Remnant 2 – Zero Punctuation

The Traveller travels, as is his wont, to a survivor community in one of Earth’s ruined cities and gets the quick induction tour – hi, welcome, here’s the ammo vendor, here’s where we hang the tea towels, and here’s the interdimensional portal we keep around for some reason. Oh you think that’s impressive? Well hold my beer! Then two of the shelter’s residents disappear into the multiverse and since the Traveller has developed a real rapport with the dozy gits in the twenty minutes they’ve gotten to know them they immediately travel after them to rescue them from whatever reject Sliders episode they’re currently trapped in. “Slow down, Yahtz, you need to pick a character class first. Do you want to be a gunslinger…” YES. “Uh. There’s actually some other classes as well.” I’d assume as much, Remnant 2, but you said something about letting me be a badass dimension hopping cowboy like the protagonist of a Stephen King pet project and frankly I’m a little confused as to why you feel the need to continue. “One of them has a dog?” THERE’S SUCH A THING AS TALKING PAST THE SALE, Y’KNOW. So anyway, my badass dimension hopping cowboy starts hopping dimensions.

I loved this whole concept in Remnant 1 and I love it now. You take the Dark Souls formula of being in a dying fantasy world without a bumhole stabbing clue what’s going on and extend it across multiple dying fantasy worlds all dying for different interesting bespoke reasons that we have even less anal distending clues about and it basically multiplies the effect. And our dude being an ordinary clueless homeboy with a base on normal if slightly banged up Earth full of NPCs going “Back from slaying nightmares from beyond the veil of time and space, are you? Have some beans on toast and tell us all about it,” gives a wonderful grounding and juxtaposition that keeps it relatable. I love how lacking in ceremony it all is. Compare this experience to something like Bayonetta where every enemy has to be introduced with a special cinematic so it can wiggle its bum at the camera in time with the surging music; not here, here you’re just dumped in the Bloodborne dimension, a bunch of screaming Cockneys are trying to chainsaw your face off, there’s giant mutant rats and angels and a ghost and all you know is that you can’t find your friends, you’re due for some target practice and you’d really rather not have your face chainsawed off. The truly interesting can speak for itself without needing a hype man.

Also, Remnant 2’s boss fights rarely miss the mark. You couldn’t pull a Dark Souls 2 and load the game up with nine hundred cop-out armoured dude with a sword fights, it’s a shooter, we’d have perforated them into cheese graters before they could yell “charge.” So it’s more often than not interesting giant monsters with big juicy shootable weak spots, frequently doing interesting things with the environment beyond “big circular room and sad music.” One highlight for me was fighting a bunch of rotating cubes in a giant maze puzzle that was like having to outwit an executive toy from the inside. However, with my ongoing struggle with Soulslike fatigue I have less and less patience for what we academically call “bullshit attacks” and sometimes it feels like edging ever closer to bullshit city limits is the only way new Soulslikes try to innovate. There’s this one boss fight against a ghost lady I was stuck on for a while because of this one grab attack that you basically have to be at full health to survive which she only pulls out in like the last quarter of the fight so it took many failed attempts to finally trial and error my way to figuring out the specific direction I had to dodge roll in to avoid it.

Come to think of it there were a lot of boss attacks that felt like they could only be avoided by exploiting dodge roll I-frames, and that’s always got the heady whiff of bullshit about it. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that we can survive being at ground zero of a nuclear blast because we did a roly-poly just before impact. You know, my experience with Rembrandt 2 is kind of the inverse of what I had with Rembrandt From The Arses, in that I went in with the positive feeling and gradually soured to it over time. I think the turning point was when I visited the wibbly wobbly evil purple dimension and was obliged to explore a very samey desert for hours on end fighting off endless respawning waves of Amazon delivery drones trying to figure out which of the eleven or twelve interchangeable grindy dungeons I stumbled upon was the one I was supposed to do to progress in the game, and which would just toss me a new amulet that’s about as much use for my build as a pamphlet on the negative health effects of showing off awesome quickdraw skills. Some with elaborate boss fights that I’d be stuck trying to beat for ages because such things are usually game design shorthand for “go this way because I gave myself tendonitis modelling this bastard’s nipples so you’d better not miss it.”

And then afterwards it’s all like “Ha ha it was an optional fight all along, here’s your ring of +1.4% pie appreciation, back to combing the desert for you.” So it did become a slog. And I ultimately stopped playing in – I don’t know if it was the last area, certainly felt like one. I was on even more post apocalyptic than previously established post apocalyptic earth earth, and try to imagine the Kiln of the First Flame from Dark Souls 1 but three times longer and all with each of the black knights replaced by an entire busload of rascally schoolchildren. Peppered with boss fights so immersed in bullshit that only the tops of their pompadour hairstyles broke surface, culminating in the whiffiest of them all. The first phase was bad enough with loads of mandatory I-frame timing, but then the second phase came and killed both me and any interest I had in finishing the game in seconds flat. Some distant twat polished off my whole health bar in three bites while I could barely see him through wibbly wobbly red glitch effects, it was like being beaten to death with a virtual boy. And I was the badass gunslinger, remember. What would the sodding dog handler have done? I don’t think there’s a command for “go straight to the pound and complete your own surrender paperwork.”