30

Mar

Darwin’s Paradox: How Can a Game This Colorful Be So Dull?

Though Darwin’s Paradox has a highfalutinly scientific title, the in-game explanation is surprisingly shallow: though Darwin catalogued countless creatures, he couldn’t, claims the games, figure out the octopus. Well, neither can Darwin’s Paradox. As opposed to Octodad, which used a comically incognito octopus to actually say something about families and fitting in, this game at best aspires to classic Looney Tunes slapstick, pitting an octopus against the nefarious–and obviously alien–food corporation UFOOD that trawls him up out of the blue.

Time and again, Darwin’s Paradox refuses to put any bite to its plot, even though the Oddworld franchise pretty much wrote the book on this, opting instead for cheap jokes (and unlockable skins) about Metal Gear Solid and Frogger, or titling an early-game nemesis Steven the Seagull. This is humor that pulls players out of the game, and sadly, there’s little substance to pull them back in. It’s not as if underwater exploration hasn’t been done before, from Ecco the Dolphin to Planet of Lana II just a few weeks ago. An interview with the studio’s art director from Game Reactor claims that “An octopus isn’t just a character; it’s a gameplay revolution,” but that’s akin to someone who has only watched a single film describing it as revolutionary. There are so many adventure platformers out there, including monstrous (Inside) and non-lethal ones (Unravel), and being able to cling to walls, camouflage oneself, or send out a jet of ink isn’t really a game-changer.

If anything, Darwin’s Paradox is too beholden to the worst conventions of the genre: a lot of frustrating trial-and-error, particularly in the game’s final act; irksome, sluggish controls; and occasionally ambiguous enemies and objects, all of which kill you, a defenseless octopus, in a single hit. Even when the game has an interesting idea, like an escape sequence where you can swap between two octopi, it drowns it in tedious chores, making you swim back and forth through a giant maze of glass tubes that seems to exist purely for gameplay purposes.

Here, too, is another frustration of Darwin’s Paradox: the first half of the game presents a somewhat realistic look at UFOOD’s processing: you see their fishing in action, you see how that food is taken into the warehouse and processed, and there’s the briefest hint of a greater commentary on the cost of the food production that we largely take for granted. But from there, the game dives deep underwater to where the aliens running UFOOD live, and because there’s relatively no in-game plot (there are some discoverable pieces of lore that add nothing of value), it’s hard to understand why the aliens have, say, a martial arts dojo, or what their film studio’s propaganda is meant to be doing. If humans are so stupid, as we’re meant to intuit, why does the alien civilization look almost exactly like the human one, straight down to the way they handle train stations?

And then, of course, there’s the game’s non-ending, which downright confirms that Darwin’s Paradox is more the whiff of a fever dream than a finished product. This one octopus, declared public enemy number one by the aliens, accidentally makes his way to the CEO of UFOOD and, when he’s too incompetent to actually land any of the shots he fires at you (though every single one of his henchmen have impeccable aim), he decides his best recourse is to self-destruct the entire complex? He’s got a big elaborate escape ship/murder machine, and yet he can’t kill this octopus, inadvertently opening up your path to escape each time he corners you? And for what? The big payoff being that after you at long last reunite with the red octopus back at the surface, you wind up instead taking his place in the ship (along with Steven the Seagull, for some inexplicable reason) and are autopiloted back to the alien home planet?

I cannot stress enough that if a comic platformer in which you play as an octopus leaves a critic asking this many questions about the game’s logic, something has gone horribly wrong. Sadly, the gameplay isn’t strong enough to camouflage the utter lack of coherence, and the characters aren’t strong enough and plot isn’t silly enough to achieve that Looney Tunes logic. We understand why the caged Roadrunner meeps in the span of a eight-minute short; after five interminable hours with this nameless blue octopus, we still know absolutely nothing about it.

Review code for this title was provided by the publicist.

2 days ago Short URL Comments

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12

Feb

A Supposedly Fun Derivative I’ll Never Play Again: ChromaGun 2: Dye Harder

Understand that I love first-person puzzles, from Q.U.B.E. to The Turing Test to The Talos Principle to The Entropy Centre, and more. I’m also a stubborn solver, which is to say, it takes a lot to get me to stop playing a game. And yet, ten hours into ChromaGun 2: Dye Harder, I’d seen enough. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case, that really only speaks to the quality of both Portal games: ChromaGun 2 is dreadfully derivative, and there’s no mixture of colors that could change that.

As with the original, players find themselves an unwilling participant in a series of testing chambers, except that instead of playing around with portals (and momentum-altering gels), you’re armed with a magnetic paint gun. Select one of the primary colors, shoot it onto a primed surface, and any other objects of a like color–like drones–will be pulled toward them. You can also mix colors, ultimately giving you six different attractants, which you’ll use to manipulate out-of-reach objects. This part’s actually pretty solid, and the sequel benefits from the ability to remove added layers of paint so that you can’t soft-lock your way out of a solution. But as chambers grow increasingly complex and, in some cases, abstract, actually solving puzzles feels less like a celebration of discovery and more as a tiresome chore of nuances.

This is also where ChromaGun 2‘s script fails it. There’s no deeper meditation behind these puzzles, no complexity to the antagonists. Richard, your “supervisor” from the first game, returns to continue testing you (and your patience), and he’s soon joined by one of his multiversal and far less stable counterparts, Mildred. Spoilers, but at one point, Mildred painfully transfers Richard’s consciousness into a robotic shell, and instead of this providing any more empathy or insight on Richard’s part, it’s simply used as a device whereby you can now “boss” Richard around to help weigh down pressure plates.

ChromaGun 2 gives itself a great setting—parallel dimensions—and absolutely squanders them. It uses the idea of a Western or Egyptian setting as a quick gag and settles right back into the same old testing chambers, except it’s the slightly sunnier, floral confines of ChromaLabs instead of ChromaTec. I slogged through the first four chapters (a total of about 35 levels, each with multiple puzzles) just to see if the game would do anything interesting with the design, and I gave up after the final chapter had me dip into a basketball-themed pocket dimension. It wasn’t even just that ChromaGun 2‘s dual antagonists gave me whiplash to Portal 2‘s GlaDOS and Wheatley, so much as it conjured up deja vu for its own, earlier levels. How many times would I have to navigate behind the scenes of a testing chamber? Face incineration?

Portal‘s humor came, in part, from subverting our expectations; it’s a thing that Lab Rat did as well, and more honestly, since the rogue AI game designer in that Sokoban puzzler specifically acknowledged stealing from other, more popular puzzlers. ChromaGun 2‘s “humor” comes from echoing Portal‘s, in the crudest wink wink, nudge nudge way. “This is the part where you…,” begins Mildred, and there’s little difference between her concluding “run” and Portal‘s “die.” The personality cores from Portal also gave explanation for some of their jokes: by contrast, what human being would ever say something like “What’s an animal that crawls through vents? Bruce Willis?” Imagine how bored you, the testee, must be, if your tester is bored enough to come up with lines like that.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing imaginative about ChromaGun 2: the developers at Pixel Maniacs get a lot of mileage out of the concept of magnetic paint, including the various ways in which you may have to circumnavigate glass walls that block your shots. But the scope of ChromaGun 2 often got in the game’s own way, with puzzles that were time-consuming to solve not necessarily because of difficulty but because of the size of a level and all the backtracking you might be required to do through it. Moreover, the fracturing of parallel worlds, while an undeniably cool effect, sometimes came at the expense of a level’s clarity: many times, I found myself stuck on account of not seeing a tunnel or panel that was obscured by the chamber’s design.

Ultimately, when ChromaGun 2 does surprise players, it’s not in a welcome way. It’s evident from the get-go that Mildred’s testing chambers are more violent and trap-filled, with pendulum-like hammers to smash you out of the way and electrical plates to shock you at every turn. There’s a joke, perhaps, in the underselling of the level title “A Bit Extreme,” except that players then still have to navigate Mildred’s anti-funhouse labyrinth, all for the privilege of facing yet another test. Don’t expect to go behind the scenes of ChromaTec in the way that Portal 2‘s Cave Johnson teased you onward: in a world of infinite possibilities, ChromaGun 2 opts for just Mildreds all the way down.

(Code for this game was provided for free by the press agency.)

2 months ago Short URL Comments

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02

Feb

The Point and Click Must Die: An “Earth Must Die” Review

When people talk about a good comedy set, they often describe it as being tight. When people gush about their favorite adventure games, it’s often in celebration of all the meanderingly fucked up things you can make your protagonist attempt, whether that’s the open-ended verbiage of classic text-based stuff like Zork, the verb-based visual interfaces of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, or the simplified iconography of Sam and Max or Full Throttle. Earth Must Die is, consequently, a very good comedy–and a timely one–in which you, the bumbling yet despotic head of the Tyrythian kingdom, must find a way to continue ruling your people in the wake of a resource shortage and rival empire. Earth Must Die‘s directness and limitations, however, don’t always make it a great adventure game.

You see, VValak is a literally hands-off ruler. He won’t lower himself to touching anything, even in the face of certain death, and he certainly won’t carry any objects that so much as resemble an inventory. Every interaction, then, comes down to VValak’s ability to convince others to do things for him, and while the Size Five Games team comes up with some marvelously wicked (and often graphic) ways in which to put his Lizardtongue to the test, playing Earth Must Die feels a bit like directing a skit–putting the characters in place, getting the timing right, and seeing how things play out.

At best, the game extrudes elevated cerebral nonsense on par with removing one’s inner logic to brew No Tea in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; at worst, it’s still very funny, but not very puzzle-y, with far too many scenarios boiling down to whether you’ve consulted the right page of your in-game Milkipedia. Whereas the best adventure games, like Size Five Game’s previous (and very meta) offering, Lair of the Clockwork God, involve outside-the-box thinking, Earth Must Die mines its laughs from finding fairly straightforward solutions to absurd situations.

For what it’s worth, you’d be hard-pressed to find a studio coming up with contrivances as rapturously insane as those VValak faces in Earth Must Die. The developers lean hard into the science-fiction setting when it comes to overcomplications: for instance, rather than fix a broken button by rewiring it, VValak’s employee injects it with a MicroWorld, using quantum acceleration to homebrew a solution: the forced evolution of microscopic workers who exist solely to fix the button. To help a pilot finish loading cabbages, VValak travels through time to change them to a less spherical (and more easily stackable) shape. You won’t believe how many people VValak kills via teleportation just so that he can cause the yacht he’s on to lean a little more to port.

If only the solutions to these puzzles were a little more satisfying. Most scenes are three screens deep (at most), and without an inventory and with only three verbs (look at, talk to, command), the most “complicated” puzzles are essentially just finding the right combination of an exhaustible dialogue options. For instance, one cleverly convoluted concept involves sabotaging a Terranoid ship by convincing the crew to fly into the sun. The idea of conducting “democratic” votes until you get the majority you want is solid, and it gives Size Five Games ample room to mock the current political landscape, but in practice, the game eliminates the interview responses that aren’t effective and outright tells you how to assemble a convincing Everyman persona and three-word slogan (like the game’s title). The satirical tone is challenging, the gameplay is not.

If I seem overly critical, it’s only because Earth Must Die has so much potential with its vivid scenarios and creative alien cultures, and I wanted to dig more deeply into them. But VValak isn’t that guy: he’s deeply disinterested in how the world works (there’s a reason his only “friend” is a nursing bot that he’s continued to suckle on so long that it has become sentient), and focused only on a single objective at a time. And while that’s a fine artistic choice for Size Five Games to make, it does have the consequence of shifting the scope from interactive fiction to just, well, fiction.

2 months ago Short URL Comments

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21

Oct

More Than Skin: “Spooky Express” Review

I feel as if games fall into one of two categories, those that were designed and assigned a fitting title, and those that were built to fit a title. And Spooky Express, as a “scary” successor to sci-fi themed Cosmic Express, looks as if it might be the latter. Thankfully, the game has a firm skeleton to back up the jokey Trainsylvania setting, and at worst, it’s alliteratively more of the same route-placement puzzles, 200+ levels spanning the Fearsome Forest to the Morbid Manor.

One train car, two monsters; who are you driving home first?

It’s not all jokes, however: in fact, the comic ways in which each type of passenger interacts with one another are a key part of finding the one route that will successfully clear each map. (No experimentation or optimization here; just track-twisty conundrums.) This is less about the timing of multiple trains, ala Railbound, and more about setting up elaborate and fleshy domino effects, having a monster chase a human out of his seat so that you might pick him up again after depositing that creature. The mechanisms are all intuitive, which is good, because you’ll need to juggle the frightful pecking order: cultists, for instance, are humans and therefore susceptible to being vampirized or zombified (“Traaaaains!”), but they can summon demonic imps that can terrify and slay even other monsters.

The game also has a neatly grim humor about it. Players may only lay down non-intersecting tracks for their one-passenger bone train, and their route must fill every final destination (be that a coffin, grave, or demonic portal) and avoid leaving any human stranded. This means that sometimes you’ll have to let the Grim Reaper conduct the train, engineering ways to first transform or kill off humans (and sometimes monsters), as you’ll never be able to transport more than one so-called “final girl.”

Admittedly, if you’re not into this sort of puzzle game, Spooky Express‘s charm will feel limited. The game also has large swings between the limited options of the more bite-sized levels (potentially too easy) and some of the larger ones (wildly hard). The built-in hint system, which reveals a few correctly placed tracks, helps, but can still leave you grasping when there are a lot of convoluted interactions at play. (“Spooky action” at a distance indeed!) Still, the catchy music and comic strip foibles of a BFF zombie and vampire do enough to at least encourage players to solve the easier main-path levels, and gently prod them to taking a brainy, zany detour into some of the optional harder zones.

Kudos to the team at Draknek and Friends for not just making the rare Halloween-themed puzzle game, but for not just making a Halloween-themed puzzle game. Every level of Spooky Express has some sort of trick that ends up feeling like a treat, and while I’ve got a sweet tooth for puzzle games, I think it’s a genuinely rich experience.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

5 months ago Short URL Comments

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26

Sep

Decidedly NOT Under the Skin: “Hotel Barcelona” Is All References

It’s hard to describe what makes one pun or reference work and another fail, but at heart I think it has to do with heart and specificity. Hotel Barcelona is all references to horror flicks, with absolutely no soul. It is a game made for the most superficial of people, those who look up the stairs of the game’s hotel hub, see two twins, and go “Wow, a reference to The Shining, how deep!” It is also a game that makes every reference so cringingly, painfully obvious because without that layer of stolen familiarity, there’s almost nothing to talk about here. Take, for instance, the first level, set in the woods surrounding Emerald Lake, where you must ultimately face off against the basketball-hurling, bloody-jersey’d Jaden. Oh, wait, sorry, the game actually takes place in Diamond Lake, and the boss is Jacob, who wears a catcher’s mask and wields a mean baseball bat, although I guess it could just as easily have been Amethyst Lake, with a boss named Jonah who looks like Chargin’ Chuck took too much of The Substance and also got Carrie’d by his teammates, or even Topaz Lake, where Jamal preys on the innocent teens by illegally leg sweeping them enroute to the soccer goal. These aren’t especially deep design choices, which says a lot considering that the boss fights, with their unique attack patterns, are probably the best part of Hotel Barcelona.

Actually, that’s not true. The “best” parts are those that eschew the tedious roguelite structure entirely, and I do want to credit the auteurs who collaborated on this, SWERY and SUDA51, for refusing to stick to any one tone or style throughout the entirety of a game. Hotel Barcelona has three main levels, but it also hides three additional bosses in innocuous places. You can meet a Sharknado-themed monstrosity in a bonus level, a creepy mechanical baby doll designed by a would-be Jigsaw inside of a pinball machine, and in the game’s best twist, if you watch all five VHS tapes (which play like AI-generated responses to franchises like Top Gun, James Bond, and Star Wars), and play the hotel’s rented 8-bit RPG, you can fight Ayako, who invades your game straight out of The Ring.

While some of these bosses are surprising and fascinating, none of them are scary so much as irritating, and for a game that’s about a magical time-looping hotel populated by serial killers and run by a witch feeding off everyone’s desires, the convention-breaking elements are way less unsettling than anything in, say, Eternal Darkness. I wanted the game to surprise me, or shock me, and maybe if you’ve never played a game from SWERY or SUDA51 before, you will be thrilled by a random (bad) last-minute surfing QTE. Instead, it felt like these two creators had chewed up the celluloid of some of the horror movies they’d seen (not necessarily even their favorites), and then regurgitated that easily digestible comfort food pap directly into the mouths of the players. It all seems eerily effortless, which is especially hilarious given how obtuse and unforgiving the controls are!

Hotel Barcelona‘s most telling moment comes from the introduction to Frances Francis, who runs the local weapon-upgrading casino. He makes a big point of explaining that he’s “not gay, trans, nor bi”–just really into cosplay, particularly Tim Curry’s role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (And to be fair, there’s nothing wrong with that being someone’s tastes, or making your particular preferences and self-identification clear.) The whole game is cosplay, and not the sincere kind born out of genuine fandom, but a cold and calculated, performatively commercial kind, one that appropriates only the costumes and none of the meaning behind them, as if the most valuable parts of Alien and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were the monsters, and not their social commentary.

I remain disappointed; Hotel Barcelona, you’re killing me.

(This write-up is based on a review copy of Hotel Barcelona.)

6 months ago Short URL Comments

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