Walking the line between esoteric art and nonsensical elitism can often be the downfall of a good idea, as the latter prevents large parts of the audience from connecting with your message. In narrative-heavy games, there is always a need for the player to understand what's happening along the way, but being too obvious is boring, while complete abstraction tends to be confusing and pointless. Suffice to say that there's an art to telling a story that pulls in the player, but doesn’t beat them over the head with a bland message.
I've been playing video games since I was a kid in the 1980s with a Commodore 64, but it wasn't until a decade later that I really threw myself into gaming. Up to that point I'd played with a NES and of course that C64, but as much as I enjoyed it, nothing had truly gripped me and sucked me into the wide world of video games that I now know and love. It took the release of the original Doom in 1993 to hook me once and for all, and I've been loving life ever since.
It's been a while since I've been able to write about a game and post a new post, so let's ease ourselves back into it with a tiny little game that managed to surprise and delight me in unexpected ways. Although I must stress that my thoughts on this game are genuine, and are by no means satirical, which is something I feel the need to point out after reading other interpretations that failed to find any value in the experience at all.
Life has been pretty good in the world of licensed games for the last decade or so, but it wasn't always that way. If you've been around long enough you might remember when the term "licensed" could be synonymous with "rushed" or just "crap". Thankfully though, these days when a licensed game is released, fans of whatever franchise is being given the treatment can look on with interest and expect something worth diving into.
When I finished playing Life Is Strange 2, I didn't really have much to say that I hadn't already touched on when I wrote about the first game. While the story was something new, everything else was just more of the same, including the nauseating and oh-so-hip characterisations that kept me at arm's length for the entire game. However, now Dontnod are back with their latest take on the formula that has kept them going for a while. Could this be a breath of fresh air, or just another dredge through niche cultural hipster life?
Something I never like reading about in relation to video games is whether or not a particular title is "no different from a book" or "the same as a movie". It's nothing new, because it's often the argument that's made against walking-simulators and visual novels. Although when I read these kind of perspectives, I'm left wondering if the writer has ever actually read a book or watched a movie.
There has to be a point in life when you realise that interacting with art can be an experience without form, or end. When I studied philosophy, I quickly learned that a lot of people really hate wrestling with questions that have no immediate answer. It seemed that no matter how compelling the discourse was, some of us can't handle a lack of definition.
How do you take a familiar game concept and turn it around to be something original and unique? Then again, how do you make this new iteration something interesting and compelling, or is it enough to be different? These questions and more will be raised when anyone dives into Vertiginous Golf.
I might be talking out of turn here from a position of ignorance, but I've always seen point-and-click adventure games as one of the most accessible genres to make. It's partly because tools like Adventure Game Studio exist, which sells itself on the premise that anyone can use the program to make an adventure game, but also because they seem to be one of the most prolific genres around.
In the last few years, I've come to the understanding that a bit of narrative surrealism might well be up there as one of my favourite genres in gaming. When I was younger, all I needed was some fun first person shooting action from id Software or Epic Games to keep me amused. These days however, I really appreciate how deep a good narrative game can take you.
With Steam Greenlight slowly dying at the side of the road, it might be worth having a think about some of its relative success stories. I say relative, because there's a bit of a well-earned stigma around Greenlit games, which are arguably considered to be of lower quality than the dreaded Early Access title. On the flip side, we now have a bunch of weird little games that probably would never have seen the light of day without the Greenlight entry point.
