Games

The Wild at Heart opens with scenes that suggest trauma and broken homes. Its protagonist, Wake, has lost his mother and is running away from a spectral father figure slumped in front of the TV and surrounded by beer bottles. You’ll read from that what you will. His younger friend Kirby has a neglectful single parent, although we see nothing of her home life. The two friends have agreed to run away together and live in the nearby woods. Things immediately diverge from that plan as the guardians of the Deep Woods draw Wake into their world. Kirby, somehow, soon follows, and the two friends meet up not long into the game.

The game’s developers recognise that comparisons with Nintendo’s Pikmin series are inevitable and they acknowledge the relationship. It’s a comparison that it’s senseless to try and avoid because there is much here that can be traced back to Miyamoto’s cult classic series, and talking about The Wild at Heart is aided by using Pikmin as a reference point. I’m getting this out of the way now, because from here I am going to casually reference Pikmin staples – if you lack familiarity with that series you will be just fine reading this, and also you should play Pikmin – and this will help in highlighting where The Wild at Heart champions its own voice, style and mechanics.

On its original release in mid 2005 – that’s “February 2006” to we lucky few European gamers – Psychonauts rapidly accumulated substantial critical praise. From the lofty perspective of 2008 this is best illustrated by a brief look at some of the awards the game garnered: Eurogamer’s 2005 Game Of The Year, a BAFTA Best Screenplay, Best Writing at the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards, and a host of awards from Gamespot including Best Voice Acting, Best Original Music and Best Platformer.

Further, Metacritic presently ranks the game with a healthy score of 88 – with only the Detroit Free Press and games(tm) ranking it under 80. It can safely be said that in the eyes of the arbiters of entertainment, Psychonaut was well-received.

When last we left Roughrewards my starting seven were still hewing living spaces from our endless supplies of mountain chert and swapping stories of the one time everybody punched that alligator a lot. It’s been suggested that a shrine be constructed in the pool of alligator blood to memorialise this founding event, and honestly I can’t think of a more appropriate thing to do in Dwarf Fortress. We’ll get to that at some point.

First, though, I need to get this shithole mountain home functional at a basic level.

It has come to my attention that in the previous instalment I neglected to name my fortress. Welcome back, therefore, to as-yet unglorious Roughrewards, newest colony of the Sunken Attic.

If you’re thinking the fortress name is pretty good and the civilisation name is a little underwhelming, you’re not alone.

When last we left our brave and stupid dorfs, they were busy attempting to punch to death a fully-grown if unconscious alligator and making little headway against its thick scales.

A few weeks back I grew obsessed with Dwarf Fortress. I blame one of my workplace proximity associates, because he started talking about the Villain Update when we were at lunch. Thoughtless bastard.

After a few weeks of watching YouTube Let’s Plays (mostly by Kruggsmash) and re-reading diaries (mostly Glazedcoast and Onionbog) I decided it was time to actually play the game. Last time I tried it didn’t go so well. Dwarf Fortress’s interface is famous for two things: being extremely difficult to get on with, and being functional and logical once you’ve become accustomed to its many idiosyncrasies. It is an interface that flies in the face of contemporary ideas about user experience. The game also uses pseudo-ASCII art so, like, who cares?

After generating a new world and searching for the recommended newbie embark site – soil or clay, shallow and deep metals, serene or calm surroundings, some woodland or trees, and most importantly no bloody aquifer – I embarked with the default loadout. Strike the earth!

God help me, I started playing Fallout 4 again.

I wrote about Fallout 4 for Arcadian Rhythms some three and a half years ago. I was, broadly, positive. After writing that rambling screed I soured on the game in the same way that I did with Bethesda’s Skyrim. I also wrote about the latter falling out of love experience, and much of what I say about Skyrim is applicable to Fallout 4, for all that my 2016 piece dissembles over my volte-face.

And yet here I was, a scant few years later, playing again. Why, Shaun? Why?

Borderlands 3: Has It Really Been Five Years? is here. And while I’ve not been waiting on tenterhooks I do like the shoot-n-loot series.

Or at least I did as soon as I worked out that playing it with friends is best: the first game, played solo, I found kinda boring. I ran the sequel with friends and instantly got why the concept works so well. Occasionally I had to ask said friends to shut up so I could listen to the dialogue, which was often funny (I can’t say whether it was actually well-written, because of the structure of a Borderlands game and missing three quarters of said structure due to chatting with friends, but it was often funny). I even played half of the Pre-Sequel, which I liked, but I ended up playing a bunch of it solo again and… surprise, still kinda boring. All told, I’ve both enjoyed these games and disliked them. I suppose this makes me an ambivalent fan.

Now it really has been more than five years since Pre-Sequel. Series enthusiasts have only had a series of episodic adventure games from the disgraced and deceased Telltale Games to tide them over. So after all this time, what has Borderlands 3 brought to the table?

Murder. Huge, disgusting, violent excess. And loot. Of course.

I have three friends – who I’ll call AJ, Madd and Potter, since those are essentially their names – with whom I play games online most Sunday evenings. It’s a nice way to stay in touch and it’s a lot of fun. They’re very patient with how bad I am at PUBG.

Over the last few months we’ve been playing Vigor, a free to play “shoot ‘n loot” from Bohemia Interactive. Bohemia are well-known for the ArmA series, which is a tactical military shooter notorious for its realism. Vigor shares some of its approach to weapon handling – running and gunning will not go well for you – but is a round-based game where cautious, paranoid scavenging is as viable and important a strategy as hunting for other players.

Sadly, Vigor does not sport four-player co-op play. This makes sense, as such a setup would run counter to its core design. At most you can take one friend into a match: someone to watch your back while you scavenge.

It is technically possible to get into a game with more friends than this. If you and three friends team up, and the two hosts don’t have too much lag between them, and they get the timing on an attempt to join a match just right, there’s a possibility you’ll load into the same map.

Remnant: From the Ashes is a game with a bad title from a team best known for the Darksiders games*, of which I have played 1.1 of them. I really enjoyed the first Darksiders, but never played far into its sequel, and know very little about last year’s third instalment.

Remnant: From the Ashes is a game I heard about via word of mouth. For some reason a good number of my friends I talk about games with were all curious about it, or at least discussing it. Why might that have been?

Remnant: From the Ashes is a game which, from the first moment I heard about it, was mentioned in the same breath as Dark Souls. Ah, so that is why my friends were discussing it. We just can’t get away from Dark Souls.

Remnant: From the Ashes, a name which I won’t be typing in full any more, because this bit is tiring and isn’t funny anyway, does have a few similarities with Dark Souls. At its core, though, it shares more DNA with DarkSiders.

Zombies! Tens of thousands of ’em! They’re all over the mall, shuffling about and eating people. And there you are, photojournalist Frank West or one of the less good protagonists, treating them like a minor inconvenience while you chase down the story.

I’ve got a lot of time for the Dead Rising series, all the way back to the 2006 original. Initially intrigued by the technology that could put hundreds of zombies on-screen simultaneously with – for the day – respectable 3D graphics and performance, I found myself won over by game design. Frank, you see, couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the Willamette mall was full of survivors who needed saving, psychopaths (…mmm) who needed stopping, and leads that needed following. The game forced decisions and sacrifice on you, and made it quite clear you couldn’t do everything.

Not the most popular design choice, if you listen to people who shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions. Waaah. I can’t do everything. Whatever. Dead Rising was an intense and memorable experience, one that actively rewarded repeat playthroughs, exploring different paths and routes and choices. It actively reinforced this approach through its meta-progression, with character levels and abilities carried over after death, if you opted to start the story again rather than load your last save. It’s a game about experimentation to learn your environment: where certain items can be found, good routes from A to B, what can be accomplished against the relentlessly ticking clock. Or, if you prefer, a game about ignoring that clock and just dicking around, smacking zombies with parasols and trying on stupid costumes.