September update! Late because life is kicking me in the butt!
Gris (Space) - This is a very beautiful game with very cool mechanics and I do not like it. This keeps getting included on lists of ‘emotional’ indie games and the most emotion I felt was a visceral hatred for the sexy naked crying girl statues being littered around to make us feel sad for hot girls who are sad. At one point you have to climb up one of these statues and of course the entry point is her (naked) butt so you know this was made by a straight man with something other than healing on his mind. I’m dealing with my own grief this year and seeing themes of grief badly handled (and with a ‘pain is beautiful’ message tacked on, even!) just makes me angry.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits (2021) - I’ve been waiting for years for this game, because the protag’s name is pretty similar to mine, and it’s finally here! I actually had mixed, but mostly positive, thoughts. Initially the controls were kinda janky, which felt like a fun artifact of a studio’s first video game. They did some improvements over the first week, but then I realized the problem might actually have been my PS4 controller? I also noticed that, despite looking like a cutesy game for kids and newbie gamers, it actually relies on a lot of video game standards that are intuitive for gamers, but maybe not so much for newbies? For example, the ‘climbable ledges are white’ mechanic that we see every studio use nowadays. Also, some of the combat sequences and puzzles are actually pretty difficult, and require precise timing. Easy Mode only turns down enemy damage, so good luck on those timed jump scenes if your controller is having issues!
Overall I really enjoyed this game. All of the collectables were really fun but I didn’t feel I missed out by not finding them all, and the game encouraged some out-of-the-box thinking. I loved the story, but it felt like there were threads they set up but never resolved? (Unless I missed/forgot some scenes - I don’t remember Kena’s hand wound ever being explained, nor why she was looking for the Mountain Shrine to begin with.)
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (Gothic) - I’m counting this even though it’s technically a DLC because both the base game and EotE took me roughly a week to play. I’m also throwing it in the gothic setting because all the other categories I should have used were taken, and googling Gothic fiction seems to fit very well.
There’s really nothing I can say about Echoes of the Eye that hasn’t already been said. It felt like getting to play Outer Wilds for the first time all over again. I went in terrified about the ‘fright’ warning and I’m a scaredy-cat, so every little spooky thing spooked me out, but I kept pushing through because I trusted the developers to show me something worth discovering. I watched a guy on YouTube play through the stealth parts because I was too scared to figure it out myself. I saw what the hidden archives had to say and I cried. I opened the locked vault and saw what was inside and cried like a baby. I braved Dark Bramble again for the first time in months and died for real for the first time ever in this game (lol). I saw the updated true ending and I’m still crying.
If you want a game that actually explores the concept of grief well, this is it.
Also, honestly, as a person who struggles with fear, the way this expansion explores fear as a theme was really cool. I’m still afraid of the stealth portions, but this is the only time a work of fiction (specifically a video game) has ever said ‘it’s OK to be afraid, but you have to work past it’ and I respect that so much.
Obligatory bingo card, I’ve got to seriously work on finishing this up: