck with me for some time now. There are a few reasons for that, but essential to all of them is the simple fact that True Colors tells a story about empathy, community, and loss without losing the thread on finding comfort in all those things. Although previous games have told powerful stories, they have struggled to at times find the balance between the drama and the human element that grounds their narrative. True Colors (with one major exception) finds that balance and tells a beautiful story of growth and finding your place in the world.
Erka Mori’s Alex Chen is, by all accounts, a character adrift in the world when we meet her. She has lost her parents, lost contact with her brother, and has no place to call home after eight years in a group home. Her power is to connect with peoples inherent emotions. This super-empathy comes at the cost of Alex herself being somewhat out of control of her own emotional state. This poor woman is on unsteady ground, and this is before the narrative kicks off. This is all a lot of words to say Alex is a character that connects. Her loss and struggle to really be at home anywhere is relatable. Haven Springs offers an idyllic home to settle in, but of course tragedy continues.
On the narrative, I should address that one major exception. The first chapter of True Colors ends with Alex’s brother Gabe being killed by a rock slide. The game has barely introduced us to Gabe and his home when everything is disrupted by his death. More time before Gabe’s death may have been meandering, but it was all too short for seven hour runtime. It is a notable complaint given the story is centered on the loss and those responsible, but not one that ruins the experience. The abrupt nature of Gabe’s death is in some sense more authentic to how loss can be, but it feels messy in a narrative sense. But it is a messy narrative, and that is okay.
Characters pain in True Colors is emphasized through the empathy system. Characters inner thoughts are laid bare, and you have to navigate trauma. Haven Springs is full of wonderful characters, people who have gone through loss and in most cases are still working through that grief. Alex is well suited to be the one to try to help these people find peace. Connecting with them and Haven Springs as a place then becomes an act of processing. Taking all this trauma and using it to be someone better tomorrow. The core story is honestly secondary to that. Jed’s heel turn is silly but fits within the broader themes of the story. Another man haunted by his past and unable to face it.
With the greed of the powerful and the indifference to tragedy that so many show, True Colors acts as an expression of collective wanting. What if we could face up to the challenges behind us and be better people? What if we could find this little pocket of earth that we can call home? What if we could surround ourselves with people that care for us and wouldn’t be the same without us? Well, maybe we’d find some peace and be able to begin our next chapter whatever that might be.
“You don’t know exactly when it happens. But one day, you look around and find that you have transformed this place just as much as it has transformed you. And the most extraordinary thing of all is just how normal it all feels. You don’t question it. You don’t doubt it, or wonder what might have been. It's your life, the life you fought so hard to have. And for the first time in a long time, you just live.”
Erka Mori’s Alex Chen is, by all accounts, a character adrift in the world when we meet her. She has lost her parents, lost contact with her brother, and has no place to call home after eight years in a group home. Her power is to connect with peoples inherent emotions. This super-empathy comes at the cost of Alex herself being somewhat out of control of her own emotional state. This poor woman is on unsteady ground, and this is before the narrative kicks off. This is all a lot of words to say Alex is a character that connects. Her loss and struggle to really be at home anywhere is relatable. Haven Springs offers an idyllic home to settle in, but of course tragedy continues.
On the narrative, I should address that one major exception. The first chapter of True Colors ends with Alex’s brother Gabe being killed by a rock slide. The game has barely introduced us to Gabe and his home when everything is disrupted by his death. More time before Gabe’s death may have been meandering, but it was all too short for seven hour runtime. It is a notable complaint given the story is centered on the loss and those responsible, but not one that ruins the experience. The abrupt nature of Gabe’s death is in some sense more authentic to how loss can be, but it feels messy in a narrative sense. But it is a messy narrative, and that is okay.
Characters pain in True Colors is emphasized through the empathy system. Characters inner thoughts are laid bare, and you have to navigate trauma. Haven Springs is full of wonderful characters, people who have gone through loss and in most cases are still working through that grief. Alex is well suited to be the one to try to help these people find peace. Connecting with them and Haven Springs as a place then becomes an act of processing. Taking all this trauma and using it to be someone better tomorrow. The core story is honestly secondary to that. Jed’s heel turn is silly but fits within the broader themes of the story. Another man haunted by his past and unable to face it.
With the greed of the powerful and the indifference to tragedy that so many show, True Colors acts as an expression of collective wanting. What if we could face up to the challenges behind us and be better people? What if we could find this little pocket of earth that we can call home? What if we could surround ourselves with people that care for us and wouldn’t be the same without us? Well, maybe we’d find some peace and be able to begin our next chapter whatever that might be.
“You don’t know exactly when it happens. But one day, you look around and find that you have transformed this place just as much as it has transformed you. And the most extraordinary thing of all is just how normal it all feels. You don’t question it. You don’t doubt it, or wonder what might have been. It's your life, the life you fought so hard to have. And for the first time in a long time, you just live.”
This review contains spoilers
There is no understating how much Guardians of the Galaxy exceeds expectations. After the unmitigated disaster that was The Avengers game (which Eidos assisted with development), the promise of a Guardians of the Galaxy game where you only play as Peter Quill was a tepid offer. Add to that an abysmal marketing campaign that seemed to lack confidence most could be forgiven for thinking this was going to be another paper thin attempt to cash in on a known IP. Nonetheless, Eidos with the deck stacked against them developed the best comics adaptation in recent memory. From start to finish Guardians of the Galaxy is an unabashed space epic. It is at the same time a campy comic book romp and a deeply human story.
To get one major point out of the way early, the gameplay is weak. The best advice one could give is go into the custom difficulty and tinker to your preference. Making Peter stronger and more capable while amping up the team element makes the game better. There are waves and waves of grunts you will need to fight in the twenty hour runtime and it is best to make that bit manageable. Still, it can be a bit of a hit or miss. But when it hits and the 80’s music kicks in it is a whole lot of fun.
The fact is that Guardians of the Galaxy is a game defined nearly entirely by its writing and world rather than any specific game design choice. It is beautiful to look at and feels good enough to play, but there is no greater highlight than the character interactions. The core cast is infused with a humanity that is so earnest and heartfelt it is nearly overwhelming. This adaptation of the Guardians is the definitive one for me, and for others as well.
Peter, Rocket, Groot, Drax, and Gamora, both individually and as a team, undergo a compelling arc that challenges their archetypes. The found family trope is at the heart of the modern Guardians and is ever-present here. You can feel the tension among this team early on in the story. They haven’t been together long and are still trying to figure out how (or if) they fit together. Each member of the Guardians is still struggling with unprocessed grief and loss, and we find them in a time that it is make it or break it.
Peter’s grief in particular is one continually explored through the game. He hasn’t moved on from the loss of his mother, his home, and the years since have failed to create an environment where he can really heal. Enter the Universal Church of Truth as the main villainous faction and you have a compelling challenge to not only Peter but the other Guardians. As failures mount and the church grows stronger the Guardians struggle, but in that struggle, they find themselves. They open up to one another and let their grief flow over. They trust in one another and fuel that hope that together they can overcome.
But it isn’t just a game about grief. No, the game maintains a strong humor and hopeful tone throughout. For the Guardians of the Galaxy coming to terms with loss is just as much about letting others in as it is acknowledging that their past is past. That trust they build is also centered around uplifting one another to be better than their worst days. In gameplay the huddle mechanic brings that human element to even the most mindless shootie bits of the game. In the narrative it sees the team challenge God and win. They complete the heroes' journey as stronger people than they were before.
Guardians of the Galaxy is nearly everything that one could hope for in a story centered on these characters. It is beautiful, connecting, and heartfelt in a way that we may never see again. The only way Guardians matched The Avengers game is in poor sales, and with Eidos’ transfer to the shaky standing Embracer Group it is unlikely we will ever see this iteration of the team again. That is a shame, because this is everything the Guardians of the Galaxy should be and more.
To get one major point out of the way early, the gameplay is weak. The best advice one could give is go into the custom difficulty and tinker to your preference. Making Peter stronger and more capable while amping up the team element makes the game better. There are waves and waves of grunts you will need to fight in the twenty hour runtime and it is best to make that bit manageable. Still, it can be a bit of a hit or miss. But when it hits and the 80’s music kicks in it is a whole lot of fun.
The fact is that Guardians of the Galaxy is a game defined nearly entirely by its writing and world rather than any specific game design choice. It is beautiful to look at and feels good enough to play, but there is no greater highlight than the character interactions. The core cast is infused with a humanity that is so earnest and heartfelt it is nearly overwhelming. This adaptation of the Guardians is the definitive one for me, and for others as well.
Peter, Rocket, Groot, Drax, and Gamora, both individually and as a team, undergo a compelling arc that challenges their archetypes. The found family trope is at the heart of the modern Guardians and is ever-present here. You can feel the tension among this team early on in the story. They haven’t been together long and are still trying to figure out how (or if) they fit together. Each member of the Guardians is still struggling with unprocessed grief and loss, and we find them in a time that it is make it or break it.
Peter’s grief in particular is one continually explored through the game. He hasn’t moved on from the loss of his mother, his home, and the years since have failed to create an environment where he can really heal. Enter the Universal Church of Truth as the main villainous faction and you have a compelling challenge to not only Peter but the other Guardians. As failures mount and the church grows stronger the Guardians struggle, but in that struggle, they find themselves. They open up to one another and let their grief flow over. They trust in one another and fuel that hope that together they can overcome.
But it isn’t just a game about grief. No, the game maintains a strong humor and hopeful tone throughout. For the Guardians of the Galaxy coming to terms with loss is just as much about letting others in as it is acknowledging that their past is past. That trust they build is also centered around uplifting one another to be better than their worst days. In gameplay the huddle mechanic brings that human element to even the most mindless shootie bits of the game. In the narrative it sees the team challenge God and win. They complete the heroes' journey as stronger people than they were before.
Guardians of the Galaxy is nearly everything that one could hope for in a story centered on these characters. It is beautiful, connecting, and heartfelt in a way that we may never see again. The only way Guardians matched The Avengers game is in poor sales, and with Eidos’ transfer to the shaky standing Embracer Group it is unlikely we will ever see this iteration of the team again. That is a shame, because this is everything the Guardians of the Galaxy should be and more.
This review contains spoilers
Resident Evil Village is if anything a testament to the earnestness that has set apart the Resident Evil series among most horror games. Full of campy nonsense, but camp without sacrificing the tension that the series founded itself on. Although Resi VII had its troubles, Village does well to fix most of these issues. It is more in line with the positive experiences playing recent Resident Evil remakes--synchronizing with their tones and aesthetics as the series enjoys a renaissance. A far cry from the drab swamps of Louisiana, Village drops Ethan Winters in a rural Europe to get his shit pushed in, again and again. The gameplay isn’t revolutionized so much as it is refined with everything feeling that little bit better. It’s Resident Evil, you know, it’s clean, no frills, and most importantly fun. That said it’s not really the gameplay that made this one such a thrill.
The world of Resident Evil has long been all over the place, but the full embrace of supernatural lore here feels like the fulfillment of a long-implied promise. This series will use anything and everything strange that they can use to induce that sense of tension and horror. From lycans to fish men to ghost dolls it can be difficult to recall that this series used to be about a pretty simple zombie virus. Still better for it, the growth of the uncanny has allowed the series to maintain itself as the years have carried on. The story is at times stretching to its absolute limits to justify how all this makes sense but none of it matters because with Resident Evil the absurd goes hand in hand with the nerve-wracking. And, because it can’t be a Village critique without her mention—Lady Dimitrescu is the colossal icon of the game, and the marketing knew it. It is a damn shame that she is the first lord to die as she casts a large shadow over the rest of title (especially Mother Miranda who lacks equal screen presence). Not to demean Beneviento, Moreau, or Heisenberg, they just aren’t tall vampire lady. Although it must be said that what lies in the basement of the Beneviento House is truly nightmarish. Village is a near perfect statement on entertaining villains. Truly can’t wait to see what ridiculous monsters they dream up next.
Ethan Winters in particular is a delight. He lacks the confidence of Chris or Leon and instead is just a blundering everyman going full stream of consciousness throughout the runtime. When this man is told that he must search out vials filled with different bits of his infant daughter from four weirdos in the European countryside to revive her following the brutal assassination of his wife he does so without a second thought. He approaches the brutalization of his body with the demeanor of a man who forgot his umbrella on a rainy day. His grand reveal as a man of mold is shocking if only because Ethan never once stopped to ponder that all it took to reattach his severed hand was some first aid liquid and a can do attitude. More than anything he proves his heroism not by being the coolest action boy but by making the sacrifice for those that mattered most to him. With his death the Resident Evil series has lost an all-star protagonist. He wasn’t just any mold man--he was our mold man. Rest in peace you beautiful man.
The world of Resident Evil has long been all over the place, but the full embrace of supernatural lore here feels like the fulfillment of a long-implied promise. This series will use anything and everything strange that they can use to induce that sense of tension and horror. From lycans to fish men to ghost dolls it can be difficult to recall that this series used to be about a pretty simple zombie virus. Still better for it, the growth of the uncanny has allowed the series to maintain itself as the years have carried on. The story is at times stretching to its absolute limits to justify how all this makes sense but none of it matters because with Resident Evil the absurd goes hand in hand with the nerve-wracking. And, because it can’t be a Village critique without her mention—Lady Dimitrescu is the colossal icon of the game, and the marketing knew it. It is a damn shame that she is the first lord to die as she casts a large shadow over the rest of title (especially Mother Miranda who lacks equal screen presence). Not to demean Beneviento, Moreau, or Heisenberg, they just aren’t tall vampire lady. Although it must be said that what lies in the basement of the Beneviento House is truly nightmarish. Village is a near perfect statement on entertaining villains. Truly can’t wait to see what ridiculous monsters they dream up next.
Ethan Winters in particular is a delight. He lacks the confidence of Chris or Leon and instead is just a blundering everyman going full stream of consciousness throughout the runtime. When this man is told that he must search out vials filled with different bits of his infant daughter from four weirdos in the European countryside to revive her following the brutal assassination of his wife he does so without a second thought. He approaches the brutalization of his body with the demeanor of a man who forgot his umbrella on a rainy day. His grand reveal as a man of mold is shocking if only because Ethan never once stopped to ponder that all it took to reattach his severed hand was some first aid liquid and a can do attitude. More than anything he proves his heroism not by being the coolest action boy but by making the sacrifice for those that mattered most to him. With his death the Resident Evil series has lost an all-star protagonist. He wasn’t just any mold man--he was our mold man. Rest in peace you beautiful man.
2021
The Wild at Heart is without a doubt the single biggest surprise of the year. It is honestly difficult to find the right words to describe it. It is in many ways a game that feels kind in everything it does. As an exploration of trauma, it does well to explore the reasons people lose themselves, hurt those they love, and even how they can be forgiven. It does all this with a real earnest heart and despite its somber moments is never afraid to embrace the whimsical nature of childhood. As magical as the woods of The Wild at Heart are, they feel like a recollection of our own explorations of the wilderness as youth--Spritelings and all. This is all supported by some stunning production values in the games art and music which are really incredible.
There are very few indie games from this year that felt as stunning to wander around than The Wild at Heart. The aesthetic just gets at that sense of magical realism that suits its narrative intent and creates the environment for a really good video game. Because it is a very good game as well. The puzzle design feels intuitive and created a nice balance between simple relaxing puzzles and ones that genuinely felt smart. The Spritelings bring a literal sense of life to the puzzles that help you feel part of a team when you solve a trickier problem. The design is purposeful and clear in its vision. There is no doubt when I say that The Wild at Heart is an unrelentingly charming title with a wonderful fusion of Pikmin-like puzzles and heartfelt storytelling. I highly recommend it. Rarely has a game been just so impressive at every level coming out of absolutely nowhere.
There are very few indie games from this year that felt as stunning to wander around than The Wild at Heart. The aesthetic just gets at that sense of magical realism that suits its narrative intent and creates the environment for a really good video game. Because it is a very good game as well. The puzzle design feels intuitive and created a nice balance between simple relaxing puzzles and ones that genuinely felt smart. The Spritelings bring a literal sense of life to the puzzles that help you feel part of a team when you solve a trickier problem. The design is purposeful and clear in its vision. There is no doubt when I say that The Wild at Heart is an unrelentingly charming title with a wonderful fusion of Pikmin-like puzzles and heartfelt storytelling. I highly recommend it. Rarely has a game been just so impressive at every level coming out of absolutely nowhere.
2021
he Artful Escape is a weird one. There is quite a lot about it that feels a bit overdone, you know? It is trying so hard to be high-minded that it might come off as vapid in another title, but here it’s wholly endearing. The game is a bit silly, and it thankfully knows it is. It melds a vibrant art aesthetic with an earnest look at the process of the artist finding their medium. What is particularly delightful about it is that it is a story of people helping you along the way. The cast of characters are as vibrant and strange as the world around them. The celebrity cast is a novelty, but credit where it is due, they don’t just phone it in. Carl Weathers in particular offers a bright light among the cast as a rock star whose light has started to fade by the time we come around. None of the supporting roles are huge parts but each plays a part in transporting star Francis Vendetti across the universe to find himself.
Although not without a sense of cynicism Artful Escape embraces the idea that you can do what you love and be yourself even if it takes you some time to get there. In support of this are the game’s adventure elements. The game is at its best when it is in the dialogue between characters or just Francis choosing what his rock style is going to be. It is at these moments a true adventure game focused entirely on the character and his growth. Alternatively, there are gameplay sections of platforming and rhythm games. Perfectly fine, but not remarkable. They are elevated by visual style but brought down by how plain they otherwise are. The game needed them to vary itself up but doesn’t mean they are entirely helpful. Regardless they don’t drag down the experience. It is a short and sweet little adventure and that should be enough for most. If any rockstar
Although not without a sense of cynicism Artful Escape embraces the idea that you can do what you love and be yourself even if it takes you some time to get there. In support of this are the game’s adventure elements. The game is at its best when it is in the dialogue between characters or just Francis choosing what his rock style is going to be. It is at these moments a true adventure game focused entirely on the character and his growth. Alternatively, there are gameplay sections of platforming and rhythm games. Perfectly fine, but not remarkable. They are elevated by visual style but brought down by how plain they otherwise are. The game needed them to vary itself up but doesn’t mean they are entirely helpful. Regardless they don’t drag down the experience. It is a short and sweet little adventure and that should be enough for most. If any rockstar
This review contains spoilers
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a marvel. The animation, art, and world design are fantastic. To see this level of quality carried from animation into the interactive space is just very impressive. Especially in a debut. The world is well realized and is very enjoyable to explore. The game seamlessly guides players through the forests to help those they find along the way find peace, even as it is clear that there is no going back and saving them. In that sense, Kena feels dominated by death in a way that few titles are. Each character that Kena helps leaves her more alone, even with the Rot by her side. As each character arc explores regret, the game endeavors to say quite a lot about how people (often fail to) move on from past mistakes. This all said, the game design does not always match the artistic design.
Being both too difficult and too reliant on conventions (like the rule of three) Kena can feel particularly plain to engage with. Each character’s story is entirely driven by a structure to seek out three things, all while learning more of the individual, before fighting the corrupted spirit and celebrating a job well done. Not to say that the individual gameplay elements are poor, but structurally it feels weaker than the sum of its parts. Regardless, that is not true of much of the rest of the experience. If Kena is the first outing of Ember Labs, I am very excited to see what they do next. This is a well told, if simple, story that is worth experiencing at least once.
Being both too difficult and too reliant on conventions (like the rule of three) Kena can feel particularly plain to engage with. Each character’s story is entirely driven by a structure to seek out three things, all while learning more of the individual, before fighting the corrupted spirit and celebrating a job well done. Not to say that the individual gameplay elements are poor, but structurally it feels weaker than the sum of its parts. Regardless, that is not true of much of the rest of the experience. If Kena is the first outing of Ember Labs, I am very excited to see what they do next. This is a well told, if simple, story that is worth experiencing at least once.
2020
It took quite a while for me to get around to Orcs Must Die! 3. Having enjoyed the second game quite a lot, as well as the short lived Unchained, the third entry had seemed paltry for a full priced entry. A year or so later, finally having played it, it isn’t any worse the wear with time. It has kept most of the core elements of the second game and designed an experience that is quite a bit more compelling than I could have expected. It is just a good time, made significantly better in co-op. Putting together a successful run is rewarding, especially on the maps which actually force players to think. Admittedly most maps have a great answer to the central problem--barricade a narrow path and lay down a death funnel. Regardless, coming to develop on that answer, especially when it doesn’t solve the problem (i.e., flying enemies, multiple routes, expense).
On the one hand it can be far too easy to rout the enemies and feel very little threat, on the other a good run can be thrown quickly into chaos. One map's quick solution can begin to feel impractical with further use. Some traps inherent limitations just don’t work on all maps. This is particularly true of the scramble mode which serves up buffs and debuffs that can absolutely break your go-to strategy. Honestly it is when those plans break, when chaos takes hold, that the game is at its best. Even having played it quite a bit I am continually willing to jump back in with the different scrambles. Suffice to say, Robot Entertainment have made four of these games and this is another confident entry into the series. Whenever Orcs! 4 comes around I will absolutely jump in again to see how they continue to build on the same great foundation.
On the one hand it can be far too easy to rout the enemies and feel very little threat, on the other a good run can be thrown quickly into chaos. One map's quick solution can begin to feel impractical with further use. Some traps inherent limitations just don’t work on all maps. This is particularly true of the scramble mode which serves up buffs and debuffs that can absolutely break your go-to strategy. Honestly it is when those plans break, when chaos takes hold, that the game is at its best. Even having played it quite a bit I am continually willing to jump back in with the different scrambles. Suffice to say, Robot Entertainment have made four of these games and this is another confident entry into the series. Whenever Orcs! 4 comes around I will absolutely jump in again to see how they continue to build on the same great foundation.
2018
Hades is the rare roguelike experience that I am actually really into. The gameplay is well layered, story well told, and its aesthetic style to spare. Even so, it still is one of the many titles with a difficulty curve that made the whole game more frustrating than I usually care for. For quite some time I had dropped the title, sure I would never finish it, but sometime after it had gone off Game Pass, I picked up a copy. Thirty runs later I finally beat Hades. Although the story doesn’t end there, it was a milestone that felt earned. Almost as soon as I had finished that first successful run I was itching to go again and see more of it. After all, if I can finish it once surely, I could do the whole ten to see the real ending. Surely.
I honestly have no clue what worked so well with that finishing run. The game is absolutely bursting with variety, and I would be surprised if a player could ever replicate a run’s boons, buffs, and rewards. I imagine it would be difficult to even hear the same character dialogue again in a single playthrough. Although, that is not to say that the core experience is entirely new each run. It can get tiresome fighting the same enemies, in the same scenarios, over and over again. It is exhausting fighting the same boss battles thirty times over. Even so, the game does a great job of communicating growth to help pave over fatigue with an interest in seeing that next thing. Whether it be with resources, skills, weapon buffs, trinkets, or just in the character relationships. Each time you return to the House of Hades you are well aware that the last run is just another chapter in a long story.
I honestly have no clue what worked so well with that finishing run. The game is absolutely bursting with variety, and I would be surprised if a player could ever replicate a run’s boons, buffs, and rewards. I imagine it would be difficult to even hear the same character dialogue again in a single playthrough. Although, that is not to say that the core experience is entirely new each run. It can get tiresome fighting the same enemies, in the same scenarios, over and over again. It is exhausting fighting the same boss battles thirty times over. Even so, the game does a great job of communicating growth to help pave over fatigue with an interest in seeing that next thing. Whether it be with resources, skills, weapon buffs, trinkets, or just in the character relationships. Each time you return to the House of Hades you are well aware that the last run is just another chapter in a long story.
2021
This review contains spoilers
I am endlessly impressed by what Hazelight was able to do here. A game that changes its form every couple of hours is a game development miracle. The resource investment to make a five minute Street Fighter segment where you square off against the general of the squirrel army on the top of a plane made of underwear is unimaginable, but the game has a dozen or more moments like that. It is a real damn achievement in game design that Hazelight was able to pull this all together into a coherent final product. This all said, It Takes Two just didn’t connect with me like it did for so many others.
It is just a matter of pacing. The game feels much longer than it actually is. Just when you think you are finally about to turn a corner, Dr. Hakim shows up to throw a wrench in the gears. Each time you are really getting a handle on the new mechanic--it’s been taken to be replaced by the next thing. Still at the same time each area feels stretched to its absolute limits. Rose’s Room alone is a multi-part slog that sees you start in a pillow fort, go to “outer-space”, fight moon baboon, go through a lengthy platforming section, fix a train station, solve a dinosaur puzzle, become pirates, fight a giant octopus, put on a circus performance, explore a magic kingdom, dungeon crawl, beat chess, win at the claw machine, and then brutally murder Queen Cutie III as she begs for her life. It is excessive and by the time you have finished this chapter you have more than half the game left to play.
Solely cooperative experiences like this are a rarity, and this stands as one of the better games in that very small market. It is a really fantastic game, but it is the definition of too much of a good thing. I can’t recall how many unique locations, boss fights, abilities, or characters there were by the end of the game, but it was in the end still a good time. By pitting two opposing forces together and making them figure their shit out it gets played hooked and keeps them going. So, in spite of the pacing issues over the course of the fourteen or so hours it took to roll credits it was (mostly) a good time.
It is just a matter of pacing. The game feels much longer than it actually is. Just when you think you are finally about to turn a corner, Dr. Hakim shows up to throw a wrench in the gears. Each time you are really getting a handle on the new mechanic--it’s been taken to be replaced by the next thing. Still at the same time each area feels stretched to its absolute limits. Rose’s Room alone is a multi-part slog that sees you start in a pillow fort, go to “outer-space”, fight moon baboon, go through a lengthy platforming section, fix a train station, solve a dinosaur puzzle, become pirates, fight a giant octopus, put on a circus performance, explore a magic kingdom, dungeon crawl, beat chess, win at the claw machine, and then brutally murder Queen Cutie III as she begs for her life. It is excessive and by the time you have finished this chapter you have more than half the game left to play.
Solely cooperative experiences like this are a rarity, and this stands as one of the better games in that very small market. It is a really fantastic game, but it is the definition of too much of a good thing. I can’t recall how many unique locations, boss fights, abilities, or characters there were by the end of the game, but it was in the end still a good time. By pitting two opposing forces together and making them figure their shit out it gets played hooked and keeps them going. So, in spite of the pacing issues over the course of the fourteen or so hours it took to roll credits it was (mostly) a good time.
There is nothing I can say now about this trilogy I haven’t said about the games as separate works. They are all excellent. Although normally these lists are just everything released in the year, to place this series would practically be cheating. These games are some of the best ever made. They establish and build a universe brimming with potential so wonderfully. Together they tell the story of a ragtag starship crew who grow together as a family fighting genocidal squid robots and I couldn’t ask them to be anything more than that. Sure, they are starting to show their age, even with the glow up, but they are wonderful and the universe they have built is one I will always want to revisit. There is no better time to play or replay this trilogy than now.