This is for my video game reviews!
In the grand scheme of things, I haven't actually played that many games, but I really like them, and I have a lot of thoughts on them. This can be a hole I can yell into, and anyone else who wants to can listen.
ART SQOOL
Date: 5/23/2022
I decided to stop playing "Art SQOOL" today. Before I render my full opinions on this computer program that is technically a "game" I will say that I am not very good at drawing. I recognize that this is because I don't really practice the skill, and I would like to eventually change that. That being said, I don't think that being better at drawing would have changed my currently held opinion that it seems incomplete as a game.
To be clear I don't think that it's necessarily bad, just incomplete. The game starts with a fairly entertaining premise: you go to an art school (Art SQOOL) to learn how to make art, guided and graded by a "super-intelligent AI" and you venture around a surreal world gathering paint colors and brushes scattered throughout it to aid in your assignments. Think the drawing tool from "gartic phone", but you have to find the colors and brush sizes in an open world. This, coupled with the fact that the movement controls were very swingy and many of the areas in the open world were inaccessible except by sheer luck, meant that the game seemed like a very boring, difficult climb to nowhere . . . unless, perhaps . . . the AI grading you gives you interesting lore/story, access to better movement, and/or hidden colors/brushes?
I stopped after doing about 12 drawings and had seen no evidence that this would ever happen. The grades it gave didn't even seem to be based on any discernable metric, and were just given at random. Maybe if I liked drawing more I would have stayed around longer for the actual content of the game, but it simply couldn't keep my interest for that long, and it didn't seem like the prompts were actually that creative either. If the game had anything more to it than bad drawing prompts, for a sparse(being generous here) drawing tool, with sections of a mostly inaccessible open world, governed by bad controls, it maybe could have passed itself off as "campy". Instead it just seemed like a waste of time.
A Mortician's Tale
Date: 3/12/2022
I finished playing "A Mortician's Tale" last night. It's a ~2 hour game about a mortician named Charlie and the experiences she has in her first year or so of her job through small, one-day snapshots that occur months apart.
In terms of gameplay it's really more of a graphic novel. Any of the parts where you prepare a dead body are entirely guided such that you can't make mistakes and the next step is always shown on screen. Everything else consists of reading emails and clicking on people to walk up to them and listen to their dialogue during a funeral. Not super engaging, but it's mostly meant to be a vehicle for the story.
The story obviously focusses a lot on death and how death is dealt with. It discusses a lot about respect both for the family, and the deceased themselves, and emphasizes the importance of respecting different preferences with regards to burial (cultural, religious, economic, environmental, etc).
It presents a lot of interesting information about death and the grieving/burial process, but ultimately the story is hindered by the fact that, other than her profession, Charlie is . . . kind of boring. More than 80% of the game is reading emails (the other ~20% is the actual process of preparing the body or listening to people at the funeral, no talking from Charlie), but we only see one 10 word email actually written by Charlie (not an auto response), where she just confirms a meeting time.
One could make the claim that Charlie is supposed to be a vessel for the player, but only once in the entire game can you actually affect what Charlie does. Everything else is either auto replying to emails or following the body prep instructions on the screen. No deviation, so there isn't really a lot of space in this "vessel" if that really is the case.
The feeling of "lost opportunity" is further compounded by the fact that the one part where you do make a decision is probably the most interesting part, where an ethical dilemma is presented, but regardless of your choice Charlie can only sit back and allow the situation to proceed. Looking at the other characters, I almost feel as if this game would have been perfect if it were only told from one of their perspectives, because each one of them has so much personality and so many varying thoughts about death itself. If one of them were the main character, the visual novel style would make sense, but with Charlie it just feels restrictive. I suppose you could say this complaint is more about the style, but I've enjoyed other visual novels before so . . .
All of that being said, I did enjoy the game as it is. The information on burial it presented was almost entirely unknown to me, and, as I said previously, it was interesting to listen to the other characters' feelings and opinions. It touches on a lot of interesting ideas, and I would love to talk about some of the game's themes and messages with anyone who ends up playing it.