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zenosanalytic · 6 years

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The Limits of Tradition

Apotheon-proper opens with a promise and an offer:

“I present to you a choice... Ascend Mount Olympus, strip these callous Gods of their power, and cast down Zeus from his lofty throne. Stand up to the cruel deities of Olympus, and earn your people’s salvation.

Or... Remain here, without the gifts of the Gods, and watch your world turn to ashes.”

Hera monologues this to your character, Nikandreos(“Nike”+”Andros” something like “Victorious Man” or, in homage to early games and out of my own sheer English-speaking perversity, “Winner-Man”), at the end of the game’s tutorial level; you fight to save Nikky’s town. It is an immediate and compelling hook. The Heavens have abandoned mortals to calamity. Your Community, your Polis, is ravaged by nature, want, and war. A friendly Deity gives you a chance to confront them. Will you confront them? How??

What follows is an entertaining and bloody 2D action platformer but, unfortunately, the premise doesn’t live up to its promise. Choice, then and later, is a fiction; your choices, what few of meager scope you are allowed, have no impact on the story in Apotheon, and little substantive impact on the game. In general, and alongside its treatment of Hera, that is my major complaint about the game: Apotheon sets a bold objective, suggests some truly great ideas, but suggest is all it does. Apotheon is a fun way to spend a few hours of free time but, with real choices, it could have been great, and that dissatisfaction(and it’s questionable treatment of women) mars a potentially excellent experience.

What I Liked

As a game -as in “a rule-bounded system to challenge and entertain a player”- The level design is excellent and clever and, provided you pursue all the Deities’ blessings(which you have no reason not to), offer s multiple routes and solutions to puzzles. The fights are engaging, varied, unrailed, and reward out-of-the-box thinking. On the gamepad the controls are crisp, responsive, and intuitive.

...Except with ranged combat(and this might just be a problem with my particular gamepad). Targeting is done with the right joystick and it is simultaneously too unresponsive to minor changes in degree, and too responsive to minor flicks of lateral or horizontal motion. The right stick is also used to look at distance by pressing it down, and this makes ranged combat even more frustrating. However there’s an auto-targeting and auto-lock feature standard to gamepads that helps somewhat, and also makes melee combat much, much easier. On mouse and keypad the controls are less crisp but not terrible and the ability to remap the keys, combined with better mouse programming, clears up the problems with ranged combat. The timing is harder to get right, however.

I generally found the gameplay fun and rewarding, and seldom frustrating, and the times when I was frustrated there was always a simple solution available if I thought about it and tried new things.

I would have liked if the mechanics of the game -saving, loading, etc- were more integrated into the theme which sort of ties into my other complaints about the story, and that’s my second complaint. Not every game can integrate form and theme so well as Undertale I guess, but I sure wish they could.

Finally the art, inspired by Classical Greek pottery and architecture, is gorgeous and the music is both gorgeous and incredibly atmospheric. On the level of aesthetics alone, Apotheon is excellent.

What I Didn’t Like

The lack of meaningful choices, or even just basic avenues of ethical expression. The only way to refuse Hera’s offer is to turn the game off. You can’t so much as leave the room, let alone the temple, where she makes it except by jumping in the fire and going to Olympus. You can’t even talk to her! You have no control over how you deal with or confront any other Gods, aside from the order you do so in, and whether to confront four gods(Dionysus, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and Hermes) who have no connection to the plot. You do quests to earn the right to confront the Gods, quests that usually requiring killing, and then you confront them in a way that strips them of their divinity, and typically their lives. You CAN choose to leave a few alive, but the game’s writing assumes their death anyway, and they have no impact, doing nothing more and becoming non-interactable, after surrendering their divinity to you. Mechanically dialogue is possible --in the tutorial you even encounter a conventional rpg ramblestring by repeatedly pressing x around one townsperson, and there’s a navigating sequence where you’re presenting with numerous choices, showing it could have been implemented-- but Alientrap(the game’s developer) chose not to; Nikandreos is a traditionalist among action-avatars and never speaks, though how well he listens is left up to the player. So you never have the chance to ask Why Zeus is so dissatisfied, and no attempt is made to tie that Why, the driving Why of the game, into Nikandreos’s story. The Why simply Is. Zeus is dissatisfied and bored with humanity out of a nebulous malaise he feels but blames them for, and longs for an empty age of silence and darkness. Nikandreos is chosen by Hera for no reason beyond, apparently, he happened to be in one of her temples at the right time, and his city was being destroyed. The Gods will not listen, the Hero will not speak, and so the only “choice” is to either kill the Gods or not play.

This lack of agency and impact is not restricted to interactions with the gods alone[1]. While you can choose to save Nikandreos’s townsfolk in the tutorial and during later visits, doing so is meaningless as the game simply kills them off-screen when you’re not there, and they have no impact on your experience of play beyond the tutorial(minus a hopeless hunter, driven to drink, who can fight beside you and dies the instant anyone touches him). As an exercise in conveying powerlessness, frustration, hopelessness, and the fickleness of Providence this is, perhaps, effective; maybe, too, as a suitably more-gory and Revenge-oriented Hellenic re-imagining of the story of Job; but as a story of choices, as Apotheon presents itself? It fails utterly.

Regarding its other narrative ambitions --as the story of a person trying to save his home and the people he loves; as a story of the Olympian Gods and how the Greeks imagined they related to them; and as a story, or even celebration, of the classical Hellenic imagination-- it doesn’t fail so utterly, but it is still rather unsatisfying. Apotheon avoids painting Hades as a villain, one of the oldest and more annoying Christian-influenced tropes of post-Olympic lit, but it hits most of the others; portraying the Gods as largely unsympathetic, petty, vain, weak, silly, supercilious, plotting, and cruel[2]. There is the potential for an interesting subplot or counter-narrative with the Gods who willingly help you --there’s even talk in some of their lines of “the Gods on Olympus changing”, not being wiped out-- but, as stated above, the game treats all of them, effectively, as dead once you’ve won their aid, and the ending implies a world where they are, at the very least, now powerless and cut off from a blasted and depopulated Earth, so that potential is not only not realized, but actively denied by gameplay and other contradictory lines. I suppose it’s at least something that there are these gestures towards a more compelling story, I just wish they’d been followed.

Then there’s the treatment of Hera. Spoilers: she isn’t helping you because she cares about humanity but because she’s angry at Zeus for his infidelities and is willing to burn down the entire cosmic edifice, and murder her own children(as the Goddess of motherhood and families, btw), to take him down as punishment. There are, again, implications and hints of her working some larger plan with the Titans, but these are never realized or explored beyond(iirc) two lines of monologue, which is a shame because that would have, at least, made a deeper and more interesting story and game, even if one that still played into a misogynistic narrative tradition that has plagued what was one of the most beloved deities of the Olympian Pantheon for over a thousand years. Clearly contemporary feminism was alien to the Greek elites of the “Classical Era”, and likely also to the populous though in different(and possibly less performative) ways, but that doesn’t change that Hera was widely worshiped, honored, and loved in ways her presentation in literary Myth doesn’t really justify(suggesting an alternate vision of her outside of rich male circles), nor does it require us to perpetuate the surviving, biased, stereotypical portrayals produced by unhappily married rich old men which have been popularized by equally misogynistic translators from later eras. Off the top of my head, Alientrap could have:

written her straight as an ally; concerned for families, property, human lives, and the proper order as the Goddess of Motherhood, Marriage, Families, Children, and Divine Order(afterall, Hera is enthroned with Zeus; if Themis sits beside Zeus, she also sits beside Hera) as Mother of Queens and Queen of the Gods would rightly be.

written her with subtlety, trying to change the order of Olympus without wrecking it, or blaming only Zeus and wanting only to harm him.

written her with an inner complexity, with regret over the Titanomachy and how Zeus treated their vanquished Titan-kin, or dissatisfaction with Zeus’s reign as King of the Gods, which drive her to seek to change things despite her love for him and those others who might suffer from it.

written her to actually make use of the parallel/nod to Helen they include in her initial monologue(she titles herself “the Fairest”, calling back to The Iliad and the Apple of Discord). Menelaus was from Mycenae; his kingship of Sparta came from marrying Helen(thus the threat of Helen abandoning their marriage; “his” property and authority came entirely through her), and he shared his rule with her as she was the true Heir. A similar situation could be envisioned for Olympus(and was by some, judging by depictions of Hera and Zeus enthroned together and equally), with Zeus’s legitimacy coming not from himself, as the youngest child of Kronos, but through his marriage to and ruling-partnership with Hera. In this scenario Zeus’s infidelities, by destroying his legitimacy as “King of Olympus”, could be the cause of the calamities plaguing Earth, compelling Hera to seek his overthrow by a mortal(all the deities are bound by oath not to oppose him) in order to reestablish Order and save the Cosmos, despite her conflicting feelings for him.

written her as objecting personally and morally to Zeus’s decision to destroy humanity, and genuinely caught between a rock in a hard place by it; forced into conflict with family by Zeus’s cruelty to humanity.

Instead of doing something interesting like those examples, they wrote her as driven only by her jealousy and blinded by it; as arrogant, vicious, and unloving, sparing literally a single short line for her sacrificed(male) loved ones, after the fact; duplicitous and deceitful; unmoved by human suffering and willing to inflict it for the sake of motivating her chosen tool of vengeance, which she secretly despises as “less than nothing”. And, making it even worse, they end the game with her chained and bound, with your only possible interaction being to kill her as she heaps abuse on you for your refusal to free her. Of course you aren’t actually refusing, once again you have no choice and are not able to do anything about her bonds(even though you JUST defeated Zeus and wield the divine thunderbolt able to harm even the Gods. These chains are apparently a far stronger, but more limited, deity), but the game presents it as a choice, and you are left to, like me, resent the implied complicity in this forced betrayal. Until that moment she clearly has other motives alongside helping Nikky --she’s even upfront about this at the start, drawing a parallel between Zeus’s infidelity to her as a husband and to humanity as a “Father”-- but she’s always(minus one moment) vocally sympathetic and supportive. But at this point, which again you cannot avoid or do anything about, all her kindness is replaced by abuses and insults for Nikandreos and humans generally.

So the game all but prompts you to kill her when she is powerless, bound, angry, and afraid. But it doesn’t stop there. Making the situation even worse, any attempt to attack her chains in the hopes of freeing her, kills her(!!!), and doesn’t just kill her, but has a high change of leading to dismemberment, which is otherwise rare in the game(I had literally never seen it until this scene, though that could be a quirk of my play style, or I might have just missed it). The ignominy of this end --either blasted to pieces or left to starve chained and no longer divine upon the unreachable heights of Olympus in an empty Heaven-- grows even more galling in comparison to Zeus’s death. He is allowed to fight(TWICE!); speaks nobly throughout; praises you for your virtues before your fight and tries to reason you into surrendering; is never anything but straight-forward and “honorable” in his behavior towards you; is allowed to express repeated outrage and pain at the deaths you have brought to his family members, and the insult to “the proper order” as he sees it, which you embody. To see the true villain of the game, Zeus, portrayed and ended with greater sensitivity and decency than Apotheon’s treatment of Hera, your ally for 98% of the game, is noxious and terrible all together.

The treatment of the other Goddesses is a mixed bag. Demeter aids you, but is powerless to compel anything from Zeus(contra her presence in myth where she is his equal in ability), or to do anything without the help of her daughter, Persephone. Persephone can only help you by losing her ability to return to Earth(which doesn’t make any sense since she IS the spring but whatevs), and she presents that ability as a noxious obligation which separates her, against her will, from Hades, which takes the small good of not making him a villain and replaces it with a larger bad of erasing her individuality and metaphysical equality[3] to Hades. Athena is a Snoot who surrenders her powers when “humbled” by defeat, but is decent in the very little screen time she gets aside from that. Aphrodite attacks you out of vanity, then willingly gives up her divinity when you trick Cupid into shooting her and she comes to feel sympathy(not love, thankfully; I’d have turn the game off right there at a sex-scene) for Nikandreos as a result. Artemis is a bloodthirsty killer who sees men as beasts and prey to be hunted, challenges you to a hunt, then cheats, and when you beat her despite the cheating she dies. To be fair only Dionysus and Hermes are portrayed as on your side(Hephaestus is more unconcerned either way), and both Apollo and Ares are portrayed as equal to Artemis in their monstrosity, but that’s to only say that their desire to portray the Olympians negatively was “equal opportunity”; not that there is no misogyny in how they present the Olympian women. One potential brightspot is that nudity is equal opportunity, though even here there are reasons to be suspicious. Satyrs and the Olympian males -Zeus, Ares, and Apollo- are portrayed as nude, but none of the lesser gods or mortal men aside from the “Trainer” merchants(though I may be misremembering). A game where bare-breasted nymphs and women are common in homes, bathhouses, and public shouldn’t shirk at male nudity, particularly when themed on a society that celebrated the nude male form, and welcomed it in many public places.

So there are my problems with Apotheon‘s story: I think could have been more open- and multi-ended, and it’s treatment of Hera in particular and women in general is pretty awful. A more minor objection has to do with game structure. Each god has their own zone which is accessed from two central hub “cities”: the Agora, and the Acropolis. These hubs have a very “GTA” feel to them: they’re large, non-linear, filled with people, patrolling guards, and secret crannies, and there’s a real sense of exploration and possibility to them. Unfortunately, this just ends up being another one of those “false choice” situations where there’s no real downside to just exploring everywhere, breaking into houses, and looting everything you find, provided you do fight any guards you can’t avoid sensibly(hint: use range when you can and attack anyone who pulls a trumpet immediately), and there’s a real positive to doing so in that you need all the money in the game to fully “upgrade” your character. And looting everything and attacking the guards doesn’t change the story one wit other than on a meta-level(the sheer terror people in the Acropolis express for you makes much less sense when you’ve been a circumspect thief, or never caused a ruckus at all). So again, it’s not really a choice; there’s no trade off for choosing to wreck up the place, no impact on your treatment or the story, and a significant negative to choosing not to. While you certainly CAN choose to be “law-abiding”, the game pressures and encourages you not to.

TL;DR

If you, like me, are tired of games asking you to kill Olympians, which portray them uncomplicatedly as either bad guys or ridiculous, powerless, and unsympathetic; if you’re tired of games that traffic in tired and gross(see: Hera and Artemis) tropes about women; if you’re tired of games that don’t even attempt to integrate story, theme, and mechanics, treating all these as simple window-dressing for gameplay, then probably give Apotheon a pass, or at the very least wait until it’s got a really good sale on before trying it out.

If, however, you’re ok with that stuff, or able and willing to compartmentalize your annoyance with these problems while appreciating good gameplay, art, music-design, and you have some spare eBucks to throw around(it’s normal price is ~$15 on Steam), then maybe give Apotheon a shot.

[1]Which could have been an interesting narrative choice. The greater Agency of the Gods could be displayed by your inability to influence interactions with them the way you could with mortals. As you gain in divinity this relation could shift; mimicking your changing metaphysical status. Or a more Achillean(Achillesian? Achillese?? I’m taking “Herculean” as my prototype here) approach could be taken; the Gods could be powerful but passive, locked into prophecy and narrative, while you, a Hero and Mortal, have the ability of choice, the power to redirect destiny, which they lack.

[2]One exception to this is Athena, which is understandable since she is The Best uwu Later Roman stories, such as Arachne and Ovid’s take on Medusa, provide an easy path to presenting her in a villainous light, but the crew at Alien Trap just can’t take it. So instead, they make her arrogant. This leads to a chuckleworthy moment when you first confront her; in a classic example of people trying and failing to write someone smarter than themselves, they just have her use lots of big, rare, words in a really showy, and not-entirely-accurate, way.

[3]Though technically, she received far more worship than he ever did.

#Apotheon #Alientrap #Choice #Misogyny #Game Design #Storytelling #Game Mechanics #Game&Story Integration #Mechanics&Theme Integration #Game Reviews #zA Gaming #analytic posts

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udayjethwa · 6 years

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The “notch” at the top of the screen. The lack of a headphone jack. Me-too features like wireless charging. Samsung has poked fun at Apple with takedowns of the iPhone X, but that doesn’t change the fact that, for many people, including us,Apple’s flagship has become the smartphone to beat.

At the same time, the Galaxy S8 has been a fantastic phone that’s raised the bar for the entire industry, especially when it comes to design. As Samsung readies the Galaxy S9 for its big reveal at Mobile World Congress in late February, it could very well leapfrog the iPhone X and create even more distance between it and the rest of an Android field.

“What does Samsung have to do to maintain or better its position against Apple? said Ramon Llamas, research manager for wearables and mobile phones at IDC. “That’s going to be the question that comes around every single year ahead of its next big release.”

Here’s where Samsung needs to improve to take back the title of best phone.

Design: Build on the S8’s wow factor

It’s easy to forget that Samsung had lost consumer trust heading into last year’s Galaxy S8 launch. This was a result of battery issues with the Galaxy Note 7, which led to fires and a total recall of the phablet. The company had to prove it could make a phone that wasn’t just sexy but safe.

“The S8 came at a time when Samsung was licking its wounds following the battery debacle,” Llamas said. “There were high expectations, and for the most part, Samsung delivered on those.”

The Galaxy S8 had a lot more going for it than an eight-point safety check. It turned heads with an Infinity Display that covered nearly the entire front of the phone. Any other handset released after that with chunky bezels looked like a total eyesore.

But there were some complaints, too, mostly about the awkward location of the S8’s fingerprint sensor: It was to the immediate right of the camera lens, which increased the chances of smudging. Galaxy S9 rumors point to Samsung placing the reader beneath the camera this time around, making it easier to reach.

“I expect Samsung to respond to that,” Llamas predicted. “That’s low-hanging fruit.”

Display: Become the king of OLED again

In our testing of the iPhone X, we were surprised by how much better its OLED screen looked compared with the Galaxy S8’s display, which is ironic considering Samsung reportedly supplied the panel Apple uses.

The iPhone X’s display looked brighter and delivered slightly wider viewing angles and more natural-looking hues. Analysts believe Samsung will make strides with the Galaxy S9’s screen, and not just in terms of screen quality.

“Where I would like to see Samsung go is with a variable refresh panel, similar to what Razer is doing with its phone and what Apple is doing with the iPad Pro,” said Avi Greengart, research director for consumer platforms and devices at GlobalData.

The Razer Phone has an Ultramotion display that synchronizes the display refresh rate with the GPU render rate, and it can scale all the way up to 120 Hz — a first for phones. The result is smoother graphics with little or no stuttering or lag. A screen with a dynamic refresh rate would not only make content look better but also save battery life.

Snapdragon 845: Efficiency beats speed

If the leaked benchmarks are to be believed, the Galaxy S9 won’t be faster than the iPhone X, even though it should be the first phone on the market with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor. The A11 Bionic chip inside Apple’s flagship seems to have more sheer horsepower.

MORE: iPhone X and iPhone 8 Are World’s Fastest Phones

But there are other reasons to be excited about Snapdragon 845, including a 30 percent graphics boost for better gaming performance, an improved image signal processor for taking sharper photos, and faster gigabit LTE connectivity.

But there’s another key benefit: longer battery life. For instance, the graphics are 30 percent more efficient. “If that translates to even 10 percent more battery, that’s huge,” said Greengart. “You combine that with a more efficient display, and you’re off to the races.”

Camera: Better low-light pics and more

Samsung didn’t make many upgrades to its camera between the release of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S8, which enabled other flagships to vault into the lead. In our own camera face-off between the iPhone X and Galaxy S8, for example, Apple’s camera delivered richer colors and more natural-looking skin tones.

Shoot On Galaxy S8

Shoot on IPhone X

Samsung also needs to contend with Google’s Pixel 2, which tends to produce better results in low light than the Galaxy S8 and also manages to pull off good-looking portraits (complete with bokeh effect) without the need for a second lens.

“The Pixel 2 is the camera to beat,” said Greengart. “That’s one area where Samsung needs to make improvements if only so that it doesn’t appear to be falling behind.”

With its new phones, Samsung will reportedly offer a new Super Speed Dual Pixel camera on both the S9 and S9+, which presumably will be faster and offer variable apertures. One lens will have an f/1.5 aperture for better low-light performance, and the other could be f/2.4, which would allow for a wider depth of field.

Only the Galaxy S9+ will supposedly feature dual lenses, which would enable that handset to offer a 2x optical zoom and a Live Focus mode that’s similar to what you’ll find on the Galaxy Note 8. But having dual lenses on the more premium S9 could have other benefits.

“Pay attention to how much dual cameras are going to be leveraged for augmented reality,” Llamas said. “The second camera will be able to better measure light, depth and distance — three very important things for any [augmented reality] experience.”

AI: Press Restart on Bixby

As Samsung’s first stab at an AI assistant, Bixby has been a bit of a mess. Promised features, such as voice commands, didn’t work at launch, and many users were angry that they could not remap the dedicated Bixby button to use it as a shortcut for other functions. (You can do it now, but only through unofficial workarounds.)

“Bixby was a bust,” Greengart said. “It was more annoying than helpful, and that’s not good.”

So what can Samsung do to make its next phone smarter? According to one rumor, Samsung may be rolling out a so-called AI UX for the Galaxy S9, which would use machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide more contextual info and anticipate what you want to do next.

MORE: 11 Coolest Things Bixby Voice Can Do on the Galaxy S8

A more recent report claims that Samsung has developed a dedicated AI chip that will compete directly with the neural processing capabilities of Apple’s A11 Bionic processor.

As for Bixby itself, look for Samsung to find more ways to get its phones to communicate with and control other devices in your home. In fact, at CES 2018, the company announced that many of its new appliances and TVs will have Bixby built in.

“As homes get smarter and you can connect to many other devices — whether it’s Nest, light bulbs, your security system, etc. — the question becomes, how can Bixby tap into these things a lot easier?” Llamas said.

AR: Embrace Google, or go it alone?

Although Samsung has been at the forefront of the mobile virtual-reality movement with its Gear VR headsets, the company did not bundle that headset with the Galaxy S8 as it had done with previous handsets.

“As I look at VR, it’s kind of slowed down,” Llamas said. “I don’t think Samsung should stray away from it too much. Stand-alone VR is still a ways off for a lot of people.” Llamas suggested that Samsung spend more time and money bringing more high-profile partnerships to VR.

At the same time, the tech world seems to be pivoting away from VR, toward augmented reality, partly because you don’t need to don a headset to enjoy an immersive experience. AR glasses are on the horizon, but most of the action in the near term will be on phones.

Although Apple has made some waves with its ARKit apps on iOS, we’re still in the very early days for augmented reality on phones. That’s why Google still has plenty of time to generate interest in its own ARCore platform and to court developers to create compelling apps.

With VR, Samsung and Google went their separate ways, developing Gear VR and Daydream, respectively. But that sort of bifurcation won’t necessarily be a good idea with AR as Apple gains momentum. Regardless, Samsung should have invested heavily in this area so that the Galaxy S9 would be primed to be the best AR phone.

“Samsung has the wherewithal and resources available to go deeper into this area,” Llamas said. “They’ve taken terrific pains to point out that ‘we’re not just a devices company; we’re a solutions company.'”

Bottom Line

Based on rumors and early reports, the consensus seems to be that the Galaxy S9 will not be a huge update. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be in order to take back the top-smartphone mantle from Apple, as the Galaxy S8 and S8+ were excellent premium flagships.

Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement, including a better display, faster performance, better camera quality and especially AI. Will all of that be enough?

“Apple lives in its own universe,” Greengart said. “The iOS ecosystem is very sticky, so it’s difficult to pull consumers away from Apple. That said, Samsung has kept ahead of Apple in terms of design.”

Now it’s up to Samsung to build on this advantage with its upcoming sequel.