Procedural Generation and Emergent Gameplay as Storytelling Devices

This post originally appeared in Recomposing the Pines on 5/3/14: 

I've been sitting on this one for awhile, with a pile of hyperlinks to various articles about procedurally-generated worlds in gaming stacked up in a post titled "Drafty Draft," but it was finally starting to play Minecraft seriously again this week after not playing much since, oh, 2010 that helped me figure out what I really wanted to say. Which is, briefly, that procedural generation in gaming is mostly awesome.

Not entirely awesome, mind you. As I ranted about at length previously in my now-locked personal blog, "procedural generation" has recently gotten roped in with "retro aesthetic," "roguelike," and "RPG elements" in the quadfecta (?) of current gaming buzz-qualities that ensure that it ends up in a lot of games that don't really use it effectively, just because it looks good on a feature list. For instance, taking out procedurally generated worlds in something like Teleglitch might actually add to the tension of the game, because you'd have some idea, at least, of what's coming, precisely what to be afraid of. Not procedurally generating the worlds of Don't Starve might actually lead to the player's accumulation of knowledge about a world's consistent geography and how to use that to his/her advantage when they next respawn, creating a situation not unlike the amazingly effective respawn mechanic at play in Rogue Legacy. But then there are games like Terraria and Minecraft, which arguably wouldn't work at all without the procedurally-generated worlds that their play takes place in.

The game that taught me not only to embrace death, but to look forward to it.

But what I wanted to write about today has less to do with how procedural generation plays into a game's mechanics and more to do with how it might factor into a game's story.

I got my start writing legitimately (if you want to call it that) about games by writing about how narratives and stories function (and fail to function) in gameworlds. Given that most modern video games are a complex combination of pre-scripted "storytelling" through cutscenes and/or "events" that eliminate 99% of player agency paired with spur-of-the-moment player interactivity, I believe that games create unprecedented possibilities for cooperative storytelling/worldbuilding (they're the same, I'd argue) between the "authors" (developers) and their audience, but that they also contain unprecedented pitfalls. The only reason most people would scoff at the idea of a "Citizen Kane of video games" is because currently the pitfalls are like sinkholes and potential peaks are fragile, windswept pinnacles.

Like this one.

In this article, Beraldo argues that "the main point is that games are a shared authorship experience. You will better remember that time you managed to evade cops opening fire at you by diving into an air duct in Deus Ex than the fact that one of the bosses was an ubercyborg with an accent." And this is what really got me thinking. I'm a huge Deux Ex fan, and this describes me completely. I remember, and appreciate, the game's Gibson-influenced cyberpunk story as something engaging and interesting and fairly audacious for a video game, especially in 2000. But I remember and appreciate it precisely because it was a very effective wrapper within which my role as a player interacting with and reacting to the gameworld around me played out. I cared about the story because the unexpected moments of air-duct-diving that emerged through gameplay were so compelling. I cared more about the air-duct-diving than I would have otherwise because the story wrapped those moments in a sense of fictional gravitas that is lacking in a game like, say, Tetris or Super Mario Bros. So it's a symbiosis, in a way. But it's a lopsided symbiosis that's unevenly reliant on the strength of the gameplay. A game without a compelling story can still be a fun game. A good story without compelling gameplay is just a slow, QTE-ridden low-budget movie.

It's unequivocally true.

But I'm oversimplifying. The reason Beraldo's example works so well for me is that he's not just talking about Deus Ex as a game that contains both story and gameplay, but a game that contains both story and emergent gameplay. The reason diving into an air duct to escape gunfire in the game is such a tense, compelling, and ultimately fun experience is precisely because there is no particular "level" or scripted scene in the game in which this occurs. Instead, it occurs as a result of the player's behavior in the world, the reactions of a guard or enemy robot to that behavior, and then the by-the-seat-of-your pants improvisation the player must undergo to escape what is likely a much better armed and armored (and thus unbeatable by main force) enemy. The scenario emerges from the way the game's rules and its world are designed, not as a discrete, pre-plotted encounter, the outcome(s) of which are already predetermined by the game's code (at least, not in a direct sense).

Warren Spector believes that games that enable these types of player-driven experiences are "the only thing that sets us apart in any meaningful way from other mediums." But it's not just a matter of being able to claim a niche: he refers to games that depend on emergent play as "engines of perpetual novelty." Not only do these games offer novel play scenarios in the short term (like Beraldo's example), they also focus more in general on the player's interaction with and experimentation within the gameworld than on herding the player along one developer-curated path, the only possible "right" experience. As Spector says, developers interested in emergent gameplay should "[e]mbrace the idea that your job is to bound the player experience, to put a sort of creative box around it -- but you don't determine the player experience. It's not about 'here's where every player does X.'"

Yeah, no more of this, please.

To me, emergent gameplay adds not just moment-to-moment novelty, but potentially limitless replay value (in games like Don't Starve, for example) that isn't reliant on new DLC and achievements that require you to replay the exact same content over and over again to achieve some esoteric level of mastery. Replay values comes not from the desire to hone your skills in a vacuum to become really good at doing one specific thing, but from the near-limitless possible permutations of your gameplay and its results and your reactions to those results that can occur in the gameworld.

Of course, non-emergent types of games just are fine (Spector and I agree on this, and I recently had a hell of a good time playing ), but I've also found that his claim that "once players get a taste of [an emergence-based] game, it's very hard for them to go back" to be very true in my experience. This really started for me with Minecraft way back in 2010. There were a lot of other things that were unique about the game to me at the time, but what really stuck out (and what still does, honestly) was the experience of trying to survive the game's nights early on while slowly learning the rules of the world and building a primitive shelter. This was emergent gameplay at its finest, determined entirely by the rules of the world and my actions within them rather than the limited gameplay dimensions of reaching a particular, required goal or the need to complete a particular level.

I think that this type of emergent gameplay is something that procedural generation can mesh with quite well. Where the effect of procedural generation is perhaps blunted in something like Risk of Rain, where the ways in which you interact with the world around you are necessarily very limited (in this case by a Contra-esque sort of gameplay), in a game like Minecraft (or Deus Ex) there are enough gameplay possibilities that randomized worlds, and randomized content within those worlds actually force a much wider variation in gameplay experiences than "Oh, I'm the purple guy that shoots the big green guy with the grey gun" or "Oh, I'm the red girl that shoots the little black dogs with the yellow bow...so that's different!"

I hope you like finding the teleporter.

And this is where story comes back in. In games with emergent gameplay, procedurally-generated content does even more to encourage players to make their own compelling experiences with the "creative box" by making sure that every player's experience is unique in its details while taking place in a gameworld that would still be recognizable to other players who are familiar with the particular game.

This is how you end up with pieces like Quintin Smith's "Mine The Gap" or Tom Francis' "The Minecraft Experiment," both "virtual travel narratives" that I examined during my dissertation work.

When a player's experience is unique in the details but relatable more generically, it makes their story simultaneously more personal and more shareable, makes it seem more like a compelling narrative that they are invested in and have helped create instead of just some game that they're playing simply to pass the time. Any Deus Ex player understands Beraldo's example immediately, and likely has a similar example of their own. But, because of emergent gameplay, their own example is also importantly different, importantly personally theirs. Any Minecraft player understands the broad strokes of Smith's narrative immediately, but because of emergent gameplay and procedurally generation, they necessarily have importantly different, importantly personal stories, because it's not only their gameplay experience that's fundamentally different, it's also the world that that gameplay takes place in.

And, well, I think that's neat. 

Review: Dear Esther (PC)

So, I finally got around to playing Dear Esther, a game that I've been asked about a number of times during paper presentations on Minecraft but never actually experienced myself. And it was better than I expected. Of course, saying I "played" it is sort of misleading, as it doesn't really let you "play" anything in any substantive sense of the word. It is, however, a master class in how to create a virtual place, to make a player curious enough about the fictional world in front of them that they'll gladly trade time in the physical world to explore it. That doesn't happen nearly enough with video games, and even when it does, it usually isn't done this well.

When I first started up the game and realized that all you really did was walk around and look at things, and that you had to walk around really slowly, I almost gave up. But, I imagined it much the same way that I think of all the "real-life" walks I go on: typically, whether I'm going on a walk around the neighborhood, or a twenty-mile hike, the first little bit is boring. It's hard to instantly remember why I enjoy the slow-down of just walking, of just soaking in my surroundings, of not trying to "accomplish" anything other than to just be moving through space for awhile. Eventually, I settle in, and walking for the sake of walking seems as natural as breathing. Which it sort of is.

The same thing happened with Dear Esther. After the brief rough patch at the beginning, I began to sense that I wasn't always going to walking through washed-out grasslands, and that I was probably eventually going to get to find out what was at the top of that Barad-Dur-like tower in the distance. I accepted that the "game" wanted me to approach it as a sort of meditative space instead of an accomplishment-powered challenge. And, intrigued, I went for it.

It's like walking in central Idaho, only not real.

I wasn't disappointed. If my description of the "gameplay" in the previous two paragraphs sounds intriguing to you, then Dear Esther is worth your while. If it sounds like a load of horseshit, then you should probably stay away. It's another experiment in (sort of) gaming, and the results were fascinating to me.

Regarding the poetry, voiceovers, etc. that make up the story, I thought that it was great. Sure, it's a little bit of a stretch stylistically, and might seem a little overly serious, but hell, considering the way Dear Esther ends, it's not exactly supposed to be a comedy. I saw the narrative as trying to do some really interesting things with time, perspective, and the perils of having an unreliable narrator as he descends into madness during the story. Seeing as how I was studying Poe while I was playing this game, maybe it was just a happy bit of synchronicity. But I think there are a lot of clever little nuances to this story that you could, if you wanted to, try to interpret, discuss, and find more meaning in. And that's also rare for a video game. Much like Psychonauts, the narrative treats you like an adult. If you're one of those people who find games like this "pretentious," then you should probably steer clear.

If this screenshot makes you incredibly sad, then we are grief-brothers.

But, combine the game's wonderful visual setpieces, consistent sense of place, and dense, psychologically disturbing exploration of grief and illness, and...wow. This thing was really, really good.

Review: Shelter (PC)

So, as I do with most games nowadays, I got Shelter marked down on Steam on the strength of its RPS review. While I didn't quite experience John Walker's level of enthusiasm about the game, I definitely enjoyed it and found it to be more than worth the few bucks I played.

Basically, Shelter is a game in which you play as a mother badger tasked with leading her cubs to safety through the wilderness. The aesthetic is really unique, and manages to successfully bypass that whole "typical indie game quirky art style" trend by sheer force of originality.

This is badgers in the woods. Neat, huh?

The different, fairly obviously differentiated "levels" of the game range from the forest-like space you see above, to a slightly greener forest-type space, to [SPOILERS] the middle of a forest fire, to a flash flood, and a night under a full moon [END SPOILERS]. So, I found the settings to be pretty varied and the aesthetic able to translate to different levels in interesting ways rather than being a one trick pony.

The core of the game, as I said above, is your quest to lead your babies to safety. There is immediately feedback for your failure, as if a baby dies, he/she is dead, and gone, and the suddenness with which this can happen and the odd poignancy of it really surprised me. It's a point for the argument that long exposition isn't really necessary for a player to be able to build emotional attachments to characters. By the time they were carried away by a hungry eagle or washed away in a flood, I cared more about these baby badgers than I did for some characters in Baldur's Gate.

While the game is really effective at creating a feeling of futility and attrition as you march through its deceivingly beautiful locales, it's also a bit annoying in the lack of agency it gives you to protect your young. For being given such an effective mission, there's really little you can actually do to effect its outcome. You can run fast, you can hunker down and walk slow, you can dig up food and leap onto small prey to kill it...and that's about it. The babies just follow you in a chain and there's literally no other way you can interact with them besides moving and hoping that they follow. The threats to your young are clearly built around this limited model of interaction, and the ways you are expected to avoid those threats are thus surprisingly clever in some instances, but ultimately it all boils down to either a) running, b) walking slowly or c) hiding in place.

With such a beautifully realized environment and a survival-style mission, I sort of expected the game to be a bit more open. It's not. It's basically an on-rails survival simulation, which was also a little frustrating to me. When there's a fire to avoid, there's one way around it. When an eagle is hunting you, you find yourself artificially closed in to a small meadow. It heightens the terror, sure, but it also makes everything feel a little more game-y than maybe it could have had it given the player a few more choices.

"If there's a fire, stop, drop, and roll five paces to the left, then up six paces, then right fifteen paces, and then straight through that conveniently hollowed-out log!"

All that said, the experience was short, (bitter)sweet, and absolutely worth the money. In this case, my complaints about the game are more in the category of "I wish it had been this instead!" than the category of "I didn't like what it was!" For what it is, it's quite good. And its approach to emotional storytelling, such as it is, is effective enough that it's worth buying and playing just to appreciate that the devs managed to do so much with so little. But you'll also likely wish that they'd done more.

SHELTER 2: BADGER'S REVENGE

Review: Rogue Legacy (PC)

At this point, I think I've complained ad nauseum about my feelings regarding the use of "roguelike elements" in games where they don't necessarily improve the game or make it more interesting or engaging. Like throwing "RPG elements" like stat points and leveling up into AAA shoot 'em up games in the mistaken belief that somehow it makes the gameplay deeper, lots of indie devs seem obsessed with the idea that procedural generation and/or permadeath just magically make a game more enticing. According to most of the "roguelike-like" games I've played lately, that's just not true.

However, Rogue Legacy does it right. It does it so right, that about two attempts into the game I literally slapped myself on the forehead with exasperation over how obvious Rogue Legacy's approach to the genre is and how nobody (including me) had thought of it earlier.

It goes like this: 

1. Fun, Castlevania-y platforming and fighting
2. The expectation of eventual death
3. The ability to carry your loot out of the castle upon your death
4. The ability to regenerate as another hero with slightly different skills and disadvantages (the next "generation" of your adventurer family, hence the title Rogue Legacy)
5. The ability to spend your saved loot on boosting your skills/weapons/stats before your next playthough
6. The required forfeiture of all (or nearly all, later on in the game) of your loot before you try playing again (you literally pay a toll to Charon to enter the castle

What the hell does he do with all of that money, anyway?

It's bloody brilliant. It captures the essence of what's great about procedural generation (the thrill of learning the layout of a map so that you can survive better and then the challenge of having that advantage wiped away in an instant) and about sudden, frequent death (you're always working your way through the castle a little bit on tenterhooks) while allowing you to have the satisfaction of knowing that every playthrough is going to be worth something. Unless, I guess, you get whacked within seconds of entering the castle and exit with 20 gold pieces. I had playthroughs where I absolutely ripped through two entire zones of the castle and came out ready to buy ten new upgrades for my character, but those were few and far between. Yet, most playthroughs I gathered at least enough gold to buy one upgrade after my sudden and violent death, and that was enough of a sense of moving forward to keep me motivated to keep playing for the occasionally big reward of those longer runs. And that's the beauty of the game. Though you play through the same four dungeon "levels" over and over again, they're always different enough that you're forced to pay attention, and they're always going to give you some sort of reward, provided you don't absolutely biff it. 

In one fell swoop, the game does away with basically all my complaints about the roguelike genre.

But there's more. Each of your character's iterations has some randomly-assigned quirks that seem sort of goofy at first but prove to be important as you get more and more used to the game.* For example, dwarfism seems to just make your character funny-looking and small, but eventually you might realize that [SPOILER] your size allows you to access many secret rooms you couldn't otherwise reach, but that your weapon's attack range is much smaller, forcing you to get closer to enemies to attack [END SPOILER]. Each of your character is also assigned a class randomly, and the pool of available classes expands as you buy more upgrades.

Oh, and most of the in-game text is hilarious.

Each time you die, you get to choose from one of three possible successors. Oftentimes this choice allows you to choose a hero that best suits your needs for the next playthrough, but sometimes this choice gives you three terrible options and forces you to face the castle with whomever you deem the least bad option. This can make for some really interesting playthroughs. For instance, once I got stuck with a Spelunker and assumed his weak ass was going to get splattered all some spike traps by the second room of the castle. I gave it my best shot, though, and about a half hour later I died with an absurd amount of money in my wallet (?). Later on, as you unlock more classes, equipment, and things like the Architect, you can put a lot more forethought into your runs, not just choosing a character with the best abilities for what you want to accomplish, but also outfitting them with the best equipment and abilities. 

I ran into a few small annoyances later on in the game in the sense that at times it seemed like I was expected to grind for gold a bit longer than I would have liked. The castle itself is small enough and the enemies predictable enough that you can run through most of it after playing and upgrading for a few hours. But you have to beat a boss in each of the four interconnected "levels" before you can progress to the endgame, and this you cannot do without some serious leveling up. So there's a point at which the game's greatest strength becomes a sort of weakness as well, as you spend hour after hour running through nearly identical halls, slaying identical monsters for gold and slowly building stats from, say, level 2 to level 15 (out of a possible 75, for the truly masochistic). I managed to beat a few of the bosses on a lower level than I apparently should have been able to, just due to still having old-school Contra reflexes, and it was nice in a way to occasionally overcome the grind through what felt like sheer playing skill, but then there was one boss in particular that I had to spend 2-3 hours leveling before I could defeat it, so there's going to be a bit of grinding mid-game regardless of how good you are. 

It was him. This motherfucker.

And it's a little annoying once you realize that many of the rooms and traps are identical and the enemies in the harder levels are just bigger, stronger, faster versions of the enemies in the early levels. One of the early thrills in the game was learning enemy types, their patterns, and their weaknesses, so this bummed me out a little.

This wizard is just like the others, but the sprite it bigger and it's more killy!

That said, Rogue Legacy was awesome, and if I didn't have so many games in my queue right now, I'd be going back for New Game+ right away. The platforming and fighting itself feels almost perfect (moving horizontally always feels a little slidey to me for some reason), and so even when you're grinding at length the basic gameplay always stays fun in that repetitive-mindless-but-good way. And strategizing your character's build in the later game really adds a surprisingly deep layer of planning that I didn't expect from the game at first. Good times! 

The end!

* This isn't true of all the traits; for example, the one that makes you constantly fart loudly really has no point aside from FARTS which are FUNNY.

Review: Don't Starve, and Some Other Stuff

I've played a number of games recently that I just haven't been able to get into, despite their scads of glowing reviews and my relative dearth of meaningful hobbies to get up to between the hours of 11pm and 2am. I didn't actually play most of these (Antichamber, Knock-knock, Monaco) long enough to have a real opinion on them other than "I don't like this." Or, perhaps more correctly, I didn't play long enough to have an informed dislike. My dislike was mostly gut-level dislike:

Antichamber: Bends the rules of 3D games and (virtual) reality in interesting ways, but bends them so far that figuring out what the hell means what seems more like an exercise in trial-and-error than anything that rewards player diligence, intelligence, etc. Frustrating but pretty to look at. A lot like your mom.

YOUR MOM IS SEX

Knock-knock: Similar to Antichamber in the sense that I "get it," but don't really care for it. I get that Ice Pick Lodge is fucking with me, and trying to do it in an artsy and interesting way, but when I make the same mistake seventeen times and receive no useful input any of those times to help me better understand how to succeed in the future, I get frustrated. My real life is already exactly like this. I want to play a game to come to understand a system and master it, typically. Even if that system is sometimes loathe to give up its inner workings, there's an understanding that it eventually will. In the case of Knock-knock, it could care less if I figure it out. And that makes me just want to move on to another game.

No, in this case it really doesn't.

Monaco: Probably missing the real point of this game by not playing in co-op, but in single player it's either just a 2D version of one of the more boring Splinter Cell iterations or Stealth Bastard without the jumping or the neat aesthetic. Bleh.

What's mine is bored.

BUT ANYWAY...I was writing about Don't Starve at some point. Or at least I will be at some point in the future.

This is what my dog looks like in the dark.

So, Don't Starve is a thing. One of those things everyone likes. I get it. I like the aesthetic. I like the idea of the point of a game being just to not starve. Like Minecraft, but more immediate. I like the idea of a survival simulator, especially one as cleverly made and as darkly funny as this one. However, it loses me when it tosses roguelike-ness into the mix.

As I've ranted about at length before, not every single game is actually improved by adding "roguelike elements." In the case of Don't Starve, for instance, the game is really compelling and surprisingly tense and creepy as a survival simulation. The feeling of night encroaching is just as effective, if not more so than it was in Minecraft the first time the creepers came out, and just thinking about the way the light slowly dies as your fire burns down makes me want to go back and play the game more because it captures the feeling of actually being out in the wilderness at night so well it's uncanny.

But I will not go back and play Don't Starve any more because for some reason the developers deemed it necessary to include permadeath, and that, for me, runs absolutely counter to what makes a survival simulation good in the first place.

Permadeath also happens to take the fun out of actual survival.

One of my favorite things about Minecraft when I started playing it, and about Terraria when I started playing that, and so on, was the fact that the game didn't bother to tell you how to survive. It gave you no goals other than to not die, but it didn't even bother to explain to you how to stay alive. And that, at the time, was a new thing in gaming for me. It was exciting to run around in a panic, trying to figure out how to build a shelter, or a stove, or how to make armor, or a better weapon. Sure, you could look these things up online if you wanted, but for me at least, figuring them out on my own was a major part of the game itself, so spoiling crafting recipes would have been breaking the game, in a sense.

The thing that separates those other games from Don't Starve for me is the fact that once you learn how to do something in those games, once you've climbed to a new rung on the survival ladder, as it were, the game mirrors your new knowledge by allowing you to preserve your accomplishments. Don't Starve, on the other hand, forces you to artificially "forget" everything you've learned about survival by starting you at square one after every death. Have a fire pit? Not anymore, you don't! Have a farm? Now it's gone! Know the layout of the land around you? Fuck you, now things are totally different (but really just a slight rearrangement of various trees and stones)!

This is annoying in the sense that you don't have your cool things anymore after you die, but it becomes really goddamn infuriating when you realize the other side of that equation: remember the first time you played and you spent a half hour or two hours or five hours building up to the level you were at just before you died? Yeah, you have to do that again before  you can experience anything new. And you have to do it again by doing the exact same things you did the first time. It's like running out of lives in Super Mario Bros.

Why the game makes you do this is beyond me. I don't see how Don't Starve would be any less challenging, interesting, enjoyable, or creepy if you were allowed to save your progress and reload if you died. Instead, no matter how good, careful, or lucky you are, 80% of your time with this game will be spent doing the exact same few things over and over again, just so you can (maybe) discover a new trick or a different resource five hours into your latest playthrough before getting killed again.

And to me, that's silly. I'm glad there are a lot of people out there who like this game, because in a lot of ways it's extremely clever and at times it was absolutely gripping in its portrayal of bare, desperate survival. But ultimately it was too frustratingly stupid in terms of the permadeath system for me to continue with it.

Review: Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers (PC)

I loved pretty much everything about this game. First of all, while a lot of the games I've played lately (Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Shelter, Don't Starve, 140) have had a really interesting aesthetic dimension, there hasn't been one that I've flat-out enjoyed as much as Tiny and Big's. Most of the abovementioned games, while being (mostly) good games that I've (mostly) enjoyed playing, have a look that, to me, elicits a response like "Oh neat! That's clever!" Tiny and Big, on the other hand, has a look that elicits a response like "Wow, this is the coolest fucking thing ajdklajeiopaj."

That video gives you a little sense of what the game's about and what it looks like. For some reason, the style just absolutely jives with me in a way that makes me feel not just like I'm playing a fun game, but also a cool game. It seems like the sort of game you would have gone to a 50s-era sci-fi themed speakeasy to play. Or something.

Anyway, the video also shows you pretty much the entirety of the gameplay: you move through huge, open levels, using your laser to cut things, your rope to drag things, and your rocket to push things. It's really satisfying and kinetic, especially when you slice through the base of an obelisk, then pull it over with your rope and scramble out from underneath it as it tips over and crashes to the ground. The game actually mostly succeeds in creating the sense that you can do anything to the world using these three mechanisms (slice, pull, push), though of course you can't. But making you feel like you can is quite an achievement. This hit me especially hard when I was playing one of the later levels, trying to climb a tall structure, and I realized that I was allowed to stop thinking in terms of what to jump up to next because I could literally carve a huge staircase in the side of the rock wall if I wanted to. And I wanted to. It succeeds in making you feel powerful in a way a lot of games try and fail at.

No mean feat when you consider the objective of the game is to get your underwear back.

In a way, actually, this is sort of the game's greatest weakness as well. Because at times it feels like anything is possible, it becomes disappointing that the game is really about doing the same three or four things over and over again. Most of the levels involve, primarily, making bridges by cutting down towers, or making bridges by cutting down conveniently-placed ceiling beams. There's some excellent variation, though, in the form of one sort-of free climbing level that gave me the strongest sense of vertigo I can remember ever having gotten playing a game since Mario 64, and an epic boss battle (the first one) that plays with the game's physics system in really interesting and pulse-pounding ways.

Unless you're one of those people who must explore absolutely every nook an cranny in a virtual world, though, the majority of the game is going to involve slicing and dragging things, and eventually the feeling of being a god is going to fade and be replaced by the feeling of being a...bricklayer, I guess? Something bad as compared to a god, for sure.

Pictured: Not Iron Man.

Tiny and Big is a short game, and by the end I couldn't decide if I should be happy it ended when it did because it was running out of Cool New Ideas, or if I should be disappointed that it didn't find more to do with its slice, pull, and push mechanics. It seems like there could have been so much more to this game, but yet it's also nearly perfect as it is. I suppose this isn't a bad conundrum to have to face after playing a game. I think it means that the game was pretty awesome.

Oh, and you know what else is fucking awesome?! The soundtrack! Not only is it a totally badass, weird mishmash of electronica and accordion music (klezmer?), the tracks are also doled out in-game for intrepid explorers who seek out hidden rooms and such. Now that's a neat idea that also takes some serious confidence in the awesomeness of your soundtrack from a developer's perspective. But in this case, that confidence is well-founded. I definitely found myself exploring the game's levels more hoping to find more tracks, and when I finished the game and was still missing a few tracks, I immediately bought the soundtrack just so I could hear them.

And that's the icing on the cell-shaded cake for Tiny and Big. A great game that might leave you wishing there was more, but mostly because what's there is phenomenally well-presented, cool-looking (and sounding), and, most importantly, fun to play.

Review: Psychonauts (PC)

In another case of my being the last one to the party, I just played Psychonauts for the first time recently, after hearing for years how it was the Best Thing Ever and how I was going to love it to death. Well, I didn't love it. But I didn't hate it, either. Actually, it's most accurate to say that I loved some parts of it but not all of it, maybe sort of like how I'd feel about a version of Basia Bulat with reindeer legs for arms.

Google Image Search failed me spectacularly on that one.

What the hell am I writing about? After I pasted that image I got up to put on a sweater and talk to a colleague and the only obvious prompt I had when I came back to my desk was Indian Gramaphone Live!: The Album staring me right the fuck in the face.

Oh, right. Psychonauts.

So, I had a really similar problem with this game as I had with Anachronox awhile back: namely, everything around the gameplay is just peachy-keen wonderful, but the game itself is so frustrating to play through that it casts a pall on the good stuff. As you may have heard from others, Psychonauts's story is fantastic. It's sense of place, world construction, voice acting, character building, plot, background music, and lots of other things (up to and including Mr. Pokeylope) are amazing. It's the rare game that truly succeeds in making you feel like you've stepped into another world, while simultaneously managing to work on a symbolic level. It's quite an achievement.

See, the levels you explore (mostly through platforming) are supposed to be the interiors of different people's psyches. And this is pulled off with the utmost cleverness. There's a lot of symbolism to be had, while the coming-of-age story at the heart of things is charming enough that if you don't want to think too hard about things like the Censors or the Emotional Baggage, then that's just fine. But there's a lot more here than we've come to expect from a video game. And that's great.

Emotional Baggage SCREAMS FOR YOUR WRINKLY CLOTHES

I'm a huge fan of emergent storytelling, and am currently in the midst of drafting a fancy blog post about it at the moment. It's difficult for me to understand, in most cases, the appeal of a game where there's a "story" and then "gameplay," each treated as two separate things. Usually at least one of them don't work. Serious Sam is really fucking fun to play, but who cares about the story? Sam doesn't even care about the story. On the other hand, the story of the Call of Duty series has become so central that gameplay arguably doesn't really exist in those games anymore, at least not in the way I traditionally understand it. But Psychonauts marries the two quite well. Or, it would, if the gameplay wasn't so boring and repetitive.

In most parts of the game, you just around and punch things. It's a 3D platformer in the vein of Super Mario 64. All this action takes place in the wonderfully realized world I was raving about earlier.

"This land is my land / this land is your land / this land is replete with / giant fish-women!"

But it just goes on and on and on. Sure, you can get new powers throughout the game, but these are typically used in a very Zelda-esque fashion: you use a power to unlock a new area or defeat a boss, but never use it again otherwise. The core gameplay almost never changes from jumping and punching, jumping and punching.

Until it does, and then it does something crazy that makes you want to tear everything's hair out. At points, this game started to remind me of Rebel Assault, which is a game that summons the dark warg-riders of the underworld through the mere mention of its title 50% of the time (I rolled my saving throw, so we're safe) because it is just...so...fucking...terrible. But why is it terrible? Because it's one of those "jack of all trades"-style games: every ten minutes you're doing something completely different, and none of the modes of gameplay have received enough attention and quality control to be compelling on its own, let alone as part of a smorgasbord of half-baked interfaces, steering controls, and the like.

Though the game's in-psyche conceit is brilliantly realized story-wise, it leads to a lot of confusing gameplay moments. For example, in one level you explore the mind of a failed descendant of Napoleon by facing off with Napoleon himself on a hex-style war game board (in the descendant's mind). You move from place to place on the board, while shrinking down to visit the inhabitants of different buildings, winning them over to your friend's cause, all before causing them to manifest into pieces on the board that you can move around to win the game. Sounds really clever and awesome, right? Well, it is.

Above: Awesome.

Until you actually try to play it, that is. Figuring out how to get to the gameplay board in the first place requires a sequence a bit like the more frustrating parts of Myst, with nothing in the way of hints. Once you've reached the board, getting from building to building is a similarly difficult problem to solve. Getting out of the shrunk-down, mini-city and back to the board proper is also completely nonintuitive and the game doesn't hold your hand at all. Instead, it expects you to move from what it essentially a platforming game to something much more complicated, assuming that just because the story is complex, the game must be to follow along with it. It's frustrating, because you spend as much time trying to figure out where to push each button and how as you do enjoying the many, many parts of the game that are well done.

In the end, I blasted through the final four or so hours in one go because I was so bored at the repetitive nature of the platforming (occasionally broken up by a totally nonintuitive spatial puzzle of some sort) that I just wanted to see the end of the game. And yeah, the end is totally perfect from a story perspective, and ties a lot of the earlier themes and symbolism together in a satisfying way. And the fact that I can even write that about a video game is awesome. But also, the last boss battle requires you to die a great many times before you realize the bizarrely unobvious combination of techniques that will allow you to win, so it's a final kick in the nuts while at the same time being a satisfying resolution of the story. Like if Lord of the Rings fired a potato gun into your crotch at the exact moment that Frodo destroyed the One Ring.

God DAMMIT.

Review: Waking Mars (PC)

Waking Mars is one of those games that started out as a really interesting premise and matured into an exercise in tedium. I hate, hate saying that about it, because when I first started playing, I was comparing to The Dig fondly in my mind and I really wanted it to keep being that awesome. The Dig was one of the first games I ever played as a young PC gamer, and it fascinated me not so much because it was a great game, but because it did such a great job of letting you play in a world that was actually believably, strangely alien.

Except the orange astronaut suits, which are totally Earth 90s.

On second thought, maybe the two games are more alike than I thought.

Spacesuits are much snazzier in the future.

Anyway, I loved the game's visual presentation, the conceit of connecting your character with other characters only through radio contact, the [SPOILERS] crushing loneliness and disorientation that results when that radio contact is cut off [END SPOILERS], and especially the gameplay. The gameplay gets you to actively observe and directly interact with the planet's creatures in a way that convincingly simulates discovery: you don't know how all the creatures and plants interact, but you need to find out because it's the only way for you to survive. And for once, survival doesn't involve blasting bad aliens with a screen that's 25% gun barrel.

What it does involve, though, is a decent amount of simplistic-y puzzle-solving and the Waking Mars equivalent of grinding. Early on in the game, when I was still all charmed by the atmosphere and presentation and story, and the ludic tasks were kept simple enough that I could breeze through them, I hardly noticed whether I was collecting enough seeds and creating enough life on the planet's surface. By the midway point or so, I had finished exploring much of the Mars underground, and the Fun Discovery Portion of the game had ended. The frontier was closed, and the Gather And "Puzzle" portion of the game began. I put "Puzzle" in quotation marks here because none of the systems you have to figure out are ever complicated enough that I felt sufficiently puzzled. Maybe if they had been a bit more complex, I would have actually enjoyed the second half of the game more. Maybe not. All I know is that once I figured out that Seed A goes in Hole B and Seed C goes into Animal F's mouth, and so on, I was then expected to spend about 3-4 hours of gameplay (roughly equivalent to what I'd played in the first place exploring the caves) collecting seeds and moving them from cavern to cavern, arranging them just so and not caring at all about a bit of it before the end of the game was accessible.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the game's planting system; like I said above, it actually fit the setting and the presentation really well. It's just that you're expected to do so much of it that a game that's surprisingly, exceptionally beautiful in a lot of other ways eventually gets subsumed by the minutiae of moving seeds from place to place over and over again. There's apparently one ending to the game that you get if you play through normally, and a better ending that you get if you collect a massive amount of seeds and bring lots and lots of things to life with them. Guess what ending I got? It makes me wonder, though, if they already have alternate endings built into the game, why not also have a slightly shittier, but still satisfying ending for people who just want to enjoy the game, plant a few seeds, and then discover the conclusion of the story?

Especially if you can get it on sale, Waking Mars is a unique, at-times-fascinating game for its approaches to setting and narrative, and for finding a way to weld actual gameplay so seamlessly to its fiction. But it's not really a good game, in the sense that I can promise that you'll enjoy it for the entire time that it'll take you to get to the end of its engaging story.

Review: 140 (PC)

Holy wow, 140 is pretty neat, you guys.

This'll be a short review because it's such a short game. But it's a very good game. It is, to paraphrase another review that I read, a rare example of gaming minimalism done right.

The premise is made pretty clear in the surprisingly functional game trailer:

It's a platformer with an abstract, shape-y aesthetic. Already you're groaning. Stop groaning.

What makes it interesting is that all of the platforming moves and tricks are dictated by the beat of the background music (reflected cleverly in the thumping equalizer that makes up the game's background): platforms move, walls shift, and solutions emerge and disappear in time with the music, and as you make your way through the level, more elements are added to the background track to reflect the increasing complexity of the gameplay.

There are three levels in the game (and clever transitions from one to the next), and each level culminates in a "boss fight" of sorts, that changes the gameplay a bit (for example, one is sort of a top-down bullet-hell-style shooting game) but doesn't deviate from the game's rhythm-based challenges. These boss battles were jarring at first for the sudden fact that I wasn't playing a platformer anymore, but the new play modes are really just more riddles based on the rhythm of the background music. Once you figure out the beat, these "battles" are a lot easier.

If I have one gripe (and I always do), it's that at $4.99 the game seemed a little overpriced. I finished it in under and hour, it was awesome, and I went back and played it a few more times just for fun. It ends at right about the time it seems like it should, but yet the concept is really great and executed so flawlessly you can't sort of help but want more variations on the jumping puzzles, more clever bosses, more music. The fact that you don't get more doesn't leave a sour taste in my mouth as much as it just makes me hope that there's a sequel or something someday, but if you're pinching pennies, for the length of gameplay you get, you might want to wait for a sale. That said, if you're at all interested in music and/or platformer games, wait a month or so for the sale, and then buy it whether there's a sale or not.

Reviews: Beyond Good and Evil and Anachronox (PC)

So, I haven't done any reviews for awhile. This is mostly because I've been playing Anachronox for pretty much ever. This is a good and bad thing. Mostly bad, though. I think.

Beyond Good & Evil
So, Beyond Good & Evil (BGE) was pretty damn fun. Actually, playing both of these games reminded me of ye olden tymes when there was the occasional AAA game that had a really interesting setting, a legitimately engaging gameworld. BGE has such a charmingly idiosyncratic sci-fi/cartoon/steampunk/sort-of-Madagascar world that I found myself really wanting to explore it.

Like Disney, but with redneck Han Solo in boar form.

Fortunately, the game follows this up with excellent mechanics, so exploring its semi-open world is a joy. It's a game that's fun to play not necessarily because of any particularly innovative or brilliant mechanic, but more because it offers a number of different game modes and all of them work pretty well. Like a lot of more modern games, BGE lets you fly a spaceship, race a hovercraft, explore dungeons, battle using a melee weapon, solve puzzles using a rhythm-based combat move, stealth your way into enemy military bases, take photos, talk to townsfolk, go shopping, talk to your party mates...and I could probably go on if I thought hard enough. All of these things (except, arguably, the hovercraft) feel pretty natural, are easy to pick up without having to learn a lot of complicated controls, and perhaps most importantly all fit well in the game's world. When you suddenly have to start flying a spaceship, it seems like a natural progression in the game's story, and in your role as the puppet-master rather than a developer throwing another toy at you to keep you playing for another five hours.

In addition to the world-fun and the game-fun, there's some story-fun to be had. The story, looked at in broad strokes, isn't particularly unique or compelling, but the voice acting, the (admittedly 2003) cutscenes, and the excellent writing make for a memorable cast of characters. Many of the game's most compelling moments come from character-on-character interaction: this is a game that's not going to pull back emotionally when it comes to dramatic punches because a) it's a cartoon or b) it's "just a game." There's some powerful stuff here, and that alone is almost worth the price of admission.

Get ready to feel some fucking boar-feelings!

If there's a downside to BGE, it's that it falls a little too much in love with its stealth-based sneaking gameplay in the latter half of the game. Having to sneak through large, open rooms and past guards happens way too frequently, considering that the game doesn't provide any sort of feedback to show how close you are to being seen or the degree of danger you're in. The camera usually swings around nicely to frame the stealth puzzles cinematically and this generally highlights the sightlines of the bad guys and the potential points of egress. But otherwise, you have no idea when you're going to fail, and when you fail (and you will), you may not necessarily understand why you failed. When you fail, you pretty much always get killed immediately: at first a large group of difficult-to-defeat armored guards descend on you en masse, and later on they just call in an airstrike from hovering laser-drones, which are a one-shot kill and are undodgeable. So, being seen for the last quarter or so of the game is a death sentence. This makes a lot of the stealth sequences trial-and-error in the "you die and die and die and figure it out eventually" sense.

Ultimately though, it's a great game with engaging gameplay and a fascinating and convincingly realized world marred ever so slightly by the old "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem. But not so much that you shouldn't but it immediately and play the fuck out of it.

Oh, and the protagonist is a woman who wears fairly sensible clothing and isn't made entirely of breasts.

Anachronox
Oh, shit. Anachronox. A game I've wanted to play since pretty much ever, but missed when it was first out on account of having a slow computer, then ignored for awhile due to apparent issues with getting it to run on a new computer, then finally purchased through GOG. This game is, in its own way, the most infuriating game I've ever played in my life. That's because it presents you with an absolutely amazingly written and voiced sci-fi epic that is as satisfyingly genre-correct as it is occasionally bizarrely unique (for example, one of your party members is an entire planet). It also gives you a visually consistent, convincing and striking universe for the game's sprawling story to unfold in. Then it makes you play a stupid, repetitive, almost gloatingly simplistic and slow-paced game to experience the story and the world it takes place in. Anachronox has a fan-made movie version in which all the game's cinematics are stitched together to tell a pretty effective version of the game's story while cutting out the gameplay entirely. That says a lot to me. To say this game isn't fun to play would be like saying having fire ants devouring your balls was mildly unpleasant.

Yep.

This game is not fun because:

1. There's about 400% too much backtracking, revisiting old locations, etc.

2. The characters just move too slowly. It takes forever to get from place to place, and when you want to move from one planet to another (which you do often) you need to walk all the way to a specific location on the planet you're currently visiting to change planets. When you want to change party members (also a frequent occurrence), you have to travel to a specific location in a specific planet, which for no necessary reason is also a far walk from that planet's spaceport. If you played this game as efficiently as possible, fulfilling only the primary objectives and nothing else, I'd estimate that 30% of this 30-40 hour game would still be traveling back to places you're already been and fighting battles you've already fought. Not knowing the most efficient route myself and needing to explore all options to complete a lot of the game's obscure quests, I'd estimate I spent about 80% of my first 15 or so hours backtracking, talking to the same NPCs over and over again, fighting the same battles over and over again...until I just downloaded a walkthrough and followed it for the rest of the game.

3. You either have to complete a lot of the game's esoteric subquests (which are obscure to the point of hilarity at times) or find a way to grind XP (hint: there is none) before you can even have a slight hope of being leveled high enough to finish the game. Many of the most obscure quests give you better weapons, which you need because without them you can't even hit your foes on a regular basis, let alone do significant damage to them. Most of these weapons can only be found during quests and can't just be bought somewhere. As a result, near the end of the game, I had a massive amount of money with no reason to spend it on anything, while I was undertaking hour-long quests just to get better weapons for my characters so I could actually defeat the monsters in the final dungeon (the final dungeon requires the use of two parties of three characters, which means you have to fully arm all your party members and not just max out a few favorites).

4. Battles are tedious. They're basic, FFVII-style ATB system battles, but they're painfully slow. There's an attempt at variety and tactics, but what it really boils down to is: 1) you get limit breaks, 2) you can move your characters on a hex-like field, but this never really plays a role other than as a novelty, 3) you can use magic spells but this drains your ability to boost your HP with shields...but this just remains a basic either-or proposition for the whole game, so again there's no real strategy here, 4) turns move incredibly slowly, 5) you and your enemies miss your attacks around 20-30% of the time, so battles last even longer, and 6) toward the end of the game, you're introduced to what's essentially a materia system, but the tutorial absolutely sucks and I found myself just not using the system at all...and you know what? It didn't matter. I beat the game just fine without ever learning it.

There are other things that I could rant about, but you get the idea and I'm tired of complaining. Honestly, I wanted to like this game. This game, with an entirely different game at the heart of it, would have been amazing. There aren't and haven't been many other games I've ever played with such a sense of place and such an excellent story and well-acted characters (except, maybe, BGE). But it is just so goddamn horrific to play that I can't honestly recommend it.

THESE ARE WORDS ABOUT SOMETHING I DON'T WANT TO HATE BUT HATE

ANACHRONOX!!!

Reviews: They Bleed Pixels and Thirty Flights of Loving (PC)

MOAR reviews...MOAR!!!

They Bleed Pixels
They Bleed Pixels is unsatisfying in the way a bad ice cream sandwich is unsatisfying: while you'd certainly hoped for more, you've still gotten to eat an ice cream sandwich and so you're not going to complain. Too much.

NOW 30% MORE OF A DISAPPOINTMENT! SORT OF!

I think in reality my love/hate relationship with this game might spring from a misunderstanding on my part of what it's supposed to be. I think I envisioned the game, based on the videos I'd viewed and the reviews I'd read before buying it, as a clever beat-em-up with a Lovecraftian aesthetic and the occasional bit of jumping.

This excited me because a) I love Lovecraft and b) a beat-em-up with a good fighting system is one of my greatest weaknesses, along with side-scrolling bullet-hell shooters and Serious Sam-style FPSs. I've logged an embarrassing amount of hours playing Super Double Dragon, Return of the King, and WWF No Mercy! over the years as a result of b).

Unfortunately, if you've watched the above trailer, you've already seen the entirety of the fighting-move set you're given during the game and you've only seen a very small part of the hair-tearingly infuriating jumping sequences.

Unfortunately Part Two, the game is really not that good when it's trying to be Lovecraft-meets-Super-Meat-Boy, which is what it's trying to do for about 90% of its running time. Which brings me to a more general point that I'd like to express to all indie games: SUPER MEAT BOY IS BETTER AT BEING SUPER MEAT BOY THAN YOU ARE.

And he knows it too, that cheeky little fucker.

They Bleed Pixels's controls are just too slippery; it's never quite clear when you're going to let go of a wall, or when you're about to grab one, the timing of doing combo-heavy things like juggling are imprecise, and all too often the double-jump just refuses to work for no apparent reason. Super Meat Boy isn't great because it's bastard-hard, it's great because it can kill you two hundred times on the same level and every single time you'll know it was your fault, because the controls are precise and the way through the level is clear. If you can't get there, it's because you're not good enough. TBP is different; generally, when I died multiple times in quick succession I was reduced to that old NES standby: screaming "I PRESSED THE FUCKING JUMP BUTTON! I PRESSED IT!!! AAAAAUGGGGGGGGAGHHGHHH!?" over and over while slamming the controller into my own skull.

Me playing Unreal Tournament in 1999.

Needless to say, this is unsatisfying.

The beat-em-up part of the game was pretty excellently done, but it just felt underdeveloped. For as long as the game takes to finish, you learn pretty much all of your fighting moves by the time you're about 10% through, and by then you've also met almost all of the (rather unvaried) enemy types you'll fight as well.*

What I really enjoy about a good hyper-hard platforming game is the sense of personal accountability that comes with a really tight control scheme (and the subsequent feeling of ultimate success you get when you beat the "impossible" game anyway). What I really enjoy about a good beat-em-up game is the ebb and flow, the punch and counterpunch between you and your enemies, the mini-strategy game that's set up in the instants between button presses as a result of the complexity at work underneath the obvious layer of graphical fisticuffs. TBP doesn't provide either of these experiences. It gestures emphatically enough at each of them that it was sort of fun for its entire maybe-six-hours running time, but there's not enough variation to make it very engaging beyond the level of a quick blast of dopamine.

What was really cool was the bonus levels unlocked when I finished the game: one that was a labyrinth-like tower with a better level design than anything found in the game proper, and another that used the game's juggling mechanic to task you with luring enemies into various traps located around the level. These were twists on the game's basic mechanic that I was mentally begging for throughout the main campaign. It's strange that they only emerge during the guest-designed levels. Oh well.

*I should note here that the game dutifully doles out new "tutorial" sections to you every time you finish an early level, but they're never anything you can't just figure out on your own after a few seconds of button-mashing.

Thirty Flights of Loving
Without getting into the age-old (and fairly pointless) argument of what a "game" is, I found Thirty Flights of Loving to be less of a game and more something that you'd "read" in a college-level Short Stories class. In fact, the next time I teach 21st century fiction or something similar, we're definitely going to be "playing" TFoL. It's a really incredible experience, but not a really incredible gameplay experience. It's an experiment (it seems to me) in the use of an interactive virtual space as a storytelling medium. And it succeeds brilliantly while managing to be unlike any other "game" I've ever "played."

Okay, I'll try to lay off the air quotes now.

This looks suspiciously like the last syllable of the word "beotchhhhhhhhhhhhh."

Everything about TFoL screams "literature" to me. Maybe that's because I'm an English professor and I'm always hearing someone scream "literature," even if it's usually in an anguished tone of voice while walking into or out of my classroom. But. The experience of playing through this game is the experience of reading a short story by a master author. Except it's not a written text, or even a film, but instead it's a video game. It has its own distinct visual style, for sure:

Block heads and duck feet are two features of said style.

The music is an excellent, if eccentric fit. Much like a movie, many of the scenes and set pieces are framed; that is, you as the player view them in a particular sequence from a particular angle with a particular timing, that is repeated even during second and third playthroughs. On one hand, the almost total lack of actual interactivity (other than just walking down the hallways the game presents you with) is what makes me hesitate to call this a game, but on the other hand it's the only game I've ever played that successfully integrates smash cuts and that's fucking awesome.

Also, you can peel an orange and throw it at a pretty block-headed girl.

The game plays a lot with perspective and time (and I can't say much more without RUINING EVERYTHING), and sometimes veers gleefully off what little beaten narrative path there is to indulge in what seemed to me at first to be random wackiness but later was revealed (by my own brain on a third playthrough) as wonderfully clever symbolism.

This really isn't a game to play and then criticize the mechanics, the graphics, the "fun" level, etc. There really is no gameplay and the entire experience will take you maybe 15 minutes, tops. But, like a good but cleverly complex short story, I went back right after the end and played it through again. And again. And then again with the commentary "track" enabled. And every time I teased a little bit more meaning out of it until I was able to decide what it all (or almost all, at least) meant to me, even if that wasn't the dev's intent. The entire time I was playing, I was constantly caught up in questions of authorial intent, meaning of symbolism,
existence of through-running themes, characters' motivations, etc. And not in a "this game's story sucks, so I don't know what's going on" way, but in the way the makes a post-play discussion session with a few friends or students absolutely worth having. And that's a really, really rare thing in the world of video games. It doesn't have to be, but it is. Though that's less (I think) because of the limitations or strictures of the medium and more because to have a story that works on the level(s) of TFoL you need a Hemingway, or a Faulkner, or a Borges...someone who can actually create an experience worth painstakingly parsing for shimmering little splinters of meaning. And that's what we have here. I don't think all games should be like this. I don't think many games should be like this. I don't think many games can be like this. But this one is, and it's remarkable. I'm glad it exists.

In this particular case, the cake is NOT a...well, you know.

Reviews: Thomas Was Alone and Fez (PC)

I'm doubling up on reviews here because I've been ripping through way too many games lately, and while I'd like to get my general thoughts on each down before I forget those thoughts completely, I want to do things with my life other than blog. Like kill us all.

Just...kidding?

Thomas Was Alone
So, Thomas Was Alone was a fucking revelation. It's the rare indie experiment in minimalism that not only works, it works so well it makes you question whether the minimalist-style games you've played before actually worked as well as you thought they did when you first thought they did work.

The game is your basic jumping-and-steering platformer, with the slight twist that you solve puzzles by switching "party" members throughout. Each party member has a different ability (or abilities), and so you end up having to have them work together (i.e., Thomas isn't alone for long) to reach each level's exit. The result is a game that's part platforming and part puzzle-solving. None of the platforming nor the puzzle-solving ever reaches a legitimately challenging level, so though everything feels really satisfying (the jumping is especially well-weighted, especially when using a USB controller), by itself the gameplay would make a clever-but-not-especially-exciting platfuzzler (portmanteau police!).

Fortunately, the gameplay isn't alone, either.

The gameplay is supplemented by some of the cleverest, best-written, and best-performed voice acting that I've ever seen/heard in a game. It's simply a narrator telling the story of the your various avatars' feelings and impressions of the world they're making their way through, but somehow...someway...it manages to turn two-dimensional shapes into some of the most three-dimensional characters I've ever met in a video game.

For example, this is awesome, but you'll only understand why if you play the game.

And this makes all the difference. It's not that the game is unfun by itself; instead, this is a perfect example of what I call "worldbuilding" in my scholarly-type writing: the voiceovers flesh out the action. You guide the various shapes through the platfuzzling action, and The Voice adds an emotional context to your actions. It's a synergy between exposition and gameplay that actually works because the shapes' various personality traits (as presented by the voiceover) match their actual, physical abilities (controlled and utilized by you). The result, paired with the game's extra-abstract, weirdo soundtrack, make basically a perfect combination.

This was really driven home to me after SPOILERS the end of the penultimate chapter, wherein you lose control of the characters you've utilized (and grown to care for, frankly) for the entirety of the game up to this point, and they are replaced with new shapes, new characters, new personalities. I was surprisingly affected by this switch; I wanted to see what happened to my new friends, and the idea that theses damn interlopers would be taking their place for the denouement of the story was vexing. After about three levels, though, I was totally engrossed in these new shapes' stories. It only took me about fifteen minutes of play to get totally reinvested. It was like the devs took me out of the originally story and stoked my frustration on purpose just so they could prove how goddamn amazingly immersive the experience of playing their game was.

And they wouldn't be wrong. END SPOILERS It's awesome. Check it out.

Fez
I'm just going to spoil this one right up front: this was another one of those games that I'd heard amazing things about, paid a decent amount of money for, and then just didn't like.

Smile all you want; you cannot mute my hatred.

It started out innocuously enough: there was a little fez-guy, and he jumped around, and he could rotate the world. Cool gimmick. Really well-produced gimmick. Nice music, nice art style. But really, when it came down to it, there was no gameplay substance. I played Fez for the lion's share of two nights, and when I was done, the game told me I was something like 85% finished (or so). All I had done was run and jump and rotate, run and jump and rotate, over and over and over, through occasionally changing (and admittedly brilliant-looking) environs. That was about it. The rotating thing is cool, but it sort of felt like if someone had made the original Super Mario Bros. without pipes and then Super Mario Bros. 2 was the exact same game, but with pipes you could go down. It would have been cool, but after you'd gone down a few pipes, you'd be over it. That's how Fez feels to me: there's an interesting new gameplay twist (I sort of shuddered just typing that, sorry) here, and it plays really well in a stylistic sense; however, it doesn't serve as the basis of a bunch of interesting skills the player is made to learn throughout the game. Instead, you just do the same thing over and over and over: rotate, look for cubes, repeat ad nauseum.

Until you get to 85% (or so) completion. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes necessary to decipher a number of bizarro ideographic puzzles "hidden" within the game's levels. Why you suddenly have to engage in medium-level cryptography at this point, when it hasn't been a part of the game at all before now is beyond me. You just do. Then the game descends into another, less satisfying pattern: using the built-in, terribly confusing map screen to navigate back to levels that you've already played so you can scribble symbols down on pieces of notebook paper, and then semi-arbitrarily try to enact the instructions described by these hidden languages in particular locations throughout the gameworld. It's about as horrible as it sounds, considering that a few minutes before this was just a pleasant but bland platforming game.

Anyway, I actually screwed around with this part of the game for a few hours, but eventually wasn't making progress that didn't entail third, fourth, fifth, or even tenth trips back to level that I'd previously scoured, and I just gave up. Honestly, aside from the somewhat interesting art direction in this game, I didn't see what all the hubbub was about. It was basically just boring as balls and made by a dev who obviously believed more in his own vision for a weird, unengaging but demanding puzzle-world than he did in making a game that was actually fun to play. Which is sort of sad, because I paid $10 to be alternately bored an angry for 8 or so hours, and because generally speaking, fezzes are cool.