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.