Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

"Don't need to be the one who does it to you
Don't need to twist the knife or push it through
Just want to see that you're in misery too
Just like me inside

I think you're better off dead"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Schadenfreude

 

 

Horror movies, books or games not being muh thang (never silenced a hill) though I definitely enjoyed Amnesia: The Dark Descent and even saw some value in the more amateurish Penumbra series I lost track of continuing the Amnesias. Only now, after Rogue Trader's drow city planted the suggestion in my head, did I get around to A Machine for Pigs, bought the year it came out thinking I'd get "into" the genre after the original's great impression. Twelve years later... it's good!

Eat the rich. And everyone else while you're at it.

I'm always leery of series being handed off to new developers but The Chinese Room's presentation managed to surpass the original while still maintaining its central theme of personal guilt. (Giving me a fair bit of hope for the success of Bloodlines 2.) Note I said presentation. While the execution is excellent, the plot's basic moralism is fairly trite, and better discussed alongside Rogue Trader's failure to entice me with its heresy. (And giving me a fair bit of anxiety about potentially watered-down bloodsuckery; so it goes.)

 

Pigs' first impression is of more lush environments than the original, if a bit of 2000s 3D blockiness yet lingered. Level design proves not merely consistently adept in herding you toward your next objective-

Oh! Ta, love. Ever so helpful.

- but rendering tangible that brassy turn-of-the-previous-century steampunk aesthetic and playing on gamer expectations. The moment you see a pig mask it's obvious what kind of monster will be Abbotting and Costelloeing you around your palatial works. To their credit they didn't insult your intelligence by faking any secrecy about the title. To their greater credit, they made the pig masks not realistic but painted them garishly like piggy-banks, contrasting all the more with the decidedly earthy brutes themselves once you meet them.

Take the very start of the story, for instance.

You come to the main entrance of your mansion, giant luxurious double doors. Not just part of the background, but tantalizingly interactable, and tauntingly locked. We intuit that we won't be permitted to simply... leave. But yes, of course any gamer worth his salt will nonetheless want to test that alternate path before writing it off. Being denied egress explicitly and not just passively just reinforces your whole situation's horror story menace. Your entrance to said entrance hall is also greeted with a mighty, ominous rumble and a heavy rattling of chains. Not from bedsheet spectres, but the giant chandeliers. Psych!

 

The puzzles are middle of the road, not brilliant but well fitted to your plot advancement, avoiding standard adventure game obtuseness. The action sequences are just frequent enough to spice up your dark descent. Just enough call-backs crop up (like the thing in the water) to maintain some minimal continuity without rehashing its predecessor. The plot is... blunt... and primitive in its emotional appeals... but at least it plays its cards in proper suit, openly shoving its monsters' repulsiveness down your throat instead of forcing you to look away.

 

But it distinguishes itself (surprisingly for a genre where storytelling mostly consists of pregnant silences, ominous creaking and the occasional mad howl) by writing and voice acting. Backstory voiceovers are delivered with the aplomb of old radio dramas, journal notes in flowery Victorian style with a baked-in dose of the ironic or comically macabre: "like pigs to truffles" or directing sewage back into the Thames where it belongs.

 

Nice. With a less conventionally moralizing climax it could've been a classic, but still, nice. As a parting shot, I will remark it's funny the pig-men are so much more interesting here than in Weird West. Did that later trainwreck try to copy Amnesia and fail in this as it did in everything else?

Don't be an idiot.

Barring that, just don't be. 

WH40K: Rogue Trader

"Searching for the answers and running from the past
Frightened by the towers that are standing in his path
Burdened by a hundred failures from the days gone by
And still entrenched in sorrow from a hundred people's eyes
Louder than the ocean and brighter than the sun
Alone in his perception of what he's said and done"

 

Interface - Nobody's Hero

___________________________________________ 

 

 

Yo no un dolcinito eretico, no soy un eretico fraticello! 

 

I hadn't planned to jump on Rogue Trader (both due to WotR's annoying characters and wanting to steer clear of WH40K for a while) but with reviews beginning to sound more positive a year post-release thought, what the hell, I'm already a marcher baron in Bannerlord so let's run with that. Warhammer though is a squad management setting. Actual roleplaying? With class/level development and backstory and ethical alignment and character interplay and all that? Beyond its scope in the computer adaptations I've seen thus far and though there are some tabletop RP systems floating around for 40K, I get the feel the game's devs mostly made shit up as they went along. So I found myself boggling at the character creation screen for a bit before just jumping in blind.

In keeping with 40K's "only war" aggressiveness, it's fairly light on healers and crowd controllers. The most obvious choice "officer" sounded too tied into leadership at first glance, so I instead gambled on "operative" as more suggestive of the back-row support style I prefer. (Hell, let's admit if I'm anyone from this game it's Inscribia but "nitpicky old bitch" wasn't made an official class.) While operatives are indeed the most reliable armor/dodge debuffers, I was not expecting them to double as snipers. However, either the class' creators saw me coming or I got lucky with the itemization, since many long-range weapons are lasers with accuracy bonuses allowing me to still prioritize support abilities. So for once I got to give the "fire l4z0rz, pew-pew" routine a fair try. After the early game I instead pivoted more heavily toward Strategist as my main preoccupation anyway.

 

Basically this ended up as my most confused character progression in my past dozen RPGs.

I'll split the roleplaying discussion off into its own rant, but I started as Iconoclast then pivoted toward Heretic then again to Iconoclast toward the end-game, and ended up giving our resident star-child the win. Turns out I'm as resistant to the lure of the dark gods as to any other hue.

I started as a preacher for lack of bookish origins, but my anti-religious sentiment reasserted itself in my faction rep contributions. 

For NPC companions my "no filthy hu-mons" tendency denied me early tanks or heavy gunners. Pasqal, Yrliet and Kibellah found permanent places in my party from the moment they were recruited. Only after mid-game did Marazhai and Ulfar increasingly replace first Idira, then Cassia (hard to let go of Cass' bonus turns) giving me a fairly beefy end-game party since I'd built Pasqal as placeholder tank in early chapters alongside Kibble.

By the same token I started as sniper but all through mid-game I was running a three-operative, two-bounty-hunter firing squad group (with Cassia as another sniper to boot since I hadn't known about the existence of net guns and upped her gunnery) so I slotted a laser repeater for a while to improve my AoE.

I used few or no consumables after Ch.1 until discovering the grenadier skill late in the campaign.

My Logic/Tech starting investment overlapped too much with Pasqal, so I dropped Tech, then ended up overlapping on Xenolore with Yrliet, only to throw up my hands in resignation and make my character an all-purpose skill-monkey toward the end.

 

Yet through all that vacillation I never got stuck. While the class system forces more redundancy than I like (you end up buying pretty much every useful skill there is on every similar character) it also allows for a lot of synergy. With myself and Pasqal as Strategists juggling mobility zones and Kibble's acrobatics, Cass' bonus turns then Ulfar/Marazhai's charges late game, mobility won most fights by dropping the enemy back row - even if it got Kibble overpenetrated by friendly fire with some regularity. (Shut up baby, you love it.) Other fights worked out because my multi-operative debuff stack tore through bosses' defenses. Others because trenchline stratagem turned my squishy firing squad into Matrix-grade artful dodgers. Others because my Strategist zones and other buffs let Ulfar switch up and reposition his fat ass to actually make use of all his attacks. Others because Bounty Hunter bonus turns let Idira buff up my entire party.

 

So maybe Rogue Trader's just a bit too easy, overcompensating for justified complaints about WotR's sky-high enemy stats. On "daring" difficulty only a few fights like Uralon or the drow's displacer beast arena fight required a second try despite my lack of optimization. But I can't damn well pretend I haven't delighted in such an assload of tricks to pull out of my... redundancy.

 

Progression also feels rushed. Tutorial/prologue powerlevels you to lvl 5, lvl 9 by the start of only the second away-mission, the first chapter consists of half a dozen missions but 16-17 character levels, exemplar before the end of Ch.2, and max out well before the final chapter. While, sure, I run fairly exhaustive campaigns, I'll still call bullshit on something like Quetza Temer (consisting of three fights and four dialogues? if you play your RP cards right) netting three levels' worth of XP. And for all the freebie consumables you find, you get almost no opportunity to spend action points on them before they're more or less obsolete, as grenades overlap with weapon attacks and it's harder to make a character without powerful weapon skills than with. The enemy groups could've also interwoven a bit better. The cult you initially fight for example (much like the Dorseys in Wasteland 3) drops off the map after the first act and only shows up in one location toward the end of the fourth to be defeated. See my previous Warhammer posts for complaints about timesinks and pacing issues.

 

Still, overall the campaign flows better than Owlcat's previous two attempts, with kingdom-building minigames feeling less like chores and big act transitions less like gratuitously punishing fragmentation of what should be a coherent campaign. (E.g. losing your armies in WotR.) Much like Bioware, Owlcat's trying to establish a winning formula, and there's a real sense they've finally been nailing down its working elements. Act 3 here for instance is the same as Act 4 of Wrath (or Kingmaker's fairy world jaunt) a confusing, alien, broken landscape to which you're temporarily exiled, but features a more satisfying narrative trajectory to success and bears more fitting proportion (in terms of both time and development budget) to the rest of your campaign.

 

That growing expertise shows in finer grain as well. Level design has improved considerably, maps never feel like a slog, have an excellent mix of combat encounters varying in difficulty, interspersed with exploration and loot pickups and the odd RP encounter to keep things fresh. Unfortunately their idea of puzzle-solving is still hit-or-miss, nothing as frustrating as the Secrets of Creation from Wrath but still tending towards brute-forced sheer nonsense with lots of red herrings (the warehouse safe puzzle on Rykad Minoris jumps to mind, or pentagram puzzle in the "unidentified ruins") but others like the Footfall funeral fare better for incorporating your environment: a kid hiding behind a crate, a few tiles NOT electrified, etc.

As far as aesthetics, I've said time and again I fundamentally dislike derivative pop culture kitchen sink settings like 40k or Shadowrun. Plus if I'm in a universe full of every trope from the past thirty years, I'd much rather be playing a xenomorph or terminator than a boring old filthy hu-mon. Nevertheless there's no denying 40K inspires a lot of gamers and Owlcat's made better use of it than it ever did of Pathfinder, lending a far more consistent feel to all of your interactions with none of the old gratuitous digressions like the infuriating Trickster path. Writing is more poetic than Kingmaker's, more consistent than Wrath's, and what flaws here linger appear to stem from the Warhammer setting itself, lines like "blessed us with the Canis Helix" serving as uncomfortable throwbacks to campy '90s young adult fiction.

 

I'd complained companions in WotR had too few interactions outside their personal quests. Remedied, and expanded to your other shipboard cast as well until it meshes quite satisfyingly into a coherent image of the Koronus expanse, from mores and strictures to politics and economy. I thought Cassia's interjection of painting metaphors into every description would grate after a bit, but it's played just heavily enough to give her a distinctive voice. I'd thought Pasqal would fall into the denigrated nerd role in the cast but instead he maintains a welcome sense of dignity and purpose, even if his quest was a bit predictable. And in direct contrast to BG3's randomness, many side-quests touch on the Koronus expanse's central conflict in some way, at least illustrating if not driving the plot.

 

I am both slightly dismayed and amused at attempts to feminize the setting from its ultra-macho teenage boy fight-fight-fight grimdarkiness. Will you have anything left if the process continues? Also, are we seriously trying to get chicks into Warhammer now? That's adorable. Best of luck, but a million disappointed boyfriends over the past thirty years will tell you It Does Not Work.

 

Aside from that, the adventure book illustrations take the best lessons from Pillars of Eternity's implementation of such interludes -

- with both skill implementation and point-of-view shifts.

 

The music... not quite as good as Wrath's more memorable ctracks (Lord of the Dead especially) and in 40K terms Guillaume David's Mechanicus score's a tough act to follow. Still a track or two on Footfall or during Ulfar's quest sounded decent, and do I detect some E.S. Posthumus inspiration in Comorragh? Specifically Pompeii?

 

And sure, some incompetence persists.

One piece of flavor text early on goes OOC to talk about combat turns.

Some tooltips are uninformative, missing or blank.

Though Owlcat's come a long way from their unplayable Kingmaker release, they're still one of the buggier companies out there, like this mission in which the NPC was supposed to get resurrected, not infinitely cloned.

If you're wondering, the second lens went invincible

Even some major mechanics don't work. I like the injury system, missed it from Pillars of Eternity, but it's terminally undercut by the ability to return to the flagship at any time to heal and just doesn't come up often enough to be relevant.

I've already complained about the inexcusably moronic "cargo" timesink mechanic. 

Or if all that's not enough for you, consider that Rogue Trader features a keyboard shortcut to reorient your camera northwards to quickly get your bearings vis-a-vis the presumably north-facing map.

It points you west!

I... I can't even...

Nevertheless great progress has been achieved. When Owlcat Games first came out with Kingmaker, they were a bunch of unmitigated fuck-ups, their list of bugs stretching longer than the game text itself, their content (like characters' gear or town management) blatantly incomplete, descriptions phoned in, characters well conceived but of uneven quality.

By Wrath they were mitigated fuck-ups.

Rogue Trader? Cargo aside, it lacks any of the pervasive misdesign pitfalls, like Wrath's nigh-infinite stats. Here, everything from single-digit damage numbers to Kibble/Ulfar/Yrliet breaking a thousand per round can be tactically relevant. The kingdom management ties into your adventures more than it serves as a gratuitous minigame hurdle. Weirdly its storytelling even seems to have improved during and after production. Much of the side content reads better than the skeleton of the plot, with Comorragh especially showing a marked jump in quality, and let me reiterate that though I poke fun at S&M zombie girl Kibble, she and the rest of the Void Shadows DLC display some of the best cRPG scripts in the business. This is no longer a product line you buy for lack of competition among turn-based, plot-driven RPGs but a worthy competitor.

 

Which is not to say I won't soon spend another lengthy post bitching out Owlcat's plot choices, RP paths and character gamut.

Inscribia's gotta nitpick after all.

 

Still, congratulations and many happy returns.

Another one I'm lucky I didn't try to grab:

Apparently it's a type of assassin bug called a wheel bug but being a nymph it hasn't grown its vertical cogwheel yet. And though they only feed on other insects that nasty-lookin' proboscis can supposedly inflict quite a stab on big pushy monkeys too.

The Cycle of Undeath

"Parasite. Slowly I approach him. Cancer. He allows his eyes to meet mine. Disease."

V:tM-Redemption - NYC Hub Rap

 

Lovecraft's The Shunned House (which you may want to read if you hate spoilers) feels fairly typical of his brief career's early half in its gothic horror scene-setting. But like Herbert West, it also draws upon Science Fiction sufficiently to hint towards his later shift toward materialistic explanations. Seriously, how many vampire stories culminate in defeating the monster not by religious rite or secrets of the ages passed down by quaintly ethnic informants, but by the thoroughly modern sanitary expedient of jugs of sulfuric acid? After all, vampire myths were at least as likely to resemble ghosts in most mythologies rather than solid corpses. In fairness, memorable but not HPL's finest work. His customary purple prose ran away from himself, as did his effort to provide historical context for his purple people-eater. But that whole gritty, slimy, chthonic nastiness imbuing what is rather explicitly a reimagined vampire myth got me thinking about the waves of vampiric (and to a greater extent, undead) portrayals as either super or natural.

 

Stoker's Dracula provides a bit of both. Educated, refined and imperious its antagonist may be, but one of the book's best executed scenes had him descending a sheer stone wall head-down in a splayed-limb, reptilian crawl, a suddenly alien, animalistic perspective shift. By the time movies rolled around in the early 20th century, monsters were expected to be monstrous and Count Orlok (rather exactly contemporary to The Shunned House) played up the second angle. Bela Lugosi was more ambivalent and Christopher Lee (conscious of the character's power/sex/violence appeal, especially to women) transitioned more fully toward the first. By the time I took an interest, the market was already redefined by Anne Rice's sexualized, romanticized vampires, which her own characters in Interview consciously verbalize as a new evil for a new age: no longer bedraggled graveyard ghouls but sleek, idealized Prince Charmings. Notably, even imitators from other genres, like the electric space vampire haunting a candle (yes, seriously) from ST:TNG's laughably terrible Sub Rosa episode, toed the new line of ethereal, sanitized parasitism, replete with dainty Victorian duds.

 

The inevitable overshoot into Twilight's idiotic emo sparkles made most genre fans finally aware that something, somewhere, had gone un-horribly off the rails. But though attempts have cropped up with some regularity to return vampirism to its monstrous roots, these have hardly contested three decades of Rice-Meyer dominance. Maybe Bloodlines 2 will help with that. Maybe not. One hopes.

 

What truly mentally clicked into conjunction with The Shunned House though was a surprisingly engaging third act of WH40K: Rogue Trader, concerning the setting's Drow knockoffs the Drukhari. Though technically evil space elves, physically thriving on Sadism of the most vicious bent also brings vampirism into the mix.

Apostrophic violation! Summon the Grammarian Imperialis!

A reliance on telepathy which could unduly sanitize the proceedings is offset by the sheer gruesomeness of their methods of extracting said psychic suffering. Something of the Orlokian ghoul seeps back into their bloodthirst and mangling torments. As with Sub Rosa, I find this side attraction merely touching on the genre more informative than official "Vampire" fare as an indicator of undercurrents moving with or against the main tide, not least because like Star Trek, Warhammer is a market force in its own right, and (again like Star Trek in the '90s) one striving for legitimacy.

 

Granted throughout all this pop culture has fixated on a different breed of undead, zombies, which have proliferated since the Living Dead days like... some kind of infectious plague. But though they really are monstrous, deformed, animalistically vicious, their core feature of losing control or intelligent planning makes zombies a very different narrative device, demonstrated by every zombie plot shifting away from them and toward survivor infighting as source of conflict. Nevertheless, the proliferation of movies about earthier, less powerful, more physical ghouls at the same time as vampires lost such traits demonstrates a market reaction against prettified monsters.

 

The new age movement has come and gone, so maybe its new evil can follow. The idea that villainy or monstrosity can be sanitized, or excused as women's sexual ideal, needs a solid stake through its heart.

I Say Ya For Teen Blackjacked

By-the-by, Yahweh wants abortions. For He doth sayetheth: "prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers" and if abortionists are sinners then their offspring deserve to be killed for that sin.

What?

Like it's any more circular than the rest of the superstitious babble spewing from your priest's mouth. Go, abort. It'll get you into heaven. Isaiah said so.

Permission and Forgiveness

"They told me my dreams were common disease
To pray to their god get down on my knees
But the dollar in heaven says slavery is free"

 

Humanwine - Wake Up 

_____________________________________________

"The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science #130

_____________________________________________ 

"Get. Your. Gunn!"

- the Antichrist Superstar

_____________________________________________ 

 

Though professional mourners were still hired during my youth in rare instances, in my region the practice had already died out, so I never got to personally witness this particularly theatric manifestation of faith. I do have to disagree with Wikipedia's statement of "the goal of being indistinguishable from real mourners" as while it would've been gauche to point it out, it was treated rather as an open secret, an accepted form of bribing Jesus for a Heaven pass, like incense or gold-plated Bibles. Because the almighty, all-knowing and all-wise creator of all happens to be a big fan of aromatherapy and Cats-grade stage wailing. At any rate, in old villages it would be hard to disguise the same handful of misty-eyed biddies, the same crone chorale making the rounds of every funeral. No, I'll go out on a limb and say another goal was indistinguished.

 

Consider caroling. By the time I was growing up it had become customary to pay carolers in cash (I assume these days they Venmo you per stanza or something) but in the old days it was especially children that would go around singing for food. Pastries in my ancestral village's tradition, maybe dried fruit. It took me a while to realize this was, among other things, a form of wealth redistribution. It allowed poor kids to amass a few extra calories before winter ramped up to its harshest, disguising such begging as supernatural ritual to save face. Same goes for giving sour old hags an occupation doing what they do best (pretending to still give a shit and making others' business their own) while dodging the question of whether or not we want them to starve. Maybe... not? I guess?

 

On a completely unrelated topic, depending on where in the world you live you may have heard a Trumpist murdered and heavily wounded two politicians in Minnesota last month, along with their spouses. The murderer is an antiabortionist with crayon diplomas from a Catholic college, not just churchgoer but church owner, missionary to the Congo, founded an evangelizing nonprofit, and I'd say the list keeps going but it would seem a bit apropos of the fact he was carrying an actual hit-list of 70 more potential victims at the time of his crimes. There's no guesswork involved here. This was a lifelong Christian whose entire history consists of Christian obsessions attacking a favorite target of Christian violence under the moral umbrella provided by official core Christian doctrine, the pretense of the existence of "souls" infused into zygotes at conception.

 

Once or twice I've made fun of libertarians, supposedly an ideology of personal rights and freedom, so often hypocritically also mouthing some family values tripe to make themselves seem cuddlier to the average idiot. Followers of any stripe show such tendencies. The more invested a believer is in any framework of thought or behavior, the more inexorably this manifests as a totalizing worldview in which the BIG GOOD THING (be it environmentalism, nationalism, feminism, laissez-faire capitalism, etc.) is the only source of goodness, and all else must be reinterpreted as one of its facets. But supernatural belief is particularly apt to provide fanatics with justification greater than life itself, and an implicit license to kill by minimizing earthly life in favor of promised eternity. For as long as you legitimize the pretense that fairy-tales about eternal souls are real, you will continue to also legitimize subhuman retard filth in torturing their neighbours to death with souls as pretext.

 

But I find the flip-side of that impulse even more perverse. By minimizing real life in favor of idiotic delusions about eternal life, believers not only forgive sadism and violence, but require permission for basic kindness. Ask them why they feed the poor and they'll openly tell you: it's the "christian" thing to do. Why can it not simply be the good thing to do? Why can you not feed children and the elderly (or everyone else, while you're at it) because it's beneficial, and fuck the hocus-pocus? We murderous apes get few enough noble impulses as it is. For two or three millennia at the very least, maybe fifty thousand years, we've had to tie even those few into propaganda for some costumed clown in front of an altar claiming he's in good with the creator of the universe. Isn't it perpetually hilarious that the showiest participants in charity organizations also oppose the welfare state? Laugh, damn you.

I've reached a weird segment of middle age where I can no longer claim to be a young buck but I don't quite yet qualify as a silver fox. I think they call this life stage "mangy raccoon" or something.

The bluebird of quizzical interest

Sigh, no, sir, I am not in fact any manner of Disney princess. Move along.

Respect Was All That I Have Wanted

"I don't know why

You're blaming me
I think this time you've lost

Your sense of reality"

 

Neuroticfish - Waving Hands

 

 

Having given the devs some weeks to fix the inevitable slew of bugs they'd introduce with their latest DLC, I picked up my Rogue Trader campaign where I'd left off, toward the end of Act 2, breaking into Exemplar levels just as the drow shit the fan. Seems a good moment to take stock of my roleplaying.

I set out with no preconceived path guiding my dialogue choices, though my fundamentally Chaotic Neutral personality asserts itself clearly enough. The Puritan vs. Radical axis slides easily toward the latter. On one topic in particular I prove consistently Dogmatic, and that's the execution of traitors. Otherwise I have no use for the Imperium or the human race writ large, and really wish we'd focused on any of the setting's many more interesting factions.

 

Strangely, though RPGs' more saccharine elements and cheap Disney-grade moralizing normally push me toward the antipodean reaches of the great wheel, 40K's "grimdark" stylings here prod me time and again in compensation to better these locals' sorry lot. Lots of sorry lot. Thus I've spent the first couple of acts bouncing between Heretic and Iconoclast but the lure of forbidden knowledge is gradually tipping those scales. My warpward slide is buffered, if anything, by the childish puppy-kicking pettiness of many of the "evil" options and by the equally childish supplication before masters dark or light. If my actions are to serve the forces of chaos, I would rather they do so... chaotically, and not subserviently. One way or another, in one multiverse or another, seems I'm still headed for Pandemonium.

 

Merely giving it this much thought indicates this game's immersion has hit a steadier stride than either of its two predecessors'. Which puts me in an awkward position having voiced repeated criticism of Owlcat over the years, not least for their writing. At least one of their staff appears to be again deliberately mocking my tirade against weird magic things:

But the old laziness and unevenness I thereby bashed is restricted pointedly to this one location as a raised middle finger. I can live with that. They're also handling their new trinary alignment better than they did Pathfinder's, with fewer choices or character traits feeling forced for the sake of artificial balance and none of the three underdeveloped - so far. Such improvement is visible everywhere. They're refraining from out-of-character asides or feigned nonchalance. There are problems with the pacing of mission/event text, but it is at least uniformly pointed, entertaining, relevant or illustrative. Only one of the NPC companions (J. hey-dearie) made me want to toss her into a volcano as opposed to half of Wrath of the Righteous' roster.

 

Doubly awkward for me to write about such progress being made within the Warhammer setting, which I've repeatedly derided as derivative, campy tween power fantasy not be to be confused with any worthwhile worldbuilding. While it would take a wider effort to raise 40K in my esteem from such depths, Rogue Trader (more than Gladius' few flavor texts) is the first incarnation I've seen <not> insulting its audience's intelligence at every step. It does a pretty good job of both preserving the grandiloquence of the basic power fantasy and also portraying a wide gamut of minor characters across social strata to better illustrate the massive and oppressive power-base your sci-fantasy heroics mandate.

 

The Void Shadows mission chain even surprised me by its quality, not only plumbing the lower decks but the degree to which Imperial piety may be twisted while remaining perfectly consistent with its greater scope of amor fati. Add to that the missions written from Kibble's demented viewpoint, and her later struggle to reconcile the antagonist's life path with her own, and at least this portion of Rogue Trader can stand against the best cRPG writing we've seen to date.

 

Yet that appreciation was immediately marred upon seeing the selfsame chain abruptly sidetrack me into a nonsensical romance subplot with Kibble. Two steps forward, one step back. The same routine was repeated in Lex Imperialis, where from the very first mission your dialogue with Solomorne is written as if you've been corking each other for years and can't live without the carresses of this rando' burly meat shield you've just met - and his little dog too. Then there's Cass' wilting damsel routine, and even Yrliet's lines have some hint that she's expected to debase herself by such an act of bestiality. *Sigh* I'll have to return to the idiocy of RPG romance. For now, along with the cartoonishness of some of your potential Heretical villainy, it's just one more way Rogue Trader's genre conventions, its reluctance to relinquish an ignorant teen audience focus, hold it back from the more nuanced interactions of the field's classics. Don't delve motivations. Gratify.

 

Why?

 

You've got a license to print money. Millions of braindead fanboys will buy anything and everything with the Warhammer logo, which they'll pretend to enjoy to justify their sunk cost of shelves full of $50 plastic toys. So make good art. Stop sexualizing it or homosexualizing it. Don't go meta for a cheap laugh. Don't try to feminize it. Don't try to justify it to focus groups. Don't crank it up to 11 for attention. It need not be a romance or a farce. Stop piling more cheap pandering and instead whittle down the existing pile. Make good on the meaningless haystack of pop culture cliches you've already plagiarized into it over the decades. There may just be a needle of passable SciFi warmongering in there somewhere. Rogue Trader proves that potential, even if it sabotages itself here and there.

 

This may just be what outgrowing Betty Boop looks like. Sure, it's not the only RPG moving on from the genre's goofy beginnings. Though the RPG revival of the mid-2010s was undercut by feminist script rewrites and underfunded over-reach for blockbuster AAA status, and though BG3 stuck to the generic sword&sorcery adventuring of its Infinity Engine precursors, others like Cyberpunk 2077 or Vagrus have struggled to flesh out their worlds and character personalities beyond stock dragonslaying heroics. In particular I've been enjoying the atmosphere in Colony Ship. (You can't enjoy the atmosphere outside it because it's in space.)

Your mid-game revolves around three deadlocked factions, a familiar enough RPG plot backdrop on its face. Yet here, none are the good or bad guys, none are wholesome innocents whose cause you can champion without guilt, none cackling villains, nor are they simple misguided idealists your hero gets to set right by the light of your just cause.

- The militaristic remnants of your mission's original leaders are running a minutely regimented police state, but also prove the only ones capable of maintaining a decent standard of living as your orphanage in the sky breaks down around you.

- The egalitarian rebel faction has turned into a decrepit Russo-Communist state in all but name, complete with round-the-clock state brainwashing and a ruling council of cut-throat self-promoters. On the other hand, they're the only ones who even seem to remember what humanitarian principles sound like.

- The religious faction wastes its efforts on ridiculous monuments while constantly on the edge of schism as every new preacher spins a new yarn the gullible masses are only too happy to turn into a noose. But they're the only ones with any hope for the future (albeit false) and they do raise one of the few valid points in defense of faith: that the big religions are the only form of leadership humanity has ever produced capable of long-term planning.

 

Why is it so hard for other developers to do what Iron Tower does, and look at the flip-side? When T:ToN came out I remarked its alignment system fell too predictably into a traditional consensus of good and evil with id-linked choices (red/silver) viewed as violent and negative while the two superego colors (purple/gold) result in "nice" outcomes like happy orphans. (Kudos once more to Avellone for bucking the trend with a character (Erritis) exemplifying the perversity of superego.) Compare to a beautiful scene in Baldur's Gate 3:

I criticized the spin put on Astarion's quest toward the end, straining a bit to frame the question of vampiric ascension in idiot-friendly good vs. evil terms as either saving or sacrificing lotsa liveses. Thankfully you can indeed take a middle road and simply have Astarion wash his hands of the whole mess, but the text still felt a bit off the mark by my ken. However, the artists and voice actor picked up the slack. On winning the boss fight you're treated to Astarion going absolutely apeshit and very thoroughly murdering his enslaver for the past two centuries past the point of redundancy... then suddenly collapsing into a cathartic wailing puddle at the realization his nightmare's finally over.

Glorious.

By the way, Astarion is evil. You're not forgetting that, are you? He is, undeniably, a self-indulgent serial murderer. Whatever's happening in that scene, whatever makes you catch your breath at our companion's every anguished snarl, it's not the triumph of good vs. evil. There are added dimensions, cross-axes in play, some more dignified than others. Figure out which ones (sex appeal? freedom? social climbing? repression? contamination?) and you'll see both potential and its hobbling.

 

I'm just saying, I wish the rest of BG3 had been that good. It's looking like I'll end up a heretic in Rogue Trader, but when I do I doubt quest text will bear out anything resembling my character's real motivations. More likely I'll be treated to yet another shallow "I just hate life" puppy-kicking insult to any player not toeing the line of plains-ape mores. But why is that a harder sell than the complexity of squad management?

 

Any company will tell you they need to sell in order to stay in business, and only the lowest common denominator sells. But to whom? Consensus does not disprove dissent. Here I am: aloof, perverse, cantankerous. Sell me something for the abhuman, not Dating Dramedy 40K. For fifteen years developers refused to make any difficult games... until waves of low-budget titles like FTL proved the market was starved for punishment. And they refused to make turn-based tactics, until kickstarted RPGs proved XCOM was not a one-off. I really do think that if you add complex roleplaying to that list... well, you may not out-sell Call of Duty, but you will find a sizeable niche market as starved for moral challenge as they've proven starved for tactical challenge.

Like Zands Through the Hourglass

I finally managed to win with Persia in Old World, and I'm not entirely sure how this happened:

Normally I name every heir something different. This time around the initial royal line died out, and the new queen Zand had already named her daughter after herself, though she wasn't the original heiress. Then the next prince asked a Zand in marriage and by the time the fourth one rolled around I just decided to give in and go with it.

 

If the randomizer wants to feed me puns, I won't argue.

Dude, Are Why To Kay?

It's been a quarter century and I'm still getting "holy shit I'm in the 21st century!" spontaneous surprise moments. I don't think my generation will ever completely get over it. Ironically it might be easier for the baby boomers and older GenXers, but for anyone who grew up during the '80s/'90s, that calendar flip was the be-all moment by which the future was defined. Every movie's plot clicked into gear when the clock struck midnight. The words "two-thousand" meant flying cars and meal-pills and robot maids. Of course being a meaningless, arbitrary measure, it came and went like a fart in the wind and changed nothing, that part's perfectly logical and even at seventeen I knew better than to buy into clearly numerologically-driven hype like the Y2K bug... but the damnable media buzz sticks in your skull, doesn't it?

Drag on, fly.

Drag that discarded aluminum.

_____________ 

 

Edit 2025/07/06: Had a bit of trouble identifying this one, but far as I can tell it's a common whitetail skimmer, specifically a male because females retain the usual dun-tinged protective coloration so prevalent among female animals

Mankind Odiously and the Dungeon Tree

"Gjev kraft til rota"

Wardruna - Rotlaust Tre Fell - translation

 

I picked up Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey a couple of years ago as one of those games having failed hard enough to sit in a nigh-perpetual 75%-off "sale" for more than it's worth anyway. What can I say, I was in the mood for a rare video game without fantasy elements that not sports-related. Slim pickins. And hey, I liked Quest for Fire well enough, so how bad could it be?

 

The politically correct title's a turn-off in its own right. Of course they could've called it "The Human Odyssey" or "Humanity's Odyssey" or "The Hominid Odyssey" (with a bonus id-od echo effect to boot!) etc. if you're that desperate to avoid the "man" slur, but SJWs just had to go one step further off the cliffs of insanity and beat the dead horse with a rocket launcher. Fine, whatever.

But don't imagine you'll cease groaning at bad choices once it boots up. Somewhere in the middle of the self-indulgently overextended opening sequence informing me repeatedly it's "inspired by true events" and the like, I couldn't help but laugh at an unexpected revelation: ah, crap, the developers' names are all French. (French-Canadian as it turns out?) Well, that means I can expect artistic panache (hey, now I get it!) with terrible or nonexistent game mechanics.

 

True enough, user reviews do warn but cannot convey the extent to which the control scheme is needlessly convoluted or just flat-out broken. Biggest problem?

I need an adult!

Though Ancestors handles through a workable enough third-person-slasher interface, you cannot attack or move normally once combat starts. Instead, all conflict is handled as quick-time events. Bad enough in itself except your command does not even register most of the time! And while we're at it, what hillbilly design school let you graduate without learning not to slap "helpful" pop-ups center-screen, obscuring the action in the middle of an unpausable action sequence!?!

On the plus side the primitive social life stuff (like mutual grooming) can feel quite charming and the jungle does look great, and though the gigantic tangled tree branches are a bit... Lothlorienish, at times, it's fun enough trying to chart a safe course through the treetops. Only wish I could fling poop at the frustrated crocodiles and angry warthogs down below. But you may notice I'm giving examples only from the jungle, not the savanna. That's because I simply cannot manage to advance past the first chapter. Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Elex or other FPS from the 2010s struggling to keep the formula fresh, Ancestors over-engineered basic movement or interaction mechanics until they're basically unusable. Aside from the aforementioned dodge dodginess, your hominid keeps latching onto random objects and the snap-targeting is customarily incompetent in separating out nearby objects. They do try to separate out social and environmental commands through the interface, but it takes a while to build up a gratuitous amount of muscle memory. (No I did not want to start grooming my elder's hairy ass, I wanted to eat his ass - I mean eat his berries - I mean eat the berries! The berries he's standing next to! The berries!) Good luck switching two tree branches at a 90-degree angle without jumping and possibly falling to your death. And just like other such misdesigned wrecks, the scripted interactions will actively cancel out your own input, with your character stopping dead or rubberbanding back to be hit by an attack you had in fact evaded. Naturally it also features the increasingly common flaw of keybindings only applying to some of that command's context-sensitive functions, e.g. standing up during sensing.

 

Then there's the greater interface itself, needlessly convoluted for the sake of faking more complexity that the game actually offers. Like combining run and jump commands into a single button. Or conversely splitting investigation mode into scent/hearing/intelligence instead of simply using different icons in the same overlay. Or again conflating your survival sim food/water/sleep status bars into a single concentric status icon that tells you little or nothing.

 

If you excuse all of that, you're still left with a fundamental design priority toward needless obfuscation.

You level up your homininnies like in any skill progression RPG (think Skyrim) by skilling up through repeated use until you can grab feats and move up through the various skill trees. Calling skills "neuronals" is slightly weird, but can be justified as immersion. On the other hand, giving you zero info on how much "neuronal energy" you currently have or need to buy a feat is, like the lack of numeric values for hunger and the like, just a pointless limitation.

One of your first tasks is building a sleep spot. Knowing how apes in general do it I looked for a bush or treetop I could modify, bending it down into a nest shape. Even after seeing the tutorial tip about stockpiling resources, I gave up after throwing three leaves on the ground because nothing was happening and sought other solutions until grinding my teeth in frustration I hit the wiki... to discover you need four leaves.

My first ape-man bled to death because I'd seen a broken bone heals with time and figured a bleed would be the same. My second bled to death because it was easy enough to figure out I need to staunch the bleeding with leaves, but nothing tells you that ONLY kapok or horsetail fibers will do, or that these objects have useful "modification" interactions when swapped to your left hand (unlike say, crushing an egg, which did nothing) and even then I didn't know why it kept failing and it turns out to be another QTE timer issue.

At one point I expanded my clan's territory. How? Hell if I know.

 

So on and on. One can spot glimmers of charming human evolution roleplaying buried under that gigantic pile of interface and interaction mistakes, but I can't in all honesty recommend wasting $10 to drive yourself insane trying to dig those few needles out the crapstack. However, I will note the irony of sabotaging your story about primitive humans by pretending to reinvent the wheel.

 

Which brings us to my second point, because playing Ancestors made me realize I've contradicted myself over the years on what constitutes good adventuring. One of my big complaints about Baldur's Gate 3 for example was its abuse of contrived or "lolrandom" surprises which for the most part merely force gratuitous reloads. But I was tickled pink when Skyrim randomly killed my character. As I detailed for TBS games, the distinction lies between an unexpected challenge or outcome growing naturally out of simpler elements, and game designers trying to force or fake such an experience, hobbling the player to strain at surprise or challenge.

 

In counterpoint to Ancestors let me offer the Dungeons games. Their main claim to fame is doubling down on being Dungeon Keeper knockoffs by parodying fantasy RTS in general. As such, their basic mechanics are... very, very basic. You've got a handful of workers and even fewer military units, all of standard goblin/zombie/demon types.

 

In fact, given its Warcraft-ish aesthetic it recalls Heroes of the Storm, a MOBA cross-promoting Blizzard's extant IPs, with one effect being highlighting just how repetitive their gimmicks had been over the previous two decades. You had two big fat guys with cleavers, elves and space elves, two races of giant spiny bugs, two kinds of paladins, etc. Yet from such trite redundancy HotS also built up true creativity like Deathwing, Murky, Abathur or The Lost Vikings all breaking the mold of such games' expected hero roles and development.

 

In Dungeons 3 I was blindsided by a new secondary resource called "evilness" which can only be harvested outside your own domain, by taking over surface locations. I was initially annoyed at yet another game throwing a wrench into my preferred turtling mindset. Interestingly though, evilness is used for research... which means a quick rush can in fact support a turtle strat instead.

 

Sparse as it may be, I'll take that sort of build-up, branching meaningfully from a simplistic interpretation of its root genre, over a bunch of pretentious artistes haplessly breaking functional genre conventions for no reason other than feigning creativity. Stick that shit alongside blank canvases sold as paintings and black-and-white movies with ten-minute scenes of some rando' eating soup.

Trying to work out a functional town layout or a tactic to defeat a new monster type is adventure.

Trying to guess the number of leaves you consider a bunch?

No.