Fallout New Vegas: The Frontier Review

This one hurt

Copious Preamble

That's right; on the tail end of my latest 'Fallout: New Vegas 'playthrough I knew that I had to rock up to that most hyped, and most controversial, of video game mods known as 'Fallout: The Frontier'. Whilst every other Fallout mod enjoyer was getting all hot and bothered about replaying 'Fallout 3: Point Lookout' in Fallout 4's engine, (That's kinda cool I guess, but I'm not head over heels about the idea) I was rocking up to try the most ambitious fan made additional content for a Fallout game ever. Which everyone had already played a year ago- yeah, I'm late to the party but that's just how I roll. I love to get in the door when the house is empty and the treat-table is empty and ready just for me, you know how it is! So after a prolonged effort of finding the mod, the original mind-you, and patching it in after learning it was too big to be worked with my mod manager, how has my experience been? That is a complicated question.

First I have to say that this the single biggest mod I have ever installed for a game, clocking in at about the same size as Fallout New Vegas itself; and that's not space taken up by sound-files and 4k texture files. Whereas the most ambitious mods before this one would stick their descriptions with that proud tag declaring their Mod to be of comparable size to a full-blown Bethesda DLC, 'Fallout: The Frontier' wants you to know that it's pretty much a whole new game. And having literally played through 'New Vegas' in order to build a character specifically for this (And 'Fallout: New California' to start my playthrough and the Someguy2000 series as garnishing. This has pretty much been my ultimate New Vegas playthrough.) I can attest to that. The mod is ungainly big, and I mean both the impressive and negative connotations of that adjective; but before I get into details there is an elephant to discuss.

So I specified 'The Original' when I mentioned sourcing this mod, and let me explain what I mean by that. Back when 'Fallout: The Frontier' was launched, after something like four years of development in the eyes of community, it was met with not exactly the grand welcome the team were hoping for. In fact there was quite a lot of controversy, some of which was directed to some of the supposedly immoral content in the mod that the community took to interpret as perverted or even sexually depraved. This led to the mod being taken off line pretty quickly whilst the team scapegoated one of their members, exorcised him, reworked the content quite a lot, and then put out a new version of 'The Frontier' so drummed back that I think even now it's still not considered a 1.0 version by the team. This I somewhat followed at the time.

Now I'm something of a hard to disturb guy, and when someone tells me I can't experience something because it's too disturbing, I'm going to want to see what all the fuss is about; so of course I sourced a mirror of the original Mod and attached a handy custom Fan Patch to incorporate the performance and bug fixes that the 'official' version of 'The Frontier' has enjoyed up until now. And what has been my takeaway of how ugly and depraved the base version is? As I expected the controversy is a nothing burger, at least in this specific respect. The 'deeply disturbing' content is either laughable or morally in-tone with much of the darkness in base New Vegas. (Remember you can sell your companion to be eaten by cannibals in the vanilla game? I think a lot of people don't.) A lot of the big sticking issues are just badly conceived and implemented, which is actually going to be one of the themes of this review. (Seriously, if people think this is perverted; don't let near some of the personalities in the brilliantly 

crafted Someguy2000 series. Remember 'The Judge'? That was a disturbingly perverted creep!)

To preface my little review here I want to remind everyone that I am an amateur writer and the quality of the storytelling is always going to be a big focal point I'll come back to in order to either praise or condemn the mod. That's something which is important to me, so I'm going to harp on it quite a bit. Also, even though this is a free Mod to a game and I typically allow a lot of lenience on account of that fact when looking at Mods; this isn't just a small project from a couple of talented creators who carved off a few months here and there on the thing. This is a huge project manned by a team that bled their full talents over multiple years to make something that was as much a statement to their skills as it was a cool thing just for the heck of it. Which is increadibly commendable and worthy of my unfiltered, no holds barred, opinion on souls and talents laid bare. Also I'm going to spoil some stuff, I'll refrain from big end-of-mod stuff.

Introduction

'Fallout: The Frontier' is one of the most frustratingly mixed experiences I've ever played through in my life and I've gone through most of 'Pathfinder: Kingmaker' on Challenging. Not because of eye wateringly unfair situations in an otherwise sweepingly great game that make you question every choice you've ever made (such as it the case with Pathfinder) but for head-scratchingly terrible directing of unbelievable technical talents that comes together in a package that should have been the single most revolutionary must-play pieces of Fallout content ever made, but just... isn't. I don't even know if I can actually recommend this mod, which is such an insane thing to say that my internal organs are screaming in protest but my brain, and what it had to endure, knows that despite everything I experienced this package was something of a huge mess. And it all comes down to direction, I have to insist, because the technical talent on this mod was godly.

My experience with this mod has imbued me with a duty to warn the curious; when you hear people say that this mod pushes the game to it's limits they mean that implicitly. Which is to say that if you are like me and are running 'Fallout: New California' and maybe a small amount of background mods (I don't have a great deal of gameplay effecting mods, I really like how New Vegas vanilla feels) the game will hit memory limit and crash- a lot. I never had a memory limit crash before I played this mod, and I've had upwards of 80 since that playthrough. The NCR airport is particularly bad for it, even when running the 'reduced NPC toggle' in the Mod manager, but certain odd spots like Junkflea, for some reason, (Which is just a Scav flea market, I thought. I don't even know what's the loading issue there) will literally crash every two or three seconds. I turned every setting to low just to get through those areas unscathed. The lowdown is that whilst this mod is increadibly expansive, offers a totally realised world space and is dripping with places to explore; the 4GB limit on memory (which is the limit after a Patcher required to play the mod) makes it really difficult to enjoy at times. I hear that a certain ENB can extend that limit to 8GB using some sort of wizardry I don't understand, but I don't play with ENBs so I was poop-out-of-luck. (Thank god 'New Vegas' boots quickly, at least!)

Wanting to experience as much as I could, and upset that I couldn't enjoy the open world to it's utmost fullest thanks to the unavoidable memory issue, I had to resort to playing the obvious main questline in The Frontier. The mod actually offers three to the player, and offers a fair bit of variety and unique routes through these questlines, but between The Northern Legion, The Crusaders and The NCR Exiles; the lionshare of the development effort clearly went into the NCR questline. It has sixteen main quests (totally ignoring the bunch of side quests) whereas the other two have nine. Plus, the NCR questline has 'Chapters' splitting the story up for some inane reason, the most technically creative sections put into it and a development story about how it was the most frustrating route to create, which makes sense considering everything they try to do in it. So I obviously played that one despite my initial compulsion to go Crusaders. (Not least of which because the Cover armour featured on the mod is only acquirable, or even viewable, in the Crusader's questline. And trust me, that's hardly even the tip of the 'that sounds short sighted' iceberg.)

Starting out

Right out of the gate the NCR questline puts an incredible foot forward by doing something so jarringly out-of-the-norm for New Vegas that it totally rocked me; on the way to The Frontier they give you a cutscene. I'm not talking about a typical 'New Vegas style' cutscene where the HUD disappears, the game takes control and the scene actors go all 'marionette' for a minute in order to stop you just shooting everything mid-speech; I'm talking multiple perspectives, different angles, scene transitions and cinematography. I can't even conceive of how this was possible aside from what I somewhat guess which is that the game is stealing the HUD and then teleporting you around the scene to serve as the camera. But its so seamless I even doubted my understanding of that until one bugged moment where I got to catch my character sheathe their gun at the start of a cutscene, but even then this is mindblowing.

Let me try and convey why I'm so enthused about this alone. First off, that bugged weapon thing literally happened once across a simply stupid amount of cutscenes, so the fact this system works as well as it does is frightening. Secondly, the mod regularly uses this to depict new scenes in different locations, which makes my head hurt to even conceive! The Gamebyro engine that Fallout New Vegas uses isn't typically adept at keeping multiple areas loaded for rapid scene transition without pop-in, but this mod pulls that off and I don't know how. Sure, proper scene transitions to new locations still require loading, but even then I was floored. Just to let you know the absolute 'high' I was on when we started this mod, so you can comprehend the height from which my mood regularly fell.

This initial introduction leads straight into the first time the game gives you a set-piece perspective shift so that you play as another character in a flash back! This one isn't quite as impressive to figure out; they just give you an outfit with a mask on and mess with your inventory and perks a bit, but it's still totally out-of-the-norm for what Fallout can typically offer you. But it's also here, right at the setting off point for the mod, that I started to pick up on that issue of 'direction' that I've mentioned a bit before. Because whilst it's all cool and everything to conceive and pull off something like this, just ask yourself for a second: Does it fit? Playing through a curated action scene as a badass military guy with regenerating health and explosions and constant gunfights- does that belong in an immersive RPG game? Am I playing this game in order to play your curated action hero, or to go on an adventure with this character I've made for myself and have already gone on all these adventures with? It's not an issue I was thinking about right away, what with the overwhelming excitement of what I was actually playing, but during the more drawn out sections where The Frontier repeats this trick multiple times, it really began to rob the immediacy and immersion from the gameplay. (You know, about as much as having a memory crash every five minutes or so.) 

Now we get introduced to the world of the Frontier and it is- oh wait, no the NCR Exiles storyline wants to keep ahold of you for the next 8 hours. And thus begins a problem I have with the mod so huge that I don't even know if I can define this as a failing in direction or more a failing in common sense. This mod will teleport you around and about the wastes for hours throughout its first act, forcing you into highly choreographed 'Call of Duty' inspired combat scenarios rather than allowing you to explore for five minutes. You need to head somewhere to do a mission? The game will teleport you there with a quick white-out screen. No need to commute and risk actually exploring this vast world that our art team worked tirelessly to create. There is a map the size of New Vegas' (Or there about) to keep the player busy, and the NCR Exiles narrative is terrified to let you out into it! They'd rather stick you doing a over blown, and considerably less fun, version of 'Exodus' from Modern Warfare 2. (The mission where you escort the Honey Badger tank through the streets. Love that mission, didn't like this iteration of it.)

And when it comes to describing the NCR Exiles narrative, something people come back to time and time again is that it feels like budget Call of Duty; because it is. You have extended, exhaustive, bouts of firefights with organised bands of... Scavengers? They're literal scavengers. And for some reason they organise into a force to try and stop a military convey carving it's way through the city with their... Howitzer gun emplacements? (Woah hold on; where are these guys getting scavving all their equipment from?) And then there's another scene where you're forced into someone else's shoes for far too long as you play through action scenes that are totally trivialised through a 'health regen' mechanic the game implants through perks. Let me repeat; they tried to emulate the health regen of COD to make the combat more fast-paced and relentless. Can you figure out the problem here?

The problem is that it's polish on a turd. Everyone knows that Fallout 3 and New Vegas' combat gameplay is utterly serviceable at best, and not particularly thrilling on its own. Instead we have the RPG systems to make things a bit more interesting with mid-fight inventory management, tracking stimpaks and other chems, using VATS and not relying on the shooting itself. This questline attempts to put the action front and centre for this beginning act and it just doesn't come together at all. Street sweeping, dug-out clearing, turret sections; it all sounds good on paper but in practice it's all just noise and tedium. Especially as it's several hours of bloated action set-piece after ill-advised hour-long boss fight between us and the incredible open world which is, I remind you, the selling point of this mod to being with! For a time I genuinely questioned myself whether or not this game had an open world or if it was all just a backdrop for some COD fanatic's dream fangame superimposed on the Fallout framework. Thankfully I was wrong.

Za Warudo

When we actually get to explore the world of Portland, otherwise known as The Frontier, my jaw hit the floor time and time again. This world space is- not what I was expecting. For some reason I expected there to be a lot more hilly wilderness areas but instead the core of this map is relatively flat, with the city of Portland taking up a huge amount of the map. (The hills and slopes are more around the outskirts.) But aside from that this map exceeds my very high expectations. It is incredible, in scale and scope and intrigue. I felt like a kid with my new company of New Vegas all over again, or stepping into that first moment of Fallout 4 (Not so much 3 because that was literally my first open world game and I was more terrified at the openness of it all.) I wanted to touch and explore everything, be everywhere, look at everything! And darn it if the random crash hotspots didn't get in the way of my burning hot passion for this worldspace.

If I've never made it clear before I simply adore ice and snow themed game worlds, and the rime encrusted ruins of Portland perfectly present all the winter wonders of my wildest dreams. The glacial blizzard chills you through the screen, the ice-chunked river makes you wince to touch (although only visually. There's no mechanic of taking damage when swimming in ice-cold waters like there should be.) and the snow covered streets and hills just make me want to jump in the gameworld so I can roll all over them, making snow angels and losing my heart in their drifts. It's quite magical what the team created here. And the winterised NCR gear is simply >Mwah< (That's how you phonetically write 'chefs kiss'.) I only wish I had more reason to wear that glorious Winterized Riot Gear with the fox skin draped around the neck piece out into the Mojave from the base game. It sort of feels out-of-place wearing thermal-tipped-equipment in a land so humid that the patrolling forces are infamous for their desire to endure a nuclear winter over one single day more of sun.

It's just a shame that the art team are the one's who bought it the most, because the writing department certainly didn't show up. Again, I'm going to hit hardest on the topic I know the most about so of course it's going to warrant a reaction out of me when the worldbuilding is bad to the point of nonsensical. The basic foundations of what makes this Mod's premise and the player's involvement in it flies right into poorly written fanfiction territory with nauseating gusto. First off, as I've mentioned quite a few times here; the faction of the NCR you interact with are NCR Exiles. An alright, if uninspired, premise if presented cleverly. (It... it isn't... they don't do it cleverly.) You'd be hard pressed pointing out these so-called Exiles, given the fact that despite their apparently limited number, having spawned from the coup of a single general, they are the single most technologically advanced outfit out of California. Bar none.

They have unexhaustive fleets of Vertibirds, (remember that the NCR only have a few in the vanilla game) fleets of working vehicles such as tanks, (No indication of that for the vanilla NCR) airstrike capabilities with seemingly unlimited strike-range (godforbid if they got their hands on a nuke) and an honest-to-goodness, totally unexplained, (unless its tucked away on some really hidden terminal somewhere) S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier right out of the MCU. Try to remember that the state of technology in the pre-war was to the state where Fallout 4's Prydwen, a floating zeppelin, was considered high-tec. And these jokers got themselves a Helicarrier propelled by magical plasma cell juice, as you do. And the worldbuilding gets worse.

How about the Northern Legion? Let's try to comprehend how there's even a force of Legion here to start with, shall we? Take note that this mod takes place in the heart of Orgeon, around the city of Portland. To those of you who don't know the American map that well; that is North of Nevada and the Mojave. The Legion famously spawned out of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, to the South-East of Nevada. Caesar's Legion has been progressing across Arizona and up into Utah, scooping up tribes in it's wake to grow ever larger, until it comes across an opportunity to prove itself against the NCR at Hoover Dam. That means the bulk of the Legion is going to be at Vegas. So for some reason, whilst Casear has his full forces prepared to prove thermselves against the biggest obstacle in his way to conquering the entire Western coast, a huge contingent of his forces (technological superior to his forces waiting in the Mojave, because of course) is stationed up in the boonies 900 miles away? And believe it or not, this gets even stupider beyond the tactical analysis.

Because of course these Legion can't just be a Northern contingent that somehow pushed itself several hundreds of miles north without breaking apart despite the very concept and structure of Caesar's Legion only existing and working because of it's implicitly centralised rule around the figure of Caesar himself, (as stated by the man, in his own words) but they actually adopt technology and use it in their warfare. Again, this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the faction in question is about, because one of Caesar's core founding principals, which you'd imagine would have to be drilled into these ice-brained idiots if they're following his orders 900 miles away from his influence, is the forsaking of technology because he claims the dependence it creates weakens the men who use it. This is core principal stuff, key separating characteristic between the Legion and NCR, antithesis meeting thesis 'Hegelian dialectics' style, and these writers just forgot about it. The same way they forgot that the position of 'Legate' isn't just a mirror of 'general'. There's only supposed to be one Legate, which is why Caesar had to dispose of the Malpais Legate (Joshua Graham) before he could recruit The Monster of the East, Lanius as his Legate. If you break it down to its etomology, the 'Legion' corresponds to a single roman army, and as a Legate is the sole commander of an army, there can only be one Legate. And yet, of course, the leader of the Northern Legion is Legate Valerius, because researching the topic you're writing about with Google searching is hard, I guess. (I have no clue how I manage it.)

And the Crusaders... are alright I guess. I have no idea why the creatives behind the Frontier felt the need to revamp the Brotherhood of Steel and in doing so make them more medieval themed, with Castellans and carrying the odd real-forged sword into battle for some utterly incomprehensible reason. (You have power armour and chainsaw daggers; why do you need metal swords?) It kind of feels redundant. I understand that the inclusion of Mormonism was supposed to shake up their image, but all it really seems to amount to is Tasha Weaver spouting our vaguely ecclesiastical rhetoric in dialogue moments that never really underline the purpose of a specific scene in a powerful manner as such themes sometimes can, but more serves as general wishy-washy colouring to let you know that this character does read some scripture. Probably. Even if she doesn't know how to contextualise it.

The writing quality

You might be picking up on a few themes here and there just from me describing the ill-thought out and fan-fiction-y worldbuilding, and allow me to reiterate: this mod's writing is simplistic. Not utterly poor, at least not the whole way through, but prevailingly, frustratingly, uninspired and mediocre. It comes out most obviously in dialogue, and of course taints the NCR characters the worst. The writers seem to have substituted all the personality of the NCR as a Fallout faction with 'generic American military grunt' such that this feels like a grunt-division of the Enclave more than a NCR contingent. Their dialogue is dry and the NCR characters are all typically one-note, even the one's who you spend a considerable amount of game-time around. I think the problem might have been that there were so many of them it became hard flesh out any one person.

The story, and this part is mostly aimed squarely at the NCR questline as I only got to dip my toes in the other questlines, does absolutely nothing surprising or risky in it's hefty length, even though I think the writers really believe it does. Even when things start to pick up, around about the second and third act after that abysmal introduction slog, the story merely rises from "This hurts to endure please cut off my ears" to "I can shut off my brain and have dumb fun here"; which is an improvement, sure; but after multiple years in the oven someone could have done a lot better. And sure, I'm saying this after having enjoyed beautifully well-written mods in the same playthrough such as the gorgeous 'Autumn Leaves', the exciting 'Someguy2000 collection', and even ''Cogito Ergo Sum' boasted increadibly snappy dialogue. The comparison isn't going to be favourable unless The Frontier was rocking actual employable writers; but it shouldn't be this stale either. It also makes me think that whoever was writing the main narrative either didn't care or was trying to wrestle something salvageable against another writing force who was a total train wreck. (And whom had total control of the first chapter.)

Do you like- my car?

But this is getting too negative for the moment, I'm starting to hate myself. How about I pick at another positive; like the vehicles! Again, the technical team soar in to save the day; what they achieved with making working tanks and armoured cars in Fallout is actual Gandalf-level magic. There is minimal jank here. I've played the various 'driving cars'/'Mech suit' mods for New Vegas over the years, and I know the sort of quality they offer; you always know what you're playing is a haphazard wonderglue job onto a base it wasn't made for. In The Frontier, despite some fiddliness with the turret of the tank, that nagging reminder of 'this doesn't belong' is non existent. These vehicles feel natural, they control appropriately, and the vehicle combat sections- honestly go one way too long so as to overstay it's welcome as literally everything in this mod does, but they function and make up actual gameplay. Even if that gameplay does feel like another bad 'Call of Duty' level.

Unfortunately it's the stability of the game, at least with my bloated upload, which made me unwilling to engage with vehicles outside of the missions they were placed in, although the Mod does fully have that option open to you if you want. I will say that my reticence spawned from an overabundance of caution based on what the gameworld consistency was like already, and the vehicle sections, increadibly, did not seem to increase my crash rate too much if at all. Combine that with it's robustness, the ingenuity of the systems involved, and the depth stretching just enough to include several enemy vehicle types from suicide bomb cars to heavy fire-spitting trucks, and I can happily close my eyes to the canonical questionability of a city ruled by working vehicles. I'm all for 'screw the lore, this is just fun'; just so long as this is, indeed, fun.

Meet my friends

As this mod provides such a big world space to explore, and so many bullet sponge foes to battle in that space including gun emplacements and enemy vehicles, it only makes sense that The Frontier provides us with companions; and this mod has a fair few. More than there are in vanilla New Vegas in fact! And these are fully realised for the most part, with personalities and companion quests, and a sort of inconsistent framing of a couple. Unlike with the base game a few of the companions will lock themselves out of their quests if you aren't playing the faction they're involved with; I appreciate the incentive to stick to your guns with a faction, I actually played so wishy washy in my current New Vegas playthrough that Ulysses had no clue which faction I was sided to and ended up threating the guys I was antagonising. (I can only speculate at how confused he was when I stopped his nuke only to fire it at the exact target he already primed.) But whenever you tell a player they have to play a certain way and lock out content to enforce it, there's a definite bad taste being left in some mouths there.

As for the character's themselves I can happily report that they were mostly a decent bunch, although some were clearly more fleshed out than others. And unlike in the Vanilla game where the companions are mostly all laid around the critical path so you're likely to naturally run into them throughout the progression of the game, these guys are all over the place; I could have easily missed out on the entire roster if I hadn't gotten curious and looked them up. Although there are a choice few that seem almost comically barebones. Take Lot, for instance. A character who is, shall we say, atypically morally aligned; but in such an unapologetic and almost surprised-to-be-judged manner that he comes across as remarkably unlikeable once you learn the truth about him. There's a real trick to writing a character who is intentionally unpleasant in way that feels believable, as I've mentioned when talking about Pillar's of Eternity's 'Durance'; but then I'm not even sure about that. Lot's ending card slate seems to hint at a sort of redemption arc which he seemed utterly non-interested in during his entire companion quest, which makes me wonder when the writers didn't go all the way and have him continue on as an asshole.

Wrench, on the otherhand, is a perfectly executed character for what they wanted to do with her. You get a grasp for who she is, underestimate her depth and assume her to just be a mercenary before her repeated interjections on your actions imply there's something more to her going on. Eventually she opens up and reveals a bit more about herself giving the player insight into who she was before with some actually shockingly decent dialogue. (after enduring the bulk of the NCR Exiles' writing, decent is shocking.) Then the player has the opportunity to go on a quest and influence her personal journey positively affecting her life onwards. That is literally what I ask of every companion and the team actually pulled it off perfectly with her. I mean, there's no actual choice inside of the quest to change her fate, it's the doing of the quest alone that is the choice; but it's meaningful interaction and I love that!

And then there's America. Yeah, she's the big controversial point hanging over every criticism of The Frontier 1.0, isn't she. I'll be honest, I don't get it. Okay, I sort of get it; but I still think it's a bit overblown. Does she have some kind of weird ambient chatter? Yeah. She says some stuff that's not what I would have written for her to say, let's just say that. But what is she really? She's a kind of annoying girl living with the Crusaders with obnoxiously overbearing abandonment issues that she vomits all over the player in your first couple of interactions. Imagine expositing your darkest insecurity upon a stranger you literally bumped into in the lobby; that's what she does. She's below average as far as companions go, and I didn't mind ignoring her quest (completing it would have locked my out of the NCR questline) because getting her bad ending was meaningless to me. And yet there is another controversial point...

The enslaving. Here's another example of bewildering implementation. The act of enslaving your companion is not, in itself, out of left field for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and it's tone. Remember: you can feed your companions to cannibals in vanilla. But for me it's just the abruptness of meeting this girl through a pretty forced interaction as part of the Crusader's introductory questline, having her life story unceremoniously dumped on you, having her become your companion and from that exact moment onwards being able to enslave her. Just out of the blue. She joins the player and you'll forever have the dialogue options to try and trick a slave collar around her neck from the supply of explosive collars that you have on you magically for some reason. It's not as if this is a theme or something, you can't enslave any other companions, or anyone else for that matter. (Outside of some choice moments in the Legion campaign.) Why America? Why so abruptly? I know you don't always need a reason to be evil in these games, the spontaneousness is part of the fun; but this particular action feels so spontaneous that it almost feels like an undue expectation. Am I supposed to want to enslave her? Why? Did I miss the memo on why she'd make a good slave? I don't really like having America hanging around me of her own volition, she's kind of whiny and she says weird stuff about her feet smelling, why would I want to force her to be around me more? Chalk this up to yet another reason why a mod of this size really needed a director.

But if there is one critique I have about the companion system overall, one huge missed opportunity; it's that the companions feel totally superfluous to the events of the main story. I mean you'll get the odd comment here and there, a warning that they'll leave if you continue working with this faction, but they aren't actually integrated into any questlines. Which is fine, doing that would be going above and beyond anyway. But The Frontier goes one step further. You're actually not allowed to bring your companions on most missions. In the same moment that the game likes to teleport you from main objective to main objective like you're freakin' Steven Grant hitting a fugue state between commutes, the game slips your companions out of reality and gives them back when your done. So all the cool set-pieces and big battles, I have to have them with my crappy faction squadmates and not the companions who carry my burdens about the place. I assume it's a question of balancing, the same reason why the mod asks to confiscate all your items when you start. (And doesn't give them back to you when it finishes, it makes you go and find them.) But it feels kind of belittling that these mod authors didn't trust us to manage our own gameplay balancing. Hey Frontier Team, you realise all your players are on PCs, right? If we want to cheat, we can console command 'kill' anything; we know how to exercise restraint. Besides, blocking off all companions from any important story beat, even just to show up for emotional support, makes their existence feel superfluous.

Above the clouds

When I came to cementing the campaign I wanted to play, I had a choice between NCR and the Crusaders. The imbalance of content is what shifted me the NCR's way, as I knew from glancing at the questlist that the NCR Exiles' questline was the only route to getting aboard the absolutely giant space station level. Yes, there is a space station level in 'Fallout: The Frontier' and it is an incredible spectacle. I'm talking, 'highlight of the mod' tier set-piece; and you only get to see it with the NCR. It kind of makes you think that the other questlines were a bit of an afterthought, huh. It was a bit of a shame because to be honest I was kind of feeling the Crusaders a bit more at that time; not least of all because I didn't crash at their headquarters every 5 minutes along with the undeniable fact that the odd desultory scripture quote in dialogue packs a pinch more flavour than milquetoast military cliché drivel all day long. But how could I pass up a trip to space? If I did that I'd be no better than Pete Davidson; and then where would I be?

The reason that there's a space station in this mod would classify as a big spoiler but given how utterly generic this writing is I'm 100 percent sure that if you've even played a single Fallout game since the first one before you can probably figure it out at a guess. Take a single second to think of how a space station would be introduced into this world, and literally your first guess is right. Incredible, how did you do it? Heck, they even introduce the concept of the space station through a nearly identical scene to how the orbital platform in Fallout 3 is shown off; only this time it makes no sense because the scenario writer favoured sceptical over coherence. (Why would these guys reveal themselves, and their capabilities, getting involved in a small scale skirmish with a bunch of scavs that they had no stake in? It's literally like they were just saying 'this plot feels kind of dull, can we come over to shake it up a bit?')

But here the ribbing stops. I fully shut my mouth because the space station is jus- wait, hold on I can't move on without making fun of the concept Vertishuttles for a second. (Verishuttles? Really? VTOL shuttles? I thought the entire point of a VTOL craft was for rapid deployment; you're going to rapidly deploy attack fleets from freakin' space? It's really going to take 12 hours for every attack team to hit the surface; the backup will arrive by the time everyone's gone to sleep!) Ahem. So- the space station is a marvel. Truly incredible. Right out of a sci-fi movie and not in a basic retexture of Mothership Zeta or something. This environment is almost totally custom, with glowing LED stripes lining the hallways and custom animation airlock doors that take 3 seconds too long to cycle for how many there are, and even bright neon lattice tucked away here and there and even on some enemy armours! Oh, and inexplicable barricades on the inside of the ship hallways, which is actually a concept nicked from Mothership Zeta. (Woah, these guys were really prepared for a completely unpredictable invasion, weren't they?)

As exciting as it looks, the station makes an even better playspace. I mean sure, it's a shooting gallery for the most part. But a shooting gallery with remarkable visuals, a smattering of differing enemy types with amazing custom skins, bunches of superbly high-quality custom guns to shoot them with, and a distinct lack of interaction with your terminally boring NCR spacemates. (For the most part. They swoop in to ruin your day here and there when they feel like it.) I had so much fun exploring this zone, mostly crash free, that I able to actually forget some of those initial pains that felt insurmountable to begin with. This single, bloated, several hours too long, mission thread saved a lot of this mod for me when I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue at times! (I was that on the ropes!) A lot of it was really fun bar one fiddly set-piece section that seemed to have wanted me to sprint in order to avoid a scripted death, which is strange because there is no sprint button in vanilla Vegas and I certainly don't remember seeing a sprint-enabling mod on the list of required mods.

However, if there is one thing I might critique: I seriously cannot tell if the 'references' in this particular part of the mod count as funny referential humour classic to the Fallout games, or just bad plagiarism in the vein of 'Hunt down the Freeman'? (Okay I'm exaggerating there. Little could be as bad as 'Hunt down the Freeman's cringe MGSV rip-off scenes. But the fact that this mod made me remember that trainwreck at any point, is not a glowing endorsement.) Of course I refer to the machinations of the Enclave guy who- (Whoops I let it slip... meh, it wasn't a shock to anyone anyway) literally is just Deathshead from 'Wolfenstein: The New Order'. He has an inexplicable German accent, similar facial scars, and an identical scene to the 'capture' scene from that game, where the game makes you choose between two companions you hardly know to decide who's about to be spliced. Heck, the name of the cell in that this decision happens in, within the game files themselves, is literally called 'Deathshead'. Is it a 'loving send up' if you just copy the events and presentation whole hog with as minimal alterations as possible to fit Fallout lore? I genuinely have trouble answering this, please give me your opinion.

But of course the Space station section wasn't perfect. As I mentioned it goes on way too long, (but the whole space is so remarkable that you'll kind of let it.) the area throws way too many new armours at you knowing full well that you'll never be able to carry them all back and you're not allowed to bring companions and leaving unique area gear just feels like a sin to my item-hoarder soul. (It doesn't matter that I'll never wear it; I need to own one of every armour type.) Oh, and they decided to throw in a Ubisoft-style dream sequence. Oh yeah; it's impressive from a technical level what they can do, as always, but my god is it a momentum killing time sink. I was nodding off thirty minutes in and I still had another thirty to go; it was miserable as all utterly unproductive dream sequences are. But I'll get more into that later.

And yet everytime I want to rage I come back around when remembering the variety of gameplay moments in this mod. You have straight shooting gallery scenes, as is standard in this mod, but then you have a honest-to-god open space jumping section! There's also a turret defence snippet against asteroids, and a zombie swarm area, a close range boss fight against an enemy with way-too-much health, a wave defence set-piece, and just everything you could ask to make this several hour long slog feel fresh. These didn't feel like mechanics heavy levels in the early game, where your time was wasted enduring a well made system that did not have the depth to sustain an entire level of interest; (like the tank defence mission or the vehicle mission) they feel like genuine snippets of gameplay variety chucked into a wagon train of a mission to create easily one of the best designed missions in the mod. Oh, and it has a mechanical boss fight at the end. I'm not talking about a-boss-made-from-mechanical-parts, although he is; I mean a boss with functional boss mechanics unlike anything the Fallout franchise has done before. (Once again; I stand agog.)

Boss Fights

Speaking of boss fights, The Frontier has a fair few of them and they're definitely worthy of a section all to their own. The humble boss fight is a time honoured video game design technique of rounding out a stretch of content with an exciting and sometimes challenging summation of the action, narrative or gameplay pieces. (And on a good day; all three) The boss I just mentioned, the robot aboard the space station, is easily the most incredible the Frontier has to offer. (Which is yet another reason why the NCR Exiles questline really shouldn't hold the Space station section hostage to itself.) The boss is almost worthy of a Portal game with the way it's laid out, and I mean that to be as high of praise as it sounds. What got me the most was the fact that is functioned. And I know I keep coming back to that, but New Vegas isn't the most stable game at the best of times. It was slapped together in a year by a studio who, admittedly, seems to have many priors in making something out of nothing in a year or under; but still means the game is held together by shoestrings and silly putty. The eldritch magic that the Frontier team must have deployed to get everything working this smoothly is honestly terrifying because they've definitely spelled the doom of all humanity with their profane practice. I can only hope their meddling in the old arts only shatters the dream-prison of Ln'eta, so that our final mind-shattering nightmare can at least be a pleasant one.

But not all the bosses are quite so cool as all that. In fact, one of the first bosses, at least for the NCR questline, is against the Legion's only tank; and on the hard difficulty it is the most tedious fight in the game. (And I fought Marko in the Someguy2000 mod collection.) Again, there's a mechanic to it, but it's one that moves the fight along at a snail's pace, all the while watching the clock go by and wondering why this hasn't ended yet. The fight took me twenty five minutes. For one boss. (Unbelievable.) And the only other real bosses of note are more traditional 'guy with big health bar' fight, which I find to be totally serviceable. Unless you stick me in a narrow room with no cover from them, so thanks so much for doing that on the Space station. 

Music

Before I forget, as I typically always do, it's important I touch on the music; because it is all custom. Like all of the building blocks that makes up the NCR portion of this mod, the NCR music suite is stuffed with generic lazy military rock that just does not fit the NCR as a faction. It would fit a blind reimaging of the US military, but again, the NCR have more nuance than that! As for every other track, the music ranged from pleasingly atmospheric to weird in good way. There was this one battle theme in particular which sounded nothing like something you'd expect to get you pumped for a fight but had just enough vaguely-techno beat in it to worm into my heart and become something I actively bumped to whenever it switched on. I don't physical dance to any other incidental music in New Vegas, so the Frontier can take that dubious honour for a point in it's favour, if it wants it. But it should bask in that positivity because I'm about to ping-pong back to one of my most hated aspect about amateur independent projects the world over: bad dream sequences.

Dream Sequences

Do you know what's bad about a dream sequence where it doesn't belong? Well mechanically they're an unnecessary stop-gap in the narrative that tips all impulse in the plot right out the window in favour of, typically banal, existentialism and abstract symbolism. It's an invitation for writers to put down the pens and let the creative minds of the artists take over, which in itself is a magnet for poor commentary. A concerned and perceptive artist knows that a dream sequence is not an excuse to get lazy, but a challenge to stretch the very extremities of their creative talent to weave ingenuity and exposition in a concise and sometimes even a profound way. In the same vein that it's said how art is just as much about what you leave out of the picture, carving a blank, rule-less, slate should be an exercise in informed and intuitive discipline.

Or you could just throw the audience into a ropey horror house where they regularly get attacked by faceless mannequins with names like 'Anxiety' and 'Fear' and 'Indignation'. Look, the creativity is there, and there's talent to pull off the stranger ideas, but there's no actual meaningful substance to any of it. And because this section of the game wasn't created with a purpose in mind, a point of the plot that had to be told, the sequence just goes on and on and on. It doesn't have a purpose beyond existing, afterall; so how can the team know when they've made enough to fulfil its purpose? The vault dream sequence meanders for a truly tortuous length of time, during which you have no progress in the core narrative, are learning nothing interesting about your own motives, (which is a theme that the dream sequence half-heartedly tried to pursue) and are regularly forced to partake in Fallout's notoriously under-developed melee systems in fights for your life. Everytime the spectacle threatens to deliver just enough to suspend your disbelief, you bump into a dead-faced clone of your hero who walks up to you and says "I've done it. I have defeated the bad guy. That makes me the hero." (That is verbatim, by the way.)

I mean come on, that's infantile levels of 'turning the question of morality back on the player'. The best they could come up with, on the infinite, unshackled plains of a dream sequence, was "You do things but have to kill to do them and killing is bad so maybe you bad?" Oh and don't forget "Bad things happen to you so feel emotions about them like sadness but sadness is also dream guy who try to attack you so you have to shoot sadness." It's a shame because when I say the visual creativity is on point, I mean it. If I wasn't in tears begging for the dream sequence to end because it's already gone on for an hour and a half, I was genuinely enjoying the weirdness of running around as a headless lobotomy patient or having spear-fights with giant exploding mannequin men. Either the writing team needed a shake up or, once again, the project needed a director to forcibly turn off people's computer and go "You've made enough, anymore and this section will be boring."

 

Bites Za Dusto

As I'd come to expect from the NCR Exiles narrative by this point, the resolution to the narrative is suitably action packed and awkwardly structured so that the main plotline reaches a crescendo about five times straight. (I thought I was watching Matt Reeves' 'The Batman' with all the consecutive story climaxes) But even though I think it was an increadibly bizarre mistake to deal with the factions in the order that they did, I will admit to actually liking the final act of this story worlds more than I enjoyed the introduction; both in writing and gameplay. Enough to make we wonder if separate teams put these two halves of the campaign together or if this one team just didn't know how to handle introductions. (Which would be fair; starting a story is often the hardest step if you haven't figured out the ending already.) By the tail end of the story the mod pretty much becomes set-piece after set-piece, which actually becomes a lot more tolerable when 'A.' you're constantly in control and immersed in the main character and 'B.' the team remembers that a cool gameplay section only stays cool for as long as the scene is a novelty. I was genuinely shocked when the bunker bash against the Crusaders wrapped in less than two hours. And genuinely happy too, because I got to leave that encounter just as excited as I was when I entered it.

I have to take off points for the twist, because similar to 'Hidden Agenda' by Supermassive games; the team pulled the old 'the most suspicious looking and sounding guy is the culprit' trick, only this time the sincerity of the narrative didn't manage to pull my bluff. I clocked the main villain the very second he was introduced and spent the entire time just trying to guess the moment he would strike. I mean they literally gave him the most Saturday cartoon villain name possible; how could he not have been the twist villian? And to summarize his presence and story- he was pretty mediocre. At least he wasn't ideologically driven, because everytime these NCR Exiles spouted their grade-level understanding of military discourse I felt my grey matter leaking out of my ear holes.

I actually think the prolonged final mission was suitably exciting and bullet-filled and explosive, with some different gameplay challenges sprinkled in there to keep things interesting. It wasn't quite as ambitious as the Space station, but it was still grand and appropriate enough to be a finale for such a huge mod. One scene I found to be vaguely reminiscent of 'Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots' later, and you get to have a pretty climatic final boss fight against a beefy, but not too beefy, final boss. I loved the spectacle of it all, it felt like the big budget finale of a particularly meat-brained Bond movie. But not the ending of Quantum of Solace because I actually fondly remember this sequence and I'm frankly amazed I even remembered Quantum of Solace's name without looking it up. (It took a second to get there.) Was it a finale good enough to redeem everything up until then? Not even nearly, it would have had to have been more than perfect, it would need to be legendary to pull that off. And instead it was great. But great is better than good, and leaving the player on a high note is entertainment 101.

In Summary

'Fallout: The Frontier' has a great many faces, and a lot of them are frustrating. From overambition eclipsing hard software limitation, to the odd buggy quest, to the terrible content balancing, the even worse writing, and rampant, egregious, plot holes. But it's also one of the most impressive feats of modding engineering ever made. I just keep coming back wishing that every aspect of this mod lived up to the technical talent on full display. (and visual talents. The world looks beautiful) But for every abject success on the part of the technical talent, creating working vehicular combat and multi-layered boss fights, there's a thoughtless implementation squandering the hard work. Bad decisions pile up high enough to sully the package, which is a tremendous shame given the heretofore unprecedented collection of ambitious and creative minds who poured their passion into The Frontier. I found sparks of an incredible experience tucked in the middle of this mod in the NCR playthrough, and a decent adventure closing out the end, but the rest of the package felt like a messy scramble of spectacular individual elements that just never managed to make it together. 

As a package, for the frustration it caused, I honestly wouldn't recommend playing it. But for the artistry behind the mod I'd at least say watch someone else play it so you can enjoy the spectacle without the vexations. The biggest mod in modding history deserved better than this, and the controversial reputation it has fostered is more than a little overblown. Taking this package for all of it's successes, I would have no problems fixing this review with a shiny A+ badge; but when weighed down with the technical difficulties, the poor to mediocre writing, the terrible mission layout design, the uninspired worldbuilding, weak characters and uneven pacing; I'm left somewhere nearer a D when evaluating the whole experience. But then I recall how much of a high note it left on (at least on the NCR Exiles campaign. The other two was surprisingly cut-and-dry by comparison.) and I have to squeeze that up to an D+ Grade; for good behaviour. I think it's the disappoint which weighs the most on me, both for what I know this mod could have been and for myself in not managing to like it. I just hope the talents who made this go onto develop more in the future, because the technical team have a game development future waiting for them if they want to take it, no doubt.

Greedy Nintendo.

 A more fitting epithet doesn't exist. 

This is a personal one all right, call it a 'vendetta' blog; because I've got an axe to grind with a little-company-who-could called 'Nintendo'. You ever heard of them? Grandfathers of the platformer? beloved arbiters for the children's audience of video games? Got it's footing in the entertainment industry by manufacturing Hanafuda cards for the Japanese Yakuza so that they could circumvent a way-too-specific law about card-based organised gambling? Yeah, well I've got something to say to them about the way they do business! Although upon reflection, I suddenly don't feel as motivated to rant about it as I initially did when I started, might be that connection to the Yakuza I just mentioned. In light of my tempered emotions I'll going to present my level-headed treatise on exactly how Nintendo exploits it's position of legacy and childhood innocence to fleece their consumer base with zero actionable backlash.

First it's important to say that Nintendo are not the only video game company out for a quick buck, of course they're not. Heck, these days it feels like every company bigger than a single room of developers is trying their hardest to charm you with their dashing grill whilst their underlings pilfer your unguarded back pockets. Square and Sony in particular are exploiting their properties in the current generation to try and underhandedly drive up the standard price of this generation's premium pricing out of some utterly transparent bad-faith argument regarding the frozen inflation of the industry which is so pitiful it hardly even warrants a response. And yet I provide one every single time this topic comes up, because if we simply ignore the greedy, they'll continue to take. Never be too lazy to spit in their faces and tell them what they're trash is worth with the only voice that counts, the dusty, crumpled voice you carry around confined to your wallet.

But Nintendo, for their part, haven't gone that route. Yet. Remember that since the next generation launched, Nintendo have been stuck to their old Switch console from the last gen and have yet to put out one of their signature ear-arresting console seller games. Make no mistake that Nintendo will follow suite with the £10 price hike; the only question is whether it'll be when their first blockbuster hits or the Switch mark 2, whatever that ends up being called. And that is because it is in their very blood as a company to manipulate, mislead, cheat and do everything short of 'steal' in order to wring water from the stony grip of their consumer's thirsty hands. In their opinion, it is their right to treat us as misbehaving pay pigs. And who gives them this right? Well much in the vein of pay pigs; it comes from us, bundled in the small print right alongside that undying nostalgia.

Nostalgia, you see, is the glue which keeps the Nintendo fronting face static even after all of these years. Systems have changed, legends have come and gone, the very building blocks of what makes Nintendo have shifted, and we squint through it all to see the family friendly visage of Mario, the scion of childhood's everywhere, and thus hypnotise ourselves into thinking Nintendo are the company for families. It's a deception they prey upon. All of the flagship Nintendo franchises are 3+, their marketing always targets the familial unit and until recently they maintained a draconian hold on censorship rules so strict that it honestly weeded out the majority of independent developers willing to sell on their storefront. (The confusing porting process to the underperforming Wii U helped push the conflicted far away.) The message is clear, Nintendo is the place for kids. But does it need to be the home of moral mediocrity too?

We can start by looking at their online services, pitiful excuses that they are. In the current age of universal ports and social media avenues and communication software bursting out the floorboards, how is there not chat functionality built into the Switch's online suite? The Switch is supposed to be the most fully realised online capable console that Nintendo have ever bought out, and yet for the sheer virtue of what they represent as a legacy grandfather of the industry Nintendo know they can half-ass it's implantation, and the net code itself, with a smile and a wink. Which doesn't even touch on the fact that Nintendo feel this is worthy of charging for, with two different price tiers, despite it's vast inferiority to literally every other online service in the entertainment marketplace. Putting old N64 emulations behind a pricy subscription wall is just the cherry on that cake.

And of course the problem runs deeper than just the online offerings. Nintendo have married themselves to this idea that their games are evergreen, and a title which is half a decade old is fully justified for being flogged again for full price as the staunch exclusivity around their properties ensures that every one of their games are sold only on their marketplace giving Nintendo total control over the market price. As such, Nintendo will totally freeze their titles from value dropping with time, as literally everything else in every consumer industry is supposed to be subject to. Depreciation is a natural product of life and finance, it gives room for the new whilst allowing old inventory to be shifted easier. And whatsmore it's a way to be inclusive to those who don't have the disposable income to shift full price on new games. But Nintendo don't care about inclusivity, they want full price games straight from their store in total perpetuity.

Which brings us to their most insane method of enforcing perceived value; manufactured scarcity. Nintendo are well within their capabilities to ensure the vast demand of their products is neatly met, however if everyone has their needs met then you've got nothing to dangle over the public to keep them hungry and desperate. We've seen Nintendo artificially strangle stock with their Amiibo movement before that thankfully died down, and again with the Super Mario Bros 3D Allstars, which is a game they literally killed from the online storefront after an arbitrary sales period. Why? So that people stop complaining how these products never drop in price. And if this ends up feeding a predatory secondary market which scalps products and then dangles them over the heads of fans for vastly over-inflated price hikes, well that's not Nintendo's problem. They got the initial sale and that's as far as their purview on the matter ends.

I like the games that Nintendo puts out, I think their value proposition is stunningly high and consistent compared to literally every other studio in the industry today, but their business practices drive me away like the plague. I only engage when there's no other choice and even then I come away feeling dirty. Recently I ended up picking up 'Fire Emblem: The Three Houses', my first Fire Emblem game, after waiting for it to go on sale for every month since the game launched. Despite its success, Nintendo didn't print any more physical copies of the game outside of the initial batch and the online store front remained typically stagnant for years, even as a direct sequel for that title entered the hype cycle. When I finally found a used copy of the game a few weeks ago, the machinations of Nintendo had this second hand copy retailing at exactly full price. And you know what; I bought it. Because at that point I knew I was getting screwed, but I'd rather get screwed depriving Nintendo of my sale than kowtow to their grubby practices. This is the reality of dealing with the number one children's games developer, apparently.

Oh, so Death Standing 2 is a thing?

 Didn't see that coming.

Having arrived late to the whole Death Stranding party, by the way of a year or two, I was able to enjoy quite a peaceful and personal relationship with the game free of the flying expectations of the release date, firing both from those who understood and appreciated the game and those who couldn't make the connection between their idea of entertainment and the content of this gameplay. As such it seems strange to me, almost entirely alien, in fact, to be hearing current news about the state of this property as though it is a thing that is breathing and with space to grow. Because, and forgive me for saying this, I really didn't think this game had the sort of legs to make it into a franchise. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the game, just take a look at my review on it, I'm practically glowing in my opinions; but that respect and familiarity just tips me further into the camp of; "sequel? Really?"

And to let you know what I'm taking about I must rush to say that there has been no official announcement nor a pretty transparent tease by way of Kojima, before you go scouring his Twitter feed like a 1940's gumshoe. This 'reveal', as it were, is actually something of a leak by way of that most reliable of unsolicited industry secret drops; an interview with a celebrity actor. Actor's get a bad rap, being expected to be the icons of society required to uphold and maintain the perfect balance of conduct, intelligence and countenance to prove an ideal role model for society. One actor slaps a comedian on stage and pearl-clutching satellite mothers gasp about how terrible a sight this is for their impressionable young children. Why exactly are actors meant to be paragons of societal virtues? They're not trained professionals who study politics, humanities or the sciences; they're performers who study how to pretend to be someone else for a time. We shouldn't put them on such a pedestal just to be a height from which to cast them down when they fall short. And neither should we be surprised when Norman Reedus accidentally mentions, during an interview question about the motion capture that went into Death Stranding, that "we just started on the second one."

 

Now to compound on the point I just made about how we look at actors, and call back to my view on the George R.R Martin's opinion about Elden Ring from a while back; he might just be wrong. Norman isn't the creative director on this project, when he first joined he himself admitted he didn't know what was going on at first and it took him half a year to know what the game was even about. So Norman Reedus could very well be taking part in one of those rumoured Death Stranding movies that we can assume are on the docket now that Kojima has expressed his interest to expand his studio in such avenues. However as far as I know Mr Reedus does now have an understanding of the game he helped make, and even has developed a friendship with Kojima, so I think it's fair to say that he would either know whether or not this was a game, or Kojima would have a hard time pulling the wool over his eyes on it. Then again I really can see Kojima playing pranks on people like that so it's fair game.

But assuming the Mr Reedus does have his facts straight, and apparently didn't sign an NDA for a game he's already started making; (Or worse, has signed the NDA and just accidentally breeched it. I hope it's just a clerical error, I don't want him getting into trouble over this.) we have ourselves a sequel I never expected to be made. I know people wanted it. I know so many asked for it. But when I took a look at the incredible experience that Death Stranding was, its personable story about rebuilding the world by establishing connection and bringing community to the lost, I have to wonder whether the game itself wanted or asked for a sequel. Beyond its action and events and the world of Death Stranding itself, that game had something to say and it has been said. Where can that message even go next?

For those who forgot, Death Stranding proposes a world where a cataclysmic event know as the 'Death Stranding' has fundamentally altered the makeup of reality. The effects of the Death Stranding are numerous, esoteric and, strangely, often allegorically symbolic of the themes of the game. (Funny that.) What is presented as a dim and dismal post-world which actively tries to kill its inhabitants even more than a radioactive wasteland, becomes a backdrop for a story about connecting the disparate dots of America so that a fractured society can become whole again and people can rediscover the value and love of having others around them. Even the BTs, with their umbilical cords reaching beyond the shroud of this world and the power to cause an antimatter explosion at a single touch, are reaching out with their hands to touch and connect with something, anything, from beyond death itself.

To drop some 'endgame spoilers' on you, the end of the game doesn't appear to naturally lend itself to a sequel either. With the breadth of the story being dedicated to trying to understand the nature of the Death Stranding and then trying to stop the final mass extinction event that it foretold. The climax of that narrative resulted in the mystery of the Death Stranding being, seemingly, fully unravelled and the end of humanity getting delayed, perhaps indefinitely. America is reconnected through the courier effort of Sam Bridges and the man himself decides to leave his job behind in order to go rogue with his brand new adopted daughter Louise, saved from the executioner's furnace at the end of the game. Not only is the state of the world effectively 'solved' by the credits, but our man is no longer in action and actively ready for retirement. Yet here is Norman Reedus effectively saying that The Great Deliverer has another slew of packages just waiting for him.

When I considered the Death Stranding sequel, I originally pictured an entirely different protagonist dealing with their version of the Death Stranding's effects that thematically tie in with a new concept so as to maintain the nakedly ideological heart of this property without it become a thoughtless action series. But apparently that's out the window with Sam being a definite returning lead. I suppose we could have this series expand to other countries as Sam tries to build a bridge to the rest of the world, but let's be honest here: Kojima is a clear Americanophile who delights in miring his stories in the American ideas of freedom and governance in land ordained theirs. Even when he was putting America to task in the Metal Gear series, it was in a gloves-on sort of way that never challenged the state of the country as it is. (At least not directly, maybe through allegory.) So in that case, maybe I want just a brand new sci-fi angle to be revealed of the Death Stranding that warrants another exploratory adventure, perhaps in the hotter south western states of the Bald Eagle's land.

I guess this all means that Kojima Production's flagship series is going to be the Death Stranding Sci-fi and not an easier-to-write-for action series that can be endlessly stapled onto for all eternity with vague engine updates every once and a while. (Ubisoft would find that concept frankly abhorrent.) I suppose I shouldn't expect anything less from a mind that begs to be challenged like Kojima's, and though this likely means a kibosh on the rumoured Death Stranding movie and/or TV show that people were nattering about, it is an opportunity for one of the most creative titles of the past generation to totally reinvent itself in order to controversially divide the gaming community once more. I hope we'll one day see something different out of KP, but even if we don't for the immediate future I'm not going to kick my feet and pretend this isn't a totally fine state of affairs either.    

Gotham Knights looks kinda meh

Arkham, this is not

'Batman is Dead' reads the hook into WB Montreal's upcoming 'Gotham Knights' video game, now coming exclusively to the elusive current gen consoles. (What an announcement to make just a few months out from the prospective release, guys. Very not-cool.)  And with this game comes on of the most lauded comic book storylines in recent DC years, that of the Court of Owls; another story in which Batman 'dies' only to not really die, so I guess we all know the twist coming in this narrative long before it can even be teased. Gotham Knights borrows what it can in order to set it's narrative in practically the same place that Arkham Knight left it, with Batman AWOL and the Batfamily coming back to Gotham to keep it defended, without actually being a direct sequel in anyway. (I believe 'Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League' is the direct sequel to the Arkham franchise. It's all needlessly confusing.)

What this means is a rooster of the Bat family available for us to pick through, but with enough caveats that this is in no way the 'dream Batman game' that fans of the deep Batman lore have been asking for. I mean for one we're only getting to play as the core members of the Batfamily, I'm talking 3 robins and Batgirl. (Not even Stephanie- but Barbara.) We have at our disposal a Robin, (One of them) Nightwing, (Because that guy can't keep himself in Bludhaven for more than a weekend) Red Hood (To give us that moody gun-toting edge to the group dynamic) and Batgirl. (As the smart-one stereotype of the group.) No Batwoman, no Huntress, no Orphan, no Azrael, No Batmite, No Ace the Bathound. It's a lean group, which I suppose adds all the more room for the team to focus on the diversity behind the playstyles of each individual member; right? Everyone should feel totally different to play, in combat and city traversal: the two major vertices of play, right?

Good thing we have ourselves a brand new character trailer in order to test that theory! Yes, the reveal gameplay trailer only had the chance to show us gameplay of Batgirl, enough to let us know that although the story wants nothing to do with Arkham, the developers will more than happily knick it's playstyle to be the backbone of their game. (Steal from the best, right?) This time around we get to see Red Hood and Nightwing in action, two characters who have also appeared in previous Arkham games (not that this is another Arkham game- it's something different, I have to keep reminding myself.) so that the distinctive playstyles have a chance to shine. Or at least that was the intention behind this, I think. Allow players to see why it is that they'll want to switch between these characters and play alongside them with their friends, oops I mean 'friend'; because bizarrely this game still only has 2 player Co-op planned despite the cold-turkey split to next gen only consoles. (What, is Next Gen not powerful enough for 4 player Co-Op yet?) I'm not entirely sure about the success of the thesis, given the footage that we saw. 

Immediately the problems with the gameplay seem clear; the combat feels weak- which feels astounding to say given the obvious connections this game has to a DC game series with excellent combat in the Arkham games. Why didn't they just copy that standard? Everything seems to mimic the Arkham series, what with the high-angled perspective shift in fights that allows situation awareness for the player to pull off counters and dodges and general group-dispersal tactics- but the actual pace of the action bears a noticeable slow-down in terms of pace. Hits feel slow, there's only a little bit of feedback impact, attacks don't appear to flow into one another as they did in Arkham, it just doesn't look as satisfying to see our hero kick a group of thugs into submission. And I actually watch a decent number of Arkham videos in my spare time because of how satisfying the game looks as well as plays, so I can pretty easily identify when something is missing here.

But there are obviously going to be concessions in the way that the game plays when we're focusing on 4 animations sets that are totally distinct rather than just the one, so the floaty punches are conceptually forgivable. The bulk of the focus here is going more into the RPG stats behind the combat, or at least it was that case when the game was first revealed, I've noticed that since the backlash enemies don't have their levels floating above their heads anymore. However, they're still going to be focusing on craftables (yawn) with different stats on suits and rarities and... is any studio capable of making a game of their own volition anymore? One that doesn't fill the classic 'looter' checkboxes? Why can't we get new suits that just look cool? Or maybe that have one special power like Sony's Spiderman did? Why does it feel like this game's biggest influence was freakin' Avengers? You know, the game that was a failure!

And while we're talking about non-combat gameplay, during the demo's break in the Bellfry, the homebase between missions, we got to see a little bit of how the game will take advantage of the multiple protagonists. Namely, by allowing them to interact. And the interaction they chose to show off in this footage? A laughably stilted dialogue between Dick Grayson and some malformed 'star quarterback' iteration of Jason Todd that bares no small resemblance to one of the Capcom's many failed Chris Redfield clones. (His design was rightly mocked) And whilst we're on the topic of Red Hood; each hero has their own method of world traversal, don't get excited- they didn't come up with anything clever or interesting and just gave Nightwing a slow powered glider and Batgirl the same wing glider that Batman had. But Jason Todd's Red Hood gets a magical green smoke cloud double jump. Why? Because he resurrected by mystic assassin's or something, I dunno, read a comic. Sort of takes away from the gritty, gun-toting image of Red Hood when he flies away on green wings like Tinkerbell.

Luckily, as this is an Arkham game in all but name, we still have stealth as an option in gameplay which is sure to add some bare basic action variety. Does this mean we're going to go the distance and have proper predator sections like the Arkham series did? With vantage points and cat and mouse mechanics that got more fleshed out as the games went along? I don't know. We saw about thirty seconds worth of stealth and it was all crawl and backstab like you'd see from any cookie cutter action title. Which in itself does not give me much hope. (If they had Predator mechanics, why would they deliberately not show them?) Oh, and to put a cherry on top of the cake, some people seem to think the enemies are too tanky, as consequence of their new RPG stats. I personally don't see the problem myself just yet, but this gameplay reminds me how that absolutely will be an issue in higher level tiers, because otherwise why have level gated enemies at all?

I really did put out the benefit of the doubt for Gotham Knights when it first launched and we some small nagging problem points, but now we're closer to launch and the game has settled itself on being firmly next gen- the rough edges are becoming wholly less excusable. Maybe if the game was balanced to allow full four player co-op they'd be some inane fun to be had jumping around the city and bashing heads, but with the limitations this is really starting to shape up as a bargain-bin version of the Arkham series which is going to be competing with an actual proper successor to those games in the near future. Every mechanic borrowed from those games has been done worse and all the 'new' ideas are tired industry trends. In short, this gameplay made the game look average at best, mediocre at worst. Maybe the Court of Owls are better off running things afterall...

The New Tomb Raider Retrospective

 My hero

With the displacement of the Tomb Raider IP from the active producers over at Square Enix to the new question marked conglomerate known as 'Embracer Group', it's clear that for this series and its contemporaries, the state of the franchise will shift. Whether that means the games will go back into hibernation after this coming game that is still being worked on is anyone's guess, and I think that from this point forth buck really stops with guys over at Crystal Dynamics and whatever it is that they want to do in order to remain profitable. I mean, for all we know they could deep-six the the Tomb Raider franchise tomorrow and go all in on running Marvel's Avengers back out of the pit they left it in. It would be insane to do so, but it was equally as insane to put together Marvel's Avengers as they did and not expect it to crash and burn. (Maybe we can blame everything that went wrong on the exes, that's usually a sure bet.) But assuming nothing is certain about the future, because it isn't, we can at least smile upon the times we had so far.

This new revitalisation of Tomb Raider, coined 'The Survivor Timeline' has done a fantastic job of establishing Lara Croft as a modern day action game protagonist; such to the extent that new Lara has practically replaced her otherwise iconic older model in the current stretch of gamer knowledge. We recognise the human, battered, ponytailed duchess just as well as we used to recognise her green-topped, cargo pant-wearing, immune to weather, predecessor. (Let it never be forgotten that the very first time we see Lara in her iconic outfit in the very first game, it's at the top of an icy mountain absolutely draped in snow. And she has shorts on. As if.) Which speaks to the talent of Crystal Dynamics for identifying what made Lara a fun character to follow in the past and how that gameplay loop could be improved upon to totally overshadow the series of the past.

Nowadays Lara is spending a lot less time shooting dinosaurs in the face and tackling thousand year old Russian Atlanteans, she's a human woman suffering the wear and tear of surviving in the wild, duelling with the elements and playing the one girl army against a secretive nation of illumanti-esque treasure hunters. The wear-and-tear system wherein Lara's player model will become scratched and bruised as moves through the grand adventure is as much a part of the series now as the actual Tomb Raiding itself. As depicting the fragility of the human at the centre of the action seems to be a key thematic device the team keeps coming back to. Whether struggling with being a lone survivor of a terrible boat crash, coming to terms with the violence she has been forced to commit and continues to pursue in the name of a vengeance that might just take as much as it relieves, or learning to get over the guilt of triggering the end of the world and indirectly wiping out a small South American town- (Not sure if she deserves forgiveness for that last one, honestly.) there's a real heart in the character of these stories for the player to identify and connect to.

The Tomb Raider Remake from 2015 rehabilitated the almost Sonic-fication that the series was beginning to go through after the main line series of games lost their direct number designation. When Lara was beginning to show up in so many disparate projects that she was becoming more of an icon of a character rather than an individual character. (Not that she was ever much of a personality to begin with, 90's video game writing being what it was.) We were given a Lara in her late teens going through her first adventure with the promise that this would be the origin of the hero we'd come to know. It was a backhanded promise, because even then Crystal would have to have known they were actually heading in a much more realistic direction and new Lara wasn't going to suddenly transform into an enigmatic, double pistol-wielding, psychopath trading bullets with mercenaries on skateboards overnight. (People tend to forget just how weird the original Tomb Raider was.)

Perhaps the most impressive new addition to the lore of the character was the inclusion, and utter image assimilation, of the bow; now existing as such an integral part of her new Lara that it's almost jarring to look back on the old box art of the original series and not see the string of a Recurve Bow strapped over her shoulder. The bow serves as a thematic device as much as a practical one, being indicative of a pre-automatic age which is representative of her lack of being prepared and outfitted with the gadgets that would achieve exactly what she'll need for the situation, demonstrating the amateur she currently is. All the while simultaneously being a versatile tool of the resourceful, representing adaptability and rugged, survivalist, tactics requiring ingenuity and rewarding struggle. It's the difference between someone having their dinner packed in their backpack and having to hunt it down and cook it with their hands in order to live; cutting to the heart of who new Lara is in comparison to old Lara.

Rise of the Tomb Raider ushered in some of the more time-honoured Tomb Raider plotpoints, like Lara's battle against the secretive 'Trinity' agency, as well as an embracing of the more globe-trotting elements of the series. Additionally, the games no longer had to pussy-foot around with the concept of mysticism within this new universe because that bottle had already been well and truly uncorked with the finale of the first game. Lara's famous daddy-issues became more prevalent too, with her family history finally entering into the picture, and I think it's around about this time that we got to really settle into this woman as a character rather than just the abstract of her struggle to survive; allowing the player in enough that they could actually come to care about what happens to Lara as her toils take a notable effect on her life. Oh, and Jonah became a main character instead of Samantha like I was initially expecting. (Kind of upset that Sam was totally sidelined given how important she was to the events of the first game.) But I guess this is a fine compromise too; everyone can get behind a bit of Jonah in their lives, I think.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the point at which Lara was supposed to ascend into the character she was in the old games, although as I said before Crystal probably knew well in advance they were heading a totally different direction tonally. Personally I think Shadow has some big pacing issues that offset the progression on the plot with sections of tedium and ill-placed flashback sequences. Also the over-reliance of Trinity as a plot point nestled back into the franchise far too quickly for my liking. Still, the gameplay was good enough that even the elements that had become somewhat stale after 3 decently similar outings didn't grate too heavily. The huge hub spaces of Shadow were a definite standout from anything the franchise had pulled off before. (Although the series had tried such scale before, with 'Angel of Darkness' if I recall rightly.) Visually it was undeniably stunning, and as such Shadow became something of an industry benchmark for graphical fidelity at the tail end of the last generation.

Right now we have a next gen Tomb Raider game in the works by Crystal Dynamics which was not initially disclosed when they first imagined their 3-part Tomb Raider narrative, implying that this could be the launching off point for the next part of Lara's life story. Or it could be a one off from Crystal Dynamics to stretch their muscles; the game hasn't even been officially announced yet so we can only speculate. Personally what I want from this new game is exactly how I wanted the last one to end; I want us to meet this universe's version of Natla and start that whole 'Atlantis' questline, only significantly spruced up in order to meet the standards of today's gaming narrative writing. I want it to push the boundaries of the big show stopper set pieces that has make this modern day series so exciting. (Like the plane engine run-away scene from 2015's Tomb Raider or the huge flood in 'Shadow') And last of all, for myself, can we have Lara end off in a slightly better mental space this time around? I shouldn't have to worry about the metal wellbeing of a fictional character so much; you made me care, Crystal, now you have to reap what you sow!

Sonic and Music

 Oh yeah, this is happening!

Of the prime ingredients that make up the meal we know today as Sonic; attitude, fur, speed- I'd say that the one attribute which has been incontestable even in the darkest ages of the franchise, is the quality of the music. From the days on the Genesis even over onto modern day entries depending on what type of music you like, Sonic has never failed to at least make an effort with each game's soundtrack. At least, far more effort than it's contemporaries. I mean seriously, take a look at some of the big games from around the same time as the classic Sonic trilogy, the early 90's and compare the competition. Mega Man 2 clocks in just behind that timestamp, but it rocked two unforgettable tracks, but not an entire library of classics like Sonic has. Super Castlevania totally revitalised the series not just with gameplay but in it's soundscape too, but was its musical success as consistent as Sonic's? Not across the years as much. Truly, Sonic stands as much as vehicle for video game music as it does for gameplay.

Sonic games music is an inexorable part of it's identity now, with fans forming judgements on the taste of people with particular favourites (If you're ever speaking to a Sonic fan and find yourself in a pinch with no personal favourite, just say 'Chemical Plant Zone'; it's a solid, if cliché, baseline.) But what makes them so good? They're great tracks, that's what! They're textured, they're distinct, funky at times, rocking at others, they serve as the soul behind each and every level and stage, serving to highlight the thematic motifs within the level whilst simultaneously just being great enough tracks to exist divorced from the game too. Sonic is never a series that leaves it's music to fill the background, there's no 'incidental' tracks in this franchise. As much as Sonic, Tails or Knuckles, the backing tracks are beloved main stays of the series rooster.

Which isn't to say that the music has been stagnant throughout the years either. Sonic 1 ingrained it's iconic zone themes into every player's hearts (Especially with the irreplaceable Green Hill Zone) and Sonic 2 bought busier and richer tracks that proved to be just as iconic. (And yet somehow my favourite from that game is still the relatively simple major boss theme) But for me personally, it was Sonic 3 where this series hit it's zenith. And how could it not with a suite of tracks, half of which are said to have been composed by the Michael Jackson. (Although whether or not that is truthful is the stuff of myth and legend.) Even so the funk-carnival beat of 'Carnival Night zone' is guaranteed to get your feet tapping. Then you've got the hop and sliding keyboard of 'Hydrocity' and 'Marble Garden'. But the top of the top, the king of kings, my favourite Sonic song bar none- the final boss theme; 'Big Arms'. That is everything a final boss track needs to me. 

It starts ominous, chilling, slow and quickly ramps up into an excitable and relentless march with that layered synthetic instrument richness which makes Classic Sonic sound so memorable. But even more than that, what makes it a stretch beyond so many others; is that just before the track loops the composer remembered that a perfect boss theme needs to tell the story of the protagonist as well as the villain. We get a rousing stanza all of the Blue menace's own that slowly builds until it's cut short and cold by a single errant note that hangs for a half second of total quiet, and then the march crashes in once again! God, I could literally gush on and on about how good 'Big Arms' is for absolutely hours, truly some of the greatest video game music work ever, even to this day.

Of course as Sonic changed in the 3D era so too did the music which accompanied him, and those with a passing knowledge of the Sonic franchise would probably be more familiar with these tracks. 2000's soaked spring-break garage-band sounding songs that coloured this more 'skateboard' era of what a cool, non-conformist, hip kid like Sonic is meant to be. It has it's charms, although for me most of that leaks out from nostalgia and irony. Do I like 'Escape the City' from Sonic Adventure 2 as a track? Of course. But would it have been something I'd listened to regardless of it's connotations to Sonic? Not even nearly. But of course this is the time when personal taste becomes more important, as is going to happen when Sonic music stopped being it's unique brand and started becoming more identifiable by the genre it was placed in. Some fans are made, others are made dubious; it's the evolution.

Quality has waxed and waned over the years but the overall calibre of Sonic soundtracks makes it so that the truly bad Sonic tracks are the standouts. And I can refer to them in designations of tiers. From the 'this just isn't really my style of music' for a lot of the Sonic vocal tracks (Apart from 'Sonic BOOM' from Sonic CD of course) to 'okay this is outright cringeworthy'; a tag I'd happily slap on the chest of a track like 'Infinite's Theme' from the latest 3D Sonic outing; Sonic Forces. (Sample of the actual lyrics "I am the toughest of terrors, I am the darkest of days"- "I am a dangerous weapon, I am the sharpest of blades, I'll cut you down in a second, 'cause I was born in this pain, it only hurts if you let it, so if you think you take me, then you should go and forget it." Reminder, this is an anthropomorphic Jackal in a mask expositing all this edge.) And if we look really closely, we can find the abjectly terrible Sonic tracks.

Music from games that most people haven't even heard of before, like 'Tails' Skypatrol', a standalone title where the suite of music can best be described as obnoxious arcade machine ditty, but for every single track. Not very appealing. And a rung even lower than that lies a game that I've mentioned repeatedly in passing on this blog for it's simply legendary status as terrible Sonic spin-off music. If you haven't heard it, seriously; look up the 2 player theme for 'Sonic Eraser'- it's a college of sounds and noises that defies the designation of 'music', so garishly awful that it almost swings back around into masterpiece territory. Until last week that would have been the music track I would happily label the worst that Sonic has to offer. But since then I've been enlightened with a track from a game that might not be as objectively terrible musically, but which is so much worse because of one simple thing: it's a homage to an earlier Sonic masterpiece.

During the dark ages of quality control in the Sonic licence, Bioware (yes, that Bioware) got their hands on the IP in order to make a Sonic RPG called 'Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood'. Having never seen anyone talk about it, I just assumed it to be another one of the companies lost gems next to 'Jade Empire' and went about my way before learning of it's negative perception by the Sonic community. Apparently they really hated the thing. Why? Mario RPG games have such a cult following, so it couldn't just be genre mismatch, could it? No, it's the music. The terrible, badly-ripped, MIDI suite which is based around various older Sonic tracks cherry picked across the franchise, although a lot of the tracks are bad 'remixes' from Sonic 3D Blast for some reason. But the crowing turd on this mud pie? The music of the final zone in the game and the capital of this eponymous Dark Brotherhood? It's a track called 'Nocturne' which is a butchering- of 'Big Arms.'

Yes, my favourite Sonic track of all time dissected and chucked in the garbage in a MIDI monstrosity that strips the layering, the progression, the texture- the SOUL of the song- in a butchering in breach of the Geneva convention. The rumour has it that the game original featured an orchestral suite which Sega turned down a week before release leading to a mad scramble to replace the music with these crappy synthetic rips; but even that is a weak excuse. I've turned my entire library of music into MIDI files before and it sometimes comes out a bit distorted, but that's because I'm turning actual percussion based tracks into a synthetic format; Sonic music starts on synthetic instruments- how did they screw it up during the port? Unless there was some morbid desire to remix totally remotely without any human input, that explanation holds no real water!

For the most part, Sonic Music is a standout and sometimes standalone bright spot of the franchise that persists through generation of games and fans. There's something transcendent about a musical spirit that can be captured again when developers so choose, as was proven through Sonic Mania, and no matter how bad the Sonic games get there's always at least one banger in the soundtrack which worms under even the most grim skin. Unless we're talking about 'The Dark Brotherhood' I guess, which deserves annihilation from orbit for its crimes. (Okay, the opening theme and battle themes are okay, I guess. But to do that to 'Big Arms'... look how they massacred my boy...) So now you know the only standard Sonic Frontiers needs to meet in order to justify its existence. Forget being a good game, screw establishing a coherent world space; just slap in one head banger and for the love of god don't sample 'Big Arms' unless you know what you're doing. That's all I ask, Sega.

Finishing off Blasphemous

For this, the ultimate Blasphemy

Yeah, I know that I literally only just played through Blasphemous and recorded by doing so in this blog here reviewing the title, but I hadn't quite pulled my weight exactly to the extent I initially intended to. To be clear, when I first got around to playing Blasphemous, the sequel had just been announced and the 'Wounds of Eventide' free update had come into the game, providing a secret alternate true ending that would set up the events of that fresh-off-the-presses follow-up. (Much more exciting than a teaser trailer, if you ask me) I knew this, however I still played the first Blasphemous as though I didn't, picking the routes I wanted to go in the moment and learning the ins and outs of the game as a new player would; all because I did not want to go about bothering myself with walkthroughs or guides for that virginal run. After that initial playthrough I went back into the game to try out the new game plus mode, and ended up sticking around for a whole second playthrough thanks to how lean and accommodating the game is in length. No 20 hour sessions here, just a sensible length and plenty of replay value. So I decided: Might as well go for that special true ending in order to wrap up my time with this whole package properly! But there was a confusion.

Much as you might have guessed if you read by the lines of my review, I fell for the mistake of acquiring the story hook to start the DLC, which requires the player to go their way off the beaten path before the mid-point of the narrative or else lose the opportunity altogether, and not realising that single hook did not, in itself, guarantee my path into the 'Wounds of the Eventide' DLC content for the rest of the game. I went and beat every boss in the base game, sans the final guy, before going and taking on the much harder set-up bosses for the Wounds, only to realise I had erred and in actually I was supposed to abstain from killing the penultimate boss of the base game before slaying the new Wounds bosses. Don't you just love hidden clauses that screw you out of your earned end? So I gave up, purposely took the bad ending to see what it looked like and then just looked up the ending that I missed. Upset but at peace. Mostly. Okay not even nearly at peace.

I imagined maybe revisiting Blasphemous on the eve before the sequel came out, but that didn't sit right by me. I was in the prime of the fandom right now, dammit! If ever I was ready to do another playthrough, it was in that present moment. So after maybe 36 hours of fooling myself into thinking I'd moved on, I started on playthrough 3. If nothing else this should tell you what I think about the game's ability to keep me hooked on the line, that I stuck around for three complete playthroughs! Whatsmore, I went out of my way to do everything I could for the last playthrough, which meant forcing myself through the miserable challenge of the 'Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night' crossover platforming levels. Good lord, Blasphemous was not meant to be a speedy platformer! Easily the hardest challenge in the game was trying to reliably pull off that damnable lamp-jump move before realising the cheat-sheet tactic of tapping the dash button during the swing. (And even then the physics were nonsensical enough to be infuriating.)

But what sort of greater enlightenment has my third and final jaunt against the horrors of The Grevious Miracle elucidated upon me? What sort of supreme peace have I achieved now that I've finally experienced that most secret of endings and am now, without having to look it up on Youtube, fully ready for whatever horrific thing this universe has up its sleeve next? Well for one, much to my complaints in the review, I can finally say that the game Blasphemous has the player character actually committing a blasphemy! I mean sure, I know that even in the base game the splash text would announce 'Summa Blasphema' upon beating 'His Holiness Escribar', but I didn't really buy that. Afterall, in the lore it was The Miracle itself that resurrected The Penitent One, set them on the path to confront Escribar and even went the distance of rewarding them by letting them take the place of the Twisted One. That hardly sounds blasphemous to me! No, only in the True Ending do you look beyond into The Dream and confront the forces beyond The Miracle itself.

Beyond even that, there are the DLC battles in general which I think mark the best, and toughest, content that Blasphemous has to offer; even in a repeat play. Stair of Dawn bought the Amanecida, which is conceptually similar to the classic final boss of the Souls franchise, the 'Soul of Cinder.' The Amanecida are 5 boss fights all wielding a different weapon and slightly different attack style, before one final boss that conjoins all those weapons and tactics into a single body that switches between each attack style in an epic confrontation that sends the two of you climbing high into the sky, dodging arrows, ducking spears and parrying swords. (I have a special kind of love for fights that have evolving boss arenas) Of course given the nature of Blasphemous, the final Amanecida, Laudes, does not switch weapons at will like the Soul of Cinder did, and instead does so at specific junctions of health, but it's still a great summary of everything you had learned so far being smashed together into one extended multi-tiered bout. What more could you ask for?

Then there are the two bosses of the 'Wounds of Eventide' that are just on a whole other level than what the base game had going on. I actually stumbled upon Isidora completely by accident on my first playthrough, and found myself utterly overwhelmed by her ferocious attacks matched with the sheer number of tracking flame projectiles she uttered out in her second phase. It was entirely distinct from the level of 'relatively easy going' challenge that even the toughest in Cvstodia had up their sleeves. Trying it again on New Game Plus when she had even more health was certainly a challenge, one of learning to equip and rely on the Prayers, which I had, admittedly, been sort of ignoring up until then. And learning to modify my pace based on where she was in her attack cycle. Much of the DLC bosses teach patience followed by punishment, which is the same formula that Dark Souls bosses so often fall back on. There is something satisfying about sneaking in that one perfect hit after a chain of perfect dodges and deflections, isn't there?

Sierpes, on the otherhand, was a totally different speed to Isidora. Less unrelentingly fast and more of a brutal slog fest of memorising patterns and chipping away at that large health pool. That serpentine foe controls the entire stage and pretty much dictates exactly where you need to stand at every individual moment, so that the entire fight becomes a back and forth of matching his actions with the perfect reaction. I certainly would say that Isidora is more difficult, but having two bosses that play so differently from one another is a really strong philosophy for shaking up the spread of the game's bosses, which I appreciate. Plus Sierpes really bought the spectacle to it's fight. Rising higher and higher with the switch in phases until you're wrapped up into the clouds above a crushed pirate ship, similar to the Laudes duel. I enjoyed them all.

And then, of course, are the extra final fights tacked onto the base game through the 'Wounds of Eventide' unique quest chain. Both are addendum final stages upon the last two bosses and both add a considerable extra layer of danger. Cristanta actually has a very important role in the background of the lore in this game as revealed in the prequel comic, and having her boss fight not be a throw-away affair like it was in the vanilla game is a good way of honing in on that fact. Although I was a little disappointed at how the ultimate final fight, against the last boss, is something it is literally impossible to lose. At the final point of damage your companion will swoop in and save you, bringing you to the beginning of that fight but restoring all your health. It's an odd anti-climax of a last fight, but then I guess given where you are it doesn't make sense to be able to die from a lore point. In the end I have to say that Blasphemous absolutely contains the sort of kick to warrant a repeat playthrough or two and not just in order to understand the intentionally esoteric narrative. I think the greatest boon this game has going for it is it's length, which makes experiencing everything again so much easier to swallow than it is for other Souls-likes of the age. Now with that decidedly behind me, I can rest my Miracle slaying hand until Blasphemous 2; and by-The-Miracle am I curious how exactly the 2001 space baby is going to evolve this narrative in the future.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has the best DLC

 I'm killing monsters.

Are you ready for one of the most unapologetically redundant hot takes on the internet to be espoused right through your window? You ready? Good, cause 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt' has really good DLC! I know right, lock me up I'm clearly insane... No, obviously everyone and their elderly grand-aunt who's been banished to the ice sheets of Siberia for the past thirty years knows well the merits of The Witcher games and their respective DLC's which are so good they feel like thievery even at full price. From back in the age when CD Projekt Red evolved from the little studio who could into a powerhouse indie masterpiece maker, capable of no wrong and beloved by the masses. A reign cut brutally short, even when compared to other industry weekend heroes, by their own hubris in their very next release. (What a tragedy; I should write a play.) But I want to throw you in the blue Police Box for a second so we can rewind to those first few days during the release of The Witcher 3's first DLC; 'Hearts of Stone'.

You see, everyone always goes on about ''Blood and Wine'. "Oh, it's like a whole new game tacked onto my game" and "Oh, isn't it's breadth of freedom just so refreshing against the deluge of typically over-priced overhyped repackaged content stolen out of the original build garbage?" And yes, obviously it is all that and more, but 'Hearts of Stone' is not without its merits. In fact, it was exactly for the incredible time I had playing 'Hearts of Stone' that I was so hyped for their next DLC expecting it to be just a little bit more of the same calibre only to be totally blown away- but I'm getting ahead of myself as everyone always does when they bring up this topic. We'll get there, we will; but first I need to remind everyone that every bit of The Witcher's DLC was great!

Even the content which released before the expansions. Remember that? They were little free pieces of micro-DLC that could be picked up totally without strings attached and they each gave tiny little boons, such as alternate outfits for Yennefer, Ciri and Triss. (I'd complain that my main man Dandelion didn't get any new threads but that default outfit is pretty impeccable as it is) A couple of short missions, a new face for some of the Gwent cards, a bunch of new facial hair options, a Nilfgaard armour set, some new more powerful crossbows (Still not powerful enough to be remotely useful in any context, though.) New finisher moves, a Temerian armour set, a scavenger hunt for Wolf School Witcher gear and a new game plus mode. That's all the free stuff, remember. Just CD Projekt Red saying "Thanks for paying for the game and not pirating it or something." The stuff you get for actually giving them extra money puts that lot to shame.

'Hearts of Stone' is an entirely standalone story which takes place in some of places on the existing map that were underexplored with in the vanilla mission spread, namely the to-the-side region of Oxenfurt. The place has it's own little town and everything; but the makeup of content means that in the usual state of play you'll blow right past the place and right onto Skellige, and by the time you've shown back up at Oxenfurt you've overpowered to godhood against the embarrassing wretches that waste your time in this meagre plane. Which makes it an ideal space to stick an entire dedicated expansion that presents a small self-contained adventure with a simply fantastic narrative arc to it all. 'Hearts of Stone' depicts a man cursed with the inability to die and seeking a Witcher to unfurl his bad fortunes. It sweeps the player into an intimate narrative with a small cast of superbly written and acted characters, squeezes in new monsters, locations, abilities and gearsto play around with and presents a finale bout totally unique from anything the game had done before. It was a triumph on it's own.

And then there was Blood and Wine. An expansion that was said to be a little more ambitious, was going to take a little more time to work on, got some people excited and then launched and shocked even the most excitable out there. Much as I claimed earlier, Blood and Wine contains enough content to be a small scale sequel; providing a hefty and epic main questline with a couple of fully branching quest choices, a huge gorgeous new world space that some even prefer over the main game's map, dozens upon dozens of sidequest hewn to the same high quality that every Witcher 3 Side quest is, countless great characters, a brand new home management system, more new monsters and armour sets than the first expansion had and, of course, a deeply personal finale scene for fans who had followed Geralt's story all this way.

But the ultimate triumph here I think steps beyond the undeniable quality of the DLC itself, and it's unassailable successes; the context paints a broad brush too. Note that CDPR were already riding high from the sudden fame of the being the big developers on the block after the whirlwind success of Wild Hunt. They were getting all humble, sending out thanks and receiving congratulations for all their hard work, kissing babies, the whole nine yards. Then they turn around and surpass even themselves by showing up the industry which had exploited and abused DLC practices for so very long. We always like to talk about Oblivion's Horse Armour, but slightly more relevant to the moment of The Witcher 3's heyday; people were still seething over the way that the 'From Ashes' DLC for Bioware's Mass Effect 3, contained a plot important companion and was exorcized from the main game to be sold as DLC on day 1 of release! I think that they even tried to lie about having made the entire companion, from scratch, in the space between the game going gold and launch. And that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to DLC practises.

It seems almost quaint to imagine a time when the biggest gripes about gaming microtransactions were tied around this DLC feeling rushed, that DLC having it's content split into several chapters, this other DLC literally containing the game's ending (Asura's Wrath and Prince of Persia Remake) and the classic: every Fallout 4 DLC being $10 too expensive. (Including the 5$ ones. They should have paid me to play that godawful non-functional 'Wasteland Workshop' trash.) Yet here was a game which already overdelivered in it's base product, offering a steal of a price for a whole other's games worth of content. It was unreal. And the adulation that fell upon that meagre studio might very well be what inflated their egos enough to think they could brag their way into Cyberpunk 2077 being the game they sold it as, rather than the one it ultimately is. (Ah it always comes back around to Cyberpunk, doesn't it? What a world.)

Most have settled on the reality that just as the Wild Hunt raised the bar of expectation when it came to RPG games, 'Blood and Wine' raised the bar when it came to expansions; but I think that something of the opposite is true. I think that the example set by 'Blood and Wine' has proven to be so galling it might have sunk the DLC sub-industry altogether. I mean think about titles since then that have dropped big DLCs and then consider how many have even attempted to come close to what 'Blood and Wine' did. Outside of MMO content expansions or Live Service overhauls; there really hasn't been a successor. The only one who is trying to match that hill of excellence, who almost seemed doomed to crash into it at this point, is CDPR themselves. So celebrate the success of 'Blood and Wine' by drinking its bounties deeply- it might just be the greatest and last of it's kind.

Poppy's Movie deal

 The Horse hasn't even woken up yet.

Don't you just love it when media unexpectedly goes cross platform without any indication whatsoever and you're left wondering if this was ever a sensible decision ever? Isn't just a magical moment to find out that a video game is headed straight for the silver screen, or the small screen, and all we can do is grind our nails praying that they don't mess things up too bad? It's just a bundle of fUn. It's like Schrödinger's Jack-in-the-box with a light stick of dynamite added in the equation, we all know what's coming is going to a surprise, probably a unpleasant one, but we just have to wait and see if its going to blow up in everyone's face. On one hand we could end up with a beautiful disaster like Netflix's DeathNote adaptation, or we could end up with something unwatchable like the eye-wateringly boring, now comes with sex scenes, Halo Paramount show. But here's a question, where exactly on that scale do you think a prospective Poppy movie would wind up?

That's 'Poppy's Playtime' if you didn't know. That bare basic horror game crafted by a studio of Youtube Minecraft parody animators which, most crucially of all, isn't actually a completed product yet. Although that initial 'game' might have seemed like a tech-demo, what with the only interesting part of it being the animation of the 'Huggy Wuggy' doll, with the entire rest of this experience being a mostly generic atmospheric walking simulator. But if you've hung around the horror indie scene for the last few years you should have known where this was going. The game picks up some traction and so this idea which only really had legs for a single story suddenly balloons into something episodic just like 'Bendy and the Ink Machine', 'Fears to Fathom' and 'Hello Neighbour'. (Kind of- with the way that the Alphas all built up a mystery for the full release to totally sink.) So episode 2 of Poppy is actually out already, but does that warrant a movie deal?

No. Obviously not. Why would anyone in their right mind consider Poppy's Playtime ripe ground for a franchise when it's narrative promise is so held up by genre tropes that the developers are bumping heads with the clouds? I'll tell you why; because it's popular. Say what you will about MOB games, but they are absolutely not in this industry for the love of the game and make no illusion about that for us. The second their initial episode tech-demo thing started to pick up that slightest whiff of traction, the steam coals of 'industry' started burning and the world was up to it's ankles in merchandising. Cuddly plush toys, Tees and hoodies, Posters, an enamel pin set, three Youtooz's, and if you're really lucky you might have snatched up one of their super exclusive NFTs. Yes, MOB games reached into the pits of hell and fashioned NFTs out of 'the sins of the damned' in order to squeeze money out of these 10 minutes of fame. Of course they're going to be seeking a movie deal!

Remember how lethargic the movie industry is, always greenlighting projects whilst the development schedule is already several years backed up, requiring existing dockets to be totally revised, projects pushed forward and back, and ideas that are popular today getting their movie years after the moment has gone. Remember the Slenderman movie? That came out in 2018. Five Nights at Freddy's got into negotiations for a movie so long ago that since then the franchise has forgone numbered entries altogether, development has moved to an actual full-blown studio and Scott Cawthorn as been cancelled for questionable real-life decisions that he deflected with all the wit and intelligence of a Kardashian spawn. The world has totally moved on from FNAF, and we're still waiting on that, no doubt awful, movie. Maybe by securing their movie deal now, at the cusp of their fame, MOB are hoping the thing might enter actual production by the time the game disappoints with it's final episode and interest starts leaking out of the franchise like through a sieve. (Not to get ahead of myself, but I've seen this back and forth before; it's a bit of a forgone conclusion.)

But what movie studio is involved with this anyway? Who have MOB games managed to enthral with the promise of easy movie riches? Beloved company Studio71 of cou- who the hell is Studio71? Well they don't have a wiki page and their website makes me feel ill to look at; but for what I could bare to glimpse at before I spent the next hour doubled over the toilet being violently sick, they sort of look like an influencer management firm. At least that's what I can ascertain from their website banner touting influencer-themed accolades such as '1# US Youtube Partner in Minutes Watched', '18,000+ channels with 13b+ monthly views' and '500+ advertising partners'. Which says to me that these people have absolutely no connection with any movie studio of worth and are either high-profile middle men that felt the need to put out a press statement regarding the project (which would be pretty out of the norm for middle men) or they're looking for a little bit of lateral business growth with this virginal foray into professional movie producing. (Everyone's gotta start somewhere.)

With that context this 'movie deal' at least makes a bit more sense. I couldn't imagine anyone in Hollywood taking a chance on something that isn't a transcendental success just yet and which is unfinished, but a company with a foot in the Influencer world is going to better understand the potential of a currently purely online audience and the need to strike while the iron is hot for flash-in-the-pan trends like this 'franchise', not to sound callous, probably will be. Remember that at the heart of Poppy's Playtime is just a play on the 'evil toys from defunct toy company' archetype from FNAF and Bendy, only with less nuance. Which doesn't mean the concept can't become something more of it's own with enough care and effort put into growing this world out some more, but MOB games literally tried to start a NFT brand in order to package the lore bit 'Mommy is coming' to paying fans. I don't think they've got some undiscovered junior Shakespeare locked up in the writing room waiting to turn this game into his opus.

The way I see it, this is going to be a slapdash rush job to try and hit all the profitability vertices at once and get out while the going's good. I don't forsee any long storied history for this franchise to compete with likes of FNAF, that isn't the style of this team anyway. Remember that these guys make their living as Minecraft animators who typically parody FNAF characters in MC format,(occasionally with suggestive thumbnails) they're about chasing trends rather than building legacies. I have a bitter sort of respect for a grind like that, it's about as honest as it is distasteful to some. And I have to be frank, I kind of want to see the sort of trainwreck which is going to come out of a cheap screamo horror movie born from inexperienced producers working with nothing but matchsticks and pleasant dreams. This might just be such a disaster it's worth watching!

Unfortunately they missed the moment to hire Nicholas Cage to be in their movie. He already made it into a cheap FNAF rip-off movie so that eclectic talent probably won't have time for the 'indie horror game becomes movie' scene twice. But every actor has to have a morbid curiosity for the doomed to fail somewhere deep down, right? I propose that Studio71 drums up some of the copious monetary funds they're racked in from those supposed 'more than half a thousand' advertisers they work with, and sink it into getting a big face- (I'm talking Pedro Pascal, Tom Holland- oh! I bet they could pick up Amber Heard pretty cheap these days!) and utterly embarrass them on screen with a trainwreck production that is totally belittling to their talent. It would be a harmless prank that everyone wins from; Poppy gets it's obligatory bad movie, big name actor X gets a suitable pay day and the audience get to come away with 'I can't believe they were in a movie like that!'. I've already given you your basic gameplan Studio71; hit me up and I'd be happy to go the next step and line out a script and everything!

Starfield drifts off to 2023

 Another year of waiting

As we get trucking along into 2022, we're getting to the point where a lot of those straggling games that managed to avoid the past two years due to complications are finally getting to the point where they're nearing competition. Gotham Knights is nearing a date and looking worse off for it, the new Saints Row is getting closer to it's current release date, heck we might even see Cyberpunk DLC this year; but if there's one thing we won't be seeing, it's a Bethesda title. Okay, I suppose that isn't technically fair. We already know that Bethesda have rented out their very own E3-type conference in the near future in which it's highly likely that they're going to show off some gameplay for something upcoming, maybe even drag out Todd to say something positive about TES VI development only for us to learn 4 years later that he was lying and the game currently only has a handful of preliminary assets reserved for it. But we won't be getting an Bethesda game this year, and that's going to be a tough pill to swallow.

I've made no secret about my lack of interest in Starfield so far. The game lost me when I found out it was sci-fi instead of Sci-fantasy and whilst the creative eye of some of the concepts looks imaginative and impressively grand, I'm familiar enough with Bethesda concept art to know that the final imagining is invariably going to be a disappointment. (Just look at what they did with Fallout 4's Mama Murphy. Square Enix, they are not.) But I'm always happy to be proven wrong and I want Bethesda to win me over with their inbound presentation. But you know what I want even more than that? For the game itself to follow swiftly after like they teased they wanted to do more of when Fallout 4 launched. Remember? When the only game they managed to pull the 'announce than launch' trick with after that was Fallout 76, a game in desperate need of more development? Well it seems Starfield was going that exact direction from the sound of things.

I believe the term mined from the internal teams to describe the state of development was 'The next Cyberpunk', which tells a damning account of the legacy that game has had to the nightmares of prospective developers out there. (Make sure to finish all your greens, or the Cyberpunk will come and ruin your game!) To be fair, they couldn't have become the next Cyberpunk unless they spent several weeks in a concerted effort to push marketing material that sold the game as something it wasn- oh, is that what we're about to be getting later this year? Yeah, then I can see why they delayed it. Of course, with this delay also comes the pushing back of Redfall, but if there's a single person out there which even remembered that game existed I'd eat my hat. A vampire game which isn't 'Vampire: The Masquerade'? Why even bother?

To be clear, I am happy that Bethesda are cognisant enough of their own development to be able to identify when a project is heading towards ecological disaster and needs a relief effort. Especially given that they proved woefully inadequate of wielding that exact foresight in the past. Launching a brand new IP is a big deal for a company like Bethesda who've stuck rigidly to their two meal tickets for the best part of the last decade, and making sure this new series launches right and doesn't end up as another 'Anthem' is a prudent philosophy to adopt. Many other companies have played out exactly what happens to the bullish who rush their budding train wrecks out the door and, spoiler alert, it never works out for them. It used to just wreck their reputation and threaten to harm sales of their next game, but nowadays I'm happy to report it often tanks sales of the afflicted game too, according to COD: Vanguard's figures! (Although Cyberpunk was immune, of course. There's always the exceptions.)

Yet even as I accept and acknowledge it, I have difficulties swallowing the delay when we think about what it means in the bigger picture. This means another studio purchased by Microsoft for the sole intention of providing XBOX with exclusives to compete with Sony, is going to hold off on delivering for another year. This is getting embarrassing now. Midway through the last generation Microsoft started talking a big game about racking up first party studios to shift the power balance, and it has achieved absolutely nothing for them so far. All they've got is delayed games and one total development hell trainwreck studio called 'The Initiative'. Hardly the Avengers of game development like they bigged up all those years previously.

Sony on the otherhand? They're looking at 'God of War: Ragnarok', Final Fantasy XVI, Spider Man 2, Marvel's Wolverine, Knights of the Old Republic Remake, and so on. Not all of those are due for 2022, admittedly, but they're set in stone guaranteed hits for Playstation, whilst Xbox just has smoke and bitter promises. What have they got coming up? Scorn? Been in development for an eon, we can hardly just any prospective guesses at it when that's coming. STALKER 2? Indefinitely delayed for obvious reasons. The Outer Worlds 2? Oh yes, can't wait for a sequel to one of the RPGs ever made! Space Marine 2? Okay, that one does look good, I'll admit. State of Decay 3? Those games are never quite all they could be; making them serial disappointments. Or how about Fable 4? The next entry in a series of games that fans can't decide if they even like or not. Like the equivalent of the 'Sonic' fandom for the Xbox fanboys, no one really knows what the players want and so this new entry could end up being anyone's guess.

The 'competition' is a joke. There is no competition here. Mircosoft has all the money in the world to throw around acquiring billion dollar studios, but for the life of them they can't squeeze any nuggets of gold out of them. Whilst in the meanwhile the Sony studios are cranking out banger after banger that are piling up so much that PlayStation are slowly deigning to offer PC players the table scraps franchises they can't be bothered to hoard anymore. "Days Gone? Yeah I guess you can have that, no one really went crazy for that game anyway." "Death Stranding? Pretty controversial. Sure, take it." "Persona 5? Nah, I think that game still has some legs on us. You can have the direct sequel, I'll keep the RPG." Yes, Sony will continue serving as villains in my mental delusions until they give me access to Persona 5- I'll accept no concessions on this matter.

So cast off all of your hopes and ambitions of a fair console war. We're not there, and we likely never will be. In their lack of competition, complacency is allowing some of the less amiable tendencies of the Sony supremacy to shine through. $70 for current gen games? You want to feed that to me and tell me I deserve it? Don't even dribble out that utter gibberish about "making up for frozen inflation", you insult your own intelligence and ours by even conceiving such rot! And where's Sony's competitors showing them up for this poor behaviour? Microsoft is nowhere and Nintendo is preoccupied with it's own unapologetic schemes to bleed its audience dry. So my message: Get your damn act together Microsoft, you're letting the entire industry down.

Dark Pictures Anthology is ending soon...

 His Dark Materials to create

Supermassive Games were, to be blunt, massive when the Dark Pictures Anthology was first announced. I mean, they weren't at the height of their fame perhaps. Their biggest moment was probably riding the high off of the first big title of theirs, Until Dawn; a game which pretty much captured the entire world for a brief time. You couldn't go on the Internet for half a minute without seeing some playthrough or impressions video or just people lauding the fidelity of the thing, it was the height of graphical prowess for it's time, afterall. That was the tallest point of this roller coaster no doubt. Then they did a game called Hidden Agenda, which is probably the single most expensive video party game ever developed, and which featured the shocking twist that the single most suspicious person in the game was actually the perpetrator! I literally did the 'nah, it can't be that obvious!'. Then there was the VR game which was pretty good but hardly anyone played it because it was a VR game- and maybe it's safe to say they fell off a little for their highs.

But when Dark Pictures was announced it was met with a rush of enthusiasm from people who wanted more of that Until Dawn style of high quality interactive story horror games where random choices butterfly out into dead cast members before you even know what's going on. Dark Pictures Anthology was going to deliver exactly that, for several completely standalone unique adventures all boasting a cast of stunningly realistic models and at least one big famous face to sweeten the pot. Different locations, new casts, all horror; it was the ideal Until Dawn dream come true. And now we're on the tail end of this little experiment with the finale coming out in the very near future, has it all lived up to the hype that fans built for it?

Firstly I should point out that whilst Supermassive are marketing this as the end of the 'season' for DPA, this series has been going on for the past 4 years, so we can see more as a freezing of development so that the team can actually do something else before they end up going nuts thinking up ways for Teenagers to die. I can't imagine anyone slapping together fan pages in anticipation for season 2 if indeed the team are looking to go the multiple season routes; not many people can dedicate a sustained fandom for a franchise that lasts nearly half a decade per season! Let's look at this as a finale of everything that has been built up to for right now, and so if there's anything that still needs to be said in the overall metanarrative seeped into these games, it should probably be said around about now-ish.

Man of Medan was the first of these horror anthology pieces, and I was ecstatic for it. Heck, I was so swept up that I went out and researched the real-life story of the Ourang Medan for a blog on the subject! And I wasn't the only one, the lazy coals of pop culture heated back up for the drop of Man of Medan, and a swarm of personalities and folk who road the wave of Until Dawn rocked up for what they believed to be Until Dawn 2. Now inherently that was unfair, this wasn't going to be as fleshed out of an experience as that game was due to the nature of this episodic venture, but such is the whim of that beast called hype- she flies where she dares, damn the wind. And when it dropped, so too did a torrent of Youtube walkthroughs and reactions. So what did they think?

It was alright. Yes, the air in the balloon just sort of deflated a bit there didn't it? Which is sort of the way that the fandom felt on the tail-end of everything. The character's felt kind of bland, the situation was promising at first but sort of fizzled out pretty quickly and the endings weren't satisfying; but it all looked really good! I wouldn't call Man of Medan the perfect follow-up to Until Dawn, but it was still probably the best the team could pull together for an entire horror story truncated into such a small and digestible runtime. It felt like a narrative in a bit of a rush, and it suffered for that; but these guys had to pump out one of these a year, that was going to be a consequence. Still people came this way expecting something to the scale of Until Dawn and came away severely disappointed. 

Then came Little Hope, a story which promised to delve into Salem and witches and time-bending curses but which turned into... something else. I cover it in a bit of detail here, but long story short I hated Little Hope. It was another 'pull the rug' style plot in the same one the first was, but this time it was performed in such a way that it almost felt like a convenient get-out-of-the-narrative-block-I-just-wrote-us-into, rather than a culmination of all the story elements which at least Man of Medan had going for it. Hell, the whole time-travel plotline ended up going absolutely nowhere and the ultimate resolution might have worked in a longer form of this plot, but felt way to hammy and performative here.

And most recently came 'House of Ashes', a story not involving teens and telling of an ancient secret hidden in the middle of a warzone which the characters become unwittingly embroiled in. We and the community might have our disagreements about Little Hope, (People seem to think it was better than Man of Medan: They're deluded) but I think the general consensus is that House of Ashes is easily the best of the Anthology so far. The characters felt like they had a path of development laid out in front of them, the setting had some legs to it and didn't conform with your absolute typical horror-plot and it's the first story in the entire Anthology that commits to its premise! They didn't do the Horror-movie (and it was all a dream) style resolution which only horror movies can get away with, and it served the replay value well. On Metacritic it's the only episode to break into the 70's, and that feels deserved. Of course, that doesn't rub with the high 70's and 80's of Until Dawn, but it's a decent protégé for a story delivery vector that no longer has it's 'niche' value.

Scrap by scrap and year after year, The Dark Picture Anthology has slowly been gaining more internet traffic overtime, and their overall scores (and presumably sales) have been rising in kind. But the fervour of the Man of Medan hasn't quite translated over for some. The games are improving, crowds are increasing, but this isn't the yearly horror event I thought it was going to become and that feels like a shame given the effort which goes into making these. Right now there's but a single episode ahead of us and given the slightly more star-studded cast than usual I think it's clear that Supermassive intends to go out on a spectacle. Can this be the smash hit that Until Dawn was once again? There's a chance, as Supermassive improves their craft and their fanbase with each release it seems we're building to a perfect set-up for one huge goodbye blowout. And I really hope that is the case, because I have a feeling it's going to be quite a wait until their next project after this year...