The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/HW9f8KnzTUU

Scrupulous developers will reuse assets and concepts between games in order to build on previous success and avoid having to build a new project from scratch every time. Some things don’t have to be changed, and players often won’t notice an asset that has been reused or they will associate a repeated concept as being integral to the series or genre. Knowing which ideas can and cannot be reused between projects is one of the greatest skills an indie developer can learn and Oleander Garden’s Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair is a shining example of reusing ideas correctly. Garden’s games have all been built upon their previous incarnation, increasing the scope of mechanical function as well as breadth of content. Pagan: Autogeny featured the same first person movement and combat mechanics that Eventide Sigil and Harlequin Fair contain, as well as a rampant disregard for linear structure that would carry forward. Eventide Sigil would introduce more players into the scavenger hunt; requiring the player to determine who had been where at what time and then chasing that person down. Harlequin Fair takes all of these systems and adds a few new ones to build even further. My issues with Garden’s games prior to Harlequin Fair was the quantity of content within. Autogeny took fewer than 2 hours to finish and I spent less than an hour more with Eventide Sigil. Total gameplay time is not at all reflective of gameplay quality, but these short lengths left me dissatisfied, wishing for more because what I had played was so unique. Has Garden remedied these complaints within Harlequin Fair, and if the game is more substantial, has the additional substance been detrimental to the game’s overall quality?

Much like Pagan: Autogeny and Eventide Sigil before it, Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair tasks the player with searching the world for a number of items to trigger further changes in that world. This time, however, the quest isn’t to form a singular collection in order to trigger an ending. Most objects that must be collected require previous collections to be completed before they can be obtained. For example, in order to acquire the Rheostat Hermetic the player must offer four aces to an altar. Those aces are the equivalent of Eventide Sigil’s relics and must be collected via conversing, sleuthing, and combating the other characters in the game. The Rheostat is also a key to another event further along, so while the Eventide Sigil format has been co opted for this game, it only functions as a single link within the treasure hunting chain. Each stage tasks the player with tackling a different set of obstacles so the player needs to determine what they are, and then the best way to overcome them. Some tasks require the player to prepare for gruelling battles against an army of enemies, while others act as a series of boss encounters, or require the player to investigate every corner of every area and maybe even figure out a puzzle. There are weapons and armour to gather in order to increase the likelihood of surviving those enemy encounters, there’s a magic system although I never encountered useful offensive magic, and there’s an alchemy system to brew buffing potions composed of a single liquid and a single herb. The world is filled with dungeons that contain some form of key to reach the next tier of locations and items.

In order to dive into the deepest corners of Toronto the player is given a handful of tools to use. Vivian has a different stat sheet within the real world and most of these stats are influenceable via a few equipment slots as well as the potions the player can brew. Faith, Armour, Strength, Pierce, and Speed are the equipment stats, while Wealth, Hungry, and Grace can be altered via other methods. Faith is a required stat in order to deal damage to enemies, without Faith Vivian will not deal damage and the player should really reconsider their equipment loadout. Faith may have other functions but I wasn’t able to determine any. Armour reduces incoming damage; by how much I’m unsure since there is no numbered health bar visible. Strength increases outgoing damage. With the lack of melee weapons in this game I think this stat is handled more naturally this way, both Ashley and I made the misconception that Strength in Autogeny would only increase damage from the sword when it also powered up the guns. Pierce reduces the enemy’s armour value on hit; pretty handy when dealing with the crusaders but not so much when fighting werewolves and vampires. Speed is obvious, as is Wealth. If Vivian is Hungry then their health regeneration will be deactivated. The player must exchange Wealth for food and bring food with them to locations they anticipate engaging in combat. And Grace can be gained by casting the Benediction, although I’m also unsure of the function. While these stats are interesting to play with - stacking pierce to kill crusaders easily, and then switching over to speed when the enemy doesn’t have a ranged weapon to run around them indefinitely - the player has very little storage capability and since the game primarily revolves around collecting items that storage capacity will be reached quickly. So what I ended up doing was finding a couple of items I liked and never taking them off. There is another group of stat changing collectibles that I had presumed would be something more than that, but unfortunately the Persona discs the player can find are simply another equipment slot that can only be accessed from Vivian’s home. These discs are valuable, though, so fighting through a catacomb that ends with a podium and a Persona disc isn’t too bad. There’s no way to know whether the fighting is for an upgrade or an objective anyway so I can’t imagine many feeling dissatisfied by this result.

Initially, the player is dumped into the city without guidance. The player will need to discern their goals as they explore and learn how to achieve them in the same way. Toronto is first split into five locations, but eventually the player will be able to explore two more once they are revealed on the map. Vivian’s house, Chinatown, The Path System, Saint Clair, and the Ravine are the first handful of locations and the Railyard and the Midway are discovered later on. I was drawn to explore the Path System first and discovered that it was a mall with a dark underground section. Without weapons or a light source, I chose to try another location. Chinatown contains a Triad base, some housing and more shops, and a tunnel occupied by the undead. Luring a zombie out into the street caused the NPC’s to begin fighting, and Triad members were getting involved too. In the end, a bunch of NPCs had died and I was able to scoop up their equipment, cash, and any cards they may have had. I took these items to the Ravine next, where the altar that dispenses the first major collectible is located. My mission was now to collect the 4 aces and bring them to this location. I basically went on a murderous rampage since I was unsure if the aces would have spawning locations somewhere in the world. In this rampage I took down the Triad house, as well as the White Knights in Saint Clair, rewarding me with more objects toward completing the various rituals and keys to continue deeper into the darkness. The more I completed, the closer I came to meeting Ada.

Narrative might be a strong word in this case, but Harlequin Fair has some things that could be considered plot points. Vivian’s computer is on in their house and the player can read the last email Vivian received to learn of a general set of goals within the game as well as a hint for getting the “good” ending. Meanwhile, there appears to be a growing conflict between the forces of heaven and hell occurring within Toronto. There are a few hideouts filled with necromancers and vampires, and even a demonic presence in some of the deeper dungeons. A church hosts a group of holy warriors and there are a couple of instances where the player must battle an angel. More and more powerful creatures are summoned onto the mortal plane and somehow Vivian is the only one capable of destroying them. Ada seems to be an angel and awaits within the Slaughterfield, a separate dimension that can only be accessed if the player possesses the Abbadon Waystone and the Ancient Astrolabe. Most changes in the world come as a result of the player’s actions, but the forces of evil will eventually take over the Path System and resist the player’s ventures into the underground. Violence will occur, NPCs will die, and the player will be instrumental in the fate of the afterlife.

Utilitarian. Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair’s presentation has even been cultivated from Eventide Sigil’s, with many of the sounds and UI pieces being translated into Harlequin Fair’s new world. That world is much darker and significantly less blocky this time, with an expertly implemented lighting system and the removal of those culling filters to make the environments moody and contiguous. I really enjoy this new grimy, nocturnal look, it plays to the strengths of the game’s art style and makes all of the violence and monsters fit into the world. NPC’s are again the 2D sprites although distinguishing between characters is far easier now that they aren’t all knights with different shields. Some of the sprites are weaker than others, but overall the quality is appropriate. The imps are fun and I liked the zombies a lot. The item sprites are very familiar, another example of recycling excellent pieces. It’s still great to see that this whole project can exist with minimal animation to keep the development focus on the necessities, and to give more space for any other ideas Garden may have wanted to include.

Autogeny’s themes are very up-front with the player while I wasn’t fully sure if Eventide Sigil had any overarching themes, and Harlequin Fair hasn’t hidden too much beyond the Christian elements, which aren’t exactly subtle. I feel that it’s natural for a player to read into the content of Garden’s games to try and discern something deeper because Autogeny was so blatant, but this time around I would liken that exercise to some first year university student trying to explain how Dr Frankestein was secretly gay and the colour of his furniture was somehow evidence to that statement. That being said, the persona discs are pretty conspicuous, right? Trying out new character traits by loading them into one’s home computer and seeing how they fit. Is Vivian building new character traits by stumbling upon them in the wild, or by tearing them from their previous owner? I can think of less destructive ways to find oneself.

Satisfaction is a strange emotion to feel when playing games, at least for me it is. Most puzzles in games are pathetic unless the game is built around them, so Harlequin Fair’s resistance to the player’s progression is deeply refreshing. The player needs to figure out their goal, and figure out a way to complete that task, and to not be told what and how shows Garden’s trust in their player’s capability. It is the definitive Oleander Garden experience thus far, and if anyone were to be interested in engaging with their work I think this is the best candidate, even with the repurposed assets and ideas. If you haven’t played Harlequin Fair yet, I urge you to. My perspective is much narrower than I anticipated and your reading will undoubtedly be different to mine.

The game is definitively longer, and the expanded content is just as good, if not better than Pagan: Autogeny and Eventide Sigil, although it doesn’t cover all of the same bases. What the player experiences is a complex web of scavenger hunts that all coalesce into a final battle in a higher plane of existence. Harlequin Fair isn’t as emotionally distressing as Autogeny, nor is it as unsettling as Eventide Sigil, instead it seeks to implant a curiosity within the player. Every stone could be hiding something fascinating, every person might have great wisdom to share, and every doorway leads to new obstacles.

Next time, the redemption of a legend will come.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/3WhWvm5UPFc

Video game criticism is exorbitantly capable of making or breaking the success of any of their subjects. Whether there were ulterior motives involved or the reviewer was having a particularly bad week, a poor reception from a large reviewing organisation can almost guarantee low sales. Being on the receiving end of a critical panning within the video game industry is almost a death sentence and for Valhalla Game Studios, it seems to have been. Despite being composed of former Team Ninja staff and lead by Tomonobu Itagaki himself, Valhalla Game Studios’ Devil’s Third was received so poorly that the studio hasn’t produced another title since. Itagaki took a 5 year hiatus from video game work, and the studio’s dreams of a trilogy would never come to fruition. Ivan’s violent adventure to prevent global destruction seemed to be the polar opposite of what the critics were wanting, and they took every opportunity to elaborate on the game’s mistakes. But was the game as disastrous as the critics claimed? Was there some predisposition to dislike Devil’s Third because of its Wii U exclusivity and bizarre character design? Was Unreal Engine 3 too archaic by 2015 or did the game’s humour just not land? To truly answer those questions, let’s take a little journey back in time.

2015 was a dark time; EA had tossed out Star Wars: Battlefront while they rebuilt Maxis into a mobile developer, League of Legends was at its most popular, Take Two was closing a bunch of it’s international developers, and Donald Trump was leading the Republican nomination. Nintendo’s home console the Wii U had been a sales disaster and during 2015 they announced their upcoming replacement, the Nintendo Switch. Developers creating games for the Wii U were suddenly put under a lot of pressure to deliver before the new system arrived, and of the 29 Wii U games released during 2015 only 10 have a Metacritic rating above 80%. Nintendo themselves were releasing poor quality games like Mario Party 10 and the infamous Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, but right at the bottom of the list lies our hero. At a measly 43 points, Devil’s Third had earned the title of worst Wii U game of the year. IGN’s review claimed it was “the kind of soulless, perfunctory action game they fear people judging the medium of video games by”, while GameSpot said that “Devil’s Third is near-impossible to recommend.” Technical problems, shallow gameplay loops, and unwelcome difficulty were among the main criticisms within almost all of the other 54 Metacritic reviews and my experience will not get the benefit of post-launch patches to clear any of those problems away. Despite this, Itagaki was still very positive about the studio’s future.

Valhalla Game Studio was founded in 2008 by former Team Ninja staff, after the release of the reboot Ninja Gaiden sequel. Itagaki had left Tecmo with intention to sue after he wasn’t awarded bonuses he was promised, and convinced a contingent of his colleagues to migrate with him. Throughout the next seven years, Valhalla would seek a publisher for Devil’s Third who would assist them in placing the game onto the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Valhalla were eventually successful in brokering a partnership with THQ but with their bankruptcy and liquidation in 2012, Valhalla were left high and dry. Korean multimedia organisation Doobic were brought aboard to fill THQ’s absence, but Doobic also went out of business during 2013. In 2014, Devil’s Third was displayed by Nintendo at E3 and released on the Wii U in the following year. Devil’s Third seemed to have been doomed to fail from the start and it isn’t surprising that the game has the reported problems that it has. But the fundamental design wouldn’t have been compromised during these publisher and platform changes, so was the original design just poorly conceived?

Devil’s Third is a third person shooter with a robust action combat system existing alongside the shooting mechanics. Ivan is a highly competent whirling-death-meat-machine, able to wield any firearm or bladed weapon he gets a hold of. At the beginning of most levels Ivan will be deployed with his katana and a couple of varying automatic weapons and maybe a shotgun or a sniper rifle. Those automatic weapons change from time to time, but for the most part Ivan’s weapons will feel very similar; they all have similar aiming mechanics and recoil effects. Hand to hand combat is well-rounded, featuring attack combos, blocking, dodging, and a targeted jumping attack for extra style. Ivan is very athletic and can use his impressive vertical leap to scale pretty high walls. He’s also quick on his feet and is able to keep a low profile when required. I especially enjoyed the slide move as it allowed swift gap closing while also allowing gunfire to pass overhead. Further, there are a few different set piece segments to keep things fresh as the game charges forward like boss battles and vehicle sections. As far as having enough to do, Devil’s Third delivers and provides a handful of systems to master as the narrative progresses.

So the criticism of the game’s shallowness seems unfounded, there’s a surprising quantity of enemy types who are best handled in different ways that keeps the various combat encounters fresh and still ensures the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. In the early stages the enemies aren’t mind-blowing or anything, but they’re filling their roles perfectly fine. More hand to hand enemies are introduced, then a mini boss of sorts appears, things get silly in terms of theming but the enemy designs are unique and engaging, and the game continues to deliver new opponents throughout its run time. Most enemies are susceptible to headshots, but since this game is exclusive to the Wii U the use of the Wii U gamepad or a pro-controller to engage that aiming is an unfortunate necessity. That being said, there’s a generous auto-aim system that keeps the shooting shockingly tight and helps to mitigate the controller limitation. I did find a few instances where the shotgun projectile hitbox didn’t engage as the weapon was fired so when enemies were very close they could avoid damage, but in most cases this did not occur. Combat with the hand to hand weapons has excellent feedback, likely refined by the developers’ previous experiences with the Ninja Gaiden reboot, and while the system is shallower than the likes of Bayonetta or Zeno Clash, when compared to games that are also primarily third person shooters (Morph X and Dark Sector) Devil’s Third’s combat is significantly more filled out. Ivan has heavy and light attacks with different animations depending on the weapon being used and can also engage different execution animations depending on nearby environmental pieces. The hitboxes aren’t immaculate but as far as Devil’s Third’s contemporaries they aren’t any worse. And the bosses are just as competently constructed.

There are 8 bosses throughout the game that don’t have explicit paths to defeating them, but some are more focussed on a particular aspect of Ivan’s combat capabilities. The bosses are usually battled within a tiny room but there are occasions where shooting the boss is the only means to defeating it. Molotov, Jane Doe, Sovershennyy, and Ludmilla Karenina are ideally battled with Ivan’s ranged weapons while Big Mouse, Grundla Saha, the Guinea Pig, and Isaac Kumano and better fought with or exclusively tackled in hand to hand combat. Molotov is an encounter that is exclusively battled from afar and acts as a climax for the tutorial, the player hides behind some chest high walls and shoots at the boss and his ads. Jane Doe is a rather disappointing encounter that acts as a more mobile version of the Molotov fight. Jane walks around the arena with an automatic rifle while some ninja enemies continually chase Ivan around the courtyard. It’s hectic and engaging, but quite underwhelming. Ludmilla is another substandard encounter although it isn’t too similar to Molotov. Ludmilla wanders around the arena while invisible, although her invisibility isn’t particularly effective so the encounter is an unfortunate missed opportunity. Every other battle is either acceptable or incredible. Or downright unbelievable. Saha is ridiculously aggressive and the Kumano fight looks like something from another game. I don’t want to spoil some of these encounters because of how amazing the reveals are. I’ll show them later on, just to demonstrate to those who won’t ever play the game how tremendous some of the encounter setups are. Instead, let’s talk about the less good things.

There are problems within Devil’s Third, of course there are, and I won’t gloss over them and present this game as something that it isn’t. There are numerous level design problems and some odd difficulty spikes that stop the game’s momentum dead in its tracks. The levels often devolve into baron hallways with nowhere to hide, or an entry into the battle environment hasn’t been ideally situated, or the player will be dropped into an arena with enemies shipped in to shoot at. This game has some insane stakes and follows some unexpected tangents, so the many streets filled with abandoned vehicles seem somewhat dishonest and almost distract from the absurdity when it does get going. And then sometimes the game deems it necessary to spam a bunch of enemies somewhere but it never fully commits. In the Big Mouse boss encounter, for example, there are 12 regular enemies standing in lines ready to shoot at the player once the movie ends. When the player is inevitably killed here the game doesn’t respawn these enemies. Games Farm would be distraught. Other times the game embarks upon a different gameplay type, such as the vehicle sections, but the mechanics aren’t as well tuned as the rest of the game and they feel cumbersome and ultimately mediocre as a result. This car sequence looks like a great time but the controls are awkward for no understandable reason.

While we’re on the subject of the game’s appearance, Devil’s Third uses Unreal Engine 3 and had to be functional on a Wii U. Unreal Engine 4 was available to developers by 2014 so the game could have been able to enjoy the advances that came between numbered versions but there’s a decent chance that the Wii U may have not been able to handle the game’s current assets within that new engine. The system’s CPU and GPU combination was cobbled together from modern components as well as components used for the Nintendo Wii, which was archaic by 2006’s standards. This meant that the Wii U could handle HD textures and higher poly counts, but when a lot of activity was occurring the system would struggle. As a result, whenever a lot of enemies appear on screen during Devil’s Third the framerate takes a bit of a hit. It wasn’t possible to optimise their way out so Valhalla should have altered their plans accordingly. This does make some things seem unnecessary though. Despite having the capability, some of the textures just aren’t up to standard. Their inexplicable low resolution causes these textures to draw attention and break any immersion that the player may have been experiencing. Similarly, some large objects exist in the environment for no good reason. At one stage, while adventuring through a Japanese theme park, Ivan passes by a replica of Mount Fuji. It’s rightfully the size of a mountain but it didn’t have to be a model, it could have been a render. I really don’t understand why these things have been done this way and it only serves to cause performance issues, irrespective of the target platform. It’s a shame too, because the bright and colourful areas are great. The palette is heavily saturated and most locations are accented by pops of red or yellow that almost juxtapose the violence Ivan is committing. And say what you will about Ivan’s design, but it is exactly the degree of dumb cheesiness I love. He’s too cool to take off his sunglasses and he refuses to wear a shirt throughout the entire adventure. I bet he rides a motorcycle too.

Ivan is one of the few characters in the game who’s name I can remember, and for a mixture of reasons. The supporting cast gets very little time to make impressions and mostly choose to yell their character traits at Ivan as he stoically walks toward them. But don’t let that stoicism fool you, Ivan can be a spiteful monster at times. His affection for C4 is supposed to demonstrate a tenderness within him, but I think Ivan’s surrender to the US military when he’s shown the destruction he and his associates had caused was a better indicator of a compassion for others. His life had been about training for that moment, and when it came Ivan’s immediate response was to eject and deal with the consequences. Other characters like the Delta Force squad leader, whose name is Captain Bob, get a fair amount of screen time but only use it to talk about the mission. Maybe their tone changes as the game goes on but they won’t often get much depth. Even Carraway is just a dude who gives Ivan orders and has a kooky backstory.

So the game’s narrative begins with a mysterious man engaging a series of explosive devices attached to satellites in orbit that causes a bunch of electrical devices to stop functioning, plunging the world into chaos. The US government is very quickly aware of the group behind the action and needs additional help to save the day. Enter Ivan, a super powered convicted terrorist who is kept deep inside of an isolated vault underneath Guantanamo Bay, who works for the US government for the promise of musical instruments. Ivan is quickly sent to Panama to track the group responsible for the attack. After some investigation, Ivan learns that his former squad are the cause and also that his sister-girlfriend character who should be dead, is in fact not dead. The journey travels from Panama to an island off the northern coast of Japan where the group had been based, and the player follows Ivan’s deadly rampage across that island. He must overcome his former allies and uncover some secret medical experiments they had been conducting before finally confronting his former mentor. Kumano yells his ideology that involves inciting nuclear war and then the two have a fight in the imaginary fire realm. C4 gets killed again but doesn’t die and Ivan gets to go back into his cell. It’s fine. C4 and the medical experiments don’t really seem that consequential, and even the fact that all of Ivan’s old friends have even super-er powers doesn’t really matter that much. The player doesn’t get to learn about what more damage would be done if Ivan fails and the destruction the organisation had already caused was severe so their plan to nuke the most populated cities on the planet had already kind of succeeded without the missiles actually exploding. And there won’t ever be a satisfactory explanation for the results of the medical experiments.

Devil’s Third was the primary reason I purchased a Wii U - yeah, another entire console to play a weirdo third person shooter, I know - but I don’t believe that purchase was a bad one. I’ve played plenty of games that do things better than Devil’s Third but I’ve also played worse. Some of the games I have played have been more competent or more mindfully adhere to the game development theory than Devil’s Third does, but they weren’t as enjoyable. Devil’s Third is so cliche, so predictable, there should be no measure by which this game is fantastic and yet it just is. Everything Valhalla put into the final product has created that perfect amalgamation of silly camp and legitimate excitement. I don’t enjoy Devil’s Third ironically, I genuinely adore this game and I’d encourage anyone to play it themselves.

In the end, I can’t agree with the conclusions of those who reviewed Devil’s Third at release. There’s a lot more fun to be had here, and the technical problems aren’t as debilitating as many made it seem. It isn’t a particularly heady experience but not every game has to be. If the player’s time is so valuable that every game has to be a life changing experience then of course Devil’s Third will be a waste of time, but is anyone really that important? The technical issues do exist, mostly as a consequence of the engine and some poor level design choices, but not so severely as to decrease the game’s value by 30-40 points, IGN and GameSpot. To ignore the humour in Devil’s Third is to ignore any personality that the game has, and to be naive enough to expect some Western-style grimey, miserable army-man game is bound to end in confusion. Devil’s Third breaks the conventions of the time by adhering so strictly to them that it seems ironic, and I think that’s magnificent.

More cool guys next time, trying to save a different party planet.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/2P43GaA--9w

Every so often Microsoft will announce a bundle of games that will be added to the ever growing list of backward compatible games on their Xbox One and Xbox Series X consoles. The most recent announcement features a number of movie licence games and a few other games from the deepest recesses of Xbox’s back catalog, including the Otogi games and a few other curios. How these games are selected may have something to do with engine compatibility or licensing availability, or even user request, but some games won’t make it onto this list. Perhaps Microsoft has grown apart from the licence holders and cannot renew their relationships, or maybe that older game used an engine that doesn’t work so well on the modern hardware. For one reason or another, I highly suspect that Digital Extremes’ 2005 game Pariah will be one of the games that will not be revived onto current Xbox hardware, despite its exclusivity at release. While it might compare favourably with the likes of FEAR 3, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and even Operation Racoon City, Pariah did not make the cut as these games have. Despite Warframe’s continued popularity, Digital Extremes’ older games have been effectively buried and interest in the developer’s previous works has not surfaced in the same manner as the likes of From Software and Arkane. Dark Sector was perfectly serviceable, it wasn’t spectacular but it was good enough to earn a cult following and yet Pariah lingers in obscurity. I played the game and I’ll share why I think Pariah has been left to rot by Digital Extremes and Microsoft.

Previously backward compatible consoles like the Wii and Playstation 2 achieved their backward compatibility by including enough of the old hardware to be able to switch to that hardware mode. Whenever a GameCube disc is inserted into a Wii console, the Wii menu displays a GameCube icon and the system switches to become a GameCube. Nowadays, things aren’t quite as simple. As games consoles become more like computers, space within the cases becomes more limited, so loading up the new consoles with all of the old components has become very impractical. Fortunately, the new consoles having greater capability means that those older systems can be emulated instead. That comes with its own complications, though. Emulation isn’t a perfected art, and especially so when using a customised operating system on your bespoke, patented hardware. Getting the emulation software working as intended, and then getting the game to function as intended requires a decent number of variables to line up favourably. Ultimately, this means that the emulated game has to be as good or better played on the new hardware else the multi-billion dollar company loses favour with their customer base. Nintendo has been failing to deliver quality emulation, even recently, so Microsoft has chosen which games and when they will become available very carefully.

With Halo: Combat Evolved’s arrival in 2001, first-person shooters would move their focus entirely away from mimicking Doom and instead became slower, more linear experiences. Despite this industry-wide shift, Epic Games and Digital Extremes saw great success with Unreal Tournament 2004 but for Epic, that success wasn’t enough. They could see that the market was losing interest in the older style of shooter and were more engaged with Capcom’s reinvention of third-person mechanics within Resident Evil 4. So while Epic pursued their new Gears of War property, Digital Extremes were left to figure out their own path forward. The Canadian developer was not prepared for what was to come in November of 2004. Halo 2’s release was unlike anything that had come before it, and the game’s first week would go on to be the highest-grossing entertainment launch ever at the time. Millions of copies were sold in that week, grossing $125 million and immediately drawing the entire games industry’s attention. This was huge and the desire to tap into that gargantuan market led to a healthy population of imitators. Less than 6 months later, Digital Extremes’ Pariah would release and while some found the game interesting enough, many noticed that the game had more in common with Combat Evolved than similarities it shared with Halo 2. Movement was slower, the weapons were less refined, and the level design didn’t feature iconic landmarks and skylines. The presentation is quite poor for the time, so I think we should get that out of the way first.

Developers working in the early 2000’s had a visible understanding of the limitations of the hardware they were developing for, and as a result many games featured a visual style outside of aiming for realism. Some did try for realistic styles and their characters, hero assets, and external environments suffered especially. Pariah’s characters are generally good models, but the animations are stiff and don’t transition into each other well. It’s like Digital Extremes used the premade animations from The Movies to create the cutscenes for Pariah. The enemies seem very robotic as a result, they almost always face toward the player and their legs seem to move independently from their torsos. The game’s lighting also leaves a lot to be desired. Everything is evenly lit throughout the entire game, even when the skybox is gloomy or the player enters an interior environment. There are so many objects that could be emitting some kind of light that just aren’t used that way. Occasionally a room will be tinted green but there’s never any shadow or extreme brightness so the environments are all extremely flat. The soundscape is similarly flat. There is very little music and most of the sound effects are stock sounds. Beeps and alarms and weapon sounds we’ve all heard a thousand times before. But the combat callouts are incredible. All of the enemies will yell the same handful of lines over and over throughout the entire game. Even when it doesn’t make sense for them to be yelling about the topic. Do Warframe enemies do that? I don’t remember the Dark Sector enemies doing that.

Pariah’s controls are effective and have aged rather well, but not in every aspect. The movement works as anticipated and there’s no awkwardness to it on foot, but things take a turn whenever vehicles get involved. While infrequent, the driving sections are steered by pointing the mouse which feels awfully unnatural. Additionally, the turret sections, either on the back of a car or on the back of a train, allow the player to aim in directions the guns cannot fire. The player will routinely be informed that their shots aren’t working when they simply shouldn’t have been allowed to turn in that direction. The weapon reticle is deceptive across the rest of the game too. The large circle reticle is so big that most weapons seem absurdly inaccurate. Human sized enemies are smaller than the reticle so the player will often see their shots fly by and not deal damage. Even weapons like the sniper rifle seem wildly unpredictable and it can make a lot of enemy encounters quite tedious.

There are very few enemy types within Pariah, but I only noticed during the final hours where a new enemy type is introduced. Just like Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, the enemies are mostly regular soldiers with occasional outfit changes, although there are some armoured enemies on occasion and flying robotic enemies in a couple of levels. Unfortunately, the similarities to Shadow Ops enemies aren’t just surface level as Pariah enemies utilise very weak scripting that leaves a lot to be desired. Enemies will frequently move to some strategically disadvantageous position and then stand still and shoot, and that isn’t overly exciting to deal with. The Shroud enemies in the last areas of the game, who are supposed to be super elite warriors use the same scripting so their advanced warfare strategies are the same as the disorganised prisoner faction. Even the enemies that should exhibit unique behaviours will simply cycle through a handful of positions that the player can eventually intuit. This goes for the bosses too, whose methods of defeat are badly conveyed, but if they were improved the bosses would be a total waste of time engaging with. I spent over an hour trying to defeat Stockton by shooting him because shooting the big machines in the room never seemed to do anything to the boss or the machines. While these are generally negative, being able to predict the actions of the rocket launcher enemies is quite funny. They have no self-preservation mechanic so they will blow themselves up consistently. And the level design frequently seems set up to introduce these kinds of mutual-destruction scenarios.

Levels in Pariah are generally very enjoyable, winding through a variety of environments with some optional places to explore and a few different gameplay types to break things up. Some of the levels are a little underwhelming, but there’s a fantastic verticality to the game that creates surprising combat scenarios where enemies can appear from any angle or the terrain can be used to the player’s advantage. The level design is certainly the most proficient component of Pariah, but the problems are tragic. The Anvil is a strange circular series of arenas that all look exactly the same and each is filled with the same enemy arrangements repeated over and over. And it isn’t as though this environment is fun to wander through. Gaining entry to the Anvil involves rambling over some very unfriendly terrain under incredibly lethal turret fire. This region also has a large contingent of enemies that make navigation more trial and error than strategic advances through a rocky hillside. And so much of the game seems disjointed, with the adventure meandering through a lot of exterior spaces and even into a prison for reasons that the narrative doesn’t really make apparent.

Pariah’s narrative suffers from a refusal to divulge important information to the player until it’s absolutely necessary that the information is shared. I had no concept of who the Shroud were until they appeared on screen, and there’s a virus transmitted through blood that gives people superpowers and they store infected people in cryostasis for whatever reason. The narrative opens as one of these cryostasis pods is loaded onto an aircraft and manifested by Dr Jack Mason for some form of transportation. The craft is shot out of the sky and only three survive the wreckage, the stasis pod is opened in the crash and a gang of escaped prisoners appears to sift through the wreckage. Mason is able to fight the gang off but only he and the female cryo patient survive. Mason seems to have a destination in mind, but Karina keeps running ahead to achieve whatever her own goals are. After some miscellaneous hijinks and the revelation of an inconsequential betrayal, the pair make their way back to the Anvil where Commander Stockton intervenes. Mason defeats Stockton and hands Karina over to the Shroud, a non-human species who created the superpower virus and intend to use Karina as a power source for their machines. After the Shroud refuse to uphold their end of the bargain, Mason goes on a rampage and annihilates a large portion of the Shroud’s military before finally locating Karina. She had been hooked into the harvesting machine already and, seeing no means to escape the facility with Karina, it is implied that Mason shoots himself. Karina’s grief causes her to explode and take down the rest of the Shroud with her, ending the game in a bleak anti-climax. The player is told about the Shroud a few times, but without any context to what they actually are, so they could be Greys, or goatmen, or living pieces of cloth with Jesus’ face on them. And Mason’s surrender of his friend to the Shroud comes out of nowhere. Fitting that nowhere and Pariah go hand in hand.

Microsoft and Digital Extremes have no desire to revive Pariah onto Xbox backward compatibility because the game just isn’t overly unique or important to anyone involved. There aren’t the same progenitor models like in Dark Sector, and the spirit of the Unreal series isn’t present within Pariah. The greater install base was happily shooting each other with Brute Shots and Needlers and the Master Chief collection has granted the Xbox players a broader multiplayer environment than Digital Extremes’ game could have ever provided. Perhaps the ideas within Pariah could be retried, with bespoke sound effects and a more fleshed out narrative. Or the game can stay where it belongs; in obscurity.

Next time, a game I’ve waited twenty years to play.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/O7ZGk1UW_hs

Electronic Arts is regularly regarded as one of the most aggressive, most destructive entities within the video game industry. The publisher has a history of treating its employees poorly, treating it’s audience poorly, and routinely dashing all hopes of quality sequels to properties they own. That reputation has softened recently, but the full list of studios they’ve closed and the number of people they’ve left jobless will always hang over the company. At the start of the millennium, EA were particularly antagonistic, purchasing a large number of well-loved studios, making drastic changes to their development cultures, and later closing those studios when the talent inevitably fled from the sinking ship. The closures of Pandemic Studios, Origin Systems, and Kesmai were rather endemic of EA takeovers, but arguably the most brutal was the closure of Bullfrog Productions in 2001. Bullfrog’s catalogue had been picking up some promising momentum, with each fresh concept being executed impeccably. That creativity was quickly stifled by the new ownership and a number of rushed sequels were squeezed out of the developer before EA tossed the drained husk aside. Theme Park predates Rollercoaster Tycoon by half a decade and paved the way for the theme park management games that are still beloved today. A direct sequel to Theme Park was created under Electronic Arts’ management which was released worldwide on a number of platforms throughout 2000. Was there any possibility that a whimsical, friendly management game could emerge from the collapsing Bullfrog? Would that game live up to its predecessors? Or has EA not changed its tyrannical business strategies throughout the last 20 years?

Debuting in 1994, Theme Park was Peter Molyneux’s second business education game. Targeted at a younger audience, Theme Park’s objective was to provide an attractive environment for children to learn the operation of a business but the resulting game ended up being popular among all audiences. Previous business sims had neglected the fun aspect of their games, choosing to focus on providing an accurate representation of the business environment at the expense of all else. This fun-facing design philosophy would underpin the rest of Bullfrog’s projects which soon became the defining throughline across their catalogue. Theme Park’s silliness was extrapolated upon within Bullfrog’s first follow up to Theme Park, Theme Hospital. Running a real hospital isn’t as conceptually lighthearted as running a theme park, but Theme Hospital’s tone and fictional illnesses keep things video gamey. While the game was well received, it didn’t reach the sales targets that EA had set for the project. A true sequel to Theme Park was requested, and in the year 2000, Theme Park World was released. Theme Park World is a much more complex game than the original Theme Park, featuring a much broader selection of attractions, four distinct themes for the parks, and the ability to customise and ride the rides in the park. The business management aspects were kept in tact, but the player also had the goal of acquiring golden tickets or keys to unlock the next theme and progress between parks as well. In some versions of the game, this manifests as a kind of campaign that the player can embark upon, and it looks an awful lot like my closing comments on The Movies whenever the player graduates to the next level. Was there some clairvoyant on the design team able to predict the coming exodus from Bullfrog and the echoing career path that Molyneux was to take?

Video game development in the late 80’s and early 90’s didn’t take the multiple years that modern video games take to construct. Solo developers were routinely shipping at least one game per year, sometimes more, so when a video game developer had a staff they could massively increase their games’ polish, tighten their focus, and guarantee consistency between projects. Their games couldn’t necessarily be larger due to hardware limitations, but the number of developers with reputations for quality releases every time was pretty close to the total number of video game developers. Bullfrog Productions were routinely shipping one or two excellent games per year and had garnered a number of fans as a result. When EA gained control of the company, the number of simultaneous projects being developed at one time more than tripled to appease a mandate sent to the developer. This prioritisation of quantity over quality disgruntled most of the senior Bullfrog members, including Molyneux who, upon announcing his resignation, was banned from entering the Bullfrog studio while still required to contribute to the development of Dungeon Keeper. Molyneux’s departure triggered many other Bullfrog employees to leave the company, as EA had expected, so in order to continue development of their mandated games EA moved much of the development of Theme Park World to French developer Mindscape. It was this split development that caused the numerous version differences of Theme Park World, which affected the game significantly.

For this video I played the Playstation 2 version, but as a child I spent a lot of time with the Windows demo that came with the family computer. That PC version is much more freeform, there are only 4 total parks to play but the requirements to unlock each is significantly more involved than the tasks required to progress on the PS2 version. Theme Park World’s campaign involves completing a handful of objectives within each park to earn the required number of golden tickets to purchase access to the next park. The player will be informed of three of the objectives, namely to have a certain number of guests in the park, to stay in business for a certain number of years, and to earn a relatively small profit throughout the course of the park’s life. There are hidden tickets throughout each park too, which are relatively easy to find once the player notices the pattern. All of these goals are extremely easy, staying in business for long enough involves simply being somewhat reserved in hiring staff, and the other objectives will occur passively as long as the park stays open. Tickets are frequently earned by winning minigames which range from go-kart races, to puzzles games and require the player to build the related attraction in their park. Some of these games stretch the definition of “game”, the ‘Strength-Test’ asks the player to decide how hard they’d like to hit the target, and then hit the target that hard. If they choose to hit the target hard enough, they win. Compared to the go-kart minigame in which the player gets to design the track they’ll race upon, it seems there wasn’t a high bar for minigame suggestions.

Everyone’s favourite part of a theme park management game is the rides, and Theme Park World has a gigantic selection of rides that spin guests around, as well as a few others. Each theme has its own unique bundle of rides that the player will periodically receive through research. Okay, I get that most theme park rides revolve around some part of the machine, but Rollercoaster Tycoon features a lot of rides that offer other riding experiences besides just spinning. Three of the first four rides in the game involve spinning around an axis, which slightly poisoned my impression of the game. Were all of the rides going to be so bland? I didn’t remember there being so little variety. As things progressed the ride selection populated with broader choice, but becoming aware that most rides are a vehicle to spin guests made each new instance more disappointing. Aside from the flat rides, Theme Park World also contains a number of tracked rides that allow the player to customise the layouts. The rollercoasters are almost all exactly the same thing despite there being a lot of variation between rollercoaster types in terms of appearance and specific elements. Hades, one of the two horror themed roller coasters, uses boat trains and a log flume style track but it amounts to the same thing as any of the other coasters. The player places pylons within a range in front of the previous pylon to draw a layout on the ground. Loops can be added from this construction mode, but the heights of each pylon cannot be edited while in pylon-placing mode, so the player has to exit one building style in order to enter the other. Lift-hills are also automatically generated, so the player can only learn of the weaknesses in their layouts once they’ve begun editing the pylon heights. The coaster will never crash, though, and the designs can never be too tall. I don’t think I managed to create a ride that had anywhere near a good stat range and I often refused to attempt to build coasters because I just couldn’t get a satisfying ride. I think a “Just above average” rating was the highest I managed. My favourite ride as a child was the go-kart tracks, and I still found them a lot of fun as an adult. Unlike go-kart tracks in Rollercoaster Tycoon, Theme Park World go-kart tracks can cross through themselves to create these super dangerous track elements. The height of the track cannot be edited, though, so I had to get the most out of the crossings and researchable elements that I could.

Aside from deciding which rides go into their park and where, the player will also be responsible for placing amenities for their guests and staff, hiring staff, paying, training, and setting work locations for them, setting ticket prices, researching rides, upgrades, shops, minigames, and decorations, upgrading their rides, customising their rides, and making decisions on statistical information. As far as management load, this game is very light. Most options are simply selected from a list that never contains more than 8 choices, and so many things cannot occur simultaneously. Typically, I hired one of each staff type, selected a few new amenities and rides to be researched, and then waited for the game to tell me when something was lacking. So if too many guests were unable to find somewhere to put their litter, the ant guy would show up and tell me about it. There aren’t complex stat adjustments to figure out, and most problems are resolved by building new things in parts of the park that haven’t been fully furnished. Some of the rides being useless without a few upgrades was fairly annoying, and being advised that a group of staff are thinking about striking unless ‘conditions improve’ is also frustrating. A lot of useful information is not divulged to the player like this, while the game also frequently notifies the player about a ride’s imminent breakdown. It would have been helpful to know where litter was becoming a problem, or where the guests were struggling to find food and drink. Basic stuff that other games would make freely available to the player.

This information may have actually been present somewhere within the game, but the atrocious user interface made finding that information impossible. A large portion of Theme Park World gameplay is spent within this blue menu. Each of these categories seems self-explanatory, and a few of them actually are. Build & Hire leads to the construction and the staff hiring menu, Research leads to the research menu, and Game Options takes the player to a few audio settings as well as the save function. I found it a bit strange that Toilets, Staff Rooms, Security Cameras, and Bins are all under the same menu category, and use the same item pool as the decorations but refraining from using decorations was just easier than managing the pool. Information is a very broad title that contains very few actionable categories. Staff can be trained, fired, and their patrol areas set through the Staff information sub-category, then rides, shops, and sideshows have their own information menus within which the player can do almost nothing. Financial Information contains a bunch of graphing options that are illegible and use scales that are nonsensical, but there is a list of incomes versus expenses that can be useful on occasion. Park Statistics tracks a few stats that are interesting but inconsequential, and it is also the menu through which the player can change the admission price. Not Information or Financial Information, Park Statistics. Close Park also doesn’t do what you’d expect. Selecting Close Park takes the player back to the park selection menu, it doesn’t close the park. At the start of every park the player has to select the entrance and open the gates, which makes the language of this option very confusing. Menu awkwardness aside, there are some other oddities within UI layered upon the park ground. All building blueprints include at least one tile of path in order to allow guests and staff entry to the facility. That path tile cannot overlap an already existing path as the path tile is considered part of the blueprint. Paths can connect on any access and the buildings can be accessed all the same if the blueprint tile is within a normal pathway or beside it. It means that like the roller coaster construction system, to build something directly connected to an existing path involves deleting a single tile of the old path and replacing it with the blueprint tile, by repeatedly switching between buildings menus. If the PC version were as convoluted as this I doubt I’d have such fond memories of it. The presentation of the Playstation 2 version also doesn’t match my memory.

Bullfrog games have a signature visual style that makes them immediately recognisable, and Theme Park World boasts that style but not in all of the ways I expected. I cannot deny this game’s presentation is ridiculously charming; all of the buildings are so characterful and the palettes are fantastic. The parks are fun to look at from the standard camera angle which is very important to a game like this. I like a lot of the ride visuals, especially the prehistoric theme, and the shops are mostly just as fun. I preferred the character sprites to these character models, though. The sprites had more of that Bullfrog aesthetic that the modellers certainly tried to capture, although they weren’t overly successful. Theme Park World’s soundscape is also a lot more jarring than I prefer. I didn’t recall as much screaming as I heard, and had to reduce the screaming volume to make some parks tolerable. The horror themed parks were especially difficult to listen to with the combined screaming and grating strings in the park’s music, but the space theme had some similar problems. The soundtrack overall seems neutered compared to footage of the old PC version, I suspect this and a few of the other changes have contributed to the technical issues I encountered while playing.

It’s been a while since I last saw a game crash, which must have been Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms back in June. Theme Park World isn’t nearly as unstable as that game, but it did die on me a couple of times. These crashes were the most severe of the issues, but a lack of polish is somewhat prevalent across the whole game. Guests would frequently become trapped on paths without any obstacles to cause them to be trapped. Perhaps the pathing was breaking down or their models were clipping into the ground, I’m unsure, but stuck guests would always cause the advisor to pop up and demand I place more drinks stalls. The parks always seem kind of empty anyway, there are never enough guests to make things seem crowded and prosperous, even when the player goes down to ground level to wander around themselves. I am also under the impression that visuals were supposed to be attached to the Research menu. When selecting a new attraction to research, the player is given the name and nothing else. Is “Sun God” a roller coaster, or a spinning flat ride? Are the stats any good? The player will have to sink a significant portion of time and resources into whatever “Sun God” is to find out. And there are limits to the number of items that can exist within a park. Usually there is a maximum of two roller coasters, and up to fifty Features, which includes mandatory amenities like toilets and staff rooms. Is the park’s land space not an effective limiter on objects in the world? It just seems that there’s an arbitrary cap on the amount of giant gorillas one could place for no good reason.

I don’t know if it is necessarily possible to play Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and Planet Coaster to a point where they’re lacking new things to do - especially the latter - but if you have reached that stage and still want to play a theme park management sim then I’d say give Parkitect a look, and after that try and get the PC version of Theme Park World running. What fun there is to be had with Theme Park World is very surface level and the more freeform nature of the PC version means that the player is able to access the more enjoyable things sooner and won’t have to battle this horrible UI. Theme Hospital and The Movies are far more enjoyable Bullfrog-style management games so I’d direct people that way before anywhere else, but as far as a theme park sim on the Playstation 2 goes, I think this is the best one.

The Bullfrog spirit is certainly present within Theme Park World, but EA’s demand for more product sooner has resulted in some cut corners that reduce the overall quality of the game considerably. Things are colourful and charming, and there’s a great range of silly concepts among the various assets within Theme Park World that let players know this is bonafide Bullfrog Productions software. But it doesn’t elicit the same emotional response that another Bullfrog game might. EA exchanged a lot of the Bullfrog audience’s good will and enthusiasm for a pay out, they capitalised on a beloved IP library for some easy cash and then moved on to their next victim. Theme Park World doesn’t exist for the right reasons, and I think it would be better if the game didn’t exist at all.

Next time, Zach, we’ll be in some town in the middle of nowhere.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/Dcl2Mms8hkU

Deadly Premonition divided the video game audience in half when it was released in 2010. While the game’s mass of technical problems saw a lot of players dismiss it outright, others would claim that the game’s story more than made up for those problems. How could a developer knowingly ship a game with so many problems when it clearly had so much potential?

Just before I get started I’d like to drop in a bit of a foreword so that the rest of the video can stay focussed on discussing the game and the more sensitive issues are laid out first for anyone concerned about them. Deadly Premonition was released in 2010 and was developed by a Japanese team. Topics like homosexuality, transgender people, and sexual assault were not handled in a mature and careful way in Japan, although things have improved very slightly. If a poorly handled homosexual or trans character is upsetting to you then I cannot recommend you play this game. If you are similarly upset by depictions of violence against women and an instance of implied sexual assault then I would also recommend that you not continue too deeply into this video. Deadly Premonition also contains some very intense violence that is plot significant and I will be sure to warn you at those moments if you’d prefer not to see it. Now, with that out of the way, let’s get going.

Development costs at the start of HD gaming were astronomically high, and a large percentage of active video game developers were not profitable enough to continue operation once the industry had made the transition. The gigantic wave of closures affected companies across the world, including studios I’ve spoken about before, but arguably the most devastated region was the Japanese video game industry. Attempting to remain as ambitious as they had been during the previous era was the most common cause of Japanese developer demise, but trying to cut corners to reduce some of the development cost could also have disastrous consequences. ThorHighHeels coined the term ‘skung’ to describe the common visual issues that would come as a result of desperate cost cutting, and I think the term is onomatopoeically appropriate. Sometimes, though, a developer wouldn’t be dissuaded from creating something excessively skungy if it allowed them to continue pursuing their ambitions, and in 2010 Access Games would epitomise HD game development on a budget with their survival horror title, Deadly Premonition. The game features a tiny number of enemy types, no more than a handful of musical pieces, and some critically awful animation culling, and yet the game’s narrative and writing are so excellent that the overall experience is of incredibly high quality. Reception to Deadly Premonition was as mixed as the game itself, but the sales were sufficient enough for the developer to keep its doors open to this day. So what was specifically so fantastic about the game’s narrative? Were the technical issues enough to prevent Deadly Premonition from earning widespread critical acclaim? And, most importantly, how could Access Games ship Deadly Premonition knowing it had the problems that it does?

With the release of the Playstation 2 in 2000, Sony were seeking to create a number of first-party properties for their new system as insurance, in case their third-party partners struck up exclusivity deals with Sony’s competitors. Capcom could not be relied upon to bring their popular franchises to the PS2, so Sony would begin development of their own survival horror game to fill the void. That game, Extermination, developed by Sony’s Deep Space, was released in 2001 to middling reviews and middling sales. The narrative similarities to John Carpenter’s The Thing were noted as a major strength for Extermination, but the game failed to perform to Sony’s expectations and Deep Space would be closed shortly afterward, leaving a fairly competent development team without a home. Access Games would waste no time in salvaging the ex-Deep Space team and keep much of their previous structure intact. This meant job security for some, and promotions for others and Extermination’s lead designer Hidetaka Suehiro would land himself a game director role under the new ownership. Suehiro, nicknamed SWERY, had a number of concepts ready to go and would lead the team to create a stealth action game, Spy Fiction, for the Playstation 2 in 2003. Spy Fiction would sell well enough for the studio to stay afloat while the team began work on their new project, codenamed Rainy Woods. The project would be worked on for 3 full years before being scrapped in 2007, meaning that Access would have to rely on some porting work before they could reconsider returning to original titles. With the release of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2005 and 2006 respectively, Access’ ambitions were reignited and the technical issues that had caused Rainy Woods’ cancellation were no longer as detrimental as they had been. Rainy Woods was reopened and eventually shipped in 2010, now known as Deadly Premonition.

To describe Deadly Premonition’s reception at release as ‘polarizing’ is an understatement. IGN’s Erik Brudvig said in their closing comments “terrible controls. Terrible pacing. Terrible sound effects. Terrible visuals. Maybe you can convince yourself that these things don't matter as you work through this surreal and quirky storyline. The rest of us will be off playing better video games.” Meanwhile, Jim Sterling said in their Destructoid review that “There is absolutely nothing in this industry that can compare to how weird and wonderful the whole experience is. Judged as a piece of entertainment, as a game that consistently surprises and amazes and leaves jaws hanging, I have no choice but to say that Deadly Premonition goes above and beyond… It's pretty close to perfect.” and then gave the game a perfect score. This huge variation in reception seemed to hinge entirely upon the reviewer’s opinion toward how valuable a narrative is to a game, as well as whether the game could be considered an art piece. One’s ability to look beyond the surface layers and appraise that aspect of the game seemed to have been the difference between 2’s and 9’s, and while I like to think that I would fall into that category of appraisers, I cannot deny that the technical problems within Deadly Premonition did detract from my experience.

Looking back at early Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games is a perilous journey into a well repressed stage of the video game industry’s history. Standard definition and the smaller resolution would allow the weaker assets to blend into the environments or be hidden off screen, but with the improved fidelity there was nowhere for any mistakes to hide. Furthermore, the video game playing public were expecting higher polycounts and higher texture resolutions, which meant more development time would have to be devoted to accumulating these assets. While the new hardware was capable of rendering more polygons at a time, the true upper limit as well as effective optimisation strategies weren’t fully available to every developer, so many of the early HD games have a swathe of issues that are caused by optimisation failings or simply over-populating environments with too many polygons. As a result, many games within the secondary waves of releases would contain rather baron environments as many of the assets would have been stripped out in an attempt to improve performance. Creating all of this took much longer than previous generation games had taken to develop, so the ability to continue to release games annually became entirely restricted to a handful of the largest studios. Smaller teams would have to create competitive games, with significantly fewer resources, at a greatly reduced scale, less frequently but also on an extremely tight schedule, without access to the breadth of knowledge present within the biggest studios, or influence over the hardware companies to get any assistance from them directly. Every game would have to be special in some hyper focused way, and they’d have to hit those heights consistently in order to stay afloat. Deadly Premonition is hyper focused on delivering an interesting story, at the cost of much of the rest of the game.

While stability is not a problem for Deadly Premonition, the means by which Access Games remedied that issue was by mauling a significant portion of the presentation. A trick implemented by many games with long render distances is to cull the animation frames for entities far enough into the distance to reduce the amount of rendering the hardware would have to engage in. You might notice this in many modern games as it does a lot to keep things running smoothly around the player while also allowing things to happen emergently in another location. Deadly Premonition has implemented this animation culling, but its range is far too short. It isn’t uncommon for in-engine movies to have a camera positioned in such a way as to put one or more characters beyond the culling range. There are so many instances of one half of the conversation occurring in a crispy 30 frames a second, while the second party responds at a jagged 5. Increasing the culling range would have resolved this problem but even the Director’s Edition, released three years later, still has this culling mistake. There are other framerate issues occasionally too, outside of the culling range but they’re infrequent and short enough to not be too much of a concern. Excluding the times there are multiple cameras on screen. I can’t really tell what this is supposed to add, but it is not to the benefit of the performance. The presentation as a whole is just as likely to leave those with a lower tolerance for imperfections looking for another game to play.

Deadly Premonition was not a particularly appealing looking game at release, and time has not been gentle to these graphics. The human characters are unfortunately good enough to not look stylish in any way, which means they all have uncanniness problems. York looks okay, his hair is a little strange but the model is pretty good, but York regularly hangs out with George who appears to be melting. Most of the other characters all look just fine, and the uncanniness is quite appropriate when it’s present within the horror segments, but the animations aren’t afforded any leeway. York’s thinking animation where he taps his chest doesn’t actually connect with his body and his smile kind of looks like a G-mod animation. The rest of the cast use the same collection of premade animations which are sometimes awfully inappropriate. Some of these animations completely disrupt the tone of the game, much like one or two of the songs or every time a character speaks outdoors. A character might have just been brutally killed, but here’s this dog so the silly jazz music has to play. The musical pieces are generally pretty good, but there are so few of them that I got tired of them quickly. The game’s palette is similarly tiring, but it’s also relevant to the game’s setting. Greenvale is a tiny town in the North West of the United States, a location that is infamously wet and a region that values its traditions and superstitions. Presenting a town like this in greens and greys both excellently reflects the overarching tone of the experience, and makes the significantly colourful aspects that much more visible. Deadly Premonition’s plot often revolves around the presence of some mysterious red seeds which are visually distinctive and the red trees that drop the seeds allow the player a vision of the evil in the area. Although, the palette during horror time isn’t a lot different to how the game normally looks, and without the wiggly red vines I’m not sure I’d have been able to tell if it was spooky time or not in some locations.

Some games just seem assembled naturally; a room looks the way it does because the real life equivalent would look that way. Other games have characters with odd idiosyncrasies who live in houses with unusual furniture layouts or dress in very particular ways. There’s something about the details that have been paid attention that shows the game’s director wants to convey something important to the player. Deadly Premonition is occasionally incredibly directed. The layout of the hospital is a confusing maze of hallways that all look the same, and under the circumstances where a person is dramatically rushed through a hospital they will most certainly get that impression. Moreover, whenever the game does shift into horror mode, the way the layouts of the familiar locations are twisted and contorted into distantly familiar tangles places the player in an uncomfortable situation. The feeling of being lost while still kind of recognising one’s surroundings is a major reason why dementia is so harrowing. As a general idea, the horror segments are fantastic but the direction cannot carry them out of their technical failings. Other areas in the game are strangely atrociously directed. Movies that are demonstrating the broad carnage that tore through Greenvale, inflicting an uncontrollable violent urge onto the entire population only really show a handful people waving weapons around. At one stage a ‘mob’ of people attack one of the buildings, but there’s so few people in the group that it hardly qualifies as a mob. These animations could have been created externally and played as a movie instead of using the engine and all of its limitations. And I have to add, shoving the least subtle spoilers into some of these does not serve the game’s narrative in any way. Fortunately, these few mistakes are blemishes on the game’s primary design.

The player will engage with two primary gameplay systems throughout their adventure in Greenvale, the exploration of the regular world and the survival horror segments through mainly interior spaces. Greenvale and all of the buildings within it have been assembled as though the town is a real place. And I don’t mean that in the normal game critic sense, I mean it genuinely is arranged like that stereotypical small American town and all of the buildings have mechanically useless bathrooms and bedrooms for every resident. The townsfolk seem to have very detailed schedules which includes eating meals and commuting to their jobs. If the player needs to interact with anyone specifically, they’ll need to know where they’ll be at what time. There are a couple of methods to get to those locations. York’s walking and running speeds are good enough, although the stamina mechanic seems unnecessary. The interior distances are small anyway, but since the town is realistically proportioned it’s usually not a good use of time to travel anywhere on foot. That’s where the driving comes in and it is fairly awkward. The cars are almost totally weightless and Access have tried to imitate weight by making the steering appalling. There also doesn’t appear to be any kind of standard braking, just a handbrake that causes the car to rotate 180 degrees, and the reverse gear. So when the car finally makes it to the maximum speed of about 50 miles per hour, slowing down to turn corners is either a dramatic movie car chase spin or not actually effective enough to turn tightly. I can’t say I hated it though, car time was usually filled with fun nonsense that certainly takes the edge off of the controls. Upon finally reaching the destination, there’s a high likelihood that the horror mechanics will hustle in and take over the gameplay. York can arm himself in these scenarios, and there are a few different weapons to choose from. The player will typically have access to a knife and a blunt weapon to beat zombies and obstacles with, as well as a standard issue pistol with unlimited bullets and also a few other firearms with collectable ammunition. Fighting in melee is as basic as things can be, York can swing his weapon and maybe it’ll hit and deal damage. When aiming with a gun, however, the game becomes a proper, full-fledged action horror game like Resident Evil 4- Body Harvest. It’s archaic and clunky but not to the game’s detriment. The enemies are slow but threatening enough to make their advances tense. Considering how clumsy the rest of the game has seemed to this point, the controls during the combat segments are remarkably well done and the only bugs are the ones that occasionally fly around York.

Deadly Premonition has some immersive mechanics that I don’t really see a need for, and they’ve been sidelined so thoroughly that I suspect Access might have felt the same. Greenvale is a living community, and so the people within it have to fulfil their various needs to stay alive. This means York has to eat food sometimes, go to bed sometimes, and wash his clothes sometimes. York’s beard will also grow and the player can choose to shave it or not. What purpose these systems serve seems to have been lost within the end product but the player does still have to manage them occasionally. When I first noticed York’s beard growth I was suddenly reminded of the horse testicle shrinking mechanic they put into Red Dead 2 because it seems to be just as unnecessary. If York’s clothes are dirty then he’ll be surrounded by a swarm of gigantic flying insects that persist into places I wasn’t expecting. They’ll follow him into the car, and into scripted movies, into the horror segments, everywhere! I can’t imagine someone noticing that the insects are linked to York’s wardrobe cleanliness. I originally thought they were just part of the building I had entered and their continued presence was a bug. Hunger and tiredness are closely tied to the game’s time. If 18 hours pass in the game, York will be desperately searching for a bed to nap in. However, whenever York enters the horror segments he is transported into some kind of parallel dimension where the passage of time doesn’t occur in the same way, or even at all. York can spend hours at a crime scene, wandering through the twisted labyrinth, searching for clues, but he won’t get hungry. Even stranger is that most save rooms within the horror portions contain somewhere to sleep and on occasion a briefcase to change clothes. But time doesn’t pass. Was it possible to starve to death in the nightmare art gallery in a previous build of the game? Or pass out from exhaustion while running away from a monster so they just disabled the entire system? Why bother with it throughout the rest of the game then?

As I mentioned earlier, Greenvale is a relatively accurate model of a rural town in the north west of the US mainland, but it was also created on a tiny budget for the first HD video game consoles, so Access has made some concessions. The town has two main clumps of buildings that each revolve around a primary purpose, housing or services, as well as a few outlier locations like the hospital and the lumber mill. York meets whoever he needs to get a task from within one of the clusters, and then must drive to one of the outlier locations where the majority of the game takes place. The commutes are fine, quite enjoyable actually, but the town’s jagged, low poly geography can be quite the immersion destroyer, and the car hates the seams too. I never flipped it, but turning certain corners while climbing hills made it seem very possible. How much dev time would it have taken to smooth the roads out? I can’t imagine it would have been much. The walkable area outside of the town is partitioned by strange berms that York can’t climb or drive over, that honestly make the environments uglier than if there had just been some invisible walls or fences in the way. The forests look fantastic otherwise, and while there isn’t a lot to find out there I think that having less of it would have drastically reduced the player’s perception of the size of the map.

The population within Greenvale is an odd collection of extreme caricatures placed alongside a rather reasonable cast, and then they intermingle in bizarre ways. A small town horror setting would be incomplete without some creepy twins, and their mother and grandfather accommodate them in the setting quite well, but their father. Keith was one of the first people I interacted with during the big town summit because he was flailing about and snapping his fingers as part of his walk cycle. York just briefed the entire town on the murder that had taken place and asked for their cooperation in the investigation, and then this dude totally breaks the mood by being this ridiculous “rocker” character. Seeing him beside his wife is so strange. He doesn’t keep this character up the entire time either, so his introduction is jarring without commitment. The more central cast within the Greenvale police initially appeared to be more caricatures, but their identities become well filled out as the game goes on. The first few interactions the player has with George make him appear as a comic relief character, but quickly he is changed into York’s straight man. Unfortunately, George’s characterisation continues to spiral further away from consistency and his position as the town’s sheriff becomes more and more questionable as the game goes on. To avoid spoilers before an adequate warning, George may actually be the worst part about this game because of his frankly atrocious motivations. Aspiring writers, never have your adult characters scream “I’m sorry Mommy” at the sky, that’s like unironically writing “The End” after your story concludes. Thomas and Emily are significantly better written characters, although they aren’t without their shortcomings. Thomas’ introduction is especially entertaining as they task York to locate a key with a particular squirrel on the key ring, but never bothers to tell York anything useful about the features of the squirrel they’re actually looking for. It’s a shame these characters aren’t as well rounded as they could have been, but what the supporting cast lack, the star more than makes up for.

Francis York Morgan is a fascinating, goofy, apparently professional detective with what appears to be a personal obsession with the case of the red seeds. The player is introduced to York going over his mental notes as he’s driving toward Greenvale during a rainstorm. This introduction makes the player’s terrible driving cannon as York manages to be on the phone and smoke a cigarette while driving, and inevitably he flips his car and ends up lost in the forest. When York finally emerges from the trees and meets the town’s police department, he introduces himself in the same, almost childlike way that he will every time he meets someone new. Something about the way he stands there showing his badge to whomever he just met and going through his introductory monologue was funny to me every time. And I kind of believe that the childish way this introduction appears was deliberate, and that it has something to do with Zach. Throughout the entire game York will make comments to someone named Zach. York goes over his thoughts with Zach, makes light conversation with them, and even stops talking with the people in front of him to confer with Zach as an aside. But despite York reaching for his ear whenever he does talk to Zach, he isn’t actually wearing an earpiece. Zach isn’t another character. Zach might be the player or Zach could be a component of a mental illness that York has, or Zach is York’s imaginary friend from his youth. Deadly Premonition does explain who Zach is, but we still aren’t into the narrative section yet so I’ll just mention that the revelation is absurd, infuriating, and yet it also manages to be quite satisfying. I believed York was speaking directly to the player for a few hours, and then I felt that York was impaired with a hyperactive imagination until the answer was revealed. York solves a chess puzzle by glancing at it, he stares into his coffee to read his own fortune, he spends a lot of time thinking about the movies he wants to rewatch, and manages to find very tangible evidence within the nightmare versions of the locations he enters, meaning that he is walking around and looking at stuff while the building’s layout and contents have been warped in his imagination.

From this point forward, I’m going to get into the horror elements and then the game’s narrative and writing. If you don’t want spoilers for those things then this is where you depart and play the game yourself.

Despite the game’s big, open world filled with silly characters and side quests, Deadly Premonition is a horror game and will regularly lock the player into the horror segments to shoot zombies that go “yuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”. These guys aren’t scary, but the Raincoat Killer has some more frightening ideas to get the player spooked. He’ll badly play hide and seek with York, he’ll engage a second camera to annihilate the framerate, the player has to wiggle the stick back and forth to make York run away from the axe-wielding murderer, and then there are a healthy quantity of quick-time events to contend with for good measure. The Raincoat Killer is much more effective at murdering women in brutal, ritualistic ways, however. The first victim, and the reason York made his way to Greenvale in the first place, was a young woman who had been force-fed some red seeds, then had her tongue bitten off, then was slashed from the sternum down before being hung from a tree in the forest. York wasn’t present for Anna’s death and so the ritualistic murder can be held at arm’s length and is a relatively gentle entry into the investigation. Comparatively, Becky’s death is so distressing and sadistic that I don’t really feel comfortable showing it. Becky was similarly force-fed the red seeds, had her tongue bitten out, and was slashed in the same way, but she is still alive when the player finds her strung up in her bathroom. This scene is extremely upsetting, as Becky screams in tongue-less fear as George and Thomas fall into the killer’s trap and cause Becky to be killed by the setup. To go from the light-hearted, Scooby and the gang stuff to this gave me an immense sense of whiplash and had me on edge for the rest of the game. I would learn who the next victims were going to be, but the potential method for their deaths was deeply disturbing. Fortunately, it never gets as severe as this again, but it does get close. Diane’s death is dark, but Thomas’ is worse for reasons I think are quite distasteful. Thomas is either gay or transgender, I can’t really tell and it seems that SWERY might have believed those two things were interchangeable. Thomas uses animations that appeal to the stereotype that gay men are overtly expressive at all times, that there’s somehow a “gay run” and a “gay salute”. But Thomas also spends a lengthy portion toward the end of the game in a dress and a wig, and fantasizes about being George’s woman. Does Thomas enjoy drag, or are they transgender? Either way, they fall off of imaginary clockwork and their face is impaled on a hook. It’s extreme, it’s shocking, it seems to come without warning. Brutality could just occur at any moment, and the player cannot get complacent so long as they’re completing narrative content.

Deadly Premonition’s narrative has two focuses; the investigation into the Raincoat Killer murders, and some introspection into York’s past. York arrives in Greenvale and vows to simply tag along with the local police force’s investigation into the first murder. After some preliminary investigation at the location of Anna’s body, her remains are transported to the local hospital where the post-mortem takes place. York has a look over Anna’s body and discovers some mysterious red seeds, the same seeds he had encountered across a string of similar murders throughout the country. He assumes command over the investigation and asks Greenvale’s Sheriff to summon the entire town’s population to the community centre to scope them out. This is where the player is introduced to the suspects, aside from two important characters. Upon returning to the hotel that evening, York meets the travelling sapling salesman Forrest Kaysen who claims to be the only person who can consistently get a species of red tree to sprout. In the night, York has a dream in which he is walking through a red forest and is approached by a boy in pajamas. The boy guides York past a zombie and through a door, which prompts York to wake up. The gang then travels to meet Diane at her art gallery where York learns of her domineering sexuality, as well as noticing that one of the clues from Anna’s scene could have been attributed to her. York doesn’t make any arrests or even informal accusations, he spots Kaysen in Diane’s office as he’s leaving the gallery and decides to allow things to play out for a bit. Anna’s sister Becky is killed in the meantime, ushering York to speed up the investigation to prevent further casualties. York and Emily are informed that the diner owner might be having an affair with Diane, and his standoffish attitude lands him as the primary suspect. That night, York expects Diane and the diner owner to meet at the local bar which prompts him to organise a big stake-out at the bar. George is posted up at the gallery, Thomas is placed inside the bar, and York and Emily wait in a patrol car outside. They follow him to the gallery where George has allowed the Raincoat Killer to slip past his watch and attack Diane. This event eliminates all of York’s suspects and, dejected, he decides to go out for a drink with George. George admits to having some deep psychological damage inflicted by his own mother when he was a child as York reassures him. Emily arrives and York spends the rest of the night falling in love with her. The next day, York goes to speak with an elder, named Harry, who informs him of an event where the entire population of Greenvale was overcome with uncontrollable aggression and began trying to murder each other. Harry had seen some soldiers pumping a mysterious gas into the town, one of whom looks awfully familiar. While speaking with Harry, Thomas mysteriously disappears and the gang attempt to track them down. York intuited to go to the bar and look for any details, which leads him to a hidden basement where he learns who is behind the Raincoat Killings. And is knocked out. George and Emily team up with Kaysen to continue the search for Thomas, as well as begin looking for York. Kaysen’s dog follows York’s scent all the way around town, taking the longest path possible to get to wherever Thomas was holding York. The player gains control of Emily while York is tied to a chair in the town’s clock tower. Thomas is the game’s first boss battle, and it’s okay. Thomas confesses that George is the Raincoat Killer, so York, Emily, and Kaysen head to the police station to confront George. While there, the group finds Carol, Thomas’ sister, sliced up with a mouth full of red seeds. In her final moments she manages to shove a handful of seeds into Emily’s mouth. York trusts Kaysen to take Emily to have her stomach pumped at the hospital while he goes to confront George alone. George eats a bunch of seeds and mutates into a big, apparently invincible monster with a very obvious weak spot in the middle of his back. He transforms a few times throughout the fight and starts yelling apologies to the sky before York takes him down. York passes out and awakens in the hospital. Kaysen had taken York there and given him a map to George’s house, where York learned the true depth of the red seeds’ influence. A note directs York to the community centre for a final confrontation with Kaysen. The red seeds seem to have hallucinogenic properties and it’s implied that Kaysen had sexually assaulted Emily while she was under the influence. As evidence of the attack, Kaysen had planted one of his red saplings into Emily’s body. She asks York to shoot her, she’d rather die than be consumed by the sapling. Lost, York asks Zach for help. As a child, York had witnessed a very similar situation. Kaysen had planted a sapling into York’s mother, and she had asked York’s father to kill her too. Unable to kill the woman he loves, the sapling suddenly grows larger, draining all of York’s mother’s life away. As reparations for failing to do the right thing, York’s father shoots himself, leaving Zach orphaned. This traumatic event caused the boy to recoil inward, inventing an entirely new person to become to protect Zach from the things he had seen. York wasn’t ever real, and Zach has to do the right thing in regards to Emily. Zach similarly fails to shoot Emily, instead she dramatically tears the sapling from her body, refusing to allow herself to be corrupted. She doesn’t survive this, but the trouble isn’t over. Kaysen breaks his illusion and becomes a lengthy, three-phase battle to end the game. Upon vanquishing the evil, Zach gets to meet with York, Emily, Thomas, and all of the Raincoat Killer’s victims one last time before leaving Greenvale and heading home.

This plot is incredible. As a crime thriller, it leaves no loose ends nor does it force the answer to be physically impossible, and it leaves enough information in the open for the player to be able to figure out the truth. And if the player does figure out who the villain really is, the story still has some twists that are excellent at sowing doubt. As a horror narrative, there is an ever-present sense of helplessness throughout the entire investigation which makes the evil that much more threatening. York might be a competent FBI agent and armed with an infinitely reloadable pistol, but those tools aren’t enough to fight back against the Raincoat Killer’s schemes. Even being present in the room with some of the victims before they die, York still fails to save them, so what good is a gun and a badge? And darkness is only truly dark when contrasted by something light. The jovial conversations in the car, York’s excitement when talking about movies he likes, inadvertently flirting with the old hotel manager, these things are necessary to make the tragedy that much more distressing. But, while the twists and intercharacter relationships are well done, the villains in Deadly Premonition lack any kind of motivation. George’s parental issues aren’t even mentioned until 10 hours into the game, where they are forcefully shoved in to give him something to be motivated by. But even with this, the reason George and these people entered into this cultish voluntary sacrifice pact is so that George can become invincible. Why does George want to be invincible? His body transforms into a big demonic creature, but what’s his plan afterward? It isn’t sufficiently explained. Kaysen tricks George into believing that a toy locket is important for the process of becoming invincible, and I can understand that Kaysen would want to play with mortals, although his motivation for doing so are as hazy as George’s. Kaysen’s intention is to force people to kill the ones they love as part of his evil demon tasks, and that doesn’t really constitute a motivation either. Does Kaysen have something to gain within the Red Room dimension by planting trees in women or by causing a town to start uncontrollably killing each other? As it stands, Kaysen’s entire purpose is to ruin Zach’s life and to mess with York while Zach was hidden away. I wonder if there’s some symbolism in this that I just can’t see. And unfortunately, the blurring between which events are truly occurring and which aren’t puts a lot of the potential metaphors into disarray.

The red seeds are very interesting to consider metaphorically, consuming them is very important to the ritualistic murders of the Raincoat Killer, they seem to have some kind of psychoactive property, and through whatever method Kaysen does so, when placed within the womb of a female victim they sprout into an advanced tree. Are they a metaphor for a substance that can cause cervical cancer? Or a drug used by violent criminals to sedate their victims? A seed is typically used as a metaphor for the start of something new, but Deadly Premonition’s seed can only sprout if it destroys someone else. But is it actually doing that in the reality of the game? York is by no means a reliable narrator and the player experiences the events through his eyes, so perhaps he has replaced the truth with his own redacted version or a version that allows him to avoid facing the painful reality. The player is shown that York is very capable of noticing tiny details and formulating an entire plan quickly and effectively, and his love of movies shows that he has a preference for the fictitious. The Director’s Cut adds a few extra scenes to provide a framing of the game’s events, which feature Zach after retirement retelling the story of his investigation in Greenvale to his granddaughter. So not only is York unreliable within the context of the game, but Zach’s version of the events being told to a child are likely to be censored and embellished themselves. I think these additional scenes add one too many layers into the mix and cause a lot of the game’s metaphorical ideas to be too deeply muddled to still retain their meaning. It’s fun to think about, but I think SWERY let the writing get away from him.

Deadly Premonition’s writing is strange. I know we’re quite deep into this thing and a statement like that is almost insulting, but to truly appraise the writing’s quality might be too complicated to do. SWERY and Access Games are Japanese, and I would assume that Deadly Premonition was written in Japanese and then translated into English. But SWERY is a very capable dual-linguist, his English was often regarded as effectively fluent when being interviewed around Deadly Premonition’s original release, so perhaps the awkward sentences are intentional. Sometimes York speaks in very unnatural phrases, so much so that you can hear the actor stumbling over the lines on some occasions. This might be cultural too, as Japanese script writing often forgoes stage direction in favour of having the character say their thoughts aloud and leaving the acting up to the actor or the animator. The phrase “Tell me about your parents” would not be met with the speech Emily delivers if it were written by a non-Japanese writer, so picking on these aspects feels like comparing things that shouldn’t be compared. However, Kaysen’s constant interruptions to the search for York are just very poor quality. Something that has prevented me from writing a script of this length has been a lesson I was taught in regards to wasting the audience’s time. The teacher used the phrase “Kill your babies” to mean that no matter how proud of a sentence you might be, you should always return to it to make sure it’s even necessary. Writing the most descriptive, poetic prose might be fun to do but nobody’s going to read it if it’s ultimately substanceless. Kaysen repeatedly interrupting one of the most interesting segments of the game and retelling information that the player already knows does not serve the game at all. This is content that I would naturally remove upon reviewing my own work and I think whatever purpose Kaysen’s interruptions are intended to achieve has been entirely missed.

These small hiccups are rare enough that the sense of wasting time will only ever appear in a flash before the valuable content returns. Undoubtedly, there are technical problems and visual unfriendliness that I’m certain have already turned a lot of people off by now. For those more concerned about the narrative, my gripes with some of the components might seem like I think more negatively about this game than I do. Deadly Premonition is a disaster, I won’t deny that, but it’s such a fascinating experience and genuinely succeeds at far more than it fails. It is a magnificent disaster. One that I highly recommend for anyone who has ever been curious. Don’t pretend that the technical hurdles are unscalable, they are and it is easily worth it.

Deadly Premonition was shipped with a lot of problems, into a climate that wasn’t especially hospitable to those problems, but the game’s narrative was such a gigantic step up from anything that it was competing with and it was good enough for many to overlook the game’s flaws. The staff of Access Games went from losing their jobs, to just hanging on, and then just about managed to piece together something unimaginably special. To have garnered a cult following is arguably the best fate a game like Deadly Premonition could attain, and I think those who worked on it are very pleased to see people still enjoying their game. Like Devil’s Third, I think Access knew things wouldn’t be perfect, but enough people would see through the chaos and bad press and they’d keep talking about Deadly Premonition so that it would find the right audience in the end.

Next time, I’ll be embarking on my Gliding.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/5RPT0j9-KzQ

Sable, 2021’s most nebulous indie hit, is mysterious for all of the right, and all of the wrong reasons. Does the world beyond the Ewer contain something worth seeing or should video games be about more than just seeing interesting things?

Video games have become increasingly affordable for independent developers to create in recent years, allowing more unconventional video games to become available and for micro-industries to spring up all over the world. No longer would a panel of disconnected executives decide what video games could be made, if people wanted to revive dead genres or sell to more niche markets then they are at liberty to do so. The games that entered the market as a result of the newfound affordability have an immense variance in quality, with some even surpassing those professionally designed and assembled projects. The critical and financial acclaim these games would achieve inspired many others to enter into game development, and in 2017 a studio would form within a parent’s shed with aspirations to create something beautiful. Despite a scheduled 2019 release, Sable wouldn’t reach digital shelves until 2021 giving publisher Raw Fury enough time to get the project onto Xbox consoles and giving Meg Jayanth and Japanese Breakfast time to work on the narrative and music respectively. This extra time may have been to the game’s detriment, though, as the final game still contains a large number of bugs that affect most parts of Sable, bugs that the additional time in development should have squashed. Did Shedworks achieve all they had desired within Sable, or did their lack of experience cause the game to have to release before it was ready? Does Sable satisfy the targets it seems to have set for itself, or are there important things missing that have prevented the game from reaching its full potential? And finally, is the audience Sable seeks as bountiful as it appears or are those who sing the game’s praises louder than their size would suggest?

Sable gives the player very few obvious clues what the game will involve during its opening, but it very quickly gets the player into the loop and sends them out into the world. The player is shown that Sable can climb surfaces, then they are given the ability to float around, and finally they are given a jetbike to ride around at high speeds. The player is given an objective without urgency and sent into a world full of mountains and stories of a bunch of side characters. On first glance, Sable looks a lot like Breath of the Wild with the combat stripped out and after playing Sable for the 12 hours that I did, yeah, it’s like Breath of the Wild with no combat. The world is split into smaller regions that have different geographies, there’s a handful of populated locations throughout the regions, plenty of elevation to climb around upon, high places to reach to fill in the map, and a bunch of creatures to find for rewards. These similarities aren’t necessarily a bad thing, though. Iterating on the parts of Breath of the Wild people enjoyed most is a highly effective way of creating a product people are certain to find value in. No need for expensive market research or gambling on a gameplay system they haven’t experienced before, Shedworks could extract the best from their inspiration and mix in their own ideas on top. Their final product is significantly different to Breath of the Wild and I think that Sable’s world is the best example of the differences.

The world the player explores consists of seven distinct regions that each maintain a different geographical identity, usually revolving around a single identifier that the other regions don’t contain. One zone is heavily forested, one seems to be actively volcanic, there’s a salt flats area, and so on. There aren’t many sources of water throughout the world and the largest population of NPCs are positioned beside a small lake. Other NPC populations occupy impermanent camps that don’t appear to hold much in terms of resources for subsistence. The world’s verticality is very rarely used in combination with the NPCs, but summiting a large mountain and coming across someone was always a pleasant surprise. The views from those mountaintops are also often incredibly impressive; the game’s render distance is very generous, there’s always a handful of landmarks to view, and the unique palette often creates screens that no other game could ever produce. The player is also shown the large distances they’ll be crossing in order to get to those landmarks, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. The distances are vast and the bike isn’t too comfortable to use over uneven terrain, but the music triggers whenever Sable is on the bike for long enough and it’s fantastic.

Sable’s most prominent, and most laboured aspect is the game’s presentation. The music is spectacular, the main theme is eerie and hopeful, and the rest of the tracks are similarly haunting. The other tracks do a lot of the work in setting up a location’s atmosphere, and since the game’s lighting acts in an unusual way the music has to do a lot of the atmospheric work. Sable is textured in plain colours, the details are minimal, and there’s a heavy layering of toon filter across every surface. I like the colours but I’m not so sure about this use of toon filter over texturing the black lines onto the objects. The filter is only active in a radius around Sable, and since the game encourages the player to climb up things to observe their surroundings they’ll likely see the filter flickering over the entire scene which isn’t a great look. It also makes the z-fighting and poorly optimised pieces look even worse. People are going to export an object with too many polygons now and again, and a normal texture will keep that mistake hidden. This might seem too nit-picky but the fix is so simple and comes down to not relying on a filter to be the lynch-pin of the visual design. It’s a shame, because some of these places are unbelievable. The region full of stone pillars looks amazing when the sun sets behind it, and driving through the central desert with the sun high above is uniquely iconic. Similarly, the large pieces of foreign debris stand out against the rest of the game’s art without seeming to clash, although they have a tendency to be quite busy and often contain containers with massive, ultra spoilers on them for no reason. The debris pieces are the only surfaces in the game that cannot be climbed which makes entering the ships into some of the few puzzle scenarios in the game.

There are only a handful of systems at play within Sable, and while the simplicity is enjoyable and refreshing, it can get a little stale. Climbing, riding the bike, and carrying items are the only things Sable is able to do so you’d better buckle up and get used to putting heavy batteries into slots. Sable is limited by her stamina when climbing so initially the player will have to survey their ascent carefully and find a way up with plenty of spots to rest upon. Again, like Link, Sable can upgrade her stamina by turning in Chum Eggs to the Chum Queen, allowing the player greater range on their climbs and reducing the quantity of time they spend assessing the surface. I think the initial quantity of stamina is pretty good, nothing outside of the very late game requires any more stamina than Sable starts with and some light exploring in most locations will yield Chums. Climbing is well rewarded, but the entire bike system is half-baked at best. Simoon is the name of Sable’s bike and the thing can barely handle most of the uneven terrain throughout the world. Cresting a dune almost always leads to the bike spinning out of control, calling the bike to Sable over rough terrain usually has disastrous effects, and the various bike parts that change the bike’s weight cause it to react even more drastically to the terrain. I managed to get the bike stuck in the ground more than once and the bike parts I got from the Crystal Plateau made Simoon into a lumbering mess. The bike would also seem to open a lot of opportunities to create races to compete in or embark upon long distance deliveries, but the closest Sable gets is asking the player to drive through a series of gates to raise a tower. In the same vein, carrying stuff could have been expanded upon in fun ways that moving batteries around only hints at. Within almost all of the crashed spaceships there are puzzles that involve moving batteries to the appropriate slots to open doors. The batteries are too heavy to carry while climbing, and Sable can only just throw them so the player has to use large pistons present within the environments to move the batteries up to higher levels. Carrying items never expands beyond this, leaving yet another pile of potential on the table.

And so, we reach the crux of my experience with Sable: the inescapable sense that something is absent. The majority of locations within the game are especially shallow and give very little reason to stay in them for any length of time. If it weren’t for the mystery of the missing power core, the only city in the game would have less than an hour of content. A bridge with statues battling on it has a quest to go there, a couple of Chums to find, and a really weak puzzle that involves waiting for some shadows to line up. None of the climbs involve much thought, and without any other form of conflict the player passes through this area once and has no reason to ever return. Showing these areas in this video is exactly the same as being within them in the game, which is endemic throughout all of Sable. So much was done to make the game’s locations visually interesting, but nothing has been done to make them mechanically engaging in any way. There are no consequences for failing because Sable can never take damage or drop the items in her pockets. The player can throw Sable from the highest point in the game and step away from the controls, it doesn’t matter. There are no stakes. There isn’t even conflict in the narrative. A game doesn’t need conflict, necessarily, but the mechanical systems within Sable are screaming for something else to tie them all together. Any other mechanic to make this world a little bit more alive would go a long way, but I suspect the game’s technical problems would prevent it from supporting that kind of additional content.

I mentioned the bike’s struggles with the terrain previously, but there are pervasive problems like that throughout most of the rest of the game too. Traversal isn’t a problem exclusive to the bike, as the tiny number of NPCs that aren’t bolted down have trouble navigating the environments as well. I watched Joti get stuck on the same lamp post more than once despite having a lot of deliveries on their plate, apparently. The handful of beetles to chase around will often find a wall to run into so catching them is much easier than I assume was intended, and every other movement occurs off camera to prevent the pathing from breaking down in front of the player. The spawnable towers that appear after the player rides through the rings also have a consistent disappearing problem. Various pieces will disappear whenever the player is interacting with the towers, an interaction that is encouraged by the consistent placement of a Chum right on top. The water also acts strangely, and I found a waterfall the Sable could climb too. And dialogue is frequently assigned to the wrong character which makes some of the narrative scenarios hard to follow. Not that they’re especially complex.

Sable’s narrative is a coming of age story in the most stripped back sense possible. Sable, the character, must leave her tribe and step out into the world upon her “gliding” where she will find her life’s purpose. Once her purpose has been found, Sable can return to her tribe and continue with her life. The gliding is a solitary excursion into the world; Sable will never meet someone to travel with nor are there many people to become friends with. Within each of the game’s regions there is a population of NPCs who might have a self-contained side-story to experience as part of Sable’s journey to better understand her place in the world. Typically, the player will have to receive one of these quests from an NPC wearing the mask Sable is attempting to earn, and upon completing the quest Sable will receive a badge that can be handed in for the mask. Whenever the player collects 3 of each badge type they can turn them into a Mask Caster, reach into the Caster’s face, and claim their new mask. Eventually, the Ibexi will return to the game’s starting location to meet Sable again. There, the player enters a large temple and will select the mask that Sable will wear throughout her adulthood. And then the credits roll. This touches on so little of the potential culture that has formed among these people, the various groups would have grown more distinct over time, but the nomads and the settled peoples are essentially no different and it’s the crystal harvester tribe who are the only ones with a different perspective on the world. The world of Sable contains ancient, mechanical structures, massive temples and observatories, strange creatures, and everyone must wear a mask at all times but apparently all of that just sprang from the ground and nobody really cares that much about it. The huge, petrified worm and the countless gigantic skeletons are also casually ignored. The crashed ships have their own side-story, but none of the regular people even care that they exist. Sometimes a scrapper will want pieces from a ship, but they never investigate further. This whole world just exists and nobody within it is ever curious about what came before.

The game does have an answer for the origin of humanity in Sable's world, and I think it’d be a much more interesting game than what is present within Sable currently. Within the crashed spaceships in each region, the player can access a terminal that is run by the ship’s AI controller named Sarin. Sarin was present the day all of the ships landed on the planet but due to a security protocol they are unable to reveal more than a single ship’s log at a time. These disparate stories reveal that a crew of people from Earth had travelled to the planet with intent to terraform it for colonisation. Something went wrong, though, and the ship became stranded in orbit, unable to return to Earth. The ship’s crew eventually resolved to place the terraformer machines onto the planet and resign themselves to a life behind their oxygen masks. The people still living on the planet, including Sable herself, are descendents of that crew that crash landed there. So much time has passed that they have forgotten their connection to Earth and how to read English. The thing is, I can still read English. So the labels on the boxes that say “Made in London” serve no purpose beyond explicitly and immediately spoiling this side story. There are no other connections to Earth aside from these labels and the ship’s logs making inference. I don’t understand why this choice was made and the dissatisfaction I felt when the big reveal within the ship’s logs finally came was comparable to the feeling of watching the poor polish and missed opportunities squander all of the potential Sable had within it.

Some of you might prefer the low stakes on offer within Sable, a game so chilled out that playing it almost seems lazy, and I don’t mean to censure you if Sable is something that sounds appealing to you. If you’re on the hunt for something visually interesting, or so shallow that you can casually chat with your stream audience and barely pay attention to what’s on screen then Sable is your ideal candidate. Or it would be if it didn’t have so many technical problems. If you like to experience interesting stories, you like characters, you like goals, you think that the best fix for Breath of the Wild’s combat was not to just rip it out, well, Sable wouldn’t be among the game’s I’d recommend to you.

I believe Shedworks has created the game they had intended to, although I’m sure that it isn’t exactly what they had planned to release. Sable is very much an exploration game with stunning views and an interesting aesthetic. I don’t think their idea is coherent with their design, though. Developers working on projects like Journey and Gris recognised that their original concepts were very simplistic, so they dedicated most of their resources toward delivering the best possible polish on their 3 to 4 hour game. There’s no fat in those games. There isn’t anything that could be removed or needs to be fixed. Sable shares none of these qualities. It was released in September and has been patched several times since then - it isn’t finished - and it has a long way to go before Sable can realise any of its potential.

I might have unearthed something that was buried for a reason.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/tZ4h3YSrjGw

Iterative works aren’t a crime within video games; doing something that has already been done is a good way to get a development team up to speed as well as draw in customers who want more of a certain thing. Some new blood engaging with an older idea can often result in some unique twists that lead to a project with an identity all its own. There is a point where those iterative works become derivative instead, and the changes being made to the base design become a detriment to the final game. Whatever fresh ideas that the change in personnel was supposed to bring to the table are just bad and the lack of talent or the refusal to take any risks keep the final product from being anything worth engaging with. This kind of thing happens regularly, but normally the bad product is singular. So when Capcom hesitated to bring Monster Hunter to the PSP and Wii, another developer decided to seize the opportunity to create a series of similar games on those platforms. The wheels were put into motion, and nothing could prevent the Valhalla Knights series from being summoned into this plane of existence. Somehow, even after the second game received the same disinterested reaction from audiences and critics, K2 decided they were still going to go ahead and create a spin-off for the Wii. Marvellous Entertainment, XSeed, and Rising Star were still on board to publish the games too, meaning that enough people had faith that this series would pull through and eventually become a worthwhile investment. What were these businesses seeing in the series that the video game playing public couldn’t? Did they truly believe that an entry on the Wii would salvage Valhalla Knights’ abysmal reputation? And why would they allow that last ditch effort to be so undeniably awful?

Valhalla Knights is a series of action-role playing games developed by Japanese developer K2 and published primarily by Marvellous Entertainment. The series debuted in 2006 on the PSP and culminated in 2013 with Valhalla Knights 3. Every entry received mixed reviews and were overlooked at the time, often receiving comments of a perceived “competence” as the highest praise, excluding the sex minigames in 3. Every game contains the same generic fantasy settings, the standard mage-warrior-thief class selection, and plenty of orcs and dragons to slay throughout the world. There was no shortage of games like this on every system the series found itself on so the awkward combat and lack of spectacle were more than enough to keep the series on the fringes. The games also rarely attempted much in the way of narrative, often introducing some bland villain to take charge of the monsters and lead them against the allied races. Valhalla Knights 2 would introduce local cooperative play to emulate Monster Hunter even further and the spin-off Wii game would even include some online play to distract the developers from creating a title people would actually be interested in playing.

Spinning the series off onto the Wii was an incredibly savvy business manoeuvre due to the system’s ubiquity at the time. The Wii was approaching 50 million unit sales by 2009, far outstripping the PSP’s sales at the same time. Clearly, this was a market that would be more receptive to the Valhalla Knights gameplay format and the disconnection between entries meant that new players could just hop in and not be concerned about missing story details. In PAL regions, the “Valhalla Knights” portion of the title was rightfully dropped in favour of simply titling the game Eldar Saga, allowing the game to sneak past anyone who happened to be familiar with Valhalla Knights and owned a Wii. I don’t believe K2 ever intended to use the Wii’s motion control functions for anything beyond a button press, and the primary reason for embarking onto the platform was the system’s technical capability. Wii games aren’t much different to PSP games technologically, so creating assets for a Wii game was something K2 were already fairly capable of. This does mean that the game looks cheap and stiff on its own, but when compared to its contemporaries Eldar Saga’s presentation is downright inexcusable.

I imagine the visual portion of this game’s design document is a single word, because describing the game’s visual style can be effectively done with that same word. Eldar Saga is brown. Every environment is glazed in a sickly brown grime, covered in an offensive layer of brown dust, or buried beneath a dry, brown smear. People used to complain a lot about games from this era; visual styles consisting of little more than “brown and bloom”, but I have to say, some bloom would’ve gone a long way toward fixing this. It’s a magical, fantasy war front with fairies and dragons so there’s every opportunity to include more colours but K2 chose not to. This is a gritty, apocalyptic setting. Very serious business. Now excuse me while I propose to this elf. The particle effects used for the magic are muted and uninteresting, and while there are some humorous gear pieces to find, even they aren’t spared from being drab and miserable. The enemies out in the world have a habit of disappearing into the environment, so if the player had the game muted for a very good reason, they might find themselves being ambushed by a small grey smudge.

I’m still not quite sure what language I’d use to describe Eldar Saga’s soundscape. The game’s music wavers between relatively harmless and surprisingly good, I wouldn’t be opposed to using these tracks in another game or as backing in a video or something, they aren’t the worst. It’s rare that the player can actually hear them, though, as the overall sound mixing is absolutely terrible, with the footstep sounds being the loudest thing in the mix. It doesn’t change when the surface of the floor changes, nor does it change when the characters are wearing different footwear. The sound is always the same and if the player fails to numb themself to it then the monotony will get very frustrating very quickly. The other sounds in the game are usually of much greater quality. The weapons and magic use fairly competent sounds and the vast majority of the enemy sounds are great. I’m always a fan of screaming and Eldar Saga features a few good screams. It’s a shame there wasn’t any voice-acting because it could have been a hilarious travesty, but the game’s narrative is so barren that it isn’t a surprise that K2 didn’t employ any voice actors.

Upon reaching the main menu, the player is given the option to play through the game’s prologue or to skip straight to the main campaign. Naturally, I started with the prologue as I assume most others would. A movie explains that this world has been locked in a timeless struggle, the allied humanoid races battling against the massed forces of the destructive monsters in desperation for survival. Eventually, the allied races manage to force the monsters back to a northern stronghold where the war meets a stalemate. The stalemate lasts for such a long time that the army of humanoids begins to waver. The alliance breaks down and the races separate, each group gradually becoming more insular and isolated from the rest. Something triggers the monsters to begin amassing again, and the player must travel throughout Eldar and reunite the old alliance, at the behest of a wheelchair bound mage. The process of reunification is the same for each of the three races: travel to their village, engage in some light narrative hijinks, and then clear a dungeon to defeat a boss. Sometimes the boss is related to the prior hijinks, like the ethnostate dwarf king, and sometimes the boss is a big bee that has nothing to do with the narrative in the area. Defeating the bosses rewards a macguffin that the player returns to the mage. Once all of the pieces are in the mage’s possession, the player is given the opportunity to propose to one of the women they had been interacting with throughout their adventure. There’s a human girl, a dwarf girl, an elf girl, and… Oh…

Aside from their brownness, the lands of Eldar are in a sorry state, with many of the structures having been reduced to rubble long ago and most of the plant life leaning toward death. The first area the player will have access to is a field to the north of the human settlement Vestlia, which is surprisingly empty. This deeply soured my first impressions of the game. There’s nothing to see here, nowhere interesting to go, and nothing engaging to do. It isn’t until the player advances to the Rhianos Mountains that the terrain to the north is interesting at all. The pathways through the mountains involve a lot of climbing and doubling back, with enemies hiding around every corner. It’s brown like the rest of the game, but these mountain pathways are the only really defined pathways out in the world. Every other overworld environment is similar to that field just outside of the city, wide open and empty. This makes the side quests to complete certain actions out in those fields quite tedious, as there aren’t any landmarks to be described within the quest text. Just go out into the field and find 20 lizards to kill. Across each field are the villages that are occupied by the other races in the game. I like the dwarf town, even if it is a little uninspired, and the elven town is just a bunch of trees that aren’t numerous enough to house all of the people who live in the village. The halfling village is located on the outskirts of a massive ruined castle but the village itself is just a bunch of wooden boxes dropped on a road in the middle of a field. Each village contains two points of contact within the population: the male village elder and a female love interest. These are the people who dispense the main quests and provide the context to the dungeon dives, at least for the first dive.

By my count, there are five dungeons to explore within Eldar Saga, although the player will have to explore the first three twice before they’re able to enter the final two. During the prologue the player must “liberate” the villages by defeating bosses within the nearby dungeons. The first dungeon the player is directed to is the Dwarf mines, probably my favourite looking environment in the game since it’s bleakness and colourlessness is quite appropriate, but also because the sound design is surprisingly well done. The level design itself is sort of disappointing, unfortunately. The only path through the first room, for example, winds through the entirety of the gigantic level and doubles back on itself, leading the player to the exit right beside the entrance, higher than when they started but the stairs are supposed to be leading the player deeper down into the mine. This would be extremely inefficient for actual mining operations, but it also forces the player to interact with all of the enemies within the level which is something they’d be desperately trying to avoid. I’ll be talking about the combat next, but for now just keep in mind that it’s preferable to avoid enemies instead of engaging with them. Let you… consider that for a moment. The swamp dungeon is surprisingly similar in terms of obstacles, but the layout gives the sensation that the entire swamp occupies a flat plain and that the player is travelling deeper into it. This is much better than the mine, but I don’t enjoy the aesthetic of the swamp, and the elf archer doesn’t help much at all. The boss at the end is also kind of strange. The Castle of Ruins, the ruin that the halflings live outside, is my favourite of the dungeons in terms of mechanical activity but that bar isn’t very high. There’s a short outdoor segment before the player enters the interior section which is inhabited by some of the rare enemies that are interesting to battle. These are the locations the player must travel around multiple times and none of these are worthy of repeated exposures. Zelda dungeons are filled with puzzles and gimmicks that make each dungeon distinguishable from each other, and while Eldar Saga seems to be mechanically similar to a Zelda game, Eldar Saga’s dungeons lack much of the assets that comprise a great experience. They’re empty, characterless hallways with a promise of progress at the end.

The controls in Eldar Saga aren’t atrocious, but the combat is shockingly terrible. The game uses the most standard wii-remote and nunchuk layout, with the d-pad used to control the camera. A for light attacks, B for heavy, C to sprint, and Z for camera targeting. Supers are activated by shaking the controller and the plus and minus buttons cast spells if they’re set to anything. I played with a sword throughout the prologue and then again during the main campaign despite being given the option to change. I tried a mage and it simply didn’t work. Moreover, I saw what a fairly high level archer character was doing and have to conclude that doesn’t work either. Combat is horrendously clunky, with attacks taking excessive lengths of time to activate and conclude. Spells take even longer to cast and the caster is fully vulnerable while they’re casting. So if the enemy isn’t killed in a single hit or it isn’t also locked into a long attack cooldown then they’ll land a series of hits onto the player. Even using a sword as my primary weapon didn’t keep me safe from taking excessive damage from a missed attack. Because of this, and how the enemies are similarly susceptible to being punished for whiffing, I mostly used the dash attack to damage enemies. It has the lowest cooldown of any attack, and moving away from the enemies trying to retaliate is the most reliable way to avoid damage. There are shields and a hit/avoid stat ratio that both have a chance to avoid incoming damage, but the chances are so low that they aren’t reliable methods of damage mitigation. And the consequences for dying are ludicrous. The player loses a huge quantity of their money and a random selection of items from their bags, which usually includes the valuable gear and most useful consumables. So death is a massive setback and supremely frustrating. Avoiding damage at all costs is highly incentivised. The enemies also have hit and avoid stats that are unimaginably frustrating to deal with.

Eldar Saga’s gameplay systems are sneakily reliant on stats, although the game wouldn’t ever admit to that. The total number of stats is overwhelming. There are so many stats, and so many of them are useless depending on the character’s job. Not only are there the standard health points and mana points, as well as the less standard D&D style Strength, Dexterity, Luck etcetera, there are stats for weapon skills, which hand those weapons are in, defence, magic attack, magic defence, hit, guard, avoid, crit, status application chance, status resistance chance, each individual magic type, resistances to each of those magic types, and three different weapon attack styles. Every piece of gear could impact any and all of these stats in any way, and they do. Not only does the player have to guess what kind of stats they’re actually using, but they’ll also have to try to blindly find gear that applies to those stats. And most gear has down sides. Throughout my play time I focused mostly on trying to gain hit chance, Slash weapon types, and as much health as possible. I knew I’d have to take some damage occasionally because the combat is so stunted, but I had no idea if Hit and Slash were the right stats to collect. I also often found items would increase my hit chance at the cost of my avoid chance, and, in the case of my main story character, almost never changed my gear from the starting equipment. The enemies can also have large quantities of these stats too, with spectral enemies having perfect Avoid so that they could never be hit by non-magic attacks. One of the bosses also had absurdly high Avoid which turned the battle into a 20 minute slog as I rolled dice against the spider’s stats. Weapons can also break and the player cannot change their equipment while outside of the game’s villages, meaning that battling through all of the enemies to reach a boss is a non-option. The player needs their sword health to beat the boss, and can’t switch to a dummy sword to retain the durability of their primary weapon. I was fortunate that supers could hit enemies through near perfect Avoid stats because I would have been unable to defeat a number of these encounters without it. And reskilling is far too expensive to entertain. There aren’t enough quests to earn money quickly enough to be able to purchase the quality equipment for even one job, let alone multiple jobs. Grinding enemies for drops and experience is possible, but that involves further engagement with the atrocious combat system and in most cases it’s easier to just restart the game.

The player gets a character reset upon completing the prologue, they cannot bring that character into the main quest so all of the gear and experience they had earned are totally wiped upon the return of the evil wizard. If the player chose a wife during the prologue, then the player plays the main quest as their child. I chose the dwarf girl and played as a half-dwarf throughout the main quest. Choosing the human girl or no wife doesn’t get the player any racial buffs, but I’d say that’s preferable to choosing the halfling. This model looks like a child. This is not an acceptable choice. Someone should be arrested for this. The new character enters the world some time after their father disappears; they have joined the alliance army and have been sent to try and retake Vestlia from the dragon that’s taken over. This fight is very silly and laughable when playing as a spell caster, since the player literally cannot know spells by this stage. The human leader of the Alliance forces tasks the player with travelling to all of the villages again and fighting another boss in each of their dungeons. He doesn’t do a very good job of explaining this, nor are the benefits of doing so really made clear. A mysterious armoured character appears whenever the player defeats these bosses to KS the player and steal their exp. He never talks, nor does he appear to be a threat to the player, but since he gets all the exp and money the player has significantly less of it when they have to fight this guy later on. After the bosses are excised, the player is sent to scout the final areas of the game which is a ridiculously long trek through multiple gigantic environments with no breaks in between. These locations are packed with ghosts and so many other opponents that running through the environments is basically the only option.

I must confess: I could not finish this game. The latter half of the main campaign was such a heinous balance failure that I wasn’t able to defeat enough enemies that were actually worth defeating. I couldn’t find quality equipment; none of the vendors and none of the loot locations ever contained equipment that was worth having. There were some interesting items, but nothing was ever useful. And it’s very possible that I had something useful in my inventory at some stage but I was killed and lost it. Or that I had enough cash to purchase something useful but died and lost most of it. Without strong gear I would have to rely on my character’s stats to carry me through the later areas. Enemies, even late in the game, are worth very little experience. Grinding enemies is not an option for someone who wanted to stop playing this game before the end of the year. The guild doesn’t supply enough quests to gain enough experience either. And even with all of that, the KSer has an attack that draws the player to them and renders them helpless, so even with the ideal stat and equipment loadout, there’s a decent chance that the player will be killed by this attack. I think this was an intelligent, tactful choice to hide the credits from anyone who managed to play this game for long enough, a method of refusing the list of people to blame for the mess the player had just finished with.

… No. There are plenty of significantly more interesting video games to play, even on the Wii. Play anything else. Please.

Multiple businesses were involved in the creation and distribution of this game, and enough confidence existed for Marvellous Entertainment to choose to distribute Eldar Saga to the international market. Marvellous had been publishing some quality games during this period so it’s bizarre that they’d invest in something as weak as Eldar Saga, and perhaps the objective was to overcome the Wii’s tiny selection of Japanese role-playing games by simply flooding the market with as many titles as possible. Titles like The Last Story or Pandora’s Tower are going to appear much better when their competition for “best rpg” on the system is as weak as the likes of Eldar Saga. As much as it might seem cynical to suggest this, there’s nothing else that makes sense in this scenario. The Valhalla Knights series shouldn’t have proceeded past the second game, let alone cross to other platforms and persist throughout hardware generation change. Don’t expect any of the other games to appear here any time.

A different conspiracy next time.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/jumxIVfO2H0

Some video games transcend the era in which they were released. They become so notorious and popular that their quality is never questioned, and people who haven’t ever played them still hold them in high regard. Nintendo games held a lot of respect in this way, although that reputation has dwindled in recent years. Now, as indie developers have begun looking to the games from the start of the millennium for inspiration, an infamous type of game has started to resurface. The immersive-sim has returned, with all of its open-ended gameplay and heady, poignant narratives. Modern entries within this category often extrapolate on this mindful style of video game story and try to tackle some new challenging topics, but this was not a feature that was present in many of the games from the initial burst of immersive-sims. System Shock and Arx Fatalis aren’t overtly political. But Deus Ex is. And as society is now more capable of seeing governments and other large organisations conducting their actions in real time, Deus Ex’s story is just as relevant as it ever has been. So with this returned relevance and the resurgence of the immersive-sim gameplay style, I figured it was now the perfect time to finally experience what so many had told me was a masterpiece.

While it’s very easy to get a copy of Deus Ex that functions on modern computers, the Game of the Year edition I got from GOG has some problems out of the box. The game doesn’t natively scale to most common resolutions nowadays, sometimes it’s far too dark to actually see anything, and there was a consistent problem with layering across the entire game. Fortunately, there are a bunch of different avenues to fix these problems, which might be a problem unto itself. I typically gravitate to dgVoodoo for resolution rectification, but making the display wider didn’t fix the lighting and layering. Steam forum users recommend a launcher called the “kentie launcher” which did consistently resolve the lighting and layering problems, but the jury was still out on whether this launcher delivered a vanilla experience. I eventually came across a mod called the Deus Ex Community Patch that did the trick. It did smooth out the textures which I wasn’t too excited about but I can imagine this look is a little more palatable nowadays. If you haven’t played Deus Ex before, or not for a very long time, then I can whole-heartedly recommend the Community Patch.

I often make presumptions of whoever views my videos, as I’m sure any writer does, but in this situation I think there are prerequisite topics I should cover just to ensure that everyone is definitely on the same page. Deus Ex was developed by the short-lived Ion Storm and released worldwide in June of 2000. Directed by industry legend Warren Spector, Deus Ex follows the story of technologically augmented super-spy JC Denton as he tries to save the world from a plague that the rich and powerful are choosing to do next to nothing about. Each environment in the game is a miniature open-world, with a smattering of characters to speak with and collection of objectives that can be completed in any way the player desires. To facilitate this freedom, JC can be levelled to focus more specifically on certain specialties; the player can choose to focus on stealth and non-lethal takedowns, or build defences and conduct full-frontal attacks if they’d prefer. This aspect forms the backbone of the immersive-sim gameplay design style and can be seen in modern games like Cruelty Squad and Brigand: Oaxaca. The virus, the responses of the leaders, the rearrangement of government entities, “only following orders”: much of the same events are currently occurring within the world right now. While the dystopian representation hasn’t quite come to fruition, Deus Ex’s vision for the future seems to have been depressingly accurate. There are also a number of things that Ion Storm could never have seen coming, technological conveniences and video game industry conventions for example, but the game never seems overly outdated or awkward.

Despite being over 20 years old now, Deus Ex’s design is far from antiquated, and in many respects, it still surpasses the targets of the higher budget games being released today. Open-world games nowadays expend significant development resources on giving NPCs detailed schedules to simulate their lives, which is ultimately unnecessary because the same sense can be created abstractly for far less effort. Hong Kong is a claustrophobic tangle of alleyways, a crowded marketplace, there’s a bustling nightclub, and the local triad headquarters are both filled with secret rooms behind secret rooms. I got the sense that these NPCs had homes and lives despite the lack of those things actually being included in the game. And all of these characters are voiced, entirely. For better or worse. There has also been a bit of a 90’s electronic revival among indie musicians recently too, lending the Deus Ex soundtrack a surprisingly modern feeling. Similarly, the rising prevalence of the “Haunted PS1” aesthetic has become disseminated throughout the indie game industry, and many are choosing to present their games with low poly counts and low resolution textures, almost retroactively modernising Deus Ex in a way. However, it isn’t totally ageless, and it isn’t as visually cutting-edge as it used to be, but Deus Ex’s visuals have a charm that hasn’t been lost throughout the years.

Originally, the game’s textures were very low res, verging on pixel art, and I do quite like that look. Unfortunately, the fan patch I used smoothed all of the textures out. This isn’t too bad overall, but something about those pixelated textures just attracts my attention more. Deus Ex certainly looks its age, the characters are all stiff and the environments are boxy, but everything is readable and effective at invoking what it intends. Hell’s Kitchen feels grimy and squalid, the air seems dusty and the sense that there’s a plague ravaging this place is palpable. The submarine base doesn’t quite give the impression that it’s deep underwater, but it’s very clear that some things that shouldn’t be happening are being done down there. These places, and all of the others do leave the game very drab overall. It is appropriate, and definitely fits the game’s narrative themes, so the lack of a vibrant palette is totally acceptable. That said, all of the tunnels and alleyways the player will be wandering through do begin to homogenise as the game goes on. Sometimes I found it hard to tell if I was sneaking around on a container ship or through a secret military base, and the game’s geographical settings almost totally vanish within some interiors. But Deus Ex’s presentation focuses more on delivering a very readable environment, rather than a detailed one. Enemies will always be clearly visible, so will the security cameras provided you’re approaching them from the right direction. For a game in its twenties, the total lack of important blobs is astounding and I’m sure the fan patch deserves some credit in this regard. But what cannot be ascribed to the patch is the game’s phenomenal sound design.

The audio portion of Deus Ex is utterly impeccable, in every respect. Ion Storm knew that the soundscape would be critical to their gameplay and they absolutely succeeded in tying the game’s spaces to the sounds. Listening for patrolling enemy footsteps is an effective method of locating them without risking being spotted, and their vocalisations are a more elegant means of informing the player they’re at risk, rather than some kind of UI pop-up. This does lead to some less exciting looking gameplay, as the player sits in a corner and listens to the world around them, but many games neglect to integrate the sound design as deeply as Deus Ex has. I did feel as though many of the sound effects were quite hollow and would have greatly benefited from more bass in the mix, but the quality of the sounds within Deus Ex is incredibly impressive for the time. Unfortunately, the quality of the voice recordings is suffering from its age. They’re a little muffled at times and they could use some extra treble, in my preference anyway. That being said, these performances are fantastic. JC’s delivery is especially enjoyable and has rightfully spawned a bunch of memes, with the writing’s humour certainly contributing. The quality of the other performances also do a lot to generate the atmosphere throughout the rest of the game. Walton Simons’ flat, monotone delivery makes his character hard to read and signals that the player cannot trust him. Now, the introduction makes Simons’ evilness immediately known to the player as he and Bob Page discuss their evil schemes for the camera, but if the player ignores that for whatever reason they’d get the right impression from the performances. The combination of the excellent sound effects, the quality music, and the tremendous voice performances make for an impressive soundscape.

So the world is full of NPCs who have places to be, there’s an open-endedness to all of the levels, and the game can be played almost blind, but what does playing Deus Ex actually entail? JC is a fairly capable combatant, able to use all sorts of firearms and hand to hand weapons to kill or pacify those who would block him from his objectives. The player is dropped into an environment while their objectives are explained to them, then they must use JC’s combat and stealth tools to complete the objective they’ve been assigned. Usually there’s a location JC needs to reach or a person he needs to speak with, at which point the game becomes a test of the player’s patience and spatial awareness. Human guards and mechanical enemies patrol the grounds of the areas JC must traverse, which the player can choose to travel through, or search for an alternative route around. It is usually possible to make it through most levels without ever being seen or attacking anybody, and doing this is a good challenge. Some of the level design makes this an exceedingly powerful strategy, while some other levels pull out all of the game’s tricks to prevent a sneaky pacifist approach. Being discovered and the resulting chaotic battle are much less enjoyable than the sneaking aspects. JC might be able to use a lot of different weapons, but the weapons themselves are mediocre, they’re either awkward or underwhelming and oftentimes non-functional. It certainly is an option, but I think it’s well dissuaded and most players will avoid direct confrontations if they can, although it is possible to build JC for combat if the player really wants to put themselves through that.

Deus Ex contains some RPG aspects that can vary the weapon types JC would prefer to use, or drastically change the way the player approaches upcoming obstacles. There are actually two separate systems for customising JC: the more standard points based system, and the exploration based augmentation system. Skill points are awarded whenever the player completes certain actions within a stage. In the level in which the player is trying to infiltrate the Battery Park castle siege, the player earns points for entering the secret tunnel system, unlocking a particular door, and locating the secondary objective barrel. These skill points can then be used to improve JC’s ability to use individual weapon types, each of the damage mitigation and healing items, the different tools used to access computers and doors, and get JC to swim really fast. These skills aren’t especially impactful in the grand scheme of the game, but they can be the difference between accessing safer routes through areas or being forced to take the hard way. The more interesting levelling system has significantly more impact on the way the player engages with the game, but these augmentations must be found in the world. Sometimes the augmentation canisters are out in the open, but they’re mostly hidden in locked boxes or require some kind of puzzle solution to retrieve. Whenever the player picks up an augmentation canister, they are given the choice between 2 active abilities to upgrade a particular aspect of JC’s physiology. I found this augmentation to change JC’s skin, allowing him to either be invisible to humans and animals or robots and cameras. These almost act as keys to areas blocked by too many patrolling guards or locations littered with too many cameras and allow the player a perspective on an environment they may not be able to reach otherwise. Since I chose to sneak through most places until I was caught, I rarely used this invisibility power, but there were instances where I would have been discovered without it. The way the player chooses to approach the enemies is only commented on by some characters, and barely ever impacts the upcoming level or narrative.

The player must use these tools to defeat the schemes of a host of extremely powerful organisations all across the world. JC Denton is one of the first in a new line of physically augmented super spies, a project commissioned by the United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition, or UNATCO for short. JC’s first day on the job involves something small and inconsequential: taking down an invading enemy force that has managed to infiltrate and take control of UNATCO’s base on Liberty Island in the heart of New York City. This group, the effectively organised National Secessionist Forces - NSF - have come to steal a barrel of Ambrosia and distribute it to the public. Naturally, this cannot stand. This is America, baby, can’t have anyone stealing government property. What is this Ambrosia stuff for anyway? (It’s the cure for a plague that’s ravaging humanity? And the wealthy are hoarding it all to themselves?) … Don’t be poor, I guess. With the occupation broken, JC gets to enter the UNATCO HQ and meet the game’s cast briefly, before being sent to another NSF attack on the mainland. It turns out that the NSF had managed to steal a lot more than a single barrel of Ambrosia and so JC is sent throughout the city to retrieve whatever he can. There are NSF stationed in the abandoned subway tunnels under the city, they’ve occupied a huge building from which they can send long-distance communications, and the NSF have even taken over a small airfield where they plan to fly their final barrel of Ambrosia to Paris where another organisation can distribute it in that city. JC stops all of these plots, but before he can reach the NSF plane and confront the organisation’s leader, JC is approached by his brother Paul. Paul has defected to the NSF and he hopes to convince JC to do the same. Paul has noticed that the plague is extremely dangerous, and his conscience isn’t pleased with the methods UNATCO is using to select the recipients of Ambrosia. Upon entering the aircraft, the player gets the opportunity to speak with Juan Lebedev, who they have been sent here to kill. I chose to hear Lebedev out, but fellow UNATCO agent Anna Navarre burst in and killed Lebedev for me. Paul’s defection means that the entirety of UNATCO is assigned to hunt him down and kill him, so JC is flown to Paul’s apartment to speak with him before Gunther and Anna show up. It’s also around this time that JC starts receiving contacts from a mysterious character known as Daedalus, who will become relevant later. Paul reveals that Simons’ is actually working for a splinter organisation that formed from the dissolution of the Illuminati, called Majestic 12, and Paul encourages JC to escape to Hong Kong where he may go into hiding. JC is ultimately captured by UNATCO, but escapes and manages to make his way to China with the help of his black hawk pilot Jock. In Hong Kong, JC learns that a former Illuminati member’s super tanker ship is being used to deploy a more deadly strain of the plague in New York. He also learns that aliens are real, and that there are genetically engineered animals which can spit poison, and he also learns the power of friendship from a couple of Chinese triads.

So it’s back to New York to stop the catastrophic plague event, before that helpful ex-Illuminati member advises to finally head to Paris to meet with some of his former conspirators. After wading through the catacombs and spending some time in a nightclub, JC meets with Morgan Everett, the Illuminati’s current leader. Everett knows of a group of scientists who possess the capability to create a device called a Universal Constructor, that can then be used to synthesise a cure for the plague. JC travels there to release the scientists from Majestic 12’s control, and then travels to an underwater lab to get a schematic necessary for construction of the UC. While under the ocean, JC confronts and defeats Simons, leaving only Bob Page left to topple. The final location, Area 51 is left to conquer, and within the many layers of secret bases lies Page and Daedalus, the advanced AI system Page intends to merge his consciousness with. Here, in this final area, the player may select JC’s fate. Will he take Page’s place and merge with the AI himself, transforming into what is functionally a god? Will he destroy Page’s security systems and kill the man, then take all of the secrets for himself and rule alongside the rest of the Illuminati? Or will JC destroy the base, plunging the world into a new dark age as all planetary communication networks are somehow contingent on a system within Area 51?

Overall, I think Deus Ex’s narrative is at its best as a video game narrative. When everything is a conspiracy and there are so many conspirators, demonstrating that on a television program would be horrendously tedious and would become excruciating within a movie, as each character would have to be shown acting as part of the organisation. In Deus Ex, each character is clearly doing something else off screen. The world doesn’t move when JC Denton decides he should go to Hong Kong, Page and the rest of Majestic 12 are still actively doing things while JC is halfway across the planet. And since the player sees the events from JC’s perspective, those other characters conducting their own schemes don't have to be shown. The majority of other characters in the game don’t do much of interest anyway, and sometimes they’re just wandering around in blown-up buildings and mausoleums for no reason. The animosity between JC and the older models of augmented spies also comes off as arbitrary. Gunther likes JC if the player rescues him at the start of the game, and he finds attacking JC in Paris regrettable. Anna can also become amiable toward JC if the player follows UNATCO orders well, so whatever animosity there was supposed to be between these characters doesn’t seem real. Moreover, I found that some characters were functionally indistinguishable from each other. Stanton Dowd and Morgan Everett are almost the same character, the Triads kind of blur together even with Tracer Tong behind one of them, and Maggie Chow is the only female character who isn’t totally interchangeable with the others.

I may have laid some criticism at the game there, but it really is the most damning thing I can say about Deus Ex. Throughout my 18 hour playtime, I never encountered something that felt antiquated, nothing that seemed poorly balanced or badly explained, no game-breaking bugs or crashes, no negative experience at all. If you haven’t played Deus Ex before, then I highly recommend that you do.

Deus Ex is held in such high regard for good reason. Ion Storm has left nothing of substance in need of additional attention. The moment to moment gameplay can be almost anything the player wants it to be, and most options are a great time. The presentation has aged, but is currently within the retro-stylings of the modern indie scene so it isn’t a problem. The game is technically flawless and only the jumps between operating systems have prevented the base files from being as healthy as they were, and a little tweaking gets the game up to modern standards in no time at all. It’s hugely ambitious from a narrative perspective, with world-ending consequences and reality-bending revelations, but the writing has also managed to keep a playfulness that doesn’t allow the grandiose plot points to get too pretentious. If an indie studio released Deus Ex today, it would be widely lauded as the greatest indie game ever made. If a big studio made it, people would be mad about the shooting and the fact that you can’t tell which one of JC’s teeth has a crown on it. As far as digging up secrets from within Deus Ex to help us now, I don’t think there’s much that hasn’t already been thoroughly and relentlessly reappropriated throughout the last 20 years. The people who played it as children are gaining access to the more creative roles throughout video game studios, so we’ll likely see its influence return again.

Next time, I have something different in mind.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which you can find here:
https://youtu.be/MNNIF60Q0B0

After someone has decided they’re going to make something, they have to overcome one of the largest hurdles in the path to completing that project: where to start. Which part of the project is the best to act as a foundation for the rest to build on top of? For a video game, there are a lot of options. The programming team may need to construct a new engine or get a key mechanic functioning that will go on to inform everything else. Perhaps the art team has a collection of assets that just have to be in the game, or a style that’s so new and refreshing that it’s destined to become the centre of the project. Maybe a director lays out a map of their ideal first level or hands their department heads a written script to base their work off of. In any case, something has to come first and define the game’s direction throughout production. In From Software’s 1995 game, King’s Field, the driving component behind the game’s production isn’t obvious, and only after putting some considerable thought into it have I been able to develop a theory. King’s Field contains level design that the player character is not equipped to overcome, enemies that aren’t conventionally battled with, a questionable definition of optimisation, and a suggestion of a narrative that ends in a way nobody could have ever expected. And yet, the game is a sequel. Someone at From Software had a vision for a 3D game with no loading screens, full of traps and secrets, and they wanted it as soon as the technology was there. They were going to make it irrespective of the rest of the game’s design. King’s Field is defined by its level design, for better or worse, the game is exactly what it was meant to be, and it’s brilliant.

In 1994, a small Japanese software company made the jump into the video game market. The advent of affordable 3D development tools meant that the barrier to entry was fairly low and small companies weren’t risking too much by dipping their toe into the medium. That team of software engineers managed to get a development build of Sony’s new Playstation and were ready to drop their 3D dungeon exploration game two weeks after the console launched. King’s Field was relatively well received by the Japanese audience, though there were certainly detractors. The game was much more difficult than most of its contemporaries which left many unimpressed. Reviews said it relied too heavily on secret items and keys, in similar looking hallways filled with enemies that were challenging to defeat. Many were still coming to grips with the idea of a 3D video game, and From Software were out here punishing the player for falling into a pit that may have contained a secret or an item required to progress. Six months later, the team had a new game built in the same engine and the reception in Japan was significantly better. While the first King’s Field game had been cryptic and impenetrable, the sequel was far easier to understand while still offering a challenge. The game’s reception was so positive that the developer was approached by multimedia corporation ASCII in order to gain international publishing rights for King’s Field, which From Software accepted. King’s Field 2 would be translated to English and released in the US in February of 1996 to middling reviews. The game’s poor frame rate and challenging combat were again criticised, but the setting and expansiveness of the game world received great commendation.

Melanat is the name of the island that the player has washed up onto. It’s an isolated rock in the middle of the ocean that is difficult to get onto and off of, and as a result, the people on Melanat cannot leave. A fisherman near the player’s starting location explains this in a fairly roundabout way, but he also claims that many of the island’s residents are trapped on the island because of an addiction to the crystals that can be found underground. There are a handful of villages on Melanat in which the player can find more people to speak with, as well as a few of the island’s magical fountains. The water that springs from these fountains has a high concentration of crystal dust that heals the drinker when it is consumed, which is likely the reason the inhabitants are addicted. Deeper beneath Melanat resides the vast majority of other people on the island. Members of an army that had begun mining for the crystals to move back to the mainland, now lost to their enveloping need to consume them. The player can find these crystals scattered throughout Melanat and use them for trade, or have a tradesman fashion a crystal flask to hold some of the magical water to consume during battle. The player rarely gets to see the sky as they explore the island. Most of the pathways are a knot of tunnels that meander between larger rooms, but there are a few bridges and the ridiculous minecart network deep down. The mines and lower tunnels extend far deeper than I expected them to, and it becomes quite difficult to remember where things are located as the paths overlap and spiral around each other. The presence of enemies and other obstacles in these tunnels can also impact the player’s ability to memorise the path they took, and the maps the player can find are not particularly helpful either.

The level design in King’s Field contains a number of quirks that give the game an isolating atmosphere, while it also includes some things specifically to be kind of rude to the player. The game opens on the beach, on a small rock surrounded by shallow water. Except it isn’t all shallow, it’s actually much more precarious than it looks and it's a great example for the way the rest of the game will function. The player is always teetering on the edge of destruction, whether they know it or not. There’s a massive play space in this game. I spent about 18 hours with King’s Field, and the majority of that time was spent navigating and trying to figure out where the game wanted me to go. And while it appears to be open for exploration, Melanat won’t allow the player into places they really aren’t ready to go, whether that involves killing the player immediately upon entering a new location, or simply locking a door that leads deeper. Right across from the starting rock is a doorway into the island. Inside there are a few enemies to fight, as well as a collection of barrels to rummage through for loot. This room also contains a well filled with Melanat’s magical water which the player can use to heal, offering a kind of base to make excursions away from for the first few minutes of the game. Right beside the well is a false wall. It doesn’t look any different to the other walls in the room, though the player might notice the texture warp or the geometry flicker which I don’t think was deliberate but it does show that there are secrets behind some of the walls. In this first room alone, the player has experienced combat, recovered from any damage they may have taken, found a piece of armour in a container that isn’t a treasure chest, and learned that there are secrets to find by interacting with the walls. This is all fantastic stuff, but this area asks far too much of the hardware, which is another key aspect of the game introduced at this stage. And as the levels become more complex, or they start to contain more enemies and traps, things start to get very clumsy. Not only for performance problems but also in terms of the challenges presented to the player. The character’s mechanical capability is fairly limited; they can walk, or they can run at the cost of stamina, but there isn’t a jump. They can equip and swing a variety of weapons, but the equippable shields only increase the defensive stats, there isn’t a button to raise the shield to block some incoming damage. So when the level includes pendulum traps that occupy the entire hallway, the player has no choice but to get smacked if they try to pass through. And while some of these traps can be deactivated via a switch somewhere, sometimes that switch is beyond the trap. Similar situations can arise from invisible pits throughout the game, although with some luck the player can run across these. I don’t find these things to be bad choices, but they are strange. King’s Field is quite good at telling the player they’re unwelcome in one location and that they should look elsewhere to progress, so when I was hit for 100 damage by these swinging spiked balls I felt incentivised to look elsewhere. The game’s combat also adds to this incentive.

Without a dedicated button for blocking or dodging, the player’s best option to avoid damage in battle is to move away from the enemy, or to circle around and get behind them which the controls don’t make comfortable. King’s Field uses tank controls with the R1 and L1 buttons used for strafing, which I’m totally fine with. This control scheme works for exploring and combat against regular enemies, scenarios where the stakes are low and there are plenty of escape routes if things do get out of control. It is possible to add an item to a shortcut button to use when necessary which I would typically assign my crystals bottles to heal from. A single offensive spell is assigned to another button, and the player has to cast other spells from the spell menu directly. Magic is a surprisingly important part of King’s Field combat, particularly when battling the game’s bosses. Hits cause a not-insignificant period of stun on enemies which heavily factored into my preference for which offensive spell to use. Even if it did the least amount of damage, the Fire Wall spell hits enemies multiple times which allows for safe approaches and some free sword damage. Without sufficient resources to cast this spell repeatedly, the player has to choose between tanking a lot of damage or circling around the enemies endlessly until the battle ends. This strafing strategy is very effective against most of the enemies in the game, though I found it to be sort of uncomfortable to use. In order to circle around an enemy, the player has to input one of the shoulder buttons and then wiggle between the up and a horizontal direction on the d-pad. It’s easy to make a mistake here which can leave the player vulnerable to an attack. I didn’t find doing this to be fun. I found it to be funny because it's very silly, but it certainly wasn’t fun.

There are 8 bosses throughout King’s Field, though there are a few rematches here and there, bringing the total number of boss battles to 11. Most of the bosses are larger versions of regular enemies, though they usually have attacks in boss form that they wouldn’t have otherwise. The first boss the player is likely to encounter is the big squid enemy near where the player awakens at the start of the game. This guy is far beyond the player’s capability when they first find it, and I struggled to defeat it as the third boss I took down. The Huge Kraken has a massive pool of health that causes the fight to take a long time even if the player is prepared for the battle. It cannot move, and instead flails its enormous tentacles at the player, hoping to knock them into the deep ocean just in front of the Kraken’s lair. This fight is frighteningly familiar, actually. Most of the other bosses in King’s Field aren’t rooted in place like the Kraken, although the Termite Queen is. It’s strange that she can only be damaged via projectile weapons and magic, and the enemy pathing problems make this battle quite disappointing. Enemies cannot leave the room they’re assigned to, even if there’s nothing that would keep them from leaving, so it's possible and practical to defeat the Termite Queen from outside of the room since the termites she summons can’t actually reach the player. The necessity of projectile attacks for this battle also doesn’t really make sense. The Queen is standing in a hallway, near enough that sword swings should be able to hit her no problem, but they just don’t work. So the player has to leave and find a bow and some arrows in order to defeat this boss. Almost every other boss is a mobile enemy that can be circled around to varying levels of effectiveness. The Bronze Knights and the Huge Tarn have relatively slow turning speeds, so once the player gets behind them the fight is essentially over. The Earth Elemental, the Demon Lord, and Necron aren’t so slow so there’s less opportunity to lock them down with backstabs. Of course, the Fire Wall spell does keep these enemies in hit stun for a bit, but nowhere near long enough for the player to be able to keep them permanently stunned until death. These three enemies are also the back end of a boss rush toward the end of the game, and they don’t go down effortlessly. Necron might even be a bit overtuned, especially since the game doesn’t run great in his arena.

I think vision and ambition had blinded the developers to the biggest problem within their game. All of these corridors, traps, enemies, and the choice to never use loading screens come at the cost of the game’s framerate, and in some instances the gameplay suffers tremendously. There are many enemies in King’s Field which have a wind-up animation linked to their primary attack. This signals to the player that the enemy is about to deal damage to them and that the player should prepare to get hit or move out of the attack’s damage zone. Skeletons are a great enemy type to demonstrate this as they have to lift their sword first before they can attack. In some locations a skeleton moves rather quickly, so the player has to be watchful of them and try to take them down as soon as possible. Unchecked, a lone skeleton can deal some significant damage to the player, but since the game is running at its best, the player can react accordingly and eliminate the threat while taking minimal damage. Toward the middle of the game, particularly around the big castle structure in the centre of the island, the game runs much worse. These skeletons don’t have any design differences to the previous skeletons, but since the player can’t turn as quickly and there’s a longer period of input delay, they’re actually more dangerous than before. Fortunately, the location that runs the poorest is free of any enemy presence at all, since the player will return there frequently to heal and regain their magic points. It’s a nice looking room, but I can’t help but think a pause to load every so often, and loading less would have greatly benefitted the overall experience.

I played King’s Field on an original Playstation and translated the AV signal to an HDMI signal in order to record the footage, so the resolution is low. Luckily, there isn’t much to see here. It’s a Playstation game so I wasn’t expecting the poly counts to be high, but these environments managed to exceed my expectations. There are a lot of flat corridors with some middling textures to differentiate the various regions throughout Melanat. There’s a lot of this stone texture early on, and it reappears toward the end of the game too. Then there are these strange, snotty corridors that I guess are supposed to be covered in moss or algae. King’s Field doesn’t look too bad compared to its competition at release, but with the Nintendo 64’s launch in 1996, as well as the drastically improved visuals present in fully 3D Playstation games like Crash Bandicoot and pre-rendered graphics like those of Resident Evil, King’s Field falls far short. It’s very likely From Software still didn’t have official artists on staff by this stage, and their programming team was probably responsible for the game’s presentation too. Oddly, the music is fantastic. It’s moody and does a lot to set the tone of the game’s locations, something the visuals can’t manage on their own. When combined with the way sounds carry down the hallways the atmosphere leaves the player nervous, like they’ve swam too far away from shore while something lurks beneath.

From Software have never really done direct storytelling in their games, and yeah, King’s Field is no exception, but there is a bit of lore to explore to contextualise some of the major events. Necron and his followers had been part of an army sent to the island to begin mining and exporting the powerful crystals that can be found there. The army had sent some supporting civilians too to manage the daily lives while the main force mined. Before long, almost everyone on Melanat had succumbed to their crystal addiction and crystal loads stopped being delivered to the mainland. The crystals aren’t magically powerful for no reason, however. Long before Necron’s army had landed on Melanat, the island had been home to a small elven civilization. The elves were mainly responsible for the many routes around the island, and they were also the ones to leave much of the magic power behind. Their deities, two dragons, were the ones to bestow the crystals upon the elves. Seath received much adoration from his subjects, and Guyra grew jealous. Guyra created the crystals, empowering the elves, but also lashing them together. Eventually, the elves were destroyed by their own addiction and Guyra fled into the sky, while Seath did what they could to try and pick up the pieces. Functional, I’d say. Any context is welcome, and I’m very happy for there to be something to explain what the whole deal was with the ending, because as it stands, it’s quite the departure.

With Necron defeated the player can access a pair of portals that both lead to what appears to be a space station filled with robotic versions of enemies found down on Melanat. After progressing through the maze of corridors and portals the player enters an open area. This is the stage for the final battle against Guyra and it’s certainly an experience. The translucent platform is pretty funny and the dragon model doesn’t match it at all. If Guyra had been in a room somewhere on Melanat it’d look appropriate, but out here on the ISS chessboard it makes this area look unfinished. The actual mechanics of the fight are very King’s Field; Guyra doesn’t move, and it has a handful of super powerful attacks that are totally nullified by standing in a specific location in the room. There is another layer to the fight, though. Guyra is accompanied by a bunch of yellow orbs that shoot lasers and absorb all of the player’s magic attacks. Where other boss encounters in the game are mechanically closer to powered-up regular enemies, Guyra is distinctly a boss encounter. Almost like an MMO encounter in how the player has to manage a mechanic before the actual target of the battle is vulnerable. There’s a finite quantity of orbs in the room, though, and I think I’d have preferred having fewer in the room at the start and spawning new orbs as the fight goes on. That way the fight at least maintains a level of challenge as the player progresses through it, instead of there being a high likelihood of death at the start of the fight but it gradually diminishes over time to the point where the player is just whacking the dragon with nothing to threaten them. Well, aside from their own hubris.

So King’s Field is defined by its level design. A gigantic proportion of the game’s content, as well as the Playstation’s processing capacity, consists of walking through the island while searching for the path deeper. The environment itself holds a majority of King’s Field’s secrets and examining it will be the bulk of the player’s activity. There are sometimes enemies within those environments, and sometimes the environment is designed to facilitate a more powerful opponent, but these things are more like distractions from the process of moving through the world. The non-player characters don’t even tell the player where to go, the level design is entirely responsible for that. And the presentation couldn’t use more of the console’s processing power because it was all needed to keep entire dungeons loaded so there weren't any loading screens. Some psychopath was determined to make King’s Field this way. They never cared to make concessions for the sake of performance or accessibility. King’s Field stubbornness turned many potential audience members away, but the final product is the designer’s strongest desire, and it’s brilliant.

Another legend next time.

The following is a transcript from a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/caAgVyXGOww

Online video game review has a pet collection of games that are universally agreed to be unscalable. Games that even the angriest youtube angry man would hesitate to unleash their trademark angry rants upon, for fear of having their anger licence revoked and having to direct that anger at something equally harmless, like minority groups. For as long as people have been posting their thoughts about games online, some games seem to only ever garner positive opinions. Everyone knows that Super Metroid is a good game, even those who haven’t played it. We’ve been told often enough to believe it. This isn’t a problem; sometimes there are games that really do have a comprehensive appeal, but that list can’t be as long as it seems. People are nostalgic for dial-up internet and command-based operating systems, they’re maniacs. Moreover, many of the most revered games were exclusive to the Nintendo 64, a stumble in Nintendo’s hardware manufacturing record that would host just more than a tenth of the library that the original Playstation had. Third parties were abandoning the platform, making it extremely unlikely for something transcendent to appear. Perhaps it was the smaller library that led many to conclude that Banjo Kazooie is one of the greatest games ever made.

Originally released in 1998, Banjo Kazooie was Rare’s first stab at a platforming game within the then new third dimension, though it wasn’t their first 3D project. Blast Corps, GoldenEye 007, and Diddy Kong Racing were all released in ‘97 which seems absolutely ridiculous. How this one company managed to pump out so many games is astounding, but that they were generally critically acclaimed is incredible too. Reviews of Banjo Kazooie often connected the game to Super Mario 64, comparing each individual aspect and often proclaiming Banjo the victor in the head-to-head. Mario’s overall moveset in 64 is quite robust, but Banjo managed to have most of Mario’s stuff and more. People were very receptive to the exploration gameplay style, which made the game more accessible, while the controls and abilities allowed more capable players to get creative as they played. Banjo Kazooie actually has characters too, allowing Rare’s personality to take centre stage. Gruntilda always has something to say, making her presence known throughout the entire game. The play spaces are small by today’s standards, but every one is crammed full of things to do that very little of the game’s environment is wasted. There are some empty spaces now and again, but it is extremely rare so it is always valuable to run through every corner just to see. And while the presentation has certainly aged, Banjo Kazooie’s colourful worlds and detailed textures are still pleasant today. Everywhere is bright and lively, and reviews and retrospectives are not hesitant to lionise the presentation, especially the soundtrack.

I wouldn’t see Banjo Kazooie until I was able to access the internet. My dad brought an original Playstation home once, with a copy of Crash Bandicoot 3, though I don’t really know why he chose it. I played my Gameboy Colour to death, and occasionally tinkered with a PC game whenever the computer wasn’t in use. The other kids I lived near would also play PC games, and I don’t think I had ever seen a Nintendo 64 in person until I purchased mine. But with access to YouTube and an interest in video games, it wouldn’t take long for me to learn of Banjo Kazooie and its apparent greatness. But every video that mentions the game will typically skip past explaining anything about it and only ever mention its gloriousness in passing. Since I acquired my Nintendo 64, I’ve played a couple of games on it and it’s been rocky. I played Ocarina of Time first and really enjoyed it. Then I was going to play Operation: WinBack but I didn’t have the controller memory card thing so I played Body Harvest instead. I had seen some generally positive stuff about Body Harvest online, but, man… That game is not good. It was also made in the UK, like Banjo Kazooie, so my expectations were all over the place. But that darkness soon lifted once I started the stream.

Banjo Kazooie’s tone kicks the door down and screams about how much fun it’ll be as soon as the console is powered on. The bright, saturated palette is on full display as the game’s joyful intro song cycles through a bunch of instruments. This song kind of comes across as a flex, the composers finally able to show their full power with a much broader range of sounds to make music with compared to previous consoles. It’s infectious too. Most of the songs make use of similar progressions or musical phrases that add a great deal of cohesion to the soundtrack, giving each location an air of belonging despite how different their themes might be. And the number of variations to the songs really helps to establish a scale to the adventure. When the song transitions to its underwater variant and then to an interior variant, and then to a mini-boss variant the idea that the level was progressing through different stages was easy to believe. It was still clearly Gobi’s Valley, but it has become something beyond an introduction. That being said, not every track is a winner. The alarms and whistles in the Rusty Bucket Bay song are obnoxious, and the melody actually makes me a little dizzy. This level also doesn’t do much for me visually. Clanker’s Cavern already executed the grimey place-of-industry aesthetic with a far more creative centrepiece. Rusty Bucket Bay is just a dockyard with a boat in it. I think Banjo Kazooie is one of the most technically impressive games on the system, I really can’t imagine the Nintendo 64 being taken further than this, but some of the level concepts don’t leave a lot of space for imaginative inclusions. Bubblegloop Swamp almost wrings every possibility out of the idea of a swamp level, with its giant crocodile head, logs and lily pads, and the village on stilts being lifted out of the murky water. The idea of entering an animal’s shell as an extra bit of depth is charming, but the player had already entered a big shell in Treasure Trove Cove. Nothing in the game is particularly ugly looking, and I think the visuals are still wonderful, but there are things that just seem to be stretched too thin or have ended up underdeveloped; the inside of the sphinx in Gobi’s Desert is a good example. These things only stick out in my mind because I’m searching for something to say, though, because talking about how much I liked Mad Monster Mansion’s presentation doesn’t bring anything new to the conversation.

My thoughts on the game’s controls also echo the statements made by others before me, but I still feel that a lot of things are worth saying. Not to excessively deride Body Harvest, but Banjo Kazooie’s responsive controls blows DMA Design’s game out of the water. Banjo’s ground speed and acceleration are perfect, absolutely flawless. And he immediately responds to player inputs. Drake’s slow turning speed and pitiful acceleration are truly inexcusable when Rare managed to get controls to be this responsive. Banjo Kazooie’s controls certainly feel tight and that sensation does a lot to make the game a joy to play, though I do think that the player can be ill-equipped to deal with particular obstacles throughout their journey. They’re rare, but there are a few instances where the player has to land on some tiny platforms with the little shadow indicator being extremely difficult to see, or typically off screen somewhere. The player can sometimes use Kazooie’s double jump to slow their falling momentum briefly to make their landings more accurate, but during a backflip the player is locked out of using the double jump. The backflip is sometimes required to climb certain obstacles, so the inability to double jump can be frustrating. And it isn’t as though this limitation prevents the player from accessing places they shouldn’t be able to get to. There are tiles on the ground that allow the player to take to the skies and fly around so it isn’t as though the game couldn’t accommodate a higher jump. The flight and swimming control fantastically, but they both suffer from the camera’s refusal to be useful. It often lazily follows Banjo, sticking about 10 feet behind him which is rarely ever enough to actually see what’s happening. Now, the game only has one instance where the stakes are high during flight, so for the most part this angle isn’t too much of a problem.

On the topic of stakes, there isn’t much to challenge the player within Banjo Kazooie, outside of a few minigames and the final battle. The majority of levels have very few enemies and even fewer hazards so the player is in little danger for a huge chunk of the game. Usually there’s a large space to explore and collect the various items scattered around, perhaps the player has to climb to a higher level to collect more stuff or jump across some water where the consequences are simply having to run back to wherever the player had fallen from. There are a handful of scenarios to stumble upon that function as puzzles; sometimes an NPC has a challenge to complete, sometimes the player has to use a transformation for something, and other times there’s a timed challenge which can vary wildly in difficulty. For accessibility’s sake, these are excellent things. If someone is struggling to complete one task, they can simply move to another that may be more suited to their capability. There are a handful of difficult challenges throughout early levels that I think are far beyond the other content of the levels they’re within. If turning the key to allow Clanker to rise to the water’s surface was tough for me, how would someone less capable than I fare? In most cases, though, the player can choose to do something else and come back when they feel more comfortable, though this isn’t always true. In order to gain access to the final boss the player will have to collect the majority of the jigsaw pieces and notes so while the player can pick and choose to progress, eventually the ride stops.

Within each level there are 100 notes to collect, and usually 10 jigsaw pieces, though sometimes triggers in the level can cause a piece to appear within the hub. Notes collected within a level are instanced to that particular visit, each level has a “note score” that resets upon the player leaving the level for whatever reason. Walking over the entry tile or dying causes the player to leave the level, so it’s fortunate that most of the level designs are relaxed. Mumbo’s Mountain is sort of an extension of the tutorial; most of the tasks involve shooting eggs at things or utilising Kazooie’s Talon Trot ability to climb steep slopes. It’s easy to see that the level is designed around these abilities, which isn’t a trend that carries much deeper into the game. Treasure Trove Cove is the next level and is probably my favourite in the game. It’s a self-contained island with challenges spread around in a way that seems natural. The pirate ship is moored in the bay, there’s a few different beachside activities to engage with, and the lighthouse at the top of the central rock allows the player to get a good view of the entirety of the level. And it is the actual level. It’s possible to fall from the top of the lighthouse to the beach far below, though I wouldn’t recommend doing it. Very impressive, and one of my favourite environments on the console so far. After Treasure Trove Cove is Clanker’s Cavern which is quite the juxtaposition. The jump from the sunny, clear beach to Gruntilda’s waste solution is a big visual shift and I do like it. I also enjoy how the clean sea water is more dangerous to swim in compared to the wastewater that the player will be spending much more time diving into and out of. The level’s focus around interacting with Clanker is also a new concept for the level design that differentiates it from those that came before and keeps the game feeling fresh. There’s a bit of a blunder in the level designs in my eyes when we get to Bubblegloop Swamp. The level looks like a bunch of obstacles were dropped in an environment and then a wall was drawn around it. Then, from this point forward, the levels switch between these styles again. Freezey Peak and Rusty Bucket Bay are both centre-piece levels, although I don’t find them to be nearly as interesting as Clanker’s Cavern. Then Gobi’s Desert is another collection of stuff with a wall. And then Mad Monster Mansion is the only other level in the game that approaches Treasure Trove Cove’s excellence in terms of design, but most of the tasks associated with jigsaw pieces aren’t as masterfully designed as they were previously. And then, the penultimate level, Click Clock Wood is really, really long. The level’s themed around the four seasons, giving the player 4 entrances into an environment that’s mostly a single, big tree, and then changing the aesthetic to represent each season. It’s fine for the first couple, but by the time I got to winter I was eager to move on. Collecting all 100 notes in Click Clock Wood takes forever, and falling out of the tree in autumn or winter can be a gigantic setback. But once the player has finally managed to do what they needed, they can move on to the game’s conclusion.

Generally, the game is fabulously designed and tremendously polished, but I’m not entirely sold on everything, particularly toward the end of the game. Click Clock Wood drags and there has been a lot of emptiness that wasn’t present earlier in the game. The quiz maze is a great concept, and the questions about voices and locations are an ingenious way to implant these details into the player’s memory. The questions about Gruntilda aren’t so great, and I tried to avoid them whenever possible. The answers to these are randomly generated upon the save file’s creation, which means the player will always have to speak with Brentilda whenever they find her and then write down the answers to the questions. Are there people who enjoy these questions? Are these included in the generalised praise? Am I reaching for imperfections to try to justify a degree of cynicism? Let’s move on to the final battle.

Defeating Gruntilda is tough. She’s a witch, and her arsenal of attacks is a lot for one bear to overcome. The fight is also a gruelling 5 phase endurance test, in which Gruntilda shifts between different strategies to send the player back to the start of the fight. The first phase is a simple dodge test, which the game’s controls are well equipped to engage with and the game’s sound design keeps it wacky and light-hearted. Next is a projectile phase in which the player must shoot eggs at Gruntilda to get her to progress through the phase. Landing the eggs quickly is a good challenge, and greatly minimises risk of taking damage since Gruntilda will be locked down for so long. It’s here that the egg aiming mechanics start to come into play. Without the pressure of a boss battle, the egg shooting mechanic is a bit awkward. There isn’t any reduction to Banjo’s rotation speed so it can be a struggle to aim the eggs accurately, but since there aren't any consequences for messing up, it usually isn’t an issue. Here, though, missing the target can cause the player to be stuck in this phase for an extended period, which will inevitably result in them taking a hit or two. Not a problem for now, though, as once Gruntilda is knocked out of the phase the flying segment begins. The player has to use Kazooie’s flying attack to damage Gruntilda in the air, while she moves around, without any aim assistance, or useful camera controls. I died during this phase a lot. Gruntilda can be hard to find while flying around, she also doesn’t fly very high above the ground and colliding with it can cause Banjo to slide into the abyss. I have a deep respect for the kids who could get past this phase. Once that’s over, it’s Jinjo time. The final two phases of the battle both involve shooting eggs into statues, which awakens the Jinjo within to attack Gruntilda. The egg aiming challenges return here, but with a new spicy, lethality to really make sure the player doesn’t get to see the credits. I saw this phase a few times throughout the hour it took for me to finally defeat the witch and each failure was agony. I’m supposed to be good at video games! Why is this so hard? I managed, though. I saw the melons, I beat the game. And it’s great.

Explaining what makes Banjo Kazooie a legendary game is much easier than I was previously led to believe. The game is packed with character, the palette is appealing, the tone is light and silly, but it doesn’t talk down to the player. It also doesn’t patronise the player mechanically, but it is simultaneously accessible to everyone so people of any age and ability can enjoy the game. While there are most certainly things to criticise, Banjo Kazooie was developed in a relatively short period for hardware that offered a significant challenge to developers, not only because the game was created for the first generation of 3D capable video game consoles, but also because cartridges were significantly limited by what could fit inside of the plastic case. Banjo Kazooie is a triumph in design, in every respect that was squeezed into it. It’s a shame that these things hadn’t been articulated to me before, because I would have played this game a long time ago.

Something typically Euro, next time.