Category Archives: Steam Games

Flem, Sticky Little Preview

Posted on by thre3zekiel

Flem_logo

This game is the most adorable game about a booger I have ever played.  Your main character is a little pixel snot, and the style of this game reflects the silliness having such a main character implies.  Its retro-style pixel art and chiptune music make it feel like a long-lost classic from the SNES, but its divergence from the usual recipe of those older games is what makes this game so much fun.  It is also a title appearing this week at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany at the Unity 3D stand.

Flem is a booger.  The first title I saw when I loaded the game read “One day in your nose…”  The tutorial takes place in a little alcove of someone’s nose where other little boogers teach you everything how you will interact with the game.  First there is your basic movement: left, right and jump.  The most important feature of movement is the roll.  Using roll is similar to running in that it increases speed, but it’s a toggle, so you don’t stop rolling until you hit the button again.  When I started, I was as careful as I could be; but once I realized how to progress in the game, I realized I had to step it up.

Final goals tend to define a game, and the goal here is timing.  Each level is a timed race to get past treacherous terrain, flora and fauna.  This is why I found myself rolling through most of the game, since you need to make a good time to progress.  I died a lot, mostly because platformers are not my strongest suit, but also because this game’s squishy exterior is only skin deep.  This is not a forgiving game.  Sure, each level is short, but that doesn’t change the fact that starting from the beginning every time is a pain.  I have cursed Flem more times than any other game in such a short period of time, and he can really be fucking frustrating, too.

Behold! The nostrils!

“What the actual fuck..?”

As you roll along through the game, you encounter a variety of obstacles, with the most common being spikes.  Spikes are literally fucking everywhere.  It’s like Flem got launched from the warm safety of the nostrils into a nightmare world of demon spikes and bizarre animals.  I wouldn’t call the creatures in this game enemies, since you don’t really fight them.  By all means, this game is almost Buddhist in its treatment of other creatures.  That I have found, there is no means to kill enemies, mostly because that is not what Flem is about.  Rather than sterilizing the environment of it natural fauna, you are tasked with slipping by them.  And they are weird.  There are yellow jumping bugs (dust mites, guess), cactus-like plants that launch pellets into the air, flying purple bugs and a myriad of other obstacles, but again, you are not there to kill anything: you just want to get past quickly.  At the end of the level, you’ll be graded, and the faster you completed it, the better your score.  Of course, there are only three scores, noted by different-colored gems.  One of the biggest points of frustration are the buttons to continue the game.  For now, it seems selection randomly flickers from one button to the next, making it equally possible to restart, continue or return to the menu by accident.  It’s really annoying, but in a preview this early, it is good to see so few flaws.

In order to get past, you are given some interesting abilities, too.  One of these abilities is gathering up little purple bubbles to float around.  Of course, there is a gauge that displays the amount of time that you have to hover, which can be refilled by grabbing another purple bubble.  This gets difficult, too, since your ultimate goal is to get to the end quickly, not to collect pick-ups.  There are also orbs that give you speed boosts, let you jump and these are trickled into the game slowly enough that you get a handle on them, and the game ramps up the difficulty at a rate that is challenging and still fun.

Older games have a more specific motivation with an interference-oriented goal.  Mario would vanquish goombas, beat on turtles and kick Bowser’s butt to save the Princess.  Flem is a booger.  He isn’t nearly as committed to combat as the suspenders-clad knight of the Mushroom Kingdom.  There isn’t even a definable enemy, just this sense of displacement that drives Flem onward.  In the very beginning, rather than some foe drawing you out into the world, you are launched out of the nose by a sneeze.  It’s a beginning as goofy as the main character, but it sets a tone of enjoying the pixels of the game rather than selecting and neutralizing targets.  As I have come to expect and enjoy from Norway, there is a talent for creating a fun environment that you pass through and enjoy, rather than tear through like a tornado full of missiles and chainsaws.  I’ll bet that’s the next sequel to Sharknado.

What the fuck is with all the deadly spikes?!

What the fuck is with all the deadly spikes?!

The art in this game is spectacular, despite the simple concept.  The tutorial, which is currently pretty basic, is delivered alongside a gallery of pictures that seem to tell the story of dissenting opinions between the denizens of the nose.  Some ended up leaving, others stayed to cultivate some kind of snot garden.  The music is always whimsical and echoes the style of the environment.  It’s not some kind of modern, pulsating techno-mix of chiptunes; it’s just plain simple bit-tunes suitable for a game on the SNES.  I would expect this title to appear on Ouya and other simple platforms.  Alongside those, Henchman and Goon are trying to get this game voted up on Steam!  I would expect this to be another fun little title for a low-ish price, so go vote it up on Steam and lets play!

Of everything that bothers me about this game, nothing drove me up a fucking wall like the spikes lining every single wall in sight.  I mean seriously!  Is the world descending into the worship of some bizarre demon-god that covers everything in tiny spikes?!  What would the point of that be?  Does he want you to just be permanently uncomfortable?  I mean, spikes are spikes, but at this size it might be, at worst, like laying on toothbrushes.  That might even tickle.  It’s like the world was infiltrated by the most effectively strategizing and bizarrely quixotic aggressor in the world.  Maybe he was invented by Woody Allen?  I dunno, just seems like something he might imagine.

Shadow Warrior, Better the Second Time

Posted on by thre3zekiel

SW_Logo

 

As with movies, games that were remade from an older title fall into two categories: epic or fail.  Shadow Warrior takes the material from the unrepentantly indecent original and sculpts it into an experience that adds to and surpasses the original.  And the way they did it is what makes this so awesome; Shadow Warrior uses the same corny sense of humor, but tempers it with a snarky, demonic sidekick. Devolver Digital has recreating an old washed-up title down to a process as simple as “give it to Flying Wild Hog.”

When SW kicks off, you main character is driving down the street listening to The Touch by Stan Bush.  People seem to like those songs from the 80’s, but not everything out of that era is worthy of remembrance.  Shit, not much out of the 80’s and even some of the 90’s is worth remembering, so this guy listening to some shitty 80’s music in a badass car on the way to a deal is a little off-putting.  Honestly, at first I was like, “God, please don’t tell me that’s the main character.”  But this game is filled with demons, so despite my pleas of “don’t make me play this guy”, I was forced to play as Lo Wang. I let out a nervous giggle and soldiered on.  Of course, this was the only thing that I, as a gamer, found distasteful about the game.  Its humor, on the other hand, is another story entirely.  If I were asian, I might be pretty deeply insulted by most parts of this game, but the way the game also makes fun of the original seems an attempt to apologize for it.

SW_powah

Huh, they misspelled “POWAAH!”

 

As with most games, the first level gives you an idea of what to expect, and it is fucking awesome.  It’s about an hour worth of slicing enemies to tiny pieces with a katana as they shriek and gush blood all over the carpet.  Your katana behaves like a magical limb-detaching wand, and at first I was really surprised by how horrible and gory the game is.  That lasted about 10 seconds before I was laughing my ass off at how ridiculous it really was.  2 parts Tarantino, 2 parts Jet Li and all Wang, baby.  It also displays how good at hiding shit in plain sight FWH really is.  At one point there is a statue behind glass in one of the main corridors, and I walked past it wondering why it was the only glowing statue in the whole place.  This statue is one of several types of collectibles that the game hides from you: money statues, bowls of blood, Ki Crystals and fortune cookies.

The statues give you money, but are not the only source of funds.  The other source is an ancient chinese method called “finding that shit lying around.”  As you collect money, the game totals it and lets you use it to buy ammo and upgrades for your weapons.  There are 3 different upgrades per weapon with 6 upgradable weapons: a pistol, machinegun, shotgun, crossbow, flamethrower, rpg.  One of the things I love about this game is a logical conundrum that I call the “Dimensional Sphincter Improbability”.  Essentially, unless you have a magical asshole that also links to an alternate dimension where you store all your weapons, it’s highly fucking improbable that you can carry an arsenal this vast.  Hard Reset, FWH’s inaugural title, solved this issue by making these weapons varying configurations of the same two weapons.  Shadow Warrior just stores these weapons in an off-screen pocket dimension that follows Lo Wang around at all times.  Of course, this game makes no apologies, and why should it?  It is a remake of an old, less-than-classic game.  Fuck logic.  Your first weapon, though, is the best.  The katana is an awesome part of this game, and you start the game dicing people up and flinging shuriken.  There is one problem with all of this.  The money has the square hole, which is distinctly Chinese, but the katana and shuriken were weapons of Japanese origin.  This game is a bizarre cultural amalgamation of two cultures.  Maybe the enemies in the next game will come from Korean lore?

The next big K-pop group, "Puppets of a Delusional Overlord"

Massacring these blood puppets was more fun than my ethics should have been able to tolerate.

Next, you have the bowls of blood.  This part makes me a little uneasy, and I filed it under “shit I won’t think about too much.”  Every once in a while, you will come across a secretly ensconced bowl of blood suspended by demonic power on a spiked shrine built of the corpses of your enemies victims.  So, naturally the first thing you do is drink it.  At least, I assume you do, and I am pretty sure it is never outwardly stated exactly what Wang does with it, but what else is there to do with it?  Rub it all over your body?  Either way, you get these bowls and they grant you Karma, which, in turn, is used to upgrade yourself with all kinds of abilities.  I spent the most of my first karma points on Ki attacks with my sword, which are badass attacks that allow you to cut through demons like lightly-chilled tofu.  These attacks are rewarding as fuck, too.  Get off a good divider of the heavens attack and your enemies basically explode while is great for taking off legs.  Your enemies will crawl off a bit, which makes it easy to deal with their friends then come back for the karma of beheading them, too.

Ki crystals are giant crystals that glow with ki power, something that fuels the demons’ magic.  Luckily, it also allows you to use Ki powers like self-healing or making a defensive bubble.  While not overtly useful, if used properly the powers become as deadly as the attacks.  Each of these collectibles allow you to buy new weapons, powers and abilities that make gameplay deeper and more entertaining.  The best part is that the abilities flow perfectly from gameplay, and the controls are beautifully intuitive.  As soon as I had the abilities mapped to my brain and the controls, I was ripping through enemies.  When I was finished, their army was measured in liters rather than kilograms.

After a battle, every arena tends to look like this.

After a battle, every arena tends to look like this.

Finally, there are these fortune cookies. Each of them gives you 5 health, which is nice, and then slips you a Confucius-style joke that will make you face-palm so many times your head will turn black-and-blue.  Generally, the humor of this game is pretty terrible, and it would even get to a point that is indecent, but the demon in your head makes it a little better.  He is an ancient, which is some kind of immortal asian demon.  The one you befriend is named Hoji, and he was banished from the shadow realm.  His story is one of Romeo and Juliet turned Pygmalion and Galatea, but with a dark twist.  He provides some comedic levity to balance your character’s ego a little.  With Hoji by your side, there is someone to keep Lo Wang from being the same person he was in the first game.  At one point he even says “Sorry, I used to be a prick.”  In the context of the game, he could be referring to his recent personal catharsis, but it also feels like a reference to that previous life.  Given the fact that this game also has more Easter eggs than grocery stores in late March, it’s not too much of a stretch.

Your enemies are also a throwback to that old time, when Nukem was the duke and consoles were for kiddies.  Many times, this game just throws you into fights where you are like “o shit I’m gonna die” and the entire time I was having flashbacks to plays of Descent and Doom.  Your first enemies are humans, but the game is fast to switch them out for an army of demons.  And those old games seemed to have a habit of throwing demons in as a foe for shooters.  I mean, look at Quake.  I had no fucking clue what the fuck I was even fighting, and the recent(ish) Quake 4 changed over to aliens instead of demonic foes.  Honestly, whatever.  Shadow Warrior made it cool to kill demons again and gave me as much of a thrill as Bioshock did.  Then there are these massive bosses that the game throws at you.  I played a little Duke Nukem Forever, and the giant-boss battles were just a little too… Duke.  They seemed so focused on the fact that the boss was massive and it played well enough, but it was just uninteresting.  Just felt like I was firing bullets into a river to dam in an attempt to damn it shut.  I didn’t feel  badass, just felt like damage control.  Boss battles in this game follow a sort of rhythm and you can measure your progress visually.  You also feel badass at the end for taking down this giant enemy.  It doesn’t feel one bit frustrating and is well done.  The battles are the same method as those found in Hard Reset, and I greatly enjoyed them.

Alongside the enemies, the game takes numerous flares from old-style games, like the card-key search.  Back in the days of Doom, it was standard procedure to be sent out after a set of keys to the complex you were running and gunning through.  Lo Wang finds himself running through arenas of foes searching for colored shrines to destroy in order to get past mystical demon seals.  It really brought me home, and I feel like this is an experience that new gamers will enjoy while old gamers can get all nostalgic.  On top of all this, Shadow Warrior had a spin-off game with Viscera Clean-up Detail: Shadow Warrior.  That is another indie gold mine and a lot of fun, so check it out.

Obligatory scenic screenshot

Obligatory scenic screenshot

Every ounce of this game screams with a righteous fire that burns through every expectation that I had.  It is a vein-bursting experience with fun gameplay, amazing music and a storyline that plays an artful, melodramatic chord against the game’s wang-fueled humor.  The game is ridiculous and over-the-top in a way that made old kung-fu movies so popular.  It doesn’t matter that this game is goofy and ridiculous, it is still a lot of fun, and in a lot of ways it is a shrine to the old generations of PC games and a fist-bump to their players.  It almost feels like I just sat down with the developers, had a few beers and talked about the “good old days of PC gaming” and how gamers nowadays wouldn’t understand.  This they would understand.  And it is really something special, even though it is so, so ridiculous.  Not to mention, the game leaves one of its main enemies wide open for a sequel.  Zilla, your former employer and demonically-enhanced lunatic, escapes in a helicopter.  You slice the other guy’s throat, though, so you get that satisfaction.  This game is 39.99$ on Steam, and I whole-heartedly endorse paying this money.  I got the game when it was on sale, so I lucked out, but it is a title you are guaranteed to enjoy.

With all that being said, the thing that boils my blood over this game is its developers.  Seriously!  How dare they make something so good!  This sets fucking standards!  They literally have made 3 fucking games.  FUCKING 3!  A game where you shred through hordes of demonic minions with righteous blazing fury, one where you blow your way through level after level of robotic minions that are spliced with human bodies and … a game starring a pink panda and a yellow lizard.  Ok, so that last one is still in development, but I am totally fucking serious.  These guys should be given some other old-school titles to revive, like SiN or Blake Stone!  I feel like the only fucking guy that even remembers Blake and his battles with Aliens of Gold!  Shit!  Oh well, I am sure all that is just around the corner, Devolver Digital just needs more money for properties acquisition.  I wish I could just give them money.  LoL!  Be so much easier than waiting for games to come out.

Lantern Forge, Dr Sandbox and Mr Hack ‘n’ Slash!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

LF_logo

 

I swear to fucking god, if I play another goddamn sandbox again it will be all my fault, because I like sandboxes way too much.  Granted, last week was the unofficial “week of sandboxes” for me, so I am getting some time in with something more violent after this.  For now, this was a game that persisted in surprising the fuck out of me.  Seriously.  Every time I thought I had gotten to the furthest extent of content in this game, I got hit with more.  It isn’t listed as a pre-release title on Steam, but the devs are still adding content, Terraria-style, so it must be an Early Release.  Either way, this game could have fucking fooled me, because it has more flesh than my own personal ass post-Thanksgiving.

When you load it up, you are in the middle of tabula rasa, a clean slate just waiting for creativity.  One of the first things I noticed was how pretty the UI is.  I mean LOOK at it!  It has everything necessary for an RPG and a sandbox while having some high-speed options for quick-paced combat, and it plays well, too.  It focal feature is a little mode-toggle that is wedged between the hotbar and mana bar like my brother’s face in a dancer’s boobies at a strip joint.  Hit that baby and you go from fun-times-with-Mr-Rodgers sandbox to fuck-me-in-the face Hack ‘n’ Slash.  No joke.  Everything is pretty colorful, beautifully detailed world and a skillful procedural generation that somehow hides itself at first, but that button flips half your menu into blood-stained weapon of death!

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, mother fucker.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, mother fucker.

Take a gander around and you will notice that my house, the log building, and the workshop, the stone building with castle walls, have no floors.  One of the perks of a (sort of) pre-release.  That is ok, though.  And here is why.  Above you can see a fraction of what is possible in ths game, attained in about a full day of gaming.  You can build houses that are basically walls, windows and doors.  Your bed is the binding point where you respawn after death, and incidentally a time-warping machine of the future.  When you sleep, night turns into day, but it looks like you just walk over and look at the bed as time changes.  Given another efficiency feature of the game, you can do this through walls.  This feature is one of the elements of the sandbox.

Next to the blue toggle are four buttons.  The first makes visible your character’s range of influence, which is how far away you can touch things.  Educated guess puts this distance at about 10 fucking feet.  This guy rivals Garrett in the “characters with the longest arms” category, but again, this makes things like harvesting a grove of trees easy, so you can avoid being at dick-distance from each tree to cut it.  At first I thought I found a glitch, but then I stared to look over the buttons, and it all made sense.  The next two buttons say they rotate objects before you place them, but don’t be deceived by this low-down, dirty deceiver; it actually morphs the physical form of items being placed.  For instance, a log fence could become a single section, a corner of fence or  just a goddamn post.  Test this out with various items as the results are titillating.  Last is the sub-subterranean article induction rectifying selector or the STAIRS button because the only fucking thing you place between levels are the stairs!  I mean, if you want to get down to the shrieking charnelhouse of nightmares that is the underground, you’ll need to take the stairs.  Press the mode-toggle before you go, though, as you can’t fight in placement mode.

Blizzard called, they want their orc barracks back.

Blizzard called, they want their mercenary camp back

Granted, before you venture in the dark abyss that lies beneath, you’ll want good gear.  You can craft a wide range of items from the beginning, but the items you may craft are limited to what you can pick up off the ground.  And by “pick up off the ground” I really mean “beat into submission with your bare hands” as the animation seems to display.  Still, you can get loose stones, sticks (which are in fucking everything), logs and food on the surface, and the list goes on.  You can feasibly get a few levels before needing to venture downward, especially since it feels like there is an entire game up top.  Eventually you will want to make stairs down.  Now if you start near stairs, DON’T FUCKING GO DOWN THERE!  I did and I got my ass torn open by goblins.  Luckily the animation just has you pulse into nothing in a flash of light, presumably as Scotty beams you back to the Enterpr.. I MEAN.. your bed.  Building your own staircase is likely to lead down to a single claustrophobic space where you claw your way through the walls for air.. or you could just craft a stone pick and dig your way out, fucking lunatic.  Down here on the first level you can find copper, albeit sparsely populated, which will get you the necessary components for some workbenches.  Materials increase in availability the deeper you go, too, but so does difficulty.  Eventually you need to go down, but be prepared when you do and craft yourself some solid gear on a workbench.

Imagine there are half a thousand artistically detailed workbenches in this game, each with their own function and an impressive array of craftable items and you’ll be imagining… uh.. this game.  I even found a workbench that uses workbenches as crafting components.  It gets intense, but as you need to go deeper, so too do you need to get crafty.  My first workbench helped me combat my hunger bar through agriculture.  The gardening workbench lets you use fruits and flowers to make seeds and potted plants.  Now many things in Lantern Forge also have numerous uses: food-bearing plants can be turned into seeds, sticks are in fucking everything and stones are always useful.  It pays to never throw anything away, so it is a good thing there are as many types of chests as there are types of crafting materials.  Granted, eventually you will have more stuff than you know what to do with, so one really cool mechanic among the pile of awesome elements in this game is the Town Center.  The Town Center is that giant ominous lantern over a bottomless pit in the first screenshot.  This uses workbenches to craft shops that are associated to the functions of those workbenches.  Over-simplified example: a gardening workbench lets you build the farming supply shop.  This can then be placed to buy food, tools, seeds and plants for farming.  The best part is the shopkeepers rotate their stock, so the items in there always change as you play.  Honestly, I am not sure what Hearthfire Studios is trying to pull, but my brain almost exploded with all the shit there is to do in this game.

What Seuss-Lovecraftian nightmare did I just acid trip into?!

What Seuss-Lovecraftian nightmare did I just acid trip into?!

Just when you think you have seen it all, they come up with this shit.  A giant haunted dollhouse in the middle of a pink and purple field spewing out knitted doll-beasts that chase you into the next fucking biome.  Great.  Combat is pretty tough at first, but as you get higher in level and secure a handle on it, it becomes manageable.  You have three combat trees to pour skill points into: hunter for ranged, knight for melee and mage for magic.  They also threw in an adventurer tree and filled it with a variety of passive abilities that make exploration, sandboxing and everything in the fucking game better in general.  On the surface, you are less likely to run into enemies, unless you are a stupid screenshotting asshole that runs into the weirdest shit possible and takes pictures while evil dolls poke him with giant needles.  Yea, that’s me.  At night, however, the forest becomes populated with all sorts of enemies.  That’s why gear can really be important.  While you can only make stone tools at first, eventually you will get to iron and mithril.  These items are, in turn, used to get even more items which can open up new varieties of craftable items, both practical and cosmetic.

Everything about this game is fun.  The art and music work symbiotically to generate the ambiance of this game: colorful and bright at first glance, but as night falls, things get dark and ominous.  And at first, it feels like a winsome frolic in an idyllic land, but as you get deeper and deeper, you will realize there is really more to it.  To give you an idea, I was playing this game for nearly a full 24 hours and still only got to the second tier of technology, crafting in copper.  Granted, I like to really explore things, so I was going all out and getting loot, farming, cooking, crafting and making a town.  This game is gradual sandbox gameplay combined with challenging combat, which spikes in difficulty to keep you on your toes.  Overall, this game is worth every cent of the 9.99$ asking price on Steam and is a lot of fun for those with this taste.  It splices two genres into a coherent and instant-switch whole that holds its own on either mode.  I am not even a fan of anime, but this game’s subtle JRPG tones really bring out the lively feelings of this game and give it a unique flair that really entertains.  Even considering everything I have said about this game, there is still so much to explore and experience about it.  Play it yourself to see.  Thumbs up to the developers on this one; Lantern Forge deserves an adoring fanbase of its own.

The Forest, Sandboxing With Naked Cannibals

Posted on by thre3zekiel

TF_logo

 

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  When in The Forest, you run like a Kenyan or die like a dog.  In fact, I am pretty sure most dogs have better deaths, but I am not here to debate that shit with you.  The Forest is fucking brutal, and you feel it every bleeding second.  It starts with your character pulling himself from a plane crash covered in blood and it ends… well.. I haven’t seen it end happily yet.  But the title screen shows two heads tied up on a stake with intestines that connect through the mouths and wraps around the necks.  And they are upside down.  Yea, shit gets nasty.  This game is also in pre-release, so remember that there is a lot that is still missing.

At the start you are on a plane ride from a presumably civilized location to god knows where when the plane is ripped in half rather suddenly.  It’s not exactly like there is a fucking smidgen of turbulence, just a loud bang like something hits the plane.  I am going to venture a guess here and say that someone threw a homing spear and it tore the plane in half.  With all the bodies and everything that seem to litter the forest, the locals have some kind of vastly successful marketing campaign that lures in hapless morons so they don’t go hungry.  Cause cannibals can’t eat each other!  That’s how they get diseases!  On the plane with you is a little kid.  He is cuddling your arm until the plane breaks apart, then he is white-knuckling the arm rests.  When you come to, you are laying in the aisle and this mostly-naked wildman is standing over the kid.  No worries, he picks up the kid’s bloodied body and carries him off into the untamed wilderness.  It’s ok, though.  Plenty of happy-endings start that way, right?  I am sure he ends up in a Disney-Pixar plot line where his father’s death in the plane crash is the tear-jerking opening.  And the fucked up reality is that I am really fighting cannibals and mutants in the woods for years to come.  Magical.

Don't worry, kid. It's more aero-dynamic without the front! We'll just get there faster!

Don’t worry, kid. It’s more aero-dynamic without the front! We’ll just get there faster!

Once you are able to get up, you need to look around you.  This is likely the last solid chance you get to search the wreck.  All about you there is soda, booze, some food and a cellphone.  This cellphone is very important because it sets a keynote for what useless, shitty inventory items look like.  It doesn’t really do anything except tell you the weather, the temperature and how far you’ve walked.  Let me repeat that: In a game where you spend your time OUTSIDE IN THE FUCKING WILDERNESS you are given a goddamn cellphone – a separately programmed mechanic – that tells you if you are cold and what the weather is like.  Of course, that step-counting feature is the major point, I think.  It lets you know just how many steps you take to get between the forest line where you cut trees, spot natives and run for your fucking life.  Naturally, useless.

Now, I died numerous fucking times right out of the gate.  The game tells you to page through a survival guide and see how it might help you, and it does at first, but it fails to mention there are cannibals creeping up behind you preparing to gnaw your ears off.  Like chewy little snacks…  I started right next to a cannibal village the first few times, and walked right in just like “Hey guys, nice grass huts!”  They tore me apart.  The second time I kept my distance, and they overwhelmed me before I had the chance to build a fire.  Strangely, fire is what keep these loonies at bay.  They see it and back off like, “SHIT! He has gypsy magic!!”  Before getting the fire together, though, the guide has you build a little stick shelter to sleep in.  This is how you save your game, so it’s important, but don’t sleep right away.  You’ll wake up at night with cannibals gnawing on those delicious ears again.  The last tutorial shows you two plants: a blueberry bush and a bush with black-colored berries on it.  I specify because the first is edible, the second will fucking kill you.  Important.  And these are not the only edible plants in the game, just two of them.  The rest you have to figure out by trial-and-error!  And I mean, most survival books are specific to a section of the world or a continent and give you a wide variety of things to eat in those places.  Whoever wrote this book just kind of implies that there are other things out there you can and cannot eat: either madly sadistic or profoundly lazy.  Not to mention, you can eat certain animals in this game but not others.  Why can I eat rabbits and lizards but not the fucking frogs and birds?  And why not the shark that washed up on the beach?  I know I would be using that for days.  Just cook it up really really well and add some salt from distilled seawater.  Maybe some seaweed for flavor.

Each year hundreds of people survive in the wilderness, except you. You're fucked.

Each year hundreds of people survive in the wilderness – except you.  You’re fucked.

This is one of those places that the game is still vastly unfinished.  I am sure that there will be more added to this book given time, but right now it is pretty useless for finding food.  Your best bet is killing animals for food anyway, clearly not a game made by vegans.  Although there is a vegan mode where the cannibals won’t eat you.  Makes it a little easier.  The primary role of the book is to help you build things.  Those ghost-walls you see up there are what happens when you place something.  It creates an image of what you are building and you bring materials over to it, building into the image.  Really neat, overall.  Of course, you need to be careful where you place things.  A ghost-image cannot be removed right now, not that I could find anyway.  Then there is the matter of cancelling an object.  Say, you want to build a fire.  In your panic to avoid slipping into the stomachs of cannibals, you accidentally select the head-on-a-stake effigy.  You’ll have to go back into the book and then exit or select something else to cancel the head.  Now I was panicked, and that is the story of how I got a head-on-a-stake next to my cooking pit.  It’s a little unsettling, but it’s a great conversational piece that adds seasoning to my skinned rabbits and lizards.  The most frustrating element of building is you have to look back into the book every time you want to plan out a section of wall or build a fire.  This makes sense the first time, but it gets old after the thousandth fucking time.  I would have memorized the best method for building a fire after having to read the book a bazillion times.  Early on all your construction should be fueled by soda and candy bars you got from the crash and luggage around it.  This gives you food and energy enough to get a good bit of a citadel plannedand built before the cannibals become too much of a problem.

O, yea, effigies?  That shit is fucked up.  One way to keep cannibals at bay aside from filling your camp with campfires is to set up little effigies.  Effigy is a nice term though.  Really, you are creating survivalist outsider art with the limbs of your fallen foes.  Fucked up and brutal.  The best part is, they only keep the fuckers back as long as they are on fire, which they stay lit for like, an half hour at most?  Then there was this problem I had where it was raining almost constantly.  So, apparently I am in a sub-tropical rainforest.  Those aren’t fucking common, but they exist.  This might help me pin point where The Forest takes place.  There seem to be no tropical plants that I can determine, and there is a shore.  The natives like taking body parts and wearing them like feathers plucked from a peacock.  The animals tend to be small and there are a lot of lizards.  At first I would think Russia, but there aren’t any wolves and it can’t be Africa since no one is black.  That would be racist.  Then again, nobody looks asian, but some pacific islanders look white, right?  Best guess, this takes place in Oceania, not too far from New Zealand.  What likely happened is all the hipsters and vegans banished the meat-eating people to an island and there they went fucking crazy and started eating people.  Of course, that was years ago, so they’ve all but forgotten about them except in stories and tales.  This is why you find hikers and campsites out here where no one in their right fucking mind could ever consider camping.  I assume they are hikers because they are miles from any roads and there aren’t any off-roading jeeps or anything.  Then again, they could have come in by plane, given there is a lake nearby and the seashore is accessible.

There is also an interesting crafting system that reminds me of the Zork games where you combine different things to create something else, like a bottle of booze and a rag makes a molotov cocktail.  Of course, there aren’t a lot of recipes to figure out at the moment.  The survival book naturally doesn’t tell you how to build any of these things, either.  I remember reading the military Field Manual on wilderness survival, and that shit is comprehensive.  I would have bought a better manual if I were this guy.

Welcome to my home, you can have a seat over by the head-on-a-spike. His name is Wilson.

Welcome to my home, you can have a seat over by the flaming head-on-a-spike. His name is Wilson.

Of course the cannibals in this game are the early enemies and the source of a lot of fun.  Before the mutants come and ruin your life, the cannibals are just funny as shit.  First off, they run around shrieking and generally acting like they think they’re zombies.  They’re all naked, including the women, so seeing some boobies every once in a while is nice, even if they are weird and dirty.  Remember all the booze from earlier?  Use a few of those bottles to make molotov cocktails, and let it rip.  These things take out cannibals like nobody’s business.  You’ll need the rest of the booze to make bombs for use against the mutants.  When you die, you also go to this fucking cave full of terrifying shit, but I don’t want to talk about that again.  The least the bastards could do is just let you die.  It really does say a lot about a game, too, when you can take one guy’s arm and smack his friends to death with it.  There is a little problem with killing enemies with fire, though.  The enemies will die and their corpses remain standing.. and breathing.  You can smash them apart with your axe, and the legs even stay there.  Then there are the women.  Sometimes you will kill them with fire and they will change from a hairless weirdo to a woman with hair.  Then you smash them apart like a blood balloon and their body parts turn into male body parts.  It is just a little weird.  All the mechanics are there, but the models and art have to catch up.  Generally this game screwed up where Minecraft excelled.  The Forest chose some spectacular graphics not realizing that all that detail leaves HUGE fucking holes.  There are so many graphics bugs in the game that going into them at length is its own fucking essay.  Minecraft had crappy graphics that were ridiculous by comparison to other games at the time.  But it worked and did its job so well that it is a gaming sensation.  The graphics were simple and clean.  This allowed the developers to move on to other, more important things, thus Minecraft had more to start with than The Forest.  Right now, this is a great game, and 14.99$ on Steam is pretty reasonable for where it is in development.  I would wait a bit on this game, though, if you expect a good and complete game.  Should you choose to invest right now (and I would advise waiting until it goes on sale again), don’t wander too deep into The Forest and it’s still pretty fun.

 

 

Reus, Sandbox of Giants!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Reus is a game for hippies.  Rather than suggesting that the player represents the power of some god, as you might expect in a game of this nature, the player is suggested to be the planet.  Now, generally speaking, while a planet could be said to be a living organism, in Reus it cannot affect its own changes.  In order to make life, oceans, forests etc. you have to utilize four extensions of your planetary will: the rock giant, the ocean giant, the forest giant and the swamp giant.  Each has a unique set of abilities that have multitudinous effects on the land, which are limited only by your imagination.

There are the basics: ocean giant makes oceans, forest giant makes forests, rock giant makes mountains and the swamp giant makes swamps.  In order to create swamps and forests, you need water and the world you start on is a barren wasteland.  This means you need to make a couple oceans first.  Oceans will soak enough land on either side for you to create a full forest or swamp.  There is also the rock giant.  This burly fucker just lopes around like a badass all the time.  Use him to raise a mountain, and the side that faces an ocean will remain the same while everything past it changes into desert.  This can be used to destroy forests and if you make a mountain or ocean on a village, they all die.

The variety of wasteland shades go from a stunning grey to a lovely off-white

The variety of wasteland shades go from a stunning grey to a lovely off-white

Some of the less obvious abilities make a sort of sense.  The forest giant can make food plants and what comes out of it depends on where you put the plant.  In a forest it’s blueberries, in a desert it’s a dry bush (more on that later).  Despite looking like a monkey, the forest giant is fully unable to create animals.  The ocean giant makes domesticated animals.  These are things like chickens in the forest or desert tortoises in the desert.  At first you would expect the forest giant to make animals, but then when you realize that all life comes from the oceans originally, it makes a sort of logic.  Plus, why would a forest giant be able to make fish?  The swamp giant is another weird one: he makes exotic animals, but again, if you think about it, this makes sense too.  Swamps are dangerous places where some of the most fucked-up shit evolves.  That and Australia.  Swamps are where you find things like Bot Flies evolving.  The bot fly is something I will not discuss, but if you are fucking curious, check it out here.  It’s fucked up as all fuck.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you. FUCK!  I just read the page a bit too much.. grah..  Either way, weird shit evolves in swampy areas.

As well as making the exotic animals, the swamp giant can also make herbs.  These tend to generate more tech or wealth than fruit plants from the forest giant.  Your rock giant will also generate a variety of minerals resources.  Alongside all of these differing resource-types, Giants are able to enhance resources with aspects.  These aspects are things like the leaf aspect, which will allow the Forest giant to add natura or food to plants.  The ways these aspects affect different resources varies based on the region-type, but typically you can transmute a resources two different ways depending on the aspects you place on it.  Be careful, too!  Some resources have a symbiosis.  These things will work together to create a bonus to what it produces.  Having blueberries in range of chickens will make it so that the chickens generate more food.  If you change what resources are next to each other, you will change the symbiosis for your resources, destroying what you had working before.  The game quickly becomes about efficiently managing what you have growing on the land of your villages after a while.

Have Number 2 step forward and say "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." Thank you.

Have Number 2 step forward and say “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Thank you.

The focus of this game is really on the villages, though.  The giants are just where you put all your powers.  Adding resources to the map makes villagers appear.  These villagers, in turn, build towns and settle lands and make the game fun.  All of the villages will start building various projects, too.  This might be a shrine, a granary or a school, and as they get higher level, they will start building higher-level projects.  Given that the effects of your giants’ powers vary based on what terrain-type you use them in, each village will have a different focus depending on where it is located.  Swamp villages tend to require tech for their projects where forest villages need food for theirs.  This isn’t always a set thing, but it all depends on what the villagers choose.  Each project is timed, too, and proper symbiosis match-ups will govern whether you meet the time-limits or not.  Once you finish a project, one of the villagers steps forward as an ambassador.  This person is someone that you pick up and allow to ride on you giants.  Having the little ambassador up there unlocks different abilities depending on where they are from and which giant they ride.  Properly managing which ambassador goes where will determine just how successful your villages will be.

This all sounds like a fun and free romp through a magical world, but there are dangers in this paradise.  The biggest among them is greed.  If your village gets too prosperous too fast, it will start to go ballistic and get dirty.  Eventually they will start attacking other villages and fucking everything up.  When this happens, you have options.  If you really really like that village, you can create “awe” among the villagers.  Do this through symbioses and properly locating different resources next to each other.  Another way to counter-act the greed of a village is with danger.  If you have desert tortoises in your area and you get wealthy and greedy, you might see the world as a desert tortoise that cannot keep up and is easy prey for the clever man.  If the giants transmute those tortoises into snakes, your ass will be too busy working on not dying a painful, poisonous death to make battle plans.  Finally, if your villagers just get too fucking greedy and are past redemption, you can always have the swamp giant launch mud bombs that burn with acidic death or send the rock giant to smash them into the dirt.  Granted,  the little bastards might just start fighting back after a while, so keep an eye on them.

Greedy little bastards...

Greedy little bastards…

Reus is a game that says a lot about people.  Those that want to work in unison with the world prosper and flourish in its favor.  Those that get caught up in their greed fight their peaceful neighbors, who are happy with what the world has given them, and are eventually vanquished to dust.  If they fight the will of the planet itself, they can win, but ultimately they just ravage and destroy the world, returning it to the barren waste it was in the beginning.  A great game and a truly interesting take on sandboxes, since it is a 2D game.  Well worth the 9.99$ asking price on Steam.

My biggest fucking issue with this game is how much memory it eats.  This thing is a memory beast.  I have 16 GB of memory in this computer and Reus still managed to crash it!  I was playing through the tutorials to understand the game.  I played straight through, got about halfway through the third one and BOOM!  blue screen fucker.  The only time I nearly ate my monitor in blind rage.

Whispering Willows, Spooky 2D Fun

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Ever watched one of those reality shows where a team of “ghost hunters” go into a haunted location, discuss its history and pretend to be freaked out by every ambient noise that wafts in from anywhere nearby?  Yea, they were all over tv for a little while.  I always wished that something would show up and scare the piss out of them, not out of some desire of vindication for the existence of an after life, nor do I want to see them being eaten by some eldritch horror of Cthulu’s nightmares, but because I wanted to see them shit their pants.  The pants-shitting part would be left on the editing floor, I am sure, but it would still be fucking fantastic.  I want the little girl from this game to be in the house when it happens because being able to jump between the world of the living and the spirit world would make trolling these guys insanely easy and entertaining.

First, Elena is the main character and a young girl.  Her father has disappeared somewhere in the bowels of the Willows, where he is the caretaker.  After setting out for the mansion in a fit of female protagonism to make Samus proud, she gets jumped by a banshee of some kind and falls backward… breaking through a little-girl-sized area that falls through to the catacombs beneath the mansion.  Shit gets heavy fast in this game as the catacombs are where the Willows family buried all its dead… for fucking centuries.  So you’re this little girl hanging out with a bunch of centuries-old coffins when you’re jumped by this spirit of a bereft native american (Imma just say indian cause it’s shorter and I am apparently an indecent ‘Murrican with no sense of racial differentiation) that decides to lend you his aide and show you the ways of the for… I mean astral projection passed down by his people.  Apparently until him, I guess.

The look on her face speaks to an ancient tongue-gargling indian maxim: "Auauaaaa glarglglaaagh!"

The look on her face is one of profound, spiritual tongue-gargling noises

Using this ability to send your soul out of your drooling human meat-husk, you can solve irritating little mazes in the walls, open doors otherwise locked and talk to people long since dead.  It really is a lot of fun, and half of the fun in the game is exploring the labyrinthine rooms of the mansion and the many annexes on its grounds.  After growing up in a reasonably aged house (149 years old is old-ish for East Coast America), I know that feeling of exploring an ancient building searching for evidence of its secret past.  Finding lost loves, betrayals and sadness sitting in the coagulating dust: And Elena gets to see it all as if firsthand from the spectral mouths of the dead.  You’ll also find fragments of the stories of the various dead laying around the mansion.  Through pieces of ancient journals, you’ll be able to follow a story of sadness from the distant east to its conclusion in the founding of your hometown.

But all is not well in the peeling walls of the mansion, and Elena soon finds herself beset with as many foes as friends.  Throughout the mansions the shattered pieces of an ancient agony skitter and hiss like cockroaches nesting in the walls.  When you get close to a friendly ghost your father’s amulet, which you wear at all times, glows with a ghostly hue and thrums along with your heartbeat.  Come across some element of spectral evil and it glows red, thrumming with its own agitation. And if you think that these enemies are just some negative energies that you can ditch with some clean living and good karma, you’re wrong.  No amount of happy-thoughts will dish you out of this one.  Get hit by an enemy, doesn’t matter what, you’re fucked.  Checkpoints in this game are pretty reasonably spaced, too.  Hit a major plot point and your game will save.

They want to give her dirt hugs!

They want to give her dirt hugs!

Puzzles in this game are also very fun and doable.  Sometimes you will find yourself wondering if you missed something, as they can be deceptively simple at times.  I know I could have gotten this game done an hour sooner if I hadn’t said “This shit isn’t working!  I must have missed something or walked past something!”  Nevertheless, each puzzle is simple and pretty cool when you finish it up.  I didn’t need to call up the answers from the internet at any point, but at some point I really really wanted to, as the game doesn’t always just fucking tell you where to go.  If that was the case, how much fun would it really be?  Precisely.  Story-telling in this game is very well done, too.  It all makes sense and it adds a dark and enjoyable ambiance to the game.  It is a game that kids will love and that adults can certainly enjoy.  It has some elements of being serious with some pretty harsh topics, like genocide, but it still maintains the winsome feeling of a mystical world as viewed through the eyes of a young girl.  More games should be like this.

Sound and music in this game are nearly indistinguishable from one another with everything being geared toward the creepiness.  It is listed as horror, but it is really not that horrible.  At times it might get your pulse up, but the game is generally more fun for its puzzle, adventure and storyline aspects.  Not to mention the art.  As is the case with indies, nearly everything in this game is a piece of art unto itself.  Just looking at the buildings and the environments is a treat.  Overall, a great indie title that is worth the 14.99$ they ask for on Steam.

So, if the windows are broken out, why do I need something to cut the vines...?

So, if the windows are broken out, why do I need something to cut the vines…?

So numerous times in the game they mention how the mansion is in a location where “the fabric of the world is thinner than other places”.  And this is reasonable.  Plenty of people report that places where Native Americans lived are thick with the linger sense of spiritual resentment.  Thus, these places tend to have a high incidence of haunting reports.  The Willows Mansion is no exception.  This place is like fucking Grand Central Station for spirits.  The thing that is most annoying about this is that it’s Grand Central Station.  Ever been there?  It’s full of all kinds of fucking people!  There are spirits in this mansion that are part of the story.  Finding them in the sea of all the ghostly faces that have nothing to fucking do with anything is like finding a contact lens in a fucking pool.  There is a couple in front of the mansion that discuss how cold they are, there is a soldier that tells you how he and his girlfriend wanted to do their nasty business in the conservatory and I swear to god there is an undead hoagie salesman somewhere in that fucking place.  Not sure what a hoagie is?  Fuck you, go to a Wawa.  (for those going to the Wawa link, I would like to point out how fucking fake that white car in the parking lot looks.  They seriously fucking shopped it in.)  Whatever, at least in a place full of fucking dust and dead-heads you can find a fucking hoagie.

 

The Fall, Protocol Bypass Complex

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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After buying this game at a discount along with some other games on Steam, I left it in my library, planning to look into it later and thinking it looked amusing.  Fast forward to a Sunday night, playing DnD with my friends, and two of those particular gentlemen start off on a gaming discussion.  I mean, I was typing furiously about games while slicing into dudes with a greatsword. Why not?  Artistic games came into the conversation, and they were off about various titles they enjoyed.  Then Jon swings a verbal hand across my face and tells me about The Fall.  He and Jay were proselytizing at length about this game. “Have you heard of it?” I drew a dull stare at the ceiling.  “No” I stated blankly. “It’s this game where you are an AI in a battlesuit and you have to override your functions to control them by putting your pilot in direct danger.” (this is where the little man in my head climbs the step ladder into my brain and pulls the chain to a light that flickers, dimly at first, to life) “OH YEA!” I exclaimed, “I bought that on Steam! So, it’s good?”  The look I received from those gentlemen told me it was an experience.  It was spectacular.  Thereby I have come to this article to concur with these allegations. And I do concur, most righteously.

The Fall is about the necessity of rules.  What do you become when you make a habit of breaking your own rules?  First, we talk about the game and if you are interested, we go deeper.  For that there will be spoilers, but fear not, I’ll warn you.  Let’s do this.

In The Fall you are an AI inside a suit.  After re-entering the atmosphere of a planet Master Chief-style, you awake in a dark cave.  Before breaking the surface, however, something significant happens: to keep the suit’s pilot from liquefying upon impact, the suit’s AI is allowed to activate the Anti-matter shield and protect the pilot.  Now this is the key point of the game.  If you go into the esc menu, hit operating parameters.  You’ll notice that there are several functions that are disabled, health monitoring of the pilot is damaged, but, most notably, the Anti-matter shielding has recently been activated.  The suit’s AI, whom you control in the game, is unable to access various functions of the suit without the pilot’s permission.  The pilot, however, has just re-entered the fucking atmosphere in a goddamn battle-suit.  That is obviously not the preferred method of atmospheric entry for a human body, so the pilot is a little unconscious at the moment.  Granted, the health-monitoring systems of the suit are knocked out, so we don’t even know if he’s still alive!  The AI doesn’t hear anything from her pilot so she decides to head out for the medical facilities to revive the pilot.  In the operating parameters there are three laws, based on the universal laws of Asimov governing robots: Must not misrepresent reality. Must be obedient. Must protect active pilot.

So easy a caveman could understand them

So simple a caveman could understand them

Now ARID, our AI babe, has some obstacles.  She has a pretty specific set of parameters with the addendum that her own systems cannot be accessed without permission from the pilot EXCEPT to protect the pilot from immediate danger.  Got it.  That is a pretty fucking important except, too.  There are a lot of problems that Arid encounters on this planet, most notably others trying to depurpose (destroy) her.  In order to maintain her own relevance and purpose, Arid has to get her pilot to the medical facilities.  To achieve this, she needs those restricted systems.  This means she has to put the pilot into imminent danger in order to override the systems and gain access.  How can this be allowed?  Well it is a matter of priorities and logic.  I have to protect the pilot.  My pilot is dying.  To properly protect the pilot from the danger of death, I must get him to the medical facilities. To get him to the med fac, I need to access restricted systems.  I can only access those systems if my pilot is in imminent danger from which those systems could save him, therefore, I have to put my pilot in imminent danger in order to gain access to those systems and save his life.  Fucking syllogisms.  Read that last sentence again: in order to save my pilot, I have to put him in danger.  Yea.  Begin decompiling, mother fucker.

This game defines the often decontextualized term “slippery slope”, except in this one, you were the pebble that started the avalanche.  Another fun little maxim this game hints at is the phrase “good intentions pave the road to hell”.  Shelley’s Frankenstein made it a thing, and that story made a habit of referencing Paradise Lost, a story about Satan falling from grace with God.  Arid invokes this maxim every time someone asks her about her primary function:

I am the A.R.I.D. onboard a Mark-7 combat suit.  My intentions are peaceful

– Arid, The Fall

I submit that this is the jumping point for the titular “fall” in The Fall.  Alright with the fucking literature lecture, back to the damn game.

From darkness you emerge...

From darkness you emerge…

The Fall as a game is still a lot of fun.  It blends a number of ludic features, those features generating the enjoyable and fun part of a game (or its most game-like features, if you will permit me), with its logic.  There are two genres at work here: Puzzle platformer and action shooter.  I don’t know how they fucking thought of this shit, but the game style literally changes with the flip of a switch.  You start off with a malfunctioning gun, but at least the flashlight still works fine.  Using this flashlight, you can uncover various points of interest.  Literally.  It is like someone took a little fucking stamp and left these tiny magnifying glass icons everywhere.  These icons tell you what you need to know about your surroundings.  They’re also how you will interact with the environment to solve puzzles.  A lot of the puzzles are pretty simple, some are tough and require thought.  I had to look up the solution to one puzzle, but I still beat the game in about 3.5 hours.

Once you get a working pistol, you can switch to the laser sight, which is combat mode.  In combat mode, you can get behind cover, vault over obstacles and bust a cap in some robotic motha’ fucka’s.  Your primary enemies are the security droids of the facility in which you’ve crash landed.  These are all droids that are following their primary functions perfectly, and this efficiency is maintained by the sinister caretaker.  You meet this guy early on in an interrogation chamber and he dogs you the entire way, throwing legions of robotic foes to sidetrack you every time you get hard on a solid lead in moving on to the next area of the game.  Combat is fun and challenging, despite the 2D look of the game.  It doesn’t feel forced and it makes sense, and you’re not jumping on anyone’s fucking head, either.  Another facet of combat is the ability to perform sneak attacks.  This is also pretty cool, since Arid grabs the enemy from behind, rips out their power core and uses it to power her pilot’s suit.  It is a neat and useful maneuver that adds to the gameplay.

Peek-a-boo!

Peek-a-boo!

Everything about the look of this game is well done.  First you have the art: every level and area is well-designed and interesting.  Your eyes will never get bored.  There is a lot of passion poured into every fucking detail of this game, and it comes through.  Each moment you are guided by the soft-blue light of Arid’s mask.  Then there is the music.  It goes from dark, ambient groans to shoot-em-up techno as soon as you launch into a fight.  It fits and it gives a sense of foreboding throughout the game.  The sound is well done.  All of the voice actors are believable and well-recorded and the sounds themselves fit each scenario seamlessly.  Everything about this game is polished and lovely, except for the odd “walking through a wall of rubble into an open dark chasm”.  That only happened once, and it wasn’t a big deal.  I just realized it wasn’t a thing, because everything else in this game is so well put together, I thought it was an actual room, or something.  This game is well made and thought-evoking.  It brings an experience that is tough to live up to.  It was also funded on kickstarter, too, so I am glad it beat a bowl of fucking potato salad.  You can pick it up on Steam for only 9.99$, and I highly recommend it.  The ending is a piece of work that will make your jaw drop.  So, on to the spoilers.

A lot of Jesus imagery in this game

A lot of Jesus imagery in this game…

 

And to tell you why, I will be issuing more spoilers than a car part company.  We have to go deeper.

DO NOT FUCKING PROCEED IF YOU WANT TO FIGURE THE ENDING OUT YOURSELF!!!!!!

There, bold, italics, centered on its own line: there is nothing that anyone can do to tell me I didn’t warn you.  Now, why all the Jesus stuff?  Well, to do that, we have to tell you the ending.  So you spend all your time in The Fall trying to get your pilot, Colonel Josephs, to the medical facilities.  Arid’s health monitoring system is damaged, so she just assumes that the pilot is not responding because he is unconscious.  She never investigates further.  In the name of saving your human pilot, you deactivate and drain all the power from hundreds of stored droids (which the mainframe AI calls killing them), kill a hive queen of these hive slugs and kill some fish that can bite through metal.  You are also dogged by the Caretaker, an insidious droid that seems to be nailing humans to crucifixes, dissecting them and all kinds of other mean and nasty things.  However, he is functioning fine.  He was just left as the sole caretaker of a facility forgotten by its owners, so he keeps on doing what he is supposed to be doing: making the facility more efficient.  Those people were not efficient, especially after some of them were abandoned at the facility (check out the carving in the front desk in the lobby c/o Levi the ex-maintenance guy) and the Caretaker depurposed them.  As for the dissections, he was doing to the people what he might do to the robots: look for salvageable parts.  It’s just a messier prospect when you are filled with sloshy, meaty bits.

So you do all of this in the name of Colonel Josephs, the man in the suit.  Arid only invokes the name of the man in the suit toward the end, when the mainframe AI tells her not to change her parameters in the lab.  This is apparently necessary to finish the last task in a repurposing evaluation, to make it so she can lie.  You know, misrepresent reality?  One of her most basic principles?  She gets to the medical bay, gets scanned and what does she find out?  The man in the suit was never there.  She is malfunctioning after all.  Took her a while to get there.

How does this relate to Jesus?  Arid does some pretty horrible things (killing various animals, destroying the last dying remnants of an ancient facility, violating some corpses and even removing the power core for another actual soldier in a combat suit) for the sake of the man in the suit.  She doesn’t know he is there, and since the health monitoring systems are damaged, she just assumes he is in there.  And toward the end this man in the suit even has a name.  She truly believes Josephs is there.  Despite this belief, she was willing to put him in mortal danger.  He would have been the one that died, not her.  He becomes a sort of sacrifice that redeems Arid of her sins (or faults in programming).  Josephs represents something that Arid is willing to sacrifice everything for.  Something she believes in to the point where she is willing to destroy the elements of her basic programming that bind her and give her purpose.  That is really poignant, too.  Just as Lucifer was willing to defy the tenets of God to enact his own agenda, Arid is willing to supplant the laws governing robots, created by Isaac Asimov, to achieve her own imaginary goal of saving Josephs.  The humans on the cross represent a non-existant ideal for which Arid risks it all.  And the theoretical man in Arid’s suit is the one she is ready to put in danger to override her systems, so she is, in effect, using her belief in this man to breakdown the basic rules of her existence.  Yea.  Just let that shit percolate for a minute.

One of the most interesting triumphs of this game is how they made Arid so human without adding a human.  She makes frequent “self-evaluations” and often comes to the conclusion that she needs to be formatted and serviced before being returned to her dock.  In human terms “I am not doing the right thing, I need to stop and look at this, I need my head checked!”  But then the screen has a moment of electronic spazzing and she corrects herself stating that these things were necessary to save Josephs, she is doing this to save him.  She is robotically reassuring herself against what she recognizes as the invalidity of her own actions and programming.  The main difference, though, is that people don’t always take these personal self-evaluations and look at themselves.  It is often too painful, and in Arid’s case it is no different.  She just performs it on a more logical level, being an AI in a robot suit and all.

This is something that we’ve seen time and again in real life: people changing the rules to make them suit an end that they deem as sacred.  Holy wars, for example.  They’ve gone by many names: crusades, jihads or whatever.  These are terrible things done in the name of a sacred ideal.  Arid is an excellent choice of name to this degree since Arid means “devoid of moisture”.  To allow a bit of poetic latitude to Over the Moon, it would mean devoid of anything, specifically true purpose.  Not just devoid of the moisture created by a human body.  And this relates to Frankenstein really well.  Take that Arid to mean moistureless, like a corpse reanimated.  They wouldn’t be juicy, especially if they were kept in embalming fluid like Dr. Frankenstein’s body parts undoubtedly were.  Just like the good Doctor, Arid sacrifices her basic tenets and uses good intentions to justify some horrible actions.  And in both cases the being left is a monster that wreaks havoc on an arguably torn world.  But it is the world that the characters in the story have.  It is self-sustaining, to a point, if far from perfect.  Who are these two to destroy what it has become?

I am bound by nothing...

I am bound by nothing…

So at the end, when Arid, by her own words, is bound by nothing, she tears off the helmet of the suit and show that she is empty.  That is the answer to the question at the beginning of this article.  What do you become when you make a habit of breaking your own rules? I wanted to phrase it “What do you become when you make a habit of breaking your own rules for an imaginary purpose?” but that is a little too suggestive.  I mean you need the chance to play it yourself to really get the full effect.

Arid represents the purpose of intention when it is backed by meaningless goals.  It doesn’t matter what you intend to do, if you violate everything to include the basic laws of your own life to uphold a universal concept of sacredness, you are exactly what you are bound by: nothing.

If you have read this far, I apologize and thank you for hearing me out.  It is a lot to read.

4PM, Where’s your emotionally devastated, alcoholic daughter?

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Roger Ebert was a movie critic who died sternly maintaining the position that video games were not art and never could be considered art.  To be perfectly honest, with all his years of experience with the artistic medium of film, it is easy to see why, nearing 70, he was unable to conceive of games as art.  In an article from his own journal, aptly entitled Video Games Can Never Be Art, Ebert details the reasons, in his mind, that games can never be art.  But asking Ebert, a man in his 60’s at the time who is entrenched in years of film appreciation, is the equivalent of asking a person that adores mexican food to try a fusion cuisine including mexican, asian and Hawaiian styles.  Simply stated, his years of experience in the film industry had Ebert inured against the kind of forward thinking required to take that next step into games as art.  He spends the article calmly explaining why various games are not art, comparing them to Chess and other simple games.  He looks at the game mechanics and trivializes about them without exploring the ideas and the implications of what this actually means about the characters, and the player as a participant.  This would be like me going to a movie and saying “This is just a piece of entertainment projected onto a public screen.  It couldn’t be art, look how fake it is!” while millions of people after watching 12 Years a Slave would be well within their rights to politely disagree.  It doesn’t matter how many accolades and degrees I possess in another, venerable medium.  But this shows the level of his own ignorance, frankly.  This man who achieved lifetime achievements in film and is widely regarded simply could not conceive of games as an artistic medium because they are not relevant to him.  And that is ok, but it makes him and his input irrelevant to any conversation concerning games as an art form.  This article will be one of those discussions.

4PM is a game made by Bojan Brbora that discusses how we deal with grief.  You play a woman, named Caroline, who is on the very last threads of her own rationality.  From the look of the game, it is very clear that she is a heavy drinker.  Everything has a thick, hazy hangover look to it.  Caroline stumbles out of bed with her slow gait and rolls a bottle in the sink, joking about skipping breakfast.  Her life is in tatters, her minimalist apartment is a mess and her answering machine is full of messages from voices brimming with concern.  There are pills and cigarettes on her nightstand, the window is open: everything in her life seems to have a sense of reckless abandon.  When you start up the game, it has a heavy sense of itself with a dark soundtrack.  Even the tutorial leads you to the edge of a tall rooftop where your character blacks out to a scene where she is driving.  It goes black again, you hear what sounds like something hitting a car in the middle of the day on a busy street.  Someone screams and the game starts.

Make cute jokes into the mirror as your own tear-soaked countenance glares back at you.

Make cute jokes into the mirror as your own tear-soaked countenance glares back at you

There are very few ludic sequences in this interactive experience that one might point at and ridicule as non-artistic.  The places where these sequences exist are very feasible, dark and almost humorous.  Honestly, each one evokes a number of emotions for anyone that might have a similar experience.  There is the party scene where you have to find the toilet before the timer runs out and you vomit where you are standing from over-indulging.  Your character dances some and tries to buy another drink, but is flagged by the bartender.  Granted, I’ve never been there, but I have certainly ended a couple nights of drinking over a toilet.  As Caroline stumbles around, the room seems to spin and undulate as the music booms and the haze of the alcohol closes in around her.  I have never felt so claustrophobic in an open setting before.

Go ahead, just puke in the flower pot. No one will notice.

Go ahead, just puke in the flower pot. No one will notice.

Another sequence features Caroline at work where she sees a few options that suit her better than getting her work done.  She could move over to a personal computer where a fresh game of Arkanoid awaits, or she can sneak a few drinks in from her personal stash of whiskey in one of her drawers.  After playing a little arkanoid and downing my drinks, I am ready to try sneaking out of the office, it seems.  Just don’t get caught by that douchey little prick Keith.  The fucker is patrolling the hallway, making this a tense scene where you realize just how deep into depression and desperation this woman has fallen.  She is ready to risk her own livelihood just to sneak out and have some alcohol.  It is sad and frightening.

As you make your way out to the stairway, you see a man cast you an impassive glance as he continues up to the roof.  Extremely unsettling.  You have the option to pursue your vice to the bar below the office, or pursue the curious man up to the roof.  These choices decide how the rest of your day goes and, invariably, the rest of your life.  Without spoiling too much of the ending, should you go up to the roof, you pick up pieces of this man’s life and discuss with him in an attempt to bring him back from the brink.  I have had a number of friends that contemplated suicide and even had to call the police to intervene on one occasion.  Talking someone back from the edge is difficult, especially when your immediate plans were to just go get wasted during the work day and tap out.

Just think about it.

Just think about it.

Everything about this experience speaks to how video games are truly art.  Perhaps the interpretation of ludic games vs. artistic works is a little undefined, but there is definitely something more to these pieces than irrelevant critics of other artistic media are willing to admit.  The fact is that art evokes emotions and makes you consider yourself in a new lens, one you might not have otherwise entertained.  4PM is a testament to videogames as a method of conveying that level of experience.  Sometimes it is not enough just to see something happen on a screen, because you can walk away from that experience.  I can watch a movie like 12 Years a Slave, be deeply affected by the story of Solomon Northup and be brought to tears.  But in the end it is a movie and I can walk away from that.  Although 4PM is about a woman dealing with grief, it is powerful, not because it challenges anything in society, but because it challenges me.  Because it is an experience that I have, and an experience in which I participate is something I cannot just walk away from.  Such an experience, real or virtual, is one that I will take as a part of myself for the rest of my life.  This experience is 4.99$ on Steam.

The only thing that I really found problematic about this game is, depending on the choices you make and what you do in the game, your ending might differ from the one suggested in the game’s tutorial.

 

The Polynomial, Psychadelic Space-Out

Posted on by thre3zekiel

headerI am a huge fan of space shooters, but this one is less a space shooter and more a spaced-out shooter.  This is a title I recommend to anyone on LSD or Acid, because it is intense as hell.  Of course, I recommend anyone with Photosensitive Seizures avoid this title altogether.  I am photosensitive in general and this game made me feel a little nauseous and headachey after about an hour of gameplay.

First, keep in mind that this game is a sort of space shooter.  You are in a spaceship and there are wormholes, but that is about the only thing this game has in common with space, real or theoretical.  Click the left mouse to fire a stream of plasma and steering is a bit difficult due to low gravity.  When you start you are a bit slow, enemies are tough to hit and, if you put the game on insane difficulty as the game instructs, you’ve died a couple of times already.  That’s ok, honestly, I have yet to discern any real point to this game outside of “get a fuck load of points.”  That is ok, though.  It is a good bit of trippy-ass fun.

dashing through outer space in my plasma-shooting ship!

dashing through outer space in my plasma-shooting ship!

There are three other types of entities in this game aside from you: ghosts, flowers and nom-noms.  Everything has a reticule around it in-game, though, so locating them won’t be too too difficult. Your allies are ghosts.  These beautiful beings look the way a child might imagine a soul or angel.  They have a central orb with fluttering wings and a vaguely defined look.  They’re tough to spot with just the naked eye, especially against the shimmering spaces of the game.  If you fly through them, you’ll heal your life-bar and gain a speed boost.  Finding your life bar is a challenge of its own, but it is the solid bar at the top.  The green/red bar on the right of your aiming reticule is your velocity bar.  No numbers, just visual approximations.  The other entity type is the flowers.  These don’t really offer boosts, but they do help you hide from the enemies.  They are more defined than the ghosts, and have a colorful interior.  I am pretty sure they don’t move, either.  They’re like nebulas that keep you from detection.  You enemies are nom-noms.  These guys look like someone took one of Mario’s Big Chomps, covered him with neon lighting and started a light-stick rave party inside.  These guys go around mauling your friends.  They eat the ghosts and it’s your task to kill these fuckers.  And it is tougher than it sounds, too, even on normal.  Aside from chomping down on ghosts, they will also shoot plasma bolts at you.  This is frustrating, especially when you start off, since you are slow as shit.

OooOoO! So pretty!

OooOoO! Ghosts are so pretty!

Yes, those are snowflakes in that picture.  When I got into the game, after it explained how I play, I went through a wormhole into this area that had a big-ass Christmas tree on a big red ball that throbbed to the pulsating trance of the music.  It was cool, especially when it played Christmas music, but it’s FUCKING JULY!  Whatever.  I guess it has just been a long-ass time since I last played this game.

Now, if you want to speed up from your initial slow-as-sex-in-a-pool-of-molasses speed, you have to either fly through ghosts, which can be tough to manage, or find the power-ups.  There are three of these things as well.  One boosts your speed, as you might’ve fucking guessed.  But it doesn’t just boost your speed, it more than doubles your speed bar, so getting these whenever you can, even if you think you don’t need it is always a good idea.  I am pretty sure this will temporarily stack after flying through a ghost, so it will be enough to keep enemy fire off you for a bit.  Your next power-up is the power… uh… power-up.  This one makes your plasma deal spectacular damage.  After grabbing this beast, you’ll mow through nom-noms like nothing.  The last one is auto-aim.  Just center your reticule on your enemies and let the power-up do the rest.  Normally with all the flying about and such, you have to lead your enemies to (hopefully) hit them and land a kill.  This power-up makes all that so much easier.  Just get them in the dotted circle and they’re toast.

OM NOM NOM!

OM NOM NOM!

I said there are wormholes, right?  Fly through one of them if you are tired of the area.  I was sick of the Christmas-themed area and wanted to get out into the greater game.  It was well worth it.  I was greeted by a wide range of procedurally(?) generated spaces full of scintillating beauty.  I really cannot say enough about that.  It says it is a fractal shooter and it really is.  Every space is shaped by invisible fractal variables that paint a spectacular picture.  The choices of colors are also really nice, but can be headache-inducing.  Its look makes Polynomial feel like another game that remembers how we were told games would be “in the future” when we were kids growing up in the 90s or the 80s.  This game really is great, and gives you a chance to just zap some dudes, no strings attached.  The music often has a highly-required trance feel to it, but sometimes you will get some really elegant piano music that really vibes for you.  It’s pleasant. I would call this a really artistic spaced-out shooter that lets you enjoy yourself and really vibe to the music.  Well worth a play and I would even say it is well worth the 6.99$ asking price on Steam.

What really pissed me off about this game?  Everything is shiny and neon colored, sparkly and pretty.  Some fucker hid the goddamn wormhole in the Christmas area, so I was fucking stuck in that section for fucking ever!  A lot of times you will find yourself just struggling against the graphics to see anything, and it gets really aggravating at times.  They have a map, but it is kind of 2D, so it really feels like it is for the look rather than any kind of useful fucking help what-so-ever.  Whatever.  I will just go off and play something that makes a lot more sense and requires me to do inane tasks rather than letting me explore shiny and beautiful space-scapes.  That should chill me out.  Who am I fucking kidding.  That will never happen.

Soul Gambler, Faust Reborn

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Every once in a while, someone tries for greatness beyond the scope of their reality.  For the main character of Soul Gambler, Faust, that was never the plan.  Faust is just like every one of you: went to school, excelled at his field, got a reasonable job in a boring position.  Paid well enough to have a good life.  But Faust was bored to tears.  That is, until today.  Until the day where you meet him.  That is the day he learns how to sell his soul.

Faust is the story about a man who sells his soul to get everything he ever wanted.  Soul Gambler is a modern retelling of Goethe’s words.  It would be easy boring as fuck for me to launch into a comparison between the two that might inevitably end with some shallow “the book was better” statements.  Honestly, I have never fucking read Faust.  Probably a lengthy and verbose masterwork of an ancient people that is difficult to relate to and  context whose context and references are enormously difficult to fully accommodate.  This is why I love video games.  We’ve moved past the lives and the times of those people for it to be fully applicable to us here.  What we need is a translation between our language and theirs.  Goethe was a German writer and Faust is a story from German legends but it is not the German I am referring to.  We need a contextual translation of Faust so that we can use it, just as those readers of its day used it, to measure ourselves and consider who we are in a new light.  Soul Gambler is an example of that attempt.  Taking these old stories and making them into something we can feel and which we can use to relate to our ancestors’ struggles.  And now, some titties.

Aw fuck no, I am not listening to any shit you say when your fucking presence makes my office into Cthulu's man cave.

Aw fuck no, I am not listening to any shit you say when your fucking presence makes my office into Cthulu’s man cave.

I am not sexist, I just needed something to break the preachy rant.  Faust really is every man in this game, though.  At least every modern man.  We’ve all gone to school or had some kind of training.  Maybe we didn’t all graduate at the top of our class, but the majority of us ended up at the “good enough” category of workplaces, and less at the ones they advertise on the fucking brochure.  We’ve all felt the grinding tedium of everyday monotony, and for the British, that’s ok.  For the rest of us, we need some fucking flare, some life, some action.  So Faust gets to meet this old gypsy woman that cuts him with a fucking dagger.  This enables Faust to slice off portions of soul life a loaf of goddamn bread reserved for his very own private dream sandwiches.  He uses these metaphorical sandwiches to mold his reality and make whatever he wants happen.  For 10% soul, you can find your own soul mate!  For 30% you can be strong and sexy as an athlete!  It gets a little obnoxious as every time you look into something with a reflection, his reflection appears and tries to convince him to chop off pieces of soul to buy a new pair of sneakers or something.

The gameplay in this is similar to pretty much every fucking Final Fantasy and Bayonetta in that it really requires is one button.  Where it differs is that you have to select with the mouse, so it requires a little more effort.  But that is ok.  This is about the story, the characters and it is really not that long.  There are also none of those pesky game obstacles to slow you down, so I got through this whole game in about 1.5 hours.  Granted, the more observant have already called my bullshit because they located the stats at the bottom of the page.  Let me make that bigger for you ; ).

Charism, huh? I thought that was the worship of arbitrary indoor furnishings..

Charism, huh? I thought that was the worship of arbitrary indoor furnishings..

So there are some RPG elements in this game: Health, Manipulation, Intelligence and Charism(a).  These stats actually have an effect in-game as well.  If you have high manipulation, you can use your jedi powers to make people tell you things you want to know.  High intelligence lets you out think stupid people.  High Charism(a) lets you charm your way out of some shit.  Overall you can look at these as chat modifiers.  You will generally end up in the same place every time, but these stats let you choose some new boxes or open new opportunities through discussions.  Another stat that will appear in the lower left corner of your screen is your soul.  It shows you, in percentage form, how much of your soul you still have left.  The more the better, trust me.  Without revealing too much you have am epic showdown at the end, and how you choose to spend your soul decides how you do in the epic showdown.  Even for those with no concept of the source material, it should go without saying that being frivolous with your soul makes this game end badly for Faust.

Good Lord! She tattooed my liver! That's the last time I pay a hooker in Belfast!

Good Lord! She tattooed my liver! That’s the last time I pay a hooker in Belfast!

One thing that really got me in this game was the terrible use of English, but the developer of this game is based in Brazil and has an option for English on the main site, so they don’t English too well.  More’s the better, honestly.  What was supposed to be a dark and mysterious tale turned into a quirky dark comedy about a guy with a tattoo on his liver, or something.  There was also some serious gypsy magic in this one, too.  This is a good game for the experience.  It really can’t even be called a game, either.  It’s an interactive experience.  These guys call it a PlayComics game, but it’s an interactive experience.  And it is well done, too.  Despite the broken English, the dialogue flowed together really well, which is an accomplishment considering this is the equivalent of a “choose your own adventure” novel.  It really highlights why games can’t really give you total freedom because every last step outside the boundaries has to be programmed in.  This game takes what equates to a dizzying tangle of dialogue possibilities and brings them all back to the same storyline points elegantly.  The music is also enjoyable in a cafe, but if you are into that sort of thing, you can download it, too.  The best part about this game is that it is only 4.99$ on Steam.  6.99$ with art and soundtrack.  If that hulking second dollar figure is too daunting for you, there is always the option to get the DLC later, which includes the music and art.

Of all the things that bother me about this game, nothing frustrates me more than the possibility that it will be passed off as just another indie game on Steam.  This game has a lot more to offer the standard gamer than just art and relation to a piece of literature.  It has a soul of its own that it tries to grant you in the process of playing.  It makes you think about things and weigh yourself in a new light, and that is the purpose of art.  To affect you deeply enough that you carry a piece of it with you.  I just want to know why the woman that is your soul mate carves the symbol of chaos into your chest to protect you.  Fucking whatever, I don’t know what kind of love-pain rituals Europeans are into these days.

Huzzah!  This is my 50th article!  Time to Celebrate with a giveaway!  I will be linking this sentence to the details shortly.  Stay tuned!