The video game industry is… well, to put it kindly, it’s kind of a massive fucking mess right now. Like, an absolute dumpster fire of an industry with no improvement or respectable end in sight.
Between Bethesda releasing an absolute travesty of a Fallout game (not to mention all of the lies surrounding associated merchandise), Activision Blizzard laying off 800 of its employees after reporting record revenue, THQ Nordic doing an AMA on an imageboard so vile that it was delisted from Google, and EA finally releasing Anthem only for it to be completely forgotten less than a week later (and also laying off a bunch of people from one of their Australian studios), there really has never been a worse time to be a fan of video games that still wants to make an effort to make ethical purchases.
Wait, what’s that? It actually hasn’t? There’s an entire industry outside of the big budget AAA titles that has been releasing fantastic, socially responsible, FUN VIDEO GAMES and we can all support them instead of massively over-payed CEOs like Bobby “Stop Photoshopping Devil Horns Onto Photos Of Me” Kotick?
Incredible.
Let’s talk about some of those then.
(Note: You can click the big ol’ title for each game to be sent to their Steam page, but each will be linked at the bottom of the article as always!)
BELOW
Having played fourteen hours of BELOW, I still struggle to understand just what it wants of me and what exactly it even is, but I am entirely confident that that is the point of the game.
BELOW is a game that hinges entirely on provoking the player’s curiosity, egging them on to trudge through quiet and eerie caves, figure out tricky and complicated puzzles, and slash through waves of unrelenting enemies.
Beyond all of that, BELOW is a mystery and it can really only be summarized with “what exactly is this game?”
On its surface, it looks to be a fairly average dungeon crawler with some survival elements. You have to collect food and water to keep yourself alive and find warm clothing or fire to not die of hypothermia in certain areas of the cave.
It’s treacherous and challenging to be sure, but what lies beneath all of the difficulty is the real challenge: progression. You can’t just walk through the labyrinthine cave system willy-nilly. Your exploration requires thought, cunning, and wit to get anywhere.
Mindlessly wandering will not only get you killed, but it will render you completely incapable of progress. Dead ends abound and the only way to get through them is to find key items, analyze the environment for switches, or just try flashing your lantern at literally anything in the immediate area for some glimmer of hope that you didn’t just waltz into an actual dead end after sacrificing half of your health, as well as all of your resources.
The only negative that I could say about BELOW is that it can get a little bit boring at times. There’s very little in the way of music, relying almost entirely on ambiance and atmosphere, and the game doesn’t start until you spend about five minutes on a slow zoom-in onto a boat in the middle of the sea.
Other than that, BELOW is a curious little title that I would recommend to anyone that wants to solve a game, rather than simply beating one.
Verdant Skies
Verdant Skies is billed as a game that is inspired by Harvest Moon, much in the same way that Stardew Valley is. Dissimilar to both games, however, Verdant Skies is set in a science fiction world in which you play as a newly hired colonist striking out into our crazy universe to create a home for yourself and others on a planet that is completely uninhabited, save for some native flora and fauna.
You perform tasks that are expected of this genre; farming, talking to other colonists, and raising animals are all something you should expect from this game, but it also goes a little bit deeper than you would expect.
Throughout the course of colonizing the planet, you will come to be able to splice the DNA of the flora and fauna to create new breeds of crops and cattle, you can expand the tiny village by building houses and farmland and bridges, encouraging new characters to join the colony. There is an in-depth crafting system in which you can make everything from survival essentials to clothes and the game even includes the light dating sim/visual novel elements that have become a staple of the genre.
More on that last note, the cast of characters within the game is also incredibly socially responsible, and not just in that it largely includes people of colour. There are characters with physical disabilities like blindness, characters that don’t subscribe to the gender binary (including one that I’ve met that goes by neutral pronouns), and most (if not all) of them are very fluid in their sexuality.
Additionally, the game doesn’t ask you for your gender or sex during character creation. Instead, the game lets you roleplay your character however you may see fit, with characters referring to you by titles, name, or gender neutral pronouns.
So if you’re looking for a nice, relaxing game in which you can romance cute folks, harvest fruit and veg from spokes, and give some animals a poke (with a syringe), Verdant Skies might be for you!
Death’s Gambit
Death’s Gambit might actually be one of my favourite games of 2018, but not to the point that I would exactly rave about it or anything.
There’s really no better way to describe it than as a 2D sidescrolling take on the Dark Souls franchise and the game is very much aware of that. There are passing references to the Souls games here and there, you start the game off by selecting your class and a starting gift, and the entire aesthetic is something you’d expect to see in a potential Dark Souls 4.
What makes Death’s Gambit more interesting than your conventional Souls-like, however, is that it actually cares enough to have a plot. A fairly good one, I might add.
Without getting too much into it (because I do want people to actually play it), you play as a soldier named Sorun who, unfortunately, bit the dust. Sorun goes on to immediately make a pact with the literal embodiment of Death because he’s a bit miffed that there are people in the world that have just, you know, stopped dying. Our hero’s quest is simple: kill the Immortals by any means necessary.
In me saying that the game knows very well that it’s a Souls-like, you can expect it to be fairly challenging, but what Death’s Gambit gets right that other Souls-likes don’t is that the challenge feels rewarding and doesn’t feel like it’s hard for the sake of being hard. The challenges are grueling, but you will, for the most part, feel them to be fair.
One negative I will mention is that it definitely has a little bit of jank to it. While most of the game is beautifully drawn and animated, there are occasional visual bugs and animations that don’t… look great. I’m not sure if it’s because I was recording the game, but the first time I went through it I dealt with some pretty ridiculous screen tearing here and there, so just be mindful that it’s not a perfect experience.
LISA The Painful
LISA The Painful‘s title screen opens up on the image of a young girl hanging from a noose, which does wonders for setting up the tone of the game. It’s dark, miserable, and will almost definitely make you sad at one or several points as you play through it… which is exactly why I’m recommending it.
LISA is very clearly inspired by the Mother franchise and this is fairly obvious in how it juggles a sense of humour along with some of the darkest themes that you can write a game about (as well as the game’s battles looking almost identical to what you’d see in Earthbound).
As if taking place in the post-apocalypse wasn’t bad enough, the game deals with the cyclical nature of familial abuse, coping with your past traumas and either succumbing to or overcoming them, and sacrificing yourself for the sake of those that you care about.
All of this is not so much shrouded in the game’s whimsical and silly world, but more nestled comfortably within it; not hidden or disguised, but just within view as you watch the Mario brothers reminisce on their previous lives.
LISA is good. It’ll make you miserable. Go play it.
Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight
The last on this list is quite possibly one of my favourite indie games ever made. Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight is pretty much everything that I want out of a game.
It’s challenging without being unfair, the soundtrack is absolutely stellar, the visuals (as you can tell from the above gif) are simple but gorgeous, almost every character, boss, and enemy design is absolutely fantastic, and it’s big without being overwhelmingly large.
There’s not much that I can say about Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight aside from the fact that I will highly recommend it to anyone looking for a cool, interesting game to play. The less said about it, the better. Go buy it.
Through the course of writing this article, it dawned on me that I was unintentionally contributing to a miconception that I’ve grown to dislike, but rather than change the wording of my opening statement, I am going to take this opportunity to call myself out and help in dispelling this misconception.
Buying indie games does not inherently mean that you are buying ethically.
While four of the above games are ethically clear, one is a bit more murky than that.
Death’s Gambit is a game that is about as indie as they come. A relatively small project developed by a relatively small team with a relatively small budget and the overall quality of the product reflects that.
It also happens to have been published by Adult Swim Games, which at face value isn’t the most nefarious thing in the world. ASG has published a lot of really cool games like Battle Chef Brigade and Duck Game.
The problem comes in as you look deeper. ASG is obviously a division of Adult Swim, which is owned by Cartoon Network, which is owned by everybody’s favourite telecommunications and entertainment conglomerate, Time Warner!
So your money, wayyyyy down the line, does end up going to greedy overpayed CEOs anyway.
Does this, realistically, mean that you shouldn’t buy Death’s Gambit? Probably not, no. It’s still a good game at its core and it was still made by a small team, but it’s important to acknowledge that your money may be going to support something that you don’t particularly agree with or even really wanted to support in the first place.
Despite what the general “gamer” community might have you believe, simply voting with your wallet will not ultimately sway the video game industry any which way. Buying indie games is largely a better route to take if you want to support developers more directly, sure, but it’s not really any more or less effective than continuing to buy AAA games either.
Refusing to buy games from Activision Blizzard or EA or Ubisoft might seem like an idea that would bring some change to the industry, but in reality it would only harm the hard-working employees at these companies before it would actually harm the people that it matters to harm: the CEOs.
The rich elite have orchestrated the system to insulate themselves as much as possible. Any potential risk they take to get that extra dollar does not bounce back at them when it falls through, but rather bounced back to the common employee as wage decreases or layoffs.
“But Luka,” One nameless reader might ask. “If what you’re saying is true and our expression as consumers doesn’t ultimately matter, then what can we really do to change things? What autonomy could we have over this at all? Aren’t we better off not even bothering?”
And to that I would say no, dear reader. I would never advocate for a sense of apathy in this matter, but rather a redoubled effort in another direction.
While the concept of ‘vote with your wallet’ might not inherently mean that anything will change, what you can do with your wallet is support independent developers like Team Cherry, Capybara, and even much smaller teams like CHUMBOSOFT. The impact of your financial consumer expression will be felt much more vividly for them than it would for bigger studios.
You can also support worker co-ops like the newly formed Glory Society and any games that they may put out in an effort to normalize the idea that video games can be good and successful without the need for the rich elite to be involved in any way.
You can also support movements like Game Workers Unite, an organization acting to improve working conditions and job security for the average game developer.
And, of course, on top of all of this, we could all strive to be more informed as consumers. Know what you are buying, who made it, how it was made, and who you are buying it from before you make a purchase.
(I specifically mention “who you are buying from” because I am linking to Steam store pages where you can buy these games while Valve has mistreated trans employees in the past and currently allows games focused entirely on raping women on their storefront. It sure is a shame that they essentially have a monopoly on the digital distribution of games, isn’t it?)
Speak out against the egregious acts of these corporations, be they disregarding the rights of workers or disregarding the rights of consumers. Never forget that Activision Blizzard laid off 800 people after reporting record revenue and never forget that EA released a game with microtransactions so exploitative that government action had to be taken.
Remember these things and all things that happen from this point on and don’t forget them, because the corporations bank on you forgetting them once something else particularly egregious happens.
Don’t feel guilty about buying the games that interest you, regardless of who made them. As long as you accept and acknowledge the problems within this industry and do what you can as a consumer to help remedy them, you can play your shitty AAA games with a clean conscience.
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