Update Two Hundred and Sixty-Four: 2 January 2019
Ken Follett's the Pillars of the Earth
102 hours playtime, 12 hrs actual, 41 of 41 achievements
7/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
A game that’s so well done it has me caring about genres I don’t typically care about, the Pillars of the Earth is a great point and click adventure game. If you care about medieval England even a little bit, you’ll go bananas about it. The game is long as hell, but filled to the brim with beautiful 2D animation that is spot on all the time and makes everything come alive.
The entire game takes place over, oh, I dunno, like thirty years or so, and you take control of different characters in different scenes, the main three being Aliena, the daughter of an overthrown earl; Jack, a disaffected young man; and Philip, a monk who gets caught up in things bigger than he can handle but just wants to do his best. The game has a very slow start - there’s three books with seven chapters each with 21 in all - and I really only started to GIVE a shit somewhere in book two. The main aspects of the game - the ye olde games of thronesy politicking, the much ado about the church, the Being A Medieval Peasant Is Suffering - just really don’t appeal to me, but the charm of the art style and the strength of the characters (particularly Aliena) brought me through.
Not a ton of puzzles per see - this game is largely TellTale-y in the sense that it’s mostly helping them live their lives and what you have to do next is fairly straight forward. The eventual overarching storyline was fairly interesting, and how the church was represented and how the women were treated in the narrative surprised and pleased me. Women, like, did things other than give birth and die! (The game did start off on a sour note, though, because, lol, that’s like the first thing that happens in the game.)
I’m happy to have won this game - it’s one of the stronger games I’ve won. While it didn’t steal my heart, I can definitely see it stealing some of yours.
Next up: Weird game time!
See you soon!
The game is long as hell
Oh god, how long did she play?
102 hours playtime
What the… oh wait, there is IDLE TIME! Must be
12 hrs actual
Yeah, that’s more like it :D
Did you have to re-play game to grab all achievements? I played in Origin version, so no achievements there at all.
PFFFT AWWW everybody’s clownin me about my idle time
The game DOES have missable achievements, but I used a guide to find the exact right places to save so I didn’t have to play twice for alternate paths - it tells you when to make a save at the latest possible minute to get the achievement. (It is here)
Sowwy.
And as I thought - missable achievements :D So I am glad I beat it on Origin. No achievements, no need to grab them all!
Women do more than give birth and die? Well that’s certainly a rather radical idea. Don’t spread it around too much or there might be some trouble. Seriously though, I always think people making entertainment should try harder to tell more interesting stories with female characters. It’s either as you say, give birth and die, or they try so hard to make them ‘better than the men’ at everything, that she becomes basically superman in a bra, and they lack the same nuance of struggles and defeat before ultimate victory that makes a character relatable and interesting.
But I’ve always said, if any medium actually has the power to tell better stories, it’s video games, because there’s so much more input from the viewer that characters can much more easily become an extension of the player through choices they make. And honestly, despite all the noise from a few knuckle-draggers, most gamers I know, don’t really object to playing as a character of the opposite sex, if the game itself is good.
Anyway thanks for the review, I might need to keep an eye out for this one, as the story does sound interesting.
I get what you mean - I don’t mind Superman in a bra, but I vastly prefer Wonder Woman, where there’s strength, AND nuance. All anybody’s asking for is women written like people and having equal weight and agency in stories in general. ‘I want strong women’ means ‘I want women in these stories to have agency’, to move the plot themselves and have control over their choices. A lot of crappier writers, or writers who don’t want to think very hard, or, scariest of all, writers who can’t imagine what that would actually look and feel like, just default to, uh, ‘girl is sexy but also now she punches and kicks a lot’.
The Pillars of the Earth handles it well where women who just have control over their own lives are…. present. They’re just there, able to take care of and manage themselves and their families and not at the whims of men. From Aliena having a ton of agency to a crowd shot of masons and merchants and women just BEING there, DOING things - it’s nice. Like real life!
You’re very welcome - I’m glad it could help.
Haha yes exactly! And the funny thing is pretty much nobody actually likes those characters. The knuckle-draggers they are hoping to snag with, ‘ooo sexy girl’, don’t buy into the fantasy that she can beat up guy twice her size, and she’s still got far too much boob on show for the feminists. Both sides can see the character as a bad attempt to bridge a gap. And yet no one really objected to Wonder woman, because she was believable. You could believe she was strong, because she was basically a demi-god, but we still saw her having to grow as a character. So we could still root for her. One of my favourite characters of all time in video games was Cate Archer from ‘no one lives forever’. She basically had the deck stacked against her and fails a bunch of times, and gets it in the neck so many times for being a woman trying to do a man’s job, but it makes her eventual triumph that much better. And yet it was still a great shooter/ spy game to boot and I would consider kidney donation for a sequel.