Culpa Innata

I just finished a PC game called Culpa Innata.  I liked it, but it’s rather bizarre, and it isn’t exactly the adventure game it’s billed as.  It’s a police procedural, and though the mystery gets solved it’s really an excuse to build up and then deconstruct a utopian society.

You play Phoenix Wallis, police officer and loyal citizen of the World Union, who has a murder to solve in the year 2047 and only your mouse to do it with.

Essentially you have to talk to people, gradually uncovering clues that lead to new people or locations to visit; there’s also a fair number of (generally not very difficult) puzzles to solve.  Most of the game, in fact, consists of interviews.  This starts out slow as (e.g.) you ask sales clerks about what kind of boss Mr. Bogdanov was, but eventually it picks up, as you get some solid clues.  The characters are varied but few really stand out (one that does is Bogdanov’s stylist). 

Movement is rather clunky… it’s a 3-D environment, yet mostly presented from static camera angles that snap you from one scene to another.  Memo to designers: never do that again. 

An odd little recurring activity is near-daily gossip sessions with Phoenix’s best friend Sandra.  As these recap events you just went through, they don’t add much except insight into Phoenix’s somewhat prissy personality.  Sandra is more lively than most of the characters, however, and I ended up following all the conversational paths. 

I like the fact that the game seems to take a feminine approach… there’s no violence; it’s highly story-oriented; Phoenix is usually kind to the interviewees and always shares her emotional reactions to things.  She also has a makeup kit whose pieces are used to solve several puzzles. 

My main complaint is that the non-linear structure wears thin, especially towards the end, when one event after another simply forces Phoenix into particular encounters.  There are a few side activities (including a large side quest designed to show up the failures of the World Union) but the game could have used more diversions and dead ends.  Phoenix can watch holovision, for instance, but after the first night (when an important clue is presented), it’s always the same show.  You never get to ask Sandra about her life, or shoot down your obnoxious junior colleage Julio.  At one point you go clothes shopping (your dowdy duds won’t get you into a fancy nightclub); but you don’t get to choose your outfit (and the outfit you get is hideous).

For a long time I was puzzled at the game’s politics.  The World Union isn’t exactly an Orwellian nightmare; it’s capitalist, peaceful, and obviously comfortable, though stiff and self-righteous.  The underlying philosophy seems to be Rand-libertarian (greed, selfishness, and ambition are praised; Phoenix’s police organization is a private company; there’s no taxation); but children are raised by teachers, sex is highly liberated, and there’s a lot of talk of NGOs which are a parody of various leftist causes.

The clue lies in the credits– most of the names are Turkish, and the game is a loose adaptation of a novel by a Turkish writer, Alev Alatlı.  Now it makes sense: the World Union is an outsider’s parody of the entire West: general prosperity and a careless dismissal of the rest of the world, American individualism and laissez-faire economics, European hostility to religion and violence.  Right-wing economics and left-wing do-gooders are thrown together because both have disproportionate influence outside the West.  In the game there’s a glimpse of Alatlı’s preoccupation with quantum physics and chaos theory; apparently in the novel she links these with an eccentric form of Turkish nationalism. 

 

Yes, it’s a loooong game

I have to agree with Jeffrey, this is the best Gygax webcomics tribute I’ve seen, from XKCD:

 

Kobolds beware!

Mostly laid up with the flu today.  But I thought I’d report on our D&D campaign.

Lore, the Dapper Swede, was eager to try out what’s known of the 4.0 rules, so he ran a simple campaign with, apparently, some of the few monsters whose stats are fully cooked: kobolds and hobgoblins. 

 It was a blast, though like any campaign this depends on the people more than the rules, and this is a good crowd.  I think we all liked the new rules.  They’re a bit simpler, and they make first-level characters way more attractive.  Spellcasters should really like them, since they can regenerate their magic between encounters.  I really liked Hunter’s Quarry, a class feature which basically adds 1d8 of damage so long as you target the nearest enemy.

 The tempo of D&D is rather endearingly slower than video games.  I’m playing a MMORPG that thinks nothing of assigning a quest like “get 200 Ghost Bug eggs”.  In several hours we got through half a dozen kobolds and four hobgoblins.  (And they got through four of us…. though fortunately you can now heal an unconscious character on the spot.)

 

Geeks gasp: Gygax gone

To start with, doesn’t Gygax sound like a monster or wizard in a Gygax-style world? 

 Besides one campaign with Lore, the only D&D I’ve played is Gygax’s last version– 1st edition AD&D, the quintessential pre-corporate RPG, complete with mostly lousy black & white art, Gygax’s oddly pedantic prose (”The locale in which the non-player character henchman is being sought, the racial distribution in that locale, the race of the prospective liege, and the manner of seeking henchmen, will all bear upon the race of any possible henchmen”), and tables, tables, tables… everything from NPC dress sense (roll 8 for “foppish”), to the cost of holy water vials, to the type of harlot you might encounter (look it up, DM Guide p. 192).

As a game, it’s outrageously complex and arbitrary… the three basic books total almost 500 closely-printed pages.  If you’re used to video games based on D&D, whether directly (e.g. Neverwinter Nights) or indirectly (e.g. Oblivion), D&D offers slow combat, excruciatingly slow levelling-up, a dizzyingly complex and incoherent magic system, and the constant possibility of debilitation by dice roll.  (The rules are packed with nasty things DMs can do to players, many of which will simply kill or incapacitate you, leaving you to sit there watching the rest of the party have fun.)  In some ways D&D is the Esperanto of games: just good enough to get people fired up, just bad enough to spark endless attempts to do better.

 But it’s fun, and surprisingly social for a geek activity.  I spent most of college in one long D&D campaign (hi Chris), and I’ll hear no gibes about meeting girls instead: half the group was female, including my girlfriend. 

That campaign also inspired Verduria, and of course Verdurian and other Almean languages, which led to the LCK, which led to the ZBB, so you can blame Gygax for all that too.

 

Livin’ in Oblivion

You may remember that I’m nutso for Oblivion. So I’m happy that my clever, sexy, and freakishly short friend Chris has been working on his Livin’ in Oblivion blog, which chronicles his attempt to be an NPC.

http://livinginoblivion.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/to-sum-it-up/

He does his best to earn a living, avoid any and all adventures, and find a few friends in Tamriel.  He’s more or less promised to continue the blog… let’s hope he does so for years and years.