The (Official) Art of Rastan

 

Keep fighting that lizard!

Video Game Commentary without Context

(The following is a select list of quotes lifted from a forum thread on RPG.net)

"She's having a thought. That's like a headache but with pictures."

"It's been fifteen minutes; I need new stabbies, dammit!"

"How am I supposed to head-shot you if you ain't got no head, son?"

"I'm the Bob Ross of 4X games, you guys."

"Is it stupid if it works? Well, yeah, it's still stupid."

"I dunno, maybe bees like puns!"

"He died the way he lived: briefly."

"I don't trust anyone standing in the street screaming about monks."

"It's not healthy to get shot with this many arrows."

"I get killed by the soundtrack in this game more often than by hostile NPCs."

"Turns out the answer to this puzzle was brute force."

"She is our moral compass. We take her out occasionally and check how sad she is."

"Their computers look even more hostile than ours. I bet this runs Linux."

"Here's a thing to set on fire! Awesome!"

"Open up! Or I'll...er...wiggle my gun at you again."

"It's okay. You're naturally buoyant, as all dinosaurs are."

"I'm fine. It's just bones and organs. I have plenty of them."

"If nobody comes from the future to stop you [from] doing it, how bad can it be?"

"I only have three pilots, cause I fired one for being ugly."

"That's a big-ass arrow through my kidney."

"Oh my god, the fish! Oh, I feel bad. But also, I kind of want sushi now."

"Fuckin' dolphins keep stealing my concrete!"

"Oh shit that's thing's way bigger than my submarine. I'll have to fist-fight it."

"Hi. You mind if I use my cheese tactics on you as well?"

"Look at my horse: it goes so fast. Better than my crappy two little legs."

"Yeah, I'm about to stab you......Thoughts?"

"These things have no spines. I don't think I want to know how their biology works."

"Kneecaps are a PRIVILEGE!!!"

"Yeah, I'm not really sure about this whole using zombie guts as sausage casing thing."

"Well, who am I to argue with my brain?"

"I apologize in advance for the injury to your spleen."

"The best shooters are those where you can set yourself on fire to damage the enemy!"

"It's a Cthulhu-Dog!" *Bang* "Say hi to Yog-Sothoth and the Outer Gods for me!"

Come Fly the Sunless Skies

Sunless Skies it the third entry in the Fallen London series of games.  It might seem like an odd place to start, but by all accounts it's the easiest to get into.  So, that's where I chose to start.  With regards to the narrative and setting, Sunless Skies feels like what you would get if you dropped the complete works of H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis into a blender and set it to "eclectic"...then sprinkled in some H.P. Lovecraft and served it in a steampunk glass.  Honestly, I'm not sure if there's a better way to describe it.  Needless to say, it's a weird setting with the story conveyed entirely in-media-res.  More than once I found myself asking the computer screen "who in the what did where now?" (yes, in that exact order).  Obviously, an answer was not forthcoming.  Thankfully, the gameplay mechanics are easy to grasp, especially if you've ever played Sid Meyer's Pirates.  Of course, flying around the "High Wilderness" in an airborne steam locomotive is only half the game.  

The other half is a text-driven choose-your-own-adventure.  Sometimes these choices take the form of a percentage-based skill check or require a certain kind of item.  These items can be physical commodities such as tea, lumber, munitions or magical time-dilating rocks.  Other times they are something more abstract: a savage secret, a tale of terror, or a moment of inspiration.  There is a wide variety of these items with some being harder to come by than others.  Aside from buying/selling goods and exploration, a lot of time is spent traveling along trade routes and hauling NPCs from one place to the next.  Oftentimes these characters can serve as officers aboard the player's gravity-defying choo-choo train and provide bonuses to to skill checks.  Most can even level-up in one of several ways by completing their individual narrative arcs.  The player's character (a captain of sorts) also gains levels throughout the game, but in an interesting twist must add an element to their backstory that justifies the upgrade.  It's a neat little idea that I think more RPGs would benefit from having.

In order to break up the monotony of travel somewhat, there are things that appear at random.  Sometimes it is a sky beast.  Other times it's something that can be looted (like a drifting wreck or abandoned homestead).  Oddly enough, there never seems to be any encounters with traders such as yourself even though there's no shortage of corsairs and patrol vessels.  I find this especially bizarre considering that neutral trading vessels were a common feature of the previous game in the series - Sunless Seas.  Having finished Sunless Skies (I got the "Song of the Sky" ending), I think I'll move onto (back to?) Sunless Seas to see how it compares to it's predecessor.  I just hope it has a few less in-game bureaucracies than Sunless Skies did. 

Through the Woods

Darkwood is a game that took me three attempts to finish.  The first two were aborted due to frustration, but finally the third time was the charm...as the saying goes.  It took me 31 in-game days and about a half-dozen deaths, but I managed to get to the ending...the true ending.  Before proceeding further, I should mention there's going to be major spoilers ahead.  If you happen to be someone who is interested in playing the game, but hasn't yet, then consider yourself duly warned.  Now, let us enter the dark.

I want to say my successful completion of Darkwood was due to me mastering the systems, but (in all honesty) I'm pretty sure the developers reduced the difficulty in post-release patches.  In particular, enemies seem to have less health in the current version of the game...that, or the weapons do more damage.  Either way, the hostile creatures that inhabit the woods go down a lot more quickly than they used to.  

With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that my first attempt to finish the game got fairly close.  I was definitely well past the halfway mark.  Despite being a hard game, the penalty for dying is not especially harsh; lose half your gear and spawn back at you home base for the region you're in.  If you go on a corpse run you can recover any lost items at the exact spot you died.  Only the higher difficulty settings place a limit on the number of times you can repeat this process.  Despite these mercies combat can still get pretty frustrating.  The character you play (known only as "The Stranger") isn't the most spry fellow.  He tires quickly, seems to suffer from tunnel vision, has a very low tolerance for punishment, and can only dodge directly backward a short distance (with no I-frames).  He can be leveled-up, but (in an interesting design decision) has to take some negative traits in order to gain positive ones.  In fact the cost/benefit ratio is so decidedly mixed, it's a common strategy among veteran players to forgo the system entirely.

One feature I greatly appreciate about Darkwood is there being more than one way to complete story objectives or acquire key items.  The NPCs I encountered throughout the game were a hideous, but memorable bunch.  Regrettably, every single one of them ended up dead in my game by the time the credits rolled.  The one exception being the Wolfman whose ultimate whereabouts were simply listed as "unknown."  Despite liking the characters, I had a hard time following the story.  It's told rather cryptically, and only really comes together at the very end.  As far as I can gather some malignant entity (simply referred to as "The Being") came to a rural part of Poland in (or around) 1975.  Fast forward to the early 1980s and the region has become a neigh impenetrable forest filled with mutations and madmen.  Since it's Soviet era Poland I guess the government isn't in any rush to get to the bottom of things though agents (called "Outsiders" in-game) do attempt to investigate what is going on.  Overall, the setting is a mix of Slavic folklore and Strugatsky's highly influential novella "Roadside Picnic."  Personally, I picked up on tones of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour of Outer Space" and Jeff Vander Meer's "Annihilation" as well.

Generally speaking, the music and visuals do an excellent job of setting a creepy mood without much in the way of jump scares (though there are a few...I particularly liked the fake out one in the epilogue with a unexpectedly friendly dog).  Gameplay-wise, Darkwood is unfortunately a bit lacking.  Certain aspects (such as ineffective barricades and banshee swarm stunlocking) are very frustrating and detract from what would be an otherwise masterful experience.  Still, I recommend checking it out if you're into survival horror - it is one of the better entries in that genre, especially when it comes to atmosphere.   

Hmmm...