PC Pick-and-Mix: Observing Dark Sorrows At the Second Gate

It’s time more reviews of PC games I had enough thoughts on to talk about here but not enough to do full articles on. This time, I’ll tackle a cyberpunk survival horror game with a very familiar face, an extraordinarily pretty point-and-click adventure, and a Baldur’s Gate game, but not the one everyone’s excited about right now.

Observer

In the far-off future of 2084, tech corporations exert more power than national governments, a terrible pandemic (the nanophage) has recently torn through society, and a years-long war rages in eastern Europe as relations between Russia and the West have declined alarmingly. (Note: Observer was published in 2017, so we can only assume that developers Bloober Team employ actual psychics.) Poland has fallen under the sway of the Chiron Corporation, which was able to exert authority and keep the infrastructure going when the government itself collapsed. On the streets of Kraków, Daniel Lazarski is an Observer – a police detective able to tap into people’s brain implants in order to probe their inner psyches.

One day, Lazarski gets a call whilst he’s on shift from his estranged son, Adam, which he is able to trace to a disgusting apartment block in the Stacks – a downmarket area of Kraków largely occupied by an underclass of “Class C” citizens. Tracking down Adam’s apartment, Lazarski discovers a headless corpse. Is Adam dead, a murderer, a bystander, or something else? Lazarski is determined to find out – but he’ll have to do so without backup, because the apartment block has abruptly come under lockdown, despite there being no evidence of a nanophage outbreak. Lazarski’s investigation is not made easier by the fact that the residents of the apartment complex tend to be eccentric, alienated, and often outright broken – and Lazarski himself is finding that his sense of what is real is becoming attenuated.

Worse yet, the killer seems to be trapped in the apartment complex too, and to get crucial information Lazarski must use his Observer abilities in the most dangerous and forbidden way possible: to interrogate dying and dead minds…

KOTOR: Knights of the Obnoxious Respawns

A little under 4000 years before the events of The Rise of Skywalker, the Galactic Republic is in crisis. The Mandalorian Wars – a confrontation with the expansionistic, war crimes-happy warriors of Mandalore – has only recently shaken the galaxy. The Republic was almost brought to its knees by the Mandalorian forces, but was rescued in through the deft leadership shown by the powerful warrior Malak and his enigmatic mentor, the master strategist Revan.

Revan and Malak were both Jedi, but they did not have the approval of the Jedi Council for their intervention, however – their actions were unsanctioned, and their disobedience saw them break from the Jedi Order. A year later, the duo returned from obscurity. Now calling themselves Darth Revan and Darth Malak, they proclaimed themselves the leader of a new Sith Empire, and had gathered to them a cadre of allies from their service in the Mandalorian Wars and disaffected Jedi. Most astonishingly, they had somehow assembled a vast fleet of starships apparently from out of nowhere.

With with Revan and Malak’s schismatic Force practices and wanton embrace of the Dark Side at the heart of Sith ideology, the Jedi Order see no alternative but to ally with the Republic to defeat this threat. At the point where we pick up our story, the alliance has just pulled off a major victory. Using her special power of Battle Meditation, a young Jedi prodigy known as Bastila has managed to pull off a daring assault on Revan’s flagship, during which Revan was bested in combat. With the previous Dark Lord of the Sith fallen, Darth Malak has now stepped up to take Revan’s place. As Knights of the Old Republic begins, you awake on Bastila’s flagship as it comes under attack in the vicinity of the Sith-occupied world of Taris; you and Carth, a war hero of the Republic, manage to reach the escape pods just in time and make planetfall.

It soon becomes apparent that the Sith are combing the planet to try and find the occupants of the fallen escape pods – with their primary target being Bastila herself. Little do you realise the incredible destiny and astonishing revelations that await once you, Carth, and Bastila manage to get away from Taris – and the Jedi Council of Dantooine inform you that in light of the pronounced unconscious Force prowess you have exhibited, they have decided to train you as a Jedi…

PC Pick-and-Mix: Jedi Outcasts, Shocked Systems, and Trübered Brooks

Time for another quick brace of reviews of PC games I had enough thoughts on to talk about here but not enough to do full articles on. This time it’s another Dark Forces sequel, the System Shock remake, and a really tepid point-and-click adventure.

Jedi Outcast: Jedi Knight II

I can’t get over how weird the title to this one is – because, of course, whilst it is a sequel to Jedi Knight, that game was in itself a sequel to Dark Forces, so shouldn’t this be Dark Forces III? Certainly someone seemed to think so, because they decided that rather than having Kyle Katarn begin the game with the Jedi abilities he learned last time around, they’d crowbar in a plot point about him handing his lightsaber over to Luke Skywalker and cutting off his connection to the Force due to his concerns about his near-fall to the Dark Side in that story – a clunky plot development that’s clearly designed solely to make sure that the early stages of this game play out like a more conventional first-person shooter (or the first Dark Forces) before we get into the Jedi stuff again.

To my mind, this is a mistake. Although the original Dark Forces was one of the better attempts to hop on the Doom bandwagon from that era of first-person shooters, it’s the Jedi stuff which gave Jedi Knight a unique selling point over the rest of the pack, and having to slog through a good chunk of the single-player campaign before you get access to them is an annoyance. Furthermore, the more stripped-back experience of the early game makes the shortcomings of this entry in the series more obvious. Whilst the first two games in the series felt fairly cutting-edge by 1990s FPS standards, this feels a little behind the curve for 1999, with gameplay which often relies too much on finicky, poorly-signposted puzzles and the like for progress. The result of this was that I got tired of the game before I even got my Jedi powers back.

Mini-Article: The Elder Scrolls Library

Over the holidays I’ve been tinkering around with the Elder Scrolls back catalogue. I’ve touched on them before in these pages but haven’t previously had much to add to my Oblivion review. Oblivion, after all, was largely Morrowind with some more modern quality of life features and tweaks to be equally suited to console play and with a much blander aesthetic; Skyrim was basically Oblivion with a nicer aesthetic and a few other minor improvements.

Still, it does occur to me that these days, thanks to the efforts of the community and due to Bethesda making the earlier games available for free, each of the Elder Scrolls games can have its own little niche and purpose. So I thought I’d so a little thinkpiece here about what I think each of them is good for…

Play The Elder Scrolls: Arena if…

…you want an exercise in frustration, or have vintage hardware to try it out on and you’d rather play an old game with no quality of life features and no modding scene worth speaking of, or you really, really love procedurally-generated content.

Arena is the game which began it all and has far and away the largest playing area of any of the Elder Scrolls games, due to its absolutely massive map which covers the entire Empire. It is also an absolute pig to play, partially because running old games on modern hardware is often a crapshoot, partially because a lot of the iterative improvements between Elder Scrolls games involve making the whole experience more pleasant to play. Whilst the very old-school approach of Arena is charming to some, the consensus seems to be that it’s better served by the next game. On which note…

Play The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall if…

…you want the old school experience whilst having some modern conveniences. This is because the Daggerfall Unity project has produced a total conversion of the game to use the Unity engine, both giving it a visual spruce-up and making it much, much easier to run on non-antique hardware.

The old-school approach in Elder Scrolls puts an emphasis on a custom experience and much less emphasis on quests, which largely exist only to support exploration. You have lots of options for customising your character compared to recent releases, there’s a massive world to explore (albeit with a certain amount of randomly-generated terrain), and there’s a particularly neat spell customisation system, which was increasingly scaled back in subsequent games until it disappeared entirely by the time Skyrim happened.

At the same time, there’s only so much you can spruce Daggerfall up, and its DOS-era conventions can still be somewhat awkward. That’s where the next game comes in…

Play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind if…

…you want the most vividly original aesthetic and lots and lots of lore, and still some old-school functionality like spell and class customisation.

Taking place on the strange island of Vvardenfell, Morrowind takes a deep dive into one of the more unusual and original cultures in the setting, and that means it’s packed with flavour. The OpenMW project has produced an entirely new engine to smoothly run the game on modern PCs and which also packs in some basic mod management, which is a big help. It’s arguably the first “modern” Elder Scrolls game, since to a large extent Oblivion and Skyrim are iterations on its formula, and that comes across even more if you use OpenMW, which makes in game controller support as standard.

Really, the major speed bump with Morrowind is that it doesn’t have regenerating magika – the points you use to cast spells – which in practice means that I find I just don’t cast spells very much unless I add a mod which provides that. Fortunately, you can get one – in fact, there’s several, the modding scene for Morrowind is very healthy and most of what’s out there will work just fine with OpenMW.

Play The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion if…

…you want something a notch closer to modern graphical standards, but to find a lot of what you see with them a bit generic.

As I said in my Oblivion review, it’s decent enough, but a lot of it feels fairly generic. To be fair, this may be on purpose – the realms of Oblivion you visit during the main quest are very odd indeed, so the more “generic high fantasy” the main game area is the bigger the contrast. However, that does mean that a lot of the weirdness which had been par for the course in Morrowind is reserved for little incidents on the main quest, rather than being stuff you’ll encounter particularly frequently through regular exploration.

Play The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim if…

…you want the most modern single-player experience, at the cost of regular Bethesda intervention. Skyrim is still actively and regularly updated by Bethesda, and whilst that does have its good aspects, it will every so often break a good swathe of the mods the community has developed; the transition from baseline Skyrim to Special Edition did it, and the recent hop to Anniversary Edition did likewise.

Still, Skyrim is significantly more flavourful than Oblivion, even if that flavour is in and of itself a fairly standard Scandinavian mythology aesthetic rather than the more distinct and original Morrowind look and feel. And as the most recent single player game it has the most energetic modding scene currently.

Play The Elder Scrolls Online if…

…you want other human beings to barge in on your Elder Scrolls experience, and to be stuck within the parameters of the MMO. Seriously, the big draw of this series is the single player experience and the scope for modding, both of which are things that are essentially incompatible with MMORPGs. Why bother?

GOGathon: Frogwares’ Sophisticated Sleuthing

Time for another dip into Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series. After humble beginnings, Frogwares had managed to develop the series into something more ambitious, with The Testament of Sherlock Holmes providing the most cinematic experience yet in the series. For their next games, they would shift gears again, simultaneously upping the production values whilst shifting more towards episodic plot structures. Would this be another fruitful reinvention for the series, or a bridge too far? Let’s see…

Crimes and Punishments

It’s the mid-1890s – spanning a period before and after the events of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson are doing what they do best – taking on cases, offering their solutions, and proposing resolutions to the matters at hand. As Holmes works his way through a series of standalone cases, his brother Mycroft is bothering him to undertake a bit of work for the government – plumbing the mystery of the Merry Men, a group of radicals who appear to be up to something or other.

Still, as the traces of the Merry Men’s work crop up here and there, matters seem to be coming to a head – and when the elder brother of Wiggins, leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, is caught up in a murder investigation, the trail ultimately leads Sherlock to a direct confrontation with the Merry Men. Will he buy into their rhetoric about robbing from the rich to inspire the poor, or will he consign them to a hands of a system out to defend the status quo at the expense of everyone else?

Planescape: Torment – Fascinating Lore and Combat Chores

The city of Sigil is built on a ring-shaped structure floating at the very centre of the Outlands, the cosmological plane of True Neutrality. It is a nexus of interplanar travel, paying host to travellers from all the cosmological dimensions, from the elemental Inner Planes to the philosophical Outer Planes to the Prime Material Plane where most Dungeons & Dragons world reside (as well as the interstitial planes which exist between those categories). It enjoys this cosmopolitan natures due to three things: the mysterious Lady of Pain who makes sure that no one deity or force takes control of Sigil, the philosophically oriented Factions who seek to use the city to promote their way of thinking across the multiverse, and the plethora of portals it pays host to. It is said that somewhere in Sigil there is a portal that can take you anywhere in the cosmos, if you have the right key.

Perhaps, then, there is a portal that can take you where you’ll find the answers to some pressing questions that have been weighing on your mind. Questions like: why did I just wake up on a slab in the Mortuary, the city morgue operated by the morbid Dustman faction? Why can’t I remember anything? Why is this talking skull, Morte, bothering me? And why do I have this weird habit of getting up again after I die?

The conventional wisdom on Planescape: Torment is that it’s one of the best CRPGs of all time, and it certainly stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Infinity Engine games (the first two Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games) in terms of having a creative plot, engaging writing and character dialogue, and clever use of Dungeons & Dragons source material, really embracing the weird possibilities of the Planescape campaign setting. By the standards of 1990s CRPGs, it’s incredible.

At the same time, giving it a replay after experiencing Disco Elysium makes a lot of the seams show. Disco Elysium is often compared to Torment, and for good reason: both games have you begin as an amnesiac as a means of easing you into this extremely ornately-described universe, based on a tabletop RPG setting. Both games offer up fairly in-depth, detailed conversations with NPCs, full of characterful writing, in the service of a plot which is as much about piecing together who your character is (and deciding who they want to try to be going forwards) and exploring your personal philosophy as it is about what is going on. Both games centre what your character says and believes as a key part of the experience. The influence of Torment on Disco Elysium is palpable, in that sense.

What Torment has which Disco Elysium doesn’t have is a full-blown combat system derived from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition – and this is to Torment‘s detriment. It’s a problem common to all of the Infinity Engine games that AD&D combat is really designed for a turn-based structure, and the single player nature of the games means that there’s no real barrier to making it turn-based, but the engine doesn’t present you with turn-based combat – it presents you with a weird attempt to persuade you that it’s giving you real-time combat whilst having turn-based assumptions baked in.

Nightmare Frames: If You Die In the Film You Die In Reel Life

Hollywood 1985. Alan Goldberg is making steady money as a scriptwriter, and is building up a formidable reputation. He got an Oscar nomination for his script for Melodies From Heaven, a serious-minded drama with a strong romantic theme, but after that his career has taken a bit of a left turn – he’s written a string of horror scripts for Ruskin Productions that have yielded significant critical and commercial hits, turning the studio into something of a mid-tier powerhouse of the horror genre. His latest script for them – Lunatic – has been Goldberg and Ruskin’s biggest hit yet, with the titular slasher being spoken of as the next Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers.

The thing is… Alan can’t stand horror. He thinks it’s beneath him. He’s desperate to do his next Melodies From Heaven and work on something he considers meaningful – but Ruskin Productions doesn’t make that sort of material, and the more horror numbers he churns out for them, the more he feels pigeonholed. His hopes are riding on Peter Evans, a big-time producer who’s taken a shine to Alan, persuading a major studio to back another prestige drama with him attached as writer.

It’s therefore both a personal and professional setback to Alan when he discovers that Peter has committed suicide. It’s not classy of him to take it personally… but he does, and his investigation of Peter’s death leads him to Helen Westmore, known as “the Sister of Mercy”, an astonishingly rich and powerful figure who is the silent backer of much of the Hollywood power structure. Helen has her name because a favour from her can transform careers; Peter had gone to her seeking her assistance when his hidden debts ran out of control, but she had no use for him, denied him aid, and that was it for Peter.

Alan, however… Alan is someone Helen does have a use for. His determination and resourcefulness have been noted, and Helen thinks he might have what it takes to track down a certain obscure collectable for her. Helen is part of a select group of Hollywood bigwigs who collect otherwise-lost movies, and Helen has a potential lead on an absolute bombshell. Back in the late 1960s, Edward Keller rocked the horror genre with Bloody Mind Games, a small independent production which was a quantum leap forward for the field. He disappeared after that – but rumour persists that in the early 1970s he was working on a second film, determined to make the most terrifying horror movie ever made. Yet Keller disappeared in obscurity, and no sign of his final production has ever seen the light of day.

Helen lays out a challenge for Alan: if he can find Keller’s lost movie, she will put her full backing behind his work. Prestigious projects, generous critical appreciation, fat stacks of cash – they’ll all come his way. Little does Alan know just how far his journey into Edward Keller’s warped imagination will take him…

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow: A Smoothly Executed Cloak and Dagger Operation

It is the late 1800s. Thomasina Bateman is a young woman from a well-off background whose father was an accomplished archaeologist, and encouraged her interest in his work from a young age. A terrible accident has left the elder Bateman paralysed and unable to speak for decades – but Thomasina continues his work, and is preparing a volume documenting the ancient burial mounds of the British Isles.

Just recently, Thomasina has received a letter from the mysterious Leonard Shoulder, telling her of a curious mound that might make perfect subject matter for her book – Hob’s Barrow, near the sleepy rural village of Bewlay. Travelling by train to the remote branch line station serving Bewlay, Thomasina is struck by the lonely landscape of the surrounding moors and the isolation of the village. She is also perturbed that Leonard Shoulder doesn’t seem to be around to meet her – or that Kenneth, her assistant who was meant to be coming up with her excavation equipment, doesn’t arrive on the next day’s train as agreed.

Short on funds and facing a wave of suspicion from the locals, Thomasina must somehow cultivate local allegiances, locate the barrow, get permission to excavate from the landowner, and hire on local help. As she works to accomplish these goals, Thomasina endures troubling dreams, is struck by moments of reminiscence about her father, and is embroiled in strange incidents. Yet none of these omens are enough to dissuade her from The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow…

This 2022 release was developed by Cloak and Dagger Games, a small development team with the misfortune to be sniped in the Google results for their name by a conspiracy theory website about gangstalking. Prior to this, Cloak and Dagger have put out a range of other indie point and click adventures, but Hob’s Barrow – known as Incantamentum for most of the development process – is by some margin their highest-profile release yet, thanks to the game getting picked up for publication by Wadjet Eye. As I’ve documented on here, Wadjet Eye represent the gold standard these days as far as classic-style point and click adventures made by small, independent teams go. Originally a vehicle for Dave Gilbert to put out his own games, Wadjet would later expand into publishing the work of other solo and small team adventure game developers, and Gilbert has generally shown excellent taste in selecting games to give the Wadjet Eye seal of approval to.

GOGathon: The Frog’s Afoot, Watson!

The story so far: the first three games in Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series each had a different presentation. Mystery of the Mummy was very much a Myst-alike, whilst The Case of the Silver Earring presented a classic-style point-and-click adventure. Then the Cthulhu Mythos-themed The Awakened jumped forward into the world of first-person realtime-rendered 3D, though in its Remastered version it also provided an alternative point-and-click third person viewpoint and control system.

With The Awakened being well-received, Frogwares realised they were onto something, and they fairly rapidly set to work on sequels. For this tranche of reviews, I’m going to dip into the other two games they made using the same general presentation as The Awakened, plus the game which saw their next big leap into more modern styles of presentation.

Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis (AKA Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsene Lupin)

It is 1895, a year after Holmes and Watson had their terrifying encounter with the devotees of Cthulhu. Holmes is feeling that old craving for opiates a juicy new case, and as chance would have it, a juicy new case is actively seeking his attention – for he receives a note from none other than Arsene Lupin, the famed French master thief. Lupin’s note is a taunting declaration that over the next five mights, Lupin is going to carry out a series of daring heists across London, with the intent of destroying national pride and making the British the laughing stock of the world. (My dude, just wait 120 years, we’ll do it ourselves just fine.)

The note also flatters Holmes by declaring him the only person who might have the wit to stop Lupin – but is Lupin overestimating Holmes? Night after night, Holmes, Watson, and Inspector Lestrade find themselves one step behind Lupin and powerless to do anything other than follow the trail of clues to the site of the next heist. Will the final score be France 5, England Nil, or will Holmes be able to save the day?

GOGathon: Call of the Longest Journey to Pripyat, the Land of Lore

Time for another rundown of stuff I’ve been tinkering with from the depths of GOG. This time around, it’s three games which I really wanted to like, and early on in my playthrough I did like, but which ended up losing me partway through.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

Back when I reviewed the Eye of the Beholder trilogy I largely came to the same conclusion as the broader consensus: the best two games in that dungeon-crawling CRPG sequence were the first two, developed by Westwood Studios for publication by SSI, with the second game adding a welcome level of additional story over the fairly bare-bones original, and with both of those games offering a fun take on the Dungeon Master formula (Dungeon Master itself being a welcome improvement on the format of Wizardry, a series which despite being undeniably pioneering when it first came out is nonetheless rather clunky and unwelcoming to play today), whilst the third game, developed in-house by SSI themselves, was kind of a botch.

Part of the reason for Westwood not taking on the third game in the series was that they were bought out by Virgin, who may not have wanted them making content for other publishers when they could be making material for Virgin to distribute. Among their first projects under Virgin was the Lands of Lore series, which are a sort of spiritual successor to the Eye of the Beholder trilogy liberated of the need to use the trappings of the Forgotten Realms and an approximation of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system.

The first game in the series, The Throne of Chaos, was unleashed in 1993. The evil witch Scotia has uncovered the Nether Mask, a magical ring which confers incredible powers of mimicry on its wearer. King Richard (voiced in the CD-ROM version by none other than Patrick Stewart), who rules the realm from Gladstone Keep, has dispatched you to recover the Ruby of Truth, a relic famed for its capacity to cut through all forms of deceit. Little do you or he know that Scotia’s forces are already one step ahead of you.