Recent reviews by root1902

Hands down, the best game I have ever played!

Pathologic is a very ambitious, very unique, genre-bending, medium-defining video game which does things no other game has done before or since. It is also devilishly vague, extremely difficult, incredibly slow and takes place entirely within one small greyish town over a period of about 30 hours. But as you go on you realise its incredibly slow pacing, its single greyish location, its trudging from one place to another are all essential to creating such an incredible atmosphere and game.

It tells the story of a small Russian town in the early 20th century steeped in tradition and built on the back of its meat industry. As you arrive in town, the leader of the town, who had spread propaganda of his own immortality is found dead from a disease known as "the sand plague". News of this plague then begins to spread throughout town and the game's excellent cast of characters all react in differing ways. The interaction with the characters is one of the game's greatest strengths, with every character acting in their own interests as the paranoia of the plague and the loss of the town's steady leadership begin to spread. The characters are generally really well written and easy to empathise with, which makes the political conflict in between them really intriguing and often you will be torn between different characters as you learn to understand their motivations and traits throughout the game. The story itself is also really rich and has some of the greatest twists and most intriguing characters in all of gaming.

But it's not the narrative which makes Pathologic great, so much as they way the narrative is implemented into the game. Never have I played a game which blends story and gameplay so well. This is for a couple of reasons: Firstly, as the story is told over a perpetual timeframe of 12 days, different characters will live or die depending on whether you complete the main quest on each day and your interaction with the characters may change their personality and how they try to react or reason with themselves over the inevitable demise of the town. This gives a sense of panic to your own actions as you know if you don't complete them in time certain important characters may die and you'll never find the end of the story. The player also has the choice of controlling one of three characters at the beginning of this game - all these characters have their own perspective of the disease and interact with the characters and narrative in an entirely different way. The other two characters who you didn't chose still take part in the narrative anyway and even more interestingly - you may come in conflict with them but never realise their motivation unless you play as the other character.

But more importantly than that is the survival gameplay and Pathologic has by far and away the best survival system of any game I've ever played. It features 6 main survival mechanics - reputation, health, immunity, hunger, exhaustion and infection and these survival mechanics are all balanced heavily against each other. By this I mean, if you are feeling hungry you might find a lemon or raw meat, these quench your hunger but may weaken your immune system. You may feel exhausted and need sleep but while sleeping you cannot eat or take medication so your hunger will rise and your immunity levels will drop. You may be out of food and need to attack innocent people to get some simply to stop yourself starving to death, thus causing your reputation to diminish etc. Trying to increase one of your survival mechanics may cause another one to decrease and so on, so there is this constant balancing act going on and make no mistake, balancing these survival mechanics is hard. But that is exactly what makes the survival system so great - it's always nagging away at you, never giving you a moment's rest as the time ticks on and it creates this incredibly stressful and emotionally dejected feeling which really allows you to experience the situation and unrest the plague has caused and allows you to understand the rationale behind the characters.

Though there are two other things which add to the brutal survival system which heighten this inescapable sense of tension even more: 1. the economy and 2. the changing nature of the town day by day. The economy was apparently based on the World War I economy of eastern europe to represent the panic of a disease ridden town and it is merciless. Money is scarce so trading is the general way you are going to get things, the only problem is that shop keepers have all the power and so basic amenities such as bread, milk and medicine all become ridiculously overpriced. At times you will have to hand over weapons, bullets and protective clothing all for a lemon just to stop yourself dying of hunger. The economy only gets worse as the days go on too and shortages of different things (food, medicine, clothing etc.) means they fluctuate day to day making it unpredictable as to what you need to hoard adding to the tension even more. There are other ways to find resources though - scavenging bins around town to find trinkets and bottles will allow you to help trade with the townsfolk. Sharp things can be traded with children (and that was one thing which made me feel guilty) for ammo and sometimes food and bottles can be filled up with water at the well in town and traded with drunks for medicine and health items. Thieves and murderers who come out at night and start you can also be killed and then robbed of money, lockpicks and resources and finally, you can break into people's houses and steal their final resources from their own home. However, it's incredibly disconcerting when you start robbing people's homes and the men of the house start trying to attack you to defend their home and it's amazing how much this got to me. That was perhaps the greatest and most creative aspect of the of the economy - the way it made me feel guilty. At the beginning of the game, I wanted to be as nice as I could, but survival is so difficult I was forced to break into people's homes and steal their things, even kill a couple of innocent men simply trying to defend their homes and it surprised me how genuinely bad this made me feel, but it's testament to just how immersive and beautifully designed Pathologic truly is.

The town's ever changing nature is also another factor which make Pathologic so immersive and so emotionally draining. It's a cliché of Pathologic reviews to use this sentence, but: much is talked about in open world games in trying to create a "living world", whereas Pathologic does the opposite: it creates a "dying world" and by doing so creates this incredibly lively and riveting environment. Day by day, different areas become infected - different characters are introduced and react through different events. Riots begin to happen, military men with flamethrowers come in to stop the infection spreading. The sand plague becomes more and more potent as the days tick by and the town, its economy and its people begin to become more infected and more panicked as a result.

And this unyielding tension is only added to fantastic ambient soundtrack and the drab but fitting art design which all creates this amazing and utterly unique atmosphere.

Pathologic isn't just about building atmosphere therefore by reaching a certain point in the narrative and then a cut scene happens. Pathologic isn't an interactive film, or an interactive tv show, it's interactive theatre - it's about watching a slowly decaying town in front of your eyes and trying to survive yourself within that! For every minute I spent with this game I felt the muscles in the pit of my stomach tighten - it made me feel extremely tense, guilty and dejected at just trying to survive. It is one of the most emotionally draining experiences I've ever had in just about any art/entertainment medium.

Like being constantly punched in the lung for 10 hours straight,

I'm currently on my fourth playthrough of This War of Mine, having still never beaten it and it just gets better and better. Unlike some survival games, where once you get a hang of the survival system the game tends to lose its edge, This War of Mine only seems to get better once you get to know the workings of the mechanics.

I still maintain that the survival/resource management system is the peak of artistic game design we've discovered thus far as a medium, at least in terms of creating emotionally engaging pieces through interactivity and gameplay mechanics; and This War of Mine, along with Pathologic, is the pinnacle of exhibiting what the survival system can do, at least from games I have played.

This War of Mine is an utterly draining game, much more so than the most emotionally draining war films I've experienced such as The Thin Red Line, Paths of Glory or Come and See and that's because it uses it's gameplay mechanics and its interactivity to its massive advantage, particularly in concern with feeling emotionally engaged with the playable characters. Seeing a character in This War of Mine die hurts me. Much more so, I find, than it does in non-interactive mediums where I haven't spent hours of emotionally draining gameplay just trying to keep them alive. But more so than that, the game is so indiscriminate and barely even wants to acknowledge this - particularly when death happens while out on scavenging hunts. Death is so swift, so instant and so cheap and that makes it all the more hurtful. In the game I'm currently playing I've reached day 22 with the character Pavel - I've fed him, I've kept him warm through the winter, I've helped him through sickness and severe wounds, I spent hours just trying to keep him alive and he's just been so swiftly and instantly taken out by a sniper. The game makes no big deal out of it - it just expects you to move on and that's what's so heartbreaking about it - the swiftness and indiscrimination of death in the game - of characters you've spent hours just trying to keep alive and keep happy, barely, by the skin of their teeth.

Every single facet of This War of Mine's game design is geared towards creating an emotionally engaging experience - it's incredibly harsh, grueling survival mechanics which force you to constantly make tough decisions, its autosave system which stops you from reloading any character deaths or mistakes, its perpetual time frame which means mistakes or false moves cannot be corrected but just have to force you to change strategy or deal with these mistakes, its combat which is not at all slick (as it shouldn't be else it would ruin the atmosphere and point of the game) which forces you to largely avoid combat unless it is absolutely necessary as a final port of call.

It's one of the very, very few games which got what made Pathologic and The Void so great - its incredible difficulty in trying to survive mixed with a perpetual time frame - and much like Pathologic and The Void, you don't necessarily have to beat This War of Mine to find it so beautiful. I'm currently on my fourth playthrough and have still not beaten it (39 days is the furthest I've gotten so far), but even if I did I could see myself still wanting to play this over and over again, it's just so breathtaking.

One other thing it manages to do which Pathologic also did and very, very few games have managed - was that it managed to make me feel guilty of my actual actions which affected the game. It didn't manipulate me to make me feel guilty by showing me a cutscene after doing something linear which you couldn't not do to progress the game like in much more acclaimed games such as Shadow of the Colossus or Ico did. It made me feel guilty in my actual own choices which I made in a split-second's thought and through its actual mechanics. This is a game in which you build your own narrative - you don't sit back and watch a cutscene - you create it yourself through your actions - look at all the steam reviews and see how many of them are people who want to share their individual story they've had with the game and want to describe what happened to these 3 or 4 individuals during the 1992-96 Sarajevo siege, in which the game is set. - It is something rather beautiful and exactly the kind of thing gaming should be doing if it wants to stake its claim as a modern artistic medium.

This War of Mine is a an absolutely grueling and harrowing game. It's a game which has made me feel guilty of my actions, it's a game which has drained the life out of me and it's a game which has left me close to tears on numerous occasions. More than that though, it's harrowing in a way only a video game could be, it uses the inherent advantages of the medium in such a beautifully artistic way which very, very few games have managed to do. Its honestly one of the most majestic and perfectly designed video games I have ever had the pleasure of playing.

I enjoy Deus Ex and System Shock 2 as much as the next person, but for me S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernoybl towers over the first-person shooter genre.

It's that chilling feeling gotten by wondering across the bleak open landscape while hearing dogs howling in the distance (this being one of the very few games to be able to pull off outdoor daylight horror), It's that weird moment when you see some invisible monster for the first time and realise the game's surreal underbelly. It's the beautiful atmosphere created by the lightning. It's the tension built by running around trying to find that one last bit of radiation protection before you die of radiation poisoning. It's that feeling of satisfaction when you finally manage to fight your way through a group of clever AI enemies, or the stress built by panickingly trying to drink enough energy drink to simply run through them.

Or, more broadly - it's the perfect mixture of challenging difficulty, fantastic atmosphere and great survival mechanics which make it so special.

The game builds itself on creating tension through its inventory management system and creates such perfect results through it. Funnily enough, early in the game I found it annoying that managing your inventory doesn't pause the game and sometimes I stopped dead in the middle of combat because I was too heavy to move, but by the end I realised that was such an incredible way of building tension. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is, after all, a game of scavenging and half the fun of the game is about deciding whether you can afford to go over to pillage a befallen enemy, work out what you need to take and if it's not too heavy to carry without getting killed.

But great survival mechanics and a really well balanced difficulty don't make a game on its own and the other main thing which really makes S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stand out is its gameworld. It's such a beautiful, desolate overworld and as much enjoyment as the challenge was just running over the baron plains with dogs howling and boars roaming around with some odd shots in the background. Even, the main homehub of Rostock has this incredibly eerie and desolate feel about it.

There's just this exquisite balance of challenge and ambience which make this the perfect FPS. Played alone, at night with headphones it is quite the experience.

To the Moon always conjures up rather superficial and in my mind nonsensical debate about what constitutes a game and how story-telling should be done within a medium or whether story-telling should even exist in the medium at all. What I've always found odd about this debate is that it's the people who side with the "storytelling in gaming should be done through gameplay, because gaming is its own unique art form and shouldn't just be copying cinema" argument, who are the ones who are being restrictive and limiting the potential of the medium themselves by setting up boundaries and defining what gaming should be.

In many ways I hate the term "game". It's a loaded term which tries to specifically narrow down a certain path in which an interactive piece of art/entertainment must go. It also seems to make people's minds up on something before they've even given it a chance and it comes simply from tradition and nothing else. The tradition that video games evolved from more traditional games such as board games and card games, yet has evolved way beyond that. How often have we seen the phrase "it's a good story told in the wrong medium" or "it's not a good game, but a good experience" followed by a mediocre score from he reviewer? I can never understand this - you happily admit the story or the experience affected you emotionally n a positive fashion but because it was in a medium which traditionally, in its formative years 40 or 50 years ago stemmed from traditional games you rate it poorly? Perhaps if To the Moon had been one of the early games which popularised the medium instead of Pong and Space Invaders we wouldn't have this problem.

Anyway, I digress. Regardless of history, I find it hard to get my head round why people would want to reduce their own enjoyment of something by creating a narrow definition of something and what can fall into that through nothing but absolute snobbery to even try and prove the medium is an art form (which is another debate in itself) or to argue why certain games are inherently better than others (note: how people who side on this side of the debate re nearly all staunch Valve fans). It certainly does have an impact as well - if people tell themselves cutscenes are inherently bad or interactive fiction is inherently bad they will automatically dislike something in those styles, subconsciously, without ever giving it a chance and therefore reducing their own enjoyment of the medium (which is what I find most perplexing - why would anyone want to do this?) There are even people who claim they would hate their favourite film if it were and minimum level interactive film/FMV game.

Perhaps more than a rant about how a game's story should be told though is whether one should be told at all. People accept stories in literature and film because they are tradition, but not al films or literature are about their plots. People don’t enjoy Inland Empire for its plot, they enjoy it for its atmosphere. People don't enjoy Dante's Inferno for its plot, they enjoy it for its atmosphere. There's absolutely nothing which says film or literature or theatre have to be plot based anymore than there is which says gaming can't be, simply because it didn't come from such tradition.

Games can be great for an all manner of reasons - some games are great for their great gameplay (Bayonetta), some games are great for their great atmosphere (Silent Hill 2), some games are great for their level design (Deus Ex), some games are great for their rich, intriguing world full of lively characters (Deadly Premonition), some games are great for their pure bizarrity and unpredictability (killer7) and some games ar great or their story (To the Moon).

I don't think it takes much or is unreasonable to enjoy all these different things which different games try to achieve. To me decrying To the Moon for its lack of traditional gameplay is no less ridiculous than decrying Tetris for its lack of story or decrying Mario Kart for its lack of atmosphere. You should judge a game on what it tries to achieve. Not because it's some kind of unwritten rule by elitist academia but because it's how you get the most enjoyment out of something and why would anyone want to deny their own enjoyment of something to create some kind of academia superiority? It's irrational. The fact that gaming is so esoteric and has such variety in the things it wants to achieve from game to game and genre to genre is one of the major reasons I love it so much.

And that's assuming that gaming is some kind of inferior medium or storytelling anyway, to which I strongly disagree. It's the interactiveness which make it so suited for storytelling. I think most people will agree that horror games can be genuinely scary even for an experienced horror gamer, whereas after you've reached a certain age and seen a few and become desensitised horror games are not because of their passive nature there is nothing to fear. Whereas in gaming you're controlling the character - It's not just watching passively as someone walks down the hall and seeing h they react when a ghost pops out, it's you controlling that person and you reacting to that ghost popping out. The interactive medium has clear advantages for building atmosphere over the passive medium and it's the same with character bonding. I can’t say I’ve ever cared about a character in a film or television show or play as much as I have plying something like Fire Emblem. That’s because you’ve put the effort it into grow these characters yourself and christ, seeing a character I’ve built up on Fire Emblem die breaks my heart. As hammy as I’m sure that sounds do think there’s a lot of truth to it and gaming has such advantages that mediums like cinema simply don’t have when it comes to storytelling whereas cinema can do very few things gamin can’t in that respect. In fact, I’d even argue it’s easier for a game to put across emotionally-gripping storytelling simply by the interaction of moving round as it increases your focus and creates the bond and interest in the story through interaction – which no matter how superficial this sounds, is undoubtedly there. And that’s exactly what To the Moon does.

Not to mention people against this kind of interactive fiction - or who claim it should be in a different medium they’re denying thousands of people incredible emotional enjoyment. To the Moon is a game which was made on RPG maker by one person in his bedroom. It cost virtually nothing. There’s absolutely no way this game could ever have been made and had the success it did for virtually nothing if it were a film or a tv show or a play and obviously not have the visual/audio impact it had as a novel. I’d make a tongue-in-cheek reference here about gaming being the “people’s medium” but certainly think indie gaming and things like RPG-maker have allowed people to put forward their ideas for nothing and get success from them, which most other visual mediums cannot.

This game made me cry and I don’t just mean my tearducts getting a bit damp and one tear dropping down my face. I mean properly bawl my eyes out til I felt empty in my stomach, cry. Moreso than any piece of art/entertainment in any other medium has as far as I can remember. You can write it off a manipulative or cheesy for attempting this, but the fact it’s been so successful for many people is exactly the point. It’s through its interactievness and your pure focus on the characters and the memories that you wade through throughout the game that the whole thing becomes inescapable and overwhelming. If you go into it with an open-mind rather than trying to meaninglessly define what gaming should be and instead judge it on what it tries to achieve then it’s an absolutely unreal game and one of the most emotionally rewarding experiences I’ve had in absolutely any artistic medium.

Breathtaking.

Perhaps the only criticism you can make of this in fact is that it's not quite as good as Pathologic, but then not much is. Ice-Pick Lodge proved they aren't just a developer with one great gimmick, but continue push the boundaries of the medium like no one else since Looking Glass Studios sadly closed its doors.

Much like Pathologic, you are thrown into a world and have to work out the rules of the game for yourself. Again though, the catch is, that the game runs in continual time meaning by the time you've leaarnt all the rules it may be too late! While this may sound cruel to make the game extremely difficult to win, it somehow adds to the nightmarish atmosphere which Ice-Pick Lodge are so adept in creating.

Saying that however, this isn't quite as pressurised and emotionally draining as Pathologic, or as panic inducing as their latest output Knock-Knock, The Void is instead much more sureen and beautiful. With it's myriad of small breathtaking worlds and spine-tingling ambient soundtrack, though there is a sense of panic with regards to the main quests, The Void seems much more leisuerly in comparison. Not that that's a criticism, far from it, in fact, the pacing and atmosphere here are almost hypnotic. Reminscent of the Echo Night series at their best, but even better.

Not to say that the game is tranquil or serene, in fact I can not think of another game where I felt so empty playing it. Pathologic elicited feelings of despair as you saw a town crumnling before you, but with the Void, it's just emptiness... There are times during this game, the pit of my stomach just felt drained, like there was nothing there. Often at the most mundane of times too: whether in Ire's Pond, Yani's House climbing Ima's Tower or in bare grey plantations.

The main idea of the game is to find, hoarde and grow colour, which acts as your ammunition, your health, your armour and your key to opening up new worlds all in one. However, there's a catch, firstly, the more colour you use, the more "damage" it does to The Void and secondly, you can only transfer colour from your "supply" pallette to your "useable" pallette in the Void and it's while in the Void where the continuous time comes into play. That all sounds very confusing and it is, but again, that's what makes the game.

In short, the Void takes time to learn, can be confusing and extremely difficult, but this only adds to the breathtaking atmosphere, constant sense of peril and pure soul-crushing beauty of the game (through both it's game design and it's world and aesthetic). It pushes the medium to new heights, it brings up that boring old discussion about video games as art and it just about makes every game which has attempted to have a sense of beauty about it look utterly pathetic in comparison. I delve into hyperbole and superlatives not because I try to convince you to play this (though I do) - after all we all react differently to games and I can perfectly understand why someone wouldn't like this - but simply because this game is like nothing else out there and because it really expresses a unique take video gaming, which many people believe to be, as a medium, still finding its place (even if I personally strongly disagree). Alongside Pathologic this is the absolute pinnacle of game design.