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Apr 17th, 2021 at 18:37:40 - Before I Forget (PC) |
This was a free Twitch game a couple weeks ago and I grabbed it because it sounded different. I'm always looking for games about death and loss. This one is about dementia. It's really short and simple, but so sad.
You play as a woman, and things start out straightforward enough. Walk around your house, click on objects, find Dylan. Eventually you (the player) realize that you (the character) have memory troubles. You're not going to find Dylan (and I guessed the "twist" immediately). Gameplay wise, it's a walking simulator with some emotive flashbacks. I think the best scenes are at the end (the frantic one and the calm final one).
In trying to interpret this, you (the player) are of course learning about the characters for the first time. It's all new. But in the context of dementia, you (the character) are also learning about the characters. At one point, she doesn't think that a magazine with her on it actually has her on it. She doesn't know who is calling her. She is unaware of her condition. Hours pass while she looks out the window, sits at a chess board, or thinks about putting the kettle on for tea. At the end of the game, all the notes and things you've uncovered are blank again, suggesting that she has forgotten again.
She exhibits the fear and paranoia and frustration that characterizes a lot of dementia patients. And the joy of realizing over and over the good things that have happened (her and her husband's successful careers) and the grief of realizing over and over the bad things that have happened. I wonder if dementia is sadder when is happens to people with successful careers and big families. Like, there's an idea that those people had more to lose. I think that's how we frame success though. Would this story have felt different if the main character was an office worker rather than a notable cosmologist? If her husband was a bartender rather than a famous pianist? Subjectively, the illness is just as devastating, and at some point, they won't know what they've lost.
This makes me think about my family members who have had dementia, and makes me think about my parents and about me in the future. My step-grandfather has severe dementia and is only being kept alive by a team of medical professionals and a girlfriend who loves him very much. He has no quality of life, doesn't know who any one is, sits in a chair with his eyes closed all day. He used to be like the woman in this story, getting up and doing things throughout the day, but then later on getting worse (including leaving his house and locking himself out, wandering outside with his guns, smashing his house windows with a baseball bat, threatening people who came over, eventually forgetting everyone around him).
This makes me remember that I should write a will and all that and specify that if I can't remember shit and get angry and paranoid and make others' lives hell and have no quality of life, to do all that is possible to kill me.
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Apr 17th, 2021 at 17:34:14 - Cultist Simulator (PC) |
This is a weird one! I was intrigued by the theme of building a cult and the way you do it through a sort of card game. You will have no clue what you are doing until you try and fail a few times. Then, I suppose like cult knowledge, it becomes clearer with study.
You start off with a menial job (in subsequent playthroughs you can choose a couple other, better jobs). You have to go to work to earn money because time passes in real time (there is a handy pause button), and I suppose you have rent and need to eat. Soon, you can perform more regular actions, such as studying, dreaming, and exploring the city. You also get other stats to manage: health, reason, and passion.
You can boost stats by studying them to get more cards, which allow you to use the stat to perform more actions or to make actions stronger. For instance, using your passion for work will let you paint. If you only have one passion, your paintings will suck and you won't earn anything, but if you have four, you can turn profit and use money for other things, such as exploring the city to buy books from the bookstore or to pay entry into a secret club or to hire a goon (who could become a follower or, better yet, a sacrifice).
Basically this is a game of managing expanding resources and countdown timers, as it takes time to study or do anything else. Eventually, you will learn more about the occult, including getting all sorts of recipes for rites, magic items, incantations, and etc., etc. I never really got past acquiring a bunch of things (I actually exhausted the library and studied every book, haha), improving my arcane knowledge, and getting stuck in a loop of going to work. I had maxed out all my stats, didn't have anything useful to dream about, and just...didn't know what else to do that wasn't going to take forever.
That was my fourth playthrough and I decided to quit because I get the gist of it. Also, I was out of health. Sometimes you will get sick, which will require health to stave off. I suppose this is like a win timer because I never figured out how to get health back. If you don't stop an illness, it turns into decrepitude, which persists the rest of the game. I had like 5 decrepitude (I must have been really sickly!). Anyway, assuming I didn't die from wasting away, I guess I would have slowly gotten the various pieces of recipes for learning about and enacting cultist things, grown the membership of my cult, moved into a headquarters (I had an empty one but couldn't figure out how to move in), hired a goon to sacrifice in the end, and raised the dead or whatever you do in the end to win. Oh, I did win a "minor victory" one time by becoming chief of police or something. I have no idea. But I sat here for three hours today clicking on things and feel like nothing happened.
My girlfriend has been listening to a podcast about Heaven's Gate and telling me about it. So, with that plus Cult Simulator, I feel like we're ready to start our own.
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Apr 14th, 2021 at 23:05:45 - Observer (PC) |
This is soooo much better than Layers of Fear, the other Bloober Team game I've played. Everything clicks here, and all that I remember disliking about Layers of Fear was improved upon. The setting--holy shit, it's so dystopian cyberpunk. The whole game takes place in these awful, run-down tenements full of drug addicts and people addicted to virtual reality. Your character himself needs a drug to stay sane; if you don't take it (and it's optional!), screen effects like tears and pixelation make it difficult to navigate. Plus, your software (you're heavily augmented) keeps letting you know you need to take it (which, irritatingly, interrupts any audio recordings you might be listening to).
The tenements are on lockdown because of the outbreak of a virus that wreaks havoc on augmented people. So you, a detective, are stuck in there, and of course, there is a crime to solve. Not any crime! You find the body of your son, missing his head. You follow a trail of murders, eventually confronting the killer, and then, well, then the story gets really, really good. But the whole game until then is intriguing, largely thanks to the tenements that you can explore, knocking on people's doors and chatting with them. These were some of the most entertaining parts, learning that there is some religious cult, talking to a woman trapped by an abuser, talking to the addicts or criminals who freak out when you say you're a police officer, talking to a VR addict who thinks he's woken up captured by the enemy and locked in a dingy room, and even completing a couple little side story quests.
But after the confrontation with the killer, some puzzle pieces fall into place, and then from there the story gets meaningful, largely, I think, with some parallels to transgender identity and issues around transitioning, as well as themes like digital consciousness and genetic modification. I liked the main character and thought the voice acting was fantastic. The visuals are creepy and beautiful with a ton of horror effects like screen distortion. The end part with the trees in the pond in particular was beauuuutiful. The audio is phenomenal. Like I said, all the elements work together.
Gameplay wise, you're mostly walking around looking for what you can click on. You can activate two types of detective vision, one to examine technology and another to examine biological matter, which are especially useful for investigating crime scenes. You can pick up objects and look at them, and sometimes you'll need to solve puzzles, which are never too bad. I think I looked at a walkthrough for one that I was stumped on, and one time because I was tired of trying to figure it out (my least favorite part of the game, the forest that masked a warehouse).
Occasionally, there are stealth sequences with a monster to avoid. These are bland, as the monster is easy to avoid. They can just take a little while because you have to go so slowly. Plenty of these stealth sequences (and other locations) are really messed up, like bad dreams. The main character is not entirely in touch with reality, and there are four or so really interesting sequences where you have to hack into the brain-chips of murder victims, where you get to see their own lost grips on reality. These were always very cool and changed up the gameplay. There was a bit of a pattern--explore, follow clues, find victim; hack victim and play through their memory/consciousness; learn some info, and then explore, follow clues...
Definitely worth a play through if you like cyberpunk, detective stories, and horror. Great merger of the three.
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Apr 12th, 2021 at 12:07:01 - Undertale (PC) |
Oops, I forgot to write anything for Undertale! I finished this months ago after I beat Earthbound. Man, it's been so long...okay, what I remember most is that the first half was way better than the second half. It started off hilarious but wore out its welcome by the end. The parodying of old RPGs is wonderfully done: enemies that care if you kill them; a story where monsters aren't all bad; the option to talk your way through the entire game; a wonderful tutorial with "Toriel" holding your hand so hard.
Ultimately, I think I'll just remember Undertale for being supremely clever and pretty funny. But in the end, like I said, it went on for too long and started to feel like any other old RPG.
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