Games that play like a sucker punch...
So, you know me. I never post any more. I never do anything but crosspost art-garbage.
This will be the exception.
I just played the latest masterpiece* of interactive storytelling from Failbetter Games: Machine Cares. Dim side? It seems to only be playable if you have Facebook. I can't find any other way to get into the game, except the 'Connect to Facebook' option, which makes me glad I have a Facebook account that I don't do anything but play games with.
It's a story about sex, drugs, and suicide, set in post-apocalyptic London. Jay is dead. Machine has called for you to take his place. You move in, but ... everything is still there. It's all right where he left it. And then Machine starts calling you 'Jay'... This happens in the first five minutes of the story, and then it all just catches fire like the undulating trails of a petrol spill from a trainwreck. It's beautifully ugly, in all the right ways.
Machine is a deeply fucking creepy character, and she leans hard on all my dystopian cyberpunk buttons. The other characters are... I swear to christ, I used to drink with these people, when I was still in school, but with different names and faces. They're identifiable. They're really real. They're not cardboard-cutout teenagers written by people who have forgotten what it was like to be that age, like so many characters in YA fiction are.
There's a stiff undercurrent of Gibson, through the whole affair. The world gone wrong, the protective circuitry gone wronger still... It's haunting, sickly hollow, and the dead space is stuffed with kitten pictures. Machine fiddles while Tower 4 burns. It questions more answers than it answers questions, overall, and given the storyline, I'm good with that. It may be the only even slightly appropriate way to approach the subject of teen suicide.
*(It appears to have one bug. There's a particular storyline that glitches like a bitch, when you max out its related statistic. Don't worry about it, just discard any cards for that story, if it starts doing that. You'll still be able to get the ending reward for the story.)
This will be the exception.
I just played the latest masterpiece* of interactive storytelling from Failbetter Games: Machine Cares. Dim side? It seems to only be playable if you have Facebook. I can't find any other way to get into the game, except the 'Connect to Facebook' option, which makes me glad I have a Facebook account that I don't do anything but play games with.
It's a story about sex, drugs, and suicide, set in post-apocalyptic London. Jay is dead. Machine has called for you to take his place. You move in, but ... everything is still there. It's all right where he left it. And then Machine starts calling you 'Jay'... This happens in the first five minutes of the story, and then it all just catches fire like the undulating trails of a petrol spill from a trainwreck. It's beautifully ugly, in all the right ways.
Machine is a deeply fucking creepy character, and she leans hard on all my dystopian cyberpunk buttons. The other characters are... I swear to christ, I used to drink with these people, when I was still in school, but with different names and faces. They're identifiable. They're really real. They're not cardboard-cutout teenagers written by people who have forgotten what it was like to be that age, like so many characters in YA fiction are.
There's a stiff undercurrent of Gibson, through the whole affair. The world gone wrong, the protective circuitry gone wronger still... It's haunting, sickly hollow, and the dead space is stuffed with kitten pictures. Machine fiddles while Tower 4 burns. It questions more answers than it answers questions, overall, and given the storyline, I'm good with that. It may be the only even slightly appropriate way to approach the subject of teen suicide.
*(It appears to have one bug. There's a particular storyline that glitches like a bitch, when you max out its related statistic. Don't worry about it, just discard any cards for that story, if it starts doing that. You'll still be able to get the ending reward for the story.)