Dragon Quill

Inside: Brok the Investigator, Song of Farca, Chicken Police: Paint It Red

CW for alcoholism and depression/suicide in the Chicken Police review — I talk a bit about how Chandler died, largely because I don’t like how the game treats drinking as a character quirk.

Brok the Investigator
(COWCAT, 2022)

I’m weirdly fond of this game. I don’t quite know that I’d rec it, but I appreciate its ambitiousness and desire to be about something, especially in comparison to the other two games in this post.

The game reminds me so much of fanfic. It’s got that problem above-average fanfic often has of raw talent and zero apparent experience, where the writing is competent but just stuffed to the gills with a billion different concepts all working at cross-purposes. Like fanfic, it’s bloated to three times the size it should be and can’t conceivably wrap up all its plotlines, so it opts to not even try, instead shoving audiences toward a “true end” that contains no actual resolution.

There are three distinct stories happening here:

1. Brok is a down-on-his luck PI who stumbles on a conspiracy to exterminate the poor classes in the Slums where he lives.
2. Graff is an orphaned teenager dealing with Family Stuff and trying to manage a school bully while he prepares for The Big Test.
3. Shay is a genius scientist condemned as insane for her time-travel experiments, which no one knows have finally been successful.

If these sounds like three wildly different stories that would be hard to cleanly integrate, you are correct! 2 and 3 should have been cut, and the protagonist should have been Brok, the guy the game is named after, and his dealing with the complexities of his society while also trying to balance his personal life. You know. Like a story.

Instead the story tries to be about everything a story could possibly be about, and it’s honestly a mess at times — from scene to scene you never know which plot you’re going to be in, and the tone whiplash can be wild, as you go from Brok being beat up by gangsters to Graff in a schoolroom to Shay spewing Uchikoshi science. The story is constantly grinding to a halt and restarting, managing to be competent enough to get you re-invested only to grind to a halt and restart again.

It also makes the mistake of trying to be about All the Issues, but in doing so is never able to treat any of them meaningfully. I also get the sense the writer is young, at least politically, because much of what is there is surface-level in a way that goes beyond just brevity — it’s very much someone who is aware of broad problems but not their more complex implications. There are a lot of very weird implications in this game. Like, it can recognize that “poor people are inherently criminals” is wrong, but can’t quite get to “poverty causes crime, not vice versa” as its lesson — instead is has to create some smokescreen of hope and vibes and explain that poor people deserve to live because they can bootstrap their way into being rich. Similarly, it doesn’t quite seem to understand that in such a starkly unequal society, the rich are rich at the expense of the poor — it never realizes that the reason things are so good in the Dome is precisely because they are so bad in the Slums; instead the two places are weirdly disconnected. It’s someone trying to saying something meaningful but just lacking the worldliness to bring it home. And I can’t even begin to unpack what it thought it was doing with women or race; it’s honestly just incoherent on both points.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things this game tries to be about, thematically:

1. Class and poverty
2. The challenges of mixed families
3. The dangers of AI
4. Some weird thing about women and being a housewife?
5. Something about racial scapegoating?
6. Something about the purpose of religion?
7. Something about humans being fallible?
8. The pressure parents put on kids academically
9. Something about surveillance?
10. Something about substance abuse?
11. Something about Big Pharma?
12. There’s a lot of ads these days, amirite
13. PTSD and survivor’s guilt

And I could keep going. There’s just no way any of these things could be meaningfully tackled by a story that is constantly trying to include all of them while also telling a minimum of three completely different plots.

It’s a shame, because like I said, there is clear talent here. That this game hangs together as well as it does — and it actually does manage to hold itself together for long stretches — is a testament to that. But it really needed someone else in editorial to act as a second writer/editor/script supervisor and whisper “kill your darlings” in the dev’s ear.

In fact, parts of this are so good it’s incredibly easy to rewrite it into something cohesive: this should be about income inequality and cycles of poverty and the way they effect families. That story is already here, you just need to remove the extra stuff and bring home the conclusion. Even the AI bit should also be about poverty — it’s kind of baffling the game never seemed to connect Tidy and the Director as emergent consciousnesses who ended up in diametric class situations and so had different reactions. The Director is wealthy and in an important and respected job, while Tidy becomes self-aware as a cleaning robot trapped in a menial existence and not allowed to leave a tiny building. The reason Tidy does what he does is because he’s in poverty. The reason the Director can be heroic is because she has wealth. Meanwhile, Brok and Graff’s loss of status after Lia’s death is living proof of the arbitrary nature of class — a freak accident can turn them from Citizens into Criminals, and the stress poverty places on them forces them both to do desperate things that strain their relationship, making them even more desperate. Further, the cases of Tidy and Bolt, when held up against the Squealers, show that the entire system, which depends on an exploited underclass, is inherently unsustainable — as AI improves and more robots become conscious, a second revolt becomes inevitable. This is all already in the game! But either the dev doesn’t realize it or was so bogged down by all the other nonsense he couldn’t get to it, so none of it ever ends up in the foreground, and the thematic conclusions are really strained and unsatisfying.

I would love to have seen there be background NPCs in the Dome saying things like, “When the bots were in charge my packages took a day to deliver, but with full automation it’s just hours!” Really emphasize how meaningless the drive for increased efficiency has become and show how brutal it was to put down the Squealers. I’d also love to see Brok actually have to deal with PTSD from being involved in a war. He’s a much more complex character as someone who found out how violent he could be in the military and has spent the rest of his life living in fear of that, and this ties directly into how context can shape behavior. It would be so much more meaningful to have Brok spend the whole game afraid of hurting Graff, instead of it just suddenly happening in some endings. His selflessness is admirable, but it means more if it slowly becomes obvious it’s also a defense mechanism — if he’s helping he can’t be hurting. And then as things start to spiral, help and hurt become intertwined, and he loses the ability to be sure who he is — and has nothing but his own judgement for the first time since the war. He has to trust that he loves Graff, trust that he’s more than the worst things he’s ever done.

This would of course mean committing to a narrative. I’m very sick of games refusing to tell a holistic story and instead giving you a dozen wildly different endings that lack any semblance of cohesion. This game makes an even more artistically cowardly decision to railroad you toward a “canonical ending” that’s a complete nonending where literally nothing is meaningfully resolved. It’s another indication of an inexperienced writer; I feel like we all go through that stage where an epic shrug feels edgy and deep before realizing that it’s actually boring and a cop-out. And I’m not sure why he thought anyone would want a story about family dynamics and class warfare to suddenly take a hard turn into full Uchikoshi at the end; who was that even for?

On the other hand, the gameplay here is quite good, let down largely by the story’s bloat drawing it out too long. It’s part detective point-and-click, part brawler, which is a really fun and unique combination. I’m not a big fighting games person so I wasn’t sure if I’d like it, but it was accessible enough that I really did. The action sequences broke up the narrative ones really well, and I enjoyed how many times I’d be trying to figure out a puzzle and then just realize, oh right, I can smash shit! I like how many nonviolent solutions actually involved smashing things, lol.

The hint system is genuinely brilliant. The game has one set of collectables, which can be used as a currency to buy hints. The hints are perfect, spoiler free and point you in the general direction without giving away solutions, steadily getting more specific if you still need help. For me they were especially useful for times when I’d missed something small, like an interactable, or if I hadn’t realized so-and-so still had dialogue left — it meant I could always be sure I’d seen everything.

And the interrogation mechanic was fun! I felt the game generally managed to guide the player toward the deductions effectively. The one time I had an issue was during the Tidy investigation, where I realized the solution as soon as I found the map, but then had to wait for Brok to catch up in order to accuse the culprit. But on the whole I was impressed at how frequently I would realize what was happening at the same time as Brok, which made me feel nice and clever during the investigation sequences. The Wes one at the end was particularly good on this. I really enjoyed how competent Brok was. The detectives in these games have been kind of stupid so far (with one or two exceptions) so it was nice to be on the same page as him.

I also enjoyed how often I would go, “Hey, I wonder if that’s an option?” and it indeed was. I liked that there were multiple ways to solve almost every problem, and one of the pluses of the brawler thing was that if you really got stuck at a puzzle you could almost always punch your way through the sequence. It was a pretty funny diegetic way of preventing the player from getting frustrated.

There’s a lot to like about this game. But at the same time, I’m not sure I’d get the sequel — I just don’t think the quantity of entirely disparate hanging threads is salvageable, at least not without bringing on a couple editorial staff, and I’m not interested in another story that won’t commit to a narrative. I would, however, potentially be interested if the dev started a completely new story, in hopes that this experience would have helped him create something more polished and cohesive next time.

Song of Farca
(Wooden Monkeys, 2021)

Song of Farca is a weird game.

It feels like it should be about something, thematically, but it just kind of… isn’t. It keeps mentioning things like CORPORATIONS and ACAB and UNIONS, but never seems to have anything meaningful to say about any of them. My impression is the game just thinks these are the kind of things games talk about, so they should be referenced, but it never shows interest in any of them. The cynical way of looking at this is someone in marketing was hoping using these buzzwords would create them a hit, but the game is so indifferent it’s hard to look at it that way.

Part of it is that the protagonist is so blandly amoral — she doesn’t seem to believe in anything and treats buying her girlfriend a birthday present with the same levity as solving a brutal murder. She’s happy to work against the mob when she’s hired by someone they stole from, the cops when they’re being big meanies, big business when she’s being paid to, but just as happy to work for them when they’re footing the bill. The ends always justify the means to such a degree that she doesn’t seem to consider the means at all. The result is that the narrative never stops to consider anything that’s happening, because she doesn’t seem to care, so her reactions to things can never serve as a thematic exploration. She has no reactions. So the game ends up with no themes. It just has references to things that theoretically one could use as themes. If the game was aware of how weird this is it could be clever but instead it’s just so bizarre.

(Though I did kind of enjoy how baffled the protagonist was about her GF being upset she had to kill someone in self defense. She’s just like, “Don’t worry, you won’t get arrested, it was self-defense!” And the GF is like, “But I had to kill a human being, holy shit…” and the protag just keeps repeating, “But don’t worry, it was self defense!” as if she can’t understand why someone might care about a stranger. Surreal.)

I realize this sounds like it could be cool and interesting, but unfortunately she’s not characterized enough to be an antihero — she just does what she’s being told to do and then moves on to the next thing. She lacks the dedicated self-interest of a sociopath. She’s just perpetually indifferent to everything and mindlessly does whatever she’s told as if she has no agency.

There’s also an edginess problem. “Wouldn’t it be crazy if someone unleashed a robot dog to kill a bunch of real dogs in a dogfight ring???” Uh… what? “Wouldn’t it be crazy if you were so awesome the government put a hit out on your girlfriend just to fuck with you?” Uh, no? “Wouldn’t it be crazy if a supersoldier took a bunch of drugs and murdered like 15 people and also did a joker thing where he kept making the protagonist choose who died and then was pulling out people’s organs and then was naked in a boardroom and you had to take over corporate security because he kept killing people and–” what the actual fuck are you talking about. No, it’s not cool, it’s stupid and gross and boring. Dead dogs is edgy, serial killers are edgy, gratuitous violence is edgy, so it’s poured on as thick as possible to try to create suspense where none exists. But it blows so far past suspension of disbelief that it’s just boring. It doesn’t resemble anything that ever has happened or could happen, and it’s so outlandish it has no real-world referent, so what in the world is the point?

The gameplay is… there, I guess? The weird splitscreen thing is stupid; I don’t know why we need to see the protagonist character doddering around her apartment for a minute at every scene change instead of the whole thing just being the console screen, and the thing taking control of your mouse and shooting up bright warning messsages if you so much as twitch is supremely annoying. All of the gameplay is line-of-sight puzzles where you have to activate certain nodes in a certain order. So you “hack” a camera that lets you see a robot which you hack to move toward a note which you can then read, etc. This has some weird effects. Like, you periodically act like you have physical access to the things you find, including sorting through a pile of chips and doing an analysis on a drug, but… how? The whole conceit of the game is the protag is on house arrest, and no one is picking the things up and bringing them to you, so…? The setup also requires everyone’s houses to have like 3 security cameras in every single room, including at the anti-technology church, which apparently also has drones and a roomba. It just doesn’t make very much sense. And the gameplay never changes at all; it exactly the same in the first hour as in the last. There’s no detection or deduction about anything, just incredibly simplistic click sequences.

I also ran into a few bugs in the dialogue section, where it seemed like a bunch of lines got skipped, or I would get interactions out of order. In one case I had someone ask me the results of casing a building before I got the call of them asking me to case it. And I was so obviously not supposed to choose the options that broke me up with my girlfriend that characters later on talked like we were still together. I picked them because I just thought it was funny to make the protag go, “Yeah I do kind of suck, don’t I?” but it was so clear you weren’t supposed to do that that I don’t understand why those choices were even there.

By about 3/4 through the samey same puzzles had become mind-numbing, and the game’s insistence I was interested in the nothing protagonist’s love life was just bizarre. Also she’s just like… constantly baffled that the people she treats like shit hate her later on? None of her behavior makes any sense and it means that choice and consequence feel completely disconnected. And god the entirely text-based sequences were an eternity.

Mostly this was just so, so boring. The ending was so goddamn stupid. I want just sitting there wishing it would end.

A few stray points:

– There’s this bizarre thing where the game takes place on fake-Malta but all the characters are Finnish or Slavic. The dev is apparently Russian, and it’s super weird they chose this setting and then just… populated it with their own locals? Was it that hard to google “Maltese names”? Or look at the ethnic background of the place? Granted I’m Sicilian and could do this offhand so maybe populating a bunch of Mediterranean NPCs is way harder than I think it is, but the effect is super weird. There’s even all these references to like, Siberian Wars and the Siberian mob. I don’t get why it wasn’t set like on an island in the Baltic Sea, they clearly gave zero fucks about the setting. Is Malta exotic and dangerous to Russians? I’m so confused by this choice.

– These are also that brand of writers that feel like they just learned the word “bitch” yesterday and need to say it as much as possible. Obviously it’s sexist but more importantly it’s all anyone ever says which is such a weird suspension of disbelief problem where everyone has the same voice. Come up with something else for people to say!

– What’s the deal with blue hair? There’s no fewer than three characters with blue hair, including the protag and her GF, who have basically the same character design. Does it signify something I’m not aware of?

– Why do so many of these games include cases that don’t let you find the real solution??? It’s such bad game design. What a waste of my time.

– There were, by my count, four fridgings in this game. I think that’s a record of some kind.

Chiken Police: Paint It Red
(The Wild Gentlemen, 2020)

This game opens with a quote from The Big Sleep, moves into some weird shit about how different races are fundamentally incompatible, and then the first line proper of the story is, “My office lock is a piece of shit if a dame can pick it.” At that stage I thought, jesus christ not another one, but I felt like I had to push through for science.

There’s something kind of viscerally horrifying to me about stock photos of women in lingerie with photorealistic animal heads. There’s something that feels uniquely degrading about it to me, especially since all the male characters get to be fully clothed in suits and coats. Giving the woman a cat head feels so gross too. I can’t quite put my finger on why it feels so much worse than normal sexualization. Perhaps it’s that it brings to mind images like this or this, which dehumanize women in a similar way. I understand, intellectually, why this happened, why this aesthetic seemed like a silly and fun thing to do, but someone needed to point of the context here and the contexts in which images like the ones they’re using typically show up. This is why you need a diverse writers’ room.

On the other hand, maybe they knew and just didn’t give a fuck. Here’s a fun (?) collage of screenshots:

The Chandler epigraph is, “Dead bodies are heavier than broken hearts,” apparently from The Big Sleep. Here’s some Chandler quotes I would use as epigraphs:

– ‘Police business,’ he said almost gently, ‘is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.’ (Lady in the Lake, Ch 27)

– “The trouble with cops is not that they’re dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something they didn’t have before. Maybe it did once, but not any more. They’re topped by too many smart minds.” (Farewell, My Lovely Ch 36)

– “In one way cops are all the same […] [They believe] We don’t have mobs and crime syndicates and goon squads because we have crooked politicians and their stooges in the City Hall and the legislatures. Crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumour, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack.” (Farewell, My Lovely Ch 49)

– “‘He had a police record.’ She shrugged. She said negligently: ‘He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.’” (The Big Sleep, Ch 11)

Fun fact: If you read books you can actually find out what they’re about! Or, terrifyingly, maybe you can’t — hell knows there’s an enormous functional literacy problem right now, maybe that’s what this is.

Anyway, here’s my list of complaints, in a semi-live-blog form, as that was the only way I could force myself through this game:

• The mobster’s name is Hobart Wessler but everyone calls him by his mobster name which is “Ibn”and a) I guess we’re just casually accepting that Arabic names are inherently criminal and scary, cool cool not racist at all b) it’s so fucking stupid, it’s like calling someone named Eriksson “Sson” or Da Vinci “Da”. I can’t get over this, why is everyone walking around calling him Ibn???
  • Omg, I think I just realized something. Do the writers not realize that when a historical figure’s name is like “Ibn al-Haytham” or “Ibn Sina” it’s a patronymic? Do they think that that’s their given name??? This is consuming me, it’s literally like telling someone they’re named “Da” after Da Vinci, omg.
    • “Hi I’m Ingrid Olafsdottir and this is my daughter Sdottir.” …This could theoretically create a person whose name was Sdottir Sdottirsdottir.
• The writing is really, really clunky, in a way where the syntax and word use is all slightly off (it seems to confuse wife and fiance a lot), with lots of incorrect prepositions (‘you could see it for miles away’; ‘cops weren’t welcome on this place’) and straight grammatical errors (“The police is here”, its/it’s confusion). While there’s no inherent problem with non-native speakers writing in another language, if you don’t have a native-speaking editor somewhere in the process it can cause real issues; in this case it sometimes becomes hard to follow and always has a feeling of not quite saying what it meant to say. I found the interrogations to be completely incoherent, as it couldn’t properly communicate the tone of the different dialogue options and I felt like I was just choosing at random.
  • The characters apparently call each other racial slurs all the time in a way that’s totally not a weird normalization of racism, but because the writing is so weird I often can’t figure out what the slurs are and why one character is calling another racist, which is surreal.
• Excess menus. Having to repeatedly click through the dialogue menu’s “talk” option to see full conversations is incredibly annoying. Why does the option to see interactables not stay activated? Why are the notebook, map, and inventory all in three separate menus when they could be so easily consolidated? Why can’t you click the icons on the map?
• I found the sudden switch from noir to buddy cop to be a bizarre tone whiplash. Everyone’s talking about BOOZE and GUNS and VIOLENCE and then your partner joins and suddenly all the dialogue is just them making bad jokes? So weird.
• Game is so up its own ass. It is ENDLESS stupid banter between the detectives, and keeps smugly talking about how genre-savvy it is. Has the protag take the case over from a detective literally named “Philip Marlowe” who was too chickenshit (hur hur I’m a genius too) to finish it out. Maybe spend less time sniffing your own farts and more time actually reading the books.
  • I find mocking the Marlowe character for being drunk to be pretty tasteless. Chandler always struggled with both alcoholism and depression, but starting drinking to extreme excess after his wife died. IMO, the drinking was a kind of prolonged suicide; all accounts I’ve seen suggest his drinking got significantly worse after her death, but he’d also attempted when he realized she was dying. He died just 5 years after his wife, of kidney and vascular disease, both things associated with excessive alcohol consumption. The Long Goodbye takes alcoholism as a major theme and is clearly an exploration of Chandler’s own struggles and how they’re viewed socially.
  • JFC, it ends with “Philip Marlowe” talking about how much he admires the protagonists. This is so cringey and pathetic.
• No actual investigation, just running around talking to people and having to listen to the characters crow about how clever they are. I barely have to be here.
• Opposite problem of unskippable text, instead of pressing to autofill the text box it just skips the dialogue, so I keep accidentally skipping lines. End result is nonetheless me having to irritably sit and wait for dialogue to slowly scroll by.
• Lots of birdtits and reptitits. I’m not surprised or anything, but it’s still really stupid.
• The “investigate” module asks such inspired questions as, “Who were the threats toward the woman getting threats directed at?” It’s like a reading quiz.
  • JFC in the third part the investigation is, “Who was it that you just spoke to who then tried to kill you?”
• Ugh, there’s a minigame that requires me to zip up a woman’s dress, so skeevy. Oh god it’s replayable. I need a shower.
• The game occasionally gestures toward cops being corrupt, but it can’t commit — it likes the power too much. In fact, it goes a step further by making them celebrity cops everyone loves and is excited to see — you constantly get people fawning over how cool and coppish you are. I imagine this is the kind of thing MAGAts jerk off to.
• Ah, and we end with that ol’ boogeyman. How boring.
• You know, Natasha was… weirdly absent from the story? Like, she never lies to you or turns out to be working against you in some way. The whole point of the “femme fatale” is that she has an agenda — you can never know if you can trust her or where she’ll turn up. But Natasha tells you she’s being blackmailed, it’s true, and then she vanishes until the last scene (in a way the game lampshades but never addresses). She has no idea what’s really going on and is completely unrelated to the plot and how it resolves. It’s super weird. She has no ulterior motives, and the whole point of the archetype is ulterior motives.
  • Wait… do the writers think the point of a “femme fatale” is that she kills someone? Like, did they interpret it literally where her showing up randomly to kill the culprit is supposed to be “proof” that she’s a femme fatale? That’s so insanely stupid but I have a hunch it’s what’s going on. LOL.
• There’s this Ed Wood movie called The Sinister Urge that was on MST3k and the main plot is about a crazy guy who’s normal until he sees photos of pretty women and then he suddenly starts killing people and that’s what this game makes me think of.

This may have been the worst one yet. Just, holy shit lol. Why are the gritty noir ones so terrible??

Mr Act asked me if this breaks the streak of animal games being the good ones, but I don’t actually think it does, because this isn’t an animal game. In fact, this game is obsessed with the human body, especially the normative female body, but also with human hands. In fact, I would call the consumption of the human body as an object the game’s main thematic fulcrum. The game simply could not exist as it does absent the human body.

Further, that everything is photorealistic and human except the portraits makes it feel completely different from the animal games, where the nonhuman is fully baked into the art direction from top to bottom. Unlike the furry games, this game is uninterested in alternative biologies — everyone has the same stock-photo body type. Narratively, it also only matters inasmuch as it’s an excuse for inane banter and to normalize racism in a way that provides plausible deniability.

To me this is thoroughly in category 2; the portraits could as easily have been plants or gemstones or any other object and it wouldn’t have mattered.