13 Points on Kentucky Route Zero - Cardboard Computer - 2013 [PC]

1. I've got to say there's a lot to unpack with Kentucky Route Zero. It is both emotionally poignant and thoughtfully experimental in its design. It's a game destined to be a critics darling while still being actually good to play. Buy it now and read my last twelve points while you wait for it to download.

2. Kentucky Route Zero was released episodically but presented in its final form, it reminds me quite a bit of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath both structurally and thematically. There is an overarching narrative surrounding a group of people on a journey away from a community ravaged by unfettered industry interspersed w/ short vignettes that flesh out its setting w/o being directly related to the story being told.

3. The main narrative is a bit of a hero's quest but especially as you dig into later episodes that aspect begins to fade. You initially control the game's protagonist, Conway, in his attempt to deliver a load of antique goods to a strange, unknown address but as the world unfolds itself, you begin to control other characters, often w/in the same scene. It goes as far as to let you control both sides of a conversation at times.

4. This lends a dream-like sense of control that melds well w/ the surreal version of rural Kentucky in which the game is set. Kentucky Route Zero adds plenty of otherworldly elements but they feel more like exaggerations than outright fabrications. 

5. At one point, for example, Conway injures his leg goes into debt seeking treatment. Afterwards, he says the leg doesn't feel like it's his anymore and it turns into a skeleton leg. You don't literally lose a body part because you can't afford but losing a piece of your life to debt is real enough.

6. Actually, sometimes you do literally lose a body part because you can't afford medical treatment.

7. Debt in general looms large in Kentucky Route Zero, specifically debt used to entangle and exploit working people. People are driven by their debt to the local coal mine, to the power company and to the local distillery. The local distillery also happens to be housed in an old church, drawing the parallel between the use of religion and the use of substances to placate the masses.

8. Wait. Is there a Marxist theme here? Holy smokes, are they even allowed to do that in video games!? Call the police!

9. So, like I said, this is basically The Grapes of Wrath. I guess Marxist isn't quite right. Kentucky Route Zero doesn't really come at you w/ solutions but it isn't shy about showing its characters being victimized by capitalist enterprise.

10. Also in line with The Grapes of Wrath, you find the people in this strange area of Kentucky have learned to survive only by relying on each other. For however hard these people have been squeezed, you find friendly, generous faces at pretty much every turn, people who are willing to go out of their way for you just because you're a person.

11. I personally found this element comforting and comfort is much needed when exploring a world as nakedly cruel as that of Kentucky Route Zero. The kindness shown was the one thing in the game that felt concrete and like something that could exist in our own world unchanged.

12. I initially played this during the democratic primary in 2019 and wrote much of this review throughout the COVID-19 crisis and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. As our world takes on an edge of unrealness and our own cruelties are laid bare to see, the world of Kentucky Route Zero begins to feel like less and less of an exaggeration.

13. Kentucky Route Zero is most definitely a game for people who spend time thinking about games but it never loses sight of its message and is all the more affecting for it. It uses sometimes unorthodox mechanics but always in the service of world building and telling its story. The end result is something both engaging and accessible, easy to get into but with layers of meaning rooted deeply in both gameplay in presentation. I hope you did start downloading it before you read this review and I hope you do play it.

13 Points on The Outer Worlds - Obsidian Entertainment - 2019 [PC]

1. If you have been waiting for some other developer to pick up Bethesda's reins and make a game in the style of the great Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, Obsidian is that developer and The Outer Worlds is that game.

2. Given Obsidian developed a golden age, Bethesda-sanctioned Fallout release, this isn't surprising. Still, I was nervous they'd mess it all up. Who wouldn't be?

3. The Outer Worlds looks an awful lot like it was developed on the same engine as Fallout 4 to me but it's actually made in Unreal. I'm just throwing this out as a bit of trivia because, obviously, nobody actually cares about this kind of stuff.

4. The setting here is a series of planets that's are run by giant corporations who are working people literally to death in order to preserve an opulent way of life for the upper classes.

5. It is unfortunate but sometimes I interact w/ people on the internet and I get the feeling some folks seem to really want to ignore the anti-capitalist themes inherent The Outer Worlds setting in spite of them being presented here in a method that could charitably described as ham-fisted and totally obvious. "Well, it's not against capitalism," these people say to God and me on the internet, "It just against large corporations running the government and exploiting people." Law's sake, people, think about this for like fifteen seconds. You are driving me freaking crazy!

6. (Law's sake is a favorite minced oath in The Outer Worlds and me using it in this review is unequivocally hilarious.)

7. As far as gameplay, I reckon it's fine. Combat is fine. There is a paper-rock-scissors thing w/ various elemental abilities. You can craft improvements for your equipment. You get a bullet-time slowdown ability which you can use if you like. I dunno... If you are familiar w/ video games, this is one.

8. Where The Outer World's really excels is in creating a world which feels concrete and consistent and that appears to have a history that goes way deeper than what you are given. As much as it is a game, it is a make-believe place where you can go and just be, the sort of thing you want to linger over a while even if you are not making progress to some specific goal.

9. You get a choice of a few companions you can ring w/ you. They all have backstories and goals of their own which is pretty neat. It also hearkens back to the first two Fallout games where bringing along a companion or two was effectively easy mode.

10. This is not truly an open world game. It is a series of open areas that you travel between from time to time. All this really means is if you want to go to a location on a  different planet, you have to fast travel to your ship, fast travel to the other planet then fast travel to the location you want to get to. I found this a bit annoying but I guess this increases immersion for some people.

11. The Outer Worlds is built from the ground up to be played through from the beginning multiple times. You cannot hedge your bets the whole game and get all the different endings from a save point a half-hour from the end . Playing through in a normal manner--as in not going and exploring every nook and cranny and talking to every NPC multiple times for the sake of it--you inevitably miss out on giant swatches of game's universe. Fortunately, a playthrough is not terribly long and they are varied enough that going through many times does not feel like a chore.

12. Going back to the anti-capitalist themes I mentioned in point 5, towards the end of the game, there is an argument presented that the capitalists are maybe not all the way in the wrong so maybe it is not so cut and dry. Then again, this argument is presented to you by chief lord of all capitalists so maybe you it is cut and dry and people are lying to you. Seriously, think about this for like fifteen seconds.

13. The Outer Worlds works on multiple levels. It's fun to play moment to moment. It's interesting to explore all the various pathways and alternative outcomes if you so chose. And if you want to pay attention, it examines our current society by exaggerating it (less than some would like to admit) and showing how things might end up if we keep heading the way we are heading. In short, it is a good video game and it's good science fiction. You should play it.

13 Points on A Normal Lost Phone - Accidental Queens - 2017 [PC]

1. As you might expect from the title, the phone in this A Normal Lost Phone is not actually normal. It is a phone that tells you a story.

2. I would argue this is an RPG. The role you play is the kind of creepy asshole who goes through a stranger's phone. I mean, seriously, respect people's privacy. Throw the phone at the mayor's house if you want to do something fun w/ it.

3. This said, w/o going homeland security on some rando, there would not be much of a game here--though I suppose a responsibly disposing of an old phone simulator game would not be the strangest thing out there.

4. It is kind of hard to discuss this w/o at least hinting at spoiling the game's big reveal but there's a trigger warning at the beginning that there will be anti-LGBTQ language involved so I think it's fair enough to let you all know that the game's protagonist, Sam, isn't a straight cis male and not everyone knows this.

5. As you initially start to go through Sam's phone, you are funneled toward reading texts and from this, you can figure out passwords and such to gain access to other apps, which give you hints at how to access the next round of new things and so on.

6. Not gonna lie: I just looked up most of the passwords online when it came to it. Fiddling w/ getting them in right or looking through stuff you've already read struck me as tedious more so than satisfying. I think the game could have added some automatic note-taking of some sort or a system that gave you options like try your birthday or try your address or whatever.

7. Poking through a phone is a pretty effective perspective from which to tell a story. It's very personal and yet not colored in the same way as, say, an intimate conversation w/ that person would be.

8. As compelling as it is, perhaps a coming out story is not the story to tell in this way. Or, in any case, A Normal Lost Phone goes too far in this matter. Eventually, in order to progress, you start using the phone to send people messages that reveal personal details about Sam. Nobody does this aside from the kind of creepy asshole you are apparently supposed to roleplay as.

9. It ultimately feels as much like a missed opportunity as much as anything. Why not make the person you are roll playing as Sam's father or someone? Why not make the player come face to face w/ the fact that what they are doing is wrong?

10. The thing is this overstepping is never pointed out as such. It is not dwelled on or even pointed out that you violating a person's privacy. You go through the motions like you are solving a puzzle in a Professor Layton game or something. I suppose if you can take for granted that your snooping is not meant to be seen as malicious in this context you can then unashamedly learn about Sam's life and story.

11.  At this point though, you have reduced the framing device of looking through someone's phone to a simple gimmick and then what's the point. I did think it was cool though that the in-game music game from just playing songs on the phone's music app though.

12. Sam's story is quite touching for what it's worth. It is a step by step of a person finding themselves but then having to leave much of what they know behind in doing so. It feels directly relatable even if you have not experienced what Sam has.

13. As I started writing this, I did not expect such a large number of these thirteen points to be about the lost phone gimmick but, I dunno, I suppose that's the name of the game so it makes sense. I will say, despite my reservations about it, I enjoyed A Normal Lost Phone and it was a good use of the couple of hours it took to play it. It makes me a little uneasy but it's not a bad game to play.

13 Points on Halo: Combat Evolved - Bungie - 2001 [Microsoft Xbox]

1. Halo: Combat Evolved is a groundbreaking game from the early 2000s, primarily loved for its multiplayer experience. I'm reviewing its single player campaign in 2019. I can't explain how my life got to this point.

2. You can actually still play multiplayer if you really want. You need to either play couch co-op, which requires friends you don't have and a couch, or you can play online which requires a complex process to simulate a local area network over the internet and friends you don't have.

3. It's the single player campaign of a multi-player focused game so we're not talking Bioshock in terms of environmental storytelling but the combat mechanics are exceptional and it's extremely important historically so definitely worth a run through.

4. You play as a space marine in a special suit of armor that makes you kick ass real good. You have an AI companion named Cortana who now wants to use all your PC's idle processor cycles to send personal information about your family to Microsoft.

5. Your enemies are an alliance consisting of every non-human sentient species that you see in game. No human is on their side and not one of them sides w/ the humans. People suck, I guess.

6. Combat is a high point, it being what has evolved after all. The specific smoothness of how you move in Halo makes it feel like a thoroughly modern shooter. This said, the original Xbox controller has only one set of shoulder buttons and so some controls are mapped in weird spots. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to aim down sites and accidentally threw a grenade.

7. The middle of Halo drags a lot. It starts to feel like every time you fight your way through a string of similar looking metal tunnels, enemies are going to respawn and you will have to fight your way right back out of that string of similar looking metal tunnels.

8. About two thirds of the way through though, a wrinkle in the story appears that amps up the tense atmosphere and pulls you through the rest of the game. W/ this wrinkle, you run into enemy types that use the same weapons as you do. You can always pick up the alien weapons in the game but the only place you ever find ammunition for the human weapons is at crash sites or whatever pre-set area the developers chose to have that ammunition in. Having enemies show up all of sudden where you start feeling like you no longer have to preserve ammunition for your favorite gun mixes up the gameplay nicely at a critical juncture.

9. Changing the difficulty improves enemy AI in addition to changing how tough they are, which is awesome, but I found myself wishing for some more granular difficulty settings. I got kinda sick of some of the bullet-spongey enemies at higher levels but didn't necessarily want to make them less aggressive and more stupid to lower their HP.

10. It is possible to auto-save yourself into a really bad situation. You can get stuck w/ low HP and low ammo and if you're stuck, you're stuck. You can't drop the difficulty temporarily to get out of a pickle so you have to restart the level unless you can find a way to cheese yourself out of your conundrum.

11. And, yeah, cheesing the AI is 101-level science in this game. Even on higher difficulties, it can be pretty easy to attract attention then run away to string enemies out and pick them off a few at a time. In fairness, doing this is sometimes how I got myself auto-saved into really bad situations.

12. The theme to Halo is an iconic piece of music but most of the in-game soundtrack is forgettable. Great sound design mostly makes up for this. Directional sound worked beautifully through stereo speakers and some of the enemy yelps are pretty much hilarious.

13. Playing through Halo for the first time now is hardly the ideal way to experience it but I suppose that and memories is what we are stuck w/. If it came out today, I'd tell you the story is decent, the controls are great, the combat is varied enough that it's only boring sometimes and it looks like an original Xbox game. After playing through the story once, I think this is destined to remain on my shelf for all eternity or until I make friends, whichever comes first.

13 Points on Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins - TT Fusion - 2013 [Nintendo 3DS]

1. In 2009, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS and proved that by adjusting perspective, you could successfully bring your open world sandbox game onto a lower powered handed and still provide the player w/ a compelling experience. W/ Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins, TT Fusion proved this approach still worked in 2013.

2. Just kidding. This game is terrible.

3. Most reviews focus on the game's technical issues--notably the chugging frame rates and extreme sprite pop-in--but I think this overlooks a greater problem: The Chase Begins is unceasingly boring from start to finish.

4. This said, its technical issues do merit some further mention. In addition to the performance issues, nearly all the voiced dialogue that made the Wii U and other versions of this seems so lively was removed and cut scenes are compressed to a messy blur along the lines of 2006 YouTube. It's also the only game on 3DS that crashed so hard on me that I had to restart the entire console.

5. My favorite overall glitch though is one where some particular sound gets stuck in an infinite loop, turning the cheerful Lego setting into a sonic hellscape where the wails of a long grieving man can be heard in every corner of the city.

6. I would like for someone other than me to do some serious journalistic research into how exactly things went wrong on the development of this game. The Chase Begins is so half-baked you just have to wonder if maybe they originally intended to port the entire Wii U release of Lego City Undercover to 3DS then realized at the eleventh hour that they couldn't and so had to slap something together for whatever release date.

7. I think this uses the same exact map as the home console releases at least but I quite frankly don't care because every square inch of this map is unceasingly boring.

8. Following the main quest, you essentially just walk from one boring map marker to the next occasionally doing some boring driving, some boring fighting or solving a boring puzzle. This is all in between boring cut scenes.

9. You can die, crash your car or otherwise fail in many ways but there is never any setback for doing this at all. You literally re-appear in the exact spot you died completely healthy and with a brand new car. Real life should be like this!

10. The only real challenge is the platforming. It's not actually hard but the crappy camera makes it a challenge not to chuck your 3DS through a window. During some of the few moments in this where I was not bored, I was frustrated because I had to re-climb the same wall for the fifth time and try a slightly different angle on the joystick to make a particular jump.

11. The combat in The Chase Begins is even more remarkably boring than anything else. You can stand there idly pressing a singular button and you win automatically because you are literally invincible. Throwing someone off a ledge significantly reduces the amount of time you spend doing this and it's pretty hard to get these tosses lined up just right so, ultimately, I found this very slightly satisfying to do correctly.

12. This has the exact same soundtrack as the Wii U, which is awesome. They seem to use oddly little of the music though. As the songs played during the end credits, I kept wondering why they use more of these songs more often. In game, you hear basically the combat music and the loading screen music.

13. A lot of the problems w/ this are a problem w/ all Lego games. It is designed as if in order to appeal to kids, it has to be devoid of challenge. I think this is a wrong-headed approach to making a game for a general audience but most Lego games get away w/ it because the moment-to-moment presentation is so charming. You reduce that quality and polish and you are left w/ a real dud. This is what Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is: everything bad about Lego games w/o most of what makes them good.

13 Points on Cookie Clicker - Julien Thiennot - 2016 [Browser]

1. Okay folks, here is how you stop yourself from playing Cookie Clicker on a Windows PC:

Run Notepad as an administrator, go to file > open
Open C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add this line to the end of the file: 127.0.0.1 orteil.dashnet.org
Save and restart your browser

2. Congratulations on your newfound freedom. Go and actually get something done!

3. To be fair, while Cookie Clicker seems to have been designed by a mad psychologists to maximize addictive potential, the only way it makes money is through ad revenue and not by hammering you w/ endless microtransactions. There are no loot boxes or other types of gambling, just an endless and effective gameplay loop.

4. Your goal is to make as many cookies as possible. By making cookies, you are able to buy buildings and upgrades to allow you to make more cookies, which allow you to buy more buildings and upgrades and so on. This is really no different than Diablo at its core. You do a thing to get better at doing a thing just for the sake of it.

5. While this gets called an idle game, it only really is until it dawns on you that your most effective strategy is to get as many bonus-providing random drops as you can. You will at first be excited to leave it running overnight to see how many cookies you build up but eventually that just becomes downtime where you can't get the random drops.

6. You do thankfully get options to play less actively but it is never as lucrative as getting a lucky couple drops in a row, where you can gain days worth of cookies in a few seconds.

7. So you keep it open in a browser window all the time.

8. You get an upgrade at some point where a sound lets you know there's been a random drop in the open browser window even if you're not actually looking at it at the moment. At this point, the game is only nominally in the background and whatever you might have been looking at in another tab is secondary to keeping an ear open to listen for that little sound.

9. The sound is a bell which is appropriate for the Pavlovian tab-switching response it evokes.

10. As far as the actual idle aspect of the game--buying buildings and upgrades to those buildings to make cookies to buy more buildings and upgrades--it's wonderful. You would not care so much about getting the random drops were it not.

11. You see, not only do you buy buildings to make cookies and then buy upgrades to those buildings, you also buy upgrades that allow one building type to improve a different building type. This is just the beginning. You get achievements that let you make more cookies. You can give up all your cookies and start afresh w/ which gives you additional upgrades. You have mini games that improve your output cookie output.

12. This is to say, finding an optimal strategy to Cookie Clicker involves serious mathematics and that's awesome.

13. I am not kidding about having to block Cookie Clicker in my hosts file but I really don't hold that against it. By giving me a reason to think about math instead of doing my actual job, it really added a nice layer to my day-to-day. Eventually, I just needed the mindspace back. It's a real classic of the genre so give it a go sometime--just not when you have a deadline approaching.

13 Points on Infinifactory - Zachtronics - 2015 [PC]

1. I have started and never really gotten into a couple of Zachtronics games in the past but now that I've let Infinifactory get its hooks into me, I think I'll have to revisit them all again. This game is great and you should play it.

2. This frequently gets described as a puzzle game but that's not quite right. You solve problems more so than puzzles. Puzzles normally end w/ elegant solutions. Infinifactory gets ugly.

3. Your task is to build constructions of block shaped elements that are then used to assemble other block shaped elements into multi-block shaped elements. It reminds me quite a bit of making automated machines w/ redstone in Minecraft.

4. Number 3 makes sense as apparently Infinifactory's predecessor, Infiniminer, was a huge inspiration for Minecraft. I didn't know this until now. I'm sorry.

5. The setup here is there's a bunch of evil aliens making you engineer the stuff described in number 3. You learn more of your situation through audio logs you find laying around because this is a video game and that's just how it's done.

6. You are not actively involved in plot development aside from beating each stage. Everything interesting goes down off screen and you find out about it through the setting. This is fine. The plot serves the purpose of creating a tenser atmosphere and that is all it needs to do.

7. Number 6 being said, Infinifactory does reward you w/ quite a bit more depth and nuance than you'd typically expect from what is basically an excuse plot, especially as you push into later levels. It builds a realistic feeling world when all is said and done.

8. You are also rated vs. other players on various criteria such as how many blocks you've used and the footprint of your structure. You put a lot effort into the solutions you've build so this little bit of incentive is enough to really push you to coming up w/ better ideas.

9. Honestly though, while it is satisfying to come up w/ solutions that are clever and elegant top to bottom, the best thing is when when of your ideas doesn't quite work and you have to slap together hackneyed fixes that take longer than it would have to just redo the whole thing from scratch and you wind up w/ hilarious monstrosities that people will ignore when you incessantly post them on social media.

10. Speaking of, this has a animated .gif exporter and it's awesome.

11. The magic here is that there is no definitive solution to any of the problems you're presented w/ so any way that you might figure it out is equally valid. Once curious thing that you'll find if you go looking for other folks' solutions to the same problems is you'll frequently be surprised by how common some of what seems like your clever solutions prove to be and vice versa.

12. This game is much longer than you might initially think so if you are just trying to get through it, maybe don't spend too much time refining your earliest solutions until you see how much there actually is to offer. The later problems are more interesting anyway.

13. Infinifactory feels quite a lot like designing circuit boards or writing code but being good at it has no practical application so it's fun instead of being something you can make money at. As such, this is a good game for those days when you want to exercise your mind w/o the man breathing down your freaking neck. Go for it.