#pleaseplay

Yesterday I finished INSIDE by Playdead on my PS4.

   What…

  …the…

  …FUDGE???

  Okay, so Playdead went artsyfartsy and popular with the critically acclaimed LIMBO, a malignant, darkly jump’n’run full of death traps and obstacles. The game is completely monochrome in black and white with occasional dips in brownish tones later. It’s very much trial and error with many of the traps and the box shovin’ puzzles are far from innovative but they do the trick. Proper physics make the feeling more realistic and less jump’n’run-ney and the story twist of the little boy who escapes from the evil traps and monsters that lurk in the murky woods and industrial factory setting is actually astounding. -----------------------------------------------------

This is LIMBO, the first title of the extraordinary developer (PC, Xbox 360, PS3 etc.)

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Cut to INSIDE, the successor or let’s say the second game by the Danish indie game developer.

The gameplay is the same: you play a little boy who starts off in the woods and then enters factory buildings and has to avoid being killed, captured, harpooned and hung up, crushed, drowned and more. The puzzles are also similar to Limbo as is the graphical style. INSIDE features a wider color palette but it still is rather dark and creepy and leaves you with a foul feeling in your stomach. So here we have way more human(oid) non-player characters in the game, some of which you have to hide from because they hunt you down (black shirt and pants wearing guys), some of which obviously are mindless puppets that only react to a certain telepathic mind-control system that you can control by plugging the boy’s head into a helmet-on-a-chord. The puzzles are extended to more complex one-room situations where you see a problem and can only proceed after solving it (sometimes simply by combining the tools at hand, sometimes by ill-controls related trial and error and sometimes by unnecessary backtracking).

So far, so limboesque.

Everybody was all over this game and went completely bonkers about how weirdly fascinating this game was, which it actually is, I think, but I was a little “underwhelmed” by the similarities to LIMBO. I was probably expecting something bigger, something more… Some of the puzzles even got me contemplating if I even wanted to go on because the controls made me furious. The underwater monsters that always catch you if you are not way ahead of them always have to be lured away in order to mile them down in the underwater struggle of e.g. flipping a switch. This is not creepy anymore if you die five times and still have to simply try your luck if your guy dives in the water correctly in order to save time because you didn’t stumble into the water and lost a valuable second. I personally would have enjoyed the game more without these sequences.

BUT: the last 20 minutes of the game were… so… I can hardly describe it. The tension rose to a maximum because the Hitchcock-like method not to show what the fuss is about until you’re the center of it, drove me wild. And after what seemed like the end it still continued to get even weirder.

I won’t spoiler here, I’ll just recommend this to anybody who’s into artsy fartsy indie games, anybody who loved LIMBO and anyone who is into David Cronenberg and/or David Lynch, the latter being a reference to the vague storytelling that leaves you thinking about the game for quite some time after finishing it, not really getting a grip on what might have actually happened there.

I'm a sucker for a good and well narrated story in video games. I think my blog description makes this very clear. So naturally I'm somewhat of an adventure aficionado. Classic point and click adventures fascinated me already on my first C64 ("Zak McKracken") or 386PC ("Monkey Island"). These days the decision-heavy adventures from Telltale are a must play for every story lover and adventure nerd, such as me. I played their "The Walking Dead" Seasons 1&2 and "The Wolf Among Us". All really good games, if a tad bit too violent, if I might say. But how they narrate the story, how well the characters and especially the dialogues are written is uncanny and outstanding for the video game business. The ending and final hard decision in TWD Season 2 made me cry, feel like an utter asshole and question myself and my moral all at the same time! Amazing. I haven't experienced such a thing ever before in games. A little annoying is their never changing engine which always features the occasional lags and sometimes slightly awkward facial mishaps. Also I'm not a big fan of quick time events, especially if the failure might kill and force you to listen to a whole bunch of dialogue over again before trying the event again. But that is just the gameplay in adventures these days, I suppose.

So here comes "Tales From The Borderlands". I picked it up for a tenner at the store for my PS4 collection shortly after I got the console and thought it can't be bad, being a Telltale Game. I even heard that it's supposed to be the best entry in their line of adventures. And I might as well agree to that.

Getting into the setting and characters takes up a little time. But once you get to know them and once you've gotten used to the setting I realised that cinematically it is the best and richest game of Telltale. The intros of each chapter alone are pieces of cinematic art. The humour in the game is remarkable and not at all forced, which it is in many cases of humorous video games. The characters grow and change with the course of the game. And they do so together. It's the story of Rhys and Vaughn who work at the corporate Hyperion on the rich and, well, corporate Helios space station. Rhys awaits a long overdue promotion but some douchebag of a co-worker, Vasquez, beats him to the punch. So Rhys decides to f*ck with Vasquez and steal his opportunity for an illegal deal for a vault key which is apparently worth a fortune in the Borderlands universe (I have to admit that I haven't really played the original titles but now after this I will do so). On planet Pandora they meet the con artists and sisters Fiona and Sascha who are involved in the deal. From here on the ride gets a little bumpy.

I don't want to spoil anything or delve too deep into the story. Play for yourself. But here's the deal: 

The characters are amazingly written and rich in personality and layers of morale. Of course you have your occasional stereotype but even the robot characters (<3 Loaderbot!) show development, emotional value and high relevance. The story is simple in its juxtaposition but creative and unpredictable in its execution. How all characters and lose ends of the story find together in the end is remarkable. Graphics wise we get the classical cel shading Telltale style. Nothing really new here but it's still very good and suits the Borderlands universe well.