Playlist (April 2020) (Patreon)

Hey everyone! 

Mark here with your Playlist for April 2020. I hope you're all staying safe. As ever, you can watch the playlist video above, or read the entries down below!

Observation

So, Observation is a basically the opposite of Event[0] - instead of being a human who works with a computer, you’re a computer who works with a human. So, you’re SAM - or System Administration Maintenance - who is an AI aboard an international space station. And when the station goes into critical alert mode, you’re gonna have to help astronaut Emma Fisher fix things up, and figure out what’s gone wrong.

This generally involves flipping between cameras, remotely accessing things like laptops and climate sensors, and solving cute but simple puzzles. 

When I first started this game, I thought it had wonderful potential. The atmosphere is kinda spooky, the way you look and move around the station is novel, and the story sets up some tasty mysteries.

Unfortunately, though, it didn’t live up to the potential in my eyes. For starters, the game feels like one long tutorial - Emma basically tells you exactly what to do at every juncture, leaving you to simply follow orders and do exactly what you’re told. Sometimes Emma will even shout at you if you’re too slow, which didn’t feel great. There’s a few moments where you can choose which task you do first, but it’s hardly much agency. It just feels very restrictive. I suppose that’s what being a computer would feel like - following orders. 

Next, while the CCTV camera system is really clever, the game gives up on this conceit at several key moments by letting you take control of a floating sphere. You can then move freely around the ship, and even into outer space for a couple space walks. A lot of the tension and claustrophobia gained by the camera system is lost in these moments. Plus, the level design of the ship is very maze-like and samey, so it’s really not that much fun to navigate.

Then there’s the puzzles. They’re very simplistic and some get repeated. There’s a puzzle where you need to find a computer password written on a post-it note and then type it into a computer - and then you have to do the exact same thing again a little while later. And then there’s the story which is okay, but a bit predictable and kinda feels like a bunch of sci-fi tropes and cliches chucked into a blender. And the the idea of an evil AI - as seen in 2001 and System Shock and Portal and Event[0] - wasn’t really explored to its full extent. A shame, as playing as the AI itself was a great opportunity for that.

So, sadly, I didn’t love my time with Observation. There’s some great ideas in there, the atmosphere is on point, and I think the idea of seeing a game through CCTV cameras is a wonderful idea. Classic Resident Evil wasn’t doing that exactly, but the restrictive fixed angles did contribute to their sense of fear. And the game Republique explored this idea, too. I’d like to see more games tackle it. But Observation just missed the mark too many times for me to fully recommend it. 

Half Life Alyx

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been playing a new Half-Life game in 2020. But hey, here we are. Stranger things have happened.

If you missed the news, this is a VR exclusive that’s set between Half Life 1 and 2, and puts you in the shoes - and more, importantly - gloves of franchise favourite Alyx Vance. You’ll then trek through City 17, solve puzzles, fight combine soldiers, and hopefully save your dad from imprisonment.

The tone of the game finds a nice middle ground between Half-Life and Portal. There are scary, frought, frantic firefights against zombies and headcrabs in the subway - but also jokes and witty dialogue delivered by a chap named Russell: voiced by the hilarious Rhys Darby from Flight of the Conchords. Both provide a change of pace from each other.

As a VR game, Alyx works really well. Combat is fun because of the physicality provided. You can duck and hide behind cover. You have full control over how you throw grenades. And you can even use environmental objects to bat headcrabs in mid-air. I kinda wish it focused more on those fun physical interactions than simple shooting, actually.

Shooting does feel good, but the ammo system is a bit overcomplicated. Reloading a gun is a fiddly sequence of buttons and interactions: a button to discharge your clip, a motion to insert a new one, another to discharge the final spent bullet. Realistic? Probably. But I’m so used to reloading being a single button press that I often died simply because I was too busy remembering how to load new bullets. 

Another good idea is Alyx’s gloves: which are basically precursors to Gordon’s gravity gun. This lets you magnetically pluck ammo and objects towards you, which certainly helps when moving around in VR is a little tricky.

Sure, you can just move around with the analogue stick like a normal FPS but unless you’ve got serious VR sea legs you’ll be nauseous in a matter of minutes. Better to use the teleport system to blink between zones. A little odd, but at least your stomach will like you.

Overall, Half-Life Alyx is a really fun experience. It’s less about being a good game, though, and more about being an exciting, immersive experience. Outside of VR this would be a pretty bog standard shooter with cute puzzles. But it’s all about that experience of really being inside City 17, of seeing iconic stuff like Combine soldiers and Striders in, what can feel like real-life. For any Half-Life fan, that’s impossible to pass up.

Unfortunately my Oculus Rift stopped working, so I've only played the first half. Boo! 

Assemble with Care

I spent a bit of time checking out some Apple Arcade games, and Assemble with Care is one that definitely caught my attention. It comes from Monument Valley developer ustwo games, and it’s a gentle, puzzle-ish game with a wholesome story - similar to Florence, in some ways.

Basically, you play as a repairwoman who has rocked up to some tranquil town and ends up getting called upon to fix everyone’s old gear. So you’ll be unscrewing compartments, swapping out dead lightbulbs, rewiring components, and switching fuses - all in the aid of repairing dodgy projectors, cameras, and a funky Game Boy-style handheld.

These sections are really quite cute in their presentation. The equipment to be fixed is a 3D object that you can spin with your fingers, and then you can pick up tools and spare parts to help you work on the object at hand. Everything is laid out neatly before you, and I love how screws end up in a cute little pot. 

But it’s also rather straightforward. The game pretty much tells you what to do at every instance, and the limited number of items and interact-able elements makes it obvious what to do next. For me, at least, I was hoping that after a couple handheld tutorial stages, the game would open up with really complex machines and difficult problems to fix. They didn’t really come, sadly.

I mean, I’m probably expecting too much. Repairing stuff isn’t the point of the game - the point is that repairing objects is a metaphor for repairing relationships and boy, that’s very twee. I played this with my fiancé and I can safely say that the game’s attempt at emotional storytelling landed with a thud for us. And, trust me, we absolutely bawled our eyes out playing Florence. So, we should be good weathervanes for this stuff.

Anyway. It’s hard to be too disappointed by Apple Arcade games. They’re basically free, and seem kind of designed to be disposable, short-lived scraps of entertainment. But I definitely saw some potential in Assemble with Care, and have to say that I’m sad it never quite lived up to that.