(Airtight Games & Square Enix, 2014)

I haven’t done any AAA games yet. Honestly can’t even remember last time I played one that wasn’t Nintendo. Do they all title themselves so obnoxiously in Steam?

This is a bad game, and while for a while it was entertainingly bad, I ultimately DNFed it when it got boring under its own self-seriousness. It’s also textbook copaganda.

At least part of the enjoyment I did manage to get out of this was the game’s attempt to set itself in Salem, MA, a place that I lived for a decade. There’s a lot to love about this choice. I’m just going to start by talking about Salem a lot and you can’t stop me, sorry. My homesickness is terminal.

First is the game’s decision to pitch Salem as a dangerous, poverty- and crime-stricken hellhole, which is hilarious. Salem is a pretty wealthy area, and because it’s historic, even its very old structures are well-preserved. As the Boston sprawl has moved outward, it’s only become a more and more expensive place to live — for reference, if we’d stayed in NE, we were hoping to move to Salem center before we were priced out; now, I don’t think we could afford it. The idea of a surfeit of gang violence on the streets of Salem is so funny to me. Mr. Act said, “I assume the protagonist grew up on the mean streets of Marblehead,” which is an accurate comparison. Oh woe is me, a poor child from the beachfront resort town of East Hampton!

The other thing is that the game kept calling Salem a “small town” and a “sleepy place” and first of all, if you’ve ever seen Salem Center in mid-October when it’s packed shoulder-to-shoulder and all the locals are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, I’m not sure ‘sleepy’ is the word that would come to mind, but also Salem is a city? Like all of Greater Boston, it’s extremely densely populated — 5,363 people per sq mi, which yeah, that sounds right. It’s physically small, yeah, everywhere in New England is small in terms of square mileage, but 45,000 people over 4 square miles is not ‘sleepy’ lol. I mean it’s not “we pack 20,000 people into every square mile” Somerville, but I can promise the traffic is a nightmare. And that’s the other thing, Salem is a huge transportation hub. It has a major commuter rail station in the city center (across from which is Bit Bar, an arcade-restaurant combo that I never got to go to a second time) and it’s at the convergence of a bunch of major thoroughfares (Exit 40A off 95N toward 114E), because of course it is, it’s been important to be able to get there from all of New England for 250 years. The commuter rail station has actually been around since 1838, so pretending this is some small, out-of-the-way place is pretty big research fail unless it’s literally set during the witch trials.

The other truly baffling decision, was that they chose this historical setting… but seem to have just made up history and historical landmarks? Like it kept having me look at history plaques and I was like “I haven’t heard of any of this stuff?” and in Googling it, none of it seems real. Why go through all the trouble to choose this setting only to not use it?? Salem has this extremely famous center square with a big plaza and a statue of Bewitched and choosing that setting and not using that iconography is so bizarre. Where’s the old custom house? The house of seven gables? The harbor? That weird museum that tries to convince people to try wicca? They women with carts selling beach rocks as magical witch stones for $20 each? The real history of the place is why it’s a spooky setting! Why jettison that? Super bizarre.

But okay, my favorite thing they made up, is this gas station. Like they invent a historic gas station that they call SOC’s and the thing about that is that SOC’s actually is a real place… but it’s an ice cream parlor (in nearby Saugus). An incredible ice cream parlor that I miss every day, but the idea that they saw the name of an ice cream shop and were like, that’s legit, but it needs to be grittier and shittier… gas station.

Oh all, there was this throwaway line where the cops thought the protagonist’s Irish name was weird, which is… I feel like the one thing even someone from the West Coast would know is that Boston is… very Irish?? The idea of anyone in Greater Boston being confused by someone being Irish is just… I don’t understand. Was this some kind of meta joke??

Because I have to be honest, I loved all this. I loved how insane it was, how little sense it made, how it completely undermined the plot of the game, how baffled and indignant I got to be about it. It was funny to me from top to bottom and seriously, 10/10 for research and setting. This is the kind of stuff I, an enjoyer of bad media, live for.

Unfortunately once the absurdity of all this wore off, though, it was just a bad game.

The protagonist was this super generic “sexy criminal with a heart of gold who turned over a new leaf” and his fridged wife was so blandly like “ooo he’s so sexy but he has past :(  but sexy??? but past :( ~~” and that was the entirety of both their personalities.

ALSO he was just like, blatantly Joey from the Blackwell games?

Like they’re literally the same color in the same outfit. The game actually takes this a step further by teaming him up with a young woman who’s a medium and they do the whole split-investigation thing and the plot even ends up revolving around someone killing mediums and… this is just Blackwell Deception. It’s really weird. What was the pitch meeting here like, “You know, those games would have been really good if only the protagonist wasn’t the woman and also it was gritty realism”?

Honestly the biggest problem with this for me was that it just kept reminding me of better games. Like every time I looked at the protag I was like, “Wow I miss the Blackwell games,” and that’s just not something you want your audience to think.

Meanwhile, the gameplay is boring, the controls suck and are very unreliable, there’s no map so you never know where anything is, the investigations are half-assed and only ever involve the protagonist noticing obvious things, and the mystery was 100% obvious as soon as we saw a little pilgrim girl running around Salem. (Incidentally, why spoil your own story with the setting if you’re not going to try to compensate by using the setting for atmosphere?) Also there are almost 300 collectibles, the vast majority of which were missable, and the hitboxes were insanely tiny.

The investigation mechanic was deeply weird. It would be like, “What evidence tells us where the suspect went?” and then you’d have to choose from options that were like:

• He went out the open window
• There’s a cheeseburger on the table
• I have personal beef with that cop over there
• My wife died and I’m sad
• Pigeons

It was honestly so bizarre that it looped back around to effective in that I kept being like… is there some next-level Sherlock-brain thing going on here where the cheeseburger is from his favorite restaurant and that’s where he went? And then I’d click on that to see what it said and it’d just be like, “No you dipshit, of course not.” But the idea that a “game” would just keep giving you one extremely obvious option and 4 that were insane and act like it was a puzzle broke me, I kept picking the insane ones and thinking, “Oooh, is the connection that it turns out the dead wife was secretly selling drugs to pigeons?” and obviously that wasn’t the answer, but I was utterly unable to stop myself from engaging with them as puzzles instead of reading quizzes. Which lent the whole thing this extra later of surreal absurdity.

Like I said, you don’t choose a setting like this, immediately introduce a creepy girl child ghost, and then have the culprit not be evil magic, but despite how obvious this was I still was irritated and let down by the nonsolution. I just fundamentally don’t find this, “Psych! There’s no culprit it’s all ghosts!” thing satisfying. And the game got so needlessly convoluted about it, with a whole bunch of fakeouts and a centuries-long conspiracy and it was just so clearly layering twists on top of twists for their own sake and not because the game or story had anything meaningful to say.

Because yeah, this is just copaganda. It even does this fakeout where two separate cops seem at different points like they’re responsible, but psych! They were just innocent victims of possession. We’re clearly supposed to be shocked and horrified at the idea that they could be responsible and relieved when they’re not. It’s so stupid.

Honestly how bad this game was powered me like a third of the way through it, but then at some point I sat down to play and was just like… nah, it’s ceased being worth it. The gameplay was bad, it was making me motion sick, and there were no cloud saves so I couldn’t swap to playing on deck to see if that would help with the motion sickness, so that’s where it ended.