Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: Night in the Woods

Cozy games hit hard

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Talking more about games. I am an extremes person in general. Take drinks. I like them boiling hot (burning my tongue) or ice cold (brain freeze). I either love something or I hate it. I’m not often tepid about something. Take movies. I love: Once, The Station Agent, and Japanese Story. And, yes, I realize that none of them are from the last decade. Movies that are beloved that I absolutely hated: Pulp Fiction, Titanic, Se7en, Amelie, and most recently, Knives Out. I could write two thousand words on each of them (and I have on at least the first) and why I hated them.

By the way. I am very careful about not saying that something is trash (except the last of those movies. That was trash. I’m just bitter because I was honestly expecting to like it when I watched it, though I had my doubts from the trailer). I prefer to talk about pop culture in terms of what I like and don’t like because unlike some people, apparently, I can see that something is good while simultaneously not liking it.

Side Note: I really don’t understand how some people are so into their own viewpoint, they can’t imagine someone having a different one. There was one content creator I used to watch before it turned out that his girlfriend was a racist, sexist asshole (and, apparently, that brought out the worst in him), and I quit watching him. He argued strenuously with one of his cohosts that if something was good , he would like it. So if he didn’t like it, it had to be bad. That made no sense to me. I don’t care for the Mona Lisa, but I can acknowledge that it’s art. I don’t like Bach, particularly, but he certainly could compose. More contemporarily, I did not care for Breaking Bad, but I recognized it was well-acted.

More to the point, if I like something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. I adore the music to Grease and will happily sing There Are Worse Things I Could Do at the top of my lungs, but I am the first too admit that the plot and themes are hot trash.

In the case of the cozy games I like, though, I think they are good games. I’m grading with a generous curve because they are all indie games. The three that spring to mind, Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall), Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games), and Cozy Grove (Spry Fox) have quite a few things in common.

One, they all have animal characters. Night in the Woods is my favorite non-FromSoft game, and I have played it three times. I would have stopped with one playthrough and been quite satisfied, but I watched an Errant Signal video that pointed out why it would behoove you to play the game more than once. As I was watching the video, I noticed that he was walking on the telephone lines–which I hadn’t done in my own playthrough.

Holy hell. You can do that? I immediately started a second playthrough and let me tell you that I missed a ton of content because I did not realize you could walk on the telephone wires. Plus, there was a scene that the first time you try to go to the left, you can’t. But, if you go back later, you can. So I missed a whole NPC questline because of that.

The story is written in such a way that if you just do the basics, you get one story. If you explore more, you get details added to the story that adds pathos and heart. There are details you can completely miss–like the fact that Mae, the main character is bisexual. When I got the bit of dialogue that made me realize she was bi, I cried. I’ll admit it. I already felt connected to her because she was a black cat (love black cats best!) who was sarcastic, snarky, and had low self-esteem. She was bipolar, which I’m not, but she also had anxiety issues–to which I could relate. She dropped out of college after an episode and went back home to lick her wounds.

I have never felt as connected to a protag as I have Mae. She had issues with her mom, which played out in a poignant way. I will say that in all three games, there is a supernatural element that is not needed. I think this game and Spiritfarer would both be stronger without it. It’s neutral in Cozy Grove, but I wouldn’t miss it if it were gone. I like the helping characters to the other side aspect of Spiritfarer and Cozy Grove, though. Both of these tackle death is a way that is both gentle and heartrending.

I don’t know why I find it easier to relate to animals who are acting like humans than actual humans. I don’t think it’s the fact that they are animals, but that they are well drawn (both literally and metaphorically). In Spiritfarer, my favorite was Gwen, a hard-bitten city deer who chain-smoked and constantly drank black coffee. She had an abusive father who made her childhood very hard, and she was unable to show love because of it. I fell for her and refused to take her to the Everdoor for a long time because I did not want to let her go. I cried taking each character to the Everdoor, but especially her. I felt bereft once she turned golden and went up in the sky to be a constellation.

In Cozy Grove, my favorite character is one of the DLC characters. Her name is Lillian McQuill and she is a mouse (bear. All the characters are some kind of bear) who is made of origami. Or wearing an origami outfit. She is a writer, obviously, and riddled with anxiety. I can read her thoughts, which makes her uneasy. She is just so precious. I also like Ben Hiberneczek, the brown cat. He’s very money-grubbing (which I don’t like), but he was also devoted his wife and now a passel of kittens. Still. Lillian is near and dear to my heart. I visit her last every day because she’s my favorite.

All of these three games have such heart. Because they are indie games, I am much more forgiving of them than I would be a triple A. I will say that in the Cozy Grove DLC, there is a puzzle that is a variant of an already-existing optional puzzle. It is so glitchy that I almost quit playing because I could not make it work. I finally did, only to have it come back a few days later. Since it’s mandatory to make progress with one of the new characters, I have to do it. And I hate it. But I’ll put up with it, begrudgingly, as long as I can eventually ‘solve’ it (solve in quotes because as I said, it’s broken).

Cozy Grove 2 is coming next year. I don’t know what Scott Benson (Infinite Fall/The Glory Society) or Thunder Lotus Games are doing next, but I cannot wait to find out.

Darkening my soul

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Ian and I were talking the other day about how I was difficult to recommend games to because I was very picky about games. Not only that–it’s difficult even for me to tell what I will and won’t like before playing the game. Well, more what I will like. I am usually very good about knowing what I won’t like, but even in that I can be surprised from time to time. Such as The Surge by Deck13 Interactive. I was expecting it to be trash and to hate it (but I had to try it because it’s a soulslike and it’s in my contract). While the former is mostly true, the latter was not. Maybe it was because I had such low expectations of it, but I quite enjoyed my time with it and finished it–which is more than I can say for the vast majority of soulslikes.

Anyway! Ian joked that it was easy to tell what game I would like–actual Souls games. That made me laugh. He’s not wrong, though, and WHY ISN’T ELDEN RING IN MY HANDS ALREADY??? *Ahem* I keep thinking I’ll like soulslikes, but I…don’t. Or more truthfully, I mostly don’t. There have been a few exceptions, but the ratio is dismal. I’ve tried dozens of soulslikes and have really enjoyed two. The aforementioned The Surge and Salt and Sanctuary by Ska Studios. Having said that, there are qualifiers. I enjoyed The Surge, but it was very much in the vein of ‘this is way better than I thought it’d be so I’m pleasantly surprised’. As for Salt and Sanctuary, it’s a slavish homage to Souls and while I enjoyed playing it, I immediately forgot it once I was done. Ask me to name a single boss in either game and I can’t.

So, yeah. I don’t like soulslikes–I like Souls games. Some people are grumbling that Elden Ring is going to be basically Dark Souls IV. Which, it’s not, but if it were, I’m all over that! I’ve watched the trailer at least a half-dozen times since it dropped and I get stoked every time. I want this to be good sooooooo bad. I’m trying not to get too hyped because I don’t want to be crushingly disappointed, but this game excites me like none other in recent years. I feel for Miyazaki because there is so much pressure on him (well, FromSoft in general, but he IS FromSoft) to produce the perfect game every time. He got almost universal praise for Bloodborne, but there has been some amount of pushback for all his other games*.


Continue Reading

The importance of not being too earnest

Posted on by • 0 Comments

There has been a trend in indie games in the past decade or so to make heartwarming games that have heartfelt narratives. In general, I approve of this trend because why not have more emotions instead of just stab, stab, stabbing everyone? It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that it’s indie devs who are cutting this pathway and not the triple A devs. Anyway, one of the first games I played that fit into this category was Gone Home by Fullbright. It was a mystery puzzle game that had the protagonist going home and finding everyone gone. You find out by picking items up and reading descriptions, then piecing together the story. It turns out that your younger sister is gay, and the story is quite heartbreaking.

Or at least it should be. I was eager to play the game because it had received universally high praise across the board. People were giddy about the representation and the story so I was eager to dive in. I was…underwhelmed to say the least. First, I have to say that my computer at the time couldn’t handle the game and would shut down after an hour or two of me playing it. The game wouldn’t save, so I’d have to start over again. And again. No matter what I did before my computer shut down, it wouldn’t save. I fully admit that probably biased me towards not enjoying the game.

However, I must also note that while I was playing it, I had the feeling of ‘is this it?’ in the back of my mind the whole time. Not that the story wasn’t compelling. Not that I wasn’t happy to have representation in games. It’s just that I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d read similar stories in YA literature. I realize it’s a different medium and it hadn’t been done before in video games, but it still fell flat to me. I was glad it existed, but it really didn’t do much for me.

A parallel of that is a game I recently called If Found by Dreamfeel. It’s about a trans teen (late teens) in rural Ireland and the travails of her daily life. It’s a short game and can be finished in an hour, and I like the mechanic of erasing things. The story is sad and familiar, but at the same time, it just….I don’t know. It felt slightly hollow for me. But I’m not a trans teen who’s feeling isolated by her gender so I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on that aspect. It’s also a game I’m glad exists, and I hope there are trans teens who play it and feel seen.


Continue Reading

The dark side to love

Posted on by • 0 Comments

This week in video game sexual harassment has been a particularly harrowing one. It started with two women accusing Jeremy Soule, a video games music composer, best known for Skyrim, of sexual misconduct up to and including rape. Three more women have said he put pressure on them to date him as well, and it turned out badly (career-wise) when they turned him down. Then, Alexis Kennedy, creator of Sunless Skies was accused by several women of using his position to pressure them, younger women, to date. He has a history of dating women who work for him, and they claim he abused them during those relationships. There were more, but the one that hit me the hardest (and was revealed in response to the Jeremy Soule accusation in support of Nathalie Lawhead, the victim) was Zoë Quinn declaring that Alec Holowka, one of the developers of Night in the Woods, had lured them (preferred pronoun) to his place in Winnipeg after they started a long distance relationship, then through a mix of emotional abuse and intimidation, isolated them from their friends and made them afraid to leave.

Zoë suffered through this for a month, and then left. They broke up with Holowka over email, and he proceeded to blacklist them from the industry. This was early in their career, and they said he’s done it to a certain extent. At first, they didn’t name him, but two women asked them if it were him. That’s when they realized he had done it more than once.

You may be thinking that the name Zoë Quinn sounds familiar. It’s because they were the victim in a case of revenge that kicked off GamerGate. They were vilified and dragged through the mud, and it showed the very ugly side of the gaming industry and how it was still steeped in misogyny. At the time, Zoë identified as a woman, and the hatred for ‘her’ and her perceived gender was gruesome.

Once the allegations came to light, Alec killed himself. His sister, Eileen Holowka, released a statement of shock, disbelief, and distress, but also support for the victims. Ian was covering the news (the link is his), and he broke it to me gently when I messaged him in the morning. He set it up by talking about the other accusations, and then he said one was going to be especially hard to me. That’s when I knew, and I had to brace myself for it. When he told me, it hit me in the gut.

Side Note: I have never had to face loving something by a person who has done something so heinous. I will get to that in a minute.


Continue Reading

What I want when I game

Posted on by • 1 Comment

I’m in between games right now. I haven’t played Sekiro in several days, and I haven’t really had the wherewithal to pick up something else. I’ve been dealing with a cold/sinus issues, and it’s really wiped me out. I end up playing solitaire because that’s about what my mind can deal with right now. It’s also what happens after I play a FromSoft game. I get so drained by it, I have no desire to try anything else. I will say, I’m watching footage of the closed alpha for Nioh 2, and it looks really dope. I bailed on the original game halfway through even though I thought it was a good game for two reasons. One, I hated that if you left a level, you had to start it over the next time you went back. My MO if I’m getting my ass kicked by a boss is to go farm up shit (like Elixirs, the healing drinks, which is another issue in itself. I hate farming for healing items or buying them). The easiest way to do that is to go back to an earlier area in order not to have to use heals to get through it. If I did that, though, then I’d have to do the whole level up to the boss I was currently fighting again. Doing that for the last boss I fought was not something I wanted to do at all. I ended up farming on that level using Onmyo Magic for free heals (hey, it’s been ages since I’ve played. That’s the best I can remember) and tapping out when I actually had to use a heal. It wasn’t optimal, but it did work. I resented not being able to choose to go back to an earlier level, though. I really, really, really hope they make that change for Nioh 2. I did notice that they simplified some of the names of the level ups. Onmyo to Magic, for instance. I don’t have an issue with this because while I’m a big fan of obscurity, I’m also a big fan of not wasting souls. Or amrita, as I think it’s called in Nioh. But! There is a rolling cat ball in the Nioh 2 closed alpha demo, so I’m in!

There are two games I have my eye on that are actually in my pile of shame. One is Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope. I have talked about this game before and I’ll talk more about it later because I will be mentioning Papers, Please, the seminal game by Pope. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, which is why I’ll talk about it later. The second game is Unavowed, which is an adventure mystery demon game. It sounds right up my alley, and I am desperately looking for an adventure mystery game I can sink my teeth into. I’ve tried several, and this is made by the highly-respected Wadjet Eye Games. They are revered in the genre, which is part of the problem. I hated the Blackwell series they did, and it’s one of the gold standards of the genre. I had to use a walkthrough to get past the first chapter of whichever game I tried. I think I tried two–I have almost all of them because hope springs eternal and they were cheap and I’m an idiot. My biggest gripe about adventure games is that their logic is not logical. They have certain events you need to do in a certain order, and it’s not intuitive at all. I mean, it probably seemed that way as they were dreaming them up, but in retrospect, they aren’t at all. Maybe if I’ve played a million of them, the logic will be immediately apparent, but it wasn’t as I was playing them. I resorted to using the walkthrough for the rest of the Blackwell game I played. I’m hoping against hope that they’ve upped their game concerning logic, but given how much people swoon over their games, I fear they consider it a feature and not a bug.


Continue Reading

I don’t play many video games but when I do awards

Posted on by • 0 Comments

It’s nearing the end of the year, and you know what that means. Countless top ten lists, best ofs, and other navel-gazing articles/videos. I did my own list last year citing my favorite games of the year, and I’m doing the same this year as well. While I enjoy me a good ‘best of’ list, I like to do things differently. I don’t think there’s an objective best, anyway, so I’m just going to list my personal favorites. As to the title of this post, it’s true. I don’t play many games, but when I do, I play the hell out of them.

The game I was reluctant to play, even though theoretically it was tailor-made for me (maybe because), and it ended up capturing my heart

Night in the Woods

When I first heard about this game early in 2017 when it was released by Infinite Fall, I immediately thought it was made for me. Indie game with a female black cat protagonist? Hells, yeah! Plus, the design is gorgeous, and it seemed like it was narrative-driven. It should be right up my alley–which was why I hesitated in playing it. Plus, it was nearly twenty bucks, and I’m really cheap when it comes to games. I like to pay less than fifteen bucks for a game (which means buying during steep sales most of the time), though I’ve loosened up on that recently.

When I finally bought it and started it up, I was immediately stumped by one of the earliest ‘gameplay’ moments. I put that in quotes because it fit the definition but barely, and it was embarrassingly easy in retrospect to figure out–if you play plenty of games. Once I got past that, however, I was swept up in the game and the protagonist, Mae. She is the aforementioned female black cat, and she captivated me in a way no protagonist ever has. A young college dropout who was consumed by anxiety, depression, and sarcasm, she was me. It was later revealed that she’s bisexual, and I felt connected to her even more strongly than I had before. Add to that her propensity towards inertia and sticking her foot in her mouth by excitably blurting out awkward truths, and I became increasingly protective of her.

I played through the game three times and still didn’t see everything in it. I only played it more than once because I watched Campster’s (Errant Signal) video on it, and I noticed things in his video I hadn’t seen in my playthrough. In addition, he said the game benefited from a second playthrough, and he was right. It was on the third playthrough that I fell in love with the game.

The art direction is fantastic, and I empathized with each of the four main characters: Mae, Bea, Gregg (GREGG RULZ OK), and Angus. Whenever I spent a significant amount of time with any of them, I came to care about them even more. The overarching story/mystery is underwhelming, but by the end of my third playthrough, I accepted it as a metaphor for what is happening in the dying Rust Belt town rather than anything literal.

I won’t gush about how lovely certain moments were or how I legit cried at the poignancy of some of the interactions. I’ve written three posts on my emotional connection to the game, and I still don’t think I managed to convey how much it means to me. It might seem ridiculous to become attached to an animated cat-girl who’s sullen, mentally ill, and a brat from time to time, but Mae wormed her way into my heart, and I’m grateful for it. I’m probably going to do a fourth playthrough before too long because there are a few things I know I haven’t seen. If there is one game that I played this year that I would recommend with all my heart, it is this one.


The best Souls-like clone from the most unlikely source

The Surge

With the success of the Soulsborne games, there have been a glut of clones. Most of them have been trash, and the ones that are not trash, well, they fall short for me. Ironically, the closer they get to Souls, the more dissatisfied I am.

One of the early clones was Lords of the Fallen by Deck13 Interactive, otherwise known as Clunky Souls. I tried it several times, but I…hated it. It was slow and lumbering, and at least in the beginning, the magic was shite. It was as if all they took away from the Souls games was that the combat was slow and deliberate. I lasted an hour, maybe two before I gave it the fuck up and called it done.

Fast-forward a year or two, and their new game, The Surge, came out. It was a sci-fi (ish) Souls game, affectionately known as Junkyard Souls. I was low-key interested when it came out, but because of aforementioned cheapness and the fact that I wasn’t that interested, I waited until the summer sale* and bought it on the cheap.

On paper, it seemed as if it were not my kind of game at all except for the Souls-like aspect of it. I don’t like sci-fi, and you can’t choose your protagonist. What’s more, the protagonist is a white dude (Warren), and the only interesting thing about him is that he’s in a wheelchair. Still. There was enough there for me to try the demo when it was on sale, and because I was between games (as I often am), I bought it and dove right in.

What’s my conclusion? It’s loads of fun, much more than it has any right to be. The wheelchair is gone within five minutes, and the conceit is that Warren has to target specific parts of the enemies to craft armor or to get their weapons. There are customized kill animation shots that never get old, and I had fun romping through the game. I unintentionally handicapped myself in the beginning by not gearing myself out (didn’t remember how to use the inventory), but once I figured that out, I was off to the races.

I mostly played with single-rigged weapons, though I did mix it up with twin-rigged near the end. A bit of heavy-duty for variety, but the game really discourages mixing weapon classes. The combat is satisfying, even if the level design is uninspired. I got lost so many times in the game because many of the areas look too damn similar. And, I never thought I’d complain about too many shortcuts, but there were several that were useless at the end of the day.

Here’s my metric for how good the level design is for games with no maps. In Dark Souls (original), I can tell you how to get from area to area, and I can tell you where every enemy is placed along the way. I can do this despite there being no map because I died so many times the first time I played the game, and now, I have each area emblazoned in my mind. In fact, I think in Dark Souls, the fact that there’s no map is one reason I know the areas so well. I can’t rely on a map, so I have to commit each area to memory. In addition, though, each area is so memorable, it’s easy to separate them. I mean, you’ll never confuse Blighttown with Anor Londo, for example.

In The Surge, much of it is played in a factory setting. Much of it is dully colored and so freaking dark. This is one game I had to crank the gamma all the way up in order to see properly. I mean, I crank the gamma in general, but not to this extent. There’s nothing to really separate most of the areas except for the executive levels, the outdoor levels, and the DLC (set in an amusement park, and one of my favorite levels of the game).

The last third or so of the game dragged on, and I was glad to put it in the done folder (though I have the second DLC to do). I had to use the wikis in the last area of the game because I kept getting lost, and the last boss was trash. In general, the bosses are not the highlight of this game (which is a deviation from the Souls formula), and the only one I really remember is the second boss from the DLC.

Still. It was a fun romp through Junkyard Souls, and a satisfying Souls-lite experience. Would hack off limbs again, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.

A sweet little dating sim that pleasantly surprised me with its heart

Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator

I don’t like dating sims. At all. I’ve tried them in the past, and they are pretty eye-rolling to play for me. It’s my personal bias in that I don’t like dating in general for many reasons, but there’s also something icky about the gamification of something as personal as dating. I feel the same way about dating in video games in general because of the transactional nature of said ‘dating’. “Do these fetch quests, and I’ll have sex with you!” Saints Row IV is the only game in which I had fun ‘dating’ because it literally was walking up to every NPC and asking if you could bonk them. I had sex with everyone other than Keith David (you can’t get him to fuck you, no matter what), and I was giggling the whole time.

When I heard of DD: ADDS, made by Game Grumps, I thought it was cool that there was a dating sim specifically for gay dudes, but that was it. Then, I kept hearing about how sweet it was and unexpectedly emotional AND it went on sale AND I was between games, so I bought it. I created a dad that was basically the male version of me (fat, Asian, rumpled, unkempt, and counter-culture) and named him Morgan because that’s my favorite name. Then, I jumped into my dad-dating adventures, and I will admit that I found it slow-going at first.

There’s a lot of text. A LOT. I lasted about an hour before deciding it wasn’t for me. I let it sit, then I picked it up again, and I don’t remember exactly why. Probably because I was still hearing good things about it and because I was still between games. Much to my surprise, I really got into it the second time around. Yes, each dad is a Type with much of the stereotypical factors that go along with that type, but most of them had more depth to them than I had first imagined.

I really appreciated that there was a variety of races and body types as well as a prominent Christian (which is an important part of his storyline), and all of this unfolds as you play the game. There is no way to get around the gamefication because ultimately, it is a video game, but I found myself caring about the characters more than I thought I would.

I also found myself in an unexpected dilemma. The dad I most wanted to get with (Hugo) had the worst child of them all. I mean, I really hated his kid. Hugo was a literature-loving, trivia game-enjoying, secret WWE-type wrestling-enthusiasm man who was fucking hot to boot. He was an English teacher, which was the cherry on top of the hot hot hot sundae, but that damn brat of his. In the end, I went for Joseph, the Christian youth pastor who was married and with children, and I got an ending that actually made me sad.

I went back to finish dating all the other dads, and my ending with Hugo was really the best and my favorite. It made me smile, and I felt genuinely touched. I wouldn’t mind playing this game one more time to get the ‘good’ ending with Robert (by not sleeping with him the first time we meet) and with my daughter (though it’s not entirely clear how to get it), but even if I never touch the game again, I am glad I played it.

That’s it for part one of this post. I have more games, so see you next week for part two of my totally objective best of 2018 video games awards!

 

 

*Steam, of course.

Walking away from the First Flame

Posted on by • 0 Comments

I heard The Pina Colada Song on my way home from Cubs today, and it put me in the mood…to play more Dark Souls! It’s my Dark Souls fight song, and I’ve heard it twice in the past week. That must mean something, right? I recently learned that there is a second ending to Dark Souls II. Rather, to Scholar of the First Sin, which is the remake/update of DS II because DS fans were so upset with the vanilla sequel. It’s pretty cool that there are still things I don’t know about the games even though I’ve played the hell out of them, much like when I found a mini-area I had never seen before in DS II, but I doubt there’s anything big I’ve missed. Then again, I missed the second ending, so who knows what else I’ve missed? I think it’s because DS II is the least-talked-about game in the series. I haven’t played the vanilla version of this game, so I can’t comment on that. I have let it be known that I think SotFS is a really good game, but it’s not a great DS game. Anyway, the biggest difference is

*SPOILERS*

There is a character, Aldia, who is the brother of King Vendrick. He’s in the vanilla game, and you have to go to his keep for reasons. However, you never get to see him, and he’s more of an urban legend than anything else. FromSoft decided to change it up for SotFS. I mean, hell, even the name is in reference to Aldia, so it’s the first hint that he’s going to feature more prominently in the remake.

In the second half of the game, he shows up at bonfires to talk to you. He gets increasingly smaller every time he appears (which is three), and he’s not human. I can’t describe what he is, exactly, but he loves the sound of his own voice. Then, you have to do things in a certain order (and I will admit I knew this before going into the end game) in order to have a certain thing happen. Does that sound deliberately vague? Well, it is.

In the vanilla game, there is an area called the Throne of Want. You walk forever to get there, and it’s the boss arena for two different bosses. First, Throne Watcher and Throne Defender (a duo), and then the final boss, Nashandra–the queen. You can also kill King Vendrick at some point, but it’s optional (and a HUGE pain in the ass). In order to have Nashandra show up, though, you need something called the Giant’s Kinship, which you can only get from defeating the Giant Lord in a memory. You cannot access the memories without the Ashen Mist Heart, which you need from the Ancient Dragon in the Dragon Shrine–which you can only access after beating the Guardian Dragon in Aldia’s Keep. Yes, I am spoiling the whole end game, but it is under a spoiler tag, and the game is four years old, so I think I can get away with it.


Continue Reading

Night in the Woods, part three: Putting it all together

Posted on by • 0 Comments
free your mind, mallard.
Mallard! What have they done to you?

Hello. Welcome to the third and hopefully the last post on Night in the Woods. Not because I’m tired of talking about it because I am most emphatically not, but because I know I sound like I’m obsessed–which, to be fair, I am. Anyhoo, here’s part two. OK. Let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about the third playthrough. Needless to say, there are going to be spoilers, and while I’ll try to note the more egregious ones, just be forewarned that I can’t talk about my third playthrough without revealing some spoilers in general.

After I finished the second playthrough, I immediately started the third. I was in a groove, and I knew there was still things I hadn’t discovered. Also, there are things I saw at the end of my second playthrough (while watching a streamer play), and I didn’t have enough days to do the whole quest. The fact that this quest exists at all is a marvel. As I was walking on the wires the second playthrough, I found a window I could open. I did that, and I went inside. There was a big float duck named Mallard bolted down, and I found a hole inside him. In the hole were two rats. Mae notes that they look hungry, and I decided I needed to find them cheese. I couldn’t find any cheese and it was only when

*SPOILERS*

I watched BaerTaffy steal the pretzel from the pretzel/pierogi vendor in the underground tunnel that I knew what I had to do, and I felt like a complete idiot. I knew it was there, and I knew the paw icon popped up when I passed by the pretzels, and Mae was chastised by the vendor for stealing before. I should have put together the whole thing, but I didn’t. I stole a pretzel and brought it back up to my babies. Unfortunately, I did not have enough days to finish it, so I made sure to do it during the third playthrough as soon as I could–which is the first day, I think.

I fed them faithfully every day and each day there was one more, and then after four days (I think), they were gone. They were free. The coolest thing is once they left, I saw them all around the city. They weren’t there before, which is a neat little touch. also, in the same place as Mallard, there was a door to the bottom right that would not open throughout my entire first and second playthrough. It’s a door that you could easily miss, and even if you found it, you probably wouldn’t try to open it more than a few times. That’s the brilliance of this game, but also the frustrating thing. You need to check everything every day, and while the payoff is so damn fulfilling when it happens, it’s few and far between.  Continue Reading

Night in the Woods, part two: Getting under my skin

Posted on by • 1 Comment
i'll just lie here, thanks!
Aunt Mall Cop was NOT amused by my antics.

I’m back to talk more about Night in the Woods. Here is part one. This time, I want to focus a bit more on the meta and on my third playthrough. Warning, there will be spoilers. I’ll try to keep it story-spoiler-free as much as I can, but I really need to get into it, which I can’t without giving some stuff away.

First, I need to talk about Mae Borowski, the main character. She’s a young (20), angry and scared black cat who tends to blurt out embarrassing or mean things when she feels threatened–which is often. She’s snarky and sassy the rest of the time, and sometimes, she’s both. She’s dropped out of college and returned to the small town in which she was born–Possum Springs. In the beginning, she’s portrayed as a bratty but endearing young woman who’s aimless and doesn’t have any purpose in life. She’s lucky she has a home to return to, and she sleeps away the day in the attic of her parents’ home–that they may not own for much longer, but more on that in a bit.

Normally, she’s the kind of character I wouldn’t like at all. But, there’s something about her that spoke to me. Probably because I *was* her when I was that age, though with a bit more social grace. I hated college and felt like an alien. I had trouble fitting in, and if I thought dropping out was a possibility, I would have heavily considered it. I only went to college because it was expected of me, and I still wish I had taken a year off after I had finished high school. For Mae, there is the added pressure of being the first Borowski to go to college, as her mom is quick to point out in the middle of a fight they have.

There is so much pathos in this game. It’s set in a dying Rust Belt town, and the depression surrounding the town is almost another character. It’s in every scene of the game, and it’s a constant reminder that many of the small towns in America are dying out. The only pizza place in town closes a few days after Mae returns home. There’s a character, Danny, who, while hilarious, is representative of the lack of livability in some of these towns. He can’t hold a job to save his life, and while some of it is his attitude, more of it is because the jobs simply aren’t there. There are the two NPCs who stand next to a bar all day long, and they only talk about one thing–The Smelters, who are the local sportsball team, I’m assuming. Then, one of the characters get a job in another city, and the two have to say goodbye. It’s sad, even though you don’t know anything else about them.

OK. Let’s talk about the gameplay, as it were. This is one of the few things I didn’t like in this game. One, it feels artificial in what is mostly an animated visual novel (and I say this as a compliment, though I normally don’t like visual novels), and it felt as if it was added to pad the game. After Mae makes an ass of herself at a party (in front of her ex, no less!), she starts to have nightmares/weird dreams that are gorgeous-looking and sounding (as is the whole game), but feels very game-y. I didn’t mind doing it once, but by the fourth or fifth time, I was just impatient to get through it. It doesn’t help that I have a terrible sense of space, so I couldn’t find where I needed to be very quickly.

Continue Reading