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New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
3 Video Games You May Have Missed in February
One of the major video game releases in February had players navigate the chaos of a growing empire, with Civilization VII introducing historical ages to the turn-based strategy series. Another, the fantasy role-playing game Avowed, gave an emperor's envoy incredible power. There were more intimate stories as well, including The Stone of Madness, a tactical-stealth game set in a monastery turned asylum, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, whose opening chapter has rebellious grit and an inspiring riot grrrl essence. Here are three other games you may have missed this month: Keep Driving If you're the sort of person who feels nostalgia for picking out CDs from your dashboard visor, making long-distance calls on your Nokia brick phone or scarfing down a slice of pizza while tinny rock music blares into the quiet night, the appeal of a game like Keep Driving is obvious. Set in the fantasized memories of nascent adulthood in the early 2000s, Keep Driving is a fun, low-stakes adventure about hopping in a car and going on a long drive somewhere, or nowhere in particular. Your ostensible task is to make your way to a music festival a few towns over. In order to simulate the hazards you'll encounter along the way, the game cleverly retrofits classic card game mechanics. A virtual deck of cards, each card with its own thematically appropriate skill — 'Drive Fast' uses extra fuel to clear obstacles — will help you make it past slow-moving tractors, flocks of sheep and even distracting rainbows. You'll fight exhaustion and a perpetually depleting gas tank. You'll pick up an assortment of hitchhikers. You might even choose to get drunk and party, crashing your ride and winding up in rehab. All these surprises and disasters are the kinds of experiences that texture and support a rich and interesting life. Although Keep Driving has a profoundly hopeful message, it also captures the raucous plasticity and vivacious drive of youth, reminding us that we all once wound up stranded without gas on the side of an empty road. Urban Myth Dissolution Center Azami Fukurai, the high-strung heroine of this Japanese visual novel, has a problem: She sees ghosts. At least that's what she thinks until she follows up on a Tokyo advertisement and visits the Urban Myth Dissolution Center, where she hopes to find a remedy for her onerous gift. When she meets the director, a cerebral young man in a wheelchair, she learns that the hazy apparitions she sometimes glimpses are not wandering shades but 'vestiges of persons and objects that existed and are retained everywhere.' The director convinces her (using a bit of financial leverage) to join his detective agency, which specializes in matters that fall outside the purview of traditional police work. Azami's investigations enmesh her in the personal lives of those who have been affected by things that seem to defy ordinary explanation — a livestreamer who sees a ghost in a mirror; a woman terrified by a man who creeps around her apartment at night. But what gives this game a special flair is that it's really about the battle against misinformation. Again and again, Azami watches how social media latches on to sensational stories and then amplifies rumors, biases and half-baked theories. I wished the game's episodes involved less backtracking. A little bit of editing could have gone a long way in delivering a punchier experience. But while not all of the game's plot twists are created equal, its skeptical bent mitigates its languors to some extent. While Waiting For those who have been bored, frustrated or even anxious when killing time, the often-charming, sometimes-perplexing While Waiting offers a tantalizing series of wait-based minigames. Here, biding time isn't a chore. That's because the narrative arc of one's life feels true. At the beginning of 100 short experiences, I was born a boy. The birth included a lemming-like line across a bridge before I was dropped through clouds that flowed like water. As a child, I reclined warily, hoping for sleep yet haunted by ghosts. As a soccer goalkeeper, I found a ray gun in the sky to shoot targets. My reward was being hit in the face by the ball. I should have concentrated on the pitch. Each scenario is timed. Although you can just sit and relax with a fidget spinner, the player really should accomplish a few tasks before time is up. When you're hanging out in a cafe watching for a bus, the rain dripping down the window inventively turns into a Space Invaders-style game. During class, you avoid the teacher by unhurriedly crawling on the floor. It's kind of a version of Pac-Man, if you were a slow loris. Likely inspirations for While Waiting include the WarioWare series, but this art is never lurid. A delicate pen-and-ink art style features minimalist yet endearingly convincing facial expressions in a game where you must often decipher an objective as the clock ticks down.
New York Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In a Monastery Turned Asylum, Outcasts Must Band Together
The Stone of Madness, a new tactical-stealth video game, delivers two meaty campaigns inside a Spanish monastery that doubles as an asylum at the close of the 1700s. One concerns church corruption while the other delves into the secrets of the dwellers of the monastery. In both campaigns, your motley band of inmates conspire to outfox their guardians, including monks, soldiers, nuns and an inquisitor. The narratives pick up a historical thread noted by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in 'Madness and Civilization,' a study of the West's long and varied history of identifying and treating people who fall afoul of society's norms. One of the prevailing trends in 18th-century Europe, Foucault said, was to confine the 'insane,' the poor and the religious and political outcasts to places where they might not be seen or heard. Taking a cue from the Darkest Dungeon series, each of the five main characters in The Stone of Madness is burdened by phobias and has particular strengths and corresponding skill trees. At night, they can retire to a room to strategize and buff one another's stats; a violin recital increases everyone's sanity. Players can wander about the monastery while controlling up to three characters at a time. The choices are quite distinct: Father Alfredo, a priest who goes from investigating the questionable goings on at the monastery to being a prisoner there; Leonora, a woman from a bourgeois background whose family packed her off because of her fiery temperament; Amelia, a young orphan; Agnes, an elderly woman proficient in witchcraft; and Eduardo (one of the asylum's longest-serving inmates), a tall man with great strength who is also mute. When the characters come into contact with the source of their fears — violence, darkness, mirrors, fire and, for Amelia, the asylum's gargoyles — their individual sanity meters are depleted. If their meters reach zero, they are burdened with new ailments like migraines, back pains or claustrophobia. Cycling through the characters and using their abilities — Eduardo can use a crowbar to remove obstacles, while Father Alfredo can don a priest's robes to pass undetected by most guards — to overcome tactical challenges is invigorating. At one point, I hit a wall trying to get Agnes to stand on a crate in a heavily patrolled area so that Eduardo could move her into a position that would have otherwise been impossible for her to reach. But then I felt like a master strategist after taking a step back and unlocking a skill upgrade for Leonora that allowed her to forge a letter at night to reduce the security in a particular area, as well as another for Eduardo that allowed him to pass along valuable items to the monastery's staff at night so he could enter prohibited areas without trouble. Returning to the section that had frustrated me numerous times, I breezed through and felt the rush of executing a well-conceived plan. 'When we were working on the final set of skills and disorders in the game, we wanted to reach two different sweet spots,' the game's director, Maikel Ortega, said. 'One thing was for each character to cover a role like the ones you see in heist movies — one of them can act as the specialist in sneaking around, the other as a hacker.' Ortega, who works for the Game Kitchen, a Spanish studio that developed Blasphemous, added that the level design in The Stone of Madness took a lot of inspiration from immersive sims like Dishonored and Hitman. 'We want the player to experiment and choose their own solution for a certain problem,' he said. Aside from its snazzy mechanics, The Stone of Madness also sports beautiful visuals. José Antonio Gutiérrez, the game's creative director, said its art direction was heavily inspired by the paintings of Goya. The studio used actors to convey the physical movements of the characters and then painted over their performances to achieve the final aesthetic. 'The backgrounds of the game are very detailed and hand painted,' Gutiérrez said. 'But the animation of the characters has more to do with Disney classical animation — cells of plain colors with only one shadow' beneath a character. Ortega said he hoped that players would enjoy the game's take on 'people fighting against the odds and taking care of each other.' Given the real-life madness on display these days, that's a cozy sentiment to sink into.
