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by Amr (@siegarettes)
It’s winter in Chicago. As I return to Mudrunner for the first time since last year, I can’t help but think of the way it reminds me of driving through a Midwest snowstorm. There’s a different vibe, but the physicality of it, the emotional content, it’s the same. Mudrunner is all the frustration and triumph of parallel parking on a snowed out street. It’s a translation of the way the tires crest and crush the waves of wet earth. The way the suspension tries to push back, until it can’t. The grinding of the wheels as they steer back and forth trying to clear a path.
Mudrunner is ostensibly a game simply about driving piles of logs between destinations, but it is also a game about the journey and the struggle between you and its primary character: the ever changing muddy terrain.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
I love being proven wrong. After doing this for a while you get a sense for how a game will generally turn out, and everything I’d seen of Vampyr didn’t give me much confidence. There was plenty of promises of meaningful choice and interlocking systems, big words that more often point to overambition than anything else. Vampyr definitely doesn’t escape that overambition. There are many rough edges–abrupt loading screens within open areas, dialogue playing over itself, oversights inside of main quests–these are only a few of the things that point to Dontnod reaching beyond their resources.
Despite that Vampyr has been surprisingly compelling. Its focus on conversation and investigation gives weight to the web of relationships within its cast. Character dialogue is limited, but the process of tracking down people, learning about them, and slowly coming to a greater understanding is deeply satisfying. Characters have tangible histories, and I often found listening to them tell their own stories as engaging as following my own.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
Most driving games are about mastering speed. They’re about obsessing about the angles through a corner, or how much time is spent at the highest gear. Mudrunner, by comparison, is often about the incremental variations in speeds within first gear. The only opponents here are the slow drain of resources and the mud that threatens to trap every one of your vehicles.
