Playlist (January 2021) (Patreon)

Hello everyone! This is the Playlist, where I talk about three of the games I've been playing in the last month. You can watch it as a video, or read it as an article. Have it your way, like Burger King.

Call of the Sea

Call of the Sea is a first-person adventure, set on a mysterious South Pacific Island in the 1930s. It's a mix of walking simulator - as you piece together the narrative from found documents and diaries. And puzzle game - as you solve Myst-like conundrums in the environment.

I desperately wanted to like this game, but it suffers from an almost fatal flaw: TPS. Or, talkative protagonist syndrome. This is when the hero of the game needs to chime in at every moment, and accidentally steal away much of the game's fun.

You see, a walking sim (like Gone Home) is about finding stuff and then inferring the narrative yourself. As the player you need to read these notes, make connections, decipher meaning, and piece together the plot in your head. However, the hero of Call of the Sea has a nasty habit of immediately blurting out the key details of whatever you find.

You might find a note and before you've even finished reading it, hero Norah will say something like "sounds like there was a rivalry between these two people!".

And so, soon enough, I stopped paying attention to the environmental storytelling and just let Norah tell the story to me - changing my position from active and engaged narrative archeologist - as you are in games like Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn, to passive listener. Which is far less exciting if you ask me.

A similar thing happens with the game's puzzles. Norah carries a journal and jots down things that might be useful for solving the game's conundrums: like symbols, constellations, and numbers. Again, this meant I didn't need to be so engaged: I didn't need to carefully figure out what was an important puzzle-solving detail - because the game was happy to just tell me! I could ignore everything that wasn't put into the journal.

I can see why the game did this: it stops you from needing to play with a pad of paper next to you (though, I don't see this as a bad thing!). But there are other solutions - one iOS puzzler I played gave you a camera so you can take photos of things that might be useful and refer back to your album when it comes time to input codes and whatnot.

So yeah - while I sadly didn't love my time with Call of the Sea, it definitely teaches a good lesson. As a designer, the level to which you aid the player in key aspects of the game completely changes their level of engagement. And we see this in other games too: how not having a map in Dark Souls makes you more engaged in navigation, for example. Maybe this is a video topic, actually. I don't know - we'll see!

Silent Hill 2

Every Christmas I like to spend a bit of my holiday break playing an older game that I've never played. So in 2020 it was time to finally face my fears and try… Silent Hill 2.

This is a horror game for the PlayStation 2, first released in 2001. It's about a man named James Sunderland who heads to the town of Silent Hill to look for his deceased wife - after she sends him a mysterious letter from beyond the grave.

What ensues is, at face value, a typical survival horror game. You're dodging monsters and using limited ammo on bosses. You're finding keys, reading maps, and backtracking through apartment blocks. But you soon realise that there's more beneath the surface.

The characters are all a bit off, the town is weirdly deserted, and you soon realise that you've been travelling downwards a lot. Like, a lot. If this was real, you'd be deep beneath the Earth by now. And this is because, ultimately, this is a psychological horror game - it's more about what's happening in James's mind than the town of Silent Hill.

Now, in 2021 this might sound a bit trite. There's been dozens of indie games that plunge into the hero's subconscious for psychological storytelling. But for a 20 year old game, it's pretty impressive. It was very much ahead of its time, and I think deserves its cult status.

And, to be honest, it still works today: it's all very unsettling and uncomfortable, which is a refreshing change of pace from jump scares and unstoppable monsters. And it's largely very playable. I played it on a PS2 emulator via Xbox Series X and up-rezzed to 1080p it looks very dashing. If you haven't played it, give it a shot.

Hitman 3

I have been utterly obsessed with Hitman 3 this month. It's the final game in a trilogy of globe-trotting assassination sims, about a bald bloke who kills his targets in the most wacky way possible: whether that's dressing up as a racing mascot, dropping a piano on their head, or slipping them a laxative and then drowning them in the bog.

As the third entry in a series, you'll definitely know what to expect by now. The game doesn't change all that much, fundamentally. But that's a-okay, because all anyone really wants with Hitman is new maps to discover, memorise, and master.

Like, for example, Chongqing - a Chinese mega city where target one is doing human experiments at the top of a heavily guarded apartment block, and target two is doing the rounds in a super secret lab buried deep below a dumpling shop.

A favourite level is set in a stately mansion in Dartmoor. The target stalks between her office and bedroom on the top floor, but can be lured outside for a photograph - or a perfect spot for a sniper assassination. But there's another way to play this mission: someone in the house has died of apparent suicide and if you snatch the private detective's overcoat you can do some deduction of your own.

Now you're finding clues, following leads, and snapping photographs of muddy shoe prints before making a conclusion. You can even help the murderer to off your target for you. It's a clever twist on the formula and shows a potential for using this sort of interconnected, carefully choreographed level design for something other than murder. I'd like to see that game.

Another welcome twist on the formula comes in a level set in Berlin, where there are a whopping 10 targets roaming in and around a secret nightclub. However, 47 only needs to ice five of them.

You see, the way I play Hitman is to fumble my way through the mission a few times, trying different kills and routes. And all the time, I'm thinking about how I'll be able to do the ultimate challenge: suit only, silent assassin - i.e. do the whole thing without getting spotted and without wearing a disguise. With 10 targets to pick from, I could figure out who would be the best five to murder within those tight constraints. Solving this puzzle was an absolute highlight.

I've still got a couple more levels to play, and a few old Hitman 2 levels I missed, and then I'll be very sad because that is seemingly it for Hitman! The trilogy is over and IO Interactive is moving on to James Bond. Here's hoping the studio puts everything its learned into a new era of sneaky spy gameplay.

That's me for January! See you next month.