Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon essentially adds one more layer to the familiar RPG dungeon crawling experience: stress. Thematically dark and inspired by Lovecraftian horror, the game will have players juggling not only the traditional health and mana, but also the mental well-being of party members. In a setting full of eldritch horrors, the fear of descending into the dark depths and never coming back is real in the minds of our digital fodder adventurers. Darkest Dungeon is aesthetically solid and builds around this stress mechanic, but it's a mechanic that fails to carry the game through to a satisfactory experience.

none of your heroes have eyes

The premise of the game is simple: there's a dungeon, it's pretty dark, it's full of crazy stuff, you gotta go clear it out. The story is mostly revealed through journal scraps that you'll find while exploring dungeons and, to be honest, isn't all that compelling. To that end, the meat of the gameplay centers around building a party of four from a handful of different classes and then running them through a gauntlet of trial and error to figure out what works. The game also takes pride in its difficulty as perma-death is the norm and the game comes out frankly and tells the player that Darkest Dungeon isn't so much about winning as it is about damage control and minimizing loss.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, if you enter Darkest Dungeon seeking perfection, you're in for a rude awakening. Whereas other RPGs might see the accumulation of resources and wealth that never gets used, every little bit counts when you're trying to pass an encounter in Darkest Dungeon and oftentimes this comes down to a form of damage control. The element of uncertainty gives even mundane actions a sense of tension, more so manifesting in disbelief. Sometimes there will be a crucial 97% success that simply fails and hey, that's just how the dice rolls sometimes. It's up to the player to really cover all the bases and consider everything that can go wrong and it's simply better to just assume that everything will go wrong.

And believe me, things will go wrong. It's important not to get too attached to any single character because you never really know when an unexpected enemy ability will wipe out your party. What results is a filtering effect: you'll start out with a giant roster and bit by bit that list will shrink as characters die, go insane, become incapacitated by disease, etc. You can pay to remove negative effects or lock in positive ones, but the price of treatment will increase dramatically as the party member becomes more and more powerful. With this, the game places players into a balancing act: do I cough up the gold to treat a lightly injured hero and risk him straight-up dying in the next delve or do I invest that money in another promising hero?

The game features your standard fare turn based combat but there is one aspect I really want to emphasize: the lighting mechanic. Give-and-take is the theme of Darkest Dungeon—it's rare to come across a scenario where you only stand to benefit. In line with this, there is a lighting mechanic during dungeon delves. Torches are consumed from the supplies inventory to light the way for your party, staving off stress and helping gain the initiative on the dark dwelling monsters. As torches run low and the light diminishes, stress buildup can lead to mental breaks in party members and monsters will be more powerful. However, all of the negative effects come with a savvy increase in loot. In some instances, it's advantageous to let the light flicker, keeping your party members at just the edge of madness. The light mechanic is an aspect of difficulty control within the confines of an already set difficulty that gives players a chance to seek greater rewards without having to completely change the difficulty setting. It's a good way to give players a temporary challenge that they don't need to totally commit to if they feel they can't pass.

Your hard earned loot then funnels back into building up your party to confront the namesake final dungeon. Darkest Dungeon boasts fifteen hero classes, each with seven combat skills, upgradeable equipment, and unique stat modifying trinkets. Each hero also come with specialized camping skills that allow for buffs and bonuses during moments of respite in the dungeons.

I think Darkest Dungeon has a strong presentation and it had me hooked for a good number of hours, but that was before I began to really see the bones underneath the mechanics. For every one hero that makes it to the maximum level, you may need to go through three or four, maybe even six fodder heroes to reach that stage. All that time, you'll be investing and losing, only to try again with the next poor sap who comes along. With this, the game becomes repetitive, grindy, and loses a lot of its agency. It's fun to theorycraft strategies and lineups but it won't take long for you to realize that the variety that 15 classes offers is mostly superficial.

Again, the underlying philosophy with Darkest Dungeon isn't for the players to optimize for success, but to have them prepare to stem the losses. The RNG elements of the game sometimes makes encounters feel more cheap than challenging as a single miss can quickly cascade into a catastrophic defeat. Tactics rely on maximizing probabilities, but there are scenarios where you can make all the best possible moves and still lose. It's frustrating and those moments reveal the shallow mechanics underneath the game.

Although there wasn't much to keep me coming back to Darkest Dungeon, the game itself was wonderfully presented with a great deal of initial theorycrafting and unexpected outcomes. The game plays like a smaller, more punishing version of XCOM with less tactical decisions available overall. Nevertheless, Darkest Dungeon is a fairly solid game, one worth looking into if you're curious about the game's artistic presentation and its employment of mental health management in an RPG.

Ready Player One, a book report

Probably one of the worst books I've read in a long time.

Ready Player One takes place in the near future of around 2040. Humanity has been casually ravaged by a host of dystopian science fiction clichés: energy crisis, climate change, nuclear war, global economic spiraling, the whole gamut. I say casually because the circumstances aren't really explained with much detail by our first person narrator, a high school senior by the name of Wade Watts. Not missing a beat, Wade tells us more about how specifically his life in this near future sucks: he lives in abject poverty like the majority of humanity, his parents are dead, he's with an aunt that doesn't care about him, and life would simply not be worth living if it weren't for one thing: the egg hunt.

Enter the OASIS, the virtual reality novum of this story. The OASIS is a video game that's permeated just about every aspect of life in this imagined future. It's where Wade and much of the rest of humanity find solace from the dirt and rust colored world that is their actual reality. People go questing, hang out in virtual chatrooms, conduct business transactions, get an education in virtual schools, and is really just an analog of the internet if everything you did on the web had an experience bar attached to it.

James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS and its virtual reality hardware, is this game developing Willy Wonka-Bill Gates-Rockefeller hybrid figure. Before his death, Halliday hid all his fortune in One Piece an easter egg and whoever finds it within the OASIS would behold unimaginable riches: (1) becoming the heir to Halliday's company that manages the OASIS, (2) a fortune of about $240 billion, and (3) becoming a god within the OASIS itself. Spurred on by the life purpose this contest gives him, solo player Wade Watts, aka Parzival, sets out on the ultimate fetch quest, assembling a wacky team, going head-to-head with an evil dystopian mega-corporation, and learning the true values of going outside by the end of it all.

Now, if you think the premise is overtly childish, even for a YA novel, I'm right there with you. Unfortunately, this is the initial buy-in, the price of admission to this story, so you have to play along and bear with me.

I think virtual reality stories are hard to pull off because the author is responsible for not only crafting the fantasy virtual world, but also the fantasy reality that contextualizes it. Ernest Cline does neither of these two things with Ready Player One and any world building details he provides is done so haphazardly and out of a sense of weak, knee-jerk sociopolitical commentary without any thought or research. The majority of Cline's world building comes from what I imagine was him reading the headlines and the first two-and-a-half paragraphs of articles from his default Apple News feed and extrapolating a world from BuzzFeed's reasons-why-humanity-is-doomed list. The entirety of Cline's discombobulated imagined reality and its relationship to the enshrined OASIS exists to reinforce one catatonic, uninspired message that sets the tone for the whole novel: real world sucks, video games cool.

More important, probably, are the characters that have been tasked with operating with and within this book's slogging message. Unfortunately for us, the cast for this book are soggy homunculi made up of the cheapest plaster and crappiest marker-drawn faces you can imagine. The characters have so little convincing personality, I can summarize our protagonist's existences in less than twenty seconds:

• Wade, our authorial self-insert god of the geeks;
• Art3mis, the short, "Rubenesque," flawed-but-perfect dream girl love interest;
• Aech, the black lesbian girl with a Cheshire grin;
• Daito, honorable Japanese hikikomori #1;
• Shoto, honorable Japanese hikikomori #2.

These characters are just personified quirks rather than fully realized people. I'll give more points to Wade's character only because readers are intrinsically stuck with him as our narrator, so we're more privy to his thoughts. Still, moments of introspection are so mundane and so few and far between, all we're really left with is a staggering amount of superficial characteristics in an overwhelming amount of telling over showing. This is a problem when Wade's perspective is the only window we get into the other characters. Art3mis is primarily there for a horribly cringe-inducing teen romance fueled by pathetic desperation and what I imagine is what Cline thinks teen romances must be like, having seemingly missed out on the experience himself. At least she has a relatively meaningful set of interactions with Wade, unlike Aech, who's really just there to tick off the black and lesbian checkboxes for Team Token Diversity. Underneath her, however, are Daito and Shoto, the absolute case in point of Cline's ignorance and whose dual stereotyping acts as a paired example of what cultural appropriation really is.

The book's antagonists don't fare much better. Innovative Online Industries, the big bad EA dig, just exists as the corporate straw-man. IOI is a company openly dedicated to winning Halliday's contest and taking over the OASIS so they can monetize it more than it already was, as if the profits that generated Halliday a personal net worth of ~$240 billion wasn't somehow enough for the board of executives. I understand that a corporation's bottom line is generating profit, but a profit motive alone makes mega-corporations extremely boring entities. "Ah, but that's missing the point!" a fan of the book shouts out loud. "IOI are greedy fucks with no morals or sense of ethics! IOI look to the OASIS and slobber at the thought of charging monthly subscriptions and plastering ads on everything!" Oh my god, the horror! What Machiavellian machinations! What truly dark and dystopian dispositions! The spirit of the game will be ruined! Oh the humanity! What stakes!

Anyways, IOI is an insipid body and just as unconvincing as our protagonists. Their employees are dehumanized, soulless drones who Cline seemingly write as if they deserve no sympathy or compassion. Quite ironically, this kind of treatment from Cline made me more sympathetic towards the faceless, nameless corporate lackeys, more so than the protagonists. IOI's workers and slaves at least felt like real people who were trying to get by in a harsh world, people who weren't just neon colored cardboard cutouts of people with an unfair reserve of plot armor. I can tell Cline tried for some kind of anti-corporate, net neutrality, freedom of the web kind of message with the hostile position that IOI takes versus the OASIS players, but none of it really comes to fruition as any semblance of an attempt at commentary is dwarfed by how comically evil  IOI is. Cline incorporates militarized corporate policing, employee slavery, prison imagery—and Christ, Ernest Cline—"indentured servitude" processing that clearly mimics Nazi concentration camps, all to remind us that subscription fees are the end of the world as we know it. 

Looking past the dull setting and its ill molded characters, we're left with the words themselves. At this point, I have to bring up what I've been trying to avoid this whole time, which is the book's '80s decor, of which Cline wastes no time or space to remind you of, every third sentence. Fans will say that detractors from the book simply "don't get it" or "missed the point" of the book, which is that the book is an homage to '80s pop culture. I understand why these references appeal to people because it's like that feeling of elation you get when you hear your favorite song come on the car radio. You perk up in attention and afterwards fall back into the doldrum of listening to background noise that you tune away from. Cline's references to the '80s are just like that, nothing more than distractions from the underlying sophomoric writing that it tries to keep afloat. To Cline's credit, the writing gets the job done, moving the plot forward in the sense that he's formed sentences out of words. The entire book reads like a gray sludge with little to no discerning features.

Halliday created the contest to spread his love of the '80s to the rest of the world; he only wanted for people to love what he loved. Ernest Cline, with Ready Player One, works towards the complete antithesis to Halliday's wish, showing off his broad knowledge of '80s trivia without any of the spirit or substance of the decade. The repeated reminders that we're in a world obsessed with the '80s fails to act as any kind of meaningful world building and, again, just serves as fluff in Cline's one-trick pony show. It reaches a point where you can skip three to five pages, read a paragraph, repeat, and still understand what's going on. The details are misplaced, uninformative, and serve no aesthetic or practical purpose. To Cline, the world found perfection within the '80s and never moved on. That, perhaps, is the real dystopia in the story: the death of creativity and imagination that bores itself out of Ernest Cline's mind and onto Ready Player One's pages.