I know what you're thinking: "Here comes that Austin, taking every opportunity he can to remind us that Galak-Z seems like a cool thing." Well, listen, that's only part of the story today. A key part, yes, but only part.
In a blog post today, Sony announced the lineup of the company's annual summertime promotion, PlayStation Store PLAY. The collection includes Journey's new PS4 release, N++, GALAK-Z, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. And believe it or not, I'm excited about each of these. Check out their release dates, prices, and a few thoughts about them below.
07/21 - Journey - PS3/PS4 Cross-buy - PS+ Pre-Order Price: $11.99 - Regular Price: $14.99
So.
Confession time.
I've never actually played through Journey. But I like Journey a whole bunch more than someone who hasn't played it has any right to.
The year Journey came out I took my PS3 over to a friend's place so that I could experience it for the first time along with her. I played around in the first area a little before handing the controller over to her, because I realized I was more interested in watching Journey than playing it. So I sat back and watched, and that was fun and moving and all of those other superlatives people use when describing One's First Journey Experience. I don't say it like that to diminish the experience. It really was all those things. But the next night, something even better happened that makes my first experience really pale in comparison.
The thing is, we convinced my friend's mom to sit down and play through Journey. And that was absolutely magical. My friend's mother plays a few games here and there, but the PS3 controller was a little awkward in her hands at first. And Journey offered very little guidance in the way of what to do or where to go. But over the course of the game, she became more and more familiar with the controls, and increasingly enamored of the game's aesthetic and emotional core. And most importantly, about an hour into playing: She met a friend.
While most people run into a handful of players during their time with Journey, my friend's mom ran into only one: A pilgrim with a white robe, signifying that the player had collected all of the hidden scarf pieces throughout the game. He was her loyal guide for nearly the entire game, demonstrating how to clear obstacles and avoid dangers with patience and care. He moved with precision and joy, as if every little jump was a celebration.
And I say "he" here not because I'm assuming his gender. In the post-game credits sequence, his user name was displayed, and when I looked up that name so that I could send him a virtual high-five, I found that he was a man in his 70s who belonged to a group of devout Journey players who spent their time as virtual sherpas. Every weekend, this group of experts would log on and find new players to guide along in their travels, and then these guides would write about their experiences and share them with each other.
It's like something out of a William Gibson novel. An elite septuagenarian guides neophytes through his favorite virtual world. What at thing, right?
Since the game is cross-buy, any player who has already purchased a PS3 copy will also have access to it on PS4, so I hope some of these Journey experts come back to play on PS4 this summer.
07/28 - N++ - PS4 - PS+ Pre-Order Price: $15.99 - Regular Price: $19.99
N+ was one of the first title that taught me that it was okay to enjoy failing in a game. Before I'd touched Super Meat Boy or Demon's Souls, before Shiren the Wanderer had converted me to the Church of the Roguelike, there was N+. And now there's going to be N++.
For the uninitiated, the N games are precision platformers, tasking you with collecting little gems, activating switches, and escaping levels while a collection of turrets, drones, spikes, and other death-dealing mechanisms try to murder you. Like Journey, the N series has a very distinct, almost floaty playfeel. You'll gracefully leap off of a ramp, bounce off the far wall, collect a few gems and then get absolutely riddled with bullets from that turret you'd forgotten about. It's all very graceful until your abstract little ninja gets torn apart.
We talk a lot about the way games can be escape routes from our daily grind, about how their power fantasies can offer us the one chunk of the day that we don't feel shitty about our personal shortcomings. But N+ did something else for me: Instead of just distract me from my failings (and let me tell you, my life was a damnable mess when it came out), N+ forced me to confront failure over and over and over again until I didn't feel so bad about the prospect. I've written before about my video game perfectionism, and N+ was one of the games that allowed me to get over that. Help a man to escape failure, he'll feel less shitty for a day; Teach a man to confront it and...
I chipped away at N+ for years. Sometimes, when I was already feeling like a fuck up about a bunch of vague and hard to understand life problems, I'd sit down in front of N+ just so I could work out those negative feelings on something that I knew was absolutely, positively tuned to make me fail. Somehow that helped.
Anyway, N++ looks really colorful and I bet it will have a dope soundtrack, too. If you've never played a game in the series, well, N is available online for free.
08/04 - GALAK-Z - PS4 - PS+ Pre-Order Price: $15.99 - Regular Price: $19.99
GALAK-Z is yet another game in this collection that has a very particular feeling of movement and control.
Now everyone sit down while I relay an important life story about how 70s and 80s anime helped me to understand humanity's relationship to technology. Nah, just fucking with you.
GALAK-Z has:
Spaceships.
Mecha.
Asteroid Belts.
Intergalactic Empires.
Itano Circus Missile Barrages.
Anime faces.
That's the stuff.
From the limited time I spent with it at E3, it seems like GALAK-Z does a bunch right. Flying the ship around, tricking enemies into ambushes, and letting fly with dozens of missiles at once--it all feels great. The game is split into "episodes" set inside of "seasons," similar to how there were levels spread out across different environments in Spelunky.
In case you couldn't tell, I'm anxious to get my hands on this one. One sad thing I will mention, though, is that developer 17-Bit has confirmed that we won't be seeing GALAK-Z on the Vita. I understand the realities of these things, I do, but I bought my Vita specifically hoping to play this game on it. Oh well.
(And hey, for the record, I do have some thoughts about our cultural fantasies of spaceships and giant robots and technofetishism and if you'd like to listen to my tabletop game podcast Friends at the Table you could hear me talk abou- wait wait wait where are you going?)
08/11 - Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - PS4 - PS+ Pre-Order Price: $15.99 - Regular Price: $19.99
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is the latest from The Chinese Room, the team which previously worked on Dear Esther (the game that managed to turn "walking simulator" into a compliment) and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (which wasn't as horrific as the first game in the Amnesia series, but explored some political and philosophical ideas that were pretty interesting). Because of that, I knew that whatever this studio was going to work on next would be interesting, and I promised I wouldn't watch any trailers.
It turns out I'm really bad at keeping promises to myself. On the plus side, I like what I've seen.
One of the game's trailers featured a pair of British ghosts (maybe?) apologizing to each other in a ruined living room. I immediately wanna know more about what's going on here. I love seeing mundane spaces rendered in high detail, and then put on tilt by some light supernatural element.
What more can I say? I'm just a sucker for that sorta thing. That's just who I am. I won't apologize for it. As Shawn Carter says, either love me or leave me alone.
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I'm trying to think of the last summer digital games promotion that had me this excited. Last year's PLAY sale was solid, but I wasn't really anticipating those games so much as I was taken by surprise by their quality. Maybe Xbox's Summer of Arcade 2009? Hrm... Something to think on.
In any case, I'm probably going to pick up all of these. How about you?