Attention Hermes Conrad: you are about to receive a letter from the central bureacracy.
I mentioned Frostpunk's more amateurish predecessor This War of Mine for its unfortunate obfuscation of so many game rules as to force you to play it via wiki cheating. Not to say it lacks quality. In fact I wish I could want to play it more.
My elite 17-inventory scavenger mule got depressed and abandoned my refuge, which almost made me uninstall right then and there, as halving my loot intake has pretty much doomed me. Still, with the spring thaw, a grandfather and a little boy washed up on my doorstep and I'm impressed by the amount of work 11Bit put into differentiating children from adult survivors, down to idle animations. Where adults just stand or shuffle around, this little kneebiter's rushing to and fro all day excitedly, from his own desginated hopscotch and other play locations to bugging the adults at their workstations. While he starts with no skills, you can have any adult call him over while performing various mundane tasks (as in the image) until he becomes an adept little routine maintenance worker who moonlights in the psychotherapeutic role of hugging people and telling them not to be sad.
Despite its game design faults, This War of Mine still manages to emphasize the right points of its "civilian in a warzone" premise artistically. Unfortunately, its faults include an inordinate amount of padding for time. Every day starts with three unnecessary and unskippable splash screens / cutscenes, you're not permitted to save game, relying on daily autosaves, cannot fast-forward even if all you can do is wait 'til mid-day to see if visitors show up or wait six in-game hours for your residents to catch up on their beauty rest. Yes, you heard me, watching people sleep is an unskippable activity in this game! Can I not get some grass to grow and paint to dry to break up the routine at least?
This was hardly the first game I've criticized in recent years for padding its campaign time with interface timesinks. At first I assumed it was merely a matter of building addictive anticipation in games like Battletech, but in its incarnation into lower-budget randomization like Battle Brothers, Urtuk and Darkest Dungeon it seems to at least as much fill the role of good old-fashioned filler. The worst offender I've seen so far however has to be Ashwalkers, a twelve-dollar game that would be overpriced at six.
I rarely jump on new releases but in this case I sniffed an aesthetic successor to This War of Mine and hoped someone had smoothed out the wrinkles. While still a survival game, Ashwalkers takes a more traditional adventure game approach as you linearly traverse zone by zone making not one, not two but several! choices along the way. A walking simulator with occasional randomized foraging tacked on. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against minimalist visuals and sound (others I've named here pulled that part off at least) but sadly it ramps up the interface timesinks to such an extent as to become an exercise in waiting to be permitted to act. Here's how half a zone (about a tenth of the campaign) plays out:
- After an inter-act intermission, you graaadually zoom in to your party standing on a dusty road. Then zoom in some more. Click to continue.
- You try to move.
- Pop-up message: we need to find medical supplies - Yeah, I know, I'm the one who decided to use the last one, and the party inventory is clearly visible. By all means, tell the randomizer to give me one.
- Move to an unidentifiable glowing spot of interest on the bare ground.
- Pop-up full-screen message: You find a giant black feather. Okay, nice foreshadowing, but why did that require pausing the game? Why can't you pop that up while I walk? Click to continue.
- You try to move.
- Pop-up full-screen message: Your team needs to find the next beacon. Yeah... I know. There is a macguffin. Neither surprising nor news. Click to continue.
- You try to move.
- Pop-up full-screen message: You just need to find its exact location. What... no shit? Wait, could I have solved my mission before now just by declaring the macguffin's "somewhere on this continent"? Like, dude, it's all cool bro, I swear I saw it around here somewhere. Click to continue.
- You wander aimlessly across twenty meters of bare dirt.
- The camera zooms out dramatically.
- You wander aimlessly across thirty more meters of bare dirt.
- The camera zooms in dramatically.
- You wander aimlessly across forty more meters of bare dirt.
- You see a giant vulture (shock and amazement!)
- Pop-up full-screen message to inform you that you have just seen a vulture. My god! It's from the Central Bureaucracy! Click to continue.
THIS IS THE SPOT WHERE SOMETHING HAPPENS > - You decide which of your four companions' approaches (brains/brawn/sneaking/diplomacy) to use against the vulture. < THIS WAS THE SPOT WHERE SOMETHING HAPPENED. Click to continue.
- Pop-up full-screen message informing you your party has taken the action you just told them to take. Several lines of text gradually appear one after another. A ticker appears. The ticker then displays a number. The ticker then gradually subtracts the two resources your action required. One resource. Two resources. The bottom line of the ticker dissapears. Click to continue.
- Pop-up full-screen message informing you your designated action took effect. Line. By. Line. Of. Text. A ticker appears. The ticker then displays a number. The ticker then gradually adds three resources to your total of supplies. One resource. Two resources. Three resources. The bottom line of the ticker disappears. Click to continue.
(...but by this point, do you really want to?)
You know, naming one party member "Nadir" seems self-deprecatingly on the nose for this game. While This War of Mine was a flawed but honest attempt at challenging and immersive gameplay, Ashwalkers is scraping the bottom of the self-indulgent, facetiously artsy "indie" barrel, padding every action with an extra second or five of downtime, and I do mean every single action. Even dialogues are broken up by watching your squad meaninglessly pace forward in between paragraphs, and within paragraphs every comma is used as pretext to pause for nonexistent dramatic tension, yielding hilarious moments like:
In the distance [DRAMATIC PAUSE]
or
In it [DRAMATIC PAUSE]
How fucking long do you think it takes your audience to read the words "IN IT" !?! It's nearly as invisible a phrase as the word "said"!
Leaving aside little verbal flubs like a savage's drawing being described as "rusty" instead of rustic or an area being described as damp "yet" verdant, as though it's a surprise that life needs water, the writing on which this entire choose-your-own-adventure depends is... not terrible, but hardly up to the task of compensating for the endless interface timesinks masking the fact you only have about a dozen decisions to take in total. The information you run across or suss out via companion conversation around the campfire merely amounts to exposition. For instance you at one point discover that Kali is the youngest member of your group. Full stop, end paragraph, and you will never need to remember this information ever again. Worse yet, those little touches personalizing survivors in This War of Mine like a kid begging his grandpa to play with him or party members interacting in some meaningful or practical fashion are utterly absent here.
Ostensibly, this game's meant to bank on replay value, but the irrelevance of its writing and the absolute monster of a mountain of time it forces you to waste clicking through interface pauses beg the question of why you would ever give a shit about even one ending achievement, much less want to collect them all.
As a final note, why did these completely linear levels employ 3D models and environments when Ashwalkers so sorely needed to devote more time to fleshing out its narratives and interactions instead? Especially since the completely locked camera obviates even visual three-dimensionality, meaning this product's sole purpose appears to be padding some pissant graphic design major's resume as having "professional" experience with 3D models.
Fucking rip-off.
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