Anna's Quest

About 4 hours in so far. It's a cute, well-made adventure game, the puzzles MOSTLY make sense and the least fair one at least has an option to skip it. (It would be fair in an old-school game, but it's very out of keeping with the modern style.)

The main problem I have with it so far is that it's cute and pleasant but the story isn't very compelling. Anna's bland and sweet and a little dim, leading to repeated sections where you have to watch her give away important magical items to people who are obviously evil. Her motivation 'save grandpa' is noble enough, but their relationship is kind of generic? There are hints of a bigger backstory and some characters being connected but again no real reason to care about those characters and their connections. There's nobody in the game that I'm thinking "Gosh, I want to know more about X". I don't even hate the baddies enough to want to show them up.

It's nice enough and fun to play but once I stop playing it I don't have a huge urge to get back to it.

oxenfree

Played so far: Single playthrough. About 5 hours (this is not unusual from what I can tell)

I'm going to do my best to avoid talking about the plot and JUST talk about the process of playing the game.

This is a narrative-focused semi-adventure game. The 'puzzles' are very light, it's mostly about running around and making decisions to progress through the story, plus a single mechanic with the radio which you use a lot. There are some pseudo-platforming elements, in terms of having to maneuver and jump around to get to the places where you're going, but I don't think it's possible to lose due to jumps or walking off edges or anything like that. The walking is mostly to embody you in the character and pace your discoveries, because a lot of talking and such will happen while you are walking from point to point.

One of the most notable things about the decisions, especially coming from a VN/RPG background, is the power of interruptions. As the characters are talking, you'll get little popup bubbles of possible things you can say. If you don't choose any of the options, the bubbles will eventually fade out and disappear, and your character stays quiet. (This feature appears in some VNs as well, perhaps best known in School Days) How long the options stay available depends on the conversation, since your interjection might not make sense if the point you were responding to passes, but if people are asking you a question they're obviously going to wait longer for you to reply, sometimes with optional extra lines to prompt you a few more times Similarly, when you DO choose an option, sometimes your character will wait for the person currently speaking to finish their line and other times she immediately jumps in to cut them off and/or change the subject.

This makes the conversations much more natural-feeling and tumbling-over-each-other than most video game dialog (RPGs are notorious for having poor pacing with multi-person conversations, like when you have to wait for each character to separately laugh at a joke and click to continue to the next one), which of course also means that it's a lot easier to miss things. If you cut someone off, you'll never know what they were going to say.

This game is probably a nightmare to play if you have any sort of hearing difficulty and/or are not a very fast reader. There ARE subtitles. Mostly. For the major character dialog. But NOT for a lot of the audio cues that are involved in puzzles (they usually have visual cues as well, at least), or a lot of the radio broadcasts, some of which are extra flavor and world building but some of which are fairly important, especially if you're trying to really understand the story. And while the major dialog is subtitled, those subtitles will appear and disappear in a flash if someone's speaking quickly or gets interrupted, and there's (as far as I know) no way to see a log, so if you can't process them, you're going to be constantly missing things. I AM a fast reader so I don't know how much of a problem this presents. Of course, you can just flounder along in confusion, because it's a spooky horror game and you're going to be doing a lot of that anyway.

Gameplay choices in things like this are a double-edged sword. As I mentioned, the walking around and interacting is not really a puzzle to solve so much as it is a method of pacing discovery and giving your characters time to talk, or not talk. You can decide you're fed up with people and press ahead, or you can hang back and give them extra time. The physicality of decisions gives you more room to waffle and be unsure and start to do one thing and then go the other way instead. All of this puts you more in the moment and makes you feel more like you're taking direct actions to move the plot along than a simple VN would. HOWEVER... well, hang on, I'll get back to that.

The other point is that you can't make manual saves. There are countless dialog options and you're always picking one and leaving others behind, but you can't make a save and go back and try the other, you have to go with what you've got. You have one automatically saved game as you go through and that's it. And you have no idea what your decisions actually affect. This does help with the roleplay aspect of pressing you to speak more naturally and not completely fixate on making the 'right' choice at every juncture because you can't... but it also means that you're constantly, constantly abandoning options that you'll never get to see.

In combination with the earlier point, we hit one of the big problems I have with "more immersive" adventure games with choices. They tend to be a PAIN to replay.

I missed a whole bunch of stuff on my first playthrough. Some of it is things where I'd like to see more of the dialog options, some of it is obvious BIG CHOICES within the story where I could have gone the other way and didn't, some of it is stuff where at one point the narrative tension was high and pushed me to actually finish the game but that meant I didn't look around and pick up all the collectibles... etc, etc. There's a ton of content in the game I haven't touched yet with my five hour playthrough. However, I am really not interested in going through all those hours of walking around again in order to get only one more slice of the pie.

From a business perspective it probably makes sense to focus more on keeping the player involved on their first playthrough and less on making it easy and convenient for completionists to see the rest, because they're a much smaller proportion of players and generally willing to put in more work. But it annoys me!

Rewarding Experiences

I've alluded to the problems with trying to set up an award for (niche especially) game narrative in longer, non-IGF-friendly games, but I thought I'd ramble about the topic a little to make the pitfalls more clear, and maybe some good ideas will come to light.

First off, if there were some sort of prestigious story game award, what sort of games would be eligible, and how would they be defined? I wouldn't really be happy about lumping every NaNoReNo entry into the same awards show as the latest Bioware RPG and the latest mainstream shooter, but I wouldn't want to start out with a VN-only show either. Too niche. So for starters:

- Only computer games in English with a primary or co-primary focus on narrative allowed.

-- This means VNs, digital gamebooks, some RPGs but not action ones, some adventure games but not pure puzzlefests, and some nebulous arty games that people argue about how to categorise in the first place

-- This would be trying to exclude AAA games in other genres, even though they obviously include narrative as a strong component. But how you actually judge that? Who would be making the decisions on whether Assassins Creed was 'narrative' enough to count? Do you try to cut them out by making the awards "indie only" instead, hoping that it's slightly easier to adjudicate? Or do you issue strict genre guidelines to include ONLY visual novels, RPGs, and adventures, and then fight over what games do and don't count as those?

-- Should freeware games be excluded, in order to keep the field size manageable, or just restricted to certain award categories?

-- What about games that aren't originally in English? What about freeware games that have been fan-translated, sometimes with or without permission?

-- Should games only be eligible if the original author actively submits them for consideration? That might limit the field, but it might limit it too much. An award's not very meaningful if it's only chosen between the games of the five people who were interested.

That's just some basic questions about the games themselves that would be up for awards. A much bigger problem is - who would judge it?

It is not practical to have a small panel of paid judges who are obligated to complete every game and compare them. Think how many hours some of these games take to complete! Think about paying a reasonable salary for 3-5 judges, at the very least, to play them exhaustively. Think how LONG it would take them, too. And, of course, a small group of judges, even esteemed judges, is obviously going to bring in their own set of biases that would make the award less representative of general opinion.

To get a wider range of opinion, you need a wider range of judges. But if it's pretty difficult to pay 3 people to play 20+ games, it's impossible to pay 200 or 2000 to do it. And, especially if all games released are eligible for awards, you just can't even begin to hope that everything will be played and evaluated. And of course, not only can you not afford to pay 200 judges, you might not even be able to get 200 free copies of every game to give out, especially not for a new contest.

So what does that leave you with? Calling out to the gamer populace to vote on the games they've personally played, and just sort of vaguely hoping you can get enough people to speak up and play fairly that you'll get a good spread of results? Well... it is sort of how the Hugos are supposed to work, after all.

If the judges are 'the gamers' rather than specially recruited judges or hand-vetted volunteers, then you need an organisation to make SOME attempt at verifying the identity of the judges and stopping people from signing up multiple times, as well as a barrier to entry to try and restrict this to people who are actually interested in the subject and not boredly clicking a webpage. This of course requires that you have created this central Gamers Association and someone is maintaining the membership and keeping track of the money (which will probably be used to pay out the awards), but one might find it a little hard to get thousands of people to sign up and pay money to get the chance to vote on their favorite video games. Or maybe it's easy, I don't know!

Now, once you've started making things into a popular vote based on nominations from this wide base, you run into the issue of campaigning. Should game developers and/or interest groups be barred from trying to push the voters to vote one way or another? And if so, how? Or is that totally fine, because that level of dedication should be rewarded? Are there other rules that can balance the possibility of one group trying to steamroll?

Of course, if this sort of awards thing were being organised there'd also be a lot of work that would have to be put into determining the categories, in order to reward different kinds of narrative instead of JUST having the 'best game' which will probably be swept by the popular thing. Categories might include things like
- Worldbuilding: setting, lore, consistency
- Player Agency: how much can the player shape the direction of the narrative?
- Multiple Endings: who does the most with the interactive ability to tell more than one story?
- Humor: obvious, but deserves its own category as its a writing thing often overlooked in awards
- Emotional Rollercoaster: not so much 'best drama' as 'most lasting impact'. what game's story most kicked you in the gut, or made you fall hopelessly in love with a sprite?
- Best Character: this is probably a more meaningful option than Best Dialog
- Best In Genre: to separate RPGs from VNs and so on (although there'd be an overall best as well)

And there'd probably need to be some rules restrictions limiting the number of categories a title could be up for final consideration in.


Again, this is all just the result of me thinking about it for a few minutes, and you can already see what a messy undertaking it could be, trying to manage it.

And even if I founded something like this and recruited 2000 people to judge it, people would probably complain I had an unfair advantage by virtue of being the founder, so I'd never be able to get awards, and what good is that? :)

Leading Ladies

Interested in some different approaches to narrative in video games? Check out this week's Humble Weekly Bundle, which is dedicated to female protagonists (sort of) and features adventure games and stat-sim/VN style games as well.

Humble Bundle Weekly Sale

Why 'sort of'? Well, The Yawhg lets you choose an avatar, so it's not necessarily female or a focused, detailed character, and Valdis Story (may possibly? I've heard conflicting reports) only lets you unlock a playable female character after you've beaten the game once. Details, details... but I try to be clear with you!

This week's bundle is also backing Girls Make Games, so your purchase helps fund scholarships in game development.

Black Closet - Elsa

Yes, the PC / Student Council President is a fixed character, not a draw-your-own. Due to game design, though, you don't see much of her other than CGs. She does not have a side image or a minion card, she is the hand that HOLDS the cards.



While her look and some of her basic personality is fixed, this is a game where every single time the protagonist speaks, you get to choose what she says, so there's still plenty of room to push things in your own direction.

Black Closet - Rowan

Oops, I almost forgot about Rowan. That's... Kind of a common reaction.



Naturally, she's the minion with the best starting Stealth score. And you desperately need someone who can carry out tasks without getting caught. Better hope she's really on your side!

Black Closet - Mallory

The Ingenue. The Pollyanna. The New Girl. And the shortest girl on the team.



No surprise that Social is her top starting skill.

Black Closet - Vonne

Behind every great leader is an awesomely organised assistant.



At least, as long as she's on your side and not secretly betraying you...

Black Closet - Thaïs

A spoiled brat prone to throwing temper tantrums, sure, but you have to expect there's more to her past that shell. One of the characters who's evolved the most in production.

In gameplay terms, she starts out with the best score in Intimidation so tends to get deployed when you need to rough someone up - er, convince them.

Black Closet - Althea

Introducing the first of your minions - er, loyal Student Council members.



Like you, Althea is a senior, which means that you've had a lot of years of history together, and university looming on the horizon. If, that is, the school doesn't come crashing down in a scandal first.

Most elegant young ladies keep their love lives under wraps. Althea is unusual among St. Claudine's students in being openly a lesbian... and willing to play "prince" for girls who aren't quite sure what they want. She flirts with just about everyone, except you.



(And if you're familiar with a game character of the same name in development, it's a coincidence! Neither of us knew the other had such a character going, and they're not exactly similar.)

since I don't do the tumbling thing

a link to a list of freeware games. Largely 2d/pixelly, tending to platformers, adventures, and horror. But trying to quickly sum it up will always get it wrong, so go look for yourself.

buried under backlog

I am so far behind in my gaming that when I went to GOG to redeem the gift someone sent me (the Back To THe FUture adventure games I'd been kinda interested in) I discovered a bunch of other games I'd purchased and totally forgotten about...

signal boost

Reposting from the Let's Play thread:

Dangan Ronpa is now available on iOS. A free download from the Japanese appstore gets you the first chapter of the game, with the rest available as in-app purchase. The whole game costs 2000 yen, which is about $25. Considering it probably costs about three times as much to import the game, I'd say it's a good price to pay.

The app is universal, customised for both the iPhone and the iPad (iPhone 4 or 4S required). It features retina graphics that look better than PSP in the appstore screenshots. An Android version is also supposed to come out, but the news I've read only mentioned iOS for now.

Getting a Japanese account to download the free chapter is easy and guides are readily available elsewhere. Once downloaded, you can switch back to your original iTunes account and still play the game. If you want to buy the game without a Japanese credit card, there are several places online that sell Japanese iTunes gift cards you can use to charge the account with.

Here's the iTunes link. If you like this game and LP, I'd like nothing more than if you give some money back to the creators. Now there's a fairly easy way to do so. Who knows, maybe if they see a bunch of downloads from non-Japanese IP addresses they might think again about an official localisation.

In case you've missed my earlier comments, this is an awesome semi-VN (There are choices, but the plot doesn't actually branch, and there are a lot of minigames) involving murder mysteries and bizarre characters, currently Japanese only and being Let's Played on Something Awful.

As I do not have an iphone or ipad this is still not much use to me, and I have no idea how many people are willing to jump through these hoops for a game they still can't really read, but one can always hope. I'd certainly love to see these games brought over into English. 999 did okay, right?

... however, if anyone knows where I can lay hands on a monobear hoodie, DO WANT.

good old sales

The only thing that jumps out at me in the current promotion is the Journeyman Project which I've heard good things about but never looked into. However, backlog. Enh.

temptation level: mild

The full Space Quest Collection is on Daily Deal on Steam.

I've never bought from Steam.

It's certainly a decent price.

But I have a huge backlog. And I've already played almost all of those games anyway.

And I've never bought from Steam.

But... I might have a reason to at some point...

Enh. If this were next week, there'd be a chance I might give in. As it is I think I'll pass.

Middens

I know nothing about this except that I saw an image from it on deviantart and then went and looked at the trailer video and went "wait what did I just see??"



So.. yeah. Surreal adventure/RPG, I guess?

a quest for meaning

This weekend's GOG sale is 'activision' (ZOMBIE SIERRA) quest games - King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest.

I went to a lot of trouble many years ago to find a legit police quest collection CD. After I did, I never actually played the games because they were a bit hard to get running smoothly on my computer setup at the time. (Similarly, I have obtained Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail but not gotten very far into it because running it was a little awkward.)

I never owned KQ7 afaik, but my then-boyfriend bought a copy, so I did play it through once. Means my memory of it is much hazier than it is for the others. Mask Of Eternity, which is a travesty and not KQ8 at all, I have not played. That probably doesn't surprise you.

And weekend sale or no, I don't think that's likely to change now.

if a book is unread, was it ever really written?

Most of the 'top 100 adventure games' list is quite familiar (I have been around a while!) but I did spot at least one potentially-interesting newcomer I'd never heard of: The Book of Unwritten Tales.

Considering my huge backlog, though, any Big Game is going to have to fight for a chance of me coming near playing it.

super high-school level thread posting

This game is pretty awesome. It vaguely tempts me to work on a slightly vicious VN where the party is getting picked off one at a time (although for different reasons and in a much LESS nasty way than happens here.)

The game is Japanese-only, so most of us can only sit here reading the Let's Play. Which is still awesome!

Ghost Trick

I *finally* took the time to get to the end of the story.

Definitely a great game with a good balance of difficulty puzzlewise. The plot gets a bit... silly at times, and I'm not sure yet whether I'm totally happy with the ending revelation or not (Although I did start suspecting eventually that two characters having rhyming names was significant.) but it was fun.

... really, ten years? Isn't that a bit harsh?