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...