This Is Not The Ending (You're Looking For)

 

According to Steam it took me exactly twelve hours to finish Unavowed. It seemed a lot longer. 

There often seems to be a disparity between how long Steam thinks I've been playing certain games and how long I think I've been playing them. Californium, for example, is a game that, in my memory, I played for quite a number of sessions, all of them lasting several hours. Steam tells me it took me just a shade over five hours to finish. I guess conflating "five hours" and "a number of sessions" doesn't necessarily form a paradox.

The Neo Cab demo, I apparently wrapped up in sixty-nine minutes. I'd have sworn it was at least twice that, probably three times, but now I dig into my memory I seem to remember I finished it in a single session so I guess just over an hour is possible.

Then again, according to Steam my total time spent in Doki Doki Literature Club amounts to forty-nine minutes, which is clearly nonsense. As it happens I tallied up the sessions I'd played and the time they took in the one post I wrote about the game: "I played for about an hour, my first session...Next evening I played again... around the end of the second hour I hit a major decision point... it took me another two hours to reach what is apparently known as the "best" ending". That's at least four hours.

In DDLC's case, there's clearly some miscounting going on. I wondered whether it was because I had the game downloaded separately from Steam but if I ever did I can't find any evidence of it now.

In most of the examples above, though, I'm fairly sure any variation can be accounted for by the way the brain works. These kind of games involve a lot of decision-making and a lot of new experiences. The brain handles the new and the important differently from the way it deals with the routine and the familiar. It's one of the reasons time seems to speed up as you get older - you're experiencing fewer and fewer events that you haven't experienced before.

 

When I think about it, twelve hours to finish Unavowed actually feels like quite a long time, anyway. While it has a reasonable amount of puzzle solving and some typical adventure game toing and froing, mostly what you do is listen to people talk, often to each other and not always involving you. It's the equivalent of sitting through six two-hour movies or sixteen forty-five minute TV shows. That would feel like a marathon.

Even as I was playing I was aware of the situation. Several times I had the thought that Unavowed would make a much better movie, or better yet a TV series, than it does a video game. 

It has a good plot with some excellent twists. All the main characters and many of the supporting cast have backstories that show potential for considerably more exploration than they get. There's evidence of good chemistry between some of the actors which the format simply doesn't allow to develop the way it could if they were able to react to each other in a more natural manner.

 

Conversely, the puzzles, while very well done for this type of game, can't help but feel awkward and artificial. There were numerous occasions where the solution to a problem was obvious within moments of entering a scene but the game required a long and laborious chain of actions to bring it about. 

Thankfully, there were few of those infuriating adventure game impasses where everything comes to a grinding halt because the action necessary is something only a character in a video game would ever think of doing, but even so, with a story this good, puzzles just feel like an unecessary obstacle.

There are certainly games that tell stories movies or TV shows could not. Doki Doki Literature Club is a perfect example. Unavowed didn't feel like one of those to me. Instead it felt strangely like the video game spin-off of a pre-existing property, the sort of game you play because you loved the show and the characters and can't get enough of them.

One thing adventure games can do that movies and TV shows really can't, however, is multiple endings. To many people I'm sure that's evidence of the superiority of gaming as a medium. Only I don't much like alternate endings.

 

My suspicion is that plenty of people aren't all that comfortable with games having several possible conclusions. If that wasn't so, we wouldn't need terms like "best ending" and "perfect ending", which I see used so often in guides, walkthroughs and discussion threads.

The existence of alternate endings in other media tends to derive from commercial rather than artistic decisions. The ending of Pretty in Pink was infamously re-shot following negative screening reactions from audiences, who didn't get the concept of two "losers" who ended up winning. There's much dispute over whether the commercial ending was better or worse but the fact remains it wasn't the one that was originally written.

In video games, though, the alternates are entirely intended and that can't but mitigate against emotional involvement. If you get the "bad" ending you can just load up a save, make different choices and get the "good" one. Which is exactly what I did last night when, first time out, I got the ending where everyone dies and the Big Bad goes on to destroy the world.

The problem with that ending isn't that it's nihilistic and deeply disturbing, although it is exactly those things. It's that it isn't "real". Instead of leaving me feeling numbed or tearful I just felt pissed off, very much as though I'd blown my cooldowns on a fakeout in a PvP match and now some jerk was teabagging my corpse.

 

It's a strange kind of fictional narrative that leaves the reader or the viewer feeling as though they've done something wrong. I've read plenty of novels and seen plenty of movies where I hated the ending but I can't recall ever thinking it was my fault.

Doki Doki Literature Club can make you feel just that way and that's the point. It's a clever metatextual examination of the nature of narrative fiction that uses the particular processes of the media platform on which it's built to emphasize the points it wants to make.

Unavowed nods to metatextuality occasionally (mainly with the references to the fictional Trollgate) but mostly it's a genre fiction tale like countless others. Were a genre fiction story to end with the death of all the main characters and the triumph of the villain it would be a bravura move. If that was Unavowed's only ending, Unavowed would be an amazing game.

With three other possible endings, one of which is all but literally the main characters walking arm-in-arm into the sunset, Unavowed is ultimately just a fun few hours. It's not going to resonate because nothing really happened. 

 

But this is a problem I have with video games in general. I find it problematic when my character is allowed a second chance (or, more likely an infinite number of chances) to defeat an opponent. In my mind, if they don't succeed on the first try, they fail. Except I hate games that really do require you to succeed on the first try because obviously I'm not and never have been good enough to pull that off.

I think that's one of the reasons I get on so much better with mmorpgs than most kinds of video games, or used to, anyway. For many years mmorpgs didn't really come with much in the way of narrative or plot but they did come with some kind of premise that your character was unkillable. There's often an in-game explanation as to why you keep getting up again.

Thost two factors mitigate strongly against my lack of belief in what I'm doing. There's both an internal logic and a lack of external contradiction. The only story is my character's story and my character never dies so trying again and again until I get the result I want seems logical and consistent. Add an overreaching, external narrative and it's less so. Remove immortality from the character but replace it, functionally, in a saved game file and second chances make no emotional sense at all.

 

In an odd, paradoxical way, I could have expected a clean ending from Unavowed. For almost the whole of the game you feel the steady hand of the narrative guiding you down a certain path. Mostly it's extremely forgiving and there's always a way out of any puzzle but there are a few occasions where you can box yourself into a corner. 

If that happens the game just rewinds time and puts you back before you got stuck. It doesn't even tell you it's doing it. The first time it happened to me, with the Dryad in North Woods, it confused the hell out of me. I thought I was bugged at first, then after I'd tabbed out to check if it was a known issue I found it was just a device the game used to push you towards making the right choice. 

That the "right choice" happened to be something I categorically would never have had my character do broke the game for me right there. It was still good entertainment after that but it wasn't the same. It was also evident that the game was going to tell one story and one story only no matter what choices you made along the way.

Until it didn't. There are four endings. Two of them require you first to take a conversation option that quite literally looks like the pause button you'd press if you wanted to go make a cup of coffee before you carried on. The third, which I would loosely categorize as the overtly "evil" one (I haven't played through it so I can't be sure) does at least look like a logical outcome of the choices made.

And then there's the apocalyptic ending, in which you rely on everything you've learned so far, remain consistent with your previous actions, and get an entirely different result. Maybe there's a moral purpose to that. A lesson to be learned.

All I learned was that I shouldn't expect internal consistency from a video game. It's a lesson I keep being taught but it never seems to stick.

Rainy Days In New York City

 

One thing you can say for point&click adventure games, they take amazing screenshots. For a start, the developers have done most of the work for you. Almost every scene arrives with your characters artfully arranged in naturalistic poses. Just so long as you don't move them about and end up with one facing a wall and another staring moodily at a light fitting.

Then there are all the pull-outs. The items you examine, the faded photographs and handbills, oil paintings and matchbook covers, each close-up lovingly re-created in period detail. All you have to do is click. No framing the shot, no swinging the camera, no scrolling into first person and out, no need to remember to hide your pet or your mount or do the dance with your entourage of followers and companion animals until all of them line up, momentarily out of shot.

Okay, I have some questions about which decade we're in. I mean, there's this running gag about an addictive game called Trollgate that Donny plays on his phone but these guys just got killed a few weeks ago? Maybe it's an old picture. Like fifty years old...

 

Best of all, no being photo-bombed by some barbarian in neon pink armor with shoulder-pads the size of twin aircraft carriers just at the crucial second before your jittering mercenary decides it's time to strike a martial pose right in front of whatever the hell it is you meant to get a picture of, only now you fricken' don't care any more...

As for commentary, it comes as standard. These shots caption themselves. Lines of dialog all neatly displayed and handily arranged so as to complement the composition, never blocking anything that matters.  No need to jab at the keys in the hope of catching that bon-mot before it scrolls offscreen. Everything hangs around long enough to ponder, consider and, if you so desire, record.

Kind of takes the skill out of it, doesn't it?

Unavowed, like most of the point&clicks I've played these last couple of years, is weirdly beautiful although it takes a while for that to come through. When I fired the thing up for the first time it gave the exact same impression all these games tend to give. 

... but then isn't this the dog that just got killed? Oops! Spoiler!

It looked like rough sketches stretched too thin. The colors looked too bright, too dull, too garish, too muddy. Not right. The textures looked false, scratchy, artificial. The characters seemed like cartoons, awkwardly animated, mannequins come to some kind of glitchy half-life.

And then, in no more than a few minutes, you're in a world. Not looking into it but in it, inside, living there. All the flaws fall away leaving a purity that comes from function fitting form. When we talk about virtual worlds this isn't what we think of but perhaps we should.

Yeah, maybe. Until you want to take a doll out of a wardrobe and the game doesn't want to let you. 

Oh, the game teases you. Tells you the doll's there. Doesn't show it, just has someone else report it then dismiss it. You don't need it. Leave it be.

Except you damn well know you need it because you're in this world and you're unravelling the mystery and you're already two damn steps ahead of the blasted game. Yes, we do need that doll! Why would you even mention it otherwise?

And then, hardly any time later, we learn about college student who lived here, how she'd had that doll nineteen years, which has to be pretty much the whole of her life, and that woman's dog chewed it all  to hell and she was so goddam angry... We even know the doll's name. It's Arabelle. 

Like a doll someone had owned and loved for all their life and even taken with them when they left home? Nah, not seen anything like that.

 

So we go back and try to take it but no, we don't need it, except yes we do. Of course we do! And then the guy in the protection circle tells us he needs something important to each of the violent, disturbed souls so he can send them to rest. Hey, do you think? Could it be?

Yes of course it could. It is. You know it is! But can you pick the doll up? No! Because you haven't danced the dance. So go finish all the other stuff first and then come back and finally, finally, the dumb game lets you do the thing you knew you had to do half an hour ago, the moment you knew there even was a doll.

Frustrated, much? Oh, yes, I have been. Frustrated by the exigencies of the form and the implementation thereof. It's a circle yet to be squared in any adventure game I've encountered. Sometimes they let you shovel everything into your capacious pockets regardless of contentious propositions like weight, volume or sanity. Other times you can only pick up things that count and only when they count. 

Some developer must have tried every point on that curve and none of them is ever quite right. Unavowed is right at the extreme end of pragmatism. There are very few intereactable objects and even fewer that allow you to interact with them before you have a good reason. There's the odd knife or screwdriver that lets you slip it into your jacket for later but even then "later" is almost always looking you in the face.

I've finished the first three cases out of seven and so far I've seen one interactable item that I couldn't figure out a use for. That outdoor water faucet in back of the Eddings house. What's that about? Other than that every hammer's found its nail.

Maybe we'll be back. Unavowed is a game that loops. It doesn't seem entirely linear although it doesn't have that go and come I remember with mixed emotions from the Broken Swords. If I had to guess I'd say we won't be turning on that tap. 

Guys? I've got an idea. I mean, it's a little left-field, I know, but could we pick the team first?

 

Maybe it's there for another. Someone who wasn't with us this time. Unavowed is about teams that break and re-form. You're always having to choose, leave someone on the bench, bring in your specialists and hope you made the right call. 

Only it doesn't maybe matter as much as all that because Unavowed is forgiving of errors. So far I haven't encountered a failure state. When it looks like you left the teammate you needed sitting in the subway car it always turns out there's another way to crack the egg using the spoons you brought along. Sometimes it's messy but you get it done.

I'll say the same thing for the game. The mechanics are messy. Just how many bullets do those two cops have in their guns, anyway? We must have been locked in that storage unit for five minutes or more before I figured out how to get free (no thanks to you, Eli) with the two of them shooting non-stop the whole time. And that motor-boat chase that came after? That was kind of ludicrous. If you can't do a convincing chase scene with the game engine you've got then why put one in?

Then there's the subway car. Rember I mentioned that? How is it we can leave someone on the train while we spend maybe a few hours hanging out in bars and alleys, breaking and entering and brokering deals that go sour, then get back on the same train and find whoever we left right there in the same carraige? 

How, exactly, does that work? Did he just sit there the whole time on the off-chance we might come back and swap him out for someone? Did the entire New York subway system go on hiatus so he'd be exactly where we left him or is it just an amazing co-incidence that we just happened to get done with what we were doing right as he came around for the who knows how manyeth time?

Or, indeed, the living, if this train system's anything to go buy.

 

For that matter, why the hell leave the decision on who's in the team until we've all got on the train? We have a headquarters. We had a meeting there to decide what we're going to investigate next. We have one of those meetings every day! Why not pick the team at the meeting so whoever's left can get on with something useful in their lab or practice throwing fireballs or hacking up the target dummy? Then, when we want to swap someone, we'll know where to find them without having to hope they'll be on the right train!

There's forgiving and there's immersion-breaking. It's not as though I want to be on a timer to fail. God knows I hate games doing that. There just ought to be a more convincing way to ease past the unbelievable. Like bullet time, maybe. Go into ideas mode where the action slows to a crawl because you're operating at the speed of thought. Where the ideas you try that don't work are framed as thought experiments not actual things you did.

I just think a lot of this stuff could have been done better. Aren't these the sort of things people notice in a play-test? I certainly found them pretty hard to hand-wave away. But, hey, it's not my job to fix this stuff. I just think it could be fixed and quite easily.

Another thing I'd like fixed is the railroading. It's nice to have dialog options but when all of them are different ways of saying the same thing, y'know, those aren't options. 

Too many times already my character has had to express attitudes that I wouldn't have had her express if I'd been writing her lines. In any situation where a choice is offered I'd like the chance to choose, at minimum, between yes, no and maybe. Or I don't care. That's always a good get-out. And just to make it even more frustrating, sometimes there's a "Say nothing" or "Keep quiet" option. Couldn't we have one of those every time?

Yes, these metaphorical choices are supposed to speak to my state of mind. I get it. Only, I'm not really all that bothered, y'know? And I'd kinda like to be able to express my lack of feeling.

I get the difference between a written character and a played one. I understand this isn't an rpg, that the central character isn't mine, but if I'm giving up agency I want consistency in exchange. Either give my character a coherent personality and don't pretend I have control of how she thinks and feels or give me all the tools to create a personality for her. If she has to react one way and one way only for the plot to work that's one thing  but if you're going to tell me how she feels about it as well then don't pretend I get any say when I really don't. It's annoying.

Those are my main gripes so far and they're common to most adventure games I've played. Unavowed handles the inconsistencies better than many and it's because so much of what it does is so good that these mechanical shortcomings stand out.

None of them materially affected my enjoyment. It's an excellent game with gorgeous art, interesting characters and a compelling narrative. Even at this early point I'm more than usually motivated to imagine re-playing it to see things from the perspective of one of the other characters, perhaps taking different decisions along the way. Usually I don't much find that an appealing prospect but here I think it could be.

Some day a real rain will come. Or, better yet, leave.

 

With the negatives out of the way, next time maybe I can focus more on what it is that I like about the game. I just hope it stops raining soon. There's a point in every game where continual rain goes beyond being atmospheric and just starts to feel miserable. And don't get me started on how everyone just stands there like it's a sunny day in spring! Talk about not having the sense to come in out of the rain. I know Eli's a fire mage and he never gets wet but everyone else must be drenched to the bone...

Okay, enough kvetching. Let's go play some more.

Wishlist

So, Black Friday. What's that all about? As usual, I got a whole lot of links to things I wouldn't buy at any price, plus a whole lot more for stuff I might consider if it was cheap enough. Certainly not at these miserable discounts, though. Seriously, if it's not half price or less, who even looks?

And of course there was something from Steam telling me there were offers on five things from my wishlist. Like that's news. Something on my Steam wishlist is always on offer and still I never buy anything. 

I was thinking only the other day how I ought to go in and clear the whole thing out. I'm not sure I'd download most of the things on there if they were giving them away. And it's not as though I've wishlisted a lot of games. Seven, to be precise, and one of those I swear I had nothing to do with. I think it added itself when I downloaded an alpha build.

 

I'll tell you what the titles I have on there are. Why not? I'm not ashamed of any of them. They're all perfectly respectable titles. I'd be in a bit of trouble if you asked me why I'd picked them instead of any of a thousand others but I'm sure I had my reasons at the time.

The not-so-magnificent seven are

• Kenshi
• Legend of Grimrock II
• Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
• Past Fate
• Flowscape
• Kind Words
• Fuser

Let's see if I can figure out why I put those on the list.

Kenshi's the kind of game that I dreamed of playing in the '80s and '90s. I read about it a couple of years ago and got a big nostalgia hit for the person I was back then. So I put it on the list. It's been up for sale several times since and every time I imagine actually playing it it's not nostalgic longing that sweeps over me - it's a wave of boredom. Imagine actually playing something like that in 2020. The world has moved on since games like this seemed like an amazing idea and I hope I have, too. If not, I don't want to know.

If Kenshi invokes nostalgia, Legend of Grimrock II is Marty McFly pulling up in your driveway in a deLorean and inviting you back to 1985. It's Eye of the Beholder II with slightly better graphics. I just think there are better ways to spend my time. And my money.
 

Steam, always parental, warns me Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS for short) isn't like anything I've played before. That's the appeal, really. It looks like something you'd fire up for a few minutes for a laugh. I generally feel annoyed with myself if I spend much time on stuff like that, though, so it's a temptation I should probably resist.

Past Fate is an mmorpg in very rough alpha state. I played it a couple of times and wrote about it. I don't like it much, I'm not interested in playing it and I have no memory of putting it on this list. I'm guessing playing the alpha added it automatically.

Flowscape I had to look at again to remind myself what it was. It's not a game at all. Occupy White Walls looks like a theme park in comparison. I'm not sure how it ended up on Steam, much less on my wishlist. I think I must have seen it as some kind of replacement for Landmark, which, now I think about it, does make it sound quite appealing. Hmm. It's 35% off. and it wasn't expensive to begin with. I might buy this one. 

There's no real excuse for not already having bought Kind Words except that plainly I don't want to. It's almost always on some kind of offer and it's only £3.99 full price. Thing is, I just know I'd never "play" it, if playing is even what you do there. I think I drained all the value out of this one already when I read all the blog posts about it a year or two ago.

Fuser, though, now there's a different story. I really want to play this. Or mess about with it, more like. I got an email announcing it a few weeks ago because somehow it's an NCSoft (sorry, NC) game and apparently that means if you play Guild Wars 2 you have to be told about it. 

I was interested enough that I watched one of the tutorial videos and it did look like it might be fun. I was less than impressed with the list of licensed songs that come with it but in a way the weirdly disparate nature of the tracks - I mean, who hasn't dreamed of a Glen Campbell/Pixies/Fetty Wap joint? - just makes it more intriguing.

 

The price tag, though. £54.99. Yeah, right. I wouldn't pay half that. Maybe a quarter. Maybe. Which is a moot point because it's the only title on my wishlist that hasn't received any kind of discount yet.

There's one title missing from that list of seven because yesterday it was a list of eight. I cracked! Our corporate overlords got me. I bought something on a Black Friday discount. First time ever, I think.

As I'm sure anyone who's played it has already realized from the pictures, the game that switched from my Steam wishlist to my Steam library yesterday was Unavowed. I'd had it on there for quite a while, since I looked at it after someone in the blogosphere was raving about it. I ought to be able to remember who that was but I'm afraid I've forgotten. Sorry about that. It's my age (plays all-situation get-out card). If you'd care to out yourself in the comments I'll backfit a link. 

(And thanks to Jeromai, who points out in the comments that he was singing Unavowed's praises a couple of years ago (and I commented to say I was adding it to my wishlist, where it was then the only item) but that we both most likely first heard about it from xyzzysqrl, who called it "one of the best games I played in 2018". It's a good thing someone's paying attention!).

Unavowed is a really obvious, unadventurous purchase. Of all the games on the list it was always the one most likely to make it to "owned" status. It's a point&click adventure game, my second-favorite genre after mmorpgs. It's urban fantasy, a subgenre I think is just made for this kind of game. It has stellar reviews. It also looks to be more than averagely replayable, making it potentially good value for money.

 

And I was missing a good adventure game. As has been apparent from numerous posts here over the last couple of years, I get quite into them and also I get quite a lot out of them, not least material for the blog. There's only so many posts I can write about levelling in World of Warcraft, after all (although that particular well is nowhere near dry yet, trust me...).

So I bought it, installed it and played through the introduction and the first case. And I was planning to write a first impressions piece on it, only, last night, right after I finished playing Unavowed, I watched the fourth episode of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which gave me an idea for a post that would combine both experiences plus a bunch of others... and then this morning I sat down and wrote this instead.

So now I have two more posts to write. Three, when you count this month's song title round-up. I guess my mini-drought is over. Suppose I'd better get on with it.

I think I might just play some more Unavowed first...