But the non-linear nature of The Cursed Crew does have its virtues. There are some magnificent moments of discovery where you feel as though you’ve circumvented the level design by maneuvering the right character into the right position to bypass certain guard setups or parts of the terrain. Simply by spending so much time with the characters, you’ll hit upon certain combinations of abilities independently, fine-tuning new strategies all the way up to the end. It’s in these moments that you see what the developers are aiming for, and they suggest that The Cursed Crew could be a tentative step in an exciting new direction for the studio, even if those elements are more notable for how they might be refined in a subsequent release.
Only toward the end does Venba hit upon a cohesive solution for both its story and its puzzles. The perspective shifts from Venba to Kavin, whose complicated relationship with his parents’ culture reframes the friction inherent to the game’s cooking segments: He has difficulty because he hasn’t prepared these dishes before and hasn’t cared to pay attention. Furthermore, his grasp on the Tamil language is rusty, so while he can refer to instructions at the top of the screen, they’ll be inaccurately translated and require the player to experiment while surmising their true meaning. This late change allows the game to finish strong, though the irritation of its earliest puzzles never quite dissipates, like a lingering taste from a dish whose flavors don’t fully cohere.
As for the MFN offices, they’re full of detailed memorabilia like posters, props, and episode scripts, to the point where simply taking it all in is perhaps the game’s main appeal. There’s a tangible love and care that has gone into making the game’s equivalent of Sesame Street studios feel plausible, as well as a clear delight in warping our memory of a show that opened up a world of imagination for generations of children into something darker.
Other UI irritations abound, serving only to further complicate an experience at odds with itself for how much information it wants to communicate at a given moment. On the whole, Jagged Alliance 3 lays some strong groundwork for the franchise’s resurgence, but it often feels like a series of individual victories that fail to work in concert for something greater.
Experimenting will more often reveal methods that do not work rather than validating the loading screen’s impossibly lofty claim to player freedom. Further, the resource scarcity that drives the game is hardly conducive to experimentation, doing more to keep you strictly on the path of least resistance. What motive is there to waste a precious gas can on some hare-brained scheme when you know for sure that it will work just fine in the generator? Certainly the more restrictive means of progression in The Bunker has its own pleasures even within a more open framework, but the game insists on calling a shot that it has no hope of making.
Nothing we see here matters because it’s all been made up for puzzle-solving. As such, the weirdness of the game’s mystery and its visuals is practically obliterated. It’s good, then, that The Tartarus Key squeaks by on the strength of its puzzles alone, because the connective tissue between them seems determined to strip the game of narrative intrigue before our very eyes.
However commendable Nightdive’s efforts to preserve the spirit of the original may be, it doesn’t take much frustrated wandering before questioning whether their modernization efforts have gone far enough.
The more fantastical elements of Redfall fail to impress, but the everyday detail of its setting manages to shine through, surfacing little stories left in the wreckage. The problem is that, even if you’re willing to dig for those moments, they’re still overshadowed by the glimpses of another, larger story: the one that explains how Redfall came to be released in such a state as this.
Much of the game involves strategizing around these quirks when possible. Upon snapping a guard's neck, for example, the "guilty conscience" trait sends your character hopping around in an uncontrollable panic for a few brief yet potentially pivotal seconds during which they might blunder into a trap or the sightline of another guard. To circumvent this, you can take care to kill exclusively (and presumably more impersonally) with weapons, or you can drag each body to some secluded area where it's safe for your assigned agent to shake off any post-murder jitters.
But for as pleasant and intermittently clever as it is, Storyteller’s breezy style comes at the cost of any real complexity. Because the game’s variables and statuses are meant to remain hidden in order to avoid overcrowding the screen with information, none of the puzzles can ask very much of the player. It avoids providing too many illustrations to experiment with and too much information to keep straight in your head. A few of the later puzzles demonstrate how easily this spareness can devolve into tedium, with several that require you to establish the family ties between dwarves. Though Storyteller has its share of clever moments, the game never quite finds the depth beyond the cozy archetypes that make up its exterior.
I’d be able to forgive these UI foibles if they contributed to a cohesive thematic style. The busy interface of a game like Highfleet appears even more inscrutable than Phantom Brigade, but it funnels its droves of information into a gorgeously intricate cockpit UI. The sliding gray menus of Phantom Brigade, on the other hand, are bland and indistinct. The bare-bones story and setting, with their anonymous blue and red factions, could very well pass for a placeholder. The game’s unique command system manages to capture what is so intrinsically awe-inspiring about giant, fickle robots battling other giant, fickle robots — but the surrounding framework lacks the same refinement and clarity of purpose.
Perhaps Colossal Cave’s unthinking fealty to the original, and its seeming dismissal of so many of the innovations that might have improved it, could be forgiven if it featured any puzzles or mechanics that would be tough to replicate in a modern design context. But no such innovations are apparent, and new touches like the first-person camera create new problems like making it easy to miss important items in the cave. Colossal Cave, then, can hardly be called a “modernization,” because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.
Faith’s visual and mechanical variety, as well as its one-button simplicity, helps obscure whatever rules it operates by. Sometimes the “save” function briefly changes, and sometimes a pivotal moment takes place from the ordinary overhead camera view rather than in the elaborate rotoscoped cutscenes, just to keep you on your toes. Faith’s masterful sense of timing and mood create a truly rare feeling of persistent uncertainty where anything can happen. The game manages to be frightening because of its technical constraints rather than in spite of them.
These issues are not unique to “The Devil in Me.” “The Quarry” often felt uneasily patched together, struggling to reconcile all of its plot threads. All of this raises a question that haunts the experience of Supermassive’s games: Amid players’ expectations of visual fidelity and complex narrative, how sustainable is a format where, at any point, any fully voice-acted, motion-captured character can die and be cut from the game in an instant?
While such digressions, to be fair, are optional, the game does encourage you to poke around every corner of its vibrantly rendered world to ensure that you’ve got the facts straight. In the end, though, Pentiment excels less as a mystery game and more as a portrait of a community. Because as a mystery to be solved and a mediation on how stories evolve over time, its focus wanders and ironically comes to fixate on elements like presentation and background lore that can all too easily overwhelm the basic tenets of telling an engaging story.
By the time the parasite does finally obstruct your ability to use machines or change weapons, the damage is already done. There are few enemies left and the game is almost over, so whatever additional tension might have resulted from these restrictions never materializes. Scorn is a transportive experience to be sure, at times a genuine masterwork of visual craft. But the unfulfilled possibilities linger a little too prominently, a reminder that it falls short of being a mechanical masterpiece, too.
Of course, these late-game inconveniences also speak to something rare and refreshing: Immortality isn’t designed for convenient completion because it’s fully comfortable with the player not seeing everything. It’s confident enough to merely suggest certain details and concepts, giving us glimpses of certain prickly edges and troubling dynamics without falling back on an overt explanation, a tidy conclusion, or even a break from the verisimilitude of the “found footage” format. It’s an impressively layered work, filled with conflicted thoughts on the concept of the auteur, the collaborative process of art, and the prospect of going too deep in the service of expression. Rather than a clean moral or cautionary tale, Immortality opts for something messier, more complex, and far more likely to endure.
Sephonie’s thematic scope is admirably wide-ranging, but its wordiness only crowds a game whose mechanics are tenuously connected. For a game that concerns the interconnectedness of all things, it’s unfortunate how awkwardly some of its pieces are glued together.
Playing Weird West, it’s hard to shake how much more gracefully other games of this type avoid similar pitfalls, with the abbreviated scavenging of Void Bastards and the easy-to-read interface of Desperados III, another western with a top-down perspective, immediately coming to mind. The latter game also supports far more complex maneuvers despite lacking the sort of pointless granularity that has the player comb through indistinguishable shelves for a handful of ammunition. By contrast, Weird West is a slog dying for an extensive streamline.
Where other isometric games of this sort heavily telegraph areas and objects that you should return to later, the levels here subtly fold in on themselves in ways that are both slyly hidden and obvious in hindsight. Tunic appears unassuming and even a little routine on the surface, but it constantly reveals how clever it is every time it encourages us to take a closer look.