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Jotun: Valhalla Edition - ReubsCubes Review

Jotun is a 2015 game from Thunder Lotus studios. You play as Thora, a viking warrior who died a inglorious death and so is denied entry into Valhalla. Instead she must find and defeat 5 mystical titans, the Jotun, in order to regain her lost honour.

Jotun’s hand drawn art combined with slick animations makes for a very striking first impression. Rather than using the high definition pixel style of something like OwlBoy or straining the bounds of their fantastical world by reaching for photorealism, Thunder Lotus went the other way. As a result the environments look richly detailed and artistically consistent without the feeling of overcluttering.

Each of the five zones have their own distinct styles and although they are the standard array of videogame location cliches; Forest, Ice, Lava etc, they’re each a novel twist on the classic idea and fit together well as part of a larger cosmology. The molten depths Brokkr’s Forge of look very different from the icy plains of ‘The Nine Rivers’, but the carvings in the rocks, the design of structures and shrines make it clear that it was all built by the same culture. Honestly it’s a marvel more games don’t draw extensively on Norse mythology. The world of Viking religious was full of spiteful deities, angry elementals, women giving birth to gigantic serpents. All the classic gaming tropes.

The Norse elements of Jotun aren’t just flavour that Thunder Lotus decided to strip for component parts. They’re integral to understanding the game’s levels, it’s design and the motivation of its lead character. The special abilities in the game take the form of blessings from various Norse gods. Thor, as god of thunder and blunt instruments, gives you a lightning charged spiritual hammer; Frigg, goddess of motherhood will heal you and Freyja the goddess of war increases movement speed. So far, so Kratos. But rather than punching these gods in the face or raiding a chest to obtain this power, you have to take a few moments to stand in quiet contemplation at their relevant shrine to get the blessing Thora considerately thanks them for their generosity once it is given.

To complete the level ‘Ymir’s Blood’, you navigate a maze of scorched earth and boiling blood to find the carvings that tell the story of the world’s creation from the flesh of the first being. Only once you’ve heard all of the parts of the story, will the way to your reward be opened. This is interesting and educational for the players but it also feels like this is for Thora’s benefit as much as ours. Remember who you are, where you came from.

Jotun by contrast with something like God of War is not interested in making the player feel like a powerful murder machine. That’s not so say that Thora isn’t a fearsome warrior. Her axe leaves gouges in the earth, tears through vines and icebergs and is capable of killing a dwarf in a single blow. But the forces at play here are so far beyond her. Most of the dangers in the levels of Jotun are purely environmental, whether it’s the creeping vines or frigid winds the things out to get you are elemental forces. Even the dwarves that occupy the cave levels are more of a oncoming tide than actual enemies in their own right.

Most games want to give players the notion of control over their world. Not just direct personal control of a super buff dude who does good flips and shoots big guns, but also trying to give us control of our world and the stories within them. Sometimes they do this well, sometimes they feign the illusion of control while still keeping us stuck into tracks. The ones and zeroes show when we realise that our choices amount to little more than a change of colour palette.

But what makes Jotun magical for me is less about presenting the illusion of control to the player character and more about realising how small you are in the grand scheme of the universe. There are moments where the camera zooms out to show you the scope of the worlds you’re travelling. The vikings believed there were nine worlds around the wolrd tree Yggdrasil and looking out over the beautiful paintings, you feel the scale and scope of those worlds stretching out before you. 

An experience familiar to anyone who played ‘Hyper Light Drifter’, a quiet pause between all the combat and grand mythic storytelling. Stepping to the edge of the universe and looking out at the stars reminds you how small you are in the face of it all. As you look out over vistas to the horizon beyond them, it engenders a sense of wonder many games try for but never quite reach. If you can climb the mountains in the distance, they might disappoint you. But as long as you can only imagine, anything could be out there.

Then there are the Jotun themselves. Each one of the five titans is a absolutely beautiful creation, lovingly animated and perfectly crafted to fit not only their environment but the mythology they’ve sprung from. Probably the closest analogue is’ Shadow of the Colossus’. The enemies are an order of magnitude more powerful than our hero, literally elemental forces all given flesh and form.

These are boss battles, there’s no question of that, complete with attack patterns to learn and exploit as well as climactic music that gives the already challenging confrontations an epic feeling. But even when you defeat one, usually by the skin of your teeth, you get the sense that they’re not dead so much as resting. Waiting for the next champion to pass through on their way to Valhalla. There’s never any sense that you could defeat the gods themselves, and even if you could you wouldn’t want to. Thora knows fundamentally that her exile from Valhalla is due to her own failure to die gloriously. She doesn’t want to take them down or spite them, she’s still holding to the tenets of her belief and trying to be the best Norsewoman she can be.

If you fall in combat, you’re told that you have failed to impress the gods. There’s no real punishment for this though, beyond having to start the level again. This is a standard game conceit but in context it becomes a much more literal statement. You have failed to impress the gods.

So get up and try again.

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Owlbears are both godless abominations and adorable fluffballs. Definitely something to add to DnD plans

The owlbear was inspired by a cheaply mass produced bag of plastic monsters from China. 

Gary Gygax and the rest of his pals in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (the very game that gave us the campaign setting Mystara, with Gary Gygax’s character, the wizard Mordekainen) kept their creative muscles strong by making up stories about the random cheap monster figures in the bag. Another one of them became the Rust Monster, for example. Some of these monster figures remain unidentified, perhaps, in a job for future game masters.

Owlbears need to become scary again. They were once described as “congenitally insane” creations of magic that were perpetually paranoid and hostile, creatures who shouldn’t exist who automatically grabbed you after 2 claw attacks, squeezed and could peck you, and with the grab, they’d do that damage every round. Every edition made them less and less scary, until the recent one, where they’re just treated as a normal animal with normal animal motivations instead of a thing created by experimentation that “shouldn’t be.” The grapple damage that made it so scary is no longer there.

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This game just gets more and more majestic.

Also I hope that Tallneck died of ‘natural’ causes and not some hitherto unmentioned Super Machine

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds scenery

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A lot of good points here, I'd never really considered how many 'obnoxious white genius' movies he is in. I am willing to die on the hill that Ejiofor and Cumberbatch should have swapped roles in Dr Strange. Also this is now my favourite use of a Venn Diagram.

The problem with ‘Cumberbatch roles’

Benedict Cumberbatch has a lot of devoted fans out there—and a lot of haters. Obviously there are many factors at play here, but this diagram helps to explain why Cumberbatch rubs so many people the wrong way.

Through his own career choices, he has come to represent two toxic influences in Hollywood: whitewashed casting, and the ubiquity of white male genius roles.

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All they need now is to announce that Iron Fist Season 2 is being replaced with The Misty Knight Robot Punching Hour and the MCU will be back on track.

First look at Misty Knight in Marvel’s Luke Cage S2

Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Mercedes “Misty” Knight (Simone Missick) 

Get the comics  here and here

[Follow SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest]

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The only thing better than Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park with cats.

In honor of the original post getting over 225,000 notes (!), and to welcome my new followers (how are there 2,500 of you glorious people?!), I present these outtakes from the first set. I have posted two of them before, but the rest have never before seen teh intenetz. For a reason. They are silly. 

Original post: http://khanandkittens.tumblr.com/post/83128292750/kitten-doesnt-want-to-be-fed-kitten-wants-to

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Horizon Zero Dawn: ReubsCubes Review

Mankind has a few standout achievements. The Wheel, Fire, Internet, cheesecake. Sadly however, the list does not include robot dinosaurs. And until such time as the scientists of the world rectify this grievous error, videogames will have to make it up to us. I can only assume that was the opening of the design document for Horizon Zero Dawn, because this the best thing since Cheesecake.

The following contains spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn. I will attempt to keep overall plot points and character moments vague, but if you’ve not played the game then proceed at your own risk.

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I love dinosaurs. Love is a strong word and it is exactly the one I want to use. I was obsessed with them as a child, dragged my long suffering parents to the Museum of Natural History at every opportunity and Jurassic Park remains one of my favourite movies. As a consequence I am incapable of being objective about anything involving dinosaurs, large aquatic or avian reptiles and almost all megafauna in general.

But my predilections for animatronic extinct reptiles aside, HZD is already a contender for my favourite game of this year. Please note that I haven’t played Neir Automata, Resident Evil 7, Persona 5, Mass Effect Andromeda, Breath of the Wild, Torment: Tides of Numenera or any other fantastic games that came out in 2017.

Horizon (and i’m choosing to  shorten the name because the whole thing is a really awful mouthful) tells the story of Aloy, a young woman born under mysterious circumstances into a primitive world that humans share with gigantic highly advanced machines, in a world that is clearly our own, an unknown time after some kind of apocalypse. As Aloy attempts to understand more about her own origins she is drawn into conflict with a evil cult known as The Eclipse and must battle for the fate of the world. Along the way she discovers more about the long gone old ones and the secrets of her origin.

Nothing particularly out of the ordinary there, naive but intelligent hayseed sets out to find their place in the world and finds evil deathcult. Friends are made, difficulties overcome and we all learn a few precious lessons about friendship, family and how entitled tech sector dickheads will be the downfall of us all.

The world itself is more interesting than either the bog standard medieval fantasy or nuke blasted post apocalypse might be. Rather than the immediate aftermath of the calamity, where people are trying to rebuild their societies and loves with the shattered remains of the world they’ve lost, the time and distance between the old world and the societies that have followed after are much more pronounced. There’s a lot of sun and nature worship and even the most basic and obvious facts about our world have been lost in time. Case in point, the scholar in the city of Meridian who’s convinced coffee cups were ceremonious vessels used in holy rituals, as opposed to cheap tat mass produced to drink instant coffee from. The issue of instant coffee itself never comes up as presumably nescafe did not survive the downfall of humanity.

Women are at the forefront in Horizon Zero dawn. Aloy’s belongs, ostensibly, to a tribe called the Nora. They have a tribal society where led by a group of venerable women called the Matriarchs and worship a goddess they call the All-Mother. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of proscribed gender roles for men and women, they all share in hunting and fighting and childrearing. Members of the tribe are of various different ethnic backgrounds, although again in a post apocalypse racial origin become a little vague. It’s a pretty equal society for all genders and races and a society that respects and elevates women is pretty rare, especially in the overly macho world of videogames. Diversity is dealt with pretty well, gay and trans characters are given plot lines and backstories that don’t hide their identities, but also don’t get caught up pointing out how inclusive they’re being. The interaction with the character of Jeneva, the warden of Sunstone Rock prison, is a particular standout. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbow in the valley of the Nora.

The Nora are a fair and equal society true but they’re also intensely superstitious and insular. They see themselves as one of the chosen people and anyone who leaves their blessed homelands is not allowed to return. Aloy was raised s one of the outcast, the members of the tribe exiles for various crimes. The Nora only ever treat her with disdain or fear and as a result she has even less respect for their customs and traditions as you might expect. Aloy cares about people and wants to do what she can to help them but has absolutely no patience for their restrictive belief systems.

The characters are noble but flawed in all too believable ways. This kind of excellent writing defines the world of horizon. The world is a mix of ancient cultures mixed with hyper advanced technology. The world is full of machines, technology so far beyond the imagination of the people in the world around it regard it as the magic of the gods. Which bring me to the most impressive part of Horizon’s incredibly detailed and designed world. The machines.

Holy mechanical t-rex they’re amazing! Most open worlds populate themselves with flora and fauna to hunt and be hunted by. Whether it’s the more grounded animals from the Far Cry series or the creatures of european myth that haunt the fields and forests of the Witcher, worlds are defined in a very significant way by the creatures that roam them. And the machines of of Horizon are spectacular, in design and execution. Based at least partly on real life animals mixed with the stylized technology, they’re the apex predators of Aloy’s world. Many of the designs, like the Behemoths and Watchers, recall prehistoric animals,  but even the more recognisable critters like Grazers and Lancehorns straddle the line between beautiful and practical.

If the machines themselves are spectacular then the places they’re built are even moreso. The cauldrons are secret caves deep within mountains at the edges of the world where the machines are built. Once it has been located and the outer perimeter breached, either by solving a puzzle or overcoming the powerful machines guarding the gates, then Aloy can descend into a puzzle dungeon that would not seem out of place in Legend of Zelda. These environments are absolutely beautiful and more than a little eerie. And once you realise what they are and how they work you’ll want to run through them all again.

Where Horizon differentiates itself from a lot of other games in the genre is how it expects you to hunt its wildlife. You don’t have the firepower or defense to go in guns blazing so instead you have to use stealth and manipulate the environment to bring down the beasts. Aloy is armed with only a bow and arrow and a few gadgets like trip wires to take down sentient robots capable of crushing her underfoot. You can’t go up against a herd of Tramplers and expect to melee them to death. Much more likely they’ll trample you. Hence the name.

Instead you have to pick your moment, analyse the weaknesses of each type of machine, (a process which becomes easier and more natural as the game progresses) choose the type of ammo then set your traps. Then, when halfway through your perfectly constructed ambush a lone Ravager suddenly dives into the melee and ruins your painstaking set up you have to improvise feverishly to try to salvage the situation or at the very least not die. There are shades of Witcher and Monster Hunter to the combat, even some Shadow of the Colossus. Like the titular Colosi, the machines feel like part of the world, and feeling the more majestic creatures is almost tragic.

Once the beasts have been felled they can be scavenged for parts, although this whole system does feel underdeveloped. There two types of collectables that you can harvest from enemies but most of them only really need to be used once or twice. You can sell them for money but that leads to you having far more than you can possibly spend. After a little while it becomes a little tedious to hunt machines for its own sake. Although the combat is reminiscent of monster hunter it has a very long way to go before it matches that franchise as far as rewarding players goes.

That a slightly unfulfilling crafting system is the worst thing horizon has going for it is indicative of how excellent a game it is. The world manages to be familiar and brand new all at once, and the same applies to the mechanics of its open world. Guerilla games have created something very special in horizon and I hope that we’ve got lots more of it to look forward to.

Thanks for reading!

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Logan is the Dark Souls of Comic Book Movies

You awake in a barren desert, the taste of blood in your mouth. The landscape is an unbroken sea of stone and dust and sun baked ground. All you have is the clothes on your back, the pain of your recent wounds and the poisonous metal you are cursed to carry, the sole reminder of a life you have had taken from you, time and time again. There a few miserable souls dwelling in this waste, fallen heroes and wretches, trying to scratch out an existence in the face of futility and pain. This is Logan, and it’s really really good.

This post has spoilers for more or less the entirety of Logan. Enjoy!

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I have, at the time of writing, just finished watching Logan, the final film featuring Hugh Jackman as the titular superhero. It’s bleak, sparse western take on the superhero genre that sees Jackman hang up his claws in style. If the opening paragraph didn’t clue you in, Logan is not a happy movie. Loosely based on the Old Man Logan comic book, it tells the final story of James ‘Logan’ Howlett, the mutant superhero formerly known as The Wolverine. It is also the Dark Souls of comic book movies.

The Dark Souls games (and also Bloodborne) have become famous for their complexity and for the difficulty of their combat, but what they really don’t get enough credit for is the massive amount of effort expended in building their worlds. With only a few concrete pieces of information to go on, players have to try and understand what they can from obtuse item descriptions and the unreliable stories told to them by NPCs with very questionable sanity. I’m not sure if the good folk at Fox are intimately familiar with the work of From Software, but there’s a definite similarity between them.

When we meet our ‘hero’ he’s finally succumbing to the decades of violence and mistreatment he’s suffered. His legendary healing factor has all but left him, his senses are growing dull and the adamantium skeleton he once relied on has started to poison him from the inside out. Exiled and on the run in Texas, he is forced to drive a limo to try and support himself and Professor Xavier, who is suffering from some kind of Alzheimer’s-like malady. A far cry from the dramatic antics of the utterly forgettable X-men Apocalypse, this version of Armageddon is much more mundane. No new mutants have been born in decades, the rest are dead or missing. There was no final battle for the fate of the world, just accidents and illness and sheer bad luck. Not Magneto, or the Sentinels, or the Dark Phoenix, the greatest enemy of mutant kind seems to have been entropy. Just like Dark Souls, where an undead curse has brought low a once great civilisation, the combination of corporate greed and genetic malfunction has destroyed the colourful universe of characters that once called it home. The areas where the characters dwell arid and scorched, the few places they find greenery it’s inextricably linked with hope and peace. Of course, by the conclusion you realised that the corn, genetically engineered to remove mutations from humanity’s gene pool, represents evil on an industrial scale.

The other thing that the film has in common with Miyazaki and Co.’s productions is that the past is left shrouded in mystery. We never find out what happened to the other X-Men, and in one scene Logan flat out states that everything we think we know about the previous X-men stories was exaggerated or entirely fabricated. We pick up scant details about the world the characters occupy, left to fill in most of the gaps by ourselves. The only person who seems to know what happened for sure is Logan himself and he is resolutely refusing to talk about it, Xavier can’t remember and Laura isn’t old enough to have been there.  This is a unique angle to this kind of film, especially in a world where we had two separate Spider-Man origins within a decade and Marvel Studios spent half a dozen films laying out every single detail of their intricate universe. There will be dozens of videos and essays about what the timeline of Logan is, and even with all of that amateur detective work you’ll still want to hang onto your own individual version of the lore in a way that is almost uniquely a property of a From Software joint.

Violence too, is an essential aspect of both experiences. Logan is unique amongst the X-men films in that it has a 15 age rating. This means that rather than the abstract slashes and vague stabbings of previous films, when Logan starts tearing people apart you see it happen in visceral detail. It’s fantastic to watch, at least in part because we’ve never seen anything like this from an x-title. Comparisons could be drawn to last year’s Deadpool, but really the former comes across like slapstick when compared to Logan. The fighting is hardscrabble, nasty, quick and dirty. Choreography goes to great lengths to make the fights look improvised, hasty. Logan’s fighting technique always relied on animal aggression and a reckless disregard for his own safety, but in his weakened state every fight is a suicide run. He still survives wounds that would kill a normal mortal, but only just. Rather than take a slower or more methodical approach though, he still throws himself into fights headfirst and is punished for it. To use the most cringe worthy of videogame parlance, he spent his entire life being overpowered for most fights and now he has to learn to Git Gut. If not for the far more vital and arguably more dangerous Laura, he’d be torn apart in seconds and have literally no chance at all against the mindless clone that ultimately kills him.

The presence of X-24 as the metaphorical final boss of Logan’s story was possibly my favourite twist the movie throws at the audience. Freed from any lingering guilt, mercy or humanity, X-24 really is the perfect killing machine. A Hollow (see what I did there?) shell of the man he was cloned from. I also have to wonder if he’s supposed to be a gentle reminder from the filmmakers to their audience that although Logan earned its high age rating, if they’d been allowed to up the violence from the beginning then we might all have a very different version of Wolverine built up in our collective imagination. Although the canon is vague in Logan, with lots of the previous films and comic books explicitly disregarded, it still trades on its audience knowing who the characters and actors are ahead of time so that their state of disrepair and weary cynicism is all the more striking.

The world of Logan is a bleak one to be sure, but it avoids Grim Dark clichés which other superhero movies have failed spectacularly to circumvent. Where the entirety of Batman vs Superman felt like sound and fury signifying nothing, here the rage and passion of the characters is like matches thrown into a lake, pointless and easily extinguished. We see them live and laugh in the few moments of happiness they’re afforded and so the tragedy falls in stark comparison to the happiness. If Logan is just about watching Hugh Jackman get beaten up and Patrick Stewart be sad and mentally ill, then it wouldn’t be half as compelling. Without contrast, the pain and suffering would get monotonous. But the presence of X-23 gives them hope, and the chance to make good on the mistakes of the past. She, unlike her companions, is not beyond redemption even if she is already a killer. And not to mention that whole section in the farm house. We get to see a peaceful domestic scene for our three weary heroes, before any chance of a good ending is taken from them in one fell, gut wrenching, swoop.

Logan is a western wrapped in a superhero film wrapped in an enigma. It’s complex and obfuscated and brave. For a superhero film,  one made by Fox no less, to be this good is remarkable and if they start making things on this level with the X-men franchise then I’ll stop sending them those daily emails asking them to hand back the franchise to Marvel. Unapologetically compromised and with only the smallest spark of light at the end of its tunnel, it’s the send-off that Jackman and his most iconic character deserved. But please don’t make a sequel.

Seriously.

No one wants Logan 2.