co-op | Mohammad Moshtaghi

A Way Out

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 12:00:00 -0700

After Josef Fares’s emotionally stunning success with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, I honestly wasn’t sure how his new team at Hazelight Studios could follow it up with their first game. Certainly there would have to be a solid story at its heart, but what else? As another story about two male co-lead characters, could A Way Out invent new and fresh co-op mechanics? Could it evoke emotional responses on par with those in Brothers without recycling too much material? Most importantly, could it — like Brothers — ask thematic questions that pierce beyond the screen and into reality?

The answer to all three of these questions is a resounding yes. In A Way Out, two players (either locally or online) each control one of Vincent and Leo, the story’s protagonists. At the story’s start, Vincent is going to jail while Leo has already been in for several months. As they slowly begin to trust one another, they learn that they both have it out for a crime boss named Harvey, the man who got them both canned. United by a desire to find their own justice, the pair hatch a plan to escape.

The story unfolds as our protagonists interact with one another and others in their environment, tasking players with surviving harrowing combat, pulling off pieces of an escape plan, and solving puzzles using their surroundings. But these elements can be found in many games; the differentiating factor for A Way Out is the way in which it demands cooperation from the players, even in the most mundane tasks. Especially in the first half of the game, every situation is an opportunity to synergize in new ways. As Vincent and Leo learn to trust one another and work together, so do the players controlling them.

It is worth mentioning, though not in any spoiler-revealing detail, that the gameplay is both surprisingly clever and spans many different game genres. Though most of the game takes place in a split-screen, third-person perspective, particular sequences play out like moments from Grand Theft Auto, Battlefield, Uncharted, Assassins' Creed, and even Street Fighter. Beyond the main game itself, many refreshing and somewhat odd mini-game experiences are scattered throughout the story: Leo and Vincent can challenge one another in brawn (in an arm-wrestling match), brains (in a game of Connect Four), and everything in between.

WARNING: This part of the review contains game-ruining spoilers.

But the glory of this game lies in its story’s false resolution. After brutally murdering Harvey in his safe house in Mexico and reclaiming the Orlov diamond whose sale Harvey sabotaged, Leo and Vincent land stateside. Perhaps we should have expected otherwise, but it felt like the game was coming to a close and both characters would go back to their wives and children happy, scores settled. Instead, a band of police storm the runway, and our protagonists have nowhere left to go. Instead of emerging victorious, the pointed guns and blue and red lights spell a return to where this adventure started.

If only, though, that were the only twist. In one painful blow, the writers destroy everything the players have learned to trust: the characters they control, and one another. When the supposed chief of police approaches to arrest the pair, a simple “Good work, Vincent” turns the entire game on its head. Everything following that point drives the pain of betraying a friend and being betrayed deeper and deeper until the players are forced to control Vincent and Leo in a 1v1 gunfight: the antithesis of every cooperative wall climb, every narrow escape, every emotional vulnerability.

Even with spoilers disclaimed, it feels wrong to give away the game’s final emotional gut-punch. Suffice it to say that it hits just as hard as the infamous sequence in Brothers where the little brother has to swim on his own. Even the way we’ve learned to control our characters and interact in this game’s world is questioned and systematically torn down.

Spoiler section over!

This game is everything you could want from an interactive story, and the masterful way that everything is built up around cooperation makes it even better. While it doesn’t fully achieve complete emotional synchronization between players and their characters (I found myself protesting loudly and angrily throughout the end sequence), the storytelling is among the finest I’ve had the pleasure to experience in a video game.

Bugs

Many of the character’s voice lines were not accurately timed, and would often trigger at irrelevant moments. This may not be a bug so much as a way the experience could be polished further.

Overcooked

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 12:00:00 -0700

I am a panda wielding a kitchen knife, desperately hacking away at as many onions as physically possible and subsequently littering the floor with chopped produce. The noise level in our living room steadily rises as my sister and I frantically shout back and forth at each other; the culinary space station we’ve been thrust into is about to rotate, and we’ll have a very narrow window before the station rotates again to ferry all the onions into another room where pots will transform them into delicious soups. But the discord is quickly joined by my brother, finding himself caught on the wrong side of an airlock, holding clean bowls for a set of soups that are nearly finished cooking. In a few moments, those soups will burn and set that section of the kitchen on fire; onions are bumped and kicked aside as my panda and my sister’s black bear accidentally dash into one another in our simultaneous attempts to get to the fire extinguisher. Orders are being missed, dirty dishes are piling up, soups are burning, tempers are fraying, and — most importantly — hilarity is ensuing. This is Overcooked.

Set with the task of avoiding certain apocalyptic doom caused by the appearance of a spaghetti monster that cannot be sated, players (controlling cartoon people and anthropomorphic animals) are sent back in time to hone their teamwork and culinary abilities. These cooperative teams of 1–4 players face challenges in cooking a variety of dishes, each introducing its own unique mechanics, in a variety of environments, each with its own hazards. Continuous failure to learn each level’s unspoken rules and strategies quickly is more often a source of comedy than of frustration, and any attempts to rely on a comfort strategy are almost always usurped by little surprises to further refine your growing culinary expertise.

For the most part, each level is fairly straightforward: obtain ingredients, chop them, assemble them into dishes, cook those dishes, plate them, serve them, and literally rinse and repeat by washing the dirty plates when they’re returned. The faster dishes are served, the more money they’re worth, and a score of 1 (passing) to 3 (perfect) stars can be scored on each level depending on the total money earned. The numerous ways each stage of preparation overlaps with the others offers more than enough material for flustering and amusing kitchen accidents, but it’s the small mechanics tweaks and zany interactions between the players and their environment that keep the already incredible core experience fresh throughout the course of the game. Mishaps abound, such as accidentally throwing away clean dishes instead of handing them to another player or slipping off an iceberg holding a finished pizza.

Although the game can be played alone (wherein a single player controls multiple avatars and switches between them), Overcooked’s hilarity of mistakes (and mistakes on top of mistakes) combined with the thrill of (eventual) success is best experienced with friends. In an age where couch co-op is largely ignored in the wake of big screen multiplayer titles, Overcooked not only succeeds in creating a satisfying co-op experience but adds innovative elements beyond the usual cooking game. If Overcooked were a meal, then Ghost Town Games has prepared us something truly wonderful and family-style; my compliments to the chefs.

We Were Here

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 12:00:00 -0700

In this two-player, cooperative, escape-the-room-like adventure, players take the roles of the Librarian and the Explorer. The two begin the game stranded in an unspecified snowy region, and upon discovering and entering a foreboding castle, they are knocked out and placed in separate rooms, connected only by a pair of walkie-talkies. The Librarian is primarily responsible for supplying information to the Explorer, who in turn navigates deadly traps and dimly lit mazes to reach new areas. By piecing together visual clues from both players' environments, puzzles are solved cooperatively, opening doors to new challenges.

For a free-to-play game, this was a surprisingly enjoyable and well-constructed experience (albeit a relatively short one, with an imperfect run taking roughly two hours). The crux of the gameplay rests on using voice-only communication to navigate inherently visual puzzles, which are fairly high-quality. Each puzzle balances complexity with difficulty in a pleasing way, and remains sufficiently independent of the rest, ensuring that each sequence is fresh and surprising. Even so, the overall experience was cohesive, rewarding attention to detail even when the details weren’t immediately relevant. Making the roles unique gives the game replay value as well; even though both players know the puzzle solutions after one successful run, switching roles gives a satisfying “ah, that’s what you were confused about!” kind of feeling.

The graphics are lacking in polish, but this is hardly a complaint given the game is free. In some senses, the lower quality textures add to the experience; I don’t really like horror games, but the use of creepy atmospheric elements and the ever-present sense that my partner was in danger was enough to create the right amount of suspense.

My real complaints are lodged against the bugs we encountered in our play-through, which (as of Update Five) required my Explorer to kill himself so we could restart from the checkpoint. This sort of broke the feeling of the overall experience, as death became a necessary means to an end instead of something worth fearing.

Finally, as a matter of opinion and not of critique, I wonder if the story could have offered any more resolution than what was hinted at in the final theatre sequence. Who was the shadowy figure that placed us here? What drives it to such strange games of mind-over-matter? And what does it want with the one left behind?

Bugs

As of Update Five, the introductory video has audio buffering issues. The chess puzzle has a couple bugs: the librarian often drops the film reel for no reason, and it is possible to get the film reel to play its spinning animation on the table itself if the Explorer applies the power too early.