Bloodborne

Hey all, it's been a long time. Let's dive back in!

Bloodborne is the new horror action RPG from Japanese developers From Software, and the fourth game in the "Souls series" (because most of them have the word Souls in the title). Director Hidetaka Miyazaki brings his trademark blend of challenge, exploration, mystery, and a coherent overarching vision to the land of Gothic and Lovecraftian horror, and creates what may be the best game in the series.

Let's put it this way: I bought a PS4 primarily to play Bloodborne, and I'm satisfied with that decision. That's how good this game is. So, why is it such a success?

First, Bloodborne keeps most of the elements that made previous Souls games special. The core combat engine is excellent, relying on a slow pace to encourage tactical thinking and featuring strong but fragile enemies in small groups to encourage picking your battles and seizing the right moment to strike. The core loop of risk versus reward in a single currency is still the beating heart of an intoxicating, addictive system designed to stretch your limits. The passive multiplayer system, where you can leave notes and hints for other players, or watch the ghostly forms of others as they die, still gives you a sense of community and hope in an otherwise unrelentingly dreary and miserable setting, as well as alerting you to traps and secrets that would otherwise be well-hidden. The game has a clear and consistent vision and a great sense of pacing, like a well-directed movie, so that almost nothing pulls you out of the experience. The game is allergic to cutscenes, quick-time events and tutorials, and the plot is minimalist and unclear unless you read every scrap of text in the item descriptions. The community is still divided over which of the 3 possible endings is the "good ending", for instance.

Second, Bloodborne trims a lot of the mechanical fat from previous installments. Instead of a surfeit of slightly different weapons and armor to collect, there are barely a dozen, but each one has a far greater variety of possible moves. Instead of an upgrade tree with half a dozen different materials to collect, there is a single linear upgrade path, plus a bunch of freely configurable gems that encourage you to try new builds without having to restart the game. Instead of Dark Souls 2's nine stats, there are only six, and each one has a clear effect on your character. Vast swathes of the game are completely optional, and in a stroke of genius, there's a whole second campaign of increasingly difficult pseudo-random "chalice dungeons" which provide a source of end-game content beyond simply replaying the game on a higher difficulty level. You don't have to worry about how much your character can carry, the quality of your armor, how many spells you have left, or any of the other make-work that plagued previous games, although there are still half a dozen too many potions, elixirs and bombs in your inventory that I rarely used.

Third, Bloodborne brings a new setting and a new feel to the table to differentiate itself from the competition as well as its predecessors. The Victorian Gothic city of Yharnam is a relentless profusion of fog, closed doors, twisty alleyways, and gabled roofs, which starts out vaguely menacing and edges closer and closer to ruin and madness as the game progresses. If anything, the new game is too busy, full of boxes and coffins and railings that can make it difficult to figure out where you're supposed to go in these circuitous levels full of shortcuts and hidden side paths. From the mechanical end, you now carry a gun instead of a shield, you can dodge much faster and more often, and you can regain health by attacking immediately after you were hit. The gun is much weaker than your melee weapons, but it's great at interrupting or staggering enemies, leading you to use it more as a counterattack or parry than a long-range sniping tool. Similarly, the lack of a shield, the fast movement, and the health regain system encourage you to stay in close quarters with your enemy, darting in and out of their blows like a fencer or a boxer, rather than inching forward with your shield up like an armored knight. The move to Victorian quasi-steampunk from medieval fantasy allows the perfect opportunity to rename or reinvent staple elements. These aren't magic rings, they're magic runs you memorize while sitting at your desk! That's not a bonfire, it's a lantern! That's not a zombie, it's an angry villager with a pitchfork! Presented in new ways, and with a much greater focus on staying active and putting yourself in high-risk, high-reward situations, the game feels liberated.

The last element is the introduction of a stiff challenge, and here Bloodborne also succeeds, perhaps a bit too well. Souls games are not difficult in the "Nintendo Hard" sense of requiring perfect timing and coordination, although they're certainly geared towards people who have played a lot of video games before. Instead, they contradict a lot of standard "video game logic" assumptions, forcing you to re-train your mind to succeed. The game is tough but fair: almost every time you die, you feel like it's your fault, that you could have pulled through if you just dodged better, or if you didn't rush blindly into that ambush, or if you had traveled back to town and spent your money on better gear or more levels. Once you've cracked the code, learned the patterns of the enemies and become comfortable with your trusty weapon, the game becomes almost easy, and the thrill of mastery floods through you. (Then, usually, you go online to brag about how great you are and how dumb everyone is who's still stuck on the first boss. But that's just Internet macho culture at work.)

Souls games are special because they respect you as an adult. You reap rewards for being observant, thorough, cautious, and decisive. There is no voice-over explaining why you're doing what you're doing, but if you pay attention you will figure it out without being told. If you draw your sword on your allies, they will be hostile to you forever. If you forget to use your invitation to Cainhurst Castle, home of the vampires, before finishing the game, no one will remind you and you'll just have to try again next time. If you ask for help from other players online, you don't know whether the other person will help you, or try to kill you; you can only hope that your respectful bow will motivate him to deal honorably with you.

Bloodborne looks great, it sounds great, it plays great, and it's just a delightful game overall. I highly recommend it.

Tomb Raider (2013)

I had heard that the new Tomb Raider reboot was good, but I certainly didn't expect it to be this good. It's the game that Uncharted 3 should have been.

I am squarely in Tomb Raider's target demographic, having little to no exposure to the previous games in the series but a fondness for linear, heavily authored third-person action games. The story is extremely perfunctory, and would probably have no emotional punch whatsoever if I hadn't read the prequel comic that came with the special edition, which introduced the characters in a much more sympathetic way than their one-dimensional portrayal in the actual game. It doesn't help that half the cast is clearly just there to die in protagonist Lara Croft's arms for a Tragic Character Arc, when the game has plenty of other scripted events that provide real character development for her anyway. This isn't inconsistent on the game's part; rather, Tomb Raider is great at letting you connect with Lara when you're playing, and doesn't really know what to do with her when you aren't.

The mechanical heart of Tomb Raider is very strong. The basic methods of interacting with the game are quickly established: climbing things, shooting things, solving physics-based puzzles, exploring for hidden collectibles, and taking tremendous amounts of physical punishment in cut scenes. Because it is 2013, there are a bunch of expensive scripted scenes where the player's only contribution is Press X to Not Die, or Run and Jump in a Straight Line to Not Die, uneasily coexisting with the actual cut scenes where the plot moves forward. Loading screens are elegantly disguised with narrow rock passages or high windows Lara must wiggle through, and generally everything comes off very well and the pacing is tight, with plenty of breathers in the large open areas to explore. Because it is the Year of the Bow, Lara has the option to silently take down enemies, allowing you to bring your environment traversal skills to bear on the combat in a refreshing manner. The bow is also mandatory for the non-combat sections of the game, used to light things on fire, attach rope to things, and hunt animals, which encourages you to use it against enemies as well.

Upgrades are plentiful, with the unusual but very apt decision to make 100% completion of all upgrades possible by the end of the game, rather than forcing players to replay to see the other skill trees. This makes total sense with the story arc of "Lara Croft develops from a callow youth into Indiana Jones and/or Batman". The order in which the skills unlock essentially co-opts the player into telling the story through gameplay: first you buy a bunch of "Survival" upgrades which provide boosts to resource collection and have an exploration and hunting theme, then you buy the combat upgrades as Lara gets more comfortable (way too comfortable) with her arsenal of melee weapons and guns, then you unlock the gratuitous finishing moves and flashy weapon upgrades. By the end of the game, your cute camisole may be ripped, but you are squarely in action video game territory, as you graduate to napalm arrows, melee combos, and a silenced assault rifle. To deal with your expanding prowess, the game narrows in scope: the exploratory sections become few and far between, the role of nature recedes and the dingy corridors of a thousand military shooters full of faceless bad guys reappear. You are occasionally asked to feel sorry for the men you brutally murder, but it's not really effective after reading a dozen audio logs from their low-rent cult leader.

Why am I even discussing how shocking the violence is in this game, especially considering it's much more tasteful than Bioshock Infinite? Because it pulls the same trick as Bioshock, of setting you up in the opening hour with a very different and much more interesting game, before turning up the Rambo meter. Lara is scared, she complains, she has a fear of heights, she freaks out after killing her first enemy, she stalks deer with her Important Objects Vision (straight from Batman: Arkham Asylum) in the forest. She is instantly relatable, she invests the player in the story, and she's beautiful without being overly sexualized to boot. So when the game drops that conceit and starts mowing through waves of enemies and awarding extra points for brutal kills, it falls into the same trap as Uncharted. Because Lara has been so strongly set up as a character who doesn't have decades of experience with headshots, it strikes a wrong note when she sets about the task so quietly and efficiently. At least Bioshock takes pains to mention that you, the player, are a scary dude, and this is not your first combat engagement or even your first war crime. Tomb Raider shoves Lara into these action-hero situations, but forgets to really develop her into someone who can handle it. She gives the impression of simply being too tired and too driven by necessity to care.

The other element that deserves to be touched on here is the ridiculous amount of bodies strewn everywhere. The first time I saw the interior of an enemy-occupied cave, with at least a dozen human skeletons, I thought it was a little excessive. The first time I saw a pile of decomposing human corpses with some tastefully arranged red candles on a skull (the universal symbol for "crazy cultist it is ethically OK to choke with your bow"), I started asking myself how many shipwrecked survivors really landed on this island, and why every single room would be full of bodies in the way most games are full of crates. This really bugged me and broke the immersion, because it is so gratuitous, unnecessary and nonsensical. There is absolutely no reason for the cultists to be this comfortable around death, and they would definitely all have contracted some horrible disease and died because they left a dozen or more dismembered rotting corpses in each tiny cave. Yes, I get that they are bad guys, but they're actually pretty sensible for evil cultists. They have a totally reasonable master plan, they play chess on duty, they're wearing regular clothes - basically, their comical lack of hygiene (to the point where the elevator will let you off next to a skeleton of a soldier killed in World War II, still propped up against the wall with his diary) doesn't mesh with the overall realistic tone of the game. Indiana Jones fights actual Nazis and they don't have this much of a body count on their hands.

While this post has a rather negative tone, it's because the game makes such a great first impression that I feel the need to nitpick about it so much. Its mechanics remain fun all the way up to the end, allowing you that moment of cathartic power fantasy as you unlock the ridiculous final upgrades. The story is prone to extremely convenient collapsing objects, and for a genius archaeologist Lara Croft is as dumb as a bag of hammers when it comes to figuring out the cultists' plan, but overall Tomb Raider makes me overlook its many flaws to earn a spot on my favorites list. It doesn't have the sheer awe of worldbuilding that Bioshock Infinite does, but it feels competent, self-assured and complete in a way that Bioshock doesn't. Every plot thread and theme gets an answer, every annoying player action is upgraded to a cool and effortless one, and the ending is satisfying without resorting to a surprise plot twist. It displays what a lot of games are missing: a soul.

Far Cry 3

What can I say about Far Cry 3? I can come up with a dozen reasons why it is shallow, lacking the emergent panic that Far Cry 2 was so good at generating or the narrative punch of Spec Ops or the thematic cohesion of Dark Souls. Yet I liked it enough to play all the way through to the end and complete every optional side quest, every collection-based achievement, every time trial leaderboard challenge. The core feedback loop that drives the player to feel good about mastering this beautiful, refreshing virtual environment is refined to within an inch of its life, always giving the player the benefit of the doubt and enabling them to play however they want, even if it's a sub-optimal decision.

Not many people liked Far Cry 2, which was a highbrow attempt to put you in the shoes of a mercenary in war-torn Africa. Everything about the game is deliberately unpleasant: the infinitely respawning enemies with armed jeeps, the randomized malaria attacks and constant gun jamming, the need to frantically look down at a paper map while driving, the interchangeable corrupt factions. The side quests took the form of requests from your buddies to commit war crimes, each more vile than the last, until by the end of the game you have devastated the entire country and even the arms dealer is more noble than you are. The most effective way to smoke an enemy out from behind cover was to set the entire jungle on fire, and the best you could expect from the local shop most of the time was an AK-47 in working condition, which was significantly better than what your foes were using. If you want to make a best-selling video game, regardless of how incisive your social commentary is, you need players to be enjoying themselves long enough to experience it. So Far Cry 3 erases or minimizes all those distinctive quirks, in favor of a more traditional open world power fantasy. Your guns are completely reliable, ammo and health are liberally dispensed to the point where you can whip up a half-dozen med kits and an invincibility potion in the pause menu, and there are not only civilians but an entire local resistance (helpfully color-coded) who will be pathetically grateful for any of the favors you grant, despite being able to mount competent sorties from their secret base even without your help. All the random odd jobs littered around these tropical island will shower you with money and skill points, and the only serious resource constraint is tied to how assiduous you are about hunting animals and skinning them for better equipment. Do you want to sneak around with a silenced sniper rifle? Do you want to barge in with a dozen grenades and a machine gun? Do you want to run around with a knife and a longbow? How about encouraging tigers and bears to attack your enemies? All these are joyful, easy, and actively rewarded by the game. Come on in, the water's fine, it says.

Simultaneously, Far Cry 3 has a narrative which half-heartedly calls all this into question. As an entitled rich white dude with no combat training, your mission is to parachute onto this remote tropical island and colonize it like the British Empire, in the name of saving your fellow spoiled buddies. Many interesting themes are alluded to here - there are frequent quotes from Lewis Carroll, allusions to Apocalypse Now, and all boss fights are replaced with mystical visions that are some combination of ancient forces, bad drug trips, and your player character being an unreliable narrator - but these themes all disappear after a couple lines have been said about them. Virtually every other named character is either a romantic interest or a double of your character, but the "good ending" simply leaves all those questions and themes hanging, letting you insist that you are not in fact a crazed killer who spends most of his free time hunting sharks with assault weapons, then go right back to doing so.

It is the very friendliness of the game that undermines its narrative pretensions, in fact. The villain Vaas, in a superb performance, points out that you have become just like him in your wanton quest for power at any cost - but almost every quest you undertake has a clear villain, a half-dozen remorseless killers in front of him, and a pure virtuous innocent whose bacon you are saving. Your girlfriend, another great character whose actress nails the line between horror and concern, worries that you are becoming a totally different person, but you rudely shrug her off, probably because whenever she calls you she is undercut by the presence of an impending mission whose urgency is undeniable. If she picked up the phone to nag you about how you spent the last two hours stealing ancient relics from the natives you were supposed to be saving so that you could earn those last couple skill points, it would strike a lot truer. There are 3 or 4 poker games in the plot, and a fully implemented set of poker games you can go to, but you never have to play the game itself because a scripted event will occur before you could possibly lose. The last third of the game showers you in new areas, weapons, and abilities, but you have already become an impossibly powerful death-dealing machine, so all you can think about is how much more boring this corporate villain and his mercenary band is than the flamboyant, scrappy pirates you were up against earlier. The center of gravity in the story is Citra, apparently the only eligible female on the island, who (of course) falls for the player immediately, providing everything from super powers to tribal tattoos to sex to an excuse to kill more dudes. You get the impression she does this act with every foreigner who parachutes onto the island, but only you the player are able to set events in motion. There's no reason to mistrust the patently unreliable narrator when it's clear that everyone involved wants Jason to do one of two things: (a) embrace the jungle and become an unstoppable killing machine, or (b) kill a hundred people to save five innocents and kick back with a Mai Tai. Nobody pushes back against you, so you have no reason to doubt yourself.

Still, the escapist fun of this game has a strong pull. Hunting animals, hang gliding and sky diving and exploring the wilderness, climbing tall towers and planning your assault on enemy outposts: all these things set the bar very high for an open-world game, be it Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto or Elder Scrolls. The game is loads of fun, but it doesn't really mean anything anymore.

The Ender Quartet

The Verdict: There is only one ur-review of Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet, and it goes like this: "Ender's Game is an incredible and thought-provoking sci-fi novel. Speaker for the Dead, the sequel, is confusing and totally different, but still a good book. Xenocide is long, boring and has a terrible deus ex machina cliffhanger ending. Children of the Mind is just dreadful, except for the last 100 pages where the plot threads from the previous books are finally wrapped up." Reviewers who read Card's copious introductions/afterwords will add, "Originally, Xenocide was the final volume of a trilogy, but the book ran too long, so Card split Children of the Mind off. This is a big reason why both the books are unsatisfying." There may also be a caveat that Speaker for the Dead was actually not as good as everyone says it is.

In a broad sense, this narrative is true, but I'd like to offer an alternative explanation.

Ender's Game is now an indispensable part of the school English curriculum (I remember sitting in the gifted program in elementary school listening to 3 different book reports on it), and for good reason. Card writes very simply and his omniscient viewpoint is very aggressive, so that Ender's thoughts and feelings are very intelligible to a young reader. The key plot threads all resonate with gifted kids: Ender is always younger, smarter and more vulnerable than his peers, and he is always thinking of new ways to trump the established wisdom, and all the adults consider him Very Important but they don't tell him what's really going on until it's too late. (The reader, meanwhile, is also keeping tabs on Ender from the outside via minor characters.) It's also cracking good sci-fi, with a fun futuristic game/sport and a great use of space technology without faster-than-light travel and an incredible twist ending that's foreshadowed just enough. The last chapter is clearly there to set up for book 2, but it provides a nice sense of closure to the story by letting our heroes take a breather.

Speaker for the Dead is the rare sequel that is almost completely unlike the original. It is 3000 years in the future, Ender is a 40-year-old man looking to settle down and get married, the starships-and-intrigue action is replaced by ethical dilemmas and interesting alien biology, and the book is littered with thoroughly unpleasant characters to act as a foil for Ender, who is pretty much ready for sainthood from page 1. That being said, it's still a very good book, and frankly science fiction needs more books with intense character-driven drama instead of yet another version of Top Gun or Master and Commander in space. There is still a twist ending, but there's also like 50 pages of denouement afterward to set up for book 3.

Xenocide and Children of the Mind are basically one very long sequel to Speaker, painfully separated in a way that does violence to a story that already spent way too much time mired in philosophical discussions, detailed descriptions of various Eastern cultures, and characters repeating the same things they said 500 pages ago. The core problem is Card's decision to split up the books chronologically, which means that what is by now an incredibly intricate plot with dozens of characters needs to be rehashed every so often even though Card has run out of interesting things to say about it.

The split should really leave Children of the Mind the entire main plot line, which involves a government effort to destroy the planet Lusitania, which contains a deadly super-virus as well as all the main characters from Speaker plus two different alien species, and to kill Ender's AI sidekick who is jamming their transmissions. This contains Card's pet story idea that the soul is a subatomic particle, and love is a real physical force that creates instantaneous bonds between and within people. This turns out to lead to a ridiculous deus ex machina involving faster-than-light travel and the physical manifestation of Ender's good and evil sides, but still there is eventually closure for all the long-running plot threads.

This frees up Xenocide to focus on the philosophical parts of books 3 and 4, which take place on totally different planets (Planet China, Planet Japan, Planet Samoa) with totally different characters who are frankly much more interesting than listening to Ender's family rehash their grievances and their stupid decisions again. Without several hundred pages of setup, the sudden intrusion of the impossible into the frustrating and repressed life of our heroine, Si Wang-mu, becomes lively and exotic again. With some forced mystery added, the awkward side of these novels could be an intriguing surprise, instead of being rehashed in every conversation in a vain attempt to make the books on the same reading level as Ender's Game, which is not even remotely true.

So basically, I'm proposing that Xenocide could have been a really cool book, if it were totally rewritten. That's the rundown: Flashes of brilliance and some cool ideas, overshadowed by a huge cast of generally irrelevant characters, needless lengthening of the plot, and above all the bloated expansion of the final volume of a trilogy into a convoluted mess.