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Dec 27th, 2024 at 08:29:15 - Death Stranding (PC) |
I should have been writing entries for this as I was playing (same with Disco Elysium…) so that I could chronicle the weird journey. I got this for free on Epic a couple years ago, but was waiting to play it until after I’d played Metal Gear V, which preceded Death Stranding in Hideo Kojima’s gameography. I wondered if there would be some noticeable evolution in game design or anything, but although similar in some respects, they are very different games. In fact, I’ve never played anything quite like Death Stranding.
I will not even attempt to explain the story. There is a good synopsis here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeathStranding/comments/vdj26q/the_story_of_death_stranding_explained_in_a/. If you’ve played Metal Gear games, then you’ll know what to expect in terms of “wtf is going on.” Suffice it to say that you are a courier. You deliver packages. The setting is a post-apocalyptic North America. As you move westward across the continent, you connect cities to a network. You’re essentially rebuilding the United States of America by putting cities online. Your work is, of course, complicated! Mostly, it’s complicated by the fact that there is another “reality” of sorts that is bleeding into ours. This reality is related to something called a “beach,” which is something like a bridge between the real world and death. Other beings come from the death-reality and from the beach and wreak havoc, there is something called “timefall,” which is precipitation that accelerates time for whatever it touches, there are terrorists, there’s World War II, there are couriers who are obsessed with getting “likes,” and so on. And, of course, you’re carrying a fetus (a “BB”) for reasons. There are twists and turns, and a good portion of the plot that will help everything make more sense is delivered after the credits, as the game keeps rolling for like two more hours.
So, there’s a lot going on…but you’re delivering packages. Mostly on foot. Gameplay largely consists of piling up packages on your back, then running from Point A to Point B, pressing “RT” and “LT” to steady yourself as you traverse fields, slopes, rocks, rivers, mountains, snow, and so on. It sounds boring, but it’s oddly engaging. If you aren’t careful delivering packages, they will get damaged, which can ruin the item and negatively affect your rating (positive ratings = more gameplay bonuses). Sometimes you have to stealth through sections where BTs are (hostile things from the beach) or avoid the rogue couriers. There is combat, especially later on, with a host of grenades and guns, and there are plenty of items to craft (a la Metal Gear). I actually barely touched crafting and minimally engaged in combat, only really enjoying it during the spectacular boss fights (which were easy, but visually stunning). The hardest parts of the game are dealing with delivering packages through BT-infested areas, and it’s less hard than annoying, because you have to slow down, and if they catch you, then tar bubbles up from the ground, BTs try to drag you under, packages fall from your pack and get damaged, and you’ll lose a vehicle if you’re traveling with one. Going around BT areas is more trouble than it’s worth, though.
There are so, so, so many mechanics that I didn’t touch. Death Stranding has this online feature whereby other players affect your game. And you’re encouraged to do things that will help other players. You can put ladders down to help people cross a river, put signposts that encourage players and refill some of their stamina, put signposts that alert players to BTs, leave equipment, build roads, and so on. I do not pretend to understand how all of this works. But it was neat whenever I was able to use something that someone else left, or when I was notified that someone gave me “likes” for something that I did that benefited them. This gels with the theme of the game of connecting people.
Trying to write one coherent summary of my experience after beating the game is challenging because there was so much going on. This hodgepodge of elements mostly works well together. You can (as I did) safely ignore what feels like the majority of stuff. For example, I rarely delivered “extra” packages, didn’t bother about my rating, rarely fought, didn’t craft hardly anything, didn’t engage in any of the extra social layers of the game, and so on. I went straight through the main mission. And it was quite the journey. If Death Stranding 2 is much like this one, I’ll probably skip it. Sasha asked me if I liked Death Stranding, and I said “most of the time.” I liked the “dull” moments traversing the landscape with packages the best (especially the ambiance when the soft music starts playing). And the boss fights were cool. The story is confusing, the combat is fine, and a lot of the game is avoidable. It’s wildly creative and something different for sure, though, which is why even though I only liked it “most of the time,” I’m glad I played it.
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Dec 25th, 2024 at 14:14:51 - Disco Elysium (PC) |
I should have been writing entries for this as I was playing (same with Death Stranding, coming soon…) so that I could chronicle great moments. But man, I got sucked into this hard, and the great moments are uncountable. I don’t know how many times—dozens, at least—I thought, “Wow.” The writing is the best in any videogame ever. My total time was well over the “completionist” time on howlongtobeat.com because I read everything I could. Approach it like a novel; part absurdist, part political philosophy, part murder mystery. There is nothing like Disco Elysium. Here are some things that set this apart from a typical isometric RPG / point-and-click (the two genres this borrows from the heaviest):
1. You play as a loser, not a hero. And not just any loser, but an alcoholic cop who also loves to do speed (although you can swear off drinking and drugs; in my playthrough I was mostly clean). This is not an RPG where you can "be anyone." You can choose the "flavor" of alcoholic loser cop, but you're still an alcoholic loser cop.
2. The writing is smart. Like academic smart. Like if I didn’t have a PhD in Sociology I would have understood far less. If you like social and political theory, you may be the target audience here. And a variety of political theories are present, their virtues and flaws explored. None are upheld as “the answer” to organize society, yet special critique is reserved for people and systems that exploit the marginalized.
3. There is no combat, except for theory combat and some dialogue-based combat toward the end.
4. There is equipment, but it’s just clothes to make you look cool and/or absurd, and they affect stats.
5. All stats affect various checks and dialogue options.
6. Your stats are characters. Okay, this is a seriously unique feature. Your Empathy, your Logic, your Endurance, your Hand-eye Coordination…they all talk to you. They give you advice (sometimes bad advice), narrate situations, provide background information, crack jokes. You would think that high stats are all good, but this isn’t the case. Yes, you’ll pass checks, but any personality trait in an extreme has drawbacks. For example, Encyclopedia is great for providing you with background information, which you can use to your advantage, but at high levels, it provides a constant barrage of useless trivia (even claiming to know things that it doesn’t!). Or, Drama is great for putting on convincing performances, telling if people are lying, and so on, but at high levels, it becomes manipulative and mean.
7. You can talk with objects.
8. The game “remembers” dozens of choices you make and tweaks dialogue accordingly. I was constantly surprised, like “it remembered I said that?!” The ending calls back to many decisions that you made, tasks you completed, and so on. It was a bizarrely sweet, touching ending.
9. You can internalize thoughts such that you have an “inexplicable feminist agenda”, understand “race theory,” become an “art cop” (a cop who is also an art critic), or fervently believe you are the one who will usher in global communism. There are like 50 thoughts. Usually, you suffer some penalty while having the thought (for a few in-game hours), and then you get whatever pros and cons for internalizing it (and you don’t know what these pros and cons are ahead of time, so it’s a gamble as to what the thought does). To unlearn a thought costs a skill point, so I basically never unlearned anything once I learned it. I actually disliked this aspect of the game, that I couldn’t experiment with thoughts because of limited thought slots and limited skill points (that I preferred to put into stats). I also disliked that if you remove a thought, it’s gone forever; you can’t have it again. When clicking around one time early in the game, I accidentally unlearned “inexplicable feminist agenda,” which I was so curious about, and didn’t realize it until a couple hours of playtime later, so I couldn’t go back and keep it.
Characters and worldbuilding are top tier. Many characters are extremely memorable, such as Cuno, a speed-addled tween who talks in the third person and poses so hard to be badass to some girl peering over a fence behind him; a “high net worth individual” who is so rich that light literally bends around him; and a group of electronic music fans who want to create a meth lab and a dance club in an old church (in which also currently reside a “crab man” who is a religious zealot who lives in the rafters and a computer programmer who DMs the world’s largest RPG and who is trying to find some rip in the fabric of the universe or something). Oh, and of course, Kim, your trusty sidekick, a cop who is better than you in every way. Regarding worldbuilding, the game takes place in one downtrodden part of a city, which serves as the lens through which you learn about the past like 50 years of world events—a communist revolution; the spread of a religion; a suzerainty; etc. It’s dense in the best way.
Quests (or tasks) are creative and, like the characters, extremely memorable. The main quest in the game is to solve a murder, but that was often the least interesting part. Instead, things like helping those EDM fans make their dance music more “hardcore,” hunting for cryptids, exploring a haunted commercial building behind a book store, trying to collect everything you need to sing karaoke at the hotel, and arguing with the hotel staff about karaoke and rent and whether he’s a bartender or not and constantly listing off new things you find that are wrong with the hotel, are all highlights. I think that by the end of the game, I did pretty much everything possible.
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Dec 14th, 2024 at 17:03:55 - Ynglet (PC) |
Chill little arcade game that was an Amazon freebie. You control this creature, which reminds me of a long snake/dragon, and basically navigate it around each level with the aim of getting various pickups, including the one at the end that completes the level. The levels are 2d planes. You can move in any direction, but gravity pulls you downward when you are outside geometric shapes. Inside the shapes, you are unaffected by gravity. So, to move through the levels, you basically "jump" from shape to shape. There is a "dash" move, which helps you jump up or across long distances. There are other surfaces: the blue ones bounce you like trampolines unless you dash through them, while the orange ones bounce you only if you dash into them. It's pretty straightforward, and there are difficulty modes which, as it gets harder, reduces the frequency of safe shapes (and, I assume, either shrinks blue and orange surfaces or places more of them as obstacles). One neat thing is how Ynglet handles checkpoints. If you pause within any geometric shape and wait like 5 seconds, the game creates a checkpoint right there, and you begin there when you die. It was a really cool way to save, something between a manual save and an autosave. The main game is just over an hour long, and there are some extra "levels," which all feel like unfinished concepts. Simple, somewhat interesting game.
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Dec 13th, 2024 at 18:25:47 - ICEY (PC) |
Picked this up because it was supposed to be a clever unreliable narrator / narrator messes with you type game (like Stanley Parable or something). It is a game in such a genre, but it's not nearly as clever or funny as Stanley Parable, Pony Island, The Beginner's Guide, Superliminal, etc., etc. It's short, there's not a lot of substance, it's combat-heavy, and the combat is not great.
You play as ICEY, a cyborg that is going after the big bad boss, Judas. On the way, you'll kill lots of other bosses and (often annoying) enemies. You'll upgrade some moves, and you'll listen to the narrator. The narrator really only has one "trick," and that is to tell you to follow the arrows (and then get frustrated with you when you don't). Yes, you'll die a couple times by not following the arrows, but obviously (videogame logic), you should explore and not follow the arrows. Exploring gets you more cash and more upgrades from secret areas, plus some cool fourth-wall breaking developer commentary (my favorite part of the whole game). Following the arrows takes you on the straight path.
I accidentally tuned it to "hard" difficulty and when it got really, really difficult right at the end, I realized that I couldn't manually change it to easy. I actually watched the last boss on YouTube. This would have been cooler if I'd never played any of the aforementioned games. Neat, sure, but in 2024, it doesn't stand up like it might have when it came out in 2016.
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