Zarf Updates

Puzzle-ish games, to be sure, but this batch felt like it leaned in unusual directions. All put a lot of weight on their visuals. Two are nearly walking sims. One (guess which) is mostly a card game. But hey! They were all interesting to write about, so I hope you are interested to read.

• Rivage
• Forbidden Solitaire
• Desolus
• The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline
• Hypnos

Rivage

• by Exnilo Studio -- game site

A timeloop metroidbrainia on a gorgeously visual space station. You're the doctor/therapist for a research crew investigating a mysterious exoplanet. Except the rest of the crew has disappeared and the station is on its last dregs of battery power. What happened, and why is fruit levitating in the kitchen?

Unlike Outer Wilds, the time loop isn't a fixed time period. Your limit is the power level. Opening any door depletes station power, and when that reaches zero, there's nothing left but the reset button. But you're free to poke around any given room as long as you like. Naturally, a lot of the game's discoveries are about getting to more places in a single loop.

I'm afraid the lesson here is that Outer Wilds made a really hard design problem look easy. Rivage is a competently done stack of information puzzles, but solving it feels procedural; it's a series of notes, not a series of revelations. The basic gameplay experience is: solve a puzzle, learn X's password as a reward, reset so you can get to X, use the password. Repeat.

It's not all passwords. Clues come in a variety of creative forms. But nearly all of them wind up scanned into your personal memory store. Keycards can be cloned, audio can be recorded, and the in-game screenshot system lets you store any image. So structurally it's mostly learning passwords.

The puzzles (between passwords) are mechanical or electronic or environmental in the Myst vein. Lots of variety, and they're mostly pretty good puzzles. Uneven, though, I would say. Some are very easy; others are baroque path-finding mechanisms which take inordinate trial-and-error or a peek at a walkthrough. I feel like more playtesting would have evened that out. (Or maybe the playtesters just enjoy gears.)

Oh, there's exactly one timed puzzle. It's cleverly worked into the time-loop mechanics, but that's no excuse. Please, kids, kill your darlings. Or at least rework them to not introduce one timer into a timerless puzzle game.

As for the story... it's the kind of game where I have to tack "as for the story" onto the end. Plenty of emails and journal entries, but the upshot is that (spoiler) anomalies or something have driven the whole crew crazy. But not interestingly crazy. They're just nasty to each other, and I can't say I enjoyed the process of finding out how. Everything wraps up with what's supposed to be a dramatic reveal, but I still don't know what the point was.

Overall, many clever ideas that don't make for a clever game. Pretty though.

Forbidden Solitaire

• by Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment -- game site

"Solitaire... but eeevil!" ...is how I described Occlude, and now I have to say it again.

Forbidden Solitaire is a completely different kettle of suicide jacks, though. It's a faux-90s faux-CD-ROM adventure game, complete with pixelated FMV and C-movie monsters with literally dozens of polygons each. Play hands of solitaire to explore the dungeons and disembowel the monsters.

Also, the game may be haunted by the shades of its developers, the people who killed themselves after playing it, and/or demon-summoning cultists. (Props to Xalavier Nelson's performance as a narcissist Idea Guy who would be the worst boss in the game industry if it weren't for the real-life game industry.)

Forbidden Solitaire is a hoot, and the solitaire offers a nice ramp of increasing strategic complexity as you collect bonuses and upgrades. And as the monsters bring increasingly nasty anti-bonuses and tricky card layouts to bear. Early levels are easy, but soon enough you'll find yourself planning your combo chains.

However, the game doesn't really offer anything beyond the solitaire mechanics and a spray-coat of unhinged cultic gore. You never hit that Inscryption moment of breaking through the walls of the UI. I kept wanting the Win95 frame to become relevant. (When the game keeps screaming "stop playing!" you should be able to, I dunno, force-quit it?) But that's not where this is going; you're on rails. Play your cards, enjoy the screaming.

Desolus

• by Mark J. Mayers -- game site

A first-person puzzler about two parallel worlds. ("Future and past", I think, although you could as well say "day and night" or "material and spirit realm".) And it's shiny. No, shinier than that. Shinier than you can possibly imagine.

The puzzle mechanics are basically switches. Stand on one to flip some world elements (walls, floors, stairs) around. Stand on another to flip world elements between the two realms. Also you can jump through a gate between realms yourself. Reach two keys (which may be in the same realm or different realms) to unlock the gate and proceed to the next test chamber.

This is deep enough to provide a wide variety of puzzles, but it's not really enough to provide difficult puzzles. For most of the game, everything you do is flip binary switches. Unlike with Portal or Talos, there's no free-placement element to the mechanic. So you can bull through a lot of the puzzles simply by plumbing the state space.

(Every puzzle is a maze! But a surprising number of Desolus's puzzles are unicursal "mazes". Just two switches available at a time; you just flipped one, so better flip the other one. Keeping track of this will get you through a lot of the game without working very hard.)

Later on you encounter four-way switches, and things get more interesting. Also there's a very nice one-off environmental puzzle (the Cathedral) built on the same mechanics. But by the time you get to that stuff, you're near the end of the game.

So, a pleasant puzzle diversion, but not much meat on the bones. But also: shiny. You are travelling through a world of glass towers, crystal trees, shimmering planes of water. The air is luminescent. The sky is an apocalypse caught mid-shatter. The visuals are amazing, is what I'm saying. It's worth a look just for that.

(Interest: Mark Mayers is a long-time member of the Boston game dev community. I think I saw the first Desolus prototype in 2016. I've been anticipating this one for a long time. Even if it doesn't make my thinky-game-of-the-year list, I'm really happy to see it finally reach the world.)

The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline

• by ONE-O-ONE Games -- game site

A walking simulator set in Hell. Sort of. Here's the deal: every 33 years, one of Dante's descendants has to return to his house, open the portal, and stroll through the Inferno. Otherwise Bad Things Happen to the mortal world. You don't know why Dante made this deal, or with whom, but it's your turn.

Your Beatrice is named Dalila, but she's not of the bloodline so her involvement is limited to supportive long-distance phone calls. After a small package-hunt around Dante's manor, and a slightly annoying rhythm QTE, it's off to Hell with you.

(Note: not Dante's House in Florence. Or his tomb in Ravenna. This is a secret country house, you know, in the middle of that dark forest.)

I should note that this setup is entirely unrelated to anything the real Dante wrote, or would have written. It's not an allegory and it's not about damnation or redemption. Sins are not ranked, sorted, or even mentioned outside of one superficial puzzle. Charon gets an ominous cameo but not in a boat. You don't chat up the souls you meet. (Well, one, but she's an Alighieri ancestor rather than a political riff.) This is the story of a family curse. Gothic weird-tale, if anything, only in a Mediterranean palazzo. Plus Hell.

There's a recognizable fantasy-art style to Hell these days. Blasted wastelands, twisted classical architecture, megastructures. Giant sculpture/titan figures embedded in the landscape. Floating rocks. I feel like I've seen a lot of it. Wayne Barlowe is a good example. Darksiders, old-school God of War... come to think of it, that Dante's Inferno action game from 2010. (Which was a ripoff of God of War anyhow.)

Anyhow, The Alighieri Circle has a restrained version of that. Bleached trees, bleached statues, bleached floating architecture, and the lakes of blood are lucent rather than bubbling. It's quite striking, but it also doesn't vary that much. You traverse three levels of Hell, arguing with your Guide (definitely not Vergil) about your curse and what you'll have to do to fulfil it.

There are a bare few puzzles -- about five. They feel rather forced, to be honest. The game is a walk-and-talk. I can see the need for variety and pacing (it can't all be bleached trees) but interactions don't have to be formatted as puzzles. Simple collectathons, or touch-these-four-rocks, would have been less annoying and could have been more thematic. (Like I said, the Seven Deadly Sins are not thematic in this story!)

The clock-chime puzzle was decent, mind you. Also very pretty.

So, a short walking simulator with good visuals and a short story's worth of narrative. I was happy to take a look, and then I was happy it didn't try to stretch itself farther than it did.

Hypnos

• by Redlock Studio -- game site

A walking simulator set in the Lovecraftian Dreamlands. A pilgrim-or-gunslinger comes to town, following the dream-or-memory of a lost child. He intends to meet the four Monarchs of the Nameless City whose name may be Kadath. To do this, he will have to traverse a lot of Cyclopean architecture.

(I was confused by the word "Cyclopean" when I was a kid. I guess the Cyclops was related to Fasolt and Fafnir, those noted giantish construction contractors?)

This game descends from the "brutalist megastructure" genre, which I'm always happy to encounter. I suppose Ico was an early example? But Hypnos takes it way, way farther. This is not a world of flat grey planes. You first see the City across a rolling Arcadian landscape, split by aqueducts and dotted with windmills. The monolithic towers are fractally textured. Stone spires and swirls of mist hang in the sky.

Beyond that... I mean, it goes up. There's a lot of up.

I know I just finished describing two different games with fantastic dream-like architecture. This one is on another level. Some of its worlds are beautiful. Others are barren and sterile. Others are abyssal (and, indeed, there's one lake of blood with tormented writing figures, very much Alighieri Circle). One world gets Gigeresque -- we had to go there, but only once. But everywhere you go is monumental... and fully detailed, at every scale. I have never played in a world that felt so large and so close-up.

Here's the thing: neither Desolus nor Alighieri Circle lets you stray from the path. The path may twist but it's your only option. Hypnos has some regions like that; but the central hub of Kadath is wide open. Paths are suggested (follow the black pyramidal steles!) but you are really free to wander anywhere you can run, jump, or scramble to.

Keeping such a game playable requires a delicate balance of freedom and guided exploration. Hypnos gets this balance... about as good as it could be. Which is not the same as perfect. You usually have a good idea where you're going. Enormous basalt tower with a thread of stairway zig-zagging up? Worth climbing! Mile-high portal full of swirling light? Probably a target! The pyramidal steles are a frequent hint, as are the four-faced waypoint markers.

But it's also possible to go wildly off-course. If you miss a side passage or a stairway, you can go an awful long way, wondering if there's a waypoint around the next corner. If you're not sure, there probably isn't; but that doesn't tell you what you missed, or what direction you should have explored.

This studio's previous presentation was Blackshard. I couldn't even get through the demo on that one. I kept missing a turn and going round in circles. Hypnos does a better job. I was often lost, but always managed to figure out where I should be going. I finished the game at about the six-hour mark, which felt quick for the sheer amount of place I had traversed.

On the up side, the game offers an excellently clever fast-travel system. Once you unlock a waypoint, you can teleport to it from anywhere in direct line-of-sight. And line-of-sight is miles. It may take effort to reach the top of a tower or promontory, but once you have, it becomes a warp-target across the breadth of the world. This makes exploration a lot more satisfying.

And the worlds have lots of extra stuff to explore. If you see a temple or a megalithic sculpture in the distance, it might be a goal in the main storyline. But if not, it will at least offer an encounter with another pilgrim, or a knight or hierophant or a scroll of Zothique wisdom. These are throwaway narrative fragments but they're nicely written. The authors have a good ear for Dream-Quest-ish bafflegab.

As for the story... oh, it's solid enough. You are on a dream-quest. You will encounter Nyarlathotep -- no spoiler, it's always Nyarlathotep -- and he will tell you stuff you don't want to hear. The Yellow Sign is out there somewhere. I'm pretty sure I found Yog-Sothoth behind an inaccessible portal. The story maneuvers deftly around these Lovecraftian commonplaces; it has its own take and its own characters. It's not horror. The Steam page is tagged "horror" but it's really not. No monsters, no black ooze. Some sky jellyfish but they're not threatening.

(Racism check: the game is not about xenophobia either. There are no bad guys. Most of the characters are drawn in an abstract watercolor style that isn't specific as to race. Although I guess the specific ones look European.) (The developers are French.)

I think what Hypnos gets right is the sense of a world which is alien. It may be foreboding (not terrifying); it may be exaltingly lovely (not welcoming). But it is never comfortable, and it is never on human scale. It looks like it has existed for time out of time, and will exist when humanity is dust. Many games have gestured at that; Hypnos lands it.