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various games i've played recently
I am making more of an effort to Actually Play the Games I Own and decided the easiest way to make a quick dent was to play the shortest ones first, so...here some of the games I've played in the last week or so. Most of these games are largely unspoilable but there are major spoilers for the end of Brothers. I don't necessarily recommend Brothers - if it was already on your radar you should avoid this entry and play it! It was a good experience! But if it's not on your radar I can tell you like twenty things I'd rather see you try than Brothers, so just read this it's fine.
1. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. This game was interesting mechanically, and I liked the look of it, but ultimately the overall experience was kind of shallow? The puzzles weren't especially challenging but they WERE exactly on the level where it's kind of pleasing to always know exactly what to do.
In a nutshell: Two brothers learn from their village doctor that their father's illness will be fatal unless he gets water from a magical tree, so they go on a journey to find the tree and save their dad. You control both brothers (one with the left side of the controller, one with the right side), which can be difficult as hell to manage for running around but otherwise works fine. Each brother has strengths and weaknesses - the older brother is literally stronger and can lift or pull more, but the younger brother can fit into smaller spaces (like slipping between bars in a gate to open it up and let the other one through). Younger brother, most importantly, can't swim - he was in a boat with their mother once and she drowned and he couldn't save her, and now he's terrified of water. So any time the brothers need to cross a body of water, you use the big brother to swim and you have the little brother cling to his back.
It's a perfectly nice game if a little awkward to maneuver. They really make an effort to keep it interesting and mix it up in terms of the different areas the brothers go to, and the types of people and creatures they encounter, and giving you a good amount of different problems to solve with the same three or four actions, but like, nothing life changing, nothing I'd really care to revisit in the future. But the end...THE END!!!!!!!!!
Long story short older brother fucking DIES, and if it felt weird up until then to try to control two people simultaneously, it feels WEIRD AS SHIT to suddenly only be controlling one, particularly when the action you're guiding him through is BURYING HIS BROTHER. But what was really a standout moment to me was the final sequence, when the younger brother is near his village and making his way to the doctor's house. There are a bunch of actions that would, in any other level, have required the older brother - you need to pull a heavy lever (which only the older brother was strong enough to do), get up to a high ledge (which he would have boosted you to), and swim across some water (which he would have carried you on his back for), and you have to do it ALONE, but you AREN'T ALONE, because the way you complete all those tasks is by REALIZING YOU HAVE TO USE THE OLDER BROTHER'S SIDE OF THE CONTROLLER TO INVOKE HIS MEMORY AND SUMMON THE STRENGTH TO DO IT ALONE???? If this game had hit me harder I would have been a fucking WRECK every time I had to do that, it is just SUCH a cool way to fully merge mechanics and story and give a lot of emotional impact to something as practical and mundane as pushing buttons on a controller.
2. Journey of the Broken Circle. This is a game that I bought on the Switch last year because it was on sale for $2 and the cover was pretty. THIS HAS LED TO ME PLAYING SO VERY MANY BAD GAMES, and this wasn't the WORST but it was certainly one of them!!!! Journey is about a "broken" circle aka one that is missing a lil slice, like Pac-Man. The circle wants to find its missing piece and goes searching for it. As the circle, you can roll, and you can jump, so the gameplay isn't too complicated. You eventually meet various companions who will join you for a couple of levels, and they sort of make you a complete circle (and they give you extra abilities while they're there) but none of them are quite right.
I think I was expecting a version of this game that is like a children's book, and at the end the circle finds the missing piece and is happy, or else it realizes it was never broken at all and learns to love itself just as it is. NEITHER OF THOSE IS WHAT THIS GAME IS. This game is about dating and looking for The One???? It gradually becomes apparent that you and your companion want different things and you have these increasingly passive aggressive arguments with a balloon and a pinecone until eventually they break up with you???? After you get dumped you end up in CAVES OF DESPAIR or whatever where you explicitly contemplate suicide and get chased around by the smoke monster from Lost as it tries to goad you into killing yourself???? ABSOLUTELY WILD SHIT.
A few reasons this did not hit for me. First: I don't date and have no interest in dating. If THE PERFECT PERSON appears in my life, I'm open to it! But I'm fine on my own and have no interest in the trial and error thing. Never in my life have I thought of this as something that impacts my ability to enjoy fiction about The Search For The One, but uhhhh I do think it was a major factor here. Maybe that's because fiction usually has characters I can invest in and I want them to have what they want even if it's not something I would want! Whereas this game is more allegorical so I think I'm just supposed to project my own shit onto this little Pac-Man, and I didn't have anything to project.
Second: For my money, up until the penultimate sequence there's no better controller experience in this game than Just the Circle (which even then is not GREAT). The balloon was kind of cool sometimes but the associated platforming gimmicks were unbearable, it just did not control with the level of sophistication needed for that to be enjoyable. The pinecone SUCKED. So when there was a "breakup" I was like FUCK YEAH MOVEMENT IS BACK TO NORMAL NOW and the circle was like "I'm going to kill myself" and we were simply not on the same page.
Third: At nearly every point in this game, a character is miserable and whining about it. The circle is always miserable when alone. When the circle picks up a companion, they're briefly very happy but then things quickly go wrong and the companion will NOT stop bitching about it. It's one thing to be trying to maintain a positive attitude about a game that is okay but not great. It's another thing entirely to be doing that while there is CONSTANTLY dialogue about how unfun the whole experience is.
Fourth: I mentioned the penultimate sequence before - that's when you meet a new companion, a slice of a circle that exactly matches your missing piece! (Okay, the way the game expresses this is by having the piece say "I will fit perfectly into your mouth!" and the circle says "been there, done that," which is DEEPLY unsettling to me.) The premise of this sequence is that while the circle was always pressing onward when the pinecone and the balloon either didn't want to or couldn't match that pace, now it's the PIECE that is too much for the circle to handle. This is supposed to be reflected in the controls - I don't think you can stop or reverse direction without resistance, because the piece is always pulling forward? HOWEVER: This is not super well executed because MOVING AROUND WITH THE PIECE...IT FUCKING RULES. The controls are better in this sequence than they are ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME, I didn't even notice that I was supposed to be frustrated by the piece pulling me forwards because I constantly had the joystick cranked all the way to the right. THE PIECE AND I UNDERSTOOD EACH OTHER. So of course the circle is like "no I don't like this" and dumps the piece???? The dialogue actually pretends to give you a choice here and you can SAY you think you and the piece should stick together, but then you dump it anyway.
Fifth: Then you go back to the depression caves where the smoke monster tells you to kill yourself some more???? Then you confront the smoke monster and it's like "YOU'LL NEVER FIND SOMEONE TO BE WITH" and you can respond by saying things to the effect of "I think I might!" or "Maybe I won't!" and I went with "maybe I won't!" because like, that's fine??? It sounded like it was the option of being fine with maybe not finding someone? But the game was like NO YOU HAVE TO BE OPTIMISTIC THAT YOU WILL STILL FIND THE ONE and made me repeat the conversation.
Sixth: Then you go to the beach and meet a square and you roll off together. I truly don't know what that was about. Was the square supposed to be The One? Is the square, like the pinecone and the balloon and the piece, just another person to date and maybe it works maybe it doesn't? Is the square a metaphor for dating women because men simply have not been working? I DON'T KNOW. IT WAS WEIRD.
Seventh: I was genuinely offended by how slowly the credits rolled. I always watch the entire credits sequence and never in my LIFE have I had the thought "this is incredibly disrespectful of my time." OVER A MINUTE WOULD PASS FROM THE TIME A NAME APPEARED ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN TO WHEN IT REACHED THE TOP??????
3. Four Swords (Game Boy Advance via YouTube). So this game is what comes after Oracle of Ages in the Main Zelda Series, but because it's multiplayer only I have been aware for a while that it would be kind of an odd stop in my tour of the franchise. But Zelda's such a major series and I had heard (SOMEWHERE????) that this was a full-fledged and Meaningful Entry In The Series, so I figured people have to do what I'm doing all the time, and SURELY there must be some consensus solution to How to Approach Four Swords. UHHH, THERE IS NOT. Here were my options:
1. Purchase multiple Game Boy Advances and multiple ALTTP/Four Swords cartridges and a GBA link cable. (This would all run me $300-400 on eBay.) Play as two players simultaneously.
2. Use a GBA emulator and figure out which emulators support multiplayer and how the fuck to set that up. Play as two players simultaneously.
3. The game was ported to the Nintendo 3DS in an Anniversary Edition that had a single player mode. However, this was only briefly available, so I can't buy it on my 3DS now, making this option: Go on eBay and buy a 3DS that has the game already downloaded to it like it's Flappy Bird. Estimated cost $150-200.
4. Use an emulator to pirate the 3DS single player version. Whether this is true of 3DS emulation in general or potentially just down to the fact that the game was only ever available digitally and for a very brief period of time, it seems significantly more complicated to do this than anything else I've ever played with an emulator, and required files that I would need to move in The Right Circles to be able to obtain, and I did not have a ton of confidence in my ability to pull all this together without making some wrong moves and saddling myself with several viruses. So it was on to option 5:
5. Watch a playthrough on YouTube. WHICH, TURNS OUT THIS GAME ONLY TAKES TWO HOURS TO BEAT? IF THAT? And while it does have "story" elements that give it a place in the overall Zelda timeline, it is also UNDOUBTEDLY A BULLSHIT ADD-ON?????? God I would have been SO FUCKING ANGRY if I had put any money into being able to play this thing, I DON'T REMEMBER WHOMST LIED TO ME BUT I WAS LIED TO!!!!!!!!!!
4. Disc Room (Steam). OKAY SO NOT GONNA LIE, after not being super enthusiastic about anything I'd played since Oxenfree, I was kind of wondering if I was setting myself up to not enjoy games or approaching games wrong by consciously trying to cross them off a list and maybe I needed to take some time away, BUT DISC ROOM FUCKS!!!!!!!!!!! You're a scientist sent to check out this big mysterious disc that has appeared near Jupiter and it's full of rooms that are full of murder discs that slice you to shit. THAT'S IT. THAT'S THE GAME. DISCS SLICE YOU UP. The tagline is literally ARE YOU READY TO GET SLICED IN HALF?
The way it works is you get dropped into a room and you have a top-down perspective of your little cartoon scientist character running around. Discs spawn and start moving around the room, and you either avoid them and live or you make contact with them and get sliced to pieces. There are a number of rooms set up in a grid, and each room after the first room has an unlock condition that has to be met before you can enter it. Most of those are survival-related (to unlock Room G, you might need to survive for 10 seconds in Room F, or maybe survive Rooms A-F for a cumulative 90 seconds) but plenty of them are death-related as well. There were plenty of times that I deliberately ran straight into a disc because dying in a specific way would unlock a new room for me.
It was so fucking fun. There are something like 60 different kinds of disc, and they all look and act differently, and there are different map zones where rooms work differently in terms of lighting or in terms of how you advance the clock to earn survival seconds, and you gain abilities as you go (although I really only ever used the dash unless I was trying to achieve something very specific). There's zero penalty for failure, you just start the room over with no wait, and it's SO fucking satisfying to repeat a room over and over trying to make it to 20 seconds or whatever, making incremental progress as you gradually figure out the room's patterns. Rooms aren't exactly the same every time, there is a degree of randomness in how the discs move, but rooms will spawn the same discs every time and those discs have set behaviors so once you've played a room enough times you know what they're going to do even if you don't know the exact direction they'll go in when they do it.
There's also an overarching story that's told as a series of wordless comics, and while that had very cool moments I honestly didn't totally understand it but also I was too focused on getting sliced up to really put a lot of thought into it so maybe that's why.
It actually really reminded me of Celeste in terms of gameplay, just how it can be brutally difficult but lets you just repeat small sequences over and over and over again, dozens of times until you finally get them down. UGH IT'S SO SATISFYING!!!!! Beating the game (on my 185th attempt at the final boss) and getting the credits roll also unlocked HARD MORE which is such a fucking hilarious thing to exist, and definitely wasn't something I was eager to sit down and frustrate myself with in that moment but will definitely be fun to come back to in the future when I want a challenge.
I LOVE DISC ROOM!!!!!!!! SLICE ME IN HALF!!!!!!!!!!!!
(I was going to do more games but then I ran out of steam, so: Oracle of Ages and Gris still on deck. ALSO UMURANGI. IT'S HAPPENING.)
1. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. This game was interesting mechanically, and I liked the look of it, but ultimately the overall experience was kind of shallow? The puzzles weren't especially challenging but they WERE exactly on the level where it's kind of pleasing to always know exactly what to do.
In a nutshell: Two brothers learn from their village doctor that their father's illness will be fatal unless he gets water from a magical tree, so they go on a journey to find the tree and save their dad. You control both brothers (one with the left side of the controller, one with the right side), which can be difficult as hell to manage for running around but otherwise works fine. Each brother has strengths and weaknesses - the older brother is literally stronger and can lift or pull more, but the younger brother can fit into smaller spaces (like slipping between bars in a gate to open it up and let the other one through). Younger brother, most importantly, can't swim - he was in a boat with their mother once and she drowned and he couldn't save her, and now he's terrified of water. So any time the brothers need to cross a body of water, you use the big brother to swim and you have the little brother cling to his back.
It's a perfectly nice game if a little awkward to maneuver. They really make an effort to keep it interesting and mix it up in terms of the different areas the brothers go to, and the types of people and creatures they encounter, and giving you a good amount of different problems to solve with the same three or four actions, but like, nothing life changing, nothing I'd really care to revisit in the future. But the end...THE END!!!!!!!!!
Long story short older brother fucking DIES, and if it felt weird up until then to try to control two people simultaneously, it feels WEIRD AS SHIT to suddenly only be controlling one, particularly when the action you're guiding him through is BURYING HIS BROTHER. But what was really a standout moment to me was the final sequence, when the younger brother is near his village and making his way to the doctor's house. There are a bunch of actions that would, in any other level, have required the older brother - you need to pull a heavy lever (which only the older brother was strong enough to do), get up to a high ledge (which he would have boosted you to), and swim across some water (which he would have carried you on his back for), and you have to do it ALONE, but you AREN'T ALONE, because the way you complete all those tasks is by REALIZING YOU HAVE TO USE THE OLDER BROTHER'S SIDE OF THE CONTROLLER TO INVOKE HIS MEMORY AND SUMMON THE STRENGTH TO DO IT ALONE???? If this game had hit me harder I would have been a fucking WRECK every time I had to do that, it is just SUCH a cool way to fully merge mechanics and story and give a lot of emotional impact to something as practical and mundane as pushing buttons on a controller.
2. Journey of the Broken Circle. This is a game that I bought on the Switch last year because it was on sale for $2 and the cover was pretty. THIS HAS LED TO ME PLAYING SO VERY MANY BAD GAMES, and this wasn't the WORST but it was certainly one of them!!!! Journey is about a "broken" circle aka one that is missing a lil slice, like Pac-Man. The circle wants to find its missing piece and goes searching for it. As the circle, you can roll, and you can jump, so the gameplay isn't too complicated. You eventually meet various companions who will join you for a couple of levels, and they sort of make you a complete circle (and they give you extra abilities while they're there) but none of them are quite right.
I think I was expecting a version of this game that is like a children's book, and at the end the circle finds the missing piece and is happy, or else it realizes it was never broken at all and learns to love itself just as it is. NEITHER OF THOSE IS WHAT THIS GAME IS. This game is about dating and looking for The One???? It gradually becomes apparent that you and your companion want different things and you have these increasingly passive aggressive arguments with a balloon and a pinecone until eventually they break up with you???? After you get dumped you end up in CAVES OF DESPAIR or whatever where you explicitly contemplate suicide and get chased around by the smoke monster from Lost as it tries to goad you into killing yourself???? ABSOLUTELY WILD SHIT.
A few reasons this did not hit for me. First: I don't date and have no interest in dating. If THE PERFECT PERSON appears in my life, I'm open to it! But I'm fine on my own and have no interest in the trial and error thing. Never in my life have I thought of this as something that impacts my ability to enjoy fiction about The Search For The One, but uhhhh I do think it was a major factor here. Maybe that's because fiction usually has characters I can invest in and I want them to have what they want even if it's not something I would want! Whereas this game is more allegorical so I think I'm just supposed to project my own shit onto this little Pac-Man, and I didn't have anything to project.
Second: For my money, up until the penultimate sequence there's no better controller experience in this game than Just the Circle (which even then is not GREAT). The balloon was kind of cool sometimes but the associated platforming gimmicks were unbearable, it just did not control with the level of sophistication needed for that to be enjoyable. The pinecone SUCKED. So when there was a "breakup" I was like FUCK YEAH MOVEMENT IS BACK TO NORMAL NOW and the circle was like "I'm going to kill myself" and we were simply not on the same page.
Third: At nearly every point in this game, a character is miserable and whining about it. The circle is always miserable when alone. When the circle picks up a companion, they're briefly very happy but then things quickly go wrong and the companion will NOT stop bitching about it. It's one thing to be trying to maintain a positive attitude about a game that is okay but not great. It's another thing entirely to be doing that while there is CONSTANTLY dialogue about how unfun the whole experience is.
Fourth: I mentioned the penultimate sequence before - that's when you meet a new companion, a slice of a circle that exactly matches your missing piece! (Okay, the way the game expresses this is by having the piece say "I will fit perfectly into your mouth!" and the circle says "been there, done that," which is DEEPLY unsettling to me.) The premise of this sequence is that while the circle was always pressing onward when the pinecone and the balloon either didn't want to or couldn't match that pace, now it's the PIECE that is too much for the circle to handle. This is supposed to be reflected in the controls - I don't think you can stop or reverse direction without resistance, because the piece is always pulling forward? HOWEVER: This is not super well executed because MOVING AROUND WITH THE PIECE...IT FUCKING RULES. The controls are better in this sequence than they are ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME, I didn't even notice that I was supposed to be frustrated by the piece pulling me forwards because I constantly had the joystick cranked all the way to the right. THE PIECE AND I UNDERSTOOD EACH OTHER. So of course the circle is like "no I don't like this" and dumps the piece???? The dialogue actually pretends to give you a choice here and you can SAY you think you and the piece should stick together, but then you dump it anyway.
Fifth: Then you go back to the depression caves where the smoke monster tells you to kill yourself some more???? Then you confront the smoke monster and it's like "YOU'LL NEVER FIND SOMEONE TO BE WITH" and you can respond by saying things to the effect of "I think I might!" or "Maybe I won't!" and I went with "maybe I won't!" because like, that's fine??? It sounded like it was the option of being fine with maybe not finding someone? But the game was like NO YOU HAVE TO BE OPTIMISTIC THAT YOU WILL STILL FIND THE ONE and made me repeat the conversation.
Sixth: Then you go to the beach and meet a square and you roll off together. I truly don't know what that was about. Was the square supposed to be The One? Is the square, like the pinecone and the balloon and the piece, just another person to date and maybe it works maybe it doesn't? Is the square a metaphor for dating women because men simply have not been working? I DON'T KNOW. IT WAS WEIRD.
Seventh: I was genuinely offended by how slowly the credits rolled. I always watch the entire credits sequence and never in my LIFE have I had the thought "this is incredibly disrespectful of my time." OVER A MINUTE WOULD PASS FROM THE TIME A NAME APPEARED ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN TO WHEN IT REACHED THE TOP??????
3. Four Swords (Game Boy Advance via YouTube). So this game is what comes after Oracle of Ages in the Main Zelda Series, but because it's multiplayer only I have been aware for a while that it would be kind of an odd stop in my tour of the franchise. But Zelda's such a major series and I had heard (SOMEWHERE????) that this was a full-fledged and Meaningful Entry In The Series, so I figured people have to do what I'm doing all the time, and SURELY there must be some consensus solution to How to Approach Four Swords. UHHH, THERE IS NOT. Here were my options:
1. Purchase multiple Game Boy Advances and multiple ALTTP/Four Swords cartridges and a GBA link cable. (This would all run me $300-400 on eBay.) Play as two players simultaneously.
2. Use a GBA emulator and figure out which emulators support multiplayer and how the fuck to set that up. Play as two players simultaneously.
3. The game was ported to the Nintendo 3DS in an Anniversary Edition that had a single player mode. However, this was only briefly available, so I can't buy it on my 3DS now, making this option: Go on eBay and buy a 3DS that has the game already downloaded to it like it's Flappy Bird. Estimated cost $150-200.
4. Use an emulator to pirate the 3DS single player version. Whether this is true of 3DS emulation in general or potentially just down to the fact that the game was only ever available digitally and for a very brief period of time, it seems significantly more complicated to do this than anything else I've ever played with an emulator, and required files that I would need to move in The Right Circles to be able to obtain, and I did not have a ton of confidence in my ability to pull all this together without making some wrong moves and saddling myself with several viruses. So it was on to option 5:
5. Watch a playthrough on YouTube. WHICH, TURNS OUT THIS GAME ONLY TAKES TWO HOURS TO BEAT? IF THAT? And while it does have "story" elements that give it a place in the overall Zelda timeline, it is also UNDOUBTEDLY A BULLSHIT ADD-ON?????? God I would have been SO FUCKING ANGRY if I had put any money into being able to play this thing, I DON'T REMEMBER WHOMST LIED TO ME BUT I WAS LIED TO!!!!!!!!!!
4. Disc Room (Steam). OKAY SO NOT GONNA LIE, after not being super enthusiastic about anything I'd played since Oxenfree, I was kind of wondering if I was setting myself up to not enjoy games or approaching games wrong by consciously trying to cross them off a list and maybe I needed to take some time away, BUT DISC ROOM FUCKS!!!!!!!!!!! You're a scientist sent to check out this big mysterious disc that has appeared near Jupiter and it's full of rooms that are full of murder discs that slice you to shit. THAT'S IT. THAT'S THE GAME. DISCS SLICE YOU UP. The tagline is literally ARE YOU READY TO GET SLICED IN HALF?
The way it works is you get dropped into a room and you have a top-down perspective of your little cartoon scientist character running around. Discs spawn and start moving around the room, and you either avoid them and live or you make contact with them and get sliced to pieces. There are a number of rooms set up in a grid, and each room after the first room has an unlock condition that has to be met before you can enter it. Most of those are survival-related (to unlock Room G, you might need to survive for 10 seconds in Room F, or maybe survive Rooms A-F for a cumulative 90 seconds) but plenty of them are death-related as well. There were plenty of times that I deliberately ran straight into a disc because dying in a specific way would unlock a new room for me.
It was so fucking fun. There are something like 60 different kinds of disc, and they all look and act differently, and there are different map zones where rooms work differently in terms of lighting or in terms of how you advance the clock to earn survival seconds, and you gain abilities as you go (although I really only ever used the dash unless I was trying to achieve something very specific). There's zero penalty for failure, you just start the room over with no wait, and it's SO fucking satisfying to repeat a room over and over trying to make it to 20 seconds or whatever, making incremental progress as you gradually figure out the room's patterns. Rooms aren't exactly the same every time, there is a degree of randomness in how the discs move, but rooms will spawn the same discs every time and those discs have set behaviors so once you've played a room enough times you know what they're going to do even if you don't know the exact direction they'll go in when they do it.
There's also an overarching story that's told as a series of wordless comics, and while that had very cool moments I honestly didn't totally understand it but also I was too focused on getting sliced up to really put a lot of thought into it so maybe that's why.
It actually really reminded me of Celeste in terms of gameplay, just how it can be brutally difficult but lets you just repeat small sequences over and over and over again, dozens of times until you finally get them down. UGH IT'S SO SATISFYING!!!!! Beating the game (on my 185th attempt at the final boss) and getting the credits roll also unlocked HARD MORE which is such a fucking hilarious thing to exist, and definitely wasn't something I was eager to sit down and frustrate myself with in that moment but will definitely be fun to come back to in the future when I want a challenge.
I LOVE DISC ROOM!!!!!!!! SLICE ME IN HALF!!!!!!!!!!!!
(I was going to do more games but then I ran out of steam, so: Oracle of Ages and Gris still on deck. ALSO UMURANGI. IT'S HAPPENING.)