The Single Player

Exploring and critiquing games and media, not just as entertainment but as a discipline and art form.

“The Vale: Shadow of the Crown” Review

Posted on 14 October, 2021 by Anthony Langsworth

The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, or The Vale, is an action adventure game from Falling Squirrel and Creative Bytes studios.

You play as Alex, a blind princess sent to a distant castle in her brother’s kingdom. After surviving an invading army’s surprise attack, you need to find your way back to safety while learning about the world, the war and your place in both.

The Vale is uniquely experienced only via audio. Its only visuals are particle effects indicating motion, weather, and time of day. The game even reads the menus aloud, presumably allowing people with visual disabilities to enjoy the game without aid.

Much of The Vale relies on the player deducing directions and distances using only sound. For example, enemy combatants telegraph upcoming attacks with yells, allowing you to raise a shield or time counterattacks in that direction. Evading enemy camps may require listening for their crackling fires or banter. Good headphones help, as does enabling any 3D or directional audio enhancement.

The Vale executes well. Most challenges are intuitive or quickly learned. You return to the challenge’s start if you fail, sometimes with a short hint. However, discerning multiple incoming attacks while using your abilities can be tricky in the more complex fights.

Communicating setting and dialog solely via voice can be slow. However, The Vale‘s script is tight. Descriptions are vivid and concise, and I never got bored or frustrated waiting for dialog. The choices of accents and voice acting are brilliant, immediately identifying the speaker.

The story is similarly tight and has many twists and reveals. Flashbacks teach skills and build relationships. “Flash forwards” unexpectedly show incorrect paths.

Removing visuals also awakens the player’s imagination. Like reading a novel, you wonder what characters and scenes look like based on accents and the occasional brief but lucid description.

The Vale makes you realize how visuals dominate games. Even for games that use stylized or simplified graphics, simple things like art and animation dominate the language used to describe them.

The Vale also reinforces that game accessibility is not about reducing the difficulty. Accessibility is about reimagining and redesigning game interaction and content.

That said, The Vale is still niche. Visuals are more effective at quickly communicating information and adding emotional context than sound. Using sound for feedback means the game cannot have a soundtrack. The Vale will not dethrone any AAA games from the top sellers’ charts.

The Vale is also short, requiring about eight hours to complete, including all side quests. The game introduces ideas, uses them a few times then moves on to the next ones.

The Vale succeeds as a game, experiment and tech demo, and it will appeal to those looking for something unusual, those with visual impairments or students of game design.

Hopefully, these ideas spread and are enhanced or included in other games. Imagine the same techniques applied to imaginative, story-rich, graphics-lite games like Disco Elysium or Planescape: Torment.

“Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order” Review

Posted on 15 July, 2021 by Anthony Langsworth

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, released at the end of 2019, is a single-player, action-adventure game. Think bits of Darksiders, Dishonored and Dark Souls combined with the Star Wars setting, music and visuals.

You play as Cal Kestis, a padawan that survived order 66. He etches a mediocre existence on the planet Bracca, salvaging spaceship parts to fuel the empire’s war machine, when an accident reveals his force powers. Cere Junda, a former Jedi, rescues him from the inquisitors, the empire’s Jedi hunters, then Cal embarks on a quest to protect other force-sensitive children from the empire.

Cal starts with minimal force powers. He learns or acquires new abilities by achieving in-game goals, which initiate cut scenes re-enacting parts of his childhood padawan training. These reflections contrast Cal’s old and current lives, help us empathize with his repressed grief and provide a temporarily safe learning environment for the player.

The levels are complex but well-designed. They are bi-directional, and the backward traversal often needs newly acquired abilities. Many short branches provide exploration opportunities. However, some require powers gained later, meaning the player must revisit old areas.

The level designers made each planet distinctive, such as the ochre sandstone and bright, yellow sun of Bogano; Dathomir’s reds, browns and sinister twilight or the vibrant, lush, green, humid Kashyyyk. Imperial interiors continue the original three Star Wars films’ styling with stadium-framed fluorescent lighting set into austere blacks and greys.

The parkour gameplay fits well with Jedi and Star Wars lore, going back to Luke’s training on Dagobah. Star Wars has always emphasized verticality to imply danger and declutter sets, such as in A New Hope’s death star.

The combat is defence-oriented, built around blocking and dodging to reveal short moments where you can attack. You eventually gain the expected gamut of Jedi powers, like pulling, pushing and jumping, and a double-bladed lightsaber.

However, you rarely feel comfortable enough to have a dominance or power fantasy. Once you can comfortably beat an opponent, the game throws in more or harder ones.

The soundtrack is standard Star Wars “John Williams-esque” orchestral, with playful woodwind and ominous brass and strings. However, other than a brief appearance from the Mongolian band “The Hu”, it lacks memorable musical moments.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is challenging. Repeatedly failing can be frustrating, but iterative learning is the path to the required and desired mastery. Dying is progress. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is essentially a puzzle-solving game, whether learning and countering enemies or combining force powers and movement to reach a seemingly unnavigable goal.

Thematically, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is about healing after trauma and loss. As Cere says, failure is part of the process and is not the end. For Cal, it is about the loss of his mentor and father figure. For Cere, it is about the loss of her padawan and estrangement from her master. For Trilla and Merrin, it is about abandonment and betrayal. These parallel the setting, both the fall of the republic/rise of the empire and the descent of the ancient Zeffo race, whose tombs you explore.

Almost all thematic treatment is during cut scenes, conversations between missions, journal entries or enemy banter during boss fights. Later cut scenes, in particular, effectively embody the “show, don’t tell” mantra, symbolism and abstractness reminiscent of Star Wars. Even the main menu theme is subdued and mournful.

Unfortunately, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order does not extend themes into missions. In other words, most of the game. It is not ludonarrative dissonance, more a missed opportunity. The player will repeatedly fail with the game’s challenging mechanics. However, respawning when you mistime a jump or an enemy defeats you may be frustrating but not a genuine loss.

Meanwhile, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order’s challenging game mechanics easily distract players from internalizing and examining themes. You are focused on how to get places or beat opponents, not what doing so means or its impact on the game’s characters.

One solution is involving other characters more during missions. They steal the show in their brief appearances with spot-on voice acting and scripts. Apart from BD-1, the R2-D2 substitute with the requisite cuteness and courage, Cal only briefly works with two other characters during missions

Cal’s personality is also underdeveloped. This “blank canvas” may make him a better player surrogate, but the developers could flesh him out beyond his withdrawal, grief, and the wide-legged swagger the animators gifted him.

That said, genuine love and attention to detail have gone into the game, whether it is the authentic motion blur and whoosh of a whirling lightsaber or the fantasy-fulfilling glee of briefly piloting an AT-AT. I laughed at the mundane stormtrooper banter, Cal not translating BD-1’s jokes or BD-1 beeping a Star Wars motif when hacking a security droid.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order strives to be a good game and not just a faithful Star Wars game. Perhaps this is why it lacks the signature Star Wars initial text crawl and subverts the opening star destroyer camera pan. The game is a challenging but enjoyable 35 hours to finish, more for all achievements, and worth it for action-adventure fans, not just Star Wars fans.

“The Outer Worlds” Review

Posted on 25 April, 2020 by Anthony Langsworth

The Outer Worlds, a science fiction action adventure role playing game, is a spiritual successor to Fallout: New Vegas. While Bethesda developed most of the revamped Fallout series, Obsidian Entertainment developed Fallout: New Vegas, widely considered to be amongst the best of them. Obsidian has done it again.

The “Fallout” series contrasted blithe advertising against bleak nuclear devastation to show how consumerism had detached us from reality, like a subtler Rad Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains. This contrast was particularly evident of the pro-industry, pro-American optimism and nationalism of the 1950’s, whose aesthetic the “Fallout” series borrowed for its retro-futuristic style.

However, The Outer Worlds takes this in a different direction. It retains the futurist 1950’s aesthetic but immediately confronts the player with capitalist authoritarianism. What starts as kitsch descends into absurdity then horror as the bureaucratic oppressiveness and repetitive, vapid advertising jingles grate.

Meanwhile, the almost surreally vibrant alien landscapes replace the bleak, practically monochromatic art style of the “Fallout” series’s post-nuclear war America. The scene is relatable enough with plants and water and clouds. However, the plants are strange puffballs and oversized mushroom trees. While the pinks and oranges of clouds in a sunset are beautiful, they are set beneath the red rings of an alien gas giant.

This alienness extends to its soundtrack. As the character first steps onto a planet, the music has sequences of solos followed by answers from the broader orchestra after unsettling, awkward pauses. Even the title theme played over the main menu starts with two flutes playing at their lowest register, giving an ethereal feel, followed by a subdued, almost mournful but resolute motif.

Both the music and art differentiate scenes and anchor the player in a location. For example, a visual overload of neon assaults the senses as the door to the promenade on the Groundbreaker recedes. The bass riffs with subtle harmonica overtones played when entering the Edgewater are reminiscent of the wild west. The intense primary colours of Terra 2 (green grass, blue water or red lava and rings) contrast against the yellow, sulphurous tones of Monarch and the dull, monotonous grey of Byzantium.

Like the “Fallout” series, The Outer Worlds thrusts the player as an outsider into a plot that subverts the status quo. Whether this subversion is for the better or worse is determined by the player’s choices. The ultimate enjoyment of the game is exploring choice and effect. A cathartic, offensive approach is an option but finding the best outcome, typically a non-violent compromise, is often harder, requiring exploration and lateral thinking.

Mechanically, The Outer Worlds is generally an evolution from standard science fiction RPG fare. As the character advances through levels, they increase skills and choose special abilities, called perks, that give bonuses. A time dilation mechanic replaces “Fallout”’s VATS, allowing the player to aim at discrete body parts to inflict penalties like blindness for a headshot. There are crafting mechanics for those so inclined.

However, the “flaw” system is noteworthy. They allow taking penalties for a bonus perk. As tabletop RPG game designers have known for some time, imperfect characters are often more fun to play than perfect ones. Flaws enshrine role playing decisions into mechanics and give a greater challenge. They are optional but must be earned. For example, you can gain phobia of a particular species, represented by temporary penalties, by fighting them too often.

The Outer Worlds also adds a new stealth mechanic by adding a personal holographic projector. Instead of save scumming your way around guards, after finding the appropriate MacGuffin, you disguise yourself as one of them but with a strict time limit. When it expires, you can renew the time limit by convincing a guard to let you pass, a task that becomes more difficult each time you try. It makes a welcome change of pace.

As for side quests, the inclusion of Pavarti’s love affair with Junlei as most fleshed-out companion quest will wrinkle the nose of some as political correctness. However, her endearing awkwardness, the relationship’s slow build and the absence of physical love scenes create a restrained and mature approach often lacking in earlier RPGs like Mass Effect.

Including Scientism, a religion to underpin the authoritarianism is a brilliant piece of world-building. Why justify people’s caste-like working conditions when you make it religious duty? Why circumvent science like other religions when you can justify fate with mathematical determinism? More exploration of these through the eyes of your companion Vicar Max or the NPC Graham would have been fascinating.

However, the purpose of religions like Scientism and its polar opposite, Philosophism, is not existential introspection like in Nier: Automata. Instead, they are contrasting strawmen, both with good and bad points. They allow the player to plot themselves on a spectrum and appreciate significant decisions are often between imperfect options.

The Outer Worlds is also not without humour. While it eschews overt pop culture references to emphasise the setting’s remoteness, it does not take itself too seriously. The deadpan sarcasm of ADA, your ship’s onboard computer, sometimes takes a moment to process but leaves a wry smile. The conversation options to persuade guards to let you pass alludes to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s “these are not the Droids you are looking for” from Star Wars. The name of your ship, the “Unreliable”, is self derogatory. There is even an achievement for shooting at opponent’s crotches during time dilation.

The Outer World’s single-player campaign as twenty to thirty hours of gameplay, depending on how much you explore or indulge the side quests. This game, a homage and evolution of the “Fallout” series, is lovingly crafted and I look forward to the inevitable sequel.