July wasn’t exactly sleepy, but August’s release schedule makes it look positively catatonic. I raced through the month’s highlights on today’s Here & Now Anytimepodcastand have further expounded below:
Black Myth: Wukongsteamed past expectations, followed by a thunderous World of Warcraft expansion, the long-awaited return of the venerable Mana series, and the much-ballyhooedStar WarsOutlaws.
I can almost count myself among the ballyhooers. It’s not my favorite Ubisoft game (Shadow of Mordor’s garrulous orcs will always live in my heart), nor my favorite Star Wars game (the original Battlefront II and Knights of the Old Republic bomb-blasted my teenage brain), but Outlaws delivers a smooth and sometimes surprising action adventure. It vaulted past the low bar I had set for it — but, then again, I managed to dodge the game’s most infamous glitches.
In any case, Outlaws’ novel approach and familiar setting — taking place right after The Empire Strikes Back — spurred me to book narrative director Navid Khavari for a Here & Now piece.:
“We've seen in the films, the Rebellion versus the Empire story, we've seen Jedi versus Sith,” says Khavari. “We were really excited to tell something new.”
The hero of Star Wars Outlaws, Kay Vess, starts the game equipped only with a simple blaster and a dream to make it big. She has to rely on her wits, her lockpicking prowess, and more than a little luck to navigate a criminal underworld set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi movies.
“This is someone who didn't grow up as a chosen one,” Khavari says. “She sees the galaxy as rigged — and I think what people are sort of looking for is that relatability.”
But more than a decade after that acquisition, and after a recent boom in movies and spin-off shows, audiences may be burning out on Star Wars. Disney just cancelled the streaming show The Acolyte after strong viewership dwindled by the end of its first season. The free-wheeling crime story of Outlaws may instead offer exhausted fans a fresh outlet.
“When you play the game, it feels like you're stepping into this galaxy for the first time, even though it's existed for 30, 40 years,” says Khavari, “We have the guardrails off a little bit to experiment.”
More modern visual novels like Ace Attorney or Paranormasight might require you to puzzle through contradictory testimonies and evidence. Emio instead steers you through deceptively linear conversations, quizzing you occasionally to ensure you’ve paid sufficient attention.
That’s not to say Emio plays quickly. I can point to the precise moment I realized the game wanted to make me squirm. I had hiked out to a crime scene, clicked at everything remotely suspicious, and then sat down to wait for a bus. Uncertain about how to progress, I spammed the “Think” action to hear my character muse about the case, then fall into a bored silence. I tried “Use Phone” only to find that the doofus had failed to charge his (still-newfangled) cell. I had him call out to the police officers who had also passed by the scene, only for him to shrug and say “Ahahah. Just kidding.” Some combination of desperate actions eventually resulted in a taxi cab coming to my rescue, but I really can’t remember what they were.
You could see this as the game’s way of rewarding diligence and experimentation. In practice, it meant that I’d rapidly toggle between dialogue prompts and the “Call,” “Examine,” and “Think” actions to push the plot along. I once held what felt like a 10-minute staring contest with a wary car mechanic, before realizing that I needed to use the “Look” action not just anywhere on his person, but on his face particularly to get him to remark on my “kind eyes” and pronounce me worthy of his help.
I’ve only ever known one real-life P.I., who led me to believe that much of the work is that arbitrary and fatiguing. It’s a hard sell for a game, though — especially when the story isn’t quite worth the pain. Emio – The Smiling Man is YA fiction with just enough blood and trauma to justify its “Mature” rating. Sometimes, it could pace a genuinely tense sequence, but just as often its old-fashioned charms turned torpid and tedious. Worst yet, it never made me feel clever like the best adventure and mystery games do. Instead, I felt like a hapless observer who had stumbled into a much bigger story.
So while Emio – The Smiling Man has a strong opening and an even stronger conclusion, it’ll make you grimace far more often than it’ll make you grin.
Also, Nintendo has permitted me to divulge that I attended a hands-on preview event for the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Here’s photo evidence:
I only later realized that my head perfectly obscured Link's — appropriate, given that he’s out of the picture in this game!
That’s all I’m currently permitted to divulge. Nintendo snipers are undoubtedly trained on my position should I dare break embargo — but in the meantime, you can catch a glimpse of what I played in this new trailer:
