I enjoyed Ahnayro enough to take a go at its precursor game, The Black Watchmen, for my B-game in the latest alphabet run. It wasn’t quite as enjoyable, though it was still worth a go.
The Premise
Like Ahnayro, The Black Watchmen is an ARG game. The player takes the role of an agent of a secret agency mapping occult phenomena, rooting out conspiracies, banishing elder evils, etc. Rather than being up against wholly invented supernatural entities, you’re dealing with things in the public domain, which of course makes it easier for players to go find an Enochian dictionary online to look up Goetic demon speech and the like. If you’re familiar with common occult conspiracy themes, you’ll see familiar faces.
Where it differs from its later spinoff is that Black Watchmen is less self-contained. The game expects you to use other apps or programs to solve some of its puzzles: audio analysis software, filters in Photoshop or the like, and it also will give you tasks like sending “in-character” emails to receive responses with your next clues. Some of these are pretty fun. But the external requirements frequently didn’t land well for me, as I don’t really want to load up on other apps for the sake of one game.
The Investment
I’ll admit it: I didn’t play fair the whole way through. Part of that was an unwillingness to download extra programs for the purposes of decrypting and removing filters from visual or audio clues. Part of it is that it’s a 2015 game that is reliant on external sources, and that’s a bit of a problem. The most jarring example was a section where you’re asked to find the one camera in a specific museum room. So you go to the web, find a virtual tour of that room on the museum’s site, allowing you to look around…
…And the virtual tour runs on Flash. Which is to say, it doesn’t run any more in 2023. What choice do you have but to cheat at that point?
I wound up finishing the first season as fairly as I could. I did go for “nudges” in some cases — the old threads on the Alice & Smith forums are pretty good about not giving you the answers directly. In some, I cheated and just looked up the answers in a guide. So it goes. The second season leans much more strongly in “use Photoshop or the like to sift through filters on an encoded .pdf” and that’s about where I petered out. I may still finish up the season with more blatant cheating, and the other content I have for the game, just to complete the narrative — it’s not poetic, but it’s fun. Certainly the implied final scenes of Season 1’s closing were enjoyable enough that it was worth it.
The Inspiration
While not quite as artistic as Ahnayro, I still found plenty to appreciate in The Black Watchmen. It obviously has a lot of similarity to modern occult-hunting agency games like Delta Green, and some very liftable stuff for RPGs.
Occult Conspiracy Hacking: The game did a neat job of showing something closer to real-world Internet sleuthing. You don’t uncover an occult conspiracy by spouting some technobabble and showing a lot of green numbers on a screen, you sift through data, find likely shell companies, and then maybe try tricks like social engineering to get an in. The plausibility made it more personal.
Supporting Cast: Bare-bones as they were, there were a couple of NPCs that appealed to me — the hardass field team leader who is a bit snide about the player’s “pencil-pushing” job, the friendlier researcher who reaches out and is happy to help. I’d use them as models for NPCs in a game.
Implied Imagery: The format of the game meant it was up to your imagination to picture how some of these encounters played out — how these dust storm desiccations happened, what the cave full of extinct insects looked like, how the field teams’ bare-bones descriptions of “rift entities” would look in person.
Overall, I did enjoy the game and I did get something out of it. But it’s pretty obvious that players are meant to play live, collaborate, and go all in on gathering resources to solve things. It’s not as self-contained as Ahnayro, and I believe I just like self-contained games better.
Next Up: C
Okay, I definitely want something different after two games of very similar fashion in a row. Eliminating things like RTSes that I don’t even enjoy playing, much less trying to beat, the possible list of C games is as follows:
- The Cat Lady: Surreal horror game about serial killers.
- Chroma Squad: Tactical RPG about off-brand Power Rangers.
- Chronology: Platformer with time travel.
- Cinders: Visual novel reinterpretation of a fairy tale that should be obvious from the title.
- Citizens of Earth: Comedy turn-based RPG.
- City of Brass: First-person adventure/shooter/fighter, Arabian Nights-inspired.
- Cognition: an Erica Reed Thriller: Point-and-click adventure game.
- Contagion: Zombie shooter. I’m unenthused just typing that, but maybe I shouldn’t be?
- Cosmonautica: Procedural space trader (as in outer space).
- Costume Quest: Halloween-themed adventure game from the reputable Double Fine studio.
- Cozy Grove: Cozy, as described, game about camping and… placating ghosts.
- Crashlands: “Open world survival craft” is the big tag on Steam.
- Crawl: Dungeon crawler with strong co-op vibe, but “playable solo”.
- Crayon Physics Deluxe: Sandbox physics puzzler, as depicted via a box of Crayolas.
- Crusader Kings II: Notoriously deep kingdom grand strategy. Can it be played without Crusades?
- Crypt of the NecroDancer: Amazing soundtrack, but I suck at actual rhythm dungeoncrawling.
- Cubetractor: Cube-pulling… tower defense? Hm.
- Cultist Simulator: Picked up before I knew the creator was kind of a turd. Lovely, though.
Cinders is probably the simplest one to compete. Cozy Grove might be endless, a “play until I’m sated” sort of thing rather than having a solid endpoint, but kind of relaxing. City of Brass and Chroma Squad are both appealing in their own ways. Tricky decision. Why must my Steam queue be so huge I can do an alphabet challenge in the first place?
Haints and Gardinels 