Welcome again to another multi-subject article where I take a few titles I've completed recently and review them in a more rapid-fire style to get caught up on my writing! As I always bring up in the introductions to these kinds of articles, I typically like to have some kind of theme tying the subjects together. For today's content, however, the theme is really just that all three of these games are on the smaller side and had equally small development teams. So, let's hop right into it and get started with the smallest game on the list!
Available for: Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows
Developed by a small Taiwanese studio, Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery is a game that I find a bit difficult to pin down my feelings about. On one hand, all of the complaints that I had at the beginning never went away. On the other hand, they all....softened? I guess I shouldn't idle on that line of thought for too long. Behind the Frame is a little bit point-and-click adventure game, a little bit puzzle game, and a little bit visual novel. You play as a young woman living in what seems to be an old timey European apartment, where she spends her days painting a masterpiece that she intends to submit to a New York art gallery. She lives next door to an old man who also seems to spend his days on artistic endeavors in the company of an old cat. And...that's basically all I can say about the story here. I could say more, but here's the thing: I kind of called where the story was going to go approximately one plot point past what I've laid out. I wasn't 100% correct, thankfully, but I feel like if I go any further you might be able to guess as closely as I did without even having started the game. In spite of how predictable the plot here is, when it reached the points that I did guess correctly, these points still managed to make me feel something.
So what about gameplay? Well, at first it's a combination of clicking on things to make things happen (such as clicking on an egg to crack it over a frying pan) and using your mouse (or your finger on ios and android) to paint bits of your masterpiece. So at first, my thought was "$10 for this seems a little steep"...keep that thought in the back of your head. But eventually the game starts to throw puzzles at you, and while these aren't difficult puzzles, I can at least appreciate the change in pacing and the added variety.
From a technical standpoint, Behind the Frame is about as solid as you might expect. I never experienced any framerate drops, crashes, animation glitches, audio glitches, etc., and that praise comes alongside the praise I can't help but give for the game's overall beauty. The apartment in which this title takes place is beautifully hand-painted/drawn with just the right amount of detail to appear lived-in without appearing too busy. The animations, while arguably simplistic, get the job done, and the soundtrack is as great as these artsy indie game soundtracks typically are. But there's one overall complaint I have to bring up before I close this review out. Remember how at first I thought the $10 price point was a bit much? Remember how I said that my complaints from the beginning eventually softened? Unfortunately, the latter doesn't change the former. This game consists of 6 chapters each lasting around 5-10 minutes, so you'll spend an hour with Behind the Frame at most, and while I did think that overall it was a decent hour, it was an hour containing an ultimately predictable story and the barest of bare bones interaction. The value-for-money proposition here simply isn't worthwhile, in my opinion. It's not unreasonable, but I'd say you're better off waiting for a sale before purchasing Behind the Frame. I hate having to give that kind of review for a passion project from a small team, especially in the wake of so many reports of steam refund policy abuse, but in spite of how this game eventually made me warm up to it, it unfortunately comes just shy of a recommendation from me.
This being an incredibly small game with few moving parts, I'll be using my smaller game scale wherein any given negative is eligible for a maximum of 2 points off, rather than my usual maximum of 1 point off.
Let us review:
Ultimately predictable story - 1.1
Poor value-to-money ratio - 2.0
The final score for Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery is...
6.9/10 - Ok
A decent effort, Silver Lining Studio, a decent effort.
Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows
If you tell me that a game is procedurally generated, chances are I'll never give it the time of day. If a title relies on procedural generation, it tells me the developer has no actual artistic vision and wanted to take the easy way out in terms of game design. However...if, in the future, you tell me that a game is procedurally generated in the Road 96 sense, I might be inclined to listen. We'll get into the particulars of that statement eventually, but for the purposes of this introductory paragraph, know that Road 96 gets a fairly solid recommendation from me with only a few caveats. Now, read ahead if you want to know why!
Road 96 takes place in the fictional country of Petria, which is ruled over by President Tyrak, a fascist president whose major talking points are his big beautiful border wall and his hardline approach to protestors. And before you make the connections I think anyone with a brain might be inclined to make, Tyrak's whole deal with the border is keeping his people in, not keeping foreigners out. At the start of the game, it's a couple months until the next presidential election, and you play as a teenager trying to flee the country as soon as possible and by whatever means necessary. Evidently Petria has a problem with (exclusively) teenagers trying to flee the country, so if a teen is caught trying to cross the border or is even suspected of it, they're sent to forced labor mines. So those are the stakes: not exactly the most realistic fascist government ever, but it gets the job done and the tension is palpable when it comes down to it. As I said, you play as one such teenager, and eventually you either succeed in fleeing the country or you get caught and arrested. And that's when the game truly begins. For you see, you don't just play as one teenager: you play as a series of teenagers each on similar trips to the border starting out at different proximities to election day. When one teen's story ends, another begins, and with each "run" or "iteration" or whatever you want to call it, the world has changed ever so slightly in response to the election on the horizon. With this in mind, the way that the game is "procedural" is that the circumstance of each leg of your journey is more-or-less randomly chosen depending on how you choose to proceed. At the end of each leg of your journey, you can choose to hitchhike (which could be dangerous), pay money for a taxi, pay more money for a bus, or just walk some of the way (which costs a large chunk of energy). Regardless of which you choose, in the next section you'll end up in the company of one of the game's handful of supporting characters, during which time you'll engage in a minigame of some kind, potentially recover some energy or earn some money, and see how this particular character's arc progresses. It's hard to tell if the developers coded the procedural generation so well that that you'll cycle through the game's cast at just the right pace to ensure that you're never spending too much time with a single character across your playthrough...or if I just happened to always choose the best method of continuing my journey...but I'm going to go with the former! It's really quite impressive how well the story seems to cycle through the various character arcs despite it not being hard-coded. However, it's not perfect, and the way in which it isn't perfect did unfortunately take away from my experience. See, at least for my playthrough, the game just up and ended out of nowhere. Not since Fable III have I seen a more dramatic jump forward in time at the last minute. I had been playing a run that took place a couple weeks before the election and I still had some progress to make in certain character arcs, so I figured there would be one or two more runs left before the game ended. However, I ended up arrested at the finish line and suddenly it was election day. I don't want to spoil anything, but apart from having the credits roll so jarringly, my impact on the world seemed shoehorned in. As you go through your runs, you have dialogue options that support either revolution, voting for President Tyrak's opponent, or staying out of politics entirely, and with each option you choose, the world is impacted in some way with a promise that the option you align with most often will have an effect on what happens when election day rolls around. The game keeps this promise, but if you choose the option I did, the impact doesn't make any sense. I think I'll handle this the way Yahtzee Croshaw handled the plot twist in 12 Minutes: by coming up with a completely different scenario that gets to the heart of the problem. The ending I got followed the following line of reasoning: "the amount of sex that was had that day spread across the country, ensuring record high virginity." It makes literally no sense that because thing X happened incredibly frequently, thing Y, the literal opposite of thing X, was enabled to happen as a direct result. Like...the thing I wanted to happen happened, but the logic to get there was nonsensical! I know I'm hammering on this a lot, but I was stunned by how abruptly and unsatisfyingly Road 96 ended. Is it possible that if I made different choices or whatever in my runs that I would have gotten a better ending? Absolutely. And Road 96 would have a lot of replay value.......were it not for one problem.
While most of the side characters in Road 96 are excellent (John and the idiot robbers Stan and Mitch being particularly strong), there's one character that throws a wrench in the works and keeps me from wanting to play the game again: Zoe. Zoe is the most insufferable character I've had to spend time with in a game in a very long time. The daughter of Petria's minister of oil, Zoe lives a hard life of not being oppressed like everyone else in the country, and so she's trying to flee the country under the auspices of being on a big road trip. Even were it not for the insufferable "I'm a victim too even though I'm rich and never had a hardship in my life" mentality that you get from the rich white liberal arts girls that Zoe would undoubtedly grow up to be, in every single run that you meet her in, she screws you over in some way. Whether it's getting you kicked out of a campground by "come on, duuuude"-ing you into playing her trombone loudly late at night or screaming out "echo!!!" into a mountain valley right at the border, Zoe just can't seem to not negatively impact you. There's one segment in particular that made me want to tear my hair out. You and Zoe are in the back seat of a car being driven by a married couple that have agreed to take you as close to the border as possible. A member of the road patrol pulls the car over and starts asking questions, and if you haven't had an interaction that gave you government papers (which I hadn't), you aren't able to conceal your identity or talk your way out of this cop figuring it all out. At this point, the married couple offers the cop a bribe to look the other way and forget about the two criminals in the back seat. The cop agrees to this proposition, at which point Zoe starts to rant and rave about how the married couple are what's ruining the country because they're enabling the cops. If you tell her to shut her mouth like I did, she refuses and calls the cop a pig and tells him he isn't going to do anything. Now, whatever feelings you have about police or warrantless car searches, answer me this: do any of these things Zoe did sound like intelligent things to do if you're trying specifically to flee the country without getting arrested? Needless to say, the cop cuffs Zoe, and you're presented with a choice: stay in the car or try to help her. I remember internally saying "No, I'm not gonna f***ing help you! You literally asked for it!" So I stayed in the car and eventually made it across the border because I didn't act like an idiot. After the credits rolled, I wondered what it really was that bothered me so much about Zoe. Sure, she was annoying, made poor decisions, and constantly screwed me over, but it felt like there was more to it than that. Then I realized: it's the Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite problem, a problem I like to call the "Moral Mary Sue". It's the problem that happens when storytellers want their characters to overcome some kind of problematic odds, but they're too cowardly to have the character themselves ever be problematic. Elizabeth was raised from birth in a tower built by a slavery-supporting fundamentalist self-proclaimed prophet that wanted her to eventually take his place as the head of his John Wilkes-Booth worshipping cult...but for some reason he had lots of books about the world and science and stuff in the tower, so she's always surprised to see the racism in her city. I've always said that Bioshock Infinite might have been a masterpiece if, at the start, Elizabeth was a full Kool-Aid drinker who fully believed "the black man" was inferior, and if her arc consisted of actually seeing the suffering around Columbia and meeting actual people of color, gradually turning her into a better person...you know, like a character arc more substantial than cutting her hair and getting a new dress. The same is true of Zoe, though it's not quite as extreme. She's the daughter of a high-ranking government official. Presumably she's been indoctrinated from birth to buy into the nationalistic lie at home and sent to public schools that champion the cause of Petria's great president. So what if, instead of lying to her dad about going on a road trip, she actually was on a road trip to see the great nation that her great president had built? What if she made all the same decisions she did in the story, but from a place of true ignorance of the plight of citizens less fortunate than her? What if every time she screwed you over, she came to the horrifying truth that she was sending another child to a life of forced labor? She could start from a place of "well I might have gotten him arrested, but he shouldn't have been breaking the law in the first place," and gradually been broken down by all the suffering her ignorance caused. Then, eventually, having seen the truth about Petria and contributed so much to its problems herself, she could end up where she eventually ends up in the story as it exists today. That would've been an excellent character arc that could've been easily paced and explored over the course of several runs. But nope. Instead we have to have Moral Mary Sues. I just can't stand that kind of cowardly writing, but I've hammered on this topic for long enough.
Now we come to the technical talk. Road 96 sports a somewhat Telltale graphical style, so on a decent PC it should go without saying that it runs well. In addition to that, I never noticed any texture pop-in, animation/audio glitches, crashes, etc, and the game features an excellent soundtrack of indie/soft rock songs written specifically for the game world. So all-in-all, it's a pretty solid technical package, but there are a couple of small issues. The first is one I've seen reported in reviews from much bigger outlets than this one: I succeeded in fleeing the country in my first run, but in the news report that played before the next one, it was reported that I had been arrested. Not exactly a deal breaker, but it's interesting that this bug was still there by the time I got my hands on the game. The second one is one that isn't really a technical thing, but I always talk about the topic in question in the technical section. The voice acting is, at times, abhorrent. And I'm not even sure if that statement is true. See, most characters have American accents, but occasionally you'll come across people with Australian or British accents (presumably as a way of making Petria kind of its own thing and not just a metaphor for this country or that). But there were certain characters that would sound like first year theatre kids trying to play serious roles, and only in hindsight did I wonder if it was just an accent of some kind. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't seem to place these characters' voices, so I was just left thinking it was bad acting. I could just be culturally insensitive or something, but I wanted to make a note of it if that's the kind of thing that totally turns you off of a game.
Let us review:
Unsatisfying ending - 1.0
Zoe - 1.0
Occasional jarringly bad acting - 0.3
The final score for Road 96 is...
7.7/10 - Pretty Good
Decent work, Digixart, decent work
Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows
If you've been following my work for the past year or so, you'll know that I've been expanding my boundaries pretty frequently. I've been trying games from genres that I normally don't give the time of day, and the results are usually positive. I may still hate the roguelike concept with a passion, for example, but I was still able to enjoy the excellent BPM: Bullets per Minute last year. Same concept with this year's Necromunda: Hired Gun, which I loved despite having no investment in the Warhammer 40k universe. I've found that expanding my horizons with enough research to guide the process can lead me to gems that I wouldn't otherwise have found. Case-in-point: The Ascent, a twin stick shooter set in a Bladerunner-esque world inhabited by both people and Star Wars-style aliens. I'm not the first reviewer to make those exact two comparisons, but there's simply no other combination of properties that could have inspired this world. But anyway, I've never looked at a twin stick shooter and thought, "I want to play that." Something about the genre has always seemed so..."boring" isn't the right word, but the right word is somewhere in that area. But a lot of people that I tend to agree with were enjoying it and at the very least, the game world looked beautiful, so I figured I'd give it a shot. And I'm glad I did.
Gameplay is simple and can be described simply: You pick the gun that has the damage numbers and firing speed you want, and you shoot enemies with it. Now, you could make the case that every game with guns can be described in terms that simple, but it really is that simple here. There are also augmentations you can use for crowd control (my personal favorite being a deployable mech suit that drastically ups the bullets you can take), but like 99% of gameplay is simply pointing and shooting. And for some reason that I can't put my finger on, it's fun to spend 99% of this game just holding down or clicking the left mouse button. I suspect it's a combination of visual and audio effects combined with the gradual drop of enemy health icons, but I can't really be sure why the guns in this game feel so excellent to shoot. For example, I eventually got my hands on what Jim Sterling might have back in the day called "a big f*** off minigun", and holding down the firing button and watching the bullets just fly into crowds of enemies somehow felt meaty. I have to harp on this, I wasn't using a controller, I was using a mouse and keyboard, and somehow this minigun in a somewhat isometric style of game felt meaty! But I digress. The game also features light RPG elements, but they're nothing to write home about and they don't impact the gameplay that much. If you really want to engage with these RPG elements, you absolutely can, and I'd bet you'd get plenty of utility out of doing so. But if you're like me and you just want to get back into the field and shoot some more bad guys, the game's difficulty seems to be balanced in such a way that you can still have an enthralling and challenging enough time with whatever you happen to find lying around.
On the subject of balancing, that's another topic I'd like to touch on that's more-or-less specific to me and people like me. The Ascent can be played solo or with up to three friends in (I believe) both online and couch co-op. Don't quote me on the co-op details because, as we're about to discuss, I don't ever look at that kind of thing. An issue I had with both the original Borderlands and Borderlands 2, alongside most 4-player co-op games that also have single player, is that the challenge in a given level is balanced for co-op, not a solo player. So, if a mission's recommended level is 7, you might get the floor mopped with you even if you're level 8 because the mission was programmed with teams of four level 7 players in mind. My frustrations with this even caused me to coin the term "the Borderlands strategy," wherein I just run as far as I can without getting killed, hopefully activating at least one new checkpoint each time, because I just need to get to the boss without being put on a stick, doused in chemicals and water, and pushed across a dirty tile floor. So a concern I always have going into a game with mainly co-op in mind is "am I gonna have to use the Borderlands strategy?" And perhaps the biggest bit of praise I have for The Ascent is that the answer to that question is "no." If I was at the recommended level for a mission, I could always make it through. The Ascent isn't an easy game in spite of its simplicity, so I was always being challenged in these levels, and sometimes I would, in fact, face the same fate that Wart's cousin Kay faced in the dishwashing scene in The Sword in the Stone. But when I did, it never felt unfair or like I failed because I needed another gun alongside me. And aside from an ever-so-slight level curve I ran into at about 75% through the runtime, I never needed to relentlessly grind in order to reach the recommended level. The only exception to this bit of praise is the final showdown, which was unfortunately most definitely designed with more than one player in mind. Without spoiling the story details, the final showdown is the type of thing where you have to do something that takes a while (such as holding down a button to slowly interface with a computer, for instance) in the midst of waves of enemies. In co-op, this would be fairly simple: have one player do the thing and have the others cover them. But as just little old me, this involves fighting off the waves until you have a slight window to breathe, doing the thing, and taking a bit of damage in the process. I made it through, but this was the only instance in which The Ascent didn't seem properly balanced.
But you know what I can't commend them for? Most everything else on the technical level. Yes, this is the catch to all of the positive things I've said about The Ascent so far. The biggest issue, by far, is crashing. My first couple of days playing this game, I had at least one hard crash every single day that I played, and I would only play for approximately two hours a day! After a particular patch, this didn't happen anymore, but whether that's the result of the patch or the result of me getting past a certain point where problematic code wasn't an issue anymore, I can't say. On the subject of that patch, one of the changes made turns ray tracing on by default. Despite having a pretty good PC, this tanked my framerate down to maybe 5 frames a second, and it took me forever to figure out what the problem was. For a patch to come out that defaults the game to suboptimal settings by default is a strange choice, so just know that if you buy The Ascent in its current state and you notice the framerate sputtering, you may need to go into your options and turn the ray tracing settings off. I've also heard that, to this day, there's major lagging when playing in co-op, but take that with a grain of salt, because I can't verify that. A smaller thing that was nonetheless pretty annoying was that certain...game world states? I'm going to go with that. Certain game world states didn't seem to save across play sessions. Unless I turned tutorials off, tutorials that I had already seen would always pop up again at the proper moment when I booted the game up again the next day (and I never remembered to turn tutorials off, so this was basically every day). So it's as if the game simply forgot that it had already showed me the tutorial about going to shops when I turned it off, so every time I booted it up, it thought "oh, it's his first time coming to the shop, better show him the tutorial!" The same goes for the bit of dialogue where your boss chastises you for killing civilians, but I can't say for sure if that's a bug or if the developers specifically programmed it to happen after every x instances where you kill civilians. Either way, I found it annoying. Another thing that was on the small side but was still annoying was the in-game map. It's not really a bad map, I don't think, it's just unhelpful. If you follow the arrow, you'll eventually find your way to where you're going...it might take you going up to one or two dead ends until you find the right path in the general direction of the arrow, but make no mistake, you'll get there. But unfortunately when you're using the game's two fast travel systems: the subway and taxis, there's no indication of which subsection of the world is closest to where you're going if where you're going is a new area. Also if you want to travel to a subsection of a different level of this multi-leveled planet, you have to physically get in the elevator and then call a taxi when you're on the proper level. So, getting around can be a bit of a chore. But what eventually becomes more of a chore is progressing as the checkpoints become less and less considerate as the game goes on. Seriously, the checkpoints actively grow less generous the further in you get. I remember one arena that I kept dying in during the prologue, and the checkpoint was right at the start of the arena, so all I had to do was go back in and start fighting again. Contrast that with a mission where you fight off waves of enemies while a timer counts down like 7 hours later, and the checkpoint puts you outside of the building. So if you die in that wave fight, you have to go back through the building and fight your way back to the area (undoubtedly losing health in the process), then trigger the dialogue you already went through again, then hope you survive the wave fight. I've already mentioned my complaints about the final showdown, but the cherry on top of that is that the checkpoint happens right before a cutscene. You can skip the cutscene, of course, but would it have been so difficult to just not have it play after the first time or something? The only silver lining in this complaint is that when you die, you keep the experience that you earned in the fight that killed you, and if you killed a major target, they stay dead. So it's not like it's a total progress wipe in addition to poor checkpointing.
Folks, I don't think I need to elaborate too much more on this. If the thought of spending some time in a Bladerunner world shooting a bunch of dudes with guns that feel good to shoot sounds good and some sizable technical issues don't bother you too much, you're gonna have a field day with The Ascent. If that doesn't sound good, then you probably already decided you weren't going to buy it a paragraph ago. So, that's that!
Let us review:
Technical issues - 1.0
Final showdown balancing - 0.6
The final score for The Ascent is...
8.4/10 - Great
Awesome work, Neon Giant, awesome work
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