Dá para considerar UNSIGHTED um metroidvania? Essa pergunta só pode ser respondida através de outra: o que é metroidvania?

Eu não tenho uma resposta perfeita para essa pergunta, mas tenho uma definição pessoal que funciona muito bem pra mim. Metroidvania é um subgênero de plataforma (tanto é que costumo usar o rótulo platformer-adventure como alternativa), com uma exploração semi-linear mediada por itens e habilidades. Simples, não? Usando essa definição, UNSIGHTED parece não se encaixar na categoria. Afinal, sua perspectiva top-down o coloca de fora do gênero de plataforma.

Mas calma lá, não nos precipitemos. Metroidvania tem que ser plataforma, mas nada na definição que coloquei acima disse que tem que ser side-scrolling. Contemporaneamente não há muitos exemplos, mas jogos de plataforma 2D podem sim utilizar outras perspectivas — clássicos como Knight Lore e Qbert estão aí para provar. UNSIGHTED é pouco convencional nesse sentido, mas tem todo o foco em movimentação e overdose de pulos dignos do gênero.

E quanto a outra parte da equação, a exploração semi-linear? Aí a coisa complica um pouco. Apesar de eu gostar da minha definição, tem um pouco de espaço pra interpretação. Isso é deliberado. Estamos lidando com arte, não é uma ciência exata. Mais do que simplesmente ver se a exploração é linear ou não, eu sempre me pergunto se ela é não-linear o suficiente para considerar um game metroidvania. Nesse aspecto, minha impressão de UNSIGHTED foi mista por boa parte do jogo. O mapa é bem grande e os objetivos espalhados, mas o caminho que você tem que seguir parece bem fixo. O jogo até marca no seu mapa a ordem exata em que você deve fazer os "templos".

Foi aí que eu descobri o wall jumping e percebi que a "ordem exata" não passava de uma leve sugestão que pode e deve ser ignorada. Foi nesse momento que todas as minhas dúvidas se esvaíram: estou lidando com um metroidvania, e um excelente, por sinal.

Assim como seu nome, muita da profundeza mecânica de Unsighted passa desapercebida de início. Os itens que você ganhou? Eles têm mais do que uma única função e podem ser usados de formas inesperadas para alcançar lugares que você achava que não podia. O inimigo apelão que claramente só pode ser derrotado com uma arma especial? Talvez a arma especial não seja necessária afinal de contas, "git gud" e tente de novo. E aquele chefão que o jogo te diz explicitamente pra deixar por último? Vai lá e mata ele no prólogo do game, nada está te impedindo.

O limite de tempo do game, uma de suas mecânicas mais únicas e polêmicas, a primeira vista parece ir contra o que se espera de um game do gênero, te punindo por explorar em vez de cumprir os objetivos. Mas não é bem o caso. Explorar te dá acesso a itens que aumentam o tempo, além de te darem um conhecimento melhor do mapa e seus segredos, permitindo que você otimize sua jornada. O resultado é uma sempre presente ansiedade e senso de risco e recompensa na primeira vez que você jogar, e infinitas possibilidades de speedrun e sequence-breaking em jogatinas posteriores — um prato cheio para fãs do gênero.

Enfim, respondendo à pergunta do início: UNSIGHTED é mais metroidvania que muito Metroid e Castlevania. E ainda tem robôs lésbicas com crise existencial. Como não amar?

It was only two hours into my playthrough of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine that I realized how much of a slog it was going to be. Within that two-hour timeframe, you will have seen everything you need to know about the game: that is, what you will be doing for the next 8 or so hours should you choose to stay in for the long haul, a venture that I do not endorse in any way.

Where the Water is theoretically premised on the concept of stories- how they evolve, drive mythologies, and convey truths and lies. The narrative involves you losing a game of cards to a Devilish-figure, who gives you a chance to repay him via collecting tales strewn throughout the land.

It’s a fascinating idea, but there’s a reason I used the word “theoretically”- it falters completely. An atrocious open world combined with a lack of presentation makes for a wasted premise.

Let’s talk about that first part- open worlds games have come under scrutiny in recent years over their interiors- once the wonder of being able to walk to the farthest horizon wears off, it appears most gamers care about the quality of the actual content. If you’re just providing copy/pasted vistas and repetitive side stuff ad nauseam, then you are not going to find much love from the gaming community.

And such was the case here. Where the Water has the worst open world I have ever had the privileged misfortune to experience. It’s an example of a concept that should have never even gotten to that stage- a concept that would have worked far better as a purely or near-purely linear video game. You have the entire (scaled) continental United States open at your fingertips, only to find that it is literally the same copy/pasted terrain, mountains, rivers, and cityscapes sprinkled everywhere minus some reskinned hues done in a pathetic attempt to reflect geographical changes.

But that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing if the actual content was diverse, but no, you find stories the exact same way- walking to a spot on the map and pressing X. Other activities like earning/losing money or seeing a pretold story grow are done the same way: walk over to a spot on the map and press X. It’s a walking simulator with barely any kind of exploration that would have at least made the journey between all the areas all the more exciting.

Compounding THIS part even further is the horrible navigation. While a lot of points are within reach, there are a number of larger character arcs that are spread across multiple states, and the walking mechanic is PAINFULLY slow. Like, slow as in it’ll bring back memories of the beginning of Morrowind. Perhaps realizing this, the developers put in the ability to move quicker via a whistling minigame reminiscent of the QTE system from Fahrenheit, as well as hitchhiking through passing cars. But both of these have their own issues: the former only has one song, meaning it can come at odds with the music playing in the background, and either way doesn’t move you particularly fast, while with the latter, you cannot decree when you will stop, meaning sometimes you will only move a few feet more before getting kicked out, or other times go past your intended destination before departing. Trains are available as a fast travel option, but they’re not universally connected meaning you’ll have to take multiple ones, and because those cost money you most likely won’t have enough to do successive trips- and while train hopping is an option (minus the risk of getting beaten up), these have even MORE limited destinations, making them not helpful for any place not closeby. Oh, and to top it all off, all of these trigger MASSIVE framerate drops that essentially render them not worth doing in the end.

Rivers are an infuriating aspect as well- you are only able to cross them at certain ford junctures, but their placement is haphazard and can often result in you having to walk a considerable distance just to find them- a simple solution would’ve been just to allow the player to walk across waterways- it’s not like it’s imperative to any learning curve or game mechanic.

The only positive thing I can say about Where the Water’s open world is that the music changes depending on what state/region you are in, and the score is so wonderful that these changes feel natural and awesome (more on that below), but that’s about it.

Graphically, Where the Water has a solid art style. I wish I was more educated in art history to give an accurate description of what it was Dim Bulb Games and Serenity Forge were trying to evoke, but it definitely seemed to be some kind of pastoral vibe. Every area has a limited color palette that, combined with simple shapes, goes a long way towards radiating a rural ecosystem, and it works. This is a beautiful overworld that screams Americana. Close-ups of characters, both small-time and large-scale, are done in a colored pencil aesthetic that comes off as hand-drawn, with excellent chiaroscuro conveying shadows and lighting perfectly. In the macro world, a dynamic day/night system has been implemented to showcase hourly changes.

Unfortunately, graphical hitches take away from this beauty. I mentioned the framerate drops above, but other smaller things like constantly clipping through every object you walk through and inconsistent shadowmapping for the clouds above are also prevalent. Finally there’s the fact that, as well-crafted as all the main NPCs are, their blinking eyes feel creepy and out-of-place!

Sound is a massive disappointment if only because it’s practically nonexistent- there’s no effect for walking, driving, collecting, or really anything. I don’t even think riding trains had any discernible audio. It’s like the devs didn’t even bother trying to implement anything, which is a crime for this title in particular for a couple of reasons: one, as a walking sim, sound is necessary in evoking an atmosphere, working in conjunction with music to craft a distinct identity, and two, the individual stories would have benefited TREMENDOUSLY from unique sonority, turning them into radio plays of sorts that would have made up for the lack of presentation (more on that below).

Thankfully, the music is on the opposite end of the spectrum. My gosh, is this one of the best OSTs I have ever had the privilege to listen to. I’ll copy/paste this from Wikipedia: “The soundtrack of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine gained praise as an authentic representation of Americana: The 30-track compilation spans folk, jazz, country, blues, bluegrass, and more.”

Yeah, I really can’t summarize it better than that. As you move from location-to-location, melodic changes happen to reflect the area that you’re in: closer to the Mexican border garners you latino beats while going inner-city produces jazz of sorts. They always fit the mood, but in the event you want to listen to something different, you have the option to change the track much like you could with the sea shanties in Black Flag/Rogue. The one downside though is that you are limited in what you can change it to based on the region: a place may only let you cycle through three different pieces, for example, until you move out of its radius. I suppose this was done to help preserve the vibe of your travels, but it impacts player choice to a fault IMO. All that being said, this is one game that I am grateful has a vinyl release as you can be sure I will be purchasing it (side note, why can’t more video games have vinyl versions of their soundtracks done?).

Because Where the Water is about storytelling, the voice acting can be divided into two distinct categories: your main NPCs (16 in total) and then the side tales. To get the good out of the way, the main NPCs are all solidly performed- each has a distinct vocalist who superbly conveys their persona’s overarching life story and accounts. On the other hand, the (apparently over 200!) side tales you collect are all voiced by a single narrator. He speaks like a character from an old revisionist western: deep voice, southern accent, and a cool delivery conveying a chill demeanor. He sounds badass and his actor’s name is Keythe Farley, who apparently voiced Thane from the Mass Effect series. Unfortunately, as talented as he is, having him do the voices for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE STORIES has to be one of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen in sound design. As TES series has pointed out, when you have a ton of side characters in a game, you need a round cast of at least 7-10 members to help create the mirage of diversity. One person doing it, even if he’s trying to do a slightly different voice, just doesn’t cut it, particularly when the stories involve a slightly bigger cast, supernatural characters, and, oh I don’t know, FEMALES (seriously, they couldn’t ask one of the seiyū from the group of 16 to play the females at least?). Another issue I had with Farley is that he often speaks too slow, taking unnecessarily long pauses after any kind of punctuation mark (commas, periods, semicolons), which does not befit the presentation-style of the game at all (more on that later). Combining these 2-3 factors led to me often fastforwarding through the conversations since they were inherently immersion-breaking.

Before moving on, I’ll give a brief shoutout to Sting for his performance as the devilish Dire Wolf. While I’m not someone who has listened to his music, I will say he should consider a career in voice acting since he was phenomenal in every scene he was in (no matter how sadly few there were).

Now we finally come to the gameplay, of which there is a lot to speak of. I already briefly talked about the gameplay above as it pertained to the open world and navigation, but there is more to rant about. Where the Water didn’t want to put any kind of effort into collecting stories- no puzzles, no minigames, no narrative riddles, nothing. It is purely a collectathon of running around, finding a button prompt, and hitting it, triggering a pop-up conversation sequence that plays out against a single picture in the back. Occasionally there is some dialogue choice, but this barely makes a difference in the outcome.
I’ve heard Where the Water described as a visual novel or VN of sorts, and I would agree with that. All cards on the table, it is not a genre that I am a particular fan of given the limited gameplay/lack of exploration value, but WTW goes out of its way to make it even worse than it is by giving no presentation value. Whenever you come across one of these stories, as I said, all you have is a single photo in the back while the narration drones on, and it’s just not immersive.

What would have been a lot better would have been to create short, minimalist animation sequences for the stories. There was this dropped animation pilot from I believe MTV called Deadtime Stories that had a simultaneously choppy and smooth animation style that consequently gave it a hypnotic feel. If you were to take that style and craft it in the aesthetic of WTW, I believe you would have had a truly entrancing visage that would have made collecting each story an invigorating mini-adventure. The aforestated slow narration would have also synced better with it since each pause would have allowed the directors to transition to a different part of the story as the voiceover resumed. Would this initiative have cost money? Of course, but you could have easily made up for that by cutting down on the number of NPCs and getting rid of the open world (and all its useless systems).

As it stands, what do you have instead? You have a single middle-aged man giving a sluggish account of a diversity of individuals while players stare at a photograph with no ambient noise going on in the backdrop; just the muted drawl of the OST as it dropped in volume. I hate to say it, but it just feels really cheap, like the devs ran out of funding to put in any substantial production value. The writing for them itself is hit-or-miss. The vast majority of the tales are entertaining on some level- some try to go for a Cormac McCarthy-esque western message, others as the basis for some folklore, and still others for just plain amusement. You do run into plenty of pointless, annoying, or repetitive ones, but I’d be lying if I said that they took away from experience. In terms of the big picture stories of the 16, each manages to be a unique tale telling of a singular human being, but overall they honestly should have trimmed down the number from 16 to 8-10, largely because there is very little thematic range. Almost all of the accounts are about the breakdown of tradition vs modernism, freedom of the open land vs. authority, and how the elites are screwing over the working class. It gets kind of mundane to hear what is ultimately a slightly-different take on a motif that you heard the last four people say.

To be clear, the display of a single picture works out better for the one-on-one NPC convos due to them being talks where you’re both blatantly sitting down and chatting face-to-face compared to those minisodes where you’re often witnessing or participating in some kind of action beat. Unfortunately, these have their very own gameplay flaw. See, all those yarns you walked around collecting? You will get prompts from the NPCs informing you that they want to hear some kind of anecdote: either humorous, hopeful, sad, or scary. Successfully telling them one of these results in you getting their favor and filling up a meter represented by an eye opening- if you manage to fully open it, you unlock the next chapter in their personal spiel. Doing this 3-4 times in a row (depending on the character) completes them, earning you a Tarot card and getting you one-step closer to completing the Wolf’s task.

It sounds simple enough right? Here are the two glaring issues with it: one, from an immersion point-of-view, the way each NPC asks you for your stories is so stupid and out-of-the-blue. They will be telling a strong, passionate chain of events that occurred in their past, only to suddenly stop and ask “hey, i’m in the mood for chills, you got any terrifying tales?”. It’s like wtf? You were just in the middle of telling me something interesting about your life, and now you want to change gears for no reason at all? What it comes down do is a writing problem- the writers for each of these could have EASILY incorporated a quid-pro-quo dialogue/response into their scripts that would have felt natural and smooth. Heck, it would have been nice to have scripted reactions contingent on the specific story you told them (though I acknowledge this would have required LA Noire-levels of writing). But at the very least, they could have very simply done the former, and that isn’t the case. It honestly comes across like an outside writer wrote in these parts and haphazardly inserted them into the pre-written dialogue of the diegesis.

The second glaring issue is that a lot of your stories are frankly hard to categorize. Scary and sad stories tend to be the easiest to figure out, but what constitutes joyful or hopeful is hard and can honestly get frustrating at times, especially when you are only given the title of your tale and not its contents to review. For example, take the apologue of a bull who was pierced with an arrow and bleeding out yet could not die- does that sound sad to you? Well, it’s actually classified as hopeful, although even that’s subject for debate since different characters might interpret stories differently- what one sees as laughable is actually more hopeful. This latter part is thankfully rare, but it does come up and will piss you off when it does.

Making this matter worse are three additional problems: one, your stories can evolve through interacting with certain prompts on the map wherein an NPC will tell you how he heard this variation of the tale you experienced/heard beforehand (how some of these even got out to the point of falling prey to telephone is beyond me)- while these sometimes serve as a good explanation as to the basis for some of our nation’s longest-running myths (Ichabod Crane, Johnny Appleseed, the Jersey Devil, etc….), most of the time they come off as random developments and seemingly change the tone of a story despite it not actually changing from its original genre (for ex. A girl who carries around rocks is turned into a witch who lures strangers using magic stones; it went from kooky to creepy, yet you’re still supposed to treat it as kooky). And because, as I said, you have no way of reviewing a story’s writing, this makes it even harder to pinpoint its classification, meaning you can end up throwing darts at a board and wasting your few chances at upping one of the 16s’ favorable meter before they have to depart. Two, stories are grouped into tarot cards schemas: when you tell one from one of them, it locks off the rest of the yarns in there until you meet the NPC again, meaning you lose access to a lot of potential plot movers. And three, NOT ALL OF YOUR STORIES GET COLLECTED. What was the point in compiling/writing/producing over 200 of these if you can’t even add half of them to your arsenal to use in this game of oral Go-Fish? I can get fleshing out the world, but this was overkill.

Thankfully, the charm system doesn’t work like Oblivion’s persuasion system wherein telling an unappealing chronicle drops their favor- it maintains the same progress each time you successfully reciprocate a request, allowing you to successfully push them over the course of multiple meetings even if you fail here and there.

Finally, there is apparently a survivalist system in place in the form of health and sleep. You can restore them through triggering world events (like helping a family who provides you a meal) or using money (also earned through world or city events) to buy nourishments from cities that successfully rejuvenate them. Listening to one of the 16’s campfires also restores all attributes. However, it’s not like it matters as “dying” simply results in you briefly meeting the Dire Wolf again, wherein you can leave and spawn at your last checkpoint, which usually isn’t too far from where you perished. Worst comes to worse, you can initiate an autowalk and go-off and do something else while your protagonist navigates to the area (assuming there are no obstacles stopping them). To clarify, it is particularly hard to “die”, but even if you do somehow, it’s not like you’re playing a roguelike.

But look, I think I’ve ranted enough. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine had a lot of potential, however it just didn’t have the vision and/or possibly budget to execute on it. The idea of seeing a heterogeneity of stories that expressed the very basis for the current status of the country could have been exciting, but lackluster production value in the graphical and sound departments hampered this completely. The open world is pointless, there are optimization issues, and the only real-gameplay mechanics are chock full of stupid flaws. I would honestly recommend purchasing the soundtrack over the game.

I see a lot of people complaining about the maze-like and extremely long levels but honest, those are what makes the game still feel quite fresh in 2021. Grab the Nightdive port (which addresses the clear technical issues of the original N64 release and 'fixes' any issues you may have had with the controller) and it makes for an FPS that has a real focus on exploration over linear progression through a stage and a wonderfully diverse arsenal of weapons, ranging from the extremely useful to the utterly useless and from brutally simple to simply brutal. Also: a great soundtrack that includes one of - if not THE - best opening level themes of all-time.

A belter.