Sinking Dagon

Marilyn Manson - Thaeter

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Oh, it was island, not city, d'oh!

 

When I dug up the Lovecraftian FPS detective mash-up The Sinking City from my unplayed back-log and realized it wasn't what I'd mentally pictured, I'd apparently confused it with Sinking Island, the 2007 adventure game published by Microids. So now I remedied that misfire. I needn't have bothered.

 

The first Syberia game earned its status as a classic for its melancholic meander through scenic early 20th-century vignettes, but his other work seems to confirm Benoit Sokal's limitation to that one talent. As soon as you load it, Sinking Island manages to make even the pre-menu splash screen more annoying (much like Metro 2033 did) then needlessly complicates the save/load routine with user profiles. But we all suffer through such nonsense if a game's actual content proves good. Here it proves not.

Your name is Jack Norm, and wow, are you ever. Granted, Kate Walker was a bland everywoman protagonist as well, but such a role better fit the requirement of an audience viewpoint in Syberia's exotic clockwork locales. Sinking Island's tropical paradise attempts to recreate that feel, but all the elements are simply telegraphed: quaint natives and their pagan beliefs, the hated old Scrooge, girlfriend with a bad slavic accent, sumptuous yet repetitive resort with many, many pointless rooms and walkways. For something made in 2007 the graphic detail is both expansive and fluid, albeit stiff and stilted like anything from that era. But bland aural and visual decor aside, it's the writing that really kills the whole mess.

 

I'm trying to make some allowance for a possibly worse English version (though I cannot seem to change the language in any way) so maybe the French cast took a better stab at pronouncing Battaglieri than bat-a-glee-airy or bat-tag-leery. But them's small potatoes. The script, overall, attempts to flesh out an interactive whodunit by putting you through all the steps of an investigation, ignoring that all those steps are in fact painfully dull. For one thing, there are too many of them. Literally. Locales are split into several redundant screens each, which you'll need to traverse every time you want to triple-check whether you've pixel-hunted some patch of screen or a character acquired another line of dialogue. For another, the phraseology could stand to be far more terse. For yet another, your very professional investigator repeats the same questions to everyone.

"Good morning Mr./Mrs. Xyz, I am Boring McEveryman; I'm here to be very beige about this police investigation. Do you like billionnaires YES/NO? Now show me some FEET, BABY! Oooohh, yeeaaaaaah!"

Just kidding. I wish it were that entertaining.

Well if this ain't five kinds of awkward.

I especially like her boyfriend just placidly going through his idle animations while some rando interrupts their dinner to photograph his gal's feet. But for the most part the text's just... bad. Wordy and devoid of substance or flavor, choked with clumsy filler like "too bad the weather is so bad" and repetitive exchanges like

"Do these pearls mean anything to you?"

"No, not really, they don't mean anything to me."

Does that prose mean anything to you? Because it does not mean anything to me. 

 

I suppose a less cynical wer than myself might qualify it all as an attempt at naturalistic dialogue instead of obviously entertaining spicy fiction, but even as such it plonks. You'll find none of Syberia 1's charm here. A few quaint ideas like comparing clues in your inventory can't rescue this hopelessly boring paint-by-numbers routine. No point in continuing past the intro. Worth at most the 79 cents I paid for it, and not a centime more.

 

On the other hand, I also picked up a complete freebie called Dagon (which, the title assures us is "by H. P. Lovecraft" - thanks, here I was afraid I'd picked up the Dr. Seuss version by mistake*) which turned out not to be a "game" at all, stretching even the definitions of "walking simulators" and "visual novels" by merely having you click to advance screen by screen. And yet... I cannot believe I'm even saying it, but this one I really would recommend.

It's an illustrated, well-narrated, full read-through of Lovecraft's short work, word-for-word with some interesting historical background and character notes you can right-click here and there. A half-hour's read and listen and watch. A museum curator's notion of a video game... but it works. It is what it is, its few features handled both professionally and with dedication to the source material. Oh, and the irony of Dagon, of all stories, being illustrated by makers of DLCs for Ultimate Fishing Simulator is almost too precious. Had some 3D models left over, did you?

 

How much more funding went into that tedious piece of catalogue filler above? How much better can you handle a worse concept if you don't go into it as a contractual obligation or a lazy, disinterested cash-grab?

 

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* Y'know, I meant that as an honest joke, but a lot of Dr. Seuss really is kinda... non-Euclidean, in a "Mimsy were the Borogoves" flexible young minds style. 

The Sinking City

Asbestoscape - And So the Story Goes

(you're not getting a Metallica song suggestion unless your sequel turns out much better) 

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Look out, Old Gods, I've got a Tommy gun! And springs!

I thought I'd polish off a quick adventure game in between longer titles, but somehow mixed up The Sinking City with... maybe The Forgotten City? Dagon? Apocalypsis? Scorn? my backlog's getting unmanageable. In any case a first glance at the FPS interface and expansive map revealed this is not the shoestring-budget old-timey point-and-click adventure I had expected. Which is both good and bad, as I discovered when setting out to explore the 3D wonderland a bit before the tutorial quest and, this being me we're talking about, managed to get myself stuck on terrain and die within the first couple of minutes.

Lousy Lake Lachrymose Leeches!

But alright, I told myself, I could stand for a bit of Lovecraftian lurking fear, a creeping immersion into vague hints and portents of gruesome, dehumanizing terrors metastasizing indistinctly beyond the bounds of mundane human experie - WHOA!

The honorable Bob Throg, esq. (probably?)

I'm sorry, I can't hear a word you're saying past that face. My but we're wavin' our Jermyns out in public pretty shamelessly, aren't we? Soooo... not so much with the gradual, creeping, indistinct lurking and vague portending, I guess? That, and there's fish-people and tattooed shirtless cultists walking around town openly and nobody bats an eyelash at bloodthirsty inhuman monstrosities. Thus I replaced genre whiplash with a first impression that these Lovers of the Craft possess all the subtlety of their idol without his talent for flowery escalation, and decided to give the first few quests a chance just so I could write off my old purchase as a lost cause and move on to some better game.

 

Instead, I gotta say, it eventually drew me in.

 

Quite a few stylistic details irked me, especially at first. I've always assumed Innsmouth should be pronounced closer to Inns-muth not -mouth as in chewing. One mob's a blatantly 'roided-out Half-Life headcrab. The writing is decidedly prosaic compared to its infamously purple inspiration. Not bad or jarring, but compared to what The Secret World's writers had accomplished with the same material eight years prior, Sinking's still amateur hour. The shallow and blunt presentation just reinforces my view that everyone really needs to give Lovecraft a rest.

 

Most all its flaws, though, stem from one fundamental design decision. Like We Happy Few and a string of other adventure/RPGs from the 2010s (or more recently the object lesson of Bloodlines 2) there was little reason for this to be an open-world FPS Skyrim clone, or then pile on with MMO-inspired graveyard runs and designated resource grinding zones. That's what the kids these days like, right?

 

The aforementioned rushed suspense is partly mandated by FPS mechanics, but one terrible design choice does not vindicate the other. Combat is easily the worst part of the game, with bad or nonexistent collision and hit confirmation, hitscan abuse, clumsy spawning or pathing. And they got very little variety out of it with only two boss fights, one easily skippable and the other toward the end of the Fathers and Sons chapter illustrating the system's every weakness. You get thrown into it with no chance to scout first. The chamber is gigantic and there's zero indication of what you're supposed to do. No hit confirmation on the boss so it looks invincible. Per genre conventions praying cultists normally have to be exterminated in such fights in order to render a boss vulnerable or stop add spawns but are here irrelevant. There's no indication where the biggest source of damage is coming from unless you're staring at your feet at exactly the correct moment. Outside that, though the four basic mob types and their alternate variants (invisibility, self-resurrection) are interesting at first, their random lurching movements fail to evoke their intended eeriness and simply become infuriating by repetition.

 

The setting of Oakmont itself serves as the main attraction and is indeed a lovely burg. It's got old preindustrial manor houses, dingy apartment stacks, even dingier shoreline wooden shacks. But then it duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates its available inspiration. Huge place for a no-name developer's sophomore effort. Thus it predictably sapped the team's capabilities, forcing them to copy-paste decor ("Men's finest clothing" and "Whately's household chemistry" obviously do a rollicking business with scores of storefronts near you) and the period-appropriate art assets jumble together. The nominal existence of a technology during a particular decade in no way assured widespread availability. (How many rail guns do you own?) In the 1920s, even with internal combustion use exploding and even in this the land of Our Ford and that patent thief Edison, relatively few people had electric lighting or telephones and even fewer cars (relying more on trains and trolleys) especially in a no-name New England port town.

What, no horse wagons for hicks from the surrounding countryside? No bikes? Nobody row-row-rowed a boat in the 1920s? Well, it would've required extra models and animations, but as a result the setting looks a couple decades removed. All the worse as this repetitiveness applies to some quest locations including the "secret" false walls you're supposed to find in the same exact spot every single time.

 

The FPS nonsense interferes with the game's more important detective mechanics as well. Monsters spawn in (and around) in the stupidest possible way, simply teleporting in from the floor, and can do so while your interface is momentarily locked by clicking to examine a clue. And as if everyone weren't incongruously blase about the extradimensional creeps, this clashes with basic walking about town. Cops shooting you if you pull a gun on people out in the street? Sure, makes sense. Unless you were trying to shoot a monster, which they completely ignore to start shooting at you instead of the gibbering abomination from beyond time and space.

 

But that detective angle, along with the cases you uncover, ends up being Sinking City's saving grace. When not spinning its wheels or tripping over itself, it provides a refreshing balance of eyeing supernatural clues in GhostVision!(tm)

Breadcrumb trails have never looked less edible.

- complete with a minigame placing events in (usually fairly obvious) order -

- and perfectly mundane clue-gathering:

Instead of the usual automatic HUD markers just yanking you in every direction, you mark your own map based on street directions, themselves often requiring a look-up in various local registries like newspaper articles. While, again, they erred on the side of caution by unsubtle quest prompts ensuring clues would be more intelligible than poetic, it's a solid foundation for a sequel expanding on this sort of writing/environment integration I myself had coincidentally called for in the year preceding the game's release. 

Alternate completion options may not affect your character's progression, but they're well-conceived as roleplaying quandaries. What more do you want? Colorful bit players, a few historical references, some hard quest decisions I'll split into a separate post, a bit of contextualized comic relief:

Though not a masterpiece, so much of The Sinking City is immersive, engaging, amusing, or otherwise admirable, yet at every turn hobbled by "hours played" padding and over-reach for twitch-gamer mass appeal, by farming random containers for superfluous randomized crafting loot, scanning hundreds of random blank walls with GhostVision, doing corpse runs and most of all alternately rushing and stalling plot development in the interest of getting players into the supposedly more exciting FPS side of things fast and often. Instead of easing in with a bit of sightseeing and vague hints, from the very start you're placing 21 case files by hand on the map (much of it DLC content) throwing you into monster fights. Come on people, pace is not a four-lett... pacing is not a four-letter word!

 

If you think The Whisperer in Darkness should've started with "here's a picture of a Mi-Go, go shoot it" you are missing the damn point!

Disco Elysium

"Come down

Hurting

Learning"

 

Billie Eilish - Xanny

 

 

It's hard for a game to impress me these days, but Disco Elysium's very opening had me boggling at the screen wondering: who the hell wrote this? And for once I mean that in the best possible way! Its mechanics offer little new, a largely text-based affair testing that permeable adventure/RPG hybrid borderland where so many ambitious indie developers flounder. No grinding mobs, XP awarded for task completion and exploration. No grinding loot, just a reasonable cash flow. Quite a bit of stat keeping but no combat system. For a litmus test of its successful execution though, consider a much later cutscene, boating across a stretch of water... gradually, very gradually, at realistic speed, without any fast-forwarding.

Sad FM indeed

It's the sort of scene I've criticized a hundred times over as uninspired filler, yet here its uniqueness, timing, pacing, framing, atmosphere all contribute to a meditative effect rarely equaled. And the campaign hovers quite consistently near that level of quality, whether its mood is humorous, macabre, farcical, exploratory or diving deep into convoluted dialogue trees. The wealth of background exposition which slightly choked Technobabylon goes down smooth here, even if you won't feel pressured to memorize it. The introspection which tripped into irrelevant navel-gazing in Sacred Fire is here differentiated into varying attitudes your internal monologue can adopt. The RPG detective schtick that sputtered into irrelevance in Gamedec here gets true skill implementation and opportunities for failure depending on your stats and past choices.
 

This is itself to gain a modifier in an "authority" check

This includes some wildly divergent paths for your campaign as a whole. I refused to cooperate with certain NPCs, which led to me never finding a particularly important piece of loot, which led to failing the climactic event... yet nevertheless going on to solve the case by the weight of evidence and reaching a rather positive ending. I avoided all political ideals, as none of them aligned with personal freedom and intellectual progress... but they did give me lines like "Chaos is my method. I am its scion." to compensate. When starting out I even huffed in indignation that this is very much not a game for a teetotaling shut-in, given its heavy emphasis on substance abuse and popular movements. (I kept expecting someone to be selling a Perky Pat diorama set.) But though a handful of skill checks prompted me to save-scum a bit, their sheer density written into the script exceeds even Baldur Gate 3's staggering gamut, albeit in a shorter campaign.

Come on, a game where you can die by stubbing your toe kicking a furnace can't be all bad, right? Not to say it's all good, either.

The inventory system could've used auto-sorting by skill boost and slot.

24 stats do result in some unnecessary redundancy (endurance and pain threshold? savoir faire and hand/eye coordination?)

The "find the bullet traces" quest is incredibly poorly worded (2/3 parts are triggered by other events) and too many others rely on stumbling upon a solution in unrelated locations.

Displaying unsolved skill checks on the map is a great quality of life interface improvement, but not updating them when they become unavailable by opting out of them in dialogue (e.g. don't play along with Plaisance's ramblings) veers back into uselessness. 

I love any system in which not only do you gain XP by action and not grinding, but time passes by your own actions. That being said, openly standardizing/listing time requirements for various actions would let you plan out your day better, immersion aside.

And, most importantly, for a game so heavily dependent on narrative immersion, either openly advertise your biases or check them at the door. No concealed carry bigotry.

 

Coming out in '19, Disco Elysium carries some obvious politically correct baggage. The only word they censor is "faggot" and an inordinate amount of page space is dedicated to otherwise irrelevant racism. Naturally, negative traits are overwhelmingly concentrated in male characters while females are always wiser, kinder, more competent or clever, etc. than the men around them. The selective outrage is visible enough in examples like Kitsouragi portrayed as victim of racism, valid yet painfully naive given Japan's own entrenched racism, and the white mercenaries killing blacks can't help but mirror H.G.Wells' hand-wringing about "the negro police" in When the Sleeper Wakes in 1900. A tone shift doesn't make you any more enlightened... but 120 years should have.

 

Sure, they tried making the racism less unidirectional with Measurehead, they tried giving a woman a wrong opinion or shady motivation here and there, but in overall effect it's like seeing a Klansman trying to lighten the mood by telling self-deprecating jokes about his WASP friends... while burning a cross on your lawn. They went out of their way to justify women's duplicity or other misdeeds and to ensure no female character is ever verifiably guilty towards a lowly male. You can walk from one end of the game map to the other going straight from one dialogue to another and another all bashing men as stupid violent drunks while glorifying women as superior beings, and the protagonist's personal history includes no option that doesn't paint him as at fault and a complete loser... for being disregarded in the first place.

 

Still, that predictable brainwashing aside, Revachol's dashed hopes and tarnished ambitions make it one of the best backdrops for moral development since Planescape: Torment and Tyranny, and the decor and ambience flesh it out expertly. Normally I scoff at full voicing (and have criticized it as a waste of development time in Obsidian/Larian's products) but at least in Disco Elysium's "final cut" rework, everyone from Kim your calm and reasonable sounding board to your inner voices' self-conscious theatricality to Evrart's oleaginous bonhomie to Cuno's manic posturing go a long way toward making the otherwise limited campaign feel like a world. And the sheer wealth of detail, while sometimes indulgently derivative (I do believe they even managed to squeeze in a reference to Coma White and Coma Black) is expertly paced over the course of your adventures.

 

It would be fruitless (and spoilery) to anatomize all Disco Elysium's melancholy, but its recurring theme of intoxication, by substances, by ideas, by ambition, by emotion, and the absurdity of human behavior thus fueled carries through the smallest details of your decrepit surroundings, your grating conscience, the careful word choice drawing you into both despair and mockery of same, the grandeur and pettiness of idealism, the nobility or self-annihilating madness of devotion, the futility of existence and the conscious decision to fill or at least bridge the void. You could argue the game's validity from any number of points, but the very terms in which it must be described to even formulate such arguments cement its advancement of a still childishly fumbling creative medium.

 

Despite its flaws, a brilliant piece of work.

Slayers of Fear

"Stelllaaaaaaaa!"

- one of the most parodied moments in all theater, yet still more dignified than this

 

My recent disappointment with Metro 2033 as a Hollywood-envious cinematic adventure light on actual gameplay drew my mind to several years later when "walking simulator" became an unofficial, then semi-official genre unto itself. Layers of Fear was among the earliest titles I remember explicitly described (and not merely insulted) as one and thus thought it a fitting measure of the style's potential. As such, it offers few elements to even analyze. Scant puzzles rely too much on red herrings or an unforeshadowed memory test. Weirdly, the last act, instead of building toward a finale, mires you in the stupidest adventure game trope of pixel-hunting for checkers pieces. You can easily ask yourself:

A bit on the nose, don't you think?

After turning off the exagerrated head bob effect making my character seem drunk off his ass (perhaps not accidentally but still very annoyingly) abundant electricity but a lack of electronics places the action sometime during the mid-20th century. (On a personal note, the decor was sometimes eerily reminiscent of my godparents' apartment building.) I must admit I giggled a bit at the thought of GenZers boggling at sight of a rotary phone, but aside from that the timeframe lacks relevance. Literary merit: variable, but mostly absent. Suffice to say the script's written by art majors -

- who think the fedora era emoted missives like Facebook addicts, though they do put more effort into some of the more official correspondence. They fare far better on visuals, with many of the individual scenes and props meriting applause.

A little while later:

Scene by scene, if you were to cut the game into ten-second increments, they're even put to solid use. Interactivity may have its drawbacks, but it offers a major advantage over more passive media in making the user inherently complicit to the action. Your every click, after all, can open the door to the next scene, demolish a building, doom or save an NPC. On a small scale, Layers of Fear displays a thorough grasp of this principle. You have no guns to shoot, no spells to cast, cannot even jump. But reading a leaflet, taking a step, even just turning your camera, can warp and disfigure your environment.

Too bad it just doesn't hold up.

 

Such gimmicks were not new in 2016, but though they'd proven effective (e.g. The Secret World) here they sour through overuse and lack of contrast. I once pointed out that the goofiness of Bloodlines' Malkavian playthrough would grow monotonous had it been predictable and constant, if it did not mingle with the mundane for counterpoint. Layers of Fear proves me right.

 

For one, the imagery is too random to add up to anything. For another, it makes naive use of some pretty tired tropes. Paintings with bleeding eyes? Seen it. And yes, if there's an elevator in a horror show, of course it has to fall at some point. Jump scares and interface screw work well when the player is distracted by working on some other task; here, your only task is to keep walking in circles triggering the next jump scare, so there's no surprise, no tension, no stakes. Similarly, the environments and props melting into each other would feel disconcerting, if there was anything they were supposed to be in the first place, but when everything's surreal it does indeed induce what Robert Sheckley coined in Mindswap as Panzaism* - a blase acceptance of the new reality, seeing the fantastic as ordinary in reverse of Quixotism. By your first hour you begin anticipating the changes so reliably that it feels like clicking through a user license agreement, flipping pages as fast as you can to reach the "next" button instead of appreciating the content.**

First off, as you might guess, that pretty much kills the traditional boogeyman horror element. Briefly at the start, hints of some demonic, rodential force made it sound like an adaptation of Pickman's Model (couldn't've turned out worse than Netflix' maladaptation) but we soon focus entirely on the protagonist's personal life. So it might still have retained psychological horror, existential dread, guilt and penance and all that jazz, but once again Layers simply lays it on so damn thick as to veer into farce. There was a point, halfway through, when I dared hope it would do for delirium tremens what The Cat Lady did for for depression, but (and I will be spoiling a bit) it pins its hopes on a far more socially acceptable routine: bashing men.

 

From the start you know some terrible event happened, and the man has to be guilty so you probably caused it somehow. Of course you're a terrible husband, but it piles on so redundantly as to lose its effect. You're a drunk, you're a workaholic, you stood her up, you made false promises, you argued loudly with her, you bought the wrong housepet, you were late for your kid's birthday, you drew scary children's book illustrations, you no longer found her sexually attractive after her accident, you broke paintbrushes, you bought too many toy dolls, you insulted salesmen, you argued with the dog, you let the kid read the label on your liquor bottle, you forgot to shop for apples, etceteree, etceterah. Even the two brief moments showing the wife lashing out get framed exhaustively and explicitly as being driven to it by the evil, evil man. Honestly, whenever I walked into a bathroom I began expecting to be upbraided at leaving the toilet seat up, having exhausted most other reservoirs of marital vitriol. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire plot of a descent into madness was written around the pretextual need for the male to be wrong in as many ways as possible. Even the obsession with vermin goes nowhere, serving no purpose but to glob on more disgust by association.

 

I would be curious to test all the critics who gushed praise at Layers of Fear with a gender-swapped version of the same plot and see if they're as willing to overlook its odd feat of redundant incoherence, absent the misandrist conceit. Such repetitive and utterly one-sided characterization might have worked for half, maybe one hour at the outmost, but after four or five laser-focused non-stop hours? Boredom. Just... boredom.

 

Even if you like the notion of a walking simulator, you must admit there's not much point in one that only works for ten paces at a time.

 

 

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* Political commentary not intended... but acknowledged.

** Political commentary... well, yes, again

P.S.: There is one utterly brilliant moment, late in the game, when you walk past an open window and see your only glimpse of the outdoors, night-time, a small patch of greenery walled off between buildings, calm and sane... and the window slams shut in your face, excluding you from nature and sanity. A smidge more counterpoint like that would have done wonders.

Amnesia: Rebirth

"Like worms on a hook
That were plucked from the hearts
Of the bodies of gods
That were rotting to dust"

 

Otep - Apex Predator 

 

 

A game about a pregnant gal falling down about twenty flights of stairs.

Also: The Magician's Nephew's gone goth!

Anyway, worship the great mother.

It's not polite to stare.

A Machine for Pigs made a good enough impression to keep me playing through my Amnesia backlog (I'd forgotten all about them until now) with Rebirth. Published a decade after The Dark Descent, it seems from the start eager to show off its more polished game engine, all those larger, more complex, interactable environments and special effects. While its underlying stiff mid-2000s blockiness is more and more difficult to hide these days, they worked it into a generally... well, stiff and blocky, chthonic aesthetic well fitting the cold, off-putting sensation so intrinsic to their survival horror claim to fame. However, while much of that is indeed well-executed, it also contributes heavily to a pervasively damaging over-indulgence.

 

The more lush environments could not help but tempt me to treat this not as survival horror but an open-world RPG, trying to explore every nook and cranny of every zone. (Hey, I like sandbox games. You put me in a literal sandbox. I'm gonna do some sandboxin'! I'm not on trial here!) Indeed, the developers themselves seemed uncertain which way to lean from zone to zone, delighting in immersing you in a massive alternate-universe ruin -

Worship the great mother.

- while struggling to maintain some degree of chill on the back of your neck. Rebirth satisfies more as an improvement on Myst's otherworldly exploration, but this cannot help but clash with its desperation to maintain the series' core survival horror theme. So many scripted events pop up randomly that it becomes tedious struggling not to trigger the next cutscene and the next and the next before you've had a chance to explore. Branching paths just waste time if you cannot fully explore a branch, invisible walls block your path or doors unlock miraculously across the map as you advance unrelated plot points with little hint as to proper order of operations. Most often you're simply thrown into mazes of dead ends, some of which you're expected to navigate while being chased, guessing at identical left or right turns in the dark.

 

The darkness in particular, while it's a constant (and logical) part of the survival horror formula, is taken to infuriating extremes. The strict game mechanics side (using light to lower your fear) works well enough, making you manage two resource pools of matches and lamp oil, with plentiful enough drops for the diligent explorer. But when every single damn zone is darker than the sun don't shine, the simple act of moving around becomes a mind-numbing chore. Cranking the gamma just to see one step ahead is a "game" I'd hoped not to play after the first Diablo. After awhile the entire trial-and-error routine of stumbling around blind while monsters jump out of the walls to chase you stops being a meaningful challenge or high-stakes immersion and just gets aggravating. Especially so as Rebirth lacks a quicksave/quickload feature, substituting an auto-respawn... which plonks you randomly in your current level. As you may guess that's worse than nothing, only compounding the central frustration of blind stumbling. I preferred to keep saving to the main menu and reload manually rather than use it.

 

So when I no longer worried about spoilers and looked at player comments I was not surprised to find Rebirth a bit polarizing, with lots of 1-star and 5-star votes. Take the rage-reviews with a grain of salt though. The various mechanics are not bad so much as overused and over-emphasized. Stumbling through the darkness would be great if such zones had not been over-extended. The puzzles can be frustrating, but hints do drop if you just monkey around with your environment a bit. The chases have some variety thrown in like needing to circle, dive, clear a path or stall for a few seconds. And when you're not faceplanting into walls, the alternate universe makes an engrossing playground of its humanoid yet eerie environments.

The backstory dovetails decently with Dark Descent's hints. Though I can't help but roll my eyes at the basic "spaceships that run on feels" phlebotinum, detailing the notion with objects you can actually pick up and combine in-game helps. I also suspect many who bash Rebirth do so on unspoken visceral reactions to its protagonist's plight of pregnancy. For some its mere centrality, complete with "Call the Midwife" cutscenes will feel overbearing. Others may feel betrayed in the opposite direction, because much like Grieving Mother, Rebirth makes you play through the discrepant weight and beatitude heaped upon childbearing and motherhood (what wouldn't you do?) a horse so high that naught may reach. Naught?

"Why does she look so much like me?"

A thread of Venus figurines and other earth-mother worship runs through the entirety of the plot, subtly shifting from being strictly associated with safe locations in the first cave to... well, play and see. For much of the campaign, I grew increasingly annoyed thinking our heroine Tasi would, much like Lorelai, never question the help she receives or weigh the value of her own well-being against the damage she causes. But while the ending can go several ways, at least one option lets you acknowledge that there are limits to anyone's entitlement.

 

Still, take any gushing praise with a similar grain of salt as well. I have not worried much about spoiling the story because the aforementioned overindulgence takes its toll in that department as well. For one thing, when cutscenes interfere with the rules of the game, we can safely call them intrusive. Being crushed by rubble sounds like a game over, except once or twice it triggers a cutscene. Normally being caught by a creature is bad, but once or twice you have to be caught for a cutscene. And the sheer number of environments and twists and turns occasionally undermines the central light/fear mechanic. Incongruously Tasi experiences no trepidation in some pitch-black areas laden with macabre remnants... so long as the darkness and gore is on that post-cataclysmic alien world which she knows issued all the horrors invading Earth. And the plot stretching over so many oversized zones results in overwhelming foreshadowing and some plot holes, notably Tasi looking for Panacea when diminishing returns and "it takes an ocean" are in fact some of the very first texts you encounter in the ruined world, entire chapters earlier. And just maybe the basic pregnancy/motherhood melodrama could stand to be cranked down a notch.

 

There are some other smaller flaws as well.

Developed shortly before 2020, Rebirth is heavier on political correctness than it had to be. Expedition to Algiers including North-Africans? Well, yes, I should think so. Inter-cultural marriage? Sure, these things happen. The only straight white males appearing as antagonists, and even going so far as to pad one's backstory with justification for "I never liked him anyway" because he's a lecherous racist? While the black man's an unimpeachable saint who never complains even as you condemn him to a fate worse than death and still worries about your well-being? Wow. No. Reel it in there, snowflakes.

Then there are a couple of apparently dropped plot threads, like the laudanum.

Or the oddity of centering a game on a francophone heroine who never drops a line of actual French, even if you switch the text language, yielding a sometimes goofy klingon swearing effect when you just know she's supposed to say "merde"

All in all, I can't call this a masterpiece, and it's been far more frustrating than it had to be. But... if you step back from immediate rage-quits and eye-rolling, this is, interestingly (like Technobabylon) a rare example of a game that just tries too hard, as opposed to the cheap shovelware we're all accustomed to. The underlying mechanics, the plot, the atmosphere, puzzles, exploration, all the elements are solid and developed intelligently... but then just slightly over-developed.

Justine, Pothole Puzzles and Speed Runs

"With his arms outstretched

With his arms outstretched

With his arms outstretched?"

GYBE - Mladic

 

A Machine for Pigs reminded me I never played the expansion for The Dark Descent, Justine, so I reinstalled for a bit just to give it a whirl. I can appreciate the very rare, almost unique setup of a female wrongdoer, but aside from that it mostly annoyed me. Unclear success/failure conditions, forced "hardcore mode" with no save files, aborted functionality (the lamp) a late-mission action sequence designed to force a restart, there's little to like. Granted the emphasis is on your puzzles. The first depends on the old observation that gamers never look up, the linking sequence and third are barely puzzles, mostly just blind, mad dashes against a timer of indeterminate length (to force restarts) but the middle challenge obviously took up more development time investment. I suppose if you don't want spoilers you can try it yourself, but it's not really worth the trouble.

You explore some rooms and find four slides to view with a projector and select two. A journal entry feeds you some vague hints about each slide with more or less negative connotations for our heroine, a non-repeatable voiceover and various paintings on the walls supply the rest of their context: specifically a crucifixion and adoration of the magi.

 

But the hints and correlation are so vague as to yield little answer.

Slide with open arms = crucifixion? I guess that's a bad one?

Standing to the right = magi looking to the right at Jesus?

Figure with the sword = presumably a Roman soldier? Journal half-confirms it's bad, but couldn't see it in the paintings.

Kneeling = worship or repentance? I guess that's supposed to sound positive?

 

But then you're still left with the question of how to give the two slides to the captive you must free, and apparently it matters which goes in the top or bottom slot. Based on what information? Are we going chronologically from top to bottom or bottom to top? Why?

 

So I gave up and cheated via a walkthrough, which just bluntly told me the answer without explanation. And so did the next walkthrough, and the next, and I get the feeling nobody actually knows the rationale behind this blurry bit of shadow puppetry. One walkthrough just brute-forced it fourteen years ago and everyone else copied the winning moves without giving a shit.

 

What's the point? Justine's completion time is officially cited at 30mins. If you're playing honestly, it takes you half an hour just to search all the rooms for this one puzzle and slot slides, pulling down books from shelves, checking for levers, monkeying with the light-box, squinting at paintings, etc. It reminds me of all the idiots calling Tyranny a twenty-hour game. Yes, if you don't actually give a shit what you're doing, read nothing, invest no attention in the world or characters or plot or exploration and simply copy stats and quest solutions off a cheat-sheet to min-max and nuke your way through the boss fights, you can reduce most anything to a CliffsNotes insult to itself. Except if all you want is a gratuitous feeling of success, you don't need to buy a video game. Jacking off's Free To Play!

 

Speedrunning is not playing.

 

I give developers a lot of shit for padding campaigns with timesinks to drag out those "hours played" quotes for marketing purposes, but must admit they're partly forced to do so by the retarded trash buying ostensible challenges just to cheat their way through with cookie-cutter builds, wiki solutions and speed-speed-speed-speeeeeeedrunz! And then complain the game was too short. Justine is a middlin'-bad puzzle/horror routine, but did any of its buyers even notice? What incentive do devs have to improve elements their customers will ignore anyway?

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?

Lamplight City

"It's a dead end, I'm burning
Disillusion beats the yearning
Could be deaf or just not listening
Would you see a difference anyway?"

 

Solar Fake - This Generation Ends

 

 

Welcome to Lamplight City, major port of "Vespuccia" in 1844. Meet Miles and Bill. Don't get too attached to Bill. He'll do it for you. Long story short, this one of those times I'd like to give an "A" for effort, but can't really bring myself to overlook the project's more amateurish aspects.

 

I was pleasantly surprised at both the general tone and the pacing, which addressed one of my common complaints about detective stories and other subgenres concerning professionals in uncommon occupations: they tend to be the pirates who don't do anything. As soon as their occupation's introduced, the story suddenly and permanently fixates on the lead's personal drama, around which all occurrences mysteriously gravitate. The Blackwell series (whose ghost sidekick deliberately invites a direct comparison) largely fell into that trap. Lamplight elegantly avoids it, and like both Technobabylon and its closer relative Shardlight, serves as an interesting lesson on worldbuilding within the constraints of a linear adventure game. After the prologue/tutorial you go through a series of five cases, all except the last registering as different enough to stay fresh.

 

From a practical angle, it notably does away with a couple of long-standing genre conventions. First off: you only pick up two or three pieces of material evidence every case, and they're not hidden objects but logical parts of the decor. Well, I always hated pixel-hunting, so not too broken up about that one. I'm more ambivalent about the lack of combining items in your inventory, which could be nonsensical "rubber ducky" grade puzzling, sure, but often required you to think about logical interactions. In Lamplight, you're left with dialoguing as a means of plot advancement, and the dialogues are fairly simple. The few detectiving pitfalls can be summed up as "don't be mean" and more often than not you're left doing the rounds of every NPC after picking up a new clue to see if it's spontaneously opened new dialogue lines.

 

Then there's the subject matter itself.

 

Gonzalez is obviously a major fan of 19th century writing - more Poe tidbits than you can shake a premature burial at - and even I couldn't keep track of the endless stream of title drops, historical puns and casual references. But he does a lackluster job on the period jargon (presumably to save players the trouble of Wikipedia trips for every detail) and the voice acting sounds weirdly hit-or-miss. It's blatantly single-take stuff, the leads sound bland (despite your sidekick's often strained attempts at humor) and while some bit players are spot-on (like Solomon the stiff-necked Jewish tailor) others are painfully identifiable as voices far outside their gamut doing Donald Duck impressions - unsurprising given how many of them pulled quintuple and septuple duty.

 

It... almost works. Almost. The wealth of characters does a good job of immersing you in a steampunk setting rather decently authentic, with period-appropriate drug, invention and fad topics. Supernatural elements thankfully do not take over the plot, with even your central haunting being left up in the air as probably psychological in nature. But some inventions (e.g. "ferroduplicator") serve as too obvious plot crutches, and telling us Bill dies right in the game store page blurb negates much emotional impact, even if it is in the prologue. Also, the otherwise painstaking world-building is hampered by the author's desperate push for multiculturalism. Not sure where in Vespuccia New Bretagne might be located, but its more authentic accents sound more apt to Noo Yawk or Noo Joyzee, not N'rleans as its name and voodoo would indicate. You didn't need every minority in there for the sake of representation.

Which brings us to the usual problem of political correctness. Less pronounced than elsewhere (at least Lamplight doesn't come out swinging like Technobabylon) and most cases manage to dodge it, but the guiltless salt-of-the-earth slum trash begin to grate after a while. The unquestioning mass acceptance of subjects like homosexuality which could not even be discussed in 19th-century "Vespuccia" ruins the attempted period setting. Then, sadly, the whole thing faceplants its grand finale into a trite, gratuitous, bland repetition of the "man bad, woman good" mantra. Because of course. Why should this work of fiction not kowtow to every single other crime plot?

 

Pity. Could've been great.

 

In one aspect though Lamplight City still outshines its competitors: its handling of red herrings. The wealth of flavor texts frequently foreshadow developments in your current or future cases, if you're quick enough to catch them. I'd guess with the state of public education being what it's been this past generation, players' ability to spot those tie-ins varies to both extremes. Twitter addict Taylor Swift fans might get blindsided. Jonathan Swift fans not so much. If you're a 19th century fiction fan and pay attention to flavor text, it might actually come across as too easy. I guessed #2's perpetrator before she's introduced from one classical mention, #3's main theme from the first mention of the victim's characteristics, and #4's BEFORE the sister even knocked on the door, from the inter-chapter cutscene, simply based on the sort of thing my sort of people would stick in my sort of story... and I was right! But the main themes each time around are not necessarily the solution to the case. Multiple leads run a satisfying gamut of rapidly debunked, plausible yet unsupported, and gradually revealed truth.

 

Period research, naturalistic explanations, rational sifting through plausible leads, a halfway reasonable treatment of technological progress vs. humanism. Yup. Could've been great.

Re: purpose?

"Tell me why, tell me who, tell me you don't know what to do"

Caravan Palace - Russian

 

Continuing my run through Weird West, I'm somewhat impressed by its many interesting mechanics, and very very unimpressed by their shallow implementation. I've tossed exactly one electric grenade in combat, to open a fight with a couple of cave terrors by slowing their movement. And why cook food when you get infinite free healing from water sources? Or why bother farming low drop rate animal hides when you get free level-appropriate gear for each character or can easily buy better gear with the gigantic pile of useless cash you rack up? Which in turn brings into question why you'd bother hunting bounties. Even the few useful gimmcks clash. Real-time combat renders complicated combos useless for their extended setup, your posse block your own shots more than enemies' and being tracked down by surviving mooks with a vendetta would be a great twist... if they didn't pop up and start a fight when you're trying to stealth around an enemy camp, promping nothing except an instant reload. But the real noodle scratcher's that in a cRPG so focused on wild west gunfights, you spend most of your time sapping victims unconscious a la Thief.

Did you forget what game you were making halfway through?

Well, it's not an uncommon occurrence.

 

If I'm not personally defending it, the Northern Empire's lost it.

I decided a few years in Calradia might be good for my health, but while Bannerlord understandably pushes its big selling point of large-scale warfare, it does so to the exclusion of the adventuring party lifestyle around which M&B was originally based, or even homesteading your fiefs. The AI is programmed to force constant warfare, no matter in which direction, and moreover seems to constantly lose territory wherever I'm not personally conquering towns for others to rule. It was great for the first few dozen sieges, but I'm beginning to sorely miss my caravan escorting and bandit hunting days, or being able to do anything other than rush to the next siege.

 

Or take Rimworld as another example. Two of its expansions, Biotech and Ideology, add a great deal of both practical and aesthetic customization to your colony. But the other two? Princesses with psychic powers and "cabin in the woods" horror with dungeon delving? How the hell do those build on the game's core Robinsonesque base-building conceit?

My recent jaunt through Fallout 3 reminded me expanding on anything with a story-based campaign in fact has always been a bit iffy. Back when it was made, companies tended to market DLCs as paid cheats, mimicking microtransaction pay-to-win schemes from multiplayer. The "content" you were buying often amounted to little more than a reskinned suit of armor with overpowered stats. But even if that trend has diminished (albeit not disappeared) you're still left with the problem of appending more content to what should have been a full campaign to begin with. Otherwise what the hell did you originally charge customers for? The spate of blatantly unfinished games marketed at full price over the past decade soured many on the concept of buying anything at release. Rare is the company like Larian which will refuse to further milk a cash cow like Baldur's Gate. (My hat's off to them on that point.) But even ignoring those issues, tacking on more content to a finished campaign so frequently smacks of pointless, gratuitous filler, like Kingmaker's endless randomized dungeon crawl minigame.

 

Or, conversely and comically, pared-down DLCs can expose needless fluff in the main campaign. We Happy Few's three add-on standalone adventures lack the main three's open world or RPG leveling elements yet play just as well or better, confirming the suspicions of everyone who pointed out the pointlessness of scrounging and crafting mountains of redundant loot. They'd obviously conceived their opus as adventure game sleuthing, and failed pretty badly at lugging that precept onto the Skyrim bandwagon.

 

It's honestly hard to discern whether more pointless bloat and feature creep stems from developers desperate to play a strength and stand out in a particular niche, or the reverse: overcooked fads and industry standards. Either way, have you noticed all the gameplay you've paid for yet neither played nor gamed?

Shardlight

"Broken trust
Ideas lost
Burn in time
Laid to rest
Look at lies
Broken dies"

 

KMFDM - Craze

 

 

Maybe you've played too many adventure game puzzles if your first thought on seeing a blank piece of paper is "obviously I now need to find some charcoal to make a rubbing of... whatever's up ahead" (plan B: lemon juice)

Also, how am I not sick of Abe Goldfarb's voice yet?

 

Anyhoo, I thought in between gigantic open worlds or turn-based strategy campaigns, it might be nice to polish off another adventure title ambling through my Wadjet Eye collection. Cue post-collapse raven death cult. Turned out pretty decent, though the setting is more interesting than the line-by-line wordsmithing.

"Reaper be damned, I'll go out my own way" indeed, and hey, nice visual foreshadowing of reality crashing through superstitions. Like Technobabylon, Shardlight is an odd duck among detective adventures in primarily focusing on world-building, and rather adroitly to boot. The pervasive use of namesake fluorescent uranium glass shards as light sources may not make total hard scientific sense, but it's visually striking and obliquely suggests a post-nuclear hellscape without resorting to Geiger counters. Neither is this a standard postapocalyptic Earth scenario (nuka-cola reference aside) as the war seems to have been more localized, collapse coming from systems failure more than direct destruction. Even where I want to hate some little touch like Amy constantly pulling her hood up or down on scene transitions (such a waste of time, right?) it fits too well with living in a bombed-out slum to criticize. Mass manipulation via hoarding of necessities, class struggle with Napoleonic overtones, an incomplete collapse leaving much technology in place as both plot levers and symbols of inequality or decay, all form one of the best backdrops I've seen in a genre mostly devoted to quirky comic relief and illogical puzzles.

Speaking of which, that expertly crafted world unfortunately does not ring with the most scintillating repartee, nor tease the brain all that enticingly. Characters mostly skew toward the flat or archetypal (I kept expecting Nelson to grate "stay awhile, and listen") and puzzles toward non-sequiturs. Usually you're giving random objects to random NPCs who spontaneously provide you with your next MacGyver utensil. (Thanks for the massively life-saving gift, here's this random bit of string I found in my pocket. Riiiiight.) (Or the gossips.) The more complex can be outright obtuse, like the calligraphy nonsense at the start, or the much later requirement to backtrack a screen to grab a fallen object you didn't even know existed. In fact, for all the authors' talent in shaping a fantastic yet believable society, they frustratingly, repeatedy fail in conveying hints and cues to the audience or building emotional impact within scenes. (Boy, ain't that the way with SciFi writers?)

Luckily the music and decor picks up some of the slack. I am hardly immune to melancholic piano/guitar twanging, and some of the tracks recall STALKER's famous fireside interludes. There are a couple of weird, random digressions, like a vision quest or a back-of-taxi childbirth which looks like some aborted female empowerment morality play, and we spend a couple of repetitive exchanges praising a female leader, but overall Shardlight is less "wokey" than even Technobabylon, which itself was not too horrible in the context of our past decades' insanity. And while it's a bit blandly conveyed, the basic plot is in fact quite interesting. The uniforms are enough of a hint that revolutionaries aren't necessarily the absolute good, and the plot consciously doubles back against the usual fall into mystical nonsense by reinstating sanity after the (still gratuitous) vision quest.

 

For a cherry on top, the ending resulting from my Chaotic Neutral disdain for both sides of a revolution is designated Free Will.

 

Well, now I suppose since it shares most of the same voices, I may as well go for the full stereophonic experience of hitting Lamplight City soon.

Sunless Skies

"And the stars will show

Where the waters flow

Where the gardens grow"

 

Roxette - Stars

 

 

After a dishearteningly tough mission in Battletech (my spaniel took it good in the meat) I decided to follow through on a decision I regretted ever since being disappointed by Sunless Sea: having already bought its sequel. To my relief though, Sunless Skies reads and plays better... better enough that if you've been curious about the Fallen London / Sea / Skies genealogy, go ahead and skip the first two and grab Skies on sale. (Though really, for a much smarter take on the same choose-your-own-adventure exploration roleplaying caravan management precept, it still can't even remotely measure up to Vagrus: the Riven Realms.)

Look, it's not like I have any compunctions against nitpicking when the mood strikes me, but every once in a while I run across even a basic concept rotted through from the bottom up. Here it's the attempt to mash together florid Victorian-flavored oneiric fantasy text walls with 2D 1980s arcade gameplay. Yes it does feel every bit as jarring as you might think to go from pages of precious poncy tea-sippin' among Her Majesty's subjects at the Maiden and Unicorn beneath the elegiac firmament of Eleutheria... straight to "pew-pew space invaders"

 

I can't avoid the impression that Skies and its predecessors (much like pixelated "retro" fare) staked out a market niche of sophomoric hipsterism, an audience which would like to play video games but also turn up its nose at them, and so will only accept a primitive parody of game-playing so as to maintain that feeling of superiority. Similarly, though the writing demonstrates plenty of linguistic aptitude and familiarity with adventure/horror tropes, every encounter rides the ironic/postironic high horse. Wouldn't want to be caught getting truly invested in a work a fiction, now would we? Chalance is ever so... common. *sniffs contemptuously* So call perception "mirrors" and call willpower "hearts" and make it a steam locomotive floating in the skies to scorn the more obvious (and just as period-appropriate) dirigibles (see space dudes not-in-space) then just ladle on a couple of repeating gimmicks ad nauseam: making fun of stuck-up old-timey brits (which SYABH pulled off better) and <abstract concept> (hours/souls/etc.) is edible/sapient/iacthulhufhtagn. Just to make sure everyone understands you're above the execution of your craft, slap on some lines like "Piranesi is, of course, bigger on the inside" (cf. "you know how elves are") and you're all set to bilk your thoroughly validated devotees by, say, peddling a $9 soundtrack for a $20 game.

 

Pity.

The creative team obviously boasted some ability. The florid prose can be quite charming when it's not crawling too far up its own ass, a few of the locations/monsters are intriguing, the layers of terrain float enchantingly below you as you chug along and the spacing of towns/hazards (along with intelligible instructions and more balanced resource consumption) makes for a far more workable horse trading core loop than that of Seas. I'll even praise Skies' travel when I talk about the virtue of distance. But the combat is both dull and annoying, the caravan simulation's pretty shallow since you rarely plan longer than one stop ahead, and engaging writing grows out of combining simpler elements (like my spaniel taking it in the meat) not strained LOLrandomness.

 

Still, unlike Sea, I have to grudgingly admit that Skies does actually... function... so long as you're willing to save-scum and not waste your life starting over every time you miss a cannon shot.

_____________________________________

P.S.: Don't get me started on their wokey abuse of the royal "they"

We are not amused.

edit 2024/10/13

Forgot to mention one bit of idiocy: why would you ever make a game about floating without taking the third dimension into account?