A Walk Across an Alien Field

I’m struggling to pinpoint exactly what it is I feel about No Man’s Sky. I find the game hypnotic and immersive, but also frustratingly jarring. I love its scope and scale, but am also frequently disappointed by its lack of variety. I love the way it lets you build your own story, but I also wish there was more of a structured narrative to pull me through it.

You see, it’s a game that is simultaneously all these things…a game that contradicts itself from start to last. It’s a game that’s not really a game until you have to manage your inventory or shoot laser beams at flowers to gain chemical elements, at which point it is the most game. It’s a game that I wish had the balls to not be a game at all, but also a game in which I wish had more game to it.

(Okay I’ll stop saying ‘game’ now)

When I initially thought about writing this piece, my brain was full of the wonderfully overwrought prose that I excel in, full of glowing descriptions of the planets I visited and the vistas I left behind. I wanted to tell the world (or more likely, the two people who actually read my blog – shout out to my wife and mum!) about what I’d seen, and beguile them with stories of my travels in deep space. But then I listened to some other people’s experiences. I listened and realised that my tales were simply not that interesting. They were interesting to me because I lived them, but when stacked up against everybody else’s they were entirely unremarkable. But then again, so were yours probably.

And you see, that’s the thing… Everyone sees something completely unique, and therefore much of the thrill is lost. The ability to capture an audience with fanciful tales of humongous spider crabs chasing me down a mountain, forcing me to dive headfirst off the cliffs and into a vivid blue lake filled with avatar-eating fish is lost when every other man/woman and his/her dog has been chased/eaten/stomped on/shot by some other weirdly wonderful creature. When Europeans set off in the 15^th century to conquer, exploit and enslave the peoples and lands of the unexplored corners of the globe, they were able to capture the attention of the public precisely because they were small bands of intrepid explorers seeing and doing things that nobody else of their skin-colour persuasion had even thought possible. If everybody was setting sail for the southern continents then why would anybody care what Magellan or Drake had to say? Would Magellan and Drake even have waxed so lyrically about their buccaneering adventures if Juan Garcia next door had been stealing the gold from some other American tribe 100 miles down coast? They wouldn’t… It’s as simple as that.

So where does that leave the game and my experiences with it? Does my experience suddenly become devoid of value and wonder simply because it’s just another log-entry in the preposterously large book of weird things thrown up by NMS’s complicated mathematical algorithms? Well no of course it doesn’t. But it means that I have had to approach the game slightly differently. Eschewing the conventional NMS wisdom that the fun is to be had at the centre of the galaxy, I have, quite naturally, found myself spending inordinate amounts of time just flying around and becoming intimate with my home system(s). Beyond keeping my ship and life support systems topped up, or occasionally chancing upon an upgrade of some kind, I have interacted little with the world around me. Like an intergalactic William Wordsworth, I have strolled the lushest of plains, scaled the highest of mountains, rambled across the craggiest of landscapes, swam in the most tranquil of lakes; all simply in the name of being there and enjoying the view. 10 hours in, and I have visited five planets and a couple of space stations across two systems. That may sound like a lot, but when I hear reports of people mainlining the game in little over 30 hours, I can’t help but feel my pace is a little more relaxed than the average.

It’s a weird beast is No Man’s Sky. I have gone from the most hype, to the least hype, and seen my interest peak and trough more times than I can remember with any other game. I started in awe of the size of the thing but have since moved to an appreciation of its understated beauty. It’s a game that while occasionally frustrating is full of charm.

When I come across an alien outpost and am welcomed in with simple yet elegant Asimov-esque prose I wish there was more to it narratively. I wish there were occasional planets with hidden entrances in the ground leading to bustling subterranean cities and entire populations of aliens to converse with and learn from. I wish these things, but that is not what No Man’s Sky is about. The Euclid galaxy (the outer rims at least) is largely devoid of civilisation and that is just the way it is. There was once something there, but those societies are now dead. Perhaps this is just Sean Murray preparing us for the realities of inter-galactic travel, where even if we were suddenly able to dance our merry-way around star-systems, the chances of encountering galactic civilisations is extraordinarily low. Who knows?

Either way, No Man’s Sky is a compelling experience and one that manages to shine despite its flaws. I think the talk around it meeting, or not meeting, people’s expectations needs to be put to bed because it is tiresome to listen to. This is the game that we have and people should try to enjoy it on its own terms. What the tiny team at Hello Games have produced is a remarkable achievement and deserves better than the conversation that’s existed around it these few weeks.

Is it the last game you’ll ever need? Of course it isn’t. But it is a wondrous and often stunningly beautiful thing! Hats off to Sean Murray and Hello Games! You guys should go take a break!

Being Bad at Games

A couple of weeks back I became acutely aware of something about myself…something which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty minor stuff, but within the confines of my own ego deeply troubling. What I realised was that… I am just not very good at videogames. I am not very good, and slightly more worrying I seem to be getting worse.

This startling moment of realisation came when playing Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. The scene in question, a hair-raising car chase down a hill strewn with shanty towns and market stalls, was something that, one would have to imagine, had been streamlined to within an inch of its life so that even the most casual of players could enjoy the “POWER OF THE PLAYSTATION”™ at its brash and brawny best. Yet, by the time I reached the final climactic part and triggered the cut-scene (which was awesome by the way) I think my death tally was up to four or five. What was meant to be an exhilarating rollercoaster ride had turned, for me, into a bit of a slog. Honestly, I was relieved when it was finally all over.

Now, I could easily put this down to simple tiredness given that I was playing this scene around midnight on the Friday of a relatively long week, but I would only be kidding myself in doing so. The honest truth is, I have found myself dying an inordinate amount of times during my playthrough of Uncharted 4 and there has been little to no correlation between my death statistics and levels of tiredness during gameplay. When I found myself stuck in the middle of no man’s land being blasted in the face by an armoured goon with a shotgun, it was not because I had been mowing the lawn that afternoon, it was because I was engaging in bad practice. When I was spotted for the umpteenth time by the enemy as I hung off the crumbling ledge of a medieval monastic ruin and subsequently sent to an early grave, it was not because I had spent the day translating Japanese legal contracts, it was because my instincts of when to move from cover had been wrong.

At first, I was defiant…after all I had completed Uncharted 2 on Crushing once before. Sure, it had been a frustrating experience and one involving many, many deaths, but I had proven that I was able to deal with third person cover mechanics in a large 3D space. But as the deaths in Uncharted 4 began to accumulate with a decidedly alarming regularity, I had little choice but to concede defeat. As it turns out, I am simply not up to being the bad-ass swashbuckler that Naughty Dog wanted me to be.

And with that grudging acceptance, I have started to look back over my history with games and question whether I have ever really excelled at any one title…to look to whether I had ever been able to claim that I was up there in the top five percentile of people playing. And you know what I found? Nothing…

For example, I always felt like I could beat anybody at a game of Pro Evo or FIFA on my day, but if I’m being brutally honest with myself I have almost certainly lost more than I have won. I remember the day that I brought back home FIFA 10 (my second FIFA) from the shop and challenged a strictly Pro-Evo loving friend to a match, only to find myself at the end of the 90minutes on the wrong end of a 2-0 drubbing. As was ever the case, I dismissed the loss as me falling foul to exploits within the game, but the truth was that even when I used those same exploits in subsequent rematches I still tended, more often than not, to finish on the losing side. The exploits may have been a factor in my losses, but it was my own relative lack of ability that was the real reason I failed to win.

It’s hard to find screenshots that accurately depict the devastating effects of a finesse shot against your goal, so I plumped for this instead.

Even if I think back to playthroughs of single player games like Mass Effect, GTA or the Batman Arkham series, I was still no stranger to the death screen. Perhaps not to quite the same level as with Uncharted 4, but still the fact remains that I have rarely found these games to be completely plain-sailing. In fact, thinking back, I cannot remember any one game in the past twenty or so years where I have managed to make my entire way through the game without dying at least once.

An element of despondency is probably at play here in me suddenly feeling so inept at the entertainment medium that I love above all else, but there is nothing quite so humiliating as facing the prospect of dropping down a difficulty level in a mainstream release, just so I can get through the game without tearing my hair out. I mean, we’re not talking about Dark Souls here… These games are marketed to the mainstream and it is expected that anybody with any level of competency at games would be comfortably able to complete them on the default setting.

I console myself slightly in the fact that I am spectacularly solid at Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, but even there am I really able to make those claims when I have only completed Spelunky once in a little over a 1000 attempts (albeit with the caveat that my past few hundred attempts have been with the sole aim of reaching and clearing Hell)?  The truth is probably not…

I started writing this piece with the express intention of uncovering some sub-conscious reasoning behind my recent struggles with Uncharted, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that this was something that reaches back much further into my gaming history. All excuses put aside, there is little choice for me but to accept that I kinda suck at games.

But you know what? Who cares? I am just not that competitive a person and I am probably not alone in this (oh god, please don’t tell me I’m alone in this!!). It may sting a little when a friend mocks my attempts with derision, or when some random unknown on a message board tells me how I’m the worst player they’ve ever come across, but ultimately I am able to shrug off these criticisms and still enjoy all of these games in the spirit in which they were meant. Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses and it would be ridiculous of me to get hung up on the fact that I keep dying in games (even though I put more time and effort into gaming than I do pretty much anything else).

And so, with that in mind, I will plough on with Uncharted and finish the blasted thing before the week is out. Come hell or high water, I will see the end to Drake’s story and I will write some prosaical review of my thoughts about it and I will post it here! The Uncharted games have played a pivotal role in getting me back interested in gaming, and I will be dammed if I’m going to let the last entry get the better of me like this! You may call me an amateur…you may laugh at my many failed attempts to finish a glorified FMV sequence…you may even think me an idiot for not simply lowering the difficulty, but you most certainly may not call me a quitter!

 

My First 4X: Civilization III

Perhaps it says something more telling about me personally, but when I found myself heading towards the year 2050, my coffers filled to the very brim with gold, I felt fairly confident of hitting a WIN screen. So when the ending screen showed up in what was my first playthrough of Sid Meier’s Civilization III (indeed my first playthrough of any Civ game), I was rather upset to find all the other leaders laughing and pointing at my puny nation and our feeble efforts. Here was me, Queen Elizabeth I of England, conqueror of the Spanish Armada and ruler over our nation’s golden age, smugly watching the gold pour in and the universities and libraries spring up across our lands, fully expecting the rest of the world to fawn over me in awe when really I was nothing more than a laughing stock. Suffice to say, my delusions of grandeur were quickly shot down as I found myself and my country relegated to rock bottom in pretty much every league table of note. No, I was not part of the old-hat money or culturally venerated elite, I was just another Liam Gallagher moving into a prestigious west London suburb and chucking a TV out the top floor stained glass window. The title of my saved game, “England the Glorious” would seem almost amusingly self-deprecating had it not been meant in all earnestness at the time.

There are two things to take away from this cautionary tale. One is perhaps that it might prove useful to read the game manual before beginning a new game in a genre with which you have zero experience. The second is that, in Sid Meier’s Civilization series, just as in the real world, money may bring power, but it does not guarantee success. You see, this is the thing I did not realise. In Civ III, the goal is not to stockpile money, but to, as the title of the game suggests, civilise the globe.

What exactly defines the term “civilising” can vary depending on your approach, but I have now found that in subsequent playthroughs (and redos) my style is to build a cultural hub and to then colonise uninhabited, resource rich lands in fits and spurts with a heavy leaning towards the sceinces. As I now enter into the middle ages with my oracles close to sussing out the ways of Physics and Invention, I feel quietly confident that these humble shores of England will produce the world’s first astronaut before celebrate the dawn of the 1600s. And Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I of England, choses to do this and the other things, not because they are easy, but because I have set the game to Chieftain and AI aggression to low and therefore face little in the way of opposition. Only time will tell whether I will hit the stars in time for the great bard Billy Shakes to be one of the first passengers on board, but I’ve got to think I’m in with a shot. (Did I learn nothing from my previous brush with unbridled arrogant self-belief?)

This engagement with Civlization III has been part of my recent on-going attempt to familiarise myself with games and genres that I had, in years gone-by, given short shrift to. In my defence, this dismissal of the 4X genre was mainly down to me simply not having a PC capable of running games (at least that’s what I thought), but if I’m honest it was at least in part also down to the perhaps misguided perception that these games were overly-complicated and for people with unlimited time to sink into them. While it is certainly true that this game is a HUGE time-sink (did I really just spend my entire evening playing that??), the idea that it is too complex to be easily understood is clearly wrong. Sure, I recognise that I am probably still getting a lot of the game’s fundamentals wrong and that there are clearly levels of depth that I haven’t even touched yet, but I think I am basically there when it comes to understanding the game’s appeal and flow. I doubt I would have got there without the help of a couple of my work-colleagues pointing out where I was going wrong, but once that initial hurdle was overcome it was all relatively plain-sailing. I even learned to love menu-browsing and learning about all the different technology paths open to you (hence my desire to achieve space travel).

This is a game that I am truly glad I chose to spend the time getting to know. Whether this will lead on to me trying many of the other highly-regarded series in the 4X genre, I cannot say for sure, but I am certainly not scared of at least trying them anymore. In fact, my only fear would be that I get drawn in too-deeply. I have a house to fix-up, blogs to write and a mortgage to pay, and so the idea of losing myself in a game such as Civ III is just a little too appealing. A rogue-lite-like (my other recent genre of choice) at least allows me to put down my device at the end of a run, but the problem with Civilization III is that I become too invested in what I have built. I simply cannot bear the idea of not seeing out the path that fate has dealt my brave and bold nation.

So will my new science-led focus bring me the fawning adulation that I so desperately desire from my global friends and foes? Probably not, but I bet you I will learn another valuable lesson in how to play this game. And that is perhaps what I love about it the most. It is not a game that holds your hand. It is a game that gives you the freedom to experiment and to learn from your mistakes. And if that’s not a lesson for adult-hood and life, then what is?

When the sun finally does set on my empire (because inevitably it always does), I will hopefully be just a little bit wiser than I am now and hopefully more prepared to deal with my next challenge in the getting-to-know PC games thing that I have suddenly decided to make into a series of blog posts… Cities: Skylines. If I can build a nation and an empire, then surely a city will be child’s play, right?

 

 

Looking Forward to No Man’s Sky

Looking Forward to No Man’s Sky

It was a sheepish Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, who was tasked with explaining to an excited E3 crowd back in 2014 what exactly No Man’s Sky is to be. A science fiction game based on the worlds of the battered book covers of Asimov and Clarke of his youth… A procedurally generated game in which every player will begin on a different planet and experience something entirely unique to their playthrough… The type of world he always wanted to escape to, but never could… These were the terms Murray used to describe No Man’s Sky, and I think it would be fair to say that he judged the pulse of the crowd, both at the conference and those watching at home, just right because from that moment on he was launched very much into the indie stratosphere.

The truth is I feel a bit sorry for Murray. Because while his company Hello Games were no doubt given an opportunity by Sony that they could not reasonably turn down, he seems almost reluctant to embrace the limelight that this opportunity has thrust upon him. After all, No Man’s Sky is clearly a passion piece for him, and while it would have been foolish for Hello Games to not take Sony up on their deal (whatever that deal may be), it has meant that the game is being viewed with a level of scrutiny that it would never have been had it remained just another GOG or Steam release.

But 2014 was a long time ago, and with the game’s release currently scheduled for 22^nd June in the EU (although a further delay would not be a huge surprise), it is still not entirely clear what No Man’s Sky actually is. Murray has given numerous interviews in which he has detailed the game’s crafting and trading systems and the broadly outlined goal of heading towards the centre of the galaxy, but the nagging doubt as to what happens on a moment to moment basis refuses to disappear from the comments of pretty much every forum post and comments section for this game. This criticism is a little unfair as A) the game is still in production and certain elements of it may still be in flux, and B) why does the game even need to follow such traditional structures as having task-orientated gameplay in the first place? This argument as to what constitutes a game in the modern era can be left for another blog post at another time, but, to paraphrase Giant Bomb’s Austin Walker, in the absence of clear information, people will let their imagination (and by imagination read “expectation”), fill in the blanks. This is probably a tough pill for Sean Murray to swallow as realistically why should he feel any pressure at all to explain his vision while he is still deep into its formation? But the truth is that by not divulging more detailed information, people’s expectations are rocketing. And when they rocket that high they almost always come hurtling back to Earth with an almighty crash and a bang. Or alternatively (and perhaps even more disastrously) people begin to lose interest. I have seen this happening already over the past 9 months or so since the last E3 showing, and it is something Sony will no doubt be aware of.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle-ground between what we have been shown thus far and what the public’s expectation has imagined it to be. In a recent interview with Brad Shoemaker, Murray went into a little more detail as regards some of the in-game systems, including an alien language to decipher and the existence of NPCs to interact with, and with that added a few more broad strokes to the overall picture. But as he talks about in the interview, showing off the game has been a challenge for him. The truth is that the game moves at a slower pace than your usual E3 headliner, and that does not always translate well to a two minute trailer or a five minute gameplay demo. How indeed are you to make a trade of silica for a new hyper drive an exciting press conference teaser trailer?

This is not to say that the game will be boring. Nor is it to say that the game will be everything you want it to be, nor the biggest disappointment of the decade. The fact of the matter is that we simply do not know. Until the finished game is in the hands of the public (and to a certain extent the media) we will never know exactly what it is we are to get with No Man’s Sky. Sony have made a rod for their own back by putting the game at the forefront of their indie showcase push for the Playstation 4 and explaining so little about it, but ultimately I expect the game’s quality to shine through come its eventual release.

Again, I feel for Sean Murray. He seems the most reluctant of celebrities (and within this small, specialised sphere of ours he very much is a celebrity), and just looks like he wants to be left alone to work on his game. So, here’s hoping that No Man’s Sky proves to be the success everybody wants it to be, and that Sean and the rest of the small Hello Games team can take a well-earned long break to recharge their batteries.

Firewatch and a Struggle for Identity

As the credits on Firewatch rolled and Etta James’ soulful tones whisked me up and out of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, I could not help but give the slightest of shrugs.

Was Etta telling me to reproach myself for turning a blind eye to the suffering of Julia? Was she singing a wistful contemplation on my ultimately curtailed relationship with the Other Woman, Delilah? Or were her lyrics symbolising my wilful regression back into my guilt-ridden self? With this natural refuge now a blazing inferno of rapidly carbonising trees, self-imposed jail cells, homework copy books and the skeleton of a young child, my guess is that she was doing any, or all, three of them.

I feel like I was predisposed to like Firewatch. I don’t just have a patience for this new breed of narrative driven “walking simulators”, I actually like them. I would even go as far as to say that they have been some of my favourite experiences of this current generation (see previous post on The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture for more on that). So, it is then somewhat surprising that I walked away from Firewatch with such a feeling of ambivalence.

There is a lot to like about Firewatch. In fact, it starts on the exact right foot. The introduction skilfully and sensitively sets up your (Henry’s) backstory and motive. You are lost and you are desperately seeking validation. And in the shadow of your partner’s rapid decline into Alzheimer’s disease, and your actions around that heart-breaking situation, who wouldn’t be? I’ve never had to deal with such an issue in my own life, and I can only imagine how incredibly hard it must be to do so, but Firewatch was able to elicit a genuine emotional response in me that not many games have done so before. By the time I arrived at my tower and got my first look out over the jumble of peaks, troughs and interconnecting pathways of the Shoshone National Forest, I felt the scene was just right for a journey deep into my guilt and insecurities. (Surprise! I enjoy pretentious games!)

Delilah, my mirror, my validation, my partner in crime, my tormentor, welcomed me through the gates into this world of purgatory in the only way she knows how… by being inappropriately forward in her tone and questioning. Ten minutes in and I was setting myself up for a real slog through the rest of the game as I was forced to deal with this inane woman on the other end of the radio. However, being the generally polite creature that I am when in unfamiliar surroundings, I tried to respond as amicably as possible. This was hardly the time to cast off the weighted shackles with which I ascended up to the tower, but equally I could not simply dismiss this other person who is just trying to say hello. Thankfully, her chatter was brief and I was soon able to go to bed. It had been a long fourteen years and I just needed a little time to process things.

A couple of hours later, and contrary to my expectations, I actually found myself missing Delilah’s voice when it wasn’t there. The world felt muted without it. Perhaps that is the nature of being deep in a forested northern wilderness like Shoshone where silence is the norm (a jungle city of wildlife it is not), but as time moved on I increasingly found myself contacting her on the merest of pretences (yes, I wish to report an abandoned outhouse, please… Now give me another wise crack to take my mind off the crushing guilt of it all). Delilah was both the person to interrupt my descent into mental self-flagellation and also the one to facilitate it, depending on my willingness to divulge, and I quickly came to rely on her. As questionable as some of her own decisions that summer were, and as socially awkward as she could be, Delilah was the lifeline with which I dragged myself over to and out the other side. I could not imagine Firewatch without her.

As I’m sure you can tell, I very much enjoyed this aspect of my time with Firewatch. The game managed to confound my early misgivings and create, in a very short space of time, a solid sense of friendship with this dismembered voice at the other end of a virtual radio, and for that it deserves a lot of praise. However, it is also the point at which my enjoyment of the game begins to waiver.

I tried not to read or listen to too much about this game before playing it, but one of the few comments I did hear being floated around was that it had something of the air of a 70s thriller. And sure enough, it did contain many of the elements you would expect to find in such films, riffing hard on the intrigue and conspiracy leanings of movies such as The Conversation (only this time YOU are the one being listened to). Towards the opening half of the game, this is the element that dominates, and the atmosphere is neatly wrapped in a blanket of unease and tension. However, as you move further forward and the in-game calendar gathers momentum, you begin to learn more and more about the story of Ned and Brian, a sad and ultimately tragic tale of a slightly unhinged father and his young son.

While Ned and Brian’s story was an interesting and moving one on its own (albeit slightly tempered by the underwhelming reveal in which you discover the fate of Brian), it was disappointing for me to discover that, in the end, the two narrative threads tied together so definitively. Of course, the lack of an actual conspiracy to transcended the obsessions of yet another guilt-ridden male hiding out in the woods may actually lend the game a greater sense of realism than it would have had should it have ran with the government meddling plot device employed earlier, but personally I was in it for the wilder and more fantastical trip and what I was served was not what I had ordered.

This is a tough point for me to argue, as I am sure there are many people out there who prefer the direction the story took, but I can only speak about how I felt after the game and what I felt was just a little underwhelmed. After such a strong opening narratively speaking, the latter half of the game, to me at least, simply whimpered away into a bit of an anti-climax. I wanted the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, but what I actually got was a bit of a soggy bottom.

My hesitations in wholeheartedly recommending this game also stretch to other areas of the game (both in terms of execution and design).

While having such a strong and real-time through-narrative was a wholly welcome change of pace for the “walking-sim” genre, it did also have the perhaps undesired effect of stopping me from fully exploring my environment (and therefore uncovering some of the subtler aspects of the environmental storytelling). Compelled to press on in the interests of maintaining narrative momentum, I often found myself at pains to not leave the main path and explore the map in all its minute detail. However, saying that, I do not know to what extent this would even be possible should I have given in to this impulse to explore, as on the few occasions that I did find myself wondering off into the bush (more often than not as a result of being lost), I found myself either blocked by an obstacle to which I did not have the tools with which to pass, or alternatively urged by Delilah to stick to my objective. Given that I have talked in the past about the momentum killing effects of open exploration on narrative driven games (see post on The Witcher: Wild Hunt) I am aware of sounding churlish here, but ultimately it is something I came away from the game feeling very acutely.

Even putting all these narrative-based concerns aside, there are still the enormous performance issues that plague the PS4 version to contend with. I am not typically somebody who would be too hung up on drops in frame-rate and pop-in etc. (I have no problems enjoying Fallout 4 for example), but the constant stuttering I encountered during my playthrough of Firewatch was enough to drive me to distraction and to even consider leaving the game alone until patched. I stuck with it in hope that I would simply acclimatise, but from start to finish the game was a mess in terms of final execution. I could perhaps understand if I was looking at something breathtakingly beautiful, but while looking pretty, Firewatch is far from stunning. I like the art, and I like the world Campo Santo made, but performance issues like those I encountered left me with a definite bitter taste in my mouth when I finally put the controller down. Maybe what Etta was actually getting at was for me to close my eyes and experience the game solely on the audiosphere? Hmmmm…..

Firewatch was a confusing experience for me. I enjoyed my time with the game in a lot of ways, but that time was also tinged with a few elements that simply did not sit particularly well with me. Most of these elements are probably more down to my own sensibilities than through objective failings in the game’s design (and in truth I have enjoyed the game more in hindsight now that I have had the time to process it), but whereas I came into it expecting to love it, I left it in something of a huff (yeah, cheers for ditching me Delilah!).

The emotions run deep in Shoshone and the writers deserve a lot of credit for the way they introduced such a sobering and mature, yet subtly delivered conversation in a medium that generally struggles to produce more thoughtful narratives without becoming overblown and overly saccharine. It is just a shame for me that the final narrative hook that pulls you over the finishing line was so blunt.

Late to the Gaming Zeitgeist

Over the course of the past year it would not be an exaggeration to say that over 75% of my gaming time has been taken up by just two games. Made available on PS+ within a couple of months of each other, these two games have even changed my primary means of gaming. Instead of taking up valuable TV real estate with my PS4, I now find myself nightly curled up in a corner of the couch absorbed in the OLED screen of my Vita. Both games share many elements in terms of gameplay and challenge, and for those who have yet to be initiated into their club, probably appear simplistic to the point of banality. Yet, both also have huge cult followings, and also have rapidly become two of my favourite games of all time.

If you haven’t worked it out already, these two games are Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl’s The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and Derek Yu’s Spelunky.

Now, if this sounds like old news then it’s because it is, and that is pretty much what I want to talk about. In regards gaming, just as with numerous other types of media, I all too often find myself late to the zeitgeist. This can, at least in part, be put down to the fact that I am one of those despicable individuals who cannot take a recommendation in the spirit in which it was meant. Even just the notion that somebody else found something cool before me is genuinely enough to put me off playing/watching/listening to said recommendation for many years to come, with recent examples including the Souls series, Destiny, The Martian, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.

* At this point I feel it is important to separate this phenomenon from that of hyped up products not meeting expectations (Interstellar I’m talking about you here!), which is an entirely different thing all together.

Anyway, this is a personality fault of mine, and I can only blame myself if I end up missing out on something great as a result. But you know what? There is sometimes a bit of an upside to this. By putting some time and distance between myself and the furore surrounding a new release, I am often able to come into a game without the burden of expectation, and as a result avoid the fatigue that results from over-exposure.

This is exactly what happened for me with Spelunky. By the time I began playing, Patrick Klepek’s Spelunkin’ with Scoops series had long since ceased, weekly Giant Bomb chat about the game had dried up and spoiler-filled message board posts were few and far between. I had ridden out the frenzied storm and was free to feel excited about the game all about myself.

When I stumbled accidentally upon the Black Market (without the key) it genuinely felt like my own discovery. Similar to the sensation you get from discovering an obscure little easter egg in some far flung reach of a giant open world map, I was almost able to fool myself into thinking that I had found something completely unknown to the rest of the Spelunky community. Despite knowing that of course this could not possibly be the case, I still could not help but feel somewhat disappointed when I found out that it was actually a commonly known location. I guess one of the advantages of playing a game at launch in that you could, in theory, be the first to discover such a thing, but I imagine that the chances are you are more likely to hear about it through a forum post than you are to discover it organically. I prefer the isolation of being divorced from the community when discovering a feature/mechanic/location rich game like Spelunky.

Similar things happened in the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth when I was first transported into the I AM ERROR room. I again knew that I could not possibly be the first to see that screen, but the fun of thinking that I COULD BE, was huge.

And this is the joy of being late to the video gaming party. Exposure and expectations are removed, and therefore the gaming experience is more pure. Do any of you have experience in coming to a game way after the zeitgeist has passed? If so, what were your experiences? Do you feel you got more out of the game as a result of that, or am I just overthinking it?

Anyway, I am now finding that my time with Spelunky and Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is coming to an end. I am still yet to even complete Spelunky or even see the hell stage (I succumbed to temptation and watched a Patrick Klepek run), but I am starting to tire of the game loop and am now looking for something else to sink my teeth into. Does anybody have any suggestions in regards great games that I may have missed? Galak-Z seems like it would be a lot of fun if I could play it on my Vita, but I don’t know if I will be able to get into it the same way if I have to play it on the big screen. What would be your suggestions?

 

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Review – PS4

The air in the fictional Shropshire village of Yaughton, the setting for The Chinese Room’s latest offering Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, is suffused with sadness. As you walk its picturesque yet empty lanes and streets melancholia lingers restlessly, desperately seeking a soul unto which it can impart its story before time renders it diffuse. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is an experience that could not exist in any time but now, yet equally is one that lies squarely within the millennia-old traditions of human story-telling.

“We leave nothing behind but our stories, and the hope that others will tell them”. These words from Iain Banks hounded my time in Yaughton, and more than two days after the credits rolled, I find myself still unable to shake the sentiment. In a period of profound uneasiness over the future of our species on this planet, The Chinese Room have asked us to explore the question as to what our legacy would be if we were to suddenly depart this plain. In the minds of designer Andrew Crawshaw and director Jessica Curry that legacy would be the idyllic rural English villages of their childhood memories.

It is on a glorious warm summer’s afternoon on the 6^th June, 1984 that the story of this very British apocalypse unfolds. Something has happened at the observatory and the village finds itself faced with the unusual prospect of being under military quarantine. Played out in audio logs, the explanation as to why Yaughton, and presumably the entire world is so suddenly devoid of life is revealed piece by piece through radio broadcasts and telephone conversations found throughout the village and the surrounding countryside. Many of these snippets of information take time and patience to seek out, but ultimately how much of this you hear is dependent entirely on you and your desire to hear it. You may end your time in Yaughton none the wiser as to what has befallen its people, but in a game that constantly encourages you to look to the skies and use your imagination this should not be necessarily taken as a negative.

However, it is in the tales of its people that the real Yaughton story is told. Revealed little by little through the faint echoes of light found throughout the map, the final day of the villagers is acted out with a warmth and humanity only to be found in the trials and tribulations of the everyday. Despite the military occupancy and rumours of a conspiracy, the interactions between the villagers remain remarkably grounded and even mundane. Beyond one local woman remarking her surprise at there being a soldier with a rifle in Shropshire, the villagers seem at times barely concerned at what is happening around them. There are conversations that do touch upon the greater issues of race and religion, but on the whole the 6^th June, 1984 is no different to any other pleasant summer’s day.

Yet, it is also within these quiet moments between the village folk that the greatest emotional impact of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is to be found. Be it the fraught and exhausted nerves of one mother too afraid to venture upstairs for fear of what she may find awaiting her, or the unquestioning belief by an elderly resident that the jets passing by overhead are there to rescue them from whatever evil has taken root within Yaughton, it is in these gentle scenes that the heart strings are pulled at the hardest. As you look once again to the beautiful night sky above, it is this time the words of Carl Sagan that feel the most apt: “In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

The village of Yaughton itself is also drawn with an enviable clarity of vision. Not all of us may be lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been brought up in such idyllic surroundings, but the thick sense of nostalgia dripping from each mantelpiece and rotary dial is tangibly real (at least to those of us from the British isles). Much of this extended mise-en-scène (an occasional Commodore 64 or a menu board listing a bag of chips for just 10p for example), is incidental to the story itself and serves mainly as grounding for the period, but hidden throughout are also numerous other more telling props, placed deliberately with the purpose of adding extra contextual details to events. These props, be they a spilt pot of paint, or a trestle table in the meeting hall covered in half-drunk cups of tea, all lend a heartfelt, yet subtle poignancy to the experience that less thoughtful eyes may have missed.

All of this is executed with a beautifully keen aesthetic. For those of us not spoilt by the graphical capabilities of more powerful PCs, the village of Yaughton and its surrounding countryside, bathed in a Constable-esque summer’s glow, shine warmly and invitingly. From the perfectly rendered side path separating two neighbours’ gardens, adorned with all the vivid colours and flowers of late spring, to the lonely windmill perched atop the gently undulating hills of the Shropshire countryside, every element lovingly brings to mind the exact time and place. They say you should always write about what you know because it lends an intimacy that is wholly welcoming to others, and it is difficult to deny that train of thought when working your way through Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

When it finally came down to it, it seems that the end of the world in Yaughton was somewhat of a gentle experience. There was no looting, no mass violence, no roaming gangs of cannibals preying on the weak. There was a determined attempt by all to just carry on and to not make a fuss. The rapture arrived and people decided what was best was to have a cup of tea and put on a play of Peter Pan for the youngsters. It was British understatedness at its most heartfelt and at its very best.

When we depart this planet, what is it we will leave behind? What is it that would we choose to leave behind? Personally, I think we could do a lot worse than leave behind the village of Yaughton.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

The Chinese Room

Robert Hill