Zarf Updates

Here's a bunch of reviews that have accumulated! Gotta push them out before the stack falls over.

There's no common theme here except I played them all since GDC.

• South of Midnight
• Old Skies
• The Horror at Highrook
• Lab Rat

South of Midnight

• by Compulsion Games -- game site

A girl heads across Louisiana flood country in search of her mother, and falls into the swamps of a Southern-Gothic fairy-tale.

This is action-adventure of a very old stripe. Think Darksiders or any of those early-2000s Price-of-Persia knockoffs. (Lithe wall-runners, not thumping Kratos types.) You run around a very pretty landscape. Sometimes you climb a (ruined) building. If the trail forks, or if you see a place to climb on the side, it will take you to a thoroughly-clued collectible before you rejoin the main track. And then you fight monsters in a bounded arena. All fights are exactly the same except for monster count. Repeat, with plot breaks and the occasional boss fight and runny-jumpy chase scene. Honestly it could be a PS3 game.

It's all well-done. I love me a building climb. There's nothing bad about this formula; it's just that it was already a formula when West Wing was cancelled.

The plot is decent. It oozes atmosphere -- mud and flood, homes and factories cluttered with people's lives. Eerie caverns. Steamships decaying in the swamp. These are the poorest parts of the South, which means the story is about white people doing terrible things to black people, and rich people doing terrible things to poor people, and for the most part I've repeated myself. The game leans into that, as it should.

But it doesn't have bite. Your job (Hazel's job) is supposed to be healing the wounds of people's souls, but the people barely figure into the plot. You meet them, you go find their stories... and you never go back to engage. You're just a witness. The story only comes alive for your immediate family: your mother, her ex-boyfriend. Your rich white grandmother, except there's not much to her either, in the end.

Compare NORCO, which throws you straight into the merciless poverty of Big Muddy corporate greed and never stops screaming. NORCO was personal. South of Midnight is tourism.

I am coming off harsher than I mean to. This was a delightful game to play through. Exploring was always fun. The environments are vivid, alternating fetid-rank and glimmering-lovely, often both. The voice characterizations are first-rate. I set the fights to easy mode so I can hardly complain that they were time-wasters. The bond between Hazel and her mother, off-stage as it mostly was, still caught me by the final scene.

The art style is an interesting take on stop-motion claymation, although the only actual stop-motion is the delightful opening cinematic. The rest of the game makes do with clay-ish surface shaders and hopping bunnies animated on twos. (Harold Halibut did it better on what must have been a twentieth of the budget.) As for the music... there were some good bits, but a lot of it felt like movie-soundtrack takes on Louisiana traditions, rather than the originals. Should have stuck to the pure-quill gospel and old-timey stuff.

But for the setting and visual style, I will forgive all that. I will never, ever get tired of New Orleans dreamscapes with hot jazz swirling over the vèvè of old Voodoo gods.

It was just... not an ambitious effort, in the end. Much ado about what you'd expect.

Old Skies

• by Wadjet Eye -- game site

You're a time cop! Ha ha, no, there are no time cops. You're a time tourist guide, working for the tacky-ass ChronoZen Corporation, leading rich assholes around history on a leash. For an extra fee they can change history -- minor details only, please.

What do you get out of this deal? No friends, no family, and no life. They count as "minor details" and are constantly being rewritten by time-jump ripples. (If anybody you cared about was a fixed point in time, you wouldn't have been hired in the first place.) The only people who remember the changes are other ChronoZen employees, so that's who you wind up spending all your time with. But hey, the pay's good. If you could spend it on anything that didn't ripple out overnight. Whoops.

Wadjet Eye's last point-and-click was Unavowed. I filed that one under "mixed feelings"; its story felt like it was there to justify the puzzle structure. I'm happy to say that Old Skies is a whole new ball game. It's a tight, vivid character story. Fia Quinn and her ChronoZen compatriots come to life as soon as they open their mouths. The supporting players are thinner, but even the rich assholes have depth and motivation. And some of the tourists will turn out to be more interesting than they look.

And let's not forget New York City, the character behind all the characters. This is New York across (real) history, rather than Unavowed's fantasy-in-the-shadows New York. History hits harder. Yes, 9/11 will happen. Yes, the game makes it work. You may also enjoy the wealth of in-jokes and sneaky references. (I know I missed a lot, but I'm always happy to run into my dude Ashbless.)

The puzzles still tend to the clunky side, but now I can say the puzzles are there to justify the story structure. Much the better way around. And your earbud-buddy Nozzo offers generous contextual hints.

As in Unavowed, each chapter is structured as a mini-mystery. Not a formal mystery (there are no time detectives either) but you generally have to figure out who did what, when and where, so that you can make the desired change to history. Or undo it, or prevent it. The clunky part is that the mystery structure is mostly running around asking every NPC every question you can think of, repeatedly, until the next plot bit unlocks. Then somebody shoots you. Death for a ChronoZen employee comes with infinite UNDO, so you get to try every possible action until one of them saves your ass.

I'm being a bit unfair. That's the basic structure, the tutorial. The flow of events (and history) gets knotty after the first chapter, and really starts to hit its stride around chapter four. And there's some old-fashioned adventure puzzles too. But you never quite get away from the "try try again" gameplay. You wind up clicking through a lot of dialogue, whether time-looping or just re-interrogating.

Recommended for the old-school adventure aficionado. If you're coming in from other parts of the narrative game world, you may feel some friction; but the writing and voice acting are worth the effort.

The Horror at Highrook

• by Nullpointer -- game site

Four explorers take on a haunted mansion. Gothic-ness will ensue.

This is interesting tack on the narrative RPG. It's closer to worker-placement board game mechanics than tabletop dice-rolling. Everything is a card: characters, obstacles, tasks, resources. You can perform a task or overcome an obstacle by plopping down a character with the appropriate skills and hitting the "go" button. The character crunches away until the task is complete. If your skills aren't high enough, add a resource with the right bonus.

Since you have four characters and lots of tasks, you can parallelize your work. And since you're always up against a rising tide of difficulties, you have to balance resource-mining with all the rest of your tasks. And of course you need to watch your hunger/madness/etc meters, and apply the appropriate palliatives when needed. Watch out for hauntings!

It adds up to a engaging mess of time-and-resource management. The kind of game where you have to stir five pots at the same time, and you can. The pause key helps a lot.

All this on top of a nice occult investigation storyline -- alt-Victorian Gothic with a dash of steampunk. Wandering spirits, creepy artifacts, occult rituals. Black cats and ravens and weird worms scooped from the well. The story leads with Poe and barrels towards Lovecraft. (The title is an unsubtle hint.)

I enjoyed this. But I felt the role-playing aspect didn't live up to the setting or the mechanics.

The mansion -- and the mechanics -- are initially a mystery; exploring them is prime fun. But once you've got a grasp on how everything works, you realize you're just in the business of stocking up on resources and applying them where needed. The tasks show up and you do them; there's no real decisions to be made. You're not solving puzzles. You're mostly not making character choices.

Critically, there are no tradeoffs. This is not the kind of game where the cure is worse than the disease. In a proper Gothic, every step forward costs you something you wish you hadn't lost. In Highrook, it just costs time. Or blood or sanity or what have you, but you can replace those with a bit of task crunching, good as new.

(The cure for lost sanity is booze, and it just works. Come on, folks. Oh, one character starts with an "alcoholism" trait, so I had to be careful about that, but it never became a problem in practice.)

Admittedly I was playing on easy mode. Negative traits piled up slowly and were easily fixed. Maybe the gameplay feels totally different in the higher settings? But I didn't see any sign of mechanics that would support that.

I think the underlying problem is that the game is balanced for a one-run-and-done experience. It's not a roguelite where you have to fail and fail to learn the system. And fair enough! This is a narrative game; the authors want to tell you the story. If you played the beginning ten times, all the wonderful bits of narrative description would be wasted. You'd stop reading them. That would be a different game entirely, and this is the game the authors wanted to make.

But I came away feeling like I'd had a quick snack in between Blue Prince runs.

Lab Rat

• by Chump Squad -- game site

Okay, this isn't primarily a narrative game. It's a block-pushing puzzle game with an original color-zapping mechanic -- a pretty simple rule which is extremely productive. The game pulls many chapters of puzzle ideas from its sleeve without ever feeling stale. Full marks for puzzle.

But it's also a narrative game, and the narrative is... a voiceless protagonist being run through through test chambers by a snarky, female-presenting AI who goes mad with power. You have to blow up her memory cores.

We will not stop you if you've heard that one before. You have; the game has; everybody gets to take that for granted. Lab Rat goes to the mattresses inventing variations and substitutions on the underlying Portal trope. It does fantasy, it does noir, it does silly riffs on a dozen game genres -- including doubling down on Portal, just to prove that it can.

It just never stops feeling like it's working for its food pellets.

Oh well. The puzzles are worth it.