Bendy and the Ink Machine

 

With horror being easily one of my favorite genres of game, I'm always on the lookout for good horror games to sink my teeth into and with all the rave reviews I saw about Bendy and the Ink Machine, I expected this to be pretty good.  To my dismay, however, it's a collosal piece of garbage.

The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair.  He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.

The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies.  The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull.  The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button.  When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office.  The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be.  There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable.  The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy.  The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.

But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam.  If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work.  The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right.  The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator.  What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game.  In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened.  I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck.  I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work.  If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother.  I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch.  I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability.  A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another.  Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else

Why Walking Simulators Are Insufferable

A genre that we have touched on this blog previously is the Walking Simulator.  An example of Walking Simulators would be things like Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Everyone's Gone To the Rapture or Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs

If you've not played any of those games then allow me to describe to you what a walking simulator is.  In a walking simulator, there is very little to no actual game play.  No challenge, nothing trying to stop you achieve your goals and very little in terms of mechanics outside of "use WASD to move and mouse to click".  The idea of this genre is that it's trying to deliver a good story to you by giving you an interactive environment for you to explore and discover the plot for yourself.

Now there's a number of reasons I find these games completely unbearable not only to play, but to hear people talking about.  The big reason that sticks out in my mind is that they aren't even games really.  A game is something that has mechanics, win and fail states, a goal to achieve maybe even some competition, things like that.  These games don't do anything like that, it's sort of like walking through an art gallery but all  the artwork was created by piss-gargling twats who think they are being deep.  "Digital Art" would be a better way to describe these pieces of software rather than video games.  For some reason the fact that they are marketed as video games just sort of upsets me.

Another reason that I hate these games are the people who make them and the people who play them.  Let me just show you a picture of the people who made indie trash heap Gone Home

These people make me sick, that fucking tit on the sofa with his beard, floppy hair and trendy glasses.  Then next to him that woman with that "ooh look at how much better than you" I am look on her face.  I bet she looks down on ACTUAL games and laughs with all her shitty indie friends about how cultured and artistic they are.  Of course I'm being needlessly mean but this is the impression a lot of these developers give off but even worse than poncy developers are the fans of these games.  All of them are insufferable little twats who think that walking simulators are one of the best things to happen to all of gaming.  Criticising a walking simulator will lead to them going on and on and fucking on about how "you just don't get it".  People joke on the Internet about games being "2deep4u" but fans of this genre tend to take that idea a bit too seriously.

However the thing that really gets to me about these games is the fact that it just takes a giant shit on actual talented developers who not only care about making games but giving us great story experiences as well.

Just look at Silent Hill, a game with a story line LEAGUES better than anything these poncy cockrockets have come out with and yet still manages to be an actual game.  Hell, the story is pretty much what this game is famous for but there are still enemies trying to kill you and puzzles for you to wrack your brain over that keep in well within the land of gaming.

Or what about Shadow of the Colossus?! A beautifully crafted game where you have to kill a bunch of mountains in order to selfishly save some dead girl.  However the more you play, the more you start to realize that maybe you aren't the hero of the story but instead some selfish prick taking a bit shit all over nature just because you're a bit lonely.  You start to feel an actual sense of guilt and doubt, as if what you're doing isn't quite right but you push on anyway BECAUSE its a game and you have to reach the end.  Then when you actually get to the end you're left feeling like complete shit BUT despite the effect that the story may have on you, you still had a good GAMING experience.  When you get over the guilt of being a prick you can play time attack and things like that and enjoy the game from a mechanical standpoint rather than an emotional, story based one.

Or hell, what about Kamaitachi No Yoru

This is an old Super Nintendo title that isn't much more than a fucking book on a cartridge.  Yes, a game that consists entirely of TEXT pisses me off significantly less than the walking simulator.  This is because while Kamaitachi is nothing but text, there is a mystery at its core that simply playing the game and picking text paths willy nilly will not give you the answer for.  You have to pay attention to all the details of the story and then even when you figure out who committed the murder you THEN have to figure out how exactly to move through the game in order to get the best ending.  It's like watching an episode of CSI but instead of the criminal being caught at the end you have to re-watch the episode like 4 or 5 times catching every little detail and then YOU have to decide which bits of evidence to use and which people to talk to in order to catch the guy.

These are just three but there are tons of games like this, tons of games making a great effort to marry fine storytelling and gaming mechanics in order to create unique and memorable experiences.  Then these fucking idiots come along, make some shitty story and put it into some shitty interactive environment and then crown themselves the kings and queens of artistic gaming.

Go choke on your Vente Starbucks you insufferable bastards.

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs

Despite coming out in 2013, I've only managed to get around to playing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs recently and quite frankly I wish that I had put it off longer.  This disappointment of a game available on PC via Steam isn't worth your time or money and I'm about to tell you why.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is developed by a British indie studio called The Chinese Room and published by Frictional Games.  Frictional Games both developed AND published the first Amnesia game but for the second instalment they didn't have all that much of a hand in it and The Chinese Room did most of the work.  This doesn't sound like a bad thing but it's what should be setting off your alarm bells because they are responsible for Dear Esther, a shitty non game where you walk around and don't do anything.  If like me you are playing this game in 2016 then another thing that should set your alarm bells off is that these same people are also responsible for shitty non-game Everybody's Gone To The Rapture so obviously these people aren't good at making games but are rather proficient at making steaming turds for stuck up ponces.

Plot wise the game is shit.  You play as a bloke looking for his children who are stuck in the giant machine under your house but with this being a horror game nothing is quite that simple.  Everything is falling apart, there's a prick on a phone who may or may not be helping you, strange pig creatures stalk the hallways and without spoiling anything shit starts to get all kinds of fucked up near the end.  The problem is that the story is so far up its own arse that it's just frustrating.  There's a tenuous link to the first game but the writing in Pigs is so piss poor that it barely even matters.  Without playing it for yourself it's hard to see where I'm coming from with this but the games plot could be compared to Final Fantasy X's and as much as I love that game the story is fucking stupid.  At least FFX had fun game play though, this title on the other hand has some issues in that department.

The game play is where this title really falls down because there is exactly no game play to be found.  This is the big problem I have with A Machine For Pigs and it's that The Chinese Room has gone and turned it into one of their fucking plot-driven walking simulators rather than an actual fucking game.  I loved the original Amnesia because it had everything this game had and some actual game play elements that made it challenging.  It had objects you needed to collect and store in an inventory to use elsewhere, it had oil and tinderboxes that turned the idea of just seeing clearly into a fucking challenge, it had a sanity meter that would deplete when looking at the monster which made it scarier because you could never quite see what was chasing you as well as some other elements.  In this game all those things are GONE and replaced with........well nothing really.  While I never got caught by a pig creature I've heard that even that doesn't kill you, it just warps you to some point on the map so there is literally ZERO ways to die in this game and that just kills some of the horror really.  All you do in this game is walk around some dark rooms and solve "puzzles" that involve picking up some kind of object and putting it in, taking it out of or pushing it into something.  All the solutions are situated basically next to the thing you need to activate or go through and you would have to be some kind of brain dead chimp in order to get stuck.

Whatever you think about The Chinese Room's other games (I think they're shit and barely qualify as games) it's clear that they are not game developers.  They are trying to pioneer some kind of new interactive fiction and while I don't like it personally I kind of think the concept is cool.  However, letting them loose on a sequel to a really strong horror game was a BIG mistake because now we are left with an initially mildly interesting title that's neither horror nor a game but just ends up being a big fat waste of time.

If you really enjoyed the first one like I did then MAYBE you can salvage some kind of enjoyment from this but it'll be like trying to suck the water from an old dishcloth.  If you have played neither of the Amnesia games then pretend like this one doesn't exist and just play The Dark Descent and then if you want more of that go and play Frictional Games' other quality titles called Penumbra.  This "game" is a waste of your money.

Serena (Plus Small Rant About Gone Home and The Stanley Parable)

Every month I try to play at least one game released this year to add to my list of Awesome 2014 releases so that I have a nice pool of games to choose from when it comes to picking my top 5 in December.

This month I went with free Steam indie title, Serena and let me tell you, it won't be making any "best of" lists any time soon.

Serena is a very strange game, just because it's a free game that is never announced to you.  I saw it on Steam one day and when I clicked it to get more information, it said "You Already Own Serena".  This confused me since I hadn't bought it, or pressed any download button and it wasn't sitting in my library, but I went with it and gave it a download.  Checking the store now it's clearly labelled as free but I'm sure it wasn't when it was on the front page, but whatever.

According to the blurb on the store page for steam, Serena is an adventure game but that couldn't really be any further from the truth.  Serena is one of those "games" that keep popping up recently.  Absolutely 0 gameplay to be had, just story, more like interactive fiction than a game.  So that must mean the story is pretty good right?  Well no, it's not

The game starts out and your character is sat at a table.  The first thing you are presented with is a photo of him and his wife, but his wife has a scratched out face and he comments about how he can't remember anything about her.  You then walk around his log cabin, clicking on things and listening to him ramble about fond memories of her.  The next few paragraphs contain spoilers, I'll mark them and then you can skip past them if you actually give any kind of crap (you shouldn't)

SPOILERS

As you find items, he starts to remember some kind of argument they had and his ramblings go from fond memories to rants about how much he hates her.  You keep clicking around and in a pretty predictable twist you find a dead body in a cabinet which I think is the protagonists body (you're playing as his ghost or something, who fucking knows), then you get a scene with his (ex) wife and her new lover burning down the log cabin to hide the evidence of her killing you.

END SPOILERS

It sounds like an interesting premise to be honest with you, but it's so poorly presented that it failed to really grasp me.  Straight away I have no idea who anyone is, where I am or why I should care about this guy and his fucking problems.  He can ramble all he wants about his wife and how much he loves her whenever I click on a chair or a dinner table but at the end of the day I just don't give a flying rats arse.  The game presents me with no reason to care about these characters and there isn't really any conflict to resolve, I'm just listening to memories and watching events play out and I have absolutely 0 input.

So, it's a badly presented story with 0 gameplay, puzzle solving or brain power required so calling it an adventure game is a bit of an insult.  If you want to play a real adventure game with a vague plot about a man who can't remember a person who may or may not be his lover, play fucking Anna

http://identitygaming.blogspot.jp/2013/10/anna-extended-edition.html

Now, what does Serena, Gone Home and The Stanley Parable all have in common?

They aren't fucking games.  Now Gone Home and Serena are complete dogshit on a stick, but The Stanley Parable proved that you can have a game like this and make it entertaining at the same time, but I think the definition of "game" is a bit stupid.

Another title that proved you need minimal game play to be enjoyable is the Silent Hill Play Novel, a Japan only book version of Silent Hill which tries to expand on the game by going into great detail about Harry Mason's thoughts and feelings during his adventures through the haunted town.

But in Japan, people KNOW this shit doesn't really qualify as a game, and thus has been assigned it's own genre title of Sound Novel or Visual Novel.  I would stop getting so upset about Gone Home or Parable being praised so much if they weren't praised as being games.

The derogatory term I keep seeing get thrown around for these games is "walking simulator", which is kind of funny but a little unfair.  Give them a name fitting of their content, like interactive fiction or something then maybe I'll stop being so upset when they keep winning awards that they don't fucking deserve.

Interactive Fiction award?  Sure I can handle that
Adventure game award?  Get fucked and go play Monkey Island or Beneath a Steel Sky and learn what a REAL adventure game is you brain dead bag of shitty tissues.