Rain World is a lot of things.

It's one of the most frustrating and challenging games I've ever played.

It's a game where every small success feels like a legitimate accomplishment and where earned comfort, rare as it may be, is relief like no other.

It's a game with a breathtaking world to explore. Every single area is gigantic and inspires your curiosity. Every single screen - of which there are thousands - is lovingly assembled and full of detail.

It's a game that nails its fascinating ecosystem. Animals in this game aren't just 'enemies,' they're realistic creatures with autonomy and personality. Sometimes they'll fight amongst themselves or get stuck and appear frustrated. Sometimes they'll just lounge around and seem uninterested in you.

It's a game that rewards you for being interested in its world, where you can learn things through observation and apply them to improve your gameplay.

It's a game with amazing animations, art direction, and music, which do justice to the rest of its elements.

It's a game full of small details and environmental storytelling that you could theorycraft about to no end.

But more than anything, Rain World is a game about making you feel small and unimportant.

The gameplay tells you this - it doesn't even offer you the precedent of fairness. You will die a lot, sometimes to things that seem unavoidable. The world tells you this. Its post-apocalyptic setting communicates that - even for a people much more powerful than you - this world consumes all. Their ruined architecture exists on a scale you can barely understand.

This overwhelming humility is one of the most powerful things a game has ever made me feel. It makes me sad that no other games like this exist. Undoubtedly one of the best and most unique experiences I've ever had with the medium, and one of my favorite games of all time.

Sentimentos mistos definem minha experiência com Heaven's Vault. Teoricamente, ele tem tudo o que gosto. Não, sério, literalmente eu gosto do arcabouço teórico dele.

A narrativa se centra numa disputa do que é a História e seu papel social e cultural. Por um lado, temos os detentores da "História Oficial", que paradoxalmente baseiam sua legitimidade na História ao mesmo tempo em que querem destruí-la como ciência. Para eles a história não é uma investigação do passado; ela é uma justificativa do presente e uma prescrição do futuro. Disputar a "História Oficial" é o mesmo que sedição. Em contrapartida, a protagonista acredita que a História é mais do que uma narrativa fixa. O passado é um repositório armazém de possibilidades não-realizadas, cujo horizonte de expectativas não era simplesmente o tempo presente. Esse armazém não tem um dono: é nosso legado coletivo. Só faltava o nome da protagonista ser Koselleck, sério.

Toda essa teoria é posta em prática de forma razoavelmente bem-sucedida. A mecânica principal de desvendar um sistema de escrita antigo é mais permeado de dúvidas e exige vários palpites e saltos lógicos de sua parte - e isso é bom! Realmente historiadores têm que assumir muitas coisas porque às vezes o passado parece ser agressivamente hostil contra aqueles que tentam desvendá-lo. Se corrigir ao conseguir nova evidência e ver suas hipóteses desmoronando é parte do dia a dia de qualquer cientista, e o jogo simula isso muito bem.

Outra aspecto que o jogo simula muito bem é como muitas vezes pesquisa é algo... Chato. Por mais que você tenha interesse na área, é inegável que catalogar coisas minuciosamente e ver seu progresso andar a passos de tartaruga não é exatamente algo excitante, por mais recompensador que seja no final das contas.

Esse tédio acaba sendo o Calcanhar de Aquiles do jogo. Não acho que o trabalho do historiador deveria ser romantizado, pelo contrário, a inclusão das características menos glamourosas da disciplina foi uma decisão acertada. Mas mesmo outras coisas que não precisam ser tediosas acabam, com o tempo, virando um fardo. O game é ambientado num mundo scifi semi-solarpunk super inspirado em Planeta do Tesouro cheio de ruínas de civilizações antigas e uma diversidade de planetas para explorar. E toda vez que eu entrava nos rios cósmicos ficava com um pouco de sono e invariavelmente pensava "já chegamos?". Não sei vocês, mas na minha cabeça navegar por rios cósmicos descobrindo planetoides de uma civilização perdida não deveria me deixar com essa sensação...

Pra ser justo, no começo fazer isso é realmente legal. Mas o ritmo do game é deveras lento e a variedade de coisas pra fazer pequena demais pra carregar a aventura por mais de 20 horas, que foi o tempo que levei pra zerar. E o game ainda por cima espera que você zere mais uma vez para ter um entendimento mais aprofundado da história? Aí é comprometimento demais pra mim.

Se Heaven's Vault fosse uma aventura mais enxuta, de digamos umas 8 horas, teria potencial para ser um de meus favoritos. Apesar de nossa fama de falastrões, historiadores sabem apreciar o poder de uma boa síntese.

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
--Watership Down

Rain World one of those games where the line of "I like it because I think it's fun" and "I like it because I respect the work that went into it" is blurred.
Every enemy has observable behavior patterns, be it hunting, pack tactics, fear of environmental hazards, or symbiosis with other creatures. Looking at the behind the scenes it's impressive how it all fits together with the AI having separate ways of tracking through sight or vision. It truly feels like I am escaping a wild animal and not an enemy with a "pursue entity: [Player]" protocol.
And understanding that is what helps mitigate the frustrations when the simulation works against you. Three camouflaged lizards camping by the one path forward isn't the devs crafting a challenging encounter, that's just where their AI is telling them to gather because they're being chased out of their usual hunting grounds by a migrating tribe of Scavenger Monkeys.
Still, this can be used to your advantage, because the lizards are territorial and don't like sharing space with one another. Coax one to assault another and they may just leave enough of an opening for you to slip past.
90% of the time it works and feels like you're overcoming the odds of a world programmed against you by fighting back with your knowledge of it.

The other 10% of the time is when the simulation breaks down. You start to see the artifice in the design and things transcend from "Tolerable inconvenience" to "Bullshit Setback."
Because Rain World still needs to be a game with a goal and path forward, and this at times is incongruous with it's measured little world.
Much of the actual frustrations I had came at the fault of the rain mechanic. You're on a timer (with inconsistent length) at the start of each day to fill your belly and find shelter, and sometimes the path to shelter just isn't the path that food has spawned on, and vice-versa.
This wouldn't be so much a problem without the karma system preventing your passage to new areas. Survive a day with a full belly, your karma goes up a level, die and it goes down. At the entrance to new areas you'll be denied access if your karma isn't above a certain level. Get rejected and you now have to remain in the area you just got through, back tracking until you find reasonable hunting grounds and survive enough cycles to get your karma level requisite.

Grinding. It's grinding. And the grinding is never fun because of the aforementioned chaos and unfairness of the simulated ecosystem. Getting through an area by the skin of your teeth feels terrific, being told to go back and do it five more times is deflating.

And it's clear the devs became aware of this deficiency, because endgame areas simply start to include farmable food and shelters right outside the karma checkpoints. Were it not tied to the game's themes and story of cycles and rebirth, I'd question if the game even needs the karma system.

The true frustrations lie in a few gimmick areas causing deaths (and thus depleted karma) far outside the control or understanding of new players. A completely pitch black network of tunnels that causes eye strain, a complex of sentient cancer and zero gravity, and fields of carnivorous grass that can only be traversed on the back of a squishy deer that can sometimes just not spawn near you (this is oddly the worst one).

But as I walk away from Rain World, I can't stay mad at it. It's too fascinating a creation. A labor of passion and experimentation.

I will, inevitably, grit my teeth and dive back in again.

My current search history:

-Rimworld beginners guide
-Rimworld how to remove corpses
-Rimworld how to destroy clothing
-Rimworld how to feed animals
-Rimworld how to get colonists married
-Rimworld slavery
-Rimworld how to cure malaria
-Rimworld how to get slaves married
-Rimworld how to farm crops indoors
-Rimworld how to knock out people
-Rimworld cannibalism ideology
-Rimworld how to set up a human farm

Uma conclusão digna da saga. Seu design é mais próximo que o de Sorcery! 2, a começar pelo fato de se passar majoritariamente em uma única cidade, e o sucesso da quest depender principalmente da coleta de informações. Considerando que o segundo game foi meu favorito, isso é algo bem positivo para mim.

Algumas coisas apresentadas no game anterior ganham bem mais espaço aqui e há subversões no plot e mecânicas bem interessantes. No papel tinha tudo para ser o melhor da série e, num sentido puramente técnico, é difícil discordar disso.

Entretanto, ainda acho que o segundo game da série é o melhor, e esse aqui supera os outros por não muito. O problema? A recompensa.

Desde o primeiro game, Sorcery explicitamente deixa várias "sementes" no meio do caminho com a promessa de que veremos seus frutos no capítulo final. Chegado o desfecho da aventura, o resultado é... Não muito impressionante, para ser sincero. Talvez a culpa seja minha e minha experiência esteja sendo prejudicada por expectativas que criei. Talvez eu devesse considerar o jogo sob seus próprios méritos, não a partir daquilo que criei em minha cabeça. Mas talvez também eu pudesse ser um ser humano funcional, e estamos aí.

Dito isso, mesmo colocando minhas expectativas de lado, gostei mais dos encontros e as ramificações narrativas de Sorcery! 2 e até do 3 (que tem outros problemas, mas não vem ao caso). Não que o resultado seja ruim, muito pelo contrário: é uma história bem engajante e que valeu a pena experienciar.

     'In a land of clear colours and stories,
     In a region of shadowless hours,
     Where earth has a garment of glories
     And a murmur of musical flowers...’
     – Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'Dedication', 1865.

It took me several years to understand my girlfriend's fascination with translation. At first I thought it was an expression of her bilingualism and that it came naturally to her. She liked to compare texts at her desk, with two books open and bookmarked. I remember seeing Jane Austen and Plutarch, T.S. Eliot and Cicero in different editions. One book she kept coming back to was George Steiner's After Babel (1975), which I later took with me. When I was younger, its seven hundred pages frightened me with their complexity, and I kept the volume only as a souvenir: the spine was cracked from heavy use, and some of the pages were slightly worn and yellowed. These marks identified her presence, her aura, her memory.

     Understanding is a translation

It was only when I was later writing notes on After Babel that I understood what she valued in translation. It is difficult to capture Steiner's theses, since they do not form a grand, all-encompassing theory, but a key idea – formative for the field of translation studies and comparative literature – is that the communication of information is a secondary part of human discourse. For him, each language colours the individual's relationship to reality in a different way, allowing them to express a situated point of view, an otherness of being. As much as Steiner represented an ideal of the Renaissance man for my girlfriend – and still does, in a way, for me – he was not without his faults. His erudition was often the result of clumsy approximations, where it was more important to keep exploring elsewhere than to specialise.

Through it all, he remained the image of a reader, eager to compare and understand the texts he encountered. My girlfriend loved translating and comparing because, in her illness, she found in it a way of travelling and experiencing spontaneously the rich imagination of texts. Compared to the simple act of reading, translation forces the reader to immerse themselves in the text, to decode its signs, to identify cultural markers and to discover the various references hidden within it. A first glance will reveal expressions and objects that refer to a more or less precise period of time; a closer look will reveal word choices and content that were in use a few decades or centuries earlier; the scansion of the text will also make it possible to delimit a style and influences. Translating means observing and experiencing these elements in order to render them as faithfully as possible into another language, knowing that the result will still be distorted.

     Un petit pan de mur jaune and the rock of the Lighthouse

To transcribe is to experience. Certain scenes, conveyed by contemplative narrators, always linger in my mind. In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs Ramsey reads extracts from the famous anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), edited by Arthur T. Quiller-Couch: each passage, chosen a priori at random, resonates with the previous ones, allowing the reader to enter Mrs Ramsey's consciousness and the atmosphere of the house. The way she picks the verses, as if plucking petals, contributes to the strange languor of the moment [1]. In Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1927), the narrator fantasises about his trip to Venice. However, this vision of the Serenissima is largely altered by Proust's own readings [2] and his desire to leave a mark, however subjective, through his literary account.

Type Dreams is fully aware of this artistic and ontological strength, drawing on the aesthetics of the typewriter and transcription to instantiate moments of contemplation in the present moment. KB0 offered a sublime insight into the relationship between the physical act of writing and existence; as such, I will not elaborate on these issues here. However, I would like to point out that, beyond the systems and anachronical Victorian aesthetics that seem to run counter to technological progress, the choice of texts is part of a veritable journey into the history of human production and Richard Hofmeier's mentality. The exercises are like musical études, and their poetic absurdity contrasts strikingly with the more concrete texts. There is something deeply wistful about these meditations on existence, death, love and memory. Just as the narrator of La Recherche instantiates his life in a literary production – to inscribe it in Time – Hofmeier seems to conjure up a malaise and an absence by transcribing texts that evoke this sorrow.

There are imperfections in the texts that remind the player of their humanity, whether due to the author's playfulness or a simple typing error. These deviations from the norm force the player to grasp their mental universe and compare it with their own. The extracts from Plato's Apologia Socratis (4th century BCE) are given in the translation by Miles Burnyeat and Christopher Rowe. A long debate about the translation of the dialogue seeks to determine whether ἀρετή should be understood as 'goodness' or as 'virtue'. Burnyeat and Rowe have argued, on philosophical grounds, that the correct translation is 'goodness' – but there is no consensus on this analysis [3]. Nevertheless, the choice of this version, rather than a translation from the Loeb Classic or that of Thomas G. West, allows Hofmeier to situate the theme of death and memory within his system of thought. These long extracts can be contrasted, for example, with the inclusion of 'Seeking Feelings for Words' by Felipe Carretoni, a confidential Brazilian writer.

     And I love you so much

The prose poem is addressed to a significant other, acknowledging their presence and the lessons they have taught the author. 'It has been some time now, love, since you taught me what love is,' the poem ends. There are echoes, deliberate or not, in the text of T. S. Eliot's 'A Dedication to my Wife': 'No peevish winter wind shall chill / No sullen tropic sun shall wither / The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only. / But this dedication is for others to read: / These are private words addressed to you in public' [4]. Carretoni's poem unfolds as the keys are struck, while the surroundings in which the typographer finds themselves slowly change. Starting with the empty, colourless room and the window covered by a light rain, it gradually regains its vibrancy as the player's avatar reappears. The act of writing exorcises the memories of a melancholy love. It is impossible to know what Carretoni and Hofmeier actually mean by this poem, but it hardly matters since the interpretation is left to the reader and player.

Both Apologia Socratis and 'Seeking Feelings for Words' remind me so much of my teenage love and the boundless affection she left me. Sometimes it overflows without knowing where to go: Type Dreams, in its mechanically contemplative approach, channeled that flood by conjuring up the virtues and lessons my first love left me – or what I imagine she left me. Over the past few years, I have spent long hours rereading and transcribing the many letters we exchanged. It was a way of reliving the feelings I had once committed to paper, of instantiating her presence once again. I have not done this for a long time, partly because the tenderness and lost love that surrounds me is painful, and perhaps because I have found other ways to honour her memory. Nevertheless, Type Dreams has brought back all those feelings and bared my heart once more.

Type Dreams is an unfinished work. The campaign for the game is not available, as Hofmeier interrupted the development of the game for personal reasons, and only a summary gives an idea of the themes addressed: 'The world's two fastest typists fall in love just as a new century is born'. A love that has nowhere to go and lives only in the imagination. Like Cart Life (2010), Type Dreams touches on everyday feelings with great humility. Typing the various texts with their distinctive tastes was a gentle stab in my chest: I felt the rustling of the trees, the kiss which tasted of the sea, the mysterious photograph by the lake and the walks on the beach all come back to me. And I cannot leave out the words we always used to close our letters.

And I love you so much.

__________
[1] Virginia Woolf meticulously constructed this atmosphere, which echoed her own vulnerability. In On Being Ill (1925), drafted while she was bedridden, she wrote: 'We rifle poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters' (Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill', in The Moment and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, London, 1947, p. 19). The hermetic aspect of a poem is increased tenfold by a patient who hallucinates an entire universe.
[2] Proust was greatly influenced by the writings of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1853). Ruskin denounced the effects of industrialisation on the Romanesque and Gothic heritage and became a leader of the Gothic Revival, an aesthetic that had a lasting influence on Proust. As such, '[his] Venice is an old provincial town, full of medieval vestiges, where intimate, parochial life is magnified; but it is also a fabulous garden, filled with fruit and birds of coloured stone, blooming in the middle of the sea that comes to refresh it' (Georges Cattaui, Proust et ses métamorphoses, Nizet, Paris, 1972, p. 26, personal translation).
[3] For example, see Joy Samad, 'Socrates’ Pragma and Socrates’ Toughness: On the Proper Translation of Apology 30b 2–4', in Polis, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, pp. 250-266.
[4] Thomas S. Eliot, 'A Dedication to My Wife', in Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber & Faber, London, 1974.

Pentiment reminds us that reading is an act of necromancy.

THE LETTERS MOVE! Even as you read the text in this game, it shifts and rearranges itself underneath your eyes. It is text as a living, breathing entity, and I am positively shocked in retrospect that no other game has done anything like this. Great innovations, I think, rearrange the world around them. They seem like the obvious solution in retrospect because they are so overwhelmingly right that it seems a travesty for any other solution to be used in their place.

Pentiment loves writing. It loves text, it adores the written word, and it is obsessed with the act of reading and being read. It makes every single other text-heavy game look worse by merely existing with such passion for this medium. How am I supposed to read a VN, play a CRPG, wander a walking sim, when the entire time I am now acutely aware of just how dead those texts are? They are cold and unfeeling, just a tool used to get across words to the player, and nothing more.

The text in this game has mechanical depth! I don't just mean the writing, which is a strong contender for the best prose in the entire medium, but the text itself -- the ink bleeds to life in front of you, filling in the outlines of the words as they appear. Several handcrafted typefaces populate the dialogue of this game, each of them accompanied by the scratching of a pen on paper or the satisfying clunk of a printing press, like the voice beeps of a visual novel on steroids -- it turns the act of reading into an awareness of the act of writing, intimately coupling the consumption of the text with the creation of the text in a way that somehow makes the characters in this game feel even more real and human than if they were fully voiced.

Each typeface refuses to just have one variant of each letter, but instead several varying versions of letters are used depending on where they are contextually located, causing the text to bleed and run into itself in a satisfying and natural way. The letters change as you read, but not in a lazy and random way, instead carefully handcrafted for effect. The speed of the changes is just so that, for those within an average range of reading speed, you won't so much notice the exact changes of the letters as they happen, but instead you will always be right on the tail of the rearranged characters, noting their presence in the corner of your eye and by the stains left beneath the newly written text. This is, of course, the titular effect, and it says everything about the historical and cultural themes explored in this game -- but that is for another review to discuss. For our part, we are here solely for the text!

In far more obvious ways, the way that characters write their dialogue reflects who we understand them to be, whether it's in the choice of typeface, the frequency of spelling mistakes, or the ways in which alternate colors of text are used. Some characters wield red text as if we are reading a Red Letter Bible, and other characters hold completely different things to be significant and holy, and thus represent that with red text instead. When characters are impassioned, or tired, or terrified, their text is filled with errors and rapidly changing letters. We get a sense of who they are without even reading the words that they have to say!

Pentiment is all about uncovering the vibrant life in that which we view as dead, permanently separated from us, and hidden by layers of dirt and centuries of distance. It argues that even the very words in which history resides are alive -- and if the text is alive, how can its contents not be? In a world of digital text and mass alienation, is all too easy to conceptualize of a relationship between us, the author, and the text that looks something like author --> text --> reader. The author creates a text, its own standalone object, and we consume it. Pentiment rejects this entirely, and reminds us that the relationship has always been that of a conversation! The act of reading cannot be separated from the act of writing. When we engage with a text, we are fundamentally engaging with its author as well, and by doing so reaching across continents, across millennia, connecting two living persons even if it means that we are resurrecting the dead to do so!

I did not think text could be something that I would find this beautiful. This is what the medium of gaming deserves, this is what it's always been capable of, and it is a joy to finally see the medium's potential fulfilled in such a loving and thoughtfully crafted manner.

Play this motherfucking game!

Sorcery! 3 continua a fórmula dos outros dois, mas num mapa bem maior e mecânicas mais complexas. Isso não é algo inteiramente positivo. Se as Baklands são maiores que Kharé, também senti que são menos interessantes de explorar. Particularmente, as várias micro-decisões e caminhos alternativos que você fazia tanto no jogo anterior parecem ter tomado uma abordagem mais linear aqui, e tive bem menos ânimo de tentar rebobinar ações e ver as diferenças possíveis. Kharé era mais enxuta, mas também mais densa e com vários eventos e personagens que atiçavam bem mais minha curiosidade.

O foco do 3 é menos nas pequenas decisões e mais numa trama e objetivos maiores, que o jogo deixa bem claros desde o início: encontre e aniquile as "Sete Serpentes" em seu caminho até Mampang. Algo interessante é que no final de sua aventura o jogo acaba subvertendo um pouco esse próprio objetivo, fazendo-lhe refletir sobre as ações que tomou no decorrer da jornada - dependendo do caso, você pode até ser motivado a refazer a aventura toda só para ver se consegue um caminho mais otimizado, ou realizando menos sacrifícios.

Inclusive, eu chegue a fazer isso, resetando o game depois de minha primeira playthrough para ver se conseguia um desempenho melhor. Mas isso foi muito mais motivado pelo receio de me arrepender no jogo seguinte do que realmente um desejo intrínseco de jogar mais, e aí mora um grande problema. Apesar de ser bem interessante, no final Sorcery! 3 acaba sofrendo de um problema parecido com o primeiro jogo: há muitas escolhas, mas as consequências estão reservadas para o game seguinte. E se Sorcery! 2 conseguia contornar esse problema criando uma subtrama para a cidade de Kharé bem fechadinha e interessante, aqui a sensação ao final é incontornavelmente de "vamos ver o que vai acontecer no jogo seguinte".

Agora sim estamos conversando. Se o primeiro Sorcery! era notoriamente apenas uma introdução de uma história muito maior, a sequência segue o caminho quase inverso. Ele funciona tão bem como uma aventura solo que não precisa de seu antecessor (que, em retrospecto, é quase que apenas um tutorial pra esse aqui), nem fica na sombra de um sucessor para dar uma conclusão satisfatória.

Acho que a palavra-chave aqui é "aventura", no sentido mais ludológico possível. Kharé é uma cidade deliciosa de se explorar, com cada encruzilhada criando novas oportunidades narrativas. E suas explorações aqui não são apenas para satisfazer a inerente curiosidade de saber o que aconteceria se tivesse escolhido X em vez de Y: há uma linha narrativa central que só pode ser resolvida com bastante investigação... Ou você pode só abandonar tudo e seguir em frente! Há liberdade o suficiente para você resolver ou ignorar conflitos de diferentes formas, sejam grandes ou pequenos.

Mesmo sendo bem amarradinho, fica óbvio que suas escolhas terão consequências maiores nos capítulos posteriores. Sorcery! 2 me deixou tão animado que mal posso esperar para presenciá-las em Sorcery! 3 e 4.

Perhaps the most compelling game world ever created, Disco Elysium expertly immerses you in its struggling world. Its gameplay flaws, specifically its pacing, often grew frustrating, but the game’s narrative integrity cannot be understated. Each time I uncovered new characters, areas, or story beats, I was completely hooked. The quality of the writing is evident not only in the world’s detailed human society, but in the heartfelt characters and uncanny situations you discover. For the first time ever, I considered replaying a game immediately after beating it.

You begin Disco as a drunken, washed out hoodlum waking up from a full-on blackout in a disgusting hotel room. You remember nothing. Completely hungover, you find a man downstairs who appears to have been looking for you. Slowly, you realize he is your partner on an investigation, and that you are a cop. The body of the murder victim has been hanging from the tree behind your hotel for a week now, and none of the locals seem to respect you whatsoever, especially the hotel owner, who claims you owe him hundreds of dollars, of which you have zero. Sucking up the hangover, you set out to solve this war-scarred city’s murder through lengthy dialogues with the locals, slowly recovering who you are along the way.
Due to my character’s alcohol-induced amnesia, I opted to confront the citizens of Revachol with only the most non-threatening questions- avoiding any risk of havoc or confusion. Very shortly I realized Disco Elysium is not built for this strategy. It is not a game where you get to interact with people in your own way. Instead, the player is forced to interact with essentially every NPC they come across in order to progress the story.
Progression comes from stat checks that force you to spend a skill point if the roll is unsuccessful, leveling up the required skill in order to take another shot at the check. It grew frustrating waiting out story material because of an unlucky skill check, but in the early game you have plenty of time and new skill points to uncover and come back to try again. It’s in the late game where these checks become frustrating, and several times over I found myself wandering through Revachol trying to figure out how I should pass the time, or finding something that will level me up so I can retry a skill check. In my 34 hour play through, I would say about 4-6 hours were spent in this purgatory of not knowing what to do, or just not being as engaged by the world because I was desperately trying to progress. Maybe I just didn’t understand what I was doing, but it’s 100% worth mentioning because those moments are what would usually cause me to accidentally never come back to a game after putting it down.

Fortunately, by the end of its first day(of five), this game had hooked me into its cold, foggy world, boasting a literary depth, a chaotic world history, and a somber, reflective mood. The game takes place in Martinaise, a battle-scarred district of Revachol that has been almost entirely ignored by it’s rulers, leaving the dockworkers union to help protect and manage it’s residents. Digging deeper, you’ll find a massive amount of history behind this society. Informed not by books or objective means, but the small-minded and emotional people around you, who all have different views on where they live and what the world should be. The relatively small open world is also packed with environmental history. Some of my favorite story moments came from the environment, such as one where you see physical evidence of a firing squad, dozens of bullet holes on a wall, your skills determining the many different military forces that could have been killed here. Was it the communards from the last war? Or the victims of the communards the war before that? The futility of life is something the writers communicate very well, and being inside this protagonist adds another layer of human desperation to it all. I’d never spoil the moment, but learning about the larger world’s natural situation, and the scientific makeup of everything, really showed me that the writing is on a different level, and that the literary effort of a game world pays off in spades. It’s full impact doesn’t really come until after you beat it, where it’s depth sits with you, and your understanding of Martinaise is likely to be more than that of so many real places you’ve been to.

This grim, hazy society functions as something much, much larger than the player. Your player-character(who’s name is technically a spoiler) doesn’t get to save the world, the city, or the town. In fact, he seems to struggle for a reason to save himself. A small, alcoholic fish in a nearly frozen pond. The amnesia-ridden opening is certainly a tired trope, but learning about this character’s past in turn effects how you view the society and world around him. It took me a while to understand that I am not playing a version of myself, but my version of this character. He has his traits and problems, and I’m supposed to be curious about that enough to dig deeper. Slowly discovering his past, both distant and recent, was a blast, and I never would have expected how much I’d grow to love this guy.
The skills you unlock determine his inner voices. Perception may point out things in your environment, or subtle behaviors of characters. Logic will remind you of what you already know and make connections you may not have noticed. Encyclopedia will drop meaningless lore on you in the strangest of circumstances. There are also some other more unique skills that I won’t discuss that focus more on the inner turmoil of your character, or his physical connection to his environment. Each of these skills are given unique voices, and are, like the rest of the game, very well voice-acted.

Until I replay this game and discover more of its content, I can’t make many definitive statements on this game, but the quality of it’s writing is certainly in the S tier level of gaming, and I will gladly continue to ponder how it was accomplished.

Uma adaptação do livro-jogo Sorcery!, que é por outro lado um spin-off da série de livros-jogos Fighting Fantasy.

Não joguei o livro-jogo original - e sendo bem sincero, tenho praticamente 0 familiaridade com a mídia, fora alguns CYOA bem simples. Não obstante, parece-me uma ótima introdução ao conceito!

... E só isso. Uma introdução. O jogo parece traduzir muito bem o estilo, com uma apresentação bem bonitinha bem próxima do que se esperaria de um RPG de tabuleiro. É bem legal brincar com o game, principalmente devido à facilidade de rebobinar ações e ver os resultados de caminhos diferentes e respostas alternativas. Mas ao final de sua aventura, a sensação é de que você apenas abriu vários fios narrativos para serem explorados devidamente nos outros capítulos. Sozinho, sem a presença de suas sequências, Sorcery! é um game sobre várias escolhas, mas quase nenhuma consequência.

Vejamos o que me aguarda nos capítulos posteriores.

Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jour é uma obra (extremamente) colonialista e imperialista. 80 Days é uma obra sobre o colonialismo e imperialismo.

Jules Verne era um burguês europeu típico do século XIX. Isso não justifica o exacerbado imperialismo e racismo de suas obras, apenas o explica. Entender as razões do porquê uma obra de seu tempo é problemática em nosso tempo não a torna mais digerível.

Não obstante, a obra de Verne não era somente imperialismo e racismo. As preocupações e interesses dele eram outros, muito mais pautados em avanços da geografia, cartografia e meios de transporte de seu século. Seu legado, por mais problemático que seja, é inegavelmente importante para a literatura, especialmente de ficção científica. Entretanto, não é como se pudéssemos simplesmente ignorar as partes problemáticas do trabalho do autor e só nos focarmos nos aspectos mais palatáveis. Os próprios avanços científicos e tecnológicos que tanto interessavam Verne por vezes eram consequência do imperialismo, por outras o alicerçavam.

Ao adaptar uma das obras mais famosas de Verne para o meio digital através de 80 Days, o estúdio Inkle decide sabiamente desconstruir frontalmente seu caráter neocolonial em vez de ignorá-lo. O resultado é um mundo que parece genuíno, com vários problemas e contradições, mas também muito a se descobrir e ponderar.

Phileas Fogg continua sendo o über inglês fleumático e inexpressivo do livro. A perniciosa ação de seu império continua sendo inescapável não importa que parte do globo você vá. Mas aqui as várias localidades que você visita não são meras colônias inglesas que deveriam ser gratas por estarem sendo "civilizadas", ou povos subalternos exóticos que só podem ser compreendidos quando comparados negativamente com o Reino Unido. Cada lugarzinho em que você passa tem sua própria história e as formas de resistência e apropriação que fazem do legado do colonialismo europeu é expressa em deliciosa prosa que nunca me canso de ler.

O jogo adiciona elementos de steampunk à narrativa de Verne, algo que pode parecer supérfluo ou que de forma contraproducente exacerbaria ainda mais o caráter imperialista-colonial da obra original. Em verdade é o contrário. O steampunk é aqui pensado com uma historicidade similar à própria Revolução Industrial: um fenômeno global, não uma exclusividade inglesa. Presenciar a enorme diversidade de autômatos, airships, submarinos e armas que cada nação representada criou e adaptou para sua realidade é fascinante e um dos pontos fortes do jogo.

Esse elemento de steampunk cria algumas oportunidades bem legais. Mais do que representações de resistência e apropriação, 80 Days nos permite pensar em legados além do imperialismo. Pegue algumas rotas passando pelo continente africano ou pelo Pólo Norte para ver isso.

Falando em rotas: que jogo cheio de possibilidades. Eu zerei ele umas dez vezes, fora partidas que comecei e reiniciei. Cada uma das partidas foi uma experiência diferente, com novas facetas do mundo se revelando para mim, e ainda tem muito do jogo que ainda não vi. Cada uma das partidas pareceu de fato uma volta ao mundo — mas em umas duas horinhas, em vez de oitenta dias.

Se eu tivesse que descrever 80 Days em uma palavra, a palavra seria "subversivo". Felizmente não sou limitado a usar apenas uma palavra para descrevê-lo!

80 Days subverte Jules Verne de duas formas. Primeiro, e de forma mais óbvia, há a pegada steampunk que o estúdio inkle dá a história. Esses elementos steampunk se integram perfeitamente à obra original, que tem um grande foco nas movas formas de transporte da época e o alcance global do império britânico. Se coisas como ferrovias e barcos à vapor não impressionam tanto os leitores modernos como faziam em para os do século XIX, com a abordagem steampunk a sensação de deslumbramento é resgatada — descobrir que formas intrigantes de transporte vamos encontrar pela frente, sejam camelos mecânicos ou cidades flutuantes, é uma das partes mais prazerosas do game.

A segunda forma de subversão é como o texto colonialista e imperialista do original ganha aqui um subtexto anti-colonial. Essa subversão é profunda, já que não se limita ao autor. É uma desconstrução do próprio gênero de literatura de viagens do original e do steampunk da nova obra. Esses dois gêneros são quase que inerentemente coloniais e imperialistas: o primeiro fruto da era das Grandes Navegações e apresentando ao público europeu um mundo novo selvagem e exótico; e o segundo fundando-se numa extensão fantástica da primeira revolução industrial. Mas esses gêneros não precisam ser assim, e a roteirista Meg Jayanth consegue brilhantemente inverter essa epistemologia. Viajar é uma forma de conhecer novos lugares, aprender sobre novas culturas e, ao final da jornada, mudar a si mesmo. E nesse mundo steampunk em que você viaja e descobre, a fantasia é usada não para repetir no imaginário as estruturas de dominação da realidade, mas para imaginar caminhos não seguidos por aqueles que bravamente resistiram a dominação. Isso sim é botar o punk em steampunk.