First Impressions: Outlast (PC)

Outlast is a game that came out last September (2013) and that I purchased, I think, around December during a Steam Winter sale.  A while back after watching a fairly decent (not great, but not bad either) film on Netflix, I developed the odd urge to start this game up.  Conklederp also asked me if there was a game that I wanted to play, so there was that too. 

Outlast reminds me a lot of the Penumbra and Amnesia series in that the game is in first person, you are a man going into an unfamiliar location where there are things that can kill you and since you are unarmed, your only option is to run and hide when said aggressors decide that your death would make their day so much better.  The manipulation of objects is not as detailed as it is in either of the prior mentioned series as objects are immediately picked up and doors/drawers are either opened or closed, no slowly opening them just a little.  Either doors are slightly open, open all the way or slammed shut.  Yes, your only option while in a psychiatric hospital filled with a lot of murderous minds is to slam doors, even when you know you are supposed to be quiet or are attempting to hide from your pursuer.

The story so far, is that you are a reporter who was tipped off about all sorts of things going wrong/bad at this building that is/was a psychiatric hospital.  So being the wanna-be Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, you head to said hospital in your jeep armed with nothing but a video camera with night vision and two extra batteries that power said night vision.  Your one choice for when you run into hostiles is to run and hide and hope that the baddies were not close enough behind you to figure out that you happen to be hiding in either a storage locker or under a desk.  Thankfully said antagonists are not too bright (although they do seem to have reflective retinas) so when running into a room with say, two lockers, they might check one, grumble something then walk out of the room.  Or they will scour the room, eventually find you then start wailing away on your squishy body with a not-so-squishy crowbar.

One aspect of the game that is a bit odd is the video camera.  When it is up and you are filming, you have the chance of making observations in written form, but when the camera is not up, no notes will be taken.  This I did not find out for the first hour into the game, during which if there was enough light, I did not use the camera.  The main purpose of the camera is to use the night vision in dark areas, of which there are a lot.  The night vision is powered by a separate battery (as opposed to the infinite main battery of the camera) that has a life of two and-a-half minutes before you have to change the battery.  If the battery runs out, you have a limited night vision, only being able to see a couple of feet in front of you, as opposed to the, say, 15 to 20 feet with the night vision activated.  

The visual quality between having the camera up and not using the camera is very negligible.  And you are able to zoom in with the camera up, which is a nice added bonus when you do not want to be killed by whatever that thing way over on the other side of the room.  Why then is there the option to have the video camera down if there is no added benefit?  Just a thought.

Presently I am about 4 1/2 hours into the game and I am in an area where I have to avoid at least two violent inmates at either end of a building.  Both areas are dark (ie: pitch black without the night vision function activated) and I have six batteries in reserve, so I am not doing too poorly.  

I will say that about two hours into the game, the protagonist, one Mr. Miles Upsur finally came to the conclusion that I had within the first 30 minutes.

That.  Exactly that.  Mr. Miles decided to scribe this note shortly after being chased by two very large men who wanted to do all sorts of unspeakable things to his body and then having run into a guy strapped into a wheel chair yelling about something-or-other.

I am getting the feeling that I am about halfway through the game and there are maybe five more hours of gameplay left, which would be perfectly fine with me.  I do not know how long the game would be able to keep up its sense of fear and dread without becoming old and frustrating, what with the being killed every so often and all.  But in the meantime, I am having a lot of fun playing Outlast and there is the DLC Whistleblower which was released back in May of this year, so I will have that to look forward to once I finish the main campaign.

Here is to surviving that long.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Only The Good Die Young

Full Review: Penumbra: Overture (PC)

I just finished Penumbra: Overture and I really want to tell you the last scene/event and post a picture of it, but that would be giving away part of the story and I don't want to be that guy.  I will say that some may find the ending a little anti-climactic and unfulfilled, as in there is not a "true" ending, but the game pseudo-segue's into the next game in the series, Penumbra: Black Plague.  The game even says "Part I" when you load, so there shouldn't be too much of a surprise by the lack of closure.

STORY

The story is somewhat of a mystery and I mean that in both the sense that the game falls under the genre of Survival Horror Mystery, but also that you find out more about the story while you're playing it.  You start off the game with a prologue saying that you received a letter from your father, whom you thought was dead and you end up heading to Northern Greenland, taking a plain then freighter.  You get dropped off in the middle of nowhere, which apparently is where you want to go and after solving the problem of the frozen hatch, your first person dungeon crawl begins.

The game's story is fairly well hidden throughout the entirety of the game.  You find out bits of information as you run from dimly lit room through darkened hallway to well lit room.  Most of the information you find through bits of journals left behind and the occasional newspaper clipping.  I have absolutely no qualms with this method of story telling although I could see how someone else may not find all too fun.

GAMEPLAY

As previously mentioned, the game runs like an FPS without any emphasis on the Shooter part.  You do have some weapons such as a hammer and pickaxe, but it's incredibly hard to kill a starving feral wolf who's darting around you, taking bites out of your ankle, shin, calf, thigh, butt, arm, back and only after three bites do you "die."  

Being the case with most/all FPS's, I had to switch the mouse's y-axis to be inverted, which only became confusing on a couple of occasions.  While playing, if you want to manipulate anything, a hand icon appears over your normal simple looking cross hairs.  This hand uses the same controls as the camera.  However, if you take something out of your inventory and want to say, try and use your screwdriver on a screw, the y-axis reverts to standard, non-inverted.  This can be a bit disorienting if you were to have a giant spider coming at you.  (Thankfully there are no giant spiders, only jumping spiders the size of a Nerf football).

The game itself though is broken up into getting from Point A to Point B to Point C.  Wherein Point B and C you'll have to solve some type of puzzle.  Getting to Point B though can be difficult if you don't have a map drawn.  Luckily, as the area you're in was once a functioning mine, there are handy "You Are Here" maps every so-many yards.  I decided that I would camp out in front of a map with my flashlight illuminating the map and just draw it down in my handy-dandy notebook.  (I highly recommend keeping a notebook to write down maps and the occasional note).  I will say that I was probably a lot more conservative about using my flashlight than I would have been if I hadn't first played Amnesia.  As there were no sanity effects and constant fear of running out of fuel/power, I only had my flashlight on sparingly.  I also didn't use any of the flares and only in the final area did I break out my glow stick.  It's not that I liked seeing in the dark, I just kept thinking that I'd reach an area where I was blocked in and I would have no battery power left to spot potential danger or solve a puzzle

Some of the puzzles though were quite difficult and I had to revert to using either gamefaqs or youtube to find out what to do next.  Other sections were flat out difficult.  As in an area where I was crouched (so no sprinting) in a tunnel and had to make it past some spider eggs, knock some boulders out of the way with a pickaxe, enter a room then shove a boulder to cover up the hole leading back into the tunnel.  Do all of this before you were bitten 3-4 times by the spiders.  I don't know how many times I replayed trying to find my way through the tunnel without dying, and then trying to figure out how to close up the hole without dying (turns out piling up chairs and rocks isn't a good enough barricade against spiders).

I'll also briefly cover dying.  Dying was something that happened to me a lot while playing.  Granted I didn't do it intentionally, but I wasn't overly frightened by death either.  Definitely by the end of the game, it was more of an annoyance than anything else.  I would run down a hallway to try and avoid Wolf #1, only to run into Wolf #2 and in the process of avoiding that wolf, Wolf #1 would catch up and kill me.  Upon restarting, I would maybe wait another 10 seconds before running down the hall, just to see if the different location of the wolf would change my outcome.   The point is, I rarely used any of my healing pills and just went for death.  I could possibly see this as a failure, but I can't initially think of how to fix it.

MUSIC & SOUND

The music I enjoyed very much although most of it was ambient background sounds designed to unnerve you, which it did very well.  When there was impending doom though, the score really kicked up and got interesting, at least long enough to know that you were about to die.  The sound effects were also really well done.  There were multiple times where I could just faintly hear the growling of a wolf and knew that I'd either have to hide quickly or make a break for it and sprint to the next door down the hall and around the corner.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In short, I really liked this game and I feel like I've become a fan of Frictional Games.  There were some aspects that I didn't like, such as not caring about dying and some of the puzzles which had to be solved on the fly while being chased by something that could kill you was a bit frustrating.  It definitely had the feel of wanting to ask a friend how they made it past the noxious gas pits.  As a whole though, Penumbra: Overture had a solid 10 hours of gameplay with about an hour or so of frustrating gameplay.  So now I'm looking forward to delving into part II, Penumbra: Black Plague.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
We'll All Sleep Well Tonight

First Impressions: Penumbra Overture (PC)

Penumbra Overture is the first game in a trilogy from Frictional Games.  I previously reviewed their lastest release, Amnesia ~ Justine ~ which was a stand alone expansion for Amensia: The Dark Descent.  After I finished Amnesia, I looked up the company and found that they had released the Penumbra trilogy three years prior in 2007.  I only recently started playing at Conklederp's request, although it didn't take long for her to convince me.  Now on to the game itself, although I'm going to be making a lot of comparisons to Amnesia as that was the game from Frictional Games that I played first, so you'll have to bare with me on that front.

Having already played Amnesia, Penumbra Overture. felt very familiar.  They're both exploration games in and fps world.  Manipulating objects is also the same as in Amnesia, in that you move the cross hairs over a particular object such as a door or a chest and the cross hairs change to a hand.  By clicking on the object, your hand grasps the item and you're able to pick up, open, throw said item/object.  One big change I noticed with Penumbra Overture was that objects here seemed to have more weight than in Amnesia, which was odd considering that this game came first.  In Amnesia I could lift boxes and barrels, hurling them across the room as if I was throwing a baseball.  In Penumbra Overture, if I can throw a barrel, it's most likely because it's empty while I can only just lift a machine motor (and move slowly while doing so) because it's made out of dense materials.

There is another major departure between Penumbra Overture and Amnesia:

Yes, you are wielding a pickaxe.  Granted it's not the most graceful of wieldings, but it does the job when you come up against the stubborn boarded up door or air vent grate.  It's not as useful against feral wolves, but it has proved effective on at least one occasion.  Yes, you have physical weapons and there's more than one way of wielding them.  Let's stay with the pickaxe for the time being as it's still right there.  You're able to slash from upper right to lower left, back hand slash (upper left to lower right) and jab with the top part of the pickaxe.  This is done by holding the left mouse button and mimicking the motions you want to do.  Now, before you start thinking that by being armed with a pickaxe, you're a death dealing miner from hell.  As any normal person swinging a weapon at an attacking feral wolf, you're somewhat clumsy.  I don't feel that that's an error on the part of the programmers, but this isn't an fps action game, it's an fps exploration/adventure game and the safer thing to do, would be to either run away or hide.

Now hiding is a big part of this game, so big in fact that you have your own visual cues to let you know how well you're hiding.  "Hiding" is activated whenever you crouch.  When you stop moving, a thin blue "fuzz" circles the screen, which lets you know that you're kind of hiding but when the screen looks like this:

(by "this" I mean when the foreground is all blue and saturated), you know you're well hidden.  Bare in mind, that doesn't mean you're invisible.  If a wolf were to come around that far corner, it would be far less likely to see/react to me than if I were standing.  If a wolf came around that nearby corner, it would spot me, stop, growl, back up, then charge and kill me in three bites.

To answer that question, yes, you do have life, although it's a slightly arbitrary health meter.  You have a outline of your body standing, highlighted in green as well as a textual description such as, "I'm as fit as can be expected."  Health can be regained by either staying put for a short while or by taking pain killers.  The only problem with this approach, is that in the amount of time it takes to open up your inventory (which doesn't pause the game mind you), and take the pills, you could almost, just as easily find a corner to duck into until your health reaches full.  As in Amnesia, death has become more of an annoyance than something that I fear.

Death now brings me to saving.  Until I began writing this, I was not sure at all about what/where the save spots in the game where.  I knew that the game kept a number of auto saves, usually when you go through a door that requires the loading screen, but an obvious place to save?  I figured they didn't exist.  It turns out that whenever you encounter an odd, creepy looking lantern that seems like it's burrowing into your soul/subconscious, the game saves.  There's no hitting "escape" then clicking "save & exit," which to some extent makes me fear for wondering when I'll come to the next transition door.  It does feel a bit odd though having/needing to go to the "Auto Saves" file to find where I want the game to load from.

One really cool thing that I've been doing while playing is keeping a notebook.  The character in the game has a notebook and I figured, why shouldn't I?  It has come in pretty handy as well.  Now instead of going to the in-game notebook to look at the page with the Morse Code cipher to figure out what the pass code is for the key pad on the other side of the area, I can just look at my own notes while listening to the radio transmission and write down the sequence.  That way when I go to the keypad, I'll know exactly what to press.  It's also been very handy for making maps.  There are in-game maps, but those are in the form of a map being on the wall of the mine and you looking at it.  You can't take it with you, so I thought it best to carry one with me.

Now, I just realized that I haven't said anything about the story and that's mainly because I'm still trying to figure out what the story is.  Similar to Amnesia in that I only was able to put all the little pieces together near the end of the game, I feel like Penumbra Overture will operate in a very similar manner.  This game also involves a lot of reading, either from notes, diary entries and newspaper clippings from topics ranging from Inuit culture, Greenland mythology, to the ravings of a man eating spiders.  It's all about creating the world and mood.

In closing, Penumbra Overture is a very creepy, atmospheric survival horror game where you go to open a door, and shit like this happens:

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

We're Gunna Need a Bigger Boat

The Red Pill? The Blue Pill?

Bottle Sprite ripped by A.J. Nitro.  Everything else from some other source.

Believe it or not, The Matrix became an angsty teenager this year, but I digress even before I able to start.  But let's continue.  I actually had to look up which pill was the one that put you back in the Matrix and which was the one that brought you out of it.  There might be some symbolic meaning behind the specific color choices, red=freedom & blue=ignorance, but if there is, I don't know about it.  But lets stay with that blue pill for a while.  Ignorance and not knowing are the reasons for this post today and hold onto that thought.

For the past week or two, I've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.  The week of Halloween, Steam was having a sale on a lot of their "scary" and Halloween-esque games so I decided to take advantage and pick up some AAA titles that I never played due to not having the appropriate system (Xbox 360 or a gaming computer).  However, when a game like Left 4 Dead 2 is looking at you with that blank hungry stare and it has a $4.99 sticker on it's forehead, I couldn't pass it up.  I also picked up the Penumbra collection, which consists of the three games in the Penumbra series (Overture, Black Plague, and Requiem).  Wait, you've never heard of Penumbra?  There's the French gothic metal band Penumbra, but we're referring to the game by Frictional Games, the people who brought us Amnesia: The Dark Descent and ~Justine~.  

Never having played any of the games in the Left 4 Dead series, you could look up a trailer and get a gist for what the game is about:

However, if you watch the trailer for Penumbra - Overture: 

You still don't know what the game is about.

With the Left 4 Dead games, you know exactly what you're getting.  I have only a vague idea with Penumbra, and that's something that I really like.  I've played about an hour and-a-half and I still couldn't tell you what the story is aside from what I've experienced.  But don't get me wrong, having a straight forward story that you know about before even starting the game isn't a bad thing and sometimes it's just refreshing to land in a world and go from Point A to Point B and kill as many zombies as you can without dying.  It's also very refreshing to play a game that you know absolutely nothing about.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian