Quick Review: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The voices – she hears them everywhere…

Before you can enter Hel, you must find the portal to it.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was developed by Ninja Theory, published by them and Xbox Game Studios, and released to Steam on August 8th, 2017. We play as the titular Senua, a Pict warrior left traumatized after an invasion of her village by Vikings. Now on a quest to resurrect her fiancé Dillion, who died during the invasion, she lands her crude boat onto a mysterious island. This goal will force her to fight mythological Norse figures on the way to Hel, forcing her to confront her own past on the way to meeting Hela.

Everything is messing with her mind.
Including her mind itself.

When it's not voices, it's flashbacks. Reminding her of why
she is doing all this. Who, around her, actually tried to
help her with her struggles... and who didn't.

But is it even real? Senua suffers from intense psychosis, exhibiting many traits of schizophrenia. She keeps seeing faces, she keeps hearing voices, some mocking, some encouraging, some wondering what she’s doing. The voices color the entire experience. True silence is rare across this adventure. Psychiatrists didn’t exist in the 9th Century, so everyone else calls it “the darkness”, or “the curse”, as if it was something she had to overcome… The game recommends playing with headphones, as the game uses 3D Binaural sound that makes every voice feel like it comes from a specific spot around Senua.

As for seeing faces... Hellblade does something clever,
where it superimposes live-action heads onto stone faces.
It's... unsettling. The face seen this way is Senua's mother,
who encourages her. Other cutscenes use live-action instead,
which gives them an otherworldly feel in the setting.

That's one found. Now to find the other. I sure love an
environment with random sigils existing around!

Calling this game just a walking simulator does it a disservice. Yes, you’ll be walking around with WASD, exploring, looking for lore stones to hear bits and pieces of mythology. You’ll face areas with specific puzzles that require observing something by focusing with E, or interacting with something with F. Closed doors will require you to find sigils in the wild, which you’ll have to focus on from specific standing points. That part is lenient, as you don’t need to be aligned perfectly, and the game further helps by flashing the nearest sigil when you’re approaching it. Other puzzles play with your perception to make things like bridges and staircases appear.

Why yes, this is, in fact, a river of blood, with malformed
bodies making up the banks.

This is also classified as a horror game. First, you have the constant presence of the voices discussing your every move. They disorientate Senua (and, by extension, the player), and yet, the longer the game goes, the more you learn to ignore the defeatist or mocking voices, and focus on the encouraging ones. You’ll need all the determination you can find, while hunting down Surtr in a forest that catches fire every time you solve a puzzle, or encounter any of Valravn’s illusions, to give two examples. Aside from the unnerving places we visit, the game's scariest moments are often in cutscenes. There are jumpscares, but the game more often utilizes atmosphere to unsettle you.

Ugh, the shield guys. Never quite got the hang of
beating them quickly... until the very end, anyway.

Took me until AFTER a long story break without fighting
to find out I could use Focus against any enemy.
Plus, Focus makes your sword shine like a lightsaber.

Then there’s combat. I wished there had been a tutorial since those controls are more complex than the rest of the game. You slash with the left mouse button, or do a stronger slash with the right button. You can block with Crtl, block with the left Crtl, change target with C or Z, or dodge with Space and WASD. I felt unprepared when the first fight was sprung up on me, but I picked up everything else quickly by checking controls in the pause menu. Other features of the game come in handy – the voices warn you when an attack is coming from behind, and mention when an enemy is almost defeated. Although these two features make combat interesting, there aren’t many enemy types, and the repetition becomes obvious early. However, the bosses are memorable, not just where they’re fought, but all the tricks they use against you. Special mention to Garmr/Fenrir, whicks blocks your view of the arena with Senua’s own traumatic memories, forcing you to constantly dodge its attacks.

Using Focus in battle slows down time and creates a really
cool effect around the fight. It won't always save you,
but it IS a lifesaver against bosses and enemy groups.

Senua is said to have limited “lives” (represented by the rot on her arm growing towards her head when she “dies”), but a precise number, like her health, or the enemies’, is never disclosed. The uncertainty is part of the dread.

There's clearly something there. You're just not at the right
angle to focus on it and create the bridge forwards.

Honestly, for a product whose development forced its team
to cut corners, even transforming a meeting room into a
green screen mocap space,  it is still in the end one of the most
visually stunning gaming experiences I've had.

The puzzle gameplay can be a little repetitive (even if we get some interesting twists out of it sometimes); but the story is worth it. The horror ambiance is on point, and the story incorporates Nordic mythology in clever ways (including how Senua envisions those gods and monsters). The music helps the tone tremendously, and the graphics make this game possibly one of the most beautiful I've ever played. The plot has several beats of mental breakdown, with all the freaky visuals they induce, and you can never tell what’s real and what isn’t. Melina Juergens was merely the team’s video editor and had no acting experience when she was selected as a mocap actress stand-in before doing such a great job in the role that she was permanently cast in it. And that performance earned her a BAFTA Award! Impressive! And Ninja Theory went to great lengths to portray schizophrenia and traumas as accurately as possible, with experts helping on that front at every step of the way.

This game is an experience worth playing through. I know I made sure to play it all the way to the end! Oh, and there is a VR edition as well.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is available on Steam for 29.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Guacamelee! Gold Edition

Luchador life isn't for me. What would my stage name be anyway? El Tabarnaco?

Some great stories start with the hero dying. Wait, what?

A game by Drinkbox Studios published by them and Kepler Ghost and released on August 8th, 2013, Guacamelee! (specifically, the Gold Edition) is a metroidvania set in Mexican culture. Our protagonist, agave farmer Juan, is helping prepare the Dia de los Muertos festivities when tragedy strikes. El Presidente’s daughter, whom Juan had a crush on, is kidnapped by Carlos Calaca, a lich from the World of the Dead and his crew of other assorted superpowered undead. Calaca plans to unite it with the world of the living, which would cause untold chaos. Juan is killed during his rescue attempt and lands in the World of the Dead. There, he finds a magical luchador mask allowing him to return to the living, where he must use his new wrestling abilities to stop the lich’s plan.

No matter how big the monster, the Rooster Uppercut will
take them down! Or any new comes that we get afterwards.

Classic metroidvania formula; Juan starts with the basics. As we progress, however, we’ll unlock new skills allowing him to access new areas, and venture further into the world. The special moves, all color-coded can be used both offensively and for platforming; as an example, the first is a flying uppercut that can let Juan reach platforms otherwise too high for him. The colored moves are associated with colored roadblocks which Juan breaks by using the corresponding attack. These are all triggered with a specific button or key pressed while holding an arrow key or the joystick in one direction (ex. Up for the uppercut). These moves require stamina points to use, however, so you may have to wait if you spend all those points quickly.

You can beat a skeleton by throwing another skeleton into
it! They deserve it, they work for evil!

The combat system emphasizes Juan’s capacity to chain hits and rain damage. Long combos can be comprised of hits on the ground, in midair, special moves, and full-body wrestling throws, and can net you extra money! Cash can be spent at save points to gain new attacks, as well as perks relating to stamina and health. The fights get harder by throwing new ideas and challenges. Some enemies can only be fought in one of the two worlds. Later enemies are protected by color shields that must be destroyed with the corresponding special move before they can be damaged.

Come one come all, I've got exactly what each of you needs!
Two Rooster Uppercuts, and a headbutt, to go!

Quick Review: Fluffy Horde

AKA that game where you kill thousands if not millions of… bunnies? That’s dark.

A creation of Turtle Juice released on November 7th, 2018, Fluffy Horde is the story of a kingdom dealing with a dangerous shaman. This magic user has created a horde of bunnies that multiply like crazy, and he is using them to destroy crops and windmills. It’s up to the villagers to defend themselves through soldiers, farmers, decoys, and anything else they can use.

That's a lot of rabid rabbits.

This game touts itself as a mix of real-time strategy and tower defense; you can summon units, which can be upgraded to have stronger/faster attacks, more health, and so on. Economy is vital, so you need to buy farmers who’ll take care of crops for revenue. In several levels, the goal is to eliminate all the rabbits before they reach and destroy the local windmill. Your main combat units are swordsmen and archers. You can buy guys dressed in carrot costumes, who will attract the attention of bunnies (who will kill them). You can select one, or a whole group of units, and move them at the same pace; you can even double-click to select all units of the same type.

Almost there! Hm, usually it's the cows that make the milk.

In other levels, your goal changes. Sometimes, you’ll have to make a cow cross a field to reach a plant that spits out milk (don’t ask, this is a weird universe), and kill the bunnies since the cow freezes with fear when it sees them. More often though, you’ll have to move a princess dressed like a bunny girl towards a party she wants to attend… and if the lagomorphs reach her, they’ll kill her. Maybe don’t let that happen, k?

Every level comes with three medals to obtain; their tasks can include winning in a short amount of time, not letting the windmill or the princess take any damage, or working with a limited number of summoned units. There is a fourth medal, obtained by completing all three objectives at once. Before starting a level, you can look at the whole field to figure out a strategy.

They are, in fact, good at multiplication.

My biggest gripe, gameplay-wise, is that it keeps piling new mechanics on top of each other, and you must adapt to these new elements. Which isn’t terrible, except not all of them come with proper tutorials, and eventually more focus is put on the accumulation of fancy gimmicks than on the basics. Those stick around, but they eventually make way for simpler problem-solving that’s necessary to encompass all the variables. The further in we go, the less it feels like real-time strategy and tower defense, and it becomes just a puzzle game with bits of the other two genres sprinkled in. What’s the most optimal sequence of actions.

Teen Princess: "They are eating me alive! Hellooooo??"
"When killed: "Ugh. This is literally boring me to death."
Christ, can I turn the fucking voices off?

The  pixel art style is fun for the concept, but it creates an issue; the bunnies are very small. It’s easy for one to slip through without you noticing; thankfully, there are audio cues telling you when the windmill or the princess is in danger. Then, you must reassign your units to fight the tiny threat. At the end of a level, when you’ve dealt with almost every little bunny, there’s frequently the one or two that remain that you just didn’t see. Repeatedly, I didn’t get a medal for beating a level in a record time because of those few left over. They are so small, they blend in with the world! Heck, you can also lose a level if there are too many bunnies.

I would like to point out the unfortunate implications of
giving a flamboyant gay voice specifically to the units
whose entire point in the game is to get themselves killed.

The worst, though, is the voice acting. Every unit has a voice, and most of them… are okay? The soldiers, archers, farmers, and the mission control warning you about the windmill and the dangerous bunny numbers, that’s fine. The princess and the decoy carrot guys, however… The decoys are given the stereotypical “gay voice”. You know exactly what I’m talking about, I bet you’re hearing it in your head. The “accent” that stopped being funny 20 years ago and should have been left in the past. The princess voice, also done by a guy and stereotypically “modern annoyed teen”, isn’t much better; it got incredibly grating and the lines, whenever she was attacked or killed, got old fast. Even if you start off finding those voices and jokes funny, they get repeated ad nauseam and become super annoying after a while.

Oh, there’s a multiplayer mode, too. Eh. Whatever.

Would help if the teen princess didn't have the HP of a
Goomba.

Yeah, not a big fan of this one! I do think it would have fared better and been more faithful to its genres if it hadn’t been rushing to introduce so many mechanics. Though, with that said, I do have a greater issue with the game’s presentation than with its gameplay. After all, there is great challenge to be found in merely beating every level, and then hunting down every medal. It’s not godawful, but it’s in that “won’t bother to finish it” category. Those two voices were a complete turn-off.

Fluffy Horde is available on Steam for 9.99$ USD.

Movie Review: Coyote vs. ACME

Ha! Vindication with a side of schadenfreude! (As always, spoiler alert, just in case!)

Coyote vs. ACME would have been just the latest Looney Tunes movie had it not had its tumultuous existence. It would have been the latest attempt at Roger Rabbit-ing the Tunes into our world, albeit with a focus we've never had before. It doesn't sound like this production directed by Dave Green ran into many issues; its life after completion, however, is a different story. Warner Bros. and its CEO David Zaslav originally shelved the finished and ready film, planning to use it as a 30M$ tax write-off for the deeply indebted studio.

This was not the only movie to suffer this fate, with the other most-cited feature being Batgirl, which DC fans were piiiiissed to learn about. This only shed further light on WB's shady practices regarding finished products, as well as their complete disregard for existing products and properties. Like, say, that time they were seen filling dumpsters with pieces of physical movie history, studio assets, and other elements of marketing.

Through some goddamned miracle, the movie I'll talk about managed to escape this grim fate. Its distribution rights were purchased by Ketchup Entertainment, who also released The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie last year (I saw it, it's good too). And it was released to North American theaters on August 28th. I'm told not every theater could get it, and it may have a limited run considering Ketchup is an indie company, so it may not even stick around a full month, even in theaters where it did get released. Still, that it saw a wide release at all is cause for celebration.

Coyote vs. ACME currently sits at over 90% in both critic and audience scores on RottenTomatoes. To think we almost could have never seen this. I think it is funny that, between my review of Space Jam: A New Legacy (where I made one joke at his expense) and this feature's release, Zaslav announced his retirement from the role of CEO at Warner Bros. Good riddance. I should've been a lot nastier to the guy. However he is apparently coming out of it close to a fucking billion dollars richer, while WB has accumulated so much debt that it keeps trying to get re-bought by new companies, and then putting THOSE in debt by association! How much goddamn sense does THAT make?? Fucking golden parachutes, I swear.

So, uh, if you hate Zaslav and everything he stands for, maybe help by going out to see this movie in theaters and help it make way beyond the 30 mil$ it was supposed to give WB back? No, seriously. Even putting aside my upcoming review. I want it to make fuckin' BANK. That would be a statement.

This film is inspired by a 1990 short story from The New Yorker, an epistolary (look at me today with the big words) tale told entirely through a reprinted court document detailing the proceedings of a lawsuit. In said document, Wile E. Coyote, the forever Road Runner-hungry supergenius, takes ACME to court over the repeated and demonstrable failures of their toony products. This being a 100-minute movie, you can imagine it takes things a fair bit further!

The story

Quick Review: Distrust

Don’t. Fall. Asleep. Or do; you gotta rest eventually. But beware…

The cold is already biting at my face.
Are you sure we can't stick around the helicopter fire?

Distrust (often completed with the subtitle Polar Survival) is an isometric survival/horror roguelite game developed by Cheerdealers, published by Alawar, and released on August 23rd, 2017. At the start, you choose two characters among several playable options, all but two of which must be unlocked by playing through the story mode. Your two characters are part of a rescue mission sent to an army base on an especially cold Arctic night. However, the helicopter crashes following a strange light appearing in the cabin. Only your survivors remain. The base’s inhabitants are gone; something happened here. Gotta figure out what, and then come out of this alive.

She's freezing, she's exhausted, and she has a cold. Surely it
cannot be wors- Oh great, what's that weird noise outside?

Your characters have three basic needs: Warmth, stamina, and satiety. It’s cold out there, so equip them with the best winter jackets you can find. Buildings are cold, so you better stock up on wood and fill those furnaces to recover some body heat. They contain generators for electricity and lights, and those may need refilling with gas – but you’ve got limited reserves there as well! Satiety simply means that the characters need to eat. Can’t find food? You’ll be in trouble soon enough. Coffee beans and cigarettes don’t count. And rancid pasta might fill the void, but it can make the character sick instead. Then, there’s stamina. The longer they go, the more tired the characters become. You can give them a short energy boost with foods, but eventually they WILL need to sleep.

This all ties together with their base health, which will whittle down by 1HP every few seconds if either of these stats is completely depleted. Hypothermia, exhaustion and hunger are no joke. Characters can still hurt themselves during tasks, or poison themselves with bad food! And they can even suffer from various forms of insanity once their health gets low! A character whose HP hits 0 falls into a coma, leaving the other(s?) to revive them with an adrenaline shooter. And those are rare. 

Pasta past the expiration date? Uncooked veggies? Nah,
I'll have the candy, it's not a headache like the rest.

Do we have anything to deal with that monster?

Let’s say your team is overdue for a rest. Find a bed, sleep in turns, good. But something strange happens. Monsters start popping up around the buildings. Research papers in the area reveal that these things appear when people sleep. While one is sleeping, the other must hold the fort against whichever new threat has arisen. Good thing they share their inventory! Each enemy has different weaknesses and can inflict a different type of harm, though you can find info on these entities before encountering them.

"Help me out a little here! I'm shoveling!"
"No can do one task per person, the game says so."

The fact that your characters must survive with what they find turns this horror/survival game into a unique roguelite. Each member of the playable roster brings their own skill; as an example, the first woman loses satiety more slowly than other characters, so she needs to eat less often. Make use of those skills to survive not just the cold night and the monster encounters. The other roguelite staple is that there are six zones, each new one harder than the previous; and each one has a puzzle to solve. However, the puzzles won’t be in the same order from one run to another; be prepared for anything.

You unlock the third character through playing Challenge
Mode. And finding a secret ending. Your reward is: A
harder time keeping enough resources for everyone!

Ugh, unlocking doors takes FOR-E-VER. And there are so
many damn locked doors. You could pick the lock, or break
the door with a crowbar instead - but you risk wasting
those items' health before you really need them.

Tools are necessary for specific actions – but they break after too many uses, and though some can be repaired, their materials can be hard to find. Besides, you might prefer to keep your wood for warmth. Later zones get harder, with snow blocking doors, windows having to be closed (who opens windows in the ARCTIC WINTER??). And the monsters get stronger and harder to deal with… Some monster-killing mechanics aren’t explained well, like the trap that is said you can just drop to the floor to catch a specific electric monster. In general, it feels like past the second zone, you spend too much time dealing with constantly repeating annoyances, all to further slow your progress. Characters can even start suffering from mental afflictions when their health gets low! The isometric view makes navigating each zone even more confusing. Finally, completing some objectives or rescuing someon can lead to playing a party of three, requiring an even tighter control of resources.

Rebuildsing beds so we can sleep and... Dammit, a window
is open again! Who I repeat, opens windows in the Arctic?
It's not even the Arctic summer right now!

Great concept, the game is good, but super tough. Though that was to be expected from a roguelite, really. You get better as you learn its intricacies, this comes with the territory. It’s not a scary game, even if the theme is horror-ish. Co-op options are included, as well as two difficulty levels (Adventure and Challenge – as if the base game wasn’t tough enough). Perhaps the worst thing I can say about this one is just how often you’re left with not much to do while either character is fiddling with keys to unlock a door, completing a long task, or cooking food. I know the waiting exists to waste stamina, warmth and satiety, but it’s still tedious down the line. And the random nature of a roguelite means a high chance of not finding what you need, when you need it.

Distrust is available on Steam for 12.99$ USD.