"What if video games have more to offer than just an exciting diversion into a digital battlefield, fantasy war, or alien invasion? While these types of games are certainly the loudest and most financially successful, there are a growing number of games asking important questions about life, the human condition, and even God." LTN exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture, you can read more about them on their website. It starts with 12 with a challenge us to be a good neighbour, and follows with others added over time. In this list, provided by the LTN (Love Thy Nerd) editors, we bring together video games that have the potential to offer more than entertainment. In video games, we step into other bodies so we can better understand our own and those of the people around us. In travel, as Andrew Soloman says, we go somewhere else to see properly the place where we have come from. More specifically, to use body therapy language, games offer us a chance to discover the inviolability of our bodies, personal autonomy, self-ownership, and self-determination. Whether this is into the awkward teenage years of Mord and Ben in Wide Ocean Big Jacket, the grandparent-escaping Tiger and Bee in Kissy Kissy, the fractured heartbroken body in Gris or the haphazard movement of Octodad we have a chance to reassess our own physicality and how we respond to and treat other people's physicality.
Stepping into the shoes of a vulnerable, small or endangered character can help us understand for a short while some of what it is like to be someone else. This is not only an enjoyable way to escape the reality of daily life but a chance to reflect on and understand ourselves, and our bodies, better. Whether we step into the powerful frame of a trained marksman or brave adventurer, while we play we have a different sense of our physicality. Slick sandbox tactics in a solid setting, let down by fiddliness and drudgery.Video games offer an opportunity to inhabit another body. In-game documents eulogise partisan valour, while the contradictions of Zorin’s doctrine of retaliation are suggested by news of punitive attacks against civilians by German police.
Moscow-based Alter Games treat Partisans’ themes with melancholy rather than chauvinism. It’s a surprise combination of genres, resulting in a satisfyingly balanced diet. The messiness and halting gameplay is annoying, but the strong core experience at least recommends it to genre fans and Commandos nostalgics. Having navigated past bugs and belligerents, I’m rewarded with a feeling of deep satisfaction. Yet Partisans 1941 is compelling enough to keep me going for hours. Too frequently, the player is grappling not just with the designed experience but the ambiguous systems of the game itself. There are enough of these issues to form a wider impression of brokenness. Then there’s the maddening behaviour of enemies in an alarmed state, who become spontaneously omniscient of every bush where you’ve stashed a partisan. Partisans have an upsetting habit of taking cover on the exposed side of cover and throwing grenades at their own feet. Partisans incentivises obsessive looting of levels to outfit your base which can drag, and the actual interaction, from inventory management to movement orders, is fiddly. The reluctance to channel the player into particular strategies can be paralysing, while engagements have a trial-and-error nature dependent on save-scumming. Unfortunately, Partisans is routinely frustrating to play. This tension between evasive and confrontational behaviour is always absorbing. If going loud is reckless, staying quiet requires patience. Of the lightly differentiated partisans you bring on missions, some, like Fetisov with his SMG burst, lend themselves to skirmishes.Įven when armed, partisans are vulnerable and outnumbered. Skill cooldowns and ammunition are rarely prohibitive. While you might mask your scent in tobacco or unplug the floodlights to stay incognito, you can often solve your problems with copious grenades.
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What makes Partisans different is the license you have to indulge in spectacular action.