Boyfriend Dungeon

There was a lot about this game that I liked. It was, overall, a cute, quirky, fun game that was quite quick to finish. But, there was also something about it that bothered me, and it took me a while to put my finger on what it was.

First, I need to describe the game. You - a player-insert character with a fully customisable name and appearance - are spending the summer in Verona, California, with your cousin. Yes, this is a Romeo + Juliet reference. You haven't had much dating experience, so this is going to be your hot girl/guy/enby summer. Also, some humans in this world can turn into weapons and you can date them.

Basically, this is a romantic visual novel/dungeon crawler. Like I said, it's quite fun to play. But...none of the datable characters really appealed to me. They were all very 'meh.' I don't care about them, I don't particularly want my character to date them, I don't think they're cute. This is entirely a matter of taste, and someone else might feel very differently.

This does, however, lead me to the other problem which is, this game doesn't really care what you, the player, thinks. Despite positing the main character as being a self-insert, the game assigns them opinions and character traits. Don't want the dagger to kiss you? Tough, she's going to, and your characters reactions will range from 'happy' to 'super happy.' Don't particularly care if the talwar breaks up with you? No, you're wrong, you're heartbroken and your only dialogue choices will reflect that. Want a platonic relationship with the estoc? You don't have to agree to sleep with him, but the game still insists on treating him as a potential romantic partner which is, quite frankly, incredibly surreal placed next to the plot regarding an unwanted admirer. Oh that guy's creepy persistence is a problem but this guy is fine?

Now, I don't have a problem with playing a character who is an actual character. Tbh, I kind of miss it. Most of the games I've been playing recently are self-inserts. But if you're going to give me an actual character to play, don't pretend they're me. Let them just be who they are. Otherwise, I'm just going to feel the incongruity of having words put in my mouth when none of the dialogue choices are things I'd actually want to say.

As far as I can tell, nothing in this game requires that your character be a sweet ingenue, so stop forcing me to be one. If you want to specifically tell a story about a sweet ingenue, fine, but be open that that's what you're doing and that the character is a specific character and not whoever the player wants them to be.

I got this game in the Pride Humble Bundle, along with several others, so it worked out as costing £1.67. I played it for 13.8 hours, and I can't say I wouldn't recommend it, especially at that price. What you get out of it will depend on how closely your opinions align with the developers. Someone who's taste or personality is more similar to the lead character probably won't feel the dissonance that I felt.

Zero Escape Trilogy

Over the past few weeks, I've played through the entirety of the Zero Escape Trilogy.  This consists of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (aka 999), Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma.  These are visual novel/puzzle games originally released on the DS and 3DS.  While the first game, at least, made use of the double screens as a plot point, I'm not sure if the other two did.  Either way, I played all three on PC.  

The first two games are bundled as Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, while the latter is sold as Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma.  I got that first one in the Steam summer sale, for £9.51.  The normal price is £23.79.  I played for 49 hours in total, so it was 19p per hour of entertainment for me, and would have been around 49p per hour at full price.  I figure I might happily pay 99p or more for a book I can read in 2 hours, so about 50p per hour is worth it.  I bought Zero Time Dilemma at the normal price of £12.39 and so far I've played it for 21.4 hours, making it 58p per hour.  I feel like this was worth it, even though this game was the weakest of the series, because I couldn't not finish the trilogy.  Plus, even though I've finished the game, I do want to watch some scenes again with the knowledge I've gained from seeing the ending(s), so even if I don't do a full replay, my actual play time will be higher.

In 999, the basic premise is that you, Junpei, have been kidnapped by a maniac calling themselves Zero. Zero, for some reason, wants you to play a game to escape.  Yes, the creator of this series is a fan of the Saw movies, why do you ask?  

The game in question is the Nonary Game.  Basically, all of the players have a bracelet with a number from 1-9 on it.  The players must move through numbered doors, solve the puzzles behind them, and eventually make their way to (and through) the 9 door (Spoiler: Yes, I know it's a q.  I don't want to say anything untruthful in this post but I also don't want to give away the twist by typing a q.  I tried doing a superscript and making that one letter larger but it just doesn't work).  The twist is in the rules.  3-5 players must pass through the numbered doors - again, numbered up to 9, like the bracelets - and the digital root of the sum of their bracelets must be the number of the door.  A digital root - explained early in the game  - is what you get if you keep adding the digits of a number together until you reach a single digit.  For example, to get the digital root of 725, you add 7 + 2 + 5 to get 14, then add 1 + 4 to get 5, which is the digital root.  This gimmick forces different characters to pair up together throughout the game, often in configurations they would not prefer.  This is nice, it's interesting.  The only way to discover the secrets of all the characters is to make different decisions in different run throughs, to team up with different people under different circumstances.

This is actually the case, broadly speaking.  The dissertation I'm supposed to be working on is based on this premise.

While I compared the game to Saw earlier, the puzzle rooms aren't actually deadly.  The deadly part has to do with the doors.  Basically, those entering a door need to scan in, enter, then scan at a second machine inside the room.  If all those who scanned in don't scan out (out is the wrong word, but close enough), then anyone who entered through the door will die by having a bomb explode inside them.  The fear comes from, firstly, if Zero, who set up the game, is willing to do that then what else might they do?  And, secondly, the fear of not being able to exit through the 9 door, since it's subject to the same rules as the others. How will 9 people get through 1 door?

Gameplay is split into two segments.  There's the visual novel part, where you watch the characters interact and occasionally make a choice to direct the story, and the puzzle room part.  I really enjoyed the puzzles in this game.  I found they generally made sense with a bit of lateral thinking, rather than being built on moon logic.  I also found that, when I thought of something, the characters did too.  For example, if I found an item and thought "Oh!  I bet the solution involves combining this item with that item and attaching it to that thing!" then I would be able to attach this to that and put it on the thing.  I wouldn't have to click around until I found some arbitrary colour text that made the characters realise what the solution was and let me actually do it.  Plus, for me, the puzzles were generally at the right level to get the "huh? Ah!  Aha! Haha" sequence of emotions, which is very satisfying.  

'Solving' the game involves another puzzle, that of picking the golden route through the game.  This is also quite enjoyable.  The PC version has a flowchart screen where you can see which scenes a character has seen.  The flowchart even notes if you've triggered certain things which change which ending you see.  You can hop around to different places, rather than having to play through entire swatches of the game again.  I enjoyed this meta-puzzle as well.  Part of the fun of the game is that you gather information from lots of places, so you, the player, need to put it all together to figure out what's going and what your best options are.  This interface makes it really easy to see what you might have missed and go back and fill in the gaps.  Apparently that was missing from the original DS version.

Virtue's Last Reward has some recurring characters from 999, but takes place in a different location with a slightly different premise.  This time, the poison-injecting bracelets specify colours and whether a player is solo or part of a pair.  Once again, you have to go through doors, but this time the teams must combine their colours to match the colour of the chromatic doors.  Again, this mechanic forces the characters to team up in ways they otherwise wouldn't choose to, which is a great mechanic for creating narrative tension and letting you discover different things about different people.  Once again, the meta-puzzle is to figure out the entire plot by taking information from different routes, and, again, a flowchart screen is available to make that easier.  One difference from the first game is that, in VLR, each decision you make pushes you onto a different route.  In 999, a dialogue decision could change your ending, but this wouldn't actually push you onto a different route of the flowchart until later.  These decisions were marked with key symbols on the flowchart so you could tell if they were 'on' or 'off'.

This nonary game - run by Zero III - is a little more deadly than the first one.  The characters are repeatedly forced to play through The Prisoner's Dilemma, gaining or losing points until they either reach 0 - which is death - or until they have enough points to open and exit through the number 9 door.  If you're unfamiliar, the Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic example of the sort of game studied in Game Theory, that is, the mathematical study of strategic interaction between rational agents.  Basically, what decisions do perfectly rational beings make when forced into conflict?

In the Prisoner's Dilemma, the two agents are criminals who've been caught and are being held pending trial.  The prosecutors don't have enough evidence to convict both prisoners of their main crime.  Instead, they only have sufficient evidence to convict them both of a lesser crime, with a lesser sentence.  So, they offer each prisoner a deal.  The prisoner can give evidence against their collaborator, claiming the other prisoner was entirely to blame, in exchange for going free themselves (betray).  Alternatively, they can maintain their silence and take the sentence for the lesser crime (ally).  BUT, if they pick ally and the other prisoner chooses to betray, the first prisoner gets a much longer sentence while the betrayer goes free.  With some arbitrary numbers thrown in, you get the matrix of possibilities below.

Overall, the best result is if both ally.  The total number of years spent in prison is 2.  If one betrays, they go three and the other gets three years, which is better for the individual but worse for the pair.  The problem is that if B suspects that A will betray - or vice versa - then their best move is to betray in defence, and vice versa.  The best defence and the best outcome for the individual comes from choosing to betray, but, knowing that, no player would pick ally because they know the other player will betray.  So, both betray and spend more time in prison.  The best option for the individual leads to the worst outcome both overall and for the individual.

VLR uses this by having each team of three choose to ally or betray one another at regular intervals, in something called the AmbiDex game.  Because each team consists of two paired players and one solo player, there are still only two votes being cast.  The problem is that the Prisoner's Dilemma has a few assumptions that VLR violates.  Firstly, the assumption is that there will be no repercussions for betraying, apart from the risk of the longer prison sentence.  The betrayer won't gain a reputation, their collaborator won't later seek vengeance, etc.  That just isn't how human beings actually work.  We have a deep urge to correct those who behave anti-socially - by glaring, tutting, calling them out on twitter, etc - and that doesn't magically turn off, even if it makes the sums easier if it does.  This is not actually a flaw.  A character does explain the resemblance to the Prisoner's Dilemma without mentioning the violation of this assumption, but it's clear that the game makers themselves know it from how they have the characters respond to different decisions.  It's a feature, not a bug.

What is a flaw, in my eyes, is that...Well, firstly, because of the numbers given in the AmbiDex game, players need to play 2-3 times before they can open the exit door and leave.  If you choose betray in the first round, it becomes that much harder to win, because no one will trust you for the second.  So the optimum strategy should actually be to ally for the first round, not betray as in the classic Prisoner's Dilemma.  But, if you ally in the first round, then the best case scenario becomes playing at least two more rounds.  To get the points you need, you'll need your opponent to ally both times.  If that happens, then you'll have the points you need after the third round whatever you pick.  And since you need to play at least three rounds if you chose to ally in the first one, then you'll need your opponent to trust you until the third game, at least.  So you need to ally in the second, to make it easier for them to trust you and choose to ally in the third.  In short, the optimum strategy is to ally in the first two rounds.

There are more factors, which makes it a little bit more complicated than that.  Firstly, whether you can trust the people you're playing against.  Secondly, the cost of losing.  Thirdly, the cost of delaying your escape until the third round rather than the second.

I'm going to ignore that first one, because whether you can - or should - trust the other characters is a big part of the game overall.  As for the second point...well, the cost of losing is dying.  That can happen, at the earliest, after the second game.  That's an incentive both to betray - to protect yourself - and not to betray - because, all else being equal, most people would prefer not to kill total strangers.  If you trust that the person you're playing against is not a total psychopath - big if - then I think the best strategy is still to ally in the first round.  You'll be closer to death, but you won't die, and if the other person recognises that you'll need to trust them in future rounds and they would prefer that you live than that you die (like most reasonable people), then they'll pick ally.  And if they ally, since you also need them to trust you in future rounds (whether or not you care if they die) then your best option is also to ally.

As for the second point...the cost of escaping on the third round is delaying your escape by 3 hours (Spoiler: Yes, I know...).  But, the cost of escaping on the second round is that you leave at least some of the other players behind, since they couldn't possibly have enough points to get through the door at that point (not least because you betrayed some of them).  If you don't want to do that, it might be worth delaying your escape for three hours and one more chromatic door, not least because, again, the puzzle rooms themselves aren't deadly.  The characters do gain information about the other threats in the game after the first round, but that information shouldn't affect the first AmbiDex game.  The fear of what Zero III might do - considering you've already been kidnapped, anesthetised into unconsciousness, and threatened with death - might be a motivating factor to get out slightly earlier, but, again, at the cost of many other players.

What if you did want to kill other players?  Well, if you betray them in the first round, they'll choose betray in the second game as a defensive measure.  In this game, betraying means you don't lose any points, so, worst case scenario, they won't die.  Best case scenario, they'll gain some points and be safer in the next round.   Killing them this way just doesn't seem like an effective strategy to me.  If someone already betrayed them then you can kill them by getting them to choose ally while you choose betray, but that will require them to believe you're trustworthy.  Which will be easier if you chose ally in the first round.  But, killing someone this way means you won't get out yourself, since you won't have enough points if you allied in the first round.  You'll need someone to pick ally in at least one more round, which will be harder if they just watched you kill someone.  Alternatively, you could leave your target behind while you escape through the door.  To me, it seems like the most effective way of doing that would be to ally in the first two games, then betray in the third game and get through the door, leaving them behind.

In short, it seems pretty weak to me that some characters choose betray in the first round.  Ally seems like the best way for everyone to reach their goals, whether they're in conflict with the other characters or not.  Even if you assume one of the other players is a psychopath, you'd also have to assume they're an idiot to assume they'd pick betray in the first round.

That said...humans aren't rational actors.  They are not the mathematically precise agents from the models, who always have correct information and weight it properly.   They're mistaken about something, or they don't understand the odds, or whatever.  A few characters claim to have chosen betray because "it's obviously the best choice" which indicates they have only a superficial understanding of the Prisoner's Dilemma and that this situation is not the Prisoner's Dilemma, it's an iterative Prisoner's Dilemma.  Which, I guess, is probably realistic for most people.  Still, having some people betray early on seems like a superficial way to create drama, to me ,which weakens the concept of the entire game.

She's going to die, you sick bitch.

The other thing I disliked about this game is the character models.  Okay, the director has a thing for scantily clad, large-breasted woman.  Fine.  One character in the first game fits that description but, okay, she dances as a hobby, presumably she was abducted on her way to or from a belly-dancing class and didn't have a chance to change.  I can live with that.  It's a bit disturbing when, in one of the bad endings, a character's corpse is posed - by the artist, not the killer - to coquettishly show off her short skirt, and I kind of hate it, but the rest of the game is good enough that I can put up with it.  In this game though...well, one character is literally just wearing a thick necklace which is apparently glued to her nipples.  That's it, that's all she has to cover her breasts.  Another is wearing what appears to be a fur-lined bikini, clearly inspired by a teenage Pebbles Flintstone and ugh, really?  Can you just jerk off in your own time instead of subjecting the rest of us to this nonsense?

The other problem with this character model is that she defaults to smiling or doing a flirty little wink.  Neither expression is appropriate for the vast majority of the game.  The character will pull other faces - shock, sadness, etc - but will then revert back to smiling at the end of the line.  Which means when asking about, for example, how deadly the game is, or the amount of danger her closest friend (in the game) is in, she'll be doing a little smile to herself.  Like a complete sociopath.  Despite the fact that this is clearly not the impression the game-makers intended to give us in those scenes.

Again, can you just jerk off to fictional characters in your own time, instead of having them make flirty faces at the camera?

The third game, Zero Time Dilemma (ZTD from now on, because I cba to type that every time) does have another large-breasted, scantily clad character, but she's the most covered of all of the large-breasted scantily clad women so far, so that feels like a relief.

ZTD maintains several traditions from the previous two games - people being captured by a maniac calling themselves Zero and forced to solve puzzles - but also breaks a few of them.  The first one, which seems small, is that the scenes are acted out more.  The previous two games were both voice-acted, but the player chose when lines would advance.  In this game, the scenes just play.  Like I said, that seems small, but another thing this game changes is that you don't start with a puzzle.  It takes a while to get to the first puzzle room and, until then, your only choice is which series of scenes to watch next.  After about an hour, in which I'd needed to touch the gamepad only a handful of times, I turned to my fiancé and said "This game seems fun, I hope they let me play soon".  I suppose it was lucky that it continued playing when it was in the background, so I could work on my dissertation during the long scenes, but most people don't buy games based on being able to have them playing as background noise.  

This game did have more violence than the previous games and the puzzles were actually risky or deadly.  A lot of the gore is just off-camera or the injuries aren't actually shown on the character models, so you don't see much more than you did in the earlier games, there's just a lot more implied.  That's not really a flaw or a selling point, it just is what it is.

Another change, which I think does weaken the game, is that you can jump between different characters.  This means that, unlike in the second game, you don't need to try to figure out their motivations and what they're likely to pick, and they can't surprise you with their choices.  The rationale for this is explained at the end, and it does become more powerful, but that doesn't help in the first few hours when you're basically watching an interactive movie (which is less interactive than Bandersnatch or Kimmy vs the Reverend).

The puzzles were also weaker in this game while also being more frustrating.  Even when you have enough information to figure out a solution - or at least something you want to try - the characters are too dumb to let you until they've seen an arbitrary bit of colour text or until you click on exactly the right pixel.  And then there are moments like when the characters realise you need to take every key from a harpsichord and the game makes you click on every single key individually.  Oh my god.  They've got the idea, just have the characters grab all of them.  And then, when you need to put those keys back down elsewhere, you need to put them all down individually, while clicking on exactly the right pixel.  It's tedious.  Being able to read and click on the slot labelled 'G' instead of 'C' isn't part of the puzzle and it doesn't add anything.

There are still a few interesting puzzles.  My favourite was working out which symbols stood for the numbers 0-12, using only  a higher/lower game and some algebra.  I enjoyed working that out.  I also enjoyed the game based on the Monty Hall problem.  If you're unfamiliar with that, the Monty Hall problem comes from a gameshow, hosted by Monty Hall.  The player is presented with three doors.  Behind one is a car, while goats are behind the other two.  The player picks a door, say, door A.  Monty Hall then opens one of the two remaining doors to show a goat, and asks the player if they now want to stick to their original choice or switch to the remaining closed door.  It's a common mistake to think that your odds of choosing correctly have now gone from 1/3 to 1/2.  They haven't.  The question is posed to make you think about the statistics wrong and come to the wrong conclusion.  The actual answer is that you have 1/3 chance of winning the car if you stick with the door you have and 2/3 chance of winning the car if you switch to the last remaining door.  

How this works is; when you pick door A, B, or C, there is 1/3 a chance you've chosen the Car and 2/3 of a chance that you didn't, the Car is still behind one of the remaining doors.  There's is a 100% chance that there's a least one goat behind the other door.  So, you've picked door A, which has 1/3 chance of hiding a Car.  You've left doors B and C.  Behind doors B and C there is definitely at least one goat.  There is also a 1/3 chance that B hides the car and a 1/3 chance that C hides the car, adding up to a 2/3 chance that you picked the wrong door in the first place.  When Monty opens door B to show you a goat, what new information has he given you?  There's still a 1/3 chance the car is behind door A, and there is still a 2/3 chance the Car is behind doors B or C.  There was always a 100% chance that B or C hid a goat, and now you know where it is.  Which means the 2/3 chance of the car being behind door B or C is now all on door C.  

To put it another way, when you're at the point of choosing whether to switch doors, there are four potential scenarios you might be in:

• You pick the right door in the first place (1/3 of a chance).  Monty Hall opens WrongDoor1 to show you a goat (1/2 a chance of opening WrongDoor1 instead of 2).   There's a 1/6 chance you're in this scenario and should stick with the door you originally picked.
• You pick the right door in the first place (1/3 of a chance).  Monty Hall opens WrongDoor2 to show you a goat (1/2 a chance of opening WrongDoor2 instead of 1).   There's a 1/6 chance you're in this scenario and should stick with the door you originally picked.
• You chose WrongDoor1 (1/3 chance).  Monty Hall opens WrongDoor2 to show you a goat (100% chance, or 1/1).  Remember, Monthy Hall is not picking randomly.  He will never open the right door to show you a car.  There's a 1/3 chance you're in this scenario and will benefit by switching doors.
• You chose WrongDoor2 (1/3 chance) and Monty Hall opens WrongDoor1 (1/1 chance).  There's a 1/3 chance you're in this scenario and will benefit by switching doors.

In short, there is a 1/6 + 1/6 = 1/3 chance you picked the right door in the first place, and a 2/3 chance you didn't.  If you didn't, and Monty Hall removes one of the goat doors, you will win by switching.

ZTD has you play a version of this, but with more than 3 doors.  Increasing the number of doors makes the problem more intuitive, so it should be easier to guess that switching gives you better odds.  One interesting thing about this game - which I really liked - is that some right answers, including this one, are random.  So you might still lose even if you switch.  It only increases your odds of winning, it doesn't guarantee it.  There's are a few more puzzles with random solutions, like one where you need to test out 8 potential antidotes in one round of testing with only 3 people.  The right antidote will make your tongue numb.  I would have liked to work out the set-up for finding the answer myself, but the game doesn't let you.  It just gives you the set-up and results and has you pick the right answer.

Unlike the previous games, this one sometimes lets you type in your choices instead of just choosing them from a list.  This sounds good on paper, but it's just not implemented that well.  At one point, for example, a possible answer is some variation on "I don't know".  To be fair, the game-makers did make the effort to make various forms of "don't know" acceptable.   But, as a player, there's no indication that not knowing is an option.  You'd expect to input the answer in the form of a name.  I can't see putting in "don't know" except out of frustration or as a joke, and I certainly wouldn't expect it to work.  There are some hints for some of the boxes, but these can be read as a translation error or just badly written when the game makers were actually going for "exact words".  

Then there are passwords you don't even realise you've seen.  Now, this only happened to me once, but it meant that I had absolutely no idea how to continue or see any content I hadn't already watched until I looked at a guide and discovered that I had, in fact, already seen the answer.  This was annoying because, firstly, as far as I recall, the characters didn't actually say the password, which was a date, it just popped up on screen at the start of the screen.  Secondly, there's no reason to believe that the characters present actually knew what the date was.  They had been kidnapped, given anaesthesia to knock them out and induce amnesia countless times (literally countless, since they couldn't remember) and had no contact with the outside world.  Sure, one character says he's been counting the days, but, firstly, he couldn't have known if the day he'd started from was the right one and, secondly, it would be so easy to lose count in these circumstances.  In short, the precise date just didn't seem very important, despite being the exact information I needed to continue.  Also, because you don't need to touch the gamepad to advance the text, I wasn't even looking at the screen the first time it showed up.  So that was annoying.  Checking guides for this game is risky because they're hard to write without spoilers, and also lots of people like to just tell you the answer instead of telling you how to find the answer.  I don't want to be told what it is, I just want a hint.

So, this game just felt a bit weak compared to the previous ones.  While it did have some recurring characters, it didn't answer some questions - like what happened to specific people from 999 - and it did create something of a sequel hook, so perhaps there'll be a fourth installment.

A Mortician's Tale

A Mortician's Tale doesn't feel like a game.  It looks like a game but you have very, very few choices and you can't fail, so it plays more like a workplace training exercise.  Have you done those?  We used to do those in labs.  The 'game' tells you which piece of equipment to pick up and where to use it, and won't let you do it wrong, it'll just keep reminding you as you click around.  It will also explain what you're doing and why, in a way most games leave up to you to figure out.

There are screenshots from the game below, including a representation of a human body being prepared for burial.

Basically, you take the role of a mortician, that is, one who prepares the dead for burial or processes their cremation.  You pop in on her career for a day at a time, over a few months.  During that period her workplace changes a few times, allowing you to see different aspects of the funeral industry.  Each day begins by checking your emails, which will tell you who you're preparing and how - e.g., for an open casket, for cremation - and gives you a bit of gossip.  On most days, your mortician will also have another webpage up that you can read.  On one day, that other webpage lets you play Minesweeper, but with a twist.  The twist is that the numbers are replaced with symbols and which symbol corresponds to which number changes on each attempt.  I didn't find it at all difficult.  If you manage to click on an empty square and so reveal several at once, it's pretty easy to see which are the 1s, and then you can work out the 2s and 3s and so on from there.  That said, I'm really, really good at Minesweeper - I'm currently playing Minesweeper 3D because normal Minesweeper doesn't challenge me any more and no one will play me at Minesweeper Flags because I keep winning - so my experience isn't typical.  Still, it's not an essential part of the game (though it does give you an achievement).

The game then has you prepare the body.  This involves some combination of cleaning them, fitting caps under their eyelids and gluing the lids shut, sewing the mouth shut, replacing their blood with formaldehyde, and suctioning out their liquefied organs.  The game isn't exactly gory, and all of the above just involves clicking and dragging the mouse, but it is discomforting.  I can see it being weirdly cathartic if you're recently bereaved - though it could also be incredibly upsetting in those circumstances - and it did help me figure out what I want done when I die.  Incidentally, I'm currently completing a Master degree in bioarchaeology - skeletons - and I still find that corpses make me uncomfortable, even fictitious ones.  I'm okay with bones - I've handled medieval skeletons - but I don't like fleshy bits.

Having prepared the body, you attend the funeral or wake, where you can speak - or eavesdrop - on the guests and pay your final respects to the remains.  Having done so, you re-enter your workspace and the next day begins.  Your only choices within the game are who to speak to - with an achievement for speaking to every guest - and whether or not to prepare the body of someone who has committed suicide.  I went with yes, because we are all equal in death and because I don't think suicide is a personal moral failing.  It's sad, and we, as a society, should take steps to make sure it isn't necessary, but the individual hasn't, in my opinion, committed a sin (I'm using 'sin' to mean a bad, immoral thing, not literally in terms of what the Catholic church has decided is a sin.  I am Catholic, I'm just not very good at it).  I've also realised that I believe having your body treated respectfully after death is a human right, no matter what someone has done.  It's a bit like the way our legal system (British, for me) has decided that everyone deserves a lawyer to argue for them, no matter what they've done or how obvious their guilt appears.  Someone has to be on your side, no matter what.  Because, I don't know, maybe this is the one in a billion time when an innocent person is unlucky enough to look really guilty, or when there are circumstances that should change the normal sentence for their crime.  I don't know.  I can't make that decision, no one can, that's why we have a whole system to decide that sort of thing, with lots of people coming together to discuss it and examine it and find the truth.  The whole issue is above my - and most people's - paygrade, and so is deciding that someone has committed a sin by committing suicide.

With the steps for preparing the body are so thorough and grounded in realism, messing up would be very upsetting, so it makes sense that the game doesn't actually let you fail.  But, this hand-holding does make it less of a game, and that's one of the reasons that the Steam reviews are 'mixed'.  The short playtime compared to the price tag is the other major reason for negative reviews.  I completed the game, with all achievements, in 90 minutes.  The description says it normally takes an hour, so I assume that extra thirty minutes came from minesweeper and intentionally moving slowly because it felt like the respectful thing to do.  I got it on sale for £1.79 - which will be the price until the 24th of June 2021 - but the normal price is £7.19.  I'd say my enjoyment of those 90 minutes was closer to £1.79 than £7.19.  I had a good experience, but I probably would feel a bit ripped off if I'd payed £7.19 for it.

You can get a similar experience to playing this game by reading the book Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, aka Ask A Mortician.  This isn't surprising because both Caitlin Doughty and The Order of the Good Death, with which she is associated, are both acknowledged at the end of the game.  I think 'acknowledged' is the right word - instead of, for example, 'credited' - but I'm not 100% sure and would need to replay the game to check.  To be honest, the mortician's career progression and the decisions she makes - without your input - feels a lot like propaganda for the Order of the Good Death.  I can't say I like the propaganda aspect but, also, I do agree with their goals and their approach to the death industry, so it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's making me uncomfortable.  I think it has to do with the mortician being such a blank slate and being the player's avatar, but also making her own decisions and whims without us.  It feels as if the game is telling us "you agree with this, you want this" but not actually interacting with us or accepting any input from us.  Like we're being railroaded.  

I'm not sure what would fix the rail-roading aspect for me.  Maybe it's as simple as giving us more input.  Maybe let us make some decisions about how the mortician's career will go, and explain to us the pros and cons of each step.  There must be a reason the funeral industry is how it is, and why most morticians don't make the decisions the protagonist does.  Why is that?  Sure, some of it might be "because they're evil and only care about money", but I doubt that's all of it.  Maybe some of it is "because there just isn't enough land" or because "X is really expensive" or "the general public don't know enough to value this skill so people can't earn a living this way".  I'd like to have seen more of that explored.  As it is, it feels like some issues exist in the middle of the game, to force the mortician's workplace to change, but then those issues just suddenly disappear when it feels like, realistically, they should still be in play for her final career move.  If that makes sense.  I'm trying to avoid spoilers.  With spoilers, what I'm trying to say is: if the funeral industry is so bad that Rose is forced to sell her family-owned funeral home to a big corporation, how does the mortician afford to start her own 'wild' funeral home?  What did she do differently?  Why did the money struggles suddenly go away?

Overall, I had a good experience playing this game.  Like I said above, I might not feel that way if I'd paid four times as much for it, so I can't recommend buying it at full price.  Also, like I said, it feels more like well-made workplace training + propaganda than a game, which has garnered it some bad reviews.

I feel pressured to make a recommendation - yes, you should buy it or no, you should not - or to assign a rating, or state whether this game is good or bad, because that's how many sites invite us to review products.  But, I don't actually think that's what reviews are for.  I can't disagree with the bad reviews on steam, they are accurately describing aspects of the game.  I also agree with the good reviews.  This is what the game is, and now you have that information, you can make your own decision about whether it's worth buying.

The Quiet Man

This is an odd game.  Odd and unpopular.  The reviews for it on Steam are predominantly negative.  I knew that going in but I bought it anyway.  Why?  Well, firstly it intrigued me. Secondly, I felt a bit sorry for it.  And, thirdly, because it was on HumbleBundle, reduced from £11.99 to £2.99, and I knew I probably wouldn't want to spend more than £3 on it.  

So, the basic premise is that the main character is deaf and you, the player, are also deaf.  That's explain in the game's first disclaimer:

You play as a deaf character, Dane, and experience the world as the character does – with very little distinct audio and no subtitles: it’s up to you to make up your own interpretation of the story as your search for the masked man unfolds.

Other disclaimers clarify that subtitles will only appear at certain times, when dialogue is intended to be understood.  It's intriguing, and a similar gimmick was handled well by the Inside Number 9 episode Empty Orchestra.  The problem - and one reason for all the negative reviews - is that the player is not deaf in the same way the character is.  That is, you'd think that gimmick would mean you understand what the main character understands. The main character clearly understands and even communicates himself, via sign language, but we don't know what he's saying or what he's replying to.  We're not even given the chance to.  I know some British sign language and recognised the sign for "thank you", but nothing beyond that.  They're using American sign language, so British wouldn't be much help anyway, but the camera work isn't set up for you to understand even if you do know ASL.  It doesn't show their hands for the whole conversation.  Likewise, you can sometimes lip read and take a guess as to what the characters are saying, but the camera isn't always focused on the character's lips.  This feels like cheating.  They've artificially reduced our senses to create a sense of mystery, and it feels dishonest.  I think the game would have been a lot stronger if we'd understood what Dane had understood and the mystery had come from what he'd missed.

The actual gameplay is basically like watching a long movie that you can't understand, interspersed with occasional fight scenes.  Sometimes, at the end of a fight, you're responsible for moving Dane towards a doorway or something he needs to look at.  I'd say the game - which took me about 4 hours to play through once - is fully 50-75% cut scenes, maybe more.  I'm okay with that.  I mean, I enjoyed Her Story and that game is entirely about choosing which videoclips to watch.  There are three basic styles - filmed scenes, rendered scenes, and interactive scenes, where you can move it.  The switch between the three can be quite jarring but that might be because I turned all the graphics settings down as far as possible.  I do that because I bought this PC in 2013.  Even then, some of the fight scenes flickered so badly they made me feel a bit ill, and the terrible camera angles didn't help with that.  

Some reviews complain about the acting, but I quite liked it.  I'm not overly critical about acting though.  I do agree that John Anthony Wylliams - Taye - gave the best performance.  I've never seen anyone pointedly close a car door with that much emotion conveyed only via only body language.  It was impressive.

The fights themselves aren't difficult, and that's speaking as someone who doesn't play fighting games and didn't understand the controls.  In fairness to me, no one understood the controls.  The only explanation of what each button does is on the start menu, where little neon stick figures show you that X is a quick punch, Y is a hard kick, B is grab, and A is dodge.  You can also use the right shoulder button to run and, as I did not discover until the sixth chapter, the left shoulder button lets you enter focus mode.  I'm not entirely sure if this mode lasts for a single attack or if it affects all qualifying attacks once entered, I just kept hammering on it.  You know you have a focus mode available when the lens flare on the right hand side of the screen becomes dramatically bright, another thing that's not actually explained in-game.  I did actually quite like the lens flare, as an unobtrusive way of conveying information without breaking the realism, once I knew what it was.

Somehow, I managed to get nearly all of the fighting-based achievements, though I'm not even going to attempt to finish the game without getting hit.  Still, like I said, the fights are pretty easy.  For the first three - of six - chapters, I wasn't even sure you could lose a fight, though there were 2-3 I struggled with later on.  There's one in chapter six where you're up against an unreasonable amount of opponents that took me ages, until I looked up how to do focus attacks.  For me, the battles being very similar and very easy were a selling point, but, like I said, I don't like fighting games.  Fighting games for people who don't like fighting games probably isn't a very big market.

Another thing that isn't made clear is how and when the game saves.  It auto-saves at the end of every chapter - and a few other times - when it shows the screen below.  A quality of life improvement would be to have a message flash up saying "game saved".

Once you've played through the game once, you unlock 'Answered' mode, where the sound and subtitles are turned back on.  In one of the few bits of direct communication, the game explains that you can access this mode by choosing to play each chapter from the menu.  Now you can finally understand what everyone was saying during those mildly intriguing video sequences!  By playing through the whole game again!  I don't think this is, in itself, a bad trick.  I think it doesn't come off well because the deafness during your first playthrough feels cheap and artificial and because the game is just too long to play through the first time without understanding what's going on.  I stuck with it because I knew, from reading other reviews, that this mode existed, but I don't think the game itself tells you that anywhere until you reach that point.  From reading a few other reviews, I've learned that the "answered" mode wasn't initially included with the game and was added in a later patch, which seems bizarre to me.  Did they not intend to include it initially?  Did they not have the game finished in time and released it only half done?

The game does get a lot more fun on the second playthrough.  I ended up really enjoying the mystery, and it was pretty interesting seeing scenes in a new light and trying to work out what future scenes might mean with the new information I had.  Plus, there were some quite clever tricks that made it look like two different characters might actually be the same person or that what appeared to be two different people were actually one, which made for interesting twists.  While my first playthrough took place over a week, completing 0-2 chapters per day, I finished the bulk of the second playthrough in one go.  But...you should be enjoying the game that much one hour in, not five.  The game takes too much time to get good, and nothing in the game even indicates that it will get good until the end of the first playthrough.  Plus, the weakness of not being deaf in the same way as Dane shows up here as well.  Characters confidently talk as if he can't hear them, spilling their guts while saying "You can't even hear me say this".  But we know he does understand some things because he takes part in conversations.  At this point, I think we're supposed to assume that Dane can lipread, so if we see their lips on screen then he heard that bit of dialogue.  I'm not sure because there are a few scenes where someone is turned a bit away but he responds to what they've said.  Although, that said, sometimes his response doesn't actually require him to have heard them, just to know that they were speaking.  All of this would have been clearer if we'd just understood what he understood the first time round, so we'd know that any new information we get in the second playthrough is information that Dane didn't have.  

The other thing we need to talk about is that this game isn't a very good portrayal of a deaf character.  Firstly, lip-reading isn't as useful as the game makes it out to be, assuming that is how Dane has conversations.  It's not like it's simple and magical.  It's hard and unreliable.  That's why sign language is a thing.  On that note, if you're having a private, one-on-one conversation with a deaf person in sign language why would you also speak?  If you don't know sign language, you might think it's easy to speak and sign at the same time (sim com), but it isn't.  Apparently the dev team did very little consulting with deaf people, so it's not surprising they got things wrong.  The review I linked to in that last sentence was written by a deaf gamer and explores the issues more than I can.  The writer also touches on the unfortunate implications of linking gang signs to sign language, which I didn't know about.  Plus, the fact that your "reward" for playing through the game without being able to hear is to suddenly regain that ability which, yeah, that has some unfortunate implications, especially now that we understand the one scene where Dane expresses how upset he is at not being able to hear.  That might arguably be because he's been tormented over it rather than something intrinsic to being deaf, but that's a very subtle distinction.  So, perhaps a better way to handle the game would be to have two characters and show different bits from different points of view.  One character can still be deaf, so maybe he notices something in the room (because no one is communicating with him so he spends more time looking around) or, okay, once he's able to lip read something no one expected to be overheard.  And maybe other characters sometimes communicate with him by writing, and having something in writing turns out to be important.  But other stuff could just be about being in the right/wrong room or something.  Then, on the second playthrough, everything you originally saw as character A you now see as character B and vice versa, and that gives you the information you need to piece everything together.  I'm just spit balling, it's not an easy problem to solve.

I guess all in all...well, is it a good game?  Is it a bad game?  I enjoyed the process of playing it, but I don't actually disagree with any of the bad reviews.  I was able to enjoy it because, for me, I thought of the game as figuring out what the plot was, which other people wouldn't go in expecting if they just went off the information in the game or the description itself.  Plus, I knew most people hadn't enjoyed it, so my expectations were low in the first place.  I'd also only played £2.99 for it, and I think I'd have found it a lot harder to enjoy if it had cost me £11.99.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, but I can't say I didn't have fun.  

The game was very ambitious and it failed to live up to what it could have been.  I think that's what happens sometimes when you fund ambitious and risky projects, and because I want studios to fund more ambitious and risky projects - because some of them are amazing - I can't say I'm upset this game was made.  It had a lot of flaws, and examining those will, I hope, lead to better games in future. 

Crystalline

Crystalline is a bit of an odd one.  It's a visual novel which feels like playing Tales of Symphonia or a similar RPG crossed with reading a romance novel.  In a lot of the visual novels I've played, the action is limited to a handle of locations because it's about relating to people rather than questing.  While this one is about relating to people, it's also about a journey.  And, as I said, a romance novel.  You can wingman for the beta couple (which I enjoyed) as well as having your viewpoint character pursue (or not) one romance option.  This lead to a problem for me; I didn't like the one romance option.  I am not a fan of the blonde, blue-eyed cliche.  I have a weakness for bitches, which is not a word I would use for non-fictional women, but does sum-up what I mean.  Strong, powerful women, who take no shit from anyone and go after their own dreams, like Vera Oberlin (of Monster Prom) or Kim Kaswell (of Drop Dead Diva, a TV show) or even Scarlet O'Hara.  Nice, boring, mousey women just aren't my type, which does not gel with what this game is offering. 

I also did not like that the game kept accusing my character of being a paedophile over an 18-year-old girl, especially when it's about non-optional dialogue.  Sure, okay, my party are under the impression that the 18-year-old is much younger and will not react well to any implied romance with her, so I'll avoid any of those options, if the game gives me that choice, which it doesn't always.

The game has eight multiple endings, which is nice.  To be honest, after playing for 13 hours and seeing six of them, I have lost interest.  This is largely because the true ending - adequately romancing the heroine and passing the mini-games - was far too easy to get.  I'm okay with the easy mini-games - though it got a bit boring on my second run through - but I was actively trying to choose the worst romance options.  I disrespected her boundaries, acted like a pervy creep, showed hentai to the youngest member of the group, and hit on other women in front of her, and she still considered me her one true love.  What is wrong with this woman?  I didn't like her to start with, and this just dropped any respect I had for her down to the floor.  And since romance is the largest part of the gameplay, that's where my enjoyment ran out.  I don't regret buying the game (£3.74) or playing it, and I might even play it again someday and try for endings E and F.  That said, my opinion on the game is a solid 'meh'.

Oh, and what is with those jiggle-physics?  Sure, boobs lol, but it really just made the game lag annoyingly.   And did every single female character need to jiggle?  Was that really necessary?

The Sims - Review

A repost of the review I wrote for the original Sims game, back in 2007.

Warning: The following contains major spoilers.

The Sims is a life simulation game, essentially. More than anything, it's like virtual dolls and doll houses.

You create your family of Sims, choosing their clothes, faces and personalities. This early version has nothing like as many options as the later ones, but there are still several to choose from.

The personality system is simple; you assign a certain number of points to a number of categories, changing how active, social, clean, or whatever else your Sim is. Your Sim can be an adult or a child. Unfortunately, this state will not change, an oversight that was corrected in The Sims 2.

Once you've created your Sim or Sim family (up to eight Sims), you can move them into a house. There are various lots to choose from, and the game provides a few ready-made houses, some already furnished. Your family starts with around 20,000 simoleans. With this money, you can either buy a ready-made home and add items to it, or create something from scratch. You can move walls, redecorate, and add or sell furniture. Most people, however, find it much easier to live in a ready-made, or overly simple house for a while, until they have enough money to build the mansion of their dreams. Bills appear every three days, and are loosely based on the net value of your home.

Sims moods are based on several factors, which are shown in an easy to understand format. The factors include hunger, hygiene, fun, which is based on how bored or overworked they are, and tiredness. Each of these can be combated through the use of items – for instance, playing basketball or watching TV will raise the fun stat, while sleeping will make sure they're not overtired. You can either give your Sims a list of orders, or leave them to their own devices, which is really not advisable. If Sims are not cheerful, they refuse to study, and can be demoted at work if they are continually in a bad mood.

As for earning money, this involves a simple job system. Sims can get a job from the daily paper or by using a computer. Each job has set hours and wages. When it's time for work, a bus will come to take your Sim, and will return when they finish work. If they meet the requirements, they may also be promoted. Each career path has ten levels. Children attend school each day. If their grades are high, they sometimes receive 100 simoleans on their return to the family home. If their grades reach F and stay there, they are sent away to military school and are never seen again.

Going back to careers, the requirements for promotion usually involve a certain amount of family friends, and certain skill points, as well as having your Sim in a good mood when they go to work. Sims can earn skill points in various categories, including logic, and cooking. They can earn skills points by, for instance, playing chess, or studying cooking using a book from a bookcase. Most of these skill points are only used for jobs, but, for instance, learning how to cook means that your Sim is less likely to set the oven on fire. There are ten skill points available for each category, and each one is slightly harder to get than the last.

The Sims uses a basic relationship system. Depending on how your Sim interacts with other Sims, their relationship level rises or falls, to either +100 or –100. Positive interactions, such as talking, raise the relationship level, while negative ones, such as fighting lower it. The default is 0, and if your Sim does not contact the Sim in question, their relationship will slowly return to that level at the rate of 2 points a day. The relationship level is unique to each Sim – for instance, it's possible to love a Sim who hates you – although more often than not, each Sim's bar will rise by the same amount as the Sim they talk to. Some positive reactions, such as kissing, become negative reactions if the Sim in question rejects the action. Once the relationship level reaches 50, on both sides, the Sims are classed as Friends. Family Friends, which are needed for jobs, are the friends of any members of your family. Some promotions require a certain amount. Friendship can turn to romance, depending on the actions taken, but it is possible to reach +100, on both sides, without falling in love.

If your Sims do fall in love, however, and they live in separate houses, they can be married. The Sim proposed to will move into the family home, and if they are the last Sim living in their own home, they will also bring the cash equivalent of all their assets. They can then be murdered, if that takes your fancy.

Sims are born when two Sims who love each other very much agree to have children. Sometimes they'll be kissing, and a message will appear saying, "Shall we have a baby?" If you choose 'yes' a little bundle of joy will appear, near to where your Sims are standing. It will need constant care for three days, before it becomes a child. Sims can also adopt children, which will be heralded from a phone call from the adoption agency. Sims can be homosexual, and adopt children – it's a non-issue within the game.

Sims can also die, in a variety of interesting ways. They can starve, die in a fire, or drown, although that won't happen accidentally. One rather fun, but very sadistic thing that everyone does at some point is to create a Sim purely to be tortured. Mostly though, with care, your Sims can carry on forever.

There's nothing special to be said of the graphics. They're pretty good quality; your Sims will never be mistaken for live-action rather than pixels, but they're clean and realistic enough.

Loading times can sometimes be a pain, especially considering how addictive the game is. Playing it for seven hours straight is not good for your computer.

As pretty much every goal is player orientated, rather than decided by the game, the game will last just as long as you want it to. It's addictive, and compelling – my sister and I would fight over the computer – and is the grown up version of playing with Barbie dolls. The game does tend to be enjoyed more by females, although don't let that stop you.

In summary, The Sims is a fun addictive game, even in this early format. It's just as compelling as reality TV (before it was overdone so completely), only with an added control and involvement factor, which improves it immensely.

Koudelka - Review

A repost of the review I wrote three years ago for Koudelka.

Warning: The following contains major spoilers.

The year is 1899. Through a horrible storm, a young woman makes her way to Neameton (also occasionally spelt Nemeton) monastery, somewhere out in Wales.

Finding no answer when she knocks on the door, she climbs to the roof, dropping her pendant into the monastery's magnificent courtyard in the process.

Finally, she kicks in one of the windows and climbs in through the roof. Therein, she finds a young man being menaced by a monstrous creature. He throws her his pistol, and you are plunged into the first battle of Koudelka.

After this short introduction to the battle system, you are further introduced to two of the main characters of the game; Koudelka Iasant and Edward Plunkett.

Koudelka, the title character, is 19 years old, and, as becomes clear throughout the rest of the game has had a somewhat traumatic life due to the manifestation of her psychic powers early on. Koudelka hears the voices of the dead; that's what brought her to the monastery, and what enables some of the game's creepier moments, as your party explores the darker areas deep within the old building.

Edward Plunkett, known in some versions of the game as Edward Brankett, is a 20 year old American/Englishman (again, depending on the version), who had heard about a rich man living in the monastery. Hearing about the amounts of money being spent and prostitutes being brought there, he claims that he decided to "put the poor man's fear of God into that rich bastard", which is the goal that brought him to Neameton.

Further on in the mansion, Koudelka and Edward run into the third member of their party - 45-year-old James O'Flaherty, a priest who, at first, does not reveal his intentions. Much of the conversation between the three characters consist of Koudelka and Edward arguing about James' varying prejudices. It's not like Edward and Koudelka get on perfectly, however - they argue a lot too. Unlike in most RPGs, the characters of Koudelka don't like each other very much. They are not together through choice, didn't grow up together, and don't even have to keep the peace because they were commanded to by some kind of superior officer. They stick together, at first, because they are three people in a scary monastery, where anything that moves is more than likely trying to kill them. They are together through fear, but this doesn't stop them sniping at each other, and, to be honest, it's fairly hilarious at times.

The voice acting is what holds this game together more than anything. It's amazing, particularly Koudelka and James. If you've played the sequels, I'd say it's better than Shadow Hearts: Covenant.

Koudelka is a curious cross between an RPG, a strategy game, and a survival horror.

Your three characters are trapped within a small monastery. There are no shops; you are reliant on items dropped by monsters or found within the building. There are no inns, either, although your characters are healed at every save point and every time they level up. Then there are the creepy caretakers, the bodies littering the monastery, and the discovery of its history as a political prison; the ghosts are not happy about this, and lose no time in telling Koudelka so. Those that don't just attack, that is. Several documents can be found which add to the history of the monastery, and explain more of what's going on. However, in many ways, it seems their main purpose is to freak people out.

There are many cut-scenes and conversations which propel your characters through the plot, and several puzzles which tend to be either slightly too difficult, or slightly too easy. In essence, you run through the building, various battles, conversations or puzzles unlocking more areas to explore, much like in the later Project Zero (known as Fatal Frame in the US) games.

The battle sequences are an interesting combination of various genres. You are pulled into a separate battle screen, like in RPGS. Your characters move on a grid, like a strategy game, although the grid is always the same. Your characters can go no further forward than the enemy - you can't sneak up behind them. This allows for a small amount of tactics, such as having a weaker character hide behind someone else and use a gun. You can also pin your enemy up against the opposite wall, and prevent their moving while you pick them off. However, if they are strong enough to throw your characters back, they can do the same to you.

The stat system in Koudelka is also unique enough to be worth mentioning. Every level, your characters get 4 points to add onto any stat. Although the stat limit is 99, this means that, essentially, your eight stats only rise by a cumulative amount of four hundred points, assuming you level up as far as possible. This really isn't that many. However, many of the weapons and armour you can pick up raise your stats by a significant amount, considering the relatively low limit. If a weapon raises someones stats above 99, you will see the benefit - you just can't raise stats that high manually. The problem with this, or rather, the challenge, is that weapons break after a certain number of uses. This does go well with your limited inventory, but can be frustrating at times; for instance, when your best weapon snaps in half right before a major boss fight.

All of your characters can use the same spells and equip every weapon, and your skill with both weapon types and spells levels up with use. The spell levels affect the area of effect, and strength, while the weapon levels affect the strength and amount of attacks, rising up to three. The movements of the characters in battle look pretty good, considering the age of the game, and, to be honest, Koudelka is pretty gorgeous in a tough kind of way. However, getting back to the subject at hand, it's difficult to level your spells up enough to be really useful without some serious training. Weapon skills rise much faster than spell skills, and, luckily for some, bare-fist is a class; raising a characters skill either without a weapon or with a pair of knuckles equipped is a very useful strategy, and is easy on your inventory. The bosses in Koudelka are fairly tough, especially the final boss, and the optional boss, Gargoyle.

Released towards the end of the PlayStations life-span, Koudelka's graphics were pretty good at the time, and, in general don't look too bad now, although they're nowhere near as incredible as some more recent games. Koudelka, your on-screen character, moves fairly realistically, especially on stairs. She's also, as mentioned, very attractive in a tough kind of way. Not physically tough, but emotionally so; at first, she comes across as unnecessarily mean, but as you go through the game you come to realise why she is that way. At first, she's really kick-ass, and has some of the best lines in the game, but then you - or rather, I did, at least - really start to care for her. She's one of my favourite video game characters, right up there with my first love, Deis.

The movements could be compared most to the Project Zero/Fatal Frame series, which does seem to have borrowed a fair few elements from this game, while the in-battle movements most resemble the original Shadow Hearts. However, the game does have some loading problems, especially in battle sequences, which causes it to play slower. It's said that this is due to the style of the graphics.

Koudelka is a very short game, at around twenty hours for a slow play through. It has very few side-quests; there is the optional boss, Gargoyle, and the extra items. Gargoyle is amazingly tough, especially considering that he levels up with your characters, and the extra items are difficult to get. The game needs to be saved at a particular time - ie, 1 hour, 11 minutes, and 11 seconds - with a certain number of items in your inventory. If done properly, quitting the game and reloading will result in an extra item. This can be a pain.

There are three endings, and they mostly depend upon your actions towards the end of the game. If you don't find Koudelka's pendant, and have it in your inventory at the end of the game, you'll get the worst ending. Otherwise, it depends on how well you defeat the final boss, much like the Breath of Fire series.

The company behind Koudelka, Sacnoth, was originally made up of ex-square employees, and it's noteworthy to any Final Fantasy addict for that reason alone. Wikipedia states that;

"Hiroki Kikuta, most known for composing the music to Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu III (also known as Secret of Mana II) while working at Squaresoft, created Sacnoth in 1997 with funding from the video game company SNK. Unhappy with what he considered as the disjointed, juvenile, and stagnant nature of most RPGs, Kikuta had intended to take the genre in a whole new direction. Koudelka was to be his magnum opus, the game that would show the world just how far RPGs could go".

Although in a way, his vision did come to pass, with the next games released, the Shadow Hearts series, Koudelka alone is generally considered more noteworthy for being the prequel to that game, than a stand-alone. However, I played this game long before Shadow Hearts, and although not amazingly unusual by today's standards, it does have a charm all its own.

The game can be difficult to find now, and can be expensive; it's best bought second-hand from game stores who sometimes don't realise what they're dealing with.

In summary, Koudelka is a great game, although slightly let down by the short length and long loading times. However, the short play-time doesn't let down the amount of character development, which is a major part of the game. It's tough at times, but in my opinion, that kind of works. It's worth looking for if you enjoyed Project Zero/Fatal Frame, or the Shadow Hearts series (although, due to various plot links between Koudelka and Shadow Hearts, the games are best played in the order they take place.

It's difficult to define exactly why, but I guess what I'm saying is that Koudelka will always have a special place in my heart and on my shelf; despite its flaws, it's a great game. The plot is intriguing, and the occasional moments of humour are a welcome relief from the creepiness of the rest of the game. You really get to care about the characters, and when a few of them showed up in Shadow Hearts - which I wasn't expecting, since, although the games are linked, it's not in an obvious way - I was genuinely delighted.

Final Fantasy II - Review

A repost of the review I wrote for Final Fantasy II six years ago.

Warning: The following contains major spoilers.

When the Death Emperor attacks Fynn, Firion, Maria and Gus are nearly captured. They manage to get away with the help of the Altair Resistance, although Maria's brother, Leon, is missing.

Still, they have more important things to worry about. Firion, Maria and Gus are roped in to help the resistance, with various other characters helping them along the way.

Your three basic characters are Firion, Maria and Gus, while the fourth character place is occupied by a constantly changing selection of characters. You have no choice as to when they join you, as it's based on plot.

Firion, Maria and Gus are all friends, whose parents were killed in Fynn. As there is very little plot in this game, compared to later Final Fantasies, there's very little character development, although Gus is able to talk to animals, and it's sometimes clear how much Maria misses her brother.

Gameplay is essentially the same as in many other Final Fantasies. There is a basic world map, with many more detailed town and dungeon maps. You are able to obtain a variety of vehicles, including chocobos, ships, canoes, sleds and airships.

Somewhat noteworthy is the fact that the world map is, like the world map at the end of Final Fantasy V, completely joined together. In other words, you can access almost any location fairly early on in the game, with sufficient grinding.

Speaking of grinding, the battle system of Final Fantasy II has lead to it being known as the bastard child of the series, and it's easy to see why that is. Unlike the other Final Fantasy's, II does not use an experience system. Instead, your stats increase or decrease based on how much they're used. For instance, a character's hit points will go up if they lose a lot of them in battle, as will their magic points. Their strength and weapon proficiency will increase as they attack, while their intelligence and the strength of their individual spells will go up as they use magic. Magic and Weapon proficiency levels work much as they do in Disgaea. Another similarity is the Inn system, which charges you according to the amount of hit points and magic points that need to be recovered. Unfortunately, you are unable to choose which characters to heal – it's all or nothing.

Essentially, what this means is that, rather than being able to wonder around and gain levels effortlessly, you must put some thought into training your characters. A glitch enables you to raise weapon and magic efficiency at a faster rate, which helps a little, although, still, much of the game will consist of training. Any character may equip any weapon or armour, and although at first, there is a slight difference between your characters stats, there is no reason for it to last. Much like Koudelka, you can train your characters to be proficient at anything you wish.

As in the first Final Fantasy, collection lists are kept, which show which percentage of items you have collected, and which monsters you have defeated. This is handy way of ensuring you don't miss anything.

The graphics show no great improvement over Final Fantasy – characters are still displayed as sprites over 2D backgrounds – but the world itself looks less fantastical, and the colours used are much more drab.

There are no real sub-quests in Final Fantasy II, although there is a small mini-game, which is unlockable once you have the sleigh. It's a basic memory game, consisting of matching paired images.

Final Fantasy II makes an interesting change from the more common experience systems. The characters are detailed only slightly more than the first Final Fantasy game, in both looks and personality, although the background characters and plot are far more developed. The game also includes many recurring features of the Final Fantasy series, including Cid and chocobos.

Every Final Fantasy has something to recommend it to a certain subsection of players, and this game is no different. It doesn't have the mainstream appeal of the overly hyped Final Fantasy VII, or the quirky memories of Final Fantasy IX. It would, I imagine, appeal most to die hard Final Fantasy fans, and to people who enjoy complicated leveling systems (Final Fantasy X, or Disgaea for instance).

In summary, I personally enjoyed this game, but felt that many elements could have been improved upon, and can see why some would not like it as much as other Final Fantasies.

Final Fantasy - Review

A repost of the review I wrote for the first Final Fantasy game. I was sixteen or so when I wrote this, so about six years ago.

Warning: The following contains major spoilers.

Princess Sara of Cornelia has been kidnapped by the evil knight, Garland, and the kingdom has no idea how to save her. Until, that is, four strange warriors are seen walking around the town. They are quickly identified as the four Light Warriors of legend, and brought to the King, where they are asked to rescue the princess in exchange for the completion of a bridge to the next continent. It seems that this is enough, and the warriors agree. When they have rescued Sara and the bridge is completed, the four warriors continue on their journey.

Final Fantasy is nowhere near as plot driven as the later games in the series. Much of it is merely exploring, with no real driving force behind your characters until near the end.

Speaking of characters, I'm not sure if the beings in Final Fantasy can be described as such. You have four warriors, and must choose which class they are. There are only six classes to choose from; Warrior, Monk, Red Mage, White Mage, Black Mage and Thief. None of them ever speak (think Ryu from Breath of Fire), and none are ever addressed by name, although you are able to give them names.

Warriors fight with swords, and wear heavy armour. They are fairly strong with good attack and defence. Monks equip very little armour or weapons, making them fairly cheap, and their unarmed attack is high. Thieves, unfortunately, can't steal, but they are quick. Their speed is really their only redeeming factor, as the rest of their stats remain pretty low.

Red mages use white and black magic, although not the higher forms. They are also more limited than White or Black mages, as they have the same amount of magic points, but have more spells to choose from. Red Mages can equip light swords and armour, giving them decently average stats.

White and Black mages use white and black magic, respectively. White magic limits itself to healing, and a few holy spells to damage the undead, while black magic is the attack magic Final Fantasy have players come to know and love. Both Black and White mages have low attack and defence.

Final Fantasy is very simple, gameplay-wise, and is pretty much what you'd expect from a traditional Final Fantasy. There is a world map, and various towns which can be visited. Most towns contain weapon, armour and item shops, as well as Black and White magic shops. For each level of spell, there are four White magic spells, and four Black magic spells. Each character can learn three of each level of spell.

For example, the level one White magic spells are Cure, Dia, Protect and Blink, while the level one Black magic spells are Fire, Sleep, Thunder and Shape. The White mage can learn any three White magic spells, while a Black mage can learn any three Black Magic spells. The Red mage must choose three spells out of the options of Cure, Protect, Blink, Fire, Sleep and Thunder. Higher level spells are more expensive than lower level spells.

There's nothing really noteworthy about the weapons and armour systems; as a general rule, each town has slightly more expensive and better quality weapons and amour, which can be equipped depending on your characters class.

Battles are turn based, although your character and the enemies don't move in any specific order. Final Fantasy characters move in their own sweet, variable, time, which can mess up any attempt at strategizing.

There are very few sub-quests or mini-games to be found here. There is a puzzle, which is accessible once your party gets ahold of a ship. If you hold the X button, and hit Circle around fifty times, a new screen will appear with a basic sliding puzzle game. If you beat the best time (which is defaulted at around two minutes), you win several items, and 10,000 gil. Just to put that into perspective, one of the best weapons in the game costs 50,000 gil, and this mini-game is accessible very early on. Defeating it within two minutes is ridiculously easy – my record is 26 seconds – so unlike in many other games, earning money is never really an issue.

Another sub-quest involves Bahamut and results in a class upgrade for your characters – Warrior to Knight, Thief to Ninja, Red Mage to Red Wizard, and so on. This changes your characters look slightly, and enables them to use more varieties of spells, although they are still limited to three per level.

The graphics consist of sprites, on 2D, plainly coloured backgrounds. They have been improved from the SNES, but are nowhere near the quality of the PS2 or even the Playstation in its prime. Still, they're simple and clean, and if not impressive, at least free from the dreadful Final Fantasy VII arms.

One nice touch is the inclusion of collection lists. These detail how many items you've found in each location in a handy blank out of blank format. This allows you to check what percentage of treasures you've found, and exactly where you've missed something. There's a similar list for the bestiary. Filling both of these in unlocks several pieces of original artwork. Somewhat annoyingly, the fact that you get the airship so early on means that many field monsters will be missed in a normal play-through, so you'll need to go out of your way to get most of the normal monsters.

Also annoyingly, the only way to save permanently is when resting; in other words, whenever you wish to save, you must either rest at an Inn, or use up a sleeping bag, tent or cottage item. You can quick save at any time, even in dungeons. Quick saves will disappear when the machine is turned off, although you can use the traditional Final Fantasy soft reset (R1+L1+Select+Start) if you need to. A handy use for this is to avoid any and all battles – you simply save every few steps, and reset when you run into anything.

Gamers shouldn't go into this expecting anything like the depth of plot of the later Final Fantasies, which is unfortunate, considering it's what the series is known for. Still, the game is fun and simple, and fairly short. I completed it in around twenty hours on my first play-through, and I didn't miss a single item. The game has two modes, normal and easy. The main difference is the enemies hit points, and the cost of weapons, armour, spells and items.

In summary, it's a fun, simple game, and a must for any Final Fantasy fan. It's not a great introduction to the series, but, considering it's said to have saved Squaresoft from going under, they must have done something right. You might, however, wish to bear in mind that that was almost twenty years ago.