Backlog trackback #3 - Dealing with the Occult.

The Occult is a popular topic in video games. Fighting demons, summoning them, and plots that revolve around bringing things back from the dead or apocalyptic scenarios headline so many games that it's become a cliche to make the stakes of a game be the "End of the WORLD!", and it's ironic that when your plot does affect the whole world it ends up having no sense of meaning. We let those things go, though, because sometimes the games are just fun to play, even though you're stopping the world from getting blown up for the millionth time (it's a hyperbole, but I feel like I'm getting closer to that milestone everyday...). That said, if you are looking for a scenario where the fate of the world rests in your hands, and you like seeing crazy dudes and weird monsters you might want to look at these games:

Indigo Prophecy: You won't see too many demons in Indigo Prophecy, but you will be seeing some weird stuff, no doubt about it. Its hook relies on it not being so much a game as much as interactive fiction. The game has two modes: adventure game puzzles of clicking on certain things in a certain order to advance the story (it's better than it sounds, really!), and cutscenes with lots of quick-time events (also better than they sound!). The trick with those this time, though, is instead of pushing buttons that they show you on screen, you're pushing the analog sticks in the indicated directions, and you don't fail the whole sequence if you mess up just once (but if you don't do any of them, then you'll end up restarting a lot of them).

The Most interesting thing about Indigo Prophecy, though, is the way it flips common game design on its head. Most game stories are essentially the context under which you're doing the actions in a game. They're hardly ever much more than a framework. Here, it's the other way around; what you're doing in the game is based around the happenings of the story. The story drives what you're doing, not the other way around.

The story itself is a pretty good story to tie a game around. You play the role of multiple characters, on opposing sides. One is a alleged killer who's trying to prove his innocence, and the other characters are the detectives in charge of tracking him down. How your actions as one party are going to affect the other is certainly a unique game twist, and using the game medium to play you against yourself is something only games can do.

That said, there are some problems that I cam across. For one, the story gets seriously crazy towards the end of the game (I mean some real Jumping the Shark stuff), and for people looking for value, the game is a bit on the short end. There are multiple ways to end the game, but most of them feel more like game over screens then real endings, and the real "multiple endings" are decided during the last game sequence, somewhat defacing the value of the choices you've made throughout the game. Additionally, most the puzzles in the game are pretty basic adventure game fare (find object A, connect it to object B to find a clue).

That said, working with the narrative as the primary focus of the game is something I'd like to see more of, which is why I'm looking forward to Heavy Rain.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: There's an abundance of the occult to be found here, if you're looking for it. If you're doubtful, the story involves nothing short of the resurrection of Dracula, who surely can't be up to anything less than the destruction/enslavement of the world. You're enemies are pretty much every occult thing you could think of, from skeletons to devils to harpies to sentient swords. You'll also be using a lot of the occult against them (as in, dark magic), from thunder to beams of energy so summoning some of your own monsters.

And really, it's this variety that makes the game so fun to play. At first, I was a bit wary to play it when I found out that every attack you execute depletes your magic bar (and, of course, if that bar is all gone, you're left unable to do anything but jump for a bit), but that fear was quickly put to rest after seeing that the bar refills itself pretty quickly, and most attacks don't drain the bar as much as you'd think. From that point on, it was a Ten-hour love affair with the game.

I've played every one of the metroidvania games on the DS, and I have to say this is by far the best one. The story is much the same as the others, but storytelling really hasn't ever been Castlevania's strong point. What makes this game so good is really the creative level design. You have a lot of powers at your disposal, and the game makes good effort in trying to get you to use them all. Some enemies are weak against certain attacks, and resistant to others, so that alone encourages you to try out different glyphs (the way you use spells) to see what the best way of dealing with them is. If you're having trouble against an enemy and you're noticing that you're not doing much damage, try another glyph.

The bosses are also design with care. With one or two exceptions, every fight against a boss will challenge you to do new things, from climbing a tower while escaping from a giant crab boss that you can't defeat until you reach the top (with a surprise ending!), to destroying all of the crystalline joints of a centaur-knight Shadow of the Colossus style, you won't be able to rely on the same strategy to defeat any two bosses.

The theme of variety also carries into the game's environments. This time, you're not stuck in Drac's castle the whole time (though you do eventually go there), and for the first half of the game you're exploring different areas on a map, all of which are different from each other. You have your ice level, but there's also some pretty cool stuff involving man-made buildings and the like.

Order of Ecclesia is probably one the best Castlevanias to date, and also one of the best DS games period. There aren't too many things wrong with it, and even the secondary modes unlocked after beating the game can squeeze an extra couple of hours of fun (Albus mode especially), so if you're jonesing for the dark and demonic on the go, you can't do much better.