Dave Critiques - Child of Eden: Perseverance pays off

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be discussing Child of Eden for those who have played it. If you’re worried about spoilers, please stop the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

Child of Eden is a game that has been sitting in my PS3 library for years. It’s been on my mind ever since I bought a console capture device back in April, and it’s sad it’s taken me this long to record another PS3 game with it. Well, the stars aligned, and it looks like after a brief play Child of Eden is what I would call the spiritual successor to Rez.

Right away I was struck by, I guess you could call it a sense of synaesthesia. Child of Eden tries its best to fully capture three of the body’s five senses and twist them around in a tumble dryer. The surreal visuals mix with the pulsing soundtrack which is reinforced by the subtle yet ever present vibration of the controller. As each stage continues, all three aspects keep building to a crescendo. Most of the time, that crescendo is a boss fight, but all of the stages play with this simple idea of building to cathartic release in different ways. For example, stage 1 has the boss quite early on, and then the action starts building all over again afterwards. Stage 4 has you fighting the boss at the outset, in the middle, and finally at the end, and stage 5 is sort of a boss rush, where all the previous bosses appear in different forms. Luckily you don’t have to fight all of them, but the variations on their original encounters undoubtedly resulted in some panic.

I’ve strayed a little from my synaesthesia point so let me talk about my first play session with the game. In that session, I played through stage 1 and 2. At the end of stage 2 when I turned off my PS3, I felt like I had just been on a hallucinogenic ride. I felt like I needed to come down. So potent was the game, and I was so focused on playing through these stages that it physically affected me. The reason I want to bring this up is this is one of the pitfalls of writing about videogames. You can watch someone play through game footage, and especially if they're commentating, you can get an idea of what is like to play the game yourself, but it is a poor substitute for what it feels like to be plugged into the machine so to speak. And I was just playing on a standard TV using a controller. Child of Eden supports 3D television and either the Kinect or Move depending on what system you play on. I tell you, I would have definitely appreciated the finesse of motion controls over using the analogue stick as I played through stages 3 and 4.

I had no idea the game would get this hard. I seemed to be alone in that thought too, as most of the help on the internet was along the lines of, “What?! It’s easy!”. It does seem that the actual challenge of Child of Eden is in 100% purges and 5-starring the level, but just making it through was a nightmare for me. And unlike a lot of other games, there are no cheats and no walkthroughs to help me when I get stuck. No, this is a game where I must use my skill to get further and the only way to improve that is to play these levels over and over again until I become intimate with them.

Part of my slow progress was taking an inordinate amount of time to work out the whole regular enemy / purple enemy divergence. Once this was realised, the 3rd stage, ‘Beauty’ was not as daunting and it only took me a couple of tries to best it. Stage 4, ‘Passion’ is where I almost considered giving up. And it wasn’t the stage either, it was the boss. Child of Eden has no checkpoints, so a 12 minute stage has to be played through again if you lose it at the end, and did I lose it at the end, time and time again. The patterns of purple projectiles it pelted me with were insurmountable. Even if I had saved up my euphorias (a screen-clearing bomb that you can hold up to 3 of), it wasn’t enough to stop the onslaught. I was becoming frustrated and disillusioned. Sure, you can farm previous levels for stars to unlock the later stages, but upon acquiring 20 stars to unlock the final stage, I realised I had to complete Passion before I got a chance at it.

So was I going to give up? I told myself that I had more than enough footage to talk about this game. I also told myself I made a commitment, and if I used a play session to keep playing Passion over and over again, I’d eventually have to win. So I bought myself a 3.5mm jack cable extender so I could plug my headphones into my television (as there’s no way to use headphones connected to the PS3), and set my intentions to finally making it through. I beat it the first try that evening. After hours of defeat, I made it through… barely. My heart was pounding, and my adrenaline was soaring as it came down to the wire between the boss and me. I had one health left and had used my euphorias. Could I pump enough damage into it before the projectiles overcame me again? I could!

So I had one final decision to make. Would I play the last stage through normally, or go to ‘no damage mode’ to scope out the lay of the land? To those wondering why I wasn’t playing on ‘no damage mode’, you don’t get scores or unlock stars for using that mode. Nothing counts. You can’t progress. Well, I made the decision to try the final level on normal. My adrenaline was high, and I thought I was in the zone enough to be able to take on whatever came my way. And you know what? I was right. After all the replays of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Passion’, I finished ‘Journey’ the first time. Child of Eden was over. I could now relax as the credits played. It's like a mini epic. I faced what seemed like impossible challenges, I thought about giving up, I decided to keep at it, I persevered, and I am glad I did. It resulted in triumph.

Thanks for watching.

Dave Critiques - The Talos Principle: What does it leave behind?

Transcript 

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be discussing The Talos Principle for those who have played it. If you are worried about spoilers, please stop the video, and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue!

When explaining The Talos Principle to others, I describe it as “Portal, with existential philosophy instead of humour”. Having completed all three endings of Talos on two occasions, I have to say that the description still stands. You enter a number of puzzle rooms that prompt you to use the tools at your disposal to solve them. As you do not use a portal gun and your character can jump, this is where the differences end (not to mention the complete divergence of theme and purpose). To take some of the headache out of first person platforming, jumping is almost turn based in that footsteps will appear on ledges, showing you where you will land if you hit the jump button. This is the first of many clever things about this game.

A lot has been written and discussed on the topic of mechanics as metaphor. Essentially it is the game imparting narrative information through the gameplay itself (its rules and systems). The Talos Principle links most of how it looks and plays to what it is about. The puzzle rooms have a purpose, the gorgeous locations have a purpose, the QR codes from other players have a purpose, and listening to both Elohim and the MLA have a purpose. What is that purpose? For starters, I think it speaks to the development team and project lead setting out to make something they really cared about. Something they could only express through this medium.

At every turn, the game is rewarding and vexing the player, often simultaneously. The puzzles can be fiendish, but you have a wide variety of them to choose from in your quest to retrieve any one sigil (the reward for solving said rooms). Exploring the world reveals lost audio logs, new computer terminals, QR messages, and even glitches in the system. Conversation is actually an important game mechanic. Once you make contact with the Milton Library Assistant, it will start to ask you very tough questions about what it means to be alive and to have consciousness. There is no right answer as any answer given will result in the MLA coming at you from a different angle. These conversations were my favourite part of the game. Although my desire to be cordial to the MLA in the face of its insults lead to it not wanting to speak to me anymore the first time through, in my second playthrough, I became friends with it, and we eventually fused into one being.

Even cooperation is a mechanic. Not only can you find paintbrushes that allow you to leave messages (that friends on your Steam account can see in their game), but the conversations between characters give great insight into how the other children of Elohim are faring. This all culminates at the top of the tower when you have to solve puzzles alongside Samsara and The Shepard (two characters you would be quite familiar with by this point). This section of the game leads towards the second of three endings, and after playing through it, I read their messages littered around the game world with a lot more understanding. Oh, and let’s not forget the playback machines, where you have to use a recorded version of yourself to help solve puzzles. If you think cooperating with other people can be maddening, try cooperating with yourself!

I’d like to take the time to address how a puzzle game like The Talos Principle works when playing through it a second time, as I did to acquire this footage. I last played the game in late 2015 so almost a full year has gone by. I had a much easier time with the majority of the puzzle solutions, and I don’t think it has to do with remembering how the puzzles were solved. A month or so before playing Talos I played a couple of hours of The Witness to see if I wanted to critique it (I do, and that video will be on its way sometime in the future). The Witness’ approach to puzzle design is not so much presenting you with puzzles to solve but rather teaching you the language that you need to solve the puzzles in the first place. That’s what caused the most grief my first time through The Talos Principle. The solutions to the puzzles often required the use of puzzle elements that I didn’t even know was possible. Returning to the game, I knew the puzzle language and had a much smoother time of it. There were still many red sigil puzzles that gave me grief, but more often than not, reading a messenger hint was enough to grease the gears of my brains sufficiently to lead towards acquiring the sigil.

So now we get to the question that is most pertinent, just what is going on? Well if you’ve completed the first ending, you’ll have a sense of what this computer construct’s goal is and what it is aiming for. Sadly the first ending means your character fails at what it set out to do, which is why I refer to ending two as the ‘real ending’ (and not just because we get a proper credits sequence). The second ending creates a sense of autonomy, and of anti-authoritarianism. It’s also only possible by benefitting from the work of others. It sort of mirrors that Isaac Newton quote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

The second ending leads to a new age of the Earth. As far as I can ascertain, the whole game is set within a computer simulation that contains archives of all of human knowledge (or as much as they could archive before they were wiped out). Elohim, the MLA, the puzzles: they’re all there to create the perfect artificial intelligence to take physical form, and go out into the reality that humanity has left behind. The ‘talos principle’ itself refers to a concept that for all our philosophising, we’re still tied to this world in corporeal form, and thus have to come to terms with the limitations that brings. The character you are playing is trying to achieve physical form. Elohim and the MLA are watchful computer systems whose purpose is to mould the intellect of those that are training to ascend and become more than themselves.

Rather than expanding on this, the third ending seems like a letdown but is a missing piece of the puzzle. It’s kind of inversely proportional to the work required to activate it. You have to gather all the bonus stars in the game, and then solve the grey sigil puzzles in the star worlds. The stars are the most ingeniously guarded of all the game’s prizes, often using elements from multiple puzzle rooms to solve (or keen observational and deductive reasoning skills). Some of the stars are hidden in quite a beautiful way, such as the star on messenger island C, but most of them I never would have found if not for a walkthrough.

My first playthrough I started using a walkthrough about halfway through the sigils in Temple B. There were still puzzles I solved on my own, but you know how this works. The more you use a walkthrough, the easier it is to go back to it time and time again when you get stuck (and it took me this long to discover how easy it is to use the Steam community guides in game). I would say I solved around two-thirds of the puzzles on my own, and ended up using a walkthrough for everything else (including the bonus stars and the larger tetromino fields). On the second playthrough, I only needed a walkthrough for 2 of the red sigil puzzles, and about half of the grey sigil puzzles (plus once again, most of the tetromino fields).

I think what this means is I am admitting that the game is smarter than me. I feel like one of Elohim’s failed children (of whose desperate messages I read so much of during my playtime). The caveat is that while I felt defeated, I still was able to succeed thanks to the work of others. Very similar to the second ending in fact. Perhaps if I was like one of the programs whose only purpose was to solve these puzzles, I might have persevered, but as that was not the case, I did what I had to do to gain the answers I required. And then the third ending didn’t feel like such a let down because as I was helped in my quest to finish the game, I can now help others in their quest. All the work to find the stars made a little more sense. To truly help others, you must be fiercely dedicated and sure of your own purpose.

Finally, after the task of completing all three endings, I wondered about everything in the game that I had missed. I skimmed most of the text files in the computers, and I’m sure I missed a couple QR codes and audio messages. I wonder how many more easter eggs were present in the game, and what they entailed. More than anything I thought of the developer’s motives for making the game.

What were they trying to say? As the game revolves around philosophy, perhaps they weren’t trying to say anything, at least in an absolute sense. It almost feels like a thought experiment. Not only how computer intelligence would regard our collected history, but how such intelligence is formed, what it means, and how it wrestles with the same questions we wrestle with. Perhaps all that matters is what we leave behind. In this game, humanity is gone, but the combined efforts of the species have been passed on (as much as it can be I guess). Perhaps The Talos Principle is a similar process of the development team passing on their ideas to those that come after them. If that’s not the purpose of life, there’s a good argument to be made for it being the purpose of art.

Dave Critiques - Alan Wake: When horror becomes tedious

Transcript

Hey hey, folks. Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be talking about Alan Wake today, and those that are worried about spoilers should go play the game before watching. For everyone else, let’s continue. So, like my Broken Age video, I initially played and wrote this critique of Alan Wake last year. I was wondering if, like Broken Age, my thoughts on the game would have changed given enough time. That ended up not being the case. To be honest, my thoughts are a lot stronger the second time round. I have a feeling that the majority of this critique will be my original writing. Enjoy!

Does anyone remember after the release of Bioshock Infinite, how articles were decrying that it was a first person shooter? How the story Infinite was trying to tell was at odds with its gameplay? That’s exactly how I feel with Alan Wake. I had a friend tell me that one of the reasons he loves the game so much is that there is really nothing else like it out there, and on that point he is correct.

There is a lot to like about Alan Wake. Growing up in the Pacific north-west myself (Woodinville, Washington), I was engulfed in the atmosphere that the game surrounds the player with. The forests, lakes and mountains exude that crisp sensation of the outdoors, and remind me of many hours spent driving to hiking trails, visiting streams, rivers, and waterfalls. The small towns were full of log cabins and diners that sold delicious pie. Twin Peaks wasn’t presenting a caricature of such places, and while Alan Wake wears its Twin Peaks homages on its sleeve (as well as nods to The Twilight Zone and Stephen King among others), it has captured an essence inherent in that television show’s location.

You spend most of your time in Alan Wake amongst the trees at night. As this is primarily an action game, and a third person shooter at that, this impressive amount of world-building put into Bright Falls and its citizens seems misplaced, or at least not fully realised. It is said that before it became a shooter, Alan Wake was an open world game similar to the GTA series, and likely the town and its denizens were conceived in that stage of development. It’s a shame, especially since my favourite part of the game was traversing the town with the sheriff. I would have liked to have had the opportunity to explore each building and talk to its inhabitants on my own terms, but the game only allows exploration in short ‘off the beaten path’ bursts, while anything having to do with the townspeople funnels the player along through cutscene or brief interaction.

Perhaps if the story had more room to breathe it would have made a greater impact. Any story about a writer and has to do with writing itself is hard to pull off. I think the creators were somewhat self-aware of this as there is an exchange late in the game between the sheriff and Alan about her reading his books. She remarks that he leans too heavily on metaphors. As I spent most of my playtime groaning at the bulk of Alan’s narration (with its heavy leaning on unnecessary exposition), this small exchange almost felt like a partial apology. I think though that the attention to detail in the world and in its characters shows too much integrity to use a fourth wall moment to point out and thus excuse a potential failing of their work.

As for the tale itself, it has all the right ingredients. There is an air of mystery about what is going on, and what the motivation of the darkness actually is (or where Alice has gotten to, what happened in the missing week of time, and is any of what the player is experiencing real). Heck, even having the possibility that Alan is just a fictional character created by Thomas Zane is bold, especially when Alan as a character is so unlikable. While the game ends on a somewhat ambiguous note, I feel satisfied with the conclusion as Alan defeats the darkness and rescues Alice. What happened to Alan is of little concern to me, and as the game itself left me cold for at least the last half (definitely since the episode titled ‘The Truth’ which starts to spell out everything for the player), the added story DLC held no pull. Even ignoring the annoying practise of having the true ending of the story in a piece of DLC, the bulk of my reasoning is I had absolutely no desire to encounter one more fight with the Taken (the name given to the spectral enemies throughout the game that require the ol shine n’ shoot strategy™).

I dreaded every fight with the Taken. It wasn’t because I was scared of them. It was because combat with them is one of two extremes. It’s either mind-numbingly tedious or teeth-grindingly frustrating. If the Taken are in small packs, shining your flashlight at them and firing your weapon can quickly dispatch them with little effort. Even the instances where one appears behind you (a gimmick that the game is guilty of overusing far too often) only requires some quick repositioning before the dispatch occurs. As the game goes on however, the way the Taken swarm the player and the ratio of small, fast enemies to lumbering brutes shifts and multiplies. While you do have tools to manage packs of foes (such as the flare or the flashbang), it is the dodge that is usually your best friend. That is if it works properly.

When an enemy is about to attack you via melee swing or throwing a projectile, a well-timed press of the dodge button will reward the player with a slow-motion reaction that is quite cinematically pleasing. The parameters to set this off must be very specific, because most of the time you effortlessly duck, move a little, and get hit anyway. Either that or you spam the dodge button when the game enters slow motion to show you the Taken appearing behind you, but then it doesn’t let you dodge and you take the hit. The most enjoyable form of this evasion when it works is when an enemy is trying to get a hit in behind you or to the side. I must have had a sixth sense on some encounters, because I decided to press the dodge at seemingly random times, only to have the slow-mo engage and reveal a foe taking a swing at me. Those instances show off the potential of such a mechanic, but because the camera is so close to the player, and the only sound cues seem to be the enemies themselves, you have to rely on such positional awareness (or blind luck) to gain the full benefits of the system. Most of the time a misplaced dodge just leads to being trapped, attacked and killed by multiple enemies.

And a mention should be made of the poltergeists which possess random objects throughout your journey and fling them at you, requiring a long stare down with the flashlight to dissipate. While this breaks up the idea of a traditional fight with the Taken, the camera and dodge functionality make these almost more frustrating, considering the size of most of the objects. I will say it does lead to some quite unique boss fights where you must battle possessed vehicles alongside Taken that can be enjoyable with the right strategic approach (and the final boss was enjoyable if just for its uniqueness), but like the Taken themselves, the frequency of such encounters overstay their welcome. It’s almost as if there was a script in the game that says “You’ve explored long enough buddy. It’s time for one of those enemy encounters you despise. Let’s spin the wheel. Will it be ghosts, Taken, or both? Yee-ha!”.

In the end, it was the world itself that kept me going. The foggy haze among the trees, following specs of yellow paint to a hidden hideaway, even visiting the watchtowers just to listen to the radio updates; these elements brought a world together that I wanted to return to, despite the game’s combat and over-explanatory narrative telling me otherwise. I’ve followed Remedy as a developer since the early 2000s, enjoying both the first and second Max Payne games. Those games suffer from some of the same issues, but they didn’t take themselves too seriously (or at least balanced the serious parts with humour and an overt noir cheese).

Alan Wake does not wink at the camera however. Yes, the game is playing with the tropes of horror and thriller, but it is trying its best to be faithful to the genre rather than using it for laughter. I think it mostly succeeds. The story isn’t the most original but is well woven. It could just stand to have had less of what’s going on spelt out for the player. For me, the world and its characters were the most accomplished aspects. The gameplay falls flat through its repetition and mechanical inconsistency, and while it would be nice to imagine this as an open world game or an adventure game, it is a third person shooter, and at least the combat is thematically consistent with the rest of the work.

Thanks for watching

Dave Critiques - 1979 Revolution: Black Friday - The problems of history as episodic fiction

Transcript

Hey Hey folks, Dave here. Just a friendly reminder that this is a critique. I will be talking about 1979 Revolution: Black Friday in depth, so if you are worried about spoilers, please play the game before watching this video. For everyone else, let’s continue.

1979 Revolution is what would happen if you played a Telltale game set during a real historical event - in this case, during the 1979 Iranian revolution. The Telltale skin disguises any edutainment that might be present underneath, as the cultural and historical information is engaging, and prompts at least myself to want to know more as I played about this time and place in history I know very little about.

You play Reza, a photojournalist who returns home to Iran after studying abroad in Germany. A lot of the game is spent documenting the streets of Iran through your photographs, and after every picture is taken, your image is shown beside a real picture taken of the exact subject. It gives a sense of authenticity to your role in the game, even if the person you are playing may or may not be fictional. Someone took these photographs during the revolution, and now all these years later, you are doing the same. That the tale of the revolution brewing is intercut with your character being tortured and interrogated in prison heightens the authenticity, and perhaps dictates your actions during those moments when you can choose how to behave.

But more than most Telltale games, the choices in 1979 Revolution undercut the story being told. During the game, I decided to stick to the creed of Reza’s friend Babak and to go through the events with a philosophy of nonviolence. I wasn’t persuaded by the arguments of the revolutionaries Reza finds himself amongst either, but despite not wanting to be a part of the movement, the story has to continue, so reluctance or enthusiasm aside, you find yourself a contributor until the climax of Black Friday. The choice made during the massacre, and whether to side with your brother or cousin feels meaningful, and where you stand when it comes to what you've seen and how you feel about it. Then Babak gets killed, and it’s easy to see Reza fully joining the movement that I had chosen to keep a distance from during my playtime.

And after this, the final section of the game is back in prison, leading to murder, an act of defiance, and a very abrupt finale. You have no idea what happens to Reza or what occurred in the time between Babak’s death and when he is arrested at the start of the game. I have read that Ink Stories, the developer wants to make more episodes with these characters, but there is the issue of funding. So at the moment, it feels like I’ve played episode 1 of a Telltale game, enjoyed it, but am unsure if episode 2 is ever going to come out. Now I know how fans of the Blackwell Legacy felt when that game was first released in 2006. I definitely want to spend more time with these characters in this time period in this part of the world. Even more, I would love to experience other periods of history and other cultures using this style of videogame.

Thanks for watching!

Why Doom (1993) is one of my favourite games

Transcript

In my last favourite games video, I neglected to tell a story about the game in question. I started Loom off with a story, and it was my intention to continue that tradition with these videos. So I would have been 11 or 12 and visiting the home of an acquaintance. Not really a friend as we didn’t hang out that much, but our mothers knew each other. He had just gotten a new computer. Along with this beast (it was likely a 486 of some variety), it came with a sound blaster, and boxed copy of Doom. Now we all had shareware copies of Doom. Everyone did, but it was rare to see someone that owned the game, let alone have a brand new sound card to showcase that amazing soundtrack and those chunky sound effects. I asked to borrow his brand new copy of Doom. He, of course, declined.

So Doom is a special case when talking about my favourite games. I played Doom and Doom II from their shareware versions to full releases all through my late childhood and adolescence. In acquiring footage for this video, this is the first time I have ever played the game properly. You see, I always played the game with cheats. IDDQD for god mode, IDKFA for all the weapons and full ammo, and even IDCLIP when I couldn’t work out where a key was for a door. I would just walk through the door. What happened this time is it changed what I remember as an engaging high-speed action game into something more resembling an entry in the survival horror genre. Years later when I played Doom 3, I thought the horror aspect of that game was quite a departure from the first two, now I see it was simply a continuation of what Doom actually is… with better lighting.

When I play older games, I have an obsession with replicating the original experience. So many games have new texture and effect packs, mods to “fix” annoying gameplay systems, and patches to stop crashing and to put cut content back in the game. I have no problem with any of this, but aside from the bug fixes, I tend to keep the game as close to the released version as possible. Approaching Doom, I made two small “quality of life” changes. The first is that I fixed the mouse movement so the mouse can no longer move your character forward or backwards, only side to side. This way I can take advantage of the WSAD mouselook control scheme that has become standard in PC FPS games. When Doom came out, I used the arrow keys and didn’t strafe at all. It wasn’t until Duke Nukem 3D that I learned about mouselook and taught myself how to play that way. Returning to Doom with that control scheme really helped. Secondly, I installed a new MIDI pack for the game’s music. One of the throughlines of most of my favourite games is their soundtrack and sound design, and Doom is no different. Here're some examples of my favourite level tracks with this MIDI pack installed.

It’s a strange question to ask how a game like Doom holds up considering that this was the first time I had ever played it without cheats, but if that opinion is worth anything to you, I will say that it holds up astoundingly well. The game was incredibly tense. Dark areas really scared me as I heard the growls of monsters in the vicinity, and it always seemed like I was low on ammo for the weapons that really mattered. Even the shotgun that became the default weapon for most of the game had periods where shells were in short supply. Then there are the combinations of monsters batched together. Episode 2 and 3 introduce you to the cacodemon without the ammo needed to quickly dispatch it, and then by late episode 3, you have to fight 3 or 4 of the floating monstrosities as imps, pinkies, or lost souls need to be dealt with as well. Sometimes they’ll even throw in a baron of hell for good measure.

I’ll end with talking about surreal level design. For me, it started to get creepy and abstract during the Deimos Lab from episode 2, with its blue walls, demon head symbols, and then a change to the colour red. In episode 3 they went more experimental with large outdoor sections, or maze-like ranges where walls open up revealing a cavalcade of monsters inside. The way the levels are constructed regarding space, and how you familiarise yourself with these game spaces (especially when searching for a key) is highly memorable, and will likely be even more so on my next playthrough as I’m no longer just walking through walls.