Sorry it’s been a while! I’ve been distracted by all the other games that have come out recently. Only three games on review this time, but I had a lot to say about each.
A Short Hike
Walking Sim/Platformer
This was a really sweet and relaxing game. The premise is very simple: You are a bird-person on vacation at a mountain park, and you need to reach the peak to get cell reception for an important phone call. In order to reach the top, you need golden feathers, which allow you to double jump and climb walls; these can be gotten by exploring the island and doing sidequests for the other tourists. It’s a great example of gameplay supporting tone and theme; the story is about a shut-in learning to get out and enjoy the world, and that’s reflected in how the cliffs initially feel insurmountable but become easy to navigate as you gain more feathers. There’s a bit of a sandboxy feel in that you can explore the mountain pretty much however you want, and you don’t even need to collect every golden feather to see everything. I still wanted to do all the sidequests, not for completionism’s sake but because all the NPCs are so lovely and I wanted to help them out. Several NPCs make the trek along with you and update their position over time, and it was really fun to keep running into them.
My one complaint is that I would have appreciated a map — the mountain is just a bit too big for me to keep everything in my head, and the verticality naturally makes it hard to see areas from afar. There were a few times when I ended up circling the mountain several times trying to search for a specific spot.
2064: Read-Only Memories
Visual Novel
This game has basically everything I wanted from ERROR: Human Not Found. The premise is quite similar: It’s a sci-fi investigation game where you must solve the disappearance of a prominent software engineer with the help of his creation, the first self-aware robot. However, it addresses basically all my complaints with Human Not Found with aplomb. Your robot buddy actually acts like a robot and ruminates on their sapience in non-trivial ways. There is even an entire scene where they reflect on what their gender is and if they even want one, including the discovery of an earlier sapient AI that did insist on a specific gender presentation and ruminating on why they feel more indifferent and what that might mean! (And this is an ending spoiler, but I appreciated getting to talk to all the newly-sapient robots in the epilogue instead of pulling the curtain over the brave new world, as well as the acknowledgement that robots who are built only for simple tasks might not appreciate sapience. This stuff is complicated!)
The human characters were also excellent here, and there are even humans with gene mods in addition to cyborgs to really up the transhumanism. In particular, there is a bevy of gay and genderqueer characters, and not in a tacked-on way like in Human Not Found. That queer presence was really essential to the story’s themes of personhood, identity, and self-discovery. It always makes me roll my eyes when future sci-fi does some parable about the personhood of AIs or cyborgs or whatever but there are no gay people to be seen. The implication that real people who exist today are more taboo than future aliens or whatever inevitably hamstrings whatever point the story tries to make. You need to have a diverse cast to make this kind of story work, to acknowledge this personhood debate doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I particularly liked the portrayal of The Human Revolution, the anti-gene-mod faction; they’re not cartoonishly villainous nor even the main villains of the game, they’re the banal, realistic type of evil where they’ll politely explain why certain people aren’t people and how proud they are of supporting legislation to make peoples’ lives hell.
Oh, and there is flavor text. So much flavor text. A little too much, if anything; I disliked that I had to interact multiple times to see everything. But otherwise, it’s very delicious.
Book of Eos
RPG
Yet another game that wants to be UnderTale but lacks the self-awareness to do so. The game’s description is “The original idea was to tell a somewhat cliche RPG story with one critical change: You play as the monsters,” and boy is that painfully accurate. The actual plot has very little to do with the monsters, and is mostly just a standard RPG Maker RPG except sometimes some humans are racist at you. There’s no explanation for why humans and monsters are at war or how any of the characters feel about it. Monsters are still races of hats with no explanation given for why or how that works. Even the “you can’t enter human towns” schtick is almost instantly forgotten; in the first town you go to, there’s a big deal made about how you have to wear disguises and can barely understand the language, but in every town after you can prance around wherever and perfectly communicate with everyone. It even botches the one thing I was looking forward to, which is exploring how nonhuman biologies influence everyday life — the merman character at one point says that he prefers saltwater, but almost immediately afterwards he jumps in a pond and talks about how great the freshwater quality is. The monster cast is only a gimmick, not anything with serious thought put into it.
Oh, and yes, you go around killing monsters to level up (and humans, but it’s still totally unfair how persecuted you are). There’s a similar handwave to HEARTBEAT‘s that they’re “less civilized”, so remember kids, racism is wrong except when it’s totally right.
Gameplay is decent but runs into all the RPG Maker pitfalls: random encounters, tactical roulette, terrible graphics. I was initially interested by how you had no healing skills and had to rely entirely on items, but once you get your final party member he turns out to be a healer, so nope, they just made the tutorial way harder than the rest of the game for no clear reason. I would give it points for not handing out full heals before bosses, but they also give you a skill that regenerates MP for free, so resource management doesn’t exist.