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Comment on Looking to hear experiences about Laser Facial Hair Removal in ~lgbt
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentYou hate to see it folks, you hate to see itYou hate to see it folks, you hate to see it
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentFirst of all, can I say that it's a little strange to have the center square on everyone's Bingo card -- arguably the best square on the whole thing -- solely devoted to card games? What if you...First of all, can I say that it's a little strange to have the center square on everyone's Bingo card -- arguably the best square on the whole thing -- solely devoted to card games? What if you didn't have one in your backlog? couldn't that be frustrating? It's not like everyone is gonna buy Balatro just for the bingo event. Anyway I had been meaning to play Card Shark for a while so it all works out, but man. Seems a little strange. Unless there's some other interpretation of "wildcard" that I'm not aware of? but that sounds implausible. Anyway.
Card Shark -- Wildcard
It's a bit of a bummer to be ending the Backlog Burner event on such a sour note. While I didn't enjoy all the games I played this month (sorry, Dead Space) they were all at least interesting, and engaging, and worth my time -- even Paradise Killer, which I hated, was probably more a victim of circumstance than anything else. But I decided to play Card Shark purely for the bit (see above) and as Jesus said, "live by the bit, die by the bit." And unfortunately this game kinda ended up feeling like a waste of time.
In Card Shark, you play as an abused, nonverbal orphan lad who discovers a gift for cheating at cards and is whisked across the French countryside in the 1770s, scamming money with his partners from a horde of nobles, dilettantes, and socialites, as part of some broader conspiracy to swindle or unseat the King. This is an enchanting premise, and the game backs it up with simple, expressive animations and a gorgeous painterly artstyle that lends the game a strong atmosphere. In the opening chapter, the writing seems subtle, elegant, and competent -- there's some strong setup here; between the wealth of your card-playing opponents and your own impoverished background it seems like there's some buildup to some kind of class struggle themes, with the sword of the Revolution hanging over your head, ready to fall at any moment.
At this early stage, the gameplay, which is a bit fiddly and repetitive, hasn't gotten old, seems like a pleasant enough diversion to propel the main story. The loop looks like this: you chose a destination. On the carriage ride there, you're taught a card trick. Then, upon arriving, you use that card trick to swindle your opponents. Repeat twenty-eight times, give or take. The tricks are pretty neat -- both to learn and to implement. By the time I finished the game I felt like I had been actually taught how to cheat at cards -- if not the manual dexterity required, certainly the theory -- and quickly and smoothly executing a cheat without raising your opponents' suspicion feels great. As the game progresses, the tricks start to get more and more fiddly and, frankly, frustrating. In Card Shark you're not playing real card games -- just executing the tricks. This means that all of the tricks are pass-fail; either you get every single stage of it perfect (and quickly, because the persistent suspicion gauge can be quite harrowing) or you get a single element wrong, or go too slow, and lose and then, worst case, you die and have to replay the whole section over. It feels a bit dumb to lose a story mission because I accidentally mismarked my four of spades as a three of spades, despite getting every other card correct; it feels annoying to lose a hand because apparently I misinput an injog on my controller and the suspicion meter got too high.
"Well, Evie, skill issue," you might say, and fair enough, I'll concede it. But I feel like the game requires an unrealistic level of perfection to complete these tricks, and really suffers from the fact that you're not actually playing realistic card games, you're playing pass-or-fail cheating sims. Whatever. It's a scope thing. Like I said, these card games at first do not seem nearly as important as the people you're playing, the conversations that happen over the table, the scheming and investigating and the so-called "Twelve Bottles of Milk." But honestly, I found that all that plotting didn't really pay off. The whole game hinges on a relationship-level twist between the main playable character and half the cast and also the king, a twist that is both convoluted and, for me, uninteresting, and relies on clumsily showing the same flashback three times from three different perspectives. Maybe all of this would have landed better if our main character had an arc, but no. He essentially get pushed around and used by the other characters, his lack of a voice consigning him to a lack of agency, and you'd think this would lead to some story about him making his own decisions or finding his own worth, but no. The Comte, the man who first whisked you out of poverty, a man who despises the upper class despite being emblematic of many of their excesses, gives you the name Eugene, and you can tell another character that you don't like the name (while she helps you crossdress and learn makeup, which all feels a bit trans-y), but regardless of what you chose in that scene, the game goes right back to calling you Eugene in the end like it didn't matter. Then "Eugene" gets one meaningful decision at the very end of the game, and it branches off into like six nearly identical endings with, as I complained about in my Prey critique, no falling action, no real payoff, nothing interesting in the narrative to latch onto.
My least favorite rhetorical device in literary criticism is when the writer smugly compares the premise of a work to their experience with it, as a way to criticize it. You know, "The villain of this movie wanted to kill the protagonist, but by the end, his incessant speeches seem closer to killing the viewer (with BOREDOM!)" It feels a bit shitty, like they're not treating the work with the respect and care it deserves. So I won't say that I feel like Card Shark tricked me, with its strong atmosphere and more fun early tricks and what seemed to be strong and subtle narrative setup -- all wasted, in the end, by creeping complexity and a plot with no payoff. But, you know, I think that's the subtext here. I really wasn't a fan of this game.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentYour mileage may vary certainly. The game's hype honestly does it no favors, in no small part (in my opinion) because it's a good game with an incredible ending, so most of the time you're kind of...Your mileage may vary certainly. The game's hype honestly does it no favors, in no small part (in my opinion) because it's a good game with an incredible ending, so most of the time you're kind of thinking "is this is? This was what people were so excited about?" I think I came around on the movement controls and the flight model but they're kind of undeniably clunky and frictional. I felt like I had mastered them by the end, which was very rewarding, but there were certain points where I missed a jump and fell to the other side of the solar system and was just so annoyed, like "I can't wait to roll credits on this game so I can find the names of everyone who playtested this and dox them"-level annoyed (/j). Certainly the game's platforming doesn't mesh well with its imprecise movement at first, and it's easy to see how what, for me, subsided into minor frustrations could, for another type of player, metastasize and make a meal of the whole experience
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )Link ParentI think it was impossible for Outer Wilds -- for any work of art, really -- to live up to the expectations I had for it. Five years of "it changed my life," "best game of all time," "don't read...- Exemplary
I think it was impossible for Outer Wilds -- for any work of art, really -- to live up to the expectations I had for it. Five years of "it changed my life," "best game of all time," "don't read anything about it dude, just play it right now" turned this game from text into myth in my mind, something I dared not approach for the longest time, lest it strike me dead where I stood. By that metric, Outer Wilds was a disappointment. It didn't live up to the hype. But it came damn close. Though I have not been substantially changed as a person, I was deeply moved. Though this is not my favorite game ever, it's probably gonna be up there. And now, having finished the game, I'm struggling to figure out how to write about it.
YouTube critics often say something like "good critique is a gift to a work's creator." I disagree. A good critique, I think, often has very little to do with the creator. It is a work of art unto itself (if a derivative one, like fanfiction for people who spent tens of thousands of dollars on art school), should connect the reader not only to a game but to Evie's particular experience with that game. My vice, as a writer, is that when my feelings about a work are too complex to be neatly expressed with my accessible imagery, I start to resort to understatements and run-on sentences and a kind of petty structural subversion that conveys nothing except maybe that I should have spent more time revising this before hitting post. When writing I try to crystallize my interactions with a work -- to freeze them in time, but also solidify them, make them clear -- for the sake of my own understanding, if no one else's. It's frustrating when the process fails, when I try to make sense of a game and my reactions to it and find only murk.
This has been the case with Outer Wilds for me. It is easy to describe the mechanics, to compare it to other works of art, and to bullet-point the handful of issues I have with it. Easy, even, to talk about the incredible ending, at least in detatched philosophical terms. But then I try to talk about how the game made me feel and all of a sudden it's vagaries and run-on sentences. Let's see if we can do it any better this time.
Before the veil of spoilers descends, I should mention: the people who say "don't read anything, just play it," were kind of right. I'll have a light spoilers section and a heavy spoilers section, but if you haven't played this game yet, you should only read the light section, if that. Outer Wilds is a game that hinges on making discoveries, and if you're not finding its secrets for yourself, you're missing the point. Okay, enough preamble.
Outer Wilds -- Erosion (light spoilers)
I've played a lot of time loop games in my life, and been disappointed (to varying degrees) by all of them. Or, well, my three favorite games (Alan Wake 2, Returnal, and Honkai: Star Rail('s Penacony arc)) all have time loop elements, but they're not time loop games: games which put you in the movie Groundhog Day, or, more likely for video games, Edge of Tomorrow. In works like these the premise revolves around understanding, exploring, and interacting with a world stuck in time, where you're the only variable and are challenged with, somehow, "solving" the loop. Twelve Minutes, Deathloop, The Forgotten City, Prey: Mooncrash. I won't waste time going in-depth on all of these games: only know that there are a lot of problems inherent with combing "time loop" and "video game." There's the problem where games are often arbitrarily interactive, which means it's not quite clear what kind of effect you can have on the world, which can lead to directionless experimentation, killing any sense of narrative progression. Or the opposite problem: the game is too linear, too objective driven, which strips the fun and experimentation of actually getting to interact with and explore the loop on your own terms. There's the repetition problem, where seeing the same environments and events can get stale after a while. And there's the ending problem: since time loops are inherently impossible, explaining the time loop often requires a left turn into some absolutely wild shit that can totally torpedo a game's ending. Each game identifies and tries to solve at least some of these problems; each, in my opinion, fails to live up to its tantalizing premise. Maybe that's why I prefer games where the time loop remains a narrative element: by segregating it within the text, away from the constraints imposed by interactivity, gamemakers suffer fewer pitfalls.
Outer Wilds is the only time loop game that I've played that truly works. Set in a solar system about twice the size of NYC by area (though mostly empty space), the game sets you lose to explore six planets, two moons, an asteroid and several assorted space installations. Think Mario Galaxy, with fewer (larger) planets, a more realistic movement model, and marginally less platforming -- but just as much whimsy, just as much conceptual uniqueness. Each planet has an inventive gimmick and poses unique challenges to exploration, whether it be crushing gravity or raging storms or crumbling rock or impossible geometry or a rising tide of sand, and each possesses enough secrets and challenges that you'll have to come back multiple times, following multiple leads; you can't see it all in one 22 minute loop. Not even close, in fact.
The loop ends with a supernova, with the sun expanding and then collapsing and then everything burning to ashes, and at the start you think, "okay, 22 minutes to stop a supernova, how am I gonna manage that?" But as you uncover alien ruins, translate their conversations, begin to follow in their footsteps, the intrinsic goal transforms from "stop the explosion of the sun" to "understand what's happening, and who came before." Providing directions, your ship's computer acts as a helpful quest tracker that doesn't throw up markers everywhere, but does collate the clues you've gathered, gesture to next destinations, and tell you when and where you might have missed something. As a result the game is much more accessible than the tricky, almost simulational flight model might make it seem at first (though there is a learning curve, to be sure); I was never lost or confused about where to go next, and if I needed a refresher I could just look at my computer -- but I also always had multiple leads to chase, multiple puzzles to solve, multiple planets to go back to.
I wouldn't call Outer Wilds a puzzle game. Mostly, you explore, gather information, and then follow that information to make a discovery: more actionable information, more answers to questions, more exciting discoveries to make. There are a few puzzles here, true, but almost invariably the solution is a trivial "come back at a different point in the loop." This won't put any wrinkles in your brain (didn't in mine, anyway, and I'm not very good at puzzles) but it is useful both as a way to demand meaningful backtracking and engagement with the loop, and to provide some diversion from exploration. I will say, toward the end of the game when options had narrowed, waiting did occasionally become a little tedious and dull, just standing there stock still for five minutes waiting for a room to open up so I could finish the game. But, you know, the game has a way to skip downtime, and besides, a little time to think about everything that's happened so far, how you feel about it all, and where it might be leading is never a bad thing. And the ending makes all the waiting worth it. My god, the ending! Up until I reached that point I had been thinking "this is good, but I don't see how anyone could find it life-changing; the ending answered that question, elevated the game tremendously in my mind, made me immediately go buy and download the "Echoes of the Eye" DLC and then not play it and just sit here at my desk for like hours occasionally switching tabs or windows trying to find diversion, trying to start writing about this game but first having to make sense of it...
Look, I'm embarrassing myself, so let's just add a tally to the "run-on sentences" column and move onto the heavy spoilers section. If you haven't played the game, here's where you get off! Go, with my recommendation! Actually, you know what, DM me and I'll buy you a copy of the game on Steam if you don't have it already. You really must play this game. And then, you must come back to read the heavy spoilers section, because I worked really hard on it!
Heavy spoilers
Early on, while exploring the shattered gravity cannon in orbit around Giant's Deep, I was stringing up an insane conspiracy board in my head. "Why haven't I seen any Nomai, when their technology is clearly still running right now?" "Oh my god, there's no indication of how long ago they lived, what if they're still here, as, like, the ghost matter?" "The numbers of eyes, what do they mean?" "Wait, they love exploration and so do we, what if I'm a Nomai somehow?" Later in the game I would find the actual answers to all these questions (mostly: "no, what the hell are you talking about?") but in a way I was right on the money with the last question. The Hearthians, Outer Wilds Ventures, you get the sense that these people are the way they are at least in part because of the Nomai. Implicitly, Nomai technology is what enables Hearthian spaceships made of sticks and glue to traverse the sky, what powers our probe launchers and our artificial gravity and probably more besides. And maybe, somehow, that adventurous Nomai spirit, that love of exploration, that search for understanding that we come to see as core to their culture -- maybe that crossed the ten-thousand year barrier to reach the Hearthians too: to instill a sense of wonder, to allow us to complete their great work and, twenty-two minutes at a time, at last discover the Eye of the Universe. To follow in their footsteps is to, gradually, come to see yourself as their child. And completing their Ash Twin Project as a natural, inevitable supernova -- the end of the universe -- provides the power it needed to finally work is bittersweet, knowing that they worked all their lives, after that horrible crash, after rebuilding their society stranded in this strange, alien system -- and never got to see the end, never were rewarded for their curiosity, were forced to build shrines and stand on the quantum moon and look up at the promise of an answer that could never be reached. Look, I'm tearing up a little just writing it. Though I probably can't name any single one of the Nomai (except Solanum, the one-sixth living one we get to meet and talk to) -- their lives, written on the walls, built into the space stations, held down by the gravity crystals, were too abstract to connect with individually -- I felt a tremendously strong connection to the Nomai as a whole, those people whose roadblocks, and whose discoveries, are so intimately and organically shared by the player.
Less strong is the connection to the other Hearthians, Feldspar and Hornfels and the rest. Though you can meet them and talk to them early on, and they have distinct personalities, and you can always hear them playing their lovely motif across the system in several instruments -- a system-wide orchestra, accessible on your signalscope -- I feel like we don't come back to them enough for them to feel like compelling characters. The questions you ask them are straightforward, often feel more like information-gathering then a natural conversation between fellow adventurers. You can chat with them about things you've discovered, but the rules for what discoveries are dialogue options seem fuzzy and imprecise so it's hard to know when, if ever, to go back to them. This is especially a shame because one of the Hearthians -- Gabbro -- is also aware of the time loop. It would be really neat if you and they could connect more over this; if they could have more of an arc, and be more thoroughly involved in the story's resolution. As-is it only really serves as setup for a mystery: you're connected to one of the three active statues you can see in the Ash Twin Project projections scattered across the system, and so is Gabbro -- so who's connected to the third?
I actually feel like the correct answer to this question (the probe tracking module) is probably one of the game's least interesting solutions, if necessary for the complex sci-fantasy system that sets the loop in motion. Especially because you get to meet an (indeterminately) living Nomai, and the interaction with her is one of the game's most exciting and compelling -- couldn't she have been the third mask, or at least a fourth?
Solanum is waiting for you on the Quantum Moon, at the south pole, looking up into the Eye of the Universe. Reaching her is technically side content, which is absurd, because for me it felt like the game's climax. Scattered across the solar system, you constantly encounter and explore the towers and hunks of rock and shuttles that provide, in bits and pieces, the answer to the Quantum Moon puzzle -- the escalating difficulty of reaching each of them aligning nicely with the increasingly narrow time windows that must be slipped through to resolve the main plot. As a result I was only able to reach and speak to Solanum near the end of the game, just before my final loop. Limited by the fact that she can't understand you (though you have a translator) it is a conversation conducted in spirals and gestures and pictograms -- and for me, while it didn't bring any new information, meeting one of the Nomai after understanding them and their work, getting to speak to one of them and befriend one of them and share her love of discovery was tremendously cathartic and also, a complete surprise. After seeing so many dead Nomai, their graves, the ghost matter that undid them, to find one still alive -- still, at the end, capable of sharing in the symphonic discovery that concludes the game, was a wonder.
At that conclusion, you take the warp core out of the Ash Twin project -- knowing that, if you slip up, or are eaten by the Anglerfish, it will mean a game over lends a tremendous amount of tension to the final loop, drifting past the enormous blind creatures in hideous and interminable silence to get to the Nomai Vessel, punch in the coordinates from the probe, and reach the Eye of the universe. Entering the Eye is an unsettling, surreal experience, punctuated by quantum flashes of planets you've been to, culminating in a bizarre and gravitationally improbable ascent -- or descent -- into what? a museum? a view onto the end of the unvierse? A thousand million billion supernovae all at once, and then, what?
We are building to something, certainly. Building musically, too. I've played a lot of space games this month and all of them have had minimalistic scores -- relying on the sounds of space, of creaking cracking hulls and hissing gasses and crawling creatures to construct their soundscapes, often shunning music entirely. Not so in Outer Wilds, where the music is integral to the experience. It is the sound of life, of existence -- whether it be the warm, nostalgic motif played and beat and whistled by the Hearthians across space, or the ominous, oozing wail of an activated projection stone, or the building synthetic climax as you remove the warp core and carry it, painstakingly, to the Vessel, or the mornful, time-distorted piano dirge when you pass by a grave, Andrew Prahlow's score is the emotional core of this game, so powerful and vital that it made me cry on the first loop, just exploring the village on Timber Hearth and hearing "Timber Hearth."
It made me cry a second time, too, at the end, after everything is gone, after I wandered in darkness until I found a forest, springing up around my consciousness, after I lit a fire there, after Esker sat down with me there with their rocking chair, after I found Riebeck's banjo and Chert's drum and Feldspar's harmonica and Gabbro's flute, found Solanum, standing with me on the shoulders of her people to reach for the dying stars, and gathered them, to play their song around the campfire, one last time.
It is easy to say: "Outer Wilds is not the first game to convey themes of existentialism in such an abstract and powerful way" and easy to say: "a surreal, musical approach to makes those themes felt works well, but not as well as Star Rail's use of color and" easy to say: "My frustrations with some of the game's clunkier elements diminished the overall experience;" easy even, to say, " But none of that mattered, as, sitting around that campfire, I was moved so deeply that..."
Easy, and true, and safe, and not enough. A song, I suppose, is worth these three thousand words, and more. If there is a way to be as raw, and vulnerable, as stripped back and laid open in writing as that song made me feel, sitting there in front of my computer at one in the morning, dishwasher whirring away above me, found family murmuring over a blunt on the back porch, I haven't found it in prose. Probably I never will, because life is so vanishingly short, and I'm never satisfied with my work. But through art, through music, through games like Outer Wilds, it is possible to see in a flash through a window to the next world, a world where I still do not matter, and am still not alone.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkMode: Standard Winning Bingo! Finished 10/25 ✅ Call of the Sea Fear ✅ Prey (2017) ✅ Paradise Killer Courage ✅ Dead Space (2023) Power ✅ Outer Wilds Creativity ✅ Holocure Quantity Fragmentation ✅...Mode: Standard Winning Bingo! Finished 10/25 Beauty
✅ Call of the SeaFear Silence
✅ Prey (2017)Order
✅ Paradise KillerCourage Darkness
✅ Dead Space (2023)Power Erosion
✅ Outer WildsCreativity Collaboration
✅ HolocureQuantity Fragmentation ★ Wildcard
✅ Card SharkEndurance Justice Progress Empathy Freedom
✅ A Short HikeHappiness Precision
✅ Celeste 64Restoration Morality Survival
✅ TacomaTime Pride And, well, that's probably me done for the month! Had a great time. Huge thanks to @kfwyre for running everything :)
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentI'm not going to do Paradise Killer the discourtesy of a full writeup, complete with praise and criticism, when I couldn't even finish it. A brief summary, nonetheless: I played this as prep for...I'm not going to do Paradise Killer the discourtesy of a full writeup, complete with praise and criticism, when I couldn't even finish it. A brief summary, nonetheless: I played this as prep for Outer Wilds, a game that's been an albatross around my neck for quite some time, because they allegedly have a conceptually similar setting: a smallish, handcrafted open world that is the site of a mystery, where you explore unguided to collect clues and leads, and then go to set locations chase them up. Unfortunately I couldn't get through Paradise Killer. Epic says I have about six hours of playtime, which is about a third of the game, and I'm finding myself dreading the idea of booting up the game again. Part of it is that, despite a host of interesting concepts, Paradise Killer hasn't really been able to hook me so far with its cast, hasn't wowed me with an unexpected twist, hasn't explored its really unique world in an interesting way yet. Probably it would at some point; this game is well-loved, and has a lot in common with art I really do like, but I feel like I haven't found the hook yet after quite a while playing. But worse is just that I find the game's weird anachronistic psychedelic vaporwave style totally grating. Charitably, it's a really good execution of a unique style that I just don't vibe with. Uncharitably, it's hideous, and gives me a headache if I look at it for too long, and to get through the game so far I've had to take a good amount of Naproxen. Perhaps I'm just not the right type of homosexual for Paradise Killer; regardless, another one in the "not for me" column.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentMy immediate instinct when you mentioned Control (which has long been one of my favorites) was to go, "no, they're not similar at all!" But thinking about it you're right that there are at least...My immediate instinct when you mentioned Control (which has long been one of my favorites) was to go, "no, they're not similar at all!" But thinking about it you're right that there are at least some narrative similarities. The Typhon and Hiss are similar antagonists; the world design philosophy of both games has a lot of apparent overlap; I can identify common thematic threads about consciousness and how humans try to harness the unfathomable. I think the reason my brain initially rebelled against the comparison is because these games feel tremendously different to play. Prey has what I would describe as a methodical pace of play. Moving through environments, gathering resources, reading text, even solving combat encounters -- for most of the game, all of it happens at this same sedate pace. Further, although at the end you can chose to blow up Talos 1, for most of the game I think it feels like you're in a kind of harmony with the environment, more working to put it right, or resist its corruption, than anything else. By contrast Control's gameplay pacing frequently alternates between the slow-paced reading exploring, and light puzzling sections and the violent, explosive, frantic combat encounters, which are so destructive that, combined with Jesse's motivations, playing Control feels almost revolutionary, like Jesse is smashing and radically transforming a system (one made of paperwork and 'béton brut'). Broadly I would assert that, thematically, Control is more interested in systems (of oppression) -- the FBC, its containment sector, its Panopticon -- whereas Prey is more interested in individuals, the people who are responsible for its disaster, how they try to maintain their own power -- Alex, Morgan, the mercenary guy. Maybe there's a good essay in the comparison.
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Comment on Follow up on the username thread: What Tildes users do you recognize when browsing and, without being rude or inflammatory, what is your impression of them? in ~tildes
Evie Link ParentYeah I mostly just recognize the Minecraft people, it always feels... serendipitous, maybe? to stumble across a comment from Noox or Durinthal or IsildursBane or you or Gravy or j0hn or Tea or...Yeah I mostly just recognize the Minecraft people, it always feels... serendipitous, maybe? to stumble across a comment from Noox or Durinthal or IsildursBane or you or Gravy or j0hn or Tea or anyone else from the server in an unrelated topic. I know this is a smaller site so it shouldn't be that surprising but
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentCW: Some real hater energy Call of the Sea: Beauty As someone who generally tries to be positive and even-handed when I write and think about art, I wasn’t really sure whether to even do a writeup...- Exemplary
CW: Some real hater energy
Call of the Sea: Beauty
As someone who generally tries to be positive and even-handed when I write and think about art, I wasn’t really sure whether to even do a writeup on Call of the Sea, a game which, ultimately, I thoroughly disliked. But if Call of the Sea is bad, it’s bad in a way that’s interesting to me, a neat little puzzle to explore, and so here I am, writing down my thoughts on it – if for no other reason, to get them out of my head. Nonetheless to stem the tide of negativity that will soon flow forth I will attempt to use the compliment sandwich method, starting and ending this writeup with praise, so let’s talk a bit about the environment.
We might conceive of Call of the Sea as a three-legged stool, where one leg is the visuals and environment design, one is the narrative and themes, and the third is the puzzles. And that first leg, at least, is a really good leg. Call of the Sea’s environments are consistently gorgeous – the art style is a little generic, that shiny plasticky Unreal Engine 4 Indie Game Look, but used to great effect: scenic vistas with vibrant colors, strange stone ruins vibrating with strange energy; a great wrecked ship, creaking and groaning beneath a raging thunderstorm – each of the game’s six levels takes you to a new environment that is both visually stunning and deliciously atmospheric. There was a brief period while playing this game, for thirty minutes at the end of chapter 2 and the start of chapter 3, where the game managed to convince me on the strength of its atmosphere and visuals and sound design alone that this would be a puzzle-y adventure game in name only; that we had taken a sharp turn towards cosmic horror, excellent cosmic horror, tense and scary and gloomy, starring a largely powerless heroine. This was ultimately an illusion. Though Call of the Sea appropriates elements of Lovecraft’s fiction, most notably “Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “Dagon,” it uses them to convey a story that is for the most part airy and whimsical, only occasionally muddied by the record of some death or tragedy.
Call of the Sea tells the tale of Norah Everhart, a woman with a mysterious chronic illness that causes unusual pigmentation on her skin, makes it hard for her to walk, and gives her a plot cough. Her husband, Harry, embarks on an obsessive search for a cure, which eventually leads him to arrange an expedition to a mysterious island in the Pacific, where he and his crew are beset by challenges and madness and failure and death. Playing as Norah, we arrive on the island in November of 1934, some months after the failed expedition, to investigate what happened to Harry, his team and the cure for Norah’s ailment. It is a strong setup, to be sure; one with all the right elements both for compelling puzzles and a moving, character-driven plot. We'll address the puzzles later but I found the plot weightless and immensely disappointing, for reasons that I don’t even need to provide spoilers to fully get into. In short: there is simply no compelling emotion here, no believable character work, no gripping drama. As we uncover what happened to the Everhart expedition, how it unraveled, it’s hard to be invested because Norah doesn’t know any of these people (except Harry), and the jumbles of personal effects we find in their tents aren’t near enough to build a solid picture, or even a passable sketch, of them and their relationships. Through Norah’s voiced inner monologue we do at least get a lot of information about her and Harry, her husband, how much she loves him, how her illness has been affecting her, how much better she (mysteriously) feels on this strange island – but Norah just tells us all these things, often in a wistful or reflective tone, that makes her life and relationship and struggles feel flat and insubstantial, just a series of mildly interesting anecdotes. As a result nothing in this story, none of the character beats, certainly not the bittersweet ending, had any emotional effect on me. Where the narrative is at its strongest, it’s exploring the mysterious connection between Norah and this mysterious island, but even that connection is painfully straightforward and literal in the end, and sometimes hinges on specific imagery that I have specifically seen used to much better effect in Returnal, a much less narrative-driven game.
Perhaps worse than the story’s utter lack of emotional impact is its thematic incohesion. It is customary for cosmic horror stories written in [current year] to have a Take on Lovecraft. He used his horrible creatures and the cults that sprung up around them and the transformations they fomented as a way to bash minorities – people of color, immigrants, artists, the working class, seafarers, lots of people really. But the reason these monsters, down to the specific creatures and environments Lovecraft devised, have stuck around is because there is something deeply compelling about them even absent the bigotry. Something nihilistic, about our utter inconsequence, powerlessness, our limitations, our inability to understand parts of our world. These themes can be explored without specifically incorporating Lovecraftian monsters – Control did so! Or by filing the serial numbers off and presenting your own take – Prey (2017) and Dead Space (2023) and Returnal (2021) all did so to some extent. But when a work as extensively cribs from Lovecraft as Call of the Sea does, you expect it to be having a conversation with him, to have something to say about his works. Not to be trite, but you expect it to answer the question, “if not minorities, what is the real cosmic horror?” The N.K. Jemisin novel The City We Became answers: racism, gentrification, the soul of a place being strangled by people who see it as dirty, unclean, degenerate. The John Carpenter film In The Mouth of Madness answers: a certain type of popular art, made to be consumed as escapism, keeping people from engaging with the real world. I am not sure that Call of the Sea has an answer to this question, not sure it has any central theme at all.
I can identify traces that seem to indicate the presence of a theme. Perhaps Call of the Sea is meant as a feminist text – when Norah says she feels more at home on the island than she ever did in the real world, is that anything? When she asks, “how could someone living in a cage all their life even know they were in a cage?” is that meant as commentary on what it was like to be a woman in 1934? But parts of the text contradict this: mainly, how much Norah loves Harry, how great their relationship is, and how the text doesn’t really say anything feminist when it comes to the other female character, expedition member Cassandra Ward. Okay, so maybe it’s meant to be an anticolonial text. This is maybe the strongest case I can make. The game spends a lot of time and goes to great lengths to distinguish Harry’s failed Everhart expedition, which often resulted to explosives, circumvention, or chauvinistic brute force to bypass the island’s puzzles – with Norah’s exploration of the same spaces, which involve listening to the island, actually solving its puzzles, and opening herself up to its black ooze. Maybe that’s why she survived and connected with the island, while disaster befell the Everhart expedition? But again the game contradicts this theme with an explanation about Norah’s special blood or whatever that both makes less thematic sense and feels a bit insulting frankly. And, worse, whatever anticolonial intentions the game might have had go straight out the window when Norah is treated to echoes of conversations by the fictional primordial Naacal tribe with gross dialogue like “We Naacal, we slaves, we suffer under masters,” just the most vile tribal stereotypes you can imagine. Okay, so maybe the story is about love, or transhumanism, or chronic illness, or the power of music? I could make a case for any of these, with textual evidence, and then also dismantle it with textual evidence from a different part of the game. The end result is that while I can pick up thematic threads I can’t weave them together, can’t figure out what, if anything, the game has to say; can’t find a strong emotional core to propel me through this story, or a thematic core to hold my interest.
That leaves the puzzles, which are inconsistent. The quick and dirty summary is that each of the six levels is structured like a really big escape room, with a few puzzles to solve usually leading up to one climactic puzzle that, in some cases, has a satisfying cumulative solution. When the game works, it scatters clues all around its environment. Norah copies them into her journal, takes them to a central puzzle, and solves it. This minimizes backtracking while requiring the player to actually explore the gorgeous world to solve the puzzle. Good stuff. But as the game wears on, the puzzles seem to get worse and worse. Less complex, less interesting, requiring more backtracking and, in one case, repeating literally the exact same puzzle like six times (it wasn’t good the first time). A few time I got stuck just because, despite knowing the solution to the puzzle, I couldn't find the right Thing to Interact With that would unlock the Contextual Prompt Required to Progress, which felt especially disappointing in the wake of the absurdly, context-agnostically interactive Prey, The puzzles are at their best in the opening three chapters of the game, when the wonderment is still alive and when you still think there might be some interesting answer to the questions the story seems to be setting up. But the puzzles get bad at about the same time the story reveals how shallow and incoherent it really is, which makes finishing the game a terrible slog.
I promised to make this critique a compliment sandwich but here I am having exhausted all I had to say about Call of the Sea, not having thought of a second piece of unalloyed praise. Call it an open-face compliment sandwich, if you like. I suppose maybe the production value, or the vocal performance of Cissy Jones as Norah, might be worth praising. Maybe there’s more to say about the game’s environmental storytelling, which, at times, does subtly convey some interesting information (without emotion, but still). But honestly, what would be the point? For however well made Call of the Sea is on a technical level, for however beautiful its world is, for however capable its leading lady, it all feels wasted on an inconsistent slate of puzzles and a story that I can’t even begin to connect with. -
Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentSpoilers follow! I do not spoil any of the major twists, but do discuss the game's premise, lore, and some minor details relating to the structure of the ending. Prey (2017): Silence It has come...- Exemplary
Spoilers follow! I do not spoil any of the major twists, but do discuss the game's premise, lore, and some minor details relating to the structure of the ending.
Prey (2017): Silence
It has come to my attention that I’ve been playing a lot of space station games this month – Dead Space, Tacoma, now Prey: all tell the story of some horrible disaster happening onboard a space station. Not just games, either; recently I’ve been reading Harrow the Ninth, a novel about the eldritch ghost of a dead planet attacking a space station – and listening to Splendor and Misery on repeat, a concept album about a slave who survives an uprising on a space ship. Last week @kfwyre mentioned “snow day” games, sort of comforting, warm and fuzzy experiences you return to; maybe my snow day indulgence is the “space station crisis” subgenre.
Playing them in such close proximity it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Prey (2017) and Dead Space (2023), and not just because of their similar surnames. Mechanically, narratively, and in terms of world design, they’re often remarkably similar, and while playing Prey I was constantly thinking of it in relation to Dead Space – not its more obvious direct inspirations, like Bioshock or Dishonored, which I played and enjoyed years ago. But while I was quite critical of many aspects of Dead Space – you can read my writeup on it here – I was, broadly, extremely satisfied with Prey, which ended up being everything I wanted Dead Space to be.
When talking about Dead Space, I praised its tenth chapter, which saw you travel to the crew quarters of the USG Ishimura and finally, finally get some sense of the humanity of the crew, how they navigated their world being devoured and their lives being destroyed by horrible monsters. The best way I can describe Prey’s world is that it’s as if Dead Space chapter 10 was a whole twenty hour game. In Prey, there is no escaping the crew of the Talos 1, the space station where the entire game takes place. A whole 250-person complement – all there in the world to be found – their bodies, or the eldritch creatures they’ve become, or the cells of survivors and holdouts they belong to. And not just them, but the detritus of their lives, their workstations and quarters and rec facilities and labs, horrible experiments intermixing with mundane life.
On Talos 1, they were making neuromods – technology that records brain signals and uploads them into a subject. Use a neuromod made by a master pianist, and you too can achieve mastery – with no effort, with only one payment to TranStar corporation. Where things go wrong is when our playable protagonist, Morgan Yu, decides to make neuromods based on these strange, quasi-magical aliens known as the typhon. Where regular neuromods could make you a genius, typhon neuromods could give you extraordinary powers – telepathy, psychokinesis, basically all the abilities from Dishonored. These might be fun in gameplay but it's implied that the typhon material in these neuromods is active, and actively dangerous: converts humans into Typhon when they die; becomes part of a golden entelechaic web that does… well, something, to be sure.
So, look, Morgan and her brother Alex and their family’s Big Evil Corporation do all kinds of vile human experimentation and implement ad-hoc authoritarian surveillance on their employees and make sophistic speeches and eventually all this wax-winged flying has predictable consequences. The typhon escape, overrun the station, kill almost everyone, disguise themselves as office furniture, start weaving their webs. Great, now go fix it. What really works about the story is not so much about these broad and predictable strokes – it’s the texture, the humanity of it all, that really made an impact. So the character you play as, Morgan, she set this whole disaster into motion. But since then she’s had her memory repeatedly wiped, and her personality written, by her brother. So a huge part of exploring the world is reconciling the person you are now (in my case, the typical self-sacrificial video game heroine) with the person you must have been to do those awful things. And the survivors on the station remember, too: remember what you did, and many of them distrust or even hate you for it. It’s a premise that immediately created a lot of narrative buy-in for me. Buy-in the game capitalizes on, by regularly giving the player choices for how they interact with the other people on the station: choices that are often less black-and-white than those present in Arkane’s previous games, and have a real impact both on the characters you meet and, presumably, the one you inhabit. Unfortunately Morgan Yu is a silent protagonist, which I’m so fucking over at this point. A compromise is being made here, of course: we are sacrificing the massive and compelling drama that would come from Morgan actually, you know, talking to other characters (as opposed to her main verbs of picking things up in one place and putting them down in another, killing enemies, or jumping around looking for secret passwords) – for the ability to self-insert to some extent, to embody Morgan and map your own opinions and experiences with the game onto her (or him, I guess, if you chose to play as male Morgan). I don’t think this compromise is worth it, personally, especially because Morgan is a person in the world who should, at least in some cases, have good reason to talk to these characters that she knew in a past life, and because interacting with these characters is like a major part of the game that often feels a little stunted because Morgan can’t talk. But I digress.
I tend to think of the immersive sim genre as a series of very interesting compromises. Combat in Prey is not deep, or obviously expressive, or even really mechanically compelling. You rarely fight more than a couple enemies at once; encounters are slow and attritive; everything costs huge amounts of resources that you might not have a surefit of. But of course, despite the lack of depth, there’s still a huge amount of breadth, and from that breadth comes the fun. All of your weapons and grenades and, if you unlock them, combat-applicable neuromods are completely unique and usable against different sets of the dozen-or-so highly differentiated enemy types. The gear and abilities you choose to upgrade determine what enemy types will be pushovers, and what types will be intractable. And so you can gauge, when you see an encounter over in the next room, how thorny it will be for you. Are you equipped for it? Or should you use your expansive movement toolset (which, again, is not mechanically deep, but has a lot of options) to bypass it entirely – build a path over it with the Gloo Gun; sneak past with the shadow dash? My point is that Prey gives you a lot of options for how to engage with its lush, gorgeous world, at the expense that each individual option is a bit uninteresting. But, in aggregate, you get a wonderfully interactive sandbox that often has this almost natural-language quality of “if you can think of it, you can probably do it.”
The problem is that this design approach is at its best and most enjoyable when the player has full access to a wider toolset. But Prey has progression systems that seem to undercut that. Combat abilities must be paid for. Weapons are upgraded separately. Many neuromods are strong – game-changing even – but highly specialized, so spending the very limited resources to unlock them might feel like it locks you into a particular mode of engagement. There are THREE achievements for beating the game without unlocking a wide variety of upgrades. The problem with that popup at the beginning of the game that says stuff like “play your way” and “if you can think of it, you can do it” (an ImSim genre convention) is that any one single “your way” isn’t going to be that interesting. That hacking minigame is fine but it’s not fine enough to sustain 20 hours of gameplay. And because I knew this going in, I was able to invest in a wider swath of my toolset, to plan my upgrades to always have a variety of options and resources available – to not lock myself into one potentially boring playstyle the whole time. To have a lot of fun with the combat and the hacking and the sneaking around because I did all three! But I can certainly imagine someone bouncing off Prey early, before they have a wide toolset – or never even getting one. That’s a shame.
You know what’s not a shame? The world design. I described Dead Space’s Ishimura as tactile – a space you could touch, feel, manipulate, shape. Talos 1 has a similar quality, maybe not tactile, but palpable let’s say. Whereas in Dead Space most of the environments you explore are systems – engines, power distribution, food production, etc., in Prey much more time and space is given to living spaces: quarters, offices, gardens, entertainment options. By the end of Dead Space I felt like I knew how it would feel to fix the Ishimura; by the end of Prey, I felt like I knew how it would feel to live and work on Talos 1, this orbital company town rendered in a lavish post-art deco style, vocal luxury that thinks itself inconspicuous. The sense of interconnectedness is perhaps not as strong in Prey; the sense of place, however, is unmatched, and facilitated by the breadth of interactivity. Everything can be interacted with, usually in multiple ways. Every door can be opened, usually in multiple ways. Every email can be read, and a lot of them are about nonsense, D&D games or melodramatic sapphic breakups or – what’s this, a secret far-reaching plot to surveil Dr. Gallegos? Well I need to follow up on that one for sure!
This all synergizes very neatly with the monster design. The first, most basic enemy you’ll encounter is a mimic, which works like the other players from Prop Hunt; can disguise itself as anything – environmental props: coffee mugs, chairs desk lamps; useful pick-ups: medkits, ammo, turrets – or even, on one memorable occasion, as the gory corpse of an already killed mimic. So everything in the lush, detailed environments is interactable, and anything interactable could be an enemy in hiding. Especially early in the game, when mimics still pose a credible threat to the underprepared Morgan, this creates an almost unprecedented level of tension, demands close attention to detail. Not long ago I played The Exit 8, a truly harrowing horror game about finding problems, discrepancies, with an ordinary environment. The sense of paranoia Prey fostered in its early hours was similar: similarly dreadful, promoted a similar level of caution and methodical play. But where in The Exit 8 that feeling was the whole point, in Prey it serves another purpose too: if you have to pay close attention to the environment to survive, it also encourages you to engage with the environment fully. To look carefully for loot (as well as mimics) or alternate pathways or alternate solutions. Prey’s paranoid early hours are extremely good at immersing the player in its environment and promoting the right kind of engagement with it.
So I like Prey, like it a lot, and feel bad for putting it off for this long. I am finding that I don’t have all that much to say about the narrative, which I largely liked, even if it was clunky in places and ended with a twist that I didn’t much care for. But, I am gonna rant about that ending a bit; again, some spoilers follow!
What is it with video games and this allergy to having falling action? I'm looking through my library now and like half of these game or more have endings that I would describe as “abrupt,” ending essentially right after the final boss or whatever. Prey, to its credit, has no final boss; the enormous horrible creature that shows up at the end is barely comprehensible, much less killable. But the game still ends right on the climax (or did in the ending pathway I chose) and apart from a very brief post-credits epilogue to reveal The Twist and summarize your choices, cRPG-style, that’s it. That’s it? Dead Space was the same way. Most games with a narrative are the same way, I’d wager. I’m sure there are plenty of counter-examples, and games that do an abrupt ending well, but off the top of my head I can only immediately think of Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 (whose epilogue was added in a post-launch patch!) as games that buck this trend, that don’t leave me sitting there scratching my head like, “oh, that was the ending?” Okay as I write this more counterexamples are coming to me but you get the point. Prey ended, and as many games do, left me wanting more in a bad way; more resolution, more time with the characters and world; more compelling drama, more marination in the impact of my choices. But it also left me wanting more in a good way. More games with detailed and engaging worlds, more compelling decision-making, more breadth of interactivity. More space stations! Prey provided where so many games fail to, and as a result was for me a cohesive and really delightful experience. -
Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkThis week's writeups in the replies. Thank you to everyone who's read them thus far :) Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Call of the Sea Fear Prey (2017) Paradise Killer Courage Dead Space...This week's writeups in the replies. Thank you to everyone who's read them thus far :)
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Beauty
Call of the SeaFear Silence
Prey (2017)Order
Paradise KillerCourage Darkness
Dead Space (2023)Power Erosion Creativity Collaboration
HolocureQuantity Fragmentation ★ Wildcard Endurance Justice Progress Empathy Freedom
A Short HikeHappiness Precision
Celeste 64: Fragments
of the MountainRestoration Morality Survival
TacomaTime Pride -
Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentThis writeup turned out to be not so much an analysis of the game in question as it is an analysis of my current mental state. Proceed with caution. Celeste 64 -- Precision I don't really have...- Exemplary
This writeup turned out to be not so much an analysis of the game in question as it is an analysis of my current mental state. Proceed with caution.
Celeste 64 -- Precision
I don't really have experience with platformers, so I'll try to keep this quick. In my entire life I've played like three: Mario Galaxy, Mario Galaxy 2, Celeste (which I really, really struggled to finish) and various assorted non-platformer games with platforming elements: Ori, Hollow Knight, Titanfall 2, the like. And I've never really liked the genre. I like movement, the process of expressing yourself by traversing the game world, but I tend to struggle with the more specific mechanical demands of level-based platforming. In fact I only played the original Celeste out of a vague sense of transgender obligation, and kind of resented it the whole time.
So what is Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain? I guess it's a kind of game-jam-y attempt to transform Celeste's mechanics into a 3D environment, loosely inspired by Mario 64 and its family of early 3D platformers. Made in a week, released for free on itch.io, taking maybe an hour and a half to complete (less if you're not as bad as I am at platforming) this is the kind of game that it would be tremendously rude to be critical of. Not that I have anything critical to say, beyond the usual "this isn't for me." The movement system works, the Celeste mechanics that are present have translated surprisingly well into 3D, there was even one platforming puzzle -- one involving wall climbing and jumping precisely to collect a bunch of rings scattered above spikes -- that genuinely delighted me. I suppose it's also nice to catch up with the Madeline and the other characters I vaguely remember from years and years ago, before I had access to HRT.
So, cards on the table, I didn't really enjoy this game. There were a couple levels I found irritatingly precise, like I barely had the skill to clear them. And I'm not connected enough either to Mario 64 or Celeste for this to hold much nostalgic value for me. But for all that, the "ending" of the game hit me like a truck. Or, well, maybe a slow-moving minivan, but it hit hard is what I'm saying.
Spoilers follow, not that this is a narrative game with much to spoil in it.
At the peak of the game world, Madeline meets with Badeline, who I guess is like the embodiment of her insecurities and psychological issues, and they talk about some nonspecific big change that they're afraid of. Madeline says that maybe this is why she's returned to Celeste mountain, and this time reformulated it as an homage to a game (probably Mario 64) that she loved as a kid. You know, retreating into nostalgia in order to feel safe, all that.
Some of my earliest and fondest gaming memories are of playing the Super Mario Galaxy games on the Wii when I was like ten or eleven or fourteen and just being so in love with it all, not only with the particulars of those games but with the idea of games in general, the idea of the enormous world that contained like a hundred other worlds and you could step into all of them, listen and hear and in some intangible way feel it all. My parents, controlling as they were, shaped my interactions with art, required everything I read or watched as a kid to be "redemptive" or "constructive" but with those earliest games I played, Minecraft and Mario Galaxy and Portal, I felt like I was able to experience art for the first time, not as something that was supposed to teach me something or improve me in some way, but as art, an aura, this overwhelming thing that was valuable unto itself. It's maybe important to come to terms with the fact that I will never feel that way again, that pursuing the nostalgia of those earliest experiences is just chasing ghosts, or becoming stagnant water, or some other evocative simile.
Yet still I play Minecraft when I'm feeling stressed (on the Tildes Minecraft Server! why not drop by, take a look around?). Still I booted up Celeste 64, knowing I wouldn't enjoy it, and I'm realizing now that maybe I did that because I just wanted to play Mario Galaxy again -- or, maybe, just wanted to be twelve again, not be hurting and tired and a little sad all the time. And it's funny, or at least ironic, that Celeste 64 didn't give me what I was after, but it did at least, with a couple lines of dialogue, make me realize what I wanted, why I was there.
I don't know what to do about this. Madeline says "you're allowed to be afraid," (but you should still keep moving forward); Acheron from Honkai: Star Rail says "Even if the ending has been predetermined, that's fine... on the road to the end, there are still many things we can do," and maybe it's time to admit that that I'm a bit burned out on all this moving forward and existentialism stuff, even if it is true. Maybe it's okay to take a little while and just soak in comfortable nostalgia, if you're aware of what you're doing and why. Also, maybe I need to go to the grocery store tomorrow morning, and it's getting late, and being self-aware to the point of self-flagellation is not a virtue. God only knows.
Anyway if you like 3D platforms this is literally free on itch and an hour long so go crazy. I guess there's no tutorial for the controls but you can figure it out, you're an adult.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentDon't apologize! I'm very glad for the feedback, and to hear your thoughts as well :)Don't apologize! I'm very glad for the feedback, and to hear your thoughts as well :)
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )Link ParentI really do want to strongly recommend Tacoma, so I'll try to avoid getting into the heavier more spoiler-y discussions of the narrative until the end; will still be talking about the themes and...- Exemplary
I really do want to strongly recommend Tacoma, so I'll try to avoid getting into the heavier more spoiler-y discussions of the narrative until the end; will still be talking about the themes and premise of the game before that, though.
Tacoma -- Survival
Set in orbit around the moon in 2088, Tacoma sees you arrive at a lifeless space station. You're a contractor, tasked with retrieving the space station AI, but as you explore the station, you'll also witness some of the station's last recorded surveillance footage, rendered in the space as low-res AR holograms, where the small crew of 6 experience a disaster and fight for survival. If you've played The Return of the Obra Dinn, this is that without the puzzle mechanics; if you've played Cyberpunk 2077, this is basically the braindance sequences from those games, but two hours long.
This is a favourite genre of mine: short narrative games -- Before Your Eyes, The Beginner's Guide, What Remains of Edith Finch -- that have an interesting enough hook to tie the player more closely into the world. Here, that's the flow of watching these recorded scenes play out. Often a scene will have two or three different conversations going at the same time, in different parts of the room. Sometimes, these conversations are plot critical, or might see characters accessing computers with critical files that you also need to access and view. Other times, these conversations are pointless, but colorful. But to follow them all, you'll be watching the same recording multiple times, fast-forwarding or rewinding to see where two people went off to chat after a larger conversation broke up into three smaller ones. It's hard to explain, but I've never seen a game do a better job of capturing the fluidity of social dynamics in a group setting. It's pretty impressive, how for every scene there's clearly been a lot of thought put into each character, even the vestigial ones -- and how they'll respond differently to each new plan or piece of information. How some might be galvanized into action; how others might break down alone but ensure they're putting on a brave face for others.
The characters really shine here. I've played games with more fully-realized characters, but maybe not more believable ones. Through the surveillance systems, you catch fragments of each person -- not only during big group conversations, scenes from the crisis, but also during much older recorded moments -- reading or singing in the shower or playing video games together -- and also emails, texts with family, and the like from computers. And the sum of these fragments are very believable, if low-resolution, sketches of a compelling cast.
This all does feel a bit like a violation of privacy, obviously. No one wants to be recorded in the shower, and viewing these private moments is profoundly uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable that the footage exists at all, and moreso even then the games' obvious and heavy-handed class and AI commentary I was thinking about surveillance throughout all of this. Implicitly, I think the game poses questions about what to do with this gross and unethical footage now that it exists. On the one hand, viewing even the group conversations that take place aboard the Tacoma sometimes feels invasive, like looking in on a family dinner, but on the other, if watching these videos can in some form preserve the memory of the presumably dead crew, and bring to light what happened to them, maybe there's value in that. It's a question I hadn't thought about before. Can the very surveillance systems created to oppress people be used against their oppressors? Tacoma seems to think it's at least worth considering.
As an aside, last week I played Dead Space (2023) and I think there are some details in this game that show that it was at least a little bit inspired by Dead Space; likewise the plot of one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes (from when I first watched it years ago, anyway), "Oxygen," seems so similar to this game's that it strains the credibility of "parallel thinking." It's always fun to catch these similarities, to be able to contextualize a work with its ancestors and its descendants, to try and trace a genealogy of inspiration.
Two more random bits of praise before we get into spoilers.
- This game does a good job, I think, of promoting a specific mode of engagement with the player. It understand that, with its somewhat nonlinear mode of storytelling, and with the complex themes it tries to tackle (not always elegantly, mind), the player will need time to reflect. As a result the station's wheel and spoke design really slows the player down between chapters, for a non-interactive elevator ride with only some light music, to think things through and prepare for the store to continue. Likewise the ability to pause, rewind, even leave during the middle of critical dialogue scenes creates a kind of Brechtian sense of distance between the player and the blobby, imperfectly rendered characters, which again drives a specific kind of engagement with the text. It's almost the opposite of, say, Edith Finch, which uses every dirty little trick in the book to connect you to the characters as quickly and viscerally as possible. I'll talk about the drawbacks of this approach in the spoiler section, but I think it's worth praising for its uniqueness and for how well it was accomplished.
- For a 2018 game, Tacoma feels really relevant, almost prescient, now. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and lately I've been hearing a lot of talk about pushing for some kind of semi-autonomous Cascadia regional bloc; in Tacoma's world, the US seems to have Balkanized, and Cascadia is one of the new nation-states. And real-world companies Amazon and Carnival Cruises appear as minor players in the game's story, which is completely wild. But beyond minor cosmetic stuff, it's the central thematic questions that Tacoma deals with -- questions of AI autonomy, surveillance, labor rights in an evolving market -- that feel most relevant, and for the most part Tacoma addresses them with a clear-eyed, historically accurate view that feels so much more compelling and plausible and immediate than the often cartoonish examinations of these questions you see in games like Cyberpunk or the Outer Worlds.
Okay, spoiler time. I'm mostly just gonna criticize the ending here so it's not really anything important. Before that, let's wrap it up: quibbles with the ending notwithstanding, I think Tacoma is a tight, engaging, and fairly original little narrative package. If you like this type of short narrative game it's absolutely worth your time; I do, and I really enjoyed it for what it was.
Tacoma spoilers
That said, the saccharine ending to this thing landed badly for me. It's not necessarily that it's unbelievable, but the fact that everyone survives at the end, even the AI, left a bitter taste in my mouth. I guess I'm looking around at the real world and thinking "if only it were that easy; if only cruise companies and secret string-pulling AI rights groups could swoop in and save the day; if only the internet were so staunchly opposed to corporate ratfuckery." I think the most plausible reading of the game's central theme, binding up all its commentary on labor and AI and government and surveillance into one, is this: "The tools of the oppressor can be used to keep each other safe, and fight back, as long as we don't forget our humanity, or let go of the bonds we share." This is a noble theme, well expressed, but maybe I'm just not in the right headspace to accept it.
Perhaps more cripplingly, the detachment that the game has, I think, created between the player and the characters really undermines the ending. Frankly I don't feel anything about the death or survival of the crew one way or the other -- thus far the game has encouraged me to intellectualize the themes and characters and so I have. And so, when everybody lives, I don't get the feeling of "oh thank God, I'm so relieved," I get thoughts of "I just am not sure that I buy this ending in the context of the world." And I like these characters, they're fantastically written and phenomenally acted, but I guess the problem is that I only experience them as characters, not as people deserving of empathy.
In the final sequence leading up to the ending, the game does make more of an attempt to align the player's experience with the characters', cutting out all rewinding, and syncing the recordings of one character discovering the truth with the player discovering that same truth, so that it kind of feels like you're coming to the realization together. It's neat as a climax to the game's primary mechanic, I guess, but in terms of actually creating empathy it feels like it's too little to late.
My favorite narrative games, listed earlier, are all willing to hold nothing back, to just absolutely punch you in the gut, fuck you up emotionally. I guess what Tacoma has done in this respect, with its hopeful ending, is subvert genre conventions. Maybe I wasn't in the right place for it, maybe I'm just a masochist, but it doesn't manage to make it work in my opinion.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkThis week's writeup(s) below Evie's bingo card (Standard/Flow) Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Beauty Fear Silence Order Courage Dead Space (2023) Power Erosion Creativity Holocure Quantity...This week's writeup(s) below
Evie's bingo card (Standard/Flow)
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Beauty Fear Silence Order Courage Darkness
Dead Space (2023)Power Erosion Creativity Collaboration
HolocureQuantity Fragmentation ★ Wildcard Endurance Justice Progress Empathy Freedom
A Short HikeHappiness Precision
Celeste 64: Fragments
of the MountainRestoration Morality Survival
TacomaTime Pride -
Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 1 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentAfter the comparatively very heavy Dead Space, and with the election looming, this was a nice palette cleanser. *A Short Hike* -- Freedom A Short Hike is the leanest open world exploration game...After the comparatively very heavy Dead Space, and with the election looming, this was a nice palette cleanser.
*A Short Hike* -- Freedom
A Short Hike is the leanest open world exploration game I've ever played. It's a game about exploring the tiny provincial park surrounding Hawk's Peak, where the ultimate goal is to summit the peak, get cellphone reception, and make a phone call. You play as a flightless bird -- a penguin? and the main mode of progression is collecting these golden feathers, which each add an additional double jump (wing flap) to your arsenal. You do this by exploring, talking to other parkgoers, completing small quest lines, etc. There's no map, and no markers, so you have to rely on your memory of the space and your compass and the helpful in-world signage to navigate.
So this is all very pleasant. I kind of expected the game to be a walking simulator going in, but was delighted to find that a lot of the game hinges on its smooth movement system. There's the feathers, the climbing, the gliding, and the jumping, which all feel intuitive and responsive. And the structure of the game world -- an archipelago surrounding a peak -- means that as you climb, it's easy to glide back down to almost anywhere on the map. That map felt pretty big at the start, but I was surprised by how much it seemed to shrink down as I understood its interconnectedness, unlocked shortcuts, and expanded the movement toolset.
The dialogue here has a sort of slice-of-life feel. Characters do have problems and worries, but they're all very small and human and everyday. There's no big plot twists or drama or even really conflict -- apart from the sinister corvid who monopolizes the feather market -- nothing that can't be solved with a little climbing, fishing, or gathering seashells. There is perhaps something to be said about the fact that most of the characters you meet are young children, but we're told that the player character, Claire, is entering adulthood, and the phone call she makes at the end is comparatively a very emotionally fraught, adult phone call. Maybe the game could be read as a bildungsroman? But this is a work that doesn't really lend itself to that kind of analysis. It's simple, sweet, fun to play, and about two or three hours long if you're exploring thoroughly. Really worth it in my opinion
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 1 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )Link ParentThere's not that much to say about Holocure -- Collaboration Fundamentally what this is is a very sound Vampire Survivors-type game with an ultralight Animal Crossing-style farming and fishing sim...There's not that much to say about
Holocure -- Collaboration
Fundamentally what this is is a very sound Vampire Survivors-type game with an ultralight Animal Crossing-style farming and fishing sim grafted on, and a lot of in-jokes that I don't get, having never really watched Hololive sreams. It's a free and totaly unmonetized fangame made for an international VTuber corporation, and I've occasionally heard that it's the best Vampire Survivors successor. I don't agree with that, but it is a more relaxing and varied game than this subgenre usually plays host to; taking a few minutes to farm and fish between runs does wonders for the pacing and probably the long-term replayability of the game. I expect to play it more throughout the month, whenever I need to lay off the more story-driven games and listen to an audiobook or whatever. There are some interesting twists to the Survivors formula here: there's been a great effort to give every playable character a unique kit and playstyle, which is a great source of differentiation from run to run. But nothing super groundbreaking to write home about. It's a well made fangame; if you like Vampire Survivors, probably worth at least a couple hours.I'm kind of cheating by listing it for "Collaboration," by the way. Because the playable characters are all modeled after streamers, the weapon ascension mechanic -- where you combine two maxed out weapons into one even stronger unique one -- is called the "Collab" system. This is a stretch if I've ever seen one, considering the gameplay has no sense of collaboration and indeed, no multiplayer component to be found. But it's in the same row as Darkness on my Bingo card, so we're counting it.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 1 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentMild spoilers follow. Tl;DR: The game is very well made, but I don't really like it. *Dead Space* (2023) -- Darkness Probably Dead Space's greatest strength is its tactility. I use this term where...- Exemplary
Mild spoilers follow. Tl;DR: The game is very well made, but I don't really like it.
*Dead Space* (2023) -- Darkness
Probably Dead Space's greatest strength is its tactility. I use this term where I might, for another game, use the word *immersion*; more than anything, the USG Ishimura, the enormous space ship where eleven of the action-horror game's twelve chapters takes place, felt like I could reach through the screen and *touch* it; my many interactions with the failing ship's engines and power subsytems and tram stations and mining equipment felt *real*. This is facilitated, most of all, by the game's cinematography. Dead Space is styled as a oner, and with one minor exception that's not worth going into it, it really is. Not in the God of War (2018) sense, where it feels like there's a cameraman present, handcam shake and all, but the 'shot' is frequently broken by pause screens and UI, but in the true sense, where all of the UI is diagtetic. There's no fancy cinematography here -- even in the game's half dozen short cutcenes -- as a result, the presence of the camera isn't felt, and I was really connected with the main character Isaac.Further contributing to this feeling of solidity is the verbs available to the player. Most of your combat toolset -- and all of the fun parts of it -- is made up of nontraditional guns; specialized tools like a circular saw or a plasma cutter or a kind of magnetic telekinesis: things that Isaac would plausibly use in his work as a repair technician. And you actually use these things to actually repair the Ishimura -- solve its mechanical failures, resolve the crisis, hopefully escape alive -- almost as much as you use them for combat.
For the first maybe sixty percent of the game, Dead Space feels like the video game version of those Andy Weir novels -- a story about a competent guy (and his teammates) stabilizing a dire situation while looking for a way out. I will, shortly, stop praising this game and say that that's a bad thing, but for now it must be acknowledged that it is very fun, and different, to play a game where you're a competent guy who fixes thing (not just a killing machine); it feels satisfying (and, again, delightfully tactile), to reroute power from administration to asteroid defense, to swap out a damaged tram car, to get the centrifuge back up and running. One of the game's neatest mechanics, which it occasionally uses to great effect, is that power rerouting. From time to time, you'll be presented with a breaker box, and a decision: to move forward, do you want to turn off the lights, or the oxygen (and, with the oxygen, the sound)? Or, more dreadfully, no decision at all: to unlock that plot critical door on the other side of the room, you have to turn off the lights, and fight your way back over there in near-total darkness, relying on your memory of the space, and the echoing sound cues from the game's intimidating monsters.
"Intimidating" is maybe a strong word. My biggest frustration with Dead Space is that, for all its heavy atmosphere and darkness and jumpscares and gore and monsters, it almost never actually scared me. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that this is an action game first and foremost, which prevents any of the monsters from really posing a credible threat: you have to be able to dismember and kill them and throw them around! It's the primary game loop! And it's fun as hell -- but the horror aspect suffers, I think. As does the resource economy, which, on Normal difficulty, felt a bit fucked. For significant parts of the game I seemed to vacillate wildly between having an embarrassment of ammo and health and none at all, almost at random. So at some point you realize that the economy doesn't matter at all, and you can just use all your resources with wild abandon, knowing that the game will detect that you're low and cough up some more; after all this is an action game, with mandatory combat encounters; you can't exactly be allowed to run out of health and ammo! Maybe I'd have a better time on a higher difficulty. But I refrained from raising it because, at times, the difficulty hit a sweet spot for me, demanded just the right amount of efficiency and care and skill to make it out of a tough encounter. But at other times, especially in the late game, it felt trivially easy -- but spongy, with miniboss enemies taking far too long to kill long after any serious threat they presented had been neutralized. This poor balancing detracts from the strength of the combat's main verbs, the dismemberment and the launching shards of bone and the useful environmental hazards that make the core loop so fun. And this all reaches its perihelion with the absolutely dogshit final boss, a big gore monster with no interesting mechanics that can be trivialized by slowly strafing left to right, for like five entire minutes.
There was one chapter of the game -- Chapter 10 -- that I found really compelling and scary. It takes a while to build any serious character drama, or incorporate any interesting psychological elements, but by the time the Ishimura is stable by the end of the second act, Isaac has discovered the source of the disaster, and the horrible muations on the ship: a strange manmade relic called the Marker, which exerts profound psychological effects on everyone around it, Isaac included. With these hallucinations comes some compelling dramatic irony: Isaac sees and touches and works with his wife, who, it should be immediately clear to the player, is like super dead. His mission markers are sometimes written in an incomprehensible language. He hears whispers from his dead friends and coworkers. He's forced to work with and against other survivors, who are just as if not more corrupted then he is, while not being sure of their motives or his own perceptions. He learns how the crew of the Ishimura, all sleeping on top of each other, experienced the same thing and fractured because of it; some killing themselves to avoid becoming monsters; some killing themselves out of a religious desire to be reunited with the dead -- and becoming monsters in the process. It's compelling, if limited, stuff -- sure, the commentary about religion and colonialism and grief and indoctrination is broad, but not nothing! Sure, suicide is used purely as shock imagery, in a way that I found distasteful, but at least it's contextualized and makes sense. Too bad that it took basically like nine chapters of rerouting power and being the competent repair guy -- with minimal diversion to do a light bit of setup that wouldn't pay off till you'd almost forgotten about it -- for these interesting narrative tricks to come into play. And shame that the game doesn't stick the landing, with a narrative resolution that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny -- no matter how much I try, I just cannot make any sense of certain characters' actions from what we know of their motives.
I suppose it doesn't help that I've seen this done, better, before.
In Square Enix's Guardians of the Galaxy (2021) you play as a crew of heroes fighting an antagonist known as the Universal Church, who are using faith energy harvested from other planets to trap people in a hive mind that promises reunion with lost loved ones, forever. This bears a striking similarity to the broad strokes of the plot of Dead Space (2008), where an antagonist known as the church of Unitology uses a relic from the core of a planet to trap people in a fleshy hive mind that promises reunion with lost loved ones forever. One level in GotG even sees you boarding a ship called The Rock and, if my unreliable memory serves, recreating almost beat for beat the opening of Dead Space -- with less gore, and more Marvel-y quips, but about the same amount of power rerouting. What I'm saying is that the influence is clear, but GotG has lifted some of Dead Space's core premise and improved upon it by focusing on the characters, their experiences, and how the Church's 'Promise' affects them and works on them. I found myself deeply invested in the story of the characters, despite not being a Marvel fan, and was moved to tears by the resolution of the plot, which hinges on those characters, their relationships, and the love they have for each other. Sure, there's a crappy boss fight at the coda, but the characters are what's important to this story, and they're what the climax ultimately hinges on.
Charitably, you could say that the characters aren't what's important in Dead Space. The Ishimura, and the monsters, and the plasma gun are what's important, and the character are mostly functional until the third act where we do get some movement. That's where the Andy Weir comparison comes back in, by the way. But when Isaac unquestioningly follows his dead wife's instructions to "make us whole" and reunite with his dead mother (a Unitology slogan? or a command from the Marker that just sounds like one?) it strains credibility. Like the main thing we know about his wife Nicole is that she hated the church, and tried to get people out of it, which is how she and Isaac met. So why isn't Isaac questioning her? Well, because the Marker's making him crazy, I guess, but that's the extent of things. There's no grounded character explanation, no conversation between Isaac and 'Nicole' that explores why Isaac wants to believe that his wife is alive so badly that he erases her identity. No, just bland obeisance. It's disappointing. It makes the obvious reveal that his wife is dead feel weightless, because it's hard to connect with Isaac's emotions: without knowing why the illusion was so seductive to him, how am I supposed to care that it's been shattered?
Some of my favorite games, the ones that have scared me the most, in the most lasting ways, are action games with psychological horror elements. I think of the Astronaut and the house sequences in Returnal, or the Hiss chant in Control. I guess I was hoping Dead Space would be that; would lean more heavily on the psychological and narrative aspects then the gore and monster aspects. Maybe my dislike of this extremely well-made and well-received remake is just disappointment; the game wasn't what I wanted it to be, and its audience loved it. I guess I'll put this one in the 'Not for me' column. But damn, did I want to love it too.
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Comment on November 2024 Backlog Burner: Week 1 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkMaking good progress this week so far. Evie's bingo card (Standard/Flow) Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Beauty Fear Silence Order Courage Dead Space (2023) Power Erosion Creativity Holocure...Making good progress this week so far.
Evie's bingo card (Standard/Flow)
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 0/25 Beauty Fear Silence Order Courage Darkness
Dead Space (2023)Power Erosion Creativity Collaboration
HolocureQuantity Fragmentation ★ Wildcard Endurance Justice Progress Empathy Freedom
A Short HikeHappiness Precision Restoration Morality Survival Time Pride
I've had laser on my face and legs. I went to I think three biweekly sessions? I have fair skin and very light, wispy hair, so the effectiveness wasn't as high as it would be for you (probably gonna do electrolysis eventually). In terms of sensation, it feels like getting flicked hard by a rubber band repeatedly during the session, and like having a mild sunburn after. It hurts, but hurts in a way that had me giggling; it isn't so bad. This was a few years ago now. It worked alright for me -- I only have to shave my face once or twice a week now, and my legs every couple weeks -- but didn't totally stop all growth, and I think the effectiveness has definitely diminished with time. That said I did fewer than the recommended number of sessions so that could play a role too. Me and two of my family members did it and none of us have had any damage or health issues from it.