Noiramore Academy Demo - What Are You Waiting For? Go Play It, Already!

Noiramore Academy is a 3D mystery adventure game or at least it will be if the Kickstarter funds. It's also by some margin the best of the Next Fest demos I've played so far. I still have a couple left to try but I would be amazed if either tops this one.

I was so impressed, in fact, that as soon as I finished it I went straight to the Kickstarter page and backed it, making it the first project I've pledged on the funding platform for several years. At $15 it's hardly a major commitment and anyway, at the moment, the chances of the game funding don't look all that great. It's currently at just over $16k on a $40k ask.

There are still twenty days left and as we all know the peak funding opportunities for Kickstarters come at the beginning and the end, with take-up following a U-shaped curve. Except that's not really true. It applies to some projects but by no means is it guaranteed. Many plateau after the first spike and just lie there, others never even get that first bump of enthusiasm.

Noiramore Academy has vaulted that first hurdle, I'm pleased to say. It made about a third of its target in the opening days, considered by some analysts to be pretty much a minimum requirement for eventual success. Still, it's asking a lot to double that over the remaining three weeks.

I really hope it can because I want to play this game. I loved just about everything about it. The creative force behind the project is Anastasia Snyder, founder of Ink Rose Inc. She's a "Digital Illustrator, Voice Actress, and Online Video Producer" and all these skills are very much in evidence throughout the demo.

Graphically, it's wonderful. It looks like a comic-book come to life. The entire demo, which took me over an hour and a half to play through, takes place in a single location and yet it felt like a whole world. 

There's an absolute wealth of fascinating background detail everywhere you look, not just in the many interactable objects, each of which tells its own story, but in every facet of the illustration and design. You could - and I did - spend a significant amount of time just wandering around the classroom, poking your nose into everything without feeling the need to get on with the plot at all.

There is a plot, though, and it's a good one in that I have no idea yet what it is. It's a mystery. That's how mysteries are meant to work.

The demo leans quite hard into the in media res approach to storytelling, trusting you'll be smart enough to pick things up as you go. As far as I could gather, you play a thirteen year-old girl who also happens to be a unicorn (A Unicornum, technically...) called Judith Hovern. 

Judith does not have the best disciplinary record and the game opens with her receiving a dressing-down from the Principal, along with a ban from Movie Club, something that seems to be important to her. As the demo proceeds, it transpires that Judith is also on the outs with a popular couple, Becky and Nicholas. (The school is co-ed and those two are described as girlfriend and boyfriend, although Judith herself makes it quite plain she's too young to be interested in boys. Ew!)

She's no loner, though. She does have some good friends, including the wonderful Gina, drama society stalwart and method actor, currently living as a fluffbat in preparation for her next starring role, and goth true crime and serial-killer buff Mariposa, who may be every bit as creepy as she seems. 

Every character, and there are quite a few, is beautifully drawn, both literally an metaphorically and the voice acting is of equal quality. There wasn't a single character that didn't sound the way the excellent dialog suggested they should. I particularly enjoyed the performance of the actor playing Gina and not only because they sounded almost exactly like my friend does, when she puts on a "funny" voice, although I admit that's a level of metatextual pleasure not available to everyone.

Too often, when I play games, I find the strength lies in either the graphics or the world-building or the lore or the voice acting or the dialog but not in all of them at once. In Noiramore Academy every aspect compliments every other perfectly. And what better way to introduce players to the characters' world could there be than have them learn about it for themselves in history class, while you sit in? Genius!

It's a fascinating world, too. Fantastical and magical but with few of the obvious tropes. No elves or dragons or wizards - just bats who might be listening and resonance waves you control with your horn. Or with a wand, if you've been unfortunate enough to have your horn snapped off, but wands offer a really inferior experience, as we all know. There's a subtext in that, right? Or am I making up my own jokes, now?

Gameplay is good. Very good, in fact, if like me you find mystery games somewhat hit or miss. I always think I'm going to enjoy them more than I do because it turns out that a) I'm not as good at spotting clues as I think I am and b) working stuff out isn't always as much fun as I think it's going to be.

In Noiramore Academy, solving mysteries is quite hands-on. There's observation and deduction but mostly there are mini-games. 

Mini-games are often my favorite part of an investigation, at least they are when I can do them. I could mostly do these although as usual I tended to get hung up on the "I know what I'm suppposed to be doing but I can't figure out exactly how I'm supposed to do it" part. 

Fortunately for me there are several playthroughs of the demo on YouTube and I have no compunctions about using them. I generally prefer to refer to a walk-through or a guide rather than bang my head against a puzzle until I stop having fun, out of some dim sense of pride. Literally no-one cares whether you work everything out for yourself or copy someone else's homework in a single-player game so why pretend it matters?

All I needed was a tiny hint, anyway. Okay, a couple of tiny hints. Three at the most. And all of the puzzles were completely fair and logical when I knew what I was meant to be doing. And original, too. I think this might be the first time I've ever repaired an antique dress using a pattern and a needle and thread.

I don't think I'm going to go into any more detail. It's obvious how much I enjoyed this one. The demo is there to play (I hope it stays that way after Next Fest ends - it really needs to for the Kickstarter.) and I strongly advise anyone who likes this sort of thing, a demographic which I'm sure includes a few regular readers here, to go try it.

If the demo isn't avaialable or you don't play this sort of game much, maybe watch the trailer or even one of the playthroughs on YouTube. I've thoughtfully embedded one above so you don't even have to leave. It makes for an entertaining watch, if watching someone else playing a game can be defined as entertainment. I picked one where the person playing keeps their trap shut but there are several more on YT with commentaries, too, if that's your bag.

There's a lot in the demo, which is flagged as "pre-alpha" but which played flawlessly for me. I was flicking through one of the playthroughs just now to remind myself of a couple of things and I noticed stuff in there that I definitely didn't find when I was playing. I may have to play it all the way through again. Oh, what a hardship that would be!

I could go on (And on. And on...) but I'm going to end here and keep this short because I know short posts get read more than long ones and I would really like to maximize my chances of encouraging more interest in the game. Mostly because it's really good and you'd be doing yourself a favor by trying it but also in the admitedly hubristic and ridiculous hope of nudging that Kickstarter a little further towards its goal. 

Anastasia has had two previous projects fail on the platform so far. I really hope the third time turns out to be the charm. This game deserves to get made.

Online, Offline, What's The Difference? A Quick Look At The Spire Horizon Online Demo

Today's Next Fest demo is an MMORPG called Spire Horizon Online. Note that "Online". It's important.

I just had to re-write my whole opening monologue because it was a riff on how, surely, we don't need to add "Online" to the names of games any more because pretty much all of them are, only to discover there are in fact two versions of this, one of which is not.

There's an open-world RPG called Spire Horizon that's already available on Steam and then there's this one, which is an MMORPG version of the same game, due to launch in December. I now realize I have been conflating the two since I first heard about the demo. I apologize for any confusion - not that anyone's picked me up on it yet.

The original is the game that one reviewer on Steam claimed was a now-abandoned student project from a single developer. The same reviewer also added, snidely, that the project must have received a failing grade. That seemed credible at the time. If true, it certainly wouldn't be the only student project on Steam. I've played a couple.

As soon as I logged into the game, though, it began to seem extremely unlikely. So I checked and the single developer part is true, which is both surprising and impressive when you see what they've achieved, but I find it very hard to imagine it was done for a student project.

The demo opens with an impressive four and a half minute long movie that would look entirely in place fronting an AA game. AA games don't exist any more, apparently, and I'm not sure I know exactly what they were they did but if they were anything like I imagine then this would have been just the sort of movie they'd have opened with.

Don't take my word for it. Here it is. It's well worth a watch even if you have no intention of playing the game.

It's lucky it's on YouTube because in the demo it glitched and jumped all over the place and I missed a lot. I could tell it was good from the bits I did see but it wasn't until I watched it on YouTube that I realised just how good. 

It wasn't the best of beginnings, technically speaking. I don't know if the juddering and skipping was down to the only available server being in "Asia" or some issue with my own internet connection, which hasn't been at it's best of late, but it made me expect the worst going into the game itself.

And things certainly weren't perfect. There were quite a few more problems. Some might have been bugs - there's a card at the start warning that the demo is "unfinished" and may contain "various bugs or issues". Most of the issues I encountered, though, like quest widows not closing properly or certain buttons not responding, could have been caused by connection issues or lag. 

Whatever the cause, there was nothing to make the demo unplayable or even to stop it being fun, which it was. I played for an hour and would happily play more if I'd had the time. There's a lot of promise here and no small amount of pleasure to be had in what's already there, although I think there's a deal of work to be done yet if the game is going to meet its proposed December 2024 launch date. 

I have wishlisted it anyway, not that that means I'll buy it. It definitely has potential. Plus it's really weird in the right kinds of ways and that's something I always like to encourage.

Here are some things that I found unsurprising about it

• It's a medieval fantasy world, all castles and keeps and greensward everywhere.
• It has lots of Kill quests and not just Kill Tens either. More like Kill 15 of three different mobs.
• It has levels and classes you gain XP by doing quests and killing stuff.
• The classes include Fighter, Priest, Sorceror and Assassin
• There are mounts including some that fly.
• There's gear and upgrades and loot.
• It plays like an MMORPG from maybe fifteen years ago, one of the lesser-known ones like Argo or even NeoSteam.

Here are some that I wouldn't necessarily have expected

• The player character is a skeleton. Hair optional.
  
• You never really get to wear any clothes. Or have a face.
• The plot revolves around your character's search for his lost friend.
• The friend is a capybara.
• Classes include MuayThai, Boxer and Musketeer.
• You get a mount and wings for free, almost at the start.

Graphically, it's lovely to look at it. The colors are rich and vibrant, the scenery is attractive and for once everything is bright and cheerful. The UI is well designed and pleasant both to look at and to use. I particularly like the font used and the borders are elgant and stylish. It's one of the more tasteful yet friendly-looking UIs I've seen in a while.

The whole game feels a bit like that -tasteful and friendly - or I should say the demo does. I imagine things get a little less cozy later on. It's explained in one of the quests that there's a protective barrier around the area keeping the really bad monsters out, so the local monsters are fairly tame. All told, it feels like a nice place. You wouldn't turn down a weekend break there, if you won one in a raffle.

Gameplay is exactly what you'd expect. Speak to an NPC, do something for them, get referred to the next, ad infinitum. Combat felt more like an ARPG than an MMORPG, with mobs coming in large numbers and respawning almost instantly. Button mashing worked for me. 

Most of the time, anyway. It is quite possible to get out of your depth, esspecially if you run out of healing potions. Of course, that's just in the starting zone. I imagine everything gets a lot tougher later on. 

The writing is... I want to say decent. It's better than functional, anyway. The NPCs have some flavor and the prose style doesn't jar. The translation is solid, assuming it has been translated. I'm basing that assumption on the location of the server. I have no knowledge of where the developer, Mendoka, is from.

I did very much like the central conceit of what I guess we're calling the Main Story Quest these days. Playing a character whose one and only motivation is to search the world for his lost friend seems like something that hasn't been done to death in the genre and it makes a refreshing change from Only You Can Save The World or I Just Woke Up And I Don't Know Who I Am. That said friend is the world's largest rodent just adds to the fun.

I don't have an awful lot more to say about this one except that I'm not entirely sure why it needs to be an MMO. I didn't see much in the short time I played to indicate what potential for grouping or raiding or even trading there might be although I did see quite a lot of other players running around. Then again, you wouldn't really expect to see much in the way of co-operative activity in the starting zones of any MMO these days so maybe that all comes later.

I suspect I might prefer to play the RPG, anyway. It's very cheap, it has good reviews and it's right there, right now if you want it.

 I'll be keeping an eye on the MMORPG all the same. As I said, I feel it has potential. It certainly felt at least as well-constructed as some I've played, games that have had far more attention, naming no names. (Okay, Palia springs immediately to mind. Crowfall, even. I'm not entirely sure either of those felt orders of magnitude more polished, let alone finished but they certainly received orders of magnitude more column inches.)

File under very much worth a look if you like this kind of thing.

Just Like Starting Over: New World Aeternum X Once Human: The Way Of Winter

After yesterday's extended diversion it's time to play catch-up. Two of the bigger gaming stories of the week were the relaunch/rebranding of New World as New World Aeternum and a new season for Once Human. And as it happens I've played enough of both to have some first impressions, so here they are.

The first thing I want to say applies to both of them: these are two highly playable games that give me very little of that familiar disconnect we've all felt when coming back after a layoff. Granted, it hasn't been all that long since I last played either of them but the core gameplay loop and the functional mechanics of each is so clear and clean it's hard to imagine it would be much different, coming back after a much longer time away.

Then again, in both cases the latest updates do strongly encourage, if not mandate, a restart. It's always easier  if you come in at the beginning instead of halfway through.

While the gameplay in each may be extremely easy to pick back up, I very much cannot say the same for the look and feel in the case of one of the pair. I spent more time - considerably more time - fiddling with the settings in New World Aeternum than I did playing the game itself, trying to make it look like the game I remembered or even just a game I was willing to spend more than thirty seeconds in. 

Here we are at last!

At one point I was strongly tempted to log back into my old (Now legacy.) character to check if I was misremembering how uncluttered the screen used to look. I have a vision in my head of New World as a clean, virtual world experience, not a jabbering mess of disconnected words and images but maybe that was beta. Whatever and whenever it was, I'm pretty sure the game never looked as chaotic and disorganized as this.

Some of it is personal preference, of course. I have a very strong dislike of seeing names and numbers bobbing about on screen so my first act in many new games is to go into the settings and turn off almost everything that displays over players' heads - names, guilds, titles - all the cruft no-one but the person playing the character ought to give a toss about. 

Then I do the same for NPCs, stripping out all the on-screen identifiers unless removing them fundementally breaks gameplay. Ideally, I like to have all information appear on mouse-over or, failing that, on a click. I want to be the one who decides what displays when, not the developer. 

I also switch off all floating damage and healing numbers, on myself and on the mobs. I can see that information far less obtrusively elsewhere on the screen or I should be able to, if the designers have done their jobs.

It took me far, far longer to get rid of all that crap in NWA (Unfortunate acronym, that, isn't it?) than it ought to have done. Far longer than it does in most games and, to my memory, longer than it used to in this one, too. Not everything I wanted to switch off had a toggle and it was a lot harder than it needed to be to find the off button for those that did.

At one point I even tried playing with the HUD off. Great for immersion but hardly practical.

In the end, even after I'd literally checked every single entry on every menu, I couldn't find any way to switch off player names,something that I have long considered to be a basic option in any multiplayer title. In a game with which I felt less investment, this alone would be enough to make me give up and play something else. Now I'm wondering whether New World ever let you switch the names off or if it was always this way and I was just too excited to care at the beginning, while later on there weren't enough other players around to make it feel like a problem.

The problem with names is, of course, always far worse when a game is new and popular. I don't know how popular NWA is going to stay but certainly when I played it was absolutely heaving. There was a huge crowd milling around the starting area and chat was a nest of vipers, spitting venom about platforms.

NWA is Amazon's attempt to launch New World as a console game and the new servers (Standard Servers as they're called.) all facilitate cross-play between console and PC gamers. That sounds very friendly and inclusive, on paper. In practice, not so much. 

I was surprised and irritated to find the acrimonious rivalry between these groups lives on. I thought it died out years ago. It seems no, sadly. A bit of friendly ribbing is one thing but this felt like a the supporters of a couple of rival sports teams taking it outside for a knock-down brawl.

It reminded me of the old days in MMORPGs, when every new game launched to the background of an ill-tempered debate in General on whether it was better than World of Warcraft. Back then it sometimes felt as though Blizzard stans bought new games as they appeared just so they could log in on launch day and tell everyone what suckers they were for playing and how they should all uninstall and go play WoW instead.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice this is the same screenshot I cropped for yesterday's post.

I prefer to have chat on but not when it's nothing but an endless argument between people with fixed opinions and others taking sides for the sake of an argument. That's no more entertaining when the sides are PC vs Playstation vs XBox than when it's game vs game.

It was, once again, a lot harder to work out how to dull that racket than it should have been. AS I say, I prefer to have chat on when possible, so first I tried some milder solutions, like limiting chat to only players on the same platform as me, an option whose very existence seemed like an admission of defeat by the developers, or dropping out of General. 

And that did largely alleviate the platform wars problem but only long enough to reveal a more fundemantal issue. Chat continued to scroll endlessly, filled with various invites and requests to join this or do that. There seemed to be a lot of links people wanted everyone to click.

For some reason I can't quite explain, but which has to relate to the font or the colors or both, even with the chat box safely tucked away in the lower-left corner of the screen, I just could not ignore it. Every time I looked elsewhere on the screen, something would flicker in my peripheral vision, low down on the left and I'd glance at it and lose focus on what I was doing. It was unmanageably distracting so in the end I caved and switched chat off altogether. This is not ideal in an MMORPG and it's something I hardly ever do or feel I need to do but I couldn't figure out any way around it.

It's instructive to compare that with my experience playing Once Human the next night. Even though the server I played on there was listed as "Nearly Full" when I joined it and it was only a few hours since the new Season had become playable, I had absolutely no problems with chat. Not only were people not behaving like nine-year olds in the schoolyard but the chat box itself, even though it was the same size and in the same location on screen, posed no distraction whatsoever, even when plenty of people were talking.

I didn't take any pictures of the horrible UI so here's one from a cut scene instead. Although, come to think of it, if anyone can tell me what that stupid timer thing at the bottom is and how to get rid of it, I'd be vey grateful. I couldn't shift the damn thing and it kept coming back.

This is a design issue more than anything. I notice it in various games. Sometimes chat imposes itself on the game, sometimes it sits back. Usually you can tweak it to push that one way or the other but in NWA it seems determined to be in your face, all the time, no matter what. Or not there at all, which is where it is for me now and where it's likely to stay. Amazon wanted to pretend the game wasn't an MMO so I'm meeting them halfway.

That's a lot of talk about the UI but it represents the amount of time and attention I felt I had to give it in the game to make it baseline playable. Once I'd finally managed to get that done, I was able to start enjoying myself. And I did.

New World has given us several cinematic introductions in its short life and now it has another to show off. They're always fun to watch, although I'm not necessarily a huge fan of mini-movies at the beginning of video games. The new one blends some of what was there before with some fresh scenes and does, I think, make more sense overall.

Indeed, the whole introduction, including the short tutorial section, is much tighter and cleaner now although I suspect that may only because someone at Amazon finally decided to sit down and work out what the game was going to be about. Probably about time that happened.

Character creation is still embedded in the introduction, which was always a nice touch. There are some new looks. It's a relatively limited selection by modern standards but that's fine. I know from long experience that if I make a character more than a few degrees outside my established preferences I'll fail to bond with them and not want to play them, so as long as I can make someone who looks there and thereabouts like all my other characters, I'm good.

Come on in! The water's lovely!

The basic tutorial tells you how to move and hit things and is extremely visual. There are lots of very bright colors and plenty of explosions. I think it's supposed to be exciting. Then it ends and you get to see the world where you'll be spending time and it feels slightly odd, as though you've come off a ride, back into the busy, bustling theme park itself, all lines and chatter and milling about.

Part two of the tutorial, the part where some very chatty characters give you simple tasks to do and praise you inordinately when you do them, as though you've somehow outpaced all reasonable expectations, takes place on the same beach it always did. The tasks are much the same, too - kill some boars, kill some corrupted sailors, loot some wrecked ships, recover some lost things, find the source of corruption in a cave and destroy it - but the flow is much better and the reasons for doing what you're doing seem a lot clearer than they used to.

Part of that is the dialog and voice acting delivered by the two new NPCs at the campfire, all of which is well above standard. The third NPC, the pirate captain, seems about as I remember her but she's fine, too. Not as good as the "king" and his long-suffering friend but good enough, even if her accent is a bit on the "Oirish" side.. 

I got as far as the first settlement in the one session I've played so far and there seemed to be a fair amount of new dialog, although it's possible it's the same old stuff and I've just forgotten it. Or indeed that it was added in one of the earlier revamps and I never played through it at the time. Whatever, it feels pretty solid; definitely better than I remember.

Yes! I knew it!

As for the physical feel of the thing, it's the same pleasurable experience it always was. New World has one of the best action combat systems I've tried. It feels fluid and natural and intuitive and they don't seem to have changed anything much that I can sense, which is just as well. 

The world looks great as always, there's lots to see and plenty to loot and there's a constant drip of dopamine as skills upgrade on use and new abilities come in. As has generally been the case, once I started playing I didn't want to stop. 

I didn't even feel annoyed by having to start over. It felt like an opportunity more than an imposition although whether I'll ever have the time to get a new character all the way back to where I left the old one is another matter. I wonder if it's safe to assume this will be the last time we're asked to do it?

Perpetual new beginnings is something of a feature in Once Human, where the need to keep re-starting been a major point of contention since launch. The seasonal structure there has met a certain amount of pushback from players and required numerous official statements and explanations from the developers who, if they ever feel they may have made an error of judgment in insisting on it, certainly haven't let that change their minds as they try to impose their vision on the game. 

Like quite a lot of people, even though I wasn't against the seasonal structure per se, I couldn't find the motivation to engage with it for the first reset, where the options were to do the same thing again at higher difficulty or do it again with other players trying to kill me. This time, with a completely new scenario taking place on an entirely new set of maps in a different part of the region, complete with new questlines and plot, though, this feels almost like the game just got an expansion.

Meet the baddies.

That's not such a leap when you think about it. Although The Way of Winter does require you to start over to some degree, so do most MMORPG expansions. You generally need to begin by replacing all your old gear just to be able to handle the new content and that's not much different from what happens here. The new gear you craft to get started may look like the old stuff you used to have but it isn't the same. The old stuff didn't keep you warm. This does. 

Expansions come with new features and that's the expansionesque feature of the new Season in OH. Now you can die of frostbite or heatstroke! What a thrill! In practice, it's just another stat to manage but I quite like it all the same.

I also like the new plot, which involves a really sinister new villain, the head of the Vultures, a criminal gang we've been slaughtering from the get-go. Nice to find out who they are at last and what it is they're up to. 

Their leader, Igna, is written and played with suitable arrogance and snark and I found him genuinely scary. So did Matsuko, the girl with the butterfly stuck to her face, who really doesn't like it when the he projects his image into her supposedly secret pocket-dimensional lair. That's how the new Season begins and I found it engaging and immersive. Once Human has consistently strong writing and voice acting and this is right up to par.

That's not threatening at all...

Things continue to go well after the introduction. There's a choice of starting points - a double choice in fact. You can opt to go into the scenario at a lower level, suitable for newcomers, or enter at a more difficult point, appropriate for experienced players. Obviously I chose the easier one, a choice which then  split into three possible locations on the same map.

I picked the one with the name I liked best and off we went. Once again I had to glide down from a hundred meters in the air, hanging on to the feet of a large hawk. It's a weird way to begin any game but it seems to happen a lot these days. Did it start in Fortnite, this falling from the sky routine? I think that's the first time I saw it. Hard to remember now, it's happened so often since.

Once I reached the ground I started to notice the cold right away. That, I think, was just bad luck. It happened to be just coming on nighttime when I arrived (Didn't I say it's always night when I log in to any game?) and the temperature naturally fell when the sun went down. Since this is an MMORPG, I don't think that time of arrival can have been set for me specifically. I was just unlucky not to get there in the daytime, when it would have been pleasantly warm.

It gave me an introduction to the new temperatue mechanic, anyway. And hypothermia. It gave me that, too. Luckly, hypothermia is just a debuff. It's freezing that kills you. 

I don't know, V. Why don't you tell me? I'm sure you're dying to.

I went straight into survival mode, built myself a camp, killed some deer (Reindeer!), striped their hides and made myself a whole new outfit with a bonus to cold resistance. I would probably have done just that anyway but as it happened it was what V, my glowing bird pal, told me to do because I was still in a sort of extended tutorial. Not surprising, since I had picked the newbie option, after all.

Naturally, by the time I'd gotten myself dressed and protected myself from the cold, the sun came up and it got warm and I didn't need protecting any more. Ho hum. So it was off to the nearest town to see what they had for me to do.

My welcome there wasn't the warmest (Hah!). There was some shouting and gun-pointing until the guard spotted my Mayfly backpack, which as usual worked like some kind of not-so-secret masonic handshake and I was in. Once again, the dialog and the voice acting was strong. It's always a good sign when I find myself wanting to listen to the end even though I've already read ahead and now what they're going to say.

And, also once again, that's where I left it; safely ensconced in the starting town, ready to move on to whatever comes next. I find myself in the happy position of wanting to carry on playing both of these new-old games, my enthusiasm for both seemingly refreshed by the forced re-starts rather than, as it could easily have been, set back.

Maybe because every time someone like you sees them you imagine we're your best mates and you give us the keys your house? Cos that's what keeps happening...

I suspect it's likely I'll get further with Once Human, which has actual new content, than with New World Aeternum, which is only offering a revised version of what was already there. Then again, The Way of Winter is only good for six weeks or so and then I'll have to start again, again, whereas this, hopefully, ought to be the last time I need to start over in New World.

As for which is going to be the more successful overall, at the moment, the clear leader in the relaunch stakes, as far as Steam is concerned, is Once Human. It has almost twice as many people playing as NWA, although there Amazon will be mostly be looking at the console numbers, I'm sure. Still, the PC game has taken a bump, too, so we'll see how that lasts. 

As for which of the approaches will have the greatest success in the longer term, I have no idea how well NWA might do on consoles but on PC I'd back Once Human, whichseems tohave burned fewer bridges and made a better job of hanging on to the players it already has so far.

I plan on playing both, on and off. I don't even mind if I have start over again at some point. Just let's leave it a while, now, eh?

Truth, Time And A Third Word Begining With "T" I Can't Think Of Just Now...

You ever have one of those weeks where everything happens at once? This blog's having one of those right now. 

There's Next Fest, for which I have seven demos to cover, four of which I've already played and one of which I've already reviewed, so that's going about as well as could be expected. Better, really. 

There was also that new, hot game that no-one's talking about that I downloaded the demo for before Next Fest even began. I've played (Some of) that one and posted about it already too, so ditto.

Then there's the launch of a brand-new, highly-anticipated open world RPG that's definitely not an MMO, which has been out for three years now and that millions of people have played, many hundreds or even thousands of them on the same servers at the same time, actually (Oh, stop it!). New World Aeternum, it's called. 

I downloaded that one, with considerable difficulty, yesterday and last night I made a character. She's Level 8 so that's a work in progress, pretty much the same as the game itself, which has been re-envisioned at least three times now to my certain knowledge. Will this be the version that sticks? We'll see soon enough, although whether anyone still cares might be a more appropriate question.

After that comes the second full PvE season in Once Human which, unlike the last two seasons that don't really count because they were just revamped versions of the first season with some bits moved around and some difficulty settings tweaked, brings a huge amount of genuinely new content to the game. 

There's a whole new region with four zones, as we would have called them in the olden days, before everything went seamless. That's an expansion by some people's reckoning. I can think of marketing departments that would be hanging the expansion label on an update like that and charging for it, too.

I read the latest press release for the update yesterday (Version 1.3 - The Way of Winter - that's what it's called.) and it does sound really interesting. Exciting, even. I've had had a really great time playing Once Human for (Checks Steam...) eighty hours so far so I'm looking forward to getting in and seeing all the new stuff. The update went live today and I have it downloading as I write. Now I just have to play it for a while and then post about it. 

I could get right on that today, only late yesterday evening, just as I was about to switch my PC off for the night, I got an email inviting me into a "playtest" for another MMO. I downloaded the client but as yet I haven't checked whether there's an NDA or anything. The email didn't mention one and I haven't signed anything but I probably should double-check before I start rambling on about it in public.

By a conservative estimate, I make that nine posts pending at least, assuming I give all the demos a post of their own, which I'm hoping I won't have to but which experience tells me I probably will. To make it a nice, round ten, I just finished watching two TV shows I want to talk about. At least I can usually portmanteau several of those into one post so I shouldn't have to go to eleven.

I realize I have now spent eight paragraphs basically doing one of those posts about blogging that no-one wants to read but I blame that on Stuart Lee. Mrs Bhagpuss put one of his books on the bathroom book pile and I've been reading the bit where he goes through one of his touring shows as broadcast on the BBC, line by line, with extensive footnotes, talking through his process. I have always had an unfortunate tendency towards unconscious imitation. I think this might be one of those times.

And now I have to go take Beryl for a long walk in the countryside. It's been raining for two days straight and she's barely been outside but today the sun has come out and supposedly it's not going to rain all day so she's more than due. I'll have to pick this up again later. 

At least Once Human has updated now, so that's something off the list, at least.

And now I'm back. 

Is there any point to these "stepping away from the keyboard" sidebars, I'm wondering? It's like when Joanne says she has to go pee in Nobody Wants This. Or, rather, when she does it in the fictional podcast of the same name she co-hosts with her sister, in the hit TV show, also called Nobody Wants This. 

That, what I did there, besides being confusing, thanks to the embedded metafiction, for which I'm not to be held responsible, is called tele-parabalizing. 

Okay, it's not but it kind of is all the same. Douglas Coupland coined the term in his seminal novel Generation X, where he also came up with a whole slew of descriptive terms and labels for quasi-cultural activities that I'm sure he hoped would catch on, making him his generation's answer to Shakespeare. That didn't happen, as the Observer's Christine Smallwood somewhat unkindly pointed out in 2006, fifteen years after the publication of the book itself, but I have a bunch of those definitions in tiny frames on my kitchen wall so I haven't been able to forget them as easily as everyone else.

That's an interesting article, by the way, the one I linked then, although I only skimmed it so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the detail. Still, it is curious how GenX seems to have slipped through the cracks between Boomers and Millennials. Also, what was Generation Y, described in the piece as "the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big"? Anyone remember them?

My feeling has long been that all generations need to be subdivided at least once. The life experiences of children growing up a decade apart are frequently too different to be tidily conflated. We probably should talk about Early and Late for all generations, which I guess would make Gen Y early Millennials. 

I didn't come here to talk about any of that, though. I seem to have gotten myself side-tracked. Again.

While I'm down this byway I might as well mention that, if you google "tele-parabalizing" to check if indeed it might have caught on more than you thought it had, as I just did, (It hasn't.) you'll find one of my posts, the frankly wonderfully-named Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas, at #4 in Google's list. Now I've mentioned it again I wonder if this post will also appear in future searches for the phrase? 

Probably not because the only reason the other one ranks that high to begin with is because I misspelled "parablizing". Coupland spells it without the second "a" and since he made it up, I guess he knows.

This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the imminent "Death of the Internet" we're all supposed to be worrying about. I mean, just how reliable was the information we were all lapping up before the rise of the AIs anyway?

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading a Stewart Lee book (It's March of the Lemmings in fact, although that's not the cover of the edition currently lying on the floor of our bathroom.) In it, he occasionally refers in considerable detail, often with dates and names, to cultural artefacts that don't exist. Sometimes he then tells the reader he's made them up but mostly he doesn't.

For example, when he mentions "an Essex folk song collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the '50s",  he's referring to a real person but when the sentence carries "from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell" he's making stuff up. Specifically, what he's doing is collating the name of Gary Bushell, a right-wing music journalist and cultural commentator no-one likes with the name of Bushell's old band, The Gonads.

That one's a very obvious joke but "The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980" by Daniel Spicer, which I assumed he'd also invented, turns out to be entirely bona fide, as does Julian Cope's band Brain Donor, a Cope project I was completely unaware of until I read about it in Lee's book. 

At one point, Stewart also quotes a lengthy post by someone purporting to be a stage manager, accusing Lee, in an unsettlingly calm, world-weary tone, of all kinds of behaviors and actions that turn out to be provably untrue. But that's what truth is: anything someone tells you until someone more convincing tells you otherwise.

I was reminded of that when I was in the launderette a couple of hours ago (I took a load of washing round after we got back from walking Beryl. If I was a comedian I guess I might say something like "This is what my life has become" but it's pretty much what my life already was, except now we have a dog...). As the load was in the drier, I was reading a novel called Starling House by Alix E Harrow and I was struck by just how many precise, specific references the author makes to books and songs which I was pretty sure didn't exist, at least not in the form she said they did.

For example, on page 44 the protagonist, Opal, makes a passing reference to "that one Prine song that everybody still hates", which would be largely meaningless and pass mostly unnoticed if it wasn't for a footnote on the same page, in which an unnamed annotater (Definitely another character, not the author.) explains "Opal is referring to John Prine's 1971 song "Paradise" on his debut album".

This is an actual song and that is an actual album and the lyrics do concern the mining industry in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, which is where the novel is set - in a small town called Eden. Prine's father grew up in Paradise, a small mining town in the same county and the song is about his experiences there.

Prine's song does not, however, include the line "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Old Gravely's coal train has hauled it away", as stated in the footnote because Gravely Power is a fictional company invented by the author. What John Prine actually wrote and sang was "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.", which is admittedly very similar but not the same.

According to Wikipedia, the real mining company that strip-mined the real Paradise was called the Peabody Coal Company. The fictional founder of the fictional Gravely Power that did the same to the fictional Eden was John Peabody Gravely. 

This seems to me to be getting extremely close to the kinds of "hallucinations" seen in AI-produced text, albeit here intentional rather than accidental. And being set down in print, it's now in the cultural record as much as anything on the internet. Maybe it even has more authority that way, even though its in a novel. Books have gravitas.

There's more, too. Across the next four pages, Alix E Harrow incorporates the full text of a supposed Wikipedia article on fictional author Eleanor Starling. There's nothing very unusual about writers creating other writers who never existed and filling out their bibliographies as though they did but backfilling fake internet data into a printed book adds a level or two of complexity, not to say confusion. 

Here, once again, the author includes a number of direct and specific references from our non-fictional timeline. They're extrmeley well-done and wholly convincing.

For example, there's a quote attributed to Guillermo del Toro: "the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier but to lay it bare". It sounds like something the director might have said, although clearly he couldn't have said it, as the fictional Wikipedia article suggests, about the equally fictional author Eleanor Starling. I did wonder if it was an actual quote, re-purposed but in fact it's wholly made up. De Toro never said it at all.

Better yet, there's a reference to Josh Witter's third studio album, "Hello Starling", which supposedly includes a song called "Nora Lee and Me" as a hidden track, Nora Lee being the name of the girl in The Underland, the one and only book Eleanor Starling ever wrote. 

Josh Ritter's third album really is called Hello Starling, although presumably for entirely different reasons. Having the song be a "hidden track" on it is a master-stroke because, of course, hidden tracks do exist but are never listed anywhere, so even if an internet search brings up no trace of any song of that name you can never be absolutely sure it doesn't exist. All we need now is for Ritter to read the book and decide to write the song and include it as a hidden track on future editions of the album and reality will have fractured into shards.

All of this suggests that humans are and always have been perfectly capable of muddying the factual waters all on their own, without the help of soi-disant artificial intelligences and lumbering LLMs. The internet, which was always awash with nonsense, may yet become so sodden with falsehood it will sink to the bottom of the data sea and lie there, a rotting wreck filled with misinformation, fantasy and lies but whether that makes it materially different from the recorded corpus of human thought and expression from the previous several millennia is questionable at best.

Did I have a point? If I did, I think I made it. Let's move on.

Actually, let's stop. That took most of the day and now I'm one post further behind where I wanted to be. Result!

I suppose I'd better get on and play another of those demos. Or take a look at that game I'm supposed to be playtesting and see if it has an NDA.

Off I go. Wish me luck. And here's hoping I make a better job of this tomorrow.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the final image, which was generated at NightCafe using Real Cartoon XL v4 from the prompt "Nora Lee and Me starling house the underland line drawing color dark gothic scary". It was the second attempt. the first, where the prompt didn't have the "dark gothic scary" part, turned out way too bright and cheerful, as you'd expect.

Sentou Gakuen: Revival - or - Kitten's Got Claws

Yesterday's post , listing the seven demos I'd picked for this Autumn's Next Fest, ended with an exhortation to myself to "go and get on with it" and for once I took my own advice. By the end of the evening I'd made an attempt at four of the demos, some more successfully than others.

The first I tried was Spire Horizon. That didn't get far. The servers were down. I tried again a few hours later and they were still down. Not the best look for a game trying to pick up some traction from a limited-time event. 

Later in the evening, while I was attempting to update the New World client to New World Aeternum, which I knew would need a full download but which in my case also required me to uninstall and reinstall the game on top of that because the new client wouldn't verify, I saw that Spire Horizon needed an 8GB update too. I did that but by then it was too late to see if the servers were up.  I'll try again later today.

Which brings us to the three demos I was able to play. Usually, I try to play demos right to the end before writing about them (Unless they're the open-ended, kind, of course.) but I haven't finished any of these. I clocked up about an hour in two and forty-five minutes in the third. I may well go back to any or all of them for a second look but what I've seen so far has given me more than enough to talk about. 

Sentou Gakuen: Revival 

After my failure with Spire Horizon, I moved on to this one next because I was very curious about it. As I said in a comment at MassivelyOP yesterday, SG:R is "a visual novel “with MMORPG elements”", whatever the heck that means. 

I couldn't quite figure out what to expect from the description and having played the thing for an hour, I'm still not exactly clear on what it is or wants to be. After a very brief visit to Character Creation, the demo begins with a lengthy introduction in which your character arrives at a very busy train station and walks through some even busier city streets on the way to their new High School, where they're about to start as a transfer student.

This part is quite literally a "visual novel" or at least a visual short story. Scene after scene appears, with lines of text at the bottom giving an internal monologue, describing what you're seeing and feeling. Except you aren't seeing any of it.  

I tried to start a new game to get a screenshot of the text but it seems you can't restart, only continue, so just imagine a caption telling you how incredibly, overwhelmingly busy the street scene above is, people everywhere, lots of noise, cars roaring by...

 

The descriptions continually focus on the chaos and clutter of the environment, attempting to conjure an impression of a bustling city, overfull to the point of chaos. Meanwhile, the pictures show serene scenes of completely empty streets with no-one anywhere to be seen. 

The writing is pretty good. It does a fine job of eliciting the sensations of struggling to find your way in a crowded city you don't know. The artists don't seem to have read any of it.

After quite a bit of that you find your way to some suburban avenues that are actually supposed to be quiet. Except they aren't because that's where the action is. Action so bizarre I could hardly believe I was seeing it. I'll summarize: 

As you walk along the street, you step in something squishy. Looking down, you see it's a half-eaten fish. It belongs to a scraggly black cat. The cat takes this interruption to its meal badly and hisses at you. You try to talk your way out of the confrontation but the cat is not to be persuaded. It attacks. You fight the cat and lose. You end up in the school infirmary, hooked up to an IV drip. 

You and me both, sister!

 

Let me make this clear. It's a cat. Not a giant cat or a magic cat or a cat-like monster. Just a cat. 

You, the player character, are a full-sized, human girl (Or boy, you can choose at character creation.). Your age isn't specified but is most likely mid-to-late teens. 

Fit, healthy teenagers do not lose fights to cats. They might, at the very worst, get badly scratched or bitten, which would be unpleasant and potentially dangerous if not treated, but since no-one gets attacked by a cat in the street, something like that could only happen if the teenager tried to pick the cat up or otherwise interfere with it. 

The cat would not, under any imaginable circumstances, pick a fight with the teenager and even if it did the teenager would not fight back.  And even even if all of that actually, through some indescribably unlikely chain of circumstances, was to happen, the teenager would not lose the fight, let alone "get their ass kicked".

I thought for a while that the game might turn out to have some kind of fantasy element that would make sense of the cat fight but no. It's supposed to be a naturalistic setting or close enough. I'm wondering now if cats in Indonesia behave radically differently from cats in Europe or the UK. Or maybe its cats in Japan, since that's where the game is set. Or maybe people in Indonesia believe Japanese cats are peculiarly aggressive and/or Japanese teenagers exceptionally fragile...

What she said...

Whatever. It happens. And what happens next isn't much less disturbing. 

You wake up with the nurse standing over you only she turns out to be both the school nurse and the biology teacher because that's a thing that happens. Maybe in Indonesia. Or Japan. 

She's very sinister and scary, her bedside manner clearly modeled on Nurse Ratched. Not only is she deeply unsympathetic, she also makes her own medicines. Unlicensed ones that she tells you, almost gleefully, are not sanctioned by any authority but her own. She makes you take one of her concoctions...

And it makes you feel much better. Anticlimax! 

That's it for the Infirmary. At least it for now. But don't worry. You'll be seeing plenty more of that hospital bed. It's basically your respawn point. Every time you get knocked out, which is going to be often unless you learn to fight a lot better than I did, that's where you'll wake up.  

May as well get used to it. You'll be back.

And you'll stay there, too, because every time you lose a fight or get caught doing something you shouldn't be doing (Which sends to the Detention Room instead of the Infirmary but same difference.) you get a timer that prevents you doing much of anything until it runs down. 

I think it may also get longer the more times you "die", too. I wasn't keeping track but I think my timer started out at about a minute and ended up closer to two and half by the time I logged out. I know it felt like a long time to just stare at the screen and not be able to do anything.

After you get out of the Infirmary, the first thing that happens is you walk into a riot. In the corridor outside, kids are fighting over lockers. There are factions, some dressed all in white, some all in black, some in cosplay or regular clothes. One guy is in full plate armor with a sword but its all plastic. 

They fight with weapons including baseball bats. It's anarchy.

All of this, once again, is in the text and only in the text. On the screen all you see is a pristine, entirely empty corridor. Once in a while a single character will appear and stand while what they have to say scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Then they disappear again. Mostly, though, you just stare down that empty hallway into the vanishing point. 

I'm not seeing it. Are you?

And it kinda works? The writing is good enough that I got the full impact of the chaotic, violent scene without needing to see it. Which means I might as well have been reading an actual novel, I suppose.

So how about that gameplay, then? Is there any? 

Quite a lot as it turns out but you really have to go look for it. I'd call this a sandbox, near as makes no difference. Or possibly a sim. There's plenty to do but don't expect anyone to tell you what it is.

I only began to get the idea once the math teacher turned up, threw some chalk around (Which, now that I come to think about it, did sparkle and leave glowing marks on the walls, so maybe there is a fantasy element in play after all...) and told everyone to get to class. 

The next station stop is: Math Class.

I thought it was going to lead to some more structured content but it didn't. Instead I slowly figured out that from this point on you're largely free to roam around the school looking at stuff, fighting other students, picking up anything that's lying around, slipping on banana skins and starting "Investigations".   

Movement took me a while to figure out. It's like an old Text Adventure game. You can go into any of the adjacent rooms. There's a little grid at the bottom right that shows you which is available. 

I found out later you can also go by train to any location. Yes, you can go to a third floor school room by train... It's the game's version of Fast Travel.  Like a lot of things in the game, it's probably best not to think about how it works.

It'd be strange enough if it was an instruction manual but it's a coloring book.

Absolutely none of this is explained, except for the combat, instructions for which come by way of a coloring book featuring Kungfu Komodo given to you by Nurse Eiko. My character was unconvinced by these idiosyncratic teaching methods and I regret to say I didn't pay much attention to them either, which is why I kept ending up in the Infirmary. 

Combat consists of some kind of symbol-matching game but I never figured it out and for once button-mashing wasn't enough. After being decked by a couple of students in the hallways and an angry Salaryman in the street when I went outside for a breath of fresh air, I gave up trying to fight people.

Also, is Salaryman an acceptable term? I seem to remember reading it had gone out of fashion but it's the one the game uses. And whether or not it's acceptable to call a middle-aged man by that term, whatever you call him is it okay for him to punch a teenage girl in the face hard enough to knock her out and leave her needing hospital treatment? 

Just because he's having a bad day? 

Seems harsh. 

Just say yes and don't think about it too hard.

It's the kind of thing that happens all the time in Sentou Gakuen, though. I know that because of those aforementioned "MMORPG elements". 

There's a box you can tick to give permission for your character to be used by the game as an NPC. It defaults to "Yes" so it's an opt-out, really. As far as I can tell, what it means is that everything your character does, like be hit in the face by a Salaryman or falling over after stepping on a banana skin, is going to be reported to every other player, using your character name, either in a window called "Info" or as a small pop-up on screen. 

I'm fairly sure your character can also appear as one of the NPCs other players fight, although I'm not so sure you'd know about it until you read the result in the Info report. I don't think it interrupts your own gameplay. Certainly, if anyone called me out I never noticed. I insulted several of my fellow students to provoke a fight so I apologize if does actually yoink you out of class for an ass-kicking. Not that it's likely to be your ass that gets kicked if it's me that's calling you out.

Besides starting fights with random schoolmates and passers-by, gameplay options come in a pop-up window for each room and include Info, Upgrade, Encounter, Nearby Students and Investigation. Not every room has all of them. Although the tabs are always available, often some of them are empty when checked. You need to check all of them in every room if you want to be sure of not missing any.

See? I told you he punched me in the face!

As well as the four tabs there are also icons that appear at the top of the screen. They do change as you move from room to room. If you mouse over them you get an explanatory tool-tip like "Do something stupid to provoke someone to fight with you." or "Buy ticket". There are quite a lot of locations outside the school grounds - shops, cafes, parks - all with their own potential activities.

You can start an Investigation in any room. Investigations can last an hour or several hours or a whole day. And that's real time. I had two complete overnight but then I couldn't figure out how to see if my investigation had uncovered anything. Maybe you have to go back to the same room to check. I just thought of that!

There are two factions you can join and actions you take affect your standing with both of them. I joined Yami, whose motto is Freedom, Diversity, Laissez-Faire. The other faction is the authoritarian one that goes about the hallways telling everyone else what to do. We hate them.

You can form a Club, which I think is like a guild in other games and you get an apartment, where as far as I can tell you can do absolutely nothing. I think your Club may get a room of its own too. If so, I bet you can't do anything there either.

I logged back in after I'd finished the post to take a screenshot and in five minutes I discovered enough new information to write a whole other post. Like there's a train for fast travel and a shop and a cafe and a whole woodland area with a "dungeon" you have to be Level 15 and get a permission slip from the Principal to enter...

 

All of which, I realize, doesn't really make it clear whether or not I liked the demo. Or whether I had fun playing it. That's because I don't know, either.

I know I was intrigued by it. Fascinated, even. I was certainly never bored. So much of it made little or no sense. It so often went places I wasn't expecting. It made me think. 

And it was well-writen, in perfect English, and the pictures were pretty to look at. So there's all of that, which is a lot. 

I just never had the least feeling I knew what I was doing or even what I was meant to be doing.

It's very likely that had more to do with my lack of familiarity with the kind of game Sentou Gakuen: Revival is than it has to do with the game itself. I'm guessing it's part of a sub-genre that has, until now, completely passed me by, meaning I have no idea what it's intending to achieve or what it expects of me.Meanwhile the developers clearly expect their audience to be extremely familiar with the whole thing and to be happy to get on with it on their own.

Either that or it's just nuts, which is always a possibility. 

I'm beginning to see how this is an MMORPG now. Just a really weird one.

Whichever it is, I'd say the demo is definitely worth a look, especially if you haven't come across this kind of thing before. It kept me fully engaged and entertained for an hour and I only stopped because it felt like I'd taken the whole thing about as far as I could without going and doing some secondary research. I'd pressed all the buttons and found out what they did. (I hadn't. There were more and it turned out I didn't really know what some of the ones I'd found did, either.) but I didn't know why I was pressing them or what I was hoping to achieve by doing it.

I may go back and play some more when I've looked into things a bit. I think I most probably will do that. Or I might just call it quits, add it to the experience pile and move on. There's a lot going on in gaming just now. I'm not sure I have the time for experimenting with unfamiliar genres just now.

More to the point, I've gone on about it for so long here that I don't have time to talk about the other two demos I was going to write about today so that's going to have to wait until next time. Or maybe the time after that.

I'm off to see if Spire Horizon is up yet. Then I ought to check out New World Aeternum. And tomorrow is the start of the Big New Season in Once Human.

It's going to be a busy week.