Neue Rezensionen von kirkir2002

If I got anything out of my foray into hardboiled point-and-click detective shlock, it’s that too many writers don’t know what humans sound like. Terrified of whiffing on a joke or dragging progression to a halt, the meta stumbled towards driving the story forward, whatever the cost. The cost, of course, are ensemble casts rife with milquetoast nothing. No one has a moment to breathe or to bond.

NOTR has… a lot wrong with it, but credit where credit’s due, it genuinely reads like a fairytale. Characters are given time to ramble nonsense, and when it’s colorful nonsense, it’s very cozy, even when the audio editing screws it up a good chunk of the time. If NOTR was 8 hours of literally just Mr. Churchmouse, this would be a positive review!

Unfortunately, Matthias Kempke seems much better suited to short fables than lore-laden adventures. Those awkward forays into short-lived dimensions only drag us away from the perfectly charming world we already built in Mousewood. When our rabbit gets pulled back in for that final lore dump… you kinda realize you’ve barely seen him at all.

I’m worried, now, I convinced myself not to like this series. It’s more than the general jank, it’s the general spottiness pervading everything. The dialogue is bereft of feeling, at times inhuman. Every Blackwell game (and every Wadjet Eye game I’ve touched) stumbles headlong into these abysmally paced inflection points that fall flat on their faces.

And still… it’s pretty clear Dave Gilbert put all his heart into Epiphany. In a series where every climax feels tacked on, we inexplicably get one of the bravest, most sincere endings I’ve seen in any franchise. There was time, over the course of this series, to make Rosa a much stronger character than she gets to be. I can’t pretend I didn’t grow attached to her anyway.

I don’t like reviews mired in compare and contrast - your opinion of one game should never be hitched to your feelings about another. And now, having said that, I’m gonna give myself permission to compare and contrast because there just aren’t that many games like Obra Dinn.

I thought I liked Obra Dinn because it was new and original and all those words people threw at it. And I did like it for those reasons! But Golden Idol helped me realize I also liked it, despite all the craziness, because it’s a compelling period drama. The first thing you see is ‘Lost at Sea, 1803.’ This is a merchant ship full of sailors, who act like sailors, who talk like sailors. It’s a mystery where the mystery is absurd but the people are still people. In Obra Dinn, you can deduce identities by listening closely to people’s accents. Or by looking really carefully at their shoes. If you know your way around a ship, you can discern extraordinarily subtle things about who is acting in what capacity. It wasn’t just a ‘New kind of detective game.’ Obra Dinn, the ship, felt like a living, breathing organism.

And so, it kinda irks me how people imply Golden Idol ‘goes deeper.’ It sorta does, but in a very logistical way. Sure, a few eurekas are amplified when you’ve deduced an identity with grade 9 algebra. But for every moment that gets your gears turning, there are five more that seem ensnared in its irritating confines.

Gone are those characterizing vignettes, traded away for Golden Idol’s faux-aristocratic English (that probably could’ve used another translation or two), confined to parting words. Gone are a lot of the cultural clues that made Obra Dinn more than just a logic puzzle.

These might seem like petty concerns, but combined with this insistence on a big ensemble cast, we wind up with a lot of characters who ‘Do’ things over the course of the story, but who feel totally hollow. Since we only get parting words, our dialogue is limited to our quantity of whodunits. What we do know is confined to notes and letters that, again, really desperately needed another draft to be coherent (i.e. ‘Excessive lust’ and the like).

I won’t give it a thumbs down, because there are just aren’t many games like Obra Dinn and more games should try to be like Obra Dinn. It scratches that itch when I turn my brain off a little. But if ‘going deeper’ comes to mean putting together increasingly complex jigsaw puzzles of two-dimensional characters, I think we learned the wrong lesson.

I do question the game’s persistent cushiness if this was really the path we wanted to go down. The class consciousness, gradually less subtextual, feels a little half-baked in a town as mediocre as Possum Springs. I’m not saying it had to be a slum, but it probably should’ve been a little uglier than this - a little more Martinaise-y. It would’ve made Mae’s re-affirmation, that yes, she really does still love this place, all the more powerful at the end.

On a more personal level, though, NITW says what it has to say very elegantly. Those downward spirals in eccentric people (basically all of our main cast) are captured really well. In a weird way, I kinda wish I had more friends like these.

Have you ever had a cool idea for a game, but when you think about it for a second, you realize it doesn’t have the substance to be an actual full-length game? Lucas Pope has a talent for turning those fun ideas into actual full-length games.

It’s a shame how (most) endings seem to spawn from a handful of your spy thriller interactions rather than how you conducted yourself with ordinary people. In a weird way, I think Obra Dinn had more of a thesis and more to say for itself.

That being said, Papers Please is probably one of the most resonant experiences in gaming. I don’t know of another game that can make you feel so terrible one moment, that can get you right back to stamp-induced dopamine the next. It’s much too easy to empathize with the victims of a robust bureaucracy, and that the game happily makes you a participant in that bureaucracy is terrifying.

What was even more striking was my ability to not feel empathy so long as there were documents to pour through.

I don’t think the game fails because of the titular barrow that seems intent on getting itself over with as quickly as possible. Rushed though the ending is, there’s a folksy abruptness to it that still had me nervous.

Rather, I think it’s Thomasina’s relationship with her father that really falls flat. The moral here has to do with the enduring, self-induced blindness of childhood goggles. But those childhood flashbacks are interspersed clumsily and in a floundering framing device - you’ve got to feel close to this guy if you’re gonna be shedding tears at the end, and I just didn’t. Even through Thomasina’s rose-tinted glasses, William’s charisma only comes out in spurts. He just seems like a cartoon dad.

And ultimately, no, I can’t forgive you Cloak and Dagger, for sculpting a pleasant town and then abandoning it for a big purple dungeon. I wanted to praise you, Cloak and Dagger, for being patient - for easing us into the terrible thing waiting at the end. Now that I’m through that purple dungeon, it all just reads as poorly planned.

(also p.s., you can’t promise a puzzle with Greek letters and then have the puzzle have nothing to do with the Greek letters. I lost like an hour on that.)

I feel so lost in you…

Writing something coherent here would imply a level of focus this game doesn’t have. And also I don’t have the energy.

It bored me a lot with stories inside stories and my original plan was to make this entire review a pastiche of its weird, wandering prose. But that would be mean. When the game is being lovely, it’s very lovely, but also, it makes me sleepy.

Also, it felt a lot like Cardboard Computer wanted to make a choose-your-own-adventure using VHS tapes. Or maybe with an answering machine? That was the best part. Maybe they should have made the whole game that.

Another instance where I can only wish I wasn’t five and a half years late to the party. A good lesson about where the real thrill of detective work lies - not in some goofy hunt for a single, mystery-shattering revelation, but rather, in a hundred inferences about people’s shoes and the like.

Upon completion (I mostly avoided spoilers!) it's been funny reading forum threads and discovering how many people got trapped in the same deductive cul-de-sacs as me. I often felt very stupid, and I loved every minute of it. That being 1,020 minutes, which is apparently how long it took.

Surprised me. It has all the makings of something unremarkable at first, but it quickly finds its feet. It’s masterful ultra-episodic storytelling to the extent that it can ever be masterful - scenes are brief, paced out and littered with mini climaxes that mostly manage to convince you of their importance.

I’m not convinced that games that promise your choices matter, really this time, will ever not feel manipulative - as someone who’s tried his hand at very basic Twine stories, I can promise you, there’s a reason no one has really gotten it right. Some choices lead to inherently more interesting outcomes, and others are too much work to ever justify the boatload of resources people want you to put in.

I think by making its branching pathways just a little distinct and just a little connected, Dusk basically does all that it can. It is a little annoying how quick time events can range from totally insignificant to character killing, sometimes without much indication, but then again, I probably shouldn’t have failed any in the first place!

Also have to praise the aesthetic. The 'slideshow' effect, as others have cynically called it, works really well for this imo. Close ups of emotional reactions, added intensity as someone invisibly whips a gun out over the course of one frame - I think it's really clever.

Whining about ‘the ending’ always feels very vague to me, so I’ll say as much as I can without spoiling it. Beyond the pretty blatant and not that interesting sequel bait, the one thing the game really botches is the framing device. Adult Zoe is underdeveloped and in my Chapter 6, she very whelmingly decides to face her problems head on!! after a boring exchange of reassurances with the most sympathetic character in the game.

It’s a shrug of an ending for arguably the two most important characters and it was pretty disappointing. If Adult Zoe was going to be one of the two most important characters, we should’ve spent some time with her at the beginning of chapters - the obvious candidate to cut would be Ash. It’s not like Dusk is otherwise afraid to tell its story out of order.

Overall, though, I was always eagerly awaiting more. There’s enough creativity at Interior Night that I hope they attempt more ambitious stories in the future.

There’s something very charming about a story that’s willing to bring itself to the back of the experience, but that remains intent on existing - after all, there would be no product without it. There are some frustrating levels in TWA where you realize at the very last second you bet on the wrong order of events. But games like this make me wonder if a captivating story can tie together even the loosest ends.

And I suspect the answer is yes.