reviews of some switch games and poetry

Celeste

I keep on thinking "SJW"s "SJW"s in my head playing this game. How coked am I to use the phrase "SJW"? A lotta 4chan lingo seems to beat the path around the political spectrum, you can't feel too bad... anytway... game is very positive... with a diverse cast of characters and some gender-ish commentary, discusses helpful/non-helpful relationships, the main character has panic attacks, the living embodiment of the panic attacks is the main antagonist.

All and all, the story kinda sucks bc of the preponderance on healthy relationships (with the self mostly) leads to dialogue which is boring feelings-exposition. "I had a lot of time to think, climbing out of this cave [...] That Part of Me was right, I can't do this." Not a bad theme but one that is too literally realized, and cliched, to be interesting.

The art in video games is usually entirely tied to the gameplay and Celeste has enough precision in its movement and fast enough load times to make the glittering, cutesy, sometimes kinda threatening pixel art fit. There's no argument that the gameplay is not excellent and the art not well drawn; but there's not a lot of surprises (in the art). There's one horror bit but it's mostly sparkly colorful stuff which doesn't do much for my desire for mystery. (why not? the core struggle of the game might not be what i'm looking for. yeah there's the weird beasts floating around sometimes, what are they doing there, the mountain has some complexity, even some horror... hollow knight also at its most central concerns was missing something, I think, that for comparison blue velvet has. I might just default to say skin on the table; blue velvet's concerns are human and ironic, pessimistic and strange. hollow knight's concerns are mostly, ancient for the sake of being ancient, or really, about the life cycle, celeste's concerns are psycholgical and personal and wholly optimistic. I'm not up for an optimistic story of personal/psychological achievement when it's not that well written and adorned with sparkly colorful imagery.

BUT the gameplay is good, punishing and rewarding, and makes some genuine innovations: most of the gameplay rewards, the strawberries, are entirely optional and, self-consciously, do nothing. But you will likely pursue them anyway and be frustrated doing it... also while almost all of the levels feel like tests of reflex, many of them are actually intellectual platforming puzzles well-laid. The sense of achievement u get beating this game, adjusted to fit yr own level of achievement via optionalness, is real video gamey storystuff.


Into the Breach

UNLESS there's some mystery inner-story I forgot to unlock then the NIHILISM OF TIME TRAVEL expressed within Into the Breach FAILS TO BE FULLY EXPRESSED. "FTL", the studio's previous game had some, like, optional hidden mysteries within the mechanics, like, you could have a subquest involving a cyborg-infecting virus. Not so with ITTB...

ITTB has bits and pieces of intense cynicism in its expanded-mobile-game length which normally means a secret is there somewhere; Hollow Knight had its share of secrets. ITTB tho doesn't include any hidden content.

The result is a game which uses cynicism to construct a mood rather than a solveable mystery. Bits and pieces will flow out through sentence-length dialogue... minimalism which feels mobile...


Captain Toad: Treasure Trackers

What's notable and IMPORTANT to note is that CT:TT does get hard, and pretty quick. Nintendo games kinda like Pixar often good at presenting simultaneous kid-and-adult experiences. But the thing about all modern Mario games is that hard levels are presented as demonic puzzle cubes and nothing more, as Toad slips deeper and deeper into the bounds of hell.

DOOM (2016 ps 2018 switch)

Released for the switch, DOOM 2018 has the best possible character protagonist; self-conscious and nonplussed. Doomguy is an immortal player who seeks to kill demons, so the game is not ambitious beyond its schedule, SCHEDULE: KILL KILL KILL KILL.

Overall tho the game is just that much uglier for bowing to 3d modern shooter requirements; ammo pickups cynically burst out of enemies and are cynically vacuumed up into your suit, bc the developers knew they had to create interesting gameplay and here's our bandaged-on solution: chainsaw gives ammo, execution mode gives health. The language of this is flickering orange or blue overlays, whereas previous DOOM games afaik didnt stray from steel or demonflesh, so DOOM 2016/8 loses some on visual tone I guess.

Douglas Oliver's "Androissements"

Only notable thing is the book-length poem "Video Hall of Fame" which is Oliver's notable and COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL, AMAZING ACHIEVEMENT with video-game poetry. The dude was 2 years from old age death when he wrote it in 1998, (book published in 2003, Oliver died in 2000, unknown [unresearched ] when he wrote it -ed)  but the interaction with video game concepts is as varied, clear, and familiar and poetic as it can be. There's a fuckton of it too, and what Oliver does really well is draw out commonalities in level design (industrial zones, damsels in distress, stereotypes, class distinctions, etc.) and considers the subconscious areas these cliches provide.

Pay attention, you druggies,
seekers of the mystic:
when inanition or when
manifold indignities
wreck or minds, the gates
to your temples, though broken,
are guarded by demons.

One thing I really deeply need with video game critical thinking is a deep consideration of games from the experience of playing them, as some of my favorite internet artists do, often to consider the ritual of gaming to be an intense and nihilistic commitment of time, fer example. Douglas Oliver however did it as a member of a generation who didnt grow up with vggames (I think). D.O.'s "video hall of fame" gets the peter webb seal of approval for most considerate and well-formed work of vg-pop-culture poetry known to peter, all of the artists trying to do the same should read this work

INSTADEATH NIGHTS:

commentary on: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/08/into-the-breach-story/

Into the Breach's  mechanics and everythin correctly transmit a vision of the world wherein u are constantly on the knife's edge of the End Of The World, better than probably any other game does: a single uncorrected mistake in the game will lead to a complete game over, 1, and 2, every game over is correctly and definitively surmised by the time traveler theme to be an actual end-of-the-world, in one particular timeline, at least.

Time travel and video games have shared that commonality for a while, the idea of retrying a bunch of times as a source of patient horror, as the most common video game story is of a time traveller finally getting it right after thousands of dead timelines like the bodies in hotline miami.

Into the Breach, taking the extra care to make this timedeath story a central theme, and then also not commenting on it too much, ends up not being cliche, a success. Yet like I said some kind of ultra-horrible middle note, a deeper mystery within, would have bit me out.

But. Anyway. I don't feel the anxiety of timelines less travelled, although I acknowledge that creating timelines where things did go right is ultimately futile, probably, although I can see how an organization such as the Rift Walkers could exist where they're doing this. Like maybe the successful timelines become partners in a timelines-spanning organization. Tachyons, baby!

BONUS CONTENT: Stephen's Sausage Roll as well didn't commit to internal memory, a secret, just as Yume Nikki may or may not have an actual coherent secret left to find. You think there might be one, waiting somewhere in the code, but the gamers cry, there is none, there is none... No challenge, no internal meaning, just a yearning for "the email which will close the laptop of my [living]."

Possibility threatens a co-extant, co-strangling sense of pain, red lines, flickering into view. Shuttered memories of past gameplay conversations, definite misses, con visits: all these equate into a nothingness, water in the tank. Shattered memories of expectations, as a young kid, that the gameplay would prove something more, the first tastes of aesthetic.

The way the mind reels around a certain prerender, texture, the sense of a brain spinning, content. That this embodies an internal meaning, sure, circumspect.

two modules review- The Monolith Beyond Space and Time and CRYPTS OF INDORMANCY

THE MONOLITH BEYOND SPACE AND TIME

This book has just amazing layout and illustration. Weird to say bc it's a little paperback b/w digest but there's no part of it which gets in the way, everything is clearly labelled, the illustrations are effective... it's got a blocky, negotiable frame and there's very little excess.

You can throw this thing around your table and you'll be happy. Ok, as for the content: I was disappointed how long and ineffective the effects section was, like I remember skipping over it first time I read it and rereading it I wanted to skip it again, but the random encounters section is gold. I'm not impressed by "the owl's service" but everything else is exactly the kinda weird fiction shit that hits the spot like Raggi can do.

The monolith itself requires some appreciation. Despite the long and involuted "brain" section, it's pretty surprising how well the central mechanic of "long white corridor, anywhere you turn is the same corridor" works. As a gameable piece of extradimensionality it's hot topic.

The worm is okay, not very powerful, carter's head is good, the inhabitants are pretty nice, the brain thing is long and not well edited but I think it's funny and usable.

- - - - - - -

CRYPTS OF INDORMANCY

ofc, if you have the bryce lynch ten-foot-pole criteria of: brevity is best, rpgtext needs to be instantly readable, I don't need pay-for-word stuff, you will give the review bryce gave where you wanna be soft on melsonia but you also see the punches laid out for you and you gotta take them.

For me, I have to appreciate: the solid prose, genuine lit kinda, the illustrations, the way the adventure takes shape in your mind on the third or fourth re-read. It is a negadungeon. But what can best be said I think is it's melsonia-comentary on the osr, maybe we can break it down:

1. the whole thing about super attention to detail

  Obv it's an osr value that you shouldn't pay prose to little details that can be made up or ignored completely. There's something to say about the value of detail as it themes the whole adventure, and potentially the dm's interpretation. I would say "interpretation" is key over "play". I don't hold a lot of stock in the idea that maybe-unnecessary detail themes the play at the table.

Crypts of Indormancy uses detail to explain all the dungeon-maker's choices. If the question becomes to the players, "why", then there is an answer. If the answer is somewhat mysterious like with Maun Hevich and the Thieving Cousin then so much the better.

Honestly, I think that players playing the adventure may learn to start asking about detail, and in this way form part of the theory of Thuuz's trap, and therefore maybe anticipate it? Or likely learn after the fact. But to be basically apart of the spinning precise cogs of someone else's world does the detail serve.

That's one answer! The other answer is that precise detail makes for a good read because it's funny and/or it builds a larger world as so many of the details here obviously do. But uhhh hold on to the fact that the players can ask for more detail here and get bigger answers and that's what separates this adventure from flat no-explanation eighties shit of which a parody is included conveniently in the module.

2. the weird intermissionary gygax-era parody in the center of the book

this I think is homage to those modules as well as a piss-take but of the british kind where maybe the whole point is to meanly make fun of something. All of the people confused and upset by the inclusion are part of the piss-take.

3. Post-colonialism

If the point of post-colonialism is examine both the colonists and those colonized by a bit of a distanced perspective, there is room here for irony, pretty-real horror, actual criticism and an acknowledgement, throwing up the hands, of the inability to criticise, in Crypts.

THE ISLANDERS:
  - Given dignity and representation, via the history (of successful revolution), representation of actual islanders (the dead bodies/ heads), cultural details

  - Horror of the colonizer's attitudes shown by the relentless insults of the islander's ethics present in Thuuz's dungeon. The obsession with insults here reflect on Thuuz but then again the rules encouraging islander characters to destroy these insults I find condescending. That being said maybe condescending to the islanders a bit is a part of what's going on here. Because we're all subject to maybe ultimately bad social pressures -ed

ELVES:
 -  I really like the idea of elves being so squeamish about death that they're rewarded xp for avoiding talking about it. Elves deserve to be squeamish and the opportunity to roleplay an elf should come with optional stuffiness.

THE ROLEPLAYING TABLE:
- deserves its own section in my analysis.

THUUZ:
- Thuuz is hilarious bc he's the center of the dungeon and yet the least-likely participant in the pc's raid. His instructions are to wait until they leave. So again the inner mystery here which is a true test of wills between the players and the text is to penetrate Thuuz's plan. Almost everyone will fail! He's a fucking genius elf man.

- Haliburton-level backup plans for a plot which is essentially cruel and perhaps pointless (or perhaps not? why make everything so convoluted?) is essentially the correct picture of apex-level colonizers, people who are tightly wrapped in their ambitions as well as protections who maybe miss the point a little because so tightly wrapped.

- The whole tomb is essentially strange and a little off because it refers to obsessions which have aged out of place and were over-focused and hate-filled.

4. THE ROLEPLAYING TABLE:

A pretty huge point that rpgs themselves are colonialist. This is obvious. The islander's miniatures are parodies of the tribal islanders just like our miniatures are thinly veiled caricatures of real-world tribal peoples.

This is no issue for melsonians, although maybe it's a bit of a point, but the examination of your rpg values as obviously coloniast in a situation which is a literal trap for the resurrection of the colonizer is uhhhhhh

5. THE BESTIARY:

Since I think Ezra is smarter than me, he has included many little jokes in the otherwise plain-weird bestiary. Unseen Servant but composed of the ghost of your ancestors? Must have something to say here about post-colonialism. The Magnetic Hypernaut which likely will never show up? Seems more just weird to me. Diremptive Evasculators also just weird.

 *  *   *

Something about the ghost of the colonizer acting out social scripts which makes your veins pop out to power the resurrection machine of the colonizer is like that Bush era thing... grad student stuff.


(The first review of this post is normal instadeath but the second review counts as instadeath: nights -ed.)

VISION'S OF HELL: INFERNIUM and STEPHEN"S SAUSAGE ROLL, bonus: instadeath: nights

Both of these games I found via bennet foddy's twitter. There's a bit of an alternate history of games there, puzzle games, if you're familiar with Increpare you get the general vibe, Stephen Lavelle's puzzlescript, just a few essentials like Getting Over It: one mechanical difficulty, a series of obstacles.

It's easy to assume that brand of games, singular-mechanic-puzzles, has its heyday now as alternative to the mechanically overloaded Assassin's Creed 2 stuff. There is only one way to solve the problem in Stephen's Sausage roll, just about (not actually true -ed), it's a puzzle box everytime, and so you get a very clear, focused message portaled into your brain.

I dunno, what was Portal compared to Infernium? That stock asset vibe, where everything is a self-conscious arrangement of assets, although Portal had surprising departures (as was the point maybe) and Infernium does not. I've talked about that "vision of hell" thing before, what with devil daggers, or really the critical work of Winter K. and Stephen Thecatamites, specifically Winter K:

“I wanted the player to feel the absolute despair of brick labyrinth, the deep cavern with no rope for climbing out. I envisioned a place of infinite width and depth—dark, yet illuminated. The softly glowing walls cast no guiding light into absolute void. They leer, useless. It is life, eternal, on the precipice of a pit, falling into the pit, scaling the pit’s rough wall, becoming irretrievably lodged in the canyon crack, in nowhere. This was my sketch of what I thought might be a 21st Century psychology: a mental world reduced to a skeletal arrangement of a maze-maker’s traps, and the obsessive drive to feed them both body and brain in hopes of purchasing escape. It is indescribably erotic.” - Shigeru Miyamoto (a fake quote by Winter)

Infernium specifically sets out to be prisonworld, as the designers and foddy said it's based on pac-man, "a maze with no exits" and although there is a consistent, jerking jump-scare every time you lose a life and a very real and very difficult "perma-death" system, I find the hellishness of the game to be centered in the sheer volume of work here, accomplished by a thin spread of creative effort, an absolute abandonment of video-game AAA density. If you can imagine Metal Gear Solid 2's reckless application of detail on one end, Infernium is much more on the single-developer unitygame just five assets end. But it's as large and as complex and *more* difficult than MGS2.

There's something obscene in a sheer volume of deathmazes, like one of those puzzlegames where every puzzle is four different colors and there's 299 levels. Moreover Infernium actually asks you to continuously harvest a fresh supply of lives or start all over again. I'll add that all this is mitigated by the unlock system, so there's uhh progression.



I guess the end point of Stephen's Sausage roll's depth came when I was able to visualize and complete the puzzles in my literal sleep. Not because they were easy, but because the sheer regard to mechanical action was enough to solve them, rather than a continuous & difficult visualization (like sweeping all the pieces off a chess board would require). The whole game is the exploration of about five moving parts; they interact in ways that are upsetting and confusing in their deepest as my brain churns and revolts at the ideas; you got to let the stupid shit go heh heh

two games by a solo developer: stephen's sausage roll by stephen lavelle and inferniuim by carlos coronado


* * * * instadeath: nights presents: was Portal (2007) all about stock assets? * * * *


this an essay which would be better done with pictures alone, but, if you can consider an essential stock-assetyness which happens every time you are gripping and pulling and grinding a metal folding chair and it makes the clankityclankityclank source engine sound as it tries to not clip, can you consider how much of that game was carefully re-arranging giant balls of energy disguised as hollow sheetmetal objects?

I think about "challenge" in video games as the reward when you get the thing in the thing. There's a clunk as it slots in. If you had to think it out before hand that's all well and good but there's still the careful, tedious process of slotting it in (especially with 3d controls). The thing so often resists being pulled in.

thunk thunk thunk bezowoop thunk

Then there's that careful, often magnetic attempt by the developers to help you out when you're close . Magnets, tractor beams always the easiest way to handle 3d-space objects . In Sausage Roll you have instead a precise and precisely non-abstract method of handling, non-abstract because the basic methodology of piercing, pushing, and sliding the sausages is so completely and depravedly explored.

You may begin to view 3D games as an arrangement of assets which all share these assety qualities, like, provisional friction. Speedrunning techniques common among several engines expose this. And how much of our imagination of these spaces gets quietly informed by the assetishness of assets. so many times where you're hoplessly sliding around a room full of superlight objects, uhh see lilly zone's geometry falls