Pinball & Guns

I started out playing Creature in the Well, but it turns out to require a level of reflexes and coordination that I no longer possess. Which is fair. I’m getting to be an old man and video games are clearly a young man’s (or woman’s or what-have-you’s, you know what I mean) game. Anything that requires twitchy reflexes and the sort of hand-eye coordination usually seen in kung-fu movies where the would-be hero trainee catches flys with chop sticks is necessarily going to leave me a little bit out of the loop. Not that it was the sort of edge I ever had.

The premise of Creature in the Well revolves around, as you might suspect, a creature in a well. This particular creature being some sort of malevolent force which has taken over a vast atmospheric control station in some distant future, or possible some distant elsewhere. In so doing it has rendered the outside world nearly inhabitable and you, as the maintenance droid BOT-C, must enter the last remnant of civilization, find out what has happened and put it all right.

In order to do this, you’ll go on a hack and slash dungeon crawling adventure which would sound absolutely bog standard and uninteresting if not for one thing: You’re going to be playing pinball. Sort of. Each room in the various dungeons of the atmospheric control plant (okay, call them different floors if you like) presents various pinball-based puzzles with bumpers and cushions and spinners and other assorted pinball paraphernalia arranged around the area with you as the paddle. You’re able to move around the room and position yourself where you like, and you’ll have several balls at your disposal with which to make shots and attempt to collect energy from each ball strike. Collect enough energy and you can exit the room.

There are, of course, secrets to discover. Some rooms contain hidden exits that don’t reveal themselves until you clear the current room’s puzzle. These lead off to other BOT-Cs, each of which has met its demise somehow. From their chassis you can salvage different colored capes and, importantly, BOT Cores which you can have installed as augments to your own at the nearby town’s blacksmith. In addition, you can find one of two different types of weapons which you use to manipulate the pinballs and solve the puzzles. One weapon is the striker, which launches any ball immediately in front of you into the obstacle course, and the other is a charger which charges up the pinballs so that when they interact with an obstacle it takes fewer interactions to “defeat” them. It was a relief to find a charger with a laser guide and a striker that could slow time fairly early in the game as anything accomplished up to that point had more to do with random luck than it did with well-placed shots.

Lest you think it’s all a bit easy, some of the obstacles will, when struck with a ball, fire that ball back at you with a bit of extra oomph that can cost you a bit of life. Other obstacles will fire off a ring of death when hit, and still others are just cannon that fire charged balls at you almost before you have chance to assess a room for dangers. Naturally, if you lose all your health, you are unceremoniously ejected by the creature from the well and deposited on your backside out in town, there to make you way back into the weather control plant and try again. Reach the end of a dungeon and you’ll face a series of fiendishly clever puzzles to solve while being attacked by dangerous sparks thrown at you by the creature from the safety of its subterranean dwelling. Many of them timed.

Creature in the Well has a lovely pastel and chalk art style full of vibrant colors placed against muted background. Even the menu screen, which you will be hard pressed to recognize as a menu screen at first, has little splashes of bright color against a yellow desert sand backdrop which helps to set the immediate atmosphere of wasteland desolation with just a few patches of remaining civilization holding on for dear life. Further enhancing the games story, which is told in conversation with the few NPC characters available to you along with bits of notes attached to the various weather control systems you will visit, is Jim Fowler’s spartan piano and glitch synth soundtrack. While the visuals inside the station are bright and poppy, the soundtrack reminds you how barren the outside world has become and how desperate the situation is for the survivors.

It’s a good, well designed, well put together, and fun game that explores the possibilities of what might otherwise seem like a fairly fixed mechanical system. It’s pinball and short of being in an actual pinball machine, there haven’t been any really successful pinball-based video games that work well outside of a few pinball simulations. Even those are few and far between. Is it perfect? No, because ultimately, I did reach my ability limit about a third of the way in. There’s legitimate difficulty there in room design and it feels appropriate, but I just couldn’t keep up with it. Younger fingers and eyes will likely do better. I’m sad to say I’ll not be able to complete the game and the fault is almost entirely mine.

I am not, however, sad to say that I will be unable to complete Borderlands 2 and the fault is almost entirely not mine.

Now look, I know lots of people seem to like Borderlands 2 and I just know someone is going to suggest that what I am about to tell you suffers from being too heavily salted, but… But, Borderlands 2 has no idea what it is doing. Sure, it looks a lot like the original Borderlands which many people, including myself, enjoyed, but there is more than just a little missing here in BL2.

First, who was responsible for checking the terrain fit and finish in this game? I lost count of the number of times my forward progress came to an abrupt, non-intuitive stop because some piece of terrain wasn’t properly aligned with the piece next to it, creating an invisible step my character had to hop over. Most especially aggravating if what you are trying to do is run away from the big nasty about to take your last slice of health only to come to a whiplash inducing halt while they line you up for the kill. This happened so often that eventually I took to a modified hopping run when trying to disengage from combat in the hopes I wouldn’t snag anything. Which, of course, frequently meant that I would then bang my characters head on some overhanging object and come to a stop that way.

I’ve been told that BL2’s story is much improved over the originals. I find this hard to believe. While it has been a very long time since I played Borderlands I do at least remember that my character was there to find a treasure vault and get very, very rich. Whether you do or not I leave alone so as not to spoil things, but this was at least a clear goal in the first game.

By contrast, BL2 seems to be about… Well, it seems to be about maybe getting involved in something that might be not good but then again you stuck your nose in it in the first place and sort of poked the hornets nest and made them angry and who can blame hornets for being angry when they get poked and then various things shoot at you, various other things tell you only you can save them from some angry hornets that just showed up for who knows what reason and wouldn’t it be nice if you kept poking the hornets so they got even angrier and maybe you should have stayed in bed that day and things would have been no worse than they were before you showed up. I mean, no one even bothers to explain why you were trying to rob the train in the games opening cutscene anyway, so how do you even know what’s going on and why? There’s no clear goal that is the thing which your character wants above all else and that will pull them through the story. Such as it is.

The final straw for me though, was when the game decided that rocks fall, and everyone dies. Which all seemed to center around a transmitter I needed to get in order to get a moon base to put a flying city back on the teleport network. For reasons.

Most of the game to that point had been fairly straight forward. Get a mission, do a mission, etc. I’d been doing every mission the game had thrown at me, even the little annoying side ones about renaming some of the critters in the game. Even the big annoying side ones that had me go back and revisit entire maps I hadn’t enjoyed the first time through. (That’s some real content stretching they’ve got going on there.) I’d done everything the game asked, so when the game asked me to go to a new map and get a transmitter then take that transmitter somewhere else, that’s what I went to do.

And immediately discovered I was under leveled and underpowered for everything in this new area. I eventually made my way to the transmitter’s location only to see the transmitter swallowed by a giant-ass f-off worm for no reason that anyone cared to explain. A worm that I emptied every bullet I owned into a half dozen times at least. A worm that cost me a cool 5k in resurrection fees. A worm that I finally had to get jammed into some terrain where the game AI couldn’t decide what to do before I could kill it. And still it took another batch of every bullet I had.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. Having collected the transmitter and taken it to the place it needed to go and plugged it into the thing it needed to be plugged into I was then informed I had to defend it for long enough for it to connect to whatever it was and get the teleport set up. And then the swarms of robots showed up. The Level +3 robots.

In Borderlands 2 level +1 bad guys are a bit of a challenge but not much. Level +2 is some more serious competition. Level +3 is a pretty hard challenge. But that all assumes you only have one such baddie to deal with. I was getting three, four, and even five at a time. And the game wasn’t even waiting for me to clear the previous wave before sending the next. By the time I took the first death, there were four +3s on screen. Death two had 7. And by death three there were 10 or more. And I had nothing in my arsenal that could hurt them fast enough to overcome their own healing. So bad was the incoming fire that I couldn’t even see to target for all the explosions and smoke. And when the game decided the transmitter had been defended enough, it told me to get to the portal and get out. Which I tried to do. Except the game waited a good 30 seconds from the time I arrived at the portal to actually let me activate it, which allowed everything to focus on me once more and wipe me out again.

It was not fun. Not even a little. In all it cost something like 20k in resurrection fees just for defending the transmitter. There was no way to prevent it, no way to mitigate it, nothing to do but stand there and take it and die over and over and over again. At about 800 a pop that’s about 25 deaths for that one combat scenario.

No thanks Borderlands 2. I don’t need to play you that badly. You’re no Souls-like where that sort of thing is acceptable or even expected as part of the learning process. You’re just badly, and apparently carelessly, designed. Uninstalled.