Doom (2016)

I think this game can be summed up pretty well by the first two story sequences. It opens up with our protagonist, Doom Guy, ripping off his chains, ripping apart some demons, etc. It quickly moves on to Some Guy trying to exposit the plot at you, only for Doom Guy to smash the monitor he's on. When I first saw this sequence I was like, "oh shit, are they seriously going to do an entire game where the protagonist is actively ignoring the plot?" (aka the least ludonarrative dissonant game of all time). Mere hours later the game seals you into a room where you can't shoot anything, and proceeds to have Plot Guy exposit the story to you anyway. I felt betrayed. Was this even the same game? Did they add the intro at the last minute of development? This gap in aspirations to reality kind of describes the whole game.

While there are probably only 5 of these exposition sequences in the whole game and their length is pretty short, it sure as heck wasn't the game I was imagining where NPCs spend the entire run time desperately pleading with the protagonist to stop smashing things- leaving the player to piece together what the plot even was with scraps of dialog. The same theme applies to the level design where they try to evoke the original Doom, without necessarily going all the way back to labyrinth mazes. Yet I would describe exploration in this game as.. unpleasant. But I also can't quite pinpoint what my brain found so bad about it. So I'm just going to put a list of my theories here instead:

• Most of the levels are linear, with secrets branching off the main path at random. But these levels are also way longer (and slower to move in) than an original Doom level, so this creates an unpleasant routine of "clear area, check map for unexplored rooms" with each chunk of the map because it's way too much of a hassle to backtrack (if the game even lets you), and you rarely get a sense of "there must be a secret here" just from looking at an area.
• There are a few levels that are less linear that use a pattern of "central room that branches out into many other rooms, unlocking in a linear fashion". These are also unpleasant to explore because the game does a poor job of giving areas distinct landmarks- while some individual rooms might be distinct, their connecting hallways/entrances are just copy paste repetitions. The quest compass diminishes the impact of this for the main route, but trying to find secrets in these places involves a lot of running in circles.
• Modern game visuals are ridiculously detailed, and this game doesn't use the modern technique of glowing interactive objects (or the older technique of "brighter palette") for secrets. This turns finding them into a really annoying version of a "spot the difference" book. There were numerous cases where I simply did not notice an openable hatch or an open air vent that I had passed by 6 times already, just because there's so much detail in every room. It honestly gave me a new appreciation for why so many new games have so much glowing crap in them?
• The original Doom's level design is incredibly historically important for establishing the art of complex levels in the following years of PC games (until the original xbox killed the tradition). You don't get Thief without Doom. But it's also very much a primordial version of the art. Maybe sliding along walls hitting the use key looking for secret doors isn't great design by itself? While they definitely didn't copy those ethos entirely, maybe they went a little too far back. Or not far enough. I haven't played the original in so long I can't really say for sure.

 The game is divided between these exploration sections, and what amounts to combat arenas. You get sealed in a wide open room (with various goodies/hazards), monsters continually spawn, and when you kill enough waves you get to move on. This is where the game is more effective at reimagining the original game. Rather than modern regenerating health, you have to melee near death demons to get more health. Rather than modern infinite ammo, you have to use your chainsaw (which has ammo of its own) to restore your ammo. Rather than the modern 2 guns, you get the full suite of over 9 weapons (and while some are definitely more useful than others, the game does a reasonable job of making you switch to different ones for different enemies). No reloading, demon projectiles are slow enough to dodge. It's pretty fun. But it also kind of devolves into the following pattern:

• Dump all of your heavy weapon ammo into the biggest demons
• Chainsaw a weak monster (since you get full ammo, but use less chainsaw ammo)
• Repeat
• (Occasionally use weaker weapons to clear out small demons)
• (Occasionally save powerup for later waves)
• (Occasionally use BFG to clear mass waves (I actually think the game wants you to use it way more than I did because I didn't realize what BFG ammo looked like until a loading tip told me in the final level))

It's admittedly pretty ballsy that the game actually doesn't have a single scripted setpiece gimmick moment (even the few bosses are just fairly traditional boss patterns). The purity of gameplay is remarkable. But it's also hard not to feel like they just stretched out an arcade game into a different structure. It's also only roughly 10hrs long, because even they knew the core of it couldn't last much longer (to its credit, it's one of the few games where I think the end is the best part). I come away from it feeling like I played a prototype more than a game, I guess? I respect the purity, but something was missing. Maybe I wouldn't have even noticed if the other parts were just as good as the combat.

Hero Must Die Again

Every now and then while perusing a list of new game releases, I come across a game with a concept so strong that I pretty much immediately sit up and know I have to play it. Hero Must Die Again is precisely that kind of a game: after overexerting himself by killing Satan, the protagonist only has 5 days left to live- during which he levels down and has to rely on party members to get anything done in battle. While most time limit games tend to just tell you to find an optimal way to kill the final boss, the only overarching goal here is to find your missing true love that no one else seems to remember (with a slice of cleaning up the aftermath of the war- kind of a statement on what happens when you ignore all the side quests in an RPG I suppose). At the end of every cycle, you get a funeral that changes depending on how well you did (amusingly with a high score of how many people attended, and how many cried).

That only half describes the process of first finding this game, though. The other half is looking at the very horny box art of a bunch of anime girls (some with belts for bras) weeping over said protagonist's dead body. Combined with the fact I had never heard of this thing prior to release (odd for someone who tries to keep up with niche Japanese games), I went into it pretty skeptical. Deepening the mystery was the fact that this is a PS4/Switch/PC port of a 2016 Vita remake of a 2007 Japan-only mobile game. Having a remake that many years later certainly implied some level of being a fan favorite, but the pretty much non-existent footprint for the English release still gave me little hope of this thing living up to its concept. I was almost afraid to play it since the idea in my head was cooler.

The game actually leans all the way into the premise. You just beat this RPG, so naturally you start with the max 99,999 gold- making purchasing decisions quite different from other RPGs. As you level down you need to equip weaker gear from earlier in the original game, too. As you meet your old party members, you'll even start to piece together what the plot leading up to beating the final boss was. The first time you start forgetting vital spells like fast travel genuinely hurts, even more so when trivial enemies start becoming impossible. It's this combination of game mechanics with theme that makes this anime titty game a way more poignant depiction of aging/disease/death than what you find in minimalist art games like Passage. The end of my first run where I was selling my now-useless legendary equipment to try to get the money to finish a quest is a moment I won't soon forget.

Beyond the premise, it's actually a pretty interesting twist on the time management genre as well. Most games tend to have extremely static loops to allow the player to master and then exploit them, but Hero Must Die turns that on its head by injecting random elements into the loop. You'll get used to an NPC offering two rewards only for the game to slap you in the face by having another character get there first and take one of them- forcing you to scramble to find an alternate method. Other times, the goal for a quest will change entirely. Sometimes two bosses will show up instead of one. It compounds on that with a Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter system where quest progress from previous runs will carry over into future ones. I didn't like the idea of it at first, but it actually ends up just adding harder additional goals while making the initial goals easier (but often only at random). True mastery involves figuring out the various permutations, and the multiple methods of achieving the common goals. The end result is it feels a lot more like a game you react to, rather than devolving into a rote adventure game where you robotically do the goals.

Coming from a mobile game, the execution of all this is pretty simple. NPCs don't move (but don't always show up in the same place), there's no night time because God paused it (yes, they actually write around having night visuals), the battle system is a mix of Dragon Quest buffs with an elemental damage system (simple but sufficient), exploration is side scrolling with no jumping, etc. Most NPCs don't move based on the day it is, so the time management is mostly about the timer ticking down in real time while exploring, and traveling/sleeping/fishing taking up longer chunks of it instantly. The world is tightly designed with only a few towns/dungeons, but care is taken to make most of them slightly unique to traverse (and to solve for efficient completion): one dungeon's boss moves around and has to be followed, another has locks/keys, etc. The simplicity is a boon for the time management, since a complete run only takes about 2 hours- long enough that you get invested in not messing up, but short enough that doing a new run feels really compelling since you can see another ending in a single session.

That's a lot of effusive praise, but it's also kind of hard to recommend to anyone who isn't way into time management games (especially at $40). While it features an Earthbound style too-easy-battle skip, it doesn't actually trigger very often so you'll be spending a fair amount of time fighting rote RPG battles (that unfortunately don't let you skip spell animations, though on the whole the speed is quick- just not quick enough for a game with this much repetition). At the same time, it's really cool when you end up having to improvise a new way to do an old battle when forced to fight with a crippled hero. The aforementioned randomization in the loop also means it can be really confusing when you can't trigger a certain event- is it random, or do you not understand the conditions? To the game's credit there was only one event I got stuck on, but it really sucks to waste 2-3 runs on a single quest when runs can take hours.  Some of the mechanics also operate in a way that isn't intuitive to casual observation, but become easy to exploit if you look up a guide (one optional quest is basically impossible to intuit in a logical in-world way, though you could figure it out if you think in purely game terms).

And then there's the story. It's mostly light, and dialogue is delightfully brief. Mostly consists of a lot of piecing together background story (both of the protagonist's original quest, and the world).  But there's also an undercurrent of darkness. That maybe you can't fix everything. One of my favorite quests involves training the next hero. She's just a terrible person. Training her is basically just giving her more power to be terrible with. There's some incredibly potent anxiety about raising future generations here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing you can do to make her a good person either. The "best" you can do is just not enable her, or possibly kill her (which the game still doesn't portray as a positive). Even in the True Ending, the kingdom doesn't last forever.

In short, there are some really good moments, but as a whole it still feels vaguely like it's missing something. Maybe because there are far more vapid moments. Maybe because all the background story doesn't add up to anything too interesting (don't get me wrong, the True Ending is pretty cool, but little of the background story you learn leading up to it makes it that much more impactful). Can't put my finger on it.

Epilogue

Oh right, the horniness. The character designs are exactly what they look like, but in practice the game doesn't actually lean into it much at all (outside of a couple raunchy lines of dialogue). You can have a kid with any of them, but the sex scenes just fade to pink. It literally feels like someone inserted boobs after the fact as a desperate measure to try to sell a Vita game in 2016 (or to sell a mobile game in 2007- I checked the original mobile game. They're not as extreme, but I wouldn't say the remake is adding something that wasn't there). It's kind of unfortunate, the romance is an important aspect of the theme of death, but the designs undercut it- especially some moments in the true ending.

I got pretty curious that the time system was so well designed for a game from out of nowhere, and discovered the lead writer/designer is one Shoji Masuda. Two of his other big games seem to be Oreshika (about humans that only live for 1-2 years and you have to breed to achieve a goal- the sequel I've wanted for years but is also literally the only game on the Vita I'm interested in) and Linda Cubed (about a meteor destroying a planet and needing to gather as many Pokemon as possible on your space ark before the time limit expires- also apparently all the humans are dicks during the end of the world?). So suddenly it made sense that Hero Must Die is so adept at time management since it's coming from a founding father. Hope that a fan translation happens some day, I guess?