![]() the character who you know doesn’t eat seafood demanding that you make them lobster rolls for dinner). The quests they send you on you have to engage with literally to humour some of them (annoyingly so at times e.g. ![]() The game uses the physical exploration of the islands as a practical metaphor for exploring people’s lives. I think the character work here is extraordinary. There are few penalties and few things you have to do by a particular time (except for one character nearer the end). There is also a lot of jumping around and flying about (on zip lines) as if you are playing a platform game but I really like how very little of this is punishing. There are plants to water and a variety of meals to cook for guests with distinct food preferences (is my favourite character the one who just likes everything I cook? Yes) and flying jellyfish to catch and lightning to bottle. There are also some guests on-board your ship who are just absolute pains but that also adds to the general atmosphere.įor a game with wistful themes and music that feels like the opening music to a Studio Ghibli film, you stay extraordinarily busy. Having said that, there are certainly some departures that hit harder than others (which I won’t spell out because spoilers). That may sound very maudlin and there is a lot of sadness within the game but it is more wistful then depressing. Eventually, you take them when they are ready to the Everdoor where they transcend into constellations. You also listen and help each one work through things. You build them cabins (stacked up so your ship looks like Howl’s Moving Castle) and cook them food and run errands for them. Your broader task is to find particular souls (many of whom you know from your previous life) who come to live on your increasingly chaotic ship. The world you sail around is a kind of staging place where people are still holding on to their material lives and issues or just generally getting on with stuff (including some industrial dispute in which you intervene). You play Stella, who (along with her cat Daffodil) has been recruited to take over from Charon as the person who ferries souls to their final afterlife. However, the world and characters are notably unusual. It’s all presented as 2D animation largely moving horizontally. You have a ship with a small number of passengers and you sail between islands collecting resources and improving your ship. The genre of gameplay is resource management and exploration. Spiritfarer has fewer murderous, laser firing crystal things though. The two games couldn’t be more different and yet both borrow Charon the Ferryman and Hades as characters from Greek mythology and both use (different) genres of game play to lead you to interact with a series of characters from whom you learn about their lives (and deaths) and your own characters back story. However, the game I will nominate in this category isn’t Hades but a game set in a quite different afterlife: Spiritfarer. I have played it but I’ll save a review for later in the year (assuming it is a finalist). ![]() If the category is to work, then “Hugo winning game” should be a notable fact about a game.Īs I have said before, I suspect the game Hades is the likely front runner, even though it has some eligibility issues. I’d like to see the winner of this category be a game that has some popular and critical acclaim but also be something notably a bit different. Novelty is just one of numerous dimensions against which we should judge works but it is a relevant one. ![]() At the same time, the award in other category isn’t used as an award to reward just the most innovative or the most boundary pushing work in that category. There is an expectation of some degree of advancing the genre in some way. However, the Hugo Award isn’t an award for ‘random book with rockets in it’. There’s no shortage of SFF themes in video games - it’s almost a default. look like they might be interesting/notable from the perspective of science fiction & fantasy as a broad genre.require more coordination than I’m physically capable of) available on a platform I have access to (basically Mac, iOS or Switch).So I have used some of the data to pick out games I haven’t played that There are a lot of games out there and the cost and time investment for games can be significant (and not always proportional). In earlier posts, I’ve tried to identify possible contenders and one reason for doing that is to help me make choices. I am attempting to put some thought into the 2021 Hugo Award Video Game category.
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