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Last week’s review was of a techno-thriller video game tie-in novel. This week’s review is of a techno-thriller video game tie-in novel. By thunder, I hope I’m not turning into one of those people who only reads one type of book. Hopefully, this review will prove interesting enough to justify it.

I should tell you up front: this is going to be long. Brace yourselves accordingly. I’m going Full Berthold on this one.

First, we need a bit of grounding in the universe of Metal Gear, which I’m guessing most of my readers have never heard of, and it may strike the uninitiated as a bit weird. So let me provide some background: as the “2” in the title suggests, this story is a sequel. The original Metal Gear Solid is about a commando named Solid Snake, who infiltrates a military installation in Alaska called Shadow Moses Island, where an elite terrorist unit has taken hostages and captured a huge walking battle tank equipped with nuclear missiles called “Metal Gear Rex.”

Well, long story short, Solid Snake ultimately defeats the terrorists, led by his cloned twin brother Liquid Snake, and destroys Metal Gear Rex. This summary doesn’t even begin to do the story justice, but a proper synopsis would take forever, and it’s not even what we’re discussing today. By the way, here’s your warning that I’m going to spoil MGS 2 in this review. The game came out in 2001, so I feel comfortable discussing every aspect of the plot.

Sons of Liberty begins with Solid Snake infiltrating a huge tanker on the Hudson River, in search of a new Metal Gear prototype. He’s assisted by Hal “Otacon” Emmerich, a scientist who worked on the original Metal Gear, whom Snake rescued during the events of MGS 1.

In short order, the tanker is seized by Russian commandoes, working with Revolver Ocelot, the lone terrorist to survive Shadow Moses. In what has become a hallmark of this series, complicated betrayals occur in rapid succession, and the tanker is sunk to the bottom of the river, seemingly with Snake aboard.

Two years later, a huge cleanup facility called “The Big Shell” has been created on the site to contain the environmental disaster. And–are you sensing a pattern here?–it’s been captured by a terrorist unit called “Dead Cell,” which has taken hostages, including the President of the United States, and is threatening to detonate a nuclear device. A new operative from Snake’s unit FOXHOUND, codenamed “Raiden,” is sent to defeat the terrorists and rescue the president.

I remember when this game came out, even though I didn’t play it, that this was a huge controversy. Fans were outraged that they were playing as the androgynous, awkward rookie Raiden instead of the grizzled, tough, high-testosterone action hero Solid Snake. Even reading the story in novel form, it’s still jarring to go from the stoic confidence of Snake to the amateurish bravado of Raiden. (By the way, the pronunciation of “Raiden” rhymes with the name of the 46th President of the United States, and not with “maiden” as I initially thought.)

Raiden is guided on his mission through communications with his commanding officer, a Colonel, and, bizarrely, Raiden’s girlfriend Rose, who insists on calling him “Jack.” This is also in keeping with MGS 1, where Snake was guided by a number of officers and intelligence analysts. But whereas they formed a coherent unit, the dynamic with Raiden, the Colonel, and Rose just feels… odd.

Speaking of odd things, the Dead Cell terrorists make the villains from the 1960s Batman series seem subtle and understated. They include a woman named Fortune, who is apparently immortal and only wishes to die, an obese explosives expert called… wait for it… “Fatman,” who wants to become notorious as the maddest bomber in history, and finally, an actual vampire.

While things are initially presented as realistic, and as in a Tom Clancy novel, great care is taken to ensure that the weapons and other military technologies feel authentic, the whole Big Shell is teeming with the surreal and the bizarre. It doesn’t take long for Raiden to start feeling like he’s living in a waking nightmare.

Adding to the strangeness, Snake and Otacon also show up to help him, despite the fact that Raiden has been told Snake is either (a) dead or (b) the leader of the terrorist group. This is a running theme in the story: everyone is lying all the time. Raiden is constantly being deceived by every person he talks to. Poor guy; at some point you have to feel sorry for him.

Remember when I said the universe of Metal Gear may strike you as weird? Guess what, ladies and gents: I haven’t gotten to the weird part yet!

Raiden eventually finds the President, who explains that the Big Shell is camouflage for a new Metal Gear, codenamed Arsenal Gear, being built under the water. POTUS had been hoping to seize control of Arsenal for himself, to use it as leverage against a group known as [ominous music plays] “The Patriots.”

Raiden asks who the Patriots are, and the President explains:

“The power controlling this country… Politics, the military, the economy – they control it all. They even choose who becomes President…

The Space Defense, income tax reduction and the National Missile Defense (NMD) programs -– every policy that’s been credited to me was actually done according to their instructions.”

“Wait a second. Space Defense was initiated by Congress!”

“That’s what the Patriots want the country to believe… It’s all a show. ‘Democracy’ is just a filler for textbooks!”

The President then outlines the Patriots’ intentions for Arsenal Gear:

“Arsenal Gear is more than just a military tool. It is a means to preserve the world as it is… The Arsenal plans include a system to digitally manage the flow of information, making it possible to shape the ‘truth’ for their own purposes. In short, the Arsenal system is the key to their supremacy.” 

“The key?” 

“Yes, the ‘GW’ system. Short for George Washington. GW is the Patriots’ trump card… once operational, it will be a completely new form of power for the Patriots to wield.” 

The President explains he was going to bargain with the Patriots, but he was overruled by his predecessor, who is now the leader of the terrorists and is also yet another clone of the Snake brothers: this one named Solidus Snake, and he intends to seize Arsenal for himself and defeat the Patriots.

The President tells Raiden to find Emma Emmerich, Otacon’s sister, who is somewhere in the Big Shell, and who has created a computer virus that can destroy the GW system. Then he gets killed by Revolver Ocelot, leaving Raiden more befuddled than before.

Anyway, Raiden works with Solid Snake (not Solidus, who is seemingly the bad guy, remember) and eventually they find Emma and upload the virus. Unfortunately, at that point Raiden gets abandoned by Snake and a mysterious cyborg ninja, and captured by the terrorists.

I feel like I need to pause to catch my breath. I bet you do, too. You know, there’s an old webcomic that graphically shows the narrative structure of famous movies. You can see it here. Some of these are pretty involved, but can you even imagine what a graph like this for Metal Gear would look like? I’m not sure two dimensions is sufficient to render it. And let me be clear, I’m giving you just the bare-bones outline here. MGS is famous for deep dives into the backstories of even secondary characters. There are a couple in this one, Peter Stillman and Olga Gurlukovich, whom I haven’t even discussed but who are actually some of the most interesting people in the story.

By the way, this is where I should probably mention that, although the novel I’m reviewing here is by Raymond Benson, who is a respected author of spy thrillers, including some James Bond books, the fact is he largely just transcribed the dialogue and added some minimal description. When it comes to the labyrinthine plot of this thing, “one man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame,” and Hideo Kojima is his name.

Kojima is, in my opinion, the ideal person to write techno-thrillers. He’s clearly obsessed with American action movies, references to which abound throughout his games, but at the same time he brings a very different perspective to the topic of American military technology, being as how he’s Japanese.

All right, have you got your second wind? Good, because it’s time to delve into the last act of Metal Gear Solid 2, and it is not merely a doozy, but, if I may be so bold, a real humdinger. The disturbing personal revelations and insane plot twists come thick and fast at this point.

Raiden is freed from a torture chamber that mimics a facility where Solid Snake was captured in MGS 1. Then he learns that the entire operation has been designed by the Patriots to replicate the Shadow Moses incident, in order to demonstrate that with proper psychological conditioning, anyone can be molded into a tough-as-nails super-soldier like Solid Snake. Not only that, but it is also revealed that Raiden was once a child soldier in an army under Solidus Snake’s command, although he repressed the memories.

(Say what you want about Solidus, but the guy has quite a CV: from fighting a civil war in Liberia to leading a terrorist organization, with a brief stint as U.S. President in between.)

Finally, Raiden discovers that the Colonel and Rose, with whom he’s been communicating throughout the mission, are actually merely AI constructs, generated from his own memories and expectations via the GW system. And since the system is now infected with a computer virus, the AI is beginning to talk nonsense to him, as in this (in)famous message from the Colonel:

I hear it’s amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hara-Kiri Rock. I need scissors! 61!

Has anybody gotten ChatGPT to say this yet?

But, there’s no time for Raiden to grapple with all this now, because Solidus Snake and Ocelot are busy betraying each other while raising the Arsenal Gear from beneath the water and crashing it into downtown Manhattan. The book diverges a little from the game here: there’s no animation of the huge fortress crashing into the skyline in-game, because it was cut at the last minute. Remember, this came out in late 2001, so I bet you can guess why. But Benson does give a little description of the horror and devastation.

Of course, Raiden and Solidus are both still alive and standing in the wreckage. Solidus explains that he has done all this to try and liberate humanity from the digital censorship regime the Patriots are about to impose. And then Raiden gets another call from the Colonel and Rose.

This is the moment that made me decide I had to review this book. Not for nothing has this scene been called by some “the most profound moment in gaming history.” And for this reason, I’m going to ask that you watch the clip as it appears in the game. I don’t consider this “cheating,” because all this dialogue appears verbatim in the book, but I do feel the voice acting and sound effects add something here. This is quite simply required viewing. I promise, it’s worth thirteen minutes of your time:

In 2001, most of the buzz around MGS 2 was the outrage about Raiden replacing Snake. And if it wasn’t that, it was that the story was too damned strange and bizarre. I mean, I glossed over some of the weirder stuff, like a guy who is possessed by a dead man because he had an arm transplant from him, or the really creepy incestuous backstory involving Otacon and Emma. And did I mention the vampire also does flamenco dancing?

And so this moment at the climax, about AI controlling the flow of digital information to manipulate human thought, just seemed like yet more incomprehensible techno-babble in 2001.

But as the years have turned into decades and life has gone on in these United States, people have started to reevaluate this scene. Some of these lines, as they say, “hit different” now:

“Trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness… all this junk data, preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.”

And even more pointedly:

“The untested truths, spun by different interests, continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated communities, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever truth suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.”

To say nothing of the suggestion of inhuman intelligences gradually gaining control of society. Of all the fascinating lines in this dialogue, the one that intrigues me most is probably the one at the beginning:

“To begin with, we’re not what you’d call ‘human.’ Over the past two hundred years, a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House. It’s not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago.” 

Okay, hold up. In-universe, the events of Metal Gear Solid 2 were supposed to take place in 2009. Two hundred years before that puts us in the Madison administration. I don’t think even Kojima is prepared to claim there were AI supercomputers then, so what does this line mean?

Well, if you think about it, a government is actually a bit like an artificial intelligence. It is a series of processes, aimed at administering a population. Theoretically speaking, government as a process could be carried on with no independent thought at all, merely the “correct” application of laws and rules.

But when you put it that way, doesn’t it all sound rather inhuman? Well, there’s a reason Thomas Hobbes named his famous book on government after a legendary sea monster. Even before the computer age, there was a recognition that “the State” was something different than just a bunch of folks getting together to talk.

“The Colonel” then elaborates:

“We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we.”

The Metal Gear wiki helpfully tells us that:

“This description was similar to the Japanese philosophical concept of kokutai or civic soul, which is derived from the mytho-political past of Japan, in which the Japanese emperor is held to be a direct genetic descendant of the sun goddess Amaretsu. This living presence of the soul of a nation has no precise analogue in Western culture, the closest match in American political language being ‘patriotic spirit’.”

Perhaps. But I think we’re all familiar with the idea of a national soul, a figure embodying the fabric of the country. What are Uncle Sam or John Bull, if not the soul of their respective nations? Does it matter that these characters don’t actually exist? In a way, if everyone believes in them, or rather what they represent, don’t they kind of exist? Then again, isn’t that pretty much what O’Brien tells Winston regarding Big Brother at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four? Hm.

See, there is certainly a lot to take in here. I mean to say, game dialogue came a long way since “our princess is in another castle,” what?

Inevitably, it all leads to a final fight with Solidus, which Raiden wins, and then Solid Snake gives a schmaltzy speech about how you are what you choose to be, your decisions make you who you are, and so on. I admit, everything after the last chat with the Colonel seems perfunctory to me.

Then again, how could it be otherwise? There are whole books’ worth of ideas in that scene. (If you want to read one, I recommend The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore. And if you want a deep dive into Metal Gear Solid 2, I recommend this video.)

As a final note, I want to say I’m glad they did this novelization, because the story on its own is interesting enough to be worthwhile for non-gamers. In fact, I’d argue it’s a better story than it is a game. I actually own a copy of the special edition, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, which I got for ninety-nine cents at a used game store that has since been demolished. I’ve never been able to make it very far in the game.

Well, that’s that. If you want a mind-bending techno-thriller, see if you can get yourself a copy of this. If it all just made your head hurt, well, I can understand that, too. In any case…“sayonara, kid! Have a nice day.”

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Murder on Eridanos starts off with a bang. Aetherwave serial star Halcyon Helen is murdered at the Grand Colonial Hotel, just before she was due to unveil Rizzo’s new drink, Spectrum Brown. Naturally, the player character is hired to investigate the murder.

The gameplay is familiar to anyone who has played vanilla Outer Worlds, although there is the wonderful addition of the Discrepancy Amplifier–an AI magnifying glass that picks up on unusual items, footprints etc. to aid the player in finding clues.

Also, one of my few gripes about the first DLC, Peril on Gorgon, has been addressed here: the new weapons are better and more distinctive. The player even gets a chance to wield Helen’s iconic pistol, the Needler, which I’d been dying to do since seeing it in this in-game poster:

Speaking of Halycon Helen, she’s a great character, and I have to admit I was a little disappointed that the game starts with her being killed off, before we even have a chance to meet her. No spoilers, but in the end it made sense.

Ah, well, okay–I am going to give a little bit of a spoiler. It’s not giving everything away, but you might want to skip it if you like to be surprised. My only criticism of this DLC is that its formula is about the same as Peril on Gorgon‘s: player is hired to investigate something, then the party which hired the player is revealed to have hidden ulterior motives.

However, the overall story was different enough that it worked. I liked Murder on Eridanos much better than Peril on Gorgon. (And to be clear, I liked Peril on Gorgon a lot!) This is saying something, because there are few faster ways to turn me off a work of fiction than by having it start off with a woman being murdered. It’s such an old trope, but Obsidian has built up enough goodwill over the years that I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.

Murder on Eridanos does what all DLC should do: reinforces the overarching theme of the main game. In keeping with the rest of The Outer Worlds, it centers around a plot by a corporation to sell harmful products disguised with saccharine marketing. The corporate propaganda art, always an amusing element of the game, reaches new heights in Murder on Eridanos.

Misleading advertising is one of the core themes of Outer Worlds, right down to the loading screens that report the players’ actions from the perspective of the corporations. The whole game is a satire on the dehumanizing effect large organizations have on the individuals they control.

Halcyon Helen is a perfect example of this–as more than one character observes, she is not a person, but a brand. Most characters speak of “Halcyon Helen,” not the actress who plays her, Ruth Bellamy. Helen is a symbol, and the corporations know it.

Murder on Eridanos is a fitting capstone to The Outer Worlds in another respect: it’s a very deliberate homage to the tropes of pulp detective stories. Pulpiness is at the heart of the game’s aesthetic, and a detective investigating the death of a serial star is about as pulp-y as it gets.

I say “capstone” because apparently this will be the last DLC for Outer Worlds. That’s a pity; the game’s potential seems endless. But as this is the end of the line, I’ll use this review to provide a retrospective on the game as a whole.

A while back, I used the term “techno-decadence” to describe a particular type of science fiction. I have to say, it was playing The Outer Worlds that made it crystallize in my mind. The game strives for a retro-futuristic aesthetic in everything, from the Art Deco architecture and graphic design to the state of the in-game entertainment industry, with its deliberate parody of Old Hollywood, right down to the many references to classic sci-fi.

This is, I think, more than just a stylistic choice. The Outer Worlds’ retro vibe speaks to nostalgia, a longing for bygone… dare I say it? Yes, I think so… halcyon days. Even the in-game sport of tossball, with its devoted fans, colorful players and collectible cards is a throwback to the Golden Age of baseball.

That the game happened to be released just after Obsidian Entertainment was acquired by Microsoft makes its themes all the more interesting. While Obsidian was joining the ranks of the consolidated corporate behemoths, it was also producing a sharp critique of modern oligopolies. A rebellion against the modern formulas of gaming, with their endless sequels and multiplayer modes and pay-to-win content models and other general malevolence practiced by the industry’s largest companies.

And the aesthetic is part of the rebellion, I’m convinced of that. Compare the soulless graphics of Call of Duty to the inspired art of Outer Worlds and you’ll see what I mean. The reason The Outer Worlds is beautiful and Call of Duty isn’t is the same reason Call of Duty has an online death-match mode and The Outer Worlds doesn’t: because The Outer Worlds is for aesthetes who want immersion in a new world.

My friends, the central question of gaming is also the question at the heart of modern civilization: do we rule the tech, or does it rule us? More precisely, are these games nothing but elaborate demonstrations of the latest machines, or are they vehicles for telling stories, with which the machines are needed to assist?

After all, a corporation is a kind of machine–a system, in which the individuals it comprises are meant to carry out the purpose of the whole unit. And so we see at the resort on Eridanos a system that is meant to deliver happiness, and therefore mandates happiness to all its employees.

Of course, mandated happiness is not happiness at all. To experience joy, people must also be able to feel sorrow, fear, etc. The human experience is a gestalt of all these things. But that’s not exactly a message that makes people want to go shopping, which is why Rizzo’s goes to some extreme lengths to deliver “happiness.”

I promised not to spoil Murder on Eridanos, and I’ll keep that promise. Just know that these ideas are present if you look for them, and the difference between being human and being a symbol for a corporate initiative are explored in-depth–and all in the context of a terrific game.

The power of games is the power to transport us to simulated worlds. The best of them let us return from these ventures with something new, like the protagonist of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey–a new perspective on reality, achieved by contrasting it with the in-game universe. The Outer Worlds allows the player to do just that, and so I say again what I said back in 2019–not really that long ago, and yet in some ways it feels even further away than the Halcyon cluster–The Outer Worlds is an all-time classic.  

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The Outer Worlds is one of my favorite games in recent years. I’ve played through it twice and a bit. I didn’t finish my third run as a melee fighter, but I was delighted to fire it up again with my original character to play the DLC.

Peril on Gorgon begins with the captain of the Unreliable receiving a package containing a severed arm and a datapad. The datapad instructs the recipient to meet with Minnie Ambrose in her manor on Gorgon.

Minnie is trying to track down the journal of her mother, Olivia, who was a scientist working in a lab on Gorgon where things went very, very wrong. (As often occurs in video game labs.) Minnie wants to restart her mother’s experiments on Adrena-Time, and needs some to comb through the marauder-infested labs of Gorgon to piece together what happened with Olivia’s experiments.

On Gorgon, we find a ravaged, lawless world that makes Edgewater look civilized. There is one small outpost, the Sprat Shack, that serves as a hub of sorts, but otherwise it’s a largely hostile and barren world with lots high-level enemies to fight. There are a few interesting vignettes in keeping with the game’s signature offbeat humor, but it’s largely fighting, with much of the plot delivered from audio logs scattered around the planet.

Which is fine. The combat in Outer Worlds is smooth and fun. There is one thing I found a little disappointing, and this is pure gamer nit-picking, so readers not interested in a discussion of equipment crafting may skip the following three paragraphs.

One of the things the DLC promises is new weapons and armor. And indeed, there are plenty of new armor sets and unique weapons. The armor was fine, but I have two issues with the weapons. First, with the exception of three new science weapons, they look identical to the weapons in the base game. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s a little bit of a letdown when you get a new revolver that belonged to one of the major characters in the DLC that looks like any other revolver.

Second, and more importantly, the unique weapons aren’t that great. Pretty much all of my weapons were modified to Tartarus and back before I ever set foot on Gorgon, and whenever I would try a new weapon from the DLC, I’d inevitably put it aside after a few minutes and go back to my heavily-customized arsenal.

Now, I know: not every player is into crafting, and for those who aren’t, the unique weapons could be a lot more exciting. I admit, I was hoping for additional equipment on a level similar to that found in the DLCs for Outer Worlds‘ spiritual ancestor, Fallout: New Vegas. Every New Vegas add-on delivered new and interesting weaponry, from Dead Money‘s holorifle to Honest Hearts‘ Thompson gun to Old World Blues‘ K9000 to Lonesome Road‘s Red Glare.

But that’s really only a small quibble. The game itself is highly enjoyable–it’s more Outer Worlds, after all, so how can that not be good? Minnie’s quest to restart her mother’s work has a variety of possible outcomes, and the one I got was very satisfying. (I don’t want to spoil anything, but let’s just say I did a quick re-spec of my character and put 150 points in the Persuade skill in order to get it.)

The Outer Worlds is a game perfectly suited to DLC. It’s logical to add a new planet to explore with each add-on. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next one.

Lastly, one word for anyone who already played Peril on Gorgon and is just reading this to see what I thought:

Llama!

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220px-Far_Cry_5_boxshot
I’m not reviewing this game. I’m reviewing the reviews of it.

I haven’t played it. I probably won’t play it. I haven’t played a Far Cry game in years. You can read my thoughts on Far Cry 2 here. My sense is that not much has changed about the series since then.

For those who don’t know: Far Cry 5 is set in Montana, and the plot involves a doomsday cult of survivalist “preppers”. I don’t know much beyond that, but I gather it follows the standard Far Cry formula of a big open world for the player to run around in, getting in gunfights and blowing stuff up.

The marketing for the game has hyped the political aspects of the plot, and generated lots of controversy as a result.

The reviews I’ve read, however, have almost all complained that the game doesn’t have any real political message, saying things like “it plays it too safe” and “doesn’t want to offend people”. I get the sense a lot of people are disappointed in Ubisoft for not dialing the political commentary up to 11.

I admit, once I learned it was going to be just another open-world mayhem thing, with no major political message, I also lost interest in it. But I can’t blame Ubisoft for making that decision. If you think about it, they hardly had a choice.

Far Cry games are about people in extreme environments, fighting to survive against hordes of enemies with a vast array of deadly weapons. There is no clear morality in the world of Far Cry, save the Law of the Jungle. So if you play these games, it means you want to role-play surviving in a savage world of death and destruction.

Survivalists, doomsday preppers, and militia types are doing the same thing. They’re just acting out this fantasy, as opposed to playing a virtual simulation of it. In gaming lingo, they’re Live-Action Role-Playing, or “LARP-ing”.

So Ubisoft couldn’t go full bore political satire against survivalist/militia-types without also attacking their target audience. For those saying that Far Cry 5 should attack people who fetishize wilderness survival and military hardware: Who exactly do you think is buying this $60 simulation of over-the-top violence and destruction?

Is it possible for a game to criticize its audience? Yes, I have seen it done once: Spec Ops: The Line presented itself as a standard-issue military shooter, only to turn everything on its head and morph into a mind-bending satire of the genre that forced the player to question why they play these things at all.

But Spec Ops was not a huge money-maker, and Ubisoft is not going to alienate a huge portion of its audience for the sake of making a clever satire. The majority of audiences do not want to be satirized. They want to be entertained. It would be kind of like writing a detective novel where the detective fails to catch the killer specifically because he spends too much time reading detective novels.

“Form ever follows function” wrote the architect Louis Sullivan, and it’s a good principle for design in any medium. Because if you try to make a game whose function (satire of gun-loving survivalists) is directly opposed to its form (a simulation of gun-loving survivalism), the customers who want the form are going to be upset, and the customers who want the function probably aren’t going to buy it in the first place.

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I had low expectations for this game. After the fiasco of the Mass Effect 3 ending, coupled with EA’s general business practice of filling out their games with overpriced DLC and tacked-on  multiplayer, I wasn’t expecting them to do much with a new entry in the series.

Besides, the original Mass Effect trilogy was a lot of fun, but also wildly uneven. The first game had a brilliant story and atmosphere, but clunky controls and emotionless characters. The second game, as re-imagined by EA, had great characters and terrific voice-acting, but an incoherent mess of a plot that was only tangentially related to the story set up by the first game. And the third game had tighter controls, better combat, and a surprisingly good crafting system—but it compounded the story errors of its predecessor tenfold, while also doing major disservices to the characters. And that was before the infamous disaster that was the game’s finale.

All in all, while I had a lot of fun with the Mass Effect trilogy, there was no avoiding the fact that it was a decidedly mixed bag—some brilliant elements; some rather shockingly bad ones. For years, I’ve said that if someone made a game that had the story and atmosphere of Mass Effect 1, the characters and voice-acting of Mass Effect 2, and the gameplay mechanics and crafting systems of Mass Effect 3, it would be a true masterpiece.

And now I know I was right. Because Mass Effect Andromeda is that game.

I don’t think I have ever been as pleasantly surprised by a game as I was by this one. I was expecting a Gears of War clone with a Mass Effect coat of paint. Instead I got an epic adventure in a sprawling galaxy, complete with likable characters, clever writing, and what just might be the best-designed combat and exploration mechanics I’ve ever seen.

You play as Ryder, a special operative who, in the early stages of the game, assumes the mantle of Pathfinder—the person tasked with setting up colonies in the Andromeda galaxy on behalf of an organization called “The Initiative”. Like Shepard in the first three Mass Effects, Ryder can be either male or female. The official canon has male Ryder’s name as “Scott”, and female Ryder’s as “Sara”, but the game allows you to choose your own first name. So, as I have traditionally done in RPGs at least since Fallout: New Vegas, I’m playing as a woman named Jane.

Jane Ryder
This is my Pathfinder. There are many like her, but this one is mine.

I have never felt such a connection with a player character before. Not with Shepard, not with the Courier, not with J.C. Denton—not even with the Jedi Exile. Something made me feel attached to my Ryder. Fryda Wolff’s terrific voice-acting is part of it, I’m sure, as she manages to at least match the great Jennifer Hale’s Commander Shepard, and perhaps even raise the bar a little higher. Tom Taylorson also does a good job in the brief but important scenes Scott has in a female Ryder playthrough. (I haven’t played the full game as Scott. I’m not sure if I ever will–to me, there can only be one Ryder.)

I can’t give a full plot summary, or this review would be longer than War and Peace. Ryder leads her team across the various worlds of Andromeda, battling the hostile species known as the Kett, making alliances with the native Angara species, setting up outposts, uncovering the remains of a bygone species known as the Remnant and in the process making the worlds of Andromeda livable for the Milky Way species—humans, turians, asari and krogan.

Desert on Eos

The first planet Ryder explores, Eos, was where I really started to grasp that Andromeda was something far more epic than I had expected. As I drove around the gorgeous, sprawling deserts, listening to Cora and Peebee banter while we fought the Kett and secured our outpost, I realized I was 10 hours in, and the save screen informed me I was only 10% of the way done with the game. For comparison, a typical playthrough of KotOR II or New Vegas (two of my all-time favorite games) takes me between 20-30 hours.

Wow, I thought. I’m sure I’ll pick up the pace soon, but I’m looking at a 40-hour game here.

Try 73 hours. And counting. The game goes on after you beat the final boss.

I have trouble being a completionist my first time through an RPG. I usually start off vowing to do all the sidequests and explore every nook and cranny, but then I get impatient and want to see what happens in the main story and wind up rushing to finish it. That didn’t happen with Andromeda—the game made me feel like I really was exploring new worlds and discovering new wonders, not just mowing down wave after wave of bad guys en route to the end.

Fighting Kett
The combat in this game is some of the best I’ve ever seen.

Now, it’s true, there are tons of bad guys to be mowed down, and what a system BioWare has designed to do so. As with the other games, there are combat powers, biotic (telekinetic) powers and tech powers. All of these lead to remarkably different playstyles. As if that weren’t enough, Ryder’s weapons are highly customizable. You not only can build new ones from scratch, but you can add augmentations and mods that drastically alter their behavior. (I made all my weapons super rapid-fire laser guns, for example.)

I almost never bother with crafting systems in RPGs, but I was hooked on this one early on. After every mission, I was always rushing back to the modding table to see what new armor and weaponry I could put together.

The way you acquire new equipment is also ingenious. Throughout the game, you can scan various objects for research points that you can spend on building new items.  This again reinforces the need to explore every inch of the galaxy in order to build new equipment that leads to better combat. It’s all a very nice feedback loop.

Now, again, good game mechanics don’t count for much without a good story and characters. After all, Mass Effect 3 had a good crafting system too, but nobody walked away from it thinking “I was really satisfied with that shotgun I built!”

Andromeda’s overall story, while not terribly innovative, avoids descending into utter nonsense like Mass Effect 2 and 3 so often did. And its character interactions are every bit as good as those in ME 2. There are even a few scenes that do something very rare for a video game (or even most Hollywood films, for that matter): scenes where the characters don’t say anything in response, but instead convey what they are thinking solely with the facial expressions. There was one scene where two crew members are arguing  over something silly and Ryder silently facepalms in the background. This was a level of nuance that I was not expecting. For all the complaints about animation glitches (I’ll get to that), it was nice to see that degree of realism.

Each member of Ryder’s crew has a backstory, as does Ryder herself. The Ryder family history is quite interesting, and gradually piecing it together makes for a very satisfying subplot, with a great payoff during the endgame sequence.

All the backstories are slowly revealed over the course of the game, and the development of relationships works much better than in past Mass Effects because of Andromeda’s slower pace. It seems more plausible that a crew member would fall in love with you over the course of many conversations and missions together, rather than the old model of “three conversations and then bed”.

Now, as you are likely aware, the knock on Andromeda is that it’s glitchy. The animations are awkward and there are weird bugs and incomplete quests.

Yes, all of this is true. The game crashes abruptly sometimes. There are some sidequests that are broken. (One was a simple “scan three things” mission, and the game never gave me the option to scan the third.) The facial animations, while sophisticated and nuanced in concept as I described, do sometimes look a little bizarre. When talking to her AI assistant, SAM, Ryder sometimes turns her head around 180 degrees on her neck, like she’s possessed. In one cutscene, one party member was placed directly over top of another, causing them to meld together—I hadn’t seen anything so weird since the sex scene in Blade Runner 2049. And the krogan party member makes the game’s framerate slow down to a crawl if you enter combat with him. (On the flip side, this glitch also makes Ryder immortal.)

Cora
This is far from the weirdest facial animation you’ll see.

All of these are indeed annoying bugs, and if you came to Andromeda as someone used to polished AAA games, I can see it would be pretty appalling.

Let me explain why I can forgive it: my introduction to RPGs was BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, which I first played on the Xbox 360 in 2006. Because it was an original Xbox game that had to be made compatible with the new console, it had all kinds of slowdown issues in combat, random crashes during loading, and a host of other issues. But I enjoyed the thrill of a grand adventure across the galaxy with my rag-tag band of party members so much that I could forgive all. I’d never played anything like it before, and a few bugs here and there couldn’t interfere with the ambitious scope of the game.

Then I played Knights of the Old Republic II, by Obsidian, and again had to deal with broken quests (fuel for Telos, anyone?), glitches, and an ending that seemed (on the first playthrough) confusing and abrupt. But I loved it even more than KotOR I for the brilliance of the writing, the complexity of the characters, the brooding, ominous atmosphere, and the deep, philosophical questions at the core of the story. To this day, it remains my favorite game—perhaps even my favorite work of fiction, regardless of medium.

Since then, I’ve loved lots of games that had their technical flaws, be they bad graphics, (Deus Ex) frequent crashes (Fallout: New Vegas) bizarre texture glitches and entire rooms that didn’t load (Alpha Protocol) or just being so utterly broken they couldn’t be played without cheats. (Mask of the Betrayer) I loved them all, in spite of their technical shortcomings, because they more than made up for it with the sheer ambitiousness of their stories, the scope of their settings, and the depth of their themes.

Nomad on Voeld
Exploring in the Nomad.

Mass Effect Andromeda is another in that class. Its flaws are the flaws of a work so daring that it pushes the limits of the possible. Unlike the original Mass Effect trilogy, which always felt oddly constrained despite its space-faring setting, Andromeda really does shoot for the stars. It gives you a sense of freedom, of exploration and of adventure. Whereas Mass Effects 1 -3 boiled down to the story of Commander Shepard vs. the Reapers, Andromeda feels like a universe of countless stories, in which Ryder’s is but one—an important one, with significance to all the others, but still, just one. As I discussed in my KotOR II video, the interplay of galaxy-spanning concerns with deeply personal ones gives the game a truly epic feeling.

Andromeda
The Heleus cluster, where Ryder’s adventure takes place.

That’s another difference with the original series: unlike the Lovecraftian bleakness of the Reaper threat at the heart of Shepard’s story, Andromeda belongs to a different strain of science fiction—the optimistic sort, about life surviving in alien settings and using technology to overcome adversity. A fittingly pioneer spirit underlies all of Ryder’s adventures, and when, after long fights and lengthy treks across strange worlds, Ryder establishes a new outpost, you feel a sense of accomplishment—like you really did use your powers to help out humanity. It’s an inspiring theme; a throwback to the “space cowboys” epics of the past, when space was viewed as another frontier to be tamed and made habitable.

While the writing is not as deep, and the themes are lighter and less complex, Mass Effect Andromeda is the first game I’ve played since KotOR II that really made me feel like I was part of a universe, and even more importantly, made me think about what that really means. Like Obsidian’s epic, it makes the player ponder the meaning and the scale of their decisions, and reflect on, ultimately, humanity’s place in the cosmos.  There is no higher compliment that I can pay a work of fiction.

Ryder in game
Pathfinder Ryder on bridge. Where to next?

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kreia
Kreia, from Chris Avellone’s “Knights of the Old Republic II”

One of the best things you can say about a work of fiction is that it changes how you think about life.  To my mind, what makes something truly great Art is if it gives you a new perspective on everyday life.

This might be why a some people don’t think video games are Art. Nobody does anything different after playing, say, Pac-Man.

This is where Chris Avellone‘s games come in.  Avellone’s design philosophy is heavily focused on “reactivity” in gameplay. Last year I wrote about why this means the plots, characters, and mechanics of his games are so thematically integrated.

To summarize briefly: “reactivity” means that the game world reacts to the player character’s choices.  Rather than just being a set series of tasks the player performs to advance the story, a reactive game environment means the player can influence what happens in the game world.  This means a game has multiple endings at a minimum, and usually different ways to complete tasks or different story arcs to follow as well.

Reactivity makes for a satisfying game experience.  You feel like you are really participating in the game-world, rather than just pressing buttons to turn the pages in someone else’s story.

This is where the “applicable in real life” part comes in: people like reactivity in the real world, too.  We don’t typically think of it in those terms, but it’s true.  People like to feel like their actions mean something.

Usually, people are at their most unhappy when they feel powerless. We want to feel like we have some measure of control in our lives, and some input in what happens in the world. We never have total control, of course, just as the player of a game doesn’t either–there is always the possibility of losing.

For example, people like it when other people listen to them. If somebody presents an idea, they like other people to engage with it, rather than just dismiss it. At a basic level, listening to people’s ideas is a kind of a reactivity–it sends the message that their input matters.

The fact that people like it when you listen to them isn’t a revelation. A guy named Dale Carnegie wrote at length about it in the 1930s. So did Stephen Covey in the 1980s. But reactivity is a handy way of understanding the concept.  If you think of everyone as a player character in their own video game, you know that what they are looking for is the opportunity to influence the world.

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I stole this idea from Barb Knowles who got it from Paul who got the idea from Aaron who stole it from Jess. (Whew! It all reminds me of the Tom Lehrer song “I got it from Agnes”–quite possibly the dirtiest song ever written without using a single off-color word. But I digress.)

  1. Blogging
  2. American football
  3. Pizza
  4. Economics
  5. The color red
  6. History
  7. Desert landscapes
  8. The movie Lawrence of Arabia (combines 6 and 7)
  9. Writing
  10. The book A Confederacy of Dunces
  11. A good scary story.
  12. Gilbert and Sullivan operettas
  13. Political theory
  14. Hazelnut coffee
  15. Conspiracy theories
  16. Well-written, metered, rhyming satirical poetry.
  17. The number 17
  18. Thunderstorms
  19. Friendly political debates
  20. The sound of howling wind.
  21. The unutterable melancholy of a winter sunset in a farm field.
  22. Pretentious sentences like the one above.
  23. Knights of the Old Republic II
  24. Halloween
  25. The book 1984
  26. Niagara Falls
  27. The song “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”
  28. Pumpkin-flavored cookies. coffee, cake etc.
  29. The book The King in Yellow
  30. Hats
  31. Chess
  32. Trivia competitions
  33. Numbered lists
  34. Mowing lawns
  35. The smell of fresh-cut grass
  36. Black licorice
  37. Beethoven’s 3rd,5th and 9th symphonies
  38. The color light blue.
  39. Exercise machines
  40. My iPad
  41. Feta cheese
  42. The movie Jane Got a Gun
  43. Etymologies
  44. Gregorian chants
  45. December 23rd
  46. The story “The Masque of the Red Death”
  47. Mozzarella sticks
  48. Leaves in Autumn
  49. Long drives in the country
  50. Fireworks
  51. The song “You Got Me Singin'”
  52. The book To Kill a Mockingbird
  53. Constitutional republics that derive their powers from the consent of the governed.
  54. Strategy games
  55. Puns
  56. Ice skating
  57. My Xbox One
  58. The smell of old books
  59. Hiking
  60. Tall buildings
  61. Bookstores
  62. Gloves
  63. Rational-legal authority, as defined by Max Weber
  64. Bagels with cream cheese
  65. The Olentangy river
  66. The movie The Omen
  67. Far Side comics
  68. Planescape: Torment
  69. The song “Barrytown”
  70. Reasonable estimates of the Keynesian multiplier
  71. Stories that turn cliches on their heads.
  72. Editing movies
  73. Really clever epigraphs
  74. The movie “Chinatown”
  75. Ice water
  76. Deus Ex
  77. Silly putty
  78. Swiss Army Knives
  79. Anagrams
  80. Wikipedia
  81. Radical new models for explaining politics.
  82. Weightlifting
  83. Lego
  84. Madden 17
  85. The song “The Saga Begins”
  86. Trigonometry
  87. Writing “ye” for “the”
  88. Well-made suits
  89. Popcorn
  90. Pasta
  91. The word “sesquipedalian”
  92. The movie Thor
  93. Blackjack
  94. The movie The English Patient
  95. Pretzels
  96. Cello music
  97. Bonfires
  98. The story “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
  99. Soaring rhetoric
  100. Astronomy
  101. Getting comments on my blog posts.

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“Reactivity”. “Choice and consequences”. “Influence”. These are the watchwords for the RPGs designed by Chris Avellone.

For example, one of the major features of Alpha Protocol (2010) was the branching path structure of its story, depending on what the player chose to do. The world of Alpha Protocol reacted to the player’s choices, making it feel like they were really changing the story as they played.

More than just being a quirk of game mechanic design, this philosophy permeates the Avellone-led Black Isle/Obsidian RPGs in surprising ways. It goes beyond just being a player ego-stroking mechanism into every aspect of the games.

Planescape: Torment‘s protagonist can influence the story, setting and other characters in countless ways, and while this in itself makes for an interesting game, the mechanic complements the theme of the story: that belief can influence reality itself. Musings on self-fulfilling prophecies and consensus reality are integrated with the structure of the game.

If video games are power fantasies, designed to make players feel like they can impact the world, then these RPGs are both archetypal examples and subtly subversive at the same time. While they allow the player to make all manner of changes to the game world, they also ask the player to reflect on the consequences of their actions.

To see how this approach differs from other RPGs, consider the popular but controversial Mass Effect 3, the original endings of which prompted criticism that none of the player’s choices really mattered. Defenders of the game replied that this was the story BioWare had wanted to tell, and so it should be accepted by the players as such.

It is a delicate balance, but in a medium defined by user input, the experience is most satisfying if the need to tell a story is balanced with giving the player choice in how it unfolds–if the story is the player’s story, and the player is not simply a bystander.

In many games, the player is to the game’s plot as Indiana Jones is to Raiders of the Lost Ark. They are at best just there to perform the requisite tasks to fulfill the writer’s story. Not so with Planescape/KotOR II/Alpha Protocol–in these, the player is the story.

Perhaps the most famous of Avellone’s characters is the enigmatic Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II. She embodies the philosophy of player choice more so than any other single character. (Her avowed hatred of the predestination element of the Force could be interpreted as opposition to the “railroading” so common in games.)

Kreia is seemingly amoral, allied with neither the Jedi nor the Sith, but uses both to achieve her goals. To gain influence with her, the Jedi Exile (the player’s character) must show that they can make logical choices consistent with furthering their own long-term goals–in other words, that they understand choice and consequence. Kreia doesn’t care if you are good or evil–just so long as you know what you are doing and can strategize to make it happen.

In this way, the game mechanics, characters and story are all fully integrated. The mechanics reinforce the characters who reinforce the theme.  This level of coherence is what produces a truly satisfying experience. When game mechanics clash with the theme or the story, the player feels subconsciously confused.

Since games, unlike other art forms, rely on user input to tell the story, it only makes sense to center them around the user’s input in every respect. If thematic coherence is what makes Art great, the greatest games should surely be built around the idea of player choice.

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I normally don’t like games that are just about repetitive gameplay. I like to make progress through a story, and reach a satisfying ending.  To just keep doing the same thing to try and get a high score doesn’t really appeal to me.

But Faster Than Light is an exception to the rule.  The game, in spite of its 1990s-caliber graphics and nearly-impossible to win gameplay, it’s extremely fun and addictive. (It doesn’t hurt that the Advanced Edition has material written by the great Chris Avellone.)

The idea is that you are in command of a starship, and you have make through nine sectors to fight the enemy flagship.  You can get different types of starships, with different crews, weapons and layouts.  I’ve only unlocked one so far, and I’ve never beaten the enemy flagship.  That’s right: I’ve never actually won the game.

It doesn’t matter, though. FTL is a journey, not a destination.  As you travel through the sectors, you never know what will happen.  Sometimes, you’ll get a free laser weapon upgrade, or “scrap” (money).  Other times, you might be lured into a trap by evil aliens.  You never know what you’ll run into.  It really is like playing a season of Star Trek.

Another element I normally hate, but FTL makes enjoyable, is the resource management aspect of things.  I normally am terrible at this,  but in this game you have enough downtime between space battles to think about whether you wan to upgrade lasers, shields, engines, etc.  You’re not rushed in making decisions.

The best part is, it’s available on the iPad, which makes it easy to take with me.  Only downside to that is I end up getting hooked when I really should be doing something else.

There are a few nit-picks–the menus are kind of dense, and on the iPad sometimes I end up pressing a menu button when I want to select a part of the ship.  But it’s not a big deal.  I can hardly wait how much fun it will be when I actually win it.

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So, I got the game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a gift.  When it came out years ago, I mentioned I didn’t care for the sword-and sorcery fantasy-setting, which was why I didn’t get it earlier, even as it won tons of Game Of The Year awards.

I still don’t care for the setting, but I will admit that it is so beautiful and atmospheric I can kind of get past that–it is a seriously gorgeous game, and it is really fun just to wander around the huge open-world with no aim, admiring the scenery.

But of course, this is a Bethesda production, so the minute you start to run into anything related to the plot or characters, things get silly.  The major issue so far in the game is that dragons are attacking the land for some reason, even though everyone thought they had been destroyed a long time ago. The opening sequence of the game involves a dragon attack, which is a shock to all the characters around.

Naturally, we learn that the player character is special, being a “dragonborn”, which gives them the power to absorb dragon souls, or something.  And of course there is a prophecy about it all.  (First rule of fantasy: there is always a prophecy. I guess they make their prophets in volume.)

My character has already been in five or six battles with dragons, and won all of them by hitting the dragon with a hammer when it lands ten yards away.  This makes the dragons seem, frankly, stupid. They could win continually if they just stayed up in the air, or perched somewhere I couldn’t get at them with my hammer.  But no, they obligingly allow themselves to be drawn into my kind of fight. It’s the “Cthulhu Problem” all over again.

Then there is the dialogue.  In one town that I rolled into while running away from monsters, there is some mystery that has to do with a house being burned down.  The locals are too afraid to investigate, because they are, according to the “Jarl” (the executive of the town) “too superstitious”.

I wanted to say to the Jarl “Of course they are!  We live in a world where dragons attack people and sorcerers openly summon evil spirits.  Just yesterday I was attacked by a gang of reanimated skeletons.  You’d be an idiot not to be superstitious in this world!”

(The house mystery, by the way, turns out to be the fault of vampires. And the clues to solving it are provided by ghosts. Yeah, I’d say the people are right to be superstitious.)

Also, there is the recurring problem of people saying essentially “well, hello there, heavily-armed stranger who just ran in three seconds ago from the vast wilderness populated by legions of bandits and bloodthirsty monsters. Here are all the secret intrigues and problems of everyone in town.. Please help fix them.”  This problem is to some extent inevitable in a game like this, but I think it could still be handled more deftly.

And then there is the criminal justice system in Skyrim.  It’s set up so the guards will attack you if you commit crimes against the people of a given town.  Neat idea, but I don’t see how it is that stealing a carrot can be punishable by death, whereas hitting the Jarl in the face with a sword can be forgiven if you put the sword down afterwards. (And yes, Fallout: New Vegas suffered from this too, a bit.)

In short, so far it seems to be Fallout 3 all over again, only more so:  awesome scenery and landscape, laughable character interactions, plot and dialogue.  And like Fallout 3, I’m having fun with it.  More than I expected actually.  If they had only gotten Obsidian Entertainment to write it, they would have had another masterpiece on their hands.