Excuses, excuses

My Steam history might explain why there's no new book this year, but it's more just reading.  I've been exceptionally inclined to just read, especially during the second half of this year.  I am still making (slow) progress on on Tangleways, and other project, and other other project that distracted me from other project.  Eventually, these will all be published, but until then, wishing you a happy end of year, and a good one next year.

New release - The Starfighter Invitation

The only thing bigger than the world's first full virtual reality game is the mystery surrounding its origins.  Who is behind Ryzonart Games?  How was such a huge advance in technology achieved?

Taia de Haas loves having her own virtual spaceship, and wants nothing more than to visit every planet in the solar system.  But she cannot ignore the question of whether such a magnificent gift comes with strings attached.  Is the game a trick, a trap, a subtle invasion?  Or an opportunity to step up and fight for her own planet?

Caught in a tangle of riddles and lies, Taia can't resist trying to win answers from Ryzonart's mysterious administrators.  But will finding the truth cost her the Singularity Game?

About the book

This is a story that began life as "Snug Ship" which is a name that I liked a lot (not least because it was easy to fit on a book cover!), but didn't exactly telegraph what kind of story to expect.  It wasn't until late in the development of the story that I decided to change to The Starfighter Invitation - not because I don't like the final title, but because I felt it telegraphed perhaps a little too much.

This was also a book that took me a long time to write - nearly two years - which I can only blame on 'research'.  To write a story about MMOs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) I felt it necessary to refresh my memory of MMOs, and so I reactivated my Final Fantasy XIV account.

Pictured is my character (Rennyn).  Although there is some pointlessly revealing clothing, one of the things I really appreciate about FFXIV is the wealth of clothing options that don't involve chainmail bikinis.

In terms of writing speed, that was a mistake.  FFXIV is a beautiful game (with a lot more plot than the usual MMO), but like all MMOs it's designed to be played and played and played.  There is no end, there is just a timesuck of enormous proportions.  Eventually (admittedly after I'd levelled all the crafts to the current max level) I decided the only thing to do was quit cold turkey, and so I logged out one day and never logged in again (though I do intend to pick it up when the new expansion comes out around June).

The Starfighter Invitation covers something of the experience of playing an MMO, while adding true virtual reality to the mix.  The experience of virtual reality is definitely a topic that opens up exploration into the self you present and the self that you feel that you are.  I also spent a lot of time thinking through narrative structure, since I was building the story along the common experiences of an MMO player.  I'm not sure the way I approached the structure will work for everyone, but much of it will certainly be recognisable to MMO fans.

I also spent some time getting into current gaming culture so that I wasn't using completely outdated slang, and now regularly watched Twitch and YouTube as a result.  I don't stream myself, however, as my internet connection is not currently up to it.

The Singularity Game series is an ongoing one, and I'll be swapping off writing it with The Trifold Age, so next up will be Tangleways (finally!).  I would very much like to get Tangleways out in late 2019, but my writing speed has definitely dropped, so I will make no guarantees.

I hope you enjoy meeting Taia (and Dio, who is one of my favourite characters ever).  See you in-game.

Links

These are the currently-available links.  I will add to them as further links (including the trade paperback) become active.

• Smashwords. [50% off coupon valid until 16/12 NS98W]
• Kobo.
• Google Play.  [Note: Google Play books are always priced as more expensive for complicated price-matching reasons - I recommend waiting until Google does a deep discount.]
• Amazon US.
• Amazon UK.
• Amazon AU.
• Amazon FR.
• Amazon DE.

Writing Distractions - a gaming rundown

Over at The Book Smugglers they're well into their yearly Smugglivus celebrations, and I have a post about the games I've been playing, and my thoughts about virtual gaming.

Lots of pretty pictures in this one!

FFXV (mild spoilers)

Final Fantasy Boy Band came out last week, and I racked up 50-60 hours of gameplay and now it is done.

Another very pretty game, and gameplay-wise it was pretty solid Final Fantasy, with endless side quests and open world stuff that you could meander through at your own speed - at least until you hit the end game railroad.

Like many Final Fantasy fans, I was a bit dubious about the 'boy band' aspect.  No female playable characters at all is disappointing - though not irredeemable to me - there has been at least one all-female FF game, and all male playable characters aren't necessarily a gamebreaker for me.

'Cindy the mechanic' nearly was.  Cindy's outfit was a painful piece of fan service, and boy did they love posing her for viewing pleasure.  The windscreen washing was particularly egregious.  She was also the female character we spent the most time with.  Still, at least she was competent.  Aranea and Lunafreya were both better dressed, and we even got to do a dungeon-crawl with Aranea, who has a nice line of snark and some hilarious dragon cosplay going on.

Unfortunately, FFXV has a massive plot problem.  For one thing, most of the plot isn't in the game, it's in an entirely separate movie called Kingsglaive (which I haven't watched).  And what started as a reasonably enjoyable game dissolved into a shemozzle of epic proportions during the end-game, with most of the characters you met during the first forty hours of the game getting a brief mention rather than satisfactory final scenes, and even the primary 'brotherhood' theme coming off pretty weak since we needed more of the _beginning_ of these four's friendship to really appreciate that friendship being under stress, and then finally enduring.

So, for those trying to decide on whether to play the game - the first two-thirds are great classic FF, if lacking in playable female characters and backstory.  The last third isn't particularly fun to play, and reads more like cliff notes or dot points of a plot rather than a satisfying story.

But it's very pretty, and I play quite a few of these games for the pretty.

Epistory (game)

I've not played a typing game before that wasn't designed to teach typing.

Epistory is definitely not here to teach you typing.  In fact, if you're not a plus 50 wpm (and preferably more like plus 80 wpm) typist, I don't recommend this game.

I mean sure, it has an origami girl on a cool origami fox trotting through an origami landscape that unfolds before your eyes.  And you can change the landscape - spawning trees or flowers or removing logs by typing their names.  And the creepy crawlies coming toward you every so often are easily banished with a quick key word or several key words.  And you even get skills to take out multiple enemies at once, and can manage boss battles where a dozen things are heading toward you from all sides and you're typing and owning them with your skills and your three and four and five letter words and then it hits you with nocturnal and polysyllabic and hyperglaecemic and...

Beginner typists simply aren't going to survive.

It was fairly short on the story part, and the control mechanism for the fox is a bit irritating, but for those who are fast typists, this game will give you a nice challenge.

Inside (game) (no spoilers)

A friend of mine emailed me about this game, noting that she'd seen reviews that said "buy and play and don’t look at reviews first so you get the full wonder of it" - and so I did.

The game starts with a boy, in a forest, who starts to run right...and that's about all I'm planning to tell you about the details of the game.  It really is a game that will reward discovering what happens by yourself.

"Creepy mindfuck" is the most common description I've been able to find for that game...and that fits well enough.  It certainly is an incredibly tense and atmospheric game, with good, mostly not-too-difficult puzzles and multiple moments of wonder, awe and horror.

I'm so-so on the ultimate ending, but this game was definitely more about the journey than the explanation.

You'll get about four hours worth of playtime out of it - and for those without the budget/inclination, this is a game which will probably be enjoyable to watch a few Let's Plays (especially a couple of the more shocking bits).

Potential spoilers in any comments, so if you haven't played don't read them just in case...

Goetia

Goetia is a point and click puzzle game where you play a glowing ball of light that rises up from the grave of a girl named Abigail, and spend your time trying to work out what happened to Abigail's family, and why Abigail's family home is abandoned.

Being a glowing ball of light has its advantages - you can pass through walls, for a start, though you soon encounter walls with demonic shields.  And a demon.

This is an eerie, interesting and enjoyable game that will give between five to infinity of gameplay, depending on how good you are at puzzles, or how quickly you give in and cheat.  It's a hard game, with no handy arrows pointing to where you should go next, but mostly logical puzzles that you can solve with a bit of work.  I was very proud of myself for solving the typewriter translation!  I cheated ruthlessly in other parts!

Recommended to fans to spooky point and click.

Fallout 4 (some spoilers)

Fallout is one of the major game franchises that passed me by - primarily because I'm a hard sell on shooters, though the Fallout series did have more of a reputation for story than most others.  It's also what's known as a 'sandbox' game, which usually means there's a ton you can do, and a thousand different paths to get there.  It's a rare sandbox game that doesn't exhaust me long before the main quest ends (eg. Skyrim).

Fallout 4: There is no massive moon hanging in the sky in the actual game.

Still, I picked up Fallout 4 at least in part because of the slick graphics, and because of the positive reviews.  And also because of some of the cartoons going around showing the character creation process, where you get to design both yourself and your spouse (though cannot choose the gender of your spouse - and, minor nitpick, the child waiting in the next room does not appear to reflect any of the appearance changes you might make [though I've heard that the appearance is supposed to be generated according to the parental appearance]).

[I spent as much time working on my spouse's appearance as my own, even though I knew that character would die before the game got really started.  Not such a waste of time, since I had multiple opportunities to visit the corpse, or watch him die in flashbacks.]

Dressing for success in the post apocalypse. Lucky there's plenty of laundry cleaner scattered about.

Starting at the fourth game in series isn't a big bar to new players, since each of the Fallout games starts with a new character (dubbed "the Lone Wanderer"), who emerges from a vault after a nuclear war that has devastated a fission-tech Earth around 2077 (an alt-reality that seems to be going for a Stepford Wives vibe).  In Fallout 3 I gather you start the game as a child born in a shelter, but Fallout 4 adds a twist of cryo-storage and you go through a brief starting sequence of your family being frozen in their shelter, your character waking briefly to see their child stolen and their partner murdered, then frozen again before being properly released.

The double-freezing leads to an obvious twist, though there is a nicely-done fakeout in relation to your search for your stolen child.  However, long before you get anywhere near your child's trail, you must deal with "the Commonwealth" (set around the ruins of Boston), where the law has almost completely fractured following the fall of the Minutemen.  They are the first of four factions you encounter and you can choose to help out, and start re-establishing protected settlements (and get lost in an entire side-game of clunkily building houses, decorating them, and setting up defences and supply lines).

The other factions are the Brotherhood of Steel (basically a variation of Nazis, always talking about purity and wanting to kill off everything not-quite-human), the Institute (a shadowy super-tech place which everyone in the Commonwealth is convinced is, for some reason, replacing people with replicants called synths), and the Railroad (a group dedicated to helping synths escape the Institute).

On the whole, I found Fallout 4 to be compulsively playable - tons of little quests, and a landscape seething with life.  I racked up between 4 and 5 full days played before I completed the main quest line and decided 'no more' (there is scope for continuing on with minor quests near-indefinitely).  At the same time, I didn't find the main quest particularly compelling - especially once you get to meet with the Institute.  Part of that is, I think, because I didn't find the Institute leader's actions at all believable (ludicrous, in fact).  There is also very little option to try to convince any of these factions to change their views, even when some of the leader's actions in particular suggest he's not nearly so firm on the major divisive issue as his words would suggest.

There are a ton of potential companions - so many I didn't even find them all - and the companion quest lines, unsurprisingly, are some of the more interesting segments of the game - and the voice acting overall there is just fabulous.  My faves were Dogmeat (the iconic german shepherd companion, who is just glad to be around you - I felt bad every time I swapped him out as a companion), Hancock and Nick Valentine.

D'aww!

The game is also swimming in bugs (some of them shoot streams of maggots at you, but the rest just mess with the gameplay).  Most don't cause major issues, but it's worth saving frequently.

Recommended for: anyone who has several weeks free, and doesn't have a book they're supposed to be writing.

Life is Strange (all the spoilers)

Life is Strange is a recently-concluded Square Enix game set in a US high school where our girl photographer protagonist Max discovers her powers of time-reversal and embarks on a journey of choose-your-own adventure and then erase that choice and choose again if you don't like the outcome.  I played the first episode of this some time ago and set the game aside because I'm not overly keen on playing through the teen experience of bullying and girls-as-victims of violence themes that the game seemed to focus on.

 

 

But plot curiosity is one of my traits – and since I'd already purchased the full series, I picked the game up again after episode 3's release.

 

The game is a type becoming more common: small to no combat (LiS has none), similar to visual novel games where you follow a primary plot while impacting secondary outcomes (how other characters feel about you, usually), with all those choices ultimately deciding which "endings" are available to you (often ranged from 'best ending', 'good ending' and 'bad ending').  These games are also increasingly broken up into a number of chapters, where at the end of each chapter you get a summary of the major choices, and a breakdown of what percentage of players made what choice.

 

 

LiS has many positives.  It's visually lovely, and the photography works nicely to make the player look at the world in even more detail.  It's well-scripted (the teens mostly talk like teens), well-acted, and has few dull or dragging sections.  If you're looking for a game that grips you by the feels and hauls, then you'll find this is a game that pulls you all the way under.

 

My initial qualm about the game – that of not really enjoying situations of female victimhood – is fulfilled in the final episode with a truly unpleasant visit to the "Dark Room".  But it's the final decision of the game that has me continuing to think about the game.  [Don't read on unless you're happy to be completely spoiled on this game.  Also note that this is a game that definitely warrants several trigger warnings in relation to bullying, abuse and suicide.]

 

LiS starts out with Max returning to her home town of Arcadia Bay to attend Blackwell Academy – particularly the class of a prestigious photographer, the hipster-cool Mr Jefferson.  Like many schools it has problems with bullying, of privileged and non-privileged students – and it's plastered with posters of a missing girl, Rachel Amber.

 

During class one day Max has a strange vision of climbing to a lighthouse during a tornado.  After class, a trip to the bathroom (and the inevitable butterfly-effect allusion) leads her to witness the school rich kid, Nathan, meet with a blackmailing, blue-haired girl – who he promptly accidentally shoots and kills.

 

Wanting to stop this event leads Max to discover she can rewind time, and she ends up back in her classroom, right after she'd had her vision of a tornado.  Naturally, she sets out to "fix things" by saving the mysterious blue-haired girl from being shot – doing so by setting off the fire alarm.

 

Max now has a dilemma – she knows that Nathan has a gun and is seemingly spiralling out of control – but she also has brand new rewind powers.  Unfortunately, Nathan's now suspicious of her, and confronts her in the car park, only to be foiled by a quick getaway in the truck of the blue-haired girl, who turns out to be Max's nearly-unrecognisable childhood friend, Chloe Price.

 

Where Max is shy and a little nerdy, Chloe is brash, rule-breaking and defiant – considerably changed from the girl Max knew.  Much of this change is put down to the death of Chloe's father shortly before Max's parents moved from Arcadia Bay: Chloe has been acting out from a sense of abandonment, her anger exacerbated by her mother's remarriage to an all-rules-and-lectures security officer, and then the disappearance of the friend who was helping her get through it all, Rachel Amber.

 

The relationship between Max and Chloe is the core of LiS.  Max's guilt and Chloe's anger play off each other as they renegotiate their friendship, and try to investigate Rachel's disappearance while dealing with the various crises that arise from a dysfunctional school – the bullying frenemy Victoria, the fragile Kate, the wants-to-be-more-than-friends Warren.  Max, with the advantages of time reversal, can help or hinder her fellow students, can accept or fail to notice Warren's romantic overtures, can uncover the spying tendency of Chloe's "step-douche", David, and anger – or kiss - Chloe.  There's a lot of joy in this section, this connection between two friends, but a couple of flies in the soup as well: Chloe is in debt, she's angry, she's messed up, and she's occasionally willing to throw Max under the bus for her own benefit.  But then, Chloe's had a dark few years, and Max's return is helping.

 

It's not until Kate attempts to commit suicide that Max really hits the limits of her power.  She can reverse time enough to try to talk Kate down, but she can't reverse it so far as to undo all the little choices and decisions that will make the difference between succeeding and failing.

 

Many players are unable to save Kate – an event so upsetting that quite a few players replayed previous chapters in order to be able to succeed – something that Max is unable to do – until she can.  Or, at least, Max discovers her time-travel abilities have expanded to travelling to any point of time in the past that's been captured in a photograph.

 

Naturally Max immediately travels back to "fix" the major event that seemed to cause so many problems: the death of Chloe's father.  And it works!  She visits the past, prevents a car accident, and returns to a future where Chloe's dad is still alive – and Chloe had a car accident instead, is paralysed, and dying, as her parents drown in medical-bill debt.  This is where the player might feel that the game universe is being a little unfair, as Max has to choose between undoing her "fix", and killing her best friend.  She chooses the friend, of course (not something players can alter), and the timeline reverts to the angry Chloe fixated on finding her missing friend.

 

Here the investigation steps up, but with a suggestion of a major cost.  Weird stuff is happening around town – snow in summer, whale beachings, doubled-moons – not to mention those persistent visions of a mega-tornado, and a clear physical toll on Max.  The story presses on, uncovering the truth about Rachel Amber – and the reasons for Kate's distress, and who is the bad person behind all this, which culminates in Chloe's sudden, shocking murder, and a not-at-all pleasant scene at the beginning of the final part of the game, where all players everywhere really want Mr Jefferson to just shut the fuck up, and Max is frantic to escape and go back and stop Chloe from being killed.

 

Which she does.  But here we hit the real consequence.  Messing with time, as heavily foreshadowed, carries a storm of a price.  Max's mental situation starts to fragment, as we spin through possible alternate realities – or perhaps simply nightmares – until finally she – and the players – are faced with one final choice: go back and undo the first change, the one that set this all off, or watch the entire town be wiped out by a no-warnings tornado.  Let Chloe die, or destroy the town.

 

In other words, this game doesn't have a "good" ending.  This is a game where you kill the person you have spent the entire game trying, in one way or another, to save, or you become a mass murderer.  Where you kill fragile Kate, sitting in her hospital room.  Where you kill Chloe's mother.  Where you kill Warren, the science-boy who was so eager to play White Knight for you.  Where you kill Victoria, the frenemy you ended up kinda on-side with.

 

Where you kill babies.

 

And here's where those end-of-chapter choice statistics become fascinating.  Because (last time I looked) in this lose-lose situation, 50% of players save the town.  50% save the girl.

 

I'm hard-wired in the former camp: the Mr Spock camp, so to speak.  You don't kill hundreds of innocent people to save one, no matter who they are, no matter how much you care.  You don't kill babies.

 

So I, the player, watched Chloe's funeral, and cried quite a bit.  Then I turned to ever-useful YouTube to watch the alternate ending, where two friends – horrified, exhausted, stunned - drive out of town through the wreckage, leaving behind nothing but rubble and corpses.  Together at any price.

 

[I have to wonder if Chloe's surname isn't a coincidence.]

 

Anyway – an unusual, powerful and complex game.  I don't think it's an entirely fair dilemma – there was no option to let the storm hit but do your best to evacuate the town, for instance.  I also think that there's a mild logic issue with why Max's power woke at all – she didn't even know it was Chloe being shot, at first, and wasn't nearly so powerfully bound up in saving her until after they reconnected.  So why did the time-bending power waken?  But I still like how this ended, I like this choice between loss and being (basically) a villain.  And it says something for the sheer charisma of Chloe, the power of the friendship (or potential romantic relationship, if you followed that course), that so many players will choose the one over the many.

 

[Note: the game skirts into ableism in the alternate timeline (this skates by because Chloe is not only disabled, but a few months short of death, so the message that being paralysed is worse than anything is leavened).  Nor is the story's handling of David (does very iffy things, but ultimately forgiven because well-meaning troubled vet) entirely unproblematic.  Because Chloe is also fairly clearly signalled as a lesbian, the game also falls into the "tragic queer" territory.]

Until Dawn (mild spoilers)

The point where I lost interest in Until Dawn was well over halfway through the game - after the First Reveal, and the Explanation Point.  At this point, the four characters I had not yet failed to keep alive (because you can, theoretically, keep all your characters alive in this survival horror game) have been told Just How Bad It Is and (mild spoiler) leave relative safety for, so far as I can tell, very little reason.

No, actually, it was when three of them (travelling in a group) not only bring no weapons, but they split up without hesitation.  And I just stopped caring.

The mechanics of the game are, in themselves, quite playable.  None of the teens in this teen slasher flick game are necessarily going to die.  They do, however, have multiple opportunities to die, depending on your branching choices, and your ability to hit triangle-circle-square in quick time action sequences.  NOT acting at certain times is also critical for survival - something that the game exploits, since you become very punchy about hitting buttons as soon as they're signalled on screen when that's usually the one thing keeping you alive.

The story is pretty par for the course for a teen slasher story - not very interesting in itself - and the characters are quite clearly deliberate stereotypes: jock, slut, sweet guy, geek guy, geek girl, bitch, dork-bro and ingenue.  It was fairly hard to like any of them (caught as you are between bland and deliberately off-putting).  Though I ended up very sympathetic toward Emily (the bitch) just because she went through _so much_.  After all the extended awfulness she survived (and apparently she has at least twice as many opportunities to die as the ingenue) I'm kinda glad I stopped before accidentally killing her.

If you can put up with the idiocy that killed the game for me during the end game build-up, then gamers might enjoy Until Dawn for the sheer challenge of not getting anyone killed (I don't even know what I did to get the first one killed), and seeing how the dynamics of certain scenes play out if more characters have survived to be present.

I was also quite interested in how close to crossing the uncanny valley we're getting, at least in the pause-scene close-ups of character faces, where many of the tiny movements of a living face have been mapped, making them look eerily alive.  Not so strong in the full-body playable scenes, but I was impressed otherwise.

CDC: A sex game for girls

Cute Demon Crashers is unique in my experience.  Admittedly, I'm not an expert in the otome gaming area, but most (non-puzzle/time management) games I've played aimed at a female audience are either adventure, adventure+romance or romance+adventure.  CDC is not about romance: it's about getting a girl some sex.

CDC bills itself as a game about "consent and feeling safe in intimacy", and focuses on Claire.  We meet Claire as she's home alone and...somewhat frustrated.  Then four attractive demons turn up and offer her no-strings sex.  And that's...pretty much it.  Claire can get to know the demons a bit and decide whether to have sex with one of them, and just how much sex she wants to have (there's a lot of emphasis on stopping at any time).  But there is never a suggestion that this is a romance (the demons cannot form romantic attachments).

I think the last game I played where sex was the goal was Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (way back in the dark ages of gaming).  But LSL was about convincing some woman (any woman) to have sex with Larry (or, apparently, just paying a prostitute - I only played the beginning of LSL), while CDC is pretty much a beginner's guide to sex as a mutually positive experience.  I'm fairly sure it's also the only game I've ever played that (depending on the route you play) provides imagery of an erect penis (not hidden as towers in the background).

Anyway, I think this game will be a gift to tween girls worldwide, and it amused this non-tween too.  We've come a long way from Larry.

Journey

Journey came out some time ago, to great acclaim, but it was Playstation 3 exclusive, and I had an X-Box.  It's now been released for Playstation 4, and I have one of those, so I've finally had a chance to try it.

And, yes, it is just as wonderful as all the reviews claim.

You start as a cloaked figure in a desert.  On the horizon you can see a mountain with a light.  And so, with bare instruction and no understanding, you start toward it.

Journey is a combination of evocative music and visual beauty and a story stripped of any language that you understand.  It is very short, but I think is the sort of precious jewel of a game that you keep by for the grey days, when you want to be uplifted.

Well recommended.

D&D vs Otome

I've played far more D&D based games than otome games (otome is a Japanese term for 'girl').  The majority of otome games I've run across are variations on visual novels, where you mostly endlessly click Next, with very occasional decision moments.  There are also massive amounts of games in Japan that have no official English language release and which I'm far too unmotivated to try and play.  Some of these seem to be quite dark.

The otome games I have liked tend to be a combination of "life simulation" (where you raise skills) and some kind of fantasy or SFF plot (like God Save the Queen).

So, anyway, last weekend I downloaded on Steam both a D&D game, and an otome game...and the otome game was better.

The D&D was Pillars of Eternity, a kickstarted revisit to a classic period of D&D gaming - if you played Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale you'll have met this sort of game before - you control a little party, running around various maps, killing stuff, exploring dungeons.  These games were a precursor to what we have with Dragon Age today - an early level of party banter and epic plotting, but without quite the level of detail.

Pillars of Eternity was neither brilliant nor entirely bad. But along with the things that were really good about this period of games, it also features some of the more frustrating problems - boring trots slowly across the map, giving the gameplay a feeling of crawling through mud, and combat that simply isn't fun.  I don't entirely dislike games with tough combat, but PoE requires a level of micromanagement to survive even minor battles on the easiest setting and, yeah, maybe I'll grind my way through this game eventually. Maybe I won't.  Hopefully the other game of this type I backed on kickstarter, Torment: Tides of Numenera, will balance all this more on the side of 'fun'.

On the other hand, the otome game turned out to be a lot of fun.  With the rather unwieldy name of 1931 Scheherazade at the Library of Pergamum, this offers the usual harem of bishounen for our intrepid heroine to stumble across (yes, including a mummy), but is just as strongly focused on Scheherazade (or Sadie) carving an Indiana Jones-esque path through a half-dozen historical locations in between studying at university in 1931.

The archaeology and mythology aspects are remarkably detailed (though with a rather hilarious trip to Australia to track down Mary McKillop's relatives), and the dialogue is often rather amusing.  The skill management, once I figured out how it worked, was challenging, but not impossible and it even makes me interested in doing more than one play-through (with judicious fast-forwarding), to see through some of the other character plotlines.

So, yes, still not doing much writing - in part because there is so much I want to write - short stories, Tangleways, and the siren call of my Singularity SF series.  Pyramids has had a rather quiet launch, but one of the true strengths of self-publishing is that I can keep writing what I want to write, without any pressure to kill myself jumping through promo hoops out of fear that the series will be dropped.

Various games

The Swapper

Of the various puzzle games I've recently purchased, The Swapper is the most playable.  It's a relaxed pace platform puzzler (my preference since I don't like the ones where you have to constantly run) and starts with you, an identityless, voiceless figure in a spacesuit, wandering about in the aftermath of a disaster that has left a mining installation abandoned.

The plot is mildly interesting, but the strength of this one is the puzzles, which involve getting into difficult places by creating a clone of yourself, transporting your consciousness into the new copy, and abandoning the old body (or positioning it strategically on switches).  The atmosphere is also nicely spooky, and I've been working my way steadily toward the end.

Never Alone

Never Alone is both similar and virtually the opposite of Swapper.  It's another puzzle platformer (with some required running, but not constant momentum).  Again it's very atmospheric, and relies on working together to get through, but the puzzles so far are not as compulsive, and the main draw is the sheer cuteness of your arctic fox companion, and the slow discovery of Alaska Native culture.

It doesn't have the same forward drive as Swapper, but I'll continue it on and off to the end.

The Unfinished Swan

The Unfinished Swan combines a fairytale story book narration with a mechanic that involves throwing blobs of paint in all directions to reveal the location of walls/floor/objects.

This is very cool for the first couple of rooms, but then begins to pall a little and even though they mix up the paint-throwing mechanism later, there's no real narrative or puzzle interest to pull me through.

I may finished it.  Maybe.

Resident Evil: Revelations 2

I've played a lot of different Resident Evils.  This one takes Claire Redfield, pairs her with a less kick-ass girl, and gratuitously kidnaps them to some sort of experimental facility where someone appears to be channeling GLaDOS, but without the entertaining passive-aggressive snark.

I'm only at the beginning of the first episode of this, and not sure I'll buy any more.  [One advantage of these chapter by chapter game releases is you save money when you discover you don't find a game interesting.]

Final Fantasy: Type 0

A pity Final Fantasy: Type 0 hadn't been released on a chapter by chapter basis!  This is a remastered PSP port, so I expected low-rent graphics (and got them).

You sure do get a lot of different characters to play with - you're an entire elite classroom, named for a deck of cards.

Unfortunately the gameplay is entirely uninteresting, and the story not much better.  I doubt I'll play more than I have.

Final Fantasy XV (Boyband): Episode Duscae

Type 0, however, came with a demo of FF XV, set in a region called Duscae.  XV has been in development for something like six years, and was long considered vaporware until the past year or so, when new trailers and now this demo have been released.  And, from the demo at least, it's a solid step forward in the franchise, leaving behind the turn based gameplay for a quicker, smoother experience.  Timefillers like the way FF combat traditionally started and ended have been removed, and the process of finding and embarking on quests is much more fluid.  And there's some funny additions, too, like cooking for buffs.

The game is also unutterably beautiful.

Of course, being Final Fantasy, there's some inevitable negatives.  I call this "Boy Band" for a reason - all the known playable characters are male (breaking a long tradition of having at least a female healer character) and during the demo the only female given any time on screen might be a mechanic, but she's a mechanic in Daisy Dukes, suffering from camera angles focused on her hips and cleavage.

 However, at least one promo image suggests there are two important female characters in the game, and while one is the typical FF ingenue, the plot outline suggests that she's an ingenue that can match the main character in battle.  [Inevitably to be defeated, of course.]

Anyway, I was already interested in playing FF XV.  I've now moved it to the top of my list of games I'm looking forward to.  The demo was that good.

Life is Strange (game) - minor spoilers

I'm using my post-release break to play a few games.

Life is Strange is an episodic adventure game about a photography-obsessed girl name Max who has returned to her home town on a scholarship - and discovers she has time-rewinding powers.  Into Max's life we introduce a rich boy with a gun, an old friend with problems, a security control freak, a new friend with white-knight tendencies, and a disappeared girl.  And many varieties of bullying.  And a coming mega-tornado.

The production values are very high, and it's a nice, playable game, with puzzles that revolve mainly about choices leading to social consequences.  And I enjoyed playing the first episode of this game, and liked Max, and I'm probably not going to pick up the rest of the episodes.

Two issues - there's so much powerlessness going on here, so many different vortices of bullying, that I just feel no anticipation for the play experience, even if the likely end result is vindication or escape.

And - particularly in a game where the main character runs around taking photos of everything - I kept having to keep myself from shrieking "Take some video!  Gather evidence!  Video the creepy home surveillance system.  Video the rich boy with a gun!  Video the bullying security guard!"

The mega-tornado also feels weirdly unnecessary given all the other stuff going on.

Anyway - I do recommend this game to anyone with higher tolerance for this kind of story.  It's very atmospheric and interesting.  Just a not-for-me game.

Mildly spoilerish bit..
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Willing to bet that the all-around-wonderful photography teacher is a creepy murderer and video-taper of girls.

Smuggling across a gaming round-up

I've a guest post over at The Book Smugglers all about some of the games I've played this year.

Child of Light

Child of Light is an Ubisoft game about a princess named Aurora, whisked away from her loving father into a realm rather overpopulated by monsters.  Fortunately she's more than ready to defend herself, and without hesitation starts swinging the too-large sword she finds.

The production values on this non-AAA game are excellent.  The graphics, particularly, are lovely, and very different from the style of most games, with their water-colour painting feel.  And, fortunately, the gameplay itself is quite well done, although I definitely recommend playing this with a game controller rather than a keyboard - the keyboard controls weren't very easy.

Unfortunately, the story didn't ever manage to be very interesting. The villain of the game is announced in the very beginning, and there's no real examination of the rightness or wrongness of her reasons - she's just bad.  Aurora has no real emotional arc (beyond becoming a little less bratty).  She collects an enormous number of companions who can be mixed into the combat, but the sheer number means most of the companions are just there to be there, with no real interest in their stories.  I never played Child of Light to find out what happens next, which is a particular failure for a game deliberately aiming for a storybook feel.

And the rhyming!  Gods.  If you're going to make all the dialogue and narration in your game rhyme, go find someone who is really really good at it.  There are writers out there who can turn a shopping list into a throbbing paeon, a series of measured cadences that can make even sprouts and detergent compelling.

Bad rhyming has the opposite effect, even when you have a little girl with a sword, and all the pretty pictures in the world.

RPG neepery

The Core RPG Kickstarter is humming along nicely - looks like if support continues the tier that involves Touchstone will be hit in the next week or so!

Watching the process is bringing back a lot of RPG memories.  I started roleplaying in university and played through quite a few different systems - original rules D&D and then advanced editions. Vampire: the Masquerade.  TORG.  Paranoia.  My friends created their own system, adaptable to any setting, and Core reminds me very much of that, of the focus on the story and taking settings and running with them.

I eventually drew back from roleplaying because the stories could get too interesting, and I started thinking about the RPG world instead of my own.  My friends were way too good at telling stories!

I still have quite a few old character sheets lying about, and was admiring the little business card sized sheets of the Core system (not least for the very cool picture).

With a dice function on my phone and my character sheet tucked into a pocket of the phone case, I'd be ready to play whenever.

Murdered: Soul Suspect (no spoilers)

A noir-style mystery set in Salem, where you set out to solve your own murder and stop a serial killer.


Graphics and world
Reasonable, not brilliant, with some suitably spooky touches, especially with the ghosty people that flicker out of existence if you try to get closer to look at them.


Extremely lazy execution, with the same few models used over and over and over again for the people.  Salem Police Force is apparently all-male, and for a while there I thought Salem was an all-white environment as well, but a handful of POC showed up about halfway through the game.


Gameplay
Play-style wise, collecting clues and picking the most relevant ones to solve your mystery of the moment is reasonably entertaining, if very forgiving.  Walking through (some) walls is amusing, and possessing people and reading their thoughts fun enough the first few times.  But it never really built to something compelling, and was remarkable for the number of people who have the exact same thought when you possess them.  It's a very half-assed game, taking you through the main story with a few minor sidequests, with very little option for variation.  It's also very short.  Very very short.


Story
Fedora-wearing ex-con cop is murdered by masked serial killer, runs around as a ghost trying to solve own murder.  His wife redeems him and is fridged in the first flashback.  Most of the people he helps as a ghost are young girls and women apparently incapable of keeping it together as well as ex-con cop ghosts.


I won't spoil the story, other than to note that I give the identity of the killer extreme side-eye given the historical rather than fictional story, and rather wonder why all mediums are women (almost all of them young).


Anyways, it's light entertainment, not very well executed, tolerable if you feel the need for more drawling tough-guy in your gaming life, and absolutely not worth the premium game price it's being sold at.

Moebius: Empire Rising

Moebius: Empire Rising is a Kickstarter-funded new adventure game by Jane Jensen (best known for the Gabriel Knight series about a New Orleans author/bookstore owner/'Shadow Hunter').

Moebius follows a somewhat similar pattern, focusing on Malachi Rector, an antique store owner who discovers he is something more, and is drawn into a search by a government agency researching repeating patterns of history.

Graphics
Graphics-wise, Moebius is pretty basic.  The 3D models are clunky in both animation and shape, and the comics-style cutscenes are no more than serviceable.

Gameplay
Agreeably well put together puzzles, with nothing too taxing.  Rather pointless cave-wandering exercise toward the end.  A couple of possible places to die, but otherwise nothing difficult.  On the Zork-factor scale, 2/10 in unforgiving.

Characters
Rector is rather blatantly styled on the BBC's Sherlock, with a superiority factor through the roof, sarcastic comments galore, and a tendency to display mental analysis in words popping up on the screen.  He is funny, but far from a nice person (definitely not the same model as the rogue-type of Gabriel Knight).  David, his primary off-sider, is the straight-laced soldier type.  There's a probable m/m romance going on between this pair, but it only takes the steps toward trust in this the first outing of a possible series.

Story
Rector is an antiques savant, and gets himself into physical danger by occasionally debunking fakes.  A new client wants him to turn his historical knowledge to a different end - establishing connections between the lives of existing people and famous people of the past (not reincarnation so much as parallels).

There is an oddness to this process, because we see Rector investigating the lives/murders of people, but being completely disinterested in solving the minor mysteries, only in establishing parallels.

Spoilery Bit
And the problem that rises in the story and the characters is the attitude towards women.

Rector (apparently an extremely desirable man) is theoretically pursued and wooed and spurns them all except for favouring the occasional woman with strictly one night stands only.  This includes with his assistant from his antiques store, who he treats with either contempt or courtesy, apparently depending on his whims.

The plot revolves around identifying the woman who will marry and support to power a future US President.  Someone has been trying to figure out who this woman will be - and kill her.

Women in the game do not come off well.  They are either jealous, there to support men to power, vapid, sex-hungry, or sex-starved.  [The only exceptions to this is a brief telephone conversation with a female senator, and two 'tough' Muslim women.]  There's even a plot point apparently revolving around how women shouldn't expect fidelity from their husbands.  Men are the people who do stuff in this story, and women are there to support them or present obstacles.

This is all a bit of a downer in comparison to the Gabriel Knight series, where we had Grace Nakimura, ever-ready to call Gabriel on his shit, and to get stuff done.

If it wasn't for all the negativity toward women, I'd call this a reasonable game, if nothing spectacular.  But, funny as his snark could occasionally be, Malachi Rector was simply too off-putting for me to want to take another outing in this world.