Five Nights at Freddy’s

Well, in the wee small hours of this morning – Hallowe’en, of course – I watched the trailers for the fun-looking Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 and decided to do the famous 4/20 mode, where the AI of all the animatronics is set to maximum. I figured out a working pattern – catching Freddy right outside your door and keeping him there, then checking on Foxy every time Chica comes so you can shut the door on her and Freddy at the same time, going quickly enough not to let Bonnie in – so got my third star.

As just about everyone knows by now, FNAF is a jump-scare game. You play a security employee who is stuck in an office with limited power while four (well, strictly five) creepy animatronic puppets stalk through the corridors. If they catch you, they will forcibly cram you into a puppet suit...only the puppet suits already have animatronic parts in them, so that wouldn’t end very well for you. You can catch them by shutting doors on them, but this takes power, and you only have a limited supply so must balance being vulnerable with being able to last the night.

Now, I don’t care much for scary games, which aren’t exactly my sort of entertainment. Creepiness hasn’t got to me since I was very small and playing The 7^th Guest, which should totally get a remake – that has nothing to do with that terrible 7^th Guest 3 failed kickstarter a year ago today. As an adult, I mostly find creepy games either very daft or enjoyable completely separate from their supposedly creepy parts.

And it was in the latter camp that FNAF fell. I bought the game primarily to watch others play – and it succeeded nicely in that respect, with the friends who had big silly reactions to the scares still making me laugh when I think back to them. But for my part, it got no more out of me than a little jump. But that’s fine. After all, the most well-remembered part of Resident Evil hinged on just such a moment, with dogs smashing through windows.

Besides, the jump-scares aren’t what makes FNAF a scary game. That’s the pay-off, but really it’s about the tension on the higher levels, where you know several enemies are coming to get you and dealing with any one of them stands in the way of dealing with the others. The sound effects build a good atmosphere, and the game is very good at building then releasing tension – once you get past the first couple of nights where the game relies on fear of the unknown. The jump scares ultimately end up irrelevant, nothing but punishment. But for the easily-scared, there’s much more to be enjoyed than just big creepy things jumping out. In other words, the journey ends up better than the destination.

But for all I bought FNAF for the jump-scare gimmick to watch others play, I ended up really enjoying it as a challenging strategy game. It is incredibly simple, and part of the aforementioned tension comes from the fact that you can’t move, you can’t fight back, your defences are highly limited, and the best situation you can be in is doing nothing.

The real fun of it, of course, comes right at the end – the fifth, sixth and custom max-difficulty levels. That’s where you’re not sitting tensely hoping things don’t pop out. You are constantly having to balance controlling four AI programs to win a game. It’s not scary, and you will know when you lose and why, with only Foxy having any capacity for surprising you with a jump scare (and he looks a whole lot less alarming when he appears than the others). The genius of the game is that two enemies must constantly be checked on with the lights, one must be checked on with the camera as much as possible, and one must be looked at occasionally and may just sprint towards your office if you don’t get the chance to check up on him – and you only just have enough power to stop this on the 4/20 mode. I don’t care if arrogant gamers want to call the game gimmicky or boring: the last levels are, plain and simple, a fun and challenging game that I am willing to bet next to none of those who censure the game have beaten. Effectively, most of the people who dismiss it have played the tutorial and decided they beat the game on expert mode.

A few other things make the game impressive. Obviously, there’s the fact it’s a small-scale indie game that one guy made on his own. Then the way the fandom has become so large and so prolific – the super-cutesy fanart being my favourite. There’s the numerous over-the-top theories based on the sparse backstory about five murdered kids, and then there’s the excitement around the sequel.

Definitely worth the meagre price and an enjoyable challenge. And I really wanna go see the creepy animatronics at a Chuck-e-Cheese now! 

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

With the switch to the far more powerful 3DS, sadly I think that the Professor Layton series lost much of its charm. Though the story was relatively strong, I enjoyed playing through Miracle Mask far less than any of the previous titles. Firstly, the attempt to replicate the eccentric sprites in polygons doesn’t work too well, and they simply look a bit clunky and unpleasant compared with their hand-drawn counterparts. Secondly, the desire to use the big top screen for the main action means a rather disjointed control system where the bottom screen is used to control a magnifying glass on the top screen. With an additional press required to bring up that magnifying glass, and then the slight difference in screen sizes meaning precision is often not quite there. Being able to simply tap on the screen where you want to inspect feels so much better – and the simplicity meant the game was much more snappy and fun to play.

Which is a shame, because the actual gameplay part – that is to day, the puzzles themselves – improved in presentation terms. It’s just that the main draw of Layton games are always the story that drives the player from puzzle to puzzle. The story itself is also a good one – after the last game covered Luke’s past, now we have a follow-up that through flashbacks shows us Layton’s. And it’s a lot of fun. It kicks off with Layton fencing his friend Randall (épée of course – he’s a gentleman!), and we soon find out that at this stage, the Professor is a decidedly un-academic young rebel with a big ole head of hair. He and Randall go on an adventure, exploring old ruins, and inevitably disaster strikes and sets up the modern-day story. So we have the fun of a mystery with a masked man (not very mysterious), the fun of Layton reuniting with childhood acquaintances – some of whom are a little awkward with him – and a kind of Kimi ga Nozomu Eien scenario only in the end prizing loyalty that goes almost ad absurdum.

All this takes place in the desert of the UK, which as I know from Million Arthur is in the midlands.  

Fun while the set-up was, though, the game itself was a bit of a grind, especially in what should have been the exciting section of exploring the ruins. The game threw away most of its best gimmicks – like a horse-racing minigame – right at the start and while the bunny mini-game was adorable, getting things wrong on it meant having to watch a whole sequence again and the other mini-games were very tedious. The robot one was both ugly and absolutely no fun. I ended up resorting to a guide to finish the absurd hidden puzzles for that one, too – but I could really have just left them.

 Things end fairly neatly for the story, but ultimately there’s a cliffhanger, and it feels slightly cheap how the good guys just don’t mention Descole again after he slips off.

I’ll certainly be playing the other Layton games, but this one was the first one that was really a disappointment. I hope they’ve refined things for the next one. 

Spec Ops: The Line

I’ve played some terrible games in my time. Honestly and truly, this wasn’t one of them. But it was perhaps the game I’ve enjoyed playing the least. I’ve resented playing a game before, but never before have I had a game resent me playing.

When setting out at the beginning, I didn’t know why a friend had lent me this game (or, in fact, lent me someone else’s copy...!) – this isn’t the kind of game I play. I don’t like macho war games. I’ve never played Call of Duty or Medal of Honor or any of their ilk. I just don’t engage with the characters or find them fun. So what was I doing here?

About halfway through, I got it. This is a military video game that plays with the concept of military video games. I’d expressed admiration for Bioshock and how it played with free will and being impelled to do something because that’s the only way to continue a game, and something similar happens here. But the way this game does it is incredibly irritating, frustrating and smug. First, it pretends you actually have a choice, leading me to waste far too much time attempting an impossible different choice for Walker. But secondly, after it becomes completely foregrounded that you’re playing a game whose main character made the wrong choice and backed the psycho who decided the best course of action was to kill everyone, the game begins beating you over the head with it to a ridiculous degree. ‘Do you feel like a hero yet?’ it asks you in the loading screen, smugness dripping from the words. ‘If you were a better person you wouldn’t be here.’ The only way to win at this game is not to play it. Which is absurd, because having made a purchase (or borrowing from someone who has!) the last thing I want is for game writers to start taunting me for engaging with their product.

This isn’t dark subversion of expectations. I don’t think I’d feel it to be even had I been a big fan of these games anyway. I don’t feel I need a morality lesson from a game, on how I need to stop to think whether killing men made of polygons is right, even if they’re meant to be MURRICANS. I don’t feel I need to feel terrible about having played through a pre-set scenario just because it turns out destructive. When Bioshock did it, I was amused because while I felt manipulated, it was a clever twist and once revealed, it was left to one side. Here, I felt manipulated but it was signposted far too heavily (‘There’s always a choice!’) and once it was revealed I was beaten over the head with it for the rest of the game.

And that’s not even mentioning how completely ridiculous it is that Walker has been hallucinating all the way through.

The story is a pretty snappy one. Three elite soldiers are sent to look for survivors in Dubai after it is devastated by massive sandstorms, a previous entire battalion sent there having vanished. When they arrive, they find that this battalion has taken over the remains of the city, apparently following a coup – and the CIA are now in conflict with them. After having to fight for their lives, Captain Walker and his two men Lt. Walker and Staff Sgt Lugo decide they need to take down this dug-in militia. Which, as I’ve already spoiled, turns out to be incredibly destructive.

The story overall isn’t terrible, other than the smugness towards the end – but I was also made to cringe a lot by how the whole thing is supposed to be a tribute to Heart of Darkness, culminating slightly embarrassingly in the Kurtz substitute being called ‘Konrad’. While darker than many such games, of course, you get to do all sorts of fun things like fire a minigun from a helicopter, shoot everything from RPGs to shotguns and zipline between huge Dubai skyscrapers.

Graphically, it is also good, with locations lovingly rendered. Unfortunately, the characters themselves are a little lacking in this department, especially in the way they move, which is clunky.

All the game’s flaws could have been forgiven if it were really good. If it had been solid fun to play, that would have come first. Unfortunately, it’s pretty terrible. The very basics are fine – the general aiming and shooting is good, the variety of weapons is admirable and the convenient way the terrain always gives you somewhere to hide is good. Unfortunately, there are certain things that ruin it. First, the awful mechanic for taking cover, which is absolutely crucial. I played on the hardest setting available at the start, and if you don’t take cover you die in seconds – and have to suffer looong loading times to respawn, which is something that definitely shouldn’t happen anyway. Unfortunately, once you take cover things get incredibly clunky – getting up again to escape from a grenade takes too long and often you end up facing the wrong way. The prompt to swap from one piece of cover to another often just doesn’t show up. If you’re running for cover from a heavy (a rather absurd idea in and of themselves), woe betide you if you take cover on the side of something, because you won’t be able to slip around the corner. Other things inexplicably won’t let you take cover, and still more you can’t shoot over despite how obviously feasible it is. This, more than anything else, made the game incredibly frustrating.

Several mandatory scenarios are also ridiculously tricky. There was one part where I had to shoot out big windows, and it seemed to take several minutes to do it. At another point, you’re chased by a helicopter and survival is pure luck.

I desperately wanted the game to end 2-3 hours before it did. But I was damned if I was gonna quit before finishing. 

Bioshock 2

I was resistant to playing through Bioshock 2 for a very long time. I bought it when it was going very cheap, but even then it took months, possibly years before I actually played. I had been told it was an inferior sequel, it was deeply disappointing, that it was like a direct-to-video follow-up of a good film. In the end, I quite regret this, because I very much enjoyed Bioshock 2. In every way, I prefer it to Bioshock Infinite.

As to its relationship with the first game, well...the story of the protagonist is certainly nowhere near as interesting. It doesn’t have that wonderful twist that plays with what it means to follow the instructions given to you by a game’s set goals. It also doesn’t benefit from revealing Rapture in all its Art Deco glory – or, indeed, Columbia up in the sky. Its iconic enemy is certainly a long way beneath the Big Daddy or the Motorised Patriot – or the Songbird: the Big Sister is one of the most annoying parts of the gameplay. It feels much more limited, since backtracking is forbidden and the game must be taken chapter-by-chapter. It lacks a genuinely strong ending, though it was wonderful and hilarious to see Rapture as a Little Sister does, and of course we don’t have the fun of the first game’s post-mortem investigation: Rapture has clearly failed and fallen to pieces, but why? That’s all been answered already, replaced by the limited mystery of ‘who is Eleanor?’

However, three critical things made this a real pleasure for me, heightened by the fact that I expected something awful and got something good. The first was that while it wasn’t quite Bioshock in terms of plot and sophistication, it was almost there. The second was that the gameplay was more polished and varied, and there were some quite wonderful ways to fight off the waves of enemies that you have to face – my favourite mostly involving bouncing them about with the wind traps. But the third and most important part was that this game did much more than the first game in exploring the philosophical ideas raised in the original.

The original, you see, is sometimes called a ‘critique of Objectivism’. Now, obviously, there was a big and obvious influence from Ayn Rand: Andrew Ryan is clearly a play on her name, Rapture’s twee early-history ideals are those of Objectivism and all that talk about parasites comes from the Objectivist (and libertarian) views on the State. But I found it a long way from a ‘critique’. Sure, an Objectivist society gets set up, goes wrong and falls apart. But it goes wrong because (a) Ryan isn’t a very good Objectivist, ends up experimenting on human beings to remove their free will, effectively constructs a big utopian prison and spoils his version of the free market by removing the possibility of import and export, and (b) because magically powered sea-slugs are discovered that make society collapse and a civil war erupt, while also creating insane drug addicts and violent superhumans, which frankly isn’t very likely in Galt’s Gulch. It was a story set in a fallen Objectivist utopia, sure, but it wasn’t what you’d call a critique of Objectivism. Rapture didn’t fail because of Objectivist ideas, but because of the ways it deviated from Objectivism – though that can also be said of Animal Farm.  

Which is where Bioshock 2 comes in. By having someone politically opposite from Ryan – Altruist Sofia Lamb – assuming power, there is a chance to explore these political ideas a little better. Despite Sofia Lamb’s bizarre attempts to create a true gestalt collective – in a rather Star Trek sort of sense – this game is also not a critique on Altruism as a political mindset, and also distorts the general concept with outlandish sci-fi, but after all, you need a driving plot for a shooting game. The real result, though, is that the conflicting political views lead to much more discussion. I absolutely loved angry Ryan’s little theme park ride ‘Journey to the Surface’, in which giant hands representing ‘the parasite’ in various acts of large-state theft, starting with the farmer’s possessions and culminating in a child conscripted for war. The obvious clash between Ryan and Lamb over art and its purpose shows a wider argument than the central one about money, and simmering beneath it all is the hint that the solution is between the two extremes...but not where American society landed.

To allow these ideas to be conveyed, a story about a prototype Big Daddy bonded to a little sister who just so happens to be Sofia Lamb’s daughter is developed. The child, Eleanor, was brought up considering the dog-eat-dog world of Objectivism was bizarre and selfish (she calls them ‘dog-eaters’), only to end up in the Little Sister programme after her mother is arrested. After her mother claims her back and undoes her programming, she resurrects her original Daddy, Subject Delta – which is you. Yes, you are a (rather feeble) Big Daddy for the entire game. Suits me!

Putting the game on hard was a good idea – it seemed just the right difficulty, though there was an overabundance of resources towards the end, making the last couple of levels a breeze, including duelling two Big Sisters and the final defend the flag battle reminiscent of that in Bioshock Infinite. A last boss would have been nice, but the general level of difficulty and the variety of ways it is possible to attack – or defend – made the rather short game immensely playable. That said, I got the good ending – and I doubt I’ll go back and replay the game for the others. I’ll just watch ‘em on Youtube.

Thinking back, as it came out in the period I wasn’t playing many games, Bioshock 2’s large posters were the first time I really knew about the series – though I likely had glimpses of the original game too. I remember it well – someone mentioned that Subject Delta was Bomberman, and I could never unsee it. Goddamn Bomberman. 

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

It’s not an unbroken record...though I might sound like a broken one. I just don’t particularly enjoy Zelda games, even if they seem like exactly my sort of thing. Like so many others, I am a sucker for Link’s design in all its forms. I mained him in Brawl and I have a T-shirt from Qwerty with a cute grumpy picture of him after harassing cuccos and suffering the consequences. This game’s retro design had him looking particularly cute, especially when doing things like running into walls, and though it was divisive, I enjoyed the gameplay mechanic of Link’s merging with walls and the dungeon design possibilities it brought with it.

Yet once again, I just found no connection with the story or Link’s simplistic characterisation.

In A Link Between Worlds, a baddie is on the loose turning important people into statues. The blacksmith’s apprentice seems an unlikely hero, but soon gets involved in the usual quest to gain the Master Sword, free seven Sages and use a piece of the Triforce to rescue Princess Zelda – who it should be noted is still formidable here despite being the damsel in distress. The unique twist here is that Hyrule has been united with an alternate world, fittingly named Lorule, which is a far more dangerous and unpleasant place, and can be entered through tears in the wall in various locations. The princess there, Hilda, assists you in your quest, as does a strange little cowardly merchant in a fun rabbit-themed costume, who towards the end in a twist that may be obvious but actually blindsided me, turns out to have more of a place in this story than might be expected. Padding this out is the side-quest for Maiamais, annoying little baby octopus-hermit-crab-things that make plaintive mewls at you from hidden locations until you save them and take them to their mama.

It took me a while to play through this short game. I put it on hold in favour of Bravely Default, and it hasn’t been tugging me back to it desperately, so that I mostly made progress on public transport. Nothing was really a challenge here, with the dungeons mostly being a case of going through the motions with nothing very devious involved, and the only mechanically challenging part being one optional mini-dungeon where you have to dash through various gates to get a rupee reward. The idea of Streetpass opponents was quite fun, but the computer AI was really too predictable and incapable of dealing with boomerangs from behind. The final boss wasn’t a pushover, either, and his patterns were fun to figure out, which is testament to good game design.

I’ve played a fair few Zelda games, now, though I can’t claim they were part of my childhood, which may account in part for my indifference. But I need a lot more character and plot to engage with a game, even one of the stature of Zelda. Mute characters can have a lot of development, but I feel like Nintendo just treat Link like he’s already fully fleshed-out and doesn’t need new characterisation. Yes, we know the archetypal story, and yes, gameplay comes first, but this was nowhere near enough fun to make up for how dull I find lil’ Link’s collection quests. Yet I’ll probably still keep buying Zelda games and seeing if the next one will engage me more, or the next, or the next. 

Infamous

This has been a long time in coming. I had quite a difficult time getting through Infamous, which I got as one of the free games given as compensation for the 2011 Playstation Network outage. I played it for a few hours but didn’t much like it, and it lay dormant on my hard drive until I decided to start finishing all the PSN games I had. Even then, it took a long time to finish Infamous because I had a hard drive problem resulting in having to replay about two hours of the game, which is a good way to make it unappealing for a while. Still, the prospect of getting a good background in before playing Second Son on PS4 took me back again, though I’m not going to get Second Son until its price comes way down and I’ve finished various other games I have lined up.

Ultimately, Infamous won’t be on my favourite games lists, but it was actually pretty good fun. Every time I played it, I enjoyed it, and there’s something endearing about Cole’s ridiculous Batman voice, the jerky way he climbs buildings as you hammer the jump button, and the funny way his head turns as if he smelled something unpleasant when he heals people.

But I have to say that Infamous feels very old-fashioned at this point. After playing games like The Last of Us, even though I know Infamous is much faster-paced it feels extremely clunky and rather late-PS2 in presentation and play style.

Infamous tells the story of Cole, a normal sort of guy who is given powers by contact with a mysterious ‘Ray Sphere’. A select few people are ‘conduits’, able to receive impressive powers from this strange power source, and as it later turns out through some time-travelling parallel-worlds comic book plotting, Cole being one who would be empowered rather than destroyed in an explosion of the Ray Sphere was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, his hometown, Empire City, is quarantined in the wake of the explosion and soon overrun by different gangs – the Reapers, the Dust Men (probably sounds cooler in the US, where ‘Dustman’ doesn’t commonly used for ‘garbageman’, though this seems to be the intended allusion) and the First Sons, each with their own powerful leaders who soon grow interested in Cole.

The game’s gimmick is that you can choose to make good or evil decisions to affect your ‘karma’. Though this is suggested to be an interesting mechanic, really it’s utterly binary – there’s no advantage to mixing up your decisions, and really you have to place through twice, once as a goodie and once as a total bastard in order to get any benefit at all. I went for good, and I doubt I’ll repeat the experience for the small variations evil decisions will make. Ultimately, I think too much is made of this minor mechanic.

But what really works are the electricity-based powers. Essentially the game plays like the first 3D Grand Theft Auto games, giving you a city to explore and missions you can engage in to move the plot along if you fancy it, but lots of other things to do and random citizens to randomly assault if you so desire. Your path is shaped somewhat by areas only unlocked by plot progression and the rather annoying mechanic of having an area go blurry and unpleasant if the mains electricity is not yet switched on there, but it’s pretty sandbox-like in scale. Cole’s actions are somewhat goofy, especially the scrambling-climbing and the badly-targeted melee, but the electricity-based powers definitely enhance this. There’s something very satisfying about grinding along electric cables, turning on slow-mo precision targeting as you go for some headshots, then leaping off and going into a powerful ground-slam move. I put the game on hard and it seemed a good setting, balanced between Cole’s powers and the grunts’ remarkably good aim, though until the final boss nothing was really much of a challenge – and he was more irritating than anything else.

The story suffers from being badly-acted and the characters being pretty uninteresting, as well as in-game models not suiting cutscenes at all, though I liked the short comic-style sequences for key events. The story is left wide open and I probably will play Second Son, but I consider this very much a second-tier title, even for its time. 

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Similar to Ni no Kuni, I completed FFXIII-2 months ago, but thought I’d see every nook and cranny and get the platinum trophy before I wrote my impressions. The developers of FFXIII-2 seem to have taken on board the criticisms of the first game – that it felt far too linear, like running down endless corridors – and gone too far in the opposite direction. In this game, the player can hop between multiple timelines, altering future events and choosing non-linear paths through the story. The effect, unfortunately, is disorientation and a rather bland world – with another terrible final dungeon.

On the plus side, moving Serah to the spotlight was a great idea, Noel may be stupidly-named but is a great character to look at and in writing terms is an intriguing concept, and seeing Hope grown up is pretty cute. Like its predecessor, the game is incredibly nice to look at, and I actually found the combat system fairly fun.

You also get to chuck moogles about, which is a stroke of genius.

I must say, while the game held sway over me for a while, I never felt it was moving me emotionally, and I grew tired of the various stages that involved rotating little rooms about. Fighting the enemies never ended up with me feeling powerful, as the best RPGs do, and I didn’t honestly care very much about Noel’s ambitions.

As for the ending, well, it only served to make this game seem like a stopgap – and I haven’t rushed out to buy Lightning Returns, I have to admit. It’s on my to-play list...but fairly low down.

Square’s games look great – that’s more or less a given. But they really have to learn to have characters that an audience can identify with again – that can get you in the heart. Sadly, these aren’t them. But this is another I intend to replay some time in the far future.