"Fuck it, that works."

These four little words, so frequently uttered while playing Tom Francis's excellent sci-fi action-roguelike Heat Signature, really get to the core of the whole experience. The best laid plans of mice and keyboards, after all, never stand up to scrutiny when you're in the thick of an increasingly FUBAR mission and have to think on your feet, or while flying through space, or while teleporting through solid matter, or any other number of dramatic scenarios.

Heat Signature puts you in the space boots of any number of procedurally-generated mercenaries, operating out a newly reclaimed base sitting between several major hostile factions. By completing missions via terminals, you gain more power over these rivals and can eventually start annexing their bases by inspiring their owners to rebel against the oppressive hegemony with your daring feats. Missions usually boil down to infiltrating a ship via a speedy lander craft, making your way to the mission objective with violence and/or stealth, stealing/rescuing/capturing/assassinating the target, and making a break for it. If the lander's airlock is too far away, a nearby window suffices: you can survive in space long enough to remote control your lander to sweep you up. Maybe you decide you want to enter the enemy ship the same way; I haven't figured out how yet, but then I'm probably too much of a wuss to try.

The ingenuity of Heat Signature - some of which is delivered by the game, some of which the player has to BYOB (Bring Your Own Boldness) themselves - is in how open the game is to improvisation. The core gameplay loop involves exploiting a pause feature to plan your next move - if there's a room full of enemies about to shoot, and it'll take too long to reload your gun to kill them all in time, what else can you do? Swing the wrench you have as a back-up? Throw it instead? Teleport a second gun into your hand rather than wait for the first to reload, and then teleport the next guy's gun after taking him out? You have all the time in the world to consider, as long as there are options available. However, the game's in its element when you have more than a handful of alternatives provided by the gadgets and gizmos you've found: a key-cloner can replicate a guard's high-level key without requiring an encounter; a subverter or crashbeam can take care of a turret or an enemy's shield; a cleverly-placed acid-trap can remove a tough guard's otherwise impenetrable armor; a swapper or sidewinder can teleport you past a clump of guards bottlenecking a vital corridor of the ship; and so on. The longer you play, the more likely you are to find gadgets that recharge every mission - you don't need to be quite as stingy with those - or even recharge mid-assault.

It's with the confidence gained from your experience and new hardware that you start taking on harder and harder missions, knowing your perspicacity is likely to save your bacon even against the harshest of odds. The game duly complies, starting with "hard" missions and working their way up to "audacious," "mistake," (as in, "I've made a huge mistake") and finally "glory." (Glory missions, rather than reward you money, instead rewards you bragging rights on your friends leaderboard.) Each of your randomly generated heroes also has a randomly generated "personal mission"; the completion of which finally allows them to retire, like in a heist movie. Retiring a character, sometimes necessary if they've been blasted out of an airlock one too many times, allows you to bequeath your best item to your successor. Claiming new bases also provides permanent bonuses to your faction rather than your immediate character: these might range from better equipment in stores to stronger starting items and a higher starting cash total. Between these inheritances and base bonuses, the game's "start from scratch" roguelike limitation becomes that much more bearable. If you really get attached to your current character though, you can simply choose to keep them out of harm's way: easier missions, missions where enemies only carry stun weapons, or a special type of lander that can instantly grab your free-floating form, for example.

I thought I'd sworn off Indie roguelikes because of how pointless they feel, guiding an algorithm through a series of other algorithms to accomplish yet another algorithm, but I'm glad to have given Heat Signature a shot. It does feel like an evolution of Tom Francis's previous game, Gunpoint, partly because you're defenestrating yourself at every opportunity that arises but also in the way both games force you to jerry-rig new solutions to immediate and unforeseeable wrinkles, exercising a mental muscle that most games can't or won't reach. I retired my first character, Lacerta Singye, after one too many bumps taking on missions I had no business attempting, but her/his successor Cascara Vega is proving to be an absolute monster: thanks to a perk that provides better items from chests, I've now got several rechargeable gadgets that frequently allow me to earn various mission bonuses like bloodless (no kills), enigma (no witnesses), silent (no alarms), and unscathed (no injury to self). Unfortunately, Cascara's a little too good: they now earn less acclaim per mission because they're famous, so if I want to keep liberating new bases at a clip I'll eventually want to switch to a newbie. Albeit, a newbie with the advantage of Cascara's passed-down self-charging shield, their zero-cooldown "Instant Connection" melee baton, or a long-range crashbeam with near-infinite uses. Sky - and space - is the limit, as long as I remember to never bite off more than I can chew; a rule I break as often as I break a space merc's nose or an unusually fragile transparent aluminum window.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Norse mythology has always been a rich - and, more importantly, public domain - vein for a quick and easy fantasy universe to play around in, whether you're writing your own Viking epic based on actual Scandinavian sagas or just need a bunch of bearded gods and weird monsters to populate your mostly original fantasy RPG. Some games are more faithful than others to this source material: you have many cases where a game might be co-opting some of that "mead and axes" flavor even if they're not expressly set in Scandinavia; those that take the middleman route and more specifically Tolkien-inspired; and others still where the various World Serpents and Frost Giants are part of a larger bestiary that's a disjointed chimera of different cultures and mythologies, that may or may not actually also include a chimera. Then there you have the rare (but not that rare) few that are absolutely and deliberately riffing on Odin and pals, frequently putting some Surströmming-scoffing schmuck in charge of averting Ragnarök at all costs.

I've been playing a lot of 2018's God of War reboot over the past week, which is very much in the business of hitting giant icy monsters with lightning hammers and frost axes, and I've marvelled not only at the game's general visual quality and combat mechanics - recalling the axe never gets old - but in just how accurately and lavishly they've bothered to portray the world (or nine worlds, to be precise) of its pre-medieval Germanic setting. There's so much to see and explore, and so many lore markers that tell you various legends about the Jotun, the Aesir, the Vanir, the Elves, the Dwarves, and the few not-dead humans in this frosted-over nightmare land in which an older, embittered Kratos seeks his solitude, give or take a little sassmouth godling under his protection.

With all that going on, I've been wracking my noggin (the Nog) for other game developers that adhere to the legacies and myths of the Norse pantheon quite as devotedly as Cary Barlog and his team. There's very few examples that can match it, but we've seen so many games from so many different genres and development regions take a spin at it that I wanted to enumerate a few here. To judge their aptitude with Norse mythology, or at least my admittedly finite understanding of same, I've rated each of these games by how Norse they are, from Norse to Norser to Norsest.

Here's a few scoring criteria:

• More than five Aesir, Vanir, or Jotun either appear, are mentioned, or referenced via some bootleg equivalent.
• Odin, Loki, Hel, or Surtr is the final boss. Or any combination thereof, in the case of branching narratives.
• The game lets you hop on the Bifrost and switch to any of the nine realms besides Midgard.
• Valkyries. The more heavy metal, the better.
• Throw in a World Serpent too. Even Final Fantasy VII had one of those.
• If there's little to no talk of the Norse pantheon and the game's more of a historically accurate secular simulation of viking life, I'm willing to give it an "Ag-norse-tic Bonus" for bucking the trend.

The Lost Vikings

Maybe I'm just hopelessly stuck in the 1990s, but I'd like to think that Blizzard Entertainment's The Lost Vikings is still the first example people think of when told to name a viking-related video game. The terrible punnery for the sequel's subtitle, Norse by Norsewest, is also in some small part the inspiration for this ridiculous rating system I have going on here.

While the three protagonists are indeed as viking as they come, the games themselves aren't so much entrenched in the mythos of Odin and the Aesir. I think they're referenced a few times, but for the most part the vikings are on their own contending with tomato aliens and time-travel (and, in the sequel, robotic enhancements; not the first game to dabble with cyber-vikings, as we'll soon unfortunately discover).

Rating: Norse.

Völgarr the Viking

A more recent example of a viking platformer, Völgarr the Viking has its titular berserker fighting his way across a bunch of varied worlds to reach and defeat a dragon. Notoriously difficult, the player is given few chances to upgrade themselves to make the road easier and those upgrades can disappear in a single moment of carelessness. The game can get you so stressed that you might even end up saying regrettable things about a coworker's offspring.

Völgarr is a viking, as the game's title informs us, but his journey of vengeance is more of a Conan-esque tour of generic fantasy races. There is a big snake, but it's not a world serpent. However, it does earn a few points for getting Odin involved, and while valkyries never show up in the flesh (as far as I'm aware) there is a big statue of one that you dedicate all your treasure to.

Rating: Norse.

Prophecy I: The Viking Child

A blast from my own past, The Viking Child is probably the first time I encountered Norse mythology in any form, video games or otherwise. What I will later come to comprehend as a brazen Wonder Boy in Monster World expy with a Scandinavian makeover, Viking Child is a platformer where your health is always ticking down but the next shop with upgrades and HP refills is only ever a few screens away. I played the Atari ST version, but it was also available on PC and Amiga (and also Game Boy and Lynx?). Some wiseacre even added it to Steam, if you're curious enough to try it.

This is another case where the Norse mythology trappings are largely incidental: Loki's the villain, Odin's the one that comes to you in your moment of need, but beyond that nothing about the enemy selection or mid-bosses you fight suggest a Scandinavian background. The protagonist, Brian, is just this tiny dweeb with a dagger; nary a battleaxe to be found.

Rating: Norse.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

Now we get into the Norse-a-likes. While The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim isn't set anywhere near a real version of Northern Europe, its titular region on the continent of Cyrodiil is nonetheless steeped in Nordic flavor, from the vague stab at a Valhalla-esque afterlife to the runic iconography found scattered across its dusty, wintry dungeons and bucolic thatched-roof hamlets. Skyrim was an impressive achievement in its day: a fully-realized world replete with natural vistas and creaky ruins that felt more lived-in than any Elder Scrolls game prior. The people even looked like people! Mostly.

Naturally, there's not going to be a lot of direct references to Norse mythology. The Elder Scrolls has its own pantheon of Gods - the Nine, a coincidental number given the number of "realms" in viking lore - and its demons are specifically that of the Daedra, which aren't really based on anything besides maybe heavy metal album covers. The sagas and ballads of the Nords and their heroic deed mirror definitely evoke Norse culture, though, and the idea of a world-ending serpent that the player must thwart is at least somewhere close to the mark. I suppose it's more of a credit to the game's worldbuilders that they managed to make a game feel so very Norse-inspired without letting that subsume or overwhelm the franchise's own bespoke mythos and history.

Rating: Norse-Norser.

Might and Magic IX

Might and Magic's glory days ended around either entry VI: The Mandate of Heaven or VII: Blood and Honor, depending on who you ask. VIII: Day of the Destroyer was an interesting mix-up that nonetheless did not reach the highs of the prior two games due to some odd design choices, and after that the series went on the decline due in large part to the disaster that was Might and Magic IX. Now, it should be said the game itself isn't necessarily terrible, at least not in its current patched form; it's just that it was clearly hurried out the door in an incomplete state because the developers were close to collapsing from financial ruin, leading to what was less of a swansong and more like the noises a swan makes after being run over by a motorboat and getting caught in the propeller.

However, Might and Magic IX - in a desperate attempt to find a voice to call its own - did crib a lot from Norse mythology for its concept and world. The player-generated party is given a "Writ of Fate" early on by the local version of Odin, which promises that they will unite the warring Jarls of the land against their sworn enemy: a warlord from the East loosely based on Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. After crashing and burning spectacularly due to a betrayal of a close ally, you find out that this Eastern fellow also has a Writ of Fate that says he'll conquer the world. It all turns out to be a scheme of "Njam the Meddler" (I wonder who this is based on?) to take over the pantheon, whom you must eventually help trap in an everlasting ice prison with the other Gods' help. A fun idea, especially the part where you have to fight your way out of the underworld, but like a lot of aspects about this game it wasn't quite baked all the way through.

Rating: Norser.

Viking: Battle for Asgard

The Creative Assembly is better known these days as the Sega-owned developer who puts out all those tactical Total War games, most recently Total War: Three Kingdoms. However, back in the mid-00s they occasionally tried their hand at some console-ready action-adventure games, including Viking: Battle for Asgard. As Freya's champion Skarin, the player had to run around a big open map rescuing his countrymen while fighting off the undead forces of Hel. (In a coincidental parallel to God of War, The Creative Assembly's previous action-adventure game - that uses a lot of the same tech - was the Ancient Greece-inspired Spartan: Total Warrior.)

Lots of bonus points to hand out here. Both Freya and Hel are mentioned, as is Ragnarök, Fenrir the wolf god, and the realm of Midgard. You unfortunately never leave Midgard, and the majority of the game is spent hacking zombies apart rather than much in the way of cool encounters with various deities and fantastical beings. It gets the cold and grim tone right, at least.

Rating: Norser.

Heimdall

Heimdall was one of the earliest games to really do right by this particular mythos, as a 1991 release that has the titular would-be deity Heimdall be sent on a task to recover the weapons of the three major warrior Aesir: Odin, Thor, and Freyr. The game is an odd mix of genres, starting with a few action mini-games that determine Heimdall's stats and follower pool depending on the player's success, before moving onto an isometric action-RPG meat of the game that requires solving puzzles, reading runes, fighting draugr and elves and other creatures, and eventually solving Loki's riddles and recovering the weapons. For this feat, Heimdall ascends to join the Aesir and becomes the guardian of the Bifrost bridge.

Naturally, there's a lot of Norseness to be found here. Heimdall's journey takes him across three realms - Midgard, Asgard, and Utgard - and viking iconography and references abound. However, much of the actual gameplay is incidental to its theme: it feels more like a standard ARPG with a few Norse trappings more than anything. In addition, the game itself is a bit of a slog - it hasn't aged all that well, and like most ealry '90s RPGs it's tough to know what to do or where you should be going - but graphically it's very sharp considering we were barely into the 16-bit era at the time.

Rating: Norser.

Thor: God of Thunder

The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and presumably that of 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum) meant we briefly saw a number of superpowered character-action tie-in games based on Earth's Mightiest Heroes: I was a fan of the Captain America game myself, which transplanted Arkham Asylum's vaguely explormer structure to a German castle filled with Hydra agents. That run included this 2011 Thor game from Liquid Entertainment (WayForward did the DS port), which I only remember because of the Giant Bomb Quick Look where they kept cycling powers to make poor Chris Hemsworth say "thunder," "wind," and "lightning" in a constant cycle.

I mean, this one's kind of a cheat, but also kind of not. The Marvel universe's take on Asgard's favorite son isn't a trillion miles removed from its public domain source. The Thor comics have always drawn in a lot of characters and settings from that universe too, and this game - unrelated to the plots of any of the MCU Thor movies, beyond the main actors lending their voices - is no exception. Thor starts on Asgard training with Loki and Sif, moves around to Niflheim, Vanaheim and Muspelheim for various objectives, fights Jotun, Vanir, and Infernir, takes on Ymir and Surtr as major boss fights, and eventually saves the day. There's the small issue of these all being distinct characters within the Marvel universe, rather than the Norse originals, but that feels like a nitpick.

Rating: Norser.

Too Human

Too Human is proof that even if a game flies off the shelves, that's not necessarily a good thing. Despite an impassioned defense by Jeff Gerstmann and his Glock-wielding hoodlums Tico and Sho' Maker the critical response to Too Human was catastrophic to its fortunes, but even this proved to be the least of the game's issues. Due to some licensing/code-stealing lawsuit snafu with the owners of the Unreal Engine that was used to power the game - Epic Games, who I'm sure will add Too Human to their PC digital game store any day now - Too Human had to be removed from all commercial venues. It's reported that any unsold copies were subsequently destroyed, possibly in a burning longboat off the coast of Copenhagen. An ignominious end to a flawed game with a troubled history. Ain't game development grand?

Too Human may have had its downsides, but fidelity to Norse mythology wasn't one of them. Sure, they turned the gods into all into these weird cyborgs who owe their superhuman powers more to nanomachines than they do to ancient magicks, but you can't besmirch Silicon Knights' ability to dredge up every manner of Norse creature (which are all robots now) and Aesir with which to populate this sci-fi universe. Baldur's your protagonist, Thor and Heimdall are your buddies, Tyr and Idunn are vendors, Valkyries resurrect your ass every time you fall (though they're in no rush), ODIN's now a supercomputer, and Loki and his demonic children are the villains. I remember something about the Nirn playing a major part too, but truth be told I've blocked a lot of that game out. I... did not have a great time with this one, though I suppose I had more fun with it than Denis Dyack's lawyers.

Rating: Norser.

Valkyrie Profile

A rare Japanese take on the Norse pantheon, the Valkyrie Profile franchise - there's two main ones, a strategy spin-off, and a recent mobile game I know nothing about - invariably has you assisting one or more valkyries in their journeys to uncover grand conspiracies revolving around Odin, Loki, Ragnarok, and the einherjar that the Valkyrie are meant to shepherd into the afterlife. In addition to some incredible graphics (pixels for Lenneth, some motion-blur polygons for Silmeria) and a deeply intricate story, the games are best known for their "Soul Crush" combo-based combat mechanics, where all four members of a party attack simultaneously to create air juggles and other functional chains.

VP's mythology chops are fairly legit, taking the basis of the valkyries recruiting the honored dead for Valhalla and spinning that into a game premise that has you cycling out playable champions every chapter as you inevitably send your best warriors to Odin. Speaking of whom, he and his lieutenant Freya (who is less a fertility goddess here and more like the Norse answer to Darth Vader) are major characters and potential antagonists depending on how the game progresses, while Loki and Surtr are your other more traditional villain options. Most of the levels revolve around defeating Norse-related monsters with your team of dead heroes too, and of course Ragnarök and all its concomitant apocalyptic hijinks is an ever-present threat.

Rating: Norser.

Jotun

This well-animated Indie action-adventure has a great sense of scale, as your tiny viking warrioress is tasked with striking down a series of powerful elemental giants and their throngs of minions in a series of tough boss fights separated by some exploration and upgrades. The titular Jotun are truly colossal, easily twenty times bigger than yourself, and sometimes it's all you can do to evade their massive AoE attacks with the narrowest of margins while you whittle down the adds flowing in from various directions.

Jotun is also venerating with the Norse material, throwing in lots of little references to the world of Yggdrasil and Midgard and the other realms. Odin appears as the instigator of this little quest of yours, as well as at the end for the protagonist's final challenge, though besides the titular Jotun there aren't too many other NPCs. It's definitely a world brought to life through all those ancient writings, hitting places like the Lake of the Nine and eventually Valhalla in Asgard.

Rating: Norser-Norsest.

Ragnarok

If you don't care about graphics, the '92 roguelike Ragnarok (also known as Valhalla in some regions) has all the ASCII goodness your unrefined palate can handle. Little more than a Rogue or NetHack that is awash with Norse mythology, the game is nonetheless extremely complex and very faithful to its source material. It also had a few conveniences uncommon to roguelikes at the time, like a saving system that only worked after so many steps (to prevent scumming) and a GUI that made it much easier to remember all the different commands you could use. The monsters were all drawn from viking legends also, and there's a huge number of them to memorize; it figures that most can hit you with debilitating conditions (birdlike "kalvins" can eat your eyes, for example, which is never helpful) or outright kill you, given that this is a roguelike.

The player is given multiple tasks to avert Ragnarök, or at least tweak the odds so the Aesir are more likely to win, and they range from recovering Odin's, Thor's, and Freyr's weapons (a common theme in these games), recovering Baldur's soul from Hel, finding Heimdall's horn Gjall so he can signal the start of Ragnarök to get everyone ready (I guess he plays Reveille on it?), and helping Tyr to fight despite losing an arm. These misfortunes are all events prophesized by actual Ragnarök legends, and so what you're doing here is a little bit of "mythological historical revisionism" to ensure these Norse gods, unlike the "real" ones, won't be caught with their breeches around their ankles.

Rating: Norsest.

God of War

And finally, we have the 2018 God of War: the most recent game on this list and the most recent game I've been playing. Sony Santa Monica has put ol' Kratos through the ringer plenty of times in his native Greece, sowing a strong distrust in the deities who would play around with mortal lives, and giving him an overwhelming anger that propelled him to the titular divine role and even post-losing his powers. Turns out you can get a lot done if you're just angry enough. With this sequel, the world is expanded to be larger than ever before and filled with incidental details and side-questing if the core path proves too challenging or dull. While I love the combat and story, the side-content is what's really making this game for me. I'm inclined to 100% the game over the subsequent week, gabbing with the surly dwarf blacksmith brothers Sindri and Brok, and trying to locate those damn elusive ravens so I can clobber them with a well-angled axe throw.

I have to say the focus on Norse mythology in this game is insanely detailed, and it helps to have Mimir - a human enchanted with vision and genius beyond mortal ken - along to provide context to the ancient triptychs and scrolls that Kratos and his son Atreyus find on the road. There are multiple worlds to visit via Tyr's temple on the Lake of Nine, each of which has its own aesthetic and enemy population, and Kratos' journey takes him all over the place even if all he wants to do is scatter his dead wife's ashes and sulk back in his wintry hovel drinking fermented deer urine or whatever tipple they have out there in the tundra.

Rating: Norsest.

That's going to do it for now, but I'm sure I've missed dozens of pertinent examples. Be sure to fill my comments section with them, if you so choose. And also don't spoil God of War because I'm not at the end yet. OK BYE.

It's not often I double up an IGotW slot like this (in fact, this would be a first), but the Princess Remedy games - there's two, Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt (2014) and Princess Remedy in a Heap of Trouble (2016) - are bite-sized adventures by design and perfect as a twosome. A graduate of some nebulously anime "healing school" (and also a Princess I guess) Princess Remedy is sent out to treat the ails of a diseased and miserable populace with the ultimate goal of defeating the source of this pestilence once and for all. Depicted through a classic Zelda-esque top-down perspective, the games have you moving around talking to NPCs complaining of various illnesses - from tummyaches to moral panics to the debilitating condition known as "being dead" - and then entering a "healing mode" where you cure them of their very specific ailments.

This healing mode is a top-down multi-directional shoot 'em up in the same engine, where Princess Remedy automatically shoots out curative "bullets" at regular intervals as the player moves her around avoiding enemy projectiles. The goal of these sequences is to eliminate every enemy on screen, each of whom has various different movement and attack patterns: one might shoot the occasional bullet your way from a stationary position, some hone in on you for collision damage, others only retaliate once you hit them - the enemies also increase in damage and difficulty as the game progresses, and each NPC has a specific assortment and arrangement of these viruses to deal with. Upon completing a healing mode fight the player is rewarded a stat boost, most of which are hearts (health). In fact, you are gated off from later parts of the game until you have a specific milestone total of hearts from helping those in the immediate vicinity. Other upgrades come in handy too, like having increased regeneration (this becomes "drain" in the sequel, with the change being that you don't regen health automatically but gain life by doing damage to enemies), stronger attack power, and more projectiles per shot. As well as earning these stat boosts from fights you can also find them in chests littered around the environment, some of which are concealed behind (not very) hidden walls and passageways. I found it advantageous to sweep up all these non-battle upgrades first whenever I got to a new area.

These games are nothing if not simple in their execution, but although each one lasts about an hour there's a certain design efficiency to boiling down the Zelda experience to those tense battles where you had to clear a room of foes moving in from all directions without kicking the bucket. This sort of condensed and concentrated Zelda-lite experience has become something of developer Ludosity's stock and trade: they're perhaps better known for the Ittle Dew series of top-down action-adventure games, which similarly narrowed in on a specific facet of the Zelda games (in Ittle Dew's case, it was the environmental puzzles often found in dungeons). Princess Remedy also benefits from the sharp, witty writing of the Ittle Dew franchise, as the NPC sicknesses become more ridiculous and abstract as the games progress.

Princess Remedy also has an unusually affectionate side throughout: in the first game, you end your adventure by choosing someone to marry, giving you the choice of every healed NPC of any gender you've met so far (or an empty chest, if you prefer). The sequel expands on this further: at any point Remedy can choose to start dating an NPC who then starts following behind you, and this has the effect of upgrading your healing mode special attack (in the first game, and the default for the second, this is a potion flask thrown like a grenade) to a bunch of different variants. You can date people, skeletons, plants, spiders, dark lords, or a particularly apathetic frog that won't help you in any way. It's all part of this cute and goofy world's charm.

The game is also one of the few Indies I've played to go the ZX Spectrum route for its aesthetic, using a lot of stark neon colors on black that tend to overlap whenever sprites cross the contours of an invisible grid. On its native resolution, the first game is barely the size of a postage stamp; the sequel, meanwhile, retains the correct ratio/sharpness of the pixel graphics regardless of the screen size. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the first game is free: it was the result of a Game Jam, while the sequel is more of a commercial fully-featured remake (and regularly drops below a dollar when a sale's on).

I wasn't expecting much from a pair of tiny games with such a lo-fi look, but I should've trusted Ludosity to deliver because both are eminently entertaining ways to spend an hour. The healing mode battles are varied enough not to drag on too much, and the alternative difficulty settings extend the games' longevity a little further if they prove to be on the easy side (I found the challenge level about right on Normal, personally). The micro-sized aesthetic has this cosy appeal to it not unlike Minit or the original The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and the games' writing made me chuckle once or twice. Both are definitely worth what little investment they ask of you.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Happy (and honestly a little melancholy) to report that I completed The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter: As I Olivier And Breathe over the midweek (hence why this blog is so late). I've much to take away from the game, beyond the amusing chest messages of last week, but the thing I wanted to focus on today is the structure of both Trails in the Sky Second Chapter and its predecessor, Trails in the Sky First Chapter. While both games follow a semi-traditional JRPG route of gradually establishing the setting and everything you need to know about the world and its characters for the opening acts, and then turning into a roller coaster of big eventful changes and dramatic reveals for its final stretch, the device through which the game's storytelling is delivered is via the conventions and quirks of the specific career of the protagonist (as well as much of her party).

In most games you play as a nebulous "adventurer" or "freelancer" role: one that is designed to give you the maximum freedom in how you choose to accomplish your goals. This absolves you from reporting in to superiors or being accountable for your actions (mostly; you still tend to get thrown in jail a lot in RPGs), but also robs your characters of the simple motivation of being a professional doing a job, supplanting it with other goals such as the pursuit of fame and fortune or a path of vengeance. The few RPGs that deign to give your heroes a day job are actually more intriguing because of it: even being a student (say, in the Persona series) will nonetheless gobble up large portions of your free time and force you to schedule your dungeoneering and world-saving to those occasional weekdays when you aren't swamped with coursework.

In Trails in the Sky, the protagonist Estelle Bright is a "Bracer": a job that collectively functions as peacekeeper, detective, mercenary, mediator, and spy - the overall chief objective of which is to maintain the peace and safety of the local citizenry by any legal means. While Bracers are given the freedom to operate as they choose, there are still certain laws and rules that they must abide by and certain approaches to problems that they should prioritize. This is part of the learning process in the first Trails in the Sky, where both Estelle and the player alike are new to this process and must learn by doing, and plays a larger role in the sequel now that Estelle is an established "Senior Bracer" and has certain expectations in that position. Rather than these rules feeling too restrictive, however, the player is drawn into role-playing the part by the occasional multiple choice response - what would a proper Bracer say or do in this moment? - and increased rewards for going above and beyond their perceived objectives. An example of the latter is being told that you need to test a weapon by getting involved in "about ten battles" with it equipped and then completing fifteen instead: the game only has so many variables with which to rate your performance on these objectives, and figuring out what the best result entails is part of the game's meta. Ultimately, the better you do, the higher you raise in the Bracer ranks, and the better reward items you receive upon hitting new tiers. This aspect is sidelined a little more as the game progresses towards its climax - professional conduct is less essential than saving the world, after all - but for most of the game it's this neat little tweak to the standard main- and side-quest format and an excuse to vary the player's objectives beyond "go beat that boss monster" or "get to the end of this dungeon."

To highlight what I mean, I've assembled a few examples of multi-layered Bracer missions provided throughout Trails in the Sky Second Chapter, discussing what is involved in the assignment and how the player might be tasked with accomplishing something outside the norm for a traditional JRPG. It's but one of the many facets that make these Trails games a bit more special than they might first appear (though I say that knowing that future games won't necessarily follow this Bracer Guild contrivance).

(Couple of disclaimers:

• The first is that there might be some mild content spoilers, though I've avoided talking about the game's story and main mission chain.
• The second is that I forgot to take screenshots of any of these missions while doing them, so I've broken up these little rundowns with more of those delightful chest messages. Can't get enough of those in my view.)

Election Office Assault

The mission: The mayoral election in the port town of Ruan is heating up, and a major campaign aide is found unconscious with a head wound. Whodunnit?

The process: A classic, albeit PG-rated, murder assault mystery for the Bracers to solve. I mentioned above that Bracers will occasionally be required to solve disputes and complex crimes: this is one of the few missions in SC that approximates police work. The assault victim, caught unawares from behind, is but one unreliable witness in a hotel full of possible suspects. Getting to the bottom of the case involves questioning multiple people about multiple subjects - where they were, their alibi, any strange behavior - until you eventually narrow down who was responsible.

Though this mission largely boiled down to speaking to the same five or six NPCs over and over, taking any new information or keywords to each one in turn, there's some really interesting mechanics in play that stretches the engine towards what is not normally a function of the game (branching conversations, abductive reasoning). You also have the choice to, at any time, bow out of the investigation and let the chief suspect take the fall. The true culprit, meanwhile, is more ridiculous than insidious. A fun deviation from the norm, all round.

Recruiting Great Gamblers

The mission: A woman is at her wit's end because her husband refuses to leave the casino in the middle of a winning streak. Can't a few cardsharp Bracers knock some sense into him?

The process: This mission serves to introduce the game's casino in Ruan, which in true typical JRPG gambling form can be cheesed for huge financial gains relatively early into the game. Though slots, roulette, blackjack, and poker are available, this particular mission involves the latter. The goal is to play three games against this one opponent - one with Estelle, one with her partner Agate Crosner or Scherazard Harvey (you choose to accompany one or the other very early into the game), and one with the foppish secret agent Olivier Lenheim who is presently serving the group as an assistant.

If it wasn't made clear enough by the game up to this point, Olivier is a fantastic character and this mission really makes his strengths apparent. I won't go exactly into what happens - it's another one of those missions where it's not clear what the best choices are, though some knowledge of poker helps - but Olivier saves the day in the most appropriately inappropriate manner possible. (For anyone curious, someone was kind enough to upload the entire scene to YouTube and I've timestamped the video at the relevant moment.)

Fishing Spot Search

The mission: The Fisherman's Guild is looking for the best spots to fish across Rolent, a relatively backwater region of the Kingdom of Liberl. The Bracers are to try fishing in any spots they find and report back.

The process: The reason I've highlighted this one is because there was some huge push back in the mid-00s in Japan before this game debuted (it took something like eight years for the localization to happen) to do more with the brief fishing mini-game seen in the First Chapter. In SC, players find fishing spots everywhere - there's a telltale ripple effect in the water to show you where to cast a line - and you then select the rod (only affects what bait you can use) and the bait (determines the type and size of fish) and have at it. A relatively simple timing-based mini-game ensues, and it's overall an activity that doesn't really factor into the story at all beyond this one side-mission. However, there is a whole library of fish out there to catch if you wanted something extra to do. There's probably a great article out there on how much Japanese players love angling in their RPGs, but I don't have a sufficiently informative perspective to write it myself.

The other reason I selected this relatively anodyne side-quest is because it's one of several where it's not clear where the cut-off should be, and is instead left to the player's discretion. There are, in fact, six fishing spots across Rolent, including one in Rolent's spacious sewer system (mmm tasty) and one in the pond next to Estelle's home. Reporting all six gets you the best reward; any fewer is still a success, but not one that rewards the maximum bonus Bracer Points. Of course, this extra level of meticulousness might be seen as a detriment, especially considering that the player has no way to tell how well they've done or how much better they could've performed. The game can be a bit on the strict side if you aren't following a guide.

The Stolen Sign

The mission: In a moment of brazen audacity, someone stole the placard to the Bracer's Guild while no-one was watching. The Bracers are left with a calling card featuring a riddle that hints to the sign's possible location. Riddle Me Piss, Bracers!

The process: Sky SC has a troublesome recurring boss calling himself the Phantom Thief who has a number of quests in the game, usually involving the theft of something of great importance. Each of these missions invariably requires following a series of riddles regarding the local environment, from landmarks around town to more subtle destinations that require a keen eye and wit to figure out. It's never made clear what the intent of these little riddle games are, beyond the Phantom Thief being something of a showboat with too much time on his hands.

What I appreciate most about these missions is how worn down the party becomes after the fourth or fifth one. At one point Estelle's response to seeing a new calling card essentially boils down to "Goddess. Give. Me. Strength." The party is extremely over this guy's shit from the second challenge onwards, though that doesn't necessarily remain true for the player. It's a typical example of the way the game throws out little challenges that don't always involve monster bashing or collecting ingredients. I found them to be a lot of fun (more so than actually fighting the Phantom Thief, who trolls you mercilessly) but then I was that one guy who bothered to hunt down all the Riddler trophies across the Batman: Arkham franchise.

The Occupation of Jenis Academy

The mission: Enemy troops have seized the prestigious Jenis Academy while the rest of the nation is in a panic over certain major story-related events and the army is stretched too thin to deal with it. Can Estelle and the other Bracers take the school back?

The process: One of the more ambitious missions in the game is also one of the easiest to miss: Chapter 8, when this mission becomes available, is a period of turmoil that has you bouncing around the whole kingdom to assuage a disaster at every turn. You'd be forgiven for walking right past the Jenis Academy on your travels, until you get a hint at the local guild that something might be afoot over there. Once you get there, the whole school's been taken over by the antagonists' footsoldiers and there's not a moment to lose if you're going to resolve the situation without casualties.

The mission is broken up into two main parts: a scouting run by a particularly stealthy member of your team, whose job it is to find out where all the hostages are and the approximate enemy numbers, done so by peeking through windows and keeping out of sight. The second half is the rescue itself, where you tick off your list of hostages as you rescue them and eventually take on the scheme's mastermind. I appreciate this mission not only for, again, giving the Bracers some serious police work to do rather than the usual bounty hunts or fetch quests, but because it relies on your knowledge of this secondary location based on previous visits and there's a certain level of respect for the player's intelligence. Jenis Academy also faced a potential catastrophe in First Chapter, and I guess the designers figured if they were going to bring back this typical Japanese highschool in the middle of a vaguely European steampunk-era kingdom they might as well make use of it again. It also ends on a funny note, defusing the tension of the hostage crisis that preceded it.

After the heaviness of last week, I was looking forward to something a bit lighter and a bit more concise that could serve as a brief hiatus between Trails in the Sky SC sessions (a game that I'm adoring so far, by the by). I found a perfect example of what I was looking for in Ben Esposito's cute little tale of a raccoon, his human friend Mira, and a magical moving hole that can swallow anything and everything with enough time.

Donut County isn't trying to pretend it isn't anything more than a truncated Katamari Damacy with some snappy millennial humor and the King of All Cosmos's tenuous grasp on human civilization transplanted onto a tribe of avaricious and curious raccoons, as depicted by the "Trashpedia" which conveys their specious understanding of the world in much the same way KoAC's mighty intellect made the best guesses it could as to the purpose of a coffee cup ("tiny boat?") or a hula hoop ("an art piece that represents infinity?"). The gameplay follows a direct correlation: you have to start by eating the smallest objects and, once you gain in mass, are eventually capable of swallowing larger and larger items until the entire level has been devoured by your voracious void.

Perhaps due to the usual limitations of budget, time, and manpower frequently faced by Indie developers, these levels are relatively small and there's no real margin of error like there is in Katamari Damacy: with very few exceptions, you need to swallow everything in a semi-specific order to complete the level, because there's no room for asset superfluity given the requisite increased amount of 3D modelling involved. This, combined with the relative smallness of the levels and the lack of any danger or a time limit, makes for a very predictable and simple progression through each level. These levels, incidentally, are discussed in flashback by the people who owned the houses getting swallowed up: each level is bookended with a scene with the entire populace of Donut County somewhere deep underground, sitting around a campfire as they deliver their tales of property destruction woes. The foolhardy raccoon responsible, BK, is nothing if not adamant that he was doing a town a favor with these all-consuming "deliveries," though the reality is that he's simply hooked on a raccoon-created app for unlockable prizes as rewards for collecting "trash" for the raccoon leader, the Trash King. The story plays more of a role towards the end of the game as you take the fight to the Trash King, but the first two-thirds simply have you bouncing from one household or business to the next, figuring out what to drop down the hole and in what order, and occasionally solving puzzles (like catapulting objects out of the hole to hit levers high up, or cooking the perfect soup) to make progress. It's a remarkably simple, accessible game even compared to Katamari Damacy - instead of contending with two analogue sticks for movement, you simply drag the hole around the screen to where it needs to be, jiggling it when necessary to make the larger objects fit down. It is, therefore, equally suited to touchscreen controls, mice, and analogue sticks alike.

When the only major complaint I can make about a game is "I wish there was more of it," the critiquing process is starting on some firm footing. Donut County is incredibly brief: the whole game is unlikely to take more than two hours. Bonus objectives like achievements might take only a little bit longer - the means of accomplishing them are all pretty obvious once you've read their descriptions - and filling the encyclopedia of stuff to find, normally the longest "side-quest" of any Katamari Damacy, is automatically completed once the game is over. It feels like there were many ideas left on the drawing board that the designers simply didn't have the time or resources to figure out how to integrate, and due to the aforementioned smallness and "single critical path" nature of levels it's not a game with a whole lot of replay value. The very last level of the game is the only time it becomes truly challenging; the rest of the time the game's more eager to set a chill mood and let you have at it at your own pace. This chill mood is helped considerably with the cute cel-shaded graphics and a soundtrack comprised of soft guitar music, chopped and screwed, with some eccentric synth and vocals to suit the game's idiosyncratic personality. "Lo-fi beats to plunge the world into the abyss to," is maybe a good way of putting it.

Overall, I thought the game was a delightful breath of fresh air. It's a smart condensation of the strengths of the Katamari Damacy franchise, with its own distinct flavor and feel reminiscent of a latter-day Cartoon Network show, and hangs around just long enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome or find itself recycling mechanics once too often, and for as much as I think they could've gone a lot further with the concept I ultimately also appreciate their decision to draw a line in the sand and only go as far as they feel they should. I look forward to eating a bunch of trash with BK and his friends again someday.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

(The "something" in this case is "sass.")

This week I've been playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC, the second part of the sixth game in the LoH series (JRPG chronologies can be fascinating things), and while the game is remarkable by several metrics the most revered aspect - at least over here - is just how snappy and fun the localized script can be. These games aren't short and are full of incidental dialogue and NPC chatter; what's more is that it has a vaguely open structure and characters will respond to certain situations differently depending on the order you've done them. For example, if you went to a destination for a side-quest before the main story directs you there, the game will acknowledge it with a line of dialogue in the way of something like "so hey, we're back here again." With all these additional modifiers to an already immense story and dialogue script, it's evident the localizers and translators spent an extraordinarily long time not only putting those words into English but working to retain the soul and humor of the original text.

The best non-spoilery encapsulation of just how high quality this localization is would either involve the pansexual libertine Olivier Lenheim, whose every line (and the responses from the other party members, especially protagonist Estelle) is golden, or a series-wide running joke where all the treasure chests contain additional messages if you try to open them again. I'm only on Chapter 3 of the game so far (out of eight, if the achievement tracker is anything to go by), yet I've managed to find at least forty of these chest messages that rank among some of my favorite lines in a video game.

(NB: I've organized them into categories and put them in spoiler blocks, because this is going to be a huge image dump otherwise.)

Sass

These chests, and most others, straight up don't give an eff. You already took all their shit; why should they feel the need to be polite?

Mystery

Sometimes asking questions just leads to more questions.

Meta

Nobody knows they're in a video game more than these fourth-wall breaking boxes.

Sad

I wasn't ready for what these chests had to say about life and loss. If I could put back that mid-level healing consumable to cheer you up, I would.

Reference

Reference humor is inescapable with many localizations, but at least these are funny.

Cute!

Not all chest messages have to be mean and sardonic. Some are just delightful.

Scary...

Other messages are terrifying to their core, however. Best to just keep walking. Don't make eye contact.

In 1964, pop artist and provocateur Andy Warhol produced a film named Empire, which featured an uninterrupted shot of the top of the Empire State Building for 485 minutes straight. Warhol actually demanded that the film footage be slowed down to 16 frames a second when shown to patrons, extending the original runtime to this new, almost eight hour long film length. It's considered a bold and provoking piece of cinema, either in spite of or due to the sheer amount of absolutely nothing going on for a relatively long period of time. Common wisdom would determine the closest video game equivalent of this would be Desert Bus: one of many joke games featured on the unreleased licensed Sega CD game Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors that later found new life as a masochistic charity fundraiser. However, it fails the comparison due to one particular factor: Desert Bus's purpose was to annoy and befuddle, not to elevate and enlighten in the manner of an art piece. After playing what feels like fifty hours of Kentucky Route Zero (my Steam tracker suggests something closer to six), I now believe it to be the more apt correlation.

Kentucky Route Zero is a minimalist, monochrome (mostly), adventure game driven by a text interface that offers multiple choice responses for the player character - whomever that might be at the moment, sometimes several characters at once - to select in order to progress the story. The game is almost entirely driven by these prompts, barring the few occasions when you're traversing the backroads of Kentucky (and, later, the more metaphysical topography of the titular Route 0) with a few directions provided by other characters. The story is... largely open to interpretation, but involves an aged delivery driver named Conway seeking a place called Dogwood Drive for the final delivery of the night and possibly his career. Along the way he joins up with Homer/Blue, a dog whose gender/name is determined by the player early on (both can be left a mystery if the player so chooses); Shannon, a TV repairwoman who finds herself assisting Conway after being prompted to do so by an enigmatic message left by her supposedly deceased kin Weaver; Ezra, a lonely and semi-feral child whose "brother" is a colossal bald eagle named Julian; and eventually a sardonic musician named Junebug who may or may not also be a robot. Their journey is that of a shaggy dog story, where one destination leads to the next with very little in the way of a sense of progression or continuity, and the long night stretches on forever like a dimly lit interstate highway.

I wanted to like this game. Lord knows it's received enough praise, with so many critical voices speaking to how affected they were by this scene or how that scene left them in a state of deep thought for many a sleepless night. With the recent advent of Act V - released January 2020, some seven years after the debut of Act I - a lot of us holding off on what might have been an incomplete vaporware product finally saw our on-ramp, as it were. However, to say the game revels in its own tedium - its own depictions of the doldrums of gettin' by in a hostile world where loneliness and despair are so often your only travelling companions - would be an understatement. The game is in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere important, and prefers it that way. At a certain point towards the end of Act I, the main character suffers a leg injury that causes them to hobble slowly around the game for some or all of the next two Acts, making the playthrough even slower somehow. In tandem with this lethargic pace, the game dwells luxuriously in those small moments between something, anything, happening, letting you absorb the atmosphere - as dour or as deliberately uninteresting as it frequently is - while clicking through some flowery, loquacious prose, even more of which can be prompted by the player with certain choices. If the game thinks it could get away with depicting eight straight hours of the Empire State Building, it would take the opportunity in a heartbeat. A very, very long heartbeat, like that of an ancient colossus sleeping dormant beneath the Earth's mantle.

For a while, I didn't mind this at all. I welcomed it, in fact. I appreciated that the game had a tone and a vision all of its own, from the wireframe vector graphics to the stark font treatment to the determinant manner in which it delivers backstory: you basically choose how each character got to where they are currently, from the dog's identity to Conway's home troubles to Shannon's relationship with her cousin Weaver, and the game remembers these choices and calls back to them when appropriate. It was around Act II's "interlude" - brief (well...) single-scene presentations that work to introduce the following Act; a vital addition back when there were still long waiting times between episode releases during which you could absorb the interlude's possible meanings - where you sit through a play involving a rundown bar and a few of its mopey regular patrons. You are a captive audience: you sit in a chair, only able to swivel around to take in a jukebox providing background sound, the nearby director and writer, the critics in the audience behind you, and the play itself, and must mouse-click your way through every line of insipid dialogue about debt and love lost and every other morose conversation that tends to happen in some godforsaken murky drinking hole, while remembering to spin around and click-through more self-aggrandizing (or maybe ironically so?) fictional reviews and director notes about the in-progress play, until eventually, mercifully, a radioactive skeleton man shows up and the sequence is over. At a certain point I'd stopped reading anything - and I love reading in games, as more than a few lengthy visual novel playthroughs will attest to - and was impatiently tapping through what felt like several hundred pages of a tiresome student project when I realized I was no longer enjoying the game. At all. Nothing about its above quirks and foibles appealed any longer, and I knew if Act III didn't pick up I was done.

It did not pick up.

Oh my, no.

So without hopefully spoiling too much (if that's even possible), I'd like to guide you through a Cliff's Notes rundown of what the third Act of Kentucky Route Zero entails. I've excised a whole lot of musing and some determinant side discussion with inessential characters, but believe me when I say there's enough of both to drown a liberal arts Professor in double-spaced A4 grandiloquence.

1. Act III begins after Conway has visited the leg doctor and been put under for a quick operation, remembering a scene with his boss Lysette. She's grown elderly and has clear memory troubles, and it's implied that she's being taken into assisted living and this is why the business will close after Conway's current delivery. Conway awakes to find his limb replaced with that of a faintly glowing skeletal leg: the doctor makes some vague comments about the great expense of the procedure, adding to Conway's (and the player's) woes, but at least restoring his faster walking speed.
2. You next emerge outside a museum, which I believe the game calls the Museum of Dwellings. Act II experimented with a variation of narration where, rather than the main characters talking to the inhabitants of the many dwelling-like structures in here (including a tent, a lean-to, a houseboat, a trailer, and so on), our perspective was instead of the museum operators speaking to the residents some time after the fact, getting a sense of what these strangers where here to find from these half-remembered conversations. Of course, we already knew why they were there (they were looking for a leg doctor for Conway), so there was little - narratively speaking - to be gained from this viewpoint change. Regardless, in Act III you are unable to enter the museum and must leave by your patiently waiting delivery truck.
3. The player is given a few destination ideas, but the choice turns out to be moot when the truck suddenly breaks down a few miles out. While waiting for a tow truck, the group is visited by musicians Junebug and Johnny in their motorbike and sidecar. They get the truck fixed and ask that the group accompany them to The Lower Depths bar (the same one in the above interlude play). An admittedly cool little musical number plays out - one that, again, flows from the player's multiple choice prompts - before the musicians realise that they won't be paid for the show. They leave with the group, choosing to accompany them to Route Zero after the barkeep gives them elusive directions involving tuning the car radio just so.
4. In Route Zero, the player navigates to a place called The Hall of the Mountain King. This cave has a group of worn down people, possibly named after major adventure game veterans like Roberta Williams and Amy Briggs, sitting around a subterranean bonfire surrounded with old computers. The player can tinker around with one called Xanadu, but it's clearly broken.
5. The group then visits an old church through some disused passageways out of the cave, and the group splits here: we focus on Junebug and a boy named Ezra, who are waiting outside in the graveyard. A shaken Conway and Shannon return and the party moves back to the Hall of the Mountain King with new information to get Xanadu working.
6. Xanadu now runs properly, and moves the party through a text adventure which is reminiscent of the backstory of a secondary group we've been following through flashbacks: Lula (who directed us here originally), George (the man who created Xanadu, who sits nearby), and Joseph (who we've yet to meet) - collectively three college undergrad or post-grads who decided to explore Route Zero as a student project, Blair Witch style, many years back. The "game" abruptly ends as it reaches the present. The group leaves the cave.
7. As the group awaits a ferry back at the bureau where they first met Lula, we are shown what happened when the group split up at the church: Conway and Shannon are shown around an underground whiskey distillery by a skeleton named Doolittle, where they can get as much or as little of the guided tour as possible under the mistaken identity as new recruits, when Conway is tricked into becoming the distillery's new delivery driver (the old one having died just before Act I starts) by taking on an undisclosed debt. This, notably, is the one time where the game actually forces you to make the choice to take a sip of a celebratory drink that puts Conway into the red, automatically pulling the cursor over to the fated decision. The flashback ends just as the ferry appears, and the Act draws to a close.

When I write all that out, it sounds eventful, but let me ensure you that it wasn't. The Xanadu adventure, the distillery tour, exploring the Hall of the Mountain King: each persists for an interminable amount of time, with some exceptionally dry narration and multiple choice suggestions that only serve to extend the banality even further. Meanwhile, the fun topics up for debate this episode include: crushing medical debt, crushing corporate debt, the permanence of certain injuries, Alzheimer's, ageing, abandonment, the death of dreams, the painful past, the painful future, the painful present, and the game's customary background radiation levels of loneliness, despair, and general malaise. The more I played, the more I wanted to die, until I eventually reached a point where I felt like I might've already done so without realizing and this game was actually my life flashing before my eyes in some abstract manner.

Let's just say I'm not really in the mood to play any more, and I am clearly not the target audience. It obviously means much to a lot of people, and I won't argue that they're probably more intellectually capable than I of getting something worth cherishing out of the dense semiotics and slow tone piece that this game presents, but if my mood dips any further because of KR0's soul-crushing languidity and ongoing exploration of the major human miseries the authorities are going to find my body in a ditch somewhere having found my own proverbial "route zero."

I did not enjoy this game. Was I meant to? Who fuckin' knows.

Rating: 2 out of 5. (Or probably higher if I'm being fair, but I haven't the energy to be civil about this.)

So, new year, new hopes and dreams for the future instantly dashed by the successful US Senate criminal cover-up and the inevitable passing of Brexit and the great purging of our socialized healthcare and civil rights to follow. It'll be weird to think that, although the 2010s didn't really see much change besides smaller phones and better sunbeams in games, the end of the 2020s could very well see us all in oppressive autocracies led by fussy-haired Caligulae or permanently on fire or both. Meanwhile, The Good Place series finale makes a very convincing case for oblivion in the midst of it all.

Still, gotta remain positive somehow. The game industry is going through some sweeping - but not necessarily negative - changes also this year, as E3 possibly gasps its last irrelevant breath, the new generation of consoles prepares for battle against an upcoming era of console-free ethereal cloud gaming, and Giant Bomb hunts for a personality and imagination big enough to fill the SmackDown-branded sneakers of Dan "Dinosaurs Aren't Real" Ryckert. If nothing else, the game industry is going to be an exciting thing to watch over the next decade, and I don't doubt there'll be many more strong years for games. For 2020 we can (probably) look forward to Doom Eternal, Nioh 2, the FFVII Remake (or the first episode of it?), Cyberpunk 2077, Ghost of Tsushima, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Deadly Premonition 2, and hopefully the localizations of Ys IX: Monstrum Nox, Yakuza 7, and Tales of Arise. Not a huge list so far, but one that will continue to grow as the seasons change.

My secular humanism has been stretched to breaking point, but I still have faith that we can sort everything out before the Doomsday Clock starts bonging the bong that ends the world. If the worst comes to pass we can at least pull up a deck chair with a bottle of whatever the newest brand of hard seltzer might be and an Animal Crossing-branded mint-green Switch and sit back as the wave of flames engulfs us all. Happy 2020!

Indie Games of the Month

January comprised the 151-155 entries of Indie Game of the Week, outlined below:

Smoke and Sacrifice (IGotW 151) is a game I wished I liked a little more, because I've been wanting someone to marry the Don't Starve style of survival sim with the strong narrative direction that you'd only get from an RPG or adventure game. Unfortunately, I don't think I have it in me to enjoy the endless cycle of toil that any survival sim is fundamentally based upon, as evinced by both this and Subnautica a little while back. It turns out when gameplay and chores become one, I check out. Especially as I have plenty of actual chores to do. Still, though, I imagine this would be a good way to teach our kids about the drudgery of grown-up life. Get them hooked on virtually taking out the garbage and filing their taxes now so the banality of maintaining a responsible adulthood can be a welcome surprise for once. (At least the game looked nice? Maybe not animation-wise, but it definitely had an aesthetic going on.)

The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game (IGotW 152) was a game that felt like someone's failed idea for a Cartoon Network pilot. Not to denigrate the game too much, because it was wholesome and silly in a way I can appreciate as someone who could use something to chase away the gloom for a brief merciful moment, but when you have the likes of Ace Attorney or Detective Grimoire doing the funny detective bit but having actual logical deductions and puzzles to solve, it's hard for something this insubstantial to stack up. Still, the number of gateways for young'uns to discover gaming continues to expand, which is an always encouraging thought.

Avadon 2: The Corruption (IGotW 153) and its deliberately archaic CRPG charm is mostly comfort food where I'm at in life, though perhaps if it hadn't popped up in the randomizer tool I use to plan my IGotW shedule I might've opted for something with a bit more of a budget. Avadon 2 does a lot with the little it has though, creating some entertaining encounters (more on that below) and a game-wide dilemma of choosing to either work for a feared authoritarian institution with no oversight and morals or siding with the rebellious forces of chaos as they prepare for a catastrophic shake-up that will end thousands of lives. I should start playing these games closer together, because there are some major characters that go through a journey across this series.

Stasis (IGotW 154) starts promisingly, as you awaken from a stasis booth and jerry-rig a couple of solutions to make steady progress through a hellish bloodbath of a research spaceship as the powerful gravitational forces of the nearby gas giant of Neptune threatens to tear the nightmare factory apart from bow to stern. Some strong Dead Space energy, coupled with an axonometric Infinity Engine-esque perspective and a whole bunch of incoherent inventory puzzles. I dug the game's atmosphere but I wish the puzzles had been a little more intuitive.

Vaporum (IGotW 155) is another game that has a strong atmosphere right out of the gate, adapting the tried-and-tested first-person dungeon crawler format for an uncommon steampunk aesthetic filled with tubes and valves and riveted metal. Advancement is centered around the player's "exo-rig" suit and affords the use of gadgets which can transform the battlefield or keep the player in good shape. Pretty handy when you're fighting no end of mechanical terrors and modified human corpses all warped by an ambiguously evil substance named "fumium" mined from an underwater meteorite. The bigger emphasis on storytelling and some handy quality-of-life features raises the game to the genre's highest echelon in my view, and I look forward to seeing more games of this type from this studio.

Hey Everybody, It's the Tuesday Slot

Wiki Project: Awesome Games Wiki'd Quick 2020

I began the year with another Wiki Project focused around the week-long Awesome Games Done Quick annual charity event put on by various Twitch and YouTube speedrunners. Each event has a mix of familiar classics like Super Metroid and Super Mario Bros. 3 as well as an exhibition of games either too new to have been showcased before or too terrible for anyone with any iota of sense to have dedicated large portions of their free time towards mastering. It's that exhibition that often has our wiki meeting the realities of years of neglect, as many new games don't have much in the way of pages and the terrible ones have been mostly forgotten. I chip in to spruce those pages up - a task that doesn't require as much work as it sounds - just to make sure the Twitch channel administrators don't bump into any issues attaching our game pages to the stream (well, indirectly, through Twitch's interpretation of our wiki API).

This year's AGWQ blog kinda comes off a little more... incendiary than I meant it to, as I first ponder the speedruns I was personally looking forward to seeing most before going into a diatribe about which parts of the wiki are in the biggest state of disrepair. Probably not the best way to endear new editors to our database-in-progress, but maybe at least one that gives them a good idea of where to start. If you ever wanted the unenviable task of removing hundreds of prohibited second-person usages from slightly older game pages by all means have at it. (We mods should strongly consider starting a bounty program for cleaning up that business...)

The Games That Would Be King (2010s Edition - Part One)

My goal with this feature was to look at the games that defined the 2010s and highlight not only those trendsetters which had and will have a lasting influence on the games industry but those that could've easily had a similar horde of imitators had we all been paying more attention to them. "The Most Influential Games of Such-and-such-an-era" is a topic prone to disagreement and goalpost-moving, which is why I spent a little more time on conceptualizing a vision of the present where the likes of Sleeping Dogs and Fez had become paragons to emulate. As for Part Two, I'm sure way more time needs to pass before we can talk earnestly about the lasting influence of the games of 2018 or 2019, and it's more than likely I'll just forget when that time finally arrives. Or I'll be dead and gone. Either way, a win for me.

Grief Encounter: The Importance of Encounter Design

I'm going to try to cater blogs around what I'm playing a little more, rather than the routine weekly/monthly features I've been persisting with in previous years. It should allow me to play more games I'm actually invested in trying out rather than those I'm only playing because it's the next relevant destination in my whistle-stop tour of the Sega Saturn library or what have you. Grief Encounter was a potential first entry in a series that explores the importance of encounter design (hence the subtitle); an important but often critically overlooked aspect of RPGs that elect for a more bespoke quality to the battles and scenarios the player might become embroiled in. This inaugural entry specifically looks at five entertaining battles from Avadon 2, each of which was a case where the limited game mechanics or narrative lead-in were used in an unexpected way to create some memorable conflicts.

This is definitely more a thing of CRPGs than JRPGs: the latter is happy enough to toss mobs your way until a boss comes along and you're finally forced to consider elemental types or resourceful item usage rather than smashing the attack button until the victory ditty plays. JRPGs usually make up for that by being more mechanically interesting, if not always more mechanically dense. As I suspect this will be a very RPG-heavy year for yours truly (isn't it always the way that untouched 80+ hour RPGs just pile up and up?), I might be revisiting this blog format again.

List of Shame 2020: A Perfect Vision of Regret

List of Games Beaten in 2020

GOTY 2015 (Adjusted)

GOTY 2016 (Adjusted)

GOTY 2017 (Adjusted)

GOTY 2018 (Adjusted)

It wouldn't be a new year without a whole bunch of familiar lists. The annual Lists of Shame and of Games Beaten make a return, with the former incorporating a larger "wishlist" (games I don't own) than "backlog" (games I do own but haven't played).

I've also updated the last four years of GOTY 20xx (Adjusted) lists: an ever in flux reckoning of my favorite games from those respective years, adjusted to include those I've played since the year in question. The 2018 list is new, while the others have all been edited for another year of catch-up gaming. 2017 in particular has become a warzone, and I keep wanting to revisit my choices and consider putting certain games higher and lower with the benefit of hindsight and memory retention. In a weaker year, any of those top ten could've been my GOTY easy.

The Games of January

Luigi's Mansion 3

It comes a little too late for my 2019 GOTY top-ten, but I've spent much of January playing two games that would've easily made the list had events shaken out differently. The first of these is Nintendo's newest entry in a series that, subtextually, explores how much Luigi sucks as a character. Luigi's Mansion has always been part-ghostbusting action game and part-kleptomaniac sim as you pick apart a room piece by piece to find hidden stashes of cash and other secrets. The cash and secrets are mostly immaterial - the only important goal is to hunt boss ghosts and acquire the next elevator button - which is a shame because these secrets are where the game can best demonstrate its expertly intricate level design. A room could have any number of hidden panels or concealed wads of bills and using the new set of tools at Luigi's disposal - a "grapple plunger" to pull down furniture or toss it around, a blacklight to find invisible objects, a high-beam to activate light-based switches, and the ever-helpful doppelgunger that is Gooigi who can pass through pipes and grills on Luigi's behalf - makes exploration such a treat. The ghost-bashing was honestly secondary to that; every time those phantasmal gates slammed down over the exits and a new batch of colored specters emerged I found myself enjoying the game just a little bit less, especially while scouring previously-covered floors for any gemstones or Boos I may have missed.

There are times when the game got legitimately challenging, either because of a tough boss fight or some exceptionally well-hidden puzzle solutions. Buying hints to the locations of gems only gets you as far as the specific rooms they're in - and I'd discover later that buying these hints robbed me of the "best ending" - and often I'd be trying everything to shake that jewel from its hidey hole. Other times I'd just be on this elated autopilot, disassembling every chamber and corridor until there was nothing left to interact with and moving on like a swarm of locusts. I'm not sure if there's a name for this phenomenon, but I noticed it when playing Eledees all those years ago: there's something so atavistically compelling about encountering a well-organized room - maybe a bar stocked with bottles, or a bedroom filled with knick-knacks - and absolutely destroying the carefully considered order of the place. Maybe we humans, like the universe itself, are attracted to chaos and the fomenting of same. Would explain the past few years.

The Outer Worlds

Speaking of cynical, The Outer Worlds has been a hoot so far and the New Vegas successor I'd been longing to play. Again, maybe because my mind isn't in the right place to enjoy its smarter choices, but I've been less intrigued by the Morton's forks and challenging dilemmas of the story arcs and faction choices and entirely focused instead on looting every location and filling my ship with food, booze, meds, gear, and decorative trophies to my sprees of larceny. It's the moments when my companions snipe at each other or I clear out an entire marauder camp in a matter of seconds with a combination of a high-powered rifle and time-dilation powers where the game shines best, and collecting a bunch of side-quests is really more of an excuse to get out there into the cosmos and see what I can find.

I love the coziness of the good ship The Unreliable and my endless storage box of filthy lucre, I love my immortal companions and their cheery misanthropy, I love that the game's injected its zeerustic "capitalism-run-amok" personality into every object description and overheard NPC chatter, and I love just luxuriating in another Bethesda-like open-world RPG with no particular destination or goal in mind even if (or maybe especially because) it's a little more compact than usual. It is perhaps more finite than I'd like - I've probably seen every type of item a dozen times each by now - but it's been scratching an itch I didn't even know I had. I'll have something more definitive to say about my overall experience with the game in next month's round-up, I'm sure. For now, I'm taking it sleazy as I cross the wilderness of Monarch, exploiting my recently acquired perk that causes headshots to do explosive damage to all enemies around the newly-headless corpse and cackling like a madman.

Other Distractions

The Good Place Season 4: For a show that became impossible to predict as it concluded the first season with the biggest twist its high-concept premise could have, only to keep changing the rules for every subsequent season, The Good Place found a way to end that make perfect sense for these characters and the vision of the afterlife Michael Schur had created. I'm obviously not going to go into any details, and it's hard to even establish what this final season is about without spoiling three whole seasons of them getting to this point, but it's the sort of definitive ending that Schur pulled out for Parks and Recreation, where we see where everyone ended up many, many Jeremy Bearimys later. That very last episode is extremely bittersweet and one that will sit with me for many years to come.

For a show to have so many great jokes and character moments and for all that to eventually take a back seat to its whiplash narrative direction and poignant messages about moral philosophy and the meaning of life is a startling prospect for primetime television, and especially for an NBC sitcom - a format usually content to stick a camera in front of a couch and have the smallest child spout a familiar catchphrase while falling over to the rapturous braying of a canned laugh track. I'd say this show was a once-in-a-lifetime special happenstance, but I also suspect that its legacy will produce many more shows like it that aren't simply content to toss one-liners around and instead tackle big questions with the same wit and grace. If not, I'm sure there's still some jokes left over on what a nightmare Florida is for whatever NBC's next big thing ends up being.

BoJack Horseman Season 6: If I'm a little more morose than usual this month, it's because BoJack Horseman saw its final chance to punch me in the gut and took it. A show as wonderfully funny and creative as it could be devastating, the final season - as unfortunately bifurcated as it ended up being - ends the only way the show could've done, leaving nothing certain except that life is hard but ultimately worth living to its fullest, because there's nothing else to follow (for as much as I wish The Good Place turns out to be accurate). The show is regularly at its most inventive and captivating during its "penultimate episode bummers," where BoJack is taken to a new nadir and the finale has to pick up the pieces for the next season to follow up on. It's sort of the same dynamic as witnessing the night of a social event that goes horribly out of control followed by the rueful morning after. This season's penultimate episode - "The View From Halfway Down" - might be one of the most emotionally powerful episodes of television I've ever seen, and certainly one of the most daring. Of course, that could say more about how little I challenge myself with any artistic medium that an animated show about a Hollywoo(d) horseperson could hit me the hardest, but I also think that wouldn't be giving this show enough credit.

Looking Ahead

Just looking at the release schedule for February 2020 and it appears "Fuck You, It's January" has decided to extend itself another month. Barely anything here worth mentioning, barring a few games that I'm not so much excited about personally but second-hand excited for those looking forward to them. Suits me; I've still got a stack of new games bought over the holidays to take a stab at. If the year continues being this underwhelming I might even be able to catch up with some Trails, Tales, and Yakuza (which almost sounds like the title of a great slice-of-life anime).

• 4th - The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics. I've heard some good things about the Dark Crystal prequel reboot (preboot?) and it looks like the tie-in game's taking a semi-serious stab at an axonometric strategy RPG in the vein of a Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. I've never stopped loving that kind of game, even if I did get burned out on Nippon-Ichi PS2 SRPGs once upon a time, and I'm hoping this game manages to do well by the format, the show, and the license as a whole. No pressure.
• 11th - Yakuza 5. The HD-ified third PlayStation 3 Yakuza is joining its two predecessors and filling out that Yakuza Remastered Collection that went on sale a few months back. Yakuza 5 is perhaps too much a good thing - I don't think a single entry went on as long as it did, or had as much content - but everything from the fourth game on has been peak Yakuza: a combination of serious storytelling and less serious side-stories, urban activities, and absurdly violent and chaotic brawling. Anyone powering through all three of those Remastered games on the trot might find themselves hitting a wall of diminishing returns here, but there's still so much to commend. My favorite is that they took the "the Pooh Home-Run Derby flash game is impossible" meme and figured out how to put it in this game.
• 14th - Dreams and Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl - Gold. I've been burned too many times by MediaMolecule's very loose grasp of what makes a good platformer to be too excited by Dreams, but it does seem like a bottomless well from which creativity can spring forth, leaning hard into enticing those trendsetter content creators that took the shaky physics and building tools of the LittleBigPlanet series and put them towards projects that were unrecognizable compared to the single-player levels. I'm sure Giant Bomb will dip into the best of those creations a few times this year, if not try to build something themselves. Meanwhile, though I'm skeptical about roguelikes, Snack World is the newest big multimedia franchise from Level-5 and I'm still so besotted with their early material that I want to keep giving them new chances, even if I've bounced off everything they've produced since White Knight Chronicles (with the notable exception of Ni no Kuni).
• 25th - Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection. I keep meaning to check out the many eras of Capcom's Mega Man I missed, having only stuck around long enough for the Mega Man Legends series for PS1. The Zero/ZX games are more explormer-like in their construction, which suggests to me that I'd probably enjoy them a whole lot. I won't have any clue what's going on in the story - I think these games assume you've played all the Mega Man X games back-to-front - but if I got through Kingdom Hearts III in one mostly confused piece I'm sure I can handle these too.
• 28th - One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows. I'm not really a proponent of fighting games, and I only enjoy Ranking of Fighters when they're checking out something terrible that they can collectively mock in unison, but even I have to admit to being curious about a One Punch Man fighter. The way they figured out a means to get around the fact that Saitama is completely invulnerable and insurmountable is a brilliant one - with no means to afford a car or even bus fare, he has to walk everywhere, which was a major factor of the Deep Sea King arc - and I'm curious to see what Jeff makes of it, as it'll probably be his first exposure to the show and these characters. I'm also happy for the whole Giant Bomb Fighter Ranking Science team in general, because February looks to be a good month for them: Street Fighter V: Champion Edition on the 14th, a new update for Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late on the 20th, and the Switch port of Samurai Shodown on the 25th.

The Legend of Grimrock franchise may be on indefinite hiatus, but it's opened a few doors (by putting rocks down on the right pressure plates, naturally) for other cautious developers wondering if their idea for an old-school first-person tile-based dungeon crawler might find an audience. Then there's the way the Indie sphere has grown to the point now where any pre-existing genre (and many that had yet to exist) has some amount of modern representation, but it's in the nature of throwbacks to luxuriate in the past more often than figuring out ways to keep elevating and modernizing these creaky formats.

Happily, Vaporum has more ideas than simply "Dungeon Master was kinda rad." In addition to an uncommon steampunk aesthetic where the walls are all riveted steel plates and serpentine pipes leading to and from destinations unknown in lieu of the usual grey mildew-y walls, the game's taken the time to figure out how to move the genre forward with a few smart mechanical flourishes. For one, it's chosen not to shy away from the "combat waltz" issue with these real-time games: the technique where you constantly juke around your foe in a circle so they cannot land an attack, while you get a swing in every time they move back into range. Instead, most of the enemies of Vaporum - the especially maneuverable ones at least - have various tricks to make the combat waltz work for them instead. Others use AoE attacks to hit you even when you're on a diagonal space away from them, and the game's also very fond of dropping a large number of enemies around you at once to force you to think tactically. To assist the player, the game has an optional "turn-based" mode where the discrete fractions-of-a-second required for movement and weapon attacks move time forward the appropriate amount but the player is otherwise in stasis as they ponder their next move. This is also invaluable for timing-based puzzles like switches that only temporarily open doors or using alcoves to stay out of reach of a stream of fireballs whizzing down a corridor. Whether this is in aid of alleviating the suffering of those who don't have the reflexes for these types of traps, or an excuse to make scenarios with even tighter timing, or both, is unclear but it's a fantastic addition regardless.

In Vaporum, the player assumes the role of an amnesiac sailor who finds himself deposited outside an impressive metal edifice out on a remote rock cropping. After entering the structure, it doesn't take long for this sailor to find and equip an "exo-rig": a suit powered by an unknown technology that has the capacity for modular incremental improvements - in other words, you're not so much earning XP for your protagonist but collecting more of this mysterious power source from fallen enemies that the suit then incorporates to increase its capabilities. The game is replete with audio logs and written journals from the people who once worked there, giving you as much background into the Arx Vaporum - as this tower was known - as you could want, as well as hints as to your own identity and an explanation as to why the place has become an eerie deathtrap devoid of people. I've come to anticipate new tidbits of lore as much as I do new equipment or handy (but finite) consumables, and the mystery of Vaporum - though at times familiar, especially if you've played BioShock - is a compelling one to unpack. At its heart though, it's every bit the dedicated Dungeon Master/Grimrock successor: the majority of the time you're either surviving tough monster encounters or figuring out which combination of switches, levers, pressure plates, pushable boxes, and teleporters will get you to the next floor of the titular tower.

Getting back to those mechanics, though, as the game has a lot of them; ranging from major distinctive features to small but appreciated quality-of-life touches. In addition to the usual modern conveniences of a save anywhere feature (though it only auto-saves on floor transitions, so be wary of that) and dedicated bindings for health (the game calls it "integrity," referring to the condition of the exo-rig) and energy restoratives respectively, there are two equipment loadouts that the player can instantaneously switch between at any time. I think the idea is to have one for range - there's firearms in the game, and though they need ammunition there are enough gun-toting enemies that regularly drop some - and then one for melee when foes get close enough. Gadgets work like spells would normally in a game like this: they require energy to use, which slowly recharges over time, and can produce offensive single-target or AoE elemental attacks, or buffs like increased melee speed and shielding. If you choose to spec towards gadget use, you'll unlock additional slots for them, giving you a great deal of versatility. On the Switch version at least, interact commands automatically lock on to relevant locations (levers, chests) but not to hidden buttons, to which you have to manually move the cursor over yourself. The game can't make its secrets too easy for you to find, after all. Speaking of which, there's an option to eliminate the mini-map if you want to pen-and-paper cartography your way through the game old-school style.

I've been really impressed with Vaporum so far. The ingenuity of its encounters - though there's more than a few rough customers - makes every battle one that requires your wits and reflexes at their fullest. Figuring out how best to upgrade my exo-rig for my playstyle - which starts by having you choose four distinct archetypes, from melee-heavy brawlers to the more gadget-focused "mage" class - has been a process of agonizing over what I want to prioritize most, which so far for me has involved a lot of dual-wielding and evasion skills. The game's bolts-and-steel aesthetic looks great with some subtle variance in environment details and luminescent hues between floors, and it nails the spooky atmosphere this particular sub-genre thrives on especially with regards to distant enemy noises as early warning signs and ambient sounds from unclear sources add to the location's mystique. It's certainly not been an easy game, but as I still have a few spare repair kits in reserve on my Normal difficulty playthrough it's evidently balanced enough. Looks to be a reasonable length also: I'm about 6-7 hours in and I think I'm around the midway point. Honestly, the few issues I have either relate to my own dubious decision of playing a mouse-and-keyboard type of RPG on the Switch (the various "ZL+A" key-bindings aren't too unintuitive, but they still took some getting used to) and that no effort was made to adjust the script to suit the steampunk time period (though this isn't necessarily set on Earth, so I suppose there's no reason these Victorian-era scientists can't say "dude" a lot). Minor and/or self-imposed quibbles, in so many words. If you mourned the passing of Grimrock like I did, know that there are other Indie developers out there who are just as adroit in "getting" games of this nature.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Space inspires an equal amount of wonder and terror alike, as an endless inky void that permeates and surrounds us all in every direction, and so there's no shortage of sci-fi space-faring horror fiction out there. However, I'd argue that The Brotherhood's Stasis is less about the abyss of space but the abyss of the human soul, given several generations to let the march of technology bring us to a science-gone-awry scenario several magnitudes worse than what we've already seen. The repercussions of this mad science is the nightmare scenario that migrant John Maracheck awakes to, after his stasis pod unexpectedly ejects him into the bowels of the Cayne Corporation's medical research vessel The Groomlake. All that surrounds him are ominous echoes and human viscera; John's immediate questions are "where is the crew?" and "what happened to them?" and "where is the nearest escape pod?". That is, after he becomes determined to find out where his wife and daughter have gone, who were back on the transport ship with him.

The game has the immediate rhythm of something like Visceral's Dead Space, where your only companionship besides the terrors that lurk just beyond your sight is a systems operator you communicate with remotely (whom provides the necessary direction), and you make your way through various ship decks that operate as discrete "levels" of the game. You can't backtrack to earlier areas, and this helps reduce the number of variables in the adventure game puzzles that the gameplay is built around. After all, Stasis isn't so much survival horror - there are certainly ways to die, but these deaths happen in pre-determined locations and require solving puzzles to surpass - as it is a traditional point-and-click adventure game that uses a fixed, axonometric, third-person perspective with pre-rendered backgrounds that recalls the classic Infinity Engine era of RPGs. This also allows the game to create highly detailed (and highly disturbing) environments without causing any problems for weaker PC systems.

While I liked Stasis's grim and gruesome storytelling and world-building, there's no denying it has quite a few bugbears beyond those actively trying to eat you. The first and most apparent is the quality of the voice-acting: the game was created in South Africa, where English is the lingua franca but far from the most widely spoken language. Some actors have an Afrikaans-accented English that is perfectly understandable, but others seem to struggle with the right intonations and phonemes, which is especially evident early on where John has a flashback of him and his wife singing his daughter to sleep before all three enter stasis. This might also be the case of voice actors unused to the medium more than it is due to regional differences, but either way the poor VA can be distracting for such a narrative-driven game. At least the voice actor for the protagonist - who spends almost the whole game alone commenting to himself - does fine. Another issue is connected to the puzzles: while the game does keep things relatively compact with how it separates itself into these discrete chapters/decks, there are an awful lot of what I generally consider "moon logic" puzzles. Puzzles that have a solution which isn't immediately apparent because they're completely insane in terms of being able to suss them out intuitively, if not perhaps in the context of a scared and desperate man jerry-rigging or brute-forcing a means forward.

A strong example of this would be when you need to do extremely painful surgery on yourself (another Dead Space riff) and must set up the operation by collecting some resources: pressurized oxygen, cryostasis fluid, human organic material, and anaesthesia. The anaesthetic is a freebie but obtaining the other three requires solving the following puzzles: with the oxygen you have to find an oxygen tank in the EVA suits in the adjacent room but for whatever reason the tank alone isn't compatible with the collector next to the operating table - instead, you have to wrap a loose cable around it that you get a bit earlier in the chapter to make it fit (???); the cryostasis fluid you collect by solving a game of Mastermind (which is partly trial and error) with the nearby stasis pod room, accidentally killing a stasis pod occupant, and mopping up the loose fluid that flows out along with them, despite being pre-used and currently spilled across a filthy floor (?????); and then for the organic material you need to collect a clump of viscera from a nearby bloodbath, but the machine won't accept it because it's not "refined" - in order to refine it, you have to stick it on a convenient surface and then hit it with an empty revolver until it's less lumpy before the machine is OK with it (???????). These puzzles continue to increase in obtuseness as the game progresses, possibly as some warped idea of a difficulty curve in perhaps the single genre that doesn't benefit from having one.

Despite these major problems, Stasis does get right what it perhaps feels is the most important aspects: a constant state of tension and dread as you bumble your way through one near-death scenario to the next, keeping its monsters just out of sight or with brief jumpscare flashes before you find out what they actually are, and the discovery of the depths of depravity that the senior staff of this medical research vessel has sunk to in the name of science hits like a sledgehammer. There is some very messed up imagery in this game even before you get to the "birthing pool" laboratories, and the developers clearly have fun revelling in the setting's grotesqueries. That The Groomlake is situated in a decaying orbit above Neptune - presently about to engulf the ship in a powerful atmospheric storm - only lends itself to the Gothic foreboding of the ship's dark and imposing architecture. My favorite aspect, as it usually is with this genre of game, is reading the journal PDAs of the doomed crewmembers and getting the gist of what happened by piecing it together from the multiple perspectives involved. For as much as I wanted to kick the game's puzzle designer out of an airlock towards the end, I can't help but commend the game for the way it develops its atmosphere, and for its grisly visual and narrative choices.

Rating: 3 out of 5.