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Sunday, 1 November 2015

Game Review: Remember Me: A great game concept hidden among hours of the same old

Remember Me: A great game concept hidden among hours of the same old

When in Neo-France, a screenshot with the Eiffel Tower is obligatory
Remember Me is a beautiful looking futuristic dystopian platformer/brawler/puzzler with an exceptional lore that you will probably never enjoy to its potential. While the game deals with meaningful questions, ‘What could the world look like if you could store, share and repress memories?’ it fails to leverage this angle, and most (admittedly good) backstory is relegated to hidden lore finds which are a chore to locate, and which you likely will not find all of within a playthrough, artificially depriving story lovers of their lore, while rewarding game environment explorers who most likely could care less for it.

If anyone would ask for a game where the art is incredible, but the game part itself is deeply flawed to a fault, this would be at the front of my mind. Across the 11 hours the campaign lasts, expect to be let down by torturous design choices in combat and platforming, which isn’t to say that it’s unplayable, only that it’s very grinding in its nature.

Despite the game’s plea in its very name, to be remembered, there are exactly and only four sequences you will genuinely care about. However, those four are such exceptional representations of the creativity of gaming as a medium that they will remain in my mind as a standout innovation, and as such I was coerced to bear with the lackluster 10 ‘in between’ hours just for the one hour of gaming delight of those sequences. What separates these Memory Remix segments from the rest of the game, and other media as a whole? You actually have to play the game to enjoy them, watching a YouTube video cannot do them justice. In my opinion, if the designers had just made the entire game around those type of sequences, added more, and fleshed out the concept further, it would have been an entirely different game altogether, and much the better for it.

The Pledge
Begin as a clueless, mind-wiped prisoner in the Bastille of 2084, see the world for what it has become in the face of memory altering and sharing technology, and instigate a revolution to return the world to the natural order of things while restoring your memory along the way. Achieved through jumping around town through strange shortcuts, defending yourself at every turn in a world where law enforcement seems to have forgotten about guns, and everyone knows Kung Fu. Mixed martial arts is apparently the fighter’s weapon of choice in 2084 and most enemies are all too happy to show off their haymaker, which feels out of place in the future. A mind hacking mini-game would have made more sense. Anyway, after escaping from prison and finding your tools, you use your unique memory hacking skills to change people’s point of views for your advantage, and steal memories from others where required.

The Turn

You will be performing multiple acts of infiltration and sabotage across the city, under the watchful eye of a mysterious handler whose personal motivations are suspect (are they exploiting your mind-wiped memory for right or for wrong). This for the most part means jumping, shimmying, and punching your way around town while facing the odd boss fight. Explorers are rewarded with health and mana upgrades, and the aforementioned lore packages.

The Power Attacks menu, also a very inconveniently timed combat segment that makes little sense other than 'Oh story's ending, might as well throw in another fight'
Unfortunately, both platforming and combat feel like a chore, and you will be bored soon by the repetitive nature of your actions. Again, and again, and again. Pathways are mostly linear, though there are a couple of moments where you are confused about the next step and after a short wait, the game points you in the right direction. There are around 14 types of enemies, which will make you vary your approach, but not radically. Combat depends on landing combination attacks on enemies, and demands motion. Unfortunately, with no block feature and dodging cancelling your combos, this again makes fights last longer than they should. You unlock special charged moves which then have inane wait times to retry, which will force you once again to either wait (during combat), or try and land combos that reduce timers. A chore.

He probably isn't coming over to shake hands
My least favorite boss fight of recent memory
Boss fights are typically not fun, and the punishment for failing a mandatory Quick Time Event (QTE) segment at the end of a boss fight is being kicked back the moment before the QTE, with the boss back to their last heath bar. This forces you to retrace a painfully dull combat sequence again and again, requiring inane requirements just to re-trigger the QTE. Should you die doing this, it’s back to square zero or the boss’s most recent health bar. At one point two thirds through the game, I seriously considered just quitting because of the frustration of such a badly designed boss mechanic. At the end, the lure of the memory remixes forced me to carry on.

The first time you experience the sensation of playing with memories, an excellent and novel game element
The Memory Remixes remain the shining highlight of the game, wherein you watch a short video sequence, and rewind it to find moments in which you can change a circumstance – the location of a box or the safety on a gun – and create a newly fabricated memory, changing the world view of the target individual radically. The designers did a great job in making your tweaks feel impactful, and a clever input mode in this mode and its outcome – making permanent allies out of enemies - makes you feel a bit like an operative in a super-secret futuristic crime unit, in a good way. Whoever came up with this concept deserves a pat on their back.
One of the possible outcomes of playing with memories


Non-exploration driven puzzles range from extremely simple to slightly challenging, and you will end up questioning the intellect of both security system designers in the future, and game designers in the past. At times, you will find a screen indicating the location of a Cache of hidden upgrade parts, which often takes more time to memorize than it takes to find the part. Worse, you may not find anything resembling the target description before you find the last passageway locked off due to progression, not a fun design choice, again.

At every step however, the vistas are beautifully detailed and you will find yourself stopping from time to time to enjoy the look of the entire game, which is very pleasant on the eyes – colorful and grand at the same time. This is definitely a game that looks better than it plays.

The vistas are gorgeous throughout the game
Just here for the art
Look at all those meaningless art assets, less of these and more ReMixes next time, please!

More of that lovely art design

The Prestige
At the end of your journey you regain your memories, and gain conviction for your actions. Through skillful memory manipulation you have the opportunity to change the worldview of key individuals and help bring back a sense of reality. As expected, there is a twist at the end, but all is wrapped up in time for supper and few loose ends are left behind. There is a fair bit of emotional poignancy in the ending, and that is to its credit.

The Aftermath
End of story, the only option forward is to replay from the start.

For specific demographics:
Price sensitive: If you want to try out an amazing new mechanic hidden behind hours of waiting, go for it on sale. Otherwise, there are better ways to spend your time and money.
Genre sensitive: Good lore where available, visuals say a lot more than anything else in this jaunt. This won’t be a must experience of sci-fi/memory enthusiasts any time soon, but it is still a competent manifestation.
Replay enthusiasts: Not much to see here, maybe a few more lore items if you care, otherwise you really don’t want to be replaying this one.
Diversity seekers: If you’ve played a lot of games, you will love the Remixes, and pretty much not care about the rest
Those with older systems: Fairly graphics intensive, will not be kind at 1080p with older systems, usually an insane amount of polygons on the screen
Art lovers: A lot here to love

Final verdict
A flawed game which many will skip, but hiding a few moments of excellence seasoned gamers will remember fondly

Game: Remember Me
Developer: Dontnod Entertainment
Launch Date: 3rd June, 2013
Time for one playthrough: 11 Hours
Time Reviewed: 11 Hours
Get it on: Steam 
Price: $30 on Steam, has reached $6 during sales

For more on the Pledge/Turn/Prestige/Aftermath Review structure, check out: http://criticalh1t.blogspot.in/2015/06/the-prestige-and-meaningful-game-reviews.html

Friday, 16 October 2015

Games for Every Age

Hello everyone,

I've talked to a lot of people in the interim since the last post, and a common question that I've come across is 'what games should my kids play?' A fair question, and for which, this (limited) post. There are also a few FAQs at the end for those who have further questions. Please note that almost all of these games can be enjoyed at any age, the ages mentioned here are sort of minimum requirements (for humans :) ). Side note, I've played most of these myself, and am recommending from experience.

Kids less than 5 Years old
Outdoors, physical, kinetic games that help build real world motor skills and social skills. Outdoor games are and will remain a consistent recommendation at all ages (not just for kids).
Indoor games that help simple logical reasoning.

Below the age of five, I strongly discourage kids from playing video games before they have fairly well developed notions of real and unreal. The last thing you want is for kids to learn early on is to take orders from others without asking why.
Puzzles, simple board games (snakes and ladders-esque), and pattern detection games like snap are far more age appropriate for this age group

Kids 5 till 8 years old
Beyond outdoor sports, now kids have the mental reasoning capacity to start learning more complex games. Chess and simple versions of monopoly can enter at this age. Among books: Where's Wally

Regarding video games, I'd recommend avoiding mobile gaming due to its ubiquitous presence, making kids eager to play games anywhere they go (at an age where they don't know better). Instead, I recommend playing games on dedicated consoles / a PC, which can be monitored and regulated in terms of time spent. At this age, kids will be able to play the games, but often will not be able to grasp the full depth of them, hence I won't recommend most challenging genres such as strategy yet.
Great games are the Mario series (pretty much anything in this), Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, Angry Birds, many simple Disney games
While I'd recommend avoiding online games, Neopets.com and Miniclip.com do offer fairly kid friendly environments

Kids 8 to 12 years old
At this age, kids will enjoy more diverse experiences and become mentally able to comprehend games better, allowing me to recommend more serious titles. and a whole new world of challenging and engaging games opens up. Among game systems, Nintendo's Wii U or a PC would be preferred at this age

Must Plays: Spore, Bastion, Portal, The Legend of Zelda series, Minecraft, Portal, Portal 2,
Brothers: A tale of Two Sons, Fable 1, Dust: An Elysian Tale, Zoo Tycoon, Sid Meier's Pirates, Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, Disney Infinity, Lego Games (Lord of the Rings, Batman, Jurassic Park, Dimensions, Avengers), The Oregon Trail, Contraptions: The Incredible Machine (1 and 2), The Oregon Trail, Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventures, Never Alone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, World of Goo, Threes, 2048

Teens 12 to 16
This is the last age group at which I'd recommend games in general, as beyond this point, more specific tastes develop among games.

Civilization 4, Super Smash Brothers, Gunpoint, Professor Layton Series, The Talos Principle, Kerbal Space Program, Rayman Origins, Rayman Legends, Valiant Hearts, Kingdom Hearts, Age of Empires (1, 2, 3), Age of Mythology, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, Child of Light, Rise of Nations, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Patapon, Braid, InfiniFactory, Rogue Legacy, Plants Vs Zombies (1 & 2), Final Fantasy (1, 4, 6), The World Ends with You, Star Wars Knights of The Old Republic (1&2), Transistor, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Monaco, Steamworld Dig, Legend of Grimrock, Mark of the Ninja, Tropico 4

Kids at heart, and teens above the age of 16

The Witcher 3, The Witcher 2, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Civilization V (The Complete Edition), Deux Ex: Human Revolution, Valkyria Chronicles, 80 Days, Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Alter Ego, Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Sims 3, Project Cars, FTL, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil's Survivor, Metal Gear Rising: Revengenace, Dishonored, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, DotA2, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Saints Row (The Third, 4), BioShock (1, 2, 3), Wolfenstein: the New Order, Borderlands, Telltales- A Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, The Walking Dead, XCom- Enemy Unknown Complete, This War of Mine, Invisible Inc, Spec Ops: The Line, Total War: Shogun 2, Wargame: Airland Battle, World in Conflict, GTA V, GTA IV, Shadow of Mordor

FAQs

PC/PS4/XBox One/Nintendo?
My personal choice: PC + Nintendo, you miss the least games.
Only one? PC
Only one console? PS4

What is the most cost-effective platform?
PC Gaming, this is a no-contest

Mobile Gaming?
Avoid Free To Play games like the plague. Most do not respect your time at all, unlike most paid games. The hidden currency that games really cost you is time, not money. For those who understand the difference between the two, don't sell your time short with a bad game.

To Pay or Not to Pay?
Pay, please support the developers! For the price conscious on PC, Steam Sales come around Summer and December, and many amazing games are at steep discounts. Also, humblebundle.com is a great source of many great games, for amazing prices.

In the rare chance there's something left to ask, leave a comment :)

Thursday, 2 July 2015

Part 2: How video games trace their origins to ancient storytellers

How video games trace their origins to ancient storytellers
Also, the road leading up to video gaming as a mass phenomenon

Part 2 of the 4 Part series on Gaming

The global gaming industry is pegged to rake in over $80 Bn1 globally this year, making it a little more than double the size of the global box office, including Hollywood, Bollywood, and any other local cinema. You read that correctly, the stereotypical nerd industry which has typically been relegated to the side of our attention and been the maligned poster boy for escapism will earn more than the global cinema earnings of every movie launched this year. I’m not kidding2. If that thought doesn’t make you think twice about the power of video games then this is not the right blog for you.

We are on the verge of seeing a wave of social acceptance for gaming, with the coming workforce and yes, even many of our politicians3, having grown up gaming and for a nice change, being proud of it. This will be a brave new time for the medium of video games, with more people being engaged, more stories being told, more subject matters and wider demographics being covered, and more lessons being learnt. In this context, it would be interesting to look back and the trace the steps that led to the creation of this industry as it is.

The journey through the evolution of gaming will be long and winding, starting from the need for gaming, and stopping near the doorstep of video games as we know them today. For anyone about to write TL:DR and move on, here’s the abridged version:

Gaming
Rooted in: The human need for a story
Adapted: As per the tools available
Expressed through: Various media
Provided: A diversity of unique stories
The Future: A platform for creating your own stories

Those who would like to read on and share their comments on what lies below are most welcome. Now we begin:

The importance of storytelling, and games as a unique medium of storytelling

As a species, we transcended our biological limitations through creativity, specifically through the creativity that allowed us to form and follow languages and the ability to believe in the unreal4. While our hardware – our bodies – haven’t changed much in the small evolutionary window of the past 3,000 years during which civilization kicked off in a big way (we’ve existed for more than 70,000 years), we’ve been able to become the dominant sentient creature on the planet through rewriting our ‘software’ – how we programmed our brains with social guidelines and followed them for the betterment of the many.

Our ‘software’ gave us the ability to communicate, to coordinate, to codify and pass on our knowledge. Common languages gifted us the adaptability to store vast resources of knowledge that would be of use to future generations – knowledge would no longer be lost with the passing of the thinker. Among the stickiest ways to transfer information, stories have had a profound and lasting impact on us. Their utility in transferring information is strongly linked to our overall evolutionary advantage, allowing us to reach the top of the food change and into positions of power in many natural systems. At the same time, our ability to believe in the non-real, allowed the set up of interlinking systems including money, governments, corporations, and religions – the inter-subjective systems that drive and guide us today. These systems are fuelled by stories: the story that paper is tradable and worth something other than paper, the story of an elected leader being better for the people than alternate forms of social guidance, the story that limited liability for large companies is the best interest of the economy, the story of god and how people can improve themselves by following His or Her guidelines.

Seeing how many of our fundamental human systems are built on the bedrock of stories, the creation of a form of media that allowed for interactive story telling was inevitable. Two way story telling most likely saw its inception with wise people trying to explain important concepts through sharing stories. If the audience members were sceptical of the original story, a crafty storyteller would have listened to the audience, gathered their thoughts, and woven their thoughts into the storyteller’s larger narrative while preserving the core message behind the original story. Seeing their own thoughts enmeshed together in the revised story would create something both novel and familiar to the audience, something new yet acceptable.

In this manner, pantheistic followings such as the Greek mythic pantheon ended up with many wives for Zeus- whenever a new set of followers were absorbed into the religion, the male god would be re-identified as Zeus, and his wife would now be added to the long line of wives of Zeus. In this case, the game the storyteller played was of communicating a new framework of social structures to the converts through a common language (the belief in a god who set systems to follow), and storyteller’s success lay in convincing the participating audience of the verity of Zeus’s power.
Stories grow through the telling and combining with others, with the underlying ideas growing stronger across the lifetime of iterations. Interactivity is the essence of improving stories, a unique feature video games are rich in.

What does a game require?

A few characteristics of games we can abstract are that they involve voluntary participation, involve rules with at least a minimum level of consistency, they tend to have a goal in mind, and they react to the inputs you provide. There are a few requirements for playing a game, and many forms of gaming have emerged using different combinations of these.


  • Time. Being a voluntary activity, gaming can thrive in the time available either by design (sports/hobby hour in schools) or intention (a kid rushing home to play games after school)
  • Commonly understood language: For communication and coordination of the rules and decisions among the players. Need not be written or verbal, simple signs can also work
  • Intellect: The ability to understanding and implement rules. Different games require different minimum levels of intellect, ranging from the basic (Visual, audio, and motor skills- Punch Buggy Red!) to the extreme (Complex - understanding and exploiting compound probabilities requiring external calculation power along with interlocking systems - advanced D&D)
  • Requiring the presence of players: Games need at least one player, a box of monopoly is not a game of monopoly if there are no players. Alone, a player is restricted in the number of games that can be played, unless artificial intelligence/machines are involved. The addition of more players opens up a vast range of possibilities. From two player chess to four player doubles badminton (with different court zones than one on one) to vast MMOs, the addition of players enables to deeper levels of gameplay and different and hard to replicate experiences. Most early games would have required the physical presence of the players. This requirement grew looser over time as new systems developed to bridge the physical gap between players (the rise of postal services allowed chess to be played over mail), and today technology allows people from all around the world to play the same game simultaneously.
  • Additional/Prepared Resources: Games can have unique requirements – a standard ball, field, and goals for soccer. A computer with adequate hardware and compatible software for PC games, add a great graphics card and peripherals for VR. Same shaped, sized, and weighted blocks for Jenga. Each requirement limits the potential of the game (you can’t play soccer without a ball) and while flexibility is allowed (half field soccer), the resources on hand constrain the gamut of possibilities.

On the whole, we can simplify to say that the simpler the requirements, the larger number of potential players.

Different games, different requirements, different experiences

With these requirements in mind, games have evolved through various forms through varying the formula again and again. In recent times, we have witnessed increases in complexity of games, as well as increases in levels of player and viewer engagement:

  • Verbal – Puzzles, find the odd one out, singing competitions
  • Mental – Politics, finances
  • Sports – Swimming, Running, Wrestling, MMA, table tennis, and many, many more
  • Board games – structured board defining rules to force decision making down certain paths. Chess, Monopoly, Risk, Checkers.
  • Prop games: Hula Hooping, three legged races, Tangram, Jigsaw puzzles
  • Card Games – Standard deck (Blackjack, Solitaire) or customized (Yu-Gi-Oh, Uno, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon)
  • Pen & Paper – List five things, simple RPGs, tic-tac-toe
  • Book based – Where’s Waldo? Spot the differences
  • Mechanical Machine dependent – Pinball, Test your strength, Physical Car Racing, Slot machines
  • Freeform Construction Sets- Lego, K’Nex, Capsula
  • Text Based MUD games, Choose your own adventure
  • Electronic Games: Frogger, LCD pre-programmed games
  • Alternate Reality Games: I Love Bees
  • Video Games – Tetris to Mario to Call of Duty to This War of Mine to Minecraft and everything in between
Each game tells a different tale, a game of Golf played by Tiger Woods is a different story than finding Waldo after pages, different from making a Death Star (or anything, really) with Lego. The point of the earlier list is to point out that creativity has driven us to develop different many different forms of expression and through them, many ways of storytelling. That time you beat your rival at tennis in college will be a story that lasts for years, the time you got a very rare item in Destiny may as well. The point is that are many ways to have fun, and video games are a subset of the larger gaming world.

Video games are a uniquely interactive form of storytelling, putting the reins in the player’s hand by design

The uniqueness of video games lies in their ability to create their own virtual worlds, distinct from the real one. Video games have even inspired their own canon and lore, the visceral experience of Borderlands could not have been created through any other media. The outcomes of your choices in Telltale’s Game of Thrones is that much more personal than the outcomes of the events in the TV series, which are beyond our control.

Games work with three different systems: Our inherent abilities (twitch reactions in shooters), our trained abilities (getting better at FTL through learnings from your previous attempts), and a seasoning of chance (random high level loot drops). This diversity in requirements and levers differentiate games from static media (TV, Books). To be fair, there are scenarios where a linear story is the best at making a certain point, or at allowing common discussion of a topic. The smart post-modern Sci Fi thriller Black Mirror is able to show exactly the parts of the future that will make you question the present, through directing the exact order of events you see. This structured sequence makes it easy for viewers to talk to other viewers about their opinions on the episode.

Video games find ways to give players more options, breaking the narrative to its advantage, increasing intimacy with the subject matter and the investment in understanding its resolution. The recently released Her Story finds a way to take a linear narrative (a series of police interviews), break it into tantalizing bits (individual clips, think Nolan’s Memento), let you know how much you don’t know (videos seen vs. unseen tracker), and creates a whole new self-driven experience (the order in which you pieced together what happened through the order in which you saw the videos, the syuzhet5). Shadow of Mordor has the Nemesis system, which creates a unique story each playthrough, with every player experiencing a similar framework but a different individual story (A: Remember the time three orc captains caught up to me in that massive fight? B: No, I never faced more than one in my game). In our future, as the focus on the individual and their value of their individuality goes up, self-driven experiences that adapt to our decisions may be the way forward, led by the video game format.

Video games are evolving into a platform for creating your own stories, Rashomon at an industrial scale

Gently we are seeing a shift, with game designers starting to think of themselves as party planners instead of authors. Shadow of Mordor’s emergent gameplay was major achievement in making video games more of a system to make unique memories, instead of a clockwork mechanism that plays the same tune every time.  

Games already have the ability to adapt the experience based on the number of players, Guild Wars 2 bosses become more powerful dynamically if there are more players fighting them, creating unique experiences on the basis of the number of players. In the future, we can look forward to games that themselves are a set of rules, defining what experiences to show to the player, where there is no one canon story, where only what you believe to be true is, Rashomon at an industrial scale.

Games are strong in providing self-learning opportunities, and self-learning is among the most powerful forms of learning.  The voluntary nature of playing games means that the player plays intentionally to learn, and that is a powerful tool for a society. I believe that we are at a thrilling point today, with a medium that has come so far from a single storyteller trying to share their wisdom to a self-learning system that encourages the player to make a beautiful and precious memory.

The present landscape of video gaming and long term future of video games respectively will be covered in the two remaining articles in this four part series on gaming


4)      Thoughts well detailed in the excellent book: Sapiens, by Harari


Sunday, 14 June 2015

Game Review: Invisible Inc

All for the want of a story...

Invisible Inc is a gameplay mechanic driven roguelike that holds a huge amount of promise, if only the game didn't feel like it was made entirely by the gameplay mechanics and graphics teams, two areas where the game shines. This is a game that was designed to be replayed a lot, and to remain challenging each time. Unfortunately, the weak story deprives the player of a lot of motivation to invest in that content. Let me elaborate:

The Pledge: A stealth driven random generated futuristic cyberpunk roguelike where confronting guards head-on is infeasible, and the objective is to build the best team you can in 72 hours. Excellent cutscene introduction sets expectations high for great visuals and great plot points. This game had one of the very best Pledges, setting my expectations really high given the slick execution of the first two hours

The Turn: Tense game of Cat and Mouse between your operatives and the guards, with each action decidedly a calculated risk and the ever increasing security timer forcing an aggressive play style. Difficult to get new items, and soon PWR (Mana) is a scarce resource to be rationed. New guard types (thankfully no dogs), viruses, and new goodies to buy keep gameplay moderately interesting but lack of any story content during missions / barely any between missions is a gigantically big missed opportunity. Feels more like an elaborate puzzle than an actual strategy game due to the limited patrol areas of guards, and the extremely strange rule of sitting on top of guards prevents them from waking up, and taking them out comes with strong penalties. Strategic decisions are related to which missions to pursue (each provides different boosts dependent on the type of mission), and where to invest your limited cash reserves (augmentations / gadgets / skill upgrades).

The Prestige: Where it all falls apart. Only one ending, though the map and specific enemies on the level are randomized. Due to lack of context due to lack of meaningful story content, ending feels both abrupt and all too sudden, with no fair visibility given on what will happen next in the series (beyond the very obvious). This was the point where I started questioning my purchase

The Aftermath: Where the bulk of content is held, new agents, alternate agents (different abilities), and new abilties for your AI. Unfortunately, due to a lack of new story it came across as less appealing than it probably is, and I doubt I'll be investing much time in it in the future. 

For specific demographics:
Price sensitive: If you enjoy the Aftermath, it's worth the price, otherwise you're out of luck
Genre sensitive: Lots of throwaway cyberpunk joy, but never synthesized in any way that makes sense. Tons of tidbits but no overarching narrative that puts the pieces into context, major letdown
Strategy gamers: Frankly the game feels a lot like a puzzle but does have meaningful strategic choices, so it's ok
Diversity seekers: Good premise, decent gameplay, fair variety in Aftermath. If you don't mind a weak story, go for it
Those with older systems: Game worked and ran beautifully and smoothly on my humble laptop, should run well anywhere
Art lovers: This and Transistor are a treat to the eyes

Final verdict: Great potential, if only it had invested more in story, this version feels incomplete. If you like mechanic driven games or particularly Turn Based games, go for it, it's a great product. For others, check out videos first and then take a call. 


Game: Invisible Inc.
Launch Date: 12th May, 2015
Time for One Game: 4.5 Hours
Time Reviewed: 5 Hours
Get it on: Steam
Based Price: $20

Disclosure: X-COM, which this is inspire from is one of my all time favorites, along with Klei's Mark of the Ninja. Klei Entertainment is one of the good indies making games that are innovative and fun, and I respect that, however I really wish this game could have been better...

For more on the Pledge/Turn/Prestige/Aftermath Review structure, check out: http://criticalh1t.blogspot.in/2015/06/the-prestige-and-meaningful-game-reviews.html

The Prestige, and meaningful game reviews

A game that can be finished in one hour (80 Days) can be a far better experience than one that lasts for a month (Clash of Anything, Really), an indie game with pixel based graphics (FTL!) may be a far more engaging and innovative experience than the latest AAA with high resolution art bursting out of the gills (Too many to list), and in this vein there are many more meaningless weasel metrics being paraded such as number of units or resolution (1080 vs 720!) in game reviews today, which fail miserably at capturing the essence of the game. This essence should reflect the sum of a game's parts, distinct from the individual parts themselves. Focusing on just one element without looking at the overall experience created by the interplay of content is doing a great disservice to the nature of games, designed as a means of spending your time in the best possible way. Hence I propose the following four phase structure of a game as the template for meaningful game reviews that do not lose the forest for the trees.

In my experience, there are four phases of experiencing a game, which I will try and roughly equate to the steps of a magic trick outlined in Christopher Nolan’s mental masterpiece, the Prestige. These are the Pledge, the Turn, The Prestige, and my own addition: The Aftermath. We’ll go into detail over these below, but it is worth mentioning that no one part is more important than the others on its own. Each plays a part towards the overall experience, much in the same way the elements of a four-course meal synthesize into a worthy culinary experience, or fail trying. Also like a four course meal, a game with bad starters and a dull main course may still be redeemed by an excellent desert at the end, but in that case there is always the risk of the player losing interest before ever reaching the exquisite desert. For the stages themselves:

The Pledge is the promise made at the beginning of the game, between the game and the gamer, laying down the essence of experience to come. What’s the game about? What’s the theme and the setting? Who are you? Your role? What kind of challenges lie ahead? What’s the objective? The Pledge lays down the framework of what the gamer should expect, the skeleton of the game’s structure. In business lingo, this would be the on-boarding.

In most cases, the Pledge will not end with the end of the formal tutorial, but with the player having a mental picture, an imprint of sorts, of what lies ahead. Where Assassin’s Creed 4 drags this on-boarding out over nearly laborious ten hours, the lighter mobile delight 80 Days makes itself clear in a much smoother twenty minutes. Effectively, the Pledge becomes the litmus test by which a player decides whether or not to invest their time into playing the whole game. In MOBAs like DOTA the pledge has been meticulously crafted to give a new player both a fair view of the game, and to incentivise them to play on with item gifts for completing the tutorial.

Just so we’re clear, I’ll share two examples of pledges - Spec Ops: The Line pledges to be a gritty 3rd Person cover based military shooter set in a disaster struck Middle East, where finding out the cause of the current situation is the game’s purpose. In Terraria, the game’s pledge is to be a fantasy themed 2D platformer where the onus is on the player to figure out what to do next, and the eventual goal is to thrive off the randomly generated environment and defeat the creatures that attack you.  

On the PC, with the new Steam Two Hour Gameplay refund policy in effect, I expect to see a lot of improvement in the quality of this segment of the game and unfortunately also a lot of window dressing in the first two hours of many new games.

The Turn is where the ordinary concepts outlined in the pledge come together to create something truly extraordinary. The Turn is where the bulk of gameplay happens, it’s the stage in which you figure out how you want to aim for victory and set out doing that, interacting with the games systems and other players as you do it. Here the game matures and fleshes out its systems, introducing new and novel characters, places, items, challenges, and corresponding rewards along the way.

In Pokemon, this is the time you spend travelling from Gym to Gym, building your team, evolving your characters, and making a lot of memories on the way (A Safari! A Boat! Fossils!). In Sid Meier’s Civilization series, this is where you grow your nation, expanding your cities, researching technology, and waging war or promoting culture on the road to victory.

The systems outlined in the Pledge also get upgraded, twisted and subverted during the Turn. A great example of a twist is the Fanatic’s Tower in Final Fantasy VI. Up till the Tower, the game gives you the opportunity to attack enemies with physical attacks, magic, or through abilities. In the Fanatic’s tower, you cannot select physical attacks from the menu, and are expected to use the other two methods to damage your enemies. The catch? The enemies in the Tower are highly resistant to magic damage, and abilities take time to use. This twist in combat structure inspires the player to question the approach that got them this far and change their team and strategy to adjust. In my own play-through, this shakeup in the fundamental pledge made me stop and relook at every system, and how to face the new challenge. I distinctly remember my train of thought at that stage - Are there any resistance bypassing spells I can use? (Yes, Ultima) Is there a way to use physical attacks without selecting them from the menu? (Yes, for one character through specific items, also through a spell) Is there a store in the tower? (No) Do I have enough Mana Potions to reach the top of the Tower in one go? (No, so I went to a store and stocked up) Was there any way to bypass the regular enemies entirely on the way to the top? (Yes, but that approach would have deprived me of both the larger challenge and the experience points on the whole). Going through the tower with my strategy and defeating the Boss at the top was an extremely satisfying victory, derived from using the knowledge I already had with me, but through relooking at what I knew in new and novel ways. This twist added greatly to both the depth of the gameplay and the lasting experience of the game itself.

The Turn is where the game designer has free reign to challenge the player, to express his creativity, and to make the ordinary extraordinary, bit by bit. The actions made during the Turn build up towards the second last phase of the experience, The Prestige.

The Prestige is where everything that has been built towards comes to a crescendo. It is the final chapter in the story, where plot threads align, and decisions make their pay off. In Mass Effect 2, this was the Assault on the Collector Ship, where the time you had invested in building your crew and your ship either paid off (no casualties, a clean mission), or failed miserably (with the option of no survivors, not even the player character himself/herself). All the effort put in the earlier phases, the time spent learning the moves, the time invested into learning the lore, and the mastery of the underlying systems and decisions are challenged more than ever before in the Pledge.

Players tend the remember the Prestige very strongly when recalling the game, as it was the convergence of their experience and choices, and as such developers do well to focus on the quality of this segment. Many games go all out at this point with extremely challenging missions and/or bosses, defeating which gives the player a mental jolt of satisfaction in having become better players at the game than they were when they began the journey. At the same time, a carnival ending isn’t required everywhere to still be poignant and memorable, Gone Home’s final revelation brought together all the pieces of the story and explained why the titular home is empty and was none the less for it. Achieving the Prestige is the goal set up in the Pledge, and when done well, it is a powerful catharsis of elements in the minds of the player. 

When players meet and talk games, they may or may not share their experience of the Pledge or the Turn, but they readily share how a game’s Prestige impacted them (I survived the Mass Effect 2 Collector mission with my entire team alive, Woohoo!). However, the Prestige itself is not always the concluding experience of a game.

The Aftermath. With the commitments made during the Pledge either resolved or intentionally left open, the Aftermath is what happens after the main story has concluded. 

The Aftermath can happen in a number of ways – 
  1. Limit the player to the game as it was just before the final chapter or a require the player start a new game from the start
  2. Allow the player to replay the game from the start but with accrued benefits (including the intangible benefit of experience of what will happen in the game) from completing the first play through (the New Game + option)
  3. Let the player continue the game where he left off, though by this point they’ll usually be strong enough that challenges laid out during the Turn will tend to be far less difficult
  4. Open up and reveal new content that was hidden till now.


An example of each of the types of Aftermath is as follows: 
  1. Mario and Luigi: Superstars Saga stops after you’ve defeated the final boss, the only way to continue is to replay the game from either the final battle or the very start again. This option does reduce the scope for replayability, as each playthrough will be more or less the same as the last in a linear game. 
  2. Fire Emblem, on the other hand, gives new save files a handful of powerful and handy weapons for completing an existing savefile, which allow the player to play the core game faster or more enjoyably, or in some cases, in a different manner entirely. 
  3. In GTA V, the Aftermath of the final heist is a strange endgame driven by completing side quests, collecting meta-game achievements and for a large part trying to figure out that entire UFO business.  
  4. An example of the fourth kind, in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, after beating the main story, an entire new character with new gameplay mechanics and a new boss were unlocked, which added an extra layer of narrative and depth to the game.


Among genres, Roguelikes are heavily dependent on the Aftermath to deliver the full range of their experience, as continual upgrades across one play provide bonuses to the next which enable the player to progress ahead and over time tease out the full content of the game.

What’s notable is that gameplay and the objectives in the Aftermath are often very different from the gameplay and experience during the Turn, as the raison d’etre of the game has changed, either because you already know the end to the story, or because you are playing more for diversity than for novelty. Linking back to Nolan’s Prestige, the Aftermath was what happened after we found out the identity of the man who had adopted the magician’s daughter.

To Summarize:


We can use the experiential stages of a game as a meaningful way to structure game reviews, one that doesn’t miss the forest for the trees and fixate over details that are not comparable. Comparing playing a game to the experience of witnessing a magic trick is one approach that can help provide a fair, overarching method to review games.

Tuesday, 9 June 2015

Part 1: Why do we need Gaming?

Understand a person, a people, or a species through how they spend their time - apart and together

The definitions of a game are legion, and I will not add another contender to that fight. Rather, I would prefer to focus on how the activity of gaming relates to how we spend our time, trace its origins and the journey that has led to the modern day video game industry, and where I see it going beyond. This is the first in a larger four part series dealing with the larger picture of gaming.

As for my credentials for this journey, I am a twenty-something gaming enthusiast with a diverse range of interests. I started gaming at the age of five and the hobby never lost its charm, evolving with me over time, across gaming platforms, countries, and even through college. While I would not be naive enough to call any one game the best, I highly recommend Civilization V, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and This War of Mine, among a myriad of other excellent options. Now, back to the topic at hand!

Since the time of humanity's hunter-gatherer days, mankind has been faced with a timeless question: What do I do with my time? In a hunter gatherer lifestyle, between searching for the next meal and ensuring the safety of the group there probably wasn't much worry over over sonnets, epic tales, or the meaning of life, everyone was probably busy enough trying to stay alive. As we laid down settlements, domesticated wildstock, divided work, developed moral codes to clarify right and wrong behavior, and invented technologies to ease our burden of work, we found ourselves with more and more free time and less and less productive work to do in it.

From this new found time and freedom, culture and all its memes were born. Language codified our communication and art translated our thoughts and expressions and inspired even more, and along the way, games came into being. At this early stage, games may have been important for their social utility. Through friendly competition with oneself or others, games would prove to be useful means to improve the capability of the group as a whole, and thus would be encouraged, or at the very least not unnaturally discouraged. Among many possible games, war games could help children practice in safe environments and grow into able fighters or generals, crafting games may have encouraged new and better designs, word games would have encouraged mental growth and development. Most games may have simply provided a fun way to spend time and help people connect with others in the community or explore and develop their own unique identity.

Games can play a powerful part in telling stories - those building blocks of society. Simple games like Cops and Robbers help children learn on their own that in a society - responsibility is rewarded and crime is not. In this way, games are vehicles for replication of beneficial memes while also establishing what is not wanted in a society, in a simple and fun way that kids can easily internalize. Given multiple games to play, different rules and rewards to understand, I'd say its safe to add that games help people learn how to learn, an essential feature in a growing civilization. Hence, games have social utility.

As is true for all culture, games also help define the boundaries of our society, by offering us choices and reflecting the implications of our decisions back at us. By offering us new concepts and helping us understand them and develop notions of their correctness, Games help bridge the gap between mankind's reach and its grasp. For a far-out example, Mass Effect introduced us to the genophage virus (something hopefully beyond our reach at this time) that selectively decimated the population of an alien race, and showed how the survivors had devolved into risk takers with little hope for their own future, and hence excellent mercenaries with little concern for their own survival. At the same time, the game series later also gave the option of undoing the lingering damage of the virus (with its own set of complications and outcomes), a choice I'm sure almost no one will ever have to make in real life. Yet, in giving us the choice the game helped us understand what we felt was right and wrong, and should there ever come to a vote over banning development of such research, the audience may have better context regarding the implications of their decision, through the experience of an interactive choice they were offered in a game. This choice, and seeing its implications either way (stopping or not stopping the virus) helps increase our grasp as a society, by using interactivity to understand our decisions, interactivity at a level almost no other form of media can offer - not books, not movies, not music.

I hope that through this primer, you are able to appreciate some of the reasons why gaming thrives due to its utility, but it would be unfair to say that another reason why it's become a rapidly growing industry in our times is simply because it's fun. Games will continue to evolve as messengers of ideas of experience, but a real beautiful part of it all is that games will continue to improve for the sake of  games, for the sake of us enjoying our time even more. Hence, through it all games add to society richness, through adding to the meaningfulness of the time we spend, both together and apart.