Hellblade : Senua's Sacrifice (PS4 Review)

I'm finding an evolving market for something akin to the adventure games of the 90's. I've played quite a few in the past few years. Grim Fandango Remastered was fun for what it was as well as a good primer for the modern adaptations of the genre. I've liked enough of these games to keep giving them a shot. Very rarely do I have mixed feelings when it comes to adventure games. Hellblade is one of those types of experiences that isn't quite like the others but shares enough similarities that I have to lump it in with more passive games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Where it diverges from those games is probably its greatest fault.

Hellblade is a psychological adventure game steeped in Norse mythology. Adventure games thrive on storytelling and puzzles - so where Hellblade starts is promising. It appears in tune with itself and sucks you in immediately. Senua arrives on the shores of Helheim to search for a way to free her lover's soul. It presents a great introduction into Senua's character - a fragile, terrified, and troubled woman scarred deeply by the events that led to her partner's death. A turbulent mixture of voices in Senua's psyche debate her every move throughout the game. These voices taunt her, encourage her, and bicker between themselves. The voice acting is top notch and visuals staggering for a $30 game. The story sticks a landing early on and sustains that driving force for a good chunk of the game. And then something happens. The experience becomes unraveled in a way that lays out where it's going and how it intends to get there. By the time that happens, it just doesn't have enough to keep the themes it wrestles with afloat within the medium.

The biggest flaw for Hellblade is the cadence that it conforms to. On paper, it sounds like a nice compromise between action adventure and true adventure games. The main issue is how it presents all of these interactive parts and what it does (or doesn't do) with them. Take for example the combat. While it's simple and breaks up some of the monotony of advancing and solving a puzzle, they overuse it so much to the point that it becomes predictable and at times even contrived. You know when a combat segment is coming up before you even get there and eventually you'll know exactly what it entails. The difficulty also increases artificially. Instead of making the combat more complex by layering new skills or introducing substantial variations in foes, the game just throws more conservative iterations of enemies at you at the same time. The end result is an otherwise stylish one-on-one combat mechanic boiling down to a frustrating chore where you have to account for multiple attackers outside your peripheral. They lean more and more weight on the combat right up until the conclusion and every interaction with it becomes an increasingly tedious task.

You would hope the puzzles make up for the tedium though, right? Well, no, they don't. They suffer from most of the same criticisms. The first puzzle you encounter in the game may stump you for a few minutes. Once you figure out the solution and get beyond that first gate though, you'd be surprised to think that they'd dare to repeat that motif for the entirety of the game. That's exactly what they do and it's probably the most deflating realization. Puzzles should become increasingly complex in any game and should feel intuitive to the world. They shouldn't just feel like they're padding out an experience - but in Hellblade they regrettably do. Later down the road, instead of solving one of these types of puzzles, you'll now have to walk around a small area and solve two or three of the same type of environmental puzzle before you can advance. Once you solve the first puzzle in the game, you know exactly what to do for the next eight hours. The linearity of the game hampers the appeal of even doing these particular tasks. You understand the language of the game in the first thirty minutes, where an undeviating path and visual cues hint way too clearly at every solution. It feels more like paint by numbers than something like The Witness where you're overcome with consistently satisfactory moments of insight. If the puzzles were more diverse and interesting or the world was more open, there'd be something here to actually sink your teeth into. But there isn't. It's all just too shallow and it practically treats its audience like they're mindless.

Hellblade seems as if its trying way too hard to fit into the video game mold. It's as if the story began as a film script and they worked their way back to the channel they felt most familiar to tell it. It's punctuated enough in story paradigm that it could work as a movie, but then they chopped it up with elementary game mechanics. The writing starts solid but becomes increasingly overbearing as time goes on. That seems to be an ongoing complaint with this review. It starts at a high point with great art and sound design and gets burdened by too much of everything else after the player base has more than grasped it. There are times when they keep driving home a point so much that you can't help but roll your eyes. And sure, you could make the argument that the theme calls for burdening and oppressive writing, but I think it hits the nail so hard and so frequently in every facet of its form that the game becomes obnoxious.

I went into Hellblade with high hopes and ended up relieved when it was over. The song in the ending credits actually made me cringe. I know that sounds like hyperbole but it did. It perfectly summed up how I felt about this game as a whole. I've posted it below in the hopes that if my review doesn't get my point across, the song possibly will. It's a shame, because you can see a clear divergence between the love that went into making the world and the game design choices and unendurable writing that weighed it down. I may be in the unpopular vote here. It just wasn't for me at all. I think it would be way easier to forgive the missteps if I could sit back and just take in the story. It has to be judged as a game. It has to be judged as a story that justifies the reasoning to be a game. I don't think it hits either target.



Grade: D

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (PS4 Review)

(All screenshots in this review have been captured directly from the PS4)

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a beautiful adventure game by The Chinese Room, the development team behind Dear Esther. It boasts a well written story of convincing characters that are matched in depth by the actors who voice them. The music, composed by the game’s director Jessica Curry, is another strong component in what begins to sound more and more like a ringing endorsement. Unfortunately, the game fails a very basic checklist requirement that left me disappointed and frustrated.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture maintains a character movement speed that I would find unacceptable to just about anyone. In fact, the further you play the more it starts to detract from your experience and become a burdening, needless weight. It’s astounding that anyone on the development team could find this as necessary without eventually admitting that it locks itself to a molasses-like trudge merely to prolong the game length. I began the experience with an excited inquisitiveness, walking around every inch of the map to observe the remnants of an empty village. I wanted to inspect all of the little details that caught my eye - but every step of the way I found myself pressing the buttons on the controller compulsively, trying to find if there was some run mechanic that hadn’t unlocked yet or I’d yet to input properly. When I realized I was putting combinations of buttons together that no sane person would ever map a run action to, I knew that I was facing my own personal sort of doomsday.

Even though the acting in this game is phenomenal and the writing is great, I began to steadily lose interest. They do try to make up for the movement speed by offering guidance in the form of these amiable little orbs of light. They lead you through this open concept map by imploring you to follow them like a dog, running toward the place they’re leading you to and then running back over to beckon before running off again. That’s great and all, but it really begins to become the only thing that pushes you forward. I began to rely on it exclusively in order to progress through the story as quickly as possible, and stopping to see many of the more subtle details become too much of a pain. I felt literally exhausted by the experience when I finally got to the end and I have no qualms in saying that I’m not entirely sure what the conclusion amounted to.

The story goes in some interesting directions based around the Biblical end-times. There are a handful of characters that you’ll encounter in a minimalist presentation, obscured forms that appear to be made of agitated light. When you activate these cues, the characters perform minute-long plays that feed you details about the characters and the “situation” that involves the disappearance of more than half the townsfolk. Each of these performances is exceptionally well done, and if it weren’t for these moments, I would’ve probably never finished the game. That creates the secondary problem of feeling numb by the ending. The final divulgence of information feels like a half-baked idea that could’ve been handled better.

Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture is the kind of game that you’ll find good things about but you may feel progressively less fond of them when you let the entire experience digest. There’s things to see here, but without the proper ability to see them, many of the world’s intricacies are willfully left unfound and unappreciated.

Grade: C

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PS4 Review)

I downloaded The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on a whim. Things have been slow for games lately and I had heard a few good things about it from friends. Most of those praises were centered around the looks - and to my understanding the game has been remade with the Unreal 4 engine specifically for the PS4. It’s described as a horror adventure game and though my experience with adventure games is limited I was compelled to play through its modest 5 hours in a handful of sittings. I was skeptical at first, feeling as if the highly realistic graphics and simplistic gameplay were going to be just another example of disproportionate priorities within game design - but each consecutive session became more and more engrossing and once arriving at the end I was left with a strong desire to seek out more of these bite-sized experiences. To that point I recommend The Vanishing of Ethan Carter highly.

Ethan Carter begins with a black screen that says, “This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand”. There are no fail states. There are no enemies. You explore the world for clues and items. The most involved portions of the game are environmental puzzles where items need to be positioned in order to conjure up ghostlike memories that will help you solve a series of murders. You then enter the proper chronology of events that will piece together how each one of these murders occurred. You’re not required to perform any of these puzzles - in fact, you could walk right to the end of the game without doing any of it. The reward of Ethan Carter is related to how much exploration you put into it. To that end, I find the game’s deceptively linear design effective.

What stood out most about the game were its vignettes of weirdness that punctuate the experience. There’s a fair share of spectacle to be had in the game that incentivizes you to really want to see everything. It's constantly looking to give you good reason to do everything. The hyper realistic presentation paired with these abnormal episodes that seem like hallucinations works quite well. There were definitely more than a few times that the game impressed me, both in the world itself and in its dreamlike happenings.

It’s hard to say a lot about The Vanishing of Ethan Carter because the majority of its enjoyment is found by experiencing it yourself. There’s not much to judge about it from a gameplay perspective and I can’t give away much of the story without doing it a disservice. I think that the shorter length of the experience works very well in tandem with what it offers. It’s a story and experience that I’ll speak fondly of and one that intrigues me to try some of the other recent adventure games that appear to be making a steady comeback.

Grade: A

Arkham Knight (PS4 Review)

Arkham Knight is a game that I wanted to like. I played through about 40% of its content before inevitably dropping it and never wanting to touch it again. The big problem with Arkham Knight is design. On a mechanical level, Arkham Knight controls fine. On a presentational level, Arkham Knight is top notch. It's just that through all of the things that Arkham Knight does right it feels more like fan service than a game I enjoy playing. I can't emphasize enough how visually impressive the world is. It's one of the best looking console games this generation and seldom struggles with framerate dips. While Rocksteady tries new things, they're not that great or even that deep. The design is formulaic, suggesting a gross imbalance between the game's presentational goals and design choices. A lot of the missions are too similar and what's worse is that the game repeats the structure shamelessly. You'll complete a mission or be in between a mission segment spending a portion of that time on a bat call talking to Alfred or Oracle or whomever else. It's nitpicking, I know, but when things are used in excess it's hard not to notice. Arkham Knight didn’t do enough to pull me in and what it offers isn’t enough to make me want more.

The driving and tank combat additions are unreasonably overused and they're bland. It's a real tragedy that they rely on it as much as they do. You use the Batmobile for chases, tank combat, and platforming. Platforming with a car is one part that I simply can’t understand. Even on paper the idea seems bad, so to see it make it to the final product brings up a lot of questions. The on-foot combat looks great and controls fine, but after so many of these games and games that I feel adopted it and did it better (Shadow of Mordor) I expected to see something new. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
What this comes down to in the end is that Arkham Knight feels like a gorgeous game with dated gameplay and narrow design choices. It’s possible that Rocksteady is just aching to move on to something new. I can understand that - but for a final hurrah, the closing chapter is stale and contrived. I think it’s worth renting it if you’re a Batman fan, but otherwise I don’t think this game has much to offer.

Grade: C

Titan Souls (PS4 Review)

You know what I love? Wendy’s. I unabashedly love it. I go there once a week and I always order the same thing: a double hot and juicy with no pickles. I love pickles too but that’s neither here nor there, folks. The fact of the matter is that it’s like a ritual for me. I love every aspect of it, including the drive there. Now what if there was some sort of horrid rule enforced on my weekly Wendy’s - say some type of obstacle. Let’s just say for the sake of this analogy I’m bumbling through here that I had to drive to Wendy’s while balancing a grain of rice on a tooth pick. For every time that I drop the grain of rice, my car is towed back at my house and my dashboard reads, “Fat chance, motherfucker! Do it again!” Eventually, I’d begin to question if the classic double was really worth it. Years later I would be found shambling around the parking lot of a Burger King, a shell of myself, talking to the french fry-laden bushes about bush stuff.

Titan Souls is sort of like this experience for me. It combines things that I love and does them in a way that feels like you’re part of some Soviet Union gymnastics team. Delineation to pattern is taboo, and while some of the one-shot-kill titans can allow a bit of mobility, the fights are either won in seconds or lost in seconds. Any fight that lasts longer than 10 seconds is just…no. It’s boring, you’re doing it wrong, you’ll probably die eventually, should I die? Should I just run into the boss and die? Sploot. Dead. Great.

Now instead of just letting you respawn outside the boss room or in the room itself, you have to run back to the boss room, which can take a few seconds but BELIEVE me when I say that this starts to feel like you’re slamming your dick into a car door repeatedly by the sixth fucking time, because the world is so vapid and bland that you hate, hate, HATE walking through it. It’s a critical problem with Titan Souls, because somewhere in between mixing Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and Zelda, the game stripped away not only the fun parts, but practically anything of praise. It’s woefully short, there’s no upgrade system or variety to the encounters, the world is more empty than Shadow of the Colossus (how the hell was this even possible?), and the fights are so short-lived that they leave no impression at all.

If this was maybe $5, I could possibly make some sort of case for trying it. It plays fine? It didn’t crash? The music is pretty? There’s clearly ideas in here worth exploring further but it’s just so far beyond dead in this iteration that I find it hard to give it any sort of praise, let alone recommendation. Just play Shovel Knight or Bastion or Axiom Verge. Do not pay $15 for this.

Grade: D

Bloodborne (PS4 Review)

After the mildly disappointing sequel to Dark Souls, it was seeming like maybe, just maybe, the Souls series could be heading into a slump. Combat was becoming a routine and players could easily best several of Dark Souls II's challenges by exercising a little bit of patience. While the sequel was admirable it lost a part of its appeal. It's great to see that director Hidetaka Miyazaki anticipated monotony. It's an increasingly difficult quality to find a developer that can embrace change while still working much of its core design into the fabric of what made a game laudable. Bloodborne adapts so well to a faster play style that it feels like a rebirth for the series.

Bloodborne is a big deal to Sony, which would worry anyone that’s a fan of Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls. While that might seem like it would be the kind of indication that the game would pull back the challenge and open the accessibility to new players in order to entice sales, the fact still stands that it's going to punish you until you decide to play it smart or play it well. The game still offers many ways to assist players with its challenges and it's always encouraged that new players play the game online so that they can take advantage of the messaging system which has been integral to the design of the Souls series. The community aspect to any of the Souls games is a large part of my reverence for it. A strong, simultaneous player base makes the world feel all the more accessible. You’ll always find players leaving helpful notes pertaining advice, emotions, humor, discoveries, warnings, and directions.

The combat is quicker than its predecessors and as a direct result far more enjoyable. By throwing out shields and adding better evasion, the encounters are frantic and fun. Still, even with the additional speed and focus shifted more toward the offensive, it feels comparable to the first Dark Souls in difficulty. Players will still make decisions based on enemy behavior and positioning is critical. You'll be faced with a few urgent choices that can make a great deal of difference.

The story and the environments remain consistently nebulous and macabre. NPC’s seldom speak clearly and even the more cryptic characters you’ll meet are voiced so exceptionally well that you’ll listen to whatever they have to say. Branchlike paths in the game are either hidden, requiring an undisclosed means to unlock them, or guarded by bosses. There’s blatant inspirations to classical horror, weaving effortlessly through the minds of Bram Stoker, HP Lovecraft, and Stephen King. It’s one of the most bizarre and fascinating aspects of Bloodborne how logical this nightmarish world feels as you progress through various locations, many of which feed into prior locations. In my first play through (which took roughly 27 hours) I missed two bosses, two regions of the world, and had barely scraped the surface of Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons. There’s genuine moments of trepidation, triumph, and discovery with each successive experience sinking its hooks in deeper. If you go in unspoiled, you’ll find small passages and items that access enormous optional areas. You’ll trigger strange, new events to occur by talking with NPC’s. The less you know about Bloodborne going in is directly proportionate to the quality of experience you’ll get out of it. I believe that all of the Souls game share one irrefutable quality: the more you persevere by your own merit the more you’ll fall in love with it.

The worst part about Bloodborne is its invasion feature. Paired with the faster gameplay and the amount of healing items that can be carried at a single time, invasions can go on for longer than they reasonably should and none of it is fun. It’s worth noting that being invaded is uncommon, as most areas appear to disable it. In my entire play through I was invaded only once. Subsequent experience being the invader proved that the system wasn’t something thought out as thoroughly as the rest of the game.

There’s a lot to say about Bloodborne but I feel it’s best left for players to dig into some of the more obscure yet deliberate design choices for themselves. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a Souls game. Despite its changes the series continues to be uncompromising in execution. The challenges that await veterans and newcomers are impressive feats in game design, providing constant memorable moments from start to finish. If there’s any question right now as to whether this console generation has anything that could be considered a worthwhile exclusive, Bloodborne is at the very top of that list.

Grade: A

The Order | 1886 (PS4 Review)

(All screenshots in this review have been captured from the PS4)

The Order has been under recent heavy fire from critics and consumers alike for various reasons. The most damning criticisms have been its heavy reliance on storytelling over gameplay, the lack of replay value, and the length. While I somewhat agree with these complaints, I also consider these complaints expected as the developers have long stated that the game's intent was to provide a cinematic experience over gameplay. The Order is a competent piece of work that set out to do exactly what it intended to do. Consumers should decide for themselves if this is something worth checking out, though I would recommend waiting for the game to lower its admission fee.

A game should always be judged on its gameplay and I think that this is something that will be on the forefront of anyone's mind. The Order has gameplay and what it does is entirely average. There's nothing spectacular about the combat outside of the graphics - it works fine and there aren't any real complaints worth mentioning. Shooting feels tight and responsive, the combat and stealth segments are mindless fun, and they try to make the quick time events as little of annoyance as possible. It does a reasonable job of pacing the gameplay along with its story segments but it's not enough.

The player is provided most of the story through cutscenes that cannot be skipped. Visual storytelling elements outside of cutscenes are empty in comparison to exposition that you'll be provided through admittedly strong voice performances from every actor. You'll see a lot of gorgeous things, but the world is lifeless in contrast to the characters that inhabit it. You're never provided a meaningful way to interact with the world around you and the linearity as well as the incessant lack of control can break the fourth wall. Players can find a few collectibles that are scattered around the environment but none of them carry any sort of significance whatsoever. I believe that this is The Order's greatest missed opportunity. A sense of the player's individuality is inherent in game design, so to rob the player of that is a fault that deserves heavy criticism. The story may take precedence, but the player should still feel as if they're driving the narrative in a game, otherwise the story suffers.

The Order is, and I mean this as kindly as I can, the most well-polished tech demo that has ever been released. It feels like a game that should've been a pack in with the PlayStation 4 when it launched. There's a lot of things in here to love, but the gameplay will easily be forgotten and as a consequence the story has difficulty supporting the weight of its cons and heavy handed design. There's nothing about the game that's bad - its's just that there's nothing about the game that comes out of the experience as wildly memorable. I remain hopeful that this series will continue because I like everything that they've managed to create. The Order's greatest task going forward will be finding a way to provide a better paced story with better gameplay and less reliance on its cinematic prowess. It's the only hope it has if it ever wishes to be taken seriously as a system-selling exclusive.

Grade: C