Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Baby!

 

With the Steam Game Festival due to end in a couple of days I thought I'd better get on and check out the remaining demos I downloaded back at the start. That meant finishing up Nine Noir Lives and playing through Ring of Fire: Search for a Killer and Kathy Rain: Director's Cut. 

I also said I'd re-download the Frozen Flame demo and give it another try. It surely couldn't be that short on purpose, could it? I must have been bugged, right?

This afternoon I did all of that and it took me... well, it's hard to say, exactly. I can say for sure it wasn't long. Probably about an hour, all told.

In theory I ought to be able to come up with an exact figure. Steam keeps tabs on how long you spend playing, after all. According to the records on my account I spent ten minutes playing Ring of Fire, twenty on Kathy Rain and eleven minutes taking a second run at Frozen Flame. 

That all seems clear enough. The problem comes when I look at the time Steam has down for my full playthrough of Nine Noir Lives. 

When I first posted about the game I mentioned my opening session had lasted seventy minutes. I can clearly remember seeing that number on Steam when I logged out. What's more, it's about how long I would have guessed I'd been playing. I know roughly what time it was when I started and when I stopped.

Coming back to it today, there turned out not to be so much distance left in the demo as I'd thought. It ends when you manage to talk your way into the first real crime scene, the Knitty Kitty Club. 

Before you can do that, though, there's quite a lot of banter between your character, Cuddles Nutterbutter P.I. and Officer Krakowski, the by-the-book cop guarding the door. Before he'll let you in you have to show him your Private Investigator badge and a form from police headquarters authorizing you to work on the case. 

Since Nutterbutter would clearly forget his tail if it wasn't glued on, this means a trip back to the office to find the missing credentials. This in turn leads to yet more banter, this time with Tabby, Nutterbutter's long-suffering assistant and so the dance goes on.

A little light gameplay comes next , in the shape of a search for the badge (Spoiler: it's under the cushion on the sofa. Took me a little while to find it) and finally a phone call to the gravel-voiced form-faxer down at the cop shop. All of this takes quite a while. I'd guess it took me at least twenty minutes.

In fact, I think I can prove it. You can follow most of the action in the second half of this twenty-eight minute playthrough on YouTube. The player who posted it, Cryptic Hybrid, must already have made the phone call because he just gets a copy from Tabby. It took me an extra four or five minutes to learn how to use the phone (cats don't use numbers) and to sweet talk the gorgon on the other end of the line.

And yet somehow Steam now shows my total time spent in the Nine Noir Lives demo as... sixty-five minutes. I somehow lost five minutes getting from where I left off to the end!

Okay, alright, never mind about that. The point is, however long it took me, the Nine Noir Lives demo is a solid, entertaining introduction to what looks like it should be a very enjoyable game. I was quite disappointed when it ended abruptly, just as I saw the first dead body on the floor. I would definitely have gone on playing if I could. I've added it to my wishlist. 

Nine Noir Lives: Recommended!

The demo for Kathy Rain: Director's Cut almost had the opposite effect. Not because it doesn't show the game off to good effect. It starts at the scene at the graveside during Kathy's grandfather's burial, where Kathy meets her grandmother for the first time since she was a child, and carries on from there just as it does in the full game.

And that was my problem with it. It's a while since I played but as far as I could tell what I was seeing and hearing was identical to what I saw and heard on my original playthrough. The graphics looked the same, the voiceover was as I remembered it, the mechanics, puzzles and dialogs appeared to be unchanged in any way. 

Since I already own Kathy Rain and this is a demo for the Director's Cut edition, I was hoping to see what was different about it, not just to be reminded of what I already knew. I kept on for twenty minutes but eventually I felt as though there were better things I could be doing with my time so I stopped.

I still have the Director's Cut on my wishlist but the main effect of partially playing through the demo has been to convince me I need to see some evidence of the extent and value of the new content before I pay again for what might end up being pretty much the same game I already have. Not quite the result I imagine they were hoping for.

Kathy Rain: Director's Cut: Recommended for anyone who doesn't already have Kathy Rain. Otherwise, maybe wait for the reviews when it comes out to see if it's really worth paying twice.

Next I took a look at the demo for Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer. Did not take me long. I hated it.

About the only thing I didn't actively dislike was the visual aesthetic. It sets a striking, minimalist tone that seems to nod towards pop art and abstract expressionism. I am something of a soft target for stuff like that as some of my previous choices probably suggest. 

It was mostly the look of the the game that made me pick it out of the pack in the first place but I do also like a good police procedural, particularly one that takes place in a near-future Dickian dystopia. Probably haven't been hiding that any too well, either.

What I don't like are supposedly adult characters who cuss and banter like fourteen-year old boys. Neither do I see any point in crowing about game mechanics designed to make the player copy down text from the screen in longhand, just so they can type it back into the game five seconds later. 

If I wanted to make notes with pen and paper I'd get in my time machine and go back twenty years. Or possibly thirty. Either let the game keep track or at least give me an in-game notebook I can record information in, ffs!

What I actually did, of course, was screenshot each piece of text as it appeared and tab back and forth. Arguably more awkward and annoying than writing it down with a pen and paper, I can't deny it. Also probably what made the demo glitch to the point where I couldn't read the dialog any more and had to close it and start over. That's on me. 

Including the restart I lasted ten minutes. If I hadn't known I was going to have to write something about it it would have been five. If even that.

Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer : Not Recommended. 

Last and definitely least in terms of what there is to see and do in the demo, Frozen Flame. I was replaying this because I was convinced I'd done something wrong the first time. As I mentioned, a commenter on Massively:OP had explained there was more to it than the ten minutes I'd spent running across a bridge and watching a gate open. 

And I'm sure there is... in the game. I'm guessing that person had tried the early access version, not the demo. The demo is just the bridge and the gate and that's it. I googled to see if anyone else was confused and found this Reddit thread. 

Well, if you can call it a thread. It's a couple of comments but they both describe the exact same experience I had. And no-one comes on to contradict them, so I'm taking it that's all there is to the demo after all.

The tiny sliver I saw did look interesting. I will certainly give it another look if ever goes into some kind of open beta or free trial. I don't think it's enough of my kind of thing to pay money for but honestly on the little I saw it's hard to be entirely sure.

Frozen Flame: Insufficient Data.

And there we have it. One thing I will say, demos are fun. Too many can leave me feeling a little queasy, like I've filled up on snacks, but somehow there always seems to be room for just one more.

Two days left. Maybe I'll take my plate and go round one more time.

Try It, You Might Like It

There's a promotional event going on right now over on Steam. It's called the Steam Game Festival. Makes it sound substantial. It's a bunch of demos and some devs livestreaming. 

If it was a bigger deal it wouldn't be third banner down on the home page, I guess. Those pinks, purples, oranges put me in mind of the kind of flyer you get handed in the center of some down-at-heel market town on a Wednesday evening. Student Night in a basement club under a second-rate hotel. First drink half price. Maybe it's meant to be retro. Or ironic. Is irony in again?

Garish as it is, there's a better-than-even chance I still wouldn't have noticed if a couple of blogs on my watchlist hadn't weighed in with commentary and suggestions. Several of the titles on both lists looked interesting so I thought I'd take a few minutes to pick through the possibilities.

It was hard work. I find Steam a pain to navigate at the best of times. It's cluttered and chaotic and not in a good way. In common with almost every virtual storefront the designers seem to live in terror of someone discovering a way to see only those things that already interest them so no matter how carefully you set the options it makes next to no difference. Everything eventually shows up everywhere.

Wow! Dymotape lettering! Not seen that in a while.

I flipped and clicked and scrolled through the jumble, trying to avoid anything my mouse touched popping out a video to tempt me. It felt like walking through a seaside town after dark, two blocks back from the promenade, signs on every corner, waiters calling out from every bar and restaurant, all trying to get you to come inside. 

If I hadn't already clicked through some of the links on Nerdy Bookahs, visited those games' individual pages, I would never have guessed they existed. Couldn't find their stalls in the festival even when I knew what I was looking for. 

It didn't help that Steam seems to categorize games very diferently from the way I'd do it. Titles I was looking for under "Adventure" turned up most prominently in "Puzzles" or "Visual Novels although, as I suggested earlier, scroll deep enough and everything turns up eventually. Just not where you expect.

In the end I had to type the names of the specific games I wanted to look at into the search field. I gave up completely on browsing for anything Paeroka or Magiwastaken hadn't mentioned. I went back to  Paeroka's links, checked them all to see if any of them caught my fancy, then cross-refered back to Steam.

I wonder how much of the city we get to see?

 

I did find a couple of things that weren't on either of the blog lists. The five demos I ended up downloading were:

Ring of Fire

The Longest Road on Earth

Frozen Flame

Nine Noir Lives

Kathy Rain : Director's Cut

I also took a look at Cats and Other Lives and Detective from the Crypt. I might download those later, depending how far I get with the ones I've already chosen.

Of all of them, the one I was by far the most intertested to try was Kathy Rain. I've already played and written about the original edition, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The prospect of an expanded version featuring "extended storyline with a prolonged ending, hundreds of lines of additional dialogue, and multiple new areas to explore" and "several new major puzzle chains." is enticing. I hadn't realized that Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye was involved. He directed the English-language voice acting, apparently. No wonder it's so good.

This is a pun that makes no sense. The customer is here to server the bartender? I still laughed, though.

The only problem I have with playing the demo is that I've already added the full game to my wishlist. I'm not sure I want to spoil my eventual fun with a teaser.

A teaser was all I got from Frozen Flame. Steam has it as it tagged as an "mmorpg", for what that's worth. Steam tags, hmmmph. Massively OP has also covered it, as a "multiplayer survival rpg". It's a fellow-traveller at least, then. I'd have a better idea if the demo had lasted more than ten minutes.

Officially, I played for twelve minutes according to Steam, but that included at least two minutes staring at the EULA with the screen frozen. I got in eventually. I was a big guy with a two-handed sword. The game told me to go to a bridge. I couldn't see it but there were things to kill so I killed them.

That part ended. The big guy vanished. I found myself at character creation so I made a character. She arrived in a very pretty snow scene. There was an NPC. He wouldn't speak. Then he woke up and some very pretty lights appeared. I made my way towards some NPCs who were waiting for me next to a huge gate. When I got there I just had time to watch it open. I had a brief vision of an open world beyond and then the demo closed down.

There's being smart and there's being a smartass. And then there's this tutorial.

 

Figuring that was it, I was annoyed enough to uninstall. A short while later I spotted a news item about the demo on Massively:OP. I commented there about my experience and a reader by the name of Solaris was kind enough to let me know there was meant to be more: "After the cinematic with the dragon you should get dropped into the game world. The game is beautiful. It’s a little tough to get started but once you do, lots to explore and discover".

I'll re-install it and try again. It did look very pretty. I'd prove it with screenshots only I was in and out so fast I didn't have time to take any.

I had a much better experience with the next demo: Nine Noir Lives. This, as the overworked and awkward title tries to sign, is a detective game with cats. Yes, another one. 

I am the target market for these, it seems. I keep playing them, anyway. I played this one for over an hour. Seventy minutes, Steam says. It was an enjoyable and entertaining hour. Seventy minutes. Whatever. Almost all of it was spent sitting back, hands off, listening to voiceover. Not so much a visual novel as a radio play with pictures.

You should try listening to yourself sometime. It's very much the same thing.

If your "game" consists almost entirely of voice acting, your actors and director need to be solid and so does your script. Nine Noir Lives isn't Kathy Rain, let alone Neo Cab, but it's professional and entertaining enough. The main character, the unfortunately-named Cuddles Nutterbutter, is nicely voiced, comfortable to listen to for long periods of time. His assistant is a little harder to take but she grew on me after a while.

The visuals are unsettling. Noir detectives usually have down-at-heel offices with shabby carpets and dinged desks. If they have a view it's of the trash cans in a back alley or the flashing neon sign on the bar across the street. Nutterbutter seems to operate out of a corner penthouse suite with floor to ceiling windows and enough polished parquet flooring for a dance hall. His lighting bill alone must come to more than most private dicks earn in a calendar year. 

As for the plot, after an hour I've only just arrived at what I assume is the opening act. I logged out when I reached the third location, the Knitty Kitty Club, just as it looked like the action might finally be about to start. 

My eyes! My eyes!

I won't say any more just yet. There's probably enough in this demo for a proper First Impressions post. It would be a shame to pre-empt it.

The event runs until February 9th. I'm unclear whether that means the demos will become unavailable to download after that or whether any demos Steam punters have already installed will stop working. I suspect it just means the promotions and the livestreams will end. You'd imagine, having taken the trouble to make a demo, most developers would want to keep it in play at the very least until the game comes out and probably a lot longer than that.

We'll find out next week, I guess. By which time I hope to have at least taken a look at my five picks and maybe posted about them as well.

Trigger Happy?

The only reason I chose Doki Doki Literature Club as a source for images to illustrate the recent Lessons Learned post was because most of it takes place in a classroom. I didn't even think about the nature of the game itself.

Maybe I should have. The screenshots sparked a conversation on the Blapril Discord. A few people were praising the game, which in turn cascaded into several more either downloading it or thinking about doing so. It will be interesting to see what those who give it a try feel about it afterwards. There's a real problem with raised expectations in situations like this.

Also, it's a game that comes with quite a reputation for reasons other than just how good it might be. Wherever you happen upon it, DDLC arrives towing a raft of warnings. As Steam says, in bold, "This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed".

Kathy Rain, on the other hand, comes with no warnings at all. Amazon thought it perfectly suitable to hand out to all Prime/Twitch subscribers last month without any preamble or explanation. Which is perhaps a bit careless of them, because of the two games I would say it's Kathy Rain that needs the trigger warnings more.

Where DDLC is a sleek, knowing excercise in metafiction, Kathy Rain is much rougher-hewn slab of horror. They both start out purporting to be something they're not but DDLC knows very well the risks its taking, while Kathy Rain appears to blunder into them unawares.

I can't really spell out what those risks are. The problem in talking about either game is there's very little that can be said that isn't a spoiler. Even saying there's a twist or that the games aren't exactly what they seem to be tells prospective players more than they should know if they want to get the most powerful experience.

Doki Doki Literature Club plays its cards close to its chest. It would be perfectly plausible for someone to be deeply immersed in the game it's pretending to be by the time it shows its true colors. That's what the developers are hoping.

Players who come to it that way are going to have quite the surprise. Even so, with the exception of one shocking incident, DDLC seems to me considerably less problematic. Kathy Rain includes the same difficult issue (twice) along with plenty more. Some are played for laughs, some for scares and some seem to have been thrown in for no good reason at all. It's a tonal nightmare.

I wouldn't think it fair to compare the two games if it wasn't for the reviews. Kathy Rain seems amateurish and clumsy in comparison to DDLC and I'd have given it a pass as some kind of indie fan project mash-up of Nancy Drew and Twin Peaks if it didn't sit there on Steam with quotes like these at the very top of the page:

Kathy Rain might just be the best adventure game I've played in a long time.”
9/10 – Destructoid

“A remarkable achievement from a first-time developer, Kathy Rain is an unexpectedly personal gem about a heroine who proves she belongs with the genre’s other big names.”
4.5/5 – Adventure Gamers

I enjoyed the game. I'm glad I played it. If there was a sequel, as the post-credits sequence strongly suggests the developers intended, I'd willingly play that, too. Even so, if this really is a benchmark in contemporary adventure gaming, it makes me wonder about the health of the genre as a whole.

For someone who isn't really much of a horror fan I do seem to have let myself in for rather a lot of it lately. Maybe it's the psychic weather.

I haven't mentioned Divinity:Original Sin 2 for a while. That's because I've stopped playing it, a least for now. It turned out to be quite an unpleasant game. I was playing it most evenings for a while, mostly because I found the gameplay quite addictive, but the relentless obsession with demonic possession and body horror leeched much of the pleasure out of the magical battling.

I finished the middle section and I was all ready to take the ship to the final showdown but I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to carry on. I suspect from the way the plot's been going things will get worse before they don't get very much better and I'm not especially keen to see how that all turns out.

That these are the people responsible for Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't fill me with confidence. Not that BG isn't without its own dark themes but I don't recall it being anything like as eager to wallow in its own degradation.

Even when I finish gaming for the evening there's not been much respite. I finished watching Tales From The Loop, which I'm very pleased to say kept up the quality throughout the whole eight episodes. I wish there'd been more.

While it certainly isn't genre horror, it contains horror tropes and I found much of it quite disturbing, existentially. It left my thoughts racing in a way that I can't say made it ideal bedtime viewing. I had to play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp to clear my mind after most of the episodes. Highly recommended, anyway.

I followed Tales From The Loop immediately with Amazon's newest series, Upload. It's not genre horror either but once again it does raise questions about consciousness and mortality that aren't especially comfortable. Plus there are exploding heads, so maybe it is horror after all.

For May, Amazon's free titles include The Little Acre, which comes with similarly stellar reviews to Kathy Rain:

“unique and legitimately stunning hand-drawn environments”
Destructoid

“sharp writing, robust voice work and wonderful animation”
Edge

“a one-of-a-kind magical tale that rivals Disney/Pixar”
HardcoreGamer

We'll see. It's apparently very short, something that almost every player review I looked at makes a point of mentioning. It was also produced by Charles Cecil, one of the driving forces behind one of my five favorite games series, Broken Sword, so I have high hopes.

The Little Acre is apparently neither dark nor disturbing and requires no trigger warnings, although from the description I suspect it could still deserve one for abandonment issues.

The other free game I took from Amazon this month is Yono and the Celestial Elephants, in which I'll be playing "a young elephant tasked to save a world he’s never seen before" as I " explore the rich history of a kingdom where humans, zombies and robots live side by side."

That should be safe enough, surely. Just so long as Yono doesn't run into any ivory poachers...

All Your Well-Learned Politesse

As I sift through the fragments of a family history that seems as unfamiliar to Kathy as it does to me, one thing, at least, becomes all too clear: if you're going to play point-and-click adventure games you can't afford to be polite. This is a truism which also applies to computer role playing games of all stripes and it creates some serious problems for me because I'm really, really uncomfortable with rude behavior.

Peculiarly, I'm significantly more uncomfortable with it in fiction than in real life. I'm fairly certain that many, even most, of the people who've had to spend time with me over the decades would be able to come up with numerous anecdotes about times I behaved very much less than politely. I've been called on it often enough to know that much.

Why it is, then, that acting impolitely when playing in character causes me such discomfort I'm not sure. It's a highly nuanced behavior, too. I think one of the reasons I strongly prefer playing diminutive or childlike or animal characters is the license it affords me to behave, well, childishly.

As I've mentioned before, Mrs Bhagpuss and I both have a queasy tendency to roleplay immature characters. In Guild Wars 2 we have a clutch of loosely related Asuras who range in age from around eight years old to late teens. They bicker and tease each other and get emotionally overwhelmed. We have a slew of long-running in jokes that we indulge, most of which revolve around insulting each other. My most-played character can be cartoonishly rude at times. Quite a lot of times.

When I play my more mature characters there, my many Charrs, for example, I am much more polite. Formal, even. Mrs Bhagpuss's Sylvari and humans tend to behave like adults, too. It's not "roleplaying" as such. It's more that the physical presence and appearance of the characters sets a tone.

That's all well and good when the interactions take place between players, particularly in an environment that encourages a mutually sustained backstory, but it breaks down almost immediately as soon as external narrative imposes itself on the action. Whatever the established personality of my character might be, when faced with a set of alternative options in a dialog tree I find it all but impossible to choose any but the most socially acceptable.

I have to be polite at all costs. It frequently seems more important to me that I maintain social norms, by which I mean real-world social norms appropriate to the society in which I live, than that I either represent the supposed attitudes of the race, gender or class I'm playing or give the responses most likely to further the plot.

If I fail to do this I feel uncomfortable. Since I play primarily to entertain myself, feeling uncomfortable is not a desired outcome. Fortunately, one of the huge benefits of MMORPGs over most other video game genres is that almost all dialog options exist purely for flavor. It's highly unusual for a choice to have meaningful, far less significant, impact on how things turn out.

In single-player RPGs that's not the case. Rather, the entire genre has tended to align itself around the concept of decisions that matter. It makes things awkward at times but I can often find a narrative thread that's acceptably unabrasive. If not, I stop. Not ever game has to be for everyone, after all.

In adventure games it's much more of an issue. By tradition, adventure games tend to have linear narratives. There may be branches and alternate endings but whichever path you take has, eventually, to lead to a conclusion. Generally you can't just wander about, exploring the world and taking whichever side quests suit you until you feel you've had your money's worth.

Adventure games like Kathy Rain, with narratives that are effectively murder mysteries (it is, as Xyzzysqrl so astutely put it, Joan Jett as Nancy Drew) don't just require you to follow a set storyline, they expect you to apply mechanics that have little connection with either normative behavior or common politeness.

The tension between believable behavior and game function is extremely evident in Kathy Rain. The narrative takes considerable pains to emphasize the importance of behaving in a rational, acceptable fashion.

Kathy simply won't perform the kind of asocial acts we associate with video games. If a person wouldn't do something in normal life, for example try to enter a locked crypt in a graveyard where a funeral is taking place, she tells you in no uncertain terms that she doesn't need to do that right now.

She needs to establish relationships with people before she asks them questions and she needs to have good reasons for the qustions she asks or she just won't do it. All of which suits me very well indeed.

The problem comes when Kathy has run through all of her available, normative behaviors and still hasn't found the answers she needs. In common with most adventure games, new locations only become available when specific plot points have been met. If there's nowhere else to go and no-one else to talk to, all that's left is to keep returning to the same people and asking them over and over again about whatever options still remain.

And that feels wrong. It just does. Going in and out of Kathy's grandmother's house on the day the old lady buried her husband and Kathy walked back into her life after a decade and a half of unexplained absence, just to sit beside her on the couch and ask yet another question feels very uncomfortable indeed.

It might even be less uncomfortable if her grandmother called her on her bizarre behavior but instead she simply complies, running through the same acknowledgments and farewells as though they hadn't happened half a dozen times already.

It's freakish and the writer, Joel Staaf Hästö, knows it. He makes a sterling effort to explain and cover for the most egregious examples, as when Hacker Dave tells Kathy not to worry about having to call I.T. guy Clyde to come fix her PC as often as she needs because "it's his job".

In the end, though, the exigencies of the form override adherence to either naturalism or social niceties. And I have to put up with it if I want to play. Self-evidently I can put up with it, because I am playing, and enjoying myself.

Would I prefer a more moderated experience, though? One where the game compensated for my errors and omissions, filling in the blanks in my journal with insights I hadn't actually had, adding information I'd missed from conversational paths not taken.

It would be less of a game, more a narration, perhaps, but would that matter? After all, I already resort to walkthroughs, not only as soon as I get stuck but also when I intuit I'm going to have to press harder and become more intrusive than feels comfortable.

Maybe I should just read a Nancy Drew novel and listen to I Love Rock and Roll on hard repeat. (Full disclosure: I have never read a Nancy Drew novel).

Better yet, maybe I should just get over myself!

Girl On A Motorcycle

A while back I wrote a post on how I don't have backlogs of games and don't entirely understand what they are. As usual, that turned out to be mostly a semantic problem. Almost everything is.

I may not have a backlog but increasingly I do have more and more games installed on my hard drive. There's a very straightforward reason for that: people keep giving them to me.

When I say "people", of course, I really mean "game companies". When I got into gaming, back in the 1980s, no-one ever gave games away. Oh, you could get "free" games with magazines. I got a ton of those. But you had to buy the magazine. And that cost about the same as buying a game.

As time went on, the price of games went up and up. Way beyond the price of magazines. Beyond even the annual subscription to a magazine. And the games I liked, MMORPGs, made you pay an up-front fee and a subscription. Keeping your hard drive clear wasn't a problem.

Then we had the Free to Play revolution and everything went the other way for a while. Instead of having to choose you could play all the things. So I did. My hard drives filled up with 30gb, 40gb, 60gb installs of games I'd play for a few weeks and then forget all about. Most of them are still there. I just bought more hard drives.

I'm watching Doom Patrol at the moment, the sweariest show I have ever seen. Swearing seems really funny all of a sudden.

Until recently, they were all MMORPGs. I didn't do single player. But at some point I was persuaded to sign up for Steam and at some later point I began to use it.

Once I had Steam, I was able to start trying things other bloggers recommended. Increasingly people I followed were drifting away from MMORPGs and writing about all kinds of games. I tried Dr. Langeskov and Doki Doki Literature Club on recommendations and liked what I found. Can you say "gateway drug"?

Somewhere along the line I installed Twitch. I think it was to watch a livestream, quite possibly one of the early hypefests for EQNext. Twitch began giving games away because now everyone was giving games away. It was some cross promotion with Amazon Prime because Amazon owned Twitch somehow and I had Prime, because it was free for three months and I got used to using it, (Can you say "the first hit is free"?) so I started downloading those too because why not?

Note to self: play more games.

Now I had games coming at me from all over. Endless free trials and free to play games from the MMORPG developers, monthly free single-player titles from Amazon/Twitch, free games from Steam...

And still they came. I installed Nox so I could play Android games on my desktop and that opened up a whole new free game ecology. I keep reading about free deals from Epic and EA and XBox Live on PC and who knows what-all else. So far I've resisted those but I'm sitting here and I might be sitting here for who knows how long - a month? Two? - and my resolve is weakening.

Not that I had much resolve to begin with. I mean. it's free stuff, right? And it comes to my house. I don't have to go and get it or speak to anyone or really do anything other than click a mouse a few times. Why would you not?

I remembered yesterday that it was a few days past the begining of the month so I went to see what Twitch had for me. An exit strategy, that's what. Now that Amazon Games is about to become a thing Amazon is distancing itself from Twitch. I don't know how social they're being about it.

Where do I start?

Amazon asked me if I'd like to deal direct and now I have a new folder on my third drive called Amazon Games. They offered me a choice of five titles for April and I picked two: Earthlock and Kathy Rain.

I tried Earthlock this morning. I lasted about fifteen minutes. The game itself seemed okay. It looks pretty enough. The plot, the tiny fragment I saw of it, might have been cribbed from the pilot of an uncomissioned Saturday morning cartoon from the late 1980s but there's nothing much wrong with that. The characters and the dialog wouldn't have challenged a seven year old but they had a certain naive charm. The combat, while pedestrian, was not without amusement.

The problem was the camera. It didn't have one. Rather, it did but I wasn't allowed to use it. You get to see what the game shows and that's that. In a 2D game, not a problem. In three dimensions with WASD controls, no. Just no.

Why do they have four beds in a room for two?

Kathy Rain is much, much better. I haven't played for long, maybe forty-five minutes, but I can say already that I'll be playing this until I get to the end. It will have an end because it's a point and click adventure mystery and they have to.

I was pretty much sold in the first thirty seconds. It has one of the most in medias res openings I've ever seen. No introduction, no tutorial, nothing. It loads, you see a room with someone at a desk, the door opens, Kathy walks in, hurls herself on the bed and starts to talk about how the room is spinning and she's about to throw up.

Her roommate, acting like this happens all the time and isn't worthy of notice, drops a revelation that instantly sobers Kathy up and next thing you know you're watching her take a motorbike ride to her estranged grandfather's funeral.

Go make it happen

Kathy wears black leather, rides a motorcycle and drinks to excess. In her backpack (it's an adventure game - of course she has a backpack) she has a journal, a taser and a pack of cigarettes. I have buttons. Go ahead, push them.

I'm not quite so sold on the retro 90s pixel art. As I've said before, I was glad to see the back of that look when technology killed it. I have no nostalgia for bad graphics. I spent a while trying to get it to look crisper but no dice. I'm getting used to it. It's starting to look good. (Can you say "habituation"?).

I also assumed, wrongly, that this was a game that actually came from the period it depicts. Not so. It was in fact released in 2016. It was a critical hit, won a bunch of awards and it currently has a "very positive" rating and four and a half stars out of five on Steam, where you can buy it for £10.99, if you like paying for things you could have for free.

I'm getting Morninglight vibes.

Everyone reading this probably played the game years ago, although I can't recall anyone mentioning it. Not going to stop me posting about it, anyway. If I do I'll try and avoid spoilers. It's just about conceivable someone is even further behind the curve than me.

So there we have it. Free games. You get a lot more than what you pay for. And literally in the time I was posting this I've acquired another. Paeroka flagged up something called Regions of Ruin, free on Steam as I write. It looked interesting so I downloaded it.

Seems I am building a backlog after all. (Can you say "addicted"?)