Oblivion Playthrough Part 2

In Skingrad there’s a guy that solicits you to stalk three people on three separate days that he suspects of spying on him. They’re all just regular people going about their lives and minding their own business. So now I’ve seen a quest where a group of crazy people incorrectly think one guy is conspiring against them and a quest where one guy incorrectly thinks a group of people is conspiring against him. I actually remember this quest from when I tried to play Oblivion the first time. You report to him three times that no one is watching him which convinces him that you’re part of the conspiracy and he attacks you. This time however when watching the second mark as he worked in a field I accidentally drew enemies from a nearby Oblivion gate when I went over to map it. The enemies came over and killed the guy. I told the other guy he was dead and he just assumed I had to off him. That seemed to be the factor which convinced him I was trustworthy so he never attacked me. When he gave me the name of the third mark I remembered reading the name previously and thought oh shit, I think that guy died fighting enemies outside the castle too. This happens a lot. Enemies follow me and everyone I pass along the way gets involved thinking they can punch a troll to death and then they become a casualty unless I decide to turn around and save them but sometimes I can’t. The entrance to Skingrad is littered with the bodies of enemies that I unintentionally lured there and then the guards took them out. I don’t intentionally get NPCs killed but whenever someone dies I take anything of worth off of them which is usually just their house key and then I go rob their house. Anyway, I’d already robbed this guy’s house but it was actually his brother who I previously got killed and took his key. They live in the same house.

On another quest I was asked to go investigate an argonian’s missing daughter who recently traveled to a small town called Hackdirt on business with her horse. When you get there everyone wants you to leave and then you find a secret cave system where there is a cult that has captured the girl. Originally I assumed she had been captured by slave traders but she’s actually to be sacrificed. Argonians are always getting enslaved or sacrificed. So I free her and then she has to get her best buddy horse and then we begin the slowest escort quest ever back to the city. The horse trots slower than you walk to the bathroom at night in the dark in a room full of coffee tables and she steers it right past bears and an Oblivion gate and then she has to get off and fight instead of just running away. You’re on a damn horse, woman. Act like it.

Another overall main quest is to get military support from all the surrounding cities to protect Bruma during the final assault. You talk to the resident count or countess and they tell you they can’t spare men while there’s an Oblivion gate open right outside the city walls. Every single place has the same story. Most of the time there is just one obvious gate that’s really close but at Skingrad there were FIVE open gates in the immediate vicinity of the city showing up on the map and that’s just the ones I’ve mapped. There may be more. I’ve never seen so many in one place. They have a serious problem. I went into the one specified Oblivion gate and shut it like the guy asked. Well, guy, your gate problem is all taken care of. How about them fighters? You should probably send them like right now while I’m talking to you without thinking or looking out the window.

Equipment in this game is so damn fragile. It only takes maybe three or four fights with moderately powerful enemies to send your smaller armor pieces nosediving to zero durability. Effectiveness of everything goes down with the durability so it’s not like you can just ignore it till it’s broken. It starts having consequences on your battle performance almost immediately. My sword becomes useless so fast I should be duel wielding a repair hammer with it to fix it in between strikes. I go into these Oblivion hellholes where there is nowhere to rest or buy supplies or repair things so I have to make sure I have a lot or repair hammers. The only thing I do more than repair is heal and that is so incredibly ineffective because I mostly have to use magic to do it and I’m not a magic guy. It takes forever because I have to restore my magika with potions or sitting on my ass and waiting. I have to conserve my healing potions for big fights because they’re expensive or I can’t find them or I don’t have the ingredients to make them because I don’t even know what the ingredients are because alchemy has no sort of documented recipe book. It’s just you picking up random shit from plants, tossing it in a mortar and reading what it does and it’s usually something worthless. I end up making it anyway for the alchemy experience and what the hell else am I going to do with 35 spittle sticks and scamp skin or whatever?

I spend probably more time recuperating from battle as I do actually playing in these areas and it’s not like you even know where you’re going when you enter an Oblivion gate. The objective is always to get to the top of a tower and grab a sigil which closes the gate and transports you back but every gate is different. They can have five or six towers in them with traps and switches and hallways leading to other towers. You don’t know which tower it’s in or precisely how to get there and it’s just a big pain in the ass all around. Eventually I realized that I don’t HAVE to engage the enemies. Hell, I chose The Stallion as my birth sign which is plus 20 to speed and I’ve been leveling up speed to be my dominant stat. I’m the fastest thing on two legs in the game. All I really need is that stupid sigil at the top of the correct tower. Once I stopped treating Oblivion gates like coliseum battles and more like American Ninja Warrior or the Aggro Crag from Nickelodeon Guts they became a lot more fun. The downside is you miss out on the loot but Deadra shit is so heavy anyway you can pick up maybe one sword and a scroll before you’re over encumbered,

One of my main abilities is security which is basically your ability to pick locks. Even if you’re not planning on being a thief there are still plenty of legitimate, legal domain instances where chests in a dungeon are locked or you need to get in or out of somewhere and don’t have a key. It’s a very common occurrence. Picking locks requires you to have a lockpick. When you access a lock a little minigame screen comes up with an interior shot of the lock and its number of pins depending on the lock difficulty. I pretty much never see anything below three pins (or medium.)  I know how this minigame believes it should work but as far as I can tell it’s fucking impossible. You need to manipulate the pick with the mouse to get all pins up and then click to unlock before they come back down. The problem is that the pick is so ridiculously slow and unresponsive that by the time you get one pin up and move over to the next the first one is already back down. It’s physically impossible to do more than a single pin. The only option is the auto try button which is basically a roll of the dice based on your skills to see if it unlocks. You just keep pressing till you succeed but every time you fail you break a lockpick. You could get it on your first try or you could go through twenty picks if you even have that many. After playing this game for sixty hours I can conclude that there is no reliable place to get lockpicks. There is no store. I’ve not discovered any black market that sells illicit items. You just have to find them around and they are not common items. It’s super annoying because I never have any. When I do it’s not enough to unlock anything. I just have to leave every locked chest. I also basically can’t level up this skill which means my character will in turn level slower.

Two of the main quests are to get mystic armor and a grand welkynd stone from a couple of dungeons that are predominantly occupied by obnoxious ethereal enemies. As you might guess conventional weapons do nothing against them. You need destruction magic spells, magic weapons or silver weapons. My destruction magic skills are virtually non existent and can’t be sustained for very long by my tiny magika meter. I have magical weapons but they have a lower base damage than my regular weapons. The magical charges wear down so quick and cost a small fortune to recharge so I never recharge them. Luckily they still do the base damage to the ghosts just minus the magical effects. The other thing is I can’t fix damaged magical equipment because I’m not a journeyman level armorer. Not to mention that it’s really difficult to get far enough away from unseen enemies to actually be allowed to repair. So I have weak magical weapons which get even weaker as I use them and I can’t fix them. It’s not like Diablo where I can just use a scroll of town portal to pop back into town at a moment’s notice so I have to run all the way back out of the dungeon and fast travel to a city where I probably have to wait for the armorer to open so they can repair my weapons and then run all the way back to where I was in the dungeon. My other solution is to use the pricier silver arrows with my nice regular bow which I can fix but then I eventually run out of arrows so I have to run all the way back out of the dungeon and fast travel to a city where I probably have to wait for the armorer to open so they can sell me what I can afford of silver arrows after selling loot from the dungeon and then run all the way back to where I was in the dungeon. It sucks. I guess I should be glad that there’s fast travel at all. In Morrowind it was just walking, levitating or riding an enormous flea.

Speaking of Morrowind, is it just me or is Cyrodiil a lot smaller than Morrowind. In Morrowind there seemed to be a lot more variety. There was more water. There was lava and volcanoes. There were robots and people in floating houses and people living in mushrooms. There were tons of little islands. It just seemed in general to be bigger and more fantastic than Cyrodiil. In Oblivion there’s just a handful of edifices and geographical features that you’re going to encounter on any trip and they’re all pretty standard fantasy fare and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all so adventuring is less enticing. In Morrowind you could set off into the woods with the prospect of a mushroom village or a city in a giant pyramid or a goddess shrine with a massive statue being over the next hill and that would effectively keep you from accomplishing your main quest in the best way possible.

I made a point to close all necessary gates to appease the rulers and gather a big team to defend Bruma. I hadn’t noticed it but one of the towns that still needed assistance was Kvatch which was the first Oblivion gate I’d closed with the help of the local guards as part of the story quest. It was sort of an early tutorial on Oblivion. The portal here appeared within the city and the whole place was completely devastated. It’s burned to the ground and I don’t think a single person was spared. Anyway, I closed that gate and thought everything was done so I left and followed the story quest. It wasn’t until pretty much the end of the game that I came back to see what help they could offer and realized that the city was still under siege by daedra and those guards I’d helped had just been there waiting for me to come back so they could oust the demonic forces and check on the count. One look at the town will clue you in on how the count fared. All the guards with me got annihilated because the enemies in the city have now been scaled to my level and there’s like ten of them attacking us at once. This is actually the hardest part in the game and it’s all because I didn’t do it when I was supposed to. All these guys with me are doomed anyway and once they’re dead I’ll get swamped with an insurmountable number of powerful daedra so I just ran through. Spoiler alert: the count is dead.

The new emperor who’s been telling me what plays to run the whole game tells me we have to let the cult open a super Oblivion gate outside of Bruma. This is the gate meant to let out the massive daedra doomsday tank weapon into our world. This is where the soldiers you’ve been collecting are supposed to defend you and the city while the smaller gates open up. When the big gate opens and you step inside alone, you see the device and get a quest update. Grab the sigil in 13 minutes or game over. YES! This is the 13 minutes I’ve been training for. The only two curveballs you get here are a switch you need to hit and a sigil keeper that you have to kill to get a key to progress. You get the sigil and the gate closes on the machine destroying it but we’re not done. Now I have to enter a portal made by the emperor to go to Paradise, assassinate the cult leader and bring back the Amulet of Kings. You can’t leave Paradise until you succeed so pack your bags and pace yourselves. I avoid fights in all possible instances because all my gear but my sword is magical now, I can’t fix anything else and I need it in good condition for the boss fight. This guy is a powerful caster who can summon infinite minions. You fight him in a throne room that has stairs leading to an upper tier ledge on either side. I am so damn fast and can jump so high that his minions can’t even lay a hand on me. I equip my bow and go up high and the second anyone reaches me I leap to the ledge on the other side of the room and they’re back to square one. I get the amulet back and escort the emperor to to the Imperial City where… more portals open up. The city is under a massive attack. The enormous Mehrunes Dagon is now in the city and it looks like all is lost. In a last ditch effort the emperor uses the power of the amulet to transform into a huge dragon to destroy the monster. He then turns to stone becoming an imposing monument to himself right in the middle of the city. Wow. I did it. I finished it.

Oblivion Playthrough Part 1

Every once in a while I reinstall an Elder Scrolls game on my computer and make a concerted effort to try and play it to completion. I have Morrowind with all the expansions and Oblivion. Prior to this I’ve attempted three or four playthroughs between the two games and they always end inconclusively for me. In Morrowind there is a story quest pretty early in the game where you’re supposed to find some tiny-ass object in a large dimly lit Dwemer ruins dungeon. I have read walkthroughs. I have searched that place top to bottom in two or three separate playthroughs. I can not find that fucking quest item. This is for all intents and purposes the end of the story for me. I leave. I continue playing. I explore. I steal stuff. I do sidequests and level up. I have fun but I have no ultimate goal and eventually I stop. I don’t really remember what happened with Oblivion. I guess I just got distracted and lost my place. Think of this as a blog post and review hybrid.

So this is Oblivion. You know how it goes. You start on the make a character screen like “I’m gonna make a badass looking mofo!” Twenty minutes of adjusting slider bars and you’re like “Maybe I’ll just make a regular guy.” Another twenty minutes of slider bars and you’re settling for “How about someone who looks human.” Another five minutes of making changes undetectable to the human eye and you’re ready to start your adventure with the lovechild of Steve Buscemi and Ron Perlman.

The game suggests a character class based on the few skills you hone during the introductory dungeon. It pegged me as an assassin but all I did was use the scant amount of equipment it gave me as it gave it to me. How could I not be an assassin? You do get to ultimately choose but I just went with the suggestion because I knew I could immediately start training in that class because I already had the proper equipment. So I'm a Nord Assassin. Another important piece of information is that I have no manual for this game. I bought it a decade ago as in PC two pack bundled with Bioshock and there's no manual for either game in the box. I have to learn everything in game or piece it together based on my experiences in Morrowind.

When I got out of the sewers after being released from my prison cell and the game proper started I went to the nearby Imperial City to sell the junk I’d hoarded. The first quest I found had to do with investigating a suspicious local merchant with absurdly low prices that was dinging the sales of the other merchants. I was supposed to tail him after he closed his shop so I did. I followed him all night. He went two places before going back to his shop in the morning. Here’s what I learned about him. He enjoys talking about the same boring shit that all the other NPCs like to talk about and he never sleeps. Thanks for wasting my time with this bullshit. Not exactly a good hook for the game.

I forgot about that and picked up the main quest which involved delivering the emperor’s amulet which he entrusted to me moments before his death. I eventually find the son of the emperor, whom this is all news to, and convince him that he's the guy all of Cyrodiil needs as a savior lest we be destroyed by Oblivion. Turns out the emperor was assassinated by members of the Mystic Dawn cult which is a doomsday cult that keeps opening up Oblivion gates all over the place and releasing all manner of demons into our world. So I escort this guy to safety. Some things happen and dammit, the cult steals the the Amulet of Kings which is a critical tool in stopping them.

On one of my earlier successful side quests I spoke to a woman who told me her husband had been tricked and robbed by two ladies of the evening. He was too embarrassed to tell the guard so they wanted to solicit a decoy John to get his stuff back. She told me to talk to her husband in their house. Their house turned out to be locked in the afternoon. Not really knowing what to do I picked the lock and went in. I spoke to him and he told me when and where I could find the two women. I left out the door and AAAAAAAAHHHH!

These damn guards. They have some kind of shining sense and know when a lock is picked within city limits and will just spontaneously appear before you, highjacking the camera with an extreme closeup and a booming voice giving you a heart attack. It's like watching some kind of screamer. When you get caught doing something illegal other than assault you get the option of paying a fine and losing any stolen goods, going to prison and losing experience and your stolen goods or resisting arrest. Has anybody ever picked pay a fine or go to fucking prison? Maybe if you're a monk or something and need to stay virtuous when you go on pilgrimages and you can't recall what you did and when. But otherwise you're obviously just going to reload the game and try again or pick resist arrest and run away. Resisting doesn't even raise your bounty as long as you don't fight them. And while we're on the subject of guards with bullshit magical powers you can't talk to them or they will call you on your stolen shit. How can they tell? My stuff is in large concealed. Do they have x-ray vision? Do you just submit to a voluntary strip search when you speak to a guard? What's the difference between a stolen carrot and a legally obtained one… which I also stole from someone's garden? By the end of the game I had two gifted signet rings in my inventory from different people. If anything THAT should raise red flags because it makes it look like I've been stealing from nobles or I’m a con artist or something. Luckily you in large don’t need to talk to guards so it’s not usually a problem.

So I went to the tavern and made a date with the would be whores, (I guess they’re just thieves?) to meet at their secluded cottage at night. I went in, told them it was a sting, they jumped me and two guards burst in through the door to help me who were none other than the supposed couple I’d gotten the quest from. So it was a double sting. Apparently they needed an unknown face from out of town to play a john to bring down these thieves. Okay… well why in the hell did I get in trouble for picking the lock on the house that a guard told me to go to to meet another guard to do a quest where I help the guards?

At some point I had to ask a goddess statue for Insight on what to do next. Before it speaks to you the nearby followers tell you you have to make an offering of glow dust. What the fuck is glow dust? It comes from will o wisps which are conveniently nearby. I suddenly had a PTSD flashback to the first and last time I saw one of these in my previous playthrough attempt. I made the mistake of attacking one while exploring in the woods not knowing they're deceptively powerful and impervious to all non magical physical attacks… and they heal themselves and they are invisible 80% of the time. I quickly realized that I was outmatched and ran but I could not shake the damn thing. Eventually I came across a mounted guard who assisted me. I stopped to watch but I should have used that time to run because it killed him and the horse he rode in on. I kept running all the way to the Imperial City leaving a trail of corpses behind but it followed me the whole way. I passed the stables where guards and ignorant serfs alike were having at this unstoppable scourge. They were all slaughtered. I ran inside the city gate. It could not pass through doors and thank fuck because I'm fairly certain the city could have been laid to waste by a single stupid glowy nebula. But even after I more or less escaped it it was still camped right there outside the city likely murdering every hapless person wandering by making everyone rue the day I tried to hit it with a sword.

After soliciting a lot of scholarly help in deciphering four rare banned books I located the hideout of the doomsday cult and entered under the false pretense of becoming a new initiate. I did everything they told me to including handing over all my stuff and making a blood sacrifice. The cult leader I was after left through a portal with the amulet which left me alone with his tribe of weirdos and his sacred portal making book which I’m supposed to take for a backup plan. The second you take that book at least two dozen cultists are going to try to kill you and I have nothing on me but a robe and the sacrificial dagger. You can’t sneak steal the book. You can’t even invisible steal it. Super lame. The guy who showed you in and has all your stuff follows you around like a Best Buy worker expecting you to start stealing shit. I need to kill this guy to get my stuff but I can’t do it very fast without my stuff and the longer it takes the more assholes show up to kill you. I ended up nudging him off of the edge of the upper tier in the big chamber about four or five times which killed him without triggering a fight. Then I took my stuff, grabbed the book and ran. You know I was kind of disappointed that Mystic Dawn doesn't show up in the list of factions you belong to. Technically I completed the initiation so I should be in it. Maybe they kicked me out.

Alchemy is one of my primary skills. I guess the idea is that assassins make their own poisons. I like alchemy. I always try to do alchemy no matter what class I choose. Every time I see a new plant I pick as much of it as I can wondering what kind of potions I can make with it. It's usually crap. You're pretty limited until you're a higher level and your character can comprehend more of the effects of different ingredients. Every ingredient has four potential effects good and bad. You're supposed to match ingredients with like effects to produce a potion with those desired results. The potency is dictated by the quality of the equipment you have and I don't know, probably your training. All of that makes sense until you see the actual product. Potions in this game are ridiculous. Everything about them is unintelligible. You can drink one to increase your luck by five points for fifteen seconds. Yeah, modify the most nebulous stat in videogames for an inconsequential amount of time. Great. My inventory is cluttered with small groups of potions that do the exact same thing but with a one second difference in the duration so they don't stack together.

There are even potions that do the exact same thing like “cure disease” but one weighs more and has a higher sell value. How? Why? What's the point? And just as weird there are potions that do things like resist paralysis by 14% for 30 seconds. It’s such a tiny difference for such a short period it wouldn’t even make a difference ultimately. And I don’t even know any enemies where I’m certain that they cause paralysis where I would buff accordingly to fight them. Hell, I don’t even know what paralysis looks like in Oblivion. Is it when you’re fighting those anthropomorphic spiders and you just suddenly keel over helpless for a bit? That effect doesn’t even last long enough for me to care about digging out a cure paralysis potion from my inventory. You’d have to be completely neurotic to want to micromanage such a pedantic string of fights and largely insignificant tweaks to variables.

Scrolls do basically the same thing but have an even wider assortment of magical effects. What the hell does “absorb skill: marksman” or “absorb skill: alchemy” do? Does it make you level up that stat quicker when using that skill? No it doesn’t because it’s something that you cast on a target and it has an “X points over X seconds” description. So does it take from the target’s skills to buff yours? How do you know which targets even have those skills to rob? How does it work? Skills are not quantified by points, they’re quantified by levels. Why in the flying fuck would you want to buff your alchemy skills in a fight? Who wasted their time concepting this scroll? After experimenting with the scrolls I discovered that the spells which are cast on touch make a lightning tether from the target to you which Presumably lowers their stat while buffing yours. If you check your stats it will show the skill is higher IN LEVEL not in points because that isn’t a thing. It then wears off off after 10 seconds. Once again, who the fuck cares? Especially the alchemy one? YOU CAN’T EVEN DO ALCHEMY AROUND ENEMIES. IT IS 100% USELESS.

Outlast 2

I bought the Outlast Trilogy for PS4 new for $12 on clearance and I played through all three back to back. I'm going to focus on the last one, Outlast 2 And because it's on PS4`I get to take my own screenshots. Yay! I love the disclaimers in these games. It’s like “You know why you’re here. Enjoy the game, sicko.”

Outlast 2 is a run and hide survival horror game just like its two predecessors. You have no weapons or flashlight but a trusty camcorder with a night vision mode that allows you to see in the dark with clear atmospheric conditions. This mode uses batteries which you have to collect to keep it functional. Some differences between this and the first two include now taking damage and needing to heal yourself with bandages which you can find. The run button is now L3 instead of L1 which is now the look behind button and let me tell you that was hard getting used to after playing two games with it the other way around. The other two games took place in the same asylum and secret testing facility but this one has the distinct setting of rural Arizona so it’s outside or underground for a majority of the game. Now I haven’t been to ALL of Arizona but I find it hard to believe that there’s a part of Arizona looks like this. Yosemite in California yes or somewhere in the Pacific Northwest maybe but this just seems like too much granite and too many trees for Arizona. Where are the red rock formations, sagebrush and Joshua trees?

The premise is that you’re a cameraman for a reporter, (your wife,) going to investigate the disappearance of a young woman when your helicopter crashes rather abruptly from unseen forces. You arise from the crash with a dead pilot and a missing wife so you set off to find her which takes you straight into the heart of a backwater commune of cultists. Their religion has loose connections to Christianity but kind of runs afoul being centered around rape and human sacrifice.

There appear to be a lot of different horror influences here all melded into one. It’s a lot of Children of the Corn and The Hills Have Eyes. And then there’s some Blair Witch Project and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And then at the end there’s even some The Descent and even one iconic death scene that was straight out of The Omen.

The enemies in this game are all over the place in breed. They’re all humans I think but there’s insane religious zealots which inhabit the ramshackled farm and village areas. They’re like The Ganados from Resident Evil 4. There’s sick people who have been quarantined to a shanty town on the outskirts. There’s weird tribal bush people in the deep wilderness and a couple of guys resembling Master and Blaster, (let’s see how many pop culture references we can do,) who hunt you down with flaming crossbow bolts. There’re mud people in the caves. It’s like a whole freak ecosystem. There’s also no way to tell who’s going to try to kill you on sight, who’s only going to try to kill you if you’re up in their face and who just wants to puke on the ground and be left alone.

There are chase segments where you have to crawl away from pursuers through a tight spot either under a house or through a cave and you move so damn slow I’m constantly thinking there’s no way they’re not going to catch me but they don’t because they’re moving just as slow I guess. it’s almost comical that it’s a dire life or death flight measured in feet per minute.

The hiding places have been significantly downgraded. Not many lockers or beds around. Instead you mostly have water or containers of water which are hard to see out of and leave your vision blurry when you come out and oh my God, is that blood? I can seriously submerge myself in a drum full of blood to hide? Wouldn’t I have to spend the rest of the game running around looking like Carry after prom night?

Ignoring the big recurring baddies, guys with flashlights are the worst enemy. If you have to go within ten yards of them they will eventually spin around and spot you if you aren’t behind something. Considering you can’t hurt your enemies, the convention that you can essentially see in the dark while they’re effectively blind in it makes it a level playing field but guys with flashlights just screws you. However you are granted another tool which wasn’t in the first game, the camera microphone. Switch it on when using the camera view and you get a sound reading on your HUD. You can eavesdrop but that’s not that important. It works kind of like a geiger counter. Depending on where you aim the camera the bar goes up when you center on a noise source which is usually a person. The higher the bar, the closer the person to your proximity. This thing works at a good distance and through walls so it’s almost like you can see through objects in a crude sense.

Like the other games there are backstory or exposition documents scattered around that you can collect and specific events or objects that you can record with your camera. I like how your camera shows a timeline of everything you’ve gathered and shows blanks when you missed something not that you can do a damn thing about it. In the other games you could flick on your camera and the thing in front of you is recorded but in Outlast 2 you have to stand there for 10-15 seconds shooting what is usually a static object and if you move at all you risk interrupting and resetting it. Really? Come on. If it’s an event, you sometimes need to immediately turn the camera on and begin recording before whatever it is ends and you never see it again. But there’s so much crazy shit happening all the time it’s impossible to tell what you’re supposed to document and what’s just another Christmas tree decorated with entrails. Why am I recording this? It’s like the hundredth… one of these I’ve seen tonight.

The segment where you have to go rafting down the river sucks. When I started out and had to paddle across the lake I kept getting hung up on an invisible wall with no way to tell that I wasn’t moving at all. In the river the raft handles like shit but it’s basically made like the door to a wood cabin so kudos on making a door that floats like a door I guess. There are two places on the river where you are scheduled to get wrecked and lose your raft but somehow on my first try I maneuvered past both of them and made it to my destination with significantly less sidetrack and hassle. However when I got there there was no way to dock and get off either by climbing up the ladder or getting on the pier because it’s only supposed to happen as part of a triggered event. I was just stuck floating around on the worst raft ever. I went past the dock and down river to a place you’re not supposed to be able to go, (still unaware things were amiss even though I’d been clipping through objects in the environment,) and I found where the river terminates in a low res pond which I actually think is creepier than the regular textures.

You periodically switch back and forth between the twisted nightmarish present reality and a twisted nightmarish version of your flashbacks from something that happened to you in Catholic school. These sections kind of remind me of FEAR (the haunted office simulator game.) When you’re at the school sometimes the Upsidedown leaks in and the Demogorgon appears and chases you. (Yes, that’s actually the most efficient way to describe it.) But seriously this monster is crazy. It’s a guy with a bunch of arms. I didn’t get a good image because he’s kind of ethereal and teleports and kills you on touch so it’s hard. Initially I was okay with this but I got increasingly annoyed with being continually transported here because I wasn’t seeing the relevance to the actual storyline I was invested in and so it just feels like I have to do busy work until I’m allowed to go back to the forest and get chased by Ganados again. It’s like the game just gets interrupted occasionally with some other game that you have to play. And when I say that I really think these should have been two seperate games. The two have too much diversion to help eachother but enough content to go on solo. Why do they need each other? The school has its own plot and identity as a psychological horror game with one big badguy and some weird phenomena that sometimes makes you question your sanity. The most interesting thing is when the game pulls off a seamless transition between being in the Arizona wilderness and then suddenly you’re in the school or vice versa. It implies that you’re having a mental episode which is reinforced when you check your footage of things from the school and it’s distorted beyond recognition. It’s like the stuff you see there isn’t really happening… but it can still kill you. The problem is this cool mechanic is wasted on transitioning from one dangerous and scary place to another dangerous and scary place. It could be so much more unsettling with a contrast between one location where you are (at least relatively) safe or there are at least rules and constants of normalcy you can cling to and then another location that is chaotic and upsetting. A good example is when you hear the siren in Silent Hill and the world changes into Alternate Silent Hill. Silent Hill as it stands is a creepy abandoned town but that’s it. It also has monsters in it but somewhere in your mind you are familiar with the concept of an abandoned town because that’s something real. When the siren goes off, suddenly the world around you ceases to make sense as you’re thrown head first into a rusty metal hellscape. As bad a place as regular Silent Hill is, when you hear that siren you feel panic because things are going to get worse and similarly when you come back out again you feel relief. In Outlast 2 you’re just going from one Alternate Silent Hill to another. There’s no sense of dread when it happens. Instead of “Oh no, it’s happening” it’s “Great, this shit again.” 

It would be interesting to see this psychological world transition concept fleshed out into its own horror game. It needs to stay subtle, no defined crossover moment. Maybe something like Jacob’s ladder. I imagine a game taking place in a mundane setting of everyday life and then it takes a sinister turn and you start seeing freaky shit. Borrowing the Vietnam War backdrop of the movie, the player would have PTSD episodes triggered by something and then your environment would change to reflect your twisted perceptions. Maybe you go to trim bushes or something in your backyard and then you turn around and find you’re stranded alone deep in the jungle with monsters signifying a distorted version of the Vietcong you remember fighting. Maybe you’re working on your car and you go under it with a flashlight and suddenly you’re back in ‘Nam exploring a VC tunnel system full of traps. The line between reality and your nightmares becomes increasingly blurred and you eventually end up killing your wife thinking she’s a monster or something. I’d buy it… then again I buy anything that’s horror.

Not until the end of the game do you get a clear flashback of what happened between you and the girl you knew in school. In it you are your child self and it plays out as an unaltered truthful memory so it’s odd to see this blood smear through the stairs door window I recognize from an earlier foray into the school, (you can see it in the image of the many armed man). Oops. I think the level designers forgot to clean that up.

There doesn’t seem to be any line that these games won’t cross. Rape, crucifixion, baby murder, baby birth, full frontal nudity, castration and even what appeared to me like a guy masturbating over a corpse… It was a nice little romp.

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a first person survival horror game based off of the Alien franchise. You play as the now adult daughter of the movie franchise's main character, Ripley. You investigate a derelict space station, Sevastopol looking for the black box data of the Nostromo mining vessel which her mother of course destroyed and fled in the first movie attempting to escape the alien scourge which has now infested the very same station you are trapped on. So in the timeline this should be between Alien and Aliens while Ripley is still in stasis in the escape shuttle.

In case you're wondering how I feel about the Alien franchise going into this game, I've read the original book, I own the original movie trilogy and the AVPs (if you care about that,) I have a Nostromo T-shirt and my dog's name is Ripley. I've never played an Alien video game… and still haven't seen Covenant.

Isolation is heavy on sneaking and hiding. You hack computers, cut through metal hatches, force open doors and generally go places you're not supposed to go to do things you're not supposed to do. The alien is definitely not the only threat you have to worry about on your way.

There’s a long build up of quiet and isolation up to your first encounter with enemies. Four armed humans appear in a big room searching for me which is a bit excessive when all I have is a wrench. When I heard them coming I fled the room. I soon discovered that there was no way I could reenter and do whatever undetected to pick them off, (assuming that’s even possible to do.) There are utility panels in a lot of places in the game where you can turn on or off local utilities like air filtration, lights, sprinklers, loudspeakers, etc. Honestly I’m mystified as to how most of this shit can help me if it does. I only ever used them to open doors and turn off security cameras which is pretty straight forward. In this room I can shut off air filtration which will make the air cloudy which I’m going to guess will make me harder to detect. The problem is that there are no boxes anywhere near where I am and it’s not possible to reach one undetected. I had no distraction items in my inventory so I just sat and thought and sat and thought. I couldn’t even pull the enemies from the room and get them to chase me. Eventually I just turned the game off. When I came back The four people had spawned outside of their room just right there around the corner from the save point. They came at me in a conga line and I just killed them one by one with the wrench as they emerged save for the last one. What was that all about? A glitch or did the game just realize I was up shit creek without a paddle and gave me a leg up?

After that I had an encounter with the xenomorph it was short and uneventful. It was like an introduction more than anything.

The next area was my first real serviceable stealth test. The area is populated with numerous ‘Working Joes’ as they are called in the game. These are low grade maintenance androids kind of like a simple prototype of Ash from the movie(s). They certainly couldn't pass for human though. They look like demon possessed store mannequins and are one of the freakiest video game enemies I’ve ever seen. Their uncanny valley appearance combined with glowing eyes and an emotionless reprimanding of you for making them waste company time while they search for you so they can beat you to death just for being in a restricted area is effectively terrifying. They're stronger and more resilient than humans but slower. I think the best part about this is that once you get attacked by one of these you don't trust any of them for the rest of the game which now that I think of it mirror's Ripley's fear of the synthetic in Aliens that looks like Ash, (the android that basically got everyone killed.) I did pretty well overall on this part.

 It wasn’t until the second encounter with the alien that I really hit the learning curve brick wall. The alien comes out of a vent after you get a password off of the computer. Your objective is to find a specific ID card in the medical facility you’re in and then get out. If the alien catches you, you die. It’s invulnerable to weapons, is really perceptive in sight and sound and also runs faster than you which means remaining undetected at all times is pretty much imperative to success. You’d think you could just sneak out of the room and go somewhere else and your chances of encountering it would be lower. NO. Similar to the rubber band AI in a racing game which magically keeps you from getting too far ahead of the computer players, you will never be reasonably distanced from the alien. Even though it doesn’t sense you it’s always going to be meandering around within 15 yards of your location at all times. (At least in this place.) Forget looking for the fucking ID. You barely have enough of a window to pop out of one locker and into another a few steps down the hall before your motion detector shows a dire proximity to the alien again. Obviously you have to enter a hiding space before it sees you or you’re fucked. Sometimes it will investigate your hiding spot. The first time this happened a ‘hold breath’ prompt came up which I missed and then died. The second time it happened I passed the prompt but then a second prompt came up for ‘lean back’ which I failed and then died. It gives you like half a second to react. What a fussy bitch. The time after that the alien just went straight to ripping open the locker and killing me with no prompts. It hadn’t seen me or even entered the room yet. Yes, by my assessment it seemed to spontaneously appear in the room after I hid for the sole purpose of killing me. What the fuck? Have fucking mercy. This is ridiculous. It’s like trying to hide from God. I keep wondering if there’s more than one of them or if it can teleport because it's just always where you are. You can leave it behind in one room and run straight into it in the next as it exits a ceiling vent in front of you. I tried messing around with a utility box I found in a pretty dark and obscure little nook. I got impaled from behind with my back against the wall. How did it find me? If I can’t successfully interact with THIS without dying then what the fuck can I interact with? How is the alien coming out of a solid wall behind me? I can’t walk around. I can’t stop to pick up or read things. Hiding works about half the time. How am I supposed to accomplish anything? Some of the automatic doors just plain take forever to let you in too. Is there even any excuse for this other than to be a pain in the ass and potentially deadly? This is simple technology in supposedly the distant future. It would be impossible to find an automatic door in present day that comes even close to opening this fucking slow. Yeah it's probably just loading the area beyond the door but it's still bullshit.

I got into a discussion with a GameStop employee who asked me how I felt about Isolation. I told him, “It's kind of a pain in the ass.” He told me he never finished it and it's on his backlog now. And he said that the alien learns from what you do and adapts. When I look at the trophy stats for the game it shows that only 28% of players complete the game, (get the final chapter trophy.) The game is a legit pain in the ass but I did get better.

I’ve never failed this abysmally hard at sneaking or at a video game in general since LAX in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which was one of the very rare occasions I abandoned a game and it was at the very end. I spent one entire gaming session just dying in Alien: Isolation like 20 times. I accomplished nothing except learning how to run and hide and what places were pointless to visit in the obnoxiously large area. Now that I know you can lean back while hiding I do it automatically. When I turned the game back on the next night I died twice in quick succession but then found the ID and escaped. I thought that was the end of that encounter but no. It's still skulking around for the rest of the chapter. The chapter finale gets pretty ridiculous. You're supposed to get to the elevator and leave the area but you have to run a gauntlet where not only the alien is lurking but men with guns who are looking for you. You don't even have to deal with the men. Just hide somewhere, count to twenty and they’re probably all dead because the same improbably cruel criteria for staying alive also applies to your human foes. (Combat and running is to the alien what premarital sex is to a murderer in a slasher movie. You do it around them, you're dead.) Suddenly they added vent openings in the ceiling that are instant death by alien if you just walk under them. They don't even show up on your detector. So you have to navigate through this dark area watching everything from the monitor in your hand to the hall in front of you to the fucking ceiling, stopping to scrutinize every single overhead square shape you see in the strobing emergency lights.

Eventually you get a flamethrower, (I like that they touched on all the equipment from the first movie: shock sticks, flamethrower, motion tracker.) The flamethrower is your ace in the hole for when the alien finds you. When previously all you could really do is scream, “Not in the face!” now you can hose that bitch down with napalm to drive it off, (or more like a couple of very frugal fireball button taps.) This could constitute an indefinite fix for continuing your mission for a while or the alien could come right back seconds later for round two. It's a crap shoot.


 Making progress in this game is often grueling. You move slow and quietly punctuated by long periods of hiding and then maybe you get killed and do it again. A lot of times the alien just won't go the hell away so you can move on. It has this tendency to just camp out near your objective. You might see it close on the detector or come in the room so you hide in or behind something and wait for it to fuck off but it doesn't. It's pacing around the room like it knows you're there and is just trying to wait you out. Sometimes it'll just go stand in the doorway. The worst is when it leaves and then comes right back in like it's going “Ah-ha!” It can do this for forever. Once after accomplishing a significant amount of tasks I decided to backtrack to a save point. On my way I had three or four encounters with the alien where I had to hit it with fire and two times where I had to hide. When I finally made it to the save point the alien came out of a ceiling vent and I had to drive it off with fire. It retreated to the vent only to come out seconds later. This time I hid behind a big column and we played ring around the rosie for like two minutes while I used the motion tracker to see which way it was moving so I could stay out of sight. I JUST WANT TO SAVE AND GO TO BED! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?


The game has a crafting system. You can collect parts and blueprints which allow you to create about half a dozen different gizmos. You can actually make a medkit. The rest are distraction, disabling or lethal depending who you use them on. They can all be thrown or planted so that they're triggered by proximity. The only ones I ever really used are the EMP device which momentarily disables uninsulated androids and the Molotov which can be used to scare the alien in a pinch if you're out or want to conserve flamethrower fuel because it depletes quickly and the more you use it the more resistance the alien builds to it. Everything else I may have used successfully once. Those noisemakers don't seem to draw enemies far enough away from me to actually accomplish anything.

The loading screen gives you tips at the bottom which is nice because it takes like a fucking hour to load the game. One of the tips is to listen to dialogue of survivors before approaching to assess if they're a threat. This is bullshit. You will never definitively know from listening to them if they'll try to kill you once you make yourself known to them because they're never going to say something as contrived as, “GRRRR, I'm going to shoot the first person I see,” or “Gee, I hope more survivors show up. I love new friends.” when I come across ANYONE or ANYTHING I automatically assume they're a threat. I've spent inordinate amounts of time listening and sneaking around people who ended up being indifferent to my presence. I've barged into rooms I thought were safe and gotten shot at. That time I tentatively entered a big occupied lobby finally realizing it was safe only to come back minutes later and get shot at. What is up with that shit? It makes no sense. Are these bad people that ousted the good people while I was out? Are they the same people but got angry at me for some mysterious reason? Why would I assume to recheck a room I'd already established as safe especially when I'm running from the alien and have my nose buried in the motion tracker. I can only really figure out the working Joes since realizing that their eyes are only red when dangerous.

The sound design in Isolation is top notch. In fact I think it won an award for it but I can't remember where I saw that. Suffice it to say that every sound made me feel like I was about to die which is great for a horror game.

 I like how well the game sticks to the retro futurist technology of the 1979 movie. You have a lot of monochromatic green computer screens and I love the big data chip you insert every time you use a save terminal. You get to talk to the main computer via keyboard just like Mother. You get to suit up in the bulky ribbed space suits with mounted lights. You even get to play a flashback where you enter the original derelict, (after the Nostromo team,) and see the Space Jockey. You see the adult xenomorph(s) plenty. You see eggs hatch. You see facehuggers hatching, crawling and attached. You see bodies cocooned on the walls. But strangely you never see a chestburster scene which is probably the most iconic thing about Alien. Even if you've never seen Alien you probably know about this scene. It's just something that's enshrined in pop culture. Hell, within it's genre it's arguably the most horrific thing in a horror movie. You get choked and faceraped by a giant spider, unknowingly incubate its egg and then an alien explodes out of your chest. Why would the game not use this?

 
This game really drags on. You just go from one issue or one foiled scheme to the next. It finally ended at about the seventh or eighth time I thought it was ending. There is bad luck and then there is moving the goalposts. When you're seconds from evacuating after getting the run-around for the last four hours and then get snatched away and cocooned in a mysterious location with the mission being go back to where you just were THAT'S MOVING THE FUCKING GOALPOSTS.

This game will definitely piss you off. Just when you think you've seen everything and have it figured out it throws you a curveball. You might not enjoy the game's cruel nature of kicking you in the dick, in fact I'm sure that's why so few finished it, but in the end the experience is at least undeniably very Alien.