I did something new last weekend. Or new to me, at least: I was at an event called Death By Die, where I tried playing my first miniature wargame.
But I guess this story started almost 40 years ago…
I used to play a bunch of Role Playing Games back in the 1990s. Always tabletop, never live action. Actually, I started even earlier, because me and some of my classmates got the opportunity to do it on the school’s budget when I was in 5th(?) grade, so we got the Star Wars RPG, Lord of the Rings and Mutant (a Swedish postapocalyptic cyberpunk game), if I remember it right. Maybe also Drakar & Demoner (D&D), the Swedish version of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). I think those were what was available at the time in Varberg, where I lived at the time. At least I think that’s what happened, but we got to keep the games afterwards so I’m not sure. Maybe the school just let us have them? It was kind of a different time…
Before that, in the late 1980s when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I had played some game books. Mostly the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever (illustrated, as it turns out, by Gary Gygax, the creator of DnD). They were books written in the second person, where the reader was the protagonist and you’d read a few paragraphs or pages at a time, then you’d choose what would happen next, i.e what page to comtinue the story on. You had a little character sheet in the end of the books where you’d keep track of things you got and how you progressed through the story. There was even a system for combat and skill checks, based on a simple random number generator: a page with a bunch of numbers on it and you had to put your finger somewhere with your eyes closed to see what you got (or you could use a D10 if you had one of those).
I mostly borrowed the books from a friend, who sometimes read them to me and I had to just listen and make the choices, almost like a real RPG. This was also the same person who later got me into the Dune books, which I’m currently re-reading (Heretics of Dune at the moment). It was fun, and often pretty difficult. I only managed to actually succeed in a couple of those books without dying or losing in some other way.
We used to spend recesses at school writing our own gamebooks in our glossary books (instead of using them to practice English or handwriting or whatever they were meant for). So I guess I actually wrote my first (still unpublished) book when I was 9 or 10. A sci fi story called Pang, sa det! (loosely translates as: “It just went Bang”), where you had to fight Hitler the second on Earth II… It may not have been great literature, but it was a complete story and a fully functional gamebook. I still have it lying around somewhere. Having done that back then is probably what made me do something similar in comics form, 22 years later, with Piracy is Liberation 010: Hypertext Consciousness (and some of the later Piracy books as well). I wanted to have a pic of Pang, sa det! beside Piracy010, but I couldn’t find it right now…
But anyway, in high school in the 90s I picked it up again, playing a bunch of different games, like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun and various World of Darkness games, such as Werewolf: the Apocalype and Wraith: the Oblivion which was the one I was Storyteller for (the WoD word for Game Master). And I tried creating my own RPG called Wormholes, set in an adjacent world to the comic zines I was making at the time, possibly the same world as Pang, sa det! (I was reading too much comics not to make it an interconnected multiverse). Maybe I’ll write more about all that at some point, if/when I finish the Piracy RPG…
We also played a few Collectible Card Games. The first two that reached Varberg were Magic the Gathering (which we never got into) and Doomtrooper (the one we started playing). I always lost because those games were often designed so that whoever could afford to get the most cards would be able to build the best deck and would always win, and that wasn’t me. We also tried Mythos, the Lovecraft-based CCG, and Rage. Rage I still think was the best of them. It was based on Werewolf: the Apocalypse and the system favored strategic thinking and an optimized deck, which meant that you could actually do pretty well even if you didn’t have the most cards. I tried playing it again a few years ago and it actually still holds up.
My -90s gaming days were followed by two decades where I didn’t play any RPGs at all, but I’ve been getting back into it. I now have one group where I play with Dice Dominion and Trauma Command (the other half of Wormgod) with Factory Farming as Storyteller, where we’re playing a long-running World of Darkness campaign. With a side quest in Kult that tied into the Werewolf story. I also have another group where my brother runs mostly Call of Cthulhu sessions.
Old and new dice…
Getting back to my original point: I’ve never had a lot of money, so the CCGs were bad enough. Playing miniature wargames back in those days would have been impossible, because those miniatures are expensive. I also don’t have the patience or fine motor skills to paint them. So I never even tried it, until now.
If you’re unfamiliar, miniature wargames are basically advanced strategy board games with RPG elements mixed in. DnD has always included something similar when it comes to combat, but you can play most RPGs using just theatre of the mind so the board game part of it is pretty much optional. Games like Warhammer 40 000 (which I’ve never tried nor even seen played, so I’m doing some educated guesswork here) do it the other way around. They’re set in a world with chracters and storylines, but all of that is more or less optional and the main part is the strategic minature warplay.
So a while ago, Anton Heed who has some zines in Fosfor and who is also a member of our collective workshop, Fanzineverkstaden, came to print out the rules and worldbuilding documents for his game, Muterad Medeltid i Europas Ruiner (Mutated Middle Ages in the Ruins of Europe). He told me about it and it seemed interesting. Long story short, I ended up at the Death By Die fest with Kinga, who was there to sell dice as Dice Dominion. And it was fun! I played 2 games in that setting and even won the first bout, though it didn’t feel like it was about winning. It was more like how I described it, an RPG focusing mostly on the startegic warplay.
My days are mostly about much the same things. No matter if I’m doing administrative work or design or project management for exhibitions or even actually writing and drawing, it all revolves in one way or another around things related to comics or art or comics art. That’s a complete simplification, but let’s say it’s all about storytelling, and even if Muterad Medeltid was also about storytelling, it still felt a lot like something new, and I liked that feeling.
There. I was just going to say something about having been to Death by Die and then it grew into an autobiography about my history with RPGs. Now I’m going to have some breakfast, then go to the post office to pick up my copy of Aphex Twin‘s reissue of the Selected Ambient Works II vinyl, and then I’m going to get some work done, or take the day off and read some Dune, because I haven’t had enough rest for the last few weeks and I’m soon entering another period of too many things at once, and I’m still digesting Hokage (Shinya Tsukamoto‘s laest movie) that I watched last night…
I know I’m late, but really, who cares? The past isn’t going anywhere. Games I played in 2022:
I finally felt the time was right to play Cyberpunk 2077 after they released updates that seemed to make it playable, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were some bugs, sure, but no more than any other game of that magnitude, and the game looks so beautiful that any such indiscretions are forgivable. So enough about that.
My first play-through was as a female Street Kid and I more or less finished it at 100%, having done all available side quests, romanced all lesbian and male hetero NPCs (I’ll do the gay and straight female ones on my next run as a male Nomad), got all the vehicles, apartments etc and most of the endings. After the Nomad I’ll do a Corpo run as well, and I’ll probably keep mostly staying away from fast travel al the way through. I just enjoy moving around in that world too much. They’ve built a Night City that has its own feel in architecture, clothes, weather, social interactions, music, everything. Maybe not a place you’d like to live in real life, but as escapism, I just never got tired of it and it’s one of the games I’ve spent the most time in.
I modeled my Nomad after Technograph (of Piracy is Liberation).Technograph
I guess it’s no big surprise that cyberpunk is a genre that appeals to me, and this is a very good representative of the genre, both in aesthetics and themes. The genre automatically lends itself so easily to satirizing the world we live in now, because it’s basically the same; a world run by corporations, with huge divides between rich and poor whan it comes to access to health care, housing, quality of life, where politicians may talk smooth but are most probably corrupt, where ads are intrusive and the media is skewed to uphold the status quo, where cops are just one more gang but more well-equipped and so on. It’s just seen from a slightly different perspective since the original roleplaying game, Cyberpunk 2020, is from the 1980s which makes this an alternate timeline where the CCCP is still a thing (which doesn’t make much of a difference). Normal life under Capitalism, only a bit more intensely so. So when CD Project Red say that Cyberpunk 2077 is apolitical, they probably just mean it’s not about party politics, because the anticapitalism is definitely there. And yes, there is an irony in a commercial product that comes with anticapitalist messages, but what else is new? Are we supposed to only make pro-capitalist content just because we live in that system?
They also released the animated Netflix series Edgerunners and a bunch of comics, all very high quality. I’m always a bit sceptical to this kind of out-branching because it’s often just a cash grab, but the side material to Cyberpunk 2077 is all good. Both Edgerunners and the comics they’ve made (Your Voice, Trauma Team, Where’s Johnny, Big City Dreams, with more coming in 2023) explore the world from varying perspectives, going into some details that are only hinted at in the game.
There was a sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, called Horizon Forbidden West. It’s still a good game, but it felt like it had lost something that the first one had. Not sure what, but it could be that there was too much to do in the open world that didn’t feel as meaningful? The environments weren’t as varied, the story wasn’t as gripping. Or maybe we’re just spoiled now with great games to compare it with?
Elden Ring, for example, which I’ve finished twice by now. Not sure what I can say about this game that others haven’t already. It’s a great game, the biggest yet from From Software, with that same feel to it that most of their games have had since Demon’s Souls. The thing that mostly sets Elden Ring apart is its accessibility to new players who may not have otherwise tried a Soulslike. There are so many different play styles available, and you can easily lower the difficulty by grinding until you’ve raised your stats enough to have a much easier time with the boss fights. Or using magic. Or using spirit ashes.
And it’s beautiful and the stories are sad and the fights are good and usually pretty well-balanced and the lore is big and interesting once you’ve managed to get more of the big picture and can actually understand what the intro is talking about.
And then they re-released The Last Of Us and I played it again and then the TV series came and as I write this we’re 4 episodes in and it’s a great companion piece to the original story. They kept the important parts and expanded on other parts in just the right way to enhance the watching experience. Like that little scene where Tess put her arm around a sleeping Joel, which held much more significance for gamers because that small detail said something about their relationship that we didn’t get to see before. And everyone is watching it and I can’t wait for the second season where everything will get so much more dramatic, and does this mean that the third game will have to come out before a third season of the show?
This feels like as good an excuse as any to show these drawings again…
Ellie from the games (part II, where she’s a bit older)A clickerAbby, from part II
Sooner or later I’ll get around to making some more posts about 2022; what I watched, what I read and what I did. For anyone who’s interested and for myself, to help me remember things…
So. Games I played in 2020/2021. Looking back, it seems I’ve pretty consistently been playing third person story-based action games, with a few exceptions. I know there are lots of other kinds of games, these are just the ones I tend to enjoy the most.
It’s also hard to choose still pictures of gameplay. By that, I mean it’s hard to show actual gameplay. Most of the pics I chose, as you can see, are of the main character posing in front of a nice background. I tried to screenshot some fighting or some other action, but they hardly ever work, and I finally figured out that it’s because those images can never capture the feeling you get while playing, so they always end up a bit disappointing. So now you know why there are so many posing pics, as you read on about what games I played in 2020/2021:
Let’s start by getting The Last of Us pt II out of the way, since I already wrote about it. It’s still one of the absolute best games I’ve ever played.
The Witcher 3 feels highly overrated. Not that it’s a bad game, or at least the story is ok, I just never got into it. I played the main story + side quests until I got to Skellige, so I gave it a good try. In the end I just mostly enjoyed Gwent, the in-game card game.
Death Stranding (which I’ve mentioned before) is a weird game. As is normal for Hideo Kojima, who also created classics like the Metal Gear games and more or less invented game mechanics like stealth, it feels like something new and special. I just don’t know what I really think about it. I did enjoy playing it and I love how he made the act of carrying things in a game feel more concrete than ever, even to the point where most of the game revolves around it. I also like the story and world-building that is based on creating unity rather than conflict. Even though conflict is of course a part of it, just as with Metal Gear you can more or less go through the whole game without killing anyone, and the main quest is about reuniting a devastated United Cities of America.
Which is my biggest problem with it. Even if it’s set in a future where the USA we know is long forgotten, it’s kind of nostalgic for an idealized version of it and it kind of feels unfair to its many victims (internationally and among its own citizens). At the same time, there are some moments in the story that are both touching and epic. I don’t know…
Ghost of Tsushima. Here’s what I thought about it after my first play-through: I do prefer my samurai fiction a bit more class conscious and less nationalist than this one is. But it’s not the first story I’ve seen/played/etc where you need to close your eyes to certain things in order to enjoy them, and when you do that, this is a great game. Probably my favorite Assassin’s Creed game (without actually being one, but it feels a lot like it could have been) so far. My problems with it are small superficial ones. I know they had Japanese consultants to get the historical settings right, but there are a few things I think they tweaked to make it work better as a game in 2020. Here are a few of them: First, the female characters should probably be much more submissive in their behavior, at least in scenes where they are supposed to behave accordning to the norms of the time. I’m glad they didn’t go that route, however, because that would have felt weird and even in 2020 it’s refreshing to see so many of the secondary characters being women. And who knows, maybe other contemporary depictions of the time period have been colored by the time in which they were made and its preconceptions of what the old days were like (also, this is set about 400 years earlier than most samurai fiction). So this is more something I noted rather than something I have a problem with.
Second, as I said I’d have preferred a more class-conscious story. The main character is a samurai, which is similar to a knight in medieval Europe, and in this case an actual feudal lord, but he never behaves like one. Or rather, he behaves like the idealized version of a knight, with some Japanese-feeling surface-level flavoring. I don’t think that’s very accurate, just as I don’t think the idealized knights in many Western depictions are accurate. The samurai code that Jin lives by doesn’t feel at all like (as far as I know) bushido. In part, maybe, but not in the core. It’s ok that he deviates from the norms of the time, but if so, I’d have liked it to be acknowledged. Of course we see the story through the eyes of the main character, so if he has a false image of what a samurai stands for, that’s one thing. But it is never really contrasted against other, probably more common, versions. I can kind of live with this one as well, but it makes me feel like something’s missing.
Third, the Mongols. Ok, it’s an invading force and they start off by killing most everyone the main character knows, but it still would have been nice with a bit more nuance. I know the open world game structure demands an enemy force that can be present all over the map and who is always the enemy etc, so it’s understandable from a gameplay perspective, but that could also have worked with a rival Japanese lord or something that didn’t encourage that nationalist sentiment. In the end, this is also something I can live with if the gameplay experience is good enough. Kind of how I could live with the “make the UCA great again like in the pre-apocalypse that we don’t really know what it was like” thing in Death Stranding. But it does disturb me that the Mongols seem to be evil at least in part because they are foreigners. I should probably mention what I base these opinions on. Am I Japanese? No. Am I a historian? Nope. I’ve just seen lots of samurai cinema and read a bunch of manga in the genre, especially the ones by Goseki Kojima (Lone Wolf and Cub, Samurai Executioner, Path of the Assassin) which are all to my knowledge pretty well-researched in their depictions of ancient Japan and samurai culture. Granted, the game is set a few hundred years earlier than those as well, so who knows, I may not know what I’m talking about at all?
At least the brush-stroke sequences between chapters look amazing.
Anyway… Even though the above mentioned elements of the story and world-building could have been done better, I’ve really enjoyed playing the game. The combat system makes for enjoyable fighting, the environments are beautiful and the map is sufficiently filled with things to do. The structure is very well-made for an open world game so it’s up there among the games in the genre that I’ve liked the most. By genre in this case I mean open world, I don’t have that many other samurai games to compare it with. I’d say Sekiro is definitely a better samurai game, but Ghost of Tsushima still makes the top 5 list (have I even played more than 3?).
And then, over time, it seems I’ve changed my mind. So here’s what I’m thinking now, after trying to play it again, about a year later when they’ve released a story expansion and fixed some things, like the Japanese lip-synch: The things that disturbed me the first time feel much worse now. The gameplay is still mostly smooth, but I have a bigger problem with all the cultural retcons/clichés. Which means that I started playing it from the beginning just to try it and I couldn’t stop until I finished the first chapter of the story, BUT I had to set it to Japanese speach without subtitles so I could no longer understand what they were saying. That made it much more enjoyable. Too bad I can’t do the same with the new story content, because for some reason I still don’t want to miss the story…
Sekiro: Shadows die twice, on the other hand, is great! I finally finished it after having been stuck on the final boss for so long that I had to restart and play the whole game from the beginning. This game doesn’t even pretend to be historically accurate but the feel of it is that it still manages better than Ghost of Tsushima. Not that they really should be compared to each other.
It’s made by From Software and has that special level design where the whole game feels like an interconnected open world. Even if it isn’t completely open, you can, and sometimes need to, move around in areas you’ve already been. It’s also and there’s a progression in time so that after finishing a certain boss the levels change with new story elements. Some parts are blocked off, some parts are ruined by invading new enemies or otherwise changed, some NPCs are dead.
There are also areas that are set in a different time, which is acknowledged by Wolf, the main character as it’s kind of a flashback but it’s not how he remembers it. His ability to resurrect after being killed is also woven into the story, as is an area that is set outside of normal reality in some kind of divine realm. Compared to earlier From Software games, Sekiro feels much more free in that you have more options for movement by jumping, stealthing or using a grappling hook to get around. I’m not going into the technical details with the fighting system which is based on posture instead of stamina and so very satisfying. This game has a special place in my heart.
So does Bloodborne, my first From Software game. I went back to this game after a few years and I finished it. And then I restarted it and finshed it again, along with the DLC, and then I finished it once more to get all three endings. And it truly is an amazing game. Some games don’t really age well, and a (at the time) 5 year old game could eaily feel old, clunky and outdated, but this one definitely holds its own against the competition. The story is great in all its subtlety. The ambience in the game is very well presented through sound, lighting, music and design. Gameplay just feels better and better the more you play and get better at it and discover nuances in what you can do. The world design and worldbuilding are both crafted with great care, attention to detail and intricacy, just as I’ve come to expect from From Software after playing this, Sekiro and a bit of Dark Souls III (which I am yet to finish as I write this, but I may go back to it at some point). I seldom play a game more than once. Playing it more than twice is even more rare, but after finishing this for the third time I almost started over again. It’s one of the great [old] ones.
Dark Souls and Bloodborne started a whole genre, often called soulsborne, or souls-like, but it started with Demon’s Souls, which is now remade by Bluepoint (who also made the PS4 remakes of The Last of Us and Uncharted) for the PS5. I never played the PS3 version so I can’t compare them, but the new one is great and I definitely see how it was a start of something. These games are known to be hard, but to a large extent that can be remedied by grinding for XP (or the equivalent souls or blood) so you can level up, and also just learning how to beat them. That was very much the case for this one.
Right after finishing it I started a new game + to get the second ending and then a new game ++ to get the platinum trophy, which I failed at due to broken (or misunderstood?) game mechanics. Now I feel that I’m done with it, but it was highly enjoyable while it lasted. It’s very good-looking and a very rewarding feeling as you get better at it.
I also played some other souls-like games, such as Hellpoint, Mortal Shell and Hollow Knight. Hellpoint is the one of the three that mostly resemble the From Software games. Similar fighting, similar level design with shortcuts and save-points, similar subtle storytelling, but this one is set in space on an occult/futuristic space station.
Hollow Knight is different in that it’s a 2D platform game, but it still fits into the genre in many of the same respects that Hellpoint also does. The fighting as very precise, for lack of a better word. Most boss fights are pretty hard, some are extremely difficult. You have to be prepared to die a lot and when you do you need to find the ghost of your previous life to get your stuff back or they’re lost forever. The subtle storytelling gets pretty dark sometimes but the art style compensates by being cutely cartoonish and there are some sequences that feel more quiet and almost solemn. I finished the main and DLC stories but skipped some of the tournament-style extra boss fights. Looking forward to the sequel if/when it ever comes out.
Mortal Shell is the one of these that feels the most unique. It does some interesting things with the fighting system, and also with character builds. Instead of leveling up your character, you switch between different bodies with differing attributes and abilities. So you can find one that suits your playstyle or you can experiment or switch depending on what fits the situation you’re in. Or you can play the game just in your basic form, without a body, which makes you extremely killable but also much more agile. The leverl design feels a bit like it’s based on opening shortcuts but it’s more just about learning how the areas are interconnected.
Also, the game doesn’t tell you what any of the things you find do, so you have to use them to find out, and all of them aren’t necessarily good for you. There are also lots of other functions in the game that it doesn’t tell you about so you need to happen upon them (or check the game’s wiki). All this opens up opportunities to experiment with combination tactics and makes you want to explore more parts of the game than just the world you run around in. I also like the mood, music and personality of the game, reminiscent of Hellblade in its bleak black metal-ishness…
Spider-man is the only game based on a Marvel comic that I even felt interested in playing, mostly because it felt like it had a story, that it had a respect for the source material and that it seemed fun to play. So it did, and so it is.
As is the sequel, Spider-man: Miles Morales, starring the character from the Ultimate Spider-man alternate timeline comics. They’re both set in the same New York City, except it’s winter in the Miles Morales game. Not sure what else to say, except they both got the feeling of web-swinging around the Manhattan skyscrapers right. There is a system for fast-travel by taking the subway, but I hardly ever used it.
Both games can feel a bit hectic at times, with nearly constant things to do that pop up beside the main story, but most of it is fun, if a bit repetitive. And it really lives up the the cliché that the city feels like a character of is own.
Another series of open world games is the Mafia trilogy. Mafia III was one of the first bigger games I played on the PS4, and now I’ve also played through the first two in the series. The mafia genre isn’t normally my cup of tea, with exceptions of course, but the genre in itself doesn’t attract me, but I like these. At least the first and third ones, mostly because the main character in Mafia II is the least sympathetic. Mafia III was a huge leap forward in quality, probably because I find it more interesting to follow a character trying to find his way around a racist Vietnam war era alt-New Orleans than a prohibition era alt-New York…
Little Nightmares II came out, as a stand-alone sequel that maintains the same creepyness that was in the first one, but expands the world and takes the storytelling to another level. Not that the first one was lacking in any way, especially with the DLC that I had missed for some reason. Both games are well worth a play-though or two. Pretty short, good-looking games with a few twists and turns that make them much more than what you might expect from most 2D platformers. Maybe these count as 2,5D? Anyway, good stuff!
Gris fals into the category of smaller games that deal with the symbolic representation of psychological processes and emotional trauma, similar to Rime. This is 2D, pretty straightforward gameplay that does much with small means. Very stylized in its art style which looks like it’s all made more or less in pencil and aquarelle, and clever in its utilization of the limits it puts on itself, if that makes any sense?
As you progress through the game, you get more abilities and the world gradually goes from very sparse grays to adding more colors, making the world feel increasingly vibrant. Sometimes, the form can create a completely different yet complimentary sense than the content, so to me this is a feel-good game about depression…
Superhot is a slow motion first person action game. With some variations, the basics is that the enemies and the world moves only when you do, so you can plan and execute your moves and choreograph your own John Woo-style action scenes. I first tried and fell in love with the second game in the series, which is Superhot VR, and now the third one is out, called Superhot: Mind Control Delete. As that title suggests, these games are full of cybernerd wordplay and a story that is both meta and more interesting than it first seems, but never fully explained. Superhot VR kept me warm during a winter when my apartment was pretty cold at times. Even if it feels like you hardly move because it’s mostly slo-mo, you can still work up a sweat dodging bullets and shooting red guys, or cleaving bullets in mid-air with a katana. I haven’t even finished Mind Control Delete yet, because it got too intense (which I don’t mean in a bad way).
Observer (or >observer_) is a Polish cyberpunk game starring Rutger Hauer as a disillusioned cop. Most of it takes place in one building where you walk around talking to tenants, looking for your missing son. It’s a dystopic future run by a huge tech corporation. Most people are augmented somehow, except a few weird purity cultists, which is a problem since there’s a digital plague going around. Just after arriving in the building there’s a quarantine lock-down, but it’s unclear if there’s an actual outbreak or just a malfunction. Both seem about equally plausible.
You have to take pills regularly or your vision becomes distorted because there’s some problem with your implants, and there seems to be some kind of monster murdering people in the building. So as the investigation goes along, you come across several persons who are either dead or dying. You hack into their brains to try to sort out what’s happened and piece together a bigger picture. These sequences are filled with abstractions, dream logic and, as the rest of the game, the horror of living in an extremely segregated class-based society where you have to make do because it’s near impossible to change your position. So it’s almost like it’s set in out world, as is often the case with cyberpunk. Just with more misery and technology (which is in need of repair but left as it is because no one can afford to fix it). I started playing this a few years back but made the mistake of always trying to play it when I was too tired, so I had to stop because nothing made much sense. Now that I came back to it and made sure not to play it in my sleep, I had a much better experience. Truly cyberpunk without being so derivative that it loses its own expression.
I used to believe that first person shooters weren’t my thing, but Deathloop proved me wrong. Probably mostly because of its set up. The story is that you live through the same day over and over and you need to kill 7 persons to break the loop, while a mysterious woman is trying to stop you from doing just that. There are 4 areas on the island you’re on, so you need to manipulate events to get all these 7 people to the same space at the same time, because if the day ends it all resets, and only you and the woman can remember the previous loops. Except you start with amnesia so you have to spend the first few loops just trying to figure out what’s even going on. So the premise and story are interesting, but it’s also aesthetically special. All the NPCs on the island think every loop is the first day, but it’s been going on since the 1960s, so they’re all dolled up in their best 60s outfits, prepared for an eternity of the same decadent day over and over, where they can do whatever they want because even if they die they’re just going to come back again when the day resets. They just hadn’t counted on not remembering the loops. So no one really knows how long it’s been going on.
This was probably the hardest game to find fitting images for, I just couldn’t find a good way to represent the feel of it. So I had to settle for the title image and a couple of background pics.
Oh, and it’s also a multiverse and you can play as the mysterious woman, invading other players to try to prevent them from breaking the loop.
Lastly, I’ve started playing the tabletop RPG Werewolf: The Apocalypse again, something I hadn’t done since the 1900s, but now we’ve been at it for over a year. Lately we’ve been mixing it up, so we all play at least two parallel characters and not just sticking to Werewolf (I play a Gurahl (werebear) and a Virtual Adepts mage). I’ve always liked White Wolf‘s World of Darkness RPGs and their focus on collectively telling stories rather than the actual game mechanics. So our sessions are a way of building a campfire narrative, a tale that we tell together over a long period of time and something to keep out the encroaching miseries of day to day life.
So I leave you with this portrait of my main character, and that’s all for this 2022 new year’s account of what I’ve used over the last two years to enhance and escape the consensus reality that some people seem so intent on destroying for the rest of us.
I’m not always sure if I write these for you or for myself or whatever, but since you’re reading this, I guess it was for you. So I hope you’ve enjoyed these rants and recommendations!
The Last Of Us part II
by Naughty Dog
Review/thoughts (no spoilers)
First, stay away from spoilers as much as possible if you plan to play the game, because it will affect your experience of it. Also, I wrote the first part of this before I had finished the game, so I had to add a second part afterwards to address some of what I said from a different perspective. Both the game itself and the discussions surroudning it have many layers and are a bit hard to condense. I had stayed away from leaks and spoilers but seen enough to know that some people seemed to really hate the game. So if it seems like I’m strawmanning a bit in the first part, it’s because I hadn’t looked too deeply into the criticism that I addressed, I just knew it was there.
The game was released a while ago by now, but I think that rushing through the game just to get an early review out would be a disservice to the experience. I wanted to give it time, take breaks now and then to process the story beats, and I’m glad I did. As I do these final revisions I’m close to finishing the game for the second time (NG+).
I’m not normally writing about games, but this one was special, so here’s my views on The Last Of Us part II:
This is an amazing game! Probably the best one on PS4, as far as I’m concerned. Gamers and reviewers have been divided. Almost everyone seem to agree that it looks amazing, that the controls and playability are improved from the first one. And the story is well told. Even the gay stuff looks like it works for most people, even if some feel oppressed by a love story that isn’t heterosexual. But most of the people who actually played the game do seem to like it. The main negativity seems to be about the feel-bad aspects of the game. And there are a lot of those. This game is an emotional horror story that hits harder than most movies trying to do the same thing. I don’t really know why people are surprised since the first The Last Of Us started with a real gut-punch, and ended with one as well, with a few more thrown in during the game. But I think people forgot that and only remembered how great the game was, just as they forgot the somewhat (comparatively) clunky gameplay because the story was so great. But if there’s one thing the developers were open with before releasing the sequel, it’s that if the first story was about love, then this one is about hate. And they weren’t kidding. This is definitely an exploration of hate and even more about revenge.
So of course this isn’t for everyone. Most players want their digital murdersprees to come without guilt or emotional consequenses, and this game denies them that. This is a rollercoaster with a few ascents but mostly descents into darker and deeper territories, a spiral of vengeance begetting vengeance. An eye for an eye for an eye, and in the end everyone is blind, clicking away in the darknes, flailing for someone to sink their teeth into to spread the disease of hatred. There are nice moments in this game, because how much worse isn’t Hell if you can still dream of Heaven (to paraphrase The Sandman)? You think it’s as dark as it can get, having played through one shocking turn of events after another, and then it hits you with something new. And then it stabs you with something that turns everything you’ve already done even darker. And then it twists the knife a few times extra just because. And I love it for it!
As in most of the best zombie stories, the threat of the zombielike infected in The Last Of Us are secondary, almost an environmental obstacle. It’s the human individuals and groupings in the postapocalypse that are the main actors.
And mixed in with all this is a love story (more than one, actually) that works really well, at least narratively. But it’s a world full of death and it’s a story full of hate and both of those things make it hard for lovers to just lean back together and enjoy each other. Any nice moment is weighed up by a bunch of horrible counterparts, and it takes its toll on the characters. As it should. This isn’t a game about Nathan Drake (the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft-like protagonist from Uncharted, another game series from Naughty Dog) running around killing hundreds of people and then living happily ever after with his family. The murders in this game have consequences. In fact, even the consequences have consequences. Don’t do this at home, kids!
And why shouldn’t there be games like this? And why shouldn’t they be acknowledged as the masterpieces they are, as is often the case with movies or literature that break new ground while showing us things in a new light?
In short: my experience with this game has been great at times, horrible at times, and I’m loving every bit of it.
And now that I’ve finished the game, I have some things to add: When I wrote the above, I still had a few hours left to play. I still stand by everything I wrote about what I liked about it, but I hadn’t actually seen a lot of what people were saying about the game since I didn’t want to spoil it for mayself. Which means that while I had picked up that some people didn’t like the game, I wasn’t completely clear on why. Now I know better and it seems to be mainly two or three points. First, some of the people who like almost everything about it have some issues with the story structure or some elements in the storytelling, which I’m not going to get into because it really comes down to a question of personal taste. For me it works perfectly. It managed to play all of my heartstrings like a guitar, and even more so now that I’m playing it for a second time. Because now I know things I didn’t on my first playthrough which makes me notice a few extra heartbreaking details that went over my head the first time. If it didn’t work for some people that’s fine, nothing to do about that.
Otherwise it seems to be about an event in the beginning of the game and one at the very end. I’m not going to get into details about any of them, but it seems to me that people had such an attachment to the first game that they just took this one too personally. It’s not so much about the game being shocking or emotionally brutal in general, but about what’s happening to certain characters and the way it happens. Which is maybe understandable but also a bit too reminiscent of that old Stephen King story, Misery, about a writer who is kidnapped by his biggest fan who tortures him to get him to rewrite a book so that the main character doesn’t die. Sometimes you just have to accept that fictional characters don’t always get to live the lives you think they deserve.
Some of the negative feedback also came from people who hadn’t played it at all but based their opinions on leaked details which didn’t give the whole picture, which is just bullshit and not really worthy of comment.
It is noteworthy, however, that about 45% of the people who played it have now finished the story (according to the trophy list). 30-40% is a pretty normal number for similar games. And considering how many copies they’ve sold, that speaks to the fact that a lot of people seem to enjoy it enough to go through all the heartache.
As usual, it’s good to remember that the voices that can be seen/heard online may not be representative of the general view of the thing, it may just be that some people are very vocal about it and the proponents of certain views (the so-called anti-SJW people, in this case particularly the homophobes, that were most active before the game was even released) are quite good at taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth in order to try to seem like the voice of the mainstream.
Speaking of whom, I’d also like to change what I said at first about this game being about hate, because that isn’t exactly true, it just feels that way during most of it, and it is a feeling that’s being explored. But there are more layers to it, which I’m reluctant to go into here (because spoilers)…
For me, I like both the ending and the rest of the game more and more the more I think about it, and some of the discussions I’ve seen about it just make me more convinced that this is something truly special. It’s more emotionally advanced and engaging than most movies on a level that I’ve never seen before in games. It’s not the first game to go that route. Both Hellblade: Senua’s sacrifice, God of War and the first The Last Of Us come to mind as examples of psychological storytelling, but this one just goes further with it. And it’s amazing.
If you did play it and need something to help sort out your traumas, I’d suggest watching some interviews with the creators and actors of the game. They do care deeply about the characters and there are reasons for everything that happens in the game. And stop sending death threats to the actors just because they did such a good job of making you care.
I used to play a bunch of Role Playing Games back in the 1990s. Always tabletop, never live action. Actually, I started even earlier, because me and some of my classmates got the opportunity to do it on the school’s budget when I was in 5th(?) grade, so we got the Star Wars RPG, Lord of the Rings and Mutant (a Swedish postapocalyptic cyberpunk game), if I remember it right. Maybe also Drakar & Demoner (D&D), the Swedish version of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). I think those were what was available at the time in Varberg, where I lived at the time. At least I think that’s what happened, but we got to keep the games afterwards so I’m not sure. Maybe the school just let us have them? It was kind of a different time…
Before that, in the late 1980s when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I had played some game books. Mostly the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever (illustrated, as it turns out, by Gary Gygax, the creator of DnD). They were books written in the second person, where the reader was the protagonist and you’d read a few paragraphs or pages at a time, then you’d choose what would happen next, i.e what page to comtinue the story on. You had a little character sheet in the end of the books where you’d keep track of things you got and how you progressed through the story. There was even a system for combat and skill checks, based on a simple random number generator: a page with a bunch of numbers on it and you had to put your finger somewhere with your eyes closed to see what you got (or you could use a D10 if you had one of those).
But anyway, in high school in the 90s I picked it up again, playing a bunch of different games, like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun and various World of Darkness games, such as Werewolf: the Apocalype and Wraith: the Oblivion which was the one I was Storyteller for (the WoD word for Game Master). And I tried creating my own RPG called Wormholes, set in an adjacent world to the comic zines I was making at the time, possibly the same world as Pang, sa det! (I was reading too much comics not to make it an interconnected multiverse). Maybe I’ll write more about all that at some point, if/when I finish the Piracy RPG…
We also played a few Collectible Card Games. The first two that reached Varberg were Magic the Gathering (which we never got into) and Doomtrooper (the one we started playing). I always lost because those games were often designed so that whoever could afford to get the most cards would be able to build the best deck and would always win, and that wasn’t me. We also tried Mythos, the Lovecraft-based CCG, and Rage. Rage I still think was the best of them. It was based on Werewolf: the Apocalypse and the system favored strategic thinking and an optimized deck, which meant that you could actually do pretty well even if you didn’t have the most cards. I tried playing it again a few years ago and it actually still holds up.
So a while ago, Anton Heed who has some zines in Fosfor and who is also a member of our collective workshop, Fanzineverkstaden, came to print out the rules and worldbuilding documents for his game, Muterad Medeltid i Europas Ruiner (Mutated Middle Ages in the Ruins of Europe). He told me about it and it seemed interesting. Long story short, I ended up at the Death By Die fest with Kinga, who was there to sell dice as Dice Dominion. And it was fun! I played 2 games in that setting and even won the first bout, though it didn’t feel like it was about winning. It was more like how I described it, an RPG focusing mostly on the startegic warplay.
