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!!

My Gaming Diary: August 2018

Game of the Month: Lust for Darkness
Lust for Darkness was released this June, the first game by indie developer Movie Games Lunarium. (If you’ve started to notice that almost every game I play is either an indie game, a last-gen game, or a free demo, I point you sadly in the direction of my un-limitless bank account.) It retails at a very reasonable £10.99 on Steam, and like many indie outings on that platform, was Kickstarter funded. It’s a Lovecraft-inspired erotic psychological horror game - incidentally bringing my Game of the Month Somehow Featuring Cthulhu total up to 4 out of 4, and technically making 2018 the Cthulhuiest year since records began! It is also completely not safe for work or younger players; and should probably be avoided by those who are uncomfortable with graphic depictions of sex and nudity, or with implications or descriptions of off-screen sexual violence.

The elevator pitch for this game is one you’ve heard a million times if you’re a horror fan: Jonathan’s wife, Amanda, is kidnapped by a cult, and he has to go in like a one-man army to rescue her. It’s also enjoying something of a renaissance: 2017 alone provided us with two high-profile examples of this exact horror game trope via Resident Evil 7 and Outlast 2. It’s one of the commonest set-ups for horror, alongside the one where a man is responsible for his wife’s/daughter’s/sister’s manslaughter/murder, and must navigate a purgatory of his own making in order to atone. (I love them but I’ll be the first to admit that horror games have a bit of a female relative problem. Not to mention a purgatorial hell-maze problem.) And indeed, Lust for Darkness plays out along very similar lines, basically like an indie soft-porn reimagining of the second Outlast game.

It certainly has the benefit of brevity: it only took me five and a half hours to play through the whole story. Admittedly, I somehow missed about half of the optional backstory documents, but I also spent enough time getting lost and doubling back on myself that it probably all evens out. On the plus side this means that Lust for Darkness can be enjoyed in a single sitting if you just follow the objectives; but whether this represents good value for money is a matter of opinion. I personally was quite happy to support a new studio on their first game for this price, but if playtime is a factor in your spending choices it’s worth taking into account.

So, is it as erotic as promised? There’s an achievement for spending 10 minutes on the orgy scene near the beginning of the game, and I cannot for the life of me think how I didn’t manage to ping it. The sprites may not be the most well-realised from a graphics perspective (and I suspect having the attendees masked was as much about not having to animate their faces as adding to the mystique of the event), but most of what’s happening in this scene lives up to the billing of an erotic video game. Sure, public sex and the occasional threesome seems to be the limits to the devs’ “no holds barred” sexual imaginations, but everyone’s clearly enjoying themselves.

After that one scene, though, the sexy stuff takes a rapid turn for the disturbing, and never really comes back. The alien dimension of Lust’ghaa, where Jonathan gets transported various times during the game, is a squidgy, vaguely sexual horrorshow. Consisting of a series of sphincter-ish doorways to womb-like caves, where people have suffered sex-themed tortures like been penetrated and ripped apart ass-to-mouth by man-sized erections, it’s enough to really turn you off the whole “sex cult” thing. There’s one other human-driven orgy scene later in the game, but you will get caught and die if you stray close enough to take a look; so that’s basically your lot for actual eroticism, unless you have some very, very niche tastes. In fact, for a game that bills itself as erotica, this game takes a weirdly negative view of sexual pleasure, equating it entirely with selfishness, pain, and death.

A game with this much sexual content, especially when mixing it with horror tropes, is never going to meet everyone’s approval; and I dare say that something this ambitious with regards to producing erotic horror in a video game will probably leave everyone dissatisfied to an extent, either because they feel it goes too far or not far enough. So while I don’t blame the makers of the game for not matching my hopes for it 100%, I do want to comment briefly on what I feel are a couple of issues around female sexuality in the game. Firstly, female genitalia is obscured throughout, except for a few pieces of abstract artwork, despite the fact that there are penises just everywhere, doing everything from lying limply on the owner’s lap to penetrating a goat. (Is this really less shockingly explicit than full-frontal vajayjay?!) Secondly, even though the female villains are clearly equal and enthusiastic participants in the cult’s orgies, it’s hammered home that Amanda was kidnapped and raped; keeping the virgin/whore dichotomy sadly alive and well in a game that otherwise came close to a pretty enlightened portrayal of female sexual agency.

Despite my misgivings about the treatment of female characters on a story and world-building level, I actually quite liked Amanda. She certainly has more claim to be the protagonist of the game than Jonathan, who has very little impact on the story as he moves through it, and who at one point can pick up and examine every knife in the kitchen before walking off weaponless to take on an entire cult. (Sure, the gameplay is largely that of a walking simulator with some point-and-click adventure features, but could walking around with a meat-cleaver in hand really have gone amiss?) Full disclosure: I did not like Jonathan, who at times came across more like a Victorian maiden aunt swooning at the thought of sex, rather than a man with a legitimate grievance against a bunch of Cthulhu worshippers. I would have liked this game a great deal more if I had been playing as Amanda throughout, rather than just during the brief prologue - and since she clearly has only fragmentary, or at least confused, memories of the year she spent in the cult, none of the mystery need be lost. Heck, she didn’t even need to be kidnapped at the beginning - the story would have worked just as well if it was about a woman who was seduced into joining the cult, began to question and investigate it over time, and was eventually presented with the decision to stay and comply or risk leaving. If this sounds like a total rewrite, I maintain that the core plot of Amanda trying to escape the cult with her baby could remain completely the same, while making this story about a woman’s time in a sex cult actually feel female-driven.

So, after expounding all my criticisms, would I recommend the game? Well, to be fair, it actually does have a lot going for it. Its concept is truly original: if you want a story about a Cthulhu sex cult, this is definitely where you want to start. Also, for what was basically a two-person production team, it’s been put together amazingly well. As a demonstration of what Movie Games Lunarium are capable of, it’s incredibly promising. It’s obviously not going to be for everyone; but if you go in expecting what you’re getting - a game about bad sex and Cthulhu - you won’t be disappointed.


The Stories Unfold: Somehow, I found the time to play lots of interactive fiction games this month, too!
Let’s face it, everybody’s got their preferences, and there’s no denying I’ve got a strong inclination towards narrative gaming right now. I started this month by finishing off the last mission from Episode 3 of The Council that I wrote about for Game of the Month in July. I know I rhapsodised about it enough then, but really: it’s such a good game. The final puzzle in Episode 3 caused me to construct my first video game crazy wall in ages, filling pages of paper with annotated notes until I could be sure I’d got it just right. And then - sweet success! The rest of the month has basically consisted of staving off withdrawal symptoms by counting down the unknown (but surely depleting) number of days until Episode 4.

No, not really! Not when I still have my run-through of Life is Strange to complete (Bae over Bay!) - a labour of love that becomes more urgent by the day, as now I have not only Before the Storm but also the imminent release of Life is Strange 2 to look forward to.

Oh, and: I finally finished Heavy Rain! Honestly though, it’s going to take a separate review blog to unpack all of that. But Special Agent Norman Jayden survived, so I was happy.

Last up: Thanks to Aramis, I’ve finally been able to return to The Wolf Among Us. I’ve been playing it for nearly two years and had only finished Episode 3 of 5 due to Porthos’s increasingly off-putting tendency towards painful lag and a harshly-lit screen. I made it two-thirds of the way through Episode 4 in a single sitting the other night, and am now quite hopeful of finishing it in time for Season 2 next year.


It’s Finally Here! Let’s Play We Happy Few (...the demo)
My fucked-up, dystopian-obsessed little heart nearly exploded this August 10th, when We Happy Few was finally given a full release after over two years in early access limbo. I say “nearly” because I haven’t bought it yet - partly because it’s inadvisable to buy yourself a game you’ve been banging on about for years when it’s finally released a month before your birthday; and partly because new games are expensive and I couldn’t clear my schedule enough to ensure I gave it the time it (and my investment in it) would have merited.

But I did have a 45 minute time-locked demo on my Xbox, a new capture card and studio microphone from my Generous Benefactors, and a dream! A dream of recording an awkward let’s play of We Happy Few that ends abruptly after 37 minutes for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet. But it was a great experience - my new equipment ran without a hitch; I enjoyed recording it even if my style is nowhere near YouTube-worthy yet; and I’m hooked on the game, even if I spent so much time mooching around Arthur’s office I’m barely into the sewer levels. I even got an achievement (diamond, no less!) which I didn’t even know you could do on a demo, so thanks for being cool about it, Xbox!


Gaming as a Family: Hidden Object Games, Morph Girl, & Multiplayer
Early this month, I took Aramis Laptop with me on an extended visit to my parents’ house for my Dad’s birthday. He was the one to introduce me to gaming early in my childhood, and was responsible for nearly every gaming purchase that affected my early experience of the medium. These days, however, he prefers slower-paced entertainment, and has developed a major fondness for hidden object games. I bought him three for his birthday - Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, Victorian Mysteries: The Yellow Room, and Small Town Terrors: Pilgrim’s Hook - and we played the first two during my visit. The Victorian Mysteries series, which adapts classic novels into HO games, delivered as ever; but my impulse purchase of Letters from Hell proved to be laughably bad (but at least we were laughing).

I also showed off Aramis’s capabilities by doing a quick group run of Morph Girl with my folks, since it’s based on unreleased footage from an indie horror film (one of their favourite genres) and easy to play in one sitting. However, they quickly became less concerned with my shiny new laptop than with the behaviour of the game’s protagonist, Elana, who they both took a vocal dislike to. I theorise that this may be because the character’s neglected wife happens to share my first name, though it might just be because Elana really is a bit of a dick.

My partner came to join us for the weekend and, despite my entreaties, I didn’t manage to entice my parents into a four-player game of Monster Prom. (They loved Cards Against Humanity so it seemed like safe enough material.) The two of us did, however, play with the new Fuckin’ Hot Summer Update on our own later. We didn’t get around to much of the new story material, but the artwork updates are evident right off the bat, and worth checking out in their own right. Miranda’s adorable new summer dress reinforced her as my personal bae among the love interests, even if she does get sidelined by the necessity of supporting my OTP (Damien/Amira 5EVA!).


Mobile Gaming: I dug out my PSP, played The Sims 2, and got sidetracked
My gaming laptop is nice and portable, but my gaming habit isn’t yet problematic enough that I regularly bring along my consoles for a few days away. As ever I had my trusty Lara Croft: Relic Run with me, and just for giggles I dug out and brought along my PSP too.

I didn’t have a PSP when they were actually a thing. I bought mine second-hand three or four years ago with one goal in mind: to play The Sims 2 PSP exclusive port. Why buy a whole new used-good mini-console just to run a game I already had on PC and PS2? Because the story of The Sims 2 for PSP is one of my favourites in the franchise, and somehow never made it onto anything other than this one fairly obscure platform. I always thought it would have been a perfect fit for the PC-based Sims Stories, a spin-off series that got three entries at around the same time this game was released.

Instead of the usual sandbox, The Sims 2 PSP hangs a pretty tightly written story off of the usual Sims game mechanics: one that takes place in the fan-favourite location of Strangetown; features popular characters like Bella Goth; and actually plays out a lot of the stories of conspiracy theories, serial killings, and otherworldly events that were hinted at in the PC version but, due to the nature of the gameplay, were never anything more serious than flavour text in-game.

So I’m once again inching my Sim incrementally closer to unravelling some of these mysteries, while at the same time remembering my realisation of a few years ago as to why the PSP was quickly replaced with the Vita. My main gripe is that the screen is so damned reflective you have to be in a completely darkened room not to see mostly your own face staring back at you - acceptable (if not particularly good for your eye-health) when playing alone at night in your childhood bedroom, but less easy to get on with when you bring it along to play during your break at work. In all honestly, I fairly quickly switched back to making expy characters in The Sims 4 on PC.