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Jun 14th, 2024 at 09:24:44 - Detroit: Become Human (PS4) |
Detroit: Become Human was a really interesting game. I’m not sure how I overlooked it when it came out, since I’ve played every other Quantic Dream game and even worked on a research project with someone using Beyond: Two Souls. Anyway, thanks to this summer’s Playstation Plus subscription, I have access to it and other PS4 games I never bought! It’s set in near-future Detroit, where the city has repurposed its manufacturing infrastructure to produce androids. The androids are designed to look identical to humans, minus some clothing markers and the only external physical thing that differentiates them, a little processor indicator on their temple, which was a brilliant touch. As the player, the processor conveyed information about an android’s cognition and emotional state: blue (normal), yellow (moderate stress), and red (extreme stress), as well as “spinning” animations to indicate thinking about something (their eye movements aligned with this to indicate thinking; incredible animation work all around!). So, by making androids basically indistinguishable from humans (and they pass the Turing Test), Detroit doesn’t dip into the uncanny valley. This makes sense in terms of the story, where the androids (and the game beats you over the head with this) become human and fight for their rights. It touches on all sorts of philosophical questions: What is consciousness, and can non-humans attain it? What does it mean to be human (in terms of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, morality, agency, etc.; i.e., where’s the line between human and machine)? Are struggles necessary for self-determination?
The most ridiculously impressive thing about Detroit is that you get to shape the lives of three androids, determine their fates, the fate of all androids (and therefore of humanity too), and in doing so, offer your perspective on the game’s philosophical questions. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with such an intricately branching storyline…or three storylines that intersect, one for each android. To say it’s complex is an understatement. I read that there are technically 85 endings. I got…one; replayability is a feature! Another cool thing about Detroit is that it’s transparent about the branching storyline. After each scene, you can see the narrative flowchart, as well as the percentage of players who made the decisions you made. This is something like what Telltale games did, where you’d see what % of players aligned with you, except here you see how different choices lead to subsequent events. For most of the game, after any given scene, I saw I’d unlocked most of the storyline. Towards the end of the game though, as major events happen (and your characters can die!), I was unlocking single-digit percentages of scenes. And who knows how many scenes I never saw at all. It felt exponential how complex the story became. The more decisions you make that have different outcomes, the more considerations the writers had to make for how following scenes could begin and progress. Often, I would see that there were like 10 potential beginning states for a scene.
The three androids are Kara, Markus, and Connor. Each has numerous paths they can follow, but general character arcs where they “become human.” Kara is a domestic android, meant to cook, clean, and take care of children. She has a sad life with an abusive man, and after a really scary interactive domestic violence scene, runs away with his daughter. She (is programed to have? develops?) a maternal bond with the child (I have some seriously unresolved questions about their relationship though). Markus, on the other hand, has a happy life, android and son-figure to an old, ill, wheelchair-bound artist. The artist encourages Markus to express himself through art, and in another violent scene with the artist’s actual son, Markus realizes he isn’t actually free. These two become what the game calls “deviant” (they deviate from their programming). In the game world, more and more androids are becoming deviant, inflicting violence on humans (often in self-defense, but the Detroit news agencies are biased!), and it becomes quite the problem for law and order and the general functioning of a society that has incorporated androids into its basic functions. The third android, Connor, is an advanced police android created for the purpose of hunting deviants. It was thrilling the first time I realized that the androids’ storylines intersect. The other two are deviants, and Connor is meant to hunt deviants, so of course they would, right?
As I learned about the characters, I started trying to shape their trajectories. For Kara, I wanted her to protect the little girl—I liked their bond—, and by the end of the game, regardless and perhaps in spite of what happened, I was fully invested in having Kara stop and nothing to get her and the girl to safety, even if this meant doing unethical things. Markus’s storyline was my least favorite because it was so over-the-top. Detroit attempts to fit a full-scale android revolution into the game, with Markus at the helm. It seemed really implausible. Markus also goes from servant android to revolutionary leader in the span of like five minutes, and leads all these complex “operations” with a handful of random other deviants. I would buy it if they were military androids or something, but a servant to an old man and a sex robot creating an elaborate scheme to hack the city’s news network from the top floor of a corporate tower, including rappelling up a skyscraper, delivering a televised “we have a dream” speech (the game loves to draw parallels between the androids’ fight for self-determination and the Civil Rights Movement), dramatically escaping with parachutes, etc., was eye-rolling. Anyway, my Markus was shot while peacefully protesting, and I didn’t really mind.
I was more upset the first time my Connor died (he comes back), destroyed by some sort of industrial rototiller while chasing a deviant. Connor is tasked to partner up with a grizzled, alcoholic cop named Hank who hates androids. I tried and tried to build a relationship with Hank. It was easy to say something to make Hank fly off the handle. Eventually, though, I decided that I wanted Connor to counter the other two characters and stay true to his programming, never becoming deviant, insisting to the end that androids are just machines. This was partly because I found Markus and his revolutionary android story annoying, and also because Hank does a 180 on his feelings toward androids. He said he changed his mind because Connor took a bullet for him, which proved that Connor had empathy. That’s not why I jumped in front of him though; I did it because (a) I knew that Connor would come back if he died and (b) I figure, given that, a police android would be programmed to save its human partner, not out of empathy but out of directive. So to me, Hank’s premise was wrong. Why didn’t he consider this? Why would someone who hated androids with such passion make the leap to “he saved me because he has empathy; ergo, he is human” instead of “he saved me because he is a machine and programmed to do so; ergo, I resent him even more.” The latter is what racists do, reducing behavior to biology and then framing the characteristic negatively. So, I ended up playing a cold, machine Connor who (like how I did with Kara) stopped at nothing to achieve his objective. According to the flowcharts, a tiny minority of players did this!
Admittedly, I enjoyed the earlier game and the final segments more than the mid- and late-game. The longer it goes on, the more holes there are. Some holes were relatively nonsensical storylines (a lot of what Markus’s ended up becoming), questionable plot twists (e.g., Kara and the little girl), and disconnected events. I am sure that some disconnected events can be chalked up to making this or that decision and therefore missing this or that piece of information. But there were a handful of times where a scene would start and it would be like, “We have arrived at this place to see this person!”, and I’m like, “Who?!”, as if I should have known who this person was already. These disconnects were filled in easily enough though, but it was weird.
Anyway, the overall experience of playing the game was excellent. I found it thoroughly engrossing and thought-provoking, even if its weaker plot lines could have been better written. It doesn’t ask all the questions you might think about and it hits you over the head with Civil Rights comparisons. But there’s plenty here to prompt you to think, like 85 endings’ worth of impressive, interconnected, branching storylines. And I didn’t even touch on the utility of the game for developing moral reasoning or social-emotional learning. As you play, you’ll unlock extras. The videos are totally worth watching. There are teasers, features of the characters (including Chloe, the “menu screen android,” who brings novel elements to the game), and mini-documentaries about the “making of,” the soundtrack, and more. Probably 30-45 minutes of video content all told that provide great insight. Definitely recommend this.
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Jun 10th, 2024 at 05:59:53 - Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4) |
Epic but drawn out nostalgia machine, with the experience hampered further by the context in which I played.
This is, as the title suggests, a remake of FFVII, and I think that unless you've been playing the OG recently, you will experience it as a very different beast. FFVII is being split into three full-length games, and this is the first third, which takes Cloud et al. until their escape from Midgar. Most of the main story beats are the same as the OG, but Remake expands everywhere it can--both fleshes out and pads. I generally appreciated the more in-depth look at existing characters close to or in the party (e.g., Biggs, Jessie, and Wedge; they were great!), but disliked plenty of the additional content because it often didn't add anything compelling. That is, the story would have been the same if we didn't have to learn so much about Don Corneo and his pimps, or watch Hojo scheming, or spend a few hours in the sewers. The Don Corneo part was straight up cringe (minus an amazing dance scene). We are treated to Cloud dressing up as a woman, which I remember being much funnier when I was 14. In 2024, we get a one-liner on gender expression, identity, and fluidity from a dancer, which was nice, except that the game then represents stereotypical exaggerated femininity of gay-coded male (and/or trans?) characters (like the squat champion bodybuilder), and Corneo is trying to fuck Cloud until it is revealed with a change of clothes that he's really a man, and Corneo is disappointed (if we're practicing what we preach about gender fluidity and whatnot, perhaps Corneo would be into the representation of femininity, no matter male or female; there is no nuance or exploration there, negating the one interesting thing the game said about gender). We know Don Corneo's a lech. We know Hojo is deranged. Making players run around doing quests for Corneo's pimps doesn't add anything; making players spend forever in Hojo's endless labs doesn't add anything; making players operate slow-moving robot arms to solve simple puzzles in a greatly expanded sewers section doesn't add anything; etc.
The side quest parts, though optional, are neat for expanding on the lives of citizens in Midgar, but are dull in terms of gameplay (usually, go find these things or go kill these monsters). I did like the proximity-based conversations between NPCs. Instead of clicking on them to talk, you listen in on their conversations when you approach them, and they're often talking about whatever has just happened and its effect on them and their lives. Despite the long and sometimes padded parts, the game was highly engaging. The presentation of FFVII Remake is amazing in every way. It's visually stunning, especially the many, many cut scenes; the music is evocative; it's really well-written; the combat is fast and fun. I definitely did not take advantage of min-maxing weapons and materia, or re-slotting materia to suit the situation, or controlling all the characters in my party. I would have liked to have been more motivated to master the combat.
It's interesting how they took the first chunk of the OG and made it 40 hours. That means they had to put all the materia, summons, weapons, leveling up etc. of a full 40-hour RPG into what used to be like 5 hours of game time. But knowing that this is only the first third of the full game, I felt like I didn't want to spend time maximizing materia, doing side quests, fighting coliseum battles, and so on. Like, it felt like a waste of time to do more than I needed to given that I could pick up the next game tomorrow. This is part of what I mean when I say that the context in which I played hampered the experience. If there is a (more highly rated) sequel, I am not motivated to spend time beyond the main story on this one. I would rather spend my time on the next one (although the next one will have the same problem, because by the time I play it, the third and final game will probably be available). What would be awesome is if the three games were released in a package and you could play them as one...kind of like...FFVII. I know that you start back at level 1 with no materia and whatnot in the next game; they're all self-contained. That also makes me worried that it'll feel like playing the same thing three times (different story, of course, but if the gameplay is the same, it'll get repetitive).
The other two contextual things that affected my experience were: (1) playing on a time crunch. I played on a PS Plus subscription, which ends in 5 days, and I still have 3 games I want to play in that time. I was rushing to beat Remake, so the longer sequences were getting frustrating. I thought I would finish the game on Saturday afternoon because I had entered the "there's no turning back now; are you sure you want to continue" part. I didn't finish it until SUNDAY afternoon, like 8 gameplay hours later, because the end is so dang long! There are actually three "there's no turning back now" points. Three! And boss fight after boss fight after boss fight at the end. I mean, totally epic, but I felt the time crunch. (2) The other thing is that the room I was playing in has no air conditioning, and it's summer in Georgia. This weekend, it was about 90 degrees. Two fans blew on me, increasingly hot air as the morning turned to afternoon, and I was physically uncomfortable. (After beating the game, I moved my PS4 and beanbag into another room with AC.).
SO, despite my playing in less than ideal conditions, and the game feeling longer than it needed to be, it was undeniably epic. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to playing (and hopefully getting more out of) the second one.
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May 28th, 2024 at 23:41:19 - Blair Witch (PC) |
Finished tonight with Patrick. We've been playing this one for the past couple months and made a push to wrap up. What is this game about? Well, you're this guy Ellis with some serious PTSD. You go into the woods looking for a missing kid, against the wishes of your wife and the sheriff, who regularly allude to your mental illness (usually in flashbacks or hallucinations). A man with childhood trauma related to woods (??), who then joined the military and got his squad killed in an ambush, "accidentally" killed a civilian, came back and became a police officer, and shot an unarmed man, is totally the one you want getting lost in the woods with the Blair Witch.
Luckily, you have a faithful canine companion, Bullet. Bullet is the best, and our biggest regret is that we gave Bullet dark colors, which made him impossible to see at night. Most of the game occurs at night. Suggestion: make Bullet the lightest color you can and give him a bright collar. Bullet searches areas for you, sniffs out items, follows trails, and is a happy, good boy. He makes you feel less alone in the woods, but also makes you feel more unnerved. Because Bullet is so lovable, you know that something bad will happen to Bullet. You just don't know what or when it will happen.
I think that the game is split into two main parts: the woods and the house. I mostly enjoyed the woods, but mostly did not enjoy the house. In the woods, you are following the trail of the kid and whoever might have abducted him. The woods become creepier the deeper you go. You get turned around. There are monsters. There is a man with a coat of human skin. It's deeply unsettling. You occasionally find a tape for your camcorder (this is the Blair Witch, after all!). Some tapes are just story tapes; watch them to get info. Other tapes are interactable. If you are looking at a spot in the environment where something happens on tape, whatever happened on tape will happen in the environment. For example, a fallen tree is blocking your path. On the tape, the tree falls. Pause the tape before the tree falls, put the camcorder away, and voila, the tree will not be fallen. You'll use this trick to get through doors, find objects, and so on. It's neat, though can be annoying when (a) you can't figure out what has changed or what you are supposed to be paying attention to, or (b) you know what you are supposed to do but you can't trigger the change because you aren't lining up in just the right way or whatever. Those are the woods. Probably 2/3 of the game. Maybe 3/4.
Then there's the house. I think this is the house from the movie, or at least a very similar house. This is where, if you weren't sure yet, Ellis descends into madness and (if you got the bad ending like us at least) becomes a terrible version of himself (again) under the Blair Witch's influence. The house segment lasted far too long, with extremely repetitive hallucinations and flashbacks, with us having to see and hear the same things we'd been seeing and hearing for the entire game, as if the game didn't think that players knew Ellis was unhinged. This was established far earlier! The house appears to have three stories, but you will go up and down roughly 50 flights of stairs. Seriously, it lasts foreeeeever, just wandering through the house, here's a flashback, there's a hallucination, here's another monster to avoid, there's the screen shaking, here's the same room you already were in 10 times ("sigh," Ellis says every time--for real, me too!), here's another text message to read, and there are the stairs yet again.
Finally, it ends. With the bad ending, Ellis is trapped. With the good ending, Ellis is freed. You will get the bad ending, but this will free you from Blair Witch. Overall, I leaned toward enjoying it. The atmosphere is great, especially the sound design. It's creepy. But it's not a psychological horror game I would easily recommend.
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May 23rd, 2024 at 08:09:13 - Gravity Rush 2 (PS4) |
This was a neat one, and recommended with caveats. I'd never heard of Gravity Rush before looking through the PS4 catalog for anything it looked like I missed before I "finish" the console. The gimmick of Gravity Rush is that your character controls gravity. She doesn't "fly" by propelling herself forward; rather, she orients herself in whichever direction and "falls" that way. Traversing the environments, especially the spans between islands, was consistently thrilling. In tighter spaces though, and when aiming for precision as during combat when you need to hit a specific core on a monster that's moving around, movement and the camera can be extremely frustrating. The episode where Kat (the main character) and Raven have to go inside the ship monster and destroy the gravity engine, sliding through tight corridors and breaking barriers, was especially bad on this point.
The other caveat is similarly something that I liked at times, too: the story. I was hooked on it for the first half. It was coherent, following the main character, Kat, and the somewhat mundane everyday challenges of the Banga fleet, a group of people living on a flying settlement. I really enjoyed this part of the game because there is great character development, not just for Kat, but for a host of notable story characters, as well as minor characters. I got to know them a bit, understood their relationships, their history, and so on. This is done largely through side quests, which are varied, interesting, and usually teach you something about this or that character that adds depth. I completed about half the side quests before deciding to focus on the main story and finish up. After like 20 or 25 side quests, although they remained creative, I was losing interest in the larger story, and there were so many side characters in Jirga Para Lhao (the second main area of the game, a bit city that the Banga fleet docks at) that I stopped caring all that much. I also thought at first that you would get worthwhile rewards from side quests (gems to level up abilities, talismans to equip that make abilities stronger), but I don’t think I ever got gems. You occasionally get a special talisman. Usually, though, it’s a costume or a decoration for Kat’s room, neither of which I care about. It also turns out that talismans are unnecessary. I hardly paid attention to them the entire game.
I also hit on some frustrating side quests, like the one where you have to pretend to be Hekseville’s (the third main area of the game, a city that Kat gets to from warping through a gravity rift) hero, Kali Angel, and go around getting people to notice you, then once a bunch notice you, eat ice cream to drum up excitement about an ice cream shop. But they can’t notice you too much! Otherwise, they’ll realize that you’re not really Kali Angel and you fail the mission. Amusing, yes, but frustrating in practice. Some of the side quests took me half an hour or more. Another maddening one was the one where I had to find a dog’s frisbee, slowly being led around by the dog until we finally found it in the possession of a spoiled little girl, whom you can only convince to give you the frisbee by teaching her how to play fetch with the dog. Thereupon you play a little “fetch” minigame, attempting to toss the frisbee to predetermined locations from where you are standing. The frisbee, not obeying any known laws of physics, flips and spins and spirals and often lands outside the target zone. I tossed that frisbee like 50 times to build up the dog’s “joy” meter because when you miss the target, the joy meter decreases. I hated that side quest so much. Anyway, there were enough frustrating ones, and my own joy level was decreasing, that I finally stopped doing them.
Back to the story…the Banga fleet arrives at a Jirga Para Lhao to stock up, where Kat and the fleet become involved in business and political intrigue. I liked all this stuff! But then, about halfway through, the game takes a turn. A giant evil city appears and after you kill the city, you get sucked into a gravity rift and appear in the city from the first game, Hekseville, where there are a lot of characters Kat knows but I don’t (and here is really where the side quests quit being interesting because I haven’t been with these characters for half the game and the story is going off the rails). The game just starts throwing crazy story beats at you. Did you know that the nice mayor whom everyone loves is also a mad scientist?! He’s going to freeze time to save his daughter!! And the city’s guardian, Kali Angel, is also his daughter and she’s also the sister of Cecie, who has been around since Banga fleet, but Cecie is also a gravity shifter really named Durga Angel, and then the entire city of Jirga Para Lhao comes through the gravity rift to help save Hekseville, and then you have to travel up a pillar because some old god appeared and said so, and when you get there, there is an ancient city and apparently you are the queen (???) of this ancient city (and honestly the part where you are the queen again was really cool; there are high points even when the story goes off the rails), but you were deposed 100 years ago and an insane child now rules the city, and the insane child releases an electricity monster (???) and you fight it and save the world the end. It was a lot of “this person is actually THIS person!!” and “this character is secretly doing THIS bad thing!! Bet you didn’t see that coming!!” type stuff.
One thing that was consistent though is how upbeat the game is. Kat is a downright positive and fun character. That upbeat and fun tone is conveyed throughout most every aspect of the game, which kept my joy meter high save for a few frustrating parts. The game looks and sounds great. The animations in particular make it look like Studio Ghibli, and there’s great detail in the world. Kat can get emotes, and early on I was using them on people to see if they did anything. Turns out that the emotes often get reactions from NPCs. I “scared” a juggler and he dropped his pins. I waved at people and they waved back. I sang and they clapped. The coolest one was when I scared someone carrying a box of goods down some stairs. He dropped the box, and about 10 tomatoes rolled out of it and went tumbling down the stairs. Detail!
So yeah, neat game for sure. I don’t think I’d sink the time into another Gravity Rush game, but I’m glad I played this one.
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