This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee wonders where all stealth games have gone to.

Check out more recent episodes of Extra Punctuation on his love for the 2004 Spider-Man 2 game, the dreaded “Walk-and-Talk,” and AAA games needing to step up their traversal.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

I find I’ve been craving a specific dish, lately. Much as I am continually frustrated by the fact that I no longer live within easy walking distance of a McDonalds, there’s a specific flavour of gameplay I used to indulge in a lot and whose absence I now feel like a void in my gut. And that is stealth.

And oh I know what you’re going to say now, Mr. Socky. “Yahtzee, how can you possibly feel you’ve been underserved stealth by the current industry. Isn’t stealth one of the ingredients of the Jiminy Cockthroat model you’re always complaining every triple-A action adventure game has? Open world stealth action games with crafting and collectibles? And plenty of games have stealth sections at least, like in that Chants of Sennaar game you were talking about recently, and those little interlude levels in Marvel’s Spider-Man where you have to play as Mary Jane crouching behind a wall throwing bits of old tin around.”

Well, to take your points in reverse order, I can think of very few examples of mandatory stealth sections in the middle of non-stealth games that don’t suck a great big non-safety regulated tailpipe. Oh, hang on, tell a lie: I can’t think of any at all. Get the hell out of my superhero fantasy game and go risk getting fined for littering somewhere else, Mary Jane.

And as for the other point, the main characteristic of the Jiminy Cockthroat model is that there’s no focus. Every element of it has to have equal placement for maximum broad appeal. So stealth is just an option you can do if you feel inclined, and the moment you mess it up it defaults straight back to the standard combat mechanic. Besides, stealth in this context is always a little bit dreary, I find. Usually it’s the Far Cry 3 thing where there’s an enemy stronghold with five or six dudes walking short regular patrol routes, and we figure out the precise order to take them all out without any of the others noticing, which often feels more like a puzzle akin to untangling a set of Christmas lights.

Whenever I manage to pull it off and neutralize all the guards without an alert, I get this profound sense of anti-climax. All this tension has been building as I creep around unseen, and it doesn’t get a proper payoff. I dump the last body in the tall grass and dust off my hands going, “welp, that’s that.” I can only think of one game where that doesn’t happen, and it’s the game that pioneered the stealth predator mission: Batman: Arkham Asylum. The predator sections don’t get easier the more enemies you take down, no, the remaining ones get more and more scared and trigger happy, they start removing your options, the music gets more dramatic, the situation escalates. That’s how you make it work, and so few games that ape the Arkham predator system realise that. If you don’t raise the tension and enemies just keep obliviously patrolling no matter how many of their pals have disappeared gurgling into the bushes, you don’t feel like a predator, you feel like you’re tidying up.

But anyway. I suppose what I’m missing are games that are entirely built around stealth as the core, intended experience. But as the aforementioned obnoxious forced stealth sections in games demonstrate, stealth is a difficult thing to pull off. I mean, it’s not hard to set up a visibility system and make guards react to nearby sounds and all that, but the sticking point comes when you have to figure out what happens after the player screws it up. A guard spots them, what happens next?

Just game over straight away? That’s what only the suckiest forced stealth sections do. It’s like a combat system where you die in one hit, it’s whacking us around the head for making one tiny mistake. Give the player a chance to run away and hide? Like one of those chase-me-chase-me horror games in the Haunting Ground mould? Better, but that gets frustrating easily. Getting repeatedly spotted and having to keep retreating around the corner to hide in the nearest fridge kinda kills the flow.

Third option: have a combat system, so if you’re spotted you can fight your way out. Which I know feels like surrender. We wanted to avoid this. We went into this wanting to focus on stealth and we’ve ended up having to come up with a combat system anyway. I did say it’s hard to pull off. I think the best compromise is to have combat, but have it kinda suck. Again, the best example of stealth that works is the game that arguably pioneered it, Thief: The Dark Project. You’re supposed to creep around the shadows bopping guards on the head, but there is a direct combat system, in which Garrett waves his sword around like there’s a dog turd on the end and is completely screwed if he ever has to fight off more than one dude at a time.

And Thief makes no bones about not wanting you to fight dudes. If you play on expert level difficulty you flat out fail the mission if you kill anyone. But that intrinsic motivation aside, you don’t want to kill people anyway. You want to feel like a smooth master thief, you want to imagine all the guards waking up the next day to find no valuables and a calling card at which they can only shake their fists in impotent rage. Having to kill any of them feels very un-classy.

I think part of why we don’t see that kind of focused stealth game much anymore is that the notion of deliberately making an aspect of your game suck doesn’t really compute in today’s triple-A production mindset. It’s a hard thing to explain to the design committee. Why are we making combat that sucks? We don’t want our game to suck. Make it suck less. Why are we wasting the publisher’s millions developing a combat system that we flat out don’t want the player to use? Explain this to me, I am very important.

As I said, the Jiminy Cockthroat model is characterised by lack of focus, because it’s terrified of telling the user that they’re playing it wrong. Stealthing, direct combat, showing up to the battle on their hands and knees with a corncob balanced on their left buttock, take whatever approach you want, our aim is to appeal to as many people as possible. But there’s a reason why you don’t buy neapolitan ice cream if you’re in the mood for chocolate. Thief 4 was an execrable pile of seagull plop, for many reasons, one of which was that it no longer had the balls to fail you for killing people. You’d butcher your way through a mansion full of screaming guards and the game goes “Well done for playing the way YOU want to play! Why not buy some of these skill tree upgrades that will make you even better at clumsy murdering?”

Big money game dev also has trouble understanding the benefits of being understated. As we know, it’s all about spectacular graphics and putting the money on screen, and very little of classic Thief’s trademark slowly tip-toeing down lonely darkened corridors would cut together into an interesting trailer. But it was second to none for slow-burn atmosphere building.

The other way Thief 4 ruined things was by following the ghost train ride route of having every encounter be an enclosed stealth challenge, handfuls of guards in tight clusters of rooms who all have short patrol routes going from one end of a corridor to the other. What I loved about Thief 2 was that the levels were huge and persistent and you had to consider the mansion as a whole. Some guards would have patrol routes that go around the entire building, and you’d never know when they might burst in and catch you lifting a candlestick or dumping an unconscious carcass into the spare toilet or whatever- You know, now I’ve sounded it all out, I think I’ve finally realised that I’m not so much hankering for more well-designed stealth games as I am hankering to play through Thief 2 again. So… I guess I’ll go do that. Yes, good idea. Thanks for listening.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lords of the Fallen. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Sonic Superstars right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, El Paso Elsewhere and ?, Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood.

Lords of the Fallen (2023) Zero Punctuation Transcript

Here we bloody go again. Don’t just rip off the title of another, completely unrelated game, Lords of the Fallen, did we learn nothing from Prey 2016? Think of the poor confused audience, you’re going to make them forget all about the previous Lords of the Fallen. “There was a previous Lords of the Fallen, Yahtz?” …well, never mind. I’m sick of complaining about it, anyway. Let’s just add the current year in parentheses to your title with this hot branding iron and we can move on. As I say, Oh No More Lords Of The Fallen has almost nothing in common with its namesake but for the fact that it’s a soulslike with a dark fantasy theme, but I repeat myself. It’s got all the usual soulslike trappings: you’re an immortal dude on a pilgrimage through various doomed lands where the locals have apparently been informed that you’ve been shagging their collective missus, boss fights, checkpoints, free healing potion refills, elevators with buttons in the floor. But wait a sec, I tried to do that thing I always do in Dark Souls where after using a lift I’d send it back and quickly hop off it so I don’t have to wait for it next time, but I couldn’t do that in Lords Of the Fallen because the doors closed too quick for me to hop off. So… zero stars, better luck next time.

Alright, well that summarizes the one part of my notes where I wrote down “BLOODY LIFTS” in block capitals, let’s look at the rest. For the soulslike connoisseur, Lords of the Fallen plays it pretty straight dark fantasy with a dash of that Catholic guilt vibe that Blasphemous does, and just to skip to the weaselly asshole damn with fine praise summary, in the field of offbrand Soulslikes I would describe it as “okay-ish.” Which makes it worth talking about, like discovering a supermarket own-brand knockoff Cola that’s actually halfway drinkable. Obviously it’s not as good as the real stuff but it’s pretty amazing that I tolerated it for as long as I did before using it as toilet cleaner. It’s got an interesting suite of bespoke gimmicks to set it apart; ammo for ranged weapons refills at checkpoints like your mana bar does, for example, and that’s something in itself – a soulslike with a viable bow build that isn’t an optional challenge mode for people who pride themselves on their ability to manage the weekly shopping. Just as well, ‘cos you bloody well need an accurate ranged option.

This game loves ranged enemies. If it can bean you in the temple with an unexpected crossbow bolt just as you’re creeping up for a backstab then that’s the day made as far as Lords of the Fallen’s concerned. It loves plonking them everywhere in concealed elevated spots, similar to the relationship I have with bottles of whiskey I don’t want the wife to know about. Also, the checkpoints are pretty far apart but you can use a consumable to create little mini-checkpoints at designated spots, like when you do a little poo in the woods when you can’t wait for the next rest area. And if you’re anything like me you’ll keep doing this not knowing you’re literally around the corner from the next big checkpoint and get very cross. But the big main unique selling point in Lords of the Fallens is dual world gameplay in a Metroid Prime 2 sort of area. Where you can shift from the living world to the world of the dead either by making an elaborate hand gesture or, you know, getting killed, and the world of the dead has extra paths and treasures but also extra enemies and spooky environment design, although the level of spookiness tends to be inconsistent.

You’ve got a magic flashlight that lets you glimpse the dead world version of the current area in case you want a quick viewing before you commit to a lease, and sometimes it’s a whole alternative appearance evoking Zdzislaw Beksinski throwing a Halloween party in the Warhammer 40k universe, with a gigantic skeleton looming over everything like it’s had a long night and mistaken our current environment for a puke trough. And then sometimes they just selectively smear some skulls and a bit of dryer lint about. And sometimes it just looks exactly the same as the living world but with the lighting saturation turned down a notch. And that communicates what became my broad impression of Lords of the Fallen A Little Bit Further This Time – that there were varying levels of could be arsedness in play. But the dead world does make for an interesting extra factor to consider – simultaneously expanding the exploration potential while giving you a little more wiggle room against the high difficulty; getting killed isn’t an immediate failure but more of a getting bumped down to remedial school where you get one more chance but you’ve got to start applying yourself or the pale faceless dudes with the skinny legs will overtake you in the grade rankings.

But I find these days there’s only one metric by which I can judge soulslikes, and that’s how long I can play them before the soulslike fatigue sets in. And I’d say Lords of the Falling Down did quite a bit better than average. The dual world gimmick gave it a freshness, ironically, since the dead world looks like it smells like the inside of a packet of airline pretzels that was forgotten about in a seat pocket for a year. And the game doesn’t seem to be doing the usual offbrand Soulslike thing of trying to outdo From Software when it comes to unreasonable difficulty, at least not where the boss fights are concerned. Very few visits from the Manus Father of The Abyss twitchy last second lockon spazz-out brigade that took over Elden Ring. I remember defeating this one hearty lad who was guarding the objective in the swampy area and being absolutely astonished that he didn’t have a second phase. ‘Cos he’d only taken, like, four goes and I still had all my teeth. It doesn’t hurt that the game’s generous with NPC support. Half the boss fights there’s just three dudes politely lined up outside like schoolkids waiting for you to pick teams. Frankly it made me suspicious. Yeah, you say you’ll help no strings attached but how do I know you won’t need help moving house next week?

Maybe this will turn off all those twitchy weirdos apparently in the majority who like it when soulslikes get less and less reasonable but I’m hoping to still have working wrists in my old age. So the bosses were fine, it was all the stuff in between that eventually wore me down. I’d say from around the snowy mountain area onwards the game gets more and more cheeky about the gauntlets of enemies it expects you to deal with. There was one particular hillside path that took me through, like, five groups of assholes, multiple of those burly shield men who all need to be carefully danced around unless you want their shields widening your bumhole by a factor of two feet, about three of that one thing who was an early game boss fight who’s clearly bitter about not getting a special health bar anymore, and you can’t just run past them all because the path is narrow and they’re a dogged bunch, especially the dogs. So it was after banging my head against that for an afternoon only to discover it was just a shortcut that didn’t even lead to progress, I soured to Lords of the Ballsack wholeheartedly. Still, it’s definitely a better game than the first Lords of the Ballsack, for what that’s worth. Hey, we walked across a room without breaking our ankles this time. Although we did tread in the cat’s litter box and punted the dog through a wall.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Assassins Creed Mirage. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Lords of the Fallen right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, El Paso Elsewhere and ?, Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage Zero Punctuation Transcript

If you’re unfamiliar with mirages because you’ve never read a Tintin book or whatever, it’s a phenomenon that appears in the middle of desolate wastelands which seem to be of substance but the moment you get close enough you realise are totally ephemeral. In which case, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage – yes I can see some of you are ahead of me on this one – is the most aptly subtitled entrant into the series until they bring out Assassin’s Creed: Another Bloody Boring Game About Stabbing. So those restless passionate creatives at Ubisoft couldn’t hold it in any longer and just had to spurt out some more Assocreedage after three years of edging, a recurring phenomenon I think of as Assassin’s Creed’s “What the hell do these people want,” breaks. The last one was after AssCreeSyndicate, when they all went “Oh, apparently they don’t want slightly cringey ‘let’s explore a historical time period on the magic school bus’ stabbing adventures anymore, let’s see if they’ll be any more receptive to ‘let’s all steal mummy’s credit card so we don’t have to grind the next five levels in a suboptimal chestpiece’ live servicey stabbing adventures.'” Hence Origins and Odyssey.

But now that audiences regard the phrase “live service” the way a person with severe indigestion regards the phrase “cream slice,” the latest thinking cap session has concluded that we people want the hell out of a return to basics. The prospect of maybe just not making any more AssoCreedence Clearwater Revivals not being conscionable, apparently, but then this series has long ceased to be a collection of individual artworks and is now an underlying force of nature that ebbs into our lives now and again like the tide. AssoCreeMirage feels like not so much a streamlining or refocussing as an attempt to turn back the clock, being most reminiscent of something like Brotherhood or Revelations, the interstitial games between 2 and 3 that warranted neither a new protagonist nor a number all to itself. It’s one measly city with the usual checklist of treasures to find and throats to stab, and it ends with the dude walking into a science fiction room full of LED strip lighting, experiencing an astounding revelation relating to the overarching plot, and then going out again. After which I assume he starts blowing up party balloons. The question is how one reduces scope in a way that feels fresh and not like a step back.

And Ubisoft’s answer to that question is “Sorry did you say something? I was busy putting haystacks under things.” At least Brotherhood and Revelations had Ezio, a main character we might still be invested in. AssCreeMargarine has Basim, a sort of unusually tall wind-up monkey toy. Initially he’s a street thief in 9th century Baghdad who I think we’re supposed to believe is a wayward teenager in much the way of a 29-year-old getting cast in a Jason film, and he’s also a shameless Assassin fanboy. He sees an Assassin working with his regular fence and goes “Ooh ooh pick me pick me, I’d be such a good assassin, I know how to squat in a bush and everything.” But he just can’t catch their eye, until he sneaks into a palace and ends up accidentally stabbing a dude, and that was the display of stabbing initiative they were waiting for, apparently, because he gets signed up with stabbing academy for the fall semester. And for most of the game there’s just not enough strife or doubt in Basim’s character to make him interesting. He joins the Assassins just like he wanted and immediately becomes mentor’s pet. Yes miss no miss can I fetch you some throat lozenges miss I caught Stebbins raiding the tuck shop miss shall I tell him to report to detention.

His only internal struggle is that he has recurring nightmares about a monster, and he could just be eating dodgy kippers for supper. In the end when he goes into the afore-discussed inevitable magic sci-fi room it turns out the dreams are significant, although why wasn’t entirely clear. It’s something to do with memories of a past life as one of those super special before peoples Assassin’s Creed likes so much, and an instance of one of the classic hackneyed surprise twists. I don’t wanna spoil, but it’s one of the following: someone you thought was harmless is actually the big bad, someone you thought was real is actually imaginary, or someone you thought had a vagina actually has a penis. But that’s the very end, and there’s a lot of jugular veins between you and there that need stabbing. As I say, there’s a deliberate return to the Assassin’s Creed basics: you infiltrate strongholds full of patrolling guards to reach objectives, no district liberating, no ship combat, none of whatever that fucking rap battle bollocks in AssCreeValhalla was supposed to be about, just the endless storybook romance between knife and random guards’ throats. The sandbox isn’t even that big compared to past games, so there’s less of a commute between stabbings.

Although it did mean a couple of locations got reused for different missions, and I’d have to clear out a stronghold I’d already cleared out once before. I feel sorry for whatever temp agency the Baghdad harbour employs. And happily there’s no levelling system, so you can stab away without concern for high-level enemies having done enough neck exercise to repel your blade. Well, tell a lie, there is levelling, the game hasn’t entirely cast off the shroud of used toilet paper strips that is the live service model, there’s levelling, equipment crafting, multiple premium currencies and a big fat “go to online store” button permanently visible in the corner of menu like a dog turd on a new rug. Oh, Ubisoft, you tried so hard to keep to your diet, but those cream slices were just too tempting. Thing is, though, you don’t have to worry about any of it. Your hidden blade still instakill stabs whether or not your sword does plus 2.5% stagger damage or your armor is dyed powder blue. And if you get to the point where it does become relevant ‘cos you fucked up stealthing and entered open combat then you’re probably playing it wrong.

‘Cos the open combat suuuuucks. It’s the usual dodge the red attacks parry the non-red attacks, but the addition of a stamina bar, possibly to lure in the Soulslike crowd, is a misstep as it means you’ll be in the middle of a nice flow and Basim will just stop responding to commands like his wind-up key needs turning. There’s the inevitable skill tree as well, doing the usual wrongheaded thing of making the game easier and easier the more you advance in it. Here’s a new upgrade that stabs four dudes at once while also dicing vegetables and conveniently pressing your trousers. It’s like the auto-climbing hookshot from Syndicate: if you’re rewarding the player by letting them not have to engage with the core gameplay as much you’re sort of telling on yourself a bit, there. I do support the rollback of scope as it means Creamy Ass Rage doesn’t outstay its welcome, but frankly it never had much of a welcome. It was a sort of “Oh its you,” situation. It brings nothing to the table to justify its presence. The gameplay’s just more of the usual and the story fires off like the last squirt at an amateur money shot. “So what does Assassin’s Creed need to do to please you, Yahtz? And don’t say piss off and die.” [ long pause ] “Yahtz?” What? You told me not to say it.

This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee discusses the Spider-Man 2 game…no, not that one, the other one.

Check out more recent episodes of Extra Punctuation on the dreaded “Walk-and-Talk,” AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock‘s incredible opening.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

So, a sequel to the not unentertaining Sony’s Marvel’s Spider-Man is coming out soon – actually, will presumably already be out by the time you watch this – and maybe it’ll be something to celebrate or maybe not, precedent in the world of Spider-Man adaptations has shown that the introduction of Venom to the formula tends to be the point when things go to shit, but for me the real tragedy is that the new game will add yet another to the enormous pile of entities one could refer to as “Spider-Man 2.” Thus making it all the more likely to bury the good Spider-Man 2 in the folds of history.

And I’ve brought that game up often enough in casual conversation that it’s high time I did a video going into detail. I’m referring to the Spider-Man 2 game based on the Sam Raimi movie that came out in 2004 on PS2, Gamecube and Xbox, developed by Treyarch who these days spend their time keeping the Call of Duty train a-rolling until the heat death of the fucking universe, apparently. I am absolutely not talking about the PC game, that came out at the same time with the same box art, but was an entirely different, much shittier game developed by some mysterious entity named “The Fizz Factor.” Gosh, remember those days, when versions of games might be completely different from one system to another? That was great fun. Asking your grandma for a game for Christmas was like playing Russian Roulette.

But anyway. Spider-Man 2 on the Gamecube was one of my favourite games in the pre-professional game reviewer phase of my life. I could play that all day, must’ve gone through it at least fifty times. Well, I didn’t have very many other games, but still. I can distinctly remember how the TV adverts played it up as the game where you can go anywhere in the city. Because of course, this was back when sandbox gameplay was relatively new, superhero sandbox gameplay even more so, and what made Spider-Man 2 so ahead of its time was the interesting traversal, as discussed in my previous EP on the subject. Timing your swings to maximise acceleration was a constant test of skill, and the game was loaded with challenges that made the most of that.

The new Spider-Man games are good, and obviously look a hell of a lot better than Spider-Man 2, but to my mind suffer a little from trying to divide the gameplay as broadly as possible, giving equal focus to traversal, combat, and various other mechanics. Which is fine, and swinging through the streets still offers the catharsis of fun traversal, but it’s got all this other stuff packed around it like styrofoam peanuts. It always feels like a mistake when a Spider-Man game has you spend too much time in combat. More specifically, it annoys me how so many modern Spider-Man games try to ape the Batman Arkham games, with reaction-based fighting and stealthy predator missions. Seems like if Spider-Man was meant to be stealthy he wouldn’t go around dressed like a really enthusiastic supporter of the Haitian national football team.

Spider-Man 2’s developer Treyarch helped out with porting some of the Tony Hawk games back in the day, and apparently they brought some of that experience forward, because Spider-Man 2 treats the webswinging like the core of an extreme sports game. Most of the side missions, races, stunt challenges, taking pictures, delivering pizzas to possibly the most iconic video game music track of the 2000s, all focus on mastering the web traversal mechanics. Yes, there is combat, and yes, it mostly sucks greasy vegetarian bum, but most of the boss fights at least take place in massive arenas in which webswinging can still be a factor. And it is quite amusing if you get in a fight with street thugs to web swing them up to the top of the Empire state building and fling them off. Pull that punch, asshole.

The point being, any old superhero can punch dudes, there are no end of video games that explore that, but what makes Spider-Man great video game fodder is that he’s got this unique core movement mechanic fucking baked into his wrists, so why the hell would you force it to budge up for more combat arenas and missions where you have to play as Mary Jane crouching behind a desk?

So that’s the gameplay, what about story? It didn’t hurt that I also quite liked the movie it’s based on, always had a soft spot for Sam Raimi’s directorial style and Alfred Molina’s a delight, but there was a lot in the movie that wouldn’t have adapted well. Namely, the whole prolonged subplot in which Peter Parker wants to stop being Spider-Man. Doesn’t exactly gel with the video game pitch. “You can be Spider-Man! Whoops! Being Spider-Man sucks!” So for the game they chuck that entire element in the bin and replace it with a load of pillocking about with Black Cat and Shocker and Mysterio.

What remains of the movie’s plot exists a little tokenly at best. You’ve got the movie’s actors doing the voices for better and worse, Doctor Octopus as the main villain checks in three or four times, and there’s an amusing scene early on where Peter Parker meets up with Harry Osborn and within one line of dialog he goes from “Hi Pete, how’s tricks,” to “SPIDER-MAN MURDERED MY FATHER AND I WILL NOT REST UNTIL I HAVE MY REVENGE.” Sort of the speed version of that character arc. But all the new stuff the developers made up for the game reflects surprisingly strong writing chops.

The whole Mysterio plotline is great fun, and ends with a pseudo-final boss encounter that I held up at the time as one of the finest subversives gags in video games, because, as mentioned earlier, I hadn’t played as many. But the Black Cat arc is really well done too, Peter has genuine chemistry with Black Cat as she shifts from redoubtable possible-villain temptress figure to manic pixie dream girl type with nothing better to do than help a shy nerdy boy work through his personal problems. And how could we move on without acknowledging the ever-sublime Bruce Campbell, brought on to reprise his role from the first movie adaptation as the narrator-cum-tutorial voice. Who spends about half the time gleefully taking the piss out of the player for following his instructions.

So the writing’s both funny and, more importantly, genuine. And all in all, Spider-Man 2 is one of maybe two or three examples in the entire history of gaming of a game made to tie in with a specific movie and come out at around the same time, being a superb game in its own right.

Cliched as this may sound, you couldn’t get something like Spider-Man 2 today. For one thing, as we were talking about in Slightly Something Else recently, movie adaptations in AAA gaming have kinda stopped being a thing. Adaptations made to tie-in with the release of specific films, at any rate, probably because games take so long to make these days trying to sync up the release dates. But what you also can’t recreate is Spider-Man 2’s freshness, and its place in the earliest days of sandbox gaming. Obviously it looks primitive from a modern standpoint, but it’s infused with an experimental feel, not weighed down by all the bells and whistles triple-A gaming has come to expect from this kind of thing. The skill tree, the collectibles, the map splattered with icons like the floor of a novelty pasta factory. As such, it may seem a trifle stripped down to a modern audience. But sometimes, like a rabid Tom Holland fan with the horn, a stripped down Spider-Man is what you want.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Assassin’s Creed Mirage right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out El Paso Elsewhere and ?, Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, and Remnant 2.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Zero Punctuation Transcript

In the last few weeks I could have been reviewing the Rapture and someone in the comments would still have said “Yeah, yeah, you beheld a great beast with blasphemous names on each of its seven heads, when are you gonna do Armored Core 6?” Half of them going “Ooh it’s by From Software and it’s basically a soulslike with giant robots, you’ll love it.” And the other half going “Ooh it’s by From Software and it’s absolutely nothing like a soulslike, but you keep saying you’re sick of them and it’s got giant robots, you’ll love it.” I did try Armored Core 6 when it came out but bounced off at first, in much the same way the entire giant mecha concept bounces off common sense. I guess that’s kinda why I have trouble getting into giant robot stuff; if it’s trying to take itself seriously I keep getting distracted by nagging thoughts like “Why would you ever rely upon giant robots with laser swords piloted by one dude, rather than use the exact same materials to make, say, five hundred tanks? That could do more than one job at a time, and don’t require centuries of high level robotics research to ensure they don’t fall over?” But the constant requests and the brief gap in the release schedule wore me down. So I went back to AC6.

That’s Armored Core, not Assassin’s Creed. Or Animal Crossing. Or Asheron’s Call. Or Ace Combat. Or Assetto Corsa. Or Astral Chain. Jesus, what is it with video games and AC? Are they trying to subliminally inform the building manager that the central heating needs fixing? And fine, I admit it, once I strapped myself down and forced myself to give it more time, I eventually got into Alice Cooper 6, although not because it’s soulslike. It’s only like Dark Souls in that there’s a focus on one-on-one boss fights, an estus flask-esque healing system, difficult combat that involves a lot of running around in circles, and a choice of endings that comes down to whether or not you want to light yourself on fire. People will call anything “soulslike” these days, it’s never been a well-defined genre at the best of times. Ooh, Sonic the Hedgehog’s a soulslike ‘cos the rings are estus and the checkpoints are bonfires and you can summon a fox with two buttholes as a support NPC. Anyway, in Armored Core 6 you’re a mercenary who’s been brought to a planet full of potentially hugely destructive magic goo that a bunch of corporations are fighting over, a premise that reminded me of Lost Planet a lot in that I didn’t care much about that, either.

Initially the plot felt like little more than a slim excuse for making giant robots smack each other about, and there was a lot about the game I found intimidating on my first shake. Perhaps it was the first mission, in which the game goes “Right, here’s how you move, here’s how you fire your weapons, got all that? Now kill this giant flying robot death monster that wants to destroy you with a ferocity seen only in a desperately undernourished spider trapped in a bell jar with a miniature bacon sandwich.” And obviously I got stomped into a carelessly dismantled Meccano project, but over multiple attempts, I felt out the workings. I soon learned that trying to be clever by hiding amid buildings, moving in and out of range, etc, would result in the boss going “Hm. Interesting. Counterpoint: white hot stream of pitiless death.” But after several tries I managed to sustain consistent damage for long enough to fill the mysterious orange bar under his health, at which point his trousers dropped around his ankles and I did some serious damage to him while he was pulling them back up. Aha, this isn’t giant robot Dark Souls, it’s giant robot Sekiro. Except instead of perfect parrying over and over again you just shoot things a lot with a gun.

The other thing I found intimidating was going into the parts shop, as the game would spread a load of engine parts across the floor with a thousand stats attached and impatiently go “Whaddya want?” Cigarette poking from mouth like an extra in a Billy Joel video. But again, with time I figured out the best approach: construct an in-betweeny all-rounder mechanical evening suit that had decent stats, avoiding the tiny spindly kitchen utensil legs for the super light fast builds and the giant chunky flared trousers for the heavy tanks, and then pile as much raw firepower onto my shoulders as I could without my legs going bandy. After that, I stuck to the strategy of running in circles around the target, holding down all the fire buttons until the pants fall off meter was full, and then speeding in for a one-two laser sword wallop to the perineum. And pursuing this philosophy, I found Anton Chekhov 6 to be a game of very inconsistent difficulty. The regular enemies slow you down as much as the little dotted lines around the doors of an advent calendar, but every now and again there’s an absolute roadblock of a boss fight that I’d have to hammer away at for half an hour.

I appreciate the game intends you to mix up your build to suit the situation as there’s a special option on the game over menu for making a quick pit stop to switch to a nicer head and bigger trousers, but I powerfully couldn’t be arsed to do that. And who needs roomier trousers without an arse. Also sometimes the game’s nice enough to checkpoint you at the start of the boss and sometimes for every attempt you’ve gotta plough through two rooms and a cinematic that wasn’t terribly interesting the first time. And while we’re on the subject, I guess the story’s about as effective as one can get considering every NPC is a faceless voice on a radio, and could conceivably be all the same dude putting on a variety of silly accents, but it was hard to get invested early on before the personalities had properly crystallized. Especially with the mission-based structuring that is always the death of pacing and flow ‘cos the game has to stop every five minutes to ask permission to continue and that tends to put me in a philosophical mood. Do I want to continue? Boy, that’s a hell of a question. I mean, I’d appreciate the rest but if I miss another Thanksgiving I’ll never hear the end of it. Oh, you meant in the game.

Nevertheless, as I say, I did find myself getting into Andrew Carnegie 6, and I think at the end of the day it came down to sheer spectacle. It’s sometimes hard to get a sense of the scale you’re supposed to be at. Sure, you can see little human-sized vehicles and stairwells and occasionally walk down a nine-lane highway like it’s a jogging track, but you could just be a dude in a model village cosplaying as a kitchen island. So to compensate the environments get even crazier with scale, which makes the notion that regular-sized humans use the space even more ridiculous ‘cos there are corridors and ventilation shafts that a person couldn’t walk across without a pack mule and a week’s provisions, but gosh darn it at the end of the day, all gameplay, interface and story niggles aside, it is pretty fun and exciting to flit around an entire ruined city dodging streams of explosions while keeping a bead on a target against the backdrop of a colossal industrial structure that makes you feel like an ant exploring a disused barbecue grille. And hey, five hundred tanks couldn’t do that. Or indeed navigate the Birmingham one-way system.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews El Paso, Elsewhere and a second mystery game. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode on Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon right now, as well as an uncensored version of this and every Zero Punctuation going forward!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Mortal Kombat 1, Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, and Chrono Trigger.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about The dreadful walk-and-talk, AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

El Paso, Elsewhere and ? Zero Punctuation Transcript

I’ve often noted that retro-style media is always nostalgic for the period roughly twenty years ago, hence 90s-style boomer shooters being in for a while because it makes 35-year-old game designers nostalgic for that time they made a custom level for Doom based on their high school and ended up in Guantanamo Bay. But like a walrus in a food coma rolling down a hill, the nostalgia wave always moves on. And exactly twenty years ago the PC boomer shooters were ceding ground to the rise of the console shooter, and third person shooters such as Max Payne, in which the camera hovered overhead like a fussy mum with an overly stocked first aid kit, slow-motion bullet time combat was pioneered to compensate for the lack of a mouse and console users being generally slower of thought from all the time they spent chewing the paint off of their Wavebirds, and the main character was rather self-indulgently modelled on the game’s lead designer with a look on his face like he was hoping binge eating sour gummies would help his chronic constipation. And now inevitably we have a new retro indie shooter that takes a very obvious and openly acknowledged influence from Max Payne, especially the self indulgent bit.

El Paso Elsewhere, designed by Xalavier Nelson, in which we play paranormal detective James Savage, voiced by Xalavier Nelson, as he bullet-time dual-pistols his way through level after level of monster-haunted labyrinths to the tune of an original hip hop soundtrack. Composed and performed by Xalavier Nelson. And the plot is, James Savage has to save the world by confronting his evil blood-sucking vampire bitch of an ex-girlfriend. And if I were any of Xalavier Nelson’s former partners I’d certainly be narrowing my eyes at this point. Self-indulgent is the word of the day, and that certainly comes across over the fifty-odd levels of James Savage’s angsty monologuing in a voice like a bloke with a blocked nose trying to seduce the microphone in the middle of a noisy building site. The exact method by which his evil ex-girlfriend is attempting to destroy the world is a bit unclear, one might almost think that aspect of the plot was included solely to turn James Savage’s masturbatory airing out of his personal issues into an act of self-sacrificing heroism. So this all might come across as a bit cringeworthy, especially when the self-penned hip hop tracks kick in and we hear lyrics that one might imagine scrawled across the back of Xalavier Nelson’s high school homework diary.

But get past all that and El Paso Elephantine plays like a fun snacky arcade shooter, “arcade” being a nice way of saying “repetitive” but it’s sort of impressive that they squeezed fifty levels out of about four visual themes and ten furniture assets. The Max Payne-style high-octane shooting comes across well enough, complete with slow motion bullet dive, which you’ll swiftly learn is completely pointless ‘cos you can turn slow motion on and off at any time and diving kinda messes with your aim, but hey, it looks cool. It’s one of those games that’s very hard to stop playing once you start. You say “Okay, I’ll quit after this level ‘cos I think my kids got into the steak knives.” And then four or five levels later you’re like “Oh well, sounds like at least one of them’s still alive.” And I put that down to the game’s simplicity. Explore a maze, shoot everything in it, it’s like Pac-Man having a Vietnam flashback. And it flows well ‘cos between the slow-mo and most enemies dying in two or three shots and ammunition boxes practically bleeding out of the skirting boards, it’s a surprisingly easy game. I say surprisingly ‘cos when editor Nick and I first played the demo at GDC, we both found it really hard in a Hotline Miami kinda way.

I’d hate to think Xalavier Nelson scaled the difficulty back before release ‘cos all the game journalists were crapping out at it. Game journalists in the middle of a convention who’ve been alternating between jogging to hotel room demos and freebasing heroin don’t make a good control group. So final summary, El Paso Elderberry is a fun if repetitive callback shooter that’s essentially the nightmare sequence from Max Payne drawn out for six or seven hours and while the story frequently has the air of Xalavier Nelson’s Geocities poetry page, that also makes it feel very personal, which I’d take any day over the usual committee-designed drivel that’s about as personal as an industrial sheep dip. And of the two games I wanna talk about this week, it is undoubtedly the good one. Although frankly that’s not worth much, because the other game compares unfavourably to a Ryvita smeared with catarrh. The game is (record scratch)

Right, well, I have to pause things there, because I had this whole review ready but then a day before it was due I was informed that the game’s embargo date had changed. I didn’t play any other games this week, nor do I have the time to make an entire other review, so please enjoy the scheduled review with all identifying elements removed. Why not have fun trying to guess what it is? Here’s a hint: it’s not Armored Core 6.

A game I’ve been wanting to talk about because I’m pretty sure it’s completely f***ing terrible.
(title redacted) is what happens when someone tries to knock off Hades without having the slightest clue what makes Hades good. So it’s a roguelite dungeon crawler in which (redacted) descends through a sequence of randomized levels while collecting blessings from associated god-like entities, except there’s only, like, three blessings total so you usually get all of them in every run. And none of them do anything to fundamentally alter the core gameplay, which consists of running up to dudes and biffing them in the mush. Seven billion times. It’s a beat ’em up with a third person over shoulder camera which isn’t great for visibility but is perfect if you’re really curious about the contours of a bathrobe. And every room in every level is the same. Some shitty one hit kill minions you needn’t worry about and two or three big lads with spongy health bars and basically the same attacks. You pick one of the latter and start duffing them up, but with a control system that feels like (redacted) is immersed to the waist in marshmallow fluff and has the leashes of two large, curious dogs tied to his wrists. And yet, the game’s still insultingly easy, ‘cos the enemy AI’s as formidable as a large, curious dog trying to lick a piece of kibble out of a hairbrush. So in contrast to El Paso Emerald Hill Zone (redacted) is the bad kind of repetitive that’s like trying to eat an entire bucket of gravel through a straw.

I got through all four dungeons on my second go, whereupon the game went “Oh no a plot development! Go through all four dungeons again but slightly bigger!” So I did that without a single death, and the game went “Oh no! Another plot development! Time to take the fight to the main baddie!” “I don’t suppose we do that by going through all four dungeons a third time?” “Hey, did you peek behind my DM screen?” This time through I died once during the final boss because I committed the classic mistake of forgetting not to clip through the floor during the opening cutscene. (redacted) is the kind of bad that makes me paranoid. Like maybe I missed something. Maybe there was a checkbox in the options menu labelled “remove shittiness.” Maybe I didn’t notice the tutorial message for the “activate jetpack” button. ‘Cos the alternative is that an entire studio got through the development and release of a game with a relatively well known IP attached that presumably has its own controllers keeping an eye on things, and at no point did anyone raise a hand and say “Has anyone else noticed our game’s a load of old flystruck sheep placenta?” I don’t know if I want to live in that world, I mean, what if I have a medical emergency around such people? They’d probably get confused and stick chewable vitamins up my arse.

This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee discusses why AAA games need to step up their traversal.

Check out more recent episodes of Extra Punctuation on AAA games needing to step up their traversal,  BioShock‘s incredible opening, and Baldur’s Gate 3‘s wonky romance systems.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

I feel buoyed with confidence after the video I did on games that make you pause to listen to audio logs. I was so glad to see the agreement in the comments. There are moments in the life of a game critic where one might start doubting one’s sanity. Sometimes it seems like every major game publisher is doing something completely terrible, but no one else has called it out, and surely such companies are fully peopled with highly educated professionals, who am I, lowly masturbator and made up swear word wrangler, to claim that I know best? Am I the weird one? Does everyone else think that a game having us pay 4.99 additional dollars so your character can have a shinier hat is an extremely desirable feature that massively enhances the experience?

Well, since we did find common ground on the audio log thing, let’s try another one, also from the world of dialogue and conveying story elements to the player. There’s another common practice in triple-A video games that I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed by lately. And I have a funny feeling that in just three words you’ll know exactly what I mean, and will agree that it’s annoying. You ready? “Walk and talk.”

Never let it be said that video games don’t learn. Players don’t appreciate being forced to watch endless cutscenes in what is ostensibly an interactive narrative, and the spectre of Bioware Face has loomed blank-eyed over video game dialogue for a long time, so some visionary said “Why interrupt the interactivity for dialogue? Let’s just let the player stay in control while all the talking’s going on and they can amuse themselves by inspecting the environment and crawling around under the furniture if they really must.” Fine in theory. But then someone got a bit antsy. “Hmm, well we still need players to hear the dialogue, it’s important. I know! Let’s oblige them to walk very slowly behind an NPC as they gab away and hold up the whole game until they do so.” Which is somehow the worst of all possible worlds.

Walk and talk has been with us for a while, but I only recently started seriously turning against it when I played the start of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. See, its predecessor Breath of the Wild had an extremely strong opening – Link wakes up in a box and steps out into a world of beauty and adventure in just his boxer shorts. And I was interested to see how Tears of the Kingdom was going to top that. Imagine my disappointment when the first thing you have to do is walk slowly behind Princess Zelda for five minutes as she talks very enthusiastically about a brick wall.

And what cemented my newfound searing antipathy for walk and talk was that Starfield, another very recent game, did pretty much the exact same thing. Which means lessons apparently aren’t getting learned. Whatever merits are to be found once you start exploring Starfield and blowing off the critical path, it still starts with having to walk slowly behind an NPC through a grey-brown tunnel while they explain to you how boring mining is and how boring your life is now because of it. Doesn’t exactly fire me up. First impressions matter, people. Because even after having tasted what the rest of the game had to offer, when it came to write about Starfield later my first thoughts were “Oh yeah, that game with the really boring start.”

But I digress. When I talk about walk-and-talk, I’m not denigrating any instance of dialogue playing over gameplay, I’ve already complained about being forced to pause the game or stay in one place to listen to dialogue and I’m not THAT impossible to please. It’s specifically instances of it where you have to walk slowly behind an NPC and the plot won’t move on until that NPC finishes walking to the destination. So there’s no escape even if you run on ahead to the exit door like an eager dog with a full bladder. Lose another point if the NPC stops dead if you lag behind or run ahead too far and refuses to continue until you’re close enough again. Now I’m having to be a consenting party to my own torture. Like a child being forced to choose the stick with which they will be beaten.

Oh, and lose another billion points if the NPC’s walking speed is slightly slower than the player character’s walking speed, meaning you have to keep stopping and starting. If you’re so bent on playing out this monologue, I’d honestly prefer you just do it as a cutscene. Something like the opening of Deus Ex: Human Revolution where Adam Jensen automatically moves through the walk and talk sequence like he’s got roombas strapped to both feet. Or that thing in Red Dead Redemption where you can press a button to make your character automatically keep pace with the speaking NPC. At least then you can pass the time looking around at the pretty scenery. Or, you know. Just press skip.

Come to think of it, it’s not even the fact that we’re obliged to press forward and tag along with the walk and talk to continue it that makes it obnoxious, because I never had a problem with the opening sequence of Batman: Arkham Asylum, in which Batman walks alongside the Joker’s entourage and, controversially, talks. I group it with the opening train ride from Half-Life. In both cases I don’t mind it so much because we’re being shown things as well as told things. We set up the environment, build tension, foreshadow a few events, say hi to Killer Croc. Also, Batman can’t walk faster than the NPCs so it’s easy to just hold forward and zone out.

So on reflection, walk and talk can work. As long as keeping pace with the NPCs isn’t annoying to control, as long as there’s something fun to look at, and as long as we’re being told something that’s actually important and relevant. Which I would assume would generally be the case if you’re insisting we stick around to hear it, but the whole sequence in the mine at the beginning of Starfield is nothing to do with the rest of the game. At best it shows you how to mine rocks. And a sodding tutorial window could’ve done that.

Besides, however important and relevant the dialogue you’re insisting on forcing us to hold forward to listen to like we’re slowly squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, you also have to consider that this might not be our first playthrough, and we already know all this bollocks and we’d really rather just skip to the monster shooting. So yeah, a skip button would be lovely. But why not have fun with it? This is supposed to be interactive narrative, after all. I wish more games would put more effort into interpreting the player’s actions and responses on the ground level. Like that bit in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 where you pass through an apartment where a TV show’s playing, and if you pick up the TV and fling it out the nearest window, Alyx Vance says something like “Yeah, suppose you’re right, we don’t have time to sit around staring at the goggle box.” It’s always a fun surprise when developers include these little allowance. It’s nice to know that the player is being considered as an active participant, not just a camera on moving dolly with an inconvenient mind of its own. How flattering that the developers remembered that I possess basic sentience.

So if you were stuck in a walk and talk but attempted to sprint ahead to the end of the corridor, the NPC could say “Oh, sorry, I seem to be boring you, shall we skip ahead?” Wouldn’t even be that hard to implement and it would mean you can skip without breaking your immersion.

The closest example to something like that I can think of is in the 2009 Bionic Commando remake. In the final boss fight, you have the option of skipping the villain’s opening dialogue, and if you do so, your character interrupts the villain to go “SHUT THE FUCK UUUP” and start decking them in the face. Not the best game overall, but blimey I’d love if every game had that feature. One button permanently bound to “shut the fuck up.” Think of all the applications. Muting randos in Fortnite. Responding to Navi in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Better yet, they should work it into the controller hardware, like the PS4 Share button. A dedicated control for shut the fuck up. Then we could all hold it up and symbolically press it during the E3 presentations.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on El Paso, Elsewhere and a second mystery game, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy XVI.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Mortal Kombat 1 Zero Punctuation Transcript

Is it even worth harping on the title of Mortal Kombat 1? Or that there are now three games one is expected to call “Mortal Kombat 1?” Not that anybody does, in the case of what the wiki stubbornly refers to as MK9. You can’t just keep resetting your universe. For one thing it means we can’t get invested in any characters or anything that happens ‘cos God might shake the cosmic etch-a-sketch again at any moment, and for another, I feel sorry for all the normal plebs who have to live in Earthrealm. Imagine being just a random bloke who runs a dry cleaner. Would you understand why you’ve had to apply for a business license three times because ten or eleven martial artists you don’t know about keep punching each other too hard, or something? Anyway, after Mortal Kombat 11 established within canon that literally anything that happens in the story has all the permanence of a single sheet of damp bog roll after Tex Mex night, newly deified Liu Kang was left with the job of rebuilding continuity from scratch. And so he proceeded to make one basically the same as the last, with a few token changes for the sake of change, and if this were the Saturday morning cartoon the story campaign persistently resembles I’d assume it was trying to force parents to fork out for another round of action figures.

So Baraka and Reptile are good guys now, Sub Zero’s a bastard and the tournament between Outworld and Earthrealm is not a bloodsoaked death arena but a sort of jolly school sports day where entrants pulverize each other’s spines in the spirit of good sportsmanship. But trouble is brewing in the form of – oh it’s just Shang bloody Tsung again. This whole franchise really is just going around on a twatting carousel at this point. I won’t hold back – the word that summarises Mortal Kombat 1 in my mind is “pathetic.” It’s pathetic how all they did to create the logo was copy paste the MK11 logo and remove one of the ones. I’ve long relished the hilarious badness of Netherrealm fighter story campaigns, but the joke is now wearing single ply thin, and now a lot of it’s just plain regular badness. Characters endlessly relaying their entire backstories to each other on their first meeting and smug villains giving away all their secret evil plans to absolutely no benefit. The plot holes come so thick and fast you’d think they were trying to bait the twat who does those Everything Wrong With videos. “I have gathered the world’s greatest martial artists to represent Earthrealm in the tournament. Psych! Only one of you can actually enter, but I guess the rest of you can hold his coat.”

“Oh Raiden, you will represent us for you are the strongest and most honorable. Psych! None of that matters ‘cos all your opponents are going to cheat. Here’s a thing that gives you lightning powers. Bet you feel silly about all those press-ups you did.” And the character roster is… well, it’s pathetic. Mortal Kombat has long struggled with physically differentiating its cast, right from the days when half of them were palette swaps of each other. I remember joking that if you stripped the cast of MK9 naked and put paper bags on their heads you couldn’t tell most of them apart. Well guess what? In MK1, you don’t even need the bags. About 60% of the cast is “generically Asian dark haired man.” A good chunk of the rest are “generically Asian dark haired lady,” and it’s Kitana I feel sorry for. With her usual role of “very dutiful reasonable Outworld authority figure with cleavage you could ski down” split between her and four other chicks she’s left with bugger all to do all plot. Besides that you’ve got the inescapable Johnny Cage who’s now living a prolonged impersonation of Bojack Horseman, and a few monsters, including a vampire lady with the voice acting of a freshman drama major reading aloud the specials at the drive thru. Blimey, I hope whoever they got in to do her doesn’t aspire to a film career.

But the real joke of the story campaign is that it isn’t a reset, really. By the end it’s reverted back to where MK11 was at the end – with all continuity screwed up into a multi-timeline mess like a Gorgon’s bad hair day. At the very end, spoiler alert, contrivance leads every good version of every character from every timeline to battle every evil version on the steps of a giant pyramid that’s shown up for no adequately established reason. Kind of amusing in the initial charge as we discover just how hard it is to animate a character running up a flight of stairs with an air of kill crazy abandon, but which versions of which characters we’re still supposed to be giving a shit about and whether or not it matters if any of them die is entirely lost upon me. It’s like Mortal Kombat as a franchise has already written itself into a corner twice so now it’s trying to break its speedrun record. If it is, it’s about the only thing Mortal Kombat 1 approaches with passion. Everything else has a lacklustre feel, even beyond the easy mode logo design. The bespoke pre-fight banter unique to each character combo just keeps getting shittier with each game. Previously it would use three dialog lines to establish at least some contrived reason for fighting to the death.

Now we’re down to two lines and they’re mostly irrelevant pleasantries. “How’s the ninja clan going?” “Eh, could be worse.” Roundhouse kick, commence stabbing. All of which raises the question: what exactly has been improved, or added to the Mortal Kombat formula, to justify a whole new instalment? Are the graphics better? Not to any appreciable degree. Especially not if you bought the Switch version, which looks like everyone’s mildly perturbed at having had their faces sandblasted. There’s a new round of fatalities to enjoy, still vastly, unnecessarily cruel in a way increasingly at odds with the rest of the game’s tone, but I zoned out halfway through the Youtube compilation ‘cos there’s only so many ways you can pull apart a poorly secured sack of guts and deckchair parts and keep it interesting. Are the mechanics much different? Oh, I don’t give Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Shits for the mechanics of fighting games, you know that, I only play Netherrealm fighters to power through the campaign on easy mode by slapping the controller on my bum and then take the piss out of the plot. But I did note that the big new gameplay feature is the Kameo system, where you are assisted during fights by another character, generally one from a previous game with even less justification for their presence than the vampire lady’s voice actress at the academy awards.

But hey, we’ve established nothing matters. The principle purpose being to let you potentially add additional moves to your combos, but more importantly to give you a whole extra set of dressup dollies to kit out with the inevitable mother hen clucking cosmetics that Netherrealm continue to flog like stingily proportioned bags of granola at a farmer’s market. And that’s about all Mortal Kombat Wonk has to show for itself. I can’t help comparing to Street Fighter 6. On the one hand, a bright, colourful game infused with energy and life, full of flamboyant characters with distinct silhouettes and personalities, with a groundbreaking approach to single player gameplay that might conceivably sell a new player on fighting games, even if it doesn’t quite prepare you for them, but at least gives you the chance to beat up a fridge, which is great if you’ve been put on a diet and are looking for symbolic catharsis. And on the other hand, you have… Mortal Kombat One. More of the usual bollocks. And I’m not talking about the contents of the janitor’s wet-dry vac after every round.
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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Mortal Kombat 1, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, and System Shock (2023).

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar Zero Punctuation Transcript

It was one of those weeks for trying new things and getting out of my comfort zone, and obviously that’s why I spent half of it playing a Bloodborne clone. Which might not be in the least bit fair. I was drawn to Lies of P for two reasons: firstly the title is an anagram of “ooh me piles,” if you don’t know what an anagram is, and secondly it’s a Bloodborne clone based on Pinocchio. And what a sentence. I mean, how do you top that? A fighting game based on Les Miserables? A top down twin stick shooter based on A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu? I say “based on,” I couldn’t help thinking as I was slashing a giant mutated purple frog man to death and a snake with a spear-wielding priest on the end popped out of his bum that events weren’t quite unfolding in the spirit of the original text. Our dad’s name is Geppetto, our support character is Jiminy and the now requisite soulslike waifu character who will level us up if we fondle her titties is the blue fairy, and all that’s just name changes. We could’ve respectively named those characters Basil, Manuel and Polly and just as credibly argued that the game is based on Fawlty Towers.

And while we’re on the subject of names, I know you soulslikes all want to have your own bespoke identities, but nobody has a patent on “strength” and “dexterity” and we all know what those sodding mean. I go to level up not-Pinocchio and the stats page is like “Do you want to increase your Motivity or your Advance?” And what the hell do they do? “Oh, they improve your Fable and Legion stats.” NYUUUUURGH. Anyway, the other main connection to Pinocchio as a concept is puppets. The story is surprisingly understandable for a soulslike, although that might be because it’s pretty much the same story as Atomic Heart. There was this society where everyone relied on robot servants, and at some point they all went banana up the tailpipe kill crazy and so you have to go in and deal with your insane brethren because you’re Geppetto’s one special puppet who’s special for two reasons: you have the ability to lie, which didn’t come up that often but it’s in the title so they had to put it in somewhere, and secondly, whenever you get covered in blood or oil from your enemies, your clothes get filthy but your face and neck remain mysteriously squeaky clean. I guess we know the exact point Geppetto ran out of Scotch guard.

Piles of Wee certainly has a striking visual quality, I suppose, although about half the environments make me think I’m playing the one quarter scale model village version of Bloodborne. And what’s that behind your back, Lies of P? “Nothing!” Is it a Bloodborne-style rallying mechanic? “No it’s nothing like that! You can only rally back health you lose while blocking! It’s completely different!” I’d say the game’s much deeper when it comes to micromanaging the fine points of your chosen build. There’s this whole weapon crafting gimmick where the blade and the handle have different bonuses and special moves and if you don’t like one combo you can snap them off and jam together different ones and have an electrified stun stick on the end of a partially eaten Twix if you want. Which is all very well, but sometimes Shites of Glee contracts a bit of Sekiro syndrome, i.e., for all the different builds available there are points where one specific style of combat is clearly favoured. The only way I beat that aforementioned giant frog ecumenical snake bottom entity was by mastering the timing on the perfect parries. Dodging wasn’t a lot of help when he was pulling out that usual neo-soulslike bollocks: lots of spazz-out combo attacks that snap to your position at the last moment and have huge invisible hitboxes the size of a parking space.

So soulslike fatigue set in, as it often does these days, and the monster variety didn’t help – everywhere you go, it’s just dudes, sometimes with a dog, sometimes with a bigger dude who spazzes out a lot. So I got bored during a mid to late game boss fight against some dudes and a bigger dude and decided to continue exploring games outside my comfort zone by playing something everyone told me was like Return of the Obra Dinn. Chants of Sennaar, two N’s, two A’s, but don’t worry, the similarities to Obra Dinn go beyond the incredibly awkward title. In essence, Pants of Seymour is a point and click adventure game in which we play a hooded dude in what is obviously the tower of Babel but is never referred to as such, possibly to avoid causing people to think about Babylon’s Fall again and setting off another wave of self-harm. You stumble into a community where everyone’s talking a weird pictographic language and your task is to decipher that language with the aid of context clues, a notebook and the invisible ghost of a fussy schoolteacher who hangs over you and ticks things in your notebook every time you’ve correctly divined the meaning of three things.

So as you know I’m a fan of deduction-based puzzle games that make me feel clever, to counteract the effect of having conversations with my wife, and that’s very much the intention here. You’ll see one dude buggering a mule and saying “Bish Glongy Splom,” and then you see another dude with his dick in a wine bottle saying “Bish Wompo Splom” and deduce “Aha, clearly Wompo means drink or beverage and Glongy means horny farm animal.” But there’s also a chance they were both saying variations on “get out of my living room.” Then just as you’ve gotten this language figured out you move to the next tier of the tower where there’s a whole other society with a whole other language that places different prominence on different concepts and whose grammar places the subject at the other end of the sentence, and the whole process begins anew. I’d say the puzzling sometimes suffers from giving away too much too easily, sometimes with the mere act of testing us. Like, I’ll have drawn the conclusion that these three words mean Apple, Hatred and Recidivism, but then the newspaper comics puzzle section opens up and says “Okay, which word means Love, which word means Banana and which word means Newsagent?” And I’ll be like, “boy, I was way off.”

Still, I enjoyed how the game culminated in a final boss where you have to get some dudes from each society together and act as translator for a conversation between them, gosh did I certainly feel clever after that. I wish it was the only thing that took the form of “a final boss” in Dances With Wolves, because there are also some rather obnoxious action sequences, usually involving forced stealth of the worst kind, crouching behind a bit of wall picking your robe out of your bum crack while you wait for a gap in the guard patrol to slowly emerge. Oh, and you get chased by a gribbly monster at one point, and it’s as interesting as my tone of voice implies. This is why games as an industry needs to have an actual long term memory. Remember when it was a trend in the early 2000s to have token forced stealth sections and they all universally sucked ass? Maybe if we hadn’t been so quick to brush our teeth designers today would still remember the taste of that ass and actually apply the lessons of history. And while we’re on the subject maybe publishers shouldn’t have forcibly removed our teeth and threatened us with prosecution if we tried to continue making use of them. Or try to charge us money to get an “I was very brave” sticker from the dentist.

This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee discusses why AAA games need to step up their traversal.

This episode is sponsored by RAID: Shadow Legends. Install Raid for free on Mobile and PC, and get a special starter pack with an Epic champion Knight Errant. Use the Promo Code JTSKIN before October 7th to get both the Epic Champion Stag Knight and Gilded Glider Custom Skin! You can redeem the Promo Code either via this site or inside RAID: Shadow Legends itself if you are playing via an Android device or on Plarium Play.

Check out more recent episodes of Extra Punctuation on BioShock‘s incredible opening, Baldur’s Gate 3‘s wonky romance systems, and not wanting to save the world anymore.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

In my old Dev Diary series I frequently talked about my adherence to the philosophy of game design that focuses on the primary gameplay loop, or the moment to moment, second to second experience. But we’ve been seeing a lot of big games lately where the primary gameplay loop appears to be, well, a secondary concern. For all the merits or demerits of Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 that I’m sure we could argue over until the Metacritic scores come home, neither game would look particularly enticing if you randomly clipped a few seconds of an average runthrough. The Starfield clip would probably just be a mid-conversation staring contest with a dead-eyed NPC and the Baldur’s Gate 3 clip would be me yelling at that bloody Astarion for not automatically jumping over a chasm the way all my other children did.

These games are unapologetically focused on the big picture. It’s usually with these epic-scale RPGs and suchlike that the primary gameplay loop philosophy breaks down. They’re supposed to be about your long term goals, reaching the end of the journey, telling a grand narrative that unfolds over hours upon hours of play. But is that any reason NOT to have a strong primary gameplay loop? Maybe you like Baldur’s Gate, but imagine if you had the option of traversing that game’s maps on the back of a purring motorbike.

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This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XVI, System Shock (2023), and Diablo IV.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about BioShock’s incredible opening, and why Baldur’s Gate 3‘s romance just isn’t very interesting.

We have a merch store as well: Visit the store for ZP merch.

Related: Do August 2023’s New Gaming IPs Have A Future?

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Zero Punctuation Transcript

Oh boy I’ve been looking forward to Bomb Rush Cyber Funk. And yes, that was the last time I’m going to call it by its actual name. We like to have fun taking the piss out of titles here on Zero Punctuation and this is enough meat to see me through the winter, right here, can’t even say it without sounding like a confused grandparent reading aloud the highlighted words on the side of their grandchild’s can of energy drink. Talk about a verbal car crash. I don’t even know where to put the dry heave, or even if I’d be dry heaving because of unnecessary colons or just dry heaving unrelatedly. Well anyway. Pace yourself, Yahtz, start with a mild one. Bum Rush Cyber Flunk is a new game very deliberately setting out to evoke the Dreamcast’s classic graffiti skating game Jet Set Radio, also known as Jet Grind Radio, apparently in accordance with the rule that this kind of thing has to be titled the way an oblivious mother dresses their child in a three-piece tartan suit for their first day of school. This isn’t one of those Bloodstained or Mighty No. 9 also-by-the-same-author stealth remake situations, the original devs aren’t involved as far as I know, but the desire to be a pseudo-stealth sequel to Jet Something Radio hangs off of Bum Flush Khyber Junk like an infected piercing.

It’s got a similar visual style, i.e., like the Saturday morning cartoon version of You Got Served, and it’s gone out of its way to look convincingly like a game on the Dreamcast, i.e., like a Playmobil set based on the above that got sneezed on by a coal miner, all janky animation and blurry textures. And of course the gameplay is based around skating through a futuristic city, doing graffiti and outfoxing a ludicrously overfunded police department. All set to music that sounds like a very excitable person got their synthesizer caught in a car door. The story is, you play a graffiti artist skater boi who gets busted out of prison by another graffiti artist skater boi, but gets decapitated by an insane DJ on the way out. So the second skater boi, instead of, like, calling a doctor or asking if you’re OK or anything like that, jams a robot head on your body and announces you’re going to help him and his crew take over the city, his crew consisting of you, him, and some perpetually jiggling girl who hangs around very conspicuously not explaining her presence.

From this I got the impression that the plot of Poo Tush Pile o’ Spunk doesn’t actually matter that much, which is a shame, because it started mattering later on and I kinda wished I’d paid more attention. Meanwhile your actual task is to go to each district of the city, paint over all the occupying gang’s graffiti and then challenge them to a stylish skating contest. Thankfully this isn’t one of those serious skating games where there’s a dedicated control for everything from pushing off to diving face-first into a concrete step. Again, it’s the Saturday morning cartoon version – you snap onto grind rails like they’re made of streaky bacon and your board is an unsupervised labrador, and then press buttons to do tricks. “Oh but don’t just randomly mash the trick buttons,” warns one of your NPC friends. And then the actual gameplay waits for her to leave and says “Yeah, just randomly mash the trick buttons, it’s fine.” Still, I was missing something, because when I challenged the Southside Crapouts or whatever the very first, easiest to beat gang in the game were called, they proceeded to stomp me in stylishness points no matter how many ollies I cracked off in a row.

I dropped the game for a few days after that, but something made me go back. Maybe it was every other game I played that week not quite scratching the right square inch of bollock, or maybe it was the innate charm of Bong Hit Cider Drunk’s retro graphics, tragically 90’s vibe and endless parade of gyrating bottoms. I returned to the battlefield and remembered that games about rewarding stylishness very rarely actually do. I mean, if an AI can’t even point out all the squares containing traffic lights why would you think it knows anything about style? No, the thing to do in this sort of game is figure out the one thing the game gives inordinately high points to and then do that over and over again. In the case of Bum Gush Diarrhoea Bucket, your secret weapon is the corner. Yes, those innocuous seeming points where two grind rails meet from different angles aren’t just jolly useful for pedestrian safety, they’re the secret path to victory. Every time you lean into a corner while rail grinding, you add one to your score multiplier, and that shit mounts up. You do have to lean into it, though. Circumnavigate an entire food court while standing upright, boo, amateur hour, sod off back to the swingset, Tommy Pickles.

Do exactly the same thing while leaning slightly to the right, yay, superstar, consider yourself served, rest of universe. Your other secret weapon is the manual button. See, your combo immediately ends if you touch the ground. Even if you so much as prod it with a toe in between using your skateboard to perform high-level particle physics experiments. But, if you hold down the right trigger as you land, you do a manual, and that does not break your combo. Then you can manual your way over flat ground until you find another grind rail with another seven or eight corners, or as I prefer to call then, angel clitorises. So again, do nine thousand tricks and touch the ground, that’s scrub shit, go get a job in the toilets so you can scrub shit some more. Do nine thousand tricks and touch the ground with your feet at a slight angle, all hail the new emperor of the cosmos. And once I knew all that, Bog Brush Cyber Twat was almost trivially easy. Although I was having fun. Sometimes it’s nice to play a game that doesn’t feel the need to point a nailgun at my gonads and command me to dance, and I could zone out and lose myself for hours just skating around the city, idly wondering if the game’s interface will bugger up if I get my combo over 999.

I do have black marks on my examination sheet. The combat is a complete wash, it’s like slapping balloons on a conveyer belt, so the police are more of an irritant than a challenge. The five enemy gangs you go up against are a bit underdeveloped as characters, and during the battle sequences I might as well have been pitting my skills against a Dance Dance Revolution machine hanging from a meathook. And the music ranges from decent to someone’s beating me to death with a malfunctioning drum machine, and I kept hearing the same songs over and over again, so either there aren’t enough tracks or that was when the concussion set in. But that’s all baby new potatoes compared to the butternut squash that is the fact that Plop Splutch Spider Haemhorrhoid is a fun game. I’ve always had a soft spot for pure traversal gameplay and this hits a good balance between skill and breezy fun. I admire how you don’t unlock abilities, they’re all available from the start and you just have to figure them out. And after I had, I could restart the game and when the jiggly lady in the tutorial went “See if you can get a combo of ten!” I could go “You mean like this?” And then still be comboing into the hundreds hours later long after her face had been fully melted off. This isn’t nostalgia; I never played Jet Set Radio and never owned a Dreamcast, because… well, one hardly needs to justify that statement, I’ve also never put my bellend in a hole punch.

This week on the Slightly Something Else podcast, Yahtzee and Marty discuss games Return of the Obra Dinn, Chants of Sennaar, and what it takes for a game to make us actually feel smart.