Certainly Strange

For whatever reason, I’ve been playing a lot of horror puzzlers lately. Of note have been “Conarium” and “Little Nightmares.”

“Conarium” is a Lovecraftian-inspired follow-up to “At the Mountains of Madness” where you are on the expedition to Antarctica to investigate the findings from the famously doomed first one. They got the tone and setting pitch perfect for “Mountains.” Very spooky cosmic horror.

“Little Nightmares” is a horror puzzler much in the same vein as “Limbo” and “Inside,” but the whole game is absolutely lush and gorgeous. Every second of game play looks like it came straight from a claymation movie. It is an especially moody, creepy, and dark.

Both are pretty short games that you can beat in a weekend, but absolutely worth it and I’m glad I played them. I don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to spoil them, just that they are amazing and moody and immersive and scary 🙂

As you may recall, I never got into Oblivion the same way I did Morrowind and Skyrim. I had assumed this was because all the characters look like weird squishy lumps that are all closely related to each other – regardless of what their race is (every race is squishy lump race). So, I installed Oblivion Character Overhaul to address this issue, and I am pretty happy with how everybody is looking now.

However, this has highlighted what is perhaps the real reason I didn’t get into Oblivion: the tutorial is a million hours long and it is super boring, which is actually foreshadowing for the game that I have yet to play. It seems obvious now, but I suppose when everybody is a horrifying uncanny valley clay monster, that can tend to obscure some lesser issues.

I don’t feel at all engaged or motivated in the whole run around the sewers while the Emperor is being attacked. The call to action is too blunt and faux-grandiose, the setting is uninteresting, and you are forced to spend hours running around on rails against your will.

Morrowind had an interesting setting and a mysterious slow build with a pacing that really drew you into the world and you started to feel like you lived there, and almost no tutorial to speak of. Skyrim had a rails-y tutorial much like Oblivion, but it was (thankfully) much shorter and it at least felt exciting.

So, I don’t know, we’ll see if I ever get around to playing Oblivion in earnest. The character overhaul was an improvement, and people *say* they love Oblivion and its quests, so maybe it just starts out rough and I’ll feel engaged eventually.