Reviews: They Bleed Pixels and Thirty Flights of Loving (PC)

MOAR reviews...MOAR!!!

They Bleed Pixels
They Bleed Pixels is unsatisfying in the way a bad ice cream sandwich is unsatisfying: while you'd certainly hoped for more, you've still gotten to eat an ice cream sandwich and so you're not going to complain. Too much.

NOW 30% MORE OF A DISAPPOINTMENT! SORT OF!

I think in reality my love/hate relationship with this game might spring from a misunderstanding on my part of what it's supposed to be. I think I envisioned the game, based on the videos I'd viewed and the reviews I'd read before buying it, as a clever beat-em-up with a Lovecraftian aesthetic and the occasional bit of jumping.

This excited me because a) I love Lovecraft and b) a beat-em-up with a good fighting system is one of my greatest weaknesses, along with side-scrolling bullet-hell shooters and Serious Sam-style FPSs. I've logged an embarrassing amount of hours playing Super Double Dragon, Return of the King, and WWF No Mercy! over the years as a result of b).

Unfortunately, if you've watched the above trailer, you've already seen the entirety of the fighting-move set you're given during the game and you've only seen a very small part of the hair-tearingly infuriating jumping sequences.

Unfortunately Part Two, the game is really not that good when it's trying to be Lovecraft-meets-Super-Meat-Boy, which is what it's trying to do for about 90% of its running time. Which brings me to a more general point that I'd like to express to all indie games: SUPER MEAT BOY IS BETTER AT BEING SUPER MEAT BOY THAN YOU ARE.

And he knows it too, that cheeky little fucker.

They Bleed Pixels's controls are just too slippery; it's never quite clear when you're going to let go of a wall, or when you're about to grab one, the timing of doing combo-heavy things like juggling are imprecise, and all too often the double-jump just refuses to work for no apparent reason. Super Meat Boy isn't great because it's bastard-hard, it's great because it can kill you two hundred times on the same level and every single time you'll know it was your fault, because the controls are precise and the way through the level is clear. If you can't get there, it's because you're not good enough. TBP is different; generally, when I died multiple times in quick succession I was reduced to that old NES standby: screaming "I PRESSED THE FUCKING JUMP BUTTON! I PRESSED IT!!! AAAAAUGGGGGGGGAGHHGHHH!?" over and over while slamming the controller into my own skull.

Me playing Unreal Tournament in 1999.

Needless to say, this is unsatisfying.

The beat-em-up part of the game was pretty excellently done, but it just felt underdeveloped. For as long as the game takes to finish, you learn pretty much all of your fighting moves by the time you're about 10% through, and by then you've also met almost all of the (rather unvaried) enemy types you'll fight as well.*

What I really enjoy about a good hyper-hard platforming game is the sense of personal accountability that comes with a really tight control scheme (and the subsequent feeling of ultimate success you get when you beat the "impossible" game anyway). What I really enjoy about a good beat-em-up game is the ebb and flow, the punch and counterpunch between you and your enemies, the mini-strategy game that's set up in the instants between button presses as a result of the complexity at work underneath the obvious layer of graphical fisticuffs. TBP doesn't provide either of these experiences. It gestures emphatically enough at each of them that it was sort of fun for its entire maybe-six-hours running time, but there's not enough variation to make it very engaging beyond the level of a quick blast of dopamine.

What was really cool was the bonus levels unlocked when I finished the game: one that was a labyrinth-like tower with a better level design than anything found in the game proper, and another that used the game's juggling mechanic to task you with luring enemies into various traps located around the level. These were twists on the game's basic mechanic that I was mentally begging for throughout the main campaign. It's strange that they only emerge during the guest-designed levels. Oh well.

*I should note here that the game dutifully doles out new "tutorial" sections to you every time you finish an early level, but they're never anything you can't just figure out on your own after a few seconds of button-mashing.

Thirty Flights of Loving
Without getting into the age-old (and fairly pointless) argument of what a "game" is, I found Thirty Flights of Loving to be less of a game and more something that you'd "read" in a college-level Short Stories class. In fact, the next time I teach 21st century fiction or something similar, we're definitely going to be "playing" TFoL. It's a really incredible experience, but not a really incredible gameplay experience. It's an experiment (it seems to me) in the use of an interactive virtual space as a storytelling medium. And it succeeds brilliantly while managing to be unlike any other "game" I've ever "played."

Okay, I'll try to lay off the air quotes now.

This looks suspiciously like the last syllable of the word "beotchhhhhhhhhhhhh."

Everything about TFoL screams "literature" to me. Maybe that's because I'm an English professor and I'm always hearing someone scream "literature," even if it's usually in an anguished tone of voice while walking into or out of my classroom. But. The experience of playing through this game is the experience of reading a short story by a master author. Except it's not a written text, or even a film, but instead it's a video game. It has its own distinct visual style, for sure:

Block heads and duck feet are two features of said style.

The music is an excellent, if eccentric fit. Much like a movie, many of the scenes and set pieces are framed; that is, you as the player view them in a particular sequence from a particular angle with a particular timing, that is repeated even during second and third playthroughs. On one hand, the almost total lack of actual interactivity (other than just walking down the hallways the game presents you with) is what makes me hesitate to call this a game, but on the other hand it's the only game I've ever played that successfully integrates smash cuts and that's fucking awesome.

Also, you can peel an orange and throw it at a pretty block-headed girl.

The game plays a lot with perspective and time (and I can't say much more without RUINING EVERYTHING), and sometimes veers gleefully off what little beaten narrative path there is to indulge in what seemed to me at first to be random wackiness but later was revealed (by my own brain on a third playthrough) as wonderfully clever symbolism.

This really isn't a game to play and then criticize the mechanics, the graphics, the "fun" level, etc. There really is no gameplay and the entire experience will take you maybe 15 minutes, tops. But, like a good but cleverly complex short story, I went back right after the end and played it through again. And again. And then again with the commentary "track" enabled. And every time I teased a little bit more meaning out of it until I was able to decide what it all (or almost all, at least) meant to me, even if that wasn't the dev's intent. The entire time I was playing, I was constantly caught up in questions of authorial intent, meaning of symbolism,
existence of through-running themes, characters' motivations, etc. And not in a "this game's story sucks, so I don't know what's going on" way, but in the way the makes a post-play discussion session with a few friends or students absolutely worth having. And that's a really, really rare thing in the world of video games. It doesn't have to be, but it is. Though that's less (I think) because of the limitations or strictures of the medium and more because to have a story that works on the level(s) of TFoL you need a Hemingway, or a Faulkner, or a Borges...someone who can actually create an experience worth painstakingly parsing for shimmering little splinters of meaning. And that's what we have here. I don't think all games should be like this. I don't think many games should be like this. I don't think many games can be like this. But this one is, and it's remarkable. I'm glad it exists.

In this particular case, the cake is NOT a...well, you know.

Reviews: Thomas Was Alone and Fez (PC)

I'm doubling up on reviews here because I've been ripping through way too many games lately, and while I'd like to get my general thoughts on each down before I forget those thoughts completely, I want to do things with my life other than blog. Like kill us all.

Just...kidding?

Thomas Was Alone
So, Thomas Was Alone was a fucking revelation. It's the rare indie experiment in minimalism that not only works, it works so well it makes you question whether the minimalist-style games you've played before actually worked as well as you thought they did when you first thought they did work.

The game is your basic jumping-and-steering platformer, with the slight twist that you solve puzzles by switching "party" members throughout. Each party member has a different ability (or abilities), and so you end up having to have them work together (i.e., Thomas isn't alone for long) to reach each level's exit. The result is a game that's part platforming and part puzzle-solving. None of the platforming nor the puzzle-solving ever reaches a legitimately challenging level, so though everything feels really satisfying (the jumping is especially well-weighted, especially when using a USB controller), by itself the gameplay would make a clever-but-not-especially-exciting platfuzzler (portmanteau police!).

Fortunately, the gameplay isn't alone, either.

The gameplay is supplemented by some of the cleverest, best-written, and best-performed voice acting that I've ever seen/heard in a game. It's simply a narrator telling the story of the your various avatars' feelings and impressions of the world they're making their way through, but somehow...someway...it manages to turn two-dimensional shapes into some of the most three-dimensional characters I've ever met in a video game.

For example, this is awesome, but you'll only understand why if you play the game.

And this makes all the difference. It's not that the game is unfun by itself; instead, this is a perfect example of what I call "worldbuilding" in my scholarly-type writing: the voiceovers flesh out the action. You guide the various shapes through the platfuzzling action, and The Voice adds an emotional context to your actions. It's a synergy between exposition and gameplay that actually works because the shapes' various personality traits (as presented by the voiceover) match their actual, physical abilities (controlled and utilized by you). The result, paired with the game's extra-abstract, weirdo soundtrack, make basically a perfect combination.

This was really driven home to me after SPOILERS the end of the penultimate chapter, wherein you lose control of the characters you've utilized (and grown to care for, frankly) for the entirety of the game up to this point, and they are replaced with new shapes, new characters, new personalities. I was surprisingly affected by this switch; I wanted to see what happened to my new friends, and the idea that theses damn interlopers would be taking their place for the denouement of the story was vexing. After about three levels, though, I was totally engrossed in these new shapes' stories. It only took me about fifteen minutes of play to get totally reinvested. It was like the devs took me out of the originally story and stoked my frustration on purpose just so they could prove how goddamn amazingly immersive the experience of playing their game was.

And they wouldn't be wrong. END SPOILERS It's awesome. Check it out.

Fez
I'm just going to spoil this one right up front: this was another one of those games that I'd heard amazing things about, paid a decent amount of money for, and then just didn't like.

Smile all you want; you cannot mute my hatred.

It started out innocuously enough: there was a little fez-guy, and he jumped around, and he could rotate the world. Cool gimmick. Really well-produced gimmick. Nice music, nice art style. But really, when it came down to it, there was no gameplay substance. I played Fez for the lion's share of two nights, and when I was done, the game told me I was something like 85% finished (or so). All I had done was run and jump and rotate, run and jump and rotate, over and over and over, through occasionally changing (and admittedly brilliant-looking) environs. That was about it. The rotating thing is cool, but it sort of felt like if someone had made the original Super Mario Bros. without pipes and then Super Mario Bros. 2 was the exact same game, but with pipes you could go down. It would have been cool, but after you'd gone down a few pipes, you'd be over it. That's how Fez feels to me: there's an interesting new gameplay twist (I sort of shuddered just typing that, sorry) here, and it plays really well in a stylistic sense; however, it doesn't serve as the basis of a bunch of interesting skills the player is made to learn throughout the game. Instead, you just do the same thing over and over and over: rotate, look for cubes, repeat ad nauseum.

Until you get to 85% (or so) completion. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes necessary to decipher a number of bizarro ideographic puzzles "hidden" within the game's levels. Why you suddenly have to engage in medium-level cryptography at this point, when it hasn't been a part of the game at all before now is beyond me. You just do. Then the game descends into another, less satisfying pattern: using the built-in, terribly confusing map screen to navigate back to levels that you've already played so you can scribble symbols down on pieces of notebook paper, and then semi-arbitrarily try to enact the instructions described by these hidden languages in particular locations throughout the gameworld. It's about as horrible as it sounds, considering that a few minutes before this was just a pleasant but bland platforming game.

Anyway, I actually screwed around with this part of the game for a few hours, but eventually wasn't making progress that didn't entail third, fourth, fifth, or even tenth trips back to level that I'd previously scoured, and I just gave up. Honestly, aside from the somewhat interesting art direction in this game, I didn't see what all the hubbub was about. It was basically just boring as balls and made by a dev who obviously believed more in his own vision for a weird, unengaging but demanding puzzle-world than he did in making a game that was actually fun to play. Which is sort of sad, because I paid $10 to be alternately bored an angry for 8 or so hours, and because generally speaking, fezzes are cool.

Review: Hotline: Miami (PC)

Holy fucking shit, Hotline Miami.

This guy...agrees?

This is an amazing game. If you like games, you should buy it and play it awhile ago. Unless you abhor violence in all its forms, in which case you should stop reading and never play video games again.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way...this is an amazing game that just also happens to be about brutally murdering every human being you set eyes on throughout the game. You are rewarded for doing this in the most brazen and brutal ways you can think of.

With baseball bats, especially?

So...yeah. There's definitely a brilliance about H:M that appeals to me on a design level. The aesthetic is perfect: the music is incredible, the color palette suits the tone of the story and the action, the sound effects are a lot punchier and more affecting than they are in most AAA shooters, the controls feel weighty but not sluggish, etc. I could go on forever about how addicting the base gameplay is just because it feels so good in all of those ephemeral gameworld-building ways that so many other games fail at. This makes the game's blazing-fast action easy to come back to again and again...and you will, because you'll die a lot, but you'll always start over about ten feet away from where you died, and after you finally finish a level, you'll want to go back and try to finish the level again, this time doing it faster, or without dying, or using only knives, or spraying everyone with an assault rifle, etc. I don't think I've ever played a game that is so fundamentally addicting as Hotline: Miami is. It's a staggering achievement just in this regard.

And then there's the hyperviolence. This might bother you, as there's a lot of it. This doesn't bother me much, personally. Or, I should say, it doesn't bother me any more than the hyperviolence that exists in pretty much every video game, film, music video, comic book, etc. that we consume nowadays. In the context of the rest of our media culture, I don't find Hotline: Miami any more offensive than anything else. You should probably play it first before deciding for yourself, but in my opinion the violence is in a lot of ways a stylistic choice more than it is an excuse to splash yet more blood all over your screen.

Although it does do that, too.

It's not just violence for violence's sake here, at least not entirely. The game does a lot of interesting things with storytelling, perspective, and (simulated) sense distortion, and I really got a kick out of it. The devs were apparently heavily influenced by Drive, and so you might consider that as a reference. The revenge-laden story is in some ways just a scaffold to set up all the violence and bass drops and neon and letterman jackets, but I also found myself legitimately trying to untangle the nuances of the story at the end, and was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the "trippy" sequences between and during levels were displaying some pretty complex symbolism and hints at the resolution of some plot threads that I would have missed had I immediately written the game off as a another pointless shootfest.

I'm not really doing a great job of conveying how awesome this game is. From a purely mechanical standpoint, it's amazingly satisfying. All the blood and violence and such makes it a bit of a guilty pleasure to me, but it's hard to feel too bad about enjoying a game this fantastically made.

I know this sort of eliminates the reason for me having written any of this, but if you're interested at all in the game, you should read this. And then, presumably buy it and play it forever.

Review: Starseed Pilgrim (PC)

Starseed Pilgrim is one of those games that was ranted about on RPS so insensibly that I knew I had to have it as soon as I had the $5.99 to fork over. Then I played it, and was, honestly, a bit wowed by its uniqueness...until I realized that I wasn't really having any fun.

Not that everything gaming has to be fun. I didn't necessarily have fun playing Thirty Flights of Loving, but (spoiler!) as you'll read soon enough, it was one of the most profound gaming experiences I've ever had. But Starseed Pilgrim purposely sets itself up as a meta-challenge of sorts, in which your first (and arguably primary) objective is to learn the game's (and the gameworld's) rules without being told what they are, except slightly in the most indirect way imaginable. I guess the risk with this approach is that once the player learns what the game is really about, he/she might not really want to play anymore. That's what happened to me.

Starseed Pilgrim starts promisingly enough: you're dropped into a stylized 2D world with no explanation, no direction, and really, no consequences for failure other than the fact that you don't progress. Though that's not really all that comforting when you consider that, at the beginning of the game at least, you don't actually know what constitutes progress or what you're progressing toward.

[SPOILER] Dongs. Your objective is to built huge floating fucking dongs in space. [END SPOILER] 

This, oddly enough, is the selling point for the game. Nearly all of the reviews that I read that loved the game (and there were many) praised its refusal to tell you anything, and the novelty of making learning the game's mechanics part of the game itself instead of something relegated to a manual, tutorial, or the pleasantly-paced but straightforward doling out of skills that happens throughout a game like World of Goo.

As I said in my Teleglitch review, I love games that make you learn, or at least make you feel like you're learning, while you play. So, I'm not necessarily opposed to a game like Starseed Pilgrim expecting you to figure things out on your own. Aesthetically, the game provides a perfect canvas for mucking about, dying over and over again, and remaining relaxed while you slowly tease nuggets of understanding out of your repeated, failed experiments. From the minimalist graphics style, to the...uh...minimalist background music, to the bright, staccato sound effects that make every movement and interaction seem like a potential enlightenment, this is a game that you can play for hours upon hours without having the faintest fucking clue what you're doing or what you're supposed to be doing, and yet still feel serene and relaxed. And that's an accomplishment in itself.

The eco-beatnik wall graffiti could be toned down a bit, though.

As I slowly began to discover the workings of the system that controlled the gameworld, that dictated my continued survival and perhaps even advancement, I did, at times, feel the kind of spark of excitement usually reserved for experiences like figuring out how to catch a squirrel in a snare in the wilderness...but it was a fleeting excitement. See, for me at least, the discovery of how the game worked basically consisted of two, maybe three major discoveries. There are two or three things you really need to understand to advance in the game. There are many variations on a few of those things that you need to learn, but that doesn't take intellect or luck or exploration; it just takes experimentation. So, after my initial excited realization, I spent a few hours [POSSIBLE SPOILER] playing with the game's various other types of blocks and writing down how each one reacted to my probing [END POSSIBLE SPOILER]. Then, there was a second realization that worked the same way: "Ah, this does such-and-such in situation A! What about in situation B, and situation C?" And so on. So, it was really less exploration and excited discovery than it was a scientific method simulator. Which is still cool, but not really that cool.

Once I realized how the gameworld worked, I was struck by the dumbfounding realization of the scope of the problem I was expected to solve. Where other reviewers apparently saw this moment as "epic" and "eye-opening," to me it was just depressing. My response was, basically, "You want me to do those couple of things I just learned how to do how many times?!" Because, really, all the things I'd just learned how to do were sort of boring things. I kept thinking that maybe there was some other, more awesome thing that I hadn't discovered yet, but then I finally broke down and read a few spoilers online, and...nope. I'd figured it all out. But there was a depressing disconnect between learning to do something and then using that skill in a mundane way that knocked me right out of the game. I imagine it's a similar feeling to realizing that you can cut notches on the ends of long logs and lay them in stackable squares to build a log cabin. That's a fucking fascinating realization to have, but it doesn't really inspire you through the drudgery of actually building the cabin through repeated cutting and stacking for days and days and days on end.

Pictured: Not a fun video game.

And that's how I feel about Starseed Pilgrim! Hurrah!

Review: Gunpoint (PC)

I straight up bought Gunpoint on the strength of its free demo, and ultimately ended up feeling about it more or less the same way I felt about Anodyne: it was just about enough fun for the money, though I wouldn't have minded if the base experience had had a little more meat on its bones.

Gunpoint sort of reminded me of Stealth Bastard, only more fun. Whereas Stealth Bastard made me feel more or less like I was playing Super Mario Bros. with shadows and a stealth meter, Gunpoint actually made me feel like I was a superspy with super abilities, dodging (mostly) bumbling idiots.

Pictured: Stealth Bastard

The fun of the game comes from finding new and different (and, optionally, increasing violent and hilarious) ways to avoid and/or destroy security guards. Normally, I don't link to trailers because it seems extra-lazy, but in this case I think this video does a great job of showing what the gameplay's all about:

The other great thing about the game is its humor. It was written and in large part created by Tom Francis, whose work in game journalism I've always enjoyed, and the game itself shows off the self-awareness that comes from someone who picks on other people's games for a living. Fourth-wall-breaking abounds, tooltips are hilarious, and the branching-tree dialogues that follow the completion of each mission provide choices that are, for once, not boring, stilted, and canned-seeming, but are instead clever, amusing, and surprising all in turn.

The game lasted me about 4-5 hours, all told (I think), and I came away feeling like I got my money's worth. It was one of those games that I thoroughly enjoyed but in retrospect think of as being repetitive and as much as I'm wired to always want more content, I think if Gunpoint had continued on in the same vein for a few more hours, I might have quit out of boredom before I reached the end. Basically, it's just as long as it should be.

And I guess, oddly enough, that's my complaint. For such a "lite"-type game, the art style is attractive, the music fits, the dialogue is interesting and the story is actually pretty multilayered and engaging. The aesthetic is pretty much perfectly tweaked. The controls are tight, and the game mechanics are clever, if a bit bare. It just sort of seems like Francis could have done even more with the game. It's such a damn good game, in a design sense, that it's almost frustrating to not see more done with what's there. When the game starts, it has a feel to it that's similar to World of Goo or Blocks That Matter, or one of those other games that slowly, excellently teach you skill after skill until you've mastered, but then it turns out that there's really only 2 or 3 skills to master and the rest of the game just asks you to use those skills over and over again, and that's it.

That probably makes it sound like I didn't like the game. But I did, very much. I'm just surprised whenever I play a game like this that's absolutely satisfying as-is, but feels like the groundwork is already laid for something even better. Then that something better never comes, and it's weird to be happy with what you've got while also wishing it could have been more.

Anyway, that's a super-vague sort of review, but I'm hungry and I'm going to go eat now.