PC Invasion’s Alternative PC Game Awards 2015

Weirdest Kickstarter Backer Rewards: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Tim: People are starting to get creative with their backer rewards. There are always incredibly-expensive-but-kinda-tempting ones like “be at the game’s launch party and have dinner with the devs”, and pretty much every game on Kickstarter offers higher tiers containing art books and soundtracks and so on, but Metroidvania (sorry – Igavania) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night stands out for a couple of particularly odd inclusions.

For starters, there’s the “8-inch stained glass window” option, which I will admit is actually kind of a cool idea for a game with a lot of stained glass theming, but is still incredibly unusual. Then there’s the considerably weirder option to have your pet included in the game as an enemy.

What better way to immortalise your poor, dead, beloved Fluffy than to slaughter them over and over again while grinding for experience? Still, I suppose it’s less creepy then taxidermy.

Most Underwhelming Pre-Order Bonus: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

Tim: What could make you want to pre-order Final Fantasty Type-0 HD more than an EXCLUSIVE LOADING SCREEN, eh? A loading screen for Dota 2, no less. Phwoar. That’s the sort of thing that gets people to open their wallets.

Okay, it came bundled with a Moogle ward and a Chocobo courier for Dota 2 (which actually is the sort of thing that gets people to open their wallets) but I had a cheap laugh when I saw that one of the pre-order bonuses was, literally, a loading screen.

Best Excuse For Fighting Rats At A Low Level: Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide

Peter: You know the old cliché: “go kill ten rats”. It’s synonymous with boring, unimaginative (usually RPG or MMO) quest design. That’s a bit of an unfortunate slur against rats though, who can be a fascinating and exciting enemy to go up against when they’re allowed a bit more in the way of character development.

Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide has the benefit of Games Workshop’s weirdo, warp-stone obsessed, mad-scientist Skaven rat race to draw upon, meaning at the very least you’re going to be hacking up a chittering, humanoid rat. If you’re really lucky, it might be roid-powered Rat Ogre, or a gas-mask wearing Poison Globadier. The variety, diversity, and sheer oddity of the Skaven returns meaning and co-operative rehabilitation to the tired old “go kill some rats” phrase. Well done, Fatshark.

Tim: This is a game based around the premise of “go kill ten rats”, only it’s less “ten rats” and more “ten billion rats.” And it works!

BesEXPLOSIONS EXPLOSIONS EXPLOSIONS EXPLOSIONS: Just Cause 3

Tim: Speaking of taking basic gaming concepts and then pushing them to ludicrous extremes…

Paul: Just Cause 3 is EXPLOSIONS. If you want EXPLOSIONS, then play this. Oddly enough, it’s incredibly fun to continually blow stuff up. It’s so over-the-top and stupid that it doesn’t really get old.

Tim: Just Cause 3 does several things well, but the thing it does best is EXPLOSIONS. It’s a game that can literally be reviewed in screenshots of EXPLOSIONS. It’s a game with multiple types of rocket and grenade launcher that specialise in creating MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS. Basically: EXPLOSIONS.

Best Ideological Dissonance In An Assassin’s Creed Mission: Karl Marx, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

Peter: Like all of the Assassin’s Creed games, Syndicate has you conveniently bumping into historical characters around every street corner (literally, in the case of Charles Dickens). Karl Marx was knocking about in London at the time, so obviously you meet him too.

His very first mission gives you the task of murdering about twenty undercover policemen, because they’re moderately inconveniencing Marx by preventing him showing up for a meeting. Now, yes, that is an absurd level of surveillance for one man, but I’m not sure this is the best way to get the law to lose interest.

For Marx’s second mission, one of the very first things he says is “Socialism can only be achieved through democratic means, not violence!” Oh, sorry Karl, did we take a vote on stabbing all those cops the other night? I must have missed that.

Most Entertaining Game Demonstration: Chris Roberts playing Star Citizen

Peter: One of the simple pleasures of covering games is witnessing a presentational fuck-up. Remember Konami’s incredible 2010 E3 conference? It was a cavalcade of wonderful, prancing surrealism.

Publishers are getting a bit too good at avoiding that sort of thing (fun for us, probably not ideal for them), so it was a rare treat earlier this month to see Chris Roberts attempting to play his own $100 million USD game. Whether by accident or devious off-stage design, Chris’ Star Citizen control set-up was not behaving itself at all, leading drunken walking, launch-pad bunny hopping, and general chaos. It’s unusual for a development team to be so entertainingly transparent about how Alpha-ish their Alpha really is, but Cloud Imperium definitely stuck to their commitment towards open development with this particular demonstration.

Paul: This video was great to wake up to in the morning. It was a great example of not testing anything before going live. It’s happened to us all at some point. Fair play to Chris: he stuck with it when most of us would have probably put a fist through the screen.

Tim: I still have absolutely no desire to pay attention to Star Citizen until it’s released or becomes vapourware, but you two telling me about this video has made me question that policy. I may have to track it down.

Best Game That Is Literally What It Sounds Like: Cat Goes Fishing

Tim: You’re a cat. You go fishing. It’s a complete waste of time, and a bizarrely entertaining (and tremendously cute) one at that.

Paul: I had no idea what this game was until Tim mentioned it and he’s absolutely correct. This literally is a cat going fishing. We need more games that do what they say in the tin.

Best RPG Featuring A Quest Where You Resurrect The Spirit of A Foetus Aborted Through Domestic Abuse And It Somehow Manages Not to Feel Gratuitous, Exploitative Or Stupid: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Peter: I still can’t believe it. Holy shit.

Tim: I don’t know enough Slavic folklore to know if this is an actual thing, or if flesh-eating foetus monsters were made up specifically for the game, but it fits in really well as a piece of “yes, that does sound like legitimate folklore.” And yes, through some dark miracle, it actually works as a questline.

Best Behind-the-Scenes Stories About Games Development: Grim Fandango Remastered

Peter: Also “Best Game of 2015 from 1998”, but hey. The Grim Fandango Remastered ‘Director’s Commentary’ features contributions from a whole lot of the original crew who worked on the game, and is absolutely terrific. You’ll learn, for example, that a special program was written to simulate the Cat Track Races, and was missing a trigger to shut off; which effectively means that Grim Fandango was running pretend races between cats for the rest of the game.

Better yet, you get to hear about the running battle of willpower between Tim Schafer and producer Lleslle Aclaro over aspects of the game that might need to be cut for time or story reasons. This culminates with a description (and included in-game image) of Tim’s crudely hand-drawn note featuring the burning beavers, and other (cut) encounters pleading “don’t cut us, Lleslle!” out of little speech bubbles.

Most Bizarre Hardware Cock-Up: Nvidia

Paul: It was back in January 2015 that Nvidia started looking into problems with the GTX 970. The cards were mysteriously not using the final 500MB of VRAM and it took Nvidia a whole month to apologise. They actually had the balls to mention in their apology that the missing VRAM was a “feature”.

Tim: Ah, the old “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” thing. Well, as the new and (somewhat) proud owner of a GTX 970, I can at least say that it hasn’t caused me any problems. Yet. Supposedly, it’s not really much of an issue unless you’re running something that the card basically wouldn’t be able to handle anyway, but it’s still a truly odd little mishap.

Most Disappointing Announcement That Never Happened: Diablo 3’s Second Expansion

Paul: I was excited about a possible GamesCom announcement of a new Diablo 3 expansion… but there was nothing. I was excited about a BlizzCon announcement of a new Diablo 3 expansion… but there was nothing. The Diablo franchise really does appear to be the bastard child Blizzard would love to keep locked away in the cellar.

The sooner they get that second expansion out the way, the sooner they can get on with making Diablo 4  – hopefully without all the massive cock-ups they made with Diablo 3.

Tim: Journal Entry 3,745: It has now been 4,194 days since the release of Warcraft 3. Had briefly given up all hope, then remembered that StarCraft 2 just finished, so Blizzard can maybe use their billions of dollars and their RTS team to work out a way to make Warcraft 4 without interfering with World of Warcraft‘s annual money machine. Then again, if it’s as bloated and spread out as StarCraft 2 seemed to be, maybe it’s for the best that they stick to milking WoW.

But yes, I’ll confess to being surprised by the lack of a second Diablo 3 expansion too. If there was one thing I expected from Blizzard this year (other than World of Warcraft expansions) it was an announcement of the more devilish sort.

Most Horrifying Tutorial: Prison Architect

Tim: Prison Architect is a really, really good game – almost Theme Prison, if Bullfrog went in for that sort of thing – and something I totally forgot about when doing my own picks of the year. A lot of people aren’t going to be able to enjoy it, though, because they simply won’t get past the tutorial.

The very first tutorial mission teaches you the basics of construction by having you build and power an execution chamber and an electric chair, so that you can execute a man who turned himself in after murdering his unfaithful wife and her lover. This is not played for laughs. It’s noted that, had he committed the murder a few hundred miles away, he wouldn’t be facing the death penalty. It’s a really sobering look at the justice system, and one that’s put an awful lot of people off the game itself. In one sense, this is good: prisons aren’t really a laughing matter, and taking them (and the death penalty) flippantly is a really slippery slope.

In another sense, it’s very, very bad. This is the only – the only – time in the game you’re actually forced to execute somebody. In Sandbox mode, you actually have to go through quite a rigmarole to even open up the ability to execute people, and it’s hardly something that’s essential to the game. Sure, you can go down the hard-ass route of routine cell tosses and continual guard checkpoints and harsh punishments, but you can also create a prison that’s focused on keeping your prisoners happy and rehabilitating them; executions are absolutely unnecessary. Both viewpoints come with their own challenges and their own downsides, and both will challenge your views on what’s “right”. It’s just a shame that a fair few people won’t get far enough into the game to see that sort of thing, because the game’s initial tutorial is the absolute darkest moment in the game, and one of the grimmest tutorials I’ve ever seen.

I don’t blame Introversion for this, and it certainly sets the tone that despite some comic overtones this really isn’t a “silly” game, but I’m still sad that a lot of people won’t continue on with it after that. It does get better, I promise.

Paul: I remember Elly playing this. It wasn’t long before she shut it down. She thought it just felt “wrong” and “unnecessary”. I can understand that having played through it myself.

Tim: And that’s my point! The rest of the game doesn’t really have anything to do with that, so it’s sorta sad that it’s putting people off.

Best Game Peter Isn’t Here To Write About: Pillars of Eternity

Tim: Peter’s a bit sick and/or on holiday, which is why his presence hasn’t been felt too much throughout these Alternative Awards, but I’m pretty sure he’d want to give one to Pillars of Eternity. I’m just not quite sure what it would actually be.

So, er… well done, Pillars of Eternity, for… being good? Or being a worthy attempt at recreating an old-school CRPG for the modern age? Or… I don’t know? Peter, help.

Paul: This award is really dedicated to Peter and his car stereo which broke over the holidays. Maybe we should have just given him an award and not Pillars?

Best Game That Isn’t Actually Out Yet: Darkest Dungeon

Tim: Early Access games are always a risk. Some will simply never get finished. Some won’t ever live up to their potential. Some promise the moon and deliver a small lump of granite. Some go through a number of rough phases and then eventually turn out to be pretty damn good. And then – very, very occasionally – some are actually phenomenally good games, long before they’re actually released.

Step right up, Darkest Dungeon, for being a game that’s kept me occupied for 66 thoroughly wonderful hours while still in Early Access. This roguelike-like-lite RPG has you send a merry band of adventurers down into a variety of horrific dungeons on your estate, where you need to manage not only their health but also their sanity. That merry band of adventurers will rapidly turn into a group of alcoholic, depressed, gambling, self-flagellating piles of neuroses, and you’ll have to split the meagre gold you get from their expeditions between teaching them new skills and getting them new equipment, and trying to keep them vaguely happy and sane, lest they disobey your orders, deliberately trigger traps, or just plain freak out their teammates in dungeons. It’s a lot harder than you might think. Apparently, exploring monster-riddled forests and catacombs haunted by the undead is actually quite a stressful endeavour.

It has its problems and it can certainly be frustrating when you lose a high-level character to a stupid mistake, an unfair trap, or a first encounter with a boss you have no idea how to fight, but hey, you always had the option of fleeing with your tail between your legs. I’m looking forward to spending another chunk of time with this when it actually launches.

Best Effort At Episodically Releasing A Game: Resident Evil: Revelations 2

Tim: I didn’t do a particularly good job of keeping up with Resident Evil: Revelations 2, which I’m a bit sad about because I quite liked what I played of it. A lot more than I did the original Resident Evil: Revelations, anyway. But that’s not why this is here.

Capcom made the rather unusual move of making an actual episodic game with Resi Revi 2, in that they pretty much had the entire thing finished before the first episode hit, and they then released one episode a week – you know, like how episodes work in TV land. This is a marked difference from the approach of pretty much every other episodic game out there, where one episode is released, and then the next episode is finished off over the next two or three months (with Telltale occasionally moving this into piss-taking territory of about half a year between episodes, and Valve obviously not understanding how episodic content – or, indeed, actual time – is supposed to work).

While that’s a bit of a pain in the arse for anyone who has to review the content, because blocking out a few hours of play and a few hours of writing every week for the same game can be a bit tricky in any busy launch period, it’s actually something I’d like to see more of. It’s an innovative approach to doing something episodically and an interesting way of trying to keep a game in the public’s mind over the period of a month, and I actually appreciate the effort made to do episodic content a little bit differently.

The Unofficial Peter Molyneux “What the Fuck” Award: Way of the Samurai 4

Tim: A new award here, which… yes, okay, so pretty much every award is new. But this one is hopefully going to be recurring.

This particular award has absolutely nothing to do with Peter Molyneux himself, and he hasn’t authorised it or anything. But when we see something so spectacularly weird that we could describe it in a Peter Molyneux way… welp.

Way of the Samurai 4 is a VERY REALISTIC game about the end of the Shogunate, in which you can literally do as much or as little as you want. Side with different factions! Murder random passers-by! Help out an amnesiac thief who gradually gets more and more sweary and abusive as he regains his memories! Go on dates in which you have to break into a house and flip open beds to find the object of your affections, then have sex with them by trying to wrestle their clothes off while they playfully kick you in the crotch! Attempt to sleep with a probably underage girl only to find a burly sailor wearing a wig in her bed! Recruit people for your dojo by hitting them with blunt instruments! Deliberately offer yourself up for torture sessions!

You can’t quite plant an acorn and then come back in five years to find a mighty tree in its place, or zoom all the way out from a worm in an apple all the way to a view of a continent, but this still sounds like the sort of thing that Molyneux could’ve idly scribbled down on a train, or that could’ve spawned from a multi-year Molyjam.

(Free-to-play doll-shagging simulator how do you Do It was a pretty close runner-up for this, incidentally.)

And so concludes another set of Alternative PC Game Awards. They’ll doubtless be back at the end of 2016 when we’ll have plenty more to choose from – although we may also mock the standard “Best of E3” awards with some more Alternative Awards in the middle of 2016, too.