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[video game post] 13 Sentinels
Aug. 19th, 2022 10:25 pmI played 13 Sentinels during my summer break in one glorious multi-day binge, because once it gets going, you don't want to do anything else.
But, I'd also bounced off the game a few times previously—the first time, because I was just too sleepy to handle such a text-heavy game, and the second time, because I was like oh my God when they mean 13 Sentinels they mean *13 unique point-of-view characters* and my brain kinda short-circuited trying to keep track of them.
Once I finished the game, I stared at a blank textbox for a while trying to come up with a pithy metaphor to describe what the game was like. "Las Vegas" came to mind a couple times—because, just like that city is simultaneously deeply alluring, and also an affront to any decent human sense of "moderation" or "good taste" or "not building a monument to gambling and unfettered capitalism in the middle of a fucking desert", this game is similarly brazenly audacious when it comes to scifi tropes and homages. The game's answer to "should we do time travel? or interdimensional travel? or time loops? or aliens? or androids? or mind-body fuckery?" is "yes", as in "all of it, and then some, and also turn it all to 11."
Such a mishmash of concepts suggests a sort of sophomoric inelegance—I saw one review that compared it to Lost. But that comparison doesn't work—though I loved Lost, that show was very obviously was making it up as they went along, whereas 13 Sentinels very obviously had some Ur-Nerd who had painstakingly, lovingly raked over the entire script, had a crystal-clear vision for how all these mechanics and story threads were going to hang together, and then hecking executed on it. Like, it's not elegant, and the endless techno-fixation mutes the efficacy of some of the emotional beats, but it's all 100% intentional and 100% checksums against a Manual Of Hard Scifi Rules, which is honestly kind of impressive. (Softer scifi seems to be in vogue these days, which is fine, but sometimes I miss the assurance that some nerd thought Way Too Hard About Timeline Causality as the structuring force in a story, haha.)
So it's the Las Vegas of weird scifi-trope-mashup-story-things, except it doesn't feel quite that grand/audacious in scope? More like Reno, maybe, or, idk, Gatlinburg, Tennessee? The latter being this extremely charming vacation town in the middle of nowhere that's absolutely stuffed full of every tourist trap available—laser tag, mini golf, arcades, wax museums, tacky replicas of famous buildings, mazes, magic shows, a ski area somehow—but not in a trying-to-defy-God kinda way, just a well-this-is-where-we-decided-to-put-all-the-vacation-stuff kinda way.
...That was a lot of preamble. Here's my bullet-point impressions of the game :P
( mild hints at spoilers; unlikely to ruin the game for you unless you're suuuper spoiler allergic )
but yeah, fun damn time! I think NEO TWEWY is still more my flavor of barely-coherent game but this was solid~~
But, I'd also bounced off the game a few times previously—the first time, because I was just too sleepy to handle such a text-heavy game, and the second time, because I was like oh my God when they mean 13 Sentinels they mean *13 unique point-of-view characters* and my brain kinda short-circuited trying to keep track of them.
Once I finished the game, I stared at a blank textbox for a while trying to come up with a pithy metaphor to describe what the game was like. "Las Vegas" came to mind a couple times—because, just like that city is simultaneously deeply alluring, and also an affront to any decent human sense of "moderation" or "good taste" or "not building a monument to gambling and unfettered capitalism in the middle of a fucking desert", this game is similarly brazenly audacious when it comes to scifi tropes and homages. The game's answer to "should we do time travel? or interdimensional travel? or time loops? or aliens? or androids? or mind-body fuckery?" is "yes", as in "all of it, and then some, and also turn it all to 11."
Such a mishmash of concepts suggests a sort of sophomoric inelegance—I saw one review that compared it to Lost. But that comparison doesn't work—though I loved Lost, that show was very obviously was making it up as they went along, whereas 13 Sentinels very obviously had some Ur-Nerd who had painstakingly, lovingly raked over the entire script, had a crystal-clear vision for how all these mechanics and story threads were going to hang together, and then hecking executed on it. Like, it's not elegant, and the endless techno-fixation mutes the efficacy of some of the emotional beats, but it's all 100% intentional and 100% checksums against a Manual Of Hard Scifi Rules, which is honestly kind of impressive. (Softer scifi seems to be in vogue these days, which is fine, but sometimes I miss the assurance that some nerd thought Way Too Hard About Timeline Causality as the structuring force in a story, haha.)
So it's the Las Vegas of weird scifi-trope-mashup-story-things, except it doesn't feel quite that grand/audacious in scope? More like Reno, maybe, or, idk, Gatlinburg, Tennessee? The latter being this extremely charming vacation town in the middle of nowhere that's absolutely stuffed full of every tourist trap available—laser tag, mini golf, arcades, wax museums, tacky replicas of famous buildings, mazes, magic shows, a ski area somehow—but not in a trying-to-defy-God kinda way, just a well-this-is-where-we-decided-to-put-all-the-vacation-stuff kinda way.
...That was a lot of preamble. Here's my bullet-point impressions of the game :P
( mild hints at spoilers; unlikely to ruin the game for you unless you're suuuper spoiler allergic )
but yeah, fun damn time! I think NEO TWEWY is still more my flavor of barely-coherent game but this was solid~~
