Zarf Updates

I know I haven't done a game-review wrap-up since... January? Yikes. And those were mostly reviews I wrote back in the November. (Fall is IGF judging season.)

Infocom stuff has taken up most of my free time -- not to mention GDC travel and NarraScope planning. But I have played a few games. I mean, new Nosgoth lore, I can't turn that down.

Here's some stuff that's been going on:

• The Séance of Blake Manor
• Intelligence
• The Artisan of Glimmith
• Blippo+
• Kevin's Playing in Berlin
• Planet of Lana 2
• Legacy of Kain: Ascendance

The Séance of Blake Manor

• by Spooky Doorway -- game site

A line-art mystery game set in rural Ireland, 1897. This is not the static detection genre; it's a good old-fashioned (doubly old-fashioned!) mystery where you walk around a hotel and ask people questions and try to catch them in lies. And dig through their luggage while they're having a drink down the bar.

Specifically, it's non-static in that time passes. You can run out. Time only passes when you EXAMINE or ASK SOMEONE ABOUT -- as we say in parser-land -- but since those are the things you do in the game, it's a real limit. The limit got on my nerves and I didn't finish the game.

I can see exactly how they got there. The manor is full to the Plimsoll line with random stuff -- you can pry into every shelf and drawer in every room. You don't want to lawnmower all that, or ask every person about every topic. You're not supposed to! Figuring out what's worth your time is a core game skill. And the only way to land that is to give every query a tiny (tiny) opportunity cost. You really have plenty of time; the tutorial sequences make that very clear.

And yet. Some critical objects are not distinguished at all. Sometimes you really do have to examine every bookshelf in every room until you run across the Bible with writing in the flyleaf.

It's not a big deal to waste ten game minutes, or even thirty. But the prospect of blowing unbounded game time looking for a puzzle-unlock was... hurty. So I hit a walkthrough. And once I went to the walkthrough, I realized that I kind of wanted to use a walkthrough for every puzzle, and then... I just never got back to playing the game.

I'm sure that if I'd kept at it, I would have reached a good ending. It was early Saturday evening (about halfway through the timeline); I'd finished several story threads and made good progress on all of them. I wasn't stuck. I kept the game installed for a couple of weeks, saying "Surely I will get back to this and finish it." Eventually I realized I was lying.

You know, this is exactly how everybody felt who bounced off Blue Prince. "The game is fine, they just have to get rid of this one annoying mechanic that doesn't even have anything to do with the puzzles!" Yeah, and Blue Prince without the RNG is a different game. Blake Manor without the time limits is a different game. I am not bold enough to assert that it would be a better game.

I enjoyed all the bits of Blake Manor that I played. It's a good (if somewhat miscellaneous) collection of period-occultist mini-dramas. The characters are all colorful and entertaining. There's a library and a hedge maze and many secret doors.

Footnote: One of my friends noted that the hotel staff includes women named "Caitlin" and "Saoirse", which is not really period. Working-class Irish women in 1897 would have been named "Mary" and "Mary".

Intelligence

• by Zero Trick Pony games -- game site

A short web-based static deduction game... in space! Which is to say, in a near-future Expanse-ish sci-fi setting. Spaceships -- corporate, commercial, and military -- zoom around the Solar System, but some of them have gone missing. Figure out how and where each one wound up. It's a pleasant combination of querying witnesses, digging through databases, and applying analysis tools.

Also, a storyline with an exciting climactic scene. The game isn't "static" in the sense of no time passing; you are involved in events. They arrive at your pace, though. You're uncovering what happened, not deciding how the story will go. (Until... well, you'll see.)

I like the general design sense of "you gain more options over time". More topics to ask about, more databases to query in, more analysis tools. I think this is what Strange Horticulture brought to the party that makes it a particular favorite of mine. It's well-used here.

...Okay, I just love analysis tools. Intelligence doesn't get very complicated -- you always have a good sense of where or how to dig on a particular clue -- but being able to run some "electromagnetic data" through the weapon signature analyzer vs the engine signature analyzer is a tiny bit of adventure-game logic that makes the world come alive.

The Artisan of Glimmith

• by Lunarch Studios -- game site

Witness-like rule-based panel puzzles, only not first-person.

There's a whole lot of these puzzles and they're consistently challenging, fair, and tight. You just know the designers built a whole testing framework to verify that every puzzle has a unique solution even though most players will never notice that.

But, as with most of these puzzle-puzzle-puzzle games, I eventually felt exhausted and put it away. It's too same-y to play in long sessions, and (as a Steam game) too heavy-weight for me to pick up for a quick snack.

I really do want some sense of exploring a world and finding something cool around the next corner. Glimmith is laid out as a floating village in space, but you're not in the village; it's a rigidly external viewpoint. Which, yes, they use to hide a few sneaky bonus puzzles -- but in a way that rules out any sense of embodiment. If you were present in the world, you could turn your head!

If they ever ship an iOS version, mind you, I'll jump right back in. That's the snack device for me. As it were.

Blippo+

• by Ekistics Entertainment -- game site

Delightful snippets of alien cable TV. "It's not a game!" warns everybody, presumably to the sort of fragile flowers who get panic attacks if they go twenty minutes without seeing a health bar. You know what? Blippo+ is a game. It updates as you play (slowly, in chunks) and you see events progressing. It's fundamentally the same genre as Immortality, or Portal if 1986-quality FMV had been available in 1986.

Headcanon: Planet Blip is from the same universe as Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Look at the hair, tell me I'm wrong. Fhloston (as in Fhloston Paradise) is mentioned as well.

Kevin's Playing in Berlin

• by Kevin Du -- game site

Kevin Du writes a game. I buy the game. I install the game. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with the game. I uninstall the game. Then I buy his next game because I want him to keep doing this.

I guess my position is that these are games but -- at least for Ginger and this one -- the set of people who are supposed to play them is empty. Russell would weep; Cantor would lie down with a damp cloth on his face.

This time it's three mini-games and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do in any of them.

Planet of Lana 2

• by Wishfully Studios -- game site

Another non-pixel-art side-scrolling puzzle platformer set on, well, the planet of Lana. (Lana is the protagonist, not the planet.)

This makes a good solid attempt at bringing in new mechanics beyond pushing crates and dodging sentry robots. Mind you, you still do both of those things, but there's also drones and fish. And you can swim. There's the occasional chase sequence.

I think the mechanics were good, but they went for complexity over difficulty. You have to do a lot of multi-step tasks that aren't tricky per se. And it throws you right into most of them. The "Use Mui's special ability to take over a drone and use its special ability" loop was particularly hard to grasp, for a core mechanic. Can we talk about a complexity ramp as distinct from a difficulty ramp? The puzzles themselves are light-weight, but I feel like the target audience will get lost trying to operate them.

Worked fine for me, though. As far as I'm concerned, the Lana games are mostly about the evocative hand-painted environments and the story (unsubtitled but enthusiastically animated).

Here, I'll tell you my favorite bit. The game sticks very firmly to the 2D-platformer plane -- it has to, for the puzzles to make sense. All movement is left-right / up-down. Except that in one cut scene, Lana turns 90 degrees and follows another character into the background. And it's ominous! "Noooo, don't step off the path! You're making a terrible mistake! Never break the frame!" With ominous music, even. And yes, the story cashes that check. I laughed and laughed.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance

• by Bit Bot Game Studios -- game site

A pixel-art side-scrolling beat-em-up platformer set in Nosgoth.

This is both delightful and entirely laughable. I mean, the whole point of the Kain series is overwrought vampire gothiness taken up to eleven and then doubled. (Camp-22?) It can't not be laughable.

But this is specifically the thing of inventing an Original Character -- Elaleth, birth-sister of Raziel -- and inserting her into every possible gap in the storyline. And doing it really well, because the writers know the storyline like the backs of their demonically-clawed hands. It couldn't be more fanfic if her name were Elaleth Dark'ness Dementia.

Please understand that I am not complaining. I love involuted fanon. I am here for it. And it's not like trying to expand canon in new directions is inherently a better idea; that's how we got the boring Hylden, who remain boring. I am just saying that filling in gaps is a self-limiting prospect.

Ok look: I am playing this in alternating chapters with the remastered LoK: Defiance, of which I once wrote: "The major story revelations are all either murky or implausible." The awful truth may be -- you can't make me admit this but I have to say the words -- that the Nosgoth setting never had that much potential to begin with.

On the up side, they got back every veteran voice actor they could. Grace to the memories of Tony Jay and René Auberjonois.

Any-how. Side-scrolling platformer! It's mostly fighting mooks and jumping. If you play in story mode (like me, obviously) you have infinite hit points so it's just jumping. And enjoying the laughable dialogue. And reading the little lore journals, which do expand the canon, full credit there honestly.

Mind you, you have to be pretty good at jumping sequences. Those get tricky. Again, story mode lets you ignore the fireballs and flying green demonponies (seriously, what were those?) I recommend story mode.

Anyhow, if you can name the Nine Pillars off the top of your head or you're ready to shout "omg it's Janos Audron's Retreat in pixel-art!", I've got your goods. But: I have not yet finished playing. I leave this space open for the ending to wow me after all: _____

EDIT-ADD: Yeah, that's about what I expected. Hit all the right marks; no surprises.

Demonically clawed footnote: I see the story was adapted from a kickstarted graphic novel. And I see that fans got cranky about getting an Original Character. Sigh.

Look, there's nothing wrong with Elalath as a protagonist. I was happy to get a fresh voice. When I complain about "filling in the gaps", it's because a perfectly good character is used as scaffolding for Raziel's thoroughly-mapped-out storyline. And the writer knows this, because the game (and I assume the comic) ends with Elaleth walking offstage into her own storyline!

I don't know if the sequel hook will come to anything, but I'm on board for it. And yes, I will pick up Dead Shall Rise in print. I'm just sorry it doesn't come with Simon Templeman and Michael Bell sneering and brooding over every line.