Game Titles Gone Wrong

Not sure what "KONG" is in this context,
but Diddy is on a quest for it

"Red One, lock blush into attack position"

You're not fooling anyone with that mustache
and slight name change, Toad!

 

Winter Games

Winter is here!  Well, at least if you happen to live in the northern hemisphere...and that statement is doubly true if you reside in North America or Europe.  So, for those of you who are entombed under a mound of heavy snowfall, what better way to celebrate the season that with some winter-themed video games?  Here's three, in which not freezing to death is a key aspect of the game.    

Survival-strategy is an incredibly rare subgenre of which Frostpunk is the only recent entry.  Taking place in an alternative version of Victorian England, the player is tasked with keeping a band of refugees alive as the world around them is slowly swallowed up by an apocalyptic super-blizzard.  It's a grim game filled with difficult moral decisions that require a tricky balancing act between pragmatism and empathy.  On top of this the player has to gather and manage resources such as food, timber and coal; all while building a city radially outward from a massive central furnace.  This towering construct is the heart of the game because it supplies much needed warmth which is actually Frostpunk's most basic and vital resource.  

The Long Dark was successfully kickstarted in 2013 and subsequently released in early access on Steam in 2014, before ultimately hitting version 1.0 in 2017.  Since then, it has gotten more updates and content in the form of DLC.  The game takes place in the Canadian wilderness with players assuming the role of a marooned bush pilot.  The story goes he crashed his plane after a massive geomagnetic storm and now is simply trying to survive.  Despite the somewhat sci-fi premise, the actual game is firmly grounded in reality.  There are no zombies or other supernatural threats.  Hungry wolves and bears, on the other hand, pose a serious danger (as does the harsh climate), but at it's heart The Long Dark is a streamlined resource management and survival game.  Finding shelter from the cold and scavenging for supplies in an open-world setting is what this game is all about.

Not to be confused with Frostpunk, this final entry is simply entitled Frost.  It's an odd little indie game about a small tribe of Neolithic wanderers trying to survive an approaching ice age.  The gameplay is centered around a deckbuilding card game of sorts.  The art is simple, but evocative.  Cards the player has at their disposal are typically tools and resources which are used to overcome challenges.  These obstacles often take the form of imposing terrain features or hostile wildlife.  The music is pretty neat as well because it's entirely made with vocalizations.  The best way I can describe it is stone age beatbox.  Overall, the game is quite difficult (even on the easier settings).  There are several kinds of character archetypes to choose from as well (each with their own style of play).  Regardless of the individual though the goal is the same - don't let the cold get you.

2022 Awards

Avant-garde Award: 

Scorn is a game that challenges the player to figure out where they are, what they are looking at, and why they are even there.  The game is incredibly obtuse, to the point that some have suggested that there is no meaning that can be derived from it.  Considering there is no text or dialogue, this might very well be deliberate.  Is human suffering due to karma?...or is it simply the result of random circumstance?  It seems to me most of the meaning in this game is what we give it.   

Backlash Award: 

Ah, Blizzard Entertainment...how the mighty have fallen.  As if bad management and all the reports of internal harassments/abuse weren't bad enough, their handling of China relations (and really their fan base in general) has been a huge disaster.  Adding to the list of issues is the poor quality of their PC version of Diablo Immortal.  It has a "0.3" user review score on Metacritic due, in large part to it being a perfectly functional game completely broken by cynical cash-grab loot box mechanics.

Brutality Award: 

What can I say?  Elden Ring is a From Software game, and as such has all the challenges that one would expect from the makers of Bloodborne and Sekiro.  Elden Ring though, allows for a level of character customization that wasn't previously possible (even in the Souls games).  As such it can be really hard to defeat certain bosses with certain builds; namely the infamous Blade of Miquella and  Goddess of Rot - Melania. 

 

Canvas Award: 

The blackness of space spotted by the white light of stars; the smear of the grey metal hull of the ring station know as Erlin's Eye.  It could make for some dull viewing, but Citizen Sleeper adds much needed splashes of neon reds, blues and yellows, plus the occasional patch of oxygen-garden green.  Of course if you jump up to the data cloud to do bit of spying everything turns an ethereal grey, but this only serves to highlight the vibrance of the real world in all its cell-shaded glory.

Ecology Award:

Considering that it was already remade for the PS4, The Last of Us Part 1 definitely feels like a case of double-dipping.  The full price doesn't do the game any favors either, especially since it lacks the multiplayer that came included in the original.  Heck, it doesn't even integrate mechanics used in The Last of Us Part 2.  The reuse of the original performances by the cast really makes this a case of Naughty Dog resting on their laurels.    

"Engrish" Award:

From the maker of My Summer Car comes Mon Bazou, a game about scraping together enough money to fix up an old junk heap of a car in rural Canada by working a bunch of odd jobs.  Despite (or perhaps because of) it being in early access, the NPC dialogue has some real zingers like "You looks good today" and  "You really talking to me about the rack track, hm".  Maybe their supposed to be French Canadian?  

Esoteric Award:  

Signalis claims to be a horror game, but isn't scary.  It tries to be retro with tank controls, but doesn't utilize cinematic camera angles.  It has some bits from novelists H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers, but really comes across as a mix of Silent Hill and Resident Evil.  The story is such a convoluted mess it somehow makes the ending of Evangelion look straightforward by comparison.  Critics appear to like the game, but none of them can really articulate why.  Also, for some reason, nobody has feet.  

Lemon Award: 

It would have been easy to pick an EA sports game again this year, but for the sake of variety Skyrim: Anniversary Edition for the Nintendo Switch is the winner.  It runs terrible do to poor coding and long-known issue involving the installation of mods.  11 years was more than enough time to fix all this.  Of course being a Bethesda game they never got around to it.  That said, the real kicker is the outrageous price tag.  It launched as a brand new full-priced triple-AAA title.

Testosterone Award: 

Do you like games such as DOOM and Space Hulk, but get annoyed by that pesky third-dimension you need to keep track of?  Well, worry no more because Let Them Come is the game for you!  In fact, this game doesn't require any movement on your part.  Every round of play begins with your character hunkered down behind the barrel(s) of a mounted machine gun.  From there it's a lot of yelling incoherently as you blast through waves of alien monsters leaving nothing but spent shells and gore in your wake.

Underdog Award: 

For this (our final category), I'm going to give the award to Horizon: Forbidden West.  It's not an especially good game, but it definitely had its thunder unfairly stolen by Elden Ring (which came out only a week after).  This is especially sad to see given that Horizon: Zero Dawn, in-turn, had its thunder stolen by Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild when it came out last gen half-a-decade before.  Guerrilla Games (the publisher) really can't seem to catch a break in this regard. 

Shimmy Simulator

The clear visor and internal helmet lighting are there
so you don't accidentally mistake Jacob for Riddick

Callisto Protocol (A.K.A. Splatterhouse meets Super Punch-Out) is basically the original concept for Dead Space.  Set on the titular moon of Jupiter, gameplay consists of linear third-person exploration and combat.  The latter of those two is further broken down into a fairly even mix of ranged and melee fighting.  In a way it reminds me a lot of the Condemned duology.  Like that pair of games, the sound design is second to none.  Aside from setting the mood, various audio cues are used to convey important information to the player ranging from the location and types of nearby enemies to the effect an attack is having on said enemies.  Graphics are also impressive from a technical perspective, but (in terms of art direction) are painfully bland.

What do get when you combine the common elements of every grim space sci-fi movie and television series from "Moon 44" to "The Expanse"?  It turns out you get Callisto Protocol in all it's generic glory.  Don't get me wrong...the game looks very genre appropriate.  It's just there is a severe lack of distinctive setting material.  The original Dead Space (for how derivative that game was) at least had a few things that made it standout; examples include Unitology, The Markers and Planet Cracking.  Here, though there really isn't anything unique.  Even stuff that could have been special, such as the exotic location, is made a lot more ordinary than it should be.  

Here's where it all began...

To demonstrate my point look at the moon of Callisto itself.  In real life, it's a big frozen ball with no atmosphere. The surface is nearly as ancient as the solar system itself and has almost one-hundred percent crater saturation.  In layman terms this means every new asteroid impact happens on top of an already existing one.  Underneath all that pockmarked terrain is the possibility of a subsurface ocean.  Imagine digging down through the permafrost only to emerge into some kind of cold underwater abyss roofed in ice with god-knows-what dwelling down in the dark depths.  It's a thalassophobic nightmare, that the game designers obviously had no interest in letting the player experience.  Instead, that terrifying encounter is only mentioned in passing and (as a substitute) we get a bunch of boring zombie mutants hanging out around what is definitely not OSHA approved industrial machinery.  Worse yet partial terraforming of Callisto has transformed the "dead moon" into basically Antarctica, complete with clouds, wind and snow.  I'm not sure why opening an airlock would suck people out if there's an atmosphere, but the game's creator (Glen Schofield) has a reputation for pointless scientific inaccuracies.  Case in point, Callisto (despite being a rather huge moon) only has 12.6 percent the surface gravity of Earth.  This seems to come into play a bit during one scripted sequence when the protagonist slowly falls down the side of a building.  The devs could have made up some excuse like "magnetic boots" to explain why low gravity isn't an issue onboard space ships or inside the prison complex, but once your out on the surface this fact should have really come into play.  Specifically, having to navigate around chasms and fences should have been trivial since you character can vault over them with ease.  It could have been an interesting change of pace from a gameplay standpoint...more of an open sandbox arena...also, zombies coming flying at our hero through the snowstorm would have been absolutely unnerving.

Speaking of the hero of this story, he fits the Dude McGuy roll perfectly in that he is a short-haired scruffy thirty-something that has little in the way of personality and no motivation beyond immediate survival.  I get that they were going for the everyman protagonist here, but give him a lisp, a tic, a phobia; make him religious or superstitious...something that the actor can work with! As is, his female counterpart would have made a far more interesting main character given that she has a backstory that could have shed some much needed light on the underdeveloped plot.  It's weird that known profession actors were hired to play the various character roles when they were given so little to do.  The real kicker though has got to be the ending.  Just as the story feels like it's starting to go somewhere the credits roll on a sequel-bate cliffhanger...got to justify that season pass, I guess.

To anyone on the fence about getting this game, I would recommend waiting until it's on sale in a bundle that includes all the DLC plus (as of now much needed) performance patches.  Only then will it be worth playing.  Unless you're in Japan, of course, in which case it's simply not available because it was deemed too violent.  To everyone else...well...you've already made up your mind, haven't you?  

Howling at the Moon

The word "quarry" has two meanings
a "rock mine" or a "hunted animal" -
Hackett's Quarry indeed!

Callisto Protocol is the hot new game out right now, but why talk about that when there's another six-month-old horror title I never got around to?  Made by Supermassive Games (the developers behind Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology), The Quarry has a lot in common with those games mechanically.  From a story perspective, it uses the classic teenagers-at-a-summer-camp setup.  Even so, it doesn't have all that much in common with the "Friday the 13th" films.  Instead, it borrows more from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the "Blair Witch"...plus there are werewolves.

That last bit isn't so much of a spoiler as an approximation.  While the featured creatures of The Quarry have a lot in common with lycanthropes lore-wise, they are visually quite different to what one would expect; tall, hairless and gaunt with elongated limbs.  These werewolves are uniquely disturbing to look at.  In particular, the first reveal scene presents them via some absolutely creepy shots.  All this is aided by (as is always the case in Supermassive Games) excellent use of lighting, sound and camera placement.  Sadly, the spectacle is undercut somewhat by their physical movement which can come across as rather weightless at times.  Worse still, this lack of inertia and mass extends to instances where said werewolves interact with other character models.  In other words, the kill scenes sometimes look more goofy than horrifying.  Regrettably, these animation woes also extend to some of the facial motion capture performances as well.  Maybe it's due to technical issues, or simply a lack of polish.  Hair and water effects are a bit rough too, though these are long-standing problems when it comes to video game development.  Overall, it's disappointing to see given the clear amount of attention and effort that went into other aspects of the production.

The writing, particularly when it comes to dialogue, is sharp in a way that reminds me of Oxenfree. To elaborate on that, the characters talk like actual American teens minus their most braindead colloquialisms.  That may make it somewhat inauthentic, but trust me...we are all better off because of it.  Of course, well written dialogue is never truly going to elevate the script unless it has a good cast to deliver the lines.  Thankfully, The Quarry excels here with a talented list of known (though not especially famous) actors who nail their respective parts perfectly.

Ironically, their sensitivity to water means that the
 teens could have waited out the whole werewolf
 attack on boats in the lake, though this only
 becomes apparent to them after it is too late 

The story itself is somewhat of a slow burn; taking the first two hours (approximately a quarter of its entire length) introducing a cast nearly the size of a Stephan King novel.  In fact, this is kind of a roadblock in terms of story comprehension due to several plot-important characters only having a very short amount of screen time.  Adding to the confusion are the werewolves themselves which look indistinguishable from one another.  While this may have been intentional, I think the game would have benefited from including some easy-to-spot hints about the origin of each lycanthrope via accessories or tattered bits of clothing still on them even after they have transformed.  Incidentally, the transformation scenes in The Quarry are cleverly dramatic in that they use a burst of gore to hide the model swap from character to werewolf.  I actually feel like it's a welcome change from the traditionally slow and drawn-out morphing that is typically depicted.  Having stated that, I do think it's a bit weird that when they revert back to human form they are suddenly wearing scraps of strategically placed clothing again.  To be clear, I'm not asking for nude characters here, just an eye for consistency.

While we're on the topic of consistency, I should mention that the shear number of variations and outcomes in The Quarry is nothing short of staggering.  As is the case with all recent titles by Supermassive Games, anyone can die though there's only one minor character that has (for story reasons) an unavoidable death.  Visualizing the tangled web of possible plotlines must be a nightmare unto itself, but somehow the dev team managed to keep it logical...albeit with two caveats.

The first is the the kind of pitfall I encountered many years ago playing an obscure indie game entitled Uncanny Valley.  Basically, what can happen is player-made choices lead to vital chunks of the plot being skipped over such that, by the time the credits roll, it feels like they accidently missed one or more important scenes...because that's exactly what they inadvertently did.  If you want to see an example of this, look no farther than the final part of Nexlander's Let's Play The Quarry.

Aside from the surprisingly hard-to-get "everyone dies" ending,
it's also possible to have any one of the main characters be
the sole survivor

The other issue with having a wide variety of potential endings is it makes wrapping things up pretty difficult.  The Quarry does have a string of vignettes summarizing how things stand at the conclusion, but doesn't offer much in the way of resolution outside of a pseudo-podcast over the closing credits.  It's better than nothing, but not exactly satisfying either.  Aside from a few post-launch technical issues, this is the biggest criticism I've seen leveled at the game.  In a roundabout way I guess it's a compliment since the implied meaning is a lot of players actually cared enough about the characters to want to know what ultimately happened to them.  I don't know though...maybe a little F.B.I. style watchlist report using snippets of condition-sensitive dialogue or text would have been better?  Like I said before, it's a hard thing to do well without creating a massive resource sink.  Endings are hard...and on that note, until next time!