September 2018 – Kill Ten Rats

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[TT] Back on the 7th Continent

Coming back around to the 7th Continent (previously), I think I’m landing on “I don’t like it.” I think it does what it sets out to do, I’m just not having much fun playing it. There are three entwined negatives for me: survival gameplay, punishing exploration, and static replayability.

Ultimately, I think the fact of the survival gameplay is going to turn me off to the game. Most games I enjoy have a foundation in building up: RPGs, RTSes, deckbuilders, all the sorts of games where you are putting together an engine and become stronger over time to meet greater challenges. There is a bit of that, and the goal is to keep yourself ahead of the curve, but it feels more like a constant stream of loss rather than a constant stream of gain, and the goal is to win before you run out of resources and chances. Instead of accumulating power and resources, you are in a race to win before you run out. I did not enjoy that aspect of gameplay.

Tied to that, the act of exploring punishes you by taking resources. It has some of that old adventure game feel: sometimes you get punished for putting your hand in the hole, sometimes you cannot advance unless you put your hand in the hole, and there is no way to tell in advance without putting your hand in the hole. Sometimes you profit, more often you get punched in the face for your trouble. That ties to the survival gameplay: keep trying things, find the path to advance before you get punched in the face too often. But since you do not know whether exploration will be required or punished this time, it creates a sense of learned helplessness. You try it, feel pleased if it goes well, shrug about the inevitability of death if not.

Which leads to the third point: players who like the game seem to like the fact that you learn these over time and playthroughs. The second time, you know not to bother with X because at best you break even. You know that you need to find Y and Z. Memorization is not a fun sort of learning. You are not learning how to play better, just which particular actions have better outcomes in fixed circumstances, and any “how” you learn is the metagame of how the developer thinks.

There are some neat things going on in 7th Continent, but I don’t think it is for me. My order included some to-be-delivered expansion content, so maybe that will change up the game in ways that will be appealing. But probably not. I think some of the reviews I had seen either embraced the survival gameplay, used an unlimited easy mode to turn it into a casual exploration game rather than survival, messed up (or intentionally changed) the rules to nullify the “punch in the face” dwindling resources, or were coming off the high of winning after X tries. Some people were really excited about going back to the first island knowing how everything worked, while for me that seems like eliminating the point of the game. It is not solving the riddle, just knowing the answer because you have heard that one before.

The 7th Continent is ambitious, but I found myself having more moments of “ugh, this” than “ooh, neat.” It is trying to capture the “choose your own adventure” and video game experience in a massive web of cards. Like the dog that plays backgammon, the amazing thing is that it works at all, not whether the dog plays well. I also played the computerized “choose your own adventure” of 80 Days recently, and had a similar reaction; at least that handled bookkeeping efficiently by using a computer, rather than giving you huge stacks of cards to work it out.

: Zubon

Shortened Time Horizons

Near-immediate gratification is one of the satisfactions of games. Not necessarily “instant,” but you get to see investments pay off visibly in a short time, rather than needing steady, daily effort for years. (Ha, and this used to be an MMO blog.)

For example, your retirement account generally moves in the right direction, but compound interest takes years to pay off. You make the right decisions and then wait for very gradual doublings. It’s worthwhile but very slow, even when it moves quickly in an up market. Whereas your idle game takes you from selling lemonade to making millions in hours or days.

In-game farming takes seconds, not until harvest season. Mining, cooking, smithing a sword? Same. You move directly from cause to effect, without waiting for the process in the middle. Exercise yields visible progress towards strength, dexterity, and endurance every time.

I spend a lot of my real life time setting up lengthy but rewarding processes. Being able to defer gratification is important and valuable, one of the greatest and simplest keys to long run success. But danged if that gratification isn’t really deferred.

: Zubon

Non-Pejorative “Ameritrash”

The term “Ameritrash” has some pretty clear negative connotations, although I think of it as a technical term contrasting with Eurogames. Eurogames tend towards abstract play, minimal theming, low randomization, and indirect competition. Ameritrash games tend towards very strong theming, downplayed mechanics, significant randomization, and direct competition.

As someone focused on mechanics in my games, I tend to favor Eurogames and don’t mind the negative connotations of “Ameritrash,” especially having grown up with quite a few board games that were clearly being sold as tie-ins to more popular intellectual properties, with nice theming but the quality you expect from a movie tie-in video game. The Tick: Hip Deep in Evil comes to mind as my personal awakening to horrible, horrible products being sold under the auspices of something popular. (Not that The Tick was that popular, but I liked it.)

Villainous seems to be Ameritrash done well. I have seen some of a game but have yet to play it. A friend who owns it and is also into deep strategy gaming described it as the sort of game you could maybe play once or twice as each villain, but it lacks depth and you will understand everything after a playthrough or two. Not a lot of A Theory of Fun style learning: easy to learn, easy to master. On the other hand, it clearly embraces its theming and embodies it well, with exceedingly high production quality. It may not be mechanically deep, but it does what it sets out to do. It also seems like the sort of game that could have a long stream of expansions (every Disney villain) and be a commercial hit, but I could not tell you how well it is selling. I know it is in mainstream stores like Target, not just game shops.

Do you have games you enjoy that would clearly deserve the label “Ameritrash”?

: Zubon

User-Defined Tags

How much do I really need to explain about what is going on here? There is not a Disneyland game with adult content, or at least not this one. How about a second image that explains much?

In the long run, this sorts itself out. In the short run, letting people influence the system lets people troll the system.

: Zubon

Orwell

Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You is more of a visual novel than a game. Longtime readers know that I do not like visual novels. This at least has some game elements and an interesting interface. It is a crime investigation story themed around government surveillance. On the whole, not bad. Your decision can affect the NPCs’ fates, but the story on a whole is on rails apart from the point where you pick which ending you want.

Orwell makes good use of having a game interface in that it makes you do some things rather than watching them happen completely passively. To take an example from a different genre, there is a difference between throwing open the gates of Hell and having the player open the gates. Even if the player does not have a choice (and you can hide that fact in the first playthrough), there is an impact to requiring the player’s complicity. This is difficult to do in other media; the movie Funny Games has a moment where it creates a viewer choice, as do occasional books that say something like, “stop reading here for this ending,” although it seems clear to everyone that quitting at that point is not the “real” ending. Orwell has several moments when you are the one to click events into motion.

There are only a few meaningful forks in the story, and you cannot derail the main plotline even if you actively try to fail. You can decide what happens to the NPCs as you manipulate information, but the main narrative is what it is.

In a story about trading privacy and freedom for safety and security, a game named “Orwell” is clearly going to come down on the side of freedom. The story is grayer than might be expected, with the “bad guys” pretty clearly in black hats but the “good guys” in ambiguous shades of light gray, where you expect that at least some of them are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unusually, the freedom-security trade off is actually somewhat of a trade off here, in that you can save NPC lives. This is kinder than many real life trade offs, where one gives up freedom and convenience for the appearance of safety but without significant benefits. This is more nuanced than you would expect from “Orwell.”

Occasionally made explicit in the story but not its main focus is how much extraneous and sometimes incorrect information gets swept up in the process of finding actionable data. Some of that is innocuous, like noting someone’s favorite color on her profile. Some of that is putting in personal information that has no relation to the case (but might, so hoover up everything!). The incorrect information is notable, for example taking a joke out of context and noting that someone engage in torture, or saving baseless speculation alongside true information. Less noted is the number of others brought into the web. While you are gathering information about targets of interest, you note their family members, romantic interests, co-workers, etc. The game keeps you focused instead of letting you create dossiers on every former college classmate of the suspects, but you notice a web of secondary names floating around the people you are following, and any of them could become subjects of investigation after a call.

I cannot quite recommend it because it is about as interactive as a good walking simulator (it uses the terms “episode” and “season” appropriately, like a TV show), but for the type of game it is, this is a good one. People who like this sort of thing will like this. It runs about four hours, about double that if you want to go back and re-do decisions to see how the story can play out differently.

: Zubon

Puzzle Agent 2

I finally got back around to Puzzle Agent, completing the sequel that tells the other half of the story. Or most of it. The ending kind of happens without denouement.

As before, it is basically a cartoon that you watch, punctuated by puzzles you solve to unlock the next bit of story. There are things you click to get dialogue and such, but it is basically a visual novel with a series of puzzle subgames. It is pretty OK? I don’t regret the time playing, but it is not good enough that I would recommend it. It is short enough, a few hours.

The puzzles are a mixed bag, as happens. Some of them are pretty good. Some are trivial. Some are esoteric, completely incoherent unless you spot the connection to something in the real world, generally a numbering system. You look for an internal pattern, and it does not exist; it is an external reference. Either you spot it and know or you scratch your head.

The story starts odd, dodges silly, and does not end particularly coherent. The main storyline gets resolution, but nothing else, and plot holes are left unfilled. It’s fun enough, but it does not add up to much. The puzzle interface is usually better than the first game, although still appalling in a few points.

I am basically ending on a shrug. I have not enjoyed the other Telltale games, given my lack of interest in visual novels. So I think I’m done with Telltale games, unless I feel like watching a story with some quicktime events.

: Zubon