Divided/United

Her Story is a very interesting game that has you sat down in front of a mid-90's police database, complete with Win95-esque desktop in the background, looking through short video clips of several interviews with a young woman regarding what was, at the time, a recent death. I won't go any further into the case or scenario details, because they could be easily spoiled. There is a very solid puzzle presented here, in trying to sift through hundreds of short video clips five at a time (a game rule, justified in-world by the database UI's shortcomings) to piece together the true picture of what happened from just this young woman's accounts, recorded at various times over a period of a few weeks. I had a great time rifling through these short video clips trying to find out what was going on, and even when I had figured out the main thrust of it in the first 20 minutes or so, I kept digging for more details until I was satisfied. I had only seen maybe half of the available clips, per an indicator in the game, when a prompt came up in the form of an IM window, asking if I had found what I was looking for. I had, and I did, in Her Story. This is a good example of a short, original, and very memorable non-conventional game, and it was under five bucks. Highly recommended.

I finally began Assassin's Creed Unity, putting in about five hours last night. We are now about 9 or 10 months on from the game's problematic release period, and for what it's worth, I saw almost no bugs or jank. There were a couple of odd NPCs with the jitters or dropping out of the sky, but nothing on the level of what there was, once. The thing that gave me the most pause was actually a prompt before accepting a very early story mission that I needed to basically go and level up before taking on the mission, which happened to be the one that ended with those systems being opened up. So no, it's not a perfect game, by any means.

I think the best thing new to the series in Unity has to be the fact that the city is modeled at a 1:1 scale now, meaning that everything feels bigger than in the past. It's not something I ever thought about previously, but looking back after playing a bit of Unity, all of the worlds of previous AC games, or probably most video games, must be like 3/4 scale or something. Distances and structures in Unity feel much more realistic, and that, I think even more than the improvement in graphics, really contributes to the feeling of walking around Paris.

There are some other new and welcome additions, such as a modified free-running control scheme, more and better animations, more character customization options, et cetera. I'll have to continue playing to see how this AC develops. Arno seems like your typical brash young jokester rake at this point, more in the Ezio or Edward vein than Altair, Connor, Shay, Haytham, or Adewale. I wouldn't say he's much like Aveline or Shao Jun, either, for what it's worth. I am fond of most of the series' leads, either way.

It's curious that they moved away from versus multiplayer with Unity, and with the upcoming Syndicate seem to have also dropped the co-op introduced here. I've never felt multiplayer was needed, or at all desired, for many games of this sort. It always just seemed like a waste of time and effort on the part of everyone involved. I highly doubt I'll ever do any of the co-op stuff in Unity. Good riddance; hopefully the time and money saved developing that will go toward improving the parts of the series that is are the main draw.