Different Class

When I went to log in to Nightingale yesterday, I noticed the minimally interactive banner (You can click it and it changes very slightly but only once.) at the top of the screen announcing the Steam Spring Sale. It doesn't feel much like Spring outside but if Steam says it is I guess it must be. 

As time goes on I become more and more enmeshed in the Steam ecosystem I resisted for so long. I used to see people talking about Steam sales and shake my head at the idea of anyone falling for such an entry-level marketing ploy. Now I hear the news and go "Ooh! I wonder if there's anything good?"

There wasn't, not really. I can't claim to have gone through the entire list line by line but I flicked all the way to the end of the main page, where what I imagine are meant to be the most enticing offers are, and didn't see much I was interested in. Not at those discounts, anyway.

Of course, there were some very heavy reductions, some of them even on titles I have wishlisted, but they're games that regularly go on sale. Horizon Zero Dawn : Complete Collection, for example, has been 75% off several times since I put it on my wishlist.

The problem with that one and several other bargains I noticed is that the cost isn't what's stopping me. It's knowing I won't play them. I don't even claim free titles from Prime any more unless I'm almost certain I'm going to play them almost immediately. 

Horizon Zero Dawn looks great in principle but in practice I'm pretty sure the gameplay wouldn't suit me very well. £9.99 may not be much but it's still a waste of money if the game's just going to sit there in my Steam library gathering virtual dust. Rather than buying it because it's on offer I should probably just take it off my wishlist.

There's an argument for culling the list quite severely. It's full of titles that have been on offer numerous times without triggering a purchase. For most of them, though, that is price-related. Discounts between 20%-40% just don't seem generous enough to make me think "I'd better jump on that!"

Even at half-price I rarely bite. There are four titles on the list at 50% or more off in the current sale but I haven't gone for any of them... yet. In every case, what that tells me is that I'm not really as keen to play them as I thought I was when I put them on. All of them are titles I wishlisted after playing demos in various NextFests and as I've said a few times, for a lot of games an hour-long demo is probably about as much as I ever needed.

There's also the salutory fact that the last several games I bought in Steam sales I either haven't even started yet or, worse, played for a while then somehow forgot to finish. If that was because I wasn't enjoying them it would be one thing but actually my hit rate on picking games I enjoy is extremely good. I'm just very bad at sticking with them for long enough to get to the credits.

Then there's the issue of timing. When I put Coreborn on the list, for example, I had space in my schedule for a new MMO/Survival title. Now I really don't, even at 70% off.

Perhaps most important of all, though, is that a lot of the games on my wishlist just aren't very expensive to begin with. If I wanted to play them - as in right now - I'd be happy to pay full price. For a discount to work its magic it needs to be attached to a game I'm already teetering on the edge of buying anyway. Then even a small reduction is enough to nudge me over.

And that's how I came to buy Class of '09 last night. I've been thinking about it ever since I somehow stumbled across a playthrough on YouTube a few weeks ago. There are lots of playthroughs of the game on YouTube. I'm going to embed one here but please pay serious attention to the warning that comes with the game itself:  

This game contains reference to sexual themes and explicit criminal acts such as drug solicitation, substance abuse, homicide, physical assault, sexual assault, fraud, and self-harm. 

Boy, does it ever. And the rest. That's just scratching the surface of the ways Class of '09 could offend, upset, disturb or outrage. If you're ready for it after all that, go ahead, don't let me stop you.

Tell you what, let's just have the intro. I'm not convinced clips work out of context and I'm not expecting anyone to watch a whole playthrough.

I've played two games of Class of '09 now. I think that's how it works. You just keep playing in the forlorn hope of getting any kind of acceptable conclusion. Catharsis.

My first run, Nicole hung herself. That was cheery.

My second run she's hiding at home because she thinks something she posted on the internet is going to get her school burned down by extremists. Compared to some of the endings I've seen, that doesn't really seem like such a bad outcome.

If Class of '09 was just sweary, boundary-breaking shocksploitation, obviously I wouldn't be here writing about it now. It's a lot more than that. It's witty, smart, funny, sweary, boundary-breaking shocksploitation, with very good voice acting. 

It didn't surprise me in the least to discover there have been attempts to shift the property to other media. It would make a great animated TV show, not least since one of its acknowledged inspirations is Daria. 

A Kickstarter looking to fund an anime based on the game raised $132k on a 35k ask last year, enough to make an 11 minute pilot episode. That's yet to come but there's a three minute teaser made for the Kickstarter that's really good.

It'd be nice if that all goes somewhere further than a pilot but for now the game's the thing and I plan on playing it plenty. I particularly appreciate the structure, which seems to resolve itself into shortish, TV-like episodes as you hit the inevitable buffers on every playthrough. More games should come in bite-sized chunks.

When I've seen a lot more of Nicole's fractal life, no doubt there'll be another post. There are supposed to be thirteen endings but how many branches before you get to them I couldn't say. It's too early to make any solid statements about how looped the gameplay is or whether there's ever any real sense of progress or achievement. I suspect there isn't and I imagine that's the point.

The one thing about the game that slightly worries me is that it's the sole creation of one guy, Max Field, who might just possibly be a bit of a dick. Here's an interview with him that kind of gives that impression. I'm not entirely comfortable with all of this supposed female psychological insight coming purely from a male perspective, either, although that leads onto a whole corridor of doors I really don't want to open.

He sure pisses the racists off, though, so at least he has that going for him.

Anyway, judge the work, not the creator, I guess. I can recommend an entertaining, if not entirely helpful, book on navigating that cultural minefield if anyone's interested. I liked it more than Rachel Cooke from the Guardian did but I can't argue with most of her criticisms. It's all over the place.

And we're getting off the subject again, aren't we? Back to the game. Or should I say games?

There's a sequel called Class of '09: The Re-Up, too, which I cannot imagine not wanting to play once I'm done with this one. It may have to wait for another sale though. At the moment it's a derisory 20% down although there's a double pack of both games (That I now realise is the one I should have got.) for 45% off.

I guess sales do have their uses, on occasion.

Fallen London Festival Of Games

Here's a little bauble you may have missed. There's a games festival going on in London right now. It goes by the catchy name of the London Games Festival. Always good to be declarative, I say. (I never say that.)

The LGF (See, if they'd have called it the London Festival of Games they could have acymonized it LFG and how much better would that have been? I used to be in marketing once, you know.) has a tag line: "Making London the games capital of the world." I wonder where it is now, assuming it's not in London?  I'd have guessed Seoul or Beijing.

Anyway, good luck with that, London. I'm sure we're all rooting for you but that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I'm more interested in your "Five amazing game demos. Free to stream now." Why don't you tell us more about those?

"Five game demos are now available to stream from the cloud, entirely for free with no download required, thanks to an exciting partnership between London Games Festival, Microsoft Azure and Gamestream

In a world-first for a global games event, you can sample key games from our festival-wide showcase of new indie games entirely free from home – you don’t have to be in London to be part of London Games Festival

The line-up covers highly anticipated indie games: Silt, Lab Rat, Grimoire Groves, Mask of the Rose and Paper Trail

Demos are available for ten days starting on 1 April to players in the UK, West Europe and USA"

Thanks! That does pretty much cover everything, doesn't it? Although I would have to query the "global games event" claim, given the hefty regional qualifications in the final line. 

I guess we'd better have a link to the website where you can join in.

 PRESS PLAY HERE!

There you go!

I pressed play yesterday afternoon, right after I ran across the NME news report that let me know I could. I get so much of my gaming news from the NME now. Who'd have imagined? They've even been covering bugs in Guild Wars 2, which either tells you something about the depth of the NME's gaming coverage or the sudden uptick of interest in GW2 since End of Dragons dropped.

The demos are each limited to sixty minutes (Or an hour as we call it here.) and your progress, always assuming you make any, will not be saved. They put that in bold on the website and now so have I, so don't say you weren't warned. 

All five of the demos look interesting. They all lean towards puzzles or adventures which is tilting in my direction. I only found that out after I finished sampling the first one, though. Employing my usual analytical skills, I just picked the one with the most interesting picture and clicked on that.

About thirty seconds into Mask of the Rose I realised what I'd done. I was playing Fallen London! Again! Seriously, how many times have I played this game in different iterations now? The first time was so long ago it wasn't even called "Fallen London" yet. It was called Echo Bazaar and I had to make a Twitter account just to play it because it was a Twitter game. Do those still even exist?

Failbetter Games is one of those companies that has a thing they do and they just keep doing it, which is admirable and understandable when the thing they have is as good as this. Fallen London has always been a great setting and I guess by now it's a great I.P. 

Is Mask of the Rose going to be a great Fallen London game? That's the question!

I'm not sure an hour-long demo can give us the answer but after my sixty minutes yesterday I'd have to say the signs are good. It's possible this could be the best Fallen London game yet.

It's cetainly the most visually appealing. The series has always enjoyed excellent design and impressive aesthetics but the nature of the gameplay has sometimes led to iconography that felt more suited to tabletop or even card deck than screen. MotR isn't exactly slam-bang action graphics but at least the pictures are bigger.

Failbetter Game's website describes Mask of the Rose as a "Visual Novel, Dating Sim, Detective Story." The Steam page uses the same tags, plus "Romance". I guess that's what it is, then.

The demo (And by implication the game) opens with character creation, something I'm not sure usually happens in visual novels, where you're mostly going to be guiding a premade character through a series of pre-determined choices There's still a sniff of the RPG about this one. 

Also, I haven't played many Dating Sims (None at all, in fact, unless you count Doki Doki Literature Club, which you would have to borderline crazy to do.) but I'm guessing it's probably not genre-typical to play a character who only wants to be friends, if they're even prepared to go that far.

(I just know someone's going to drop into the comments now and give me chapter and verse on how modern dating sims cover all shades of the spectrum of human sexuality and I really hope that's true but if it is, it must make the games hell on wheels to code. How many conversation trees would you need? You'd need a conversation forest!)

Other than that, to me it felt very much of a piece with all the other Fallen London/FBG titles, just with the pieces swapped around and the pack shuffled. There's the same arch humor, the same existential dread, the same fin de siecle, pre-post-apocalyptic ennui. The writing feels almost identical, which, since the writing is probably the franchise's strongest suit, is a good thing.

The setting and the vibe may be familiar but the mechanics feel significantly different, this being very much a visual novel not a "browser based story adventure". Fallen London's mechanics were "rather pedestrian" according to Alexis Kennedy, writer of the follow-up, Sunless Sea and he should know, since he wrote Fallen London as well. 

According to his Wikipedia page, Kennedy, who founded Failbetter Games in 2010 and remained "chief narrative officer and creative lead", left to go solo in 2016. Well, that's what we'd call it if this was a band we were talking about. From what I saw and read as I played yesterday, whoever took over is still very much working from the framework he established, narratively speaking.

If the ambience and the atmosphere felt much the same, the new mechanics felt fresh. One thing you could never accuse Failbetter Games titles of doing is tripping merrily along. They play slowly and get feel slower the longer you go on. Mask of the Rose bucks that trend.

It may be rash to judge from just an hour (No maybe about it.) but I certainly found the visual novel format much more sprightly, a skip rather than a trudge. Even though the structure still involves a great deal of repetition and the gameplay seems to come down to little more than asking a series of impertinent questions, I found the hour just flew by. 

It was also notable how strongly the narrative seemed to want to interrogate the concept. I've never made my way far enough into any of the games to find out if the storylines ever reveal how London came to fall ("Carried away by bats" isn't much of an explanation.) but it always seemed to me that it wasn't really a question one asked. 

Even more so, no-one ever explained how people were surviving underground, where the food and the light and the heat came from, how everyone wasn't going mad with fear, claustrophobia and hopelessness. (Okay, going mad with fear, claustrophobia and hopelessness is pretty much the USP of Sunless Sea but you get my drift.)

In Mask of the Rose, all these concerns are front and center. In just the small section I played we were treated to conversations about the number of Londoners missing or killed in the fall, the instability of the buildings that survived, the shortage of drugs, medicines and doctors to treat the sick and injured, the inability to grow fresh food and the consequent reliance on handouts from the mysterious and sinister Ministry of Accounting and Recounting. 

Questions were raised concerning the impact of the event on organized religion, there were references to social pressures around transgender identity and ethnicity and I had the opportunity to quiz two people who may or may not have been citizens of Hell about their romantic inclinations. It's a lot for a demo and it augurs well for the full game.

I've wishlisted it on Steam, for what that's worth. Mask of the Rose might be the Fallen London game I've been waiting for. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to go on waiting a while. Release date is "To be announced" and we all know that means "Not this year."

Four more demos to play, then, and eight days left to play them. With the clock ticking at an hour per game, that shouldn't be too hard to manage. I hope they're all as good as the first one. 

If you happen to miss the window of opportunity opened by the LGF, Mask of the Rose, Silt and Grimoire Groves all have downloadable demos on Steam. Lab Rat doesn't and Paper Trail doesn't even seem to be on Steam at all, despite the "Wishlist" button on the game's website that takes you straight to Steam's homepage.

More reviews as and when I play them, if they feel worth the trouble. And maybe I'll review the streaming aspect, too. I didn't even mention that, did I?

A Novel Approach

Two more demos from Steam's Next Fest today; one wishlisted immediately, the other on the "maybe" pile. Steam describes both as "Visual Novels". Let's start with the warm-up act, Night Cascades.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this one. It comes with a daunting list of "Mature Content" advisories: "Contains discussion of same-sex relationships, homophobic attitudes, smoking, alcohol use, mild rude language, occult symbolism, misrepresentation of religion, and corporal punishment. Contains suggestive romantic scenes between two adult women". A couple of of those promised to be new gaming experiences for me. I'm pretty sure I've never been warned about "misrepresentation of religion" in a game before.

The demo really doesn't live up to the promise (Or should that be threat?) of a list like that, although to be strictly fair, almost everything in there does make a nominal appearance, if only by allusion, with the notable exception of corporal punishment. The whole thing takes place in a single location, a small, cluttered office in a police station, somewhere in the early 1980s.  The action, such as it is, consists of a lot of conversation and a couple of "puzzles" in the form of photographic evidence from the crime scene.

There are three characters: a male police officer, who may or may not hold those aforementioned "homophobic attitudes", a female police officer, who is gay but not out to her colleagues, and a supply teacher and folklore expert, who also hires out as an advisor to the police on cases of a supposedly occult nature. 

All three of these characters have pre-existing relationships of some kind, the details of which are explicit in the case of the teacher and the senior cop (She tutors his adolescent daughter.) and largely implied in the case of the two women. (They were at college together, where they seem to have had some kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship.)

The crime under investigation involves some witchy shenanigans in the local woods and the gameplay, such as it is, revolves around close examination of photographs. There's a lot going on, especially for a demo that barely lasts twenty minutes. You might wonder how they pack it all in and the answer is by having almost no moving parts.

For once, calling this a "Visual Novel" stretches the definition of "visual" more than it does "novel". The camera is static and so is the background. The characters are standees. All focus is on the dialog, which for much of the time fills a full third of the screen. Other than during the two evidence examinations, which themselves are no more than very basic exercises in clicking on images, all that's required of the player are a few mouse-clicks to keep the dialog rolling.

I lie. Even that minimal degree of interaction isn't strictly necessary; there's an Auto Play option, allowing the whole thing to unfurl like a very slow, minimally-animated cartoon, the kind that used to blight the TV schedules in the very 1980s when Night Cascades is set.

I quite liked it, other than the music, which is so annoyingly cheesy I had to turn it down to a murmur.  There's really no game here at all but I find it increasingly fascinating to observe the way a game-like interface, allowing even an extremely limited range of interactions, can successfully raise involvement far beyond what could hope to be achieved with the same content in more traditional media. If I came across Night Cascades as as an actual animation using this technique I very much doubt I would carry on watching for more than a few moments and I'm sure I wouldn't read it as a novel but somehow just having to press a button to move the text on makes me want to keep going.

I could if I wanted, too. The game, if we're calling it that, went live the day after Next Fest ended. It's not very expensive and there's a ten per cent discount for the first week. I'll pass, for now, but I'm reserving the option to come back later.

The second demo is for a game called "The Wreck", described succinctly on its Steam page as "A mature 3D visual novel about sisterhood, motherhood, grief and survival.". Guess what? Based on the demo it's all those things and more.

I haven't seen nearly enough Visual Novels to know how original The Wreck is but it felt very fresh to me. My default take on these things has long been to wonder whether the ideas they're trying to express wouldn't be better served by other, more established forms like movies or television, books or comics. As I mentioned above, though, the more I expose myself to the possibilities of the new forms, the more I begin to understand their discrete appeals.

The Wreck takes that to another level altogether. It's an experience I don't feel could easily be replicated, let alone surpassed, in a less interactive, more passive medium. That's not because there's a lot to do as a "player". There's no gameplay as such at all. And yet somehow there is and it's compelling.

The key difference between this demo and the one for Night Cascades is involvement. There's no conceivable way you could add an Auto Play option to The Wreck. It's very much an active not a passive experience but I categorically would not describe it as a game. There are sequences when you need to look closely into the screen and make a selection but they have none of the sense of being puzzles, even in the limited scale of those in Night Cascades. There are numerous dialog options but it never becomes any kind of "Choose your own adventure" with multiple outcomes, even though there's a palpable sense of mutabilty to the experience, all centered on small choices made in the moment.

Pull back. The first thing that struck me about The Wreck is how beautiful it looks. I took four screenshots in the opening few seconds, a car driving down a country road in bright sunshine. After that I was too wrapped up in the experience to take many more.

If the visuals are striking, so is the sound, specifically the voiceover that narrates the whole thing from the perspective of the central character, Junon. The studio behind the project is The Pixel Hunt, "an independent video games studio based in Paris." This, presumably, means the text and dialog is translated. If so, the translation, at least in the demo, is flawless.

The voice acting is better than that. The actor ("Actress" as the developer's website somewhat quaintly styles it.) playing Junon gives what have to be some of the best line readings I've ever heard in a video game. The nuance is extraordinary. The accent helps, if I'm honest. There's such a musicality about it.

Like Night Cascades, much of the demo is taken up with dialogs through which you navigate by mouse clicks but the two could scarcely be more different. For a start, The Wreck feels hugely more natural, the characters giving the impression of three-dimensional figures in a living world rather than cardboard cutouts in a store-room. 

Much more significantly, the clicks you make change things, only in ways you don't get to see. Certain words are picked out in different colors and those you can click on to get a response, usually from Junon's thoughts, but each choice you make moves the scene on with no explanation and no going back. What Junon would have thought or said had you made a different selction remains opaque.

I absolutely loved the enigma of that mechanic. There was none of the glib sense of choosing a path, more the momentary recognition of a passing thought. As an evocation of the way a mind works I thought it was unusual and powerful.

The whole demo is steeped in smart, effective and to me, at least, original processes that just work. There's an extended flashback to a memory from Junon's childhood, which you're able to roll backwards and forwards in time to catch fresh insights. It's the demo at its most gamelike but it still doesn't feel much like playing a game. 

Neither do the times when words appear scrawled or painted across the backgrounds. Nothing asks or tells you to click on those, it just seems like the thing to do. Apart from one or two basic tips on which controls to use, nothing ever really tells you what to do next and yet I always knew.

There's a scene where Junon, driving her car in an emotional state when she probably shouldn't be, veers off the road to avoid a deer and runs headlong into a wall. Everything in the car flies up around her in slomo. Nothing tells you to click on any of it and yet you know you should, so you do and on the game goes.

It's hard to describe and as I said I didn't take as many shots as I normally would to exemplify and clarify. I could go back and replay it, get the screens I need, but why? The demo's there, still, it's free and it takes less than half an hour. That would be half an hour well spent, I'd say.

Very highly recommended, although maybe I ought to add a trigger warning for anyone having issues around end of life choices. It's curious this demo gets nothing when the much more inoccuous Night Cascades comes with a basket full.