It's not a circle

I have not been writing much this year, to the point that I didn't talk about the second part of Alan Wake, which came out a year ago. 

The first game, I remember it with mixed opinions. The story was spectacular, but the gameplay was not very fun, up until you reached the dark place where strange things started happening and was very interesting. But the previous sections, which comprise most of the game, felt....long. You were traversing woods at night and enemies came at you, the same enemies always, and you had to beat them to get to the next point, another wood section. 

 Also, for some reason, you tended to travel by night, when the enemies were more powerful. I kept wondering why not take a good night's sleep and continue in the morning when it was sunny and safe....in moments when you were stranded it's ok, but every time to go out at night seemed unnecessary...

Nevertheless, the story was very good. It was very smart to connect an evil entity with the power of stories, and to indicate that you could modify the story but had to beat it in a way that made sense, if you gave yourself superpowers in writing the evil entity could do the same with itself, so you had to respect the story. 

Since the first game, these people had made Control though. And I'm a big fan of Control and know these people can make great stories, so I was for sure very interested in this second part, even if I'm more interested in Control 2. So, of course I had to play this. 

And I have to say that Alan Wake 2 is so much better than the first game. Still not as fun as Control, but Control is about action, and Alan Wake 2 is about horror, and it does it quite well. Horror is based on making you fear for your safety, for what will be next after the corner, for thinking you're running out of bullets. And Alan Wake 2 manages this extremely well, much better than the first part.

First, let's talk graphics. This game is gorgeous, detailed and realistic. It's amazing how good it looks, it feels like you're playing a movie. The scenarios are very detailed and unique, and feel asphyxiating somehow, in a good way for a horror game. How light work and influences the environment is also very well done. And it's worth mentioning that they've abandoned the "only going out at night" approach and follow a much nicer and scarier method: Considering that overcast north-pacific weather can make areas quite dark, that's what you get in plenty of areas, just the inside of buildings with no power or cloudy areas or rainy areas. This gives a greyish dark look at the game that matches well with its themes.

The plot is complex: Seems like Alan Wake disappeared years ago, and there's people that also disappeared in the lake that are reappearing and getting murdered by a cult, and you need to investigate this as an FBI agent called Saga. You start playing as Saga, who's a very interesting character that seems to have something more than intuition when resolving crimes, and you start investigating the latest murder. The game includes a special mode where you write down clues and follow up logic threads to figure out what happens, which I found quite cool, especially because later on there's threads that you might not find or complete fully, depending on your findings. 

Soon enough things turn to worse as Alan Wake's pages appear and indicate future attacks by shadow creatures, which keep happening as described. Without spoiling much, eventually you also play as Alan Wake, but it takes a while to get there, and then you can switch between these two characters as you advance their plots in parallel. 

In the middle there's also the FBC involved, and Ahti, the Janitor from Control plus other characters from previous games, connecting everything together.

When you play as Saga you find possessed shadow people that you need to light to burn their protection and then shoot, while if you play as Wake there's plenty of shadows around, some are harmless but some of them attack you and need to flash with light to reveal as monsters to attack back. Each character has slightly different weapons and abilities (instead of investigating cases, Wake can do fixed reality alterations of scenes and places), but the gameplay is basically the same. Saga needs to deal with occasional boss fights while Wake just has lots and lots of enemies depending on the area. 

There's a bit of free-roaming aspect in the game, where you can revisit areas and affect their status (the water level is important in this game, since the dark presence lives in the water), but if you're progressing the plot you don't need to do that, this is just for the bonuses and hidden items and logs (and there's plenty of those). 

The plot is amazing, although I called several of its twists in advance, but that's just a well-made story with foreshadowing, not a fault of the plot. It feels quite epic and deep, with scary, weird and even funny moments all thorough the game. The use of real-video actors mixed with everything else makes it a very cinematic experience, but very artistic. There's even a short movie you can watch completely at a certain point, which is not required at all for the game and you can skip and miss, but it's cool that they recorded everything in case you stay to watch it. The developers are Finnish and this is an aspect heavily referenced and shown in the game, which I think it's a nice touch.

The game is not long, as with most horror games, but still may take 15-20 hours to finish. It's quite unforgiving, to the point that I ended up reducing the difficulty in the last part of the game to avoid repeating the same scene time and time again. 

The only flaw I found in the game is that, after all of it, it feels the progress we've made in Alan Wake's global story is...not much. There's progress yes, but there's a lot of unsolved things left for a third part, or maybe a second part of Control, not sure. But this ties well with the internal world, since in the dark place affected areas you tend to have to go through the same place three times before being able to finish them for real....

Recently there was 2 DLCs added to the game. The first one is a lot of fun, with three independent stories a la "Twilight Zone", with a very light-hearted tone and lots of humour, with the last story being genre-bending about what's a game and what you do in it. The second DLC is more serious, following one of the main characters, a FBC agent before she appeared in the main game. The tone is also quite sarcastic too, poking fun at AI and content-generation farms and declaring them evil, plus introducing really really scary areas and concepts, making it a very scary but nice addition to the game. 

Remedy (the developers) are really doing great games, interconnecting everything and creating a very interesting world, and I'm sure to try and buy whatever they produce next.

When everything is done right

At university, between the geeky atmosphere of D&D comics, computers, videogames and people that loves stories, I was told about Baldur's Gate, and was give Baldur's Gate 2 to try. Later on I also played Baldur's Gate, and a bit of Neverwinter Nights 2.

I didn't finish any of them. While they were indeed very nice games, I found them hard and overwhelming, with too many people coming at you and asking you to do quests. The characters, though seemed quite nice, and the atmosphere and style of play was certainly fun. It seems to me it took too long for me to advance much and found the good/evil alignment present in the game a tad simplistic and somehow didn't quite catch me enough to finish them. It's hard to describe, they were nice games but also not so easy to play them, somehow? 

One factor for sure was the combat, real-time based with the option to pause. Combat tended to get very chaotic very fast, having to just pause constantly or just letting chaos ensure. There were also a lot of options and it wasn't very clear what builds were good or not, in my opinion. Anyway, the point is that I played them a bit, thought they were cool but not good enough to finish, somehow. 

So, years and years later, the announcement of Baldur's Gate 3 didn't impress me at first. However, after the first 2 Baldur's Gate games I did play other rpgs with similar style, like Pillars of Eternity. I really loved Pillars of Eternity, seemed to me that game did the same as BG and BG2 but did it correctly, and one of the best points of that game was the reputation system, which I haven't seen it done as well anywhere else. Anyway PoE pre-conditioned me to being more accepting of the style, so when there were more news about BG3 coming out I did check it a bit. And what I saw impressed me.

First, the studio: Larian Studios is an independent studio, they make their own games the way they want them with no interference from a bigger publisher or mother company, like it's commonplace at the moment. So, they have a certain vision and can stick to it. They had experience in other RPGs, turn-based, and everyone said they were really good too, although I had not played them. They are European-based, there's even an office in Barcelona, they seem to treat their employees well and try to respect people. In a year where big companies have fired thousands just so they can claim profits to their shareholders, the approach Larian seems to be having is certainly refreshing.

Then, the process: They've been developing the game for years, and there has been a public beta going on where the input of players has been taken into account as the game progressed. They've been re-releasing better and better versions until they were satisfied with the result and then released the game, focusing on the devices that worked and not stressing about making one single global release or anything like that.

Then the acting: They've gotten really really good actors, charismatic, really good at their job,and they've dedicated a lot of resources in recording lines and lines and acting them out, fleshing out the characters with the help of the actors and the team, and really taking care of getting the right expressions and voices at each moment.

Regarding the gameplay, instead of real-time combat, since this is D&D roleplaying, the devs had done it in a turn-based system. That was reassuring, and it made sense, a lot of powers and skills are meant for turns, converting them to real-time was more complex than just leaving them as they were. With turn-based you can calmly plan what you're doing, check the orders, and create strategies for each combat and try different things.

The graphics look very vey good, especially considering the massive areas the game has, and the character design and details are very well thought. Maybe there's games with better graphics, but with so many characters and combinations it's perfectly fine if the game still looks like a game, although the character's expressions are very detailed and communicate their feelings very well. 

Finally, the story and the quests: It seems they polished these to absurd amounts. The moment I saw some videos about the game, I saw the liberty they were given to the player. You could use your skills talking with people or interacting with the world, you could jump, you could fly, you cold throw things, you could do quests in a thousand of ways, and the game let you try them and also was prepared for it. 

So, I had to get it. And I did. And it's one of the best games ever. All the things I've mentioned come together into such a work of art, of love, of inspiration, where people did their best and offered their best that you can feel it while playing. I mean, it's not perfect 100%, there's a few things that have issues or could be improved, and in then end it's D&D, with its shortcomings of being very battle-focused, but anyway, this game is almost perfect, it's a glorious example of what to do when doing games. 

The game also offers cross-platform and multiplayer. The cross-platform is especially impressive, you can save your game in the cloud and then play form your pc, ps5 o xbox, as long as you have the game in each one of these systems. This means buying the game twice, but I confess I did just that, I was so impressed by them after playing a bit on my pc first that I thought they deserved it, and I've played in my pc and my ps5 at different moments. 

What is impressive is the sheer amount of combinations that are allowed, pre-thought and codified inside the game itself, with dialogue included to address them all. It needs to be experienced, but there's one case I saw which I will explain:

In the first act of the game, you find two camps, a druid camp with refugees inside and a goblin camp that is attacking the refugees and druids. Plot-wise, it makes sense to fight the goblins, since they're working for the big bads of the game, but you're given liberty about how to act. The druids have one good leader missing and the second-in-command is an asshole, that wants to basically kill the refugees living with them and perform a magic ritual that will isolate the druid camp from the rest of the world, to protect themselves from the goblins. 

So, my first though is that I wanted to save the refugees, and maybe some druids, but wanted to kill the second-in-command. But most games are binary, so its either one camp or the other, and the first times I played I just killed the goblins, where you get a lot of freedom since you can infiltrate them first and talk with several characters there and get info and do quests as well. Anyway, after the first time I revisited, and tried to side with the goblins up to a point where I was supposed to betray the refugees and it was too evil for my taste, so I ended up killing the goblins again anyway. So I played a third time. And the third time I discovered an option where you propose to the refugees to kill the bad druid. And you do, but then I was found out, and refugees and druids started to kill each other in a massive fight. And then the goblins came and congratulated me for this, but I didn't do it, it was accidental! But that the option that I really wanted was there was quite refreshing, and that this scenario was not talked in any of the guides I was checking to see options speaks of the level of detail this game has, most people may not even know this is a possibility, especially for "evil" play-throughs in which you don't want to slaughter the camp straight away.

Things just get more complex from there, with entire plot points being different depending on what you did and what characters survived, like the fact that one evil character that I just killed at first can be a companion later on depending on these same actions. 

In general the "Good" options are more polished, with less bugs, I guess because more people were selecting them and reporting issues, but the "Bad" options are still quite complex and different and there's just so many paths you can follow to your objective...

The game is actually pretty hard. In normal difficulty, if you just barge into fights unprepared, unequipped and don't use the right skills, you will die and die fast. You need to think carefully and plan and anticipate, and sometimes to have a bit of luck too. Some endgame fights are especially challenging and unfair, especial mentions to the Shar practitioners fight (like, a 20 against 4 pileup) and the Raphael fight (this one is purely optional, being the hardest fight in the game, but the music and the epicness of it omg, it's a must to experience it....)

Another good point of the game is that it just trashes the "Good"/"Bad" system and instead you have more or less affinity with your companions. Being bad once does not prevent you from doing good later, and in general you're just tied to your stats, but you're free to investigate options and do things anyway you want. It's also worth mentioning that thanks to the writing and the acting, the characters feel alive an deep, they do feel like your companions and you want to help them and progress the plot with them. Especial mention to the main actors, that have seen a lot of well-deserved success thanks to BG3 and all the interactions they're having with fans, their streaming of playing with themselves and in general being great people.

Finally, what they did with the support deserves another comment: They just keep improving the game and releasing new content. I mean, at a certain point maybe it's too much, but they added an epilogue, they improved several key functionalities that players complained about, they fixed bugs, changed texts, clarified things and in general just kept adding to the game, even when everyone had already bought the game.  

It's no surprise they've won "Game of the year" in every contest they've participated, it's that good, yes.

And as a last note, this is what happens when everything is done right, and when people make games thinking about the players, about what they would like to play themselves, about having fun, and about being fair and good and treating their employees fairly.

If more companies were doing things like this, the game industry would be much better...

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.

 

 

 

 

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. 

Feelings of achievement

 I have a backlog of games to talk about. Haven't written in a while after all...

The first one I wanna talk about is Elden Ring. 

Elden Ring is the latest game made by From Software. From Software are famous for making the same game over and over again, with slight variations. The most famous of their games till now was Dark Souls. They did Demon Souls before that, but it wasn't as successful as Dark Souls. Dark souls became a trilogy, and they also did Bloodborne (which I've played a bit) and Sekiro. 

All these games, including Elden Ring, feel....extremely, extremely similar.

They're all RPGs, where you start with a chosen class. In most of them the initial class has different attribute distribution but does not limit you and you could level up different attributes to change class or favour a particular play style. In most of them the initial class may change a bit your initial equipment, and your initial equipment tends to be really really good, actually. In all of them you get better by upgrading your equipment more than levelling stats, and equipment scales with certain stats. In most of them you have skills and spells. In all of them you need to find "safe points" (not to be confused with save points, the games save all the time) from where you can reset the whole word, resurrecting all enemies except bosses and special ones, and when you die you start from the last one visited. In all of them you level up in these safe points. In all of them you use the same currency to level up than to buy things. In all of them it seems that the plot is something that is just hinted at, that you need to figure out with item descriptions and cryptic conversations. In all of them you dodge-roll, and sometimes parry. In all of them you just have a basic weak attack and a stronger attack, plus some skills/spells that you can equip. In all of them you  explore huge areas that interconnect with each other, sometimes finding shortcuts, but not always with a clear defined path or a clear reason why you're advancing there or where do you need to go next. In all of them if you see some big structure far away, it tends not to be decoration and you can actually get there, traversing the world. In all of them there are rooms with bosses, separated with a fog wall that you need to traverse to get there. In all of them you play "multiplayer" all the time, and you can invade other games or be invaded for PvP or offer help to other players or request help, in certain moments only. In all of them the game saves your current status up to a second ago and you cannot reload the game before you did something or died, so actions have consequences that you cannot easily fix sometimes in that playthrough. In all of them when you die you need to find again your body to recover the currency lost, and if you die before that you lose what you had before.

And all of them are REALLY HARD. Like exasperating, unfairly hard. For example, you fight a boss that is pretty hard, and then when you've managed to kill half of its life, a copy of the same one appears and it's 2 against one.  Or you enter an area and the boss jumps from behind and kills you. Or there's an enemy hidden next to a cliff so they can attack you and push you. Plus just the fact that most enemies deal incredible damage, are really hard to evade or block, and it's just really hard to advance or do anything.

I've played Dark Souls, managed to reach a hard area after a long time, and stopped playing because I was afraid I'd be very frustrated in that area and didn't feel like trying again. And I've played Bloodborne a lot less, getting into an area with a boss fight that felt unfair and too hard, and abandoned it. 

So, I was wary of Elden Ring. At the same time, it seemed a fascinating game. The engine of the game seemed exactly the same as before, with some differences, but the graphics had been greatly improved, and it just looked beautiful. The mechanics that people talked about seemed very flexible and with lots of options to explore, more than in any previous game. The atmosphere seemed very mysterious, a very strange world. And most importantly, while all other games were linear, kind of, Elden Ring was the first one that was an open world. That meant that you could find a place too hard, and instead of being totally blocked there was the option to explore a different area, train, level up, and get back there and try again. This and the fact that there was a new mechanic that allowed you to summon AI helpers made me think that maybe this time I could give it a try and play the whole thing. 

And that's what I did. 

The game is really good. Really really good. It's addictive in a way. It looks beautiful, and just makes you wanna explore it and find everything it has to offer. The game is also as hard as advertised, but it's true that summoning helpers is a game-changer, and it's the difference between impossible and doable, sometimes. 

Yes, it's frustrating. But it's part of the fun, to repeat a section or boss, to get better, to finally win and to succeed. The feeling you get when you do that is amazing, and you cannot get it from an easier game, it has to be that difficult to feel that good once you manage to beat it. 

The plot is weird and confusing as said. Apparently George RR Martin helped with some initial ideas, names and lore, and then From Software did the rest and the actual details. The end result is interesting, although it's very very hard to figure out what is going on really, plot-wise. You're in charge of getting the Elden ring, a magic device, and rule the lands as the Elden lord. However, it's not really even a ring, more like a collection of powers that you can somehow receive after defeating people, until you get enough fragments that you can challenge the current ruling powers, to replace them. Where you are and why, and what is happening is really obscure and requires you to read item descriptions and fragments and piece things together, and even then it's like very very strange. The world itself is rather grim and almost everything that you encounter is trying to actively kill you, with some npc exceptions. Nevertheless it achieves in making you always curious to see what will be the next monster or the new trap, and if you'll be able to survive it. 

The game has "quests" that happen besides the main task, but they're as obscure, if not more. Using a guide seems like a must, but I have to say it's still fun to just wander around and see what you discover and find. But without guides, it's really really easy to miss steps or not understand what you need to do. I also have to say that most quests end "badly", with NPCs turning against you and you killing them or just dying as an effect of advancing the story, and it gets tiring after a while. It feels you'll end up ruling an empty land with nothing interesting in it because you killed everything. That's also why it feels nice to be able to protect and save some of them, which can be achieved only by following guides to avoid bad outcomes. In order to save one, for example, in my main playthrough I forced myself to do the hardest bosses of the game, that are optional, in order to get the right combination of elements that saved a particular NPC.

The game has several endings, and some of them are hard to get. The standard ending feels very short and rushed, like just saying "oh you won! congrats!" and that's about it. Then there's like three other variations of the standard ending, that require too much effort considering the result is the same ending, with a different colour filter, and with one different sentence, but that's about it. Finally, there's two endings that are more worthwhile, a bit longer and . In one of them, you help an NPC enough that you become partners and marry or something, and at least it seems less lonely and that you achieved something because you're guiding the world to a different purpose. The other ending is the "worst" one, where you burn and destroy the world as it is, but also it's not so bad, considering the world is shitty and all interesting NPCs may have died or been killed, so a lot of people say it's the true ending and the one that you're supposed to get. 

The nature of the game makes it that you cannot re-load and get a different ending, you need to play from the start. However there's a game+ mode where you start with all your level, skills and items, and enemies are just a bit stronger than before, and if you do that you can play again and beat the game in record time. I got the partner ending and then I replayed the whole game just going towards the end and got a second ending, one of the more generic ones, out of curiosity, and watched the rest online. 

Even if the endings are not that great, the whole experience of completing the game is still very nice and feels quite amazing, as if you have finally managed a very hard task and you can feel a bit proud of yourself. 

Definitely worth playing.

Mind browsing

Recently Double Fine finished and published Psychonauts 2. Considering the first one was 20 years ago and finished with a cliffhanger situation and plenty of unexplained details, that's a lot of time to pass.

The original game was amazing. Original, colourful, deep and full of innovative mechanics. Basically the game allowed you to navigate people's minds and each mind is different, of course. Each mind represented a number of traumas and obsessions and problems, and lot of them introduced unique gameplay for their sections. 

The game was not successful commercially and caused issues for Double Fine, that took a long time to recover and stabilise. I didn't play it originally, only much later. I usually love all their games, so I'm glad they managed to recover and continue with this plot, even if it took that long. 

The second part continues just a few days after the previous game, and answers all the mysteries the first game left. The mechanics are the same, this is a platformer game with special "psychic" powers like levitation or telekinesis, and sometimes you enter minds and have to deal with special mechanics of that particular mind. 

The graphics of the game are cartoonish, better than the original with more details but still with the same look, that could seem more childish and cartoonish, also because the main character is a small kid. They've improved and polished them though, with vibrant colours and effects, making them more alive and cinematic. 

The controls remain a bit strange. 3D worlds are hard to navigate if you need to jump and move fast, that's a problem that has always plagued 3d platformers, and this is no exception. Sometimes it's hard to figure out where are you and if you'll fall in a ledge or not. However this feels just charming, and part of the game.

The combat is functional, but a bit chaotic too, with lots of powers to balance depending on the situation, while you only have 4 mapped to buttons. The common enemies also feel sometimes like "extras", not integral parts of the normal game, added because you need to fight enemies sometimes in a game but not because it makes sense thematically, while the proper bosses of each area are great.

All these traits don't look impressive. However, the plot is where this game shines, like most of Double Fine games. The plot is amazing and deep. Quite moving at times, quite inclusive, and surprising and mysterious, even if I called some of their twists. The characters are also great, developed and funny and interesting. And the mind levels are a treat, visually stunning, imaginative, complex, etc. 

Special mention is needed for the sensory overload level, which needs to be experienced, Jack Black song included. This game is pure art, plain and simple.

The game may not attract people initially, like the first one,  because the synopsis of the plot, the character description, the style of game, etc...all conspires against it somehow. By the game description you would not expect to have complex puzzles like a graphic adventure. By the game characters, you wouldn't expect too much depth. By the graphics, you would not expect serious topics discussed. But the game has all that, and it's infuriating that a studio as good as Double Fine seems to have to be begging for scraps while horrible bland games are made by the hundreds. 

So yeah, I'm recommending it strongly: Even if it seems like it's not your kind of game, give it at try. And try to buy the first one too, they're a pack and they're incredible, even if there has been 20 years between each other.

Remastering and Remaking

 One of the reasons I wanted to get the PS5 was because I wanted to play the Final Fantasy 7 remake.

I played the original FF7 with my laptop when I was young. I spent one whole month not doing anything else than playing FF7, during summer, and it was an incredible experience. It was like playing an anime series. The music was incredible, the combats were epic, the plot was complex and curious, dramatic, with twists and funny moments too, and well, it was a very emotional experience overall, especially at that age. 

So, when I saw about the remake and actually played the demo, I was impressed. Much better graphics, like a permanent CGI movie, better than the CGI movies of the original game, and with expanded story? I mean, evidently I wanted to get it and try the full game. So I did. 

For starters, the game is just the first part of a series that will remake the original game, but with unknown changes. This game only covers the plot until the party leaves Midgar, which is a sizeable chunk but represents around 15-20% of the total of the original one, I'd say. That's a lot of game left to do, which is a bit annoying, but oh well. 

The graphics are incredible. I didn't really play any FFs after the 9, and therefore I didn't see how they progressed, last I played was with the original PlayStation. Therefore the current graphics feel amazing. This is how the game played in my imagination basically, like when reading a book when you create your own visual world, the first game's limitations created such a world inside your head with the actions you could see. This new version actually plays as if you see what your inside world looks, with all the details and movements and everything. It's amazing. 

The gameplay, I have to say, is interesting, but now being more action-oriented instead of turn-based was not a plus for me. I quite like turn-based games, and while it's cool to perform actions yourself, the way this game works means you're usually controlling one character while others do whatever, while in the original you did order all characters, because there were turns. This new combat system means you always start with Cloud attacking, while sometimes I'd like to start with another character. It's cool though, that's undeniable. Again, maybe I missed the previous FFs that prepared the terrain for this gameplay and I'm just not used to it, but well, for me this is not an improvement from the original. 

The plot remains amazing, but with more in-depth. Some topics are explored with more detail, new characters are introduced, some characters are developed more, and in general it remains interesting while feeling also fresh. And there's a little twist: The game introduces the concept of....how to say it, continuity guardians. Basically, there's creatures trying to make the plot to happen like in the original game. However, you can fight them. And as you do, some plot things change. This has incredible potential and it's a great way to make the remake while changing the plot, and also allowing for a new fear/hope in this one: will Aerith die again, or you'll be able to change things enough to save her? It's a hard question that is not answered in this game, but the fact that now the plot may change opens up this interesting possibility. For sure there are several characters that all of a sudden have survived their previous demise, so it's clear that they're catering a bit to the fans and opening up possibilities. I'm quite excited about this, actually, and I found it was a genius move to go in different directions while having an explanation as to why is that possible, by linking both games as two different dimensions. 

The music...I have mixed feelings. Some songs are amazing as in the original or even improved with the better sound quality. However, some others have been...reduced? They feel more generic somehow, when trying to make them more commercial-like and actual, pop-like, which detracts from the experience. Some themes still caused goosebumps, that's for sure. 

In general, the game is pretty great. However, there's one little detail that made me...not like it as much as the original. And that's the combat length, and the new "padding" sections. The combat, again maybe I missed the previous FFs and it has evolved to be like this, but now every single monster has ungodly amounts of HP, which means that it takes forever to kill even the simplest ones. This feels like cheating, extending the game length and difficulty simply because some bosses require 30-min marathon sessions or similar. There's also the fact that in the original you could train and become god-like yourself, totally breaking the game, but hell, it was fun to achieve that and overpower all the enemies easily and quickly. I feel this change detracts from the game, especially considering I don't always have time to dedicate uninterrupted attention like this. Then there's these "padding" sections, sections where you need to do the same thing 3-4 times instead of just one, like the plate lights or Hojo's lab, apart that this last one breaks an important tense moment and delays it, which reduces drama. It feels a bit of  a copy-paste to extend the game without adding to the plot much and without advancing much, and doing one of these tasks just once would work perfectly well and enough. The game is long enough with the added content, so this feels like "cheating" to claim it's a very long game when some parts are repetitive.  

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, especially the parts that deviate from the original, and the PS5 exclusive section with Yuffie was a lot of fun and quite interesting too, and it was great to see a final secret video after finishing it. 

I have also to comment that playing this made me wanna play the other FFs I played, 8 and 9. I found them remastered and I've been playing 8 again lately, with slightly better graphics but same game. And I have to say, it's awesome still, and I'm enjoying it a lot and finding it was not as long as I remembered. For sure the remakes can be fun, but it's also really good when you can just replay the remastered version, getting all the original content.

Anyway, now I'm waiting for the next instalment to see in which direction they will go...

Challenges can be fun

With the PS5, I also managed to get some games to play with it, of course, but most of them were PS4 ports or adaptations, not exclusive PS5 titles that really used its potential. 

That's why recently I got Returnal, which is a game developed only for PS5. I got it second-hand, because I was wary of the game. I did some research and I've heard it was really difficult and frustrating. At the same time it's crazy expensive if you get it as new. After completing it now, I have to say it may be worth it, the game is THAT good, but with some disclaimers.

The game is hard, really hard. One of the reasons why is that the game has sections, or biomes as they're called, and after one of these sections (and their boss fight) you get some permanent upgrades sometimes, but before that anything that you manage to get gets lost after death. After death, you start from the beginning, again, with nothing. This is rough, since you can have a great number of items and stats that you managed to scavenge from around, and then you have a misstep and you lose everything. There's also the fact that every time, minimum, you need to go through the first section to get to the second or third one. And the same applies with the last 3, you need to go through the 4th section always.

There's also the fact that it's a rogue-like, which means that after dying the next map will be automatically generated and randomised. In this game that means that each biome has an X number of rooms, with Y number of places that can have items in each room, from a Z selection of items, and with V types of enemies available for that biome and room, and every time you die the game randomizes this selection of combinations. Each run is a bit different. You can find the same rooms, yes, but now the items are different in them, or now there's this type of enemy when before there was that another type or no enemy whatsoever, or now there's this trap, etc. 

The gameplay itself is a strange one, a third-person bullet hell: You control your character from a third-person view, use a weapon to shoot enemies and the enemies launch thousands of glowing bullets, circles and other stuff that can damage you and tends to fill the screen with colours that you need to avoid. In order to not get damaged you should not cover but run around, strafe, jump and use dash to avoid most attacks, although you can occasionally cover too, yes. 

The graphics are incredible, the game looks beautiful and alien, and the different biomes look different and cool. Boss fights need to have a special mention, they're incredible, with so many colourful attacks and strange designs, they feel quite epic and are just beautiful to see. The sounds effects/music is great also in putting you in a tense position, you keep hearing the monsters sounds around you and lots of little actions have their sound clue. And here we need to talk about the controller. The PS5 controller promised some type of "haptic" feeling: That is, that it makes you feel things that are happening in the game through special vibrations. It sounds a bit strange, because haptic feelings need usually some strong electric engine and a fixed base, but what they've achieved without all that is quite amazing. There's a lot of actions that make the controller vibrate and sound, and then you feel what's happening. Like the rain, you feel tiny drops falling on you through the controller, and it's really really cool and immersive. It´s hard to describe, you need to experience it a bit, but it´s really impressive.

The story is...very weird. This game is quite the mind-fuck. I'm not sure I have a good explanation about what happens and why, even after unlocking the second ending. However, it is quite an interesting experience, and open to interpretation. I don't wanna spoil anything in this case, but I´m not entirely sure what to believe or take as true after the experience.

I finished the game recently, and while it's hard, I had a lot of fun with it. I was immersed quite fast to the pace of this game, and I got better and better at it, with some moments thinking there was no way I could pass a certain element, and then after some training seeing I could, or even making it easy thanks to a special combination of luck, practice, the right weapon and the right consumable item.

The game is a challenge, and like all challenges, if you do succeed, it feels amazing. Not only that, you discover yourself doing very hard stuff that you thought you'd never be able to do. This is a great feeling, but requires patience and time, and also some predisposition to it. I was lucky to be able to master the game more or less, but it's true it was time consuming and could be quite frustrating sometimes, when you think you have a great weapon and items and some random encounter that is not even a boss or side-boss destroys you and you need to restart from scratch. But I have to say, I enjoyed it immensely nevertheless.

It's a beautiful, exasperating game, and it's totally worth it.

 

 

 

Resident Evil 8: Action-horror like RE4, but good this time

Recently I self-indulged a bit and got myself a PS5. I only had the original Playstation, so this allows me access to plenty of exclusives that, over the years , I had to miss. 

For the moment though, I'm also using it to see some of the newest games at their best, since it's quite a powerful thing. And one of these games that I got new was this Resident Evil 8, or VILLAGE (written so the initial "vill-" looks like VIII, like 8 in roman).

There was a lot of hype about this game but what I've saw beforehand was not very inspiring, reminding me a lot of RE4 (which I hate)....but I gave it a try, and was pleasantly surprised. For starters, the graphics are still amazing, very realistic, painfully so when getting hurt. The gameplay is streamlined and it's a lot more action-like, with less focus on the survival part and easier to manage and kill enemies. You need to pace your resources but there's more of everything. The inventory is huge and it separates consumables and weapons from keys and treasures. There's an upgrade and shop system, and well, some parts of it feel a lot like RE4 but somehow in a better way (the shopkeeper even jokes, saying the same sentence and intonation from RE4 and saying he's joking, he knew someone who said that).

You continue after 7 playing as Ethan Winters, living in "Europe" (probably Romania), and in the first 5 minutes of the game Chris Redfield apparently kills your wife Mia and kidnaps your daughter Rose, only for her to be stolen from him 5 minutes later too. So that's the main drive of the game. Things are not really as they seem, spoilers ahead, just in case. 

After waking up from the accident where your daughter gets taken by someone else, you end up in a village. At first the initial house looks very much like RE7, but soon enough you just go out and it's dawn, and you see yourself  in a small rural area with a huge castle and some weird houses, windmills and a factory. 

You discover the village has been attacked by these monsters that looks like a half-zombie half-werewolf, and after finding some survivors that die immediately afterwards, you're captured and brought to the presence of the 5 big bads of the game: Mother Miranda (the leader, like a religious local figure that has protected the town till she decided to kill everyone), Lady Dimitrescu (the lady of the castle, very very tall and drinks blood), Heisenberg (the one managing the factory, with magnetic powers), Moureau (an ugly half-fish person-monster) and Donna Benevento (a girl that has creepy puppets that talk for her). 

These people have...charisma, really. Maybe except for Mother Miranda, who is more hidden, the other characters are quite interesting. They're bastards, but interesting bastards. You kind of wanna know more about them, as you see them verbally fighting to decide what to do with you.

After escaping their little games, you go back to the village and meet Duke, the shopkeeper, who seems like a weird 6th member of the family but that is trying to help you somehow. He's quite mysterious. He tells you your daughter may be in the castle, and you go there to find her. There Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters try to kill you to drink your blood, together with their zombie-like servants, but after some going around you do manage to kill all of them, in the case of the lady with the help of a poisonous knife that turns her into a monster, because otherwise she's perfectly immortal. This castle section was really cool and big, mysterious, and the vampire theme, while ridiculous, was cool. It was also very nice to see their total disdain for males (they call you man-thing), although they treat their female servants quite bad too. You end up picking up a flask, and Duke tells you that's your daughter, split in 4 pieces, but that your daughter is special and is not dead, she can reform if you gather all 4 flasks, in hands of the 4 lords (the bad guys, apart from Mother Miranda).

The castle occupies quite a lot of the map, but after finishing this section you never go back there. Next there's Donna Benevento and her house. She's in fact making you hallucinate. As part of these hallucinations there's this little segment of a very creepy autopsy you perform on a doll that represents your wife, and you discover clues hidden in the doll that allows you to escape and kill the creepy main doll, which in fact was Donna. I really loved this part too, it was like a ghost story, without enemies (except for a specific one that is best left to discover, that is extremely creepy and unsettling and not a doll) but with puzzles and mysteries. You do feel a bit of pity for Donna, she seems to have some mental problems or something, and she did attack you somehow but she could have killed you from the start and she didn't, it seems she wanted you to like her like a daughter or something.

Between these main sections you always return to the village for a bit, discover new areas in there and can gather some special treasures and recharge on ammunition. You also find out that all monsters are usually created though the use of the mutamicene from RE7, the mold thing, but with different variants and results, and that Mother Miranda was the one that found it, became immortal, gave immortality to 4 "childs" of hers, the 4 lords, and was isolating the village, getting tests subjects from it and keeping it uncommunicated from the rest of the world.

Next is Moureau, that lives in a reservoir with water. You find him fast, but he turns into a giant fish monster that is also blocking escapes with disgusting mucus-like substances, and you need to drain the water and fight him to escape. This section was a bit more painful, more generic, and you feel sorry for Moureau too, because he's not all that well in the head and he's not that much in control, it seems, and wants the approval of Mother Miranda. 

Finally there's Heisenberg. However, he contacts you and tells you he wants to help and get rid of Miranda, but you need to prove yourself. He leaves his flask in a stronghold with the werewolf-zombies, and after defeating lots of them and returning you can access his factory, where you talk. He keeps saying you need to use your daughter to kill Miranda, but Ethan says his daughter is not a weapon and gets all angry about it, so Heisenberg pushes him into the basement of the factory, where a weird monster with an airplane engine in the thorax and chainsaws instead of propellers chases you, till you fall even deeper. This section is full of robotic zombies, improved by Heisenberg with metallic parts. While talking he seems nice and a person you can reason with and the verbal fight you have with him seems extreme, but in the notes you find later in the factory you do see he's quite psychopathic too and has conducted horrible experiments with people in there. 

This area is long and dark and labyrinthic. After learning the paths it's not too bad, but it's quite hard to orient yourself and the map doesn't help, with levels and corridors that go up and down and up again interwoven with others, so when you see them in a 2D map it's quite confusing and then it's hard to find where you need to go. There are cool mechanics in there, but it felt claustrophobic and a bit too long. After clearing several floors and having to fight and kill the airplane-engine monster, Heisenberg drops you again to the bottom, which feels a bit annoying. In there you find Chris, who finally tells you that your wife at the beginning wasn't your wife, it was Mother Miranda, because she can transform into others and wanted to get the baby. This is very ridiculous in the sense that most of the tension between you and him could have been avoided with this simple explanation, but oh well...even other soldiers that work with Chris keep telling him later that he should have explained this to Ethan, so it's referenced inside the game that it's a very stupid decision. 

Anyway, he gives you control of a special tank that is immune to Heisenberg's magnetic powers, and you get into an elevator to the top and end up fighting Heisenberg, turned into a metallic monster. This fight is ok, but if he had remained in human form and instead used his magnetic powers, there's no way you would have won, while as a monster and just hitting you it's relatively easy.  Once the fight is over, Miranda appears, shows you she has your daughter and proceeds to rip off your heart with her hands, leaving you, Ethan, dead on the ground. 

You continue playing as Chris now, raiding the village with other soldiers (that this time do not die), because the mold in there is going wild and Mother Miranda has made a mold fortress around a place where she expects to do some ceremony. Some guys from an organization that was good in RE5 but is now bad seem to be trying to access it too, but they're killed by the mold. You fight waves of werewolf-zombies and get into the fortress, only to find Mia, Ethan's wife, alive and relatively well. You also discover that Miranda learned that the mold keeps consciences of dead people that died around that area, and wants to resurrect her daughter's consciousness inside Ethan's daughter, and all her experimentations have been for that purpose, to find a worthy vessel, while her other "childs" were not good enough. They also explain that this mold is the original one that was used to develop Eveline from RE7 later on, and that Umbrella's founder met Mother Miranda and was inspired by her to do the viruses and parasites, even using her symbol as the company's symbol. Chris tells Mia that Ethan is dead but Mia seems not worried, and says that's impossible, because there's something she has kept secret...

...and you start playing again as Ethan. You're having some type of dream where Eveline tells you you're actually dead, and that you died in the first scene of RE7, after Mia attacked you and the dad of the family basically killed you. But Eveline resurrected you, and you're mold, yeah. Which explains also why your daughter has some mold-like properties. Here I feel totally vindicated from my theories, as I expressed in my post for RE7. I mean, it wasn't that hard to guess, but still, I totally called it. It didn't help that Ethan glued his hand back in RE7, has flashes from Eveline, he can glue his legs too in RE7, and also in RE8, after Dimitrescu cuts your other hand during the castle, you just put it back and use some disinfectant to heal it. I mean, it's quite obvious, but still nice to have guessed it correctly. 

Anyway, even if you're mold, you're in horrible shape. You make your way to where Miranda is, and find her with your daughter. Your daughter does something to her, apparently trying to help you even if she's just a baby, which makes Miranda vulnerable. You fight her, and she's just very very tough, but you manage to kill her. However you're crumbling too, apparently, and you just give your daughter to Chris, and grab a bomb detonator and wait for the mold to come to you to detonate it, destroying everything and yourself, as Chris and Mia leave in a helicopter with your daughter. A final scene after the credits shows Rose, your daughter, older now after an indefinite number of years, visiting Ethan's grave. Then some guy in a suit escorts her out, saying they have a mission for her, and calling her Eveline. She gets annoyed and says her name is Rose, and pushes the guy but goes back to the car. This implies that she has some part of Eveline in her, and I really like this idea, because in her last moments Eveline sounded pitiful, she was a little girl that people experimented on and she just wanted a family and to be loved, so it does feel kind of nice to know she has had some type of redemption and can re-live a bit through Rose. 

And that's the game. I really really enjoyed it, although it can be ridiculous at times or make no sense too, but I think it's a similar idea to RE4 implemented a lot better. It's not so much survival horror this time, it's more action-like, but the gameplay and the characters give it a life of its own and made me replay the game several times. After the first playthrough I got some bonuses and managed to get some infinite ammo for some weapons, which helped in me wanting to play it again. It was also nice to try and complete many of the challenges the game has, which return special points that you can use then to get special weapons and stuff. Some of the challenges are insane, but there's a lot of replayability value. People said the same of RE4, that it was a good action game, but for me in RE4 the story implementation specially ruined it, and didn't make me want to play it, while in this case I'm happy to replay. The only shame is that the 4 lords were dispatched very fast. They're very colourful characters, even if evil, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of them in other games or DLC, but well,for the moment that's all we'll get it seems. 

Quite enjoyable and good, in summary. I'm pleasantly curious about what they'll do next after such strong 7 and 8.

How to fuck up stories because of ego

 I haven't written in a while and have some games and comments pending, but I wanna finish my comment on the Mass Effect trilogy (I haven't played Andromeda anyway and I understand it should be considered apart). 

The third game in the series seem to imitate a style of making series and science fiction, popular in the first decade of 2000, were things are bleak and very unbalanced, and anyone can die. Recently I finished Battlestar Galactica (I got tired at some point of the drama and had not watched it all), and certainly the style of ME3 reminded me of that. 

I've talked about ME3 in the past, when it came out. It has epic moments, and there are plot points that are amazing. Curing the genophage, or making peace between geth and Quarians, both things optional and only available if you had done the right choices in previous games, felt very good and adequately epic. Apart from that, graphics are still great, more detailed now and a lot more gory, and the gameplay still holds quite well, although the downgrade of the shockwave ability done from the previous game hurts a bit, I have to say. So, the game is quite decent overall, and does delivery in some of their promises.

Where it fails, it's in other aspects. First and foremost, the fact that Earth is made as this special place that is worth saving over all the other races and planets. This is so human-centric that is annoying, and one cannot help but make easy parallelisms with colonialism and white supremacists, where there are countries "worth saving" and others that are not (like recently in Afghanistan, for example). Other races have planets that fall or get hit pretty hard, but earth is the one that seems to endure the most and also where everything needs to happen.

Then there's the fact that, while some decisions from previous games are truly explored and expanded, some others are translated into points. These points mark if you'll be able to reach the "best" possible ending or not, or if you will fail while trying. The point system feels...weak. A cheap way to translate decisions into something that affects the game. The ending of ME2 took decisions and made them matter. ME3 turns them into "+100", definitely a downgrade. 

What is most grating, though, is probably how the ending has been managed, and how it turned out to be. In the end, the problem is that some race decided that any universe that has AI, will then have these AI revel against their creators and kill organic life. Which is....not true, even in the ME3 universe. As part of the game, we could make peace between the current rogue AIs and their creators, and the AIs showed they just wanted to help and coexist. So this argument is pure bullshit and undoes plenty of things inside the story. Then, I mentioned it before but the last decision about what to do about it is taken there, without considering previous ones, which is....easy, very easy, not taking any risks. An ending that changes based on one last decision has been made before and is boring, you just reload and see the different ones. ME2 did this a lot better. 

What's worse in all this is that I understand this ending was the result of some boss that, instead of deciding what to do in a committee, like all the rest of the plot points of the game, decided to do whatever they wanted without external supervision from the rest of the creative team. This sounds....awfully familiar to how Game of Thrones ended, or also the creative process behind the movie Prometheus, that left plenty of bullshit too. More and more, I've seen "famous" people that did great things do shittier stuff the moment they're considered famous and don't have a support team around them that helps them streamline their good ideas, to make them really good, instead of assuming they're great and going forward with horrible stuff because no one dared to tell them they suck now. I mean, see what George Lucas did in the prequels. Check the latest movies Steven Spielberg has done, or the 4th Indiana Jones (or as we like to say, the movie that shall not be named). Check Ridley Scott, James Cameron, etc...hell, even Terry Pratchett in his latest novels where he clearly was mentally affected by Alzheimer and no one dared to tell him it wasn't that good anymore, although in this case he's quite innocent and more understandable...there's sometimes these ego trips by people that fuck stories really bad, and it's quite a shame.

Well, anyway, after all this negative comments, I have to remind that ME3 is still a great game, and I really enjoyed this replay. And I have to make a special mention to the DLC. DLC can be quite "evil", when it greatly improves the original game or adds important plot points, and I have to say, yeah, ME3 DLC is quite evil in that sense, because it's really really good and it makes up for the flaws it had quite a lot. 

ME3 has 3 big DLC packages that improve the plot a lot. First, there's Leviathan, which explains the reaper's origins (interesting but maybe it was better to leave them a mystery), is quite epic and feels a bit like Abyss (the movie). Then there's Omega, which doesn't add as much but explores a bit more an "asshole" character from ME2, Aria. She's still an asshole even if she's nice with you, but you understand her better after this and the whole plot is really cool with action. Finally, there's the Citadel DLC. This one is just amazing. It's funny, intense, curious, introduces cool concepts, and has some of the greatest moments and dialogues of the series. This DLC is an apology letter to the fans of ME3 by the creative team, showing what ME3 could have been, and it's a proper send-off for the trilogy, allowing you to interact with all the people that have been part of your squad (unless they died, and then they also get a special moment for them) . I know it's paid content and I'm against it usually, but in this case it's totally worth it and amazing. Originally I didn't get it when I played for the first time, but now I did, and this really redeemed ME3, because I think ME in general shines more when it's funny and warm and properly epic, instead of when it tries to just be epic in a very limited and overdone military-style way. 

And it's best left unexplained, so you can experience it if you'd like :)

Mass effect 2: Bigger and better

Following up on my previous post, I want to talk about Mass Effect 2 this time. The game came out some time after the first one, enough time that I had partially forgot about these games the first time it came out. It promised to continue the epic tale, although the scope seemed a bit less epic from the description. 

The game said that now you worked for Cerberus, a racist organization in the first game that performed dubious research and were bad guys, focused in humanity first and fuck the aliens, basically. And that your mission was to attack a base used by a race called "Collectors" that were kidnapping humans. When stated like that, this game seemed initially a downgrade from the first one.

Therefore, it was a big surprise to see the game ended up being awesome. I'd say, overall, it's better than the 3rd game. The 3rd game requires another post, of course, but let's say that, without DLC, it has several screw-ups that made it inferior. With DLC this is compensated, but that's "cheating". ME2 is really really good since the start, with no extras. 

The game is basically a "heist" story, with the heist being the attack I mentioned. To succeed you must find a group of people willing to help you and you need to gain their trust. Some characters repeat from the previous game, although there's plenty of new ones. You work with the white supremacist organization but they give you free reign about what to do and you can put distance with them, and there's a lot of character development, for you and for your partners.

Graphics are still awesome, slightly improved from the first game. Gameplay is similar, but with a lot more action: the power system has been remade, and biotics especially have been improved and are pretty awesome now, more dynamic, you can keep using them instead of a weapon.The weapons have been changed, and they've backtracked on the idea of having no ammo, and now they do have ammo, which I think it's a downgrade and makes no sense story-wise, but it may be true that it accelerates combat if you compare it with the previous game. Enemies are a bit more varied and there's less feeling of padding or combat repetition, although some sections do feel a bit elongated. 

What has been developed a lot are the side missions. You no longer explore deserted little squares with the same 3 interiors copy-and-pasted, now you don't really explore with a vehicle but you do missions, each with their layout, their objectives and goals. This feels fresh, interesting and does not seem repetitive at all, and the game gets really better from it. The resources mechanics, where you scan planets for resources, is still a bit tedious but in no time and just checking the ones around you as you do side missions you can get all you need.

The game now mostly consists of recruitment missions, where you find a new crew member, and then if you interact enough with them, crew members also give you loyalty missions, missions that guarantee their loyalty to you. All of this is purely optional actually because from the start or at any point, you can try and trigger the suicide "heist" mission, but if you don't have enough ship reinforcements, the right crew and the right equipment, the mission will fail. As you recruit members, there's a few special missions that let you gather extra information that you'll need to at least be able to start the suicide mission without failing immediately, and after these are completed you're free to try and do it, but if you don't have everyone's loyalty, people will die, and sometimes it won't be the person not loyal the one that dies.

That means that what makes sense is to delay the mission as much as possible while you make sure your whole crew is loyal and happy, while at the same time not delaying it too much after a certain event that happens after the third special mission. Some of them are tricky to convince, because certain pairs will fight each other and you need high diplomacy/intimidation stats to make them both happy, and the same apply to some loyalty missions where you need to do some convincing, but nothing crazy if you've been consistently trying to increase one particular stat of these two. 

Where the game shines is in the fact that you interact with all your crew members, establish a relationship, get to know each other and befriend them. This game is basically a huge character development plot for all your team members, and it's brilliant to see and experience. This is a strong character-driven story, and their diverse stories are original and interesting, and they make you wanna try and help everyone. After you've developed relationships with all of them, friendly or romantically if you romance one of them (you can only romance one person), you want to keep everyone alive, and then you try extra hard for the final mission. 

The final mission is also a very bright moment for the game. It's epic, it's big, and it's made in such a way that there's a lot of possible outcome combinations. Some characters may die, and you need to select the right people for the right tasks to avoid it. If you mess it up enough, you may also die while still completing the game, which is a pretty awesome thing, although it's a "bad" ending. The level of care about your previous choices and options is amazing and I've never seen anything like this in other games that mention that all your choices matter, since in other games it's more common that this is not true at all (and I'm including ME3 in this list, which makes the case of ME3 all the more annoying, because they did do it well in ME2).

This time I played with a female renegade vanguard Shepard, and I have to tell, it felt amazing and awesome to launch enemies left and right with biotics, or to dash towards them and hitting them hard to then shot them with a shotgun, and being able to be sarcastic and foul-mouthed and just a lot more aggressive than what I used to do the first time I played. I still don't like to be mean in such games and I tried to be quite gentle with the crew, they were friends after all, but it was liberating to play a female character like this, and I totally recommend the experience.

The wonders of space

After finishing most of the games I had for xbox, I decided to relive the Mass Effect saga, seeing as they were going to re-publish it in a special version. I tried to use the original games with my xbox one, and they work fine plus I have all the DLC I've bought over the years or that they made available for free after some time. 

Similar to RE, I'd like to talk about each game, starting with Mass Effect 1 (ME1). This is one of the first games I bought for Xbox 360, and when I saw the trailer I thought it was fake or misleading: It couldn't be that we had a long, well-developed sci--fi roleplaying game with such nice graphics and complex story. I thought I'd start it and it would be somehow reduced.

And well, while it had room for improvements, I have to say that no, ME was as spectacular as it seemed it could be. The game offers a lot of world-building, that is clearly inspired or derivative of other works of science-fiction, but that doesn't reduce its glory or its scope, which is massive. From the first seconds you get several choices and the game starts recording these and keeping them stored, to develop a story.

Mass effect defines a universe with aliens where humans have joined the intergalactic civilisation. You play as commander Shepard, a human, that is tasked as the first human member of an elite group of soldiers that can do pretty much whatever they want(Spectres), with the task to investigate what another "evil" guy from this group is doing and disrupt him. As you try to perform this task, you keep discovering that there's more at play, since the bad guy seems to be working helping the Reapers, giant artificial intelligences that kill all galactic civilisations advanced enough to space-travel every 50.000 years, which in this game are just some myth, a boogeyman, but that you believe are behind this. 

As you play, you discover that the bad guy's ship is actually one of those Reapers and has mind-controlled the "bad guy", something the Reapers can do, start controlling everyone in their proximity. If you have enough persuasion points you can make the bad guy see this and he kills himself, and end up defeating both of them (well, you and hundreds of other ships, the Reaper is big and tough) right before they can invite all the others to start the galactic extinction process.

So, this first game puts a very strong foundation. It creates a rich lore with different alien species, makes the scope epic enough while being just an introduction to the overall story arch and starts recording these key decisions that will influence the overall experience: did you save this or that character, did you help someone in there, did you kill these others? Depending on your choices, the experience will vary, and it's quite cool. 

Having said that, the game has numerous issues. 

The first one is that the non-story part is a bit lacking: Combat feels slightly static and repetitive: You go into cover, maybe use some powers, shot some enemies. Not having bullets and depending on the "heat" of your weapon is cool and I think it was innovative, but the combat was very basic cover-based stuff, not very exciting and a bit strange. Powers are also not very practical, most biotics make people float in some way but don't do proper damage and feels like it's not that spectacular then. Tech abilities are a bit better but not much. Then, when you're driving the Mako, a kind of tank, you just keep blasting at people and it's not that interesting, really. Combat is something you do to advance, but it's not something cool or very enjoyable, basically. 

Related to that, the exploring mechanics is cool in principle: You get to check all the planets in several galaxy sections, and you can land in some of them, some ships and some stations. However, the implementation of this results in a lot of very very similar terrains, where each planet that you can land has only a square of explorable terrain were you find some dead bodies and ruins and that's about it You spend most of the time trying to climb mountains with the Mako in order to get to some little point, no more than 5 per region, if that many. It makes you feel quite....alone, in what should be a vibrant populated galaxy. When you find structures that you can enter, all of them have the same look and distribution. You have the mine, the ship and the research bunker, multiplied by 10 or 20. You never find characters living there, only enemies with some exceptions where you can actually interact with some bad guy before they kill someone or before fighting, but that's it.  Side missions always include going to such places, and therefore a lot of this ends up being like a chore because you already have done 20 of the same, before.

So, you have a lot of time spend in the game, if you want 100% completion or close to that, just repeating the same tasks, which is not ideal. However the main story quests are good and diverse, so that compensates this issue a lot, and the main quests are really great and interesting, and the places you explore are amazing.

Another problematic point is that, in this game and the third one specially, you can feel the USA military industry has influenced it. I'm hundred per cent sure of it. You, in theory, are a spectre and respond only to the council, but you accept your former military chain of command without question, taking missions and orders from them, and there's lots of instances of "patriotic" moments and comments about how good it was to serve the military. I mean, I get it, shooters in general tend to be militaristic, and you need fights in theory to make the game challenging. But there's a....tone, in the game, that defends a lot the military, explains its glories and shows it as they say with modern ones, that they're the people defending your freedom and fighting for you. However you soon see that you're fighting for the humans, and the other races sometimes can go fuck themselves, which is totally not fair. I mean, you do try to help other races, but when there's a human-other species conflict, the game tends to heavily side with the human one, to the point that is shameful and bothersome. There's stuff that humanity's army does, that would be painted as evil if it wasn't because it's the human army. 

Related to that, there's a human bias in the game, as if humans are the best ones, more diverse, more daring, etc. This feels....very racist, sometimes. And the game gives you the option to explore this "racism" as a valid way to play the game, sometimes as "renegade" options, when maybe part of being "renegade" would be to say, "well, fuck humans, I'll help this other species now because I like them more". I kept finding this rather problematic. I mean, I understand in rpgs you are free to be an asshole, and it may be part of your choices....but there's "racist" options that are not painted as "bad" as they should be, in my opinion. Also, let's face it: humans are boring! You have a lot of other species to explore, and the game centres on  humanity, as if you'd be unable to relate to some other species. I guess there's male idiot players that think like this, and there's too many of them, and the developers pandered to these groups, but well, these incel-type with no empathy can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned and the game industry should not cater to them.  

In this first game, your supporting characters are also missing some definition. You start knowing them and you talk with them, but they don't say much. You can already do a type of "loyalty" missions for them, but they're very generic missions like the rest of side quests, and they only trigger a bit of conversations with them. However it's enough at least to start knowing them, and seeing glimpses of their personality, and they're already likeable, just not very developed yet, and they all adore you somehow without you having done much yet. 

Another issue that the game has is sexism. Sexism is rampant in videogames, but well, as you create new species, the typical thing of giving the females boobs is quite common in here, while at the same time hiding some females of certain species that look weird already as males and probably the developers thought would be too unappealing to the standard male gamer and didn't bother to design, at least in this first game, where you only see males apart from female humans and Asari. And related to that, special mention for the Asari, a race of hot blue girls that are all girls and pair with any other species, clearly a sex fantasy of someone. Although in the second game you do discover that the way you see them as beautiful human-like may be them mind-controlling you a bit, since every other species sees them as beautiful and similar to themselves, a nicer explanation that does not remove the fact that all of them are beautiful in-game and tend to have quite big breasts....

Finally, it's worth mention that the game is quite derivative. We're not doing anything revolutionary here, the game uses tropes and ideas from famous other science-fiction works and movies, from Ender's game to Alien, Star wars, etc. You could still take it as a homage more than pure plagiarism: The game tries to evoke a feeling most present during science-fiction works of the 80s, as the developers mentioned.

However, even after listing these issues, the game is quite awesome. The side quests are tedious but necessary to get nice perks in later games, and the main plot is great and amazing. The Citadel gives you a sense of wonder that is difficult to describe, but feels amazing. Ilos is incredibly creepy and epic. The music accompanies you in great ways, especially when it's not the military sections, but the sections where you're in awe. And the interactions you can have, the choices and the people you meet, all create an amazing experience, like having really a first contact with alien life.

Resident Evil 7: Awesomely Creepy

All this time that I played the older RE games was to lead to this point, to play RE7. This one I was told that it was again scary and good by several people, so I was very curious about it. 

The game clearly breaks itself from the past trend and decides to reinvent the saga, in another direction, a much better one. For starters, even if it's the 7th installment, the official name is Resident Evil: Biohazard, a way to start anew somehow. And what they did was to go back to its roots in some ways, regarding important details and regarding horror. RE7 is finally a horror game. Yes there's action, of course, but this game is again properly scary, properly tense and visceral and dark and very creepy. 

I have to confess I love creepy atmospheres. Creepy is a subtle feeling of dread. Not too obvious, not too evident, it's achieved by creating an environment that just feels....wrong, for some reason. And where you expect you'll be jump-scared at any moment, or that reality itself will crumble around you or something bad will happen. It can be lots of things, but when done right it creates a tension that is amazing to feel. It's like scared but interesting, like you cannot stop watching now and wanting to learn more, and it's fascinating. You don't achieve creepy by just making gore, for example, you can make gore creepy but it needs to be subtler than this. The creepiest things are the ones that look the most normal or innocent right before they don't. 

 RE7 achieves high levels of creepiness. It's also a bit disgusting sometimes, or not as subtle as it could be, or very gory at moments, but the feeling you get playing it has this special something that makes it extra interesting and compels you to go on and find out what's happening. 

Let's start with the "boring" part: Graphics again have been improved, the game looks very realistic. Humans appearing in it have a lot of detail, while still clearly being fake they are high on the scale of realism, to the point that they're a bit uncanny-valley too, a bit disturbing sometimes. The game is dark and greenish, somehow, that's the best explanation I can make of the general colors you see. The game happens in a single night, regardless of how many hours you really play, so you notice as you advance around, when it's still dark, or when you finally get to a point where the sun starts to raise, almost at the end. Most of the time you're inside some house, and the details you see are both gruesome, sometimes a bit too much, but also detailed and creating this special atmosphere. It feels claustrophobic at times, and it does make you wonder sometimes why the main character didn't run away like after the first 5 minutes of the game. 

The game is done now from a first person perspective, which makes it very immersive. At the same time it's not like a shooter, it's a first-person survival horror so you don't have a lot of ammo or health to just splurge and waste resources. Also, the main character is not an action hero. He does a lot of stuff for being a normal guy, but the game manages to make you feel like you're not comfortable with all this action around you somehow. You do need to aim and shoot from a first-person perspective though, but sometimes you need to run around or evade, more than fight. It has some similarities at times with Alien Isolation, in the fact that some enemies are only really vulnerable in some moments, and other moments you can only run away. These moments are a bit arbitrary, it's not clear why in one instance you can and in the other you can't, but it's fine, it's not too confusing anyway. Your inventory is very similar as to how RE1-RE3 worked, with limited space that you can increase if you find extra bags, but a general storage unit that is interconnected between locations so if you find one you can find all your items, regardless of the place. It has also this concept of a "Safe spot", the room with the storage that also has a save point, a place where you will not be attacked or followed. 

Weapons are varied. You progress from a knife, to a pistol, to a shotgun. You can get a flamethrower and a grenade launcher, you can find better pistols and shotguns for the second half of the game, and you can unlock a Magnum with very limited ammo, useful for the final boss fights and particular moments. You also find explosives, that are nice sometimes for the slowest but tough monsters. To heal yourself, you use disinfectant, which is frankly funny because you just pour it over your hand and ta-dah, you're cured, but it's part of the charm of the game, not taking itself very seriously but this time clearly being in parody-style, not like in RE4. Plus, there's another reason that I suspect about how you heal, but it's not confirmed, we'll talk later about it. In this game you need to combine base materials with chem fluids to obtain ammo, disinfectant or other useful items, and the end result is that you need to manage your inventory to have space but also have ammo and health. There's special injections that you apply directly into your arm that make you reload faster or have more life, but those are rare and hard to find or unlock, usually only as secrets. There's also sometimes secret pictures that show the location of those secrets. In general there's quite a lot of variety of things, rather interesting.

Puzzles are still simple, but better. You need special keys for different areas, you need to examine some objects, you need to think a bit for some sections and get the proper combination, or shadow, or examine the right thing, and overall the game feels less linear, having to go back to areas and re-explore them or access previously-shut doors. Linear games feel like movies, less interactive, plus purely linear environments feel very fake: Our houses and streets are not one long corridor, so when previous games did that it didn't feel right and here this is corrected. The maps themselves are interesting and very creepy, although most of the action happens in a central group of houses. The only weaker place is a section that happens in a salt mine that feels more monotonous and less creepy in the main game, but the rest do feel scary and tense. 

So, let's talk about the plot/campaign, and its ramifications. Previous RE were very old  (RE6 is from 2012) so I didn't warn, but here I do, even if it also has some years already: Spoilers ahead. 

In RE7, you're Ethan Winters, a married guy. Your wife, Mia, had some weird "babysitting" job a while ago, and then she disappeared, with one last message telling you that she lied to you, and that if you see this, to stay away and do not search for her. However, you get another message from her, not even a message, some card mentioning an address in the middle of nowhere, an abandoned plantation in  Louisiana, USA. Basically redneck/hillbilly territory. So you go to investigate. 

The game is set in the current time, but it has this strange very retro feeling, and it uses a lot of retro things. You don't bring a phone with you it seems, and you just get there at the fence of the property, leave your car and start walking around the forest. I'm not sure if you warned the police as well about this place, but it seems like you didn't exactly. 

Ethan....seems to be not very bright or something. Soon enough you find proof Mia has been in the area, her driving license, but at the same time you start finding dead birds and animals, and some weird sculpture made of cut up cows. At this point you should just call the police and leave, and there's actually two points at the start where he should have done that, this is the first one. You seem to see some guy in a yellow raincoat passing by, but he disappears. So, you find an area with several houses, and only one is accessible, marked as "the guest house". Inside everything is disgusting, with rotten foot and mold and worms, dead crows, etc. It's an abandoned horrible place, that also has some articles talking about disappearances in the area. Here you also find your first save point, in this game represented by cassette recorders. Yes, like if we were in the 80s or something. Also, you find an old CRT TV with an old videotape. Again, this feels...strange, there's no explanation why in the game you're finding usable old things. I have my theories but we'll get back to that. 

In RE7 when you find a tape and play it, there's this cool mechanic where you actually play what's happening on the tape, you turn into the character that is filming. In this first tape, you observe a crew investigating old "haunted" houses for a Youtube channel or something. You're the cameraman, accompanied by the actor and a producer I think. You enter the guest house, that looks exactly the same as not although maybe a bit better, and after a bit you lose track of one of the guys that seems to have disappeared into thin air. You discover a secret chain in the fireplace that opens a secret door, you go through this secret door to a basement and you find the guy standing against a wall and not saying anything. When you touch the guy so he answers you, he falls backwards on top of you, apparently dead, bleeding from his eyes, and the video gets cut there. That's the second time Ethan should just say "screw this" and leave as fast as he can from the place, but he doesn't: Instead he has the awesome idea of opening the same door and going the same path. The stairs to go down break, preventing you from going back up, and you need to navigate through horrible water covering up to your neck to get out of the area. You do find the body that you saw on the tape again, he floats suddenly in front of you, all gross but very dead and not a zombie or anything...and then you arrive to an area with a prison door and a woman inside. You unlock the door, and there's Mia!

Such a short game! And so easy! You can just go back now :).

..Except you don't, exactly. As you try to find a way out with her guiding you, she says she lost her memory, but that "daddy's coming" and asks why did you come. You tell her she wrote to you and she says she didn't. You find some door, but then while exploring another area she screams and disappears. You explore a bit forward, find some stairs out of the basement and go up, but find another locked door. You hear noises, go back to the basement and find Mia in all fours, making weird scary sounds and looking paler. She screams at you, hits you very very hard and her face contorts and changes, turning uglier somehow with rage and glee. She pushes you into a room where you grab an ax and are forced to hit her with it until you hit her neck and she goes down, dying. You leave the area for a sec, but when you get back her body is gone, and the locked door opens. As you exit, she appears again saying that it's ok, she understand...and then she goes crazy and ugly again, hits you, stabs your hand to the wall with a screwdriver and proceeds to cut your left hand with a chainsaw. You escape, find a gun and shoot her until she goes down, while bleeding from your left hand like crazy (yeah, that's impossible), and she goes down again...and then this other big guy with the yellow raincoat, Jack, hits your head and takes you and Mia away.

And that's the intro of the game :D. It's visceral, violent, creepy and scary. It resembles more a ghost horror story about possession than an old RE game. And it's amazing, cannot compare at all with the action-based crap they did before. 

So, you get kidnapped by a crazy family,: The husband (Jack), the wife(Marguerite), the old lady(?), and the son(Lucas). There's also a daughter (Zoe) but she somehow remains sane and actually helps you, she contacted you before on the phone and said she wanted to help you. They seem to regenerate, which explains why Mia is not dead, she also regenerates. And someone has stapled your left hand back to your arm, and it seems its working as if nothing has happened, which is ridiculous but funny. In this first half of the game you explore one of the old house and then another older one, where you fight dad and then mom, in that order. Jack is super strong and regenerates, and follows you around. You end up beating him and he explodes into goo, but you don't know if he'll stay dead, because he shot his head in front of you before and still recovered. Mom seems more fragile but she turns into a giant bug and her area is full of big flies/mosquitos, bug swams and other such nasty things. The old lady meanwhile keeps showing up at weird places around the houses, smiling at you, seeming catatonic and following you with her eyes but not moving more than that and being all creepy. You sadly cannot shoot her, the game prevents that if you aim in her direction because you know she'll try to murder you at some point....

Soon enough, apart from the family and the bugs, you run into "Molded", which seems to be converted almost-dead people, that have been covered in mold until the mold controls them and creates claws and giant mouth with teeth. They're quite disgusting and scary, especially because they're black and tend to show up on dark places, plus they look like some of the molded background walls. As you progress, you find out that Mia arrived to their house from some crashed boat found in the swamp with "Eveline", a little girl, and Eveline gave them a gift. Seems clear Eveline is somehow responsible for making them almost immortal and for creating and controlling molded. After the first house and before the second, you find the trailer where Zoe lives, apart from all the madness. She's not there but she talks with you on the phone and mentions a serum that can cure Mia and her from Eveline's influence. 

After defeating Mom, you find Eveline's room, where you can see that she's some disturbed little girl, and you find some disgusting weird arm, an ingredient of the serum together with a head. You hear Eveline for the first time, although you don't quite see her. She seems mad at you but wants you to be the new dad of the family or something, together with Mia, so you can turn into her parents. As you escape the molded she sends your way, you go back to the trailer to discover Lucas has kidnapped Mia and Zoe, and has the head. Lucas is quite the psycho, and seems he was disturbed long before Eveline arrived with Mia, his house is full of traps, in "Saw" style. After playign his little games and not being able to kill you, he escapes and you manage to get the head and liberate the girls. Zoe prepares two doses only of the serum. Jack appears again as some weird giant monster and you're forced to use one of the doses to "heal" him and kill him for real in the process.

After this you only have one dose, and you're forced to choose between Mia and Zoe. This is quite interesting because it's been a while since RE games had the courage to pull multiple endings, and I approve of it. However, it was badly implemented: saving Zoe gives you a bad ending, the game progression makes no sense and then her and Mia get killed, while saving Mia gets you the best ending, is internally consistent and saves both of them in the end. Saving Zoe seemed like the "morally" right choice, plus Mia has been clearly lying to you about some stuff, apart from being possessed, and Zoe has been really helpful and nice to you by contrast, but the game punishes you harshly for selecting Zoe, and I think there's room for improvement here, they could make the final sections more different based on your choice or something.  Anyway, let's pretend we save Mia, Zoe gets mad at you but says she didn't know what to expect, and you say not to lose hope, that you'll send help and rescue her too. 

You leave with Mia but find the ship that had the accident, a huge tanker that is just sitting there, and at that point "Eveline" attacks you, a giant-molded tentacle. At this point you change perspective and play as Mia, where she sees Eveline taking Ethan. You explore the big ship as her, at first with no weapons which creates a lot of tension when you do find some molded crawling around, and while having hallucinations where Eveline shows up, really a little girl that seems quite psychotic. You seem to start remembering things, and Eveline shows you a tape that shows what happened. This is the moment you quite see that "tapes" in this game seem more like an illusion, a mechanism where I guess Eveline transfers knowledge to you mentally, because there's no way Mia was recording what happened on the boat in first person and then she transferred this into a VHS tape inside the boat. Which makes sense, since no one would use tapes and CRT TVs in this current time.

In the tape it's clear Mia worked with some Umbrella-like bad organization that was developing bioweapons, and they created Eveline, a girl that produces fungus spores that can infest and control people, give them powers but also turn them into monsters. The girl itself then has control and communicates with the infected people and creates illusions in their minds, which is why Mia sees her and gets possessed. Mia and another guy acted as her parents for transport, but she reveled and escaped, while keeping Mia as a mom figure. After reviewing the tape in which she infected all the people in the ship and made it crash against the swamp, she asks you if you'll be her Mommy, and when you reject her openly she gets mad and dissappears. In this section you search for Ethan in the boat, replaying a lot of things you've seen already in the tape, which makes it a bit repetitive. The only enemies in the area are molded and they're scary but less interesting that the family, so this was the more cumbersome part of the game, although still interesting. You rescue Ethan but Eveline possesses you, and you kick Ethan out of the ship before she makes you kill him. 

Now back as Ethan, you escape the ship and reach an old salt mine. You go inside the mine, and found out Lucas was cured from Eveline's control by the company that made her in exchange for reports, and he's just bad, he's not really possessed, although he is regenerating. Eveline unleashes a lot of molded on you while signing a children's song, being all creepy, and after you survive the attack you find yourself back at the guest house. You also make a special venom from her cells, that Mia gave you, that is the only thing that can apparently kill her. In the guests house you confront Eveline, who is plaguing you with hallucinations of the attack Mia did to you in there, but now you see she was controlling her and guiding Mia's actions. As you advance towards her as she unleashes psychic waves against you, you inject her with the venom, which disperses the hallucinations: Eveline was the old lady that you kept finding, that you assumed was a grandmother of the family. Leaving the lab made her get old super-fast. As she complains no one liked her, she dissolves.....just to come back a second later as a huge tentacle mold monster with her face in the middle. You fight her one last time, until a passing helicopter drops a special gun against bio-weapons, that you use to freeze and finally kill her. The helicopter lands, and Chris Redfield, this time with human proportions and being a lot nicer, rescues you and shows  you Mia is in the helicopter (if you choose her instead of Zoe). And the game ends. 

So, there's a few loose threads: What happens with Lucas? And What happens with Zoe? These are solved in expansions that I will comment quickly. The first expansion is free, you play as Chris Redfield, working for Umbrella. Yes, Umbrella turned its head around and decided they had done horrible things and now they have started working to fix what they have been doing. And you fight Lucas and his traps, in the Salt mine, now saturated with spores and quite claustrophobic, I have to say, very good atmopshere, you want to get out of there as you play. You again lose a lot of soldiers from your squad (that's starting to becoming ironic, Chris loses people left and right) in Saw-like traps (the movie, I mean), but you manage to hunt down Lucas and kill him The second expansion I had to buy, you play as Zoe's uncle, a big strong guy that decides he can punch molded until their heads explode (yep, this one is a bit ridiculous). You find Zoe infected but are told there's a cure, and you punch your way around enemies till you manage to save her with the help of Chirs. Chris tells her Ethan sent him, and Zoe is happy that Ethan fulfilled his word.  

And thats RE7, at least what I played and found interesting. I will comment a couple of extra things: First, the fact that Ethan has glued his hand back and also sees Eveline as a girl that appears and dissappears, and is affected by her powers may mean he's actually infected but not yet controlled. That would make a lot of sense and would explain how can you survive all the crap that you do, or how come you see tapes with what happened in the past: All those are Eveline making you see things or somethign like this. However, a bit like the indoctrination theory in ME3, this is not explored, at least in this game, which is a bit of a shame.

Second, that I loved this game a lot. I found the plot quite dark but interesting, and that it was the right decision to reduce scope so much and focus on a little story here in a small place with a few houses. That's how you do horror well. Horror that is at planetary scale is not really horror, is usually just action. Great horror needs to be minimalist, and here it was done perfectly. I liked this so much I don't mind playing it again and sometimes I have replayed some section or watched some area again, and it's still interesting and compelling. 

Apparently, RE8 will come out soon. The game is set in some village, and there's apparently werewolfs and vampires ans who knows what else. This doesn't fill me with excitement, because reminds me too much of RE4. However after an RE7 that was this solid and good, I'm definitely curious...