Anarchic Fox on 15/7/2023 at 20:57

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I've been gradually working on Tears of the Kingdom. A couple weeks ago I also decided to try Salt and Sanctuary again, and unlike the previous two tries I didn't bounce off it. While I like a cautious sword-and-board in From games, here a nimble spear- and magic-based build served me far better. The magic has an interesting stamina system, which I rendered moot via the right combination of rings. It also has an interesting concept of elemental balance, though in practice it just means alternating fire and lightning attacks. Other than these innovations, though, the game is excessively faithful to the Dark Souls formula, down to quirks like the quarter-encumbrance fast roll. Its encounter design drops in quality in the back third, though I guess you can call that faithful to Dark Souls, too. Still, a solid game, and as I recall it appeared before most of the other From imitators, making its (two) developers some of the first to realize that From had created a new genre.

Jason Moyer on 17/7/2023 at 15:26

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So uh, finished POE2 which was fine. Parts of it were great, I like the world and mythology and the exploration of colonialism and whatever was good, the gameplay was fun, but I feel like out of the 65 hours or whatever it took to do everything maybe an hour of that had anything to do with the main crisis you're supposed to be dealing with. I think I would have explored the colonialism and piracy more and maybe had the gods trying to manipulate that stuff instead of the entirety of the game basically being "which group of people are going to claim the island at the end".

Next in my backlog is The New Colossus, which is reminding me of how much I kinda hate the Machinegames Wolf reboot. An hour in and I've spent 50 minutes of it watching cutscenes with really badly written heavy-handed racism against blacks, racism against jews, wife beating, animal abuse, fat shaming, and a decapitation that was so long and drawn out I almost missed it because I shift-tabbed into the overlay web browser out of sheer boredom. And 10 minutes of the worst feeling gimmick shooting ever. People seem to think Youngblood was bad, but I think out of the entire series it's my favorite because you get to explore cool maps and shoot fucking nazis the entire time with maybe 5-10 minutes of scripted nonsense total. Maybe this is a hot take, but I don't need 75% of the game to be really bad exposition in order to have the motivation to shoot nazis in the face. I dunno, I'll probably make it about another hour before rolling the backlog dice again.

Sulphur on 19/7/2023 at 14:02

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I finished Bramble recently, and I agree with a lot of the things you said. For a small indie game, it's doing some interesting things, but I also think it suffers from a lot of inconsistencies, tonally and mechanically, and it's got a pretty bad aftertaste because of them.

I do like the fairy tale premise, because I've always been a sucker for a good fairy tale. And there's a lot of nice visuals to be had because of it - I especially loved the detail of pollen hanging in the air in drifts, a small thing but an important one; it provides warmth to any scene it's in, and when you're running around a sun-dappled forest and chasing tiny fairy creatures, it can feel almost palpably magical.

But: things shift pretty abruptly soon enough. I was thinking, 'oh, okay, like Little Nightmares' when you had to wade through offal at the giant butcher's kitchen, but that's not necessarily something we haven't seen in grimmer folk tales. So I kept going, and slowly began to realise that sequence was not just a statement of intent, it was a promise that things would get much worse.

You're right that it's a cheap move to have a small kid as the protagonist, not necessarily because of the horror, but because you as a player are being forced to watch a kid undergo trauma while being unable shield him from it. Add to it the fact that since you control Olle, you physically push him through the nightmare - this means there's a certain degree of complicity the game draws from you, and even the fact that all of this is to save his sister is little consolation for it. It's deeply unpleasant, and maybe that's the point, but good gravy, I didn't like it.

Beyond that, a pretty big contributor to the unpleasantness is also that the game controls terribly - Olle's jump is unnaturally stiff yet floaty, and the fixed nature of the camera means that gauging distances is a best guess scenario very often, and the game's quite happy to kill you in concert with its lack of invisible bounding walls to block off areas you shouldn't run or flop into. Combine this with the boss fights and they're generally irritating, with a bunch going on for too long. The saving grace is that it's not very difficult, but it was annoying to have a game poorly telegraph things and depend more on learning by dying instead of skill - and yes, I hated Limbo for the same reason. But the difference is Limbo didn't control half as poorly, and in both cases it was still a young kid, so that's no excuse for it to feel off. (And also, I really, really disliked the zombie bit. That was the most ham-handed part of this thing, and felt like it belonged to a different game entirely.) And props to them for the ludicrousness of the final boss battle being its most annoying while being scored to 'In the Hall of the Mountain King'. While the song makes sense thematically, it's so at odds with everything that came before it that the entire sequence serves as a perfect microcosm of the game's poorly juxtaposed elements.

But really, what gets me about Bramble is how dark it becomes, and its use of Blomstertid beguiles and repulses me as a truly affecting moment. I loved that scene you linked, but I think the reprise is what really stuck with me, because it's at about the point where the game's shown you stuff that a kid should never have to deal with - ritual infanticide, satanic witch texts, a boss fight which ends in Olle brutally taking a life... and then, after all of this, it brings in that tune and shows you lines of crucified women in a forest that's choked with ash and dead trees. Tonally, it's a perfect moment... for any other game. Then you realise you're still playing an 8 year-old, and he vomits at everything he's just experienced.

I kept asking myself what the point of all this horror was, and I can only come to the conclusion that the developers wanted to depict the loss of innocence -- they even refuse to wash the blood off of this poor kid's face until you get to the end. All right, heavy-handed symbolism, not very classy, but okay; if you wanted to depict the old days as harsh and unforgiving, you have and then some. This kid, he's gonna need whatever the mediaeval equivalent of therapy was. But there's still something wrong here: the game simply doesn't follow through on this theme of innocence irrevocably lost, and the ending seems to ignore it in favour of a status quo reset (it was all a dream!). Not addressing the cost of the journey cheapens the entire thing and seems to misunderstand its own story along with what folk tales evolved to be (a lot of them may have started off as warnings to little children, but that wasn't their only remit). As much as there are parts of the game I really liked, from the audio to the visuals and specific scenes, overall it leaves something to be desired.



Side-note: I've read a few Swedish folk tales, and from what little I know they're not this grim. The devs have stated that they wanted to take inspiration from the stories they grew up with and put them into this game. At least a few of those stories must have been Swedish history though, because the stuff with the witches can only be explained by the witch trials in Sweden from the 1600s, which were short but brutal. (And there's some heartbreaking stories in there, if you look them up.) I think that's why the tonal dichotomy can be so severe, because they've synthesised not just elements from folk tales, but also some of the more grounded horror from real life.

nicked on 20/7/2023 at 11:21

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I picked up all the old, old Tomb Raider games in a Steam sale a while back. Never played them at the time but I enjoyed the newer ones so figured I'd give them a try.
Rough start - the tank controls and total lack of free camera movement made my brain hurt. I pretty quickly gave up on trying to remap the controls to a pad, and just used the keyboard, to stop my brain constantly trying to move the camera with the right analogue stick. At some point it clicked and, despite being clunky and slow, the controls started to feel more natural.
And wouldn't you know it, Tomb Raider 1 holds up as a pretty great game today. The story is of course nonsense about ancient aliens, but the level design and atmosphere is top notch. There's a fantastic sense of lonely mystery to all these abandoned places that shines through even the jankiest of PS1 graphics. Ironically compared to the 2010s Tomb Raider games, the combat is by far the worst element. Almost all the enemies are inexplicably aggressive endangered species which you usually gun down remorselessly by simply finding a ledge where they can't get you and holding down attack. Thankfully fights are few and far between. The last quarter of the game is also the weakest, with the intriguing tomb environments giving way to boring mines and weird sci-fi flesh caverns. But if you can stomach getting used to the controls, you'll find a solid, tightly designed exploration platformer.

Tomb Raider 2 on the other hand, makes a terrible first impression - immediately doubling down on the shit combat without improving any aspect of it, and throwing levels at you that are supposed to be recognisable human environments that the engine is not at all well suited to, while simultaneously filling them with bizarre, nonsensical switch puzzles where a lever on one side of Venice opens a door on the other side of Venice for no particular reason. It also seems to come from a school of design that assumes the player is already an expert at Tomb Raider 1, because it's immediately just as hard as the later levels of its predecessor and never lets up.
Then there's the story, in which Lara is hunting for a Chinese artifact because... no reason, except white privilege I guess? And this pits her against an army of Italian stereotypes and some even more yeesh-inducing Tibetan monk stereotypes. Not to mention even more endangered species. All of whom she cheerfully murders in the name of good old British colonialism. Still, if you grit your teeth past some of the earlier levels, there are some really imaginative and enjoyable levels later on (though thank god I'm playing on PC with save anywhere, some of the later levels are so hard I was having to practically quicksave between every successful jump).

Thirith on 20/7/2023 at 13:48

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I'm currently thinking that Bramble will be the game I play after Hollow Knight (which I suspect I'll be done with in a week or so), though Sulphur's write-up has made me look forward to it both more and less. We'll see how that works out. Seeing how I found Little Nightmares disappointing because of how little it finally does with its imagery and themes, I am curious to see how I'll respond to Bramble.