This is a vertical scroller-shooter with the emphasis on SHOOOOOOOOOOOOT.
Also, you’re a cat lady singer. Just roll with it.
You shoot things that are trying to shoot you, with both of you spamming terrifying quantities of pew-pews at each other. Seriously, there’s no reason to ever take your thumb off the “SHOOOOOOOT” button.
I’m largely unfamiliar with this genre; I always dug 1942-style shooters, but this is that dialed up to ELEVENTY BILLION, and I’m pretty confident that’s it’s own thing. So, I’m not really in a position to know whether this is introducing some worthwhile twists of its own or if it’s just More Of The Same. But, that does make me vaguely blank-slate-ish, so I can evaluate it sort of on its own terms.
This thing is a bastard to screenshot, though; if I take my fingers off the dodge and SHOOOOOOOOOOT buttons long enough to get a screenshot, I asplode
So, how is it?
It’s … all right. There’s definitely a fun bad-ass feel to darting around blowing the unholy crap out of anything and everything. But it might be too much of a good thing. There’s just NO REASON to stop shooting, ever. The game often boils down to figuring out how to weave my way through the torrents of return fire so I don’t get blowed up. This means I’m often focused on a comparatively narrow portion of the screen, and just trusting that other stuff is probably blowing up the way I need it to.
There are some ideas here that the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining. When stuff blows up, coins start drifting down the screen. (They’re translucent and difficult to see, but given how much this game has a vested interest in reducing screen clutter, that’s not a bad call.) When you catch them, a meter goes up! Why do I want that meter going up? I’m … not sure. More numbers means more better, right?
You DO use the coins to continue; run out of lives, you’ll need X coins to continue. Not enough coins, go back to the beginning. I quite like this; it’s a clever approach.
You can change to a different shooting mode by holding down a particular button as you shoot (which is awkward — why not just make it a shootin’ button in its own right?), which is less efficient but causes opponents to drop medals instead of coins. I eventually figured out those medals are what allow you to purchase unlocks elsewhere in the game. There’s apparently some sort of connection between the coins and the medals, but I’m not sure I get what it is.
Ultimately, it’s too fiddly for my liking, too unforgiving. Finding the gaps in a gigantic bullet maelstrom just isn’t my bag. But if it’s yours, this game is probably worth a look. Maybe it’ll be too familiar, but maybe it’ll give you something new.
All right, random number generator. Wanna close out the first 100 games with something cool?
Page 32, Game 12: Purplest Prose by Pammu
“A Trashy Game About Trashy Writers Writing Trashy Romance”
In light of the fact that this is a pre-release demo, I’m going to try to limit the degree to which I go all jerkass critic on this one. But I want it on the record that going FULL metal jerkass was absolutely on the table here.
This is a top-down JRPG. You’re a shopkeeper’s assistant, in a land that had a devastating civil war ten years ago (but things seem pretty all right now). You’re trying to help out your friends and employer; times are tough, work and money are both scarce.
First, as much as I dislike this game, credit where it’s due: it LOOKS fantastic.
Fruitstand Lady is honestly a really nice boss
The world looks warm and appealing, the incidental bits have a nice sense of steampunk flair. It’s a completely credible looking game.
Playing the game, unfortunately, is where things start coming apart.
For all the opening text sets a Fate of Nations kinda tone, the story starts off very small. Your introductory “quest” is running down a kid who stole a loaf of bread while you were on your lunch break. I’d say that you get to choose whether to go all Javert on him or not, save that I don’t recall actually getting a choice; the merciful option appeared to be the only one available to me. Hell, even the clever option of trading him my lunch so I could return the loaf of bread wasn’t something I came up with, it was just assumed.
Which is fine, I guess. I tend to go the Good Guy route pretty hard when I have the choice. Just raised my eyebrows a bit when that was the ONLY option.
The great Loaf Caper is the tutorial quest, and you get into your first fight, where the game reveals that it’s going the Final Fantasy turn-based route. This is the first really severe problem: the combat is boring as hell.
Not sure these guys understand how “punching” works
You punch, they punch. Somebody’s gonna run out of hit points, and whoever runs out first loses. That’s it. Just stand there and trade shots.
You can choose to dodge or block, but … why? You can’t block them to death, you must punch. So, punch.
There’s also a “debate” mechanism, which the game treats as some sort of major innovation. Some characters want to “debate” you, which means “Have a conversation that isn’t inconsequential background chatter.” To the debate screen we go!
Much debate! Very conflict!
In order to “win” the debate, you must select the correct dialog options. Which ones are correct? Eh, guess. It’s not like you have any way of knowing.
Choose the wrong dialog option, lose the debate. But, don’t worry, you can just restart the debate at no penalty whatsoever, save for the real-life time you wasted.
This is deeply unsatisfying. But, given that this is how the plot advances, there needs to be SOME mechanism for letting you recover from whatever faux pas you just made.
The plot wasn’t grabbing me. I appreciate that it was trying to keep things small-scale and intimate before gradually expanding in scope, but the opening text put me in exactly the wrong frame of mind to care about helping my boss keep her fruit stand running.
Unfortunately, following that plot is where the game irrevocably lost me.
To figure out what was up with her supplier, I had to travel to a nearby town and ask WTF was going on. This is, naturally, dangerous, as one would expect from the conventions of the genre.
Yeah, that is not the exclamation point of Snek Friendship right there
However, fighting triggers the fight minigame, which, as I’ve established, I hate. So, I avoided it wherever possible.
I get to the town, I eventually have a chat with the supplier. I work out a deal where he’ll provide the fruit for a little more money. And then, IMMEDIATELY after the conversation concludes, three goons jump me and BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ME. Game over.
The fight was not even remotely winnable. There were no other choices I could really make; just punch, punch, punch. The three of them ran me out of hit points WAY before I could return the favor.
The way the game is set up, it looked like I could have at least two other companions. You can also get gear. I had neither. So, I reloaded the game, and retreated all the way back to my home town to see if I missed any gear or allies.
Gear is outrageously expensive. I DID find a weapons shop, where a set of brass knuckles cost about twenty times the cash I had on me. I started talking to people in the hopes that some of them would turn out to want to join me, but go no hint that anybody might.
I wandered around a bit and found some random junk in the countryside, but nothing that would turn the tide of a curb-stomp battle. I did grind a bit, though, and managed to make third level.
Wondering if perhaps that was enough, I returned to the site of the massacre, redid the conversation, and retriggered the fight. I once again got the shit beaten out of me, but did a lot more damage on my way to the grave (without getting particularly close to winning). So, does that mean I need to be fourth level to have a reasonable chance of winning? Or maybe fifth?
Whatever. I believe one of two things happened here:
The first is that I was SUPPOSED to find some combination of companions and/or gear, but managed to completely overlook them. If this is the case, then the game is doing an abominable job of directing me towards them, because I was actively looking for them and came up empty.
The second is that the game wasn’t expecting me to simply beeline for the main storyline, and was indeed counting on me aimlessly faffing about in the countryside until I gained more levels. Given how boring I found the combat to be, that was simply not going to happen. Perhaps there were some side quests I could have tripped over?
Regardless. Either the game is so poorly designed that I cannot trust it to guide me to the resources I need to advance, or it has so little faith in its main storyline that it doesn’t think I’m likely to pursue it. Neither theory makes me interested in continuing.
As mentioned, this game is in an early state. And like I said, it looks fantastic. I did appreciate the feel that I really was a member of a community, that there was plenty of shit going on around me that had nothing to do with me. It really did feel like a living city. But neither of the game’s two big conflict resolution mechanisms were at all interesting to me: combat is rote and tedious, and “debate” is a simple matter of guessing the correct dialog path over and over until you get it right. Even if I wasn’t savagely murdered for caring about the plot, I really don’t know that I would have bothered following all the way through to the end of the demo. There’s just not much game in this game.
In this game, you and between 7 and 11 of your friends (and one facilitator) will pretend to be stars. This entails lying in a dark room in a very specific place in your constellation, whispering to each other (space is BIG, you guys) and playing with your flashlight (and the light on your phone will do nicely, assuming your battery can survive that much use). What do stars have to say to each other? The game has some ideas. See what you wind up saying.
This is less of a “game” and more of a facilitated experience. I don’t want to say too much about it; the rules specify that it works best if the players come in relatively cold only knowing the rudiments, and having looked through the entire ruleset, I believe it. For the right group of players, one interested in tackling some REALLY hefty emotional themes, this could be one hell of an experience. Something that’ll have the players involved saying “Hey, remember that time we all pretended to be stars at Nick’s place?” for YEARS, possibly as a prelude to discussing some really difficult shit.
The game advises warning players that it deals with themes of isolation and loss, so … yeah. I can say that without spoiling anything.
If you and your LARP buddies would like to do something a bit more resonant than punching goblins and don’t mind ending the night in a somber and contemplative headspace, this looks like it might be one hell of a game. I haven’t actually played it, but I’m quite comfortable recommending it.
Okay, script. Got anything maybe a little lighter for me?
Page 24, Game 18: Gataela by Atemly Games
“A Victorian Steampunk RPG! Debate, convince and negotiate with NPCs in order to save the country!”
Yeah, let’s do a colonialism. But, like, with gears and shit.
In Black Mass, players will be taking the roles of Lydia and Catherine, a girl and young woman (respectively) in 1690 Salem. They’ll be fleeing into the woods for the titular black mass, where they’ll discover … something.
What are they fleeing from? What are they going to discover? That is, of course, what you’re playing to figure out.
If you’re familiar with the indie games scene — or, if you’re bouncing through a gigantic pack of indie games at random without actually playing them because fuck it the world is ending and what else are you gonna do, but yinz may or may not relate to that one — that description probably gives you a pretty clear vision of what the game is like. Something small, just a few pages, that gives a few broad outlines and leaves the bulk of figuring out the game in your capable hands.
You would be wrong. So completely, utterly wrong.
Even cutting out the illustrations and Kickstarter thank yous, the rulebook is easy 50 pages’ worth of material. This game is very highly structured, and the book walks you through all of it.
For starters, just what kind of “witchcraft” are we talking about here? The game suggests playing in one of three fundamental “modes:” basically, you’re either talking full-on broomsticks and boiling cauldrons shit, historically accurate psycho-drama, or some combination of both being used for some blood-on-the-snow horror.
From there … remember how I specified that you’ll be playing Catherine and Lydia? And are you still confused by my throwaway Pixar joke in the cold open? No matter how many of you there are playing the game (and one of you will be acting as the GM), you will be controlling these two pre-defined characters Inside Out style.
Each of you will choose from one of the nine personas defined for each of the two girls. Perhaps you will be Catherine’s love of music, and Lydia’s tendency to creepy-whistle. Or Catherine’s fondness for secrets, and Lydia’s relationship with the woods. You’ll take turns “driving” at various stages of the game — and the game has very well-defined stages.
You’ll also use a Tarot deck to figure out what’s going on, with cards that compliment and/or conflict with whatever persona you’re currently inhabiting. You will assemble the cards at various stages, and you will tell a complete story.
This game intrigues me. Not enough that I would want to put a group together to play it (post-pandemic), but it’s such the polar opposite of so many games I’ve encountered. The focus is comically narrow, down to specifying the names and ages of the two girls at its heart. But the game explores that topic with intense structure, and clearly has a ton of work and thought behind it.
The end result is something unique and intriguing. I don’t know that I’m into it enough to put the work into manufacturing an opportunity to try it, but I’d take that opportunity if it happened by. Very cool game.
But will this game be as innovative?
Page 45, Game 9: The Stars Whisper by Wheel Tree Press
“A LARP for 8 to 12 players that asks: what do stars talk about as they shine into the void of space?”
Oh, you know, star stuff. Hydrogen burn rates, gossip on who’s gone supernova, that sorta thing.
On the one hand, it’s easier than I’d like to come up with a bunch of reasons why this is not the best possible version of this game.
On the other, the version of this game that actually exists is pretty fuckin’ dope and is the most satisfying action shooter I’ve yet encountered in this playthrough.
It’s Groundhog Day! But in space, with laser cannons.
Your ship is alone, and facing steadily increasing waves of enemies who would like you to die now, please and thank you. Your in-game character is actually aware of this situation, and would like to figure out WTF is going on so they can escape their explosion-laden time loop.
This is the first fight, so apparently, ya girl has been doing this for a while before you even showed up
You have the Asteroids control panel, with your key moves being rotate, thrust, and shoot. The physics are Newtonian, but with a speed limit; you can only get yourself moving so fast. Also, your guns have non-trivial recoil, so you can use them as reverse thrusters. You have a lot of space to work with, more than can fit on one screen, but it’s not infinite.
Enemies start relatively small, but get bigger quickly. Before long, sniping at a couple of corvettes not much larger than you turns into exchanging torrents of gunfire with carriers and battleships and big freakin’ THINGS that are going to try and ram you into oblivion.
IT’S ON MOTHERFUCKERS
Your ship can take a beating, but your hit points are finite. When you notice you’re in trouble, try and get yourself out of the fight; your ship will regenerate as long as you’re not shooting your guns. Then once you’re no longer trailing smoke, get your ass back in there.
What Cycle 28 Gets Wrong:
The game is remarkably stingy about teaching itself, and you have to rely exclusively on trial and error. That thing about being able to regenerate when you’re not shooting? Had to figure that one out myself. Also, some things you can fly through, others will damage you should you collide. The enemy ships you CAN’T fly through all appear to have bright colors, but you can’t use that as your only visual indicator of danger, because they also leave bright glowy exhaust plumes behind them, and those appear to always be harmless. Honestly, there’s just a lot of visual clutter in general, including some background stars that it took me a hot minute to realize I could simply ignore.
There’s also a score multiplier that I’m pretty sure increments itself after you kill X number of enemies, but then resets itself back to x1 when you take a hit. In practice, the only real way to move that particular needle is to find a carrier and hose-down the fighters erupting from it. If you’re really keeping an eye on your score, you have to find one of them to fill your murder-tank back up before you go big game hunting, which was weird to me.
You steadily spawn drones/fighters, which are weirdly inconsequential. Hell, took me a while to figure out that you just automatically pop them out at regular intervals, and that they’re not generated in response to a button press. I liked having the little guys around, I suppose, but there was nothing I could do to control or influence them, so they were more an inconsequential background thing than something I could gear my fighting strategy towards. They seem to die pretty quickly once the fights get REALLY bonkers, and frankly that’s when I’m most in need of the help.
The viewable window is zoomed in much too tightly, and tends to keep focus BEHIND the direction of travel. When I’m turned around and spraying foes with endless torrents of laser blasts, this works! When I’m zooming along, it means I can’t really see what’s in front of me. That’s not cool. I wanted to see a LOT more of the battlespace than I actually could.
I honestly have no idea how to advance the story. I found a thing, but my only way of interacting with it — shooting it — seemed to do nothing. There was a “boss monster” that occasionally popped up, but by that point the battleground was such a shitstorm that I couldn’t really deal with it.
What Cycle 28 Gets Right:
Being FUKKIN AWESOME.
The frustrations I had with this game are real, and will likely keep my from coming back to it. But I played the absolute HELL out of this game, and would probably keep playing it some more if I weren’t so curious to see what else the Justice Bundle has to offer.
Zooming in, blasting away, and trying to evade fighter swarms as my ship repaired itself was just plain FUN. The “Oh shit!” moment of realizing another swarm of enemy ships had cut off my escape route made for some fantastic ducking and weaving as I tried to find a NEW path to safety.
Combat is kinetic and satisfying. I kept feeling like a nimble, deadly bad-ass, right up to the point where I asploded — and I had to force myself to NOT dive back in for Just One More Game when it was time to go to bed or write this review.
That’s how I know a game really has its hooks in me. When I’m talking myself into playing it Just One More Time in lieu of getting some sleep … well, fuck it, being tired sounds like Tomorrow Pete’s problem. LET’S GO WRECK SOME SHIT.
The soundtrack kills it too, a classy synth score that did a great job of steadily escalating the tension until it became appropriate for the spectacular life-or-death hellstorms I kept finding myself in.
I wanted this game to be more than it was; I wanted it to be a little more willing to teach itself to me, I wanted to be able to zoom-out my view of the battlefield particularly once things started getting really bananas, I wanted a better sense of how I could engage with the story it was trying to tell. But even without all that, I still had a blast playing it, and am very glad to have found it.
Definitely recommended.
Okay, what wacky time loop is THIS game going to lock me into?
Page 15, Game 27: black mass by will jobst
“a game about seeking and finding in the woods of Salem”
So, gonna be either worshiping dark powers, or observing the horror of weaponized misogyny. I’m anticipating a “Play with the lights out” kinda experience either way.
Arkanoid-alike. You know the drill; ball goes up, ball hits a brick or two (hopefully), ball comes back down, get your paddle under it and bounce it back up there again. Occasionally, it’ll knock loose a power-up that you may catch. Knock out all the bricks, move on to the next level.
Getcha bounce on
I’ve played this game, plenty of times. Balance feels a bit wonky; the ball moves too slowly for my liking, and the paddle moves too fast (even on its slowest setting). But, what the heck, plenty of games take old ideas and spruce ’em up with new elements. So, what new ideas is Brick Breaker Remix bringing to the party?
…
Up next:
Page 11, Game 3: Cycle 28 by Pill Bug Interactive
“A fast-paced space shooter with screen-shaking explosions and a mystery at its heart.”
Ah, it’s a print-n-play! I used to do a little vlog on those. I’m down for it — if the game looks good enough.
Where are the instructions? Checking the main page … ah, it’s a print-n-play SUPPLEMENT. Okay. Surprised there isn’t an instructions page, but I’m guessing that’ll be obvious if I knew the rules to the base game. Do I have the base game as part of this bundle?
I can’t tell such things from going to the game’s page, I’d have to download it through the bundle … ah, there it is, on page 49. Right, download that guy, and … still no instructions.
Ahem.
All right, go to the game’s page … is that an instructions PDF? I think it might be. And … it’s 32 pages?!
Sorry, game, but you are making me work WAAAAY too hard to tell if I’m even curious enough to play you.
This is a game I could go absolutely HAM on, but that would be douchey. So, let’s keep this relatively simple and not dickish:
This is a relationship sim that is simultaneously dull and cluttered. There are a lot of ideas here, but most of them aren’t developed well enough to matter.
So, you’re a young woman, with the ability to see fairies.
‘Sup
You saved this particular fairly from dehydration. In thanks, she did a little fairy magic, such that whenever you take a picture of somebody, you’ll be able to see whether or not they’re your soulmate. For some reason, you think this is a curse, and swear off taking pictures of anybody ever. However, you do love taking pictures, with a camera from the future. Sometimes you can get technology from the future in this world — it just kind of happens.
All of this is incidental.
The actual visual-novel-style gameplay revolves around your relationship with your girlfriend (whose presence in your life might have something to do with fairy magic, or not), and this is where the game really exhausted my patience. In the morning, you can talk to your girlfriend, or you can do some gardening. The conversations exhaust themselves quickly, and become repetitive. Then, you go to work, taking photographs. Your boss will ask for a photograph of something, and you have to guess which section of the city you can find it in.
Sometimes he asks you to find a river
Then, you get home. You can talk — again, these become repetitive quickly.
At home, you can dress-up your girlfriend. You can also buy clothes for your girlfriend during the day, and you’ll be rewarded with clothes as a reward for the plot moving forward.
Also, the game keeps track of relationship stats:
Loveometer at 116 — that’s good, right?
The hearts go up every time you talk, even if it winds up being the same conversation you’ve already had and you just fast-forward through it. Energy stayed at 2 the entire game. I have no idea what that means.
Every once in a while, something different will happen. This will either fill in some history on your relationship, or it will be a slightly different conversation.
It’s all just … dull. None of the conversations are particularly interesting, the relationship isn’t terribly interesting. I had a bunch of jokes queued-up to really hammer that point home, but really, trying to avoid being a bag of dicks here. I stuck through it for 40 in-game days, and while the game dropped HINTS that something might happen, nothing actually did. I feel like an hour of gameplay was more than enough time to give it a chance to go somewhere.
Not recommended, obviously. Though I do wish the dev well; this game doesn’t work, but hopefully they learned some stuff they can take forward to the next project.
Maybe this next one will be more my speed:
Page 54, Game 19: Scratch’s Sc0re: Hellish Descent by NinjaHELL! Productions
“More Damned Cards for Old Scratch’s Favorite Game”
I have absolutely no idea what to expect from this. Let’s check it out.
A darkly beautiful game of exploration and madness, I could recommend this game entirely on the basis of its look and its mood. Unfortunately, I kind of have to.
You are a deeply troubled man. Something terrible and tragic has befallen you; based on the fact that you have some prescribed meds, you might even have some mental illness thrown in just for good measure. You are trapped in the labyrinth of your own mind, desperately trying to process what has happened. This takes the form of exploring a series of platforms and solving the puzzles within.
The game looks and sounds fantastic. Your avatar is a perfectly-animated 3D model, while the rest of the backgrounds are a consistent crude-but-creepy style, everything in black and white.
Pretty sure I’m being watched. Possibly by myself.
You’ll explore, you’ll interact. You’ll find things that will help you move forward.
THE CHICKEN FLUTE OF DESTINY
What may be harder to figure out is … why.
Each stage represents … something. Something related to whatever trauma it is you’re struggling to process. There are words, there are images. There was a boat. There was a woman, there was a child. Perhaps it was your fault. Between stages, there will be an interstitial in the “real world,” as represented by your depressing-ass room. You’ll get some more information, but it’s not as helpful as one might hope.
What happened? What does it all mean?
I played the game to completion, and I honestly couldn’t tell you with any degree of confidence.
Whatever this is, it is not the teddybears’ picnic
That confusion, unfortunately, extends to the gameplay itself. Why am I pushing this slab around? Well, because it’s pushable, and presumably, where I push it is where it needs to be.
I can’t get to that ladder, because there are eyes and chains and shit blocking it. How do I get rid of that blockade? No idea … oh, look, I picked up a thing, now the blockade is gone. Sweet. That’s definitely progress.
This gets better as the game progresses, mostly. There’s still a fair amount of do-it-cuz-I-can up until the end, but actual logic puzzles start showing up, forcing me to, like, think and shit. That magic chicken flute I picked up can play songs, as long as I’m in front of mechanized chicken statues.
Ba-bawk-bawk-bawk, motherfuckers
If you play a song the statue doesn’t care about, it will ignore you. If you play a song it responds to, it will respond with a TERRIFYING YOWL SUITABLE FOR LETTING THE CITIZENS OF TOKYO KNOW THEY SHOULD SEEK SHELTER BECAUSE GODZILLA APPROACHES and also change the state of the game in some way.
Unfortunately, the underlying story remained deliberately obtuse until the very end. I appreciate that it wants me to engage with the symbolism and such, but … look, I’m kind of a basic bitch. At some point, I need some shit spelled out for me. What the hell HAPPENED? Was the woman my wife, my mother? Was the kid my son?
I just don’t know. I even got all the way to the very end (where I’m pretty sure my reward was the sweet release of death), and I still don’t know.
It’s safe to say this game offered me more in the journey than it did the destination, but I gotta say, it was a pretty solid journey. The story’s impenetrable, the gameplay is fine but nothing special, but good god DAMN does this game set a mood. The opening credits recommend you play with headphones on and in a darkened room, and … yeah, I actually kinda regret that I didn’t wait until the sun was down to play it.
It’s creepy, it’s eerie, it’s darkly beautiful. I don’t know that I’d call it a horror game, but it ain’t fuckin’ Mario, either. I’d have liked it better if I understood more of WTF was happening and why, but I was ultimately glad to have played it all the way through to the end. If you feel like playing something suitable for a dark room, I can definitely recommend it.
Perhaps this one will be a bit more accessible:
Page 31, Game 25: By Your Side by Takafumi
“Live a daily life of love!”
I’m already concerned there may be some translation issues. What the hell, let’s find out!
Give it credit, this game executes its underlying concept about as perfectly as you could hope for. I just wish that underlying concept weren’t so thoroughly defined by such bone-deep cynicism.
Also, there’s a subplot that’s aged … badly. Very, very, very badly.
You’re the latest employee for NoviNews, the most important news organization in the country of Novistan. You’re in charge of selecting which articles get run; kind of intense for an entry-level position, but what the hell, gotta start somewhere.
Meet Jack Lumberman, who will determine what the nation thinks
After a hard day of saying “Yes” or “No” to the articles that come across your desk, it’s time to walk home. You’ll chat with folks — co-workers, shopkeepers, random citizens, your brother. You’ll see how the news you chose to promote is affecting the world around you. And your choices will affect it — dramatically.
The game looks fantastic. Core gameplay is a very slick visual novel, but the connecting interstitials are a playfully animated side-scroller that give a wonderful sense of context and place to the world. The conversations you can have feel meaningful and satisfying; it really feels like you’re choosing to develop and nurture relationships with other people. There’s a lot here to like.
But there’s just as much to take issue with.
This is a game with a thesis, and that thesis is that the media influences reality. It’s a highly defensible thesis, and one well worth exploring. But the way the game chooses to explore it is not that the media is TEMPTED to bias; it’s that the media HAS NO CHOICE but to be biased.
At one point, a random passer-by in the street accused us of running nothing but thinly disguised opinion pieces, and … yeah. Often as not, that was literally all that came across my desk. In Headliner, you can be Fox News, or you can be Daily Kos. Stuff that seems like actual researched NEWS was few and far between.
So when our nation’s decidedly fascistic leader started talking smack about those filthy filthy furriners, my choice was to either run his comments with our implicit approval, or … not run them. I was never presented with the option of running his commentary as news (because if the leader is saying that shit, it IS legitimately news) but also fact-checking his obvious xenophobia. Is there any EVIDENCE that the furriners are up to the nefarious shit he says they are? Seems like a relevant thing to report on one way or the other, dontcha think?
So, yeah, under my bottom-up stewardship, NoviNews WAS decidedly anti-government. It was either that or be a willing propaganda arm. Even attempting balance was not presented as an option. Fox News or Daily Kos. No in-between.
This had consequences, as one would hope for a game. At one point, my brother was thrown in jail for talking smack about the government during his open mic set. My reporter friend wrote that up as a story, of course, which further battered our relationship with an overreaching government.
Later, my boss at the news agency was led away in cuffs for spreading sedition. I was unable to bail my brother out of jail, and he simply … disappeared. One would think that this would lead to me having the options of putting both deeply disturbing developments in the news. One would be wrong.
There’s also the game’s take on healthcare, which I found quite grating.
MEGANOPE
The game wants to present all choices as having consequences, good and bad, and the health care issue is no different. In this instance, the co-worker you can choose to pursue a romance option with has a worsening pre-existing condition, one that could prove debilitating or even fatal if left untreated. Treating it will require medication that isn’t cheap. So naturally, pursuing the nationalized healthcare option will … cause her to get sick and (possibly — it’s implied but not stated) die.
WTF?!
The way this plays out reads like pure “SOSHULIZED MEDCINE!!!!!” scaremongering. I did not care for it, at all.
The biggest issue was that she was unable to get the care she needed, because opening the system to all caused it to be overwhelmed … thanks to the ongoing pandemic.
Remember how I said there was a subplot that aged badly?
Yup, this is a thing
There’s a pandemic raging through Novistan. Opening healthcare to all causes the system to be overwhelmed by people who would like to stop falling ill and not be barfing in the streets. This is presented as a failing of socialized healthcare.
As I’m writing this, it is late in July, 2020. I live in the United States. It has been over four months since I spent any time socializing face-to-face with someone who is not either my wife or her boyfriend. The economy is in dreadful shape. My homeland has responded to this crisis in the most inept, half-assed way possible. While other countries across the world are trying to return to some semblance of normalcy, my own country is currently locked in a debate about how many dead children and teachers we’re prepared to accept if the schools reopen.
This is a direct consequence of how intensely this pandemic has been politicized here. Pretending that it’s all a hoax, that it’s no big deal, that no precautions are necessary has become a point of motherfucking PRIDE for a disquieting percentage of the population. They’re not a majority, but they’re enough to keep the fire burning, to keep us isolated in our own fucking houses indefinitely. It’s an impossibly childish reaction — one that has been actively encouraged by right-wing politicians and their enablers in the right-wing media.
This game was released in 2018. The developers had no way of knowing that, two years later, their audience would be painfully, intimately familiar with how a country might respond to a lethal pandemic. They had no way of knowing how badly their take on it would miss the mark.
The pandemic is a remarkable non-entity on the news desk. There’s occasional shit about the Great Leader blaming it on the foreigners, but there’s no fucking INFORMATION to distribute. No expert pieces from the doctors trying to keep everybody alive, no information on how to effectively protect yourself or your family.
There are, however, plenty of Ominous Hints that it is all a big government conspiracy. That it was engineered and released by the government as a mechanism for controlling the people.
This is the attitude I keep seeing in real life on Facebook. This is the attitude that is crippling my country. This is the attitude that is going to further wreck the economy and devastate any business without the cash reserves to ride out the storm.
This attitude — that it’s all a big orchestrated conspiracy — is literally killing people.
The devs wrote this game in 2018. They had no way of knowing what the world would be like a mere two years later.
Nevertheless. If anybody who worked on this aspect of the game’s story somehow finds their way to this blog, from the bottom of my heart:
Go fuck yourselves.
And fuck your implication that pandemic victims flooding the health care system somehow represents a failure of making that care available to them. I would have liked to run an article about how fewer people are puking to death on the streets. I would liked to have used my power to put pressure on the government to allocate more resources to the healthcare system in general and fighting the pandemic in particular.
I would like to have treated the in-game pandemic as something other than either a background nuisance that will surely go away if I just ignore it hard enough, or as fodder for conspiracy theories that I’d only promote if I were explicitly trying to hurt the government.
Frankly, that’s what most of your choices feel like: choose an agenda, then select the stories that advance it. Are they TRUE? Eh, it’s not like you have any way of knowing, bloody little actual information crosses your desk. I have no doubt that attitude drives a lot of real-life news coverage, but the game’s failure to provide any other option feels so deeply cynical that it further soured my opinion of it.
I was not TEMPTED to become a partisan player — I was FORCED to. There’s a difference.
The great failure of this game is that, by trying to back you into a series of corners where you HAVE to take a side, it denies you the opportunity to feel like you’re guiding an actual legitimate news outlet. Instead, it feels like being a lazy news junkie with a popular Twitter feed. You may retweet or ignore whatever you see other people post. Going out and getting more information, BETTER information, simply isn’t an option. Retweet or ignore. That’s all you have. That’s the game.
I did have an adorable doggo, though. At one point, when a bunch of hijacked drones crashed into buildings on my block and set them on fire, I dashed into my apartment to make sure my beloved Newshound got out of there all right. The game, however, decided that having buildings adjacent to mine on-fire was not a threat worth worrying about, so I just gave him his nightly ear scritchies and went to sleep.
Who’s a good buddy for the ongoing collapse of civilization? You are! You are!
Also, there were literal fat stacks of cash scattered around my apartment, which accumulated as the game went on. There was no way to spend them — but there were several things I would liked very much to have spent them on. I have no idea what satirical point the game was trying to make with this, but whatever it was, it missed.
Stacking those Franklins, but purely for decorative purposes
Clearly, this game pissed me off. There’s something deeply ironic about a game that, in trying to explore how the media has an agenda, winds up promoting unstated agendas of its own. But, shit, there’s a lot to like here. It looks great. Its plot elements were extremely hit or miss, but some of them did hit.
Am I ultimately glad that my script put this one on my plate? I … guess I am, kinda. It did offer up some stuff to think about, even if more of that was “Holy SHIT did the game fuck this up!” than the developers probably intended.
Recommended. Tentatively. With a whole lot of reservations. But recommended nevertheless.
What agenda will this next game promote?
Page 15, Game 28: The Guilt and the Shadow by oophok
“A short story exploration puzzle platformer inspired by the old point and click games.”
Lots of elements than could work. But please, no slideyboy picture puzzles.
