It takes two all-star legends to conquer the dreaded Disc Room of Osiris; in chorus, we pray that they do not become its prey.
It Takes Two
Part of me wants to call this a “comeback” – a return to form for designer Josef Fares, whose last title, A Way Out, failed to reach the lofty heights of his earliest title, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It doesn’t quite pan out that way, though. For starters, It Takes Two shares way more in common with A Way Out than Brothers (they’re both exclusively two-player co-op action-adventure games), and, most pressingly… A Way Out was pretty good! A Way Out failed in ways that aren’t at all reflected by how mesmerising and engaging it is; its clunky dialog, generic storyline, and confusing contrivances never distracted from the inventive co-op scenarios. So It Takes Two isn’t so much a “return to form” as it is a refinement; much-needed polish atop of a formula that was, honestly, already most of the way to being perfected.
Immediately, It Takes Two tells a more affable, witty, and playful story. It’s mature, sure – you play as two parents who are planning to divorce one another, despite it clearly being a traumatic point of contention for their daughter – but, with the two parents having been turned into living (and undying!) dolls through the magic of their daughter’s grieving tears, it has the scope and lively energy of a Pixar movie; memorable characters, showcasing impeccable comedic timing while interacting with one another, drive the narrative forwards in ways that feel so much more fresh and entertaining than anything in A Way Out. It also verges towards tragedy and horror in choice moments, but overall, it’s a delightfully cartoonish romp with well-considered dramatic overtones.
The gameplay is utterly superb. At the core of the game lays a 3D puzzle-platformer, but like in A Way Out, there’s never a dull moment; there’s always a new, inventive challenge, or a silly distraction, or whole new modes of play, woven into the pacing of the experience with the utmost of expertise and forethought. It’s truly impressive just how far they can stretch the formula – how many spectacular gimmicks they can introduce, without any feeling forced or incongruent – and with it all held together with masterful voice performances and art direction, the aesthetic and mechanical throughline of It Takes Two is a pure joy to explore.
Perhaps the only real problem with It Takes Two is that you need to play it with a friend. I also have to wonder if, like the otherwise sublime Portal 2, it has little replay value for anyone who might want to introduce a new friend to it after completing it. That’s small potatoes, though, for a game that is a masterpiece of cooperative level and puzzle design – and thoroughly masterful in its presentation, too. Josef Fares is still a creator to watch, then, even if he may have slipped and shown his arse on A Way Out. Still – if A Way Out is his worst game, and It Takes Two is his best, I can’t help but be excited for what he has in store next, cos that’s a damn fine body of work all the same.
GRID Legends
I’ve made a lot of mistakes, writing this series over the past few months – some more notable than others, others I managed to fix soon after publishing them hoping nobody would notice – but the single biggest error, the one I regret the most having written 147 entries and counting… is that I came away from Gran Turismo 7 with positive sentiments. Granted, I was relatively backhanded while complimenting the title – I called it “Sunday drive lazy” – but hindsight is 20/20, and geez, let’s call a spade a spade: Gran Turismo 7 is simply not fun to play.
For comparison’s sake, here’s GRID Legends. GRID Legends does a lot of what Gran Turismo 7 does! It features a staggering amount of varied motorsports disciplines, over a vast array of tracks and locations. It has hundreds of vehicles, all handling differently from one another – from lumbering trucks to spry open-wheel racecars – each handling believably, each showcasing detailed interiors, each modifiable both aesthetically and mechanically. GRID Legends might not hold up to Gran Turismo 7 on a technical level (indeed, playing on an Xbox One S, my play experience with GRID Legends looked relatively atrocious), but it undoubtedly matches it on content, and then… like… and I really can’t stress this enough as a point of difference… GRID Legends is fun to play.
I did say that Gran Turismo 7 was “boring,” and… again, it was intended as a compliment. Honestly, I think I was mostly just taken with the sheer mundanity of it all; the ubiquity of the starting cars when compared to titles like Forza, that are itching to get you behind the wheels of enormously powerful and rare hypercars as soon as you start playing. GRID Legends features no less ubiquitous vehicles – no less mundane beginnings for your up-and-coming driver – but in a video game that has driving mechanics that are entertaining. It captures the sense of speed and fragility that you would feel when barrelling down a racetrack in a dinky little bomb of a racecar. Admittedly, Grant Turismo 7 is uniquely leisurely (especially considering all the soft jazz in its soundtrack), but it is far from unique for its breadth of cheap cars to choose from – and GRID Legends was just the game to make me realise that you can have both the white-knuckle thrills of a Forza Horizon and the tedium of driving a Prius on sealed tarmac at the same time.
Gran Turismo 7 is an abysmal live service riddled with connection errors and microtransactions, and GRID Legends has Ncuti Gatwa in it. He’s the new Doctor Who! Gran Turismo 7 certainly doesn’t have any Doctor Whos in it. If you have a copy of Gran Turismo 7, I can only recommend flinging into the ocean like a Frisbee. (I’d recommend buying GRID Legends in its stead, but it’s published by EA. Boo.)
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl
Finally – a platform fighting game featuring the beloved and universally renowned characters from The Loud House!
As a fellow fan of The Loud House, I certainly don’t need to tell you what an amazing joy this is. I mean, after all this time, the wait is finally over! Lincoln and Lucy Loud – the titular all-stars of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. Now, as we all know, not everyone is familiar with The Loud House – “Loudless,” we call ’em, the poor sods – and Nickelodeon was actually gracious enough to include bonus guest characters from some of their more niche, less popular franchises. Several characters from SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appear on the roster, throwing the tragic Loudless a bone (as well as those who are well-versed in obscure, flailing IPs, like SpongeBob).
Impressively, the game plays a lot like Super Smash Bros.! It’s… imperceptibly worse than Super Smash Bros. There are a lot of little tweaks to the formula, but unlike PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, which aimed to create new mechanics within a familiar gamefeel, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is altogether shameless about its clear inspiration. Which, I should say, is actually great – Nintendo oughtn’t have sole dominion over platform fighters (and Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl enters a market decidedly rich with competition on that front). It’s mechanically solid, and boasts… decent enough presentation (some characters fare quite a bit better than others in the art style they’ve chosen, here). Voice acting – only recently patched into the came, alongside items – is notably sloppy, but then, it was admittedly never a priority for the developers, who clearly opted to put their budget primarily toward refining the game itself.
So, all in all, it’s the game The Loud House fans have been clamouring for, and Nickelodeon’s good grace to cater to the wretched Loudless makes for an enjoyable crossover experience. Between us Louders, though, it’s worth considering that… you know, it, uh… it does justice to… the Louds… and the way Lincoln and Lucy, err, they… do those things they do. Those things!
…okay, look. I don’t know what The Loud House is. In my head, I’ve always read “The Loud House” as “The Proud Family,” and I was very much taken aback when I realised that the Louds were fuckin’ white. Hell – when I first saw Lincoln Loud in the game, I thought he was out of Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends. I have no idea – not the slightest clue whatsoever – what The Loud House is about, yet alone when it aired, or, like, what its target audience is.
Oh! But I know who Garfield is, though! I like Garfield. He’s nice.
Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris
I have to commend Square Enix for something altogether unexpected – the rebooted Lara Croft from 2013’s Tomb Raider did not immediately become the Lara Croft. Perhaps they were worried the reboot wouldn’t catch on, or perhaps it was too much work to retrofit the edgier, more realistic Lara into in-development titles, but I’m nevertheless impressed that Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris stars the Lara Croft from the trilogy of mainline games starting with Tomb Raider: Legend.
…reboot Lara Croft really wouldn’t work in Temple of Osiris, anyway. It’s a sequel to Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light – an isometric, co-op, action-adventure game, with elements of dual-stick shooters and Diablo. Lara Croft teams up with the Egyptian deities, Isis and Horus (and some fourth guy, who isn’t even a deity, pfft), and sets off on a classic tomb raidin’ adventure – finding fragments of an ancient thing to combine into some other thing to do some radically powerful thing. It’s MacGuffins all the way down, and it is especially ridiculous when compared to the reboot (which, I should stress, released a year before this), but it is set-up enough for a rollicking journey through the sprawling catacombs of Egyptian pyramids. Solving intricate cooperative puzzles, shooting at skeletons, running from giant alligator gods – it’s all in a day’s work for Legend’s Lara Croft, where I fear reboot Lara Croft would trip on a loose tile and tumble painfully into a chasm.
Now, there is, of course, a pressing question: how faithful is Temple of Osiris to the mythology and spirituality of the culture it ruthlessly pilfers from? I can’t answer definitively – the closest I’ve gotten to being educated on these topics is watching Moon Knight on Disney+ – but I’m nonetheless confident that the answer is, “not very”. …it’s Tomb Raider. The franchise’s authenticity and tact hasn’t much improved since the 90s. I can all but guarantee that the historical and mythological content in Temple of Osiris is entirely questionable, if not outright offensive. Still, I did enjoy fighting Sobek. He’s a big alligator! Did you know Sobek was the god of semen? …okay, well, I don’t know if that’s true. I just heard it from Hbomberguy that one time.
…y’know, I’ve long thought a crossover between the old Lara Croft and the new Lara Croft would work extremely well. The old Lara Croft is practically a cryptid in comparison; cold, unfeeling, Terminator-esque in her murderous efficiency. You could quite easily pit reboot Lara against her ruthless predecessor in a bone-chilling survival horror game. I’d ask Square Enix to get in touch with me so I could give ’em the full pitch… but geez, they recently sold the Tomb Raider IP, the fools.
Disc Room
I’m resisting the embarrassingly strong urge to leave you with a hack quote, all, “Disc Room will do for disc rooms what Jaws did for the ocean!” Disc Room isn’t even a horror game – it’s gory, maybe even deliberately disconcerting, but it isn’t trying to scare anybody – which is maybe telling on myself, then, that I am terrified by Disc Room on a conceptual level? Which… okay, yeah, the idea of a room that just throws giant buzz saw blades at you until you’re eventually killed by being cut clean in half is no-one’s idea of a vacation, I guess, but I’m not far off from outright fearing that I might one day find myself inside of a disc room. Which, in my defence, isn’t an impossibility! It’s just an… err… infitisimal probability.
And it does a disservice to what Disc Room actually is – practically, a brutally difficult bullet hell shooter, just, with the bullets replaced by sawblades and none of the shooting done by the player. It’s an intensely satisfying time attack dodge-’em-up! The level of control you have over the imperilled protagonist is unbelievable – it’s so tight (as you’d hope!), to the point that I feel I should draw comparisons with Super Meat Boy, despite that being a 2D platformer. Anyone who’s played Super Meat Boy will know, though, just how pitch-perfect every aspect of the player’s interaction with the controller was – how fine-tuned, how direct, the movement was. Disc Room harkens back to that sort of perfection; you always move in the direction you want to, when you want to – which makes the inevitable bloody deaths that much less frustrating. They have guaranteed that the challenge is between you and the game – and not you, the game, and the controller.
The deaths are inevitable, by the way. You’re tasked with surviving in any one of hundreds of discrete disc rooms for as long as possible – usually only a few seconds. Progress is not just determined by survival, but also by challenges that involve (for example) being killed by as many different kinds of discs as you can. So, death invariably comes – and quickly. You’d think this would take the sharp, rusty edges off of Disc Room’s bleak conceit, with the impermanence of death woven into both the flow of gameplay and the connective narrative, but… no. No, now I’m just scared that when I’m improbably trapped inside of a disc room, I’ll just die… over and over, forever and ever. I, err, haven’t successfully convinced anyone this isn’t a horror game, have I?
Chorus
As much of a well-worn trope as it is, the science-fiction staple of techno-religious cults is really not one that rears its head in science-fiction video games with much frequency. It’s on the periphery of a great many franchises – the ever-popular Halo seems worth mentioning, here – but on the whole, I tend to associate the trope more with books and television (and the expanded lore of Warhammer 40,000) than with the storytelling medium I’ve devoted a whole blog to. And it maybe goes without saying, but the more specific and niche the technological focus of the cult is, the better. I will enjoy a cult that is generally good at computers far less than a cult that, say, worships 3½-inch floppy disks.
Chorus, then, opens with a rather unique conceit: the player character, Nara, is a defector from a techno-religious cult, called the Circle, that has learn to harness the power of something called the Void to specifically become superhumanly adept at piloting starfighters. Their supposed goal is to unite all peoples of the galaxy by joining them in eternal unity, together in what they call the Chorus – a goal they have sought to achieve by killing anyone and everyone who doesn’t want to join them in the Chorus. She tells us that she is responsible for a singular act of (admittedly, reluctant) planetary destruction that resulted in the instantaneous genocide of billions of lives. And so our story starts, quite some time later, Nara having fled from the reach of the Circle, working as a mercenary for a peaceful deep-space settlement called the Enclave using her suspiciously, paranormally expert piloting skills; her past, hidden from those she’s befriended, but no less a looming shadow over everything she does. In the game’s first mission, she is sent to scavenge the scrap from a long-felled station, and her thoughts intrude upon the urgency of her mission: you destroyed this civilian station, and everyone aboard. Back when you were someone else.
The story is considerably mature, then, especially for what is essentially an arcade-style space combat game. I’m fond of it! …with minor caveats. Overall, Chorus superb, and it executes on everything it sets out to do, but it sadly isn’t quite to my tastes; you can only control the yaw of your starfighter, not the roll, and levels are designed with an artificially predetermined “up” and a “down”. This doesn’t make for a bad game though – to the contrary, Chorus is hugely enjoyable, its set-piece dogfights are suitably intense and engaging (to say nothing of its visually spectacular environments) – but it does mean Chorus is less of the kind of space combat game I specifically enjoy playing.
Maybe. I do wonder. I tend to value details like full 360° control (akin to six degrees of freedom games) and cockpit views (also, regrettably, missing from Chorus). But would I actually like Chorus that much more if I could roll my spaceship around of my own accord? Or am I just being petty; griping over what is little more than a personal nit-pick against a choice likely decided upon early into development, evidently made with a great deal of forethought as to the mechanical necessities of the kind of game they were making? Should I accept these few exceptions so that I might appreciate the totality of their artistic achievements? …no way. Spinning is a good trick! Chorus is objectively worse for not letting me spin! I award it no points, and may God have mercy on its soul!
jk it’s actually very good
Prey
Guest writer: Emilia Wennqvist
Warren Spector, the wizard who conjured Deus Ex into existence, once opined that his dream video game would take the principles of an immersive sim and rather than take the player on a globe-trotting adventure, instead confine them into a single location that undergoes dramatic changes over the course of the game as a result of the player’s actions. Spector, bless him, imagined the game taking place in a single city block. Arkane Studios, seeking to return to the roots of the genre, imagined and created Talos I.
I cannot stress how much I love Talos I. A testament to man’s hubris, his greed, and his disregard for others. It’s a great place to cower in panic after you’ve expended all of your shotgun shells and your medkits while you’re bleeding out and hunted by a goop monster (horny in a different way than you might be thinking). As your dying self falls onto an up-until-then spotless conference table dressed in brass and mahogany, thanking God and the Soviets for letting JFK survive his assassination with your final breath is a simple reflex.
Of course, the game isn’t so crass as to pull an Outer Worlds with its critique of capitalism, thank the Soviets. Instead, it simply lets you observe how the metaphorical brass of the station all get their own cabins decorated with literal brass while the working joes all have to share a barracks-like hall with their little “habitation pods”. The head honcho, Alex Yu, even gets a lovely bungalow office high up in the arboretum, the prick.
On a serious note, I don’t like horror games. I love reading horror, watching horror, and writing horror, but video games utterly melt whatever layers of protection I feel I have between the narrative and my brain’s reaction to it. The moment something spooks me too bad, I’m out. When I’m out, I’m out for good. I don’t like scavenging for ammo, either. The anxiety I get when I just don’t have enough to go around hasn’t ever felt good in the way I hear people talk about with something like Resident Evil. So, imagine my (system/bio) shock when I realized that a major reason I was having so much fun in a survival horror immersive sim wasn’t just because of the “immersive sim” part, but also, the “survival” and “horror” parts. System Shock being one of the early imsims and also a survival horror title isn’t something I’d ever really thought much about, but in Prey, the way those elements fit together just feels natural. For example, survival horror titles hinge on resource management while immersive sim titles hinge on naturalistic resource distribution. Prey, then, has all of your resources come from recycling items in your environment. Of course a space station with concerns about weight allocations for supply rockets would want to recycle things more diligently than on Earth! So just put your funny little banana peels into the recycler, watch them become little blocks of reusable material, and pick them up when they individually fall into the receptacle. Hope no-one heard any of that, yeah?
Now, the story? The story… look. Tell ya what, kid. If you’ve managed to avoid spoilers for a five year old game so far, I’ll give ‘ye a li’l clue, see? What ya wanna do is, ‘ssumin’ ya got the game, ya play the first ‘our or so blind – like a mole rat – play ‘ntil ya foind yaself on dat dere Talos I, see? And then look up the ending. I’m not joking. The game’s so much better if you actually know where it’s going. That’s the one problem with the whole thing and I don’t besmirch any of the losers and hosers who hated the game because of their allergy to endings. Yes, it’s unsatisfying, but having now lingered on that lack of satisfaction for a while… sometimes it’s good to be unsatisfied. Alright, I’m out.
You may have noticed, but I took last week off because it was my birthday! I turned 30 years old, and I only feel… somewhat more fragile, now that I’ve left my 20s behind. Oh well. Time comes for us all. As for these posts, I should be caught up to the present soon enough – I’ve got a decent number of friends stepping in for a week’s worth of entries, bless ’em. In the meantime, though… don’t tell the Webbys, okay? I want to still be eligible for a Webby. I am owed a Webby, goddamn it.
Thankyou so much to Emilia for providing that Prey review, which she aptly titled “Prey Is Amazing, And Here’s Why”. I don’t know why she decided to type like a New York mobster for the duration of the final paragraph (???) but, frankly, it’s better than anything I’ve written all year, so I do hope you all recognize what a special treat that is. Ya mooks! …ah, see, now I’m doin’ it.
Ann's Play Space 