2 Responses

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running this on… man, my lowbies all like negative or psi damage. Let’s pull the 50 fire/elec blaster out of hibernation and burn some zombies. Bosses and no AVs, 2 heroes at +0.

   —

   Uh, you can only get three wrong answers on Family Feud before control passes over to the other team.

   Maybe that wasn’t what you were going for there.

   A mysterious communication device in Dark Astoria sends me looking for somebody’s family in an abandoned building? Hey, aren’t you just ripping off that new Dev Choice arc?

   On passing by a sculpture I get a couple of silent transparent followers named “Regret” and “Memory”. Ally destructible with ally guards? Nice effect.

   After I frob an empty trash can on the ground floor I search higher, and find a desk. There’s a half-finished email about absentees there… and my allies decide that this is the perfect time to betray me.

   Oh, I see. They were just normal allies - there’s another one, Loss, hanging out in the final room. I poked around after the mission was over, finding some older files.

   Sadly, I cannot destroy the terrible sculpture.

   Oh. Some clever electronic wizardry was at work here. Automated distress beacon, of a sort.

   —

   Hmm. The “boxes” are getting redder. And unchecked.

   Anyway, going inside to find…

   …homicidal mannequins. Yay? They’re clustered around another mannequin with a mask, taking pictures.

   The mannequin says the same thing as the automated message.

   The supposedly homicidal ones start pursuing me, but on the off chance this is actually a family and I’m insane I’m leaving them be.

   I head upstairs and find another computer. Hmm. A mysterious prank, and another unfinished mail.

   Upstairs are more mannequins, standing around in crazy poses.

   There’s a schedule on the wall. …man, I know they’re going to come to life and try to wreck me when I click this thing.

   But I’m clickin’ it anyway, because that’s just how I roll.

   The schedule doesn’t have any system text associated with it, but it seems to be “normal”. Usual operations, more mysterious absences and “illnesses”.

   The mannequins on the last floor are all toting around assault rifles.

   Hmm. There’s a computer up here, but it won’t turn on.

   Okay, looks like I have to go kill a family. I mean some homicidal mannequins.

   Okay, looks like I’m just going to be going back to that (presumably now active) console and disabling the whole affair so people don’t waste their time searching an abandoned building.

   …there’s a tall man out front. And some new mannequins seem to have showed up now, posing like they’re holding rifles.

   Oh, and the lower floor now has some mannequins I’m definitely wondering about.

   …a TV remote. Huh. But no sign of whatever it was on camera.

   —

   A face in the static. And I go off looking into what it might be.

   Oh wow! They released the Baphomet lab into MA.

   Man, now that the BaniPan have their own drum section they can really liven up a mission.

   I find some old recordings that suggest that Dark Astoria has always been full of other **** that be freaky.

   …and I wonder why there are still doors that open and close in this map and Baphoclone didn’t just claw his way through them.

   So, uh, all I’ll say about the bottom floor is that this is something they never expected would be a bad thing when they put your allies on the minimap.

   Also his release “dialogue” says he is “either unaware of your”.

   …and when the mission’s over he turns hostile.

   Oh, this is tempting… eh, why not. BURNINATING THE ZOMBIE MAN.

   The wandering patrols of memories and suchlike help a bit there.

   …and good lord he looks freaky as HELL with the lights turned out.

   So the boss who regretted his lack of salvation and then looped a warning to leave it be… is that another sort of recording, I wonder?

   —

   Opening dialogue for the next mission: “A town where, because the people stopped caring for it, it stopped caring for them, and one by one they left; the town was no longer their home.”

   I think you need to break that up a bit.

   “A town where, because the people stopped caring for it, it stopped caring for them. One by one they left; the town was no longer their home.”

   Or if you want to creep it up a bit: “The town was no longer their home. One by one they… left.”

   Okay. Image in the television telling me to come fight the monsters. Also it’s really freaking tall, just like the guy who left the remote in the first place.

   Gee, I suppose I should trust it blindly!

   Oh, Johnny’s personal hell. Nice choice.

   The crazy man with a gun in here apparently cons Rogue, which means he starts by trying to wreck his own boss group and works down from there. I try to give him a chance to bolt, but he’s there shooting at me right up to the end.

   I do get to see him beg the Pantheon not to leave him, which is darkly amusing.

   —

   And now, it’s time for an ambush.

   Or not. I have a feeling these guys are just here to try and keep the TV contained… or something.

   Apparently I do actually have to wreck all of them, not just the vocal ones, to unlock this coffin I found in the ditch.

   And apparently there are ancient cannibal gods even the ancient cannibal gods are afraid of. Well, I imagine you’d get hungry, sealed outside eternity for eternity.

   Hmm. One boss group to go and suddenly the red text wants me to reflect on my isolation… and the place is full of mannequins.

   …alright. Let’s see what’s in this coffin. It’s glowing now.

   Yet another mannequin. Keen.

   The last Banished Pantheon I had to eliminate was a zombie who went walkabout from my rain of fire. I wonder if I was supposed to open the coffin only after I’d wiped everything out and the chaining worked oddly for some reason.

   Regardless, final image: graveyard filled with immobile mannequins in poses like they’re carrying something… frozen in time, perhaps.

   Oh. Now that’s an interesting effect. Good thing I didn’t tweak my default font scaling or anything. It looks like… a cave and a tree? Or maybe just some sort of deformed rabbit.

   Checking the souvenir… ah. Never assume that what you see and feel is real.

   For some reason I feel like I just did the B-Side of Video Killed The Radio $name.

   —

   Storyline - ****. It starts out promising… or rather, I don’t expect it to make any particular sense and just enjoy the atmosphere. Am I supposed to be watching the tape “still inside Astoria” at the end, and just seeing myself walk in, stare at static, and then walk out under the influence of some unknown force? That at least might explain the weird dichotomy of the guy who inspired the mannequin being somehow both an insane immortal radio host and a desk jockey at a modern-day electronics store.

   The memories alternately flip out at me when I poke at their office building too much and help to contain Adamastor when he goes crazy in the Baphoclone lab. I never see them and the mannequins in the same mission, but that in itself may not mean anything. For some reason the mannequins strike me a bit as being “footsteps of Mot”, and they’re certainly great effects, but what am I to make of how it all ends? Especially since it all seems to have been a hallucination within a hallucination within a who the hell knows.

   I thought there might be something going on here with the idea of recordings, and the Banished Pantheon troops that I fought all being, somehow, recordings-in-flesh, and the memories are holograms and the mannequins are photographs, and in the weird un-world un-time of Dark Astoria they’re all jumbled together. But the immortal radio host just took ad 30-06 to that idea.

   I had a weird idea for the closing and souvenir, which I thought I’d share. Basically the closing is you getting snapped out of some reverie at an electronics store - the TV static was, for some reason, fascinating . And the souvenir is some kind of… student film? that shows up at your hideout in a plain brown wrapper, which starts with you taking notice of that weird burst of static in Dark Astoria that turned out to be a shaman’s lightning hitting a junction box, except in the film you go off on this grand adventure, though wrecked offices and a melted radio station and a cave of flesh, and the last shot is you staring down at the mannequin in the coffin as the camera angle shifts higher and higher and higher and then you’re lost in the fog. For some reason it’s really unnerving, but you file it away as a curiosity and get on with the immediate threats.

   Design - ****. The surroundings are great, but as I said I really didn’t get how the “memories” were used, and the rescue in mission 2 seems a bit silly, especially when the mannequins sprout rock socks for no reason I can work out. Just start out the mission with the security console active and put the masked mannequin in as an ally boss or something. (Or some kind of enemy captive with ally spawns, though I think if it’s a contact you still can’t harm it. I’ve seen the technique used much earlier on to create friendly reporters interviewing cops and suchlike.) The description can talk about how you can deactivate this sick joke while you’re at the security console.

   Gameplay - ****. There’s a little hiccup with this arc being truly solo friendly, and that’s the over a dozen mandatory bosses in the final mission. The masks might not be too bad, but those Totems hit like a truck. I don’t know exactly what you can do about this - maybe some of the bosses are just optional and the vocal ones are the important kills? Maybe either paint the Pantheon grey or call out the silent ones as weird mannequins in their own right?

   Detail - *****. Oh sweet lord yes. The first two missions were the most fun I ever had getting no XP, and I actually jumped in the lab map when I opened a door and saw a totem pacing around. This arc sets a mood very, very powerfully. The mannequins are extremely potent as suspense, if nothing else.

   Overall - ****. An interesting ride that hops the rails a bit in mission 4 and just kind of coasts to an unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere. Tremendous, tremendous atmosphere, though.

   Posted on November 10th, 2009 at 11:30 pm

2. PW Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   Very, very creepy and disturbing. I had to give it low marks for gameplay due to essentially being no exp for several missions, but the arc does an outstanding job of setting up an atmosphere of horror.

   Posted on March 8th, 2011 at 4:41 pm