Video Game Reviews [April 2023]
Apr. 23rd, 2023 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaggedwolfBeen on a roll recently. Most of these were from the Bundle For Ukraine that was on itch.io last year. Ordered very roughly from most enjoyed to least enjoyed.
A Short Hike
A short open-world game where you play Claire, a bird who’s trying to get to the top of Hawk’s peak.
I spent an afternoon on this game while sick in bed, and found it quite charming. Gliding and climbing were both easy to pick up, the former just plain fun to do, and I never felt frustrated traversing the environment.
It helped that both the music and the vibes of every character, including Claire herself, puts you in a very chill mode. We’re going to summit Hawk’s peak at some point today, but there’s no rush - play some beachstick ball, take a kid on a boat ride, learn to fish, find some treasure. Maybe you’ll fall off a cliff or two, but hey, just pick yourself back up and have at it again.
The creator’s GDC talk was insightful, too.
Pyre
Supergiant’s third game, where you guide exiles as they compete for the chance to return to their homeland. Got it for super cheap in the Steam sale currently going on.
The cut below is full of spoilers, obviously. TL;DR Would recommend it.
First off, now that I’ve played all four Supergiant games, I can rank them on story, gameplay and music, which are the main things I pay attention to.
Story: Bastion > Pyre > Transistor >> Hades (Cohesion and endings and how moved I was)
Gameplay: Hades >> Bastion > Transistor > Pyre (Though maybe don’t trust that last pair - the frustrations of Pyre’s are far more recent in my mind than Transistor’s)
Music: Pyre ≈ Transistor > Bastion > Hades
On to Pyre itself. The setting gripped me from the start. Exile to the desolate and dangerous Downside represented by the Commonwealth as an act of mercy, which only gets more horrific as when you learn that the inability to return from the Downside isn’t the Commonwealth blocking the way but the physical reality of the two regions, what the Scribes’ original hopes for the Commonwealth were, and other fun stuff the Commonwealth does like clipping exiled Harp’s wings.
The Reader is a fairly different protagonist from those of the other three Supergiant games. The Kid, Red, and Zagreus are more defined characters, of course, but the distinction I refer to is the Reader’s physical inability to participate in the rites. I found that oddly compelling. You can read, a skill few of your friends have, but you know you can never obtain your own freedom/return, only guide them to theirs.
You have some freedom to define the Reader. Their gender, their background (I picked “crippled scholar”), their motives, their responses. The tooltip system for the latter was helpful in fleshing out motives for each possible option, and in the general game text as an easy source of lore your character would already know.
And of course, you pick which of the ragtag bunch of misfits get to ascend to the Commonwealth, and which don’t. Which got to me more than I expected, because they’re a very good ragtag bunch of misfits that technically aren’t even that because they’re part of the Nightwings, the triumvirate designed by the Scribes to always get to play in the Liberation Rite. (It is so fair for all the other triumvirates to hate us. They should hate us more.)
I picked Jodariel to ascend first even though I hadn’t learnt her backstory, because she’d been there the longest and because I was struggling with playing her. And then I thought, okay, I really have the hang of playing Rukey and Hedwyn, they’ll be the last two I liberate so I can get through the rites easily.
But right before the next Liberation Rite, Rukey, whose debt with Barker I’d resolved, asks me if he can go home to his mother and uncles and I was like fuck! I gotta send the dog home even if it makes gameplay annoying! And then the next Liberation Rite I was thinking of sending Pamitha home because she’d clearly gotten as far as she could with her sister, but Hedwyn got sick again that cycle and clearly missed Jodariel and so once more I was like fuck it!! Go home Hedywn!
Emergent story stuff like that drew me deeper into the world, and I appreciated it. I got pretty attached to everyone by the end of the game, and the conclusion with it being impossible to have all of the Nightwings reunited left me feeling some kind of way, an unavoidable ache even in the fairly good ending I got by winning all Liberation Rites. I sent the Reader up. I had to, after she’d spent the whole game thinking she’d never go home again. Of the Nightwings, T’izo, Volfred and Bertrude were the ones who stayed in the Downside. I think that mostly works for those three, but I did feel bad that Volfred never got to see the fruits of his efforts first-hand.
I think my only complaints character-wise is there weren’t even hints of any f/f or m/m, while there was stuff for Hedwyn/Fikani, Mae/Almer, even Jodariel and that random demon guy, and plenty of other m/f stuff. Pretty straight world here.
Since Pyre is the last of the Supergiant games I’ve played, it’s fun to see the position it occupies in their journey between Transistor and Hades, both in setting and gameplay.
In setting: Bastion occurs in a world after a calamity has destroyed the city, and you go among the wreckage. Transistor takes place while the process is actively consuming the city. In Pyre, the stars are fading and the society above is giving way to a new one. Hades’s world is static - the underworld is a fundamental constant, as are the gods, and all that changes are their relationships with each other.
This shift makes sense, given all these games’ genres, but there’s something about the “dying world” ones I like. Maybe it's the preciousness of the moments you get there, or something else I can’t identify. Though saying this, Pyre’s version of a dying world is my favourite because it is the least depressing and I like endings with less death XD.
In gameplay, particular in repeating sections of gameplay against the same enemies: Bastion provides an in-universe explanation for New Game Plus. Transistor has Red traverse the city and then go back the way she came. Every cycle in Pyre you revisit a subset of Rite locations, facing off familiar teams, and meet yet another at the Fall of Soliam. Finally, in Hades, you run through roughly the same path from underworld to surface countless times.
You can kind of see them tightening the game loop more and more and it definitely worked - I have 79 hours in Hades, that gameplay loop is addictive.
Gameplay is probably the weakest link in Pyre. I found it unintuitive, and never really got the hang of teamwork. Mostly just kept picking a player, having them banish enemies and get the ball as far as they could go, and retrying with the next player if that one got banished. Halfway through the game I lowered the difficulty. Whether that was due to inherent annoyance at the gameplay or that I played this game in a single night (don’t do this), I could not get the hang of beating the Chastity trio the second time around.
Other thing I couldn’t tell if it was my late night delirium or the game writing being unclear: At some point the Voice starts ranting about there being a traitor, and the phrasing made me think this was a traitor to both the Plan and the Commonwealth. This made me incredibly paranoid for a cycle and a half, where I started wondering if Mae was the traitor and if I should put off sending her to the Commonwealth. It turned out that the Voice was just being pissy about Volfred LOL.
Finally, I loved the ending song, and loved even more the final shot of a library filled with books in the daylight.
Arcade Sprits and its sequel, Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers
Dating sim visual novels that heavily feature arcades. In the first, you work at a small arcade that’s getting threatened by the big franchise next door. In the second, you join a pro competitive fighting game team that’s climbing through the ranks.
I generally enjoy a dating sim more when the protagonist also gets to be fucked up about something, and it’s not just the love interests who are fucked up about things that the protagonist helps solve. Both protagonists here deliver in that regard. The first game’s is pretty depressed and believes they’re cursed to never be happy, until working at the arcade gives them new motivations, while the second has an unhealthy obsession with winning as a signal of their self-worth. Great low points for both of’em.
The casts in both games are a fun array of characters, with very different personalities, and opportunities to choose who you spend more time with. In both games I had my favorites, but I also very much bought the casts as actual friend groups. I think the part of the game that I enjoyed most was the personality-defined responses, where most of your responses in this VN fall into the personality types of Quirky, Gutsy, Steady, or Kindly, and your choices set your personality more in stone. The more compatible your personality is with a potential LI, the higher the chance that you have a shot with them when the romance chapter rolls around. As someone who very much enjoyed playing Purple!Hawke in DA2, I had fun repeatedly picking Quirky to say the most bizarre shit to the other characters to make them laugh.
Also, these games definitely feel like they were written by someone who really loves arcade games and wants to tell me all about them, which makes the whole arcade focus work. There's also an subplot in both games about sentient AIs that can get pretty wild.
The second game added some new features. There’s a Rival character that’s customizable in terms of appearance, gender and whether they’re a friendly rival or a big jerk. There’s also some NO GOOD OPTION dialogue moments where literally every response is the wrong thing to say but your character can’t say anything else - I liked most of those other than one of the first ones we see.
Now, the downsides. I found the voice acting so bad that I immediately lowered the voice audio volume to zero after the first five minutes and kept it that way. Maybe there is later voice acting in either game that is better, but honestly, in visual novels like these ones I rarely feel a need for lines to be voiced.
Secondly, the writing could sometimes get pretty clunky or on the nose when it came to trying to deal with topics like toxic gamers and the like. Not like I disagree with any of the games’ takes there but the writing could definitely have been smoother imo.
Overall, dating sims that are exactly as they are advertised. I see that the developer’s next VN is about being a gig economy villain henchman, so I’ll probably check it out if reviews are good.
Backbone
Howard’s a racoon private-eye in a noirish city ruled by apes, and a typical case of a deadbeat husband leads him into the darker underpinnings of the city.
Great art, I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the first half of the game, visiting various neighbourhoods and working with the investigative reporter to investigate the deadbeat husband case that turned into the missing girl case that turned into something else all together. Howard is the classic self-indulgent sad/cycnical private eye, which I always enjoy, but I also loved his banter with Renee and Anatoly.
I even liked the bizarre dream sequence-esque view of the parade that Howard sees. Super weird, didn’t see that coming at all in the best way.
Unfortunately, what happens next I also didn’t see coming, except in the worst way. It was like the game’s plot essentially fell apart or stopped knowing what it was about, and I was disappointed by both that turn and how the game ended overall. Really unfortunate.
You are at your local bar talking to the people and intermittently texting your girlfriend. The dialog system is mildly entertaining, what with letting you cycle through options for different parts of your reply, but the game really is a 20 minute “....okay I guess that happened.” experience.
There were a couple of other games I started but soon decided I wasn’t enjoying enough to continue (Promesa, Celeste), so I don’t have much to say about them.
no subject
Date: 2023-04-25 05:40 am (UTC)