To my utter dismay, I've hit a bit of a dry gaming patch lately. I've been unlucky enough to encounter not one, but
three games in a row that didn't click with me and that I ditched around the three-hour mark, utterly blasé and disgusted. I'd be tempted to attribute that stroke of bad luck not to a temporary failure of my ever-dependable gaming instinct, but rather to the fact that the involved games were cheap digital-only PSN games, and such games are pretty much hit-or-miss propositions. Without further ado, here are the offenders, along with the reasons they failed to enthrall me:
Vagrant Story: I grabbed that subterranean Squaresoft cult classic for a couple of euros; and at first, it seemed like an inspired purchase. I was extremely fond of that game's claustrophobic vibe, in medias res introduction à la
Dark City and vaguely menacing eroticism reminiscent of '70s exploitation films; and although the gameplay first conjured horrific memories of
Tomb "Them controls are too fussy"
Raider,
Vagrant Story's physics were sleek and polished enough to make me quickly forget that first impression. On the other hand, I was not so enthusiastic about the fighting system, which struck me as dreadfully boring. Instead of treating us to some hack-and-slashy goodness, Squaresoft introduced a tedious extra step in the fighting process: enemies must first be locked on, after which you have to choose the body part that will get the most damage. Whether Squaresoft chose those mechanics for the sake of being original or because automatic aiming with melee weapons was not possible at the time, said mechanics take all the urgency away from combat. On top of that, killing foes is busy work: they don't grant XP and they drop loot once in a blue moon, so you're basically killing them just to clear the way. But the dealbreaker was the fact that each weapon is efficient only against a given type of foe and that weapons must be levelled-up and switched on the fly if one wants to progress smoothly. The though of spending hours of my life levelling up weapons filled me with such dread that I wisely decided to give up on the game. I really liked
Vagrant Story, but I'm not sure I can ever muster the courage to touch it again.
Siralim: I had an instant crush on this game, to be honest. It boasts everything I love: nostalgia-inducing 8-bit graphics, a simple and fast-paced turn-based fighting system, randomly generated dungeons that are a joy to explore, tons of missions that give perfect incentives to roam&grind and, last but not least, the possibility to run solo. With such a perfect list of features, there was absolutely no reason for me to lose all interest in that game after a mere three hours of play, was there? And yet, that's
exactly what happened, and that untimely defection can be blamed on two factors. First, the number of dungeon floors is actually infinite and there is no definitive end to the game; and that killed all my drive to crawl on the spot. If it's up to me to decide when I want to stop crawling, I might as well save myself some time and not start crawling
at all, all the more so as I've never been fond of sandbox games with no grand finale: I need a goal, a challenge to keep me playing. Give your dungeon 500 floors if you want, but make it finite. Secondly and most importantly,
Siralim uses level scaling, which makes level-grinding entirely pointless. This means that the only way to overcome difficulty spikes (the first one being pretty early on at floor 5) is to farm all sorts of materials to improve your weapons and spells; and I dislike farming, which I deem too random and unproductive. All in all, this game is an exercise in sheer, utter
laziness. The developers dispensed themselves with implementing a balanced difficulty curve, thought-out difficulty spikes and a seamless progression towards a final boss; instead, they threw in a bunch of algorithms for random dungeon and mission generation, level scaling and difficulty spikes and called it a day. I don't see why I should play that lazy excuse for a dungeon crawler when there are dozens of better dungeon crawlers available.
Bastion: This highly praised title crystallizes everything I despise about indie games. With its anaemic, simplistic and unpolished gameplay craftily hidden under a thick coating of gimmicks and edgy aesthetic choices,
Bastion is the perfect illustration of the expression "style over substance". Alas, the game's flashiness and apparent originality wear off very quickly. The gimmick of the levels assembling themselves as you progress is just like the 3DS' 3D effect: it wows you at first, but you stop noticing it entirely after five minutes. The narrator gimmick could have been a neat one, if the developers hadn't been dumb enough to reveal said narrator's identity after ten minutes of play. The baroque, colourful art style is undeniably gorgeous, but there's so little variety to the levels that it becomes boring after a while. The story is told in a disjointed way for mystery's sake and ends up being totally incomprehensible in the process; and last but not least, the bleak atmosphere à la
Limbo becomes seriously depressing after a while. All this arty varnish wouldn't be an issue if the gameplay were satisfying, which is unfortunately not the case:
Bastion's real-time fighting system is sloppy, unprecise and frustrating. There are often so many mobs attacking at once that the only way to progress is to slash and shoot blindy while running around, dodging and chain-healing; and while these hectic one-against-hundreds battles are undeniably thrilling at first, they quickly become irritating. Enemies also feel a bit too
insubstantial to be really pleasant to slaughter, and that's all to blame on their wobbly hitboxes. Hitboxes are
everything in Action-RPGs and can make or break a real-time fighting system; in the case of
Bastion, they don't utterly break the fighting system, but they certainly don't help its case either. Once I got bored of the fancy gimmicks and fully realized the gameplay's utter lack of depth, there was no more hope for
Bastion and I dropped it just like its two predecessors.
There's at least one good thing to be found in this series of unexciting games: if I lose access to my digital games once the PSN bails out, I won't shed a single tear for these three. Needless to say,
Siralim and
Bastion reinforced my natural aversion to indie games, and I don't think I'll purchase many more of these in the future. For one gem like my beloved
Rainbow Moon, there are ten turds like
Siralim and
Bastion that rely on lazy algorithms and attention-grabbing gimmicks to get by. I have a couple of digital indies left to play, such as
Titan Souls and
Hotline Miami, and I wouldn't be surprised if I end up hating them as well. But hey, only play will tell! And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to dig up a REAL game from my precious collection to compensate for that festival of mediocrity. (Yeah, I know; that jibe's easy and cheap, but it feels
so good). Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!