There is nudity. Below the fold.

You guys that have read my garbage for a while know that I sometimes do music reviews...mainly of an artist or an album (you know, the way music reviews used to be done). I've been thinking of doing the seminal/phenomenal/niche hit which was T'Pau's self-titled album. That was the one with Heart and Soul on it.

Calling T'Pau a pop group doesn't cut it. That first album is utterly unique. But I don't really know what it *IS*.

Other than a puzzle, of course.

Gonna have to think on this one a bit.

Makoto-sensei from Rakujitsu no Pathos.

Original pic was from the cover of Volume Two. Had to isolate the figure, clean up, then edit out the title which was overlayed across the cover. I'm not thrilled with the colors here, and will probably create some more versions. This is just the best that popped up tonight.

Rakujitsu no Pathos (Pathos of the Setting Sun) is by the famous manga-ka Tsuyatsuya. He normally creates sexually explicit manga about big-breasted older (early 30's) women screwing around with younger (19 - 26) men. (Japan, amirite?) Rakujitsu no Pathos is about big-breasted Makoto-sensei who discovers a former student from her brief teaching career is now a recently published manga artist (he draws big-breasted older women screwing around with younger men) and lives next door to the apartment her and her new much-older (45-ish) husband have moved into. Makoto-sensei is sexually frustrated from her unfulfilling older husband, and Aki-kun (the former student) has had a crush on Sensei since he met her. They proceed to have a "will they/won't they" affair. Departing from style, Tsuyatsuya is making this one all about teasing and frustration. There is no sex so far, and very little explicit content. However, the pages bleed hormones and sexual frustration. The two leads want nothing more than to get downright primitive with each other, and are either frustrated by circumstances, chance, or their own feelings of guilt and embarrassment.

It's tremendous fun. It's like that rare soft-core porn movie that you keep telling people is really a good movie that they should watch! (Shannon Whirry made a couple of those...speaking of someone who really needs to be targeted on this image blog...finding HD images of her is almost impossible, though...)

You should read it! It's available in...places....

I need to remember to ask Don if he's ever played one.

Gone Home and Tacoma by Fullbright don't need to be reviewed by me. These two games are the legends of walking simulator/storytelling games. An interactive novel like Highway Blossoms may scratch a certain itch, and is certainly a deep and well told story. My recently-reviewed experience with Lifeless Planet adds jumping puzzles and massive levels to explore. But in Gone Home and Tacoma, Fullbright absolutely NAILED straightforward interaction and an immersive environment that substitutes for challenging gameplay and the fear of failure.

They also mastered the concept of subverting expectations.

There will be minor spoilers. It's a review, after all. I will warn you now that both of these games are worth playing. Either will take just a few hours.



In Gone Home, you play the role of a young woman returning home after a year spent touring Europe. The game begins with you leaving an answering machine message for your mother telling her you'll take a cab home from the airport, so she doesn't need to come pick you up. When you arrive home, on an appropriately dark and stormy night, you find the lights out and the house locked up.

Oh, incidentally this is a new house for your family. They moved in about six months ago; inheriting the small mansion from your father's wealthy, reclusive uncle. This isn't the house you lived in or grew up in, so everything is new to you. Many boxes are still sitting in closets unpacked, and some rooms show recent renovation work being done.

Checking the answering machine you find your message, and a sobbing girl calling for your sister, Sam. You have no idea what's up with that. You soon find a letter from your sister apologizing for not being here for you, and imploring you to not come look for her, and don't go looking around for explanations, especially not in the attic! Ominously, the attic entrance is surrounded by red fairy lights, which looks positively demonic in the darkened house.



The attic is locked, and so you wander the house; learning Sam's story and, if you look hard enough, a handful of family secrets hidden away in a few corners. The music is eerie, and doors constantly creak open around you...or at least they sound like they do. You are so convinced of what you're going to find at the end of the trail that the actual ending takes you completely by surprise. And it's wonderful. And it's consistent with things that you wouldn't be told in letters from home. There is one narrative trick used in order to tell the story in a slow manner, but I'll forgive Fullbright for that. It works.



Tacoma is the Tacoma, a lunar orbit transfer station. 100 years into the future, you are a data recovery contractor sent in to recover the Artificial Intelligence and all station records off of the Tacoma, following an accident that caused the station to be abandoned. You travel through the station, following promptings and directions from your employer to recover the necessary data. At different levels, while the data is downloading, you can explore and discover remnant recordings of both the last three days on the station after the accident and older files that tell you about the contracted staff who maintained Tacoma.

Moreso than Gone Home, Tacoma is framed as a mystery. An asteroid impact disables the life support equipment of the station. The regulations say the station owner will immediately dispatch a rescue ship, but the crew want some re-assurances. So does the station AI, Odin; one of the older AI's in existence. The crew doesn't trust their employer, and the player is playing the game having seen many stories of spaceship AI's murdering the crew, especially after being giving orders that contradict programming. Fullbright manages to flip the script again; and there are plenty of clues to tell you how everything is going to go if you're paying attention.



Both of these games are short, and can usually be purchased cheaply. If you haven't tried either one, then get both. They're well worth it.

Lifeless Planet is one of the better reviewed "walking simulator/storytelling" games that has come out in recent years. In fact, it's one of the few that I was really excited to play based purely on pre-release info and imagery:



Early space exploration, Soviet iconography, and the requisite "things not being what they seem" plot. Sounds like an opportunity for great sci fi!

Well, almost. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game if you like the genre. You follow a linear path through the game, gradually learning the story through the landscape and interacting with recordings and writings. The core story is pretty decent, but the creators failed in a few small but important elements. There will be spoilers here, so if you want to enjoy this game yourself (no reason you shouldn't, especially if you can get it under $10) go do that now. A slow play-through will take 8 - 10 hours. I read recently that a speed run can take as little as 90 minutes.

The Core Story:

You, "Astronaut", appear next to a spacecraft that looks similar to an Apollo Command Module. You have a concussion, and your two fellow astronauts are missing, although there are footprints leading away into the distance. Seeing as Command Modules aren't capable of takeoff, you would assume that your return to space will be handled by some other spacecraft you are unaware of. Except the narration (by yourself) informs you that the three of you were meant to land on a lush, fertile, Earth-like world and...just live there? There's no mention of colonists on the way or building settlements or anything like that. But, since the world you're on is clearly NOT lush and fertile, and in fact doesn't even appear to have much oxygen, things have clearly gone wrong.

The Subplot:

Or you're insane, which may have something to do with your missing/divorced/lost/dead wife. Here's where the story starts falling down. Astronaut doubts his sanity several times early in the game. There's the concussion, of course; but you also see visions of hospital beds with accompanying life support equipment. This visions only occur in the first two or three chapters, right up until you find out he has a missing/divorced/lost/dead wife. Then the visions stop for the rest of the game, and the subplot with the wife just disappears until the very end. Except for the Fourth Twist.

The First Twist:

After climbing over a mountain ridge and encountering a massive network of deep canyons, you come across elevated power or telegraph lines. This is one of the famous images shared from the game. Those lines lead to a small village on the rim of a canyon.



This is a Soviet Union-era village, completely deserted and even partly buried in blowing sand. The structures are all wooden, and appear to have been abandoned for at least 50 years. You find one of your missing companions, nearly dead of giant-hole-in-chest disease, which makes me wonder why I share my oxygen with him as I watch it leak out through the hole in his everything. Also there is a secret lab nearby.

The Second Twist.

In the lab, almost everything is revealed: in 1974, the Soviets discovered a mysterious portal in Siberia that instantly teleported them to this lush, fertile, Earth-like planet. They immediately began colonizing the planet; keeping its discovery secret from the rest of the world until they had become the de facto masters of this new planet. The Soviets built towns, laboratories, dams, radio towers, etc. The only problem was massive electro-magnetic interference that caused Earth power solutions to be largely ineffective.



So the Russian scientists started experimenting with the power source for the portal itself: a mysterious green moss that covered almost the entire planet. They called it "The Green Fire." They were excited when they realized they had an entire world of powerful energy that was practically unlimited! The records also indicate experiments on a person, which turns out to make no sense.

The Third Twist:

It turns out all these portals and the portal power sources are actually ancient artifacts left over from some alien race. Whatever they were, they were giants, and they're all gone, now. It's not clear whether they are from this planet or colonized it themselves, building portals across the galaxy.



The Soviets originally tapped into this technology, harvesting the excess energy. They eventually learned how to tap into the energy directly.

The Fourth Twist:

The moss isn't infinite! The Soviets cross a line and the planet begins dying. The moss dwindles, and the portals from and to Earth fail. The colonists are stranded on this world. Desperate for answers, they discover a woman who has mutated to adapt to the green moss, The scientists begin experimenting on her; injecting alien DNA to make her more powerful. Or something. And she's still alive! She's probably the Soviet woman you've been following across the landscape, who seems to want you to follow her. Did I not mention that? That's because I think you're meant to initially believe Astronaut is imagining her, because of his missing/lost/divorced/dead wife. Her footsteps create the green moss on the ground everywhere she goes, so you can follow her at night.

The Fifth-nth Twists:

The Soviets knew all along the aliens crash landed here! They found a crater and the remains of the alien ship! It was probably millions of years ago! Some of the portals are basically giant rock arches like you see in Arches National Park, meaning they must be millions of years abandoned, but others are still fully functional alien technology! The aliens are still here! They are giant Ents that live under the surface of the planet that have been trying to kill you because humans destroyed their planet! Except for them! After you supercharge the Russian Mutant Woman with the Alien Green Fire Energy she merges with one of the Ents and starts giving life back to the planet, because that was how she mutated! There's one more functional portal, and it's supposed to go to Earth! Or maybe it goes to the Alien Home World!



Oh, and your wife is dead. She fell while hiking and was already decomposing when you found her. You put her on some type of cryogenic life support in case someone finds the cure for dying and decomposing while you're gone on your 15 year+ lightspeed trip.

Relativity:

Oh, God and then there's time relativity. The Lifeless World is fifteen years away. So the astronauts are cryogenically slowed down so they don't age 15 years during the trip. So there's that. The Soviets, when they discover the portal back to Earth, realize that the Earth on the other side of the portal is something like twenty years into the future from their point of view. When the portals start to break down, the time dilation gets worse somehow. It's very hard to place where anything is in the timeline because of this, because early on it's implied there is a lot of two-way travel and communication, and then later in the story you learn that's impossible.

This applies to the alien technology as well. Things you see early on you learn later are ancient relics of the alien technology that are so old they appear to be part of the landscape now. And yet some of the alien technology is just fine.

You realize in the end that the writer either told you what he wanted you to believe at different parts of the story, or didn't ever bother to go back and check his continuity. Because the story is told slowly enough, almost everything works *in the moment*, but you realize after stepping back that many later story elements contradict earlier revelations. Not as in clarification, but as in retcon. The problem is that most of the retcons make the earlier story elements impossible. The scientists can't both not know whether the aliens were native to the planet, and also have found their crashed ship right after starting the colony.



The game attempts to explain the story in the order you experience the story, when you're actually playing through areas that affect different parts of the timeline. So the story you experience has different motivations and explanations than the story you're told. Now, I just made that sound a lot more clever than it is. In fact, I left the possibility open that it was actually a clever idea that plays with the timeline. It doesn't. It isn't. It's an issue of having to re-write things in order hide elements of the story that you're not meant to know about early on. This ends up clumsy and confusing. The "wife" subplot ends up completely meaningless. My best guess is that it was included in order to ramp up the mystery of the Russian woman, but even that seems half-hearted. I'm starting to suspect it was element of an earlier version of the story that they ended up abandoning or changing. Maybe the Russian woman was originally a phantom that lead Astronaut to safety; which is when you learn that he can't let his dead wife go. I don't know. But it doesn't work in the published version of the story.

Missed Opportunities:



So look at that image. I've been crawling through this world for a couple of hours or more at this point. I have just recently learned how the Soviets killed almost all life on the planet. A mysterious Russian woman with glowing green eyes and green footprints seems to be leading me somewhere. And after finishing an area, I come upon this view. The woman staring into a huge depression that extends to the horizon in all directions. Clearly some kind of marker stacked on the precipice she's standing on. I immediately thought "Oh, my God, that used to be an ocean!"

Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. The game has no opinion. Something that awe-inspiring, and the game just ignores it. Instead, when you approach the woman (after another jumping puzzle), she cliff-dives off the edge and you get transported to the next area. Oh, yes. Transported. Some areas of the game you just walk from one area to the next, but for some reason several transitions are hard cuts where you're just suddenly in a different region. I guess you're meant to believe you're at the bottom of the cliff you were just standing on, but it's not always very clear. This jerks you out of the story every time it happens. The game has you scale a sheer volcano wall at one point, there was NO REASON for hard cuts between areas!!!

In The End:

The atmosphere and design of this game are a 9/10. The music is pretty good, the graphics are good enough, the actual experience of standing the game and looking around is phenomenal. The Soviet-era architecture is fantastic. The game mechanics are good. Gameplay exists of platformer-style jumping puzzles, and all but a few areas are dead simple; present only to add just a touch of difficulty to ramp up tension at times, and engage the mind.

Disappointingly, the story is where the game fails, but not too badly. It's easy enough to ignore the fridge logic and just move through the game so you can see what happens next. In fact, I finished the game in about 9 hours over three consecutive days. It was after the second day, after going through all of the mid-game revelations and heading into the final segments, that I started realizing that the story was contradicting itself in some areas. That the timeline didn't make enough sense to help explain anything. But I didn't care in the end; it was still fun to play. The conclusion is satisfying enough, though predictable.

The failure is that it was so close to being a truly excellent story, and fell just a bit short. Still, as I already said, I recommend it. Pick it up on sale and you'll get a good ten hour experience out of it, maybe.

UPDATE: I just checked captchas. They're still not working. Still trying to find out why.

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I think the bow is a bit much, but whatever makes them happy.

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