Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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Recently completed the Last Guardian (PS4).

Better wake up Trico, we have a long way to go.

Gameplay:

• A platform puzzle adventure, you play as a young boy who wakes up to find yourself trapped together with an injured mythical beast called a Trico, and the only way to escape your predicament is to work together to scale a mysterious impossibly tall tower.
• The boy is able to fit into tight spaces & climb surfaces too small for Trico to grab, so whenever the beast hits an obstacle or can't continue for some other reason, it's up to you to go off and find a way for him to progress (usually by way of accessing a switch or bringing him back some sort of item, after engaging in the brand of platforming that often shows up in big budget PS exclusives like God of War or Uncharted). The boy is otherwise pretty helpless (whenever grabbed by an enemy, you must mash all buttons in order to break free), however at times you have access to a magical shield that lets you call forth lighting from Trico's tail to blast away distant obstacles & enemies, temporarily disable enemies from moving, and access special switches.
  
  An example of the type of platforming you'll be doing a lot of (note the ivy you'll have to climb once you reach the tower).
• You'll rely a lot on Trico to progress, as by and large he's the only one able to dispatch enemies, you need to ride him as he jumps to ever higher areas of the tower, and climb him to reach foot holds out of your reach. Eventually you'll get the ability to give him directions (you can point out a high place you need to get to, or direct him to a heavy switch only he can activate), though he (purposefully) has the mannerisms of a cat and oftentimes won't pay attention, at least not at first.
• Apparently Trico's affection for you (and how long it takes him to obey your orders) are affected by the amount of glowing barrels you feed him (some you run across as you progress, and are even mandatory, while others are just off the beaten path) and things like how quickly you tend to him when injured (you can pull out spears that enemies plunge into him), though there's no in-game meter showing you how much affection he has (in fact, the game is devoid of many gamey elements, such as any sort of HUD depicting life & the like).

Audio/Visuals:

• The game has a beautiful, almost haunting, atmosphere. With the theme of nature overtaking ancient ruins with some cell shading on the human characters, mixed with more realistic environmental texturing & game design, it kinda makes me think of what a cross of BotW & GoW (2018) would look like
  
  
  A couple screens of indoor areas. While the outdoor landscapes often remind me of BotW, the indoor areas have a vibe all their own, such as the top one that looks like a hallway Kratos himself may have to venture into.
• The attention to detail, particularly the immaculate plumage & animations of Trico, is absolutely stunning. However it comes at a price, as the framerate can be very rough in spots, and absolutely tanked a couple times (at least on base PS4). It tends to be a bigger issue in outdoor areas, but luckily, due to the general slower nature of the game, it doesn't kill the game.
  
  This visual splendor comes with a catch.

Story:

• While there's not a whole lot of dialogue & only a few cutscenes (the boy usually just narrates here & there, and sometimes it's just a tip if you're taking awhile on a puzzle), the relationship between Trico & the boy develops meaningfully via the beast's actions, as he behaves more & more like a domesticated pet, fiercely lunging into danger whenever the boy is in danger, and acting like a lost puppy whenever you have to separate from him for any length of time. There's some really emotionally powerful moments, particularly late game.
• I also feel confidant in saying there's quite a bit of environmental storytelling going on when it comes to the design of the tower and what it's history & ultimate purpose may be, but I still have a lot of unanswered questions, even after the credits rolled.

Conclusion:

• Dealing with Trico may have been just as frustrating as it was brilliant, and it does have some noticeable performance issues that can't be ignored, but there's just something special about this game. It's that kind of experience that absolutely grips you and doesn't let go (making you play into the wee hours of the morning before you notice), and while I can't in good conscious put it on the same pedestal as GoW or Spider-Man in terms of PS exclusives, I still say it's a must try at the very least, especially with how often it goes on sale.
  
  The sun sets on an unforgettable adventure.

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Some plot spoilers in this post for the game I'm going to discuss, since they're intimately connected to the premise and gameplay.

Clock Tower 3

Platform: PS2

Completion Status: Finished the game nearly 100% on my first go. Collected 240,000 rooder points (whatever those are). Played around a bit with the optional costumes.

The Clock Tower series began life as a 1995 Japan-only horror game on the SNES. A classic point-and-click adventure game, it distinguished itself with a focus on multiple endings, gameplay that encourages the player to run and hide to avoid danger (a design choice that has become more popular in the West with the advent of indie horror games like Outlast and Alien: Isolation), and, most iconically, a garden shear-wielding slasher appropriately dubbed "Scissorman." A 1996 PS1 sequel (which was localized as just "Clock Tower") made it overseas and continued the story of the first game. A spinoff (marketed as a sequel overseas) also released on the PS1 in 1998, but was disconnected from the mythology of the original. It wasn't until a few years later, in 2002, that a true numbered sequel released for the series.

Clock Tower 3 distinguishes itself from these earlier entries in a number of ways. Perhaps the most immediately notable change is how it ditched the point-and-click adventure gameplay of previous entries in favor of (then) contemporary survival horror game design, with (limited) combat interactions, an emphasis on creative fixed camera angles, and full 3D movement of the character.

In Clock Tower 3, you play as Alyssa Hamilton, a teenaged boarding school student on the cusp of her fifteenth birthday, who returns to her family's mansion to try and find her mother, who had mailed Alyssa an alarming letter instructing her to go into hiding. She encounters a sinister black-clad man, who claims to have kidnapped her mother, and through her exploration of the mansion discovers a bizarre family history that involves travelling through time to combat an evil, supernatural underworld.

There's really not a lot to do in this mansion. Instead, it's a hub world of sorts. Like Peach's Castle in Super Mario 64, it contains a series of portals that transport you to other points in space and time, where you (as Alyssa) will explore a mystery and encounter a stalker.

Unlike the more grounded, giallo film-esque atmosphere and plots of previous Clock Tower games, this entry is pure urban fantasy. If you've ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then the plot should sound familiar: young women in Alyssa's family actually have superpowers of sorts. Termed "Rooders," they have, for countless generations, protected the world from Subordinates, evil Entities who infect humans and drive them to murder. There's a fairly convoluted mythology that is introduced in this game, involving numerous ranks of supernatural monstrosities, bizarre heart-eating rituals, resurrected Victorian-era noblemen, and time travel. Actually, that last bit is relevant to the discussion about the gameplay I'm leading into, because apparently these supernatural warrior girls travel through time to defeat their enemies, and the portals you'll be travelling through will transport you to various points in England's 20th century history.

When you enter a portal and time travel to whatever point in history you're going, you'll explore a small, but dense set of environments as you discover the Subordinate you're looking for and dig into the history of certain victims of his. Functionally, this plays out a lot like a Resident Evil game, as you explore environments and read documents and notes left behind by the deceased and, usually, end up accessing the memories of a victim. Other than the primary stalker in the given level, you'll encounter various angry ghosts of people who died violently. There's an interesting puzzle element here, as, while you can't fight these spirits, you can find some memento from their past life, reunite it with their corpse, and 'defeat' them by granting them some measure of peace, which will cause them to travel to the afterlife.

The main attraction when it comes to the enemies in this game are, of course, the Subordinates who will stalk you throughout each level. Previous games features a lot of run-and-hide style gameplay, but, curiously, the threat level of any given stalker in this game is curiously limited. They'll obviously kill you if you don't escape from them, of course, but you can still solve puzzles when they're chasing you, which removes the immediacy of needing to shake them, and their AI is often dumb enough that you can take advantage of the level design to leave them in the dust, or even have some fun at their expense (in the first portal world, I discovered a small bridge I could crawl under, and, hilariously, every time I tried to leave my hiding spot on one side or the other, the stalker would furiously start running around a small portion of the level to try and catch me, so I had some fun and kept crawling back and forth between the two sides of the bridge to troll the AI and have a cheap laugh at its expense).

The stalker in any given level is almost always going to be faster than you, so it's not unusual for them to catch up with you but, unlike previous games, you have a reliable way to slip out of trouble. A refillable vat of holy water will temporarily stun your stalker any time you use it on them, so there's not usually too much of a reason for them to permanently corner you. In classic Clock Tower fashion, there are places to hide from these enemies so you can ditch them, but they're not hugely prevalent, and you won't spend an enormous amount of time hiding in this game. And, as I pointed out earlier, the enemy AI is dumb, which removes most of the tension when you are hiding from them. I can literally hide behind a thin curtain right as the stalker is entering the room, and it won't think to look in the most obvious place imaginable to find me.

The game does have some cheap jumpscares, though, and, in certain scripted locations, the enemy will jump out from a hidden spot on the screen (remember, the camera angles are fixed) and scare the bejeesus out of poor Alyssa. This is when the panic meter comes into play. See, the stalker won't usually be able to kill you when she's in a normal frame of mind, but one too many close skirmishes with her attacker will cause her to enter a state of panic. This leads to visual distortion of the screen, of course, but, in a supremely irritating design choice, she will also randomly stop and shiver for a couple of seconds at a time. Oh, and if the Subordinate attacks Alyssa when she's in this state, it's an instakill. So, combine random pausing for several seconds at a time, an enemy that is faster than you, and attacks that lead to instant death, and you should probably be able to see how this game can become irritating quickly in certain scenarios. Thankfully, Alyssa will be able to hoard some sort of stress relief item that you can use to calm her down so a scripted jumpscare doesn't lead to her getting herself killed over and over and over again because of the game's sparse save points and lack of a checkpoint system.

The subordinates themselves are... well, I won't spoil them too much, except to say that they are almost uniformly ridiculous. This game turns lack of subtlety into an art, so you'll see this villainous scoundrels do a lot of dancing and evil laughing as they engage in their evil deeds. It's ridiculous, and if this game doesn't sound scary, well... that's because it isn't. I'm not entirely convinced this was even meant to be a horror game. Almost every second of this experience is loud and utterly bizarre. This extends to the few human characters you encounter throughout the game as well. The most prominent one is a childhood friend named Dennis, a coward who will nevertheless thirstily follow Alyssa into hell for no particular reason. The weirdness of everything is hugely amplified by the game's extremely notable (for the time) reliance on mocap technology for the animation of the character models in cutscenes, which leads to almost everybody flailing and throwing themselves around like they're in the middle of a seizure or something. It's impressive given this a PS2 game (and the game itself is visually top of the line for something on that system), but prepare to be disturbed by this game's frequent cutscenes in all the wrong ways.

Nowhere is the... err... "distinctness" of this entry better represented, though, than in the game's boss fights. So, first, and most crucially: the game has boss fights. In a Clock Tower game. It's very weird. Not content to leave it at this, however, Alyssa will transform into a sort of magical girl when it comes time to fight the entity that has has obnoxiously been following you around for an entire level. She fights with what look to be light arrows, like Princess Zelda might use at the end of a Legend of Zelda game. The aiming mechanics are horrendous, unfortunately, because as soon as you aim, you're unable to adjust your aim at all. Instead, you'll have to lower you bow and raise it back up. Now, do this multiple times with enemies that are usually moving around, and you might see why this can be irritating. The way to get around this is to wait for the stalker, who will keep trying to attack you throughout the fight, to trigger an attack animation, which will usually keep them planted in one spot for a few seconds. This is enough time to start chipping at their health.

If the stars align properly, sometimes enemies will both stop for a period of time AND immediately begin running at you from that same angle, which means you'll have enough time to charge up your arrow. Arrows do marginally more damage the longer you charge them, but the real fun begins when you charge it long enough that your arrow tethers them to the ground. This will usually keep them grounded long enough to fire off more charged tether arrows and then, finally, if all goes right and you tether them three or four times, you can pull off a ridiculous looking super-attack. When this activates, Alyssa will fire off an arrow into the sky, and it'll rocketing down towards the enemy like a comet and cause a massive explosion that will either kill or gravely wound your enemy in the process.

If that description isn't sufficient, please look for yourself:

The magical girl protagonist in my horror video game looks like Sephiroth from FF7 summoning Meteor, sans the three minutes of watching the solar system blow up.

Anyway, there are also special binding arrows that will, if they hit true, automatically trigger a tether, as well as arrows that cause more damage than normal. You only collect a small handful of these, though, it appears to be impossible to cycle between them, meaning you'll have to use them in whatever order you collected them throughout the game.

It might be tempting to let fly with these against some of the game's more obnoxious normal bosses, but please, resist the temptation, because you'll want as many special items as possible to use against the ridiculously OP final boss, who has multiple life bars, can inflict tethers on Alyssa, and so quickly cycles between powerful attacks that force you to move that she barely even gets time to fire uncharged arrows at him. Even if you trigger a super attack on the final boss, it'll take off less than half of his health, but, again, every little bit helps.

What else to say? Once you beat the game, you'll gain access to a number of unlockable outfits for Alyssa to wear throughout the game (although these obviously don't show up in the pre-rendered cutscenes). In general, they're sort of sexualized, with one of them being a tight leather outfit with a breast window, a skimpy cowboy-themed one, one that shows off her legs (including her underwear if you crawl around, like you frequently need to in this game to get through holes and whatnot). There doesn't appear to be much else of significance, however. Like I noted earlier, the game tells you that you earned a certain number of "rooder points" by the end, but I have no idea what the significance of those are, how you collect more of them, etc.

So, what do I think about this game? It's hard to say. Despite the high production values, this feels like a cult production of sorts due to the large number of weird design choices the developers went with. It's hard to recommend this to people: it's a horror game that's not scary, and the animation/acting in it are distractingly over-the-top most of the time. It's a survival horror game without weapons or health management. I can't, in good conscience, say it's a really good game, but as someone who seeks out different experiences, I was reasonably happy with how refreshingly bizarre the whole thing was.

7/10

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A couple of weeks ago I finished up the Order: 1886, a launch era PS4 exclusive shooter set in an alternate history London.

Ready for an outing, old chap?

Gameplay:

• The core gameplay mechanics revolve around being a third person cover shooter. I imagine that if you've played anything similar over the past couple generations, you have the gist of what to expect here, as it doesn't really shake up genre conventions, though it does deliver them with the kind of big budget polish you'd expect from a first party Playstation release.
• In terms of armaments you have pretty much everything you'd expect of it's contemporaries (pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns, bazookas & the like), plus a few more unique firearms such as the Arc Gun (fires charged bolts of electricity) and my personal favorite, the Thermite Gun (with R2 you spray an area with a powdery substance, then with R1 launch a flair that ignites it, incinerating all within).
• You switch out weapons with the D-Pad (left equips sidearm, right main weapon, up smoke grenade, & down explosive grenade). One small catch, as you may have noticed is that you have to switch out your firearm in order to use a grenade (rather than there being a dedicated grenade button). It's a bit of an annoyance (as you'll likely only want to use one when overwhelmed with foes anyways), but I guess can't be helped when some of the main weapons (such as the aforementioned Thermite Gun) require the use of multiple shoulder buttons. It's not a huge mark against the game overall, though.
• When not shooting things the game tries to break things up in various ways. The most common of these is simply cutscenes to flesh out the story (in fact a few of the shortest missions consist of only a few cutscenes, only interrupted by you having to walk once or twice), though there are also a few "investigation" scenarios (you have to walk around a room and interact with highlighted objects, looking over them with the right analogue stick, seemingly just to show off how detailed the PS4 can render things), the kind of "ledge platforming" so commonly seen in Sony's releases (though it's used even lighter here than usual), and the occasional QTE (in fact, the few boss encounters the game has completely eschew the shooting mechanics in favor of QTE slugfests).
  
  "ledge platforming"
• Make no mistake, the game has a lot of shooting, and what is there is very polished & can get quite intense, but whenever your first shootout doesn't occur until halfway through the second mission (and the third mission is one of those short talky ones), the game's reputation as something you watch more than you play isn't completely unfounded, at least at it's onset, and exemplifies the stereotypes that surround Sony's exclusives moreso than something like God of War.

Audio/Visual:

• It's made by the same studio (or a subset of it) that brought the wonderfully detailed world of God of War to life, and it shows. Despite the fact that it's a launch era game, it looks fantastic, at least from a technical point of view.
• Unfortunately I think it's adherence to realism is it's greatest drawback, however. The fact of the matter is that you're scuttling about the back alleys & sewers of 19th century London, mixed in with a tone that mixes in some horror elements (without making an effort to actually be scary), resulting in a very dreary game world. There was some hope with it's steampunk elements, but other than one mission on a luxury blimp, they play the world mostly straight.
• Making things a tad worse is that it's a very dark game in terms of lighting. Probably exasperated by the light filter on the screen that makes things look like it's being captured on old time film, it can be unbearably dark to the detriment to the gameplay in parts. At one stealth section in the game's second half I turned the game's brightness to max (a setting I usually don't mess with), and it made things a lot better
  
  Trying to shoot enemies that bum rush you in the darkness can be trying.

Story:

• You're put in the role of Sir Gallahad, a member of a clandestine knighthood (directly linked to the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table) designed to protect the Crown from rebel insurrections & more importantly, from the things that go bump in the night. However (despite the fact that in terms of gameplay you'll be facing firearm toting humans rather than the occult more often than not), while investigating the Jack the Ripper murders he quickly notices that supernatural activity is way up in London, and despite some pushback from his higher ups, he investigates and discovers things aren't as they seem.
• It's not a wholly original narrative, with some of the twists being pretty easy to guess, but as with most things in the game, it's presented with a high polish. Plus, in this secretive organization Nikola Tesla (yes, that one) is the Q to Gallahad's Bond, suiting up the Order with all sorts of high tech weapons & communication equipment (explaining the presence of more modern weapons, & sci-fi ones, that otherwise shouldn't exist), which is a fun connection I wish they would have played with more.

Conclusion:

• I know it sounds like I'm being harsh on it, but that's just because it has such potential. The core gameplay is solid (especially if you like shooters), but I think if they had made the "downtime" gameplay a bit more engaging & upped the ante in terms the steampunk & supernatural elements, it could have been something special, and now it probably won't get the sequel it obviously sets up. Still worth a punt at the bargain bin prices it regularly finds itself at (I got it for $5).
  
  It's been a long day.