I've never played a visual novel before, but I was expecting something far less interactive than Analogue: A Hate Story. Before I started playing, I knew the basic premise: search through the logs of a long-missing spaceship, and find out what happened to the crew. Fortunately, it would seem that my idea of what the game might be was formed from the driest possible description.
The journal entries and letters that make up most of the game's text are sorted and presented to you by a pair of AIs, both of whom add a great layer of characterisation to the main story. The opening in which the player and the first AI, *Hyun-ae, work through some interface quirks together is a neat way of building a bond, and it got me immediately engaged.
Once you get to the meat of the investigation, it feels like flipping through an old diary with a friend. Most of the log entries can be shown to the currently active AI, and they'll share some thoughts and opinions with you, often unlocking more documents in the process.
The more you learn about the society that formed on board the ship, the more the cracks start to appear and you see the injustices that ultimately led to the event that wiped out the ship's population. At that point, with a perfect sense of timing, the game presents you the option of speaking with the other AI, *Mute. Suddenly, everything wrong with the former inhabitants is personified in this one character. She revels in the misery on display, and takes salacious delight in picking through the private lives of the crew. As she reveals more "unsent letters", I feel distinctly grubby. My reading partner had been replaced with a tabloid journalist.
Of course, this game is too well written to leave it at that. As the nature of *Mute becomes apparent, we understand what she was built to do and the ideas she was made to reinforce. This is certainly not a story of moral absolutes; no one is virtuous, no one gets away clean.
Backloggery sig
Friday, 7 November 2014
The Swapper #2 [Finished]
What a fantastic game. Amazing atmosphere, a story that I'll be thinking about for days, and some really well balanced puzzles.
The graphics are something truly unique. Building all the objects in game from household junk and clay gives The Swapper a truly alien appearance. You can tell what everything is meant to be, but it looks just wrong enough to be unsettling. The excellent music and sound design are the delicious icing on this cold and terrifying cake. From space.
The game rarely lets you forget the horror at the core of its central mechanic. You are cloning and killing yourself over and over. Early on, the game asks you to reach the top of tall rooms by leapfrogging up a chain of clones, each successive vessel crumpling in a heap below. Occasionally I found myself dashing through bulkhead doors to avoid the sounds.
As you discover more about Theseus Station, more questions are raised about the true nature of the swapper device. Is it transferring consciousness between bodies, or forcibly overwriting the personality of the new host? Body swapping sci-fi isn't anything the new, but the ongoing story of the device's origins, and the discoveries made on the planet below are a clever take on it.
I'm also going to note here, just in case I end up borrowing the design at some point, the map was excellent. Clean, well laid out, and extremely good at showing you everything you had yet to explore. Also worthy of note is the placement of fast travel stations after every section of the game that was tricky to navigate. The designer realised that these sections are fun and challenging but wouldn't bare repeating as you back track through some sections of the station.
That's two excellent games done, will this be the start of a streak or have I just cursed it?
The graphics are something truly unique. Building all the objects in game from household junk and clay gives The Swapper a truly alien appearance. You can tell what everything is meant to be, but it looks just wrong enough to be unsettling. The excellent music and sound design are the delicious icing on this cold and terrifying cake. From space.
The game rarely lets you forget the horror at the core of its central mechanic. You are cloning and killing yourself over and over. Early on, the game asks you to reach the top of tall rooms by leapfrogging up a chain of clones, each successive vessel crumpling in a heap below. Occasionally I found myself dashing through bulkhead doors to avoid the sounds.
As you discover more about Theseus Station, more questions are raised about the true nature of the swapper device. Is it transferring consciousness between bodies, or forcibly overwriting the personality of the new host? Body swapping sci-fi isn't anything the new, but the ongoing story of the device's origins, and the discoveries made on the planet below are a clever take on it.
I'm also going to note here, just in case I end up borrowing the design at some point, the map was excellent. Clean, well laid out, and extremely good at showing you everything you had yet to explore. Also worthy of note is the placement of fast travel stations after every section of the game that was tricky to navigate. The designer realised that these sections are fun and challenging but wouldn't bare repeating as you back track through some sections of the station.
That's two excellent games done, will this be the start of a streak or have I just cursed it?
The Swapper #1.5
I played The Swapper for about four hours yesterday, but then I had friends over, and fell asleep about five minutes after they left. I have many thoughts about this excellent game, so I'll do another post later today.
Wednesday, 5 November 2014
The Swapper #1
Here's a game that I've been looking forward to playing for a while. I'm a big fan of the kind of sci-fi that takes technological advances, pushes them to their logical extreme and then examines the often horrible implications.
The Swapper opens with what can only be an intentional musical call back to Star Trek, perhaps to lull people into a false sense of security. That is immediately stripped away as soon as you're into the game proper. The art style is all dereliction and decay, real-world clutter repurposed as abandoned technology. The atmosphere is incredible, with the lights on your spacesuit shining through swirling mist and sounds echoing off into the distance, there's a real sense of isolation.
A few rooms explored and we get to the major gameplay mechanic: cloning. At any time you can create copies of yourself, and switch your consciousness between copies. If this sounds like fun, just wait until you swap bodies and then accidentally walk your old self off a cliff. The poor sod hits the floor, legs shatter. It's all very grim, and immediately brings to mind The Prestige. I can't wait to see the path it's going to take with this; the creepy audio logs seem to suggest that it's not going to be pleasant.
The Swapper opens with what can only be an intentional musical call back to Star Trek, perhaps to lull people into a false sense of security. That is immediately stripped away as soon as you're into the game proper. The art style is all dereliction and decay, real-world clutter repurposed as abandoned technology. The atmosphere is incredible, with the lights on your spacesuit shining through swirling mist and sounds echoing off into the distance, there's a real sense of isolation.
A few rooms explored and we get to the major gameplay mechanic: cloning. At any time you can create copies of yourself, and switch your consciousness between copies. If this sounds like fun, just wait until you swap bodies and then accidentally walk your old self off a cliff. The poor sod hits the floor, legs shatter. It's all very grim, and immediately brings to mind The Prestige. I can't wait to see the path it's going to take with this; the creepy audio logs seem to suggest that it's not going to be pleasant.
The Walking Dead [Finished]
A milestone! If nothing else, starting this blog has cleared one game from my backlog, so I'd call that a success. Oh, and what a game it was.
Unfortunately, episode 4 had some of the weakest sections so far. Too much of the frankly awful shooting mechanics, and a fair amount of traipsing up and down corridors when a simple cut away to the next scene would have been far better for pacing. This, in particular, was a real shame, because the game has done a pretty good job of giving the player control at just the right moment. Games like this always include a certain amount of backtracking, and where other episodes have done a good job of getting right to the meat, here it seems to forget that it's even an option. This is even more surprising given that this is the penultimate episode. There's a lot to get done in order to position the story for the finale, and I would have liked to see some of the newer characters get a bit more development.
The set up ends up being more than worth it. The final episode is all killer, no filler. The conversations that highlight the awful choices you've had to make along the way. The gut-wrenching moment when you realise that Lee is truly done for, combined with the gradual transfer of player control to Clementine. This last deserves special mention. I was reminded of Brothers, a wonderful game that everyone should play, in that the mechanics of player control underpin and reinforce the story. As Lee slips away, his, and by extension the player's, only agency in the world is to issue verbal commands to another character. It's a neat trick because it reminds us that, in a point and click adventure, this is all we ever really do.
So, farewell for now, The Walking Dead. I still have 400 Days to play, but I'm going to need a break first to appreciate it properly. I don't imagine I would be doing it justice by launching into it immediately after that ending.
Unfortunately, episode 4 had some of the weakest sections so far. Too much of the frankly awful shooting mechanics, and a fair amount of traipsing up and down corridors when a simple cut away to the next scene would have been far better for pacing. This, in particular, was a real shame, because the game has done a pretty good job of giving the player control at just the right moment. Games like this always include a certain amount of backtracking, and where other episodes have done a good job of getting right to the meat, here it seems to forget that it's even an option. This is even more surprising given that this is the penultimate episode. There's a lot to get done in order to position the story for the finale, and I would have liked to see some of the newer characters get a bit more development.
The set up ends up being more than worth it. The final episode is all killer, no filler. The conversations that highlight the awful choices you've had to make along the way. The gut-wrenching moment when you realise that Lee is truly done for, combined with the gradual transfer of player control to Clementine. This last deserves special mention. I was reminded of Brothers, a wonderful game that everyone should play, in that the mechanics of player control underpin and reinforce the story. As Lee slips away, his, and by extension the player's, only agency in the world is to issue verbal commands to another character. It's a neat trick because it reminds us that, in a point and click adventure, this is all we ever really do.
So, farewell for now, The Walking Dead. I still have 400 Days to play, but I'm going to need a break first to appreciate it properly. I don't imagine I would be doing it justice by launching into it immediately after that ending.
Monday, 3 November 2014
The Walking Dead, Season 1 Episode 4
Episode three may have had the highest main character bodycount so far, but at least it looked pretty. All warm autumnal tones and piles of rustling leaves. Episode four is a misty November murk, and the puzzles are equally grim. Another child shot in the head and a family pet exhumed, and I've only been playing for half an hour.
Further exploration of Savannah reveals what was obvious to everyone except Kenny: all the boats are wrecked or gone. We get a glimpse of the outer walls of a terrifying compound run by social Darwinists, then the wall crawling ninja turns up and I have to go for a long lie down.
Further exploration of Savannah reveals what was obvious to everyone except Kenny: all the boats are wrecked or gone. We get a glimpse of the outer walls of a terrifying compound run by social Darwinists, then the wall crawling ninja turns up and I have to go for a long lie down.
Sunday, 2 November 2014
The Walking Dead, Season 1 Episode 3
I love point and click adventures. One of my earliest memories of playing games was The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga, and ever since I've been hooked on the combination of sharp dialogue and borderline nonsensical puzzles. The Walking Dead has some of the best writing of any game I've played, but the puzzle solving can be a bit pedestrian by comparison.
Episode 3 opens with a chunk of what this game does best: it takes two characters who already hate each other, then has both of them piss you off right before you have to pick a side. Lilly is growing more and more paranoid, and Kenny is using it to push his plan to get the hell out of the motel. This leads into a fairly dull bit of investigation, but the game seems to realise this and pretty quickly has a bunch of bandits kick the door in.
Now, I'm one of those freaks who can't aim without inverted mouse controls, so of course I managed to make a total pig's ear of the fight. Thirty second later, we're all piling into the RV and abandoning the motel to a swarm of walkers, attracted by the gunfire.
This leads into my favourite section of the whole episode, as Lilly starts to lose it completely, and we're forced to stop by the roadside to scrape a walker of the bottom of the van. Some excellent camera work really ramps up the tension, making sure we're don't know who is going to snap until the moment before it happens. Things escalate fast, and with each set piece our group gets smaller and smaller.
Speaking of set pieces, this game remains a master of them. Getting the train up and running left me with a glow of satisfaction, which of course meant that I was about a minute away from being asked to shoot a child in the head. Oh Walking Dead, don't ever change.
The episode wraps up with the striking image of a jackknifed petrol tanker hanging off a bridge and blocking the path of the train. This looks so good that I can almost let them off one of the worst fire effects I've seen, when the whole thing inevitably goes up in flames.
Episode 3 opens with a chunk of what this game does best: it takes two characters who already hate each other, then has both of them piss you off right before you have to pick a side. Lilly is growing more and more paranoid, and Kenny is using it to push his plan to get the hell out of the motel. This leads into a fairly dull bit of investigation, but the game seems to realise this and pretty quickly has a bunch of bandits kick the door in.
Now, I'm one of those freaks who can't aim without inverted mouse controls, so of course I managed to make a total pig's ear of the fight. Thirty second later, we're all piling into the RV and abandoning the motel to a swarm of walkers, attracted by the gunfire.
This leads into my favourite section of the whole episode, as Lilly starts to lose it completely, and we're forced to stop by the roadside to scrape a walker of the bottom of the van. Some excellent camera work really ramps up the tension, making sure we're don't know who is going to snap until the moment before it happens. Things escalate fast, and with each set piece our group gets smaller and smaller.
Speaking of set pieces, this game remains a master of them. Getting the train up and running left me with a glow of satisfaction, which of course meant that I was about a minute away from being asked to shoot a child in the head. Oh Walking Dead, don't ever change.
The episode wraps up with the striking image of a jackknifed petrol tanker hanging off a bridge and blocking the path of the train. This looks so good that I can almost let them off one of the worst fire effects I've seen, when the whole thing inevitably goes up in flames.
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