It’s been a long time since I last spoke about Game Pass and its inherent benefits. One of the downsides with a subscription model is that you have no say; it’s not a democracy, but a dictatorship. You will play this unheard of two-star rated game because that’s all we’re adding to Game Pass this month.
I will subserviently install and trial any game the subscription offers like a desperate technophile craving the kick of a wholesome, finished virtual experience. I will linger on the store page, hungry for bargains, for price-drops that never fall as far as I’d like them to, belayed as they are by some lackey at Xbox.
For a long time, as is often the case, there’s been a barren spell. I ran down my subscription and waited patiently until my vigil was rewarded: over the past month, there’s been a flock of titles fit for installation and trialling.
Here then, are my top picks, the games I’ve really been playing and most importantly of all, enjoying.
Blue Prince
The premise of Blue Prince is simplistic and elegant. Your great uncle has bequeathed part of his estate to you with a catch: before you inherit his fortune, you are to locate Room 46 in the 45-room house he has left to you.
The game begins on Day One inside the hall of your soon to be new home. Three closed doors lead from the hall. From here, you draft rooms from a pool of randomly selected options and move up a 5×9 grid towards the Antechamber (a locked room that most players will presume has something to do with Room 46).
When you enter a new room, you’re treated to a miniature world of clues that interlink with other rooms and the wider story. Rooms can take many forms: dead ends, rooms with one, two and three additional doors, and rooms that correspond to a colour.
Rooms with a colour relate to specific aspects of the story and complement one another. For example, one of the green rooms grants you the opportunity to draft all future green rooms for free instead of spending those sought after gems.
On that note, throughout the house you’ll find keys, which can be used to open doors (usually the higher up you go on the grid); gems, which are used to draft increasingly lucrative room designs; and gold coins that can be spent in a variety of ways.
The ending, once you find Room 46, is, I found, underwhelming and doesn’t do justice to the tale being told, doesn’t respect the player’s time – for most of what you encounter is veiled behind a web of story and elaborate information.
You can tell this is the work of eight years by a lone creator because it’s grown all out of proportion. This isn’t a criticism: it’s clear Blue Prince is a labour of love. The thing is, when
we’re not restricted, editorially, it’s natural to wander down verbose avenues. I recently saw a quote from a writer describing his first attempt at a novel that had burgeoned to 400,000 words: he described the novel’s voluptuousness as ‘tumouring’ and this is the effect Blue Prince conveys: there seems to be an end and then there isn’t. Not only do the rooms spread, they grow unnecessarily wild like a dense rainforest, obscuring from view the direct approach.
In hindsight, the Antechamber is a misleading anticlimax: a room off a room does not represent a puzzle or a twist, rather a redundant layer. The result is a step-by-step process, layered with artificial story. Neither the story nor so-called puzzle are intertwined; both can be told and completed independently. An example of this is the safe codes (I’ll say no more) and how you soon realise they’re not needed to find Room 46, and yet you’re lead to believe they are.
It took me 38 days to find Room 46 and I have no regrets. Blue Prince embodies originality: the story is sufficiently unique, the setting intriguing, the design and soundtrack alluring. Days later, I was still reminiscing about my time in their home, exploring the grounds methodically, studying the rooms as if I was stood in some future virtual gallery.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I’m not sure why turn-based games have been neglected. As a child of the nineties, I grew up on turn-based JRPGs. I remember buying Final Fantasy VII for PC from PC World – when games came in an oversized box with a thick gossamer instruction manual that contained not only the details of how to install the game, but backstory and character bios.
Clair Obscur was inspired by the former Ubisoft employee, Guillaume Broche, which goes some way to explain the continuous departure – of AAA developers – from making games that tell original stories we care about, featuring characters that are believable and relatable. It highlights the depth of shareholder greed and antipathy shown towards the playerbase.
If one person and an idea can galvanise a group of people to create a vision, it shows gaming isn’t dying or clueless, but perhaps temporarily misguided. Video games made by smaller teams seem to undergo a distillation, where the game is refined and honed into the final output as envisaged by the concept art and those nascent, exciting dialogues that spoke, drew and coded those ideas into existence; whereas larger teams, much like a corporation, like those offices some of us work in, experience a situation where the soul and essence of the individual is eroded and gives way to a monoculture of ideas, or a pseudo-creativity. If a box has been ticked, somewhere, then surely we’re onto something. How else could five insipid Assassin’s Creeds be explained?
In the world of Clair Obscur, Expedition 33 is about to embark to eradicate the Paintress, some kind of extraordinary being causing the yearly Gommage (a rubbing out, or in this case killing), which disappears those at the age of, or above, the descending number scrawled on a tower at the distant island where the Paintress lives.
And so those who must take action are forever getting younger. I see an analogy to a world where the future rests on the shoulders of the youth and where wars are fought at the expense of youth. There’s a lot about this game that can be analysed, much like the gaming history it draws from.
Final Fantasy VII’s focus on corporate greed and environmental disaster, when the environment wasn’t spoken about outside scientific circles. Or Final Fantasy X’s mature exploration of the themes of hope, love and sacrifice, holding the players hand to show them the differences between the naivety of childhood and the inherent difficulty and choices associated with adulthood; and even the futility of blind faith and the repercussions of adherence to those kinds of norms.
From experience, a game is doing something right when a review takes so long to reach the game and its mechanics. That’s not to say the game isn’t worth playing, rather that there’s a layer of complexity, in the form of story, augmenting the game and underpinning its fragile gameplay – for games are but a handful of reviews away from a disaster.
I haven’t played a turn-based game for a long time. The battle sequences are aesthetically pleasing and non-disruptive; they elaborate on the traditional your-turn-my-turn by adding actions to moves and incorporating a parry and dodge system to prevent, disrupt and redirect damage through counterattacking. Having been out of the loop for so many years, I’m unaware whether this is original, or has already been done, but for this thirty-something gamer, it was hyper fresh.
Like all great turn-based games, the combat is addictive, the characters likeable, their strengths and weaknesses apparent, and array of abilities satisfying to watch play out on the screen against a menagerie of enemies.
Clair Obscur reminds me of the joy I felt when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time. Whilst my praise may seem overly liberal, I want to balance that by saying it’s not perfect. It’s not and the writing can be melodramatic – a lot of unnecessary merdes and putains, presumably for quirky impact – and the acting disingenuous, as though they don’t believe the severity of what’s happening in their lives. Nothing ever is perfect though. I applaud the creativity, the originality of the idea and the risk the team took to create a game they believed in, because it shows.
Dredge
I’ve been wanting to play Dredge since its release, balking at the steep price (even when on sale) for an indie game – yes, I’m tight. The blend of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, seafaring and inventory management pulls together some of my favourite tropes and mechanics.
You’re the captain of a small boat and have decided to take up the role of town angler at Greater Morrow. What could be better: the open seas, coastal living, secluded from the hubbub of the cities. Sadly, all pleasantries end there, for it becomes immediately apparent that there’s something fishy – oh dear – going on, and the stench isn’t limited to your new home.
You hear of mysterious happenings from the townsfolk; you spot aberrant varieties of fish in your net, their bulbous glands and pearlescent skin a hint at a lurking menace; and the fog and paranoia that sweeps in at night to engulf you. All is not well here.
The days are as still and calming as the surface of the water; you’ll fish and sell your catch to earn money for future upgrades; you’ll complete quests to reveal new areas of the map, new fish and increased rewards; and of course, you’ll eventually accumulate enough resources to begin improving your loadout: upgraded rods to catch a wider variety and type of fish, engines to go faster and farther, lights to ward off the nightly horrors, and additional space to carry more fish.
Eventually, you’re forced to fish at night for new species and ungodly creatures from the abyssal depths. As your day-night routine goes to pot and the paranoia of night fishing gets to you, your workload seeming to increase, you begin to wonder whether this is in fact the office… Sorry, my net caught on a notion there… And you begin to wonder what is reel and what is not.
It’s a truly pleasant game to play and manages to balance the comforting cadence of the day, with the roughhousing of the night. You’re never too far from a safe harbour; from the revolving blades of light emitted by a lighthouse, nor the dots of lights on the floating buoys, reminding you that you’re only a spurt from shore.
Whilst Dredge is a horror game, it’s never explicitly awful: it imparts an oppressive atmosphere with the implementation of a claustrophobic fog that prevents you from seeing nearby obstacles or malevolent terrors. But as I said previously, you’re not stuck at night, there’s a way out, and with careful navigation, there’s no need to be out longer than you have to.
And so the satisfaction of Dredge is in cataloguing the fish you catch, expanding your encyclopaedic knowledge of the region, and strengthening your resolve, fortifying your floating home for the gradual revelation that awaits such a curious angler. The question is: do you really want to find out.
