Topic: Games you've recently beat

Expand

I played and finished Afterparty this week. It's the follow-up game from Night School Studios, the creators of Oxenfree. I was personally completely unaware of it's existence until very recently despite loving Oxenfree. Great premise, so I just had to pick it up. I love a good weird take on any subject matter, and the setting of hell is ripe for crazy and funny situations. I like that they went a completely different tone with this one versus Oxenfree as well, but ultimately the game very much fell short.

At the heart of the game is the friendship between your two playable characters, Milo and Lola. I can't say I was very invested in their relationship throughout, and I actually ended up seeing myself rooting for them to be torn apart. I was actively trying to sabotage their relationship with my dialogue choices as the game was slowly coming to an end, because in my head that was a better place for the story to go at that point than for them to stay together as BFFs. That was a weird experience for me considering how likable the characters in Oxenfree were, and how I really believed their relationshops and wanted them all to thrive. I think the problem with Milo and Lola, without getting into spoilers, is that a lot of their conflict in the game is centered around one certain thing that keeps being repeated. It really doesn't help to add any stakes to their relationship, especially when the positive aspects of the relationship seem to be more interested in breaking the rule of "show, don't tell". I felt like I was more often being told why they are good friends than seeing them actually interact as good friends. It just didn't feel like a particularly well written character bond to me, and that's a real shame as the game basically rests on the shoulders of that.

Despite it's shortcomings there however, the game generally does have good dialogue. Dialogue is obviously of the utmost importance in a game in the style of Oxenfree/Afterparty, and it mostly doesn't disappoint. There's a lot of fun jabs and exchanges throughout. The real star of the game is Erin Yvette's Wormhorn. She plays Milo and Lola's personal demon whose mission it is to make their life hell and feed into their worst fears and insecurities. Although that sounds like it could be a very intimidating character, the character of Wormhorn is actually very upbeat, fun and sympathetic. She's just trying to do her job and everyone is making it far too hard! Yvette brings the perfect voice to the character with a playful and hyperactive performance. Her scenes are incredibly well done, and more often than not quite creative. These sequences stand out so much that I honestly felt like I was missing out whenever she wasn't on screen.

The story of the game is actually very straightforward, as opposed to the very mysterious and twisty nature of Oxenfree. The game quickly feels like one giant fetch quest divided in many other fetch quests. Luckily the game's personality makes up for it's somewhat uninteresting story progression, but I really wish they had put more effort into making the storyline feel more organic and not like a checklist. The highlights of the story are easily the beginning and end of the game. Unfortunately, thanks to this game's choice/consequence nature, there's two endings and I felt like I had gotten the wrong one. Despite technically having "won" the game I felt incredibly unsatisfied with my ending and would have really preferred the other one. I don't think either ending really does fit the bill, but the other one certainly would've been a slight improvement.

Speaking of the choice and consequences, while not at all in-depth, I did feel like it offered enough for me to not be bothered by it. There's definitely some branching paths and different choices you can make that felt to me like they had an impact on my experience, and that's really all I can ask for with a small-scale game such as this. It's probably the part of the storyline that I feel like they handled best. The whole drinking gimmick did not affect this system in the slightest however, and that was quite disappointing. I was excited to see what they could do with this, but ultimately it just amounted to ever decreasing extra dialogue choices that didn't really help most of the time. Getting a drink also felt like a complete time-waster, as I feel like I had to sit there for at least 20 seconds just to get a drink. It was tediously slow.

I do quite like the score they employed for this game, and there were some really good sound effects too that are still stuck in my head. The sound design in general was really well done, and it's one of the few aspects of the game I can give any real praise to. I'm personally not really a music/sound person when it comes to games ever, so when I do notice it, it really means something! I wasn't a really big fan of the art style, because the faces of Milo and Lola looked incredibly low poly to me and it was very distracting. Hell looked quite good, but there was absolutely zero substance. It's a lot of long walkways with barely anything to interact with in the way. The world felt very shallow in that sense, and the dialogue went quiet more often than I would've liked. Not to mention the amount of times dialogue would decide to cut off, which is a highly irritating pet peeve of mine.

All in all I had a good enough time with the game. It definitely felt like a drag to finish at some points, but there were enough fun situations and dialogue along the way that it never felt like a chore. It's a tremendous step down from Oxenfree in my eyes, so if anyone is interested I wouldn't go in with high expectations left over from that game. Afterparty is a solid 6/10, but it could've been so much more.

Expand

So I finished The Outer Worlds two days ago. I’d started playing somewhere in December, but thanks to a busy holiday season I wasn’t able to finish it earlier. I ended up clocking out with about 45 hours on the in-game clock, which in my eyes is an incredibly long playtime. I don’t quite understand the early complaints about how the game was too short, since I’d be very surprised if anyone properly playing and exploring could get under 30 hours.

I can admit that the larger narrative in this game does feel rather short. I went to basically every location in the game, but if my memory serves me right you’d have to only maybe visit half of them to finish the main story if you were ignoring side content. There’s not a lot of main missions, and they often intertwine with what’s considered to be side content by the game. I can understand if people who avoid side content like the plague would be disappointed by its length, but it’s a true disservice to the game and the way it’s built to play. A lot of the side content can heavily affect the main storyline, and influence your eventual ending. I found it to be very well written as well and handle choice excellently. I haven’t played a game before that so constantly uses speech checks, but I love the system. I’d probably love it less if I wasn’t putting all my skill points in the places necessary to pass them however!

The storyline is quite good. It slowly reveals more and more about the world in a very satisfying manner. You’ll slowly figure out the story of everything that’s happening yourself, rather than it feeling like a huge info dump when you’re eventually told the complexities. All the computer logs truly were of importance as well, which I appreciate since many other games might use them just to fill players’ time with nothing of interest. I won’t spoil the location or anything, but there is a time in the story where you will head to a place where there are many computer logs to read about what happened to the people in that location. It’s probably the first time ever I’ve been really invested in something that would be considered lore, and it haunted me throughout the level. The writing and humor in this game are certainly very well done.

There was definitely a sense of ludonarrative dissonance to the finale of the game however. I felt like I was cheesing the big final climax, but I only ever used methods the developers intended. It created a sense of dissatisfaction, but getting the perfect ending was a good way to eventually balance that out. I'm pretty sure that had I gone about it any other way it would've resulted in many, many deaths too. There was quite a difficulty spike for me in the final stretch, which I can only assume was a result of my lack of spending skill points in combat abilities as well as the pistol remaining my default gun for the entire game. Up until that point I was easily able to manage with my loadout however, but at the start of the final stretch I out of nowhere doubled my death count from 2 to 4 while being attacked by ridiculously strong enemies. I was max level too. I guess that teaches me not to always go exclusively for speech check skills!

The combat was generally very basic. It’s not very in-depth of an RPG if we look outside of the narrative aspects. This personally doesn’t bother me really, as amazing combat mechanics are the very last thing I’d look for in a game. The companion abilities are quite cool even if they eventually become a chore to watch. The game gives you plenty of opportunities to forgo combat situations entirely though, which is my preferred method of playing. Maybe it was made a bit too easy in that way. A lot of the situations the game will present you with are quite easily resolved in a peaceful manner that will be more satisfying than any other. There’s not many moments of morally gray, and the hardest time I’ve had picking a choice has to be the very first big one. At the end, where you have to choose between different sides, there’s a very obvious choice that the developers want you to make. One is very vilified whereas the other is quite clean of any reasonable accusations. It did cheapen the feeling of choice a bit, but passing speech checks will never not be satisfying.

Even with all of this, sharp writing, lovable companions, a plentiful of interesting content, beautiful graphics and whatnot, the game still feels like it’s missing something. I just can’t quite put my finger on what it is. Everything it does it does well, maybe even great, but as a full product it just doesn’t quite hold up to that bar for me. It was never not entertaining, but it was never truly exciting. I don’t think it does enough differently to really differentiate itself from other, similar story-driven games. It feels like a very safe game, which in all fairness resulted in a very good product, but it does miss that thing to make it just that little bit better. I had a good time with this game and I don’t regret playing it or any of the hours I put in. It’s certainly recommended to anyone interested as far as I’m concerned. I just don’t think it’s likely to surprise anyone who might be on the fence or convert anyone to a new genre of games. It’s a very solid 8/10 experience, but I’m not sure if I’ll remember it for years and years to come. All that said, I’ll definitely be returning for the DLC!