Disco Elysium: Hope in a defeated dying world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich bastards will kill us all if they can

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Totally recommended.

 

 

 

 

Disappointed but not surprised

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

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

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

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

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

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

For three reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you want that?

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

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

See what the right-wing parties do.

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

Fresh stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just walking

Happy new year! 

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

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

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

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

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

Opposite to this we have the progressive parties.

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

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

And none of them will be a perfect option. 

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

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

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

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

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

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.