Author: Chamomile Has A Blog

WATCH_DOGS is a 2014 video game. Usually I list the year to give context to what games were contemporary and sometimes to point out how certain things made sense at the time even if they haven’t aged well. For example, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate’s aping of the style of BBC’s Sherlock made a lot of sense in 2015.

But for WATCH_DOGS, “2014” is the sub-genre and premise. Not that it strictly takes place in 2014 (although I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be set, like most media with a modern setting, more or less in its year of release), but that it is so heavily informed by the culture and anxieties of that year to the point where it becomes a useful view of what the world was like (or at least, what contemporary mainstream culture thought it was like) in the Obama era. All the Obama era concerns about the surveillance state and electronic warfare had reached their most advanced forms, and yet remained totally detached from the alt-right Nazi militias and peer-to-peer cyber and propaganda warfare that have become the dominant conversation. These days, concerns about the surveillance state are a side note to discussions of the FBI tracking down January 6th insurrectionists and what 2022 sanctions limiting the activity of Russian psyops did to the audience of this or that online community or the comments section for whatever political news site or YouTube channel. In WATCH_DOGS, it’s firmly the other way around, with the vaguely right-wing militia being bit players included, as far as I can tell, mostly just to give rural the small town section of the map some criminal baddies for protagonist Aiden Pearce to mow down.

DEDSEC, the off-brand Anonymous that the game presents mostly heroically (Aiden doesn’t want to help them at the end, but it’s not really clear why), doesn’t have any QAnon imitators or splinter factions. Corporations and government act as a unified whole, “the Man,” rather than being deadlocked by bitter partisan political warfare, but the police are still considered good guys despite being government enforcers. Aiden Pearce uses binaural beats for “digital trips” which, modulo some exaggeration for gameplay, evoke the idea that such beats’ effects on the psyche could possibly replicate or even approach the effects of psychedelic substances, a common myth from the era which has quietly fallen by the wayside as more and more people have tried it and had no effect, making it clear that the exceptions are some combination of placebo and attention-seekers fabricating counterculture tech so that they can claim to be on the bleeding edge. Good background music does help with focus, but that genre is dominated not by any alleged binaural beat, but by lo-fi hip-hop beats to relax/study to.

The game’s morality is also 1) focused on with a reputation mechanic that rewards you for completing missions that help the city or rescuing civilians from firefights and penalizes you for killing civilians and police, and 2) an absolute mess. Firstly, the game takes place in Chicago, yet it still posits killing the cops as a bad thing. All cops were not broadly considered bastards back in 2014, but the fucking Chicago police have always had a reputation as authoritarian stormtroopers, plus, vigilante justice is nearly impossible to justify if the police are doing their jobs. The protagonist’s hacker powers come from slicing into a city-wide network that the police already have access to, so if the police aren’t either totally incompetent or totally corrupt (or both), what can Aiden possibly do that the ten thousand strong Chicago Police Department can’t?

And a lot of mechanics that clearly put the public in danger have no impact on reputation at all. You can hack stoplights to cause a car crash at an intersection right after you pass through, for example, thus catching pursuers in the wreck while you speed away. Apparently the injury and potential death of the civilians caught in the crash aren’t important. You can also wander around town hacking random people’s phones to siphon funds out of their bank accounts with no impact on reputation.

The reputation system is, of course, reputation, not something that claims to be judging your actions objectively, so maybe the idea is that your theft and causing wrecks can’t be traced back to you and thus doesn’t affect the public’s opinion. If that’s the case, though, you’d expect the narrative to notice that, high reputaiton or low, the protagonist is an unrepentant villain who freely harms innocent people in pursuit of his goals with, at best, a Homelander-like willingness to save people whenever it benefits his public image, or that they’d be more willing to use police as footsoldiers of resident evil corporation Blume.

The game’s themes in general are a dog’s breakfast. It’s doing that corporate storytelling thing where it brings up something (at the time) topical and controversial, but then refuses to say anything about it. Aiden Pearce uses the city-wide ctOS surveillance system to track down criminals and evade police, but the game never takes any position on whether this is a good thing, or if it’s a bad thing, or if it’s bad that ctOS exists but Aiden is making the best of it by using it for justice, or if it’s good that ctOS exists but criminal hackers and corporate corruption are perverting its potential. The game runs in the room, shouts “city-wide surveillance network!” and runs away. You can decide to use or not use ctOS in various ways, but the game doesn’t notice if you do. The first and only time your choices impact the story or game world is in a mid-credits scene where you can decide to kill the hitman who killed Aiden’s niece (accidentally, while trying to kill Aiden) or not, so the story neither makes its own point about its own themes nor does it give you any meaningful way to provide your own answer.

In WATCH_DOGS, there are vaguely four criminal factions that keep showing up: First, the mercenary “fixers,” criminals for hire who show up as generic baddies for things like the assassins being sent by a mysterious villain with unknown allegiances or the goon squad who provide combat backup for a random hacker. Second, the Chicago South Club, your classic mafia, run by someone considered a model citizen who has the mayor in his pocket, and a major antagonist of the game. Third, the Pawnee Militia, some right-wing gun nuts who live out in small town Pawnee which has somehow been imported from the Pacific Northwest, who, as far as I can tell, exist mainly to give some criminal bad guys for the protagonist to mow down in that section of the map.

Finally, the subject of our discussion: The Viceroys, an inner city street gang being run by a criminal called Iraq, because he was in the military and brought back professional tactical training with him, which he passes on to his inner circle. That whole backstory has nothing to do with Saints Row, but the name is suspiciously close to the Vice Kings, a gang specializing in prostitution and other sex work from the first Saints Row game. The Vice Kings were the black gang, and while the WATCH_DOGS gangs are not as heavily racially coded as the first Saints Row game, the Viceroys have the same inner city Compton-from-the-90s vibe that the Vice Kings were channeling. And while the sex slave auction that you infiltrate halfway through the plot is a joint venture between the Viceroys and the Chicago South Club, the Viceroys are the ones who are in charge of security, with the Club in a more managerial role (there’s an implication that the leader of the Club is grooming Iraq to take full control of the auction at some point, as reward for doing the Club’s dirty work), which is another connection to the Vice Kings, who run prostitution rings with at least some amount of human trafficking involved (you save some kidnapping victims early on in the first Saints Row, although it’s not clear how much of the Vice Kings’ sex trade is coercive).

And once I started wondering if the Viceroys and the Vice Kings were connected, I noticed that the charming sociopath criminal ally/last minute antagonist Jordi Chin is pretty similar in temparament to Saints Row mascot Johnny Gat. He’s got the obsession with violence, the flippant and (moderately) witty disregard for human life, and even the same first letter and cadence to his name.

I don’t think any other game elements are particularly borrowed from Saints Row. The Militia and South Club don’t have a ton in common with any of the Saints Row series’ gangs, none of the other characters remind me much of any Saints Row characters.

There’s no smoking gun that Viceroys are Jordi Chin are definitely based on the Vice Kings and Johnny Gat, and probably the biggest evidence against is the question in the title: What’s the point of the comparison here? Jordi Chin as a Johnny Gat expy kind of almost makes a point about how fucked up the character is, and maybe say something about the Saints Row games as a setting where that character feels natural and at home, except the protagonist Aiden Pearce is the actual player character and therefore does pretty similar violence to what Johnny Gat gets up to (implicitly – gags about his body count and his general attitude imply that he does similar ultraviolence as your average Saints Row player, but it’s never directly depicted). And Aiden acts like Jordi Chin is much more violent and unstable than he (Aiden) is, even though it’s hard to tell the difference between them. Admittedly, the game does try and encourage not harming civilians, whereas Saints Row doesn’t care how many people you run over, but regaining reputation lost from accidentally plowing through pedestrians is so easy that the nudge against civilian casualties is pretty gentle.

And while Jordi does turn antagonist at the very end, it’s like thirty seconds before the credits roll, and you defeat him literally by pressing the square button. You don’t have to move into position or wear away any defenses or anything. He shows up, he points a gun at you, you push the square button to hack a nearby light to explode, and that takes him out of the fight. It’s really baffling what Jordi’s last minute betrayal is supposed to accomplish and I wonder if there was supposed to be something else here, something that might actually say something about Johnny Gat – like that an unstable violent psychopath wouldn’t actually be a reliable ally the way Gat is.

A lack of clear messaging isn’t unusual in WATCH_DOGS (the first game, not necessarily the whole series – I haven’t played the second one yet, and haven’t even decided if I will play the third), so I don’t think the lack of anything to say about Johnny Gat necessarily means that Jordi Chin isn’t based on the character, but it does make me less confident in the connection. Maybe there was a commentary on Johnny Gat that got cut down until we get the Jordi Chin we see in the game as it is, a character with almost no relevance to the plot at all. Maybe someone really liked Johnny Gat or some suit thought they should capitalize on the popularity of the archetype and shoved a character based on him in, and the reason why Jordi Chin has little to do with the plot is because he’s just there to check a box labeled “character who’s kind of like Johnny Gat.” Maybe it’s all just coincidence, and there was never any connection between Jordi Chin and Johnny Gat (or the Vice Kings and the Viceroys) at all.

Ori and the Blind Forest released in 2015, initiating the Metroidvania revival that’s still ongoing. You can tell Ori started it, because it had to bridge the gap between the current dominant indie archetype, the Metroidvania in a ruined world, and the previous dominante indie archetype, the platformer about a tiny cute thing in a big scary world. Hollow Knight, the genre’s current reigning champion, also had a tiny cute protagonist, but even then, the Knight comes across as far more capable than they appear, rather than being a small vulnerable thing in a dangerous world like Ori (and the protagonists of Limbo and etc.), and Blasphemous, the Bloodstained series, Crowsworn, and so on don’t have tiny cute protagonists at all.

You can also tell Ori is the first in the Metroidvania revival because it’s not as good as basically any of its follow-ups. Ori has lots of skill in execution, especially in its art and music, but it lacks a lot of quality of life features that have become standard as the indie Metroidvania scene has developed. It had no fast travel system until its Definitive Edition rerelease in 2016, its combat is pretty perfunctory for how central it is to gameplay, and it has almost no branching paths at all. It follows a pretty standard Metroidvania structure where you have a prologue area that sets up the main quest, three MacGuffins you need to get, and then a final confrontation with the bad guy at the end, but instead of setting you loose in the map like other Metroidvanias of the modern era, Ori takes you through one MacGuffin after the other in strict order (something which more closely resembles older Metroidvanias like Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid).

Ori also has some major missteps in its most climactic moments due to ludonarrative dissonance, that is, the feeling communicated by gameplay not matching the feeling communicated by the story. At the end of each of the three MacGuffin dungeons, the reactivation of one of the elements of the forest (water, wind, and warmth) causes some manner of Metroid-style escape-the-lava, with the most fast-paced and intense music and visuals in the game. The mood of the rest of the game is much slower, exploratory, sometimes tense or dread-inducing, but not frantic like the escapes. Punctuating the ends of the dungeons with such fast-paced escape sequences is a good idea, but they’re way too hard to serve their purpose. The escape sequence isn’t usually even the hardest part of the dungeon, but it’s hard enough to require multiple attempts, which sucks the momentum right out of them.

The first one, in the Ginso Tree, isn’t so bad, although dying even once robs the sequence of a lot of its momentum. The second and third escape sequences, however, lose all their excitement because you can’t actually race through them in a blind panic the way the game’s atmosphere wants to imply. You have to methodically pick your way through, learning and adapting to each obstacle until you can run the entire gauntlet from beginning to end. It might seem like the added challenge would increase the tension, but the opposite is true: Being repeatedly confronted with the reality that nothing worse than being sent to the automatic save point at the start of the escape makes it inescapable that actually I have plenty of time to escape. Hours, really. What stands between me and success is not the need to go fast and escape danger, but to repeat the same obstacle course over and over again until I have it memorized. The third and final escape sequence is especially egregious, since nearly every obstacle is an instant kill no matter how much health you have left, meaning the escape can only either be so easy that you complete it flawlessly on your first try, or else it must confront you with the reality that the stakes could scarcely be any lower.

The sequence following the Forlorn Ruins escape works much better. Kuro, the evil (ish) owl, is hunting for Ori, who must hide behind various rocks and logs to escape her, so the challenge is in platforming around the area while staying hidden. The mood in this scene is tense instead of frantic. Dying over and over still confronts you with how low the stakes really are, but at least the pace of the narrative and the pace of the gameplay are in sync.

The story aims for a bit of nuance, and falls apart in doing so. It turns out Kuro, the main antagonist owl, hates the tree Ori is trying to revive because the tree killed Kuro’s babies. That’s not an implication or hyperbole or anything, in the prologue the tree does a big light show to try and signal the lost Ori to come home (it doesn’t work), and it is later revealed that this directly and unambiguously killed the owl’s babies, so the owl takes revenge on the tree to protect her remaining (unhatched) child.

Ori wasn’t even in any kind of danger, and had no way of signaling back to the spirit tree if they were. The only way the distress signal can work is if Ori sees it and is able to follow the light show back home (it doesn’t work – Ori’s adoptive mother Naru dissuades them from following the lights). It’s only after Kuro’s children are killed by the light show that Kuro goes after the tree for revenge, causing the forest to wither and become dangerous, at which point Ori ends up re-orphaned and wandering through the now much more deadly forest looking for food. The spirit tree couldn’t reasonably have predicted all the dominoes that would lead to the distress signal putting Ori in mortal danger, but you’d think it would be aware that it would kill any owls in range and that Ori wouldn’t benefit from the light unless they were in a safe and stable enough position to follow it home.

At the end, Ori sets the forest on fire (Ori themselves may or may not have intended this, but it was an inevitable side effect of the main quest to revive the tree and pretty easy to see coming – the previous two dungeons caused a flood and a windstorm, and the last dungeon is a volcano, so it’s not hard to guess what kind of storm its restoration is going to cause), threatening to cook Kuro’s remaining child alive, so Kuro has to sacrifice herself to restore the tree that killed her children, so the spirit tree can use its power to put out the fires. This doesn’t kill Kuro’s remaining child, even though it kills the owl herself – maybe it’s because the remaining child (unlike the others) is still an egg.

So on the one side we have Ori, who’s trying to revive the tree that used its baby-killing distress signal to let Ori know dinner was ready and it’s time to come home, and who sets the forest on fire to the point where an egg halfway across the map is in mortal peril not as an accident or a result of outside interference, but as an expected consequence of the quest. On the other side we have Kuro, an owl who was minding her own business when the spirit tree killed all her children save one, who attacked the spirit tree to protect the remaining egg, and who ultimately sacrifices her life to revive the spirit tree (her most hated enemy!) once it becomes clear that this is the only way to save her remaining child.

I think Ori is the villain.

Abrahamic religion is no fun. A single omnipotent deity overseeing the universe just sucks all the drama out of everything. Western developers have a tendency to import a lot of Abrahamic assumptions even when making games clearly based on pagan concepts. For example, Black and White. Each civilization has exactly one god, that god is a disembodied entity with arbitrary control over natural forces. This ain’t no Zeus or Poseidon, it’s an off-brand Yahweh with a video game karma system bolted on.

Okami, however, makes you feel like you’re actually playing a benevolent deity in a polytheistic paradigm. Okami is a reboot of Japanese mythology that recycles characters while ignoring their exact relationships and character arc in the traditional stories, so you are Amaterasu, sun goddess of Nippon, except also you are a wolf. Susano is not your irresponsible younger brother, but rather the irresponsible descendant of a great warrior who fought alongside your previous incarnation, Shiranui, and who struggles to live up to that legacy. Issun is not an unrelated character, but instead is your sidekick, and when you find his magic mallet, it shrinks you down to his size instead of growing him to yours. The basic personality and theme of each character is intact, even though everything else is original – which means that you, playing as Amaterasu, are the benevolent goddess of the sun and protector of the Japanese people.

Okami is a Zelda-style adventure RPG sort of game, where you gain items and level up certain stats, but the emphasis is more strongly on your skill in combat than on your raw numbers. So, naturally, one way in which you are a benevolent deity is by running around beating up demons, and upon completing a certain dungeon or defeating a certain boss, you will bring an end to a curse zone, restoring life and beauty to a place that had become poisoned and desolate. That much is obvious, anyone who sets out to make an adventure RPG where you play as a benevolent deity can get that far.

Where Okami shines is in lots of smaller things you can do for XP. A lot of the side quests in the game involve performing small miracles, using your magic brush powers to help random peasants accomplish things they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to. For example, one early side quest involves an old woman who’s lost the pole she uses to hang drying laundry from. It fell into the river and was swept away. You can use your brush powers to magic up a new pole from thin air. Ordinary mortals can’t perceive your true form, that of a wolf painted with divine markings with a flaming mirror floating over your back and a tail dripping with magic ink. They just see a white dog. So, they have no idea you’re responsible and they don’t thank you directly, but instead offer up praise to the heavens ambiguously. There’s lots of little side quests like this, so everywhere you go, you’re performing miracles. Many of them are a simple and straightforward use of your magic powers, as easy as “use the cut power to help this samurai cut a tree” or “use the bomb power to help this firework maker make a bigger bomb,” but the fact that they’re quick and easy is an important part of it: You happen across someone having a problem that they’ve been bashing their head against for hours or days, wag your magic tail a little, and bam: Solved. For them, it’s a miracle. For you, it was Tuesday.

Plus, one of the collectible side quests is to find animals and feed them, which requires you to keep a stock of a couple of different kinds of food (seeds, herbs, fish, and meat) so that you have the right kind whenever you stumble across a wandering animal, or else make trips back to the merchant to buy exactly enough food and then head back to the animals you found (they hang out in the same place like a proper collectible, rather than spawning randomly or something else super annoying). Every time you feed them, you get a neat little cutscene of the animal eating while Amaterasu watches over them, with calm music in the background.

Okami portrays a benevolent deity not just as beating up bad guys, but as directly helping people (and animals) everywhere she goes, and it makes me feel more like a hero than the vast majority of games I play.

October’s Humble Choice is out the day I’m writing this (October 4th). What’s in the box?

Deathloop is an assassin-y kind of FPS like Dishonored (it’s from the Dishonored guys) where you have to kill eight targets before the timeloop you’re stuck in reinitiates. There’s also a rival assassin who’s trying to kill you, who can be played by another player or by an AI. Could be a flop, but could be cool. I’ll try it.

Monster Train is a roguelike deckbuilder game and I have had enough of those. I’m glad I got lucky with Banners of Ruin and stumbled into a winning build fairly early, because otherwise it probably would’ve wound up in Regrets. Monster Train has a weird and kinda cool premise where you’re demons on a train repelling an angelic invasion into Hell (and presumably counterinvading into Heaven at some point), but I’m just done with the gameplay on this one. Turns out, Slay the Spire is probably the only deckbuilding roguelike game I need.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is a collection of branching-narrative games in the “games that wish they were movies” genre. This is a bad genre. Just make movies.

Disciples: Liberation is a dark fantasy RPG with inquisitors and undead and stuff, and I’m on board for that. We’ll see if it sticks the landing or not, but I like the premise.

Maid of Sker can’t wait to gush about how cool Welsh ghost stories are. It’s a horror game where the gimmick is some kind of sound-based thing? This seems less like a movie with some QTEs slapped onto it to provide the ghost of gameplay and more like one of those horror walking simulator games born from gamer culture’s collective grief for the cancellation of Silent Hills. I like that genre well enough to try its best examples, but not enough to go digging for more after that, and Maid of Sker definitely looks like it’s in the strata where I’d be digging for more.

Epic Chef is about being a chef, presumably in an epic way. There’s some kind of gameplay for cooking stuff, some kind of gameplay for farming stuff, some kind of gameplay for chef duels. Kinda looks like Stardew Valley crossed with Cook Serve Delicious, but I think I’d rather play those games. It doesn’t help that I’m not much of a fan of the low-poly art style.

Railroad Corporation is a railroad tycoon game. How many of these do we have now? Too many. I don’t know if Railroad Corporation is the best of the genre, and I don’t care enough about this genre to find out.

Golf Gang is a golfing game. I do not want to play a golfing game.

That’s two pick-ups, but also I got some wishlist items from assorted Steam sales (and, in one case, from realizing that the listed price is $5): Hades, Drug Dealer Simulator, Hacker Simulator, and Ori and the Blind Forest. The math on How Long To Beat doesn’t seem to be adding up, though. Prior to adding these games, I had (according to the website) 167 games on the list. After adding these six games, I have…170? All of the new games are on the list, as CTRL+F confirms. Some of the stats screens (which do helpful things like tell me that 100% of my games are either unlisted platform or PC) are adding up to 173 like they should be, but the number indicating the total number of games on the list is 170.

Still, I know I added six games this month, which is the same number of games that went on the Complete list (Out of Space, Thief Simulator, Far Cry 2, Okami, Iron Harvest, and Crypt of the Necrodancer), plus some went into Regrets (Little Big Workshop, Industria, Magicka, the Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game – no big story behind the last one, I just consistently passed it over when looking for a new game even though it’s got one of the shorter playtimes on my remaining list, and realized this means I don’t really want to play it). I’ve got two games that I should be able to unload from the backlog fairly quickly, too – Ori is only about 10-15 hours long, and I’m nearly done with Project Highrise, a game I’ve been picking at here and there since June. So there’s some reason to be optimistic about the backlog shrinking despite continued acquisitions.

On the other hand, when I’m looking for a new game to play, I usually look at the How Long To Beat backlog sorted by shortest average completion time. That means the games I play are skewed towards the very shortest. Sure, sometimes I play a game like Far Cry 2, chosen because I’ve played it and liked it, just never finished it, and I’d had a bunch of Regrets lately and wanted something I knew I’d like and wasn’t broken, but mostly I’m going through games more or less in ascending order of average time to beat, and I’ve pretty much run out of games with a single-digit hour completion time. Will my backlog keep shrinking over time, or will it eventually start to expand again once I finish chewing through all the short games?

Of course, this isn’t really a problem. It’s not like finishing the backlog would represent some kind of accomplishment. It’s just a means of getting myself to try out new games that I’m very likely to enjoy. And since it isn’t a real problem, I don’t plan on putting much effort into a solution, particularly since the only three obvious solutions defeat the point of the project in favor of number-goes-up: I could cut off incoming games as much as I like, but then I’d be missing out on games I want to play. I could increase the amount of time I spend playing games, but then I’d be interfering with other parts of my life for the sake of a goal that doesn’t really mean anything. I could try to finish games more quickly, but I’m naturally a thorough and methodical player, so I’d be having less fun if I switched to playing just the main story in the name of finishing games as fast as possible.

So instead my solution is to shrug my shoulders and not worry about it. My backlog is steadily shrinking right now anyway.

I just finished Crypt of the Necrodancer earlier today. It’s a rhythm-based dungeon crawling roguelike where every move has to be done in time to the beat of the song. The dungeon crawling is, naturally, pretty simple, limited purely to movement in the four cardinal directions, but learning enemy patterns to hit them properly is very satisfying. A lot of realtime RPGs like this end up with a sort of “dance” you can do to optimize damage output, and Crypt of the Necrodancer puts the dance front-and-center and puts the steps of the dance in beat with the level music, then backs it up with a soundtrack that slaps. It’s a ton of fun, although unfortunately hard to describe – you just kind of have to see it, or better yet, play it.

I say “finished,” but there’s a strong argument that I gave up two-thirds of the way through, instead. Crypt of the Necrodancer has four different dungeons and eight different characters. The starting character is Cadence, with no special features, and then there’s special characters like Dove, who can’t attack enemies and thus has to race through all the levels avoiding all attacks, or Monk, who dies if he ever touches gold (he took a vow of poverty), which means every enemy he kills leaves a lethal hazard behind, or Bard, who doesn’t have to step in time with the music (the enemies move whenever he does, so you can take as much time as you need to decide where to move next – I’m pretty sure he’s an accessibility character). Some of the characters are part of the story, but non-canon, like Cadence’s bomb-happy uncle Eli, who told her not to seek out the Crypt of the Necrodancer, or her slow but powerful father Dorian, who went missing in the Crypt and needs to be rescued by Cadence (his run is sort of canon, except in that he canonically loses at some point).

But there’s also two unlockable characters who further the story: Cadence’s mother Melody and her grandmother Aria. Melody wields a special weapon, the golden lute, which damages every enemy who gets adjacent to Melody. This isn’t as invincible as it sounds, because some enemies block damage from certain directions, attack from range, or have multiple HP, and unlike Cadence, Melody can’t damage enemies with regular attacks. She has to use the lute’s damage aura exclusively. Still, the golden lute is more powerful overall than almost any of Cadence’s weapons (and it’s way better than the default dagger that Cadence starts a run with) and being restricted to it means that all weapons are removed from Melody’s item pool, which means chests and merchants are more likely to stock other things instead, like armor, spells, charms, or healing items. It took me at least a couple of tries to beat each dungeon with Cadence, and I needed a lot of practice to defeat the final dungeon and the Necrodancer, but Melody was more like a victory lap, tearing through the first three dungeons effortlessly and only requiring about an hour of practice to defeat the Necrodancer.

But dear god, Aria. Aria, Cadence’s grandmother, is a difficulty wall. For starters, her story is not about seeking out the Necrodancer at the bottom of the crypt (he’s truly, completely dead by the time Aria’s leg of the story begins), but about escaping the crypt after his demise. This means you start in the fourth, hardest dungeon and have to make your way up. Worse, due to the specific way in which Aria is undead (it’s not really clear how – Cadence’s heart was taken by the Necrodancer and beats in time with his music, and Melody was using the golden lute to keep herself alive, but Aria just kind of pops out of her coffin and clocks the Necrodancer at the end of Melody’s story, with no explanation as to how), she can only wield the basic dagger as a weapon, she takes damage if she ever misses a beat, and she has only one HP (plus a special item that revives you at full HP if you die – for Aria, this gives her one extra hit point but leaves healing items useless). Like Melody, items she can’t use are removed from her item pool, but since that includes not only all weapons, but also all armor and healing items, what you’re left with is spells, charms, and accessories.

You can argue that Cadence is the main story and once you’ve defeated the Necrodancer with her, you’ve won the game. Melody and Aria, like all the other non-Cadence characters, are side/post-game content. They even fit into common post-game content niches: Melody is an overpowered character of the sort frequently given out as a reward so you can stomp all over the game now that you’ve beaten it, and Aria is a massively more difficult character for people who want to keep going.

But they’ve got cut scenes that pick up where Cadence’s story left off, and the conclusion of both Cadence and Melody’s story is found in the opening cut scene for Melody and Aria’s stories (respectively). Like, Cadence’s story ends with her and her father standing at Melody’s grave, Dorian promising that he’s going to show Cadence why the golden lute was worth braving the Crypt of the Necrodancer. It’s not hard to figure out what happens next, but the scene where Melody actually gets revived is the start of her story, rather than the end of Cadence’s. The game goes out of its way to make Melody’s story seem not like a sequel to Cadence’s, but Act II.

I suspect these stories were assembled as they went along, though. That originally, Crypt of the Necrodancer was made with just Cadence, telling just Cadence’s story. I think it’s clear that by the time Cadence’s story was complete and playable, they had already decided to add Melody (after all, Cadence’s ending cut scene is clearly intended to set up Melody’s, to the point where it almost doesn’t work on its own), but I think the game’s original outline ended with Cadence and Dorian defeating the Necrodancer. Cadence’s story has a really good ending. Reaching the bottom of the Crypt of the Necrodancer, she is confronted by her father Dorian, who has been enslaved to the Necrodancer’s will, but she is able to break the curse. Then, she and her father fight together (you control both of them simultaneously, upping the complexity for the final boss) to take the golden lute and use it to defeat the Necrodancer. Triumphant, they return to the surface, where Dorian uses the golden lute to revive Melody, reuniting their family.

Melody and Aria’s endings are comparatively a lot more lame (I looked up Aria’s cut scenes on YouTube). Melody returns to the Crypt of the Necrodancer with the golden lute to revive him and demand answers. He says no, so Melody uses the lute to destroy him again. Melody’s playthrough has a lot of flashback cut scenes about how her mother Aria used the lute to bring back plague victims, but then the greedy villagers wanted its power for themselves, so she set out to destroy it and never returned, but the main plot of her playthrough is that she set out to find information and failed, and then Aria pops out of her sarcophagus to take over. And the entirety of Aria’s story is reaffirming that the golden lute needs to be destroyed, and then they do that.

It’s a lot of backstory and lore and what traces of character drama exist aren’t nearly as compelling as Cadence’s story had. Melody establishes that she never knew why Aria had left her and then in the very next line says she understands now and reconciles, but it wasn’t established earlier on that Melody felt abandoned by Aria. It’s vaguely implied that Dorian has some kind of impure intention for the power of the golden lute, but he only ever uses it to bring his wife back to life, which seems like a perfectly good thing to do, and Melody comes across as pretty ungrateful talking about how she could “see the greed in his eyes, behind the desperation” when he told her about his plan to retrieve the lute while she was dying of plague.

And then Aria has to die in order to destroy the golden lute, but apparently Meldoy doesn’t? For that matter, neither do Dorian or Cadence? Cadence smashes her skull on a rock in the opening cut scene and then the Necrodancer pulls her heart out of her body to restart it to the beat of his music. While she looks perfectly healthy, she is strongly implied to be some kind of undead. Melody is revived directly and explicitly by the golden lute, and she says she has to keep playing it to stay alive, so when it’s destroyed, she should re-die pretty much instantly. But apparently not, it’s only Aria who dies.

Given the difficulty wall with Aria’s story, this game is definitely going into either Complete or Regrets – there’s no way I’m beating this game with a one-hit-point-wonder who can’t even equip a reach weapon. Since Cadence’s story has a better ending than Melody’s or Aria’s anyway, I’m calling it Complete.

There’s a couple of games I played and finished and never really talked about on the blog. I didn’t have much to say about them. My buffer’s also shrank to less than two weeks, so I figure it’s time to get less picky about subjects, so here’s a post on a couple of games which individually I had little to say about, but which collectively I might get four or five paragraphs out of, we’ll see.

Party Hard is one of the first games I played after assembling my huge list of games. It’s an indie pixel art game where you play as the Party Hard Killer, a serial killer who goes to big parties and kills every single person there. It’s a stealth-ish kind of game where you have to use a combination of booby traps and a knife in the back to kill unsuspecting party guests while avoiding being seen by anyone but your victim. If anyone survives to call the police, the cops will show up to arrest you. It’s possible to outrun them if you know the level layout well, and they will get bored and leave after a while, a surprisingly realistic depiction of the rigor with which the police have traditionally handled serial killer investigations, but trying to outrun the police is still risky. They’re faster than you, and shortcuts or obstacles which allow you to manipulate their AI into running around in circles until they give up aren’t totally reliable.

I like Party Hard for a similar reason to why I like Assassin’s Creed games: It’s a video game that sticks me in a cool location and gives me something to do there. The fact that the thing to do is murder everyone does mean that the location goes from popping to literally dead the more successful I am, and the pixel art isn’t nearly as immersive as AC’s AAA graphics, but no one else is making video games set in party locations, so Party Hard is what I’ve got and it’s not bad. There’s a house party and a frat party and a Halloween party and a beach party, a party on a pool atop a skyscraper and a party on a cruise ship, a biker barbeque and at the end a subway party being thrown by the kind of maniac-idolizing dipshits who think it’s a cool idea to throw a party and have everyone dress like the Party Hard Killer.

Carrion is a Metroidvania where you play as a shoggoth. You escape from containment in a lab, sneak through vents to kill humans and absorb their biomass, and steal back bits and pieces of yourself that the scientists hacked out for study in order to reabsorb your alien shoggoth powers. At the beginning you are a wolf-sized blob of tentacles and teeth that’s pretty reliant on the old “make noise in one direction, then pop out from the opposite direction” trick. At the end, you gain complete shapeshifting abilities and walk out into the city as John Carpenter’s Thing. It’s pretty good, but it desperately needs a map. The structure of the game is that there is one hub map and then many levels leaidng off from it, with each level being small enough that you can explore and semi-memorize the layout, and that works but doesn’t particularly add to the experience over just having a map. Worse, one level entrance is actually inside another level, not directly connected to the hub. These kinds of nested levels are usually no problem in a Metroidvania, but in mapless Carrion, it’s excruciating. Also, I feel like I’ve brought up Carrion’s lack of map before, but I can’t find it anywhere on the blog, so hopefully it was on Discord or something.

I sort of talked about Spellcaster University, and the only thing I really have to add besides what I talked about in that post is that I really wish someone would take the build-a-magic-academy concept and do it better. Like Party Hard, Spellcaster University is a game that I played to completion because a C is still a passing grade, and that’s good enough if you have no competition.