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Jun 7th, 2018 at 18:23:26 - Prison Architect (PC) |
This one student of mine has been bugging me to play Prison Architect for two years. "Did you play Prison Architect yet? Did you play Prison Architect yet? Aw man, you gotta play Prison Architect!" He also bugged me to play GTA V, so I guess he likes games about criminals.
I didn't know until I booted it that Introversion made the game. I really liked Darwinia back in the day, and DEFCON was interesting. This made me more excited to play Prison Architect. Sims / god games / city builder type games are not usually my thing, even though I sometimes think one will look really cool (Crusader Kings II and Kerbal Space Program are both awaiting their unboxing in my Steam library).
My initial impression...wait, back up. I spent an hour playing in sandbox mode on accident before I realized that the campaign was an extended tutorial. Why? Because when I ran the game, it just...started in sandbox mode. No title sequence or anything. Just a plot of land with trucks delivering some workers and supplies, a letter from the CEO giving me basic tips, and a couple basic goals. I thought, "Wow, drops you right in!" But no, this is not the tutorial. In my first hour, I was so lost. I couldn't figure out how power generators worked. My piping was all tangled. I didn't know how to assign a function to a building. Hell, I didn't even properly know how to build buildings. The difference between building a foundation and just laying concrete and putting walls around the perimeter was unknown to me then. That meant I couldn't build a holding cell, and the prisoners, they just kept coming! By the time I went to start over, I had about 35 prisoners roaming around near the road, all hungry and dissatisfied with my prison management skills.
I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I think I clicked "help" shortly after starting over, and it opened a wiki that said at the top, "STOP! Don't read this until you play the tutorial in the campaign." Who knew the campaign was a tutorial? Why doesn't the game say that? Why doesn't it start you there? The campaign is broken up into 5 chapters, and it does indeed teach you, beginning with the very basics in chapter 1 (like how to designate a building), moving through dealing with riots, rehabilitating prisoners, assigning prisoners to work, assigning guards to patrol, and tons more. It does this through a really well told narrative, where each chapter is connected despite each one taking place at different prisons. It begins with you building an execution chamber and holding cell for a man sentenced to death for a double homicide. The next chapter sheds light on who he killed. And so it chains prisoners and events together.
Despite all the things I enjoyed about Prison Architect (I looked at a clock and it was like 4 hours later), the campaign has some seriously annoying bugs. Here are a few I wrote down in my frustration:
--Objective: Build a common room and place 8 chairs for a meeting space. Problem: There was already a common room, but I had built another one earlier. With 8 chairs. But this objective wouldn't tick off. Solution: I looked up why I was stuck and the internet said you have to just put the chairs in the original common room (even though it tells you to build a common room). So it doesn't recognize the second common room with 8 chairs and you cannot proceed.
--Objective: Use riot guards to stop a prison riot! Problem: Riot guards get stuck going through doorways and killed one by one by prisoners with batons. No more riot guards come and I cannot figure out how to proceed. Solution: Restart the mission. This time the riot guards move a little more smoothly through doors, and the NPC correctly hits his cue and gives me reinforcements and moves the story forward.
--Objective: Put out the fire. Problem: The fire is out and it won't tick off the objectives list. Solution: Call in a fire truck and move firemen to where the fire was even though they extinguished it 30 minutes ago.
--Objective: Build phones in all the yards. Problem: I only see one yard, and I built phones in it. It's telling me I'm 50% done, so there must be another yard, but I don't see one. Solution: There was another yard that was not labeled, and I built a building on top of it. The game didn't overwrite the yard and replace it with the new building. If I want to place payphones in the second yard, I have to demolish my buildings one by one to find out where the yard was. Why not just let me put phones in the one remaining yard?
--Objective: Oversee 20 family visitations. Problem: I have built a visitation center, but no one is visiting (by the end, I had built five lonely visitation centers). Solution: There is a specific spot you have to build the visitation center. You probably built over it with another building. You have no way of knowing. I guess this one isn't technically a bug, it's just not giving the player necessary information. Same as before. Demolish buildings and build visitation centers until you figure out where the mandatory spot for it was.
I was planning to play in sandbox mode after the campaign, but the last campaign level is pretty much sandbox mode, and I have no real desire to build and manage a prison anymore. Oh , and also, the game does grapple a little with nature vs nurture and prison as deterrence vs rehabilitation. It comes down on the side of rehabilitation, and I think the game does a really good job of using procedural rhetoric to explore what it is like to be a prisoner or run a prison, including putting the player in the position to contemplate issues of the criminal justice system both while playing and once they are done playing. Good job Introversion!
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Jun 6th, 2018 at 13:29:18 - The Novelist (PC) |
The Novelist is a game about a novelist. And his wife and son. It's a simple narrative set inside a house. You play as a muse (or ghost, or spirit) in the house. You see, The Novelist begins, as so many stories about writers do, with the family coming to the house for the summer so the novelist can conquer writer's block and finish his book. The Shining and Alan Wake this is not. The only horrors are the incessant demands on your time and attention of your wife, son, editor, friends, and extended family.
The game is broken up into three months, and you play three significant days within each month. On these days, the family experiences conflict, and it is up to you, the muse, to float around the house reading letters, diaries, magazines, looking at pictures, and exploring the characters' memories, in order to find out what each character wants. In your snooping, you can walk or you can travel between light sources by "possessing" them. This is important because the game has a stealth mechanic where if family members see you, they will become suspicious. Linger too long, and they'll become spooked and you can't choose their daily resolution or compromise. At the end of each long day of snooping, you decide how the novelist should proceed and whisper in his ear at night how to manage the conflict (because he's the only one who can make final decisions in the family--burn the patriarchy!).
Of course, you can't give everyone what they want. Only one person gets what they want! Then you can choose a second person to compromise, and the third is left unhappy. Unfortunately these options are pretty predictable and repetitive. The novelist struggling with writers block generally wants to spent his time writing. The wife, struggling with her husband and their marriage, generally wants intimacy or support. The son, who is probably 6 or so and has a learning disability and trouble making friends, always wants the novelist to play with him or take him somewhere. No matter which decision you make each day, one person is happy, one person's outcome is something like, "She was disappointed (they're always disappointed) that Dan didn't quit working promptly at 7:00 and spend the next four hours cuddling on the couch with her, but she was happy that he quit at 8:00 instead of 9:00 and only drank 1 bourbon instead of 4," and the third person is invariably upset.
I don't think there are many endings for the game. At the end of mine, the novelist was offered a university position, even though, as far as I could tell, he only has a BA and has published 1 book aside from the one he's writing in the game. They also refer to his position as both assistant professor and associate professor, and claim that "the sabbatical program is very attractive," which means the writers don't know how professorships work. To take the job, the family had to move, so the wife is disappointed that she can't work for an art non-profit. Despite the novelist crushing her career goals, the game says a few sentences later that the couple lived in a honeymoon marriage madly in love for the rest of their lives. Aw. The son, who I only gave what he wanted one time, grew up to be an isolated teen doing mediocre in school, and worked odd jobs in his 20s with few friends. Hey, it's not my fault! How does one summer mess a kid up so much?
I wouldn't bother with this. It's slow, borderline tedious, with no payoff. It would take 20 minutes to read this story instead of 2 hours and 20 minutes to play it, and you wouldn't lose anything because you don't see characters interact anyway. There's no humor and it's too serious and overdramatic. I didn't like the wife much, and I really disliked the kid. If this is what having a family is like, I don't want one, seriously. I did connect a little to the novelist, but I guess that's because I write and have experienced a lot of the pressures he is under, including struggling with time management and scheduling, and he is a teacher now. I do wonder if he'll ever get a sequel though.
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Jun 5th, 2018 at 21:20:41 - Little Inferno (PC) |
As the game approached its climax, I had begun feeling like I was wasting my time. Burning consumer goods from mail-order catalogs in a fireplace and trying to piece together 99 combos was making me a little crazy. "What the fuck are three items that will give me a MANLY COMBO??" "This stupid combo needs something cold, but there are FOUR COLD ITEMS! AAAH!" The game started throwing nuggets of significance my way a little earlier, but once the climax hit and the game fundamentally shifted, I understood.
Little Inferno is basically Plato's allegory of the cave. The game is played facing a fireplace (Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace). You order consumer goods from mail-order catalogs and burn them. When you burn items, you get more money than you paid for them in the first place, and you can also get tokens that speed up how quickly items are shipped to you (Amazon membership?). It's extremely repetitive action, but I got really into trying to figure out the combos. The animations and sounds from burning toys are amusing too. I also realized how irritated I got when something too a long time to ship. Just like in real life. You carry on letter correspondence with your next-door neighbor, who laments that there is a wall separating you. You write and mail some things back and forth, but then she goes and burns her house down. Accident with the fireplace?
I won't spoil the rest, but suffice it to say she starts putting ideas in your head, ideas that make you think you might be real. The gameplay then changes and the player gets a lot to think about. Our entertainment can lure us into comfort or serve as an escape, making it easy to ignore the wider world, our responsibilities, other people and events. Often we are lonely, isolated, and we don’t exist in the world, but digitally or in our fictions. We see the shadows and flames and call it reality, choosing not to turn our heads away from the screen and take advantage of the experiences in the big (scary) world.
It's not just the screen that provides warmth and draws us near, but the chill of an increasingly isolating, bureaucratic, rationalist world pushing us toward what can comfort us. Sometimes it repels us, and other times it lulls us. In Little Inferno, everyone has to burn things in their personal fireplaces because it's been getting colder and colder, constantly snowing. The receptionist at Tomorrow Corporation embodies this rationalization, and the conversations your character has with adults are absurd in part because of the scripts the adults follow in their jobs. You are a customer, nothing more.
The game tells us to go outside. There’s a whole world of experiences for us to go get. We can have meaningful relationships with other people who are “through the wall." I find a very anti-consumerist message here too. Burn your things. They are keeping you from new experiences. But, as the game keeps telling you, once you leave the cave, you can never look back. We're changed by experience, by responsibilities, by transitions in life. Another reading of this is that it's talking about transition between childhood/adolescence and adulthood. When the early stages end, we have to go out into the world. But as I said above, it's not easy. It can be cold, not warm and cozy like your hearth. You’ll have to pay. People won’t always help you. But that’s okay because you'll grow through your experiences. I'm sure there's more commentary here I haven't thought about much, such as how we play games, but I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
Excellent game. The end is worth the journey of burning stuff.
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Jun 5th, 2018 at 14:50:33 - Proteus (PC) |
Neat pixel art exploration game. You spawn in the ocean and make your way to an island, which is different every time you play, save for some landmarks that will appear in different places. It's beautiful to look at, and the music is procedurally generated. As you walk, it ebbs and flows, new instruments and sounds come to the fore. Find a creature, and it hops away to do-re-mi. I chased a lot of creatures into the sea. I wore headphones and walking around the island was sensory bliss.
There is one landmark that you find that can move the game forward if you sit there overnight and watch the stars pulse and streak overhead. You can progress the game in this manner through seasons, and at the end you get a surprise. The seasons just change the color palette mostly. Trees will also shed their leaves in the fall, there is snow in winter. The whole experience lasts under an hour, and if you don't figure out how to progress the seasons, you might get bored from wandering aimlessly after 15 minutes or so.
I can see turning this on to relax and letting the music wash over me.
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