games

My logic for the month was: if I have a new PC, with a new (-ish) OS, and a new gamepad^@, it would be logical to test it all with something familiar. Besides, something familiar is comforting, which is nice these days.

I started with Dungeon Keeper. Then I remembered this post^@ and went from there. But not just to replay those four games, I also used them as jumping off points to look at other similar games. Oh, and I narrowed it down to games that are 20 years old or older, in addition to the usual restrictions.

Dungeon Keeper is a very atypical RTS. Something of a god game, something of a management sim, something of a first-person shooter. At this point I do not trust myself to judge it properly, it is undoubtedly one of my favorite games. Except for a couple of levels^@ that are actually evil.

KeeperFX is a good improvement, and works great in Lutris.

Dungeon Keeper → Project Nomads is also an atypical strategy/action hybrid. You have an island that can go on a predetermined path. You build structures on it in a sort of RTS fashion. But you can also control turrets and planes, and there are even levels where you are mostly on foot. If you try to be careful, you will spend most of your time flying ahead and destroying enemies before they can even get to your island. Also, while it is clearly a huge stretch, I decided to put it in sailing games. Sure, your island is more like an aircraft carrier that you can barely control, but why not!

I have written a lot about Quake II.

Quake II → Unreal had a lot going for it back then. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the negelect we see today from an apple-biting Fortnite maker, it would have been a series on par with id’s Doom and Quake.

We have a story of sorts, told through logs and books. We have interactions with friendly NPCs. Heck, it was even occasionally shown in promotional art that you could play as a woman. And it is a legit choice, not a hack, like in Quake II.

And, of course, it was a pretty impressive technical achievement. Huge maps. It had good gameplay tweaks (alt-fire for example). The multiplayer was not bad, much improved in Unreal Tournament.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land goes places. Well, ok, maybe a few places, nothing out of the ordinary, but still. A post-apocalyptic Kirby game? Ok, the story has moments that justify that choice. Also, the final boss is… awesome! Other than that, it’s just a very good game.

Choo-Choo Charles is more silly than scary, really. But pretty fun.

I also watched more of the new Star Trek shows.

Question: What if something that checks most of the boxes but still doesn’t feel right? To me, that’s Discovery. The representation alone should be praised, loudly, but the overall feeling is kind of meh. It doesn’t help that basically everything good has a pretty noticeable stain on it. The show talks about mental health all the time, but uses ableist language. Representation is done in a very bizarre and awkward way, with a lot of obvious missteps. There are good characters, almost all of them, but again, I just don’t like the story.

Question: What if your expectations are pretty low? That’s The Orville. I can’t say I never liked MacFarlane, but I don’t like him now. But I can’t deny that first, the show doesn’t really feel like his show most of the time (when it does, it’s very jarring), and second, it’s not bad, not at all. If you add those low expectations, it’s a strong sci-fi series. It doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, but it doesn’t hide behind the humor (it’s barely there) and isn’t afraid to go for heavier subjects.

Discovery stumbled so Strange New Worlds can chill. Saying it’s low stakes is a little weird, but it kind of is. It’s not the first Star Trek show out of this new bunch, it’s doing safe, mostly episodic storytelling, its comfortable in bringing in a lot of characters from the original series. It’s, well, chill.

Planet of Lana is lovely. A relatively straightforward puzzle platformer, with a simple story told without actual words (in Simlish, if you will). Calling it Nausicaä-like is a stretch, but I will do so anyway.

While I admit that Signs of the Sojourner is not really my thing – I don’t like card games – I think the way it depicts conversations is very clever. You have to make a path out of cards, simple as that. Well, they are called cards, but they behave more like dominoes, where a one pip side of a piece can be connected to a one pip side of another piece, but not two pips, three pips, etc. I don’t want to spoil how that mechanic evolves, but if I mention that it’s a conversation, there are people who are not on your wavelength, you can get tired, etc., you can probably guess.

The story of The Invincible, as they never tire of reminding you, is based on a novel by Stanisław Lem, so it is pretty straightforward: it is the era of science fiction that was more about ideas than plot twists. As far as I can tell, the game takes some liberties – it invents another spaceship where the player character comes from – but the core is there.

I would not call Dolphin Spirit: Ocean Mission an educational game, it is a fantasy. Literally, because there are some magical elements, and figuratively, because you can oh so easily clean and fix the environment. I don’t want to criticize it too much, it’s still a pretty good game, but don’t expect a serious depiction of problems that the world is actually facing.

Suzume is pretty great. My only gripe is that it’s kinda a love story between a high school girl and a college student, which is yikes, but only kinda, as it doesn’t go anywhere near “there”, so it’s a little yikes. Other than that, it is funny and sad, beautiful and great sounding.

I can’t really recommend Star Trek: Picard. If you liked The Next Generation, yes, there is a lot there (and bits from other shows and movies). But it is not a good Star Trek. And if you didn’t like it, well, depending on why, you can enjoy some of it, but it’s still not a good show. In the end, I didn’t hate it or anything, but, yeah, I would have stopped very early if I hadn’t been like “Hey, it’s TNG!”

Nimona feels too real. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the wall is mentioned almost at the beginning, and you can guess that this is more of a contemporary story than it seems at first. Well, at first it seems like a mix of near future and medieval, but you know what I mean. It is also a personal story of a couple of misfits. I was expecting to write something like “and the book is better that the movie because of this and that”, but that is not the case. Some things have been moved around, the adaptation loses in some areas but gains in others. So I can’t recommend one over the other, but I can recommend both.

Remember Dragon Age? Do you think we will get another one? Too sad? Okay.

• Redemption is only interesting as a live-action adaptation. Not bad, but just unremarkable.
• Dawn of the Seeker is so dull, I’m sure it was done on purpose.
• The first season of Absolution is pretty great. It’s colorful, there’s action and comedy, but it’s also dark in some places. Dragon Age by and large never goes completely grim dark, but it doesn’t shy away from heavy themes.

It’s hard not to be cynical about movies like The Sea Beast and Strange World, or even Nimona. They all tend to ignore the systemic nature of the problems, offer simple solutions that will not work, and overall do not stray far from the status quo. But there has been a slow shift toward something resembling an actual stance. And they are all still quite entertaining, with at least a clear improvement in the area of representation.

I also decided to finish Into the Badlands. I can’t vouch for the whole thing (I stopped, what, 5 years ago), but the last half of the last season and the show as a whole wasn’t bad, wasn’t bad at all. It’s a dark, post-apocalyptic story where everyone’s kind of bad and yada yada yada. But there’s still a lot of good stuff: complex and diverse characters, the story makes sense if you squint a bit and/or ignore the parts you don’t like, it looks good in a bleak sort of way, and of course the thing it was sold on, the fighting is great.

It seems that “dungeon crawler” has become more of a theme. Are you in a dungeon most of the time? Dungeon crawler! But it was a subgenre at one point. And one I barely touched, so I decided to correct that. Of all the options, I started with something modern, with quality of life improvements and all that.

Operencia: The Stolen Sun is somewhere between high fantasy and fairy tale. It is also somewhere between epic – as the title suggests, the sun is stolen – and small and cozy. The maps are not too big, but can feel grand, you’re never dealing with big numbers, the puzzles have a storybook feel to them. Overall, it is like a good tabletop RPG campaign, one that would not challenge you, but would entertain you nonetheless.

I would call Soul Searching a walking simulator with light survival elements, but you are on a boat most of the time, so it is a sailing simulator with light survival elements. There is not much to add, just to mention that there are heavy themes, the name does not lie.

Skye is a pleasant, very painterly and completely free arcade flight game. Except for a few races that can be challenging, everything is quite relaxing.

The Tartarus Key is not particularly scary – it is not a survival horror, there are no monsters, hardly any jump scares, and no existential stuff either – more atmospheric. A haunted house attraction, more or less. Puzzles are all contained, escape room style, so you always know that you can solve them. Good characters, not a bad story.

Iron Lung is brilliance in minimalism. You basically stare at three numbers (X, Y, angle) and four buttons (2 for angle and 2 for movement) all the time, but the pressure (pun intended) of being in a barely holding metal apparatus in the depths of an alien ocean is palpable. It is also quite short.

Signalis is an interesting example of two things. First, it takes gameplay from old survival horror games and uses it with very little modernization. This means that if you want that kind of thing (I apparently did), it’s great, but if you don’t want to deal with very limited inventory, respawning enemies, and a lack of clear direction, there’s not much to mitigate that. There is some mitigation, on the level of, say, the Resident Evil 1 remake, but that’s about it (the map is good, for example, but is also missing for a chunk of the game). Second, it is clearly influenced by a lot of things – movies, books, games – that are, to put it politely, problematic. But unless I missed something, which is possible, it doesn’t bring bad elements from those inspirations.

Wretched Depths is a free little fishing game with Twin Peaks-style weirdness and some eldritch horror. You catch fish with your upgradeable fishing rod and lure, and some strange things out of the corner of your eye.

Afterdream was not bad, but disappointing. Gameplay is okay, just a simple point and click. The addition of a camera was kind of meh. The biggest flaw is the story. Some time ago, I played the first Distraint, which was made by the same person, at least it had something to say.

I was throwing away my old computers – not into a landfill, people took them, who do you think I am – and one of the things I found on one of the hard drives was a Minecraft server I was running back then. Unfortunately, it seems to be an old iteration before I moved it to a real server and actually built the thing I want to talk about. Oh well.

You can click on the image above to see the whole map, but there is not much to see except for this central part. We were in the resource gathering phase, if I remember correctly.

At some point on this server, I built my first mob farm. And while figuring out how to do it – how mobs spawn, how to transport them to a place where you could easily and safely whack them with a sword, that sort of thing – was fun in itself, the fact that it was being used by everyone on the server (which is just 3 or 4 people, but still) was much more satisfying.

Honestly, this is one of, if not the most satisfying gaming experience I have ever had. But as I said, I use games as a lens to talk about other things, so draw your own conclusions about the collaborative nature of human beings :)