You are reading What We Played, a monthly column where we remember which games came out exactly five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago. In the July issue, we practically comprehend the meaning of the phrase “human masses”, for the first time we encounter the work of Darren Korb, trick aliens with tricks with gravity and spray blood on the walls in a spectacular way like never before.
Inside was officially released on June 29, 2016, but only on Xbox – but it only reached PC on July 7, so most of the players met her in the middle of summer. And we immediately realized: the developers from Playdead have not spent six years on their new project in vain.
At first glance, it might seem that Inside was repeating the formula of Limbo, the Danes’ previous game that made them famous in 2010. Again a dark setting, again a little boy as the protagonist, again platforming and creepy puzzles, any mistake in the solution of which turns into a terrible scene of the death of a child. Sometimes it is a great achievement for a developer to repeat its previous success with dignity, but Playdead did not just make a second Limbo. She expanded and complicated the original concept in all dimensions: in terms of the plot, and in terms of the complexity and variety of puzzles, and even in the most literal sense, translating the game from 2D to 3D.
If the black and white hero Limbo traveled through an abstract afterlife, the boy in a red shirt from Inside was already making his way through the backyards of a totalitarian society, where people are nothing more than experimental material for the invisible government apparatus. A damp and dark forest, an ominous pig farm, suffocating emptiness of huge mines and factories, flooded subway tunnels – Playdead led the players through a whole line of small dystopias, the oppressive atmosphere of which Kafka and Orwell themselves would envy. Moreover, the Danes managed to tell a chilling story with a stunning ending without a single word: they so successfully fitted visual symbols, disturbing sounds and cruel puzzles to each other that they spoke for themselves. The three-hour adventure kept you in suspense from the first to the last minute, and not a single sophisticated riddle seemed like an empty attempt to stretch the passage.
Immersing the player in such a tangible nightmare is a feat that often turns out to be beyond the power of even the developers of “big” horror games, but the creators from Playdead definitely deserve the right to write it on their resumes.
Inside is chilling, juggling a spectrum of negative emotions – from pity and disgust to fear and nervous anticipation. The game places the player in a repulsive, but alluring eerie and even disgusting secret world. And then, for three to four hours, he pulls the strings, causing at the same time the desire to quickly get out of the way, and an irresistible desire to understand what is happening here. There are no gameplay innovations in Inside, but believe me, after completing the game, you will not remember puzzles at all.
From the review of review addiction on Inside
10 years ago – Bastion
The protagonist of the next birthday game of July is also a child (or a teenager? In the game he is called Kid, or Malets), but not at all helpless. And the world he travels through is far from being so depressing, although it is also on the verge of an apocalypse.
Ten years ago, when Bastion came out, there was still no concept of “recognizable handwriting Supergiant games“: The game was their debut project. But now, after the release of Transistor, Pyre and Hades, the key elements of all the studio’s work in it are immediately visible. Here you will find colorful hand-drawn graphics, a simple but graceful role-playing system, a script full of melancholic humor, and, of course, an unforgettable dreamy soundtrack by Darren Korb, for whom Bastion once became the first experience of working with music for games. (Seriously: even if you don’t plan on playing any of these projects, listen to their soundtracks – there is a great chance that you will add to your music library.)
According to the plot, Malets travels through the literally crumbling remains of his world: almost all of its inhabitants have already died, and the islands of the earth soaring in the air are inhabited by thunder tails, stench eyes, garbage gulps, pyrians, nogolysis and other monsters, whose names speak for themselves. The last hope of a dying world is the mysterious Bastion, a structure that can hold the flying fragments of reality together. It is his Malts that will have to be restored, painstakingly collecting materials for the restoration of the Bastion on those islands. But to repulse the monsters that have flooded them is not so bad; even the process of moving creates no less difficulties, because new tiles of space on the go are collected right under Maltz’s feet, and you never know which one will turn out to be a trick and suddenly collapse into the abyss.
The main and almost the only companion of the hero throughout history is Rooks, a mustachioed old man, on whose behalf the story is being told. Most of the time, he is present in the plot only as a disembodied voice-over, who teases the hero for every mistake, cheers for him in battles and wittily comments on every player’s action. Stepped on an unsuccessful tile and fell into the abyss? Be sure: the sarcastic grandpa will surely screw up the remark that some of the world’s saviors need to look at their feet more often. And sometimes, on the contrary, he will support and console Maltz with a few words that, no matter how poisoned life is made by the mistakes committed, what has been done cannot be reversed and you can only move on.
Ten years ago, the developers at Supergiant for the first time pulled off, perhaps, their most iconic trick: instead of separately developing combat and action, and separately – the narrative part, they fused them together. And, as time has shown and the huge success of recent Hades, the formula still works great.
The very bastion shown in the title plays here the role of your fortress, from where you teleport to capacious and saturated levels, the passage of which takes from seven to ten minutes. No long running through the dungeons, no sales of junk accumulated in half a day of robberies and murders, no bosses killed in thirty runs, or exhausting mail quests here. All missions are bright, staged and do not have time to get bored. Fingers do not hurt, demons do not dance before their eyes in a dream, and after the next battle, it seems, even the muscles relax.
From the review of review addiction on Bastion
15 years ago – Prey
I want to talk about the original 2006 Prey either all or nothing: in a couple of paragraphs, neither its painful history, nor the chaotic mechanic can really be described, but we will try it anyway. And if after that you want more details, read our material about all the twists and turns of its development or a review, where all the gameplay findings of Prey are described in detail.
In short, the anecdote is this: back in 1995 3D Realms announced the development of the space shooter Prey – as it was customary to promise at that time, the most unusual, innovative and thoroughly saturated with 3D graphics, which has never been seen before. Moreover, it was not someone else who should have run the project, but Tom Hall himself, who, ironically, just appeared in the issue of VCMI last month: there we remembered him Anachronox 2001 release. Actually, it was Anachronox that indirectly became the first stone hit by the Prey development scythe. Hall dreamed of complete creative freedom and gameplay revolutions (he originally hoped to give them to the players in Prey), but the bosses from 3D Realms tirelessly reminded: creativity is creativity, and you have to earn money. Hall’s too ambitious experiments did not have enough time or resources: 3D Realms focused not so much on innovation as on compliance with industry trends. Already in 1996, after another conflict with the management, Hall stamped his foot and left the project, taking almost the whole team with him, and began to develop Anachronox in a pair with John Romero id Software… And Prey was left an orphan – and in the next ten years changed the leading developers and engines several times, in order to change which the entire game had to be rewritten practically from scratch.
In the end, she passed into the hands of a little-known team. Human Head Studios, to which 3D Realms has already set a much more mundane goal: “Please finish this long-term construction at last.” Instead of a long-suffering custom engine, they took a fresh id Tech 4 from Doom 3, and in July 2006, Prey finally saw the light of day. By that time, half of the audience had already forgotten about the long-standing announcement and did not pay due attention to the new product, half, on the contrary, were disappointed that half of the old promises were not fulfilled. The graphics, although quite decent, did not present any “next gens”, and a significant portion of the gameplay was built on the same Doom patterns.
Prey was saved by the very unique mechanics that somehow made it to the release version. The main feature of the project was games with space and gravity: at some levels, the protagonist Prey literally walked along the walls, changed the floor and ceiling, turning enemies and objects in the locations upside down, and also jumped between the portals in the walls – and this, we recall, is more than a year before the release of Portal. Some spatial puzzles really boggled the imagination, but, alas, they turned out to be few – and all the space between these bright fragments was occupied by filler corridors with primitive waves of monsters.
Not surprisingly, after that, everyone was waiting for the announced Prey 2 as a second coming, hoping that the sequel will allow the developers to unfold to the fullest. But a string of failures continued to follow the series: already in 2007 the office of Human Head Studios literally burned down, in 2009 3D Realms actually stopped working. Development rights passed to Bethesda, where they decided to redraw the concept of the sequel entirely. How it ended, you probably already know yourself: after several years of lazy development, the second part was finally canceled, and Bethesda used its rights to the franchise only in 2017, when Prey was relaunched from the Arkane studio – developers Dishonored… And although they made an excellent game in their own way, it no longer had anything in common with the original, except for the name.
In places in Prey, absolutely brilliant episodes do happen. For example, you are walled up in a cube that can only be opened with a switch, which must be drawn along all planes, rotating the surrounding space. Or here’s a tiny planet that you can run around entirely, like in Crank’s “Moonshine”. Or a maze that mirrors reality, in which, having miscalculated the shot, you can hit yourself in the ass. It is absolutely incomprehensible why Human Head alternates bouts of their own genius with bored adventures along dark corridors and do not give their fantasy free rein.
From the review of review addiction on Prey
20 years ago – Max Payne
And the twentieth anniversary of July 23 was marked by perhaps the most famous of all the games in this issue: the first part of the legendary series of bloody attractions Max Payne. Let’s not sing the praises of a cinematic masterpiece for the hundred thousandth time Remedy Entertainment, which gave the whole gaming industry the very concept of bullet-time. Better admire what a devastating effect the game made in 2001 on the then editor of review Mania Oleg Polyansky: we will probably never be able to get such indelible impressions of gaming novelties as in the late nineties and early zero.
… A bullet, scattering air molecules, flies to the human body in order to form a wound in it with its head part. It’s a damn exciting sight. For the one who stands on the blind side of the trunk, it is pleasant. For someone who is open, usually a little less. But their thoughts no longer interest anyone. In the main role – a piece of lead weighing several grams; all the others are just greedy observers who know that there will be one less of them now.
Fractions of a second have their fractions, and those have theirs. For a bullet, these are huge periods of time: they make up its life. For a person, this is a matter of moments, and he will no longer have time. The head will inevitably form a wound, and a cloud of bloody mist will thicken around the small entrance hole. Swaying, the body collapses to the floor. Equilibrium for him is an impermissible luxury.
… The frantic crackle of a pair of “engrams”, fell, roll, a shotgun volley throws a man to the floor, and a blinding flame no longer bursts from the machine guns, reloading, a turn, a doublet in the face – not a face, but a bloody mess, the third tore the air with shots somewhere at the edge of the field of view, turn, jump …
… knock-knock … knock-knock … knock-knock … The blood hits the walls of the ventricles and the aorta hard. A lead swarm flies by – so slowly that you can knock all the bees with clicks. The roar of a shotgun stretched to infrasound, an astonished face … and a falling body, around which the camera is slowly circling.
This is Max Payne. He is so all, through and through and entirely. A game filmed by a director and cameramen; programmers only transformed the film frames into binary code. It turned out to be a funky show in the style of John Woo and “The Matrix”. Long-term construction was not started in vain. <...> Max Payne is without a doubt the most entertaining game in the history of the genre.
For the anniversary of the game, Sam Lake, the main writer of Max Payne, who once gave the protagonist his face, and the actor James McCaffrey, who voiced him, recorded a congratulation with a surprise
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What did you play in July five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago? Be sure to let us know in the comments.
