Скорошни рецензии на The Centipede

> first mission in game
> last baddie one-shots my Centurion
> OK

> second mission in game
> jump up to say "hello" to the big bad Shadow Hawk in my measly Blackjack
> "hello" is spelled "all the medium lasers to the face"
> Shadow Hawk turfs it
> knows it's only a matter of time before he gets his
> OK

The RNG regularly makes you and anyone else it feels like its ♥♥♥♥♥ in a way John Romero could only dream of, so it perfectly emulates BattleTech tabletop. The cinematic camera is also a nice touch, though it could perhaps clip through hills less.

11/10 will tempt the dice gods again

Event[0] is worth a try for, if nothing else, its central conceit and experimental mechanic: interact with a natural-language parsing AI as your only real way to effect your environment. It's not very long, as befits an upgraded student project, but it's competent. It's competent even where it's not quite competent: the language parser is not that great; Kaizen will often talk about something completely unrelated when asked a direct question. Kaizen is also an AI from an alternate-history 1980s, has been floating in space for about thirty years, and has been traumatized at least three different ways. It makes sense that it's fairly scatterbrained. It's not too frustrating, but trying to determine Kaizen's feelings can be limited, especially when sometimes it seems rather moody. I consider this a good thing because it adds a layer of tension; you can't just butter it up to get enough Sympathy Points to get whatever you want, and the feeling that you have to consider Kaizen's feelings and opinions (even if you might not really have to) adds to the game's central conceit.

Is it worth twenty bucks, though? If you value games based on run-time, probably not, especially if you're not prone to investigating nooks and crannies or carefully interrogating AI. The plot itself is rather simple (go to A, do B, go to C, and so on) and quite linear. On the other hand, I'd say the story and the experiment deserve to be rewarded; something that could have easily gone quite wrong and been mostly frustrating is actually a very enjoyable experience. If you do drop twenty dollars on it, then, savor it for what it is and take the time to appreciate all the little details they inserted.

(Unimportant worldbuilding note: Purists might note that while it's set in an alternate timeline that diverged at some point after the war, it's still visibly the 80s we know and love aboard Nautilus despite her being built in an entirely different context. The Moody Blues still existed, Blade Runner was still made, and Neil Armstrong still stepped on the Moon despite nation-states (and by extension the superpowers) "popping out of existence" in favor of United Earth sometime before 1969. It's not a big deal, of course, but it is prone to fridge logic. A simple apologia for it would be to suggest that the story has been idiomatically translated; analogous cultural touchstones that make sense to us haver been substituted for the game-universe's "actual" details in order to make the game make sense.)

This atmospheric horror game is definitely a spiritual successor to Layers of Fear and, perhaps, is a slight overcorrection to the criticisms of Layers of Fear. Like Layers of Fear, Observer is mostly limited to a single cramped building and plays tricks with geometry. Unlike Layers of Fear, however, it relies slightly more on jump scares and evade-the-monster gameplay, which is where I think it missteps. Bloober Team is extremely good at building tension and horror from just the environment and plot of their games; from using geometry tricks to illustrate collapses into madness to the small details they use to create dystopias (Layers of Fear's house as a microcosmic dystopia; Observer's Fifth Polish Republic as a macrocosmic one). They're so good at it, actually, that standard gameplay and scare tropes really only serve to jarringly pull the player out of the narrative.

Luckily, they're not that common. I understand why they're in there: leave them out and people would complain that it's a walking simulator. The very nature of the plot, however, as an investigation allows for building tension and dread as well as momentary cathartic releases of terror--perhaps part of the issue with the "survival" parts of the game is that the method of getting Game Overs doesn't really fit up with the narrative; having to evade monsters is a pretty thrown-in mechanic when you could literally ruin the character's sanity should the player decide to poke around places that they shouldn't. They set up that tension by talking about Observers jacking into people's minds and the risk to their sanity, but then leave that mechanic unbuilt instead of making a psychological survival horror game where the player is constantly pulled between doing their job (investigating) and "staying alive" (staying sane by not looking at horrible things).

So, going into it, be aware that it is a touch uneven and doesn't live up to its full potential.

BUT

(and this is a big but and I cannot lie)

IT IS STILL AN EXTREMELY GOOD EXPERIENCE.

Limiting the environment to a single tenement building allows Bloober to lavishly spend time on the environment, building an atmosphere of dread in that the postapocalyptic world is, even outside the tenement, completely horrible. The mindscapes are distinctly unsettling, as they should be. The blending between sanity and madness--in proper unreliable player character fashion--is again done expertly. The twists and overall plot make sense, which is absolutely vital for a detective story. Finally, Bloober again strikes one of the best balances I've seen between player agency and character condition by carefully limiting what can be done and further limiting cutscenes.

Based on its own merits, in a marketplace where good psychological horror is really quite rare, it's definitely worth the thirty bucks they're asking for.

Bottom line up front: <i>Orwell</i> comes highly recommended as a visual novel relevant in our connected, surveillance-state times.

<i>Orwell</i> is not a particularly difficult game. You merely act as the conscience for the eponymous automated evidence-gathering machine that potentially has access to <i>everything</i> in The Nation's network. You tell it what's relevant; it tells that to investigators responsible for actually acting as the long arm of the law. Of course, it's still basically in prototype so it's not necessarily that great at parsing relevant information. Drag and drop the relevant information.

Think of it as a mystery simulator where you're a few steps removed from the evidence, and to piece things together you have to gather quite a lot of information from quite a few sources... say, from the desktop computer of someone who may only be tangentially related to the case at hand, or phone conversations between people of interest and total strangers. I say "total strangers" but, hey, they were talking to a person of interest, so doesn't that make them people of interest too?

Let's get them introduced to Orwell, shall we?

In the modern world where conspiracy theories like ECHELON and PRISM have turned out to be very real things made lawful through either everyday foreign spying or antiterrorism bills that authorize domestic surveillance, <i>Orwell</i> is a game about the flaws--and benefits--to such thinking. Are you able to stop terrorism (or, perhaps more accurately, are you willing to make the sacrifices necessary to do so)? Can you keep investigations limited despite your best intentions? Or do you just hoover up <i>everything</i> because there is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt? And... in the end, how can it go so horribly, horribly wrong?

Those in <i>favor</i> of a surveillance state will probably be somewhat annoyed with <i>Orwell</i>, but with a title like that they shouldn't be surprised. Those against surveillance states will appreciate it, though they may actually disapprove of the game's level-headed attitude towards such things: yes, it's a conspiracy, but it's a conspiracy of well-meaning people who are honestly(?) trying to make The Nation a better place by doing their jobs.

It's a visual novel, so replayability is limited except for completionism and once you get a feel for how the writers like surprises, you can start to see some twists coming--or at least expect twists to happen--but this is a negligible criticism. <i>Orwell</i> is, at its core, about both freedom of thought and the inherent problem with surveillance and preventative enforcement: even with universal surveillance, information is neither perfect nor complete and errors will be made. The game occasionally forces these errors, which can be frustrating, but if you approach it as a choose-your-own-adventure story with a clever user interface these are forgivable.

A Wolf In Autumn is a very short story--scratch that, "tone poem"--disguised as a puzzle game. In comparison, the developer's earlier work, Fingerbones, was a short story that started with after the end of the world and went downhill from there: what happens if a guy who's read far too much Nietzsche for his own good survives the end of the world? Mr. Szymanski's sense of horror is primary psychological, and the psychological trigger he enjoys pulling most is transgression. Fingerbones was a story that started mundane and, as the player went through the motions of a puzzle game, it slowly transgressed the usual player's conventional morals. By the end, you know what's going to happen. You dread it, but, like craning one's neck at the grim-looking traffic accident, the sick part of your soul has to make sure.

A Wolf In Autumn also gets its creepshow factor from transgression. However, unlike Fingerbones, it starts walking past the line from the word go: you're a little girl. You're a nine-year-old girl, alone, locked in a shed by your mother. In Szymanski fashion, it all goes downhill from there. Lines are, of course, crossed and that is where A Wolf In Autumn is most effective. It also does well with tension and suspense. There are one or two things that could be considered jump scares, but either they fall flat or I'm just not particularly susceptible to them and they're the game's weakest part.

Don't buy A Wolf In Autumn for gameplay or expansive content, since it is only about an hour long. Those will inevitably disappoint you if you put much value in them. Buy it and play it if you want... a poem. A feeling. A theme. If Fingerbones was about the potential barbarism in people well past the pale of everyday existence, A Wolf In Autumn looks to things closer to home. By the end of the game, you'll realize you probably know at least one person that this tone poem comes dangerously close to describing. Depending on where you live, that person might live down the street and there may be a handful of them to boot.

If you're particularly unlucky, you might find it speaks to your own condition.

First, an important caveat: the negative reviews are not, generally, incorrect.

This is first and foremost because No Man's Sky is a niche game that was marketed far too broadly and which became a victim of the Hype Train, both for gamers and, apparently, the developers.

I bought this game based solely on the initial trailer: discover some caves, discover some critters, discover some planets after flying around, maybe get in a space battle or two. On these points, No Man's Sky delivers as a 1970s Sci-Fi Paperback Book Cover Simulator. Critters are randomly selected (mostly) real-world animal bits slammed together in a blender with, quite often, little rhyme or reason. Planets are generally monochrome monoclimates, though the chroma are often quite exotic colors and the climates at least vary from world to world. Terrain is almost universally dramatically jagged hills-to-mountain-ranges, and ships are randomly generated from a stable of fit-together modules. I can see how it all went together, and how it could've been so much more...

...but everything could be so much more. Best to consider things like this as they are rather than what they could be; the latter always leads to disappointment. Since I avoided the hype train, I don't have the emotional investment of other reviewers. I don't feel cheated, because I got mostly what I expected.

That being said, again: they're not wrong.

No Man's Sky is simultaneously the best example of and an indictment of sandbox games and the mythology surrounding them. To most people, sandbox games are about freedom: the freedom to go anywhere, do anything, and forge one's own gameplay and have fun in one's own way. Most popular sandbox games, however, are structured: Fallout and Grand Theft Auto have plots and missions and mechanics that at least suggest, if not emphasize, that "this is how the game is supposed to be played." EVE Online is multiplayer, so "correct play" becomes a matter of emergent behaviors from the collective; one of the reasons that Hell is other people is because other people, particularly those more powerful, impinge on one's own agency. One really can't have a massively multiplayer sandbox game that is truly free, as power structures will emerge--even if these structures are merely matters of etiquette, of evaluating the difference between respectable players, noobs, trolls, and so on.

No Man's Sky offers absolute freedom within its mechanics by taking others out of the equation. You are, functionally, alone. There is a narrative in terms of the setting's backstory, and there is a suggested personal narrative with the "center of the galaxy" quest, but... this is all optional. In No Man's Sky, it really is the job of the player to construct their own narrative and determine how the game is to be enjoyed. In that sense, it really isn't a game. There are rules, but no real end objective. It's probably best described as Will Wright described SimAnt: it's a toy. The game is what the player constructs around it. As such, No Man's Sky is more rewarding to the person who simply wants to see what's over the next hill, to affix names to things, to take pretty pictures. I find it relaxing and somewhat therapeutic.

No Man's Sky's greatest weakness is not in its 1970s book-cover aesthetics or its through-a-blender monster-aliens or its limited NPCs. Its greatest weakness is that it demands creativity from the player, but only permits it in the metagame: who are you, why are you exploring, what do you do? Up to you. However, you cannot create in the game world. You can name entire star systems and everything within it, but not your ship. Not yourself. Whatever your account name is, that's who you are. Minecraft was, originally, another absolute sandbox 'game' (especially in single-player) that required the player to decide most everything about it. However, it also tapped into the basic human urge to create. It facilitated most players' subconscious need to make things. Lego are and have been absurdly popular for forty years now because they allow practically anyone to create sturdy things. In Minecraft, even when it first came out, people could slap together dirt blocks to make buildings, sculptures, what have you. While it eventually got a 'plot' with an 'ending,' the draw for Minecraft remains the freedom to create it gives players.

No Man's Sky lacks that. Even though one can affix names to everything, it is by its very nature a consumptive experience. Players can't create; they can only consume what the procedural generation makes. Within the laws of the universe they have absolute freedom: there are no gods, no kings, not even other peers to judge how one plays. These laws are limited, though, and this freedom in a narrow world is its own downfall as players suffer an existential crisis in game. Existence precedes essence in No Man's Sky even as it does in real life for many people. There is no point to it. Not even the 'center of the galaxy' quest. The point is, determined, by you--but just as in real life you cannot wish yourself into the heavens, in No Man's Sky the laws of the universe constrain your agency and thus your ability to make something out of it.

Background: I'm an aerospace engineer who has always loved spaceflight, hard sci-fi, and clean-white 2001 futurism. I am basically the target audience for this.

I'm not going to bother summarizing gameplay and whatnot; other people discuss those in their reviews just fine. What I'm going for is to describe what this is: it's not really a game, nor is it really a walking simulator. It is a spacewalking simulator, which makes it distinctively different, and not just because it's in three dimensions. Spacewalks are usually carefully choreographed activities that take hours because every motion is done carefully (y'know, being in space is dangerous and all) and difficult (inflatable space suits fight your every move as they try to retain their inflated shape).

Therefore, if you go into this like it's a game and try to dodge the various spinning or electrical things... yeah, you're going to be frustrated as you bounce off everything and probably die (I don't know, I didn't).

If you think like an astronaut and find ways to go around, it'll be fine.

If you go into this like it's a game and use constant thrust like an oldschool jetpack... yeah, you're going to run out of oxygen. (It's actually a pretty clever hard sci-fi mechanic to use breathable stores as super-crazy-emergency-contingency reaction mass--even if it counts as an energy bar game mechanic--and just goes to show just how pear-shaped the mission's gone.)

If you think like an astronaut and use careful, controlled bursts and move slowly when you need to finesse things, you'll be fine.

It's a beautiful game--the visuals are probably the lion's share of it's appeal--so make sure you've got a system that will allow you to appreciate the experience. My rig is about three or four years old now and I had issues with both geometry and texture popping during long-distance spacewalks. Nothing horrendous; all it did was take me out of the moment for a few seconds.

Finally, about the meta-backstory about the Microsoft dude who is apparently using this an allegory for his own life... don't worry too much about it. Only one intercepted transmission is too on-the-nose in my book, and, in the end, it doesn't look like he's really absolving himself of anything. He faced the music, and you will too.

(I'll be emphasizing tone and design choices in this review, since other reviews seem to have the mechanics down pretty well. In short, they're simple rules that build into complex solutions and quite fun.)

It's not a long game by any stretch. My five hours of play time as of this writing is one playthrough, done thoughtfully, with no rushing and restarting several levels just to do better. If you're one of those strict "one dollar per hour" types, then you'll be disappointed as far as that goes.

It's still worth a ten-spot, though, and here's why: it's coherent. Everything in it is there for a reason, and everything that isn't fails to be there for a reason. The pixellated art forces a distinct style and conservatism in design; every pixel must be in the right place and have the right color so your teensy adversaries and environmental objects are distinct enough for you to actually use. The relatively austere color palletes work with the moody jazz music (which gets more electronic when you're rewiring buildings) go with the distinctly future-noir storyline, and even the humor fits: given the game mechanics very silly things can happen, and the use of low-key humor suits this... and when the game hits more serious notes, the humor is gone because it would be inappropriate. After all, humor does have its place in noir, be it Spade wisecracking in The Maltese Falcon or various snarky quips in things like DOA or Double Indemnity.

In a time when games, even indie games reliant on one or two people, can be all over the place when it comes to generating an experience, it's great when a game comes out that basically exemplifies everything the indie experience should be: fun, competent, and where every part meshes with every other part because there's no huge teams trying to stand out or failing to communicate with each other. To sound like the stereotypical hipster douche, this is an artisanal game, where a very few someones obviously worked quite hard to make something that worked and made sense...

...yet avoids the usual ostentation and pretentiousness of other indie developers by having a gently self-deprecating sense of humor. It's a game, so there's a learning curve built into the plot that doesn't make too much sense; they tease themselves over that. It's not actually a game-at-gunpoint, so the title's a bit off, and they tease themselves over that. The superjump mechanic is kind of silly, so they have a bit of fun with techno-trousers.

Even the humor is well balanced; as mentioned above, it's absent where it'd be inappropriate and past that, the player can decide that their particular freelance spy is a cold professional rather than a wisecracker. The only places where the very low-key humor is mandatory--tooltips, achievements, and the like--are all basically optional and thus don't put an out-of-place clown nose on the whole thing.

Even the short length of the game seems to fit. The plot is sufficiently complex for noir without being byzantine; adding additonal missions could only have served to act as filler or confuse the issue. In any case, it doesn't let the mechanics or puzzles get stale. Each new mission is a new challenge, but a surmountable one, and sufficiently novel that one can't just pull out some "I win instantly" trick honed over dozens of previous missions. It stays just long enough to be satisfying, to do what it sets out to do, and then ends before it can become tiresome.

It may be a short game for ten bucks, but it's a short game worth ten bucks because you'll have as much fun with it as you might have with a longer game that's twice the price.

What the actual smeg.

Same crappy control scheme as the original Godus, guaranteed to get you carpal tunnel syndrome as you click and drag and click and drag and click and drag to push around terrain. Dude. Paintbrush mechanics. This isn't hard, it's been done before, and this is obviously a mobile game that you've not got around to porting yet. PC does not use the same interface.

Same goofy faith mechanic, albeit with a much better refresh rate. You no longer have to worry about building support structures, since it does that for you... automatically... wherever it wants. Which, given the awkwardness of terrain sculpting, is probably not where you want it to be.

Pathfinding is laughable, which is kinda important given how loopy the terrain gets.

The little blood-spurts really don't work with the toy-world art design.

Combat is of the classic move-units-to-area-en-masse-and-who-attrites-first-loses style. Whoopie.

And it crashes at the drop of a hat.

No wonder the "your team" developer nonsense when you load up the game is generally apologetic.

(Oh, and let's give you god characters to play which... kinda defeats the purpose, one thinks, especially when all of the provided characters are explicitly psychotic in some fashion or another... actually, upon reflection, they're basically reskins of the Warhammer Chaos gods--there's a BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD Khornate, a Tzeentch power-mage, a Slaanesh hyperslut of sensuality, and... well, the Nature god is vaguely nice, like Nurgle. Maybe they know their market.)

Molyneaux produced Syndicate, for Christ's sake. Syndicate, hands-down one of the most fun RTS-ish games I've ever played.

Do yourself a favor and go find a copy of Syndicate Plus or Syndicate Wars and never bother with this tripe.

The Talos Principle is easily the most intelligent game I've played in a very long while, if not ever, certainly the smartest since The Swapper. No great surprise, since the writing talent behind The Swapper also wrote the story for this game.

There are similar themes between both: the meaning and function of morality, of existence, of what "makes a person." The Talos Principle goes into much greater depth, however, and extends its arguments on to the purpose of life and of civilization. It is a very adult game, in terms of emotional and logical maturity, which really means that it should be played by almost everyone as soon as is feasible. This is what games can be as an art form, provoking questions and using interactivity as a way to immerse participants into the subject.

For the gamers out there, all the references other reviews make to Portal are valid. In terms of gameplay, this is a puzzle game, but I cannot say it is a puzzle game first and foremost. Like Portal, the puzzles--or, more accurately, the environments of the puzzles--are a way to tell the story. Luckily, the puzzles were constructed by experienced game designers (of the Serious Sam series, amusingly enough) and so if you're not interested in philosophy, The Talos Principle works as 'merely' a challenging puzzle game. I'd still highly recommend poking through the terminals; if nothing else, you may find it thought-provoking.

For the philosophically inclined, The Talos Principle is a highly "scientific" game with a metaphysical naturalist worldview. While there is some mention of "soul," this is to the edges of the actual discussion. You're playing a machine, an artificial intelligence, hopefully analogous to a human being (since it is you playing: the protagonist is silent and functionally without personality independent of you, including having your Steam handle for a name and justifying this in backstory), so sapience is a mechanistic function that can be replicated artificially. All else extends from this premise, with one caveat. Technically your character lacks an existential crisis because you have been created for a purpose, and that purpose is the Process, capitalized in-universe. The Process... requires you to solve puzzles. This may be insufficient for you, however, as it has been for previous (or concurrent--the in-game chronology is intentionally confused) AIs. With no afterlife and no universal balancing of moral sums, The Talos Principle discusses morality, purpose, and meaning from an existential humanist viewpoint.

Those of you with a classical background may recognize Talos from Greek mythology; specifically, the metal automaton that defended the island of his builders before he was unstoppered and all of the ichor that powered him ran out. I won't spoil the actual in-game Principle for you, but it dovetails with the game's naturalist philosophy.

I highly recommend this game on all levels: as a game, as a work of art, and as a philosophical argument. A good deal of it can be quite depressing--after all, "there is nothing but the Earth and the bones of the dead in it"--but I feel The Talos Principle is merely clear-eyed about the matter. It doesn't mope, it doesn't refute, and it doesn't resort to nihilism, and in its resistance against the darkness it rationally puts forward an argument of purpose and hope. Again, not to spoil anything, in the game when all is lost there is still heroism. Not the petty soap opera heroism of noble effort in vain or the last act of defiance, but of finding--and, if need be, making--hope and carrying on.