[You See The Corner Of Something Under A Chest] - I Pick It Up...

I had an odd piece of luck yesterday. I was in the bedroom and I just happened to notice the corner of something, sticking out from under the blanket trunk I inherited from my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. It used to sit on the landing of the house I grew up in and when I was about eight or nine I could still hide inside it with the lid closed, so it's pretty big.

Anyway, what was poking out from under it turned out to be a Steam card. You may have read that they're not doing them any more, which is a total pain because it was only last year I realised you could buy them in our local supermarket. As soon as I realized that, I put "Steam Cards" on my wishlists, along with a note about where to get them, and I got about a hundred pounds-worth for Christmas. 

I added all of those to my account right after I got them and I've spent most of the money now. On games I haven't played, of course. I'm a traditionalist that way. 

I figured it was obviously one of the exhausted cards from back then, It must somehow have fallen on the floor and gotten kicked under the chest. That sort of thing happens all the time in our house. I picked it up but, as I was about to throw it in the bin, I happened to notice it the silvering on the back seemed to be intact.

I don't buy a lot of physical gift cards and I've never bought a scratch card in my life but lately I have been buying those virtual cards the cats sell at the Catzebo booths in Neverness To Everness. In fact, I've been buying some every day since they added them a few weeks back.  

At the time I wrote about those cards, I thought they were going to be a limited-time addition to the game that would go away when the next update dropped but that's not how it went. The booths are a permanent attraction on the streets of Hethereau now, which means I've had to become a lot more temperate with my purchases.

It was fine to go hard when they were only going to be there for short while. Even then, I only had the one crazy day, when I bought out the entire stock. Mostly I was pretty restrained. 

So anyone should be. The odds of winning, though, are very poor. I wrote in the post about how it looked very much to me as though the operation was designed to leech your wallet dry steadily and slowly and now, with a lot more data to go on, I'm still absolutely convinced that's true.

By far the most likely outcome, every time you play, is that you lose 10-20% of your stake. If you stick to the cheap cards (In the permanent version of the game there are only three types of card: 10k, 30k and 50k.) that doesn't matter much but if you buy all the cards every day, or even just all the 50k ones, you'll be broke in a week. 

Well, I would. Might take you longer but you'd get there.

 

Even with my relatively small spend, I wouldn't get ahead of my combined losses even if I won one of the big prizes. I must be well over a million in the hole by now. Most of that happened long ago, though, and I've written it off as part of the learning process. Also, it was fun. 

These days I mostly finish even or slightly ahead. As soon as I start losing, I stop. Well, soon after, anyway...

And it's not like you get nothing for your money, even if you lose. You get a bookmark.

For a long time I didn't really put much effort into bonding with the characters on my team but recently I've started to get into it. I have several at Affinity Level 5 and a couple at 6 and I'm working on getting all of those to ten, eventually. It'll be a long haul but I'm not in a hurry and the game's not going anywhere.

To that end, I'm doing stuff with them all as I run into them around town and I'm handing out all the gifts I'm allowed, every day. Every scratch card gives you a bookmark that's worth a hundred Bond points. That's what I'm mostly using.  

I do all the character side-quests as I come across them when I'm strolling down the wide avenues of Hethereau or whenever one of my imaginary friends sends me a message on Bagel, asking if I want to meet up. Those quests can be short and silly - I did one involving choosing hair-care products for Mint's tail the other day - or longer and weirder - like when Linko and the Appraiser went looking for aliens - but there are only so many of them and some are gated by specific affinity levels. 

Gifting has a daily restriction on how many gifts you can give but you can carry on giving gifts forever. No-one can have too many bookmarks, apparently. It's a guaranteed path to BFF status, if you have the patience for it. Which I do.

Getting back to the point, all these in-game scratch cards have attuned me to the process, so when I spotted that unblemished silver strip my fingers began to twitch. Could it be? 

Yes, it could. It seems that somehow, last Christmas, I'd managed to lose one of my precious Steam Cards under the blanket chest without even realizing it had gone missing. It's not that hard to imagine. There were a bunch of them, all separately wrapped. It's not like I was keeping a count of the number and value when I opened them. I'm not twelve years old!

I scratched the silver off and there was the code. I put the code into Steam and suddenly I was £20 richer. What to spend it on?

It was hardly a pressing decision. I hadn't spent all of what I added to the account last Christmas. I have a strong aversion to spending the last of anything. I always like to keep a little in reserve, just like Beryl always leaves that last piece of chicken for Mr. Manners.

But still. It's very rude to ignore such serendipitous good fortune. If you do, the universe starts to get the idea you don't want any favors and stops giving them to you. It's like anti-manifesting. And as it happened, I did have an idea of something I might want to play.

The same morning, yesterday morning, before I found the card, I'd had one of those emails from Steam, telling me something on my wishlist had gone on sale. I get a lot of those. I rarely pay them much attention. Half the games on my wishlist go on sale all the time.

As it happens, though, this wasn't just some old favorite having another 30% off moment. It was a game that only launched yesterday that had chosen, as many games do, to begin at 10% off for a brief period before going to full price. 

Usually I have no idea when any game on my wishlist is going to launch. Name any of them and I probably put it on years ago and forgot about it almost immediately. This one, though, is one of my picks for the Fantasy Critic League Wilhelm's running, so I'd been waiting for it. 

It's called Nighthawks and it's by Wadjet Eye, a developer many of whose previous games I've both played and reviewed here. I played the demo in a Next Fest last year and I said of it then

 "I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available."

I often say things like that. I rarely follow through. I believe it when I say it but once I've said it I forget it. I'm like that. It's annoying, isn't it?

This time, though, the astral forces were clearly coming together in a concerted effort to make me keep my word, for once. It would have been positively hubristic to have ignored the omens. So I bought it.

Obviously, I haven't played it. I've downloaded it, both to the desktop and the laptop, where I'm fairly confident it will run, since it's effectively a visual novel with mostly static images. Finding the time to play it is going to be the challenge. 

When I do, no doubt I'll review it here, but for now I'd very much like someone else to review it. Preferably someone the FCL considers a "Top Critic". It's become very clear in this, our second season, that picking a winner is only half the job. You also have to pick something that's not going to vanish into the great darkness cast by the shadow of the 20,000 or more games released every year.

I'm still waiting for a third Top Critic to review Beastro, a game I picked that came out back in June. It has six reviews so far, only two of which count. If it could get one more, it would almost certainly score me something. It has a "Very Positive" Steam rating from over 600 reviews but that counts for nothing where the League is concerned. Until one more Top Critic weighs in, it's worth a fat zero.

The same fate might befall Nighthawks although I'm hopeful it won't. Wadjet Eye is a reasonably well-known developer and much respected in the point&click adventure niche where it mostly operates. This is a slight departure for them but visual novels and P&Cs are almost interchangeable on many levels so I'm optimistic. Plus, the demo was excellent. [Edit: I've just seen it's got 89/100 from PC Gamer so if thay're interested, I'm sure others will be.]

Nighthawks also received some unexpected publicity just before launch, when Steam's algorithm mistakenly identified it as an "Adults Only" game. The team posted an amusing report on the store page explaining the panic that caused and what they had to do to get their game re-assessed and correctly labeled. 

As they say in that piece, they were lucky to have "the fanbase and the (relative) clout to make a bit of noise and get this handled quickly", which is why I also believe Nighthawks will eventually pick up enough reviews to register a score for my Fantasy Game Company, Pretty Blue Fox Games. Beastro, though, I suspect is a lost cause. 

Sidebar: Pretty Blue Fox, by the way, in case you don't recognize it, is the name of  the game-playing group in Philip K Dick's early-60s novel, The Game-Players of Titan. I've been using it in various contexts almost since I started gaming because heaven forfend I'd actually come up with an idea of my own. 

However well or badly the game does for me in the League, I'm certain it's going to be a lot of fun to play. In that respect, I'm equally confident about the other League pick I have, the  one that's due to launch in less than a week. That one's called Nivalis Nights and it's the sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk. 

Unlike Beastro and Nighthawks, Nivalis already has an Open Critic page set up even before it launches, which I'm taking as a good sign. There's every chance I'll also buy Nivalis Nights on release although if I'm going to be rational about it, I should probably wait until I actually have time to play it, by which time it will most likely be on sale.

But hey, where's the fun in being rational? 

Next Fest - Nighthawks At The Demo

I sorted my Steam Wishlist by "Date Added" this morning and Nighthawks came out as the oldest game on there. I added it almost six years ago, on January 15, 2021. If there were any games on the list before that, I must either have bought them or removed them but I guess it's entirely possible I started using the Wishlist just to keep tabs on Nighthawks, which is the game I've most wanted to play ever since I first heard about it.

In fact, I just checked and there's a post from November 2020, actually called "Wishlist", in which I talked about games on my wishlist that had recently gone on sale. None of which I ever bought and none of which are on there now, either. At some point, my wishlist became dominated by games whose demos I played and liked during Next Fest. I do sometimes add other things but not very often. 

Nighthawks, though, was one of those exceptions, not that it's done me much good up to now. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first opportunity anyone's had to give the game a try in the seven years since the Kickstarter campaign offered a "proof of concept" demo back in 2018.

I had actually forgotten the game was ever on Kickstarter. It's being developed by point and click adventure specialists Wadjet Eye Games in collaboration with Richard Corbett, one of the people behind Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. With a pedigree like that, it hadn't occured to me crowdfunding, would be needed but lots of things that don't seem to make sense happen on Kickstarter.

The campaign did fund successfully but only barely, limping across the $125k threshold with a final total of just over $136k. I'm never really sure what low numbers like this mean for a game in development. Clearly that sort of money's not going to have kept the lights on for the last seven years and if it was to raise the game's profile, seven years with not a word about how things are going doesn't seem like the best way to build on the publicity of a successful Kickstarter.

Then again, it wasn't supposed to take seven years. The estimated delivery time was May 2020, less than six months after I added it to my wishlist. Five years later, this demo is pretty much the first I've heard of it. So, was it worth the wait?

Oh boy, yes! It's exactly what I was hoping for, a beautifully designed, elegant, classy package that's great to look at, listen to, read and play. I found the demo highly immersive and thoroughly engaging. If it wasn't already on my wishlist then it certainly would be now.

Stylistically, it's gorgeous. Beautifully designed without being over-elaborate. And every screen is a painting. I don't think it's a co-incidence that the name of the game immediately brings to mind that famous work by Edward Hopper, either. It's as though they've taken those "concept art" illustrations so many games use to get people excited and then used them in the finished game, instead of replacing them with much less interesting graphics as is the usual way of such things.

This also seems like a moment to say something about AI. I've always expressed a qualified interest in the use of AI in the creative process. I'm not out there with my pitchfork and flaming torch, yelling about how it's a sign of the end times. I make AI images for my own amusement and find quite a lot of them aesthetically pleasing.

It's just a tool, though, and one with considerable limitations still. No AI-generated image is going to stand up to competition like this. These pictures have a warmth (Ironic, given the setting and subject matter.) and a humanity (Ditto.) that AI, at least so far, can't match. I very much doubt we'll be seeing AI-generated images in games that rely on illustrations for ambience or impact any time soon although I've played plenty of games where the human-created pictures were nothing to write home about, so there may be some bleed-through around the edges..

The writing is similarly characterful, oozing with personality and leaving no-one who's played any of the Fallen London series of games in much doubt over the provenance of this one. It's a pretty fair bet that anyone who's interested in Nighthawks will be more than happy to read the equivalent of a novel's worth of prose in order to play it but just in case anyone's in any doubt, that's exactly what's expected of you. 

Several novels, in fact. 800,000 words. That's half as long again as War and Peace, always cited as the benchmark for a very long novel. Of course, this being an RPG with multiple starting points and branching plot-lines, you're never going to have to read all those words in a single play-through.

As I began the demo, it felt for a while that it was going to be all reading, all the time. I'd been playing for a fair while before the first voice actor piped up. Once the dialog began, though, the game turned out to be fully-voiced. The voice acting is good, too. Not flashy or overdone and enjoyable enough that I wanted to hear it all, even though I'd sometimes read to the end of the conversation before the actor had reached the end of the first sentence.

The game is set in the one city where it's acceptable to be a vampire.Vampires have recently been revealed to the human population as facts not fantasies but that doesn't mean they've been accepted, let alone welcomed. Tolerated is the word and not even that by everyone.

Since this is an RPG, the demo begins with a series of questions you need to answer and choices you have to make to decide who you're going to play. I've always liked these systems, where you express a variety of preferences and dislikes and select some slivers of back-story for the game to weave into a personality you can build on. It takes all the effort out of coming up with a characterization.

The demo itself is probably quite replayable because of this. The end card suggests you might like to go round again with a different "Sire" to see what happens. I haven't done that yet but I very well might at some point. It'll be something to do while I wait for the full release, which is still "TBA".

Only having played the one character so far, I'm not sure if everyone starts at the bottom of the heap but I certainly did. No masked balls or opulent bedrooms dripping with velvet, brocade and crystal chandeliers for me.  

 

The demo begins in the filthy backstreets of Cradlebridge as you search for some traitor your sire has tasked you with finding. Your home, such as it is, is a flophouse room in the ironically-named Halcyon Hotel and your evening meal is the bitter blood of an old woman.

Well, mine was, although I immediately regretted it. Very early on, you get the choice to let the woman go or sink your fangs into her and since I was somewhat nervous about the low levels in my blood-meter, I opted for the latter. Her blood turned out to be barely worth drinking but the act of taking it from an unwilling victim locked me out of any chance of becoming one of those benign vampires who only drinks from consenting donors.

I guess that makes this one of those "Choices Matter" games although I can't say for sure that it would have mattered that I made that specific choice. I might have preferred a warning at this very early stage, all the same. But then, I did know I was doing a Bad Thing. I just chose to do it anyway. I shouldn't complain when the obvious consequences followed.

The gameplay is harder to describe than it could be. Nighthawks is consistently labelled "an RPG" and it has a lot of the tropes and mechanics of one but it also shows its Wadjet Eye detection/adventure heritage quite strongly. There's a good deal of opening drawers and looking under beds for evidence or clues in the demo as well as an even greater reliance on long conversations in which you tease information out of the various people you meet.

Mechanically, the game uses a system similar to the one I mentioned in a couple of other demos this time around, where instead of moving around a room and clicking on things to see what they do or examining them to find out what they are, you select much the same kinds of actions from a list. This seems to be the way some developers are handling things these days and I like it - up to a point.

I'm guessing that's the influence of  the Visual Novel genre, where there has to be something for you to click or you might as well be reading a book but there's not much leeway for independent thought or action. Not that there's much more of those in traditional adventure gaming. You do have a lot more freedom there to wander around, poking things, picking them up and putting them in your pockets but in the end there's generally only one solution to the puzzles and only a set number of ways you can combine the objects.

The downside of the "select an action from a menu" approach is that it feels more obviously linear. It's possible that, in the full game, selecting one option might close down others but in the demo I didn't notice that happening. I ended up clicking through everything in the end. On the positive side, though, it avoids all those super-annoying times where you just keep looking at the same things over and over, trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. Or, worse, where gameplay turns into a minute inspection of the screen, pixel by pixel, just in case you might have missed something.

On balance, I think I prefer to have all the options laid out in front of me, whether that's done, as in Nighthawks, with a menu or as in some games by having a key that makes all the interactable objects light up. In the end, I want to have fun and hear stories, not solve puzzles.

That said, it may well be that the finished game will offer a mix of mechanics. There is one screen in the demo that deviates from the pattern. When you walk into the bar at the nightclub, instead of a menu and dialog panel on the right, there's just a full screen picture with "Talk to Bartender" along the bottom. Maybe they haven't finalized everything just yet.

The eventual game is supposed to have some elements of management simulation, where you end up running the nightclub. There's no hint of that in the demo, where the club is very firmly in the hands of an undead mobster. How you would come to be the one in charge instead of him is not immediately obvious.

You do get to see something of the game's combat system, which is nominal at best. It's the purest of RPG combat, where the game decides everything on the basis of your stats and gives you the result without any active involvement required from you, the player. 

I made the mistake of taking on a couple of masked ant-vamp vigilantes even though the game warned me I was over-matched. There was a lot of grunting and thumping and blood-spatters all across the screen as they kicked my ass. Later, I sparred with a vampire enforcer in the boxing ring. That went a lot better although the visuals and sounds were identical.

I'm more than happy with that sort of combat in a game of this kind. It sure beats some irritating quick-time event involving a lot of meaningless button-mashing. You do have access to certain special abilities, called Gifts, too, so there may be some way to bring those into play during combat although I didn't come across anything like it in the demo. I did get to use my Beast Within gift once but that was during a conversation. (Well, if you call being shot at a conversation...)

The full game has upwards of eighty voiced characters, ten companions you can ask to join you and "Multiple adorable rats, some of which you can pet." In the demo I think I met maybe half a dozen NPCs, only one of whom I could have teamed up with, had I so chosen. (I did not.) Didn't see a single rat, adorable or otherwise. 

That took me about three-quarters of an hour. I would have carried on for longer but the demo has a timer in the form of a clock that ticks away in the background, warning you not to stay out too late in case the sun comes up and presumably turns you into a pile of ash. 

I'm speculating there - the exact mechanics of vampirism in the game aren't laid out in the demo. It may not be about extreme light-sensitivity at all. The game wanted me safely tucked in bed by midnight, which seems like an unnecessarily cautious margin for error.

I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available. Can't offer any better recommendation than that.