Nahdia's Indie Game Thread

[Nahdia]

anyway ill write up more thoughts on them later but over the long weekend i got xbox game pass and played:
-Tell Me Why, DONTNOD's new narrative adventure game. good, and it's interesting how far they've come since Life is Strange
-CrossCode, which at this point (I'm like... 1/3 the way through?) I'm pretty sure is gonna go down as one of my favorite games of all time.

i've been informed i am legally required to try Ori next. but if anyone has recs that are included with game pass that my laptop can run, i welcome them.

[Vi]

i mean presumably, some people enjoy that kind of thing? people who are more disciplined and can enjoy a game in bite-sized doses. that's not me tho

I mean fwiw your description of Forager reminded me of my description of Animal Crossing, and the latest installment of that released earlier this year to just a small bit of excitement, so etc.

[Nahdia]

ofc ofc, different strokes for different folks. animal crossing has a lot of things which appeal to me. collecting things, a sense of achievement from purely aesthetics, etc. the nice thing about animal crossing though for me at least is that it's a game that gives you permission to put it down. forarger prides itself as being (this is a quote from their blurb in the steam store) an "idle game that you want to actively keep playing". frankly, i don't think that's a good thing. i think that's a very bad thing. it has the pacing of an idle game with the urgency of an RPG.

[Isis]

What is Game Pass?

[Nahdia]

Basically Netflix for video games. I highly recommend it.

[Nahdia]

Despite being branded xbox it's for pc

[Nahdia]

I also played an hour of crusader kings 3 on it and remembered I why I don't like that game.

[Isis]

My mind is a little bit blown right now

[Nahdia]

I know right? I felt a little silly not getting it sooner.

[Nahdia]

-CrossCode, which at this point (I'm like... 1/3 the way through?) I'm pretty sure is gonna go down as one of my favorite games of all time.

okay, so after spending all my evenings this week and all day today, i have finished CrossCode (what's out now anyway... apparently there is future content still planned). it is 3am, i really should just go to bed, but i have lots of thoughts about this game and i want to get them out NOW before i risk losing some of them

Okay so I'll talk briefly about the gameplay first, because most of my strong feelings are on the story. CrossCode is an isometric RPG with a simple but deep and satisfying real-time combat system and a heavy focus on puzzles. Lots and lots of puzzles. Sometimes puzzles that, when you enter a room, make you want to just close the game. Or look up a tutorial on Youtube... not that I would ever do that .

honestly, the gameplay is a big part of what impressed me and kept me playing this game. i rarely sink my teeth into a game this large (i clocked ~40 hours at completion, including a healthy amount of sidequests and grinding for good loot before i battled the final boss). i've had a bit of a falling out with RPGs in general because i find they just ask more investment than i'm willing to give, but CrossCode certainly earned my engagement via its mechanics in addition to its story... with an asterisk on both of those areas. the game does occasionally stumble when introducing a new enemy or puzzle element and failing to explain how to interact with it in a non-obvious way. but for the most part, mechanics are CrossCode's strong point. which makes it all the more surprising to me that I invested so much time into this game and left feeling satisfied. usually what keeps me invested in a game is its story, and excellent mechanics are just a nice bonus. but in this case... well, it's complicated.

i'll just say right off the bat that i did overall like the story of CrossCode. I loved the setting, but this was kind of a gimmie. CrossCode is set in a fictional MMORPG (which is itself located on an in-universe real far off planet and uses "instant matter" to create enemies and puzzles). My first MMORPG was World of Warcraft, when I was

eleven

, and I played it basically every second I could when I wasn't at school or when my brother wasn't having his turn on the communal computer. So I am deeply nostalgic for MMORPGs, not as a genre of video game itself, but for the setting and the social interactions that come from that. this is also why I unironically enjoyed Sword Art Online... I know, I know. So CrossCode had a pretty hefty bonus right out of the gate.

The main cast was also strong! Main character Lea is a mostly silent protagonist (there are in-game reasons for this) with a surprising amount of character. The deuteragonist Sergey Asimov (a bit on the nose there but alright) is a bit flat, but still a perfectly likable character with consistent motivations and the like. The rest of the core cast are all varying degrees of charming. Emilia, the third most prominent character in the game, is a great character imo. Her relationship with Lea is one half of the emotional core of the game, and it mostly works if being a bit saccharine. Her lines are also far and away the funniest in the game.

The larger supporting cast on the other hand is... fine at best. And the antaognists/villains feel like they were written by Marvel. Which is to say they're super generic guys doing evil things because... business? Or whatever? The main antagonist narratively is never even a major threat in the actual gameplay. Instead, the real big-bad who you do face down at the end of the game, has his duties as final-boss taken by... someone else.

And the core plot is also a success and generally well-executed on... for the first 95% of the game anyway. Then the ending comes. I'll discuss the ending in a moment. Suffice to say, the call to action, the big mid-story twist, the actual events driving the story forward? All good.

Okay, but the ending though. And uh, spoiler warning obviously. I won't ruin the best reveals (there's only one major twist, and it comes less than half-way through the game).

Trigger Warning:

suicide

The ending of CrossCode is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that the two major villains, Gautham and Sidwell, have really... weird endings that just don't work or satisfy. Gautham has been a strange character throughout, to the point where even the other characters react with confusion to his actions in-game. But he is complicit and even a participant in the big bad (Sidwell)'s morally awful acts, so he's certainly a villain. We only know bits and pieces of his character through fuzzy flashback memories and stuff we learn from Sergey, who loosely knew him years ago. So like, in essence, he's never fleshed out until the very end. In the very last levels of the game we finally learn about his motivations: Gautham is obsessed with the pure creative process and wants a player worthy to interact with the levels he's created. He stops Sidwell from thwarting the heroes' plan just to get you to do his puzzles and fight his big boss at the end. Which is... weird, but whatever.

But then something wild happens. Gautham, the REAL PERSON (not the player character in the game) shows up. And jumps to his death. It's played as this huge emotional moment and I could tell I was supposed to be sad but really I was just shocked and confused. Sergey explains that Gautham must have been consumed the burden of the terrible things he's done, but the way it's stated seems to be an effort to absolve him which just... didn't work for me. Ultimately the character was kind of inscrutable from beginning to end. He needed a lot more clear development. SPEAKING OF NEEDING MORE DEVELOPMENT...

Sidwell, the actual big bad... less "strange" and more "literally who?" Again you see and hear bits and pieces about him. But overall he's just a nothing character. which makes the confrontation at the end that much less satisfying. I enjoyed seeing Lea clock him in the face and Sergey yell at him, but it wasn't this huge satisfying moment of the villain finally being defeated. It was more the cheap satisfaction of watching a Nazi get punched. Because I felt nothing for this man. Which made it all the more weird when, in his very last lines, the game suggests that there's a weird Father/Daughter dynamic between him and Lea which............

WHAT?!

.

This is CrossCode's core failing more than anything. It is a story with no coherent message. And yeah, maybe games don't always have to say something, but there are moments like this where it feels like it's TRYING to say something. Gautham's death is another of these big emotional moments, but it just doesn't work. Lea's grappling with her identity and her friendship with Emilia are all well and good, but the game's narrative is absent of actual themes besides like... friendship I guess? But even then it doesn't totally stick the landing. One of Lea's closest friends, C'tron, is just not present at all for the final act. There are multiple moments in this act where Lea has heartfelt conversations with her friends (including a couple she barely ever interacted with... but okay) and there are tearful goodbyes in the last scene... but C'tron just isn't there! He announced a couple of days earlier he was taking a break from the game for "personal reasons" and that was it! Maybe it's realistic, but it's also bad writing. If the writers were trying to make a point about the fickleness of online relationships or something, examine that further! There is one conspiracy theory explanation for C'tron's disappearance which technically makes sense, but it's not a satisfying idea so much as fridge logic bait.

It's now past 4am and I've written way too much. Ultimately, CrossCode's writing is fun at times but deeply flawed. Still, a mixture of nostalgia and great mechanics will indeed make this game go down as one of my favorites.

[Nahdia]

if you that whole thing, you are the sort of person i often wish i was.

ill finish Tell Me Why tomorow, probably.

[Ythan]

if you that whole thing, you are the sort of person i often wish i was.

You too can be a stoned insomniac if you believe in yourself.

[Isis]

I wish I was a sort of person like Nahdia

[Vi]

ill finish Tell Me Why tomorow, probably.

this sounds like a game that's nothing but a heartache
or a mistake

[Nahdia]

does this game even really count as Indie? i guess im using the term in a fairly loose way to just mean "not massive budget AAA experience" which is maybe wrong but meh

Tell Me Why is DONTNOD's latest narrative... "adventure" game (I'll explain those quotes in due time). Since their first game, DONTNOD has had the same problem many creators of breakout hits; people keep comparing their new stuff to the thing that originally put them on the map (Life is Strange). I'll go ahead and get that out of the way here, with the caveat that I'm in the minority that thinks Life is Strange is... not that good, actually. But suffice it to say, Tell Me Why is better than Life is Strange. There, that's out of the way. Now I don't have to juxtapose the two games anymore... except I'm still gonna. Tell Me Why

is

better on the whole, but it's also really different from Life is Strange. And it's the ways the two games, separated by half a decade, differ from one another that interests me.

But first I have to make a tangent to talk about a different game.

Gone Home and Life is Strange are similar not only in content and mechanics (albeit on a different scale, certainly), but also in that both games were breakout hits (again, different scales) by studios previously unknown. For anyone who wasn't involved in the, er,

gamer discourse

in the halcyon days of 2013, Gone Home was a controversial game because people raised a fuss over whether it really is a game at all (it is). People said it wasn't a game because it was just about walking around and picking stuff up and listening to audio files. People said it wasn't a game because you never really interact with and change the game world so much as witness it as you explore. But the most prevalent and least helpful argument was that it wasn't a game because Gone Home wasn't fun. I'm not going to take the time to dismantle all those arguments. There are responses if you care to find them.

To an outside observer, it might have been surprising just how passionate the discourse around this seemingly niche topic was. And certainly there were many people who really did feel strongly about the debate over what makes a game a game! But in actuality, the debate around Gone Home was actually just like the game itself in that it was wasn't really about what it seemed like on the surface. From its store page blurb to its banner and art style, Gone Home is made to

look

like a mystery game, potentially even with horror elements. And the beginning of the game plays this straight: you show up at your home finding it totally abandoned in the middle of a spooky lightning with no indication of where anyone has disappeared to, and you need to figure out what has happened to your family by exploring.

But Gone Home isn't

really

a spooky story about finding your missing family. And the debate around the game wasn't

really

about what makes a game a game. Gone Home is a queer love story, specifically a love story between two teenage girls. And the debate was really sourced from anger that people got "tricked" into playing a game that peddled "SJW ideology". Some people gave these takes outright, but most would intersperse the "stop putting gay shit in muh vidya games" within the more acceptable, legitimate discussion people were having about whether Gone Home was really a game. It's not a coincidence that Gamergate began barely a year after Gone Home's release. The Gone Home debate was proof of concept for tactics that hate groups and individuals used to frankly unsettling effectiveness in that whole upsetting saga.

Another year passes, and along comes....

Like Gone Home, Life is Strange much more concerned with the story its telling than gameplay. Like Gone Home, it doesn't fully show its hand at the start with regard to it being a young adult lesbian love story. Life is Strange was... well, I already said earlier that I think it's not great. I could write at length about my thoughts on the game, but the gist is that I think it was overhyped and its fandom got wildly bloated because of a counter backlash against the anti-SJW atmosphere of Gamergate which was still fresh in the memories of many gamers. Basically, Life is Strange was in the right place at the right time. But in fairness to the game, it came out in five episodes over the course of an entire year and the fandom inertia started before it was known it was gonna Get Gay (though there were subtle indications from the start. And like, a loooooot of shipping.) And a big part of the reason they collected that inertia is because UNLIKE Gone Home, Life is Strange was... wait for it... fun!

Unlike Gone Home, Life is Strange isn't just an environmental exploration (less charitably: walking simulator) game, it's an adventure game! And it has time travel which you can use in all sorts of fun ways! Want to impress some cool scatter bros but don't know the lingo? Just keep rewinding until you learn the right things to say! Want to see the consequences of a big important choice? Pick one and then rewind time and pick the other! Want to save that nice girl from getting splashed by an oncoming truck hitting a puddle? It's rewind time! The tone of the game goes back and forth between silly antics and intense melodrama, but for all the stuff I felt didn't work or just weren't good about the game, Life is Strange at least tried lots of things to make the player feel like they were playing a game beyond the dialog wheel.

Remember when this post was about Tell Me Why? Well it was, and now it is again. The evolution of DONTNOD's development philosophy between Life is Strange and Tell Me Why is fascinating given all this history. Maybe it's just that they really wanted to differentiate themselves from their original work. Maybe it's that they didn't know how to do what they did with Life is Strange with Tell Me Why's subject matter. But whatever the case, the most striking thing about Tell Me Why is that... the fun is gone. There are still supernatural elements; that much has become a staple of DONTNOD's work. But save for a brief sequence or two, there is no joy in this game.

Life is Strange got

awkward

around when developing its relationships and discussing its themes. Tell Me Why is excellently written but just... so heavy and heartbreaking. The drama here is more intense and present from the very start. The cutscenes are longer and more cinematic. The puzzles and quicktime gameplay sections are more simplified and more sparse so you can keep getting to more of the actual story. The adventure game elements of finding items and using them is still technically present but feels more like a series of fetchquests. It is not a fun game. But what was true in 2013 is true now: games don't

need

to be fun anymore than movies need to be comedic or art needs to be realistic. Games that focus on mechanics probably should be fun, but narrative games can strive to make you feel all kinds of things... and boy does Tell Me Why do that.

It's striking to me that the studio that got itself on the map by making a queer romance that was also a fun game has now eschewed the fun for a more cinematic, dramatic experience. Tell Me Why would probably have still been judged more of a game by the proto-gamergate anti-Gone Home mob of 2013, but it's arguably on thin ice by their standards (and there are still queer characters and themes, so they'd find some reason to hate it anyway).

[Ythan]

I had an urge to make a joke but apparently Vi already made it.

[Nahdia]

oh jeeze i just got that.

[Isis]

i like that you start by questioning "what is indie" but then the game in question is one of those ones so heavily narrative focused it raises "what is game". It's like an onion with layers.

[Ythan]

What is an onion?

[Isis]

A special rank of knight of unspeakable power

[Ythan]

The cactus in me is pleased at this response.

[Ythan]

We're gonna get chased out of this indie thread though.

[Isis]

that would be perfect, I would actually finish Underhero today

[Nahdia]

looking back my CrossCode rant is a bit 3AM incoherent so i wanna clarify where i think the game falls flat:

When a game (or a story of any medium) sticks with you, it's usually not just a function if its plot or setting or characters, but the

themes

it hit you with and how it made you think about those themes via a thesis.

Themes are the broad stroke elements woven throughout a story, oftentimes in more than one form, and the thesis is how the author asks you to grapple with these themes. Sometimes this is in the form of just a question, but frequently it's both a question and an answer. Take Undertale. Pretty much anyone who played and seriously engaged with that game can tell you the themes and likely the thesis as well. Undertale is a game about morality in a situation where there are no consequences, at least not permanent ones. And uh, vague spoilers for Undertale I guess, but its thesis is that yes, morality still matters in these cases because a) you still have to live with the weigh of your own actions and b) sometimes there

are

permanent consequences that you don't foresee.

Now, putting aside the whole discussion about all media being inherently political, a game does not NEED to have themes or thesis even if it has a story. Sometimes they accidentally end up with one anyway (looking at you, Call of Duty: War is Good and Super Cool Actually), and sometimes the themes of media are more subtle or light, and don't need to be engaged with to actually enjoy the media.

CrossCode's problem is that there are moments where this game very much feels like it thinks it has themes and/or a thesis... but it doesn't. Not to any successful extent, anyway. Big moments like Gautham jumping to his death or Lea sucker-punching the big bad and then his subsequent... weird ass response... feel like they were supposed to be emotional climaxes that brought lots of elements of the story together... but they weren't and they didn't. They just felt out of place. I'm not saying these moments SHOULDN'T have happened. They could have been made to work, but they just didn't. If I had to guess, I would say the writers of this game made the unfortunate mistake that even veteran writers do of forgetting how much of a character is actually in the official text and how much exists in your head or on peripheral notes. Gautham's suicide felt out of nowhere and the emotional reaction was only as powerful as our empathy for Sergey, a character we DO know and love, being sad at the death of his friend. But for the writers who created Gautham, who probably know him better than even the most dedicated fan ever could, it may well have been a really powerful moment on its own. But... we can't read the minds of the authors. This is why it's really important not just to have people beta read your work, but to have people with no prior involvement whatsoever in your project read it.

Okay, but I have neglected to mention that CrossCode does in fact have on theme! And that is... wait for it... friendship. At least, I think? Whereas the big moments in the final scene really didn't work, there are some effective, if a bit saccharine, midpoint moments where the friendship between Lea and Emilia is tested. And this is another point where this maybe worked better for me than most because of my immense nostalgia for the social community of my medium population classic World of Warcraft server circa 2005. I

adore

the idea of a story that explores the kinds of relationships that form in these games. We seriously need more of them that aren't Ready Player One because that book was a fucking dumpster fire. CrossCode... kind of does this. Sometimes. The problem is, if this is its core theme (and there are a couple points like Sergey's ending dialog that suggest it is) well... there's still no thesis, and the game seriously fails to incorporate friendship as a theme in all but the most surface ways.

This is best exemplified by one thread of the plot that starts in the middle climax and is resolved right before the last dungeon of the game. Light spoilers, but o keep it simple, Lea (that's you) is captured at one point in the game and tries to escape with her friend who is also captured. But ultimately that friend must be left behind in order for Lea to escape, so a big part of the final chapter where you storm the evil base is rescuing this friend. And you do that but... there's no payoff. There's no heartfelt reunion. You just get him and he's safe and you never interact with him again. Maybe it'll be in the postgame DLC when it finally comes out? There's also the fact that your band of friends literally waits at the bottom of the tower which is the last dungeon while you go and save the day. There's in-universe reasons for this but... yeah, it feels pretty bad if you've been hyped up on this friendship theme. They could have found a way to work around this plot barrier, but instead they just drop the whole thread and you finish the game alone, with none of your precious friends... woo.

Was Gautham's death supposed to tie into this friendship theme? Maybe, Sergey is briefly distraught at the loss of his friend... but it's not really expounded upon and it really isn't like, a satisfying conclusion if that was the intent. The weird shit with Sidwell certainly isn't related as far as I can see. The final pre-credits scene of CrossCode is Lea saying a heartfelt goodbye to all her friends (except the one who had to disappear for no satisfactory stated reason... that's still a thing) but it feels more like a curtain call than an actual message.

Again, it's okay to not have a message, particularly in games. Games often can stand up on the merits of their mechanics. CrossCode certainly could have, and does! But CrossCode seems to think its saying more than it does, and that makes the ending that much more of a let-down, thinking of what could have been.

[Isis]

pls don't talk about Ready Player One