I can hear people’s objections about the lack of even the illusion of player choice, and the way in which you are driven through its spaces on tracks without any real opportunity to explore. I can imagine what the key critiques of it are, even without reading anything about it. I highly recommend this to people who loved the writing in Thomas Was Alone, and to people who like text-based games in general. But the writing and the story are really, really fun. Given my own propensity to try and see as much of the text as I can in one sitting, this can get a bit tedious. Getting to them is less a matter of cleverness and more a matter of simply exhausting all of your options. Still, to progress through the story you must hit on certain crucial bits of dialogue. It still presents a compelling story and offers you the opportunity to role-play within it. The dialogue is choice-based, in the vein of Telltale, except that your choices don’t seem to have a great deal of impact on the actual story - or even the relationships between the characters. The story is a straightforward mystery that you investigate the only way you can: by talking to people on the train. Subsurface Circular has a little bit more fun with the fact that its characters are robots, encumbering some of them with really strange traits, like having their mood entirely determined by the mood of a separate robot. However, in Thomas Was Alone, that fact was basically only relevant to the plot: the character drama proceeds as if the characters are odd humans. It is written by Mike Bithell, of Thomas Was Alone fame, and like that game it is about artificial intelligences. It observes the Aristotelian unities more aggressively than maybe any other game I’ve played: it takes place in real time, as far as I can tell, and your character does not (and cannot) move from their seat in the subway carriage. Subsurface Circular - This is a miniature, dialogue-driven story game that takes place on a single, continuous train ride. So I still feel like the ambiguity won’t be explained away to the point where the airstrip vignette becomes banal.) But then, if there’s any developer we can trust not to make anything too tidy, it’s Cardboard Computer. I really liked it as an inexplicable, beautiful moment that’s basically unmoored from the rest of the story. (A final note for obsessives: it looks like the airstrip from the first chapter, which initially seemed like little more than a haunting non-sequitur, is actually going to take on more significance.
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I’ll say no more, except that if you intend to play KRZ at any point, you can’t skip the intermission features, because in spite of their brevity they are as enthralling as the actual chapters of the game. Or at least save the final, longest video until after you’ve played the game.
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I watched the videos first (save for a couple of hour-long, out-of-universe media art pieces that may be edifying but don’t seem crucial), then played the actual game. But when you take into account the fact that “Un Pueblo De Nada” has a slew of online videos associated with it, all of which are live-action renderings of broadcasts from the public access station we explore in the minisode, it rises to the level of prime KRZ. The minisode itself has less to offer than its two immediate predecessors: “The Entertainment,” which opens up the possibility that the entire game is a stage play being written by one of its supporting characters, and “Here and There Along the Echo,” which makes trawling through a touch-tone telephone menu fun. I could have identified that as a KRZ premise even if you hadn’t told me it’s a video game. Kentucky Route Zero : “Un Pueblo De Nada” (and assorted miscellany) - Kentucky Route Zero ’s final intermission minisode is an elegiac trip behind the scenes of a declining small-town public access station. Readers here will likely be most interested in this one. When I get in a mood, I commit.Īlso, I had three pieces on the radio this weekend. Read on to find out if I managed - and to find out which of the gaming podcasts I tried out was the best. But it feels good to be back to this medium for at least a while, because all three of them were extremely interesting, and it was hard to pick just one to recommend. But I have plenty of that at the moment, so I played no fewer than three games this week.
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And when there’s too much time for them to stretch out into, they can take a toll on your self-worth. I’ve been avoiding games for a while because they stretch out to fill the time. So, what does one do with one’s suddenly guilt-free spare time on an occasion such as this? One plays computer games. This has resulted in a general sense of stability, clear headedness, and purposefulness that I haven’t had for a while. If you’re one of my six regular readers, you will likely already know that I got a job recently.