the smell of chinatown
There is a nostalgic smell from my past, a smell i always associated with Chinatown. I could never quite pin down what it was. It is a slightly acrid smell, not from food or incense, but something else. For the longest time i thought it must be some kind of exotic packing material that only existed in the warehouses of Hong Kong through which all
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I didn't find the game especially buggy, although it's been patched a bunch since launch. It is quite pretty, the controls are reasonably smooth and the infiltration mechanics work fairly well. It was solid enough as a mindless stealth shooter that I played it all the way through, despite my ongoing disappointment with the shallow characters and tedious/predictable stories.
There are lots of cyberpunk games that don't involve shooting the place up. A bunch of them are point-and-click adventure games like Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the infamous Beneath a Steel Sky), Gemini Rue (amazing game), Lacuna, The Red Strings Club, Gamedec, Technobabylon, The Sundew, Void & Meddler, Born Punk etc etc. Some of them are much better than other ones, and the best ones are the ones that don't fall into the trap of making the protagonist an angry, bitter, jaded shithead.
Cyberpunk 2077 failed as a compelling story for me because every character is unapologetically violent and vengeful. In fact the whole world is, and that doesn't ring true for me. Even in places that are wracked with poverty, places that are literal warzones, they're not 99% filled with moustache-twirling villains who gleefully rape, torture and kill six times before breakfast. How - as a reader/watcher/player - am I supposed to feel anything for a "meaningful" storyline death when hundreds of other deaths are shown that nobody, anywhere in the story cares about? At least in military sci-fi like Halo or Mass Effect the weight of being at war is always acknowledged.
I suppose if I'm charitable the writers might be trying to say something about how people in a hyper-modern society have become desensitized to violence, but that only makes sense if the violence is happening on the other side the world, or the other side of town. I think people who do have to deal with violence on their doorsteps are affected by it, quite profoundly. If games want to show the effects of a violent society on the people who live in it, making all the main characters murderous vigilantes (at best) feels like it's missing the point a bit.
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That makes sense. Thanks for mentioning the other games - I'll check them out!
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Ahhh, Beneath a Steel Sky is available for free on Steam!
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It sure is! It's one of the free games available with the ScummVM point-and-click emulator. You can find some more here: https://www.scummvm.org/games/
I don't mind paying for adventure games usually, because a lot of them are built by small teams and they're a niche genre nowadays, so I like to support the creators. But there are still a bunch of hobbyist ones that the creators give away for free. They're probably more of them on https://itch.io/ than Steam. You could also check out AGS too: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/
I read https://adventuregamers.com/ to keep track of new releases. They have a very particular house style in their reviews that I find extremely tedious, but it's still a good place to find out what's going on.
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This all sounds great - thank you for the links! I'll check them out.
I'm really into indie games. There's one I played quite a bit a few years ago, Wildermyth, which was good fun, simulating a RPG turn based game, but point-and-click adventures have a special place in my heart because of all the games I played in the late 80s, early 90s.
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