The Stack

Suppose you have two weapons. One hits for 100 points once per turn, the other hits for 20 points five times per turn. They seem equivalent, right? But if you find a socketable weapon upgrade item that makes each hit do 5 more points, weapon B gets more mileage out of it than weapon A does. On the other hand, if you find an upgrade that makes a weapon do one additional hit per turn, weapon A is the clear winner.

Considerations like these occupied a surprisingly large portion of my time playing The Stick of Truth. With factors like elemental damage, damage reduction, status effects, and so forth, the math of combat is elaborate enough that one piece of equipment usually isn’t obviously better than another at a similar level. And the game keeps throwing new equipment at you! A major quest can give you multiple entire outfits to choose from, in addition to all the items you can buy from stores.

And the thing is, by the end, it’s kind of irrelevant. I developed a dominant strategy: at the start of each fight, I’d have the PC and Kyle both use their costliest skills, which do massive damage to all enemies. For most non-boss-fights, that was enough to end matters without even using a weapon at all. But I suspect that pretty much any strategy you choose would work in the end. It’s not a difficult game. In fact, it’s so not-difficult, I managed to basically miss out on an entire major mechanic, because I confused Power Points (used in special abilities) with Mana (used exclusively for farts), and thought for most of the game that I couldn’t afford to use fart attacks in combat. Farts, in addition to providing powerful attacks, have the particular virtue that they interrupt enemies in the act of preparing spells. But it didn’t matter. I survived without being able to do that.

Nonetheless, the game tries to motivate you to collect all the outfits and weapons just by keeping track of them in a “Collectibles” menu, and awarding an Achievement for filling in all the spots in that menu. It does a similar thing with the Chinpokomon figurines scattered around the town, which don’t seem to have any relevance to the game beyond collection for collection’s sake. Making friends is also treated as a collection game, although this time it’s one that unlocks combat perks.

Now, I realize not everyone feels like this, but I’m into collection for collection’s sake. And this game, like many modern games, is polite enough to let completists like me continue playing after the final boss is defeated and the credits have rolled. But, despite some twinges, I don’t think I’ll take the bait. Collecting all the outfits would require grinding for cash, and that’s something I just don’t feel like doing. The game has been blessedly grind-free otherwise; simply making progress in the story provided me enough XP that combat became too easy to be interesting.

Plus, there’s thousands of other games out there waiting to be played. Let’s try another one.

I’m pretty far into The Stick of Truth now. The story is divided into a series of days and nights, with the days spent questing around the town and the nights devoted to self-contained scenarios in more fantastical environments. Day 1 is spent recruiting for the human side, so they can recover the Stick from the elves who stole it. Day 2 starts similarly, but turns into mostly questing on the elves’ side. At the end of day 2, the elves and humans join forces against a new threat, and at the point I’m at in day 3, I’m still trying to recruit more allies in preparation for the presumed final assault. At the same time, there’s a second story going on in parallel, about a government cover-up of a UFO crash and subsequent spillage of alien goo that creates Nazi zombies.

The story been exploring various dimensions of unpleasantness throughout — scat jokes, racism, bullying and other acts of juvenile cruelty, children being exposed to nudity and sexuality in uncomfortable ways (including an extended sequence where the player character watches his parents have sex), anal probing, zombies. But it’s only at this late stage, well into what I believe to be the final chapter, that I finally reach a point that’s nearly overwhelmingly revolting: the abortion clinic scene.

I won’t go into detail. It involves hiding from the Men In Black by pretending to be a doctor, and consequently going through a special QTE sequence. Failure results in cartoon gore ¹Not to be confused with cartoon Gore. He appears in the game too, but elsewhere., followed by death and starting the sequence over. I’m not sure why this makes me queasy while the rest of the game leaves me relatively unmoved. Maybe there’s just something special about the combination of botched surgery and genitalia. Maybe it’s the way that the QTE makes you pay attention to what’s going on, instead of just watching for button prompts or abstract sparkles like in the combat system. Maybe it’s the combination. Regardless, I had to shut off the game for a while at this point, and contemplated just abandoning it there.

But I did come back. I have a desire to see this through to the end, and I think this has a lot to do with how compelling the game’s RPG treadmill is. (I may go into that in my next post.) And, thankfully, the next mission breaks the gross-out a bit by sending you off to Canada, which, in South Park continuity, is rendered in an even less realistic style than the USA.

Now, I said that The Stick of Truth puts you into a war against (kids pretending to be) elves, but elves are far from the only things you fight. You fight anyone who stands in your way, or who is the subject of a quest, including characters who aren’t even part of the LARP. For example, at one point, the only thing that stands in the way of sending a war party to recover the stolen Stick is that one of your teammates is in detention down at the school. In the course of rescuing him, you battle a number of hall monitors — and, blurring the lines between reality and make-believe further, you do it with exactly the same combat system as usual, magical abilities and all. You can even receive quests from people outside the fantasy scenario, like when the mayor asks you to help solve the town’s homeless problem by beating up homeless people. The inner game is fully integrated into what passes in South Park for reality.

But then, little kids doing magic fits right in, because the town of South Park is no stranger to the outlandish and bizarre. I have only a slight familiarity with the show’s lore, but I know that it’s seen such sights as Jesus and Satan, underpants gnomes, and talking poo. So when I find myself fighting alien abductors, or a herd of Nazi zombie cows, I assume that it’s just drawing more from the show.

I really like how these lore references are handled, by the way. This is an area where I felt the 1998 South Park FPS fared badly: it assumed that anyone who played the game was already familiar with everything from the show. But here in The Stick of Truth, part of the premise is that you’re a new kid in town. Your primary quest is to go and make friends, and that leads you into the LARP and thus into the rest of the game. Because the player character is a newcomer, the game has an excuse to treat the player as a newcomer as well. Even in the few cases where I do recognize something, the game’s brief introduction to it is at least an opportunity to crack a few jokes about it.

When I call The Stick of Truth a “South-Park-themed RPG”, I mean that it’s an RPG at its core and a South Park property on its surface. If you replaced the graphics, dialogue, and flavor text with something more like standard fantasy RPG material, you’d have a game that plays the same, but it wouldn’t be at all recognizable as South Park.

You might be tempted to say that this is simply how licenses of this sort work, that they’re always just veneers on top of an established genre. But it isn’t necessarily so. Consider how the gameplay of Wing Commander was clearly and obviously inspired by Star Wars, despite having a story and setting that drew more from the Man-Kzin Wars stories. The resemblance to Star Wars exists only at the level of gameplay, but was strong enough to draw comment at the time. And that kind of gameplay-level connection to the source material is what The Stick of Truth pointedly lacks.

Nonetheless, there are a few ways that the source material touches the game at a deeper level. The first comes at when you choose a character class, which, due to the LARP-within-a-game plot, is something that happens in-story, the choice presented by the character of Cartman. You have a choice of four classes: Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Jew. This both continues the Jewish jokes from the show and enables more of them in the game, but it isn’t just a throwaway gag: Jew is a fully fleshed-out character class, with its own special abilities based on more Jewish jokes. Naturally, this is the class I chose, on the basis that it’s the only one unique to this game. Then I thought: wait, it’s probably just Cleric under a different name, isn’t it? But it isn’t. I don’t really have a handle on what the specialization of the Jew is supposed to be — possibly it’s the generalist class, like Final Fantasy‘s Red Mage. It does seem to have some focus on abilities that become stronger as you sustain damage, which I suppose could be another tasteless Jewish joke, an encouragement to get your Jew beat up a lot.

If there’s no Cleric class, where do you get your healing? Largely from snack foods, but also from Butters. Butters is a supporting character from the show who I was unfamiliar with. In the game, he’s a Paladin who joins your party and can heal you with a laying on of hands, which he interprets as patting you on the back and saying “I got your back, bro” or similar sentiments. Again, skin-deep theming. Apparently the Paladin role suits the character’s innocence, but it’s just a mapping of an existing character to an independently-existing role. Eventually, however, you acquire other party members you can swap him with, and the first one you unlock is Kenny. If you know anything at all about South Park, you probably know that Kenny dies in every single episode, only to come back without explanation in the next. This inspires one of his powers in the game. If he falls in combat, rats drag his carcass away. A few rounds later, he just walks back in and resumes fighting as if nothing happened. So, here, we have gameplay drawn from the source material.

Then there’s the fart jokes. This game makes farts into one of your fundamental skills, both in combat and in solving environmental puzzles that allow you to bypass fights. This defies easy classification as deep or shallow theming. On the one hand, Cartman, who teaches you the secret of power-farting, refers to it as a “dragon shout”, specifically pointing out its resemblance to the Dragon Shout abilities in Skyrim. On the other hand, the game does use the ability in particularly South-Park-fart-joke ways, like letting you fart through open flames to create explosions.

OK, apparently I don’t feel up to finishing This War of Mine right away, so let’s try something sillier and less stressful from the same bundle. The Stick of Truth, despite its South Park theming, is pretty much a conventional combat-oriented RPG, premised on a promise of inevitable progress and growth, and that seems a good antidote to TWoM‘s constant grim struggle to stay afloat.

I have to admit that I’ve never been a South Park fan. I’ve seen a bit of the show, I saw the movie, and I even played one of the previous South Park games — specifically, the 1998 FPS using the Turok engine, which, heretically, modeled the characters in 3D. But the whole thing always seemed too mean-spirited for my tastes, its comedy created mainly from the relief that follows the shock of the transgressive. And I do specifically mean shock, not just offense; the whole effect depends on things being unexpectedly offensive. I think in particular of the Terrence and Phillip show from the movie here: the humorous part wasn’t just their relentless profanity, it’s that they broke into it so suddenly and without warning, while not even seeming to acknowledge that it was happening. Even the animation style is designed to contrast with the content, putting the viewer off-guard by making the show look more innocent than it is. But to keep that working for any length of time, they have to keep ramping up the tansgressiveness. That’s a road that ultimately leads to Princess Hears a Strange Noise, and I for one am not willing to follow it that far. And on top of that, a lot of the characters talk in the sort of silly voices that people only use in real life to make fun of other people.

The game, then, has sort of the opposite feel from Undertale. Where Undertale encouraged you to empathize with monsters and treat them as beings worthy of basic respect, The Stick of Truth treats all its characters with derision and contempt.

Despite an intro that presents the war between the Humans and the Drow Elves to control the Stick of Truth as something real happening in a fantasy realm, it quickly turns out to all be a neighborhood-wide LARP. And by LARP, I mean schoolchildren playing make-believe as an excuse to beat each other up. As a result, the game is kind of like a meaner version of Costume Quest. Not just because it involves wandering around a suburb with children in costumes, but because it blurs the line between reality and make-believe. You eat packaged snack foods to regain hit points, and your RPG-standard search for loot just means invading people’s houses and stealing stuff, but when you’re fighting, you really do have the magical powers and special abilities of your fantasy RPG character.

The combat is a great deal more involved than Costume Quest, though. There are a number of status effects to keep track of, both positive and negative. Your enemies can enter a Riposte stance, which makes your melee attacks backfire, or a Reflect stance, which does the same for missiles. Both attacking and defending prompt the player for timed button presses, often multiple presses in sequence. The result, for me at least, was that combat was, if not exactly taxing, then at least involving enough to keep my mind off other things, like how mean the premise is, and how crass the dialogue. This may be how the game is setting me up for sucker-punches to come, when it ramps up the transgressive enough to punch through my indifference.

I commented briefly before about Undertale‘s redemption narrative as applied to Dr. Alphys, but she’s hardly unique in the story. Nearly every major character in the game is defined in terms of their flaws and failures, at least at first. Toriel is overprotective, Papyrus has delusions of grandeur, Sans is a slacker, Undyne is excessively zealous, and so forth. I’ve seen a theory that maps the major characters to the different circles of Dante’s Inferno, and while the details of that were very much a stretch, it’s worth noting that there is a fair amount of disguised Hell imagery in the game. You are, after all, in an underworld full of monsters, and, as with Dante, the only way out is through. A focus on the charcters’ sins adds to this, even if it is mainly done for humorous purposes.

But if there’s one thing we all know about Undertale, it’s that it’s “the friendly RPG where nobody has to die”. They may be sinners, but that doesn’t make them bad people — or even if they are bad people, that doesn’t make them your enemies. I mean, they are your enemies for the most part, but they don’t have to stay that way. Going the Pacifist route means figuring out how to resolve conflicts without violence, and that means treating the antagonists like people instead of like monsters.

This applies to the lesser encounters as well — in fact, it applies better. A lot of the major encounters come down to “survive for long enough and eventually your opponent gives up”, but the random encounters are all about paying attention to the monsters and figuring out what they really want. Maybe a monster just wants you to notice what a nice hat it’s wearing. Maybe it wants to wash you, or get into a muscle-flexing contest. Monsters have weird obsessions sometimes, and I think this makes the whole thing work better than it would in a less-exaggerated setting. The modeling of their motivations isn’t terribly sophisticated — the mind of a monster is a simple state machine. Still, it’s significant that you can relate to them as more than just things that you harvest for EXP. After this, it feels peculiar to go back to playing conventional combat-based RPGs, where your enemies are more objectified.

Now, even for a Pacifist, combat isn’t just a matter of guessing the right things to do. In between your actions, you still have to dodge your opponent’s bullet-hell-like attacks. Some of the attacks are more abstract, some are more representational, but it’s worth noting that, within the game’s fiction, they’re always really attacking your soul rather than your body. It’s like a big metaphor for introversion and social anxiety. People approach you at random, and you try to satisfy them as quickly as possible so they’ll leave you alone and you can stop dodging bullets. Occasionally, with the major characters, the end result is that you make a new friend.

I’m tempted to say on this basis that social anxiety is the player character’s defining character flaw, but that doesn’t really fit with your role in the story in general. It’s worth remembering as a technique, though.

I’ve only played a few days more since my last post, but things are already getting more desperate. I’ve taken in another survivor, because I figure you have to at least make some attempt to be the good guy, but it means one more mouth to feed. I’ve suffered a couple more raids, this time losing more stuff — clearly the game wants me to make weapons and fortifications, but how can I do that when it keeps taking the necessary materials away?

On top of that, a patrol stopped by to deliver the game’s first big moral dilemma: they’re looking for people who attacked a humanitarian aid convoy, and are willing to give me a whole bunch of loot if I rat out my neighbors. I took the loot, on the basis that if I’m not attacking humanitarian aid convoys, no one else should get away with it either. But my guys became Sad as a result. Sad is a status effect like Sick or Wounded, and I assume that it’s similarly fatal if left untreated.

I feel like I’m falling behind, and I’m seriously contemplating starting over so I can do better. Just one thing stops me: the sense that I’d be missing the point. That things are supposed to be falling apart, because that’s is the way the story goes. If I’m not willing to watch my people suffer, I should be playing some other game.

The latest Humble Monthly — yes, of course I’m a Humble Monthly subscriber, I’m exactly their target audience — contained a couple of games I had been curious about, including This War of Mine. I’m currently one week into it, in terms of game time.

The basic concept is that it’s a story of war from the point of view of noncombatants without a lot invested in the outcome, who just want it to end. You get a team of three (to start with) displaced people, sheltering in a bombed-out house, which you see in a sort of dollhouse-like cutout view. During the day, you direct them to resource-management and crafting tasks, trying to make their improvised space more livable, feeding them and tending to their wounds. During the night, you go on scavenging missions to other dollhouses, to find more food and crafting materials. How aggressively you scavenge seems to be a matter of choice: there are places where you can take other survivors’ possessions, by stealth or force. A mere week in, the game has not yet pressured me to take the dark path. I’ll admit that I did some stealing at one point, mainly because I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, but I haven’t even tried to craft weapons yet. That may prove my downfall. Always in games with resource-management aspects, like Civilization, I tend to overprioritize research and production and underprioritize defense. And this game is in some ways Civilization played at a much smaller scale.

It’s unusually slick for such an obviously political game. This is no Papers, Please, made of cartoony pixel art, but a current-generation-console-looking work, all done in the desaturated tones and light blooms that console gamers seem to think signify “serious game for grownups”. Except that this time it might be true.

Only, I keep asking myself: Is it really so different from a zombie apocalypse game? I’ve certainly seen zombie games with very similar underlying crafting-and-survival mechanics. War is presented here as just a flavor of natural disaster, something beyond anyone’s control that destroyed these people’s lives to the point that they have to start over. And while that is a considerable statement in itself for a game to make, it also makes it seem like choosing war as the thing that destabilizes civilized life was a little arbitrary.

Something I was thinking about recently that doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention in the voluminous writing about Undertale: the repeated theme of garbage and its redemption. Like how Bratty and Catty, two shopkeeper NPCs found in an alleyway, sell you things they found in the garbage, including the second most powerful weapon and armor in the game, or how Napstablook, a depressed ghost, invites you to “lie on the floor and feel like garbage” together, which results in visions of the universe. Spoilers ahead.

There’s a garbage dump in one area, which isn’t notable in itself, except that the ending of a Pacifist run keeps returning to it: there’s a bit about going to the garbage dump for a date, which leads to a conversation in the epilogue involving the line “OH MY GOD! YOU’RE GOING BACK IN THE TRASH!!!”, which results in everyone else saying that they want to be in the trash too. And why not? They really are rubbish monsters: even the most formidable of them failed to take down a small child without any EXP who wasn’t even fighting back. The same scene has them admitting that they’re all losers — but that being defeated by the player character was the best thing that happened to any of them.

The garbage dump collects refuse from both the underground and the world above, the world of humans. As such, it’s where the monsters get all their human technology. You get to it by falling, an echo of the fall into the underground in the game’s beginning. Thus, all of monster civilization is as a dump to the surface world. The humans regarded the monsters as trash, so they swept them into a cave where they wouldn’t have to look at them.

This is echoed in one other area, the True Lab, located far under the Underground just as the Underground is far under the surface. This is where Dr. Alphys ran away from her guilt by sealing away the wretched products of her mad experiments: disturbing things that glitch up your screen and put the wrong text in the wrong places during combat. In fact, the entire atmosphere of this sequence is one of wrongness, and the wrongest part of all is the monster named Amalgamate, which can’t even attack you properly: it instead makes pathetic gestures towards what would be an attack if it were being done by something less messed-up. But at the end, all the creatures in the lab are freed and reunited with their families, who accept them.

Dr. Alphys herself spends a lot of time at the dump. I suppose that makes sense with the dump’s connection to technology, but it also has to do with her sense of worthlessness, of having failed as a scientist and as a person. She was tasked with something bigger than she could handle, and she lives with the weight of the consequences. There’s some subtle suggestion of a suicide attempt. She’s so convinced of her true worthlessness that she engages in the always-disastrous ploy of trying to fake being a hero, repeatedly creating the appearance of danger so she can come to your increasingly unconvincing rescue. This plot thread is designed to make the player annoyed with her, but annoyance is defused once you recognize the hopelessness that inspired it.

The really striking thing about Alphys, though, is that when she’s first introduced, she seems like nothing more than a comic character, a socially-awkward anime-loving nerd stereotype. And she never actually stops being that, even as you come to understand her better and feel sorry for her. Forget redemption from guilt. It’s the guilt that redeems the character from being just a joke.

In fact, that’s a general feature of Undertale‘s style, and of Homestuck‘s style before it. (Toby Fox, creator of Undertale, is one of the main members of the Homestuck Music Team.) Characters and plot elements are introduced in a mocking way that makes you not take them seriously at first, but you wind up gradually caring about them as you learn more. Even the music often has a pattern that fits this notion, starting off with chiptuney square waves and then introducing richer sounds and realer instrumentation once the melody is established. Heck, the very first thing you see in the game is a mockery of all manner of awkwardness in old games: a picture in what I think of as “CGA Palette 2 Brown” over the text “Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: HUMANS and MONSTERS.” Accompanied by what sounds like the soundtrack of a NES title, but which eventually turns into the most significant and emotional theme of the game. Garbage redeemed.

There’s actually a second theme twined up there: Memory, a theme first heard from a music box under a forlorn horned statue in an unregarded passageway under a leak that’s raining water on its head. This statue isn’t in the dump, but it’s in the same general area. You have no way of knowing its significance, or even if it has any significance at all, when you first encounter it. It’s only much later that you find a “Royal Memorial Fountain” containing an awful statue of the local TV star Mettaton that was installed only a week ago to replace an old statue of Prince Asriel, and can put two and two together. Asriel is the game’s chief villain and also its chief victim, a dead child infused into flower by one of Alphys’s experiments, as forsaken as his discarded statue, with nothing but determination where his soul used to be. “Flowey”, as Asriel now calls himself, does his best to provoke you into violence throughout the game, but the best ending can only be achieved by showing compassion to everyone, including him, the character who deserves it the least but needs it the most. And the statue foreshadows that: by showing it a little kindness, protecting it from the underground rain with an umbrella obtained from a garbage can, you start the music box playing, giving you the musical clue you need for a puzzle that conceals a powerful artifact.

You don’t actually get the artifact, though. Your actual reward for your compassion: dog residue.

See, this is one of the game’s big participatory jokes. When you try to take the artifact, you’re told that you can’t, because there are “too many dogs in your inventory”. Checking your inventory, you see that there is an “Annoying Dog” in there that wasn’t there before. When you remove the dog from your inventory, it immediately runs to the artifact and absorbs it, leaving behind only some “Dog Residue”, which is variously described as “Dog-shaped husk shed from a dog’s carapace”, “Dirty dishes left unwashed by a dog”, “Jigsaw puzzle left unfinished by a dog”, and various other randomly-chosen descriptions. Using this item fills up all the empty space in your inventory with more dog residue. Except sometimes it also yields some “dog salad”, which is a healing item. So your reward looks like garbage, but it’s really unlimited free healing items, provided you’re hip enough to this game’s themes to not just throw it out. You can even sell the extra residues for free unlimited cash, if you can find a shop that will take them.

The amount of healing you get from dog salad is somewhat randomized, with different descriptions for different effects. At its strongest, it heals you completely, with the message “It’s literally garbage???”

Even though I’m most of the way through Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows, I think I have to hang it up for a bit for the sake of this blog’s recovery. I need to play something I can finish, and this game isn’t really designed around finishing. It’s designed to be a lifestyle game, like Candy Crush Saga or the Elder Scrolls series — something that you keep dipping into over a long period of time. That’s how I was playing it before I started blogging again: at most a battle or two a day, and not all of them victorious. New unlocks, new ideas, were sparse. Mostly it was just new battlefields. There’s well over a hundred maps — more than I’ve ever seen in a tower defense — and the systems of level-specific achievements and harder difficulty levels that net you more XP are all trying to get you to play them more than once. People online talk about beating Endurance mode, which I didn’t think was even theoretically possible.

But I do want to come back to it (or keep coming back to it). It’s insanely polished, especially in comparison to previous Gemcrafts, to the point where I fear it will spoil me for other tower defenses. I can see this being the game that I play between other games this year.