Quarantine gaming

So we’re all locked indoors and are being told to limit social activities or events for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a couple of months in between jobs, and don’t need to work full-time. This is actually the perfect time to unwind and relax. While a lot of people have been struggling to cope with staying home, my lifestyle and introverted personality fits very well with just being home all the time and to be honest, I’m loving it. I feel like I have some sort of superpower where I can go for long periods of time without any human contact whatsoever and still manage to not go insane.

So what have I been doing with these two months off? Well, I was supposed to go traveling in South America, but coronavirus has successfully thwarted those plans. So instead, I’ve been at home playing video games, reading some books, watching movies, catching up on side projects, and planning a cross-country move in the midst of a global pandemic. No stress. It’s actually been quite nice to not have to worry about working in the middle of all this. I applaud everyone who’s able to somehow work remotely and focus on their day job these days, especially the ones with kids. And a special standing ovation to the healthcare and essential service workers who are still regularly going into work every day and saving lives.

I feel privileged enough to have the ability to not worry about my finances or work in these couple of months, so I’m trying to enjoy it as best as I can. Because I know that once I move out to San Francisco next month, things will get real busy real fast. So I’ve been using this time to catch up on my gaming backlog that I almost never have time to get to when I’m working full-time. It’s a good time to knock out all those things that I’ve been mentally zoning off in my head going “When I get a good chunk of time where I can play this for 4-6 hours consistently without interruptions, I’ll get to it.”

So what have I been playing? Well, to start, I’ve wrapped up a few games that I started last fall and never finished. The Outer Worlds, an excellent space sci-fi RPG from Obsidian with the witty humor and deep quests not unlike Fallout New Vegas, this time topped with a hefty dose of corporate capitalist undertones. It was fantastic. The dialogue choices and characters had me in laughing fits at times. The game is great but not incredible. The combat and exploration aren’t exactly top shelf, but the writing and quests are the saving grace of the game. A friend put it really well in saying that the game itself isn’t that spectacular. It’s average at best, but we’ve been in such a shortage of quality RPGs lately from triple-A studios that having The Outer Worlds in context just feels really good. A straight up adventure romp with clever writing and funny dialogue. Enjoyed my time with it.

I also finally got around to finishing Outer Wilds. Literally everyone was talking about this game when handing out Game of the Year awards last year, and I felt a little guilty for not completing it. So I picked it back up and played it through till the end. And my goodness, what a game. I cannot even begin to comprehend how this game was designed and built. I’ve watched behind the scenes and documentaries going into it, and it’s truly astounding. Never have I seen a game give such level of freedom and control over how they chose to explore and approach their goals. You can literally go anywhere and do anything, and everything you do is giving you some kind of clue that builds up towards a mystery that you need to solve.

There are absolutely no objectives on screen in Outer Wilds. You’re just piecing together your next run and next mission yourself based on what you think you need to do and where you think you need to go. This kind of open-ended player driven exploration is an extreme rarity these days. In any other game, you’d usually be given a quest with a dotted line or quest markers to go to and finish the mission so you can move on to the next one. Not in Outer Wilds. It plays with so many engrained mechanics and completely flips them over their head that players can’t help but feel pleasantly surprised. It makes them feel smart for planning everything themselves and doing everything themselves, even though the game is subtly guiding them behind the scenes.

The way it plays with time is also incredible. In Outer Wilds, the sun explodes every 22 minutes and you have to restart your run. The discoveries you make and information you find are saved in your ship log permanently. So you explore different bits of the solar system every run and figure out what happened to the now extinct alien race in the surrounding planets. Over the course of every 22-minute run, strange things happen in the planets. A twin pair of planets orbiting each other have a pillar of sand flowing from one to the other. A planet with a black hole at its center crumbles into itself over the course of one run. Another planet with stormy tornadoes constantly engulfs and spits out its landmasses, making some parts of the planet accessible only at certain timeframes in the run.

These variations make sure every run is unique and interesting in Outer Wilds. And there’s so much more left to the player. You get to discover hidden shortcuts and the fastest way to approach or land on a planet all by yourself. You get to map out every single thing you’re going to accomplish in a run and then do it. You feel in control of your ship and your run the whole time. There are no power-ups or collectibles in the game. In fact, you have everything you need to complete the game in your very first run. You just don’t have the knowledge or information. That’s what you’re gathering through the runs. How did these planets form? Why do they do all these weird things? How can I use their characteristics to my advantage? You’re answering all the questions yourself and getting to solve the mystery yourself, so a huge hats off to the devs for pulling this off. It deserves all the recognition and fame that it has gotten.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Disco Elysium. This is another game that swept the floor in almost every awards show last year, and with good reason. Disco Elysium has the best narrative and writing in the entire medium, period. There’s absolutely no question about it when you play it. Even if you’ve played games with incredible narratives, this one is going to blow everything else out of the water. It’s undeniably good. The writing is so sharp, the dialogue so cutting, the phrases and sentences so smart that it leaves you overwhelmed and speechless at times.

I wasn’t totally sure what to expect going in. It was actually the retro-futurist art style that sucked me in. It looked like a rushed watercolor painting with intentionally messy patterns and textures lazily overlaid on top to exaggerate the tone and setting of the game. And what a world it is. You play as an alcoholic detective suffering from amnesia who finds himself on a very important murder case. You get to pick from various skills to assist you in your quest, things like Visual Calculus, Rhetoric, Drama, Conceptualization, etc. The gameplay consists primarily of you having conversations in your head with all these skills. Yes, you’re talking to your own skills in your head. They subtly try to convince you about what’s right or wrong, what to pursue and what to give up, all while reinforcing the character’s own self-hatred and destructive abilities. It’s just so weird and strange but it works so well in the game that you can’t help but be impressed.

The skills behave differently if you have too few or too many points invested in them. The Encyclopedia skill, for example, seems like a decent one to get at first glance. It starts to define basic terminologies and nouns commonly used in the world. But invest too much in it, and it keeps popping up mid-conversation giving you endless Wikipedia-page like descriptions of random facts about useless things that seemingly go on forever. Invest too many points in Interfacing, and you end up literally getting a fetish for machines and handling objects. Again, it’s really weird but it works really well in the context of the game.

You’re not just talking to your own thoughts, of course. You’re spending time interacting with the citizens of the neighborhood and trying to figure out what caused the murder you’re investigating. You’re interrogating people and getting into fights with all kinds of factions. The game is smart, clever, well-paced, has a lot of content and is really, really satisfying. I’ll say though, there’s a ton of reading involved. The entire game is just reading paragraphs upon paragraphs of text. And a lot of it can be incredibly dense. There were times I had to take a mental break after an hour or so of gameplay just because reading these sentences had me exhausted. If that doesn’t sound like your jam, this game might not be for you. But if you can invest the time into it, boy is it rewarding. An absolutely excellent investment for what you’re getting out of it.

I also recently completed Doom Eternal. I loved the hell out of 2016’s Doom reboot, and this one totally impressed in every way that I was expecting it to. It wasn’t just “more Doom 2016”, but instead was a re-thinking of the game’s combat strategy. Every combat encounter required a lot of thought and careful consideration. You could not simply start a fight, walk up to demons, and murder them with shotguns. You have very little ammo in this game, and you get a lot more equipment like a flamethrower and ice grenades to deal with pesky enemies. Winning a combat gauntlet in Doom Eternal means juggling multiple demons at any given time while managing ammo, health, and armor efficiently all while staying on the move and using the level to your advantage.

Doom Eternal throws a lot of enemies your way. Way more than you might think you can handle. And it expects you to rip and tear your way through all of them. It gives you all the tools you need to be successful, but it’s up to you how you want to modify and upgrade your weapons. There are tons of collectibles, secrets, and challenges hidden throughout the massive levels, which I greatly appreciated. There’s also a wide variety in the environments and areas you go to, unlike Doom 2016’s binary Hell and UAC levels. Overall, this game was such a delight to play. I found myself looking forward to playing more and more of it the deeper I got into the game, and it’s just fantastic how they’ve managed to make a combat-focused game feel so engaging and thought provoking.

Hugo Martin, the Creative Director of Doom Eternal, himself said that the demons were being seen as “chess pieces” internally on the development team. They first throw a new enemy at you by itself to show you what it can do and to see how you’d handle it. Once you’ve beaten it, it doesn’t mean you’ve conquered it. The real test is dealing with multiples of those while you’re being attacked by a variety of Super Heavy Demons from all over. Just adding one extra type of demon or a couple more variations of another demon completely changes your gameplay style and how you’d approach the problem. I really appreciated the depth of combat gameplay in Doom Eternal, and it an absolute gold standard in how to design a gunplay focused game revolving around push forward combat. Really, really impressed with it and the team at id Software.

I also got the chance to play and finish Afterparty, Night School Studios’ spiritual successor to their famed Oxenfree. I loved the hell out of Oxenfree and had been closely following the development of Afterparty ever since it was announced. I pre-purchased on the Epic Store, but once I knew it was coming to the Switch, I absolutely had to get it on there. And it was incredible. The way it casually introduced and normalized the main characters just being in hell and having to drink their way out by defeating Satan in a drinking game was nothing short of sheer brilliance. The writing is cutting and sharp, it’s incredibly funny, and has a lot of deadpan existential humor all over it. It was literally made for someone like me.

Similar to its predecessor, Afterparty’s conversation system allows you to interrupt other characters while they’re talking and even lets you not say anything at all as a response. As a result, conversations flow very smoothly and feel very natural. The voice acting cast is a talented bunch, and they knocked it out of the park in this game. The setting is so absurd and the things they talk about are so zany, but the writing and dialogue really killed it in this game, so a huge hats off to everyone who worked on that. My favorite parts were where demons would repeatedly bring up regular human problems as the bane of their existence, like marital issues or maintenance requests at home or not loving their job of torturing humans. I loved how it downplayed the “hell” aspect of hell and just showed demons enjoying their party side chilling at bars and nightclubs. I don’t think the game gets enough credit for seamlessly accomplishing this kind of worldbuilding, it’s just so well done. Loved my time with this gem of a game.

Aside from that, I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on and off. This game is truly a delight. Every little thing is so polished and hyper detailed, it’s just so pleasing. When you unlock the museum, taking a stroll in there has got to be one of the most relaxing and uplifting things you can do in this quarantine. Shaking trees for fruit, digging up fossils, fishing for new creatures, finding new DIY recipes, and talking to your neighbors resulting in a very satisfying daily loop of activities that ensures you’re working towards building a community on the island. Of course, everything’s coated in a deep paint of Nintendo cutesiness, so there’s lots of silly humor and bad puns all over the place.

I think what I actually like most about Animal Crossing is its interface. I’ve spent a lot of time just staring at the text animation when you’ve got an option selected or replaying the animation of highlighting a menu icon to see how it scales and appears. Every text box has a very light wiggle movement that slowly permeated and deforms over time. It’s got so many hidden details in its UI animation, it’s amazing. The actual art for the icons and world objects are just as incredible, with the game using strong shapes with solid colors and strong outlines to call out and differentiate one type of similarly silhouetted fish or fruit from the others.

If I had any criticism about the game, it might be how slow it feels in the start. Because it’s a game where you have to play it for a bit every day and set it down until the next, the firs 3-4 days can be grueling. There’s not much to do and you’re sort of just waiting for things to happen. You can of course move your Switch clock forward, but I’d rather play the game as intended. I’m not big into the multiplayer aspects of it, so I’ve just been gathering materials and stocking up supplies to eventually craft a lot of things. It gets very repetitive, but the game does a great job of giving you agency over literally everything, from where to place your house to deciding where every single building on the island goes. You can eventually reshape the entire island to your liking, so it really does make you feel like you put in all of that work yourself. Overall this is a fun little game to play in between all the other things I’m playing.

And then I made my way through the story DLC for Control, which was my favorite game of 2019. It’s called The Foundation, and it expands on the lore of the Oldest House and gets real weird. I was pleasantly surprised by how different yet similar it felt to the base game. In a nutshell, it feels like more of Control, which is what I bought it for. It’s honestly stunning how this game manages to convey so much dread and weight through environments and level design alone. Most games try so hard to create a specific ambience and atmosphere through spooky objects and haunting soundtracks, but Control does it all through architecture, interior architecture at that. The brutalist buildings and creepy caverns somehow work so well at telling you that some really weird, mysterious stuff has been happening around here, ensuring that you’re always curious and suspicious about every little thing. It’s amazing and I had a blast with it.

And last but not the least, I binged the hell out of Final Fantasy VII Remake in just a matter of days. 50 hours in less than a week. It was that good. I played the demo and was incredibly impressed by the combat system that was a hybrid between a turn-based and action RPG, and was immediately hooked. So I bought the full game the day it released and just completely lost myself in it. The game is so well realized, so well crafted, and highly polished. The characters are incredible, the storytelling is fantastic, and the worldbuilding is astounding. My only real complaints with the game are that it feels too linear in certain areas (areas in between the sectors and the slum scrapyards for example), that sidequests are locked to certain chapters, and that the camera isn’t great in certain boss fights (especially groups of aerial enemies). It’s 10 hours longer than it needs to be due to all the excessive open world padding that they added in, which took the game down from a 10/10 to a 9/10 in most reviews. But wow, what an excellent experience from start to end with tons of jaw-dropping moments, amazing cinematics, and over-the-top action sequences. Loved my time with it.

So yeah, that’s a lot of games to be playing. But I’m enjoying it because I know it’s nearly impossible to get this much time off in today’s world. I’ve experienced some really fantastic games, some of the best I’ve ever played actually, during this scary quarantine. I’m grateful for the fact that I don’t need to worry about everything happening out there and can just get lost into a virtual world for a little bit. Gaming has always served as a great escapism tool for me, and it feels even more essential now than ever. It’s been a way for me to stay mentally sane by engaging deeply with a character or a world and taking control of a piece of it. I think we could all use a feeling of a little control right about now, so give one of these a whirl if you’re feeling down or bored during this quarantine. They’ve all got my seal of approval.