Dead Cells Review

Lose your head.

Dead Cells is one of those games that you inevitably hear about as it bounces across the astrosphere raining it's prominence upon the gaming world, but which you never actually pull the trigger to pick up and try for yourself. I guess for someone like me, the sense that everyone else is playing the same game that I am is actually a little bit of a turn-off within my pretentious, main character syndrome, mind; in fact, I'm only now considering finally getting around to Cyberpunk 2077 for that very reason. In fact, the most that I ever knew of this game before diving into it was the whole situation with the IGN reviewer who 'accidentally' plagiarised some independent reviewer's article on the game. Now since that seems like such an easy way to get your work done, I would absolutely be down for doing the exact same thing but unfortunately I just don't have the verbose foundation to sell that illusion. Shame, I really would love to save myself a Saturday of work.

When I picked up Dead Cells it was with the entire package attached, because I always said to myself that when the time came to dive into this particular ocean, I would do so with the intention to experience everything the game has to offer in it's current state. That's because Dead Cells is, at it's heart, a Roguelite game where 'runs' through the core campaign are randomised in map layout, enemy density and, should you have the appropriate DLC, the biomes that you pick through on your journey through the island. Although, Dead Cells does keep it's adherence to some basic principles of design in order to promote the second side of it's dual-genre body- the castlevania framework. That's right, Dead Cells litters it's world with a few opportunities to improve one's movement set for the sake of being able to visit some previously unexplorable biomes or secret rooms with wall jumps or teleportation runes you can pick up. Quite a fascinating combination given the typical rigors that a Castlevania would demand and the relative free-form chaos that a Rougelite invites.

In it's gameplay, Dead Cells presents a surprisingly heavy-feeling combat platformer where the player is expected to find three styles of weapon to battle with- melee, ranged and a shield. This pairs with the dodge button to make a very basic but broadly applicable combat system of dodges, parries and slaps that most people will find instantly familiar if they've played any platformer or even a Souls game before. Speaking of Souls, Dead Cells' own RPG-like improvement system is based around randomly dropped 'Cell' spat out from slain enemies, or from bosses, or from special challenge doors between biomes that reward either passing through a level as quickly as possible or killing a certain amount of enemies without being hit. Reinforcing those types of playstyles for those who may not have even considered taking the game as 'fast-paced' or 'kill carefully'.

The Rougelite comes to play in the weapons and tools you pick up on each run that are selected from an ever expanding pool of items you'll find off drops, boss weapons and a large amount of cross-over weapons borrowed from a plethora of indie platformers from all over. Every single one of these weapons change up the gameplay significantly with unique attacks, effects and, yes, flavour text bonuses, rarities and levels for those who like that style of looting. Now I knew a decent chunk of this starting the game, but what I came to be utterly astounded by was the amount of seriously incredible platformers and indie games in general that Dead Cells has crossed over with in order to add some really cool meaningful items. It's more than just throwing in a little reference here or there, it's like the game has positioned itself as the Smash Bros of the indie space with the amount of connections they've made.

I was ecstatic to find the Pure Nail from Hollow Knight dropped from a wrought-iron bench lent from that game, just as I really enjoyed cosplaying as Slay The Spires' 'Ironclad' through just one of the several dozens of skins available in the game. Gordon Freeman's iconic outfit and Crowbar spawned in one of my runs, and the shrine from Blasphemous dropped a face-smashing flask from that universe to play around with. I am quite sad that the crossover item for Blasphemous wasn't 'Mea Culpa', but I suppose the team needs to make every item stand out as something special and unique in gameplay, not just for how it looks as a sprite. (I actually appreciate that design integrity.) And, of course, the most recent DLC for Dead Cells brings the 'Return to Castevania' crossover which not only introduces items from that legendary franchise into Dead Cells, but also new bosses, a whole new biome and a simply incredible remix of the iconic Super Castelvania IV track- Vampire Killer.

Yet through all of it's crossovers, Dead Cells manages to retain a decently consistent high quality pixel palette style that compliments well with the popping colours of differing biomes and enemy types and weapon effects to create an aesthetically pleasing game. Even the crossover games items don't clash when slightly redesigned to work within Dead Cells art style, further cementing the game's curious point as a nexus meeting pinon from which all other franchises connect. In fact, the only visual problem I have with the game is from the vanilla main bosses, all three of which carry the same visual theming which not only doesn't gel with their chosen biomes, but which stands out in their 3D models in a manner I would honestly describe as a little ugly. Every other boss the game has added since is more thematically appropriate and interestingly designed in general, but I wonder why the core route never got a redesign.

Perhaps that might tie back subconsciously to the somewhat flippant relationship that Dead Cells maintains with it's own narrative. Our hero, the Beheaded, seems to be something of a detached protagonist from the relatively grim kingdom brought to it's knees by Malaise and the draconian measures of a king out of his depth. He communicates only through thoughts and hand gestures, with those gestures mostly being comically rude or upbeat and his thoughts on lore snippets discovered between runs typically being light-hearted or pithy. It's a cuddly way to approach a world like this and one that is definitely of it's own style- but I won't lie to you and say that I like it. Personally, I'm more a fan of the platformer titles that treat themselves with a degree of seriousness that allows me to get immersed within that world, but it's much more this team's style to wink at the camera and tell a joke. But to each their own, I relent- I know somebody would find this style of narrative endearing.

As with any run-based game, Dead Cells is designed from the ground up to be replayable and not just through the randomness of map spawning and layouts. There are special Boss Stem Cells earned by beating final bosses which make the game harder and introduces new enemies, (And even a true final ending down the line apparently) the DLC add totally distinct routes with their own bosses to contend with and it's actually impossible to experience everything in a single run through of the game. For this Dead Cells situates itself with so much content to keep a player occupied, with daily runs and boss rushes to throw in there as well, that the game can easily serve as one of those titles you keep installed for years to come and throw on whenever you're doing something else for a quick under-one-hour run. Not because the game has you tied to it through some daily reward system, but because you want to see how far you can get exploring some far corner of the game that you've never touched before. That's what a forever-style game should feel like to play.

Summary

Dead Cells is a supremely robust and polished Rougelite Metroidvania action platformer that knows exactly what it is and revels in being just that to the best of it's ability. It presents fantastic gameplay variety, biome + enemy diversity and miscellaneous activites to keep the player always hooked doing something. I can see in this game a gem that has been cut over years of love-stricken development to remove every lingering impurity from the gleam and leave a near perfect gem. At this point I honestly think that the only holdups the game still has are stylistic decisions that differ from what I would have preferred, but not in a manner significant enough to detract from what is a wholly spectacular package. Action platformer lovers and rougelite fans: you need to play this game. Metroidvania diehards may find the very nature of the constantly regenerating world a little less appealing. Lionized off my first complete run-through, which even then just feels like scratching the surface of this game, I'm happy giving Dead Cells a whole hearted A Grade on my arbitrary scoring scale for being a fantastic example of a genre pinnacle.  I genuinely hope this title remains a touchstone of indie gaming for many more years to come, because the industry needs more monoliths like this representing it's best.

Dead Island 2 looks... good?

 Well I'll be...

Wait, no- you can't do this to me. I literally wrote an extended blog about the inescapable dangers of Development Hell the other day, and here comes a game I was absolutely certain would be a gorey and bile-strewn victim of that ravenous death hound but here we are- I may have to eat crow. And you know what- a game that looks wildly better than my meagre expectations is always a great turn of circumstance very much worth celebrating, especially when we're talking about a sequel to a game 'franchise' I was done with before the first game finished. A sequel who's gameplay reveal had ended up blowing my socks clean off with the kind of detail and attention you'd never expect from a video game currently on it's third development reboot! Deep Silver passed this game off more than an unloved child between relatives, but it seems Uncle Dambuster is the golden foster here to bring the best out of the ugly duckling and turn it into a truly gruesome goose- and frankly, I'm wildly impressed.

Given the amount of generalised improvements we've seen make their way into this higher tier of zombie game, I shouldn't be quiet as impressed as I am everytime I've seen a 'flesh and blood' system-but I can't help it, I don't know when these systems are going to start to grow old but they sure aren't there for me yet. I still gawp with grim fascination when I see Resident Evil 2 Remake's dynamic gore system which built flesh ontop of a skeleton so that bullet defamation worked exactly as it should on the zombies. Dead Space Remake had a very similar innovation with how it's Necromorphs were built, which worked particularly well with that game's focus on mechanically coherent dismemberment. Now we have Dead Island 2 bringing it's own take on these same systems which look to be fitted with some extra pizzazz features like the ability to break jaws clean off, or smash the face plate off a monster in a special uppercut move. It's gruesome in all the greatest ways a zombie game can be.

When Dead Island 2 was first announced all those years ago, (verging on ten if I recall) it was just going to be a lukewarm expansion on what the first game and Riptide had offered with the only real innovation being the larger setting of LA. Which itself would have been something of a misleadingly sweet fruit, because anyone who has played this series before knows that these games haven't exactly been the best when it comes to properly exploring their settings. The first act of the first game was fine, seeing the huts of the resort, but then we were sent to a packed city which led us through cramped alleyways and trudging down ugly sewers, or a jungle that felt more like a half-baked maze level with the walls swapped for tropical trees. I actually don't know how long Dambuster have been working on this current iteration of the game, but it seems they haven't veered too far away from that 'directed and linear' formula; which means that if this game cannot rely on an 'open world exploration' gimmick to sell it's units (Dying Light pretty deftly nicked that crown anyway) then it would have to the moment-to-moment gameplay that makes Dead Island stick out.

From the recent gameplay it really seems that the team have buckled down and really gone to task with finetuning that part of the experience, creating not only an array of killing implements but imbuing them with collaborative effects that can work off the environment, (i.e. electrocuting water, setting fire to oil trails, blowing up gas canisters) another gameplay ideal I love in modern gaming which goes overlooked so very often. It feels as though Dead Island 2 wants to capture the crown of the game where it's fun to jump about as a murder hurricane and slice through zombies in the most creatively in-your-face manner as possible; a status-quo which I think can grow stale quickly without an abundance of variety to combat, or a reason to stick around for the world and narrative that immerses you in the grim task.

Dead Island 1 famously suffered from huge tone issues thanks to one trailer for which the marketing team went absolutely nuts and decided to film a heart-wrenching family tragedy in slow motion reverse shots; totally adverse to the happy-go-lucky crush-a-monster-with-a-tennis-racket nature of the game in question. The tone of the built game was supposed to be like Dead Rising, but what we ended up seeing was a Walking Dead drama with piano music and dramatic slow-mo for effect! This wouldn't have been such a problem if that trailer didn't then go viral, which resulted in the development team getting an order from the head office to retrofit their almost finished game into being more like that dramatically wrenching trailer. It's hard to say exactly what effect that late-game change in tone had, but I can only assume that certain tonally bizarre plot shifts, like what happens to Jin after she gets kidnapped by the gang, came as a result of the darker splash atop the completed narrative.

But I have to be honest, unlike one of those pearl-clutching fainters who write for a lot of the games review outlets online, I actually cherish and applaud games when they break across the barrier of the comfortable to address topics you'd never have expected. The Voerman Sisters from Vampire the Masquerade are iconic and not just because Jeanette dresses like that. (Or because Grey Griffin voice them, although her performances are always iconic.) They are a perfect representation of the World of Darkness because of their horrifically twisted origin story that is born within the forgotten and discarded of society, and scars itself onto your psyche painting the sort of broken people who can expect to meet throughout the world of VTMB. I don't think Dead Island ever got that dark with it's story, but they flirted with that direction and I really liked that daring. In combination with the silly elements it actually gave Dead Island a somewhat uniquely uneven tone.

From the looks of it however, even when it comes down to the marketing, Dead Island 2 has much more interest in being a light-hearted Dead Rising style game. But then, even Dead Rising had it's intense moments. (But lightly intense. 'Capcom intense' if you will. Weenie-hut-junior compared to the where Dead Island looked like it might be heading.) I wonder if perhaps that may be something of a smokescreen to obscure some equally as break-neck screech turns into the troubling and disturbed, or just an honest to goodness regression to a style of game that the team can feel comfortable in- wowing people on the basis of pure spectacle rather more so than in the dark minds of the narrative designers. (Personally, I don't know why we can't have both.)

Dead Island 2 has really cemented the fact for me that there really will never be a zombie movie or TV show that will be able to match games on terms of spectacle ever again. Video games totally and unreachably tower above anything that movie makers can feasibly do and can juggle their content better to fit the sensibilities of whichever audience they're approaching too. Whilst no one can sit here and tell you that the game we're seeing is destined to completely revolutionise zombie games as we know it, because I see no evidence of that level of supremacy in any footage we've seen, I think there's an argument to be made that this may just be one of the better titles from this genre ever released, which is insane to say after the mistakes that Dying Light 2, the sequel to the game that effectively leaped over the original Dead Island, made. I really am starting to believe in the undead magic of virtual Hollywood again- praise, Vecna!

Starfield is delayed... again

Well... shucks.

What is in a deadline? Hopes? Dreams? Ambitions? I'm really curious, because it seems that out of all the entertainment mediums we see trounce about within the world, gaming is the most given to pushing back their final release date at that time you feel like you're sitting on the home stretch. Remember that Cyberpunk did this only a couple of months before their launch? Although to be fair, that turned out to be a warning for a game that was no where near the state it needed to be in to satisfy the breadth of it's audience. How many movies can you think of that get pushed back by half a year out of nowhere? Aside from the actual un-releasable train wrecks, or those prolonged franchises, I don't think there's a culture like that at all in the movie making business. Deadlines are this immutable, unshifting, monster that must be met and won't back down for anyone or anything.

Of course, nobody is going to be more devastated about having to push back the game than Bethesda themselves. Not only has the company been very open about their utmost wish to reduce the amount of time between announcement and release- in hopes of really capturing that lighting of the reveal moment: We've seen perhaps the biggest possible culmination of this philosophy in the game they literally just published: Hi Fi Rush. Tango Gameworks' break from the norm which was released within the same hour that is was first unveiled to the world. With a clear direction like that present for the all the world to see, you just know that the entire team of department heads must have been biting their lips to nubs before admitting that Starfield just wasn't going to be in the place it needed to be for the launch day. Which, to be fair, is better to realise now then several weeks after it's in the hands of the public.

Starfield is, afterall, a break into a new IP the likes of which Bethesda hasn't done for more than two console generations at this point. And it's a game that comes after a string of less than Steller launches, (not including the Skyrim Re-release they snuck in there) so yet another spotty launch window was likely not an option. Still it is pretty frustrating that Bethesda seem nervous enough about the state of a game, that all the world seems standoffish on, to the point where they'll kneejerk delay the thing during what should be the home run of marketing. I know that for me it at least starts ringing some alarm bells that maybe the ol' Open World kings might have bitten off more than they can chew with the hundred visit-able worlds and the customisable flyable ship and the mod support and all those hallmarks we expect with a Bethesda title of yore.

I've not been very quiet about the fact that I consider Starfield to be a side-ways step in the development of Bethesda as developers and storycrafters. I think that a straight science-fiction world seems like a waste of creative fuel for a company that seems to excel best writing high fantasy and cramming those skills into the other projects that they make. I really wanted a cool Sci-Fantasy space adventure with twisted aliens popping with crazy lore and silly powers- what we're getting instead feels fundamentally flat-footed and bland. I think the presented story hook they're dangling from the reveal trailers is honestly bad, as far as open world storytelling goes, sounding more like a blunt fishing hook than an interwoven series of embedded arrows pointing you towards a larger mystery. And with every moment that Starfield prolongs itself, my scepticism grows.  

I also find it quite curious that Todd Howard presented this not as a delay but as if this is the first time the Starfield release window has ever been discussed, and it isn't. Don't know why the guy feels the need to be a little cagey about that, but then who is Todd Howard with an unhealthy sprinkle of lying in his grand overtures? In the window that would have seen the game release we will instead be getting an 'direct' into the particulars of Starfield, but even that hasn't really gotten me too excited as almost every glimpse of the game we've got up until now has come with an equal amount of studio footage of Todd or someone from the team talking about the philosophy behind each design step and justifying it, which is great for a 'behind the scenes' video but in this build-up-stage rubs me a little as though the developers aren't confident enough in the footage they've put together to speak for itself.

But I am a consummate worrier when it comes to these sorts of things because I've been burnt by the industry just so many times of late. Bethesda were once so lock-step with the sorts of experiences that I was seeking out of my gaming time but recently it's felt more and more as though they've slipped into an entirely different audience demographic that aggressively precludes me. Just as Bioware have slowly being doing ever since the days of Dragons Age Origins- I'm feeling like the adult at a teenagers birthday party wondering where all the like-minded thinkers got to. And, of course, that has been what's led me to other sub divisions of RPGs, to the classics of the genre and back around to JRPGs. The genres that have never let me down. Maybe Bethesda just aren't making games for people like me anymore and that's something I have to accept.

Of course, alternatively Starfield is the launch back to form that I've yearned for out of the Bethesda team and I'm splitting hairs about a game I just need to play to get. And I suppose in a way my feelings on the game pretty much track with the exact sort of scepticism that Bethesda are trying to avoid by truncating their announcement-to-release strategy. I wasn't much feeling the game when it was announced, my worries got swept aside when the game was first shown off and in the moments since the excitement has worn off and the worries remain. Bethesda want to capture that sweet spot when buyers are at the height of their excitement before the mental blockers that defend their wallets kicks back into action. And I can definitely understood that squeamishness what with everything I'm going through as fan right now.

Starfield is going to come our way at the late-year deadline of September 2023, capturing the Christmas period and wrestling for attention alongside the other heavy hitters who typically occupy that month. Although Bethesda does have a tendency to take the air out of the room so maybe it's them who need to start considering their surroundings in the months to come. (Like that Robocop game that was just delayed until September! Uh oh- Officer Murphy might be walking into a second massacre!) With it will come a brand new chapter where I think Bethesda will get it's last chance to prove it's still got something special to be part of the 'cool' crowd, and don't quite deserve their reservation to the 'ol fogey developer' club that they've been temporarily placed in of yet. I certainly want to believe that Bethesda still has some pep in it's step so I'll be rooting for them, not least of all because I want Elder Scrolls VI to rock as much as V did!

When did Pokemon become a Live Service?

Did I blink?

I suppose it should be something of a public service announcement to say it out loud if you've not read it before, but owners of the latest generation of Pokémon games should immediately put down the controller and leave the game dormant for the foreseeable future whilst Nintendo try to solve a problem that is hard-corrupting saves. Yes, apparently the most recent update to the game in order to add a 'please pre-order the DLC' button to all of the ingame menus, carried with it a 'worst case scenario bug' which is effecting a bunch of people with sporadically different triggers. I've been lucky enough to avoid it by now but I'm not going to risk picking it back for nobody. Then again, the saying does go "Unlucky in love, lucky in cards", so knowing my luck I'd probably be fine going on a straight 24 hour bender until the next update drops. Although I've heard something quite curious from those unlucky souls out there who did land on 'snake eyes' with their save files. They bemoan the loss of countless hours of work they put into getting all the Pokémon and shinies in their deck.

Work is the word they use, not 'playtime', not 'amateur zoologist try-outs'; these people consider the collation of the Pokédex they want, the collection of the tournament-fit fighters that they need or the collection of shinies they desire, as being akin to work. And to their small credit, for most of these people that is actually a totally reasonable equation to make. Some of these people are talking losing Sixty shines with their corrupted saves! SIXTY! Bear in mind that Pokémon Home isn't open to Scarlet and Violet yet, meaning all of those shines had to have been caught in bred in the few months since these games came out. And also bear in mind, that Scarlet and Violet gutted the ability to effectively breed on the hunt for shinies. (I can only assume that such a man has possess no job or hobbies or family or even legs, and thus only play Pokémon all day.) But that verbiage there; of playing a game so often it's pretty much akin to a second job- there's only genre of game that really evokes those sorts of feelings that I can think of.

Live Services have since the very beginning of their existence been an investment as much in your time as your money. They are titles usually put together with less content than you'd hope for out of your typical fully finished video game, but stretched out so painfully thin through level-gating, intentionally grindy level curves and overly big boss bars to make that small pool of content last long enough for the devs to cook up some new content and slip it out the door before the community is done and dusted with the original lot of stories and missions. A philosophy likely borne to mimic the MMO cycle, but to a much easier to replicate degree. These are games that require daily commitments for grinding to get the things that you want, to roll the die for the right weapon drops, grind out enough currency to spend at the premium shop or simply unlock the newest level cap before the next update shoots that cap into the stratosphere. Does any of that sound familiar?

All of the Pokémon games have been time investments in order to reach the feasible 'completion' point of the game and collect all the available monsters listed within the Pokédex. But I have to admit that recently there really has been a trend towards stretching out content to last longer and this most recent generation in particular has even had it's hand at Live Service-style adding of content. I've already mentioned how the egg system has been gutted, but EV training is just as painful with there being no decent way to grind berries. So Tournament building is unnecessarily bloated. (Sword and Shield, with the Isle of Armor, is still the best game for building Tournament ready Pokémon in.) And the main quest of Scarlet and Violet does stretch on for an inordinate amount of time for a Pokémon game; almost in the manner that a Live Service game might with it's storylines. But I think the biggest smoking gun comes from the new raid system.

Itself an evolution on Sword and Shield's Dynamax raids; Scarlet and Violet offers a collaborative dungeon system where players can meet up over the internet to fight giant powerful Pokémon and be rewarded with a chance to catch that Pokémon after the fact. There's less 'collector' reasons to do so now because this generation's gimmick is kind of visually underwhelming compared to last generation's, but the special promoted dens that Gamefreak cycles in and out do provide some fantastically built Pokémon to snatch up. But recently Gamefreak went that one step further, by debuting two version exclusive brand spanking new Legendary Paradox Pokémon that can only be caught in these raids. Essentially a lightning bolt call to action summoning fans back to the game as any Live Service might by debuting a new raid or dungeon. (You know, just with considerably less effort on the developer's side, because this is Gamefreak we're talking about here.)

The typical cycle of a Live Service game revolves around these calls to action that summons the audience back to their stables, because through this electricity bump the developers and publishers can ensure player retention and increase player's conviction and devotion to the game. The more players become devoted, the more they're likely to spend on some of the microtransactions to keep the game going. Now, Pokémon has yet to introduce any form of microtransactions (Thank god) however we can see a similarity in that basic approach to recurrent customers if we take the scope of the model and expand it out to a franchise-wide view. From here, it's very clear that Pokémon games have actually been on the Live Service train of development for quite a while now, perhaps ever since the very first sequel before even the concept of the Live Service wyrm was a glint in it's mother's postman's eye.

Pokémon games have always boasted about their 'Poke Bank' service which allows monsters to be transferred from game to game, essentially tying the progression of each game into one continuous train regardless of narrative consistency. This alone provides a throughline from which the developers can pull players time and time again to the 'action' of buying the latest Pokémon game in order to interact with their favourite monsters. Adding new Pokémon with each generation simply encourages achievers to work on building their collection, killer archetype players will want to maintain their best Pokémon against the growing competitive meta with ever increasing rooster, explorer players will build attachments to the memories of their longest held Pokémon, and socialisers are being catered to with Gamefreak's relatively recent venture into online community features. (Although that is very much still work-in-progress.)

So to answer the question: When did Pokémon become a Live Service? I guess it kind of always was, only the franchise has leant into it's own unique take on the genre which celebrates it's own mechanics and strengths; which is one of the directions that the Live Service genre is sorely lacking in. Perhaps when Gamefreak have run out of ideas, or pushed their creativity to the limits of Nintendo's current hardware, they'll fall into the lowest common denominator and find some way to throw in 'Loot systems' with rarity tables and all that cookie-cutter heartless feature-systems that all the rest of these games automatically chuck into the cauldron without a single critical thought- but until then this franchise stands a beacon that even in this most whittled down and gutted of genres, there can be some creative individualism. Maybe that is why Pokémon has remained itself a giant of the industry for so very long. (Because it can't be the quality of the games, god knows that.)

Where is Development Hell?

 It lies in you and it lies in me!

We talk so often about this mythical space between land or sky, or perhaps land and that burning molten core of our earth, within which stunted development rules supreme. A place that game development slips into wherein no one escape unscathed, and where a simple genre game can balloon into hundreds and even thousands of hours more than it was originally supposed to take to make. You think that a game which takes around 10 years longer to make than you'd expect must be polished to a mirror gleam powerful enough to blind pilots in space, right? Not really, being stuck in Development Hell is typically an example of wayward management, iffy planning, shifting goalposts and/or fundamental concept shifts, all of which leads to crucial work being repeatedly chucked out, to devastating effect on everyone's personal progress. Development Hell is the death of efficiency and the death of ultimate fine tuned perfectionism. And it's becoming more prevalent as the industry grows.

I think back in the day the games industry was much more familiar with the basic idea of pitching a game concept, starting the work and then figuring out the whole process wasn't working and cancelling the thing. Heck, that's how we got famous vaporware stories like 'Starcraft Ghost', 'Battlefront 3', 'Agent' and 'Star Wars: 1313'. (Actually, that last one was cruelly killed by Disney after they gutted Lucas. The studio, not the man. They'd save him for seconds.) Whether it was due to the more prevalent presence of clueless venture capitalists driven by the 'young investor' motto of "Keep sinking money and you'll get returns one day." or simply how much cheaper it was to maintain development windows back before every studio was 400 bodies too large. Remember, nowadays you can somehow sink 100 million into creating something as milquetoast and drab as the Saints Row Reboot. How? God knows, but that ain't the sort of costs one shakes a stick at.

My theory is that as games have taken more and more resources to develop, both in manpower and funding, it's become harder and harder for the people pulling the purse strings to admit when it's all heading nowhere fast. With the typical sunk cost fallacy of any gambler settling in, they start to figure that if they pull out now then all that money which has already been spent has been totally wasted, but if only they put their head back on the tables and ride the dip that theoretical shot-caller can make it all the way back around, stick out the choppy waves and sail it to smooth waters and recovered losses. So the money keeps rolling on, the ugly development practises, bad teams, unproductive work cycles, just keep piling ontop one another and the resulting projects ultimately end up draining more and more life out of the studio, the staff and eventually the product on the other end. Usually proving more disastrous than it would have if a component leader had just stepped up and pulled the plug off rip.

Of course there can sometimes be other major factors in play. Anyone who's sat around scratching their heads as to why it is Ubisoft have been insisting on bringing out this 'Skull & Bones' for close to 10 years now; the answer is probably because they actually can't kill it off. The game was spurred on by a development grant from Singapore, and if I know Ubisoft I'm guessing that's a grant the company has already spent and aren't really in the financial position to refund. (Especially not after the recent couple of years they've had.) I'm going to be charitable and assume that all those development dollars went into the game they were supposed to. (And, in doing so, assume this isn't a 'Randy Pitchford funnelling funds meant for Colonial Marines into Borderlands' situation. Allegedly.) They have to bring out this game sooner or later, and take the reputational hit when it's dead in under a year just like their other similar titles because this game was built and geared for an industry that has evolved 10 years past where this project was when it started. Such is the toil and cost of the Development Hell.

I've found myself thinking of this most cursed of holes due simply to the situation surrounding a game that I was actually following for a time: Beyond Good and Evil 2. Wait- no, not that Beyond Good and Evil 2: the one which existed as nothing more than a CGI movie of Jade jumping through some desert buildings. I'm talking about the other Beyond Good and Evil 2. The one that existed purely as a CGI movie of a foul mouthed monkey... no, actually we did get some scant snippets of early alpha (or let's be honest, pre-alpha) gameplay over the many years since this second iteration of the game has been announced. But it seems that every year we ended up hearing less and less about the updates surrounding the game, until we reached the point we're at now where Ubisoft simply assures us that it hasn't been cancelled and tells us to go away.

It's actually quite an interesting little loop hole they're exploiting to get around fan disappointment, because Beyond Good and Evil 2 was, in fact, cancelled a very long time ago. That original version of the game not only changed in narrative drastically (from a sequel to a prequel) but in fundamental genre. (From a single-player action platformer to a Live-service style multiplayer hybrid thing.) By attempting to cajole the fans with the false promise that this current project is the same they were getting excited over back in 2008, Ubisoft have sacrificed their own dignity in technically making BGE2 the longest game in official development by a team of supposedly competent professionals. And if the habits established and reinforced by all the Development Hell denizens of times gone has taught us anything; it's to be more wary of a game the longer it languishes in that slip-space.

All the hallmarks of games developed long past a sensible timeframe are there in the pudding; the game is developing for a trend that has died down (live service titles are dropping like flies). The early game marketers went around boasting technology that sounded space age when we heard about it- an entire solar system rendered in-engine- but now we've got No Man's Sky which rendered about a dozen galaxies in it's game. Only really the genuinely gorgeous visual style of the world those initial trailers proposed remains, and that unique culture-smashing art style is inherent to the Beyond Good and Evil franchise as a whole, it's what made the first game's world so striking and memorable. But is that enough to ensure the game isn't going to be a stretched-out, uneven, years-too-late mess if it ever comes out? Who can say...

What makes the Development Hell so insidious, is that it's everywhere. Anyone who has ever sat down to pursue any sort of artistic endeavour has felt it's fingers creeping up their back as they work, slipping it's way around their throat. It's waits in every procrastination, every erased line, every break- threatening to curse those of us doomed to ever seek an untouchable 'perfection'. But try to run from it, never take your foot off the pedal, that in itself presents the cruel prospective of an inevitable crash at some point. It's a dance of mediation, managing a project or just managing yourself with that project- knowing when to start and most importantly, the thing the world seems to be somewhat forgetting, when to stop. Remember, even in the worst case scenario where everything has led off a bridge and the whole project needs to be scrapped- you are a better artist for having gone down that road to begin with, and can take those skills to the next empty page you work.

Making a villain (Part 1?)

 I'm the bad guy.

I've had villains on the mind recently. I can't really nail the reason down to one recent experience in media because, truth be told, the very concept of villainous characters is just utterly ubiquitous with storytelling in general. Particularly in video games. We yearn to have some sort of foil to overcome, typically a humanoid one with sharp teeth and a scowl, But what are the ingredients that go into making the kinds of villains that we remember and harken back to time and time again, and what are the sorts of villains that end up as duds? Well, it's a topic that stretches back as far back as stories, to and likely beyond that famous Mesopotamian poem: the epic of Gilgamesh, and as such I doubt I'll be able to nail down the exacts in a single introspective blog here and now. But taking some baby steps, I want to talk about recent villainous character that I've experienced to ruminate over the things that work and things that don't. (I'll put spoiler tags at the beginning of each relevant paragraph.)

(Puss in Boots: The Last Wish spoilers) So The Bounty Hunter in Puss in Boots is a great example of a supremely effective villain, even as he shares that role with two others. Though he's not the most present bad guy on screen, he's the instigator, the motivation and ultimately- the closer. All this is achieved very clearly despite the fact his true intentions are cleverly concealed until the third act- and that's because of a very clever framing device. You see, spoilers, The Bounty Hunter is not actually a simple hunter gunning for the price on Puss' head who just happens to be more skilled than him in every way, he's literally Death. Hunting after Puss to to snuff out his last life because, as classical depictions attest, he hates little more than being cheated out of his prize and cats cheat death more than most. (And Puss does it so disrespectfully too.) This isn't a simple bait and switch, it's a switch up and escalation where the magnitude of the trouble the main character is in blossoms exponentially- skyrocketing the stakes. Death is also a fantastically rounded antagonist, making the most of his scenes to spur on the plot, drive at Puss' fear, and then symbolise his overcoming of the narratives conceit with his, particularly poignant, 'stalemate'. He only retreats because Puss has discovered a respect for the one life he has left, thus satisfying Death's clearly stated ethos, as disgruntled as the Wolf is to admit it. As far as villain writing goes, Death must be one of the most efficiently complex in modern storytelling.

(Also, Puss in Boots) Jack Horner, on the otherhand, is delightfully one-note and proud of it. An heir to a pie business he would turn into a empire, 'The Last Wish' is very clear to establish that Jack has absolutely no excuse baked into his backstory to explain his homicidal and utterly loyalty-free being. The man callously chases the last wish for an utterly selfish, and beautifully narrow minded goal- (literally just "I want to control all magic in the world") he spends the entire movie accidentally, but gleefully, murdering his own staff; and by the time his comeuppance comes even he seems unsure as to which one of his laundry list of crimes he should be getting punished for. Jack embodies all the ways that writers are traditionally conditioned not to write a villain, but these writers commit fully to the see-through villain concept in celebration of his utmost transparency. What results is a villain utterly pure in his intention and thus able to be enjoyably villainous- which makes a stark contrast to all recent Disney movies and their running theme villains of "My generation sees the world differently to how your generation does!"  

(Hogwarts Spoilers) If you want an idea of what happens when the Horner route isn't committed to fully, look no further than Hogwarts Legacy's Ranrok. Everything about that goblin is villainous, from his South-end gangster voice to his pointy teeth and evil eyes- but Hogwarts Legacy can't decide on whether they want to make him cartoonishily evil or darkly sympathetic. On one hand, he seems driven by nothing but a vague desire to be more powerful than wizards- which sounds mostly indistinct as far as plans go. On the otherhand, he's lionized a movement based on generations of perceived wizarding oppression, which itself feeds into the natural sympathy of the underdog. Neither angle is delved into significantly, which makes the entire characterisation feel very wafer thin. And wafer thin villains tend to verge towards the forgettable before long.

(FromSoft Soulslike spoilers) Every FromSoftware Souls-Like game pretty much has the same final villain who, naturally, serves as a microcosm of the narrative and/or game world. The biggest commonality in all of the Souls games is that they almost always depict a once grand kingdom that has fallen past it's prime and is, or has, collapsed(ing)- with Dark Souls specifically revolving around the idea of perpetuating the dying kingdom or letting it pass with grace. Which is probably why almost every Souls Games ends with a battle against a frail old man who was, at once, the stately king of that world. Even as his power and skill surges up to be that final game challenge, they always wear on their design the embodiment of their disrepair. Gwyn wears his charred robes and desiccated skin, such that he looks more a walking corpse or hollow than a once proud king. Ishin is reborn young, but we can see it's just a shadow of the broken body which had just a while ago passed on. In the Shura ending, you do fight that old body with it's boney limbs and brittle white hair. Even Nashandra from Dark Souls 2 sheds her healthy body in favour of puppeteering her marionette of bones- a personification of decay itself. In this way, FromSoft turns the tackling of the boss into a higher confrontation against the core conceit of the narrative itself. Higher conceptual ideas indeed.

(Spiderman PS4) Which brings we around to one of my favourite villains in a game I recently played, Otto Octavius from Spiderman. Now anyone with a passing knowledge of the Spiderman mythos knew exactly who Dr Octavius was within the lore; but the Spiderman PS4 reimaging of Peter Parker's world recontextualized the doctor as a brilliant confidant and mentor for the scientist and researcher inside of Peter. The writers devoted quite a lot of attention not just to establishing how indebted to the doctor Peter is, giving him a job when he had nothing, but also how much Peter looks up to the good doctor, as a personification of the underdog who rejects the easy sell-out route in favour of striving to the betterment of mankind. All this backdrop and contextualisation makes the inevitable moment where the doctor goes mad, from pushing too fast on his own experiments, all the more tragic- like a Greek play: you know what's coming and the only question is how high the play will raise the characters before their fall. But there's actually one moment which I think cuts deeper than all else. From the moment things start going wrong, the developers offer a softening olive branch to ease the pain of the doctor's betrayal. "It's his neural chip frying with his brain: this isn't the same man that Peter looked up to!" 

Whilst simultaneously playing both sides by hinting this darker side was always part of Otto, all the chip did was override his reservation and ability to self-mediate. This is that balance between committal and backtracking which I think a lot of writers get stuck within in modern storytelling; presenting ambiguity and confusing it with complexity. Not that there's anything wrong with such a set-up, indeed some of the best confrontations in fiction are the one's where you still can't decide who was in the right 10 hours after you put the book down; (Like with Huey from MGSV) but the greatest hit to the gut will always come from full committal. That's why I rate so much that moment, in the very last encounter of the game, where Spiderman is stopped just a few seconds before the seemingly inevitable 'rip off my mask to show you who I am and appeal to the human inside' trope scene which almost every major Spiderman story attempts at least once. He is stopped by the reveal that, Doc Ock already knew he was Peter. He always knew. And everything he did, brutalising and victimising Spiderman, he was knowingly committing on Peter as well. What a simply fantastic way to crash the worlds of Spiderman and Peter into one, which is again one of the running themes of that game's entire narrative. And a cold break from the expected into the cold truth of the stark and haunting. That moment, in print and in performance, might be one of the most powerful scenes I've personally experienced in Superhero media- all because the writers knew where to commit to really dig the dagger deep and twist the handle!

From this brief glance at some of the most interesting badguys of the past year (at least for me- I know Sekiro and Spiderman reach back quite a bit further) I think one general consensus we can draw is that the most effective villains marry the core conceit and theming of the story into themselves and commit to one extreme or the other. Whilst realism would demand the more mediated two-sided approach, our simple dopamine-craving minds respond much more to that clearly defined, cut between the lines, villain. (With a full stop) There is nuance, of course, for mediums, genres, themes and styles; but the talent of the storyteller is to recognise what works and figure out how to brew that same dish with different, sometimes wacky and bizarre, ingredients. Maybe unravelling these concepts will help enrich us, both in how we consume and conjure stories in the future. And maybe I'll try some similar investigations in the future, depending on how I feel about the topic.

They Always Run Review

 And I'm always chasing.

I'm like a moth when it comes to games sometimes. I'll just be buzzing about minding my own business and then the most out-of-nowhere game will dangle itself in front of me with a dashingly smooth 2D platformer visual palette and gorgeously brushed landscapes and suddenly I've got to have it. But as you'll have likely picked up from my Hollow Knight review, I'm the kind of guy to buy in the moment and play several years later. As such, even though I added Sci-Fi fluid slash-gunner 'They Always Run' to my sights from the moment it first showed of it's stuff in the announcement trailer, I only made good on that fascination earlier this month. But I'm starting to really come to appreciate my laissez-faire approach to cool indie titles like these, because it means in my most drained moments I can pop a little nugget of pure creative joy to hop around in for a few hours and lighten up a dour... well, life I suppose.

That was how I came across what has become my single favourite platformer of all time, Hollow Knight, and how I came across another platformer just totally oozing with visual thematic glory, Blasphemous. And for me to be thinking of those games in the same breath as 'They Always Run' is certainly high praise indeed given how I felt, and very much still feel, about both of those games, but I will come out right now and say that I think this title here is actually a very different category of game to what both of those titles were trying to be. Not just because they were Metroidvania action platformers and this is very much more of straight-forward action-platformer; but because what is presented within this game is actually a slight more 'bare-faced' and 'basically coherent' then those grand, and sometimes narratively interpretative, 'story puzzle boxes' of games.

'They Always Run', as the title might imply, follows the journey's of a sci-fi bounty hunter with one of the most generic male hero protagonist names of all time; Aiden. (I don't know what it is about the name Aiden, but it's like the starter name for any fiction writer, for fantasy or Sci-Fi.) Aiden is a suitably bad-ass-coded anti-hero character with his poncho, revolver-esque pistols, triple blades and sight-obscuring face plate- perfect to to fit within the sci-fi wild western universe of frontier bounty hunting justice depicted throughout the game. You can expect to visit various genuinely gorgeous painted-landscape worlds chasing perps across the galaxy in a surprisingly head-strong narrative which... and I'm being very honest as a lover of storytelling myself- totally brushed by me throughout the majority of my playtime. The lore, the universe, the empire, the three-arm mutant species, (of which Aiden is a member) none appealed to me as much as the desire to just play the game.

And that might be because the very basic premise of 'They Always Run' is just so darn approachable and pick-up-and-play. You are privy to a loving animated set of three-handed melee blade attacks that smoothly transition from foe to foe as you cut open woefully unprepared foes between sections of moderately basic platforming. It's neither too stressful nor too patronising to be a wind-down game; and for that alone it's worth the time of anyone who just loves their platformers. But the game does sprinkle in some variety in platforming challenges, which grow in kind with movement options, enemy archetypes, (although you'll reach the four archetype limit within about 3 hours of play) and even an RPG tree that offers frills ontop of the established combat suite. None of it is overly serious or attention arresting, which I think plays a lot to the game's advantage.

As a hunter, Aiden is sent through space outposts dotted with rooms of enemies to slash through, optional bounty targets to scan and collect, (very reminiscent of 'Star Wars: Bounty Hunter') and even the odd 'secret chest' with a collectible slightly off the beaten path. You'll never quite find one of these bases splayed out with the sort of complexity and 'intention of design' from a metroidvania style title, in general the game is more linear, but the game makes up for that slight deficit with some genuinely arresting visual motifs both in the pleasing parry-kill animations which never quite get old to watch and practically every environment. There's so much appropriate detail placed just smartly enough to not clutter the brush-swept canvass, and yet not so little as to make the various biomes and worlds feel too dreamlike and indistinct. There's a strong heart of balance to the entire 'They Always Run' formula.

Your third mutant arm works operates as a utility tool, smashing junctions through walls in a very simple puzzle minigame, or spending bio-energy to smash enemy units for heavy bits of damage. But considering how every enemy is pretty straight-forward as it is, you'll very rarely find yourself coming up short on bioenergy units. Mostly I just like the way the third arm changes up the art of the game, allowing for three-way kill animations or super-dexterous feats where you slide along the floor whilst uppercutting and shooting someone from across the room. The style of what Aiden can do most often overwrites the relatively simplicity of pulling it off. But if you're looking for a rewarding combat system where you feel like you earn every cool finisher- 'They Always Run' will always leave you wanting for something more.

What I was most surprised by, considering the very basic premise of a sci-fi cowboy bounty hunter, was how dedicated this game was to taking it's world and lore seriously. The whole universe recently freed from a tyrannical empire lore is treated very straight-faced and the general prejudice against the three-arm race is supposed to be an emotional touchtone to relate to. It all seems a bit heavy-handed and a little out of place for a game that just really needed to have a loose string of missions related to bounty hunting in order to justify it's own exsistence. Instead we get an honest-to-goodness personal quest for revenge that intertwines with the plights of others that become your crew of confidants against the remnants of the empire who genetically engineered and enslaved the Three-arm people.

But even if I question it's appropriateness, I am a lover of narrative: so I took the time to engage with the story from the moment I realised it wasn't going to be throwaway. (Even if that was a few hours after it already started.) From that lens, I think the key aspects of the world are introduced in too weak of a manner, even a simple introductory scrawl of a couple of lines would have helped set the stage of the world so I know what is important and what isn't. I'll have known not to care about the crime boss you work for during the first mission and only that mission, but to pay more attention when going through the three-arm slum area you pass through in about thirty seconds- but which holds seminal importance to the main narrative later down the line.

The script employs the use of flashback moments throughout the story, and whilst they are placed appropriately for the scenes depicted they just aren't introduced properly- as such I thought the first flashback was me seeing the memories of a corpse I just interacted with rather than my own. Also, some of the flashbacks are literally just a couple of seconds long, containing no purpose within the narrative for further explaining the main character's backstory or expanding upon their former relationships beyond what might be seen in a fine-tooth-comb investigation, and I don't think the overall narrative is strong enough to warrant such an examination. The side character's are decent, as is the general writing style which teeters on angsty but just about manages to keep grounded at the most dangerous wobbles. But I have to admit certain characters like Haze, the surly always sarcastic always belittling member of the group, I found intensely annoying. I know that archetype of character is typical for this style of story, but I've seen it repeated far too often to the point I just can't find the charm in it anymore.

I think the game lacks a real impact behind it's major story beats due to that disconnect between presentation and narrative tone that I just can't get over. Whenever anything important happens I can't conjure up the emotion to respond to it because I haven't been immersed in that way to believe or care about what's going on. I don't even care about the plight of the three-arms all that much, and that might be because I don't even fully understand their backstory. I know they were bred to dig up some kind of mineral, but I don't remember if they ever bothered to explain that mineral's significance to this universe. That would be fine in a game that asks me to explore and interpret it's world, like Hollow Knight does, but for a fairly straightforward narrative that feels like an important omission to the bare basic vertebrae of the plotline.

Which is probably why I was so genuinely shocked when the game then had the gall to end on a twist cliffhanger. Honestly, I didn't really think the story had enough going on in it to warrant a follow-up story, even with the twist reveal at the end which I didn't see coming, but I also did not care enough to be wowed by such a turn of events. The game actually reminded me a little of 'Fallout: The Frontier' in it's final sequences, which is to say; it felt a little overly self indulgent to an unearned degree. Which is a shame to have to say because I otherwise liked the game I was playing and would be open to playing a follow-up provided the gameplay sees some change up and variation so I'm not just playing more of the same. Despite the surprising amount of effort dedicated to it; I wouldn't really return just to see this story picked up.

'They Always Run' is a solid indie platforming action game that impresses and sometimes stuns with it's 2D visuals, but never never quite manages to match that level of dazzle with it's gameplay or narrative. As it is, the game is extremely approachable and easy to pick-up-and-play; which I think is perhaps it's greatest strength as something to while-away spare time on with it's pleasing animations and basic platforming puzzles. But I can see from the tone of the writing and world building that someone in the team was angling for something much more out of this title, maybe just on the writer's table, but they wanted a semi-serious narrative which I don't feel this game managed to carry. As it stands, I did enjoy my time and for the price would simply have to recommend this perfectly solid platforming title for being just a great time to play. When it comes to actually judging the strength of the game next to some of the other modern platformers I've come to love, this one doesn't quite hold up. I think I'd probably award it something of a B- Grade on my scale, shooting above the average on the strength of the quality visuals which elevate the game. Maybe with an increase in scope and money invested, the apparently inevitable sequel can step things up to turn these promising bones to as strong a package as this game's writers want it to be. And on that day I will be happy to rave about it's success right here!

Loss

 And losability.

Once upon a time it was said that videos games cannot, fundamentally, stand as pieces of artwork to be considered comparable to other forms because by their very nature, as interactive media, one can succeed or fail at them; whereas you cannot, objectively, fail to experience a piece of art. (I feel like modern art snobbery might have a thing or two to say about that, but's theirs is not the angle I wish to adopt today.) Even at the time when I first heard this, I think the concept sounded like bunk to my little ears, and the years have further solidified my belief that the experience of engaging with a video game is not dependent on the completion of that game. In many ways, video games propel themselves to another level of artistic expression when they go so far as to provide functionality and purpose behind a 'lose state' to further enrich the storytelling. Gamers should, by and large, very much welcome the iron hand of the fail state and all the unique opportunities that it brings. But things aren't that simple, are they?

The first game I personally remember playing which really engaged with it's loss state and turned a real mechanic out of the eventuality of dying is the classic, Dark Souls itself. Now you know how the game works by this point, surely; you gain experience points in the form of 'Souls' for every enemy that you defeat, experience can be spent at save points to level up or improve gear, but if you die between spending those souls then you'll drop every spare XP point on you along with a desiccated body. Those points can be reclaimed, should you find your corpse and interact with it, but should you die again before the recovery then that new body with overwrite the old one and you'll lose those left over souls at the same time. This adds a punishment for failure and death and recontextualizes the player's relationship with XP rewards so that they have to examine what it is they value too much to risk and what they comparatively consider not worth this time of day.

But Dark Souls is not itself an outlier in this style of game design in the slightest, in fact there's an entire genre of game built to cater towards the concept of 'losing' in games. I'm talking about rougelikes, wherein the premise of the game is typically some sort of procedurally generated platformer world with randomly selected tools and equipment dropped in there to pick up and combine. A world which then shifts and changes everytime the player character dies and is sent back to the beginning. Think Rogue Legacy, Enter the Gungeon and Dead Cells. These games shoot you right back to the starting line with each failure, but also build in special persistent unlocks so you never feel the full weight of losing all progress because in some way any of ground has been crossed. In many ways the resilience to stick out the losses is as important as developing the muscle memory of each enemy and the general knowledge of all good item combinations.  The art of these games has as much to teach in that department as Dark Souls does.

And then there are the titles that take their own approach to dying. Such as Death Stranding, wherein the death of the hero doesn't stop any ongoing events because the hero, as a Repatriate, cannot fully die by any known means. (Aside from in one very specific story instance which isn't worth bringing up right now because it would take half a page to explain it.) As the gameplay cycle of Death Stranding revolves around delivering supplies across routes through the land, it makes sense for the punishment of 'temp dying' to be the creation of giant explosion craters which scar up the landscape at the spot where you fell; making future supply runs just that tad more complicated than they would have otherwise been if you'd remembered to pack your faeces grenades properly. Yet again, death is punishment but it isn't the end of play; because that avenue is totally open to the developers creative and intuitive enough to take advantage of it.

Yet all of these systems that I just describe still do, in some way, disincentive the act of failure; which makes sense, does it not? The overall goal of most games is to actually succeed in some fashion, usually to overcome some great difficulty or big evil villain- and as such, we as gamers are typically imbued with this resulting resolution so fully as to be totally adverse to even entertaining the prospect of failure when there is literally any other alternative on the table open for us, even in situations where failure and it's punishing consequences are designed to be a process of the game. But when would such a circumstance be? How about in one of those Role Playing Games that focus on the power of the random dice roll?

XCOM, Baldur's Gate 3 and all games of it's ilk rely on chance rolls for a good deal of it's systems. Whether you're carefully planned and executed strike actually passes the hit-percentage and lands, whether that attempt to roll for a persuade skill-check passes the chance and succeeds, whether you pass that death saving roll and avoid the permanent demise of a cherish team mate- all of those situations come back to the virtual roll of digital dice. And in such games it is fully possible to, should you so decree, save scum. As in, reload a save when you encounter a rolled result you don't like and try it again. In a way, cheating yourself of the consequences of a bad turn of luck when the game itself is pretty much designed to present you with such turns of fate and ask you how to deal with them. Messing up an XCOM ambush you've spent 10 minutes planning is heartbreaking, but it's kind of what the game is about. If you hit every shot all of the time, then you're not really playing a chance-based tactical game at all, are you?

And when we expand the confines of that example to RPG games, the situation becomes even more distasteful. These branching RPG games are built to exacting standards so that every eventuality beyond the death of the protagonist can branch out into it's own reality, whether that be a choice made or a skill check failed. Screwing up a 'persuade' roll doesn't just automatically result in a 'game over', because the roll of the dice is not the test of skill, the consequence of that roll is. By save scumming your way around, making sure you win every roll, you're paving your way past all the effort that narrative designers, level designers and everyone else who gets roped into that process, put into making games like that structurally sound. At that point, why are you even playing a roleplaying game to begin with?

But even as I say and acknowledge all of this readily, I'll be the first to admit that I do, in fact, save scum. When I'm totally screwing up a key mission in XCOM, knowing well that a full team wipe is pretty much a death sentence to an entire campaign in higher difficulties, I'll save scum to the beginning of the level. I probably would save scum even more so if I didn't personally limit myself to one save at the beginning of each XCOM mission. In Baldur's Gate I try to live out the failures of my rolls, but sometimes you'll hit your 5th miss in a row and just lose your ability to be objective- from that point onwards what else can you do but slip on into the autosaves list and play a quick game of 'time god'? It's a bit like cheating fate, and it certainly doesn't feel good after the fact, but I'm just going to be replaying this section in pretty much the same manner anyway; so I'm just saving myself time- right?

Coming to the point of accepting losing is perhaps one of the general lessons of playing games from a philosophical standpoint. Many historical games that have been developed throughout antiquity are themselves based on microcosms of real-world pursuits, battles and war most often, wherein players would compete and win or lose without suffering the irreversible consequence of death. It is a safe space, or a magic box, wherein one can experience outside of their comforts or capabilities, without feeling the scars after the fact. Accepting that philosophy in our stance towards modern day gaming would go a long way to emotionally enriching the gameplay experience- or at least making it up to all those poor level designers out there who spent several weeks planning out every way someone can fail to walk up a set of stairs to an audience of no-one. (Won't somebody think about the fail-state designers?)

Fast times at Square Enix high!

 There's only enough room for one dragon

Forspoken is one of those games that ol' Nostradamus me just knew wasn't going to make it big from the very second I saw it. I took one look at the visuals, saw recycled assets from Final Fantasy XV for the world, and recycled visual flairs from the tech demo 'Angi's Philosophy' in the character design, (although I would only remember that very recently in a flare of realisation) and mentally checked the thing out as a lazily processed title. Of course that was a very uniformed preliminary assumption of what I was seeing, and there's nothing inherently wrong with reusing old ideas, and even old assets, to create something new and interesting. But something about the way that Forspoken looked, to me at least, just wasn't fitting together. I didn't like the vast-stride canyon jumping, the featureless craggy expanses and especially not the static flick-wrist combat. But first impressions are mere illusions to which we attach far too much significance- I'm sure the game would win me over given time.

And yet, it didn't. Most seemed to get along with the idea of Forspoken at first, even somehow the well-worn idea of an Isekai premise, all until Frey opened her annoying mouth and started to speak. Marketing is an oft scrutinized equation in the formula of game creation, and one often tossed aside as pandering trite; but if there's one example to prove the power of bad marketing- it's Forspoken. Totally misunderstanding the tastes and sensibilities of the audience, misidentifying the strength factors of your game and how best to convey it's tone, and chucking context free cringe-dialogue at the unwary viewer with clueless abandon has to be one of the most self-sabotaging marketing routines the modern industry has seen. Unfortunately, unlike the movie studios who tried to cut the original Blade Runner into an action movie for the trailers, Forspoken doesn't have that same level of quiet genius in the supporting package to win over the misled and ticked off.

Not least of all because the game was being sold for an eye-watering $70; a price tag insisted upon by Square Enix as just payment for the sheer quality of the products they develop and put out... a laughable joke if ever there was one. On the flip-side, and though the comparison seems a little worn by now, I want to present Tango Gamework's Hi-Fi Rush. A thematically irreverent rhythm-accompanied smash action game that was announced and released within the same hour. Only possible thanks the to the combined platform of Bethesda and Microsoft fans, as well as the novelty of that sort of release window; but still an idea that would conceptually be marketing suicide. But by what small metrics we can actually track, digital sales figures, it would appear that in their shared launch week Hi-Fi managed to beat out Forspoken. In revenue. Whilst Hi-Fi Rush was half the price of a traditional premium release. That is just... ouch.

All this is to provide the background for the news that has been flying across all the relevant headlines recently; Luminous Productions, the Square Enix based yet apparently legally distinct development entity, has been announced to be shutting down after a mere month of Forspoken's release. Let me remind you all, that this was only their second full game release after Final Fantasy XV and we still don't know how much of a flop the game actually was, or wasn't; without a rough idea of development costs we can only speculate. I mean, it was certainly a critical flop, but sometimes those games make money regardless. Not enough to justify keeping Luminous around as a studio, however; because those developers are going to be split up and reassigned to the far-away studio of Square Enix. A studio which, as I said, is located in the exact same building that Luminous was. So... not a big change there, I guess. Maybe some cut pay checks.

Still, it's a sad legacy to leave behind. Even Final Fantasy XV had it's problems both before and after the launch of that legendary game. Before there was the whole, you know, fifteen year development period hanging over the entire team. A little bit trying when you've been doing nothing but make the same game for your entire career. After the game came out there was trouble realising the full scope of the potential, whereupon the extent of the game and it's world was supposed to unfurl through the DLC which got cut off mid-way through production. Fans have but rumours about the giant swathes of content they missed out on, but people say that Episode Noctis would have combined some of the scrapped elements from Final Fantasy Versus XIII into the XV timeline! What I wouldn't give to have finally see Stella interact with Noctis- god, we missed out!

And then Forspoken comes along with it's underperformance, itself just the latest in a slew of bad release games which Square Enix has run out of scapegoats to blame. First it was the Deus Ex developers for failing to address the climate and wants of their franchise, which cost them their trilogy; then it was all their western studios at large for just being so weird and hard to market, leading Square to drop them off at uncle Embracer's and never come back. Now we have more failures, and the hammer has to finally land on someone responsible. Sure, Luminous has to fold but it just can't be them. Luminous didn't seize control of every low performing title that Square has put out over the last 4 years. At somepoint you have to turn around to the common denominator: Yosuke Matsuda.

That's right, CEO Matsuda is being tossed out of the corporate window with a golden parachute, leaving all of his cringe inducing promises of metaversal NFT future unfulfilled, stinking up the place. Meaning that the era of his tyrannical rule is over and Square Enix can finally move on under the purview of their new supreme leader: Kiryu Kazuma? (Why do I hear 'Receive You' playing?) Wait, I read that wrong... actually that's Takashi Kiryu, a man who looks like a computer render of the one in the RPG who betrays the group in order to run back to his evil master, only for the dark lord to end up crushing him like a bug because even he can't stand to be around the snivelling little worm of a man. Oh, and he's also got history leading an NFT company in his past.

So it's seems we're on the verge of some historic changes across the Square Enix world, whilst also a historic amount of crap staying exactly the same because of the revolving door of clowns we call the corporate elite. Even with Matsuda out the door and Luminous shuttered, don't think this marks the end of confused titles bouncing off walls with mishot marketing campaigns that kill once decent ideas, all because the powers that be are too busy salivating over the exploitative potential of their WEB3 suger daddies. You expect me to fall about praising the bravery of the company to finally give the slightest amount of change a shot? Or to give this new CEO a chance even knowing exactly what he's all about, where's he going to take Square and how the board of directors probably only brought him on board hoping for a 'play as you earn' tainted future? Yeah, that's a negative to all that. Kiryu can bite and receive me.

Fallout Remastered Vegas

 This wasn't a part of the deal!

Yes, I'm still madly and hopelessly in love with Fallout New Vegas, no I don't believe this irrational and frankly embarrassing obsession will ever truly be free of me and I absolutely have enough fuel to go nutso about the game itself once more. Because with the recent shifting of the gaming world that placed the creators of that masterpiece within the same conglomerate that owes the rights to making sequels, I can't help it if my little monkey brain keeps doing involuntary backflips of excitement. Every little sneeze out of Obsidian is now code in my head slowly unveiling the hexadecimal coordinates whereupon stands a buried box containing a geo-cache treasure hunt to the source of the river Amazon in order to find the prospective release date of a theoretical New Vegas 2 spray painted on the wall of a rainforest cavern. I can't help myself, I'm fully lost to total conspiracy nut mode.

Of course, it doesn't help my gentle sensibilities when Obsidian themselves are haphazardly waving around their intentions and suppositions about the many things they could do if the got the go ahead to make a New Vegas 2. Buzzing with the enthusiasm of a eager developer but unfortunately dripping with the candour of a team that most certainly aren't under any contract to keep a bubbling Fallout game under any sort of wraps. Still, with every slipped message into the internet ether the powers over at Obsidian ignites the dormant New Vegas fanbase like an electric whip across the snout of the slumbering dragon, and we cause enough of a stir with each awakening to remind Microsoft how much money they could be squeezing out of us if they just smooshed Bethesda together with their playpen partner for a little impromptu date. The sooner the better, Phil Harrison; none of us are getting any younger over here!

As such it was obviously going to become the topic of a blog when some off-handed comment thrown off the cuff of a speeding train impressed Obsidian's willingness to create a New Vegas remaster if permitted. Of course, I have some thoughts. Firstly: they're still thinking about us! Ain't Obsidian a bunch of softies... and secondly: Huh? What about New Vegas 2? The deal always was, at least as far as the world was aware, that Obsidian were ready to make one more new Fallout title within their trademark West Coast setting, reminding Bethesda once again about what makes this franchise special. New Vegas 2 was shorthand, such a game would obviously not be set in Vegas but somewhere else up the Golden Coast. Maybe San Francisco. But the point is that we were supposed to be getting excited for a new game, not a pampered up and repacked slug at ol' faithful.

The dark cynic bumbling away at the corners of my soul, prepped to wage his forever war against the optimism and hope to drag me back into that crushing pit of slick, suffocating despair, tells me that this is the product of tempered expectations. This almost sounds like the 'settle scenario' of a studio who vied for the contract to make a full blown Fallout game and were fobbed off, leaving them to seek this much more meagre consolation prize. Of course, I have nothing but my own paranoia to evidence for that, and perhaps such comments are more just the idle thoughts of another direction Obsidian could frame their relationship with modern Fallout; but it's all got me wondering nonetheless. Which means I'm also worrying. There's no reason Microsoft or Bethesda would straight turn down an absolute PR win like a Fallout New Vegas 2 announcement- is there?

Now the obvious question that is brought up with a topic like this is why on earth do we even need a remaster when we have mods. Since time immemorial Fallout New Vegas has boasted graphics enhancement mods and 2k retexture packs and ENB filters and Project Nevada and whatever the modern successor to Project Neveda is these days. The point is, you could totally spruce up New Vegas in a hundred different ways in order to get it looking spic and span for the modern hardware of today. I may be the only person in the history of man that likes the vanilla look and gameplay of New Vegas, but let me tell you I am in the extreme minority. Most New Vegas fans these days are playing builds of the game that look better than anything Obsidian could have dreamed of cooking up back in 2011. The players have already remastered the game.

However a Remaster could be an opportunity for the team to go to some of the weak points of the actual code behind New Vegas and patch up the ship. Improve the application beyond it's paltry RAM limit, improve general stability to reduce crashing frequency, and maybe throw a little foundation across the general visual aesthetic so that players who aren't me won't vomit everytime they load up the vanilla EXE. A Remake could go even further, building the game on an updated engine that could take advantage of the play features of modern Fallout. Sprinting, proper iron sights, snap corner aiming, hotbutton throwables- all the features that make Fallout 4 the best shooter in the franchise. Bringing that quality of gameplay to the quality narrative of New Vegas would be incredible! So incredible, in fact; that some fans are already trying to do that with the 'Fallout 4: New Vegas' mod. (Which I suppose would receive a swift 'cease and desist' if this idea gets the green light.)

In such a world, one where New Vegas is re-released and becomes the new 'most recent' Fallout in the franchise, we would see a vast recontextualization of what it means to be a Fallout fan. Know that the Fallout fandom of 2011 is a mere shadow compared to what it currently is today, and many modern fans have never engaged with any game before 4 to really understand what it is about the Fallout setting which makes it so fruitful and worth revisiting. Everytime Bethesda touch the franchise they focus on the least interesting part of the world most; the wasteland, whereas since Fallout 2, Black Isle Studios (Now Obsidian Game Studios) knew to make Fallout about the post apocalyptic society which has blossomed out of the fires. If you want gritty nuclear survival stories, play Wasteland. If you want quirky and bizarre fun-house mirror branches of post-world 'society' which run the gambit from utterly farcical to horrifyingly despotic and cruel- come to Fallout. With New Vegas thrust once more in the spotlight, I think a whole bevy of relatively recent franchise fans will endure their abrupt 'coming to Jesus' moment for Fallout.

Still, if you asked me what I hope for out of the Obsidian acquisition; it's New Vegas 2. I honestly don't care if Obsidian immediately turn around and go independent again the second after that theoretical game releases, I just need another great Fallout in my life sometime before I die or geopolitics swivel off in a direction that brings up towards an actual Fallout. Fans have been yearning for years, Bethesda (bless their hearts) have their attentions occupied elsewhere (to the stars for now); there really is no better course of action than to bring back the grandfathers for one last shot at the gold. For all the guff and rolled eyes that the professional reviewing industry gave New Vegas on it's launch, I'd like to see some small level of schadenfreude when that very same direction they jeered and mocked rears back around to be the new golden age of western action RPG games. Give us that opportunity, Microsoft; We beg!