My Gaming Diary: November 2018

Game of the Month: Life is Strange: Before the Storm

I get the feeling that when I look back in time on my gaming experiences in 2018, one thing I’ll remember very strongly will be that this year, I fell in love with the Life is Strange franchise. I played the main game twice after picking it up for pennies in the January sale; played The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit when it released in June; and though I’m not quite ready to start Life is Strange 2 just yet, it will almost certainly be one of my first gaming purchases of 2019. In the meantime, though, I have the Deluxe Edition of Life is Strange: Before the Storm to keep me hooked on this wonderful, wistful world.

Before the Storm takes place, as the name would suggest, three years before the first game and its central environmental catastrophe. It’s 2010, main game protagonist Max has been gone from the town of Arcadia Bay for two years, and Max’s childhood best friend Chloe is starting to realise that Max seems to be dodging her calls and texts. Chloe’s dad William died shortly before Max moved away, and it’s fair to say Chloe hasn’t been the same since these twin traumas befell her: in two years she’s gone from a seemingly happy and well-adjusted tween to a classic bad girl in the making, complete with underage consumption of beer and cigarettes, petty theft, and failing grades. All of this is not helped by the fact that her mother is dating a man she can’t stand, an unemployed veteran who seems to be stealthily moving in with them, and is aggressive in his assertions that he will be taking William’s place as Chloe’s father-figure. For anyone who played Life is Strange first, this is predictable enough: it reaffirms canon and explores Chloe’s history without adding a bunch of new details that feel like they should have come up in the original (a major pitfall for prequels in my experience).

The central event of the game is Chloe’s burgeoning relationship with Rachel Amber, the Laura Palmer figure of the heavily Twin Peaks-inspired Life is Strange universe, whose disappearance creates much of the driving force for the first game’s plot. Chloe and Rachel both attend Blackwell Academy and are known to each other, but only begin to bond after meeting at an illicit underground music gig that they both sneak into despite being underage. Chloe, at this point, exists halfway between her own personality and Max’s from Life is Strange. She already has her interest in alternative music and general air of rebellion, but is also far more insecure: repeatedly insisting that she has no friends to share her passions with, and finding herself far more easily intimidated by anger and threats of violence than she will be in time. Her appearance is even reminiscent of Max’s: she hasn’t yet adopted her iconic blue-and-pink dye job and ever-present beanie hat, leaving her with short mousy blonde hair a lot like her friend’s; and her dress style is a more conservative jeans-and-tee look that has still to evolve into fully-fledged punk. Rachel, meanwhile, is very much to Chloe what Chloe will later become to Max: the effortlessly cool and confident friend who gives the illusion of being powerful and in control of her own destiny, even though this is far from the reality of her situation.

Since Rachel never directly appears in Life is Strange, she’s one of the few characters Before the Storm is able to build more or less from the ground up. Another is Eliot, a guy who seems to believe that he’s Chloe’s boyfriend, who wasn’t even mentioned in the original game (no prizes for guessing whether that relationship works out or not). While the first game left the details slightly hazy, the implication that Chloe is either actually gay, or else bi with a strong preference for women, is made even more obvious here. Chloe’s diary, framed as a series of letters to Max that she will never send, talks directly about her sexual interest in women, which combined with her use of romantic terms to describe her attachment to Rachel leaves little room for doubt as to who she’s really interested in. Unlike Life is Strange, which limited you to a little ambiguous flirting and one kiss “on a dare” between Max and Chloe, it’s possible to play Chloe’s relationship with Rachel as a full-blown love affair, and the stats reveal that this is what at least 75% of players chose to do. As someone who was never Max’s biggest fan but loved Chloe, I was shipping Chloe/Rachel since I played the first game; and my squeals of girlish delight whenever Rachel shows interest in me… um… that is, in Chloe, have to be heard to be believed. Theirs is a beautiful love story in Before the Storm. Even the knowledge that the events of Life is Strange are only three years away, and will end with Rachel betraying Chloe before coming to her own tragic end, surprisingly don’t take the shine off of their budding romance for me. It’s an incredibly teenaged relationship that probably wouldn’t have lasted in the real world, and so its eventual breakdown feels authentic; but it’s a very well-written example of its kind, and furthermore captures the feeling of a romance between two young women incredibly well.

Before the Storm is the only game in the Life is Strange franchise (to date) not developed by Dontnod, though the environments and character models are copied across directly, so it’s a pretty seamless change from a visual perspective. There’s an audible difference, however, because due to a union strike none of the original voice actors return in the main three episodes; though Hannah Telle and Ashly Burch voice Max and Chloe again in the bonus episode, a prequel to the prequel set in 2008. (The latter also contributed to the writing of BtS, ensuring that Chloe’s character was handled with love and understanding.) While many fan reactions ranged from disappointment to plain distraction at the change, I actually found it helped to enhance some aspects of the game; principally, the unreliable narrator status that must be attributed to both Max and Chloe after seeing the setting and characters from their differing points of view. One of the most surprising differences between their interpretations was in Chloe’s mother Joyce. Max sees her as a perfect mother, filled with limitless compassion and only tested by Chloe’s extremities of misbehaviour; while Chloe sees a woman with a sharper tongue and shorter patience, who has a tendency to make poor decisions that impact on her daughter more than she is willing to admit. What’s wonderful is that neither interpretation needs to cancel out the other: the fact that Joyce’s relationship with David had a genuinely bad impact on Chloe can be inferred in the first game, and is just made more explicit by Chloe’s refusal to see Joyce as a victim to the degree that Max does. The slightly different intonations given to Joyce by Cissy Jones (LiS) and Bootsie Park (BtS) help to emphasise this subtle shift in perspective. The game is full of clever little hints like these, without ever bashing you over the head with them, leaving you to decide for yourself whether Max, Chloe, both, or neither were ultimately “right” in their ideas about Arcadia Bay and its denizens.

Because November was another busy month in my life, I only managed to play the first two episodes of Before the Storm, leaving me with the finale and the bonus still to go. I simultaneously can’t wait to play the rest and want to put it off for as long as possible, because at the two-thirds mark the story feels as happy as it’s going to get: Chloe and Rachel just had their first kiss and vowed to run away from their unhappy homes together, which obviously I know can’t happen in a prequel, but seeing it all derailed is going to be a painful process. Maybe it’s just my aforementioned preference for Chloe over Max, but I’m actually enjoying Before the Storm even more than the original Life is Strange, despite its poorer critical performance and the fact that no-one has any superpowers. (Or do they? Rachel seems pretty witchy, and I’ve always had my pet theory about who really caused the storm in the original… But that’s a digression for another time.) There’s something achingly beautiful about the earnest but immature Chloe stumbling ever closer to disaster without realising it; an unselfconsciousness that Max’s awkwardness always got in the way of when she was driving the narrative. Maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for a well-done prequel to bring on the doomed-love feels; producing one that is both canonically consistent and not too self-indulgent is a rare talent, but one that the makers of this game possess in abundance.

Hallentineoween!

I’ve heard Halloween referred to as “Goth Christmas”, but I think there’s an argument for calling it “Goth Valentine’s” instead. While most countercultural geeks of my acquaintance embrace Christmas with enthusiasm, not many of us bother with Valentine’s Day in my experience. However, you’d be forgiven for suspecting that Halloween is the holiday that gets us in a romantic mood, judging by the fact that alternative dating simulators Monster Prom and Dream Daddy both came out with an update in the final week of October 2018.

The announcement of Monster Prom’s “That October Holiday” Update didn’t come as much of a surprise: the game was released back in April and has enjoyed near-constant support and community engagement since, including the “F*ckin’ Hot” Summer Update back in June; and, as the devs themselves put it, how could a supernatural-themed dating sim not do something big to celebrate their first Halloween? New content includes a time-limited Halloween-themed home screen for the game; temporary Halloween outfits for all the characters (who, since they’re all monsters already, have just come dressed as each other); and a new secret ending which is creepy and grim in the extreme, and immediately became one of my favourites because I am a sick, twisted individual. The new path also includes a significant amount of voiceover work by Arin Hanson and Sarah Williams, who play Scott and Polly, including a new end credits song that replaces Mike Krol’s now-iconic “Fifteen Minutes” if you manage to trigger this Very Special Halloween Ending.

More surprising was the announcement of Dream Daddy: The Dadrector’s Cut. After last year’s rumoured Halloween DLC for the game never materialised, most players had written off the idea of the game continuing to evolve, especially as the developers had announced console ports as their immediate priority. However, on October 30th the Dadrector’s Cut launched on PS4, as well as being added to the Steam version as a free update to the base game.

All well and good, you might ask, but what makes this Halloween-y? Well: the press release promises “new sidequests, previously cut content, and a brand new minigame” - and for anyone who’s been following Dream Daddy for a while, that “cut content” comment seems like a pretty clear reference to the infamous “cult ending”. Despite the nightmarish “Escape from Margaritaville” ending to Joseph’s route being a visible presence - both in the Steam achievements and within the game’s code - since it launched last summer, there was no way to get the ending or unlock the achievement legitimately in-game. One school of thought held that it was the outline for an upcoming Halloween DLC, while others thought that it was merely a creepy Easter Egg for anyone poking about in the game’s files. However, the trailer for the Dadrector’s Cut included a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it frame at the very end, with Joseph standing in the sinister dungeon environment from those same hidden files, which is hard to interpret as anything other than a knowing nod to the fans who’d been anticipating its release. Whether this equates to the ending being made officially available in the game remains to be seen - the internet is keeping remarkably quiet about it - but I’ve started a new game to sample the updated content anyway, and plan to see what I can uncover.

To complete the trinity of spooky dating simulators, I also finally started playing Doki-Doki Literature Club! this month. A much truer example of the visual novel genre than either Dream Daddy or Monster Prom, DDLC! is 90% clicking through a story on the screen and 10% deciding which girl you want to date, and how to go about winning her affections. It’s also allegedly one of the most disturbing psychological horror games in years; I haven’t actually got to the point where the scares kick in yet, but knowing it’s going to happen at some point ratchets up the tension in what appears to be a cutesy and generic tale of high school romance to an unbelievable level. (In case you’re wondering - my character is dating Yuri, the cripplingly shy purple-haired bookworm who keeps writing me poems about ghosts. What could possibly go wrong?!)

RIP Stan Lee

As a Marvel geek I was saddened this month to learn of the passing of Stan Lee, the creative mind behind much of the Marvel multiverse and arguably the face of the brand, who died at the impressive age of 95. The end of a life that was both so long and so well lived is as much a time for reflection and celebration as mourning, and as a fan I could think of nothing more fitting than to turn to one of my favourite Marvel creations - LEGO Marvel Superheroes (the original and 2) - and systematically work my way through the map, saving LEGO Stan Lee (a character voiced by the man himself) from every wacky peril the little sprite finds himself in. Excelsior!

The Steampunkiest Time of the Year

Christmas may seem right around the corner, but there’s one tradition that keeps the festive season from encroaching into my orbit too early: Steampunks in Space, an annual steampunk/sci-fi convention held every last weekend in November at the National Space Centre in Leicester, my original stomping ground. Its whimsical Victoriana combined with a Doctor Who fixation makes it perfect for getting you into the Christmas spirit, and it’s such a fun event that I usually spent most of November getting excited for it, so my festive spirit doesn’t peak before its time.

In that vein, I was determined to play something at least tangentially steampunky this month, which is why I once again picked up The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve been replaying this one on-and-off since last Christmas with the hope of earning its Platinum trophy (which I am happy to say I finally achieved, with two days of November to spare). The game in itself isn’t especially steampunk-themed, but Sherlock Holmes stories are a huge influence on the steampunk genre (plus a major obsession of mine). That being said, the game’s finale takes place in an abandoned circus that’s been converted into a factory producing poisoned soup to generate an epidemic among the poor in a move to undermine Queen Victoria and stage a coup… which is a plot so cracked surely only a steampunk author could have come up with it.

I also used this Platinum run to boost my hype for The Sinking City, another Frogwares game (this one inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft) that’s coming out in March and is the top of my 2019 to-play list. Other than that, I gush about the Frogwares Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series so much there’s not really much to add here, except to plug the article I wrote about it earlier this year on Blanket Den, as well as my own flash reviews of the franchise.

The Sims Corner

Last month, I left the Goth family all attempting to seduce their respective vampiric paramours (save for young Alexander, who was too busy trying to negotiate with the monster under the bed). November continued along the same lines: Mortimer, Bella, and Cassandra would build up a relationship with Caleb, Lilith, or Vadislav; flirt outrageously; do all the required reading (yes, really); and then asked to be turned into a vampire… and be roundly rejected. It looks like the acceptance stats for the “Ask to Turn” interaction must be super high. Luckily, I’ve turned ageing off, so they’ve got as long as they want to work on it.

Meanwhile, the Black Friday sales saw some pretty generous deals on Expansion Packs and Game Packs (but not Stuff Packs) for The Sims 4 on the Origin store. I was intrigued when Jungle Adventure came out earlier this year, so I treated myself amidst all the Christmas shopping. After spending too long in Create-A-Sim like always, I had a passable Sim Lara Croft heading out into the unknown wilds of Selvadorada, a new vacation destination that comes with the pack. Jungle Adventure has been accused of feeling empty compared to some of the other game packs, and I can certainly see where those reviewers were coming from. Huge and intriguing and beautiful environments in the early stages of the Selvadorada jungle end up having only a few interactable spots, with the (presumably) more exciting stuff locked behind new skill checks that can only be beaten through an amount of grinding. But nevertheless, I’m enjoying myself: playing archaeologist and tourist at once, without leaving the comfort of my living room or retraining for years, is a pleasant novelty; and avoiding game guides for the jungle locations means that I can enjoy the exploration with no more idea than my character as to what’s around the corner. Plus it’s hilarious when she gets covered in bugs, though presumably still a lot more pleasant than anything her official counterpart has experienced in the last three entries in her franchise.

Lara Croft: Relic Run: Oh, F**k, An Update Has Broken The Game

Speaking of my favourite tomb raider: the section title on this one says it all, really. Early on in November Lara Croft: Relic Run received an update that has not played well with my 11-month-old phone. Everything from the thumbnail to the colour saturation on the in-game graphics is now slightly off, with the added dissatisfaction that it now crashes if I’m in a level for more than a couple of minutes (which I sort of have to be to finish them…). Even the tried-and-trusted method of switching it off and on again a few times has failed to yield results, so for now I guess it’s back to regular old non-mobile gaming for me.

An Open Letter from Detective Cole Phelps, L.A.P.D.

To my colleagues at the L.A.P.D., and to the citizens of Los Angeles whom I have sworn to protect,

I would like to take this opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about my conduct while on duty over the last several days.

First and foremost, I would like to address certain aspersions levelled against my driving skills. Yes, it is true that I have on several occasions had difficulty keeping within my lane, or indeed on my side of the road; and in fact, yes, sometimes I struggle to actively keep off the sidewalk. Sometimes I have driven, some might say recklessly, head-on into oncoming traffic. I have hit, at an estimate: three lamp-posts, a mailbox, the backs of uncounted other motor vehicles, the side of a streetcar, and one pedestrian.

In fact, I'd like to pause in the defence of my driving skills for a moment to put to rest the most malicious rumour of all: that pedestrian was not killed. In fact I barely clipped him, and he didn't even fall over. He walked away from the site of the mishap (I feel that accident is too strong a word) under his own power, and I am sure with no lasting ill-effects. My partner on patrol that day is willing to testify to the truth of this statement, though to be honest I am offended that the matter has got this far out of hand already, and I'm sure everyone involved would rather people just drop the matter.

To return to my original point, there are several factors to be given in my own defence. First, my patrol car handles like a shopping trolley with a wheel missing that will crawl to a dead stop if not pushed past 70 mph, to say nothing of the fact that holding down the foot-brake for a second too long causes the car to reverse. I would really like to see those detractors among my colleagues do any better.

Second, no damage to public or private property has been even remotely comparable to the cumulative effect of these numerous impacts on my own car, the bonnet of which now resembles a cross between a concertina and an empty soda can that's been - well, I suppose the closest analogy would be "run over by a car".

Thirdly and finally, it has become apparent to me that the citizens of Los Angeles either do not understand or simply choose not to obey the significance of a police siren. In order to compensate for my difficulty, which I fully acknowledge, in handling the finer points of controlling my vehicle, I elect to sound my siren whenever said vehicle is in motion. I was taught to understand that if you encountered a police car with its siren running, you should pull your own vehicle to the side of the road to allow it to pass. Apparently not so the motorists of Los Angeles. Likewise, though admittedly this was never directly covered in my driver's training, I believe that the unspoken yet easily inferable rule exists that should a police car with its siren sounding mount the pavement in your vicinity, it is your duty as a citizen to clear that area as quickly as possible. I am an officer of the law attempting to do my duty and protect you, in spite of the contemptible state of the equipment I have been given to do so. I am not asking for your thanks, but a little co-operation seems like the least you could do.

Before I conclude, there has been another accusation cast in my direction of late, with regards to the facts in the case immediately preceding my promotion to detective. It has been implied by various of my colleagues, whom I regrettably suspect are resentful of my sudden rise through the ranks, that it took four identical conversations with my suspect to extract a confession, despite my having an eyewitness account irrefutably pointing to him as the perpetrator.

It does not take a trained psychological profiler to understand why I did this; not to be too blunt about it, a child would understand the tactics I put to work during that interrogation. Forcing the suspect to go over his story again and again, with word perfect repetition every time, was both disorienting and confusing for him. I knew that eventually he would slip up, would deviate from that well-rehearsed script - and he did. During that fourth session, he confessed to everything. He was dancing to my tune the entire time, good people of Los Angeles. As to any of my colleagues who claim to have heard three loud altercations between myself and my commander in the hall outside the interview room, in which he repeatedly (not to say repetitively) questioned my intelligence and abilities - I’m sorry to say that they were taken in as well. It was all part of our carefully executed drama to get that confession. It is not in my nature to want to deceive honest, law-abiding people like my colleagues; but a little hurt pride on the part of the less imaginative among our boys in blue is a small price to pay to live in a city that is safe and free from crime, is it not?

In closing, I would like to emphasise that it is not for myself that I wrote to address these misrepresentations - it is for you, the citizens of Los Angeles. I am a naturally reserved man, but it has warmed my heart on many occasions just how many of you have recognised me from my many high-profile cases; have stopped in the street to greet me and congratulate me on a job well done, even as I knocked several of you over in the course of my latest foot pursuit.

(Rest assured, those snatch-and-grab pickpockets were dealt with to the full extent of the law - though once again, some have called into question my decision to use deadly force when intervening in what they have termed “non-violent” and “relatively minor” offences. I am a soldier in the war against crime - not to mention a decorated war veteran - and as a soldier of such long standing, I possess near-perfect aim. I am not a cold-hearted man, and I fully accept that those deaths were regrettable. But to call them “unnecessary” and even “cruel” would be to ignore both the righteousness and the surgical precision with which justice was dispatched. I doubt that anyone except a card-carrying Red could disagree with my thinking.)

So it is to you - the good, law-abiding, god-fearing people of Los Angeles - whom I dedicate this clarification, as I have dedicated every day I have spent on the force to date, and hope to do so for a long time yet to come. (But please try to bear in mind my advice about the siren.)

Yours,

Detective Cole Phelps, proudly of the L.A.P.D.

My Gaming Diary: October 2018

Game of the Month: Vampyr

“What is a wall but enslaved stone? What is glass but tortured sand?” And, indeed, what is October but a month of increasingly chilly days and dark evenings, perfect for filling with as many scary stories as you can cram into your eyeballs? As a devoted horror fan, I hope never to find out, which is why this month I have not so much doubled as tripled down on the scary games.

OK, so calling Vampyr a scary game might be pushing it a bit, but it’s one of the most supernaturally themed games on my must-play list of 2018, and crucially, the price has dropped quite a bit since it was released in June; so I decided it was a perfect game for the month of Halloween. Gameplay-wise it’s an action RPG in spook’s clothing developed by Dontnod, a surprising swerve into the unfamiliar for a studio whose output to date has been dominated by Life is Strange titles. Vampire-based action RPGs have historically been my jam (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is my all-time favourite game), so I approached this one with a mixture of high hopes and trepidation.

Before I begin, in the interests of full disclosure I must admit that I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Vampyr. October was a full-on month for a number of reasons, and so my time with the game so far has probably been around six hours; unfortunately, I chose this of all months to opt for a game that’s reportedly around 30 hours long, i.e. the longest story mode I’ve played so far this year. So what follows is a far from comprehensive review of Vampyr; more like a first impression, really.

A week before I bought the game, an update added Story Mode, an extra-easy game mode which (as I understand it) cuts the combat down to a bare minimum. If I’d known how much of October I was going to spend feeling ill or otherwise distracted, I probably would have picked Story Mode. As it was, I went for the easier of the two combat modes, on the basis that I’ve played enough decision-based games this year and that it was time to change things up a bit before I forgot how to wield a virtual weapon altogether. Growing up, I cut my teeth on some of the clunkiest combat systems in gaming in the early 2000s - my three undisputed favourites were Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, American McGee’s Alice, and the abovementioned V:TM-B, which is like the unholy trinity of good story/bad mechanics in gaming from that era. But because these games and the muscle memory associated with them became the standard for me, I’ve never become much good at games where the combat system was… well… good. I’m a hack-and-slash melee brawler who can’t aim to save her life. Fortunately, Vampyr’s combat system is also a little bit broken, so we actually get along fine. Honestly, for me the most frustrating part is how long the game goes between auto-saves, making it harder to perform my signature trial-and-error fighting style without a lot of tedious backtracking in places. But even if the weapons can be a bit hard to handle the vampiric powers are on-point (I invested early on in the “blood dart” attack and was super glad I didn’t wait for the game to prompt me to do so, as I doubt I’d even have got to the end of the prologue section without it). However, knowing as I do now that Story Mode landed as part of a response to the game’s narrative being praised much more highly than its gameplay, I would likely have made a different decision.

The game can be janky sometimes. As I mentioned before, auto-save points are few and far between, and don’t always turn up where you expect - for example, at one point I cleared out a group of six or seven enemies; moved to what was definitely the next, separate area; was killed by a new pair of bads; and was annoyed to find that I’d spawned back before that big group fight, in contravention of everything I thought I knew about save points in action games. The menus and sub-menus and sub-sub-menus (this is not sarcasm; there really are sub-sub menus) can be confusing and time-consuming to navigate. And occasionally the graphics just go a bit weird. For example, I find myself endlessly distracted by the fact that every male character Jonathan talks to suddenly becomes a head shorter than him in the dialogue animations; this despite the fact that Jonathan doesn’t seem to be much above average height in the regular environments, or that female characters are a much more realistic couple of inches shorter than him during their dialogue scenes. I keep thinking: is this some sort of power-play? Is he maybe standing on something? Are all these guys just really short and I didn’t realise? Were they slouching before? It’s a minor thing but once I noticed it I couldn’t un-see it.

My enjoyment of the character of Jonathan has been largely determined by what I’ve been willing to bring to role-playing him. The character as he’s written is not terrible, but neither is he necessarily all that great. The quote at the beginning of this entry is from his opening monologue - he’s certainly got the moody tortured poet vampire archetype down by his first night among the undead; and while he’s processing a lot of legitimate trauma, he often comes across as a self-absorbed rich boy who quite casually barks out questions and commands to the predominantly working class characters around him, even when he’s not using his supernatural powers to influence them. But I’m finding that playing up these aspects of his personality is actually adding to his charm: his heart’s in the right place and he’s clearly very brave and intelligent, so having some faults to counterbalance his virtues - such as brusqueness and a hint of casual classism - keeps him from being a bland Gary Stu. (I mean… he does sort of look like a nocturnal turn-of-the-century Nathan Drake, doesn’t he?)

So what keeps me coming back to Vampyr - at least whenever I have a couple of precious hours to spare? It’s a cliche to say so, but so far what’s drawn me in most is the atmosphere. London in the grip of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic is an unusual enough setting for any story, and the run-down districts I’ve encountered so far are so dingy and grim that it’s actually beautiful how faithful the artists have been to the concept. It reminds me a lot of the environments from my beloved Adventures of Sherlock Holmes games by Frogwares; while the desaturated eternal night of Jonathan’s vampiric existence calls to mind the way games traditionally visualise the worlds of Lovecraft. In other words, I’d be quite happy to kick around with Vampyr for now, even if it was nostalgia alone that I liked about it; though I suspect Call of Cthulhu and The Sinking City might knock this one off its pedestal once I get my hands on them.

Indie Horror at Halloween: Simulacra and Layers of Fear: Masterpiece Edition

As a horror fan and low-key goth type, I have a moral obligation to play as many scary games as I can at Halloween. To tie this in with my completionist tendencies (or what I wish were completionist tendencies…) I picked up two of the shorter indie horror games I started earlier this year: Simulacra and Layers of Fear.

I’m still about half an hour from the end of Simulacra - I know this as I’ve looked up some hints because, dammit, I want to hook Anna and Ashley up and I will cheat to do it if I have to! I don’t know much about the game’s endings, except that there are four possible outcomes; but right now I’m more concerned with whether Anna’s phone battery can die before I even get to the end game, or if that’s another in-game trick. For a weird little indie FMV found-phone outing, this one can sure make you paranoid.

Not only did I finish Layers of Fear, though: I did so in just one more sitting (take that, scary ghost lady who freaked me out so much last time I didn’t pick up the game again for months!). I even got a conclusive ending - something I’d ruled out as nigh-on impossible on a first run-through after seeing the ridiculously detailed walkthroughs online. I’m still not entirely sure how I did it, but I’ll take the win. It turns out that whether what I got was the “good” or “bad” ending is up for debate, which is pretty ingenious. I got the one where the artist lives and recovers his talent - but, potentially, never regains custody of his daughter. For me, this seems preferable to the one where he flings himself on a flaming pile of his wife’s portraits to symbolically join her in the fire that disfigured her, but apparently this is the subject of a heated debate among players, which seems… odd, to me. The way I see it, it’s valid as a piece of full-circle storytelling, but it’s a romanticising of suicide I’m just not comfortable with supporting. Anyway, because I don’t believe in giving myself a break, I quickly moved on to the Inheritance DLC and am now in the process of terrifying myself all over again!

It turns out my parents love Supermassive Games nearly as much as I do

Last month I bought myself a copy of Hidden Agenda - a PlayLink game for 1-6 players made by Supermassive Games, creators of Until Dawn. (They’re also developing Man of Medan, which I queued up to play twice at EGX in September and is one of my most-anticipated games for 2019.) Supermassive are up there with my favourite developers and, because you can’t get the full Hidden Agenda experience with fewer than three players, I strong-armed my parents in to playing it with me and my partner.

We got maybe one-third of the way through the game during that visit, and they asked me to bring it with me when I visited them for Halloween at the end of the month. They also mentioned that since I’d be bringing the PS4 anyway they’d like me to bring my copy of Until Dawn, which I started re-playing with them over a year ago, and which I now believe to have been their hidden agenda all along.

While they definitely enjoyed the story in Hidden Agenda, they cited the use of personal devices instead of controllers and the fast-paced nature of semi-competitive multiplayer as making it a bit less accessible to them, both as older people and inexperienced gamers. In Until Dawn, however, they get to make the decisions and call out their instructions to me while I handle the QTEs and remind them to review their totems. Because there are nine player characters in Until Dawn it can be a very good game to play in a group like this, giving the feeling of multiple narratives regardless of how many players there are in the team, allowing some to focus on characters they prefer while others take control of meta-game elements like trophies and clues.

Until Dawn is a game I would dearly love to platinum, which can only be achieved through multiple playthroughs. While it’s possible to do a meticulously planned run where you know exactly what you’ll do and when to ensure a particular outcome, having someone else who’s new to the game call the shots is a fun way to pick up some of the different trophies without it feeling like a military campaign. The most difficult part is not spilling the beans about some of the majorly cool twists that are coming up - or letting on that my parents have so far for the most part managed to make much better decisions than I did on my first play-through (they don’t know this yet but everyone’s still alive, whereas I was two down by this point). I can’t wait until I visit them at Christmas, when we’ll hopefully have time to finish off both games and I can finally stop self-censoring all these spoilers!

The Council: Episode 4 - Burning Bridges (Minimal spoilers below, but best to proceed with caution.)

The penultimate episode of The Council was released on September 25th. I played it in the days that followed and, while I’m still loving the story, there were a few flaws in the implementation that will hopefully be ironed out in an update soon.

My only big annoyance with this game so far came in this episode: two of my allies got killed off, which would be bad enough if it felt like my fault. But I later learned that one could only be saved through a series of pretty counterintuitive actions, while the other seems to have been the victim of what was basically a coin-flip choice on my part that apparently went the wrong way. (The implementation weirdness came when the player character, Louis, kept referring back to spoiler-heavy information that those characters were supposed to have told him in dialogue if they had lived, but that I hadn’t heard in-game and so only understood after I googled them.)

But there is so much more that’s good in this game. Louis is one of those characters who you can learn to deeply enjoy playing as if you take his eccentric portrayal in good humour. Like Ethan in Heavy Rain, he’s credulous in the extreme; like Jonathan in Vampyr, he’s kind of an arrogant jerk at moments that don’t warrant it. But he’s also a bewildered young man who’s suddenly lost the guiding maternal hand (pun intended) that’s shown him the way his whole life, so it’s very easy for the player to occupy this mindset as you fumble through a story that’s always verging on too complex without ever quite crossing the line.

Finally: who knew how unsettlingly dread-inducing this game was going to get? Episode 4 introduces new, sprawling, unexpectedly Lovecraftian environments and - most surprisingly - last-act additions to gameplay that make every decision feel more powerful and more perilous at the same time. Even the most previously benign of the surviving characters are starting to come across as eerie in the extreme, making you suspect that they might turn out to be the real villain of the piece - and yes, that very much extends to Louis himself, whose morality takes a few turns this episode that he may not be able to come back from.

Needless to say, I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the finale; which I’m guessing will be released around Christmas, judging from the schedule so far. Announcements tend to only come a week or less before a new episode lands, though; so I’m not expecting to hear anything before I’m a fair few chocolates into my advent calendar.

The Sims Corner

I wanted to make my Sims’ lives a little more supernatural for October, but I stayed strong and held out; and eventually Origin blinked first, putting The Sims 4: Vampires Game Pack and The Sims 4: Spooky Stuff Stuff Pack on sale. (I’d previously sworn off Stuff Packs since they’re almost never value for money, but this one was 25% off! OK, I still feel like I paid a little over the odds, but you can host a Halloween costume party and dress as knockoff Llama-themed Batman, so I’m happy.)

I’d originally intended to create my own vampire character or play with the premade ones in the new town of Forgotten Hollow, but after noodling around for a while I found myself drawn back to the Goth family from the base game. Their whole aesthetic obviously lends itself to the vampire thing already, so I’ve decided to make it official. Spooky married couple Mortimer and Bella are now maneuvering to seduce cute bisexual vampire boy Caleb Vatore at their Halloween party in the hopes of becoming creatures of the night. Meanwhile, their teenage daughter Cassandra is receiving some worrying yet intriguing midnight phone calls from master vampire Count Vladislav Straud. And their young son Alexander seems preoccupied with the fear of monsters under his bed - but with this family set-up, who can blame him?

Destination: Star Trek

With CoxCon and EGX over, I’ve got no more gaming conventions coming up until 2019. I did, however, poke my head in at the gaming booths at Destination Star Trek this October. The jewel in the crown for me was Star Trek: A Final Unity (which Jesse Cox and Octopimp recently did a hilarious let’s play series on). While I was dropped in midway through the first mission with little idea of what I was doing, I can definitely see the appeal, and it’s one I’d like to come back to someday. It’s also impossible not to admire the technical and budgetary achievement of having the entire cast of The Next Generation lend their voices and images to a game with a branching storyline. Add the fact that the game was released in 1995, long before that would have been simple to implement (or indeed before a fully-voiced video game spin-off was necessarily a wise investment). Tie-in games might still be a mixed bag to this day, but this one looks worth the trouble of finding an emulator that can run it.

And finally, a Lara Croft: Relic Run status update

Still stuck on Level 30, within spitting distance of the next stage, which unlocks at Level 40. I’ve been playing this game for most of the year and mainly enjoying it, but the “endless runner” description is starting to feel a bit too apt...

My Gaming Diary: September 2018

Game of the Month: Detroit: Become Human

Detroit: Become Human is the latest interactive fiction game from creator David Cage and his studio, Quantic Dream. It’s their fifth game but only the second one I’ve played, after spending some time earlier this year on their most famous game pre-Detroit, 2010’s Heavy Rain. There was a game in between called Beyond: Two Souls, released in 2013, which I bought but haven’t got around to playing yet, but which was not as well-received or well-remembered as the other two.

Detroit: Become Human is a sci-fi story set in 2038, when incredibly lifelike androids have become common industrial and domestic helpers; but this has greatly widened the gap between rich and poor, with working-class people struggling to find jobs that can’t be done more efficiently and cheaply by androids. What follows is a story of the singularity - Artificial Intelligences gaining consciousness equivalent to that of humans - that is, perhaps uniquely, told exclusively from the perspective of three androids undergoing this transformation: Kara, a housekeeper charged with the care of a young girl; Markus, a carer for an ageing well-known painter; and Connor, a police officer responsible for hunting down ‘deviant’ androids.

Having so recently played Heavy Rain, I definitely found Detroit to be a more polished experience by comparison, and not simply because graphics have come on such a long way in the past eight years. A common criticism levelled against Cage’s characters is that they can be clunky in their dialogue and decisions; but that’s actually a strength in a game about AIs unexpectedly gaining sentience. The androids who make up the majority of the main characters are suddenly thrown into a situation where they have an adult’s strength and intelligence, but the emotional stability of a newborn - making the oddities in their behaviour seem perfectly sensible in context. The acting is also much better: there really are no weak performances in Detroit, but stand-outs for me were Bryan Dechart (heavily tipped for next year’s Best Performer awards for his role as Connor), Jesse Williams (Markus), Clancy Brown (Hank), and Gabrielle Hersh (Chloe).

Beware significant story spoilers from this point on in the review.

The main characters for the most part stayed in their own lanes, with the separate stories only really coming together for the end-game. Predictably, Connor was my favourite - not only was he a clear re-imagining of my favourite Heavy Rain character, FBI Agent Norman “Nah-mun” Jayden, but his story contained the most internal conflict. An android whose purpose is to detain other androids if they become sentient, Connor is the only character to struggle with his torn allegiances, and in fact is the only character who you can choose to have reject his humanity and remain truly robotic to the end. Admittedly this led to a bit of an issue for me (unlike Kara and Markus, Connor never has a breakthrough “moment”, even if you choose to have him embrace his deviancy), but it lent his story a depth of choice that was absent from the other two. Markus’s story was perhaps the most linear, but between Jesse Williams’ compelling performance, and him getting to showcase some of the coolest mechanics in the game, I found it very enjoyable nonetheless.

Kara’s story was the weakest for me, though admittedly this might be biased by the fact that it was a typical arc about a female character wanting to be a mother, which is something that always falls flat for me. There was plenty to like about Kara and her surrogate daughter, Alice, as characters; and she still got to do some cool stuff that, while it all revolved around her maternal urges, showed her to be as brave and independent as Connor and Markus. In short, it was a pretty well-handled example of a set of tropes that don’t do much for me; even though I was disappointed that, as is so often the case in a David Cage game, nearly every female character was established as either a mother, a helpless child, or a sex worker as her defining characteristic.

Because this is an interactive drama, one of the big questions hanging over a playthrough of Detroit is the ending(s) you get, and whether you managed to keep everyone alive. I’ve historically been unusually fortunate in this regard. Well, friends: this did not happen for me in Detroit: Become Human. At the end of my game only three of the determinant characters were alive - Markus, North, and Alice - which left Connor, Kara, Hank, Luther, Josh, Simon, and a couple of minor characters very dead. The defining factor in this bloodbath seems to be how radicalised I became by the end. Up until the final chapters I’d consciously been playing my characters (especially Markus) as determined to assert their equal rights to humanity firmly but peacefully. After the assault on Jericho, though, and the development of deviant androids being rounded up into camps and killed, I’d had enough. (I think some real world frustrations may have bled through here.) While what I really wanted was a third option - going to liberate the camp armed but with violence only as a last resort - I had to choose between another peaceful protest or a full-on assault. Neither choice filled me with confidence, but I was absolutely against another slow-walk-into-the-waiting-guns scene like the ones that come earlier in the game, so I turned the liberation of the camps into a war for lack of a better option. The result was really quite cathartic, but ended with Markus and North making a rather sorry spectacle as they addressed the crowds alone at the end, everyone else having been lost along the way.

Kara, meanwhile, ended up dying at the Canadian border control distracting the guards so that Alice could get through, in a moment that I’d be more annoyed about if I hadn’t felt it was a thematically appropriate way for her to go. I do, however, remain convinced that I accidentally funnelled myself onto a bad track early in that scene by interacting with the environmental cues in the wrong order, which is a peeve of mine in this sort of game - if I’m about to trigger a new scene and lock myself out of this one then give me some sort of warning, please!

Connor’s final scene gave me one of my biggest moments of instant regret ever in a video game. It wasn’t so much that Connor died - again, heroically waking up an army of deviants to turn the tide of battle is a pretty badass way to go - but the fact that I sacrificed Hank to do it really sucked. Connor and Hank seemed to be having a pragmatic moment of “do what you have to do” camaraderie, but when after all that Hank died blaming Connor for failing him anyway, I felt shitty (even though this kind of hot-and-cold behaviour is just so typical of that relationship).

With both Connor and Markus, I get the sneaking suspicion that taking the less logical track in terms of protecting the androids (e.g. going to the camp unarmed, saving Hank instead of waking the army) would have worked out better through some Deus Ex Machina business in the long run, despite the rest of the game leaving me decidedly shy of relying on outside forces to save the day. Obviously this is all just fuel for a really fun second play-through; but all the same, this kind of bait-and-switch outcome on decisions in gaming is widely derided for a reason.

Detroit: Become Human is the best David Cage game, in that it’s the most David Cage game but in a (mostly) good way. There is an irresistibly cute cop; the female characters are kind of flat (but bearably so in this case); the game-play is fun if you like QTEs and huge decision trees (I do); and the story is ambitious and cool while you’re in it, but ends in a way that’s not quite as satisfying as the build-up. It’s good to see the studio that blazed the trail for interactive fiction come back onto the scene after struggling for so long to follow up on Heavy Rain: it’s a more than worthy successor to its genre-defining sibling, is a visual treat, is well-acted and thought-provoking. No game that gives the player this much choice will ever have a story that hangs together perfectly, but Detroit goes out of its way to push replayability, which may be the key to solving that particular issue. In the end, if like me you like interactive fiction, stories about AIs gaining sentience, and a bunch of very lovable good guys, this game will hit all your requirements. And then it will leave you in a moral crisis, like the one I’ve been having since I, a lifelong pacifist with a strong belief in personal loyalty, became a militant revolutionary who sacrificed so many friends for the greater good. The day they replace me with a better AI can’t come soon enough.

What I did on my holidays

My birthday was in September, and so my family and I spent a few days at Center Parcs Sherwood Forest to celebrate. What we didn’t know when we booked was that our village of choice had introduced a new attraction just three weeks before we arrived: a VR booth! Even though I was attempting to take a mini-break from gaming for the week (though I did sneak in a bit of Relic Run and joined my Dad for a HO game called Deadtime Stories), I of course could not resist the urge to try VR for the first time.

The booth was designed by a company called A.I. Solve and ran two games, called Alien Invasion and Mayan Adventure. Plot-wise, they do exactly what they say on the tin; my personal favourite was Alien Invasion, since you get a greater variety of puzzles to solve and the possibility of a good ending. Mayan Adventure felt more like a demo, perhaps because of the booth’s enforced five-minute run time, and as far as I could tell was unwinnable story-wise (though still really fun). I’m still dubious of VR as a household gaming peripheral: the booth I was playing in was the size of a small bedroom, whereas the gaming space in my living room has maybe one square metre of floor space in front of it. But as a cutting-edge take on an arcade machine, I was sold.

Towards the end of the month I took another small break: I went to EGX for the first time! Unfortunately, due to a combination of me feeling horrendously ill that weekend and the show’s organisation being a little less, well, organised than might be desired, I missed out on quite a bit of what I wanted to do. But there was a lot of great stuff there: highlights include getting my first portfolio review (favourable!), playing the Man of Medan demo a couple of times (I can’t wait!), and seeing all three OutsideXbox/Outside Xtra live events (I love those guys!).

The Sims Corner

I want so badly to get back into The Sims. With that in mind, I made a new save in The Sims 4 base game (all I own currently from the latest gen) and re-introduced myself to the only characters who I know I’ll always want to play as: the Goth family. My plan is to build on the game just a little every month, hopefully acquiring a few of the Expansions and Game Packs that I’ve missed out on, adding new characters along the way to populate and complicate my world, and generally just getting that nice mix of nostalgia and new stuff. The Sims is still my go-to franchise when I’m feeling poorly or stressed, and even though my gaming horizons have expanded significantly over the past couple of years, I find myself wanting to stay connected to my gamer roots.

Gifts, Games, and Spider-Man: LEGO Marvel Superheroes

The new Spider-Man game on PS4 came out this month, and it looks freaking amazing. But my birthday reminded me that I have quite a few games I’ve been given as gifts over the past couple of years that I really want to get back to. With both these things in mind, it’s not really surprising that I spent quite a few hours in September playing LEGO Marvel Superheroes - both the 2013 original and the recent sequel. (I should note that I do have a copy of LEGO Marvel Avengers too but have kind of skipped finishing it for now because I’m so behind in the franchise.)

The third LEGO Marvel installment was released late last year, and was an anniversary gift from my partner back in February. While I’ve played the original game twice in story mode, and am now just cleaning up side-missions and trophy hunting, to my shame I hadn’t gotten further than installing the new one until now. It contains very little that’s entirely new, but has made a few much appreciated improvements - foremost to me, a flying mechanic that finally feels intuitive. You start off playing as the Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a terrifically strong start - even if the events of Infinity War have cast a tragic sheen over the comic relief you’d usually expect from both the Guardians and a LEGO game. Gamora and Rocket in particular are very satisfying to play as, and a lot of work has clearly gone in to making every character feel unique - especially impressive considering the roster, which includes a few dozen main characters and variants, and a small army of freeplay unlockables.

Like The Sims, the LEGO games are pure comfort food for my soul, so I expect to be cuddling up with this title a lot more over the coming winter months.

I Love Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. Did I Just Kill Telltale?)

Speaking of new games out in September, in the month that everyone got talking about Life is Strange 2, I finally finished Life is Strange! (Bae over Bay - love you Chloe!) I also finally got myself a deluxe copy of Before the Storm, and so between that and wanting to revisit The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit one more time, I can’t imagine I’ll be getting around to LiS2 until the full season is completed. I don’t mind this at all, since I only got into the franchise earlier this year and I’m happily catching up at my own pace; however, I can envision that avoiding spoilers is going to become more of a problem the longer I leave it.

September also graced us with the penultimate episode of The Council, the only episodic game to date that I’ve bought while it was still in production. I barely scratched the surface of Episode 4 by the end of September, but suffice to say even though it’s a little-known title with poor chances of getting a second season, I’m starting to suspect it might be my game of the year.

You know what else I did this month? I finally finished The Wolf Among Us! It took me nearly two years (for various reasons, most of them out of my control), but on September 19th I finished the final episode and tweeted about how happy I was that I waited, since Season 2 will finally be coming out in 2019. Then, on September 21st, Telltale - the giant of the interactive fiction gaming studios - folded. A lot of great people lost their jobs under terribly unfair conditions, TWAU2 was cancelled, and I was once again left to wonder whether I killed something just by loving it from afar.

September 23rd is Celebrate Bisexuality Day! (And it's also EGX 2018 - Day 4!)

Happy Bi Visibility Day to one and all! I’ll be celebrating this September 23rd in style at EGX in Birmingham, making this a doubly exciting day, which got me thinking that I wanted to write a blog about the intersection of two subjects close to my heart: bisexuality and gaming.


Bisexual Gaming History
I’ve been doing a lot of research into LGBT+ history in gaming recently, which has unearthed seams of interesting information I never knew before. For example, the first appearance of a canonically bisexual character in a video game was in 1992 in Ultima VII - making the “B” in LGBT+ the last letter to get represented in a video game (G, L, and T making their debuts in '85, '86, and '88, respectively). Perhaps to make up for our late arrival at the table, the first ever LGBT+ player character in a video game was a bisexual man (Curtis of 1996’s Phantasmagoria 2), arguably the most underrepresented LGBT+ identity in gaming. And the first ever same-sex marriage option in video games occurred in Fallout 2 in 1998, with bisexual characters Davin and Miria both happy to marry a player character of either sex.


Best Bisexual Games
I’ve also been thinking about some of my overall favourite representations of bisexuality in games. I’ve played a lot over the years, watched even more let’s plays, and gone out of my way to find out about how LGBT+ characters have made their presence known. From this overwhelming amount of data, I’ve identified four games that I want to highlight as either getting bisexuality very right, or just going above and beyond to represent bisexual identities and experiences.

1. The Sims
The Sims has always been somewhat ahead of the curve in LGBT+ recognition: the series introduced civil partnerships in 2004; same-sex marriages in 2009; and opened up gender customisation, allowing for trans and non-binary characters, in 2016 - putting the franchise well ahead of many real-life countries for LGBT+ rights. In the midst of all this, it’s easy to forget that their bisexual recognition has always been strong: since the very first game came out in 2000, technically speaking every character in The Sims has been bisexual, with everyone happy to couple up with anyone of an appropriate age, with emotional compatibility the most important factor in finding partners for your Sims. Even after The Sims 2 introduced a hidden mechanic allowing for gendered romantic attraction, everybody has remained bi to some extent. In a society that still tends to assume heterosexuality as the default, it’s refreshing to see a fictional universe that instead positions degrees of bisexuality as the standard state for its inhabitants.

2. Life is Strange
The first two games in the Life is Strange franchise are popular for the romantic relationships between the three female leads: Max, Chloe, and Rachel. But what I want to draw attention to in particular is the often overlooked nuance with which bisexuality is represented in the franchise. The majority of Chloe’s emotionally significant relationships are with women, but she is obviously attracted to men as well, at least physically; while Rachel’s situation is the inverse, sharing a deep attraction with Chloe but seeming to prefer dating men most of the time. Max has romantic options with both Chloe and Warren, and can downplay either in favour of the other or give them both equal attention, leaving it up to the player how far to take either relationship while making it clear that Max sees romantic potential with both. It’s a huge acknowledgement that, rather than being a one-size-fits-all deal, bisexuality encompasses a wide spectrum of sexual and romantic attractions.

3. Dishonored
Many RPG franchises give you the option to choose your character’s gender and then role-play their sexuality however you want, by choosing from a line-up of possible love interests. This trail was notably blazed by studios like BioWare and Bethesda, but it’s becoming something of an industry standard. Canonically LGBT+ player characters, however, are much rarer. Appreciate, then, the Dishonored franchise’s playable characters, two of whom are canonically bisexual women. Billie Lurk’s bisexuality, hinted at from her initial appearance in the first game’s The Knife of Dunwall DLC, is directly stated in her audio diary in Dishonored 2: “I've loved a number of women, and even a couple of men, but I've never loved anyone like my Deirdre”. Meanwhile, Emily Kaldwin’s love interest, Wyman, never appears on-screen, and their gender was deliberately left unspecified by the writers, allowing the player to fill in the blanks. If the unmissable in-universe possibility of Emily being in a relationship with a man or a woman isn’t evidence of canonical bisexuality, I don’t know what is.

4. Monster Prom
While the other games on this list are all great examples of bi visibility in gaming, it’s hard to deny that bisexual women enjoy far greater canonical representation than their male counterparts. Not so in Monster Prom, which takes care to offer a balanced mix of genders and identities in its cast of canonically pansexual characters. This is important because not only, for example, are punky short-haired Amira, party girl Polly, hipster Liam, and slender pretty-boy Oz all bisexual, but so too are spoiled rich girl Miranda, grungy hunk Brian, and ultra-jock Scott, tapping into aesthetics of bisexuality (and bisexual masculinity in particular) that would usually be ignored in favour of more recognisable stereotypes. It also can’t be overstated how important it is (to me at least, and I suspect to a lot of other people) to see a very LGBT+-oriented game where opposite-sex relationships between bisexuals are treated with equal validity as same-sex relationships, and not sidelined as lesser examples of queer identity. I mean, I love you Dream Daddy, but c’mon, let us decide whether to flirt with Mary as well?


The Future of Bisexuality in Gaming
While writing this, it’s really hit me how little representation there is of bisexual men in contemporary gaming compared to bisexual women. While female bisexual characters tend to be fairly overt, the identity of bisexual males is often relegated to a single throwaway line of dialogue (Javier in The Walking Dead: A New Frontier), or all implicit and only clarified post-facto by the creator (Jacob in Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate). The Borderlands franchise is a classic example: while there are many LGBT+ characters and I’m not at all complaining about its inclusiveness, it strikes me how only Mad Moxxi makes frequent references to her bisexual attractions, while the bisexuality of male characters Axxton and Mr Torgue is only really referred to in their absence when others talk about them. Trevor in Grand Theft Auto V would probably be one of the best examples of bisexual men in games were he not also a depraved and violent psychopath, though it is refreshing that his sexuality is never either the proof or the cause of his awful deeds. What Remains of Edith Finch gives a hugely sympathetic portrayal of bisexual man Lewis, but I cannot recommend anything so heartbreakingly tragic becoming the benchmark for bi men in gaming.

The upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey looks promising, with twin protagonists Alexios and Kassandra both given the same romantic options with men and women alike, in-keeping with the Ancient Greek setting of the game. And with little yet known about the details of Life is Strange 2, is it too much to hope that it will do for bi men what the first game did for bi women? Probably - and I’m actually not wanting it to be just a gender-flipped rehash of the original - though there’s no reason you can’t have a queer love story in there just because the focus is elsewhere; in fact, that could be quite a progressive development in itself.

While the games industry, when viewed as a terrifying gestalt entity, hasn’t yet fully grasped all the concepts of bisexuality, I think it’s fair to say we’ve at least arrived now. Bisexual women are being given agency all over the place and taking centre stage in their own stories, which is a huge deal when you think about how recently the concept of female bisexuality was primarily being marketed to titillate (hypothetically straight and male) gamers. I do hope that bisexual men manage to catch up soon, although having at least two members of the Assassin’s Brotherhood on your team has got to be a strong starting point.

To summarise: play Monster Prom! Thank you for coming to my 2018 TED Talk.

"Heavy Rain": A Complete Ramble

Beware spoilers below, including ending spoilers, for Heavy Rain.

Before I get into my opinions, I want to start off by boasting about my QTE prowess in Heavy Rain. In a game that I’ve heard a lot of people talk about screwing up on their first play-through, I naturally assumed that I’d meet with similar disasters; so I was super proud to get all four playable characters alive to the end game, and then even have the three heroes defeat the villain in the final showdown. Another boast - I was so lightning-quick during the Mad Jack fight with Norman that I didn’t even get to the final two-thirds of the fight, because I slapped the cuffs on the guy and subdued him so early on.

For balance, I did not do nearly this well when I played Until Dawn last year. In that game I managed to lose Jessica to a fumbled QTE, Matt to a bad choice, and Mike and Ashley to poor timing. So hopefully this is evidence of my reflexes improving (which is meant to be one of the pluses to regular video gaming, right?). The only determinant character I lost in Heavy Rain was Lauren, who drowned when she and Shelby were trapped in the car - which was really sad because I did like her a lot and was trying to save her, but either didn’t understand what to do or wasn’t quick enough to do it, or quite possibly both.

In addition to impressing people with this, what I’m trying to confess is that despite Heavy Rain’s many, glaring flaws, it boosted my ego somewhat, and I’m bound to be biased by that. In truth, when I first finished it I wasn’t sure how I felt; but it’s been a couple of weeks now, and the other day I saw a copy of it on a shop shelf and said, without thinking, “Oh, I loved that game!” Which, once I stopped to think about it, definitely felt true. It’s an interesting combination of loving things about it that I genuinely thought were great, and ironically loving things that I thought were so terrible they were funny, but hey - love’s complicated.

Speaking of love, have I mentioned enough that I ended up with a massive crush on Norman Jayden? My mother let me watch Due South on TV at an impressionable age, and it instilled in me a lifelong love of stories about by-the-book super-cops who are just trying to do the right thing in a corrupt world. Poor Norman. I just wanted to hug him, mainly because it’d be nice for him to get some human contact that didn’t involve having his ass handed to him every chapter. From what I’ve seen from the Detroit: Become Human demo, Connor seems to be very much cut from the same cloth as Norman; leading me to comment that David Cage might be terrible at writing realistic female characters, but he sure can come up with the sort of clean-cut white boy I’m guaranteed to fall in love with.

In fairness to David Cage, not all of his female characters are as terrible as I may have made out. In the past I’ve commented at length upon what I consider to be Madison’s many flaws, both in-universe and on a meta level, but she isn’t quite the only woman to feature in Heavy Rain. Lauren Winter is arguably the most significant non-playable character in the game - less of a motivator than Shaun, maybe, but far more of a featured presence, actually appearing in a lot more chapters. Other than the fact that she’s introduced working as a prostitute - which is not necessarily a problem, but does feel like a gratuitous attempt to sexualise her - Lauren is a fairly proactive and competent character. Like Madison, she puts herself in ridiculous amounts of danger pursuing the Origami Killer; but unlike Madison, who stumbles into the case by chance, Lauren is the mother of one of the victims, and therefore her reckless drive felt much more believable and sympathetic. When Madison tried to flirt her way into getting information, she came across as a skeevy journalist not much better than the men she was taking advantage of; when Lauren did it, I felt her desperation and her disgust, but also her raw determination. As I’ve already mentioned, I was truly quite shaken up when I failed to save her, although I comforted myself that it did mean I spared her from the awful revelation about what Shelby did to her son.

I chose not to pursue either of the optional romance paths in the game, which were between Ethan and Madison and between Shelby and Lauren. In both cases, (and even putting aside the spoiler that Shelby killed Lauren’s son), it just felt really gross to attempt to seduce someone literally in the moment they were trying to get justice for their kidnapped and/or murdered child. As a result, Ethan neither moved in with Madison nor got back together with his ex-wife Grace at the end (which I understand can happen if Madison dies); instead, he and Shaun seemed to be taking some time together to heal and bond after everything they’ve gone through, which I think is both healthier and more nuanced than a romantic ending would have been. It was actually pretty heartwarming, even if my main impression of the men in the Mars family throughout the game was frequently summed up in the word “derrrp”.

So where did everybody end up? Ethan and Shaun started to rebuild, as I’ve mentioned; and Shelby died because he always does if one of the protagonists can successfully fight him at the end (Norman, in my game - of course, because he’s clearly the hero in a cast of fools). Poor Lauren was dead, but I can’t entirely pretend it wasn’t something of a mercy in many ways. Madison wrote a book and became a TV personality; her ending reminded me a lot of Lana in American Horror Story: Asylum - maybe it’s just a trope that almost always sails alongside the Intrepid Lady Journalist archetype. Though she levelled-up in usefulness towards the end, she remained a fairly flimsy character for most of the game, but at least one person clearly misidentified her as the real saviour of the day: the mysterious “Vincent”, who turns up to one of her book signings in order to drop sinister hints about his role in a sequel that’s probably never going to happen now.

And what of Norman, my best boy and bae-of-the-month? Well, it turns out that, in true fashion for beautifully suffering characters, Norman gets screwed to some degree no matter what ending you get. Consensus is that the best you can manage is to deliberately guide him away from the warehouse, forcing him to miss the end-game but prompting him to quit his job and, with it, his destructive addictions. Not exactly a fair pay-off for the most competent character in the game.

The ending I got, in which Norman is instrumental in defeating Shelby, started with a section on the same talk show that Madison appears on (which I have quietly retconned out of my personal headcanon as an unnecessary duplication of the scene, as well as weirdly out-of-character for Norman). This is followed by Norman apparently overcoming his Triptocaine addiction; only to begin hallucinating the toy tanks from one of his ARI games in real life - a grim confirmation that it was the technology, and not the drug, that was his real and ongoing destructive addiction.

I’ve seen a couple of attempts to write this off as either a joke ending by David Cage that landed a little too hard, or evidence that Norman is actually recovering - since he’s only hallucinating small assets, not whole ARI environments as he was earlier in the game. Much as I’d like to believe the latter theory in particular, I’m more inclined to believe that Norman is still in danger from ARI unless he quits entirely. I don’t demand happy endings in fiction, even for my favourites; more important to me is that this feels true to his character. Who knows, it might have been cast in a better light if the Heavy Rain Chronicles prequel had ever gotten further than a single, Madison-focused episode; but I can live with this outcome, even if I am a bit sad about the knowledge that my favourite character is the only protagonist who never gets a happy ending on their own terms. It’s been said many times that I’m always drawn to the underdog, and it seems like I’ve been true to form here.

Heavy Rain may be much sillier than a story about child murder should ever be, but David Cage did pretty much single-handedly elevate the interactive fiction genre from the weird cousin of the gaming world to one of the hottest genres going. It's fair to say that The Walking Dead, Life is Strange, Until Dawn, and perhaps even this year's BAFTA Best Game winner What Remains of Edith Finch all benefited from the groundwork laid by Heavy Rain, even if they weren't directly influenced by it. It may not be the best example of its type, but it is still great fun to play, especially if you know what you're in for and aren't expecting a cutting edge gaming experience from a title that will be turning 10 before you know it. Say it with me now:

JAAASON?!

...

SHAAAUN!!