Playlist (September 2020) (Patreon)

Hello everyone! 

I've had a good month for gaming. Which is to say that I played about 2 hours of the Avengers game and got so demoralised about the state of modern games that I flinched so hard I ended up in 2018 and just played older games instead. Though, with one notable exception. 

Let's get started. Watch it as a video above, or read it below.

Frostpunk

So I finally checked out Frostpunk. This game comes from 11bit Studios, who are best known for the morally-challenging survival game This War of Mine.

Frostpunk has some of the same themes - morals and survival - but the set-up is very different. This one is a city-building game, set in a post-apocalyptic snowball world where temperatures regularly dip below minus 40 degrees. Luckily, there's a massive coal-powered furnace that you can build your town around - literally. Instead of building on a bog-standard grid, your city spirals out in a unique radial system.

Anyway. So, the game is all about gathering and then managing resources. You'll need to get coal, wood, steel, and food - carefully deciding where to spend your precious materials for the most gain.

What makes it really fun is that weather system. Throughout the course of the campaign, the temperature will regularly drop even further - forcing you to suddenly shift gears and figure out how to maximise warmth even more. Perhaps shutting down production for a while so you can spend more on heaters. 

And then things get even more hectic in the end game, when a giant storm-to-end-all-storms rolls in, plunging the thermometer past minus 100 degrees. It turns into a crisis that will really test your ability to keep everyone warm. I really loved this moment: it felt tense and cinematic and I felt enormously satisfied when the storm finally passed and most of my civilians still had all their toes.

Now, back to This War of Mine for a second. That game worked wonders by really asking you the question: how far would you go to survive? It regularly asked you to steal and kill other civilians in order to keep your own people alive. It was full of moral dilemmas, and routinely made you feel like a monster.

Frostpunk has some of the same choices: for example, you quickly have to decide whether children will be made to work in mines or not. But I found this side of things almost entirely ineffective. I don't know why, but these tricky moral choices didn't weigh on me at all. Perhaps it was the zoomed out view, turning my people into tiny pixels knocking about. Or perhaps it was the fraught nature of the situation - if we don't make hard choices, humanity will be over. But either way, I felt like this part of the game fell a little flat. Maybe I'm just a monster.

This didn't matter, mind you. I still enjoyed the game massively without that aspect. But it's interesting that what worked so wonderfully in one game, had little impact in another. Game design, huh? What a nightmare.

Forza Horizon 4

I fancied a driving game this month, so I decided to try one of the better-reviewed racing games of the last few years: Forza Horizon 4.

The Horizon games are open-world driving games, in the same vein as Burnout Paradise. This one takes place in a weird crunched down amalgamation of Great Britain, where it takes about 5 minutes to drive from Edinburgh to Oxford. It also takes place during all four seasons, allowing you to drive across frozen lakes in the winter or into fields of sheep in the spring. 

As a racing game, it feels wonderful. It's got a great physics system powering the cars, it sounds amazing, and there's a never-ending series of races to take part in. I especially love the showcase events, which are mad experimental races that might have you competing against, say, a train. Or a jet plane. Or a banshee from Halo. 

I also dig the game's approach to difficulty. While you can of course pick the challenge level of the other drivers - you can also tweak lots of little things about how your car works, such as automated steering and braking, transmission type, and more. 

I mean, sure, this is a part of lots of racing games. But it's an interesting thing I've been thinking about: the game lets you not only change the difficulty of the game but also the complexity level of the game's core mechanics. Racing game experts can have manual transmission and simulation-level handling, while newbies can have a fun arcade experience with automatic gears and assisted breaking. Everyone gets to have fun.

The only thing I have to say about Horizon is that I don't really care about the game's main claim to fame: the open world. I quickly realised that I didn't care about finding hidden cars or smashing little billboards. And I'm not going to designing my own tracks. So I just ended up with a normal racing game but one where I have to drive between races instead of just picking them from a menu. A small annoyance that eventually stopped me from playing the game any further. Shame.

Spelunky 2

Yeah, you better believe I've been playing Spelunky 2. Like, a lot.

The elevator pitch, if you've somehow never played the first game. This is a cute platformer - part Mario, part Castlevania - but with randomised level design. And if you die, it's right back to the beginning of the game. It's tough and routinely maddening - but it's also fair, stuffed with secrets, and crafted from interlocking systems that regularly lead to hilarious anecdotes.

The sequel is, very much, more Spelunky. You'll find the same items, the same monsters, and some of the same world themes. The shopkeepers are back, Kali is back, the black market is back. But there's just more now. It's kinda like a Spelunky expansion pack that adds a bunch of new bits and bobs into an existing package.

But that's actually more impressive than it sounds. Spelunky was a perfect video game, don't try to deny it. And so adding anything new is like trying to balance on a Jenga block tower. But almost every addition - like rideable turkeys, dynamic fluid systems, clever new systemic connections, and more, all fit without toppling the tower.

And so it's still a perfect game, but I - as someone who put hundreds of hours into the first game - get to experience the excitement of secrets and surprising interactions all over again. And also the feeling of slowly getting better and mastering a hard game - because, damn, this game is kicking my butt. It's much harder than the first game, which is good for Spelunky veterans but might destroy those who never mastered the first one.

Either way, my time with this game is very much just beginning - so I'll let you know how I get on in the future.

That's your lot for September. See you next month!