Rime

This month's free PS Plus game was 'Rime'  - a 2017 game from Tequila Works. I'd just come out of 'Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice', so I was in the mood for something a little more colourful, and maybe a little less full of misery and death.

Colourful it certainly is. Bright and vibrant, the game has a sort of Disney aesthetic which at first put me off. It seemed like it might be insubstantial, and that's not generally my thing. But I was wrong. It's good, and fun, and - crucially - quite short.

You play a small child in a cape, running about a beautiful island populated only by pigs, birds and a little red fox thing that acts as a guide. Crumbling architecture hints at previous inhabitants, but there is no human life to be found.

Gameplay is simple, but develops a number of enjoyable and interesting mechanics as you get further in. There is no combat to speak of. Genre wise I guess it's a kind of 3D puzzle/platformer, if that makes any sense.

It reminded me of a few other games. The island full of puzzles which must be unlocked to explore further brought to mind The Witness (though Rime is more about art than intellect). The way the mechanics build and progress through the game felt a little like Portal at times. And the climby-jumpy environment navigation was a lot like Uncharted, though without the wisecracks and murder. Oh, and it's a little bit like Monument Valley here and there, which can't be a bad thing.

Narratively, the whole thing is carried by environment. Which I like, so hurrah for that. There's no language at all: our protagonist does not speak, unless you count going "Laaaa!" when employing the game's singing mechanic. A lot is communicated through imagery, sound and body language. This makes the game a very immersive aesthetic experience.

There is story, but I'm not going to go into that too much here. Safe to say, though, it's a refreshing change from conventional game narrative - free of gunfire, revenge or treasure hoarding. You can safely add this to the list of games which are gently pushing the industry into new and interesting narrative directions.

I finished the game in about seven hours or so, which is pretty good for me, as I'm one of those gamers who likes to wander about cluelessly, wondering what I'm meant to be doing and enjoying the scenery. It was a gentle, absorbing experience - satisfying on a gameplay level while also being very emotionally engaging.

One of the things I like about games in general, and Rime in particular, is how encouraging they can be. Each chamber in Rime has a series of mechanics for you to play with. Glowing orbs, lenses, levers, giant stone blocks that you can move about - that kind of thing. Each of them has a function. And everything is there for a reason.  You stand and observe the elements in the room, knowing that somehow these things will combine to help you escape.

There's something wonderful about looking at a seemingly impossible situation, where everything seems stacked against your chances of success, and yet knowing that there is a way out. That if you can just be creative with the things at your disposal, there'll be a moment when you get it right. Everything will click into place. Gears will turn, levers will heave into motion, and the shape of the world will change around you.

It's not often like that in real life, is it? And maybe it's a little daft to assume that there's always a way out. Sometimes that's not the case. But I think there's something to be said for a game that looks at a hopeless situation and says, "This might not be the only way to be." It's a message that sits at the heart of Rime's narrative experience, and that theme is reflected in its excellent gameplay.

A beautiful little game, well worth your time.

Get on with it

I've finished Uncharted 4. Finally. Good grief, it takes its time to finish.

I kept thinking "This must be approaching the end. We appear to be wrapping up." Nathan would get to the Huge Amazing Temple where surely the treasure was going to be, and I felt like I'd been playing forever, so this was probably it. But no, pretty much every Big Final Place would end up being wrong. Just another clue leading to yet another Maybe The End place.

Don't get me wrong, I was having fun. Uncharted 4 is an incredibly enjoyable game, full of variety, wonder and excitement. The locations are spectacular both in terms of their aesthetic and their level design. But it all just felt a bit... much.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic now. AAA titles like this are aimed at players who spend many hours on their games - an audience that tends to be younger than me. People of my age, even those without children, tend to have less time to play. And maybe even when I have the time, I feel a little guilty about spending hours and hours pretending to be a man swinging around a jungle.



Balancing act

But I'm not sure it can be just age. I've played plenty of other games for longer. Metal Gear Solid V took many, many hours of my life - far more than Nathan Drake's zany adventures. And I happily spent whole evenings on Deus Ex, and even snapped up the DLC as soon as it came out.

So it must be something to do with the game itself. As I've noted in a previous blog, there is a decent variety of things to do in the game. Driving, climbing, shooting, sneaking and puzzling are all seamlessly integrating into the game's narrative and the timings are very smart. A frantic combat section will be followed by some calm exploration, which will then lead to a dizzying climb across clifftops.

But as well balanced as the game is, there is a limit to the amount of times you can pull the same stunts. Everywhere Nathan goes seems to be utterly impossible to get to, without leaping across chasms and clinging onto tiny ledges by his fingertips. It's fun, but it gets old after a few dozen repetitions.

So I started to experience some level of fatigue with the mechanics. As brilliant as the level design is, there's only so many times you can hear Nathan saying "Oh no, a dozen more bad guys got here before us! We must now sneak about strangling them all one by one," without starting to lose interest.

And then there's the narrative issues.


What are you doing here?


It's very apparent that the Uncharted series is not leaning heavily on 'realism' as its main selling point. Part of the joy is the ludicrous nature of the situations Nathan finds himself in, and the insane good fortune he has when swinging from collapsing roof to burning forest.

But I still want to feel like things matter. And it's the small things.There are so many places which are simultaneously:

a) Full of enemy soldiers and
b) Utterly impossible to get to without leaping across crumbling cliff faces.

How do the soldiers get there? Do loads of them die, every day, just trying to get to work?

Not a big deal. But I like the world to feel real. The Last of Us did a much better job of making the situations feel believable and lived in. Different tone, I realise. But maybe that's why I've played that game three times through and would play it again tonight. I believed in the world.


In conclusion

Uncharted 4 is certainly a good game. It has many exciting sequences and well designed experiences. But it's very linear and gets repetitive. So it's not a great game. I want a little more control, please.

Next up, Until Dawn. 

A Burrito For Adam Jensen

I really liked Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It consumed me in a way that few games do, with its exciting world of side quests and mysteries and its cool cyberpunk aesthetic. So I was very, very excited about it's sequel - Mankind Divided.

I bought the game the second it came out and finished it last week. It's been an enjoyable experience, if not quite as absorbing as its predecessor. Storywise it is nowhere near as coherent - I finished the game without being 100% sure exactly how the world was different now I'd killed a bunch of cybernetic bad guys. But I did enjoy killing them. So I suppose that's a success of sorts.

Hacked

My absolute favourite thing to do was to hack security terminals and turn turrets and robots against their own masters. I found this hilarious and did it as often as possible. I don't think the game AI allowed them to respond any differently that they would to a regular attack, but my imagination added a layer of surprise, betrayal and indignation to the faces of the guards as their previously trusted robotic friends started to blast away at them.

So it's been a good experience. But I found the world slightly less involving, for some reason. A lot of work has gone into making future Prague feel real. The NPC dialogue is pretty good and gives a flavour of how it must be to live a normal life in the world that I charge excitedly through. The computers, all of which I hack into, are full of interesting, world building stories.

But there's something missing, and I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's that part of me knows that all these details - all these wine shops and carefully decorated apartments -  are just a pleasing aesthetic veneer over the real stuff of the game. I want to hack door locks, find secret passages, disable security cameras and - crucially - fight guards. That's where the game play is.

No hard feelings

No-one is ever going to ask me if I care about the woman in apartment 23 whose husband got artificial augments against her wishes. It's not really going to feed into the story proper, except at a vague, thematic level. It's not gameplay, so part of me discards it. A sniper rifle, on the other hand, fills me with joy.

I don't always feel like this with games, so I'm not sure what it is.

Today I stood outside a burrito shop, in real life, waiting for it to open. I watched the people passing by. A big guy in a hoodie. Five young lads, probably in college. A bunch of University students. A shuffling guy, likely homeless, searching empty bags on benches. All people with stories and lives and agendas of their own. All of whom would react in different, astonishing ways if I so much as spoke to them.

Meanwhile the inhabitants of future Prague brush me off whenever I click a contextual prompt in an attempt to interact. They say their pre-programmed phrase, and turn away, to stare at the same thing they were staring at before. If I start to throw grenades about, they will cower and cry, but only for a while. Then they'll go back to their staring, motionless lives. I saw one man weeing into a urinal for the entire time I was knocking out guards behind his back. He never stopped, and he never will.

Salsa, cheese and sour cream

I wonder if there can be a game where Adam Jensen can buy a burrito. Where it can be as meaningful as my experience, choosing the salsa, the guacamole, the sour cream - not because it will inflate my health bar, but because I want it for its own sake. Because it's nice. Could a game make me do things for genuine pleasure, rather than through mechanics? There are some that come close, maybe.

I'm going to eat my burrito now. The matter will convert into energy to keep me going. The taste will activate pleasure centres in my brain, raising my mood. I also got another point on my loyalty card when I bought it.

But it's different. Isn't it?