Reviews at Gamespot
A complete list of all my reviews published at Gamespot.
Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
Recent Reviews
Some of my current work as published at Gamespot:
Published at Gamespot on November 2, 2020:
Reviewing Baldur's Gate 3 at this point in time is a delicate proposition. It shows a good deal of promise, yet there are plenty of warning signs it may not fulfill its potential. But predicting the future is not really the task of an Early Access review. To some extent, it is fascinating to play Baldur's Gate 3 today with the knowledge you will be able to follow its progress over the coming months--and possibly years--with a kind of academic interest in how AAA RPGs are built. You'll be able to witness first-hand how rough cuts are beaten into shape and finally polished. And for some small section of the audience, that alone will be worth the price of admission. For the rest of us, however, there's no rush. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't done yet. It's okay to wait until it is.
Published at Gamespot on September 24, 2020:
Reflecting on my time with Crusader Kings 3, I'm struck by the breadth of experiences it offers. My journey took in such a range of emotions that trying to pin down a particular perspective seems futile. I've chuckled in bemusement at the absurd naked man in my court. I've felt the enduring familial pride as a daughter fulfilled her deceased father's lifelong ambition. I've been bored just half-heartedly watching the years tick by, uninspired to intervene. And I've suffered absolute heartbreak, a gutpunch as potent as any game has delivered.
In a sense, Crusader Kings 3 is all over the place. It doesn't always work perfectly, and at times it really makes you work for it, but there's something amazing in that any of it works at all. Strategy games can tell interesting stories as their empires rise and fall, but their procedural narratives are rarely as affecting and poignant as they are here.
Published at Gamespot on September 27, 2020:
But even when you're able to best appreciate Pendragon's procedural storytelling, when you're able to grab a handful of its narrative threads and weave them together across multiple half-hour playthroughs, the returns are diminishing. Each session is too short to allow for the consequences of your actions to carry real weight. By the time you make it to Camlann, you're only just getting to know Lady Niambh or Sir Lancelot, and now it's farewell until you are reunited on a future playthrough--minus any memory of what you just experienced together. And as the scenarios start to repeat, you've got to dig deeper to find something fresh.
Pendragon is a fascinating experiment in trying to marry procedural storytelling to a roguelike structure. It does so with mixed success. With smart writing at the forefront, it delivers a rich and evocative world steeped in fantastical adventure. But when its more mundane systems intrude, you find that reality is a little more prosaic.
Published at Gamespot on April 21, 2020:
In Other Waters develops its central mysteries in expert fashion, drip-feeding its revelations in a way that feels natural, and dispatching you to inspect the corners of its map in a way that doesn't feel contrived. As you steadily learn more of what Vas' partner was up to on this strange planet, and you yourself begin to grasp humanity's plight, the mystery builds to a confident conclusion--one that satisfies yet remains aware that some questions are more enticing when left unanswered. In this sense, its story echoes the restraint that runs through the entire game to deliver a stylish, assured, and utterly absorbing adventure that demonstrates again and again it knows how to do a lot with seemingly very little.
Tacoma review
As a genre label, “walking simulator” is most often used as a pejorative, despite the best efforts of those fans who have sought to reclaim the phrase. I first heard it applied to Dear Esther and thought it fit that game’s poignant stroll through the Scottish tundra, albeit in an amusingly reductive way. The problem with using “walking simulator” to describe Firewatch, Jazzpunk, Virginia or Gone Home is that the walking is the least interesting thing about them.
Tacoma is the second game from Fullbright, the creators of Gone Home. It’s similar in some ways, but also shows the developer is confident enough to tackle something more ambitious.
As in Gone Home, you’re exploring a modestly-sized environment - in this case a space station comprising half a dozen multi-roomed sections. And, also like Gone Home, you’re trying to piece together the events that occurred just before you arrived - in this case what happened to the six-person crew of the Tacoma.
Where Gone Home triggered simple audio diaries spoken by the main character when you picked up a pertinent object, Tacoma opts for a far more elaborate recreation. Everything aboard the station is recorded and able then replayed using sci-fi augmented reality tech. As you move from section to section you’ll witness AR holograms of the crew running through scenes that took place days earlier. You’ll see them walking about, performing their duties, talking with each other, or sometimes just chilling out. You can pause and rewind to see what that crew member was doing earlier before entering the room.
Typically in games like this you’re made to feel like an archaeologist, digging up digital remains to study the past. With Tacoma, however, I feel like a different metaphor is warranted.
Here it feels like you’re watching a play, except you’re up on the stage mingling with the actors and following them around, even if you can’t interrupt their lines. You can, however, pick up and examine a host of objects, rifle through desks and drawers, and even interact with the AR desktops of each crew member and read some of their recent emails or listen in on recent calls.
It all adds up to a remarkably effective way of telling a story. The crew members transcend their brightly-coloured hologram depictions and become what feel like real people. Thanks to the quality of the writing, you’ll understand each person’s history, their motivations, their fears, and their relationships to each other, in a way that few games manage.
You don’t do a lot in Tacoma, at least in a conservative gameplay verb sense. You walk around and pick things up and that’s about it. Instead, what you do in Tacoma is observe and think and connect the non-linear dots of its layered story. And you care about and empathise with and root for the six people who were there before you.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Serial Cleaner review
So you’ve just beat a level in Hotline Miami. There’s a dead body sprawled on the floor in every room. Murder weapons abandoned where they fell after use. Blood just everywhere. Someone’s gonna have to clean this all up before the cops arrive.
Serial Cleaner takes this premise and adapts it into a fast and fluid stealth game. You play the titular cleaner sent into a series of increasingly gruesome crime scenes to clean up the mess. In each level you have to dispose of the corpses and murder weapons, mop up the blood (typically a certain percentage of the total spatter), and pocket any trophies you’d like to display on your bedroom shelf.
Serial Cleaner also seems to misunderstand its premise. You know the bit in Pulp Fiction where Harvey Keitel is called in to help “clean up” the situation after Vincent shoots Marvin in the car? They get the cleaner in to ensure no one suspects a crime has been committed. Here, by the time you arrive at a crime scene it’s already crawling with cops. You have to run around the level, grabbing bodies and whatnot while staying out of the vision cones of the patrolling police. It’s weird and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but I guess at the same time it has to be this way for the stealth gameplay to function.
Levels are small, generally no more than two screens high and wide, and take place in office spaces, warehouses, trailer parks and other down and out locales. You’re able to hold down a button and zoom out to see the entire level and plan your approach. Maybe you’ll wait for that cop to walk past the window then you can duck through the door, hide in the closet for few seconds, head out the back, quickly move that pallet crate, grab the body and you’re… Shit! They spotted me. Restart.
Despite being a stealth game, it’s fast. You move quickly, make mistakes and quickly jump back into the level, just like Hotline Miami. Bodies and items are semi-randomly respawned each tiem you restart so, while you can learn police patrol routes, you’ve still got to improvise. If you get spotted you do have a few seconds grace to find a hiding spot before you’re caught. But it’s annoying when an off-screen cop suddenly turns around and sees you, giving you almost no time to react.
Between levels there’s an attempt at a story where you’re living with your mum who’s seemingly oblivious to your chosen career, and the two of you chat about bills and watch TV together while an ominous cloud drifts by. It’s odd and had me playing through all 20 levels with a degree of curiosity I’m not sure the fairly simplistic gameplay would’ve matched.
This article first appeared in PC PowerPlay.
Dream Daddy review
“Build that dad!”
So I build my dad. He turns out to be a tubby, balding dude with tufts of grey around his ears and a thick salt and pepper beard. He’s wearing a blue t-shirt emblazoned with two fried eggs where his man-boobs are hanging. I call him Beanton.
Beanton’s just moved to Maple Bay with his teenage daughter, Amanda. In a scene-setting conversation I get to elaborate a little on the family history and decide that Beanton was once married to Amanda’s mother but she passed away some years ago. Father and daughter get along well though, and they’re looking forward to discovering more of Maple Bay.
We go for coffee at the local cafe. I order an Iced Teagan & Sara while Amanda opts for a Macchiato DeMarco, which will either make you chuckle in pain at the excruciatingly niche puns or scratch your head. Mat, the cafe owner, seems nice. Chilled. A little bit flirty maybe? I dunno, is it flirting when someone lets you sample his new banana bread recipe? Either way, I hope he picks up on the subtext when I tell him he should call it Right Said Banana Bread.
Back home, Joseph the next door neighbour pops over in a pink polo and blue sweater casually tied around his neck. He’s brought a plate of welcome cookies. Beanton and Joseph make small talk while Amanda scoffs the cookies. I’m just clicking through dialogue boxes here. The conversation’s cute and all, but I kinda wanna make some choices. I don’t, and the exchange ends when Joseph invites Beanton and Amanda round for a barbecue on Saturday.
Things pick up at the park when Beanton meets Brian, also the father of a teenage girl, and the two face off in a faux-Pokemon battle where they attack each other by bragging about their daughter’s accomplishments. Showing Brian that drawing of Amanda’s that Beanton keeps in his wallet was super effective!
Dream Daddy is a visual novel. You click through dialogue boxes and the odd internal monologue from your avatar daddy. Occasionally, and it must be stressed just how very occasionally, you get to choose to say something or to decide what to do next. It may well carry the subtitle “A Dad Dating Simulator” - and while it’s certainly true you’ll go on a handful of dates with the dads in town - there’s none of the complexity you might expect from an actual sim.
Where Dream Daddy does succeed is in depicting a cast of characters you’ll actually grow to like. At first the dads appear to be stereotypes - the preppy one, the goth one, etc - but take the time to get to know them and you’ll realise that the complexity is revealed in the deep characterisations of everyone you meet. Indeed, the real star of the show is the relationship between Amanda and her dad. But I guess Dream Daughter: A Parenting Simulator hasn’t got quite the same ring to it.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
The Low Road review
My partner didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust him. So of course in a game called The Low Road I had no option but to blackmail him into co-operating with me. You can stuff your ethics and consciences and enjoy the view from the high road. I’ll be down here getting the job done.
The moral vacuum described here is the 1970s American automobile industry and, in particular, the parallel industry of corporate espionage that fuelled it. Initially, you play as Noomi Kovacs, a young intelligence graduate starting her first spy job. She’s itching to get out from behind her desk and into what she imagines is the thrilling, dangerous world of field work. But her boss, known as Turn, doesn’t think she’s ready. Anyway, these days - this is now the ‘70s remember? - most spy work can be done over the phone.
I liked the first puzzle of this stylish, sometimes silly, always sardonic, point-and-click adventure. Turn gives Noomi a case file and a phone number. You’ve got to read the file (don’t worry, there’s only a handful of documents within) and use the information you’ve gleaned to extract the necessary answers from the person you’ve called. I liked it because it made me feel clever. I didn’t feel like a spy exactly, but I did get a genuine sense I was identifying clues and piecing a puzzle together. It didn’t feel rote.
The Low Road gets a lot right with its puzzles. Sometimes it’s about using the right object you’ve collected in the right place. Sometimes it’s about getting the right information from someone and then using it to get more information out of someone else. Some puzzles present you with a single screen activity, such as pickpocketing an ID card by guiding it through a maze of pockets without alerting its owner. Most puzzles are standalone, but a few require you to recall things that happened earlier in the game in funny and unexpected ways. It’s always satisfying when you make those connections.
Also unexpected, to me at least, is the sense of humour. This isn’t a sombre or gritty look at corporate espionage; it’s goofy, sarcastic and frequently absurd. When Noomi needs a four-digit passcode to enter a secure door, clicking on the panel prompts her to try 0001. Clicking again has her try 0002. A third time has her try 0003. Click on a pigeon that’s just minding its own business on the roof of the agency building and its feathers start to fly. Keep clicking and it’ll abruptly disappear, popping like a balloon.
It’s possible to fail and prematurely end the game. The first time I encountered this occurred after selecting the wrong option during a conversation. I figured it probably wasn’t the smart thing to say, but I wanted to see what would happen if I did. Noomi’s cover was predictably blown before an amusing coda summarised how the cast lived out the rest of their lives. Then it quickly rewound and I was back at the fateful dialogue choice.
When faced with the decision again, I didn’t have to think twice. I took the low road.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles review
I thought Yonder would give me a sword.
My inventory comprised a hammer, an axe, a pick, a scythe, even a fishing rod. But my scabbard was empty, my sword hand flexing anxiously without a blade to wrap its fingers around.
Yonder looks, for all the world, like a third-person action-RPG in the vein of The Legend of Zelda or Fable or a toddler-ised Darksiders. It looks like the kind of game that has you trekking across a fantasy countryside, running quests for hapless villagers who stand around all day and night patiently waiting for you to solve their problems, and hacking and slashing whatever nefarious creatures get in your way.
So where on earth was my sword?
Turns out Yonder isn’t that kind of game at all.
What might be used as weapons in another action-RPG are all granted more mundane utility here. The hammer is used to break boulders down into chunks of stone and to smash crates in order to collect the materials within. The axe is used to chop down trees, turning them into bits of wood. The pick allows you to mine various types of ore from the sliver-like veins found running across rocky surfaces. The scythe cuts through long grass. The fishing rod, uh… actually does kill fish, though this shouldn’t suggest that there are in fact nefarious creatures dwelling underwater.
Yonder is instead a game almost entirely about crafting.
But first it begins with a shipwreck. You wake up in a cave on an island, your crew seemingly vanished. After encountering a fairylike creature you embark on a quest to save the land of Gemea from the “evil murk” that has infested its eight environmentally distinct regions. The local Gemeans greet you as their saviour and are all-too-willing to give you tips on how to beat back the murk as long as you run some errands for them first.
There’s Theodore over in Goldlake who wants you to catch him a nackle fish. There’s Marina who needs you to deliver her enough stone so she can reopen the East Docks. There’s Hugh in Fairmont who teaches you how to make a bundle of sticks by combining three sticks and some vine. Teagin Gabardine, the master tailor, will help you craft some new sails for your ship if you can just bring back some giant moth silk. And then there’s Lion-Maned Jess who’ll show you how to craft a buttaberry blower and lace fish into a haberdashery, which in turn you combine with a tailor’s kit (made from twine and wood), some silk, cloth and dye to make yourself a brand new basic tunic.
Early on you’ll inherit a farm near the village of Fairmont. You can upgrade it with animal pens in which you’ll house various creatures you’ve befriended out in the wilds. I lured a groffle there with the promise of celium seeds and it repaid such kindness with a continuous supply of groffle milk that I could use to trade for other items and, uh… groffle poop that I had to scoop up every time I revisited my farmstead.
Every quest tends to involve travelling to a remote location, fetching something for someone, crafting something for someone, or travelling somewhere to fetch something then using it to craft something for someone. You’ll join various guilds in your travels, each of which specialises in a specific crafting profession - from carpentry to tailoring via cooking, tinkering and brewing. As you progress through the guilds, you’ll unlock new crafting recipes which, in turn, allow you to deliver more complex items to the demanding villagers.
Pushing you through all this crafting and collecting is the ever-present murk. It acts like a gating mechanism: collect enough sprites hidden in the world and you can clear the murk and restore life to Gemea. It’s a simple progression system, but it works well to keep you eager to poke around looking for more sprites and more murky areas.
Yonder isn’t challenging in an action game sense. Instead what it demands from you is the ability to read a map in order to navigate its world while also remembering where to find its dozens upon dozens of crafting materials. Part of this is due to the map only showing a quest’s final destination and not the route you need to take. You’ll know, for example, that you need to get to that village in the middle of a mountain, but you’ll spend a considerable amount of time exploring the area until you find the path that actually takes you there. If you expect thorough waypoints you’ll likely feel frustrated here. But if you do enjoy mapping a location in your mind and learning the best routes to take as you backtrack across the land, there’s a lot you’ll find to be satisfying.
It could do with some more polish in its presentation, especially in the way it delivers its story. When you talk to an NPC the camera auto-centres on their face but doesn’t take into account nearby objects. As a result, I’ve had more than one conversation with, for example, a fence instead of the person standing next to the fence. Also, quests can often start and end with little fanfare, either failing to convey why you now need to collect five eggs or forgetting to let you know what you received in return for handing over those five eggs.
It’ll be interesting to see what the developers add to Yonder over the coming months. Updates that add some polish and more crafting recipes would be welcome. What I hope they don’t do is add a sword. You don’t need one.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Old Man's Journey review
The past ten years or so have seen video game development move through a period of Dadification. That is to say, from Sean Bean in Fallout 3 to Lee in The Walking Dead, from Red Dead’s John Marston to various BioShocks and countless others, there has been a heck of a lot of dads in video games of late. When I spoke with Rime creative director Raul Rubio a couple of issues ago, he cited the birth of first child as an inspiration for much of that game’s sensibility and thematic exploration. It’s easy to imagine that as developers reach a certain age, the games they make might reflect their life experience. The teenage fantasies of space ships, robots, dragons and really, really hot elves start to give way to serious, adult responsibilities, like being a parent.
Old Man’s Journey can be seen as the next logical step in the Dadification of games. It’s the Video Game Dad taken to the next level, you might say, if you were still obsessed with the aforementioned teen fantasies.
You play as an old man. You can tell he’s old because he has a big grey beard and carries a walking stick. His journey, as referenced in the title, is both literal and figurative. With stick and rucksack in hand, he sets out for a walk in the countryside. The 2D landscape is composed of numerous layers, each typically representing a hill or a road or some other platform you can traverse. By clicking on a layer you can move it up and down, thus altering the landscape. For example, by dragging the cruves of two hills that were previously separated, you can cause them to now touch and the old man can travel between them.
At its core, Old Man’s Journey is a puzzle game. In each of the dozen or so locations, most of which span a good half dozen or so screens, your objective is simply to guide him to the end, manipulating the layers of the landscape as you go. What makes it tricky is that you cannot move the layer he is currently on, and so most of the puzzles are derived from having to work around this restriction. Still, it’s a light affair, and none of the areas left me stumped for terribly long, even if a few of them do serve up some clever variations on the theme.
What I enjoyed most about Old Man’s Journey was its tone. It’s a slow paced game – you’re an old man, after all, and he really does walk everywhere – that leaves you with plenty of time to dwell in its whimsical art and gently strumming guitar soundtrack. Each area plays like a vignette of a man – a husband, a father, a grandfather - looking back on his life, trawling through memories, for better and worse. The revelations aren’t profound, but the mood will strike a chord with anyone who’s lived a life and has regrets. Playing this game won’t be one of them, though.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Zafehouse Diaries 2 review
Anthony, Juan, Lisa, Joshua and Karen made it to Lumpkin Springs. The fragile group consists of a police officer, a nurse, a priest, a salesperson and a carpenter. Karen isn’t adjusting well to the group. Hopefully, Joshua can hold things together.
This is my introduction to Zafehouse Diaries 2, a mostly text-based zombie survival sim set in generic suburbia where Lavender St meets Cinnamon St and there’s still a bank in the middle of town. There are five sandbox missions of increasing difficulty and when you start each it procedurally generates the layout of the town, the items and enemies you’ll find in each house, and the five survivors who compose your group.
Joshua is the salesperson, it turns out. He’s also “uncomfortable around women,” apparently. I’ve already picked him as the weak link in the group. He is one of two characters who doesn’t start the game equipped with a weapon so I task him with searching the (s)afehouse.
Karen is the carpenter, of course, and she has nothing but red lines to the rest of the group on the relationship meter. We’ve only just begun the mission and already she thinks she’s a superstar. I click on her stats and note she’s got five stars for the barricade skill. I put her to work dismantling microwaves and kettles, the initial step of constructing a sturdy fortress, as any five-star carpenter would know.
Anthony and Lisa get along, possibly because they’re the oldest in the group. And possibly because they both own pistols. Neither of them like Karen, for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, though they seem sad at the lack of kettles in the house. Anthony doesn’t like Juan either, but Juan has a shotgun so he’s not going to voice his disapproval too loudly.
From the town map I instruct Anthony, Lisa and Juan to investigate the houses along Cinnamon St. They report back each time, informing me of the number of zombies they spotted inside each abode and whether it contained any useful salvage. 49 Cinnamon St looks the best bet; according to Anthony’s “very confident” report, there’s food and medical supplies inside and only a handful of zombies.
With the place now scouted, the three of them breach the house. Anthony entered via the bedroom window while Lisa and Juan took the bathroom. I hear some scuffling noises and blood spatters across the pages of the diary as a prelude to the full report.
“The fighting took place throughout the house. They killed eight zombies. Lisa and Juan were injured in the fight.”
Lisa’s injuries were worse. Lacerations to her chest, stomach and legs. Juan’s okay to search the house and I get Anthony to patrol in case any more zombies turn up. They grab the food, some painkillers, bandages, some rifles rounds and a machete, rest for a few hours and then head back.
Anthony, Lisa and Juan returned to the (s)afehouse. Joshua quietly waited for the right moment and let them inside. He’s still holding things together.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs review
Just days into my reign as the new lord of Ascalia, I decided to take a trip to Falgarwood. My council, consisting of my two sisters, my bodyguard, and the cranky ghost of a long dead ancestor, thought it’d be a good idea to get to know the area. Let the local peasants put a face to the name, that sort of thing. It’ll demonstrate that you care, they said.
A few days later I’m lost in the sprawling wildwood, fighting for my life against a pack of balefolk - or animated trees. Balefolk have this special ability, you see, where once they lose 50% of their health they can cast a spell called Petal Dance. The first time I saw one of them do this, conjuring up a swirl of leaves to orbit its trunk, I thought it was cute. When the second one did it, I grimaced. When the third one did it, I quit the game in disgust.
It took me a while to work out what was going on. Why did Griffith my bodyguard, the tank of this operation, lose 300 hit points that turn even though he wasn’t attacked? Wait, why is he now dead? And, hang on here a minute, why is Signy, the swift damage-dealer of the party, also mysteriously dead? And, ohferchrissakes, now I’m dead too.
Petal Dance, you see, not only gives these damn trees a huge buff to their shields, which under Regalia’s combat rules you must first deplete before you can inflict any real damage to an enemy’s health. It also does a ridiculous amount of real physical damage to each member of your party every single turn no matter where they are on a grid-based battlefield. It’s insane. It’s infuriating.
It’s also a good example of how Regalia wants you to play its combat. This is a strategy RPG built on a foundation of turn-based combat and supported by some light base-building and dialogue options. What’s novel is that in combat you don’t get a basic attack. Every action in combat is a special skill, all of which operate on turn limited cooldowns.
Kay, the main character, has skills that range from buffing ally’s shields and attacks to a ranged attack that weakens an enemy to a low-damage melee attack that hits multiple targets. Other party members have their own, increasingly diverse, array of abilities. The challenge of each encounter is managing the best turn to use each skill while also countering the skills the enemies throw at you.
I eventually overcame those bloody balefolk and their Petal Dance garbage. I realised I had to focus my attention on one tree at a time, using Kay to buff Signy and Griffith so they could kill it quickly before it had the chance to cast. We’ve rebuilt much of Ascalia now, and I think even the local peasants don’t hate me too much. The castle renovations are looking pretty good, too. Especially since I chopped down all the bloody trees.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Rime preview
Pristine blue water laps against the shore, its white foam fringe briefly darkening the sand before retreating. Further down the beach a thin headland reaches out to support a brilliant white tower like a hand holding a candle above the ocean. The sun is high in the sky, there are birds singing and crabs scuttling across the sand. It’s an idyllic setting for a game. But some players just didn’t get it.
“This is not like Halo,” Rime creative director Raul Rubio recalls one playtester telling him.
“I asked him why he thought it would be like Halo and he said ‘I dunno, because you start on a beach?”
Confusion about Rime extends beyond simple-minded playtesters whose gaming experience starts and ends with Halo 1’s Silent Cartographer level. When Rubio and the team at Spanish development studio Tequila Works, best known for 2012’s zombie-themed platformer Deadlight, were shopping Rime around to prospective publishers, many of them didn’t quite know what to make of it either.
“When we first start showing the game to publishers, especially Japanese publishers, they’d say this looks so original and exotic,” Rubio tells me.
“We were surprised. For us we look outside our window and we see the Mediterranean Sea. Publishers would ask us if it is supposed to be the Caribbean. We’d say no, it’s just our home.”
Part of the confusion may be attributable to Rime’s evolving development process. After shipping Deadlight in 2012, Tequila Works brainstormed its next title via an internal game jam. All staff were encouraged to play around with their own ideas for prototypes and let their imaginations run wild. The game that would eventually become Rime was born during this process.
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That initial concept was a survival game. Players had to gather food, find water, hunt wild animals and build shelter. But it wasn’t the game Tequila Works really wanted to make. So they began stripping it back, trying to find the core essence of Rime: in the end they found the island, the tower and the castaway. From here they rebuilt the game from, as Rubio describes it, first principles.
“We want to find the extraordinary in ordinary things,” says Rubio.
“With Rime we wanted to make something that felt personal. When we were kids and we took summer vacations we would go to the beach. We would have months of adventure and exploring. Remember, this is Spain and so everything is pretty old. But because we were children everything was also new to us. So that’s where we started.
“What if we made a game where instead of having a clear goal, we wanted to make the player feel like a kid again? A game where you have no idea what the rules of this new world are and you have to discover it by yourself. So instead of explaining everything, tutorialising everything, telling you what to do and where to go, what if we stranded you on the island for real?”
My first few minutes spent playing Rime encapsulate this feeling perfectly. I know I’m on an island, I feel like I’m alone and I have no idea how or why I’m here. All I know is that there’s a tower in the distance and I can’t get into it.
I run around and get a feel for the way my character moves, all gangly limbs that he never quite seems fully in control of. There’s a momentum, an eagerness and a clumsiness to his movement that instantly reminds me of my own childhood holidays spent clambering around water-slick rocks at the beach.
I press a button and he shouts. I do this a few times, hearing it echo off the surrounding stone slabs. I feel like I’m lost and alone and calling it in the hope that someone else is there. I shout again, this time near a small green statue of what looks like a monkey. It glows. I find another statue and shout again. It glows too.
I spy a cute little fox and follow it until a few minutes later I find several green statues nearby. I position myself roughly equidistant to them and shout again. All three statues glow and a door opens up in the wall ahead of me.
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Tequila Works soon found they wanted Rime to be about exploration and discovery. Their original vision of the game’s protagonist, the castaway, was of a stereotypical fit, muscled man. As the game changed, so did the player avatar, from capable adult to naive but inquisitive child. And with this change in tone, the whole game shifted in terms of mechanics, from survival to solving puzzles.
“When you’re a kid you’re not aware of the dangers of the world, right?” says Rubio. “Kids represent fearless exploration. At first we had a stamina system, but it was restrictive when we wanted you to be able to explore everywhere.”
Once the main character was established, Rubio says the core of Rime’s gameplay flowed naturally. Kids want to explore so Rime needs large open locations and a traversal system that allows players to run, climb, swim and jump around the island. Kids are curious and like to prod and push at things so Rime should be about environmental puzzles that encourage players to experiment and discover how things work.
Kids also like to make lots of noise, as Rubio, the father of a small child, explains.
“When we were thinking about all the stuff you could do as a kid, shouting was at the top of the list,” he laughs.
“We realised this allowed us to strengthen the player’s bond with the kid. Remember, the kid doesn’t talk, so a lot of his expressiveness is done through animation. Whether he’s feeling happy or sad or scared you can see it because his movements are changing to reflect those feelings.
“The shout is contextual, it changes a lot depending on where you are and what you’re doing. Sometimes he’s singing, sometimes he’s just calling out, other times he’s trying to communicate with the fox or urge other creatures away. You start to understand how he’s feeling, and of course you’re hopefully feeling the same way.”
I keep exploring the island. I find an apple tree and am able to pick its oversized fruit and carry it around for reasons I don’t yet understand. I find a pig and chase it around, never quite able to catch it. I wander into what appear to be the ruins of long-abandoned temples and poke around. I keep shouting.
“In terms of the puzzle mechanics, the shouting works because it helps create a world that feels real but also where magic is possible,” Rubio explains.
“When you’re shouting at a statue and it causes its hands to start waving and suddenly a door opens, it makes no sense. But it’s not just random.
“We took a lot of care in conveying a visual language. All the green elements, like the jade statues, are activated by sound and, more importantly, all of them open something. Everything yellow indicates a physical interaction, so gold objects are things that you can push or pull, for example.”
Scattered around the temples I find stone blocks trimmed with gold. I’m able to push and pull them. Some of the blocks hold more green statues and I’m able to move these into positions that allow me to shout and trigger more doors to open. Other blocks are simple weights I can move onto various pressure plates. Others still support golden geometric shapes that when viewed from a particular perspective cause a kind of <i>trompe l’oeil</i> effect that triggers environmental changes.
Rubio is keen to stress that the puzzles have been designed so that a player with “no clues, no tutorials, no nothing” is able to solve it. My experience so far suggests that this doesn’t mean the puzzles remain simple, but rather it means that the mechanics used to solve them are always consistent.
===
Solving each puzzle rewards me with new avenues to explore but it doesn’t feel like I’m moving from one puzzle room to the next. My progression through this part of the island feels organic and free of artifical gating. I suspect this is born from the developer’s decision over the course of its extensive playtesting to strip away puzzles that didn’t add anything to the game or were only there to hold the player up.
“We started playtesting very early in development,” says Rubio. “We were removing many of the things we knew worked in games, like the combat, so we were scared about what we were doing.
“Obviously we knew we couldn’t please everyone but it was important to know why some players were getting frustrated. One of the important things we learned was from players getting frustrated at not knowing why they were having to solve a certain puzzle. They were having fun exploring and then they were asking what has this puzzle got to do with the rest of the game?
“I can tell you that in the beginning they were too complex. Now they’re more accessible and also more gratifying. We find players are able to discover the solutions for themselves, whereas in the past they were having to ask us for solutions. That’s a big difference.”
I just want to point out that I didn’t ask for solutions during my play session. Sure, I got completely lost at one point and did restart the demo over again, but I declined all hints. I even solved one puzzle in a way that the PR rep looking over my shoulder mentioned they hadn’t even seen.
If you do get stuck though, Rime has a way to help you out. But in keeping with the rest of the game, it does so in a subtle, unobtrusive kind of way.
“When you feel lost, we have the fox,” Rubio explains.
The fox acts as a kind of “player guidance system” whose job it is to ensure you are never lost on the island. But it serves a dual purpose in also becoming a narrative element. Rubio’s hope is that players will care about the fox and then bond with the fox. And at the same time the fox itself goes from being this wild animal to connecting with the kid and learning to tame those wild instincts.
When I ask why a fox, specifically, or whether it could have been another animal, Rubio says the fox is a reference to the classic French tale The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In the book, the titular prince comes to Earth and befriends a fox who helps him understand human nature.
“It could have been a dog,” he admits.
“But we liked the idea of the fox better. Remember it’s a wild animal so it’s not going to stay with you all the time. A fox is going to take some interest in the kid, play with him a bit, and then run away. He’s not supposed to be your pet.”
The fox got me back on track a couple of times. I particularly appreciated how his bright orange fur made him stand out even from distance. There was one moment when I was wandering around and spotted the fox perched on a ledge way over there. I trotted on over and was immediately sucked into examining a brand new puzzle. It felt natural; the fox was beckoning me rather than nagging me about what to do next.
“One thing players enjoy is when they’re playing along, they start to feel stuck on a puzzle, and suddenly they see the fox somewhere, and they’re like ‘Oh, I can see up there! I wonder what that means?’” says Rubio, who I swear was not watching me play his game earlier. (It’s true, he’s in Madrid; I’m in Sydney.)
“The fox comes and goes,” he adds. “We like to think that the fox more often appears when the player needs the fox, not the other way round.”
===
Two of my favourite games of recent years are The Witness and The Talos Principle. Playing through the early areas of Rime reminded me of both of them in some obvious and some not-so-obvious ways. They’re all puzzle games, broadly speaking, though they each take a different approach to the type of puzzle they present. They’re lonely, isolated experiences intended to allow for plenty of contemplative downtime between epiphanies. But they also possess a central, driving mystery: who built this place, and why?
Rubio tells me he wants the island itself to be a character in the game, perhaps even the main character. He wants the island to tell you a story. Paying attention to the environment is not only an aid to exploration or puzzle-solving, but there’s a narrative purpose too.
“I never say that you were invited to the island,” he says.
“You are simply here on the island. When you start the game everything is colourful and cheerful and full of life. But once the island knows that you are there, maybe the reaction is not so good. This is not about good or evil, but maybe you are trespassing?”
He won’t elaborate further. I consider asking him if he ever watched Lost, but I’m trying to push from my mind all thought of John Locke insisting that the island brought him there for a reason.
Rime’s island is intriguing, though. There’s a weirdness and a sadness to it, not to mention the very occasional glimpse of a cloaked figure watching me off in the distance. I want to know more. I want to spend more time shimmying up Rime’s weathered monoliths, scouting its remote caverns, toying with its ancient contraptions.
“Telling a story is about how you feel when you experience that story,” says Rubio.
“It’s not literally about the words, it’s about the message. The best stories in games are not about the lines of dialogue you remember, but about remembering how you felt when you played them.”
If Rime lives up to expectations, there are three things it’ll be remembered for: the island, the tower, the castaway.
//BOXOUT
The name Rime comes from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge. It’s an old poem about a sailor who kills a seagull and it curses his whole crew. He’s the only one left alive on the ship and he’s literally carrying his guilt, which is the origin of the metaphor about having an albatross around one’s neck.
Rubio tells me he felt this idea of realising you need to carry on and live with the consequences of your actions described the story of Rime and so they chose the name as a tribute.
I asked him if there’s a boss fight against a giant albatross at the end of the game and he laughed loudly before ending the interview.
This article was first published as the cover story of PC PowerPlay #262.
Expeditions Viking review
The clue’s in the name. No, not the Viking bit. Though it does accurately describe the amount of beards and longships awaiting you. It’s the other bit, the bit before the colon.
Expeditions is the name of the series which began a few years back with Expeditions: Conquistador. Both games lean heavily into ideas of travel, of trekking to new places and returning home, of time passing. This is the kind of RPG that’s less about quests and more about journeys.
You play your tribe’s young new “thegn” prematurely thrust into a leadership role after the untimely death of your father. While such a title is technically hereditary, anyone with an axe has the right to challenge - and this being Vikingtown, there’s no shortage of axes.
An early challenge to your nascent rule is a neat example of the whole game in microcosm. You talk to your rival first, running through branching conversation trees that let you colour the tone of your approach, and if that fails, you fight. But even then there’s a handful of choices you can make to give yourself an advantage in the fight. And everything you do - from dialogue choices to actions within quests - has repercussions for how you’re perceived by your party members.
Character stats further illustrate that this isn’t just an RPG about killing and looting, though there is plenty of both, don’t worry. All five attributes, including Strength and Endurance, can offer special dialogue choices while the 66 (mostly upgradeable) skills range from being able to wrench away an opponent’s shield in combat to crafting and repairing weapons to cooking food when you make camp.
When you travel across the campaign map, time passes and your party grows tired and hungry. You’ve got to plan your route between campsites, bring enough food, set guard and scout duties, even assign someone the responsibility of cleaning up the camp before you leave. (Don’t do the latter and it lowers the site’s security, making it more risky to camp there next time.)
Combat is turn-based and tactical. Positioning matters to gain line of sight and flanking bonuses, and success is very much determined by how smartly you employ each character’s skills. Get your archer to let off a ranging shot first to boost accuracy. Stun and enemy with one fighter before another steps around to backstab. If you simply move and attack you’ll be reloading very quickly. Party members can’t die in combat, but they’ll sustain injuries that impair their abilities and must be healed over time while camping.
From the outset your goal isn’t to embark on a quest to save the world; rather you must prove yourself a worthy leader, navigate political instability and earn the respect of your people. This journey takes you all over northern Europe, but you keep returning to your home. Every time you do, you chat to you family and friends and realise how far you’ve come.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Loot Rascals review
Loot Rascals combines the strategy of deck building, the blind luck of random drops, and the constant tension of a Roguelike. On paper it looks like a really solid set of gameplay mechanics, and in practice it mostly delivers, but it never quite managed to hook me in the way I initially thought it might.
There’s a silly premise about travelling to an alien planet that is possibly also a theme park to rescue someone called Barry who is possibly a robot with your friends who include another robot and a giant pink baby man. A British man narrated all this at me during the opening cutscene but it was clearly all utter gibberish so I forgot it immediately, and I advise you do the same.
All you need to know is: there are rascals and you loot them. And you also fight them. If they die, you carry on; if you die, you restart from the beginning.
All this fighting and looting plays out on a hex grid that sprawls off in all directions and is only revealed as you move and the algorithms make their procedurally generated magic. Somewhere in this labyrinth of hexes, among the branching, looping and dead-end paths, is an exit. Reach it and you move on to the next level.
It’s turn-based in the sense that time (and indeed your enemies) stand still until you move into a new hex. Enter the same hex as an enemy and you fight, the outcome determined in moments based on your respective stats. There’s a short day/night cycle every few turns, which is important because some enemies will get the vital first attack in if you encounter them at night, and vice versa. Juggling when to attack is just about the most significant tactical consideration Loot Rascals demands of you.
The most significant is building your deck to determine your stats and special abilities. You set out with six cards consisting of the most basic attack and defence stats. Defeated enemies can drop new cards that you can add to your deck to a total of ten, arranged in two rows of five. Some cards grant bonuses, say, to the cards to its immediate left and right or only if placed in an even numbered column or if its the only one of its type in your deck or for what feels like an endless number of reasons.
I enjoyed tweaking my deck to get the most out of the cards at my disposal. There’s plenty of variety, too, particularly when the drops mean your deck is heavily weighted to either attack or defence, and you have to adjust your approach accordingly. But it can feel too random at times, and your prospects of progress too heavily reliant on finding good cards. Overall Loot Rascals feels like it lacks the depth and high skill ceiling of a truly great Roguelike like Spelunky.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
The Surge preview
“We were wondering if Donald Trump had been reading our design documents,” laughs Jan Klose, managing director at Deck 13 Interactive and creative lead on the German studio’s upcoming action-RPG The Surge.
I’m chatting with Klose via Skype having just played through a preview build of The Surge consisting of an early game area that introduces players to a dystopic Earth on the brink of environmental collapse. The level is an intricately designed industrial ruin full of half-destroyed machinery, crazed workers wearing mech suits, hostile drones, dust storms and toxic waste, and culminates in a boss fight against a giant robot that bears more than a passing resemblance to ED-209 from Robocop.
Klose is keen to stress that he doesn’t consider The Surge to be post-apocalyptic. He constantly and very deliberately refers to its setting as “near-future.” I get the feeling from talking to him that he’s more interested in how society falls apart, and discovering if we can find a way to prevent it, than how we manage to cope and rebuild things after the fall.
The player-character, Warren, works for a technology corporation called CREO Industries. At the outset of the game, he’s just another working grunt, labouring away; a tiny cog in the monolithic machine. The world hasn’t been destroyed, Klose tells me, but climate change has made basic resources scarce and placed likely irreversible strain on the Earth’s environment. A desperate coalition of world governments called on the private sector to pitch their solutions and CREO won the contract.
“Our basic idea was to look at the world today and paint a very grim picture of a near future,” says Klose. “If we take a look at the news we see a lot of frightening things happening all around the world. What will happen if people don’t get their act together and do something about [climate change]? Or what if we do act but we’re too late?”
At this point I ask Klose what he thinks about developing his game to a backdrop of an American president pledging to pull out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, repealing environmental regulations left, right and centre, and signing executive orders that lease federal land to coal mining companies.
“Did [Trump’s] secret service have access to [our design documents]? Because it reads and sounds very familiar to the the road we’re predicting,” says Klose. “We hope that when the game comes out in a couple of months that it doesn’t feel like history but rather still a projection of what might or might not happen in the future.”
Of course, The Surge is hardly a political game. Having played through the preview level I can nod in agreement with what Klose is saying, but he’s not bellowing any kind of call for a global revolution. He doesn’t want to beat you over the head with Ideology and Dogma; he’s happy for his game to offer little connections to reality and nudge players to make the political links themselves.
“I don’t see a reason why games should merely be escapism from reality,” he says. “It’s important to give your game’s background and story a little bit of meaning and purpose. I think it’s cool if you consider games a cultural product, if you pick up cultural references and also put in cultural statements.
“If you want you can see or read a lot in The Surge, however if you don’t want to then hopefully it’s just a nice action game and we don’t bother you with it. But of course there’s a lot that we think about, that we see that’s going on, and there’s a lot of that reflected in the game.”
He’s right, too. The Surge does seem, at least based on our short time with it, a nice action game, though we would append RPG to the genre categorisation. Warren is initially equipped with a handful of weapons and implants for his exo-suit. He ventures out from a hub through multi-pathed levels, fending off enemies with a few combo-able melee attacks, salvaging scrap and gear schematics, and unlocking shortcuts that circle back round to the hub where he can level up and upgrade his gear.
It’s a nice action RPG that, and let’s be honest here, is very, very, very heavily indebted to Dark Souls. To this writer, that’s both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you’ve got my interest immediately and I’m more likely than most to connect with the deliberate combat, not bounce off the high degree of difficulty, and appreciate the satisfaction that comes from gradual mastery. On the other hand, any game that borrows from probably the best game of the last ten years is just setting itself up for failure in comparison.
With The Surge, Deck 13 is having its second go at making a Souls-inspired game. 2013’s Lords of the Fallen was its first, a sort of heavy metal meets Warhammer spin of Souls, where manly men have manly beards, every hammer is as big as an anvil, and even your spauldrons wear spauldrons. It was a solid affair: the beefy, impactful core combat was only let down by samey enemies and straightforward level design, while the whole thing was carried along by an enjoyably goofy yet overly-serious to the point of parody storyline.
Lords of the Fallen was also Deck 13’s first proper big budget title, having previously cut their teeth on much smaller point-and-click adventures and the 2009 action RPG Venetica. Klose says they learned an awful lot from that experience, his team has numerous structures and workflows they didn’t have before, and they have been able to apply all that new knowledge to The Surge. He highlights three areas where he believes The Surge really improves on Lords of the Fallen.
“In the level design there were things we tried to do,” he says. “Some of them worked really well but in the end [Lords of the Fallen] was pretty linear, even within one level there were not many ways to take or opportunities to experience things in a different way. So for The Surge we said let’s make the level design far more intricate.
“We also wanted to let players experiment more and do more with their skills. And with enemy design, especially with our limb-targeting system where you can cut off parts and reuse them in one way or another, we also want players to experiment.”
Looking at the preview build as evidence, I think it’s fair to say that in terms of the level and enemy design the improvements are a success while perhaps the jury remains out on the possibilities for experimenting with skills.
The dilapidated factory at first feels tight and compact. Later, as you discover shortcuts and connections not immediately apparent, reveals itself to be as sprawlingly labyrinthine as the best Souls locations (say, Lothric Castle in Dark Souls 3 or the Lost Bastille in Dark Souls 2). By the time you’ve encountered the boss of the area, you’ll have unlocked five disinct paths heading out from the hub into the surrounds, all of which intertwine with at least one other path at various points deeper into the level.
At one point I found a lift leading down underground, but decided to leave it and keep exploring above ground. About an hour later, after entering some tunnels elsewhere and slowly working my way through a network of dark and twisty passages I stumbled upon the same lift, only this time from the opposite end leading back up to the surface. I’m not suggesting this is a revelation akin to taking the lift in Dark Souls down from Undead Parish and ending up back in Firelink Shrine where you began the journey some hours earlier, but it’s a good indication that Klose and his team will deliver on their goal of more intricate level design.
Combat in The Surge adheres closely to the typical Souls experience of punishing players who show their impatience. Each encounter demands you manage your stamina, drained with each attack, dodge or block, learn to read enemy attack patterns, understand how to position yourself both in and out of attacking range, and realise when you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. If you’ve played a Souls game, you’ll know the basics. But there’s a few unexpected tweaks to the formula.
Despite what you might expect from the near-future setting and the concept of a sci-fi Dark Souls, there are no guns or any kind of ranged weapon. Your weapons are mostly drawn from a selection of repurposed work tools: a metal pipe substitutes for a staff capable of crushing and thrusting attacks and an exo-suit saw attachment serves as a sword. The five weapons I used in the preview build varied enormously in terms of their attack speed, damage output, and moveset, even if they all in theory possess one vertical and one horizontal attack.
Weapons can be upgraded, boosting their raw damage, as long as you have the requisite crafting materials. You also become more proficient with them through use, as in the recent Nioh; the higher the proficiency level, the higher the bonus damage it applies to each attack. Curiously, proficiency levels aren’t applied equally across all weapons; some apply a higher scaling to the damage bonus than others. I increased my primary weapon’s proficiency to level 8 by the end of the preview area and noticed a significant boost to its damage output. But there were other weapons I could have used that offered even more of a proficiency buff. I’ll be very interested to see how these variations balance out in the final release.
The other notable addition The Surge brings to its combat is in the limb-targeting system Klose mentioned earlier. This kicks in when you lock on to an enemy and, if it has multiple limbs, allows you to flick the right analog stick (trust me, you’re not playing this with mouse and keyboard) to target one of six specific areas: head, body, right arm, left arm, right leg and left leg. These limbs correspond to the six places where enemies (and you) can wear armour, so if an enemy’s left his head exposed you can aim all your attacks there and do extra damage with each hit. The flipside is by targeting an armoured limb you’ll be able to cut off that right leg, for example, and salvage the parts for your own use.
The limb-targeting system has a nice element of risk and reward, and Klose is justifiably pleased with how it has turned out.
“We’ve got a good feeling about the limb targeting,” he says. “We know it’s the sort of thing that if you do it badly it can feel like a useless add-on to the combat or something that just makes it feel more difficult. We want players to use it in a variety of ways.”
My experience was the first time I encountered an enemy I would target his unprotected limbs, if he had any, to make each fight easier and allow me to save my healing items. Later, when I was running through parts of the level I was familiar with, I’d focus on the armoured limbs in order to get those materials I’d need to craft my own armour upgrades. Farming becomes intentional, rather than relying on the RNG of item drop rates.
“If you want to have a full set of armour then you’ll need to have targeted pieces from the six body parts on enemies to even get the blueprints,” Klose explains. “Then to craft the item you need to obtain more parts from enemies off the same type. So you might say, ‘For this run I need one head and two legs,’ which sounds a little weird, but it’s really a lot of fun when you go hunting for the materials you need from enemies that you now know how to defeat. They’re still going to be tricky to defeat, since you’re targeting their armoured limbs, but they are now basically prey for you.”
All this crafting and upgrading is done back at the central hub of the level, which was a medical bay in the case of the preview build. Here’s where you trade in your scrap (read: souls) earned from defeating enemies or found in out of the way places throughout the level. Level up and you increase your exo-suit’s core power, which acts as both your level and a cap on the parts (armour) and implants (skills) you can attach to your suit. Each piece of armour costs power, as does each implant, with additional implant slots unlocked every five levels. Early on in the preview level I could only equip armour on my legs and fill three implant slots without exceeding my core power. By the time I defeated the boss, though, I had enough to fill five implants slots and wear a full set of armour.
Klose wants players to appreciate the flexibility of the implant system and to be forced to make hard choices over which ones to use.
“You can mix and match your skills depending on the situation you’re in and that gives you a lot of freedom to think about how you want to approach the next location,” he says.
“If there’s an area with lots of environmental hazards you might want to take an implant that shields you from fire or poison or whatever, but you maybe need to drop a health implant that increases your maximum health. Or maybe you want to go for finishing moves or to get a good bonus from defeating an enemy, but these won’t help you in a boss fight. So maybe you might need more healing or something that increases you stamina instead.”
I probably didn’t get to play with enough implants to get a feel for how tough these choices will be. Aside from one early moment when I opted to go without the implant that lets you see enemy health bars in favour of one that gave me extra tutorial information, I never had too many implants that it felt like the decision were painful. I can say, however, that I was pleased to hear Klose say that the implants do get really specific; beyond the early game health increases there are plenty of later implants (such as one that provides a stamina boost after defeating an enemy or buffs a particular type of damage on a particular type of weapon) that allow players to fine tune and customise a distinct play style.
My time playing The Surge and chatting to the developer leaves me feeling confident that Klose and his team understand how to make an action RPG in a post Dark Souls world. I asked Klose why he personally likes the Dark Souls games so much and he said it’s not just about the challenge but the feeling of a game “where you really need to advance bit by bit and need to take care about what is happening, what you’re doing, how you’re equipped.” Which sounds like good advice for Donald Trump, too.
This article was first published as the cover story of PC PowerPlay #261.
Pro Evolution Socceroos
FIFA 16 cover star Tim Cahill might tell you otherwise, but Konami’s long-running football sim had the edge over EA’s officially licensed FIFA throughout the PS2 era. Sure, in several iterations of PES (or Pro Evo, as we called it) the entire Dutch national squad were named “Oranges001”, “Oranges002” etc, Ryan Giggs was called Gigsi, and Arsenal were known as The Wengerboys (or something like that) while FIFA got every player and club name correct like the class nerd it was. But it didn’t matter. Pro Evo played a game of football like we’d never seen before. From PES2 in late 2002 through to PES5 in late 2005, there was more Pro Evo played in the HYPER office than any other game.
I can’t recall exactly when or even which version of Pro Evo, but during this time we set ourselves a challenge: we would win the World Cup.
That probably doesn’t sound too hard. No version of Pro Evo forced you to qualify for the World Cup. You just said I’m going to play the World Cup Mode, picked your team, and you were right there in the group stage of the finals. From there you had to win a handful of games to win the World Cup. Easy.
So we tweaked our challenge: we had to win the World Cup on the five-star difficulty setting while playing as Australia.
Now, for those who haven’t played Pro Evo, bear in mind that five stars is as difficult as it gets. Even seasoned players, as we were, would struggle at five stars to overcome the preternaturally aware AI defenders intercepting passes and goalkeepers pulling off freakish saves. And playing as Australia? Well, let’s just say we had managed to invent for ourselves a six star difficulty setting.
We also had to play it together. That meant four players on one team, each one of us as determined to bask in the glory of scoring the decisive goal as we were culpable of neglecting our defensive duties, pulling the side completely out of formation and failing to man mark the opposition striker. It was breathless, exhilarating and utter chaos: four green and gold clad buffoons exhausting their stamina bars at an unprecedented rate as they all galloped after the same ball in a sight typically reserved for your local under-7s team on a Saturday morning now transported to the world stage.
Australia by this point had only ever qualified once for the World Cup finals, way back in 1974. But here we were, the Socceroos mixing it with the best from Brazil, Germany, England and Italy. We pulled off some stunning upsets (a 3-0 win over the then World Cup holders France was one to tell the grandkids) and some absolutely shambolic defeats, including a 2-1 reverse against Costa Rica. But we never won the World Cup. Our best result was a brave loss to Argentina (I forget the score) in the semi-finals.
Let’s see if Tim Cahill can do any better in 2018.
This article was first published in HYPER.
Quake o'clock
If you walked into a renovated warehouse in Redfern in 2004, past a delightful receptionist named Kate, past the fishbowl offices occupied by boring senior management types, through the flood-prone production farm, ducked out the back door and squeezed along a tiny, freshly watered alley that lead to a second less-renovated warehouse that HYPER once shared with half a dozen other games magazines, a handful of kids magazines, and a non-regulation-sized indoor cricket pitch, you would hear, as the time ticked over to 5pm, someone call out.
“It’s Quake o’clock!”
Who are we trying to kid here? It was often well before 5pm.
Back then Next Media (which, to clarify for the Nextmedia lawyers reading this, was a totally different company to the Nextmedia that publishes HYPER today) actually employed lots of people to write about video games. They even staffed multiple magazines with these people. There was HYPER, of course, and its three full-time staff; PC PowerPlay and its five full-time staff; there was PlayStation World and Total Gamer and PC Gamezone, too, all of whom employed professional games journalists. The world was very different back then.
When you put a dozen or so games journalists in a room together with unrestricted access to the office network they inevitably feel the urge to shoot each other in the face. And even though it was five years old at the time, Quake 3 Arena remained Next Media staff’s preferred method of shooting each other in the face. Impressive, especially when you consider the other options available in Redfern at the time.
Despite the ludicrous, almost bombastic nature of its overwrought heavy metal aesthetic--I mean, come on, it’s like the art team at id Software actually said “You know what’s better than doing sci-fi or fantasy? Sci-fi AND fantasy!” before onanistically sketching gothic cathedrals floating in space--there’s a purity and simplicity to Quake 3 that was rare at the time and unheard of today.
There are no roles or class abilities. Every character is the same. There are no loadouts or unlockable weapons. Every weapon spawns on the map in the exact same spot every time. There are no character specific ultimates. Powerups can be picked up by any player and also spawn on the map in the exact spot every time. It’s as level a playing field as any deathmatch shooter can be, one that rewards players who take the time to learn the map, plan routes between weapon spawns, and know when exactly the powerups are gonna respawn.
Of course, not everyone back in 2004 was a noble entrant into the Quake 3 Arena. There was one HYPER deputy editor who would mod his character skin to appear smaller than the model’s hitbox would register. And there was the PC PowerPlay editor who would launch the server but then disconnect if he was losing and quit the game for everyone. We didn’t care though. Come 5pm the next day, the call would go out.
“Quake o’clock!”
This article was first published in HYPER.
Sunless Skies preview
The ocean, in the tradition of Lovecraft, is terrifying in its unknowability, its ineffable vastness. You honestly have no idea just how many tentacles lurk beneath that moon-dappled surface.
Fallen London and Sunless Sea, the literary giants upon whose shoulders Sunless Skies rests, drew upon the ocean for not merely their geographical setting but their mystery, their sprawling possibilities. They were both remarkable works of interactive fiction, particularly Sunless Sea, which unmoored players from a traditionally linear story and let them chart a personalised course through an archipelago of narrative moments, choices and consequences. The Unterzee (the titular Sunless Sea created when London quite literally fell) wasn’t an ocean exactly; it wasn’t quite that big. But it was large enough to get lost in, to make you feel anxious when you ventured too far from port, and to hold a considerable number of tentacles.
Space, then, is rather like the sea. It’s vast and sprawling--in fact, it’s really quite large--and is dotted with planets and asteroids and the like in much the same way you find islands and other landmasses emerging from the sea. So when Queen Victoria decided, in the fantastical alternative history of the series, to expand the British Empire beyond the Unterzee she opted to travel to the stars. It’s likely, however, that she couldn’t escape the tentacles.
Sunless Skies, from the honestly named developer Failbetter Games, was just recently successfully crowdfunded, rocketing past its Kickstarter goal of £100,000 three times over. In reaching for the stars, it promises to let players apply the colonial principles of the actual British Empire and declare all of space terra nullius. According to Failbetter, this means “Stake your claim. Fight to survive. Speak to storms. Murder a sun. Face judgement.” Which, as far as bullet point sales pitches go, starts out as you’d expect, takes a detour into the unusual and evocative, and finishes rather ominously.
Failbetter CEO and the game’s art director, Paul Arendt, has a slightly different spin.
“Sunless Skies is a game of exploration and survival set in a Victorian nightmare vision of outer space,” he says. “This isn’t a void of emptiness that’s dominated by cold physics and mathematics. This is a busy, fecund environment that’s full of life, full of danger. It’s an environment that fights back when you try and conquer it.”
We wish more developers would describe their games as fecund.
But it makes sense. Sunless Skies is a game full of life. In Sunless Sea, when you died you could choose something to pass on to your next life, but essentially you were rerolling and starting afresh. In Sunless Skies, you don’t merely inherit your previous captain’s possessions; you inherit every choice and impact they’ve had on the world. Life carries on, from one generation to the next. I think I’ll leave the tentacles for the grandkids to take care of.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Night in the Woods review
At one point in Night in the Woods a minor character says to Mae, the feline protagonist, “Hey can we hang out sometime?” Mae blinks, as the two of them sit on a roof high above the main street of Possum Springs, their legs dangling over the edge, “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
Night in the Woods isn’t what I was expecting. I think I’d assumed it would be a cutesy 2D platformer with a spooky story, a few funny, self-aware lines of dialogue, and some Limbo-style puzzles. I was wrong. Night in the Woods is narrative-driven adventure that consists almost entirely of conversations with friends, neighbours and other people around town.
Mostly, though, it’s about hanging out.
Mae’s a 20 year old college drop out who has returned to her home town of Possum Springs and moved back into her old bedroom in the attic of the family home. Possum Springs is the kinda working class “rust belt” town that globalisation left behind. The mine’s now closed, and so’s the supermarket and every second store on main street is boarded up. No one has a phone because you can’t get reception anyway. It’s the kinda place where half the kids dream of leaving town while the other half just hang out and do dumb shit.
Mae reconnects with her old high school friends with just the right balance of enthusiasm, awkwardness and a desire to make up for lost time. She joins up with her old bandmates who are still practicing and still yet to actually play a gig. She runs into younger kids who know her by reputation only, and a cranky elderly neighbour who’s never forgiven her for some terrible incident in her teens. She goes to a party and throws up on her ex.
Poking through the suburban mundanity is the odd hint that not everything is quite as it seems. As Mae wanders around town, chatting with people and exploring every nook, cranny and rooftop, you’ll catch glimpses of mysteries and metaphors that run much deeper. How did that janitor know your name? Why does your aunt keep warning you to be careful? Whatever happened to that missing kid? What do those recurring dreams mean?
Turns out Night in the Woods isn’t really about cute little animals and their nocturnal, arboreal adventures. I mean, on one level it is, but at the same time it <i>really isn’t</i>. It’s about being human, growing up and the often fumbling attempts to make something of your one shot at this weird thing we call life. It’s about people who change, people who try to cling to the past, and people who can’t seem to change no matter how hard they try.
Night in the Woods is about escapism. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves when we’re listless and bored. It’s about the fantasies we create to serve as motivation to strive for something better, or at least to give us hope that there is something better.
It’s about realising it doesn’t matter if your mum isn’t cool because she loves you no matter how badly you screw up. It’s about not knowing how to say the things you want to say to your dad but you know it means something to him when the two of you share the couch in front of his favourite tv show. It’s about friendships that endure and bonds that grow stronger through fights and forgiveness.
You really should hang out there.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
Memoranda review
Video game developers all too rarely look beyond genre pillars like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings for inspiration. So when the creators of a new point and click adventure claim to have been influenced by the short stories of Haruki Murakami, it piqued my attention. The end result only disappoints when it adheres too closely to the conventions of the adventure genre.
Murakami is a Japanese literary author best known for his novels Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. He typically portrays a contemporary real world where the mundane and everyday is punctured by the surreal. Page upon page is devoted to describing banal activities such as preparing food while outside a second, moss-covered moon hangs in the sky. His writing can feel plain, almost naive, yet at the same time--and certainly in my experience--can feel exhausting in its painstaking attention to minute detail. In one book, a man sits at the bottom of a dry well for chapter after chapter. It can be hard going.
Memoranda isn’t a retelling of any particular Murakami tale. Rather, it’s a pastiche of his style; it borrows elements (characters, situations, cultural references, etc) from a selection of his short stories and reworks them to explore the same themes of loss and the fragile reliability of memory that often punctuate the author’s work.
It tells the story of a 20-something woman who suffers from insomnia, thanks to the unnerving presence of a gap-toothed old sailor at her bedside each night. She keeps old photos and scrawled-upon post-it notes pinned to her apartment wall--what the game describes as her memoranda--in an effort to hang on to her memories of the past. The only problem is: she’s forgetting her own name.
The game plays out in as traditional point-and-click adventure fashion as possible. Each of the slightly more than a dozen locations around the sleepy seaside town in which the woman lives is depicted as a single, static screen. You click to look at certain objects, to talk to various people, and to use or combine items you’ve collected along the way. New locations are unlocked as events unfold while certain actions can trigger changes to previously visited areas. The former tend to be well-telegraphed and highlighted on the town map but the latter often require backtracking just to double-check if anything’s changed.
The puzzles are all over the place, frankly. They tend to take more from Murakami’s sense of the absurd than the everyday. Where this fails is when there’s no rhyme nor reason for a particular solution working, or when the surrounding dialogue or character observations fail to do their job in providing clues. But when they succeed there’s a poetical or metaphorical resonance to the solutions. I enjoyed making these leaps of logic, connecting the metaphorical dots even if they were unintuitive. Even when I solved puzzles via brute force, I was often able to appreciate the cleverness of the solution in retrospect. Sometimes, objects in inventory are closer than they appear.
This article was first published in PC PowerPlay.
When esports ends
It’s 2005 and 19 year old Scott Bednarski is working his regular shift at Bunnings when he gets a phone call. It’s his manager.
“Can you get time off next week?”
“Probably.”
“Good, ‘cos you’re going to Singapore.”
Scott recalls running through the store telling his bewildered workmates he was flying overseas to play video games.
Two years later and Scott is just one month into a new job when his Counter-Strike: Source team gets the call to head to Malaysia for the Asian region qualifiers of the inaugural Championship Gaming Series. Once again Scott needs to get some time off work.
“My boss said no,” he says.
“I called in sick on the Friday. We prepped on Saturday and played on Sunday. Come Monday I was still in Malaysia. I didn’t even call my boss to say I wasn’t coming in.
“I was just planning to see how it went, I was just so excited to be overseas again. We qualified, we came 2nd and were told we would be paid salaries [to play in the first season of the CGS television series]. It was one of the best days of my life.
“I told my boss I would not be coming back to work.”
===
Scott was fortunate. Most professional gamers don’t get to quit their jobs, especially in Australia. The money simply isn’t there. But playing games competitively at a national or international level can be as demanding as a full-time job even if the financial rewards aren’t there. Pro players sometimes have to make tough choices between pursuing their gaming passion and securing their future, but regardless of their decision their gaming exploits can profoundly shape their subsequent careers.
Josh Edwards was a prodigious nine year old who had already conquered DOOM and Quake by the time a group of older family friends introduced him to a new Half-Life mod in the late ‘90s.
“I was already doing speed runs for DOOM and Quake, doing the rocket jumps and all that stuff, before speed running was really popular,” he says matter of factly.
“I was hanging out with a few family friends at a barbecue one day and they suggested we have a LAN party. I’d never played Counter-Strike before. But sitting down at CS beta version whatever-it-was for the first time it just felt natural to me. I just picked up the game in a heartbeat and was beating these guys who were 9-10 years older than me.”
Not too many years later Josh was part of the same CS: Source team as Scott Bednarski that got the nod to go to Malaysia for the CGS qualifiers. Unlike Scott, however, Josh made a different choice.
“That year [2007] was all about me trying to decide between recognising gaming as a future for me versus doing my final year of school,” Josh told me.
“When the CGS offer came through--the CGS was offering a US$35,000 salary as well as travel all around the world--I was already three-quarters of the way through my HSC year. And I had to choose one.
“That was tumultuous for me. I guess it did cross my mind that “hey I could make a living off this.” It's not just going to be one tournament and a quick buck, you get salaried even if you lose.
In the end Josh chose to finish his HSC.
“Looking back now I feel I made the right choice, because of where I am now in my career. But for several years after that choice it still weighed heavily on me, I’m not gonna lie.”
Although he continued to play at pro and semi-pro events in subsequent years--his last appearance at a tournament came in 2014 at ESL in Cologne where he played Battlefield 4--Josh’s decision to prioritise his studies enabled him to secure a marketing job after graduating. Now a sales and marketing executive at PC hardware vendor Viewsonic, he’s been able to draw on his gaming expertise in his post-gaming career.
“I started at BenQ when they were a consumer display company. Now they’re better known for their gaming products. Viewsonic kinda poached me because they want to move into that field too.
“I’d fulfilled that bucket list goal of playing in an overseas competition. Since then I haven’t played in a fully professional team.
“Having said that my career is heavily tied to gaming. I’m supplying monitors to events, sponsoring teams, sponsoring streamers, and that’s where I like to put my effort now.”
===
The overwhelming majority of pro and semi-pro players tend to have two things in common. They start their career young and that career doesn’t last very long. The typical player is already competing by the time they are 18 and has likely moved on to other pursuits by their mid-20s.
Jared Krensel was something of a late bloomer. He knew about competitive gaming, and throughout his school years he’d visit internet cafes to play Counter-Strike, Dota and Warcraft 3 against his friends. But it wasn’t until Starcraft 2 in 2010 that his interest in competitive gaming was fully captured, thanks to the ease with which Youtube and other similar services made it possible to watch other players perform and compete.
“Everything was just so accessible,” says Jared. “I started watching GSL (Global Starcraft League) and it was just an incredible production. It was a pretty eye-opening experience.”
Jared was 21 and at university when StarCraft II released. He spent much of the mid-year holiday that coincided with the game’s launch playing online and working his way up the global ladder.
“It was so easy to find videos online that let you learn how to improve your play. I got sucked into that community pretty quickly and hooked on trying to understand the game and open up its complexity.”
He won his first tournament in early 2011. ”It was just for charity,” he recalls. “There wasn’t any prize money.” But he was hooked.
After that he played every tournament he could find. By mid-2011 he realised he’d been neglecting his study as the competitive Starcraft 2 scene really took off. He put uni on hold to commit to playing full-time.
“It was a big scary decision. I had no idea if I was anywhere good enough to be a pro. I knew I couldn’t focus on school because I guess I was somewhat addicted to Starcraft and at the same time I couldn’t practice as much as I wanted to. So I felt like I wasn’t meeting my potential in either thing. I remember talking to my girlfriend at the time and telling her I wanted to quit school and play video games. She said to go for it if you really want to.
“It’s that moment where you say I’m literally doing this fulltime, this is all I’m going to do. I’ve got to make money out of it, I’ve got to support myself, I’ve got to be organised, I’ve got to put all my effort into this. You realise you’re taking this crazy gamble.”
Jared’s gamble saw him putting everything he’d earned back into trying to get better at playing StarCraft II. He was scrounging for sponsorship dollars just to be able to afford to fly overseas to compete, and any winnings would go straight back into getting to the next event. After qualifying for a tournament in Korea, Jared seized the opportunity and paid a Korean team to put him up in their team house for six weeks so he could practice with them.
He’d been making some money on the side from coaching regular players who just wanted to improve their game, but it wasn’t enough.
“I just wasn’t making enough money. I was actually in debt to my friends and my girlfriend. In 2014 I spent a few months in Europe, qualified for some big events and beat some of the best players in the world, but I wasn’t winning any money. I came back after four months and had no money in the bank.”
Faced with the prospect of going back to uni and, in his words, getting a job at Coles, Jared decided to give gaming one more shot. He threw himself back into coaching, started streaming and making videos for Youtube, and was incredibly lucky to be offered the chance to commentate. In 2016 alone he was flown to Shanghai (twice), Taipei, Mexico City, Dubai, Valencia and Los Angeles to commentate various StarCraft II tournaments.
Despite his newfound success, Jared remains aware that his post-playing career is heavily linked to the fortunes of his chosen game, StarCraft II.
“I definitely want to stay in this kind of role,” he says. “But will I have to swap to another game? It’s definitely a question I think about. Every game does have a lifespan. Blizzard loves StarCraft so I know the developer support is going to be there. Will it be the most lucrative game? I don’t know.
“StarCraft II is the biggest strategy game and there’s always people coming into the game or going back to it. And even if the viewers on Twitch aren’t that high, I know it has a huge Youtube audience. And that’s something I’m trying to crack. I’m learning editing, presentation skills, things like that. And so if StarCraft II goes away I feel I could move into producing content for Overwatch or any of the other games I enjoy playing. At least until StarCraft 3 comes out in ten years!”
===
Someone who is well aware of how the popularity of a game can affect their career is Mike Abdow. A software engineer for the past twenty-or-so years, Mike works for a company that develops flight simulation software for commercial airlines, defence forces and other industries that need to train pilots. For Mike, who grew up playing flight sims on the Commodore 64 and PC in the 1980s, it’s a dream job.
For the past twenty-or-so years, Mike has also been Australia’s best Virtua Fighter player.
“It was like nothing I’d seen before,” Mike says of his first encounter in 1993 with the original arcade version of Sega’s fighting game. “Fully 3D, 60 frames per second, the animation was just unbelievable.”
At the time, Mike was attending the University of Technology, Sydney, just a few blocks away from the city’s then main drag for gaming arcades.
“It wasn’t unusual to rock up to the arcades on George St on a Friday night and find a crowd of people watching the game and waiting to play. They used to have Virtua Fighter 2 in a huge cabinet positioned behind the glass entrance to the arcade with the screen facing the street so spectators could easily see it. There were so many people trying to watch it that they couldn’t all fit inside the venue.”
Mike would be there every night for an hour or two. On Fridays he’d be there until it closed. The owner of the arcade would occasionally organise tournaments. This was Mike’s first taste of playing VF2 competitively.
But Virtua Fighter never took off in the same way that Street Fighter and Tekken did. The biggest annual fighting game tournament, the Evolution Championship Series (or EVO, as it’s referred to), has only included Virtua Fighter games in its playlist on three occasions--Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution in 2003 and 2004 and Virtua Fighter 5 in 2007. Mike finished 5th in 2007, netting himself close to $1000, enough to cover half his airfare.
The year prior, the World Cyber Games featured Virtua Fighter for the first time. They opted for the just-released PS3 version of Virtua Fighter 5, which was released without online play, a factor that may have limited its appeal.
“I turned up to the Australian qualifiers and there was literally no one else there,” Mike laments. “Such was the state of the game.”
When he got to the finals he found a tournament run under unusual rules by organisers apparently unfamiliar with the game. Despite player protests the event proceeded. The following year VF5 was back at the event, but Australia didn’t have a qualifying spot.
Unlike other pro players, Mike never had to make a tough choice over his career within and without games. That’s because he never had the opportunity to do so.
“I’m not going to say I have regrets,” Mike says. “I can confidently say I have no regrets at all. That’s partly because I’ve got a great job and I’m 100% certain that I’ll never earn through a fighting game what I’m earning in my job.
“So I won’t say regret, but I’m not too proud to say that I’m a little envious of the better represented fighting games. The latest Street Fighter and Tekken get a lot of exposure and popularity and with that a sense of legitimacy, like the game’s made it, it’s got credibility now. The last EVO was shown on ESPN, that’s huge. It’s not like when people ask me what I was doing in New York for a week? And I say, oh, I was playing a fighting game you’ve never heard of.”
===
It’s 2008, a year after Scott Bednarski experienced the best day of his life. The Championship Gaming Series has run way over budget, one of the people behind it has embezzled millions, sponsors have pulled out, and the Global Financial Crisis has just hit. Scott and his team get an email saying it’s over.
The team basically dissolved on the spot. They couldn’t continue playing. The money had run out and they had to get jobs. Scott found himself unemployed for two years. He knew he couldn’t be a professional gamer any more but he still wanted to remain relevant and part of the scene. He ran his own team for a while but it didn’t pay the bills.
“I had no proper skills,” he says. “I had played video games straight from school. I had worked at Bunnings for 2-3 years, played professionally for a couple of years and then was unemployed for two years. [With that as a CV] it’s really hard to find a job.”
He eventually found a gig as a labourer and worked his way up to managing a scaffolds yard. Then, a gaming start-up he’d known for a while finally secured funding and they invited him on board as a consultant. He now works full-time at XY Gaming, a platform where gamers can compete against each other for real money. The CEO is someone Scott used to play against years ago.
///BOXOUT
Ella Leung played for one of the few all-female competitive teams in Australia. She played Counter-Strike: Source and CS: GO with Vox.Eminor, a team managed by Scott Bednarski.
She describes herself as someone who doesn’t want to do anything unless she can give it her best. Unlike many other players, she never found the choice between gaming and her career particularly difficult.
“[Gaming] was serious but I never thought that it could be a career,” she says. “I was at university at the time so I always had something else in mind. It was always a side hobby for me.
“I’m a pharmacist now at a hospital and I do find myself thinking, maybe I could stream on Twitch or maybe I could commentate. But it takes so much time. If you’re gonna Twitch you gotta Twitch every night, you can’t be an overnight sensation.
When she was playing, Ella would spend 4-6 hours every evening practicing with her team. Since quitting she says the lifestyle change has been dramatic.
“It’s a lifestyle sacrifice if you want to play. You need about three hours if you want to play three games and I just don’t know if that’s a priority for me any more. It’s very tiring and repetitive. It’s also punishing physically, because you’re spending so long just sitting there not really using any of your muscles. I feel like a lot of people just game and don’t really take care of themselves.
“Just the other day had the opportunity to jump into a game--we had five girls online for the first time in forever. I think it was my first game in about a year. I just decided to take a break and I’m enjoying that break.”
This article was first published in the PC PowerPlay Technical Handbook 2017.