Celeste Is a Very Interesting Failure

After the game frenzy of 2017, I'm glad to report that, a month and a half into the new year, the rate of new, interesting games coming out has been considerably lower than in the parallel time period of last year. I can't blame anyone for wanting to stagger their game's release now: I wouldn't want to follow the year of Night In the Woods, Mario Odyssey and The New Colossus, either. And yet, three brave titles have stepped up to attempt to grab the gaming public's attention at this early time of January-February: Iconoclasts, Celeste and Dandara. 

I've yet to play Iconoclasts, although I fully intend to, and I've only just started Dandara. But I've already put a considerable amount of time into Celeste and it's... not very good, is it?

This is the point where I usually give the obligatory spiel about how I didn't dislike Celeste because of its difficulty, but this seems unnecessary this time, because, for a change, the Good Gamer brigade did not come out to defend this game from any possible criticism. My assumption is that they tried to reconcile the need to attack any game with a female protagonist with the need to defend any game proclaimed difficult and their little heads exploded from the contradiction du machisme.

Having said that, I... actually don't think the game is that hard? It's certainly not easy, but I don't see this stumping any seasoned platformer veteran. Much like with last year's Cuphead, it's one of those games that provide a healthy, well-balanced challenged, although I... really don't think there's any point in rising up to it. 

My biggest problem with Celeste is that I just don't buy it. I don't mean the game itself I did buy that, and on the Nintendo eShop too, so it was pretty expensive. But I don't buy the setup of this game. With other games that sell themselves on extreme difficulty or on trial-and-error, the punishment and the grind always fits in with the world the games inhabit. Super Meat Boy was cute, but you were playing a constantly-bleeding meat-person who was fighting an evil fetus. Hotline Miami is all about nasty, casual brutality, in both setting and gameplay. 

But I just don't buy these cute characters, taken straight from a Scandinavian children's cartoon, as actors in a world full of evil, death and precision platforming. I don't. And although the tone of the game does get progressively darker, it's still, at least until the point where I fell off - around the end of chapter 5 - a wild, wild contrast that is never properly bridged. 

And even though the game never sat right with me on this level, I decided to just go with it, hoping I didn't just pay eShop prices for a game that I really didn't find all that remarkable. But what really pushed me off, what really drove me up the wall, is when the game needlessly locks you out of previous areas. 

To explain why this is so annoying, I have to explain some things about collectibles in Celeste. Celeste has, as far as I could tell, four types of collectibles: red hearts, blue hearts, cassettes ("b-sides") and - the most common - strawberries. I won't get into the first three, but strawberries are basically collectibles that you get by going off the beaten path and completing challenges more demanding that those you need to just get through a level. 

It's an attempt to give what appears to be a pretty short game more longevity, but I find that often, this sort of thing does the exact opposite. I'd argue that carefully labeling the exact extra things a player can do puts one into a frame of mind where, once you get all of the collectibles, you've gotten everything you can out of the game. I can think of very few games with collectibles that I didn't stop playing altogether once I got all the collectibles. It's almost a guarantee that I will only play a game once.

But even putting that aside, Celeste has this infuriating habit of locking you out of areas without so much as a warning, meaning that every time you go past what the game has decided is a cut-off point, if you realize you missed some strawberries in the last section, you actually have to go back to the level select screen and start the whole section again just to get one strawberry the game indicates you missed near the end. 

And this doesn't always even happen by choice. What finally led me to be done with this game is when an enemy explosion sent me to the next room prematurely, with a strawberry still in plain sight in the room before, and with no option of going back. And yes, the game does tell you that you don't have to pick every single strawberry up. But the truth of is, much of the challenge and the fun I've had with the game was when I was trying to pick up strawberries. Just getting through the game's main path felt, to be frank, a bit dull. 

And that's a shame, because the plot bits up to that point really started to hint at much more interesting things coming up. Celeste is not the name of the game's protagonist, who's named Madeline, but of the mountain that she is climbing. At first it seems like just a random game premise, but very soon it becomes clear that the mountain climb is an analogy to Madeline's need for a challenge, to prove something to herself, to overcome her own inner demons. 

Along the way there are also some interesting characters - an old woman who speaks in ominous tones, the ghost of an abandoned hotel's owner, and most importantly, Theo, a professional photographer who came to the mountain in search of the ultimate photo opportunity. Theo's dialogue is pretty cringe-worthy at times, and I hate it in general when media tries to be super-hip with lame social media references - Theo keeps mentioning his "InstaPix" account, and often speaks in hashtags - and in niche video games, one should really know better. But as a character, Theo is mostly charming, likable, and provides some much needed emotional respite from the intensity of some of the rest of the mountain's inhabitants.

He's also black, which is probably another reason why the Good Gamers are nowhere to be seen. 

When Celeste is good, it's pretty good. It's cute, visually pleasing, and the satisfaction from figuring out how to get to a seemingly impossible to reach strawberry is certainly there. It's just a shame that the game chose to be so obtuse and so inconceivably badly designed at points that the best compliment I could give it is that I found it very interesting to try and analyze just how wrong it all went. 

Well, that's enough of that.

Tacoma Review

AI Justice Warrior

Here's a story you've heard a thousand times before: it is the future. A very powerful corporation is obviously evil, but presents itself as a force for good. Things aren't what they seem, and there is a conspiracy to hide this fact. Also, is AI the same as human consciousness? Is it dangerous? Should it have the same rights as us?

Tacoma is full of such overused sci-fi cliches, and in lesser hands, it would be just another throwaway story about the evils of technology. But thanks to clever storytelling, informed by social consciousness and masterful character development, Tacoma manages to rise above the tropes and actually say new and interesting things about its well-treaded subject matter. The result is an exceptionally effective and touching plot-driven game - one whose more cringe-inducing moments are easy to forgive. 

Developer: Fullbright
Publisher: Fullbright
Release Date: August 2, 2017
MSRP: 19.99$
Rig: Intel i5-4440 @ 3.10GHz
16GB RAM
Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme

Tacoma is the second release by developer Fullbright, a studio known for the critically acclaimed 2013 game Gone Home, a game that. despite my best intentions, I simply could not stand. I thought its writing was amateur and that attention to detail was distributed in the worst way possible. It was a game where you could pick up every pen and kitchen utensil, but you couldn't have a single meaningful interaction with the world the developers built. 

You can still pick up a lot of random stuff in Tacoma, but this time around, we are allowed to do more than idly admire the well-crafted environments. To those not familiar with the studio's work, Tacoma is a walking simulator, a game devoid of the battle and puzzle mechanics of more traditional games which instead focuses on story and characters. A lot of games in the genre, Gone Home included, are content to let you walk around and pick up data logs that slowly unravel a story. But Tacoma takes a far more interesting approach to its storytelling. As contractor Amy Ferrier, you have been hired to investigate the events that transpired aboard the titular space station, which lost its oxygen supply, with the status of the crew members unknown. With AI Minny, which supplies us with what is probably the best and most criminally underutilized vocal performance of this year, and a device that looks kinda like a fancy 3DS, you are sent to Tacoma to retrieve whatever data remains in the station's systems.

This is done by examining captured security footage of the station's crew, but rather than regular video logs, you will be examining Augmented Reality records - letting you view events as they happened in their actual locations on the ship.

This mechanic - reminiscent of the detective cases from Arkham Origins, only good - isn't a simple gimmick, but integral to the storytelling. By pausing, rewinding and following different characters, the player can experience events from different perspectives, and find out more about the various crew members. Sometimes this allows you to fulfill a very practical need, like following a specific character to learn how to progress to a different location; sometimes it is used to establish characters and relationships, for example, by allowing you to view two characters in more intimate circumstances. Either way, it is always highly rewarding to experience all aspects of a particular scene. 

While watching AR footage, there will be times when crew members view their AR desktop, a sort of computer screen projected in front of them. This allows players to look through messages and other bits of information appearing on-screen, revealing more about the interactions between crew members, as well as the outside world - including families still waiting on Earth for their loves ones' return. Being reminded that characters have a life outside the confines of the station not only makes them feel all the more real, but also make the dangerous situation they find themselves in feel even more real.

The AR aspects are a fresh way of telling a game story, one that I don't doubt other games in the genre will iterate on in the coming years. But Tacoma, as befits a game by Fullbright, is much more than its mechanics. Gone Home was a topic of conversation due in no small part to its positive and realistic portrayal of LGBT characters, and Tacoma builds on this tradition while also presenting a cast diverse in terms of gender, race and religion. While not much is made of these differences, they do play a part, from things subtle as books found in one crew member's quarters, to a request by another to commemorate the genocide his family survived. These cultural aspects are strong enough to be noticed without being in any way stereotypical or cartoonish, as they have often been portrayed in lesser works.

But above all, Tacoma excels in touching on an aspect few works, informed by political liberalism, ever dare approach: class. Tacoma's main characters aren't high-ranking, "enlightened" executives, but working class people, ultimately victimized by an economic system that values profits over their lives. Its cast includes the type of working people you are likely to meet in either a factory or office environment: the rebellious professional, the union militant, the company man (and it is usually a man) seeking to ingratiate himself to upper management, complete with the sort of smarmy, cringe-inducing humor that comes with the territory, the admin worker trying to do her best despite the situation - they're all there, and they're all portrayed realistically, but also compassionately. Everyone will have different preferences when it comes to the cast members, but I doubt that by the time Tacoma's end credits role, anyone will have any genuine hate for any of them.

Sadly, this is also where I feel Tacoma's story falls a bit flat. Tacoma has been praised for presenting a world where oppression on the basis of identity no longer exists, but where working people are still victimized by capitalism. I do not believe one is possible without the other, and some would say that that is my view, and I shouldn't let it take away from my enjoyment of the game. Here's my problem: I come from a country where there is a staggering amount of workplace accidents in construction sites - over 50 deaths per year, which is more than 5 times than the amount of workers who die in workplace accidents in any other field of work. For comparison's sake, proportionally, that would be as if almost 2000 construction workers a year died in the US, about two times the actual figure (which is already alarmingly high). The reason for this is simple: an acute lack of safety inspectors enforcing regulations. The reason for the lack of inspectors? While one cannot say for sure, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Israeli construction workers are overwhelmingly Palestinians and Eastern European and Central Asian immigrants.

Tacoma has all the correct parts: a racially diverse workplace, a focus on working class people, and a story condemning capitalism for being callous with their lives. It just neglected to put these pieces together. And although I am impressed that Tacoma's story is so good and deep, far beyond what one can usually expect of video games, that I am even able to make this criticism, it is still a significant and disappointing weakness. If anything, its focus on the "oppression" of AI and whether or not they should have the same rights as humans smacks of the sort of timidness of games that discuss racism purely through the prism of the  oppression of elves or dwarves.

But while this weakness should be noted, it should not prevent anyone from giving Tacoma a chance. For aside from this point and some admittedly weak writing, as well as some wonky visuals - the limits of Unity, its defenders' protests notwithstanding, are quite apparent - Tacoma is not only a vast improvement over Gone Home, but a brave and refreshing story-focused game from a consistently brave studio. We deserve more stories of this caliber in games of this level of quality.

Final Score: 8/10

Firewatch - Do you wanna know why we keep starting fires?

More like "hiking simulator", amirite?

For all of its troublesome origins, the term "walking simulator" remains a very useful shorthand for a genre that has become very popular in recent years: exploration games that are based more on narrative and immersion than on any standard gameplay mechanic such as combat, stealth or puzzle-solving. It's a great idea on paper, and it sounds easy - until you remember how hard it is to get anyone immersed in a world with which the only modes of interaction are looking around and reading conveniently-placed notes. Questioning established gaming tropes without coming up with any of their own answers, most games in the genre have felt anywhere from uninspired to downright lazy, with at least a dozen Gone Homes to every Stanley Parable.

It is with no hyperbole, then, that I say that Firewatch is by far the best walking simulator I've played to date. While far from perfect, it shows a rare understanding of how to build a setting and get players invested in a story, to the point where I already know that I will play through it again - something that I've never done with any other walking simulator.

Firewatch's replay value is due mostly to it being so enjoyable, but there are a few choices to be made which not only have certain (admittedly minor) effects on unfolding events, but also serve to draw you into the story. The game starts by telling you that you are Henry, a man in his 20s who is getting very drunk with friends - say no more! I immediately identify with this guy. But at some point, Henry notices a fetching lady and decides to hit on her. The lady turns out to be a professor, and Henry must have way more game than me, because while I never had much success hitting on my professors stumbling drunk, Henry and Julia end up getting together and eventually getting married. Their happiness is not long-lived, though, as you eventually discover that Julia is suffering from dementia.

The decisions you make during the aforementioned sequence, especially those that take place as Julia slips further and further into dementia, will tell you what sort of person your iteration of Henry is. This entire intro is composed of text intercut with scenes of Henry making his way to the forest where the bulk of the game takes place, and while this is in all likelihood a budget move, it is surprisingly effective and does a good job of separating the part of Henry's life taking place before the game and the part you will be most active in.

No option to make a Metal Gear Solid reference, then?

Sadly, this is where the problems start. As a game based mostly on immersion, Firewatch cannot afford to be as shallow as it is in the decisions it has you take. For example, after a particularly exhausting day of taking care of Julia - already very ill - Henry wants to steal away a few hours at a bar while Julia is asleep. That you will go out is a foregone conclusion - you can only decide whether or not you will block the bedroom door so that Julia can't get out. If you think your character wouldn't leave his mentally-ill wife alone at home, or if you think he could get just as some much relaxation from staying in with a bottle of Jack and playing some Rocket League, sorry - the game has already decided to disregard your opinion on the matter.

Firewatch is littered with such immersion-breaking moments, and they're not limited to the decisions you make alone. Most of the game has you walk around a reserve, taking care of fires and other disturbances. It's absolutely gorgeous, and walking around the forest, taking in the view, discovering animals and admiring the foliage - when it's not clearly just made of flat, pixelated textures - feels great. It's a world so easy to get lost in - that is, until you want to maybe get closer to where another character is supposed to be and hit an invisible wall, or when you talk to a couple of characters far away who are clearly just blacked-out stick figures, or when you look at a tree and notice one of the aforementioned flat leaves. And then immersion breaks, completely and irreversibly.

Seriously, these leaves.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not big on immersion in video games. It tends to encourage treating playing them as an escapist activity, and I find escapism troubling in any media. But in Firewatch, immersion is pretty much all you have - otherwise, your computer game story is just a cartoon with questionable production values. I realize that one can only spend so much money on a game's visuals, but it seems to me that making the world less pretty overall but more cohesive would have been a better use of resources.

And still, Firewatch draws you in. It is so beautiful, so well-written and well-paced, so charming, that all these issues are easy to swallow. For every bad texture or plot convenience you find, there's at least one moment where you adopt a turtle, find a raccoon, or listen to a really great exchange between Henry and Delilah, the other main character in the story, that just puts a big smile on your face. The running time isn't long, even with optional content factored in, but the wealth of dialogue options and secrets make Firewatch a deceptively deep experience.

Seriously, this turtle.

Most importantly, Firewatch shows how walking simulators should be done, sort of like how the original Batman showed how Batman movies should be done.

Let's hope the next one is a Batman Begins rather than a Batman Returns.

Finally, I just had to get in how hilarious it is that we needed a rope 

to climb down this barely two meter, easily scalable wall.

Score Calculation: Turtles have hexagons on their shells. Raccoons have two colors (black doesn't count, because it is the absence of a color). In my book, that's a

Final Score: 8

Verdict: Firewatch's significance far exceeds its score. In a genre plagued by pretentiousness and laziness, it is a genuine and successful effort at being artistic, emotional and entertaining. We fully expect it to become an inspiration to some truly great games in the future.

Pony Island - I love pony, pony don't lie, I love pony, almost much as Undertale

2016 is off to a good start

Pony Island almost seems like a game that didn't want to be discovered. It's called Pony Island; it has a yellow-pink-purple logo; its trailer begins with a pink pony running through a green field; everything about it reads like a guide on how to make mainstream audiences lose interest, like a game version of that Achewood strip where Ray decides to make it easier for people to rent gay porn videos by giving them boring false covers (we were still kinda renting videos back then). But through the combined strength of its own quality and the morbid fascinations of the fringes of the gaming community, Pony Island found its critical attention and approval, and we are all the better for it.

As the trailer is quick to clarify, this is not a game about ponies - well, maybe just a little. It's mostly a game about game design. Yes, it's another one of those meta indie games, but unlike most of its predecessors, Pony Island does not feel smarter or more special than its audience. It's frank about the frustrations of a developer without wallowing in self-pity, showing how the special dynamic between designer and developer can, despite its aggravations, lead to making better games, to the benefit of everyone involved.

Of course, how Pony Island does that is a secret that I prefer not to divulge. It's the kind of story where even knowing the genre and basic content matter is something of a spoiler, and Pony Island is a game that absolutely everyone should experience, though its deeper themes will appeal mostly to more veteran gamers. Suffice to say, the game is chock full of surprises, secrets and easter eggs that, almost a month after its release, still have fans looking everywhere for more things to discover.

On a gameplay level, Pony Island is divided into two parts: the first is a side-scrolling runner, and the second is a riddle game where you have to guide a key to a lock through various obstacles, a bit like a very basic version of The Incredible Machine. Both are functional, and at times, the riddles can be fun to figure out, but gameplay is generally Pony Island's weakest point. Unlike games such as Arkham City and Shovel Knight, where entire challenge modes could be made consisting solely of variations on bits of the main game, the non-narrative parts of Pony Island are very much a one-trick... well, you know.

It's the narrative where Pony Island truly shines, though, and a major part of that is the incredibly oppressive atmosphere the game creates. Though not an outright scary game, PI's minimalist design and its intentionally vague and unfriendly communication with the player give the experience a sense of alienation and paranoia on the level of early Silent Hill games and parts of the first Metal Gear Solid. It's incredibly creepy, and while it's certainly not a game you'd have a hard time playing in the dark, it does feel pleasantly uneasy all the way through.

While the basic gameplay never changes all that much, the scenarios surrounding it are constantly evolving, in what is clearly a commentary on the evolution of video games throughout the years. At first you go through levels one by one, but eventually, the game does open up and allow you to explore a world map to varying degrees of freedom. It's a nice touch, and it's also where many opportunities lie to engage in another important part of the game: collecting tickets.

There are 24 tickets in total, received for completing various side goals that the more diligent players will come across. Most just require going off the beaten path, but a few need a genuine flash of brilliance or just a lot of patience and meticulous exploration to be found.

That is where another major flaw with the game is revealed: Pony Island is very bad at check-pointing. This isn't a problem in the runner levels, where failure only means starting the stage from the beginning, but with the more exploration-oriented parts of the game, or rather, with players' ability to access these parts. Pony Island's plethora of secrets naturally encourages replaying different sections and trying different things. However, while the game does allow players to jump between acts from the main menu, getting to certain sections is incredibly trying of one's patience, and the game is all too eager to throw points of no return all over, forcing one to repeat various mundane tasks just to get to the fun parts again. And while the dialogue is brilliant the first time it is read, being forced to stare at the screen and tap a key as the same text messages appear very, very slowly, inevitably breeds contempt.

All that being said, the extent to which I've been dancing around talking about the game's actual plot should clue you in to how much I recommend experiencing it for yourself. For all its flaws, Pony Island certainly merits a playthrough, even if I highly doubt that I will ever go back to play it again after playing the whole way through twice and repeating certain sections to find secrets. At 5$, though, that's plenty - certainly more than I've gotten out of many 15-20$ indie games, nevermind 60$ AAA games.

Besides, look at how cute that listless little pony is.

Score Calculation: Pony Island is one-half pony and one-half secrets. However, there's simply not enough pony, so that the pony part is in reality only four-fifths of a half, giving us

Final Score: 9

Verdict: I would like a listless pony plushy please.

The Psycho Mantis Video Game Awards 2015 - The Best, The Worst, and The Ones You Just Need To Find An Excuse To Mention

Remembering Psycho Mantis (1998-2015)

Psycho Mantis, 1998-2015, killed by lazy writing. Rest in power, brother.

Friends; colleagues; enemies; 2015 has been an exceptionally good year for video games, the best since the superb 2011. However, it had its fair share of dark moments as well. One of the losses we suffered this year was that of beloved villain and, some would say ([weasel words]), the most powerful practitioner of psychokinesis and telepathy in the world - our friend, Psycho Mantis.

We first met Psycho Mantis in 1998. Though just come into the world, he was already a highly skilled maniac and villain, with the power to know one's taste in video games, make a controller vibrate, and make people lust for polygonal muscle man Solid Snake. With such accomplishments at the year of his birth, one can only imagine what power he could wield as an adult. Sadly, Psycho Mantis was taken from us just one year before entering adulthood, when he was reduced to a mute plot device in the name of fan service, doing bad things for no discernible reason and controlling a fiery man under suspicious circumstances. I dunno, I'm sure it's explained in the audio logs somewhere.

And so, to commemorate the passing of our dear friend, I announce that every year, from now on, we will celebrate the best, condemn the worst and shrug at the most mediocre in video games each year, all under the banner of Psycho Mantis. Good night, sweet prince; we did like Castlevania. We did.

The Psycho Mantis "Reckless Person"* Award For Worst Video Game, 2015

In the age of Steam, finding terrible games is hardly a challenge. Its Under-10$ section is filled with Baby's First Zombie Shooters, Game Design Course Failed Final Projects and other assorted garbage that Valve saw no problem with unleashing upon the paying public. However, when one seeks out bad games and finds them, one can only blame, uh, oneself. Our winners today may not be the most broken or badly designed games out there, but they are the ones that, despite their ambition, budget or history, failed most spectacularly to make good on their potential. Without any further ado, our Worst Games of 2015 are:

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

"Is that a man with a bright pink sniper rifle, or some tumbleweed? How could I ever tell from 20 meters away in broad daylight?"

What more could be said about TPP that wasn't already said in this review written by gaming's most handsome personality? As if bent on missing every chance it had to be good, TPP took an excellent crew of programmers, designers and voice actors and used them to make one of the most stale experiences of the past year. With a broken stealth system, fatally stupid AI and some surprisingly droning performances, the latest iteration of Metal Gear Solid is an incredibly dull experience, which could have been a decent mix of Call of Duty and Far Cry had it not been far less interesting than any of the good entries in either franchise. Even D-Dog couldn't make this game remotely worth going back to ever again, unless you want to play a drinking game where you take a shot every time you can't tell when another character has started talking on a codec call or an audio log. Either way, you're going to need a lot of booze.

Cradle

Hey, let's force players to click on things even when there are no actual dialogue options! That won't get old!

While "walking simulator" is often used as a derogatory term, I feel like it has become descriptive enough that it can be used in a non-offending manner. Indeed, the idea of a world so rich and interesting that exploring it alone is enough to hold one's attention is a very attractive one. The Stanley Parable proved that it can be pulled off, and I honestly feel that some games - for example, Grim Fandango - would have been far more enjoyable had the developers not felt compelled to shoehorn lame puzzles into the affair.

Cradle, however, is the classic example of a walking simulator done badly. While beautifully designed, the gameplay consists entirely of annoying fetch quests, which are made worse by how inexplicably slow movement is. The loading times are unbearable, the frame rate drops to 15 fps unless an Xbox controller is connected to the computer, and if you think that means the game is fun to play with a controller, aren't you silly, because then whenever you look around, your character will keep moving long after you let go of the analog stick, as if attached to a swivel chair. I'd make a joke about controller ports, but screw it - just don't play this game.

Broken Age

Yeah, I'm not playing that again to get a screenshot.

I have toyed with the idea of writing a review for Broken Age that would be nothing but a bunch of expletives, the score included, but we are trying to be more positive around here, so this will have to do. Broken Age is a game akin to that annoying couple everyone Unfollows on Facebook because they keep trying to show you how lovey-dovey they are. From the dreadful voice acting to the pretentious art style, everything about Broken Age screams "Look at me! I'm so adorable and indie!". 

While I think Grim Fandango is not very good from a gameplay perspective, it is an incredibly well-written game, and it is well worth suffering through the really bad puzzles to experience its story. There was hope that by now, Tim Schafer's game design skills would catch up to his writing skills. Sadly, somewhere along the way, things went terribly, terribly wrong.

Some reviewers put Broken Age on their worst list mostly due to its second part, which implies they actually played all the way through the first. These are dedicated people, the type who always kick their tires before they leave. We salute them.

Worst of the Year - Until Dawn

Whatever you say, scary silly-putty man, just don't hurt me!

When I dislike a game, for the most part, I can still appreciate what some people like about it. For example, I get that some people enjoy The Phantom Pain's combat and open world design enough that they don't mind the terrible stealth mechanics or the non-existent plot. But then a game like Until Dawn comes along, and I feel like a complete madman. I mean, have we all been playing the same game? "Game of the Year contender"? "Well-written"? Is this a prank?

Until Dawn's basic premise is as cliche as it gets: a bunch of unbearable teenagers drive us up the wall in an effort to make us want to watch them find their deaths at the end of some psychopath's steel. Isn't it easier, though, to just walk away from fictional characters you find annoying? What happened to you in life that you are so quick to call for someone's blood? You - you're just like those slasher villains. No, you're worse. Compared to you, I'm not so bad.

Good horror, like what you'd find in a John Carpenter movie or the early Silent Hill games, is subtle and atmospheric. It makes you fear for characters' lives. It makes you question what you've seen or heard. It leaves things to your imagination, because it's made by people who know that what's going on in your head is far more effective than any miserable CGI effect could ever be.

Until Dawn is not good horror. It's the sort of video game that will doom humanity on Halloween, kill you a week after playing it, or another horror movie reference, because those are obviously sophisticated and show that I am smart. Who is the boogeyman? My favorite color is blue.

The Psycho Mantis "Either Very Cautious... Or A Coward" Award For Games That Were Just Kinda There, 2015

Not all games fit the extremes. Some games are somewhat enjoyable, but held back by developers who didn't want to take any risks. In other cases, we get what you were going for, but you didn't quite pull it off. Either way, we couldn't just shut up about these games, could we? And so, the Psycho Mantis award for abject mediocrity goes to:

Batman: Arkham Knight

Pictured: any street anywhere in the game.

Batman: Arkham City is one of my favorite video games of all times, and is still widely regarded as the best Batman game ever made. Sadly, ever since City was released, all that developers of subsequent iterations of the Arkham franchise could think to do was to repeat what City did, only bigger. While Knight is not as shamelessly derivative as Origins, and the main story wasn't bad, it still required a lot of busywork to fully unlock, including some rather artificial uses of the Batmobile - and this coming from one of the very few people who were actually OK with the Batmobile overall.

Arkham City worked because it had a few brilliant ideas confined to a small space; with the game world expanded, these ideas got diluted and the brilliance was lost in the resulting mess. I still know all of Arkham City by heart, but I doubt anyone could ever distinguish the many samey locations one finds in Arkham Knight's Gotham. Add to this an overly complicated pre-order system, insulting DLC and a criminal PC port, and we get a very sour note to end a still-mostly-great franchise on.

Axiom Verge

Time for another exciting Gun Change!

Axiom Verge really wants to be Metroid, but its combat has more to do with Destiny. With its retro graphics and soundtrack, AV sure looks and sounds the part, but the bosses are little more than bullet sponges, requiring very little actual strategy to get through. And while there are many guns, many of them are useless for combat, instead being used primarily to open very specific doors in very specific ways a la the key cards from the original Metal Gear. Get with the program, Axiom Verge - doors can read your body salts nowadays.

Honorable Mentions

The following two games, while interesting and very well made, were a bit too modest in scope to warrant an actual award. Games should not be judged on length alone, and my best-of list contains games with running times of anywhere between 4 and 180 hours, but these games are really stretching it. Still, they have earned some praise, and it will be very interesting to see what the people who made them will come up with in the future.

The Deed

DAMMIT MOM I SAID I STARTED GOING TO THE GYM

A highly open-ended puzzle game, The Deed has you playing clue from the murderer's perspective. While ostensibly a game about successfully carrying out a murder and a frame-up, The Deed also touches on class relations, messed-up families, and the emptiness of a materialistic existence. Either that, or you're just supposed to stab a person. Either way, it's well worth checking out, especially given that it's only a dollar on Steam.

Halloween Forever

Man, this game got dark.

Running time aside, Halloween Forever is one of the best platformers I've played in a long time. While never as hard as any of the NES games it might remind you of, the fun of exploring the levels and figuring out the bosses give it a surprisingly high replay value. It doesn't hurt that the game is beautiful, with an art design imbued with a loving attention to detail - it really says something about a game when just looking at the main character walk is a joy, and no, it's not because I want to have sex with a pumpkin (although...). It's a steal for just 3$ on itch.io, and should developer Peter Lazarski decide to release an extended version on Steam now that the game has been Greenlit, it is more than likely to get an entry on the best-of list of that year.

The Psycho Mantis "Prudent Person" Award For Best Video Game, 2015

I've been mostly dismissive of indie games in the past, but this time around, the indies killed it. While AAA publishers grow ever more bold with their 50$ season passes and increasingly aggressive microtransactions for what is basically the same open-world shooter, indie developers have come up with some of the most original, interesting and fun games we've had in years. And so, the highest honor in video gaming goes to:

Dropsy

Trust me, this all makes perfect sense.

It's been a long time since we've had a good old-school point and click game, but Dropsy manages to be a lot more than just a throwback. Its creative approach to storytelling and unique art style give it an identity all of its own, making it endlessly charming, emotional and, at times, downright sinister. The ending leaves something to be desired, and the day and night cycle, combined with the somewhat obtuse nature of some of the puzzles, can often be frustrating, but these relatively small annoyances do little to detract from the experience. Also: you have a doggie.

Downwell

I'm a fan of  the Aqua color scheme, personally.

I was gonna make a song, but then I played Downwell

I had my recording software on, but then I played Downwell

Now I still don't have the drum parts written, and I know why, oh well

Because I played Downwell

Because I played Downwell

Because I played Downwell

I was gonna learn game design, but then I played Downwell

I was gonna read some Unity tutorials, but then I played Downwell

Now I can't put anything by me on this list, oh hell

Because I played Downwell

Because I played Downwell

Because I played Downwell

I was gonna ask a woman on a date, but then I played Downwell

I was totally gonna do it, you guys, but then I played Downwell

She totally might have said yes and let me kiss her, but it didn't go so well

Downwell is a very addictive game, is what I'm trying to say with this happening reference.

The Magic Circle

Not sure about those propellers...

The Magic Circle is one of those games that you're better off going into knowing as little as possible about. With a few neat puzzles cleverly incorporated into what is essentially a walking simulator, The Magic Circle raises a lot of interesting questions about game design and the interplay between developers, crowds and fans. Though simplistic at times, it's a must for anyone who is either interested in game design or just wants to fly around on the back of a fire-breathing turtle monstrosity.

Crypt of the NecroDancer

I don't get no lovin', and that's no lie.

Crypt of the NecroDancer's gameplay mechanic sounds like little more than a gimmick at first: it's a roguelike dungeon crawler where you are required to time attack and movement to the beat of the background music. Look past the silly premise of fighting being just like dancing, though, and you'll find the most interesting blend of real-time and turn-based combat I've seen since Final Fantasy VII's Active Time Battle system. The music is also brilliantly incorporated into other aspects of the game, with Goblins who ballet dance as they run away from you. Dragons who headbang as they hunt you down, and shop owners who sing along to the melody when you're near, cluing you in to their shop's location as well as adding another element to the arrangement.

All that would have been nothing if the music got old, but thanks to composer Danny Baranowsky, that's never a problem. Every stage has its own musical style, with a different song for every level within the stage, and they're all awesome. Also, I can't figure out if I suck at this game or if it's just plain brutal, but the fact that I still have fun as I die again and again and again really says a lot about CotN's quality.

Best of the Year - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt & Undertale

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

I can hardly imagine two games that are more different, but in a way, that's what makes having The Witcher 3 and Undertale together at the top of this list kinda perfect. The Witcher 3, a 10M$ game made by a team of about 200 people, shows that a game doesn't have to be generic in either gameplay or story just because of its AAA status. Undertale, a game mostly made by just one person with a 50,000$ budget, shows how much you can make with so little. The Witcher 3 is more ambitious, but Undertale is more consistent. And while The Witcher 3 is the culmination of a well-established IP, Undertale has all the rough charm of a completely original title.

So much has been written about both of these games that I feel it would be a waste of space to repeat what others have said about their gameplay or story. All I can think to do is to share my own experiences, in the hope that they will be enough to explain why they are my games of the year for 2015.

The Witcher 3 was a game that grabbed me so much that I played it for 3 months straight with hardly a single break and never got tired of it, and the Hearts of Stone expansion - which I was almost cheeky enough to give its own entry - only reminded me how much I love it. I'm still not sure whether or not I like it better than Witcher 2, which given how much I love that game, is a very good position to be in. I have some issues with it, especially the insignificance of choices made in previous games and even many made within the game itself, but disappointing as that was, The Witcher 3 remains a masterpiece.

Undertale obviously did not last as long as Wild Hunt, but it was one of those games that within the first five minutes went from a game I was sure I'm going to hate to a game that I knew I'm going to love. From the moment I got past the initial twist and met Toriel, I fell in love with the game and its characters. By that, I don't just mean the main characters, although they are nothing short of brilliant ("I'M NOT CRYING! I JUST... CAUGHT SOMETHING IN MY EYE!" / "what did you catch?" / "TEARS!!!"), but also the monsters. Undertale is often praised for enabling you to go through the entire game without killing anyone, which is cool, but its genius lies in giving every monster its own personality. For me, that's where Undertale's most memorable moments came from, and it's why I still cringe at the idea of killing any of the enemies in the game. Of course, if that's what you want to do, go ahead - it's up to you how to play your game. But you're gonna have a bad time.

Of all the games I played this year, these are the two games I can guarantee I'll still be coming back to years from now. They're more than just games for me - they're worlds I can't stop thinking about. Frankly, any year that gives us even one game like that is a damn fine year, and so, 2015 has been extremely generous. With upcoming games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2 and Horizon, there's every chance we'll be just as lucky this year - fingers crossed!

*Yes, I know it's "man" - I'm trying to be inclusive here!

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Not a hero, just an old killer

It's the pain you feel from a once-great franchise that isn't there anymore!

Of all the games due to come out this year, none filled me with as potent a mix of excitement and apprehension as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The first Metal Gear Solid may be my favorite game of all time, and Snake Eater is not far behind. Even Metal Gear Solid 2, easily the worst among the first four main MGS titles, is a great game in its own right.

The last few years, however, have not been so kind to the franchise. The last good Solid game was MGS4 in 2008, and even that had a trainwreck of a second ending which sullied the whole experience. Since then we've had Peace Walker, the "nice try" of the series, and Ground Zeroes, which was almost universally reviled due to it lasting just under two hours, having no plot and, scandalously for a Metal Gear game, no boss fights. The idea of combining these two games in an open-world setting, which nowadays usually means diluting the narrative in favor of a string of boring, rote sidequests, did not seem like one worth looking forward to.

Sadly, The Phantom Pain does not exceed expectations, nor does it fulfill its creators' stated intention of maturing the series. In its rush to distance itself from its predecessors, it forgot to forge an identity of its own. The result is a game that is not only bad at being Metal Gear Solid, but which also fails to be a particularly interesting version of anything else, driven down by a misguided desire to be edgy and an abundance of corporate greed.

Remember, this is a sneaking mission! Nah, just kidding

The Phantom Pain picks up Big Boss' story 9 years after the events of Ground Zeroes, and it wastes no time getting into it. After the obligatory tutorial scene, you face gas-masked soldiers a la the first Half-Life, a floating, psychic, gas-masked child (there's a lot of gas masks in this game for some reason), and a man made of fire. There's fighting, sneaking, car crashes, a chase on horseback - so exciting! So much action! Man, I can't wait to see everything they've thought up for this game!

And then you sneak into a base to rescue a guy. Then you sneak into another base to kidnap a guy. Sneak into a base to get intel. Sneak into a base to maybe kidnap several guys. Maybe you find out that you can't rescue the guy you wanted to rescue. Maybe you thought you snuck into the base but ah, the big bad knew you were there all along, and know he has a speech prepared to read out to you. It's the same same thing repeated ad nauseam until the game finally decides to throw you a bone and show you a cutscene to break up the monotony. It gets even worse later in the game, when you are forced to literally repeat past missions to unlock further parts of the story.

But this repetition is not only bad for the player, as it also serves to expose The Phantom Pain's broken mechanics. The basics are the same as in Ground Zeroes: you can sneak past guards, or if you prefer, take them out silently, either before or after interrogating them. Non-lethal knockouts are possible, but recovering soldiers will alert their buddies to the fact that something is afoot. As usual for MGS, killing enemies is discouraged mostly through score penalties at the end of the mission, but non-lethal is the more enjoyable way to play the game. Another holdover from GZ is reflex mode, where upon being discovered, you enter what is essentially bullet time, giving you a chance to take out an opponent before he alerts the entire base to your presence. I find that it only serves to further dilute the stealth element of the game, but it's harmless enough, for a very simple reason: the stealth in this game is complete nonsense.

Initially, you might be tempted to be very slow and methodical, riding slowly on horseback, hiding from enemies by clinging to the opposite side of the horse (which, admittedly, is a cool mechanic), scanning the base for the best route in and slowly working your way through, memorizing the guards' patrol patterns as you go. The game can be quite challenging when played this way, especially if, like me, you play MGS without killing, knocking out or alerting anyone, and as such, you might find yourself repeating certain sections quite a few times. That's when you start looking for shortcuts, and upon doing that, you realize the enemies in this game are deaf, dumb and blind (dumb as in stupid - they can talk just fine).

In most cases, you can easily run all the way to a base's outer wall undetected. If you run right next to an enemy, they'll hear you, but otherwise, feel free to run around the desert in plain sight of the guards. The enemies' hearing problems get downright creative at times: I once managed to sneak into a prison cell past a guard, but then couldn't find an opening to sneak back out. Luckily, the game allows you to throw empty magazines to draw guards away from their positions. I meant to throw a magazine far past the guard to make him go investigate, but my angle was bad and the magazine instead hit the ceiling and fell down - prompting the guard to go up one floor, thinking that the noise came from up there. This was shortly after I managed to sneak past a guard who was 15 meters away from me - just under 50 feet - by crawling on the ground in broad daylight. Not that the guard didn't see anything: he looked, said "huh?", moved in to check closer, and then determined that he was just seeing things.

Luckily, stealth can be safely ignored, and often should be, seeing as its faults can work against you almost as often as they work for you. With your impressive arsenal of weapons, armed combat is a piece of cake. In fact, even without any weapons, you should be OK. I was once detected by four machine gun-toting soldiers who were quite far apart, and I managed to run up to each one and knock him out with my bare hands. A lot of people complain that MGS4 felt too much like a shooter, but I guarantee you that if you run up to a group of enemies with machine guns in that game, you're dead.

That wouldn't be so bad if TPP wasn't an especially mediocre and uninvolved take on the genre. By the penultimate story mission, you will find yourself marking your enemies with your uncanny ability to forever keep track of anyone you have ever seen, instructing your sniper companion to take down wave after wave of enemy tanks and even calling in full-blown airstrikes, wondering what happened to your Metal Gear Solid and why you're wasting your time on this vapid power fantasy when you could just go play Far Cry 3 or Black Ops II and have a much better time.

It's awesome when you get that puppy, though

Speaking of the companions, let me be very clear - they're awesome. Each companion in The Phantom Pain is not only immensely likable, but also useful in its own way. D-Horse is good for getting around quickly undetected, D-Walker is good for a speedy getaway with some serious firepower, and D-Dog - well, D-Dog is just the best. I love D-Dog. My best moments in TPP were spent petting D-Dog and looking at how beautifully rendered his fur is. Other than being cute, he can also detect enemies from some distance and distract them, making him the best way to keep the game enjoyable for those who, like me, insist on playing stealthily.

And then, there's the aforementioned sniper, Quiet. Once she's recruited, the game is basically over, because Quiet can take down an entire base before anyone knows what's up. In fact, she's almost a must if you want to take down one of the bosses non-lethally, and then your role reduces to running around to compensate for the time it takes her to reload. She's also one of the most egregious example of sexual objectification I can recall in any media, walking around in what is essentially a bikini, because - get this - she has to breathe through her skin. It's obviously nothing more than an excuse to have her walk around half-naked, never mind the fact that no one questions why, if she needs to have as much skin exposed as possible to breathe, she doesn't just shave her head. That wouldn't be considered all that sexy, I guess. It's a shame, because a more well-rounded and far less exploitative portrayal could have made her into a great character. Instead, we have moments of attempted drama constantly interrupted by childish attempts at titillation.

This is the conflict at the heart of The Phantom Pain's narrative issues, and while sexism is a large part of it, it is by no means its only manifestation. Putting aside the futility of trying to make a mature game in a series where we fight robot ninjas, giant mechs and photosynthetic old men, TPP's main problem is that it tries to act grown up while still retaining all of its childish prejudice. TPP confronts you with shocking image after shocking image, trying so hard to impress you with its po-faced, brooding facade, just to piss away what little atmosphere it managed to build up by having Quiet literally shove her butt in your face the very next moment.

It doesn't help that both the usually witty and likable Snake as well as the over the top, maniacal Ocelot barely say anything in this game, and what little they say is said with as little emotion as possible, because you know - maturity. Add that to the fact that both, along with Miller, affect the same low-end growling voice in all of the many, many useless codec conversations that they partake in, and you get a cast of characters that is not only impossible to like, but mostly hard to even tell apart, a problem that is compounded by the insane amount of datalogs, which contain most of the game's dialogue (and by the way, no, I don't consider datalogs to be plot).

One of the most cringe-worthy moments in the original Metal Gear Solid is when Snake asks Meryl how she managed to sneak a gun past some guards, and she answers that "women have more hiding places than men". When a similar comment is made during the ending of Ground Zeroes, the silly and stupid sexism of the past graduates to full-blown misogyny. There's nothing more juvenile than a child trying to prove its maturity to the world, and The Phantom Pain's hateful exploitation of women is but the final blow to the plot's credibility.

And of course, microtransactions

Not long after The Phantom Pain was released, we learned that an entire act is missing from the game, presumably due to considerations of development time and budget. Don't worry, though: the game does contain a multiplayer mode that absolutely no one asked for, complete with microtransactions that will allow you to build your base up faster and, in an amazingly shameless act, recover soldiers and equipment that enemies make off with - the closest thing to date to a game trying to squeeze protection money from its players.

The outright theft of a third of the game isn't even the worst effect of the multiplayer mode: it is the way the pretense of running a base interferes with the single-player campaign. It makes you grind to get certain types of equipment, wait around for said equipment to be developed, and in general forces upon you an overly-complicated and annoying base management system that stops the game dead at several points. By the time TPP was drawing to an end, I was hoping someone would destroy Mother Base again just so I could be liberated from this trite, aggravating micro-management.

Mired in myopic cynicism and utterly contemptuous of its fan base and legacy, The Phantom Pain feels like a game that knows all too well that it will never have a sequel. It may be popular now, and of course, I am more than happy for the people who enjoy it. However, I do not expect history to see it in quite as positive a light.

Score Calculation: In its own right, The Phantom Pain is a slightly above-average third-person open-world shooter, earning it a score of 6 for being a well-executed version of an extremely worn-out idea. However, with an entire act missing, it is in reality only two-thirds of a game, taking the score down to 4. It gets a point for having the best dog in any video game ever, but I'm gonna have to knock two points for its abuse of the Metal Gear Solid name and for Quiet's starting outfit, leaving us with

Final Score: 3

Verdict: Like Silent Hill 4, the fourth season of Community and the prequel trilogy before it, we sentence The Phantom Pain to be that part of the series that we skip over during marathons. Its name forever to follow the word "except" when mentioning one's love for the franchise during a discussion of favorite video games, TPP typifies what happens when talent fails to match ambition and natural evolution is substituted with caprice, all topped off with healthy dose of AAA-developer cynicism.

Game Review: Gone Home

Gone Home is one of those games that was bound to be divisive. In a gaming world populated almost entirely by open-world shooters - seriously, go check on Wikipedia how many of the best-rated games of recent years are "open world action-adventure" - it's a highly non-standard gaming experience, and the themes (or rather, theme) that it explores are none too popular among mainstream gamers. Despite that, Gone Home seems to have gotten a lot of praise from major gaming websites, which is when you should start getting suspicious.

Before I start the review, let me tell you that I was pretty heavily biased when I started playing this game, although in two different directions. On the one hand, I really wanted to like this game. I want games to be innovative; I want them to help loosen patriarchy's grip on gaming; most of all, I have nothing but the deepest respect for the Fullbright Company, GH's developers, for coming out publicly against some particularly disgusting sexism on the side of the organizers of PAX. On the other hand, I always knew I would end up hating this game. Every single review I've read of it made it clear that you basically do nothing in this game but go around a house and read things, and I hate nothing more than a low-budget movie pretending to be a game.

Gone Home puts you in the role of Katie, a woman who comes back to her parents' home from a year in Europe and finds the house completely empty. Instead of doing what every other 20-something year-old would do at this point and invite everyone you know for a keg party, Katie decides to explore the house and uncover what happened, reading notes and listening to audio logs (somehow) left by Katie's sister Sam in order to piece together what happened. Basically, take Bioshock Infinite with nothing but voxophones and way worse graphics and you get Gone Home.

I'm not going to have any spoilers in this review, but it already says a lot that there really isn't all that much to spoil. The plot is so unoriginal and predictable that I could call the whole story from 5 minutes into the game. Seriously, after the first 2-3 audio logs, anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of 90s pop culture should immediately know pretty much what the ending is going to be, and this game almsot prides itself on its abuse of 90s pop culture icons, complete with whole cassettes of crappy 90s music spread throughout the house. The predictability of the plot makes trudging around for clues all the more unmotivated, and if I were Katie, I'd seriously be working on that keg party by now.

But seriously, that's it - you go around, reading notes, listening to audio logs and - if you're into that insuffarable alt-rock or wannabe-punk of yesteryear - play cassettes. There's no gameplay and no sophistication. Then I realized that I used to play games like this all the time - back in the 90s, there was a deluge of point-and-click adventure games, and everyone dug the hell out of them. Sure, they were nothing to write home about (get it?), but they were a fun distraction for a few hours, had some cool puzzles and often some very intelligent and funny dialogue and characters. Gone Home is basically a modernization of that genre, except it has no characters, boring as hell dialogue, and 3 of the world's most trivial puzzles. It is a point-and-click in the spirit of the worst, laziest representatives of the genre, which had you basically clicking on everything in sight until somethign happened (e.g. Phantasmagoria 2).

Gone Home received a lot of praise for its attention to detail, and yes, you can pick up and examine almost every item in the house, and it's clear that the developers put a lot of time and effort into making sure that the items you look feel real and distinct. But if anything, I'd say there's way too much attention to detail. It's never clear what's important and what isn't, and when you can pick up and look at every pen, eraser and book in the house, it's just too much. It's a classic rookie mistake in basically every form of art that it's amazing to me that no one has called the game out on this. When you make everything stick out, nothing sticks out, and the whole games becomes a big pile of nothing.

Sam's voice acting is pretty good, though not without its weak moments - at some point, Sam tells about a kiss she had, and then proceeds to unleash the most stereotypically girly giggle I ever heard in my life. It is such a weak moment, especially given how it clashes with Sam's portrayal as a brave girl who, from early on, resisted attempts to peg her into a traditional gender role. Most of all, I am seriously bothered by how meta the concept of the audio logs is. Unlike other games that employ them, there are no physical devices that contain the logs, so all you can conclude is that these are just diary entries by Sam that are being read out. But if Sam is so desperate to hide the full story from Katie -  as the game clearly tells you she is several times - why the hell did she go to such lengths to record it for her and leave clues as to the location of the records? Why make Katie go through all of this reading and exploring? The whole basic concept of the game just smacks of lazy design.

I mentioned that there are a few puzzles in the game. Actually, only one really deserves to be called a puzzle, and even that one only reveals the ending to a subplot - you don't need it to beat the game. The first one was particularly disappointing - you need to find a combination to a drawer lock, and I was looking around for clues, looking for combinations that were mentioned often, and I was so excited to try it on the lock. It didn't work. I decided to go back for it, only to go a bit further and see a combination clearly written on one of the items in the next room - a combination which had nothing to do with anything in the game. And this is one of your three puzzles, mind you - the only times in the game where you, the player, are actually needed.

Also, this is a minor point, but I have to mention this - why are there so many things in the game written in cursive? I mean, I know a lot of native English speakers can read and write in cursive pretty fluently, but even then it's not everyone. Why the hell would you force me to read so much cursive? It's so painful, so straining. The Last of Us had a lot of stuff in cursive, but guess what? You could push a button and get a typed version of the same text, which makes sense given that your character probably knows how to read cursive. Gone Home even does this at one point, but then, for some inexplicable reason, some of the most important documents in the game are this huge page of cursive with no typed version. Seriously, Fullbright, I love you people and all, but screw you with all this cursive.

Don't get me wrong, there are some very nice moments in this game. I really cracked a smile in the part where Sam talks about this kid she hated, but was friends with because "he always had the best Nintendo games". Another good one is when you see Katie and Sam's answers to a school assignment, in which students were given a list of sentences describing menstruation and had to rearrange them in the correct order. Katie just followed the instructions; Sam interspersed them with a story about a woman who rebels against oppressive societal norms and becomes a leader in the Polish in WWII. It really does a great job of building up Sam's character, though like I said, this portrayal is hardly consistent.

Lastly, I can't finish this review without saying anything about the game's price. This game takes at most two and a half hours to finish, and that's if you read everything, do everything, and examine everything. You can probably finish it in under an hour if you power through it. And yet, the developers had the nerve, the outright gall, to ask 20$ for this game. 20$! Do you have any idea what PC games you could get for 20$? You could get both Deus Ex and System Shock 2 on Steam for less than that, and have 30-40 of the best gaming hours of your life (both games, by the way, have better graphics than Gone Home). Hell, you can probably get some of the most awesome 3DS games for 20$, and you'd have a ball without having to get out of bed. 20$ for this non-game with zero replay value? Shame. Shame!

So, bottom line: don't get this game. It's so not worth your money. It is borderline offensive in asking for so much money for so little game. Just watch the Let's Play on YouTube - you'll get the same experience without getting ripped off. The only possible reason I could think of to buy this game would be to have Fullbright's back given their stand on PAX, but I'd like to believe you can be a progressive and still give people a product worth their money. But that's just me.

Game Review: The Last of Us

The first problem with reviewing The Last of Us - and this was true even when it first came out - is that most people had already decided what they think about the game before playing it. When GameSpot scored the game an 8/10, the website and reviewer Tom Mc Shea received a torrent of angry and at times downright hateful responses claiming that they scored this "masterpiece" unfairly – this a full 9 days before the game was released. This incident was one of many things which inspired me to write this post.

Considering the fact that The Last of Us has been out for two months and that pretty much everyone has heard about it by now, it may seem pointless to write a review of it now. But given how much this game has been praised - usually, for all the wrong reasons - and given what I have already written, I believe it can be safely said that this review remains relevant. While I will discuss the plot, I am going to first and foremost discuss gameplay, and especially, how often these two aspects are confused when discussing this game.

Disclaimer: As far as I can tell, this review is spoiler-free. However, keep in mind that when reading a review, there's always the risk of being exposed to some minor spoiler, like the location of a fight or a type of enemy. Tread carefully.

I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT

A good place to start a game review is identifying its genre, so that people would at least loosely know what to expect. With The Last of Us, that's not as easy as it may seem. The game has been marketed as a survival horror game; however, anyone who identifies survival horror with games like Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil (I know, I'm ancient) will have a hard time understanding why. To explain that statement, let's talk about what survival horror is in the context of video games.

Survival games are about overcoming a situation in which the odds are stacked against you: you have limited means in your disposal with which you have to overcome impossible odds, including enemies that are extremely difficult or impossible to defeat. In Alone in the Dark, few monsters could be killed with conventional weapons, and some could not even be seen without special equipment. The Resident Evil games (the first few, at least) are well-known for not even giving you enough ammo to clear the first few rooms you go through. The message that these games sent you early on is that not all encounters can or should be dealt with as fights; that killing all your enemies is not always desirable or possible, making them a constant threat in your exploration of the game world. And you usually have to explore those areas of the game a lot. [1]

If we agree on that interpretation of survival, then it certainly doesn't apply to The Last of Us. Your characters are much stronger than most enemies you'll meet, and unless you're incredibly wasteful and careless, you'll have more than enough ammo and supplies to beat every enemy in the game, even on the highest difficulty level (Survivor). In fact, for the most part, not only is it possible to finish off all enemies before moving on, but it is actually required. There are very few encounters in the game that you can avoid, and even then the game sometimes discourages that choice by giving one of the enemies some collectible that you can't get any other way. There is even one cutscene, which I can only interpret as an intentional meta-joke, in which your character is told by another that you could sneak by the next set of enemies without killing them, "even though I know that's not your style", to which the response is "we'll see how it goes".

So there is no survival element in this game; what about horror? You probably already know that there are zombie-like creatures in The Last of Us, the Infected, which have already killed the majority of humanity, and are a constant threat to the survival of the species. This setting sounds promising: what's more horrifying than to have all of humanity under the constant threat of a violent death at the hands of a throng of nightmarish monsters?

To its credit, the game does a remarkably good job of explaining the existence of these "zombies": the Infected are not undead, but humans whose brains have been taken over by parasitic bacteria. They are living creature, similar (at least at first) to zombies, who are highly aggressive towards humans. The fact that this is based on the real world Cordyceps parasite, which can take over an ant's brain, makes the story seem all the more realistic and horrifying. It also explains why the Infected can be killed by conventional means like bullets and choking.

However, all that tells you is that The Last of Us is a video game set against a horror backdrop. Sadly, this horror is never reflected in the gameplay. Horror in a video game is the constant feeling of insecurity; the understanding that not only are you comically under-equipped to defeat your enemies, but that you can never know what threat will come next, nor when and where it will appear. Both Alone In the Dark and Resident Evil are full of examples.

There's none of that in The Last of Us. Oh, you'll face quite a few Infected; however, the game almost always lets you know when the Infected show up and when you've killed all of them, and the same is true for fights with humans. Combine this with your ability to hear Infected from afar and effectively see them through walls (think Detective Mode in the Batman Arkham games) and it's basically impossible to be surprised. To be fair, this super-hearing is disabled when playing on Survivor difficulty, but Survivor only opens up after one playthrough. Since it doesn't change the location or number of enemies in any encounter, you are unlikely to be surprised.

I just told you a lot about what The Last of Us isn't, but I still didn't tell you what it is. To do that, let's be unconventional and talk gameplay. Like I said, encounters are little more than out-and-out combat, but The Last of Us actually does a good job of forcing you to be smart about how you engage enemies. Combat is fast and fluid, with a very good action vibe to it. There are many, many ways to engage enemies, and the game generally forces you to take advantage of all of them to be effective. 

The game gives you many chances for armed combat, with 12 different weapons available. The game thankfully avoids shooter cliches like three barely-distinguishable machine guns or overly-powered RPGs, with most guns different enough that you will find yourself switching between all or most of them in accordance with the situation you find yourself in. Some guns are better for taking down enemies who are further away, some are better at close range, and others are useful mostly against the bigger and stronger enemies. Even the two basic weapons, the pistol and revolver, which are pretty much the same in practice, have enough cosmetic differences between them to feel legitimately distinct.

Melee combat is less effective, as you may quickly get overwhelmed by enemies, but you will still use it in the beginning and in the later stages of an encounter to conserve ammo. Luckily, your character is so badass that he can kill almost anything with at most four punches. You can also use various melee weapons like crowbars, two-by-fours and baseball clubs to make it harder for enemies to hit you back, and these can be outfitted with various extensions that give you a certain number of one-hit kills. 

While guns and punches are fun to use, you will be even more effective if you take advantage of the game's stealth mechanics. Like pretty much any action game released nowadays, sneaking up on an enemy allows for an instant-kill takedown, but The Last of Us offers several fiendishly clever variations on that concept. Your character is quite the ninja, and can sneak around without being heard by human enemies, and for the most part, by Infected as well. Upon grabbing unaware enemies, you can finish them off by choking them, which doesn't take up any resources but does take a lot of time, meaning that you could be spotted and attacked by other enemies in the meantime; or you can finish them off with a shiv, which is fast but uses up precious supplies. Either way, you'll want to drag grabbed enemies away before taking them out in order to keep enemies unaware of your presence for as long as possible. Alternatively, you can use grabbed enemies as hostages, forcing other enemies to stay back while you sneak off with their buddy, or use them as human shields, firing at enemies with a handgun while forcing them to either hold their fire or hit their own comrade.

This is only one example of how combat in The Last of Us is smart, fun and strategic. However, it is also the only thing you do in The Last of Us. This is how the game goes: you go from one location to another, killing almost every living creature you come across and picking up any supplies you find. And don't get me started on the "puzzles" in the game, uninspired fetch quests which make the Legend of Zelda's box-moving affairs look like advanced calculus in comparison.

Older gamers will remember that there used to be a genre a lot like this back in the day: games like Double Dragon and Final Fight, called beat 'em ups, where your goal was to advance across the screen, kill all enemies and pick up anything they dropped. And while combat in The Last of Us is a hundred times more sophisticated than any beat 'em up I've ever played, it operates on the same basic philosophy. The result is that The Last of Us is a stealth-'em-up game with a survival-horror plot. Few games are able to make the plot and gameplay fit together, to make combat feel like a necessary and logical extension of the story, and sadly, The Last of Us isn't one of those games.

I JUST SHOT THE HELL OUT OF THIS GAME

The plot and voice work in The Last of Us has received praise from just about everyone, and rightly so. As far as writing and voice-overs go, The Last of Us is perfect, and I am not exaggerating. Everything the characters say and do is believable, [2] and even the dialogue that enemies exchange with their comrades and with you is mostly very solid.

The most surprising thing about the game's plot is it's attitude to humanity. It could have been very easy for the writers to say that after the outbreak, times are tough and people are scum, period. But the game insists, even in this dark setting, to show faith in humanity. You'll see characters go from being ruthless killers to caring human beings through their interactions with others; you'll see the most aggressive and violent people showing their vulnerabilities upon finding the body of a loved one who fell victim to an infected attack; you'll learn of people who, against all selfish instincts of self-preservation, let strangers in need into their lives and sometimes paid dearly for it. In a way, The Last of Us isn't just the story of humans trying to stay alive; it is the story of how some are still trying to stay human. With this in mind, the daily struggle to not become Infected – manifesting itself not only in fights against Infected, but in the actions of humans who preferred to end their lives rather than let the parasite take over them – can be seen as a much more metaphorical struggle against losing one's humanity.

The story, as compelling and well-written as it is, would not have been as effective if it weren't for what is definitely the best voice-acting cast in gaming history and one of the best casts I've seen in general. Especially noteworthy are Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, voicing Ellie and Joel respectively. Baker is an established voice-acting god, and Johnson is a pleasant surprise for those who haven't heard of her before, to say the least.

This is The Last of Us' true triumph and the lasting impact it will have: never again will anyone be able to give a game a pass on terrible voice acting and a silly plot because "it's just a video game" (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy X). Gamers can and should expect more from video games in the future, and The Last of Us is a perfect answer to all who say that video games are not art.

Of course, everyone's opinion is valid and whatnot, but I can't help but call out some of the criticism of the game's plot. One less-enthusiastic review which I have already mentioned is the one written by Tom Mc Shea for GameSpot:

"Joel, already accustomed to a life of brutality and focusing on his own needs [Mc Shea asserts throughout the interview that Joel was a criminal before the arrival of the Infected, something which I have found no support for anywhere in the game], has partnered with a woman of a similar disposition. Tess… like so many of the characters in The Last of Us, has a one-note personality that allows little room for a more nuanced interpretation… Such flimsy characterizations erect an emotional barrier for the first few hours of this adventure… Without any sympathetic characters to latch on to, you are left with little attachment to this pack of selfish animals."

Philip Kollar, writing for Polygon, went even further:

"The Last of Us made me feel sick to my stomach... It paints a vision of a near-future that is cold, heartless and, in many cases, downright evil. It's not a fun place to be, and likewise, the game isn't really a fun thing to play."

When I first read these comments, honestly, I was kind of offended. Not to play the Middle-Eastern card or anything – I'm no oppressed refugee myself – but I don't think these lines could have been written by anyone except members of the better-off sections of Western society. It is as if these people have absolutely no sense of what violent oppression and a daily struggle to survive do to people. People like that have no time to be sympathetic. People like that don't have the privilege of sticking to some lofty, abstract moral code. It is exactly the humanity that occasionally shines through in The Last of Us that shows that its creators got it, that they put their judgment aside and made the effort to think what sort of humans a disaster-struck environment might breed. Anyone who doesn't get that obviously can't enjoy the plot to this game, and I truly pity them for that, because if you don't understand hardship, you don't really understand humanity either. The Last of Us does a perfect job of presenting both. It is nothing short of incredible. [3]

WELL, IS THAT EVERYTHING YOU HOPED FOR?

I really enjoy playing this game, and I highly recommend it to anyone. I just think we sell video games short when we say that this is as good as they get, because to be honest, it's not. There are better games out there than The Last of Us, with comparable plot and voice acting. And although better and worse are subjective things, there are certainly games out there that have introduced new concepts, revolutionized gaming, and have done that while looking and sounding better than The Last of Us. If anything, I think the graphics in this game are objectively bad. Lighting is weird, textures are often ugly, and the game will frequently give you headaches if played for too long. Final Fantasy XIII came out 3 years before this game, and say what you will about it, it had far better graphics and was probably a little less linear.

At this point you might say: OK, The Last of Us may not have a lot going for it other than a really great plot and the combat. But how much more do you need? I mean, a lot of games try to be sophisticated and end up wasting your time on backtracking and busy work, so maybe The Last of Us' genius lies exactly in its simplicity? Well, there are a lot of genuinely sophisticated games out there, but it's true that if combat was really flawless, there wouldn't be much to complain about. However, combat is plagued by many problems which hold it back, especially in terms of AI.

First of all, combat has no clear rules. It's not about randomness or circumstances: what you can or can't do changes not only between battles, but between enemies in the same battle. Take the first serious fight against Infected: the first Infected you notice is standing still, and you can easily sneak behind it and choke it. When playing on Hard, you can usually sneak up on the rest of the Infected just the same, even if they sometimes detect you for no clear reason. However, on Survivor, I have never been able to sneak up on any other Infected in that encounter, no matter what I did. I could have accepted that I'm just not good at sneaking if it weren't for the fact that I could still sneak up on that first Infected, but all others immediately detected me when I was a few steps behind them. In other encounters, Infected didn't even need to see me or hear me to detect me, leading me to suspect that the game just made them automatically detect me when I crossed some map boundary, like video games did about two decades ago.

Another problem with combat is that it often punishes you when you try to be clever and rewards you when you take a brute force approach, especially when dealing with Infected. See, the weaker Infected, called Runners, are easier to sneak up on, but they are faster, and upon seeing you, will alert the rest of the Infected around to attack you. The more dangerous Infected, called Clickers, can't see, but have excellent hearing, and can kill you as soon as they catch you. There are also Stalkers, a stage between Runner and Clicker and probably the game's greatest miss. They are supposed to be sneaky and cunning while still able to see, but in practice, they mostly just run between two spots making scary noises.

These problems are illustrated by one fight where you face two clickers and a pack of Stalkers. Try this out if you want to have some fun: make a lot of noise, say, by running in place. The Runners, who don't have such great hearing, won't react, but the Clickers will come out swinging. You can finish both of them off – I used a shotgun for this, so you don't even have to be that quiet – and can now deal with the runners with no hassle from the clickers. Worse yet, because of the messed up detection mechanism the Runners have, you can approach and draw them back one or two at a time, so that they don't even stand a chance. Similar tactics won't necessarily get you through all fights - again, the rules are very inconsistent - but often enough, they do.

Human AI also fails to impress in this game. It happens all too often that enemies will see you from a distance, shoot at you, see you running to the right, then go to the spot you stood at, go to the left, and ask "where is that guy?" There are even worse cases where enemies seem to just forget ever seeing you, and cases where they know where you are but fail to pursue you, even when they outnumber you and could almost certainly beat you if they didn't try to get you one by one.

All of these AI bugs greatly encourage camping and brute-force tactics, and discourage intelligent stealth combat. I actually thought the game was pretty challenging when playing on Hard because I was trying to go Metal Gear Joel, but since on Survivor, being stealthy is rarely an option, I quickly realized just how easy combat is if one simply camps and takes advantage of faulty AI. Add to that your apparent ability to choke a person to death while standing right next to another enemy without him hearing you, and things really get facepalm-worthy at times.

Of course, you can ignore this and handicap yourself by refusing to take advantage of these bugs, but you really shouldn't have to, and in other games, you don't have to. Try to win by drawing enemy fire in Arkham City or Mass Effect 3. I dare you. You'll see the Game Over screen quicker than you can say "man, this review is long".

BOTTOM LINE

The Last of Us is a fun game with an amazing plot. It's not a masterpiece gameplay wise: combat, as fun and innovative as it is, is all there is to it, and it has more than a few problems, including an underwhelming AI and lack of clarity regarding what you can get away with. Still, it's a great game which in all likelihood will keep you coming back to get all the collectibles and see what else you can or can't do in a given encounter. And when you're sick of the single-player campaign, there's very good multiplayer in this game as well.

This review was written using the PAL version of the game, which is thankfully much less gory than the American version (though still plenty gory), after finishing the game on Hard, Survivor, and Survivor+.

[1] There are actually survival games which have little or nothing to do with horror. For example, Far Cry 3 is a survival game: you have to be clever in picking up resources and taking on enemies, because for the most part, everyone else is much better equipped and much stronger than you. And that's not only true for human enemies: a tiger in Far Cry 3 will mess you up, hard.
[2] Other than that cringe-worthy "I just shot the hell out of this guy". Ugh. Some people claim it's a reference a scene from The Unforgiven, but I'd say it's a bit of a stretch, and even if it is, doesn't quite work.
[3] It's also worth mentioning that anyone who played the game should know that Mc Shea's characterization of Tess is completely wrong.