It's the New Year, and the Blog is Back!

The blog is back! A house move, a month long internet drought, a complete dearth of any new games and the loss of my writing mojo added up to my terrible neglect. So, what bought me back?

New games of course. I'd finally got some cash together, and fortuitously, found a lot of great games at extremely good prices. After leaving the 360 in a corner until mid December, I spotted Call of Juarez: Gunslinger going cheap on XBLA. Purchase made. Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light followed soon after when I snuck them into the trolley during the Christmas food shop. Gunslinger turned out to be fantastic, especially since I only downloaded it because it was cheap. With a great narrator, and some clever narrative tricks of its own, it felt like playing a cross between Bastion and top quality Sergio Leone movie.

Tomb Raider followed shortly afterwards and it was truly excellent. Rhianna Pratchett and Crystal Dynamics have somehow achieved the impossible. Firstly, they've turned Lara Croft into a normal human being who gets thrust into an incredible situation and is forced into some incredible actions. Secondly, they have made a game that can do the ancient tombs and spectacle that Uncharted does so well, without it feeling like an Uncharted clone. It did put me through the wringer though, and I decided I needed something whimsical and nice before I plunged into the famously grim Metro: Last Light. So, on the 30th of December I paid for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. By the 31st of December, it was my game of the year.

Brothers came across in the demo as mixture of Ico, Journey and Fable, a sort of co-operative single player game set in a pre-industrial fairytale village. It felt light and whimsical, and it was beguilingly beautiful, exactly what I needed after the emotional gauntlet of Tomb Raider. I got one over on the local bully, I played catch, helped a rabbit win some friends and met a helpful troll who threw me over a crevasse. The demo ended and I decided that I needed to own this game. Funds were tight though and I had to put off buying. Then it showed up on XBLA after Christmas for a pittance. Decision made.

After purchase, Brothers quickly revealed something else, the whimsy that I loved was tempered by a Limbo-esque dark heart. The game begins with a traumatic flashback and opens for real with one of the titular brothers knelt at a gravestone. From there, the tone stays dark, with you wheeling the brother's father to a doctor in a cart. According to the doctor, the only way to save him is with water from the tree of life. Cue an epic Journey across a vast and diverse world. The brothers visit a mine, traverse an ice filled river, cross a forest with only a flaming torch for defence, visit a vast castle, cross a very special battlefield, and work their way through an arctic village. You have to work the story out yourself. The language of the game is entirely fictional a-la Ico but in a clever twist, is not subtitled. Thankfully the stellar characterisations help making sense of the story simple, and many of the events would be universally understandable whether there was language or not.

There are betrayals, rescues and romance. There is levity, wonder and grief. Every vista is beautiful. There is spectacle everywhere in this game, but it's nothing like the bombast of something like Tomb Raider. Brothers wants to show you beautiful things. It wants to make you gasp and smile. It wants you to experience childlike wonder with every discovery. However, every moment of joy is hard won and often tempered by a crashing comedown. There is tragedy in this world, some of it directly connected to the Brothers, some of it around them. It all adds up to one of the most beautiful, affecting and genuinely sad games I've ever played. Like The Walking Dead, Brothers is a rollercoaster of emotions and it will stay with me for a very long time. The ending was especially poignant, and marks the first time ever that I've welled up at a game. It wasn't a full blown cry, but the eyes definitely weren't dry.

If you like any of the games I've compared Brothers to, you owe it to yourself to play this game. If you like indie games, you owe it to yourself to play this. Same if you do the games are art thing or if you like a good old cry. Actually, you should just play this. You can't afford to miss it. It's really that good.

Game of the year 2013.

At the end of The Walking Dead. (Possible Spoilers)

I finished the last episode of The Walking Dead last night. So eager was I to see how it ended, that even after an evening out, I downloaded it as soon as I walked in the front door. It was so good it inspired a rare late night gaming session in me. Then it inspired loss of sleep while I turned the whole thing over in my mind and tried to digest all that happened.

The Walking Dead is fiction of the highest order. Less a game, more a graphic novel whose plot and conversations you direct. Things only went downhill. There was never any reason to feel like a zombie slaying badass, like you do in Left4Dead. The Walking Dead never let you forget that the walkers used to be people, and I felt a pang of guilt with each one I bought down. The situation is never anything but dire in the Walking Dead. The oppressive atmosphere hung over every decision I made. And it was never as simple as good or bad. There was only bad or bad. Terrible or terrible. Every decision I made wound up being tempered by wanting to do right by Clementine.

Never before, have I felt so attached or protective over a videogame character. Clementine is a masterstroke. I saw and did monstrous things over the course of those five episodes. I stole food, murdered a man in anger and willingly dropped another to his death. These were my decisions, none of them were foisted upon me by the game. I ignored the alternatives and Lee and I had to live with the consequences. But seeing the look on Clementine’s face, each time she found out about these things really cut deep. You know what you're doing is wrong. Sometimes the things you do are even necessary, but seeing how Clementine reacts to them is really wrenching.

There was room for compassion in this crazy mixed up world. Lee and Kenny bonded, which is to say, Kenny and I bonded. I liked him, and when the time came, I couldn’t let him do a thing that no man should have to. So I shouldered the guilt and did it for him. We had each other’s backs for the whole game and despite disagreeing with him at some points, we were friends right to the end of the game.

The Walking Dead was an emotional rollercoaster. Actually, no, it wasn’t. There are highs and lows on a rollercoaster. The Walking Dead was an emotional cliff. Forever tumbling downwards, with no let up until the episode ended. There were moments of sudden and explosive violence between other characters that were so shocking that at one point I put the controller down and just said holy shit for five minutes while the scene played out. I wanted justice for what happened and did something pretty awful to make sure I got it.

If you have not played episode five, read no further. There are spoilers ahead.

The fifth episode in particular was one emotional low after another.  Seeing Lee slowly killing himself to get to Clementine was heart rending. Saving her did nothing to stop the sink ever downwards, because I knew what had to come next. If I didn’t have a heart of stone, I would have cried at that moment. Seeing Clementine in that state wasn’t part of the plan. All Lee wanted, all I wanted, was to make sure she was safe.

I worry for her future.