Dreamfall Chapters

And so we have our final Dreamfall Chapters check-in for the month. With today's livestream duties, I was only able to complete the third Book, but that's probably for the best. The story is moving a mile a minute right now - if nothing else, the Dreamfall has adapted to the quick plotting of the episodic format, with cliffhangers and resolutions bookending each, well, Book - and it would help to have more time to process the puzzles and events without this daily deadline hovering over my head. For whatever reason, despite the alacrity of the storytelling, each of these chapters is still taking a while to get through. I'll refer back to yesterday's explanation about the sheer size of the game world not helping with the puzzles, given how much real estate there is to sweep for puzzle-crucial hotspots. There's also the fact that the fifth Book has yet to be published; I wouldn't say it was overdue, looking at the scattered release history of the four Books thus far across 2014 and 2015, but Book 3 ends on what is a relatively unhurried note compared to Book 2 - and probably Book 4 - and I'd be happier to leave it here for the few weeks or months it takes for this game to see a conclusion.

At any rate, this will be the last update for Dreamfall Chapters for the foreseeable future. After today, I'll be moving onto a new game, as per the rules of May Mastery. I can't say that my time with this game has been an entirely positive experience, my issues evenly split between the problems caused by the technical limitations of this PC and the less fortunate design choices taken by the developers, but I'm still eager to see the game's story to its conclusion. I thought I'd try and spend the rest of the pre-spoiler recap section of today's update on attempting to articulate why I'm so invested in this setting and its characters.

I covered the basics of the plot a few updates ago - there's the near-future contemporary world of Stark and the fantastical but largely allegorical fantasy world of Arcadia, and there's a strong connection between the two called the Balance that ensures that neither suffers unduly because of the other. It's a similar system we've seen in other games, most notably in the Tales series which frequently visits the idea of two worlds in symbiosis where almost everyone in one world is incognizant of the other and vice versa, but The Longest Journey/Dreamfall always approaches this material with a surprising level of maturity. I can't say if the game does a better of job of making Zoe seem like a typical young person than, say, Life is Strange with its principal cast of liberal arts college students, but she seems believably neurotic in her interactions and her journal entries. Even the fantasy archetypes wandering around Arcadia have nuance and well-established motivations behind their actions, and there isn't a single character that the game doesn't offer the option to delve deeper into if you're the prodding type. Again, it's not quite sweeping the bedrooms of every major cast member for a dozen objects that prompt little "this is what this person is about" observations, but very few are throwaway one-notes with the exception of a few comic relief types. Dreamfall Chapters' new characters have been a mix of great and middling so far, but I've grown attached to a majority of them and am sad to see them leave the game through misfortune or circumstance. Book 3 especially seems prepared to let a lot of its characters go, and I'm finding it harder than I anticipated to say goodbye.

I think what's integral about the game is that it manages to create two fairly "standard" settings - a standard near-future version of our world with relatable technology that feels like is only a handful of years away despite it being set 200 years in our future, and the standard fantasy world of Arcadia with its magical races and fantastical creatures - and then adds a number of complications to both. Stark, for instance, suffered something called the Collapse due to the events of the first game which caused the magnetic poles to bug out, and to this day there is no longer artificial flight or satellite coverage as a result. Technology has had to double back and follow a different route to reach its present advanced level - for instance, creating supersonic subterranean "bullet train"-style conveyances between distant locations on the globe rather than airline travel. Corporations rule everything and cities have become enormous and now encompass several countries, causing new borders to be drawn, and characters talk about how the US is a dangerous militaristic tinderbox, Europe's a dive with no sunlight and constant rain due to environmental issues, and most of the more pleasant and temperate cities on Earth are now in Africa. It's one of the cases where they reveal just enough lore about the world to seem valid, but not enough that it begins to sound contrived and prompting belief-suspending "how did we get there from here?" questions. Likewise, Arcadia is a fantasy world experiencing an industrial revolution, sidelining anything magical for the more reliable and scientific and pushing the non-human races further and further away from civilization. It sort of feels like Narnia after the Telmarines arrived, where an alien human faction is unleashed on an unwitting fantasy world with the technological intelligence of the Renaissance era but the xenophobic, theocratic close-mindedness of the medieval period, who then conquer the world and make it a miserable place to live for anyone not human. The games have always kept themselves grounded in that sort of allegory despite the unfamiliar (at least to reality, if not to other fictional settings) surroundings.

Really, though, it's always been the series' keen eye for characters, the quirks that go into its world-building and fairly decent writing on the whole that has kept me around this long. Plus, it's never been shy to raise a dozen mysteries and only explain half of them, setting its sights on an even bigger overarching narrative about the nature of reality in that universe and the role of the mystical and unknowable Draic Kin (as in, dragons) that may never see a proper conclusion for as long as the series lives. There's something inspiring about maintaining that level of ambition, even in the face of the many, many adversities that the series and its developers have seen since the franchise's inception almost two decades ago. I'm sure we all have at least one troubled long-running form of fiction that we're attached to that may never live long enough to see a proper ending.

The Verdict: After three days and three of its five episodes/"Books", my May Mastery coverage of this episodic game is at an end. However, be sure to expect more recaps for Books 4 and 5 in the (hopefully) near future. We're definitely on the home stretch now. (Four Stars for franchise fans, Three Stars for everyone else.)

Book 3: Realms

To recap from last time: Kian was unable to save Oldtown from being raided and burned down by the Azadi, and Zoe watched in horror as her food-cart friend Nela blew herself up in front of the EYE building - the paramilitary organization that has closed down Zoe's present home of the district in Propast of Europolis (what was formerly Prague). Zoe herself was left in critical condition, being dragged away by an unseen person.

Well, before the game feels like filling us in on either of those plots, we once again visit our inscrutably destined mystery child Saga. She's grown up since last time; now she's a precocious kindergartener with an affinity for drawing scenes from The Longest Journey. The child naturally has a mysterious link to April Ryan and the White Dragon - neither of which the game has bothered explaining too much, even passively as an optional dialogue option - and after a protracted search of her inter-dimensional home in the Aether for nine of these hidden drawings, Saga finds herself walking through a portal to her first "shift": the name of the mysterious power that lets April and Zoe switch between Stark and Arcadia. Where she's gone, the game wouldn't say. It's also worth noting that Saga's mother vanished soon after the first interlude with her, back when she was an infant. Whether "mommy" is a dragon in human guise or something else entirely has yet to be ascertained.

Leaving Saga's, well, saga hanging like so many sketches on a wall, we return to Kian to see that Oldtown did indeed get roasted and most of the rest of the magical races have been deported to prison camps. At least this gives us less ground to cover for the Marcuria-based puzzles. In this brief section, Kian attempts to get to the bottom of the tubes that the Azadi have installed all over Marcuria. Curiously enough, it's actually a giant adding machine that the Azadi scientists have concocted, and removing the magical races is instrumental to minimizing the amount of magic, or "chaos", that might disrupt the system's calculations. That the game built an entire computer the size of a city made from pneumatic tubes sending calculations in various directions is kind of a neat development, and it remains to be seen what will be done with this technology. It's also apparent that many of the Azadi are ignorant of the magical races true fate in the concentration camps (the game doesn't quite go so far to call them that, but that's the implication), simply assuming that they're getting repatriated back to their homelands. At this point the scene ends as General Hami discovers Kian is still alive - the General is the man who trained Kian and tells him to be careful at the start of Dreamfall, and his presence in Marcuria is a major issue to Commander Vamon - Kian's hated rival and the man most eager to see Kian get executed - and the local Azadi ruler/administrator/"emissary" Sister Sayha, who have been in cahoots to formulate a plan to conquer the Azadi Empire. It's a whole Lannister subplot that the game frequently revisits, letting the player in on who the villains are and what they're up to as far as Arcadia is concerned. Kian escapes the General, but some seeds of doubt have been sown and now it's a matter of seeing if General Hami can expose Vamon and Sayha's duplicity before they are able to arrange a convenient accidental death for the visiting dignitary.

Back to Zoe, we see that she recovered mostly intact from the bomb, but now there's even more stringent martial law on the streets and the city is practically deserted but for the EYE enforcers and their drones. The next few puzzles involve resolving to find out what happened with Nela - she was set up with an antimatter bomb rather than a non-lethal EMP which would've disrupted the EYE's communications rather than exploded a whole block - and finish what the Hand started in uncovering the role the Syndicate has in the phony election and the city-wide clampdown. It also involves a long chat with Hanna, who potentially has the same shifting powers as April and Zoe. We then make a visit to Mr. London's warehouse, where he seems to be torturing some schmuck with a virtual golf game, and some evidence we need to prove that the Syndicate was behind the bomb. It's here we meet Shitbot for one final hurrah - there's a few puzzles that require switching his personality cores around to procure the right evidence without getting spotted by goons (fortunately, there's scarcely any stealth involved). That chapter ends with Zoe finally using the Dreamachine to make her way back to Arcadia through her dream powers, but instead she fully vanishes and shifts over like April Ryan once did. "What the shitty shit is going on?", to paraphrase Mira.

The game concludes with two brief sequences from both Zoe and Kian, as Zoe finds out where the resistance can be contacted (with the help of Crow! Crow's back! And as reluctant to get involved in adventures as ever!), is taken to the resistance hideout and almost meets Kian before being dragged off for questioning, and then the game seamlessly switches to Kian as he is resolved to leave Marcuria to followed the kidnapped Bip - an urchin that he's been building a friendship with over a handful of resistance missions - and find evidence regarding the magicals that have been deported. We also get Anna's story, finally: she's been sweet on Kian ever since he saved her from Vamon's gang on the streets of Sahir when both were far younger, and has been resolute in finding him again. Kian sneaks on board an airship (or "cloudship") leaving for the Ge'en prison colony for evidence of Vamon and Sayha's wrongdoing and the chapter ends on a fairly noncommittal note.

As for the big decisions this episode, we had a few:

• Return the worker's tools or keep them: This is one of those clever ones that gets answered by whether or not you remembered to do something, rather than having a big binary decision flash on the screen with ominous music. I've seen this happen in a few other games of this type, where you might stop for a moment while seeing the end results screen and realizing that it was a decision you made without knowing it was there. I recalled that the missing tools needed for the first part of that mission might get the very Welsh bartender Ulvic in trouble, given that they were purloined under his tavern's roof, so I returned them before entering the computing room and ending Kian's first section. Hopefully I've spared Ulvic from some pressing questions.
• Dodge Falk's shot or Distract him: The first time Zoe tries to use Mira's Dreamachine, shortly into her chapter, it tips off the EYE operatives who have been keeping tabs on her. We come face to face with the German guy working with our therapist Dr. Zalenka, a guy apparently named Falk, as he points a gun in Zoe's face just as she wakes up from the dreaming device. By choosing to dodge the bullet, I let Falk have a great shot at the EYE officer sneaking through the window behind me. Turns out this Falk person, whoever he is (the game reveals his name in the decision description at the end, but as far as I know the game has yet to introduce him), is on Zoe's side. Or, at the very least, not ready for her to be captured or killed by EYE forces. I have no idea what might've happened if I'd chosen "distract". I wonder if I can get my main character killed by making a bad decision?
• Take Likho's hand or leave him behind: Right at the end of the episode, before leaving on the cloudship, I had the choice of taking the grouchy Dolmari Likho along with me. Likho's been on my case since jump street, and every decision I've made so far as Kian seems to piss him off more, so the last thing I wanted to do was to bring him along on a buddy-buddy mission to magical concentration camp island. Probably made a misstep there, since his assistance would've no doubt come in useful, but I really didn't feel like spending the next Book getting threatened in his growly voice for my inadvertent magical racism. This whole on-the-nose holocaust allegory probably the most tiring part of the whole Arcadia section of the game, to be honest.

As it stands right now, Zoe is being detained in the resistance's HQ, Kian is off to gather evidence and potentially free some magical prisoners, and Saga is... I dunno, off doing something somewhere in the multiverse. Somehow I don't think I need to worry about her. I will say that the five/six-year-old Saga's accent - which I imagine is a Norwegian accent, given that child voice actors in video games are usually sourced from the families of the developers - is absolutely adorable.

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Dreamfall Chapters

As promised, today's update on Red Thread Games's Dreamfall Chapters will largely be comprised of very spoilery episode recaps and how I've tackled the big decisions so far.

Before then, though, I'd like to expand on the various reasons why I continue to be dissatisfied with the game. To continue yesterday's point about how any adventure game made in the episodic format seems obligated to throw in momentous decisions of which you cannot possibly predict the result, an ubiquitous aspect I already don't much care for in modern adventure games, Dreamfall Chapters adds its own curious and not necessarily beneficial variations to this format. The first, and the one that perhaps almost defeats the purpose of this feature, is that the player can actually see how the player base has voted before they've made the choice themselves. It may make a tough decision easier to handle if you know which way the vox populi took it, but it could also lend credence to the idea that one choice might lead to something catastrophic, and the ratio of decisions could be weighted by those on a subsequent playthrough who already know what will happen if a certain course of action is chosen. The other thing is that the game almost explicitly tells you at the end of the chapter what may result as a consequence of your choices - whether it regards your relationship to another character, to the fate of someone else, to possibly even the way the game will eventually conclude. With these tweaks it almost feels like the "big decision" format was begrudgingly forced upon the developers and they've tried to find ways to make it as painless as possible for all the series fans who are now constantly stressed that they've made the wrong choice for that character or cancelled a potentially exciting side-story or killed off a beloved ancillary character. This is played up in game too: Kian and Zoe are always constantly questioning the decisions they made, as they both continue to adjust to their new lives and the tragedies that seems to follow them both.

There's also the second issue I have with the game, and this is something they opted to carry over from Dreamfall. No, it's not any forced stealth sections - there's a couple of minor puzzles that required eluding detection, but it's scarcely as bad as Dreamfall, and I actually got a jokey "I Thought There Wouldn't Be Stealth!" achievement for messing one of them up too often - it's the fact that each chapter of the game involved a giant confusing hub to run around in with only a handful of hotspots scattered across them that were required to solve the puzzles. These towns were built for a sense of verisimilitude; instead of warping from one story-significant area of the town to the other like in most graphic adventure games, you have to manually jog over there, and there's naught but window dressing to see on the way. When there's only three or four hotspots you need to be concerned about, but you're spending several minutes running between them each visit, it doesn't feel like a conducive use of one's time. That Book 2 had one of these immediately followed by an even bigger one, in two completely distinct but equally labyrinthine urban settings, it really padded the game out beyond the handful of puzzles and cutscenes that comprised the game's "meat". The game feels unnecessarily drawn out because of sequences like these, but it's possible future chapters won't have this issue - whether that's because I'm now used to running around these places and won't get lost quite so easily (there are maps everywhere, but the game did not let you take one with you for the longest time) or because the game has moved onto new locations, I'll never say. Well, not yet.

Now that I've completed the first two Books, I'm still invested enough in the game's story and that of the overall series to keep going, but it's fair to say that this game has problems. I'll elaborate some more tomorrow, where I hope to complete Book 3 and hopefully Book 4 before moving onto the next game on the May Mastery list. For now, though, we enter spoiler town for Book 1 and Book 2 of Dreamfall Chapters:

Book 1: Reborn

I discussed last time that the first half of this Book is to bring our two main characters off the bench and back into the active roster. Or something sports-related to that effect. I suck at that kind of metaphor. Stark inhabitant and former bioengineering student turned world-hopping secret agent Zoe Castillo was left in a coma at the end of Dreamfall, while Azadi Apostle and all-round badass Kian Alvane was caught redhanded by his rival Commander Vamon conversing with April Ryan, the heroine of the first game and leader of a rebel faction, shortly before the Azadi had her killed and Kian imprisoned. It was one heck of a cliffhanger, to say the least, and after nine years (though in-game it's closer to just one) it was time to emancipate the two of them from their unfortunate positions.

Zoe has managed to pull a Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and is rescuing sleeping people Dream Warriors style from their lucid nightmares in an inter-dimensional space called Storytime. She's been here for months, passing from spectral dream avatar to spectral dream avatar, helping them to overcome whatever fears have trapped them in this place. You get to play through a few of these scenarios - a woman dreaming about constantly falling, a man scared of the dark and unable to cope, and a young girl who is terrified of the monster in her closet. These puzzles are solved with a handful of curious superhero abilities that Zoe can utilize in this dimension: one brings light, one lets her read the minds of the dream ghosts, and the last slows time down. The game has some fun building a handful of puzzles around these mechanics, before it decides to strip them from you once it becomes clear that Zoe has to wake up. So, after having a Persona-style heart-to-heart with an avatar of herself, she decides to do just that. The first big important choice of the game pops up here: does she go back to her old life, or try to forge a new one? I opted for a fresh start, if only because Zoe talked frequently about burning her bridges due to the twist that her father had been lying to her about her not-so-dead mother all this time. With a new life, she could move to a different city and try to rebuild from scratch.

Kian, meanwhile, is about to face an early execution from a clearly worried about something Vamon before a jailbreak manages to bust him out. It meant the sacrifice of the cool sea captain from Dreamfall to power the blood magic needed for a portal out of there, which isn't something I'm sure Kian would approve of even if he wasn't already raised to fear and hate magic of all kinds. He's given little choice but to then join the city of Marcuria's Resistance against his fellow Azadi - a vaguely Asian, vaguely African civilization which abhors magic and magical sentient races due to a stringent theocratic society. This sequence simply involves moving up the jail tower to the roof, which involves a few inventory puzzles and then bullshitting your way past the unctuous warden. The game's second and third choice hits here: mercy kill a dying prisoner to save him from being tortured for information, or let him be recaptured alive? as well as kill the warden or let him live? It seems like the vast majority let the first die and the second live. As did I, as Kian had given his word to that effect in both cases, and it's not like the warden is made to be entirely unsympathetic (though he sure looks like a little fantasy Hitler). The game doesn't do much with Kian after getting him out of prison, however, letting us ponder his fate as Vamon gets in a couple of revolver shots as Kian reluctantly escapes through the portal.

We're then taken back to Zoe where we get a full sense of what she's been up to since waking up, as the game skips ahead some three months: she woke up without her memories of the events of Dreamfall, convenient given the amount of information she has about Arcadia, the dream world, the conspiracy behind the "Dreamachine" devices and what may or may not be a doppelganger hiding as her ex-boyfriend Reza. Forgetting that she's supposed to be suspicious of Reza, she decides to build a new life with him in Propast, a district of the Europe-encompassing Europolis where Prague used to be. She presently works as an intern for a expletive-hurling technical whiz and her silent partner as they repair and repurpose old robots and sell them onto private vendors, and lives in a tiny apartment with crappy ventilation. So far, so twenty-something. This chapter's mostly about getting used to running around Propast and completing a list of objectives, all of which involve the aptly named Shitbot as it humorously fails at one career after another. This chapter then moves onto Zoe's volunteer work as a gofer for what she considers to be the least disappointing political candidate running for Mayor of Propast. This involves trying to win over a local underworld figure with some influence on the local downtrodden - the awesome Queenie, who can read Zoe like a book - and agreeing to help her find a pickpocket urchin named Hanna to earn her support. Zoe also goes to visit Reza at his place of work, the underground investigative journalist outfit The Hand That Feeds.

The last big decision of this Book involves either arguing with Reza over his controlling attitude or letting it slide for a quiet night in; the implication being that their relationship is tumultuous and may fall apart at any moment. They did originally split up for a reason, after all, and we're still not sure whether this Reza can be trusted. Even so, I chose not to argue; Zoe deserves some peace.

Before moving onto the next book, I just want to go over the characters that are introduced in Book 1. They'll play significant roles in the Books to follow, and also because I really like a handful of them. There's Zoe's food-cart friend and local Marxist Nela, who is frequently getting hassled by the ominous EYE patrolmen that have clamped Propast down under a martial law that the game has yet to explain; there's Mira and Wit, Zoe's dubious employers, and it's from the former we get many of the game's best lines, albeit ones filled with ableist slurs and strings of cusses; there's the outspoken editor Sully, who works with Reza at the Hand That Feeds and openly flirts with Zoe in a boisterous Hakan way that doesn't feel at all creepy somehow; Zoe's manager for her political volunteer work, the idealistic Baruti Maphane with some rad hexagon-hair; the wise old underworld matriarch Queenie, who might be a familiar archetype but at least she's way better than the uncomfortable "Chinese Merchant" stereotype in Dreamfall; and then the awesome but dead Captain Bachim, who chose to run himself through to save Kian when Kian wasn't up to the task of murdering the badass pirate that had helped him jailbreak. We'll be seeing more of all of those (except the Captain) in Book 2, and probably the Books to follow.

Last, though, we have to address the final enigmatic interlude that concludes Book 1: the infant Saga, and her meeting with a spectral figure I think we're supposed to assume is the deceased White Dragon from the first two games. Saga apparently lives in an inter-dimensional homestead with her parents, one of whom is green and glittery, and I suspect that there's some serious destiny afoot for this baby. It's fun to play an adventure game as an infant though. Might well be doing that again later this month...

Book 2: Rebels

Rebels sure felt a lot longer than the first, but really it's only because it was stacked with more puzzles and running around, and not so much with story stuff. We get a whole lot more Kian this time, as he begins this Book by meeting his fellow resistance members - including Likho, who does not get on well with Kian at all, what with Kian having cut down his father and all - and taking his first assignment for the cause. This is actually three assignments: meeting The Mole, who is revealed to be the wiliest and possibly the last of the subterranean Banda people from the first game; setting a shipment of Azadi weapons (guns, of course) to explode, which leads to the game's aforementioned "not stealth at all" section as you put a fuse together while avoiding a patrolling guard; and uncovering a turncoat by sneaking into a meeting of a racist faction working with the Azadi against the magical sentient races and later identifying the same guy in the magical slums via his odor. Again, these feel like minor assignments intended to get the player used to running around the new-look Arcadian city of Marcuria, which returns once again from the first and second games.

We then return to Zoe, who has been explaining her dreams to her therapist Dr. Zelenka (isn't he a Stargate Atlantis character? Is this supposed to be a reference?) who the game chooses to reveal to the player as being in cahoots with the same shadowy agent that's been monitoring her through Reza. Whoever this Toht-like fellow works for, and I assume it's the evil congolmerate WATICorp from Dreamfall, they're very curious about how much Zoe can remember about the Dreamachine conspiracy she supposedly helped to foil. What follows is another bunch of assignments - help Baruti track down where his and Zoe's political party's funding is coming from, continuing to help Queenie track down her teenage runaway contact, and once again trying to patch things up with Reza at his place of work. These tasks eventually overlap: Baruti and Zoe's benevolent mayoral candidate is shown to not only be in cahoots with her fascistic rival candidate but also the EYE-controlling corporate-funded Syndicate, which leads to Zoe either choosing to give Baruti the incriminating data or disseminating it to the public via Sully and Reza's The Hand That Feeds. Naturally, I went with the latter; it seemed far too obvious what would happen if you let a disillusioned Baruti take the priceless info to his crooked candidate and demand answers. Baruti didn't seem to happy with my decision, though at least there's a hint that he survived the ordeal in a later sequence. Hanna, meanwhile, turned out to have some connection to the same dreams Zoe is having, and I'm highly suspicious that a character with the same hair color and the name Anna appeared in Arcadia at the same time to lend assistance to Kian. It's hard to say if either Hanna or Anna can be trusted yet, but they seem to play a major role in the events to come. Neither of them have too forthcoming yet, however.

The game then switches back to Kian for a shorter stay in Marcuria, as the Resistance get a tip about a big raid on what's left on the magical sentient citizens of the city by the Azadi. Kian spends some time solving some irritating puzzles about "sand-witches" and fireworks to get the info he needs, but the mistrustful Likho decides to ignore it and the raid goes ahead as planned. Meanwhile, Zoe discovers that the Hand That Feeds has been closed down by EYE, who managed to intercept the big story before it went out, and follows a suspiciously-acting Nela after the latter hands Zoe a package to take care of for a short time. Nela then heads to the EYE HQ to blow herself up spectacularly for her Communist comrades, and a badly hurt and unconscious Zoe who was not able to escape the blast radius is dragged away by an unseen figure as the chapter ends.

Obviously with three more Books to go there's a lot of story left to see, but with this Book it felt like the game wanted to ratchet things up a few gears after the relatively sedate and newbie-welcoming first Book. Already, characters are dying left and right and we're seeing the disastrous results of some early decisions. We have a couple more cliffhangers to resolve for next time, and after these events it's unsure how much longer Zoe will stay in Propast, or Kian in Marcuria. Damn, and I've only just gotten used to the maps of those two places.

For the record, here are the big decisions we were required to make:

• Calling out Na'ane as a traitor or keeping silent - This is more or less addressing a sorta plot hole from the end of Dreamfall, where Kian manages to meet April Ryan for the last time due to him strong-arming her confidante and the Resistance's healer, Na'ane, for the information on her location. You can then choose to be a total dick and expose her to the Resistance as the traitor that allowed April to be discovered by the Azadi agent chasing her (as in, you) or talk to her later in private about the matter. I chose to keep her sins a secret for now; if I'm being given a chance to redeem myself, it strikes me as hypocritical to not allow her the same opportunity. Especially since I was the one that forced her hand in the first place.
• Warn Queenie about the Unity party or accept her support as well as tell Queenie where Hanna is hiding or keep it a secret: Both of these appear right at the end of Queenie's mission to track Hanna down, which involves the game's most obtuse puzzle yet (it involves getting the attention of one of the thousands of ad-bots floating around the city, and using its sales pitch as a distraction). Queenie's depicted as a trustworthy character who appreciates honesty and loyalty, so I chose to warn her about the political party I was in the process of exposing as well as keeping Hanna's location a secret after Hanna asked me to.
• Give Baruti the incriminating evidence or give it to The Hand That Feeds. See above.
• Torture or Threaten the Azadi captain for information, and then also Kill or Spare the Azadi captain. I'm not really playing Kian as a psychopath, since most of his storyline has been about finding redemption after his bloody life as a peerless Apostle of the Azadi, so I opted for the least violent approach both times. It may have caused more damage however, since Likho wasn't as quick to believe the information as he might've been if I tortured the poor sap for it. Likewise, he didn't approve that I let him go and accused me of choosing the Azadi over the magical races, though his companion Enu saw the tactical advantage of keeping the guy around as a spy instead. Incidentally, they set that guy up to be a racist child molester purely so I might more inclined to kill him, and fuck that. That's a weak-ass play at moral relativism. No enlightened person chooses to kill a guy because his crimes make him a colossal asshole, though letting him go with the threat of revealing that information to his superiors (which will lead to a very unpleasant death, we're informed) might've been too lenient. (And hey, I chose to kill Whoreson Junior in The Witcher 3, so maybe I do have my limits.)

I could go through all the characters in the Resistance - Likho, the blue warrior with a chip on his shoulder; Enu, the chatty catgirl comic relief who frequently slips into TMI mode; the weird deer lady ringleader Shepard - but they don't feel particularly significant. Not yet anyway.

Instead, let's wrap this up for now and I'll cover more of the game tomorrow. That is, if I don't get burned out from running around cities for hours.

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Dreamfall Chapters

The first session with Dreamfall Chapters has been... interesting. I'd been hoping to complete the first episode (or book) today of what is currently four - I have no idea when the fifth is supposed to arrive given it's been half a year since the last one - but the game moves extremely slowly. I don't just mean plotting-wise either; as the first chapter of the game I can forgive a certain amount of catch-up and table-setting, especially since it's been nine years since a lot of players last spent time with these characters. Rather, either due to the technical limitations of my computer or some other issue, everything seems to move in slow-motion and the dialogue has these big, long pauses between each line. I don't think the first chapter was meant to take this long to complete: all I've really done is complete two of its chapters, each of which only required three or four mini-puzzles each. I'll be messing around with the settings for tomorrow's continuation to move things along quicker, at any rate, where I hope to at least complete the first two books and possibly follow with the final two on day three.

What this shortcoming does provide - a silver lining, as it were - is an opportunity to create spoiler-filled recounts of the books I've played through tomorrow and Friday, while preserving today for general impressions on the game and setting everything up for those unfamiliar with the series so that anyone can read today's update without it revealing too much. Like most episodic adventure games, a lot of what's worth remarking upon relates to the strength of the narrative, both in terms of plotting and how that plot is delivered, and what tends to make accounts of these games valuable is discussing the ever-ubiquitous "big choices" that each game requires of you at certain points in the story. Given that almost all of that might potentially spoil a first playthrough, I'll save it for the updates to come.

Dreamfall Chapters is, collectively, the third and probably final installment of The Longest Journey series which began way back in 1999. The Longest Journey's sequel and the immediate predecessor to Dreamfall Chapters, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, was released in 2006, so it's a series that has always taken its sweet time for each new installment. The heroine from the second game onward is Zoe Castillo, a former bioengineering student from Casablanca who begins that game having lost her sense of purpose in life and embarks on a dangerous and exciting adventure after a close reporter friend of hers goes missing. Whereas the first game was a standard graphic adventure point-and-click, Dreamfall went for something a bit closer to "action-adventure", with combat mini-games and stealth sections thrown in for flavor. Those sections didn't quite work out, but the game's script and puzzles were fortunately as strong as ever. As for the overall story, there's a little too much of it to get into detail here but it essentially tells of two worlds - the magically-inclined Arcadia and the technologically-driven Stark, the latter of which is our world - and a deep connection between them that suggests that when one is threatened, so is the other. It began with a whole bunch of malarkey about some feuding magical immortal dragons, the delicate balance of energies between the two worlds and, most recently, an attempt to destabilize both by attacking people through their dreams. Frequently, the games in this series split their time between the fantasy trappings of Arcadia and the near-future sci-fi of Stark, all the while creating parallels between the two distinct settings that help the player get to the bottom of whatever's threatening both worlds that week.

Naturally, I don't hate the game. Wouldn't want to keep playing if that was the case. I do feel like the modern episodic adventure game format and its now-established balance of minimal puzzle design and maximum "make a choice and maybe regret it later" story-shifting decisions does the world of Dreamfall/The Longest Journey a disservice in some respects; for one, the game was never about moral choices, because while the characters they presented could be troubled and conflicted, they always did what was right in the end. That's just how the forward motion in these types of stories happen to work. Zoe and Kian, who appear to be the game's protagonists this time around, both had arcs filled with suffering and self-doubt that allowed them to grow as distinct characters throughout the events of Dreamfall, though all too often in these episodic games the developers try to let the player take their own interpretation of the story by presenting dilemmas that determine how those characters react to situations and will adjust their personalities based on those choices. That's fine when you're creating characters from whole cloth, but it doesn't work as well when you're using pre-established personalities with their own clearly defined moral compasses and beliefs. You could rationalize that the present flexibility of their personalities is due to how their respective worldviews/faith have been shaken by the tragic events at the end of the second game, and the intervening months between that game and this one, but I'm not sure it's all really sitting right. Some of the decisions so far have been fairly weak too, though that might have more to do with the writing than anything else. Either way, they don't feel like they belong, at least not yet.

Otherwise, the game is as well-written and well-realized as the others in its series, and even though I've barely got past the game's reintroduction of its two main characters (the third is, uh, presently occupied? With being dead? Maybe? Probably?), I appreciate that they've apparently switched back to the less action-oriented gameplay of the first game. I hope it continues to do well by the legacy it's been shaping these seventeen long years, and finally bring closure to some mysteries and cliffhangers that many fans of this series have been waiting to see concluded for almost a decade (though for me it's only been a year, thankfully). If nothing else, I'm glad this game exists for that reason.

Be sure to come by tomorrow for a detailed rundown of the first (and hopefully second) books and the rationalization behind the choices I made. I'll include an opening paragraph or two discussing general non-spoilery updates too, just to keep those who have yet to play the game in the loop regarding my ever-mutable perspective as I get further in. (Looking to create something like the rundowns in my Life is Strange playthrough from December, for reference.)

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Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack

The best praise I can give Mutant Blobs Attack, though it's perhaps the biggest bummer as well, is that it reminds me a lot of the gone but not forgotten TV show Futurama. Futurama mined a lot of comedy from a classic sci-fi premise of aliens and the wonders of the future, told variously through the filters of the early 2000s when the show was made and decades throughout the 20th century as the basis of many of the sci-fi tropes it tackled and its overall retro look. I used the word "zeerust" to describe Mutant Blobs Attack last time: it's a made up word (from The Meaning of Liff, a book written by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams and QI co-creator John Lloyd, who conceived the neologism from a town name) that describes a future of the past. Say, what the folks from the mid-20th century envisioned what the 21st century might look like. Some of the technology they predicted is still years and years away from us even now, most notably interstellar travel and extraterrestrial colonies, while many others we presently enjoy (like this internet thing here) were not predicted at all, and there's a distinct fingerprint of the prevailing sensibilities and fashions of that decade that makes its future-that-may-have-been look simultaneously dated. Likewise, the art direction and music of Mutant Blobs Attack evokes various decades of sci-fi, presenting a world that has an elevator to the moon but still has computers the size of rooms. It's a tongue-in-cheek attempt to recreate the zeerust of a 1950s B-movie about a blob devouring the world in the distant future where we have let our amoral experiments run amok. (But if I'm being honest, what really drives the comparison home between this game and Futurama is that they both feature a green "Horrible Gelatinous Blob" with an irritated expression that keeps eating people out of habit. Similar cultural DNA, I suspect.)

Anyway, I figured I'd open with a clarification for something I wrote last time because there's not a whole lot else to add about this game. My appraisal of it yesterday is still every bit as applicable now that I've beaten the game: it's an excellent puzzle-platformer that never runs out of ideas for various physics and precision-based conundrums, all of which is anchored by the game's core mechanic of putting on mass by eating objects that are smaller than you, as that then lets you eat larger objects including whatever blockade is preventing you from moving forward. The game certainly doesn't pull any punches as it goes on, and there are times where I've died multiple times at the same spot within seconds of respawning, creating a Super Meat Boy style medley of squelching sound effects. The game is very generous with its checkpoints, however, and it's very hard to get frustrated at any given puzzle given how quickly you respawn and how little repetition there is to suffer through. There's also a self-destruct if you're attempting to get one of the game's point tally medals and have missed a few collectibles, provided you hit it before the next checkpoint is reached.

Collectible chasing is a little more exasperating because the game is very linear and, as stated, checkpoints frequently and usually after hitting a point of no return. The stages themselves, though, are fairly brisk and rarely take more than five minutes to complete, and you can whiz through them quickly once you've ascertained how to solve their environmental puzzles. I appreciate that while the requirements for the best result - a gold medal - are steep, it's never to the extent that you need to grab absolutely everything. When you're being thrown into fast-paced scenarios like a forced scrolling section with an instant-death laser beam following closely behind you, stopping for every little blue dot is the last thing you want to do.

One other game comparison I'd like to make before wrapping this up is to Rabbids Go Home. Besides the similar emphasis on finding objects and increasing the size of your haul, as well as a similar chaotic comic sensibility, there's a distinct secondary story going on with the humans in the background. Humans, in both cases, are treated as "others": we see ourselves as another sentient species might see us, flawed and stupid and violent and incoherent and panicky. The Blob initially escapes his laboratory imprisonment because of the brutal testing they put the blobs through, and is constantly avoiding the traps the humans have set to stop it. As it gets ever bigger and starts eating humans along with everything else, humanity gets more and more desperate to stop it, including sticking it in a rocket and firing that rocket at the sun. The blob takes all this in stride and, without giving too much away, proves to be more than the humans can handle. My favorite hilariously dark moment comes right at the end of the game: After devouring an entire city, the Blob delves underground and begins to eat the Earth from the inside out. As you escape into space to start munching down on the planet's surface, a group of rockets fire off in every direction. They look like the guided rockets that the humans have been firing at you, but they're actually colony ships built to escape an Armageddon - in this case, the player character's voracious rampage. If you're fast enough, you can vindictively eat every last one of them and cause the human race to go completely extinct. It feels like something right out of the alternate ending of "Little Shop of Horrors", and the perfect way to put a cap on the game's extended B-movie homage.

The Verdict: The game's beaten, so I gotta move on. An easy recommend for fans of smaller and less complicated games like this. Five stars.

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Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack

The zeerust-tastic Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack has a couple of pertinent facts to disclose: the first is that it is the sequel to the equally 1950s sci-fi heavy Tales from Space: About a Blob (which fans of this site will remember for its memorable Ryan and Vinny Quick Look) and it was one of the 2012 games to be part of the launch library of the PS Vita. But all its history doesn't matter so much as the fact that it's an excellent puzzle-platformer that I'm enjoying very much.

Both Blob games share a lot of similarities. The player is the eponymous blob of the title; a ravenous gelatinous creature with an exceptionally dim view of mankind, which it first sees as an obstacle to be avoided and eventually as food to be eaten. With nary a Steve McQueen in sight to stop them, the blobs move through each stage absorbing any and all edible matter and increasing their mass, using a similar size-gated progression seen in the Katamari Damacy games. Mutant Blobs Attack's annoyed amorphous anti-hero also has a few other tricks up its contractile vacuole (I looked that one up! I think it's the amoeba's butthole!): it can cling to or repel itself from metallic objects with innate magnetism, and it can use telekinesis to push and pull certain objects in the vicinity. Along with its intrinsic shapelessness and a downward stomp, it's a versatile character and the game isn't lacking for ideas to challenge the player with the number of abilities on offer. It can make it a bit hectic to remember what all the buttons do, but even playing on keyboard I've been able to adjust.

Not enough good things can be said about how it controls either. Despite being a slippery customer, the blob is easy to manage because every point of contact between itself and the ground counts as "standing", allowing the player to clip the edge of a platform and still correct their way on top of it either by pushing hard enough or jumping again. Decent air control, a workable if limited wall jump and some generous checkpointing means I rarely have a reason to grouse about a sudden death. There is certainly a few cases where the control is taken away from you, specifically whenever you're whizzing through tubes at incredible speeds, and there's a few times when I've gotten killed a few times at the same spot and a tooltip's had to appear out of the ether to inform me that there was a heretofore unknown application of one of my powers I could use to avoid dying so much, whether that's using the stomp move to switch direction while falling down a fast-moving vertical corridor lined with spikes or using rockets to push very close to a wall. That the developers thought to give players a chance to figure it out on their own first before lending a helpful hint is actually fairly novel, and I wonder how useful such a feature would be in, say, Super Mario Maker whenever Patrick Klepek is playing it before his first cup of coffee in the morning.

It has some angular style to a lot of its artwork, which I imagine comes from a more 1960s/1970s era of graphic design of the like Saul Bass was probably known for. I'm no expert in that field, obviously, but I recall seeing it a lot in Jazzpunk too and it definitely leaves an impression. Music's odd, but it's starting to grow on me too. I could do with fewer memes, pop culture references and shout-outs for other Indie games on the background billboards, but that sort of nonsense tends to be inescapable with Indie games of a certain vintage.

In his most recent Jimquisition video, Jim Sterling considers the reasons why an inventive but flawed Indie game might get preferential treatment over an equally inventive but flawed AAA title by the critical community, and how many critics seem to prop up Indie darlings while leaving so many AAA games with half-hearted acclaim and middling scores (you know, like the audacious ignominy of a mere 8.8). He came to a few conclusions in the course of his video - Indie games take more risks, have less advertising to promote themselves effectively and thus are more attractive games to champion, and that there are a vast number of Indie games released every year and the only ones that ever get talked about tend to be the cream of the crop - but the observation most relevant when discussing Mutant Blobs Attack is how Indie games are highly rated because of their frequent emphasis on simplicity over complexity. When you set your sights on as modest a goal as creating a puzzle-platformer with an appealing aesthetic, responsive controls and enough abilities and tricks to learn to keep the game fresh for its comparatively brief four or five hour average runtime, it's hard to find fault in a game that nails each one of those targets. Maybe you could knock off points for a lack of ambition or a fundamental similarity to other Indie games in the same genre, but ultimately those are some arbitrary and unfair admonitions and I'd have no qualms recommending this game to anyone after what I've played of it so far, while I may have more reservations about an equally unconditional endorsement for The Witcher 3 simply because a game that big and ambitious is bound to have a few more faults to poke a wagging finger towards.

I'm about halfway through the game, so let's stop here and save the rest of the discussion for tomorrow. Until then!

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(All right, so y'all may be wondering about Burnstar. You might recall yesterday that I was being sort of wishy-washy about whether I liked it or not; but the truth is there was something about the game that was bugging me and in my tired state last night I wasn't quite able to put a finger on what that was until I resumed playing it again today: it has no way to reverse mistakes except via a full restart of the level. This started becoming a problem when stages became larger and required that I place a dozen bombs and rockets in ideal spots to maximize the output of stars, all the while avoiding getting clobbered by some random stage hazard. Mess up once, and it's right back to the beginning. None of the courses are actually all that long - the time limit goal is usually around a minute to 90 seconds - but there were times where I'd spend three minutes setting up everything perfectly and dying on the way to the exit, and I could almost see minutes of my finite lifespan falling away from me like grains of sand in an hourglass.

My number one rule for game design is "never waste the player's time", with its player-side corollary of "stop playing a game as soon as it starts feeling like a waste of time". Again, numerous ways to interpret that (does grinding and farming count?), but it basically boils down to whether or not a game is requiring you to do something you don't want to do, such as repeat the last five or more minutes, because of some deficiency in the design. I can't imagine it would have been a huge issue to implement a reset function that would take the player back to just prior to the most recently placed explosive if the player thinks they messed up - it's not like they don't provide a grace period to recover any placed bomb, provided the player can grab it before it explodes. I can't see myself playing any more of that game, knowing what frustrations lie ahead without that necessary concession to user friendliness.)

Burnstar

I was curious about Nerve Software's Burnstar, a Bomberman-styled puzzle game, after I saw a Quick Look of it on this site. It seemed to be the sort of breezy, stage-based puzzle game that might be good for brief play sessions between bigger games. At its heart, though, Burnstar feels like another awkward iOS-to-Steam port with the same bouncy fonts and colorful presentations endemic to that platform, presumably with which to entice a casual audience looking for something that screams "light and fun". I'm not saying that necessarily reflects on the game's core gameplay at all, but it's one of those cases where the first impression counts for a lot and now it's hard to think of Burnstar as anything but another cutesy entry in the pantheon of Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans. They all have the exact same visual style; it's like every American-made pseudo-anime cartoon in the 2000s.

Burnstar has a very loose approximation of a plot - a squad of what I can only describe as "Pyro Babies: The Team Fortress 2 Spin-off That Never Happened" run around their world attempting to incinerate the toxic goo left behind by a mysterious enemy. The goo and the crates containing them are strewn around every area of the forest, and it's down to these conflagration experts to figure out the optimal way of torching every last trace of the malignant fluid. I might wonder why the developers chose a forest as the first setting, since I can scarcely conceive of a less flammable location for a bunch of firestarters, but maybe the game artists are really into drawing forests. Or it's a weird ironic goof that no-one remarks upon.

At any rate, there's a considerable number of rules that should be obeyed in order to determine where these optimal bomb placements are. They mostly stem from understanding how the game's fire physics work:

• An object of a certain value will spread fire to any adjacent object of equal or lesser value. Value, in this case, also corresponds to height from the ground: a medium box won't light a large box on fire, but a large will a medium. It goes large red, medium orange, small yellow and then the loose purple goo itself.
• Certain crates will explode when ignited. Orange crates will explode one space in every direction around them, and red ones will explode two spaces in every direction. The bombs themselves also have a one space area of effect. Destructible objects like cracked walls can only be destroyed by explosions, not fire.
• If a crate regardless of its size is surrounded by fire on at least three sides, it'll ignite no matter what. There's a lot of situations where a crate will be surrounded by loose goo, and it's by igniting that goo that you can easily destroy the crate.
• As well as getting roasted by any open flames or explosions caused by the bombs and crates, there are usually a few stage hazards that can kill you. Naturally, you want to avoid all of it, as it forces you to restart the stage. Each of the four characters you can choose from have a separate ability that helps you avoid damage, from a shield to clones to temporarily freezing hazards in place.
• Stars are required to complete the level. Specifically, something in the region of 60-85% of the stars in the level are needed to achieve a satisfactory rating. Collecting all 100% earns a gold rating. A similar system exists for destroying a percentage of targets (crates, goo, etc.).
• Finally, you have a time limit on every stage too. This is just another rating, so you can choose to ignore it. That's what I've been doing. I hate it when puzzle games centered around carefully and deliberately choosing your next move also force you to hurry up at the same time. If you decide to go this route, Burnstar's (the orange guy) dash move is the worst for staying alive but the best for time trials.
• Collectible saplings? Question mark?

That's about the extent of the game mechanics up to this point. It all makes more sense when you see the game in action via that Quick Look I linked to or in the screenshots scattered around this blog. Each stage becomes a several step process of figuring out how to get all the bombs on the stage - you don't start with any, so finding them lying around is the only way to blow anything up - and then ascertaining where those bombs should go. It largely involves following the chain reaction in your mind back to its most likely origin point - usually a box that won't be destroyed in the chain reaction itself but can trigger the rest of it to happen if blown up first. You also need to be wary of star imprints on the ground; these only turn into stars if an explosion occurs on that spot, so it's often a good indicator of where you need to set your bombs. And then that's pretty much been the whole game so far, excepting one mediocre boss fight that was clearly styled on Pac-Man and doesn't merit further mention.

I'm fairly torn with this one. I managed to complete the first of what I presume are four worlds based on the achievement descriptions, and while I appreciate the depth of strategy involved I'm not sure how much more the game has to offer. It still has at least one other power-up up its hazmat suit sleeves - a rocket, which I'm guessing acts as a bomb that you fire in a direction rather than place on the ground - but if the game turns out to be a series of very similar but far harder puzzles, there's not a whole lot about that prospect that appeals. I'll stick with it tomorrow until it becomes evident that it's run out of ideas, and then I might temporarily bow out and move onto something else. Who knows? Maybe Burnstar will keep tossing around novel twists on its formula for the rest of the playthrough. I can certainly hope that'll be the case.

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Welcome back to Sunday Summaries everyone. May Mastery '16 continues to be a thing - while I'm thankfully not quite in the "I regret that I forced this daily obligation upon myself" phase of the feature, there's still just over two weeks left to get there.

Elsewise it's been a quiet week around here, the regrettable closing of Disney Interactive and Avalanche (not that Avalanche) notwithstanding. I suppose you could call this the point in 2016 where the seas recede for a few miles before the tidal wave shows up, though maybe that's giving E3 too much credit this year. Developers are dropping out of the event left and right, or doing the barest minimum like Nintendo, and I'm wondering what the state of the E3 streams will be like. In fact, I wonder what my "Alternative to E3" series will be this year too. I'll have to start workshopping some ideas...

New Games!

Odd and limited selection this week, befitting the advent of the Summer slump. While there's a couple of new AAA releases, I'm going to have to give the spotlight to the North American release of the graphically remastered PS4 version of Valkyria Chronicles. For such an underrated game at the time, it's being given new leases of life all over the place: first with a highly publicized Steam release in 2014, and now with this PS4 remastered version. The original game already looked gorgeous - seamless cel-shading with muted colors and a watercolor effect that became more pronounced in static images - so I have no clue how they may have polished it further. Hopefully we get some footage of it from either coast of Giant Bomb this week - I remember Vinny and Dave checking it out a good few months after its release, once it became abundantly clear the game was something special, so maybe Vinny and Austin will give it its due with a timely video this time instead. Of course, what I'm really hoping for is that this leads to PS4 versions of Valkyria Chronicles II and III as well. The latter of those has yet to be released in English, and it sounds like we non-polyglots are missing out.

Other new games this week include that sequel to Homefront no-one asked for, Homefront: The Revolution. I suppose if you've spent a lot of money to buy the IP off the imploding THQ, you might as well make something with it. Lemonade from lemons, as it were. In other possibly misguided video game project news, we have the modernized Shadow of the Beast for PS4. I'm cautiously optimistic about that one: there's nothing about the gameplay of the first that's worth salvaging - that game was the Rise of the Robots of it time, where most of its goodwill came purely from its graphical advancements (not to mention the box art from British sci-fi surrealist Roger Dean, who would frequently work with Psygnosis for some trippy covers) - but with the right amount of inventiveness you could turn that game into something fun, like a weird open-world brawler in the vein of Zeno Clash II. Morbidly curious about it, as someone who briefly played the original some two decades plus ago.

There's also a PSN release of the PS2 JRPG Wild ARMs 3, which I can personally recommend. It's my favorite game from the Wild ARMs franchise; a series that features a Trigun-esque setting of a planet permanently locked in a Wild West period, with a whole lot of sci-fi ancient civilization business hovering just outside of view. There's also the attractive Shadwen, which appears to be the Trine guys making their own successor to Thief since Eidos Montreal evidently wasn't up to the task. That anime fighter that got Quick Looked recently, Koihime Enbu, is out on Steam this Thursday. Finally, we have Far Harbor, the first big DLC campaign for Fallout 4. I generally stay away from the DLC for any Bethesda game (if there's one type of RPG that doesn't need any extra content...) but I hear it's usually of a fairly decent quality and size, and those saps who bought the Fallout 4 season pass or had it included in their purchase of the game deserve more than just a bunch of robots floating around Boston and a new workbench. Rumors have it that Far Harbor has the biggest landmass ever included in a Bethesda DLC, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout both.

Wiki!

Nineteen pages saw some renovation this week, which takes a huge chunk out of July's thirty-two releases, though we're still firmly stuck in that month for one more week. I couldn't tell you why July of 1995 was so busy; Summers are usually too hot to do much of anything, hence why there's usually little going on in the release schedules. Of those nineteen, we saw five new pages: Shin Ikkakusenkin, Super F1 Circus Gaiden, Big Ichigeki! Pachi-Slot Daikouryaku 2: Universal Collection, DunQuest: Majin Fuuin no Densetsu and Shogi Saikyou. Isn't it odd that, despite having Japanese titles, you kind of already know what four of those games are about? As always, be sure to check my ongoing list of SNES/SFC pages I've added to the wiki here for more information - no point in repeating myself.

Of the remaining fourteen, we have some stand-outs to peruse:

• Mystic Ark is an RPG I've wanted to jump into forever, since it's a deeply strange scenario-based RPG from the developers of Brain Lord and The 7th Saga. These aren't exactly approachable games, even with English text, but they're some of the most distinctive and imaginative RPGs on a system that saw an immense number of uninspired Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy imitators.
• Castlevania: Dracula X is the second and last Castlevania game for the system, and is more or less a watered down version of the excellent Castlevania: Rondo of Blood for PC Engine CD (and, way later, PSP and Wii Virtual Console). Time will tell if Vinnyvania deigns to cover this one or skip straight from Bloodlines to Symphony of the Night. Actually, beyond Bloodlines, I'm not sure if there will be another Vinnyvania...
• Talking of PC Engine CD ports, Super Variable Geo is another one of those anime all-women fighting games of some notoriety. It's also one of those grossly porny ones where the girls who lose end up having to do something sexually humiliating as punishment, so it's for the best that the family-friendly Super Famicom cuts those parts out and sticks to the fighting.
• Kat's Run: Zennihon K Car Senshuken is a little more wholesome: a Super Mario Kart style mode 7 racer with an all-female cast in "kei cars" - what Japan calls its smaller vehicle class which include microvans and two-seat convertibles. It's a cute little racing game, in other words, and another case of Atlus going outside its demons and angels wheelhouse for something with a bit more levity.
• Ranma 1/2: Ougi Jaanken is a game I'm only bringing up because Ranma 1/2: Hard Battle featured in the most recent Ranking of Fighters. It's actually one of the few Ranma games for Super Famicom that isn't a fighter; it's a block-stacking game based on janken (rock-scissors-paper) instead. If Jason couldn't convince Jeff to check out Ranma 1/2 through playing Hard Battle, maybe he'll have better luck via a competitive puzzle game. We know Super Famicom-exclusive puzzle games have gone down well in the past...
• Chou Genjin 2 would've been known in North America as "Super Bonk 2" if Hudson managed to localize it, but unfortunately the one Bonk game to never be released outside of Japan might also be its best: the game goes full ham with its transformations this time around, and offers a great mix of surreal nonsense and competent 2D side-scrolling platforming.
• Finally, I want to give a special shout-out to Laplace no Ma, or Laplace's Demon. There are precious few horror-themed JRPGs out there, and this one seems to be a decent combination of an unnerving survival horror game and a solid turn-based RPG. Oddly enough, the game was originally a first-person dungeon crawler for the PC88 and, rather than being an up-rezzed port of that, the SFC game is completely different, opting instead for a top-down view with a different set of RPG mechanics.

May Mastery '16!

The second week of May Mastery '16 saw a quartet of Steam games from the past few years. I'd recommend checking their individual daily entries for a deeper cut, but here's the four of them in a nutshell:

Abyss Odyssey is a 2D side-scrolling procedurally generated action RPG "roguelite" with combat that feels like something out of Super Smash Bros and a trippy narrative featuring an evershifting labyrinth borne of a powerful warlock's dreams. Its combat didn't sit right with me - a little too chaotic for my tastes, and not in the fun way that ACE Team's earlier Zeno Clash games were - but the game has style to spare and I appreciated almost everything else about it. If you're in the mood for permadeath and weirdness, I might suggest you check it out. Perhaps you'll have better luck with it than I did.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a first-person horror game from TheChineseRoom, and a spiritual (and nominal) sequel to Frictional's Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It's very barebones compared to its predecessor, and I don't mean that in a spooky skeleton way; it feels like a lot of the integral mechanics like replenishing a finite light source and the insanity effects of being in the dark too long were stripped away, leaving what is essentially a spookhouse ride of jump scares and ominous voiceovers from a crazy British man obsessed with godly machines. It's fine if you're just in the market for some thrills and chills, but it feels more like every generic horror game on Steam than the trendsetter Dark Descent was.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: Critter Chronicles was so-so for the series, but probably still in the upper echelons of modern graphic adventure games overall. It had a pervading sense of superfluousness to it, as there wasn't a huge amount of impetus to know where Critter - a joke character with few redeeming qualities - came from or how he met the cowardly rogue Nate Bonnett prior to the events of the first game. The series' best qualities - the high number of wonderfully hand-drawn settings and the sharp wit of its often fourth-wall-breaking script - were a little lacking too, but then this wasn't exactly a full-priced entry and I should probably respect the difference.

Ronin is the most recent game I've played, a 2D side-scrolling stealth action game with a compelling turn-based structure that lets you plan out your next action in the middle of a frantic firefight. Despite a few glaring mechanical faults and a really dire format for its final mission, I quite enjoyed this one. I might prefer playing Gunpoint overall, but Ronin set out to make itself as badass as possible and I can't say that it didn't achieve that goal. With only fifteen missions and a handful of upgrades to play around with, it doesn't overstay its welcome either.

Ronin

Well, Ronin perhaps did a smart thing bowing out as early as it did. As it naturally ratcheted up the difficulty for its later missions, those seams I talked about last time did begin to transpire. I've a laundry list of grouses that I'm thinking of sticking in their own spoiler block section for my peace of mind, but suffice it to say that a game that demands a certain amount of precision from its player should see to it that it exhibits a similar level of mechanical rigor itself. A tool-tip straight up admits that the jump indicator line is a lie, and you're likely to find many other ways that the UI will inaccurately portray the predicted result of the next move before you execute on it, rendering the protagonist dead or close to it through no fault of the player.

I can respect the game's strengths though, and I do think the turn-based aspect is a really neat idea that allows for some creative balletic murdering. It would've been fantastic if it followed a time-stop system like this to its natural end point; namely, an option to view a replay of the mission you just completed without all the pausing so you can watch your little revenge-obsessed assassin quickly flip around a room and systematically take out all of its guards in real-time. I'm guessing that, along with the mysterious other characters in the frequently shown photograph of targets the heroine carries around with her, it was a feature that the developer didn't have the time or resources left to implement. It's a shame they weren't given more time to polish the game, though it also makes me hopeful that Ronin 2 can excel where the first fell flat a few times.

The acquired skills really helped with the end game, and not just because it made the level of challenge more approachable. The ability to teleport directly towards someone is an insane game-changer that allowed for some truly nonsense killing sprees, as you're likely to quickly regain enough points from killing your surprised foe to teleport again to a goon on the opposite side. Add to this other badass skills like throwing and recalling your sword, or tossing shurikens at everyone in sight to give yourself a moment to breathe, and there's no disputing the game's coolness factor. In that regard, it's perhaps a little closer to Klei's highly stylized Mark of the Ninja game.

But then we come to those little annoyances that the game throws at you with greater regularity as the difficulty, size and complexity of the missions grows ever higher. I've stuck it behind a spoiler block as it's a fairly nit-picky bulletpoint list that throws off the format of this article. However, there's a second reason too, and that's because the last item on this list concerns the final mission. I didn't want to spoil anything about it, but the game tries to go for something cinematic and it ends up being very user unfriendly and detrimental to the overall game. Consider yourself warned for spoilers (as well as for a lot of quibbling):

The Verdict: All right, so I won't deny that there's some sour grapes here. But the game's brisk, cool as heck and you can overlook a lot of its problems by taking them into account and working around them. The jump line doesn't account for your head, allowing it to get clipped by a bullet? Well, you can learn from that death and adjust for next time. Shurikens won't stun the sword dudes, and neither does throwing a sword at them? That's something else you know not to try the following attempt. The checkpointing is (mostly) generous, and you're free to take on a room of enemies in any manner you choose - it could end up looking like the most Inspector Clouseau assassination ever, as long as everyone is dead except you. For those reasons, I'd give this game a light recommend. Hell, Vinny seems to love it, and who could ever disagree with that guy? (I could. Three stars.)

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Ronin

Between the two GB livestreams and the Beastcast I had very little free time left, so I only got past of the opening chapter of Tomasz Wacławek's Ronin today. That means I haven't quite yet received the full experience of the second-to-second madness of trying to stay alive in a room full of red lasers criss-crossing around where my helmeted avatar is presently floating. Yup, it's a flimsy excuse, but I knew going into this feature that I'd be pressed for time on some days. Fortunately, I've got enough to talk about with what little I played.

Ronin is a 2D stealth (though the game insists it isn't stealthy, since it's happy enough if you're just running around shanking fools in the open) action game where a helmeted assassin must hack every system on a stage, killing as many enemies as she can with just a katana and a surprisingly amount of physical agility. It differentiates itself from, say, the structurally similar Gunpoint by how it'll switch to a turn-based mode in the middle of a firefight, allowing the player to plan their next move before executing on it. Sometimes your options are limited; if you're in the air, for example, you'll continue falling to the ground on the next turn in the direction you were moving unless you choose to use your rope to swing away instead. There's a lot of trial and error as you get a sense of what you can avoid and when, and who to prioritize in a room of enemies with guns and swords (oddly, the sword guys are the bigger issue). That's essentially it: hack the computers by removing all their guards, kill all the guards without tripping alarms or killing civilians to "perfect" the stage, and then leave. Getting a perfect rating earns you a skill point for a pretty small tree of nonetheless useful skills, like stealth killing enemies from above or throwing your sword at someone (which you'll then have to run over and pick up again, unless you get a separate skill to recall it to your hand like a Jedi). It appears to be imperative to perfect the earlier missions for the skills they unlock to maximize the chances of defeating the later, harder ones.

But all that's just the basic synopsis. As for my thoughts on the game, I really wish I could get a bit further into it so I could start seeing the seams that people are told me are there - not that I should be looking too hard, of course, as living in the moment is always more important. There's a tough fight right at the end of the first proper assassination mission - the heroine is checking off a list of targets as she runs around in motorcycle leathers with a katana, like in that one movie (I think it was called The Bride That Couldn't Slow Down) - that I imagine sets the standard for the scenarios to follow: you have to micromanage the room, finding an opportunity to off each target but focusing on staying alive until those opportunities presents themselves. There's some incidental death you could hope for - I slashed one of the heavy samurai guys and sent him flying hard enough that he somehow took out of one the security goons - but the best bet is to separate enemies from the pack and finish them in relative peace. Divide and conquer. The game actually anticipates this, however: if you get a sufficient amount of distance away from a guy who knows there's a murderer on the loose, he'll phone it in which causes an alarm to go off and costs you your perfect mission rating, as well as summoning more goons to deal with. Keeping people busy is every bit as important as giving yourself some space to eliminate enemies without their friend(s) immediately blasting you away. I'd be curious to see if the game's later firefights will exhibit the same mix of exhilarating and methodical.

It's good that the game has a generous restart system though - it pretty much checkpoints after any terminal hack or before you trigger a fight - because it's very easy to get killed. Getting hit by an enemy's red line, which indicates the area of effect of their next attack, can happen more often than one might hope by the way it can catch your feet or head if you misjudge the distance of your jump. Likewise, the sword guys can chop you out of the sky from a certain distance away, and the rope swinging takes a few tries before you can correctly judge how far you'll swing for that turn. I'll just explain what I mean by that: Whenever you prepare to jump, the game creates a line of motion for where it will take you. Depending on its length or height, this line turns red at a certain point, and that indicates where you'll max out your "move" and it'll switch over to the enemies' turn before you'll come down to Earth. The rope doesn't offer a similar guide for where you'll end your turn after you use it, though, making it an unpredictable commodity. These are just nitpicks, really, and I'm sure I'll be able to compensate for them over time. For now, I'll reserve judgement until I'm a lot further in, at which point it should be easier to determine whether or not I want to see it through to the end. I'll start making some proper headway tomorrow, now that the weekend has begun.

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The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles

You know, perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles is how little of it ties into or is referenced by the second (well, nominally) The Book of Unwritten Tales game. It's almost as if King Art Games didn't want people who didn't play this one to miss out on any callbacks, which proved to be a smart choice because The Critter Chronicles is completely inessential. We didn't really need to know how Nate met Critter; it's implied from the moment they show up in the first game that they're a fantasy Han Solo and Chewbacca equivalent, complete with tenacious bounty hunters on their tail and a (possibly) stolen ship that was won in a (probably) crooked card game. This game sets a lot of that up too, but what's the golden rule regarding prequels and anything Star Wars related? Unnecessary, as history has proven.

That isn't to say it's a bad game. I don't recall every mechanical feature that was in the first The Book of Unwritten Tales, as it's been a few years, but Critter Chronicles is jammed pack with all the convenience features that should be compulsory in every modern graphic adventure game: A button that tells you where all the hotspots are (and an option to turn this mode off, if you feel that not being forced to pixel hunt is "cheating"); hotspots that actually vanish once the game's had its little joke or two at the ultimately inconsequential background object; likewise, inventory objects don't even have a prompt if they can't be combined, unless the game has specifically written a joke for a particular item pairing; it closes off areas you no longer need to revisit to remove the amount of unnecessary backtracking; it lets you speed up walking animations with a double-click, or skip them entirely if you clicked on the exit to a different area; and the game ensures you're never lost by highlighting the current task at hand on the inventory pop-up. Even if the game wasn't gorgeous (though the character models are a bit rough close up) and the script both amusing and clever, this series would be an utter delight for adventure game fans for getting all of the above right. The developers clearly adore adventure games and have played more of them than most, and it shows with that attention to user friendliness.

I don't want to spoil anything regarding the plot of The Critter Chronicles (though as a prequel, there's a number of factors you can take for granted) but I will say that it has five chapters in total. Chapters are generally determined in-game as specific multi-part areas in which one or two "major" puzzles need to be solved, with a lot of minor puzzles in the way of those solutions. Five scenarios is actually kinda beefy, more than I was expecting for this little stop-gap while the second game was being developed, and I probably spent a good five or six hours with the game total. I rarely got stuck, but that's less to do with my limited perspicacity (I have to use big words to sound cleverer, for one) and more to do with how accessible the game is to a modern audience who were not weened on whatever bullshit nonsense Roberta Williams threw at us on the reg. That I was moving at a fairly brisk pace for those five hours should give you a decent idea of how much content there is here for what is often treated as a standalone expansion for the original game.

Of course, that doesn't exonerate it of its major faults. Critter and Nate are the least interesting characters in the series, the plot this game tells is entirely unnecessary - everything that happens in this game you already knew about because of incidental dialogue in the first, though perhaps not the fine details - and there are no new characters in the game that would appear or even get referenced in the second, unlike the massive number of callbacks there were to the first game in the sequel. You also spend about 60% of the game in the same area: a frozen tundra in the Northlands that has three screens total (four for Critter) to poke around in. The rest of the game takes place on Nate's ship The Mary and a brief stopover at Seastone, a location from the first game. And despite my saying that the game lightens up on meme humor more than its parody contemporaries, we still saw a "cake is a lie" goof (and man, did that one really get everywhere despite being such a minor gag in a game filled with major ones; even Lords of Shadow had one) and the loony animal activist Petra (I get it) holding an "a bukkit for every walrus" sign. Regrettable.

The Verdict: The Critter Chronicles definitely feels a little superfluous, but it has the Book of Unwritten Tales brand stamped on it and that still counts for an awful lot among dedicated fans of this often mistreated genre. If you've played the other two The Book of Unwritten Tales games and adore them, by all means check out this one too if you haven't already. For anyone else, and especially those for whom a little Critter goes a long way, I'd say just stick to the main games. Three stars.

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