Zenge - Thoughts

Occasionally during a Steam sale I'll grab a bunch of short, cheap puzzlers to play in between the longer games in my backlog. After finishing the fantastic Golf Peaks, I quickly jumped into Zenge in need of something simpler to tickle my brain. But Zenge is... I'm not sure what to say about it. Similar to its cousin Hook, its a game about following lines more than anything else, and unless the pretty art strikes your fancy, Zenge will fail to leave much of an impression.

Like a lot of the puzzlers I have, Zenge is so cheap that it makes no sense to discourage anyone from trying it. I mean, for four US quarters the game lasts about two hours and doesn't bombard you with any stupid design decisions. But on the flip side there's not really anything fascinating about it. The biggest draw Zenge has going for it is that after completing a puzzle, a picture will materialize that links the previous and future puzzles together. But the story the game tells is more of an abstract journey out of the pages of a child's book than it is an adventurous yarn that draws you in. That's not a knock against Zenge or children's books; it'll probably just be something you either fancy or don't. And personally, despite how much I appreciate awarding the player with art post-puzzle, that wasn't the main reason I picked the game up—the puzzles were.

And this is where I struggle to think up a lot of things to say about Zenge. It starts off simple enough to ease you into its various mechanics, but by the end you don't feel tested on your mastery or blown away at how all the systems come together. Like Hook, the bigger the puzzles get the more mindless busywork you have to do to make sure the various jigsaw pieces can move around each other and slot into place. There's nothing that'll stump you or flip your understand on how to play the game upside-down. You'll simply move pieces and then rotate or shrink them if they won't fit. And that's basically its entire playbook.

The one thing Zenge has over Golf Peaks is that its music is very soothing and beautiful. But presentation alone usually isn't enough to win me over, and Zenge is not an exception to this rule. The game's enjoyable enough that I actively sought to finish it and didn't regret my time spent, but it's likely you won't hear me talk about Zenge outside of this one, lone blog post.

The Last of Us - Thoughts

There is a pervasive, gnawing, heavy misery to The Last of Us that I would've call "niche" had it not been one of the most successful video games released for the PS3. Thinking on it, I would have been skeptical if you told me a decade ago that "downer" media like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones would become huge hits. Reveling in misery didn't seem like something large swathes of the population enjoyed—or at least, it certainly wasn't something people sought out more than once or twice a year. And while video games have always had an intimate relationship with violence, from the fatalities of Mortal Kombat to starving virtual friends to death in The Sims, few games have plunged into the murky depths of depravity. Those that did were usually seen as deviant; folks knew about Postal, Soldier of Fortune, and Manhunt, but adoration for those titles typically came from edgy teens, hungry for any kind of transgressive media. Plus there was always an element of farce to gaming's most violent offenders, making games like Carmageddon feel more stupid than sadistic.

So industry darling Naughty Dog taking a hard left turn into zombie-lane was surprising, especially coming off of the plucky Uncharted series. This post-apocalyptic world would be thematic inverse of Nathan Drake's universe: sick, sad, and dotted with blood trails that led to tragedy. Replaying it again in 2020 for Part II's release neither shocked nor sickened me, but I was mystified that so many people latched onto such a nihilistic experience. Perhaps they endeared themselves to Ellie and Joel, finding warmth in their rapport and struggle to survive. But if you pay attention to the game, love isn't the cornerstone that holds The Last of Us up—that privilege belongs to fear.

For the record, I think The Last of Us is best video game released in 2013. It's extremely polished, tells an enthralling tale, and is a hell of a lot of fun to play. That's why, despite being puzzled that so many people are captivated by it, I would never argue that they shouldn't be; The Last of Us is probably Naughty Dog's magnum opus. I don't think it's flawless—Pittsburgh goes on for too damn long—but it's an indisputable AAA masterpiece in my eyes, and a game I long for others to experience.

Yet it's obvious it won't be everyone's cup of tea. The Last of Us lands a gut-punch with its opening in order to submerge you in the terribleness of its world, conditioning you to see murder as numb, morally gray offense. As manslaughter soon becomes second nature, you'll pick up on game's prevailing ethos: you need to kill to survive. Coincidentally the theme is propped up by a ludonarrative harmony, as any time your character lacks the means to fight back—whether in gameplay or in a cutscene—bad things will inevitably transpire.

My dilemma with this, and my subsequent struggle to understand the love for it, is that it's a libertarian's wet dream. The Last of Us is anchored in the fear of the other and spends more time exploring and reinforcing this concept than it does trying to refute it. Every character lives in constant fear, from Marlene to Joel to Henry, and whatever characters don't die become jaded to the prospect of trusting others. This is an idea pervasive in the zombie genre ("what if the real monster was MAN??!!"), but the subtler, quieter moments of The Last of Us add this terrifying loneliness to everything. And by the game's close, it will echo the theme tenfold. I think narratively the game is brilliant—the ending is absolutely perfect—but it will leave you with a hollow feeling, one that blurs the difference between surviving and suffering. There are no champions or heroes in The Last of Us—there's just a pack of desperate scavengers and you... and you better learn to become more ruthless than they are.

I spent a long time on this melancholic preamble largely so I could gush about how superb the killing is in The Last of Us. I chose Survivor as my difficulty this time around and did not regret it—robbing the player of supplies and their ability to "see" through walls vastly changes the experience. Escaping a gang of infected may be tense on normal, but in Survivor you're deprived of all your toys and ammo, forced to do calculations like how to kill six enemies with four bullets spread across three different guns. The increased difficulty removes any leverage the game might provide the player, forcing them to rely on their patience, instinct, and a little bit of luck to make it to the end. You'll learn how to ration supplies and savor being handed a box of shotgun shells, and even when the odds may be stacked against you (like, say, having a flamethrower and two arrows going into the final fight), The Last of Us teaches you that there's always a way to survive.

I cannot undersell just how much playing on Survivor works thematically with The Last of Us, primarily because it helps turn the player into a monster. Animations for strangling and stabbing people are vicious because they need to be—you have to be sure the enemy you just subdued won't be getting back up. Likewise, it's disgusting to watch a nailbomb shred a man's legs into a rosy aerosol, but neutralizing a patrol that way can be immensely cathartic. The ammo famine turns headshots into small celebratory explosions, and there is an almost transcendent quality to stumbling across the multi-use, insta-kill ax. Throughout your playthrough, moments of barbarity will slowly transform into gleeful psychopathy, like lining up two people for a single shotgun blast, or throwing a molotov at a stubborn foe hunkered down behind cover.

The violent video games I mentioned before invoke the same mindset, but The Last of Us is ever-conscious of its own bloodlust, Ellie cursing after every murder. Similarly, deaths in cutscenes are shocking and instantaneous—unlike your own game overs, which linger for too long in order to show you the grisly reality of failing. Joel doesn't see manslaughter as entertainment even if the player might, which helps to keep you grounded so you'll treat your opponents as the dregs of humanity instead of bags of blood operated by code. For The Last of Us, the satisfaction of killing is counterbalanced by the misery of death, which is one of the reasons why I found it to be so hauntingly effective.

The last thing I'll mention is something that I didn't expect to stun me: the music. While the visuals and mocap still hold up today, I was awed by Santaolalla's discordant soundtrack. The Last of Us' prevailing sense of misery is magnified by tracks that are rarely melodic, instead oscillating between uncomfortable, primal and eerie. I hadn't really noticed the music on my first playthrough (outside of the main theme), but this time I was constantly aware of the unorthodox and yet perfectly fitting soundscape to this dead-end world. Beside the fungal-infected zombies, Santaolalla's unsettling strumming is probably the defining aesthetic of the game.

You will find no peace in playing The Last of Us—and if you somehow manage to, it'll be because you've forfeited your empathy. Playing on Survivor can be a grim, frustrating experience (my kingdom for one half of a scissor!) but like Dark Souls, the difficulty complements the narrative like butter on toast. The game isn't completely bereft of beauty and softness, but you'll only be granted fleeting glimpses of joy, usually after caving in a man's skull in with a brick. I love how brutal and miserable The Last of Us is, but—as paradoxical as it sounds—I don't want to love its brutality and misery. I want these characters to be hopeful and graceful and kind, but as humanity spirals downward, The Last of Us posits that fear will prevail.

Mass Effect: Andromeda - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

To those that claim that Mass Effect 3 killed all interest in the series, I invite them to play Mass Effect: Andromeda.

I have a lot of sympathy for the task that BioWare Montreal had before them—return to the Mass Effect universe, despite the previous game effectively "ending" it. To get around this, the studio wisely shepherds the player into a nearby galaxy, giving them new worlds to land on, new aliens to meet, and new mysteries to solve. But while it may appear as if the Mass Effect title is an anchor weighing down a fresh new sci-fi plot, the real problem becomes Andromeda itself. Gone are Mass Effect's best qualities, replaced by uninteresting imitations, open-world shenanigans, and vestigial resource systems.

Right off the bat, Mass Effect: Andromeda's writing is a colossal step down. Conversations are stilted, ideas constantly drift off, and the dialogue is as sharp as a pencil eraser. This turns arguably the best part about Mass Effect—interacting with your teammates—into something that's fairly mediocre, if not baffling at times. It doesn't help that BioWare Montreal decided that the defining aspect of Ryder (the main character) would be awkward meta-commentary, so even when the dialogue is decent, you're bound to get Ryder interjecting with, "okay, seriously? You did not just say that!" The lackluster voice acting does the script no favors either; I'd honestly be shocked if there was anyone that thought the writing was on par with the previous Mass Effects.

Adjacent to that thought, Andromeda's main plot starts off interesting... but never goes anywhere ambitious. Stationed across the Heleus Cluster are terraforming stations built by ancient robots, all of which are being sought after by the enigmatic and warlike Kett. And that's essentially the entire plot. There's some twists and turns throughout the story but Andromeda never escapes the looming shadow set by the Reapers. The Remnant are basically robotic Protheans, the Kett are organic Reapers, and every other Mass Effect race is just how you remembered them, dealing with the politics and prejudices of old. There's a new friendly race in this neck of the universe (the angara) but there's absolutely nothing intriguing about them, outside of their reincarnated memories—a fact that only plays into a single side mission.

Andromeda's main focus is squarely on the war between the angara and the kett, which is one of the reasons why I found the Mass Effect label to be kind of superfluous. The ties to the previous games are meant to make Andromeda feel more familiar, but there's almost no reason why the Milky Way explorers couldn't have all been human. Sure, there's a krogan-only outpost that the other aliens are scornful of, but the struggle of the krogan for autonomy feels like an old hat by the time you solve their dilemma. Differences between the species are ultimately minimal since the back half of Andromeda treats humans and their colorful space companions as all the same: vermin for the kett empire to subjugate.

The kett aren't a terrible video game baddie, but they are extremely dull to fight against. They don't exude creepiness like the Collectors or danger like Cerberus snipers, and their most memorable unit—the Ascendant—is the worst fight in the goddamn series. You have to shoot at an orbiting sphere in order to make them vulnerable, and then you only get 1-2 shots until the sphere shield returns, turning a single unit into a three minute ammo-wasting snoozefest. A lot of the other beefy units also overstay their welcome, but the Ascendant was a noxious brew of annoying, boring, and hard to hit. I generally enjoyed fighting the remnant more, but both factions lacked diversity, so how you fought one enemy wouldn't really change from how you fought another.

Mass Effect has always had this problem to some degree, but the wealth of battle options at your disposal meant you could push and pull on the encounters according to what powers were available. Gameplay-wise, Andromeda is unarguably the most diverse Mass Effect title, letting you mix and match skills and passives from any tree. But then it contradicts this freedom by limiting your repertoire to three powers max and completely disabling the manual use of ally abilities. So it really doesn't matter which of your allies you bring into combat—you're the only person that can dig yourself out of a tricky predicament. In fact, teammates were as useless as they were in the first Mass Effect, rarely killing opponents and constantly, constantly getting in the way of my sights. By the end they could dish out some decent damage, but that was nothing compared to the powerhouse Ryder became; my allies were better off as meatshields, and even they couldn't perform that role well.

But becoming a space wizard that could lob black holes every ten seconds wasn't an easy road to travel. I've been playing through the Mass Effect series on Hard and Andromeda has been the only one to put up a fight the entire time. Enemies are considerably bulkier and harder to hit (your aiming has to be VERY precise), and if you lose any of your health or ammo you have to go hunting for a resupply crate, which are few and far between. Taking cover is also fluid and buttonless, which occasionally works well out in the wild but is a mess in close corridors, where the only way to get Ryder to lower their head is by running them against an obstacle. To make matters worse, acquiring gear in this game is a confusing, bloated nightmare. You can spend one of three types of research points to obtain blueprints, which can then be developed with 4-5 different elements you'll mine from planets, and your gear can be both modified and augmented, and they come with their own rarity level, and there's over 100 types of weapons and armor to try this on. Or you can do what I did and just buy stuff from vendors. Once I found the Isharay and started collecting biotic damage armor, I had no reason to engage with 95% of the materials cluttering up my inventory.

The best thing I can say about Andromeda—besides having to ruminate on your level-ups since the difficulty is no joke—is that it's not starved for content. There are six sizable planets to explore with scores of side quests sprinkled across each world, ranging from "go scan this rock" to "kill a sprawling outpost of bandits." Between this and the ludicrous inventory system, Andromeda is brimming with content to kill time with... it's just a shame that the gameplay isn't all that fun and the narrative is uncompelling at best. Oddly enough, Andromeda struck me as a monkey's paw remake of the first Mass Effect: finally you have lush, open landscapes to explore and colonize! But it comes at the cost of having boring friends, shallow enemies, and conversations that are as memorable as what you ate for lunch last week.

There's a big fight at the end of Mass Effect: Andromeda where the main villain relentlessly taunts you with the most tired and cliche threats imaginable. By this point any kind of love or curiosity that I had left for the series had been drained, and all I could do was marvel at how utterly disappointing the experience had been. The other games had their problems too, but by the end of the day you still cared, having forged racial alliances and gathered together a ragtag team to save the universe. In Andromeda, I had no idea narratively how I beat the final boss and I didn't care what that meant for the world. I didn't even bat an eye when, after the boss's unceremonious death, a scant five sentences were spoken and then the credits began rolling. Mass Effect: Andromeda tried its best to forge its own path, but it ran out of gas as soon as it left the docking bay.