The Unfinished Swan

          Video games have been struggling with their identities recently. Much like pubescent teens, video games have been growing in size, intellect, and maturity. Sure they make mistakes and things can get a bit hairy, but overall they have been moving in the right direction. But as this self-awareness grows, questions about what exactly this medium is and how it works are bound to arise. Self-reflexive games, or games that either bluntly or obliquely tackle the subject of games themselves, have started to become a lot more common. The Bioshock series is the most notable of the bunch, ignoring Bioshock 2, but Little Inferno, Far Cry: Blood Dragon, and Thomas was Alone have all in their own style begun to contribute to the conversation of what video games are and should be. The Unfinished Swan, developed by Giant Sparrow for the PS3, continues this trend while also providing an affecting story about family.

            The story is told in the form of a children’s book. A boy named Monroe loses his mother and, when taken to an orphanage, is allowed to take only one of her many paintings with him. He chooses the unfinished painting of a swan which was her favorite. One night, the swan escapes through a door he’d never seen before, and Monroe finds himself in a vast and magical land. As Monroe travels through the empty kingdom looking for the swan, he finds snippets of a story about the king who ruled the place. Everything that happens in the story is very whimsical, but not always without weight. The story is full of loss and regret and can at times become very sober, but it is never somber. It is well-balanced with humor and a light touch. Art and the act of creation are also very important in the story, but that comes out more in the gameplay.

            This game is no simple platformer. Yes there is jumping and climbing, but from the very beginning you are forced to reveal the world around you. The game begins with a solid white screen. Upon experimentation, you realize that the only things your character can do are jump and throw little black balls of paint. The paint reveals that there is a world around you. The developers cleverly placed white objects in the world, and the only way you can move through it is by finding them. Though the objects and the walls are there no matter what you do, painting them feels like you are bringing them into being. You wander around painting everything until you eventually find shadows. Then there are huge cities and labyrinthine mazes that you can still splatter with black paint, occasionally finding barrels or streetlamps hidden against the white walls. Eventually your paint can make vines grow or lights shine; getting to the point where you can actually paint platforms to get to higher places. It’s impossible not to think parallels to the developers as you do this. The artifice of the game is constantly revealed by the gameplay. I’m not sure why necessarily, but I know it was on purpose. There is a breaking of the fourth wall during the credit sequence I won’t go into that makes it all but certain this was their intention. It may be that the developers were drawing parallels between classic artistic mediums and video games. There may be a personal story, as this feels like a very personal game. I can’t be sure. I implore you to play it and tell me what you think.

            As important as art is to this game, it would have been a shame if it was anything but beautiful. Luckily the game employs a starkly beautiful style fitting that fits it perfectly. The buildings in the cities look like something you find in Greece with pure white walls and pale blue roofs. All of the lines are bold because of the pervasive use of white in the early levels and black in the later. The music is also very spare, using a lot of chimes and piano. It’s all very indie.

            Of course it isn’t perfect. The Unfinished Swan can feel very boring some times. It doesn’t drag exactly, but it definitely meanders. If most games these days are like a Michael Bay film, this game is more like an episode of “Winnie the Pooh”. If you stick with it, though, you won’t help but be charmed by it. It’s so sweet and sincere it’s hard not to. The action also begins to pick up slightly near the end, if that’s really all you need. In the end, this is an effective little story about art, family, and all of the other things I’ve already said it was about. They pack a lot of feeling into what is about a two to three hour game. The visuals are stunning, the gameplay is fun and surprisingly varied, and it’s just so damn nice. We need more games like this. Hell, we just need more of this in general. A piece of media without a drop of snark or cynicism is practically unheard of today. I don’t know if this trend of thoughtfulness will continue, and I don’t even know if the developers intended to make any kind of a statement with this game. I just know that I become more encouraged almost any time I play something new these days. Hotline Miami notwithstanding.

             Also, Terry Gilliam lends his voice to the game. I was surprised as you are.

Hotline Miami

            I will never understand the masochism that allows people to enjoy unbearably difficult games. In the beginning, the beginning here meaning the 8 and 16-bit eras, video games were hard because the challenge was the only thing they had going for them. If a video game was easy, you were done with it and probably never wanted to play it again. If a game was difficult enough, it could become legendary. Most gamers still know the Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start) because of Contra. Cheating was almost necessary to beat that game. Nowadays there is no reason for the difficulty to be that high. Storytelling in games, even small indie games with archaic graphics, has advanced greatly. This has allowed games to not be so hair-tearingly frustrating. Developers can balance the difficulty to give enough challenge that winning feels satisfying, but not so difficult that you want to smash everything you own in anger because you’ve died eighty times in the same room. Hotline Miami spits in the face of this development, then douses it in gasoline and lights it on fire.

            The game is about a psychopath who murders a lot of people because he keeps getting phone messages from some unknown source. Every once in a while he also talks to a bunch of guys in animal masks. In between missions he goes to various local establishments like bars and video stores, which all seem to be run by the same clerk. While there, the clerk offers him something for free while saying a bunch of cryptic stuff, and then the psychopath protagonist leaves. It’s not much of a story, but it’s intriguing. You know that there’s something weird going on as you’re playing, and it’s tantalizing enough to make you want to keep play for a while. The ultra-violence is potentially a little off-putting, but it works with the seedy Miami underground they’ve built. What would Scarface be without a lot of blood? The art style is also extremely cool. Everything is 80’s neon. The music is jarring and haunting, but can also be funky at times. Unfortunately, that’s all I can tell you about the story. There’s an 80’s psychopath, it’s violent, and the style is cool. Why is that all I can tell you? I quit at Chapter 11 because I couldn’t take the gameplay anymore.

            The actual style of gameplay isn’t the problem. It’s a top-down shooter kind of like the online flash game Endless War or, more appropriately for the style of the game, like the 80’s arcade games Smash TV and Robotron. This vantage point provides more of a tactical view in practical terms, and it allows more distance from the character in terms of narrative. Unfortunately I found the actual controls to be incredibly loose. I was constantly running into walls when I was trying to make it through a doorway, missing people right in front of me with an attack, or opening and closing doors when I really didn’t want to. While these may seem like minor problems, they become vastly more important when every shot is a one hit kill against you. It doesn’t matter what kind of weapon they have; it’s going to kill you. This forces you to think more tactically, which is usually fun and rewarding. In Hotline Miami it’s tedious and frustrating.

            For one, the enemies will always see you. They can’t see through walls, although eventually there will be windows they can shoot you through, but if you’re in the room with them then they know you’re there. You can’t sneak up on these guys for some reason. I have walked into bathrooms in that game where a man is urinating and could have no way of knowing I was there, and yet after one step he spun around and shot me in the face. Who is so cautious and fast that they can stop peeing and shoot you in the face in the time it takes to cross a room? But the most egregious, stupid, and frustrating part of the game is the complete unpredictability of the enemy AI. The room that made me quit the game had me start by busting into a room with a guy at the end. I didn’t have a choice; the door just opens. Having a shotgun, I was forced to shoot him rather than take him down quietly.

Every single time I shot that guy, a different configuration of enemies came from different directions. I never knew how many guys I would have to kill, or how many were waiting for me in the different rooms. I could never get a feel for where I should go or what I should do, and I inevitably met a horrible end every single time. It was infuriating. I woke my girlfriend up just from yelling at the stupid screen. Also, it’s not like I could sneak around them to advance. The only way to advance is to kill everyone in the level. So even though I knew it was a bad idea I had to go into a room with three guys on multiple occasions, try to shoot them, miss because the aiming is atrocious, and then get shot and pummeled to death by the Russian mob. I understand that this game is a love letter to the difficult games of the past. The retro style, the blocky graphics, and the frustrating difficulty make this more than obvious. Here’s the thing about those old games though; they were predictable. The reason it was ok that Super Mario Brothers or whatever was hard was that there was a pattern. If you could figure out the pattern, you had the level. I still remember most of the Sonic and Knuckles. There is no pattern in Hotline Miami. Guys will come at you and you have to figure something out because they have every advantage. It sucks.

            This is not a game that was made for me. I like stories and worlds I can get lost in, not dying over and over until I happen to get lucky and make it past an area. If a game is going to be difficult, it has to be consistent. It has to be fun. It can’t feel like you’re being unfairly dispatched by imaginary gangsters. I really wanted to like Hotline Miami. It’s weird, and has a really cool soundtrack. Unfortunately, loose controls and the frustrating difficulty really hold this game back. I hated it. Feel free to call me a wuss in the comments.

           

            Sorry this is a day late. I was at my cousin’s wedding reception most of yesterday. Everything will be back to normal next week.

Thomas Was Alone

            Thomas was Alone is not as simple as it looks. This game, developed by Mike Bithell, looks from the screenshots like something a child with a surprisingly robust knowledge of game design could do; all of the characters are quadrilaterals and the environments all exist in weirdly-geometric abstract spaces. Even the gameplay is pretty simple for the most part, with the player jumping from platform to platform while avoiding water and spikes. It sounds like every 90’s platformer from Super Mario Bros. to Aladdin, but without any enemies to fight. The difference, as always, is in the story. Thomas was Alone is a beautifully written game, and the integration between the story and the gameplay is done exceptionally well. No game has ever made you love a rectangle as much as this one will.

            The game starts with an AI spontaneously generating a personality. His name is Thomas. His first thought is that he’s alone, and his second thought is how he would like that to change. He proceeds through a few levels, making observations and generally wondering about his existence, when he comes across another AI named Chris. Chris is a surly guy who would rather not hang around Thomas if he can avoid it. Unfortunately for him, they need to work together to progress through the levels and continue moving up and to the right. AIs keep showing up, each with a different personality, jumping ability, and in some cases a special ability. Claire, for instance, can float. The player can switch between these characters with a simple push of a button. The player will need to use the skills, abilities, and varying heights of the group of friends to escape an evil cloud of pixels as well as wherever it is they are.

            Though the quadrilaterals never speak themselves in the game, the BAFTA-winning narrative performance of humorist Danny Wallace provides plenty of insight into the mind of an artificial intelligence. Each shape is infused with so much personality that you quickly become attached to them. It is truly remarkable how willing we are to anthropomorphize anything and everything. The narration is sharp and funny, but is often tinged with a bit of pensivity or even melancholy as the game progresses. This is aided by the wonderful score. The mixture of string instruments and mechanical beeps and boops is both atmospheric and evokes the mixture of the mechanical and the natural or spiritual embodied by the AI.

            While I really enjoyed this game, it is not perfect. There are some wonky control issues. Because the quadrilaterals don’t have legs, it’s hard to get a sense of where they are on the platform sometimes. This is especially true when you are trying to jump. A few of the jumps need every nanometer of space, but if you are slightly off then your character won’t jump at all. Also while the game isn’t ridiculously difficult, but there were a few times where I needed to restart many times because of poorly spaced checkpoints. There is also some question as to the actual message of the game. It raises interesting questions about the nature of life and friendship, as well as the necessity of sacrifice for the survival of a community. However, the game sort of just ends after a somewhat confusing stretch of plot. After a certain point in the game, and you will know it when you see it, everything feels sort of out of place. It left me more than a little puzzled considering how well-constructed the story had been up to that point. It isn’t horrible, and it isn’t so jarring that it ruins the game. It was just something I noticed could have been better.

            This is a truly great game. Even though it has some flaws and can be very simplistic at times, you become so invested in it and it is so charming that it’s hard not to like. The writing is superb, the gameplay is ingenious in its simplicity, and the sound design is spot on. It also raises a lot of big questions about the nature of life and community.

I highly recommend it.

            As a side note, I’ve realized lately that I don’t give a lot of bad reviews. The worst I’ve said about a game so far is that it’s just ok. Part of it is that I’ve mostly been reviewing cheap indie games I picked up in the Humble Bundle or for free. It’s hard to hate something when it’s cheap and you have no expectations. I try to point out the flaws in things, and I think I’m getting better at it, but it’s not always easy when you genuinely enjoyed something. I’m still getting the hang of this style of writing, so bear with me. Thanks for reading; I’m sure you are attractive and extremely intelligent. 

Far Cry: Blood Dragon

           Video games have a problem with being serious. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in the past decade or so developers decided that a video game needed to be super serious to be taken seriously. It needed to tackle big themes, make a statement about humanity, and chide us for enjoying violence as we shooting the weaponry they programmed into their game. This hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. Great games like The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite have been a direct result of this movement. Unfortunately, it also gave us the four player-character deaths in Modern Warfare 2 and the whiniest narrator since Holden Caulfield in Max Payne 3. The quality of the writing separates these games. Modern Warfare 2 is not exactly narrative heavy, while the story in Max Payne 3 serves only to slow-motion jump the player from one set piece to another with little to no regard for character development. A lack of awareness of how absurd they are also holds the games back from narrative greatness. The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite take a lot of time building characters and setting the rules for their respective worlds so that nothing feels out of place or too silly. Modern Warfare 2 has you fighting Russians in a fast food restaurant with Keith David. So what does any of this have to do with my game for the month, Far Cry: Blood Dragon? Well, to understand Blood Dragon, you have to understand the current climate surrounding game narratives and you have to understand its parent: Far Cry 3

            Far Cry 3 typifies games that take themselves too seriously. It tries to tell an affecting narrative sharing similar themes with Heart of Darkness while it also throws ridiculous drug-fueled hallucination sequences and one-dimensional characters at you. It expects you to care about a bunch of rich white kids with little to no redeeming qualities while the main character, king of the rich white kids, lives out his own personal white native/white savior narrative. Then to make the disconnect even greater the game plops you on an open world island which makes forgetting the gist of the story very easy, and gives you a number of silly missions to take away any of the power the story has left. The narrative is atrocious, especially considering how much time they apparently put into it and how much game journalists apparently loved it (just read their Wikipedia page.) The game is saved by its stellar gameplay, which eschews any pretense of a serious game and lets you blow up sharks with grenades. So after playing this slog of a campaign and joy of an open-world experience, I was more than a little surprised to find out about Far Cry: Blood Dragon. I thought it was a joke at first; Far Cry 3 with 80’s home video trappings? It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s the beauty of it; in Blood Dragon Ubisoft has made a strong statement against their own game. They’ve made a campaign that is both compelling and fun. Unfortunately, they raised a whole new set of problems that prevent Blood Dragon from achieving greatness.

            First things first: the setup. You are Sergeant Rex Power Colt; a cyber commando just trying to make his way in this mixed up, post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. After unearthing a plot to destroy the world, you are forced to destroy the madman who thought it up by any means necessary. The odds are not in your favor; if the Omega soldiers don’t get you, the bevy of mutated animals probably will. But if you have enough skill and enough balls, you just might make it through…

            The writing in this game is seriously brilliant. Though the comedy may lean a little too heavily on references sometimes, Colt’s dialogue never fails to make me laugh. It doesn’t hurt that the man speaking that dialogue is none other than Kyle Reese himself, Michael Biehn. His gruff, sarcastic tone screams action hero, and his one-liners never grow old. The story is ridiculous, but it’s supposed to be and it never wears out its welcome. Some things that try to be bad (read: Syfy movies) succeed without being entertaining. They’re made that way simply because they know if they make something sound crazy enough people will watch it. Here, the insanity is genuine. You can see there is real love for the aesthetic and the style of the time. This especially shows in the obscurity of some of the references. The shotgun is called the Galleria 1991, a Terminator 2 reference. The game starts with an assault on a base from a helicopter while Little Richard’s “Long, Tall Sally” plays; a reference to Predator. It’s not subtle, but even if you don’t get the actual reference it enhances the experience. You know that “Long, Tall Sally” is the only song that would fit that sequence even if you’d never seen Predator. You inherently understand the African-American sidekick who needs to slip curse words into every sentence even if you’ve never seen a buddy cop film or The Thing. It’s ingrained in our cultural memory. The narrative isn’t Dickens; it’s Bruckheimer, and it’s perfect.

            In the middle of all of this 80’s nostalgia, however, are a lot of references to video games. Of course a lot of the references are to games at the dawn of the medium. For instance, the cut scenes in the game are not fully animated. Instead, they are drawn figures which move stiffly around a background. If you’re having trouble picturing it, imagine a child moving a paper doll around a picture of a house. Basically, it's this with better English. However, there are a lot of modern touches as well. They have a comically extended tutorial that includes a joke about free-to-play games. Also alongside a tracking bar that fits awesomely into the 80’s pastiche, there are hints and tips. This has been a very modern addition to the world of games and is used extensively in Far Cry 3, except that in Blood Dragon none of it is helpfully. It’s all painfully obvious tips like grenades explode or silly such as one that wonders why zip lines aren’t called sky ropes. It’s hard not to joke about the genre you’re working in when making a parody, but these jokes really stick out against the neon background of the game. Blood Dragon constantly jokes about the over-the-top style of these cheesy films, but it never questions why they existed. On the other hand it seems to constantly question the modern conventions it lampoons, especially those prevalent in Far Cry 3. A great example is the collecting missions. The player collects video tapes, watches TVs, and collects notes of one of the head doctors working with the main bad guy. This is similar to the idols and letters you collect in Far Cry 3. Whenever you collect something in Blood Dragon, though, Colt feels the need to say something like, “Six million credits to rebuild me, and I’m doing this?” The player-character actually thinks it’s pointless. This treatment of the different elements actually gives the game something of a message against all odds. Blood Dragon is constantly questioning why we aren’t making ridiculous things like we used to. Why do we have brown military shooters full of burly guys that say “Stay frosty” when we could have beefy dudes in jungles shooting aliens while insulting their mothers? It’s a plea for a badly needed does of invested frivolity; pointlessness with soul, if you will. Blood Dragon tries, even if just for a second, to teleport us to a time when film and the media were like vacuous babies. Everything was new and exciting, with insane outfits and androgynous men lived alongside ripped action heroes and a ridiculously folksy president. We still had the Soviet Union to direct our irrational hatred towards, and everything was right with the world. Blood Dragon wants everything to be simple again.

            Unfortunately, just like its vision of 80’s pop culture, this game is deeply flawed. For one the gameplay somehow, in some small but important way, took a hit. The guns just don’t feel right. Gone is the thrill of creeping through a jungle stalking bands of mercs. Most egregiously, the world is way too dark. In an attempt to make the neon of the lasers and the general Tron-inspired glow of the place pop, the environment is almost completely black. It’s incredibly difficult to get a sense of where you are and where you’re going when you’re lost in a great void of a landmass. It was hard to connect to the space on any level. The same can be said for the bases. One of the nice touches in the Far Cry 3 was that every base was different. The differences in Blood Dragon are so minute that they may as well not exist for the most part. This all held the game way back. Setting, level design, or mise-en-scene if you’re a fancy cinema studies major like myself is one of the most important aspects of a game. It is where your player will be spending most of their time. It’s one of the best ways to convey the story without exposition. When you decide to make it black with a kind of red, hazy miasma hanging over it, the player will not connect. Also, as great as the story is, it falls into the anticlimax trap that Far Cry 3 has. I can't say more without ruining the whole game.

            We can never go back to the 80’s; at least not until we invent a time machine. The culture of the time period was born of fears surrounding the changing political and social landscapes combined with a swiftly diminishing innocence that can never be replicated. Even for all of its love for the time, Blood Dragon is steeped in reference and irony because it has to be. We live in a time where everyone knows and understands where this is coming from, and to not wink is to not be in on the joke. The 80’s died, strangely, in 1993 with Last Action Hero. I can still appreciate what Blood Dragon is trying to do, though, and certainly champion a restrained version of the gospel I’m sure I’m only reading into it. Games do need more silly, over-the-top games with no agenda other than excitement and entertainment. We need crazy ideas. We need originality, even if we have to steal from other generations to get it. Blood Dragon needs more polish and a gameplay tune-up to be sure, but it was so much fun and seemed like it was so much fun to make that it hardly seems worth it to complain. If this review seems mixed, it is only my feelings are equally so. I want so badly to live in a time where I can see “G.I. Joe” cartoons and think they’re awesome without qualifying how silly they are, but I also understand how far we’ve come as a people since Reagan hand-delivered the first vial of crack to the inner city. It's hard to reconcile, just like its hard to reconcile that I love the style and tone of this game more than anything I've played since Infinite, but the gameplay felt so weird and unpolished. 

            This is a blog that reviews games, but I also try to work in a little academic thinking and actual reviewing rather than consumer reports as often as I can. Unfortunately, whether its the cold I came down with this week or a battle between the part of me that loves great works of art and the part of me that loves terrible pieces of trash, I honestly can't decide how I feel about this game. I can't say whether this game is good or bad; it defies those labels. I hate having to be that ambiguous in a blog like this, though, so I'm going to put it this way. At one point in the game, Colt gets a hold of a Gatling gun he can carry around and use. It's awesome. What's even better than that, though, is that when he is shooting over an extended period of time he starts to yell like Johnny Utah wishing he didn't love Patrick Swayze so much. There is a distinct possibility that at some point in this game, you will walk into a base full of cyber soldiers and empty a Gatling gun that shoots lasers at them while screaming at the top of your lungs. For me, that makes up for pretty much any failing the game has. If it does the same for you, play the game. You'll love it despite its flaws. If not, there's no point in you even thinking about it. 

           

           

            

Tiny and Big

           I am  a sucker for game physics, and physics are what has  made this generation and hopefully the next generation so exciting. A lot of people focus on the graphical power of a game, which is arguably one of the least important aspects of a game. As long as you can see what is happening and the developer has a good sense of style, things don’t need to be photorealistic. Sonic and Knuckles is still more beautiful than most of the brown military shooters that have come out recently. On the other handSonic and Knuckles. You can’t mess around with weight distribution and other physics based puzzles like you can in Half Life 2 either. That is the kind of evolution that impresses me. This is why Tiny and Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers (or Tiny and Big as it will be known hereafter) is so up my alley. The gameplay is all pulling, pushing, and cutting the sometimes massive setting elements in the game. It can be very impressive. Unfortunately, it is marred by a lack of polish that can make the game excruciating.

, you can’t blow up buildings in

            Developed by German development team Black Pants Game Studio, Tiny and Big has a promisingly oddball story. A nerd named Tiny is on a quest to retrieve a pair of magic underpants from a bully named Big. The pants, as he calls them, were given to him by his grandfather. In order to get the underpants back, Tiny must scale a vast and ancient pyramid while avoiding the doom which lurks around every corner. The game is funny in that quirky way so popular in independent media. The hand-drawn look of the game adds to this goofy strangeness. While often charming, the indie sensibility can also get in the game’s way sometimes. Tiny and Big seems to be a sequel, although I didn’t know this until I had already finished the game. I know nothing about the game that came before it, or if it was anything more than a beta version of the game I played. Either way I hope it explained or showed more than Grandpa’s Leftovers, because this game is confusing. While the basic storyline and motivations all make perfect sense, the particulars of the world don’t. I don’t actually know what Tiny and Big’s relationship actually is. At the end of the game they seem like they might be brothers, but you never get that through the rest of the game. Also the dialogue can be maddeningly obtuse.  The characters seem to always be saying things strangely or in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. This may be because of the translation, because I have to assume it was originally written in German. The lack of voice acting didn’t help. I don’t like reading my games unless it is subtitled or a JRPG.

            The gameplay, unfortunately, is haunted by similar problems. On one level, I really loved it. Tiny and Big is one of the purest platformers to come out in recent memory. Helping Tiny jump, cut, pull, and push his way up the temple can be very fun and rewarding. The laser is especially well done. There is something about cutting rocks into platforms or slicing off the entire side of the temple to reveal a secret area that is amazingly good fun. I would really like to see this style come back in another game. Then, just as you’re having fun, the lack of polish starts to show. For instance, it’s often difficult to tell exactly where a platform ends. There were multiple times where I accidentally fell off a ledge because I got a little too close to the edge, or I wasn’t paying attention and strolled right off a cliff only to find myself standing on thin air like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade. The giant rocks you cut can smash you, which makes this aspect of the platforming fun and dangerous. However if said rock even thinks about rocking backwards it’ll squish you. The level design can be gorgeous with huge, sweeping vistas of desert or the impressive scale of the massive temple Tiny’s climbing. Then again, the whole place seems to be littered with crevasses you can fall through at any moment. There is little more frustrating in the world of games than falling for seemingly no reason. I almost quit the game a few times over it.

            The biggest failing in Tiny and Big is the lack of connection between the story and the gameplay. The story doesn’t really seem to enhance the actions taken by the player. I rarely felt connected to what Tiny was doing because I was kept at a distance by the strangeness of the dialogue as well as the lack of exposition. I didn’t understand what I was doing or why I was doing it most of the time. I didn’t even know WHAT I was supposed to be doing in a lot of cases. The game is not always clear about where you need to go. The most important aspect of any story is motivation. Go to any creative writing workshop and I can almost guarantee that they will talk endlessly about why the characters did whatever they did. We know that Tiny needs to get the underwear back from Big because it came from his grandfather and he cherished it, but that emotion never really comes through. We don’t know anything about his grandfather at all other than that he was an archaeologist that specialized in underwear for some reason. About halfway through the game I started to get really bored because I neither knew nor particularly cared what why anything was happening. I was just cutting down platforms, jumping on them, and all the time moving closer towards…something. It picked up a little near the end, but that middle sagged amazingly low for such a short game.

            So Tiny and Big is destined for the worst of all fates: mediocrity. There are really cool things going on in this game. The music is great, although obviously not so great that I remembered to mention it in the main body of my review. I like the gameplay most of the time, and the story has its moments. It all ultimately feels disconnected. The game simply doesn’t try hard enough to make you care about what is going on, and is somewhat shoddily assembled. I look forward to a better product next time, because this series has potential. I just hope that Black Pants Game Studio can get their act together. Also, maybe they could stop being obsessed with underwear. That would be nice.

I'm Scared: A Pixelated Nightmare

          Video games are a fantastic medium for the horror genre. The experience of controlling a character walking down a dark corridor is much more visceral and terrifying that watching someone on a screen or reading about it in a book. I haven't been truly scared by a film since The Ring came out in 2002. I can say, with some bruises to my ego, that I am still a little creeped out because of I’m Scared: A Pixelated Nightmare.

Video games are a fantastic medium for horror. There is something about walking down a dark corridor rather than watching someone or reading about someone doing it that makes the experience much more terrifying. I haven’t been scared by a movie since

            I’m Scared, which you can download here, is a first-person horror game developed by Ivan Zanotti.  The game starts with a completely silent screen onto which text appears as if it is being typed in real time. It seems to be a basic tutorial at first, but ends with the ominous words, “I’m extremely sorry. I didn’t really want to do that. Forgive me.” The player then awakens in a bare room with a table, a wardrobe, and a table. Once out of the room, the player wanders around, looking for a heart with which to open the door. None of this sounds scary written out, but in the moment it is chilling. Your footsteps sound like thunder when you walk. The low-quality graphics and low draw distance make everything fuzzy. Then, White Face shows up.

            I’ve never been more terrified by the prospect of wandering around looking for keys than I was during I’m Scared. The horror is perfectly paced. It doesn’t rely too heavily on jump scares like a lot of recent horror films, but it also doesn’t burn so slowly that it becomes boring like the rest of the recent horror films. I don’t remember a single scare chord in the whole game. All I remember is the hissing and the laughing that foreshadowed White Face’s arrival. The sound design in the game is impeccable. It’s jarring, creepy, and uncanny with its choppy synth qualities. I’m Scared is a game that knows that louder isn’t scarier. A soft electronic hiss and a squishy moan beats a roar any day.

            In tandem with the lo-fi, retro sound design is the graphics. I’m Scared has Superman 64- level graphics; just replace green smog with inky blackness. Contrary to popular design theories, higher graphics could have ruined this experience. The poor graphics are a great source of horror. Again, low draw distance makes it so you can only see a foot in front of your face. The blocky, dare I say pixelated environment naturally morphs common objects into unnatural shapes. The solid colors, which look like the result of a game developer overusing the bucket on MS Paint, serve as a perfect canvas for when the blood starts appearing. It all feels like, well, a nightmare; dark, confusing, and dreamy.

            Both the poor audio and poor graphics serve to remind us just how creepy early gaming could be. One the most unsettling piece of music to me, to this day, is the song that plays in Lavender Town in the original Pokemon games. There’s something about poorly recorded pieces of media that creep us out more than well-produced pieces of similar narrative quality. Look at Paranormal Activity. That movie is objectively idiotic with unlikable characters played by actors slightly above community theater, but it is still regarded by many as terrifying. There’s a fifth sequel coming out this year. That is not a typo.

            There’s not a whole lot to say about this game other than it is spooky as hell. The controls are all simple and fairly standard, and there’s not really a lot to do. The game is all atmosphere; a brooding and somewhat archaic experience similar to what Lovecraft might have made if he knew anything about video games. It’s also free, so I’m having a hard time really finding flaws with it. The low production value works in its favor, much in the same way as its popular predecessor Slender. It’s a prime example of how graphics don’t need to make a game more realistic to be effective. It’s also a lot of fun to play in the dark.

Little Inferno

            It’s been snowing for years and nobody knows why. What do you do? Burn everything you own, of course! Little Inferno, the arson simulator developed by the Tomorrow Corporation, is a darkly comic and vaguely moving tale about a boy who buys things and then lights them on fire. The gameplay consists of lighting various objects on fire in different predetermined combos. For instance if you burn the toy pirate and the bicycle together, you get a combo. Combos give you money with which to buy more stuff to burn and stamps to deliver the stuff to your house faster. After getting enough combos and buying all of the things in your catalogue, you can buy…a new catalogue full of new things to burn and new combos! It all sounds kind of pointless written out here, and it is. That’s the point.

            The story doesn’t seem very interesting at first. Again, you’re a boy burning things in his shiny new Little Inferno Playset from the Tomorrow Corporation. Yes, the corporation in the game has the same name as the development team (which consists of three guys, by the way.) Then, a little girl named Sugar Plumps starts sending you letters. She is a little crazy, to say the least. Whenever one of her letters arrived, I always wondered if they had Adderall in this universe and, if so, how she had managed to stay off of it. Her letters, as well as letters sent by the head of the Tomorrow Corporation and a weatherman, all work together to reveal bits and pieces of the world they live in. It’s really cold, namely. Everyone is burning as much as they can to stay warm. Honestly it would have been nice if they’d been a little more specific with their story. Like Dear Esther and a lot of art actually, Little Inferno remains intentionally ambiguous to allow for discussion and the ideas of the audience to influence the narrative. It’s not exactly a blank slate, but more of a Rorschach test. You get a vague impression of what’s going on, but everything’s so abstract and sometimes downright random that it’s hard to pin. I think, for instance, that all of the Little Inferno sets are contributing to the cold snap. The soot is building up in the atmosphere and causing the Earth to cool, which in turn causes more burning. It’s the opposite of a runaway Greenhouse Effect. It never states this though so there’s no way to know. It’s just a theory I have.

            Though the narrative lacks substance, its integration into the gameplay is very well done. One thing that is certain about this game is that it is a commentary on the games we play today. Again the actual message is maddeningly up for interpretation, but consider the point of view. For most of the game all the player sees is the Little Inferno. The edges of the fireplace/toy form a graphic match of a television. The game consists of putting objects into this screen and then destroying them, which is essentially how developers make their games and the audience plays them, respectively. If I had to guess, and I do because I’m that type of person, I would say that this is a statement on modern gaming. The simplicity and the potential tedium of the gameplay points out how much we are willing to go through to achieve an end that doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a satire about how we play games that even goes so far as to question whether or not we should play games anymore. This satire mostly comes from the gameplay itself. While the letters and some late-game developments put it into sharper focus, it’s all there in the fire. The different objects you can order from the catalogue all have different effects when they are burned. Some pop, some change the color of the fire, some freeze things, some just scream horribly. When you are burning a teddy bear that watches you as it burns, it’s hard not to question whether or not we've

gone a little far in the video game violence department. It’s lightened slightly by the dark and referential humor in the game (the video game catalogue is the best) as well as the Burton-esque art style, but the deep disturbing knot in your stomach is still there.

            Little Inferno isn't a great game, but it’s got a lot of great ideas. It can be tedious, and the lack of story details can be frustrating. It tries to be artistic, weird, and enigmatic, and it achieves that to some extent but occasionally at the cost of fun. The best way to describe it is quirky. Quirky is an overused term that lost a lot of its meaning once Zooey Deschanel became famous and everyone started trying too hard to be different. That’s how this game feels. It’s trying too hard to have a different and interesting story. It’s trying too hard to connect with the fringe. It’s trying too hard to be weird and artsy. Again to its credit, Little Inferno is often effective and boasts some really interesting ideas and commentary. I thought the beginning of the ending was extremely well done, which will only really make sense if you play the game. I thought the creepy toys and the little touches like the music that plays while perusing the catalogues were also inspired. But then the actual ending comes and it makes you wonder what the point of it all was. I encourage everyone to try the game if they can. The developers deserve to be rewarded if only because they tried to make something deeper than Call of Duty: Dog Simulator. It’s a beautifully flawed work of art. Maybe next time, just don’t try so hard?