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Jul 12th, 2020 at 10:36:58 - Hacknet (PC) |
I'd heard about this one from PC Gamer, which occasionally mentions it as the best game about hacking ever. I wouldn't generally care about a game about hacking but if PC Gamer raves about a game for years, I'll get curious. So, I didn't know quite what to expect, something in the vein of these games that teach you some programming maybe. I was close-ish. Hacknet makes you feel like a hacker (like I would know...) and is way more authentic than that Angelina Jolie movie.
You get a mysterious email from a person named Bit, which begins your adventure into hacker organizations. You proceed through a number of missions, proving your skill and gaining others' trust, going deeper and deeper also into Bit's story until you get to the bottom of things. Missions include some interesting requests, and are sometimes morally gray, including altering people's academic transcripts, hacking a pacemaker so that its owner can die (his wishes are being denied by hospital staff), and correcting death row victims' last words.
You do use command lines to navigate computers and mobile devices, but there is also a UI. I liked that the game had other user-friendly features like hitting "tab" to complete a command or file name. For example, if you want to decrypt GameLog_userlist_July12.dec that is password-protected, you would normally type Decypher GameLog_userlist_July12.dec [password]. Using tab, you can just do Dec [tab] Game [tab] and password. It saves a ton of time, especially when you're doing the same commands over and over, and you don't have to remember long file names or keep looking them up in your directories.
The whole thing was just really intuitive, and I keep coming back to the *feeling* of being a hacker. For example, when you hack a device, you should always check for connected devices first. When you are done snooping around, you should always delete the logs so that no one knows you were there. I never got busted for forgetting to do this, but the game makes you think there are consequences. There are also defense mechanisms on some devices, so you have to get past firewalls, open ports, and get in and out quickly. If you ever get caught, you have to reset your IP address, which is annoying because then nothing that you've already hacked into remembers you. So you either hope the username and password are still there or you have to hack it again.
In many computers there are various silly chat files from bash.org, which I had never heard of. Apparently this is an old repository of conversations that people post from IRC; then the moderators review them to see if they are "funny" or not. A lot of them made me laugh (the one about reading Harry Potter but replace the word "wand" with "wang"); others are even more toilet humor or borderline offensive. But, amusing rewards for exploring, in addition to other extraneous files and easter eggs to find.
Finally, at the end of the game, you receive an in-game email from its creator, who invites you to email him with thoughts about the game. He also gives some context that it was initially created at a 48-hr game jam and so on. Neat! I actually emailed the guy just to say thanks for making Hacknet. There's a DLC that I think I own that I'm going to boot up next.
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Jul 11th, 2020 at 10:52:53 - Opus Magnum (PC) |
Ever since SpaceChem, which I loved, I have been afraid to try more Zachtronics games. They are so clever, yet require such mastery. I dabbled with the idea of trying Infinifactory and Shenzen I/O, but eventually decided they looked too hard. Then Opus Magnum came out. I immediately liked the interface, and it reminded me more of SpaceChem than the others. I had the experience I thought I would with it and am happy to have given it some time.
In Opus Magnum, you play an alchemist. Finishing up your degree, you learn how to use a "transmutation engine," which lets you assemble and disassemble elements to create new alchemical products. Upon graduation, you are employed at one of the world's royal houses. You begin by making mundane items--skin creams, hangover cures (it's just water, ha), and glue--for the nobility. Then some intra-house conflict begins and the solid story moves forward. You begin producing things for the war effort, and, long story short, you eventually find yourself in hiding and plotting a coup. Somehow, this text-based story (with character portraits) was riveting, and it is neat how the alchemical puzzles fit right in.
Gameplay (puzzle) wise, you are given reagents, various mechanisms to move reagents around the machine, and an ultimate product to synthesize. Mechanisms may be grabbers that pick up/drop things, rotate, and extend; grabbers with multiple arms; bonding or de-bonding reactions, and tracks that grabbers can move along. Your goal is to figure out how to make the end product from the reagents using the mechanisms at your disposal.
You have to program the mechanisms to move. They can turn, rotate what they are holding, extend or retract, and move along tracks. Arranging the instructions for each mechanism is just like arranging music in editing software, if you've ever done that. Each mechanism is an "instrument" and you harmonize their instructions.
The puzzles get difficult real fast. I made it halfway through Chapter 2 before quitting (out of 5 chapters and many bonus puzzles). I love learning the basics of Zachtronics games, and seeing how clever the puzzles are, but I never care for maximizing efficiency that is the key to completing them. I did read the rest of the story online though and watched solutions for the rest of the puzzles. These YouTube videos of players making beautiful solutions are mesmerizing to watch. Confirmed, there is no way I would have gotten much farther!
So, as far as Zachtronics puzzle games, I think I'm done for a while, but I do want to check out Eliza, the visual novel they did about AI and therapy.
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Jun 27th, 2020 at 17:48:17 - A Mortician's Tale (PC) |
Wow, I really liked this. Last time I taught Death, Grief, & Dying, I had students play That Dragon, Cancer. Then I asked them to seek out other games with themes related to the course, and this was one they came back with, along with Gris, which I have queued up.
So, first thing, the game is short. Like an hour or so. It took me almost an hour and a half because I was trying to win a stupid Minesweeper mini game. But it packs a lot of information and story into that hour. I wouldn't have wanted it to be any longer unless there was a lot more gameplay variety.
A Mortician's Tale is a death-positive game that aims to educate people about the death industry, burial practices (especially eco-friendly types), cultural differences in death and grief, and so on. They obviously collaborated with Caitlin Doughty, who has become quite well known as a...if this is a term...public mortician? Go read her books and check out her YouTube channel if you're interested in the death industry.
In the game, you play as a mortician (who looks suspiciously like Caitlin Doughty) for a mom-and-pop funeral home. You check email (you have a friend, a friendly co-worker, a boss, and a listserv that will email you). The email from your boss always has some description of your next job (who died, what their family wants, etc.), and then you go prepare the body. You have a few tools, and you just follow explicit instructions each time. It's a bit zen in that way. Once you prepare the body, you go to the funeral parlor and can talk to the attendees. I enjoyed this because some will be acting quiet and reserved at the funeral, while others will be sobbing, others will crack jokes, others will be on their phones. They'll discuss feelings, cultural differences, wonder whether they've made their loved one happy, and so on. It's often sweet. The purpose is to show the player that there are many different ways to grieve and that not all funerals are alike (point driven home at the end of the game).
The game's strongest accomplishment is teaching players about alternative (eco, mostly) burial practices, which are gaining popularity in the US. Before I taught this course for the first time, I had never heard of green burials, alkaline hydrolysis, orbital burials, or anything! But most everything I've heard of is in the game, including cremation jewelry. The game also discusses grieving, seeking help, considerations for preparing trans people, wills, religious perspectives on burial practices and corpses, and a major narrative thread shows how small funeral homes struggle in the face of large corporations buying them out.
There are two cases in the game that stood out. The first was when you get an email about a suicide victim. The game asks you (the character, but you) if you want to take the job (the only choice the game ever asks you to make). If you opt out, then you just get another body to prepare. This is nice for people who may be triggered having to interact with a (virtual) person who killed themselves. The second was when you have to prepare a homeless man. When you take his urn to the funeral parlor, there is no one there to see him. It was sad and made me reflect on inequalities related to death.
I noticed as I played that I became desensitized in a short amount of time to the work of preparing bodies for burial. This reminds me of Paul Kalanithi's excellent memoir When Breath Becomes Air, where he discusses this at length regarding his time as a hospital resident. When you get a job, you stand over the body and are instructed to clean it with a sponge. The first time doing it, I did it slowly, like wow, I'm washing a dead person. It was reverent. By the end of the game, I was just like yeah yeah, wash wash scrub scrub, into the furnace you go! It's awful! But that's a main theme of the game, our desensitization to death, our distance from it, the impersonal nature of burial practices especially when they become handled by corporate entities.
Yeah, so I really, really enjoyed this and will definitely create an assignment for my students play this in Death, Grief, & Dying this semester. Perhaps they can choose between this and That Dragon, Cancer. We shall see.
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Jun 27th, 2020 at 12:49:38 - The Witness (PC) |
Played this for 4 or 5 hours and am over it. This is a puzzle game from Jonathan Blow of Braid fame. It's set on a big, beautiful island that you explore in first-person. Scattered around the island are a number of "hubs" containing grid-based line puzzles with many different rules. These begin simply enough, but I quickly found myself scratching my head.
A cool thing about the design is that there are no tutorials. Every puzzle follows some logic and you can figure them out by doing other puzzles and observing the world around you. At least, it's cool because you will have great "aha" moments, but it is also maddening because if you get stuck, there is no help.
The first puzzles just ask you to draw a line through a maze. Then, black and white dots appear and the line must also separate the two types of dots. As you complete puzzles, you will usually see a power cable light up that leads to the next puzzle in the area. Eventually the powered cables open doors and whatnot. So although the island is open, and you are free to explore most of it at any time, it does do a decent job of guiding you through easier areas first. That is, until you discover the town in the middle of the map, which apparently contains the hardest puzzles. When I saw the town for the first time, I was so confused, though based on previous experience, I realized that the answer to "what are the rules of these puzzles" must be in other areas, so off I went to explore some more.
Suffice it to say that there are many, many clever takes on the "draw a line" mechanic. Another neat thing that The Witness does is force you to use the environment to solve puzzles. In one area, I realized that I had to draw lines around objects in the background behind the transparent grid. In others, I realized that I had to trace shadows cast by tree branches behind me, or trace a line to an end corresponding to an apple on a tree in front of me.
Despite being periodically like "wooow" and impressed with the puzzles, like I said, they were also maddening because I could not figure out for the life of me how many of them worked. What are all these colored shapes? What do I do with the tetris shapes? I sort of figured out the latter, but only on a surface level because more advanced tetris shape puzzles stumped me. My previous "rules" didn't work, so they must be incomplete. The island is so big that finding where to find a rule can be quite the challenge. Eventually, I discovered a boat, which enabled me to zoom around the island faster and see some things I had not previously seen.
So, that's about where I stopped, just aimlessly looking at new places in the boat and not feeling like I was making progress. Progress toward what? You would expect a puzzle game in a 3D world to have some sort of story, but although I had the feeling that there was a story, I can't tell you what it is. I don't know who I am, what this island is, why there are line puzzles all over it. If someone said what's the story like, I'd say I don't know. My motivation to continue a difficult or drudging game is often bolstered by wanting to know what happens next, but that doesn't happen here. So I quit.
Then I watched this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0
First, this guy is phenomenal. I will be watching more. But, most importantly, this video confirmed that I made the right decision to stop playing. Watching it, I am certain I would have made some more discoveries, but also certain that I never would have finished because the game is so obtuse. While I appreciate Jonathan Blow's work here on an intellectual level, actually playing it through is not something I would subject anyone to. It turns out that you get no story until you beat the game, and that it's a game about perspective. Like, to get you to think about perspective itself, both in terms of observation and epistemology. Oh man. I don't want to play a 30-hour difficult puzzle game to think about perspective. I'll just think about it!
If someone was interested in the game, I'd suggest playing it, but not pursuing it too hard. Struggle a bit, but if you really want to stop, stop and listen to someone smart talk about it.
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