“A short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor.
Or, if you prefer, a playable music video.”
I felt a trace of Tale of Tales’ The Path – in order to fully experience and “finish” the game the player is required to essentially do the opposite of what the character is told; the opposite of conventional designer-dictated narrative. “Don’t stray from the path” as “Get to your cubicle.”
One could play the game forever, but the monotony of the looping routine gradually becomes agonizing.
Suicide is a game element but is used in an odd way that can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to be reminiscent of “Groundhog Day” or “Moon.”
Some of the most memorable moments are those of player-initiated absurdity. Standing alone in a field in your underwear with a cow, while your idling car blocks traffic being one. Most of it involves being in your underwear, actually.
A curiosity about this “follow/don’t follow”, “do what i say” or “don’t do what i say to do” binary is that in the end, everyone can pretty much discern the ultimate intent of the game designer, following an initial mental re-adjustment, but again, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Are the only true player-subversions of perceived or actual designer intentions through cheating, bugs, or exploits, or is it in unexplored emergence? The latter is an exploration of systems and mechanics interplay, whereas the former can be supplemented with player-constructed narrative explanation? Narrative fallacy?
I found the game to be more contemplative than subversive, and ultimately bleak, but moments of beauty persist.
Something to watch for from the USC EA Game Innovation Lab:
“The player’s voyage through The Night Journey takes them through a poetic landscape, a space that has more reflective and spiritual qualities than geographical ones. The core mechanic in the game is the act of traveling and reflecting rather than reaching certain destinations – the trip along a path of enlightenment.”
“It’s a game that rewards you for slowing down and for introspection,” says Viola, 59, a pioneer in the medium of video art for more than 35 years. “You’re alone and you’re not even told why you’re there. You just fall out of the sky into the middle of this amazing landscape with mountains, sea, desert, and forest, and go wherever you want,” he explains. “The more you do things mindfully, the more is revealed to you.”
Playdead just announced that Limbo is headed to XBLA. Looking forward to seeing this at GDC.
Limbo looks fantastic, and there’s something just so archetypally elegant about that little stroll in the woods; its evocative of Miyamoto’s childhood hillside wanderings, and my own memories of the intersections of exploration and imagination.
Are atmospheric silhouette graphics all that it takes to impress me these days? I think no – Feist and Limbo in particular look to be particularly subtle and refined in gameplay and sound as well – but there still is something to be said for simplicity of visuals taking such a strong position in the indie community now.
One of our tenets is to look closely at what the big studios do, then do the exact opposite.
This is a stylistic as well as practical decision. What happens if non-mainstream style is appropriated, to some extent, by the mainstream (as things often do with very near everything besides games)? What’s next?
You play as a lone person trying to stem the tide of a riot. There is no context given – only black and white to indicate disagreeing opinions.
The game begins with you as a lone dissenter among a raging sea of “white” opinions. If you don’t push against the tide, it carries you along with it.
The game states the goal as bringing as many people as possible to the side of peace. To do that entails entering abstract rhythm matching games for each rioter you attempt to convince. I found it simple but nuanced. Verbally shotgunning a rioter won’t convince anybody – you have to wait; listen.
As your words spread through the crowd you gain more and more converts to your cause, but ultimately you find that swaying the opinions of the masses results in simply a mass reversal and more violence and rioting – your converts put down their placards and take up torches once again. You change colors again and again to promote peace, but the situation escalates nonetheless.
Finally you become gray, your words lose their impact. You can’t convince anyone, because you yourself aren’t convinced of anything anymore.
That’s my take on it, at least. Kudos to Intuition.
Just some quick notes on this great modern point-and-click adventure game. The narrative is characterized by simple, nonverbal communication – it is a quiet, contemplative game that lacks much in the way of exposition. The most of that happens to take place in the main character’s head, through his memories and feelings expressing universal, archetypal stories.
Gameplay feels a bit limiting at times, with limited control of character movement and action – but puzzles work out to be quite rewarding.
The real star of the show is the art; contrast between sharp, rich textures and pencil sketches, minimal animation that is full of personality, and true originality in bringing this strange world to life. See for yourself…
So the recent extended trailer for Gagne’s Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is out. The animation looks fantastically smooth and well-conceived, but to be perfectly honest the Scandinavian black metal makes me cringe. Personal taste, that’s all. If it must be metal, may I recommend Sunn O)))? Better for atmosphere!
I’m particularly impressed with some of the larger creatures – the snapping one in the corridor actually seems to be genuinely frightening. Here’s hoping for more of those moments. Also, the potential of environment scalability could be interesting in this context – the trailer does flash a brief scene of your ship appearing smaller than it usually does in an open space. Scrolling-tunnel gameplay does eventually get old and is certainly nothing new.
The release of this trailer seems to have generated a lot of excitement tempered slightly by comments on the unoriginality of the gameplay and the origin of the aesthetic. I’m all for old-school/simplistic/subtractive gameplay these days (within reason), but commentary on the silhouette aesthetic has definitely got me thinking.
The look is highly minimal, with a “shadow puppet” sort of contrast between flat black foreground images and saturated colors in the background. Gagne, an animator with decades of animation/film industry experience, has explored this visual style before, and Tartakovsky‘s work on Samurai Jack also comes to mind. However as this aesthetic seems to have become an indie game trend these days, it merits some game-specific analysis.
World of Goo did not utilize this look throughout the entire game, balancing a more colorful look with the high contrast look in certain levels, and actually tied in a somewhat unexpected “digital” art style at a certain point in the game. Regardless, the game art maintained its stylistic consistency well throughout. It’s also a great game, incidentally.
Feist has won awards for its visual design (equal parts shadow puppets, Miyazaki sootballs, and Where the Wild Things Are) without even having been released yet. The vibe reminds me of indie exploration games like Knytt, which had an incredible atmosphere. The silhouette look and the music push what I’ve seen of the game so far in that direction as well.
Patapon for PSP is another obvious one and is pretty much a straight unadulterated expression of the silhouette look.
Am I missing any big ones?
Functionally, the shadow puppet/silhouette look seems to be, in a sense, a return to traditional arcade game aesthetics – albeit in inverse. Both vector and pixel-based graphics of games like Tempest and Robotron 2084 relied on the use of brightly colored foreground graphics over a black background, due to the challenge of providing visuals that would be as playable as possible within the constraints of current rendering limitations. Picture Robotron 2084 on a highly colorful backdrop with flat black characters, and voil?†, you essentially have the shadow puppet look.
The advantage of this look thus has much in common with its minimal ancestors. High contrast of in-game objects lends itself well to simple, straightforward gameplay, minimizing clutter. If the gameplay mechanics work to this end, playability can be improved by a look this simple and contrasted.
Other advantages are more representative of the times. Shadowed foregrounds and characters can create a highly moody look, which can be good for building a certain sense of atmosphere. Compare this with the look of LocoRoco for example: LocoRoco also has flat, simple foregrounds, but with a colorful style that is more reminiscent of well lit Katamari Damacy levels or Saturday morning cartoons – a style that doesn’t lend itself to a compelling atmosphere (despite how good Katamari Damacy is).
Another positive of this visual style – it seems that it can only be good for development costs – the creation of flat shadow characters and environments would seem to be much less costly than creating a modern platformer look like Braid. Also, the de-emphasis of texture and depth can lead to increased polish in surface details or animation, as several of these games have demonstrated.
Anyway, that all being said, I’m looking forward to seeing how Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet turns out. Did I mention I dislike the music? I really dislike the music.
– The imagery of Love made me recall discussions I periodically have with my artist girlfriend. I show her various videogames that I considered to have new and unique art styles. She responds that it looks almost the same as every other 3D game, even ones i would consider to be very different. These conversations lead to the realization that “large differences” in art direction of most 3D games in reality are only slight differences when considering the overall effect received by the viewer. While the differences in atmosphere, color tone, detail of textures & shapes, and light’s interaction with the environment may be significant between games like Shadow of the Colossus, Half Life 2, Gears of War 2 & Okami, the similarities outweigh the differences. They all consist of objects of certain colors and shapes placed within a 3D environment where light sources determine color intensity & darkening viewed from a mobile camera: essentially, the modern definition of rendering a 3d environment.
– Her primary question is: With technology at the state it is, why isn’t exploration of other methods of visually representing space more common? Can we visually create the atmosphere of walking down a city street without attempting to recreate each individual lamppost or garbage can? Can we rethink digital 3d space in a manner distinct from the legacy of games like Wolfenstein?
– As far as I can figure, there are 2 general methods of at least partially achieving this goal.
– The first is to create a 3D space in the traditional sense, but then apply complex filters to change the viewer’s perception of the world.
– The second is to rethink from the ground up how to make the viewer perceive movement through an environment while viewing a 2D screen.
The announcement of Love is exciting to me on many levels.
A game that is as freeform and open to personal innovation as Dwarf fortress that takes place in a dynamic public place shared with friends and strangers is very compelling. You would have the ability to work with friends to test the limits of the toolset and your imagination while simultaneously being able to be inspired by other citizen’s creations and their alternative methods.
The fact that Love is the brainchild of a single person is equally inspiring and leads me to appreciate the product even more.
However, what I want to reflect on right now is the art style and how it resonates with an ever growing personal desire for videogames and their art direction.
Love is a world built out of very simplistic 3d shapes and structures. However, by using tricks that involved complicated uses of “edge polygons” and alpha textures, the game distorts these simple shapes to be slightly more fluid and dynamic in their appearance. There are no hard edges only skewed lines and somewhat blurry intersections.
This effect in practice creates a very painterly landscape where the colors and shapes themselves are alive. As you move through the land it feels as if you are progressing through a 2d image or painting: the painting is changing as you move, rather than you are moving around a static, sterile 3d space.
This somewhat new representation of a 3d space in a videogame sparked abstract discussions about the goals developers can have now that our technology has progressed to a sufficient level. For example, can we try and recreate how we view the world, rather than simply creating digital representations of objects existing in the world?
I’m going to muse a bit about this topic in my next post, part 2.
Just wanted to quickly mention one of my favorite recent indie webgames – Pixeljam’s Dino Run.
The concept of Dino Run is extremely simple – control a dinosaur running for its life from the effects of a nearby asteroid impact.
The presentation is intentionally outdated as a stylistic decision: pre-8-bit era styled pixel graphics and ambient sound effects, with a few flourishes. Overall a very nice retro/minimalist aesthetic of prehistoric fauna and increasingly desolate environments; forests, waterfalls, tar pits, caves, volcanoes, etc. Some of the level art has a nice depth to it despite the color and resolution simplicity, and crashing meteorites are suitably dramatic.
Gameplay is mostly minimal as well with some nice touches if the player wants to delve deeper – in RPG-esque features, items, speedruns, multiplayer, boulder rides/doomsurfing(!) and so on.
The game understands and does a few things particularly well, in my opinion, gameplay-related, atmospherically, and thematically.
FLIGHT (DEFINITELY): Running for your life is a classic gameplay technique when supplemented with the appropriate atmosphere. That is, with the proper treatment, something as straightforward as a set time limit to gameplay becomes something frantic. This kind of gameplay, when done well, can invoke some of the most primal of instincts, fight or flight. Narrowly escaping when it seemed the wave of destruction would overtake you can trigger euphoria, despite the simplicity of the presentation. In my opinion, Dino Run joins the ranks of other lofty examples of this idea done well – Metroid, Half Life 2, Mirror’s Edge… among others. Finally, the fact that your little dino manages to indulge his insatiable appetite while running from certain death adds an amusingly morbid dimension to the experience.
LEVEL DESIGN: Game design which does not allow the player to do or see everything in a typical playthrough invariably adds to the believability, specifically verisimilitude, of the game world (see 20 Mysterious Games on Gamasutra). This is only a good thing if the game is already well designed at its core. For games with a strong atmosphere, not being able to see the limitations and boundaries of the game world and the fiction of the experience in striking clarity only adds to the immersion a player can feel. Dino Run is not perhaps the best example of this quality but the combination of the simple gameplay and multi-path level design (including some hidden paths) work well together to encourage the player to wonder “what if I had gone the other way?” Games which allow the player to see the ends of all roads, metaphorically speaking, and all possibilities lose some of that quality of immersion.
EXTINCTION?: Finally, as an extension of the first point, there’s something compelling about playing a game in which the goal is to survive, but not only for the sake of surviving – rather that of staving off extinction. The game intentionally uses those particular terms – extinct and doomed – and the finality those words evoke tended make me consider humanity’s existential crisis and the ultimate (perhaps?) destination point of all things, oblivion. The player’s actions in the game seem to not only represent the struggle of a single creature to survive, but also symbolizing all life’s universal fight to outpace extinction. The presence of your fellow dinosaurs and mammals running through the stage heightens this feeling. Although the player actually can succeed in guiding his dinosaur to safety – ostensibly at least – the feeling of grim inevitability runs consistently throughout the experience. Pretty deep for a little browser game, huh?
Some things I would have had on my wish list if I was on the dev team:
- higher danger from other creatures (being trampled, eaten, etc.)
- a better feeling of acceleration and momentum
- being able to select or unlock different species of dinosaurs (and mammals?) with different starting stats and access to certain areas of the map – i.e. higher starting strength vs. lower starting speed, small tunnels, etc.
This should of course be incredibly obvious upon spotting a screenshot of the game…er…maybe not?
Despite the fact that this image is downright adorable… the point seems to be that the game design capitalizes on the player’s preconceptions of what such a cute-looking indie 8-bit style platformer should seemingly be like. However while music and visuals and simple gameplay initially points in that direction, the game ultimately leads to a quite different experience from the player’s expectations.
It manages to make a smoothly gradual transition into unease, menace and beyond while simultaneously shocking me at least a few times. The sound and music were great, but the control and level design certainly could have been expanded on. However the effect the game aimed to create was certainly not hurt at all by these minor shortcomings.
Very worth the few minutes it takes for a playthrough.
