#DiscoverIndies: Apocalipsis: Wormwood Edition - Harry at the End of the World (NS)

Like a lot of games that catch my eye while browsing in the Nintendo eShop, Apocalipsis: Wormwood Edition looked interesting, and the title alone... yeah, I am a sucker of apocalyptic stories.  The game is a point-and-click adventure but somewhat stripped down compared to other titles like Thimbleweed Park and even The Office Quest.  In Apocalipsis, all of the items you need to proceed through the puzzles in the single screen, are all located in that screen.  You do not have to constantly try out items on objects hoping that they will work, breaking immersion (kind of), and turning the game into a chore rather than an experience.

I feel like for this game, I just want to share a bunch of the screenshots because that was the biggest draw for me.  I did enjoy the story, somewhat posthumously (in terms of finishing the game), and it was only after finishing the game did I realize that there are multiple endings, possibly based on how many flowers you find throughout the game, as well as the order of the items you select to turn into a potion in the end of the game.  For me, I was just trying to pick up stuff and then haphazardly made whatever poisonous concoction that earned me the Bad Ending.  But that really depends on your take on the game as I thought that the ending was fairly fitting for the character.  Kind of.

As I mentioned in last Monday's article, there is a lot to unpack in this game, both in terms in the decision to use woodcuts as the predominant art style, and then there is the story itself which involves the character of Harry in his adventure/quest to rescue his love, Luka.  The story to Apocalipsis is revealed as you play the game, and for me, it was not until I had finished the game and reread all of the mid-scene narrations that the story really made sense.

Perhaps the decision was to spread the story throughout the entire game rather than right at the beginning because there is no talking between the characters, all of the stories are given during these narrated scenes from Harry's memory.  Like I mentioned, it was only after I finished the game and was looking back through the screenshots, rereading the screens that gave the voiceover narration, did the entire story click for me.  Definitely one of those "Ahhhhhh, moments."  Some of the more obscure scenes still escape me as I am sure there is some deeper meaning behind the character and design choices.

Really it just boils down to if you like point-and-click adventure games with minimal inventory management.  Since all of the items you need to complete the puzzles are all located in the screen you start in, some moments may devolve to clicking anywhere and everywhere on the screen hoping that something gets picked up that you might be able to use elsewhere on the screen.  It did feel quite good not having to look up a walkthrough guide to get through this game, and that there was not anything that led me to overthink many of the puzzles.

Now to play the prequel, One Night in the Woods, which thankfully comes bundled in the Wormwood Edition, and I am hoping that the story will flow a little better now that I know the generalized events that lead to Harry on his quest to save and have my own head-canon for what happens.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental


P.S.
One last for the road.

MIDI Week Singles: "Take Us Back" - The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season (NS)

"Take Us Back" from The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season on nearly every gaming platform ever (2012)

Composer: Alela Diane

Album: To Be Still

Label: Rough Trade

Publisher: Skybound Games

Developer: Telltale Games

Last weekend I finished replaying The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season on the Nintendo Switch. "Take Us Back" by Alela Diane is the closing credits song after the final episode in the first season and I am kind of surprised I hadn't looked up the artist or the album back in 2014.

Now, lyrics analysis is not one of my strong suits, so since this song was chosen to be played during the end credits as opposed to it being written specifically for the game, I could probably do a really bad job of guessing how the lyrics could be interpreted into the world of The Walking Dead.  Instead, I will just say that after the last 10 minutes of Episode 5 "No Time Left," the solemnness of the song was a perfect match in feeling and tone.  Plus the title of the song and the chorus of "Take us back/ take us back/ take us, take us back" acted like a cry for a world lost, and a return to simpler and less chaotic times.  And that is not entirely untrue these days either, although with significantly fewer zombies.  There's your lyric analysis!

It is a pretty song and the only one that I know from Alela Diane.  So maybe I will just listen to more.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental

Game EXP: The Office Quest (NS)

I picked up this game for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, I currently work in an office.  Granted it is a small office housing only three other people and directly below us is a rather tasty brewpub and taproom, but it is an office.  And I worked in a workers compensation insurance claim office (in various departments) for three-and-a-half years.  Also, the idea of an office full of people inexplicably wearing onesies was rather humorous.  So I picked up the game when it was on sale and over the course of a week, playing here and there, I spent about five hours and finished the story.

Because this is a point-and-click game, I did overthink a couple of the puzzles, but thankfully all of the puzzles were relegated to an area, so it was not like I had to go from one room in the office, down a flight of stairs, into a bathroom, down a drainpipe through a hole in the floor of the bathroom in order to use the key that I found lodged inside a coworkers CD drive to unlock the electronic safe that had shorted out due to the leaky bathroom pipe which contains the printer paper you need in order to print out the report that you have to deliver to your boss.  No, the puzzles here were not that stupidly complicated even though some did span a couple of screens, but the screens were literally screen-sized playing areas.  And, you did not have to worry about inventory management, or wonder when you were supposed to use that stapler in order to unlock the hidden ending.

I think my biggest critique with The Office Quest was that there was not enough office in the game.

Only the first section of the game is spent in the actual office, but then you climb out through a grate located in a storage room, through a pipe/tunnel and then you emerge out of a tree in a forest.

The rest of the game is spent following a flitty red/orange object that distracted you back at the beginning of the game, your Magoffin if you will, through a series of bizarre locations, meeting all kinds of strange characters along the way.

The puzzles are a combination of logic puzzles with some environmental puzzles thrown in for good measure, as well as a couple of I-Have-No-Clue-What-To-Do puzzles, again because I tend to overthink point-and-click games.  I did, in fact, have to consult various walkthroughs for a couple of the puzzles, one of which required me to go back a couple of screens to events that started after you leave the screen (as in, there was not a car full of people when you were last in the screen, and two screens later, you are expected to know that you should go back and find a said car full of people in order to get $50 from one of them?).

I feel like by the end of the game I felt. . .good?  It is kind of hard to explain.  I enjoyed the game overall and although I did need assistance on a couple of the more confusing and obscure puzzles, I thought that I did a decent job in figuring some of the more difficult ones out on my own, which is a good feeling.  As the credits rolled, I did not feel in awe by the experience, which was a little disappointing after having eyed the game for over six months.  That being said, I am happy that I picked up The Office Quest and spent the time with it, even more so because it was on sale.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Create & Share!" - Chicken Wiggle (3DS)

"Create & Share!" from Chicken Wiggle on the 3DS (2017)

Composer: Matthew Gambrell

Album: Chicken Wiggle 

Label: Bandcamp

Publisher: Atooi

Developer: Atooi

I do not think I need to use the disclaimer here (again), so I will just link to the original Game EXP article I wrote almost three years ago.  Interestingly enough, I had mentioned using this track for a MIDI Week Singles article so that is where I wanted to land for today (being a day late from yesterday).

"Create & Share!" was probably one of my favorite tracks from the game, which is a little amusing as it is the music that plays while you create your own stages that you later share in the in-game's dedicated library of user-created content.  There is just something about the melody predominantly hear on a keyboard-type instrument, but then there is also a flute that comes in a couple of times that just really endears the song to me even more than had the flute not been there at all.  The flute does make more appearances later on in the soundtrack carrying the melody.  And all of this works really well while using the in-game toolkit to create custom levels (a la Super Mario Maker being the closest comparison).  The song is interesting enough to have on the background on a four-minute loop when you are pretty sure that you are going to be spending more than four minutes creating, tooling, and fine-tuning stages.

I am very interested to see how this song develops when the game is essentially remade after a successful Kickstarter campaign (back in 2018) when it is released later this year on the Switch as Hatch Tales, which will include newly orchestrated music from Grant Kirkhope.  Will he use themes already written by Matthew Gambrell or an entirely new melody?

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

A Mess Without Words

Writing About Not Being Able To Write (July 2020 Edition)

Things are strange. Not just the fact that I'm typing this on my phone while standing in the kitchen cooking dinner, that's just first world problems level of strange. But I mean that we are 131 days into a global pandemic with no coherent plan of action from our federal government.  Then, in the city we live in, there have been 5o nights of protests against violence caused and exasperated by not just local police, but by police departments all over the United States, and for about a week now, undeclared and unidentified federal enforcement (as in they have not publicly declared which government organization they are affiliated with, or have any way of identifying them on their uniform, even by their last name) have been using tear gas and low impact munitions (I forgot the specific term) on people gathering peacefully as well as kidnapping people for undisclosed offenses.

On the gaming side of things, I have been finding it difficult to write articles over the last couple of weeks. It's not that I don't have games or content to write about, I think it's just the motivation is lacking. Last month I finished The Sinking City after playing about 75 hours and I have a two-part article half-written. I was also in the process of writing an article for Wolfenstein: The New Order when I ended up finishing Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (both on PC) and so I decided to combine the two into one article and then that article stalled as well; but I feel that I need to write that article before I start in on Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus , and Wolfenstein: Youngblood (both on the Switch) otherwise I may never write/finish/publish those/that article(s).  In the last couple of weeks, I also finished Old Man's Journey, The Office Quest, and played through the first game in the Apocalipsis: Deadwood Edition for #DiscoverIndies. I have also been replaying through The Walking Dead: A Telltale Games Series, The Complete First Season, and recently started Golf Story.  

{At this point I continued writing from my work computer while on break(s)}

Sometimes my process usually includes uploading pictures I have taken to folders on my computer, looking through them while creating a rough outline of things I want to cover.  Other times I will just start writing about the game, whatever comes to mind first, then I will write in blocks and rearrange the paragraphs as a greater theme or narrative develops.  Maybe it is because the last three games I have played were all point-and-click, or at least variations on that genre that makes it difficult to write about.  "I then went to this room where the puzzle was particularly difficult, and I did have to resort to using a guide to help me through, but otherwise it was a decently created puzzle, even if a little obscure."  I could probably put this one sentence into every other article I have for point-and-click adventure games, and maybe that is the problem?

I also think that sometimes I end up too deep in my own head and have grand ideas for articles that end up being too big in scale to properly execute.  Take Apocalipsis: Deadwood Edition for instance.  The game pulls heavily from the art of woodcuts, specifically 15th-century woodcuts, focusing heavily on Albrecht Dürer, as well as the Danse Macabre woodcut by Micheal Wolgemut.  It also uses a lot of occult themes and imagery from that same period.  I want to cover all of this information and do the game justice because it really was a fun game that was not too difficult as far as puzzles go, and I loved the visual aesthetic.

What I am now thinking that I might do is do a light-writing article and just share some of the screenshots that I feel cover what I loved about the imagery in the game.  And not just for Apocalipsis: Wormwood Edition, but for the other point-and-click games I have/want/need to write about.  Maybe there does not need to be an in-depth analysis of every game, even the ones that I have loved playing, just the ones that I feel I have the time to invest in writing.

I think that is where some of this comes from, the time commitment to play games and share that experience.  I do try to share some of that on my Twitter account although I would rather not have that become my primary source of sharing/reviewing games. However, it does afford a lot less time; but with the character limit still stuck at 140 for Twitter posts from the Switch, that makes writing more difficult.

We will see.  I think I just needed something to write about, so writing about not being able to write about something seemed like the obvious choice.  See y'all on Wednesday.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
I Stumble Through The Rugged Door

P.S.
Black Lives Matter

MIDI Week Singles: "Funky's Fugue" - Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

"Funky's Fugue" from Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1994)
Composer: Robin Beanland
Album: DK Jamz: The Original Donkey Kong Country Sound Track
Label: Nintendo Power
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Rare

I decided to use music from Donkey Kong Country today because it was just released on Nintendo's SNES Online app on the Nintendo Switch.  We have previously covered music from this game in the past, although this track is the only one that was composed by Robin Beanland, with the rest being written by David Wise and Eveline Fischer.

Being one of the more high energy songs in the game, it is interesting that it is relegated to essentially menu music for when you want to fast travel between the locations on the island.  So I guess it kind of makes sense.  Doesn't it just make you want to dance?  It might have that effect on me if my arms and legs had any sense of cooperative rhythm with my brain, but that's the way things happen.  But I just wanted to share with y'all one of my favorite songs from this game, and from one of my favorite composers from Rare.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

So Far Out Of Reach

MIDI Week Singles: "Into the Water" - Old Man's Journey (NS)

"Into the Water" from Old Man's Journey on the PC, iOS, Mac, Android (2016), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch (2018), & Xbox One (2019)

Composer: scntfc

Album: Old Man's Journey Original Soundtrack

Label: ScienceLab

Publisher: Broken Rules

Developer: Broken Rules

I played and finished Old Man's Journey last week, although I ended up listening to the soundtrack the day after I started and finished the first area and quickly fell in love with "Into the Water."  This song accompanies the second stage in the game, when the Old Man journies away from the hotel, through the countryside, falls down no fewer than four waterfalls, then watches as an old boat is pulled out of the water.  That is pretty much the entire level, which could be played during the entirety of the song without it repeating.  Then the last section of the song (~3:26) is the music that plays during the end of the level flashback, which then returns to the normal song when the memory is over.

Another thing I love about this song is the instrumentation.  That it could be a couple people sitting around a table or in a living room, just jamming on their respective instruments.  Maybe reminiscing about the old times?  Then the audio quality at the end of the song during the memory section, sounding like it is being played from a slightly warped and scratched record, maybe recently discovered stashed in the back of a cabinet for the last 30 years and newly discovered is a really nice touch.

That's really all I have on this song.  It's fun and a nice contrast to the environmental puzzles in Old Man's Journey becoming ever so slightly more difficult as you progress through the game (and panic as the Old Man falls down yet another waterfall and you wonder how he has not yet broken a hip).

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Instrumental

Monthly Update: July 2020

It's June.

Fuck.  No, it's July.

I realize I could have just edited that first two-word sentence, but it seemed like the way to go considering how this year is shaping out to be.

So welcome to July 2020.

As of this writing, the county I live in is still in Phase 1 of reopening while the majority of the state is in Phase 2 and looking forward to Phase 3, all the while infection rates for COVID-19 are steadily on the rise, breaking the record number of newly reported cases every couple of days.  Thankfully though our (current) total infected since the beginning of March (8,931)is still lower than what Florida reported on June 27th.  It was 9,585 new cases.  In one day.  One.  Day.

And the protests are still going (which is a good thing) and there are signs of progress in one form or another.  Mississippi finally joined 1865 last month and decided that having a racist symbol used to oppress an entire ethnicity (and any other non-white ethnicity) was probably not a cool thing to do in this day and age, although what their new state flag will look like has not yet been solidified beyond requiring it to have "In God, We Trust" emblazed somewhere, so things could still go deeper south if they are not careful.  In the last week, there has been more attention drawn to the death of Elijah McClain who was murdered by police in Aurora, CO and the chances of that case being reopened or re-evaluated are growing, which is good.  Meanwhile, two of the three police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor are still gainfully employed and one has been fired, but none have been arrested and tried.  Which is bad.  And thankfully the death of Robert Fuller is being reexamined by the FBI after he was found hanging from a tree in Palmdale, CA two weeks after Malcolm Harsch's body was found also hung from a tree in Victorville, CA.  Both were initially categorized as suicides.  This closer examination of both crime scenes is a good thing.  And in the last four days, there have been two separate instances of white people pulling guns on either protesters or people that they themselves hit with their car.

I have no idea how to transition from this.

But hey*, I did manage to kill over 1,190 nazis while playing through Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, as well as the 949 that I killed playing Wolfenstein: The New Order, as well as however many I will kill in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Wolfenstein: Youngblood.  Yeah, I'm a sucker for this series.  I also finished The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition on the Switch and there (should?) be a two-part series coming out for that game, which was a lot of fun and far from the dumpster fire that certain swaths of the gaming community would have you believe.  I also finished Old Man's Journey which was a nice emotional ride in and of itself.  And I have been playing Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and I will have a review of that game that may get me banned in a few online circles, but that's just the way the brass tacks fall these days.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Instrumental

*I really need to work on my transitions.

MIDI Week Singles: "The Partisan (feat. Tex Perkins)" - Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (PC)

"The Partisan (feat. Tex Perkins)" from Wolfenstein: The Old Blood on PC, PlayStation 4, & XBox One (2015)

Composer: Mick Gordon

Album: Wolfenstein: The Old Blood Soundtrack

Label: Soundcloud

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Developer: MachineGames

I just finished Wolfenstein: The Old Blood over the last weekend and it was a nazi-killing-fun-fest of a good time.  The music did not stand out to me as much as it did in Wolfenstein: The New Order or there were not any many instances or cut scenes to showcase Mick Gordon's music.  

And then the credits rolled and "The Partisan (feat. Tex Perkins)" started playing and everything changed.

Now, all of a sudden having a song with lyrics as credits music when the rest of the music in the media (film, video games, etc) can be a little jarring and in the case of Gangs of New York, seem grossly out of place or just rip you out of the immersion created from the last couple of hours of storytelling; yes, I have issues with this particular example.  While having "The Partisan (feat. Tex Perkins)" play as the credits rolled was a bit unexpected, it was wholly welcome.  The only change I might have made was to actually have the song start earlier, during the final cutscene with the planes flying off towards Deathshead's compound (the beginning of Wolfenstein: The New Order) and then the vocals come in when the title card pops up at the beginning of the credits.  But that is just me.

And while writing/researching this article, I found out that this song is actually a cover of an anti-fascist French Resistance song written in 1943 by Anna Marly and the lyrics by  Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, called "La Complainte du partisan," or literally, "The Lament of the partisan."  That this song could have existed in the alternate timeline of W:TOB is pretty rad, and this cover being metal-ified by Mick Gordan music and Tex Perkins' vocals just add to the badassness of the song and the message of anti-fascism, which is something that is not out of place in our reality, 77 years later.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Let The Blood Flow