Hard West 2 Review – Bouncing Back
Hard West 2 is aptly named. Its default difficulty setting is called Hard, too, and with good reason. Enemies are punishing and your squad’s capacity to battle against overwhelming odds is tested relentlessly over the course of several dozen hours of turn-based tactical combat. It’s a game about choosing the exact right moments to use their unique skills and working them in tandem to tee up devastating chain reaction combos. It’s tough, sure, but this demonic rendition of the American Frontier, where grotesque locomotives warp to alternate dimensions and blood rituals summon the walking dead, supplies you with the necessary creative tools to stand your ground, and rising to the challenge proves immensely satisfying.
There’s more to Hard West 2 than turn-based tactical combat, but not much more. The primary focus is a series of missions, usually with some choices about which mission to tackle next. In these, you command a posse of four gunslingers, taking turns to shoot, use supernatural skills, and advance from cover to cover. Along the way, as you traverse the overworld map on horseback, you’ll meet characters and accept quests from them to hunt down wanted criminals, investigate murders, recover livestock, fight waves of outlaws and demons, rob a bank, and most importantly, track down the man who stole your souls in a rigged game of poker aboard his steam train from Hell.
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Outside of combat, Hard West 2 is essentially a bare-bones RPG. Conversations are minimal and straight to the point. Towns have shops where you can buy new weapons and replenish consumable healing items, buffs, and explosives. Quests rarely involve much more than sending you off to investigate a location and returning once the job is done. Narrative choices are limited to supporting which of your companions has the right idea for dealing with the current problem, and you can make camp to rest and chat with your companions to learn more of their backstories. These chats are linked one-to-one to the narrative choices you’ve made in a way that rather unflatteringly exposes the bald mechanics: support a companion often enough and you’ll level up your relationship to unlock the next tier of their backstory. It’s all quite basic and dry. But at least the RPG portion of the game is out of the way pretty quickly and doesn’t waste too much of your time getting to the good part: the combat.
The combat in Hard West 2 is a success because its design grasps the significance of meaningful differences. Every aspect, from the abilities of your posse members to the weapons they’re able to equip to the design of the maps, adheres to the principle that a small number of things with large differences is more interesting than a large number of things with small differences. Characters and guns, in particular, are given room to carve out a distinct identity so that deploying one over another is a genuine, and often drastically different, tactical choice.
There are only six playable characters, of which only four partake in a mission at once, but each brings a unique ability that means they never feel interchangeable. As a result, the makeup of your posse has a profound effect on the way you approach a mission. Main man Gin Carter, for example, has the Shadow Barrage ability that lets him shoot through walls, hitting multiple targets and bypassing the enemies’ cover bonuses. His companion, Flynn, can swap places with anyone–friend or foe–in her line of sight, and at later levels can deal damage over time to her victims. Broad strokes are used to paint these abilities, enhancing the differences and ensuring that whatever configuration of characters you end up using, you’ll find eclectic ways to combine their powers.
I particularly loved Old Man Bill for the way his Deadman’s Revenge ability upends the traditional play style. He can damage every enemy in his line of sight within range, with the damage increasing as Bill’s own health decreases. When Bill’s in the posse, you’ve now got a character who actually benefits from taking damage and is most usefully positioned when in the middle of a crowd of enemies. Later, he develops bonuses that further accentuate these seemingly counter-intuitive abilities, such as gaining critical hit bonuses the more times he finds himself in the firing line or giving him the ability to counter an attack if he ends a turn outside of cover.
Further, I found Bill worked hand in glove with one of the two indigenous characters to join your posse, Laughing Deer is the melee specialist and his extra speed and attacks meant he was the ideal follow-up, charging in like some sort of machete-wielding cleaner to deal the killing blow to the enemies struck by Bill’s Deadman’s Revenge.
Melee weapons can only be used when adjacent to an enemy, but you only spend one of your turn’s three action points to do so. Pistols and shotguns both use two AP, but the former has greater range and can hit targets at different elevations, while the latter can spray multiple targets with one shot. And finally, firing a rifle consumes all three AP you get each turn, but its damage and range outperforms the other weapon types.
Any movement you make consumes AP, too, so deciding which weapon to use on any given turn is a choice that carries significant consequences. It’s rarely just a matter of which gun is going to hit for the most damage, either. Since each weapon type is tailored to particular circumstances, it’s about maneuvering your posse into the best spots to take full advantage. Even the simplest decision can feel agonizingly important. Should I hold position and take a three-AP rifle shot for more damage or should I only take a two-AP pistol shot but also move to a potentially more advantageous position?
Further complicating matters here is Hard West 2’s most ingenious flash of inspiration. When you kill an enemy, a status called Bravado is activated and the character who landed the killing blow has all their AP replenished. Essentially, this means if you can score a kill, you get a whole extra turn for free–it’s astoundingly powerful. Some enemies can go down with just one shot; many others take two or three. That extra turn from a kill might let you get another kill, which means another extra turn. Chaining together kills to activate Bravado multiple times on the same turn quickly becomes the goal of every turn. And, boy, is it satisfying.
This demonic rendition of the American Frontier, where grotesque locomotives warp to alternate dimensions and blood rituals summon the walking dead, supplies you with the necessary creative tools to stand your ground, and rising to the challenge proves immensely satisfying
The Bravado system works so well because it encourages aggressive play and incentivizes taking chances. There’s no exact equivalent here of the overwatch system from XCOM, so there’s no real way to hunker down and pick off the enemy as they come at you. Instead, you’ve got to take the initiative and Bravado actively rewards you for taking risks that pay off. When you’ve got one character left and all she has is a 50% chance to hit, in another game, a risk-averse player might decline the shot and use the turn to heal up or buff their defense. In Hard West 2 you know that if that 50% shot comes off, that enemy is dead, Bravado kicks in, and you get a whole extra turn to wreak more havoc. Bravado’s always there, egging you on, urging you to give it a go, to roll those dice. And it’s very hard to resist.
Bravado also works to stretch the tactical considerations of each turn even further. Maybe one character can’t get a kill, but they can do damage and another can complete the kill to activate their Bravado. Suddenly you’re thinking, “which character do I want to get Bravado on this turn? And if I want Flynn to get Bravado this turn, what moves are Gin and Bill going to have to make first to ensure that happens?” You’re mentally mapping out each character’s potential moves, swapping between them to check their lines of sight and to-hit chances, running through the various combinations of orders you can give them and how each character can best take advantage of the previous one’s moves. Bravado is a tremendous reward for planning ahead.
The Bravado system complements the high difficulty, too. If you’re not making full use of your posse’s skills, it’s really easy to be overrun by enemies in much greater numbers, moreso when they start regenerating their health each turn or if you’re facing certain enemies who can simply summon more enemies to join the battle. Given the stern challenge, Bravado is the most effective method you have for turning the tables, and it becomes crucial to chain kills to keep it active for as long as possible. By the mid-game, if you’re not taking out a half-dozen or more enemies in a single round, then you’re probably missing a trick somewhere along the line. With the high difficulty, fortunately, comes a high strategic ceiling.
Supporting the excellent combat engine is a clever skill tree system that utilizes playing cards gained by completing missions. Far from merely a skill tree presented in a novel fashion, these cards are dealt into a hand for each member of your posse and confer a bonus to, say, the character’s health or movement speed. Get enough cards and you can start dealing poker hands that unlock new skills for each character. Deal Gin a pair and he gets a damage boost while Bravado is activated. Deal him a four-of-a-kind and his Shadow Barrage ability now also inflicts the Burning status on any enemy it hits, while also conferring all the benefits of any lower-scoring hand.
The cards are dealt from a common deck, so you’re distributing limited resources among your characters to fill out their skill trees. And this means making tough choices about who gets which cards to enable them to unlock which skills. I found myself gravitating towards certain characters whose abilities I favored, dealing Flynn those three Queens because I knew I’d make better use of her increased shotgun damage than if I dealt them to Bill to unlock his critical damage boost. The fact that new cards are often offered as a reward for completing secondary mission objectives is also a terrific incentive to fully explore each mission map.
However, the map design doesn’t always allow the combat’s tactical depth to fully express itself. The maps are typically narrow and focused on funneling you into a series of two or three distinct encounters. As a result, the maps can feel compartmentalized in a way that is both a strength and a weakness. They feel manageable in the sense that you can think of clearing an area, pausing to regroup before moving on, and even drawing a line with a manual save. At the same time, they don’t deliver the kind of continuous running battles that might involve having to split your attention and resources across several different hotspots at once, and the greater strategic scope this might entail.
Adequate use is made of the terrain. Variations in height are common across every map and, with an increased chance to hit from higher ground, much of the strategic thinking revolves around one or two characters securing elevated sniping positions while the others work to flush enemies out of cover or finish them off.
However, there’s not a great deal of variety elsewhere in the map terrain. Whether you’re fighting your way through a mining complex or a saloon or a church and graveyard, they’re all composed of the same basic pieces: The same walls that provide full cover and the same waist-high structures that provide half-cover, the same ground you can run across, the same ladders and staircases that let you reach upper or lower floors. There are few new situations to deal with–no dark areas that restrict your vision or swampy ground that slows your movement, for example–and no attempts to deliver any sort of dynamic changes to the encounters other than what the enemies themselves can bring.
You can interact with some objects in the environment, which provides a little additional variety. The lid of a nearby sturdy crate can be flicked open to transform half-cover into full, or a table can be flipped over in classic Western bar shootout-style and used as cover. But these aspects are minimal and don’t fundamentally alter your approach.
Better are the environmental objects that serve the Ricochet ability inherent in certain guns. Triggering this ability lets you target specific objects–often a metal drum or pipe or similar–to bounce your shot off them and onto an enemy you couldn’t otherwise hit with a clear shot. Maybe you can’t get a bead on the guy inside that building, but you can hit the stove behind him and rebound the bullet into his back.
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The Ricochet ability does fundamentally alter your approach in that it opens up the possibility space of the map. You’re now having to calculate a whole new series of angles when considering where to position your characters, not just those vectors that may allow you to get a shot on the enemy but how that enemy may be able to use Ricochet to get at you. In fact, it’s a sign of how effective the ability is at expanding the tactical board that even on the very final mission, I still found myself caught out by an enemy puncturing my careful squad positioning with one well-placed ricocheted shot that I simply hadn’t noticed was possible.
Much like that final mission enemy, Hard West 2 gets it right where it counts. Despite some thin RPG trappings, it’s ultimately a highly-accomplished game of tactical combat with two or three genuinely terrific ideas executed exceptionally well. While it does suffer from a lack of imagination in some of its map design, that doesn’t detract too much from how enjoyable it is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your posse and find creative ways to put down hordes of Wild West demons.
Indika Review – The Devil Makes Three
Indika is a hard game to define. It looks like a horror game, but it’s not scary–at least not in the conventional sense. It plays like a third-person puzzle game, but most of the puzzles don’t require much thought. What Indika definitely is, however, is a fascinating psychological examination of faith and doubt that’s supported by remarkable visuals and mature writing. Occasionally, its ambitions get a little unwieldy, but developer Odd Meter’s decision to take on these heady themes and confidently explore nearly all of them is an impressive feat.
You play as Indika, a nun tormented by a demonic voice in her head, as she travels across a nightmarish interpretation of 19th-century Russia to deliver a letter. Most of the game consists of traveling from point A to B, solving a few puzzles, and watching cutscenes, but within these tasks are moments of introspection and self-discovery. Along the way, she meets an escaped convict named Ilya who claims God speaks to him. What ensues is a nuanced exploration of faith and doubt, love and hate, and pleasure and suffering. Both characters believe in the same God; rather than pitting a believer against a nonbeliever, Indika explores the space that exists between two interpretations of the same faith. This specificity allows Odd Meter to delve into different shades of Christianity and examine how the same texts, rituals, and prayers can be bent to ascertain different meanings.
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These frequent philosophical exchanges could have easily come off as overwrought or self-indulgent, but all these musings are in service of the characters and their development over the course of the story. For example, Indika tells Ilya she joined the convent of her own volition, but because her decision was fueled by emotions and experiences that were out of her control, can she really say she became a nun through her own free will? Ilya challenges this notion, and declares that free will is how we rise above our biological dispositions. Reflective conversations like these are key to Indika’s character as she grapples with her faith and attempts to make sense of her life.
It helps that Indika is portrayed by the fantastic Isabella Inchbald, and Louis Boyer embodies Ilya with equal confidence. There’s a raw authenticity and conviction to their performances that bring both characters to life. You can hear the fear and doubt in Indika’s voice and the desperation and hope in Ilya’s. Meanwhile, Silas Carson’s portrayal of the devil is humorous, sadistic, and cordial in his demeanor as he deftly narrates the action. While the writing and acting are great, they are occasionally undermined by awkward animations. Sometimes the action will look a bit too robotic, or dialogue won’t quite sync up with a character’s mouth. These are minor issues overall, but sometimes it was just enough to take me out of a scene.
Nevertheless, Indika is one of the most visually arresting games I’ve ever played. Developer Odd Meter uses framing, color, and lighting to achieve a look and feel that is rarely seen in games. Wide-angle shots often distort Indika’s facial features and warp the background to give the experience a voyeuristic feel. The framing, meanwhile, consistently impresses as it accentuates the action and world. In one section, after being chased by a wolf the size of a truck, the beast takes a tumble and wedges itself in a water wheel. What follows is a subdued conversation between Indika, Ilya, and the devil in her head about whether or not a beast can be sinful, as the camera tracks the dead wolf being dragged underwater by the water wheel. It’s a macabre scene given the context alone, but the stylistic choices allow the tone to meet the moment more effectively than a standard shot/reverse shot conversation would.
Rather than pitting a believer against a nonbeliever, Indika explores the space that exists between two interpretations of the same faith.
These choices aren’t just for show, either. They are bold and sometimes jarring creative decisions that reflect Indika’s inner turmoil as she travels across Russia. There are sections where the world–at least from Indika’s perspective–is split in two. When this happens, an oppressive and discordant synth kicks in as hellish red light soaks the scene. Through prayer, Indika can reforge the world around her and suppress the chaos. To progress, you–and by extension, Indika–must rip apart and merge her world by alternating between Indika’s cacophonous hell and her quiet reality. Although rare, these moments give weight and meaning to Indika’s gameplay as they leverage Indika’s themes of faith and doubt.
The same can’t always be said for the game’s puzzles, though. Most are simple and mundane: Move some boxes around, manipulate a crane, and strategically align lifts and elevators. Puzzles like these make sense in the early hours, as the game familiarizes you with Indika and her menial life. But as her world expands, these bland puzzles start to feel tonally and narratively incongruous as Indika struggles with her faith, especially when some puzzles literally let you tear the world apart, while others have you shove a box around.
With these criticisms in mind, it may seem like this story would be better told as a film or book. What’s fascinating, though, is that Indika clearly understands the medium it inhabits. It brazenly leverages video game tropes to elevate its themes. You’ll earn points for acts of faith, such as performing the sign of the cross at crucial moments, lighting altars, and collecting religious texts. You can then use these points to unlock skills that increase the amount of points Indika can earn. The thing is, these points do nothing. The loading screens even tell you they are useless. They have no discernible value and are simply a shallow way to measure Indika’s faith.
Yet, I didn’t want to miss any of it. I lit every altar, collected every text, and mashed the sign-of-the-cross button (yes, there’s a button) at every opportunity. It’s almost silly to gamify this stuff, but putting Indika through the motions as she builds up an arbitrary “faith” score while she’s actively questioning her faith is brilliant. I grew up religious. I went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic school. There was a distinct period in my life when I was questioning my beliefs, yet I still held on to some of those ingrained rituals. There was a quiet guilt that I couldn’t expunge: a feeling that could only be alleviated by going through the motions. In a way, it feels like Indika is using the language of video games and my understanding of them to reinforce her feelings of faith and doubt. Indika is about the internal struggle of a nun who isn’t entirely sure what she believes anymore, but seeing her cling to tradition–through my actions–is powerful.
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Although Indika does an excellent job exploring its themes of faith and doubt, there’s one subject the game doesn’t handle with the care it requires. In one particular scene near the end of the game, it touches on some uncomfortable territory that–depending on your interpretation of the story and its themes–might feel unnecessary. Up until that point, the evil that exists in the world feels intangible and theoretical. Indika and Ilya talk of hell and demons, but it always feels distant, almost as if God is protecting Indika on her journey. That is, until the final moments of the game, which allude to a sexual assault. The reasoning behind this scene is to test Indika’s faith, but as it stands, the scene in question feels like a means to an end rather than something Odd Meter wanted to properly explore.
Given the Catholic Church’s long and pockmarked history of sexual abuse, it makes sense that it plays such a critical role in Indika, but it’s not examined with the care that is necessary. The scene and what follows are clearly intended to elicit a lot of different emotions and speculation, but when those knee-jerk reactions stem from something so traumatic, it feels unearned. It’s almost as if the game wants you to move on as quickly as it does, which stands out as unusual in a game that is otherwise very thorough in its interrogation of sensitive subject matter. To be clear, Odd Meter doesn’t botch this scene entirely. Atrocity is often the most difficult test of faith, and they had the good sense not to show the assault itself. However, once the scene ends, it feels like Indika is barrelling towards its conclusion, while I was still trying to make sense of what just happened.
I’m often frustrated when developers lean on religious iconography but fail to explore faith in a meaningful way. Some of the greatest works of art exist because of religion, either as an exploration of it, a testament to it, or a denouncement of it. Human history is inextricably tied to religious faith. Yet, outside of a few exceptions, games tend to avoid commenting on religion without obfuscating it behind fake dogmas and fantastical gods. Indika’s direct examination of Christianity allows it to better explore the gray areas of religion and faith that are often lost when the recognizable specifics are swapped with allegorical fiction. And while the execution occasionally falters, its willingness to grapple with these difficult themes, and the conclusions it draws, make Indika a fascinating journey.
Endless Ocean: Luminous Review – Hope You Really Like Fish
Between the advent of cozy games, farm sims, rhythm games, narrative adventures, and more, we’re in something of a golden age of non-violent games. If you want to take a break from shooting and punching and instead just relax with some chill vibes, you have myriad options available to you. Endless Ocean: Luminous is an aquatic take, letting you freely explore the ocean with no danger or violence to speak of whatsoever. It sometimes straddles the line between game and edutainment in ways that could be engaging, but achingly slow progression and a lack of realism leave it feeling washed up.
Scientists say only 5% of the ocean has been explored. The name Endless Ocean, and the unexplored nature of the ocean itself, suggests an incredible degree of possibility and adventure. In practice, though, there actually isn’t all that much to do in Endless Ocean: Luminous. You can take part in a Solo Dive, in which you explore a seemingly randomized map; a Shared Dive, which is just a Solo Dive with friends exploring the same map together online using Nintendo’s Switch Online service (complete with its usual shortcomings); and Story Mode, which gives you short missions consisting of objectives accompanied by a little dialogue.
With this dearth of options, its approach to progression gating further compounds the lack of variety. After the first handful of story missions, the others are locked behind scanning ocean creatures in Shared or Solo dives. To scan you just hold the L button in the direction of sea life until the meter fills, which then gives a detailed look at the creatures in your scan. But the progress gates are set so absurdly high that the novelty wears off quickly. One of the earliest gates is set at 500 scans, which felt high but reasonable. The next was at 1,000, so I had to get another 500. That rubbed me the wrong way. By the time I reached the next gate, set at 2,000–meaning I needed another 1,000 scans–the chill vibes were gone. I was just annoyed. It’s hard to overstate how frustrating it is to spend almost an hour roaming around a randomized map scanning fish, only to exit the map and find I’ve only gained another 200 pips toward my next story goal. Plus, judging by the creature log, there are just under 600 species of sea life total in the game. Why would you need to scan 2,000 times to see a mid-game story mission?
Not that there’s much story to tell. You’re a new diver accompanied by an AI companion, exploring phenomena of glowing fish, and sometimes you’re accompanied by a brash (but actually cowardly) fellow diver named Daniel. The story missions are short and largely uneventful. Sometimes they end so quickly that I was genuinely surprised. Other times, they feel like a glorified tutorial, which makes it that much stranger to gate it behind so much free-roaming playtime. At least one of them is just a cutscene with no actual diving gameplay whatsoever. Occasionally, the story mode will deliver something unexpected and fun, like a massive or fantastical species of fish, but those moments are few and far between. There is a meta-story involving an ancient relic with 99 slots, which you fill in by discovering certain artifacts scattered randomly throughout dives or by fulfilling achievement objectives, but it feels more like a busywork checklist than a real story-driver.
And because the scanning requirements are so excessive, small inconveniences feel more impactful than they should. It’s easy to pick up a fish you’ve already scanned while trying to register a new one. Every time you scan any fish, it zooms in on them for a moment, forcing you to hit B to back out of the detailed view. If you scan multiple species at once, they’re grouped in a listing together, which is meant to be a convenience feature–but new species aren’t prioritized in the list, so you need to scroll down to find any with a “???” designation to mark them as discovered. If you don’t, the unidentified fish remains unidentified. If you scan a large school of the same fish, they’ll all be listed separately. In Solo Dives, the map is slowly charted in segments as you explore, but keeping an eye on the map to make sure I was filling in the little squares meant I could fail to notice a fish swimming by, or I could miss a depth change that may reward me for diving deeper.
Your dives get you experience points to level up, which increases your dive capacity, which you can use to tag sea creatures to swim alongside you. At first, these only include the smallest of sea creatures, but as you build capacity, you can swim with larger ones that are used to solve riddles. A stone tablet might challenge you to come back with a particular type of turtle or a fish that “sails as it swims.” Even then, though, the solutions are too rigid. When I returned to the tablet with a “Sailfish,” nothing happened, presumably because it was not the specific solution the riddle had in mind.
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In addition to story progress and dive capacity, leveling up also opens new but severely limited tiers of customization options. Those include palette swaps for your diver or individual SCUBA suit parts, different stickers to apply to your profile, and emotes. There isn’t even a different helmet or mouthpiece, just the default in different colors.
It feels as if the goal was to create a virtual, interactive aquatic museum, and the variety of sea life does support this nicely. It actually is exciting the first time you see a new species of sea turtle or an extinct megalodon shark, even if you know that it can’t hurt you. But the mechanical underpinnings get in the way of its potential as a museum too. For example, every species of fish has a blurb with some interesting marine facts, complete with a reading of it from your AI companion. This could be a cool and educational feature, but when you’re pressed to perform thousands of scans, it’s hard to bother listening to every blurb. There also isn’t an indicator for when you’ve already heard a blurb, and since you’ll see species repeated a lot, it’s nearly impossible to remember which ones you have or haven’t heard–even if you can tell dozens of roughly similar-looking fish apart, which I can’t.
In part due to its non-violent nature, Endless Ocean does not present the depths very realistically, even to my layman’s eyes. Your oxygen is unlimited, and you don’t need to worry about temperature or depth. You’ll never freeze or get decompression sickness or drown. More aggressive species will never attack you. Species of fish seem to be scattered more or less randomly around the map, which leads to oddities like finding large-scale creatures in shallow waters, or discovering deep-sea dwellers in middle-depths instead of the deepest, almost pitch-black parts of the ocean where they actually reside. And while this is likely a limitation of the Switch hardware, the fish, coral, and ocean floor themselves aren’t rendered photorealistically enough to instill a sense of awe and majesty.
It seems Endless Ocean wants you to spend most of your time diving with friends to pass the time. The Shared Dives option is the first one on the menu, after all, and it is easier to fulfill the simple procedural objectives when you’re paired with other divers. But like most Switch games, you join friendly games using a digital code, and there isn’t built-in voice chat, so you can’t really treat it like an underwater virtual lobby. Even if you could, though, scanning fish with your friends would not sustain the group fun for anyone but the most devoted of sea-life enthusiasts.
Endless Ocean: Luminous could have been a realistic SCUBA sim with all the treacherous hazards that real underwater divers need to consider, a relaxing chill-vibes game that’s mostly about finding fish with your friends, or a story-driven game centered around discovering awesome and even extinct underwater beasts. It has pieces of all of those, but it doesn’t commit to any of them. Instead, it takes the enormity and glory of earth’s largest and most mysterious region and turns exploring it into a dull, repetitive chore.
