A Tale Of Two Demos

Next Fest is over for another few months. The timing was bad for me. I didn't get to play many demos. I did, however, manage to spend some time with two I was very interested in; a couple of games that looked very different on the surface but which turned out to be much more alike than I expected.

The two titles are Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades For Dead Spies. The latter, as I explained in an earlier post, is the follow-up to the much-garlanded Disco Elysium, produced by what's left of the same studio, Za/Um, while the former is merely "inspired" by it. 

So, on the basis of the demos alone, which does a better job of continuing the legacy? The original or the copy?

I won't bury the lede. The copy wins by a mile. 

Both the demos are huge. I put just under an hour into Zero Parades and twice that into Esoteric Ebb. In both cases it felt like I'd barely gotten started. In large part that's because they each require an enormous amount of reading and, in the case of ZP, listening. 

Whether the maps are extensive in the demos I can't say. I barely got past the opening areas of either. I suspect there's plenty more I could explore but in each case I felt I'd seen enough, albeit for very different reasons.

With Esoteric Ebb, I didn't want to carry on much further because it's very likely I'll buy the full game. There was an option at the beginning of the demo for progress made there to be carried over and I took it, but I'm not sure it worked. Since I don't want to have to do all that reading again, I think I'll wait until I have the game installed before I carry on (Although I did install the demo on my laptop so I could carry on playing it in bed last night...)

I could buy the game right now if I wanted, of course. It went on sale yesterday. It's been well-received so far, with a Very Positive rating on Steam and a score of 88 on Metacritic. From what I've seen of the demo, that's well deserved.

 

Esoteric Ebb doesn't look much like Disco Elysium in screenshots or sound like it in the description. It's an RPG with a cartoon aesthetic that's very European. It reminds me of any number of strips in publications like Pilote or Metal Hurlante back in the '80s. 

It's also solidly placed in the fantasy genre, even if the specific stripe of fantasy is "post Arcanepunk", whatever the hell that is. It has magic, spells, levels, classes, all the standard RPG trappings, although if you're expecting a standard RPG, you're going to be very disappointed.

Zero Parades, on the other hand, looks almost exactly like Disco Elysium and takes place in a very similar setting. Possibly in the same world, I'm not sure. If you're expecting a faithful sequel you're going to be, once again, very disappointed. 

I was. I was more than willing to cut Za/Um some slack over the controversies that have dominated all news about the studio for the last couple of years. I haven't really been paying that much attention the details, the rights and wrongs of the whole affair. I was just hoping whoever was still using the name would come up with a worthy successor.

On the evidence of the demo, that's not happening. The whole thing felt like a second-rate imitation to me.

Not the visuals, which are up to the standard of the original and look very much like it. Nor, really, the gameplay, which was fine as far as it went. Superficially, Zero Parades is Disco Elysium 2.

The problems start with the writing. It's not bad by any means but it has that awkward sense of trying just a little too hard to be something it doesn't quite know how to be. 

Disco Elysium was truly, genuinely, effortlessly unhinged. That was its glory. By comparison, Zero Parades reads like a bunch of familiar tropes, layered over with a thin veneer of by-the-numbers weirdness. It's like a student review version of a hit show - earnest, eager and unconvincing.

The very premise gave me trouble. Making the game about spies imparts a totally different spin from Disco's police procedural. In DE, you start out as some kind of burned-out detective, stuck with a much slicker partner, working a dead-end case in a no-hope town. In ZP you're some kind of disgraced super-spy, who's just been woken from cryo-sleep and sent on a mission that's gone wrong even before it's begun.

I can see how these are supposed to be equivalents but they really aren't. One is grim, gritty and bleak. The other is exciting, dramatic and adventurous. Still, the settings are equally down-at-heel and the central character equally adrift from the course they're supposed to be following, so that oughtn't to matter so much.

The reason it does matter is that all the info-dump about the political background, so subtle and complex in Disco Elysium, is here thrust at you in wodges of dull jargon that doesn't give much of an impression of nuance below the surface. What was kept to the background in the earlier game is foregrounded here and I found it off-putting, like having to sit through a series of political lectures when all I wanted was to get on with the plot. Or, indeed, find the plot.

Worse than the uninspired writing, though, are the voice-overs. I talked a little about the truly awful narration the last time I wrote about ZP and it absolutely does not improve on further hearing. None of the other voices are anything like as bad but neither is any of them much good. After about half an hour, I couldn't take any more. I switched the voices off altogether. That is not something I do often or feel I need to.

Mechanically, I did like the demo. The controls feel intuitive, it's easy to spot things you ought to investigate and the character animations are very impressive. The game looks good and plays well. Arguably, better than Disco.

 

The problem was, nothing I was doing seemed all that interesting. Long before I decided I'd had enough I'd stopped caring about the political situation people kept talking about and the constant references to spycraft were no more welcome than they are in any game. I just don't find spies a very interesting bunch of people, I guess. As for the mission, it never got started.

It's possible all of the things I'm complaining about are artifacts of the slow-burn design Za/Um is famous for. Disco Elysium took hours and hours to warm up and didn't really get its hooks into me until about twenty hours in. 

But it had something, right from the start. An edge, a sparkle, a glint. A mystery, just out of sight, that I couldn't ignore. On the evidence of the demo, Zero Parades doesn't have anything like that working for it.

Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, very much does. Even though it opens with that exhausted and exhausting cliche, the main character waking up on a slab in the morgue, it grips from the start. 

Mechanically it's very similar to Zero or Disco. You wander about, looking at stuff or talking to people and every time you open a dialog with a person or an object you're set to spend the next few minutes clicking and reading. Seriously, if you aren't the sort of person who's ecstatic at the thought of starting a five-hundred page novel, you'd be better off looking anywhere else than at any game that claims to be inspired by Disco Elysium.

 

There are two huge differences between Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades, though. Firstly, in EE the text is cynical, satirical, witty and frequently genuinely funny. Secondly, there are more than ample opportunities to make choices and choose responses that feel like they might change something.

There are even dice to roll. Where ZP has some indecipherable process involving mental states and meters, none of which seem to be under your direct control, EE has RPG stats and ability checks. And amazingly it manages to integrate those into the process without detracting from the aesthetic.

Another huge advantage EE has over ZP, especially in a demo, is a clear and comprehensible plot. Well, not so much a plot as the starting point for one. And in that way, it's a lot closer to Disco than Zero. 

Disco Elysium begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate a dead body hanging from a tree. Esoteric Ebb begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate an explosion in a tea shop. From there, everything slides in all directions but at least you know what you're supposed to be doing. 

ZP starts with the mission you've been woken up for being terminated and your orders being changed to "Come back to base immediately". From there on, you're on your own. That theoretically gives you complete freedom to act but it mostly left me feeling confused and directionless. In Esoteric Ebb, I always had a purpose, even if mostly I kept getting distracted from pursuing it.

 

Perhaps the most surprising difference between the two demos is the way each explains the political and cultural background that's so important to them both. ZP either layers it in gnomic jargon, presumably intended to feel deep and meaningful but actually just coming across as obtuse and tedious, or reveals it through stilted, unnatural conversations, some no more enjoyable than sharing a bus ride with a conspiracy theorist.

The NPCs in Esoteric Ebb not only have much sprightlier conversational skills, they have much deeper dialog trees that range widely across a range of topics and still manage to keep most of them interesting and relevant. The dialog is far more naturalistic, too, albeit only by the terms of an RPG. The complex social, cultural, religious and political background bleeds through by osmosis. 

Which isn't to say there's no info-dump. There's plenty but it's handled almost wholly through highlighted key-words on which you can, if you wish, click to get a short explanation or gloss. It's like having an internal wiki for the game. I found it useful and enlightening.

I could go on but there's every chance I will, at some point, buy Esoteric Ebb, at which point I'm sure there will be more posts about it here. I wouldn't rule out buying Zero Parades entirely but given I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to finish the demo, that does seem unlikely.

If anyone else has played either of the demos, especially if they've also played Disco Elysium, I'd be interested to hear other opinions, particularly on Zero Parades. Maybe I'm missing something... 

Slightly More Than Zero Expectations

Disco Elysium was always going to be a hard act to follow, even without the drama that overtook development studio Za/Um soon after after the game became a hit. Now, with that stinking fish hanging around the necks of whoever held onto the name, a second success has quite the headwind to overcome, as the comments following the just-released "First fifteen minutes of gameplay" video for the follow-up, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, make all too clear.

Here's a taster of the general sentiment:

"Brought to you by the people who stole Disco Elysium".

watch the NOCLIP documentary on the making of "Disco Elysium" instead

Can’t wait to pirate this

Same shit, but way worse. Good luck trying to sell that lol

Forced, uncool, soulless, and most of all- not disco.

All of which is fine but I'd have to say a video of the first nineteen minutes of Disco Elysium itself probably wouldn't come across as a work of genius, either. It took me quite a while to get into  that one and I wasn't completely sold until on just how good it was until I was maybe halfway through my forty-hour run.

Here's the whole video if you want to make up your own mind.

Having watched the whole thing, I would have to say there are some fairly obvious problems, foremost amongst them the voice acting. There are only two speaking parts in the clip but neither is enjoyable to listen to. One is just dull but the other is very annoying, something that's especially worrying considering it's coming from the character you are going to be playing for upwards of thirty or forty hours. 

For some unfathomable reason they've chosen to give her an abrasive and unconvincing estuary accent, all glottal stops and dropped consonants. I'm not sure how that comes across in other territories but in the UK it comes with a lot of baggage that's quite hard to override. 

For anyone, I would imagine it has a certain lack of charm. It's distracting and misleading given the context and although I did begin to tune it out by the end, my strong feeling was that if I was playing the game I'd have to turn the voice-over off altogether.

I'm not alone in my discomfort, either:

Narrator's voice is fkn terrible, can't imagine a sane person listening to this for 20+ hours

narrators voice is horrible

turn-a! in-a! ... they really f'ed up with voice ... played disco Elysium 3 times and i enjoyed the narration there ... here it sounds just annoying.

If the voice acting is disappointing, at least the writing doesn't seem too bad. I'm not sure there's enough in the video to tell if it's going to end up feeling like a pastiche of the original but I fear it might. The vibe is similar for sure but how far it might diverge from the template it's too soon to say.

One thing that jumped out at me early on was a reference to "The Whole Sick Crew", which appears in the dialog in quotes. The Whole Sick Crew is a phrase I attempted to popularize as a name for my friend-group in the 'eighties, which sadly never caught on. I also used it here as a title for one of the sidebar collections until I thought better of it and changed it to something less potentially offensive.

I'm not claiming to have invented it. Like whoever wrote the in-game dialog, I stole it. For anyone who doesn't recognize it, it's the collective name given to a group of characters in Thomas Pynchon's novel "V". To see it used in a video game is both encouraging and worrying although the fact that it appears to have been used as a throwaway does incline me more to the positive end of the curve.

I also don't know how far along in development the game is but there are a few moments when the voice-over doesn't match the text. Then again, that's true of almost all finished games, presumably because if the actor ad-libs or extemporizes or has a slightly variant script to follow, it's too much trouble and expense either to re-record or get the art department to alter the visuals.

Speaking of the visuals, that looks to be one area where there won't be too many complaints. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Which is a truly terrible title, by the way...) looks like Disco Elysium (A superb title.) but better, somehow. The images look bigger and clearer without being in any way less painterly. I particularly liked the animation on the player-character, which seemed unusually naturalistic.

What little gameplay there is on show in the video looks as though it might be slightly more challenging than the first game. On the other hand, there's such a scripted feeling to the entire fifteen minutes it's very hard to be sure. 

There are counters for things like Anxiety and Delirium that quickly go into the red and require some corrective action but it's impossible to tell if there's anything the player could have done to avoid ramping them up to that extent. It looked to me as though they were going to go critical no matter what, possibly for plot reasons.

Anyway, I'm not about to start reviewing the game on the basis of a video of someone else playing the first quarter of an hour. Even though I was obviously starting to do just that...

No, what I am going to do is review the demo, which isn't available yet but soon will be. It's going to be part of the next Steam Next Fest, which runs from 23 February to 2 March. It includes "two quests...various side stories... and some of the quirky and questionable characters..."

I do already have the game on my Wishlist although, like everyone else, I am somewhat dubious about the provenance and suspicious of the circumstances that brought it into being. I'm hoping the demo will be enough to make it clear whether the people that retained the name also kept the talent. 

We could certainly do with another RPG as good as Disco Elysium. Whether this is it remains to be seen. 

Once More, With Filling

A genuine Friday Grab-Bag this week, I think. Not some music or TV post trying to pass. The plan is to keep them all short but I reserve the right to extend and also repeat, as in come back another time with a full post. I might be glad of a few of these topics if next week's slow for news.

Renewal of Interest

First up, a return to EverQuest II. Yes, well, I never actually left, of course. I just haven't been playing all that much for a few weeks. Yesterday's EQ-oriented post reminded me of a couple of things. Firstly, that I still really enjoy both the EverQuest games and secondly that I'm still paying for them. 

Not only do I have an annual All Access subscription, the only one I've kept for any publisher, but I also bought the latest EQII expansion, Renewal of Ro, back in December. By this point, I'd normally have completed both the Adventure and Tradeskill storylines on several characters and be pretty much done until the next big update. Not so this year. I need to get back to it if I'm going to get my money's-worth.

As of yesterday, I was only about halfway through the Adventure timeline on my first character and I hadn't even started the Tradeskill signature on any of my half-dozen max-level crafters. The Tradeskill questline is usually much faster to complete as well as more relaxing and less demanding so on my return I decided to begin there instead of picking up where I left off with my Berserker. He was just about to go into a solo dungeon last time I played him. That was also why I stopped. 

Crafting my way to success feels a lot more like fun just now. I finished the Tradeskill line this morning. I guess it took me a couple of hours. Technically, I haven't quite finished it yet because I need to do fifteen of the repeatable public research missions to unlock flying on my Sage, the character I chose to go first, but as far as storyline goes, I'm done. And it was great.

As a player of multiple characters in EQII, I'd happily swap the long Adventure questline, which will probably take me fifteen hours or so at least, for the much shorter Tradeskill version.  I could take all my characters through the craft quest it in around about the same time as one adventurer and it would be more fun, too. 

Back to Collage

Remember Disco Elysium? It was pretty good to begin with and it gets better all the time because Za/Um can't seem to leave it alone. They keep tinkering with it, adding new bits and pieces, to the point where a second run is starting to tempt even me, someone who generally can't be bothered to play through games twice to see what would happen if I made different choices.

That said, the latest update doesn't ask that I play the game at all. It's a typically left-field idea from the developers called Collage Mode, which "grants you full access to characters, environments and props from the game, along with filters and frames". 

What it does is allow you to select character models, backgrounds and filters from a menu, then slap them all together however you like. You can also give the characters dialog of your own and frame the whole lot to look like a set-piece suitable for illustrating a blog post or a magazine article. I imagine you could make comic strips or even a graphic novel if you had the patience.

I spotted it last night, just before I logged out of Steam and couldn't resist fiddling around with it for half an hour. The new mode is free to to anyone who owns the game, which itself is on sale for a massive 75% off right now. If you don't have it in your Steam library, you should probably go do something about that. 

Is it Spring already?

Ah, well now. That's the question, isn't it? As the Met Office explains "How you define the first day of spring depends on whether you are referring to the astronomical or meteorological spring". Astronomical Spring begins on March 20th but Metereological Spring started over two weeks ago, back on March 1st.

Valve clearly can't make its mind up because Steam's first ever Spring Sale opened yesterday, which is neither one thing nor the other. As the video, which acknowledges the confusion, explains, the sale runs until March 23rd, which is indisputably Spring, however you count it.

I had a quick skim through the offers this morning. There seem to be a lot of bargains. I might even buy something. Spring is possibly the worst time to start selling games, though, wouldn't you think? Just when the weather's clearing up and the nights are getting lighter. That's probably why Steam has never done a Spring Sale before. 

Game Over!

Speaking of buying games on Steam, I actually finished one of the ones I bought last month. Nine Noir Lives took me just over seventeen hours by Steam's count, although you can knock a couple off for the times I left the game idling while I had tea or took the dog out. It also crashed on me twice, something I can hardly remember any point and click adventure ever doing, and since it only seems to autosave when you quit to the menu, I had to redo a substantial amount of dialog both times, adding to the running time.

I'll probably do a whole post about this one and all the other noirish adventure games featuring anthropomorphic animals I've played. It's getting to be a lot and I'm starting to wonder why it's such a popular sub-genre, at least with indie developers. 

 

For now, I'll just say that I enjoyed the game, for the most part. The humor can be hit or miss but I found it generally more amusing than not. The voice acting can be overly arch on occasion but that's hardly inappropriate given the setting. Mostly the lines are well-written and land solidly.

Visually it's pleasing in the main but the cut scenes have a weirdly unfinished feel to them, almost as though they're placeholders waiting for the real artist to come along and finish things up.

Mechanically, I found the puzzles fair enough. There were a few occasions where I knew what to do but couldn't figure out how to do it, which I much prefer to having no clue at all. I used a walkthrough on several occasions but not for much more than a nudge in the right direction.  

The real strength of the game is the characters, all of whom are strongly individuated. If most of them are one trick ponies, which they are, then at least it's generally a good trick. I particularly liked the existential Russian bouncer and the effete Henchtigers but every character had something going for them.

All in all, I'd firmly recommend Nine Lives Noir to afficionados of the furry detective point&click and mildly to anyone else.

Finish With A Song

It's just as well I wasn't relying on a roundup of what I've been listening to this week to fill my Friday posting quota. I've earmarked precisely two songs for consideration since the last time I posted. It's not that I haven't been listening to a bunch of new tunes; it's just that none of them have been anything special.

This is, though. It's the third single from Lana del Rey's upcoming album, Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. Added to the first two, the title track and the sublime A&W, it makes the strongest imaginable case for Lana's ninth album being yet another classic, her fourth such in a sequence beginning with the monumental Norman Fucking Rockwell. She's already my favorite songwriter and performer of the 21st century and if she carries on like this she's going to end up being my favorite of all time. 

The new song's called The Grants and it's about family, Elizabeth Grant being Lana's birth name. I'm guessing that's her dad, Rob Grant, on piano, although the surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry that's already up for the track doesn't mention it. It'd be a shame if it wasn't, though, wouldn't it?

That's Friday. I'm out of here.

Somehow The VItal Connection Is Made

Even before I get started, let me have a good old grumble. I like Blogger as a platform. It suits me. I'm used to it. I could do with a little more flexibility in layout but I can live with what I'm given. There's just one thing about Blogger I really can't stand.

Somehow, someone thought it was a good idea to set a combination of keys that could instantly wipe everything you've written. As though it never existed. 

I'm not saying it was anyone at Blogger or even anyone at Google. It might have been someone at Microsoft. Let's say it was. Blaming Bill Gates is a thing these days, isn't it? It could even have been someone from Firefox. That's the browser I use when I'm blogging.

Whoever it was, it's Blogger I blame. They should know people who use their platform bumble. Anyone who knows what they're doing is on Wordpress. Everyone knows that. Someone at Blogger should have come up with a better way to stop in-progress drafts from vanishing into the ether. Never to be seen again. And I mean never.

When something goes this way it seems to be gone for good. None of the many suggested ways of recovering lost data can bring it back. I've tried them all. Well, all the free ones. That I can understand.

It doesn't happen often (thank God). In fact, I can only remember it ever happening to me twice in nearly ten years, although that both times were in the last six months suggests it might be a growing problem. As you can probably guess, it just happened to me now. Fortunately I'd only written about four or five paragraphs. Last time it happened it was pretty much a whole damn post.

There is one way to avoid it happening. Okay, two ways. Three, if you count writing the posts in a separate text editor of some kind , although that seems like a backwards step to me. 

The main one would be not to press that combination of keys in the first place. It would work, too. If I knew which combination of keys it was I'd do that. 

Yeah, no I wouldn't. It's not like I meant to press them in the first place.

The other is to remember to open a Preview as soon as you start typing. If you somehow manage to blank the draft the preview will still be there in another tab of your browser and you can laboriously screenshot it and reconstruct the post from static images. I did that once. I remember writing about it.

There. That's got that off my chest. Back to the post I was going to write. Only now it's going to be shorter. Shorter-tempered too, likely as not.

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I saw this morning the upcoming Final Cut version of Disco Elysium isn't going to get a classification from the Australian Classification Board. That's not too surprising. It doesn't take much to trigger the sensibilities of the ACB. Ironically. I sometimes wonder if anyone on that board has ever met an Australian.

They might be doing the Aussie Disco fans a favor. Although there are a few new quests and some other tweaks, the main addition is loads more voiceover, just about the last thing I thought the game was lacking when I played it.

Steam's been asking me to for permission to update the game for a while. I'm guessing that would move me onto the final version. Those who already own the PC version are entitled to the update for free, I believe. 

That's why I've been scrupulously avoiding it. I would like to play again some day and I'd prefer to do it with the minimum of over-enthusiastic people just throwing themselves into their parts.

No, if it's acting we're talking about, how about going the whole hog? I noticed from the Gamesindustry.biz post that there's a Disco Elysium TV series in the works. According to a Variety report from last year, it's being produced by the guy behind the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Make of that what you will. 

The Variety article also told me another thing I didn't know: Disco Elysium is based on a novel, namely Robert Kurvitz’s “Sacred and Terrible Air”, published in 2013 as “Püha ja õudne lõhn”. 

I'd like to read that. Unfortunately it was published in Estonia. In Estonian. 

Reddit says there's an English translation on the way.  Steam firms that up: "It is currently in the process of being translated to English. Robert has been working hard to get Disco Elysium finished but once we have launched, he’ll be able to return to the book. Expect it in the second half of 2020."

That didn't happen but i imagine we can all guess why. So the same guy who wrote the book is also lead designer and writer on the game. Further investigation shows the whole thing is based on Kurvitz's tabletop roleplaying campaign. Because of course it is. Aren't they all?

The Escapist has a good article on the provenance of the game and the philosophy of its creators. Some choice quotes from Robert Kurvitz: "The two biggest favors anyone’s ever done me in my life are the political education from Estonian punk bands and what (lead designer and writer) Chris Avellone did with Planescape: Torment". and "We have an insanely ambitious list of projects we want to make in the Elysium setting. The last one I want to make, when I’m 50 or 60".

Planescape:Torment is a game that constantly turns up as both a benchmark and a touchstone for everything ambitious in crpgs. I hated it. No, that's not fair. I never got far enough in to hate it. I gave up after about an hour. Horrible, horrible game. Or so I remember it. I guess I should probably give it another try.

On the longevity of the project, well, if it happens it'll be after my time. I'll settle for the TV show. And a sequel to the game. There's going to be one, of course: Kurvitz "has plans for an expansion and full sequel for Disco Elysium".

Maybe this flag has something to do with that. PCGamer thinks so. Fun to speculate.

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As originally conceived this whole post was going to rumble confusingly between meta-musings on the nature of hyperlinking, the origins and spin-offs of Disco Elysium and Lana del Rey's new album Chemtrails Over The Country Club, which I had delivered to my door this morning along with a bottle of black mould remover and a new duvet. 

These things are unconnected. Everything is connected.

By the time my hard copy appeared in my recycling bin (it passes for a letterbox in times of pandemic), and even though I'd pre-ordered to be sure I'd get it on day of release, I'd already managed to read a full review. More jarringly, the review came complete with click-throughs to the whole album, which I steeled myself to ignore. 

I was going to link to the links so those who might still be trying to maintain a veneer of skepticism over Lana's genius could test their no doubt wavering resolve only... they're gone. That's kind of weird. 

I mean, I thought it was pretty weird the whole album was there to listen to for free on day of release to begin with but it's even weirder now it's disappeared. Maybe someone at Pitchfork has fat fingers, too. Maybe they pressed the wrong key combo. I know how that goes.

The review itself looks pretty good, by which I mean it says things I agree with. In general. In specifics I can't compare. My dedication is such that I came here to write this first. I haven't listened to the album right through yet. They score at Pitchfork, which is crass but compelling. A solid 7.5 is strong enough after Norman Fucking Rockwell's 9.4, I guess. 

I notice they don't talk much about what the songs sound like. Pitchfork reviews rarely do. That'd be like dancing about architecture, wouldn't it? A lot safer to stick to analyzing the lyrics.

The whole focus on the sheer Americanism of the del Rey project struck me as true but it's so much bigger than that. Lana may be "truly American—specifically American" but that's because she's becoming the great chronicler of the American Century, the 20th (which everyone knows didn't end in 1999). Her references, while rooted in American culture, speak to the way that culture dominated everything for all of our lifetimes. 

Until, perhaps, now. The Pitchfork piece on Chemtrails links to both the online magazine's own, excellent, review of the monumental Norman Fucking Rockwell but also to another highly insightful take on that landmark recording from The Atlantic. 

As the piece says of Lana's breathtaking "The Greatest", "It’s an epitaph" and it is. Thing is, Atlantic takes it to be an epitaph for America. I took it to be something more. 

That's the problem with masterpieces, isn't it? You either have to top them or you have to stop.  But no-one ever does stop, do they? And we wouldn't want them to.

Where do you go after the end of the world, anyway? On, of course.

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See, I would have tied it all together if it hadn't been for that pesky Blogger! Or I think I would. I guess we'll never know.

Happy, As A Clam!

 

When I anounced my intention to steer this blog away from its unwritten mission statement - "all mmorpgs, all the time" - I never meant to replace the online with the offline, the massively multiple with the single-player or the rpg with point-and-click. Nor did I imagine I'd find myself running a showcase for every micro-game, demo and introductory prologue available for free on Steam. 

That's what seems to have happened, though. Oh, well. 

It doesn't help that Steam is one of those annoying 21st century cliches, the dumb AI. It sits there humming to itself, noticing everything but understanding nothing. The more of these fragments I download, the more it suggests. It doesn't seem to pay attention to whether I spend any time playing them or whether I uninstall them as fast as I can. Steam believes in love at first sight. If you clicked, you must have clicked.

Of course, I'm not helping myself. Or Steam. The AI keeps asking me what I think of things and I keep refusing to answer. If it'd only give me a "None of your damn business" button I'd click that all the time.

Hey! You know what this is? It's a bit for my stand-up routine. Or it could be. I could have used it in the Steam freebie I played today, a game called Clam Man 2: Open Mic, "a stand-up comedy RPG adventure" or, if you will, "...a combatless, narrative RPG". Not a promising premise, perhaps, but let's find out. Maybe it won't be toe-curlingly embarassing after all.

I saw it on the list of free games Steam's AI likes to show me now it's realized how cheap I am. Mostly I mouseover and move on but the curious title was enough to get me to click through. 

On the store page I noted the "Very Positive" rating so I scrolled down to check out the reviews. I was already halfway minded to give the thing a try anyway. After all, as the shill said, "Give the game a shot! It's free! You've got nothing to lose!". 

What swung the decision was the way the reviews kept comparing Clam Man 2 to Disco Elysium. 

"I liked Disco Elysium for a lot of reasons and I think this game took inspiration from it."

"Oh, how I wish that more games would be inspired by Disco Elysium! Clam Man 2 does a splendid job of using that type of RPG gameplay formula."

"It's like Disco Elysium meets Kingdom of Loathing."

"Glad to see games in the style of Disco Elysium."

"It reminds me of a light hearted, fishy Disco Elysium."

"Bikini Elysium basically."

Wait, what? Bikini Elysium?

There are over two hundred and fifty reviews and it seems like half of them make the same comparison. And honestly, having played it, I'm surprised it's not more. It may not look much like Disco Elysium but it sure as heck plays like it.

Which is odd. Because Disco Elysium is bleak, alienating and disturbing while Clam Man 2 is warm, funny and relatable. 

Which is odder still. Because Clam Man really is a clam, man, and all the characters are fish. Or shellfish. Or arthropods. And the whole game takes place underwater

That's why one of your four stats is Aquamobility. The other three are Improv, Self-Awareness and Detection. Having played Disco Elysium I knew what was up with the stats as soon as the combined tutorial and character creation section got going but I'm pleased to say Clam Man 2 does a much better job of introducing and explaining its core concepts and mechanics than Disco does. It doesn't just leave you to flounder. (Don't forget to tip your waitress. I'll be here all week).

One very significant way in which CM2 differs from DE is that those four starting stats are all you get. There aren't any secondary stats introduced during gameplay and you don't have gear slots to kit yourself out with clothes and accessories that boost your skills. 

At least, not in this free Prologue, you don't. I'd hope that might change in the full version of the game because being able to tweak your build by wearing different insane costume combos or learning abstruse and surreal life-lessons was a big part of what made Disco Elysium such fun to play.

To counter that absence, Clam Man 2 (I have to keep adding the numeral for clarity. Apparently there really is a Clam Man 1. Or just Clam Man, I guess) comes with a visual trick that I found almost ridiculously effective and affecting. A red D20.

That's an actual 3D model of a die in a purely two-dimensional game. Two-and-half. Whatever. When there's a significant roll the big red die clunks down and bounces across the screen in an entirely convincing fashion. 

The suspense as it teeters on edge before toppling one way or the other is excruciating. I've always loved dice rolls in RPGs. I enjoyed the way Disco Elysium displayed them but this takes it to a whole 'nother level.

The underlying premise of what I'm guessing we're now calling Disco games is an open acknowledgment, a celebration even, of their rpg heritage. Instead of burying the randomization in the deep background they bring it into the spotlight. Clam Man 2 goes that step further and makes it the star of the show.

Oh, wait, no. That's you! You're the star of the show. Or you will be if you can just come up with three jokes ("Bits. We call them bits") that work. The plot takes you from your mundane job behind a desk at Snacky Bay Prime Mayonnaise ("What is it you do there?") to fame and fortune on stage. 

Yeah, not really. More like open mic night at the comedy club that just opened in the basement of your office building. The one no-one even knows is there yet. So before you even get to perform, how's about going out and doing some unpaid promo? And while you're at it, see if you can come up with some material. It's not like you know any jokes, now, is it?

That's the plot. It's also the gameplay. Except, just like in Disco Elysium, one thing tends to lead to another to the point where it's hard to remember what the point even was. 

My favorite part was running letters between a five-year old child and her estranged father. I found him hiding in a mailbox. Got a good bit out of that one. Then there was the Awkwardness Scale. Some recognition laughs there. The food war in my fridge was spectacular but I ended up not using it. I can try it out next time. I'm going to need new material.

The demo, prologue, free chapter, call it what you will, took me about two hours to finish. It has a start, a middle and an end. It works as a short standalone but in it you can also see the shape of the game to come.

Even though I finished what I set out to do there seemed to be a lot of loose ends left untied. You only need three jokes to get up on stage. I had four and I could have had several more. I still had unfinished quests left over (yes, they do call them quests) and most quests seem to reward ideas for jokes. I'm guessing there were several side-stories I didn't get to see so there's some replayability.

I'd want to see them, too. The writing is good. I wouldn't call it great but then I think I'm picky. I wouldn't call Disco Elysium's writing "great" either. Another thing the two games share is a predeliction for academic theorizing. I like it but I can see how it wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

The only time I thought the writing fell down was with the on-stage routine routines themselves. My bits went over with the audience but they sure wouldn't have made me laugh. I appreciate comedy is a matter of taste, something the game goes out of its way to emphasize, but I couldn't see why anyone would find some of Clam Man's observational asides amusing. At times, I thought he sounded more like a sociology professor than a stand-up comedian.

The visuals are strong. Maybe too strong. It took me quite a while to warm to them. I did in the end but I have to say that anthropomorphized crustaceans are always going to be something of a hard shell. I mean sell. 

While the world and the characters look nothing whatsoever like anything in Disco Elysium, the UI, specifically the communication interface, is incredibly reminiscent. It's hard to say just why text works but this really does. It's a positive joy to read and interact with.

As for the music, what there is of it is good, but someone really needs to write more. Two hours listening to what amounts to a pastiche of a few bars of the guitar figure from Pale Blue Eyes is a little much, even for a Velvets nut like me.

Minor quibbles aside, Clam Man 2: Open Mic is good. Possibly very good although I'd reserve judgment on just how stressful it might be. I did find some of the dice rolls nerve-wracking and the final on-stage performance, which the full game will have you repeating night after night with an entirely new routine each time, could end up being nightmare fuel.

If you can hack the pressure, I'd strongly recommend anyone who played and enjoyed Disco Elysium to check it out and it would be ideal for anyone who considered trying DE but wasn't sure they wanted to pay the entrance fee. Also anyone who likes fish and jokes, although not jokes about fish, of which there are mercifully few.

If you want those, you're going to have to go some plaice else. 

Yeah, that doesn't work. 

Edna? Wanna come workshop it with me?

Amateur Cartography

I have a habit of hammering out comments on blogs without necessarily having read the rest of the thread. I don't always do it, or even mostly, but there are times when I read the post, have an immediate reaction, open the comment field and have at it. Then I post the comment, read it back and only then read what other people have said.

Sometimes that means I find I've repeated a point someone else has made. Sometimes another comment adds information or insight that makes me wish I'd read it before I sounded off. Most times, though, it doesn't really affect anything. I'd have made the same comment either way.

Once in a while, though, something strange and unpredictable happens. This morning I made the following reply to a post at Later Levels entitled "Taking notes: keeping records during video games":

"I hugely prefer the game to do it for me, for two reasons. Firstly, as you say, it makes for a more relaxed experience for the player. Much more importantly, though, in almost all adventure or roleplaying games I see myself as the director not the actor. It’s my character (or the protagonist if it's a named character) who inhabits the gameworld. I’m merely facilitating their explorations. They have skills that are not my skills and knowledge that is not my knowledge. I can direct them but it’s they who have to act. Accordingly, it’s they who need to make notes, not me."

 When I read it back after I'd posted it, I spoted this comment by Quietschisto immediately preceding what I'd written:

"Taking notes is half the fun of mystery games! Automated notebooks etc. are a bit of a turn-off for me, as it takes away player agency. When confronted with a narrative focusing on a central mystery, the player character becomes secondary, it’s all about the player himself putting together pieces of the puzzle, and anything the main character does automatically can spoil something. What if the player came to a different conclusion? Following a wrong lead is part of the game, and when done correctly, can be a lot of fun. So, go Team Manual Notes!"

There could scarcely be a starker encapsulation of the difference between two sets of expectations of the same source material. The waters are muddied slightly because the nominal subject here is adventure or mystery rather than roleplaying but the genres share such an extensive hinterland these days I don't feel it's much of a stretch to treat them as variants rather than separate entities.

 

I've held roughly the same position since I first began playing tabletop rpgs in the early nineteen-eighties. When I was introduced to the concept and set about creating a character of my own I never felt that character was my avatar (not that we ever used that word back then). I felt I was the author or the director but never the actor.

In any situation the question was never "what am I going to do?" but "what is my character going to do?". Always at one remove. It made perfect sense to me. After all, I don't know how to cast spells or wield a battle-axe. I couldn't climb a cliff or ford a river in flood. If I lifted my torch to light a cave and saw an eight-foot tall spider looking back at me I'd probably have a heart attack and if I didn't I'd run like hell in the opposite direction.

It's always my character who has skills and aptitudes and abilities and attitudes that allows them to survive in these situations, not me. And the games enable that by use of various statistics and numbers and rules. The more the game can facilitate that process, the better.

I have never liked making maps or keeping written records while gaming. It's sometimes a necessary chore but I've always seen it as a shortcoming of technology. If making maps is a part of gameplay, my character should have cartography skill and checks should come from that. When passed, the game should provide appropriate mapping.

That didn't happen much in the early days of mmorpgs but my response wasn't to make maps of my own. Instead, like most people, I searched around until I found someone who liked doing that sort of thing and used theirs. Most people presumably felt that way because there was a whole publishing industry based around printed maps. 

 

One of the handful of websites all EverQuest players had bookmarked was EQ Atlas. Most of us probably had a folder next to our 14" CRT monitors with all the maps we thought we'd need neatly printed and filed. Another was Allakhazam, where you'd find all the nitpicking details of every quest, none of which the game documented for you.

As time went on, EverQuest, like almost every other mmorpg, acquired in-game maps and in-game quest journals and all kinds of accoutrements to make it so the player didn't have to do the grunt work any more. And for most of us it was grunt work. We'd all been relying on the existence of a relative handful of people who actually enjoyed making lists and drawing maps. And those people, because it was fun for them, kept on doing it. But the rest of us didn't have to and we were glad.

Except I wanted more than that. I wanted it to be my characters who had the combat skills, not me. I wanted the outcome of fights to be decided by dice-rolls not by how fast I could twitch my fingers. And, yes, I wanted the characters I played who had lower stats to be disadvantaged materially in game as a result. It was supposed to work both ways. You shouldn't be able to compensate for your characters low dexterity by dint of youe own nimble fingers.

I used to argue that case in game, not infrequently. It was rarely well-received. Most people thought they were playing a game not watching their characters living a life. And, ironically, the more the games did to take the load off the players, the less important the characters became and the more the games became about player skill.

It wore me down like water on a rock, smoothed away away the jagged edges but left the core. I don't mention it in chat any more and I accept that much of what my charactesr do in game will be limited by my skills not theirs. But it didn't change my basic belief: it's not about me, it's about my character. 

 

The result is all games mean less than they did. They've become just that: games. Somehow, they used to be more than that.

In mmorpgs it doesn't matter all that much. It's a confused and confusing medium anyway, the personal mixed inextricably with the social, other people's enjoyment affected by your knowledge, ability and skill. Once you start playing team games it can't just be all about you any more. And once you've learned the habit it carries over even when you're playing alone. 

Single-player rpgs and character-based adventures and mysteries are different. There, it's the player, the character and the game. No-one else's feelings or wishes to consider. You can cheat as hard as you like and you'll only be cheating yourself. Use walkthroughs, save-scum, keep rolling the stats until you get the ones you want. Even download third-party hacks that break the whole game. Go ahead, knock yourself out, no-one else knows and if they did they wouldn't care.

If you're going to play it straight, though, it comes back to the perspective split. Who's looking at the world? You? Your character? The two of you together? The first feels mechanistic, the second is impractical. It has to be both, doesn't it. But in what proportion and with what precedence?

This has much to do with what I liked about my time in Revachol and also what I didn't. More than most games I've played it goes hard on the concepts of character skills and knowledge. The protagonist can do things you never could, knows things you never will, feels things you just can't. He does it in context and without your assistance. He has hunches, feelings, insights. He pulls off feats you wouldn't have thought him capable. Him, neither.

 

If he did this all on his own Disco Elysium wouldn't be a game. It would be a peculiarly animated movie. But you direct him. You build up and tear down his personality. You dress him in costume. You give him motivation. I've rarely felt the role of director a more apt metaphor than here. At times it's scarcely a metaphor at all.

I said at one point that I felt Disco Elysium worked best as a game. My views on its weakness as a narrative have moderated but I don't want to walk that back. In fact I think I'll walk it forward. It plays as I feel a video game should, if it aspires to be something more than a game. For once, most unusually, I didn't find myself thinking here was a story I'd enjoy more told in another medium. As a movie perhaps or a novel. For once the gamelike elements seem integrated, utilized, not appended or indulged.

One of the great strengths of the design is that the gameworld retains an intense, brooding sense of mystery while at the same time not expecting the player to go searching every nook and cranny for enlightenment. Everything that can be revealed is highlighted for you. Everything, that is, the character is able to perceive. 

The character's perceptions are modified by many factors: items, thoughts, skills, attributes. Only through a combination of these does he see his world. But you see him and there's your agency. You wind him up and set him down and hope he performs.

It's a compromise. Technology hasn't yet reached the level where we can insert ourselves into worlds nor yet change our perceptions to match another's. We're stuck for now with smeared lenses and thick gloves, trying to squint the world clear while we fumble at the controls. But this feels a little cleaner, a little closer. If I screw up my eyes I can almost see the future.

It's a future where I won't be keeping notes. Or drawing maps.

Last Days Of Disco

Well, that was an anticlimax. Is what I said last night when I finished Disco Elysium and sat back to watch the credits roll. Seriously, guys? That's it?

According to Steam the whole thing took me thirty-eight hours but you can knock three off for the time I left the game open in the background while I was writing a post about it, so call it thirty-five in total. I hadn't looked to see how long it had taken other people but that's about half what I was expecting.

I had noticed the pacing was off. For the first couple of dozen hours my journal was stuffed with half-completed tasks. I kept adding more. It seemed like I was never going to get on top of my caseload. 

Then, quite suddenly, a whole slew of investigations and side quests sorted themselves out, ticked themselves off and left me with just the bare bones of the main storyline to consider. 

At one point I ran out of things to do altogether. Time moves very slowly if you're not active. I'm not even sure it moves at all. I found myself visiting the bookstore to buy a book just to pass the time. I read it cover to cover half a dozen times just waiting for night to fall.

After that, things began moving again. Fast. Big, set-piece events arrived, one after another. There was a climactic moment where I thought the game had ended with my character's death, but no. On we went, options narrowing, until...

Everything stopped. Murder solved. Loose ends tied. Everyone into the car and back to headquarters, only there wasn't even a car. Just Game Over. 

Jarring doesn't cover it. Disappointing, frustrating, lazy, half-assed... all of those. It's conceivable the effect was intentional but if so I'd have to question the commercial wisdom of building expectations so high only to let them to collapse at the climax.

It's a difficult thing to discuss, of course, and for two reasons. There's the obvious issue of spoilers. I worked very hard not to learn anything about the game before or while I played it and I don't imagine anyone would thank me for tossing out unsolicited reveals. Even now I'm loathe to go look anything up because I'm acutely aware that another run-through might be very different. 

That's the other issue. In a game that relies so heavily on branching storylines, any detailed discussion even between people who've played it to the end is going to involve a great deal of unshared information. I'm not a great one for replaying narrative-driven games but the first thing I wanted to do when I finished Disco Elysium was start over and try again.

 

Sticking to spoiler-free generalities, I was expecting something more numinous. Much mention is made thoughout of cosmic themes. There's a fin de siecle feel to the world, an attenuated ennui, stretched to encompass the end not just of the century or even the millennium but of time itself. Even, perhaps, of existence.

Given the relentless emphasis on mysterious, arcane, unseen forces it came as more than a mild let-down to find that in fact all I'd been doing was solving a near-motiveless murder and that all the shadows following me were mundane ghosts from my immediate past. And by ghosts I mean bad relationships and poor life choices.

The capper - and this is a spoiler, albeit one of the most dismal you're likely to see - was the disclosure that, in my much-ballyhooed former, forgotten life I'd been... a high-school gym teacher. It was at this point I realized the writers must be taking the piss.

As I mentioned in my first impressions piece, I'd made a snap decision, almost immediately after at character creation, to play my character as straight-edge as possible. No drink, no drugs, no rock 'n' roll attitude. Just the facts, ma'am. Just doing my job.

I didn't entirely manage to keep that up. I never took a drink, never smoked a cigarette, never ingested a substance other than the basic equivalents of mana and hit point potions. I did flirt briefly with the idea of being a superstar but I gave that up early on.

Whenever there was the chance to "Say Nothing" that's just what I did. If anyone tried to get me take sides I'd tell them I had no opinion or emphasize I was just there to solve the crime.

After a time voices in the game and occasionally the game itself began commenting on how boring I was. There were digs about how I'd always pick the option that didn't really answer the question: Option D - "None of the above".  

There are twenty-five achievements in the game. I got seven of them, including "The World's Most Laughable Centrist", "Goodest of the Good Cops" and "Literally the Sorriest Cop on Earth". I'm not convinced any of those is meant as a compliment.

I did also get "Hyperstellar Law Official" for picking seven "deranged superstar lines" and "Il Coppo del'Arte" for choosing five things an "Art Cop" might say but in both cases I quickly changed direction when I realized I was in danger of becoming interesting. 

What I'm left wondering is how much those conscious, role-playing decisions controlled the eventual direction of the game I played. It seemed to me that the longer I went on, the less original and outrageous the game became. By around two-thirds of the way through it really could have been just about any well-made murder mystery. It would still be a very fine game by any standards but groundbreaking? Definitely not.

 

And I have to suspect I made that happen. I wanted my character to be boring and I got what I asked for. And along with a boring character I got a boring ending. Unless and until I play through the game again as a reckless, self-aggrandizing speedfreak or a depressive, incompetent lush, just two of the personalities the game seemed keen I should try, I don't suppose I'll know. 

The idea that I might spend another thirty-five hours cannon-balling around Revachol, taking drugs, getting into fights, making lunatic claims and ignoring every kind of precedent and protocol, only to end up finding the result is just the same - a murderer caught, case closed, everyone back to the station - is a risk I'm not sure I'm prepared to take. I could go watch some other peoples' play-throughs on YouTube or read some of the commentary I'm sure must exist. But that would defeat the object, wouldn't it? Assuming the object is to be entertained and enlightened rather than merely informed.

Outside of the metagame I have some smaller problems with the process. The nearer games like this approach some kind of existential meaning, the more glaring become the inconsistencies of the form. In some ways the quarter of Martinaise feels crunchingly real but as hour after hour went by I found it harder and harder to overlook the unnatural state of stasis that prevailed there. 

It's one thing for a shopkeeper or cafe manager always to be at the counter but for a woman to spend five days smoking on an open rooftop, never moving even when it rains or snows? In Revachol no-one feels the cold or the passage of time, even though once in a while they might mention feeling either or both. But they don't act on it. A lorry driver stands in the street, staring at nothing, day after day after day. A woman waits on a boat. A man leans on a pillar. Another balances on a railing. Lucky the minor character who gets to sit down.

There has to be a better way to facilitate player agency while also maintaining a sense of reality. Or there does if you want players to feel they're doing more than playing a game. The problem Disco Elysium has here is that it does some things so very well (when NPCs do interact with their environment - just getting up from a chair or using a keyboard - it may be the best I've ever seen) that the things it does just in exactly the same way all other games do stand out as wrong.

I'm also highly suspicious of some of the self-referential writing and the occasional winking at the fourth wall. I was willing to give all the stuff about role-playing games in a role-playing game a pass when I thought it was going somewhere but in my playthrough it went nowhere at all, which made it feel false. Perhaps in another run that won't be the case but should games be predicated on the expectation they'll be replayed? 

Perhaps they should. Probably they should. In essence it would be a reason to tell stories this way rather than another. There will, inevitably, be a lot of failures that way, though. We're back to the concept of the "good ending" once again, only on methamphetamine. 

I could write a lot about Disco Elysium. If I play it again I'll write more. It's an annoying game in that it demands to be discussed at inordinate length and in extraordinary detail but the options for doing so are necessarily limited. It needs a group of people who've all played it to sit around afterwards and argue it out over drinks until the sun comes up or the bar closes, whichever comes first.

To sum up, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a fine game and I unreservedly recommend it. It's also intensely irritating for the reasons I've given and a whole lot more I haven't mentioned. 

I feel quite pleased with myself for playing from start to finish without using walkthroughs of any kind other than a couple of times when I thought the game might have bugged out on me and I had to check if that was true. It wasn't. 

 

I'm also very pleased with myself for completing the whole thing without dying. Apart from that one moment, when I thought I'd been fatally shot but apparently it was just a flesh wound, I never even felt I was in any real danger. That's what happens if you always pick the most boring option, I guess, but it's worth it to get the"this really happened" sensation a single-threaded run always accords.

Perhaps most satisfying of all was another achievement, "Recruit Junior Detective Kuuno de Ruyter". Only 2.2% of Steam players have unlocked this, which is probably because Cuno is one of the most unlikable characters I have ever encountered, with his potty mouth and his screeching Scouse accent.

He swears, unimaginatively and ceaselessly, usually in your face. He insults you and ridicules you. He whines and complains and generally behaves like a foul-mouthed four year old even though he's supposedly an adolescent. 

There ought to be an achievement just for tolerating him long enough to wring the information you need from his sneering, snarling face. To come to understand his pain and bring him finally to redemption deserves sainthood. Or at least a qualification in social work.

What I disliked most intensely was the writers' seeming disinterest in outcomes. Stories blossom then die. There's no closure. As a player I wanted closure and I felt it was needed, structurally. Too many endings were teased then not supplied. 

If the point is there are no neat endings then don't give such a neat ending to the main story-line. The case may have been closed but all the doors I'd opened along the way were still wide open, banging in the wind.

Unless I left them that way. Maybe I did. 

Oh, well. Too late to close them now. 

Maybe in another life.