Wayne Santos's Blog

My science fiction, cyberpunk, sorcery mash-up, The Chimera Code, is now on sale for… Less than whatever is the base unit of currency in your country!

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Why can’t mages fight cyborgs with magic swords,” then I took a few hundred pages to answer your burning question. AND AT THIS PRICE?!

I myself have found many a fantastic book by getting suckered into “It’s less than a buck, dude” sales, so now your chance to do the same. You can find The Chimera Code for sale at all the usual suspects:

Rebellion Publishing

Amazon USA

Amazon Canada

Amazon UK

Kobo Canada

Google Play Books

So if you’ve got more coins than you know what to do with burning a hole in your pocket, then just do what I do. See that something is on sale and compulsively buy it, as the word SALE overrides any financial common sense you’ve managed to hold onto! My book is now less than that cup of latte you wanted to buy, but still more expensive than a single piece of white rabbit candy and hey, who buys just one of those?

I’ve been waiting 16 freaking years for this sequel, and it ended up being everything that I hoped it would be. I’m going to gush on this one because it’s a strong contender for my personal game of the year.

Tim Schafer is an anomaly in the games industry. He came up through the ranks as a writer for classic “Lucas Arts” point and click graphical adventure games back in the day, like Tales of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. His games always quickly stood out first because of the incredibly unique humor and sharp writing, and second because the ideas were so original and unlike anything else in the industry. So it’s no surprise that when he started his own company, Double Fine Games, the titles that came out of it would be similarly off the beaten path.

Psychonauts was released for consoles way back in 2005, and while it never set the world on fire in terms of sales, critics noticed. The idea that a 10-year-old ran away from his circus home to sneak into a summer camp for psychics had never been done before. It was smart, funny, engaging, progressive for the time, and had some of the most imaginative levels ever seen in a platformer as players jumped from one mind to the next to save the kids of the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp from a nefarious plot. It was also, even by 00’s standards, a little wonky with its controls and had an unexpected, unwelcome difficulty spike in its final level. Those flaws aside, however, many marveled at just how original, engaging, and funny it was.

Fast forward to 2021 and the sequel is finally here. It’s everything good about the first game, and more.

The first Psychonauts was a master class in imagination and comedy writing. Unfortunately, it was also sometimes a cautionary tale in questionable game design. At its heart, the Pyschonauts series is a platformer, similar to the Mario games of old, but of course, in three dimensions. As you hopped into the heads of other people, Tim Schafer’s whimsy and craziness shone through in the wonderfully original level design.

Unfortunately, that imagination was occasionally hamstrung by the mechanics of the game itself. Schafer was, up to this point, mostly known for his writing in point-and-click adventure games, not action-y platformers. That inexperience came through in the occasional awkwardness and lack of tight responsiveness in the controls. The design decision to create collectibles for each level and place some of them in out-of-the-way places that demanded precision navigation sometimes pushed the controls beyond what they were capable of. This reached its nadir in the final level, where some intense precision platforming was required, while a timer counted down to demand you get things right the first time, and various enemies shot at you. Suffice to say that for many who had enjoying Psychonauts as a balanced game up until that point, the sudden orders-of-magnitude difficulty spike shut out quite a few gamers from enjoying its satisfying ending.

That doesn’t happen here. Psychonauts 2 offers a reasonable level of difficulty on normal, and even allows players to turn on “cheats” if they like or just play the game for the story. No one’s getting shut out here and the game is a joy to play, unless you’re a hardcore gamer that only wants to play games that others can’t easily complete.

It’s obvious that Psychonauts 2 has been carefully considered for years. Every criticism of the original game has been addressed. Levels still retain a fresh, original whimsey but are now tied more closely to the personalities and neuroses of the people they center on. Controls are tighter and more responsive, though still not on the level of the most polished action games. Fortunately, however, the game also no longer has unexpected difficulty spikes that suddenly expect you to be a top-class gamer when previous levels weren’t that demanding.

What you’re left with is a relatively smooth, wonderous gaming experience, punctuated by long bouts of adventure game style dialog and that signature Tim Schafer humor. I never thought I’d see a situation where a psychic girl contentedly cooked in a kitchen while terrified wildlife assisted her like Stockholm Syndrome Snow White situation, but Tim Schafer’s lunatic imagination should never be underestimated. There’s variations on platforming, incredibly diverse level design and art direction, including rock/psychedelic levels that may be new all-time favorite, and, perhaps most surprising of all, a clever, insightful, non-stop barrage of humor that is sharp, but never cruel.

Psychonauts 2 is an easy recommendation for anyone that wants an original platformer experience, an unusual game experience that involves jumping into the minds of other people, or a well-written, interactive comedy. This is easily the funniest game of 2021, and it’s not even close. There’s so much to love about this game.

Not having had the luxury of being able to afford multiple consoles at the same time, I’ve always tended more toward PlayStation consoles than Xbox machines. That’s mostly because I love JRPGs, and am not a huge FPS shooter or PvP player. So it means I missed out on some of the more notable exclusives and developers on Microsoft’s platform, like Remedy, responsible for the unique, Stephen King-esque Alan Wake game.

Well, now I’ve finally played Control and understand what I’ve been missing this whole time.

Jesse Faden is a woman with a lot of trauma in her past. She and her brother were caught up in a paranormal catastrophe that led to her brother going missing and Jesse herself drifting from one job to the next for years. Finally, she gets wind that her brother may be in New York, at a government agency known as the Bureau of Control. She somehow enters the building while it’s in the midst of a lockdown and what follows is not what she expected at all.

The Bureau is what might have happened if Fox Mulder had been allowed the budget to run his own government agency. It’s an official organization created to deal with the paranormal and then hush it up from normal people, encouraging them to embrace Internet conspiracy, or debunked theories. Or, conversely, if H.P. Lovecraft had been taken seriously and asked to put together a government run branch to navigate a world in which Elder Gods exist, and Cthulhoid artifacts fall into unsuspecting hands, then this is what that agency might have turned out like.

It’s a super intriguing premise for anyone with a love for cosmic horror and paranormal mysteries. But of course, this is a game, and it could all have fallen apart if it wasn’t fun to play.

However, narrative is only part of a video game. The game itself is usually the main event for people that play, and in that respect, Control manages to deliver. The best way to describe the gameplay is a psychic third person shooter. You’ve still got guns, ammo, reloading, and running around shooting at… things.

But on top of the gunplay, you’re also grabbing chairs, tables and potted plants, telekinetically hurling them at opponents in between reloads. You’re leaping off the ground and levitating in the air as you shoot people below you. And then on top of that, there’s an exploration component as you wander the halls of a vast and not dimensionally compliant office building with a disturbing history and some a wide variety of government employees who are trying to survive by maintaining bureaucracy, doing advanced meta-physical research, or just blowing holes in things with pseudo-psychic firearms and ammunition.

Throughout all of this, you’re constantly drip fed hints, text, audio and video logs that flesh out just how well developed this world and its conceit is. This is a deeply weird setting that’s been given a lot of thought, and it provokes the imagination with all the tantalizing hints of other cases and adventures this agency has gotten into.

This is one of those rare games that manages to balance a huge amount of world building with just the right amount of teasing, rather than giant blocks of exposition. And then it takes that world and wraps it up in tight responsive shooting mechanics, and coated with some pretty robust psychic powers. I took a while to get around to playing this game, so by the time I did, it was the better performing, more stable, all-bugs-patched-out PS5 version, and it was a solid technical experience as well.

If you want a shooter that controls well, is unusual in setting and mechanics, and has a massive air of mystery about it that draws you further into its twisted world, Control is a game I easily recommend. Not having ever owned a Microsoft console, I never got a chance to play Remedy’s other games, but Control is an excellent introduction to the studio.

This one of the bigger games of the year for me, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Flawed, sure, but still an amazing experience.

Nier: Replicant, or its full name, Nier: Replicant ver.1.22474487139 is a remaster of a game that originally came out in 2020, during the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era. It’s the work of a Japanese game developer by the name of Yoko Taro who now has a reputation for creating some of the most distinct, absurd, genre-breaking, existential games out there. In other words, the guy is an auteur in the video game arena, same as other legendary designers like Hideo Kojima, or Richard Garriot, aka Lord British.

I first came across Yoko Taro when I innocently and foolishly popped a game into my PlayStation 2 called Drakengard. I’d gotten it because I thought it would be fun to play a game where you ride a dragon. Well… you do ride a dragon in this game, but you are also introduced a hellscape of twisted motivations, vengeance gone off the rails, existential angst, incestuous desires and the end of the world. Mechanically, it wasn’t an amazing game to play. Narratively and thematically, it was a like being asked to light a firecracker and finding out you’d detonated a nuke.

Since then, Yoko Taro has hewed closely to this particular brand of dark, existential, surprisingly deep narratives, embedded in games that usually devolve into slaughter-fests. That was a pretty niche space of occupy, but he filled it for a certain kind of gamer for many years. Until Nier: Automata came out in 2017 and suddenly put him on the mainstream map and made him a critical darling. I couldn’t even tell you what it was that changed. Was it that gamer and critical taste had changed? Was it that he worked with Platinum Games, a revered developer of combat-action games, so this time the fighting was actually really good? Was it just his time, because eventually the best kept secrets come out?

Whatever the case, Nier: Automata blew up, became a surprise hit, and Square-Enix, the publishers, suddenly needed to fill a void for more Yoko Taro they hadn’t anticipated they’d have to worry about. Fortunately for them, Automata was the spiritual successor to Replicant, and since everyone was going Nier crazy now, hey, why not just trot that previous game out again, since so few people played it?

Nier: Replicant is a narratively ambitious action-RPG. The baffling opening occurs in the summer of 2053, except that Tokyo is an urban wasteland and snow is falling. A boy and his sick little sister are eking out an existence in an abandoned store, when shadow demons attack, a book grants the boy super human powers, and then the game time-skips to 1412 years later. A new boy that looks exactly like the old boy is a warrior in a quaint fantasy village, and his sister who looks identical to the other girl is still here and still sick.

The game continues to remain confusing after that.

I only got a couple of hours into the original PS3 version way back when, so this was essentially a new game for me. I will say though, that I appreciate the application of that slick, shiny, modern console graphical paint job. The biggest thing, however, is that they gave the combat engine a massive overhaul, probably to bring it in line with the high quality combat of Automata.

Yoko Taro is an incredibly visionary when it comes to telling stories. He’s also great at playing with the expectations and conventions in game design that players take for granted. However, he is not great at designing a snappy, responsive combat system that feels good. That was very apparent in the original Replicant, but this remastered version takes cues from Automata and is all the better for it.

Now that the game has gotten its HD facelift, and combat has been tweaked to feel faster and better, there’s nothing holding the game back from being deeply weird and disturbing. And it is, in that sneaky Yoko Taro way that catches the uninitiated off guard with a major does of guilt and self-reflection by the time you get to the end.

It starts out as a generic fantasy action RPG. You have an idyllic village, a quest to save your sister who is afflicted with an illness referred to as “the black scrawl,” and you set off on your adventure. You even make an arch-nemesis of someone who calls himself the Shadowlord, so it all feels very trope-y fantasy. Then the Yoko Taron-ness kicks in.

One thing Taro loves to do is change the story through multiple playthroughs. The first time you play the game and see it through to its “end,” that’s only the first of many endings. Also usually the most generic/expected/tropey one. Subsequent playthroughs, however, reveal more about what’s going on under the surface. It’s not unusual in a Taro game to think you’re just killing bad guys without remorse, and then, as the game reveals more of itself, really question if you’re doing the right thing, and just who is the bad guy here after all?

Mechanically, the game plays and feels fine. Not amazing, not to the same heights as Automata or the big action games like Devil May Cry, but it’s playable and responsive now. There’s a LOT of repetition in this game, a lot of fetch-quests with to-ing and fro-in across the world. Those elements can definitely wear out less patient gamers, but I’m not one of those.

I personally enjoyed my time with this game a lot. However, I don’t necessarily make a general recommendation of this game for everyone, because of my two disclaimers:

a) I am a Yoko Taro fan, so things that others find infuriating, such as a not happily ever after, or repetition in gameplay are things I can tolerate.

b) I’m one of those pretentious gamers that enjoys “meta” aspects of game design that look at and subvert traditional game themes and mechanics in unexpected ways.

I’m glad I finally got a chance to sit down and play this game, years later, improved both graphically and mechanically. None of the Yoko Taro insanity has been compromised, and it continues to be a fun, albeit weird, narratively challenging experience.

There was an online panel conducted over in the UK, and was somehow included. They even let me talk, which is always a mistake.

Worldcon, otherwise known as the World Science Fiction Convention, is always planned years in advance. This time out, one of the cities that’s competing for selection of the event is Glasgow in Scotland. Thus, the Glasgow In 2024 initiative is already underway to convince the world that for 2024, this is where the event should be held.

One of the things they’re doing to prove just how serious they are is showing how they can already handle events, even online. One of those online events was a panel featuring the authors of Solaris Satellites series, which is three novellas put out this year. The authors participating in the talk were of course, me, Edmonton, Alberta Wunderkind Premee Mohamed, and Ottawa/Gatineau fence sitter Derek Künsken.

The online panel talked about our novellas in particular, writing in general, and, in a turn I never saw coming, Canadian eccentricities like bagged milk. A topic, apparently, that none of us could leave alone. If you’re interested in watching the video, it’s right here:

There’s a new short story anthology coming out later in the year and I’m one of the contributors.

Great Plains Publications is a Canadian publisher that has been putting out great local work for years. Now as part of their ongoing tradition, they are releasing the latest edition an anthology that puts the spotlight squarely on Canadian speculative genre authors.

Darren Ridgely and Adam Petrash helmed the previous anthology, Parallel Prairies, which had the same guiding principles. Get some Canadian speculative talent together, but put the focus on that not-so-heavily-covered area of Canadian weirdness, the prairies. However, where Parallel Prairies kept the stories focused on the province of Manitoba, the new anthology has opened up to any current or former resident of the so-called “prairie provinces.” As someone that grew up in the wintery streets of Edmonton, Alberta, I definitely qualify, even though it’s under the “former” category.

So keep a look out for Alternate Plains, releasing in October 2021. It’s going to be chock full of that wide open prairie weirdness. It even includes a story from my fellow agency and publishing sibling, Premee Mohamed, who’s star is in crazy ascension right now, and is definitely a writer you should be reading.

I’m also pleasantly baffled to see that the image on Alternate Plains is actually a direct reference to my story! I have no idea what sacrifice I accidentally made to the publishing gods to get that to swing my way, but I’ll take it. I won’t give away how or why that image is related to my story, but I will, as a resident of Alberta, say this.

Vegreville is just a weird place, man.

The Persona series is one of my favorite JRPGs, but I was a little nervous to hear it would be getting the Dynasty Warriors treatment. It turns out getting a spin-off in this genre actually worked pretty damn well.

I’ve been there (I think…) from the beginning. I remember playing the original Persona on the PlayStation 1 as well as the second game. Then Atlus made some huge changes to this Shin Megami Tensei spin-off when they made Persona 3 on the PS2 and firmly distinguished it as a very different game tonally from the parent SMT series. However, it was Persona 4 that really cemented this series as one that I could get deeply, emotionally invested in, and that continued with Persona 5.

There’s just something about living out the day with a bunch of idealistic high schoolers, studying, hanging out with friends, making important connections, and then running around in mystic dungeons, fighting demons with the psychic embodiment of a person’s strength and/or trauma. The Persona series has really resonated with me, especially since the third game, but Persona 5 Strikers is a very different, surprising beast.

It’s a direct sequel to Persona 5, meaning I would strongly discourage anyone from playing it without having gone through that previous game’s emotional journey. Strikers takes place six months after the events of P5 and doesn’t hold hands when it comes to reintroducing the characters, or their past adventure, so you need that base familiarity going in. However, where the Persona 5 was a turn-based Japanese role-playing game firmly cut from the same cloth as previous titles, this one has been handed off to Omega Force, a developer usually associated with the Dynasty Warriors series. That franchise is not about turn-based combat or teen angst at all, but rather, historical figures kicking epic levels of ass, as single heroes wade into the middle of entire armies and kill everyone by swinging their weapons around.

I have never been a huge fan of the Dynasty Warriors series. I’ve played a few here and there, but I always found one person killing thousands of people to get monotonous after a while. I was deeply concerned that it would be the case here, and I’ve never been happier to find out how wrong I was. Omega Force got the memo, and rather than trying to force a Persona game into the Dynasty Warriors mold, they tweaked the basic DW mechanics about as far as they could go to be virtually unrecognizable in a Persona context.

So where I was expecting Joker and the rest of the crew to wade into a horde of a bazillion shadows and cut down everything in sight, I instead got something that plays an awful lot like the recent Final Fantasy VII Remake. You’re still casting spells, still exploiting elemental weaknesses, and even shooting guns. But you’re also switching characters out, physically bashing monsters, and it’s only small groups of opponents, not a vast trash mob horde.

But the biggest surprises for me are the improvements to the characters and the story. The gang from P5 is no longer struggling to define themselves, and the rapport they now have is a constant highlight. They good-naturedly trash-talk each other, and as they once again rise up against evil, they find that the evil is not so evil. In the first game, the opponents the Phantom Thieves went up against were so cartoonishly evil it was almost difficult to accept. This time around, the antagonists are nuanced, damaged people where you can understand exactly why they do what they do and even sympathize with it. It makes for a more surprisingly mature story that looks on trauma sympathetically, instead of giving the Phantom Thieves–and the audience–an easy moral out where they can bash and kill at leisure without making the conscience uneasy.

Persona 5 Strikers is an easy recommendation for fans of the first game. Don’t get scared off by the transition to a Dynasty Warriors combat system; they did it right with this game and made the DW mechanics fit Persona, not the other way around. If you missed hanging around with the Phantom Thieves and want a more action-based romp with a bit more moral complexity, just pick this up and have at it.

Two bits of news.

I now have a snazzy, updated website to accommodate some of the new work and freshen up the look of the joint. Behold ye, these mighty works, and despair.

I also have a new audio interview for people that want to listen to someone talk faster than they can breathe. The Intermultiversal Space review website now has both an early review of my novella, The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling as well as a recorded interview with me.

If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, click on the links above and check it out, there are plenty of past interviews with other SFF writers that you might be interested in hearing.

I have a new book coming! It’s actually a novella, which, in publishing parlance, generally means stories under 50,000 words, with the average novel being about 100,000.

My novella is The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling, courtesy of my publisher, Rebellion. It’s part of a Canadian Trifecta, which was not something my publisher meant to do. But somehow, as the opening salvo of their “Solaris Satellites” line of three novellas every year, their debut titles are all coming from Canucks.

I’m not going to question that, but I sure am amused by it.

There hasn’t been a release date determined, as logistics things are still being worked out in the background, but you can go to the Rebellion website to find out more about it.

What do you get when you take every science fiction and anime trope imaginable, throw them into a blender, and hit the “frappe” button. 13 Sentinels, apparently; a weird, wonderful game that surprised me with how crazy, yet coherent it was.

Vanillaware is not a prolific studio. Over the years, they’ve only released a handful of games, all of them marked by their signature lush, traditional 2D artwork. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim continues that tradition. However, where previous games were all romps through different flavors and cultures of fantasy, 13 Sentinels is firmly science fiction. More specifically, it’s a gushing, fan-obsessed love letter to the unique kind of science fiction at the nexus of movies, anime, and 80s Japan. But it works.

What’s most surprising about 13 Sentinels is that it’s far from a conventional game. This isn’t an action game, JRPG, or even strategy game. It’s a genre specific to Japan known as a “visual novel,” which is essentially a story told in video game format with minimal interactions. Typical visual novels are just big portraits with a big space for text. Players advance the text, and occasionally make some choices, and that’s about it. 13 Sentinels follows some of this structure’s basics, then arc welds a pause & play strategy game onto it.

This game takes a lot of chances and shouldn’t have worked. But it does. Amazingly well.

Juro Kurabe is a typical Japanese teenager going to highschool in 80s Japan. He wears a uniform, loves science fiction films, and has a rich friend with a killer hi-fi set up and game console. He also has some weird dreams about fighting in the future in giant robots. Or being an adult and working on a secret high stakes mission. And he’s not alone; a lot of his friends have similar experiences.

All of this combines into a crazy science fiction jaunt that takes every 80s Japanese, science fiction, and anime trope and smooshes them all together. There are major shades of Gundam, Megazone-23,  transfer students, high school angst, street food, and American SF cinema, like Terminator and E.T., all liberally sprinkled throughout. If it’s a cliche or trope you’ve seen in anime or watched on TV, odds are it’s in here somewhere.

While the game is a visual novel, it doesn’t follow typical conventions. Vanillaware is famous for its detailed artwork in side-scrolling games, and it sticks to that here. In some ways, the presentation feels similar to 80s adventure games, with no large portraits and things in the environment to interact with. However, the addition of time-travel, parallel dimensions, and giant robots means there’s a lot more choice going on here than in traditional visual novels.

13 Sentinels is, on paper, an absolutely bonkers concept. It’s not just that the story proudly holds up ever SF Nerd trope it can find; it does so in a non-linear fashion. As the title suggests, there are 13 characters in this story and game. The trick is, players have the choice of picking which characters to follow for a bite-size of story before moving onto the next character. Or they can take a break from the character-centric narrative and advance the plot by taking part in pause & play strategy battles, directing giant robots to fight off huge mechanical kaijus.

This means that every player’s experience with the story is going to be different. Choosing different characters in different orders should create an insane mess when it comes to piecing together a plot. Somehow, Vanillware has managed to evade this danger and created a complicated story, full of twists and turns, that somehow doesn’t lose you despite being convoluted and non-linear. I have no idea what kind of planning must have gone on for them to create a story that makes, regardless of the order you consume bits of the plot in, but it’s an impressive trick.

The pause & play strategy game is abstract, but fun, and gives you many options. The battlefield is laid out on sections of a downtown Japanese city. Your forces and the enemies are abstractions, represented by simply icons on the map. You can pause at any time to issue orders, then sit back and watch the havoc play out in real-time. This will all feel very familiar if you’ve played modern MMOs with their abilities and cooldown cycles.

13 Sentinels is clearly a labor of love. Every scene, every character oozes the feel of a bunch of nerds, with money, deciding to roll the dice on Gen-X nerdy nostalgia. This is a niche game, aimed at a specific demographic, so fans of typical action or FPS games won’t find a lot of love here. But for people that love twists, turns, giant robots, and a truly astounding lesson in “how to write a non-linear story that players assemble themselves,” it’s a very impressive game.

I really enjoyed 13 Sentinels and how shamelessly it jumped into classic anime and SF tropes. The artwork is gorgeous, and not something seen too often in today’s 3D polygonal gaming landscape. The pause & play iconographic strategy took me back to my days of imagining giant robot battles in my head, and in the year 2020, it’s not unwelcome for a theme celebrating The Power Of Friendship to make its case without irony or winking at the audience.

I’d recommend this game to anyone that is a fan of anime and twisty tales. You don’t get AAA level gaming action and explosions, but you get a memorable story and a loving nostalgia trip.

The post Video Game Review: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim appeared first on Wayne Santos.