I almost couldn't see the finish line through the dirt kicked up behind my competitor's hover bike. I'd taken a lot of damage, and I was starving. Losing the race didn't do me any favors, because now I'm strapped for cash. I decide that fixing my bike is more important than eating, and then I walk around the city looking for work. There's a pizza delivery job, a tutoring gig, or a bounty I could chase down, but my hunger is going to make doing any of that more than a little difficult. I think for a second, chill beats thicker than the rain around me, and I decide its time to start making some sacrifices. I don't have any power cells to sell, so I go to the music store and sell back enough records and tapes to eat. I can always buy them back later, once things start to look better. I'll buy the whole store, once I win the Grand Prix. Words are easy, though. Now it's time to put action to them.
The story arch of Desert Child comes out naturally, almost entirely through gameplay with little in the way of dialogue or guidance. Outside of one character who suggests you get to Mars, there isn't any direction or tutorial. You have your goal, and now you head towards it. Everything else plot-wise - who your character is, his struggles, and what it means to win - comes from your experience with him, your choices. Does he lift a part from this bike off the street and risk attention from the cops, or does he deliver pizzas and make an honest wage to buy the part himself? It makes you feel as though the character is being build in your head, in the ludonarrative, and it feels all the more real and immersive for it.
You start as some kid with a hover bike and barely enough money in his pocket for food, and eventually become a well off competitor in the Grand Prix on Mars. You start on Earth, and must save up for a ticket to Mars while balancing out life costs like food and repairs on your bike. Once you get your ticket off this rock, you find yourself in a city with a wealth to do and one goal in mind: save up $10,000 for the entry fee to the Grand Prix. The city is where you can truly get lost. There are odd jobs here and there, some legal - tutoring other racers, testing out an experimental gun for a mechanic, delivering pizzas - and some that are illegal - throwing a race, hacking a bank, etc. All that matters is scraping up the cash so you can mod or fix your bike, feed yourself, and maybe buy a couple tunes to bop as you walk the streets and beat against the daily grind. Watch out for some of those beans in the market, though. They can have . . . odd effects.
The game being gameplay focused for story means that fail states are cannon, which excited me when I lost my first attempt at the Grand Prix but had made more than enough money in the competition to buy another entry ticket. Sure, the game gets easier once you've made it to the Grand Prix because of this, but it feels realistic and consistent with the world. I'm not a winner yet, but I am a competitor, and I've gone from struggling at the fringes of underground racing circles to a mainstay with an honest to God profession. It was a unique frustration. I no longer felt like an underdog, but that didn't dissuade me from wanting that Grand Prize. I felt like I'd entered a new chapter in this character's story.
Succinctly, Desert Child mixes racing games (with quite a lot of shooting) with a miniature life sim connecting the different pieces together. This life sim is one of the two major features that really ties this game together into a narrative experience as well as a game in a natural way. The other is the style. Desert Child oozes style, and is easily summed up as: cool af. TripHop- and Vaporwave-inspired beats fill out the game's soundtrack (as well as a couple satiric tapes of radio talk, such as an Alex Jones show and an Alan Watts style speech about racing bikes), and the animation and pixel art gives the game a feel like it was yanked out of the early 90s and modified for modern gaming similar to how the bike's are in the story. It is a stylistic triumph, utilizing pretty tired tropes at this point to their maximum potential, and getting away with it anyway. It's hard not to feel so fucking cool while playing this game.
It's incredibly immersive, and not due to a sense of realism in terms of graphics, but because of it's commitment to world context and complete canonizing of all actions. You can feel the struggle of every inch gained, and the weight of every dollar wasted. It feels like a Russian Doll of games that all interact and rely on one another, along the lines of the Persona series (although not nearly as long or complicated -- Desert Child is 3 hours). That struggle, however, comes at a cost. Desert Child is grindy, and that generally goes without saying as the life sim aspect is meant to give meaning to grinding, but even so the game is grindy beyond even what its presentation and gameplay context can cover up or justify. Saving up for the Grand Prix can be a little exhausting, both because your payouts don't grow as you get better, and because races and jobs only get harder, making the struggle just as you're toeing the finish line that much more stressful, and frustrating. It's only a small complaint, but it dampens a nearly perfect experience. As we continue to talk about game stories and how we blend cinematic elements with gameplay storytelling, and as we learn the rules and limits to what we are willing to overlook when it comes to ludonarrative dissonance, Desert Child stands proudly as uncinematic in execution and yet more cinematic in feel than most games, and with virtually no ludonarrative dissonance to speak of. Storytelling in gameplay alone is alive and well here, and it will probably go down as one of my top 10 games of the year.
9.0
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