Gone Home

I started writing up a big long piece about a thing but it was taking forever. Then I played Gone Home which turned out to be pretty great and also much easier to write about. So I'm going to do that. Right now!

Gone Home is described as a "story exploration video game" on its website. What that means is it's a game about wandering around an empty house. You play as a 20ish year old who's just returned from a year gallivanting around Europe to the new house her family moved into while she was away. Upon arriving at 1AM you find the house ransacked and the family members missing. You're then given control and can explore the house, look for clues and try to figure out what's happened in the year since you've been gone and where everyone is.

Exploring the house is basically all that you do, and it's riveting. The game is set in the mid-90s, which means there's VHS tapes of the X-Files and bootleg cassettes of riot grrl bands for you to find. It also means nobody has a mobile phone or the internet which handily removes any plot contrivances those things would've created. You search through the house finding little bits of information that fit together to create a history of the house and the family that lived there, uncovering the trials and tribulations they went under while you were away. What's great about this is you're rarely given the whole story about what's transpired, just a few tidbits, leaving your own imagination to fill in the gaps. Sometimes things are obvious, sometimes less so, but's it's a wonderful way of telling a story. For example, you find a letter addressed to the father telling him that his reviews of stereo equipment are no longer cutting it and if he keeps this up he'll lose his job. A few rooms later you find boxes and boxes of the same book, written by him, clearly showing that he's a failed author who's reviewing these things as a fall back. You then find a hidden bottle of booze in his study and things become even darker. This type of storytelling is prevalent throughout the game and it's great.

Upon picking up certain objects you will trigger an audio log from Sam, the main character's younger sister, detailing what's gone on with her life in the form of a diary entry. The voice acting for these is pretty incredible, they cover a huge range of emotions but it's never over-acted, it's all done very naturally. I've never heard the actress before and it would not surprise me to see her show up in whole lot more games in the near future.

Here's a trailer for Gone Home that features some of the voice acting and a bit of riot grrl. What I love most about this trailer is how it gives off completely the wrong vibe you'd want to send out for the game, but does so with such style. The ending where they put the tape back in the drawer is such a hilarious little moment, I love it.

A big part of what I like about Gone Home is very spoilery, so I'm going to hide the next bit. Don't read this if you plan on playing the game! I'm super serial here guys.

[SPOILERS]

Gone Home being a game gives an expectation to the player that at some point, something will happen. That there will be a moment in the game where you have to actually do something in a game-like manner. Shoot a dude, solve a puzzle, any type of action. For the first third or so, or at least in the way I explored the house, the game was setting up the mystery of the house as supernatural in nature, that the family had been haunted by a poltergeist or something like that. The distressed messages on the answer machine, the pillow fort in the living room, the electrician unable to detect why the lights go on and off. The game never says "Hey, a ghost murdered everyone" it instead gives you a bunch of facts, and you as a player playing a game take those facts and construct a narrative that makes sense. Gone Home is a spooky game where you explore a spooky house, of course there's going to be ghosts I thought. But as soon as Sam's relationship with Lonnie became obvious all references to supernatural happenings seemingly disappeared. The game suddenly became a completely different entity and it was awesome. I thought the game was one thing based on random information I had, but a single new piece of information changed my understanding of the game entirely. And this wasn't just a plot twist, before the relationship took centre stage I assumed at some point I would fight a ghost or banish Uncle Oscar's soul to hell. Afterwards it became a family drama. The very genre of game and how I was supposed to play it changed based on a single kiss. Yeah!

While I have the spoilers up, I'm going to talk about the ending. Up until the very last audio log I had no idea how the game was going to end. This was all supremely tense as I genuinely cared about Sam and didn't want this game to end unhappily. I opened the attic door and wondered if I would find Sam and Lonnie spooning in bed and it would all be lovely. I climbed the attic stairs and saw the empty bed. Dammit. There was a note on the bed and a dark corridor off to one side. Given that the game had just faked out a happy ending I assumed it was going to have a disastrous one. In my mind I would find Sam having hung herself at the end of the corridor. This was terrible. I picked up the last note and Sam sounded depressed. I refused to walk down the corridor. If she was dead this game would have crushed me. But she wasn't. Her voice reading the journal turned extremely happy and excited! Lonnie had gotten off the bus! Yes! This was excellent! I ran round the corner and found the journal and all was right with the world! The most amazing part of my final minutes of gameplay was how my experience came about solely based on how I had interpreted the items I had found. The game didn't lead me down one path to make me believe one thing and then throw a twist at me. I went down that path of my own volition, using my own mind to create a narrative based on how I would interpret the evidence. Does it speak poorly of me that when confronted with a depressed teenager my thoughts instantly turned to suicide? Did I subconsciously want the game to end up as a tragedy because I'm a masochist who wants to feel unhappy, because the narrative left me with no other interpretation, or was it because the creators actually designed the game to be that way? I don't know. And that's awesome.

[END SPOILERS]

I should have just spoiler tagged this whole post...

Gone Home is lovely. It turns wandering around an empty house into an experience filled with conflicting emotions bought about by self-constructed narrative. It's atmospheric, detailed, has great voice acting and sound design in general, it looks gorgeous. It's awesome. You should play it. It's made by The Fullbright Company and you can get it from their site. And now I'm pleased to leave you with the Princess of Power.

Things That Were Good - July 2013

An amazing feature that I'm carrying over from my super old blog, things that were good! In which I write small amounts on things that I thought were good from the month.

Games

Kentucky Route Zero This is a point-and-click adventure game told in a weirdly minimalist, artsy manner. It's very atmospheric and being released episodically with the first two episodes already out and three more on the way. You mostly play as a trucker who gets lost making a delivery and is told to take the eponymous Route Zero to get to his location. It's described by the developers as a "magical realist adventure game" but that doesn't really mean much. It's very good.

No One Lives Forever I hadn't played this before but I've been meaning to for literally 10 years. I finally got around to it and was unimpressed :( It's very dated in both gameplay and level design. This came out 2 years after Half Life and I'm shocked that the level design is still so Doom-esque with confusing corridor systems and no attempt to ground the layout in reality. I haven't finished it but I plan on going back and seeing if it gets better.

Movies

Fast and Furious 6 The Fast and Furious movies have become the absolute perfect level of stupid. It's insane to think that the 6th entry in a film franchise would be so good. It's not quite as amazing as 5 but it is 1000% more stupid. Also the post-credits scene sets up 7 to be the best of the lot. I can't wait!

Pitch Black I saw this back in the day and thought it was OK, saw it now and thought it was OK. This film is really low budget, especially when compared with the overblown sequel. There are a few clever parts, and I love the nihilistic message, so overall it's good.

Chronicles of Riddick This I hadn't seen before. It was terrible, and not in a good way. I watched this back to back with Pitch Black, it's weird how the two have nothing in common. Sequels tend to be similar to the original, this is stupid, poorly written, poorly direction action movie; Pitch Black was a low budget horror film.

Man of Steel I was expecting to hate this from what I'd heard of it but I really liked the first two thirds. I thought there were good performances, the writing wasn't stupid and it made me like Superman, something I've never done before. Then the film enters the third act and it turns infuriatingly stupid and I understand exactly why people hated it. Even with all the idiocy it was a much better film then I expected, hopefully the sequel with Batman fixes the problems.

Books

Fiend Thinking I was tired of zombie fiction this book didn't really interest me at first glance. Then I saw some glowing reviews for it so gave it a chance and finished it in two sittings. It starts with a generic zombie plot, over night most of the world's population turns into zombies, but adds a cool twist: the only people who don't zombify are those high on crystal meth. The survivors have to keep using because if they get clean they'll zombie. The entire book follows a standard zombie plot but all of the characters being meth addicts certainly feels original. The ending is super great, you'll see it coming from a mile away but that doesn't lessen the impact. Great book!

Music

Au4 A really cool post-rock/ambient band, sort of like Tool but less sad. They have both of their albums for free download on their website and I'd really recommend them. The opening track from their second ablum, Everyone is Everyone (and Everything is Everything), is the song that got me on to them after it was used in a TV show and it's probably my favourite track of the album. It goes to lots of different musical places and gives a nice primer on everything the band is about.

Matt Berry - Kill the Wolf I really like Matt Berry's previous albums with their mix of prog and folk, but Kill the Wolf feels like a letdown. His past album's explored lots of different musical spaces whereas Kill the Wolf seems to hone in on gothic folk. Devil Inside Me is the only track that I can see on Youtube so that's what I shall link. It's not a bad album, but it's also not an interesting one.

TV

Venture Bros Season 5 of the Venture Bros has ended and it was excellent. It was a bit short at only 8 episodes, it goes up to 9 if you count the Halloween special from last year, but I would say it's the most consistent run of episodes they've ever done. I love that this show is constantly changing, it doesn't like to make things easy on itself. Writing an awesome character out of a show because it would be a tad contrived to keep them around is something I never see other shows do, but Venture Bros did that with Brock, and it's led to an awesome place for the show to be in. It sucks it will probably be 2 years before more episodes, but if they keep this quality I shall be happy. SPANAKOPITA!

Top of the Lake A drama/mystery miniseries released earlier in the year, this is lovely. It's set in a rural village in New Zealand and is about a 12-year-old girl who is found to be pregnant, then disappears. It's full of good actors doing lots of good acting at each other, with a great script and great direction. Some of the plot is a bit too forced, and I didn't like how neatly some things get cleared up at the end, but it was mostly outstanding. For a dark and depressing series like this, the hilarious lesbian commune run by the crazy lady was so out of place but was played so brilliantly it all fit in nicely.

That is it for July! Welcome August!

Transparency! It took me 2 weeks to notice the text wasn't justified so have now edited it.

Hotline Miami

This week I have finally finished Hotline Miami. Blog go!

I got Hotline Miami when it came out last year but didn't give it much of a chance. I liked playing the game but the visuals legitimately hurt my head after about 15 minutes of play. It has a retro aesthetic using low resolution graphics that are constantly rotating and zooming and pulsing and colours and shooting pain right into my eyes! It meant that I could only play the game in short bursts, which after a little while got annoying so I put the game down. In the past couple of weeks I've been playing through it again, I still get pain in the brain if I play too long but doing a level a day has let me enjoy it safely. I am getting old...

Hotline Miami is a top-down murder-em-up set in 1980s Miami. You play as a crazy person who gets messages left on their answering machine giving an address under the assumption that they'll go to the address and murder everybody there. You're given no information on who your character is, who the people you're murdering are, or why any of this is happening. The story is told through dream-like cutscenes featuring men wearing animal masks talking in meta nonsense. Oh, your character also wears an animal mask when murdering, so the other men wearing animal masks may or may not be fragments of a multiple personality. Or maybe you're part of a gang of mask wearing murderers. Or maybe the crazy man has weird dreams. Maybe the entire game is a dream? The story's told in a way that any interpretation can be correct and that fits how the game is presented. There's even a short post-game campaign where you play as a different character who murders the previous protagonist after barging into their campaign, creating an entirely different continuity. The mess of a storyline is brilliant.

After two blog posts I've finally realised I can embed youtube videos, so that's what I'm going to do. Here's an incredibly sexy live-action trailer that was made for the launch of Hotline Miami:

Hotline Miami is excessively violent. Every person you kill explodes with ludicrous amounts of blood. You have a whole host of weapons to choose from and killing with them all feels great. Unlike most other games that are produced, Hotline Miami knows exactly why you play it and doesn't try and treat it as otherwise. You don't play Call of Duty because you want to save the world from terrorists, you do it because you want to shoot people in the face. But that isn't how the game is marketed. There seems to be an unspoken rule between developer and consumer, the truth of why people play gets hidden behind some narrative construct, most likely to make them not think about all this murder. When playing Halo, Cortana will tell you to "Get across the bridge and turn off the distortion field! We've got to warn them about the gravity well!" but that isn't what she means. What she really means is "Go over there and murder all the dudes!" but she won't say it like that. It would be crass to say something like that. It's perfectly fine to go over there and murder all of the dudes, but only under the pretense of getting your communications back on line before the Infinity gets too close to Requiem. Hotline Miami doesn't give you that pretense. It says "Go over there and murder all the dudes!" so that's what you do. And it is bloody.

[SPOILERS] There's an excellent cutscene later on in the game when the player confronts the people behind the mysterious answer machine messages and asks "Why are you making me do this?" as if when somebody leaves an address on your answer machine you are forced into going there and murdering everyone. When they reply "It's a game. Aren't you having fun?" it presents a wonderfully meta concept. You, the player, are the one forcing the character in the game to commit all these atrocities, and you probably are having fun. Brutally murdering people. Just because the game told you to. With no reason behind it. Hotline Miami is an incredibly violent game that is giving an anti-violent message. It's having it's cake and eating it too. It lulls you in with it's fun murdering and hits you with a message saying you shouldn't like this sort of thing. It makes you feel bad for having enjoyed it because you really should feel bad for finding pleasure in murder...

The game then gives you the option of murdering the people you're talking too. Which of course you take, murdering people is super fun![END SPOILERS]

I don't really have anything to say here, but I wanted to have another screenshot so needed a paragraph of text to break it up... Oh, I know what I can say.

The levels in Hotline Miami all follow a strict formula. You go to a building, murder all the people in the building, leave the building. It follows that formula almost exactly for most of the game, so when the formula gets mixed up it feels awesomely special. It happens a couple of times so it never feels gimmicky, the level where upon walking back to your car an armored van smashes through the front door was an unexpected surprise that really helps the game feel less like a collection of levels and more like a cohesive whole. There are a few other small things that help with this, the loading screens being scenery passing by in a car is a wonderful dichotomy. It hides game mechanics, in this case a loading screen, to make the entire experience more seamless. But between each level there is a huge title screen giving the name of the stage. It's a beautiful contradiction, at times the game is hiding the fact that it's a game, at others it revels in it.

Following on from what I said about Jet Set Radio, the music in Hotline Miami is brilliant. It's mostly a mix of chiptune with funky bass lines and rocking riffs. During the dreamy cutscenes the music is more sinister and creepy but in gameplay the music is high energy and super cool, it's primary purpose is to make you feel awesome about murdering all of the dudes. It makes you feel like you're taking part in a kickass action scene and is a huge part of the game's aesthetic. The music fits incredibly well with the graphics and I love it.

After you've killed everybody in a level, the music stops and your character has to walk back to their car, traversing the carnage they left behind. It's an excellent use of silence as when you were murdering everyone just a few short seconds earlier you had the music rocking away in the background, pumping you up and making you feel doubly awesome for all the violence you're committing. But in the silence you have to walk over the bodies you've slaughtered and are given some time, if only a few seconds, to reflect on what you've done. It's marvelous.

A sequel had recently been announced, so I'm going to embed the teaser trailer for that here:

The melancholic music present in this trailer is sublime. From the small snippets released about the sequel so far it looks like they're going for a much more down tempo game, not simply copying the high energy of the first and instead going in the opposite direction, keeping the gameplay much the same but completely changing the tone of the game. It will be interesting to see how this makes the game feel, the first being a psychedelic sugar rush of violence and empowerment, the sequel perhaps being the crash that follows. That would be nice, make me feel bad about all this murder.

Hotline Miami is cool, it's brutally violent without glamorizing it but most importantly it's fun. It's everything an indie game should be in this day and age, it does something you'd never see in more mainstream games and does it in a way that plays to it's strengths whilst hiding it's weaknesses. It's a low budget game that is overflowing with ideas and you should totally play it!

I played through Hotline Miami on the PC through Steam. I currently have 10/35 achievements. Getting A ranks is hard!

Remember Me

I played Remember Me. I'm going to blog about it. Because that's what I do!

Remember Me is an action-platform-puzzle game set in a cyberpunk-styled future Paris, about a girl named Nilin who wakes up after having her memory wiped and gets thrust into her former life as a freedom fighter/terrorist, fighting against the evil corporations that market and abuse memory alteration hardware. The combat is a shoddy knock-off of the freeflow system that Arkham Asylum popularised, the platforming is a shoddy knock-off of the jumping and climbing that Uncharted popularised, and the puzzles are... a quite interesting new mechanic involving memory manipulation that's halfway between Inception and Psychonauts.

The gameplay of Remember Me is unfortunately sub-par, the combat is based around performing combos, but doing so when against multiple enemies is annoying rather then challenging, and the platforming is generic instead of exciting. Not all is doom and gloom however, the art design is wonderful. Paris of the future is full of wonderful technology that feels like it could possible happen. There is augmented reality everywhere, very little that's relevant to gameplay but it's very immersive. There are menus projected in front of restaurants, names projected above people's heads, warnings projected in front of dangers, all of which are believable and very cool.

The developer of Remember Me, Dontnod, had trouble finding a publisher because the protagonist of the game was a woman, which in a publisher's mind means the game wouldn't sell. Even with publisher troubles Dontnod kept their integrity by not changing Nilin into a dude, but apparently didn't have enough integrity to avoid the cover art of the game being a shot of Nilin's ass.

Integrity, thy name is bum

The writing is all over the place. At moments there is excellent introspection, at others there is moronic psuedo-intellectualism. When you first use you memory altering abilities to alter somebody's personality, Nilin has a monologue about how this power is quite dark and questions herself for using it, hopefully making any player who thought it was a cool ability to take a second look. A late-game reveal is treated especially well with it occurring as on off-hand remark during gameplay. When it's then mentioned in a cutscene it's done so with no fanfare, fully trusting that the player would pick up on it themselves. On the other hand, there's a supporting character named Bad Request, a great name for the wacky hacker he's introduced as, but as soon as he's involved in some drama it becomes hilariously out of place. "Dammit, they're doing horrible things to Bad Request! I have to save Bad! Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaddd!!!"

When considering the bigger picture the writing is great, when down to dialog it can be silly. The memory altering storyline knows that you think there will be some crazy twist, but the story twists all occur in unexpectedly smart ways, nothing seems gimmicky in that regard.

Possibly the worst thing about the game was the ending. I won't spoil it, but the end boss was incredibly fucking stupid. It wasn't necessary and ruined the mood the game had spent creating for the 15 minutes prior. For a game that was trying new things it seems poor judgement to leave that boss in, I can't imagine anybody who was liking that game up to that point would have been disappointed by it's removal.

Getting nit picky, I think that cutscenes not being skippable is basically unacceptable. I'm sure there are some insecure writers out there who think their vision must be appreciated, but when you design your game around multiple playthroughs, having to watch the cinematics again when all you want to do is mop up achievements is maddening. It should be mandatory that cutscenese are skippable, nobody who cares about the story is going to skip them on their initial playthrough, and if people don't care about the story you've either done a poor job at telling it or they weren't going to care in the first place. Shape up people! This is basic game design here! A related quibble, checkpoints before cutscenes? Shame on you game, shame on you...

This all sounds like me being negative, but I really liked Remember Me. It has a whole bunch of flaws, most of which could be easily fixed given a bit more time, and it saddens me that the time wasn't taken. Production values feel high, but with the public publisher problems Dontnod had I doubt the game had that high of a budget. It never feels cheap, which is important, but a bit more polish in the gameplay department would have helped immensely. The game is at least interesting and has new ideas, they surely knew going in it would be a battle to get this game released and it would be a shame to criticise it for being too ambitious.

It would be acceptable to say that Remember Me is not a good game. It's trying really hard to be one, but it fails in most regards. It succeeds in a few ways, and if you're willing to trawl through some bad to get to some good, then it can be a pretty great game. At the risk of sounding horribly cheesy, I choose only to remember the great bits of Remember Me, and in doing so the game is excellent.

I played Remember Me on the Xbox 360 and got 1000/1000. After an initial playthrough on hard I went through on easy to get all the achievements.

Jet Set Radio

Hello blog! I've been meaning to start using you again, but couldn't think of a good topic to start with. Over the past week I've been playing Jet Set Radio HD and I thought that's as good a thing as any to blog about, so let's shake it!

Looking back on it, the Dreamcast was the last great games console. Going forward from it game production costs have skyrocketed, causing innovation to decline and originality to become an afterthought instead of the main driving force in game development. All of the new IPs the Dreamcast launched were products of a much earlier time in game design, back when things didn't have to make sense or be seen as marketable to the widest audience possible. There were titles where you played as sky pirates, dancing aliens, insane taxi drivers, men collecting capsule toys, and of course rollerblading graffiti artists. It's a shame that all of those series' failed to gain traction in a post-Dreamcast world, with the XBox unleashing the space marine juggernaut and the PS2 securing huge exclusives for both the east and the west with car stealing and endless adventures. It's understandable that the Dreamcast-era games have seen minimal follow-up, it was under their watch that Sega fell in to financial ruin and had to drop out of the hardware market completely, so I can't hold too large of a grudge. However playing Jet Set Radio recently, it's made me think back on those times and what has happened to the games industry, and how quickly AAA shifted from originality to marketability... 

Enough moping! I like being positive, and Jet Set Radio is a fantastic game. If you haven't heard of or played it, it's a game set in a hyper-stylised version of Tokyo where a bunch of rollerblading gangs fight for the streets using graffiti. You play a member of the GG's, a new gang that's all about having a good time and dancing, who recruit a whole host of members throughout the game. The goal of each level is to spray paint your targets whilst avoiding the police, the military and an increasingly bizarre number of villains. Behind all this is a weird storyline that's told via DJ Professor K, the DJ of the eponymous Jet Set Radio, about an evil corporation who are brainwashing rival gangs in search of a mysterious record. The story doesn't matter, but it's suitably off-the-wall none-the-less. Word-hypen-word.

The HD port of JSR came out last year and I snatched it up quickly but didn't really play it. I went through the first level then got distracted by something else so it sat on my 360, awaiting the day when I would play it again. That day came last week and I burned through it, painting loads of graffiti and grinding a whole bunch of rails. I had a lovely time. Was that time lovely due to nostalgia? I don't know. I played the crap out of JSR on the Dreamcast so it's certainly possible. My first hour or so of HD was spent annoyed at the controls which made me think the game wasn't as good as I remembered. But then everything clicked and I was doing amazing things, grinding from rail to rail, spraying some tags, grinding more rails, spraying more tags...

There isn't much gameplay-wise to JSR, and it would be debatable to say what it does have it does well, with the steep learning curve scaring off newcomers, but the game is oozing with style. The cel-shaded graphics of the game at a higher resolution look stunning, there is little graphically to date this game as old as it is (13 years!) and the visuals are beautiful. For the most part the cel-shading hides the low-poly models and low-res textures leaving you to marvel at the wonderful design work. With four distinct areas the game has heaps of variety, no muddy browns or boring greys here! Except in Kogane, which is mostly muddy brown. Or Benten, which is full of grey buildings. But Shibuya? That is a cavalcade of colours! All the levels are well designed with each looking and playing quite differently.

From a visual standpoint there's no black sheep, but from a gameplay standpoint there is, and that's Grind Square, a hyper version of New York's Times Square. All of the action takes place on top of a bunch of skyscrapers, which sounds awesome, but you will inevitable fall off. Instead of respawning you back up top, the game makes you skate about at street level, where there is nothing to do, and take an elevator back up. This wouldn't be so bad, but the finicky controls mean you'll fall a whole bunch of times and the 30 seconds you spend faffing about with elevators becomes quickly annoying. Consider yourselves picked, nits!

The music plays a huge role in JSR's charm. It features an eclectic mix of all different genres ranging from funk to electro-noise. With the storyline being told almost entirely by a radio DJ, the music being supremely cool was important. Few games seem to bother with their soundtracks, the only recent game I can think of with an awesome soundtrack is Wet, a game that went the style-over-substance route and failed miserably, but did so with such audible charm. There is little more to be said about the soundtrack, it's incredibly cool and I wish more games would take the time to do the same.

I did some googling around and came across a site that aims to continue the spirit of Jet Set Radio's soundtrack, promoting music that fits in with the eclectic mix that made the soundtrack so brilliant. The site is jetsetrad.io and it's pretty recent, seemingly only starting back in March, but there are already a whole bunch of tunes up and from what I've heard they generally fit with the aural aesthetic that JSR created.

Playing JSR has really got me in the mood to play some more so I'll be going through the sequel in the near future, it will be interesting to see how that holds up with my memories. And even though it's unlikely, I really, really hope Sega decide to bring this franchise back. I can't seem to find any sales figures of the HD mix but this article from Major Nelson shows JSR as the 2nd highest-selling XBLA game behind Minecraft for a week, so it at least did well for a few days...

Purely for informational purposes, I got 400/400 achievements in JSR HD, over a total of not-quite 4 playthroughs. Woo!