Adventures in Gaming – April 2023
In which I talk about games I've picked up and am working through
(Assassin’s Creed Origins - Kotaku Australia)
I recently took FIFA off my X-Box because the best way to ensure I play the narrative games I’ve bought, or have access to through Game Pass, is to keep myself from the endless roleplay of being Chelsea F.C.’s manager. Madden is long gone from the hard drive, NBA 2K is maybe superior but takes up too much space. Yet I’ve won three straight UEFA Champions League titles and may be on my way to *finally* winning the Premier League. Yet The Year of (A/C/)JRPGs can’t properly commence with such interference, and we’re nearly a third through the year.
After some hand-wringing and foot dragging, I’ve finished the prologue of Assassin’s Creed Origins. I’ve beat the first two AC games, and AC III, but am very early into the first of ACII’s two spinoffs. I’ve played the very beginning of AC IV: Black Flag. I don’t presently have access to Unity and Syndicate. They’re on sale now, but I’ll wait for the next sale. Huge backlog and all. I say all this to say that I kind of want to play Odyssey more than Origins (I’ve heard them each described as the best of the Witcher-influenced current era of the series) but for some reason didn’t want to skip order (part of my problem that helped me compile such a bloated catalog). The game’s parkour is almost too frictionless, and I miss feeling stealthy and elusive in combat. It feels very much like a contemporary open-world third person action-RPG with a marvelous historical setting. One feather I’d put in its cap is that the HUD is very manageable (pretty easy to switch between a fully immersive screen with no editorialization and the often-lampooned HUD that tells you how and what to do at every moment).
(Witcher 2 - BitTech.net)
I’ve also finished the prologue of Witcher 2, which came out in 2007 and I started in 2019 on an X-Box 360 that died in 2021. I have Witcher 3, the influential game that many people don’t finish because of size rather than difficulty and which is responsible for the current shape of the AC games (at least until Mirage comes out later this year). Wild to consider that Witcher 3 came out nearly 8 years ago now. Besides getting me to pick The Last Wish (the first collection of Witcher short stories translated into English) back up, it’s fun to dip back into a third person fantasy RPG that’s invested in the politics of its world. That is even if it’s not invested in the politics of the real one we inhabit, with author Adrzej Sapkowski self-defining as mostly apolitical, which tends to mean begrudgingly or comfortably accepting the status quo. Of course, art created with internal politics which tries to flit external politics will tend to reflect and refract external politics in interesting, unwitting ways. I also like throwing fireballs at guys before stabbing them in the face.
(Citizen Sleeper from Fellow Traveller Website)
Citizen Sleeper is a very creatively told story. I’ve heard it referred to as an adaptation of a short story I haven’t read, while developer Gareth Martin said it was inspired in part by the anthropology book The Mushroom at the End of the World. I love the game’s ambience. It’s another one I picked up and then put down – heard about it on Waypoint and then found the gameplay jarringly sparse. In any case, it’s smooth, just not what I was expecting. It’s a choice-through-dialogue kind of game, with lots of simple menus that determine and explain your options and world. It’s a roleplaying game with a lot of visual novel DNA. I always swear it has voice acting and narration because the writing lives so well, breathing so much life into its characters and setting.
Your character is a “Sleeper,” a being quite like a replicant, a deeply monetarily indebted human whose consciousness has been uploaded into a machine; it reminds me in parts of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep and Altered Carbon and somehow even of Total Recall. You awaken in a cargo hold after stowing away, running away from the backbreaking labor of your shell-life. This part reminded me some of Disco Elysum (another unfinished RPG on my console) and as I write I recognize it also recalls Outer Worlds or even Mass Effect Andromeda and Outriders through this theme of failure to escape through the vast reaches of space.
In any case, players move through a space station installation making friends and building community, biding time, trying to keep your built-for-planned-obsolescence body from decomposing while working a variety of jobs at bars, restaurants, corporate construction sites, gang hideouts, and communes. Babysitting and dodging bounty hunters are both things you do in this game. I’m presently *stuck* because I’m fairly certain I’ve got a one-way ticket to another life that I can bring my friend and his daughter to, but I’ve got multiple communities I’m part of, yet they can’t leave if I don’t go. Plus there’s new additional content to explore – three new episodes of late game content added in the last year.
Citizen Sleeper is one of the most masterfully written games that I’ve ever played. It’s about finding compassion and fulfillment in the cultivation of community in the fallout of capitalistic collapse.
(The Ascent - Steam)
Speaking of managing capitalistic collapse, I’ve also recently taken The Ascent back up; it’s a space-faring cyberpunk game where the megacity world you play on has recently lost its connection to corporate overlords after a stock panic caused rapid business liquidation. It’s an isometric RPG twin-stick shooter where players move through urban outskirts infested with enemies between hub worlds, on the way investing in building up your character’s stats, upgrading weapons and gear, and solving other people’s problems. Part of my reinvestment comes from the fact Diablo IV is coming out soon and I’ve played so little of Diablo III or Diablo-inspired games but this one ranks high among some lists of Diablo clones and I’d like to see if I have a taste for this sort of ARPG. I suppose my closest corresponding experience is probably with the X-Men Legends games, though I’ll return to Pillars of Eternity sometime this summer as well.
(Hades in Hades)
I’m not sure rogue-lites count as an RPG subgenre, but I’ve finally defeated Hades, God of the Underworld, in the game Hades. Apparently, players have to do this ten times to see credits and have to max the affinity of all the other characters to see the epilogue. I also, shortly prior to beating protagonist Zagreus’s dear old dad, discovered God Mode exists. I haven’t used it yet because of the ways I feel about easy/story modes generally – it’s okay for other people but I’d feel like I’m cheating (except for when I was playing Gears of War co-op with my buddy a few months ago, that’s different); and this all stems from my trying to make sports game experiences as realistic as possible. What a self-assigned headache. We’ll see if that holds. Often if I’m frustrated after a death, I want to rush through the House of Hades to get back to the fight in Tartarus, but I end up stopping to talk to Nyx or Achilles or to pet Cerberus and end up stopping to talk with everyone. I love the character relationships in this game, and I want to learn some of the deeper truths of the Olympians’ motives, though I’m also concerned I’ll run out of nectar too soon. It’ll all get figured out.
It was incredibly fun to pick Hades back up and see that I could be good with weapons besides the shield – I got through Elysium to the Temple of Styx with the bow and rail of all things, before beating Hades, indeed, with the shield (Aspect of Zeus).
Also Loop Hero – which I have on Steam and haven’t played in a year or more – just made its way to Game Pass so maybe I’ll be seeing more of it soon.
Oh, Vampire Survivors… how does one describe that? A roguelite shoot-em-up? A fantasy action shoot-em-up? A reverse-shoot-em-up? I don’t know. I do know that I’m very early into it because a Discord I went into was discussing it and talking about concepts of exploration that hadn’t even occurred to me as possible.
I just uninstalled the trial of Inkulinati but I could see myself recovering it. 2D sidescroller tactics game with the roguelite start-your-run-over concept and a medieval-inspired art style. I’m into it. And I also need to pick Pentiment back up because that’s probably one of my favorite games of all time. And, yea, maybe I’m playing Suzerain (which is definitely one of my favorite games of all time) on my phone sometimes.
“Actual JRPGs! Where are those?” you ask.
(Final Fantasy VII on Vida Extra)
Well, Octopath Traveler came off Game Pass when Octopath Traveler 2 dropped on Switch. However, I did squeeze a couple hour-long sessions of Final Fantasy VII out this weekend. I’m still very early into the game, and am frequently thinking about other JRPGs I want to play but need to get through this one first (FFX and X-2, Dragon Quest VIII and XI, Chrono Triggger) and I may try the Personas out soonish (I wished for them to appear on Game Pass, they literally started appearing on my birthday, and haven’t been touched since install).
So that’s where I’m at with games at the moment. More or less. I’ll update as I get farther into things, or drop off things, or maybe do full reviews of things. Stay tuned!