Month: September 2023

I talk about video game openings a lot, and booting up Just Cause, two things leap out at me. First, the writing in this game aspires to mediocrity. I mean, Christ, the cut scene at the end of the opening mission has a hot tsundere slapping our protagonist over some unstated romantic slight from the past. A bald-faced cliche delivered unironically.

But despite the fact that this is clearly not a game you play for the story, it still opens up with a cut scene that establishes in less than two minutes that fictional Caribbean nation San Esperito is ruled by President Salvador Mendoza, Medoza is a bastard for vague reasons, and Rico Rodriguez is going to go and topple his regime on behalf of “the Agency,” which will probably work fine because this is an American game from 2006 and is therefore a universe carefully crafted to ensure that self-awareness and humility will never be beneficial traits. Then bam you are parachuting out of a plane and onto the beach to fight off government enforcers on the way to a safehouse. Not only are you playing the video game almost instantly, you also get out of the prologue and into the open world inside of fifteen minutes, the vast majority of which are spent in cool gunfights.

Getting the opening pace right used to be something that even poorly written video games got nearly perfect (Hades is even faster so there is room for improvement, but we’re under two minutes either way) without even really thinking about it. I think Half-Life was probably the start of the shift, here. Half-Life’s tram ride and Half-Life 2’s redux were both long periods of setting the mood before you got your crowbar and had at it. These were both really good, but it gave rise to much worse imitators which slowly morphed into failed film directors delivering two-hour long prologues whose only gameplay is a railroaded tutorial, dominated by cut scenes scripted and blocked by people that Netflix said no to.

Autonauts vs. Piratebots is a programming game where you program robots to gather resources and then process those resources into weapons so you can equip warbots and defeat the piratebots. It’s a decent take on the concept, but it’s got several annoying flaws.

First of all, and this one is completely subjective but it bugged me the whole game, your bots’ main armament are swords and bows, only unlocking “hand cannons” near the end, and even then they look like black powder. The tech tree is kind of ridiculous anyway, in that the only metal resource is generic “metal” so it’s not like we’re alloying copper and tin together to make bronze until we can get forges hot enough to melt hematite into iron or anything, and if I’m commanding a bot swarm, I want little treaded rovers with tiny and adorable miniguns on the back.

Secondly, every single recipe is just slightly more complex than it should be, mainly in how it always requires earlier techs as inputs even when that doesn’t make sense. Military units require gold, gold is obtained from selling food, so at first you can toss raw wheat into the spaceport for peanuts, but then you can unlock kitchen tables and ovens to bake bread. At first you grind wheat into crude flour to make crude bread. Later you upgrade your millstone to something that requires electricity and a wind farm and now you can grind up wheat into good flour to make good bread. Except actually you also need some crude flour as part of the good bread recipe, so in addition to your windfarm powered awesome mill, you also need a bot-muscle powered lame mill. Sure, this means the good bread recipe is more complex and thus requires either more bots or more cleverly programmed bots, but since there’s no cost to getting more bots besides the hassle of programming them – or just copying their programs if it’s to harvest more of a resource you’ve already set up a production line for – this doesn’t really make it any more challenging than if the good bread line was identical to the crude bread line except that it required better mills powered by a windfarm. Adding the windfarm is the part of the upgrade which isn’t just busywork, cut the rest.

And thirdly, directing armies is too automated to be intuitive as an RTS but not automated enough to be satisfying. Towards the endgame my (active) defencebot cap was 25, so my standard army was 10 knights, 10 archers, and 5 sappers, each of which had slightly different programs: WarBot, ArcBot, and SiegeBot. I never fully explored the programming options, so it’s possible there was an unexplained method whereby I could set my production facilities to automatically download the appropriate program from the database into units as they’re completed, and to do so until there are 10 active bots running WarBot, 10 running ArcBot, and 5 running SiegeBot, so the fact that I had to set each bot manually as it came off the production line might be my fault for not bothering to explore all the options. But definitely there’s no way to then write an Overmind program that waits until WarBot, ArcBot, and SiegeBot are all topped off before telling them to attack the nearest pirate outpost. Having them attack outposts based entirely on proximity rather than picking targets based on the strength of my army versus the strength of the target outpost would’ve been slightly inefficient, but a lot of automation is like that: You lose some finesse in exchange for the ability to turn it on and then forget about it.

On the other hand, this could lead to a point where you’ve got new production lines taking advantage of all the new tech already up and running, and now you need new tech from powerful pirate outposts, and you’re just kind of waiting for the army to finish threshing through all the pirate outposts between you and the target outpost because you’ve automated their attacks. But if you want directing the army to be more engaging, then the interface of reprogramming bots to target a new outpost (which you can, fortunately, do en masse so you only have to rewrite the program once per command issued) is way clunkier and less satisfying than the standard right-click tile to move, right-click enemy to attack.

It was also terrible for my productivity because its only obvious stopping points are when pirate bosses are defeated, which took me like six hours each. This is definitely a personal issue, but I found it hard to break the game into smaller chunks. The pirate bosses aren’t the only outposts with new technology, but the use for one new technology is often vague until you find another new technology that uses the resources gathered by the first new tech in order to produce something directly useful, which means the smart thing to do is to ignore all your new tech until a pirate boss is defeated, then look at all of it at once in order to set up a production line in a more efficient manner rather than creating workshops blindly and hoping they aren’t on the other side of the map from the resources they turn out to need as inputs.

There’s no point rewriting Dungeons II. I say that, but actually looking at the mechanics of the missions and writing a plot to go with them from the ground up sounds like something I might do sometime. But a Dungeons III rewrite is much less an exercise in creating an entire story from whole cloth. While Dungeons II had a bunch of references to other games’ protagonists and told you that they were a party of heroes who had wronged you so you should go stop them, Dungeons III has an actual plot. Unfortunately, it’s a plot with one beat that it repeats over and over again.

The one beat the plot has is that Thalya the dark elf is an evil creature but has been raised to be good by the paladin Tanos. The Absolute Evil – the disembodied hand of evil that you play as – sends a shadow to corrupt her, and she instantly becomes the general of the Absolute Evil’s armies. Thalya does a Gollum and Smeagol thing with her good and evil halves arguing with each other, and Tanos beams in to tell her she must return to the light, and evil Thalya tells him to fuck off while good Thalya bemoans that she is not in control.

This is a perfectly serviceable premise, but the problem is that there’s twenty missions, voice acted dialogue for every single one, and we’ve gotten these beats out of the way by the end of mission three, leaving nothing to do but repeat them seventeen more times. But the game does have something else going for it: A total of four heroes rule the realms you’re sacking, with Tanos as the ultimate king/hero but with three allied rulers, who pace the game out, with the first five missions ending with a fight with Grimli the dwarf, the next five ending with a fight with Yaina Overproud the sorceress, and so on. And these could be used to shine a lot on the reasons Thalya has for choosing evil over good. Even in the game as it exists, the good side of Thalya does slowly get won over to evil, but it seems to be more out of exhaustion than actually reconsidering just how heroic these heroes are. They went this way with Grimli, so the lack of it for any of the others to instead repeat Thalya’s rebellion against Tanos over and over again was a huge missed opportunity.

The Grimli arc barely needs revision. Its first three missions are dedicated to setting up who Thalya, Tanos, and Grimli the dwarf king are, as well as that Grimli is racist against Thalya once for being an elf and twice for being a dark elf. Even in the existing game, evil Thalya brings up that Tanos never defended her against his dwarf friend’s insults, so it’s really only in the next arc with Yaina Overproud that the ball gets dropped.

Yaina Overproud’s schtick is that she is vaguely capitalist, and this game released in 2017 when Bernie Sanders was at about the peak of his popularity. It’s not super clear how exactly she is being capitalist in any kind of hypocritcally evil way, the game just mumbles something about banks and then has Yaina carry a bunch of completely unrelated Sailor Moon references for no reason. I always wonder if there’s some WoW meme (or worse, in-studio) in-joke that would explain the connection. In any case, Thalya opens the game by opening up an orphanage, which she then burns down after being possessed by the shadow of the Absolute Evil, and you could make something of that by having Thalya be angry that she wasted so much time putting a pretty face on Tanos’ regime while Yaina raked in all the gold to lead a life of champagne dinners and glamorous excess.

Elric the Pretty is a narcissistic paladin. Doubling up on paladins since main antagonist Tanos is also one, but whatever. In the game as it is, Thalya’s good half falls entirely silent for this arc, which I guess might count as a second beat in her character arc if you’re generous, but rather than just going quiet, I’d have her actually get won over. Elric is vain, selfish, and self-aggrandazing, and good Thalya can wonder aloud how she ever thought of him as heroic. Put under the pressure of the Absolute Evil’s invasion, all of Tanos’ heroic companions have revealed themselves to be selfish cowards, throwing wave after wave of their own men at the Horde hoping to find their programmed kill limit and never fighting themselves until the dark armies have smashed through the gates, torn down the walls, and scattered all the defenders.

Other than desperately needing line-by-line editing to remove all the redundant lines and give Thalya more than one joke (she has a bit where she gives commands to do three evil things, where the first two are some kind of cartoon mayhem and the last is some kind of nonsense, which isn’t particularly funny the first time and then gets repeated on an almost per-level basis), the last arc basically works as-is: Thalya has a confrontation with her adoptive father Tanos, and put under pressure, Tanos goes full authoritarian psychopath.

There is one mission in particular that needs to be pretty much completely rewritten, where the premise is that you summon the Absolute Evil by sacrificing lots of captured heroes and then it beats up Tanos, which is bad for two reasons, first, this isn’t even close to the final mission so they have to contrive a reason why the Absolute Evil doesn’t just do that again in future confrontations with Tanos, and second, I’m supposed to be the Absolute Evil, the disembodied presence running the dungeon and directing the minions. Sure, it’s not a 1:1 representation, Thalya is implied to be taking on way more of a leadership role than the game depicts directly, but mostly the Absolute Evil is the player character, and when you get summoned, the subsequent battle is entirely in a cut scene, so it doesn’t at all feel like you’ve taken a more hands-on approach to the fight than before. Did the game just think the players would be disappointed if not reassured that they could totally beat Tanos up?

Spiritfarer is a saily-aroundy game like Merchant of the Skies, but it doesn’t have the base building mechanic that Merchant of the Skies sold itself on (no surprise there), still doesn’t have any combat, and also there is almost no trading. Instead, while you do sail around places exploring a map of the world and unlocking prows that can break through increasingly implausible barriers is a major game mechanic, the gameplay rests almost entirely on resource and time management. Your boat is sort of a Stardew Valley farm that floats, and while certain resources are only gotten from specific locations – you can’t grow extra wood or ore from your boat, so you’ll need to visit islands for them – others, like fish and farm crops, come mainly from messing around on your boat while waiting to sail from one place to another.

But all those mechanics are basically just to give you stuff to do so that your boat will feel like a community with a daily routine and errands to run and stuff, which is vital, because the basic premise of the game is that you are Charon’s replacement ferrying souls to the afterlife and these souls hang out on your boat between when you pick them up and when you resolve their subplot so that they’re ready to pass on. Since you’ve got things to do on the boat, watering crops, sawing wood at the mill, weaving thread into cloth and so forth, you see them wandering around. You’re in charge of handing out food for them and there is a dedicated hug button, both of which improve their mood (among other, more character-specific things that help give them individual personality), and if their mood is high enough they’ll do certain things automatically. For example, the union leader lioness (oh, all the departed spirits become animals on your boat for some reason – they were clearly human in life, though, so I think it’s just an excuse to have a giant cartoon toad hopping around the game) will harvest ore on her own when you visit an ore island, then process it into ingots, and then give you the result, so long as she’s not in a depressive funk. So you wander around the boat processing raw materials into whatever resources you need more of for whatever quest you’re focused on right now, and you bump into a couple of people who are busy contributing in their own way or just wandering around talking to each other or interacting with objects on the ship like a lazy lion (the lionesses’ husband) who likes to lounge on a couch.

I dimly recall that this game made Yahtzee cry, so I went into it with pretty high expectations. It’s good, but not that good. Yahtzee’s literally-cried moment was with the aging hedgehog named Alice. She died of old age and develops dementia over the course of the game. Now, I wasn’t totally unmoved by this. The tangled snarl of memories in her shattered mind is pretty realistic to how dementia works, and that’s a real thing that happens to real people which means Alice was an effective reminder of what it looks like when someone’s body and mind are slowly worn away until, when I finally led the gibbering corpse to eternal rest, I felt like it was probably for the best. She didn’t deserve to die, but she deserved to go on like that even less, so lesser of two evils, I guess.

I like these characters, but it doesn’t particularly feel like anything is getting resolved. They don’t seem to come to a personal realization about their backstories, they just share them with me and then move on through the Everdoor to whatever lies beyond. It does a good job converting the ship slowly but steadily into a floating graveyard of empty houses that were once occupied by people I knew and cared about, but the emotional climax falls flat. Gwen reaches the Evergate and is bitter about her awful father, but I already knew that. She also talks about how lucky she is to know Stella, the protagonist (they knew each other before Gwen died), but it feels kind of hollow because I was just ticking quest objectives off. Alice awakens from her dementia for half a second at the Everdoor, but only half a second, and barely has time to focus before the fog is back. Summer worked for a major agribusiness and the chemicals she used gave her cancer, which ultimately killed her, symbolized by a giant dragon. The one that made the most impact on me by far was Atul, who simply vanishes after you finish his last quest, in the way of an abrupt death that you didn’t see coming (although even then, only partly – I very much expected that Atul’s final quest would be his last unique quest, and the last one would be the visit to the Everdoor).

All of these characters work well before their emotional climax at the Evergate, and their absence afterwards is felt, but the actual Evergate text feels like aimless rumination on things they’ve already told me. I enjoy the game’s vibe but its emotional climaxes are the part that fall flat for me, and nowhere is this more true than the game’s actual ending, where it turns out it was all just a dream. This is not as hackneyed as it usually would be, because the whole game is about coming to terms with death, so it’s not thematically out of left field when it turns out that the whole thing is a dying dream and the death you’re coming to terms with is your own.

But that still leaves the problem that none of what you’re doing actually matters. The whole magic trick of fictional narrative is that we pretend to believe something we know is false in order to feel emotions about it. Strip away the false reality and make Spiritfarer a purely abstract game and it’s interminably dull – the gameplay is there to provide space for your boat full of departed spirits to feel like a community, because giving you things to do means there are things you do with other characters. The gameplay on its own is extremely basic platforming, usually of the babby’s first Unity game variety. It’s the animation and the characters that make the game engaging, but then half-ish way through it’s revealed there are actually exactly two characters: Stella, the protagonist, who is every single character except Lily, her sister, whose words from reality occasionally penetrate the dream. In that context, the only thing that matters at all are those conversations and the rare occasions when Stella is having a conversation that advances her own arc. Gwen and Atul and Astrid are all just mirages who matter only to the extent they influence Stella, and while each of them do, they do so very rarely.

The game is also just not as good at being a metaphor for accepting your own death as it is a metaphor for dealing with the loss of others. In large part this is because you are (I assume) a conscious, thinking being who is going to react to death in some sort of way, but corpses are not and do not. The game is very good at depicting life going on without the jovial toad man who taught you how to saw wood or the cynical deer woman who taught you how to weave cloth, gating progression through newer spirits’ stories and higher tier upgrades behind upgrades that require spirit flowers, a resource acquired exclusively from spirits passing through the Everdoor. You can choose exactly when Gwen passes on, but you can’t get through the ice barrier into the winter parts of the map with her still on board.

For your own death, though, the point when you pass on is the point when you’re done playing this video game. You choose to die when you’re all alone (there is, for some reason, one spirit who never passes through the Everdoor, but he still runs out of unique dialogue pretty quickly and fades into the background, so he may as well have left) and have nothing left to do. That’s not how most people experience death at all! That’s the experience of a biologically immortal being who’s outlived the entire human species!

On the other hand, if you completely ignore that frame and pretend the game never abandons its original premise, then it matters a lot whether the departed spirits have a mediocre versus ecstatic time on your boat in the couple of weeks they spend between this life and whatever lies beyond. I spent a lot of time with and had a lot of fun in Spiritfarer, but only by ignoring the twist and pretending the game was really, genuinely about faring spirits, that Stella isn’t dying, she’s dead, and Charon, an actual magical god of passage from this life to the next, selected her departed spirit to take over his job.