Category: Videogames

Pentiment: Layers of Meaning, Labyrinths of Motive

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Crime, CRPGs, Fiction, Historical, PC, Videogames2 Comments

Somewhere in the Bavarian Alps is the little town of Tassing, steeped in ancient traditions and legend and overlooked by the Abbey of Kiersau, one of the few remaining monastic houses in Christendom where monks and nuns live as part of the same institution. It is the early 16th Century, and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire the Reformation is getting underway – but Tassing and Kiersau will find themselves gripped by problems much closer to home.

1518: Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist from Nuremberg working towards being recognised as a master of his craft, comes to Tassing to work as an illuminator in the abbey’s scriptorium. One day, another guest arrives – Baron Lorenz Rothvogel, here to check on a work he’s commissioned from the artisans of the abbey. The Baron is no stranger in these parts, and given the way people react to him he seems to have no shortage of enemies. When he’s found murdered in the abbey’s chapter house, the elderly Brother Piero is accused of the killing, but Andreas realises that this just isn’t plausible, and resolves to save Piero by seeking the truth – or at least a better suspect…

1525: Andreas, now an accomplished master of his guild, is travelling with his young apprentice Caspar.. When they visit Tassing on their way home to Nuremberg, they find that the town is on the verge of open revolt. The taxes levied by Abbot Gernot, already burdensome during Andreas’ first visit, have become outright ruinous, and Gernot has also imposed harsh restrictions. Meanwhile, the people have learned of risings happening elsewhere in the Empire, inspired by the Twelve Articles, themselves influenced by Protestant theology.

Otto, a leading voice of the growing revolt, is found murdered – and the townsfolk blame the Abbot, chasing him and the other monks into the library of the abbey. Realising only disaster can ensue if the mob storms the abbey, Andreas convinces them to give him a chance to discover the true killer – but the Duke of Bavaria’s troops are on the way, and Andreas must act fast…

1543: Magdalene, the daughter of the local printer Claus and a talented artist in her own right, can just about remember the events of the revolt, though she was very little at the time. The Rathaus, where the newly-constituted town council works, is to be decorated with a grand mural depicting Tassing’s history, and Claus has been commissioned to do it. As he is in the midst of his research, before he has even decided on which subjects he will depict and how he will do it, Claus is attacked by a mystery intruder.

With Claus bedridden with a terrible brain injury, Magdalene steps up to take up the mural project herself, and in the process she begins to peel back the layers of the town’s history to find a secret someone is determined to prevent coming to light. It is a secret which will lead her to the very foundation of the town – and to the hidden thread running through the two murders Andreas investigated…

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Console Capsules: A Half-Baked Blade Runner and Two Platonically Generic JRPGs

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Console Capsules, CRPGs, Cyberpunk, Dragon Quest, Fantasy, Fiction, JRPGs, Mega-CD, PlayStation 2, Science Fiction, Videogames, Visual NovelsLeave a comment

Time for another entry in my series of brief reviews of console games. This time around, I’ve got a look at a couple of Mega-CD games which I kind of bounced off and a PS2 game I put a seriously unholy amount of time into.

Snatcher (Mega-CD)

Not so much influenced by Blade Runner as flatly stealing from it, Snatcher casts you as Gillian Seed, a Blade Runner Junker tasked with tracking down artificial replicants Snatchers. Originally designed by Hideo Kojima for the PC-8801 and MSX2 home computer platforms, it’s a visual novel-style game which is replete with references to Kojima’s other work (you get a robot sidekick called Metal Gear) and got a significant upgrade when CD-ROM versions were created for the PC Engine and the Mega-CD, adding in a new third act which expands the plot with material from SD Snatcher, an RPG adaptation of the orignal for the MSX2.

Games generally don’t get convoluted multi-system lineages like this unless they strike a chord somehow, and in the case of Snatcher it is more due to presentation than gameplay. It looks fantastic for its era, is willing to go to gorier and more sexually explicit places than many games of the period, and there’s a lot of dialogue and information to plough through, but when it comes to making actual progress you have fairly simplistic puzzles and shooting sequences, some of which frustrated me. I gave up after I went to a location where it turned out I needed to show people someone’s photo to get them to admit to having seen him, reloaded in the place where the photo was, only to find out I couldn’t take the photo – I don’t think you’re allowed to pick it up unless you’re already run into the issue of not having it, which would make sense if you weren’t playing an allegedly professional investigator who’s trying to retrace the tracks of his slain colleague and might expect to need a photo to jog the memory of potential witnesses.

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Scratching My Itchy Bundle: Spooky Offices, Empty Starships, Cheap Diners, and Bloody Rituals

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Fiction, Horror, PC, Point-and-Click Adventures, Science Fiction, Scratching My Itchy Bundle, VideogamesLeave a comment

It’s time for another entry in my occasional series where I look through the games in the Bundle For Racial Equality from itch.io and see what takes my fancy. Since the last time I did one of these, Trump got back in office and everything in the US has gotten just that bit more fraught, so who knows – maybe there’ll be another Bundle For Racial Equality coming along soon to match the policing atrocities of the second Trump term.

Location Withheld

Location Withheld is a simple little exercise in implementing a first-person point-and-click adventure in Unity. You don’t walk anywhere, there’s only one location, and there’s not a whole lot to explore in that location; you’re just plopped in front of a computer with some case files on a string of mysterious incidents, and little do you realise that you risk being the next victim of such an incident unless you unravel the clues which unlock your only means of self-defence. There’s not much to it, but there was never meant to be much to it – developer Bryce Bucher did it as an exercise in proving to himself he could get a game published before he got out of high school. Short but effective, it does the job but perhaps doesn’t quite merit the full price tag, so I’m glad I got it in the bundle.

The Fall of Lazarus

You awaken from cryosleep onboard the Lazarus, a starship in deep space. What a surprise: something weird and enigmatic has happened to the ship. It can’t wake up the other passengers, you’re off-course, and there’s a weird cube thing in one of the cargo bays. It’s down to you, assisted by the ship’s computer, to try and complete the mission and get away.

The Fall of Lazarus is a walking simulator from No Wand Studios, funded via Kickstarter. There’s a big ominous timer indicating a five hour countdown, though I found I was able to finish it within two and a half hours despite getting stuck on some puzzles (often, annoyingly, the ones which were poorly communicated rather than the ones which were genuinely difficult). It’s a fairly generic concept, spice being added by your protagonist’s snippy relationship with the ship’s computer and the hints of your personal life having unravelled at some point in the past, though the dream sequences and whatnot are incoherent enough that they don’t so much suggest an alternative story so much as they undermine the legitimacy of both layers of the story. Did the protagonist’s partner, Adam, die of old age, or die in a fire, or leave them? What’s the timeline here? Some of the dates on the e-mail logs don’t entirely line up, in part because I think the developers sometimes forgot whether they were using American-style month/day/year dating or the far more sensible day/month/year system.

This is basically the product of the sort of game design process which decides “protagonist is guilty about something = PEAK STORYTELLING“, and the end result is riddled with enough clichés that the game seems to lack a distinctive voice of its own. There’s a hallucination sequence where you’re trying to make your way to a cake you never get to eat, ha ha, the cake is a lie, good grief stop reminding people of better and more original games. I enjoyed exploring the ship here but I didn’t enjoy the storytelling which was attached to it.

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PC Pick-and-Mix: The Cunning of Kathy Rain, the Tepidness of Techno-Bumble-On, and the Brutality of Blackshard

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Cyberpunk, Fiction, Horror, PC, PC Pick-and-Mix, Point-and-Click Adventures, Science Fiction, Videogames, Wadjet Eye3 Comments

Once again, it’s time for me to fill you in on some videogames I recently enjoyed. This time around, I’m going to cover two point-and-click adventures and a first-person explore-a-thon.

Kathy Rain

1995, somewhere in America. Kathy Rain is an aspiring journalist with a punky, leather-clad biker sense of style, in her second year of studies at college. She’s overcome significant adversity in life; when she was six, her father skipped out on her mother, who took her away from their hometown of Conwell Springs – and then her mother turned out to be a harmful, abusive individual with major mental health challenges of her own, to the point where last year Kathy had no alternative but to have her committed. One day, Kathy’s goody-two-shoes Christian roommate Eileen comes across a news article – Joseph Rain, World War II flying ace and beloved local figure in Conwell Springs, has died.

Kathy is rattled, for Joseph was her grandfather; she contemplates skipping out on the funeral, but eventually hops on her beloved bike (the Katmobile) and heads to Conwell Springs to pay her respects, and to finally break the ice with her grandma, who she’s not had contact with since her mother took her away. As Kathy explains how her mother had filled her head with nonsense about her paternal grandparents which she only later realised were lies designed to turn Kathy against them, the two reconcile and reminisce about old times… and then granny drops the bombshell.

You see, it turns out that back in 1981, not too long after Kathy and her mother left Conwell Springs, Joseph met with some sort of horrible disaster; the local sheriff found him in an unresponsive state in the local woods, and doctors were unable to get to the bottom of what was wrong. Initially they assumed he’d had some sort of stroke or other neurological event, but a series of MRI scans revealed no damage whatsoever and they were at a loss to explain why he had gone catatonic. It was a state he’d never recover from.

Kathy decides there’s something worth digging into here, and begins her own investigation into Joseph’s strange accident… if it even was an accident. Bit by bit it becomes apparent that there’s something very, very strange in the woods around Conwell Springs – and the truth about what happened to Joseph will only be uncovered if Kathy penetrates to the heart of it. So begins a journey which sees her confronting otherworldly forces and her own personal history – for the force at the heart of the woods has its own plans for Kathy Rain…

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Heaven’s Vault: A Breath of Rareified Air

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Fiction, PC, Science Fiction, VideogamesLeave a comment

Aliya is an archaeologist, and a resident of the Nebula – a cluster of inhabited Moons (planetoids) floating in space, with streams of liquid and gas running between them known as the Rivers. Aliya sails the Rivers in her ship, the Nightingale, seeking to piece together the history of the Nebula through studying artifacts and texts. Aliya is able to do this in part because she is part of the University of Iox, having been adopted by Professor Myari at a young age out of the slums of the deprived Moon of Elboreth. Iox is the most powerful Moon in the Nebula, and forms the hub of the Iox Protectorate, a federation of a number of Moons which is nonetheless a mere shadow of the Holy Empire which used to rule from Iox – or, for that matter, the older and stranger bodies which existed before the Holy Empire.

Aliya’s work is difficult for several reasons; one is that the first Empress of the Holy Empire issued an edict that all knowledge of “Ancient”, the written language of the Nebula prior to that point, should be excised, so all truly old pieces of text take a bit of effort to translate, though Aliya’s vocabulary is growing bit by bit. The other major problem is that history is a despised discipline on Iox – for the in-vogue philosophy among the intelligentsia is Loop Philosophy, which believes that time is cyclical and therefore there’s no particular need to uncover history when it’ll all come around again when you wait anyway. Why, for that matter, would anyone bother learning to invent and build their own robots, when robots can be excavated from chambers deep beneath Iox where they were buried a long time ago?

Nonetheless, on some level Myari admires Aliya’s persistence and respects her skills – and that’s why, despite the relationship between them being somewhat rocky due to their differences in outlook, Myari calls on Aliya for assistance in a crisis. Janniqi Renba, an expert roboticist, went on an expedition of his own a while back but has fallen out of contact, and Myari is increasingly concerned for his safety. Myari exhorts Aliya to track down Renba, and to that end assigns her a robot to act as a helper to Aliya (and a pair of eyes and ears, and occasionally a mouthpiece, for Myari). Aliya dubs the robot “Six”, for she’s been assigned five robots before – and One to Five have all suffered dire fates.

So off they go into the depths of the Nebula to seek Renba – and soon enough it becomes apparent that whatever it was Renba was doing, it doesn’t seem to have any obvious connection to robotics. If anything, he seems to have been engaged in archaeological work of his own – and when Aliya tries to follow up on Renba’s work, she finds herself drawn into a mystery in which the fate of the Nebula itself may hang in the balance…

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Parserdammerung: Twilight of the Text Adventures

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Books and Periodicals, Gareth Pitchford, Literary Criticism, Film Theory, and Art Appreciation, Non-Fiction, Text Adventures, Videogames1 Comment

Many text adventure fans could give you a quick potted history of the medium; Will Crowther wrote Colossal Cave in 1976 to run on mainframe-style systems, Scott Adams founded Adventure International in 1979 in the wake of his 1978 effort Adventureland, the first text adventure designed for home computers, and then outfits like Infocom in the USA or Magnetic Scrolls or Level 9 in the UK elevated the format to ever-higher standards over the span of the 1980s. Then graphical adventures came in and the likes of Sierra and LucasArts became the new hotness, and the commercial viability of the format faded away despite latter-day efforts like Eric the Unready trying to find novel ways to repackage text adventure gameplay. Then the genre lay dormant until enthusiasts online rekindled it as a hobbyist scene, aided in part by a new generation of coding languages like Inform or TADS and the proliferation of text adventure interpreters which allowed games to be played on a variety of platforms without extensive recoding by developers.

But what about that bit in between the death of the commercial industry in the late 1980s and the rise of the online hobbyist scene in the mid-to-late 1990s? There was an awkward gap in the early 1990s where text adventures basically didn’t trouble mainstream retail distribution channels outside of a very few quixotic attempts to defy the direction the industry was taking and the odd compilation bundle, but at the same time the online community was still at its nascent stages. (One could debate about when exactly the online scene hit critical mass, but important landmarks would be 1995, when the first Interactive Fiction Competition took place, or 1993, when the Inform language was first released and Graham Nelson put out Curses, the first game written in Inform that wasn’t a tech test and a release which seriously raised the bar in terms of the quality of the online homebrew scene’s output.)

With the organising force of the Internet available to only a few and with the genre losing its place at the top table of the industry, text adventures entered a twilight period – a Dark Ages where local, regional scenes thrived or failed based on the enthusiasm and ingenuity of their participants. Insight into one such scene is offered in Twilight Inventory by Gareth Pitchford. Drawing largely on reviews written for fanzines back in the 1990s, Pitchford is specifically shedding light into what was going on in the world of Britain’s 8-bit home computers – a world of Spectrums, Amstrads, and BBC Micros whose commercial fortunes were fast fading at the same time as text adventures were, and had enjoyed expansive libraries of commercial text adventure releases during their heyday.

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GOGathon: Doom + Doom II

On By ArthurIn Fiction, First-Person Shooters, GOGathon, Horror, PC, Science Fiction, Videogames4 Comments

Doom is a widely-beloved classic for a reason, and whilst there’s much to be said for the simplicity of the original release or the community spirit of various fan-written engines usable to run the original game files on modern machines (or toasters, or pregnancy tests, or…), Doom + Doom II finds Bethesda and ZeniMax trying to find an official new engine for the classic Doom games for modern machines, taking advantage of present-day game controllers, widescreen screen resolutions, and all that jazz to make the old bird sing. You get an absolute ton of content with it too, so here’s a rundown of my thoughts on the different iterations of 2.5D-era Doom you get with it.

Doom

The original Doom remains a briskly enjoyable little FPS, rudimentary enough that its limitations like the fact that you can’t look up and down, can’t jump, and it’s not true 3D are all rather obvious, but skilled enough at working within these limitations to remain impressive. The advantage it has over modern first-person shooters is primarily in the fact that it runs incredibly smoothly; the fact that you can run Doom on basically anything is a tech meme for a reason. You could probably run Wolfenstein 3D on even more things, but Wolfenstein is a bit more simplistic and samey than Doom, in part because of the more limited range of opponents and environments. By comparison, Doom was cutting-edge for 1993, which means it’s small and compact enough by necessity to squeeze onto all sorts of things but still remains kind of cool when it does so – and when you run it on a modern machine it’s astonishingly smooth and fast, which means it can still be a refreshing antidote to more recent but more resource-hungry FPS games which might not run as smoothly on your rig.

The version you get here contains all three of the original episodes, released via shareware (the first episode was put out for free and could be circulated as wished, if you wanted the next two you had to put down money for them), as well as Thy Flesh Consumed, the fourth episode tacked on when it was rereleased as The Ultimate Doom for the conventional retail market. There’s a notable discontinuity between the original three episodes and Thy Flesh Consumed, largely because the extra episode goes for being deliberately awkward for the sake of adding a bit of extra difficulty. Thy Flesh Consumed also, like Doom II (which preceded it) dispenses with the cool maps between levels showcasing your progress across the settings of the different episodes (respectively the Phobos base where a teleportation experiment has gone badly wrong and opened a gate to Hell, the base on Deimos, which got drawn into Hell, and Hell itself) in the main game. Still, it’s cool you got to revenge the bunny that gets killed in the iconic ending to the original three episodes.

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Quitting A New Beginning Before I Even Get Started

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Daedalic Entertainment, Fiction, PC, Point-and-Click Adventures, Science Fiction, VideogamesLeave a comment

Bent Svensson is a widowed retiree who finds himself profoundly depressed about the whole “widowed” and “retired” thing. Back when he was in active work, he was a marine biologist who cared deeply about ecology – so deeply that he ended up spending a stint in hospital from overwork. These days, he lives alone, trusting his son Duve to continue his work, mourning the loss of his wife, and badgered into ignoring his passion for ecology in favour of living for himself by a therapist who has little to no understanding of his personal values. One day, as he is puttering about some chores, he is visited by a strangely-dressed woman flying an unusually modified helicopter, who tells him an incredible story.

This woman is Fay, an inhabitant of a post-apocalyptic future where runaway pollution has reduced humanity to a few dwindling populations in deep underground bunkers, signs up for a desperate mission to try and save the planet by travelling back in time to a period when it was still possible to turn things around and prevent runaway climate change from ruining everything. At first they leaped back to 2050, and only after numerous perils did they realise that they’d miscalculated and the point of no return was substantially earlier. Nonetheless, information uncovered in 2050 revealed that Bent’s work could have provided key technologies that could have salvaged the situation and turned around the downfall of the climate. Can Fay persuade Bent to believe her story, or is Bent too marinated in cynicism and therapeutic codswallop to believe he can make a difference still?

A New Beginning is a point and click adventure by Daedalic. Its original German-language release was in 2010, following on the heels of Daedalic’s early adventures Edna and Harvey: The Breakout and The Whispered World; a “final cut” of the game (the one I’m revieweing), translated into a broader range of languages and otherwise tuned up here and there, would follow in 2012, a year which saw something of a surge of Daedalic releases – alongside the final cut of A New Beginning they also released the first two Deponia games and The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav.

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Console Capsules: Finely-Honed Hitmen, Meddling Kids, and UFO Legacies

On By ArthurIn Action, Adventure Games, Comedy, Console Capsules, Crime, CRPGs, Cyberpunk, Espionage, Fantasy, Fiction, Historical, Horror, JRPGs, Lazer-X, Mega Drive, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Point-and-Click Adventures, Sandbox Action, Science Fiction, Sega, Techno-Thriller, UFO Soft, Videogames, WesternLeave a comment

Welcome to Console Capsules, the console equivalent to my PC Pick-and-Mix series – this is going to be my tagline for when I fancy reviewing some console games I don’t want to put out a full-length review for. This time around I’ll be covering the rest of the most recent Hitman trilogy, an old Scooby-Doo point-and-click adventure I hadn’t been aware existed until recently, and then I’m going to make a total mockery of the concept ofthis article series.

Hitman 2 and Hitman 3 (PS4/PS5)

It’s been a while since I took a look at 2016’s Hitman – the first entry in the World of Assassination trilogy – having finally gotten around to trying it out during the pandemic. I was left suitably impressed, regarding it as a welcome return to and elaboration upon the gameplay principles the series was built upon, that being large, complex levels where you were given a basic mission objective – assassinating a particular character – and given carte blanche in how you achieved it. This was especially welcome after 2012’s Hitman: Absolution had a few too many levels which deviated from that wide-open approach to provide a more linear action experience in common with other triple-A narrative action games of the era, watering down Hitman‘s unique selling point for the sake of conforming to what the rest of the industry is going.

The 2016 Hitman didn’t just reverse that trend, it also doubled down on the unique features of Hitman by creating truly massive levels where a rich variety of different approaches were possible and supported, creating a true murder sandbox. Its 2018 sequel, Hitman 2, offers more of the same, with a somewhat more polished engine and quality of life features. Again, it’s largely based around big levels, assassination as the core of gameplay (though missions often have additional goals), and encouraging replayability through very similar means to those the first game used.

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Silent Hill 2: Remade With Love, Replete With Malice

On By ArthurIn Fiction, Horror, PC, Silent Hill, Survival Horror, Videogames1 Comment

Konami have been justifiably taken to task for their poor custodianship of the Silent Hill franchise. It was all going so well when Team Silent put out the first four games – even the weakest of which constitute compelling stylistic experiments well worth the attempt and with lasting influence on the survival genre, the best of which are absolute classics of the form. The next four major games in the series struggled by comparison, facing declining critical and commercial receptions, and then a couple of years after the muted reception of Downpour there was the damaging PT debacle, in which Konami put out a teaser minigame which turned out to be a taster of Silent Hills, a new game directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro with artistic contributions from Junji Ito, only for Konami to unceremoniously cancel the project, with recrimination and bitterness all around.

For a good while now the franchise has effectively laid fallow – like other mostly-dormant Konami properties, it’s largely been used as a source of concepts for pachinko games or multi-franchise crossover games, to the point where a chibi Pyramid Head has shown up in Bomberman and International Track and Field games. In 2022, however, Konami announced a slew of new Silent Hill projects – interestingly, with different creative teams working on each of them, suggesting a willingness to let various different people throw some ideas at the wall to see what sticks.

Late last year the first of these – Silent Hill: Ascension – emerged; this was an interactive drama series in which the direction of the story was shaped by audience responses between episodes, like a big budget version of those Slender Man web series from back in the day. That kind of came and went without me really noticing, and checking out some reviews after the fact people don’t seem to have been fond of it; in particular, the fact that it’s a CGI series rather than live action means that it came across a bit like a group playthrough of a Telltale Games-style cinematic adventure game (a la The Walking Dead) which you can’t actually download yourself and do a solo playthrough of.

Much more exciting to me – and, it seems, to a rapturous videogame-playing public – is the remake of Silent Hill 2 that’s been put out by Bloober Team, whose Observer I’d previously reviewed on here. Though I felt that game had some shortcomings – in particular, a rather phoned-in voice acting performance from Rutger Hauer – the team’s knack for implementing a really disturbing aesthetic notable. Moreover, Bloober Team are big Silent Hill fans; though as with many studios their earliest releases consist of small, unambitious little games aimed at the more casual end of the market, their first really major release was Layers of Fear, which established their survival horror credentials and was apparently spawned out of a desire to make the sort of game which PT had hinted at being.

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