Category: video games

Ocean’s Heart

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Ocean’s Heart is a top-down 16-bit adventure game in the style of A Link to the Past or The Minish Cap. You play as Tilia, the daughter of a former soldier who manages a tavern on a small island. After the island is attacked by pirates, Tilia’s father sails away to chase them down. He doesn’t return, so Tilia leaves the village to look for him.  

Ocean’s Heart is set on an archipelago of interconnected islands. Most of the map can be navigated on foot, while sailing serves as a form of fast travel. The archipelago is densely populated, with multiple large cities and smaller towns, but it’s also filled with beautiful green spaces. The primary biome of the islands is “forest,” but there’s an incredible amount of diversity within this biome, from alpine pine forests to leafy old-growth oak forests to swampy mangrove forests.

The green spaces of Ocean’s Heart are gorgeous, and the pixel art is a true feast for the eyes.

When I was a kid, I remember being disappointed by the 3D graphics of the N64 and the PlayStation. Now I find the visual style of games like Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII to be charming, but for a long time (until there were better alternatives) I thought the blocky polygons and difficult-to-read environments of “next gen” games looked like garbage. I kept thinking that what I really wanted was for developers to use next-gen technology to make pixel art more polished, intricate, and interactive.

Ocean’s Heart is exactly the sort of game I wanted. Flowers and grass rustle in the wind, falling leaves drift across the screen, and birds take flight as you approach. The overworld map is dense with interaction points, all of which are visually signaled without being obtrusive. The landscape is also dense with scenery that does nothing but add magic and wonder to the environment. Towns and cities are filled with uniquely designed stores and characters, and each center of population has its own distinct visual character.

Even aside from the graphics, Ocean’s Heart is a lovely game. Although it doesn’t disrupt the basic Legend of Zelda gameplay formula, the way Ocean’s Heart structures and populates its world is extremely well executed. Unlike many Zelda-style games, Ocean’s Heart features an excellent balance between gameplay and written text. The dialog offered by the NPCs is substantial, and the player can interact with all manner of books, bookshelves, maps, paintings, documents lying on desks, and so on. Very little of this text is necessary to understanding the game’s story, but it makes the world feel like a living place that exists independently of Tilia and her quest.

The menu screen of Ocean’s Heart offers modern ease-of-use concessions, from the option to save the game at any time to a labeled map to a list of sidequests. Many titles seeking to capture a retro feel – Tunic springs immediately to mind – seem to expect the player to engage with the game through the medium of an online walkthrough, but Ocean’s Heart is entirely self-contained. The player has a great deal of freedom to move across the archipelago, but it’s difficult to become lost. The confidence derived from such a well-curated experience makes exploration all the more enjoyable.

As in any Zelda-style game, Ocean’s Heart contains about half a dozen mandatory dungeons. These dungeons have no maps, but they’re laid out in a way that feels easy to navigate and speaks to thoughtful game design. Careful exploration of the world will reveal another dozen optional dungeons with more specialized themes. My favorite of these optional “dungeons” was an entire Mediterranean-themed island with its own fully populated town of cafés and street musicians and people sitting on terraces while drinking and enjoying the sea breeze.

Ocean’s Heart comes equipped with an optional hard mode that you can trigger early on and reverse any time you want, but the default level of difficulty is well balanced. You don’t have much health at first, and healing items are extremely limited. More than anything else, this early-game difficulty seems intended to keep players on the critical path. As you power up Tilia and her sword through various collectables scattered throughout the world, exploration becomes more comfortable. Many players may have to resign themselves to dying several times at the beginning of Ocean’s Heart, but the difficulty curve balances out about an hour or two into the game’s playtime, which is roughly eight to ten hours.  

I haven’t encountered any discussion of Ocean’s Heart in the Legend of Zelda fan community, so I was surprised to learn that it was originally released in January 2021. I’m amazed that I hadn’t heard of it before I saw it on sale on the Nintendo Switch store, because this game is really good. The gameplay is solid, the writing is fun, and the beautiful pixel art is everything I ever wanted. Ocean’s Heart is also inexpensive and accessible to players of all skill levels, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s up for a chill and rewarding island adventure.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is half sci-fi visual novel and half real-time tower defense tactics game with a moderately robust system of mecha customization. It’s an amazing work of nonlinear digital storytelling, but it’s also about 25 hours long and difficult to talk about without spoiling certain elements of the plot. I’m therefore going to spoil a few small bits of the game’s premise, which I hope will make this review easier to follow.

To simplify the story significantly, 13 Sentinels is about teenage mecha pilots from different decades in modern Japan. Although the timeline stretches from 1945 to 2188, the primary setting of the game is an urban high school in the year 1985. Time travel is introduced into the story fairly early on, but it gradually becomes apparent that the various pilots’ movements between decades may not be time travel at all. In addition, a few of the characters are very concerned with “loops,” which seem to be connected to the different “generations” of mecha you control during the tower-defense sequences.

Your job, as the player, is twofold. First, you need to defend the city during a multi-stage final battle against invading alien mecha; and second, you need to follow each of the thirteen characters’ stories in order to figure out how they got to the point at which the final battle begins.

The tactics battles are short and linear, and you can repeat battles to grind for experience or meet certain challenge conditions. You can choose the difficulty level for these battles, which end in victory automatically if the tower does not fall within the time limit. The visual presentation of the battles is somewhat simplistic and occasionally confusing, but they’re easy to cheese through multi-target long-range missiles.

Personally speaking, I’m not big into tower defense tactics, but I found the mecha battles in 13 Sentinels to be extremely addictive. If you, like me, are interested primarily in the narrative aspects of the game, I would say not to worry too much about the mecha battles. They’re easy and fun!

Meanwhile, the visual novel portion of the game plays out in a series of roughly five-minute segments. There are thirteen viewpoint characters, and each character’s story is divided into six to eight episodes. Although some of the episodes have conditions that need to be met before they’re unlocked, you can switch between characters and play through the episodes in whatever order you like. You can also complete a lot of the story without doing the mecha battles, and vice versa.    

The story segments are set up like a 2.5D (Paper Mario style) adventure game in which you navigate between connected screens while talking to NPCs. Most of these story segments are linear, by which I mean that they necessitate specific actions performed in a specific order. Each character’s story has its own style of gameplay-adjacent narration, and certain segments of two of the characters (Juro Kurabe and Yuki Takamiya) might necessitate using a walkthrough. For the most part, though, each story episode is fairly intuitive and self-explanatory, and the player can sit back and enjoy the art and writing and voice acting without having to worry about making decisions.  

Although each individual battle and story episode is relatively short, there are a lot of them in aggregate, and the game will take at least twenty hours to finish. Unfortunately, you have no control over the opening tutorial sequence, which takes about an hour to complete. Because this tutorial takes so long, I think it’s important to let people going into 13 Sentinels know that it doesn’t reflect the content of the vast majority of the game.

I recently listened to a discussion of 13 Sentinels in which two people who’d played the game attempted to explain it to a larger group, and one of them made an embarrassed comment about “anime tropes.” I think it’s worth discussing these tropes (without spoilers), as they appear primarily in the opening tutorial and may turn off many players to an otherwise excellent game.

The first anime trope is fanservice, by which I mean “male gaze anime pedo bullshit.” For whatever reason, this fanservice is frontloaded into the tutorial and then more or less disappears. In other words, it’s a little gross at the beginning, but then it stops being an issue. It’s kind of like the opening of Final Fantasy XII, where you have to get intimately acquainted with the dimples in Penelo’s ass and watch Fran straddle a flying motorcycle in lingerie before the game drops the fanservice pretense and gets down to the business of telling a story in which the characters aren’t sexualized at all.

The second anime trope is basic netto uyoku brainrot. This is concentrated at the beginning of one character’s story but then stops being an issue. There’s not much to say about this, save that it’s fairly common in a lot of anime-adjacent work that came out of Japan in the late 2010s, and that it will probably go over the heads of most people playing the game in English. I’m generally sensitive to this sort of thing, but it’s such a minor part of the overall story that it was easy to roll my eyes and not be bothered by it. Also, that character’s storyline gets much better later in the game.

The third anime trope is “giant mecha that can only be piloted by teenagers in high school.” As someone who generally dislikes this trope, what I would say is that the diegetic explanation is very good, and that the narrative payoff is a lot of fun. The explanation and payoff don’t happen until late in the game, but they’re worth suspending disbelief for.  

In a lot of ways, 13 Sentinels has strong Final Fantasy VIII vibes, and it’s good to remind people (mainly myself) that Final Fantasy VIII was actually a really smart and interesting game. The conceit of all the characters being in high school is admittedly silly, but the “daily life” nonsense at the beginning of the game exists primarily to serve as a contrast for what you learn about the story as it progresses.

I don’t want to say that anyone’s enjoyment of 13 Sentinels will be dependent on their tolerance for anime tropes, but what I would say is that you might need to be patient with the game during the first hour. Like any other JRPG, 13 Sentinels gets so much better once you’re free from the mandatory tutorial.

Given that 13 Sentinels levies a tax of an hour of your life before you’re allowed to start the game in earnest, I want to try to explain why the experience of playing it is worth the price of admission.  

To begin with, 13 Sentinels is a gorgeous game. The character designs are gorgeous. The backgrounds are gorgeous. The lighting effects are gorgeous. The animation is limited, but it’s gorgeous as well. Every tiny detail is just so incredibly gorgeous, and the game constantly reveals new details.

I also appreciate that 13 Sentinels isn’t so much a traditional visual novel as it is a nonviolent adventure game. I love this style of interactive storytelling, and I love to see it done with a proper budget. You don’t just passively watch the characters and look at all the gorgeous art; you get to move through the lushly detailed environments and interact with them using standard JRPG mechanics that help guide you through the story.

While the writing doesn’t draw attention to itself at the level of its prose, it’s a marvel how everything comes together in bits and pieces in a way that makes perfect sense. Some character episodes must be unlocked, so there are a few gates regulating how much the player knows at any given time, but 13 Sentinels showcases nonlinear storytelling at its best.

The game also features a good mix of subgenres. Some characters are normal high school students who gradually get sucked into the larger story, while other characters begin right in the middle of a hardcore sci-fi action movie. Some of the characters have love stories, while others have murder stories. A surprising number of the characters’ stories look deeply into ontological definitions of humanity. Meanwhile, there are some characters you don’t get to play as, an aspect of narrative gameplay that generates its own set of themes and questions.

If you get bored with one character, you can always switch to another. All of the stories are connected, so you might uncover something that causes you to view the formerly boring character in a different light. Some of the characters resonated more strongly with my own interests while others left me a bit cold, but all of the characters have fully realized narrative arcs that somehow manage to keep developing deep into the endgame.

I can’t say too much about the game without spoiling it, but I was constantly dazzled by the storytelling. When I say that the narrative payoff of the anime tropes is worth the initial silliness, I mean it – the ending of 13 Sentinels feels satisfying and well-earned.

Because it’s divided into bite-sized chunks, 13 Sentinels is a great portable handheld game, and it’s perfect for the Nintendo Switch. Its load times are almost nonexistent, so it’s easy to pick up and put down and pick back up again. I gradually played 13 Sentinels over the course of about two months, but I imagine the game’s structure would make it a lot of fun for people who prefer to binge stories.

So, despite the slog of the opening tutorial, I’d definitely recommend 13 Sentinels if you’re interested in a smart and fun sci-story that’s also a smart and fun game.

Ground Down

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Ground Down
https://inverts.itch.io/ground-down

Ground Down is a short botanical horror story presented in the form of a Twine game. The player is occasionally offered choices concerning how to proceed, but there’s only one ending. Depending on your choices and your reading speed, I’d say Ground Down takes about ten to twenty minutes to finish.

You play as a young farmer whose grandmother has just passed away, leaving you the farm you’ve grown up on. You also have your grief, a house full of mementos, and debts to pay. On top of that, you’ve started to grind your teeth, but you have neither the time nor the money to visit a dentist.

I should say that, if you’re unusually squeamish about teeth, you might want to give this game a pass.

Personally speaking, I’m a little squeamish about teeth and dental pain in general, but I very much enjoyed this game. I felt some mild discomfort at the beginning, but the way the theme of “teeth as a symbol of agency” comes back at the end of the story is nothing short of brilliant.

The writing of Ground Down is fantastic in general. Each sentence is perfectly constructed, and each word is chosen with care. There’s a Raymond Carver feel of resonant simplicity to the prose, which is a pleasure to read and to reflect on. The gradual build of the narrative tension is subtle but palpable, and the ending is gorgeously cathartic.

The creator describes Ground Down as a “kinetic novel,” and there’s an interesting rhythm to the text, which sometimes speeds up and slows down. The choices you can and can’t make are interesting as well. Although your choices don’t affect the ending, they’ll color your understanding of what happens.

It’s also worth noting that the Century Gothic font is easy to read, and the contrast between the dark gray background and the light gray text is easy on the eyes, especially if you’re playing the game on your phone. The ambient background music, Kevin MacLeod’s “Decline,” is perfect.

Really, everything about Ground Down is perfect. I played the game twice, and I’m looking forward to playing it again soon. The story’s theme of protecting the roots of your identity from the erosion of late-stage capitalism resonated with me, and the imagery is delicious. And, as a fun bonus, you can name and pet your hen!

The Minish Cap

~ Kathryn

Nintendo recently released The Minish Cap on the Game Boy Advance virtual console included with its Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription service. This service costs $50 a year, and you have to pay the annual fee all at once. As a reminder: It is always morally correct to pirate Nintendo games.

The Minish Cap came out around the same time as The Wind Waker, and it translates a lot of The Wind Waker’s characters and enemy designs into a 16-bit pixel aesthetic modeled on A Link to the Past. As a Zelda game, the structure of The Minish Cap is very conventional: There are five themed dungeons in five themed zones. You must beat these dungeons in order, as the item you find in each dungeon allows you to access more of the world. All of the dungeons are well-designed, and it’s fun to navigate each of the five zones.

To me, there are three things that make The Minish Cap special. The first is a core game mechanic that’s brilliant and magical; the second is a minor game mechanic I hate; and the third is the game’s lighthearted tone.

The main conceit of The Minish Cap is that Link is able to shrink down to the size of the Minish, tiny little mouse-elves who live in adorable mushroom houses, hollowed-out books, and so on. The Minish spaces in the game are a Studio Ghibli fantasy on par with The Secret World of Arrietty, and there are a number of fun navigation puzzles that require Link to alternate between human size and Minish size. This is especially enjoyable during an item quest that requires you to return three books to the library, which necessitates navigating the central hub of Hyrule Castle Town at Minish size.

Unfortunately, the Minish are obsessed with fusing kinstones. A kinstone is a broken medallion, and several dozen NPCs are willing to connect their half of a kinstone with a matching half in your possession. A successful fusion will result in a small change somewhere in the world – a merchant will come to Castle Town, a treasure chest will appear in a cave, or a special golden monster will appear in the field. These fusions are mostly random, as are the kinstones you find. All of the game’s sidequests (if you can even call them that) are connected to kinstone fusions, and the randomness of the fusions can make these sidequests infuriating. Thankfully, none of the sidequests is necessary, as The Minish Cap is easy enough to play with just the bare minimum of resources.

I imagine that most players will probably think of successful kinstone fusions as fun bonuses, but a Zelda game without sidequests can feel a little empty. In addition, because many of these fusions are made with random NPCs at seemingly random points in the game, none of the sidequests is connected to a narrative.

This lack of substance and specificity is tied to the lighthearted tone of The Minish Cap, which doesn’t have much of a story. The King of Hyrule has been possessed by an evil Minish wizard named Vaati, who turns Princess Zelda to stone during the first ten minutes of the game. Because only children are pure-hearted enough to see the Minish, only Link can save Zelda. Meanwhile, none of the adults care about any of this.

Aside from Zelda and your trusty talking hat Ezlo (who has also been transformed by Vaati), nothing bad happens to anyone in the game. In fact, everyone is quite happy.

In The Wind Waker, the disconnect between the carefree world of the Great Sea and the importance of Link’s quest is a major thematic element of the story. The only person living on the Great Sea who cares about Hyrule is Ganondorf, and the only reason he cares is because he’s been woefully displaced in time. The fact that no one except the King of Red Lions understands Link’s quest emphasizes The Wind Waker’s tone of loneliness, and this is why it’s so emotionally impactful when Link finds someone who appreciates the stakes of what he’s trying to accomplish and volunteers to help.

Meanwhile, in The Minish Cap, Hyrule is densely populated by Hylians and Minish who seem to be doing just fine, even without a government. Aside from poor Zelda, everyone is living their best life, and no one needs your help. I can’t overemphasize that there is not a single element of darkness in this game, which has no narrative tension and very little forward momentum.

A fandom friend who recently played The Minish Cap for the first time said that this is the game they’d recommend to first-time Legend of Zelda players, and I can understand where they’re coming from. The Minish Cap is about as conventional as you can get. Overall, it’s really fun, and neither its combat nor its puzzles are difficult.

Unfortunately, the kinstone fusion sidequests can be hideously annoying, and the game’s “safe for children” cutesy tone makes the world and its story seem unimportant and forgettable. The Minish Cap feels like it was created for casual players, and your mileage may vary on how much you appreciate this.

In the end, The Minish Cap is still a great 8/10 game that’s very much worth playing, but it’s on an entirely different level than A Link Between Worlds, which perfected the top-down 2D Zelda formula while also featuring excellent writing and interesting design work. Given its limitations, I think The Minish Cap will probably appeal most strongly to 16-bit retro game fans, as well as its actual target demographic of ten-year-old kids.

What Remains of Edith Finch

~ Kathryn ~ 3 Comments

What Remains of Edith Finch is a walking sim that takes about two hours to complete. It was released in April 2017 for Steam and PlayStation 4, but it’s now available on a number of other platforms, including the Nintendo Switch.

What Remains of Edith Finch is visually gorgeous, and it falls into my favorite category of games: It was created for an adult audience by a small team of developers who take full advantage of the interactive gaming medium but don’t frustrate the player with unnecessary puzzle or platforming elements. There’s a lot to explore in this game, but the atmosphere is never broken by the player having to get up and check a walkthrough.

You play as a teenage woman named Edith Finch, who is returning to her family’s house on a small island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The house has been abandoned ever since Edith’s mother moved away in order to escape “the family curse,” which holds that everyone who is born into (or marries into) the Finch family dies in a tragic accident. In order to find closure, Edith tries to reconstruct the details of her family’s deaths, which the player experiences though a series of vignettes that play out in the form of short interactive stories.

Progression through the game is definitely on rails, but it doesn’t feel particularly linear. This is partially due to the unique architecture of the Finch house, whose rooms seem impossible yet manages to fit together neatly like the pieces of a puzzle. The game’s sense of progression is also enhanced by the player’s interactions with the environment, which are essential to the storytelling. I’m going to use the case of Edith’s older brother Lewis as an example of what I mean.

Lewis is a young man who loves fantasy novels, video games, and weed. After he graduates from high school, he drifts aimlessly for a few years before getting a job at a salmon cannery. This job is just as dreary as you might expect, but Lewis survives the tedium of menial labor by immersing himself in daydreams. As the player, you use one joystick to control the repetitive motion of decapitating fish and throwing them onto a conveyor belt while simultaneously using the other joystick to guide Lewis’s avatar through his RPG-themed fantasies.

Lewis’s daydream gradually becomes more interesting and complex. This is reflected by the game inside his mind being upgraded, almost as though it were being remastered across various eras of gaming consoles. The controls for the salmon cannery aspect of Lewis’s life never change, and they remain a constant annoyance as the fantasy slowly expands to fill the screen. When the player is jolted out of this daydream back into the bloody and poorly lit factory, it’s much more jarring than it would be if we were simply reading or watching Lewis’s story.

The psychiatrist who narrates this vignette says that Lewis’s death was caused by a hallucination triggered by withdrawal from hard drugs, but the player understands that it was a suicide brought about by his overwhelming desire to no longer be anchored by an unpleasant and unsatisfying reality. This episode is only twenty minutes long, but I cried. Kind of a lot actually.

What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t sad or sentimental; rather, it’s nuanced and incredibly beautiful. It doesn’t offer the player the same sort of transcendent experience as a more ambitious game like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but its smaller and more personal stories are replete with mystery and wonder. Although the two games were made by different developers, What Remains of Edith Finch feels like a spiritual sequel to Gone Home, and it’s such a pleasure to see the gaming medium used to apply magical realism to gothic dramas of family ghosts and personal journeys of discovery.

I was inspired to return to What Remains of Edith Finch by a recent episode of the podcast Watch Out for Fireballs, which you can listen to (here). Reflecting on the game almost six years after it was first released, I would agree with the podcast hosts: Although What Remains of Edith Finch was almost universally praised when it came out, I’m afraid that its Wes Anderson style of twee humor might not land the same way on social media now. What Remains of Edith Finch treats the twinned subjects of death and mental illness with humor and sympathy in a way that celebrates the joys of being alive, and I’m not sure its multilayered tone would necessarily survive the black-or-white mentality of Twitter.

Still, I love this game, and I appreciate it even more now that I’ve had more personal experience with grief. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that What Remains of Edith Finch is uplifting, but the two hours I spent with the game improved my mood, bolstered my courage, and reignited my creative motivation. As with any work of art, the specificity of the game’s tone and viewpoint may not land with everyone, but it’s precisely this specificity of storytelling that makes What Remains of Edith Finch so strange and fun and interesting.

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game

~ Kathryn

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game
https://ribyrnes.itch.io/candypink

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game is exactly what it says on the label: a cute and pastel-colored pixel game that teaches you how to make marshmallows. You play as a pastry chef who has just been promoted to the kitchen of a company that makes pink heart-shaped confectionery. The recipe includes sugar, corn syrup, water, and a secret ingredient… love!

Just kidding! The secret ingredient definitely isn’t love. Anyone who is squeamish about gore should probably avoid this game.

A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game was made for the Two Minute Horror Jam, with “two minutes” being about how long it takes to finish the game. The experience of playing A Perfectly Normal Cooking Game actually takes about five or six minutes to properly savor, which will probably include you laughing and saying “oh no no no no no no fuck no” to yourself at least once.   

The game also has a secret ending. Along with a lot of people in the comments, I got the secret ending the first time I played the game, as the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

There’s not much I can write about such a short game without spoiling it, so let me just say that this is a neat little story with perfect presentation that uses its medium well.

Another fun two-minute horror game on Itchio is:

Make Sure It’s Closed
https://corpsepile.itch.io/make-sure-its-closed

Make Sure It’s Closed does a fantastic job of creating a palpable sense of dread in a very short span of time, so much so that I want to recommend this game to any writer who needs an easy and effective reference for what “dread” feels like. I was so impressed that I also played the creator’s game The Open House (free on Itchio here), which is a bit longer and less immediately accessible but still a lot of fun.

Cosmic Horror and the Ruins of Capitalism in Night in the Woods

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I maintained my sanity during the pandemic by spending time outdoors in abandoned places. Some of these places exist in the real world, but most were virtual. One of my favorite haunts has been Possum Springs, a depopulated town in western Pennsylvania that serves the setting of the 2017 story exploration game Night in the Woods.

In Night in the Woods, you play as Mae, an anthropomorphic cat who has dropped out of college and moved back to Possum Springs to live with her parents. With no job and nothing better to do, Mae decides to investigate the disappearance of several local children. It turns out that there is a monster living in the abandoned mine tunnels under Possum Springs, and a cult of town residents has been feeding young people to this creature in return for a promise that it will prevent the town’s economic decline. When Mae and her friends catch the cult in the act of sacrificing one of its own members, its leader tells the group of teenagers that these rituals aren’t easy for them, especially now that they’re getting older. It’s time for a new generation to take over and ensure the prosperity of Possum Springs, however modest this prosperity might be.

Mae and her friends don’t join the death cult, of course. They escape from the monster, and the mine tunnels collapse and trap the remaining cult members underground. At the end of the game, Mae reflects that what she’s taken away from this experience is the conviction that, if there is no benevolent higher power in a hostile universe, then she and her friends will have to help each other while doing the best they can for themselves and their community.

The elements of cosmic horror in Night in the Woods are genuinely creepy, especially during Mae’s interactive nightmare sequences, but the purpose of the cult is to serve as a thematic juxtaposition to the true terror of Possum Springs, a large and impersonal set of interlocking systems that collectively exploit hardworking but vulnerable people – namely, capitalism.

Mae’s parents are afraid of losing their house to the bank because of an usurious mortgage they took out to finance Mae’s college tuition, and entire neighborhoods in Possum Springs are filled with repossessed, unsold, and subsequently abandoned buildings. The pastor of the local church wants to open a shelter for the newly homeless and the railroad drifters who camp out in the forest next to town, but she fails to obtain a permit from the city council due to concerns that lowering the property values in the neighborhood will fatally disrupt an already struggling real estate market.

The horror of an absurd and uncaring universe in Night in the Woods has very little to do with the unfathomable monster lurking in the mine tunnels, although the cult of older people who sacrifice members of younger generations for the vague promise of being able to sustain an imagined standard of living comes uncomfortably close to allegory in the wake of the 2016 American presidential election. Forces beyond our control and comprehension are indeed destroying individual lives and modestly thriving communities, but these forces are nothing as quaint as a stygian tentacle beast that eats children.

According to Scott Benson, the lead writer and artist of Night in the Woods, Possum Springs is located in western Pennsylvania just outside of Pittsburgh. This situates the town in the Rust Belt, an economically depressed region stretching around the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Detroit. The cities in the Rust Belt were centers of American manufacturing until the 1980s, when international free trade agreements incentivized companies in sectors like natural resource extraction and the automotive industry to outsource materials and labor. Formerly bustling mines and factories closed, resulting in a dramatic decline in population that in turn resulted in the bankruptcy of many smaller businesses.

It’s currently possible to accrue a sizeable following on social media by posting urban exploration photos of shuttered factories and other ghostly relics of infrastructure, such as empty schools, hospitals, movie theaters, and shopping malls. There’s a certain poetic charm in high-contrast photos of healthy green weeds stretching up through the cracks of ash-gray concrete and leafy vines twining around rusted iron support pillars. Images of the remains of modern civilization devoid of human presence provide fertile ground for the imagination to run wild.

Night in the Woods denies its players the solitary pleasures of urban exploration, however. As a dialog-driven game, its story can’t be advanced unless the player participates in conversations with various people around Possum Springs. As the you learn more about the town, you begin to understand the problems experienced by its inhabitants, which range from poverty to alcoholism to severe depression. At the same time, you come to appreciate the people who care about each other and want to do right by their community even despite the financial and emotional burdens they carry.

Night in the Woods suggests that the fractures in the community cannot be repaired by any given individual action, like “going to college” or “owning a home.” Rather, the problem lies in the larger economic forces that steamroller over working-class people in small towns. None of the characters Mae interacts with are stupid or unaware of what’s happening, but most of them don’t have the agency to make any real choices about their lives.

Night in the Woods features a number of optional sidequests that tell an ongoing story about the historical tension between the former mine owners and the labor unions in Possum Springs, and it’s clear that the working conditions for miners were deplorable. The mines closed at least a decade before the story begins, but the labor of the workers in Possum Springs is still exploited. Mae’s father, who was laid off from his job at a small factory, now works at a large supermarket by the highway that forced the local grocery store in Possum Springs to be shut down. At the end of the game, Mae’s father considers starting a labor union at his workplace, which pulls money out of the local economy without benefiting the town or its people.

The game’s presentation of unions isn’t entirely positive, however. As Mae’s friend Bea explains, the unions are male-dominated, and homosocial labor solidarity lends itself to an atmosphere in which overt sexual harassment is swept under the rug. Mae’s friend Selmers, who started writing poetry for the rehab program she entered after becoming addicted to pain pills while working at the local pharmacy, performs a reading of an incredible piece about how even unionized jobs are becoming unsustainable in the face of global capitalism.

Night in the Woods is ultimately about accepting uncomfortable realities while moving forward and finding friendship and community in difficult times and circumstances. The game isn’t just a protest against the violence of the global neoliberal capitalism that destroys local economies; it’s a model of resistance on a small and personal scale, as well as an argument for the quiet beauty of allowing outdated structures to fall gently to ruin.

Small town life isn’t for everyone, but neither is building a community from scratch in a big city. If nothing else, it’s good to have choices. The gameplay of Night in the Woods is centered around making choices, and the choice Mae and her friends make is to bury the monster in the mine, sacrificing short-term gains for long-term stability.

Although Night in the Woods is set in the days leading to and following Halloween, its advocacy for regrowth and positive change is a welcome message as society gradually begins to recover from the effects of the pandemic. If nothing else, Possum Springs is a great place to find surreal and spooky chills, and Mae’s homecoming is a crash course on how to make conversation with other people in real-world places that will be hopefully be not so abandoned in the future.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This essay was originally published on May 18, 2021 in Entropy, a digital magazine about the fringes of art and culture. Entropy closed its website in late 2022, and I am reproducing this publication with the kind permission of the editors.

One Night, Hot Springs

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

One Night, Hot Springs (here on Itchio) a short visual novel that takes about twenty minutes to play. It’s the free-to-download first chapter of A Year of Springs, which is available for $5 on various platforms, including Nintendo Switch. The story is about a 19-year-old girl named Haru who spends the night at a fancy onsen hotel with her childhood friend Minami and Minami’s friend Erika. Everything seems set up for a fun girls’ night out, but Haru is worried that being trans might make getting into a public bath tricky.

Minami and Erika are both a bit clueless about what it means to be transgender, but each is kind and supportive of Haru in her own way. The onsen staff are kind and supportive as well. No one particularly cares that Haru is trans, but they still go out of their way to make sure she feels comfortable, just as they would for any other guest. Haru is shy and doesn’t want to cause trouble, but a staff member assures her that plenty of people need (and deserve!) a bit of extra attention, and that trans guests aren’t actually as uncommon as one might think.   

There’s a big pink banner with a content warning for transphobia hovering over the game’s page on Itchio, which is why I didn’t take the plunge and buy the full game. I got seriously burned by The House in Fata Morgana, and I don’t want to play another visual novel about a trans character being abused or harassed. It turns out that I need not have worried, thankfully. If you’re honest to everyone about your character being trans, the ending you’ll get is called “The World Can Be Kind, Too.”

There’s an educational element to the game, and this can be something of a bummer, as the social and legal realities of being LGBTQ+ in Japan aren’t great. Still, One Night, Hot Springs is mostly about simulating the experience of spending a relaxing evening in the company of good friends at a beautiful onsen hotel. The artwork is cute yet polished and offers the player lovely visions of traditional architecture, delicious food, and screenshot-worthy outdoor vistas.

One Night, Hot Springs is just as wholesome as its artwork is adorable, and I really enjoyed the story. I was inspired to get the full game, A Year of Springs, and I’m looking forward to playing it soon.

The Academy of Raya Lucaria

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

This is how I imagine Sellen and Rennala celebrating the end of the semester at the Academy of Raya Lucaria.

The postapocalyptic world of Elden Ring isn’t a great place to live, and good people usually end up dead. The Academy of Raya Lucaria seems as though it was dangerous even before the world ended, as very few of the wizards who studied there had even the slightest hint of ethics regarding the otherworldly powers they were attempting to harness. As much as I would love to study magic myself, I’m fairly certain that I would die – or even worse, become undead – within the first semester of wizard school.

Also, multiple people have commented to me that Elden Ring contains the most accurate portrayal of academia they’ve seen in a video game. As a professor, I think it’s best that I keep my comments to myself, but damn if that isn’t the truth.

Hoa

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Hoa is a short and nonviolent 2D puzzle platformer set in a gorgeous green world of hand-painted art. If you’ve ever watched a Studio Ghibli movie and wanted to spend more time exploring the backgrounds, Hoa was made for you. The game’s gentle piano music is reminiscent of a Joe Hisaishi score, and Hoa gave me strong My Neighbor Totoro vibes in all the best ways.

You play as a tiny fairy who has returned to the forest after a mysterious trip across a body of water. Your motivation is unclear, but your character seems to want to make her way back to her home. Along the way, you navigate eight levels organized according to simple themed platforming puzzles. Your goal in each level is to wake the level “boss” by restoring light to their sigils, and the boss will give you a new navigation ability once you collect all the golden butterflies scattered throughout the level.

There is no combat or hostility in Hoa, and successful navigation of each level requires the cooperation of its denizens, which include snails, ladybugs, jellyfish, and tiny little robots. As your character walks, flowers bloom and leaves unfurl to help her on her way, and she double jumps in a swirl of sparkling pixie dust. All of this magic is understated and feels like a natural part of the world, and every new level is filled with pleasant surprises.

Unfortunately, there are parts of Hoa that are somewhat unintuitive, especially toward the beginning.

In the first area, your character is taught that she can break horizontal branches if she jumps on them with sufficient force. In the next area, she’s presented with a vertical branch blocking her way. On a higher level, a bug repeatedly rams into another vertical branch, eventually breaking it. It seems the message is clear: If you ram into the vertical branch on your own level enough times, it will eventually break.

This is not what the game is trying to teach you, however. What the game wants you to do is leave the room and walk all the way around the area so you can enter the room from the opposite side, where the branch that the bug knocked down now forms a bridge to another room. Hoa is trying to teach you that all of the rooms in an area are interconnected, and that sometimes you’ll need to approach a puzzle from a different direction. This makes sense, of course, but it’s counterintuitive. When I tried to search for a walkthrough, I found dozens of people asking the same question: How do you break the vertical branch?

In other words, it’s easy to understand what the level design seems to be suggesting, but it’s harder to understand whether that’s the solution the designers intended. I won’t lie – this can be frustrating.    

Once you get deeper into Hoa, you’ll begin to understand how the designers constructed these puzzles, but the game’s combined lack of precision and flexibility still creates unnecessary moments of tension. Although Hoa seems to be aimed at young children, I feel like it demands an unusually high level of patience and forgiveness, as well as an ability to read the abstract intentions of the designers instead of the concrete environment of the game. I would say that Hoa may indeed be a good game to play with a kid, but you probably want to play it all the way through by yourself first.

I should also mention that there’s a gameplay twist in the final level. It’s very good, but it’s also legitimately challenging in a way that the game hasn’t prepared you for. The basic gameplay loop is significantly disrupted, and there’s a certain tricky sequence about halfway through the level that I imagine might cause many players to quit the game without finishing it. Still, even if Hoa doesn’t perfectly execute what it’s trying to do here, it offers the player an interesting concept presented with a surprising degree of style and creativity.

I don’t want to suggest that these moments of frustration break the game. Once I was able to get past the idea that Hoa is supposed to be easy and intuitive, I was able to have a lot of fun with it. After you get a better sense of what the game wants you to do, you can make your way through the later areas with minimal hassles as you enjoy the art and music, both of which are well worth the experience.

My first playthrough of Hoa took about two and a half hours, which includes the time I spent searching for puzzle solutions online. My second playthrough was a smooth one hour, and it was a chill and peaceful experience. I’d say that Hoa is a solid “7/10 game” in the best sense of what that generally means, with the more unpolished elements serving to endow the game with a unique sense of character. All things considered, I’m happy that Hoa is a piece of hand-crafted art that exists in this world.