Chamomile Has A Blog

God, I’ve gotten a lot of posts out of Far Cry 3. I didn’t even play it for that long. I played it on PS3 due to technical difficulties on PC, so I don’t have Steam keeping track of my playtime, but it might’ve been as little as 15 hours (the console controls meant I wasn’t eager to take on many side quests).

Today’s post is about Far Cry 3’s ending. It’s really badly rushed. The entire southern island has exactly one character in it, an infiltrator of the evil mercenary company backing up the evil pirates you fought on the north island. He’s a reasonably fun character, but he doesn’t really have an arc. He just helps you infiltrate the mercenary company alongside him, set up an assassination of the big bad Hoyt, and then Hoyt plays an Uno reverse card and kills him instead. Which is then followed by Hoyt’s two bodyguards inexplicably vanishing so you can have a quick time event knife fight with him, and after that you’re dumped into a room filled with not only a dead Hoyt, but several dead guards. It’s clear that there was supposed to be more to getting you from the point when Sam (the south island’s one character) is killed to the point when you knife fight Hoyt, and they just didn’t have time and money for it, so they clumsily stitched it together with the next complete section of the game, where you rescue your little brother from being taken off the island to some unknown destination.

And the final final mission is so rushed it basically doesn’t exist. Throughout the first half of the game you’ve been saving your friends from Vaas’ pirates one by one. Riley, your little brother, was allegedly killed, so as far as you know all survivors are safe on the north island and ready to flee in a boat they’ve been repairing while you do all the protagonist-y murdering. But Jason Brody, the protagonist, decides to stay (in a cut scene, so it’s not really “you” doing it the way it’s you, the player, doing the murdering) in order to join the Rakyat warriors he’s been fighting alongside and take out Hoyt’s operation on the south island. It’s not framed like Jason just wants to finish the job, either, he’s leaving his old life in America behind to become a Rakyat.

Side note: There’s shades of mighty whitey in all this, where Jason Brody, American upper middle class failson, finds his calling, and that is to be a better Rakyat warrior than any of the natives of Rook Island who grew up in the culture. In fairness to Far Cry 3, though, I don’t really get the impression that the Rakyat are really an indigenous institution. They’ve clearly got connections to the native culture (the name “Rakyat” sure isn’t English), but they also seem like a weird and creepy cult, they’re obsessed with defeating Vaas and Hoyt, and you’re not even the only foreigner to become a prominent Rakyat – your first Rakyat ally Dennis seems to be the most prominent warrior before Jason shows up, and he’s from Liberia. It’s possible that the Rakyat are supposed to be a genuinely indigenous culture of vaguely menacing brown people, but it’s also possible that they’re supposed to be a terrorist cult formed in the wake of trauma inflicted by Hoyt’s mercenaries, one whose historical roots are, as is the case with most nationalist movements, one part aesthetic and two parts delusional.

On the one hand, “native culture who gets taken over by reactionary cult of personality in response to colonialist violence” seems like way too much nuance and depth for Ubisoft writing. On the other hand, nothing in the game oversimplifies to the point where that’s not a plausible interpretation, so the Rakyat actually are a very nuanced and interesting faction, even if I suspect that it happened by blind luck rather than deliberate story decisions.

But regardless, that’s the setup of the game going into the final mission: You make friends with the Rakyat while saving your friends on the north island, you decide to remain with the Rakyat and let your friends leave without you to head to the south island, and while on the south island you learn that your little brother Riley is actually alive and resolve to save him, much to the dismay of Citra, the Rakyat’s high priestess spiritual leader lady.

Continue reading “Far Cry 3 Had A Rushed Ending” →

Bookkeeping note that probably no one but me cares about, but which I find kinda funny: After nearly running out of backlog a bit ago, I switched to weekly posts for a bit, and while rebuilding the backlog, I’d sprinkle in new posts as they came until I had a 2/week schedule, then back up to 3/week. This meant that the posts relevant to the game I was discussing at the nadir – Far Cry 3 – wound up scattered all over the place. We were nearly through that era, but then the April Humble Choice dropped and I’d forgotten to leave room for it in the schedule, so rather than shifting every blog post by a couple of days, I just picked up the next post in the queue and dropped at the end, then put this post in the free spot. This post is timely (I don’t have much of an audience, but at least in theory people might read this post before deciding whether they want to sign up for the Humble Choice this month) and Far Cry 3 thoughts are very much not, so this makes sense, but it does mean that Far Cry 3 posts are spread out across like three months now.

Anyways, the April Humble Choice dropped on the 4th. What’s in the box?

The Death Stranding Director’s Cut is something I’m very 50/50 on. Hideo Kojima is a mad genius and Death Stranding is the point where he’s completely off the leash. Sometimes the results of this sort of thing are glorious and sometimes it results in the creator disappearing up the ass of their own very niche interests and creating a game that nobody but them is interested in. Death Stranding’s reviews make it clear that it’s not maximum trainwreck but equally so that it’s not maximum genius. I’ll definitely throw it in the backlog and see the results myself.

Aliens Fireteam Elite is a space marines vs. xenomorphs game. These games always struck me as deeply misguided. Xenomorphs are horror monsters, and while Aliens puts the emphasis on a swarm whose individual members are fairly expendable rather than a single killer creature, it was still about a team of cocky protagonists slowly coming to realize how much danger they’re in and breaking down as they’re picked off one by one, until only a small handful of survivors make it out in the end. And being a singular creature type with a striking design facilitates this horror really well and high-octane shooty action really poorly. If the protagonists are wading through the xenomorphs rather than the other way around, then you need really divergent enemy types amongst the xenomorphs to keep it interesting. While I could imagine someone doing that, there’s no sign that this game has done so, and I’m not going to sink 8-10 hours into it to double check.

I’m playing the Borderlands series right now, and so far as games about shooting cool looking alien monsters with a variety of firearms goes, I can’t imagine anything based on the Alien franchise will ever compete. Having a single really cool monster design seems like it would give Alien a headstart over Borderlands’ knock-off creatures, but if the premise of your game is simple visceral fun, then Borderlands’ simple visceral designs work better than something like the xenomorph, despite the xenomorph’s vastly superior cultural cache and artistic merit, because Borderlands’ monsters are purpose-built to be blown up with rockets and the xenomorph is very much not.

If you want to make a game that captures the feeling of Aliens, it needs to be about taking a squad of space marines in or near a xenomorph hive to complete some mission, with the expectation that completing one out of three objectives in exchange for losing half your squad is a pretty typical result, one that emphasizes variety in your team over variety in the enemies (although you don’t have to go with a perfectly lore accurate version with only three different enemies – facehuggers, standard xenomorphs, and the queen – but you do have to have a setup where the standard xenomorphs remain a significant threat from one end of the campaign to the other).

Rollerdrome is my new gold standard for indie games on a limited budget. It sells itself on the weird mechanical concept of being a shooter where you’re on rollerskates and do mid-air tricks to get more ammo. That’s a weird and cool concept and I would like to check it out, but I don’t want to spend more than a few hours on it. How Long To Beat clocks its completion time in at 5 hours, so this is something I can fit into a single lazy afternoon. It doesn’t seem to have much more to offer besides that weird and cool concept of a roller blade shooter, but it’s short enough to plausibly not wear out the welcome of that idea.

Life is Strange 2 is the sequel to the award-winning game where you walk around as a hipster. This one stars a different hipster, I guess. I’m not down on the walking simulator genre in general, I think there are some valid experiences to be had where the only significant mechanic is walking around a place. Return of the Obra Dinn, most notably, is a walking simulator attached to a bit of paperwork, and while the paperwork does add some kind of pass/fail metric, it is not the primary mechanic. The primary mechanic is walking around observing things. Obra Dinn is sufficiently opaque that some kind of checklist of things to figure out is needed to pull a player in deep enough to understand just how much there is to explore here, but you can imagine a game (or some kind of interactive experience, anyway) that drops you into a crime scene that’s sufficiently straightforward at least in what the crime was, and then leaves you to piece out what happened without any mechanic for checking if you were correct. It’d be a very internet-era thing where the fun would be in the conversation happening around the game, either within small circles of friends playing the game together or a broader sub-culture if the game manages to become the flavor of the week, but we are in the internet era so that could work.

The Hipster Walking Simulator series, however, uses its mechanics to deliver a linear plot with the illusion of choice (the first game had exactly one real choice at the end). It feels like another one of those things like Gris that should’ve just been a film but Kickstarters for films don’t do as well as Kickstarters for video games so they slapped on some dialogue choices that alter nothing.

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is a narrative-focused game where you are a sad knight. It has a text and illustrations format that looks interesting and beautiful, but, I mean, it’s about being a sad dude in a medieval dystopia. “What if you had to struggle against unfair odds to make something of your life” is not some weird experience I need to play a video game to experience, and while there’s a lot to be said for a relatable story, it’s really not clear what else there is besides this game being about a guy who must struggle against unfair odds to make something of his life.

I’m going to pick up Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp because I like the writing of this series so hey, why not, but I’m not putting it in the backlog. I said earlier that Rollerdrome is my gold standard for an indie game not stretching its content thin, but the Monster Prom series is also good for this (although the quality is in a steady decline from the original, as it struggles harder and harder to make its thin mechanics apply to new situations, and they don’t seem to have any proper game designers on staff to write new ones). In fact, Monster Prom is really good at simultaneously having an extremely low time to complete (about 45 minutes) but an extremely high time to 100%, which means it can plausibly be the one video game bought in a month for someone with more time than money and who really likes Monster Prom without holding closure on its story hostage to 20+ hours of gameplay for people who like it enough to engage with as a distraction but not as the main game played for a full fortnight.

Revita, meanwhile, continues the blight of indie games that stretch themselves thin with Roguelite gameplay. Neat pixel aesthetic, gameplay that looks unexceptional but fun, aaaaaand a 10 hour completion rate for just the main story on How Long To Beat with nearly 30 hours for main story + side content (and five hundred hours for 100%, although given how round the number is, I’m guessing that’s one guy submitting what may or may not be a wild guess – HLTB doesn’t make any effort to check that people reporting completion times have actually acquired relevant achievements, and while liars get washed out by numbers in popular games, Revita’s not that popular).

I have mixed feelings about passing on Founders’ Fortune. The premise of a cute little village-building game where each villager has a randomly generated personality and develops relationships with other villagers sounds like fun, and I’m mainly passing up on it because I’m worried this will end up like Little Big Workshop where it’s very frustrating in play because it’s poorly balanced or has UI issues or in some other way lacks polish. These kinds of city builder games have a steep demand for effective polish which means indie games can fuck them up easily, which can result in a game that I play for 20+ hours but ultimately walk away from unsatisfied because it was slowly smothered by its technical limitations as my little workshop/village/whatever scaled upwards past the limits of what the game could handle while still only reaching half of what the game’s objectives tell me should be possible. I’m worried enough that Founders’ Fortune might do this that I’m passing on it even though I have no particular evidence that it actually will.

That’s two new games in the backlog bringing me to 168 total, meaning I am finally below 170 games even after a monthly restock from the Humble Choice (although partly I got here from moving the Forest to Regrets after realizing that, for all that I really want to play the game that the Forest promised, I’ve already played enough of it, and read enough of their wiki, to know that they didn’t make that game, and also Die Young when I realized that the game they were promising sounded a like what the Forest actually delivered, which I evidently don’t like enough to sink more than 5 hours into). I’ve been hovering at around 170 games in the backlog for a long time, with dire implications for what games I might never get around to, but it is starting to look like that was mainly a consequence of 1) working out the kinks in how selective I should be with what games go into the backlog and 2) the OGL crisis devouring all of my free time in January and February of this year, to the point where I had zero game completions in all of January.

Let’s rewrite Fobia to focus on the things it does well and cut the things it does poorly. I’m using time traveling witch rules here, so I want to keep the plot at about the same level of resource-intensiveness but I am going to assume that it costs me nothing to tear out a finished piece of the game and replace it with another piece of approximately equal spectacle and complexity.

The goal here is to focus the plot on the well-designed hotel and the two iconic monsters: Gasmask Girl and the game’s boogeyman, which according to achievements is probably supposed to be called the Red Light (he has a reddish-orange lantern he carries around). Gasmask Girl haunts the protagonist throughout the hotel but turns out to be friendly. The Red Light periodically pursues the protagonist through the hotel and is plainly unfriendly, not only kill-on-sight hostile like the other monsters but much more willing to pursue the protagonist for long distances. At the same time, he’s very easy to fool by taking circuitous routes, so let’s not talk up his intelligence too much.

We also need some reason why the hotel is full of puzzle locks, and “a cult built the place” is a tried and true means of accomplishing that. The cult doesn’t necessarily need to still be active, though. They never appear as enemies, and may appear as a voice on the phone, but don’t have to. The cult doesn’t need to be relevant to the plot because it doesn’t have any compelling characters, just a well-established motivation for building a hotel full of puzzle locks. Likewise, we need a bunch of zombies and mutant bugs to prop up the combat end of level design, but we don’t need the reason for their creation to be at all central to the plot. It should be a result of the same forces driving Gasmask Girl and the Red Light rather than being totally unrelated, but it doesn’t need to be a major focus. Much like “cults build puzzle locks, it’s just how you be a cult,” it’s fine if the monsters are explained by “the supernatural shit concerning Gasmask Girl and the Red Light also caused a bunch of monsters to show up, these things happen sometimes.” Puzzles and monsters are an important part of the hotel’s level design, so we need an explanation for them, but we can rely on tropes to carry us over the bumps in those explanations as long as we don’t spend much time on them.

Finally, we need to explain the camera. The camera is very important to early gameplay, giving the player a means of interacting with the environment without having anything to fight. This contributes significantly to the game’s slow build, where you begin with a ghost train where you’re haunted by Gasmask Girl and you end by using chemical weapons to weaken Red Light until he can be killed with two shotgun blasts to the face.

Side note: There’s an argument to be made that starting with an homage to Silent Hill and ending with an homage to Resident Evil is a bad idea, but Resident Evil 4 had that basic arc (although its early bits are less informed by Silent Hill, they still have a much more horror-focused tone compared to the second half of the game) and while a lot of people hated the tone shift, other people loved it. For this rewrite I’m going to assume that the escalation from Silent Hill straight horror to Resident Evil action horror is a worthwhile artistic goal, since it takes the player on an arc from being helpless before the monsters to strong enough to confront the most deadly of them all, and even does so in a way that relies more on the player learning about the Red Light rather than simply getting bigger guns. You do learn about the Red Light by reading someone else’s notes rather than with any kind of experimentation, but that still carries the theme of brewing up a bespoke weapon to defeat him, not just using a rocket launcher.

So that’s four objectives a rewrite needs to hit:

-Why did the cult build this hotel?
-Who is Gasmask Girl?
-Who/what is the Red Light?
-Where did the camera come from?

Continue reading “Fobia Rewritten” →

Fobia is a first-person survival horror game about being trapped inside a haunted hotel with a bunch of monsters. The game is a love letter to at least two different survival horror franchises, those being Silent Hill and Resident Evil, and there’s mechanics with a camera that lets you interact with some kind of parallel universe or something which might be inspired by Fatal Frame, but I haven’t played any of those games so I don’t know. I know enough about Fatal Frame to know that Fobia isn’t lifting anything wholesale, but I’d miss the subtle similarities to Resident Evil and Silent Hill if I weren’t more familiar with those franchises.

My fears that the name was Welsh proved unfounded – the game actually takes place somewhere in Brazil. You are a journalist staying at the titular hotel while investigating the mysterious happenings about town. Your contact in the town never meets you, and a strange black hole looking thing knocks you out. When you awaken, the hotel is in ruins, overrun with strange monsters, and there’s some kind of cult involved because of course there is.

The similarities to Silent Hill are partly in that they have their very own Pyramid Head knock-off boogeyman and partly in that you can use the camera parallel universe thing to walk through a hole that was here but now it’s gone. The game particularly takes inspiration from the playable trailer for Silent Hills, and while a lot of those inspirations could also be taken from Resident Evil VII, the game is full of Hideo Kojima references. The main ghost early on is the “gasmask girl,” and while not every spooky person in a mask is necessarily a Psycho Mantis reference, the game goes on to have a gear puzzles that requires you to gather up three metal gears. “Metal gear” is their actual name in the inventory, even though you’d think the metal nature of the gear would go without saying.

Fobia evidently wants to make sure anyone who’s paying attention knows that it’s here to put a moratorium on the whole Why Did Silent Hills Have To Die?! genre by not just aping the trailer itself, but trying to make the game it was a trailer for – a survival horror game. There are ghost train bits in Fobia, especially early on, but there’s also puzzles and combat. The puzzles are fun to figure out, though not very difficult and often bizarre and inexplicable (good to see Trevor & Chamberlain is still getting work), and the combat is exactly the kind of slow, resource-hungry thing that it should be. The standard enemy of the game is the zombie, whose exposed heart forms a weakspot. You can kill a zombie with just three or four pistol bullets if you aim carefully, but of course, it’s hard to do that while they’re lurching towards you to claw your face off, and it can take 10-15 bullets if you’re spammy with them.

About 80% of the game takes place in the hotel, and that part is really good. You slowly explore the hotel and unlock new routes to new places and shortcuts to old ones, revisiting old locations with new tools to find new secrets. It’s another affirmation that almost every genre is improved by also being a Metroidvania, and survival horror in particular has an obvious benny to give out to players who discover secrets, since limiting ammo and healing to the point where you might actually run out is a key part of the genre.

Fobia’s not without its flaws. It uses the survival horror style save system, where you can only save at certain points, and there’s just no reason to do that in the modern world. The tension of being far from a save point is a real thing that games like Dark Souls use to their advantage (although even then, there’s more to it than just having limited checkpoints), but it grates badly against the kind of immersive horror that the survival horror genre aims for. Thinking of save files and how long it’ll take to redo all the progress you’re liable to lose if you die in a boss fight isn’t scary at all.

The game over screen is so perfunctory that it looks like a placeholder, which is a pretty forgivable offense for a genre where actually killing the player is usually ill-advised, but then those boss fights are liable to do just that. They’re not extremely hard, but the bosses are absolute bullet sponges, and if there’s enough ammo in the boss arenas to kill the bosses, it has to be exactly enough, because I found that going into a fight without a decent bit of ammo to start meant I would lose not by running out of health, but by running out of bullets. There’s no melee attacks to use as a backup, so if you’re out of bullets, you are done fighting. In normal combats, you can run away and rearm, or tank a bit of damage while squeezing past an enemy to reach your destination. In a boss fight, you’re locked in the arena, so if you’re out of ammo, you may as well load a save.

The worst problem is probably the inventory system. You have limited inventory slots, but ammo and healing items all stack while puzzle items, being unique, do not. So rather than asking you how much health versus ammo you want to pack, already not much of a choice due to the lack of a melee attack which means that if you run out of ammo you may as well headbutt a railroad spike anyway, all the inventory slot system really does is force you to go back and forth between a storage chest any time you need to swap out puzzle items.

Plus, the last 20% of the game takes place in a secret underground bioweapons lab (there’s that Resident Evil influence breaking in) completely disconnected from the hotel map. I think the idea is that this would be a final gauntlet to cap off the game? But I’d spent the entire rest of the game navigating the nine floors of the hotel, and while a cellar level had been implied before (restoring floor buttons to a damaged elevator is a mechanic for unlocking shortcuts, and there’s room on the panel for basement levels – although it turns out you don’t actually use that elevator to go there), it’s much bigger than I expected, totally detached from the rest of the hotel I’d been exploring, and noticeably harder.

Difficulty spikes are always a dangerous thing. I’m much more forgiving of a game’s rough edges if it’s easy, because it means I can roll over the bland parts without much thought and linger on the good bits. If the bland parts are also hard, they demand time and focus, and the last thing a developer should want is players spending time and focus on the parts of the game which are bad.

The ending is pretty lackluster, as well. I didn’t really have any idea what was going on at the end. The backstory of the main villain Christopher was pretty well explained, as is the deal with this game’s boogeyman, but Stephanie’s motivations are opaque. Why is she searching for the main character by his initials (she doesn’t even seem to know he’s male), and since we know she isn’t following any other character’s agenda, what is her actual goal? Where did the camera come from, who left all the “we are connected by a camera” messages on the walls, and was the player character the intended recipient of those messages? Does the camera connect the player to 1960 or to an alternate 2010 (the year the game takes place, for some reason)? The camera’s version of the prison beneath the hotel looks the same as what we see in the 1960 prologue, but the camera also shows lots of smart phones and modern computer monitors, a bunch of hotel damage that presumably only occurred during the outbreak, and sometimes (including the time when the mechanic is introduced) displays gaping holes in the architecture that aren’t there in normal vision, all of which suggests that the hotel is in a similar but distinct warzone state rather than being tied to 1960.

The identity of Gasmask Girl is technically revealed, but Gasmask Girl’s actions don’t make any sense in the context of her true identity. If she has an existing personal relationship with the player character and is locked in a deadly struggle with Christopher to be the only psychic god on Earth, why the fuck does she spend the first fifteen minutes of the game haunting you ghost train style? What is Christopher’s ultimate plan? He clearly wants to prevent Gasmask Girl from becoming a psychic rival, but he’s also got some kind of chip on his shoulder about free will. Presumably something relevant to “if we redefine free will to mean something stupid, then we don’t have free will!” idea that is somehow considered a defensible philosophical position, but what does Christopher think he can do about that (and this question is particularly hard to solve because there’s no getting around how stupid the philosophical “dilemma” is when you start asking what would change if people had “free will” accoridng to the stupid definition – presumably people would start taking actions totally at random, not influenced by their environment or their own personality, and this would be good somehow?)?

A check over the internet suggests no one else has figured any of this out, either, and I’m not convinced that the developers actually have answers. It’s possible that they do have it all worked out, but stuck to the Silent Hill method of lore-that-requires-deciphering so hard that there’s not actually sufficient clues in the game for anyone to figure out what’s going on. But it’s also possible that they had a vague idea of what’s going on (Christopher and Gasmask Girl locked in psychic power struggle, protagonist stuck in time loop) but a lot of the details of the time loop got away from them and they were running out of money or the parts of the game they’d already developed had too many contradictory loose ends to tie together or they just gave up on untangling the knot and shipped a game with a nonsense plot.

What plot elements are nailed down in the game as it is have a lot in common with President Evil’s lore explanation for the original Silent Hill. There is a small child with supernatural powers who is battling a sinister cult (in Silent Hill, Alessa is supposed to birth a dark god but doesn’t wanna, in Fobia, Gasmask Girl has psychic powers related to Christopher’s and he’s trying to contain her so that he will be the only psychic god on Earth), the child has a personal connection to the protagonist through supernatural shenanigans (the protagonist’s daughter is the reincarnation of Alessa, and Gasmask Girl is the protagonist’s daughter from the future with psychic time travel powers), there’s a time loop in Silent Hill according to President Evil’s explanation, which posits that the New Game+ is actually diegetic, and it is explicitly the case in one of Fobia’s two endings that you are kicked back to the start of the game for a diegetic New Game+.

I believe President Evil’s interpreation of the first Silent Hill is not accurate to what the developers originally intended. Rather, I think Team Silent made a vague game about a sinister cult torturing a child to birth an evil god and didn’t bother keeping track of the details much while also littering the game with references to their favorite horror authors, and the sheer density of references allowed President Evil to pull in basically as many new plot elements as he needed to make the story make sense under the guise of the references being obtuse clues. That’s not to say that I think President Evil did this on purpose – I think he naively assumed that Team Silent had an actual plot figured out (rather than a vibe), and Team Silent had left enough references to other horror media lying around that he was able to assemble a theory.

Does anyone still have that guy’s email? We’ve got another job for him.

Hero’s Hour is an indie game that’s basically Heroes of Might and Magic but for mobile, except then for PC again. It’s got pixel art so it can squeeze under 1GB and fit into the spare space next to all your photos and videos and stuff, and while its interface was resized for PC and isn’t obnoxiously massive on a monitor, it does come across like it was designed for a smaller screen. I borrowed a disc of Heroes of Might and Magic from a friend for a bit in Elementary school and then never played it again after I gave it back –

Okay, actually, brief aside, because I can’t let this story go past without expressing some rancor. I actually traded for the game with a game called Lego Island that I couldn’t get working on my family PC anyway. The kid I traded with gave me a burned copy of HoMM II, and when my babysitter at the time found it, she pressured me into trading it back because I’d given away an original copy of a game for a burned disc and the dipshit thought I’d been scammed. Of course, if you think about it for all of two seconds, you realize that what I’d actually done is given away a game that doesn’t work on my PC anyway (and as an eight year old I had absolutely no hope of upgrading) and in exchange got a copy of a game which both worked and was also much better. While it was indeed pretty shady of the other kid to trade outright for a burned disc instead of throwing in a burned copy of the original Lego Island game after the fact so that we both get both games, the deal he offered me was still a good one from my perspective, regardless of the other kid’s ability to offer a better one at trivial cost.

Plus, what I didn’t realize until afterwards is that fucking obviously the other kid burned a copy of Lego Island before giving the original disc back to me in exchange for the burned copy of HoMM II, so it’s not like this was even preventing him from benefiting from his arbitrage (and if that was the goal, then I should’ve been told to demand a copy of Lego Island, since he’s clearly capable of making them), nor did it impede his piracy in any way (I didn’t even know he was planning to trade me a burned copy until we made the trade and he still wound up with copies of both games – the only one who lost anything was me, the one who bought Lego Island with my allowance money and then traded it fair and square). Fighting piracy was certainly not the motive regardless, because that babysitter promised to work out how to burn a copy of Lego Island so that we could trade copies instead of an original for the copy, and then she didn’t. I was moving to the other side of the state in just a few weeks and she knew it, so the time window on this was pretty narrow. I wish I’d tried just hiding the HoMM II copy and lying about having traded it back. I wouldn’t have been able to present the Lego Island disc as proof, but maybe she wouldn’t have called my bluff, and even if she had, there was relatively little she could’ve done about it.

Anyways, the relevant point of all this is that I did play HoMM II as a kid, but not very much, so I know how the games work but am certainly not a good perspective on how Hero’s Hour holds up to that series’ highlights (although I am given to understand that the last few games have been garbage). I don’t know how the balance of Hero’s Hour factions compares, or if the units are more or less noticeably distinct, or if the different heroes have more gameplay variety, or whatever. What I can say is that there’s enough overlap between different heroes and factions that none of them feel super distinct from each other after sinking a few hours into the game.

I can’t even properly remember how long a single HoMM II scenario took to complete or how far into it I got, so I have no idea if the name “Hero’s Hour” refers to how the game is usually over in just an hour (or two), i.e. it’s Heroes (of Might and Magic) in an hour, or if HoMM was always like that and “Hero’s Hour” was just a cool sounding name that gets the fantasy vibe across while helping to identify the game as a HoMM successor. But certainly it is cool that the games only last about an hour or two. You can’t quite squeeze it into a lunch break, but you can squeeze it into an afternoon. I suspect that Hero’s Hour is much faster than HoMM because it has realtime battles, which means they tend to be over in about 3 minutes, and even titanic clashes usually take no more than 5-10 minutes. Going turn-based, I can easily imagine HoMM battles lasting 30 minutes if both armies are large enough.

Unfortunately, there’s not any kind of campaign released yet, and they’ve already pumped out one DLC, so it seems like there isn’t one planned. There definitely was one planned at some point, because the level editor has campaign dialogue in it, but no actual playable campaign. There’s some worldbuilding if you dig through the game’s codex, and each faction has twelve different named heroes (six unique ability trees each of which has two heroes associated with it), with a very fun and satisfying diversity in fantasy creatures between them. Like, the theme of the Arcane faction is being all wizardly and most of their heroes are humans, but that doesn’t stop them from having a lion person. A campaign that explored who all these characters are and their relationships with each other (even if those relationships are relatively simple and one note – he is a lion man with unyielding courage! She is a cunning sorceress queen! Together, they fight crime!) would be a lot of fun, although doing it for all twelve would certainly be a challenge.

You would want each scenario to introduce an average of probably about two new characters each. You’d have some scenarios that introduce four new heroes at once, introducing two new characters in the protagonist faction and two new characters in the antagonist faction, but you’d have others that introduce just one or even zero, so I think two is a safe average. With twelve heroes each across twelve factions (not counting the DLC faction), that’s about 72 scenarios. That’s over three times as many scenarios as HoMM II, over twice as many scenarios as StarCraft or Age of Empires (Age of Empires II is probably a better comparison for that general era, but the eight billion expansion campaigns that game has received in its 2010s revival era has made it annoying to look up which campaigns were original – most wikis and guides sort them by continent, the way the Definitive Edition of the game does). The game does have a level editor, and I’d considered trying to make some campaign scenarios myself, but unfortunately I find the controls for setting up things like “the first time the player enters this area, display this text” to be pretty difficult and clunky to work with. I may circle back and try it at some point, but I don’t have any immediate plans to do so now I’ve worked with the game’s tools.

Internet Lore states that after the reception Vaas’ opening conversation received in a preview, Ubisoft redesigned the game to feature him more heavily. I don’t know if this is true at all and I haven’t even heard rumors about exactly what alterations were made, but certainly this would explain why Vaas wears his welcome so extremely thin in this game.

I get why people were hyped for Vaas after the opening conversation, it is indeed pretty great. He comes across as menacing, unstable, and yet like he probably does have some genuine insight mixed in there. He doesn’t really come across like he’s in charge, though. He fucks with one of the other pirates on his way out of the opening cut scene, and the way the pirate reacts suggests that Vaas is a sufficiently senior coworker that open retaliation is off the table but not so senior that Pirate Mook #6 can’t be open about how much he dislikes Vaas’ antics.

Then in the rest of the game, not only is Vaas now the boss of the pirates (there’s someone higher up the chain than him, but he runs a mercenary outfit completely separate from Vaas’ pirate army) and the main villain of the north island, he also captures the player no less than three times over the rest of the game. That’s three times not counting the capture that happens before the game begins, where he takes Jason and his friends hostage for ransom. One of these captures is particularly egregious because you have to kill like six guys on the way into a location where one of your friends is allegedly being held, discover it’s actually just a recording, and one random mook smacks you from hiding. What made that guy special, that he could capture me when the other six guys were so much fodder for my assault rifle? And it doesn’t speak well to the sequence that I can’t remember a single thing Vaas says. I remember he sets a house on fire and you have to escape, but not what he says about any of it.

The part where he captures you again and tries to drown you is better, although (as Vaas himself points out!) it’s pretty badly diluted by the fact that this is the second time Vaas has put you in a budget hillbilly version of a Bond villain death trap and for some reason he still expects it to work. Sure, the whole “definition of insanity” rant is good, but then he does the same thing anyway, which kind of defangs him as a threat. Capture number three is where he finally just shoots you. You get better. It really feels like the hand of the author shoving you back into Vaas’ clutches over and over to show off their favorite character.

And then when you sneak into his compound at the end of the north island, he ambushes you, because even at the point where the time has come to actually kill Vaas, the game is too enamored with him to let you have the advantage at any point up until you actually kill him, which, y’know, at that point it’s unavoidable, seeing as he’s dead and there’s still half of the game to go. It’s not even the same compound where you started the game (that location never appears again and is apparently northwest of the playable map – people hacking the game have found it).

The final fight with Vaas also sucks. You have to shoot a bunch of Vaas ghosts as part of a trippy drug sequence, and you’re forcibly equipped with a puny SMG without nearly enough ammo in its magazine to do it, which makes the fight difficult on console because I can’t do what I do for the rest of the game and stock up on so many bullets and syringes that I can power through the inadequate controls. This meant I heard Vaas and Jason have the same hallucinatory conversation like fifteen times before I finally killed him. At least the conversation happened during gameplay, unlike the similarly atrocious fight with big villain Hoyt at the end of the game. You’re supposed to assassinate Hoyt with an ally, he turns the tables and kills your ally, and now two of his goons have you at gunpoint while the two of you play a menacing game of poker. He cuts one of your fingers off for losing a hand, and then…you’re having a knife fight with him somehow? It’s not explained where the guards went, and the fight is a quicktime event with fairly narrow windows to input the commands, and the fight-y bits are interspersed with monologue that you get to hear again if you fail the quicktime event. Quicktime events were such a terrible idea and they’re a significant chunk of every boss fight in this game (they’re all of two out of the three boss fights).

I’ve talked about how I dislike Cook Serve Delicious 2’s lack of food upgrades, meaning that every food type comes in right away with every recipe unlocked, which makes it impractical to slowly memorize the input combos for certain order types and thus necessitates hunting for each ingredient one at a time. There’s still a finite number of recipes per food type and they still all have unique names (I think – due to the impracticality of actually using this information, I haven’t thoroughly checked), so you can still memorize them all, but it would require dedicated study and this is a video game, not a business venture. If I’m going to be doing work, I have much more profitable and/or artistically satisfying ventures to be working on.

But Cook Serve Delicious 2 also has a number of improvements over its original. For starters, its menu is vastly expanded. Whereas the original had not quite forty different food types, the sequel has more than I can count and I estimate somewhere in the low hundreds. The limited food types meant that there were only a small handful of themed menus you could create: You could run a diner, an Italian restaurant, a Japanese restaurant, and a fancy restaurant. Also technically a concessions stand, but only because you have very few menu slots at low levels so corndogs, pretzels, soda, and popillas could fill up the whole thing. In Cook Serve Delicious 2, the hundreds of menu items mean it’s possible to have dozens of different themed restaurants, as indeed the game comes with thirty-three different pre-made restaurants.

Cook Serve Delicious had a few special challenge levels – catering jobs, Iron Chef challenges, the doom recipes of the ancient chef ninjas – where you had to cook a specific menu, focused on just one or two foods. Whereas the main game allowed you to assemble your own menu guided by various factors, mainly centered around increasing buzz to drive more traffic to your restaurant and thus allow you to make more money in a single day (but also have to serve more customers in the same amount of time, driving up difficulty), these missions were specific, set challenges. Cook Serve Delicious 2 massively expands this concept with its thirty-three pre-built restaurants that you can work shifts in, often 10-ish shifts total. Each restaurant has a theme, and the menu for that restaurant steadily expands and the buzz steadily increases as you go up shifts. The menu doesn’t expand just by adding new food types, however, but first by cycling food types out while keeping just three or four entrees on the menu, making it easier to learn as you go, and only slowly expanding to a full menu of six entrees (along with usually some number of side dishes, although since the way the mechanics work a greater number of side dishes makes things easier, the more difficult shifts are usually no sides, entrees only, Final Destination).

And while the removal of upgrades has made it impractical to memorize the menu thoroughly enough to get even a bronze medal on all the shifts, the game also added Zen Mode, which gives you an infinite timer to fulfill all orders. Much like my cunning strategy for beating Hollow Knight’s hardest challenges, this lets me engage with the challenge up to the point where I’m no longer having fun, and then turn about 90% of the challenge off and coast through the finish line (silver and gold medals are disabled on Zen Mode, but I was never going to sink in the triple-digit number of hours needed to get silver on all 350-ish challenge levels).

I think the lack of upgrades does CSD 2 a huge disservice because of how rough it makes the early game. Getting to grips with the more complicated menu items is very annoying early on, and the strengths of the game don’t really show themselves until you’ve gotten past that frustration embedded in its primary gameplay loop. The original had an elegant solution to this problem that the sequel has ditched for no reason, which is too bad, because once you muscle through that issue, it really is a major upgrade on the first game.

About halfway through Far Cry 3, the main plot has an arc where you have to save the last unsaved (and surviving) hostage, Keith, from Buck the rapist hitman. In order to do this, you have to help him find some legendary treasure of the Chinese fleet of Zhang He, one captain of which apparently broke off and settled on the game’s Rook Islands, enslaving the natives and building big old Chinese monuments for a while before Zhang He caught up with him and destroyed his little fiefdom to send a message about desertion.

It’s a cool Indiana Jones style plot. Seems better suited to a side quest rather than the main quest, since shoving it into the main quest means that you have to have Buck, a hitman who has one of your friends held hostage and also has a teacher/student fetish, thus justifying his exposition dumps where he tells you the history of the ancient ruins you’re raiding while still maintaining enough menace to be a plausible threat. In fact, the level of menace Buck’s given is really overdone (not to mention kink shame-y and homophobic, but that’s a whole other thing), seeing as he confronts you in person like five different times and, being the start point for a main story mission, you will almost certainly be loaded for bear every time you talk to him. He bullies protagonist Jason Brody into playing along with his schoolteacher fetish, calling him “sir” and other ego stroking.

Jason bristles, but never to the point of doing the obvious thing: Aiming his shotgun at Buck’s head and explaining to him how MAD works. Particularly since it isn’t even mutually assured destruction: Jason can kill Buck at-will (Buck has a gun tucked in his pants, but Jason has a shotgun or an assault rifle or something in his hands whenever he walks up to Buck, because it’s a first person shooter), and all Buck can do is have one of Jason’s friends killed in return. And even that requires Hector, Buck’s lackey on the other end of the phone, to go through with it after the maniac who’s killed a minimum of a half-dozen pirates (and that’s being very generous with assuming the vast, vast majority of kills are non-diegetic – if we take gameplay literally, the number is most likely 200+ and Jason regularly fights entire squads of enemies and wins) blows Buck’s head off, picks up the phone, and says “hey, I killed your boss, do you still want this ancient Chinese treasure, or should I just hit up the contacts who gave me the precise location of three of my other friends to track you down?”

And then when (inevitably) you do kill Buck, it’s with a quick time event knife fight. I’m pretty sure the idea is that you’re supposed to really despise Buck so that you kind of follow along with Jason’s journey from regular guy to player character, but the problem with this is that the player character switch gets flipped at the end of the tutorial, like eight hours before you meet Buck. The way the geography of the game is set up and the way Ubisoft open world games work, I’d gone through the pirates of the entire north island like a scythe by the time I met Buck, and he still acts like he holds all the cards. I can buy that having Keith at gunpoint in an undisclosed location is enough to coerce Jason into cooperating with the treasure hunt, but Jason doesn’t even try to threaten Buck with any of the military grade weapons he hucks around.

HuniePop 2 is bad, and that makes me sad.

I’ve talked before about how HuniePop 2’s cast is 25% intentionally grating and pathetic, which gave me an uneasy sense that this game is made for people who are both horny for and contemptuous of women. I get the impression the creators were nudged into this – the greater plot is about sexing some sex demons into satisfaction so that they don’t destroy the galaxy, and this “only your dick can bring satisfaction to the gods” set up is very straight-male-centered, sure, but that’s not a bad thing for HuniePop to be. It’s not Mass Effect or…I dunno, whatever’s currently popular in AAA, I haven’t really given a fuck for like five years, but these huge tent poles need as broad an audience as possible to make back their massive costs, and thus they aspire to saturate gaming culture for at least a few weeks following their release. Companies that make the pitch that every gamer should be playing or at least talking about their game are inherently making decisions about who “every gamer” is and can be held accountable for that. HuniePop isn’t like that. It’s a niche indie game, and should be leaning into that niche. HuniePop 1 was, despite a token option to play a woman, just as laser focused on the straight male experience as HuniePop 2, and I liked HuniePop 1.

But now that they’re making a cast based on fan feedback and requests, HuniePot has churned out a game that, at least partly, views women as annoying and pathetic. Now, it’s still less than half of all the cast who’s like this – I think Abia’s nymphomania is annoying, but the game doesn’t seem to be trying to push her as a nuisance the way Lilian and Suki are clearly intended to be grating and Candace is very intentionally a moron. Lola’s new outfit (she’s a returning character from HuniePop 1) is badly a mismatch for her personality, but her personality has survived and her sense of initiative and ambition have always made her one of my favorites. Nora’s doing what she has to in order to scrape by and her resilience (cartoonishly one-note though it is) is admirable. Ashley’s unashamed hedonism is fun.

But it’s also got a bunch of annoying little shits, and you are supposed to date and ultimately fuck all of them in order to win. Lilian in particular is not only a nuisance, but also feels like the fantasy of an extremely divorced man who dreams of dating teenagers in spite or even because of the huge gap in maturity.

The game’s advancement system is also much worse, even more so than I realized in my original post on the subject. Having 4 different types of XP to juggle mostly just adds annoying busywork – you can never run out of time (unless you’re going for a specific achievement, which the game doesn’t even let you track without manually counting the game days), so you can always go and farm up the specific type of XP you’re lacking. But also, all XP expenditures are now tied to the random items that appear in the shop. This means that whether or not you’re able to upgrade a specific stat depends on whether or not relevant items have spawned and in what numbers, but nothing stops you from blasting through a day to reset the shops if you really want to upgrade one specific stat and the shop didn’t give you anything (or not enough of a thing) to advance it.

The date gift system is also much worse because now gifts are attached to specific girls rather than being tied to your inventory. On the one hand, different girls respond better to different token types, so it makes sense to create a build for each girl that targets the token types they get bonus points for and ignores the tokens they give reduced points for. If this was a system that allowed you to assign a specific build to each girl and load it in automatically when on a date with that girl, it’d be an improvement. But assigning a gift to one girl means you can’t then assign the same gift to another girl (and it’s not like this is a realism thing – these gifts are bought with magic love fairy XP and can be regifted to the same girl any number of times because we’re playing fucking HuniePop, not anything with pretensions of being a remotely grounded relationship sim). So in order to have reliable access to gifts that do broadly useful things, you have to wait for twelve copies of them to come out of the roulette machine and give one of them to each of the twelve girls in the game.

And my entire build in HuniePop 1 was built on early gifts that produce a ton of sentiment (used to activate gifts) followed by later gifts that produce extra turns or affection (the score used to determine if you win). About a quarter of the way in, and HuniePop 2 definitely seems to demand similarly optimized gift builds, but assembling such a build is far more tedious because you either have to do tons of busywork swapping the appropriate gifts out of one girl’s inventory and into another’s for every date (and you have to remember to steal all your important gifts back before you leave a date, because you can only access the inventories of girls in the same location as you), or else you have to buy a dozen copies of all the relevant gifts. And some of the more powerful gifts don’t seem to exist anymore. Maybe the game is trying to push players away from a broadly effective omni-build like multiplier-maximization followed by a gift that trades your multiplier in for raw points, the latter of which can be deployed on your last turn for 25%-ish of the points needed, which is frequently enough to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

But since the cast is so dense with annoying characters, I don’t care enough to play long enough to find out. Cook Serve Delicious 2 switched up the way its recipes worked in order to add new features while simultaneously removing the upgrade system that made learning new recipes fun, and that made getting to grips with its new systems a frustrating slog, but CSD 2 was still a fun game with a fun theme so I put up with it long enough to get good at the new systems. But HuniePop 2 is a game driven by dialogue and match three games, and a big chunk of its cast have miserable dialogue and I don’t want to relearn how to do whatever new strategies are supposed to be the key to success for its match three. The game has been officially banished to Regrets.

It makes me sad. As horny as HuniePop 1 is, it’s weirdly kind of wholesome about it. Your goal is to take ten to twelve (depending on how many secret characters you unlock) women on amazing dates until they fling their clothes off out of overwhelming lust at your match three skills. It’s ridiculous and it knows it’s ridiculous and your progress towards victory is marked by the increasingly less-clothed pics the girls text you, but the primary means of interacting with the game world is to show people an absolutely enchanting time and that’s adorable and cozy. HuniePop 2 being bad is like if a Stardew Valley sequel came out and not only were the mechanics about 20% more frustrating for no reason, but it also had weird blood and soil undertones that read like the developer is trying to court a fascist segment of the audience without being so overt about it that they lose everyone else.

HuniePop is the best match-three game by a huge margin. Match-three is a genre that normally relies on time pressure, blindly finding matches as fast as possible to cover the screen in particle effects as little gems or fruits or whatever explode and sound effects chime in panicked celebration, and the game’s difficulty is balanced so that you’ll usually get about 90% of the score needed to beat the level and they can offer to sell you an extra ten seconds to push you over the top.

HuniePop takes that jangling set of plastic keys and turns it into a real game by giving you unlimited time but a fixed amount of turns and more flexibility in how far you can move a token to make a match (you can move a token as far as you want along a row or a column, but not diagonally or by making turns, which puts much more of the board in play). Then it ties the whole thing together with an in-game upgrade system that makes victory near-inevitable yet allows you to challenge yourself by winning with as few upgrades as possible, bolts on some character-driven with a cast that’s middlingly shallow individually but also large and diverse enough to carry the game despite the somewhat one-note nature of most of the individual characters, and then adds anime boobies.

That last feature is in some ways utterly bizarre, drastically narrowing the potential audience for the game, and yet I think it might be less mad than it is genius, because the anime boobies audience definitely exists and is absolutely ravenous and yet rarely served by any game with any selling point beyond “there are anime boobies.” A game that had both anime boobies and actual gameplay was able to pick that audience up and walk away with it (I mean, not really – the whole HuniePop series has all of three games in it (one of which barely counts), and that’s hardly draining the hikikomori slush fund to the point where no one else is making sales, but it could if there were enough of them).

Continue reading “HuniePop 2 Tries Too Hard To Be Different” →