There isn’t a word in the pitch for Burly Men at Sea I don’t like: a quirky tale that tells a slightly different story based on your choices, with each branching path taking between 20 and 30 minutes to complete. What’s more, the minimalist graphics are pleasing to the eye, a lot of the creature design is just too darn cute, and the human-voiced sound effects and music fit the tone perfectly.
Indeed the game makes a great first impression. I was fully on board to follow the adventures of the three Beard brothers, Hasty, Brave, and Steady, who on a fishing expedition find a bottle containing a map promising adventure. Setting sail for the unknown, they are promptly swallowed whole by a gigantic whale, and the course their journey takes from there is up to you.
There are few puzzles to speak of in the game. Most of the time, choosing the way forward is as simple as picking a direction. Occasionally, it is not so obvious that you are at a fork in the road, but usually on subsequent playthroughs, the dialogue will let you know you can choose differently.
I had a great time during my first two playthroughs, getting two fairly different outcomes. It helped that the second playthrough yielded different dialogue since the story loops in a way that doesn’t reset everyone’s memories: characters recall you passing by before.
Unfortunately, the third playthrough is when you start getting diminishing returns: the dialogue remains the same as on the second playthrough, and you start realizing that while the middle part of your trek can have you visit interesting places and meet a variety of characters, your starting point is unchanging, and all 12 possible paths lead to only two outcomes. In a scene you can’t skip or fast-forward through, you slowly make it back to the starting island either on some vessel, or by walking on the seafloor.
The game seems to be going for a “the journey is the reward” theme, but watching the same two endings again and again quickly grows tedious and diminishes what came before it. Finding an untrodden path isn’t exciting anymore when you know exactly where it leads. The story, however charmingly presented, lost its grip on me once I became aware each new situation I found myself in would have no payoff.
The comparison with Oxenfree is apt. You get visions from touching the people you find encased in ice, legends play a part in the mystery, that kind of thing.
Kona is set in a tumultuous time in French Canadian history. The province of Quebec experienced a post-war boom of social and economic development. Massive public and private investments were made to exploit the resources in Northern Canada: hydroelectricity, mining, forestry, etc. The economic boom fueled Quebecois nationalism. A separatist provincial political party with aims to secede democratically from the rest of Canada was formed. But violence erupted as a separatist paramilitary group multiplied bombings, injuring and killing people. The federal government invoked the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties and calls upon the military to detain people without charge.
As I said: tumultuous.
You play as Carl Faubert, a private investigator hired by a rich industrialist, William Hamilton, to investigate acts of vandalism on his property. Hamilton basically owns the small town of Lake Atamipek in its entirety: the mines, the general store where his own (mostly French Canadian) employees have no other choice but buy their wares so far up North. He has the place under his thumb, and resentment has been brewing.
Unfortunately, no sooner have you reached the place than an incoming car throws you off the road. When you wake up from the crash, the road leading out of town is blocked, the other car’s passengers have fled on foot and, more alarmingly, you are in a blizzard the 52 degrees F forecast did not prepare you for. When you reach the general store, it becomes clear that the town has been deserted by all except roaming wolves and dead residents encased in solid ice, and that that’s Williamson on the floor, dead of a bullet wound.
I may be biased due to this game bringing to life a region I'm familiar with, but this is a rich setting for a first-person adventure game. Kona is at its best for me when I’m reading the in-game touristic and promotional brochures pushing Northern Canada as “The New Klondike,” a villager’s diary about her unhappy marriage, or a nationalist’s indignant screed against the capitalists buying up everything. It gives Lake Atamipek character, and I loved exploring it.
It’s a shame that the writing of Kona doesn’t measure up to this world-building. As you investigate, explore, and solve puzzles, an omniscient narrator comments on Carl’s situation, provides historical context, gives insights into Carl’s frame of mind… constantly. The voice actor doing the narration sounds very smooth, but the script has severe problems of tone that actually pull you out of the game. The tense early moment when you’re run off the road and wake up in an inexplicable blizzard, for instance, is instantly neutered by the narrator exclaiming “Scratches did not stop Carl. His mother would be so proud!” It’s often jarring, sometimes cringe-inducing, and seldom witty or even appropriate. You can opt to get less frequent narration in the options menu, but it doesn’t fix the writing.
Something is off with the main character as well. When you discover Hamilton’s body, the narrator explains that Carl’s biggest worry has become where his paycheck will come from. And sure, not getting paid for making the trip would be a concern, but I would think it would be tertiary to the fact that a killer is around, and that a preternatural blizzard is going on. Carl has to be the most incurious detective ever. It’s actually surprising he doesn’t carry on his vandalism investigation, paying the murder no mind.
Outside of pamphlets, diaries, and an omniscient narrator, the story of Kona is also delivered through Carl’s inner thoughts that get displayed on in-game surface (most often the walls) whenever you examine an object. It looks cool, but it’s very inconvenient as you need to stand right next to an object to interact with it, and more often than not, you need to step back to actually be able to read. The feature should have been ditched or, even better, the game could allow you to stand further from the objects you want to interact with. Carl Faubert: Near-Sighted Investigator.
Speaking of eyesight, this may be a “me” problem, but play as I might with the gamma correction slider, I never found a setting I was comfortable with. Setting it so the indoor environments weren’t so dark would just lead to the snowy outdoor areas to be too bright and washed out. Not wanting to miss a clue, I would strain my eyes, giving myself headaches. Something other than a small white dot to indicate things you can interact with would have been appreciated.
In the end, the setting of Kona is the real star. Snow in general is underused in games, and you don’t get to explore a small mining and logging community very often in this hobby. The supernatural elements in the game had me interested right away, but the interface issues and the tone of the narration kept pulling me out of the experience. Check it out if you’re looking for something new and interesting, just be prepared for some rough edges.
I sometimes find myself nostalgic for the times I rented Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a friend. They were obtuse and had clunky controls, sure, but I found them fascinating. They oozed with weird hues of purple and neon green that you wouldn’t see in a Mario game, and they taught me to fear day/night cycles. I could never go back to them, however. They were legitimately poorly designed.
A Hole New World is a retro-style platformer that takes inspiration from those games, but is selective with what it lifts from them. For instance, take the controls: it uses only two action buttons for jumping and shooting, but allows the player to quickly switch weapons using the shoulder buttons instead of making one choose them from the pause menu. Same philosophy with the graphics; the game mostly sticks to the color palette and the resolution of the NES, but takes liberties by putting on screen giant bosses or huge amounts of enemies that would bring the 8-bit Nintendo hardware to its knees.
I’m fine with this.
I was also relieved to discover that the game is not nearly as punishing as its inspirations. Again, it has elements of old platformers: lives, hidden 1-ups, and continues. But as long as you have lives left, you are revived on the spot and lose no progress (except against bosses, where you’re taken right outside their room). What’s more, the areas you cleared of monsters aren’t repopulated until you choose Continue on the Game Over screen. And even then, you start back at the last checkpoint, not the beginning of the stage.
That is especially good news given how large the stages are. They are long, often several screens high, and each one has a mirror, nightmarish upside-down version of itself that you visit whenever you jump into a pit. When in the inverted world, the physics are inverted as well, meaning you are walking on the ceiling. Your controls aren’t inverted, however: you still press down to duck. That takes some getting used to.
Exploring for secrets is a real joy. Beyond helpful 1-ups tucked away behind fake walls, the world is peppered with odd visual gags that made me smile. Early in the Castle stage, you can enter a dungeon cell and find two people deep into a game of Go. A demon erupts from under the board, disturbing their game. Dispatch the enemy, and the players pick up their pieces from the floor and resume their game, paying you no attention. Finding events like this one is strangely rewarding, and when you finish the game, a screen hints at what other cute one-off sprites you may have missed.
Unfortunately, in modernizing certain elements of old-school platformers while trying to preserve their charm and some of their trappings, the developer hasn’t managed to strike the right balance in terms of difficulty. The extra lives I regularly found throughout stages allowed me to stave off the Game Over screen until the very last stage. There, I used my first two continues. And then, against the final boss, I used 33 more.
That’s right: I had to throw myself at the final boss nearly a hundred times before I could defeat it. I guess it’s not a completely unfair fight since I eventually triumphed, but it required a level of precision nothing in the game prepares you for. It didn’t help that in the heat of battle, I would to forget which button was Jump and which was Shoot… and eventually I realized that part of the problem was that Jump is mapped to the B button, and shoot to the A button. A Hole New World overtly references Mega Man, Castlevania, or Ghost ‘n Goblins, yet inverts the controls all those games use. I can only imagine I’d have had an easier time had the controls been properly mapped.
A ray of hope in the horrible night: the developer’s Twitter account has announced that the game would be patched to let us control the game with the X and Y buttons as well. But will they let us map them how we want? I have no idea.
Despite the difficulty spike at the end, I really enjoyed playing through A Hole New World. The game scratched a very specific itch for me, and despite its problems, it ended up giving me a far better experience than revisiting the fascinating, clunky horror games of my childhood would have. Let’s hope the planned fixes elevate the game even more.
Subsurface Circular is a “Bithell Short”, a game from the developer of Thomas Was Alone made in the span of four months as a palate cleanser of sorts between bigger projects. It is a short interactive story where most of the gameplay consists of choosing between dialogue options.
In a future where sentient robots called Teks have replaced humans not just in low-skilled jobs, but also in psychiatry or sports, you play as a detective who, in the subway, runs into a Tek asking you to look into a friend’s disappearance. You normally get assigned cases by the Management (the humans on top), but decide to take on this task, otherwise a short game would be even shorter. From there, you never leave your subway car, but instead interrogate the Teks who come in to see if they’ve seen anything suspicious.
The game has a couple of dialogue-based puzzles and a pretty kicking soundtrack. It even cleverly uses the Switch’s HD rumble feature to simulate the feel of a train stopping and going. However, this type of game lives and dies by its writing. Neo-noir stories where robots with minds of their own stand in for oppressed minorities is a popular subgenre of science-fiction and one I’m very familiar with, so I set out to do my best and choose the dialogue options that would get me to the bottom of this mystery. Always polite and often keeping the fact that I’m a detective to myself, I questioned robot nannies and construction workers to learn if they were aware of strange happenings. I had the case solved after a couple of hours of reading.
Turns out I could have been rude and unsubtle and still solved the mystery, as most dialogue choices barely have any impact on the way things unfold. One of the most significant changes in my second playthrough is that I nicknamed an old Tek “Rusty Piston” instead of “Grandpa”. The interactivity in this game is minimal, to say the least.
So when I say this game lives and dies by its writing, I mean it. And unfortunately, the more I thought about the game and the world it describes, the more it fell apart.
After the first playthrough, you unlock a developer commentary option. In it, the developer states that it was very much their intention to make a political game. The game is not subtle about, on one level, Teks standing in for immigrant workers. But if you’re going to write an allegory with robots standing in for humans, you run the risk of unintentionally saying something gross.
For instance, your interviews reveal discontent amongst humans because Teks have taken their jobs. You can choose to reply in disbelief “But that’s against their best economic interest!” or “But we’re doing the jobs they won’t touch!”, as if you could appeal to the financial sense of bigots to make them accept the other. As if “they’re good for the economy” was the best reason, the most moral reason, to treat others with dignity.
Add to this the fact that the robots you meet in this game have no inner life, not even a fake one like the replicants of Blade Runner 2049. They are 100% their job. Their very personality is set to match their occupation. Despite the game’s efforts to humanize the Teks, by having them demonstrate emotions for instance, they were never a convincing simulacra of humanity to me. It made a would-be gut-wrenching dilemma late in the game rather clear-cut. And again, if the goal of the developer was to have the player empathize with the plight of immigrants, I wonder if having robots standing in for them would have the opposite effect. On the commentary, the developer admits the allegory isn’t perfect, but I would argue it’s downright harmful.
Outside of the janky allegory, the game touches on other interesting themes, but never explores them deeply enough. It is stated for instance that private ownership of Teks is illegal and that all Tek athletes, psychiatrists, librarians, or nannies are government-owned, yet only the wealthy can afford their services, meaning this isn’t a post-capitalism society like in Star Trek. What does that look like? How many people has poverty killed? I find it weird that a game that aims to be political doesn’t even try to explore these questions.
I don’t believe I am thinking too deeply about all this: getting the player to think about the consequences of increased automation and the power structures that lead to inequality and scapegoating is the whole point of the game. I think it’s commendable and I have no doubt the developer had the best of intentions, I just hope that next time they handle such serious questions with more care.
Yeah, I tried to be upfront about the fact that I barely touched it. The game just lost most of its appeal when it became clear Karen wasn't interested in playing co-op. I just can't see myself going online to play this one.
If that's the way she comes across to you, it's probably mostly my fault and is the result of my editing combined with a less-than-stable Skype call. She'll say "Moving on" to keep the conversation flowing and on track, which is often needed on RFN. I'll be more mindful of the way I edit coming back from interjections that stop one's train of thought, but I assure you that during recording, we don't find her rude or monopolizing the conversation.
You're going over the line with your comment, FL. There's a way to criticize with kindness.
Are you saying that you're not enjoying coming across as overly critical and negative, and that before you even said anything you knew people would make a big deal out of your light criticism and would act overly defensive? That you're a big fan but had some issues with the latest that came out, and it brought you down?
I can't imagine what that's like.
Look, I'm sorry for being snarky but I tried to be mostly positive, it's just that no one else seemed to have the same feelings about the game as I did, so I had to express them. I know some listeners feel the same way I do, and I don't see a reason to not express that point of view. The alternative would have been to shut up, which is largely what I did for the one hour Odyssey conversation between James and Greg on 547, so go ahead and enjoy that.
I may have some more positive things to say in future episodes, as I find aspects of the game I like more. But the collectathon nature of the game isn't something I enjoy, and unfortunately it's prevalent and unavoidable when playing through the game.
Yeah, I feel like I had covered pretty much all the bases: I conceded Odyssey's co-op might be useful in the context of helping a child play through the game but isn't fun with an experienced player. I don't find controlling Cappy fun, and Karen doesn't WANT Cappy control taken away from her.
3D World is my gold standard for 3D Mario co-op.
All of this was covered in the episode itself.
As for the negativity, it's not something I wanted to bring to the podcast, but it just resulted from just liking a game everyone else LOVES. I made sure to state more than once that I wasn't as down on the game as I came across, and that it just came down to my preferences.
I want a public library that has Nintendo games like the G-man has. Although I always feel slightly judged by the librarian based on the books I'm checking out. I deliberately mix in a few high-brow books I have no intention of reading just to throw them off.
Librarian definitely did a double take when he saw the cover of The Binding of Isaac.
Well in that case I have an issue with the basic design of the game: the size of the levels, the constant stop-and-go navigation, and the lack of checkpoints when a bit of bad luck can wipe out half an hour of progress.
I think overwhelming players and punishing failure harshly can work well if we're talking 3 minute long Overcooked levels, but it's not so fun in a game about exploration.
I did lower the difficulty down a notch after the recording, and the game has become less frustrating and more enjoyable to Karen and I as a result.
The podcast has been around for 11 years, i.e. for nearly as long as Nintendo has had online games. If you're looking for RFN giving Nintendo credit for what it's done well on DS, Wii and Wii U, that's where you'll find it.
Reiterating every time the topic of online services comes up that there are online Nintendo titles we've enjoyed would be, frankly, tedious.
If you can't revisit 11 years of podcasting, on this very episode you can listen to me saying I'm enjoying playing an online game on the Switch. Us being critical of the way Nintendo is handling online on Switch in the second segment doesn't erase that.
So yes, obviously, we've been enjoying free online for a while, in quality, fun games. The question was related to the roll out of Nintendo's online app which, I remind you, only allows voice chat in limited game modes and is of little help trying to set up games with friends. It also stops working the second you let your phone's screen fade out, which is unacceptable.
The question was also about Nintendo charging a price for playing online at all in the near future. Given what we've seen so far of the app, it's hard to see this move as something other than Nintendo taking away free online play in exchange for an app that doesn't work.
Eh, maybe it wasn't all reviews, and I should have said instead that it's my impression from reading IGN back in those days. Them being divided into Sony, Nintendo and MS channels lead to some pretty nutty hyperbole, and each hyped release had to be bigger and better than the competitor's last.
I fully expect MK8D to be the only MK game on the Switch. That's why I'm waiting for DLC that appeals to be more than the few extra characters and the battle mode that the Deluxe version adds to the Wii U release.
The problem as I see it with the limitations of the Switch, notably the fact that it's "delicate" as you put it, is that they make it more appealing than the Wii U to me, but less appealing and convenient than the 3DS in most situations.
Once I get a Switch, I see myself only using it at home or when I've reached my destination: a friend's home, a vacation spot. But between points A and B? It will remain safely tucked away so as not to scratch its unprotected screen or tempt a thief with a $400 CDN piece of electronics.
Chances are, that friend's home or that vacation destination will have a TV, so I'll probably want to carry the dock as well, and perhaps extra controllers. That hardware will be easier to lug around than the Wii U's, but that's not saying much.
For bus rides or flights or trips for which I want to travel light, the 3DS is way more convenient and the Switch will stay at home.
Nintendo's marketing has positioned the Switch as a home console that you can take on the go, and that sure is the way I see the console as well.
I'm sorry if I didn't have much to say. "What Brash Games did was bad" is the coldest of takes, and it's all I had.
The conversation about working for NWR being a formative experience missed me because I came into NWR as a fully formed adult already, with a steady job and absolutely no intention of breaking into the games writing market.
I guess I could have spoken about how I justify to myself spending an afternoon a week editing the podcast. The basic gist is that podcasting looked fun so I tried my hand at it with my own biweekly podcast, and when I got recruited to edit RFN, a podcast I loved then and love now, it seemed like a trade up and a way to make sure RFN kept going. The fact that no one else on the site gets paid was also a consideration, but that was mentioned on 520 already.
I treat it as a time-consuming hobby. I made sure when I came in that I would be able to get breaks occasionally and so Jonny and then James picking up the work a lot of week-ends has helped tremendously. And I'm constantly looking for ways to save time to make it easier for myself and make sure I don't burn out.
None of this has much to do with the Brash Games question, hence my silence.
I see people bringing up Drake's body count in the Uncharted games all the time. I know it struck me when I played them, and I talked about it on social media. But reasons to talk about that series don't often come up on a Nintendo podcast.
It's true we could have spent more time discussing violence, but a) the email specifically focused on sexual and religious content (and SMT and Bayonetta were the examples provided) and b) personally, I think I flat out never really played any shooter in front of Karen. So we never had a discussion about them the way we discussed Bayonetta.
My experience playing Disaster: started it with a crowd of IGN forum-dwellers meeting for mostly the first time. We all made fun of the opening scenes, shouted "Steeeeve!" with abandon. It was great.
Trying to play the rest of the game later on my own really didn't live up to that.
There being just the one town is one of the refreshing things I liked about it, actually. I don't care much for getting to a new town and having to find and talk to every NPC before moving on. I mean, I do it, but I don't particularly care for it.
I loved having a one stop shop for all the gear in the game, one stop for all the quests. Loved the streamlining, and thought they could have pushed it even further.
It's a dungeon-crawler for sure, even if it looks like a traditional DQ-inspired RPG.
My twitter feed wasn't as encouraging, especially a friend of mine who kept raging against the game and especially the final boss, which he had trouble beating. Said it was one of the worst games he played that year.
Then again, he said the same of 7th Dragon. "Too easy".
I'm currently exploring the Aeolus Vale in the present, in DQ7. Still enjoyable. But I kinda wish the ending were in sight, and yet I know I'm about maybe halfway through the game. I'll probably take a break before I burn out.
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