The games I’ve been playing recently (The Witcher 3, Axiom Verge, and Carrion)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, although seeing as nobody reads them it shouldn’t matter. But still, keeping up the practice of writing can’t be a bad thing, so I’m going to talk about several games that I’ve been playing recently. I’m talking about several games in one article or essay or review or I think “blog-post” is probably the most accurate names for these things because they are posts that I’m putting up on a blog.

Anyway, the first game I’m going to talk about is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Having finally gotten around to playing this enormous game, I have to admit that I’m struggling to remain interested. Let me clarify that statement: the writing is fantastic, the story is engaging and not overly complex to point of confusion, and the world design is interesting. The gameplay is serviceable, but for something that’s apparently inspired by Dark Souls, it’s one of the bits that I think is slowly letting it down for me.

Again, it’s not bad, but there are a lot of things that are bothering me about it. Firstly, off the top of my head, Geralt seems to have a problem picking things up from fallen enemies, meaning I often have to trample over dead bodies in order to position Geralt in just the right position to pick things up; the same goes for herbs and other alchemy ingredients.

Another thing is that the combat can feel awkward sometimes, but I guess I’m just still not used to it. For a game like this I’m used to the combat in Dark Souls where I can block incoming attacks with my shield. But I can think of two circumstances where the combat system really pissed me off. I’ll talk about the second one first. I had just been informed about the Bloody Baron’s daughter hiding out in a nearby town, so I get on my horse and ride out the front gate and across the countryside. After about 5 minutes of uneventful riding, a tutorial message popped up saying that enemies with a skull next to their name are too strong for me to beat at my current level. I dismissed the message and was instantly attacked by a giant thing that came out of nowhere and killed me in two hits. At which point I respawned all the way back at the Baron’s manor. So that pissed me off.

The first one though happened a bit earlier during the botchling mission with the Baron himself. Side-note first: the botchling is such a creepily designed monster that the first time I saw it, I had to pause the game and stop myself from feeling nauseous. Anyway, once I told the Baron to pick-up the botchling and head back to the house, we were attacked by wraiths. FUCK WRAITHS. These things are one of the most annoying enemies I’ve ever encountered. They teleport right next to you and start hitting you before they’ve even spawned in properly, but if you roll away just before that happened they just drift over to you and continue attacking. What’s worse is that I couldn’t save after the first encounter happens to go well, nor could I reload an earlier save to buy some food and healing items without needing to redo huge amounts of the story.

Speaking of the story, the main reason why I’m struggling with it, is because you can only experience the story for the first time once. If it were any other game, I would have just given up and put it back on the shelf to try again when I’m in more of a mood for this type of game, but  really don’t want to replay all the stuff I have done, because I feel that would detract from the experience of the story. Does that make sense? Probably not.

Well, I’m still slowly getting through the game at a pace of between 20 minutes to an hour every 3 or 4 days, so at this rate I should have finished the main storyline by about 2026. In the meantime, I’ve also been playing Axiom Verge, a METROIDvania released around the same time as The Witcher 3, and I spell the Metroid part of Metroidvania because it really does follow the Metroid formula and ignores any influence of Castlevania; mainly because of the setting but still. I think I stole that comparison from Zero Punctuation.

Anyway, Axiom Verge puts you in the position of a scientist involved in a weird teleporter accident, similar to Another World, who finds himself stranded on a mysterious alien world. Guided through the caverns or facilities, I’m actually not sure which word would be correct here because of the retro-style graphics seeking to copy Metroid’s homework, the scientist, named Trace, is guided through the facility by a malfunctioning AI asking you to restore power to her and her kin. For the most part, there isn’t a huge amount to say. You’re told that an evil scientist is responsible for causing a breach between this Universe and a Universe of chaos, and the rest of the game is just Metroid.

No seriously. Think of Metroid, that is Axiom Verge. It’s quite good for a Metroid game too, except the grappling hook is pretty bad. In fact the grappling hook made me pack this game in. Actually, come to think of it, the controls in general were pretty abysmal. I had to remap pretty much every button you have to something that actually made sense, but what I could never make any sense of is why the button for cancelling out of menus was tied to the button for using the grappling hook. They are literally listed as “Grapple/Cancel” in the config menu. The same goes for the jump button and the accept button.

The controls are probably much more suited to a gamepad rather than a keyboard, so I might give the game another go at some point with a gamepad. But for now, I can’t be bothered. I’m starting to think that Metroidvania’s are more suited to gamepads than keyboards, but I’ve always played the Oddworld games with a keyboard and I can get through those games without issue, but I guess I’m just used to them.

After giving up on Axiom Verge, decided to give Carrion a go. Carrion is described as a reverse horror game in that you are The Thing from The Thing, A huge gelatinous blob of blood, viscera, and teeth, trapped in a facility full of delicious humans, probably all with families and pet dogs. Your objective is to escape from the facility, which takes place either in the middle of the desert or in the large metropolis, I’m really not sure which after look at the background art, some of which show a desert and some of which show a skyline of skyscrapers.

Carrion really is an experimental game. There are upgrades you can get as the monster slowly rebuilds itself from harvested fragments of its DNA, but other than that, most of the mechanics are introduced in the first 30 seconds and then they never change throughout the game. I haven’t finished it yet, but I would think it’s possibly I little bit too long for what it is. Sure it’s fun sneaking around the armoured security personnel, and it’s also fun to rampage at a group of terrified, unarmed office workers, but after a couple of hours, that’s all you have been doing since the start of the game. Each level also has a puzzle element to solve, but they mostly just involve pulling the right switches to open the right doors to get to the next switch to open the next door, all the while finding the handful of points that let you grow your biomass throughout the facility, letting you open the final blast door. I hope I described that clearly (I probably didn’t).

Carrion is worth a play though. You might want to remap the controls if you’re on keyboard, like I usually am, often to my own detriment. But, unlike Axiom Verge there aren’t enough functions for your control layout to become a complete mess by the half-way point.

I’ll probably review Stranger’s Wrath soon.