Hell Cell Motel

There are no good answers to what was going on in this room. 

Oxide Room 104 puts you in the role of Matt, who returns to a motel after some sort of crime, only to get ambushed by a weirdo and wake up naked in a tub. The bathroom door is locked, his name scrawled on it. 

So you have to find your clothes, and figure out how to unlock the door. Search the cabinet over the sink. Search the dresser. Search the toilet. Once you find your way out, you learn the door out of the room is locked. So are the windows (as far as I can tell, you don't need to bother with the windows. While the game will always let you check them, they never open.) The key is on a plate, a giant centipede coiled around it.

If you make it out of the room, you find yourself in the inner courtyard of the motel. And there's a strange woman whose face is shrouded by her ink-black hair! And she vanished, in her place some creature with a human's lower body, but the upper body is just a set of jaws.

At this point, what has been a sort of horror puzzle game, with you searching your (creepy) surroundings for items you need to escape the room, becomes a quick-time event, as you hit buttons when prompted to help Matt avoid other monsters. You make it to another room, and the item hunt/puzzle aspect resumes. That's what dominates the game. The quick-time stuff is sporadic, saved for when, I guess, the game designers decided they needed to shake you up a bit.

If you die, from blood loss or poisoning or stupidity - like firing a gun at a monster in a room filled with gas, whoops - you wake up shackled in a different tub, Orange Jumpsuit standing over you. He tells you what a useless idiot you are - in a profane and British voice that nonetheless has a breathy aspect that reminds me of the Abominable Snowman character from Looney Tunes - and cuts off one of your limbs with a saw. Then you wake up again in the tub where you started, all limbs present and accounted for, and start your attempt to escape from square 1.

You get up to 3 "deaths" before he decides you're not worth the hassle. Four if you find a picture of the girl, which somehow acts as an extra life. My impression is the subsequent attempts will take a different route, in terms of which rooms you visit and search. The puzzles may be simpler, but there are a lot more monsters, including roaming the courtyard. At least the game doesn't skimp on bullets for your handgun.

I don't entirely understand what's going on. Something about Orange Jumpsuit using Mysterious Girl's mind as sort of a computer in a bio-engineering experiment. A way to rifle through people's thoughts and memories? You find a lot of documents as you search the rooms, some signed as "Eva", some as "Evil", some as "Matt", and some as "Doc", which is Orange Jumpsuit. Those didn't really tell me much other than someone in here is suffering a break in their mind, darker impulses taking over. Whether Evil is Eva or Matt, I don't know. Maybe one, then the other? Some of Matt's writing you find later suggests his worst impulses are getting stronger, so maybe he's getting infected while he's here?

The game ends rather abruptly. You wake up in the tub where you usually lose limbs, but Doc's not there. You can see someone strapped in a chair under a tarp, but can't do anything to help. You stumble into the hall, and then Doc is chasing you as you try to reach an elevator. Apparently that turns out differently, depending on how many times you died, but none of the endings seem to tell you much. I gather there's a sequel, Oxide Room 208, which may be set concurrently with this game and tells another side of it, but I'm not buying it.

I got the "too many deaths" ending, and the "no deaths" ending. The latter at least gives you a fun option, once you make it to the elevator. Doc keeps futilely trying to reach through the gate, and the game lets you click a button like he's an object to interact with. Normally when you do that, the button options are things like "Examine", or "Inventory." This time, the only option was "Revenge." Well, you know I love me a good revenge opportunity, so at least the playthrough ended on a high note (even if there's a phone call between Doc and his benefactor afterwards where he states he doesn't think Matt will make it through the forest.)

Feeling Shifty

Mr. Shifty involves a silent, teleporting guy who infiltrates a hi-rise tower. As you find out from his tech support, Nyx, the tower is owned by Chairman Stone, who stole MEGA Plutonium. You've got to steal it back via teleporting and punching.

Every level is a different floor in the tower (or under it.) The view is topdown, enabling you to see the layout of the halls and rooms in your vicinity. You can also move the camera a limited distance with the right thumbstick, to peek ahead. There's usually some objective you're trying to complete on each floor. Reach a security terminal to get more accurate blueprints, destroy a certain machine. Sometimes you're just trying to make it to a different elevator to take you to the next floor.

There are lots of hazards in your path. The goons ramp up from guys with handguns, to shotguns, to machine guns, to flamethrowers and grenade launchers. There are big dudes who just punch, but take an extra hit (3 instead of 2) to knock down, women with dual pistols who seem to have limited super-speed (after the first time you hit them, they do a very fast backwards dash to escape your punching range), and vaguely ninja-ish women who can zip into your face faster than you expect. There are also exploding barrels, automated machine guns and missile launchers, and laser traps. So many laser traps. Chairman Stone must have loved the first Resident Evil movie. 

All of that in a variety of configurations. However, friendly fire is a thing, so you can often get the opposition to eliminate itself. There was one particular room, in the last level, where I had my most success when I stuck to safe spots as much as possible, and the moving lasers mowed down most of the enemies. Just don't get caught in the blast radius, because Mr. Shifty is a real glass cannon. One hit and you're down. Most enemies' weapons have laser sights, so you can tell where they're aiming and, you know, not be there. But with how much ordinance is flying around sometimes, that can be difficult to track. Fortunately, the game restarts from the room you died in, rather than the start of the level, but at the same time, when you finish a level, it tells you how long it took, and how many times you died.

Seeing I died 59 times on level 16 was disheartening.

You also have a limited number of teleports you can use at one time, highlighted at the bottom of the screen as five boxes. You recharge, but it sure feels like, when you've exhausted your jumps, it takes forever for even one to recharge versus how quickly it happens if you're just recharging from 4 to 5 available teleports. The teleports are aimed with a little cursor that swivels and moves as you do. Range is limited, so some levels involve puzzles where you have to figure out how to get from A to B when the most direct hallway is separated from you by a thicker than usual wall.

Fighting fills a meter just above the teleport capacity display. When it's full, and you're about to get shot, you enter a sort of bullet time where everyone else slows down. So you can get clear and hopefully knock out several enemies in the few seconds before it drains.

Almost everything in the environment is destructible. On the one hand, this is dangerous. If you aren't careful, an enemy might have a strong enough weapon to just destroy the wall between you and keep firing. Though again, helpful in terms of friendly fire. However, this means there are all sorts of things you can use as weapons. Not guns - Mr. Shifty considers guns to be a coward's weapon, not like teleporting behind someone and punching them in the skull - but broken pipes, staffs, keyboards, the heads off marble busts, sodas from the drink machine. Chairman Stone has a lot of Greek or Roman statues with tridents or shields that you can pick up and hurl. Then pick up and hurl again. (You can't Captain America the shield, or maybe I just wasn't doing it right.)

I at least understand those as a design choice; Stone's a wealthy guy who thinks he's hot shit. I'm less sure why he has boat oars displayed on the walls everywhere, but hell, they make for good cannon fodder smacking.

Mr. Shifty is a game that, when it's going you well, you feel super-slick and accomplished. The one-hit-kill nature of the gameplay means that can vanish in an instant and, at least for me, once it was gone, it was hard to get back. One death seemed to wreck my timing. I'd start dying repeatedly in the same room. So it can be anger inducing sometimes.

The Party that Never Stops Restarting

Alex is headed to Edwards Island for the high-schoolers' annual wild party with her best friend, Ren, and her new step-brother, Jonas. On reaching the beach, they find only two other people: the queen bee, Clarissa, who has issues with Alex, and Clarissa's friend, Nona.

But that's OK! Because Ren really just wants to investigate the spots near a cave that emit strange signals, which is why he had Alex bring a radio. And it does pick up some strange signals. It also makes a strange floating triangle Jonas finds inside the cave vibrate until it forms a big triangle. At which point everything goes to hell. Something got loose, and it's angry and desperate to stay loose. If that means hijacking the bodies of 5 teenagers, that's what it'll do.

Oxenfree's gameplay is; 1) you guiding Alex from one place to another, 2) having her tune in various signals on the radio, and 3) dialogue trees. Characters will say something, and Alex has three possible responses, each mapped to a button based on its location. Something I didn't recognize until the second playthrough, you have the option to say nothing. Dialogue balloons will (usually) fade in a few seconds if you don't say anything. I don't feel like your choices make much difference to how the plot plays out, but they do impact your relationships with the other characters.

How they do that, in terms of which dialogue options prompt what shift, I couldn't tell you. Sometimes when a character says something, their face will appear in a dialogue balloon above another character. Clearly whatever was said caught that character's attention, but in a good way? A bad way? No idea! Until Dawn had a screen you could check that would show how relationships between whichever character you were playing and all the others where trending, but Oxenfree's got nothing similar I could find.

Which is accurate - not like you can be sure how a comment will go over in real life - but frustrating in a game where so much is about talking. I played through 5 times - doesn't take more than a few hours once you know where to go - and when the game tells you how things turned out with everyone at the end, I kept getting basically the same results. Jonas and Alex were always distant, Ren moves across country and Alex rarely hears from him. She has only a vague notion what Nona's up to.

The 5th time, I got it where Jonas and I are tight-knit siblings, and Ren and Nona are dating. I have some idea what I did for the latter, but no idea what prompted the change in outcomes for Jonas and Alex. If anything, I thought I was doing worse than usual with him. Now I did somehow create distance between Alex and Ren, so I'd figure that was enough, except it didn't change anything vis-a-vis Jonas when I did the same thing on playthrough #4.

Maybe that's just down to me. I tried to pick different responses, or make different choices. There's a point you decide to check if the museum on the island might have any clues, and one of Ren, Jonas or Nona is coming with you. I usually pick Ren, since it's his idea, and between he and Jonas, "best friend" wins over "step-brother of 5 minutes." But one time their arguing was so irritating I picked Nona. It didn't seem to change anything, but everyone's incredulous reactions were funny.

Still, certain situations I always responded to roughly the same. Sometimes I couldn't remember what I picked the time before. Or I didn't like the other options. Too cruel, maybe. The last 3 playthroughs, I told myself going in that I'd take the spirits up on the offer to let them have Clarissa in return for letting the rest of us go.

And, without fail, when the spirits made the offer, I'd refuse. The first time I chalked up to a sense maybe their hold on us wasn't as secure as they claimed if they were bargaining. After that? It was just stubbornness. Or else a feeling that, even if Clarissa was cruel to Alex, she didn't deserve that.

I don't understand the time travel - time displacement - aspects of the story. How characters vanish and appear somewhere else. Yes, sometimes the spirits possess you, and so you lose time, but you wake up in the same place. I can sort of square the notion that this throws Alex back into memories of her and her deceased brother, maybe because the spirits are trying to distract her (although you can apparently alter past events, at least according to subsequent flashback trips.) Doesn't explain people appearing or disappearing or dying in front of you, then turning up fine later. I also don't understand how winding antiquated tape players gets you out of smaller time loops.

Part of the reason I kept playing was to see if I could get them free entirely. First time, I tried closing the doorway from the other side, consigning Alex to a horrible fate. Didn't work. We've already discussed my reluctance to give them Clarissa. At a certain point, you can find letters around the island that tell what happened to the spirits. I was banking on that info to help Alex reach the spirits' humanity, convince them to let go and move on, if I could just find the right thing for Alex to say. No dice, and a cursory search online suggests I can't get this group out, only maybe save a different Alex from falling into the same fate.

Which is not an ending that puts a guy in the mindset of having accomplished anything by finishing the game.

Parental Supervision Declined

In Loco Parentis, you play as a young woman who's just moved into a new apartment. An apartment smaller than any of my dorm rooms. I don't think the room is even wide enough to have a bed, and lengthwise, all the wall space is taken up by desks and cabinets. If she's paying more than $100 a month for this play, she's being robbed. The hallways are dark, there's garbage bags and boards and desks and old refrigerators just sitting in the halls or on the landings between floors.

Oh, and there's a little girl that's calls for help as she's dragged into an apartment by an old woman. An old woman indifferent to the revolver you find to try and threaten her into releasing the kid. Which, to be fair, could simply be her being so old death holds no terror for her.

But there are also the spirits, or whatever you'd call them. Floating, translucent things with squid mouth that will float towards you if they see you. You can push them back with the flashlight you find, provided you don't run out of batteries, and bullets do disperse them. But you need the bullets for the old woman, too, and they're scarce.

If you dispatch the "crone", you then have to deal with the handyman, who the little girl also doesn't like. He made too much noise while she was trying to watch TV. I didn't get far in this game, but it seems pretty clear helping this kid is a bad idea. Which means I don't feel bad I didn't get very far in the game.

As far as I got, the levels seem to boil down to simple tasks. First, destroy or remove something the person cared about. You have to run between different floors - up or down doesn't seem to matter - chucking tools down the garbage chute or whatever. Then shoot something else. The shooting has to be completed within a certain amount of time, or you die. Which was where I got stuck, because I only had two bullets, which apparently wasn't enough, and couldn't find more before I was killed.

And the game feels very inconsistent about what you're supposed to do. The handyman occupies random objects, which you can tell because you see bugs crawling around them or hear snoring. Don't touch those objects. Until the game changes it's mind and wants you to shoot something. Except sometimes I can see the handyman as an actual person, messing with a floor's circuit breaker, and other times I can't. So am I supposed to shoot him, or the objects?

The controls are obnoxious. You can't readily open doors or drawers if you're carrying something,s o if you want to chuck something down the garbage chute, you have to drop it first, then open the door, then pick it back up. It feels like the cursor has to be in just the right spot for you have the option to interaction with something. The game relies a lot on jump scares, where you turn around and someone's swinging at hatchet at you, then they disappear.

Some games, if I get stymied, I'll go online to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Loco Parentis isn't worth the time that would waste.

The Illusion of Upward Mobility

Set in an unnamed industrialized nation, Norman's Great Illusion follows the life of one person over the course of a year. Time in the game moves in roughly one-month increments, and each day we see starts the same. His alarm clock goes off, you guide him to his dresser to get clothed, then to the dining room table for breakfast and chit-chat with the wife and daughter. The talk is just something you read, not a situation where you can choose between dialogue options. At the end of the day, you return home and go through the process in reverse. Dinner and chit-chat, change out of your clothes, bed.

In between is the actual gameplay, such as it is. You work at a factory across town as an engineer. You have to drive there, so there's a driving mini-game. Which is basically a timing thing. The vertical line moves back and forth across the grey bar, hit the button when it's inside the green bar. If you botch it, your car takes damage, which accumulates, and eventually you'll have to pay repair bills, which cuts into your funds.

At work, you do math. Literally, the game shows you a calculator with a series of problems on it, and you punch in the answer. At least it helped me brush up on my Order of Operations! If you mess up too much, the boss sends you home. If you do everything right, you get a bonus on top of your pay. If you do well enough months in a row, you start getting raises.

The trick - and the point I assume, given each time you leave for work the game throws up some quote about not speaking up for the unionists, or how dangerous nationalism is to labor - is until you manage two raises, you make less than the Expenses the game charges you. Even if you don't damage your car, don't do anything else that might hurt your standing at work or cut into your pay, even if you get the smaller bonus for good work, you're still getting poorer the entire game.

The rest of the gameplay is choices you're presented with. Two cops are chasing someone who is hiding their face. Do you tackle the person fleeing, or step aside? It's Election Day! Will you vote for the main party, or one of the others? Will you support the factory workers when they protest the factory taking a contract for poison gas? What about if they move to unionize as a pushback against increased hours, causing additional trouble for your department?

Eventually you get an ending, one way or the other. In my first playthrough (which didn't take 30 minutes) I was a good little worker bee. Got the raises, secured at least temporary financial security for my family. Then I went to work one day, and while I was gone, someone came and took my wife and kid. Or so I'm told. Maybe they left because I was working too much and never around. I never even found the time to finish putting together my daughter's bike. Just look at it! The negligence!

Second try, I was more supportive of the workers. Eventually got blacklisted. Also interrogated when it turns out my secret ballot wasn't so secret after all. Certainly not a distressing looming fear to have at present in this trashfire of a country! Wound up broke, especially after I spent that whole day buying Christmas presents and not working, which sapped my remaining funds. Given a choice of 4 options, I joined an underground workers study circle and my family spent years moving from place to place until, I assume, the Revolution occurred. At least my kid probably had to leave the bike behind, so I no longer felt guilty about that.

It's not really a fun game to play. If nothing else, you're watching that dollar amount creep closer to 0, no matter how careful you are. At least the first time through, the vague sense of panic I'm doing something wrong I can't see. Probably not something I need a game to impart.

The Best and Worst Ways I Passed the Time Last Year

I'm not going to bother with a Music category this year. Not enough candidates. Just mark down The Catalogue featuring Requiem as the Best Album of 2025 and we'll move right along.

BOOKS

30 books read last year, 18 non-fiction and 12 fiction. The fiction was mostly in the first half of the year, and there wasn't a lot that stood out. A lot of things that were interesting or engaging in certain ways (the turns of phrase, the underlying concept), but less so in others regards (characterization, or the big reveal was something I figured out halfway through the book. Best would go pretty easily to Rebecca Roanhorse's Mirrored Heavens, where aside from one character implausibly surviving a situation with no real satisfying, she pulled together a lot of disparate threads into a cohesive and satisfying conclusion. The book never dragged, the dialogue had some snap to it, a well-written story to finish the trilogy. None of the others really come close.

For worst, as much as the good old boy in Randy Wayne White's The Man Who Invented Florida pushed all my worst buttons, I think I have to give it to Robert Richardson's The Lazarus Tree. It was a mystery, but there was never much tension or suspense. Certainly no one in the village seemed in any rush to solve the murder, and the main character really isn't trying to do that either, so much as figure out what his friend's teenage daughter is up to. It felt like Richardson spent a lot of time hinting at mysteries or secrets to us (but not his protagonist) about different villagers, but none of them were relevant to the actual story. At best, they felt like set-up for some future story, but that doesn't do much for me while I'm reading this.

The non-fiction tended to shift in areas of focus over the course of the year. A lot of baseball early, then a lot of biology in late spring-early summer. The back half of the year ran more to film history, with a little bit of political or archaeological history thrown in. I had a few more possible options here. I enjoyed Blood in the Garden quite a bit, which surprised me given my antipathy to the 1990s New York Knicks. No Name on the Bullet had some details and facts I hadn't seen about Audie Murphy, but a lot of things I had from other sources.

But for the best, I'd pick Roger Kahn's Good Enough to Dream and Edward George's The Cuban Intervention in Angola. Kahn captured a lot of the things I enjoy about baseball, without the irritating nostalgia-tinted perspective that jarred me out of David Lamb's Stolen Season. And Kahn also built a lot of humor into the book when describing the chaos of trying to run a minor league team on a shoestring budget. As for George, he gave me pretty much exactly what I was hoping for when I got curious about Cuba inserting itself into things in Africa. I got a sense of the different powers, the push-and-pull between them, the problems complicating any sort of resolution, and the descriptions of the battles were aided with actual maps and a clear organizational philosophy to the writing. On the Road of the Winds by Patrick Vinton Kirch would be a close third.

Worst would have to be Peter Polack's The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War. It was more narrowly focused than what I was hoping for, concentrating on one extended battle in Angola without going much into the context or history. But it still had time for strange digressions about how many private security companies from South Africa operate in the Middle East these days. The description of the battle and movements of the various sides weren't well-illustrated to where you could picture what happened, and there was little clear flow in how he went about describing it.

MOVIES

First off, films covered as part of Overdue Movie Reviews are not eligible, because they aren't new to me, which is what this is focused on. Which leaves 44 movies, 11 of which were from the 2020s. Which is not a pattern I would have expected at the start of the year. Second most common decade was the '50s (7 movies.)

For best films, for all the late-70s to late-80s comedies I watched, I'd say How to Beat the High Cost of Living was the best of the lot. Or at least the one that made me laugh the most. Kid Glove Killer was a quick, compact but clever little thriller, and Escape to Athena was fun simply for the bonkers cast it had. But the top 2 would have to be two movies I watched very early in the year, No Name on the Bullet and Prey.

The former was great in the way this one person arrives, and his mere presence - because Audie Murphy mostly just sits, drinks coffee, and watches people go by - causes to the town to basically tear itself apart. All the ugliness and guilt the supposedly nice citizens are hiding makes them throw away what they profess to believe in so easily. The latter just built things up so well, paralleling the Predator taking on greater and greater challenges while at the same time Naru is slowly building herself up into that great challenge, using the skills she already has.

On the negative side, well, even James Coburn couldn't make me enjoy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (combined with the general dud that was Killer Elite, not a great year for me and Peckinpah movies.) Arrowhead had potential, but it was a '50 Western, so it was never going to be what I wanted. But I think I knew what the two worst films were going to be back in the summer, and sure enough, it's The End and Fear Blood & Gold. I mean, Throw Momma from the Train wasn't really funny outside a couple of moments of physical comedy, but it was funnier than The End, which went to exhausting lengths to assure us Burt Reynolds' character was a self-centered coward, then doubled down on that through the rest of its run time.

And Fear Blood & Gold? Just nonsensical. If Santiago wants to escape from Oscar, why doesn't he run when he successfully spikes his beans? Why does Oscar, having been drugged once by Santiago, accept a hallucinogenic drug from his later? Why does Oscar shoot with his revolver turned sideways like he's some '90s gangbanger? Why does the film need the odd old man? Who captured Oscar and Santiago at the beginning of the film, and why did they never appear again? Just a total disaster, and not even bad enough to put me to sleep. 

VIDEO GAMES

I beat a lot of games this year, although maybe that's the wrong word, given how so many of them were structured around dialogue, with only a limited amount for you to actually do. Did I really "beat" Dear Esther or Firewatch, or did I just reach the end of them? Maybe "finished" is a better word.

Anyway, worst game is really easy. It's 890B, which was a frustrating, pointless piece of crap with stiff dialogue, no character development, with almost all the run time burnt on puzzles I could play on a graphing calculator back in the '90s. The game apparently has good and bad endings, but it there's just a single Achievement for beating the game, regardless of which you get. Because they know nobody is going to play this trash twice without being reimbursed for it. A buck-and-a-half, and still a waste of money. I mean, I figured out after 30 minutes that Hello Neighbor was not for me, but I can see how someone else might enjoy that game. Not 890B. 0 out of 5, send the game designers to the gulag and leave them there.

Best games is trickier, because, with all these short, fairly limited games I played, it's a case of which thing a game focused on that I preferred. Abzu was a beautiful game, and mostly very relaxing to play, but not exactly challenging or the sort of thing where I felt really invested in the story. On the other hand, I enjoyed aspects of the story and the character development in The Fall, but it was such a murky-looking game and I really hate aiming using the right joystick.

So, if I just pick two, I guess it'll the The Stanley Parable: DeLuxe Edition, and The Sinking City. Stanley Parable simply because it was hilarious. It's probably the thing I laughed hardest at all year, outside of conversations Alex and I had at various points during our trip in October. As for Sinking City, while I'm not a huge fan of sanity meters, and definitely didn't love the wobbly screen effects that accompanied a wavering sanity, there was still a lot to enjoy in the game. Searching for evidence, being given the option what to do with that evidence once you had it. The visual look of the characters and setting. They kept crafting simple and straightforward, so it was useful without having so many options I got paralyzed by choice and couldn't figure out what to do.

Bury the Ashes of Your Past

Henry takes a summer job manning a fire tower in a remote national forest in Wyoming. For the next three months, he's on his own. Just him, and the bears, and the drunk college girls messing with fireworks. Oh, and Delilah, the woman manning a tower to the north. At night, Henry can see the lights from his tower, though it's her voice he'll become very familiar with, and she's contacting him over the radio all the time. As it turns out, there may be more people in the woods than Henry knows.

Firewatch is people running from their pasts. The game starts with Henry making his way to his tower, interspersed with text describing the course of his relationship with his wife. Though you can choose between options in certain cases - the first thing you said to her, what kind of dog you get - it all leads to the same place. Early onset dementia for her, and a flight to a remote fire tower for Henry.

Most of the game is you talking with Delilah while you wander your section of forest on one task or another. Or, depending on how you play it, Delilah talking at you, while you wander your section of forest on one task or another. The game gives you anywhere from one to three responses depending on the situation, but there's also a time limit to respond, so "silence" is also an option.

The game will point when you've reached something Henry finds noteworthy or confusing, - aspens, an abandoned backpack, beer cans - and you can contact Delilah to report it, if you want. The third time through I triggered a dialogue where Delilah mentioned how some firewatchers talk all the time. When Henry asks if she means him (because not all Henry's dialogue is chosen by you), she confirms it. So the fourth time around, I gave her the silent treatment. I only reported what the game required to advance the story. (Also, there was one time she was freaking out thinking I committed arson, and it got annoying enough I finally replied to shut her up.) Likewise, I withheld any personal information about Henry. In that playthrough, Delilah knows, or assumes she knows, that I'm running from something or someone, but doesn't know who or why.

I also, on that last playthrough, tried to withhold the truth of what I found in the cave from Delilah. I thought that would have been an interesting choice, to just leave it there, a secret held by two people that have never conversed, or really even met, and will never meet again. The game wouldn't allow that, refusing to advance until you told her.

When I started playing, a coworker said the game really messes with your head. I didn't have that experience. I think, after Henry got clocked on the skull, and I realized it wasn't something I could avoid, I stopped worrying. It felt like, whatever happened was unavoidable, so it was pointless to stress. No matter how close I am to my tower when Delilah reports there's someone up there, I can't catch them in the act. Also, I replayed the game to try playing differently in terms of how immediately I completed objectives, or how forthright I was with Delilah, to see if I could change the behavioral report you find in the latter stages of the game. It didn't work, which increased the feeling of being on rails.

(Somewhere, the obnoxious Uber-Narrator from that one ending of The Stanley Parable DeLuxe Edition is yelling at me that all the choices are illusions and I should go outside. It's friggin' cold out there, lady!)

I probably should have taken more time to just wander. You can only go so far in any direction before you hit terrain the game won't let you climb or cross, but whatever objective you've got will keep. You're not going to be killed by a puma if you dick around in the woods too long, the story simply won't advance until you finish that objective. If you want to take a bunch of photos of the lake with the disposable camera you found before checking if the firefighters are at the old campground, do it. Doing extra exploring was how I found my pet turtle!

 

(If you alert Delilah to your find, you get three possible names to give it. If you keep it to yourself, it's just "Turtle." But he'll always be "Turt Reynolds" to me.)

The game gives you the option to push for a romantic relationship between Henry and Delilah, but I never felt comfortable with that. He's still married, even if it's unclear how often his wife remembers who he is. I'm of the opinion Henry needs to sort that first. Considering how commitment-phobic Delilah seems, it doesn't look like a great plan anyway. Both of them, as well as the "third man", out in the woods, are trying to hide from things they don't want to face, but it's not going to work. Even if you keep running, the past follows along.

The Partial Pieces of the Family Tree

What Remains of Edith Finch details the title character's return to a family home she hasn't seen in years. Not since her mother took her away, leaving her great-grandmother Edie (actually Edith Sr., but "Edie" is going to be easier to differentiate her from the younger Edith) behind.

Edie vanished. Presumed dead, but there's no body, no trace of her. Edith hasn't returned in the idea of finding her, so much as maybe trying to understand what the hell is going on with her family. Because pretty much everyone dies under bizarre or disturbing circumstances. Her mother's response was to seal off almost every door in the house, and Edie's response was to drill peepholes.

As it turns out, there's one, mostly empty, room still open, and it's there Edith learns there are other ways to get into the rooms. So you move from room-to-room, studying the lives of people who mostly died decades before Edith was ever born. The rooms were preserved as is even before Edith's mom started closing them up like she was entombing someone who she perceived as insulting her family's honor, which makes it feel less like Edith is roaming through a familiar house, and more like she snuck into a very strange museum.

In each room, there's some item, that once Edith finds it, triggers a vision or recreation of the person's end. These are the parts that are most like a game, as you have a little more control. Great-Aunt Molly's diary details her waking up and feeling so hungry since she was sent to bed without supper, that she turns into a cat, chasing a barn swallow through the tree branches outside her window. Then she's an owl, and you guide her over snowy fields, before making her swoop down to snatch rabbits and swallow them whole.

Edith's older uncle's epitaph is a poem her mother wrote about him refusing to participate in their father's wedding to his second wife, opting to fly his kite instead. You guide the kite across the sky scattering the words of Dawn's poems, or knocking them loose from where they're wedged against a wood sculpture.

The visuals shift depending on whose story you're exploring. Great-Aunt Barbara's story is told as a comic book, with cell-shading that reminds me of that Gamecube game Killer 7, where you wield a crutch as a weapon. Edith's younger brother Milton's is a flip book, with simple cartoon characters. The depiction of the fantasy world her older brother used to escape the drudgery of his job seems artistically like Journey, though maybe that's just the robes the ancillary characters wear.

The game tells me I found all the stories, which means I don't know what's going on with this family. Edie's father left Norway to escape the ill fortune that dogged the Finch family, but tried bringing his house with him. They both sank. Dawn seemed convinced the stories Edie would tell were somehow responsible for what was happening, but Edith never learns what that means. So we're left with questions. Where the hell did Milton go? What actually killed Barbara? I'm left wondering why there was a train line on a remote island to where Walter could get run over by it. Edith gets there by ferry at the start of the game, so what the hell was the train connecting?

I don't have the answer, and I don't think Edith does, either. Which is too bad, since she seemed to be there looking for something to pass on. I guess it provides a lesson that you lose people, and you may not ever understand why, or even how. I figure there's probably something in not following either Edie or Dawn's approaches.

There are all these pieces or sights that suggest the house was slowly coming to a halt. Each time someone died, the place associated with it was fenced off, to be left unchanged and sacrosanct. But at a certain point, what's left for anyone to live in? At the same time, Dawn seems like she's following "out of sight, out of mind." Whatever she thinks is picking off Finches one after another, she also thought could be contained by closing doors. Literal, in terms of the house, and figurative in how she closes off from Edie and keeps Edith from any answers.

Which leaves me wondering how to interpret her giving Edith a key that would unlock the secret passages. A recognition avoidance was no answer? Edith mentions she hadn't been back since they left, and that, once she gets there, she realizes the feeling she always had at seeing the house was fear. So it seems like there was little chance she would have gone back snooping on her own, if Dawn was worried about that, and figured she might as well give Edith a safer way to explore.

The Only Way Out of the Nightmare is Through

In Among the Sleep, you play as a toddler who receives a teddy bear for his birthday. The bear comes to life, at least when no one else is around. Which means you aren't alone when you wake up that night and your crib is tipped over. Making your way downstairs through a dark house to your mother's room, you find she's missing.

From there, the game sends you to a peculiar cabin where you feed items that represent memories of your mother into a machine to open a door that takes you to different, nightmarish realms. The goal is always to find another memory and get closer to finding your mother. Sometimes it's a matter of finding your way where you need to go. Others it's about finding something you need to proceed. Maybe there's a sealed door and you have to find the item that acts as the key. Or you have to manipulate the environment to reach a higher path. Find some stuff to put on one end of a seesaw to raise the other end. Very late in the game, like, final level late, it adds the ability to throw stuff so you can knock over jars that hold things you need.

As you move through the game, there are towering, shadowy beings that will appear from time to time. Sometimes you just hear an inarticulate bellow, but on other occasions, you can see them roaming about. One part of a level, you're in some sort of library in a swamp. (In a nice touch, the words on the spines of the books are unintelligible because the kid can't read yet.) The shadow is roaming the aisles, and so you have to pick your spots, ducking from beneath one bookcase to the next without being spotted. (The toddler is significantly faster when he crawls than toddles.)

Later, you're moving through twisted hallways filled with bottles. When you knock one down, and despite my best efforts, I did knock some down, the shadow will emerge, raging. You have to get to one of the cubbyholes or hiding spots that are too small for the shadow to enter. Sometimes, the presence of the shadow frightens the kid badly enough his vision starts to blur and shake. You can press a button to hug Teddy, but while that casts a glow on your surroundings, I'm not sure it does much to alleviate the fear. But I'm also not sure the fear does much to inhibit your movements, though I usually tried to stay hidden and still when those moments happened.

It's pretty clear, even before the search for mama begins, there's something going on here. Your house is full of boxes, there are scribblings of the kids you find as you progress, and it's always just the kid and his mom. Eventually, there are half-photographs of a guy. Ominous! For a while, I thought Teddy was going to turn out to be some evil thing, considering he kept encouraging me to chuck these memories into the machine. It turns out to be more mundane, and more disturbing. Yeah, the end of the game is a real kick in the head I did not see coming. And then it's over, and I was left sitting there thinking, 'Did that just happen? Is that it?' Very abrupt.

Just A-Driftin' Along, In the Vacuum of Space

In ADR1FT (yes, the game uses "1" in place of "I"), you are Alex Oshima, commander of the crew aboard a space station built by Hardiman Aerospace. You wake up in the middle of chaos. Something has happened and the station is shattered the pieces drifting together. Thankfully, the orbit doesn't seem to be degrading, but if you're going to make it home, you have to repair some mainframes first.

What that involves is repeatedly going to the central spire of the station, which tells you a particular mainframe isn't responding. You have to make it to the section of the station related to that mainframe and acquire a new central processor or something like that, then bring it back. It's always the same error message, the part you grab is always the same (save the color.) Once you reach the right spot, it's a matter of pushing a button to initiate the sequence that gets you the part you need.

So the challenge is in making there. Alex is inside a spacesuit, and it has some mobility capability where you can direct your course, speed up or slow down. If you hit stuff, your suit starts to get damaged, cracks appearing in the visor. The jets that provide thrust and maneuverability are a shared resource with your air supply, so you have to keep an eye on that. There's still some equipment producing live currents that, if you hit them, do a considerable amount of damage to your air supply. Also, any time you move outside the confines of the station, the rate of air loss speeds up.

The suit is not at 100% when you begin, so there are some leaks even after you get it repaired. But the station is broken into pieces. You aren't accessing space by passing through airlocks or decompression procedures. You drift down a hallway and whoops, the part at the other end is no longer connected. Or you enter a room and one of the windows is blown out. So there's rarely a point where I would say the station is providing any sort of protection that ought to diminish the air loss.

Each time you reach one of the computer stations to retrieve a part you need, the computer there also upgrades some aspect of your suit. Oxygen capacity, suit integrity, thrust speed and something else I forget. Unfortunately, it doesn't let you pick, so suit integrity is the last thing that gets improved, while it's the first thing I'd have augmented if given the choice, since that would reduce the air loss. The game provides a lot of opportunities to replenish your air supply, either by bottles floating around (all of which flash green to help you find them) or dedicated stations on the interior walls. So it isn't too hard to find more air, and you can get most anywhere with minimal thrust if you're willing to wait for Alex to drift there, but that's more complicated if the suit is constantly leaking air like a sieve.

The one time I died in the game, it was because I tried to reach a satellite the suit's scanner told me had something. The satellite was a ways out, it was very early in the game, and I didn't use my limited oxygen (which I also didn't replenish before floating into the void) wisely. After that, I settled for drifting slowly when I was out in the open, focusing thrust use on course corrections, letting inertia carry me where I needed to go. There's no time limit, so there's no reason to rush, save impatience. And if you float, you can watch the Earth below you, and that's pretty neat.

Once you have the four mainframes up and running again, you can board the escape pod at any time. But there are other things to seek out, if you care. The company wants you to recover things like a special camera and a hard drive. There are 25 solid-state drives floating around. You might also, you know, want to figure out what happened to your crew. (Spoiler alert: They're all dead.) The scanner will help you find things like that, although the crew's suits have a flashing red light you can see from far off. I do wish the scanner didn't think it was necessary to tell me about locked doors. Most of them can be unlocked simply by holding "X" as you float closer, so they're really just, doors. I don't need to know that, and it would significantly declutter the screen.

As you go along, you can also access audio logs of yours and the crew that shed some light into what was going on. Alex granted one crew member a transfer home, but not in time. She was also putting a lot of pressure on the crew to hit the marks in whatever it was we were trying to accomplish, and probably disregarding safety protocols in the process. Which certainly makes it seem like Alex is to blame, but there were things here and there that made me wonder if it wasn't the guy on the crew that this was his last mission. He'd been in space so much, he had incurable cancer, and was not happy about spending the remainder of his days on Earth.

If there was an ending that provided resolution, I never unlocked it. I reached a point where I had certain uplinks working again, but they couldn't transmit because some debris severed a cable. I could find the damage easily enough, but I could never get any guidance as to what to do to fix it. I checked every Youtube playthrough I could find, and none of those helped, though I'm also not inclined to sit there 2+ hours sifting through the videos. Eventually, I gave up and decided to send Alex back to Earth, leaving it at everything being her fault.

Honk Honk Hiss Honk

In Untitled Goose Game, you are a goose, who wreaks havoc in a small English village. Because you're apparently the only goose in town, and have nothing better to do. Or maybe it's revenge, revolving around the series of events that resulted in you being the only goose in the village.

Nah, probably just a goose having fun. 

The game gives you an entire checklist of things to do at five different locations. Steal enough stuff from the town garden to have yourself a picnic on the lawn. Scare the brat in the town square so badly he locks himself in a phone booth. Or the garage. Or one, then the other. Traumatize that kid! Show him who's boss! (You.)

Once you finish most of the list in a given location, the game will add one more task. If you can get through it, the path to the next location will open, along with whoever you've annoyed putting up some sort of sign declaring their intolerance of geese. Once you get the whole way through, the game adds a bunch more things to do.

As a goose, you have a limited number of moves in your repertoire. You can grab things with your bill and carry or drag them. You can honk, you can flap your wings (but not fly), swim in the various waterways, duck low enough to get under tables or other low-hanging objects. How you combine those skills to make an old man fall on his bum or steal a toy boat from a sink, that's for you to figure out.

Some solutions are as simple as grabbing the object and running. You can't outrun a person over the long haul, and if they catch you, you'll drop whatever you've got. But if you can get to someplace they can't, a pond or through a hole in the fence, you're golden.

Others require more steps. If you want to open an umbrella in the TV store, you'll have to get past the shopkeeper to swipe an umbrella, then stash it somewhere she won't find it and take it back, but still close enough to the store you can drag it in after you've lured the salesperson out by terrorizing a child, and before they return.

And, of course, you can just run around causing mayhem for the heck of it. Do you think the nosy artist lady's "fish with legs" statue is obnoxious? Steal it! Drag it off somewhere and dump it in a hole, or at least keep her busy having to put it back where she wants it. Pull stuff off the shopkeeper's shelves. Turn on the sprinklers while the gardener is standing next to them. Uproot all the figures in the model village. Ring bells. Turn on radios. Turn off radios. Topple trash cans. Steal flowers. The world is your dumpster. (I don't think geese care for oysters.)

Every soul creates their own Hell

Neverending Nightmares puts you in control of Thomas, a man caught in a string of unsettling nightmares. The gameplay, such as it is, involves you walking the halls of whatever location your nightmare has placed you. It may start innocently, with Thomas deciding to go downstairs to get some milk, but things go downhill fast. The hallways are full of doors, which take you through bedrooms, bathrooms and studys that seem to loop back on themselves. Or you enter a room, find it to be a dead end, and re-emerge on a hallway that isn't the same as when you went in.

The shadows may grow thicker, obscuring your view, or the darkness may swallow everything. If you're lucky, the game grants you a lit candle, but for at least one stretch, you're stuck watching a black screen as you walk, ears alert for the sounds of anything else.

Because Thomas will encounter things. Sometimes what seems to be his baby sister, bloody-eyed and dragging an ax. Men with no eyes wrapped in straitjackets, or porcelain dolls that close in if you dally too long in a room. During the nightmares set in the asylum, you're sometimes chased by a maniacally grinning version of yourself, wielding a cleaver.

You don't have much recourse in these situations, except to try and make it through a door. Harder than it sounds. You can make Thomas run by pulling the right trigger, but he's slower than Alan Wake and tires faster, too. Although sometimes, if you meet a danger, you can elude it by simply going back the way you came until you can't hear it any longer. Then when you resume your original course, the danger has mysteriously vanished. One of the game's creators was apparently trying to capture their experiences with mental health issues, but I'm not sure what that would represent, if anything.

If you're caught, you die, but just wake up in a bed and step back out in the hallway where you died. You can't get out of the nightmare that easily. There are different endings depending on which direction you go at certain points in particular nightmares. Step through one door and get your Achilles tendons cut by your sister, step through another and walk off the porch into a void. Sometimes your sister is your sister and a small child. Other times she's your doctor at the asylum, a cold and distant one at that. In one sequence, you wake up in bed with her and she says she's your wife (Thomas is as confused and disturbed as I was, which is nice.)

While Thomas always "wakes up" with a start and breathing hard, his expression through the game doesn't suggest fear so much as confusion, or maybe weariness. His life has blurred into an endless stretch of misery and loneliness, broken up by pain inflicted either by others or himself. The encroaching darkness doesn't bother him. Neither do the monsters; Thomas doesn't see them and quail in terror, though he usually screams at the moment they "kill" him. Which probably says something about his true mental state and that he's not so eager to let go as he might believe.

I don't think I was ever scared while playing; once you figure out he's going to pop back up in bed if he dies, still trapped in his nightmares, it's hard to feel too worried about screwing up and getting him killed. Unnerved maybe, at some of the things Thomas encounters. Amused, that the art style reminded me of the intros to Mystery! on PBS I remember from when I was a kid. Exasperated, definitely, both at how slow Thomas is (though that tracks with a lot of my nightmares, moving like I'm in molasses) and how long it sometimes took to get to the point where something different happened.

It's like, you're walking, you're walking, try this door, oh another cobweb strewn bathroom, onto the next hallway, you're walking, try this door, bloodstain on the wall, you're walking, you're walking, wasn't I just in this bedroom? there's that creepy doll, you're walking, oh I'm back in the dining room, hey things are looking more worn down, maybe we're getting somewhere, still walking.

As a metaphor for feeling trapped in a headspace where every day is empty, save old memories and regret, and there doesn't seem to be an exit from the maze, it's effective. But it's not exactly engaging as a game you're playing. The monsters show up and at least they're something to try and escape or elude. 

There's a Lot of Shapes in the World

I'm not entirely sure how to describe Shape of the World. You begin in a grey space. Gradually, the land varies and undulates as you move towards a red triangle. Pass through the triangle, you're on a shoreline, with trees, and strange, brightly colored creatures. From there, you'll make your way across and up the land, through forests and caves and canyons, always heading for the top of the mountain.

There's typically at least one, if not more of the triangles in the area. Passing through one changes the colors of your surroundings, and usually causes faintly glowing monuments, spires or just big, round rocks, to appear in front of you. You interact with the monuments (hit the right trigger), and they swell and glow brighter. Once you hit them all, a staircase appears, either to carry you to another part of that area, or on to the next.

That's really about it, as far as gameplay. You can wander within an area as much as you like before moving on. There's no limit, no defined objectives other than occasionally walking through one of the triangles and interacting with the monuments. Take the long route along the trails and across downed logs, or sometimes the monuments are giant doughnut shaped things and interacting with them will either launch you in the air or jerk you towards them. Except the terrain tends to merge back into a formless state if you get too far away, then diversify when you return, which can get a little confusing. I found myself getting turned around sometimes. In theory you can always see the triangles, so they can act as a landmark.

The interact function also lets you alter your surroundings, in that you can make trees and other vegetation vanish when the tiny black triangle that's basically your targeting reticle is visible over them. Doing this also, for reasons I don't understand, causes you to surge forward, as though you destroyed the tree by occupying its physical space. You can't do this with land formations, so it's not like you create the mountains and valleys. At least not consciously or actively. What exactly my character is, or how it functions, I'm not clear, so perhaps your mere presence creates them. The object observed is altered by being observed, or something.

Most of the animals are small, shaped like the jellyfishes that you encounter in underwater levels in NES Mario games, or worms that poke straight up from the ground like grass. Or the occasional turtle. But there are also seahorses the size of real horses drifting about in the air, and whales high overhead. To the notion of not understanding what my character is, most animals run when you approach, but default to benign. The interact button doesn't do much to most of them, though there is an urchin in the cave area that looks a bit like a dandelion puffball that bursts (and launches you) if you touch it. There's another blobby thing that turns transparent, so you can see its skeleton.

One exception: The early stages have something the size of elephant, but shaped like a half-jelly bean stood on its flat end. It moves with dozens of tiny legs, and if you "interact" with it, will ram you and send you flying. (You aren't hurt; or, at least, there's no visible difference in how your character moves. As there's no time limit, there's also no heath meter.)

Sometimes glowing seeds appear, always in clusters of five. You pick them up and a little silver triangle appears in the bottom center of your screen. Then you throw the seeds where you like, and stuff will sprout. The little triangle turns red as your seed bank runs low. Also, the color scheme of the area will change again. (Really, the game feels a lot like just sightseeing on a world under a black light.)

There are usually multiple seed clusters to find within an area, but even if the seeds look different, what grows is typically the same as whatever else is appearing on its own. Which is a little disappointing, but does give you the opportunity to go around making trees burst apart, only to throw down a new one in its place. And it gives you a way to annoy the giant half-jelly beans from a safe distance. Just chuck a seed at them! It may even sprout where it lands after bouncing off them.

It's a game that moves at the pace you choose. You could blow through it quickly, zipping from one triangle gateway to the next as fast as possible. Or you could find a spot with a view you liked and just sit there and stare. I tended to play until I got bored, which was probably about 45 minutes at a pop. But it was a very relaxing 45 minutes. 

Puzzle Solving Machines in a Maze

In The Talos Principle, you are a newly-created machine/program placed within an artificial world by something claiming to be God, which encourages you to solve puzzles in realms it grants you access to. Except these realms are set in buildings in the middle of a frozen plain, where there's also a tower. God doesn't want you to go in the tower, but if you do, it can't stop you. 

There are computer monitors set up throughout the realms, which you can use to access a vast archive. Or what's left of it, as time has seemingly degraded many of its entries. Still, there's enough to tell humanity is probably long in the rearview, the victim of some disease or similar catastrophe. Within the archive is something else, another presence. It toys with you, asking you to prove you're alive, or define life or consciousness, or how meaning is derived. God occasionally cuts in with the booming, "BEGONE!" voice while you're typing, but you'll encounter "the serpent" again when you solve enough puzzles.

I guess it's possible, within the limited response options the game gives you, to have revealing conversations about the nature of your existence in this artificial world with the serpent. But I went so long between plays, and sometimes made little enough progress that it might be two or three times playing before the next conversation, so I'd forget our past discussions. My responses apparently came off as philosophically inconsistent or maybe just poorly thought out.

But the serpent also had the tendency to play tricks and then mock me, and when I pointed this out - one of the response options was essentially, 'Whatever I say, you're going to tell me is wrong' - it made a snide remark that I couldn't just avoid the question. This is the wrong thing to say to someone with my contrary nature. After that, I simply wouldn't give it anything. Whatever it said, whatever attempt at getting agreement or finding common ground, I denied, cutting the discussion short. You know, the proper way to deal with an argumentative dickhead, when punching them isn't an option.

The puzzles are all about getting various Tetris pieces, which you need to be able to open doors to access the other realms, or, if you choose, the different levels of the tower. Of course, once you've got them you also have to arrange them to unlock the doors, and that was sometimes more of a headache than the puzzles themselves.

I used Youtube for the puzzles quite a lot in the back half of the game. Sometimes I could see the outline of what I needed to do, but couldn't get things arranged properly. Sometimes I had no clue. Especially when it involved the recording device. There are several tools you unlock through the game, any or all of which may be present in a given puzzle. Some are a simple as a block, others are platforms, fans, or crystals on tripods that can angle or aim lights where you want them.

And there's a machine that, when you turn it on, records whatever you do. When you finish, you go back to the machine and hit play, and a hologram of your self repeats those movements. So for a while, there can be two of you, each carrying your own block or with your own crystal tripod. So the other you can depress a switch, or use a tripod to send a beam to unlock one door, while you do the same somewhere further on. I really hated those, which is probably why I won't play again to try a different approach with the serpent.

The version I bought also included Fire of Gehenna, which I think is a sequel, set after your character in the first game makes the ultimate ending choice. God's shutting things down, and tasks another machine/program to descend into a prison-realm it created and free earlier programs it placed there for one transgression or another. By solving more puzzles, naturally.

The puzzles are the same as before. This time, you interact with the inmates via a message board community they somehow built up over their time imprisoned. You can read the posts, which might be one of them doing a long-running pulp story when they only vaguely understand humans or the concepts involved, or just musings. Sometimes they ask you questions, or debate your presence among themselves. The ones running the message board have their own, private, threads where they plot to run a smear campaign against you as you tear their world down.

Even if the responses the game gave as options weren't limited to one sentence, I'm the wrong person to send. You want someone for a mission from God, call the Blues Brothers. Given the choice, I'd simply say, "I'm not making you go. Come if you want, stay if you don't, this place is toast either way." In fact, at the point when you've freed all the others, but "Admin" is reluctant to leave, the game finally offered that as a response and you better believe I used it.

I called it a day when I realized that, to free Admin, the game expected me to go back and get a bunch of the gold stars that were elsewhere within the puzzles I solved to free the prisoners. I got a handful in The Talos Principle, but didn't find it worth the hassle. I certainly didn't feel like bothering with it here, even if the one I'd be trying to save had asked to be saved.