Elf Sternberg

I've been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn again, and I've come to the conclusion that the greatest failure in writing of the series is the relationship between Laulai of the Banuk and the punk band Concrete Beach Party.

Warning: if you haven't played the game, there are some minor spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds in here.

When you decide to play The Frozen Wilds, one of the missions you can find and complete is named Waterlogged. In this mission you meet the musician Laulai, who loves to "play" the vast pipes underneath The Yellowstone Dam's drainage basin. Using massive drumsticks reminiscent of Taiko drums, her playing could be heard for kilometers in every direction. But the location where she played has been flooded, and you have to find out why and see if you can drain it and give her access to her instrument again.

There's a lot of adventuring that goes on, but eventually you succeed. Along the way, this being Horizon Zero Dawn, you find a lot of audio recordings of two people from the ancient days: Shelly & Laura. They were part of a team, originally a large team, that maintained and administered the dam. As time went on and automation came to Yellowstone, the size of their team dropped to ten, then five, and then finally two. For a year, Shelly and Laura maintained the dam themselves. Laura had an electric guitar, and Shelly figured out that if they drained the receiving pool the pipes at one end had an amazing sound quality. They created a band, "Concrete Beach Party," and recorded a single song, "The Last Two Girls On Earth."

And then Ted Faro and one of his corporate arms took their jobs away, breaking them up and sending them to opposite ends of the Earth before the robots came and ate them. Or they killed themselves... because those were the only two options for humanity in 2064. Laura and Shelly both loved the other, best friends until the end.

The greatest writing failure in Horizon Zero Dawn is that literally seconds after Laulai thanks Aloy for saving her instruments and gives a short speech about how badly she wants her music to connect her to her ancestors, Aloy finds the one and only recording of "The Last Two Girls On Earth" and does not go back and play the song for Laulai.

Laulai discovered what Shelly had discovered, that the pipes in the overflow basin were an amazing percussion instrument in their own right. Aloy has a recording of Shelly using those pipes in the coherent, rhythmic, Western way a punk band would use them. Aloy knows that Laulai is desperate for connection with anyone else who treated these pipes that way, and she knows that Shelly was desperate for some kind of closure, some sense that someone, anyone, other than she and Laura had ever heard or appreciated Concrete Beach Party.

And yet the writing in the story neglects all of that. It drops it as irrelevant, an uninteresting component of the game avatar's accrual of experience points. It never gives anyone in this sequence the closure they deserve.

One of the things that I treasure most in playing a video game is having someone interesting to hang out with. Give me a reason to like them, let them "save the cat" to use a Hollywood expression. Elizabeth from Bioshock is pretty canon, but so are a lot of characters. Bloodrayne, at least in the original series, with her mixture of murderous sexiness and ingenue bewilderment, was fun to hang out with. Aloy is... usually... worth hanging out with, but this sequence filled me with a great sense of disappointment. The writers missed a major aspect of her character with this broken opportunity, and it's a shame it can't be fixed.

Singularity from Raven and Activision, is a fairly ordinary first-person that takes a lot of its flavor from classic titles like Bioshock and Half-Life 2. It clearly falls into the "me too!" category of development, which is pretty much where Raven always falls; there's a reason why it's always getting the follow-on missions, which are always a little flatter than the original. Here, they're trying to do something original, and the results are mixed.

First, the art, music, and basic plot are all top-notch. You're a US Navy Seal sent to the Russian island of Kortuga, where a tragic nuclear accident happened in 1960 during the height of Soviet/US tensions. There, you discover that the reactor wasn't nuclear, but something made with E99, the phlebotinum of the story that ultimately leads you to acquiring super powers with which to fight off the ever-increasingly bad guys. As you make your way across Kortuga from the civilian docs at one end to the reactor at the other, the effects of E99 become more and more visible as you fight off waves of zombies, monsters, mutated vegetation, and a secret Russian combat team dedicated to rebooting the great Soviet conquest of the world. The weird, glowy plantlife is heavily Half-Life influenced. There are three possible endings, but only you last action picks which final cutscene you see, so it's not like Bioshock in that regard.

The art is fantastic; a lot of effort went into making Kortuga look and feel realistic. Abandonment and decay are the word of the day; this island hasn't seen human habitation in five decades, after all. Notes, tape recordings, and film strips tell the story of Kortuga and its inhabitants, the kind of parallel storytelling mechanism found in Bioshock and Doom 3, where the place clearly had "a life" before you got there. Some of the scenes create genuine pathos. (If everything is falling apart, how to the tape recordings and film strips even work? Ah, you see, there's actually a plot point to explain that!)

There is some great dialogue, although as Captain Renko you only get one line yourself. You have a series of allies, although the role of one, Katherine, is poorly explained. She's not presented as either eye candy or love interest, but her own motivations aren't clear enough to justify her presence. Devin, Boraslov, and Demichev all have clear reasons for being on Kortuga.

The one biggest complaint I have about the game is the railing. There are places you simply can't jump to or walk toward because, well, because the developers didn't finish developing anything past that point. Modern games like Half Life 2 and Bioshock allow you to go back and recover resources sometimes, but Singularity is old-school: when you enter a zone, the door slams shut behind you, even if the place is powered down! There is only one way to go: forward. You're having what the developers describe as "a guided experience," rather than an open world.

The combat is fairly straightforward and familiar to anyone who's played first person shooters. There are a few boss battle set pieces, most of which are well done. Your powers have a specific theme for which telekinesis doesn't fit at all, but telekinesis becomes one of your most important powers.

Singularity was worth the $4.99 I paid for it used. I don't know that I'd have bought it new. It was worth every penny, and every hour of play, but I probably won't play it twice.

Portal 2 is pretty much as good as everyone is saying it is.

Portal 2, part of the Half Life universe, and the sequel to Portal, is set in the underground testing facility of Aperture Science. You, a young woman named Chelle, gifted with an ability to fall from incredible heights unharmed (as well as smacking into walls) and rapid healing from bullets and lasers, are the plaything of GlaDOS, a crazed AI who is using you as a "test subject" to determine the usefulness of the Portal Gun, a device which can tear two holes in the fabric of space/time, through which your character can fly/jump/walk to get to distant positions. Portals can only be made on reasonably flat surfaces. Each round consists of a series of puzzles which involves figuring out where to place portals in order to reach your intended destination.

The original game consisted of twenty such deliberate tests, followed by an escape from GlaDOS's sadistic test facility and an equally long and difficult trip through the Aperture Science laboratories to reach GlaDOS and shut her down.

Portal 2 picks up somewhat after that. You're Chelle again, and GlaDOS is back, and there are three times as many puzzles as last time. Not all of them belong to GlaDOS, though; you find out that testing is in the blood of Aperture Science, and that tests like the ones GlaDOS is putting you through have been a staple of the business since Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science, founded the business in 1949. The tests are hard, the revelations surprising, and the commentary, delivered by a variety of ancient recorded messages and by the two AIs (the sadistic GlaDOS and the ridiculous Wheatley) absolutely hilarious.

There is also a mystery: Who are you? ( Spoilers. )

I also completed all of the single-player achievments. Some of these constitute mini-games in their own right, such as "Smash every video monitor in the fifth set of test chambers." It's a different set of requirements to use the equipment in the room to shoot, fry, or crash something into a monitor, than it is to press the buttons, re-arrange the furniture, and power on the laser stations needed to open the EXIT door, and they are quite a challenge. "Overclocker" (complete a certain very hard room in under 70 seconds) was a nightmare. I also found several easter eggs: rat man lairs, the Secret Society of Opera-Loving Gun Turrets, and (yes) ( Half-Life 2 Secret ).

A hint: start a new game. During the "calisthenics portion of your assessment," look at the painting. Then, after the wake-up, look at the painting a second time. That's your first clue, and it is to your last act.

Portal 2 successfully takes Portal, a throwaway amusement put together by a very small team at Valve, and makes it a first-class game with more surrealism, more fun, and more sadism than the original. It incorporates itself completely into the Half-Life universe, while adding its own collection of mysteries. Both the script writer and the puzzle masters deserve the accolades: Portal 2 is a first-person shooter where you never get to shoot anything, but instead must solve fiendishly difficult puzzles, all the while uncovering the deep weirdness of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson and his unfortunate crew. It is that effective narrative that makes it worth your time.

The thing about Bioshock II, as you're going along, is that it feels much more like set pieces. In the original, there were transitions from one level to the next, sure, and they were endpieced with bathysphere trips, but you got the sense that you could always go back, could always travel anywhere in the bathysphere network that you'd already been. In II, the train goes in one direction, and at every stop there's a path on the map indicating your progress. Even when you step out into the ocean (an interesting innovation, I will admit, especially the first time!), you inevitably end up back at a train station. It feels much more like scenes in search of a story, whereas in the original it was closer to a story in search of scenes.

That said, the seventh level of Bioshock II is finally getting around to telling a story. It's been building slowly, fitfully, and not with the linear progression and underlying sinister themes of the original. Level 6, "Dionysus Garden", was especally egregious in a "tell, don't show" kind of way, but Level 7, "Fontaine Futures", is doing a much better job.

There is some smarts behind Bioshock II. You can see how much better "Pauper's Drop" and "The Atlantic Express" could have been if some consistency of vision were applied to Eleanor and Sophia's story. But those levels were about plot tokens, not about the story itself.

I still have no idea who I am, though. Some hints are: I'm a clone of Jack Ryan, I'm Andrew Ryan, I'm Diane McClintoch. All three are possible, since the vita-chambers works for me.

Well, we'll see, won't we?