Disco Elysium: Hope in a defeated dying world

Sometimes I've mentioned before the discussions about games being art, and that some games are especially good at transmitting this. And today I wanna talk about Disco Elysium, which is such a spectacular example.

Disco Elysium is a game about communism, and how it failed. About a dying world. About second chances. About the past dragging us down and preventing us to evolve. About how there's major powers that are not letting us thrive. About the ridiculousness of purity culture and how we're our own worst enemy sometimes.  About insanity, religion, decadence, corruption and state violence. About resignation and resistance and about doing what you can instead of trying and failing to do everything. The game affects you deeply, takes hold of you and doesn't let you go. The game is funny, sarcastic, tender, sad, deep, profound. The game can be played in lots of different ways, and have different outcomes to different situations while being the same game. This game changes you.

The game itself is a kind-of roleplaying game with isometric perspective, where you can equip things from your inventory, click on things to inspect them and choose between options when talking or analysing things. You start the game and have to select how to split 12 points between 4 main characteristics, which have each 6 sub-characteristics. You can assign from 1 to 6 in each of these, without passing the 12 points total. This will stay like that in your game, but as you level up it's possible to increase sub-characteristics. These 24 different sub-characteristics determine how you interact with the world. Everything you do gets a skill check against one of those (at least, sometimes against several of those), and a dice roll plus your points in that sub-characteristic determines if you succeed or not. That's the whole game, you explore things, you talk with people, and you roll the dice (or it's done in the background as you speak) and, well, things happen and are narrated to you. As you finish quests and gain xp you can level up and either increase the points in a sub-characteristic or unblock a though process or remove a thought. Thoughts happen to you as you advance, and if you work on them they can give you special abilities or bonuses, plus they develop your thoughts as well. 

You start the game naked, on the floor of a hotel room with no memories. What is clear is that, 1-you've had some kind of auto-destructive binge that was the last straw in a chain of auto-destructive binges related to an ex-wife and 2-You're insane: the 24 sub-characteristics of you mind are talking to you, all the time, recommending things to do, giving you insights and their thoughts on all the matters. 

Soon after recovering some clothes and talking with people, you discover that you're a police officer, that you have a new partner that has come to join you today, and that there's a very dead body of a mercenary hanging from a tree behind the hotel, quite ripe after more than a week there. You need to find who did it and why, prevent the rest of the mercenaries from killing the union workers who they suspect killed the guy and try to put peace in this neighbourhood of this city, Revachol, the centre of the world, the cadaver of a region that tried to be communist and got bombed to hell and invaded by the coalition of the rest of the world. 

The world is dying, and so are you most probably, as you're an older guy that has abused substances too much out of depression and finally managed to get enough brain damage to somehow start from scratch and piece yourself together. 

What follows is an investigation in which you talk with everyone, you manage to influence local politics, you try to keep peace and really find the truth, plus to find some tether to keep you going and find beauty in the destroyed buildings and bombed areas, where you try to find inexistent animals, where you meet corrupt union leaders, good people, a fanatic liberal, the last few real communists that are too busy arguing and making pamphlets, old warriors, young drug addicts, fascists, assassins, strike-breaker scum, people lost in the edges of society and a mess of a city that feels alive and decaying at the same time. And also, you find hope. In little things, in recovery, in healing, and in revolution, in a way. Hope made from other people and from friendliness and collaboration. Hope as resistance from an uncaring world, against all odds and reasons.

This game is a statement. It's precious. It's a fucking work of art. And to really experience it you need to try it and discover what it contains by yourself.

This game is such a good political discourse that their creators got cheated by the publishing company and they lost the rights to their world and their story. They're not getting money out of it, so yeah, find copies, download it and play. Their message is important, the money for the publisher is not.

Rich bastards will kill us all if they can

The title here is misleading, I'm not ranting, I wanna talk about the second part of Horizon, Forbidden West and the DLC, Burning Shores :p . But it's a pretty good summary of the game, actually...

So, the sequel came out, and I played it and loved it. And recently they made DLC for it, and I also loved it, and want to comment on it. 

The first game was tough to follow up, the stakes were pretty high, the discovery of what had happened was incredible and the feeling of the full plot was really amazing. So, Forbidden West had to expand on it. And I think it did a very good job, although it has a few flaws. 

We start again following Aloy, who explains that even if we stopped the previous threat that wanted to kill everythign again, the world terraforming is not working properly with rogue AIs not doing their job, and therefore we need to find a solution, which would be to get a copy of the main AI involved in the job and restore it. 

At the end of the previous game this wasn't that clear, but it makes sense. The previous AI had to sacrifice itself in order to stop another AI from going rogue and killing everything, so it makes sense that the terraforming is failing all around us. And even if the original rogue AI that wanted to kill us is gone, there was another rogue AI that was less aggressive but in charge of building machines that was causing problems on the first game, so it makes sense this will be a prominent antagonist. 

Let's start with the basics: The graphics are amazing again, with a level of realism that is just beautiful. The different natural environments are relaxing to watch and traverse, and the enemies are detailed and cool to see. The game feels alive with nature and breeze, and some places that you discover are amazing to look at. 

The gameplay is similar as before. This time you can climb more surfaces, although not all, and you become a lot more mobile thanks to a number of inventions, like a grappling hook or a kind of glider that lets you fly a bit, or at least fall down slowly. Combat lets you use more melee combos this time, although there's lots of new remote weapons you can also try and experiment. In my opinion a bit too much variety in weapons and skills, I ended up focusing on a few that worked for me and ignoring the rest, although I'm told some of the new ones really do damage. 

You still scavenge resources, parts, plants and such, and then can craft or exchange for new weapons or upgrades. 

The game suffers a bit from this tendency of open-world games to make a lot of options available, when you could get rid of several of them and still be a fully enjoyable game, but I guess it depends on how you play it. But in general it's good, very open. The extra mobility is quite welcomed, feels a lot better to be able to jump from high places. 

The focus changes a bit, and now you can use it as if it was a sonar Ping, revealing things around you. This is very practical because it lets you use it without going into focus mode and then leaving, and it highlights elements that you can interact with that are close to you.

There's very hard hunter trials again, and now there's also strike matches (a table game you can play inside the game, very strategic, I liked it), solving little ruin puzzles, finding scanning drones, a few tallnecks and cauldrons, melee combo trials (hard to do, combo instructions are not always very clear) and machine races (pretty hard and annoying sometimes because the hardest races do these annoying tricks all race games do of using rubber bands and moments where rivals are just faster than you for no reason). There's also an arena mechanic, but you unlock that on the last segment of the game, so you can accidentally just skip it completely. 

The world-building is superb, and special mention goes to the Utaru, with their amazing gardens and houses in giant disc antennas, a tribe that actually grows things and makes food.

So, this is a general feeling of the game, some improvements from the first, more content, more options, bigger map and plot. 

About the negative, it feels a bit like nitpicking, but the following is true: one of the tribes of the game is this Spartan -like tribe where only warriors thrive, that bases all their culture on leftover vids displaying some kind of military air force group. This and other details feels like the USA air force and army paid to the developers to work these subplots and details as if it was a recruitment advertisement. We know they've done it more evidently in other games and movies, so I don't discard this is what happened here. It's not a lot, but it bothers me how there's moments where they're trying to make military stuff cool somehow, and feels a bit shoehorned. Then there's also the Vegas section, talking about the city of dreams as if Vegas was amazing, when it's a capitalistic hellscape made to trick people out of their money. Again, feels like a Vegas advertisement. Apart from that, some of the rewards for completing relic puzzles or drone scans feel underwhelming since it's just cosmetic details.

But well, that's about all I have to say about negative points.

The plot is amazing, and the characters are lovely and great. Without spoiling too much, it becomes apparent soon that Aloy is trying to do too many things without asking for help, and this just makes things worse. Once she actually asks for it, things improve a lot, and the sense of creating a network of real friends that will work together to prevent the end of the world is great, like a family that supports and helps each other. Also worth mentioning that I love that the real antagonist here become a group of rich bastats that managed to escape in a spaceship, became immortal, came back to earth and, as the rich bastards they are, decided to destroy the world to remade it to something they like, and the people already living in it can get fucked for all they care. It was quite cathartic to fight this type of people and to point clearly that they're at fault and that they were the problem originally. It's good that this message is made across the game loudly and repeatedly. 

The game ens with the discovery of the real final enemy: Nemesis, made of the mind of the rich bastards, that is trying to come to earth and destroy the humans that created it. We will need to wait for the third part to finally fight it though. 

Meanwhile, the DLC deals with one of these rich bastards causing chaos in a separated area. The DLC is quite nice, very epic (the final boss is spectacular and you'd need to see it for yourselves) and introduces a love interest that, finally, seems to be a good match for Aloy (and also a woman). There were several characters in the first game that seemed they could be interested in her, but nothing was done, and the most obvious one was kind of projecting from his dead lover to you, so didn't feel like the right choice. This new character, although introduced a bit suddenly, feels quite nice, the interactions are natural and it's kind of cute how both her and Aloy are flirting in a kind of clumsy way. 

In general, I enjoyed both the game and the DLC very much. A lot of questions left unresolved from the first game are finally clear, several of the best characters have returned and improved upon, there's new amazing characters and the plot continues to be amazing, interesting and kind of relevant with the current world. 

Totally recommended.

 

 

 

 

Disappointed but not surprised

I haven't written in a long time again, and also not about politics, because situation is shitty. But wanted to comment on a certain aspect of it. 

First, to say that the two majoritarian "independentist" parties, ERC and Junts, haven't done much at all lately. They've used elections just to get into power, get salaries, and then keep the status quo, making pacts with parties that, in theory, should never agree with them like PSOE/PSC and PP.

These two other Spanish parties have responded by betraying them at any chance too, so it's really really stupid that ERC and Junts still try to pact with them when there's solid proof their word is worthless and they will not fulfil what has been said. Although Junts and ERC are also very very guilty of that. 

So, people are pissed at these two independentist parties. The third big one, CUP, has acted much better in general while not being perfect, but has been added to the group for some reason(even though it never had enough power to act on much), maybe because people, once they distrust their original choice, apply the thought that "the rest are the same" when it's not actually true at all.

So now, there's an undercurrent of thought that these three independentist parties must be punished. And way too many people have decided that they will punish them by not voting at all.

That's the stupidest, STUPIDEST thing I've ever heard. 

For three reasons:

1-The less votes there are in an election, the more votes the right gets (and here I mean PSC/PSOE, PP and VOX. These three parties represent right-wing politics, from moderate on the first case to extreme in the second two ones).

Parties don't give a fuck that people didn't vote as long as they get representation. 

Basically, if there's 100 people able to vote and only 10 people vote, let's say, and they vote 4-PSOE, 3-PP and 3-VOX, these parties will not say "oh, why no more people didn't vote". They will say "oh yes, we won a lot of representation, we're the best!". And they will do whatever the fuck they want. And it will be BAD. 

These parties are the enemy of everything good. Simply put. Independentist or not, you should NEVER let these parties win at anything. If your actions are making their life easier for them, your actions are automatically BAD. 

2-Not voting doesn't give any power to your cause. 

If you want to change things, there's two options, revolution or voting for things that represent you in some way. 

To all these people that don't vote: will you automatically take arms and start a revolt in the streets? No? Then what you're doing is harming your cause. 

Nobody, nationally and internationally, gives a fuck about why you didn't vote. They only care about the people that voted. It's been proven time and time again. There's been lots of elections in the world where for several reasons people didn't vote that much. Nobody has ever commented. The final results were the only ones that counted, and that was taken as "the will of the people". 

I totally agree not voting should be considered as a bad sign. But nobody cares, so not voting will be ignored, and if something it will be considered as a fact that "independentism has lost strength, nobody wants it anymore". So, do with that what you will.

3-Dont vote for the parties that you don't like, but change your vote!

It seems like once there's a party that is yours, it's them or death. If they don't do a good job, lots of people stop voting altogether. A lot of people didn't change their vote from ERC to Junts or CUP or some other combination of this, they just stopped voting altogether. 

This is stupid! You don't like your last vote? Change it!

If people don't vote, less votes means more representation. Let's say that you have 10 people voting in total. 5 vote to ERC and 5 want to punish ERC. If the 5 that want to punish ERC don't vote, ERC gets 100% of the votes, so 100% of representation ->great success! We're on the right path, people love what we do!

Do you want that?

If instead, the 5 people that want to punish ERC vote Escons em blanc, CUP, PACMA, anything really that is not ERC, ERC gets 50% of representation ->they're punished. 

I will concede that there may be not many options available that seem good. But not voting will do NOTHING whatsoever to help you or your cause. 

See what the right-wing parties do.

They never, ever, miss a vote. That should give you a clue. 

Fresh stories

 I have been playing some more games, and I'd like to comment of them.

The first one of them is one that I've been replaying now but I actually finished last year and a half or so, and it created a big impact on me. Somehow the story and the characters felt very real and well-made. The game is called Horizon: Zero Dawn, and recently they made a second part, that I'll also explain a bit at some point.

Let's start with general mechanics: The game is an open world sandbox style of game, where you play as Aloy, a girl from a primitive tribe. The game is based on sneaking around and using bow and arrows mostly in order to debilitate and kill the enemies, which can be other humans or machines that look and behave like animals. You gather resources from killings, can craft ammo, potions and traps, and has also some close-combat mechanics with a spear. There's some skill trees where you can get upgrades as you level up, and it has a strange healing mechanic where you collect herbs and use them to transform them into health, as if they're communicating fluids somehow. Early on you gain the skill to scan your surroundings to find enemies and items and analyse their path and weaknesses,  and a bit later you also get a skill to "hack" some of the machines in order to gain control of them. The animal machines tend to have differentiated parts that you can target, and you usually use this to target weak parts with specialised arrows that damage more that part, in order to weaken the machine or remove some of their weapons. Later on you do get more specialised bows and some specific weapons, like one that lets you put traps or another ones that ropes down machines. You can buy and sell things, and there's mods you can apply to armour and weapons to improve them, with different rarity and power. All in all some original ideas but nothing groundbreaking either.  You're gathering resources as you find them and kill things and build more stuff and level up, in a kind of flow that is nice and feels fun most of the time, as you explore the world. You can climb some places but not everything, they're special marks where you can do it and usually they indicate a certain path you need to follow as you move up.

The graphics are really great, with different types of regions including jungles, deserts and snowy mountains, and you're always surrounded by nature, being able to gather resources by hunting too. The machines are beautiful and original, just copies of real animals but in a robot format, and how they behave, the lights they emit and how they move and react it's really cool, and definitely one of the big selling points of the game. Some are like current animals but others are like dinosaurs, with the most fancy one being a T-Rex in machine form and full of weapons. The game is set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptical setting, but at first you don't know anything, you just see there's ruins of buildings, of cities and towns, and there's sometimes caves where there's facilities with old advanced technology while you're just using a spear and bow. People seem to live in little towns without modern technology, but the ruins hold more advanced stuff.

To get you into moving around in this world, you find quests talking to people, where they ask you to find something or help them with something, where you use your scanning device, called focus, and find things that cannot be found without this technology. Quest tend to be interesting, although sometimes the middle of the quests adds some machines to kill to add action, when I think just the quest as they are would be nice enough and there's no need to make you kill enemies, but I know big companies tend to think that if you're not killing stuff the game will be boring and they force developers to add fights in the middle, so oh well. 

Anyway, all this is not that special, just quite nice and expected form a modern big game, apart from the machines that are amazing.

Where I think they made a huge difference is in the plot. I loved the plot, the world-building and the twists and surprises.

So, in the game you're Aloy, who is from a tribe, the Nora, that are particularly closed and not accepting of modernities, very traditional. You have lived apart from them all your life because you were born without a mother, one of the ancient abandoned ruins one day made a baby appear out of nowhere, and they were superstitious about it and thought that was evil somehow, because they're matriarchal and a person without a mother cannot be a good sign. Another shunned person raises you and becomes your dad, and in the process you find a special ancient device that lets you read and learn stuff about the ancient civilisation (our civilization but in the future) that somehow got killed for unknown reasons. 

Don't want to spoil too much of the story itself, but once you manage to leave that first closed area and explore more ruins with your device, you learn that some capitalistic CEO idiot made an army of automated killer robots that feed on organic matter for fuel and self-replication, and then was unable to stop them. However some humans started a massive project, Zero Dawn, to try and do something about it. 

Since you see that there's humans, vegetation, and some small animals the world seems fine now, but there's also the machine robots, of course, that seem to be performing tasks of bigger animals that are no longer present in this world. So, you assume something was done that worked. 

As you investigate, you see that people thought Zero Dawn was a weapon, but eventually discover that it was just a project to create underground facilities that hid AI-controlled storages that would be able to kickstart life back on earth, including humans, after everything on the top got killed. And the last people just did their best to try and save as many species, data and people as they could, knowing they wouldn't get to see it. And the world did end, it's just the project worked enough to restore life.

There's another plot on top of this as things happen nowadays that are threatening everybody in the world again, but this setting I found it amazing, very sci-fi, very anti-capitalistic, and I don't know, it was an experience to see what had been done in this world and how it made sense and created an incredible sci-fi apocalypse story while remaining positive and encouraging. 

Then there's the fact that Aloy herself is charismatic, nice and funny and smart, and several characters you encounter also feel well-developed and interesting. You feel this is a group of people you wanna help and improve things, and the general tone is very positive, even when things seems quite bad and hopeless. I also loved how progressive is everything that happens on the game, where foolish traditions and prejudice are frowned upon and marked as stupid since the beginning.

As you move around the world and discover different societies, their styles, their customs, and uncover more and more information the game sets up a very interesting premise and world-building that kind of makes sense, while keeping things epic enough.

The game also manages to end the current plot in a satisfactory manner, while leaving details to solve and discover in future sequels and letting you made theories about what happened and what's going to happen.

In an era of game clones and repetitions, this game felt very original, very fresh and hopeful and full of life, and I loved it. It definitely influenced me in wanting to get a PS5 so I could play more of it. Definitely worth playing. 

Just walking

Happy new year! 

I didn't post many things nor many political rants lately because I haven't been inspired and things didn't change much since last time, and it's tiring to repeat how fucked we are and all that, and I'd rather talk about video games when I can, really. 

However, I thought I rant a bit anyway, just cause it's been a while, and apparently next year there's going to be some elections.

Instead of explaining Spanish and Catalan situation (it's shitty), I wanna talk about a quote, by Eduardo Galeano:

    "Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking."

This, beautifully said, is a very important point to make regarding progressive ideas and policies. Conservatives, fascists and totalitarians have it easy, because their preferred state is one of paralysis, of right reduction, of stasis, and therefore they're content with status quo, with dictators and idiocy, violence and repression and being brain dead.

Opposite to this we have the progressive parties.

And we have to be realistic here: they all suck. 

Of course they do. They try to defend progressive ideas but they tend to be too moderate, or with ideas too improbable or too hard, or too idealistic, or they may have corruption in their files (conservatives are corrupt by definition though, make no mistake here). They're falible and not good at their job sometimes, and they make mistakes. 

And none of them will be a perfect option. 

However, this means that what you should do is pick the least bad. What you should never do is to stop walking, to stop voting and participating in polítics. 

We're aware they're not perfect because no one can be perfect. We should strive for perfection and walk towards it, while accepting there's flaws we need to work on. 

Not participating in polítics is giving free reign to the other side. And the other side is evil incarnate. The other side will fuck you up, chew you, spit on you, burn the fucking world down and give the ashes to the rich. Never forget that.

Leftist and progressive parties are not perfect, but they're definitely less bad than this. We should demand perfection from them, but not to the point of punishing all of them out of being able to make changes. Because for sure the others won't be punished for being the abhorrent monsters they're used to be, that's their default, what people expect of them and what their voters want and support. 

And remember, we're just walking towards an impossible goal, the point is to get closer.