The Thaumaturge

Earlier in the month I reviewed a Polish adventure game with RPG elements and a sci-fi setting 100 years in the future, so this time I thought I’d shake things up by writing about a Polish adventure game with RPG elements and a historical fantasy setting 100 years in the past.

Wictor (pronounced “Victor”) Szulski is the titular Thaumaturge, a person born with the special ability to wield magical powers through a connection to a demon known as a salutor. Wictor is drawn to his hometown of Warsaw after the death of his father, bringing him within the crossroads of various historical forces as well as a blood vendetta involving his family.

The Thaumaturge is fun, sweeping you into the world of early 20th-century Warsaw while wearing the pride and love for its Polish heritage on its sleeve, yet ultimately you do little more than run around Warsaw and then watch an ending cutscene; by constraining itself to historical fiction, The Thaumaturge doesn’t give its plot enough space to do anything, leaving what should be a story-based game feeling like it doesn’t really have one.

Gamedec

As it says in the blog description, I’m just a guy who likes mysteries, games, and mystery games. So you’d think Gamedec, a mystery game about mysteries in games, would be right up my alley, but there are just too many rough edges for me to recommend it. I wish I could, and the pieces are there, but they just clash with each other in a way that prevents the game from coming together as a cohesive whole.

Those Who Submerge Like the Water Spirit / 水魑の如き沈むもの

And so one we come once again to a spooky murder mystery with Genya Toujou. I find it funny how for both series I review on a set schedule—this and Lychee Kamiki—both series ended up with a snake-themed entry during the Year of the Snake. Coincidence, or something more...?

(Alright, so as far as the Chinese zodiac is concerned, the “water spirit” corresponds more to the dragon rather than the snake, so hopefully the previous paragraph wasn’t blasphemy. But still a funny pattern!)

The Perfect Outsider / 有限と微小のパン

They say don’t meet your heroes. Maybe that applies to books, too.

I always knew I’d read The Perfect Outsider, the finale to Hiroshi Mori’s S&M Series. Well, “always” is a bit of an overstatement. After I finished The Perfect Insider, the first book in the series, I knew I’d read The Perfect Outsider. I wasn’t sure about the intervening books, but the next two passed my test, so I dutifully proceeded through the series until we arrived here, and… I wouldn’t say I wish I hadn’t, but it was certainly a disappointing ending. For most of the book I thought it was fun and plot-focused with an interesting scenario, but Mori’s bad habits started creeping up again in the final third until the book culminated in an anti-climax letdown.

As a warning, the premise of The Perfect Outsider (and thus this review) has general spoilers for The Perfect Insider. I think it’s a bit of an “open secret” if you look at Mori’s works, but you’ve been warned!

The Poisoned Chocolates Case

The Poisoned Chocolates Case is a fun trick novel by Anthony Berkeley. The premise is simple: the six members of a club called the Crimes Circle (a bit like the real life Detection Club) decide to investigate a real murder, and each present their theory in turn. Naturally, each member comes to a different conclusion, and each member’s theory seems to disprove the previous member’s. The Poisoned Chocolates Case is a wonderful examination of how shaky detective novel solutions can truly be, in the vein of the Late Queen Problem.

One Outs / ワンナウツ

If it isn’t already obvious from the blog, I’m a nerd. I don’t care for sports. So if you haven’t heard about One Outs before, it might seem odd that I watched (and loved!) a baseball anime, but One Outs isn’t really about baseball. It’s a psychological/gaming anime right up there with the best of them, and it just so happens that it’s about baseball rather than a series of bespoke games.

Crystal Pyramid / 水晶のピラミッド

Crystal Pyramid is a grand, larger-than-life mystery that is perhaps a bit too grand and larger-than-life. Souji Shimada’s recurring detective Kiyoshi Mitarai investigates a murder that occurred at a full-scale recreation of the Great Pyramid of Giza on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and this mystery works really well, but there’s a lot of extraneous flak that comes with it.

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative / AI：ソムニウムファイル ニルヴァーナ イニシアチブ

When I first finished AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, my feelings were a lot more positive than those for its predecessor, AI: The Somnium Files, which is admittedly not a high bar. (Boy are those names a mouthful.) But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that pretty much no individual component of NI was better than TSF… except for the fact that the main characters weren’t absolutely insufferable. So NI may not be more well-crafted than TSF, but the fact that we don’t play as Date still makes it way better in my book.

Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

Icewind Dale is the final game created in the Infinity Engine using Dungeons & Dragons 2e rules, after Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. Despite being made after those games, it doesn’t stack up to any of them. Baldur’s Gate provided a balanced experience and Planescape: Torment focused heavily on story. Icewind Dale, on the other hand, is a combat slog, and that descriptor should tell you what I think of it.

Numerical Models / 数奇にして模型

Numerical Models is the penultimate entry in Hiroshi Mori’s S&M series and features a model (person) murdered at a model (toy) convention, but unfortunately falls quite short of being a model (paragon) murder mystery.

Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition

While I enjoyed Baldur’s Gate I & II and understood why they made a big splash when released, they were notably dated and I didn’t think they rose to the level of a masterpiece. Planescape: Torment, the next game developed in the same Infinity Engine, is a masterpiece. It’s also notably dated and far from perfect, but it explores weird, interesting and unique ideas with intelligence and well-crafted writing.

Baldur's Gate (I & II)

In discussions of CRPGs, Baldur’s Gate is often held up as the holy grail. It was celebrated by its fans for being expansive and deep, and maintained a dedicated fanbase through its modding community. Release of the Enhanced Editions in 2013 helped maintain modern interest, and Baldur’s Gate 3 proved to be a massive hit. By how well do the original games hold up now, especially without any nostalgia to view the games through?

Murder in the Crimson Manor / 紅蓮館の殺人

Murder in the Crimson Manor is lit. Actually, I think it’s just okay, but “Murder in the Crimson Manor is lit” seemed like a snappier opening, and obliques references the massive fire that occurs in the story. It’s competently plotted, has a decent premise, and employs some fun tropes… but these various elements don’t reinforce each other, and there was nothing that wowed me. So while I liked Murder in the Crimson Manor, my feelings are admittedly lukewarm.

The Surge

The Surge is a sci-fi horror Souls-like that does everything competently but not memorably. The game takes place several decades in the future when Earth’s atmosphere has gotten too polluted to support life, but a company called Creo has developed several marvelous technologies in response, including Resolve, which is able to cleanse the atmosphere, and exo-rigs, which are basically personal mecha suits that can enhance a person’s strength, agility and stamina.

We play as Warren, a wheelchair-bound man and new Creo employee. He goes through the process of receiving an exo-rig (which involves having the suit grafted onto him without anesthetic in an absolutely brutal cutscene), and when he wakes, the Creo facility is a wreck, and the other employees appear to have essentially become zombies that attack everything on sight. Warren needs to fight his way through and out of the Creo facility and discover what caused all the mayhem.

Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest

The only reason I bought Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest is because it’s by the same people that made Legend of Grimrock. (I’d do anything for those guys.) Druidstone is not Grimrock—which I knew going in. It’s a puzzly tactical RPG that takes place in a Tolkienesque fantasy forest; a competent-built challenge with a fun aesthetic.

Salt and Sanctuary

If I told you to image a 2D version of Dark Souls, you’d probably come up with something extremely close to Salt and Sanctuary. It’s hard to give a more concise summary of Salt and Sanctuary, because “2D Dark Souls” really sums it up. But what makes Salt and Sanctuary special is that it isn’t just Dark Souls flattened into two dimensions, but a conscious conversion to take advantage of the changed context while maintaining the spirit of Dark Souls.

The Quarry

I hope you didn’t think I was done with Supermassive Games just because I finished reviewing The Dark Pictures Anthology! Just like any good horror movie monster, just when you think it’s over we’re coming back for one final scare.

The Quarry is another narrative horror game from Supermassive, in the same vein as previous entries but a bit closer to Until Dawn than Dark Pictures in that it’s longer, has a larger cast, and focuses on single-player rather than co-op. The game is fine at what it does, but misses some opportunities, and in particular how difficult it is to replay the game and explore other choices.

Switch Back / 今はもうない

The S&M series has always had a lot of character work and philosophical tangents, and while they sometimes felt a bit overbearing, they never intruded on the mystery plot too much. But in Switch Back it feels like Mori has really drank his own Kool-Aid. I don’t know if Switch Back is my least favorite S&M book, but it’s definitely in the bottom tier. While the mystery plot isn’t bad, it’s incredibly bare, leaving the rest of the page count to be filled by awful character work.

The Devil in Me

The Devil in Me is the grand finale to “season one” of The Dark Pictures Anthology. While it’s larger in scope than the previous games and unquestionably boasts the greatest technical leap in the series, it feels like that came at the expense of the story. That doesn’t mean it was bad, because it wasn’t. There’s very little in the game that I would call bad, but also very little I’d call great. It’s a decent entry in the series, but the high point of season one remains House of Ashes.

The Locked Rooms of the Twin Snakes / 双蛇密室

The Locked Rooms of the Twin Snakes is the fourth book in the Lychee Kamiki series starring the titular high school prostitute detective, and I think it’s the perfect entry to read in the Year of the Snake. The book explores the past of Hiroshige Aikawa, a recurring character from the previous books that’s a policeman and one of Lychee’s clients. Other than the hardcore sex scenes, this book provides basically exactly what I’m looking for, with a wild but well-clued solution and a streamlined investigation with basically no fat to cut.

House of Ashes

House of Ashes is the third game in the The Dark Pictures Anthology, after Medan of Medan and Little Hope. The first two games were fun but flawed, and the premise of House of Ashes seemed a bit lackluster… but it ended up being the strongest game so far, showing that Supermassive is not content to rest on its laurels and is aiming to improve with each iteration of the series.

The game takes place in Iraq in 2003, near the beginning of the US occupation shortly after Saddam Hussein was deposed. We (mostly) play as a group of US military operatives searching for WMDs. However, during a skirmish with some Iraqi soldiers in a small village, a chasm in the ground opens up, causing members from both sides to fall into the ruins of a long-forgotten Sumerian temple. The former enemies will need to learn to work together to overcome the horrors of the ruins if they want to have any hope of returning to the surface....

The Tragedy of 1 / 一の悲劇

I assume most people reading this blog know who Ellery Queen is, but for who don’t, he (actually the joint pseudonym for two cousins) is one of the most influential writers from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. He was famous for novels resolved by a chain of deductions from physical clues, used to narrow down the suspect list to one candidate. While there aren’t many authors writing mystery stories with that style of plotting in English nowadays, there are plenty of Japanese writers who have adopted the style, including Alice Arisugawa and Yuugo Aosaki (who was marketed as “Queen of the Heisei period” with quite unfortunate timing since Japan’s emperor passed shortly thereafter, ending the Heisei period).

But another author who writes in the Queensian school is Rintarou Norizuki (which, like Ellery Queen, is both the author’s pen name and the name of his fictional detective), author of The Tragedy of 1, which is clearly a reference to Queen’s Drury Lane series. To be honest, I’m not sure why I read this book. As you may have noticed from my blog, I usually play a series or read an author’s work in order unless there’s a particular reason to start with a different work. The Tragedy of 1 is not Norizuki’s first novel, and I can’t remember what (if anything) prompted me to buy it... but I suppose it’s a decent choice to read “1”st.

(Following the same convention as my Alice Arisugawa reviews, Norizuki will refer to the author and Rintarou to the character.)