Lacuna (2021)

this game is a really good way of telling stories with a not bad story inside it. on balance, I suppose I'd prefer the reverse, but I'll take it!

in many ways, it's what I thought the blade runner game was gonna be. you know, from 1997? booted it up and was hype to see all these panels and tabs for logging your clues and suspects and evidence. was really looking forward to piecing things together and making theories. but actually the game just did all that for you. you don't do anything with the folders and charts of evidence, you just click shit to put it in there. cyberpunk pixel hunting with fully automated sleuthing.

lacuna is that if you used the panels to do detective work. tabbing back and forth between your conversation logs, your lists of evidence, your email history, news reports, grabbing factoids here and there to make deductions and submit your findings. what impressed me was how much this setup lends itself to handholding - relevant bits of news reports are highlighted, it is possible to do process of elimination on your theory sheet - but handholding is, in fact, quite rare. you have to make some deductions in this bitch. some educated motherfucking guesses. and, if you get it wrong, the game's gonna proceed with your wrong answer, and (allegedly) the plot is gonna diverge.

as a noir buff, I appreciate the presentation more than the actual writing. oh, there are a couple good observations - I remember an exchange with my partner where he tossed off some casual comment about human behavior that felt surprisingly subtle and poignant - but mostly this hardboiled detective is both too self-aware and too interested in spelling out the themes. some very blunt philosophy about nihilism crops up inelegantly in tense moments. a very "subtext is for cowards" game in places, which makes the 10% of the game that is gentle and subtle and well-observed all the stranger. but, seriously: the bits where you ride an elevator and the camera swings to the side to show the future metropolis, and the hardboiled narration kicks in, and the idle animations start up (or maybe you pace back and forth)... man that shit is good. the fact that you have to wait in real-time for your train to arrive, that a lot of walk-and-talks are directly-controlled, that you listen to a sting operation from an outpost and it takes a full 90 seconds of mundane chatter over the wire and you wonder if shit's gonna go south... it's really effective. love it.

and more political undertones about colonialism, with ethical quandaries pitting your professional loyalties, your personal relationships, and the greater good against each other, all with imperfect information so's you gotta guess. yeah, the plotting is not the best cyberpunk nor the best hardboiled mystery, but the execution makes up for a lot. it is good enough to make the suspense and the stress and the thoughtfulness land.

I've owned this for I dunno how long and I'm glad I finally sat down with it. good shit right here.

A short investigation and choices-matter visual novel set in a cyberpunk-inspired fictional (or I think it's fictional) universe. What I liked about right from the beginning is that you're not some jazzed up edgerunner with crazy cyber implants. I really like the show and expect I will LOVE CDPR's masterpiece once I get around to playing it, but it's kind of refreshing to just play a guy in a frumpy suit who smokes too much and lives in a small apartment with a pet iguana. Walking around the city, you get a taste of that kind of dystopia. There's also a definite human cost of corporate greed element to the whole story. But I liked that Neil Conrad, the protagonist, is just a normal person trying to live his life and do his job who gets caught up in a huge scheme.

The game starts out with being a pretty straightforward investigation-style point and click. I liked that it didn't rely on moon logic and it was really just a matter of digging through 4 or 5 sets of clues to deduce the right answer. But as it progresses, you have to choices and these choices have some very impactful consequences. The story that unfolds is really well done and is much bigger than the protagonist's role alone; I like that we're left to imagine those parts he wasn't connected to. It makes the import of his choices even bigger. I'm not sure if there is a "good" ending or not. I got one where Neil, at least, was generally happy.

Just played the prologue/demo. Promising game which could be something interesting if it wasn't for game's worst enemy: writing. The terrible hard-boiled/noir-esque dialogue has killed it to me, to deliver such dialogue one knows how to write it -for instance Sin City, which is sometimes as poetic as it can be absurdist- but if the average writing for average stuff is bad imagine if you try to deliver some "genre"-dialogue, that isn't a real term but hell.

For instance "so do you agree with the capitalist thought and personal gain//I don't want to discuss philosophical questions with you" that was actually a fragment of dialogue in the game, it made me cringe. Video game writing is the most underdeveloped element in the making of a game, the only exception to the rule that contains excellent and memorable dialogue is Vampire -The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Disco Elysium. The rest, even some that are really good, are nevertheless roller coasters regarding their quality.