Author: Ben

Writer and Editor at GRView, prior experience of talking about military narratives in post 9/11 videogames, communications technologies as political vectors as well as pontificating about ludo-narrative dissonance and racing games on the GRcade podcast.
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Monthly games review – Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PS4, PS+)

One of the often-heard cries of denouncement from the more emotive end of the gamer audience spectrum is that reviews (and reviewers) are not being ‘objective’ enough, that they are biased for or against a particular title which makes their subsequent coverage invalid or flawed. Such claims can be a psychological defence mechanism to insulate one’s sense of rationality and informed purchasing against a low score for a game; a visible indication that the purchaser was wrong or ill-informed.

The increasing volume of remasters, HD collections and other such terms for older games getting a new lick of paint and released on newer platforms or on PC again brings this problem to of subjectivity in reviews to the fore. How can anyone review a ‘new’ game if they have played it before, and in the case of Day of the Tentacle, if it is wrapped up in several layers of individual and collective nostalgia?

At this point, dear reader, you will have to take my nostalgia-riddled words with as many grains of salt as you like, however lets get the objective context for the game and what it is out of the way before I go on to polish the past and give it another airing. For those unfamiliar with the game, Day of the Tentacle is a point-and-click adventure game from LucasArts, a studio who cornered the market of the genre throughout the 1990s with other titles like Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Loom, Indiana Jones and Sam and Max. You play a trio of characters trying to stop the evil Purple Tentacle from taking over the world through a clever time travel mechanic which accentuates the goofy and fundamentally silly story and required solutions to the puzzles; often involving sending items back and forward in time.

If the esoteric nature of point-and-click adventure games puts you off in general; the often nonsensical leaps of logic required to find a use for particular items that can completely stop you in your tracks, then Day of the Tentacle may either convert you through its humour or reinforce any existing prejudices towards them. On a technical level Day of the Tentacle Remastered does a great job of polishing a game from over two decades ago and making it fit to be seen on larger and high-definition screens (as with other games of this type from Monkey Island to Halo you can switch between the old and new visuals on the fly to see the difference), however apart from some optimisation of the controls for consoles it is still the same game it was 20+ years ago.

I enjoyed revisiting a game I have fond memories of playing in my youth and was able to pull some puzzle solutions from those memories, however this would not be the experience of someone playing it for the first time, especially as it is available for ‘free’ with Playstation Plus this month. The game does give you plenty of nods and suggestions through dialogue however there were several times that even I had to look up a few hints to get me back in the right direction that were obvious in hindsight. This necessity to get inside the mind of the designer to find the solution to an obtuse puzzle is not unique to Day of the Tentacle and is a common problem in the point-and-click genre as a whole, but fortunately there is nothing as obtuse as the infamous rubber duck puzzle in The Longest Journey for example.

Day of the Tentacle is one of the most popular and fondly-remembered games from a period when the point-and-click adventure genre was king; its technical presentation and extras such as a developer commentary make it a worthwhile play-through for those who may have played it a long time ago and want to revisit a classic that’s been given a new coat of paint. For those who didn’t play it the first time around it is a worthwhile foray into gaming history and a potential springboard into a now much reduced genre.

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Watch Dogs 2 and the problem of marketing versus reality

When Ubisoft revealed Watch Dogs 2 at E3 2016 I was not impressed. The first game was bogged down with controversy surrounding its graphical downgrade compared to the promotional materials. It took itself seriously in a way which seemed at odds with its own mechanics, positioning itself as a William Gibson-esque gritty cyberpunk thriller but was a fairly standard third-person open world shooter with a few extra UI overlays and some nifty environmental interaction; not to mention its fundamentally unlikable protagonist. The reveal trailer for Watch Dogs 2 showed a fundamentally different but, to me, an equally off-putting premise. It looked like an example of corporate executives and marketing gurus trying to be “down with the kids”:

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh9x4NqW0Dw[/embedyt]

Fortunately for me (and less fortunately for the first-week sales figures which were down 300,000 from the first game) I was wrong. Beneath the memes and millennial-baiting buzzwords is a game with some real moments of emotion and camaraderie as you work with the crew of DedSec, find out more about them through inter-character dialogue and the documents you find/hack during missions. Watch Dogs 2 discusses the murky legality of mass surveillance, criminal profiling, election fraud and corporate collusion by those who do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, all filtered through a neon analogue to real hacker groups. These issues are more immediately relatable to the everyday life of the game’s target audience than Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s pro-war space jingoism disguised as deep commentary moral browbeating or Battlefield 1’s inconsistent and one-sided narrative on the horrors of the First World War as a framing for what appears to be more of the same old Battlefield experience but with biplanes.

However Watch Dogs 2 does more than that, but in a way that may be too subtle for its bombastic purple and green neon visage. During conversations between the members of DedSec the point that what they’re doing – hacking corporations and government departments all over the San Francisco Bay area – is only reinforcing the position of the tech and big data giants who they are targeting; showing that such security and control is necessary to counter these dangerous hacker groups. This tautological loop is similar to the problems faced by real groups like ‘Anonymous’ who Ubisoft have candidly explained were the inspiration behind DedSec in the first place in a now unfortunately deleted interview. This inspiration is clear throughout Watch Dogs 2, whether it be arranging attacks on the game’s Scientology analogue or the textual/visual language of DedSec’s public releases.

Science fiction presents an opportunity to extrapolate real-world issues to their extreme; certain episodes of the original series of Star Trek are blatant Vietnam allegories and Paul Verhoven’s 1999 adaptation of Starship Troopers is a scathing critique of US foreign policy. Watch Dogs 2 achieves similar ends through taking current real-world issues, which is no mean feat considering how long games take to make, and expanding them for the player to unpick in a detached and experimental environment. Unfortunately in this case Ubisoft have hidden this so successfully its flashy exterior that the marketing is potentially sabotaging the game’s appeal to certain audience demographics, who may only discover its appeal when its price drops or when an inevitable “Complete Edition” or “Game of the Year” bundle comes out next year.

“Walking Simulators” like Dear Esther and Gone Home are often criticised for not having enough game behind their exposition, something that Watch Dogs 2 successfully deals with. Even if you don’t care about the direction of its political and technological commentary there is still a large and robust open world action/stealth game to enjoy underneath that deserves to succeed, almost in spite of itself and the intentions of its publisher.

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Monthly games review – Stories: The Path of Destinies and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (PS4, PS+)

Its time for another roundup of the games given out for ‘free’ as part of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold and Sony’s Playstation Plus programmes. Today I’ll be looking at two games from the latter in recent months to see if they are worth downloading and playing.

Stories: The Path of Destinies (PS4 version reviewed)

Cutting monetary corners and getting more for less has been a staple of artistic creation for decades; Japanese animation uses techniques like panning static background frames across each other to give the impression of movement, or using short loops of a few frames of animation to set tone and mood with very little actually going on and filling runtime. In the early days of videogames developers had to pull off similar tricks to realise their creative ambitions and to get round hardware limitations at the time.

Stories is a top-down action game which takes inspiration from the Batman Arkham games for its combat but innovates in its approach to using limited resources and environments to tell a story and build a game outside of its own limitations, constructing its depth and longevity through a Groundhog Day framework of repetition. Set in a world of anthropomorphic animals in a land of islands in the sky, the protagonist is a charming swashbuckling fox named Reynardo looking to defeat the evil empire who are on the cusp of defeating the rebel forces opposing them. Through well-written and delivered dialogue and branching choices Reynardo tries various approaches from going after a super-weapon to destroy the forces of darkness to trying to use the Emperor’s daughter as leverage. As you repeat events and try new options Reynardo learns several truths about what is really going on. Once you have achieved an ending which falls into each category of truth you can use this information to go for the ‘real’ ending and save the world properly.

Stories pulls this off fairly well, the writing and narration are very well done, the world environments are basic but coherent and the combat apes all the best elements of what made the Arkham games so great. The biggest problem was that it taxed the PS4 way more than I was expecting. As well as performance dips throughout I was unable to finish the final fight in the game as the sheer quantity of enemies and effects brought the framerate crashing down and made the timing of counterattacks and dodging out of the way of incoming spells incredibly difficult and was made all the more frustrating by the fact that there was nothing I could do about it.

Apart from the hardware limitations the game itself is excellent; a unique and fun action romp that clocks in at about 5 hours or so to get to the ‘true’ ending but with plenty more scope if you want to go back and get every other permutation and variation of Reynardo’s mishaps along the way. If you have this on PS+ and haven’t given it a go then it is well worth a try, other than that I would recommend getting it on PC where hopefully the performance issues that plagued this version wouldn’t be a problem.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (PS4 version reviewed)

‘Walking Simulators’ get a bad rap from some elements of the gaming community, that they are not real games because there is little to no interactivity, competition, fail states or difference in experience from playing it yourself versus watching someone else do it. EGTTR is one of the most egregious examples of all of these criticisms in action.

Most of the defence of games like EGTTR is that its more of an ‘interactive story’ and that its about the characters and world than the gameplay. If this is the case then why have such an open world? Good stories don’t have chunks of the protagonist trudging about between snippets of dialogue like a book that has several blank pages between each paragraph. This open-world framing meant that on at least two occasions I stumbled into areas which would later be the poignant finale for the current section I was in which completely undermined their impact. Having grown up in the countryside the rural village setting was excellently done but much of it was completely devoid of anything to do, like you were looking at an elaborate display piece through a glass screen. All the trudging about following the light ball to the next piece of dialogue (which got stuck several times and prompting full reboots) quickly stopped being a chance to drink in the majesty of the setting (which was difficult given how much the framerate was all over the place) and became an immersion-breaking bore even with the bizarre and counter-intuitive gradual speedup run mechanic that many people played through the entire game without realising was there. Its story was interesting and the voice acting was excellent, however without turning on subtitles showing who each blob of light talking was it would have been easy to lose track of who was who – even more so with how spread out each titbit of dialogue was within its non-linear framework.

Games like The Talos Principle directly challenged the player to think about philosophy through adversarial dialogue and found texts/audio files and the game deals with themes similar to EGTTR, however they are all built around a robust puzzle game whose mechanics and level design build on and form part of these discussions. The Stanley Parable uses humour and Escher-like level design to play with game tropes in a memorable way while being even less interactive. The Old City: Leviathan is an incredibly dense and esoteric game full of exposition, but it is short and linear enough to keep it all fairly concentrated. Games like these either need a solid gameplay framework to build this kind of storytelling around so that even if you ignored the plot there would be a fun game underneath, as with The Talos Principle or Icey, or they need to offer either more dense and intellectually challenging content to think about during and after a relatively short and punchy duration or be funny enough to pull the game and the player along and this has neither. As a result I absolutely cannot recommend Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture as either an enjoyable videogame or a noteworthy narrative experience.