I am not particularly good at video games. This is hardly a revelation or a surprise. I wasn’t very good at them in the 8 and 16 bit era, and while they’re, in a lot of ways, more forgiving now, I’m out of practice and learning new controls and mechanics. Given that, it’s perhaps not a surprise that I’ve already had to restart a couple of games, after realising that I’ve been missing a lot of things.
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| Scarlet Spider in Spider-Man PS4 |
The city of New York is wide open to you in Spider-Man PS4, at least it is if you take the time to open it up. That’s where I’d gone wrong in my initial start of the game. I was completing missions but also marching through the story. I hadn’t taken the time to take down Kingpin’s bases, open up the towers that grant access to the city, or deal with that many low-level crimes. Restarting the game, I spent time on these things. I got further in my percentage completion while only about half as far into the story, I opened up the entire map, and I raised my level further than I had in my initial start. With more achievement points, I crafted extra gadgets and tried out the Scarlet Spider suit. I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but with the Scarlet Spider suit I found the character a little harder to control; a bit more erratic, so I have, for now, gone back to the updated suit that Dr. Octavius builds early on.
Control is still my biggest enemy in Spider-Man. To a certain degree, I’ve got the fighting down at this point. It’s probably still not pretty, but I can beat most of the larger fights on the first or second go. Web swinging is still a bit more challenging. I’ve got the rhythm of it while swinging leisurely through the city, but chase missions are still a problem, and I have to figure that out before I get back to Shocker. On the whole, I’m still having an immense amount of fun with Spider-Man, and the thrill of the feeling of really inhabiting the character hasn’t gone away.
I also restarted Persona 5 Royal. After losing a fight pretty early on in Kamoshida’s Palace, I realised that, as with Spider-Man, I hadn’t done the right prep. I had also probably made my first foray into the palace too late in the game’s somewhat unforgiving timeline. There is a LOT to do, you have to study, do your part time job, investigate things and build relationships with characters around you, all while the timeline marches forwards, sometimes in big increments, while you’re going through the school day. Inside the Palace, there are tactics to figure out and Personas to find, use and combine, and working through the various options is a challenge. Do I spend my money on medicine (and therefore build up my relationship with the doctor), or weapons (servicing the relationship with the shopkeeper). Maybe I should abandon that and spend more time reading, or hanging out with my friends. Let’s just say I’ve looked at a few strategy guides for this one. The problem with restarting is that, great as P5R clearly is, it takes a long time to get going. The many cutscenes are well rendered and acted, but going through them a second time in as many weeks isn’t ideal, and neither is an 80/20 split of cutscenes vs play for the first few hours.
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| Kara in Detroit: Become Human |
In fresh starts, the most notable is my newest pickup: Detroit: Become Human. After a couple of days, and maybe 3 hours play, on the Casual difficulty setting (Experienced felt, frankly, like a lie) it’s in some ways the least game-like of the things I’ve played. Interaction feels more like triggering the next thing most of the time, and yet it’s done something no other game has ever done. Detroit is a multi-stranded narrative in which you play one of three different characters, scene by scene. Connor, Kara and Markus are all androids. Connor is a cop of some sort, investigating deviant androids who rebel against their owners, sometimes violently. Markus and Kara are domestic models who each end up breaking their programs, Markus when his owner’s son shows up and threatens his father for money and Kara when her owner attacks his young daughter, Alice, who Kara is essentially the sole carer for. With Kara and Alice on the run, Connor and his human partner (an excellent performance from Clancy Brown) are sent to look for them. The object of this section, while playing as Connor, is to find Kara and Alice as they hide. I didn’t want to find them. I’d got wrapped up in their stories, and come to care about both characters, and I didn’t want Connor to catch them.
The astonishing graphics draw you in, with exceptional facial animation that gives the characters real emotion, and the acting is very strong all round. I already know I’m going to play Detroit several more times after I finish this run, and that’s because of its system of choices, allowing you to take many different paths with both dialogue and action (should Kara shoplift, or hold up a convenience store?). At the end of each section the locked-off paths are displayed, along with the choices I made; tantalising hints of other ways the story could have gone, and the chance to correct choices I think I got wrong on a subsequent run. It’s a genuinely fascinating and involving way to tell a story. Is it strictly a ‘game’ on casual setting? Perhaps not, but as a proof of concept for an interactive movie, I think my reaction to having to search for Kara and Alice, and my relief at being able to choose for Connor to have to allow them to escape, speaks for itself.
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