Category: Video Games

A Mortician’s Tale

Short, interesting content, more akin to a visual novel. Very little gameplay or player agency.

I picked up the Racial Justice Bundle at least in part because I wanted to expose myself to a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t otherwise play. I also started this blog mostly to recommend games to other people. (And to like, pretend to be a game journalist, but same difference.)

This puts me in a bit of a bind regarding A Mortician’s Tale. Aspects of the writing for the game seem extremely strong and well thought out, but as a game, I’d say it’s far closer to a visual novel. The gameplay, at least as far as it’s present, has almost no player agency. I’ll talk about why I feel this way in a moment, but my overall verdict on the game would be this:

A Mortician’s Tale as a game is likely to appeal to individuals who like short, experimental things. The game took about 45 minutes to an hour for me to complete, and that was while reading most of the in-game emails from NPC’s. It has very little replay value outside re-reading text. Unless you have an curiosity for the subject matter (death and funerals) or experimental indie projects, I don’t think you’ll enjoy it.

Despite all that, it’s worth noting that I didn’t put the game into a “Didn’t Make The Cut” article because I did find it fairly interesting and thought-provoking. Let’s talk about that, and also, a brief warning: this article is about to sorta reach that point that most online recipes do, where it says very little about the actual thing you came to the article for (game stuff) and a lot more about the author of the article.

There are three main sections to the game: Preparing Bodies, Attending a Funeral, and Reading Emails. I’m just gonna go through em real quick in that order.

Preparing Bodies is the majority of the “gameplay”-like aspect of A Morticians Tale, and it’s pretty similar in execution to something like Trauma Center: Under the Knife or maybe Cooking Mama. You have a variety of tools that you use in order to accomplish things, but the main kicker is that you actually cannot screw this up. Like, the game will not let you use a tool incorrectly, or at the wrong point in time.

On the one hand, I get it. If you make a death-positive game about the importance of what happens with people after they die, letting the player poke a smiley face into the body of a teenager who killed himself might not fit the tone.

On the other hand, it means that the extent of actual gameplay in the game is limited/non-existent. While being guided through the actions of preparing a body is interesting, the fact that there is no real need to focus or learn anything. After the first body, I more or less just clicked and went as fast as possible, because you don’t actually have to learn anything, and the game doesn’t let you screw up. Anything interesting in this section of the game is limited to learning about the process that is used to prepare a body to be displayed.

Next we have Attending the Funeral. I found this to be a weaker part of the game, as it mostly consists of listening to 4-5 people talk in discussions that are less than a paragraph, and then leaving. Here’s why I’d consider it weaker.

I’ve been to maybe five or six funerals, most of them before I was 18. Almost all have been generally Christian as far as funerals go, but the people in them are fairly different. Off the top of my head, here’s a short list:

  1. Grandparents
  2. Classmate
  3. Family Friend
  4. Tutor/Neighbor
  5. Family Friend Relative

I mention this because the reasons for these deaths widely varied. Some of these people were very old. One had a long term fatal illness. One was a suicide. Another was in great shape, went for a run, and was killed by a heart attack.

My point would be this: regardless of the death, or the expectation and preparedness for it, funerals are incredibly emotional. A Mortician’s Tale never captured any of that emotion for me. Regardless of who has died, it’s hard to not end up overwhelmed at least a bit, whether it be from loss, or from empathy for those who have lost of a loved one.

This brings us to the last part of the game, reading emails. I would say that this is one of the strongest parts of the game in terms of writing, but again, it doesn’t actually allow any interaction or choices. It’s more like a neat sort of creative writing.

There’s a bunch of interesting stuff here regarding the death business, the up-sell of funeral packages, and the whole concept of as death as an industry. But none of it is actual gameplay.

I already gave my verdict on it up above, but while I wouldn’t recommend the game to people who are solely looking for a game, it’s still interesting as an experience. Also, I’m pretty sure it took me longer to write this article than it did for me to beat the game. So, yknow. Not sure what that means.

Until next time.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Because Mario Party isn’t rage inducing enough on it’s own.

If you’ve seen Twitch at all recently, you’ve probably seen Fall Guys. If you haven’t, allow me to summarize it for you: imagine a battle royale game, but instead shooting each other death as teenagers, you’re all happy jelly bean blobs competing in Mario Party style mini-games to be the last person standing.

It’s simple, cute, and amusing, even if it isn’t particularly deep. Some of the mini-games are fun. Some of the mini-games are not as fun (looking at you Perfect Match). Some look like complete bullshit, but actually have some strategy like Tip Tap Toe.

Most the games are at least enjoyable, and the fun primarily comes from watching other players be launched, whacked, and otherwise smacked around, and also by being a winner. There are a few game modes that are legitimately great, like Hex-A-Gone, a multi level Tron style mode, where the last person to fall all the way to the bottom wins. Most of the team mini-games, like Soccer, Egg Collection, and Ball Rolling are also enjoyable.

When I was first writing this post, I actually had a bit where I was going to go into the worse game modes, and tear them apart a bit, but then a funny thing happened: see, with the exception of Perfect Match, most of the game modes are pretty good when the servers aren’t massively lagging. One particularly awful game, Tail Tag, is actually really fun when things like hit detection and stuff actually work.

I think Fall Guys is a ton of fun, and worth playing, but I have a few caveats to that statement. First off, I suspect there is a large section of individuals who just won’t have a good time. If you already hate stuff like Mario Party, or WarioWare, or just battle royale style games in general, you might wanna pass on this one.

Secondly, Fall Guys is a lot more fun with a friend. If you can get even one other person to play with, each game becomes less of a solo deathmatch, and more of a fun mess as you work against and root for each other. I had a lot of fun with the game on my own, but it’s undeniable that the joy of the game is dampened when every other character you beat or get beaten by is anonymous.

Fall Guys is $20 on Steam, and while it does have micros, they’re purely cosmetic, and not for anything you can’t get anyway.

Fall Guys will not cause you to look inward. It will not grant you peace, or force you to confront deep seated fears. But it’s fun. And when you are launched into space, or toppled into the void right as you jump because some rando grabbed you for absolutely no good fucking reason, it will give you something to be angry about other then the unmitigated nightmare that has been 2020.

Quantum League

A mind bending shooter that’s best played with a friend. Really neat unique time mechanics, but not a massive player base.

Update 2/15/2023: Quantum League isn’t 100% dead, but there’s no future updates to the game planned, and there’s no playerbase. That said, the game can still be purchased and played, meaning that I stand by my review. Just now the part where you NEED to grab a friend to play it with is 100% accurate.

I first saw Quantum League about 2 years ago at PAX East, and even though I didn’t play it then, I was interested in the premise. So what is the premise? Simple.

Quantum League is a 1v1 or 2v2 shooter played in rounds, where each round is a 15 second time loop that repeats three times. I enjoy the game, but it can be a little draining after a while, since there are only those two games modes, and you’ll only ever play against humans. For explaining the mechanics, I’m going to talk about the 1v1 mode only.

When a round starts, you have your dude, you have a pistol, and you have five other weapons. The weapons are pretty straightforward, you have a sub machine gun, a sniper rifle, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, and the only funky one, a kinda beam-stick flamethrower. All of them behave pretty much as you would expect from any FPS. In the first round, it’ll just be you and your opponent, and depending on the game mode, your goal will be to either shoot ’em, or be the only person standing on a given capture point at the end of the round, which (big surprise) will most likely involve shooting them. The round will end after 15 seconds, even if you kill them early on.

Loop two is where things get interesting, and where Quantum League really shines as its own game. Like I said above, the game is played in loops, and in round two, you’ll have the same starting locations, weapons, everything else, with the game’s one big mechanic in play: there will now a be copy of you, replaying all your actions from loop one in addition to your normal controlled self. Your opponent gets one, too. They will replay all actions you took in round 1, exactly as you performed them, and they can still be interacted with. In Quantum League, when you die, instead of waiting to respawn or taking other actions, you instead just continue playing, but as a ghost. Your ghost version can’t interact with anything, damage anything, or score. But it can still shoot, move and otherwise do whatever it wants, because there is a very real chance that at some point in a future loop, you might kill the killer before they kill you, and as such, your clone will suddenly remain alive instead, meaning that its actions are now a resource you can use.

Loop three is the same as loop two, except with clones from round one and two, and one big difference: rounds are only scored at the end of loop three.

This time mechanic is the thing that turns Quantum League on its head, and is what makes the game completely different from almost any shooter out there. The key to winning in Quantum League isn’t pure twitch reflexes, or more accurate aim, but to plan your actions, recognize what your opponent will do in response, and then move to anticipate their future actions.

Here’s an example: Iin any given loop one of Quantum League, my preferred weapon is the sub machine gun. The SMG is a medium range weapon, losing at long range to the sniper, short range to the shotgun and beam rifle, and lacks the inherent area denial and angle capacity of the grenade launcher. So why pick it? For me, the SMG is the most effective continual area denial tool in the game. My plan is to move up behind cover, fire a few shots down various angles that I suspect my opponent may try to use in future rounds, punishing them with chip damage if they do, before finally actually moving to try to take out my opponent and win the round. In short, I’m not even shooting at my opponent, I’m shooting at where I think they’ll be in the future.

And this is just a small fraction of the sorta neat stuff you can get up to. There are also respawn globes and a few other mechanics that make the game even mind melting then it starts out as.

The only two big gripes I have with Quantum League are the hyper competitive nature of the game, which makes playing it for a long period of time fairly draining, and the lack of other game modes.

If Quantum League sounds like your sort of game, you can get it on Steam and it looks like a Switch version comes out soon as well, but I haven’t played it. I really suggest find a friend who also interested, because that way you can do 2v2 matches, and 1v1 matches if no one else is playing at that point in time. The game’s player base is still pretty small.

A Short Hike

Be a bird, climb a mountain, fly around and stuff.

A short hike is a fun, simple collect-a-thon in which you try to climb to the top of a mountain. It has a very Animal Crossing aesthetic, and the actual gameplay often reminds me of Breath of the Wild. It takes maybe 3-5 hours tops to “Finish” the game, and it probably has some repeatability, but more for exploring the island, and less for mechanical challenges.

Also, I almost didn’t play it, even after downloading it, because I’m an inverse elitist, and kinda assumed it was a Firewatch-esque game novel.

Whoops.

A Short Hike is well named. You’re quickly introduced to the main character, her aunt who she’s staying with on a small island with a mountain in the middle, and okay, now you’re playing the game. There is a given reason for having to climb the mountain, but it’s not really that important in any way.

The game is played from a top down isometric perspective, like Animal Crossing, and a decent amount of time spent trying to get to the top of the mountain is going to to be spent looking for various items, golden feathers, and other interesting things. The general structure of gameplay is, “Follow a trail, hit a roadblock, find a way around the roadblock, or start exploring,” or at least I think that’s what the structure is supposed to be. My gameplay structure was more, “Follow the trail, find something interesting, get distracted by it, search around, find some treasure, chat with some folks, and then remember that technically, I’m supposed to be climbing a mountain.”

I have one big gripe with the game, and it’s that the flight controls are a bit cumbersome. Looking at the game afterward, I suspect it’s because the game might be intended to be played with a controller, instead of mouse and keyboard, but it can make some of the bits near the end a little tricky.

Lemme explain what I specifically mean. A Short Hike has a locked camera, and said camera seems to shift when you enter certain spaces/move through a given zone. This isn’t a problem while walking, but when you’re flying/jumping, if you pass through one of those barriers, the game has a habit of re-orienting your bird, and all of sudden, your inputs make the character fly in a different direction then intended. This can also be tricky if you’re trying to land on top of things far below you. It’s my only real issue with the game, and I suspect it might just go away if you use a controller.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with A Short Hike. It’s a few hours long, and it’s $8, which seems about fair to me. You can buy it on Itch.io and on Steam, and it was part of the Racial Justice Mega Bundle on itch, so if you bought that bundle a bit back, you already own it! And you should play it!

With 2020 continuing to be the winner of year it is, it was nice to just fly around a chill island and have a good time. Take care of yourself, and stay safe.

Itch.io Racial Justice Bundle – Didn’t Make the Cut #1

All the games I played, but didn’t grab me enough to get their own full article.

A massive amount of the stuff I’ve been playing has been from the itch.io racial justice bundle, and there’s a lot of stuff that for whatever reason, either never grabbed me, or I didn’t feel like writing a full article about. So here are three of the things that were just sorta “Meh” to me, but might be your cup of tea. Or not. Maybe they’re just kinda lousy.

Gladiabots

You have a team of robots. Control them with a robust visual programming languages. Solve challenges with them. I did the tutorial, got through a few levels, and just sorta dropped it. Nothing about it really grabbed me, or made me super interested. I found myself just spamming the same sets of AI over and over, and then tweaking them if they lost, then just spamming them again. For games like this, I feel like the moment that really sells the game is where you try to get some sort of tricky or clever plan to work, and you pull it off. I never had one of these with Gladiabots.

0n0w

For some reason, when I downloaded it, this game was like four gigs. I’m torn between calling it Instagram Filter Simulator and Acid Trip Simulator, but since I’ve never actually done acid, I’m just gonna call it Instagram Filter Simulator.

I do not know why you would play this. It’s trippy without purpose or rules, and by the end felt like I was having a headache. If you have to run a Call of Cthulhu game, and have no idea how to describe things that are unseeable, this might be a decent placeholder. Otherwise, I’d say skip it.

Bestiary

Bestiary is far more “experimental writing prompt” than game. Look at semi-randomly generated pictures of monsters. Write something down. Rinse, repeat. That’s it. It’s amusing for like 5 minutes, but after that, feels pointless.