Amnesia: Mechanical Horror

As much as I adore games focused on storytelling (which the astute reader will notice made up four of the top five games I played in 2013), I have to admit that most commonly, storytelling in games is done wrong.

As much as I like Uncharted, not the best story.

There's various schools of thought on the matter of game storytelling. The most common is the cutscene model: the now familiar structure of having gameplay occasionally interrupted by cutscenes that tell the story, with both parts of the game having a minimal connection at best. Some games will try to make cutscenes part of the gameplay, putting in quick-time events to simulate gameplay in the middle of a cutscene, but these are more often than not annoying distractions or ways of getting a game over. The great majority of AAA games follow this model, but if you need examples, games as different as Uncharted, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the Final Fantasy series are big-name applications of it. These "cutscenes" can be full-on video, or text-boxes in the style of early RPGs.

A variant on the cutscene model is what I like to refer to as the BioWare model, where most

cutscenes involve decisions, so the player can gets to choose what their character says and does. Of the popular models of gaming storytelling, this is perhaps the most benign, as it adds a great amount of involvement with the player, andThe Walking Dead or the unfortunate Alpha Protocol, which have a strict timer on decisions.
creates a set of mechanics for storytelling. Sometimes, more gameic elements are introduced within cutscenes, such as in my beloved

The third is the minimalist story, very popular in the early days of gaming, and still largely used in the platformer genre, where the story is either non-existent or told entirely outside the game itself. Prominent examples of this are games such as Super Mario Bros. or DOOM.

The prevalence of these three approaches lies at the core of the problem when it comes to videogame storytelling. The first step in the train of logic in all three is the separation of "proper" gameplay and story. This, however, is a huge misstep in my opinion. The value of gaming as an artistic medium lies within its interactivity. This is something that no other artform has, and gives gaming a huge amount of potential. Segregating gameplay and story is preventing the medium from achieving everything it can. There's nothing wrong with the models above, they're just not exploring the full potential of videogames.

Hmm, yes, I'm quite refined. "The Mechanical Model", you see

And as such, comes the fourth model: The mechanical model, where it's, prepare for a big surprise here, the mechanics of a game that tell a story. This is usually done in sandbox-style games: The Sims can tell some hilarious tales because of the way the mechanics interact, and Dwarfs?! is a rather brilliant story of a dwarven kingdom's rise into power and fall because of digging too deep and greedy through next to no text at all.

The problem with these is that it offers almost all creative control to the player. The story's setting and tone is set by the game devs, and everything else is handed to you, to do with as you wish. This can be extremely entertaining, and some phenomenal games have come out of this mentality, but a player isn't going to create a story as deep and rich as a dev could: the average person doesn't have the time, skill, or desire to do so.

However, a few games use the mechanical model in a more mild way. They set the mood and atmosphere through the gameplay, but leave the overall plot in the control of the devs. This can result in a truly fantastic experience, and it is a shame so few games do this.

Of these games, perhaps the most successful is the legendary horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The plot is right there in the name: You have amnesia and are descending through the darkness.

I will fully admit: I am easily scared. I've played many horror games, and even the worst of them have scared me to a rather large degree. I've also played some of the pinnacles of the genre, such as Silent Hill 2. Never have I been so damn afraid, so terrified to the very bone as I was during my first hour playing Amnesia.

Looks plesant enough here, but this game is pure evil genius.

The reason for this is simple. Amnesia uses mechanical horror: Its very mechanics are, by nature, terrifying. Let me explain. Games
are essentially all about resource management. You have a few resources, and expend one to either gain or not loose another. In a shooter, you use bullets to not loose health, and in an RPG you use potions to gain health.

These resources are usually all beneficial. In a shooter, you want as many weapons as possible to most efficiently dispatch enemies, thus saving
on both ammo and health. In an RPG, you want to be as high a level as possible, gaining more health to loose and allowing you to obtain more potions to replenish this health with.

Amnesia, at a base level, subverts this. Your two main resources are Health and Sanity. Health is fairly self explanatory: you loose it from getting hit, if you run out of it, you die. Sanity is a bit more complex: You loose it from being in scary environments, mainly in the dark, or witnessing disturbing events. Now here's the catch: You can create light for yourself, by using your lantern or lighting torches and candles in the environment, but you can't fight. Combat-wise, Amnesia is a pure stealth game.

As one would imagine, light makes stealth difficult. This means your two resources are in direct opposition to one another. If you keep your sanity high, it's more likely you'll get killed by the monsters following you, but if you make it easy to sneak around them you'll go insane and end up defenseless against your pursuers anyway. Any decision you make will affect you negatively, and this makes the game intensely terrifying, having to know that every action you take is a mistake.

This alone would make Amnesia scary, but it's backed up by a large amount of other mechanics that induce horror, as well as truly masterful visual and sound design, which propels it above even the masterpiece that Silent Hill 2 is. As soon as I finish the game I'll write up and post a review on this very blog.

The Best Thing I Played In 2013

The Walking Dead

Telltale's Walking Dead was a genuine surprise. This was a studio that had previously survived on lackluster adventure games, with the occasional spark of brilliance, making a licensed game (already a red flag in itself) based on a property that had lost anything resembling decent writing or originality at least two or three years prior, in my absolute least favorite genre, point-and-click adventure.

And it was brilliant.

Don't judge this game by its cover. And title. And dev.

It's hard to describe exactly what made me engage with The Walking Dead so much.  It doesn't do much to innovate. The core gameplay mechanics are uninteresting, and the storyline is rather played-out. Why exactly do I love this game so much?

It's the interplay of all those aspects, how they support one another. The storyline by itself is a decently written zombie story, with some surprisingly well written characters, and these characters are what carry the entire game through a curious domino-effect., where caring about the characters leads you to care about the story, which in turn makes you care about the gameplay, and so on and so forth.

Special props to Telltale for both the characters of Clementine and Lee, which turn what would otherwise be a really good experience into a truly great one. Clementine has seen plenty of praise by the internet, and deservedly so: She is quite possibly the only well-written child in videogames, and, even if she wasn't, is a complex and interesting character in her own right. Clementine feels like a real person: She goes through emotional ups and downs, not always with a clear reason. She's not a Princess Peach to be saved, nor is she a Bayonetta to go out and kick ridiculous amounts of ass: Clementine is a smart, competent young girl who can look after herself as much as any other eight year-old could in a zombie apocalypse.

Tenderness: Something you see entirely too little of in games

However, I think the character of Lee often gets overlooked. It's amazing how much characterization Telltale managed to write into a character whose words are almost entirely chosen by the player, pulling off in the space of one game what BioWare couldn't properly pull off with Commander Shepard in the space of three. Lee is not only a great player character, but a good character in his own right: struggling between what he feels is his moral obligation to protect Clementine, his moral obligation to protect the group, and his own survival instinct.
I could stay here and praise each character by turn: I could tell you how brilliantly Kenny's steadfast loyalty is pulled off, or describe the rage and frustration that I feel every time I come up against Larry's rampant selfishness, but that would make this run entirely too long. Let it be said that almost every person you meet ranks between the best characters that have graced a videogame.

Believe it or not, all great characters

The visual style is amazing, opting for a cartoonish, cell-shaded look reminiscent of the original comics, and shying away from the unpleasant-looking and excessively gritty style of the TV show. This forces Telltale to work around action scenes, with human deaths almost always occurring off-screen (giving them that Jaws "shadow of the monster" feeling) and the quite rare zombie kills being shocking more through the brute force of the action than the effect of said action on the zombie.

If this were a review, gameplay would be were I'd dock a few points, but it's still brilliant. Early on, puzzles are slightly too complex, creating a frustrating distraction from the main meat of the game: The story and interactions between characters. However, after Episode 2, they become considerably simpler, and the gameplay instead serves to reinforce the story: simple but time-expanding puzzles whilst a wave of zombies approaches to give you that extra punch of tension, a sweep of an area in a moment of panic for Clementine's safety, that sort of thing. It's not the star of the game, but it definitely gives the story just that much more kick. What's most important is that it does that crucial thing I've always insisted on: Storytelling is done through
the mechanics of the game, and that makes everything a lot more affecting.

Those little text-boxes terrify you as much as zombies.

The dialogue system is probably the best part. It's a simple menu with a few choices, with a timer that forces you to make quick decisions, which lead to you sometimes saying something you'll regret. Something brilliant is that silence is, for every dialogue choice, an option. The most innovative feature of the game is in the instant feedback
pop-ups that show up at the top left of the screen, telling you that your actions will have consequences: lying to someone might net you a "Bob will remember that". At first, these seem like they'd ruin what actions will have consequences, but the true brilliance lies in that these pop-ups are not always relevant. Bob might remember that you told him you had unlimited food, but it doesn't make a difference if he gets eaten by zombies on the way to said non-existent food, or if you happen to actually
find a real source of unlimited food. This gives the game incredible amounts of tension, thinking back, and requires you be a crafty speaker.

Not as terrifying in Left4Dead

I also have to give props for not including many actions scenes at all, at most one per hour or two. What fights are present in the game feel desperate and brutal, an effect that would've been lost in a game more focused on popping zombie heads: The zombies truly feel like a threat with how rarely you dispatch even one.


Now, I haven't played what's out of Season Two yet: I think great part of what drove me to enjoy the first game so much was playing all the episodes in a row, not taking month gaps. When all of Season Two is out, I will buy and play it. I am similarly impatiently waiting for all of The Wolf Among Us and Telltale's Game of Thrones to come out.

The Walking Dead is not the best game I've ever played. That honor still goes to either Deus Ex or the first Amnesia: Both of those games were objectively better constructed than Walking Dead is. Nonetheless, neither of them affected me as deeply and strongly as Walking Dead

Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season One is not only my favorite game that I played in 2013, but my favorite game of all time, after seven years of the spot being taken up by Deus Ex.

The 2nd Best Thing I Played This Year

Hearthstone

I've never been a big Blizzard fan. I played Diablo and Diablo 2, but never got into any of their other games: My hate of RTS prevents me from getting into either StarCraft or WarCraft, my being unwilling to pay a subscription for MMOs unless I have an established base of friends in it ensures I'll likely never play World of WarCraft, and my utter hatred of always-online DRM for games outside the Free-to-Play market means I'll never even consider touching Diablo 3.

I don't know who any of said heroes are, but it's pretty sweet.

As such, when everyone was either excited or disappointed over the announcement of a WoW-based CCG at Blizzcon 2012, I was lukewarm. I do enjoy card games, but they're considerably too expensive for me to be able to properly play them, not to speak of the difficulties of finding people to play them with.

Then, when footage of the game started coming out, I started getting interested: A beautiful-looking, simple-to-play card game that has an extremely fair business model, allowing you to play and even collect booster packs without paying? Sign me on. The more I watched, the more I liked the game: The simplicity hid layers and layers of strategy, with the Arena mode (an in-built Draft mode) offering a completely different metagame to explore.

When I finally got into the closed beta, I was not disappointed: Hearthstone is one of the most addictive, enjoyable experiences I've ever had. Any other year, Hearthstone would have easily taken the number one spot: I can foresee playing this thing for years to come. Unfortunately, after 7 years since I first played Deus Ex, I've finally found something to debunk it as my favourite game of all time, and that something pushed Hearthstone down to number 2. What is that something? Well, imaginary visitor, you'll have to find out tomorrow, now won't you? (Unless you don't happen to see this the very day it's been published, of course, in which case I must seem rather silly)

The 3rd Best Thing I Played This Year

Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations

For me, 2013 was the year of the Visual Novel. I played an inordinate amount of the damn things, including the previously mentioned Katawa Shoujo, the brilliantly insane 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, and the rather dull but somehow endearing Hotel Dusk: Room 215. I also made my way through the entirety of the Ace Attorney series, with the exception of the recently released Dual Destinies.

Characters this ridiculous-looking taken so seriously is great.

A game about lawyers has no right to be as endearing, funny, and most importantly, entertaining, as the Ace Attorney series quickly becomes. Every game is full of emotional highs and lows, crazy plot-twists, and quirky characters. The way the gameplay is presented is something truly unique, this being the only series that has ever truly gotten the solve-a-crime feeling just right.

Now, every game in the series deserves being played, and some of them would outrank numbers 4 & 5 on this list if not for my internal "one game per franchise" rule. However, the greatest achievement of the series is, by far, this game: The third in the series and the final one in the "Classic Trilogy". Trials & Tribulations doesn't differ much from the first two games gameplay-wise, and both Apollo Justice and Investigations: Miles Edgeworth refine the gameplay further, but Trials and Tribulations is the end of what was originally going to be a standalone trilogy, and it shows. Loose ends from the previous two games are tied up beautifully, plot threads you never thought would have anything to do with each other collide into insane cases and create a fantastic assortment of mysteries to wade through and enjoy, unraveling plot threads in dramatic and hilarious court sessions alike.

Trials & Tribulations is not the mechanical best of the Ace Attorney series, but the story is heads and shoulders beyond any other game in the series, and in a Visual Novel, that elevates it far beyond the rest of the already fantastic saga.

The 4th Best Thing I Played This Year

Jade Empire

As a huge BioWare fan, by the beginning of 2013 I'd played all their games but two: Dragon Age 2, which, as the internet had led me to believe and I later found out myself, was a horrendous atrocity, and Jade Empire, which pre-EA days was widely considered to be pretty great, but still the worst game BioWare had ever made.

Not actually that much Jade in said Empire.

It was with the sentiment to patch up the last remaining hole in my BioWare knowledge that, after enduring Dragon Age 2, I sat down to play Jade Empire. What I expected was a tragically flawed game with amazing story and setting. Instead, I got the best story and setting BioWare has ever created accompanied by one of their best combat systems to date.

Whilst not as pleasing as Mass Effect 3's (which, despite the ending, I consider the best Mass Effect) fluid shooter gameplay or as tactical as one of their "proper" RPGs, Jade Empire combined both of these aspects to produce a strategic and meaty brawler which felt great to use and was, as cliched as this sounds, easy to learn but tough to master. Combine this with my favorite BioWare plot-twist and a criminally underused, ancient-Asian setting, and you get what, to me, is the best game BioWare ever made.

The 5th Best Thing I Played This Year

Far Cry 3

When Far Cry 3 was coming out in late 2012, I had a fair amount of doubts about it. I'd previously played Far Cry 2, and I really liked the ideas behind the game, but it was marred by repetitive mission structure, uninteresting terrain, and an annoying amount of re-spawning enemies that made movement around the world a severe pain in the ass. Far Cry 3 seemed to me to be making all the same mistakes: The open world element in 2 had resulted in the majority of its flaws.

Something, Something, Definition of Insanity

When it was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews, I was pleasantly surprised. Further investigation into the game resulted in me seeing what people were talking about. The flaws that had held Far Cry 2 back were largely gone, and a fantastic story with one of the best villains to ever grace videogames put the icing on the cake. Far Cry 3 made for an insanely fun romp around a beautiful environment. Unfortunately, the game suffered from power creep, and resulted in your character quickly outgrowing the tense, rock-hard combat that gave Far Cry 2's fighting great part of its charm.

Despite this, Far Cry 3 is a great piece of entertainment, a fun way of shooting some dudes in the face. Much like its predecessor, it didn't quite hit its mark head-on, but it got closer, and its mistakes were a lot more forgivable and it overall made for a considerably more enjoyable experience.

It's worth mentioning that competition for this slot was fierce: Far Cry barely knocked out BioShock Infinite. It ultimately gained the place when I realized that BioShock obviously wanted you to think about its plot, which proved to be a mistake when said plot crumbles apart when thought about too hard.

The Best I Played, 2013 - Intro & Honourable Mentions

The Best I Played, 2013

So, denizens of the internet, another year is done, and, as it seems to be the cool thing to do online, I decided to make a best games of the year list, but upon starting to think about it, I realized a big problem with this plan: I barely play new games. I game on a tight budget, and as such will usually play only a new game or two a year, most of the rest of my time being sunk into older games I've picked up on Steam sale.

The solution to this seemed obvious: Ignore the constraint of this being the best games released this year. What will soon follow is the best games I've played in 2013. These have a wide, wide release window - one of them was originally released in 2004, though it became playable for me (and I imagine for most of the people who might read this blog) in 2007.

I want to mention that the list may seem a bit strange this year, and this is because of my New Year's Resolution. Yes, that's right, that thing no one keeps. 2013 was the first year I kept my New Year's Resolution, and it was this: To play a game every month that I wouldn't have played otherwise, hopefully in a genre that I hadn't tried out or wasn't particularly fond of. This had some varying results, but was mostly a succesful experiment. A great number of these games are now on the list, and a number of them I despise with all my soul.

Now, I decided on 5 as a arbitrary number that I'll use, mostly because I rarely play enough games a year to make a top 10 without having to shove at least one or two meh experiences in there. However, this isn't enough. There's games that I feel deserve a mention that won't make it onto the list, and I'll explain why. This year, I've got two of these bad boys, and I feel both of them are interesting discussions to be had. Now, the list will be rated, 5th being the worst and 1st being the best. I'll release the list an item a day, starting from the bottom. Now, on to the honourable mentions.

The Honourable Mentions:

Alpha Protocol:

The ONLY Espionage RPG. Ever.

A game I'd heard a lot about, often in the context of "Great idea, poor execution" threads on gaming forums. I like Obsidian, the developers, a lot, and as such, decided to give it a try. For the first two or three hours, I was presented with an uninspired, linear narrative with an interesting conversation system marred by atrocious gameplay. After those two or three hours, Alpha Protocol transformed into an amazing spy story with tonnes of freedom, an intricate and complex story, still marred by atrocious gameplay that doesn't quite know whether it's an RPG or a cover-based third person shooter. Unfortunately, it stayed in that state for only a four hour stretch, and died off with a whimper after an appaling, hour-long finale that made next to no sense and decided to shift all its focus back onto the ridiculously clunky and unresponsive game element. Those four hours of magnificence that Alpha Protocol had were indeed magnificent: a fantastic spy game that the medium has needed for decades. The rest is a pathetic excuse for a game. I can perfectly see where the general consensus on this game came from: Not only is the gameplay some of the most tedious I've seen, but the story is badly damaged by both the beginning and the ending and turned into something quite mediocre. The four hours that Alpha Protocol shone are worthy of a spot on this list. The other half of the game solidly keep it away from it.

Katawa Shoujo:

This guy is the funniest person you'll never meet.

Wuh-wuh-whuuuuut? A romantic visual novel on the honourable mentions of a manly man such as yourself, Rariow? Well, yes, actually. Remember that New Year's Resolution I mentioned? Well, early on in the year, in January in fact, I happened upon Sean 'Day[9]' Plott, who is now one of my favourite people on the internet. Browsing through his stuff, I found out he was on a series called MetaDating, where Day[9], along with Sean Bouchard and Bill Graner, two incredibly intelligent gentlemen, played and discussed romantic games, be it for a laugh or for discussion of a genuinely good game. The most recent episode at the time was Katawa Shoujo, a anime-styled free dating sim visual novel, which received some genuine praise from the trio. Now, I hate romantic stories, I'd never played a visual novel before, and I am rather lukewarm to anime, which made this the perfect first step in completing my New Year's Resolution. And so I did, fully expecting to come out of the experience disgusted, for two simple reasons.

Katawa Shoujo was made by people from 4chan. Anyone familiar with the internet should know why this rings alarm bells: 4chan is one of the most depraved corners of the internet. I love the site, don't get me wrong, but there's a bunch of messed up people on it. This is the site that once almost tricked me into poisoning myself with mustard gas. Second, Katawa Shoujo is set in a school for the disabled. I fully expected the very sweet beginning seen on MetaDating to turn into a disgusting fetishistic... thing rather quickly, and was so ready to get out as fast as possible that I actually kept an uninstall shortcut on my desktop.

Yeah, pretty much.

Boy, oh boy, I couldn't have been more mistaken. Katawa Shoujo is the only pure romance story I've ever enjoyed, and one of the best things I've experienced this year: a fantastically written, delicately and tastefully handled, emotionally crippling piece of storytelling goodness. It's got it's emotional downs and ups, going from heart-wrenching to hilarious, and a amazing amount of heart. Every one of the five paths in it is worth re-experiencing at least once, and more than one of them will bring you to tears. It's got its flaws, don't get me wrong: Most h-scenes were quite gratuitous and seemed jammed in the game just because that's what's expected from the genre, which really contrasts with the otherwise elegant and tasteful storylines (Though luckily, you can turn them off if you so wish, and I recommend doing so in most cases), and a route or two were a bit meandery and pointless for large chunks of their duration, even if they were all ultimately great once they hit their stride.

So, why isn't it on the list? For the simple reason that I can't bring myself to call it a game. Katawa Shoujo is something you read, not something you play. What a game is and what it isn't is something I will get around to discussing in my ramblings - eventually - but I don't think Katawa Shoujo qualifies. Now, I want to make this very clear - If I considered Katawa Shoujo a game, it would most definitely be on this list, likely at second. Even as a non-game, I give it my hearty reccomendation.