I did it. I finally finished Assassin's Creed: Valhalla! I'll probably come back later in the summer though, to mop up the side stuff and play the Siege of Paris DLC that's gonna be releasing somewhere around that time. I kept picking at Persona 5 Strikers as well, and I'm still not feeling that too much. But I also played some smaller-scale games that I enjoyed.

Silicon Dreams

It’s a testament to the writing of the team at Clockwork Bird, which I believe consists of 2 people, that someone who is normally as impatient as me had no issue sitting through what was basically 5 hours of constant streams of text.

I wasn’t familiar with the studio’s prior work (including games like Spinnortality, a cyberpunk management sim) but a stray article that I happened to skim through caught my eye, likening this game somewhat to Papers, Please and Blade Runner. The comparison is not entirely inappropriate.

In Silicon Dreams, the main gameplay loop is that you start off at your desk getting ready to interview a subject. Sometimes there’s evidence to read through before establishing a link to your subject. There’s a distant feeling to these interviews. The subjects don’t sit in front of you, in your cushy office with a view of a nice holographic looking tree. They’re sitting in a dark, industrial looking interrogation room that you have the power to manipulate. You can restrain them in their chair and affect the lighting to attempt to elicit certain emotional responses. Additionally, there is no voice acting and the soundtrack is very airy and sparse, leaving the focus squarely on the interview process.

Well. I say interview, but it’s really more a series of interrogations. The subjects (android and human alike) are almost always suspected of something, and it’s your job to get to the details. I think. This game features many branching paths, and it seems like there’s a lot of ways you could go about playing this. Do you want to be a company android solely looking out for the interests of Kronos, the big faceless corporation that manufactures basically all of the bots? Or do you want to sympathize with the revolution that is looking out for the interests of the androids, championing freedom?

I chose to play my android as a company bot through and through, always having the interests of my employer as my priority. That led to some questionable moral choices - but then again, the character you play as is an android specifically manufactured for the purpose of interrogating and identifying deviant androids. I realize that I’m basically just laying out what this game is, but seeing it have so few reviews on steam, I figured it can’t hurt to describe it and sing its praises a bit, ‘cause I definitely feel like this should be on more people’s radar.

As I said earlier, the writing is stellar. Which is good, because so much of the game relies on the written word. The music is just kind of there, more to set a mood than to inspire. The UI is both functional and sleek-looking, and given the studio’s size I’m not surprised to see the game doesn’t have voice acting. There is such a rich world here, and I genuinely hope we get to see Clockwork Bird return to this in either a sequel or a new game set in the same universe because I thoroughly enjoyed Silicon Dreams.

Batman: The Telltale Series

It’s been roughly 5 years since I last played a Telltale game. I’ve played most of the games they released during their heyday of adapting popular franchises into their signature style of game, but somewhere around 2016 is where I kind of dropped off. They started releasing a whole bunch of games quickly, which made it obvious just how much their games were following a template. Don’t get me wrong, their template is a good one, I just had too much of it too quickly. Returning after 5 years though lets you see it in a fresh light and appreciate it in a new way.

Batman has become well-trodden ground in the last 12 years, kicking off with the excellent Arkham Asylum. What Telltale has managed to do here though is to spin these well known characters in a somewhat different way, which makes the story as a whole unpredictable - not something you expect in a franchise like Batman. The story starts off as a political story where Gotham’s vote for the next mayor is imminent. Bruce Wayne is backing and funding Harvey Dent, squaring up against current mayor Hamilton Hill. It doesn’t take long for the story’s scope to increase, eventually encompassing many beloved characters like Catwoman, Penguin and Joker and even a new one in Lady Arkham. The story has some rough patches in terms of pacing, where things kind of slow down unnecessarily, but overall I really enjoyed this rendition of Gotham and its inhabitants. The new spin on the Wayne family’s backstory was also a really interesting take on Batman’s origins.

Gameplay-wise, it’s exactly what you expect out of a Telltale game. Conversation options with a timer, some (extremely) light adventure game scenes where you walk around a small area and inspect things in your surroundings and combat sequences of the quick time event variety. QTEs have had their fair share of critics, but I feel like it serves its purpose. It lets the combat sequences be more heavily tailored to each unique situation, and Telltale did a good job of directing these scenes.

Telltale also has a very distinct art style for their adventure games (I hesitate to call them this, I feel like “Telltale game” is a genre of its own at this point), but the comic book nature of this franchise lends itself really well to this sort of look. Other than some characters and a few animations looking a bit stilted, the game looks really good.

Overall, I remained invested in the story and enjoyed it. The sequel, Batman: The Enemy Within, wasn’t really on my radar before now but I might pick it up, because I thought this fusion of Batman and Telltale worked well.