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innuendostudios · 5 years

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Thoughts on... some more games

[discussing The Silent Age, Unforeseen Incidents, and Unavowed; all spoilers studiously avoided]

Thoughts on The Silent Age

I think I first heard about The Silent Age on an episode of Idle Thumbs at least a year ago? They implied it was a neat bit of time travel malarkey, and that’s exactly what it turns out to be. You’re a janitor in the 1970s who has a run-in with a dying time traveler who tells you basically everyone in the future he’s just arrived from has died of a horrible plague, he’s come back to prevent the outbreak, but now that he’s dying it’s your job to finish his task. You inherit his portable time travel doohickey and... well, solve a bunch of adventure game puzzles.

What we have here is a smattering of puzzles with the twist that every location exists both in the “present” and the post-apocalyptic future. It’s a clever hook, and it makes a fairly standard set of adventure game puzzles more interesting, though you’ll jump back and forth in time so much that becomes mundane. Outside of a few sequences where your time travel doohickey is out of power - which have some of the better solutions - every puzzle requires a jaunt forwards or backwards through time. Every single one. It loses some novelty after a bit. It doesn’t help that every single puzzle is also an inventory puzzle. The time travel mechanic seems like it would lend itself to some real clever braintinglers, but time travel mostly exists as a way of getting around locked doors, sneaking past guards, and giving you two versions of every room to look for inventory in. Any object that looks like it’s important, you need to slap another object on. The formula never changes.

I’m ambivalent about inventory puzzles, because an adventure game engine is generally designed such that you can fit rather a lot of different kinds of puzzles into it. I made a point in my Monkey Island video that the opening three trials each involves a completely different part of the engine: learning patterns in the dialogue system, interpreting information in the picture window, and possessing without necessarily using inventory while the game makes jokes with the sentence line. But inventory puzzles have always been the path of least resistance - they’re the simplest to design and the easiest to program. So far as inventory puzzles go, The Silent Age’s inventory puzzles are not at all bad, but, given there’s a much more interesting time travel mechanic right there, it's a missed opportunity.

As for the story, for much of the game, it seems purely functional. It’s not particularly original - as you can guess from the premise, it’s borrowing a lot from Back to the Future and Twelve Monkeys. And time travel stories can often feel like puzzle boxes more that interesting narratives; a bunch of curious loose threads in the first half are all explained in the second half when you see how the time-travel shenanigans played out. The characters aren’t deep, the horrors of the apocalypse aren’t deeply felt, the ethics and mechanics of time travel are hinted at but not really engaged with. For much of its runtime, it’s just a well-oiled machine, and you play to watch the cogs turn and the tumblers fall into place. This can be satisfying but also kind of hollow.

But, unlike a lot of time travel stories - and a lot of adventure games I’ve been playing recently - it gets richer in the final act. Right when you feel the puzzle box clicking inexorably and obviously into shape, the game makes room to get just a little bit heady. Not intensely so, but enough that the game proves smarter than you thought. And it manages to find an ending that is unexpected and oddly compelling. It still grazes against some topics its not prepared to delve into - okay, game, you’ve dutifully avoided the bootstrap paradox in some clever ways, but don’t these laws of causality kind of prove that fate exists? - but it does give the ending a bit more heft than I was expecting.

It’s a quick, play-it-in-an-afternoon game, and it didn’t exactly knock my socks off. But after so many capsule reviews where I say “good game, but I wish the ending was better,” it feels really good to say, just this once, “the ending made the whole experience better.” It’s short and it’s cheap and it’s worth checking out.

Thoughts on Unforeseen Incidents

I’ve never really gone into my problems with Broken Sword - and today is still not the day I rant about how Broken Sword is everything wrong with adventure games - but, as I’ve said elsewhere, Unforeseen Incidents is Broken Sword if Broken Sword were good.

It’s got a similar flavor of hapless dork protagonist who stumbles into a conspiracy by pure chance, a similar female journalist sidekick whom he clearly has a crush on, and even the last line of dialogue in the game seems like an intentional inversion of the ending of Broken Sword. The difference is that the conspiracy actually makes sense, the sidekick is capable and interesting instead of just cute and French, the jaunting between locations doesn’t have overtones of imperialist globetrotting ripped off from Indiana Jones, none of the puzzles are infuriating, it maintains a consistent tone, the jokes are actually funny, and there are no cutscenes with Don Bluth’s rubbery faces and bad pacing. (I said I’m not getting into it today!!!!)

So, yes, Unforeseen Incidents does Broken Sword one better, and, seeing as Broken Sword is (bafflingly) considered a classic, that should put the game on your radar. But, also, even if it’s markedly better in every way, the game is clearly derivative of Broken Sword, which robs it of some novelty. (It also borrows a major plot twist from a certain not-very-good action movie, but it would be a spoiler to say which one.) It’s generally good advice that, if you’re going to steal, steal from someone you can improve upon, but it would have benefited from feeling a little more original.

Anyway, the basic plot hook is - in keeping with The Silent Age - trying to stop the outbreak of a plague. The main character, Harper, is a broke handyman in a small town that appears to be ground zero for an incredibly virulent and lethal disease, and he gets involved, at first, to help out his professor friend in finding a cure. (So I guess that’s another game that borrows from Back to the Future, but Harper’s friendship with Professor McBride is at least a little more plausible than Marty’s with a disgraced nuclear physicist.) Things get weirder and more complicated from there.

Here’s a thing that happened while I was playing: Most of the puzzles are fine. Just fine. Nothing to write home about, but they get the job done. A few were a bit annoying, but nothing insulted my intelligence. But there were about three that actually stumped me, where I couldn’t think of what to do next, and I looked up solutions online. Now, most of the time, when I look up a solution, the answer is something dippy and I think, “Well, that wouldn’t have been interesting to solve,” or, “How was I supposed to think of that?” It’s rare that I regret looking up solutions to adventure game puzzles, because, generally, if I’m looking up a solution, it’s because the game has not convinced me solving it myself will be interesting.

But, in this game, every single puzzle I looked up the solution to I kicked myself for not thinking of the answer on my own. This is not my usual experience! The solutions were actually clever, and I would have felt genuinely smart for figuring them out. I kept thinking, “Shit, I should’ve thought of that!” I dunno why this happened multiple times in this game when it’s so uncommon in others. Maybe the bulk of the puzzles were normal enough that I kept assuming the ones I was stuck on didn’t have interesting solutions. Maybe they didn’t prime me for the kind of lateral thinking I’d have to employ a handful of times. Or maybe I’m just not as smart as I think. (No, no, it can’t be that.)

It might be a pacing thing? Since most of the puzzles didn’t give me trouble, the game moved at a pretty steady clip, so the few times I was legitimately stumped just ground everything to a halt. A game that had more stumpers might’ve had a more methodical pace, where being stumped wouldn’t have felt frustrating. But, whenever I didn’t know what to do, it was annoying, because the game felt like a page turner whose pages suddenly refused to turn.

Or perhaps I’m making excuses! The short version is, when you get stumped in this game, take a break and come back to it later, see if you can’t figure the stumpers out on your own. I think you’ll be happier if you do.

The writing is generally good across the board, owing, I suspect, to some journeyman script work from Alasdair Beckett-King of the Nelly Cootalot games. The story really lends itself to stock characters and functional dialogue, so having everyone be just a little more believable and interesting than is strictly necessary is quite lovely.

Overall, the way the conspiracy shakes out is, well, believable and it works fine enough, but it’s not... interesting. There’s some solid character work thrown in at the climax that’s seemingly there to make up for an underwhelming payoff in the plot proper, but it doesn’t carry enough weight. I don’t get to say “the ending made the whole experience richer” this time; it’s another good game with a weak ending. (Not bad, just weak.)

Still, I had a really good time with Unforeseen Incidents, and would highly recommend it, if recommendations are, for whatever reason, what you came here for. It’s got good characters and great voice acting and some nice twists and turns, and the design ain’t have bad, either. Check it out.

Thoughts on Unavowed

It finally happened! I’m writing up a Wadjet Eye game! (Well, it is in a batch of mini-reviews, not getting a whole post of its own, but shut up.) My previous assessment of Wadjet Eye as a company was that their games - both those made in-house and those published but made by other studios - are consistently interesting and often good but never great.

I might be taking that back now.

The buzz around Unavowed was that its opening was one of its best sequences, so I grew skeptical of the whole game when the opening didn’t do much for me. Having finished the game, I’d say the first half hour is actually beneath the quality of the complete product - the writing is fine but not amazing and the first proper puzzle is actively bad. Rather than opening strong, I feel the game’s real talent is for deepening as you play it.

The basic premise is that you are a person - in my game, a woman - who has spent the last year possessed by a demon. The game opens with the demon being exorcised from your body by what is basically the supernatural version of the Men in Black or the RIPD - a jinn and a fire mage who police the secret world of spirits and elementals who hide in plain sight in New York. Having been touched by a demon and having no place to go after a year of murdering people while possessed, you join the Unavowed and work to uncover the mystery of what your demon was up to during the year you can’t remember. Spirit activity has been on the rise lately, so your adventure also involves recruiting new people to the Unavowed who have been, in various ways, touched by the “other side.”

Where the game started to click for me is when I recruited Logan - a bit character from my opening flashback - into the team proper, and I, er... fell in love with him? I don’t usually crush on fictional characters, or on men (real or imagined), but in the rare event it happens, I apparently have a type? Logan is a strapping, bald, man of color with a soft voice and a tortured past and he’s filled with regret but also working every day to be a better person and he’s even good with kids and oh god I adore him. He’s also a spirit medium, which means, if I died - and I would die for him - he would ease my passing, but how can I move on to the next world if the thing keeping me here is you, Logan? How?

The richness of the characters is what starts to bring the whole thing together, and they are some of the best characters I’ve hung out with in a game. The game is rife with little touches that keep the spotlight on their personalities - you bring two companions with you on every mission, and there’s a smalltalk feature where whichever two you picked will just chat about whatever, and you’ll find yourself lingering in a scene with nothing to do just because you want to hear the rest of the conversation. You can also chat with your companions at any time, which serves as a hint system but also lets you make smalltalk of your own.

The buzz has mostly praised this focus on character, but I think maybe folks are giving the plot short shrift? Things are pretty episodic for the first chunk of the game - you have a mission, you bring two teammates with you on it, and you go home when the mission is done - but around the midpoint there are... developments... which are, frankly, kind of brilliant? I don’t want to say more than that, but its the kind of stuff that reframes what came before, and it starts building towards a complex, satisfying, and unpredictable conclusion. Dave Gilbert is good with characters, but he’s no slouch at plot developments, either.

There are still some weirdnesses that I wish weren’t there. This is one of those games where one needs to clarify that having good writing is not the same as having good dialogue; Unavowed has frequently excellent writing but its dialogue is only OK. One of those games where I keep rewriting it in my head, which is generally a sign that the emotional beats are solid, I just wish they’d been written slightly differently. Being given the choice of who joins you on missions means that puzzles that can only be solved with the abilities of people you didn’t bring with you are still present, and they, at times, threw me off of what I was actually supposed to do. I also couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just go get the person who can do the thing I need done; the game rather arbitrarily refuses to let you swap out teammates once you’ve started a mission, even though the plot sometimes demands one get swapped without your consent. (In my game, Vicki got shortchanged, because, every mission I brought her on, for plot reasons she would get replaced with Logan partway through, not that I’m complaining.)

The game also borrows the “moral choice with lasting consequences” that everyone’s been borrowing since The Walking Dead, and even does the thing when it confronts you with the consequences of all your decisions in the late game, and, while it executes it okay, it was contrived when The Walking Dead did it, it was contrived when Life is Strange did it, and it’s still contrived today. There have to be better ways to make your decisions feel meaningful than having an antagonist monologue all your choices back at you in the endgame!

Also, for a game so focused on character, I wish there were more complex character arcs. This is a thing video games are kind of notorious about: The cast of Unavowed often have character-building moments, but, because they can happen in any order and some are optional, they can’t really change the character in any meaningful way (at least, not without writing a whole lot of additional content). In my game, my darling dear Logan had a fairly significant epiphany that, due to the nature of the game, was never mentioned again and didn’t alter his trajectory. In screenwriting terms, it was a Transforming Change that never led to an Ultimate Boon. If I’m being honest, the beat was also a little pat, but there were several similar beats with other characters that landed with more impact, but also never came to anything.

All that aside, I really fell for this game. The plot seems designed to justify vignettes that explore the game’s magical world, but each vignette also furthers a satisfying narrative. In my experience, you often get one or the other. It’s one of the best narrative games I’ve played in recent memory, and, of all the ones I’m discussing today, the one I’m most likely to play again. It’s definitely the most cohesive and complete game I’ve played from Wadjet Eye; I’m not sure how I’d rank it against Resonance, which has higher highs but is a deeply, deeply flawed game. Fortunately, we live in a universe where we don’t have to choose!

Unavowed is great. You should play it.

Odds & Sods

I also played Virginia recently, but have nothing to say about it except that it’s beautiful and you should play it right away, and I played Alum which... hoo, I am not ready to talk about Alum yet.

#capsule review #unavowed #unforeseen incidents #the silent age #adventure games #writings

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