Helter Skelter in Summer Swelter

…The birds flew off to a fallout shelter. Which I mention because I was thinking some of the Fallouts would be candidates for this month’s Long Game theme - I have them all, except for the Fallout 4 Season Pass, and they’ve patiently waited through the years for attention. The only one I played for more than a taste was the first, back when it was still an Interplay property running from a CD. And also because it’s been hotashell here lately, something I feel with force and precision since we’ve been performing our adaptation of The Three Musketeers these last four weeks out in Riverside Park, and this week we’ve been baking. Tonight is closing night, and my feet are looking forward to their vacation.

My other two candidates for Long Game were Deus Ex - I can’t believe I’ve hardly played Deus Ex, I think I’ve got something like two hours in it - and The Witcher, which I also can’t believe I’ve never played, and which is what I chose. Also a lot of time, and I mean a lot of time, went into exploring Secret World Legends, which I’m enjoying. That’s not on Steam yet, and even when it gets there I’ll probably play it on the client rather than through the Steam overlay. I mostly like MMOs when they are mostly single-player experiences, so my last two games were TSW (I started before the re-launch, but I’ve been playing exclusively in the new one) and Neverwinter, though someday I’ll probably get back to Guild Wars 2.

Anyway. Games.

• Blameless
  

  3 hours playtime

  4 of 4 achievements

• Violett
  

  10 hours playtime

  11 of 22 achievements

• The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
  

  14 hours playtime

  no achievements

Blameless (2016) is a short free game, and I like those from time to time. You’ll read that it takes under an hour to complete, which is probably true for good gamers. Hey, I never said I was good at gaming, I said I liked gaming. My own run lasted 2.7 hours and involved dying a couple of times at the end - I was actually at the final sequence, I just didn’t realize how to trigger it - and then getting stuck in the scenery on reviving and having to go back to the start. So, my time reflects a not-very-clever experience, in which I also managed to miss the flashlight, forgot that there were two keys on the keyring, and managed to put every item in the first room into the vise except the one that actually belonged there. But! Got all four achievements!

The game is well-made, and as expected for a small-dev free game it’s very limited in scope. We are an architect lured out of the city by a job offer; the anonymous caller thumps us on the head, and we wake up in a dark, locked, and deserted construction site. We’ll need to get a few doors open, get the fuses sorted out, and make our way back out into the world - like ya do. The pretty environs are sensible and put together nicely, though only a few objects are active and the inventory system is a little rudimentary. It’s a good way to drop a couple of hours, and I had fun poking around in there.

Violett Remastered (2013, Steamgifts win) apparently had a tough buggy launch, but it’s fixed now. And it’s really terrific. Violett, a sullen cartoony young teen, moves with her fighty parents to a run-down creepyish country house - which looks like a pretty awesome property actually. She’s not very happy about this. While sulking in her room, she sees a winking glimmer from a cracked hole in the wall. She has apparently never watched Doctor Who, so she reaches in there and pulls out a mysterious amulet, which transports her into our behind-the-mirror game world.

The vibe is Alice in Wonderland, but with toothier monsters - as it should be, since Alice was much darker in tone before Disney made it so cheery. We move through zany stylish chambers, cluttered with wild exaggerated objects or punctuated with crazed architecture, solving puzzles to move through the maze, collecting a variety of objects - three flavors of devilishly-hidden orbs, fragments of the amulet, pages of a tome on the warped animal denizens we’ll meet, a few piping whistles - and doing favors for the weird residents so they will open gates, give us soup, move aside, let us have a hat, and so forth. Some of the hidden stuff is seriously hidden, which is fun and will no doubt turn frustrating when I’m trying to hit the completionist achievement (prediction: either I’ll skip it, or there is a walkthrough video in my future).

Not all of our tasks are clear - Violettland creatures speak Gabble, with minimalist pictograms, to indicate what they want us to do, and that can be a little baffling. I think the game has such mixed reviews in part because it’s very confusing right out of the gate. It doesn’t ease us into the puzzle-play, it flings us right into the middle of it: we collect orbs without knowing why until we’re a couple of hours in, and the second room - well, the third, but we can’t get back to the first one - is an Escher-y labyrinth with several exit branches. This happens while we are figuring out what on earth we’re supposed to be doing here, and it makes the game feel daunting. In fact it eases up quickly once we get a sense of how things work, and from my vantage somewhere fairly well along the story (I think) it’s great fun, and challenging.

The Witcher (2008) is just a spectacular game. My schedule really hasn’t allowed me to jump into my so-loved big RPGs for a long time, and I have no idea how long it will take me to finish this one, but so far - I’m just entering Chapter II - everything has been a joy. People complain about the combat controls in this one, but I find them pretty flexible. Easier than Morrowind, though that may not be saying much.

Action in The Witcher is great, but what really makes this game shine is that everything about it is SMART. It feels like it was stripped down to the basics of What Gamers Want, and then built fresh to make that the center of the title. Why don’t all studios do that? So far only the collect-‘em-all aspect of the sex partners feels out of place: our Witcher, Geralt of Rivia (you probably know this already), can make some nooky time for many of the characters we meet, and after scoring we get a fantasy boudoir sex card to mark each event. The action is all very staid and not inappropriate, though who knows, it may get kinkier later. And the cards are well within the arty conventions of the hard-bitten fantasy setting we’re given, which is a craven medieval place and not any kind of Middle Earth. It’s just the collecting aspect that strikes me as off. Because, frankly, Geralt is a pretty grim and damaged guy, and I don’t doubt he gets laid in his travels. But I don’t think he collects. It’s beneath him.

Geralt’s moral choices are part of the game-play, which is cool. I’m going high road, which is always my instinct. I gather this will actually make some difference later on, but I’m not there yet. I’ll surely have to play the game again at some point, because I lost Vesna Hood, the barmaid, after saving her from a night attack by some of the worst of the villagers. Shaken, she asks to be walked home through the night’s creatures, but I couldn’t get her past an infestation of barghests; I can handle them, but she can’t, and she insists on getting into the fight. I now know how to get that quest finished properly, thanks Internet.