What is Gone Home exactly? Well, if you know of Dear Esther then you should have an idea of what the game is about. It tells a story and its up to you to explore and find and piece together the story for yourself. Thats all, theres no combat, theres no exp, theres nothing but just exploring. That said you will miss a lot of stuff. Unless you scour through everything picking up every single thing, look under the tables, flip open every single folder. You will miss something. Even if you do all that, there is no guarantee that you will get the entire story. Its up to you to piece together the story, some parts are purposely vague, while others are obvious. I think that is pretty cool. I missed a big portion of a subplot in the story and going back I was able to piece it together.
What is the story about anyways? Well there really isn't any way to explain without spoiling the story so it basically is just you coming home to the home your family recently moved to while you were at Europe. There you find that the place is a mess and no one is home. You must walk around and interact with the world to progress with the story and find out what happens. You will read journal entires, you will find things that give clues, and you find that the empty house is really quite alive. The people that live there felt real and believable, it felt like they were still there and could come home at any second. At the back of your head it will keep nagging at you, thinking of the worst possible situations. After the story you become emotionally attached, you find yourself running to your destinations praying you're not too late, that what you're thinking is just a fantasy.
The best part would the the ambiance of the house. The dark corners, the flickering lights, the creaks as you step on the old wooden floors, and just the sound of the thunderstorm would keep you immersed for the entire time. Your mind plays games on you as well, seeing the plant in the corner of your eye, the red dye in the bath tub, the messy bedrooms and the feeling of dread creeping up from your stomach. This game is Dear Esther done better. However there is a $20 price tag which caused a lot of complaining. Is it worth it? If you think of it as a movie then the price tag isn't that much different. I enjoyed this game tremendously.
This proves that "art games" can work and there may potentially be more of these games in the future. Dear Esther started it, Gone Home perfected it. Now I can't wait to see what else other people can create.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Remember Me - I hope you're playing on a controller
Let me start with this. Quick time events are bullshit. Whats worse are quick time events optimized for a controller on a PC game. Thats my biggest problem with this game. Its not the stupid boring game play, its not the repetitive combat, its not the clichéd stupid story, no its quick time events. How bad are they you ask? Well on a controller you're supposed to spin the analogue stick, on the mouse and keyboard combo you need to spin your mouse around. This just does not work the same way, as you circle your mouse around it keeps fucking up and going backwards and rewinding what you are trying to do.
To start from the beginning, this is a third person "action" game. By action I mean walk in a straight line for 5 hours and button mash the left and right mouse buttons repeatedly until it breaks down. The combos are there for you to use but its completely worthless. You always meet a group of enemies so you'll never be able to pull it off before you need to dodge. Thats not all there will be assholes climbing up walls so you need to hold shift to lock-on and then left click to shoot them down so you can punch them to death. Then there are the giant assholes who suck up all the power of the little assholes so you can't kill the big asshole until you take out the small assholes first all while the big asshole is chasing you around. Then there are invisible assholes where you have to constantly shift and left click a light button every 10 seconds so they are revealed. Combat is stupidly repetitive and boring. Having all these "combos" you can customize doesn't do shit. You are forced to take a punch move in this part of the combo string, forced to take a kick move in this part etc etc. It just gives you the illusion you can customize. Are some attacks faster or slower? No I don't notice it. Do some hurt more than the other? No it doesn't. So whats the point. Nothing. Not like you'll ever pull off a full string unless you're fighting one on one anyways. You'll be hitting the space bar every two seconds to dodge an incoming attack. Dodge can be used at any time to get out of anything. Theres no getting locked inside a combo theres no fear of needing to dodge, theres no fear of not seeing an attack coming as a giant ! will appear and the world slows down waiting for you to hit the dodge button.
What do you do when not fighting in combat? You climb. That sounds fun! Thats like Mirror's Edge right? No. Not even close. Saying its like Mirror's Edge is like saying Solitaire is a real game. All you do is walk in a single path. And along the path will have yellow arrows telling you to go here go there. You just hop and hop and hop and hop and hop and hop and hop some more. The worst part of hopping is the controls. Its completely unoptimized for mouse and keyboards. Not to mention the camera jerks around when you're trying to do look to the side. Occasionally you stop to shift left click something, which is probably the worst part because it wastes your time having to search around and you just want to get out of this part because its stupid and boring, then continue your hopping. Every few hops you take enemies appear and you can't continue until you punch them all to death. After that you hop some more. THEN SUDDENLY OUT OF THE BLUE YOU GET SOMETHING DIFFERENT! There are gray spots you can stand on to press E to access stolen memories to see how to get past these areas. What it usually does is let you know where the "safe" areas are in a minefield or something of that sort. You basically get one second to watch the thing then it disappears. Honestly it does shit to help but state the obvious. Its easier to just keep running. After hopping for what feels like an hour you get to the very end of the path which is a boss. Bosses are easy as all hell but also a very long endurance fight with your attention span. Its boring. Its like fighting the same as a normal enemy but you punch longer. Then when it gets close to dying you need to suddenly do a quick time event. If you screw up you have to redo it again after you bring it back down to that health (it regenerates slightly.) You get a split second to click a button then it shows a circle button with an arrow from the left circling to the top then to the right. Oh it must be to spin the mouse like the memory mixing I just did a little while ago right? NO. I did that fight for 30 fucking minutes before I realized that was a the dodge key. WHAT?
Theres also memory mixing. I've only seen it once so far so its not very common basically you go through someone's memory and then go back and change parts of the memory so it plays out differently. The one I had to do was I had to kill the man instead of letting the doctor save him. You watch a cut scene then you have to constantly turn your mouse in a clockwise circle to go forward in time and counterclockwise to go back in time. Press E at certain times to ruin someone's memories until the right combination works out. Then we get to the story of the game. Basically its the most cliché story. You lost your memory, the evil corporation Memorex controls everyone's memory and then tried to remove yours but you resisted because as a video game protagonist you're badass like that. Now you've lost most of your memory and is on a quest for revenge against the big evil corporation while some random seedy guy is helping you who obviously sounds like a bad guy who believes the end justifies the means and you're obviously going to have to fight him along the way or he might be the true villain after all. Fortunately I didn't get very far into the game probably about 25%-30% of the game before I ran into a bug. I used the Sensen DDOS and it bugged out one enemy and it wouldn't die and I couldn't die so I was in limbo because unless you kill every enemy you cannot move on.
I didn't feel like starting over at the last checkpoint because theres no save button you have to go back to a checkpoint every time you die or turn off the game. And if you decide to quit after watching cut scene or something important. For the love of god don't turn off your game because the next time you start it you have to sit through the whole thing again. It'll take like 5 minutes to watch and there is no way to skip it. All in all its a very mediocre game with a cliché story, bad combat, boring and tedious game play, and worst of all the most unoptimized controller to mouse and keyboard port ever.
To start from the beginning, this is a third person "action" game. By action I mean walk in a straight line for 5 hours and button mash the left and right mouse buttons repeatedly until it breaks down. The combos are there for you to use but its completely worthless. You always meet a group of enemies so you'll never be able to pull it off before you need to dodge. Thats not all there will be assholes climbing up walls so you need to hold shift to lock-on and then left click to shoot them down so you can punch them to death. Then there are the giant assholes who suck up all the power of the little assholes so you can't kill the big asshole until you take out the small assholes first all while the big asshole is chasing you around. Then there are invisible assholes where you have to constantly shift and left click a light button every 10 seconds so they are revealed. Combat is stupidly repetitive and boring. Having all these "combos" you can customize doesn't do shit. You are forced to take a punch move in this part of the combo string, forced to take a kick move in this part etc etc. It just gives you the illusion you can customize. Are some attacks faster or slower? No I don't notice it. Do some hurt more than the other? No it doesn't. So whats the point. Nothing. Not like you'll ever pull off a full string unless you're fighting one on one anyways. You'll be hitting the space bar every two seconds to dodge an incoming attack. Dodge can be used at any time to get out of anything. Theres no getting locked inside a combo theres no fear of needing to dodge, theres no fear of not seeing an attack coming as a giant ! will appear and the world slows down waiting for you to hit the dodge button.
What do you do when not fighting in combat? You climb. That sounds fun! Thats like Mirror's Edge right? No. Not even close. Saying its like Mirror's Edge is like saying Solitaire is a real game. All you do is walk in a single path. And along the path will have yellow arrows telling you to go here go there. You just hop and hop and hop and hop and hop and hop and hop some more. The worst part of hopping is the controls. Its completely unoptimized for mouse and keyboards. Not to mention the camera jerks around when you're trying to do look to the side. Occasionally you stop to shift left click something, which is probably the worst part because it wastes your time having to search around and you just want to get out of this part because its stupid and boring, then continue your hopping. Every few hops you take enemies appear and you can't continue until you punch them all to death. After that you hop some more. THEN SUDDENLY OUT OF THE BLUE YOU GET SOMETHING DIFFERENT! There are gray spots you can stand on to press E to access stolen memories to see how to get past these areas. What it usually does is let you know where the "safe" areas are in a minefield or something of that sort. You basically get one second to watch the thing then it disappears. Honestly it does shit to help but state the obvious. Its easier to just keep running. After hopping for what feels like an hour you get to the very end of the path which is a boss. Bosses are easy as all hell but also a very long endurance fight with your attention span. Its boring. Its like fighting the same as a normal enemy but you punch longer. Then when it gets close to dying you need to suddenly do a quick time event. If you screw up you have to redo it again after you bring it back down to that health (it regenerates slightly.) You get a split second to click a button then it shows a circle button with an arrow from the left circling to the top then to the right. Oh it must be to spin the mouse like the memory mixing I just did a little while ago right? NO. I did that fight for 30 fucking minutes before I realized that was a the dodge key. WHAT?
Theres also memory mixing. I've only seen it once so far so its not very common basically you go through someone's memory and then go back and change parts of the memory so it plays out differently. The one I had to do was I had to kill the man instead of letting the doctor save him. You watch a cut scene then you have to constantly turn your mouse in a clockwise circle to go forward in time and counterclockwise to go back in time. Press E at certain times to ruin someone's memories until the right combination works out. Then we get to the story of the game. Basically its the most cliché story. You lost your memory, the evil corporation Memorex controls everyone's memory and then tried to remove yours but you resisted because as a video game protagonist you're badass like that. Now you've lost most of your memory and is on a quest for revenge against the big evil corporation while some random seedy guy is helping you who obviously sounds like a bad guy who believes the end justifies the means and you're obviously going to have to fight him along the way or he might be the true villain after all. Fortunately I didn't get very far into the game probably about 25%-30% of the game before I ran into a bug. I used the Sensen DDOS and it bugged out one enemy and it wouldn't die and I couldn't die so I was in limbo because unless you kill every enemy you cannot move on.
I didn't feel like starting over at the last checkpoint because theres no save button you have to go back to a checkpoint every time you die or turn off the game. And if you decide to quit after watching cut scene or something important. For the love of god don't turn off your game because the next time you start it you have to sit through the whole thing again. It'll take like 5 minutes to watch and there is no way to skip it. All in all its a very mediocre game with a cliché story, bad combat, boring and tedious game play, and worst of all the most unoptimized controller to mouse and keyboard port ever.
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