It's been a while since I've done a game review, so I thought I'd write one up on a game I just finished called Stasis. For those of you who've never heard of this one, Stasis is a point-and-click adventure game that follows more in the vein of Event Horizon, The Thing, and Alien than something like Myst. It promises a terrifying environment with engaging puzzles and a story that makes you pee yourself, but does it deliver?
Well, yes and no. Don't get too excited about the comparisons, because while it bears similarities to those movies, it tends to fall flat in certain areas. As per usual with these reviews I'll give you a basic plot synopsis and an overview of my general opinion so that if you're just looking for a recommendation (or something to avoid) without getting into Spoilertown then you can know where I stand and not have the story ruined. And it's a good thing I do it that way because after that we're gonna get into some heavy, heavy, game-ending-ruining level spoilers because I've got some shit I need to get off my chest about this particular...thing. But I'll warn you before those come up, so no worries.
Stasis is the story of a man, John Maracheck, and his quest to rescue his wife and child (Ellen and Rebecca, respectively) from what basically amounts to hell on a spaceship. He wakes up from a stasis chamber, badly injured, and after getting some medical attention he's contacted by a woman named Te-ah who promises to help him find them and get off this ship. Over the course of the game's story, delivered through PDA logs and computer terminals and emails, he discovers that science has gone mad in space (again), and this entire ship is host to dangerous creatures that want nothing more than to nibble on your soft, meaty bits. They've killed almost all of the crew, and it's up to John to solve puzzles, collect items, and survive long enough to see his family back to saner areas of the universe.
The first thing I'll say about Stasis is that the atmosphere is quite good. They were going for Alien meets Event Horizon, and they hit that area perfectly. The technology has an almost retro-futuristic feel to it, not quite at the level of Alien: Isolation, but getting there, and impressive for an indie title like this one with a very small team. Seriously, the credits were about 15 lines long. But with that small team they made this ship feel like a real place with real danger, even if they did go a bit too heavy on the shock/disgust factor of SPATTER EVERYTHING IN GORE. But the Groomlake (the ship) feels at once wide open and oppressively claustrophobic, alive and dead, highly advanced yet falling apart, and I have to give props to The Brotherhood for nailing the atmosphere to the wall with industrial medical staples.
The puzzles are also very well thought out. I'm basically an idiot, but for some reason I love point-and-click puzzle solvers, even if I do need some help with the occasional fiendishly difficult puzzle. But, after getting the help, I feel like a dolt because more often than not it just involves creative use of the environment and what's in my inventory, like most P&C games. However, I will say that in some instances you could wander about for hours (if you're just determined to not look it up) pixel hunting the environment for that one single item you're missing to solve everything. That kind of thing makes certain areas of this game more than a little frustrating, but apart from three or four instances I found all the items very handily. The puzzles are fun, challenging, and creative, and there are very, very few instances where I thought, "I don't know how the fuck they expected me to figure that out."
The voice acting is tight the vast majority of the time, but other times leaves a little to be desired. I don't want to talk too much shit about an indie studio, because they might not have been able to hire professionals, or even semi-pro VA's, and for the most part the lines are delivered well with the proper amount of emotion behind them. The VA's try, even if they don't nail their performances 100% of the time. Although, for some reason, you can't pause while the voice reel scenes are going. Can't work that out, but set aside some time to play this one if you pick it up.
The graphics are also serviceable. Now the backgrounds are downright gorgeous at certain points, and a lot of detail went into them. I can't fault the background designs one bit. They were always interesting to look at and hunt through. The character models, on the other hand, felt a little wooden, and looked more like they were sliding across the screen rather than interacting with the scenery at times. Granted, this is an isometric P&C game, so this isn't really all that important, just something I noticed more often than I should've in the game. But, indie title, so some things can be forgiven.
The soundtrack is also very well put together, and adds the proper level of creepy to the environment. The sound effects are very well made too. They're good sound quality, and honestly if you get it I'd recommend playing it at night, in the dark, with isolation headphones on to get the full effect. I don't know if I'd pay an extra five bucks to get the soundtrack downloadable on its own, but it does what it's supposed to and never detracts from the overall experience like pixel hunting or the somewhat wooden character models occasionally do.
Now, for the bad shit. I feel like I've given a balanced accounting of this game's various features, laying out good and bad, but this is so bad it needed its own section before you throw down your money.
As I've said several times, this is a point-and-click adventure game in a horror environment, and gameplay is centered around puzzle solving. They go to a lot of effort to make you feel like you're directly in danger a lot of the time, as if a monster is going to leap out at any moment and tear your head off Dead Space style. However, in order to give the player ample time to actually solve the puzzles, that literally never happens. Apart from certain points wherein the dangerous thing is on a track and completely avoidable, you are almost never in direct danger. This excludes a couple of timed puzzles wherein you have to take care of a certain thing in a certain time or die, no avoiding it, but overall you have all the time you need to search for items, combine them, try them on different things, backtrack, whatever you need.
Once you realize this the game quickly goes from, "For a P&C game this is really creepy and scary," to, "Okay how much longer will I have to scrape my mouse over the screen to find that one thing I'm missing?" The sense of danger is completely gone, and even in those instances where something does kill you it's just a matter of trial and error till you learn how to avoid it. So really this is less like Silent Hill and more like Dark Souls, in the sense that you don't feel directly threatened, but if you are you have infinite lives so you've got plenty of time to learn how to deal with it. So while the atmosphere in the game is plenty creepy, it's not played to the effect it could've been if John's life were actually in direct danger more than four or five times in the entire game.
I mean, this is a horror game, for god's sake. Atmosphere that never materializes into anything becomes background noise after like an hour of dithering around the medical facility.
So far as a verdict goes, if you dig horror games and point and click adventure puzzle solvers, this is worth a buy on sale. At the time of this writing it costs $20.00 USD, $25 for the Deluxe Edition on GOG dot com. I just have the basic, and I'm pretty sure I got it on sale myself. Put simply it's just not worth $20 in my estimation. For a game with only one ending, one storyline, extremely limited replayability, about 9 hours of story in that one line, and a depressing lack of danger for a horror game, it's worth playing, but drop that price down to around $15 and we'll start talking. $10 would be a lot more fair, in my mind, but for an indie title it's well put together and doesn't try to be more than what it is gameplay-wise. They knew what they were doing and did it competently. My recommendation is drop it in your wishlist and pick it up when GOG puts it up on sale. If you're into a good puzzle solver with some damn fine atmosphere (problems with that taken into account) this game won't disappoint and is actually fun to play.
Now we're gonna get into serious spoiler territory, so back out now if you actually want to play this thing and don't want the ending ruined because I'm about to bend that shit over a table and fuck it to death. I should mention again that, as a game, Stasis is perfectly playable, didn't crash, and was entertaining for however long it took me to get through the story. I have very few issues with this game as a game, apart from personal nitpicks mentioned above.
As a story, however, I have some very large fucking problems, and since this is getting into personal taste and my opinions on the horror genre in general, I've left it for this section of the review instead of bringing it up beforehand.
Okay so, as stated, this is about Evil Science Being Evil In Space. Fair enough. That's been done a lot, but this game takes a new little twist on it that I don't see a lot in sci-fi horror. Everything on this ship is 100% the fault of humans spitting in God's eye. There's no aliens, they don't go to hell like in Event Horizon, there's no cosmic evil, just human scientists being completely evil little shits and taking experiments far beyond the bounds of ethics and sanity.
This isn't a problem in and of itself. It was actually pretty cool. I thought there was going to be some alien organism, but no. The plot of this game can basically be summed up as:
So we've got mad scientists, a crippled spaceship far beyond the bounds of traveled space, genetically engineered monsters eating people, and one guy wanting to find his family and get the fuck out as fast as possible. Ostensibly this is a really good setup for a sci-fi horror story. How, you may ask, could they fuck this up?
They fundamentally misunderstand how this type of horror story is supposed to go, especially within a video game like this. This game has a bad end, and only a bad end.
Now I should mention that I have no problem with horror stories ending badly. Most of H.P. Lovecraft's stories ended badly, and I love movies like Requiem For A Dream. Not every horror story has to have a happy ending, and indeed some stories are better served by ending badly. The issue with a story like Stasis, compared to something like, say, In The Mouth Of Madness by John Carpenter, is that the bad end in Mouth Of Madness was set up from the very beginning. It was obvious as the movie progressed that John Trent wasn't going to make it out because it starts off with him in a mental institution covered in charcoal-drawn crosses.
We know where this is going from the jump.
However, with a story like Stasis, we're expecting some kind of reward for all our hard work, and maybe this has something to do with Stasis being a video game rather than a movie. In a movie, we're drawn along with the story, we don't actively do anything to advance it. Asses in seats, we watch along as the story washes over us and no work is required on our part.
In a game, on the other hand, we do put in that work. What takes 2 hours max to tell in a movie takes upwards of 5 to sometimes more than 60 in a game, and on top of the time investment we also have effort invested into it. With a game like Stasis we've gathered items, combined them, put them places, solved increasingly difficult puzzles, and followed along with John's emotional turmoil as he's discovered exactly how fucked up this ship is and imagined what could be happening to his wife and daughter. Because of this, we want them to make it out.
Spoilers, they don't.
Nobody does.
This is a big, catastrophically fucking huge problem with this game's story. At least in my incredibly arrogant opinion. The big kick in the balls, the point I started to actively dislike this game's story, was late-late in the game where we have to sit there and watch one of the abominations Dr. Malan (the mad scientist in charge of this deathtrap) has created rip John's daughter to squishy wet bits in front of our faces without being able to do anything about it.
This feels like you're betraying me. Like you're saying, "Oh, you thought there would actually be some kind of glimmer of hope in this universe? How stupid of you! Our story is much better when you see everything you thought you were working for killed in front of you! You don't get to have hope, you silly pleb! Hope is for losers! Grimdark and eternal sadness is what makes stories grown up!"
Yeah, piss on my back and tell me it's raining.
So okay, the daughter is dead in a horrendously grotesque fashion and he had to watch it happen, but Ellen is still alive, right? We still have a chance for a moderately happy ending in all this death and misery! Yeah, their daughter's dead, but we can link up with Te-ah, make Malan pay for that, and then escape from this hellship and inform the government about what Cayne Corp. (the evil corporation bankrolling the Groomlake) has been doing out here where nobody can hear me scream!
No, you retard. That's not how things really work! How fucking stupid of you to have hope! That's for fags!
So you go through some more puzzles and finally make it to the hangar where Malan has Te-ah at gunpoint, and your wife is in a stasis tube near Te-ah's escape craft. After some puzzle solving wizardry you take out Malan, then Te-ah turns on you! After all the help you gave her, she decides to leave you for dead because your wife's bone marrow has the research in it (somehow) and she wants to sell it to some other corporation so that she can ruin Cayne for killing her husband years ago. So after another quick puzzle you wind up killing Te-ah, but because the other stasis pod was damaged there's no hope for John.
In a last heroic act before he dies, John (you) send your wife off in the escape craft (already on autopilot). He watches the ship fly off out of the hangar, away from the Groomlake, and into space towards safety! We get a nice big panning shot of the Groomlake, see Te-ah's ship flying away, zoom in on the inside, close up on the stasis pod, take a look inside, and...
Ellen's a fucking corpse. Sunken eye sockets, dried out skin, the full nine. She's fucking dead, John. Everything you worked for in this game has come to absolutely jack and shit, and jack left town.
I cannot properly put into words how badly this pisses me off after sinking like 8 or 9 hours into this game's storyline. If it weren't for the clever puzzles and all the effort they put into writing the PDA notes and the music and the fun I had actually playing the game, this would absolutely be a fucking deal breaker for me. As it stands I'm currently on the fence about whether I should've recommended people pick it up earlier, even on sale.
As a horror junkie who's put a lot of time into understanding this genre, let me explain what makes a satisfying horror story.
Satisfying horror stories have one of two ends, good end or bad end. Satisfying bad end horror stories telegraph that shit well beforehand, so you know what you're getting into. In Requiem For A Dream, they're all drug addicts, and there is literally no glimmer of hope in the entire movie. You know precisely what you're getting into from the jump, from word go, and what makes that movie effective is knowing they're fucked and watching their self-destructive behaviors run their natural course.
Or in Return of the Living Dead. This is the series with the immortal zombies you literally cannot get rid of. The extinction-event zombie movies. They never get better. There is literally no part of that movie wherein you think, "They might have a way to stop this." Not one spot. So when you get to the end and they're burning the bodies, and the virus gets up into the clouds and rains down on a graveyard to animate the corpses, it just cements the "YOU'RE FUCKED" nature of those films, which puts them in sharp contrast to George Romero's zombie movies.
Now, in a story like what Stasis could've been, exemplified in something like Silent Hill, if you do everything right along the way there's a good end to that game. Harry makes it out, rescues and adopts the baby, and even the police lady gets to live. It was happily ever after until Silent Hill 3 happened, but my point is at the end of SH1 you were satisfied because you put in the work, solved the puzzles, killed the monsters, and saved everybody. The hope for making it out alive was always there, and in the proper ending of the game it pays off in spades.
Or for another example that's closer to sci-fi horror, Alien. In Alien Ellen Ripley(oh I just caught that, I bet the devs thought they were slick) has to deal with this fucking monster slaughtering all her friends on the crew, runs a marathon of trials, and makes it out at the end. Even the cat lives (They kill the cat in Stasis. Pissed me OFF.). That even translates over to the sequel. It has a satisfying ending because our heroine overcomes the danger and escapes.
With the amount of work a game like Stasis expects you to put in, having it end like that is A: cheap as fuck and B: seriously dissatisfying. Like I said, it was nearly a deal breaker for my recommendation. You just couldn't let us have a nice thing at the end of this hellish series of trials you've designed for us. Fuck's sake even Portal has a good ending. Once again I'm finding it difficult to put into words precisely how bad of a decision this was, and precisely how angry it makes me.
Really I think this anger stems from having the main character watch his daughter get ripped to pieces in front of him. It almost feels like the original ending of Clerks.
For those unfamiliar, the Kevin Smith movie Clerks actually ends with Randall and Dante cleaning up and leaving the store to come back to work the next day. In the original ending, however, a robber runs in at the end and shoots Dante in the chest, killing him. This ending was changed because a professional filmmaker sat Smith down and told him, "You can't just kill your main character because you don't know how to end your movie."
That's what this feels like. They didn't know how to end the game on a good note, so they just killed everyone and called it a day. Even the heroic sacrifice of John trying to at least let his wife escape is completely undercut and pissed on by having her be dead this entire time. It makes the entire struggle of the game, the emotional investment I as a player put into it, and the story itself feel pointless and like it might as well not have been told.
Maybe I'm being a curmudgeon about this. Likesay, the game is competent and does what it intends to, but that ending just rankled me so damn badly I had to rant about it. But this post is too long by half, so I'll wrap it up now. If you want to play this game after knowing that, go to and good luck, but get it on sale. Can't stress that enough. I'm sure when they were designing it and writing it they felt that this was a great subversion of your standard horror story ending and that it was a remarkably clever thing to do, but all it did was piss me off and make me not want to pick up any of the other games with their studio name on it.
This was worth the time sink and the money, but by god did that ending piss me off. Grab it if you dare, but don't say I didn't warn you.
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I know it's been a while since I've done a book review, but you guys had to know that wouldn't last forever. Regardless of how slow I read, I do read, and lately I've been getting caught up on the book with the best tagline in history alongside being the best damn Star Wars replacement I've encountered. You guys already know how I do things, but if you don't I'll give you a quick rundown for old time's sake as well as the new people who might've showed up.
Usually my reviews are pretty glowing, and this'll be no exception. It can't be helped. Not only am I fairly easy to please, I'm also acutely aware that I have a limited amount of lifetime and don't want to spend it reading and watching things that I'm pretty sure I won't enjoy. There's a reason I talked a lot of shit on Twitter about Fight Club (the book) and never formally reviewed it. Anyway, the way this usually goes is I give a spoiler free breakdown of my verdict and why I liked it, then I get into plot synopses while leaving out as much as possible because I don't want people to think they can get the full story from my cliff notes book report. So now that you know what's coming, here's my verdict:
Go buy this book and read it. If you like military science fiction that even delves into the realms of fantasy, much like a certain other space opera series I've already named here, then you're going to love this. It's tightly written, tightly focused, has great characters, and a lot of emotional impact with highs, lows, and moments of supreme wonder that will leave you absolutely rabid for more. I've got the rest of the books in the series thanks to my brother having turned into an absolute lunatic for this series, and with good reason, so I'm gonna be devouring the absolute hell out of the rest of them and will report back when I'm done.
Here's an affiliate link to where you can buy the kindle version. If you're not familiar, don't worry. Affiliate links don't affect Nick or Jason's profits from the book sales. Amazon just gives me a kickback for sending people over there to buy it from their side of the profits. As of the time of this writing, it's $3.50 or so, and for the amount of action packed into this book (along with everything else), you can't beat that with a stick. This link will also appear at the bottom of the post so you guys don't have to scroll all the way back up here.
So with that said, turn back if you don't want spoilers, because they're a-coming. You've got the link, go buy the thing and give it a read if you don't want to know a surface level understanding of what goes on in it.
All right then.
I am not in any way fucking around when I say that Galaxy's Edge: Legionnaire is some of the best military science fiction I've read since Starship Troopers. Admittedly, this isn't a genre I spend too much time in. I've read the aforementioned Heinlein, The Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles, and a few other books here and there. I find the genre greatly entertaining, but I'm not a soldier and I've never served in the military, so I don't have much frame of reference to know how accurate they're getting to what being in the real military is like.
Given that, I'm not touching that one with a ten foot pole. I can only say that given what I've heard of the military from people who've served in it over the course of my life, this book seems to capture the experience fairly accurately. But again, I don't know, so I'll leave that to the people who do know.
But my lack of military expertise aside, it'd probably be useful to get into a brief plot synopsis. Legionnaire follows Victory Company, a bunch of what seem like Marines if I were to equivocate to current American armed forces, as they are moving towards Moona Village on the planet Kublar in Galaxy's Edge. Turns out that's more than just a cool name for the series, it's an actual place, and it's about what you'd expect if you've watched shows like Firefly or Babylon 5.
The purpose of Victory Company's visit is to facilitate the integration of Kublar into the Republic, as they've been supposedly newly conquered and now have their own senator. But all is not roses and unicorn farts on the planet of the frog-men. As they're approaching the village, their caravan gets run up on by insurgent forces and blown to absolute shit, and as the attack happens one soldier, Chhun by name, looks into the sky and sees the Capital ship they arrived on, The Chiasm (uber cool name, btw), explode.
This isn't a heavy spoiler, this is like the ending of chapter one, here. Don't worry, I'm just whetting your whistle. Much like they do in this book. Like I said, this thing is masterfully put together.
So from that point on Victory Company is basically fucked. Completely and utterly. They have no backup, a lot of them are dead, there's no hope of rescue, and their one real base has been destroyed by the insurgents. Oh, and they're being dogged by a combined force of native Kublarans and an army of the Mid-Core Rebellion, the insurgents trying to topple the Republic. The book follows these brave soldiers as they attempt to get off this hellspawned rock, and let me tell you it's one page-turning, rip-roaring motherfucker of a yarn from start to finish.
The characters are exactly who you'd expect to be in a situation like this. There's Chhun and Wraith, the two who are in command through most of the book, although not by choice as the chain of command had more than a few links broken thanks to the attacks. Wraith appears calm and collected most of the time, and Chhun defers to him more often than not. Chhun is our main character, and we see this story through his eyes, but more on this later.
The cast is filled out by various grunts including Rook, Twenties, Exo, Maldorn, Devers, Doc Quigs, and Pappy, and I just gotta say these names are bad ass. I love everything about this book, and these two knocked it out of the park. I wish I could come up with names this badass in my own work. But these guys have various levels of involvement with the story, and the relationships between the various characters are played straight and to the hilt. Especially the relationship between most everybody else, but Exo in particular, and Devers, the "point".
Pretty much everybody in this story but Devers is an actual soldier, while Devers is a "point" who's in command not because of prowess or valor in battle but because he's graduated from an officer's academy. Now, just saying, I already love this trope. The cocksure douche-canoe who just can't help being an arrogant piece of shit to everyone around him because he graduated from Buttfuck Academy with honors and they're just regular soldiers who then gets his ass completely handed to him one way or another and realizes he needs to let the guys with experience handle the situation. I love it, and this story delivers on this trope in spades. It's very satisfyingly played, and makes the ending all the more poignant, because [SPOILERS REDACTED].
But all of the characters are lovingly handled and presented, which makes the deaths of several of them hit you that much harder. They feel like real people, which is how characters in a novel should be presented. Especially given that the story is told through the eyes of Sergeant/Lieutenant Chhun, and these men are his friends and battle brothers. And I said I had more on that, so here it is.
The way this book is written is very interesting, because it's almost all told in first person present-tense. This is a very rare feat, and Cole and Anspach accomplish it very well. I was actually left a bit gobsmacked as I first got into the book, because I'm not used to anybody writing in first person present tense, but after a while you settle down and get into the groove of the story. They don't mess this up once, so far as I was able to catch, and it was able to draw me in so thoroughly that when I got to the epilogue (which is told in the traditional style) I had to shake my head and adjust because it was so different from the style of the rest of the book. This is the kind of undertaking that makes tons of writers shit their pants at the mere thought, and here these guys are out doing it and making it look easy.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous of that skill.
The action in this book is as lovingly detailed as the characters, and when Twenties puts a sniper round through a Koob you can hear the crack of the rifle and see the gore spatter across the desert topsoil. It gets hot and heavy, and a lot of this book is taken up by conflagrations and firefights. And they never get old, not even to the last stand at the end, which feels like something right out of a classic war movie.
The politics in this book are also very well worked out, and right from the jump you get the net that things are not well in the Republic. The tagline, "The galaxy is a dumpster fire," is also the opening line of the book, with Chhun regaling us with precisely how fucked up a universe this is, and how little there is that can be done about it. This isn't the focus of this book, being a military sf novel concentrated on the plight of Victory Company, but I feel its necessary to bring it up because of what it does.
As I said, this book is tightly focused. We don't leave Kublar until the very end, and even that's just for the epilogue. However the discussions between the characters and little hints that drop in Chhun's internal monologue which forms the prose of the novel inform the reader of a much, much larger universe that you just want to go out and explore. There are a few other franchises that do this, such as Star Wars and Mass Effect (the first one, at least), but none of them in such a fashion as this.
In those other franchises, you actually do get to go out and explore, so it scratches that itch fairly readily. Star Wars in particular has been around long enough that if you want to go tripping around the galaxy there are more than enough avenues for you to readily accomplish that goal. From the expanded universe novels and short story anthologies, to the other movies in the series, to the video games like Knights of the Old Republic, it's really easy to just pick a point and jump into the Star Wars Universe and just see what's going on elsewhere.
In Mass Effect your primary goal is to run around and get people on your side to help fight the Reapers, and find out what their goals are. You go to several planets, and there's a ton of lore in readables and the internal encyclopedia of the game. So if you've got a question about Mass Effect, there's probably somewhere in the game itself that it's been answered.
In Legionnaire, however, all you get are little hints. Names dropped here and there. A few historical touchstones like The Savage Wars that get talked about in the vaguest terms. All this comes together to leave the reader ravenous for more information about this place they find themselves in, and the authors handled this slow drip of information expertly.
When these guys said they were making a Star Wars replacement, I cannot put into words how little they were fucking around.
In the final analysis, this book is amazing. It's also fairly short, which I find to be a point in its favor. Depending on how much time you've got on your hands you can read it in a day or two. It's a gripping military adventure on par with Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Starship Troopers (the book), and pretty much any other great military story you'd care to name. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up.
Particularly if you've been left cold and dissatisfied with the recent offerings in the Star Wars canon since Disney picked it up. I'm one of those people, to the point of having written off Star Wars near-entirely barring the original three films and the Expanded Universe material. I'm upset about what's happened to one of my favorite stories in the hands of people who do not care about it or the fans and customers who keep it afloat, and I've been in the market for a new space opera I can actually get excited about in the wake of the devastation of Star Wars.
I can promise you that Galaxy's Edge absolutely delivers, at least in the first novel. I'll let you know about the rest when I read them, but my brother's gone through the rest of the books and he assures me that it's like the old Star Wars never left. Full of mystery, spiritualism, space wizards, space magic, and awesome military combat. Now I can't say for sure because I'm not there yet, but his tastes and mine in this area align very closely, so I'm inclined to believe him.
In any event, I can't recommend Legionnaire strongly enough. It's one of the best recently released sci-fi books I've read, and it had me straight glued to my kindle whenever I had a spare moment to read. I even dropped the other five or so books I'm currently reading to finish it. It's that good.
So as I said, do yourselves a favor and pick this one up. It's absolutely worth your time, and comes in kindle, paperback, and audio, available on Amazon Dot Com. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel, and I'll report back as soon as I tear through that one and let you guys know how the story goes.
Here's that link again in case I've convinced any of you to do what you should be doing and go buy this book.
So as I stated in the last segment of my most recent podcast, I've been getting into the whole "visual novel" thing. Up till recently I've only played Sakura Dungeon, which was fun because it had girls with animal ears (with copious amounts of lewds because let's be real here that's what those Sakura games are for) as well as a dungeon crawl and battle mechanic that kept the fun going beyond what mere breasteses could provide. I'd heard people talking up Doki Doki Literature Club, and I played that and was severely disappointed.
Then a friend introduced this game to me.
[Sidenote: I don't consider visual novels video games because they have only the most basic of gameplay mechanics, and are far more accurately described as slightly interactive, choose-your-own-adventure comic books. In the case of the ones that are specifically romantically focused they're choose-your-own-waifu adventure comics. I'm just going to refer to them as "games" because it's a useful shorthand rather than having to type all that bullcrap out every time.]
And this game changed my opinion on the whole visual novel thing. I won't say it was an earth shattering revelation, or a game that completely revolutionized how I think about visual novels (VN's for short from here on out), or that it was even a really fantastic game in its own right. Because at base it isn't anything particularly special. The music is decent, the art is okay, the animation (what little there is) is on the good side of amateur hour, and the writing isn't anything to write home about in and of itself. However, it's the overall effect that brings this game home as something that is obviously a labor of love, and is more than anybody currently bitching about representation has ever done in their lives to further representation of people with disabilities in video games.
Did I mention that? That all these characters are disabled in some fashion?
Because I should've. Maybe I need to back up a step and explain what the game is actually about, here.
So Katawa Shoujo (literal translation: Cripple Girls, colloquial translation: Disabled Girls) is a visual novel about a last-year high school student who has a heart attack and discovers he has arrhythmia. He is placed in a boarding school for students with disabilities, and over the course of his first few days meets several girls that are all in some fashion disabled. Shizune is a deaf-mute, Hanako has burn scars and severe psychological issues because of this, Lily is blind, Emi had her legs amputated just below the knee, and Rin has a birth defect that stopped her arms from growing and as a result has stumps just below the shoulder. Over the course of the game you as the player pick which girl you'd prefer to romance and attempt to follow their arc to the "good" ending. "Good" is in scare quotes here because it doesn't always end on the happiest note.
So far as the first act goes (wherein you pick which girl you're going to go after) it's fairly well written, and your choices in dialogue do have an effect on how this game ends up, which is more than you can say for Mass Effect 3. But you get introduced to all the girls, and via these dialogue choices you choose which you're going to get involved with. I actually had to look up a flow chart to figure out how to get the entire story from this game, but thankfully they had the foresight to put in a "skip" mechanic so you can fast forward through stuff you've seen already.
Personally I've only completed two arcs and am working on a third, eventually planning to make my way through the entire game. However I noticed some things while playing this game. The rest of this ramble is basically going to be some thoughts that I have about it and how it relates to the incredible disconnect between an internet culture like 4chan and an internet culture like Tumblr, so if you want my verdict I'll go ahead and give it here before I get into a shit ton of pointless bloviating.
The game is good, and in my opinion you should play it. It's free, available via direct download from the website or via torrent. The writing is a bit simplistic, and as I said the music (while good) isn't going to be starting any revolutions anytime soon. However it's absolutely worth a play, and to be honest they should probably be charging for this given how well it's done considering where it came from and how emotionally impactful it's capable of being. If you're into VN's, or romance in general, or just want to experience 4chan kicking the absolute shit out of Tumblr in terms of representation done well, then I'd recommend it. But if you're anything like me, just remember this is more of a comic book than an actual video game and you'll be good to go.
So that done, let's talk a little about the development process with this game. Because frankly I can't talk too much about the story without spoiling things, and if you're going to go play it I don't want to ruin things for you.
This game came about because of a sketch from a doujin artist that 4chan just would not shut the fuck up about for years. So eventually, a bunch of anons got together and made a game studio specifically to produce this game. They called themselves 4 Leaf Studios (based on the 4 leaf clover 4chan logo) and got to work. It took a while, but eventually KS came to be and has since been translated into god only knows how many languages. Now as far as I know, and I'm open to being corrected on this, the first act was written by one guy, and then each girl's individual arc was written by different people who were invested in telling that girl's particular story.
Apparently Shizune, the deaf-mute girl, was subject to several re-writes, and looking at the flow chart I can believe it. Every other girl has plenty of decision moments, and Rin's is just completely fucked up, but then you bird's-eye Shizune compared to the rest and it's a straight line with one branching decision that leads to either the good or bad ending. So if you decided to go after the deaf-mute girl, your mileage may vary. This is the one I'm currently playing through, and I haven't gotten far enough to say one way or another. Just be aware this apparently isn't the best written of the arcs.
However, the complete autist writing and rewriting Shizune's arc aside, each arc for this game was essentially written by somebody who thought that particular character was best girl. Therefore all the arcs (exempting Shizune of course) are written with a kind of loving care that has the quality you'd expect from an image board like 4chan, but the passion shines through beyond clumsy turns of phrase or echoed words. It's quite obvious that the people writing these different arcs cared about telling a decent story within what they were given to tell, and this leads to some legitimately heart-wrenching moments depending on what girl you've decided to romance for this playthrough.
So here's the part where I devolve into random social science bullshit because to be honest this is the thing that really astounds me.
4chan is an anonymous imageboard. It has a well deserved reputation for being one of the worst places on the entire internet, and before Tumblr turned into the absolute fucking dumpster fire it is now, that was true. However, there's a distinct disconnect between the approach towards representation in media taken by 4chan, and that taken by Tumblr. I should be clear here, I spend a fair amount of time on Tumblr, and comparatively far less on 4chan. So while I've heard of 4chan's excesses and depredations, I've actively seen Tumblr's in real time. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Tumblr is the worse of the two.
4chan is akin to the internet's red light district. You walk in there knowing what you're about to get, because of the reputation. And because of the way deindividuation works (basically anonymity), you're likely to be metaphorically stabbed because you simply look like (or sound like, given the medium of text people interact with each other through on that site) you haven't been stabbed yet. It's a kind of initiation ritual and fact of that website that if you appear to not have been stabbed yet, someone will eventually try to stab you.
Contrast this to Tumblr, wherein you have actual screen names (a feature actively and vehemently discouraged on 4chan, despite the ability to engage in it), as well as an email address tied to your account, and shit gets far nastier than a metaphorical stabbing. People have been SWATted, reported to the police for false crimes, had their pets taken away and euthanized, driven to suicide, and all manner of other nasty shit. There are decent parts of Tumblr, but eventually that part (which is most of the site's userbase) is going to find you and decide that you are problematic in some fashion, and as such not human and not deserving of human decency, mercy, or opportunity for redemption.
And what really sets this in sharp focus in regards to Katawa Shoujo is that 4chan bitches a lot, but they don't bitch about representation. Just stroll into any thread on /v/ and you'll be subject to a deluge of autists screaming about a video game that got them all upset. But very rarely do you see 4chan wanting [x] people group to be represented more often in video games. There are occasional threads, but those are obviously troll threads and get the treatment they deserve. Overall, /v/ really seems to just want decent games. Apart from the people who are there to just interminably bitch about literally everything, of course.
Now Tumblr?
These people bitch on the fucking daily about how we need more representation of [x] demographic in video games. Very rarely does a day go by when I'm scrolling Tumblr and I don't see someone bitching about this very thing. They constantly whinge about this kind of stuff, and the most stunning thing about it is they never do a god damned thing about it other than bitch, despite the fact that tools like RPG Maker exist that would give them the opportunity to do exactly what they want. Game development is hard, yes, but it's not impossible. It's a learnable skill, and any one of these people shouting into the void on Tumblr could learn it and be the change they want to see.
And yet they don't. Because bitching is easy. Actually doing something about it is hard work.
So when it comes to a game like Katawa Shoujo, I'm standing absolutely gobsmacked by the fact that 4chan indeed did this thing. Granted, a VN isn't exactly the most difficult game to produce. However they actually got off their duffs and did the thing rather than constantly bitching and hoping that someone would do it for them. And so far as I know, this wasn't done out of any kind of call for representation of cripples in video games.
It was done because these particular anons wanted to tell these particular stories involving these particular characters, and so they went out and did it. They made it happen, and that's why I say 4chan does it better. Because to do something better than someone else, you actually have to do more than complain. You have to lace up your boots and get to work. These anons have done more for the representation of cripples in video games than anyone currently pissing and moaning on their Tumblr blog about how terrible it is that there aren't more crippled people in vidya.
These random anons approached this subject matter with a respect and tenderness that outshines the best AAA company you can think of on their best day, and they did it all for no recognition and no money. I think this was a bad move, because they had all the makings of a talented development studio, but I wasn't involved and their decision to do it for free is their own. This actually gives me a bit of respect for the anons of 4 Leaf, because putting the game out for free proves this was a labor of love rather than a cash grab.
Which, I can guarantee that any game coming from Tumblr in a similar vein would absolutely be a cash grab.
These anons cared about these characters and these stories, and as such they made a product that even the best of what Tumblr has to offer from the people who seem to be very opinionated on these matters wouldn't be able to match in a thousand years. And to be perfectly honest, when the infamous internet hate machine is giving you exactly what you ask for and doing it far better than you could ever hope to do, it might be time to hang up your spurs, cowpoke. So at bottom this post here comes down to a challenge.
4chan has already outdone Tumblr by leaps and bounds just by putting this game out. If you're really so concerned with representation of demographics in vidya, then step up, learn to make a video game, and be the change you want to see.
Because if 4chan is being the change you want to see in the world, and doing it better than you could simply by virtue of having done it in the first place, maybe you don't actually want to see this change happen. Maybe you just want to bitch. Maybe, like the cartoon says, you don't want a solution. You want to be mad.
But so far as Katawa Shoujo goes, as I said, it's a VN. You should have a basic understanding of what you're getting into, but go play it. It's worth the time it'll take you to download and play the game. Find your cripple waifu, dear reader. Because this is probably the only game that'll give you the chance.
I realize as I'm finishing this up that I should absolutely mention the problem with Emi, and the h-scenes. Because those are things that should be addressed.
So the issue with Emi is that she's the main storyline, and the one that (apparently) most people fall into on their first playthrough. I felt like this was railroading, and it kind of is. There's one dialogue choice that flags you for heading towards Emi's arc, and you have to do some ridiculous bullshit backflips to get out of it. This is a design flaw in my opinion, but if you just make the proper choice at the proper time (depending on whether you're planning to romance Emi or literally anyone else) it can be easily avoided. It just seems a bit bullshit to me to make her that important that it's basically one or two dialogue choices that decide whether you get shunted into her arc, or whether you get to go for another girl.
That being said, Emi's arc was very well told and enjoyable.
She just isn't best girl.
Because apparently I have a taste for bacon.
Now to the h-scenes.
Being a romance VN, this game eventually rewards you with "porn" of the character you've decided to romance if you make the right choices. There is an option to turn this off, and from what I've read doing my research because I'm absolutely that much of an autist, it doesn't effect the game or the character development all that much. From what I've seen (because y'all already know what time it is if you're reading this) the h-scenes are tastefully done for porn and actually do have an effect on the relationships between the characters themselves.
This isn't the kind of game where sex is just an, "Oh, I love you so I'm going to have teh sessy teims wit u" kind of thing. Shit has real consequences, and even gets into the personal psychology of the characters and how they react to the main character showing interest in them and actively pursuing them as a romantic prospect. This was really interesting in a few instances because, as I said, it had an effect on how the game progressed and how these characters reacted to you.
Ostensibly, if you got the h-scenes of the character, you got the "good" ending, but this isn't always the case. There are ways you can severely fuck this up between that and the end of [x] arc. To the point of that character hating you and never wanting to talk to you again. Which is an interesting dynamic I haven't seen in my (admittedly small) experiences with games like this before.
In my opinion this just proves that this game wasn't meant to be a vehicle for amputee porn. If they'd wanted to do that they could've just come up with the basic character designs, posted them in a thread, and let the drawfags have a fucking field day making lewds of them all day. That didn't happen.
Well, it might've happened, but I haven't seen it, and what Katawa Shoujo threads I've actually seen on 4chan nowadays have not included the lewds that may or may not exist of these characters.
This game is meant, in my opinion, to be a heartfelt story of a young man finding out he has a disability, meeting various girls, and coming to love them not because they're disabled, but for who they are beyond the disabilities. The h-scenes are, I think, them not flinching away from difficulties and realities of getting romantically involved with a disabled person. Much like (and I know this is a stretch but bear with me) Henry Miller didn't shy away from his sexual liaisons in his various novels. It's an unflinching look at what engaging in a romantic relationship with a disabled person might be like, and given the writing I can't tell if the particular anons who wrote this game have experience in this area or if they're just extrapolating based on what they think would happen in individual situations. It gets right down to the nitty gritty, and it would've been very easy for them to shy away from this and not include it, despite the fact this is a romance game.
They didn't, and I think that takes balls, to be honest.
But overall, Katawa Shoujo is a good VN, and moreover it shows what a bunch of autists on an imageboard can do when they put their minds to it. As I said, they've officially done more for the representation of cripples in vidya than anyone on Tumblr has ever even thought of doing.
So go give it a play.
It's free, and there are worse ways to kill an afternoon.
Here's the link to the website for the interested.
So this is a movie that I had studiously avoided watching for a while now. It looked dumb as shit, I'm not gonna lie. I had also seen snippets in various trailers that didn't do much to mollify my opinion. Seeing Will Smith's character yell, "Fairy lives don't matter today!" wasn't exactly encouraging, given that I'm part of a literary movement that wants to kick politics out of writing/film/etc as much as possible, I'm not looking for a movie that plays to either side of the current political divide, right or left. I'll still laugh at jokes that agree with my politics, because I agree with them, but at the end of the day a fun sci-fi/fantasy/drama romp with a good plot and decent acting and writing is all I'm looking for. I don't want something that plays to my biases.
Well, I'm here to tell you that I was wrong about Bright.
I know, stop the presses, holy shit I was wrong about something. Shockingly enough, that tends to happen more often than I'd like, and Bright totally blew me away. Going in I was fully expecting a bare-bones buddy cop movie with heavy political overtones that were an obvious allegory to what's currently going on in politics, and there are some nods in that direction, to be sure.
But first and foremost, this movie is built to be entertaining, which as Bradford C. Walker has stated, should be the primary goal of any piece of fiction. I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but I can't make any promises.
The basic plot of the movie is that at some point in the past there was a war against a Dark Lord, and the orcs chose to fight on his side. This has led to a certain stigma against orcs, which has caused them to be ghettoized to an extent. Human society has dealt fairly well with the introduction of fantasy races, developing to a technological level about on par with what we have now in the real world.
Magic exists, and it's incredibly dangerous, only able to be wielded by a select few, called Brights. There are magic wands, and if you're not a Bright, simply picking one up could have disastrous consequences to say the least. This is most definitely not a universe where the average person can become a wizard, or Bright, through diligent study a la Dragonlance.
There is what could charitably be called a cult looking to bring back the Dark Lord, and another cult looking to stop it. These two are constantly engaged in a kind of underground war, and both are despised by the authorities, but things are coming to a bit of a head when our story takes place, and it falls to our unlikely and (sometimes) unwilling heroes to put a stop to it and save the world from the return of the Dark Lord.
Will Smith plays a police officer five years out from retirement, just trying to do his job and get by without any trouble. For unknown reasons (to me, at least, as I only watched the movie once, maybe they did go into it) nobody wants to partner up with him. He does his job, but he's not overly nice about it, and simply views it as a paycheck. He doesn't have any high-minded ideas about justice or the greater good weighing him down.
Joel Edgerton (whose work I'm not personally familiar with outside of this film) plays the first orc law enforcement officer in the world. He's a rookie, and despised by his own people, who see his turn to law enforcement as a betrayal. But this is what he wants to do and he is determined to be good at his new job. He doesn't suck up to Ward (Smith's character), but throughout the first half of the movie it becomes clear that he's an idealistic cop who wants to do right and clean up the streets.
And absolutely nobody wants to partner with him, because he's an orc. Including Ward.
These two being basically mashed together despite mutual antipathy leads to some of the best character interaction I've seen in a non-established movie series since some of the earlier Marvel movies. Smith and Edgerton play off of one another so well it's almost akin to something like Reservoir Dogs, or Goodfellas, in the sense of you put two great actors in a room or car together, and they're constantly trying to out-do one another.
I'll come out right now and say I think Smith is an amazing actor, and I haven't seen a movie that he's acted in that I've disliked, or that I think he's done a bad job in. Hancock, I, Robot, I Am Legend, all of these movies I think he did a great job as the character he was attempting to portray, and I think he gets unnecessarily shat on because he's Will Smith. Much like Keanu Reaves gets shat on because he's Keanu.
Reaves' performance as Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula is to die for, and if you think he did a bad job as Robert Arctor in A Scanner Darkly I'd advise you to go watch that again and pay close attention to his performance. Smith, like Reaves, is actually a solid actor, and given the right role and proper direction he's able to shine and bring a special bit of personality to a role that few other actors can match. And this absolutely bears true in Bright.
His character is a street-level cop that's seen too much, is far too jaded for his own good, and absolutely refuses to put up with other characters' bullshit. He calls people on their shit immediately, but is also willing to make deals to save his own skin. At the same time, he's willing to abandon said deals just because he knows the people engaging him are trying to fuck him. Smith brings this character to life with a realness that I doubt other actors put in the same roll could deliver.
Edgerton, on the other hand, brings a bit of almost whiteness to his role. He's awkward, he doesn't understand how to act in police culture within the context of the movie, he gets why people dislike him but is determined to prove them wrong, and his delivery of the dialogue is spot on. Personally I don't think they could've cast a better person as Jakoby, and I'm looking forward to seeing other programs Edgerton has acted in. I might've seen him here or there in minor roles in the past, but regardless I'm going to be paying attention to his career in the future. The guy's damn good, and he played Jakoby to the hilt in this movie.
So far as the character interaction in this movie goes, Smith and Edgerton have serious chemistry. I'm talking chemistry like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor had chemistry. These two play off one another so well that if I had any faith in any film awards ceremonies anymore I'd nominate them for everything they were available for with regards to this movie. Once again, this goes back to my comparison to Reservoir Dogs or Goodfellas.
If you put two amazing actors in a room together and tell them to play off one another, they should immediately start trying to out-do one another. This is the precise dynamic we see in Bright. Smith and Edgerton are constantly trying to one-up each other, and the overall effect doesn't lead to overacting as seen in Patrick Stewart's portrayal of Gurney Halleck in Dune, wherein if he's on screen, he's the most overly dramatic motherfucker on the screen. These two build on each others' portrayal of their characters very naturally, and the overall effect comes across like a buddy cop movie straight out of the 80's, with all the animosity, rivalry, ribbing, and eventual getting-along that entails.
Which leads me to my next point, the buddy cop dynamic. If you'll remember, most 80's buddy cop movies had the two characters be initially combative, but eventually set aside their differences in the face of the greater threat. Through combating this greater threat they come to understand and have a grudging respect for one another, and even develop a rudimentary friendship to hopefully be expanded on in future sequels. This is precisely the kind of relationship we see in the main characters in Bright, and it was very refreshing in the Era of Subversion™ to see this dynamic played completely straight as it was in the movies in this genre that preceded it.
The writing in this movie is also extraordinarily good. The dialogue sounds 100% natural, and it was nice to see Will Smith getting another role that allowed him to talk straight as a character (like in Hancock) rather than make the character out to be something he's not. He's a reluctant hero, but a hero he becomes. Not through some prophecy, but by a combination of predestination and his choices as a person, which make perfect sense within the context of the events in question.
Which leads me to my one gripe with this movie. There are politics in it.
This is by no means an overriding message the movie is putting before the story. Make no mistake, Bright is meant to be a fun, buddy cop, urban fantasy, let's-save-the-world-even-though-we're-nobody's-and-probably-can't romp before it's meant to be any kind of political commentary. However, with a producing studio named Trigger Warning, we can expect a couple of political messages with our fiction.
The scene I mentioned at the beginning of this review is probably the worst offender in this regard. Fairies are regarded as a nuisance in this world, and one is bothering Ward's bird feeders. His wife orders him to go kill it, and he proclaims to a crowd of gangsta motherfuckers, "Fairy lives don't matter today!" and proceeds to beat the fairy to death with a broom, because they're little better than vermin.
There was also specific mention of "diversity hires" several times in the movie, and allusions to law enforcement being constrained by diversity education and having to make allowances for Jakoby because muh diversity rather than him having proven himself worthy of being a cop. I'm not going to lie, this shit is tired.
I don't really care which side of the political spectrum you happen to be on. I'm obviously more right-leaning, myself, but I'm not looking for fiction that plays to my personal biases. I'm looking for entertaining stories. That's why I've studiously avoided the vast majority of Hollywood movies that have come out in the past few years, as well as shows and movies on Netflix.
I'm not interested in this kind of shit.
If you want to make mild political points or jokes, fine, be my guest. As long as it doesn't detract from the overall story, I'm good with it. For example, in Welcome to Night Vale (before I stopped listening because the main voice actor told me personally on Twitter I should be physically assaulted because I disagreed with him politically), they make several jokes about gun nuts. I admit that gun nuts are kinda crazy, and despite essentially being one I can take and even laugh at some good-natured jabs at our side. Especially if the fiction is overall very good.
What I don't countenance is preaching, and I'm happy to report that although Bright engages in lighthearted jabs towards the left-wing and right-wing of politics, none of this is overbearing, has any real weight it applies to the story, and are nothing more than one-time gags played for laughs and quickly abandoned. They make their joke, often in one line of dialogue, and move on. The overall plot itself is able to be enjoyed while completely ignoring these jokes. Few of them that I noticed were plot-specific, and the ones that were are inoffensive unless you're just looking for something to bitch about.
There is definite political commentary there, but like any good story it's delivered within the context of the world they're presenting to you, and any allegorical connotations can be safely ignored in the interest of enjoying the overall story. These jokes can be safely written off as, "Oh, they're ripping on BLM," or, "Oh, they're ripping on racists," because while some of them have a bearing on the overall plot, they're one-note jokes and are quickly lost in the onrushing stream of the actual plot of the movie.
Which, I think, might have something to do with its critic ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.
At the time of this writing, Bright has a rating of 27% from critics, but 87% from fans on the aggregate review site. I think this might be because Bright is an actual heroic adventure story, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else.
Understand, Bright is the story of two cops finding out that a cult is operating in their jurisdiction to bring about the second coming of the Dark Lord and slaughter billions of people, and these two unlikely assholes figure it's their duty to stop it. These two characters are beat to shit, shot, blown up, run over with cars, and god only knows what else, and yet they persevere in their quest to stop this horrible thing from happening.
They're not heroes out of legend, they're just the guys who were there, and were able to do something about it.
This is 100% a heroic adventure story akin to The Lord of the Rings, wherein a couple of random, no-account people were in the wrong place at the right time, and decided they had to fix things, because if they didn't then who would? They didn't want to be there, but they were, so they might as well try to save the damned world.
This is an unabashed, unapologetic, urban fantasy pulp romp, and I couldn't enjoy it more if I tried. If you have Netflix, you could do far, far worse than spending the two or so hours it would take you to watch this movie. There's also a shoutout to my personal favorite movie of all time, The Fifth Element, when they pick up the Elven chick and she's spouting incomprehensible gibberish in the back of the car while they're being trailed by people who very much want to hurt them and her.
And fam.
If you're going to do a shoutout, however subtle, to my top-tier favorite movie in the history of film...
Well, I don't have much choice but to endorse your movie. Simple as that.
Go watch Bright. It's fun as fuck. Moreover, it's fun as fucking. This movie is like good sex, and like with good sex I may have my gripes, but those gripes are mere nitpicks. Overall there is nothing wrong with this movie, and I'm very much looking forward to the sequel. Smith and Edgerton did an amazing job in this movie, and the overall product is absolutely worth your time.
Ignore the critics, and go watch this movie.
