What’s the Point of Limbo?

Since its release on XBox Live Arcade in 2010, Limbo has racked up awards and generated a substantial amount of critical writing. I didn’t have XBox Live when it came out, so I’ve been waiting on a PC port. When it finally came out on Steam late last year, I jumped on it. This turned out to be a disappointing experience.

Given the critical reception Limbo received, I expected one of two things. Either this would be a game that pushed some boundaries or a game that was remarkably well put-together. Limbo is neither. It follows well-worn traditions in art games, and its design lacks direction. It has a beautiful audiovisual style that tries to create a unique atmosphere, but other elements of the game undermine this atmosphere at every opportunity.

I could easily forgive the lack of novelty if the design were coherent, and I’d forgive the incoherence if it had something new to offer. As it is, Limbo is neither special nor well-crafted, though it feints enough in both directions to stand as an impressive achievement in artistic ass-covering. Its unusual visual style lets it be categorized as an art game at first glance, while its overall polish invites judgement by more conventional criteria. This is clever maneuvering that, if successful, lowers expectations in all directions. If unsuccessful, it offers the opportunity to fail in multiple ways at once.

Short Reviews: Swimming Upstream

Being slow with the blog for a while means my backlog of experimental games has grown even more overwhelming. Today I’ll be covering some games from the June Experimental Gameplay Project, theme “MASHUP,” so you can see how far behind I am. There’s nothing for it but to keep pushing forward against all odds!

Squirrels with Machine Guns and Towers of the Prophet

Most of the June games took the theme in a pretty straightforward direction, mashing up two genres to see how the mechanics combined. For that reason, there weren’t any mind-blowers this month, but it was a great platform for simple gameplay experiments. One thing I found curious is that I really enjoyed both Squirrels and Towers, which use tower defense as one half of their equations, despite the fact that tower defense is perhaps my least favorite game genre. Luke O’Connor’s Squirrels combines it with a quirky platforming thing, while Towers by M.C. Spross combines it with an RPG.  It’s the latter that I could see really destroying my life, if it were polished up. This would seem to imply that my problem with tower defense games is just the inability to run around doing stuff that relates to the defense-building. I’ll never be a real strategist.

BookwormTris and Coglitz

Another theme this month is games that I found instantly addictive. Along with Towers of the Prophet, this includes BookwormTris, the Scrabble/Tetris mashup from Steve Gargolinski. The control scheme is quite awkward, but it sucked about half an hour of my life away. I’m told there are commercial games in this mold, but I’m furiously trying to forget that information for the sake of my health and productivity. I don’t think I’m familiar with the source games for Jonathan Giroux’s Coglitz, but it’s similarly difficult, awkward, and impossible to put down. Are mashups a good path to addictive gameplay? It makes sense. You get hooked on a game when it can be picked up easily but is hard to master. Combining two familiar gameplay styles could be a shortcut to that.

Life

The artists were remarkably well behaved this month, but it just wouldn’t be an Experimental Gameplay Project without at least one game that flips off the theme, jumps out the window, and comes up with something neat. Arnaud de Bock’s Life doesn’t seem like much in its component parts: you’re a spermy thing, you collect stuff, things fall apart for no reason around you, and there are a lot of collision bugs. Yet it all adds up to something that doesn’t feel much like anything else. It also has quite a striking visual style, as seen above.

Impasse

Games where your movement changes the environment are surprisingly hard. It’s inherently confusing when an action with well-known consequences is suddenly given consequences outside of its usual behavior. Impasse, a slick little puzzle game by Wanderlands, has a nicely stripped-down mechanic that uses that confusion to good effect. The levels are small and well-designed enough that you don’t lose your mind following the mechanics. They’re hard enough to follow on their own.

 

 

 

Short Reviews: Chemical Reactions

This is up a bit late. I blame Labor Day! Also, getting swamped at work. Anyway, last week I was mainly playing through last May’s Experimental Gameplay Project entries, with the theme of “ZOOM.”

The Camera Made Me Fat! and Broken Zoomometer [direct download link]
Both of these games use a pretty straightforward interpretation of the theme: scrolling in and out makes your avatar grow or shrink while the rest of the level stays the same size.  There’s nothing too deep going on here, but it turns out that this is a pretty fun mechanic. Both games also use chaotic, hard-to-control movement schemes, which adds a lot of entertainment value when the physics of your avatar keep changing.

Secondario: Mushroom Overdose
From Alexis Andre, a Mario clone in which you a) have only ten seconds to finish each level and b) are constantly growing larger. In practice, this means a lot of micro-Mario levels with very precise jump timing. If you are not great at platformers, this is a good game to make you furious! The neat thing about this game is that it dramatically throws off your ability to predict how your avatar will respond to your actions. It’s very hard to teach yourself not to judge jumps by your current size, but by the size you’ll be when you land. Freaky stuff.

Chrysopoeia
This entry from One Life Remains is by far my favorite of this month’s entries. You are a small red square who regularly generates little blocks with words on them. Those little blocks are drawn to other blocks of the same color, and when they combine they get bigger. Each color also has its own movement behavior. When enough of them combine, you can finally read the word that’s written on them. And if any block touches you, you die.

This basic setup produces a lot of nuance in the gameplay. It’s a bit safer to have a few large blocks rather than a lot of small blocks, so a good strategy is to try to drop your blocks so that they combine with others already on the field. Of course, this means getting close to existing blocks, which is dangerous itself. Growing blocks is also how you figure out what they say, which is the real motivation to the game. I was able to decipher “vision,” “serial,” “stance,” and “preform.” One type of block – black with orange border – continually eluded me, even after about half an hour of desperate attempts to build it up to legibility.

Chrysopoeia means turning lead into gold. What it means in the context of the game isn’t obvious, but the gameplay here could serve as a metaphor for many things. I thought of it as the artistic process. You’re building something, but you’re not sure what it is yet, and if you try to jump the gun you’ll ruin it. Beautiful game.

A Closed World
I came on this one via Robert Yang. Yang’s blog has a critique of the game from the perspective of LGBTQ media pitfalls, and one of the developers showed up in the comments to argue for his work. It’s a great discussion, check it out. For my part, I was mostly interested in the game because it uses combat-style conversation mechanics. It’s basically a rock-paper-scissors thing: enemies have three attack styles, and you have three defense styles, each of which is strongest against one attack type.  In a battle, you figure out which attack your enemy is using against you, and counter with the strongest defense. Sometimes the enemy blocks out one of your tactics. You can also “breathe” to regain health.

So it’s not anything too sophisticated, but I still like to see people trying. It’s also interesting to see a game that runs into the problem suggested by Ari in a comment on one of my Mouthwash posts: won’t combat-like dialogue get annoyingly repetitive?  Your mileage may vary, but in the case of A Closed World, I found myself reacting differently to the unvoiced dialogue of the enemies and the worded dialogue of my avatar. By unvoiced dialogue I mean something like “The demon taunts you!” as opposed to worded dialogue like “Why won’t you let me live my life?” I tuned out the unvoiced dialogue pretty quickly. I perceived it as an indicator of the game state, and abstracted it accordingly. But the worded dialogue, which was repeated, did get annoying, even in something as short as A Closed World. A useful lesson for the future of conversation systems, I think.

Short Reviews: Gormless?!

I was pretty busy this week (also hurricane), but I got a few steps forward in the backlog. One odd thing about this week is that I played two games in a row that prominently used the term “gormless.” I have never encountered that word before, so that weirded me out. It also coincided with my listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland for the first time in a while. So what I’m getting at is that for the past week I’ve had this song stuck in my head that goes, “Gormless, gormless, moonlight slaking on a midnight lake…”

I’m sorry you had to hear all that, but sometimes having a blog is about making strangers deal with the weird shit in your brain. So here’s what I’ve been playing this week!

Alone in the Park
Right on the heels of my recent ramblings about game comedy, here’s a game with genuinely funny writing. Katharine Neil’s short adventure mostly has you running around collecting things for an array of weird characters. Not a lot of depth to the gameplay, but your interactions with the characters are a blast. I’d love to see more from this developer, but it looks like this is all she’s made so far.

Chance of a Lifetime
The next two are from the May Experimental Gameplay Project (theme: Zoom!). First up is another from Steve Gargolinski, whose Hero Test I reviewed previously.  A cool concept, but much overexplained. The use of extensive voice-over to explain the game’s theme and mechanics was also a feature of Hero Test, but there it worked as part of the joke.

This strategy is a less natural fit for the tone of Chance of a Lifetime, which is about a young man out hunting for UFOs. In this case, the constant voice-over drains the setting of its mystery and tension. Since the voice-over in this game is the protagonist’s internal monologue, it also blocks the player’s identification with their avatar. This is not an automatically bad thing, but I don’t see how it contributes to the themes in Chance. Rather, I think the use of an internal monologue instead of, say, displaying tutorial text is meant to increase immersion. That it did the opposite in my case is interesting.

Lifetime
Well, this one ran long and eventually turned into my Robot Geek post for this week. I’d try to wrap this up more gracefully, but I need to get this stuff sorted before the power goes out. HOLLIS OUT

Short Reviews: Awkward Attachments

Just a few short reviews this week. I had the bad luck to run into a few more buggy/unplayable games than usual. Comes with the territory, that. On to the games that worked!

Block Push Championship
Another great puzzler from Stephen Lavelle. One of his favorite maneuvers in these type of games is to put you in control of an unwieldy set of objects spread out in space, instead of a single point-based avatar. (Other examples include Constellation Z, Whale of Noise, and The Rose Garden.) Block Push Championship does something similar with a Zelda-style sliding-blocks puzzle, by having the blocks attach to you and each other every time you touch them. As with most of Lavelle’s games, it’s easier to figure out how to play the game than it is to describe your strategy. Pure procedural learning!

Don’t Go Alone
A Ludum Dare entry by pgil that puts you in the shoes of the escorted NPC on an escort quest. It has a Little Red Riding Hood theme, and the contributions of the powerful hero, while helpful, are not entirely welcome. After a point, his indiscriminately flung attacks start to hurt you too, and he keeps stealing your potions. It has a rushed ending (as pgil admits), but it’s a clever idea.

Vicious Cycles 2011
Like Planescape: Torment, this is another case of a game that turns the failure-restart cycle into a part of the storyline. In this case, you play a time traveler whose job is to maintain a particular timeline by disarming a bomb. Failing to prevent the explosion loops you and your supervisor back to the beginning for another try. You pick up information in failed timelines that you can use to solve the puzzle in the successful timeline. It’s tightly plotted, and the little bits of information you pick up about the game world are kept in the background. Nice stuff.

Short Reviews: Terrible Gameplay is Hilarious

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I’ve been tweeting links and brief assessments of all the experimental shorts I play. Most of these don’t end up getting full reviews here or at Robot Geek, but I like to record my thoughts on them anyhow. In addition to that, I’m going to start writing slightly longer comments on most of them in review roundup posts like this. They’ll go up every week or so, and I’ll have a little more space to talk about each game.

So, here’s what I’ve been playing this week! For a little background: this blog was pretty much on hiatus for a year, and during that time I kept saving links to games that looked interesting in case I ever started it up again. I did, and since then I’ve been working through this backlog at an agonizingly slow pace. That’s why, for example, today’s post contains a bunch of games from April’s Experimental Gameplay Project. Eventually I’ll catch up!

Second Person Shooter Zato
A clever idea, executed pretty well. Works like a 3D arena shooter, except that the camera is attached to the enemy’s head rather than your own. When there are multiple enemies, you get a splitscreen. To get rid of enemies, you have to spin around and shoot into each approaching camera. I found that it messed up my sense of right and left quite a bit. I kept turning around the long way, wasting precious time. I played until I died and took off. It’s a fun little game, and I dig the smirking Gravity Bone-esque style of my avatar.

Hero Test 
The rest of today’s games are from the April EGP, which had the theme “Cheap Clones.” This theme produced a lot of parody games. Steve Gargolinski’s Hero Test is a fun one, which plays on Portal and other games in what Gargolinski aptly terms the “Robo-Asshole genre.”  In this case, rather than a hostile guide who blocks your progress or encourages you with tough love, you have one who grudgingly lets you pass through a number of challenges at which you fail. It’s a nice little twist on the trope. Also, having an avatar who’s terrible at everything you do is just hilarious to me for some reason.  I think QWOP is the funniest game ever made.

Escape the Cage
Another clever piece from Aaron Oldenburg, creator of Depression.  Escape the Cage screws with room escape games by letting you play in two modes: one in which you  try to escape a room by collecting a typically random pile of items, and one in which you stand outside the door and open it whenever you get impatient enough. The length of time you wait at the door is then saved and applied to the next game played in escaper mode. The result is that the escaper ends up just screwing around for a minute, and then the door opens. It’s an unexpected way of using mechanics to highlight the absurdity of the genre.

Fleaz
A baffling YouTube game that is, in theory, a parody of Nintendo DS pet games.  I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with this game because I chose to play it in 3D. Doing so takes you to a medium-shot 3D view of a 25-year-old computer on which the game is playing in 2D. This is amazing, and while it made it impossible for me to read the text or play the game, I respect it aesthetically. And hey, that’s three really funny games in a row!

Depression (2011)

Aaron Oldenburg’s Depression is a short entry in this past February’s Experimental Gameplay Project. If you’re not following the EGP, you should. The organizers come up with a short theme every month, and participants come up with a game prototype in seven days to fit it. You end up with lots of short, simple experiments that are occasionally really fantastic. For example, Loop Raccord [review] was an EGP game on the theme “Neverending.”

Games that take the theme as a starting point and glide off into something they just feel like doing are frequently the most interesting. The theme for February was “ASCII,” and the results were subsequently full of text used in unusual ways. Depression stood out not because its use of text was particularly clever, but because it presented such an elegant interaction metaphor.

Depression uses your webcam as the only input. When you start the game, the screen is full of eyes represented by the word “eye” in white text. The camera tracks the position of your face, the center of which is marked by the word “face.”  The eyes move around randomly until there’s a face nearby, at which point they swarm towards it. If enough of the eyes gather around your position, the screen changes to the mirror view you see in the screenshot above. The textual eyes form a noisy background to a silhouette of your actual face, as recorded by the camera: note my absurd Marlo Thomas flip in the lower right-hand corner for orientation. This mode lasts for a few seconds, then returns to the original view.

This results in a dead-simple but surprisingly effective game about social anxiety. As the title hints, the game replicates the fear of being looked at when in a state of emotional distress. Social anxiety is very solipsistic. You see other people in terms of how they see you, which is why the enemies in Depression are eyes and not other faces.  You can try to dodge these eyes by moving your face around, but they’ll eventually get to you. And when they do, you get an alarming reminder that your image is actually being recorded. A game that uses a webcam like this can make you feel exposed in a way that other forms of input can’t.  It’s hard to escape the feeling that the game itself is watching you.

One of the fun things about Depression is figuring out strategies to keep the eyes away. These often turn out to be pretty good extensions of the central metaphor. You can, of course, look away from the screen. This keeps your face from being recognized, but you’re also not meaningfully playing the game anymore.  You can also cover your face or the camera with your hands. When there’s no face in view, the eyes just wander around randomly. This isn’t exactly a winning state, but at least you’re protected from the mirror screen. You can always avoid scrutiny by not showing up.

My favorite strategy took a slightly different direction. I grabbed a nearby Polaroid of me and my boyfriend and held it up to the camera. When there are two faces in view, the eyes usually get evenly divided between them.  This keeps them from reaching the critical mass that causes the mirror screen to appear. You could, of course, do the same thing by playing Depression as a co-op game. Having a partner makes things so much easier.

Pathos (2011)

The relationship between the player and the avatar varies a lot between games. Sometimes the avatar character is meant to be an unembellished extension of the player, as in any first-person game with a faceless, voiceless protagonist. Those are increasingly rare in mainstream games, however. Usually the avatar has some character of her own, whether this is a character that the player mostly determines or one fixed by the designer. The more fixed characters can lead to a strange experience of a game. This is particularly true when the player feels disconnected from the avatar character, as Michael Abbot recently discussed in relation to LA Noire‘s Cole Phelps.

Sash Mackinnon’s Pathos is a short game that takes this disconnect even further. The avatar character is a boy who jumps into a mysterious light in his room at bedtime. You can occasionally control him by clicking your mouse, but much of the time he stands in place talking to himself. When you try to click during these periods, a “No” icon flashes in the corner of the screen. Later you spur him onwards by shutting off lights behind him or clicking a button to lower a platform.

The disconnect comes not only from this limited interaction but also from the fact that the boy is increasingly terrified of you and your manipulations of him. In the end, you get an avatar of your own and chase the boy down, revealing that you were the monster under the bed all along. Mackinnon has stated that he intended the awkward interaction to be a metaphor for this adversarial relationship. The limited controls are meant to be frustrating at first, until you realize that you really are moving the boy against his will.

This raises the question of who exactly the protagonist is in this story. If the protagonist is the central character that the audience most identifies with, we clearly have two candidates here. The boy arouses more sympathy: he is telling us his thoughts, we can see his facial expressions, and he’s a scared little kid. The monster is an obvious villain, but it’s also the character the player controls. And while we don’t hear the monster’s inner thoughts, we are manipulated into sharing them. We get impatient with the boy’s slowness, and frustrated with our inability to control him. We may identify with the boy emotionally while identifying with the monster in a more direct way.

Pathos is a simple game, but it does a good job of pointing out that traditional definitions of protagonists and antagonists may need to be expanded a bit when it comes to game stories. What does identification mean when it comes to game characters? Is the avatar always the hero? Is the player? These are questions that bear more investigation.

Loop Raccord (2010)

“I see storytelling as a game: whenever I am making a film, a book or a comic, I set a series of rules for myself and I try to play with them to reach their limits. Watching a movie or reading a book is not a passive experience.

The viewer/reader can perceive those rules if he feels that they are set for him, and he can play with you, trying to decode them to anticipate the author, and be surprised and amused whenever he cannot.

So in many senses, even if I have no specific game-making background, I feel like I’ve been making games for a while.”

- Nicolai Troshinsky

In a recent post, I talked a bit about my love for experimental film and how that influences the way I see experimental games. So I was pretty excited when I came across Nicolai Troshinsky’s Loop Raccord while catching up on experimental games. Loop Raccord was one of the finalists for the Nuovo Award at this year’s Independent Game Festival. The nominees make an impressively diverse lineup that says good things about where experimental gaming is right now. But I found Loop Raccord especially charming.

The game is inspired by found footage work like Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film, where pieces of film from existing movies are edited together in new combinations. When making such a film, one thing an editor may want to do is find some harmony of movement between two dissimilar clips, spliced back to back. Loop Raccord turns the process of searching for that movement harmony into a simple puzzle game. Each level is a grid made up of short found-footage clips, each of which contains some movement through the frame.

The player’s job is to match the timing of the clips one at a time to create a continuous path through the grid. At each stage, there is a leading clip whose movement you are meant to match, and an active clip that you can pause and scroll through to set up the timing. The game scores your raccords based on how precisely timed they are.

I eventually got the hang of finding perfect raccords, usually by focusing on the leading clip rather than the active clip. But there was one combination of clips that absolutely threw me. It’s shown in the screenshot above. The leading clip features a man slamming what looks like the trunk of a car closed, and the active clip is a boy sitting down while someone closes a door in the background. And try as I might, I could not force myself to sync the two clips in terms of motion. Every single time, entirely against my will, I synced them so that the two doors shut at the same time. Even when I realized what I was doing, I couldn’t stop myself. I was only able to pass the stage by clicking randomly on the active clip until it lined up by chance.

It seems like Troshinsky is interested in such puzzles of perception. Another one of his games, Motion Columns, is a match-3 game in which you match items in terms of motion patterns instead of color or shape. It’s phenomenally difficult. In the description, Troshinsky suggests looking slightly away from the game screen, in order to use the superior motion detection of your peripheral vision to pick out the patterns. These are games that push the player to struggle against her customary modes of perception. When you get a few good raccords in a row, you start to see the film clips in a different way. You abstract them into motion patterns, and for a little while, you stop seeing the man, or the door, or the words. Just like you have to stop seeing the colors to get into the flow of Motion Columns. But these states are fragile. If you screw up, the colors and the people overload your senses once again.

The terrific quote that starts this post is from an interview with Troshinsky by IndieGames.com. I’ll probably write more about it later. For now, I’ll just note that a lot of resistence to experimental film, and other experimental forms, comes from the viewer not knowing that they are expected to play along. I suppose that gives art games a little bit of an advantage.

Loved (2010)

The hostile guide has become a common trope in art and indie games (not to mention some bigger games like Portal).  Designers can’t get enough of having a disembodied voice berate you and lead you astray.  In Seven Minutes (review), a furious floating head tries to convince you that you can only win the game by not playing it. In Time Fcuk, your future self seems to give you advice at first but gets increasingly confused and alarming.  A 2010 Global Game Jam entry called depict1 takes this to its logical extreme: everything the guide tells you about how to play the game is wrong.

I suspect this trend arises from designers grappling with the use of tutorials in games.  It’s a common complaint that modern games seemingly require longer and longer tutorials and more and more guidance.  In the original Legend of Zelda, you got this:

While in The Ocarina of Time and subsequent Zelda games, you get a little fairy that follows you throughout the game and constantly tells you what to do next.  Whether this expansion of the tutorial is a necessary consequence of games getting more complicated, the industry appealing to less experienced players, the realization that no one actually RsTFM, or just lazy design remains a lively area of debate.

Whatever the reason, anxiety or annoyance over heavy guidance in modern games seems to be inspiring designers to play with the aggressive aspects of this guidance.  In a sense, the fact that a game like depict1 or Time Fcuk remains playable despite the unhelpfulness of its instructions serves as a counterexample of sorts to the need for such instructions.  Mostly, though, the dissonance is just really funny.

Alexander Ocias’s Loved, on the other hand, is a short platformer in which the hostile guide is used to dramatic rather than comedic effect.  Throughout the game, the guide asks you questions, often responding angrily or cruelly to the answers.  It also gives you several instructions within the game, some of which are helpful and some of which will get you killed.  If you follow these instructions, the guide rewards you by adding detail to the blocky game world, making it easier to see the platforms and spikes you’re dealing with.  If you disobey, colorful blocks of noise begin to surround you, to the point where you can’t see the environment anymore.

This all very effectively serves Loved‘s overall metaphor of a game as an abusive relationship.  If you do what the game wants, things get easier, but it’s all very demeaning (and the game itself will hurt you sometimes).  If you refuse, the game gets harder, which makes it more rewarding when you do beat it.  Your rejection of the abuse becomes a visual rejection of the game environment itself, which you nonetheless have to navigate to escape.  The extent to which Ocias fine-tunes this metaphor and builds it into the game’s design is truly impressive, and I found Loved to be a very affecting experience as a result.

It is exciting to see a clever comedic trope like the hostile guide doing more emotional heavy lifting.  Part of me suspects that comedy has an easier time discovering narrative innovations than drama.  It’s promising to see this process happening in games.