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younglegends) wrote2020-07-10 02:42 pm
younglegends) wrote2020-07-10 02:42 pm
Entry tags:
[vg] recent games
i have been playing/watching a lot of video games lately from game bundles and sales, so i thought i'd make a post talking about how i felt about them!
GAMES I'VE PLAYED RECENTLY
prey: ★★☆☆☆
my completionist ass who sucks at video games spent 30 hours finishing almost every side quest on story mode for, you guessed it, the story, and it really had the audacity to disappoint me so bad like that. i just... ugh. idk where to start. let's be real i'm into games for the story so maybe i wasn't the best audience for this game, because its strengths are probably the combat system, with things like the gloo gun, the mimics (which were VERY cool i'm not gonna lie), and the typhon abilities. not to mention the nightmare that pretty much gave me a heart attack every time it showed up (the very first time i didn't even see the quest marker pop up i was just minding my business killing a phantom and then this huge ass shadow beast starts fighting me?! thanks i hate it). also it's true that the main story quests really felt like thinly veiled reasons for you to just explore a new part of a map, which admittedly was fun until it got to the point where you had pretty much uncovered all areas so then there was so much backtracking to do lol.
as a game, prey definitely had one of the coolest beginnings i have EVER experienced. when morgan woke up again after the first test day i thought it was going to be some time loop business but the reveal where you shatter the window glass to see a testing lab outside your "apartment"... i got literal chillssss which unfortunately were never replicated again for the rest of the 30 hours i took to play this game
to be honest i think i had high expectations because 1) from the company that made dishonored, My Favourite Game Of All Time and 2) it was about an asian protag working on a space station with an incredibly diverse cast of characters including her ex-girlfriend... like sign me up. but as i played through the game all the characters and your relationships with them felt incredibly underdeveloped:
maybe also because the ending SUCKED SO BADDDD. like i hate "it was all a simulation!" games/stories soooo bad because ok nothing meant anything. and prey tries to give it actual stakes by having the simulation be FOR something, i.e. this is humanity's last hope, and the events of the game actually did happen, but to morgan, not you (because you are not morgan lollll maybe that's why your identity and relationships felt so cold). but it still feels hollow because ok so the real morgan actually acted a certain way and did certain things in these real situations but i'm going through the motions of those situations in a fake simulation to prove to humans that i am capable of empathizing with humans... eurgh it annoys me so bad just thinking about it. idk maybe i'm just biased against this kind of story but i was so disappointed by it.
i just really get so mad that the game spent so long trying to get me invested in who morgan yu is only for the ending to reveal GUESS WHAT, YOU WERE NEVER ACTUALLY MORGAN YU LOL <3. ok so?! where's the real morgan yu who did evil shit and how did they face the consequences and/or dig themselves deeper? thanks.
what remains of edith finch: ★★★★☆
cw: death, suicide
this was really just spellbinding to play. i love games that are all about the story so yes this was made for me but at the same time the way the stories were told were so creatively entrenched in the video game medium in a way i'd never experienced before. the whole thing really felt like a love letter to video games as a medium for storytelling. there's something incredibly powerful in the way you not only experience the stories, in terms of perspective, but also act to have them unfold... not that you can choose what happens, because you can't—it's a story—but it's your action that continues the telling of it.
my thoughts on the individual stories:
GAMES I'VE WATCHED RECENTLY
soma: ★☆☆☆☆
i didn't play it for myself so maybe that affects my rating. then again maybe if i had played it myself i would have hated it more. from what it looked like to me on the playthrough i watched it was a hell of a lot of walking around in the dark for thinly veiled reasons to progress to the next point (kind of like prey except in prey the setting is at least more interesting with more to discover imo). i was also probably not the intended audience because i just wanted to know more of the STORYYY but there was so much sneaking around in the dark bc it's a ~horror game, obviously.
idk what to say... the questions and concepts raised about identity and consciousness and copies of yourself were interesting but i just remember having such an averse reaction to the ending lol. not that twist of ~YOU were the original this time, not the copy!!~ but when he lashes out against catherine and causes her to short-circuit and she, or at least this version of her, effectively "dies"... i just hated it so badly and i'm trying to work out my own feelings on why that was. i think it was just that the connection he and catherine were able to forge against all odds felt, personally, to me, like the core of the whole game. obviously it's a horror game, obviously it's OK to have horrifying and unhappy endings, but i think i just felt a visceral clash of personal emotional values and that's why i reacted so badly to it lol. because i was genuinely expecting in my mind that it would end with him and catherine in the deep looking up through the blackness of the water wondering if they had succeeded... but like not alone. and that somehow counting for something i guess? i recognize that's a false ideal i made up in my own head so it's unfair to get angry at the game for not falling into line with it but it is ultimately how i felt. but also, the gameplay did seem like something i would hate, so.
devotion: ★★★★☆
i think my rating for this is so high because i've never seen a game that is so realistically and naturally grounded in chinese and taiwanese culture (...or that i've never seen/played any chinese or taiwanese games, i guess) and it was so interesting to see. more than the story itself, how the game told that story was amazing. the apartment, the objects, the mandarin (spoken and written), everything felt so real and so resonant (obviously! bc it was made by taiwanese gamemakers! i'm just saying that for me it was a first time experience and i was amazed and captivated). although there were english translations for the objects/dialogue there were also other nuances that were embedded into the environment that i felt were more cultural in terms of whether you'd catch them or not. for example, the scariest moment in the whole game imo, when the singing competition host on tv is announcing the scores and her voice becomes more frenzied as she repeats 88 over and over again until i realized she was shrieking 爸爸... and this is a smaller thing but when finding and reading the excerpts of the father's script i literally recoiled at the excerpt that revealed he was writing about a happy family of a husband, wife, and SON........ like holy shittt that actually made me sick. and it's one of the excerpts you find later too when the handwriting's all sloppy and you get the sense that everything is deteriorating.
the ways the environment was used to develop the story were so creative, like the doll puppet show, the various rooms, and the picture book which was soooo beautifully done (esp with mei xin's scribbled additions to the story) and one of my favourite parts of the whole game. i also remember that moment of planting the origami tulip and coming back to that room later to find it overflowing with yellow tulips... the moments of beauty were so poignant. the jumpscares on the other hand were not that well done but thankfully there weren't too many of them. i already wrote about the part that terrified me the most but ALSO that scene near the beginning when the mannequins are all arranged around the living room and you leave to the bathroom and when you turn around they're all standing in the doorway staring at you.... and they don't do anything but they're just THERE... AUGHHH that shit was terrible i'm freaking myself out thinking about it now. and the ritual part was of course awful. but again, sometimes more than the story itself, i think the ways in which the story was told were so interesting and creatively designed and executed. and i really loved that.
CURRENTLY PLAYING:
bioshock
tbh not sure how i'm feeling about this. i bought and played through like 80% of bioshock infinite several years ago but have since forgotten everything about it and so i decided i wanted to play through all the bioshock games in order to experience it fully. it's... fine, so far? i'm pretty meh on gameplay and the world and also the characters to be honest. also on my crappy laptop it crashes every few saves or if i play it for too long at a time soooo i've spent way too much time having to replay parts of the game over and over which really does affect my enjoyment of it lmao. kinda hate the combat system but that might just be bc i suck at fighting shit. i'm nearing the end of the game and my motivation at this point is really just getting to finally finish it. that said, the "would you kindly" reveal was p cool as someone who has somehow never been spoiled on it lmao
i also started playing night in the woods a while back but i've paused bc i restarted the whole game in a fit of hubris after finding out i should be committing to a single friendship route at a time instead of trying to have the best of both worlds LOL i really did love it so far though, i think my favourite part has been the poetry club, making bea laugh at the mall, and talking with lori by the train tracks which was such a beautiful moment. searching for another game to play now too... i tried gris the other day but wasn't feeling it at the time, i think i'll try oxenfree next!
GAMES I'VE PLAYED RECENTLY
prey: ★★☆☆☆
my completionist ass who sucks at video games spent 30 hours finishing almost every side quest on story mode for, you guessed it, the story, and it really had the audacity to disappoint me so bad like that. i just... ugh. idk where to start. let's be real i'm into games for the story so maybe i wasn't the best audience for this game, because its strengths are probably the combat system, with things like the gloo gun, the mimics (which were VERY cool i'm not gonna lie), and the typhon abilities. not to mention the nightmare that pretty much gave me a heart attack every time it showed up (the very first time i didn't even see the quest marker pop up i was just minding my business killing a phantom and then this huge ass shadow beast starts fighting me?! thanks i hate it). also it's true that the main story quests really felt like thinly veiled reasons for you to just explore a new part of a map, which admittedly was fun until it got to the point where you had pretty much uncovered all areas so then there was so much backtracking to do lol.
as a game, prey definitely had one of the coolest beginnings i have EVER experienced. when morgan woke up again after the first test day i thought it was going to be some time loop business but the reveal where you shatter the window glass to see a testing lab outside your "apartment"... i got literal chillssss which unfortunately were never replicated again for the rest of the 30 hours i took to play this game
to be honest i think i had high expectations because 1) from the company that made dishonored, My Favourite Game Of All Time and 2) it was about an asian protag working on a space station with an incredibly diverse cast of characters including her ex-girlfriend... like sign me up. but as i played through the game all the characters and your relationships with them felt incredibly underdeveloped:
- i felt no closeness or relationship at all with alex when he's your literal brother who has betrayed you for the sake of a common stake you once both believed in—like, there's so much potential there? but idk why i felt nothing maybe because he only communicates you through phone calls that barely develop anything other than Morgan Dont Do This Please You Must Understand I'm Not Gonna Tell You Shit Tho.
- with mikhaila—i think the only moment i felt real potential for Character Conflict was when you played the audio log of you coldly killing her father only for her to instantly forgive you a few minutes later, and again not to your face, but by calling you and saying "it's okay i know that wasn't you as you are now so i can't be mad..." (i mean yeah now we know it Literally wasn't you but still it felt like. HELLO?! nothing means anything? who are any of us)
- genuinely i think the only interesting character in the whole game—and there are a lot of characters, mostly corpses you find with audio logs or email inboxes or environmental tidbits that reveal a little bit about what kind of people they were—was danielle sho because she just had so much personality (lol) and her relationship with abigail but like they're dead/she dies so... whatever...
maybe also because the ending SUCKED SO BADDDD. like i hate "it was all a simulation!" games/stories soooo bad because ok nothing meant anything. and prey tries to give it actual stakes by having the simulation be FOR something, i.e. this is humanity's last hope, and the events of the game actually did happen, but to morgan, not you (because you are not morgan lollll maybe that's why your identity and relationships felt so cold). but it still feels hollow because ok so the real morgan actually acted a certain way and did certain things in these real situations but i'm going through the motions of those situations in a fake simulation to prove to humans that i am capable of empathizing with humans... eurgh it annoys me so bad just thinking about it. idk maybe i'm just biased against this kind of story but i was so disappointed by it.
i just really get so mad that the game spent so long trying to get me invested in who morgan yu is only for the ending to reveal GUESS WHAT, YOU WERE NEVER ACTUALLY MORGAN YU LOL <3. ok so?! where's the real morgan yu who did evil shit and how did they face the consequences and/or dig themselves deeper? thanks.
what remains of edith finch: ★★★★☆
cw: death, suicide
this was really just spellbinding to play. i love games that are all about the story so yes this was made for me but at the same time the way the stories were told were so creatively entrenched in the video game medium in a way i'd never experienced before. the whole thing really felt like a love letter to video games as a medium for storytelling. there's something incredibly powerful in the way you not only experience the stories, in terms of perspective, but also act to have them unfold... not that you can choose what happens, because you can't—it's a story—but it's your action that continues the telling of it.
my thoughts on the individual stories:
- i loveddd molly's, because she was the first, and she just so beautifully subverted all of my expectations for this game and all its stories. when she opened the window to look closer at the bird i thought, oh so this is how she dies, she falls out the window, i see. except then she turned into A CAT! and it was literally magical! and i could climb the tree branch out into the night! the game did such a good job of building up to that and really bursting into that moment of freedom, i completely felt that sense of joy and wonder. and then the dread/fear of the story's ending.
- barbara's story, plotwise, wasn't my favourite but i have to commend the medium with which it was told... the horror comic book was so well done and when the reins were handed over to me to act out the story i was literally like NOOOOO i do not want this........ i hate it here... but again so effective for building mood and tension. i feel the same about sam's story (with the camera) and milton's flipbook. just so much creativity in how the telling of each story is so beautifully wound up with who that person was.
- in terms of your own action continuing the story, i really felt it in calvin's story, when you have to swing for so long, and also gus when you're flying the kite through the words and then collecting all of the flyaway furniture, feeling a sense of vindictive satisfaction at the whirlwind you're controlling, only of course to have it turn on you in the end. gregory was awful, of course, and the letter to kay was wrenchingly brutal. walter's story was really well executed—i think i just personally found the twist to be a bit too cruelly ironic and on the nose.
- of course my favourite story undoubtedly belonged to lewis. i have never experienced a feeling like that in a video game and i doubt i ever will again. when you go into his room and there's the tidbit about how edith would always play video games with him but he wasn't very good at them. and then in his story, in the middle of slicing salmon heads at the cannery, and the monotony of repeating the mindless rhythm for so long—when the black cloud appeared to represent his imagination taking over, and i realized what he was imagining was a video game, i literally got tears in my eyes. i have tears in my eyes remembering it now. and his imagination expands, and the game expands, and it gains dimension, and colour, and detail, and it takes over. and still the salmon are piling up, and the dissonance between the right hand slicing the salmon and the left hand navigating the imaginary video game, and how even that can be managed into its own sort of rhythm after long enough. and the video game story, narrated so beautifully in that neutral tone by the therapist, and how there was the option to romance either a prince or a princess, and how they're indian probably because lewis wanted to connect to that side of his heritage. and when it builds up to the adoring crowds and the walk you have to take up to the guillotine i literally balked... i had to walk forward and complete the story but i really didn't want to and even considered just stopping the game so i wouldn't have to do that to him, as him.
GAMES I'VE WATCHED RECENTLY
soma: ★☆☆☆☆
i didn't play it for myself so maybe that affects my rating. then again maybe if i had played it myself i would have hated it more. from what it looked like to me on the playthrough i watched it was a hell of a lot of walking around in the dark for thinly veiled reasons to progress to the next point (kind of like prey except in prey the setting is at least more interesting with more to discover imo). i was also probably not the intended audience because i just wanted to know more of the STORYYY but there was so much sneaking around in the dark bc it's a ~horror game, obviously.
idk what to say... the questions and concepts raised about identity and consciousness and copies of yourself were interesting but i just remember having such an averse reaction to the ending lol. not that twist of ~YOU were the original this time, not the copy!!~ but when he lashes out against catherine and causes her to short-circuit and she, or at least this version of her, effectively "dies"... i just hated it so badly and i'm trying to work out my own feelings on why that was. i think it was just that the connection he and catherine were able to forge against all odds felt, personally, to me, like the core of the whole game. obviously it's a horror game, obviously it's OK to have horrifying and unhappy endings, but i think i just felt a visceral clash of personal emotional values and that's why i reacted so badly to it lol. because i was genuinely expecting in my mind that it would end with him and catherine in the deep looking up through the blackness of the water wondering if they had succeeded... but like not alone. and that somehow counting for something i guess? i recognize that's a false ideal i made up in my own head so it's unfair to get angry at the game for not falling into line with it but it is ultimately how i felt. but also, the gameplay did seem like something i would hate, so.
devotion: ★★★★☆
i think my rating for this is so high because i've never seen a game that is so realistically and naturally grounded in chinese and taiwanese culture (...or that i've never seen/played any chinese or taiwanese games, i guess) and it was so interesting to see. more than the story itself, how the game told that story was amazing. the apartment, the objects, the mandarin (spoken and written), everything felt so real and so resonant (obviously! bc it was made by taiwanese gamemakers! i'm just saying that for me it was a first time experience and i was amazed and captivated). although there were english translations for the objects/dialogue there were also other nuances that were embedded into the environment that i felt were more cultural in terms of whether you'd catch them or not. for example, the scariest moment in the whole game imo, when the singing competition host on tv is announcing the scores and her voice becomes more frenzied as she repeats 88 over and over again until i realized she was shrieking 爸爸... and this is a smaller thing but when finding and reading the excerpts of the father's script i literally recoiled at the excerpt that revealed he was writing about a happy family of a husband, wife, and SON........ like holy shittt that actually made me sick. and it's one of the excerpts you find later too when the handwriting's all sloppy and you get the sense that everything is deteriorating.
the ways the environment was used to develop the story were so creative, like the doll puppet show, the various rooms, and the picture book which was soooo beautifully done (esp with mei xin's scribbled additions to the story) and one of my favourite parts of the whole game. i also remember that moment of planting the origami tulip and coming back to that room later to find it overflowing with yellow tulips... the moments of beauty were so poignant. the jumpscares on the other hand were not that well done but thankfully there weren't too many of them. i already wrote about the part that terrified me the most but ALSO that scene near the beginning when the mannequins are all arranged around the living room and you leave to the bathroom and when you turn around they're all standing in the doorway staring at you.... and they don't do anything but they're just THERE... AUGHHH that shit was terrible i'm freaking myself out thinking about it now. and the ritual part was of course awful. but again, sometimes more than the story itself, i think the ways in which the story was told were so interesting and creatively designed and executed. and i really loved that.
CURRENTLY PLAYING:
bioshock
tbh not sure how i'm feeling about this. i bought and played through like 80% of bioshock infinite several years ago but have since forgotten everything about it and so i decided i wanted to play through all the bioshock games in order to experience it fully. it's... fine, so far? i'm pretty meh on gameplay and the world and also the characters to be honest. also on my crappy laptop it crashes every few saves or if i play it for too long at a time soooo i've spent way too much time having to replay parts of the game over and over which really does affect my enjoyment of it lmao. kinda hate the combat system but that might just be bc i suck at fighting shit. i'm nearing the end of the game and my motivation at this point is really just getting to finally finish it. that said, the "would you kindly" reveal was p cool as someone who has somehow never been spoiled on it lmao
i also started playing night in the woods a while back but i've paused bc i restarted the whole game in a fit of hubris after finding out i should be committing to a single friendship route at a time instead of trying to have the best of both worlds LOL i really did love it so far though, i think my favourite part has been the poetry club, making bea laugh at the mall, and talking with lori by the train tracks which was such a beautiful moment. searching for another game to play now too... i tried gris the other day but wasn't feeling it at the time, i think i'll try oxenfree next!