Castlevania

Castlevania: Lords of Shadows is occasionally beautiful, occasionally exciting, and occasionally rewarding. However, to fully enjoy its best parts, you must endure a handful of drab settings and boring stealth puzzles along the way. At times, it's enough to make you want to put the controller down. But stick around until the end, and you'll enjoy a satisfying reward of eye-catching boss fights and a satisfying conclusion that ultimately diminishes the negative impact of the game's earlier issues. Lords of Shadow 2's story should resonate with anyone with a continuing interest in the series' narrative, and even though the ending won't hit newcomers as hard, the occasionally fantastic environments and monsters create a worthwhile experience that stands tall on its own by the end of the tale.
You're in a tough position at the start of Lords of Shadow 2. You, Dracula, awake from centuries of rest in a cathedral, smack in the middle of a modern metropolis. Your archnemesis from the first game, Zobek, is your first real contact. Despite your hatred for the traitor, you enter into an agreement with him. Help Zobek defeat Satan so that he may conquer the earth in his place, and he'll free you from immortality once and for all. To do this, you must take on Satan's devoted acolytes, who've implanted themselves into key positions in society.

This all comes after a rousing prologue, which sees Dracula at full strength battling righteous warriors in and around his unholy castle. For all the excitement offered there, the true start to Lords of Shadow 2's plot with Zobek is relatively deflating. Your motivation, to hunt someone else's enemies, doesn't inspire much excitement. Plus, you're immediately thrust into one of the most bland and uninspiring settings to be found: an industrial scientific complex replete with sheet metal, red pipes, and security guards. Memories of the first game in the series are filled with fantastic vistas and monumental architecture; apart from the prologue, Lords of Shadow 2 frustratingly avoids them early on.


It would be one thing if the boring start to the central plot quickly gave way to combat, which is the real reason worth playing Lords of Shadow 2, but instead you're forced into tedious and questionable stealth missions almost immediately after your reunion with Zobek. It's not inherently bad, but Lords of Shadow 2's stealth puzzles offer no room for creativity and unnecessarily slow the pacing while offering little in return. The prologue teaches you that this is a game about dark castles, fearless knights, and heavy combat, then it hits the snooze button. Unfortunately, it's throwaway content that gets in the way of the good stuff periodically throughout the game, but thankfully, it doesn't dominate the experience.
Lords of Shadow 2 eventually returns to what it does best: gothic action adventure. Throughout the story, Dracula finds himself back in time, though it's not immediately clear whether this is actual or imagined, but it brings the game back to its roots. Combat and fantastic environments take center stage, and with the game's new free-moving camera and an emphasis on exploration, both aspects feel fresh and new. Thanks to the flexible vantage, you're able to dash and leap during battle with greater accuracy than before. Throw in multiple new and diverse skill sets, and Dracula accurately feels like a powerful evolution of his former self, Lords of Shadow's Gabriel Belmont. This time around, there are a few new tools to play with, including a new weapon class that's capable of breaking down fortified enemy defenses, but the biggest changes (apart from the camera system) are the skill mastery system and the weapon-dependent move lists.

In Lords of Shadow 2, you learn skills for each weapon--shadow whip, void sword, and chaos claws--independently. Skills are learned by spending experience points granted during combat, and each has a gauge that fills with use. Once the gauge is full, this experience can be transferred into the given weapon, increasing its mastery level and effectiveness. The fragmentation of the move lists delays your effectiveness in battle somewhat, but it also allows you to focus on customization, opening the game up to different types of combat strategies.
When you aren't fighting, you spend quite a lot of time exploring and clambering about your environment. By default, your objective is often highlighted on the map, but unlike in the linear Lords of Shadow, it's up to you to find your way there. It's usually clear where to go; hint-like swarms of bats tip you off to handholds for climbing and ledges for leaping. However, unlike in the first game, there are many alternate paths to explore in search of treasure. While not game-changing, the openness feels appropriate given the wide world around you. Apart from some occasionally frustrating pathfinding inadequacies, it's the map that ultimately stands in your way. Unlike older, exploration-heavy Castlevania games, Lords of Shadow 2 employs a map that is only ever displayed on a piece-by-piece basis. Plus, the "world map" is just an illustration with names and numbers attached. It doesn't hurt the moment-to-moment poking around, but it doesn't entice you to backtrack either. If you can't easily see things you've missed, or more importantly, places you haven't been, returning to previous locales becomes an unappealing prospect.

Of course, there's also the fact that halfway through the game, the narrative and frequency of impressive set pieces begin to steamroll ahead, and the last thing you want to do is look back. Zobek eventually takes a sideline to Dracula's ambitions, and you begin to understand why you're going to such great lengths to thwart Satan. With the emphasis on Dracula and the memories of his family, you feel compelled to move ahead. In this way, Lords of Shadow 2 is a late bloomer. It takes a while for the story to show its true colors, but it eventually blossoms into an engaging tale filled a few clever surprises that should thrill anyone who's familiar with the series.
Much of the latter half takes place amidst sublime examples of gothic architecture, with nearby storms raging as you hop along rooftops, adding to the drama. Boss fights become a much more frequent occurrence, pitting you against gruesome monstrosities befitting of Castlevania's legacy. Their appearances can be quite striking, bringing to mind some of the best designs from film director Guillermo del Toro's work. They're evil, expertly crafted, and offer a variety of challenges that test your abilities with every weapon in many different ways. They require fast reflexes and deep knowledge of your move list, and the creativity on display is nothing short of captivating.
It's a pleasing change of pace after slogging through boring environments, waiting for things to happen, and you finally get a chance to take advantage of the time spent buffing up your skills in combat. The contrast between the two halves of the game is hard to ignore, and even though you have to force your way through mediocrity to get to the good stuff, the conclusion and the last hours leading up to it justify the time spent steeped in boredom and frustration.

Lords of Shadow 2 should have been a much shorter game. Still, though the game's stealth sections and drab modern settings represent the worst elements of the three-part saga, the tail end of the game contains the best of every aspect that the series is currently known for. It's the stuff you expect Castlevania to be made of, and after contending with forced stealth gameplay and a weak narrative at the start, it feels good to be home. Even better, the final act wraps up the Lords of Shadow trilogy with authority, and the game's final moments leave you both gasping for air and sighing in relief. It may not strike newcomers to the Lords of Shadow tale with such force, but it's nonetheless a surprising and fulfilling conclusion to Lords of Shadow 2's distinct plot. Regardless of your experience with the saga, if you have the patience to get through the rough start, you'll discover a much better game waiting for you on the other side.

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Resident Evil 4

Nine years is a long time to wait for a proper port, even for a game as celebrated as Resident Evil 4. Its release on the GameCube in 2005 ushered in a new era for the franchise, as well as a different perspective and play style that its sequels quickly inherited. Capcom capitalized on its immense success, porting the game to multiple platforms, and the game was graciously welcomed by the succeeding console generation on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Though nine years is indeed a lot of time for a second PC port, there is a reason it may be warranted. Resident Evil 4 has been available on the PC since 2007, but its release was less than stellar compared to its console brethren. The horror it unleashed was more on a technical level, given the lack of mouse controls and the option to adjust visual settings. Dubbed Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition, the game has returned in an attempt to set past wrongs right. The game has received substantial upgrades, and may be the best version yet released, even if "ultimate" might not be the right word.
Resident Evil 4 has returned to the PC with a fresh purpose. Unlike the original port, this latest edition comes complete with a host of welcome enhancements. The game has been adjusted for widescreen and 1080p resolution fixed at 60 frames per second. There is also native keyboard and mouse support with options for custom key binding, anti-aliasing, a bevy of high-resolution textures, and greatly reduced loading times. Resident Evil 4 HD contains the original game, complete with all prior additional content, including the Separate Ways side campaign.

The story of Resident Evil 4 is nearly common knowledge at this point. Ashley Graham, the daughter of the president of the United States, has been abducted, and series veteran Leon S. Kennedy has been dispatched to a remote, undisclosed village in Spain to recover her. There, he discovers that the religious cult responsible for the kidnapping has unleashed an ancient, mind-controlling parasite called Las Plagas onto the Spanish countryside. The game differs from its predecessors, detaching itself from the series' staple enemies, zombies, and favoring multifaceted foes that display cunning and a dark intelligence. As Leon progresses, enemies grow more grotesque, shedding their humanity and replacing it with a cold, insectoid carapace.
Leon travels across varied and fascinating environments as he searches for the missing Ashley. Adhering to the franchise's history of creepy atmosphere and dark locales, Resident Evil 4 features misty forests, rundown houses, musty caverns, a labyrinthine castle, and military facilities. Enemy types vary greatly and include pitchfork-wielding farmers, chanting cultists, and horrifying genetically engineered monstrosities that can force even the most stalwart players to turn heel. But Leon isn't alone against the infected horde. He is joined by a cast of interesting characters, some newly met and others appearing out of his history, teasing past romantic entanglements and bitter rivalries. The dialogue and some later sequences get goofy at times, but the story's somber overtones keep things intense, from the slow trek through creeping fog, all the way to the explosive finale.

The main attraction of Resident Evil 4 HD is the graphical upgrades, and what Capcom has done to breathe new life into its aging thriller is impressive, mostly. Leon and his assortment of allies and foes have never looked shaper or better defined. The wide-screen support with high-resolution textures running at a crisp, smooth 60 frames per second should be enough to get even the hearts of most veteran Resident Evil 4 fans pumping with adrenaline once again. And, yes, it all performs beautifully. Trees and shadows are imbued with realistic grace, text featured in menus and passing notes is clean, and even the fine-stitched lettering on Leon's alternate Raccoon City Police uniform is easily legible. However, the new textures have an unintentionally negative side effect.
One of the reasons behind Resident Evil 4's launch into stardom was the game's unequivocal attention to detail. Capcom took special care in crafting a realistic and believable world with a gloomy ambiance. While Resident Evil 4 HD boasts high-quality textures, they aren't universal, meaning the original textures that have lingered since 2005 stand out more than ever, ironically making the game feel more aged than ever. In the game, you may stumble across a stone wall composed of realistic cracks and earthy green moss. But in the same area, you could find a wooden box leaning up against the wall that still retains the archaic textures, resulting in a blurry, brown object strikingly out of place.

It can get distracting, considering it's difficult not to notice a stark contrast between a building and the ground it stands upon. Many of the new skins feel too clean, scrubbing away rotten wood and rust, robbing the game of its dingy flavor. Castle walls look sharp, and research laboratories feel uninviting and sterile, but the caverns between them look muddy, with textures that are warped and stretched. Texture glitches also pop up from time to time, and measure in intensity from flickering to, on a rare occasion, getting replaced by what appeared to be the image designated for text, because the enemies turned black and were covered in lettering. The game lets you switch back to original textures if you like, but the heavy pixelation may not offer abatement.
Benefiting from the graphical overhaul are all but one of the cutscenes during Leon's campaign, which play out in real time. Capcom gave far less attention to Separate Ways, which still includes low-quality full-motion video cutscenes that look even worse due to the game's higher resolution. There is also a grievous error that occurs following nearly every video. As the game transitions from the clip back to gameplay, there is a strong chance the screen will turn bright green for up to five seconds.
This passing annoyance quickly treads into frustrating territory. The game occasionally challenges you to complete a quick-time event between scenes. This transition alone, which takes you from a blurry clip, to sudden action, and onto the following clip, oscillates with enough force to threaten whiplash. Being asked to press a pair of buttons between the scenes comes as a jolt, and the lag produced may decrease the amount of time allowed to complete the move, ending in failure. In one such moment, I missed my cue and had to try again. Except the second time, the green screen overlapped the brisk moment of gameplay and cleared only after it was too late. To continue my game, I had to press the appropriate buttons right as the green screen appeared.

The loudest complaint befalling the original port of Resident Evil 4 to the PC was the lack of mouse support. The squirrely, nauseating user-created aim mods that followed only exacerbated the issue. During that time, PC users had to either get used to it or opt to play the game using a controller. Though aiming with the mouse is finally possible, it is far from perfect. When you're fighting at close range, the laser sight has a chance to twitch, making fights against advancing ganados more strenuous than necessary. At long distance, aiming a weapon's laser pointer has a slippery, unnatural feel, making shots difficult and unnecessarily taxing on your ammo supply. There is also a short, but noticeable, delay between holding out the knife and being able to look around.
Like before, your best chance is to equip yourself with a gamepad. The most preferable choice is the Xbox 360 controller, since the game has been updated to support it; gone is the need to memorize the cryptic numbered buttons from the old PC port, because the game includes appropriate onscreen graphics for the device. When you have a gamepad in hand, the controls are roughly comparable to the GameCube experience. The camera floats behind the protagonist's shoulder, creating a third-person view. When an enemy is spotted, the game requires you to first hold your aim, while the camera flies down closer, enlarging your field of vision. Combat favors strategy, offering different ways to dispatch enemies based on the current situation. Going gung ho and blasting away may leave you scrambling for ammunition, and the optional knife does only so much against tougher foes later down the line.

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Titanfall

When you look at Titanfall, it's easy to see the familiar. Most of the weapons, grenades, and abilities fill well-worn niches. Many of the environments are like the grimy villages and industrial complexes that have hosted countless online battles in dozens of other games. The competitive modes are bog standard. And yet, when you play Titanfall, it's impossible to shake the feeling that you're playing something special.

The key is mobility. Titanfall gives you the ability to leap, climb, and wall-run your way around the map, and these simple actions create an exhilarating array of possibilities. No longer constrained by corridors and stairwells, you and your foes engage in high-flying, freewheeling combat in which the sheer joy of movement makes the familiar feel fresh and vibrant. This novel brand of warfare is enough to heartily recommend the game, but that's not all that this multiplayer-only shooter does well. You also clash with your foes in lumbering battle mechs called titans. These powerful brutes fuel a weightier, more tactical type of combat that intertwines beautifully with the light-footed action, and herein lies Titanfall's triumph: two distinct kinds of combat blending seamlessly together to create chaotic and dynamic battlefields unlike anything you've ever experienced.

So how does this mobility work? As a jump kit-equipped pilot, the stunts you can perform all stem from two abilities: the double jump and the wall run. The first one is self-explanatory and allows you to surmount shipping containers and leap into second story windows with ease. The second one is dependent on the angle of your approach. If you run straight at a wall and leap into it, you're stuck trying to double jump your way to a window or a roof. If, however, you come at a wall from an acute angle, you automatically start running along that wall horizontally. Once you start wall running, your double jump capability resets, and then the fun begins.

If you spot an enemy down an alley, you can wall run straight at him, bouncing back and forth between parallel walls to make yourself a tougher target. If you're trying to cross a courtyard, then double jump off the rooftop, wall run along a billboard, and double jump again to another rooftop. And how did you get on the roof in the first place? Perhaps by wall jumping upwards, back and forth between two buildings, or perhaps by leaping out of a top floor window and double jumping back on to the roof. Though the moves you can eventually perform are complex, the root of every maneuver is those two simple abilities. A solid tutorial puts you through the initial paces, and though it might take a few matches to get a good sense of how your pilot sticks to walls, it's easy to start chaining together impressive feats very early on.

This makes simply moving around the map both a continual pleasure and a constant challenge, as you gleefully try to exploit every billboard, building, and zipline to your advantage. The 15 maps are all rich with opportunities for creative locomotion. Titanfall takes place on distant colonies in the space-faring future, where the polished steel of well-established settlements contrasts with the rusty metal of frontier outposts. Dense urban areas play host to daring rooftop acrobatics, while a corporate enclave provides curving architectural lines for pilots to exploit. Many buildings have open interior spaces as well, so weaving in and out of windows and changing elevation rapidly is par for the course. It's always empowering to learn the maps in a competitive shooter, but this satisfaction is heightened in Titanfall because your expanded mobility means there is so much more to learn.

It also means that your enemies can come at you from almost any direction. Pilots move at a brisk clip, so there's a lot of potential for quick flanking runs and rapid pursuits. They are also fairly fragile, succumbing to a few well-placed shots much like their military-shooter counterparts. This encourages you to be even more aware of your surroundings and to take advantage of one of the more disruptive maneuvers in the game: the wall hang. At almost any time you're running along or jumping onto a wall, you can stop and hang, take aim, and fire. Being able to switch quickly from wall running to guns blazing helps ensure that a mobile pilot is not a vulnerable pilot, and the potential for ambushing players by hanging in unexpected places is nearly endless.

Fortunately, one of the tactical abilities allows you to temporarily see your enemies' skeletons through walls and spot any potential ambushes. The other two--turning nearly invisible and boosting speed and regeneration--round out a trio of powers that have been extensively utilized by other games and aren't initially very exciting. But like so much in Titanfall, these familiar abilities take on new life because the extensive player mobility allows you to employ them in new ways.

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Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z Review

Dragon Ball is one of those properties that's had its ups and downs when it comes to game adaptations. And when I say downs, I'm talking about pretty incredible lows: bottom-of-the-barrel material like Ultimate Battle 22 and Final Bout that frequently turns up on "worst games ever" lists. But it's had some highlights, too: The Budokai series made a lot of fans happy, hitting on a formula that satisfied what buyers crave from an anime-flavored fighter: a comprehensive cast, true-to-the-source visuals, and fighting that made you feel like a hyper-powered Super Saiyan.
Sadly, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z is not Budokai, instead following in the underwhelming footsteps of more recent DBZ efforts like DBZ Kinect. It's a confused, overly chaotic mission-based action game that tries to recreate the team-based camaraderie oft seen in its source material, but more often than not falls flat on its face.

Battle of Z offers three gameplay modes: a single-player, mission-based story mode that follows the various story arcs seen in the anime/manga series, a co-op multiplayer mode, and a versus mode. The multiplayer modes become available after playing a short ways into the single-player mode, but you'll probably want to play through a good amount of single-player to unlock characters, items, and status-augmenting cards you can equip on your Z fighters before going online. I say "going online" because there is no local multiplayer available: if you want to play with friends, you must play online.
You'll jump into single-player mode first--since you don't really have much choice. Once you navigate through confusingly-designed menus and get into the actual game, you immediately notice that while the character models themselves look fantastic, the environments are sparse and dull. To be fair, the anime wasn't exactly known for its lushly illustrated backdrops, but the fighting arenas in Battle of Z rarely go past the likes of "craggy, rock-laden environment" on the inspiration scale. You'll also likely struggle with the controls, which map everything to buttons that don't really make a lot of sense (such as ascending and descending via the face buttons), and have you executing special skills with further badly-thought-out button combinations.
Once you achieve some measure of competency with the controls, however, you start to see the way combat flows in the game. You and a posse of pals (either human or AI-controlled) zip around arenas pummeling waves of foes with your various superpowered attacks until you've finished them all off. Cooperation amongst your team is key: players can give and share energy and revive fallen teammates, as well as coordinate to execute high-damage team attacks like the meteor chain, which ping-pongs an opponent between fighters. Characters fall into four types--melee, support, ki blast, and interference--which helps determine both the effects and the effectiveness of their individual skills. Individual characters can also receive bonuses and special abilities through equipped cards and items, which can be either won during missions or purchased with points earned throughout the game.

The team-based focus is an interesting idea, but it just feels messy in practice, mainly because Battle of Z's combat feels unfocused on many levels. You have a decent arsenal of attacks at your disposal, but for most characters, only a few of these skills are actually effective in dealing damage to foes--the rest exist solely to help you regain meter to execute the aforementioned effective strikes. It leads to a frustrating cycle in which you try to land basic hits on an enemy to replenish SP energy--which can be quite difficult on some of the bosses--in order to actually perform the attacks needed to cause significant damage, all while your AI teammates seem to have no idea what they're actually trying to accomplish. Sometimes even knowing what you're trying to accomplish is hard enough--the camera can be dizzying, target lock-ons drop or fall behind objects for no good reason, and oftentimes there's just so many ki strikes and special attacks and characters flying in from offscreen that it's difficult to get a handle on just what the heck is actually happening.
Ultimately, every moment in Battle of Z feels is a struggle--not to overcome challenges, but simply to enjoy the game. After you wrestle with the controls and menus, you're faced with stage timers and tedious encounters in which you deal piddling amounts of damage with each attack, all the while battling a targeting system that actively hates you, and AI teammates dead set on not helping you when it matters most. Dragonball Z is all about straining, training, and eventually overcoming unfathomably powerful foes, but this is not so much an entertaining depiction of developing your latent talents as much as it is a simulation of a year's intense training in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

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Dark Souls II

Dark Souls II asks this question of you at every turn, encouraging you to press onward in spite of imminent death. And with each death, you lose a little of your humanity and become more hollow. Your maximum health slightly diminishes each time as well, eventually sinking to 50 percent of its full value, and yet as each sliver of humanity is sliced away, you heed the call to move onward. Eventually, you overcome the obstacle that stood between you and victory--that quartet of gargoyles swarming you on a rooftop, that arachnoid demon plunging poisonous pincers into your flesh, that disgusting mound of meat that defies description. You have triumphed! But your gain does not come without sacrifice. You have sworn, you have gasped, and you have sweated. You have forfeited your own humanity so you might collect the souls of the damned.
Like Dark Souls and Demon's Souls before it, Dark Souls II is not just a fantasy role-playing adventure, but a cloud that hangs heavy over your head whenever you so much as think about it. These modern classics developed by From Software have rightfully earned a reputation for being brutally difficult, but their beauty is derived not solely from difficulty, but also from dread. Dark Souls II is not a survival horror game in the normal sense, but few games can make you this afraid to peer around the corner, while simultaneously curious as to what awaits you there. Death is so very beautiful in this game, for it comes at the hands of amazing beasts and warmongers: hulking armored knights, shimmering otherworldly invaders, and tendrils that rise out of black pools of poison. Sure, each death punctures your heart, but one of Dark Souls II's many gruesome pleasures is discovering new ways to die.
The eerie blackness is front and center as you start up the game and enter the mysterious abode in front of you. Three old crones await you inside and ask you to customize your character and choose a class before venturing into the unknown. Like most of Dark Souls II's characters, these women offer vague advice and refer to events and concepts without filling in the details. The anxiety mounts as you weave in and out of the nearby caverns that fill you in on the basics of movement and combat. This area may teach you the fundamentals, but it also raises a number of questions. What are those odd voices you hear when you stand near the bird's nest that rests on a narrow ledge? What is the significance of the flame sconces scattered about that you are meant to set alight? How do you survive encounters with the monstrous ogres on the beach below that squish you like a measly bug when you draw near?
Welcome to Drangleic, a world that is not quick to whisper its secrets to you, in a game that trusts you to find the answers for yourself.

This introduction is not as soul crushing as the original Dark Souls' opening, but that's just fine, for Dark Souls II offers you an early taste of hope, a feeling that was quite rare in its predecessors. That hope arrives by way of Majula, a gorgeous oasis that's as close to a home as you will find in the game. My first glimpse of Majula was a revelation. As I emerged from the nearby shadows, the glowing sun blinded me, and I stood in awe of the world opening up before me. Whenever the bleakness of Drangleic at large overwhelmed me, I was glad to return to this hub for an emotional refresh.
Majula is more akin to Demon's Souls' Nexus than to Dark Souls' Firelink Shrine. It is your central hub of operations, and while it's mostly devoid of life when you first come upon it, it slowly fills out with the vendors you meet upon your travels, many of whom set up shop there. Your most important contact there, however, is the cloaked woman who allows you to level up in exchange for souls, the game's currency. But even Majula is not immune to mystery. There's an impossibly deep hole in the ground here, one that spells certain death if you fall into it. (Don't let it fool you; the boards that crisscross this passage may look high enough to provide a safe landing, but you will not survive that fall.) What's down there? Surely something valuable must lurk down there. Or something horrifying. You eventually make your way down, but Dark Souls II doesn't tell you when or how that may happen.

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Yawhg

The Yawhg isn't really about the Yawhg, as it turns out. Though the titular calamity is destined to ravage your medieval village in a scant six weeks, it's not half as important as the way that you spend your remaining time. And who could find the hours to make doomsday preparations anyway, when there are demons to be slain, magical potions to be imbibed, and artless lute players in need of some comeuppance?
The role-playing game by Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll confines itself to familiar grounds: a rowdy tavern, a gladiatorial arena, enchanted forests--eight locations in all, brought to life by a few whimsical drawings. Each locale houses two possible activities, and each activity occupies a week of your remaining six. At the arena, for example, you might while away the hours with blood sport or spend them in the grandstand betting on the matches. These initial decisions are a formality, conferring the expected benefits--some improved strength for the former, a bit of coin for the latter. But at week's end, there's always a further choice to be made, this one less rote than the first. Perhaps a bomb has been set in the palace, or you happen upon a gathering of magical talking rats. The Yawhg's four playable characters are tabula rasa, molded or warped by these decisions.

It takes a village to raise them. There's a communal quality to The Yawhg, not unlike a board game when you get down to brass tacks. Two characters must be fielded at minimum, the tacit implication being that the game is best experienced with a few local friends. The unnamed characters you can choose from are identical in every quality save physical appearance and coloration of attire; it's easy to imagine friends squabbling over them like Monopoly players arguing who gets to be the dog (spoiler alert: I do). The board game similarities only get more prominent as the action unfolds. You move your characters' tokens about their cartoon village, settling upon a fantasy trope of choice and seeing where the cards fall. A breezy sort of strategy takes shape for players keen on maxing out their abilities, who can play with an eye to the simple logistics of the stat bonus handouts and angle for the "best" ending. For everyone else, there's always the tavern.

There's a curiously inert quality to actions taken in The Yawhg, even a week spent binge drinking and bar fighting. It's owed in large part to the writing, which adopts an austere approach throughout. Mercifully, the scenarios it describes are not straightforward, and the scripting is careful enough to ensure that few decisions ever feel like wasted efforts, even as it deadpans that you've just, say, contracted vampirism. If you try to pay for something when you don't have any cash to your name, you're still usually treated to a bit of expository dialogue, even if it's just to say that you stumbled upon a lost bag of coins on your way back home. Plus-one finesse here, minus-two mind there--the effects act as rewards, consolation prizes, and, occasionally, punch lines. The Yawhg uses these statistics as video game shorthand, penciling in the rough structure of a personality over the six turns like an art student doing a 30-minute sketch exercise.

The art direction of The Yawhg reveals a practiced hand. The illustrations riff on medieval trappings, playing fast and loose with proportion and color like an illuminated manuscript filled with classroom doodles. The artwork turns out to be flexible too, perfectly comfortable capturing the highs and lows that the randomly generated storyline doles out. Ditto for the lilting, folksy musical score, which takes on an increasingly melancholic tone as the Yawhg approaches your town.
Six weeks pass in a heartbeat. There's something to be said for The Yawhg's spartan writing style, but in a game this short, it's asking a lot for it to weave a meaningful narrative. Despite the doomsday countdown, the stakes feel pretty low. It would take a bleeding heart to be much affected by a sentence or two telling you that you defused a bomb, or that a nameless, faceless character you happened upon once has died. And what about the third or fourth time it happens? Like any good board game, The Yawhg feels geared toward replayability, but you'll find the game's various scenarios repeat themselves too quickly for the liking.

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