Sifting Through The Embers

It's been a while since I was last enthused or excited about the imminent launch of a new mmorpg. Thinking about it, I wonder if it's happened at all since Guild Wars 2 a decade ago. I could check back through the blog but the very fact that nothing comes immediately to mind tells its own story.

That's not to say there hasn't been a steady procession of new games I've been interested in or enjoyed - there most certainly has - but it's been much more "Oh, that looks like it might be worth a try" than "When's it coming out? I can't wait!". As I was musing the other day, I'm not one hundred percent convinced that, did I not have a blog to write, I would be playing new mmorpgs at all. I'd more likely just be ditzing around in the same old ones, quite contentedly.

With that in mind, it's perhaps not surprising I completely missed the (surprisingly smooth) launch of a relatively significant title this weekend. The first I really knew about it was this morning, when a couple of news items caught my eye. It was only when I came to do the research so I could write this post that I realized not only had I failed to notice the game had gone live, I'd been wholly mistaken about the kind of game it was, pretty much from the moment the Indiegogo campaign that introduced it to the world began.

I can cite a few mitigating circumstances to explain, if not excuse, my series of errors. For a start, I stopped following development of the a long time ago. I crossed the game off of my mental checklist a few years back, mostly thanks to some tetchy dev responses I'd seen in comment threads. It seemed for a while as though even mentioning the game unfavorably in passing would result in a visitation so I avoided mentioning it here at all, an embargo that snowballed into avoiding reading about it and eventually into forgetting it even existed.

Before I stopped paying attention altogether, I did read a particular series of marketing and PR releases that skewed my understanding of the game altogether. There was a moment when Saga of Lucimia, as the game was then called, was making a big deal of how dark it was going to be. That's not dark as in horror-inflected. They meant literally dark as in "can't see your hand in front of your face".

The video that showed all the things you wouldn't be able to see is no longer available but as the  article on MassivelyOP explained, "Players won’t be able to use torches in battle, but the darkness will still be there, meaning that players will need to have someone in the group holding a lantern or torch so that you can see what’s going on."

Somehow I got it into my head that the entire game was going to be like this all the time. Until about an hour ago, I did genuinely believe the original plan for Saga of Lucimia was for a world perpetually shrouded in darkness, where you'd never see anything that wasn't illuminated by an artificial light source and in which one spot in every group would always have to be taken by someone who did nothing but hold a torch.

In retrospect, that never seemed likely to work, let alone be popular, even with hardcore, old school mmorpg vets and indeed no-one was expecting that it would be. I'd simply missed the point.  Night-time and some dungeons would be very dark but the world itself would have normal day/night cycles and no-one was being asked to carry a torch outdoors, when the sun was up. 

Another thing I hadn't really taken on board were the many comparisons with original EverQuest and Vanguard, both reference points that would normally have piqued my interest. I had registered the extremely strong commitment to group-centered gameplay - the original pitch specifies "Zero solo content" - but my conception of early EQ, from the perspective of someone who'd been there at the time, was of a very solo-friendly game. The supposed connection between EQ, Vanguard and "group content only" was lost on me. Still is, for that matter.

About the last thing I remember hearing about the game was when an internal implosion within the development team resulted in a change of name. Unfortunately, when the new name, Embers Adrift, began to appear in news items, I confused it with another, extremely similar name, Worlds Adrift, a now-shuttered mmorpg, whose main focus was steampunk airships. Every time I saw an article about how Embers Adrift was coming along, I mistakenly thought it was talking about another game entirely.

Given all of that, it would have been a miracle if I'd spotted the open beta in time to take a look for myself. I didn't, which was a shame. It was only three days, so I didn't miss much, but I would have liked to have popped in and taken a look around.

That was my one chance to see the game for free but of course, now it's launched, I could pay and play any time. Having had a quick flick through the information available on the website, I have to say I'm significantly more interested in that possibility than I ever imagined I might be.

The general tone of the website is far more welcoming than I remember from the game's earlier iteration. It reads very much like the other would-be "old school" mmorpgs, Pantheon, Camelot Unchained and the rest - very much focused on the tastes and expectations of people who enjoyed playing these kinds of games nearly a quarter of a century ago but recognizing that times have changed and not always for the worse.

Most specifically, gone are the boasts that the game features no solo content whatsoever or that absolutely nothing can be achieved without a group. Instead, as the FAQ puts it, "Grouping is not required in Embers Adrift, but it is highly recommended. With a group you'll be able to get to locations that you never could reach on your own." 

An article at MMO Haven has a detailed, bullet-point list of features that seems to have been written with the more curious, less already-committed potential player in mind. It claims the game has "Adventure content designed for solo players, small groups, and full 6-person groups for levels 1-50" and "Vast overland zones and non-linear dungeons with escape routes". 

All of that makes the game sound considerably more like the EverQuest I remember, rather than the peculiar "uphill in the snow both ways" miserable experience that seems to have become the mantra of a certain kind of reverse-rose-colored-glasses demographic. The promotional material mentions a number of features that appeal to me, among them being able to gain xp purely by killing mobs and traditional tab-targetting combat.

At this point I might very well be thinking of making an account, downloading the game and giving it a try. Granted, there's absolutely no chance I'm going to be settling back into the kind of forty hour a week grind that so enraptured me back at the turn of the millennium. I'm confident that will never happen again and I wouldn't want it to. 

I would, though, be very happy to have a new game using those old mechanics that I could potter around in for a while, seeing the sights in the lower-level areas, putting in a few hours here and there, now and then, as the mood takes me, killing rats, kobolds, goblins or whatever the local farmers feel they can't handle (Although the FAQ does point out that farmers in Embers aren't quite as helpless as we've become used to seeing in other games: "While some NPCs wouldn't mind a hand around the farm...they typically handle their smaller problems on their own").

I might even have been curious and tempted enough to lay out the $29.99 they're asking. It's an introductory price, set to rise to $39.99 in November. Thirty dollars isn't an unreasonable price to pay for a buy-to-play mmorpg, even one from an unproven, indie studio, although I feel $40 might be pushing it a little.

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. In keeping with its traditionalist values, Embers Adrift also comes with a $9.99 monthly subscription, a price that's also set to rise after an introductory period, this time to $14.99 in the New Year. Once again, I don't think that's necessarily an unreasonable ask. If the company wants to keep entirely clear of all kinds of cash shop shennigans as it claims, foregoing both lockboxes cash shop with the commitment that it "will never have micro transactions", the money to keep the servers up is going to haveto come from somewhere.

It just isn't going to come from me. And, frankly, I remain to be convinced it's going to come from enough people to keep Embers Adrift  viable in the medium to long term. The game probably doesn't need a huge number of people to sign up to meet the minimum commercial threshold for continued existence but there's very little understanding of just how big (or small) the potential market for these old-school titles is likely to be.

$40 for the "box" and $15 every month for as long as you want to play seems like a very significant barrier to entry in the current market. I'm very well aware from numerous conversations in the general chat channels of various older games that a hefty proportion of veteran gamers have enough disposable income to see these kinds of sums as trivial but those players also tend to be the most settled in their ways and the least likely to jump ship from the games they've already been playing for much of their lives. 

Whether a newcomer can prize enough of them away from EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or WoW Classic or P99 or any of the myriad other emulator projects, most of which are either free to play or vastly better-known or both and most of which offer a combination of familiarity and novelty as they continue to build on established foundations, remains to be seen.

I hope they can. From all accounts I've seen so far, Embers Adrift is a solid attempt at providing a satisfying experience for a specific audience. That's a lot more than can be said of many of the crash-and-burn projects that have plagued the mmorpg gamespace in recent years. 

For me, it's probably not quite the right fit and also about a decade too late. I'm not saying I'll never pay a subscription for a new game of this kind - I'll probably stump up for Pantheon, if it ever arrives - but for now I'm happy enough with what I have.

What I most certainly will do, however, is take the opportunity to kick the wheels and inspect the teeth, should Embers Adrift ever decided to throw open the doors for a "free weekend" or offer some kind of  "free trial". I imagine it will have to, eventually, and I imagine those few days will probably be enough for me.

Back To Back To The Future, Again.

As promised, here's my review of the seventh and final demo I chose to try during the recent, now ended, Steam Next Fest. It's called Unusual Findings and the bland, bleh name is about the only thing about it I didn't like.

That's may be a little surprising, given my previous comments on the 8-bit revivalist movement. As someone who suffered those tawdry graphics purely by necessity at the time, the incessant harking back to an era where everything looked blurry and pixelated mystifies me. By this logic, there should be a boom in 14" CRT monitors right now and we should all be spending our evenings watching network TV shows on the black and white portable TVs in our bedrooms.

The thing is, I've now played so many of these things I feel I must be getting Stockholm Syndrome. My brain is filling in the visual gaps and adding detail that was never there so they look almost attractive at times. They're not, of course. They're functional at best. I'd far rather have better graphics, by which I mean ones in which objects are recognizeable by their appearances rather than just by the labels that pop up when you mouse over them.

What I would say in favor of the better among the 8-bit nostalgia trips is that modern design sensibilities and a strong sense of historical irony does mitigate considerably against the self-imposed limitations of the form. Some games lean heavily into making the look do the work; this one plays with the knowingness of the audience.

Let's be clear; Stranger Things Season One is the model here. Set in the 'eighties, Unusual Findings rings every bell it can find to start your nostalgia glands drooling. And it works, even on me. When the first cut scene opened to the sound of Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round I was right back there, watching Pete Burns camping it up on Top of the Pops in 1985.

Kudos to developers ESDigital for licensing an actual eighties classic. It really adds... well, I was going to say gravitas but I guess I mean authority. One thing that really has changed since the 8-bit era is the dominant role popular music played in the culture. Back then, the charts were the unavoidable gateway to acceptance as part of the zeitgeist. You might have been the gothiest goth in gothtown but you still knew what was Number One. Everyone did. These days? Yeah, me neither.

So, Unusual Findings is set in the 1980s and does it's best to look as though it was made then, too. It's a very specific version of the 'eighties we're talking about, naturally; the decade that gave us Weird Science, Back to the Future and The Goonies - because of course it fricken' is! Funny how it's never the 'eighties of Delicatessen, Jean de Florettes and Paris, Texas, isn't it? Or even Duran Duran, Thirtysomething and Magnum P.I.... at least there's a nod to The Blues Brothers in the opening credits.

Here's the plot as revealed in the demo: Vinny, a boy in his early teens, is home, grounded, because he and his pals, Tony and Nick, somehow managed to blow up a neighbor's garden doing "research". After a tough love lecture from his dad, who tells Vinny how proud he is of him for acknowledging his mistakes then locks him in his bedroom anyway, Vinny shows just how much he's learned from the experience by escaping via a zip-line from his window to the treehouse, where his buddy Nick is waiting. Together, the two kids jump on their bikes and cycle to Tony's house, where he convenmiently lives with his stone-deaf grandma, all of them willing to break every rule in the book for a chance at a night of "free adult cable".  

Tony, the real boffin of the gang, has already done all the complicated, technical stuff off-camera, so all the guys need to do is switch on the set and tune in the aerial to make their hormonal dreams come true, only instead of naked girls, all they get are some weird flashing lights - on every channel. Just then a flaming object plunges past the window and crashes somewhere in the depths of Green Woods, just outside town. Guess what happens next?

Well, I didn't expect a pack of wolves, I'll tell you that. Nor the shocking thing that happened after. 

Based on the demo, Unusual Findings has a good plot and a better script. Those are both fairly standard in point and click adventures, I'm pleased to say, but it also has excellent direction, which is a lot more unusual. As a game that pays homage to movies, this does a pretty good job of feeling like one. The opening credit sequence, which runs immediately after you solve the simple problem of the first location and get Vinny out of his bedroom, is particularly well done.

Less impressive is some of the voice acting, although not for the reasons you might expect. The three leads are all competent enough and the line readings are mostly convincing but there's an occasional tendency towards hysteria that doesn't sit all that well with the source material. A couple of lines come across awkwardly, very much an adult play-acting a teenager getting over-excited rather than a convincingly hyped-up teen. 

The weirdest thing, though, especially since all three voices sound authentically American, is the moment when one of them namechecks "Wile E. Coyote" and calls him "Willy E. Coyote". It's not some kind of in-character joke, either, as the subtitles make clear and the tone of the actor suggests the name means absolutely nothing to him.

Leaving aside how that ever got past the edit, it's not even a native speaker's misread. Assuming you'd never seen a Roadrunner cartoon and had no idea who Wile E. Coyote was, you still wouldn't say it like that. "Wile" is never pronounced "Willy" in either standard British  or American English. It's a second-language error.

Other than a few nit-picks, the voice acting is fine and anyway the game is fully titled so if it gets on your nerves you can just turn it off in Settings. All the controls are eminently sensible, with a single left-click on any interactable object bringing up a tripartite menu allowing you to Search, Look At or Talk To whatever you have targetted. If you Search and there's something you can use, the game automatically pops it into your inventory.

There are only a handful of puzzles in the demo, all of which are easily solved. There's barely even any Adventure Game Logic to handwave away. I could imagine doing the things that have to be done in the game and doing them the way they're done, which is highly unusual. Granted, they'd be more likely to happen in a movie than real life but they're certainly possible.

The demo took me almost half an hour to finish and the time flew by. I enjoyed some of the knowing period references, which seemed to me to have a little more irreverence about them than these things often do. The scene where Tony unknowingly outs himself as a future Brony is particularly sweet.

As always, a plea from the developers to add the game to my wishlist appeared at the end, a request with which I happily complied, only to find the game has already been released. It's currently on sale with a launch discount of 15%. Full UK price is £15.99, which seems very reasonable. 

Even so, I think I'll wait for a bigger discount in a later sale. I seem to have something of a surfeit of  point-and-click options right now.

Do You Feel Lucky?

Since I have nothing in particular I care to write about today and it's probably time for another music post (Well, it's been a week...) I think I'm going to roll the dice and let fate, in the shape of File Explorer's handy "Random" function, decide. This really is russian roulette for my credibility (Always assuming I ever had any.). 

I'm going to use my older, bigger music folder rather than my current one because it has far more songs in it that I've never posted before. I'm going to keep rolling until I have enough to fill a post and I'm going to use whatever comes up, unless I can remember having used it before or I think it's too boring to subject anyone else to. Neither personal embarassment nor considerations of good taste will be deemed sufficient reason for exclusion.

The folder in question has nearly four thousand songs in it and I was using it from about 2012 until early 2019. There's a ton of stuff in there I've completely forgotten about and almost certainly some things I wish I'd never downloaded. Let's give it a spin...

And what a great way to start! The magnificent Shampoo doing Trouble, their signature number and biggest hit. Yep, they did have more than one. I remember seeing this on Top of the Pops back in the mid-90s (It was 1994, apparently.) Can't say I remember the execrable Malcolm McLaren introducing it, although at this remove he does add a certain je ne sais quoi. Creepiness, mostly.

Shampoo went on to become archetypally big in Japan, surely to no-one's surprise. Historically, they sit somewhat uncomfortably, bang-slap in the middle of the Britpop era, singing about girl power a couple of years too late to be riot grrls, a couple too soon to be Spice. I've always loved 'em.

OMG! What the hell is this? It's The Distillers with the extremely weirdly-named The Young Crazed Peeling. I have no memory of ever seeing or hearing this before. It's very loud, isn't it? And shouty. Goes well with the last one, in an in your face kind of way, too. I wonder what made me think I'd want to hear it again? I mean, I quite like it but you'd have thought once would be enough.

Skipping over several picks that either I've already used or which aren't on YouTube any more, we come to this little gem. It's "a mock-up band doing a phony "cover" of The Darling Buds' song "Sure Thing."". Made as a college project, the audio is the Darling Buds' original with what's presumably a college band vamping while the singer lip-synchs. 

I love the Darling Buds. They had a string of low-key, poppy hits in the late 'eighties and turned up occasionally, doing them on Saturday morning kids TV shows, but I saw them at least three times in basement clubs and live they had a sound as hard as granite. Weirdly, if you put "Darling Buds" into YouTube now, most of the results are for Dr. Teijinder Bhatti's "popular hair transplant clinic" in Mumbai or for another, unrelated band of the earnest, acoustic persuasion. Band-naming is such a minefield.

Motor Girl by Gaijin. Hmm. This must come from when I was truffle-hunting through the Indonesian and South-East Asian indie scene, which is huge but largely invisible outside the region. Judging by the comments, I'm guessing this lot are from the Phillipines. Once again, I have to question why I thought it was worth downloading. It's nice enough and all but I don't think I'd have been missing out if I'd never heard it again.

Ah, I do remember these guys, although not the song. It's Chimera by O Children, who've been here before with the much more memorable Dead Disco Dancer. I do enjoy a nice slice of goth from time to time, the colder and bloodier the better. This is a bit mannered compared to some of their other, more unhinged material, but it's fine in its way.

And this justifies the entire post! If you only watch one video here today, make sure it's this one: Out On The Street by Space Waltz. I must have found it either when I went virtual crate-diving in the Australian/New Zealand corner of YouTube or, more likely, when I was educating myself about Jobriath, something I belatedly got around to doing about ten years ago. 

There was a spate of Ziggy Stardust clones around the time Bowie finally broke through but surely none of them had the cut-glass tones of Space Waltz's Alistair Riddell. He makes Bowie himself sound like a brickie. Somewhat unbelievably, Out On The Street went to #1 in New Zealand back in 1974.

Take A Ride - TOYBLOÏD. Wow! That rocks! I think they're French but their name has an umlaut and they sing in English so who really knows? Well, anyone who can be bothered to take ten seconds to check, I suppose, which rules me out. I was dithering over whether I wanted to post this one when it started but it really builds and there's a fantastic one-note guitar solo about half-way in. 

A couple more and we're done, I think. I'll tell you one thing I've learned from doing this today, though. If you see a video on YouTube you think you might want to watch again, seriously, download it. Don't assume it'll be there next time you look. I've already had to skip several picks because the videos aren't on YouTube any more. I might start putting some of them back up if I have a moment, although I guess that could be asking for trouble...

I've definitely featured The Goon Sax before but I don't recall posting this particular track, Sweaty Hands. They split up earlier this summer, sadly, something of a surprise given they seemed to be building up quite a buzz. They were all still in school when they formed the band so maybe it's just as well. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were talking the other day about how weird it would be to be in one of those bands that meets at school or college and then goes on to play together for fifty years. No wonder so many bands end up not speaking to each other.

And finally...

A reminder that novelty isn't everything. Sometimes you have to touch base with the classics. One of the all-time great music videos, too. Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat but you didn't need me to tell you that.

There was a while when a few people I knew liked to tell me I looked like one of Bronski Beat. Not Jimmy Somerville, obviously. I can kind of see it although not really.

This has been fun - for me, anyway. It's also been highly instructive to see how many things I've downloaded aren't on YouTube any more but also just how many more I had to leave out because I've included them in previous posts. I passed on a couple that didn't look like they'd be a lot of fun for anyone else although given that I thought it was worth packing them away for safekeeping in the first place, I guess I should have more trust in my own judgment. 

I don't, though. Future me always shakes his head at past me. Then again, what do either of them know? Present me is the only one that matters.

Talking About Not Talking

There was a time when I'd have done just about anything to get access to a closed beta for a game I was looking forward to playing. Okay, not "anything". I mean, I wouldn't have gotten a gang together to steal a diamond necklace from a museum by abseiling down through a hole in the roof, just in case anyone was thinking of asking...

No, I mean I'd have been happy to fill in all kinds of forms and sign all kinds of waivers just to get to see some half-finished game before most other people got a look at it. I'd have been willing to enter contests and make new email addresses and register new accounts, all that bureaucratic malarkey.

Then, if I was lucky enough to get an invite, I'd dutifully have put in my hours, posted my thoughts on the forums, submitted my bug reports and feedback and generally played the role of a good little unpaid QA. My reward for all that self-effacing effort, other than the smug satisfaction of knowing something other people didn't, would have been the knowledge that most mmorpgs genuinely are better in beta. 

Seriously, they are. Or they used to be. But that was in the days when developers didn't just let anyone in. They didn't generally start sending out invites until the bones of the game felt solid. I did play one or two "betas" that barely ran (Horizons, I'm looking at you...) but mostly there was already a game there, waiting to be tested, not just an engine and some promises. 

These days, I'm not at all sure the old "better in beta" meme stands up any more. Most developers don't even bother waiting until they have what would have passed for a beta-quality product before they throw open the doors to anyone with a credit card. Early Access and Paid Alpha have all but done away with real betas.

Or so the theory goes. It's not a theory actually supported by facts but then who bothers with facts any more?  

This week I had an email inviting me to apply for access to a Closed Alpha for a game I am very interested in playing. A couple of days later I saw a news item at MassivelyOp offering access to an alpha preview for another game, one I hadn't heard of before but which sounded interesting. Both seemed like opportunities.

Had I signed up for either of them, I wouldn't be posting about it now. Well, to be strictly fair, I might have been able to mention the bald fact that I'd applied but that would have been all. Both games have positively draconian NDAs, one of which even requires a digital signature, the first time I've ever been asked to supply one for anything outside of my paid employment.

Both games have forms to complete that come with boxes to tick to confirm you've read the Terms and Conditions and Rules of Conduct. Being the suspicious, nit-picking, rule-fearing kind of person I am, I clicked through and did exactly that. Yes, of course I skimmed but I stopped and read in full all the sections about which I had concerns.

Having done so, I declined to proceed with either of the applications. I have to say, hitting the "Do Not Accept" buttons was a bit of a buzz. As Barbara Pym so aptly puts it in her first novel (Some Tame Gazelle, pub. 1950.) which I happened to be reading at the time, "there was a certain pleasure in not doing something".

It wasn't just bloody-minded awkwardness that led me to turn down the offers. Nor was it any lingering concern that to play now might spoil my pleasure later. No, what put me off participating in the testing was something much more straightforward, a purely pragmatic, practical concern: the NDAs for both alphas absolutely forbid any kind of reporting whatsoever.

The last time I signed an NDA for an alpha was for New World. As it happened, I really liked what I saw in that first test; anything I might have said would have been highly complimentary. Ironically, by the time Amazon Games were letting people into testing without an NDA, the game had changed to the point where I was no longer quite so sure about it.

That was an educative experience. I fully appreciate why companies don't want opinions to be formed by early builds that will almost inevitably change out of all recognition by the time the game launches. This isn't a complaint about the existence of NDAs in this context; asking would-be testers to sign them seems to me to be an eminently sensible precaution.

What I learned from New World and now from these two games is that I personally am no longer sufficiently interested in the process as a player to abide by such restrictions. It came as something of a minor epiphany. I think it's entirely possible that I now play games almost wholly because they give me something to blog about, not because I want to play them in their own right.

Not being able to blog about New World during the first alpha irritated me no end but at the time I was still sufficiently motivated to log in and play just for the experience. It's hard for me to imagine doing that now. If I'm not going to write about something, these days I don't generally feel the urge to bother with it at all.

Conversely, when I do play something new, I get twitchy if I don't have a way to take screenshots at a moment's notice. Almost the first thing I do in every new game is to open the Settings and look for the screenshot commands. If I can't find them, which is disturbingly common, especially in games still in a pre-release version, I immediately exit the game and fire up FRAPS. If that doesn't work, I prepare myself for the laborious process of using PrtScr, cutting and pasting individual images to Paint.net as I go, which makes playing the games feel juddery and disjointed and not much fun at all.

And yet I persevere, because what really interests me is reporting on what I see and do in the games, not just seeing and doing it. It's been like this for a while, now, and once again I'm not complaining. My suspicion is that if I wasn't blogging about most of these games I wouldn't be playing them at all.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't be playing any games. I'd be playing far fewer games, that's true, and probably I'd be playing the games I did play for fewer hours, but I haven't lost my interest in or love for the genres I favor - mmorpgs and adventure games in particular. It's more that I'd be doing boring things in them that no-one would ever want to hear about... even more than I do already.

And that's why tests with NDAs really aren't going to work for me, not so long as I'm writing this blog. It'd just be too frustrating. The thing about hotly-anticipated games that haven't been released yet is that they make for really good copy. It's not so much that posting reveals draws a crowd; it's more that new stuff is really, really easy to write about.

It's self-evident in the choices I've made here over the last two or three years. I enjoy writing about games when they're new and confusing. I find the learning process compulsive and I like to go over what I'm learning at inordinate length, partly because it helps me clarify things but mostly because i just like the sound of my own voice.

Eventually, when things start to become clear and the shine of the new has faded a little, I can settle into just playing for the fun of it without feeling I have to write everything down. That's about where I am with Noah's Heart now. Athough there's still an uncomfortable amount I don't understand, I no longer feel compelled to discuss my lack of understanding in front of an audience. I just do my dailies and enjoy it.

To sign a legal document forbidding me to share my thoughts and opinions about a new game here would be to condemn myself to an indefinite period of frustration, which is reason enough to opt out,  but there's another reason as well. 

I'm not at all happy about some of the exaggerated claims of ownership over anything I might write about the game even when permitted. I understand I'm playing off other people's copyrighted work here and I'm very willing to respect things like image rights over the screenshots or video I might take in the games but when it comes to writing about my time playing, my words are my words. 

It's not just NDAs for testing environments that make these land-grabs, either. I've uninstalled more than one released game over content creation rights clauses in the EULA. I may not be making any money off the things I write here but I'm damned if I see why anyone else should.

This, then, is most likely the only post I'm going to get out of these two games until they hit some kind of open access testing, if not launch itself. I remain interested in them but I'll defer any comments until I'm allowed to make them freely and without restraint.

I'm not even going to mention which games they are.

Tuesday Tapas (Does That Work?)

After a run of hefty posts it might be time for a grab-bag, don't you think? Why should Fridays have all the fun? Let's start with the bad news and get that out of the way first.

Chimeraland Server Merges.

It seems the global launch of Level Infinite's excellent creature-crunching mmo/survival mashup hasn't gained the traction the developers might have hoped. We're looking at server merges after just three months.

It's a shame the game hasn't received more attention in the West but for all we like to pretend the genre is in steep decline, there's actually a glut of mmorpgs right now. New additions to the select roster of AAA titles that still dominate the press cycle may be few and far between but new mmorpgs from other territories or independents seem to throw themselves against the cliffs of indifference almost weekly.

I have to admit to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution. I really like Chimeraland but I haven't been playing much. In years gone by I'd have been happy to have made it my focus game. I'd have spent twenty or thirty hours a week playing it, probably for months. I'd have been willing to pay a subscription, too.

These days, the sheer choice on offer makes a commitment like that feel silly. Even so, I still might have bedded down in the game, had I not already put in a stint on the SEA servers and had Chimeraland's global launch not clashed with another new mmorpg, one I hadn't already worn the shine off - Noah's Heart.

Three months later, here I am, still playing Noah's Heart every day. Chimeraland fell out of my rotation very quickly, slipped back in with the "Please Come Back - We Miss You" event, then dropped out for a second time as soon as I'd bled said event dry. 

This sort of thing always makes me a tad anxious for the prospects of the games I enjoy. They're all fragile, dependent on fashion as much as quality. Playing both games over the last few months, despite getting slightly more attention in the specialist media, I'd have to say Chimeraland always looked the more at risk. Although the SEA server I used to play on didn't feel exactly busy, I did see other players most times I logged on. By contrast, on the global server where I occasionally play now, I hardly ever see anyone - and if I think back, I never really have. It's always felt deserted, even at launch.

In practical terms, it makes no difference to me whether Chimeraland has a slew of servers or just the one, so long as there's a place for me. I play solo and never interact with anyone. I don't even know how many servers there were to begin with. I just picked one at random and never looked back.

As for the possibility of losing my house, should someone else's structure be merged onto my plot, that really doesn't matter either. I've barely started working on it. It's one room, a patio and a rooftop viewing area. It would take me a short session to rebuild and I could make a much better job of it.

Even so, server merges are rarely a good sign and Easten imports don't generally have the longevity of local product in the West. I can't help but feel this is a harbinger of worse news to come.

Keeping Busy In Noah's Heart

Noah's Heart, by comparison, seems pretty busy. There are people in all the towns, zipping around on motorcycles and llamas, stacking on top of each other at the crafting stations or just standing around in clumps, doing who knows what.  

The community in Noah's Heart, if you can dignify it with the term, is perforce quite "active". The whole game revolves around something called Activity Points, which monitor and reward your level of engagement with the manifold opportunities available. The very first thing you see each day as you log in is a tally of your activity, although since it's always zeroed at the start of a session I'm not entirely sure why it's there. It would make more sense to have it pop up when you log out.

How busy you keep yourself in the game as an individual is up to you but as I mentioned briefly in a previous post, Guilds are expected to stay on the treadmill. As expected, my previous Greek-speaking guild was forcibly disbanded by the server for inactivity a couple of weeks ago.

I'd found being in a guild surprisingly useful so I immediately began looking for a replacement but every guild with a recruitment drive had strict activity quotas. You can't really blame them, when the penalty for slacking is oblivion.

In the end I decided to go with the method that worked so well the first time, namely doing nothing and waiting to be headhunted. It took a few days but eventually a drive-by invite popped up and I accepted it without a moment's hesitation.

My new guild, which I think, from memory, is called Guardians, is almost full and rates "High" on the health meter. Guild chat is quite lively and this time it's even in English. There are no specific activity requirements that I've seen other than making your daily Donations, something I would always do anyway because there is literally a daily for doing it. 

The big crime is inactivity. If you're offline for more than three straight days without a note from the Guild Leader, you're out of the guild. Since I've logged into Noah's Heart every day since launch, that's not a problem for me at the moment. If I take a break at any point I doubt I'll bother to petition for vacation time. I'll just wait to get picked up by another guild when I come back.

Edgerunners and The Last Bus

By utter co-incidence I found myself watching two very different SF series on Netflix side by side. One was the high profile Cyberpunk 2077 spin-off, Edgerunners, about which I posted right before I began. The other was the made-for-Netflix British kids show, The Last Bus.

The first season of each series just happened to consist of ten approximately thirty minute long episodes. For a week and a half I watched an episode of one followed by an episode of the other, which has to be some kind of object lesson in the breadth of field of which the genre is capable.

Everyone's probably familiar with the ultra-violent, foul-mouthed, hyper-sexualized content of Edgerunners but I imagine the homespun, love-is-the-answer, child-friendly The Last Bus has probably passed most of my readers by. Imagine something the Children's Film Foundation or the National Film Board of Canada might have made in the 1970s, give it a very slightly higher budget and update it for the 21st century but not too much. That's about where we're landing. It's almost literally a SciFi re-imagining of Here Come The Double Deckers, ffs.

I really enjoyed it. As some of the surprisingly positive reviews suggest, the characters and the acting are the series' greatest strength. By the end, I came to appreciate every one of the straggling, random selection apocalypse-dodging schoolkids, although god knows Misha made it hard work at times. I did genuinely shout at the screen more than once, when she was doubling down on her paradoxically apathetic sarcasm.

The special effects were generally acceptable, although whoever signed off on the "bus goes over the cliff" scene clearly needs to think seriously about their choice of career. I mean, how hard is it to drive an actual bus off a cliff? The script was decent and the plot solid. The whole thing ends with an unapolagetic lead-in to a second series, which I very much hope Netflix gives them. I'd certainly watch it.

I imagine Netflix would be only too pleased to give Edgerunners another season. The anime's racked up five star reviews across the board from critics and viewers alike. Having watched it to the end, I'm thinking a second season might be somewhat problematic but I can't really even hint as to the reason without giving some massive spoilers, so I'll just stick to what I thought of Season One.

I liked it a lot. I'm tempted to say I loved it but it would be more accurate to say I loved certain scenes and a couple of whole episodes. That's not to say the whole thing isn't good - it is - but some of it is truly excellent. As Naithin said in a comment (Which I forgot to reply to - sorry, Naithin!) last time I mentioned the show, "I wouldn't put it on the masterpiece pedestal." I felt the structure was a little baggy in places and some of the fight scenes were a tad self-indulgent.

As I said in that post, the only reason I came to watch Edgerunners at all was the involvement of Let's Eat Grandma's Rosa Walton on the soundtrack. Her tune, "I Really Want To Stay At Your House", crops up twice, both times to devestating effect. The whole soundtrack is great, especially the song that plays over the end credits, Let You Down by Dawid Podsiadło.

I let the credits run to to the end after all ten episodes just so I could hear that play. The Franz Ferdinand song that backs the intro sequence is pretty damn fine, too. I watched that through about half the time as well.

Perhaps the obvious comparison would be with Cowboy Bebop, although that may just be because it's the only remotely similar anime I happen to have seen. The two series share a number of key elements, though, including but not limited to a corporate dystopian setting, a crew of characters so cool it's physically painful to watch them, an overwhelming sense of ennui laced with hopeless romance and a nested maze of secrets and betrayals. All it's missing is the dog.

Not being quite as good as your influences doesn't invalidate the attempt, of course, or we'd pretty much have no popular culture at all. Edgerunners is very, very good and that's more than enough.

And that's probably more than enough for this post, too. I'll just end by mentioning some

Music News Snippets

I saw this week that Taylor Swift's upcoming album, Midnights (Already topping my Amazon wishlist) features a collab with Lana del Rey. Given they share a co-writer and producer in Jack Antonoff, himself in the news for snapping back at the increasingly unmoored Kanye over his supervillainesque stance on, well, you name it, it probably had to happen sometime. I'm just glad it's now. 

The new track's called "Snow On The Beach" and I only wish I could bring it to you here but since the album's not out for another ten days and for once nothing's leaked, I can't. We'll just have to wait until Friday week. 

Now all we need is a date for Lana's next. It's only been a year but, man, it feels so much longer...

Robots, Voodoo And The Afterlife

By the time I finish writing and editing this post, the latest Steam Next Fest will have ended. I'm beginning to wonder, as Krikket does, if it wouldn't be better just to have a "Demo" category on Steam, one that didn't come with a self-destruct button. Except... wait.. there already is one. It just never occurred to me to look!

The obvious advantage of these periodic, time-limited events over the always-on demos on the game pages is clearly the attention they draw. In this small corner of the blogosphere alone I count at least four bloggers who've posted at least one Next Fest report this time around and I can think of two or three more who've covered it in previous events. By contrast, almost nobody posts about random demos they might have tried in the fallow months between festivals.

I hereby pledge to make more of an effort to play and review demos of interesting games as and when I find them, not just when Valve fires the starting gun. It shouldn't be hard. I really enjoy demos. They're kind of like singles as compared to albums: much shorter but much punchier, the good ones, anyway. Like singles they're also a lot easier to sum up in a couple of pithy paragraphs, plus you can bundle a bunch together and make up a full post with a lot less effort than reviewing a whole damn game.

Going into this most recent Next Fest, I was somewhat unimpressed with what was on offer but either I picked exceptionally well or I was mistaken. I've now completed another three demos, leaving just one to go, and once again they're all winners.

For a while, I wasn't expecting to be anything like that positive about the first of today's batch, Life of Delta, and I still have some serious issues with the demo itself, even now I'm feeling a lot warmer towards the full game. If I was tasked with coming up with a demo that would entice people into wishlisting an adventure game, I'm not sure I'd begin by locking the player in a single room with no dialog and almost no interactions and then ask them to solve a particularly long, awkward puzzle before they could even get out of the door.

Not to overstate the difficulty but even after I became sufficiently irritated with my lack of progress to go watch a YouTube walkthrough, I still couldn't do it. In the end I gave up and went to bed and that was almost as much of the demo as I saw. Luckily, after a night's sleep I decided to give it one more try. Suddenly it was easy.

Why? Did I have a dream revelation of some kind? No. I already knew exactly what to do the night before. I'd watched someone do it on YouTube ffs. The reason I hadn't been able to solve the puzzle, which involves watching multiple icons to see which ones light up to match a pattern, when you click on a button, is that the visual difference between the lit and unlit icons was all but indistinguishable in artificial light. It was only in the morning, with sunlight streaming through the window, that I could tell which ones were "On" and which were "Off".

The reason I persevered is that Life of Delta opens with a gorgeous cut scene, good enough to make me wish it was the start of a whole movie. The in-game graphics are also excellent. The trailer shows a little of both.

Once I'd finally freed myself from the first room, everything else went about as smoothly as any other point and click adventure game. The controls are intuitive and the rest of the demo has interesting conversations, manageable puzzles and plenty to see. 

The music and background sounds are fine, too, but for once I won't be praising the voice acting; not because it's bad or because there is none but because all the robots speak in a kind of Charlie Brown-adult mumble. It's a common but very risky choice. Sometimes, as in the SteamWorld games, it's so incredibly distracting I have to mute it but here it works pretty well. I imagine it must save a bomb on paying professional voice actors, something that's only going to get more controversial in years to come - not that AIs are the only threat to employment for the game voiceover specialist...

The Life of Delta demo took just 48 minutes, well over half of which was spent in that first room. Even so, I saw more than enough to mark it "Recommended". I'm going to save myself the trouble of trying to find an unobtrusive way to say the same about the other two. I'll just get it out of the way now: they're all three "Recommended".

Second in this batch comes the game I mentioned at the end of my last post, Pitstop in Purgatory. I was slightly wary of this one, not being crazy fond of afterlife fantasies, but it very quickly won me over with a combination of characterful images, clever writing and solid voice acting.

Before I go any further there's something I ought to mention. To myself. I literally just found this out right now, when I searched for the trailer on YouTube for the post. Actually, there are several "somethings" that need to be addressed:

• 
  Pitstop in Purgatory launches on Steam in just three days.
• The full game is already available on Itch.io.
• I already own the blasted thing!

I had no idea. It's one of the myriad games (Okay, 1,182.) in this summer's Indie Bundle for Abortion Funds, which I bought back in July. Naturally, I haven't played any of them. I think I managed to scroll through about half of them before I gave up. Sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing.

If Pitstop in Purgatory is in any way representative of the quality of the games in that collection, I really need to go back and take another look. The demo is both engaging and entertaining, the afterlife theme adopting an original and surprisingly undisturbing tone despite the heavy trigger warnings (Death, illness, torture...)

The graphics, which didn't immediately appeal, quickly grew on me. They look like either pastels or chalks. The settings are as constrained as you might expect from a purgatorial scenario but the richness of the illustration offsets any serious claustrophobia. 

Mechanically, Pitstop in Purgatory plays comfortably with no noticeable glitches or hiccups, a sign of a game that's already been released. The character you play, Astrid Braid, used to be an actor but her recurring role in the drama of life has just come to an end. As she struggles to come to terms with the fact of her own demise, Astrid meets a cast of self-centered shadows, all of whom have a lot to say, none of which is of very much help.

Troubled by visitations in her sleep (Yes, there is sleep in purgatory. In your own bed, no less. Also, there's drink. Sounding quite cosy now, isn't it?) it seems Astrid may be destined for something better than everlasting limbo. Or is it something worse?

It took me 38 minutes to take Astrid as far as she could go, namely the bar and her bedroom. Whether the entire game takes place in those two locations, which would at least be thematically appropriate, or whether the nether stretches further is something I guess I can discover at my leisure, now I know I own the game. Not much point wishlisting it on Steam, either, although had I not just made my great discovery I certainly would have.

Thirdly and lastly comes Foolish Mortals. This one also has a supernatural setting and a historical one as well, although I can honestly say I didn't notice until half-way through. The action takes place in Lousiana in the 1930s but I'm so used to seeing the New Orleans cliches in TV shows and movies I took the clapboard houses and paddle-steamers to be nothing more than contemporary set-dressing. It was only when the Maitre D' at the Captain's Club started going on about Prohibition that I realised we'd stepped back in time by almost a century.

Since we're in the Louisiana swamplands, the plot necessarily revolves around voodoo. How could it not? The demo opens in something of a flurry, mid-quest with, three out of five ingredients for a voodoo summoning already in your bag, along with an empty soda bottle and one or two other things. It's taking in media res to extremes. For a moment I thought I must have missed a step but no, that's where the demo begins, although maybe not the game.

The full game is set to feature "more than 30 fully voiced characters...over 70 gorgeous hand-drawn locations..." and offer "a full-length experience, with a gameplay time equal to Monkey Island and Broken Sword." I still haven't played Monkey Island but the Broken Sword titles were an immediate point of reference for me here.

It's a long demo for a long game. It took me almost an hour and a quarter to gather the remaining ingredients and complete the spell, at which point... ah, no, I'd better keep that part to myself. The puzzles weren't over-complicated or illogical although they were adventure-game unlikely. It's very much a positive point in the game's favor that I completed most of them without referring to the extensive and elegant in-game hints, a feature I only discovered close to the end.

The voicework I would describe as solid rather than exceptional. It does have very much the light tone of the Broken Sword games, albeit without that series' signature banter between two leads. Maybe that's coming later. As for the visuals, I think "gorgeous" is more than fair for the paintings, documents and other full-screen illustrations. The locations themselves are neat and attractive but perhaps leaning more towards the functional than the decorative.

As for the plot, always a key feature in games of this nature, the demo sets things up nicely. Once again, I don't want to give too much away, but there's a development at the very end that suggests a significant change of direction from what I'd been expecting until then. I'm certainly curious to find out what happens next.

Foolish Mortals is scheduled for next year. There's a Kickstarter running. It's only just started but with 24 days still to go it's already well past the modest £12,000 target, the pot standing at £20,575 as I write. 

I won't be backing it. They definitely don't need my money to get the job done. I will be wishlisting the game on Steam, though. It's exactly the kind of thing for a long, winter's evening.

That just leaves one demo left from the seven I chose five days ago. It's called Unusual Findings and I'm pleased to say the demo's still available even though Next Fest has ended. I'll try and fit in a review somewhere. Who knows? maybe it'll be good enough to merit a whole post of its own.

Three Down, Four To Go: Steam Next Fest

I've been whittling away at the seven Next Fest demos I picked this time around and so far it's been a fun little diversion. I've finished two, made a deal of progress in a third and just started the fourth. I'm going to wait until the event's over before I decide which titles are going on my wishlist but from here it looks like three out of the first four.

Wishlisting games on Steam is an interesting subtopic of its own. The ostensible reason for wishlisting is to remind yourself and others of titles you'd like to buy, either when they become available or when you have the time or the funds. It also ensures you don't miss out when titles go on sale, as they frequently and seemingly randomly do. Whether you ever do end up buying them is, of course, another matter altogether.

In recent times I've noticed another aspect of wishlisting. It appears to have some intrinsic value to the developers seperate from the possible financial gain they accrue, should you eventually decide to buy. Devs aren't shy of asking, either. I've seen a number of appeals asking demo players to consider adding the game to their wishlist because it helps build the marketing profile for the game.

They don't usually phrase it quite as baldly but that's what they mean. It seems to be similar to content creators on social media platforms asking you to Like or Subscribe. I don't want to derail my own post here so I might save this for later but I just googled "How does Wishlisting on Steam help developers?" and got a ton of interesting-looking results. 

Suffice it to say, adding a game to your wishlist after playing the demo has implications beyond merely bookmarking it for your personal records. I recently de-listed a game after I learned it had changed direction to incorporate crypto, NFTs and play-to-earn. I could just have left it there and forgotten about it but I wanted to make sure my interest in and approval of the title was no longer implied and that any benefit to the developers from my having it on the list, however minimal, was withdrawn.

Gosh! And to think we used to just buy games and play them. Onwards and upwards, eh?

So, to the demos, in the order I played them. First up, Midnight Girl. This one ticks so many of my boxes I feel like I'm in an Amazon warehouse. Or maybe a Kafka novel... I need to work on my similes. 

Here's the full, extremely lucid, description from the game's Steam page:

"Midnight Girl is a 2D point-and-click adventure game for mobile, PC and console.

The game takes place in France in the mid-Sixties. The story, mood, and style of the game are inspired by the city of Paris, Belgian comics and Sixties cinema.



The late teen tomboy Monique lives as a cat burglar in Paris. After a heist gone wrong, she ends up in jail where she meets an enigmatic prisoner. They escape prison together, and agree to venture on a spectacular heist for a precious diamond. Thus begins a quest that takes our heroes through a catholic monastery, a Parisian metro station and the Catacombs.

The game focuses on story and atmosphere. The gameplay mixes elements of stealth, discovery and puzzle solving."

I mean, come on! Is there even any point in me reviewing the demo after that? Or playing the game? Also, did you know that if you cut and paste from a Steam page into Blogger it lifts the entire video and embeds it? I didn't but I do now! I'm going to be doing that a lot more from now on, you can bet.

I loved this. As a demo, it's just about perfect. It looks like all they've done is lift a whole chapter from the middle of the game. They start you running with no instructions or preamble and it just works. Everything is wholly intuitive. The controls feel immediately natural and comfortable, the story makes sense, the voice acting is delightful, the puzzles are logical, the solutions are credible and best of all it looks and sounds gorgeous.

As will be made very clear, even though I play a lot of point and click adventures, I really don't much like the puzzles in them. I frequently refer to walkthroughs because I stopped finding second-guessing the bizarre thought processes of developers fun many years ago. When I find a P&C that stays fun throughout, even when I don't refer to a guide, that's a game definitely worth wishlisting.

And recommending: so, recommended.

Next we have Rosewater Not to pre-empt the body of the review but I loved this one, too. That probably shouldn't be all that surprising. I've started with the demos I'm most interested in and I'm working my way down, so it would be a bit of a problem if I didn't like the opening salvo.

Rosewater is set in the Old West, although it rapidly becomes apparent that's an Old West not our Old West, unless I was napping through double history the day we covered cross-continental airship travel putting the railways out of business. The game's version of the mid-nineteenth century seems to be satisfyingly free of gender and racial bias, at least on the hour or so I've seen of the gameplay so far, which neatly sidesteps some of the more problematic elements of the frontier life for a 21st century audience.

You play a freelance writer and ex-champion boxer called Harley Leger (French pronounciation.) The demo opens with you fresh off the train, standing in the dusty streets of a typical no-horse town. You're there for a job interview at the local paper but in short order you find yourself the intended victim of a pickpocketing scam before almost being crushed to death by a body thrown through the second-story window of the newspaper office - by the very person you've come to see.

Do you really want to work there after that? Apparently so, yes. And it's believable that you would, too, because the writing in Rosewater is very good indeed. In the hour I played, very little about the plot or in the many conversations felt video-gamey at all. Yes, there are a few puzzles because without them I guess it wouldn't qualify as a game at all but even those felt like the things the protagonist of a novel might do, not something leveraged in to appease a gamer's expectations. 

Despite that novelistic qualiy, Rosewater doesn't have a typical "visual novel" sense to it at all. To me, it felt more like being inside a radio play, possibly because there's a lot of dialog. Most of the action consists of talking to people, which might be a problem if the conversations weren't so interesting and the voice acting so good.

Seriously, the graphics are simple and charming but the voice acting really shines. Everyone is just on it. The line readings are nuanced and impeccably delivered. It's a real pleasure to listen to - like a good radio play. It's no wonder the Steam page makes a feature of the quality of the voice cast with photos of everyone involved, although the seventy-five minute video may be pushing it just a little...

I thoroughly enjoyed the demo of Rosewater, which I still haven't finished after more than hour of concentrated play. There is a technical problem I ought to mention; the demo frequently freezes for a few seconds as it loads data from the hard drive, which is something I haven't seen a game do for a long time. I assume that will be fixed by the time the full game arrives, so with that one caveat, once again, recommended.

Thirdly and finally for today, The Abandoned Planet.  Described on its Steam page, briefly, succinctly and accurately, as "A throw-back, retro-inspired, point and click adventure with chunky and beautiful pixel art", this was one I didn't really take to with the same enthusiasm as the others. 

It's not that there's anything really wrong with it, more that my patience with this kind of thing expired back in the late 'nineties. I can't see the attraction of making new games using the kind of graphics that we had no choice but to put up with back then. It's not like we wouldn't all have preferred a higher resolution all along, is it? I don't recall many developers making a feature of how little detail there was in their graphics or how blurry they looked...

Oh well. Nostalgia is a thing that sells or so it appears. And the graphics here aren't unappealing, even if I did keep finding myself squinting to try and bring them into focus. It wasn't really the look of the the thing that put me off so much as the gameplay.

Again, there's really nothing much wrong with that, either. It's all just as you'd expect: explore your surroundings, examine everything you see, pick up everything that's not nailed down, use X with Y on Z, solve the puzzles to progress. 

The problem for me was that there was literaly nothing else. It's all puzzles, relentlessly, one after another. There's nothing you can find that isn't used for solving a puzzle, which is why there's so little to be found. There's one character - you - and the only time you hear anyone speak is when you talk to yourself. The voice acting is good but the actor doesn't have much to work with when all they can do is describe what they're seeing and doing.

I finished the demo but only with the assistance of a walkthrough on YouTube. That's not because any of the puzzles were hard or unfair - they're all quite straightforward and reasonable - but because I kept losing interest. All adventure games require a certain degree of compliance but here the whole thing felt just a little too mechanical.

That said, I don't want to be overly critical. The Abandoned Planet looks to be exactly what the developers say it is. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, the demo suggests it's exactly what you'll get. Recommended, for those who like this kind of thing - just not for me. 

And that's it for the first instalment. I started a fourth demo, Pitstop in Purgatory, last night but I only had time to play for twenty minutes. I will spoil my own review by saying I enjoyed it a lot. With luck I'll finish it today and maybe another demo too. I don't plan on posting anything over the weekend so I ought to have time to finish a couple more, if they're concise.

Final thoughts on the bunch next week.