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.

#oneaday Day 651: Circle of Blood

Having beaten Xenoblade, I was in two minds as to what to play next. Should I go and grab something brand new, or should I delve into the Pile of Shame?

I opted for the latter. Broken Sword, to be specific, and the new(er) Director’s Cut version, which features (marginally) updated graphics and some extra Nico-centric scenarios. The new stuff so far is cool — some immensely satisfying codebreaking puzzles are a particular highlight — but the fact that the sound quality is so markedly different to that from the original game is a little jarring.

I have fond memories of Broken Sword. It came out when I was doing work experience down on PC Zone. That particular issue saw me writing a bunch of captions for some material about Quake, and publishing an entire review on Virtua Fighter PC in which I used the then-fashionable terminology on Zone of “turbo nutter ninja bastard” to mean “very powerful”. But that’s beside the point.

Broken Sword comes from a very different era to the console-centric experiences we have today. This is obvious in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s a point and click adventure, and while we do still get some of those nowadays, they’re a lot rarer than they used to be — and I can’t remember the last time a point and click adventure would have been regarded as a triple-A title. Secondly, none of the characters feel the need to run everywhere. They saunter around at a leisurely pace, mercifully just short of being infuriatingly slow. This relative slowness, however, gives the game a much more “sedate” feeling pace while you’re playing — it’s almost relaxing to play, despite the fact that you’re chasing down a murderer.

Perhaps it’s the sensation of using your brain in ways it hasn’t been used for a while. The concept of “puzzles” in a lot of adventure-style games these days tends to (still) involve pushing blocks around or finding ways to get to switches. Broken Sword, meanwhile, involves good old fashioned adventure game puzzles. In order to open a door early in the game, you need to pull on a cross on the wall, wedge it open with a shell casing you found earlier, insert a stone tube into a socket that opens up, pull out the shell casing (which hopefully you had remembered to flatten under the door earlier, otherwise you’ll have to repeat the above process) and use it to lever open the stuck door that had been partly activated by your insertion of the stone tube. It sounds a little silly, sure, but it makes sense while you’re playing — and by golly it’s satisfying when you work it out for yourself without the aid of GameFAQs. And it’s not as stupid as the rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey, a game I’m finding myself hankering to replay very soon.

Broken Sword is quite impressive in that it has been around for a very long time in computer game terms and still “works” as a game today. Sure, the pace may seem relatively snail-like to console gamers (though the original did come out on PS1 and Game Boy Advance, among others) but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the puzzle and dialogue-heavy gameplay. In fact, we could stand for a few more games like that these days, and a few less that involve you staring down the barrel of a gun.