I’m pretty sure I was thinking of an entirely different game or games when I wrote this – there was a Spring Thing one where the RPG characters were all like on a TV show, so you could talk to the “actors” during a break, I think? – but thanks for reminding me of this one; “you’re nicked, Sonny Jim” made me laugh again four years on.
3 Likes
they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?),
Without seeing it, I assume that means that they’re not consulting on the design and making changes. Instead, they’re just churning out different logos until the client is happy with it.
This could conceivably be cheaper if they’re just employing an artist rather than a team of people working to discuss and refine things. Coordinating specifically requested changes could get take hours of work between multiple employees on different schedules.
I don’t know — I’m not in design nor do I work for a company — but as a freelance writer that’s the impression I get when my clients’ teams shrink and editors and the like disappear.
2 Likes
The Saltcast Adventure, by Beth Carpenter
I was recently reading a review of the DnD 3rd Edition version of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting – sometimes I make questionable choices about what to do with my spare time – and the author teased out a distinction between “generic” fantasy and “vanilla” fantasy: there’s some fantasy that’s too specific, too flavorful, to count as generic, and yet lacks the sort of twist or high concept or especially-novel distinguishing feature that would admit it to a subgenre. Thus: vanilla.
(You might be pooh-poohing this whole idea, but try a spoonful of regular plain yogurt, and then vanilla. They’re different!)
(You might prefer the plain, of course. That’s fine too).
So yes, The Saltcast Adventure is the kind of fantasy where you can’t get two paragraphs in before the narrator informs you that you’re now the farthest you’ve ever been from home (those of you reading these reviews in order will note that I mentioned this scene in Fellowship of the Ring two games ago), and where one paragraph after that we’re told, in solid but Tolkien-invoking prose:
The trees here look different; they’re taller, with canopies that reach high into the autumn air, grasping at the pale sun. There are huge boulders scattered across the landscape, glittering stone that looks nothing like the occasional flint pebbles that fleck the paths long behind you. The smell in the air is sweet, unflavored by human industry.
The protagonist is of course an unassuming peasant who’ll have to tap into heretofore-unguessed reserves of strength to succeed in their quest, which is to delve deep into a subterranean world of monsters and stop their attacks on humanity and get a reward from the king. She (yes, she’s a she, and a mother, so that’s a nice departure from the norm though hardly that interesting in itself) starts off with some water, some rope, a knife, and a lantern with a small enchantment placed on it. The lore infodump is woven skillfully through the opening, but it’s there, and the setting’s major distinctive element – magic gone awry can create different kinds of the eponymous Saltcasts, mutated or spirit-ridden creatures with supernatural powers whose lives are bound up in tiny mirrors – is a specific, but not exactly revisionist, take on fantasy worldbuilding.
And yet, the game leans into its meat-and-potatoes conceits with admirable consistency. The Saltcast are the only unnatural creatures in the setting, for example, and while the exact mechanics of the magics that create and sustain them are laid out with the detail of an RPG monster manual, they’re all presented as individuals, both as to their powers and their personalities, and not all are hostile. Madelaine, meanwhile, while the very model of the plucky hero’s journey protagonist, is drawn with conviction – her grit and perseverance feel well-earned, her devotion to her struggling family rendered with poignancy:
You close your eyes, see your children’s faces. Thin, wan, smiling. Mattias’s teeth have started falling out because he does not eat well enough.
She seems like an individual, not an archetype, and the same is true of the central antagonist, who is recognizably a load-bearing Foozle of the type that has clogged CRPGs since time immemorial, but whose uniqueness extends beyond a perhaps-overcomplex backstory and cool special effects – not to mention the plucky supporting cast.
There’s a risk that all I’m doing here is inferring a qualitative difference based just on quality. It is true that Saltcast Adventure is a well-executed example of its form; as noted above, the prose largely avoids Generic Fantasy Bollocks, with descriptions that leverage all the senses, and while the piece is long it’s well-paced, with act breaks coming just as I was feeling like the plot structure could use a change-up. Meanwhile, the choice mechanics are nicely done too – besides a few pick-a-door false choices that shunt you to the same scene regardless and could have been excised, you’re given options to try to build connections or prioritize efficiency, with stakes that feel high even though the mechanics are reasonably forgiving (you can accumulate wounds, but the game doesn’t visibly track them, and if you die you’re able to immediately undo, so I think it’s hard to lock yourself out of good outcomes).
But I’ve played tightly-made stories like this before, and this one does do things a little bit differently. There’s a big twist right at the end of Act 2 that I legitimately failed to predict, for example, and if the final section can’t fully pay it off, that’s probably just because the author would have needed to add an extra hour to this three-hour game to make it land. And while each decision the author made about how to construct the Saltcast, their origins, and their society comes straight out of the fantasy playbook, the gestalt still winds up being memorable. Moreover, the game has the discipline to stick with its intentionally-picked elements rather than watering them down with the exact same stuff you’ve seen a million times before. So yeah, if the only kind of yogurt you like is peach or blueberry or, god help you, chocolate raspberry, you’ll probably want to give Saltcast a miss, but it remains a great example of why vanilla keeps selling too.
4 Likes
That makes perfect sense, but in this particular game, as I understood it, they are putting new logos of their own company on their own official company stationary. The person in question is writing business letters, then designing a new logo each time to put at the top.
2 Likes
Hmmm, I guess. Combined with the half-hour play time this is tentatively going on my review list just so I can try and make heads or tails of this.
2 Likes
Forbidden Lore, by Alex Crossley
Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.
There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.
Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.
Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).
But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:
Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk.
So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?
Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.
Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.
I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.
forbidden lore mr.txt (100.3 KB)
3 Likes
Metallic Red, by Riaz Moola
(This is one of those games that’s difficult to discuss without getting into spoiler-territory, and blurring out ¾ of the review would be an awkward compromise, so caveat lector).
A couple of times this Comp, I’ve stumbled onto decidedly non-standard ways of experiencing games: I mistook a jokey ending in the Curse for the main thrust of what it was trying to do, and I inadvertently gave myself the same name as the principal NPC in Final Call, making it all go off a bit more Fight Club than intended. Now with Metallic Red it’s happened again: when my solitary space-trucker had a dream where a hooded figure asked “have you drunk the kykeon?”, I assume for most people it will be an alienating, mysterious beat, but for me it was like sinking into a warm bath: oh hey, we’re doing the Eleusinian Miseries, er, Mysteries!
In fairness, that’s not all we’re doing. Metallic Red starts out quite austere: after the lovely but forbidding tarot-inflected cover art sets the mood and an introductory paragraph establishes the boxy, dilapidated nature of the ship you’re piloting, you’re confronted with an excerpt from Oedipus Rex that ends “Do you know the family you come from?” From there you’re shunted into a series of highly granular, dull activities as you while away the days until you reach your destination. That first day you meticulously clean the ship; on subsequent ones, you can tend to the greens in the hydroponics bay, exercise to keep muscle atrophy at bay, or just futz around on the internet. More interesting, perhaps, are your flirtations with divination: you 3D-print a tarot deck and pull a single card every day or two, and you’re also erroneously delivered a mechanical orrery that you rewind in order to track the astrological influences of your life and birth, though in both cases there’s something half-hearted or desultory about your engagement, performing the requisite actions without thinking about what they mean.
Oh, and in between days you dream, visited by some that appear to be fantasies, others that might be memories (the Eleusinian Mysteries one struck me as the former at first, but turns out to be the latter). Their content seems to reflect a fear of engagement (in one, you’re horrified at the idea that another person might be coming within a thousand kilometers of your ship), of disorder (an earlier part of that sequence involves trying to adjust one bolt in your food-synthesizing machine, only to be horrified when it breaks), or both (the most viscerally compelling one sees you sitting next to your dad on the grounded ship, as he eats a hamburger and spills food waste all over the consoles).
To say this is all conveys a monastic vibe would be an understatement – but per the twist halfway through, it would also be completely wrong. Your trip, you see, has taken you back to Eleusis, or at least an underground colony that’s named itself after the sanctuary of the cult. Here, the spartan choice-based interface, which previously presented only a few options at a time, each of which had to be exhausted to progress, blossoms into the freedom of parserlike navigation as you’re welcomed back to a spiritual community that once counted you a member: you’re here to consult with the hierophant. And as you wait for your audience, you meet an old friend again, help with the cooking via a lovely peanut-sauce-making minigame that’s dead-on to how I do it (add half a dozen ingredients a little bit at a time to keep things proportional as you accumulate enough for the dish, tasting liberally as you go) before being served a deliciously-described feast – by leaving the brethren, you haven’t escaped asceticism but embraced it.
The hierophant, meanwhile, is no dogma-bound prelate. By this point I was unsurprised that he was sympathetic, while the protagonist indefatigably pressed an absurd point, insisting on being allowed to renounce membership in the community – absurd because, as the hierophant reasonably pointed out, while they’re happy to say goodbye to you and let you continue on your own way, what you’re really asking for is to forget what you learned when you became an initiate, and that’s impossible. And then the game ends.
This review has seen me just uncharacteristically narrating the plot of the game, because I think before evaluating Metallic Red it’s important to get a sense of what it’s doing, and what it’s doing requires some explication (I haven’t read other reviews yet, but I’m very curious to see what folks made of it) – and that comes back to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Again, it’s not just the Mysteries, there’s some business with jade figurines that I think must be drawn from a different tradition, references to bird-auguries that are more Roman than Greek, and it’s notable that your ship is a “Buraq class”, referencing the flying steed that took the prophet Mohammed on a trip to the heavens. But the conversation with the hierophant clearly centers on something the protagonist learned or intuited in a ritual, so this is the natural jumping-off point. And while we don’t fully know what happened in the sanctuary at Eleusis, we do know they focused on the earth-goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and had to do with the latter’s journey to and return from the Underworld: allegories for death, but also rebirth and, perhaps, immortality.
Why does the protagonist want to escape a memory of immortality? We can’t know for sure, and in fact clearly aren’t meant to; in one of the web-surfing sessions from the first part of the game, you read an interview with a game designer who’s chosen to keep the important elements of the game’s narrative off-screen, only gesturing towards them in dialogue, because:
when an event has already taken place and players only hear about it after the fact we begin to look at agency differently. No one can change the past, but we can use our agency to build a future.
Still, there are intimations of what might be driving this perverse desire. For one thing, the protagonist’s father, he of the distressing dream, is noted as a major supporter of the cult, and presumably the reason you joined it as well, which puts that Oedipus Rex quote at the beginning into some context. And then there’s your attitude to your decaying ship, which is worth quoting at length as I think it serves as a kind of thesis statement:
You suspect that once it passes from your hands it’ll be decommissioned but you don’t mind old things. It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. If you float through a bulkhead awkwardly and chip some of the paintwork, it’s just another chip to be added to the litany of minor damages the craft has sustained over its working life. And the totality of damages is just what the ship is composed of. No one at this point could really imagine what the Metallic Red was like when it was new. When it was first built, the concept of an object without history was entirely different to what it is now, and there’s no way to think backwards into what it meant whilst surrounded on all sides by the ship as it currently stands.
This idea of an object without history recurs in various forms through the piece: there’s also an article on a jet fighter that’s been abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle, which makes the protagonist muse on the contrast between the anonymous thing it’s becoming and the bureaucratically-known machine it once was, with a serial number and kill counts and all. So too is the theme of going backwards: recall how you retrace your past via the orrery.
Existence as the accumulation of damage; a father who’s part of a religious cult; the impossibility of imagining original innocence when inside the wreck of what it’s become. It’s not very subtle when you look at it like that, is it? Noting that “metallic red” can refer not just to rust but to (iron-filled) blood would just be gilding the lily; so too would nailing down the trauma that makes the protagonist view the knowledge of immortality as a curse rather than a blessing, and turn their back on sensual pleasures to boot.
To be clear, I’m not intending to oversimply what the game is saying – we’re finally at the evaluation part now, and I can say that I very much enjoyed this. The author has taken what could have been a simple core story and through restraint, allusion, and skill, created something so memorable no world-fleeing hermit could forget it. Admittedly, perhaps its blurb’s warning that it contains “elements of esotericism” is too understated – the player probably needs to have a reasonable knowledge of its reference points to make sense of Metallic Red’s agenda – but after all the way of the Mysteries is that only the initiates understand.
5 Likes