#oneaday Day 86: Emio – Roll Credits

I just finished Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, the new Nintendo Switch release that, as the name suggests, acts as an official sequel to the two classic Famicom Detective Club games that were first released on Famicom Disk System, and subsequently remade for Switch a couple of years back. You can read my thoughts on both of them here and here.

I’ll do a “proper” writeup on the game at some point in the next few days over on MoeGamer, but suffice to say for now that it was excellent, and acts as a wonderful successor to the already very good two predecessors.

For the unfamiliar, the Famicom Detective Club series unfolds as Japanese-style adventure games. That means you spend the majority of your time selecting actions from a menu, reading a lot of dialogue and searching for the next “trigger” to move the story along. Japanese adventures are more about the plot than solving puzzles; to put it another way, they are the modern equivalent of the narrative-centric “interactive fiction” versus the mechanics-centric “text adventures”.

The first two Famicom Detective Club titles occasionally lapsed into “click on every option multiple times until something happens”, which was mildly annoying, but this new third one makes the sensible decision of highlighting important words and phrases in the dialogue which generally gives you a solid idea of what you need to do next. You can actually turn this feature off if you prefer, but honestly just leaving it on is the best way to keep the story flowing.

The story this time around concerns a dead body that has been found. The corpse is a student named Eisuke, and he appears to have been strangled. Unusually, his corpse was found with a paper bag over his head, and a creepy smiley face scrawled crudely on the bag. What then follows is your attempts (as both the self-insert protagonist from the first two games and his long-suffering coworker Ayumi) to solve the case by interviewing suspects, examining important locations and gradually piecing everything together.

In the tradition of Japanese adventure games, you’re not really “doing” much beyond simply advancing the plot, but that’s fine. There’s no “moon logic” to worry about here; it’s just about enjoying the story unfold, and occasionally demonstrating that you’ve understood what you’ve witnessed through short “Review” sequences that quiz you on the most recent happenings. There aren’t really any consequences for getting these wrong other than Ayumi giving you the stink-eye, but that will be punishment enough for many players.

I’ll refrain from saying any more about the plot for the moment for the sake of spoilers, but I will say it’s refreshing and welcome to see Nintendo going unabashedly adult with this one. It’s PEGI 18 rated with good reason; it does not pull punches, and I mean that in several respects. The game is all the better for not holding back; it drives home the fact that the case you’re investigating is very serious for a number of different reasons, and the complex motivations of the many characters you’ll encounter over the course of the plot will keep you intrigued right up until the end.

I was also impressed by how comprehensively it wrapped things up by the conclusion. It pulls a little bit of a fast one on you in this regard, but I’ll leave exactly how for you to discover.

Anyway, yes; Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is proof that the Switch very much still has plenty to offer in what most people are assuming is its twilight year. And it’s yet another reminder, if one were needed, that modern gaming isn’t actually all that bad, really — so long as you steer clear of the shit bits.

More on MoeGamer at some point this week.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

2455: Not-So-Super Max

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I finally got around to finishing the last episode of Life is Strange yesterday. My final feelings about the whole thing were… overall positive, but a little mixed in a number of areas. Personally speaking, I didn’t feel it was the utter masterpiece most critics made it out to be; in fact, there were a number of aspects in the final episode that I found fundamentally unsatisfying and downright awkward. More on those in a moment; let’s talk more generally.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Continue reading “2455: Not-So-Super Max” →

2454: Spooks and Spectres

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I finally got around to starting the Blackwell miniseries of adventure games this evening. These are some games that I’ve had in my GOG.com library for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to playing before.

So far as I’m concerned, the Blackwell games have a good pedigree, as they come from Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, who produced the subject of the very first Squadron of Shame SquadCast, The Shivah. While The Shivah was a little lacking in production values (as, too, is Blackwell — at least, its first episode is, anyway; I can’t yet speak for the subsequent ones) it told an interesting story and was a good adventure game to boot.

The Blackwell series centres around protagonist Rosangela Blackwell, last of her family line. Both her aunt and her grandmother succumbed to a mysterious mental illness, and Rosa discovers that she may be at risk too. What the psychiatrists didn’t know, however, is that the Blackwell family has a legacy: a ghost named Joey, who has been stuck in between this life and the next for the last forty years, and who has found himself “attached” to each generation of Blackwell women to fulfil some sort of greater purpose. Rosa is the latest to discover the existence of Joey, and is determined to get to the bottom of who he is and why he has been haunting her family.

The Blackwell Legacy, the first installment in the series, is largely concerned with establishing the characters and the setting. Joey isn’t present until a good halfway through the storyline; prior to that, we simply see life through Rosa’s eyes as she learns what little there is to know of her family’s mysterious apparent mental illness. Once Joey shows up, however, the story becomes much more supernatural in nature: he and Rosa team up to help restless spirits move on to the next world.

The Blackwell Legacy opens with Rosa investigating the suicide of an NYU student. It gradually comes to light that she and two of her friends had been meddling in the occult — did these people not pay any attention to horror movies? — and consequently, two out of the group of three had ended up dead. The girl Rosa was originally sent to investigate passed on with no regrets, it seems, but one of her friends finds herself stuck between realities, unable to accept that she is dead, while the third attempted suicide and failed, ending up in the same psychiatric hospital where Rosa’s aunt spent her twilight years.

The story strikes a good balance between “real world” investigation and the supernatural; in order to help the restless spirit move on, Rosa has to research the people involved and what they were up to. The game features a cool “clues” system where Rosa makes notes of important people, places and things in her notebook, and these can then all be brought up as topics of conversation when questioning witnesses. There’s also an Ace Attorney Investigations-style system whereby Rosa can “connect” pairs of these clues to produce a third clue based on her conclusion, and indeed most of the puzzles in the game revolve around doing this, then asking someone about it.

The Blackwell Legacy was a short but enjoyable adventure that I enjoyed a lot — it certainly made me curious to see where the story goes in its subsequent installments. Its low-res pixel art with jerky scrolling brings to mind the old LucasArts games, it had some good, atmospheric music throughout and the voice acting was decent — albeit done with poor equipment and software, a criticism which could also be levelled at The Shivah. Joey is particularly prone to shouting into the mic and performing with particularly plosive plosives, for example, while other voiceovers have a great deal of background noise, presumably as a result of boosting quieter voices up in volume a bit too much.

The game was also a bit prone to crashing to desktop — I’m not sure what it is about adventure games that make them some of the most crashy games on the planet, but I swear, of all the games that have crashed on my PC in the last few years, most of them have been adventure games — but fortunately there’s an autosave system that prevents losing too much progress.

Overall, I enjoyed The Blackwell Legacy a lot and I’m looking forward to playing its sequels. If you’re a fan of classic late ’90s-era point-and-clickers, you could do far worse than check it out.

2435: Memories: Read

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I finished Read Only Memories earlier. I liked it a lot! I posted a review on Steam, but I thought I’d post it here too because I’m feeling lazy.

Read Only Memories is an adventure game in the ’90s mould, seeming to draw specific inspiration from titles like Snatcher and Rise of the Dragon, and set in the same world as the (later, and wonderful) VA-11 HALL-A.

On the whole, it’s a great experience. The pixel art aesthetic really works for the game and has clearly been designed by people who know what good pixel art looks like. Everything about the interface, including the font, is well-designed to look like a retro adventure game, and the FM-synthesis soundtrack complements it nicely.

Puzzles are relatively thin on the ground but in a couple of cases are more interesting than “use the thing on the thing”, which is worthy of note, though the final puzzle in the game seems to play by some inconsistent rules that can lead to failure seemingly by no fault of your own.

The story is well-written and filled with interesting characters, plus deserves note for having a number of possible solutions to various situations, though not all will lead to the “best” ending. The game encourages you to consider the consequences of your actions and the things that you choose to say, even though those consequences may not become apparent until much later. I very much liked that your behaviour over the course of the whole game affected some later events rather than choices having an immediate impact on what was going on.

The overall plot is one of tolerance and understanding, and strikes a good balance between casting the player (whom you can name and gender as you desire, since you never see them) as an “everyman” sort of character prone to putting their foot in their mouth when confronted by groups they don’t quite understand, and presenting a solid message about acceptance, learning to trust one another and personal growth.

The only real criticism I’d level at the game is that its handling of gay and transgender characters feels a little ham-fisted, with their presence and the “reveals” of their identity seemingly being calculated to go “SURPRISE!” rather than simply blending them into the setting. Big burly, manly bartender dude? SURPRISE! Next time you meet him, he has another big hairy dude all over him calling him “hon” at every opportunity (though that said, I couldn’t help but like Gus). Meet an eccentric, long-haired, bearded TV producer? SURPRISE! They’re a lady! That and the presence of a non gender-specific character demonstrates just how awkward using singular “they” as a pronoun is in dialogue.

Ultimately it doesn’t hurt the overall plot at all, but these instances stick out like sore thumbs when they happen as they just don’t quite feel like they’re in keeping with the tone: the implication elsewhere in the plot is that society has moved beyond discrimination by gender and sexuality, and instead onto discrimination against those who are “augmented” in some way, either through cybernetics or genetic hybridisation. To specifically draw attention to gay and transgender characters in this way as the game does feels counter to this implication, which is otherwise well handled.

This game’s spiritual successor VA-11 HALL-A handles gay characters much more elegantly by them simply… just being there, no big deal, no big fuss about who they are, no sense that the game is holding you down and urging you to admire how progressive its views are.

I played this game before the big update that adds voice acting, and if you’re interested in this game, I’d encourage you to do the same. The few parts of the game that do already have voice acting (just the intro and epilogue at present) are immensely jarring with the rest of the game’s presentation, and the delightful beepityboopityboop noise that dialogue makes throughout the rest of the game is a much more powerful stimulus to the imagination than a voice actor whose interpretation of the character may not match the one you have in your head after reading the text.

Overall, Read Only Memories is a game I give a solid thumbs up. The issues I mentioned above are minor in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully the team will learn from them — and from the things VA-11 HALL-A did better, despite being produced by a different team — and produce even greater works in the future.

2357: Life is Strange

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I’ve played the first two episodes of Dontnod’s adventure game Life is Strange, and I’m enjoying it so far. It remains to be seen whether the whole thing is the life-changing masterpiece some people I know have made it out to be, but it’s certainly solid and interesting so far.

It didn’t start brilliantly, though this was partly my own fault for deciding to read through all of protagonist Max’s diary before actually doing anything. Max’s blathering on about how amazing it was to be in a “diverse” school and other such witterings made me recoil at the prospect of an obnoxiously self-righteous heroine, but thankfully the game nipped that in the bud pretty quickly, and Max actually comes across as a likeable individual — a little shy and withdrawn as well as more than a bit nerdy, so eminently relatable to me. Whew. Bullet dodged.

I’m less enamoured with her friend Chloe, who is built up in Max’s diary to be some sort of amazing super-friend, and comes across as a spoiled, unnecessarily rebellious jerk when we finally meet her. It’s been years since Max and Chloe have seen each other, and Chloe has been through some changes that are perhaps best exemplified by the fact her hair is now blue. Her rebelliousness is at least a little understandable, though; she’s dealt with the death of her father and her mother marrying someone else, who so far has been depicted as a bit of a twat — and an abusive, angry twat at that. Unfortunately, Chloe’s way of dealing with things just makes her, too, come across as a twat, and I find myself questioning why Max fawns over her at every opportunity, since they are so very different. Still, I guess we’ll find out more about Chloe as the series progresses, so I will reserve final judgement on her until we see where this all ends up.

Outside of the Chloe-Max interactions, which are clearly intended to be a centrepiece of the narrative, Life is Strange is solid and enjoyable, being effectively an interactive high school drama, with all the usual frictions and cliquiness that signifies. There are the bitchy cool girls, who Max takes great pleasure in successfully humiliating in the first episode. There’s the hot teacher that all the girls fawn over. There’s the weird janitor. There’s the overly religious, abstinence-preaching girl who stands up for what she believes in even as she gets relentlessly abused by those around her. And like in most good high school drama movies, Max is a relatively inoffensive, pleasant sort of individual who manages to get along with most people if she tries.

Where things get interesting is in Life is Strange’s main twist: Max’s discovery that she has time-shifting powers. In other words, she is able to rewind time and make use of this fact to her advantage: perhaps she can learn some information, then rewind back before a conversation and use that information when talking to someone. Perhaps she can see the consequences of an action, then rewind and reconsider. Perhaps she can use her powers to save people’s lives. The mechanic itself is simple and well executed, and it’s used creatively in a variety of places, both to allow you to reconsider your actions, and to resolve various situations.

Being an adventure game of the Telltale-esque mould, Life is Strange is riddled with decision points, some of which are more important than others. Particularly significant decisions tend to be binary in nature, and Max always has something to ponder after making one of these choices. Interestingly, the game’s script always manages to make it seem as if the other choice was the “right” one, so there’s no real sense that there’s a path down which the writers feel like you “should” continue; often, there are no real good choices in particularly difficult situations, so it’s a case of deciding how to handle it in the moment.

Life is Strange’s setting is presented really nicely. Deliberately eschewing photorealism in favour of a somewhat watercolour-esque aesthetic, there’s a lovely vignetting effect on the screen that blurs the edges, and scenery and set dressing is heavily stylised rather than realistic. The characters have a touch of “plastic doll” about them, but this is in keeping with the rest of the aesthetic; a kind of slightly otherworldly appearance, like things just aren’t quite right, but where it’s hard to put your finger on what is actually wrong.

The writing is good, too. Conversations are believable, riddled with modern slang and authentic modern cultural references. Like Deadly Premonition, the last game I can remember that did this, Life is Strange isn’t afraid to namecheck real things — celebrities, movies, books, authors, artists — and does so without feeling like they’ve been included just to show off how cultured the writers are. Instead, it all feels very natural, and adds to the authentic feeling of the setting as a result.

I’m intrigued to see where the overarching narrative goes. There’s clearly something very odd going on with Max, whose power appears to take a physical toll on her, and she also keeps seeing visions of her town being destroyed by an enormous tornado, which presumably will show up (or not?) in the final episode. But alongside this, there are numerous other well-crafted subplots that intertwine with one another nicely, so it will be interesting to see how all these fit together by the end. Aside from a few hitches in the script here and there where you’ll figure really obvious things out long before Max does — a common problem in adventure games — the whole thing seems like a very well-crafted narrative experience, and I’m intrigued to see where it ends up, though I kind of hope it doesn’t involve Chloe quite as much as I feel like it’s probably going to.

2190: Rubble Without a Cause

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I played through the second episode of the new King’s Quest game today. It’s a lot shorter than the first one, so I was able to get through it in a single sitting. Despite being fairly short, though, it’s an interesting contrast from the previous episode; rather than being a relatively large (for an adventure game) open world with a non-linear series of puzzles for you to tackle at your leisure, Rubble Without a Cause, as the second episode is known, takes place in a much more confined environment, and largely focuses around one big puzzle: how to free everyone from captivity at the hands of the goblins.

Yes, instead of throwing us back into Daventry, Rubble Without a Cause puts us underground in a goblin prison complex. Graham is dismayed to discover that most of the major characters from the town of Daventry appear to have also been abducted, along with the eccentric merchant’s “unicorn” Mr. Fancycakes. Thus begins a quest to find a way out of this predicament.

There’s a twist, though: unlike most adventure games, you don’t have all the time in the world with which to achieve your goals. Unfolding over the course of several days, the adventure sees the health of all of the prison’s occupants — with the exception of Graham — decline as the days pass. Thus you’re presented with some difficult, mutually exclusive choices throughout as you determine who it is best to give medicine and food to as they require it. And once you start getting closer to escaping, you need to determine which potential companion is going to provide you with the best chance of succeeding, and ensure that they are in good health for when you make your attempt.

The small scale of the episode initially felt a little disappointing, but on reflection after finishing it, I very much liked the concept of it being based around one central problem for you to solve, and felt this was a good use of the episodic format to provide a short-form but complete-feeling experience. You can solve it in a number of different ways, too — it is, I believe, even possible to complete the episode without anyone running out of health and being carried away by the goblins, but I most certainly did not succeed in that particular endeavour today.

In many ways, the King’s Quest episodes we’ve seen so far are a great example of “gaming short stories” — quite literally, since they are presented as stories narrated by the ageing King Graham (whom I’ll be very surprised to see survive the fifth episode) to his grandchildren. This presentation of the narrative as a participant narrator looking back on his past actions is an interesting twist on how old Sierra games such as the original King’s Quests used to work, with a strong contrast between the omniscient, non-participant narrator and the in-character dialogue between characters. King’s Quest, as a series, maintained this style of presentation until its seventh installment, and it’s good to see new developers The Odd Gentlemen returning very much to the “feel” of the classic Sierra adventures.

So was Rubble Without a Cause worth playing, given its short length? Well, if it was a standalone game by itself, I’d perhaps feel a little short-changed at its small scale and short length. In the context of the whole series, though, it makes a good, nicely contrasting follow-up to the excellent first episode, and has me once again hungering to know what happens next!

2019: Hero of Daventry: Some King’s Quest First Impressions

Following on from my post the other day, I downloaded the first episode of King’s Quest on PlayStation 4 today, and gave it a bit of a go earlier. Andie seemed to be enjoying it, so I paused for a bit while she went and had a nap, then we went and had dinner. Will probably play some more tomorrow.

First impressions are very good indeed, though. The game has a gorgeous art style, wonderful animation and a spectacular voice cast, including Christopher Lloyd, Josh Keaton and Maggie Elizabeth Jones.

Most notably, though, the game is very much aware of its heritage. I was concerned that a new developer taking on such a legendary series would lose some of the magic of the original — or worse, try and retrofit their interpretation over the top of the existing format, or “reboot” it — but my mind has been very much set at rest so far, with a story and characterisation that feels very true to King’s Quest’s lightly comedic (but, at times, surprisingly dark) fairy-tale nature.

Of particular note in the animation regard is how much care and attention has been lavished on protagonist Graham. Although he’s now a beautifully animated 3D model with a dramatically billowing cape as opposed to a tiny pixel dude with yellow skin, there’s a bunch of wonderful little touches in the new game as callbacks to the original King’s Quest games. Make Graham walk instead of run, for example, and his slightly cocky strut looks just like the crude walking animation of the original game’s sprite. And in one sequence, you jump into a river; the animation as Graham flails about in the water is pretty much exactly the same as his old sprite did any time you wandered into a body of water and forgot to type “swim”.

And, pleasingly, the new game incorporates the original series’ fondness for killing you off in a variety of horrible ways — though, given the game’s narrative framework of an elderly Graham narrating his past adventures to his granddaughter, any unfortunate demises are represented as Graham either making a mistake in his memories or cracking a joke.

The use of old Graham as narrator allows the game to do something that a lot of modern adventure games these days don’t do: use a narrator. This is one thing that made Sierra adventures unique and distinct from their biggest rivals LucasArts — in every one of their games, the narrator was as much of a character as the characters who had actual dialogue. In most cases, the narrator wasn’t a participant in the narrative, instead taking an omniscient viewpoint of what was going on, but there was a very clear sense of authorial voice that was often distinct between Sierra’s different series. The narrators of King’s Quest used flowery language and occasional cringeworthy puns — a habit Graham has picked up in the new game — while Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry used lowbrow humour to good effect. Gabriel Knight, meanwhile, took the bold step of having a narrator with a very strong Creole accent explain what was going on — stylistically appropriate, though initially jarring if you were used to the somewhat cleaner, more easily understandable tones of the American narrators of Sierra’s other games. (Once you became accustomed to her drawl, however, she delivered some delightfully sarcastic zingers at Gabriel’s expense throughout the game.)

Pleasingly, old Graham’s narration pays attention to what you are doing and has a variety of responses for when you try to do the same thing over and over again. There’s no Discworld-style “That doesn’t work!” here; instead, keep trying to do something that’s clearly wrong and old Graham will come up with more and more fanciful reasons about his futile attempts, until eventually his granddaughter stops him in most cases. There’s also a delightful running joke about That One Adventure Game Item You Use For Everything when you discover a hatchet which comes in useful for a while. After its final task, however, Graham leaves it behind, with old Graham putting special emphasis on the fact that he would “not need it ever again”. (Prior to this, of course, you were free to attempt to use it on anything and everything, with suitable comments from both Graham and Gwendolyn along the way.)

So far, then, I’m delighted by how King’s Quest has turned out. It’s smart, funny, beautiful and captures the essence of the old games while bringing them right up to date. I’m looking forward to see how the remainder of this first episode continues — and how the series as a whole develops over time.

2017: Quest for the Crown

It’s weird to see a new King’s Quest game on sale. I haven’t tried it myself yet — I’m probably going to — but the early buzz surrounding it is very positive indeed, even sans involvement from series creators Roberta and Ken Williams.

For those not quite as old and jaded a gamer as me, King’s Quest was one of the very first graphical adventure games. I hesitate to call it a “point and click” adventure, because although it supported mouse control, you actually had to type things in to a text parser in order to actually do anything. As the series progressed, it gradually and noticeably improved; by the fifth installment, it had made the full transition to a more conventional point-and-click interface as well as offering a “talkie” CD-ROM version; the seventh installment abandoned traditional pixel art in favour of some distinctly Disney-esque animation, and the eighth… well, most people don’t talk about that one.

For me, King’s Quest as a whole is an important series to me. It represents one of the earliest game series I played, and also some of the earliest games I actually played to completion. They also represent an early form of using the video games medium as a means of telling a story — albeit a very simple one in the case of the first couple of games; from the third game onwards it started to get quite ambitious — as well as a wonderfully vivid realisation of the world of fairy tales.

Back in the days when King’s Quest first appeared, it wasn’t at all unusual for games to take heavy inspiration from existing works of art. Numerous games made use of famous classical tunes for their “themes”, for example, and others drew liberally from popular mythology for inspiration. The original King’s Quest games were no exception, as they saw you running into everyone from Rumplestiltskin to the Big Bad Wolf — and, in many cases, dying horribly at the hands of fairy tale monsters.

Despite the fact that it drew heavily on popular mythology, though, King’s Quest had a feel and an atmosphere all of its own. Like the best fairy tales, it presented a world that appeared colourful, happy and vibrant on the surface, but which was mean, horrible and out to get you underneath. The King’s Quest games were notorious for having a wide variety of means for the protagonists to die throughout them, ranging from being eaten by a giant to tripping over your wizard master’s cat while being too far up the stairs, and subsequently breaking your neck when you hit the ground. So frequent (and frustrating) were the death scenes in King’s Quest and other adventures from the same stable Sierra that main rival LucasArts made a specific marketing point of the fact that it was impossible to die or get stuck in most of their games — with the Indiana Jones games being the only real exceptions, and even there it was pretty difficult to die.

But as frustrating and irritating and, at times, downright illogical as the old-school King’s Quest games could be, they represent one of my formative experiences. They’re something that helped me understand a medium that, as you’ll know, is very important to me. They’re something I shared with my family, since many of us used to play them together and try to solve them. And they’re something that I will always have fond memories of.

It’s for this reason that I’m really happy to see King’s Quest making a comeback — and, moreover, to see that it’s being received very well so far. I’m excited to give it a try for myself very soon, and I look forward to seeing how the subsequent episodes develop over the course of the series.

1370: What’s Up, Red?

As predicted, I completed Tales of Xillia (like, Platinum completed) earlier, but prior to jumping back into Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory I decided to give Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller a try.

I’ve had my eye on Cognition ever since it was a modest Kickstarter campaign from a group previously best-known for a(n admittedly very good) King’s Quest spinoff. It sounded interesting for a number of reasons: firstly, that it was a modern adventure game — the supposed “death” of the point-and-click genre was somewhat exaggerated — and secondly, that Jane Jensen (of King’s Quest VI and Gabriel Knight fame) was acting as “story consultant”. While this isn’t quite the same as having her actually write it, it would, I thought, at least provide a greater-than-average chance of the game having a decent, well-written story.

I played through the first of the game’s four episodes earlier, and was not disappointed. Given that most people I know who have played it seem to think that the first episode is the weakest, I’m very excited to see what follows.

Cognition follows the adventures of FBI agent Erica Reed, a feisty redhead haunted by her inability to save her brother from a serial killer three years prior to the events of the main plot. Erica’s a little unusual, however, in that she has a strange supernatural ability that enables her to relive and even manifest memories from the past simply by touching things. Initially, all she can do is touch an object or body and witness a short snippet of what happened, but as the game proceeds, she learns a couple of new abilities under the tutelage of the Wise Old Mystic Woman Who Runs the Antique Shop.

It would have been easy for Cognition to play up its supernatural aspect and even rely on it too much to carry its mystery story, but Erica’s abilities are used sparingly, subtly and effectively. It’s rarely a “magic bullet” that allows her to do things a good forensics team wouldn’t be able to do given enough time; it is, more often than not, used as a means of ushering the story along by providing clues.

It’s much more complex than just flashbacks, though; in one of the best puzzles in the game, you’re tasked with using your “regression” ability to reconstruct the memories of a key witness who can’t remember some important information you need. By collecting information and using it to prompt the witness to remember things, you’re able to manipulate the images of his memories to provide specific details — the colour of someone’s dress, the time a photo was taken, what was written on a note — that ultimately lead you to the answers you seek. It’s a clever system that works really well without resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo — it’s just something Erica can do and while it’s clear that part of the plot is going to revolve around her struggling with these visions, for the most part she accepts it as just another tool in her arsenal.

Jensen’s influence is apparent in the characters, all of whom are strongly defined. Erica herself initially appears to be somewhat “flat” personality-wise, but over time it becomes clear that she is, more often than not, being quite deadpan, and when she’s around people she likes and trusts, she opens up and shows her more good-humoured side.

One of the things I’m particularly enamoured with is that I’m getting a slight “Dr. Naomi” vibe from Cognition. It’s not quite the same, of course — Erica is an FBI field agent compared to Naomi’s forensic investigator — but there are certain similarities. Most notably, on a number of occasions you’re “quizzed” by characters on what you’ve learned from your investigations, with progression dependent on you giving the correct answers. The penalty for giving an incorrect answer isn’t as harsh as in Trauma Team — there are relatively few moments in the game where you can die or “fail” — but it’s nice to have a game check that you’re paying attention in a suitable, plausible context.

I’m intrigued to try the subsequent episodes now. I have a feeling that four won’t be enough!

#oneaday Day 886: King’s Space Police Quest for Glory Suit Larry

I’ve been playing through the Quest for Glory series recently for the Squadron of Shame’s upcoming podcast. I’d never played them before, and it turns out they’re rather good — particularly once you get on to number 4 and you get John Rhys-Davies on narration duty. I shall refrain from further discussion of that particular series for now, however, as that would get into spoiler territory.

I do want to talk about Sierra in general, however. Sierra, if you’re unaware/a young whippersnapper, was the developer and publisher of these games, and was notorious for being one of the “big two” names in adventure games in the ’80s and ’90s. The other was, of course, LucasArts.

Sierra and LucasArts took wildly differing approaches to what was ostensibly the same genre — the point and click adventure. While LucasArts embraced movie-style presentation and player-friendly interface features such as an intelligent cursor (i.e. one that automatically highlighted interactable objects for the player), Sierra games were punishing. LucasArts made a point in their game manuals to say that they wouldn’t kill off the player character unnecessarily, and indeed in most of their games it was impossible to die or even fuck things up beyond all recognition. The exception to this was the Indiana Jones series, in which Indie found himself in danger and could indeed die — but generally only if the player really messed up.

Sierra games, meanwhile, at least in the early days would kill players if they took a wrong step on a mountain path. Or if they said the wrong thing to another character. Or if they got caught by a wandering monster. Or… you get the idea. They were hard, and not necessarily fair about it either. But the constant sense of peril that you felt a Sierra protagonist was in (at least until later games such as King’s Quest VII and Gabriel Knight, anyway) provided a very distinctive flavour.

This isn’t the only way in which Sierra adventures were unique. They’re some of the earliest “auteur” games I can think of, where a selling point of each game was who it was written by. Each of Sierra’s stable of game designers had their own specialisms — Roberta Williams handled the fairytale King’s Quest series, Lori and Corey Cole handled the adventure/RPG hybrid Quest for Glory series, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy worked on Space Quest, Al Lowe was in charge of the smutty Leisure Suit Larry series, and Jane Jensen worked on a variety of titles including the seminal Gabriel Knight. Each had their own distinctive “voice” and “style” that was all over their respective work, despite the things all the games had in common.

Different people were drawn to different series for different reasons — King’s Quest provided a Disneyesque take on popular fantasy and fairytale tropes, for example, while Space Quest was a self-consciously silly sidelong glance at the world of sci-fi. Despite the early titles all being very clear parodies or homages to existing work, each series evolved over time to develop its own unique flavour — and, curiously, pretty much all of them managed to self-destruct with disastrously awful final instalments, the most notorious being King’s Quest VIII‘s inexplicable shift into becoming a Zeldaesque action RPG rather than the gentle, light-hearted and family-friendly adventure it had been before.

Despite the fact that each series managed to commit seppuku in its own distinctive way, that doesn’t make the earlier titles in the series any less worth checking out. Sure, many of the early entries have graphics that weren’t exactly bleeding-edge even at the time of their original release, but their gameplay is solid, and their stories are the sort of thing I’d describe as being part of a gaming “canon” if such a thing existed. (It doesn’t, making that whole statement pretty much redundant. But they’re certainly fondly remembered by pretty much everyone who played them — even with the frequent and frustrating deaths taken into account.)

They’re a reminder of a simple time when there weren’t quite so many new games being released each month, and “a new game from Roberta Williams” was an exciting prospect. That excitement is still present in gaming to a certain extent today — many people are keen to see what auteurs like Jane Jensen (who’s still steadfastly producing adventure games), Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo “Metal Gear Solid” Kojima, Swery65 (Deadly Premonition) and Suda51 (No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw, Shadows of the Damned) are up to today. The difference is that these “auteur games” are regarded as niche interests or cult hits today rather than big releases.

If you’ve never tried any of Sierra’s games, head over to GOG.com and check ’em out now.