Super. HOT. Super. HOT.

In medias res, the brilliantly white level starts with two bright-red, crystalline dudes in front of me, guns being brought to point at my face.

The guy on the right easily gets there first and a black bullet comes straight at me with a flowing red trail emerging behind it. Time creeps forward with the bullet slowed as if through treacle.

I lean to the left, trying to also look around slightly, causing time to speed up, and I feel the bullet brush past my ear. But I've now formulated a plan.

I reach forward for the black ashtray on the table in front of me and manage to throw it at the dude on the left before he manages to get a round off. It smashes into his face, stunning him and, far more importantly for my plan, causes him to let go of the shotgun's handle. Shards of black glass that used to be an ashtray will keep him busy for the moment and that moment is all I need.

The gun's forward momentum from being brought to bear on my head keeps it coming closer to me, close enough that I can reach out and grab it out of the air. Already with a slug in the chamber, the guy on the right can only wait for his next round to arrive in the barrel.

Aim, shoot. This time it is me creating red trails in the air.

The guy on the right tries to dodge but it's not enough. His head explodes into a thousand reflective fragments as the buckshot impacts.

Now I've got a choice to make as I wait for the next shell to load, hopefully to take out the guy on the left: how do I spend that fraction of a second? For a start, now the super-imminent danger is over, I need to look around and see what else is coming for me right now. Work out where I am, what happened before these gentlemen decided I needed to not be here, and make sure there aren't any more bullets already heading in my direction...

Super. HOT.

If You Don't Think You're Biased, You're Doomed

So I wrote a thing recently that's somewhat outside of the bounds of stuff I cover here but also thematically linked to a lot of how I apply my education in statistics, science, and engineering to wider issues and sanity-checking stuff that's more political, legal, and social than my day job typically involves.

If the worst thing that can happen to you is being called out, your unexamined biases mean you're pretty much the opposite of the Rationalist or "man of science" you perceive yourself to be. This will lead you down blind alleys, being highly selective in pruning your sources to fit a narrative you like but is fictitious. Then you'll have a very public meltdown defending the factually incorrect dribble you thought was a masterpiece of factual reporting. If you think you're white but totally not racist, cis but not transphobic, etc. you're setting yourself up for failure the moment it turns out you are partially the product of your environment. Read about exactly that happening.

The Fall and Rise of Tomb Raider

I've enjoyed the Tomb Raider series(s). I mean, I've enjoyed all four (five?) of the different series of games that are called that or offshoot from that original 1996 title.

The grid-based frustration of the early games, back when exploring Croft Manor on PC was part of the post-Quake explosion of 3D that eventually resulted in me saving for a (3Dfx Voodoo powered) Orchid Righteous 3D. That amazing moment where buying new hardware suddenly made a load of games I already had into completely new games, jumping forward a generation. After the 3rd game in as many years, I started to lose track and the reviews started to indicate the series was coasting into the drain. That grid-based movement system could only survive so long and when analogue sticks were the norm, it made very little sense (especially by 2003 for the 6th game in the series). Hell, I even went back to that first game when it came out on mobile the same year as Angel of Darkness (where the grid was a better match for the nGage's digital buttons than the PS2 evolution of the series).

Then the series was rebooted in 2006 with a trilogy of games that completely redefined how the input system worked. Rather than being forced to perfectly input what the level demanded, the system looked at what the user was pressing and then did the most sensible thing. Pointing in the vague direction of something catchable and pressing the jump button probably means the player wants to jump there. The reboot, Legend, was a great romp; the remake of the first game, Anniversary, reminded me of those hours spent in 1996 while feeling completely contemporary in 2007; but I started to feel fatigue at the greater focus on combat (rather than exploration, traversal, and working out puzzles), the slightly rough edges on intuiting what input was demanded, and the increasingly fantastical plot in Underworld. But this was also the time when Naughty Dog was starting to make an exploration/puzzle-light, combat-heavy (and unfortunately bullet-spongey), very cinematic push into the sub-genre with Uncharted. Underworld was the first Tomb Raider that had to compete with Nathan Drake and I preferred the WWII zombies to the Norse zombies.

So the AAA Tomb Raider games went dormant again in 2008. Nathan Drake was left to take control of that sub-genre and move it even further away from puzzles and towards combat. But Lara Croft emerged as a budget series that courted mobile. 2010 saw Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light emerge on consoles, PC, and mobile. A co-operative puzzle game with more of a challenge arena design than a linear progression, it managed to get a console sequel and spin off to a pure puzzle game on mobile, last year's rather enjoyable Lara Croft GO.

While that was happening, AAA Lara Croft came back for another reboot. A new origin story this time, rather than repeating the story first laid out in 1996. 2013's Tomb Raider would have made my list, if not for the fact I didn't get round to playing it until the start of 2014. It polished those controls (including removing suicide from most of the traversal controls, leaving it for the QTE moments), expanded the combat so periods of action actually felt good, and completely reimagined progression into a semi-open world. This was a series of areas in which you could really explore, with collectibles to encourage full discovery of every surface. The story was a lot more grounded, despite still engaging with fantastical elements (as Uncharted does), and everything was just the right side of the reboot scale to feel both fresh and familiar. A 1996 relic had been completely transformed into the new series. The only thing I really missed: it lost the tomb raiding. There were hardly any puzzles left, leaving the traversal to feed into the open area designs and upgrade paths that unlocked new paths as you came back to areas. It all worked to make a great game but I remarked at the time that this was the best Uncharted game ever made. Better combat, more open areas and backtracking to justify the traversal as more than busy-work in linear levels, and a great story: this was the natural evolution of Uncharted. But it had shed the puzzles and lack of combat focus that made Tomb Raider games distinct from what Naughty Dog makes.

Which brings us to Rise of the Tomb Raider, released on Xbox last year but just this week arriving on PC (and coming to PS4 at the end of the year due to Microsoft paying to give Uncharted 4 some breathing room - something I'm sure Sony are none too unhappy about).

The 7 optional tombs of the last game have been bulked out, both each being larger puzzles and including 9 of them; the combat feels a bit better but I couldn't narrow down why; and the traversal skills have been slightly refined on top of the already-great power curve. It's all rather minor tweaks rather than any radical departures but as the sequel to the reboot of both mechanics and story, this game was always going to feel incremental. It's not a knock against the game, which feels every bit as great to slowly unwrap as the last game.

The engine has been completely rebuilt, although a 360 port does exist to enforce some consideration for 2005-era silicon on the general design. Within those constraints, the game (and 2013's title was never bad looking on PC and did reasonably well as a 1080p port on the current console generation without much tweaking to that PC template) can occasionally look stunning and rarely less than competent under a range of lighting conditions.

The 2013 reboot managed a diversity of locations and conditions hard to believe could exist on a single small island (because they couldn't, welcome to suspension of disbelief), giving it a great visual range. Rise fails to quite live up to that standard and, while it is by no means just a game about the same looking ice and snow, this is disappointing. There is a brief intro chapter in the desert to remind you of the old jet-setting level design ethos the series once had and some short cinematics in a room of Croft Manor and a small apartment but this is another exploration of a single contiguous space. Just like in 2013, that means a few very large and non-linear levels, many more linear sections you pass through a few times to hoover up optional tasks or travelling back for story reasons, and some corridor sections that literally exist to allow narrative to play or provide a break from the action as you move between areas - single use traversal or combat puzzles. As you spend most of your time in the large areas with fast-travel available throughout, this may contribute to the lack of variety felt. The large areas are not all the same but not as different as in the last game.

Rise is mechanically solid. The combat is still good enough to feel like you're getting a change of pace when it arrives, and you can upgrade out both skills and weapons to tailor that experience. Range with a rifle or bow or focussing on throwable makeshift gear, all the way into a melee-focussed character - the options are there and you can expertly switch it up as your upgrade tree fills out. Stealth and using the traversal tools during combat is not the deepest experience but is enough to facilitate competent stealth play. While the last game was contemporary to the Last of Us, this one feels like it maybe references back to that range of combat experiences - although that could be more down to how similar they both played in 2013 so a 2016 sequel that refines either one would maybe look like it was moving towards the peak of the two. If you can't see 6 different objects (mainly bottles) to throw and distract an enemy near you, you're in an area where combat is impossible.

Traversal is still an almost Metroidvania-lite experience of slowly collecting all the tools needed to travel anywhere and travel quickly. This isn't a game focussed on combat everywhere (small patrols that repopulate areas after first cleared are trivialised by the mid-game combat upgrade curve so just become resource dispensers) and lots of the more open areas rely on traversal being diverse with the more linear stuff needing each tool to be fun to use. Rise stands up to this task just like the last game, although there is now even less focus on QTEs, almost completing the transition away from their heavy use in the 2006-era trilogy. But those few times when the controls don't read my desired input correctly and result in a needless death feel all the more frustrating today (especially when it is one jump that consistently misreads my intent until I realise what input combo is actually required or direction to request the jump in). This is not to say Rise is worse that earlier games; it is not, and the checkpointing means you will never lose a collectible and usually only go back seconds. But my standards are always rising and it feels like Tomb Raider is standing still on this. It's not yet to the point where I never look at the death screen and think "that's not what that input is requesting happens!"

So incredibly solid, a worthy successor to the last game, and something everyone should play if they got any enjoyment out of the 2013 reboot. But why don't I feel the same passion for this as the last game? On the one hand, this is more of the same and not a heady combination of familiar and fresh - this isn't the series realising something Enslaved or a Naughty Dog game hadn't: going more open with the levels can be really good.

On the other hand, it's also the story and, crucially, the characters. The last game wasn't perfect, but when you got on that boat at the end there was a reason to care about the ensemble cast of secondary characters who made it with you and the ones who didn't. That cast is largely not returning and, strangely, not being replaced either. This is not the solo logs of Lara Croft raiding tombs, but the characters that do appear feel little more than vessels of ideology (which is better explored in the collectible texts) and functional story progression. Lara Croft is possibly the only vaguely human person in Rise. And that really hurts the story's urgency in a game filled with side-missions and collectibles. I hate to use the tired phrase, "this story is really video-game-y" but I'll say that this story presentation wouldn't have been out of place in a game released next to Underworld, where I last felt the narrative was losing me. World-weary, depressed Jesus fights the evil papal army sounds like an Assassin's Creed parody. Better characters and dialogue could have made a mechanically identical game to this stand a lot taller.

Finally, I need to address a potential disaster for PC gaming. In 2013's Tomb Raider, I played at max settings and 4K to remove aliasing (SSAA). This one I could only get near high settings at 1080p30 (with FXAA) and changing most settings or even resolutions lower than my picks did not make the game much better. Short of completely turning off the real-time shadows entirely, not much moved the needle and nVidia's numbers indicate this isn't just my mid-range machine (awaiting FinFET GPUs, and hopefully HBM2 if that gets into the affordable enthusiast tiers). "Newer game requires faster machine" isn't news and I accept that this is a better looking game and I do like the higher settings I struggle to run the game with. However, I have gotten to a place where the game is consistently around 30fps in all areas with my current settings. Except for when it isn't.

Sometimes the game will, when rendering something that I've seen it do before at 30fps, crunch down to a stuttering mess. We're talking ~10fps averages. Unplayable. It can also drop down in-between this and normal performance. At one point the performance woes got so bad (8fps average, indoor area) the map menu, which stops rendering the game (check your GPU logs, the load is <10%), couldn't get past 15fps - something was bogging down the CPU so badly it couldn't dispatch enough calls to render a 2D menu. The only thing I consistently found was that restating the game fixed it; going down to 720p or turning all the settings down (to minimum) didn't and the GPU logs didn't indicate something on my end like a heating issue or even something as visibly broken as Just Cause 3 had (logs showed the GPU stalled and then flushed the VRAM (or just stopped using it for a tick?) the same moment that game degraded into low perf mode). Reviewers have mentioned this issue. And I've heard this being reported on nVidia and AMD GPUs so it's not a specific driver bug.

I also want to bring in a 3rd PC port from the last 12 months and talk frankly about potentially ruining the experience of paying customers. Batman: Arkham Knight. The Denuvo (seemingly memory-resident rather than on-start one-time-check) anti-piracy technology is used in all three of these games that have unpredictable and somewhat setting-agnostic performance issues that (at least in my experience of Rise and JC3) seem to be a degraded perf mode that the game drops into. The game is capable of doing the job required, but sometimes it stops and you have to restart it to get back to the normal perf mode. And this happened more than once or twice. Both those games I've put in tens of hours and have encountered at least that many times when I've needed to quickly restart after the game massively chugged (as a persistent state, whatever location I moved to) for no good reason and with no alleviation coming from turning the settings all the way down. It's random as I've had it happen within a minute of booting the game up and had no issues for several hours solid gaming.

Rise is better than JC3 on my machine: I was annoyed but once I realising this wasn't my settings/machine but a bug causing a degraded perf mode, I could quickly react to seeing perf had stalled and restart to get back into the game. Frequent checkpoints find another use and SSDs show why they're mandatory for the PC experience when that loses you less than a minute. JC3 hit that degraded perf mode so regularly that I had to stop playing it for a few weeks. Some patches and my machine getting an OS wipe (moving from Win7 to Win10) later and it was still there but with about the frequency I find in Rise, so I could complete the game. I really hope this is just a coincidence or some bug in some shared code between Rise and JC3 (both Squidix published) because if this new anti-piracy software is getting in the way of the game code talking to the GPU drivers and stalling into a low perf mode, we are going to get a lot more bad PC ports that should really sing on a mid-range PC. I include Batman on this list because, despite having somewhat different perf issues, it was something the devs said simply wasn't fixable and if the anti-piracy layer was broken then those devs could not fix that if the publisher would not accept simply disabling it.

Games of the Year 2015

So a fourth year of picking out notable games released (approximately) within a calendar year. I guess that makes it a tradition for this blog.

Life is Strange

I've already written about why this game is emotionally resonant, necessarily pondering, and mechanically important for several genres. To quote myself this is "one of the most exciting things to come from a publisher in years". A slow and considered story about young adult (queer) women coming to terms with the world and growing into who they are. It's also the shot in the arm that graphic adventure games needed since coasting on the success of Telltale's first Walking Dead season and it's hugely informative for anyone working on the narrative systems for modern RPGs.

Visually the decision not to chase photorealism pays dividends with the brushwork even extending to things like rain splash effects and wet shaders - the cohesion tied together with a thoroughly modern engine to render it in detail without distracting defects. The one area which could really have done with more investment is animation - the audio performances are mainly incredible and are leaned heavily upon as the face animation is very basic. Max and Chloe('s voice actors) sell the game throughout with plenty of strong performances from others. When you're telling a love story, you need those two main performances to chime and they do. The fandom that grew out of this game have clearly found fertile ground to grow from.

Everything in Life is Strange is painted broad and universal but also small and specific. Everyone is a caricature but also given depth and time to show their quirks beyond the exaggerated surface. Most people can identify with the themes of the story and the main characters but this isn't a story about straight men. It works because the glut of stories about straight white cis men distorts what stories we commonly see told in major, "all audiences" media. It is an everywoman story in a medium where the notion of an everywoman is barely explored above a very low budget ceiling. Hopefully it is the start of a new wave of published-funded projects. [photo source]

Pillars of Eternity

As I mentioned earlier in the year, this is a classic CRPG right down to the painted backdrops and limited use of 3D acceleration to make it pop. Of course, coming 15 years after the height of that genre, this use of 3D now extends to fully 3D characters and monsters with very detailed artwork for the backdrops but this is more of a "what a classic CRPG could look like today" than even the modest fully-3D top-down competitors like Wasteland 2 or Divinity: Original Sin. This is a 2015 take on the Infinity Engine, not the Aurora Engine.

What PoE does add to the table is a much-improved interface and some systems changes away from GURPS/SPECIAL/(A)D&D that allow more playing of the game and less working through the rule system to find how to progress. The combat is deep enough that dungeons are a great time exploring your party's classes but it doesn't ever dominate the game (and things like a 15-level mega-dungeon are offered as completely optional content for those who want more time to enjoy that incredibly refined tactical real-time with pause system); it's a CRPG so most people will come for the story. You can feel the experienced writing team in every inch of the game's narrative - a story that manages to vault the bar of even a rose-tinted view of those classic CRPGs.

Cities: Skylines

Another game I talked about at the same time, this is what SimCity (2013) should have been. Offline (no always-on DRM), mod-friendly, simulational, and built to allow fans of the classic SimCity games to enjoy a similar experience with a new layer of infographics and citizen simulation to run on top of it. For this game, that means importing a lot of the transit simulation from the developer's previous Cities in Motion series into a core city-builder template.

Not every citizen is simulated in detail (something EA planned for SimCity 2013 but only managed to reach simulating 10% of the Sims as agents and those acted too stupidly to generate meaningful outcomes) but there are certainly enough of them milling around and travelling to make traffic quickly become a constant system you need to master to enable your city to grow. The initially small plot of land grows as your city does and you can pick where it expands to rather than just getting a centred square of land. But most of the rest of this game is the classic (low & high density) R,C,I city-builder you expect from the genre and which has only slowly evolved since SimCity 2000 solidified the template.

This is exactly what you want after EA's Maxis completely dropped the ball in every way and left the somewhat archaic SimCity 4 from 2003 as the latest proper entry in the series. A thoroughly modern, infinitely moddable, 3D city-builder that reacts exactly how you expect and with a deeper-than-expected traffic simulation that shows the developer's previous focus. Anyone who enjoys this genre should be satisfied by this budget release (even if the headline feature from the expansion actually turned out to be part of ongoing support and so robbed that additional purchase of much value).

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

So I grew up in very rural England. This game was to me what many games have been to people who grew up in locations like New York, LA, San Francisco, or London. This even goes back to around when I was born for the period setting. All rendered with incredible fidelity and underlaid by another exceptional Jessica Curry soundtrack. Just as in Dear Esther, the soundtrack really sells the piece and makes wandering around uncovering the places and narrative never feel plodding.

This is definitely far larger in scope to that previous game and you can see every inch of Sony's involvement in the assets, rendering these villages and fields in detail you expect from AAA, not indie. There are a couple of slightly unclean edges to remind you this hasn't had the funding and army of artists you get for Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, or Battlefront; but otherwise it's amazing to wander round something that looks like where my life started.

The actual narrative, told via audio plays, helps to build a living, breathing space in which you are walking (after a cataclysm that has left every leaf untouched but no person remaining). It speaks to smart allocation of resources on the project and completely held me throughout the game. A game about isolation, searching, and small village toxicity that eventually falls to self-sacrifice and the tail end of the nuclear scare that fits the period.

The Beginner's Guide

As I touched on around release, this game has some meat to dig into both considering the text and the metatext that it has created. Advertised as 90 minutes of narrated game design, this follow up to The Stanley Parable shares a lot of the build process but uses it for a completely different exploration into game design.

Here the question is not about the illusion of choice in constructing levels but how a game developer can cope with the stress of the indie game process. How does an artist hold it together to complete a project? How do they deal with other people (or other facets of themself) during development and sharing their creations? How does feedback or just the act of letting a work grow without you pull on a fragile nerve?

It's a game that benefits from going into blind but being prepared to work for your fulfilment. You will spend 90 minutes with a narrator and look at a series of levels but this is like describing an audio-book as 4 hours of listening to someone speak: technically accurate but saying nothing about the actual experience of listening. If you have any interest in small-scale game development or discussions of mental health then this is an outstanding game to play.

Until Dawn

Do what the writers of Agents of SHIELD refuse to and construct a scenario where we can all enjoy watching Ward die, permanently. Then watch it a few more times, you deserve the catharsis if you've been putting up with that TV show. Also contains plenty of Peter Stormare emoting, again, and that's almost worth the entry fee alone.

While this had a tough development cycle (originally a PS3 Move-controller game), the final product shows none of that uncertainty. This is a confident horror story with state of the art performance capture the likes of which Sony normally only get to roll out for their David Cage projects (Heavy Rain, Beyond). It's also structurally very similar to those games, with emphasis on decision making and branching narratives driving a cinematic experience.

The advantage that Until Dawn has is competent writing and editing staff that bring together a post-Cabin in the Woods horror story that nods at the genre tropes while offering a game where, depending how you play it, everyone (individually) can live or die. American teens painted to been just unlikeable enough that their gruesome deaths aren't too much of a downer for the plot but don't destroy your investment in at least some surviving. As is necessary in the modern era of horror, tropes are either played with or inverted left and right so you're never quite sure what will be played straight and the different paths allow for some genuine unexpected moments as you know that theoretically everyone can survive whatever situation they're in.

DiRT Rally

Proper rally games that you can play on a standard joypad are back.

There's always a bit of give and take developing a game about driving (and with rally it's always about driving; racing is for people who are fighting the other cars, not the cliff face that will squash them if they don't take this corner [caution jump into right 4 tightens] just right): how demanding should the game be vs how much money can be spent on something that only appeals to a few driving game fans. In recent years it seemed like all rally games moved further and further from the sim side of the scales and towards arcade handling and difficulty.

This is where a small skunkworks team at Codies came in and decided to fix that. Get their old engine, throw out the handling model, and try and build a semi-sim game that is the equivalent of Forza or GT in providing a soft sim focus that can appeal to people who want to take things seriously but maybe don't want to spend £300 on a wheel and pedals. People who want a challenge and for track condition to matter, to need the co-driver to guide them. DiRT Rally is an incredibly solid attempt at that which just made final release after a period on Early Access. If you fondly remember games like RalliSport Challenge or the Colin McRae Rally games, this is for you.

Notable Runners-up

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - Just good clean cooperative multiplayer design that points to hopefully an explosion in asymmetrical knowledge co-op games coming soon (may get talked about more next year due to VR support).

Her Story - Fun, revered, almost made my list. I think the impressiveness of the design of the search system wears away with distance. While you're playing it, hunting the keywords to unlock the new videos you crave to make sense of the narrative, it seems really clever. Given distance, you start to wonder exactly how carefully constructed it all was and how it was somewhat inherent to the nature of language. It's a fun short ride through a bad search engine that is absolutely worth playing.

Just Cause 3 - From that very first moment, this game is totally upfront about how nothing is serious and everything is on fire. A sequel that refines the movement tools and builds a new sandbox. What little narrative there is shows sparks of self-awareness that raises it above the tired skeleton it is attached to. But it's the fluid traversal tools that make this game stand out; an itch that, last year, was satiated by inFamous. Just like that game, JC3 is rather copy-pasted in structure but it's all about using the varied tools to keep yourself engaged - hour 50 of Forza is only different to hour 5 because of how you make your own progression and a basic unlock chain you walk down with some freedom of selection. But it can't go on the main list because the performance (on console or many PC configurations) simply isn't there, the bugs are too many, and some of it is unquestionably stuff considered "known shippable" and that's not ok.

Lara Croft GO - Not just a reskin of Hitman GO. A really nice, cheap puzzle game with style showing how much can be done with mobile GPUs without chasing photorealism.

Sorry Undertale, I think Caro does a great job of explaining why you're not on my list. Just as with Brothers, this gets a mention for how far my views diverge from the consensus of reviewers in general and specifically critics who generally share my tastes (and politics).

Not Enough Hours in the Day

Kerbal Space Program - I just didn't have time to do more than watch others play it while working - finally out of Early Access and looking great. Space physics and rocket science, or at least an approximation of them in a construction game.

Rise of the Tomb Raider - Sorry Xbox, I'm calling this a 2016 release as I played the last game at 4K on PC and loved it, not going to sub-1080p (variable res) and buying an XBOne just to play this a couple of months earlier. When Steam put up their presale page saying this will release in January, I wondered how many people started eyeing the 30-day refund period on their 2nd console purchase.

Cibele - I didn't have time to grab this but I'll mention it as I did play Freshman Year this year. Both released in 2015 by the same dev as last year's how do you Do It? and about topics larger games fail to engage with so well worth checking out. FY is another really short vignette piece like hdyDI.

The Witcher 3 - This would take a lot of hours and I was playing quite a few top-down RPGs this year (as the last few years have been thick with new takes on the classic perspective/game systems). It helps that there is almost certainly going to be a 2.0 patch and the end-of-DLC edition, if previous games are any indication.

The Choices in Life is Strange

Life is Strange is a narrative game about making choices. There are countless examples of this genre from RPGs to the popular modern Graphic Adventures but LiS embraces an element of save-scumming to remove the short-term experience of finality that drives a lot of those decisions. When players are allowed to fully explore every dialogue tree, a game about choices becomes one that can really focus on the cause and effect that occurs more than within the immediate moments after a choice is made.

Anyone who's played many games built around choices will remember plenty of occasions where the designers have reinforced the idea of consequences by inserting gotcha answers into the dialogue trees. Pick the wrong answer, see the "amusing" failure and either be thrown back into the same question to pick an acceptable answer or hit game over and reload from the last save. The equivalent of the tabletop GM getting tired of your crap and bringing the freestyle nonsense to a swift end.

The classic model, before gigabytes of audio data came with every game, was to have players read their choices, pick an option, and then jump into the response. The player was the protagonist who decided a response and then jumped into the corresponding reply, possibly with some key bits voiced for effect. Then "cinematic" because the only way to sell games and everything had to be voiced. Eventually the player character was forced into a voiced role (and so the narrowing of the avatar into only roles that matched the recorded dialogue) and it was decided that the player should not have to read the full dialogue before making a choice and hearing it delivered by the voice talent. A decision that has given us the modern dialogue wheel and which many people will push back against. Now you have to guess at roughly what your avatar is about to say and so are guessing at the reaction it will evoke once removed.

But Dontnod Entertainment, expanding on the time-manipulation sections in their previous game, Remember Me, have found a path forward that retains the voiced dialogue without requiring the player to guess at what is going to be said or putting paragraphs of text up before a choice is made. This freedom can clearly be felt in the long dialogue blocks that can be triggered when the player picks what to discuss. But none of it is a permanent, locked choice due to the mechanic by which time can always be rewound and other choices made. The player is never left screaming at the screen as their avatar does or says something they would never have wanted to role-play in a tabletop version of the story.

I've previously discussed how Life is Strange manages to carefully genericise the setting and story to allow this European young-adult tale to play in America or elsewhere (even tagged as a story in a fictional Oregon coastal town). It doesn't quite stick the landing on that, especially when measured against specific local expectations ("Well I didn't talk like that when I was a kid"). But it does provide widespread familiarity for a story that generally doesn't get funded by the publishing model for computer games. That's the reason why the narrative of this game is one of the most exciting things to come from a publisher in years: a reasonably highly funded studio project about two queer women finding love amongst the background of ubiquitous rape culture in higher education.

But it's also mechanically interesting and a step forward for the genre of games that provide the player with narrative choices. How can you go back to a game that offers some broad categories and emotions on a wheel and pretends that the player is making an informed choice to role-play by fumbling through the dialogue when this system offers the player genuine choices about how to interact?

The cost is that you can no longer embed gotchas into your dialogue systems. Players don't need to game the system with save-scumming to undo immediate reactions to their choices but this just means they no longer are playing a game of second guessing the writers and avoiding picking the selection under which a mine has been hidden.

Life is Strange is a game all about choices, tying the ludic and narrative strands together into a coherent whole. And none of them are a cheap way of punishing choices. When necessary, as seen at the end of episode two, the ability to see all options is restricted to avoid exploitation of the game (with save-scumming or reaching for a phone to look up a FAQ) but in general the point of a game about the effect of actions is to show them occurring over the spread of days and even years. At no point does denying the curious player the chance to see what other options the writers put into the dialogue tree ruin that.

Who is the Beginner’s Guide?

If you’re curious about the toll of labour to create games, if you're a fan who likes to take ownership of what they consume, if you're a creator who struggles with balancing the aspects of your art, if you once explored with Build or Worldcraft: play this game.

You probably want to read Cara Ellison's take and Austin Walker's review (as I'm going to quote a comment he made below that review)

One of the thoughts I was wondering while playing this, especially as the revelations start to avalanche towards the end, was if this was an autobiographical game. Reading the reaction, this has been a common response.

But, as I started to muse on what is possibly unknowable (without a statement by the author or the coming forward of the game’s Coda), I came to realise I didn’t care. One interpretation of the game (as Cara discusses) is that there is only one character in the game. Wreden is Coda, Coda is the creative inside Wreden and the narrator is the weight of expectations, the desire to publish, the perception of the audience. I realised that was the only way I really read the game. That was my internal canon for what this game was about. So it becomes a different question about the autobiographical nature of the game, because on some level it seems impossible not to be.

My one issue so far with the discussion is that I’m not sure everyone is asking the question in the same way, even if they’re asking it about the reading that the narrator and Coda are based on two different people:

Austin Walker:

If it's real, then it's not an apology at all, it's an incredibly gross exploitation of someone's work that isn't Wreden's. And the game seems to understand that, which is what makes me think it is in fact Not Real.

I don't think anyone would suggest it is literally real (that this game is a set of levels by someone other than the Wreden, which Wreden had edited in the ways described by the narrative) - it'd be taken down from Steam (eventually) as a copyright violation and ruin Wreden's career. The metafiction is fiction, but that doesn't mean this can't be about real events. This could be autobiographical. Just because an author writes about a plagiarist entirely in his own words, it doesn't mean it's not a story about his previous plagiarism or what it felt like to be plagiarised in the past. That's not my interpretation but I don't think it's easy to dismiss and self-contradictory to the game's theme and revelations.

What I think is possible is this is an autobiographical game (either with Wreden thinking back to him as the narrator/fan/editor or as Coda) in which the actual transgressions of the past have been replaced by entirely new content (so we never see what actually made the real Coda's work special but see work far more loosely inspired by it than map edits) in order to explore the previous exploitation that occurred without repeating the actual breech of trust. The alternative being a work of complete fiction that is only riffing on Wreden's thought experiments or far more loose experiences of fandom, creation, etc. that don't closely align with events described in the game.

I'm not sure that I think this being autobiographical (if Coda isn’t Wreden) is problematic. As long as these aren't literal recreations of the actual levels from a real Coda but rather totally new levels that may riff on some themes (or even specific glitches) that really were in some original works that inspired this (or maybe Coda is completely changed in this retelling to avoid further exploitation) then it seems ok. It would, ultimately, be a sort of apology as there is a clear admittance of wrongdoing (even if qualified by focussing on the narrator's intent so much) by the close. It is only exactly as exploitative as anyone who recounts their own history, tying in unnamed others who are core to the story without naming them.

As I interpret the game as narrating an internal struggle (with creation, with modifying your own work beyond where it may be "finished" in the eyes of your internal creativity, with the fear of publication, with the weight of indie PR) for a single person then I'm not so invested in wondering if this is an autobiography. In a sense I think it is likely to be so, as an exploration of this headspace that seems incredibly relatable to so many indies; but if Wreden is Coda then obviously none of this is a literal retelling of external events but rather the internal narrative of someone torn between silent creation and distribution of more user-palatable variants that lose that original message and substitute in more commercial design.