Inside: 9 Years of Shadows, Cookie Cutter, The Captain, Sunless Skies

9 Years of Shadows
Metroidvania

A curse has stolen all color from the land, and also unrelatedly (?) killed a bunch of people. Nine years later, a woman enters the source of the course hoping to break it or die trying. Not actually as grimdark as it sounds, though it’s definitely trying to be. The gameplay is pretty standard, though it does have one feature I found clever, which is that your mana is your health and vice versa. Instead of taking damage when you’re hit, you instead drain mana to cast a shielding spell; it’s only when you’re completely spent that you lose health (which is very limited). This provides for some good risk/reward gameplay, as you can take out enemies faster if you use your spells, but that puts you in greater danger. You also regain mana via attacking, which encourages aggressive gameplay instead of turtling. There is also a healing mechanic similar to Hollow Knight’s, where if your mana is empty you can stand still for about a second to recharge it; this can be done without limit, but of course it can be tricky to find that window of safety in a boss battle. Unfortunately, the endgame throws this all out the window by giving you passive mana regeneration, which disappointed me. It was a cool mechanic and the devs should have stuck to their guns, I think.

Only two things are noteworthy about the story: The big twist is spoiled by the name of your spells — why the writers did this I can’t fathom — and the hero is really, really murdery. We’re told the curse corrupts people and turns them into mindless monsters, yet lots of bosses seem to be normal people who the hero cuts down just as mercilessly. This includes an abused girl who was desperate enough to sell her soul to become a demon, which makes her evil and deserve to die. This is very different from the sad boy who did the same thing for the same reasons, he’s a woobie who gets to live. Interesting, that.

Additionally, the graphics glitch badly if you pick the 1920 x 1080 resolution setting on a monitor with a narrower resolution. That option should just be locked off if your monitor doesn’t support it. (Most games actually force my monitor to that resolution; not sure why that wasn’t the case here.)

Cookie Cutter
Metroidvania

This one was oddly boring. The designers made the questionable choice of making all counterattacks instant kills, including against bosses, which trivializes almost all combat. In particular, it makes regular attacks feel like a waste, since a counter will kill an enemy regardless of how much damage you deal; it’s not like in Sekiro where there’s a connection between health and the guard meter. Some enemies have to be parried multiple times before you can counter, but if you know an attack well enough to parry it once, you can parry it any number of times. The game gives you a ton of different weapons and powers and attack combos, but I never used them except against the few enemies you can’t counter. On top of this, there’s no contact damage, so it’s entirely possible to just… walk past enemies. I eventually lost interest in effortlessly dispatching every enemy by waiting for them to rush me with their easily-parried attacks.

Story is a standard cyberpunk thing about how corporations are evil and abuse workers, and also immortality is bad, I think? Nothing we haven’t seen before. The most notable thing is the extremely unnecessary and poorly-directed voice acting that doesn’t even match up with the subtitles half the time. I muted it after the first cutscene and never looked back.

The Captain
Adventure

This is very openly a Star Trek fangame with the serial numbers filed off, but without even the veneer of utopianism or the idea the protagonists are supposed to be good people. Like Star Trek it’s very mediocre-to-bad sci-fi, with culture that hasn’t changed in 1000 years and alien planets inexplicably populated by humans. Star Trek did that because it was live action, video games don’t have that excuse. It’s not like the graphics here are even that detailed, more creative alien designs wouldn’t have been hard! Anyway, I lost interest after the planet where you’re railroaded into stealing an oppressed indigenous culture’s sacred artifact because the hero can’t say no to sexy ladies.

Sunless Skies
Roguelike/Visual Novel

The sequel to Sunless Sea, which I reviewed way back in 2017. It is a massive improvement on every front and the developers clearly listened to complaints. Combat is much more engaging and skill-based, it’s much easier to get moving in the early game, leveling up is more convenient, and everything is a lot more streamlined in general.

The story is also a lot more interesting: Instead of being set concurrently with Fallen London, it depicts an alternate future where Queen Victoria has murdered the Bazaar and the Sun, allowing London to escape from their clutches. Victoria has clawed open the gates of Heaven and now seeks to expand the British empire into space, with Victoria ruling as immortal god-queen thanks to the discovery that time is a physical resource that can be mined and exploited. This decision to completely blow up the setting definitely got my attention and ensures the atmosphere feels noticeably different than in Sea. I was consistently intrigued to learn what happened in the intervening time and what the new, radically changed status quo is like, and the answers do an excellent job of balancing cosmic horror with “humans are the real monsters”.

…And yet my interest still ultimately petered out, just as it did with Sea. I think, perhaps, the novelesque storytelling and roguelike gameplay are intrinsically at odds here. Roguelike gameplay is about falling into a routine, understanding the game’s systems so well you can do them on instinct; but that runs directly counter to appreciating the beautiful prose at every location. You can’t stop to smell the roses every day of your 9 to 5 job. It also takes so long to get anywhere, especially if you have to deliver large amounts of cargo that necessitate round trips and micromanaging your inventory. If I’m interested in a story I want to stay immersed in it, not spend half an hour on a fetch quest before I can read the next page.

And frustratingly, and perhaps related to the roguelike aspect, the stories rarely ever have satisfying endings. The game’s leadup trailers advertised that changes to the world would persist across captains, but from what I could tell this only happens exactly once, in the tutorial quest, and then is never used again. Quests and world states still get reset with every captain, which makes sense from a gameplay standpoint to allow you to make different choices and such, but it ends up making your actions feel pointless. Brabazon was a particularly bleak and frustrating example of this — the writers will show you that capitalism is evil and living under it is horrific, but then tell you there’s literally nothing you can do to fix it, you just have to wallow in inescapable misery forever. At a certain point this feels less like criticism and more like normalization: Yes, capitalism is bad, but it’s also an inescapable part of the universe that can never be fundamentally changed, so don’t bother trying to fight back. We’ll acknowledge the British empire was evil, but letting you dismantle it to create a better world? Unthinkable.