Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

One of the games from the August Humble Choice is Emily Is Away <3, the third game in the Emily Is Away series of nostalgic chat-based visual novels. The first Emily Is Away focuses on the internet of 2002-2006 and takes place through AIM Messenger. You play as a high school and subsequently college student with a crush on Emily, who is never away, because the gameplay is about talking to her through AIM. The first game is free, so I decided to give it a whirl before picking Emily Is Away <3, so that I can maybe give Emily ❤ away if someone else wants it.

As a nostalgia vehicle, Emily Is Away fails for me in particular for two reasons. First, I was ten in 2002 and fourteen in 2006, so the game’s initial hook of talking about Coldplay in AIM chat just doesn’t land for me. I used AIM as a teenager, but it was on the way out, and I never knew anyone who cared about Coldplay. Emily ❤ takes place on off-brand Facebook in 2008, when I was 16, and would line up much better.

Second, the game (at least in its first few interactions) relies heavily on a romantic entanglement between the protagonist and Emily, and I am an aromantic with a mind of metal and wheels who never cared who a girl I was interested in might be dating. There was more than one attractive girl in my circles, I was aware teenage relationships were fragile and temporary so a girl dating someone else didn’t really present a long term obstacle anyway, and my interests in relationships was pretty limited to begin with, especially for the amount of effort a relationship with a high school relationship usually requires.

Plus, the girl the protagonist is interested in is one they know in real life, and regularly see in person. The only reason they’re using AIM chat to stay in touch is because using the phone requires slightly more effort. Emily is exclusively the character you interact with early on (maybe for the whole game?), and it’s jarring to me that a 00s-era AIM conversation would end with a promise to meet up in real physical space at a party later that evening. When I was a teenager, the internet was another world with almost totally distinct inhabitants, and the friends I had online and used things like AIM chat to talk to were completely different people from who I saw at school.

None of this is a fatal flaw, though, because they’re obviously pretty specific to me. No, Emily Is Away’s fatal flaw is that after you pick a dialogue option, you have to hit keys on your keyboard to type it out. It doesn’t matter what keys you press, it’ll always match (more or less) the dialogue option you selected, so this is just a bit of friction between making a choice and seeing results. There is occasionally some characterization of the protagonist as they start to write one thing, then delete it and use a different phrasing (usually going from something very strong to something more restrained), but it’s really not worth the bit of friction introduced into every single player input. I keep thinking to myself “maybe it’ll be more relatable if I muscle through the opening conversations with Emily and find some side characters to talk to” or “maybe Emily ❤ will work better for me since it takes place in 2008 when I was 16,” but ultimately, I don’t want to struggle through fake-typing out all my responses when I still have over 170 games in my backlog.

In Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, Evie Frye is an Assassin chasing after the Shroud of Eden to prevent the Templar Lucy Thorne from using it to take over the world somehow. At the point in the story we’re talking about today, Sequence 5, Evie doesn’t know the Templars’ exact plan, just that they need a new piece of Eden after they accidentally blew up the Apple of Eden (I say “the” but at this point in the continuity there’s at least a couple floating around – this one can’t be the same one the Assassins and Templars were fighting over in the Ezio trilogy, because that was still around in 2012).

Evie solves some puzzles and tracks down some puzzle key thing in a hidden room in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that’s when Lucy Thorne pops out of nowhere. You have a quick mini-boss fight, and then in a cut scene Lucy takes the puzzle key from around Evie’s neck where Evie had been wearing it like a necklace (for all of five minutes) and runs away. After reducing the bosses’ health to zero, you win, but actually, you lose. It’s at least framed as Lucy grabbing it on the way to being tossed out a window and then using her parkour skillz to escape, but if they needed Lucy to win at this point, why not cut the (fairly dull) boss fight and just have Lucy be there ahead of Evie?

What makes it particularly aggravating is the premise of the Assassin’s Creed series: The frame story is that you’re a modern day Assassin reliving the genetic memories of an ancient Assassin master, usually to learn where some Precursor artifact wound up 200 years ago in the hopes that it’s still there to be recovered today (this hope turns out to be accurate a shockingly high percentage of the time, particularly since the modern-day frame plot is often vestigial to the point where you can go ahead and give it an anti-climactic “yeah, the vault’s empty” ending and it would be fine, because the storyline we care about is the one with the pirates/French revolutionaries/Industrial Age gang wars/whatever). The memories are fuzzy, which is why you can run around locations freely instead of repeating exactly the dead Assassin’s movements step for step, and you can do side quests in any order, and so on. This is necessary enough for gameplay that it would have to be handwaved even if it didn’t make sense, but it does: Memory is imperfect, and the genetic memories you’re accessing haven’t properly stored what order events occurred in, so the Animus has to be able to handle the ambiguity. I mean, genetic memories don’t work that way at all, but once you’ve accepted that a DNA sample can remember specific events, the rest is pretty plausible both in comparison and generally.

What makes this aggravating is that there are bonus objectives for full synchronization: Things your ancestor specifically remembers doing and which will help synchronize you (giving you new abilities) with the memories if you do them as well. For example, in the fight with Lucy Thorne, apparently Evie Frye specifically remembers countering every one of Lucy Thorne’s attacks. Which is the only way Lucy can do any damage. So the canonical outcome of this fight is not that it was a desperate struggle between evenly matched foes that could’ve suddenly tilted towards either side at any second, and Lucy seized an opportunity to grab the key and escape. It’s that Evie was completely dominating and then Lucy got phenomenally lucky.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is a 2015 game, but Valhalla was a 2020 release and is still nailed to that dead platform. Anyway, UPlay was dead on arrival, even in 2015 it should’ve been obvious that this was never going to be a Steam competitor. And Uplay doesn’t even have the courtesy to be merely useless, it’s actively harmful to the gaming experience. I’m on a cruise to Alaska celebrating my father’s retirement (two years late because Covid), which has generally been quite lovely and most of the games I downloaded onto an old laptop for the trip have worked fine and ultimately I’m not spending that much time on video games while on a cruise ship, but I don’t want the buffer to run too thin while I’m out here and certainly the thing that’s most stood out in terms of video games is that the only video game that has given me any trouble despite patchy ship wifi and so forth has been the Ubisoft game I brought.

You see, I have two Ubisoft accounts, the main one, and the backup I use to submit support tickets for when I can’t get into the main one, because Uplay is finnicky. For example, two-factor authentication stopped functioning for no reason at one point, leaving me unable to log in. I wasn’t even at sea, that was during the drive up when wifi still worked fine. In any case, I accidentally logged into the backup account, opened up Syndicate, and was presented with a new game. So then I log off, wrestle with Uplay’s login for a while longer, and get into the main account, only to find that the backup account’s new game data has now overwritten the one, single save file you get across all devices and, apparently, any number of Uplay accounts. Luckily, I’m not super invested in the story or anything, I don’t ultimately care that much so long as I get to run around London stabbing people, and it’s not like I’m on a deadline to beat this game, but it does mean I have to replay the stupid tutorial introduction missions again.

I might be able to retrieve my old save file from my old computer and get Uplay to recognize that, and maybe by the time I get home I’ll feel like wrestling with Uplay to make that happen, but I don’t know if I’m going to bother, just play the new save file to completion instead. Certainly this has cemented my decision to use Syndicate as the breakpoint where I stop bothering with Assassin’s Creed games. I was starting to think “y’know, people really seemed to enjoy Origins and Valhalla, and those settings might be played out in a way the French Revolution and Renaissance Italy are not, but the Caribbean is pretty played out and it was still fun to play the Caribbean but also you are a parkour ninja.” But this experience has hammered a nail into that coffin. No thank you, no more Ubisoft games, I’ve probably got too many already, really. I’ve still got a bunch of Far Crys in my backlog that I’ll still play, because I already bought them and these games are fun to zone out to podcasts with, when Uplay isn’t getting in the way.

I guess I could review the cruise itself, but it’s not like I go on three of these a year. I don’t think I really have the depth of experience to say anything about it besides “cruises are fun” and also surprisingly affordable, so if you can take a week off and can manage to save $1,000-$2,000, maybe consider taking one. The ship’s crawling with boomers, but they’re much more polite than you’d expect, I think partly because I’m not staff and partly because they’re grateful someone under 50 is around to make the place look less like an unusually ritzy waiting room for the morgue.

Eastern European video games are so famous for producing brilliant but unpolished gems that the term “Eurojank” was invented to refer to them. Pathologic is a Eurojank survival horror game, STALKER is a Eurojank shooter, Gothic is a Eurojank RPG, and so on. The Witcher series was never Eurojank, but it’s got a lot of the hallmarks of one, and especially its third entry did the impossible – delivered on Eurojank ambition without the actual jank. Clearly this was some kind of Faustian bargain, because Cyberpunk 2077 failed to deliver the ambition but had all of the jank.

As that first paragraph hints, the core of Eurojank is manic ambition married to janky execution. Eurojank games are carving out a whole new sub-genre for themselves, one which usually never gets any entries outside of that one game or series, and they have the bugs and lack of polish that you’d expect from a mid-size company trying to invent an entire genre with one video game. Each Eurojank game is an experience that no other video game will give you, something new and visionary, but also they have a bunch of jank you have to get used to.

The “Euro” in Eurojank stereotypically refers to eastern Europe specifically, although that stereotype doesn’t quite hold even with the three Ur-Eurojank examples I gave in the first paragraph: Gothic was developed in central European Germany (not even on the east side of the old border). Necromunda: Hired Gun continues that trend of being technically in Europe, albeit far to the west of the stereotypical Eurojank game.

Necromunda is a loving recreation of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium’s most infamous underhive. The maps are half-functional steel plants built with the pointless enormity of the Imperium of Man, deep trenches carved into Wall-E style mountains of trash cubes that lead upwards to bunkers to storm, and mineshafts dug miles deep for raw materials. There are side missions to retrieve human corpses because that’s a valuable food supply, to destroy the ventillation fans in an enemy gang’s hideout so they’ll asphyxiate on the industrial fumes that permeate the hive, and to both rescue, kidnap, and execute unregistered psykers. It’s a game that understands what a 40k video game is supposed to be: A playable death metal album that takes place in a galaxy ruled by an evil empire that’s just past the height of its power and entered into decline, crushing its hapless subjects between its merciless, failing machinery, but still too powerful to be meaningfully opposed from within (logically speaking, there must be certain frontier sectors where Imperial power has receded to the point where local powers could successfully break away and create democracy or whatever, but if you want democratic rebels breaking away from a fascistic empire, why are you not playing a Star Wars game?).

But dear god, the jank. The game has an atrocious reverse-difficulty curve. By the time you’ve finished the second level (maybe even the first, I was still getting to grips with the game and wasn’t great at distinguishing enemy types yet), it’s already throwing ogryns and enemy lieutenants with powerful refractor fields at you. Psykers and ambots get introduced in the third level, but while they have different powers than other enemies, they’re actually much easier to fight than the lieutenants with the refractor fields. Genestealers show up in level 7, but they’re some of the easiest enemies in the game, melee-only foes who you can just kite while unloading a heavy bolter at them. If there’s been any new enemies in levels 4-6, I didn’t notice them. There’s only 13 levels in this game, and while I definitely expect there to be some new mini-bosses, boss fights, and maybe a new elite enemy type like the psyker and genestealer, it’s pretty clear at this point that the basic mooks you clear through are the same at the end as they were in the beginning. The Escher, Orlocks, and Goliaths are all visually distinct and fantastically well-represented, but none of them are meaningfully harder than the others.

This would be a flat difficulty curve, but you also have upgrades. Buying new bionics and a better arsenal of weapons makes the game noticeably easier as you progress. Bionics give you new powers like slowing down time or a pulse that both stuns enemies and deactivates refractor fields within a certain radius (when fully upgraded, a very wide radius), and while I find that the autogun you get in the first five minutes remains a pretty reliable all-rounder weapon even after I’ve unlocked the entire arsenal, the heavy bolter’s insane damage reduces even the tankiest of (non-boss) enemies to red mist in just a few shots, often chewing through a refractor field before I even notice the golden glow intercepting my shots, and while the bolter’s recoil is too intense to be used at anything but very close range, the plasma gun is great for sniping because of its even higher damage-per-shot. It’s not extremely accurate by default, but the right upgrades can give it fantastic range in exchange for a terrible reload speed, which is perfect for sniping.

Between the enemies having variety but not escalation and the bionics and weapons becoming steadily more versatile and in some ways even directly more powerful, the game gets easier as you go. I was seriously considering tossing this game on the Regrets pile early on because its difficulty was so intense even when taking B-ranked side missions (supposed to be the easiest type) on the lowest difficulty option and it was still really difficult, but once I managed to scrape some credits together and buy some upgrades, easy difficulty started living up to its name and I switched back to normal. Now only S-ranked side missions give me trouble, and even then, it depends on the exact objective (objectives that require killing mini-bosses or capturing territory are much harder than objectives that require destroying stockpiles of ammo or drugs or stealing food – the latter feature infinitely spawning enemies, so ignoring them to hit the objectives is not just viable, but to some degree required). I’m sure this is partly because I got better at the game as I played, but also I have way better gear.

Some basic quality of life features are absent as well. This is a looter shooter, except the advantage of a +2 bolter over the standard are tiny enough that you can ignore them, and the process of getting loot is clunky enough that you probably will. You can’t open your inventory screen in regular gameplay, instead exclusively opening it when at the weapon upgrade shop or when choosing your mission loadout, so you never do the looter shooter thing where you swap out new weapons mid-mission because you found something better, and once you’ve found your first heavy bolter, you’ll probably never find one that’s better by enough to be worth the trouble of customizing it to max out whatever features you’re using heavy bolters for (probably close range damage, but maybe there’s other uses for that gun that just aren’t obvious to me).

There’s no mini-map and the objective markers aren’t nearly sufficient to tell you where to go. Since you’re in an underhive, knowing which direction your target is in doesn’t always help because the door leading to the other side of the wall between you and the target might be far to the side or maybe even in the opposite direction. There are occasional wide, open spaces when you’re out on the ash wastes or in a particularly cavernous storage chamber or whatever, but these are the exception, which means a lot of missions, especially side missions, are spent screaming “where the fuck do I go next?!”

Side missions take place in the same maps as the main missions, but in small, cordoned off chunks of them, repurposed for the sake of the side mission. That’s a great way to recycle content (like all games, Necromunda would be better if it was a Metroidvania where all maps connected to one another in a massive interconnected hive, but that would require significant time and money and it’s not super insightful to say “this game would’ve been better with an extra six months and $2,000,000 poured into it”), but it means that you’re often going backwards from the direction the main mission took you, which means all the level design that drew your eye and made the way forward intuitive in the main missions is now useless or sometimes counterproductive. An elevator in the third stage, for example, is very obvious at the bottom but gets lost in the clutter a bit on the top. No problem if you’re starting on the bottom, but if you’re in a side mission that starts you on top, it can take a bit to find. If it’s a side mission that’s constantly spawning enemies, that makes things much worse, because you can’t just carefully sweep the area for the way forward (the elevator’s not hard to notice if you walk right past it), but instead bounce around the arena trying to dodge gunfire while looking for a way out while not even sure if what you’re looking for is a door or a ladder or an elevator or what.

This does lead to a cool thing where over time you build up familiarity with the hive and eventually memorize the connectors between different rooms, but that would’ve happened with a map, too, and with a map the progression would’ve been from a tourist checking the map every two minutes to a native who’s got the routes memorized. In the map-less game that we have, the progression is from a frustrating experience where you can’t find where the fuck to go next while being chased by infinitely respawning Orlocks to actually being able to navigate the level and complete missions.

I do recommend Necromunda: Hired Gun to anyone who likes 40k, but I have to give the massive caveat that you should start out on the lowest difficulty even if you’re very experienced with shooters, and that you should grind some side missions to improve your bionics and customize your weapons as soon as that option is available. You’ll usually profit from even a failed side mission because of loot you picked up along the way canceling out consumables spent (there’s a low cap on how many medkits you can buy going into a mission, and they’re cheap), so expect to make money getting shot to pieces at least four or five times before you build up enough wealth to fight on a level playing field. Tweak the difficulty back upwards once you feel your upgrades are surpassing the level of challenge the game can throw at you (or don’t – I could probably manage hard difficulty at this point, but I’m not gonna).

The title is an exaggeration, of course, but “way more video games should be Metroidvanias than are” isn’t as pithy.

Now I’m not saying that most games should have the Metroidvania style action-platforming gameplay. It’s good that lots of different genres exist covering lots of different gameplay. What I am saying is that most genres of video game could stand to have a Metroidvania-style interconnected explorable world (and I’m using a lenient definition here that includes 3D games with interconnected worlds like Dark Souls). The game that’s brought this on is Yoku’s Island Express, a game which asks “what if pinball was a Metroidvania?” and the answer is “it would be way better, obviously.”

Continue reading “Every Video Game Should Be A Metroidvania” →

Banners of Ruin is a deckbuilding RPG in the kind-of-like-Redwall genre of slightly anthropomorphized animals in a medieval society. So, you assemble a deck of cards by choosing one from a random selection of three every time you win a combat, with cards representing different fighting techniques, weapons, shields, and so forth. In my current playthrough, I happen to have been able to recruit several additional bear party members, and I also happen to have run into a lot of heavy armor that I’ve used to further augment their tankiness. The end result is that in a game where enemies who deal 20-25 damage are supposed to be especially lethal, I have a party full of bears who each individually have 50+ armor on top of their 50+ HP. Armor is restored to maximum after each fight (but HP is not), and non-boss enemies have almost no hope of getting through my armor to hit my HP, which means I don’t even really have to worry about healing because of how incredibly resilient I am.

I have dubbed this build “Invincible Bears” and although all of the bears died, a single stray mouse was able to stagger to victory. This was only, like, my third run, but I guess I’m putting this on the Completed list. God knows I’m not going to sink in like 50 hours or whatever to unlock whatever secret ending I’m sure is buried under challenge modes or grinding for ultra-rare encounters or whatever.

I try to only have so many games installed at once, as part of my efforts to actually finish games and cut the list of ones I’d like to play/finish someday maybe down to a double digit number, instead of doing what I’ve done for years now, which is pick at games five or ten minutes at a time and inevitably end up going back to the same handful of familiar titles. It’s working, but the time estimates on How Long To Beat aren’t always particularly accurate. Sometimes it’s a disconnect between how I play versus how the average person plays. Sometimes what I view as “Main Story +” is closer to what the crowd thinks of as “100%.” And sometimes, as is the case of Going Under, the devs tell me that the game should be played without the handicaps and I take them at their word, which is apparently not what most people do. That, or everyone’s so much better at video games for me that the average completion time is half of mine. I could’ve called it quits on Going Under early, shuffled it off into my Regrets category on Steam, but I’m glad I didn’t. It has a good ending.

Not a mirror match, though, which is why its final boss was way harder than Transistor’s, the game I blasted through in one day. This time How Long To Beat was wrong in my favor. Seven hours? This game barely lasted five. I thought I’d play for two or three hours tonight, and by that point I was so close to the finish I decided I wanted to bring it home.

Continue reading “Mirror Matches Are Hard (To Make)” →

When I was discussing Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s four prologues, I mentioned that the first game was the only one with a good opening, and even that one was debatable. Since then, I have replayed the opening to Syndicate and also remembered that there is more prologue in the first AC than I remembered. Tackling that second one because it’s faster, I totally forgot how much heavier handed the modern day segments were in the first Assassin’s Creed, and that part of the prologue involved one of these modern day sections where they just dump conspiracy exposition on you before letting you get to the part where you parkour around Damascus. I was thinking that the only setup was the botched assassination against the head Templar, the return to Masyaf, and then the Masyaf tutorial, which is still getting a bit long in the tooth by the time you reach that tutorial, but nope, there’s more that I had completely forgotten about.

But I’d also been remembering Syndicate’s opening as being worse than it was, or maybe better, because it’s so damn close to finally getting it right. The game opens up and says “you are an Assassin, that guy is a Templar, stab his eyes out!” And the first mission is a tutorial-y setpiece that probably could’ve been a bit less heavy-handed, but it’s a set piece in which you are an Assassin and that guy is a Templar, which makes it way better than the usual bullshit that feels the need to explain how our protagonist learned about and joined the Assassins at all.

But then after that they feel the need for a “welcome to London” mission that’s the usual interminable Assassin’s Creed intro mission, where it forces you to go talk to Jayadeep Mir nee Henry Green and you have to chase an orphan and do a carriage battle and sync up one very specific viewpoint and otherwise have all the game’s systems explained to you before you’re allowed to just explore the open world. After they already had a big setpiece opening that explains most of the game’s systems to you! Does someone at Ubisoft really like their boring prologue tutorials? While they were planning out the opening, did some executive raise his hand at the end and ask “wait, but where’s the boring prologue tutorial in all this?” and then demand they add one in when it was explained that they didn’t have one? Everything the meeting with Jayadeep Mir accomplishes (including the introduction of the character Jayadeep Mir) could’ve been done just as well by sticking the players in a London openworld fresh out of the opening, stamping a story mission down on Jayadeep’s shop, and possibly locking some content behind completion of that mission (for example, depending on how the plotline with the street gang the Frye twins are using for muscle needs to be written, you might want to lock the gang war missions until after you’ve hit up Jayadeep and he’s explained how the Templars control the city).

The Syndicate opening was nearly good, and then they tripped at the finish line. And this has certainly impacted how I remember the game. Four years after having played the first hour-ish, once the story had devolved (as stories in my memory tend to once I’m four or five years past when I first consumed them) into a soup of vignettes, my brain had rearranged the very first opening scene of the game to the climax of the first proper chapter, and the horrible intro with Jayadeep Mir had taken over my recollection of the game’s introduction.

Probably I’m on the wrong end of this bell curve’s peak in terms of remembering Assassin’s Creed stories properly, because Assassin’s Creed games are games I play so I can listen to a podcast and I’m never more than half-paying attention to what’s actually going on, but other games I play in this way manage to stick with me better than AC games do. The Half-Life games have reached the vignette soup stage, but my brain isn’t editing Ravenholm into the game’s opening as a terrible gravity gun tutorial, and even the Half-Life 2 episodes are mostly just gone from my memory, but not much interfering with Half-Life 2 itself the way the Syndicate vignettes actually rearranged themselves in my mind. Undertale is well past the point where it should be vignette soup, but I still have a solid and reliable memory of how that game’s plot went.

Going Under is hard. It’s got options to do things like give yourself extra HP, lower the health of enemies, or increase the durability of weapons, but they’re labeled “accessibility options” which makes me worry that if I, a perfectly able-bodied person, take too many extra heart containers, there might not be enough left over for someone who’s actually disabled. I’m finally closing in on the endgame, though. There’s three dungeons in the game, then a crossover dungeon, then hardmode versions of the first three dungeons, which I assume is followed by a finale in a hardmode version of the crossover dungeon. I’ve been two of the three hardmode dungeons, so I’ll probably have this game finished soon (maybe even by the time this post goes live – I’m writing it like a week in advance).

There’s an achievement for each of the hardmode dungeons, and after getting the second one, I decided to check what percentage of other players had gotten that achievement. Only 10.9%. Nice! You know you’re getting into an elite group of people who play this one obscure indie game a lot when your achievements are nearing sub-10%.

Except it turns out I’ve already got a bunch of sub-10% achievements. There’s a collection of NPCs who hand out side quests, you see, seven or eight each. Each of them can be your “mentor,” and you can have one mentor equipped at a time, who give out bonuses. Each mentor’s bonuses are unique, and get better the more of their side quests you’ve beaten. So, obviously, if beating the main quests is getting difficult, you focus on mentor quests for a bit to power those up. I had all the mentor quests maxed out by the time I took on the co-working space dungeon at the game’s midpoint.

Each mentor questline has a separate achievement for maxing it out, and the one with the most completion was 9.2%. The least completed mentor was 7.1%. You guys are playing Going Under wrong! Why would you try and tackle the hardmode dungeons before getting the bonuses from the much easier mentor quests? Some of the mentor quests are definitely very tricky, but they’re easier than the hardmode dungeons in the game’s second half. If I’m guessing the meaning of some of these achievements correctly, completing some of the mentorships – including the one for Swomp, who is probably the strongest mentor in the game – is less common than beating the whole game!

Makes me wonder how many people are beating the game by just turning all the accessibility options to maximum and facerolling. You damn kids! Those extra heart containers are for people with Parkinson’s!