Over the past couple of months I have purchased an insane number of games off Steam because they were on sale I needed to get a broader scope of interesting game mechanics to look at aside from just “the most recent PS3 titles,” which all look like the same game anyway (God of War IV: Dante Alighieri Goes To Hell). One of the games I got my hands on was the little-known indie title The Void, a spectacular little gem by Ice-Pick Lodge, the Russian developer who did Pathologic prior to that, a very notable title in the Adventure Game world that was Game of the Year in Russia about five years ago.

The Void takes place in a universe between Life and absolute Death: a place of tranquility floating above the nothingness of the end of existence, called the Nightmare. And Nightmare it is: an atheist’s nightmare, where the pleasant promises of the Judeo-Christian Paradise have been avoided and instead the game opts to plunge you straight into a metaphysical Purgatory, where  all is dead and your own death creeps steadily towards you, threatening to consume you and pull you into the pits of absolute nothing. Sounds pretty much like Hell to me.

While in this ravaged – yet strangely breathtaking, beautiful and dark – landscape called the Void (where our title hails from), you attempt to keep your soul alive by feeding it scraps of Color, a kind of mystical essence that you can pull out of plants and other curious sources with a bit of struggle.

In the Void (and The Void), Color is life. Color is all. Color is your life; you must feed it into your heart in order to stay alive, and enemies assailing you with cause the Color to bleed from it. Color is your stats; when filling your heart (or hearts, if you begin to acquire more) with Color, depending on the Color you fill yourself with, you’ll become tougher, attack stronger, be more impressive, make things grow easier. Color is your time; when traveling outside the smaller chambers that make up the Void, your color drains from your heart at a steady rate. Color is your power; as Color passes through your heart while in the Void, it filters from your heart into usable Color called “Nerva” – this Color is basically your mana, used to cast spells to fight, to protect yourself, and to manipulate the world around you. Color is your currency; Nerva can also be used to make things grow and feed other barely surviving things in The Void, causing them to over time bloom and produce more Color for the collecting.

If at any point your heart becomes empty of Color, you die, and your soul falls to the Nightmare, the nothingness.

The Void is, at its core, an unending struggle to find Color and keep your soul alive, while frantically avoiding wasting the precious drops.

While the story became very engaging later on, it began terribly slow at first. As a player, you thirst for knowledge, for experimentation, for knowing what the rules of the game are – and they are explained, along with the story, in due time, as you complete each task set before you. Your eagerness must quickly subdued into begrudging patience, awaiting to be rewarded with more information or power only until you’ve completed each task, or you’ll become increasingly agitated with the slow pace of the game and the time it takes for things to grow. I suppose this is to ease the player into the idea that, in the Void, they must take, measure and use every moment, since they cannot waste a second. You must use your time wisely, for you have precious little of it. The Void encourages you to build, to move, to use every second efficiently. The game rewards you for going forward – but it also punishes you for it.

As you learn more of this Purgatory that slowly seems to be dying from some kind of apathy, you are introduced to the central struggle that has caused this world to slowly collapse – a battle between spirits called the Sisters – beautiful young women with very different personalities, most of them eager to see you succeed and feed them the Color they die for – and spirits called the Brothers – monstrous, hulking demon creatures, protectors of the Sisters,  supposedly ascended from Nightmare, and therefore, quite possibly from Hell itself, and many all too happy to kill you. The playing field shifts through the game – Sisters become your puppetmasters, Brothers your rivals – then you are the puppetmaster, taking from the Sisters what you need, killing off Brothers one by one. And all throughout, there are hints throughout the story, special chambers, things that make you question exactly what it is you are experiencing, along with vague and fleeting mentions of your living self, and the possibility of breaking free of the Void and returning to life. It is a long and grisly battle, segmented by “cycles,” with each new cycle sprouting new Color into the Void. There are 35 cycles made up of 99 seconds each, and at the end of the 35 cycles, your soul cannot continue, and you die.

The Void is a horror game. But it is not like other horror games you have played; no other horror game I have played so far has tried to do what The Void has done. Since, you see, in no other horror game has my mortality been so palpable. There is always a sense of fear that may grip a player when fighting enemies in any game, but it’s always under the premise that, it’s okay, you’re not really in danger anyway – it’s a game, and you can go look for some health packs in a minute, or re-load your saved game. The Void did not give me that luxury. While traversing the Void, you are always aware of just how little Color you have, of how it’s slowly draining, of how your life is dwindling. When you are forced to use Color to combat, you wince as you apply more and more Nerva to a blow, trying to break your enemy quickly, using as little of your precious Color as possible. If is the fear of starvation, of your dwindling candle, that possesses you throughout the whole game. The name of the first Chapter of your Chronicles is “Famine.” You hunger for Color, and fear the absolute death that comes for your soul if no more sprouts in time.

The game itself coaxes and taunts you as your Color dwindles; as you run low on Color (“Lympha”, it’s called, when it’s still in its raw state) and are forced to use your Nerva to fight, use magic or feed Sisters and plants, you start to hear whispers. “Drop by drop, you come closer to Death,” the game tells you. It’s chilling, and enhances the growing agitation you feel as you scour desperately for sources of Color. You must also beware of making mistakes with your Color, as well – painting a tree with color and not putting in enough means you will get back a minor amount of color, and you will unable to re-paint it until it has shed its leaves after several cycles. Not drawing the right symbols for the right spells will also cause you to lose some color in the process.

Additionally, The Brothers are not present in the Void at first, but appear suddenly near the beginning of the game and from then on make your existence in the Void all the more complicated. They are horrific, mutilated, generally towering over you, speaking in terrible voices, blind. Their very presence on the map inspires fear or apprehension, and God help you if you are forced to combat one of them early on.

I played The Void for about three to four hours straight, then came to a conclusion: Ice-Pick Lodge wants to break your soul, and they want you to give up playing video games forever. The game is maddeningly difficult, and it is quite literally impossible to save yourself from a bad choice earlier on in the game – you often have to load way back in the past, or begrudgingly begin a new game. After looking up a few tips on the Internet (The East and its look-for-help mentality!) I believe I may want to go back and give it another try, and actually complete the game this time around, but the apprehension of running low on Color, the frustration of watching it dwindle, knowing I’m out of luck next cycle and that I don’t know where to get my next batch of Lympha to survive, can be terribly overwhelming, not to mention the fear of angering the Brothers and having them come after you.

Still, its difficulty brings up the question: are they trying to break your soul? Or are they trying to show you just how resilient it is? What does the design say about the theme?

Supposedly, people are calling The Void an adventure game with resource management involved. I suppose it sort of is, but that’s also like saying that Harvest Moon is a farming simulation. There is more to it than that – more to see, more to speculate, more questions it brings about, more terror and stress that it causes. On a more introspective perspective, what is The Void? What does it symbolize? Through the difficulty, the mechanics chosen, the story, and the small things the Sisters would say, such as “Nobody cares about anything anymore. And nobody knows why nobody cares,” I’ve begun to believe that maybe The Void is a game about humankind’s struggle to keep the good things in life first… to not lose the flavor and richness of the world in the face of nightmares. To not lose its soul, and the deep apprehension one might feel as the joy of life, of the things around one, begins to fade. Hence, we must find new joy, and use what little joy we have to rework the world around us, make it bloom with things that will fill us with Color anew.

We must not let ourselves grow bone tired and weary of the lives we lead, unhappy, lacking in the love that we once held for them.

The murkiness of the setting in which the Void exists only further accentuates that, giving it a dreamlike, abstract quality: all these strange landscapes seem to have no connection to each other; up and down, in and out don’t really make sense and all doors lead to the same places.

The charm and and meaning I found to The Void was not echoed by everyone and was, of course, completely rejected by a few who felt the game had too many issues and not enough congruency. A good analysis that looks completely the other way from mine is Andrea Morstabilini’s analysis of The Void on Aventure Gamers, and it’s a good read if you have the time.

Myself, I was happy with the purchase, and I still remain fascinated by Ice-Pick Lodge’s amazing use of a single resource to define an entire game experience. Now, I’m going back to playing “the most recent PS3 titles” for a bit. I mean, it was just Christmas. I’ve got loot to enjoy.

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In Monster Hunter Freedom 2 for the PSP, a player begins as a newly hired Monster Hunter arriving in a cold mountain town. The premise is that the player has been sent to replace the old Monster Hunter, who was killed by a beast that attacked the village. While playing this game, a player experiences several aesthetic values from it including Challenge, Self-Expression and the Epic model.

The Challenging model gives a player a specific sense of accomplishment as she works her way through the game. In Monster Hunter, a player will be sent on missions into the wild where she will constantly be challenged by enemies that are more and more difficult to bring down, but will be rewarded with money and rare loot from the corpses of the monsters she hunts. As her prey becomes stronger, she can use the items she collects from the wilderness to improve her own armor and weapons, allowing her to overcome the obstacles before her. Against each enemy she has the chance to practice techniques until she masters her weapon of choice, allowing her to defeat stronger and more agile enemies with skill and determination.

Players also get the ability to experience the Self-Expressive aesthetic, with several fighting styles to choose from in order to take down monsters, and with different types of armor and weapons they can buy or fashion. Each fighting style can change the gameplay completely, with ranged weapons dealing damage from far away and leaving players exposed with very little armor, and close-range weapons dealing massive damage in one blow or very quick bits of damage eating up an enemy’s health. An even more unique piece of equipment is the Hunting Horn, which is a support class for playing in a party, and heals or casts strength buffs on nearby allies. Each piece of armor has its own unique look and build. Players can also improve armor they own and make it stronger without having to change it for other, stronger armor. With several different body part slots to equip armor onto and many different styles and specializations to choose from, players are given the sense of satisfaction from earning their armor and the feeling of freedom that comes with being able to choose their appearance. As they complete missions and defeat more enemies, they also unlock titles for themselves, allowing players to adopt interesting customizable titles such as “Walker of Mountains” or “Racing in The Sky”. Players also get the opportunity to play cooperatively with friends over Ad-Hoc wireless connection. Up to four players can band together in a party and take on missions, allowing them to show off their stats and armor and share their abilities and experiences with each other.

A player is also presented with the Epic model when playing Monster Hunter. He will start out a lowly novice with no titles to his name, and as he completes quests will unlock titles, obtain items, expand his farm, forge more and more prestigious armor and weapons and fight monsters of increasing size and difficulty. The first beast a player will encounter is a terrifying, roaring dragon creature known as the Tigrex, which defeats a player utterly and leaves them stranded in the snow. The player must face the Tigrex again several times through the game, never being able to stand up to its power and being forced to run away, but with every loss comes more and more victories until a player is able to take the Tigrex down. Monsters even beyond the Tigrex will be greater in size, power and terrifying strength, but a player will be able to overcome them all in time, filling him with the feeling of accomplishing Epic and fantastic tasks. Monster Hunter does fall short when showing a player the result of his actions—the creatures he defeats will be alive and well if he ever returns to defeat them, and there is no visible change in the world if he chooses to help troubled people or not. However, the game can be excused in that through the fact that, regardless, a player still feels a great satisfaction from defeating and even capturing monsters, and the more he defeats those monsters, the more rare loot he will collect from their corpses—such as bones, skulls, teeth, hide and more.

Monster Hunter Freedom 2 takes many of the elements from an MMORPG and incorporates them into a unique single-player experience. Part action game, part roleplaying game, part Pokemon-collector game, Monster Hunter tries to give players a sense of challenging, epic play and allows them to express themselves by giving them a great deal of customization in both gameplay styles and visual appeal. Monster Hunter Freedom 2 was a huge success (and continues to be one) in Japan, where it not only has several released games on the PSP but has a large MMO Action-RPG game Monster Hunter Frontier. Unfortunately, in the U.S., it is very difficult to get a copy—however, there is a good chunk of fans who have gotten their hands on the game and enjoy it for its amazing blend of hardcore achievement gameplay and short, ten-to-thirty-minute causal play missions.

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My grandmother got me Bully, by Rockstar Games, for Christmas. I eagerly started playing it, and was just about ready to dive into reviewing it for today when suddenly I was struck with the strangest of urges to forget all about Bully and sit down at my computer to play with spaceships.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed–literally dreamed, like, this was what appeared in my head when I was asleep–about having a tiny, maneuverable craft that could fly through space at warp speeds, letting me jump from beautiful planet to beautiful planet in a few quick seconds of high speed rumbling. This is exactly what EVE Online has been able to offer me. So please understand and bear with me–my enthusiasm for the game is very biased.

However, I have to be utterly honest when I say this is perhaps the most refined MMO experience I have ever played, seen, or could have imagined. EVE Online, with just a few tweaks, could very well be the perfect MMORPG.

I’m going to explain this by using the basics of MMO gameplay. There’s four types of people who are involved in the whole Massively Multiplayer Online experience: Killers, Explorers, Achievers and Socialites. These are the basic psychological and attitudinal gameplay rules that have been analyzed by all kinds of experts such as Richard Bartle, the creator of the Multi-User Dungeon. We all have bits and pieces of each in us, and everyone has a different reason why they play. But for the majority, people have discovered everyone who plays this kind of game has similar motivated goals that drive their experience.

Explorers love to explore. They love to see all the rich and detailed worlds that have been generated by the fantasy game around them. They love finding and claiming new places, knowing where things are that nobody else know. They’re pioneers in the expansion of the game world.

Achievers are determined to beat the game. Not only beat it, but get everything possible. These are the people who get all the epic armor of a single set so they can look monstrously intimidating and almighty.

Socialites are in it to be with people. They love playing with their friends, starting guilds and clubs, knowing and meeting new people.

Killers just want to ruin the game experience for everyone. They find twisted pleasure in breaking the game somehow, or finding a new way to kill people that makes them irritating. They love to be a nuisance–and a successful one at that.

All of these player types fit me almost to a T, leading me to believe that I’m probably simply engineered to be the world’s most MMORPG-tuned gamer. I love every part of an MMO experience, and feel pained when a particular element is missing from the formula.

EVE Online is so amazingly brilliant to me because it misses absolutely nothing. There is nothing the player lacks in experience at all.

Firstly, let’s look at the premise of the game. EVE Online is an MMORPG based around travelling through space, in spaceships. That’s right–there’s no first person shooting, there’s no running around with a sword that’s too big for you. There are no magic points and there are no magic spells. You can’t be a gnome. This automatically turns people away. It seems the term MMORPG is unconsciously supposed to imply ‘ridiculously overpowered barbaric fantasy heroes killing dragons online’. Mega Manly Online Rippling Pecs Games.

In EVE Online, they throw all that fantasy cartoony stuff and throw it right out the window. Your HP bar becomes your ship’s shields and hull strength. When you’re shot down, you don’t come back to life as a ghost–your corporation revives a clone they have of you back in your home base and insert your digitalized mind back into it. You don’t earn experience by fighting–your characters reads books on their own. All you have to do is assign them a skill to learn, and they gain experience points over time, even when you don’t play. Of course, this also means that there’s no faster way of earning those skill sets, which is both the game’s strength and weakness.

So how does this game deliver an almost perfect MMO experience? For Explorers, there’s an entire universe to see, with different stars, planets, mining colonies, everything. It’s massive, and there’s different attitudes of play depending on where you go–going by a security 0 star is officially considered a form of suicide, because of the likelyhood of being shot down. It’s a little bit on the repetitive side, sadly, as there’s no way to see the lush worlds on the planets below. But I’ll come back to that later.

For Achievers, there is an almost ungodly number of things to get. Skills to learn, ships to buy, weapons to upgrade, money to make. There’s always something to do on EVE. You just don’t finish EVE.

Socialites have the ability to form corporations, and work together with corpmates to buy and build and achieve, reach farther than other corporations, and become domineers of the market and the social world. There’s a bit of a problem with this system, but I’ll come back to that in just a few seconds.

Lastly, Killers have the best lot of all. This game is wonderful if you love to break the game for other people. Since you have the option between being a pleasantly legal miner or a government-defiant pirate, you are capable of almost any style of play. I’ve seen pirates launch after swarms of newbies in a flood of destruction. If you can get a ship that’s quick and strong enough, you can easily assault and annihilate anyone of your choosing (provided they don’t warp away in time), making the game delightfully exciting.

But let’s come back to Explorers and Socialites. The experience is great for everyone. It’s great for Explorers and Socialites. But it’s not great enough. EVE has a wonderfully exciting universe that’s expansive and takes time and patience and know-how to navigate. But there’s not all that much to see. I flew my ship across solar systems, visiting planets, asteroids and space stations. The space stations were all beautiful. The view from space was magnificent. And then it was over. That was it. There were still places to go in the universe, but really–it’s the universe. How different are things going to get from one solar system to the next? The problem with this game is that it lacks the minute depth of something like SPORE for the explore-phile. People want to go down to the planets, look around, see the views, paint the landscapes.

A similar thing happens with Socialites–they have the power to make their own chat channels, to make corporations, to have connections all across the galaxy–but they can never really see their friends face-to face. EVE Online has a beautiful customization menu that allows you to make the most diverse and exciting characters I have ever seen in a game with customization. But all that work is then demoted to a simple profile picture, and no-one will ever see your character’s animated, fully rendered face.

The EVE Online team is currently working on a new expansion (just after releasing the Trinity expansion, jeez) which will supposedly allow players to get out of their ships and walk around in the interior of space stations and interact with other player models. That’s really exciting. I’m praying on that expansion, because I believe it may very well be what EVE has lacking that will make it pretty much the ideal MMO game.

I played through two weeks of the trail version over the winter break. It didn’t take me very long to realize how much strategy and depth there is to EVE gameplay, even though people continued to insist that newbies couldn’t understand the game until they played for at least six months. When my trial expired, I thought, “This is an amazing game. I could spend the rest of my life playing this game.” So I didn’t renew my account. I can’t. It’s dangerous–I may end up sucked into another WoW addiction that I just can’t handle. So I’m giving up EVE–because it’s simply too good, and will take up too much time. I can’t afford to be dedicated to that leisure right now. I mean, I need to review a game weekly! Not only that, but I already keep my WoW needs stifled because I simply can’t pay monthly fees–I don’t have enough budget to do so.

The Trinity expansion was recently declared “The Best Game of 2008.” I have to say, I agree. EVE really left me with nothing but positive impressions. I can’t wait till the new expansion is released, and the worlds will all become fully explorable and social interactions be heavily facilitated.

My final verdict on the game: if you want an MMO that’s not WoW and that’s seriously fun, get EVE. If you like space, get EVE. If you have free time, get EVE. It’s worth it.

And I will envy you.

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I had a strange and horrible nightmare last night that revealed several things about myself.

In the dream, I was playing a portable game. It could have been any console. Something like an action RPG with 2D graphics and puzzle elements. I ended up beating the game after what felt like an eternity of seeking treasure and fighting giant tortoises with cannons on their backs (I’m already considering the game possibilities of this) only to be taken back to my village and being offered a magnificent reward: a weapon I could later use by continuing the completed game, so essentially I could keep my prior equipment and do more long quests. In spirit, it sounds like a strange hybrid between Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Monster Hunter Freedom 2.

Anyway, the nightmare happened when I was trying to choose which of the legendary weapons of the village I wanted to have. As I was scrolling through them, I got a preview of that the weapon looked like, but nothing on its stats! Its attack power, special abilities and buffs were nowhere on the screen! And I looked around for some button that would give me the info of the weapon before I chose it, but I couldn’t spot any info on the screen, and was terrified to press any button out of fear that I would accidentally select the weapon when I wasn’t ready.

Then I accidentally pressed the back/cancel button, and suddenly the gifting ceremony was over! I was outside, and I didn’t have any of the weapons! I ran around the village trying to find where the ancient weapons were stored and see if I could still have one, but to no avail. Panicked, I tried to remember where I had last saved my game and whether it would be feasable to simply restart my console and try working back up to that point.

In my desperation, I woke myself up and lay there in stupor, thinking that timeless phrase again: “Oh my god, I’m so glad that was just a dream.”

And then I had to think to myself, “Only a game designer would have a nightmare about bad design choices in a screen for selecting a weapon.”

I must be insane.

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