Nanoreview: Nothing but the Rain by Naomi Salman

A painful monologue on the violence of oblivion

In the rainy town of Aloisville, people have been forgetting the recent details of their lives. It began gradually, without anyone noticing, until repeated episodes removed longer and longer portions of their memories and someone finally figured out that the cause was something in the rain. Contact with water in this town makes you forget. Not all at once: a single drop will only take away the last minute or so. But if you're not careful outside, if you're not covered enough or watchful enough, a downpour will erase your identity in full.

Naomi Salman's novella Nothing but the Rain is told as a series of journal entries by an elderly doctor, Laverne, who desperately holds on to what's worth remembering by writing it down, the notebook effectively serving as a substitute for her mental faculties. She has lost count of how long Aloisville has endured the endless shower of forgetting. There are rumors, half-remembered theories, constantly rediscovered facts that never complete the picture of their situation. She knows that the town has been cut off from the world, that there's no phone signal and no internet, that food aid is airdropped every so often, that armed guards prevent anyone from leaving. What caused it? Why there? Why them? If the truth has ever been found, it's lost now. The humidity in the air suffices to make you uncertain of the passage of time, dooming you to a perpetual present.

Nothing but the Rain narrates a brief series of episodes in Laverne's life, centered on her ties to the neighboring families she's built a mutual support network with. Although solitary by nature, Laverne still upholds her medical oath, and thus fulfills her share of responsibility for keeping Aloisville alive. But the successive entries in her journal reveal dangers she's already forgotten, as well as regrets she stubbornly refuses to forget. A society deprived of its history, and therefore of its identity, reverts to the most elemental tasks of survival. Fight or flight, eat or be eaten. There are no certainties. As Laverne puts it, "I found myself wondering if this had happened before. I didn't know everything I'd seen; I didn't remember everything I knew." Life is reduced to the most immediate necessities, because there's no point in settling debts or making plans. Without memory, human dignity is lost too.

This is a book that reads fast and hits hard. I typically have a terrible time with unreliable narrators, but in this novella the explanation for the lack of details and the biased recollection is fully believable. It's not that the narrator has an agenda in her way of telling events, but rather that she can't trust her own side of the story. This way she has no advantage over the reader: she's as disoriented as us. She has nothing to hide; she just has many parts missing. This authorial choice overcomes the automatic mistrust that unreliable narrators produce, and instead sparks an empathy that feels true. We can't get to know Laverne more closely than she's letting us see, but it's not a frustrating experience because that's the limit of how closely she knows herself. The effect is a tone of sincerity that one rarely finds in tales of the apocalypse. Even when she's feeling jaded and pessimistic, it comes from a place of care instead of cynicism. Her use of irony brings the story closer instead of setting a distance.

Laverne confesses to her diary the impossible choices that impossible circumstances can force upon us. The point of the story is not finding the answer to what caused the rain, but exploring what's left of the human spirit when it loses everything that defines it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Salman, Naomi. Nothing but the Rain [Tor, 2023].

Microreview [video game]: Tacoma by Fullbright (developer)

Enhanced Space

Tacoma is the not-at-all related followup to the critically acclaimed Gone Home and Fullbright's second game. The sophomore game stereotypes suffer the same problems as a sophomore album from a band. Can they repeat success? Will they try to strike out in a different direction and potentially lose their fans with a bold change, or will they try to recapture and build upon the success of their first release? In Tacoma, you will find less of the former and more of the latter. 

You are Amy Ferrier, a contractor for Venturis Corporation. Your task is to retrieve the AI named ODIN from Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma. While you're there, you can also learn the fates of the crew who are mysteriously absent. It doesn't take long to find out that a disaster aboard Tacoma is the cause of their disappearance. 

Playing Tacoma is going to feel extremely familiar to fans of Gone Home. You're in space, on a space station, but you're still largely picking through other people's stuff and listening to their stories as you collect data on ODIN. The mechanical twist to Tacoma is that the stories are told mostly through wireframe mannequins of the crew presented in an alternate reality (AR) interface. ODIN was recording these scenes and allows you to view some of them. You can fast-forward, rewind, interact with physical objects and AR interfaces as you follow the crew through these scenes. The way these scenes play out is easily the most natural feeling presentation of video game cutscenes I've ever seen. A scene may start with half of the crew present, but some will walk in, others will walk out, and you can follow them through the scene to catch different conversations. It's really cool to watch in motion, and allows the game to present multiple storylines in an extremely seamless way. 

Tacoma is packed with little side stories. If you were to solely follow the AR scenes or watch them only once, you'd absolutely get the gist of the main plot. However, in almost every drawer there's highly detailed notebook or tablet full of details that make Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma a place in the world, and make the wireframe cutouts into people. Tacoma accomplishes an incredible task of humanizing a seven person crew, in a video game, in a short amount of time.

The short play time is what will cause the most heartache for people. Like Gone Home, my personal playtime with Tacoma clocked in at a brief two and a half hours. I'm thorough too; I watched every AR cutscene multiple times to follow all of the characters in each scene, I read every AR interface, and I unlocked every locked door. A speedrun of Tacoma would only be limited to the amount of time it takes to watch each AR scene once, which is likely far less than 30 minutes total. If the short playtime doesn't discourage you, looking for anything more than a futuristic, AR-enhanced version of Gone Home might also bring disappointment. Make no mistake, for better or worse, Tacoma is very much a product of the team that made Gone Home. It didn't suddenly turn into System Shock or The Walking Dead. The puzzles to be solved are simple, and there is almost zero player input. In some ways, Tacoma would almost entirely complete itself without the player. In fact, you don't even need to watch the AR scenes. You can accomplish your mission by watching slow moving progress bars fill in over the course of three hours. 

But you should watch those AR scenes, and interact with the objects around you, and get attached to these very human characters. Tacoma has some of the finest video game storytelling you will ever find. Just don't go looking for something more than that, because you won't find it. Tacoma is excellent, but it rides on the shoulders of Gone Home.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 AR cutscenes are a unique and well-done method of storytelling

Penalties: -1Gone Home in space isn't too far off the mark

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Fullbright(developer). Tacoma [Fullbright, 2017] 

Microreview [video game]: The Signal From Tölva by Big Robot Ltd (developer)

Dark and Foreboding

An hour into The Signal from Tölva, I was not impressed. I was wandering around a lot of wide open, empty yet somehow linear valleys with a couple simple gameplay tools and objectives. It seemed like there wasn't much to it. And there isn't. But it comes together in surprising ways. 

Those sparse landscapes are littered with wreckage. As I progressed through the game, it was quickly obvious that this was a place that used to be important. There are wrecked space ships, wrecked factories, even derelict giant robots, rusting and half-buried in the dirt. The character you play as is working for a mysterious information broker and doesn't actually set foot on the planet. You possess the chassis of surveyor robots, who are the mortal enemies of bandit robots and zealot robots. None of them particularly look or behave differently, which adds a real nihilistic angle to the conflict. Surveyors, bandits, and zealots are all fighting for control over this scrap heap planet to no particular purpose. 

You do have to fight for control though. Progress in the game is largely measured by how many bunkers you control, which are where you can change your weaponry and items, read the story tidbits that fall out of items you collect, and where friendly surveyors spawn. To take control of a bunker, you have to eliminate all of the bandit and/or zealot robots in the immediate vicinity. To aid you, you can fill one of your two weapon slots with a command item which lets you enlist surveyors. They'll follow you around and attack enemies. But draw off too many surveyors to help you take one bunker can result in a previously captured bunker being overrun by enemies and lost. It's a tricky, and somewhat annoying balance. Some of those bunkers are not easy to capture and having to recapture them more than once can be frustrating.

Calling it Far Cry with robots is both reductive and giving it too much credit, because Far Cry makes a better first impression and has a lot more to do, but I really enjoyed this game for reasons that are more difficult to quantify than most games. Tölva has a mystery to it and it's got a melancholy atmosphere. The landscapes are littered with dead machinery, and it took this article by Lewis Gordon to really recognize why they seemed so familiar. I drive past the abandoned, dormant remnants of industry every single day. Its former and current purpose gives me the same feeling of wonder at what it was like when they were in use as I do wandering the planet Tölva. This is not something everyone is going to connect with, but it absolutely increased my appreciation for this game. 

I recognize that it's difficult to recommend a game based on my personal experience with the environment it's portraying, especially when the game parts are mechanically unremarkable. But reviews are not impartial, and I more-or-less played The Signal From Tölva to death because it's got a unique feeling to it and I wanted to experience that as much as I could. A free expansion is in the works, and, for a game that sincerely underwhelmed me at first impressions, I'm very much looking forward to it. I may even read the 48-page lore PDF that the game comes with.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 4/10

Bonuses: +5 evokes feelings of curiosity and wonder over the remains of what may have happened on this alien planet

Penalties: -1 the game parts are very unremarkable

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (well worth your time and attention)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Big Robot Ltd(developer). The Signal From Tölva [Big Robot Ltd, 2017] 

Microreview [video game]: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided by Eidos Montreal

Classy Warfare

 
We've reached the fourth entry in the 17 year old series, and we've seen two games followed by two prequel games. The series famously started with the approach "all conspiracy theories are real", but the most recent entries, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, have skewed away from the most outlandish conspiracies and closer to cyberpunk influences. Still conspiracy is at the center of the theme, and they're beginning to run out of steam with Mankind Divided.

You are once again Adam Jensen, mechanically augmented ex-cop, ex head of security for an augmentation manufacturer, now Interpol agent. You're based in Prague after The Incident, in which most augmented people lost control of themselves and attacked others until their controlling entity was stopped by Jensen. The world is now deeply divided into pro-augmentation and anti-augmentation, with a UN vote removing rights for augmented people coming soon. From this stage, Jensen must investigate the bombing of a subway station that is blamed on pro-aug extremists.

Mankind Divided takes the "any approach to a problem works" philosophy all the way through. If you're sneaky, there's cover to hide behind and venting ducts to crawl through everywhere. Are you shooty? Get your guns out, there's plenty to shoot. Want to hack computers and talk your way out of problems? That works! Lethal, nonlethal, silent, noisy, it all works. An amazing amount of work went into this game to give you the ability to play it as you like.

This is also reflected in Prague itself. By the end, you'll feel like you know the city because every neighborhood and location is well detailed and obviously lived-in. The amount of detail in the levels and thought that went into the gameplay really reflects the love the developers have for the game.

One of the hallmarks of Deus Ex is a globe-hopping plot. That doesn't exist here, but it's not necessarily a detriment. You'll spend almost all of your time in Prague. Again, Prague is so well fleshed-out that it's not Dragon Age 2 situation, but I did absolutely get worn out seeing the same subway train loading screen.

With so much attention given to the gameplay and the city, the conspiracy and the plot as a whole are fairly weak. It tells a very simple story with a lot of the more compelling elements taking place as side missions. It's got one beat (augs vs. non-augs) that it hits over and over. It's not a new beat, as this conflict has been at least touched on by all previous Deus Ex games, and that's a big disappointment. It also suffers from feeling under developed. It's not a short game by any means, but it feels like it ends just as it's picking up. The ending also obviously leads into the next game. This is a real bummer because it seems that the studio is moving on to Marvel games in the near future.

On a not-unrelated note, I would be remiss if I did not mention the presence of expendable microtransactions in this single player game. You can pay real cash for in-game cash or praxis points, the ability development currency. It is utterly unnecessary as I found no need for any more praxis points or cash to support my personal playstyle, but you could make the game a lot easier on yourself with straight cash. And, like currency in the game, once you use it, it's gone. It's not like you're buying yourself a permanently larger chest of cash for every playthrough. You spend your cash and your praxis points and they're gone. It doesn't detract from the game because the game is clearly balanced and designed to be played without external influence, but that just highlights how utterly unnecessary the microtransactions are.

With the future of the series in doubt, this isn't exactly the note that I wanted to see it go out on. Mankind Divided is fun and open-ended in ways that many games can't get close to, but it's hampered by a thin story in a series that used to get high marks for complex storytelling. I don't think Deus Ex is dead by any means, but Mankind Divided makes the case for spending more time on the Marvel games that are sure to bring in piles of money with less effort necessary to impress. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a good game that should have been great.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 truly a "play as you like" game

Penalties: -2 weak main plot for a plot-heavy series, -1 spending a ton of time criss-crossing Prague can get a little tiring

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Eidos Montreal. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [Square Enix, 2016] 

Microreview [video game]: Firewatch by Campo Santo

Controlled Burn

I was going to buy Firewatch no matter what it turned out to be. I've been a listener of the Idle Thumbs podcast since shortly after it started, following Chris Remo from when he was an editor at Shacknews. I love the insightful discussions the Idle Thumbs crew has every week. When the bulk of them joined together to form Campo Santo, I was instantly onboard for whatever game they would make together. "What is Firewatch?" was never a relevant question to me. I'm glad to report that, now that I know what Firewatch is, it's rather good, if a little pedestrian.

You play Firewatch as Henry, a volunteer fire lookout in Wyoming in 1988. You're in Shoshone National Park to look out for fires (obviously), and get away from your life for an indeterminate amount of time. Your boss, Delilah, is in the next tower over, and you communicate with her through your walkie-talkie over the course of the game.

Let's get this out of the way first: Firewatch is a first-person, narrative-driven adventure game. A "walking simulator", if you must, comparable to Gone Home, but set outdoors with more walking to do, but not necessarily more to see. The game is to listen to and talk to Delilah, "solve" a mystery, and get lost in the woods. You have a map, so getting lost is on you, and the mystery is revealed in whole by the time you get far enough in the game, so the bulk of the game rests on Henry and Delilah.

What it does best is that interaction between Henry and Delilah. Over the course of the game, you learn a lot about each other and it's wonderfully voice acted and well written. As Henry, you have a little bit of control over your voice. Many of your responses to Delilah are multiple choice, some with wildly different tones. There's a multiple choice prologue that sort of acts as a mad libs for your own Henry, but your choices don't necessarily change the story in radical ways. Some dialog might be a little snark-heavy, but that's also a choice of the player. Delilah and Henry are great, and Firewatch is non-existent without them

Though it's a short game (3.5 hours by my count), it's difficult to put down once you start. I didn't intend on playing through it all on release day, but as soon as I stopped, I would think about getting right back in to see what the next day brings. The game parts are a little anemic, and the ending abrupt, but the storytelling, character building, and the environments are all fantastic. It's a game that will give you something to think about for at least as long as it takes to play.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Henry and Delilah's complex relationship

Penalties: -1 don't expect a lot of puzzle solving or action

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (well worth your time and attention)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Campo Santo. Firewatch [Panic Inc, 2016] 

Microreview [video game]: Alien: Isolation

(Almost) Perfect organism.

I’m a huge fan of the Alien franchise. Alien is an amazing movie. The rest of them are mostly good for different reasons, but Alien is the true masterpiece. The video games based on the franchise, however, have largely focused on Aliens and beyond. It’s all marines, and pulse rifles, and “game over, man”, and usually predators too. The next most recent Alien franchise game was Aliens: Colonial Marines and it was a huge mess, but it was a straight-up action game. A bug hunt, if you will. It seemed like Sega had wasted a lot of money and time to make a game that couldn’t do any justice to the movies. Now, we have Alien: Isolation. Note the difference in title. Alien rather than Aliens. Isolation, not Marines.

There is but one alien. There are no colonial marines. There are no pulse rifles. This is a game that wants to recreate the suspense and horror of the original Alien. The game casts the player as Amanda Ripley. Amanda is the daughter of Ellen Ripley, the main character from the Alien series. Amanda’s an engineer and she joins a Weyland-Yutani crew to retrieve the flight recorder of the ship her mother disappeared from in Alien, the Nostromo, from the space station Sevastopol.

Sevastopol, from a cutscene

Isolation is a first-person game, but to call it a first-person shooter would be misleading. Sevastopol is inhabited with scared civilians, scavengers, maintenance androids (known as Working Joes), and an alien. Though the game provides a handful of weapons and constructable devices to combat these threats, in most cases, it’s a better idea to run and hide. In sharp contrast to every single other Alien game ever, this alien is invulnerable. It cannot be killed, only chased off or evaded. The androids are not invulnerable, but they are rather hard to kill. You will waste a lot of ammunition if you try to kill all of them. Fortunately, Sevastopol is littered with cabinets, lockers, and closets to hide in. The AI is not particularly hard to get away from, either. The alien has rather good vision and runs faster than Ripley, but the androids seemed particularly unaware of their surroundings. They were more of a threat in numbers. Human combatants seemed to have the awareness of the alien, speed of androids, and guns. In fact, I was rather put off early on in the game by the first encounter with hostile human enemies. I started the game on ‘hard’ difficulty, and as soon as anyone spotted me, I was riddled with bullets and reloading my save game. It happened about 10 times on the very first enemy encounter. I just couldn’t get around them sneakily. After I dialed the difficulty back down to medium, it was less of a problem.

This mixture of threats lead to some interesting situations. If the alien was around, it could be exploited to clear a path. Most often, if I found hostile humans, I’d use a throwable or other tool to make some noise. It would attract the alien, who would summarily clear the room of all hostile humans. Then I could swoop in, pick ammo off of the bodies, and continue on my way. This never seemed to work with androids, though. I guess the alien didn’t care about them. This ambiguity also affected the constructable items. There are a lot, such as noisemakers, smoke grenades, EMP mines, molotovs, and others. There is no tutorial, which I appreciate, but it takes some practice to learn the usefulness of each item. I never found a situation where the flashbang would’ve been more useful than any of the others. This combined with a save point system to create a lot of tension, but also at least some unneeded frustration.

Some really incredible lighting and effects.

You can’t save anywhere, only at emergency terminals. These terminals helpfully beep continuously, so they’re easy to find. However, there is a delay between when you use it, and when the game saves. This means that if the alien is chasing you, you can’t run to the save point to save your progress before it impales you from behind. There were also a couple situations in which the next save point is far enough away that dying before you reach felt like a real loss of progress. A particular section had me navigating a stairwell while stopping to turn on lockdown systems. The stairwell was littered with androids, and the alien was lurking around. Combat makes noise, so engaging the androids meant also engaging the alien, which I was not equipped for at that point. I died more than a few times because I had gotten two of the three lockdown systems turned on, but an android stumbled across me, and the alien ate my face in the ensuing struggle.

So the AI isn’t great, the save points suck sometimes, and the story is thin, but Alien: Isolation is fantastic to play. All of the environments are ripped straight from Alien, and amazingly detailed. Sevastopol looks lived-in and falling apart. It almost decays in front of your eyes. Every work area is filled with tools and containers. One of the best parts of Alien is that the set design is amazing and it’s just as good in Alien: Isolation. Human enemies talk to each other. Working Joes mutter to themselves constantly. The alien hisses and crawls through vents. All of the screens and monitors and computer interfaces look perfectly early eighties. The environment in Isolation is unparalleled.

Spoiler alert: This isn't going to do anything to the alien.

This level of detail is also enhanced by the immersive controls. They’re fairly simple, but the game combines them in interesting ways. Door bars need to be removed, maintenance hatches need to be cut off with a torch, security systems need to be hacked. These are all done with two mouse keys, a use key, and the movement keys. You can look around while you’re performing most of these actions, so you can see if an android is approaching or if the alien is in the distance. Even though it was often too late to escape if you did notice such thing, being able to keep an eye out felt right for this game.

I love the eighties technology aesthetic in this game.

Most first-person games clock in under 10 hours. The bigger budget games can get even shorter, such as Call of Duty games. Alien: Isolation does no such thing. I clocked 15 hours into it. It may have gone on a little longer than it needed to, but I never felt like it was outstaying its welcome. In fact, the more I played, the more I wanted. After getting past the frustrating stairwell bit, I was hooked.

"I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."

The bottom line is that, despite some minor flaws, Alien: Isolation is an amazing game, probably the best Alien franchise game ever.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 amazingly detailed environments, +1 Alien game that’s not a bug hunt, +1 immersive, sensible controls

Penalties: -1 dicey AI, -1 save point frustrations

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (Well worth your time and attention)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Creative Assembly. Alien: Isolation [Sega, 2014]

Bonus DLC Review: I had a chance to play through the “Crew Expendable” and “Last Survivor” DLCs for Alien: Isolation before posting this review. These two DLCs are short (maybe 30 minutes each) but replicate some of the intense parts of Alien, taking place on the Nostromo and playing as members of the crew. It’s cool in the way that walking through a movie set is cool. The ship is lovingly recreated and there are audio logs from the crew scattered about. There’s not a ton of new game to play in here, but any Alien fan should play them.