2064: Read Only Memories (2015)

Initial impressions:
Gameplay-wise, so far it's half-adventure game, half VN. Unfortunately, the introductory puzzle was very dull (pick up some headphones, pair them with two home devices, write and submit a review of them, go to bed), and the VN dialogue is cute and well-written but goes on for too long. I suspect this, and possibly the VO issue, is just a standard aspect of the VN genre - all you've got is talking, so let's put as much of it in there as possible - and the adventure game aspect is making me a little itchier to get through the dialogue than I should be.
The presentation is cute, though it's mildly irritating to have the graphics take up so little of the screen! The interface is a little annoying: it often takes more clicks than it should to do something, even before the standard VN dialogue clicking (why do I have to open a verb coin then select use for each icon on my computer rather than just click on them?!); there's voice acting and the text always runs slower than the VO so you either finish listening to the line then have to wait for the text to catch up or you're clicking to get the text up immediately and you've read the whole thing before the VO has got halfway through - it feels like one of those escort missions where the NPC's walking speed is halfway between your walk and run speeds, and it's yet more clicking!

Welp, it crashed, there's no autosave, and I can't be bothered to spend like ten minutes clicking through all that dialogue again to catch back up to my latest manual save. I got an hour or so in. It's fine, but it's incredibly linear and the adventure game stuff doesn't actually have any heft, it's more like a minigame to break up the VN clicking. It feels like a 'my first cyberpunk story' and/or 'my first VN', probably better suited to a 13 year old Hot Topic customer. Everything about it is good - the voice-acting, music, art, writing - but it's all very cutesy (your robot pal sounds very much like Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun) and can get wearing fast. If it were a game within a game, like something that Chloe plays in Life Is Strange or something, it'd be amazing (assuming it didn't crash and fail to save!). Or even as a portable game, something to play on your phone while you commute. (Looking at Wikipedia to see if it was originally a DX game or something, I see it was first released on PC, but also that it only later got a port and a voiced update - with the "2064" bit being added on at that point - so that might explain why the VO and text aren't very well synced.)

Rating: nicely made, but a bit basic and some UI irritations.

Her Story (2015)

BIG SPOILERS BELOW

I love the concept of this but suspect I will get frustrated with very quickly.

Yeah, I was right, not sold on this at all so far! I've only played about 30 minutes, I guess, but I don't feel any compulsion to play more. Basically, you're put in front of an old CRT monitor with a database of a bunch of 10ish second clips from some police interviews of this one woman. You can search the clips' transcripts for any word(s), and it brings up the results. That's it. You don't know who you are, or why you're looking at these clips. I can only assume the goal is 'find out what really happened', though all you can do is watch (and tag and bookmark) clips, it's not like there's any way (currently) to communicate your deductions. Also, there's no way to take notes, never mind copy paste sections of the clips' digital transcripts. Plus, if you do a search it only shows you the first five results. What I'd actually do here would be to put them all in order, and just watch the interviews through, but there's no way to do that and I wouldn't want to do that level of tedious busywork anyway.
So it seems like what this is, is 'watch three or so interviews and then have a little think to yourself about what might have really happened', with a bunch of contrived obstacles to make it feel like a game. She mentions the cat flap in one clip, so I do a search for cat flap and watch a couple more clips where she mentions it. It's a possible ingress to the house for a thin person. So, what, I'm just supposed to flail wildly at random stuff like that, tab out to Notepad and basically transcribe everything, grinding away until I have a vague idea of what happened? This just... does not seem interesting to me. Has anyone else played this? 

I quickly glanced at some reviews and saw one mention that the reviewer had 3 A4 pages of notes by the end of it. This reminded me that generally I'm not a big fan of detective games, mainly because I go in with little faith that things will make sense, that its expectations of my deductive skills will be reasonable, and that it will be much more fun than those 'every blue tile must be next to a green tile' logic puzzles, and I'm not often proved wrong. I had hoped that the unusual format of this game would force the designer to avoid these issues, but it seems that instead it's just exacerbated them.
I think what's dampened my enthusiasm is that I don't feel like I'm solving a mystery as much as I'm solving a search engine.
I suspect that the game putting you in front of the UI with no context of who you are etc is an indicator that this is to be approached as a logic puzzle rather than a story, like playing Minesweeper with video clips, and that's just not very appealing to me. And yet simultaneously it seems like there's no formal end state, so I'll just have to decide whether I've finished or not, which feels equally unsatisfying and undermining of my confidence in the game.
I really want to like this game, so I might give it another hour tomorrow and commit to making copious notes and try to give the game the benefit of the doubt that I'm not just wasting my time transcribing a load of irrelevant fluff, see if it clicks for me and I suddenly get really into it... (If I'm not even supposed to be doing stuff like that and I'm supposed to just be jumping from clip to clip and gleaning some sort of overall story, I'd rather just watch Memento or an episode of Bergerac.)

Okay, played it for a couple more hours. I managed to fluke my way into finding a big story thread through some random search, which wasn't super satisfying but at least it got me underway. I also started getting those reflections on the monitor and bits of music to tell me that I'd found an important clip. So, it was quite fun for a while finding out new bits of the real story. And it's cool to go back to watch the older clips and realise that her performance is very different and that her clothes are much more vibrant, like she's putting on a show. By the time you get to the confession interview, she's in a plain white top. Smart touch. Also, I get now that the results are in chronological order and become more telling as they go, so the 'first 5 results' thing is there to force you to come up with more specific words or combinations of them.

But now I'm back to feeling like I'm fighting the search engine/abstruse game structure rather than solving a mystery, because as far as I can tell I basically know the entire story - the midwife, the twin in the attic, the murder with the mirror shard and then the cover-up - but the game hasn't ended, so I'm just flailing around again trying to work out what questions still exist. Like, I don't know where Hannah is at the time of this final interview, but how do I find that out? There's no way to know what search terms will get me there. For all I know, there's an entire extra level of story I haven't got to yet and an even more recent interview where it turns out that actually she was pretending to be Eve pretending to be Hannah and she actually is Hannah. Or something. I was hoping the clock might be a way to judge how far through the game I am, but seems not.  I think I'm at the stage where I need to go get hints on how to complete this thing, which is a shame.

Okay, so I looked at some hint guides trying not to spoil anything for myself, and saw a mention that the database checker shows you how many videos you've watched. So I thought maybe the aim is to watch every single one of them. So I set to that, watching the older clips that I'd mostly been ignoring, and after a couple that I didn't think had really told me anything more, I got the chat window. I said yes I understood and I was finished, just to see what happened, I was told to log off to meet SB outside, did that and got the credits! It also called me Sarah and referred to what my mother had done, which I actually hadn't realised at all - I had assumed I was Hannah (or maybe Eve in a twist) a few years later. I probably should have thought about it, as I knew there was a baby and the clock said 2024, but I figured that must have been matching my system clock because why would he set the game in the future? Anyway, after the credits, it gave me the ability to see all videos for any search, not just five, but going back in and using that just feels like cheating. So, I know it's kind of my fault for saying 'yes, I understand everything' but also I knew that I didn't know what I didn't know, so I was hoping to bump up against some sort of final test and then be able to go back in with more focus.
So, I guess the remaining question is, where is Hannah? I did see in the hint guide that there's a question of whether it's actually split personality because in one video you see her tapping their secret code to herself. Also, I did notice that the tattoo timeline maybe seemed a bit weird. Like, she was supposed to have got that when she went to the bedsit, and I figured that was why Simon found it easy to believe she was just someone who looked very similar to his wife. But there's one interview where she doesn't have the tattoo, which doesn't make sense?
But yeah, it's stuff like that which I found a bit frustrating, because either I knew what questions I wanted to ask but not how, or I didn't know which questions remained. And the way it ended was not very satisfying either, though I cop to that being half my fault.

Okay, looking at Wikipedia, I think I understood like... 80% of it? I think it hedges its bets a fair bit by having the answer be 'there are three possible interpretations' and also by leaving it up to the player to decide the game is finished! 

Rating: interesting, but frustrating in lots of different ways.

Late Night With The Devil (2024)

Didn't think much of this. It makes too many fake footage errors, the acting is often stagey when it shouldn't be, a lot of the characterisation and dialogue is far too close to Larry Sanders for comfort (I know they're both pulling from Johnny Carson et al, but even so) and there's nothing very surprising in there. Felt like a slightly lazy Inside No 9 episode. David Dastmalchian is really good, though.

Rating: Fine.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

I genuinely struggled to get through it. It has the feel of a cinematic universe movie, just rushing to handle all the different plotlines and franchise elements that it feels obliged to cover. Just jampacked with story elements that it unceremoniously drops or forgets about, barely any jokes and the ones that are in there are painfully unfunny, full of fanservice in ways that almost never make sense, and zero new ideas. The reason "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" had promise as a title was that it suggested a sequel that took a complete left-turn and dared to throw out a bunch of elements from the first movie; the replacement, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", seemed like a clever title but in retrospect it's an accurate indictment of a movie that does nothing except repeat the original.

Rating: Atrocious.

Trap (2024)

It was goofy fun but closer to a The Visit or Old than Sixth Sense or Split in terms of quality. One of those ones that feels like it should be an "M Night Shyamalan presents" rather than one directed by him. I really liked Josh Hartnett, his kid and Allison Pill, and Senya Shyamalan was alright (good singer-songwriter, okay actor). The concept of the structure being successive cat and mouse games getting tighter and tighter was cool, but it did lead to a lot of stuff feeling contrived or disjointed. If you go in expecting silly genre thrills you'll probably enjoy it.

Rating: throwaway fun

Dream Scenario (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

A solid execution, but the allegory for internet fame was so close that they may as well have not bothered with the dream stuff and just had it be about a milkshake ducked guy. It felt like a semi-Kaufman. And when they do finally commit to the concept for a few minutes at the end, it conflicts with the rest of the movie which had up till then kept it ambiguous at best as to whether anything metaphysical had happened (and in fact seemed to be leaning towards it being coincidence until the internet article at which point it became mass suggestion).

Rating: intriguing but timid

Anna's Quest (2015)

It's produced by Daedalic but not developed by them so I thought I'd give it a shot. So far, I'm not really enjoying it. It's incredibly twee and bland, from the artstyle through the voice acting to even the font (which is either Comic Sans or very close to it). The VO also goes at a snail's pace and contains fairly regular misreads. The storytelling isn't up to much either, starting with a pointless prologue then the inciting incident told via storybook cutscene (terrible decision) and gameplay kicking in with you stuck in a small room and doing some rote puzzles. It's in the Daedelic engine, so it does also have a few of their standard problems like the characters moving too fast for their walk animation so they look like they're sliding around, and the tacky adverts on the menu screen. Also, there are no custom animations for any interactions which, as I think I've said previously (probably with a Daedalic game), you can't really get away with at high resolution. And even Monkey Island etc would have a few of them! It just feels really cheap. At least that Daedalic guy didn't insist on singing a song at the start, I guess.
Anyway, I just got stuck (which I maintain should not really happen at this early stage of an adventure), and looked up a walkthrough and the solution is nonsense. Basically, you've got to get the collar off a tired but grumpy cat, so you need a bed for it so it'll go to sleep. I got the lumpy pillow and put some toy stuffing in it to make it comfy, but it's still "not appealing enough". That's all the hints I get. Apparently the solution is to use the scissors to cut a bit off the curtains and use that on the pillow. I have no idea why this is the case.
So I'm going to give this a tiny bit more of a chance but I doubt I'll be spending long on it. 

Re. the curtains puzzle, if you try to use them, she does mention that they're soft. So I suppose that if you've guessed that the problem with the pillow is that it's not soft enough yet, then you might decide to try to cut a strip of curtain off and just lay it on top of the pillow, but it's a hell of a reach, especially when the player character Anna is giving you the solution to a bunch of other puzzles before you get to complete them.
Another classic Daedalic issue at play is the ever-present question "is this bad writing or a bad translation or both?" If the lead character didn't say "oh" or "pardon?" or "sorry?" every other line the game would be half as long and a lot more bearable.
So, I got out of the witch's cottage by gathering the ingredients of a spell, then went to a village with a tavern and a blacksmiths and a church and yawwwwwn. My quest is to cure my sick uncle so I go see a wizard and find out my big mission is to... gather the ingredients of a spell! Nope. Along with a new character whose VO is so bad I can only assume they were a backer or something (the main feature of the extras is what seems to be fan art of the game, so they were crowd-sourcing at least some stuff), this is the last straw. I had hoped it would get a little more exciting once I escaped the cottage but it went the other way if anything. So I'm done with it.

Rating: twee, rote and bland with infuriating VO.