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May 24th, 2021 at 09:16:37 - Prey (2017) (PC) |
Prey didn't live up to my expectations. Here's what I expected: shapeshifting, mind-bending and fast-paced FPS action, maybe some portals (re: the last Prey game). What Prey is: a slower-paced immersive sim with a ton of crap to pick up and a ton of audiologs/computers/emails/notes to find. It has cool pieces, but the whole was underwhelming.
Talos 1
The Talos 1 space station itself is huge. There are maybe 12 areas of the station, plus you can put on a spacesuit and explore its exterior. It's a neat, well realized environment. This is perhaps best exemplified by it feeling lived in. You can, in fact, find every single person aboard the space station, and that's, according to the internet, 268 people. Most of them are dead, but they leave their traces. Although I didn't find them all, and I don't know how many I did find, I did get an achievement (unexpectedly) for reading every single email and listening to every single audiolog. So I feel like I was close! Anyway, the fact that I found all the extra narrative stuff speaks volumes about how engaging Talos 1 is.
Search Everything for Neuromods
The downside of this is that they had to try and make 268 people and their lives compelling enough that players would want to explore everything. Most of the side stories are fine and, after a while, you realize that the main point of them is to get neuromods. Neuromods are central to the game's story, but the short of it is they are skill points. You start the game with few of these. They seem hard to come by. You think you'll never have enough to get the many useful sounding skills in the (initially) three skill trees. But eventually you gain access to recyclers and fabricators.
Recyclers allow you to deposit all your junk (you know, from obsessively searching trash cans, beneath stair wells, and kitchen cabinets) to convert to raw materials. Place the raw materials in a fabricator to craft items ranging from guns to ammo to other useful items. Eventually, you get a recipe to fabricate neuromods, which is obviously awesome. And they turn out to be pretty cheap, requiring one rarer ingredient that you get from killing Typhon (the alien enemies). Well, if you pump points into the skills increasing yields of exotic material, and if you choose to fight Typhon around Talos 1 instead of avoiding them, then you'll wind up with tons of neuromods. Seriously, by the end of the game, I had about 50 unspent neuromods (average skill cost is probably 4 or 5).
Difficulty Curves
The thing is, you simply don't need all those neuromods. You'll search high and low and spend time managing your inventory, but the game becomes quite easy as it goes on. At first, wow, Prey gave me a challenge. Each new enemy type was dangerous and scary as I scanned them and learned their strengths and weaknesses. Ammo is scarce at first and you have no psi powers for a while. I relied on sneaking up with my wrench to melee enemies--saves ammo, but risky! But once you do learn all the enemies' strengths and weaknesses and you get some basic Typhon powers (these open up three more skill trees for a total of six), you will be more efficient with ammo and you'll have all the items you need to kill anything. Even the "Nightmare," the big scary alien who occasionally surfaces to hunt you (and you can kill it or hide from it for 3 minutes and it'll go away) becomes simple to take down.
A Dull Plateau
What all this culminates in is a dull plateau of gameplay that persists for at least half of the game, which is long if you bother doing all the side quests (which I did). You'll be a packrat searching for stuff to convert to neuromods, which you don't really need, completing side quests for characters who aren't really that interesting, that give you more neuromods and items that you already have enough of because you are a packrat. And you'll be able to hack anything, lift the heaviest objects, repair the most difficult electronics. In short, I could go anywhere. I wound up debating whether or not to just pursue the main objective or continue with side quests just to see if there were some really cool ones. It wound up feeling very MMORPGish: go here, click that, go there, retrieve that, bring it to the NPC, follow their next instruction to go back there, search that, get your reward.
By the time you are at this point in the game, you will be doing a lot of backtracking, whether you are doing side quests or not. You will have unlocked the exceedingly complex travel system within Talos 1 (consisting of an anti-gravity tunnel, a central elevator that doesn't work for a long time, airlocks to get to sections of the ship from outside) and you will be acutely aware of how you still have to take specific routes to get to specific places despite the myriad doors, hatches, and elevators you will have unlocked. I bet if I hadn't bothered with all those side quests, reading emails, and listening to audiologs, the game length would have been cut by 25-33% and if there was a fast travel system, it would have been cut by another 10-15%. I guess, by the end, it just felt bloated, and it went on for ever and ever. In fact, in the very last area of Talos 1 that I explored, the game tossed 4 or 5 new side quests at me. Like, I'm about to finish the game! More of these side quests!? Uuuugh!
Mimics
Okay, at the beginning, I said that I thought Prey would focus on shape-shifting. This is what I remember from the ads years ago, and promos always focused on this. There is an enemy called a Mimic and they can transform into ordinary items (coffee mugs, chairs, etc.). This is, again, central to the story, and I remember learning that the player-character could also transform into things. This sounded like great fun. In practice? Mimics (and Greater Mimics) are the first enemies you find and they are a complete gimmick! Yeah, you'll walk into a room and get jump scared by a coffee mug. It's cool, it's fun, you'll kill the Mimic in two swings of the wrench. Sometimes they'll run off and turn into something else, but whatever.
Eventually, yes, you can turn into coffee mugs too. This is not exciting. It allows you to be a little sneaky, evading enemies as they walk past the ordinary office printer you have become. I get it. It's an immersive sim and this is a clever way to take on the stealth element. But it's just so unnecessary. You can already sneak. Enemies are not hard to kill. Maybe you want a pacifist run or something? I thought this would be more central to the gameplay, but it isn't. No enemies hide except the Mimics, the first enemies you encounter. And there's nothing else you can do with it except turn into something and sit there.
Narrative
The main story is pretty interesting and kept me engaged throughout. The choices seem fairly binary. The ending (whichever ending you get) is not the ending though. I was underwhelmed at the ending, and had it predicted since I had gotten a "secret" earlier ending that spoils the actual ending. But after the credits, Prey redeemed its narrative. It made me feel bad for wondering if I could kill a friendly NPC because I really shouldn't have done that. I was judged accordingly. Oh well!
I'm going to try out Control next, which hopefully is not very similar to Prey. And hopefully it doesn't melt my laptop.
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Apr 27th, 2021 at 22:11:10 - Untitled Goose Game (NSW) |
Beat this with Sasha the other night. It's a really silly game and lives up to its promise that you are a horrible goose. The premise is that you annoy the crap out of small town villagers, and it is a joy to be so annoying.
You are given a series of objectives in each of several areas of the village. Objectives include things like stealing objects from villagers or otherwise doing something to them that causes them to look dumb (like knocking a bucket onto a man's head). The villagers obviously are not pleased with you, annoying goose that you are. They chase you and constantly try to fix what you have destroyed. Taking advantage of their impulse to clean up your messes, you can lead them around areas, divert their attention, and enjoy watching them shake their fists in frustration.
So, the joy in the game is being annoying, yes, but there is also joy in solving its puzzles. You can see your to-do list, but it's up to you to figure out how to make whatever it is happen. Dress up the mannequin? Hmm. Have a picnic? Hmm. Etc. To cap off everything, I think, is the score, the rambling, crashing piano that escalates as you cause a ruckus.
Worth a few hours.
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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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