#blgr

September 28, 2022

Blue Grosbeak

Audubon’s Paton Center for Hummingbirds

Antichamber

Dev: Alexander Bruce

Pub: Demruth

Released: Jan. 31, 2013

Did I finish it: Yes

20 hours logged

Colortone

Dev: Kirill Belman

Pub: Kirill Belman

Released: Oct. 29, 2015

Did I finish it: Yes? But I’ve just noticed that Steam didn’t give me the latest version for some reason, even though it’s from back in January. Dunno why. I think it only matters for achievements.

2 hours logged

Visual Style

Antichamber: When it came out, this was a fresh and interesting use of minimalism. It’s a good way to make a puzzle game: color is used to draw the eye to important objects, and certain shapes are used to signal when you need to do something odd to progress. Not everything is completely necessary, as there are secrets peppered throughout, including some of the most awesome dev rooms I’ve ever seen. Some of the puzzle elements have whimsical or unnerving designs that work with the fake-deep level mottos to draw you into the space emotionally.

Colortone: Generally speaking, copypasted from Antichamber. There’s much less variety in the puzzle elements, though. This isn’t all that bad, because it’s significantly shorter, but it bears mention.

Sound Design

Antichamber: Soft synth music and natural sounds form an ambiance that feels quiet despite never being silent.This makes unusual sounds very powerful. There’s a... thing involved with the ending, and it makes a noise that scared the hell out of me the first time I played. This thing pops up from time to time, always somewhere you can’t properly investigate it, fueling your curiosity about the environment.

Colortone: Music and footsteps. The music isn’t terrible, some very generic relaxation stuff. It contains very short loops though, and gets annoying pretty quickly. Ultimately a pretty poorly chosen soundtrack.

Puzzles

Antichamber: A masterwork of physical puzzling that deserves to be every bit as influential as Portal. New mechanics are introduced at an engaging pace, are used together in interesting ways, and are never forgotten. There are a few opportunities to play with the tools you’re given outside the puzzles you need to finish to progress, allowing you to learn new ways of using them that can make your work on the main line more efficient. Due to the map cleverly looping back on itself, frequently dumping you into hub rooms or teleporting you directly to new puzzles, many spaces you’ve visited before become recontextualized by new abilities you acquire. Finally, the game features many spaces and puzzle elements that behave in a completely non-physical way, adding to the atmosphere of mystery and presenting novel challenges of logic, unbound by the usual constraints of an object-based puzzle. Overall, despite the lack of a fantasy setting, Antichamber feels like a simulation of learning to do magic.

Colortone: ...Needs work. The puzzles are interesting enough on a logical level, but their physical design makes them tedious to execute, an issue that gets worse later in the game. The platforming is awkward enough that this game probably should’ve been in third-person, though I can’t imagine a character design that would’ve felt appropriate. It’s also a little buggy: nothing really game-breaking, but objects do sometimes behave in unexpected ways, occasionally necessitating a restart. The mechanics fit together well enough, but then again there really isn’t room for anything to have been forgotten. There are only 14 discrete areas to work through, with the last few containing two or three puzzles rather than one. Each one ends with a long chute dropping you into the next one, which is a decent enough way to say “yes! You did it!” Unfortunately, it also prevents the interconnectivity that brought Antichamber so much depth.

Ending

Antichamber: Wow. I think I actually said that the first time I saw it. It’s odd, because in any other game, an ending like Antichamber’s might be about as satisfying as “thanks for playing!” After the quiet minimalism and cerebral play of the rest of the game though, the release of tension in the last few moments is a really great finale.

Colortone: “Yes! You did it!” And then there’s nothing at the end of the chute. Did they mean to make more? Are/were they planning to update it at some point? I hope so. Being unfinished would explain alot about this game.

Bottom Line: I am tempted to label Antichamber Priceless. It feels like it is a museum as much as it deserves to be in one. It should definitely be studied in schools of game design. However, as a product it’s still short, and has no real plot. It doesn’t exactly strike any deep passions in the human soul. Even considering my own quirky taste, it’s a bit difficult to picture paying more than $20 for it. Definitely worth every penny, though.

Unmechanical

Dev: Talawa Games

Pub: Teotl Studios

Released: Aug 8, 2012

Did I finish it: Yes

5 hours logged

LIMBO

Dev: Playdead

Pub: Playdead

Released: Aug 2, 2011

Did I finish it: Yes, but I didn’t bother with the secrets

3 hours logged

I’m playing with the format a bit this time because I want to compare and contrast these two. Kind of a Goofus and Gallant of physics-based puzzle games.

The Protagonist

Unmechanical: An adorable robot helicopter that is shaped like an apple. It has many applecopter friends.

LIMBO: Some kid. Nobody likes him. Seriously.

The Intro

Unmechanical: You’re flying across a beautiful open plain with your fellow applecopters. Suddenly, you are snatched underground by a menacing robo-claw! Oh, no!

Also there’s DLC where the intro is some dumb thing about a pink applecopter being kidnapped by the same automated facility and you going to help “her.”

LIMBO: You wake up. Where are you? What are you doing, other than going right?  A cold open like this can work, but it’s got to be supported by well-paced revelations.

The Setting and Visual Style

Unmechanical: Everything is so pretty! Look at all these cool machines! Wow, that hole sure is dark, I don’t wanna go in there! What’s in that other place, though? Let me get up there! I definitely feel invited to explore every room and play with the objects in them, even when I’m not working on a puzzle.

LIMBO: Sure is greyscale in here. I get that this game was pretty early in the “silhouette platformer” fad, but that shit was garbage from day one, and almost always an indicator of pretension. The world is well-drawn, at least, but everything looks so awful. It’s supposed to be depressing, but I think artists who do misery porn forget that boredom is a major part of depression. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want to go there.

The Stages and Puzzles

Unmechanical: While there are some set pieces that feel a little forced, like the Simon Says you run into early on, as the purpose and function of the facility gradually becomes clearer to you, the puzzles begin to seem like believable parts of it. Every so often, a new mechanic will be introduced to you, and the puzzles thereafter will tend to use all these tools together in some fashion. 

There’s a few places where your path can branch, which further encourages exploration and isn’t particularly common in 2D puzzlers. These branches are well-designed loops that send you back to the hub, so you won’t get lost trying to find the next puzzle.

You are never put in danger; the one time any actual harm is done to you is in the DLC, and it’s only to impose a limitation for the next set of puzzles. You’re repaired shortly thereafter. This is important because a puzzle game, especially one based on object physics, should generally feel fairly relaxing. This encourages toying with things and abates frustration.

The difficulty curve is superb. Some of the early puzzles feel almost a little patronizing, but as you are shown the building blocks of the world you’re in, a comfortable ramp of challenge is built up. I only had to get help with one puzzle, and that was because I didn’t realize I needed to reset something from a previous puzzle that was altering the conditions for the one I was on. The DLC is unfortunately different in this respect: I had to look up most of the puzzles, as puzzle elements were frequently visually hidden. I didn’t care for this difference in approach at all.

LIMBO: This kid should seriously consider staying dead as a viable option. Why would you WANT to live in this place? Everything you have to deal with here serves as a reminder that the worst thing about brutal survival is that it’s tedious. The game is full of die-to-figure-it-out puzzles; if anyone’s ever described it as “hard but fair,” they deserve to be punched square in the balls. An unwelcome degree of precision in platforming and timing is required for several of the puzzles; I can do this crap and harder, but I’d prefer if it were kept to games that focus on it.

Stages are not strictly linear: this I assume because there are apparently some secret objects you can collect that I wasn’t aware of until I had to look up a walkthrough to do one of the more obtuse puzzles, and accidentally got a text one instead of a video. The trouble is, since everything kills you, sometimes excruciatingly slowly, curiosity is heavily disincentivized. I’m not going down that hole. It’s obviously death.

The Music

Unmechanical: There is some. It’s soothing and thematically appropriate.

LIMBO: There is none. (?!?!?) I mean... there might have been some. If there was, it was that sort of droning cave-noise junk that horror games always have somewhere in them, and so I never became aware of it. The soundscape is mostly (or entirely?) constrained to ambient noises, which are just as boring as everything looks. At one point a bunch of saw blades and other mechanical bullshit that was trying to kill me did synch up and sound like a Nine Inch Nails track. I guess that was kind of neat.

The End

Unmechanical: Throughout the base game, you’ll periodically encounter a larger copterbot with a wrench and flashlight taped to his head. At first you’re just curious about him, because he keeps hiding from you. I’ve seen him referred to as the janitor, as you see him sweeping at one point. In a few instances, he is directly (though rather trivially) obstructive to your progress.

Eventually, you find the machine that makes the strange floating balls of light that power the rest of the facility. It turns out that, until you were taken, that’s where all the applecopters it’s sucking up go. This place is eating your friends. And the janitor is trying to prevent you from stopping it. These aren’t broken units being recycled, either: their chassis are all untouched, and you can hear them squealing as they bump around inside the pneumatic tubes. 

He saves you from a falling girder shortly after that, sacrificing his own life in the process. And I don’t care. He’s a Nazi collaborator. Giving himself what he deserved doesn’t redeem him.

So, I told you all that so I could explain why the ending bugs me, as it’s the one place this game really screws up. You are given a “choice.” That is in scare quotes because you aren’t really aware of the ramifications of what you’re doing at the time. On the one hand, you can use the collaborator’s blown-out chassis to fool the facility’s sensors into letting you escape to freedom. Alternately, you can become the new janitor. Why? Why would you do that? If I could continue on to use my new powers to dismantle this horrible deathtrap, I’d gladly do so, but it just fades to black, so I can only assume you’re going to be the same guy for the next poor bastard who doesn’t get sucked straight to the processor.

The end of the DLC campaign suffers from a similar error. Although you know what you’re called upon to do this time, the “choice” is still stupid. You can leave your crushed “girlfriend” on a switch to run away by yourself, or you can stuff yourself into a pair of exposed wires to power a machine that will bring her back to life, after which she carries your limp corpse out. The problem is, of course you do the latter, because it’s already been established that the kind of damage you’ve taken is recoverable. Hell, it’s more surprising that she can be brought back; she looked as screwed up as the janitor was.

So, yes, the writing could be better. Overall, I feel like this is a risk any dev runs when they go for the “storytelling without words” bit, which is pretty popular in this genre.

LIMBO: Who the fuck cares? Nothing is ever revealed about this “setting” except that it’s a terrible place, where everyone and everything is trying to kill you, and usually succeeds. I never had any inkling of an objective other than “go right” until about three-fourths of the way through the game, when I was pointlessly teased about some sad girl with a hime cut playing with rocks or some shit who I was apparently trying to reach. I had to find out from the store page that this is supposed to be your sister, and you did all this because you were “unsure of her fate.” Despite being given no reason in the game itself to have doubts about it, or indeed any hint that you had a sister to care about in the first place. Since the game is called LIMBO, is she supposed to be dead? Are you? I have no idea, and I have been given no reason to care.

[Originally posted to my main 4/12/2016]

Dev: SUPERHOT Team Pub: SUPERHOT Team Released: Feb 2016 Did I finish it: Got all the secrets in the levels, but haven’t touched the endless yet. More importantly, beat the high score in Treedude. 0 hours logged, because I was naughty and needed to try the game while broke

“The most innovative shooter I’ve played in years!”

My ass.

It is an interesting idea, used in a novel fashion. It’s not completely devoid of creativity, I’ll give it that. It is rather unique, somewhat fun, and generally good. It’s also heavily overrated, largely because the game actively encourages you to go out and overrate it. So, that’s the most innovative marketing I’ve seen in years, I guess. Ridiculous that it worked, especially for a game that’s so painfully overpriced. Time control has been done before; to this degree and farther in Braid, and in shooter/action games in several, though the use and purpose of it has generally been quite different.

That core idea is something I would like to see used elsewhere. And it’s popular enough that it’s very likely going to spawn imitators, and at least make a little divot in the direction of the genre. For that, I’m glad SUPERHOT exists. The full potential of SUPERHOT isn’t as a game; I’d say what it could ultimately do, if picked up by somebody else and polished for the purpose, is reduce the barrier of entry to making cool action-oriented machinima. I could see a system where you play a game and are then free to not only recut what you’ve done, but tweak animations, swap assets, and perform other editing in a very accessible way, turning your Let’s Play into a feature film. SUPERHOT Team seems to be aware of this possibility as well, given the editing and publication functionality. It’s something I predicted years ago would exist some day, so that’s neat.

You’ve probably been waiting for the “but;” brace for dropping shoes.

Firstly, actually playing the game is kind of a strange experience. For the vast majority of my first run of the story missions, it was actually just… incredibly boring. I have no idea how so many people broke through that crust to get to the part of the game that’s actually good. Once you start dealing with the constraints of the various challenges, it’s a much better puzzle.

Secondly, the graphical style is hot garbage. I shouldn’t have to say that; anyone can see it. It was clearly their intention to make it look bad, and they even say as much in some of the dialogue. It’s worth talking about though, because I feel that it’s a sort of inappropriate use of minimalism this stark. The whole point of their game is topicality: VR is finally actually a thing, so let’s Ask Questions. I’m guessing they adopted the retro aesthetic of their out-of-simulation content to harken back to the times when everybody first thought VR was going to be a thing really soon. They went back too far, though, and we got a terminal for a university mainframe where there should’ve been a C-64. When things looked this ugly, nobody wanted to strap a display to anyone’s face. This weird, anachronistic presentation was pretty jarring to me. Seeing periods get mixed together has a strong tendency to make me feel like a particular attempt at retro is an affectation by somebody who didn’t really love it.

They don’t, by the way. SUPERHOT Team is, as far as I can tell, terrified and/or contemptuous of games and the people who play them. They also seem to have similar feelings about technology in general, as well as transhumanism/the Singularity. This game is blatant and vicious propaganda against our subculture, and I’m surprised I haven’t heard anyone else saying so.

I voiced similar concerns in my analysis of Undertale, but that came with three tons of hemming and hawing, because there was so much about that game that shows Toby Fox does love this medium and its history. Between that and the sheer moral complexity of the characters, I felt like he was actually just asking hard questions. I frequently feel like I should go back and change that review to reflect that realization, but I can never figure out exactly how.

SUPERHOT isn’t asking questions. It’s Just Asking Questions.™ The conclusion they draw is obvious, and they are trying to either make you think like they do, or (as with their entreaty to do guerilla marketing for them) turn you into puppets that unintentionally parody some of the behavior they are so contemptuous of. Everything about their presentation: calling you a dog and barring your progress if you don’t sit, forcing you to “type” words that they wrote, (the most pretentious and wanky bullshit I’ve ever experienced, incidentally) the mod of the “hacker” chat room basically being a cult leader and mouthpiece for the shadowy entity behind it all; the whole thing seeks to remind you that agency is something you are only given in strictly limited quantity by your masters because it is known that you will use it in the intended fashion.

Imagine this next bit in flashing red 40-point Impact if you like:

THIS IS WHAT SUPERHOT TEAM ACTUALLY BELIEVES

Hardcore gamers are somewhere between junkies and cultists, seemingly obsessed with bringing vulnerable young children into their fold. Their elitism, superficiality, and obsessive nature makes them dangerous tools of whoever might choose to pick them up at some point. Not dangerous people, though. They can’t ever be complete people. They’d have to go outside for that, amirite?

The pointlessly violent games that appeal to hardcore gamers are potent brainwashing tools that drain players of empathy, investment in their surroundings, and concern for their well-being. Virtual Reality builds upon this foundation to make games into a kind of horrifying mind-controlling super-meth that, even if it never literally hypnotizes you as it supposedly does in this game, will fundamentally alter your person to the point that you aren’t one.

This technology comes at a pivotal time in human history, when some believe us to be on the brink of superintelligence. Transhumanists are dangerous fools for thinking of this as a good thing; they already talk all kinds of frightening stuff about how their identities and their shells are two different things.

These three incredibly scary social no-no zones might someday form a perfect storm in which a rogue splinter of some shady corp/gov research network becomes a ravenous machine-created oversoul, literally eating people by taking over their minds with our cutting edge, enthusiast-targeted media and directing these thralls to “free” others by murdering them.

But worse than all of that, they think that you having agency in an interactive medium is fundamentally fake. Rather than being a feature that was popularized specifically because gamers frequently choose to play a different game than the one the designers made, hidden secrets in difficult to reach places are just proof that you are predictable in your childish desire to complete collections. You are part of this world, and therefore controlled by it. You were never free, and now your masters have decided to end the pretense. According to SUPERHOT Team, any choice you make that was accounted for by The System wasn’t really a choice.

And you know what? Fine. Whatever. I don’t even care that much. The worst thing about the propaganda is that it causes much of the writing and presentation to be extremely paint-by-numbers. I knew every beat that was coming as I played this game. They have a rabbit hole with no-slip stair mats and OSHA-compliant railings.

Mainly, I just think it’s really goddamn weird that I am the only person I know of with this opinion of the thing. Given how hyper-political games media is getting these days, how did everyone just… miss this?

Bottom Line: $5. It’s still a fairly fun game. They can be stupid assholes. Trying to change game culture at this point is like standing at the bottom of a waterfall and trying to piss it back up. Knock yourselves out, hipsters.