Which is a mouthful of a title, but bear with me.

I bought this game on release out of a quite naturally-placed loyalty to Penny Arcade. It’s my opinion, and I can say this with absolute sincerity, that PA makes some of the most intelligent, insightful commentary on games right now, more so than many academics that I read. Plus, they can say “shitballs” while they’re doing it. Good times all around.

That said, PAA:OtRSPoD:Ep1* was one of the casualties of last year’s academic crunch, and I didn’t get around to it until this past weekend. Which is a blessing, really, since I can now move directly into Episode 2. I thoroughly enjoyed this game – it’s not perfect, and every now and then it’s a bit glitchy, but it’s rare that a game actually makes me laugh. Challenge is easy, adrenaline even easier. Honest, dialogue-centric fun? It’s been a long time since I’ve been anxious to see a cut scene or followed every dialogue path without thinking, “Hell, this better be worth it.” It’s been an even longer time since a punchline in a game has made me laugh. For the humor alone, it’s worth it.

And it’s not simple humor, some to think of it. There’s a great deal of literary allusion, not to titles or characters but to worlds, themes, and styles. Much of this comes from the overblown “dark apathy” of H.P.Lovecraft, the grand, stylized epics of Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard, or the gleeful anachronisms of steam-punk – too often referenced without irony by thousands of hack-imitators, imitated in turn by too many game writers. Yes, you can fight the great evil that threatens us all – but do it in a world with animated trashcans, a hobo king that fights with a sack full of other hobos, the Silent Pope of the mimes, urinologists, singing garbage men, exploding clowns, devious barber shop quartets, a boardwalk full of highly-inappropriate carnival games, and that infamous juicing robot, the FF-2000. Much like Penny Arcade itself, this is style writ large. Much of the world is described in Tycho’s voice: self-aware, overwrought, desperately serious, an homage and a satire on all those pulp- or pop-culture artifacts that we love in spite of ourselves, not to mention a perfect foil for the lowbrow, puerile, aggressive, and often surprisingly innocent Gabe. It’s a clever stylistic pairing, and one that hits the perfect tone for fans of the comic.

I’ll admit too that I’m a sucker for the traditional, turn-based RPG combat. Give me a line of my guys, a line of bad guys, and some semblance of weapon-upgrading or attack strategy and I’m happy -  the setting is hardwired in from my youthful obsession with the canon of golden-age RPGs. With the current crop (I’m looking at you, Eternal Sonata), the problem is always story. As a player and a narratologist, I play to find out what happens next, and the banal, hopelessly juvenile offerings of this generation of consoles has me turning to other genres for my narrative fix – even to the dreaded Console First Person Shooter, one of my least favorites. And yet Bioshock and Dead Space are in my current XBOX 360 rotation**. I miss deep, intelligent, thoughtful stories in RPGs; I’ve grown out of many of the games I used to play, and the ones that still seem worthwhile are harder to play because I expect more from both game design and technology than we had in the mid-nineties. Penny-Arcade Adventures is by no means deep or thoughtful in the traditional sense, but it is intelligent. It is absolutely absurd, and revels in its absurdity. And it’s strikingly well-crafted as well, from a design standpoint – small technical glitches aside. With writing this good, I’m not going to quibble about a few path-finding issues.

I’ll also say that there’s a certain attraction for me in short, 3-5 hour games, things that can be finished in a weekend or an afternoon. Fallout 3 has been on my list of games I’m playing for a long time now, and I’m nowhere close to finishing it. In fact, I’ll often turn to something else, knowing that I only have an hour or two in which to play, and not wanting to get so deep into something that it’s difficult to turn off. I’m also struggling with playing a long experience in such short chunks, like reading half a chapter at a time. I look forward to PAA: Episode 2 because I know I can start and finish it this coming Saturday, if I so choose, and that the time will be well-spent. I’m certainly of the generation that likes both guarantees and (relatively) instant-gratification – don’t get me started on MMO reward systems – but it’s a good thing in this case.

One last thing: the classic adventure game, which Penny Arcade Adventures certainly draws from, can be funny but runs the risk of also being frustratingly arbitrary, particularly when it comes to puzzles or “riddles”. The team at Hothead Games has walked a very fine line here: the game is easy to follow, not difficult to finish but still engaging, and hilarious in the vein of the best Penny-Arcade comics – but never random. Everything ties togther in a way that makes contextual sense, and this isn’t an easy world to make sense of. Funny, absurdist, and logical. Well done, gentlemen.

In other words – man, fuck these giant evil robots. *cracks knuckles* Let’s go make some friends.

*Doesn’t that look great as an acronym?

**Why I didn’t just buy these on PC? Call it a dependence on GameStop and their wonderful 3 for 2 sales. Hopefully my shiny new Steam account will help with that.

Too much traveling this past week, and not enough computer time… This slick-looking, slickly-written little detective fiction isn’t a bad game to bring on a plane trip, in theory, but I’ll admit I had some trouble with it.

I have a love-hate relationship with both classic adventure games and interactive fiction. I love the worlds, the ideas, and the general premise of “narrative first”, and I nearly always detest the execution. With Hotel Dusk: Room 215, I’m less than an hour in and I just can’t bring myself to play anymore.

It shouldn’t take this long to get to the meat of a game. There’s the germ of a good idea here: a great set-up, an engaging lead character, and there’s probably a nice, neat solution to the mystery at hand. But Hotel Dusk is hamstrung by its excruciatingly slow pacing. There’s a set-up, yes, but no hook. Characters appear at random to block my way “forward” (whatever “forward” means here) until I’ve asked them the requisite number of questions about themselves, or solved an arbitrary, gamey-game puzzle. And there are simply too many words. I’m watching slow, text-driven conversations in which characters use seventeen lines of dialogue to say what could be said in three or four – and while each line is well-written, the conversations aren’t engaging enough for me to slog through them. I’m used to reading fast, immersing myself in the words of a story. Between the speed of the text and the nagging interactions, I’m not even having fun, much less paying attention.

There’s the hint of a great art style here – I love the way that chararacters are penciled in against sketchy backgrounds, although I’d lose the faux-3D hotel set – and the hint of a decent thriller or mystery. But right now, I don’t have enough faith in either the narrative or the writers to think the eventual payoff is worth my time. Maybe this should have been a novel instead?

A good try, but I got what I wanted from the Gamefaqs forum – simply the story, without the gimmicks of the game. And I switched over to Super Princess Peach for the duration of the flight home, which has an unhealthy amount of pink and a talking umbrella. Honestly, I wanted either something to read or something to do, not the weaker parts of both in one package.

We can do so much better than this.

I’ll freely admit that I’m an Agatha Christie junkie. I’ve read every mystery the woman wrote, and as many of her short stories and plays as I could find; and Hercule Poirot is not only my favorite fictional detective (with apologies to Sherlock and Adam Dalgliesh), but one of my all-time favorite characters. Christie novels are like comfort food for me; so I was somewhat anxious about this particular translation.

Mystery games as a genre are difficult for designers because they expect so much from their players – it’s not about timing or precision, but about intelligence of a very specific nature. You can’t depend on a player to be Sherlock Holmes without some serious guidance; you can’t expect that players will automatically make the links that Poirot or Dalgliesh would make, given the same set of clues and events. And as tempting as it is to add multiple possible endings, that seems to me to dilute the nature of mystery’s best impossible problems. I can tell you right now how Christie’s Ten Little Indians ends: who did it, how, why, and the reasons and methods by which all ten suspects die. For some author to come in and add not only multiple endings, including a love interest for the new eleventh guest, but a “brand new killer!” (as the box advertises) seems to be the most obvious way to approach the problem, and the least fruitful in the end. As a retelling of Ten Little Indians, this is a disappointment – so much of Christie’s novel is watered down, wasted, or simply lost, and so little is actually gained!

Additionally, the simplicity of the actions I’m given to work with are downright discouraging. I understand that the classic adventure game has certain gameplay staples, but this particular attempt is as story-driven as they come, and I’m constantly frustrated by searching for the arbitrary actions that will drag the story along. For example, I know Marston dies first, by drinking poisoned whiskey right after the initial accusations, but it took me ten minutes to figure out that I had to pick up a gramophone record before that event would occur. Of course, as soon as we add any truly innovative piece to the adventure game format, we classify it as something else (take Indigo Prophecy, for example), but that doesn’t change my sense that I’ve been playing through a wasted opportunity here.

The lack of decent animation, or even decent character models, means that those moments that are the most powerful or suspenseful in the book come across as bland or even silly here – how am I to know what Blore is thinking when his face and body language are completely inexpressive? In this world, an “angry” character shakes a little and the corners of the mouth turn down; that is simply not enough. Add to that the out-of-time Patrick Narracott, who shows up in jeans and a leather jacket in an era when everyone else is still dressing for dinner – not to mention that our uptight, proper governess Vera Claythorne wanders around in a revealing purple evening gown, looking like a flat cross between the Little Mermaid and Jessica Rabbit. Add to that the mostly atrocious, often lengthy expository dialogue. Without the novel’s ability to present each character’s point of view as needed, our Mr. Narracott suddenly and unbelievably becomes everyone’s personal confidant. The house and island themselves are serviceably built, but without character, and I often felt as if I was wandering through a user-created area in the Sims, not a gamespace meant to inspire paranoia in both the characters and the players.

There are a hundred little nitpicks I could focus on, from the massive oversights in terms of character and design to the small mechanical frustrations, like uninterruptable dialogue or the camera angles in individual shots. But the truth is, this game isn’t meant for me. It’s meant for non-gamers, who might not know what they’re missing, and for fans of mystery novels who will buy it on name recognition alone. And frankly, I don’t think we’ve yet found a structure for mystery games that truly works. I’ve played any number of games with a mystery at the core, but I’ve never been the one to actually solve it; my task as a player is to survive, to follow the story, to complete the requisite number of missions or puzzles, and then to watch the main character uncover the truth for my benefit. For games that are pure mysteries, like this one, I feel like I’ve been promised Poirot and am still stuck playing Hastings, all the time being told that my actions have both merit and meaning when they’re really only triggers to push me through a mostly-set plot. Other genres hide their rails far better than this; of course my actions don’t have true meaning in this fictional space, but I still need to feel like they do.

I won’t tell you who the new killer is, but I’ll say that I was sorely disappointed, and unmollified by the fact that the designers include the original ending as a bonus. Christie’s most infamously frustrating puzzler deserves better than this, as does the genre. I suppose I’ll be just as frustrated when someone releases “Romeo and Juliet the Game – now with an all-new happy ending!”