Zarf Updates

Not summer games, not fall games, but... something of both. (In betweens.) I let the review file accumulate for a few weeks and here we are.

More reviews coming soon! A whole lot of adventure games dropped this month; I'm still in the middle of a few.

I'm also did-not-finishing a few of these games, which is unusual for me. Some of this is general world stress. I am pretty distracted with all the terrible things. Some of it is just saying, hey, I'm not having fun with this part, I'm allowed to put it down. Doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad. Or even that I don't recommend it!

• no signal
• Neyyah
• The Siege and the Sandfox

no signal

• by exodrifter -- game site

A modest adventure game of the "something happened on this space station" subgenre. You float around... well, you fly-mode around; your first-person view is curiously immaterial. Walls and furniture don't impede you but closed doors do, until you find the right keycard. Good thing keycards are material. For quite a while I thought that the developer just hadn't bothered with gravity or colliders. Turns out no, there's a story reason for it all, but you don't discover it until the end.

This has just a couple of kinds of repeated puzzles -- slidey circuit boards and a mathematical keycard system. Aside from that, most of the game is obsessive package-hunting. The sort where you check every drawer in every closet, and then look under every bed. And there's a lot of empty rooms to search. There's probably nothing in an empty room but you have to check the drawers just in case.

Admittedly the fly-mode makes this easier than it otherwise might be. Also the hint button, which gives you a rough location for any unfound objects in the room.

You are collecting keycards, fuses, hard drives, and a few other tools. The hard drives contain journal entries, which is where the story comes in. But it's not very connected to the gameplay. If you're cynical, you're just skimming the journal entries for the very occasional drop of a safe combo or keycard location hint. If you're into space station slice-of-life, you get an interestingly out-of-order narrative about a handful of people -- decent writing, just somewhat peripheral to what you're doing.

The ending is the best part. I won't spoil it, but it does a good job of contextualizing and doubling-down on the situation you've discovered.

Not a ground-breaking game, but I enjoyed spending some time on it.

Pet peeve: everybody uses that Interstellar black-hole rendering now. Fewer people know how it works. You can't just putt-putt around the bendy halo and see it from underneath! That's a visual distortion of a flat ring. Please.

Neyyah

• by Defy Reality Entertainment -- game site

Someone loved Riven very much and wanted to create an experience just like that.

You know how Tolkien created Middle-Earth because he wanted a place to fit all his language ideas? And then we got a decade of writers creating worlds to fit all their ideas about Middle-Earth. Completely different starting point.

Or, closer to home: Will Crowther was a caver who recreated a cave he'd explored. The kids at MIT were not cavers. When they made Zork, they were recreating a game that they'd played -- Crowther's game. Different approach, right?

None of this speaks to quality, one way or the other. Zork was better than Colossal Cave. (More imaginative, better puzzle sense, better parser.) Terry Brooks never rivalled Tolkien but he settled down to some readable stuff once he'd gotten the shameless riffs out of his system.

Neyyah... it's pretty and it's got lots of neat machines. It's not really recreating Riven though.

I think it's a problem of balance. Any particular puzzle machine in Neyyah is a reasonable idea. Each location is interesting. The pathways are appropriately convoluted. You can ride a minecart or a hoverpod. There's portals. (Lots of portals.) All neat stuff.

But it's all spread out over a lot of scenery. You spend days just exploring and exploring, collecting keys and clues and plugging power-cores into consoles. (Almost the first thing you find is a box of power-cores.) You don't have to actually engage with the game -- or the story -- because you're still filling in corners of the map. When I found a key or a clue, the hard part was remembering where its associated lock or puzzle was.

Just because a puzzle machine is neat doesn't mean it fits into the player experience. And if your volumes of carefully-worked-out lore aren't an active part of the story? Cut 'em.

(I have a post brewing called "Lore was a mistake." I mean, as a game-design concept.) (Yes, that includes those long journals in the Myst library. Riven avoided that problem! That's one of the reasons it was really good!)

When I scrubbed through the last of Neyyah's easily-reachable zones, I realized that I had completely lost track of my goals. I'd have to re-explore the world again -- this time taking map notes on where all the puzzles were. That was when I lost steam.

Like I said about the remake of Obsidian (1997): I now find slideshow-style adventure games tiring to play. Without free movement or even free panning, parsing the environment is more work than I want to put in. Squinting at the cursor to see whether I just turned 90 or 180 degrees: not fun.

Also not fun: lack of autosave. I don't care how retro your style is. Autosave is mandatory.

Enough griping. What does Neyyah do well?

The islands really are pretty. I love a baroque wrought-iron catwalk. (Remember Schizm?) The islands are in different time zones and the varying light is beautifully done. There's cute critters.

I complained about the world being too spread out, but navigation is actually speedy and responsive. You can click-click-click your way along the paths and walkways, and click through the elevator/portal/minecart animations as well. This is not your creaky DVD drive from the 90s.

Similarly, the journals are voluminous and somewhat repetitive. But you don't have to read them exhaustively. I'm pretty sure every important clue appears in at least two places. That's a good design principle.

The dialogue is cheese-tastic but the FMV actors have a great time delivering it.

I realize this is a lot of very qualified praise. Sorry! The creator of Neyyah has put an intense level of effort and attention into his game. I am genuinely impressed. I want more Riven / The Room fan games. I will buy yours. (Playing House of Tesla now!) I just think I've played enough of this one.

The Siege and the Sandfox

• by Cardboard Sword -- game site

Everybody's playing this month's metroidvania but I'm terrible at fighting. So I bought a different one.

The Siege and the Sandfox is a 2D stealther/platformer. It's a spiritual sequel-or-homage to the original Prince of Persia -- minus the combat. If a guard catches you, you die in one hit. So it's about the sneaking, plus a bit of whacking unsuspecting guards from behind. But mostly the climbing, jumping, and exploring to find new climbing-and-jumping skills.

There's a frame story (murdered king, duplicitous queen, you know the stuff), provided by a narrator. It's almost an audiobook: "The Sandfox knew that the key would be nearby..." Amelia Tyler (the narrator) has great fun with this, even doing voices for different characters. It's not just for story beats, either. The game generates contextual storylet lines as you move around and encounter different situations. It's really nicely done.

The first half of the game was very satisfying. Unfortunately, I got bogged down in the second half, as the map broadened out and required me to find more corners to explore. I think I know where I'm supposed to go next, but it's got a lot more guards than previous areas; progress got frustrating. Also the game is a bit buggy. So I put it aside. I don't regret the time I spent, though.

(If you want to know exactly how far: I got the wall-climbing and roof-shimmying gear before giving up.)