thriller – Diabolical Plots

GAME REVIEW: McPixel

written by David Steffen

McPixel is a point and click puzzle humor game released by Sos in 2012. The game is made up of dozen 20-second mini-levels where the main character McPixel has 20 seconds to save the day, usually by defusing a bomb. Clear inspiration for the game is the 1980s show MacGyver (which was recently rebooted), known for putting its eponymous hero in tight spots where he had to improvise a solution to a deadly problem in minutes. And to some extent maybe even MacGruber, the Saturday Night Live spoof of MacGyver in recent years–MacGruber came to mind more readily since MacGruber regularly fails to stop the explosions.

The controls of the game are very simple–a 20-second timer is counting down, but you have plenty of time to try something, anything, which you do by clicking on objects in the scene. In many cases the bomb is not even visible so you don’t always even have a clear objective, but your path is the same–try clicking on everything.

When he’s in a tight spot (and he always is), McPixel’s first resort are kicking, peeing on things, or eating something. Many of the actions he does don’t really make sense for saving the day… but often these things are the ones that actually do save the day, so I guess McPixel just has an uncanny instinct for such things? The game tries for humor by this subversion of expectations, though the punchlines start to feel repetitive pretty fast–repetitive lowbrow humor here (though I still received it better than most Adam Sandler movies).

Visuals
King’s Quest I era graphics. I like SNES-level pixelart, and occasionally have enjoyed very blocky low-res recent releases like Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, but this is going a bit far for my taste. I suppose it does get away with some of the more lewd actions, since it’s kindof hard to be sure exactly what McPixel is doing in some cases.

Audio
Thankfully, the audio is not from the same era as the graphics (the music on King’s Quest I era games are ear-splittingly shrill). But you’re not really missing anything by playing it muted.

Challenge
The only “challenge” in the game comes from thoroughness–try everything you can think of in every combination to find the solution, and again to find all the gags to unlock extra levels. Some of the extra “challenging” levels might block you for a while, but only because the “active” items on the screen are hidden–which just ended up being a tedious challenge rather than a fun one.

Story
No real story.

Session Time
Very quick, which makes it easy to pick up and put down. Which, honestly, is most of the reason why I played it, because it’s hard to find games that are so easy to play for less than 5 minutes at a time.

Playability
Just click on everything methodically.

Replayability
A little bit, to find all the gags and unlock extra levels.

Originality
On the one hand, it’s the first game I’ve played based on an endless string of MacGyver/MacGruber mini-levels to defuse bombs. On the other hand, it… got very repetitive very fast, so the originality wore out real fast. There’s only so many people you can kick and only so many fires you can piss on before it starts to feel a little worn out.

Playtime
I didn’t quite finish all of the levels, because I got tired of clicking randomly one of the “harder” levels, where the active items on the screen are hidden so it’s a lot of randomly clicking and then seeing the same actions again and again and again.

Overall
If you have a very juvenile sense of humor that does not wear out from repetition, if you like games that requires methodic playing rather than action or puzzle or whatever, if you like games with very outdated graphics with a funny premise.

If you dig Metroid style platformer-shooters you should enjoy this game (and if you don’t know what a Metroid style platformer-shooter, it’s not a bad choice to be the first of its type you’ve played). Although I played through most of the levels, it was mostly because it’s a quick game to play for just a few minutes, and because it was easy enough that it still drew my completionist side. But it’s a hard game to recommend. $5 on Steam.

BOOK REVIEW: Wayward by Blake Crouch

written by David Steffen

Wayward is a… I guess I’d call it a mystery SF thriller… the second of a trilogy written by Blake Crouch and published in 2013 by Thomas & Mercer.

If you follow reviews on this site regularly, and this one seems familiar, that’s because I’ve already posted a TV review of Wayward Pines Season 1 which is based on Blake Crouch’s trilogy of books and covers a similar set of events as the trilogy of books. And I recently posted a review of Pines, the first book in the trilogy. The first book relied a lot on big mysteries for a lot of its appeal and revealed many of those mysteries at the end. I can’t talk about book 2 without talking about those mysteries, so if you want to be surprised go read the first book.

To give a quick recap of the first book, Secret Service agent Ethan Burke and his partner travel to Wayward Pines, Idaho to investigate the disappearance of two Secret Service agents. They get in a car accident in town and Ethan wakes up in the hospital, and something is very wrong about the little town. There are all kinds of bizarre rules, such as no one is allowed to talk about their past, and everything about the town seems set on forcing its residents to stay–the only road that’s supposed to lead out of town just loops back into it. Ethan fights hard against the town and becomes the target of a fete–where the sheriff of the town leads the citizens of the town to find and kill someone who has broken the rules. Ethan survives the fete and because of his resourcefulness he is let in on the secret of the town. David Pilcher, the secret leader of the town, has had a decades-long project that started when he discovered that the human genome was becoming corrupted and the human species was quickly changing into something else entirely. When no one believed his research, he set out on a project to preserve as much of humanity as possible, gathering people he could trust to act as his staff and collecting others against their will. His research perfected the technology of cryogenic sleep and he put all of these people (including Ethan) into cryosleep. 1800 years later he and his staff woke up to find that his prediction had come true–the world as far as they could explore had been overrun by the evolutionary descendents of humanity–which they dubbed aberrations (or abbies for short)–vicious human predators. They set out to rebuild Wayward Pines, protected by sheer cliffs and a high voltage fence and then woke up people to populate the town. During his first attempt to populate the town he tried telling people the truth, but suicide rates quickly rose, and he salvaged what he could by starting over again (putting people in cryosleep erased their memory since the last sleep). David Pilcher names Ethan Burke as his new sheriff to help enforce the rules of the town and keep people safe both from the abbies outside the wall and to keep the growing discontent among the townspeople from exploding into revolution.

Phew, sorry, long back story, but most of that’s important to understanding the basic plot of this book.

Near the start of the story Ethan Burke discovers a corpse of a woman who has apparently been murdered, and Pilcher assigns him the task of investigating. Although the violent fetes are a part of life in Wayward Pines, unsanctioned murders are rare, due in large part to the constant surveillance of the residents. The murdered woman was one of Pilcher’s employees working in the mountain to oversee the surveillance and discipline of the town, and she had been venturing into town in the guise of a townsperson to root out the secrets of a group of residents who have found ways to dodge the surveillance. Meanwhile, Ethan has been reunited with his wife and son–when he first came to Wayward Pines 2000 years before he came there before her, and she was taken by Pilcher more than a year later. But, skip forward 2000 years, and she and their son was woken from cryo more than 5 years before him so she has already settled into living in the town by the time he arrivs.

Although the setting and protagonist the same, this book has a decidedly different feel from the first book, Pines. The first book feels more like weird fiction because of the unexplained oddities of the little town and the constant attempts of the protagonist to pick at the edges of the strangeness. By the start of this book Ethan has a much clearer idea of what’s going on and has been drawn into the conspiracy himself, so rather than being in the position of rebellious loner he is a family man in a position of precarious power whose job is both to protect and oppress the people of the town. He hasn’t lost his rebellious nature, but he is in a very difficult position.

The mystery of the murder made a good centerpiece for the book, (and was a surprise to me even though I’d seen season one of the TV show because of changes in the adaptation), and Ethan’s interactions with Pilcher are a constant source of new information to understand the situation this little town is really in.

The most interesting new addition to me that differentiated this book from the first one is to see more deeply into the point of view of the staff that live in the mountain surveilling the town. While the people in the town yearn only to get out of the town, the people in the mountain yearn to get into it–to live under the open sky and be able to live a comparatively carefree life and just forgetting all the strangeness around them. That was an interesting dichotomy to read about, and one that was largely absent from the TV show.

The book is interesting throughout, and manages to avoid the Book Two Slump of many series. Although it depends on knowledge from the first book and leads directly into the events of the third book, it has an arc that stands on its own that starts with the major change of Ethan being promoted to sheriff and ending with major events that lead into the third book’s story.

BOOK REVIEW: Pines by Blake Crouch

written by David Steffen

Pines is a… I guess I’d call it a mystery fantasy/SF thriller… the first of a trilogy written franchise tie-in novel written by Blake Crouch and published in 2012 by Thomas & Mercer.

The story begins as U.S. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke travels to Wayward Pines, Idaho to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents who were last heard from as they approached the mysterious little town. After a car accident en route, Ethan wakes up in the Wayward Pines hospital, unable to contact anyone and unable to leave. In many ways it seems like a stereotypical small town, but there are big warning signs that something is not right in this little town–the strange things that people say, the strict rules the town keeps about not talking about your past and not asking questions. He wants nothing more than to escape the small town and get back home to his wife and son, but every route out of town is blocked–the main road only loops back into town again. He finds one of the agents he was looking for (whom he had had an affair with in the past), but she seems to aged more than she should have. Everything is a mystery in this mysterious, ominous, little town.

I read the books after already seeing season 1 of the TV show, and so I knew pretty much what to expect but I was interested in where it differed and where it was the same. Pines stuck pretty close to the TV show, albeit covering only the first few episodes. There are some notable differences, probably just to compress the plot enough to fit it on TV, and the book had more of an emphasis on Ethan’s past torture at the hands of a terrorist. The main things that differed were supporting details like character appearances and character ages, and that sort of thing, which is always a little confusing but not terribly so.

I commented in the TV Review that some of the “weird little town” moments kind of reminded me of Twin Peaks but that the show did a reasonably good job with them and didn’t make it just a ripoff. I was interested to read in the introduction that Blake Crouch is a huge Twin Peaks fan and this trilogy was his attempt to write something that had some of the same feel to it, so I think it’s interesting that I picked up the reference.

Book 1 provides a pretty solid plot arc on its own, making it a reasonably good standalone book on its own. By the end of the book you find out clear explanations for most of the weirdness in the town but with enough questions left to leave plenty of remaining mystery, the immediate plot arc resolves in a satisfying and interesting way, and at the end of the book the situation changes drastically enough to serve as an excellent hook for reading the next book–many things are the same but big big things have changed so if you’re like me you’re immediately drawn by the question of “WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?”