Several games that I gave up on. Inside: Filament, Virgo Versus the Zodiac, Sifu.
Filament
Puzzle
A puzzle game based around leading a wire around a grid to activate switches without intersecting itself. This simple premise is remixed and iterated on countless times in very creative ways; every time I thought the game had exhausted what it could do, it surprised me with something new. However, I never finished it because it’s also hard as nails. In her review of A Monster’s Expedition Act discussed the importance of puzzle games having a dynamic difficulty curve, with hard puzzles interspersed with easy ones to keep a player’s momentum going. This is not the case in Filament; the difficulty escalates very quickly and rarely ever drops back down. I think the game’s non-linear structure may have made this worse; you can access almost every puzzle from the start, which on the one hand means that if you’ve hit a wall you can try different puzzles, but on the other hand means that after you’ve done all the easy puzzles it’s nothing but hard puzzles for the rest of the game. It doesn’t help that there were, I felt, too many puzzles — you typically have to solve sets of 10 to 20 puzzles in order to make any visible progress. I don’t know how many there are in total, but it has to be well over 100. I made it to the final area only to find it filled with over a dozen more impenetrably hard puzzles, and just gave up. It was too much.
There’s also a framing narrative about space corporations being evil, which isn’t anything new at this point. The story (told through crew logs unlocked by solving puzzles) was moderately interesting, but incredibly backloaded. I had only just started to get to the interesting bits when I gave up, which was at the endgame. The narrator also, unfortunately, got on my nerves quite a bit; she’s your typical irreverent too-cool-for-school type, which in the context of a setting that demands as much professionalism as a space expedition is just grating and immersion-breaking. Flagrantly slacking off on your job, disrespecting the chain of command, and sneaking out for drunken parties when the only thing protecting your from the void of space is a fragile metal box is not cutesy and endearing, it is horrifying, and it beggars belief that such an unsuitable candidate was ever selected for this job in the first place.
Virgo Versus the Zodiac
RPG
I just couldn’t get into this game for some reason. I liked the demo, but the full game lost me just when it seemed to be picking up. The game claims it’s inspired by Paper Mario, but it doesn’t play much like it at all; every attack is based around one of a small set of timing minigames that rarely match up with the animations themselves, which makes the combat feel very repetitive and unengaging. Part of the reason for this is that the game drowns you in alternate equipment and weapons, each of which give you a different ability. I’m sure this is appealing to some gamers, but I just felt overwhelmed, especially since most of them were so similar. I never changed my loadout very much throughout the game, even as the game kept throwing more and more items at me.
The story is pretty impenetrable. It tries to be in medias res, but it never does the part where it catches you up afterwards. The world used to be ruled by gods (named after planets), but their children (the Zodiacs) rebelled, overthrew them, and divided their territory among themselves. The protagonist, Virgo, is some sort of tradcath monarchist who wants to bring back the good old days when the gods were in charge, so she’s taken it upon herself to fight the other Zodiacs and take their crowns, which will accomplish this… somehow. I initially thought the gods had been killed, but then in the third area Virgo’s parents just show up out of nowhere, so apparently they’re just in exile somewhere, in which case I don’t understand why they haven’t reclaimed their own territory and why Virgo needs to do this? We’re also told there’s a lot of history between Virgo and the other Zodiacs, but they only reference this obliquely. The game lets you make choices about how to deal with them that change the course of the plot, but because I don’t have Virgo’s knowledge or share her emotional attachments, I felt completely disconnected from Virgo’s actions and had no idea what the consequences of my choices would actually be. Like, Virgo says the other Zodiacs are evil and deserve to die, but are they? The game claims she’s an unreliable narrator, but doesn’t provide much in the way of alternate viewpoints. I just ended up feeling incredibly lost and confused. The gameplay still could have carried that if it wasn’t horribly boring and repetitive, but alas.
Sifu
Action
A beat-’em-up where you age every time you die, trading health for damage. I was intrigued, but hit a brick wall at the second level. The game is so fast that I genuinely don’t understand how it’s humanly possible to achieve the necessary reaction time. The game is also incredibly punishing, as you age faster if you die in quick succession, creating a death spiral. Your age persists across levels and once you pass age 70, your next death is final, so even if you do manage to beat a level, in practice you’ll need to redo it to near-perfection so you have more lives in future levels. I thought that if I could beat Sekiro I could handle any action game, but apparently not; this one was just too much for me.
Sifu is so fucking good. I love it. Its ‘pacifist’ route is imo one of the closest pacifist routes to truly have a narrative and mechanical integration in any action games. Ignoring the fact that the game still has you kill or maim dozens of mooks per level, I am absolutely enamored of how the game wants you to pacify the bosses: by breaking their posture twice *without* draining their healthbar or EVER touching the ‘kill’ action commands you get. In such a tense fight, being forced to maintain that level of discipline actually seems to jive with the martial arts concept that is supposed to be the basis for the pacifist route.
Something that Sekiro and the soulslikes are missing, in hindsight, is like… a really engaging offense to go with the defense. In Sekiro you basically just have your sword swing and whatever special move you put on; the prosthetic weapons were almost never interesting or engaging outside of the fights literally designed to be defeated by them.
Lately I’ve been playing Monster Hunter: Wilds, and it is slowly becoming my favorite action game because of just how much your offense and defense can flow into one another. Each MonHun weapon has a character-action moveset that has combos and maneuvers that feel much fresher and more fun to execute than Soulslike ‘do I press R1 or R2’ offense.
They introduced a mechanic called Offset, in which certain attacks can clash with a monster’s attack and negate the damage, sometimes even knocking the monster over and unlocking a special follow-up attack. It’s pure dopamine. There are a variety of weapons and they don’t just have different offensive movesets, they have different defensive options as well. Some weapons can block, some have dodges with big invincibility frames and built-in counters, and some have the aforementioned Offset, or a combination fo the three.
I would say Sifu is almost up there with MHW, where it combines the parrying and dodging with an elaborate fighting game moveset, but I don’t think that game quite balances it properly, because realistically you’ll never get to use the full moveset on anything more dangerous than a basic mook. It’s better to learn 2-3 quick combos that you can comfortably execute in a brawl, and spend the rest of your attention learning the defense.