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When, mere minutes ago, I effused about the quality of Mass Effect 2's character-centric storytelling, there was an implied asterisk. The Legendary Edition package was my first run with DLC character Zaeed, and he sucks.
Not in gameplay terms - I mean, as a soldier, he seems fine I guess? - but his "grizzled old mercenary" personality never evolves past a flat stereotype; his backstory-revealing mission is narratively and mechanically uninteresting; and his conversations with Shepard aren't really complete.
I should be clear: when Shepard talks with other crew members, they often both talk, to each other. In contrast, Zaeed mostly talks at you. (Spoiler alert, so does Kasumi.)
Mass Effect 2 is at its best when you're learning more about its characters and probing them for fun reactions. Zaeed is ... not Mass Effect 2 at its best.
It's not that he or his loyalty mission are "bad" -- they're just bland.
Mass Effect 2 fixes most of the first game's shortcomings - combat is streamlined, character and inventory management is a breeze, the Citadel is mercifully dotted with fast-travel points - and brilliantly iterates on its predecessor's excellent world-building, by populating that world with exciting and compelling characters.
Shepard's new squadmates make the returning cast seem dull in comparison: Mordin and Jack are easy favorites, but even the monotoned Samara gradually unfurls a truly fascinating backstory. Every member of this main cast is charming and memorable in their own distinctive ways. (Well, maybe not "every" member, I actually forgot all about Jacob -- but, uh, everyone else is memorable.)
And the hub-and-spoke narrative design, with squadmate recruitment and optional loyalty missions all branching out from the "main" plot, puts the player mostly in charge of the game's pacing. It's a great approach to player agency and makes jetting around the galaxy - to pursue your own agenda, in your own way - feel really fulfilling.
... of course, taking full advantage of that agency requires some reading ahead. I'd definitely call it a "design flaw" that Mass Effect 2's quasi-point-of-no-return is totally un-telegraphed, and knowing about it beforehand is critical for exploring as much of the game's content as possible.
I also consider it critical to take a technical approach to Paragon and Renegade responses. I've done no small amount of complaining about Mass Effect's dialog options, and have given up on the idea of "playing a role" through them; but when you consider the Paragon and Renegade statistics to be just that - statistics - then dialog becomes just another game system, and achieving good outcomes (like making Tali and Legion get along) requires optimizing that system.
That change in my perspective is probably the biggest reason why I'm increasing my rating of Mass Effect 2 from the "Good" score I gave it ten years ago. Not because the Legendary Edition makeover has fixed its imperfections - notably, planet scanning and hacking minigames are still tedious as hell - but because, this time, I played the game "right" and spent more gameplay time focusing on its strengths.
When you treat Mass Effect 2 like the "dysfunctional crew management" game that it really is, it's easier to appreciate and have fun with Shepard's interstellar crew of misfits.
In fact, it's so easy that I had to go ahead and finish the entire! third game before taking a break for Glog posts. How's that for an endorsement?
Even in its time, the first Mass Effect was a mixed bag. The Legendary Edition remaster shows that its good qualities still hold up; despite its bad qualities, which the remaster has ... also preserved.
Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that the Legendary Edition still has lackluster side-missions, an empty-feeling galaxy, narrow characterization choices, and confounding inventory management. (The item limit is higher, now, but cleaning items out remains a chore.)
It is a little surprising that auto-saves are still infrequent, menu navigation still doesn't work quite right with a mouse, and decade-old stability bugs are still around today.
But the sometimes-tedious gunplay, the often-awkward dialog, and the usually-dull exploration are still worth tolerating for the sake of Mass Effect's intricate and enchanting universe. Just like my first time through, I was happy to spend hours upon hours digesting the game's lore through conversations and the in-game codex.
The "world" is the real star of this show, and the Legendary Edition's updated graphics show it off splendidly.
... I mean, given how much-improved I remember the next game being, I might still consider this entry little more than a prologue. But it's a fine prologue, just like it was before.
At about 90 minutes of linear content, the game is more than just a well-polished tech demo, but there's still not much meat on its bones. The story is a fun-enough throwaway, with an "illusion of choice" motif that evokes (but doesn't measure up to) Spec Ops: The Line or BioShock; and the extra collectibles and other post-game features don't really seem worth exploring.
SuperHot's core gameplay, a balance between first-person shooting and puzzle-like movement tactics, is ... pretty fun! And with complementary mechanics like throwing objects, disarming enemies, and turning a dude's gun right back onto him, that tactical-shooting action remains engaging throughout the story's 20-30 short levels.
I don't know if I'd say that it left me wanting more, though; I feel pretty satisfied with what I got.
I loved the demo back in 2014, and I specifically name-checked it again in 2016; but all this time, I've been sleeping on The Talos Principle -- assuming (or hoping) that it would remain playable, and fun, years later.
It did! Phew.
The demo promised fresh-feeling and brain-tickling puzzles, and the full game delivers those pretty consistently. With some late-game exceptions - which I'll complain about in a few paragraphs - each puzzle is a fun mini-journey of discovery and learning, with enough complexity that reaching a solution feels genuinely satisfying.
And like the best puzzle games, The Talos Principle isn't "just" a series of puzzles to solve; those solutions lead to pieces and hints for further puzzles, and higher-order puzzles bleed into the game's over-arching narrative and message.
There is a beautiful sense of cohesion, or even harmony, to how The Talos Principle weaves its level designs and objectives together with scattered text files and occasional voice-overs. The "subtle" and "intriguing" story hints I saw in the demo gradually grow into a compelling, thought-provoking plot that's both a brilliant companion to the puzzle gameplay, and impressively well-paced in revealing its various mysteries.
While ultimately it would be easy to summarize the story as "humans build AI to replace themselves post-extinction," it is awe-inspiring how thoroughly detailed that story gets. The early game piques interest with analyses of ancient civilizations and philosophy; and as those develop into thought experiments about the meaning of "life" as a society or as a species, other bits of info start to clarify the fate of the humans, and the reason for this virtual world's existence. It's an enthralling tale from top to bottom, despite being made up by only a few dozen text documents and audio diaries.
And I love that the in-game narrative makes a point of mentioning that their AI training world was built in ... the Serious Engine. Now that is some commitment to veritas.
Sadly, I wouldn't have made it all the way through that plot if not for some internet guidance. And here's where I complain about the "walls" I hit in The Talos Principle's puzzles.
One common culprit was the record/replay mechanic, in which you record yourself taking some puzzle actions, then play back that recording and interact with those replayed actions. Many of the puzzles involving this mechanic just got way, way too complicated -- like Recursed, the amount of state-management involved gets pretty gnarly. And it's especially frustrating when making a mistake in the replay means you need to go back and re-record from the beginning.
Then there are the secret stars, most of which are so secret, you'd never even see them, let alone figure out how to get to them. I had to use online guides just to locate the bulk of these suckers.
And while there are, technically, in-game hints, there is a very limited quantity: only three! And, the way you unlock these hints is itself hidden! In the last in-game world! ... so they're not very helpful.
But by the time I really needed help, The Talos Principle already had its hooks deep in me. I don't feel bad at all about having to "cheat" through the last few puzzles, and I'm still plenty satisfied with the narrative payoff.
The last level, especially (the one at the top of the tower), was an incredibly fun and rewarding capstone to the whole game. I'm kinda hoping that there's more content like this in Road to Gehenna.
All of these words are synonyms for "weird." And Kentucky Route Zero is all of those. It's weird.
"Weird" isn't necessarily a bad thing, in fact I would more often call it a good thing -- it can be the difference between a rote reiteration and a memorable innovator. But in the case of Kentucky Route Zero, a "weird" mysterious plot is tempered by "weird" hard-to-follow story structure; and seriously impeded by "weird" UI, with visually-ambiguous navigation and cumbersome point-and-click prompts.
I'm not sure if I'd call Kentucky Route Zero too weird, but I would at least call it weird in a bad way. Tantalizing curiosity I can sign up for; disorienting smash cuts and off-puttingly clunky controls, not so much.
Super Time Force Ultra - as its tongue-barely-in-cheek name suggests - takes a fun and flippant approach to sci-fi storytelling. Not unlike No Time to Explain, its absurdist attitude toward time-travel-induced chaos is a great hook.
The problem with STFU is that ... well, while I admire its unique twists on time-rewinding mechanics, the resulting gameplay tends to be more confusing and frustrating than it is fun.
If you die, you can rewind time to before your death, and drop in as another character -- or as another copy of the same character. You can even prevent your first death by shielding that character or pre-emptively taking out your killer. Neat, right?
It's also really hard to pull off, in terms of avoiding and pre-empting whatever killed you before. Most often, the best I could do was to jump out of the way and leave my previous self to die again.
Alternatively, if you rewind time without dying, you can drop in another character to combine forces. This is especially useful in boss fights, so you can unload lots of bullets, or hit multiple weak spots, at the same time; but coordinating these characters while simultaneously avoiding a boss's attacks is pretty difficult.
This "combine forces with yourself" mechanic is incentivized by having a time limit on each level -- forcing you to stack characters up instead of having just one character plink away at an obstacle. But a nasty side-effect of these time limits is that the farther you get in a level, the greater chance you have of getting "stuck" and not having enough time left to finish.
And what's the solution to that? Why, rewinding time some more, of course; in effect, replaying the level, but faster. Which is more than a little tedious.
Again, while I admire STFU's attempts to be more sophisticated than dumb-chaos run-and-guns like Broforce, I don't think those attempts really paid off. Making good use of time-rewinding is hard, and most often just feels repetitive.
Progress: Finished the intro level, almost(?) finished the Year 673 level.
I never outright said that Trine 2 demonstrated an ignorance of the original game's design shortcomings, and an inordinate focus on shiny graphical effects; I just thought it, very loudly. Catching up to Trine 3, though, I don't think it even needs to be said -- the game gives itself away.
The sky is shiny, the water is shiny, the foliage is shiny, ... everything is shiny. But in moving from 2D side-scrolling levels to a fixed-camera 3D format, with depth, one wonders if Frozenbyte learned anything from 1990s beat-em-ups: when the camera is fixed to the side, z-axis movement doesn't make the game more interesting; just more difficult to understand.
User reviews further indicate that this iteration of Trine loses character progression, i.e. developing advanced skills in later levels, and that the level count overall is shockingly low.
The promise of a new The Lost Vikings I saw in the first Trine feels like a mirage, now. Even the developers' self-reflection and the now-released sequel don't dissuade me from the conviction that these guys, great as they may be at making a super-shiny physics-based engine, aren't really interested in making a puzzle-platform game.
