Category Archives: Games

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM – Play Diary

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THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM
Nintendo
2023
Nintendo Switch

Tears of the Kingdom’s greatest strengths are in its use of mystery to drive plot, in lost time to create pathos, and its incredible mechanical depth to enhance the gameplay of Breath of the Wild. I found the eventual storyline regarding Princess Zelda to be quite moving, and the dungeons at the centerpiece of this game’s five major temples are clever and concisely designed. Songs like “Lookout Landing,” “Water Temple,” and the new “Main Theme” prove Manaka Kataoka (who got her start writing the iconic “7 P.M.” theme from Animal Crossing: New Leaf will be one of the greatest composers in gaming history. Rather than share the same sort of post I typically do regarding Tears of the Kingdom, an enormous and gorgeous game which could merit an entire playthrough diary and a book’s worth of criticism, I’ve decided to share the diary I wrote during my first days with the game. 

5/14/2023

I’ve decided to start keeping a diary of my sessions playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. There are a number of root causes, but the primary is pretty simple – I want to track my own understanding of the game’s world and lore, exploring the narrative empty space the game offers. It wouldn’t be the first time that I started expanding on a narrative throughline and had it collapse by game’s end. Skyward Sword’s Groose, in a heroic sacrifice, seals Demise within himself and becomes the Demon King Ganondorf, destined to battle his friend Link generationally and lose every time, maybe intentionally. Or…not. But that empty space I filled in still feels thematically relevant and possible, informing how I think about the game’s text. Maybe that misdirection was always in place.

Tears is full of empty space, literally and figuratively, for the player to try to piece together a mystery. A being what look like Zelda keeps being spotted throughout Hyrule, only she doesn’t really behave like Zelda and seems capable of some kind of teleportation or projection. My theory, right now, is that this is The First Zelda, Queen of Hyrule, the Sage of Time (so named by the Sage of Wind) who has projected forward to aid (or threaten) Hyrule’s people. Documented so far, I’ve spotted her:

-Silently blessing Link’s arm with Recall, in the body of a Golden Tear.
-Receiving the Master Sword from Link, presumably back in the past.
-Standing on Hyrule Castle’s ruins before floating away in golden light.
-The Blood Moon rises, with new, more confident, slightly fear-inspiring dialogue.
-*REPORTED*: Zelda came to Kakariko Village after the Upheaval dropped the Ring Ruins. After inspection, she told Purah and her team to stay away from one particular floating ruin. (I can’t airdrop onto it – maybe an angle where pictures can help?)
-Spotted in Rito Village, though no mention of her doing anything but floating away.
-Spotted on Stormbringer Ark, just walked forward and disappeared (no floating.)
-Seen in Memory of the Sage of Wind, where she’s called “The Sage of Time” and in which she predicted Link’s quest.

Zelda in front of the Blood Moon.

Any of these appearances could hypothetically be “Our Zelda” (would like to come up with a name for her. The Archeologist?) or The Sage of Time, or even any Zelda in between those two. So far, none of the Zeldas I’ve seen since separating in the Tomb Depths acts like our Zelda. She’s more direct, mostly, with the rest being on the marginalia. Our Zelda is prone to tangents, repetition – she’s a little nerd and we like that for her. She’s also much more timid. I believe these are appearances by The Sage of Time, and Our Zelda is still somewhere else.

The Stormbringer Ark legend is a curious one. Why did the Rito return to Hyrule? Did they first reach the Stormbringer during The Demon King’s first invasion? The memory of the Sage of Wind indicates so. No other reference to an upheaval is mentioned during the Sky Temple. Did the Rito people simply not participate in the Imprisoning War? Was the Stormbringer (armed with cannons) used as the lead battleship in an aerial fleet? Many questions still to answer. Winter has thawed with Colgera defeated. I’m a little melancholy to have fully reset the region so quickly, but I don’t actually love snow areas in these games, so I’m more likely to dig deeper.

Other threads to pull on in the next sessions:

-Kakariko Village’s Ring Ruins. Still don’t know what these are. One story about the six sages found so far. Might have to make a priority here.
-Hateno Village’s Mayoral Election. The fashion lady is obnoxious. I’m helping Reese. I do really like the hat she designed, though.
-Lurelin Village’s pirate invaders. They’ve taken over my favorite town in the whole game. I’ll have them longshanks. I wonder if you’ll have to go around and find all the citizens who’ve left, or if word will travel for you.
-How long has it been since BOTW? Seemingly, at least a few years. Zelda built a school in Hateno and took over Link’s house. Tulin has come of age, from childhood to becoming a warrior. Paya is now a young adult.
-Impa’s pilgrimage. She left with someone and put Paya in charge to search for something. I wonder if we’ll find her out there.
-The Chasms and Sky Archipelagos. If there is some broader narrative to explore above or below, I haven’t found it yet. No quests are really sending me up or down to explore yet. I know the Yiga Clan is in the depths somewhere, though. I need to hunt for some sky quests. Maybe then I’ll be able to upgrade my power supply.
-The Lucky Clover Gazette. Stable questline. Maybe the first thing I’ll do is warp around to different stables and progress those questlines ASAP. Give myself some more direction.
-Lookout Village. Haven’t really dug deeper into the castle or what’s going on in the village. Supposedly, after the first Temple is completed, stuff opens up in Lookout. I’ll have to stop back.
-Bubblefrog Caves. No idea who to trade the snowflakes to. Satori gave me a clue to look for caves. I wonder if that’s still online, or if it’s been long enough that I’d need to return to the mountain to extend the blessing.
-Din’s dragon. I’ve seen Farrosh and Lanayru. No sign of the red dragon yet. I haven’t been north of the castle except for the Rito questline.

I’ve visited three of the major towns and activated their warps. That leaves five more, right?
-Tarrey Town
-Gerudo Town
-Death Mountain Town
-Zora’s Domain
-Lurelin Village

Lurelin is next. After that, I’ll have to start poking around. I did see that Hestu is apparently northeast of Lookout Village, so I’ll head that way in the hopes of expanding my inventory.

Hestu in Tears of the Kingdom.

5/15

Okay, I made very little lateral progress (just getting east of Lookout slightly) but I made a ton of progress on many of these questions. It’s crazy how much of this game is just laying about in open fields to surprise.

-Bubblefrog Caves. I’m headed for Woodland Stable to meet the “old couple” there who collect Bubblefrog medals.

-Lookout – Things didn’t open up *that* much after the temple. Hestu’s arrived, thankfully. The hidden passage under the castle has a Demon Statue and a little loot down there, but until I can break black blocks, I’m not getting any deeper. (Diamond weapons? Eldin power of summoning?) I’ve unlocked the next phase of Josha’s Chasm questing, to find an underground temple and get a power there (Auto-Build?)

-Impa’s pilgrimage. Sure enough, she was right on the path from Lookout to Rito, investigating the Geoglyphs. This was probably the most impactful bit of lore I got all session – the Geoglyphs each carry one of the Dragon’s Tears, which unlock a memory of Our Zelda’s experience on the other side of her time jump. She definitely is operating in the past! And it seems I was wrong about The First Zelda. If the Sage of Time is not Our Zelda, then she’s also not the First Queen of Hyrule. The First Queen of Hyrule, Rauru’s wife, is a Hylian named Sonia. Each Geoglyph has a memory (found in a small water pool on the design). The next phase of Impa’s quest, where I can presumably find the locations of all the designs and add them to my map, is in a cave in the Hebra trench.

-Lurelin Village’s pirate invaders. Zonai Monster Control have been sent to contest the pirates. I’m headed that way next *for sure* after the Woodland Stable (lol).

-Ancient Hylian text crashed down into the Lookout, sending Wortsworth the Lore Expert to Kakariko Village. Maybe this will allow the questline to progress?

-A construct merchant crashed just north of Lookout, offering a trade of 100 crystallized ore (or whatever currency) for 1 energy cell. Thankful I’ve got that all sorted now!

-Found some brightcap hunters and shield surfers all headed toward the Hebra region. And a cave with a “white bird’s treasure” north in Hebra. If I need to make some cash and find new weapons, I should probably explore northern Hebra.

-Hit 8 hearts, so I’m headed for my first stamina ring. Will switch back to hearts till at least 16 i think after that?

-The Lucky Clover Gazette questline seems to have pointed me toward a vision of Zelda riding some great beast. The images look unfamiliar – maybe this game’s interpretation of Dodongo, but otherwise not recognizable to me. (Dodongo are one of the Zelda 1 enemies still not interpreted in this game, so they’d make sense! There are too many not included to list, though, and they certainly won’t add all of them.)

Main quest stuff: I’m surprised, but returning to Lookout has definitely pointed me toward Eldin next. They’re battling a Gloom crisis on Death Mountain, turning Gorons hostile, but the land is temperate and the need for fire-resistant armor is temporarily eliminated. I’m sure once I clear the Gloom it’ll be back in full swing, though…maybe will buy the armor before I complete that questline.

Lurelin calls, though.

Impa’s blimp overlooking the Geoglyph.

5/16

Lurelin draws even nearer! I’m overlooking the swamp now, with an awful Thunder Gleeok visible overlooking the path into Lurelin. I found a pirate ship on the coast as well, so I know I’m getting close. (Unfortunately, given every enemy appears to be a black or blue foe, I may be here waaaaay too early.) Some headway on other questlines as well.

-The “odd couple” collecting bubbulfrog medals is Kilton and his brother. I never really interacted with Kilton in BOTW, and it feels like he’s got a different vibe.

-We are close enough in time to the Upheaval that a sidequest where borrowing farming tools from a stable is close enough to be a misunderstanding. Maybe a few months.

-Found my first Gloom monsters east of the castle. That was…terrifying oh my god!!!! They can take a lot of damage!

-The Yiga Clan have set up shop on the Great Plateau. I got a Yiga mask after setting free a designer. They also outlined on a map three other locales – they’ve kept their primary base in the desert, but also set up north of the castle in Hebra and even further east of Death Mountain in Akkala.

-The Great Plateau also had by far the most powerful shield I’ve found so far.

-I’ve found the musicians and the first Great Fairy! The others are marked on the map, and they’ll require musicians of their own. You can meet the musicians outside of the band’s tour, you just have to figure out where they went. The drummer is somewhere north of Kakariko, the flutist is at the Horse God’s old stomping ground stable.

-Speaking of the Horse God, a nap revealed that it can be found at a stable in Akkala. People looking for the Horse God think they can find the White Stallion.

-The journalism questline so far has been fairly relaxed, but hasn’t helped me find much of anything about Zelda. The Great Fairy seems to think the blonde figure who looks like Zelda isn’t her.

I also found another couple memories. The first was mostly just showing Rauru’s sage power – big fire of lasers, but also saw Ganondorf’s Gerudo forces (and his summoning of the molduga.) The second was more important – it depicts Sonia’s grave (the mural in the intro also depicts Ganon taking the Secret Stone from Sonia, presumably killing her) and Zelda confronting Rauru about their demise. He mentions “his hubris” leading them to that point. His hubris…maybe Ganon came looking to make a pact? Or maybe just peaceful conquering.

Almost to my goal. Almost rescued my friend from pirates.

The south Thunder Gleeok.

5/17/2023

LURELIN IS SAVED!

That’s really the only major event in this session that I saved. Bolson is there and is going to help rebuild the time – 15 logs and 20 hylian rice. That was one long fucking fight.

I also did fight my way through the black bricks in the Hyrule Castle-bunker passage. It was a fun run! It leads basically into the bottom of the castle, what’s left after you shoop half the castle into the sky. I did one more major event. I leapt under the chasm under Hyrule Castle…and, yeah, unsurprisingly, that leads into the endgame. It’s a long series of tunnels, full of black horriblins, shock like likes, shock keese, ice varietals of both of those, and a white lynel. All of the above are covered in gloom. And then you eventually make it back to the tomb from the beginning. The mural – it reveals that using the monster sword, they can summon a great dragon to battle Ganon back. Past that, you jump down into the heart of the gloom, where a cutscene plays and you fight a full horde of Ganon’s army alongside any sages you’ve gotten secret stones. Since the spoilers abound (I already know too much about the dragon being summoned, for example) I figured I’d find this out sooner rather than later anyway, and thankfully now I know how difficult it is to accidentally stumble into the endgame. (How many people accidentally found themselves battling Calamity Ganon in BOTW? This is way more obvious and requires way more intentional travel. Though…maybe there’s a shortcut I haven’t found.)

Lurelin is saved. 🙂

FEZ

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FEZ
Polytron
2012
All platforms

Fez is the first video game I had to start keeping a notebook to complete. On the surface, Fez is a classic pixel art puzzle platformer with a twist – all of its 2D environments actually exist in 3D, and by hitting the controller triggers, you can rotate the world to another perspective and see a new part of the level. The primary action is jumping around collecting golden cubes (or, for extra challenge, the purple anti-cubes.) Collect all of them and ascend into the monolithic hypercube for a light show akin to Beyond the Infinite from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The world of Fez is a brightly colored collection of floating islands, the primary sensibility being comic. In the town where your avatar Gomez lives, his neighbors largely deny the presence of a third dimension, living a life unaware of a world beyond home (the door is on the back of the 3D island.) There is a factory zone where little billboards in some sort of cube language are accompanied by portraits of Gomez’s Doughboy-like kinsmen. Little pixel frogs ribbit and little pixel gulls caw. The animals, little machines, and bouncy mushrooms are all animated with the kind of charm that rewards attention to small details.

But whatever is Beyond the Infinite is encroaching on this world. Breaking into the third dimension seems to have broken something – as you continue to explore, more and more of the world crumbles into what seem to be black holes, tears in the fabric of reality that Gomez can disappear into. (The game is very forgiving with respawns, finding whatever solid ground you last set foot on and quickly depositing Gomez back to where he can stand passively.) The majority of the sense of peril in this game stems from the early career score by John Carpenter synth descendant Disasterpeace (It Follows, Mini Metro, Under the Silver Lake.) Some tracks are peaceful, others majestic, others energizing – but when he aims for horror, the sense of dread that envelops everything still chills me.

Math class.

After the credits, Fez loops back into a “new game plus” that offers a new first-person perspective and new rewards for earning all 32 golden cubes and all 32 anti-cubes. Doing so involves ascending into Fez’s true difficulty. Fez is not, at its core, a puzzle platformer. The game transcends into a game about archeology. It involves looking for ciphers and decoding ancient language. It involves reading ancient star maps to understand how ancestors looked to the stars. It involves, well, taking notes. The obvious comparison point for games critics in 2012 was Myst. But I haven’t played more than a half hour of Myst – when indie games center on this kind of meta-puzzle, like the brilliant Outer Wilds or this year’s Animal Well, I compare them to Fez.

There is something so immensely rewarding to me about this kind of language game. I’m bad at learning languages in real life – I think in English. I recognize our language’s many, many faults and confusions, but it is the system I understand. While Fez does have a literal language cipher (one that conforms to English directly) it also offers other, less linguistic symbols. Fez doesn’t just challenge the player to solve puzzles – it challenges the player to learn How To Learn. It invites you into a game world with very limited information, gives you everything you need to solve it and hands you the reins to pursue as much knowledge as you care to collect.

The maddening thing about a cipher game is that it is a one-and-done experience. I cannot un-ring the bell. Walking through Fez’s world, the solutions that were once obscure and required meticulous attention to detail are immediately obvious. Being in Fez’s game world is pleasant, listening to Disasterpeace’s score. Some of its platforming challenges are rewarding in the same way replaying a Mario game can be. There are moments of knowing I’ve solved something before but not remembering the exact solution. I used to consider Fez the greatest game I’d ever played. Not being able to recapture that experience will sort of always crystallize it as the best game I played when I was 20 years old.

Fez was a five year passion project, and one of the early examples of a breakout indie game. Unfortunately, Fez ended up being the end of a sentence for its developers rather than the beginning. Even before release, lead designer Phil Fish was considered by entitled gamers to be a blowhard who would never release his game. Then, Fez came out and was extremely buggy, resulting in dismissal from would-be fans (the game works great now.) And then Fish became one of the few male voices standing up to #GamerGate’s bigotry, eventually resulting in him exiting the game industry. Fish will likely never make a game again. The spirit of Fez lives on, but how quickly we silence our own luminaries.

DEPRESSION QUEST

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DEPRESSION QUEST
Zoe Quinn
2013
PC

Depression Quest is a twenty minute narrative game that exists in text, a few scanned polaroids, and some sparse music. You read an account of living with debilitating mental illness and select responses the way you do at the end of a page in a choose your own adventure book. The development software, Twine, simplifies the process of flipping to page 94 by keeping all the threads invisible to the player. It’s very easy to work with, to the point where I’ve developed a couple of very short games in the system (none of which are currently online.)

The game’s primary innovation in the interactive fiction space is crossing out and making inaccessible some of the “healthier” responses to stressors or anxieties of daily life. It communicates very effectively the cognitive dissonance mental illness sometimes creates, where you know it would be better to call and cancel plans but conflict avoidance results in you just lying in bed until you get the “dude wtf” text. It would be better to take a shower and make a meal that actually has some real nutrition, but drinking too much beer is a lot more accessible right now.

There are other, equally brilliant games in the Twine space. One of my favorites, my father’s long long legs, is a fun horror short story similar in tone to some of Stephen King’s best. Another, With Those We Love Alive, combines folklore and fantasy storytelling to aim for a more literary direction. I spend a lot of time on itch.io, playing the free games that float to the top of their recommendations. Most are just fun little mechanics explored in a small game, and occasionally there’s some really wonderful narrative play happening.

A world outside of commercial video games used to be a lot more exciting. Just before the fall, it was chronicled in Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, a narrative of queer and feminist indie game developers creating new and exciting small games that cannot exist with the purpose of generating profit and appealing to the masses. Both Anna Anthropy and the author of With Those We Love Alive have since been credibly accused of abuse. The Video Game Zinesters are maybe the most fractured creative art scene I’ve ever followed. Most retreated from the public gaming sphere entirely when #Gamergate set its ire against them pretty directly, the movement stemming from a positive write-up of Depression Quest on Kotaku.

These small games I love are still being made, but the effort it takes to get people to play them is growing every year. The rise of gaming blockbusters like The Last of Us, God of War, Alan Wake, and my beloved Like a Dragon games have led to games as narrative artistry looking more like soap opera TV and cinema. Even some of the people who grew out of this scene, like Sam Barlow of Immortality and the post-Telltale effort of Campo Santo, have moved bigger and farther away from mechanics first storytelling. It’s not that I want these specific people back making the games again. But replaying Depression Quest is a reminder of a time where the future of games looked unpredictable because the possibilities were endless rather than because the arms race of the mass market was simply unsustainable.

KNOTWORDS

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Knotwords 
2022
iOS, Google Play, Steam

Game designers Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger’s (Good Sudoku, Spelltower) greatest game is Knotwords, their take on crosswords. Unlike the New York Times crossword (or most cryptic crosswords you’ll find), the game does not rely on definition clues or puns to give you the word. What Knotwords uses to clue players toward solutions is zoned areas – outlined sections of anywhere between two and six squares, and a clue showing what letters will be used in that section. The clue also clarifies any doubles you might need – you might get a three-letter clue that spells “OFO,” for example, and those three letters might contribute to spelling “FOOD.” The zones are divorced from the actual puzzle solutions, meaning the actual solving feels quite a bit like a standard crossword. It’s how you get to that solution that things change.

Anyone who does traditional cryptic crosswords will tell you is that most crosswords you’ll find in a magazine or newspaper are actually trivia games first and word puzzles second. If you are familiar with, say, all of the pop culture and historical references in your average NYT crossword, it’ll be solved almost as quickly as you can enter the letters. If you don’t know the last name of “Figure skater Katarina” or “Castle in ‘Hamlet’,” you may be sunk. Add in NYT’s adoration of theme puzzles and you may be trapped in by obscure puzzle logic, multiple puzzles tied to one piece of trivia you don’t know, or, worst of all, the dreaded rebus.

Knotwords does away with all of that – your only required knowledge is the words you hypothetically can spell with a set of letters. If you happen to be unfamiliar with the word in question (the game uses wiktionary, which doesn’t include proper nouns but does include several exotic boats or shrubberies) you can also ask for a hint, offering the definition as well. But because the game also offers all the letters you need, you can also often solve your way into unfamiliar words just as often as you do in a regular crossword.

Our most recent screenshot of a Best New Time! We’ve kept our streak since public release.

Playing the game for free, you’ll have access to the daily puzzles – these grow in difficulty from Monday to Sunday in a way familiar to most daily puzzle players. On average, doing the daily mini and daily classic puzzle takes my wife and I about five to fifteen minutes before bed. We also have bought in for the “puzzle packs,” which are monthly and include some lightly themed puzzles (still less trivia oriented than any crossword, but puzzles themed around food, flowers, or “no big words” can be fun changes of pace) about on par with the standard puzzles.

By comparison to Good Sudoku, their last game, Knotwords is not a game you can readily binge. It’s also stripped away Good Sudoku’s leaderboards, which I find a huge help here. The app has kept Good Sudoku’s perfect visual design and user interface, however, with great colors, beautiful, big blocky letters, and jaunty music that remains peaceful. The letters thunk down satisfyingly, and after solving a puzzle, you’re greeted by the Rabbit, who makes the most satisfying sounds imaginable. According to Schlesinger, “The bunny SFX were created and implemented within the last 12 hours before we submitted the builds – partially because there was so much to do, but partially because [Zach] and I just both completely knew exactly what it would sound like!”

Some might say this game’s modest ambition is not worthy of a “favorite game.” Maintaining a 761-day streak of playing, I can’t help but disagree. How many games can honestly say their design truly rivals the crossword itself? I think its answers to the classic problems of crosswords constitute brilliant game design – no longer being asked “Carly ___ Jepsen” as the most boring of crossword fills and instead just engaging with the language itself alone let me delete the NYT crossword from my phone. And, on top of that, it offers enough meat to the daily experience that it outclasses the endless Wordle-alikes, only meant to hold your attention for a minute or so. With the games Gage and Schlesinger make, there is perfection in simplicity and elegance in presentation. A game that so respects its players’ time and intelligence is one that has the potential to last in our hearts for years.

NIER REPLICANT

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NIER REPLICANT
Yoko Taro, PlatinumGames
2021
Xbox, Playstation 4

“Weiss, you dumbass! Start making sense, you rotten book, or you’re gonna be sorry! Maybe I’ll rip your pages out one by one, or maybe I’ll put you in the goddamn furnace! How could someone with such a big, smart brain get hypnotized like a little bitch, huh? ‘Oh, Shadowlord, I love you, Shadowlord, come over here and give Weiss a big sloppy kiss, Shadowlord.’ Now pull your head out of your goddamn ass and start fucking helping us!”

These words greeted players eleven years ago every time they booted Cavia’s NieR Gestalt, released in the United States as NieR, an action RPG largely dubbed an interesting failure with a great soundtrack. Yoko Taro’s name at the time was completely unknown. That he has managed to transform NieR into a juggernaut uttered in whispered tones alongside Hollow Knight, Persona, and the like is the sort of project every game hopes to endure. Working with PlatinumGames, Taro remade NieR Replicant, the Japanese version of NieR, from the ground up, with rerecorded voice acting and music, new graphics and gameplay, and a new ending. He titled the remake NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… – I will be referring to the remake as NieR Replicant and the broad collection of games as NieR from here on.

NieR takes place in a fallen world. Whatever security existed before has succumbed to an encroaching plague known as the Black Scrawl and the progressive incursion of monsters the people call Shades. Our protagonist (named by the player, known by fans as Nier) searches for a cure to the Black Scrawl for his sister, Yonah, who lives in a village led by two twins, Devola and Popola. The Black Scrawl leaves Yonah an outcast, as no one knows how the plague spreads. When Yonah finds a rumor of a cure known as a Lunar Tear, she sets out to forbidden, dangerous ruins, where Nier rescues her and encounters a magical tome. The book speaks, informing Nier that his magic may be able to combat the Black Scrawl, and their adventure begins.

NieR adventures with gameplay in shocking and delightful ways. Without giving anything away, it references the history of adventure games and horror in surprising, funny moments that take the gameplay off-model. The remake, Replicant, has taken the moment-to-moment action gameplay outside those setpieces and transformed it into a modern, high quality Stylish Action Game, similar to a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, but with so many accessibility options to remove as much difficulty as you like. If you find yourself frustrated by the combat, NieR Replicant is incredibly accommodating in letting you focus on the story. I think more games should offer experiences like this one, which don’t change the core experience on-screen and instead offer options to make it easier to see it through.

The NieR franchise, or the Greater Yoko Taro Project, is largely contextualized by repetition. Players of the breakout sequel NieR Automata will be familiar with his recurring approach involving replaying portions of the same game with minor variation that lead to different narrative outcomes. Players of any two Yoko Taro games in the NieR or Drakengard franchise will recognize his recurring tropes, themes, interconnections, and affection for his characters and lore. And, yes, to see NieR through to endings D and E, you will need to play through NieR roughly two and a half times. I love this fact – it remains one of the most powerful ways to build familiarity with characters and heighten the inevitability of its high highs and low lows.

The protagonist starts the game loving his sick sister, Yonah – he will come to love his ragtag party. From the foulmouthed Kaine, to the snobbish animate tome Grimoire Weiss, to the strange chipper child Emil, this found family comes together to care for one another so deeply that it will change the fate of the world. NieR Automata takes a science fiction approach to relationships, beginning from programmed remove and showing where emotion causes things to break down. NieR Replicant is an epic fantasy. Instead, its emotions are operatic from the very beginning. It uses that passion to focus on how everyone is capable of violent, world-changing love. 

NieR Replicant is also a dark fantasy. The protagonist loves Yonah, but over time, we also come to understand how he resents her illness and wishes he could have a normal adolescent life. Kaine and Emil undergo incredible trauma in their assistance to Nier, facing incredible sacrifices in the face of an immature, egocentric brat – a brat they love. The answers they find about the Shades, the Black Scrawl, and the world they live in are horrifying and raise existential questions about everyone they’ve ever known. NieR Replicant is special because it finds a way to marry intense, sincere kindnesses and awful, melodramatic tragedy.

Even if games aren’t for you, I have to recommend Keiichi Okabe’s music for the game. His style marries emphasis on acoustic instruments (strings, guitar, harp, piano) and women’s harmonized vocals. All of the vocal music in NieR Replicant is performed in the game’s fictional language, a language that sometimes sounds like Japanese, sometimes like German, sometimes French. Okabe’s musical themes communicate the emotional heft of its characters’ decisions and devotions. The soundtrack’s melodic drive, intense control of arrangement and orchestration, and willingness to vary between the familiar and the subversive reflects the game’s own mission. 

DRUG WARS

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Drug Wars
John Dell
1984
PC/DOS, ripped off as Dope Wars

Animal Crossing players are likely familiar with the turnip stalk market. Each Sunday morning, a traveler named Sow Joan (or her also-punned granddaughter, Daisy Mae) comes to your little Animal Crossing town selling turnips. You’re expected to buy them in bulk for roughly 100 bells (the standard currency of Animal Crossing.) Over the course of the next week, your local shop will buy turnips for anywhere from 30 bells to 600. Should you fail to sell them over the course of the week, they will rot.

It’s a fairly basic market speculation simulator, and the way to “game” the system is to have enough friends playing the game that one of them can call everyone over to their market when their turnip prices are favorable. Successfully taking advantage of the market is what allows Animal Crossing players to go from struggling to maintain a balance of $60k to swimming in billions over the course of a year. Because you’re not paying rent or buying groceries, failed investments rarely ruin lives.

This basic concept – buy low and shop around till you can sell high – is the core of 1984’s Drug Wars, programmed by a solo developer named John E. Dell. You have 30 days to make as much money as possible – you start with $2000 and a debt of $5500 owed to loan sharks. You buy and sell cocaine, heroin, acid, weed, speed, and ludes. You can also buy guns for fighting off Officer Hardass and his fellow cops, or trenchcoats for holding more drugs. The interest on your debt to the loan sharks grows quickly and can end your game entirely, but taking out a bigger loan is the only way to get a decent score.

The original DOS Drug Wars.

That arcade infrastructure of the “high score” is an interesting one for a PC game released during the video game crash of ‘83-’86. PC games held strong during this time, but arcades and consoles were on the way out, meaning it was not especially likely people would see that high score. But Drug Wars offers no other ways to celebrate your success – there’s no nominal “buy a nice car” or “buy a Scarface mansion” money goal you’re meant to reach. It’s all measured by that score. Shut out all conception of material reward, material harm, material wealth. You grind drugs and kill cops to be the best drug dealer you can be.

There are other multiplayer games that evolved around the buying and trading of materials to establish market values around this time – Taipan! and StarTrader were cited as direct inspirations for Dell. Like StarTrader, M.U.L.E. uses a similar space colonization theme and multiplayer competitive concept. The difference that leads to Dell’s choice in subject matter and eschewing multiplayer is that Dell was an edgy sophomore in high school. Drug Wars was an assignment for his computer lab. As the story goes, the game was later rewritten and rereleased so many times that even the shareware retitling “Dope Wars” has its own classic nostalgia.

Drug Wars on a TI-83 graphing calculator.

The simplicity of Drug Wars is an accident shaped by its creator trying to get a decent grade. That simplicity is what makes it endure. Games go through cycles of simplicity and hypercomplexity. Right now, I think we’re on a wane, coming down from a peak of percentile modifiers to subsurface microstats and arcane board games and RPGs that seek to simulate the walking balance of a mech’s hydraulic limb system. There is a desire to just get back to skill being built around risk management, with any math being relatively basic.

In that sense, Drug Wars is important to me as a central reminder of how a small game you made in a couple weeks can endure forty full years. Of course, John E. Dell never made a dime off Drug Wars, and according to him, he rarely gets work off its reputation either. Ideas are just as easy to find cheap and sell high.  If you’re clever, mechanics can be reshaped from colonial exploration to sophomoric crime cartoons by a literal sophomore – and then back into cute animal cottagecore by the biggest game developer in the world.

MINI METRO

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MINI METRO
Dinosaur Polo Club
2015
PC, iOS/Android, Switch, PS4

Most games that get cited as “perfect” are either so purely gameplay that they can be modified to fit any aesthetic you want or require such a bizarre cocktail of ideas that they cannot be replicated in any other medium. Tetris is a beautiful game of mechanical perfection – the two best Tetris games of the 21st century, Tetris DS and Tetris Effect, transform the game in wildly different ways. The former, Tetris DS, is a celebration of Nintendo history with a Capsule Corporation menu aesthetic, borrowing sprites directly from NES classics including The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. The latter, Tetris Effect, sends Tetris into the new age stratosphere, with a sea of stars and a pulsing electronic soundtrack, a vibe somewhere between Burning Man and cult imagery. Alternatively, you can have the Super Mario franchise, where you have to cohere overall plumbers, giant turtles, extreme anime pop visuals, and ragtime or big band soundtracks – there is no dramatic “genre” or “mode” that this fantasy obviously fits, no game we play in real life that this matches beyond “pretend.”

Mini Metro illuminates the gap in this contrast by combining its pure gameplay with an immediately identifiable aesthetic that instantly teaches the player how to play it. The game takes place on a topographical railway map. Different shapes appear over time representing stations – each station starts receiving customers, represented by the station shape they’re trying to travel to. You draw rail lines between these stations (with just a drag and drop, easy as can be) and immediately trains start trafficking them along your drawn railway. Your goal is to keep the system running as long as possible before a station’s capacity overflows.

Drawing an effective railway is not simulated purely by distance, but also by the order you’ve drawn your stops – rerouting a line may result in a cleaner pathway that allows the train to take a turn smoothly rather than having to stop at a 180 and build speed again. Each in-game week, the city invests a little more funding – this can take the form of tunnels and bridges for crossing water features, additional trains to travel your rail lines, or additional lines of travel, each represented by their own bright color. The game comes down to drawing smart, efficient lines, and managing your choices in investment to protect yourself from accidentally hitting a dead end. 

Designers could complicate this system and add currency for each rail line, add structural concerns for bridges about how long a carriage can cross safely, include “quality evaluations” along the way for earning extra bonuses from investment. But every decision in Mini Metro stems from the core concept of the aesthetically minimal topographical railway map. These ideas are not those represented visually on the map, and so they’re never introduced. Even the game’s soundtrack (by It Follows/Fez composer Disasterpeace) exists only in the forms of tones which play when passengers arrive or depart from a station. 

A London run at its conclusion.

What separates Mini Metro from other “perfect” video games in my mind is the fact that it so directly looks at a real world concept and adapts it into a compelling and legible game. For comparison, Tetris began as an imitation of a pentomino puzzle game – in a sense, that relates back to Tetris, but the game is also an imitation of other box filling games, not a real world phenomenon. It’s a signifier of a signifier, never quite reaching back to whatever the original meaning was. Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the concept of the Pikmin series because he’d gotten into the habit of gardening and liked imagining a little world in his garden – but the experience of commanding Pikmin as a small military and using them to perform a long-term scavenger hunt has almost nothing to do with gardening. 

Development on this game started after a trip on London’s Underground – even if it hadn’t been London, it’s hard to imagine this game starting any other way. I’ve only encountered city train systems while traveling, and I still can so quickly understand what’s happening in the game because the gameplay is so well communicated by the iconic aesthetic. The railway map design allows the game to abstract more literal simulation without losing focus on the game’s actual intent, which is managing and designing an effective transit system. It’s a motivating game design philosophy, a reminder that play can be right in front of our noses rather than requiring the imagination to create a funny little plumber who shoots fireballs at kappa. Mini Metro is ingenious in the same way the George Dow and Harry Beck transit map model itself is ingenious, communicating where the trains go without literal geography, using easily recognized symbols to communicate importance, and using attractive bright colors that catch the eye and linger in memory. 

CELESTE

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CELESTE
Maddy Makes Games
PC, Switch, Playstation, Xbox

I Was Born For This.

“It was her dying wish.”

“I have to do this.”

The mountain is joining the pantheon of quests in games, alongside a princess in another castle, an alien outsider threatening planetary destruction, and, yes, revenge. There is a mountain; we go to the mountain to climb it. In Journey and God of War, much of that journey is just in getting to the mountain. It is always visible in the horizon; sweeping vistas after long climbs show us that we have “gotten closer,” but not close enough to tell how far the mountain really sits. After a time underground, both games find the base entry point, the snow falling to our character’s face, tassels and scarves flowing in wind.

Celeste too is a game about a mountain. Like the prior year’s Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, it is a game that starts at the bottom of that mountain from the beginning, teaches you the base mechanics of its precision platforming, and sends you on your merry way. And I think Celeste uses that mountain as a similar concept to Foddy’s as a reflection of the player’s own potential depression, insecurity, and need for a hard fought victory. These are, I think, perhaps the two best platformers of the decade in that they introduce new platforming mechanics while using expert intentional level geometry to communicate themes and an idea.

“Introduce” is, in some ways, a tough verb for Celeste, which to an outsider familiar with Matt Thorson’s prior game Towerfall might look like an actual ROM hack of that game. Its movement and airdash were immediately familiar to me, as I’d spent hundreds of hours playing what I’ve (obnoxiously) called “the Best Smash game, bro.” (Towerfall will get one of these columns someday soon, too, when I have a chance to get everyone together and play it for an afternoon.)

Celeste then does something better, that thing our favorite platformers do. Each chapter of Madeline’s story introduces new mechanics. Elevators that move on touch, blocks of starstuff that shoot Madeline forth like she’s cutting through jelly, feathers for Dragon Ball’s nimbus flight; each is quickly explained, quickly understood, and a project to master. These mechanics are then still remixed into later stages, but carefully and thoughtfully and not “because we were afraid it would be disappointing if we left it behind.”

And then it does something even better. It tells Madeline’s story of depression and isolation, and of her willfulness to climb this mountain. It meets Theo, who is kind, aloof, and feels like a real friend, whose musical theme is cozy as James Taylor. It introduces Madeline directly to her other self, who injects the game with as much humor as she does pain. And it does this all with the lightest of touches…except for the brilliant score by Lena Raine (plus credited remixers for the truly difficult B-Sides) which is a natural, exhilarating fit for the game.

Celeste also has no trouble breaking out of its “mountain” theme to play with color.

Lastly – Celeste’s Assist Mode is a hallmark for accessibility in games. That a game so openly confident in its difficulty, so inviting to be compared to “masocore” games and ripe for speedrunning, also is so kind to its player and wants to avail itself to disabled gamers who might gain something from Madeline’s story? It’s just the whole package. They made what they wanted, and made everything they wanted.

Celeste is maybe most iconic for its creator, Maddy Thorson, using the game to come out and transition, to mild outrage from anti-woke chuds and celebration among queer gamers desperate for icons in a dude-heavy landscape. It is not the first queer game by a trans developer, nor is it the most outwardly queer game. However, prior landmark queer games are largely dialogue-heavy adventure games or visual novels, or the comedy short-form experiments of developers like Robert Yang or Nina Freeman. Celeste takes advantage of a gap in the market – a game aimed directly at the heart of the speedrunning hardcore gamer community. Anyone who’s ever watched Games Done Quick knows just how overwhelmingly queer the speedrunner demographic seems to be – Celeste manages to combine queer aesthetics with a gameplay-first design, executing a precise shot at a previously unfulfilled niche. It’s become a landmark “most important” game for that reason – thankfully, it’s a great example of where “most important” and “most fun” meet.

PENTIMENT

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PENTIMENT
Obsidian Entertainment
PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

Describing the process of pitching Pentiment to the executives at Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer stated, “I never would have proposed Pentiment if it weren’t for Game Pass,” the Xbox subscription service which offers a Netflix-like model for playing new games. Indie game development creates brilliant games, but Pentiment is the sort of achievement that can only be made with the decades of expertise leveraged by its development team and the resources afforded by studio development. One look at its art in motion reveals the nature of this staggering accomplishment – they have married the medieval art of liturgical Dutch masters with a game Sawyer described in the linked interview above as “Night in the Woods meets The Name of the Rose.” The presentation of this game is clever and full of the kind of ideas smaller teams cut for scope.

You play primarily as Andreas Maler, an apprentice artist working on his masterwork (think master’s thesis in a grad program) in a monastery outside the small Bavarian village of Tassing. You characterize Andreas through dialogue choices which offer you great freedom, but his voice and sense of humor largely remains the same wherever you place his values. Andreas, meanwhile, characterizes his peers, with different fonts reflecting different levels of literacy – when he realizes he had somebody wrongly pegged, their next line will play out, change font, and then be presented again to reflect their class and education. It’s the sort of judgment you get used to Andreas making.

Andreas defending friend and mentor Piero from the snobby Brother Guy.

The game’s story spans twenty five years in Tassing’s history where the town is thrown into uproar by a series of murders, all seemingly disconnected…save for one mysterious link. Andreas takes it upon himself to solve these murders and protect the falsely accused, partly because he is an educated outsider but also because he is somewhat arrogant and selfish. These murder investigations take place over the course of a handful of days. Andreas will visit with different townsfolk to ask questions, potentially lure them into exposing secrets, and collect evidence. At the end, whether he has enough evidence or not, he will nominate someone for execution, and depending on his case, his accusation will succeed or fail.

Unlike classic LucasArts games, it is impossible to collect all of the evidence and information you need in one playthrough. Convicting the wrong person for a crime won’t stop the game in its tracks. It’s a storytelling game, and part of that story involves finding your own values as you explore impossible situations. As a result, navigating the game’s choices becomes a series of very intentional decisions, and exploring Tassing’s world merits eagle-eyed attention. As a roleplaying game, it gives you so much space to play, to solve problems and find new ones based on choices you made hours ago, that it compares favorably with Sawyer’s prior landmark quest design in New Vegas.

Pentiment’s story is told with expert writing which neither becomes self-serious and dry or the Monty Python skit the art evokes for many modern players. The game is very funny without being condescending to its characters – it respects them as people, not so different from us, but also respects the difference a world of rotted food and Catholic governments would have on its characters’ worldviews. There are moments in this game where a less expert hand might make this a diatribe, but Sawyer and his narrative design team manage to largely keep Pentiment in the voice of the manuscripts which have survived from the era – albeit in plain English rather than unnecessary Middle dialect.

Andreas, dreaming of Saint Grobian and his revelers.

On that Middle dialect – I don’t want to scare people away who might enjoy this game but may not have the Medieval European history education to enjoy it. Whenever a proper noun or historical movement is invoked, you can hit the view button and it will zoom you out to view definitions of each of those terms. Adding in-line footnotes to a game based in history is so outrageously smart that it should become a standard in almost any narrative game. The UI itself is presented as a medieval text, clear maps and quest logs laid in an artful tome.

The joys of Pentiment come in unraveling its mystery and coming to love its characters. Its core mystery weaves in and out and comes to a satisfying conclusion. In the meantime, meals, knitting competitions, local festivals, gossip and play give you opportunities to care for the people you might be sending to conviction. One of my favorite characters is Klaus Bruckner, a block printer and family man whose sense of friendship and loyalty are spoken in sometimes blunt but fair clarity. There are ten other characters I might’ve selected.

One highlight is optional. An Ethopian priest, Brother Sebhat, has come to visit Tassing’s monastery to present his manuscripts for study and documentation. However, he hasn’t gotten a chance to meet the townspeople. He asks you to organize supper. When you arrive, more people than he ever imagined have joined to meet him. Sebhat takes the opportunity to learn about life in town and share his experiences as an outsider, before reading a passage from his own bible. The game’s art style changes at this moment – he presents the story of Lazarus in the art of Ethopian Orthodox Catholicism, with the townsfolk joining this story. The children ask why everyone in his bible is brown. Sebhat’s storytelling gets the chance to express a deeply felt, reassuring sermon about death and salvation, a welcome balm during this murder investigation. As he’s telling his story, one of the little girls steals Andreas’s hat – she then mad dogs you, like, “are you going to interrupt Brother Sebhat to get your hat back?” If you let her keep the hat, twenty years later, her child will be wearing it as a family heirloom.

Brother Sebhat’s Bible, at the moment Andreas’s hat is stolen.

That sequence, I think, highlights the deftness with which Pentiment expresses its narrative. Pentiment is not afraid of the scripture in its world, willing to embrace religion as a powerful force in the lives of its characters, but remains skeptical of the institution which governs that religion. It celebrates the difference between different churches, the churchless, the pagan, the European and African, between men and women. It tells this serious story with a sense of humor, the recognition that sometimes kids are just little shits, without becoming a farce. Sebhat’s supper is one of many scenes that moved me deeply.

I’m a geek for this kind of stuff – medieval literature meets murder mystery is a fanfiction my dreams wrote up while I was writing D&D campaigns in high school. I never thought it would be realized in a video game. It is chock-a-block full of magic, empathy and history. Pentiment marries a celebration of life alongside a recognition of the hardship and violence of a time where most leave no monument. From graves marked for “Two innocents” to the ruins of Roman aqueducts littered throughout Tassing, Pentiment works to preserve a history many never learned.

Desert Golfing 1

Posted in Games, Uncategorized by

Because this piece is no longer available in The Daily Cardinal without use of intense google-fu, I’m reposting it on my own website. This piece originated in The Daily Cardinal’s Arts section on September 29th, 2014.


Some might say that beginning my residency as The Daily Cardinal’s video games
columnist with an editorial on a mobile game is inauspicious. But amidst the
several titles entangling me, none pull as much focus as the stark “Desert Golfing.”
Described by iOS developer Adam Atomic (“Canabalt,” “Hundreds”) as “the ‘Dark
Souls’ of ‘Angry Birds’”—perhaps the most absurd form of description, akin to the
constant ringing question begging, “When will video games have their “Citizen Kane”
moment?,” whatever that means—it is a spare experience that closely evokes the
beloved RPG’s unforgiving indifference.

The game’s presentation is flat and hot; a light brown sky is delineated against a
rough and imposing dark orange landmass. Like a construction paper collage, the
angular hills defy the often-natural rolling dunes. Other times, the land towers above
the small white ball at impossible angles, revealing the constructed nature of each
hole. When the first prop appears beyond simple land and hole flags, it does so
without fanfare, yet it simultaneously serves as a secret to be uncovered and a
fascinating invigoration, an omen that, yes, there is more to discover in this vast
wasteland.

The game presents itself in the iTunes store with a short haiku: “To see a world in a
bunker of sand/And a heaven in a wild cactus,/Hold infinity in the pocket of your
shorts,/And eternity in Desert Golfing.” It appears to be near endless. At hole 2172, I
have yet to feel a need for the game to end. The furthest hole I can find a peer to have
reached is hole 2884.


Yet the game must have an end, for it is clearly authored and personally manipulated;
unlike “Minecraft” or “Flappy Bird,” each player encounters the same courses (as
made evident only by a handful of diligent players posting screencaps to Twitter) and
no one has yet reached an “impossible” course. The continuing journey towards the
game’s denied conclusion is not so much a race as a pilgrimage. And, yes, those
farthest along the two-dimensional path are reporting that there is something to see
upon the horizon.

Swinging at the golf ball is performed exactly as one might launch a red bird at a Bad
Piggy, albeit the game permits you to place your finger wherever on the screen you
might like. Its difficulty often lies in the treacherous nature of its sand; most golf
games use sand as an occasional trap, impossible to escape without using too many
strokes. “Desert Golfing” offers no such escape from the sand, but as a result offers
advantages one might not have previously perceived in the frustrating particles. Sand
will catch a ball as easily as it will allow it to move each simple grain; the ball is
capable of stopping on an incline if it arrives there at the proper angle, but will
tumble or, worse, bounce if granted a bit too much angular momentum.

A simple score counter hangs atop the screen; rather than offer your average-per-hole
or total strokes per 18-hole course, the game keeps a constant count, tallying your
every swing as you ascend into the hundreds or thousands of holes. In one sense, this
is freeing; there is no end in sight, allowing players to swing to their hearts’ content and improve their scores later, upon easier holes. Simultaneously, every swing takes on meaning towards the hole. There is no resetting the game and “starting over to improve one’s score;” your mistakes are only altered by improved performance over the continuing sands.

Time-wasting is often how mobile games are excused for their simplicity, but “Desert
Golfing” offers a meditative experience. With so little detail, the focus must simply be
on the mechanical; “aim, pull, release, observe, repeat” is its rhythmic drum. Games
often feature this same rhythm; September’s largest release, “Destiny,” offers the
same promise of the sublime upon the horizon and the same sort of “aim, pull,
observe” rhythm, albeit with grander skyboxes and sand and a far smaller geography.
“Desert Golfing” is available on iPhone and iPad for $1.99, and on Android devices for
$.99.