Tag: video games

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The city & the city & the city & …

So, I have a game in my head today, and it’s not actually one I played recently.

I blame this video, which we watched yesterday evening during dinner prep:

It reminded me that even though I didn’t “really” play this one – I just watched someone else do it and offered occasional commentary – it really is a pretty great representative of the video-game-as-art.

An RPG where you may never really meaningfully engage in combat of any kind, where your skills aren’t things like Strength or Dexterity or Intelligence but rather “Visual Calculus” and “Shivers” and “Inland Empire.” Where your skills are voices in your head that literally talk to you, pushing for one course of action or another, making suggestions, informing.

A tale of a disgraced cop who opens the adventure by apparently going on a bender so massive and so intense that he wipes out his very identity and must re-learn how the world works.

A densely-written exploration of a city and all the tangle of stories in it.

An experience that is by turns darkly funny, ominous, emotionally touching, and (at least once) a little awe-inducing, too.

A lot of the rhetoric around the game on its subreddit and such seem to suggest that people think it’s bleak, or depressing, but I’m not sure where they are getting that from. There’s an awful lot of hope in it, too, and stress on the importance of connections and connectedness.

I like the video creator’s suggestion that really, all of us who live in cities live in a different one. This is true, I think, though having been forcibly cut off from it for going-on-two-years thanks to the pandemic has somewhat dulled my sense of what the city is.

When I moved here, someone who would become a very close friend insisted on taking me around on a tour. “I want this to feel like your city.” I’ve always appreciated that; it is one of those memories I like to pull out and consider when I am craving something that feels rather cozy. And I wonder, sitting here, feeling isolated from it, what my experience of the city was, and what it will be again when I can go back out into it.

What I remember: I live in a city that is full of art.

That means art in the somber, stoic ways of the Royal Ontario Museum or the AGO, where I can (could) go to spend some pleasant hours taking things in, a kind of communion where instead of partaking of what someone tells you is the body of a god that died for you it is another human being, giving of themselves across time and space and identity and place. Across that tiny synapse of a gap between selves, vast enough to contain all the oceans and never be truly full.

That means art in the rough edges of surprise, the bit of graffiti where almost nobody looks, the painted doors and mailboxes, the mural around a corner, the mysterious signage on a lamp-post with a story in it. The same impulse, less stately but no less intense.

That means art in the kitchens of cozy neighborhood pubs with worn upholstery and that one little crack in the window that someday someone will get around to fixing, maybe. And tiny little cafes barely big enough for a table and grand modernist food vistas that charge hundreds of dollars for a little ballet of delicate, edible constructions. And, yes, even the mildly exasperating, how-is-it-possible-to-be-this-hipster-and-this-bourgeois-at-the-same-time places, the ones where sometimes I feel I ought to be angry with them but at the same time isn’t it just someone having a dream?

That means art on the stages of grand performance venues where actors and singers and dancers whose names are known to the faithful come to present tales and songs, and also art on the street corners and in the tiny, cramped interiors of local bars where performers of all sorts come to gather, and to do the things they must in order to live. (Because the president of Square is wrong; what yearns for expression will express itself.)

That means art in the hands and on the workbenches and on the carefully-arranged shelves of the tiny shops of local craftsmen and artisans, some who make glamorous things like high-end jewelry and some whose shelves are lined with soap or blends of tea or dainty little candies or…anything, really.

Yes, the city is also, in some ways, bleak and messy and poorly managed. Yes, affordability is a problem. Yes, it, and everywhere, struggles right now with treating its people well. But it is also full of interesting people, making and doing and being and sometimes telling their stories to one another. Humans do that.

It is oddly reassuring to me to think about it still happening, out there, somewhere, even if I cannot go out into it right now. Perhaps someday I will get to go exploring again. I like that idea. I wonder what I will find.

I wonder very much what kind of city the others around me live in. What their experiences are like. What frames them. What they see when they ride a city bus or wait on a subway platform or look out a window onto a wintry landscape. Does the woman on the bus opposite me live in a cutthroat city, where everyone is constantly striving to backstab their way into positions of power? Does the man in the coffee shop staring at his phone live in a tedious city, bland and enervating? Or perhaps it is alienating, cold, spiritless?

I wonder what kind of city I will live in when I go back out into it; when I eventually manage to overcome the constant sensation of too-brightness, too-loudness, too-muchness and the unease of so many, so close. I hope it is as fun to go exploring in.

And now I think I need to read Invisible Cities.

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An empty space for play

First, a delightful thing to begin the day with: Twenty Thousand Hertz did an episode on Simlish. I do not play The Sims, but you don’t have to be even remotely interested in the game itself to enjoy hearing the history of this fake language or the ways it’s expanded as the game’s popularity exploded. (Easily worth a listen for the covers of songs alone.)

It’s a funny thing about simulation games. I can easily lose myself for hours in something like a Civilization or one of the many little “build and manage a small kingdom/village/etc” games that are available on Steam…but not The Sims. Perhaps it’s related to how I never really played with dolls as a child (I much preferred going on epic quests with a stuffed animal or two.) I bought Euro Truck Simulator on sale once, but haven’t ever really sat down to try it out; it has not grabbed me the way something like Monster Hunter or Chicory or Ace Attorney does.

So…why am I perfectly comfortable spending hours laying out a little village in Banished, or trying to see what happens if I go for the technological victory with the Egyptians, or something, but just…bounce right off The Sims or [Insert thing here] Simulator [year]?

I mean, I suppose it isn’t all that surprising that I am more attracted to games that have a stronger plot or characters. I am a story junkie. But…I think more to the point, there’s something about the kind of game that just plunks you into a space and says “Welp. Have fun!” and then leaves you to it that tends to leave me cold. As though the people who made it aren’t really interested in engaging with me. (Which is foolishness, I recognize; that very openness is the entire point if you are the sort of person who loves this kind of sandboxy game most of all.)

You can of course add things TO such a game that means I can get stuck in comfortably. I’ve had a great time in Minecraft after adding a few mods that layer in a little bit more of a sense of progression, perhaps even a little framework on which I can build a plot in my head – and adding other people to a game like this turns it into a hangout, not an empty house I am wandering around in, which also helps immensely. It’s amazing how much more comfortable just puttering around doing not-much-of-consequence becomes if other people are around – and hey, perhaps at the end of it you’ve made something cool together.

It seems faintly ridiculous to me that the reason I might have trouble with sandboxy games is that they don’t seem to want to connect with me. In other games I like, I know the creators are entirely unaware of my existence…but it still feels, somehow, as if they did what they did in order to share it with me and others like me; there is a connection in watching someone’s movie or reading someone’s book or playing someone’s game or going to someone’s show.

Someone is expressing themselves, and I am there to experience that expression, and that is often very satisfying. If the thing they have made is delightful, so much the better.

In a sandboxy game, I suppose I am free to express myself – but there is unlikely to be anyone to share that expression with. It feels sort of lonely…and there is that strange sense that I have just been parked in front of the TV in lieu of some richer interaction.

I am probably overthinking this (I am awfully good at overthinking), but it’s an interesting little meditation.

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Where the colors are

I suppose it’s kind of heartening that I’m not alone in feeling that an awful lot of media products lately have had that washed-out, desaturated, “this is serious so we can’t use colors” look to them.

It is, of course, autotune for the eyes. Didn’t hit the pitch you were aiming at? Can’t quite get the light for the scene just right? No problem, we’ll just do it in post – and then we somehow end up with a kind of…samey-ness to everything that I am marked as An Old for noticing.

I mean, yes, computers are cool, and yes, you CAN do some really awesome stuff with them, absolutely. But I love practical effects in movies; even the ones that read as a little clunky to a modern viewer still elicit a sense of ‘how did they DO that’ wonder that I just do not get from watching something or other from Marvel. I know how they did that. It isn’t mysterious to me. Respect to the crews involved in making all that CG come together, but there is a real delight in watching something and knowing it came from a whole team of bright, creative people devoting their energies to figuring out how to build that alien or explode that city or what have you, then doing it.

I suppose if all your art is “content” now – if it is more important that you make money than that anything is expressed – it is best to keep your costs down by letting the computers do more of the work. From the studio’s standpoint, all movies and tv – all media products really – need to be min-maxed in service to capitalism, and so here we are with cop shows with weird greenish filters, CG everything, lootboxes in video games, and entire generations of music listeners with preferences for computer-modulated voices over organic ones.

It’s also probably why approximately 97% of new movies/tv I hear announcements for make me check out immediately. Yet another entry in an exhausting cavalcade of sequels and reboots and so on, any new thing with a glimmer of promise or interest certain to be pounced on, copied endlessly, and wrung for money until absolutely nobody can muster the energy to care about it anymore.

I know, I know. Old man yells at cloud. It is a marker of my out of touchness with the world that it bothers me.

There must be others though, surely, who keep asking their tvs “…OR you could, you know, make new things?”

I suppose there are. The market for indie games is bustling and vibrant at the moment, at least until the big boys take notice and decide they need to muck everything up; I’ve played literal dozens of things from smaller studios that have been polished, complete, delightful experiences on release. Sure, some of them don’t quite go where I was hoping, and sure, there’s some janky bits, but oh boy is it ever worth it to be playing something that has the capacity to delight one.

The same goes for other media products, too. I will forgive an awful lot of rough edges and jankiness in something that delights me, in something that feels, as I experience it, like the people who made it were enjoying the act of making.

There is a kind of communion there. You had such an amazing time making this; I do not know any of you, but I can tell. I am having an amazing time experiencing it; thank you for sharing. At the tabletop, when it’s going well, everyone gets to have that feeling at the same time – making and experiencing simultaneously, enjoying it together.

That is just the best. Seriously.

I wish more of the people who make decisions rather than things understood it.

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Recently played: Moonglow Bay

I’ll just begin by dropping the trailer here. If this looks at all like your jam, why are you still here? Go play this.

The launch trailer.

For anyone who might like a bit more detail before jumping in, here’s the elevator pitch:

Somewhere in the Maritime provinces of Canada, a couple is preparing to embark on the launch of a new business: the kitting-out of a small fishing boat that will bring in the essentials for a tasty array of street foods. Unfortunately…something goes wrong.

Cut to three years later. One half of the couple has been missing since then, and the worst is assumed by all, attributed to some superstitious minds as being part of a curse upon any who dare to fish these waters. The remaining partner is shaken out of a depressive funk by the sudden arrival of her daughter from Quebec, and the two of them decide to at least give the business a try.

What follows is a surprisingly cozy little adventure with RPGish undertones in which the hero/ine (depending on which character model you choose to play) sets about exploring the seas near the town of Moonglow Bay, fishing up all manner of curious creatures, cooking piles of cute little voxel seafood, and gradually rehabilitating the initially faded and run-down little town.

The voxel art style may take some getting used to for some audiences, but I find it rather charming in its simplicity, and it lends a rather charming toy-like quality to the environments; everything is lovingly rendered from the models of new fish to the flag of Nova Scotia flapping at the stern of your little trawler to the cute little beds of vegetables in the community garden you (eventually) help to install.

Maybe this toylike quality lends to the relaxing vibes of the game, or perhaps there’s just something inherently soothing about the loop of going out onto the seas, fishing things up, then bringing them home to perfect another recipe in a series of little minigames reflecting your various cooking techniques. The core mechanics are generally pleasing and low-stress, making this a good choice for unwinding on a lazy weekend afternoon.

Or maybe there’s just something fun about doing it all with a friend or partner – there’s two-player couch co-op in this one, with player 1 taking on the role of the main character and player 2 their daughter River. While only player 1 can progress quests, both characters can team up in both fishing and cooking (in more complex recipes), making the process of stocking the aquarium with all of those rare and curious fish that much quicker.

Fair warning for those who prefer their experiences be highly grounded in reality: There are definitely some fantasical elements present in this little story – mainly regarding some of the more improbable sea creatures you meet. (Unless there is something going on in the Maritimes that they’re not telling us further west, I am fairly confident we’ve got some imaginary fish happening.) There’s also a little janky-ness, but nothing too out of the norm for an indie title; we haven’t experienced any showstopping bugs to speak of.

Also, you have a dog named Waffles, who has an annoying habit of parking himself in the middle of the deck when you’re fishing – but he is still a very good boy, and you can pet him, which sort of balances out in my opinion. 😉

Anyway. Overall, this is a charming little chill-out game with easy drop in/drop out co-op – great for those lazy Sundays when someone just needs to take a minute to flip a load of laundry or stir the soup or whatever. Easy recommendation for anyone who enjoyed Stardew Valley, especially if they enjoy the fishing angles of such games!

Maybe make that soup a chowder or something, though, because you WILL crave seafood something fierce.

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Recently played: Lacuna

If you go and look at Lacuna’s page on Steam, it will tell you right up front what it is. “A sci-fi noir adventure.”

And what we get is exactly what it says on the tin. Our hero lives on the planet Ghara, the big dog in its solar system, working for this universe’s equivalent of the FBI. One evening, you’re preparing to do protection detail for a diplomat…except that he gets shot before you have the chance to so much as say hello, and then we are off to the proverbial races.

What follows is indeed an extremely noir-ish story, both in presentation and content. We have the protagonist with the estranged family and the brooding voice-overs (the only fully-voiced lines in the game). We have the murder plot that leads, in a roundabout way, to something complicated and infrastructural. We have a little blackmail, even, for that extra frisson.

We navigate all this in a very point-and-click sort of way, roaming from grandiose hotels for VIPs to the rough-but-colorful neighborhoods of the lower layers, always taking the train. (And yes, I do mean literally “lower layers” – the stratification of society in this universe means that your only shot at regular doses of direct sunlight is to be wealthy.) At each locale, we meet a character or two, chat with them, and gather clues from the environment. So far, so normal.

And then we get to the tricky bit for any detective-themed video game: How do you gamify detection? How do you make a process that is so very essentially internal to the player’s brain manifest on the screen? How do you try to guide them through working out the right answers to key questions, rather than brute-forcing it with guesses?

Lacuna’s answer to this is…homework.

No, really; when there’s a problem that needs to be worked out you receive a “sheet” to complete with a series of multiple-choice questions, and when the game determines you’ve advanced far enough that you ought to have the clues, you’re invited to submit it. These are typically not incredibly complicated – two or three questions – but in order to identify the right answers, you must first have asked the right questions of the NPCs you interact with, found all the clues in the environments, and then trawled back through your chat logs, etc., to work out what you ought to submit.

I have mixed feelings about this as the major detecting process. On one hand, assembling the pieces into a confident answer can be quite satisfying. On the other, one thing that Lacuna seems to really enjoy doing is obfuscating information. In one early case, you are told very explicitly by the NPCs at one location exactly what the answers to some crucial questions are – except that those NPCs are wrong, and the only way you can possibly know that is to correctly deduce a different set of answers, open up a different location, and then complete a mostly-unrelated side task that will eventually lead to a single casual mention of the right answer you need.

Here’s the wrinkle that makes this especially important: Lacuna does not allow you to manually save. Ever. All choices you make are permanent, so it’s very easy (presumably by design) to lock yourself into a kind of cascading failure state. We did not do this, for the record; both of us have fairly well-honed detective-game instincts, but it seems remarkably simple to end up on a path to doom from pretty early on without knowing it. (A post-playthrough review of the game’s discussion boards on Steam suggests a number of people had this kind of experience.)

There’s also a feature that will add an additional layer of pressure to this by putting a timer on all of your answers to questions. We somehow managed to disable this without ever knowing it was there – or perhaps it defaults to “off” and is only enabled if you want an extra challenge? Some of the choices were plenty difficult even with time to think them through, so I can only imagine how much easier it would be to miss a key piece of information, or accidentally piss off an important NPC with that timer bar ticking down.

I appreciate the commitment to the “choices matter” approach to storytelling here, but I’m not sure I am completely behind these design decisions myself; at the very least, an option to go back and replay some scenes to make different choices without having to start the entire game over again from the beginning would have been welcome.

Oddly, despite the massive difference your choices can make in terms of story outcomes, your actual progress feels somewhat “on rails”; there are a number of occasions where we were barred from trying out something or following up with an NPC rather arbitrarily (usually by someone attempting to move or carry something very large and heavy. The effect is a bit more Marx Brothers than perhaps the designers intended.)

All of this sounds a bit like I didn’t care for the game, doesn’t it? Not quite; whatever I might think of some of the design choices, the story itself is enjoyable and nicely told, and the art – of the “pixels + dynamic lighting” variety that seems popular lately – is evocative and has a lot of fun little background detail that I wish we could have interacted with a bit more for additional flavor.

If any of this has piqued your interest, perhaps it might also be helpful to know that the game is quite short, even for thorough players like ourselves – perhaps 5-6 hours if you’re taking it slowly, and easily complete-able in a session or two. (The ending we got was pretty satisfying, but if you ended up with one you didn’t care for I expect a second playthrough would go even faster.)

If you find yourself with a few hours and the inclination, give it a shot; perhaps you’ll have different feelings about the detective system than I do, and then we can discuss it.

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Recently played: Death’s Door

The bus pulls up in front of the office on a gray, rather bleak day. We hop out, making our way up to the quietly grim edifice, making our way slowly through the halls, claws ticking against the tiles.

Did I mention we’re a crow?

More importantly, we’re a crow with a job to do. This is Reaper headquarters, and we’re running late to pick up our assigned soul for the day.

It does not go as planned.

What follows is a dungeon-crawling adventure that is simultaneously charming and melancholy. You trek through three major “worlds,” a la Zelda, each with its own whimsical cel-shaded theming. Each is home to a boss monster and a power-up that you’ll be using to revisit earlier areas and scoop up all the little hidden goodies. I wasn’t driving this one, so I can’t speak to the combat elements, but it’s certainly fun to watch.

So far, so normal. And I suppose there isn’t much that is new here exactly…this isn’t trying to deconstruct or revolutionize the genre so much as put forth a well-presented iteration on it that is polished to a sheen and mostly free of unnecessary fiddly bits. (For us – and, I suspect, for most who tend to be thorough explorers, there really wasn’t all that much backtracking even at the end of the game, when one would ordinarily be scooping up all the leftover collectibles.)

The twist here is more philosophical than aesthetic or mechanical: Everything that happens in this story comes about because someone feared their own death and sought to stop it. The little Reaper-crow you play very quickly finds themselves facing it; a Reaper is mortal while on the job, and unless and until the soul they seek is returned to the great vault, they will age and die. (Or very possibly worse…but to say more than that would be a spoiler.)

I think my favorite bit of this one is the little blend of humor and melancholy. The silliness of Barb the Bard and her quest for a banger (or the barkeep at the Stranded Sailor). The mononoke-like forest spirits. The little eulogies the gravedigger provides for each fallen boss.

It’s a worthy play. If any of that sounds interesting to you, hypothetical reader, give it a try.

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Adios, July.

It’s August already. How on earth did THAT happen?

I mean, I know the answer. Same way it was just March of 2020 like, three weeks ago: Nothing’s happening.

I haven’t been out to eat at a restaurant in a year and a half. I fear my efforts to write here are already monotonous, even though the only point of them is to try to keep expressing myself, somehow. It’s hard not to imagine my hypothetical audience being bored out of their minds with me.

And now I’d better start keeping an ear to the ground for Christmas ideas.

Time is really ripping by out there. It’s a little like being in a ship when the sea is stormy outside. It’s been so long since I last touched the water, the idea becomes alien, a little frightening.

We played a little game called Adios the other night. It’s a tiny indie game about a farmer who’s been helping the mob dispose of bodies while feeding them to his pigs. He’d like to stop now, thanks.

Except, as the lanky man in the sharp suit keeps saying, first patiently and then not so patiently, they are the ones who cut ties. Not you.

You feed the pigs. You look after your horse. You ponder the blight of the chestnut tree. You insist.

So does he.

Irresistible force meets immovable object.

This is not one of those elaborate games with branching paths and multiple endings. It’s not trying to be. This is a sad, quiet little story, earnestly presented and oddly moving, where some of the most impactful moments come from things our POV character can’t bring himself to say.

(I won’t lie, the part with the dog kind of killed me, and it’s been years since I last lived with a dog. You will know exactly which part I mean when you get to it.)

A little janky, sure, and perhaps the art style’s not for everyone. But who cares? Glossy perfection isn’t what we’re here for. If this sounds interesting to you, trade it for a couple of hours of TV.

Just, uh, maybe have a little something cheerful on hand as a chaser. No reason. Just saying.

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A spirit log for the campfire: Cozy Grove considered

There is a genre of game that isn’t so much meant for playing as it is for “tinkering around with for a little while, regularly.” Commute games. Games for waiting in the lobbies of doctors’ offices or for fidgeting with on long car trips.

Last year’s Animal Crossing was one of these, and one I know was a bit of a pandemic savior for many, as it gave us all a little something to do in the mornings besides read the invariably-terrifying headlines and ponder, you know, the seemingly inevitable degeneration of the world into a blazing mess as we bear witness to the unholy convergence of the accelerationism of the desperate and the indifference of the powerful into…well. This. Screaming a little inside every day. Y’know.

So perhaps it’s appropriate that 2021 has brought us something of the love child of Animal Crossing and Edward Gorey, the creepy-cute Cozy Grove.

No, this was not followed by a rampage.

Here’s the elevator pitch: You are a Spirit Scout, a member of a community-service group for kids that will look suspiciously like the Scouts we all know with the serial numbers filed off. Your avatar is a bright-eyed young thing with a sash just itching to be filled with merit badges by providing assistance and comfort to the spirits of this world.

Unfortunately for you, you’re stranded on the island of Cozy Grove, which has something of the vibe of a state park and its accompanying small rural town if both had been broken up into jigsaw pieces and scattered about in Limbo. (Not the video game, Limbo as in “a kind of ever-shifting purgatory.”) The only points of true stability here are your campsite (where Flamey, your trusty…familiar? Demon pal? hangs out) and the homes of the spirit folk (mainly bears) you’re assisting in working through their afterlife issues; everything else is constantly shifting.

Each bear (like Patrice the mail-bear above) has their own set of quests for you to do, and their own story to tell, revealed in chunks as you complete said quests. In and around that, you will fish and tend gardens and catch bugs and dig up treasures and do all the other classic things one does in games like this. (At least there is not an exorbitant mortgage to pay off, so there’s that.)

The game is structured so as to reward frequent play in small increments: Complete enough quests and you will be advised in no uncertain terms that you’re done with anything major for the day.

…Like so.

You’re still free to putter about making money or catching fish or decorating or whatnot, but otherwise you’re good to head out and go make of the rest of your day what you will. Tomorrow there will be a few more story bits to complete, and thus the cycle shall continue.

Aesthetically, the game’s certainly appealing – the creepy-cute visuals are accompanied by an extremely chill soundtrack heavy on summer-camp-flavored instrumentation, mainly guitar/banjo-adjacent. The same creepy-cute quality extends through the narrative as well; nearly all of the game’s little plotlines so far have wavered between bleakness and adorability, and the regular emails from your scoutmaster acknowledge what ought to be a rather dire situation (a single child stranded on a remote island) with a remarkably blase cheeriness. There has not, thus far, been any indication that I am likely to be rescued. (It’s certainly possible that your Scout is in fact Dead All Along as well, but I suppose we’ll find out.)

…So how do I feel about it?

I wouldn’t class it as one of my favorite games of all time, or even of 2021 so far: this is a type of game I’ve seen a lot, and other than its black humor it’s not bringing much to the table in the way of novelty. However, as a commute game, it’s solid enough; the little stories are entertaining, the art and writing are amusing, and I appreciate that the experience is deliberately self-limiting to just an hour or so before one is encouraged to come back later.

It definitely beats watching the news while I have that second cup of coffee before work.