Cover photo from Future? No Thanks!

Whew, what a relief to be putting the finishing touches on this post. Between planning an overseas vacation that we’re leaving for later this month, hosting visiting friends and family, and playing some long-anticipated game releases, it’s been quite the packed month.

You may have noticed some differences in the site! As of this month I’m rebranding it; although I am indeed still Mike and these are my musings, the blog has a new name and domain : The Afterimage, located at its new home — theafterimage.net. If you’re curious about what’s behind the name, I’ve updated the About page with some details. I’m considering changing up the look and layout of the site as we approach its first birthday, so stay tuned.

My latest obsession has been Fire Emblem : Fortune’s Weave, the game that finally made me give in and purchase a Switch 2. The Fire Emblem series is near and dear to my heart, but I haven’t actually played one since Fire Emblem : Radiant Dawn for the Wii. I think it was about time that I tried one of the modern entries, so I pushed past my misgivings about its massive playtime and jumped in. Well, I’m over 100 hours in at this point and am still only barely at the doorstep of the final act of the game. It’s proven itself to be quite unbingeable, which is rough for me and the way that I tend to engage with games. I’d say expect some impressions for next month’s article, but I can’t say for sure I’ll even be finished with it by then. Wild.

Got a good slate of other games from September though, before Fire Emblem consumed all of my free time. Let’s get into it.

First things first, it’s finally out in the world: the long-awaited sequel to Remedy’s CONTROL, the David Lynch/SCP Foundation-inspired game that sits high in the rankings of my favorite games of all time. I tend to take some vacation time around my birthday every year, and coincidentally this mini-vacation lined up with Resonant’s September 24th release date. Once it launched my partner and I grabbed some snacks, turned the lights down low and prepared to binge our most anticipated game of the year.

We emerged about four days later, groggy but satisfied with having seen the game through to the end. Although it has the characteristic rough edges of a Remedy production, there is still so much to love about Resonant’s characters, worldbuilding, and dizzying moment-to-moment gravity-warping gameplay. I have a lot to say about it, so I’m going to spin off my thoughts into a full review. Expect it soon; when I publish it I’ll come back to this article and add the final score I’ve settled on.

What is one to do when society passes you by? When by all accounts the world around you has undoubtedly improved, but you find it utterly incomprehensible? That’s the dilemma of one Harvey P. Huffstone, a baby boomer and former insurance adjuster who now lives in the Socialist Republic of Pittsburgh in the year 2045.

Harvey’s response to this dilemma is “Future? No Thanks!” He’s made the choice to undergo gentle euthanasia, but before this is approved he’s encouraged to enjoy his last day on earth via a laundry list of tasks (mostly centered around consumption, as his death doula observes) where he’ll experience vestiges of joy from the version of the world he remembers. This presents itself as an open-world adventure game where you’re tasked with pursuing simple pleasures such as drinking the last can of Coca-Cola in Pittsburgh, eating a real steak, getting in a fistfight (he always wanted to do that), and perhaps enjoying the touch of a woman one last time. Accompanied by his sunny robotic dog companion Omegabot, he sets out to do so.

This game’s developer, Molleindustria Games, is the project of Carnegie Mellon University professor Paolo Pedercini. His previous works have been much smaller, focused experiences geared toward both educating and entertaining through a leftist lens, such as McDonald’s Videogame, Green New Deal Simulator, and Meet Me At The Workers’ Club. Future? No Thanks! Is his most ambitious project yet, over five years in the making. It’s set against an aggressively-miniaturized but still recognizable version of Pittsburgh’s downtown and surrounding areas (North Side, Oakland, and the Strip District). A fun fact about me is that I actually lived and worked in the Pittsburgh area for the better part of a decade, so it was delightful to run across so many iconic Pittsburgh buildings and landmarks while drifting through the streets in Harvey’s souped-up motorized wheelchair.

Putting my own nostalgia aside, this new socialist Yinzer utopia is a blast to explore. This is a freeform open world game that feels like a classic adventure game; there’s a new character to talk to around every corner and they are by-and-large hilarious. The writing of the game is uniformly fantastic, deftly employing dark humor alongside some interesting worldbuilding about how drastically the former United States has changed. Pedercini makes no secret of the fact that his politics lean left, but is more than willing to poke fun at or skewer those on the same side of the ideological spectrum as himself whenever it’s called for, often highlighting the possible pain points of implementing worker-centered socialism with dry wit and humor. It’s very easy for a piece of art written from a certain ideological perspective to morph into a vapid soapbox for its author (see anything written by Ayn Rand, or the many painfully unfunny conservative comedians), but Pedercini’s self-aware dialogue steps confidently over this pitfall and had my partner and I howling with laughter during many character interactions.

During one memorable scene at the local worker-owned brothel, Harvey can choose to spend the night with a human sex worker for 10 work credits, or for the considerable discount of 5 credits, a robot sex worker. We went back during a second run to try the option we hadn’t picked before and I honestly can’t decide which one was funnier. Another great interaction occurs at a coffee shop where the barista pelts Harvey with a lecture about how problematic the coffee trade has historically been… Except that it abruptly cuts to a black screen with “30 Minutes Later…” and then back to Harvey sporting a thousand-yard stare while the barista prods him that his coffee is ready. Probably my favorite scene, though, involves a group of self-proclaimed Cybertarians (part cyborg, part libertarian) you find in the US Steel Tower who spout quotes from the 90s cult classic Hackers and wax poetic about how capitalism shall rise again.

Future? No Thanks! is full of incredible character moments like this. Humor is so difficult to pull off in a video game, so when it lands as well as it does here it’s something to take note of. This game also has a surprising amount of pathos as well; Harvey is objectively problematic but in a mostly harmless way, but also quite relatable in the sense that one day we’ll all reach the point where the modern world ceases to follow the same comfortable rules and logic we’re familiar with. Harvey’s personal failings and dated views are often the butt of the joke, but there are a few pleasantly surprising parts of the story where the satire steps aside and instead views him through an empathetic lens, which ultimately is a main element that keeps the game from becoming too one-note. It’s an impressive high-wire act, and Molleindustria deserves credit for sticking the landing where a lot of similar games stumble.

I highly encourage you to check it out yourself. Maybe it’s just laser-targeted at my own politics and sense of humor, but I think it’s legitimately the best-written and funniest game I’ve played this year. I’ve put together a supercut of a handful of my favorite scenes below; if you get a laugh out of these I think it’s likely it’ll land for you as well as it did for me.

Although just a handful of studios continue to make them, the venerable point-and-click adventure game genre has fallen by the wayside. Looking back at the 1990s, I would say that the genre was actually one of the leading testbeds for new technology during that decade; many of them deployed rudimentary 3D, full-motion video clips, and full voice acting long before those things became commonplace. I consider myself fortunate to have been there during that transformational period and to have played so many of the classics (Full Throttle, the Broken Sword series, Blade Runner, the Tex Murphy saga, and of course Monkey Island).

Nowadays, I play maybe one or two of these per year. I’d heard lots of positive buzz about Endacopia, a crowdfunded and highly-anticipated surreal comedy-horror adventure game by animator and pixel artist Andrés Guerrero, more commonly known by his handle ANDYLAND. Guerrero has a style that utilizes bright colors and cutesy imagery that hides an unsettling dark side just underneath the cheery veneer. A good example of his style is Dinkle, one of his short animations on youtube.

Endacopia adheres to this same kind of style where it constantly rides the line between lighthearted and deeply disturbing, with the bright colors of the characters and setpieces frequently being tinged with a macabre undertone. This is enough to keep the player on edge, and it sprinkles in a handful of legitimate scares to reinforce that atmosphere. The game keeps most details about its setting ambiguous during the early hours; you are dropped into the role of the “guardian angel” of a boy named Mellow as he tries to escape the house of his guardian/captor Henry, a giant lizard who claims to know what’s best for Mellow and will not hesitate to cave in his head with his mallet if he steps out of line. Mellow escapes Henry’s house by making a deal with a strange toilet parasite and gets flushed deep into the underground. It’s a rough trip and Mellow is cartoonishly shaken-apart, and his first task will be to put his body back together and reacquire all of his senses before moving on to meet the strange residents of the underground and solve its mysteries. There are three main areas you can choose to tackle in any order: the strange carnival of Misery Town, the cheery-but-haunted animal village of Timesville, and the brutalist corporate parody The Office.

It’s up to the player to piece together the lore of this world and what is actually going on behind the scenes, but without going into detail I can say that the story went in a different direction that I imagined and subverted a lot of my expectations. It’s definitely worth a play if you dig ANDYLAND’s aesthetic or adventure games in general, and can be finished in a lean 6 hours or so.

So here’s a totally random one. Recently a friend of mine was visiting us, and in-between our scheduled activities we were looking for a co-op game to play to pass the time. We sifted through my Steam library and then checked my wishlist. I had totally forgotten that Cuphead got a DLC (the Delicious Last Course… oh I get it) and that it’d passed me by. “Yo.. Cuphead?” was my proposition, which he was totally down to try. We’d both played and beaten it when the game was new, so surely picking it up again would be like riding a bike, right?

Wrong. To warm up we went all the way back to the base game’s first boss, Cagney Carnation, and got our asses handed to us for about 20 minutes before the latent muscle memory started to come back. After we finally took down the damnable flower, we jumped right into the DLC bosses. Cuphead is a notoriously difficult 2D platformer-shooter to begin with, and the new encounters are certainly no joke - they will put your reflexes and tenacity to the test. There are six brand-new bosses plus a secret boss, as well as a section called The King’s Leap which is a series of chess piece-themed challenges that test your ability to dodge and parry attacks. To assist you in surmounting these new challenges, you can buy an item that will allow either you or your co-op buddy to play as brand-new character Ms. Chalice, whose double-jump, dash-parry, and extra health point can prove invaluable.

I played through the entirety of the base game solo, so playing co-op was a novel experience for me. Cuphead is a visually busy game to begin with, so having more than one player character on screen spewing projectiles made certain situations (and enemy attacks) harder to parse, which is somewhat offset by the fact that you can tag your partner back in when they die by executing a parry on their ghost. We made use of this… extensively. The first few bosses were pretty rough for us but eventually we hit our stride and started progressing much faster. I think we finished the whole thing in just over 6 hours, split between several sessions.

The Delicious Last Course retains the stunning 1930s-style rubber hose animation and swanky jazz from the base game and is full of personality and delightful visual flourishes from its set of screen-filling, oddball enemies. This was an unexpected detour, but a welcome one, and I enjoyed having a reason to return to Cuphead once more. The Delicious Last Course is every bit as savory as the base game and I definitely recommend it to fans of the original, but be ready to be humbled.

At last, the complete 1.0 version of Valheim has come ashore, over 5 years after the game launched in early access. This is a game I’ve been keeping an eye on, and it’s one that my friends love and have played off and on during its development. I originally played it with some of them shortly after early access began, and I remember having a great time exploring this beautiful Viking world set against a low-poly PS1 aesthetic; it was the perfect thing to distract me from the doldrums of the Covid-19 pandemic. We dove back into it when 1.0 launched last month, and currently there’s a small PC humming away in the corner of my basement hosting our dedicated server.

Like with most early access titles, I was content to wait for the complete version of the game before really investing time in it. So what has changed between then and now? As far as I’m concerned, not a whole lot. The slow but steady series of updates to the game added new biomes to challenge such as the Mistlands, Ashlands, and beyond, but I’ve never seen these as I haven’t progressed that far in the game. If you’re unfamiliar with Valheim, the game is set up as an procedurally-generated open world survival crafting game with fairly strict vertical progression. By that I mean you’ll start in the Meadows biome, build your Viking village, harvest enough basic resources to craft rudimentary weapons and armor, kill the area boss, move to the next biome, harvest its key resources and upgrade your gear (in this case copper and tin to make bronze) and so on. The farthest I’ve personally made it is the Swamp biome (the third out of a total of eight). After killing the boss there and setting sail to new lands, I made landfall on the Plains. Wait, what’s that in the distance? It’s coming at me awfully fast. … What’s a “Deathsquito?”

And here’s where I ran headfirst into the reality of how this game is set up. Valheim can be unforgiving in its brutality; it’s inevitable that you’ll be spending time running back to your corpse and retrieving your dropped gear after a monster annihilates you (which the aforementioned Deathsquito did despite my best efforts to fight back). It rewards accumulation of game knowledge but also methodical preparation and a cautious approach to combat. The accursed insect (bane of many new players) may not have oneshot my character if I were geared appropriately, but aside from looking up information on a wiki, there was no way to learn this without a lesson from the School of Getting Wrecked and Respawning. I later found out that the next logical place to progress to would be the Mountain biome, but around that time is when most of my friends fell off the game — and so did I.

I had a similar experience when booting up the 1.0 version of the game. As I mentioned earlier, not much has changed in the early-game experience aside from a handful of new recipes and building pieces. After getting back to the Swamp and exploring it a bit, I felt my momentum waning and my desire to move onto something else overtaking it. I’m starting to think that the genre of survival crafting just isn’t for me, maybe? There’s lots to love about Valheim — the experience of sailing across its oceans and exploring new lands is fantastic, its excellent lighting brings more life into the world than you’d expect from a low-poly style — for lack of a better term it’s just a vibe. I think its perceived faults have to do more with my own biases than an objective lack of quality; survival crafting games lose their sheen for me quickly and playing Final Fantasy XIV for over a decade kind of burned me out on highly-grindy vertical progression. The netcode is also a bit wack but I’ll spare you the full explanation; suffice to say it makes some… let’s say interesting choices in regards to how NPC and physics simulations are handled in multiplayer that don’t always make for a great experience. I do still recommend it if this is your genre though, assuming you haven’t already put your life in the hands of great Odin.