Game EXP: Innsmouth 22 (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Innsmouth 22 through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Innsmouth 22

Systems: Windows, Linux*

Release Date: October 25, 2024

Publisher: Raven Novels

Developer: Raven Novels

Time Spent: 6 Hours 42 Minutes

First off, we have an entire playthrough of Innsmouth 22 up on our YouTube channel here if you want to go watch that before reading the article.  But just a heads up, it runs about 6.5 hours, and it's best watched in chunks, probably not all in one go.  And apologies for the seemingly random cut-off times for the videos.  Since there werne't any specific chapters, I decided to end a video either when Lorenzo went to bed, or when I myself started dozing off.  Secondly, the developer mentioned this on the Steam page, but Innsmouth 22 exclusively uses AI-generated art.  From what I can tell, the rest of the in-game text is all created and written by Raven Novels, although as evidenced by the title, is heavily inspired by The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft, but only in ways that we'll get to later.  Secondly, while I haven't found 

The game follows an Italian professor, Lorenzo Righi as he travels to New England for a conference for fringe and mainstream history where he takes a short trip to the small town of Innsmouth that was organized on his behalf by the group that organized the conference.  What was nice about the overall story in Innsmouth 22 was that while it was inspired by The Shadow Over Innsmouth, it is not an attempt at a direct translation or retelling of that story.  You know, an adaptation.  Because Innsmouth 22 takes place in the present day, Raven Novels immediately has to come up with reasons how and why Lorenzo would react to certain events and anomalies while carrying around a smartphone.  It's an approach that I really appreciate because I feel it's almost easier to create a period piece and limit the technology available to our main character which does increase the tension why you can't just make a phone call or look up information on Google.

Because the game only uses AI-generated art, it was sometimes difficult to gauge the actual look and feel of the town of Innsmouth, especially as the story progressed.  In the story by Lovecraft, it's described as:

    ... a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. [...] The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. [...]

    The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier, and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots.1

The Innsmouth in Innsmouth 22 is an interesting anomaly.  At first, it's described in a similar manner to the Innsmouth in the book, but as the story progresses, it is described and appears to be a more hospitable town.  While not a bustling and vibrant coastal community, there are people around here and there, although I don't recall anyone being described as having the "Innsmouth look" but regular people who just lived in a small New England fishing town.  What further confused me a bit about Raven Novel's depiction of Innsmouth was that later in the game, Lorenzo makes a comparison to H.P. Lovecraft's stories which then brings up several dozen questions about this world, mainly, is this fictional town then supposed to have just been the basis for Lovecraft's real story about a fictionalized version of the in-story real Innsmouth?  I don't know if I worded all of that correctly, but I think my point might've come across?  Yes?

There are several connections Innsmouth 22 has to the source material such as a church that isn't specifically named but we can assume that it's the Esoteric Order of Dagon as Lorenzo accidentally wanders upon a ceremony/mass one of the evenings he's in town.  There's also the character of Zadok, although here he's not the exposition dumping Zadok Allen, but instead, he's Jim Zadok who's unemployed but living on a pension who does give Lorezno a bit of history on Innsmouth, but most of that had been left to an unnamed Bartender in the previous scene.  Together they're both contextually important scenes, and I suppose that they were split up between two people to create more characters in the town, and again, this is just an adaptation.

And this is an adaptation after all.  There are references to the break into the hotel room at the Gilman Hotel, there's references to Deep Ones and Deep One Hybrids but not in such a prevalent way that they are used in the book, there's the sequence with the Bartender talking about the Marsh and Eliot families although here it is almost a variant retelling of Dagon; although thankfully it never felt that Raven Novels was trying to shoehorn in every other Lovecraftian reference.  Lorenzo does discover familial connections to But Lorenzo is allowed to leave Innsmouth halfway through the story and continue with his conference, which surprisingly, has the player sit through several minutes of multiple speakers instead of glossing over the conference itself.  

Rather than try to finish writing an exhaustive book report, I'll say that the remainder of the game there were some interesting choices as far as the story went.  There were additional revelations about Deep Ones, there was more international travel, and surprisingly considering Lorenzo's penchant for describing nearly every woman he met, there was no infidelity.  Or maybe I just made the correct dialogue and choice options to avoid that scenario?  I did greatly appreciate that there were frequent choices that I could make so it wasn't just pressing either A or ZR for the whole 6.5 hours.  Even if the different choices ultimately led to the same outcome, it was nice to at least have the illusion of agency in a visual novel.

I had several issues with the game. Most notably, because the game was originally written in Italian and translated into English, at times, it felt that the translation was not the greatest in the world.  This is not a dig at Raven Novels or an attempt at Anglocentrism as most everything was legible and I did experience a full story.  There were times when the translation though didn't feel either fully authentic or I would think, "That's an interesting way to phrase that."  Secondly, and related to this, was that there were times when there was no English translation and Italian came up on the screen.  In my head, I had created the headcanon that this happened because a character was just super excited about something and slipped into using Italian.  I'm not 100% sure if it happened with any character that would not have spoken Italian, but that was what I thought.

The last thing was the use of AI art, which I partly understand, but I found it at times distracting.  I know the generalities of what to look for when you're trying to determine if a picture is AI-generated like where lights are hung, table and chair legs, windows, light sources, etc, and since I already knew that this game exclusively used AI-generated art, I knew what I was getting into, but at times I found myself more compelled to look at a setting for things that looked off or structurally impossible.  On that note, there was a drastic change in artistic style toward the end of the game (Episode 11 if you're watching along) when Lorenzo, Tom, and Emma dive to look at the engravings at Plum Island and upon their return trip to the harbor.  It's a very different choice in art and it doesn't remain consistent for the rest of the game compared with the previous six hours.  I guess it could make sense in a Colour Out of Space sense, but here, to happen out of the blue was an interesting choice.

Overall, I thought that the weaknesses of Innsmouth 22 did not overpower what I enjoyed about the game.  I appreciate an attempt at a modern adaptation of a story that was not only written but also takes place 90 years ago and places it in a modern setting with all of the amenities and conveniences we have today.  I also enjoyed the use of music and occasional environmental sound effects, even if the music might come across as repetitive after the first hour; and it's pretty dangerous to play late at night because I think I've now conditioned myself to become sleepy whenever I hear that song now.  As far as the end of the game goes, while it was fairly abrupt, there was a certain Lovecraftian charm to it.  Once you make your final choice in the game, there are a few lines of text to read, then the game simply ends with an "End."  I'm sure that "Fine" looks a little fancier than simply "End" the same way that some films end with "Fin" instead of using English, but in English, "End" almost comes across as a placeholder or just poorly written.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

When You Look Into My Eyes

P.S.  You might've noticed that around the 17-minute mark on Part 9, the aspect ratio changes, and that was because I went back and "refilmed from this point until the end, because I had dozed off while playing and I skipped through this part rather quickly.  So when I went back to the game and started it to "refilm" the game had been released and updated since the previous night, which included changing the aspect ratio along with the title screen.

P.P.S.  There were also several times when I accidentally brought up a secondary settings menu while playing, and that apparently happens when you press the Steam Deck joystick to the left in this game; so it's an in-game feature, not a bug, which confused me the first time it happened.  And to ruin some behind the scenes magic, when that happens in subsequent videos, it's because I was starting to doze off.  Sorry.

1. The Shadow Over Innsmouth by Lovecraft, H.P.
Visionary Publishing Company, April 1936

Announcement: Innsmouth 22 (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Innsmouth 22 through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Innsmouth 22

Systems: Windows, Linux*

Release Date: October 25, 2024

Publisher: Raven Novels

Developer: Raven Novels

Time Spent: 6 Hours 42 Minutes

All throughout this week, we will be releasing walkthrough videos on our YouTube channel for Innsmouth 22, a new visual novel from Raven Novels as played on the Steam Deck.  We will have our typical Game EXP article up on Friday where I talk about my experience playing Innsmouth 22 in all of our grandiose words and whatnot.

The posting schedule will be as follows:

• Monday: Parts 1 & 2
• Tuesday: Parts 3 & 4
• Wednesday: Parts 5 & 6
• Thursday: Parts 7, 8, & 9
• Friday: Parts 10, 11, 12.1 & 12.2

The videos will start to go live beginning at 6:30 and every 30 minutes after throughout the week.  The videos are commentary-free and do not contain any spoken dialogue.  I'll leave the rest of my thoughts for Friday's article, but I hope you'll join us throughout the week.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Off You Go, Begin Your Climb

Game EXP: Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft (VSD)

 

Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft
Systems: Windows, Linux, HTC Vive*
Release Date: September 24, 2021
Publisher: Bit Golem
Developer: Bit Golem
Time Spent: 1 Hour

Games based on stories and mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft are notoriously challenging to get right, for several reasons, although it really depends if the devs are going for a direct adaptation of a specific work or simply using it as reference material.  First, from a narrative perspective, characters in Lovecraft's stories don't always have the best outcomes; even those who aren't racist or bigots.  Sure, they might survive the initial encounter with whatever unnamable horror they come across, but they are often forever afflicted with some form of fictionalized psychosis or break from reality that might lead them to a premature end.  Being able to convey that in a way that makes sense to the player can be difficult, which often leads to 4th wall-breaking effects like in Eternal Darkness and Dead Space (Mobile).  Secondly, video games are somewhat unique in that they give the observer/player some level of agency in the story being told.  If you take away the player's illusion of choice with the promise of a traditional video game, then you can run the risk of alienating the player when they begin to feel that what they are doing has little to no effect on the story.  Lastly, a conventional video game where you kill enemies runs the risk of minimizing the whole feeling of helplessness against an unknowable cosmic entity that is pervasive in a lot of weird horror literature.  William Dyer doesn't unload a clip from a Savage 1907 into the formless mass of a Shoggoth as he flees the city along with Danforth.  Olmstead doesn't fire off rounds from his Colt 1911A1 into the group of Deep One Hybrids as they break into his hotel room.  Often, their only option is to run.

Where this leaves us is with the visual novel format, which upfront tells us that we are essentially reading a book and that we are only passive observers, at least to some extent.  Bit Golem has gone just a little step beyond a typical graphic novel where you read text, press a button to proceed to the next text, and repeat until the end of the story, but only just.  Here, you do just that, dialogue and descriptions are read to you from the perspective of the narrator, but you are also able to look around your environment, primarily to take in your surroundings.  The secondary reason is that there are little nuggets of historical context hidden throughout many of the scenes delving into trivia about H.P. Lovecraft, the story of "Dagon," elements of the Cthulhu mythos, and other interesting bits of knowledge that are not necessary to complete or understand the story.  It would be like if a video game had annotated footnotes that were partially hidden.

[EDIT]** There are going to be people who are both more and less familiar with "Dagon" that will not like its presentation here, and to those people, I can only say that that is your prerogative and you lost zero money and at most, 30 minutes of your life.  I did play through a second time to re-experience the story and to look for the additional trivia I missed the first time around.

I really enjoyed what Bit Golem has done with their vision of Dagon and I think that playing it in VR would be equally amazing, although it appears to only be available through Steam VR and is not (yet??) available on either of the available Meta Quest headsets through their respective storefronts.  If it does become available, I can assure you that I will buy it and experience one of my favorite Lovecraft stories all over again.  In the meantime though, there are several other stories/visual novels from Bit Golem that I will be picking up by year's end.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Your Mind Rots With Every Year

*I used "HTC Vive" as a catchall when I should probably clarify with "Steam VR" since there are several VR headsets, not just the HTC Vive that are compatible with Steam VR. And since my laptop is not strong enough to run my Oculus Quest 2 headset through to play games with Steam VR, I will still need to wait for either a port or until after I upgrade to a more powerful system.

**I edited the original article which had originally said that the narration from the game was an abridged version of the story, forgetting that the entirety of the text is "only" 2,216 words. I had thought that the story was longer, being a while since I had reread it. Thank you to Bit Golem for the clarification and pointing out my error.

Game EXP: Alone in the Dark Prologue (PC)

Alone in the Dark Prologue: Grace

Systems: Windows, Steam Deck

Release Date: May 25, 2023

Publisher: THQ Nordic

Developer: Pieces Interactive

Time Spent: 15 minutes

I have some experience with the original Alone in the Dark, originally released on DOS by Infogrames back in 1992, and played that game the agonizing way it was meant to be played, with arrow keys and the spacebar as an action button (which you had to pause to select what action you wanted to perform when you unpaused and returned to the game).  The point is that I am somewhat familiar with the Hartwood family, the Dercerto estate, and the general vibe that this game very successfully was establishing.  I love survival horror games that can convincingly incorporate non-combat gameplay and at the same time, fool me into believing that I am not playing a point-and-click adventure game.

The Alone in the Dark Prologue is a short introduction to this reimagined world from the original game with the full game being released later this year.  Before starting the prologue, I specifically did not look up information about the game apart from it being essentially a remake of the original Alone in the Dark, just to make sure that it was not going the route of the 2008 remake by turning it into a first-person shooter, or the 2005 movie by just being apparently bad (both of which take place in the present day).  Not that I needed the game to take place in the 1920s, but I find that it helps with this kind of story by limiting the types of resources the player can use in the world, although there are obvious exceptions in games like Outbreak and Layers of Fear: Inheritance.  I spent 15 minutes total with this demo, and that was watching all cutscenes, exploring every available room, talking to every person I could find, and interacting with everything that gave me an "A" button.  Sure there was no combat, no equipable items apart from the one key I found that immediately went into an invisible inventory that I could not pull up.  And once it was clear that I was going to be playing as Grace, a child no more than 12 years old, I was not expecting her to be wielding crowbars or touting a six-shooter.

What I found interesting about this prologue is that it really is just a prologue and less like a demo of the full game, designed to set the tone of the full game which releases on October 23rd of this year, so I cannot say if this short story will be included or will be a separate entity altogether.  It is not so much a demo in the traditional sense that you might expect from Street Fighter 6, System Shock, or Gal Guardians: Demon Purge in that all you did here was walk around, talk to people, look at things, and unlock a door.  Sure there were context events that happened, but I would not say that I experienced all of the functions or mechanics of the game enough to say that I know what to expect from the full game.

While the main game does not currently have a Steam Deck rating, the prologue is rated as unknown compatibility, but I did not have any issues playing the game the three times I booted it up; the first time for my playthrough, and the other two times to get a couple of pictures I missed.  The game, by default, set all of the graphical sliders to High and Ultra, so I decided to leave them as such.  The game ran fine, although I probably could have turn down the settings for a smoother experience, but there were no hiccups with long load times or stuttering between gameplay and cinematics.  The graphics were about what I was expecting considering this is not an AAA studio, but I do not know if I would want to trust the Alone in the Dark IP to a AAA studio with the end goal being board member profits and not the customer's experience.  What it really boils down to, is that I was very happy with this prologue and how it ran on the Steam Deck, and if the full game runs as well as this did, I will be very happy come October.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
So It Shall Be Written

P.S.  I just wanted to throw in that it appears that, at least in this one instance, that the developers utilized functioning mirrors, or at least a trick to give the impression that mirrors are functional in this game.  I actually do not know how the technology works for mirrors to be a thing in video games, and I am sure that there are ways around it so that the game is not actually generating a mirror image of what the camera sees based on where both the character and camera are in relation to the mirror in the stage.  Yeah, like I know what I am talking about.

Book Review: She Walks in Shadows

She Walks in Shadows

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles

Publishing Date: 2015

Publisher: Innsmouth Free Press

She Walks in Shadows is a collection of short stories inspired by the weird fiction and cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft.  This collection was brought together by editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles and is unique because all of the short stories were written by women and for the most part, also have a woman as the protagonist or at least the focal point of the story.  The forward to the collection points out the common practice of gatekeeping women from Lovecraftian stories and the common misconception that "...women do not like to write in this category, that they can't write in this category."

I admit that while never consciously writing off writers who are women, a large number of the books that I end up reading are written by men.  Sure I can say, "But I've read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Master and Apprentice by Claudia Gray, and The Children of Men by P.D. James, and they're all women" but that excuse would come across similar to "But not all men!"  It is true that horror novels are a male-dominated field and you have to make a conscious effort to find authors who are women if you are not already familiar with them.  So for me, this collection was a great place to start because it gave me a bit of flavor on each of the authors writing styles and how they might construct additional short stories or longer novels.  If I had read a physical copy of this book and not an eBook, I probably would have put post-it notes on stories that I really enjoyed and would want to look up more about the author later, but instead, I just used the highlight option on my Kindle to mark the title of the story and the author.

Now, because this is a collection of 24 short stories and one poem, it would be a bit difficult to write a review of each individual story beyond a sentence or two and I did not really consider doing that when I started.  I figured I would read all of the stories and then put down my overall impressions of the stories as a whole and as a collection.  When I look over the titles in the table of contents, there are stories that I immediately remember, mostly because I enjoyed them while a few I felt kind of meh about, and others that I struggle to recall anything that happened.  Like any collection of stories, not all are going to grab me or speak to me.

The ordering of some of the stories seems pretty obvious.  "The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad" by Molly Tanzer and "Body to Body to Body" by Selena Chambers follow because they both deal with characters from Lovecraft's A Shadow Over Innsmouth and while I understood the purpose of having them next to each other, I found that I had to frequently tell myself that the two stories were not connected even though they both had characters named Asenath and Eunice.  "When She Quickens" by Mary A. Turzillo and "Queen of a New America" by Wendy N. Wagner both deal with powerful Egyptian women who have the ability to transfer their lifeforce into another body, be it willingly or unwillingly.  I was kind of surprised that "Eight Seconds" by Pandora Hope and "Shub-Niggurath's Witnesses" by Valerie Valdes were not closer together (separated by seven stories) because they both dealt with Shub-Niggurath, although they are fairly different in every other way.

One thing that took me a while to get used to, and at times I still found slightly disorienting was the time period in each story.  While one story might take place in Egypt 500 BCE and the next takes place in early 2000s New England followed by early 20th century London.  I realize that part of this could just have been reading one story after another like it was the next chapter in the same story and maybe I should have put some time between each individual story, but I guess that just means that I was so entertained by "Lavinia's Woods" or "Eight Seconds" that the following respective stories felt a little off, at least at first.

I have been trying to determine if I would recommend this book and that opens up several variables.  A lot of the stories either use character or place names from Lovecraft's stories like the aforementioned use of "Asenath" and how immediately, without going into a lot of additional explanation, the writer is imbuing this character with preconceptions that the reader likely knows of this character from A Shadow Over Innsmouth and how their characters are connected.  So how much of the story works with the reader either knowing already about the character or is there a lot of lost context from the reader not already knowing about Shub-Niggurath?  It is similar to the criticism I have with most Star Wars books, then the author could just say that "The Gamorrean tip-toed down the corridor..." without going into any further description on what a Gamorrean is and why tip-toeing for them would be somewhat out of place and creates an amusing image.  But then at the same time, if the story mentions goats early on, in any type of context, you know that Shub-Niggurath is likely to make an appearance, and does coming into the story with that knowledge already in place ruin the reveal?  It could really go either way.

I think that I would recommend this book as I enjoyed more than half of the stories, and of those that I liked, I will be looking into a few of the authors a bit more.  There were a lot of fun stories that took typical Lovecraftian themes of mortality, blood as lineage, and unknowable cosmic entities and twisted them into ways that I had never read before and in ways that I had never considered.  Not all of the stories were memorable, but that just really means that they were not memorable to me.  But yes, a good collection of stories from several different writing styles to keep the reader guessing (in a good way) and to prevent one story from feeling identical to the next.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Your Blood in My Veins

P.S.  And now you see why I was never particularly great at writing book reports.

Game EXP: Call of Cthulhu (NS)

Call of Cthulhu

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Original Release Date: October 30th, 2018

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Developer: Cyanide Studio 
Play Time: 

I was pleasantly surprised by Call of Cthulhu, not that I was expecting a bad game, just that the Metacritic reviews (which I only just looked up while writing this article) rated the game across all systems between a 63 and 68, with the Nintendo Switch port receiving the highest of the ratings and the general clamor that I seemed to hear online was that it was not a great game.

I loved this game.  

I almost feel that I could just leave that as the entire article, but I will delve a little bit deeper.

Call of Cthulhu is a game based on the Cthulhu mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and expanded upon by some of his contemporaries and is an original story by Cyanide.  I feel that a lot of games based on Lovecraft's works pull mostly from his story, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" where a veteran of World War I and Private Investigator Edward Pierce is hired to look into a missing person case in the town of Innsmouth where he checks into a hotel, is attacked by locals, meets colorful locals who don't attack him, then witnesses a procession of Deep Ones emerging from the sea and eventually, more or less, goes insane.  Okay, I guess this Call of Cthulhu game does pull a bit from that formula, but unlike a lot of video games that are steeped in cosmic horror, there is predominantly no action.  There were a few context/dialogue choice sections that involved violence, and one area at the end of the game where you could shoot a gun.  The rest of the game was spent talking to people, running from creatures, trying to stealthily avoid orderlies, and making deductions using clues found at various locations.

Call of Cthulhu came out around the same time as a similarly themed game that I reviewed last year, The Sinking City from Frogwares Games.  And while The Sinking City was an open-world (within the confines of a city), Call of Cthulhu was a more contained experience, allowing the player to explore set pieces with loading screens acting as transitions between chapters and locations.  For the most part, it allowed me to feel that I could not get lost trying to locate the next area, although there were a couple of times when I felt confused as to what I needed to do, or even if there was more than one way to proceed to the next area.

The first thing that stuck out to me was how good the game looked on the Switch in handheld mode.  I know the Switch screen maxes out at 720p, but this might have actually made the game look a bit better than playing on a larger screen, although I did play one of the additional endings in docked mode and it still looked good.  Not that the game has to look good for the storytelling to be effective, but that was just one of my first impressions.  I did notice though that the Unreal Engine 4 had some animation snafus when it came to the lips of some of the characters, often with their lips pulling back pretty far to reveal a mouthful of pearly whites.  I just chalked it up to this being a Lovecraftian story and the effect was purposeful to make characters feel a bit off.

However, there were a number of cinematics where the facial animation was amazing, both in terms of running on the Switch and just in the accomplishments of Cyanide's team to capture minuscule facial animations.  This scene happens to lead into the third act (I think?) where Edward Pierce has witnessed something that would normally be something that would be considered impossible.  His reaction here, I feel, is the buildup from the first half of the game and he just is unable to contain a sense of normalcy.  The straw that broke the camel's back.  I love the way his eyes twitch back and forth.  

I love when he looks down in the briefest moment of disgust as if something is crawling up his chest.  I love the brief look into the figurative camera as if he is looking at the player themselves.  I love how he breaks down at the end as I am sure a lot of us would do in the exact situation, that he is not so macho that he is above the inability to accept everything that has happened to him.  I find it a brilliant performance from the animation team, the director, the voice actor, pretty much everyone involved in this scene.

Another thing that stuck out to me early on, was that the choices I was making, especially through dialogue options had immediate and seemingly long-lasting consequences.  In the bar on the island of Darkwater, there was a local who was giving Edward Pierce some guff while in a bar so I punched him when he came at me.  This apparently did not sit well with the bartender and he refused to serve Edward a drink because he was an outsider who had caused violence.  No amount of trying different dialogue options would get me a drink, so I moved on and continued talking to the rest of the patrons, a few even commenting about the scuffle at the bar.  There were a number of times during conversations, or interacting with objects that the game notified me that what I just said or did "will affect your destiny."  At the time I did not know if that meant something along the lines of The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series, and only after I beat the game did I discover that certain actions did affect which endings you were eligible to receive, but I will get to the end of the game later.

A mechanic that Cyanide implemented was a sanity meter of sorts, complete with a meter and a list of ways that your sanity has been affected and could possibly be in the future.  I was a little worried when I discovered that your sanity meter would never refill or repair itself and that witnessing potentially horrific events was the primary cause for the meter being depleted because exploring and examining weird phenomenon is one of the hallmarks of a Lovecraftian mystery.  So then the question is to examine something that could potentially decrease your sanity, or go without information that could change how you perceive current and future events.  Is it worth it to examine the body of a desecrated corpse on the operating table at an asylum to find out if the body was surgically mutilated or possibly from some otherwordly creature, leading your investigation towards either a human or a supernatural suspect?  By the end of the game, I did completely use up all of my sanity, which I was fine with and it made sense considering the events that happened, but there were a number of sanity effects that were left hidden making me wonder how I could replay the game and see if I could manage to have Edward Pierce go semi-insane in a different manner.

There was one book that I had Pierce read that affected his sanity, but the game had apparently not Autosaved before I turned the game off (I know this because there were other events that I ended up having to repeat).  This brings me to the saving mechanic, or auto-save mechanic as it were. There are only specific moments when the game saves as well as all scene and chapter transitions, which I did find frustrating at times.  I can understand not having access to specific save files or being able to save right before examining something hoping for a different outcome, but there were a few times when I wished I could just save the game manually and go to sleep (it being sometime after midnight and knowing that Goblino was likely to wake up in 4-5 hours).  Maybe it's just nitpicking at this point and I think I must be spoiled by being able to save whenever I want.

There was one section in the game that I felt pretty lost at, as you had to navigate a maze through darkened rooms with limited light.  It was definitely one of those moments in a game where you feel like this might be the place that you cannot get passed and you either have to stop playing or seek a walkthrough.  You might wonder how this section played during playtesting or if the game even went through playtesting because of how lost I felt.  Did the game even go through playtesting?  Eventually, after two nights of failed progress, I took a step back from the game, and because the chapter restarted from the beginning each time I started the game back up, it actually allowed me to approach the maze and notice clues directing you where you needed to go that I had bypassed the first two attempts.  It is still a semi-anxiety-inducing section of the game that does not bring back good feelings when I think about playing through again, but there were a number of well-placed jump scares and a well-established feeling of dread as you began to realize how you needed to solve the level to escape the maze.

Going into the final act was a bit of a departure from the rest of the game and I am not 100% sure how the decisions I made with various characters influenced how these events unfolded in the end-game.  This is where you are saddled with a gun and the game, kind of, becomes a first-person shooter.  It is only a handgun and you do have limited ammunition and you do not pick up additional rounds of ammunition from the people you kill.  Now that I think about it, I would not be surprised if there is an achievement or some story element that is revealed if you get through this area without killing anyone that you can avoid.  I, on the other hand, did actively kill people when their icon turned from passive white to murderous red.

The end of the game was interesting and I only fully understood what had been going on during the game after watching all three of my available endings and reading what a fourth possible ending could have been having I not drank any alcohol during the game.  I do not want to spoil any of the endings, but I will say that they felt very Lovecraftian, than no one ending felt like it was designed to be the "Good Ending."  What I mean is that all of the endings had some level of trauma involved, seemingly regardless of your sanity level at the end of the game, and while a character may have survived the whole endeavor, they were forever marred by the experience.  They may have stopped a cult attempting to resurrect or bring about a cosmic aberration but at the further cost of their own sanity or even their life.

I would love for Cyanide Studio to tackle another weird horror story, maybe not specifically Lovecraft as there are a lot of stories that could be well adapted, thinking specifically of Algernon Blackwood's novella "The Wendigo."  I would not want another Edward Pierce mystery nor would I want an Edward Pierce origin story as The Call of Cthulhu does a great job with his particular story.  These types of stories are difficult to do well in video game form and despite the low critic scores across all systems, I really think that Cyanide Studio did a great job with the material and the feeling that comes across in a lot of Lovecraft's stories.  They did The Call of Cthulhu justice, and that was really what I was hoping for from this game the whole time.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Game EXP: Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace [Part III: How I Played] (NS)

Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PC
Release Date: March 23, 2021
Publisher: Asmodee Digital
Developer: LuckyHammers, Asmodee Digital

This series of articles looks at Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace as played on the Nintendo Switch.  Part I of this series goes into the difficulties I faced while trying to write this one article that ended up being split up into three.  Part II was another attempt at finishing up the one article but ended up being primarily about game mechanics and comparisons between the Mansions of Madness board game and the video game.  Part III is (supposed to be?) about how I personally played the game, without a lot of the previous context and information that I covered in Parts I & II.

When you start the game, you are given the choice between seven investigators to play throughout the scenarios.  During the game, you do come across additional investigators who join your group.  In between scenarios, you can select who you want to be in your group and you do not have to always have your initial investigator in the group.  All of the characters are taken from games in the Arkham Horror Files universe and I was familiar with all of them except Sefina Rousseau and Zoey Samaras.  Not knowing how the game was going to emphasize certain skills and attributes, I decided to go with the trumpet player Jim Culver, being a trumpet player myself did not factor into my decision-making process.  I did take a bit of a meta-gaming approach though deciding on Jim in that he had strong mental resistance, was not weak in any of his combat skills, and was strong in both initiative and ranged attacks.  Also having the passive ability to offer mental buffs to the other members of the party seemed like a great skill to have as well.

As I talked about in Part II regarding Traumas and the Mythos Clock becoming more annoying and an inconvenience rather than its intended threat, during the first two scenarios though, I was pretty terrified about the effects and how often I seemed to suffer attacks to the characters' sanity.  I would be frequently on the lookout for cigarettes and more often than not, even in the late-game, I would use them immediately.  By the third scenario, you have enough investigators to choose from that you cannot take everyone, which is when you can take advantage of being able to heal Trauma by leaving players back at your head office.  Each investigator left behind during a scenario is able to heal one Trauma each scenario, although I could not tell you if the healed Trauma is chosen at random or if it selects the oldest Trauma to the most recent.  By the end of the game, I had Jim in my party for a couple of scenarios and definitely going into the last one without an ounce of Trauma on him, partly because I had him stay back for a couple of missions, but also because I had him focus on ranged combat.

So let us talk a bit about combat.  Compared to Mansions of Madness, there is a lot of combat in this game.  Combat in AHME was all turn-based and semi-tactics based on a gridless area.  Sometimes in MoM, you could go the entire game without fighting anything, and then in the final act, you might fight a couple of cultists and then a race to activate a portal that would pull a Star Spawn back in.  In AHME, some levels would have body counts in the dozens, especially in the later levels.  In the early game, this became worrisome and tiring all at the same time because I would often want to progress with the investigation and uncover clues related to the story but instead, I found myself attacking inmates in an asylum or cultists in any number of different locations and barely hanging on by single digits by the end of encounters.  This is one area where I felt the game diverged from its cosmic horror roots where individual encounters felt emphasized over the dread of what could be; although getting that sense of overwhelming fear across in a video game is admittedly difficult to convey.  That being said, combat overall felt pretty good, never feeling that the enemies were purposefully overpowered or that there were eight enemies against three investigators.  In fact, some of the minibosses during the first couple rounds of combat came across as overpowered to the point where I would start panicking, but my team was such a well-oiled machine, that with the exception of one battle that I kept losing because I was taking on too many cultists too early in the scenario, we never lost a fight.

Speaking of weapons, I had not mentioned it in Part II, but the weapons all have a durability mechanic so that M&P Revolver you picked up two scenarios ago is likely going to break before the end of your current mission.  Thankfully the game does a good job of giving you a general idea about when an item is weakening and going to break by changing the color or the text on the item, changing the durability description, and then the damage decreases as well.  In the early game, this was a pretty frustrating mechanic, especially with guns because ranged combat was preferable to melee for obvious reasons; the further an enemy is the less likely they are to harm you unless they of course have guns too.  As mentioned above, one of the reasons I chose Jim Culver was because he was strong with ranged weapons so it was at times frustrating to have a character who could not use one of their innate abilities because either a gun broke or you were just plain out of ammunition.  By the last three chapters, however, there seemed to be both plenty of ammunition and guns so that I had even had one character carry additional guns in case someone else's wore out and I had almost stopped carrying healing items altogether.

You know, I feel like that sums up a lot of how I played the game as told through a few of the in-game mechanics.  I am leaving a pretty big chunk of the story untold because there are pretty significant spoilers the further along in the game you go, even more so if you are familiar with gods that H.P. Lovecraft created (not just inspired by Lovecraftian mythos)*.  The story itself was pretty interesting if not a bit predictable halfway through, but I still felt compelled to play through the scenarios through to the end of the game.  There were not any escort missions or mini-games that made the game itself unbearable.  The voice acting at times fell a little flat and emotionless especially considering the events unfolding around the investigators.  

Because this is based on H.P. Lovecraft's writings, I feel I should also talk about how the blatant racism and anti-Semitism present in some of his works were not incorporated into the game.  In terms of social commentary and awareness considering that the story takes place in various areas of the Southern United States in 1926 with a cast of characters who were not all white, I did not pick up on any racism towards the characters; which could also mean that it was there and I was oblivious or did not pick up on it at all, which I am of course open to admit if it was there.  There were some scenarios, the one that took place in the asylum was a bit cringy in that 90% of the enemies you fought were patients of the asylum, all acting violent due to the proximity of certain events/creatures in the asylum.  It genuinely did feel a bit strange having an admitting doctor join your group partway through the scenario then engage in murdering the patients, even if it was out of self-defense.  This probably could have been handled a bit better, but that is just me and my 21st-century lens.

So where are we now at the end of this three-article series?  I am 100% genuine that Asmodee Digital (and Luckyhammers) did a great job in making Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace feel like a video game version of Mansions of Madness, they very much succeeded on that front.  And, I could see that same reason being the biggest turn-off for people coming into this game cold.  According to the trailer that was released in 2018, back when it was still titled Mansions of Madness, the video game kept the room tile system of the board game so that the rooms and maps in each location can be randomly generated allowing the game to be replayed multiple times with the layout being different each time.  While this concept I do actually love, having played through the game once, I do not feel overly compelled to play through it again, at least for the time being.  However, having the rooms and movable tiles potentially opens the game up to additional DLC that uses the same tileset for various locations which I would actually be pretty excited for, but due to the lukewarm responses I have read about AHME, I honestly would be pretty surprised if there were additional games that came out any time soon.  But at least I would be interested, so at least there is one.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

P.S.

SPOILERS

So it is mentioned, maybe by the fourth scenario (the cult mansion one) that the primary cosmic horror in this game is Shub-Niggurath who is also known as The Black Goat of the Wood with A Thousand Young.  When this name was being dropped, first I was like, "Okay, I know which monster was connected to Shub-Niggurath in Mansions of Madness, so that is probably what we are going to be facing here and I am not at all looking forward to that encounter."  Secondly, knowing Lovecraft's racist views, I always make sure to pronounce the name of Shub-Niggurath (even if he did modify the name from a mention in a story by Lord Dunsany) to sound the least racist possible so that it doesn't sound like that particular racial slur that it very much could sound like.  And Lovecraft has said that a lot of the names that he came up with were written to be approximations of sounds created by creatures without human vocal cords so one pronunciation being different than someone else's is not necessarily wrong.  So I was a little surprised that the pronunciation of Shub-Niggurath that went with was the one that I try to avoid; I won't type it out.  Whenever this god comes up in games and I have to pronounce it, I stick to "Shub-Nih-goor-ah-th," with an emphasis on the "goor."

Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there.

Game EXP: Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace [Part II: The Game] (NS)

 

Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PC
Release Date: March 23, 2021
Publisher: Asmodee Digital
Developer: LuckyHammers, Asmodee Digital

I initially had some (a lot of) trouble writing the article for LuckyHammers (RIP 2019) and Asmodee Digital's Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace as played on the Nintendo Switch when I started back in April.  I decided to break the one article up into two because I felt that was how I was mentally breaking down the game when I thought about my experience playing it and how it might be perceived by unfamiliar audiences.  I was also afraid of coming off as gatekeeping-like because there were a lot of times that this game felt like it was made for fans of Mansions of Madness and I could tell what the developers were trying to do, and other times that I felt that people who have not played the board game may not enjoy the video game.   In the original draft of this article, I found that it was quickly getting out of hand, both in terms of its composition and the flow of information mixed with anecdotes, so splitting this up into separate and slightly more focused articles seemed like the best way to continue writing and remain sane; although I am still going to be jumping around a lot because I was unable to write this in any other way.

Conklederp and I are avid fans of the Mansions of Madness board game (both first and second editions by Fantasy Flight Games) and we have delved a few times into the card game Elder Sign.  Both games exist in the shared Arkham Horror Files universe along with the original Arkham Horror board game, Eldritch Horror, and a slew of similarly themed card games.  Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace (AHME) was originally announced back in 2018 as Mansions of Madness: Mother's Embrace but later changed the name to Arkham Horror, I assume to keep the game under the primary umbrella of Arkham Horror Files rather than one of the side-games.  You can read more about the game's delay and the changing of development companies over on Dicebreaker's article from November 2020.  I bring this up because I feel that it plays into the expectations of a traditional mystery/adventure video game and the final product that was released.

AHME is based on the mechanics of a board game and a lot of the time it feels like you are playing a single-player board game within a video game setting.  You take control of a primary character chosen at the start of the game and other pre-determined characters join your group as you play through the various scenarios.  Each character has both health and sanity points with HP typically in the 15+ range while SP was between 6-8.  This disparity tells you immediately that the odds are stacked against the characters suffering mental trauma than physical trauma, but more on that later.  There is no dice rolling or the usual action limitations that you have in board games (number of actions you can perform each turn) because that would make the game cumbersome and instead, you move around the playable area as you would any other 3rd person exploration game.  There are objects to interact with, some are merely just observing curios like paintings or a disemboweled corpse, while others you are able to interact with. 

Thinking again about the board game, having Hit Points means that once you reach 0, you become injured and your HP resets, but if it reaches 0 again, you are killed.  In AHME, your character only passes out for the duration of the fight unless you have an item to revive them mid-battle, although there are some sanity and status effects that can cause damage while you are exploring your location, but I never had a character "die" outside of a fight.  Sanity Points in AHME operate differently than in the board game, where you become insane when you reach 0 and die if they reach 0 again after being reset.  While bandages are used to heal HP, the only item I consistently came across to heal SP were cigarettes, which also caused 1 HP damage (because smoking is bad kids; no but really, it is), but my biggest problem was that there were far too few cigarettes to be found, which made acquiring trauma feel inevitable; maybe that was the point?  Here, you acquire trauma, but that trauma is already built into your character and you are actually able to see ahead of time what that trauma will be when their SP reaches 0, because it will reach 0.  Knowing ahead of time what trauma a character could experience allowing you to choose which character would have the least inconvenient traumas that would affect your chances of completing an upcoming scenario.  Having this knowledge is not what this type of game should be about, and instead should have had the trauma be randomly picked from a collection of possible traumas to add a sense of fear and unknowing.  This was another major critique I had.  Having trauma should have felt more impactful than it really was and more often than not, it just felt more like an inconvenience than anything else.

Another game mechanic that dealt with going insane and acquiring trauma that felt like it should have been more feared was the Mythos Clock.  This was a five-pointed pentagram clock displayed in the upper right of the screen that advances if you fail a skill check (see below) and the clock reaches five.  During the first scenario, I was actually pretty concerned every time the Mythos Clock inched closer to five as I was unsure what type of horror the game would unleash on my characters.  By the time I reached the third scenario, the Mythos Clock became an inconvenience similar to trauma, that I sighed at and little else.  Similar to traumas, having your initiative taking a slight hit or requiring everyone to make a sanity check or just straight up taking -2 to your SP is something that I can live with.  There was an item you could use to reset the Mythos Clock, but for whatever reason, you were only allowed to use it while you were actively engaged in combat.

Speaking of items, (and better transitions), inventory management was actually a nice part of the game, something you never have to worry about in Mansions of Madness.  In AHME, each character only has four inventory slots which you could fill with equipment at the beginning of each scenario.  Here you chose from all of the items you gathered in previous scenarios that were now open to all characters; re-equipping everyone was not bad at all and I would have actually hated having to unequip and then re-equipping everyone.  Having a limited inventory does make sense to a certain extent if you think of this being a realistic game with characters who are not pack mules, but then again you are investigating a cult obsessed with cosmic horror resurrections in 1926, so realism is not a requirement.  Most of the time, I would have characters armed with a ranged weapon, a melee weapon, an item that granted a buff to one of their skills, and either a healing item or empty to make room for items found during a scenario.

Coming from the board game which does have sliding block and codebreaking puzzles (think Mastermind), I was pretty disappointed to find out that puzzles as a mechanic were completely removed and replaced by contextual clues and the pressing of a single button in order to solve the puzzle.  Each character is proficient in a particular skill (Search, Manual, Willpower, Social, Logical, Physical) that can assist with them solving a puzzle, otherwise you have to essentially guess what the appropriate action to take would be or you suffer another advancement on the Mythos Clock.  A few scenarios into the game, you come across the reporter Rex Murphy who has a unique attribute that gives him an additional skill that can help to determine an additional clue when solving a puzzle, making them very useful to have in your party since the investigating character pulls information from everyone in the group, not just the individual who is interacting with the object.  Often times this would lead me to include Rex in the party when given the option, but I would also choose characters that seemed to make sense for them to be going to specific locations, but that is just me roleplaying instead of thinking strategically.

The biggest frustrating thing about the game is the load times.  Oh, bloody hell the load times!  I do not know if this is an issue on the Nintendo Switch and if it primarily happens in handheld mode, but these were easily the worst loading times I have experienced for any game on the Switch.  

Thankfully the game would only need to load when you started a scenario and when you finished.  Moving between floors in locations or cutting between gameplay and cinematics would typically only take a few seconds.  The load times starting the game would easily take over a minute, oftentimes upwards of 1m30s on average.  One time in particular it went as long as 1m48s.  What is kind of ridiculous about this is that there is music playing in the background while the game is loading, but there apparently was nothing in the game's code to tell it to repeat because the song would end before the game finished loading and there would just be dead air.

As long as we are now discussing things that bothered me about the game, there was a stage that took place in a swamp, which in and of itself was fine, but the game itself looked off.  First and foremost, this area felt more like a physical board game than any other stage.  When you had your character walk through swamp-like areas, there was zero interaction with the ground, as in areas that the characters should have been up to their knees, they were standing on like it was hardpacked dirt.  There were some textures to plants and rocks and the trees were not exactly two-dimensional panels that rotated with the characters, but the swamp water, which you could walk on like a painted garage floor, made it feel like the characters were not a part of their environment, just placed there as an afterthought.

Another issue I had was commentary by a character throughout the entire game who was never in your group.  Without giving too much away, it does kind of make sense by the end of the game, sort of and in the loosest way, but it still seemed strange.  You would be exploring a room or engaging an abomination that had been trying to kill you, and this character would give you advice or analysis of a scene.  From a narrative standpoint, it seemed like it might be more fitting if you were reading a book, but within the game and the game world itself, there would have been no way for your playable characters to have any of this information.  Not that the information was integral to completing a scenario or giving hints on how to solve puzzles, just commentary akin to sports commentators being broadcast into a football player's helmet between plays.  Like in the scene here, the investigators were questioning the origin of the sigils and runes written on the floor, and the character interjects that creature may spring back to life and kill you if you do not leave.

The optimization of the game for the Switch felt like it could use some improvements, both in terms of fixing some bugs and improving the frame rate of cutscenes towards the end of the game.  In one instance, the dialogue while searching a mailbox had been swapped with dialogue for searching a table at a cafe, and vice versa.  In the same location, one search location had code/text instead of the in-game text. Going into the final battle is when I felt the game suffered the most because it almost felt that whoever was in charge of Switch optimization did not seem too focused, especially after watching a video on YouTube for how the cutscene should have played out (major spoilers!); I will include a video I captured on the Switch from the same scene far below the article as it does contain major spoilers.  I could chalk it up to being played in handheld mode, but that should have been something to have been accounted for.

My last gripe with the game was the end.  In Mansions of Madness, there is always an epilogue that is very Lovecraftian in nature if you succeed or fail.  When you successfully complete a scenario the wording can still fill you with dread and oftentimes, successfully completing a game simply means that you escaped alive to tell your tale, but the cosmic horror is still likely to strike again, possibly through influencing another cult to try to bring its consciousness into the world.  You do not so much save the world as prevented this one event from coming to fruition but likely have suffered physically and mentally because of the events.  There is an open-ended-ness to a number of Lovecraft's stories and to the epilogues in Mansions of Madness, but this one felt only half-written.  Maybe I was just hoping for too much, but once the credits started rolling, I felt kind of ". . . huh. . .  Okay."

You know what, I think I am going to leave this article at that, which I realize is kind of a downer with you have come this far and only finding out now that this is not the end, but the middle.  I promise you that Part III will be a shorter article and full of a lot of the fun that I did actually have playing.  And I did have fun, otherwise, I probably would not have completed the game or even set out to write this series of articles, and also being the main reason why it has been so difficult for me to write about.  So feel free to visit us again on Friday for the final article in this (now) three-part series looking at Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Such Attitudes

BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW