2019 is upon us, but before I can start looking
ahead to the new year, I’ve got one last
video to put out.
It’s time for another quarterly wrapup!
And this time, I seem to be going through
the video game equivalent of seasonal affective disorder.
From a reality-warping journey through hell
to a dark horror story about self-harm, most
of the games this winter get dark and heavy.
It’s not quite all doom and gloom, however,
and just like the winter season, this wrapup
does have an occasional ray of sunlight that
manages to sneak through the clouds.
But whether they’re cheerful sweet nothings
or heavy, introspective works meant to make
you think, every game on this list is worth
checking out!
If this is your first time here, hi, I’m
Alex, and this is First Five, where I ask
if games are worth your time, not your money.
And today is a wrapup of a bunch of fun little indie games that have come out since the start of October.
The only requirements are that they’re good,
and that you can finish them in five hours or less.
And we’re starting our list with one of
this season’s strongest titles, Gris.
GRIS: Gris is like...if someone tried to turn
an interpretive dance into a video game.
It’s the closest we’ve ever come to getting
another Journey since, well, Journey.
It’s an emotional landscape, a raw mood
painted across a screen, an allegory for the
experience of a single emotion: grief.
It’s beautiful.
But that’s nothing new.
If there’s anything you’ve heard about
this game since it came out a few weeks ago,
it’s that it’s beautiful.
It’s all pretty much anyone can say about
it because it’s 90 percent of Gris’s appeal.
The puzzles and platforming that make up its
gameplay are simple and sparse almost to the
point of being a formality, the game is linear
without much opportunity for exploration,
and there’s not much in the way of a concrete
narrative to attach oneself to, so all that’s
left to lean on is Gris’s visual and audio
aesthetic.
But, surprisingly, that’s enough.
Gris tries to be a video game second, and
an allegory first.
And that allegory of the grieving process
is a well-executed one.
The game is soaked in the iconography of loss
and sorrow and the main character is physically
haunted by the dogged specters of her bereavement.
And from there, the game walks through the
slow, uneven process of recovery, of literally
reclaiming pieces of yourself as you move
on.
That’s the appeal of Gris, and I’ll admit,
it’s probably not for everyone.
But if you’re ready to take that emotional
dive, if you’re willing to look at the game
on its terms, you’ll find something there.
I’ll admit that I’m a little torn on Gris.
On the one hand, I feel like video games as
a medium just aren’t the best fit for this
work of art, that some of its few gamey aspects
are its weakest elements by far, and that
it would have been best suited as an avant
garde animation project that could just hit
you with a nonstop feels train.
But I’m also aware that video games are
probably the only medium where you could have
done this specific project and actually seen
anything remotely approaching commercial viability.
Something like this would have never made
it to the big screen.
It would have dwelled in obscurity, an arthouse
short film with a cult following at best,
maybe a moment of notoriety on social media.
Better perhaps, then, that it settled where it
did, where it has a day in the sun.
But either way, I'm glad that I was able to play this one.
But believe it or not, Gris is actually
not the most melancholy game on this list,
despite being a game literally about being
miserable.
That honor goes to The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.
This is a sidescrolling puzzle horror game
where the puzzles are all solved by putting
the game’s protagonist, J.J., directly into
harm’s way.
It kicks off when J.J. and her friend Emily
hit up a mist-shrouded island off the coast
of Maine, where I’m pretty sure literally
nothing good has ever happened in any story ever.
After their first night, Emily goes missing,
and J.J. has to risk life and literal limb
to chase after her.
Along the way, J.J. has also developed the
miraculous ability to survive no matter how
badly maimed she gets.
And often, she’ll have to purposely hurt
herself to progress, sometimes using severed
body parts as weights and sometimes using
her own body as a torch to burn away vines
blocking her path.
From having to listen to J.J. screaming as
she’s lit on fire to the gross sounds and
movements when she’s walking around with
half the bones in her body broken, only to
stumble and fall over with a wet splat, there
are so many little details in this game that
make it all feel rather disturbingly realistic
and sometimes like it kind of borders uncomfortably
on torture porn.
Luckily, there’s a point to this beyond
creatively exploring the most excrutiating
ways to maim a young woman.
The game about literally tearing yourself
apart to achieve an objective unsurprisingly
makes for fertile ground to plant a message
about self-harm, but The Missing’s plot
is also inextricably tied to LGBTQ topics
that would technically count as a spoiler,
but are about as obvious as that one train
car you get run over by midway into the game.
Overall, J.J.’s emotional state is...about
as battered as her physical one, and as with
a lot of great horror, the physical terrors
on-screen are all symbolic and tangled up
in J.J.’s own personal traumas.
Whatever hand-wringing I might do over the
game’s blood and severed limbs, it is true
that The Missing makes something meaningful
out of it all and creates a unique, interesting
puzzle game in the process.
Whew.
So after those two games, I think we’re
in desperate need of a palette cleanser.
Which means it’s time for something completely
different!
It’s time to talk about The Haunted Island,
a Frog Detective Game.
Whereas the last two games were ultra-heavy,
melancholy explorations of the miserable side
of the human condition, The Haunted Island
is an hour-long comedy about, well, a frog
detective investigating a potentially haunted
island.
The setup is straightforward: someone thinks
their island has been haunted by ghosts and
called in a team of scientists to investigate,
but they’re stumped, which means the next
natural candidate for getting to the bottom
of things is an old-fashioned detective!
It’s all wrapped up as a detective game,
but in reality, this is all an elaborate excuse
to have a chuckle talking to some of the most
mind-bogglingly incompetent people in existence.
The Haunted Island’s comedy is the driest
variety of British humor possible, with the
detective going about and having polite, sincere
little conversations with the island’s batshit denizens.
No statement or situation in this game is
too absurd to not be delivered with a straight
face, and the frog detective carries the entire
game’s humor by playing the most affable
straight man in existence, just merrily going
along with whatever absurd nonsense that comes
his way like it’s another Tuesday at the
office.
Mechanically, there’s not much here: a few simple dialogue trees and adventure game bartering puzzles.
This game rides or dies on its jokes and its
upbeat tone.
But if dry humor is your thing or you just
want to slip into a lighthearted little adventure
for an hour, Haunted Island’s got you covered.
On the opposite side of the
spectrum from Haunted Island, we have a game
so mechanically focused that almost its entire
story is wrapped up in a wordless intro cutscene.
Next on our list is Nowhere Patrol.
Hey look!
I found a boss rush game!
Nowhere Patrol probably isn’t my favorite
in the genre, but it’s still a solid entry.
The game pits you against a castle of giant,
sentient household objects in a pure, no frills
boss rush.
And those bosses are really well designed.
They’re a bit more methodical than bosses
in other games, always going through the same
attacks in the same order and encouraging
you to memorize the fight like an MMO raid
boss.
But that doesn’t mean they’re pushovers!
Fights can often drag on through four, five,
sometimes even six phases, each with their
own dance of attack patterns to memorize,
and because of how quickly damage recovery
wears off, you can find yourself losing half
your health from a single misstep.
I don’t consider myself to be much of a
slouch when it comes to these games, but I
ended up bashing my head against this guy
for two hours until I finally broke through.
Which brings me to my sole complaint with
Nowhere Patrol: there is no saving.
You either make it through the entire game
in one sitting, or you run out of time and
try again.
I personally cheated and just left the game
running and paused for, like, a day, but if
you only have an hour or two to sit down and
play, I can imagine it’ll be extremely frustrating
to bash your way through half the bosses,
only to just have to call it quits and go
back through the whole game again next time.
And reaching the end of the game is only the
beginning.
While your first run or two are obviously
going to be more about surviving to see the
credits, Nowhere Patrol asks players to come
back again and again and perfect their abilities.
If you manage to beat a boss without taking
a single hit, you’ll be rewarded with a
final, extra-powerful phase where the boss
activates their final form and stops pulling
punches.
The few times I’ve managed to get a boss
to this point, I’ve gotten absolutely demolished,
so there’s definitely a high skill ceiling
to pursue on this one, whether you pursue
it for a few hours to see the credits or come
back again and again.
But speaking of coming back, there’s
one game that came out this month that feels
like it’s come back straight out of the
‘90s in every way, from its look to its execution.
I’m talking about Dusk.
If you’ve ever enjoyed a ‘90s shooter,
you’ll probably like Dusk.
Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen, Quake...Dusk is
a love letter to the olden ways of shooting
things before scientists developed the chest-high
wall and reinvented the way man waged video
games forever.
Doom is probably one of the most foundational
games of my childhood, so you can sure as
hell bet I’d be on board for this one.
But for those not immediately sold by the
thought of reliving the ‘90s, let me break
this game down.
Dusk checks all the boxes a ‘90s shooter
would: blistering run speed, breakneck combat,
an unrealistic armful of weapons that all
have their situational strengths and weaknesses,
that old, chunky pixel art, regular inclusions
of old bosses as new rank and file mobs, and
encounter design that constantly mixes up
different packs of enemies with its level
design to put the player in new, interesting
situations with the same familiar obstacles.
But more importantly, Dusk has a complete
mastery of tone and pacing.
It knows exactly how to make you feel vulnerable
and on edge in levels like the Cutty Mine,
where you’re forced to move back and forth
through a winding maze of dark, tight corridors
filled with invisible enemies and monster
rooms that open behind you, and it knows exactly
how to create a pitch-perfect moment of destructive
catharsis, like this one moment where after four hours
of fighting tooth and nail against the forces
of evil, you’re handed a full pack of ammo
and told to just go ham and wreck everything.
Dusk shifts tone almost at will, jumping from
full-on action to light, atmospheric horror
to surreal segments where the world slowly
starts breaking down around you, and it executes
all of these moods, as well as the transitions
between them, with a deft hand.
Just recreating the shooters of old and giving
me a treadmill to consume new content on probably
would have been enough to make me content,
but this willingness to play with its tone
is what puts Dusk over the top and keeps it
feeling fresh and different from the games
it’s inspired by.
That’s it for this quarter’s wrapup of
games, but there are two more honorable mentions
before I go.
This was...a fantastic quarter for video games,
especially this past month’s deluge of indie releases.
There were so many that even with a wrapup
dedicated to playing through all the games
I missed, there are still a few that slipped through my fingers that I desperately wanted to be on this list.
The first is Gal Metal, a whacky rhythm game
for the Switch where you play as the drummer
for a Japanese all-female metal band fighting
off an alien invasion.
It sounds...incredibly weird, incredibly Japanese,
and incredibly fun.
The other is a visual novel that seems to
have passed by unnoticed called Distress:
A Choice-Driven Sci-Fi Adventure.
Distress features over 80 endings to its branching
narrative, and while I haven’t gotten a
chance to start playing it, I’m eager to
see how much each of those endings diverge
from each other.
So if either of those two sound equally exciting
to you guys, maybe check them out and report
back with how they are!
And be sure to let me know in the comments
about any other short, awesome games that
have come out recently and I’ve missed!
The more cool game recommendations, the better.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for more
recent short titles, I’ve got a whole long
backlog of reviews you can check out.
Seriously, I do this all year-round, so you
can find a ton of great, short games that
will absolutely blow your mind.
And if you liked this video, hey, hit that
subscribe button.
Thanks for watching this far, and I’ll see
you all next week.
