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Citizen Sleeper 2, One Foot Forward and the Other Slightly Backward

Spoilers for the entirety of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Citizen Sleeper 2 was up there with my most anticipated games of the year. After beating the first game mid last year, I've read every article posted about the sequel, bought the art book made by Lost In Cult, and done everything in my power to get my close friends to play it. Citizen Sleeper is easily one of my favorite games ever made, and unfortunately, the second game does fall short in comparison. Now don't get me wrong, I still loved my time with Starward Vector. The art by Guillaume Singelin is unsurprisingly still incredible, the music and world design still gives you that same unique atmosphere, the cold unforgiving vacuum of space and the somehow even colder and more vicious people behind the corporate dystopia that looms over the game at all times. Yet that warmth is still present within the characters you meet and the found communities that somehow continue to persevere and thrive due to the individual people within them. My only criticism of this game boils down to one thing, time. It took me around 11 hours to beat the first game, that game takes place in one really big location. It took me only 12 hours to complete Starward Vector, which has close to a dozen major settlements and even smaller locations. This game is aiming to have a broader scope, but the characters and narrative suffer due to the lack of time to flesh everyone out. This was most apparent when I approached the end of the game, by that point I had recruited every person you could which adds up to around 7 or 8 people being on the ship. Save for Bliss and Serafin, most of the characters in your crew barely interact with one another outside of their story quests. This leads to the ship feeling really empty a lot of the time. It would have been really cool to hear other characters chime in during major story events, maybe giving insight on potential outcomes based on their specific expertise. A simpler example would have been to add more events while you traveled to other locations. This does happen sometimes with a few of the characters, but most of them didn't get that treatment during my play through. I don't think Nia or Kadet said a single thing to another character on The Rig after recruiting them. Which really sucks, I loved hearing these characters interact with one another and I don't think it should have been as rare.

In terms of broader narrative, I found most of the stories told in this one to be pretty underwhelming in some way or another compared to the first game, save for everything that happens in Wellspring. Laine is a relatively weak villain (though the dialogue involving his control over you is very well written and unsettling), The new characters, while very charming, didn't grab me with their conflicts like the first game. Most of the stronger narrative moments involved a returning character, like the standoff on the asteroid with the fraction drive, or finally figuring out the history behind Olivera. Every character story has the ingredients needed to be something really cool, they are just crushed under the lack of time that permeates everything in this game. The second to second game play is vastly improved, Starward Vector demands that you understand and play around its systems and will heavily punish you if you don't. This can create some really cool narrative gameplay moments, like with your first infiltration into Darkside.

I beat this game a few days ago and will probably come back to this post with different feelings in the future after it's marinated in my head a bit. It says a lot about a game when my one issue is that I wish there was more of it. Starward Vector is absolutely worth your time, while not as numerous, It's filled with lovable characters, challenging decisions and superb writing throughout. Gareth Damian Martin and the others who've worked on these games are profoundly talented individuals and I am confident that their future projects will continue to amaze.

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard Should Have Been Rated T

Spoilers for the entirety of Dragon Age: The Veilguard

I can't fathom how Dragon Age: The Veilguard exists in the way it does. Every now and then a game will come along that is so baffling in its design that I spend more time wondering how they came to certain decisions than thinking about the actual content in front of me. I'll start with the things I liked, which is unfortunately, not much. I found the combat and some of the exploration elements to be pretty fun and reminiscent of the recent God of War games, a comparison I'm sure you've heard before. Some of the overlap is pretty hard to overlook, the exploration and level design philosophy in both games are VERY similar and you can feel it with the small puzzles you do, the party members having different abilities that can interact with the world, looting, gear progression etc. While none of these ideas are new to games like this, even with God of War, it's the most recent and apt comparison I can make based on how the game feels to play. While I am a bit disappointed that you can't control party members in full like in previous installments, it makes sense for the combat framework here. Build crafting wasn't as flexible as I would have liked it to be, but I still found it to be fun a lot of the time. There's enough variety present within build crafting and itemization that I never found myself brushing it off just so I could get through the game, unlike some other aspects. I played a mage and landed on a hybrid necromancer evoker build that I was really enjoying. The other thing I liked is a double edged sword that will transition into what I didn't like about the game, which is basically everything else. The art design is a mixed bag to say the least. On one hand, the environments are stunning, there isn't a single location that isn't beautiful to look at. Some stand outs being Arlathan, Minrathous and The Crossroads. Another point for the art design is the sky box tech they used. Veilguard might have the most beautiful and detailed sky boxes I have ever seen in a video game. Unique lighting techniques are used in some areas and the sky boxes fully take advantage of that. Also it had been said to death but I cannot get over the Qunari design in this game, they look like direct descendents of Yakub.

Tone is a difficult thing to set and stay consistent with in any story, especially one that is meant to be experienced for 25+ hours. Veilguard fails to set a consistent tone on almost every level. This is a considerable step down from previous Dragon Age games in terms of everything related to writing. This game revolves around trying to kill two "gods", from act 2 to 14, that is the main goal. Except there's almost no consistency with how dangerous and powerful these gods are. What do I mean by that? One of the big shifts in tone is at the beginning of the game when you go to D'metas Crossing and find a terrible mess of alien looking biomass and corpses strewn about everywhere. Up until this point, Veilguard had been relatively light hearted with you exploring a magical, colorful forest and meeting characters that present no friction to any dialogue choice you make. Then you're thrust into this town with people mangled everywhere, you can see bodies that were trying to escape only to be caught by something and reduced to a skeletal shell, devoid of their outer layer of skin. It would have been an effective shift, except right after this we go back to happy go lucky dialogue and characters. When you go back to Arlathan and tell some of the people about it one of them goes "First the darkspawn and now this, all of this is getting very scary!". While this line was so bad I laughed out loud, it signaled to me that the writing in this game is probably not going to get better. Later on the gods wreak havoc on a city and you have to choose one to save, one of the most impactful choices in the game. However the city you choose to not save, while looking a lot worse for wear, doesn't feel all that terrible, especially when compared with D'metas Crossing from earlier. There are a few more moments I could make an example of but the bottom line I want to make is that both of the gods do not present as a threat save for a few moments towards the end of the game. Solas should have been the main antagonist of Veilguard, he is by far the most compelling and well written character and is with you the entire game. Knowing that this game used to be called "Dragon Age: Dreadwolf" it's pretty easy to assume that this used to be the case for the narrative and was later changed.

The most disappointing thing in this game would have to be the party members. There are 7 of them in total and I only really liked 4 of them. However, I didn't do many of their companion quests as I got to a point where I didn't want to do side content anymore and just wanted to be done with the game. That left all of their stories unfinished and it's baffling how little characterization these characters get within the main story. Some of the characters have major moments within the main story that relate to their quest line, but that only counts for 2 or 3 of them depending on how you look at it. I'll leave the thoughts on the side content for later, for now I want to go through each party member. I don't have much to say about Harding as I found her to be a pretty nothing character. She has some moments during the memories of the Dreadwolf quest that leave her with interesting questions about her people and their history, but other than that she felt like such a nothing character. I can say the same about Bellara but she had a bit more charm with her energetic personality that endeared me to her a bit more. Neve is cool, she has better dialogue than some and worse than others, very middle of the road. She is focused on Minrathous and really really cares about Minrathous, that's her entire character. By itself that's not a big deal, Lucanis is like that but with Treviso, I just found it to be a bit redundant since my Rook was also a Shadow Dragon that cared about Minrathous a lot. Emmrich is really awesome, I really like the spin on a necromancer being really nice and posh. He provides the most insight during the group discussions and has funny banter with the other characters. Lucanis is probably my favorite, during the main quest he falters and doubts himself and changes quite a bit. I kept it pretty short for most of the characters since I don't have much to say about them. While I liked some of them, none of them left a lasting impression on me. Davrin and Taash are interesting in what they represent rather than their actual character. Taash is pretty compelling, kinda? Their journey of self discovery is handled pretty weirdly. During my playthrough, they have one conversation with Neve right after they join the party and then decide they are non-binary. I love seeing representation in games but this felt very "hey guys look, we have a non-binary character!!!" rather than something genuine. Especially when the rest of their questline has to do with their cultural identity and that you basically tell them to choose rather than say "hey you don't have to be defined by either groups of people because you are your own person". It's a very cool idea to flesh out a non-binary character in a long rpg like this with both their gender and cultural identity, it's just handled poorly here. Another thing that upsets me a bit is Davrin. I like his character quite a bit, however, he represents the step back the Dragon Age games have taken with Veilguard in terms of mature themes. Race has always been an important theme in these games, I played an elf in Origins and that decision heavily affected me for the entire game. Yet here things are all of a sudden just more tolerant? They mention how elves are still heavily discriminated against, Bellara says it a couple times but most of it comes straight from Davrin, I played an elf for Veilguard and all it changed was that I could say something about the gods every now and then in conversation. None of the discrimination present in the other games is here in Veilguard, which is crazy because the plot of this game should have amplified that idea tenfold. The gods threatening the entire world are elven and everyone knows it. That is a ripe opportunity for upsetting and insightful storytelling and all we get is Davrin saying "Elves really have it hard" every now and then.

I skipped most of the side content in this game, and I was heavily punished for it. The game tells you a few times that you should do the side stuff and I ignored it for the most part, this led to me getting the "bad" ending where every single member of my party, myself included, died, saving the world in the process. My issue lies with the lack of decision that led me to this ending. There were no dialogue options throughout the game that I could have chosen to prevent this and get a better ending. The game basically said to my face after the credits rolled "If you did the side content you would have gotten the good ending". I do not think an rpg that prides itself on the choices you make affecting the narrative should work like this. That's not even mentioning the lack of choice you have in regards to anything in this story, you make decisions don't get me wrong, they just don't affect much. Even with the party, 9/10 times everyone in the party agrees with everything you do, I only saw the "X character disprove" pop up maybe 3 or 4 times and I was choosing the meanest options you could make sometimes. The worst part is, I found the ending I got to be the most affecting and emotional part of the game. My home city of Minrathous looked like D'metas Crossing, everything was terrible, all my party members were dying one by one, leading to my character sacrificing himself to save the entire world. It was the dark and desperate tone the game was teetering on the edge of for the entire runtime come to fruition, and directly after Veilguard gives you a text pop up that basically says "you didn't do the side content and everyone died because of it". A final slap in the face after Veilguard actually made a risky choice, I should have been the one wondering what I could have done differently after the credits rolled, wondering if I had helped the party with their personal issues if things would have turned out differently, wondering if I had helped the various faction prepare for the coming battle if we could have won with little to no casualties. Veilguard disguises itself as a narrative choice driven rpg but there is a story it wants to tell, it does its best to push you in the direction of the ending they want to show as it would be consistent with the rest of the pg-13 writing the game has to offer. I wish we could have seen what the original concept of this game would have looked like, when it was more Dreadwolf and less Veilguard.

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The Split Sun of Silent Hill 2

Spoilers for the Silent Hill 2 remake

I think everyone has moments where the sun looks especially beautiful. Well maybe not just the sun, don't look directly at that by the way, but the surrounding sky. Maybe the clouds are a shade of pink and orange in the late afternoon, maybe you're spending the day with someone you care about and that make the surrounding world just a bit more lovely. I'm sure you can think of a moment in recent memory. For me it was two moments, one after the other, separated by a table and and a bunch of ones and zeros. Silent Hill 2 does not let you see anything with a clear lens. In the over world you have the signature fog obstructing everything that is further than 5 feet in front of you. The original Silent Hill fell back on this due to the technical limitations back in 1999 but subsequent releases make use of this fog as a intentional stylistic choice. Any time there's any fog outside you bet your ass I'm audibly saying "in my restless dreams I see that town, Silent Hill". It's a piece in what I think is the most oppressive atmosphere I've experienced in a piece of art. Yet later in the game, that fog becomes comforting. You spend a lot of time in and around the fog, you wade through it while walking the streets of Silent Hill and watch it seep in through doorways and windowsills. There's comfort in consistency, which the game breaks that with the Otherworld sections, somehow taking an already oppressive atmosphere and shoving rust and rot down your throat for good measure. The Otherworld sections are dark, wet, and nightmarish in every aspect making it all the more impactful when you go through a doorway and you're suddenly back in Silent Hill, fog and all. You never see the sun in Silent Hill 2. There's never a moment where the sky clears or it gets any brighter than the gray in the air, except for one fleeting moment. After you meet Maria, you travel the town a bit and make your way to the hospital in pursuit of Laura. Once you get there, you're greeted with a small section that subtly points you towards a particular staircase that you need to go up in order to progress. The moments before your ascent aren't particularly special, you pick up some bullets, grab a syringe with throbbing heart eyes, and probably get jump scared by James staring into the camera while you save. The moments between you and that staircase are mesmerizing. Golden light pours in from outside while a subdued, almost lifting melody plays. The hospital is a abandoned, disheveled mess with dust particles floating in plain sight due to the sunlight. Despite all of that, it's a notable and welcome shift from the rest of the game. You know there are nightmarish horrors lurking behind those locked doors, everything outside of this hallway will torment James to no end, it's the only reason they exist, after all. This is a moment of reprieve in an otherwise suffocating experience, and breath deep I did. I also needed a break after that, I'd been playing for a while at that point. I decided I wanted to draw for a bit, my small drawing desk being conveniently next to the desk with my computer. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was low. I could see the one high rise building in the distance through my window. There was a slight haze, that same golden light bounced across my room, I could see just a little bit of dust in the air. In a game filled with moments memorable for their sheer creative terror, the one moment that offers reprieve has stuck with me. As that hospital hallway drifted further and further away as I progressed, I found myself yearning to be back there when the game was at it's most bleak, I found myself yearning to find the emotion of seeing the same sun within two separate realities.

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For the Emperor... I Guess.

When gaming journalists said that Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 was a "Xbox 360 ass game", they were right... kinda? For better and certainly worse, this is a game out of time. It plays what I imagine a Gears of War game would play like (I haven't actually played any of them) and it's narrative flows exactly how a third person action game with a mission based structure and emphasis on flashy set pieces would. Yet most of the faults of Space Marine 2 lean heavily on things that can't be hidden behind the crystal clear pillar of "PS3 ass game". Gameplay is really simple, you shoot things, melee sometimes, and have a heavy reliance on using finishing moves when an enemy is low health. This will restore one armor charge, which is huge, especially on higher difficulties. You'll be introduced to new guns and sometimes get a jump pack that lets you dash and jump around but other than those things, the gameplay loop never changes. After mission three, save for a few weapons that don't change much of anything, you've seen what Space Marine 2 has to offer. After mission 4, the game was really dragging and it doesn't help that the narrative in this game is pretty mediocre. It's a Warhammer story, I'm not trying to pull anything out of it, I'm already reading this back in the voice of Jacob Geller, but I really think they could have went harder and some of the decisions they made were really crazy to me. So, the game has a campaign and sometimes another squad will go do something else that will affect the main campaign in major ways. You can play as this other squad but it's basically a side mission as this doesn't move the story forward. There are two particular instances of this that baffled me. The first being where you're tasked with delivering a message. The team that you don't play as is tasked with killing a giant psychic hive mind monstrosity in order to shut down the connection with the main hive fleet. This is prime main quest material and would have really split up the middle chunk of this game from feeling kinda boring before shit goes crazy at the end. I would be happy that there's basically two missions instead of one, but the combat being how it is, I don't want to go back and play that mission when it could have just been a cool set piece. Same with the mission towards the end. While it's really cool that the squad falls through low orbit as battleships explode all around, the other squad gets to fly a 200 year old ship and ram it into a giant heretic obelisk. While I think those are slight missteps, the set pieces that are in the main campaign are absolutely fantastic and those paired with the phenomenal art and set design are the only reason I kept playing. That and I like Warhammer a lot, so I did shout "for the emperor" a few times while doing the same melee combo I'd been doing for 3 hours. I repeat, the art design is so fucking good, the tech they use for meshing sky boxes and giant hordes of enemies is unreal. If they release an art book I will be buying.