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Review: Destiny 2
It's a game that has no doubts as to what it wants to be, largely delivering an experience with the fervor it deserves.4.0
Editor's Note: This review is based on a pre-release build of the game, playable as part of a in-house event hosted by Bungie. The build is largely representative of the Day One experience of the game, but the review may be updated should an aspect being discussed change to any dramatic degree during the launch period.
In every respect that Destiny felt forged from nail-biting uncertainty, a mélange of design decisions that would be rewritten and redone time and time again over the course of three years, Destiny 2 exudes confidence and belief. It's a game that has no doubts as to what it wants to be, and has largely delivered a gameplay experience with the fervor that it deserves.
That confidence is obvious from Destiny 2's first minutes, a no-nonsense barn burner of a sequence where the Tower, the first game's starting social space, is laid to waste by an invading alien army called the Red Legion, led by a hulking goliath named Ghaul. After taking the Tower out of commission, Ghaul usurps the energy of the Traveler, the haunting planet-sized entity looming over Earth's last safe city, leaving all of our planet's Guardians without their phenomenal powers, and the player feebly staggering out of the city and into the wild, forced to eke out some measure of a resistance against the invaders from a farmland bivouac in the middle of Europe.
It's a harsh reset button that Bungie executes here, leaving players at less than square one. However, the developer also performs a public service with this setup: giving the Destiny series its first straightforward story. None of the major campaigns of the first game were particularly effective at establishing or maintaining tension, investment, and thrust at the outset. Even The Taken King expansion left the Books of Sorrow—the best sci-fi storytelling in the series thus far—as an obscure collectable. Once Destiny 2's introductory missions are over, players will know their priorities beyond a shadow of a doubt: getting your power back, finding the Tower's scattered leadership, freeing the Traveler, and putting as many bullets into Ghaul as his disgusting face can hold. That clarity of vision makes a drastic difference. None of the missions feel like superfluous busywork. Every fight is a necessary skirmish in the desperate scrape to bring Earth and its protectors back to 100%.
As one might imagine, though, players don't stay powerless for terribly long. A few early missions do entertain the notion of a world where Destiny's Guardians are mere mortals—a brief, lonely period where you limp across the countryside, hunted by rabid animals and with no way of resurrecting yourself if you die. After about an hour, players will have some semblance of their regular moveset back, access to their new subclasses, and introduced to the new character-upgrade system. Destiny 2's approach to character progression ditches the slow, interminable process of filling in circles with XP for a marginal ability boost for a streamlined branching path of earning single upgrade points every new level to put into movement, grenade, and Super enhancements, each adding decisive, noticeable changes every time.
Again, clarity is the name of the game. There's no confusion as to the benefits of every little incremental step characters take as they level up. The tradeoff for the stronger upgrades means fewer options for customizing one's playstyle compared to the last game. On the flipside, though, fewer options associated with each subclass means more impetus to flit back and forth between them depending on the scenario, without the constant worry of one subclass being woefully under-leveled compared to the one players get comfortable with.
More importantly, Bungie's greatest triumph here is brutally murdering the concept of progress being tied to a routine. The first game gave the illusion of freedom, only to constantly wall itself off from players feeling truly free. Nebulous, lore-based missions with compulsory, terse exposition led to a nonstop cycle of turning in loot for currency or gear, talking to someone about a new mission, then retreating to orbit to access more. Lather, rinse, repeat, and for hundreds of hours, all dotted by notoriously slow loading times.
Destiny 2's new worlds blossom for the player, with tasks strewn throughout the open world, the end of one dovetailing elegantly to the next from your exact location without breaking narrative stride. Some of the old niceties are gated a bit behind specific actions; weirdly, players don't get access to a Sparrow hoverbike until some hours into the campaign. Few seem menial or meaningless, though. The rewards are immediate and, generally, resolution to every little narrative thread can be chased down with the tenacity it deserves.
That last point is a huge factor in the game's success. Compared to its predecessor, Destiny 2 is lighter on impenetrable lore and heavier on sheer storytelling. Gone is the first game's Grimoire system, which forced players to Bungie's website for details that should have been in the game to begin with. In its place are more cutscenes showing the first game's Speaker being brutally interrogated by Ghaul, dream-like sequences in forests that relate affecting little tales about the history of each Guardian subclass before players are given their new powers, exploratory missions that show us what the Red Legion has done to the worlds they've invaded. There's far more interaction with the first Destiny's staid, mission-providing leadership, all of whom display camaraderie, question the logic of a mission in real-time and, most blessedly, provide a sense of humor. The game leans perhaps too heavily on Nathan Fillion's Cayde-6 throughout for that humor, but he's balanced out by some breezy comedic banter, much of it offered up by Gina Torres, as Ikora, in straight-woman mode—surely to the delight of Firefly fans worldwide—but the best of which is provided by Cayde's own gleefully schizophrenic ship A.I.
All of this would fall apart without the kinetic core gameplay, which is the one thing Bungie got unquestionably right from minute one. Destiny still plays like Halo unchained; it's the result of years of Bungie polishing the console first-person shooter to its highest shine, enhanced by a slew of flashy, devastating superpowers and exhilarating player movement. Where Destiny 2 kicks things up a notch is in the level design, expanding the scale of even the smallest shootouts from unmemorable desolate landscapes and industrial detritus to lush, vibrant places where devastation has yielded to thriving plant life and natural beauty, even if that natural beauty is alien to our eyes.
To look at any new Destiny content from the outset is to essentially examine a foundation upon which one hopes Bungie can build cathedrals to white-knuckle, space-operatic heroism. When the first game was all said and done, we had seen an ambitious project that turned out to be disappointingly hollow in spots. The foundation that's Destiny 2 already feels rock-solid, a refinement and reinforcement of Destiny's best elements in every respect.
Developer: Bungie Publisher: Activision Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: September 6, 2017 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Language, Violence Buy: Game
Review: My Friend Pedro Vividly Casts You as a Bollywood-Style Action Hero
Every shootout is an opportunity to execute a thoroughly balletic performance of sorts.4
Bollywood's charm lies in the sheer melodrama and absurdity of its films, which typically feature heroes taking arms against foes in lurid fashion. The industry's influence on My Friend Pedro, a shoot 'em up from Swedish developer Victor Agren's DeadToast Entertainment, is certainly unmistakable. Indeed, you'll feel like a Bollywood strongman as you mow down mobs of henchmen in spectacular ways as the game's unnamed protagonist, with Pedro, your chatty banana companion, cracking wise by your side.
Each level of the game is presented as a 2D platformer, and there are unbounded thrills to be had in making it through each area, from ramming through a plate-glass wall into a room to gliding down from an overhead cable to the story below. As you caper across abandoned buildings and deserted rooftops with an array of firearms at your disposal, you'll pump your enemies' guts full of lead as the dizzying electronic soundtrack—redolent of a neo-noir film—slickly complements the carnage. And because you have to plan your moves in advance, it's almost as if you're choreographing that carnage. Every shootout is an opportunity to execute a thoroughly balletic performance of sorts. And with more points awarded for intricate stunts, there's a huge incentive to bring as much pizazz to your violence as possible.
How you carry out all these stunts is dependent on your creativity and skill, with players equipped with an arsenal of Bollywood-esque combat techniques. Among these is a nifty trick called split aiming, which lets you wield a pair of guns and shoot two targets at the same time. You can also perform an elaborate somersault in midair, all while raining bullets down on the targets below you. Even conveniently placed objects, like a frying pan laying on the ground, can be used to pull off even more outrageous stunts. The pan, for instance, is an especially useful weapon against hard-to-reach mobsters: Kick it into the air and fire at it and your bullets will ricochet off its surface and right into nearby enemies.
In later chapters, My Friend Pedro points to a more profound narrative beneath its silly veneer, weaving in clues to the protagonist's depression as well as a twisted backstory. There's an entire chapter devoted to his crumbling mental state, with the player traversing through a hallucinatory dreamscape painted in pastel hues, all as quirky, floating figureheads and soft doughy clouds dance about. The shift in tonality is jarring, but there's a pleasant self-awareness to My Friend Pedro as it shovels cartoonish levels of elegant violence at the player. Later chapters even see the game breaking the fourth wall to poke fun at you. In one instance, you'll be laying siege upon a crew of white brutes known as hardcore gamers, whose soundbites consist of familiar gaming lingo like "Git guud noob" and "GG."
Throughout, you can dramatically slow down the pace of combat, and you'll feel like Neo from The Matrix as you leap off an impossibly tall skyscraper, fending off hordes of enemies falling alongside you. If the slow-motion gunplay makes such feats easier to pull off, there's more challenge in mastering the controls that allow you to split aim, wall jump, and somersault. That gameplay may be limited in the end, but the violence in My Friend Pedro is so hyperbolic and varied—at one point, you'll find yourself doing backflips on a motorcycle in order to avoid a barrage of bombs—that you'll be gunning to repeat levels in order to best your high score. It's mayhem that speaks so strongly in the language of the Bollywood action film that the only thing you may be left wanting for is the wisecracking Pedro to do a song-and-dance routine once the curtain comes down on your adventure.
The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Tinsley PR.
Developer: DeadToast Entertainment Publisher: Devolver Digital Platform: Switch Release Date: June 20, 2019 Buy: Game
E3 2019: The Best and Worst Surprises
The 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo presented an industry in transition.
The 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo presented an industry in transition. As the current console generation winds down and new hardware is still in development, the subject of how games will be played going forward has come into question, as the technology to stream games via the cloud supplants the need for consoles or PCs.
In a 15-minute presentation prior to E3's launch, Google unveiled their cloud gaming service Stadia, a subscription-based service—for use on desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices—that allows high-end gaming without the need for expensive hardware. Supposedly offering computing power significantly stronger than that of the PlayStation Pro and Xbox One X combined, Stadia relies on Google's own data centers, with the only real bottleneck being consumer internet speeds and bandwidth caps as the gameplay is streamed to the end user. Hands-on experience with Stadia has shown it to be incredibly impressive—provided one's internet connection is stable and fast enough to handle the required download speed.
Even before the expo officially kicked off at the Los Angeles Convention Center, notions of "traditional" video gaming were being challenged. There was no greater sign of the shake up than the absence of one of the three major console makers: Sony. The company eschewed not only their usual press conference, but any showing at all. While many have suggested that Sony, who had informally announced their upcoming PlayStation 5 console earlier in 2019, wanted to benefit from Microsoft announcing what the target specs would be for the Project Scarlett, the simple truth is that Sony doesn't have much to currently show to the public.
Only two of Sony's upcoming first-party exclusive titles particularly stand out: Naughty Dog's The Last of Us 2, a known quantity which has already seen multiple previews, and Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding, whose trailer premiered shortly before the expo kicked off. In the end, releasing the trailer ahead of E3 was a smart move on the company's part, as the ongoing enigma that is Kojima's next title dominated discussion for days instead of getting lost in the sea of announcements after E3 was officially under way, and a solid release date is something that Sony can boast about in a year where their exclusives are scant.
EA also elected not to host their customary press conference, instead opting for a streamed video presentation similar to the Nintendo Direct broadcast. The company's decision not to discuss anything about this year's disappointing Anthem is damning, not only for the remaining fans of the game hoping to see the game properly supported moving forward, but for EA itself, whose frustrating trend of misusing developers they acquire has left BioWare on thin ice. As one live service game in an ocean, and created by a company with little experience making such games, Anthem was always destined to face an uphill battle; at this point, some four months after its release, turning the game around would require faith in the product and an evolving cycle of new content, both of which EA could have presented to the world here. And there's precedent for this, demonstrated by the success of Destiny after its first tumultuous year. Alas, not even a mention across the entire show.
The main event of EA's Play presentation was their upcoming Star Wars title Jedi: Fallen Order. Though the somnolent 14-minute video that capped the presentation seems to promise a cross between Uncharted and The Force Unleashed, hands-on time with the game reveals that its closest analogue is Dark Souls, given that it takes place across large open areas with bonfire equivalents the protagonist can meditate at, which inexplicably revives all enemies. The combat feels like that of Dark Souls, with the fast-paced lightsaber duels of something like Jedi Academy replaced by slower, more precise one-on-one battles where you must manoeuver around enemies to fight them individually, and in a manner that recalls other From Software games. Whether Jedi: Fallen Order will be as difficult as the Soulsborne titles remains to be seen, though one would assume EA would want the title to be accessible as possible, especially considering their recent and lousy track record with the franchise.
The first official E3 press conference was presented by Microsoft, which had a stellar showing of new games and announcements. New titles demonstrated include Outer Worlds, a Fallout-esque sci-fi action adventure game, a new Battletoads game featuring bright and colourful cartoonish graphics, the latest iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the next chapter in the Gears of War series simply titled Gears 5, and survival horror outing Blair Witch. Microsoft's next console, Project Scarlett, was broadly discussed as a technical powerhouse without mentioning any specifics, including price, as if to ensure Sony has no edge on the competition when their PS5 announcement finally comes. More interestingly, Microsoft presented their version of the cloud streaming gaming, the Microsoft xCloud service, which Phil Spencer was able to elaborate on during Giant Bomb's Nite Two live show.
Spencer notes that while cloud streaming services are convenient, allowing gamers to play games anywhere, they're to the detriment of consumers in terms of actually letting them own the games they buy. The Stadia pricing model includes not only subscription fees, but also additional prices on top for some games, which is troubling as purchasers will only "own" any game they buy as long as the service is active, or if they have an active internet connection. If Google, or any streaming service, pulls the plug, purchased products simply go away.
Which is why Microsoft is working toward a hybrid of cloud streaming services with traditional ownership models, where gamers will own their console and their games, but can also stream them to other devices to play games on the go using the cloud. Google's Stadia offers something more akin to Netflix, and looks to suffer from some of the same issues as Netflix when it comes to content disappearing as licenses expire. Whether Microsoft's model works also remains to be seen, but their excellent and inexpensive Game Pass service, which saw extension to the PC during E3, has demonstrated both the excellent value and the focus on services benefitting the end user that Spencer advocated for.
Bethesda was in full-apology mode for their first press conference since the disastrous launch of Fallout 76, bookending their presentation with saccharine, insipid videos about how they understand and like gamers, how they're gamers themselves, and other such rigmarole. Bringing out Todd Howard to discuss said elephant in the room would have been a misstep had it not been for the announcement of the game's Nuclear Winter DLC—a fresh take (currently available in beta) on the battle-royale genre—as well as a Fallout 76 freeplay period where anyone can play the game with the new content. Nuclear Winter is a surprising amount of fun, a squad-based battle royale allowing players to choose where they spawn on the map and then take advantage of classic Fallout devices while fighting to become the only survivor. For example, becoming invisible with a Stealth Boy offers a fleeting chance to get the drop on enemies or flee an area teeming with overpowered opponents, or jumping into a set of Power Armor gives more health but impedes player speed and is loud enough to give away player location. At time of writing, Bethesda have made Nuclear Winter an indefinite add-on for Fallout 76, which gives the populace at large a reason to try Fallout 76.
Standing high above Bethesda's other announcements and demos, Doom Eternal looks to be a spectacular follow-up to the successful 2016 reboot, escalating on the core gameplay with new abilities including a combat grappling hook and a flamethrower, and an expanded narrative involving angels as well as the demons of Hell. Elsewhere, Square Enix's press conference largely focused on the Final Fantasy VII Remake and concluded with a baffling look at Marvel Avengers, a game that probably should have been revealed back when Avengers: Endgame was still a part of the popular conversation but probably wasn't given its ugly and bizarre character models. More notable, though buried within the conference, was the announcement of Dying Light 2, which looks to be an ambitious and sprawling follow-up to the original game. It boasts expanded parkour gameplay in a new environment that changes with player choice, promising to give fans a unique experience with each playthrough.
Nintendo Direct closed out the conferences, announcing two new Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC characters: the much-loved dynamic duo of Banjo and Kazooie and the not-so-loved hero from Dragon Quest. The Link's Awakening remaster, which boasts frustratingly cutesy graphics that go against the original game's theme and tone, was also exhibited; it's as if the developers thought that the cartoonish look of the original 8-Bit Game Boy title was an intentional stylistic choice, rather than how Zelda games looked at that time, and that it was something that needed to be made cuter. It feels like a significant misstep, and one that's bound to cheapen the surprisingly mature and thoughtful narrative. Nonetheless, it's pleasing that this underplayed classic will find a new audience, and Nintendo's diorama displays of areas from the game on the show floor were exceptional and gorgeous.
Finally, a new Animal Crossing was revealed, with a fresh island setting, new crafting gameplay, and the inclusion of fruit stacking. After sideline missteps like Pocket Camp, Amiibo Festival, and Happy Home Designer, a new Switch entry seems to be exactly the shot in the arm that this beloved series needs to get back on track.
Although E3 2019 demonstrated that there are major changes coming for the gaming industry, some things remain the same, even if it's just Devolver Digital taking the piss out of, well, the big-budget press conference. Indeed, latest conference was as fresh, joyous, and deranged as its predecessors. The future of video gaming might be uncertain, but there's still plenty to look forward to and celebrate, and this is something the folks at Devolver Digital are committed to proving year after year, and with a humor that could stand to rub off on the industry at large.
E3 ran from June 11—13.
Review: Outer Wilds Is a Wondrous Maze of Infinite, Breathtaking Possibilities
This is a rare adventure game in which the journey is actually more of a reward than the destination.5
Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds begins and ends with a quietly spectacular explosion. As a result of this open-world space exploration game's time-looping mechanic, one of those explosions is the first thing you'll see every time you reawaken, but it's so far off in the distance—just a brief flash of rippling orange in outer space that's overshadowed by the surface of a massive green planetoid—that it might take a few cycles before you actually notice it. And even then, its significance won't become apparent until you've blasted off from your home planet and flown yourself out there to get a better look at the blast.
The understated appeal of the smartly designed Outer Wilds stems from its abundance of deliberate details scattered across its worlds, ever-nudging you toward understanding how various scientific phenomenon operate. This is a game so beautiful that you might spend hours taking in the sights before you start focusing on its loose, nonlinear plot. Despite taking place in a comparatively small six-planet solar system, the game's open-galaxy design feels full of infinite possibilities, each excursion as fresh and exciting as the last, even hours in.
Should you survive for a consecutive 22 minutes, you'll come across that second explosion. You'll hear a sonic boom and, if you're facing the right way, see a universe-engulfing tide of crackling blue energy coming your way, resetting the time loop and providing a fairly substantial (though never obtrusive) endgame, one in which you must find a way to prevent your sun from going supernova. But think of the solar system's terminal diagnosis as less of an ending than a chance at a fresh beginning: carte blanche to try just about anything.
Even if there's only one real way to "beat" it, there's no wrong way to play Outer Wilds, and no barriers in your way. You don't have to fight any enemies or level up—a tacit acknowledgement on the game's part that the galaxy's destruction can't be prevented through brute force, only through the fearless act of discovery. For one, you'll fly through a tangle of tornadoes on Giant's Deep that are periodically thrusting the planet's islands into orbit, and on Brittle Hollow, you'll follow a precarious trail of gravity crystals along the underside of the planet's exposed equator. You also don't need to collect any items. Everything you need is given to you at the game's start: a radio-frequency scanner, a launchable probe that takes pictures and measures surface stability, an auto-translator for alien languages, and a spacesuit capable of rocket propulsion. How you choose to use these items to do your first-person exploration is entirely up to you, and that freedom is a large part of the game's charm.
Early on, you'll visit a museum that outlines the history of the Outer Wilds space program, with exhibits that call out some of the unexplained quantum phenomena and gravitational distortions that your fellow explorers have found. You'll later encounter many of these same exhibits in the wild, on a much larger and dangerous scale, but as the museum suggests, the game's overarching theme isn't just about encountering these things or exploring the many eye-catching, heart-stopping wonders of Outer Wilds, but appreciating how they work. You're going to be eaten by a giant anglerfish, smashed by a rotating column of ash, engulfed by the sun, buffeted by heavy gravity, thrown through a black hole, electrocuted by a jellyfish. But you'll also study the skeletal remains of that fish or the frozen corpse of a jellyfish and realize how to utilize them. You'll marvel at what first seems like magic, and then you'll pull up Clarke's third law and exploit the technology or quantum physics behind it.
The game's time loop allows players to harmlessly test lethal hypotheses, such as what might happen if you use a geyser to propel yourself to new heights, or mix two forms of warp cores in the High Energy Lab located on Ember Twin. Throughout, your ship's log tracks the overarching goals via a digital corkboard web of rumors—concerning gravity cannons, missing escape pods, your fellow explorers, and the mysterious Quantum Moon—but it doesn't explicitly ask you to pursue any of those leads. In fact, Outer Wilds never even warns you that your sun is about to go supernova or suggests that you find a way to stop it.
Repetition is often the bane of time-looping games, and this is where Outer Wilds benefits from its open galaxy setting. You can travel to anything you see, even if it's not always apparent how to, say, land on a stray comet, or approach the tiny space station that orbits the sun without being pulled into a massive star. Moreover, each planet feels distinct: Your home world of Timber Hearth is a small region of geysers and massive oxygen-producing trees, which is a far cry from Giant's Deep, a gas-giant-like planet made of fluid layers, and the dangerous Dark Bramble, what with its misty voids and treacherous anglerfish.
And these planets continue to change as time passes, which makes familiar locations feel new again, if visited later on in the game. Take, for instance, the two binary planets known collectively as the Hourglass Twins. As sand is gravitationally pulled from Ash Twin and deposited on Ember Twin, you'll find that the latter planet's caves fill, becoming inaccessible. By contrast, as Ash Twin is denuded of its sandy shell, entire towers are unearthed.
Elsewhere, as planets orbit closer to the sun, iced-over paths might melt open, revealing shortcuts through, say, deadly, invisible ghost matter. You might start out trying to access the Southern Observatory on Brittle Hollow, but along the way, you may discover the massive bridges leading to the Hanging City, get sidetracked by signage pointing to the Gravity Cannon, experiment with leaping between tractor beams that lead to a Quantum Tower, or simply stumble into the hollow planet's black-hole core and end up teleported elsewhere. Or you might get struck by debris and die, resetting back to the game's start.
Think, then, of Outer Wilds as a maze without dead ends, or like the Nomai language itself, which is depicted as a series of geometric spirals branching out from a fixed point. Each branch, no matter how small, offers up some sort of discovery, whether it's just a breathtaking vista, a scientific model, a fossil, or a text log. The rare adventure game in which the journey is actually more of a reward than the destination, Outer Wilds delights in inviting you to spend a few minutes marveling at the sight of the galaxy as planets orbit balletically in and out of view. You're not exploring a series of discrete worlds so much as you are engaging with one interconnected star system, constantly learning right up to your final expedition. That's the brilliant hook that'll keep you returning, loop after loop, not just for the chance to watch the dizzyingly beautiful (and angrily reddening) sun crest into view, but to better know why it does so. The real world is overwhelming and unmooring, but here, in 22-minute chunks, you can wrest back a sense of control and understanding of a momentous model galaxy.
The game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.
Developer: Mobius Digital Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Platform: PC Release Date: March 30, 2019 ESRB: E Buy: Game
Review: Warhammer: Chaosbane Is a Hack-and-Slash Adventure Without Purpose
Even the few inventive stretches of the game are ultimately driven into the ground by a punishing sense of repetition.1
The opening cinematic for Warhammer: Chaosbane sets the tone for the game that follows. The series of crudely animated storyboard sketches describe a rather generic massive-scale war that's just been concluded against the forces of Chaos and how your chosen protagonist bravely helped Commander Magnus to victory. What follows isn't a hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler so much as a hack-and-slack time-killer, one that pales in comparison to the game that Chaosbane fruitlessly emulates: Diablo.
Chaosbane's squandered potential is most evident in how the game mishandles its four selectable characters. Elessa, a wood-elf archer, is meant to use poisons and traps to keep enemies at bay, but those skills are never needed, as the game's witless AI hordes are only too happy to serve as stationary targets for her arrows. The dwarven Bragi Axebiter uses a chain axe to grapple into foes, since his rage-based mechanic relies upon constantly hitting things, so it's odd that many dungeons are filled with long, empty corridors that drain his rage meter. Konrad Vollen, a shield-bearing soldier gains extra strength when taunting or being swarmed by enemies, and yet outside of the co-op campaign, he seems rather listless, his status-boosting AOE banners largely going to waste. And then there's the high-elf mage Elontir, who's impossibly complicated to handle in the solo campaign. Indeed, the joy of finely controlling his spells is lost in the hectic rush of constantly teleporting away from foes.
The first few dungeons showcase Bigben Interactive's latest at its best, as they at least offer the illusion of depth and variety. You'll move from the green-hued sewers beneath Nuln to the ramparts above, and then through the grim, gray-hewn streets of the ravaged fortress city, all the while learning exciting new moves. (Never mind that the characters seem to have inexplicably forgotten all their heroic skills from that introductory cutscene.) But should you decide you don't like Bragi's fast-paced dual-wielding axes and want to shift to Konrad's slower, more methodical sword-and-shield bashing, you'll have to begin a whole new campaign, and it's here that the game's non-randomized levels come dully into view.
Even if you never restart and choose to stick with a single character, the rewards are quickly diminishing. You'll revisit slightly different areas of Nuln's sewers and streets throughout the first chapter, fighting, for the most part, the same types of monsters: some sort of swarmer, some sort of tank, a ranged unit, and perhaps a mounted creature. Your hero, limited to a single weapon type, only ever minimally upgrades his or her loot, and of those 14 active abilities and countless passives to equip, only a few builds seem viable or interesting.
The game's main campaign is relentlessly repetitious. Dungeons are straightforward affairs, mostly linear corridors that are occasionally pockmarked with a treasure-filled cul de sac, though they offer no optional objectives or lore. There are no side quests, no interactions with townsfolk, not even a shop. There are only five or six NPCs, all of whom give the same fetch-quest variations, only with slightly different accents, and ultimately, whether they send you to the frosty trees of the Forest of Knives or the floating stone bridges of the Chaos Realm, the result is always exactly the same. While Chaosbane abounds in colorful background details—toothy red maws pressing out of the earth, tentacles flailing far beneath you—the game would have been better served by bringing more hazards to the actual forefront, so as to break up the monotony of just how easy it is to vanquish your enemies.
Even the few inventive stretches of the game are ultimately driven into the ground by that sense of repetition. Chaosbane's four bosses are its strongest feature, given that they possess unique mechanics that you must learn to strategically overcome, from dodging a bullet-hell attack to baiting a laser away from the pillars that you'll later need as cover. But replaying these encounters in Boss Rush mode quickly blunts the excitement of learning boss patterns, making these encounters as rote as any other enemy in the game. Increasing the difficulty simply allows enemies to hit harder and absorb more damage, which makes the game longer, not harder, and the post-game Relic Hunt mode's random enemy modifiers do little to change this. To put it lightly, it's a case in which nothing is adventured, and nothing is gained.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by HomeRun PR.
Developer: Bigben Interactive Publisher: Eko Software Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: June 4, 2019 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Violence Buy: Game
Review: Pathologic 2 Bears Witness to the Enormity of a Town's Suffering
Playing Pathologic 2 feels like suffering, and it's meant to be that way.4
If "fun" is on one extreme of the video game emotional spectrum, Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic 2 is on the other. It drops you into its setting with a harshness that's redolent of a season's first blast of freezing cold. As that setting, a remote town on the Russian steppe, is ravaged by mass hysteria and plague, you feel desperate and hopeless, struggling against a force you don't understand and cannot seem to overcome so much as momentarily stave off. Playing Pathologic 2 feels like suffering, and it's meant to be that way.
Despite the number in its title, the game is a partial remake of the cult 2004 original, which featured three playable characters with different yet interconnected stories. As of its initial release, this remake features only one: Artemy Burakh, also known as the Haruspex, a surgeon called back home by his father, a sort of folk healer within the community. For most players, however, experiencing Pathologic 2 once as a single character will be more than enough, given the game's length and sheer difficulty. Over the ensuing 12 days, everything in the village goes wrong. Its dubious meat-packing industry halts, the tensions with an indigenous group called the Kin run hot, and a plague fills the air with black particles. People die in the streets, their houses, and the makeshift hospital cobbled together in the theater. Plague districts are cordoned off and marked by great bonfires. The army arrives, prepared to purge. For this isolated village, it feels like the end of the world, and you feel it in your bones because the game constantly places you on edge through its harsh survival mechanics.
Meters for exhaustion, hunger, and thirst tick down every minute of each hellish day, and while there are initially plenty of functional water pumps around town to quench your thirst, the other two meters need to be managed on a constricted schedule and whatever pittance is on hand. If any bar fills, it begins to subtract health. Throughout, you get what you need however you're willing to get it. Children, for one, love nuts and sharp objects, so you might trade a pair of broken, rusty scissors and some peanuts for a salted fish to eat (at the cost of thirst), or sell one of three revolver bullets for the coffee beans necessary to stay awake instead of losing a few precious hours sleeping. Perhaps you'll sully your reputation by cutting out the kidney of a dead mugger to sell for a bandage. Furthermore, plague districts affect an immunity meter that, if you don't manage it properly, gives way to an infection meter.
Players will have these variables hanging over them as they're loosed upon the town in first-person perspective. Each new day provides new events, new conversations, and new leads on certain mysteries. On the way to investigate any such points on the map, you must constantly weigh the need to finish certain events before nightfall with the need to manage meters. Is it worth it to take a detour to a shop, to trade with kids playing in a yard, or to root through an abandoned house? After all, the way Pathologic 2 handles failure is harsh, reducing the health meter and occasionally subtracting from other statistics in the event of your extremely likely death, making the next attempt more difficult. And yet the very act of managing those stats or prioritizing certain tasks might also lead to missing others entirely, with resulting consequences. Other events seem designed only to waste precious time by diverting your attention from other matters, and you're rarely told which is which.
The only thing that significantly hinders the game's apocalyptic despair is the sense that its difficulties have been tuned a little too sharply. For as much as the game's survival systems are designed to be overbearing and exhausting, they often feel unnecessarily harsh, somewhere beyond the point that has already been so clearly made. In such moments, you begin to wonder if scavenging wouldn't still convey a huge amount of stress if food satisfied just a little more of your hunger, and if the meters ticked down just a little more slowly. The developers have promised an option to adjust the difficulty in the future, though in the game's current state, it's hard not to wish for a slight loosening of its grip around your throat.
All the same, there's seemingly no "right" way to play Pathologic 2. Its design philosophy is totally antithetical to the mainstream, prioritizing the embrace of failure and the stirring of emotion over linear forward progress meant to feel traditionally "good." Even before you're tasked with saving lives, the game is already an intensely difficult, grueling experience, and the eventual need to treat infected people—whether they're general patients you're being paid to save or the named characters whose survival continues their role in the story—adds still another potential stop on a crowded itinerary, another place where funds and items may be diverted to pay a toll in human lives. For example, gathering herbs allows you to brew tinctures that can be used for diagnostics, but tinctures as well as antibiotics can be traded and sold just like anything else. So you're forced to choose which lives are most valuable, and it feels horrible to end up choosing yours over and over again.
As these different elements converge, it feels as if a community's entire being has been crammed into Pathologic 2. You grapple with the town's economics, keep up relationships, save lives, and peel back what layers of the place's dark history that you can. It's one of the most stunning examples of a game as a cohesive whole, as every aspect is tuned for maximum stress and horror—an atmosphere of imbalance and overhanging dread that's enhanced by the eerie, ever-clanging score. All the while, the abattoir looms large in the distance, its giant, dripping sacks of meat hanging uselessly on their suspended journey to the station. The doomed wander in full-body canvas cloths tied around them, and strange beings in ghastly crow masks with glowing eyes stand watch. The town appears lost in an endless ocean of straw-yellow grass. Few games are as transportive as this, and fewer still will leave players so utterly convinced that they never want to see such a place for as long as they live.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by tinyBuild.
Developer: Ice-Pick Lodge Publisher: tinyBuild Platform: PC Release Date: May 23, 2019 Buy: Game
Review: Draugen Undermines Its Mystery by Pulling a Shyamalan on Players
The game forsakes worldbuilding as it increasingly gives itself over to making the most digressive of statements.2.5
The self-professed "fjord noir" whodunit Draugen certainly doesn't lack for wild ambition. While that can be an invigorating impetus to the artistry behind a video game—or that of any creative work, really—it can also run great ideas into the ground. And there's no clearer example of that than the latest from the Oslo-based Red Thread Games. Draugen is clearly mistrustful of its potential, stuffing itself with more and more narrative ideas until it practically asphyxiates, ending up as a sprawling and unresolved mess.
The game, though, makes a great first impression with its breathtaking setting and attention to detail. You play as a stodgy American named Edward, languidly rowing a boat along a meandering Norwegian fjord, backdropped by impossibly blue skies and snow-capped mountains. He's accompanied by his young ward, Lissie, a boisterous and irreverent teenager who has a penchant for dropping quips and endearing jibes, and much to Edward's chagrin. All the while, the tranquility of this scene is punctuated by a beautiful and evocative orchestral soundtrack, the melody eventually subsiding as the duo docks at a nearby island.
To Edward and Lizzie's surprise, no one has come to pick them up. The island's small village seems recently abandoned, almost as if its inhabitants vanished overnight. It's an impression made all the more eerie by the fact that Edward and Lissie were invited to the remote island by its most prominent family. And as Lissie tears off toward their host family's homestead and he trudges after her, Edward can only ponder exactly what's going on in this place.
It's a picture-perfect setup to a potentially enthralling mystery about the secrets that plague this remote island, except that Edward is troubled by another mystery he's looking to solve: the disappearance of his long-lost sister, Betty, who he insists has been leaving him clues to her whereabouts. But the inquisitive Lissie, who very much has the moxie of a budding detective, picks up his slack, jumping at every opportunity to learn more about the island's secrets, even egging Edward on with her unbridled enthusiasm and imagination.
Throughout, Edward is able to search his surroundings for clues to his host family's whereabouts, with prompts tagged to specific items around the island and inside the family's house, leading him to make more logical conclusions than those of his more instinctually driven companion. At its strongest, Draugen spins colorful banter from the collision of Edward and Lissie's disparate approaches to investigation. Lissie, for one, is prone to pulling nonsensical theories out of nowhere, and the contrast between her youthful exuberance and his reserved demeanor feels natural and lived in—until it suddenly isn't.
Draugen's sense of atmosphere is rich enough to keep one riveted for two thirds of its campaign, but then the developers spring on us a narrative curveball that effectively kills their game's momentum. And things go downhill from there. Twist after twist is introduced without seeming rhyme or reason, almost all of them completely untethered from the mystery behind the island. After a while, Draugen completely buckles under the weight of one too many revelations, which mostly revolve around Edward's deteriorating mental state—a plotline so astonishingly convoluted that it raises more questions than it answers.
Moreover, the game forsakes worldbuilding as it increasingly gives itself over to making the most digressive of statements, which includes poking at the fallacies of the very detective genre to which Draguen belongs. This is most apparent in how Edward, in a moment of exasperation, tells Lissie that delving into the island's mystery is a colossal waste of time, hollering at her, "This isn't Agatha Christie. There won't be a convenient set of clues leading to a tidy conclusion." And Draugen seems only too happy to heed his words, given how many stones it infuriatingly leaves unturned. By the end, the impression that lingers most is that Red Thread Games didn't have much of an endgame planned out in advance aside from wanting to leave players feeling as if all their detective work was for nothing.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Evolve PR.
Developer: Red Thread Games Publisher: Red Thread Games Platform: PC Release Date: May 29, 2019 Buy: Game
Review: Void Bastards Drolly Weds the Roguelike with the Immersive Sim
It fits together disparate genres so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.4
The droll wit of Void Bastards is baked into the game's very premise: A transport spaceship bearing an assortment of freeze-dried prisoners (more room that way) is stranded in a particularly nasty nebula. There, pirates roam, monsters devour ships, and all the unfortunate citizens have been bizarrely mutated into murderous, foul-mouthed horrors. Once rehydrated, prisoners are shooed out into this unforgiving corner of space to scavenge derelict ships for parts until their probable death, after which the next unfortunate soul indicted for a comedically pedantic crime (having too many teabags, entering an office after business hours) continues the work. And so on. The gears of capitalism turn even in these ruins of bureaucratic failure, a sprawl of files and forms and insidiously softened terminology from which the prisoners (who are referred to as "clients") may cobble together the tools to return home, where things probably aren't all that different anyway.
As setups go, it's a cheeky, immaculate framing device for a roguelike, which typically deals in randomized levels, permanent character deaths, and accumulable items. It contextualizes its inherently morbid repetition as, in the terms of this pencil-pushing dystopia, "expendable" prison labor, which allows Void Bastards to start shifting variables as early as the start of every attempt. Since each prisoner is a distinct entity, each comes with randomized traits, like being short (meaning they don't need to crouch and are harder to hit) or never being attacked by one specific type of mutant. Others might smoke and therefore cough every so often, or shout in joy every time they pick up an item, both of which will alert nearby enemies to their position.
Such interactions between different variables, even as small as the way incidental noises affect stealth, typify the other genre that developer Blue Manchu patterns Void Bastards after: the immersive sim. In the image of System Shock, BioShock, and even the recent Prey, you have a variety of options to survive your first-person scavenging. Whether you favor stealth, traps, or running and gunning, the goal is to potentially take advantage of all the different systems at work. You can lock mutants in a room with a cluster bomb, or perhaps get creative with the Rifter, which warps an enemy out of existence until you bring them back in whatever location you wish. But those same systems can also work against you. For one, a ship with sporadic power outages might mean, at the worst possible moment, that you need to take a detour and give the generator a good kick. Both the roguelike and immersive sim are predicated on happy accidents, unexpected consequences, and the adaptation necessitated by both.
Void Bastards does, though, dramatically simplify the scavenging process to encourage a more frenetic style of play. Rather than fiddle with an inventory screen, prisoners vacuum up every single item inside green storage containers, which are marked on the minimap when you're in range. This shift turns each excursion into more of an actual run, where you're skating down metallic corridors, popping open containers, and blasting (or fleeing from) any enemies in the way. From there, the game piles on additional pressure points, like a limited oxygen supply or rifts that endlessly spawn enemies. You can certainly mitigate most of these risks—lock the doors to the rift, visit the oxygen resupply room if there is one—but it will take time, oxygen, and perhaps health if you run into, say, a powerful gun turret on the way.
These scenarios can even create further complications. What if the rift spouting nasty conglomerates of floating heads is in the oxygen room? The game is successfully designed to force you into split-second decisions and rethink your strategies, given the way its different systems interact in pressure-mounting ways. That said, the game doesn't eliminate the immersive sim's more meditative qualities so much as shift them to a separate planning stage. Prior to boarding a derelict vessel, you're given a detailed readout of what to expect and allowed to choose equipment accordingly. It tells you enemy types and the quantity of each, what resources are plentiful, and what complications will arise, like power outages or radiation leaks. You even get a map of the ship in question, with items logically distributed among the named rooms; food, as you might imagine, is most plentiful in the dining hall.
The amount of forethought the game affords you is rare among roguelikes, which tend to introduce things by surprise. It imbues Void Bastards with a greater sense of consequence since you're not at the mercy of randomization so much as your ability to plan and execute, as well as knowing when to retreat or when to avoid a ship entirely. An ideal run of Void Bastards is about planning, going on a run, and then having your plans upended by any of the different variables at work, requiring you to quickly adapt while coming up with a new plan.
However, this also means that Void Bastards is at its weakest when everything hums along smoothly. The game features a variety of absurd, amusing weapons and its distinctive comic-book art style is pleasing to look at, but a glut of smooth, uncomplicated runs can grow monotonous. The amount of strategy it affords you somewhat hinders its ability to tempt you off the path of least resistance, into the unknown and the sense of discovery that makes both roguelikes and immersive sims truly shine. But beyond this issue, what makes Void Bastards so thrilling is exactly what elevates other great nontraditional roguelikes like Slay the Spire and The Binding of Isaac: for fitting together disparate genres, in this case the roguelike and the immersive sim, so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Humble Bundle.
Developer: Blue Manchu Publisher: Humble Bundle Platform: PC Release Date: May 29, 2019 Buy: Game
Review: Castlevania Anniversary Collection Turns Its Back to a Series's History
It's not greed in this day and age to expect publishers to respect and preserve their history. At this point, it's an artistic responsibility.3
The prospect of the widely detested Konami of 2019 turning a jaundiced eye toward the best franchise the beloved Konami of yore produced was, rightfully, a frightening proposition. After all, this is a publisher that's had no qualms about charging $10 for an extra save slot, or canceling entire games, regardless of positive reception or earning potential, based on a grudge against creators. Remember that Konani's last major contribution to the Castlevania series was a pachinko machine. So, it's almost a tiny blessing that the worst thing visited upon the Castlevania Anniversary Collection is a sort of benign neglect.
Out of the series's history, the Anniversary Collection includes the three NES titles (Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse), the first two Gameboy titles (Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge), Super Castlevania IV (originally released on the SNES), Castlevania Bloodlines (originally released on the Sega Genesis and outside the United States and Japan as The New Generation), and the NES port of Kid Dracula, which was only released on Gameboy in the U.S. Want to play Haunted Castle, the obscure arcade game that serves as the mechanical basis for the first NES Castlevania? Or Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, the beautifully ambitious PC Engine CD spinoff? You'll have to purchase those, and a sizable list of other Castlevania titles, separately. Which is a shame, because it only takes about five minutes of playtime apiece to realize that the Gameboy titles are taking up valuable real estate here that could easily have been filled by better and more interesting games in this series. The same can somewhat be said of Kid Dracula, an old-school mascot platformer that's adorable but ultimately expendable.
The big question to be considered with any sort of collection or remaster effort is one of purpose. Is it to bring a game visually or mechanically up to modern standards? Or is it to preserve its code? In recent years, we've seen Sega accomplish both with their Genesis Collections, Capcom with their Anniversary Collections of Street Fighter and Legacy Collections of Mega Man, and SNK with their 40th Anniversary Collection. The list goes on and on. Ultimately, for a collection supposedly celebrating a series's 30th anniversary, the amount of effort put into this release suggests a relationship long dead.
There are countless stories and questions about the creation and advancement of the Castlevania series that remain untold and unanswered—stories you can tell either through the inclusion of the later games that showcase that evolution, or through the inclusion of ancillary materials that tell the story more directly. Many a developer has made that effort in bringing games of this age to modern players. Konami simply doesn't, and it's not for a lack of proof to draw from, given how different latter-day titles in this series became in the PlayStation/Nintendo 64 era. There's an entire thriving genre of video games co-named after this series. That alone is a grand reason to chronicle the how and why of this series's legacy in thorough detail. Yes, putting the effort in to localize Kid Dracula certainly took work, but it's also the least relevant game to said chronicle. This is a collection that feels loveless as a result, as it lacks so much context or respect for the place these games hold in gaming history.
Konami—partnered again with developer M2, a studio renowned for their work on similar compilations for Sega and SNK—takes a similarly haphazard approach to the more restorative aspects of this collection. Aside from a manual Quick Save system, a few perfunctory graphics filters, and screen frames, the games are, well, essentially ROM dumps. The only major concession to posterity at the moment of this review—post-launch content is planned—is a digital book, with rough concept sketches for all the games, and one admittedly excellent interview between famed series composer Michiru Yamane and Adi Shankar, show runner and executive producer of Netflix's fantastic animated Castlevania series.
Even just the small favor of including one or two of the basic graphics-smoothing options that even the most rudimentary emulator can provide would've shown some level of forethought and consideration went into the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. Putting aside that it's being released at a time when archival efforts for gaming are in full swing, this collection feels almost begrudging of the series's existence. Given Konami's current rep among both those who play and develop games, it's not a stretch to consider that that may be the case.
Thankfully, whatever enmity Konami holds toward its glory days as a developer doesn't affect the games whatsoever. The meat of the collection is, of course, the NES, SNES, and Genesis titles, which have all held up extraordinarily well to time. The original Castlevania remains quite difficult, but there's very little in the game that goes beyond "tough but fair" aside from an infuriating fight with the Grim Reaper toward the end. Simon's Quest is the most troublesome of the bunch, in that it's so obtuse in its clues and RPG elements that it's essentially impossible to progress without the aid of a strategy guide. But it's also the most academically fascinating game in the collection. Many of its puzzles, designs, and mechanics are easily decades ahead of their time, even if they're poorly implemented into the game.
Dracula's Curse, Super Castlevania IV, and Bloodlines represent the series hitting a creative stride, the 8-bit Hammer horror trappings of the first two games making way for the series to develop its own identity. Dracula's Curse and Bloodlines both bring a playfulness and mechanical ambition to the fray. The former does this via a grand experiment with branching paths and character swapping, the latter through a series of hardware-pushing special effects and optical illusions. Despite being a first-generation SNES title, Super Castlevania IV remains one of the system's crowning achievements, especially in the sound department. Adventurous beats and melodies give way here to impressive facsimiles of an orchestral experience, featuring haunting choirs, evil organs, and ethereal, synth atmospherics that create a soundscape unlike anything else produced at the time. That, and the game's organic, painterly aesthetic brings a dose of legitimate unsettling terror and dread far beyond the abstract pixels of the NES games or the bloodier but more cartoonish aesthetic of Bloodlines.
It's not greed in this day and age to expect publishers to respect and preserve their history. At this point, it's an artistic responsibility, and for a series as creative and ambitious as Castlevania, simply tossing a few barely touched ROMs at players and calling it a day can't help but feel a little insulting, all the more so because the games presented in this collection make a rock-solid case that they've never been more worthy of the attention.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Hill+Knowlton Strategies.
Developer: Konami, M2 Publisher: Konami Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: May 16, 2019 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Fantasy Violence, Partial Nudity Buy: Game
Review: Layers of Fear 2, Though Terrifying, Clings Too Tightly to Its Script
The game's first few acts are its finest, particularly for their strong sense of physicality.3.5
Bloober Team's latest, Layers of Fear 2, puts you in the shoes of an actor trying to find his or her character, in both the literal and figurative sense of that phrase. From a physical perspective, this means interacting with all sorts of horrific sights aboard a luxury cruise liner's cabins: the dioramic creations of an enigmatic director (voiced by Tony Todd of Candyman fame), each designed to trigger the actor's suppressed childhood memories. And from a psychological perspective, this means losing one's grip on reality, as the line blurs not only between the role the actor has been tasked with playing and the actor's past, but between a film production's props and sets and what the actor becomes convinced he or she is seeing: hedge mazes, pirate coves, industrial cityscapes, and so on.
You've been hired to star in a film being shot aboard the 1930s-style Icarus Transatlantic, but over the course of the game's five linear acts, it becomes clear that something else is happening on the curiously empty ship. Players set out from an increasingly dilapidated dressing room, exploring not just the ship itself—everything from the coal-lined engine rooms to the kitchens and first-class cabins—but a variety of on-board sets that have been built by the director, such as a pirate ship that's surrounded by papier-mâché waves, and a recreation of a private screening room. Such visual touchstones and their recurring motifs are the layers of fear of the game's title, opening themselves up to multiple meanings, like the playing cards that reference Alice in Wonderland but also point to a relative's gambling addiction.
The game's first few acts are its finest, particularly for their strong sense of physicality and connection to filmmaking methods and aesthetics. The simple puzzles require you to operate slide projectors until you've found the perfect shot, to use turntables to position your mannequin co-stars, or to follow chalk-drawn blocking notes across the various dioramic film sets. Even though some effects are logically impossible, such as the way flickering projector beams pierce solid walls, so that the ship's cabins sometimes seems as if they're bleeding pinpricks of light, the director's manipulations are so clever that you convince yourself that it's all somehow just a practical effect, or a really good perceptual illusion, as with the various doorways that vanish if you so happen to break your line of sight with them.
As Layers of Fear 2 reaches its conclusion, however, and the protagonist becomes more defined, we become disassociated from what should be the game's most unnerving effects, like red-gel-lit hallways lined with squirming body parts. At times, it feels more like you're watching a scary film from the comfort of your living room than actively participating in one. An early sequence that draws inspiration from Fritz Lang's Metropolis—its giant brass pipes, its columns of steam—is particularly strong for its function as a filter through which the actor processes whatever horrors he or she is actually seeing in the boiler room. But it's not long into the game before it starts to feel as if films are being referenced as a matter of course. Indeed, no narrative purpose is served by the awkward mini-game in which you fly, and in hallucinatory fashion, the rocket ship from Georges Méliès's iconic silent short A Trip to the Moon, or the appearance toward the end by the twins from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
Still, even when these references and recreations fail to connect to the game's grand design, they're at least arrestingly vivid in their aesthetics and often quite unsettling. Layers of Fear 2 doesn't explain or justify these sequences, which makes them all the more striking. You may ask, "What, exactly, have I stumbled upon?" By contrast, the many artifacts and collectibles that you pick up throughout are frustrating for the way they elaborate upon the game's horrors instead of deepening them: Watch as art imitates life, they seem to say to you, specifically the fateful choices made by a brother and sister who once stowed away on a ship very much like the one you're trapped on. These narrative moments provide a safe harbor from whatever else is more immediately going on around you, giving truth to the game's binary choice to either "Lose the character, find yourself" or "Find the character, lose yourself."
Because Layers of Fear 2 is a game about the madness that lies within one's imagination, it's no surprise that the moments that hint at unseen horrors—and the 3D audio is particularly effective on this front—are more unsettling than those that explicitly show them. The sequence in which you're trailed by ogre-like footsteps is infinitely more unnerving than the one in which your pursuer is depicted as a fire-breathing titan, whom you can easily hide from. The more that Layers of Fear 2 offers players a peek behind the curtain, the more it leans on redundant trial-and-error chase sequences, effectively leaving psychological complexity in the rear-view mirror and making it harder for us to get lost in its illusory horrors.
The acting conceit of Layers of Fear 2 presents a compelling psychological dive into what it means to create a character, to truly imagine yourself as someone else. But each time players might be swept away into something truly unsettling, the director's demands snap things back to a comfortable reality. For all its unsightly imagery, the overall arc of the game conforms to a familiar structure (especially in the ineffective New Game+ mode), forgetting that its scariest moments are those unexpected ones between the instructions given to you by the director. Layers of Fear 2 can be terrifying, but only when it stops clinging so tightly to its script.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Evolve PR.
Developer: Bloober Team Publisher: Gun Media Release Date: May 28, 2019 Buy: Game
Review: In Observation, the Ghost in the Shell Is the Player Itself
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.3.5
The setting of Observation is the familiar stuff of science fiction: a space station dotted with airlocks and hatches and run by a voice-activated artificial intelligence. But the lens through which it's viewed is not. You play as S.A.M., the aforementioned AI armed with a battalion of unblinking eyes: the cameras that line every one of the eponymous station's hallways. Despite his constant watch, something has gone wrong aboard the station. The Observation has spun far off course, most of its crew is gone, and neither S.A.M. nor Dr. Emma Fisher, who appears to be the station's only survivor, know what happened.
Besides observing, most of S.A.M.'s functions are doled out piecemeal for the exclusive task of progressing through the guided storyline. He can access things like laptops and terminals. He can open (and close) doors, and he can recite whatever data he's been asked to find by Dr. Fisher to help unravel the mystery behind the station's crisis. Though sci-fi connoisseurs may already have ideas about where the story will end up, Observation is, despite appearances, less a game about refusing to open the pod bay doors than cooperating with Dr. Fisher. S.A.M. isn't one to cause problems so much as help solve them by dutifully performing different tasks.
If Dr. Fisher needs to broadcast a signal, for example, you'll need to call up the ship's map and access cameras in the room housing the astrophysics terminal. From there, you'll use the terminal to look up the coordinates on a black-and-white image, send those coordinates to the communications screen, and then input the numbers manually. It's not glamorous or even particularly challenging work, but neither is being a space station's artificial intelligence; the game's most complex tasks involve things like tracing a schematic for clues or piloting one of the spheres floating around the zero-gravity station to reach camera blind spots.
As rote and mechanical as these operations may be, they sink you deeper into your role as the AI. The game's excellent interface design helps you feel at one with the environment through interactions that feel tactile. Adjusting camera angles is slow and accompanied by a faint hum. Spheres are likely to bump into objects since they're a little unwieldy and don't turn on a dime, and their camera view fizzles accordingly. Various text displays don't look friendly, as a smartphone display might, so much as functional. They're rendered in stark reds, whites, greens, and grays that evoke old technology—the loud clacking of keyboards, of numbers not entered so much as forcibly pressed in. The station isn't exactlys old-fashioned, but its occasionally clunky software feels rooted in a tangible past, as if modernization has yet to erase the vestiges of technology conceived near the turn of the century.
And yet, playing as a computer isn't the same as feeling like one. Engaging with the game means navigating its menus and devices by lumbering through human thought processes, relying on the inefficient motor functions of sausagey fingers mashing on controllers and keyboards. When moving inside a sphere, the labyrinthine station can be confusing to navigate without stopping to check a map, making it easy to float off down the wrong hallway.
To compensate for player awkwardness, Observation specifies that S.A.M. is too damaged to operate at full capacity, but it's not quite enough to maintain the illusion. No machines ask you to interact quickly or skirt around a fail state. While this gentleness keeps the game humming along smoothly without constantly stopping to chastise players, it makes what are ostensibly the routines of a computer feel built to accommodate humans' comparative sluggishness, preventing you from fully inhabiting a believable role. Frantic characters simply stand and stare while they wait for you to complete even the most time-consuming of tasks.
But the player's presence isn't a total loss since it gives the story room for subtlety. The development of S.A.M.'s emotions is understated and even totally peripheral to the central mystery because your personal reactions to characters, the solutions you uncover, and the attachments you develop stand in for what S.A.M. feels. Your emotions are his. As the plot escalates and the suspense grows, the momentum may slow as you fiddle with a door switch, but it never stops to explain character growth because you fill in the blanks yourself. S.A.M.'s development is almost taken for granted, allowed simply to be as a part of a larger story and compelling mystery buoyed by a unique perspective. There's a ghost growing inside S.A.M.'s mechanical shell, and after just a few hours with Observation, it turns out to be you.
This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Tinsley PR.
Developer: No Code Publisher: Devolver Digital Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: May 21, 2019 Buy: Game
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I have used Scott as a travel agent multiple times. Our latest trip was to Rome for a few days, then an 11 day cruise before finishing up our travels and staying in Venice for a few days. Scott made all of our arrangements from airlines and airport pickups to tours while on our cruise
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Scott has planned a couple of trips for me in the last couple of years. One to England and France; and then a second trip to England. I was traveling on my own, and gave him a list of places I wanted to see and visit; and Scott arranged everything. Before I left, he gave
Walker Kansas City, MO

subset: commoncrawl


text:
No Croutons Required - The Winner for April and the Theme for May
The theme for April was to come up with a vegetarian soup or salad with antipasto from the fridge just waiting to be made into a lovely dish. Congratulations to Greensleeves of Chez Maximka who submitted this Vegetarian Solyanka that has my mouth watering. I am always intrigued by Russian dishes.
Actually, we have two winners this month. Congratulations to Lisa of We Don't Eat anything with a Face. How could I resist this Pesto and Antipasto Puff? Olives, pesto, cheese, basil and jalapenos are surely a treat along with the puff pastry.
I will be hosting the May addition of NCR. After much thought, I have decided that the theme will be eggs. Make a soup or salad where eggs are the shining ingredient. I will also accept egg curries. For a recap of the guidelines, please go here.
Posted by Lisa Turner on Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Serve it up in No Croutons Required
Serve it up in No Croutons Required
4 comments:
- janet @ the taste space said...
Congratz to Greensleeves! I guess this will be one month I sit out since I don't eat eggs.
- May 2, 2012 at 1:42 PM
- Greensleeves said...
I am thrilled and honoured to be the winner of this popular contest.
Janet, you don't have to add an egg to the soup. It is optional, and more for decorative purposes. This soup is rich enough without eggs, in fact I didn't add it. I only suggested using it. :)
- May 2, 2012 at 1:48 PM
- Greensleeves said...
Oups, please disregard my comment re eggs, I thought you referred to the soup.
- May 2, 2012 at 1:49 PM
- janet @ the taste space said...
Your soup looks delicious, Greensleeves, with or without the eggs. I will be sure to try it sans egg, though. ;)
- May 2, 2012 at 2:13 PM
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text:
1 syllable
- bert, berte, birt, blurt, burt, burtt, chert, curt, dirt, erte, flirt, gert, girt, herdt, hert, hirt, hurt, hurtt, kirt, kuhrt, kurt, peart, pert, purt, schwerdt, shirt, skirt, spurt, squirt, turret, vert, wert, wirt
2 syllables
- advert, alert, assert, avert, boisvert, concert, convert, desert, dessert, divert, evert, exert, inert, insert, invert, mcgirt, mcguirt, mcwhirt, overt, pervert, revert, subvert, thibert, unhurt, vanwert
3 syllables
- disconcert, reassert
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