Neue Rezensionen von kirkir2002

It’s incredible the hoops people will jump through to find fault in the games that are trying really hard to tell engaging stories in new ways. How many op-eds do I have to read about any and all engrossing narratives having inherent ‘film envy.’ It’s frustrating for someone who just wants nice little stories. And it’s even more frustrating when mediocrities like 11-11 seem intent on proving them right. This is not an engrossing narrative. This is not a well-told story. Elijah Wood and Sebastian Koch have to do their damndest to convince you the writers know what people sound like. In two languages!

When you get down to it, this is a game incredibly sparse on content. You don’t get to know what these environments are like. You don’t get to know what these people are like. You don’t get to know what war is like, because the white speech bubbles above the heads of NPCs generally prompt a single offhand remark, (in two languages!), vaguely human-sounding, and then off you go into a terrible minigame. This is a game that needed two-way, heartfelt conversations about people’s experiences. But those experiences are all stuffed into vaguely human-sounding monologues from two exceptional (weee a balloon!) perspectives. And that money all presumably went to Elijah Wood. And it’s not good.

Even if the human talking was vaguely human sounding, would it be any good? Probably not. Because everything here is scattered into as many unmotivated little sections as possible. You get to choose whose story you want to experience first, like it’s some terribly meaningful decision - only to be ushered off into the other narrative 30 seconds later. 11-11 also has a bad habit of drawing attention to all the nothing in its playing space by literally pointing you to the next step - you know, as opposed to all the other people littering up the world. On one hand, little segments of game are reserved for anyone who painstakingly dug up every collectible - on the other, you’ve got characters shouting to ‘C’mon Harry!!’ if you do. Ultimately, it’s cut in too many parts that make every strange story beat seem like a dart thrown against a wall - look out for icebergs!Barret shot a guy! You have a pigeon now! Do a bird dance! Balloons weee!

Ok, other problem here is the art, which, yes, is oftentimes blurry. That would be more ok if they committed to it. I don’t know anything about Monet, but when his paintings did depict people, his faces seemed to imply imminent movement. The subject might be halfway between two expressions or soon to start speaking. If you want to imitate that style, you don’t get free reign to keep everyone’s cheekbones as uncannily still as possible with permanent, uncanny nothings on their lips. Honestly, it might’ve been more artistically and thematically appropriate not to give anyone faces.

Positives? Positives. Mm. The cat-pigeon segments were nice even if the camera angles weren’t. I also liked how the ‘good’ ending isn’t really the good ending.

But overall, this is a lot of ideas, not particularly well expressed in the first place, belched out in rapid succession. Those ideas coalesce into nothing new or poignant. If this is the bar for a good story, I’m not surprised I can’t convince people to see games the way I do.

There’s a startlingly down-to-earth sensibility Mothmen glows in that the devs seem ready to defend to the death! And I get it. It’s a lazy critique of pulp stories, and stories in general - wahhh, these characters are ‘flat.’ That word does an astonishing bit of legwork. It’s this want for a very specific kind of story couched in a pretend offhand remark. There’s a humanity in everything that can (and can’t) be presupposed about an imprecise archetype - and that’s every character in Mothmen. Something that feels precise, but not enough to put your finger on.

I think the characters here mostly accomplish that. There’re extraordinary things on ordinary edges that feel very human. I think the actual problem is the game’s insistence on putting these characters through a ‘fast-paced’ story that doesn’t have enough time to respect their normality. There’s a certain point where these characters seemingly lose everything that makes them charming almost-cliches so they can just become cliches. Who have a lot of lore to tell you.

It makes me hate the mothmen for eating through the story. Like moths. I hate that this game shakes out into something that doesn’t quite work because it has the foundation of something revolutionary. If the next installment in this series keeps at the same breakneck pace, I hope the devs look for more pauses in the action to consider how their characters, in all their normalities and abnormalities, would really react.

Takes unremarkable little minigames and loads them with meaning. I do tend to agree it’s less than the sum of its parts, though.

Generally, the younger the character, the more intriguing their parcel of story. The game struggles to find its voice when it’s taking itself a little too seriously - it excels when it shuts itself up and embraces absurdity. The environment outside the minigames does a good job at inflating itself, but it lacks some fundamental tension as we weave between chapters. A Gone Home-y thunderstorm would’ve been nice.

While WROEF continues to be influential, I think it’s been surpassed by more complete experiences that don’t neglect the stories between the stories.

Lives up to its reputation in every way I never imagined. Relentlessly witty. Maybe the best depiction of internal monologue in anything. I'll replay this one day with the voices turned off. Voice acting is mostly competent but occasionally fails to capture the subtleties in its prose.

But what an achievement. I can't forgive myself for how long I went without playing this.

There’s a lot of fiction interested in ‘complexity’ right now - on crafting complex worlds with complex characters where no one is wholly good and nothing is completely certain. A lot of RPGs want to do something like this. I don’t think any have committed to it so carefully and so empathetically as Pentiment.

There’s a feeling I got from this game - of actually living in that complex world where nothing is straightforward - there’s a feeling I got here that the exact same setting in any other medium would never be able to replicate.

And I think that’s really cool. It’s a setting that feels big and small at the same time. There are more characters than you’ll be able to keep track of, but by the end, you’ll still recognize them, if that makes sense - and you’ll recognize how small they are.

It’s not perfect, yadda yadda. There’s a trend in otherwise mundane visual novels to seemingly abandon their roots at the climax so something terribly dramatic can happen. Pentiment, for better or worse, hitches itself to this climax from the get go, and I don’t think it’s great. Thankfully, it’s also very brief. Looking back on it, it seems more like an oddity surrounded by hours and hours of pure bliss.

And I was worried, for a while, I wouldn’t be able to love this game - I thought it would wind up a period drama, charming, but forgotten. Instead, gradually, it surrounds you with this one theme - the very scary idea that truth doesn’t really matter so much to most people; not if it gets in the way of a good story. And it seems so often today that there are these weeds that just burst from the soil and suddenly take up the entire garden - and we’re left fact-checking more than reading, trying to peel away the weeds that look an awful lot like the thing we were trying to grow.

So to summarize, I think this’ll be my obsession for the next while. I made a list of little moments that I love while I was playing - here are 4 of my favourites:

Right after the first murder, the game needs to dump a bunch of leads on you. It would have been so so easy to shove you into a room with an ‘important’ character to monologue at you about how important your investigation is. Pentiment, instead, takes the opportunity to actually acknowledge Andreas’ mental state - ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, a person just got murdered. Instead, you get one of the sweetest interactions in the game - dinner with the sweet little Druckeryn family who comfort you and progress the story at the same time. It’s so lovely.

Andreas notes that Sepp’s full name is the same as his father’s - Sepp asks him what the point is. It becomes clear Andreas likes saying stuff for the sake of saying stuff.

Minigames interspersed with dialogue so that you somehow care deeply about both - nothing like cutting cookie dough while you ask folks about how their folks burned in the fire.

I think I realized what the Casper persuasion check meant a second before it happened. One of the gutpunchiest gutpunches I’ve ever felt.

So after stretching it thinner than I probably should have, I have less to say about Immortality than I expected. I think it’s a game with something genuinely innovative at the centre, but that makes a lot of not particularly well-thought out choices the longer you stare at it.

This is my first Barlow game, and it won’t be my last. I think he’s really committed to telling stories in a way the medium stupidly neglects - in that ‘shandified’ way where stories feel more organic the more ordinarily and randomly scattered they’re told. Storing that information in neat little clips, which seems like his bread and butter, might offset that effect a little - might cheapen the trick a little. But it’s an efficient way to do something that isn’t done enough in the first place, and so I like it in theory.

And even when you get past the cool-ness of the concept, there’s still a lot to like about Immortality. More research than people acknowledge went into making Ambrosio feel like a heady 60’s adaptation of an 18th-century tragedy and Mnisky like a detective thriller grasping a little over its head. It would’ve been easy, what with a name like Immortality, to neglect the little movies behind the movies - and I’m glad it never feels like that’s the case. The actors consistently punch above their weight and Barlow’s team of screenwriters keep the fake films central to the experience.

When it comes to actually progressing through the game, unfortunately, I can’t help but feel like there are a lot of good ideas explored in not very good ways. The reverse function is something that could just exude that icky creepypasta effect if it were used diligently - as the only (and I emphasize ONLY) means of exploring the game’s dark underbelly, it gets real old real quick. It seems like there was a haphazard attempt to turn the feature into a puzzle at some point during development, and it just makes everything into a chore. It’s hard to appreciate the story behind the story when the big scary noise is buzzing in your ear for the umpteenth time. People say it’s easier to manage with a controller, but for me personally, a vibration would be even more excruciating. I don’t know what the easy fix is to this - maybe some actual puzzles to uncover the secret clips - maybe not quite so many secret clips in the first place - but I don’t think this was the way to do it.

As for the clips themselves, I kinda feel like the secret story is delivered a little on-the-nose. This is presumably where budget comes into play - you can’t really show the events the characters wax poetic about while staring into your soul. Once again, I can’t help but feel like it would be nice if there was something different - a little bit of show interspersed with the monologues, however slyly delivered.

And so where I’m at… I think Immortality is worth playing in that there’s just so much going on - there’s just too much clever, innovative stuff not to give it a try. There’s something at the core that’s very good, and a lot of moments that made me feel a lot of feelings. There’s a version of this game, maybe a little buttoned down, maybe not so reluctant to own its identity as a creepy interactive movie, that could deliver its best moments a lot more consistently.

A really wonderful piece of storytelling :)

You can find creativity in unexpected places! The developer has mentioned their work in GIS - which, on the surface, sounds about like the least inspiring thing imaginable.

But that would be wrong. There is such a precision about the layout of this game - a lot of thought went into why environments are the way they are, and how those environments affect us. It certainly helps that the developer grew up in these very environments - but NORCO really makes it feel like you're the one who grew up here. And in a point-and-click adventure, that's already a lot!

You can feel that same respect in every character, and in every bleak development. The art and music hold up their end, but my favorite part was just how human everybody feels. You can really lose yourself just listening to people talk. I appreciated this dedication to telling, for the most part, a very contained story, allowing for layers on layers of dialogue.

There are a ton of instances where it would've been so easy to throw in some repeated line of dialogue and leave it at that. You have to convince a character, for example, to split off from a cultish religious group - you have to go and record other members explicitly defying their faith. You learn that the group is generally anti-technology, and you recorded one kid talking about being on his phone all the time!

In the game, though, you do learn that the cult recruits people on a message board. So, I half-expected this character to get outraged, and half-expected an autogenerated 'That doesn't convince me' you would get from any other line of random dialogue. But the developers actually thought of that! They have a special line for that bit of dialogue! There are so many instances like this where you really feel like you're having a real conversation, and I just love that!

Apart from the little things though, it's just a very interesting meditation on identity in the modern day. We find identity, now, in increasingly niche and bizarre places - the game makes the point that in all of its strangeness, the world is still grounded in the same institutions as always.

If I have one criticism, I thought the ending was a little too grand. The sheer bleakness isn't the problem - I think that fits pretty well with the game. It's that NORCO, to me, felt like a very personal story about being caught up in things out of your control. There's a little dissonance there, I think, where we are small and malleable, but our protagonist is... ultimately not that.

But overall, I loved it. Even if I would call the game pessimistic, there's definitely this thematic out routed in empathy - and, without spoiling anything, how you understand that will impact the game. All in all, it's a wonderfully thought-out story with very human characters that convey a lot of emotion.



Also, I really love Million :)

Omori gives you a really unique blend of elements you wouldn't necessarily expect to mesh together - but these elements do everything in tying together a story that will hit you hard, no matter what path you go down.

This'll sound real cynical, but I was prepared to be underwhelmed. I've been totally let down by promises of an emotional experience, and for the first few hours, I really wasn't seeing it. Even when I began to understand what it was doing, I thought the world was too generic to get invested in. But even when the game isn't skewering you, it has a way of growing on you. I would lose track of time and suddenly feel something for this character and that character, until it was for the whole ensemble... until I was totally bought into the experience.

What really stuck out to me about Omori were the constantly changing expectations. To pull off what the game is going for, it has to convince you of a whole slew of things before you really understand it. It tells you it's a cheery RPG with a somber edge. Then it confuses you with a section of psychological horror to keep you on your heels. It all intersperses until you get a better grasp of what it is saying - it forces you to keep playing if you want to understand. And when you think you do understand, it hits you with a gut punch. Even without going into the content itself, it's amazing that a fairly open game can lead you down such a well-planned sequence over 30 or 40 hours.

I love how deceptively simple everything is until it isn't. I love how cliche the game pretends it is until it isn't. I love how confident the game is that you'll love one character so much, that you'll chase them across 2 different spaces knowing you probably won't get to them until the end... and how it totally worked.

I won't say it's flawless, and I still think I'm more critical than most people here. I thought the dialogue started off pretty clunky. It seems to get better as the game goes on, and it seemed particularly improved in Deep Well, but it never really goes away. There are so many instances where I thought 'This could have been phrased better.' It's really baffling when you contrast it with how masterfully the most important points are expressed. It created the impression that different people were writing different sections without much communication.

In contrast to everything the game subverts, I also thought the combat system was a bit of a missed opportunity. I hate to bring out the inevitable Undertale comparisons, but it really set a precedent for combat systems supporting the story and themes. As far as I can tell, beyond vague references to the characters' standard emotions, Omori tends not to do that. There are some crucial exceptions - in a lighter example, one character will introduce you to a healing item by beating you within an inch of your life - but for the most part, the story comes to a halt when a fight needs to happen. You can make the argument that this is consistent with the protagonist's mindstate, but it just isn't very compelling.

Still though, and this feels weird to say... I feel like Omori creates a different standard for itself. The best parts are so beautiful, and the whole experience is so ingrained into the best parts, that everything else seems like a drop in the bucket. The experience on the whole is so worth having that it feels silly to present this like a pros/cons list - it's not close. If you're comfortable with exploring some dark subject matter, go play Omori.

The main thing to know going into Dead Money, is that it's really different from the base game. The bright, happy go-lucky atmosphere is traded in for something far more dark and pessimistic. If you go down far enough, you'll see a lot of angry reviews, and I think this is the reason why. People didn't really want something as dark and as different as DM in the middle of New Vegas.

The fact that something this ambitious and genre-defying even exists in the Fallout series is kind of amazing. Even for a DLC, making something like this was always going to be risky, and well, the hate it gets a lot of the time is kinda the result.

Besides the shift in tone, Dead Money takes your weapons away at the beginning, and uses a variety of tools, which force you to stay on its intended path. Your health is constantly drained, and you could die at any second. This keeps you constantly on-edge, and attentive. While this does remove a lot of what makes Fallout an RPG, I have to defend it, because it works so well in what it's going for.

Behind all the weapons and factions, it's easy to forget what Fallout is about. There was a war a few centuries ago, and almost everybody died. Ordinary people were caught in the crossfire. They didn't really have a choice, and in the DLC, neither do you. As far as the antagonist is concerned, you're just another pawn in the grand plan. I think another reason why Dead Money feels so crappy, is because it reminds you that you're not really all that special.

Along with that, the lore has a really cool theme that I won't spoil here. The dreary, and altogether creepy atmosphere compliments just how unsettling and tragic that idea is. But when you leave the villa at the end, and you go back to the happier outlook that the rest of the game has, you sort of have the opportunity to experience what the characters in the lore never did. It's just really self-aware, and well-written.

Dead Money doesn't necessarily feel like a Fallout DLC, but its sheer consistency and strong theme make it one of the most unique bits of gameplay I've ever seen. It's not great for the same reason the rest of New Vegas is, but it's spectacular on its own terms. If that sounds interesting to you, and even if it doesn't, I still think you should try it.