Total Playtime: Text Adventure 2 - Heaven's Vault
A good videogame book!?
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.
Behold the first episode of Text Adventure's second series. It's only fitting that our video game book book club forces us to contort our titles into the malformed and over-punctuated shape of many video game titles! We very much put our best foot forward this week with Heaven's Vault 1: The Loop, by Jon Ingold, earning the highest single score a book has gotten in this series.
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House Of The Dying Sun rescued space from the nerds, but we let it go again
This machine kills traitors
This is not a war. There is no glory or prize to be won, no victory to be had. There are no gods to satisfy or rewards to covet. There is nothing to gain. You are not here to save the galaxy or prevent the apocalypse. There is a truth, but it is not holy. It is beyond holy. It is this:
Twelve traitor lords remain.
House Of The Dying Sun begins with an imperative tolling bell, and can only end in ruin. That is your explicit purpose. It tells you upfront, not with a cutscene or Sim Cameraman prologue, but in black and white, with intoxicating immediacy.
Levels open with thrumming drums and full engines warping you in to the target, under a beautiful classic font declaring dramatic titles like "Vengeance at Ember Field" and "Slaughter at Horuus Gate", in keeping with its almost 1970s filmic energy. Suns blot out enemies. An ally flies through the fire of missiles you shot down. One HUD marker doesn't rotate with you, and that feels better. Every level is a careful diorama, a stage.
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Vholume review
Who runs this city?
A good parkour game is a gauntlet of faith. You follow the flow of a city designed by some invisible hand: paving stones tilted at angles suggestive of a left turn, a warm light inviting you into a distant doorway, some plank of corrugated scrap extended toward an unseen edge. You are chasing a breadcrumb trail, except you don't always know what's crumb and what's dirt. Over and over, you leap without looking. Sometimes that means you die. But, when it's done right, you feel like you are predicting the future mere milliseconds ahead of time.
The best levels of Vholume make me feel like a clairvoyant with springs for legs. The worst feel like a brief test of my faith, nothing more. The protagonist of this wall-running platformer will often wheeze as if they're running out of breath. At the end of one run, I realised I had been holding my own lungs for the two full minutes it took me to hit the dark doorway that marks the finish line. This game is such a rush, it will deprive you of oxygen.
Thirty-one levels, a wall run, and a
A ride in the war taxi
The Commander Goes Zapping in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam
"War is fun," says the commander. "You get to shoot things."
The radio is cracking heavy static, the helicopter blades are whud-whud-whudding over our heads, bullets are whipping past, or plinking loudly against the chopper's hull. The commander in the seat next to me is still speaking but I can only hear snippets of what he says. It's almost impossible to make out the rest of his rubber-banding words.
"It's -— and yeah -— sometimes you -— shot at -— that's -— "
I'd like to say this is an atmospheric feature of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, the latest multiplayer shooter to be set in the jungles of 1960s Vietnam. But it's really just the game's comm systems buckling under the pressure of a war sim that relies on wall-to-wall chatter. The pilot, who has a clearer radio channel with me, translates.
"Basically, he says: war is fun!"
Like the conflict it's based on, the warfare in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is not symmetrical. The two factions don't have matching abilities. US players can fly helicopters and drop napalm strikes. The North Vietnamese have tunnel systems and better camouflage. The first Hell Let Loose, set during WWII, had the same hardcore tactical battling and quick deaths. But the factions generally used the same explodey technologies and methods of war. Here, each side has a distinct flavour. The sound of choppers either makes you anxious or relieved.
Down on the ground, you either can't see ten feet ahead of you for jungle bushes, or you can see for miles (and be sniped for miles). You can take a boat downriver, but a dozen muzzle flashes might erupt from the bushes at any moment. You almost never see the person who riflewrecks you from a mysterious position in an abandoned fishing village. The safest place, surely, is a hundred feet up in the sky.
A trail of white smoke whooshes past our helicopter.
"Wow," says the pilot. "Rude."
The commander stirs next to me. "Was that an RPG?" he asks.
"Uh, maaaybe," says the pilot cheerfully.
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The Lie-In
Links worth clicking
Good morning, videogames. Except it's not morning. I have finally failed to deliver this article on time, as I'm away from home at the moment doing other things. Forgive me. We'll add an extra tier to our new subscriber goals at which I will be flogged. In the meantime, a collection of links awaits you below.
The second collection of Metal Gear Solid re-releases is arriving next week, and Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio revisited the fourth game in the series to talk about what's aged well, and less well.
But the poorly aged stealth action is far from the most shocking thing about Metal Gear Solid 4. Instead, it’s how direct Kojima is about tackling political issues without mincing a single word.
I love brush-based level design. Brendon Chung loves it too, and his opinion matters more as the maker of 30 Flights Of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy and Skin Deep.
It’s intentionally and specifically not a general-purpose tool designed to do anything – and I think that’s great. It’s built from the ground up to focus on authoring geometry for 3D game levels, allow you to make it as easily
Jank Mail: Auto battling
This week in PC gaming
It has been a big week on Jank. By far the main event was Brendy’s extensive explanation of why he doesn’t like auto-battler games, which continues to rack up online commentary from the tiring “let people enjoy things” (he at no point suggested they shouldn’t) to the intriguing “there is a semi-arbitrary distinction between game feel rooted in physical movement and game feel rooted in UX design” (busted).
My point is not that these games make us lesser players or lesser people. It's just that they're not half as interesting or groundbreaking as their huge sales numbers and endless praise suggest. Just because something is powerfully psychologically compulsive doesn't make it good art. Just because something eats your time, doesn't make it worth your time.
So much of our life is already made slick with the grease of automation. It is absurd to think of anybody wanting the self-reading book, the self-watching movie. Why would I want the self-playing game? The whole distinction of games as a medium is that they are about doing stuff. The game that leans more and more towards autoplaying threatens to
What you could play this weekend
And what we are
What a week it's been. You must be eight or nine months into the school summer holidays by now? Twelve or thirteen heatwaves, effectively one never-ending nightmare of sweaty necks and bleached grass? At least the weekend is here, when you get to put down childish things (the arbitrary strictures of work) and instead commit yourself to the pursuit of being human via the medium of videogames.
I'll tell you what we're playing this weekend if you tell us yours.
Repterra
I grew up watching Saturday-morning cartoon Denver, the Last Dinosaur (he's my best friend and a whole lot more). But what if Denver wasn't the last dinosaur? What if there were, in fact, too many Denvers? This is the nightmare scenario posited by Repterra, a "base-building survival RTS" in which you can ultimately turn dinos into your best friend and a whole lot more, where "more" means using them as mounts in your forever-war against their kin.
Hearth And Hamlet
Brendy Caldwell, Videogame Cop might have outlawed games that play themselves, but I'll continue to smuggle contraband incrementalism into the pages of Jank. Hearth And Hamlet promises "relaxing idle
Total Playtime: The Hubris Era
Karaoking well is the best revenge
Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.
Alice and Nate were both unavailable this week, prompting Brendy and I to realise the crushing shortage of local whimsy in our lives. Our daily existence is simply devoid of rural oddities or freestyle whimsy that lends itself to a banging cold open, so we ended up with several minutes of middle-aged car chat which Brendy heroically drags back to a gaming reference.
Those matters aside we turn to the matters of the week, chiefly Saber’s CEO lashing out at a departed writer who handled it by having a great night out that ended in karaoke, which is the sort of karmic vengeance we should all aspire to. Plus: good philanthropy yet with concerns about whether philanthropy can actually be good, the ongoing destructive instincts of large corporations, and big walks with medium guns.
Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies
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