There is always a baseline of joy in video games. Interacting with our avatar, learning the controls and the rules, reading the level to know where to go and what to try -- playing video games is fun. But a baseline of fun can be found anywhere. It isn't to video games specifically that we go for fun, we want something more that only that medium can provide. Granted, a lot of times this comes to a feeling of accomplishment, of overcoming odds and besting a system you've learned inside and out. Some of the most lingering experiences in the medium, however, are those that give you a sense of existing in their world. I don't just mean like how Red Dead Redemption 2 makes you exist in its world by swamping you with chores and minor, inconvenient manners of "play" that do little to actually make the game more fun or engaging. Rather, it's the minor aspects of play, it's the the desperate gripping on the back of a colossi in Shadow of the Colossus, or holding princess Yorda's hand in Ico, or . . . untying a boy's shoes as the most annoying goose to ever exist.
You've seen the title, so you know I'm attempting to co-review Team Ico's influential classic Ico, predecessor to one of the most classic games in the video game canon Shadow of the Colossus, and the more recent Untitled Goose Game, the Switch's weird, pseudo-stealth puzzler. This may seem incredibly strange (or even blasphemy, if you haven't played Goose Game), but I think that these two games have one particular core part that collects them in a particular design perspective: gameplay as something akin to avatar manipulation. Specifically, Ico's button to hold Yorda's hand so you can guide her through levels, and Untitled Goose Game's buttons to duck your head, quack, grab with your mouth, or spread your wings. There is the feeling while playing these games that you are a physical character, which in turn impresses on you a feeling of role playing. Games like Grand Theft Auto, great as they are, give you a very loose sense of character allowing you to essentially break the fourth wall by engaging with it as a game rather than as a story with characters. There isn't anything wrong with this, but that lingering feeling of place and person that Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Untitled Goose Game give you is something I find more and more attractive as a play more and more games.
Part of the reason I want to harp on about this is because of how it creates a unique engagement with the game in question. Untitled Goose Game has a physicality and a whimsical art style that envelops you in its experience. The waddle of your goose feels rather realistic, as well as the rest of the goose's detailed and expressive animations. Whether it is spreading your wings as you run away from a broom wielding shopkeeper or the way you strain your neck in order to try and steal that rake from the gardener, the physicality of the animation feels very much like a convincing performance by an actor, something keyed in on subtly but so consistently it becomes a convincing conduit toward a more full and fulfilling engagement. You don't feel like you are playing a game, you feel like you are a goose. The game itself plays out like a stealth game, where your job is to sneak around a complete a to-do list of annoyances to the townspeople of this small, English village. There is little in the way of fail states outside of having to set up your plan again in order to complete a particular entry in your to-do list. The puzzle elements I mentioned before are in how you go about planning this. At one point in the game, you find a little road with a shop with all of its wares out on tables and shelves, with an attentive shopkeeper wielding a broom to shoo you away if you come to close. One of your to-do list tasks, however, is to collect a series of items and put it into a basket. There are multiple ways of completing this, including taking items out of trash cans rather than the store itself, but one of the more effective ways I found was to grab a near by walky-talky and use it to lure the shopkeeper away. Other methods include stealing or messing up displays to distract her while I made off with what I wanted. The game's freeform allows you to express your inner goosey-ness to your hearts content. Feeling so much like a goose, I would often find myself acting like a goose just to entertain myself or for a quick laugh, totally distracting myself from any of the game's tasks. I did things like hid in a bush, give a little quack, and ducked my head out of sight when an alarmed gardener turned to see where the sound came from. I cannot recall a game that made me so consistently giggle at my own absurdity while keeping that self conscious feeling of playing a game so far from my mind. I've used the word engagement probably far too many times in this review as is, but it is the perfect descriptor for what I'm trying to talk about here. It is a sense that the distance between you, the actions in the game, and the character you play as is so small it is nigh unnoticeable. In this way, Untitled Goose Game is a master of form, even if, artistically speaking, it has virtually null to say. And it doesn't need to say anything.
On the other hand, Ico feels as though it is saying quite a bit, even if it is far more impressionistic. In Ico, you play as the titular character, a boy who was born with horns on his head, considered an omen by his tribesmen. Ico is taken to a remote castle where he is placed in a jar, presumably to be tortured or to otherwise die and relieve the tribe or village he was born in from whatever misfortune he could cause them. There is an impression of tradition here, partially in how this is mentioned to have been done before, and in that the jar you are imprisoned in is in a room lined with others. There is a fault in your jar, however, and you are able to escape. Knocking your head on the ground after crashing your jar, you have a quick vision of a cage dripping in dark shadow, giving you your first indication of what to look for next. This cage turns out to be in the next room, risen high in a hollowed tower by a thick chain, containing not a darkness but a young girl. This is Yorda, who seems older than you but not by much. You release her from her cage and find she does not speak a language you can understand. shadow creatures rise out of the ground and attempt to take her away from you, but you fight them off with a stick and begin the game proper. The game, in summation, has you venturing through the castle, solving puzzles and using the games physics to climb and explore. Your ultimate goal is to get Yorda out of this castle prison, as well as yourself. Every area is essentially two puzzles: how do you get from point A to point B, and then how do you get Yorda from Point A to Point B, given her limited traversal skills. What sounds like a glorified, full length escort mission is much closer to a combination of Myst and the original Tomb Raider. Exploration, puzzle solving, and platforming are the core gameplay loops, but cinching these together into something cohesively meaningful is the affect of Yorda. A button is dedicated to calling her over to you, and when she is close enough this button holds her hand. Having this physicality between yourself and a virtual character is a unique connection that gives Yorda a kind of compassionate weight many other escort characters do not have. Early on, it becomes obvious that Yorda cannot make it far without your help to boost her up a ledge, or catch her hand during a long jump and pull her up the other side. The fact you cannot die outside of great falls also makes you far more gun-ho about jumping into coded danger in order to save her, the truly vulnerable one. All of these little affects cause an emotional resonance between you and Yorda. Likewise, little details throughout make her more personable. Things like save points being glowing couches you two can relax on together add a fourth wall breaking surrealism that feeds into something rather nostalgic and vulnerable. With all of its mystery and mythological implications, Ico feels primarily about a boy and girl slightly older than him, about how the boy tries to pull this girl through an adventure she isn't equipped to handle, and how the two build a connection. The imagery of these two sitting on a couch together immediately made me think of myself sitting on a couch, and doing that then made me feel something very personal toward Yorda, not like I was literally sitting on the couch with her, but that there was a time and place, sometime younger where perhaps I fancied someone and wanted to share some piece of media with them, and while we were on this grand adventure together in reality we were simply sitting on a couch, sharing a moment. These touches don't build towards any concise meaning, but I don't think that that matters much. Art does not have to be hammering down some specific political or moral point in order to be meaningful, sometimes it can impress the nonverbal minutia between moments, the subtle, ephemeral connections that exists in slivers of timelessness and the echoing affect those can have on the subconscious. In the end, Yorda saves Ico, and experiencing that predictable switch in dynamics isn't so much expected because it was basic, but because it was an echo of something felt. We don't feel Yorda to be so helpless as to have no autonomy, but as someone we want to see express that autonomy, and she does when we are in trouble. It is the punctuation on a series of impressions on connection, on companionship, and the importance therein.
There is a valley between the artistic significance between these two games, but the feeling of connection between player and avatar are incredibly similar, even if they are applied to divergent effects. While it is easy to set Ico on a pedestal for its emotional impact and artful execution, Untitled Goose Game utilizes similar theory towards its design in order to elevate something small and simple into something fun and memorable. In the search for greater and more useful theories on game design and their affect on the player, my money is largely on this sense of interaction, that it is one aspect of game design form that has the most impact, and the most versatility, because it is part most game-like, most impressionistic, most lingering, and the aspect most likely to affect those well traveled in artistic abstracts and those equally just looking for a game to play. Stanley Kubrick talked of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove that there were only a few people who directly identified with abstracts in such a way that they would have an effect on them, that what truly affected most people was their emotional reaction or impression of a film or work of art. He said that the truck driver and the Cambridge student were vastly different in education and intellectual integrity, but that emotionally they were far more alike, and that it was here he wanted to strike. He wanted people who never thought of science, the evolution of man, the possibilities of the cosmos, and the concept of God to consider these concepts and their interplay through 2001, and he wanted people to think of the true horror of what people being in charge of nuclear weapons really consisted of with Dr. Strangelove, and he wanted to do it in a way that was understood by everyone on an immediate, emotional level. So too could games be expressed, and while film used primarily shot composition, mise en scène, and music to create these impressions, games can utilize control and avatar-player relationships (although I cannot stress that framing, music, and mise en scène are also incredibly important to games) to create impressions, one that affects the intellectuals and hobbyists alike.
Untitled Goose Game
8.5
ICO
9.5
No comments:
Post a Comment