Why am I indicating a fiscal year for my Backloggery Beatdown series? Well, I was not interested in writing a post about games I had yet to finish, and games that cannot be finished. In hindsight, this post runs long because it covers multiple games. Going forward, I’ll turn in my “homework” every month, even if it’s embarrassingly paltry.
Let me kick this off with the one game that I have beaten in 2023.
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium was at the top of my game recommendations on my Steam Deck. I thought that I could knock out a bunch of shorter games, but after Strider, which I covered in the last BB, and Shank 2, I decided to give attention to a game that is not decidedly mediocre.
A frequent mention among 2019’s GOTY contenders, Disco Elysium is the game that Planescape: Torment wanted to be. For starters, Disco Elysium passes the bar for actually being a video game rather than a facsimile for interactive digital entertainment. Triggering a game over by failing to pass seemingly simple “motorics” check for the protagonist to retrieve his tie from the ceiling fan in his hotel room after a bender during Disco Elysium‘s opening minutes is an example of how much depth awaits. There are four primary stats: intellect, psyche, physique, motorics, and under those categories are six traits each. I briefly looked at customizing my character, but this system is one of the most robust ever created. I settled for an archetype, “the thinker”: “Extremely intelligent. Very bad with people. Knows interesting facts, comes up with original ideas.” It most closely matches me IRL, because I am certainly not “sensitive,” and the “physical” archetype is a straight up knuckle-dragger.
Controversy about developer ZA/UM aside (I side with the creative team, naturally), Disco Elysium is based upon a homebrewed tabletop module that the creative team’s lead writer, Robert Kurvitz, created and played among friends. Disco Elysium is a staggeringly genius game where player choices create the illusion of infinite possibilities within a finite medium. This creates a feeling contrary to that from the illusion of choice even though they are analogous; the key here, is how the game makes the player feel, and Disco Elysium is a game that can generate profound feeling.
That said, I regret saving my skill points after leveling up through most of the game, saving points in case I fail a D&D-style skill check. I should have put points into shivers and inland empire, for they provide considerable lines of additional internal narrative that enhance the overall experience. Imagine Keith David narrating nearly a half-million words of dialogue, and one my gain a glimpse into what Lenval Brown has accomplished here. Disco Elysium being fully voice acted is an added bonus to the Director’s Cut that makes the game even better.
I do have one critique: passing a check with a 30% chance feels good. Failing a 94% skill check almost made me want to spike my Deck. Instead, I would calmly save scum. And save scumming a 30% check is much, much more difficult than saves cumming a 94% probability, of course. Besides that, Disco Elysium is a one of the best games I have ever played.
Shank 2
I only played Shank 2 in an effort to maintain my reputation as something of a completionist, but for some reason it is incompatible with the Deck. Slowdown city. I ain’t even mad, because the original was meh, and the first couple of levels in Shank 2 was simply more meh.
Kena and the Bridge of Spirits
I regret not playing this sooner. I also regret beginning my playthrough on the hardest difficulty in an effort to platinum in one attempt. The joke is on me, because Kena on the hardest difficulty is unrelentingly difficult–I’m talking Maximo from the PS2 days where no matter how much health Kena has, she dies in 1-3 hits.
That said, the game is indeed adorable, and the animations are Disney quality as the critics say. What the critics downplayed is how Kena roots itself in Eastern philosophy and spirituality, blended with fantasy. It pleased me to be reminded of Yuna’s pilgrimage as a summoner in Final Fantasy X, who exorcises pyreflies and guides them to the Farplane before they mutate into fiends. Where I left off, the game was beginning to explore how Kena is not an aimlessly altruistic spirit guide, but as she serves the spirits of the deceased so that they can pass on in peace, she seeks answers for those she has lost herself.
Bonus for me: the lead minds for the Kena‘s developer, Ember Lab, are black.
Oxygen Not Included
I have actually been playing ONI on and off since its 2017 Early Access days. Sadly, I never took the time to composing an update for my playthroughs. A good opportunity should have been toward the end of October 2020 when I contracted COVID and was off from work for an entire month. As it was my fifth attempt at a colony, I named my asteroid Melancolony V, and played long enough to manage launching rockets into space. At that time, the space biome was the “endgame” of ONI, and there was not much to do after achieving homeostasis in my colony after about 500 cycles except run experimental builds. But I am not a tinkerer like that; I just copy builds from the gigabrains no YouTube like Francis John and Echo Ridge Gaming.
Enter the Spaced Out! DLC. It theoretically provided me with an opportunity to return to ONI, but with options that expedite space-faring. But being the person that I am, I decided to launch Melancolony VII. Yeah, I accidentally skipped VI, but I may go back to it should I decided to run one of those unique Spaced Out! colonies that require space adventures sooner rather than later for resources.
The developers at Klei marginally increased the difficulty of the base asteroid to compensate for some of the game’s additions. For example, the research tree now requires handling radioactive materials, compelling me to watch a few YouTube tutorials so that I could optimize my uranium deposits’ output. The addition of cobalt and lead as metal ore and refined metal, respectively, allowed me to save my gold and iron ore exclusively for high thermal conductivity builds.
I once again breached the surface of my asteroid into space. I also found a teleporter that beams dupes right to a teleport receiver on another asteroid. Perhaps the anticipation of learning rocketry calculations all over again intimidated me from playing further. That, or waiting for what feels like an eternity to build my anti-meteor grid just bores me into playing something else.
Forspoken
Despite the gaming industry collectively panning Forspoken, I maintained my promise of supporting the game on “day one.” However, I changed up a little, purchasing the game not for myself, but for my sixteen-year-old daughter who has a penchant for open world games.
Using her as a guinea pig proxy, I observed her playthrough. I have to agree with the criticisms in regards to the poor dialogue. Frey swears worse than a combined company of sailors, so many F-bombs that Samuel L. Jackson sounds comparatively wholesome. In one specific dialog, Frey says to an NPC something to the effect of “I’m just blowing smoke up your ass,” and I experienced an epiphany, because I have never, ever heard anyone black say a phrase like that.
It is not new news that Asian development teams generally do not know how to depict black people. I do not know why Luminous Productions chose to portray Frey as a homeless, orphaned young black woman with a tenuous relationship between gangs and the police; I suspect that the end result reduces Frey into a tired pathological caricature.
In regards to the claims that Frey is an unrelatable character, on one hand, these criticisms come from those who are accustomed to protagonists in Devil May Cry or Bulletstorm or Madworld or The House of the Dead: Overkill; if Frey were male, I think these agitators would be less-inclined to take umbrage with her. On the other hand, Frey’s unrelatability could be attributed to the fact that there are no black people are on Luminous Production’s development team, and therefore Frey is what a non-black people imagine a black woman to be. At most, Squeenix hired a few black people as consultants for Forspoken, but the principal elements of the game had already been set in stone by the time any feedback had been taken into consideration. So gamers are treated with a character that could have been better than what she is.
Blerd Beats 
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