kavreb
A pretty-looking and smooth-riding experience, it lacks the thrills of a first-/third person camera due to its isometric view, but amply makes up for it in other regards. The only reason my grade is so “low” is that I quickly found out that these kinds of storyless repetitive sports games aren't really quite for me (I prefer different kinds of repetitive games, e.g. first-person shooters :p ). It also means I haven't made it far into the game and considering I haven't played it once in months, it felt weird to keep it under my actively playing games. But for what it's worth, I still have it installed so I might return to it for a ride or two now and then. That too is a recommendation of a kind.
2022
A comedy game that is trying its best to zap away its fun with frequent annoying repetition (even more before the game informs you of a skip button) and absurd puzzles and continuity. The absurdity is the joke, but if even the settings menu is so incomprehensible that I just gave up trying to understand it, you're pushing it.
Many of the puzzles also run out of steam long before you are done with them (especially some minigames), forcing you to repeatedly retry scenes that have already lost all of their humour potential. The absurdity here works both for the benefit of humour but also to the detriment of solving the puzzles, often relying on trial-and-error to find the correct answer, with a lot of tiresome cutscenes upon nigh-inevitable failures. And if I have to see Steve, the harbinger of repetitive actions for (mostly) lacklustre jokes, one more time …
Ultimately, if you are open to its absurd and frequently scatological humour, there's enough laugh-out-loud moments (and occasional snickers) to justify the game's existence (and the one euro I paid for it), but I still finished it on YouTube.
Many of the puzzles also run out of steam long before you are done with them (especially some minigames), forcing you to repeatedly retry scenes that have already lost all of their humour potential. The absurdity here works both for the benefit of humour but also to the detriment of solving the puzzles, often relying on trial-and-error to find the correct answer, with a lot of tiresome cutscenes upon nigh-inevitable failures. And if I have to see Steve, the harbinger of repetitive actions for (mostly) lacklustre jokes, one more time …
Ultimately, if you are open to its absurd and frequently scatological humour, there's enough laugh-out-loud moments (and occasional snickers) to justify the game's existence (and the one euro I paid for it), but I still finished it on YouTube.
To compare this to Dead Space is a cruel joke - while the ambition is there in its influences, The Callisto Protocol achieves nothing that comes even close to the vicious horror of the Dead Space series (well, most of them).
For one, playing it often feels less like a survival horror and more like a walking sim with the occasional moment of repetitive action. There's nothing wrong with being a walking sim, but one would expect the game to then have better writing and level design. But the quality of both is perhaps best exemplified in an early scene:
You take an elevator down to solitary confinement in error, and the guy in your ear whispers with fear "be careful, that's where they keep the worst of them". Well, first of all it's just offensive to all the people that have ever been put in solitary confinement, which in reality is an inhumane method of punishment that can easily be abused and used as a power play. There's nothing inherently more terrible about the people in solitary confinement than there is elsewhere in the prison, and the quick jump to uninformed prejudices betrays a lack of sophistication on the part of the writer.
But perhaps the most disappointing thing game-wise is that there's actually nothing in solitary to justify the other man's fear. In reality, it's perhaps 10 minutes of nondescript corridors, a few doors you open painfully slowly (that, to be fair, manage to be a bit scary, exactly once), and a few encounters that are either laughably theatrical or trivial.
Once you get to the other side of the level that was described as the scariest thing around, you should feel a release of pressure that had been building up through its dreadful passages; instead I laughed thinking "that was it?"
The endless corridors punctuated by the occasional action encounter describing the first part of the game (and, frankly, most of it) was enough to sap any goodwill that had been built up by the simple joy of entering a space horror setting. What's the point of even talking about the underwritten characters and the uninteresting villain figure or the simple action loop that quickly grows numbingly repetitive and the melee combat that keeps undermining the seriousness of the setting with its clunky silliness (it truly is so kind of all the enemies to wait around for a but while you clobber them on the head after every attack).
It could be a better game with less meaningless corridors (e.g. if the feeling of dread was real when walking through them), no annoying enemies (e.g. constant quick-time tapping annoyances that inevitably drain some of your life), better checkpointing (again with the one-hit-deaths after an annoyingly long crawling sequence and whatnot; do they not play their own games?), bigger inventory earlier, less telegraphed scares (it quickly stops being scary when you know the scare is just a cutscene happening in front of you), and more enjoyable weapons (the melee is okay, for a while, even if it gets a bit repetitive, but the worst failure when comparing it to Dead Space is the lacklustre shooting with the run-of-the-mill guns). Oh and some writing that would actually make us care about the characters.
But it's possible there never was much hope for the game because the central gameplay loop itself works against the dread - when killing enemies is all about timing your dodges and hits around their well-telegraphed attacks, there's not much tension, especially when even in groups they wait in line. Every time the fear of the unknown grasped me when entering a new area, it was wiped away as soon as I met the first enemy - I know you, I thought, or I'll know you soon enough, and you are not scary. It started working against it - the few times I did feel scared, I just reminded myself how unscary this game is, and lo and behold, so it was.
The action in DS was sudden, desperate and nail-biting, but in Callisto it is, for the most part, a silly dance, and there are few silly dance numbers in the world that terrify one's soul.
Why then did I still persevere?
Cause I'm a sucker, a sucker, for space horror with weighty movement and action. It might not be that much fun to fight in Callisto, but it sure feels good hitting a monster in the face with your baton and then shooting them as well, just to be sure, the bullet ripping out your weapon like thunder. And the fighting does get more involved later on (and there was one corridor fight that felt legitimately great and I might remember years from now). And I've played so many mediocre shooters like this that it's actually a bit nostalgic going through the dumb story in the boots of Video Game Protagonist Man #334. And it really does look gorgeous (I especially loved walking through the scrapyards covered in snow with a blizzard blowing at your faces and the tall sparsely lighted buildings towering above you in the distant dark).
But it really is a game made up of poor decisions, from its basic gameplay to its enemy, encounter and level design, all working in tandem to undermine any chance of an effective horror atmosphere. The action can be fun and involving, but its silliness and predictability just further undermine the rest of the game; and that's long before you get to a long sequence with enemies who work on hearing alone, it's just that they have very, very bad hearing, so you can be loudly stomping their buddies to bits and pieces right behind them, just to then turn around and sneak kill them next. It's ludicrous and kinda not scary at all, y’know.
And yet. And yet. When I wasn't playing it, I kept thinking of wanting to play it. It doesn't make the game good, but it does up the rating a bit. Or just shows what a tool I am.
Tool enough to even finish it - but not a step more because the game, in a desperate attempt to really prove what a failure it is, ends on a cliffhanger meant to promote the story DLC - the actual end of the game, cut off to parcel out at 1/5th of the full game’s price. What a disgrace. But really - it's the most appropriate ending for a game built on disappointment upon disappointment.
I came for the space horror, I stayed for the pretty graphics and weighty action, and I came away amazed how utterly a game can still fail. A riot.
For one, playing it often feels less like a survival horror and more like a walking sim with the occasional moment of repetitive action. There's nothing wrong with being a walking sim, but one would expect the game to then have better writing and level design. But the quality of both is perhaps best exemplified in an early scene:
You take an elevator down to solitary confinement in error, and the guy in your ear whispers with fear "be careful, that's where they keep the worst of them". Well, first of all it's just offensive to all the people that have ever been put in solitary confinement, which in reality is an inhumane method of punishment that can easily be abused and used as a power play. There's nothing inherently more terrible about the people in solitary confinement than there is elsewhere in the prison, and the quick jump to uninformed prejudices betrays a lack of sophistication on the part of the writer.
But perhaps the most disappointing thing game-wise is that there's actually nothing in solitary to justify the other man's fear. In reality, it's perhaps 10 minutes of nondescript corridors, a few doors you open painfully slowly (that, to be fair, manage to be a bit scary, exactly once), and a few encounters that are either laughably theatrical or trivial.
Once you get to the other side of the level that was described as the scariest thing around, you should feel a release of pressure that had been building up through its dreadful passages; instead I laughed thinking "that was it?"
The endless corridors punctuated by the occasional action encounter describing the first part of the game (and, frankly, most of it) was enough to sap any goodwill that had been built up by the simple joy of entering a space horror setting. What's the point of even talking about the underwritten characters and the uninteresting villain figure or the simple action loop that quickly grows numbingly repetitive and the melee combat that keeps undermining the seriousness of the setting with its clunky silliness (it truly is so kind of all the enemies to wait around for a but while you clobber them on the head after every attack).
It could be a better game with less meaningless corridors (e.g. if the feeling of dread was real when walking through them), no annoying enemies (e.g. constant quick-time tapping annoyances that inevitably drain some of your life), better checkpointing (again with the one-hit-deaths after an annoyingly long crawling sequence and whatnot; do they not play their own games?), bigger inventory earlier, less telegraphed scares (it quickly stops being scary when you know the scare is just a cutscene happening in front of you), and more enjoyable weapons (the melee is okay, for a while, even if it gets a bit repetitive, but the worst failure when comparing it to Dead Space is the lacklustre shooting with the run-of-the-mill guns). Oh and some writing that would actually make us care about the characters.
But it's possible there never was much hope for the game because the central gameplay loop itself works against the dread - when killing enemies is all about timing your dodges and hits around their well-telegraphed attacks, there's not much tension, especially when even in groups they wait in line. Every time the fear of the unknown grasped me when entering a new area, it was wiped away as soon as I met the first enemy - I know you, I thought, or I'll know you soon enough, and you are not scary. It started working against it - the few times I did feel scared, I just reminded myself how unscary this game is, and lo and behold, so it was.
The action in DS was sudden, desperate and nail-biting, but in Callisto it is, for the most part, a silly dance, and there are few silly dance numbers in the world that terrify one's soul.
Why then did I still persevere?
Cause I'm a sucker, a sucker, for space horror with weighty movement and action. It might not be that much fun to fight in Callisto, but it sure feels good hitting a monster in the face with your baton and then shooting them as well, just to be sure, the bullet ripping out your weapon like thunder. And the fighting does get more involved later on (and there was one corridor fight that felt legitimately great and I might remember years from now). And I've played so many mediocre shooters like this that it's actually a bit nostalgic going through the dumb story in the boots of Video Game Protagonist Man #334. And it really does look gorgeous (I especially loved walking through the scrapyards covered in snow with a blizzard blowing at your faces and the tall sparsely lighted buildings towering above you in the distant dark).
But it really is a game made up of poor decisions, from its basic gameplay to its enemy, encounter and level design, all working in tandem to undermine any chance of an effective horror atmosphere. The action can be fun and involving, but its silliness and predictability just further undermine the rest of the game; and that's long before you get to a long sequence with enemies who work on hearing alone, it's just that they have very, very bad hearing, so you can be loudly stomping their buddies to bits and pieces right behind them, just to then turn around and sneak kill them next. It's ludicrous and kinda not scary at all, y’know.
And yet. And yet. When I wasn't playing it, I kept thinking of wanting to play it. It doesn't make the game good, but it does up the rating a bit. Or just shows what a tool I am.
Tool enough to even finish it - but not a step more because the game, in a desperate attempt to really prove what a failure it is, ends on a cliffhanger meant to promote the story DLC - the actual end of the game, cut off to parcel out at 1/5th of the full game’s price. What a disgrace. But really - it's the most appropriate ending for a game built on disappointment upon disappointment.
I came for the space horror, I stayed for the pretty graphics and weighty action, and I came away amazed how utterly a game can still fail. A riot.
2021
Clunky as hell, but kind of endearing, the story of a small girl searching for her sister in a world government by randomness and a cruel Queen, you'll mainly be spending your time talking to weird-looking people or fighting angry automaton-looking creatures. Oh, and you also have a dice with feet and hands that you throw to do battle with and who's your best friend ever.
There's quite a bit to complain about in this game, thanks to the clunkiness alone, but I don't really want to. There were times where I even considered quitting it - because it's long and clunky - and perhaps I would have if playing it on a handheld hadn't made it so easy to keep picking it up again.
But I kept wanting to return just to see what's going to happen to Even and Dicey next, and what intriguing world will wait for me in the next district.
Because the game is basically divided into 6 phases, each corresponding to one district, which in turn corresponds to a number on a six-sided die. You start in one-town and work your way up, and the way the number is expressed in some towns is pretty cool, e.g. everybody having two conflicting sides in two-town, including the mayor who has literally split in two, with the bad version of him building a whole other town in the sky (on the flip side).
You need to keep upgrading your die to be able to roll higher numbers in order to enter higher towns, which in turn allows you to also roll higher numbers in combat encounters, and the sense of progress and joy you can get from going from rolling only ones and twos to being able to roll a five or, god forbid, a six(!) is something remarkable. It's one of the most satisfying growths I've ever seen in a video game.
And the combat is pretty fun, gathering energy to play the cards you've put in your deck beforehand, that can give you weapons, placeable cannons, heals and whatnot, even if it's still pretty clunky and somewhat repetitive and you'll be done with upgrades and deck-building long before the game is done with you. It's also not too easy and there were many a times I was kept on my toes by it.
But it's the quietly endearing writing and worldbuilding that really kept me in it for the long run (even if I did play most of it on silent, seeing no need to hook up the headphones for its subpar soundscape). I don't know what I would have done without Dicey, but I probably would not have seen the end credits.
There's quite a bit to complain about in this game, thanks to the clunkiness alone, but I don't really want to. There were times where I even considered quitting it - because it's long and clunky - and perhaps I would have if playing it on a handheld hadn't made it so easy to keep picking it up again.
But I kept wanting to return just to see what's going to happen to Even and Dicey next, and what intriguing world will wait for me in the next district.
Because the game is basically divided into 6 phases, each corresponding to one district, which in turn corresponds to a number on a six-sided die. You start in one-town and work your way up, and the way the number is expressed in some towns is pretty cool, e.g. everybody having two conflicting sides in two-town, including the mayor who has literally split in two, with the bad version of him building a whole other town in the sky (on the flip side).
You need to keep upgrading your die to be able to roll higher numbers in order to enter higher towns, which in turn allows you to also roll higher numbers in combat encounters, and the sense of progress and joy you can get from going from rolling only ones and twos to being able to roll a five or, god forbid, a six(!) is something remarkable. It's one of the most satisfying growths I've ever seen in a video game.
And the combat is pretty fun, gathering energy to play the cards you've put in your deck beforehand, that can give you weapons, placeable cannons, heals and whatnot, even if it's still pretty clunky and somewhat repetitive and you'll be done with upgrades and deck-building long before the game is done with you. It's also not too easy and there were many a times I was kept on my toes by it.
But it's the quietly endearing writing and worldbuilding that really kept me in it for the long run (even if I did play most of it on silent, seeing no need to hook up the headphones for its subpar soundscape). I don't know what I would have done without Dicey, but I probably would not have seen the end credits.
2022
Why do game developers think that adding QTEs to a lousy movie will make it into an exciting game?
Seeing as The Quarry was leaving PSN, I thought to try it out with my partner, and so on one cosy autumn eve we cuddled up on the sofa for an enjoyable spooky-month event, and made the mistake of choosing this.
We played for an hour or two, and it was after a long boring setup for a couple of characters instantly discarded, and then another long setup for a whole new cast of characters, when I had the choice between taking a fast route back to the cabin, or the scenic route, and I opted for the scenic one, that my partner decided that enough was enough and they were just too tired to continue that evening.
The tiredness lasted right up to The Quarry leaving PSN, and while I still harbour some interest in this campy slasher, I will never pay 60 euros for it (or, for that matter, even a quarter of that), when there are so many better actual horror movies to pick from, or actually engaging coop games to play.
I've played through one of these games before, and while it was no masterpiece in horror game storytelling and whatnot, it spent its intro on developing characters that mattered to the plot and giving them some poignant conflicts. It also didn't paragraph all their feelings in a "Policeman Joe will remember this" kind of flying emotions in reply to your most "important" dialogue choices.
They also didn't all move and smile like an AIs understanding of how human faces and necks work. The Quarry might not have a single good scare or dread to its name (in the first few hours), but it sure can creep you out. Too bad it's accidental.
I might return to it one day, because I'm a sucker for stuff like this; but I sure hope I won't.
Seeing as The Quarry was leaving PSN, I thought to try it out with my partner, and so on one cosy autumn eve we cuddled up on the sofa for an enjoyable spooky-month event, and made the mistake of choosing this.
We played for an hour or two, and it was after a long boring setup for a couple of characters instantly discarded, and then another long setup for a whole new cast of characters, when I had the choice between taking a fast route back to the cabin, or the scenic route, and I opted for the scenic one, that my partner decided that enough was enough and they were just too tired to continue that evening.
The tiredness lasted right up to The Quarry leaving PSN, and while I still harbour some interest in this campy slasher, I will never pay 60 euros for it (or, for that matter, even a quarter of that), when there are so many better actual horror movies to pick from, or actually engaging coop games to play.
I've played through one of these games before, and while it was no masterpiece in horror game storytelling and whatnot, it spent its intro on developing characters that mattered to the plot and giving them some poignant conflicts. It also didn't paragraph all their feelings in a "Policeman Joe will remember this" kind of flying emotions in reply to your most "important" dialogue choices.
They also didn't all move and smile like an AIs understanding of how human faces and necks work. The Quarry might not have a single good scare or dread to its name (in the first few hours), but it sure can creep you out. Too bad it's accidental.
I might return to it one day, because I'm a sucker for stuff like this; but I sure hope I won't.
Death is an inevitability.
Yet we spend such great parts of our life worried and anxious about it, trying to escape it, feeling sad and crushed about meeting it, grieving everything that we cared about inevitably succumbing to the great reaper.
It is as natural part of life as birth, perhaps even more so - you might not be born, but you will die.
What Remains of Edith Finch might seem as only about death. You will notice it for the first time when you open the Options menu - the book with their family tree is right there, and if you look at it for even a bit, you might notice something strange - only one name doesn't have a death date.
And far too many that do, have one too close to birth for comfort.
Indeed, the Finch family seems plagued by death, some in their old age, most in young, one terribly so; and you step into the shoes of the only living member of the family and through her eyes explore the huge family house from which no room of a dead person has ever been removed, only new parts have been added for the newly received.
It is a house of death, a literal museum of the family Finch, the rooms of its members kept in pristine conditions of the day they died - so deeply obsessed are the leaders of the family with memory that even a living twin had to share their room with the dead one for 8 years. It's a tragedy, and suffice to say, this family should really have moved on.
And yet the game is not nearly as morbid or as depressing as it sounds. Even within the most tragic of tales (even within the one I had the most difficulty playing through since my own child is the closest to that age, those moments mere miniature drops of time behind), there is hope and the acknowledgement of the beauty of life. A boy dies, but also flies; a man dies, but also lives; a girl dies, but within gives the greatest performance of her life; and so on. Within their deaths, they are not dying, but living, however short it might seem.
And you see it all through their eyes - within their rooms, you come upon the missives of their last memories and by entering them, you will learn what made them tick, and see their final moments; and again - while it sounds depressing, in the moment, it is not really so.
It is only afterwarfs that the real weight of this empty house and all those dead kids really hit me. The game, even within its very last moments, looks at death with acceptance and not with despair, but just a little dry sense of loss, as if it's too bad we didn't get to take the afternoon tea, but oh well, such is life.
Such is life, and such is dead; and What Remains of Edith Finch is the best walking sim I've ever played, and a surefire inclusion in my all time favourite games.
What's more, I yearn to walk again through the cluttered corridors and hidden passages of the childhood home of Edith Finch, even if all I'll meet there will be my lonely thoughts, the lingering ghosts, and the unavoidable fact of death. But what beauty as well!
Yet we spend such great parts of our life worried and anxious about it, trying to escape it, feeling sad and crushed about meeting it, grieving everything that we cared about inevitably succumbing to the great reaper.
It is as natural part of life as birth, perhaps even more so - you might not be born, but you will die.
What Remains of Edith Finch might seem as only about death. You will notice it for the first time when you open the Options menu - the book with their family tree is right there, and if you look at it for even a bit, you might notice something strange - only one name doesn't have a death date.
And far too many that do, have one too close to birth for comfort.
Indeed, the Finch family seems plagued by death, some in their old age, most in young, one terribly so; and you step into the shoes of the only living member of the family and through her eyes explore the huge family house from which no room of a dead person has ever been removed, only new parts have been added for the newly received.
It is a house of death, a literal museum of the family Finch, the rooms of its members kept in pristine conditions of the day they died - so deeply obsessed are the leaders of the family with memory that even a living twin had to share their room with the dead one for 8 years. It's a tragedy, and suffice to say, this family should really have moved on.
And yet the game is not nearly as morbid or as depressing as it sounds. Even within the most tragic of tales (even within the one I had the most difficulty playing through since my own child is the closest to that age, those moments mere miniature drops of time behind), there is hope and the acknowledgement of the beauty of life. A boy dies, but also flies; a man dies, but also lives; a girl dies, but within gives the greatest performance of her life; and so on. Within their deaths, they are not dying, but living, however short it might seem.
And you see it all through their eyes - within their rooms, you come upon the missives of their last memories and by entering them, you will learn what made them tick, and see their final moments; and again - while it sounds depressing, in the moment, it is not really so.
It is only afterwarfs that the real weight of this empty house and all those dead kids really hit me. The game, even within its very last moments, looks at death with acceptance and not with despair, but just a little dry sense of loss, as if it's too bad we didn't get to take the afternoon tea, but oh well, such is life.
Such is life, and such is dead; and What Remains of Edith Finch is the best walking sim I've ever played, and a surefire inclusion in my all time favourite games.
What's more, I yearn to walk again through the cluttered corridors and hidden passages of the childhood home of Edith Finch, even if all I'll meet there will be my lonely thoughts, the lingering ghosts, and the unavoidable fact of death. But what beauty as well!
2014
The first smartphone game I played and got really hooked on for a while. Until I figured out the optimal play and then once I went as far as I could go with it, got bored and uninstalled it in order to avoid wasting more time on its mindless movements.
Then a few days ago I decided to reinstall it to show to a friend and promptly got one of the highest scores I've ever had. But what I found out was that I didn't really care; however, there was something I did care about:
The simple zen-like activity of moving blocks around and getting these little pleasure shots from seeing them merge.
There's nothing much to the game, and it doesn't require much brainwork, but that's exactly what makes it kind of enjoyable when I'm feeling bad and just want to stare at something mindless, lightly lessening the pain in my soul with each box merged on a blandly colourful screen that suits its zen mood.
There's little to recommend here, besides the first high and the following zen, but doesn't that actually sound like quite a lot? I do not know how long I'll be playing it for this time, but as there are enough bad things in one's life to often take one's mood down, I guess I'll soon find out. For now, I'll be doing and playing anything else when I can, and when I cannot, I'll be moving the boxes, each a tiny but potential step closer to peace.
And then, having written that, but before posting, I played a bit more and saw the number climbing higher and higher and found myself excited enough about it that I suddenly wanted to see how far I could go, and just like that, the zen was gone and instead it became a slightly anxious long slog towards every higher numbers where a few wrong moves can suddenly gridlock you to an annoying loss.
After a few days of occasional play, quite unexpectedly, after a few bad moves, that's exactly what happened, and I considered quitting the game for good. Again.
So much for zen.
Then a few days ago I decided to reinstall it to show to a friend and promptly got one of the highest scores I've ever had. But what I found out was that I didn't really care; however, there was something I did care about:
The simple zen-like activity of moving blocks around and getting these little pleasure shots from seeing them merge.
There's nothing much to the game, and it doesn't require much brainwork, but that's exactly what makes it kind of enjoyable when I'm feeling bad and just want to stare at something mindless, lightly lessening the pain in my soul with each box merged on a blandly colourful screen that suits its zen mood.
There's little to recommend here, besides the first high and the following zen, but doesn't that actually sound like quite a lot? I do not know how long I'll be playing it for this time, but as there are enough bad things in one's life to often take one's mood down, I guess I'll soon find out. For now, I'll be doing and playing anything else when I can, and when I cannot, I'll be moving the boxes, each a tiny but potential step closer to peace.
And then, having written that, but before posting, I played a bit more and saw the number climbing higher and higher and found myself excited enough about it that I suddenly wanted to see how far I could go, and just like that, the zen was gone and instead it became a slightly anxious long slog towards every higher numbers where a few wrong moves can suddenly gridlock you to an annoying loss.
After a few days of occasional play, quite unexpectedly, after a few bad moves, that's exactly what happened, and I considered quitting the game for good. Again.
So much for zen.
2021
The grade is all for the story, which I found mildly intriguing. The game is also often quite gorgeous-looking in a dark, horrorish way. But when it comes to gameplay, it's rubbish, with most of the game having almost nothing for you to do but push forward, and yet the game isn't even brave enough to be a walking sim, instead breaking up the cutscenes and endless shuffling (can't even call it running, especially when they disable the "sprint" button yet again) with meaningless "push a button to continue the story" type of interactions.
The mechanically most involving moments of the game are when you're let loose in a small area and forced to solve some rather easy puzzles in order to proceed, with the one in the Red House being my favourite. It's the only time I felt any intellectual stimulation during the game, even if that too wasn't all that much.
But what's worse is when the game decides to amp up the actions and throw you into some escape sequences with insta-deaths and bad checkpointing. Considering how mediocre I found this game, those were the moments where I asked myself most seriously "why don't I just watch the cutscenes on YouTube?"
So it all falls on the writing, storytelling and acting, to prop up this nothing of a game. To a degree, it succeeds - at least enough that I saw the game through (though not enough to make me want to avoid gameplay videos on YouTube whenever I got stuck). The first half an hour where you're saying goodbye to your step-father was appropriately dramatic and even touching, enough to get me excited what delicious darkness and writing would be waiting for me.
And I did love the dark atmosphere of the game and its old broken-down Soviet hotel setting (even though it's funny hearing everybody talk and write in English in Poland), and I was for the most part legitimately interested in the story, and there were moments and themes where it shocked me and had some nice surprises (though some of the choices are questionable, to say the least, especially in a game that does nothing with them). Part of me even enjoyed playing through this world myself, instead of just watching it on YouTube.
It's just that there were too many moments where I was wondering why I'm even playing it or where I got angry at another aggravating one-hit-death or a meaningless blockade (if I have to cut through another goddamn skin …)
And then, as if the lacklustre mechanics weren't enough, once you arrive at the very ending, the game doesn't have the guts to even end properly, instead going for an ambiguous ending that means absolutely nothing in a game so concentrated on plot and narrative - and I say that as a person who routinely defends ambiguous endings by saying that the story so far has given us the tools to understand what is important to understand about it, that to go on would have actually been meaningless because we already got enough of the story to finish what matters in our heads.
Not here though. But I guess a shocking sound effect on a fade to black makes the game seem more meaningful. Goodness knows this bloody thing needs every support it can get.
Oh, and I wasn't scared even once. Just like in a proper horror game.
The mechanically most involving moments of the game are when you're let loose in a small area and forced to solve some rather easy puzzles in order to proceed, with the one in the Red House being my favourite. It's the only time I felt any intellectual stimulation during the game, even if that too wasn't all that much.
But what's worse is when the game decides to amp up the actions and throw you into some escape sequences with insta-deaths and bad checkpointing. Considering how mediocre I found this game, those were the moments where I asked myself most seriously "why don't I just watch the cutscenes on YouTube?"
So it all falls on the writing, storytelling and acting, to prop up this nothing of a game. To a degree, it succeeds - at least enough that I saw the game through (though not enough to make me want to avoid gameplay videos on YouTube whenever I got stuck). The first half an hour where you're saying goodbye to your step-father was appropriately dramatic and even touching, enough to get me excited what delicious darkness and writing would be waiting for me.
And I did love the dark atmosphere of the game and its old broken-down Soviet hotel setting (even though it's funny hearing everybody talk and write in English in Poland), and I was for the most part legitimately interested in the story, and there were moments and themes where it shocked me and had some nice surprises (though some of the choices are questionable, to say the least, especially in a game that does nothing with them). Part of me even enjoyed playing through this world myself, instead of just watching it on YouTube.
It's just that there were too many moments where I was wondering why I'm even playing it or where I got angry at another aggravating one-hit-death or a meaningless blockade (if I have to cut through another goddamn skin …)
And then, as if the lacklustre mechanics weren't enough, once you arrive at the very ending, the game doesn't have the guts to even end properly, instead going for an ambiguous ending that means absolutely nothing in a game so concentrated on plot and narrative - and I say that as a person who routinely defends ambiguous endings by saying that the story so far has given us the tools to understand what is important to understand about it, that to go on would have actually been meaningless because we already got enough of the story to finish what matters in our heads.
Not here though. But I guess a shocking sound effect on a fade to black makes the game seem more meaningful. Goodness knows this bloody thing needs every support it can get.
Oh, and I wasn't scared even once. Just like in a proper horror game.
2022
The fear of death
Is what this game is so good at invoking
Even when you know it will not happen
Cause the game is much kinder than it seems.
The writing is throughout envisioning a cold world encompassed in darkness with the few specks of light giving you hope while at every periphery the potential for absolute collapse lies in wait.
But the game believes in you, and in humanity, and from the space-punk drenched corridors it carves you a life.
Citizen Sleeper is a cavalcade of space opera and cyberpunk weaved together, with a healthy injection of humanism (and some nice diversity). There are many ways this story can end, and you can see them all with a bit of reloading. As the game goes on, it becomes easier to survive as you learn the place, create connections, gather resources, and overall carve out your own little place in this world floating through space where you can feel relatively safe, the panicked survival of the first part of the game giving ground to a more relaxed just-getting-by (though it does feel like you've broken the game). You can even feed a cat.
The knowledge is always there, that you're not quite part of them; but the heart of the game is firmly in a kind of multicultural amalgam of poor people trying to live beneath the larger political and economic forces that occasionally break through, and usually not in a helpful capacity. The free DLC trilogy deals fully with such bigger forces, but the predominant themes still concern the lives of those that are othered and the people who can accept them.
For a game where the main visual is an nondescript space station and the only colours the occasional (very cool) character portraits and the gameplay basically scrolling up and down the station, clicking on points of interest and choosing dialogue options, it's a wonder how riveting and exciting this game can be, and how atmospheric, the writing pitch-perfectly evoking the feeling of living on a capitalist space station (with all the nostalgic strength of a childhood spent in sci-fi novels), and how touching, with moments that will remain (it's the kid and the dad for me - for, amongst others, deeply personal reasons …), right up to the gorgeous ending of the last free DLC.
Almost like a good book - only there you won't feel you're one bad choice away from dying of an illness that you don't have the money to cure.
Oh damn, it was "living under later-than-late stage capitalism" sim after all.
Is what this game is so good at invoking
Even when you know it will not happen
Cause the game is much kinder than it seems.
The writing is throughout envisioning a cold world encompassed in darkness with the few specks of light giving you hope while at every periphery the potential for absolute collapse lies in wait.
But the game believes in you, and in humanity, and from the space-punk drenched corridors it carves you a life.
Citizen Sleeper is a cavalcade of space opera and cyberpunk weaved together, with a healthy injection of humanism (and some nice diversity). There are many ways this story can end, and you can see them all with a bit of reloading. As the game goes on, it becomes easier to survive as you learn the place, create connections, gather resources, and overall carve out your own little place in this world floating through space where you can feel relatively safe, the panicked survival of the first part of the game giving ground to a more relaxed just-getting-by (though it does feel like you've broken the game). You can even feed a cat.
The knowledge is always there, that you're not quite part of them; but the heart of the game is firmly in a kind of multicultural amalgam of poor people trying to live beneath the larger political and economic forces that occasionally break through, and usually not in a helpful capacity. The free DLC trilogy deals fully with such bigger forces, but the predominant themes still concern the lives of those that are othered and the people who can accept them.
For a game where the main visual is an nondescript space station and the only colours the occasional (very cool) character portraits and the gameplay basically scrolling up and down the station, clicking on points of interest and choosing dialogue options, it's a wonder how riveting and exciting this game can be, and how atmospheric, the writing pitch-perfectly evoking the feeling of living on a capitalist space station (with all the nostalgic strength of a childhood spent in sci-fi novels), and how touching, with moments that will remain (it's the kid and the dad for me - for, amongst others, deeply personal reasons …), right up to the gorgeous ending of the last free DLC.
Almost like a good book - only there you won't feel you're one bad choice away from dying of an illness that you don't have the money to cure.
Oh damn, it was "living under later-than-late stage capitalism" sim after all.
2023
I don't quite see the point of this game.
Besides a time waster and a somewhat-functioning Skinner machine, of course.
But in my (granted, limited) time with the game I didn't make a single interesting decision, be it during a battle or in any of the menus, upgrading items or choosing a weapon. What's more, none of the simple battles offer any challenge at all - the creatures have barely enough time to react to you before you've tapped them to death with a few hits. The bigger monster might require a few rolls or blocks before you down them, but even with them I've reached a point with my upgrades where they melt. I'm sure they'll get more challenging soon enough once the numbers climb higher again, but even then the fights are mechanically too undemanding. That's fine if that's what you want, but I prefer more involving, or at the very least more challenging, fight for one's life.
But perhaps the biggest sin the game commits is that there's no real reason to get off your sofa and go hunt some monsters because you can clean up your surroundings, put the phone away, pick it up again when you remember, and there you are - replenished. Not even once did I go out of my way to hunt somebody, instead just shrugging my shoulders when I ran out of stuff to do in my vicinity, and opening up another app. Not that there's anything to motivate it either - I could see stuff outside my vicinity, but felt no desire for anything, seeing no value in any of the pickups nor any interest in chasing down any of the monsters. You might want to do it, if you're actually trying to do the quests, but looking at the quest list I felt another instance of "what's the point of it all?"
It doesn't help that the game looks awful - bland GPS maps mixing with the occasional generic textures. The closest I game to a pleasant surprise was seeing low-pixel images of familiar places as backgrounds to some mineable rocks. Seeing a Google maps version of my street with some monsters on it doesn't really do it for me alone.
The best moment was joining a friend's game and having a laugh at the silliness of the game. I do appreciate it for affording me such a relatively simple and easy way to have a bit of a coop, but that's the best I can say for it.
So, all the complexity seems empty, the battles lacklustre, and the motivation for moving around in real life non-existent; perhaps I'm being unfair towards a game that requires more attention and more time investment, but throughout my time with it, it just couldn't convince me in why I should bother more. I don't usually play games like this and perhaps that's the reason for my distaste, but if it couldn't impress me with an experience that I've never had before, what could it wow me with then?
Certainly not with anything this game has so far.
And yea, I've read that the game gets more engaging as you go along, with combos, different weapons, and hunting specific monsters for quests and crafting, but the lacklustre presentation and repetitive gameplay loop isn't really incentivising me to explore further - you only have a few pages to convince your readers that you're worth it, and if you can't, well, there's always somebody else who will. Monster Hunter Now just didn't convince me.
Besides a time waster and a somewhat-functioning Skinner machine, of course.
But in my (granted, limited) time with the game I didn't make a single interesting decision, be it during a battle or in any of the menus, upgrading items or choosing a weapon. What's more, none of the simple battles offer any challenge at all - the creatures have barely enough time to react to you before you've tapped them to death with a few hits. The bigger monster might require a few rolls or blocks before you down them, but even with them I've reached a point with my upgrades where they melt. I'm sure they'll get more challenging soon enough once the numbers climb higher again, but even then the fights are mechanically too undemanding. That's fine if that's what you want, but I prefer more involving, or at the very least more challenging, fight for one's life.
But perhaps the biggest sin the game commits is that there's no real reason to get off your sofa and go hunt some monsters because you can clean up your surroundings, put the phone away, pick it up again when you remember, and there you are - replenished. Not even once did I go out of my way to hunt somebody, instead just shrugging my shoulders when I ran out of stuff to do in my vicinity, and opening up another app. Not that there's anything to motivate it either - I could see stuff outside my vicinity, but felt no desire for anything, seeing no value in any of the pickups nor any interest in chasing down any of the monsters. You might want to do it, if you're actually trying to do the quests, but looking at the quest list I felt another instance of "what's the point of it all?"
It doesn't help that the game looks awful - bland GPS maps mixing with the occasional generic textures. The closest I game to a pleasant surprise was seeing low-pixel images of familiar places as backgrounds to some mineable rocks. Seeing a Google maps version of my street with some monsters on it doesn't really do it for me alone.
The best moment was joining a friend's game and having a laugh at the silliness of the game. I do appreciate it for affording me such a relatively simple and easy way to have a bit of a coop, but that's the best I can say for it.
So, all the complexity seems empty, the battles lacklustre, and the motivation for moving around in real life non-existent; perhaps I'm being unfair towards a game that requires more attention and more time investment, but throughout my time with it, it just couldn't convince me in why I should bother more. I don't usually play games like this and perhaps that's the reason for my distaste, but if it couldn't impress me with an experience that I've never had before, what could it wow me with then?
Certainly not with anything this game has so far.
And yea, I've read that the game gets more engaging as you go along, with combos, different weapons, and hunting specific monsters for quests and crafting, but the lacklustre presentation and repetitive gameplay loop isn't really incentivising me to explore further - you only have a few pages to convince your readers that you're worth it, and if you can't, well, there's always somebody else who will. Monster Hunter Now just didn't convince me.
2020
I just don't like its style.
I played the first game, enjoyed it somewhat, but never fell in love with it in the same way I did with for example Dead Cells. The artistic style was just too cold and glistening, and the silliness not of the type I enjoyed much (also the characters looked weirdly bulky and a bit chibi to me - neither something I enjoy). The second game doesn't really change any of that so it was going to be an uphill battle anyway.
It doesn't help that in trying to improve the game, it makes some user-unfriendly choices that I really didn't appreciate, like not showing the player what they're choosing between before they've actually made the choice. It makes the choice pointless and the game a grind before having explored enough of it to have the information to actually make meaningful choices.
The action also feels clunky, especially in how you have to position your character; though that might be unfair as positioning can be a challenge in other such games as well, e.g. Dead Cells. I just never enjoyed it here or felt that I had enough alternatives to overcome it successfully enough.
The story offers some interest with its mystery, but not enough to drag me through it. Writing this review a month or two after last playing it I can't even really tell you what it's all about, some guy going crazy? It also wants to be too funny for its own good, undermining the seriousness with constant silliness.
I also found its bullet hell difficult to handle already in the intro level, and I found little enjoyment in completing most levels (excluding the challenge levels; those were pretty fun). I did appreciate the opportunity to fiddle around with the difficulty settings and I did enjoy the game more once I had turned some stuff lower or off, but after 5 or more hours I'm pretty sure this series just isn't for me.
I played the first game, enjoyed it somewhat, but never fell in love with it in the same way I did with for example Dead Cells. The artistic style was just too cold and glistening, and the silliness not of the type I enjoyed much (also the characters looked weirdly bulky and a bit chibi to me - neither something I enjoy). The second game doesn't really change any of that so it was going to be an uphill battle anyway.
It doesn't help that in trying to improve the game, it makes some user-unfriendly choices that I really didn't appreciate, like not showing the player what they're choosing between before they've actually made the choice. It makes the choice pointless and the game a grind before having explored enough of it to have the information to actually make meaningful choices.
The action also feels clunky, especially in how you have to position your character; though that might be unfair as positioning can be a challenge in other such games as well, e.g. Dead Cells. I just never enjoyed it here or felt that I had enough alternatives to overcome it successfully enough.
The story offers some interest with its mystery, but not enough to drag me through it. Writing this review a month or two after last playing it I can't even really tell you what it's all about, some guy going crazy? It also wants to be too funny for its own good, undermining the seriousness with constant silliness.
I also found its bullet hell difficult to handle already in the intro level, and I found little enjoyment in completing most levels (excluding the challenge levels; those were pretty fun). I did appreciate the opportunity to fiddle around with the difficulty settings and I did enjoy the game more once I had turned some stuff lower or off, but after 5 or more hours I'm pretty sure this series just isn't for me.
2021
What a weird game.
Last year when I got a new phone and with it a new enough Android to run video games, this was one of the first ones that I tried out having heard so much good about it, and for a while, I lost my life to this and Marvel Snap. I even got pretty good at it, though not great, unlocking the secret characters only through cheats after deciding the work needed for them wasn't worth the (personally) precious hours of my life. And then, after a brief but intense love affair, I stopped playing it and soon deleted it full-scale, thinking that that would serve my life better. I didn't regret it.
Seeing my best friend discover it a few weeks ago (now more than two months ago from writing this review …), I was caught up with the bug again, and having witnessed them playing it and feeling the itch, I reinstalled it as well.
My first disappointment was that it had kept none of the saves, despite being on the same phone; it was worse than tears in the rain as it's much less time-consuming to cry than to fully upgrade and unlock everything in this damn game.
But my biggest disappointment was that despite all my knowledge of the game and accumulated skill, I was incapable of surviving much longer than my novice friend. The character just doesn't accumulate enough XP or damage output or health to be able to survive the onslaught past a certain point. It was only after I got a few upgrades, with Amount (giving another projectile) the most important of them (especially with my favourite character, Gennaro, who boasts another extra projectile) that I managed to go far beyond the 15-minute mark and almost hit 30.
Almost.
And that's the thing - how much is doing well at the game really about one's ability and how much is it just upgrades and luck in drops (which can be modified by further upgrades)? There's no denying that skill matters some (I was capable of doing some real daredevil stuff that my friend is still learning to dare, allowing me to progress faster), but if it's virtually impossible to finish a run without upgrades, and the moment you get some good ones you get almost to the end, what is the value of all this accumulated knowledge and reflexes really?
Well, none, of course, it's a silly videogame, after all. But I feel more disappointed now than I did before.
But hey, I still enjoyed my revisit and watching the numbers go up and coasting at the very edge of survivability knowing that's mostly my knowledge of how the game functions, and my daring. Even if I'm unlikely to ever return to the game again.
But hey, I already returned once to this endlessly addicting weird little thing, so who the hell knows?
Even if I haven't picked it up once between writing this review two months ago and posting it now. Go figure.
Last year when I got a new phone and with it a new enough Android to run video games, this was one of the first ones that I tried out having heard so much good about it, and for a while, I lost my life to this and Marvel Snap. I even got pretty good at it, though not great, unlocking the secret characters only through cheats after deciding the work needed for them wasn't worth the (personally) precious hours of my life. And then, after a brief but intense love affair, I stopped playing it and soon deleted it full-scale, thinking that that would serve my life better. I didn't regret it.
Seeing my best friend discover it a few weeks ago (now more than two months ago from writing this review …), I was caught up with the bug again, and having witnessed them playing it and feeling the itch, I reinstalled it as well.
My first disappointment was that it had kept none of the saves, despite being on the same phone; it was worse than tears in the rain as it's much less time-consuming to cry than to fully upgrade and unlock everything in this damn game.
But my biggest disappointment was that despite all my knowledge of the game and accumulated skill, I was incapable of surviving much longer than my novice friend. The character just doesn't accumulate enough XP or damage output or health to be able to survive the onslaught past a certain point. It was only after I got a few upgrades, with Amount (giving another projectile) the most important of them (especially with my favourite character, Gennaro, who boasts another extra projectile) that I managed to go far beyond the 15-minute mark and almost hit 30.
Almost.
And that's the thing - how much is doing well at the game really about one's ability and how much is it just upgrades and luck in drops (which can be modified by further upgrades)? There's no denying that skill matters some (I was capable of doing some real daredevil stuff that my friend is still learning to dare, allowing me to progress faster), but if it's virtually impossible to finish a run without upgrades, and the moment you get some good ones you get almost to the end, what is the value of all this accumulated knowledge and reflexes really?
Well, none, of course, it's a silly videogame, after all. But I feel more disappointed now than I did before.
But hey, I still enjoyed my revisit and watching the numbers go up and coasting at the very edge of survivability knowing that's mostly my knowledge of how the game functions, and my daring. Even if I'm unlikely to ever return to the game again.
But hey, I already returned once to this endlessly addicting weird little thing, so who the hell knows?
Even if I haven't picked it up once between writing this review two months ago and posting it now. Go figure.
At first it seemed unbeatable. Then I found a character I clicked with and beat it twice in a row. And then I got bored.
A nifty little thing with very short legs, I thought. After beating it twice I didn't feel much pull back, nor any interest in trying out the higher difficulty. I felt like there weren't enough interesting decisions to make during play; before deciding to shelve the game, I did think that I had tipped my toe in too little, but eh, life is short.
That’s what I thought after a few hours with the game - and then spent the next few weeks of occasional play to 99% the game.
And I came so damn close to a 100%.
It's just that finding those last items is a bit too much trouble than I care for. But oh boy, slowly moving from failing every run to completing every run to balancing somewhere between them, with dips towards one or the other side depending on the character, difficulty (and luck), and finally arriving at a place where I'm playing with some truly bonkers strategies, this game managed to slip near my heart and make itself home there (for a while).
The simple and seemingly luck-based gameplay slowly gave way to a more nuanced understanding of the game and its characters. I still can't tell you what a good strategy would be or what I do differently now from when I started the game (and got whooped every run), but I sure am doing something differently, enough to even tackle some expert courses. The random dial can still sometimes swing so cruelly that there truly is no way of coming back, but you can prepare for it (to a degree) and the game does offer moments of sweet calculation as you’re trying to figure out the best course of action considering your limited choices (and oh how sweet it is to then come out on top). Though perhaps the sweetest thing might still be a clean run of few enemies and shields all the way. Arriving at the final boss with 99 shield and a big sword is a moment of delicious OP; even more delicious is killing him before he can even touch you (or running through the game with 999 stealth, cackling madly at the fools incapable of doing anything - and it wasn’t even nearly my wildest run).
So, at first a disappointment, blossomed into a game I spent more time with than I could have imagined (and definitely is worth more money than the game costs). Delicious.
(Played on Android, actually, but there's no choice for that ...)
A nifty little thing with very short legs, I thought. After beating it twice I didn't feel much pull back, nor any interest in trying out the higher difficulty. I felt like there weren't enough interesting decisions to make during play; before deciding to shelve the game, I did think that I had tipped my toe in too little, but eh, life is short.
That’s what I thought after a few hours with the game - and then spent the next few weeks of occasional play to 99% the game.
And I came so damn close to a 100%.
It's just that finding those last items is a bit too much trouble than I care for. But oh boy, slowly moving from failing every run to completing every run to balancing somewhere between them, with dips towards one or the other side depending on the character, difficulty (and luck), and finally arriving at a place where I'm playing with some truly bonkers strategies, this game managed to slip near my heart and make itself home there (for a while).
The simple and seemingly luck-based gameplay slowly gave way to a more nuanced understanding of the game and its characters. I still can't tell you what a good strategy would be or what I do differently now from when I started the game (and got whooped every run), but I sure am doing something differently, enough to even tackle some expert courses. The random dial can still sometimes swing so cruelly that there truly is no way of coming back, but you can prepare for it (to a degree) and the game does offer moments of sweet calculation as you’re trying to figure out the best course of action considering your limited choices (and oh how sweet it is to then come out on top). Though perhaps the sweetest thing might still be a clean run of few enemies and shields all the way. Arriving at the final boss with 99 shield and a big sword is a moment of delicious OP; even more delicious is killing him before he can even touch you (or running through the game with 999 stealth, cackling madly at the fools incapable of doing anything - and it wasn’t even nearly my wildest run).
So, at first a disappointment, blossomed into a game I spent more time with than I could have imagined (and definitely is worth more money than the game costs). Delicious.
(Played on Android, actually, but there's no choice for that ...)
2015
A hilarious comedy game with too much repetition.
There are too many endings that force you to replay huge chunks of the story in order to get more jokes from the other path, turning the game from a fun choose-your-own-adventure to a poorly working Skinner machine. Though it must be said it did get better once I found the skip buttons.
I would still have liked there to be better checkpointing, e.g. before every choice so that if you instantly die (which you often do, in very funny ways, so they're annoyingly worth searching out), you can instantly return to it after seeing the art for the ending.
The writing is great though, and following the "actual" Hamlet's story as Shakespeare wrote it (especially if you start with Ophelia) is one of the funniest things I've ever read in my whole life. I’ll probably return to this game from time to time to search out lines that I’ve missed, just because it’s so funny, but I still can’t get over the repetition (if you couldn’t tell from the fact it was the thing I spent most of the review complaining about).
There are too many endings that force you to replay huge chunks of the story in order to get more jokes from the other path, turning the game from a fun choose-your-own-adventure to a poorly working Skinner machine. Though it must be said it did get better once I found the skip buttons.
I would still have liked there to be better checkpointing, e.g. before every choice so that if you instantly die (which you often do, in very funny ways, so they're annoyingly worth searching out), you can instantly return to it after seeing the art for the ending.
The writing is great though, and following the "actual" Hamlet's story as Shakespeare wrote it (especially if you start with Ophelia) is one of the funniest things I've ever read in my whole life. I’ll probably return to this game from time to time to search out lines that I’ve missed, just because it’s so funny, but I still can’t get over the repetition (if you couldn’t tell from the fact it was the thing I spent most of the review complaining about).
A story of a society gone mad - Ryan wanted to build a utopia of ultimate freedom, but without any proper restraints it fell prey to amoral capitalists, ideological cult leaders, deepening paranoia and inequality, and the worst of human impulses, given free reign.
I cannot say what is the perfect form of government; democracy certainly isn’t it, but neither is anything the great hypocrite Ayn Rand suggested, nor what Ryan accomplished. The original Bioshock stories are deeply critical of the ideas of objectivism by portraying the logical apocalyptic conclusion of human selfishness run rampant.
But it’s also weirdly centrist. Bioshock games offer no alternatives to their broken societies. Bioshock Infinite famously equated the horrors of slavery and the revolt of the slaves, the most disgusting Bioshock has been, but even in Bioshock 2 your main opponent is the only person in Rapture talking about cooperation between the disenfranchised, social welfare to take care of the less lucky, and countering the power of the elite who are shown very willing to abuse it while breaking their own rules of freedom. That she also turns out to be mad and selfish is just what videogame villains are wont to do, whether they want it or not.
It’s a weird experience though, playing a game like that - you walk through the decaying walls of a failed idea, fighting some socialist-cultists, and following the lead of an unknown girl calling you father and the words of an extreme capitalist who in his previous life exploited and abused without regret and who even still encourages you to kill children for a small boost in power; that his story arc is supposed to be the one to make you cry is asking a lot (and I have to give it to the actor that he almost convinced me, despite my utter despise of this character).
Yet that’s also what makes the (better) Bioshock games more interesting than your usual run and gun. They might not be as smart as they think they are, but they are trying to grapple with some serious ideas. That they don’t offer any answers (besides “it’s all fucked”), might not even be as big a problem as I make it out to be, as long as they offer some motivation for thought.
Oh, and just playing it, the shooting and plasming and so on, is really quite fun. Playing on the hardest difficulty does sometimes feel like you’re trying to undermine your own experience of a fun run’n’gun, but it’s never challenging enough to be annoying and the game offers you such a variety of fun and interesting tools to tackle its challenges that it takes a long time for the enthusiasm for the mechanics to run its course.
I was however done with the game earlier than it ended. The last few levels I was ignoring most of the world and exploring little, just going where I was supposed to in order to move the story towards the end. It’s not a long game, but I felt it exhausted its mechanics some considerable time before the ending. For the last part, I was even running around with only the drill, having little interest left in the shooting that I had already been doing for such a long time.
The world itself is deliciously evocative, and I especially appreciated the occasional horror vibe. Rapture is a cool place to explore, much cooler imo than whatever the place in Bioshock Infinite is called (and I don’t even like games with water).
If it had been a bit shorter, and if the ending hadn’t been quite as meh, I would have probably considered it my favourite Bioshock game. As it is now, that’s probably Minerva’s Den. But hey, this one’s pretty good too.
I cannot say what is the perfect form of government; democracy certainly isn’t it, but neither is anything the great hypocrite Ayn Rand suggested, nor what Ryan accomplished. The original Bioshock stories are deeply critical of the ideas of objectivism by portraying the logical apocalyptic conclusion of human selfishness run rampant.
But it’s also weirdly centrist. Bioshock games offer no alternatives to their broken societies. Bioshock Infinite famously equated the horrors of slavery and the revolt of the slaves, the most disgusting Bioshock has been, but even in Bioshock 2 your main opponent is the only person in Rapture talking about cooperation between the disenfranchised, social welfare to take care of the less lucky, and countering the power of the elite who are shown very willing to abuse it while breaking their own rules of freedom. That she also turns out to be mad and selfish is just what videogame villains are wont to do, whether they want it or not.
It’s a weird experience though, playing a game like that - you walk through the decaying walls of a failed idea, fighting some socialist-cultists, and following the lead of an unknown girl calling you father and the words of an extreme capitalist who in his previous life exploited and abused without regret and who even still encourages you to kill children for a small boost in power; that his story arc is supposed to be the one to make you cry is asking a lot (and I have to give it to the actor that he almost convinced me, despite my utter despise of this character).
Yet that’s also what makes the (better) Bioshock games more interesting than your usual run and gun. They might not be as smart as they think they are, but they are trying to grapple with some serious ideas. That they don’t offer any answers (besides “it’s all fucked”), might not even be as big a problem as I make it out to be, as long as they offer some motivation for thought.
Oh, and just playing it, the shooting and plasming and so on, is really quite fun. Playing on the hardest difficulty does sometimes feel like you’re trying to undermine your own experience of a fun run’n’gun, but it’s never challenging enough to be annoying and the game offers you such a variety of fun and interesting tools to tackle its challenges that it takes a long time for the enthusiasm for the mechanics to run its course.
I was however done with the game earlier than it ended. The last few levels I was ignoring most of the world and exploring little, just going where I was supposed to in order to move the story towards the end. It’s not a long game, but I felt it exhausted its mechanics some considerable time before the ending. For the last part, I was even running around with only the drill, having little interest left in the shooting that I had already been doing for such a long time.
The world itself is deliciously evocative, and I especially appreciated the occasional horror vibe. Rapture is a cool place to explore, much cooler imo than whatever the place in Bioshock Infinite is called (and I don’t even like games with water).
If it had been a bit shorter, and if the ending hadn’t been quite as meh, I would have probably considered it my favourite Bioshock game. As it is now, that’s probably Minerva’s Den. But hey, this one’s pretty good too.