Stay Home, Chill Out #3 - Michael and Ollie Breakout of Velen
Most of us have now been in some form of lockdown for around a month now and might be starting to go a little stir-crazy. Maybe you have started pacing around the room a little? Possibly forgotten what day of the week it is? Maybe you haven’t taken your pj’s off in 10 days and you have drawn a person on the mirror for the company? All acceptable coping mechanisms in these strange times. But one thing is for sure. We all want to escape our confines. However, in reality, this would be grossly selfish and put both yourself, your loved ones, and vulnerable people at risk. This is why I turned to…
APE OUT - Michael Leopold Weber
Usually I’d have a joke-y comment, but serious, just play APE OUT.
© Gabe Cuzzillo/Devolver Digital
I could easily spend hours of your time and mine fawning over APE OUT’s visual and sound design, which is some of the best I have seen in our glorious medium. Believe me, I could spend at least 5000 words on the end credits alone. But instead, I want to focus on one specific aspect of APE OUT that makes it the perfect game for these troubled times: its sense of breaking free. Each album starts with you, a 500lb gorilla, locked in a cage. From there, through brute force or happenstance, you suddenly find you find yourself with an opportunity to run. So what do you do? Do you just sit in captivity? No. You run. You run straight at, and through, every person in your way in ever-increasing violent and hilarious ways. Our primate friend is only limited to 3 actions: run, grab and throw, but the four distinct albums will have you using these actions in different ways. Some guards have shotguns, some have assault rifles, while some run away, but all impede your breakout. Solo developer, Gabe Cuzzillo, keeps the game feeling both inventive and fresh, through nuanced changes to the level design and enemies, even though you are fundamentally doing the same thing in each randomised run.
APE OUT wouldn’t be my dictionary definition of “chill”. There are some levels, especially in the last album that took me many, many tries to the point where I had to put down my controller before I threw it into oncoming traffic. But once you fight through these tricky levels, once you get to the end of your incarceration after being blown up, shot down and set on fire, the sense of freedom is palpable. That is what we all need right now. Sprinting forth with the wind in our fur and animal-rights abusers blood in our hands. Striding toward an uncertain future, sure, but a future not dictated by tyrannical humans. A future within our control.
Oooooh, the ape wants out. Now I get it.
© Gabe Cuzzillo/Devolver Digital
Stay home and stay safe you lovely lot. We will all be striding gracefully in the wind soon enough (try not to throw too many people out of high rises though..)
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Oliver Luddy
My relationship with Geralt of Rivia didn’t start out very relaxing. Somehow, I spent €80 on his game in two years and only played about five hours of it until recently.
Pictured: me getting messed up fighting my first Wyvern unprepared.
I bought it for the PlayStation 4 after it started to go down in price, at the time I reached Crookback Bog but was put off by the controls. After Buying my first gaming PC, I needed something to play on it to justify the damn thing, but I was struggling to justify another €60 on a game. Turns out my answer was GOG.com, which puts Geralt’s adventures on offer every other week.. “I’ve already bought it once… but dammit I want to play a game with pretty light shafts shining through trees”. I didn’t even reach the Bloody Baron before my Destiny addiction stopped me from playing anything else for about two months. Leading up to Christmas. Henry Cavil donned the tight pants of The White Wolf and the Switcher was released… “Wow, I can’t believe they got that game running on Switch, maybe I shoul-- SHUT UP, ITS €50. NO! NO WAY! NOT WHEN YOU OWN IT TWICE ALREADY…………”
*sigh* Anyway I now own three copies of this game.
Yes, I have a problem, but after all that I finally felt compelled to invest some time into the game, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. Despite its universal acclaim, The Witcher just wasn’t clicking for me. There's a good reason for that: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is overwhelming on approach. The main story is an open-world, sprawling 50 hour epic; every fetch quest has a fleshed-out narrative and characters with nuanced motivations, branching dialogue and often works in one of the game’s many peripheral systems; from alchemy, to detective work to combat. On top of all this, it is the third game in a franchise, which is itself a non-canonical continuation series of six books and two collections of short stories written in Polish by Andrzej Sapkowski and translated into English years later. Where do you start with that?
Turns out, you treat it like a book.
As the famous song about Geralt goes, “Dirty deeds done dirt cheap”.
Gif by @SunhiLegend
For several nights I tried to figure out what people found so alluring about this franchise, doing an hour or so of Witcher contracts before bed. I still couldn’t find much to cling onto in this grimdark world at first. However, I kept chipping away at it, like a collection of short stories. Every night, with each sidequest and note read, I’d learn a little more about the history, the politics and the characters, focusing on Velen. The way the game’s leveling works meant that as long as I didn’t progress the main questline, I wasn’t ever getting enough experience to venture outside the earlier game areas. So for my first 20 or so hours with the game I grew intimately familiar not with the world of the Witcher but with the life of a sellsword trying to make ends meet. I didn’t wear fancy Witcher armour, craft swords or enhance my magic, and I played on a harder difficulty, so I was genuinely quite vulnerable. Instead of going on an epic quest, I just went from village to village offering my services. I would do busywork, but every now and again a simple contact would develop into something much more - dealing with everything from hauntings and marital affairs to petty local politics.
By the time the PC cross-save patch came out, I felt like I had filled in many of the blanks the game leaves for you if you are unfamiliar with the series. My history with Geralt may have been different from someone that read the books or played the previous game but I had a true feel for who this man was. When I moved to PC I also began my search for Ciri and the world exploded in size and life. The city streets of Novigrad were muddy and brimming with people while the seas of Skellige shimmered and contained countless mysteries. All the while I left my past in Velen on the Switch, the console’s blurry textures like a memory half-forgotten. It was like beginning a sequel to a game I had spent 20 hours with.
For as big and loud as The Witcher 3 gets, it is the quieter moments that will stick with me.
Since then I have done every Witcher contract and put about 80 hours into the game and, currently, I’m crafting every set of Witcher gear before I dive into the two expansions. I have bought the first short story collection and am very tempted to go back to the previous games. Almost every night at the moment I’m excited to dive back into that world. Like a good book, I can’t put it down.
More chill games recommended, more time passed. Good Job! Check out Ollie’s first list here or James and Mathew’s picks here.
