Which is worse: An ugly game, or a boring one?
Two recent gaming releases produce an accidental grudge match between the eyes and the head.
Left: Luna Abyss (Image: Kwalee Labs), Right: Demons' Timeline (Image: DigitalCats)
I’ve been torn lately between my eyes and my head; between my sense of gaming aesthetics and my sense of play. It’s like this: I’ve had two games on my to-play list over the last two weeks: Luna Abyss, a very shiny first-person shooter that obscures some pretty dull gunning gameplay behind its glossy science fiction cosmic horror weirdness, and Demons’ Timeline, a game that is absolutely my brand of bullshit—internet detective-ing on a fake internet—but which has a visual design so completely repellent to me that I genuinely struggled to take the plunge. So, which wins out when gameplay and visuals go head-to-head?
I tried Luna Abyss first, so let’s tackle it in that same order: Created by a team called Kwalee Labs, it has an ostensibly hooky premise, casting players as prisoners of a bizarre futuristic religious state tasked with exploring a massive and hostile “mimic moon” in order to cut days off their trumped-up prison sentences. (In one of the game’s cuter touches, every time you complete an objective, you get a notification letting you know a few weekends’ worth of days have been snipped from your multi-decade term.) The game makes a strong first impression, introducing players to their personal “warden”—a giant head on a sort of mechanical worm neck named “Aylin”—and then quickly dumping them into a series of massive bio-mechanical labyrinths.
For my first hour or two with the game, I was vibing as intended: Running along goopy pipes, jumping through various monstrous hoops, and blasting enemies in the game’s quick-moving take on FPS combat. Fighting in Luna Abyss is a neon-soaked, and frequently gorgeous, affair, thanks to a touch lifted, deliberately or not, from Housemarque’s Returnal and Saros (and before them, from the conventions of bullet hell top-down shooters): Enemies fill the screen with brightly lit bullet patterns that you then have to snake between, breaking shields and filling your opponents with lead before they can completely overwhelm you. (It also cheekily steals some elements from 2016’s Doom, most notably a health restoration mechanic that revolves around abusing weakened enemies.) Meanwhile, I also got at least part of the measure of the game’s platforming mechanics, which rely in places on abilities that let you teleport yourself into watching eyeballs, then fire yourself up to new vantage points—a fun way to play with perspectives, and avoid some of the pitfalls that tend to crop up with first-person jumping.
So: Looks great, moves smoothly. What’s the problem? Only that, under all that gloss, the core activities I was doing felt incredibly familiar. The game may call its assault rifle and shotgun by other, more sci-fi themed names, but they’re the same guns I’ve been blasting bad guys with since the old Doom; at the same time, the game’s encounter design leans extremely heavily on spamming the same four or so enemy types, meaning that while every fight may have the look of a potentially lethal Laser Floyd show, the actual mechanics of killing were decidedly rote. After clearing the game’s first major chapter, I found myself having the hardest time actually bringing myself to pick the controller back up, knowing I’d only be subjecting myself to more of the same.
Demons’ Timeline, meanwhile, had almost the exact opposite arc. Let’s start by establishing this: I have neither the space, nor the inclination, to litigate the overall aesthetics of anime character design in this column. Suffice it to say that the game’s title screen—which features a cat girl curled up in a box in a pose that seemed simultaneously designed to infantilize and sexualize her—was a pretty major red flag for my personal tastes. But the idea—of, essentially, solving supernatural mysteries via Twitter stalking—was interesting enough that I pushed my way through the game’s Steam demo, and then, once it was complete, quickly turned it into a purchase.
Operating in the tradition of investigative games like The Roottrees Are Dead (albeit with significantly more simple puzzles), Demons’ Timeline is genuinely neat, asking players to match up random strangers’ personal and private accounts as they unravel a story of secret super-powered demons living amongst humanity. (Weirdly, you don’t spend a lot of time investigating the demons themselves, but the actual mysteries and puzzles that do crop up are usually fairly interesting.) Amazingly, the game’s writing manages to make an asset out of its general meme-brainedness; when a game is directly about internet culture, and seems to have a pretty good handle on it, a few dumb jokes culled from various collections of online shibboleths can be forgiven. And, most important of all, the more I played, the less I even noticed the cat girl, despite the fact that she’s on the screen for most of your play time.
And that, ultimately, is the answer to the question I posed at the top of this column. Because, when it comes to gaming, even the best aesthetics ultimately fade, reducing themselves to a background element that supplements, but can never replace, the thrill of actually playing. For multiple nights, Luna Abyss has failed to lure me back, because as much as I like the look of the thing, the thought of listlessly shooting my way through another dozen hordes of indistinguishable monsters was too hard to stomach. Whereas I booted up Demons’ Timeline every night for four nights straight, rolling my eyes at the title screen each and every time—and then immediately forgetting my annoyance in pursuit of the compelling mystery it was asking me to solve.
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