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Choice heavy narrative games can be pretty enticing. The idea that your decisions can alter the flow of the story is engaging on a pretty fundamental level, and there are many games in a variety of genres which attempt this concept to varying degrees of success. One such game that recently released called As Dusk Falls tried its own spin on things. It's an adventure title in the vein of other minimally interactive games where the primary means of engagement is making a series of decisions related to conversation and actions. You play as a selection of characters from two families whose lives are intertwined via a convergence of circumstance where both were dealing with their own stresses and happened to cross paths at the Desert Dream Motel in Arizona in the late 90's. One of the families, the Holts, are in dire straits due to some risky actions of their patriarch, and the other, the Walkers are in the midst of a move due to their own patriarch having lost his job due to an accident at work. And how this mingling of circumstances and characters plays out will permanently impact the lives of all involved.
I really liked the setup for the conflict. There was realistic tension that motivated everyone and it was easy to feel empathy and/or disdain for how these characters responded to the forces that pressed upon them. The narrative and characters were pretty believable in both their choices (your potential actions) as well as their acting. I'm incredibly hard to please when it comes to voice work (as I've mentioned), but for the most part, this group of actors did a fine job with their roles, and that went a long way to facilitating my interest until the end. There are plenty of twists and turns and the game does a nice job of reinforcing the weight of your choices by providing certain “crossroad” moments that have added weight in addition to showing you branching path maps at the end of every chapter which displays all the possible routes, many of which are empty due to you having chosen other paths. There's surely plenty to see if you are invested enough to want to uncover all the permutations, although there are only a few major branching paths. Outside of those pivotal crossroad moments, you're also required to make many other decisions for dialogue and actions, and these are all time-based, forcing you to act instinctually rather than ponder at your leisure. For the conversation choices, the timer is lenient enough to give you time to consider things, but you'll need to choose within a reasonable window. For the action-based choices, there are many quick-time events where you'll either be swiping, spinning, holding or repeatedly clicking in response to on-screen prompts. Theses interactions are usually in moments of physical drama, and while I understand their inclusion, they're not very engaging or challenging. Overall though, the story was carried by a convincing set of characters that felt like they had genuine troubles, real-life personalities and were just trying to muddle their way through some challenging circumstances. Got to love having a fat guy in a t-shirt as one of the main characters.
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In terms of visual presentation, things were quite unique, for better or worse. In the first place, there's very little pure animation aside from some vehicle sections and a few other small elements within the scenes. Rather than pure motion, we're given static panels that sometimes shift in rather quick succession to impart the sense of action, but not at a rate to convey any sense of smoothness like you might expect in film or other games. It's a herky-jerky sequence of quick cuts and changes to impart movement. Secondly, the artwork has a feel of being real life photos with a painterly photo-editing filter applied, giving a lifelike, yet distanced from reality appearance that seems cheap. It kind of grew on me, but I never stopped feeling like it had a lazy, low-budget sort of feel. One issue that I found strange was the fact that the file size for the install was around 50 GB. How, just how?! It's mostly a collection of static frames. It must have been an incredibly inefficient use of storage. But I did really like the story, and that was the focus of this game. It took around 6 hours to finish, and while I liked it, I was satisfied to live with the choices of my single play-through. It's an enjoyable enough one-and-done in a genre that rarely reaches “special” status for me in terms of my gaming preferences. Worth playing though, and maybe very good for someone who is really drawn to this sort of experience. 3/5.
32) Arcade Spirits (PC)
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Visual novels are not a genre that I have much familiarity with. I'm not against them in premise, but when story is pretty much all you've got, there's little wiggle room for error, and if the narrative doesn't click there's not much left to enjoy. So I've always been a little reluctant to try out games in this niche, especially because I've found so few game stories to be really worth experiencing, no matter the genre. But I found myself drawn to a game from my itch.io library called Arcade Spirits that focuses on an alternative future timeline in the year "20XX" where the arcade scene never fell out of fashion and they remained places where core gamers went to enjoy fellowship and both current and retro games. Being a child of the era where arcades were still booming, I've carried many positive memories of that now-defunct cultural scene, and I was enticed enough by this premise alone to give this game a try, and there were plenty of fun references to games of the formative arcade era throughout.
You start out as a character of your choosing. You define yourself in terms of appearance and gender prior to beginning. Things start out with you being down on your luck, having just lost yet another job, and believing in some sort of family curse that is holding you down. You're down in the dumps without any sense of direction or purpose. You've resigned yourself to your fate and are really just wallowing in your own misery while trying to keep your head above water. Your roommate Juniper intervenes and introduces you to an AI life-coach app called IRIS that she believes may help you get out of your funk by finding work and a life-purpose/setting that is in harmony with who you are. You decide to humor her, despite having little enthusiasm for her idea, and that sets into motion a chain of events that brings you to a mom and pop arcade called the Funplex, a little business in an out-of-the-way strip mall beside a bookshop and a variety of other quaint non-chain establishments. You have an interview with an older lady named Francine who you come to discover has owned this arcade for many years with her now-deceased husband, and she's looking for a floor manager to help put out all the little fires that can arise in the course of running this type of business. The interview goes well, and you find yourself on a new path. In the beginning, it's just a job, but over time you get to know and make close connections with the other members of the small team running the Funplex as well as some arcade regulars and a variety of others that make appearances in the course of dealing with the challenges that face you in your role. There are plenty of events in the narrative that put the crew under stress, and without spoiling things, I'll just say that there are dirty business interests to deal with in order to stay afloat. In these conflicts, there is a connection created with you and your new work family, and this crew develops tight bonds and came to remind me a bit of the Scooby Doo gang for some reason - maybe the van they drove to go hunting for new (retro) arcade cabinets. They were just this unified band of buds that stuck together, and I enjoyed getting to know their unique personalities. Everyone had a distinct character and remained consistent in who they were throughout, giving each one a fairly believable identity.
In terms of your interaction with the game, you are offered choices in many situations in terms of what you want to do and how you want to respond. There is a meter that allows you to choose responses based on different emotions from quirky, steady, kindly, gutsy and “basically", which is kind of a default when you don't like anything else, I suppose. How you respond builds your personality over the course of the game and gives you an identity that comes to define who you are and how you do business, both personal and professional. Your choices can and do affect the direction of your relationships and how the narrative unfolds. There are romance options which seemed pretty basic, although to be fair, I don't have much experience in games with this sort of mechanic. But I did end up wooing one of my co-workers and we found ourselves together outside of work context, ultimately having a happy ending. There's nothing explicit, and everything is very innocent. There seems to be a variety of ways things could play out, both in terms of romance and story, and so there is the potential for replay if you're really drawn in.
I also thought the artwork was mostly well done. Everything was colorful, vibrant and adequately detailed, although there was minimal animation in the backgrounds and character animation was mostly just a change of facial expression depending on the emotion of the response. There were a pretty good number of locales and scenarios that kept things fresh visually as well. The music was upbeat and techno-infused and contributed nicely to the overall mood.
In terms of the story itself, despite things being fairly interesting, it just didn't really have much electricity, ironically enough. There were plenty of twists and turns and a fair amount of drama, given the setting, but things still felt a bit lukewarm much of the time to me and never really got my pulse moving. It wasn't a bad story to be sure, and I liked the theme of finding your place and changing your circumstances and getting out of a negative mindset to find your purpose, but it never really elevated into an exciting tale I felt I couldn't put down. Decent, but not what I'd want from such a narrative-heavy experience in terms of my own desired sense of engagement. I will also say that Arcade Spirits wears its spirit - no pun intended - of inclusivity very obviously upon its sleeve. There are a variety of ages, body shapes, races, romantic orientations and gender/gender-identities, either implied or clearly suggested. I don't mean that as a bad thing, but it felt very transparent and obvious in that messaging, and it's clear that the voice behind this work may be of a younger, or at least more modern persuasion, despite the game making references to the long-past heyday of the arcade scene. I only say this because some are offended by such liberal choices of identity. I'm a live and let live type of guy, so it's all good with me, but in the interest of disclosure there is a prominent theme and message of "inclusivity", so take that as you will. It never feels like it's forcing any ideology upon the player, but the themes are there nonetheless.
In the end, I did find the game to be worth the roughly nine hours I spent with it. If nothing else, it made me more curious about the visual novel genre as a whole, and I found myself wondering what hidden gems may be out there waiting for me to discover. I've already done some digging into some others that I think may be more compelling to me. And the setting where the 1983 video game crash never happened and the arcade scene continued to flourish kept me interested, if sometimes only because of my own history and nostalgia for the period. And the generally hopeful tone of the game was enjoyable in a feel-good sort of way. It's not a can't-miss game in my view, but I'm glad I gave it my time. 3/5.
31) Skautfold : Shrouded in Sanity (PC)
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You find yourself on your knees in front of a man named Waltham who asks you to sign a contract after informing you that “It worked perfectly.” He tells you that if you fulfill the contract he wishes you to sign that you will freely walk the land, a rare condition for this place and time. You are free to refuse, upon which the game ends immediately, as I found out - not much of a choice, ha. So upon signing, you then learn that you have been given some “new abilities” and are led to a gothic manor while undergoing a brief tutorial of the basics. Within the manor, you are instructed that the king and his four knights reside within and that no one can leave. You are also told that you are free to explore as you wish, but you must kill the 5 individuals and that only the king matters. Additionally, if you are killed, Waltham informs you that “the contract” will allow him to bring you back. Thus began a lesser known indie Soulsbourne-like called Skautfold: Shrouded in Sanity.
So off you go in this open-world hack and slash adventure. You are given a sword and a pistol and have nothing else to do but discover the world about you. As you explore, you'll find a variety of enemies with attack patterns that can be learned and exploited. There are other weapon and sword-wielding foes as well as more Lovecraftian monstrosities that stand in your way. You can parry enemy attacks if your timing is right, bringing them to their knees (if they have them) which opens up a potentially powerful finisher. You can fire your pistol to damage the bad guys, although you only have five bullets at the outset. Whenever you slay your enemies you can extract vitae, a vital essence that when accumulated allows you to eventually upgrade the number of bullets you carry (and a variety of other potential perks) or buy "Yth stones" from a particular vendor. These stones can also be found as rare drops from enemies and they give you the opportunity to upgrade the damage of your sword as well as your overall health and stamina at various NPCs within the manor and its surroundings. If you die, you lose all your vitae, yet this can be recovered if you are able to return to the spot of your demise, as in the Souls series. The variety of enemies and their attacks were fairly different and interesting in their well-animated movements, and they presented a pretty stiff challenge.
Discovering the manor unveiled not only more resistance, but also a fair bit of lore and flavor text, imparting a sense of place to everything. It all revolved around royalty, power, some deep cosmic mystery and some sinister deeds, and I enjoyed what was given, but I would have liked a bit more clarity and cohesiveness to the details. As it was presented, I felt like I only got a limited and frustratingly incomplete taste of who I was and the overall conflict. I don't mind doing the work for clarity, but here there weren't enough dots to connect. Another issue was the layout of the environments. Navigating from place to place could be a bit confusing at times, and there is no in-game map, so it forced me to learn by memory. The frequent deaths could sometimes make getting a feel for your surroundings and how to get from place to place a bit challenging, but the world wasn't so huge that it was an unreasonable task. I would have also liked to see more equipment as a part of the experience. All you ever have is your sword and pistol that you receive at the beginning, upgrades aside. There was no armor or loot to play around with, and to be fair, it wasn't a big deal, but I just felt that pull of wanting to develop my character as you do in games that provided the inspiration for Skautfold.
Overall though, I mostly enjoyed my time with this game. It took me about six hours to beat the game, but there is a new game+ which offers, what we are told is, a much harder experience. (I thought the game was tough enough the first go round.) There is also a chance to play the game as any of the bosses that you defeated, and I thought that was an interesting twist. At its core, things felt very “Soulsy” with the stamina-management, the combat rhythm of rolling/dodging, parrying and learning enemy patterns. The overall atmosphere was well-done, visually and sonically, and I had a pretty good time with this one. It was missing some of the depth that I crave in this type of game, but I found it to be worth seeing through to the end. I'm also curious about where this series goes, as the developer has made five games in this universe, each being a bit of a different genre apparently - a very interesting and enticing premise. I've already got four of the five games in my library, and I had enough fun that I'll see what the sequels bring to the table at some point. Good, but potential for improvement that I hope is realized in the games that followed. 3/5.