Saturday Summaries 2018-10-13: Time-Sensitive Edition

This week's SatSum's going to be a little bit bottom-heavy (there is something in the trunk, but my pride prohibits me from calling it junk) so just a moderately-sized intro this time. Speaking of moderately sized...

Since it comes up a little later when I talk more about Shadowrun: Hong Kong, I wanted to cover game length and how much is appropriate in what contexts. We've become inured to the idea that RPGs often carry big run-times. I presently have about eight RPGs I want to play on my backlog, but their enormous respective lengths means I'm unlikely to get to more than a handful before the end of this year, and because 2018 has been really busy with new RPGs it's likely I'll have a few more to check out next year.

The thing is, a well-sized game is as often a draw as it is a negative. I can't budget for a lot of new AAA games, which is why most of my features have revolved around retro and Indie games of late, so a decently-sized RPG that might last a month or more can be a godsend. However, what it all comes down to is how well a game might allocate that runtime across the types of content it has. I'm someone with a mildly obsessive habit that tends to complete all the content a game has to offer, so too much filler or a languid pace or a lack of conveniences - like fast travel or a day/night system that can be easily manipulated - can really make the difference to my enjoyment of a game. A long game might be a fine thing if its content is corralled in such a way that it never gets dull, or if it has an epic-length story that needs a lot of time to tell, but games built around "radiant quests" or too much time given over to roguelike "keep starting over with zero or very incremental progress" playthroughs or repetitive procgen dungeons isn't something I'm really in the market for these days.

A common habit of mine of late is that, whenever I purchase or consider the purchase of a new game, I hop onto HowLongToBeat.com and see what their contributors have logged as the "completionist" time for the title in question. I've got a few games with approximate completion times noted in my backlog text document, the following being a sample:

So presently, I'm strongly considering Trails of Cold Steel so I can wrap up the remainder of my PS3 games and also because a few of my Twitter pals have been catching up with it this year and have nothing but praise for it, but faced with a playthrough of potentially 100 hours or more is giving me pause. Ditto for finishing the last of my Wii U games with Tokyo Mirage Sessions and its own possible 75 hours of investment. Something like the new South Park RPG though, I could probably wrap up in a week or so, which is making it seem the more tempting option despite the fact it's possibly only the fifth or sixth best game on there. Given its reputation among my peers, I don't imagine that additional time to complete Trails of Cold Steel will be time wasted per se, but time considerations continue to be a major factor in my decision-making for backlog entries.

What's probably not helping with how long it's taking to get through this backlog of long-ass RPGs is how often I break to play different games for blog features. Blog features like the following:

• The Indie Game of the Week was A Hat in Time, the Gears for Breakfast 3D platformer that was in development for a while and finally came out this month last year. For all its problems, I can't dislike the game due to its smart writing, jovial sense of fun and excitement, and endlessly inventive ideas for set-pieces. The way each of the game's worlds requires a different approach and the various power-ups you have at your disposal ensures that there's never a dull moment, and - like Skylar & Plux which I reviewed a few weeks ago - the game smartly prioritizes quality over quantity when it comes to collectibles and designing challenges.
• The alternate Tuesday slot went towards a rather loquacious boss fight rundown in Hollow Knight: Bosswatch. The Bosswatch series, incidentally, is a per-game review of the various bosses of the Soulsborne games: I guess with this I've canonized Hollow Knight as another of their kind. I couldn't get into too much lore detail as I'd like, because there was a huge number of bosses in that game to get through, but I hope from this piece you get a thorough sense of where my head was at during those fights and the pieces I was able to put together about their backstories afterwards. I mean, it was either this or complaining about how creepy and hostile the Deepnest was.
• Since there's no easy way to tell folks about a recently updated list - Giant Bomb notifications only apply to when the list was originally created, and only then if the site's coding is behaving itself - I wanted to remind folk that I'm continuing to update the Liststorm of Scariness throughout October. Though it's built to follow the series of one-off October horror game LPs of the Super Best Friends Play channel - my next favorite LPers after GB - it's also serviceable as a list of horror games to consult for ideas when the Halloween mood strikes you on this or any other month. I'll also post another reminder at the end of October when the list will have grown some more.

Addenda

Movie: Premonition (2007)

Boy was this a dumb movie. I was floundering for something to watch this week - while most people are busy dusting off their old Halloween favorites, I'm not much of a horror buff - but then saw that Giant Bomb East was amusing themselves with a horror-themed Film & 40s all this month. I skipped last week's zombie movie - I know enough about The Return of the Living Dead from listening to a separate podcast on it that I don't feel the need to watch it - but I figured a family-based psychological supernatural thriller with Sandra Bullock was probably going to be about as scary as getting stuck in traffic, and almost as exciting.

All that (accurately) said, Premonition was entertaining enough with the commentary track playing alongside it. I was worried the nature of the movie's twists would preclude it from being watchable with a quartet of drunken dummies yelling in my ear while I tried to follow all the time-travel paradoxes and Chekov's Guns, but as the commentary itself points out the movie wasn't consistent enough to even cover its own ass with a certain subplot about the scarring of a child, so if it didn't want to follow its own logic I don't see why I had to. Instead, I chuckled along with the duders when it came to the world's clumsiest pallbearers and bizarre MTV editing whenever Sandy got one of her titular visions, glad to have some company - of a kind - for a deeply silly movie. I feel like Giant Bomb is still finding their feet with this movie commentary biz, but ridiculous films like this that lose nothing if you're missing occasional lines of dialogue because Dan wanted to talk about the time he stepped on a light bulb with bare feet are far more appropriate than something a little more riveting and attention-worthy where the commentary would be too distracting, or even fond favorites where I'm miffed they missed some amazing(ly stupid) moment because they were too preoccupied by their own off-topic conversations.

Also, man, there's a huge number of Sandra Bullock movies I've not watched if her Wikipedia filmography is anything to go by. It's the few big vehicles in the 90s that everyone's seen - Demolition Man, Speed, The Net, While You Were Sleeping, A Time to Kill - and then nothing for me until Premonition and 2013's The Heat. If Abby's threat to turn "A Season of Sandy" into a real thing actually transpires, I think I'll have a lot of catching up to do. (Also, she's played three characters called Linda? Is she really a "Linda"? I couldn't say.)

Game: Shadowrun: Hong Kong

No new games for me, just a lot of catching up with those I started last week for various blog features. Shadowrun: Hong Kong might be a little more compact compared to others of its genre, but it's still a RPG and that means a 20 hour run-time at the very least, hence why I'm still picking away at it a week on. I mentioned while reviewing it for last week's Indie Game of the Week feature that the Shadowrun games are, like their table-top equivalent, very heavily built around single "runs" which usually act as self-contained episodes that provide the funding and experience (the game calls it "karma", and you more of it to improve a stat/skill the higher that stat/skill is) you need for harder missions further down the road. The game has its own overarching narrative too, but it expects you to be decently equipped and levelled by the time its final "point of no return" act comes along.

Right now, I left the game at the point where I've completed all the runs and just need to trigger the series of missions that finishes the game, so I thought I'd do a mini-round-up of the first three of these runs with spoiler tags where apropos. That should hopefully give you all a clear idea of the sort of variety the game offers, the twists and turns you might expect along the way, and the amount of "game" that each one individually contains.

Outsider

I'm skipping past "Act I", during which you make it to your hub area and become a shadowrunner employee of the local Triad boss. It's all story stuff and not particularly remarkable, as its purpose is to ease you into the game's mechanics and campaign setting if Hong Kong happens to be your first Shadowrun rodeo. Instead, we move onto the first batch of shadowrun missions you're given, one of which is Outsider. There's a good reason why you want to start here, which should become clear as I describe the mission in more detail.

The goal here is to figure out who has been offing high-ranking members of the Whampoa tribe: a futurist sect of deckers and other tech experts that sell their expertise to various underworld groups and live together in an urban commune of sorts. They're left alone by the criminal elements and cops alike because they're useful to both. However, someone evidently has a grudge, because the elders of the tribe are getting gruesomely murdered one by one.

So this is your typical detective/clue-finding mission. The more legwork you do (investigating sites, talking to NPC witnesses), the clearer a picture you get by the end. If handled correctly, you can actually finish this mission without a single fight - the game is structured in a way that you earn karma for completing side-objectives and runs in a satisfactory way, not for killing enemies - and see justice done.

The culprit is a still-intelligent ghoul called Gaichu. Ghouls in the Shadowrun universe are mindless beasts that were once human; infected with a virus that warps them into a cannibalistic monsters akin to fast, vicious zombies. Gaichu, being a stringently trained Red Samurai (the elite protectors and agents of the Japanese conglomerate Renraku), has retained his sanity and has only become more deadly in melee with his newfound ghoul abilities. He was hired by the Whampoa elders to assassinate one of their own: a very skilled but obstinate decker who rarely voted with the rest of the herd out of an abject contrariness. Once Gaichu eliminated her, they refused to pay him and instead called in a SWAT team to dispatch him and cover the whole episode up. Depending on how much of this you've intuited, you can either kill Gaichu - he is a ghoul, after all, and he was murdering those elders though not quite as violently as you were led to believe - or take your evidence to the local dogsbody and mediator and have the elders arrested and Gaichu cleared if you can sufficiently make a case for him. The latter outcome actually earns you Gaichu as a future shadowrunner you can take with you on missions, with his own side-quest and everything, so that's what you want to go for - especially if you don't have a strong melee tank in your group.

The Dig

A fun mission, the idea here is to rob a mansion of the ill-gotten gains it obtained from the ruins situated underneath - the owner bought the land and built their mansion on top so they could have full ownership of anything the archaeologists dig up (your client would prefer to see these artifacts in a museum; that is, a public one). Your goal is a couple of ancient books situated somewhere in the ruins on the sub-basement floor.

The first part of the mission, though it's mostly optional and is meant to serve as a smokescreen, is to smash and grab a certain amount of loot from the "museum" ground floor of this manse. The issue is that the client has only suppressed the alarms enough for ten such breakages, and many of the items are fake: however, the client is in contact with you and can see what you see, so he'll evaluate items on the fly. The way this part works is that the more valuable items are behind extra layers of security, so you need a decent hacker (Is0bel works if you're not a decker yourself) to open some doors, and a decent intelligence or strength to move a hidden bookcase.

Beneath the mansion, you see that the artifact books you've been sent to collect carry their own baggage. To whit, they've attracted some malignant spirits and gargoyles, which present a relatively tough close-range fight where the more formidable corpses will "tag" an ally after striking, warping both of them to a secret area where they're cut off from their companions. That's not so bad if the target is a decent fighter, especially in a melee role, but not ideal if they're the rigger or decker or someone similarly less martial. There's a couple of these fights, one for each book, but if you can get the jump on the ghoulies and mow them down before they get close, it's an easy enough extraction.

Bad Qi

This is the game's first attack on a corporation building, which are usually the shadowrunner's bread and butter. Most shadowrunners are getting hired by anonymous corporate reps (in shadowrun lore these guys are always called "Johnson", or a regional equivalent (Mr. Wu is the norm in Hong Kong)) to sabotage their rivals or steal research, and that's the goal here. However, instead of taking or destroying something more concrete, the goal is to disrupt the corporation's carefully managed "feng shui". For that reason it's a good idea to bring along Gobbet, your on-call ork shaman.

This mission serves to introduce both corporate espionage as a common recurring theme, and also teach you the importance of mystical energies and superstition as both have become legit things after this version of Earth's "Awakening" some decades prior. After all, if elves and dwarves and shamanistic magic are all real, there's no reason eastern mysticism like qi and feng shui wouldn't be also, and both of those play a major role in the game's denouement (at least, that's what I've gathered from NPC dialogue, since I'm not there yet). The game gives you a few options for sneaking past the ground floor, in case you didn't have a decker with you or a decent charisma stat (the Corporate etiquette is useful here too), and then it's simply a means of searching around the upper floors for qi centers and disturbing them: smashing mirrors, moving office dividers around, setting certain plants on fire, and so on.

The run's unexpected challenge comes in two parts: once you've disturbed the flow of qi enough, malevolent elementals start showing up and attacking, and because of the bad qi everyone suffers hits to their willpower stat (the one that determines spell damage and resistance). Afterwards, once your mission is complete and the qi flow is so bad that the effects are physically manifesting in the world, you have to defeat a team of corporate mages on the way out. If you've done a decent enough job disrupting the qi, they're very badly affected by it as magic-users and should be less of a problem than they would be normally.

So that gives you some idea of the variety you're likely to face. No single run takes more than an hour or so, and only that long if you're spending the time to do them well or taking the game's turn-based combat slowly enough to ensure zero losses, but they offer these little glimpses into the expansive universe of Shadowrun and test your ability to adapt to new information or sudden disturbances. After, you get to spend what you've earned on upgrading your character and equipment, and the game smartly and subtly raises all the stat requirements for tasks when they present themselves in subsequent runs, ensuring an even level of difficulty throughout regardless of which order you do these missions in.

I also find that, because of this structure, the Shadowrun games are perfect if you want to hop in occasionally rather than blitz the whole thing in a handful of sessions: there's plenty of ways you can catch up on what's been happening with the overall plot, and none of the runs are connected and thus require remembering key details about how a previous mission went. Both it and Dragonfall are great little RPGs if you're in the mood for something tactical and less demanding of your time.