CW: Light discussion of suicide
When you think about it, it is a little odd how uniform the controls for guns are across games. It’s not even limited to shooters - any game where a gun is in your hands for more than a minute or two will probably have you (on keyboard and mouse) shooting with left click, aiming with right click, and reloading with R. It’s so commonplace that games that dispense with this control scheme tend to stick out in your memory as One Of The Things That Game Does. To be fair, Receiver 2 does still bring back some of what I just mentioned - you shoot with left mouse, aim with right mouse, and R… kind of reloads? Well, it racks the slide. It’s a fairly minor part of reloading given that you don’t do it every time, but it counts. Depending on how you want to break it down (and the state that your gun is in) there are several additional steps, but don’t worry, those all have buttons too, separate buttons.
One of the interesting things about having to press forty goddamn buttons to reload your gun is that it becomes a kind of meditative practice. If you’re able to avoid saying “fuck this” after shooting yourself in the leg on three consecutive reload attempts, you begin to develop muscle memory. This is usually a good thing, but you will have to adapt to different guns or you will go to put your Glock on safety and shoot yourself in the leg in full-auto. This isn’t all about the buttons you press, though, because Receiver 1 had fucky controls too, and this isn’t a review of Receiver 1.
Receiver 2 takes things to the next level in a number of ways - the most obvious is that the game has actual textures now (instead of vaguely gesturing in the direction of “graphics”), but there are also more guns, more tapes, and additional mechanics. Receiver 2 is about diligence. Better textures and lighting means those turrets are better able to blend into the background. More guns means you need to remember additional quirks for each gun. More mechanics means that you can no longer just autopilot once you’ve figured the game out - bullets will richochet, negligent discharges will happen. You will need to listen to the tapes to figure out if it’s safe, or if -
I also mentioned shooting yourself in the leg. This will happen. A lot. It happens significantly less frequently as you get the rhythm of the game, and then you will get the Single-Action Army and you will remember what shooting yourself in the leg is like. I said it’s a game about diligence - the tapes are not joking about understanding the lethality of the tool and "anchoring yourself in the moment". It is not about autopiloting, it is about understanding the process so thoroughly that you can make the correct decision under pressure without hesitation.
So what are all those other tapes about? Why does the dude always sound like he's about to cry? While it’s not very clear if the Receivers are a cult of some kind, they’re at least some kind of movement dedicated to fighting The Threat, a nigh-supernatural force that preys on unsteady or unfocused minds. When its effects are at their worst, this can result in the Receiver taking their own life... and this is where my feelings on the game’s themes become a little mixed. Suicidal people are generally treated with dignity in the game and are still granted agency in its story, despite the influence of “The Threat” on their decisions, but mixing in lore elements when talking about actual suicide feels a touch wrong, even if the message is generally right. It does help the themes of the game come full circle - themes that initially feel like they’re about a spooky ghost that places turrets everywhere, but transform with time into warnings about taking care of your mental health. The Threat Echoes - another new game mechanic - are also a bit indelicate unless you read the reward(?) tapes afterward (they don’t automatically play) where their purpose is made clear: highlighting how easy it is to lose sight of the people who value you and your company when things go south.
It’s not a perfect way to send this message, but it’s very clear the developers put a lot of care in and are sincere about it, and I do think it makes a lot of good smaller points on the way to painting its grander picture. It’s an interesting message to attach to an extremely mechanically unique game, and - in addition to wishing more people played it - I wish there was more exploration of the themes it contains, because I do think there’s a lot to talk about that’s just being left on the table when Receiver 2 does find its way into the conversation.
When you think about it, it is a little odd how uniform the controls for guns are across games. It’s not even limited to shooters - any game where a gun is in your hands for more than a minute or two will probably have you (on keyboard and mouse) shooting with left click, aiming with right click, and reloading with R. It’s so commonplace that games that dispense with this control scheme tend to stick out in your memory as One Of The Things That Game Does. To be fair, Receiver 2 does still bring back some of what I just mentioned - you shoot with left mouse, aim with right mouse, and R… kind of reloads? Well, it racks the slide. It’s a fairly minor part of reloading given that you don’t do it every time, but it counts. Depending on how you want to break it down (and the state that your gun is in) there are several additional steps, but don’t worry, those all have buttons too, separate buttons.
One of the interesting things about having to press forty goddamn buttons to reload your gun is that it becomes a kind of meditative practice. If you’re able to avoid saying “fuck this” after shooting yourself in the leg on three consecutive reload attempts, you begin to develop muscle memory. This is usually a good thing, but you will have to adapt to different guns or you will go to put your Glock on safety and shoot yourself in the leg in full-auto. This isn’t all about the buttons you press, though, because Receiver 1 had fucky controls too, and this isn’t a review of Receiver 1.
Receiver 2 takes things to the next level in a number of ways - the most obvious is that the game has actual textures now (instead of vaguely gesturing in the direction of “graphics”), but there are also more guns, more tapes, and additional mechanics. Receiver 2 is about diligence. Better textures and lighting means those turrets are better able to blend into the background. More guns means you need to remember additional quirks for each gun. More mechanics means that you can no longer just autopilot once you’ve figured the game out - bullets will richochet, negligent discharges will happen. You will need to listen to the tapes to figure out if it’s safe, or if -
I also mentioned shooting yourself in the leg. This will happen. A lot. It happens significantly less frequently as you get the rhythm of the game, and then you will get the Single-Action Army and you will remember what shooting yourself in the leg is like. I said it’s a game about diligence - the tapes are not joking about understanding the lethality of the tool and "anchoring yourself in the moment". It is not about autopiloting, it is about understanding the process so thoroughly that you can make the correct decision under pressure without hesitation.
So what are all those other tapes about? Why does the dude always sound like he's about to cry? While it’s not very clear if the Receivers are a cult of some kind, they’re at least some kind of movement dedicated to fighting The Threat, a nigh-supernatural force that preys on unsteady or unfocused minds. When its effects are at their worst, this can result in the Receiver taking their own life... and this is where my feelings on the game’s themes become a little mixed. Suicidal people are generally treated with dignity in the game and are still granted agency in its story, despite the influence of “The Threat” on their decisions, but mixing in lore elements when talking about actual suicide feels a touch wrong, even if the message is generally right. It does help the themes of the game come full circle - themes that initially feel like they’re about a spooky ghost that places turrets everywhere, but transform with time into warnings about taking care of your mental health. The Threat Echoes - another new game mechanic - are also a bit indelicate unless you read the reward(?) tapes afterward (they don’t automatically play) where their purpose is made clear: highlighting how easy it is to lose sight of the people who value you and your company when things go south.
It’s not a perfect way to send this message, but it’s very clear the developers put a lot of care in and are sincere about it, and I do think it makes a lot of good smaller points on the way to painting its grander picture. It’s an interesting message to attach to an extremely mechanically unique game, and - in addition to wishing more people played it - I wish there was more exploration of the themes it contains, because I do think there’s a lot to talk about that’s just being left on the table when Receiver 2 does find its way into the conversation.
2 Comments
@Dadhunter: It ramps up fairly steadily - you crawl through the same maps with the same weapons and your goal is to collect 5 tapes without dying. Each time you do this it goes up a difficulty level (until you've done it five times in a row), each time you die it goes down. Around 3 it becomes a much tougher game - new enemy types that are harder to spot, less ammo turns it into an actually fairly hard game. There's a lot here to enjoy if you just like the mechanics of the guns (they've added a compound/practice range with its own set of unlocks) but the "real" game has a pretty steady difficulty curve throughout
Dadhunter
2 years ago