I went into Chivalry half-expecting it to be a total war-esque strategy game. Instead, I found a first-person multiplayer hack’n’slash. Apparently It was pretty popular for a while after it was kickstarted and launched back in 2012. Even as recently as 2018, RPS put it 7th on their list of best multiplayer games on PC. Forgive my abundant ignorance and forgetfulness here, as always. I can’t even work out which Humble Bundle it came in, or why else I would have it.
I had a sunny day (twenty minutes) out at the training field AKA the only offline component of this game - partially because this was a new thing, for me, and partially because I didn’t really expect to find much of anything to do online. There I learned the basics of combat – a slash bound to left click, a poke and a carve both bound strangely to the mouse wheel, a block/parry to right click – and the point of each of the four class options. I shot some bows, I launched a catapault, I tried to discern the supposed backstory for between the two factions of this multiplayer venture, a conceit that was in no way further pushed by the game thereafter.
Eventually I headed to the server list, where I found a few middling to full options, confirming that as of November 2019, Chivalry (the game, anyway) is not dead.
And after a couple of hours of that, I feel comfortable in saying it is actually (still) silly, irreverent and enjoyable, even beyond its vaguely serious medieval veneer. Most of the games I joined would either be Team Objective or Free For All – in either case I would get out-poked and out-positioned and then watch my character buckle to the ground, blood spraying, head or arm rolling elsewhere. I was killed by cookie-cutter men with big axes and small daggers, men with spears, men with bows who pulled out knives after I ran up to them and whiffed a stab from behind. Despite my terrible stats, no-one seemed interested in flaming me. The FFA’s especially felt like an absurd festival of inconsequential blade-swishing - I left every game with a vague gnawing to keep playing and a horrendous K/D ratio. I’m almost sorry I didn’t round to it sooner.
The Cat Lady is a sidescrolling horror-adventure game. It contains: long sections of dialogue, item-based puzzles, jump scares, slow-moving character animations. It was released in 2012. It was made by Harvester Games, an independent studio from Poland. Apparently a sequel, Lorelai, was released earlier this year. Curiously, three out of the last five games now have been made by different Polish studios.
The protagonist/Cat Lady in question is Susan Ashworth. Susan is a forty-year-old woman who lives in an apartment, more or less fully alone aside from the occasional company of stray neighbourhood cats. Susan is suffering from severe depression — the game begins with her attempting suicide. She ends up in a limbo realm where the French-accented ‘Queen of Maggots’ tells her to go back to the living realm and kill five psychopaths (“parasites”). So she does, kind of, but the subsequent quest to do this is very mixed in with Susan’s own path to recovery.
The Cat Lady is a perplexing, frustrating, interesting patchwork mess of a game. I don’t know what I think of it. I don’t know whether to celebrate its relatively (to most other games) thoughtful depiction of mental illness or discuss how this is still overly enmeshed in problematic depictions of violence. I don’t know whether to commend the game’s partial unwinding of the lonely cat lady trope or to reflect on how it reaffirms this idea of depression as something that makes someone act like an arsehole to everyone around them.
The whole game is kind of like this. It uses surrealism and unreliable narration to imply discursive thinking into the altered states of perception produced by mental illness, but then it seems to narratively validate these altered states because the plot of the game involves murdering, and getting murdered by, serial killers and psychopaths. It has lots of overbearing, superfluous dialogue, mixed in with some genuinely thoughtful and insightful moments – which it then undercuts, again, with ridiculous violence. For example! The first time The Cat Lady made me think, oh, maybe this game is actually going to take this subject seriously, was in the second chapter when Susan talks to a psychiatrist and it gave you these dialogue options of, like, talking seriously about your past, yay, the game is making the implicative link between trauma and illness, maybe there is hope! And then….. and then the psychiatrist MURDERS YOU because he is A SERIAL KILLER.
And it’s just like. What?
I think, in a vacuum, this sort of tonal rollercoaster would be fine, if this was one game among many that explored different depictions of different kinds of experiences of mental illness – sure, that would be totally valid. The Cat Lady has one of the more interesting explorations of mental illness I’ve seen in games. But this is both a medium that is very prone to violence, and one in which mental illness has largely been tied with the motivations of evil boss characters, in much the same way that we often look for it as the motivation for crimes without necessarily trying to understand the social underpinnings that go into it. Video games have been more likely to stigmatise mental illness rather than engender understanding. Working with this background, continuing to tie violence to mental illness poses an associative problem that, through its spectral depiction of surrealism, it never really shakes itself of – it doesn’t work hard enough against the pre-existing tropes, basically. But that isn’t to say it’s wrong, only that I don’t know if it can be categorically declared ‘a success’. Like, sure, I get that maybe it’s meant to be read as allegory, or maybe we’re meant to appreciate that not knowing what is real is indeed one of the game’s core points about depicting mental illness – but then, the logical leaps it makes are so large, it frequently undermines so much of the sensitivity in its world-building. It’s hard to find much to hold onto, or know where to orient ourselves to parse what these depictions of these themes are saying.
It’s all over the place in so many ways. It starts poorly – the first two chapters are the weakest – but I liked it better the more I played of it. Some of puzzles are a little infuriating, though I ended up enjoying how they played out more often than not, particularly once I’d picked up the rhythm of the game’s thinking. The voice-acting is extensive though not always convincing. The penultimate chapter has a neat sleuthing layout that really slinks into a cool, elaborate whodunnit puzzle. After the chaos of the first two chapters, I liked the way the game built up through the middle, reorienting around depictions of Susan’s apartment and the warmness of the little moments like having coffee and a cigarette on the balcony. I appreciated the morose, mostly monochrome pallet with sparing and smart interjections of colour. I liked the way the art feels cut together, lo-fi but intricate. Some of the jump scares are pretty good.
It’s…I don’t know. I feel like I’ve mostly read positive things about it, but I can’t get totally on board, nor do I really have the time/energy to more coherently unpack why I think it doesn’t always deal with its heavy subject matter that well. Maybe it’s an angle thing. If you’re asking “does it have a good depiction of depression for a schlocky horror game?” then yes. But remove the genre requirement, then no. Everything is relative.
update 9/10/2019** Some people have already discussed The Cat Lady with regards to representing mental illness with a bit more clarity and nuance than I have. Sarah Stang (2018) at First Person Scholar discusses The Cat Lady alongside Fran Bow and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, acknowledging that while these depictions have shortcomings, they represent a comparative step forward for games:
The particular strength of all three games discussed above is that they feature female protagonists with mental illnesses and emphasize healing rather than curing. In Fran Bow and The Cat Lady, the clear message is that people with mental illnesses can help others and themselves, can overcome adversity and live with trauma, and can form meaningful relationships.
Stang links to a couple of other articles that give a reasonable background on the problematic relationship games have with mental illness. Sarah Nixon in 2013 gave a concise rendering of how horror games particularly tend to use and stigmatise mental illness. Aaron Souppouris (2015) looks at particular mechanics more extensively in discussion with a clinical psychologist.
I also liked Eric Swain’s short and sweet take in 2015 (from ~5 minutes in), on a critical distance confab postcast in discussion with Austin Walker in 2015. Swain described the game as Freudian studies “through a 2000s nu-metal aesthetic”, noting how interesting the game looked and also the nice balcony scenes, but mentioning that it was hard to know what the game’s creator wanted to say about certain sensitive topics. **
Duration: Eight hours.
When/Why: A few years ago I was friends with a guy named John. We were in a book club with a bunch of other ex-classmates from uni. John also liked playing Dota, during the period of my life where I, too, was on that horse. I played Dota with John and his friend a few times, and was shocked at how angry and rude he was in game, this everyday fairly polite and thoughtful guy. Anyway, at some point John mentioned or recommended The Cat Lady in the context of a discussion at book club, which is, I think, how I came to buy it in a steam sale in early 2015. I played it for a bit but found the physical slowness of the game too patience-testing at the time, given that at the time I was, as mentioned, addicted to the dopamine gambit of Dota. When I later mentioned this – my inability to get through the first chapter of the game he’d recommended - to John, he agreed that it was “a bad game”, further confusing me as to why it was brought up in the first place, and indeed I’m not sure if John has actually played it, seeing as it doesn’t come up as something that exists in his steam library, or at least, on the steam account of his that I’m friends with. So, that’s the long story as to how this game came to be here. But why else do you read this blog?
In which I glory in the stalwartly unreformed beauty of Binary Domain - a SEGA love letter to a bygone era of Capcom games. An era that seemed unsure whether to throw out the survival and the horror as it evolved away from Resident Evil. An era that celebrated and may have been defined by weak spots and cheesy dialogue, when games were fun. This blog post attempts to convince you that you should also covet a peek at the affectionate meanderings of this unashamedly traditional gem.
There are too many games from 2012 that delve into the realm of moral quandary, or that toy with the meaning of the experience of playing at all, to begin to list properly here. Nevertheless, among the supposed dilemma of Far Cry 3, the clever ambiguity of Spec Ops: The Line, and the binary choices that change the contents of the world of Dishonored, there is another game that asked us to balance the emotions of our virtual squad mates, while reveling in just how traditional a game it is.
This game is Binary Domain, one of my favourite things about games in 2012. At its core are games like Extermination or even things as venerable as Dino Crisis 2 - games you essentially play in the third person while ploughing your way through the story as you make your way through its levels, cut-scenes and the often wild exposition of your interactions with other characters. As with those Capcom titles, it feels like translations from Japanese to English have made it through intact but occasionally there are some wry smiles or confused faces to be made at errors in punctuation, spelling or the entire meaning in the sentences that crop up on screen or in spoken dialogue.
It's as if Binary Domain is made out of the DNA of these older titles, even though its third-person cover system, and macho, muscular grey-armoured protagonists make it seem initially like something that fell from the back of a Gears Of War shaped truck.
Seemingly, as with all recent SEGA releases, marketing for Binary Domain could generously be described as muted during the launch window. Some noise was made about the voice-controlled Consequences system, where spoken commands enable you to encourage, cajole and insult whichever members of the cast you had chosen to escort you through various levels. Despite the general linearity of the plot, and whilst not displaying the same shearing scope of choices as seen in that other SEGA-published gem, Alpha Protocol, the subplots of Binary Domain can and do play out differently depending on who you have impressed or upset during your journey through the game. The AI characters react differently to you in conversation and in combat, however inescapable the main plot itself is.
Fighting robots and weakspot-toting Boss Giant Robots, there is an old-fashioned gameplay joy to be had in shooting off the arms, legs and heads of these unfeeling, mechanical foes. Although the introduction to the game proper makes it signpost clear that somebody has produced human-analogous robots, who are so convincingly homo-sapiens that they don't even know themselves to be mechanical, no such moral issues stand in the way of the oddly satisfying gunplay, very occasional simple puzzle solving and relentless destruction of the various bits of robotic hardware your foes throw in your way.
The banter or sulking of your team-mates accompanies all this action, and your relationships with them are shaped by your shared experiences as you attempt to answer the question put to you on the official website, and possibly the back of the game box: "Will the team's human bond be their greatest strength or will they fall to the machines?".
This question is tested in a number of ways, none of which are particularly revolutionary or demanding, but in a way that somehow gives this unremitting action game a certain depth of character, not least through Cain, the horrifically stereotyped but strangely hilarious french robot who comes to represent the best addition to your roster of pals, adding as he does a certain Je ne sais quoi, a much needed panache and a bit of meta-querying about the value of life and artificial life as it turns out that robot jokes might actually be funnier than human ones.
In many ways, it is Cain the robot that reassures me that most of the plot must surely have been written by somebody with their tongue wedged firmly into their cheek, as it skirts around issues presented to us by things like Blade Runner. Our heroes disjointedly make their way through the enjoyable if clumsy story on the way to a similarly listing ending. Even this isn't really a negative observation, as it is in this dislocation of story and action that the true feeling of Exterminations and Dino Crises appears, as our heroes intrepidly force their feet through a very small swamp of moral imperatives, almost tackling questions about authority and power, diverting along unintentionally hilarious sidetracks that examine in passing the things that underpin human relationships. It certainly doesn't delve too deep into any existential blatherings, despite the title of the game, the fact that it is a video game, and the fact that it is a game that asks you to talk to a machine to play it leaving itself open for all sorts of unnecessary metaphysical analysis.
Perhaps you could criticise Binary Domain for being an almost throwback title in its form and presentation but I couldn't stop my positive memories of Capcom titles of old having a similarly positive effect on my perception of it. You engage in robot destruction within various areas full of enemies, attempting to score highly with stylish headshots, the timely removal of legs and flowing periods of destruction rewarding you with a sort of experience point currency that enables you to upgrade your gear as you go. While it probably shouldn't garner any awards for originality, innovation or spectacular understatement it is a thing full of immense fun, something that more serious titles often forget to their detriment.
Whatever the exact mix of nostalgia or enjoyment, Binary Domain was one of the best things about 2012. Bravo et Encore, SEGA.
Welcome to a brand new year everyone! 2012 came by too soon - I didn't have time to set my New Year's resolution besides unlocking more achievements and playing more games :P With a new year in mind, that means plenty of more video games to keep on the look out for. This leads to a very important question, what games are you guys looking forward to the most? If you ask me, here's my list:
Mass Effect 3
Borderlands 2
Bioshock Infinite
Darksiders 2
GTA V (hopefully!)
Tomb Raider
Diablo III (but really wishing for Torchlight II)
Max Payne 3
Check out gameinformer's Big Games of 2012 list here.
