Renowned Explorers

The folks at Abbey Games know their business. I loved their first game, Reus - one of the very few that I've enjoyed enough to unlock all the achievements on Steam. Renowned Explorers is their second effort and it did not disappoint.

In Renowned Explorers, you take charge of a group of three adventurers who set out on expeditions around the globe to discover fame and treasure. The gameplay takes place on three levels:

1. The between-expeditions strategy phase where you improve your crew, make scientific discoveries, and plan where to go next.
2. Moving from location to location on each expedition's map. This part is semi-randomized. Many of the map components are always the same, but located in different spots and connected in different ways from one game to the next.
3. Turn-based battles between your crew and various enemies, ranging from animals to villagers to cultists, and even the occasional angry ghost.

I use the term "battle" loosely, because you have three different approaches for conflict resolution. You can be Aggressive with actual physical harm, or Devious with calculated insults, or make Friendly overtures. The idea is to overcome their resistance to your cause, and any of the three approaches is viable as a primary focus. In each conflict, there's an overall "mood" based on the combination of your approach and that of the enemy. You often need to tailor your approach based on the specific enemy you're facing. For instance, if you encounter a bunch of Devious monkeys, it may not be a bright idea to charge in Aggressively, since your crew gets a penalty when the mood is "Escalated" (you Aggressive, enemy Devious).

I really like this "combat" system that gives you more options than just smacking around the bad guys. Making good use of the mood can swing a conflict in your favor (or vice versa, of course). Which crew members you have along in a particular game can make the exact same encounter play out very differently from one game to the next. And the game might give you bonuses for using a particular approach, giving you incentive to find a way to prevail even despite negative moods.

A game consists of taking your crew on five expeditions. You collect renown based on how well you find gold, gain status in the eye of your peers, and make scientific discoveries. A game is won if you exceed 2500 renown after finishing your five expeditions. I won most of the games I played, though occasionally I'd fail to reach 2500 renown or my crew would be defeated in a tough encounter.

There's plenty of crew members to choose from, divided into four classes: scientist, fighter, scout, and speaker. Each class gives you bonuses at certain types of challenges, and each individual crew member has strengths and weaknesses during conflicts. Choosing a crew such that the members compliment one another is important!

The game got quite a bit easier once I picked up More to Explore, the first expansion. It added two new mechanics that give you additional bonuses: Campfire stories, where your crew's expedition stories give you bonuses; and Treasure bonus choices, allowing you to choose from a set of bonuses when finding a significant treasure. The latter is especially useful since Treasure bonuses are very powerful, so being able to choose one that fits with the crew you're playing helps a lot.

There's also a second expansion out now, The Emperor's Challenge. It adds a whole new game mode where you're collecting trophies based on completing specific challenges, rather than just going for the highest renown score. I haven't played it quite as much yet, but I've liked it so far. The trophy requirements often go against the strengths of your crew, so you need to be extra careful in planning how to get those trophies while still staying alive and completing your expeditions.

There's very little to find fault with in Renowned Explorers, in my opinion. If the style of gameplay appeals to you, then the game will have its hooks in you pretty quickly! My only real complaint is that the options for expeditions is fairly limited, so you end up doing the same things repeatedly as you play more games. The expansions are helping with that by adding more expedition options.

I've made it through about 70% of the achievements in Renowned Explorers, and I fully expect that I'll keep playing until I get the rest. After this and Reus, I'm looking forward to seeing what Abbey Games comes up with next!

Telltale's Game of Thrones Season 1

I bought the Game of Thrones episodic game from Telltale a while back during a sale, and just recently got around to playing it.

It's unfortunate that the first thing I noticed about this game is how non-user-friendly it is. Installation required me to download direct from Telltale, rather than using Steam or some other distribution platform. (I assume that was because of the sale price, since it's available on those platforms, but I only had the one option.) Then I had to wait through an installation and update process, which was extremely slow. After playing the first episode, I had to download each of the other five episodes one at a time (also very slow). The game runs in a tiny window on my desktop with no option for higher resolution. The graphics are choppy, even more so than in other Telltale games I've played, and on occasion the sound gets out of sync. Several times the game screen blanked out and I had to kill the program to restart, and once it crashed trying to reload my save (fortunately a second attempt worked). It takes a lot of patience to get through all those technical and distribution issues.

Beyond the technical issues, the game shares the pros and cons that go with pretty much all episodic adventure games. My least favorite of these is the action sequences, including one almost immediately after starting the first episode. I had the usual trouble with them, dying several times largely because I didn't understand what was being asked of me (why isn't my character crawling away from the bad guy...whoops, I'm dead...oh, it wanted me to press down instead of up) and had to repeat the sequence. But I was always able to get through it once I'd seen what the game was asking for, and the sequences aren't terrible...just annoying.

This Game of Thrones adventure does a reasonable job of replicating the Game of Thrones feel. The player represents the Forrester family, a northern noble family traditionally tied to the Starks. The game switches you back and forth between various family members in different locations, which is a bit different since most of these kind of games are from a single viewpoint. It's familiar here, though, since the books and HBO show use the same kind of viewpoint switching. There's plenty of intrigue, betrayal, and spiteful enemies, as well as the occasional death of a character who seemed central to the plot.

Both the strongest and weakest points of the story in this game are its close ties to the events in the books/HBO show. On the one hand, I understand that it's a big draw to see the main characters like Tyrion or Cersei or Jon Snow, and to be affected by major events like the Red Wedding. These kind of interactions give the player a feeling of being part of the same world they read about or watch on TV. But the same close ties limit what can happen in the story and make the player's choices seem less important. When you know what's about to happen at the wedding of Joffrey and Margaery, for instance, it seems pretty silly to be engaged in political maneuvering for the favor of Tyrion.

Much of the time, I felt like I was just watching the story rather than being part of it. I could make some small impacts, but some pretty bad things were going to happen no matter what I did. That's a problem with all of these episodic adventure games, but it seemed worse with this one than most. I suppose that's to be expected in the Game of Thrones setting, where bad things seem to happen to most everyone all the time.

Don't expect to learn much in the way of answers at the end of the sixth and final episode. It feels very much like the middle of a story, with only one really big question answered (whether or not the North Grove is a real place). Clearly they're setting up for at least one more season. Had I realized just how much they were going to leave unresolved, I probably wouldn't have played at all until season two was out.

If you're a Game of Thrones fan and looking for something to augment the books/show, this Game of Thrones episodic adventure game is a decent choice. But if you don't like or have no opinion on Game of Thrones in general, I wouldn't bother with this game. It's unlikely to change your mind about the world if you dislike it, and the books/show are a much better way to get involved for the first time.

Life Is Strange

While it is certainly true that life is indeed strange, this post is about the video game, not the philosophical observation. Life Is Strange is an episodic adventure game (similar to the various Telltale games). Note: It's pretty much impossible to completely avoid spoilers when talking about this kind of game, but I'll try to keep it minimal.

The protagonist in Life Is Strange is Max, a photography student recently returned to the town of her childhood in order to attend the prestigious, private Blackwell academy. She almost immediately discovers that she's somehow gained the ability to rewind time. Her first use of this power is to save her friend Chloe, who she hasn't seen for years, from being shot. Max proceeds to use her abilities to solve problems from the mundane (saving the occasional small animal, moving a fellow student to avoid a puddle splash) to the remarkable (saving lives, finding missing persons).

Life Is Strange has two main drivers: a missing-person mystery and the relationship between Max and Chloe. The missing person is Rachel, a girl from Blackwell who was Chloe's friend and went missing just before Max came back to town. Max had dropped out of contact with Chloe after moving away, but they rediscover their friendship as they work toward finding out what happened to Rachel. Chloe has had some terrible life experiences and has reacted by becoming a prickly, difficult-to-like rebel. But she and Max genuinely care for each other, and the game does a great job of showing that relationship.

The game touches on quite a few modern social issues while moving through the mystery-solving and relationship-building. Chloe's step-father is an ex-soldier struggling with reintegration into civilian society. There are several instances of bullying at Blackwell, including one that leads to a suicide attempt. Drug use is rampant among the students. It's fairly heavily implied that Chloe is lesbian or bi-sexual, but unwilling to be open about it. Max does have some opportunity to help in these areas, though she can't always find a resolution..and sometimes attempting to help makes things worse. Much like real life.

Storytelling in Life Is Strange is uneven, particularly early on, but it does get better later. At first, everything you encounter seems mundane and unimportant. Max mostly wanders around Blackwell and discovers a whole lot of standard teenage drama, occasionally using her time powers to harass a bully or smooth out a relationship. I might have been tempted to give up, had I not heard good things from friends about the game. It wasn't until the third episode that I felt the story really picked up, but once it did I was hooked and anxious to finish it out. The storytelling may not be smooth, but in the end I found it to be well worth the effort to get through the rough patches.

There are also some technical and mechanical issues with the game. I noticed several places where the video and audio weren't properly synced up. There were more than a few times when I had a hard time maneuvering Max and/or the camera view so I could select a particular item or other interaction. Nothing game-breaking, but certainly annoying.

The player never gets an explanation of how Max got her powers. We do learn eventually that she has limits, and her abilities might even be causing some of the very catastrophes that she's trying to prevent. I didn't mind that the writers chose to leave that part of the mystery unrevealed, largely because it doesn't really matter where the time abilities came from. The way the story unfolds, it wouldn't make any difference whether it was magic or future technology or anything else.

Playing through Life Is Strange was a very interesting experience. It may not be the most polished game, but I thought the characters came alive, and the story was engrossing once it got going. Well worth the 10-12 hours of playtime.

The Wolf Among Us

I've had The Wolf Among Us sitting in my Steam backlog for many months. Decided recently to finally install and go through it.

The game is one of Telltale's episodic adventure stories, similar to the Walking Dead series. I'd played that one a while back, and enjoyed it enough to put other similar games on my list to buy, including The Wolf Among Us. It was on sale a while back, so I'd picked it up in a Steam sale and it was waiting for me ever since.

The world of The Wolf Among Us is taken from the Fables comic series, though that didn't mean much to me since I've never read it. It's an urban fantasy setting, where characters from fairy tales have come to the mundane world and live in secret. These are known as Fables and they live in Fabletown, a portion of New York. Those who aren't human make use of glamour spells to hide their true forms, or else are kept in seclusion in a hidden area outside the city called the Farm. The story is set in 1986, so many of the modern conveniences like cell phones and Internet access are missing.

The player in The Wolf Among Us is Bigby Wolf, as in Big Bad Wolf. He's given up eating pigs and sheep and children, and is now the sheriff of Fabletown. That's not an official police position, of course, since they're in hiding. So his glamour makes him look more like film noir private eye than a police officer. Except when he's pushed into real fights, when the glamour tends to fail and the wolf comes through.

The story follows Bigby as he investigates a series of murders. Fables are dying, which is a rare thing - they usually live for hundreds of years, if not forever. As the sheriff, it's his job to find and stop the culprit. I won't say anything much about the story details, since there's not a whole lot to be said without spoiling at least some of the fun. But I will mention that I thought there were several heavy-handed hints early on in the story. The characters don't act on them until later, but as the player I noticed. It takes away from the suspense when some pretty obvious clues are being ignored.

Despite all the characters coming from fairy tales, The Wolf Among Us is an adult-themed series. It's got plenty of violence, lots of suggestive art and conversation, all sorts of shady underworld activities, and massive amounts of profanity. Definitely not a kids game. I honestly thought some of it was over the top - trying to get a "gritty" and dark feel to the story is one thing, but you get kind of numb to it after a while.

I played through The Wolf Among Us fairly quickly, in about 8 hours. It felt much like watching a short TV series, with a bit of interaction added in. I enjoyed it, though not as much as I did the Walking Dead series.

Telltale Games' Episodic Adventures

Telltale Games is a studio that has made a name for itself creating episodic adventure games. I've played their Walking Dead series in the past, and have others waiting in my Steam backlog.

These episodic adventure stories are basically interactive graphic novels, where the player is the central character. The "episodic" part refers to how the story is broken up, sort of like chapters of a book or episodes of a television show. Within each episode, you're regularly prompted to choose from a set of choices, usually part of conversations with other characters. The format reminds me a lot of the old choose-your-own-adventure books (which I loved as a kid). Your choices are fairly limited, but they do affect how other characters treat you and how the story unfolds.

Mostly this works smoothly, although occasionally the story will seem to jump around if you make choices that weren't completely integrated into the larger whole. For instance, sometimes a character will refer to a prior comment that they never actually said (but would have, if your choices had been different). Those are pretty rare, but it's a bit jarring when it does happen.

Another issue with the format is that you have to wait until the choices that you're given allow you to make progress. It may seem fairly obvious to the player what your character should be doing - maybe you spotted a clue earlier, or caught another character in a lie - but the choices you're given don't allow you to act on it. It's a necessity of the limited-choice format, but knowing that doesn't make it less annoying.

Unlike a book format, in a video game it's possible to add some action, so there are limited sections where you need to hit various movement keys or click on certain spots in order to help your character in a fight. Personally I could do without those portions, since I'm terrible at them and often end up having to retry them after dying. Fortunately there aren't too many, generally just one or two per episode.

Having made all those complaints, I can still say that these games are a lot of fun to play. How you treat other characters often comes back to affect future interactions, for good or bad. The choices you make don't affect the most basic components of the story, but they can have pretty big effects nonetheless. And the game will show you how many other people made similar choices, which is an interesting window into how others think about the same situations.

Unlike the old choose-your-own-adventure books, I've not gone back through these episodic adventure games to see what would have happened if I'd made other choices. Partly that's just due to time - it takes a lot longer to play through the game again than it did to just flip to another page. But another part of the reason is that the game feels complete once you've gone through it, even if some of your choices didn't lead to the ideal outcomes. I still may play through the games again at some point, but I wouldn't enjoy doing it right away. I'd need time for the old play-through to fade a bit from memory first.