Zarf Updates

Home from NarraScope! Here's what I've played this month.

• The Operator
• Dungeons of Hinterburg
• TRON: Catalyst

The Operator

• by Bureau 81 -- game site

A shortish narrative game which falls somewhere between the "hacker game" and "bureaucrat game" tropes. You have a computer screen, which is most of your interface with the world. (Not entirely, and the game makes some hay with that.) You're a faceless Fed intelligence operator (not entirely faceless, and see above). You do database searches for the cops out in the field. Mostly this means digging through folders of evidence to find the field that answers a specific question -- "What is the shooter's name?" "What is the inconsistency in this transcript?" And so on.

But then you stumble across Wot You Ought Not, and some nice hackerly interactions get mixed into the gameplay. More realistic than the usual pipe-puzzle hacker minigame, although it never gets trickier than "use this terminal command correctly."

(I appreciated that you can browse databases and evidence folders entirely from the simulated terminal. I get the feeling the game was designed as a pure CLI setup, and the devs added GUI affordances in player testing? Just a feeling.)

The story feels somewhat loose around the edges, and the writing is pretty clunky. Or the translation is -- the developer is French, and the game's faux-American-FBI schtick doesn't really hold up. In particular, when someone is introduced as "Mike TRENCH" and you need to type their full name, it's "MIKE TRENCH" rather than "MICHAEL". Full-ish. And yes, the whole game uses French-style last name capitalization.

And I suspect the voice actors were mostly running on "ham it up and hit these plot points". (Sorry, Barry! Good job on the drawling!)

Anyhow, it's an effective spy thriller if not an effective story. The real-world interstitials, cast in super-blurry non-video, are a neat way to provide FMV ambience on a super-low budget. (And, again, a bit of gameplay...) The story has quite a bit of narrative variation -- a single ending, but several ways to get there depending on how individual chapters go. Mind which wire you cut, now.

Dungeons of Hinterburg

• by Microbird -- game site

Combination dungeon-crawler and visual novel. Dungeons have appeared in a cute village in the German Alps; now local hostels and weapon merchants are making bank as tourists flock in for slay-cations. You alternate between dungeon-grinding (daytime) and buffing your relations with the locals (evenings).

The dungeons are primarily puzzle dungeons, padded out with combat scenes. Feel free to play on easy or very-easy combat mode. The puzzles are the feature here. Puzzle-solving tools are a fairly familiar mix of bombs and hookshots and magic skateboards, plus some more creative spells. The tool mix changes up from region to region so there's plenty of variety.

This is very cute. (And very relatable to my vacation last year in a cute village in the Dolomites. No monsters on Lake Garda but many ducks!) Exploring the town and chatting people up is fun, and so is the game's take on the bizarre social environment of RPG-as-tourist-industry. Much like Boyfriend Dungeon's "let's dunj" vibe, albeit without the talking swords.

However, the puzzles weren't quite engaging enough to hold my interest, and the combat was just repetitive and boring. (C.f. South of Midnight.) The game clearly wants to break up the dungeoning with visual-novel stuff -- like I said, you alternate modes. But then I found the enforced alternation to be annoyingly restrictive! I wanted to spend time just chilling with the cute slayer chick at the ice-cream stand, but nope, gotta dunj during the day, every day.

I mean, you don't have to. You can spend the afternoon at a scenic vista, or just take the bus back to town. Similarly, you can spend an evening at the movie theater rather than finding an NPC to talk to. It was just... regimented. Every clock tick hustles you along.

I got about halfway through the game, and then decided that it felt too much like work and put it away. The plot was just getting interesting, mind you. Smarmy Mayor! Engaged, difficult character arguments over the future of the dungeon industry! Drat, I'd better not talk myself into reinstalling...

TRON: Catalyst

• by Bithell Games -- game site

One more delivery in computer-land and you can call it a night... except the package explodes. Suspicious! The red-neon Core cops want to throw you in the game arena. You would prefer to avoid this. Luckily, or "luckily", the explosion glitched you out and you seem to be experiencing déjà vu...

(You might wonder what kind of a legal system revolves around a game arena. To some extent Catalyst is a novel-length exploration of a political situation-slash-conspiracy that makes sense of this Tron cliché. The game isn't actually an arena story -- spoiler, you escape almost immediately -- but I wonder if that wasn't the seed of it.)

Tron: Identity, Bithell's previous effort, was a short visual novel with a bit of puzzle solitaire. Catalyst is much more ambitious: a narrative-heavy action-RPG which sprawls across the Arq Grid, from the towering city of Vertical Slice to the storm-whipped Outlands. It took me about ten hours to play through. I guess that's a smallish game by commercial RPG standards, but it felt big to me.

I have to say it was somewhat padded at that length. The designers clearly want you to feel like you're exploring a living world. The early areas are pretty well packed with chatty pedestrians, but as the game gets more expansive, it starts to feel like an RPG -- big maps dotted with people saying "Have a nice cycle" plus a few side quests. Lots of "go here next" plot arrows; on a map like that, there's no shame in using them. The story involves lots of running back and forth across the city. And fighting roomfuls of guards at every turn. And then there's enough dialogue to balance out all the running around and fighting -- which is a lot of dialogue.

I mean, it's good dialogue! I really liked the story. It's intricate and political and flamboyant and personal. It involves grand ambitious schemers and little people getting on with their lives. It extends the world of Tron: Identity; you will eventually run into some familiar faces. Now with voices! Catalyst isn't fully voice-acted -- way too many side characters and RPG side-chats -- but key plot scenes are voiced.

On the down side, it is not fully animated. Of course that's an unfair expectation. It's delightful that a small indie studio gets to play in the Tron universe. Disney could be cranking out soulless multiple-A trend games, and I suppose they will before the new movie hits. But I am very happy to play something on the low-budget-with-heart side.

The visual style is terrific, to be sure. It's a top-down view, so it's not intensively modelled; but the architecture has a wonderful sense of space and depth. Lots of tiny brush-stroke details. (I particularly loved that the city streets have bike racks. Not Tron motorcycles, but, like, Tron bicycles.)

It's just off-balance for a critical action scene to be represented by a fade-out and a couple of sound effects. Same goes for a chapter-transitional voyage down the Source River. Give us a comic-book illo panel, at least!

Still, this is neon-red meat for Tron fiends. Yes, the pacing is padded and clunky and you will get tired of derezzing guards. But it's Tron -- gleaming towers and glittering polygon trees and abysses of backlit code. If you don't shout "How effin' awesome is this?" every time you turn a corner, what are you even doing here?