Attack of the Backlog! – November 2018 Round-Up
In Attack of the Backlog!, I’ll be discussing my attempts at tackling an ever-growing backlog of games, from both a campaign/story and an achievements completion point of view. For the sake of keeping track of things, I’m only going to mention games I’ve actually finished and/or completed that month.
So, another month, another bit skimmed off of the old backlog’s top – November saw slightly less activity than previous months, mostly due to a combination of workload and some general clean-up efforts in longer games, but overall I can happily say that most of the goals I set up on September were reached.
Without further ado, let’s have a look at some numbers for November – this time, with extra multiplatform goodness:
- 64,38% average Steam achievement completion
- 236 Steam games in progress (with achievements)
- 1170 Steam games unplayed, 471 of which come with no achievements
- 203 Steam games at 100%
- 3 Games added to account
- TSIOQUE
- Monster Hunter World
- Sunless Skies
- 3 Steam games completed
- Shank
- Uncanny Valley
- We Were Here
- 37,84% average PSN trophy completion
- 46 PSN games played overall
- 848 unearned trophies
- 2 PSN games completed
- Exile’s End (PS Vita)
- Grim Fandango Remastered (PS4)
- 1 3DS game completed
- Radiohammer
Steam tracking courtesy of completionist.me , PSN tracking courtesy of PSNProfiles.com.
Right off the bat, you’ll noticed that we’ve finally started making some progress on platforms other than PC – this mainly came as a result of weekend play, where consoles were a much “easier” alternative to booting up the PC (especially the handheld stuff, 3DS and Vita). Comparatively, this month saw the completion of six games and the acquisition of three, two of which (TSIOQUE and Sunless Skies) were respectively Kickstarter and Keymailer rewards (Keymailer is a streamer tool that allows developers to provide games for streaming purposes), leaving Monster Hunter World as the sole purchase of the month.
Thus, 3 games completed at minimum – check. Ratio of six-to-one for finished/purchased games – check. Focus on multiple platforms – check. All goals met for November, the first month I managed to do so since starting this challenge in September. Needless to say, I was very pleased with how November turned out.
From the games completed, a few were interesting or enjoyable enough to sit through (Grim Fandango Remastered and We Were Here, the former of which indirectly inspired the “Fun With Remakes” post from a few weeks back, the latter being the focus of the “Asymmetrical Design” post).
The rest, however, were a bit less enjoyable for a variety of reasons. Radiohammer, a short rhythm game on the 3DS, lacked an interesting enough soundtrack – something that more often than not is the result of budgetary constraints but which is especially noticeable in this genre. Shank, a side-scrolling beat-em-up with a focus on visceral action, didn’t quite work for me (despite it being a quite well-made game) mainly due to a few design decisions regarding enemy and level design (especially in the highest difficulty, where dying means you’ll need to replay the entire level from the beginning. Finally, Exile’s End is an unremarkable side-scrolling exploration game (in the vein of Metroid or most post-SotN Castlevania games) with a somewhat interesting premise but let down by some control issues and a general lack of polish. As for Uncanny Valley…
Let’s have a closer look, as it allows for a very interesting look into horror game design.
Uncanny Valley is, in essence, a short horror game with a very old-school aesthetic and design. You control Tom, a recent hire as a security guard at a seeming-abandoned facility, who slowly comes to the realization that not all is as it seems with his surroundings. As the game progresses, the player is tasked with figuring out the facility’s dark past, as well as how to escape or otherwise reach one of several endings available.
If the above description seems a bit… lacking, it’s because a lot of the game’s effectiveness comes from exploration and discovery – though I ultimately didn’t enjoy it due to a few design decisions (more on that below), the overall experience is worth looking into, going in blind and putting up with its flaws – thus, it is quite hard to describe without spoiling the reader.
Aesthetically, the game is competently made, if perhaps a bit too low-fidelity to fully realize the setting’s potential. Visual design is always a big factor in horror, being the primary source of the player’s stimulus and in Uncanny Valley, it might perhaps have been better to go for a design that included more expressive faces (in the vein of fellow low-res horror games Distraint and Lone Survivor) – the impact of a few scenes involving character interactions often feels mild or flat, mainly due to the game relying solely on text to convey emotion.
Conversely, the environmental design is quite good, with the game’s handful of locations providing a great backdrop for all the events and happenings. A series of small touches, such as the clever use of light and dark areas; the juxtaposition of the rural, primitive forests surrounding the much more high-tech facility and living quarters; and the claustrophobic feel of the second half of the game – these are all very well done and invoke a feeling of dread and unease that is often missing from its contemporaries. The game’s side-scrolling nature is also used to great effect, with a lot of the level design exploiting and being enhanced by the player’s limited viewpoint, which in a way reminded me of the much-beloved SNES horror game, Clock Tower (albeit being much slower paced).
Similarly, the audio design is (mostly) implemented very well – from the game’s (admittedly limited) soundtrack to the sound effects and ambient noises, there is little left to be desired from it all. While there are not a lot of audio cue variants, they are very effectively used in conveying whatever mood the current scene requires (such as a certain chase sequence you’ll expect to hear a lot in the final parts of the game, and which never ceased to startle me even when I was expecting it).
However, there is one major problem with Uncanny Valley that utterly destroyed the whole experience for me – its pacing. Pacing is, I’ve always felt, the most important part of a horror game. Proper pacing is what allows for the unease to build up, the incongruities to start adding up, the tension to mount – humans are, for the most part, designed to tense up and feel less and less at ease as time passes, while also acclimating to it if exposed for long enough. Therefore, a badly-paced game is one that fails to find the proper balance of exposure – it either delivers the horror “payoff” too soon or too late. In the former case, tension will not have built up sufficiently, leading to a much less potent horror payoff. In the latter case, the unease slowly becomes familiar to the player and thus destroys all tension as they eventually grow accustomed to their surroundings.
In Uncanny Valley’s case, the pace tends to be all over the place. The first half of the game is one long session of build-up with not payoff – by itself, way too long and failing to actually induce any lasting tension or unease. The latter half, on the other hand, is a continuous sequence of non-stop action and stealth set-pieces, which results in the player quickly “getting used” to the danger and ruining the tension potential for the most part. Exacerbating the issue further, Tom’s movement speed is way too slow (and while a sprint ability is included, it lasts for way too long to be actually useful), making any mistakes on the player’s part often their last and, owing to a perma-death mechanic tied to the game’s endings and which is only apparent at the game’s end areas, often leading to frustration and repetition.
On a separate subject, achievements: the game is mostly remarkable in that it requires a lot of playthroughs to complete, as most of them are tied to reaching specific endings – as mentioned above, the quasi-perma-death system used can complicate things, as the game is designed to delete the save file once any ending is reached (and with a few endings being tied to Tom dying, deaths often lead to a wiped save file and a need for starting from the very beginning). Thankfully the average playthrough will take less than a couple of hours (assuming a general familiarity with the game’s levels), but the aforementioned slow walking pace can make early parts feel like a chore to power through. The rest of the list is at least rounded out by more inventive achievements, such as discovering specific events or optional interactions – though the game seems to be a bit dodgy with achievement triggers, which once again only serves to highlight the problematic design choice of deleting a player’s save (something that I’m generally against, outside of specific genres such as roguelikes).
I feel that Uncanny Valley has a lot of untapped potential – the ideas, the mechanics, the audio designs are all solid, it’s mostly a matter of pacing and some specific design choices that make it all fall apart. Which is ultimately a shame – with a few more tweaks to the pacing, movement limitations and save game management, this could have been a quite memorable game. As it stands, it at least becomes an interesting example of how much influence pacing has over horror experiences – an example to avoid, perhaps, but still valuable as a postmortem.
Which games did you play in November? Got any backlog-related horror stories to share? Tips and tricks for keeping it in check? Share below in the comments section!
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