Wave of Mutilation

I find that when playing The Binding of Isaac, my rate of progress is inversely proportional to the unmolested appearance of my (digital) physical form. And for a game that starts me out as a naked crying child lying fetal in a shit-covered basement, that's really saying something. But it's true. The more unrecognizable I become, the better chance I have of beating the game.

To the uninitiated, The Binding of Isaac is an indie rouguelike dungeon crawler, created by Edmund McMillen (one half of the duo who brought us (the unassailable) Super Meat Boy) and Florian Himsl. The premise of the game takes a cue from the Biblical story of the same name—the one where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac on an altar and Abraham actually gets to the point where he raises his knife and then God intervenes, tells him to stop, and congratulates Abraham for passing the obedience test. In McMillen's modern retelling, Abraham is traded out for a psychotic Christian mother who gets a message from God to take the life of her son. In the moments before his slaughter by kitchen blade, Isaac discovers a hidden trapdoor in his bedroom and hops down into a hellish basement, which I'm pretty sure—if this were taken to be a real-world scenario—represents the moment of trauma-induced personality splitting. In other words, Isaac's mind makes a heroic getaway from reality.

The game itself is like a giant randomized Zelda dungeon with an ugly brown color palette and a penchant for grotesque monsters that fall everywhere along the spectrum of maggoty, larval, arachnoid, and demonic. Each new room presents a fiendish surprise. It could be as harmless as a couple of flies buzzing around some piles of feces or as sinister as a horseman or two of the apocalypse. You could say The Binding of Isaac is where the eschatological and scatological intersect. It's also a Freudian playground. Did I mention that your default starting weapon is projectile tears? Isaac literally cries his nightmares to death.

Of course that's just the beginning. For the player bent on actually beating the game, Isaac's starting condition simply isn't going to cut it. When not busy clearing a room of monsters, the player's secondary objective will be to scrounge around for access to items that will—hopefully, but not always—improve Isaac's chances of survival. Some items grant Isaac an extra heart of health. Others increase his speed, damage, or the distance and fire-rate of his tears. Some items function like a secondary weapon that can be used and recharged by defeating more monsters.

The game includes about 200 unique discoverable items, some of which were added as part of the Wrath of the Lamb downloadable expansion—and I must say, it is pure delight to stumble upon an item you've never before encountered, because its effects are never immediately obvious.

If the game's premise were not already gruesome enough, its use of items adds even further context. They're like the fragmentary narrative details that surface in the aftermath of a disturbing news story about a man discovered to have been living with a second family hidden in some underground bunker—maybe he dressed them up in clown wigs and had them sleep on piles of hay. Discoverable items in The Binding of Isaac paint a similar portrait of neglect and abuse. Isaac picks up a can of dog food, which the game labels “dinner,” and gains an extra heart piece. Or he finds and dresses himself up in mom's lipstick, heels, and underwear, each of which—when collected—add to his projectile range. These are some of the more brazen examples, the ones that make you chuckle painfully to yourself, because you realize this is comedy at its edgiest but comedy nonetheless. Many items derive from your everyday religious iconography—the halo, rosary, pentagram, and ouija board. Others are just plain bizarre, usually with a bent toward the grotesque.

I've already written about the joy of the rougelike experience in my review of Spelunky (where I also linked to an excellent essay regarding the refreshing unfairness of The Binding of Isaac), and I'm pleased to see many of that game's design philosophies carried over into this one. But I find myself even more interested in this idea of mutilation as the path to victory. I never quite know how my character is going to look by the time I finish a game—most likely in defeat—but I know it won't be pretty. Most of the passive items have some kind of disfiguring effect, which will stack up on prior disfigurements. I might end up bloated from lard, sickly green with a cold virus, shooting red beams from a cyborg laser eye, with an iron coat hanger protruding from my head. I may be the color of brimstone with devil horns and a bloodshot cyclops eye. I may be gliding like the cherubim over the pits and boulders. Who knows?

In another game, these items would be called powerups, and even in The Binding of Isaac, that's essentially what they are doing. They're making the player character more mathematically powerful against the hordes of enemies. But by their thematic subversion, they help to actually tell the game's story.

Now, I've done a lot of item scavenging in video games. Just this past weekend I was looting desks, trash cans, corpses, purses, and boxes of caramels (stuffed with hot dogs?) in Bioshock Infinite. Unfortunately, that game's narrative is so discordant with its bloated gameplay systems, it didn't end up meaning anything that my character was eating food pulled from the trash. In The Binding of Isaac, I am digging for spare change in excrement, and—what can I say?—there's just no getting around that I'm digging through excrement. My narrative situation has truly plummeted me to such lows.

I've tried to think of any other games that have similarly turned the tables on traditional protagonist empowerment. I couldn't come up with any concrete examples, aside from some vague, recurring game themes that have to do with the corrupting nature of violence, soul harvesting, etc. But what other game has rejoiced so profoundly in the suffering of its hero?

It's no secret McMillen has a complicated history with religion. He's basically gone on record to say The Binding of Isaac was informed by negative childhood experiences with Christianity, both his own and those of other family members. And yet, to this day, he remains fascinated with the notion of holy suffering.

“I grew up with a picture of a bloody dying man who is suffering for everybody, a martyr, and it's the whole idea of self-sacrifice,” McMillen said in an interview with Eurogamer. “Your exalted God, your God, rips his body to shreds for the good of the world. Violence becomes holy.”

It's often said that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I suppose that's true to a point. There are some types of trauma that, I'm sure, just aren't good for anyone. Still, who's to say what good might emerge or danger be averted for other people down the line when we are honest about our personal experiences, when we confront those dark themes and expose them to the light of day? Maybe there is power in shared suffering. Maybe we need more avatars to absorb that abuse so we don't have to. Maybe one person's psychological damage is another person's spiritual enlightenment.

Isaac is not your typical exalted hero. He's the sacrificial lamb, and this is his body—bloodied, cross-dressed, and genetically mutated for you.

Gomez the traveler

Mario — right-running princess rescuer; Goomba-stomping good guy of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Link — free-roaming juvenile adventurer; sword-swinging protector of Hyrule.

These heroic 8-bit mascots, whose franchises formed the foundation on which generations of future games were constructed, had practically no personalities in and of themselves. Yes, Mario was an Italian plumber, but did you ever see him hunched over a broken toilet? Has Link spoken a single word in all his 26 years—his guttural huffs, screams, and “Hiya!” shouts notwithstanding (and, no, the animated TV show doesn't count exist)?

We don't relate to these characters the same way we do to characters in other—more detached—media, acting out in words and scenes. We know them through the limited actions we cause them to perform. We characterize them in relation to the visual spaces they—and we—inhabit on our television screens, through the intertwining of our triumphs and failures.

Fez hearkens back to these early games—pays them tribute even—while creating an aesthetic almost entirely its own. With its hero, a doughy bipedal creature named Gomez, the game introduces a familiar kind of mascot but sends him on a much different kind of journey.

Gomez is a traveler, and I want to make that clear. He's not an adventurer—that would signify danger or discomfort, the embodiment of a harrowing story in the making. To be perfectly honest, I don't think Gomez is ever in any real danger. His supposed death plummets are too painlessly and immediately reverted. (Granted, a lot of Mario's deaths look pretty painless as well, but then Gomez never has to contend with hammer-throwing turtle soldiers.) It's questionable, at least from the initial game ending, whether or not Gomez is even an actual hero. He hasn't really chosen his fate. He's a traveler. I really can't think of a more apt description.

The journey of Fez starts out like the best travel stories do—at home. Gomez wakes up in a one-room hovel, the kind we recognize from at least a half-dozen Japanese role-playing games. There's a bed on the left side of the screen, a drum kit on the other. On a table at the foot of the bed sits a white mug. Is it for coffee? Does Gomez drink coffee? There are books on a shelf and pictures taped to the wall. Best of all, Gomez has a red-tacked poster depicting a landscape many players will recognize—perhaps not right away—as the waterfall from the opening title screen of The Legend of Zelda. Already, Fez is priming our muscles of observation. It's also repurposing the familiar.

Even as Gomez makes his way to the top of his floating village, engaging in rather flat conversation with his unassuming neighbors along the way, the player most likely knows from prior knowledge about the game what's going to happen—that the world will spin on its undiscovered axis. Sure enough, a mysterious artifact descends from the heavens, followed quickly by the titular fez, granting Gomez the ability to shift his environmental perspective. This gives Gomez an unusual method of movement. While he remains a 2D character moving about on a 2D plane, his perspective-shifting mechanic gives him four distinct planes upon which to explore his environs.

I think the real journey of Fez begins a few minutes later, after Gomez's sidekick has explained how to collect the little yellow cube shards that open the door at the bottom of his island village. But before we go there, I want to emphasize the importance of the perspective-shifting mechanic as it relates to Gomez's home village.

Have you ever lived in a place for a long time, only to find yourself looking at a stretch of familiar territory from an unfamiliar vantage point—like looking at your town from the top of a ridge or in an airplane, or examining your backyard from the other side of a chain-link fence? Or have you ever had that strange sensation of entering a new space that you had only ever looked at from the outside? Maybe it was the first time you went to a neighbor's house, or the first time entering the basement or attic of a childhood home, and it made you really think about the strange things that must lurk—or simply exist—on the other side of a wall. That's sort of what discovering a new dimension is all about. It's about perceiving the things that were there all along—a treasure chest in a hidden room, the coils on the back of a refrigerator, etc.—and slowly realizing that what we see is only the tiniest fraction of reality.

To the casual player, Fez makes for a neat little sightseeing romp through a pixelated wonderland. It's a game of movement, collecting, and maybe some light puzzle solving. The game's creator, Phil Fish, describes it in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie as a stop-and-smell-the-flowers kind of experience, and as a player I would agree. But I wouldn't want to undersell the rich blend of figurative aromas the world of Fez exudes through its varied locales. Yes, there are the quaint seascape portions of the game and the magical forests, but there is also the dark, gothic cemetery realm. While the joy of discovery courses throughout, it's very often a joy tinged with foreboding. There's never any telling what kind of scenery awaits on the other side of a door. The great thing about Fez is that it doesn't have to conform to any rules—aside from its incredibly strict square-equals-cube rule.

But there are some things that remain consistent. For example, although every area evokes meaning, nothing in the world of Fez is explicit. One area of the game, all dark and monochromatic green, gives off the visual impression of a classic Game Boy adventure. It also plays like a sewer level, and the player arrives there by going down something that looks like a green Mario pipe-shaped well. These subterranean levels involve the dreaded valves that must be turned to raise and lower water levels, one of the gaming medium's most tedious pastimes. Is this the septic chamber of nostalgia, an abandoned era that nevertheless remains in our collective memory space?

There's also the sense that these are either relic or presently lived-in spaces. Every discovery within the world of Fez is in fact a rediscovery of an intelligent presence, some culture or entity that created, guided, and connected all the spaces. We see walls, signs, graffiti, and other structures that bear an indecipherable coded language. Everything evokes a riddle just begging to be cracked. What does it all mean?

And yet the casual player need never come close to figuring it all out. To travel and find the path of (Gomez's) physical progress and then complete the game, according to its creators, is sufficient.

But to those that yearn to know more, the game invites a deeper kind of play, one that requires much more than just figuring out how to jump from platform A to platform B. It's a game of slow, intense, sometimes maddening observation. The player will begin to look for clues, often in all the wrong places. It becomes a very mystical kind of journey, something well described by Stu Horvath over at Unwinnable as he notes the game's many kabbalistic undertones. The traveling experience becomes a transcendent one, almost a pilgrimage, as the player seeks out a more spiritual, metaphysical resolution to the game than a mere credits screen.

This feeling is much different from other so-called puzzle games I've played. Portal never felt like much more than a means to an end—the player as a lab rat fighting its way out of the maze. Even Braid, while satisfying as an experiment in time-based platforming mechanics, proved futile when attempting to coax satisfiable meaning from its vaguely personal text portions—at least for me. (I doubt anyone will be able to offer a better interpretation than the one Terry Clark pitches to Jonathan Blow in this piece from The Atlantic.)

I can appreciate those who criticized the game, such as Ben Hornsby at Action Button Dot Net. He offers a great line when he suggests, “Fez's deep therapist's couch problem is that it has fetishized the wrong stuff; it has fetishized an already-misguided fetishization.” Part of what he means by this is how developer Polytron has tried to build a game almost completely centered around the kind of quirky secret fetish that used to be something of an enjoyable side phenomenon in games like the original Super Mario Bros. trilogy (until it became something formalized in the likes of Super Mario World, with things like transparent colored blocks signifying, “Hey, look, there's a secret path here!”). Fez seems almost too obsessed with its enigmatic identity. Is there even enough of a game here? I think there is, although it was a little disappointing to discover that when I had solved one particular puzzle I had sometimes solved a whole suite of related puzzles. It dampened some of the overall mystery.

I think it's also relevant to point out that Fez—which, as of now, is still an Xbox 360 exclusive—is a buggy game. I myself walked into a temporarily game-breaking glitch that I thankfully was able to solve by deleting and then re-installing the game's slightly corrupted patch. But there are multiple other instances in which the game either crashed or got all hiccuped during screen transitions. As almost pure conjecture, I wonder if the game's technical challenges are simply the result of its dubious architecture. After all, we know that the universe does not mathematically function like the world of Fez, which is constantly proposing arbitrary solutions for where and how the little Gomez avatar is positioned or depicted in relation to its 3D-turned-2D surroundings.

It would be a cop-out (or sacrilegious) to say that the buggy nature of Fez makes it a better game. It doesn't, and I wouldn't be surprised if Phil Fish was still a little tormented. Nevertheless, this idea of an unstable, collapsing universe is at the core of Fez's threadbare plot. So maybe it's just ironic. Maybe Fish unconsciously designed his own thematic scapegoat.

But it also helps to place the game in its modern context. Now more than ever, the video game—especially the independent game—is indelibly linked to its real-life author and developer. It's not the same as in 1986, when playing a Mario or Zelda game was like establishing first contact with an alien civilization. We're more aware of the fact that games are indeed made by human beings, which is why we can have both grace and contempt for these people when their products don't turn out perfectly.

We're also simply much more literate in our playing experiences. The games of the past have become the lexicon for how we relate to and think about the games of present. Fez, in all its Tetris-piece glory, is an acknowledgement of this—a celebration of what came before. Gomez may not dwell in the pantheon of gaming's greatest mascots, but maybe he's not intended to. He's a traveler. And his journey is our pilgrimage.

Indie Games Roundup

A lot of game players talk about the constant battle of working through their backlog of games. Devoid of the ample free time with which we desire to play video games, we end up accumulating at a faster rate than we can consume. Our shelves fill up with shrink-wrapped boxes. Our digital Steam accounts becomes giant lists of unplayed games—most, if not all, purchased at a special sale price that we just couldn't pass up. Let's not even mention the inevitable Humble Indie Bundle.

I have my own games backlog, but I also have another backlog on top of that one. These are the games that I've played but haven't blogged about. Obviously, there's no rule that says I have to write about every game I play. I actually don't think that's a very good way to approach writing. In the future I would love to take a more thematic approach to my posts. I'd love to be able to tackle games from a more intellectual standpoint, to treat games as cultural artifacts with rhetorical (not necessarily authorial) messages worth examining. I would love to do a close reading of a game, like this.

Unfortunately, most of my eight-hour-plus day job involves writing and editing. It's hard to put my remaining time and energy into more hobby writing and hope to achieve much analytical depth. But it's also hard not to feel I'm being derelict in my duty when my ratio of played games to blogged games becomes too unbalanced. So in this post I play a wee bit of catch-up. Similar posts may or may not follow, but for now here are a few quick thoughts regarding four indie games I've played through since starting this blog in late 2011.

Bastion (2011)

developer: Supergiant Games

There's a lot of style coursing through Bastion, especially in the soundtrack. But more than that it's got a lot of styles plural, which is also true for describing the soundtrack. (I like how The Gameological Society put it: “It sounds like Portishead scoring a Sergio Leone film.”) I'm just not sure how well all those jumbled styles work together.

Everyone knows Bastion as that game with the awesome gravely-voiced narrator who comments on everything in real-time. (“An old ferry barge sends the kid on his way,” “Now the kid sees something stranger still,” “The kid's ready to go, and his ticket out is right where he started,” etc.) This being the age of “Let's Play (insert game title here),” it's no wonder people ate it up. It seems the era of the sad lone gamer in the basement died quietly (and with dignity) a long time ago. Today's gaming consumers yearn for companionship, and they can have it—whether that be directly through a voice-chat headset or through more indirect (introverted) YouTube channel surfing. Bastion gets that. It offers a different kind of companionship.

It's also a new take on narrative, with that voice constantly explaining, constantly interpreting, constantly codifying the action on-screen. Is he a reliable narrator or is he full of hot air? Or is he like a sports commentator who gets paid to make sure there is never a dull moment during the broadcast?

Unfortunately, I happen to be a terrible auditory learner. I'm pretty sure everyone feels that way, but it's true in my case. There's a problem when every line gets treated in dramatic, hard-boiled fashion. It becomes its own version of monotone. I start to tune it out, and that being the case, I didn't quite follow the “story” of Bastion very well.

But more than that, the narration just felt like a gimmick to begin with. Whatever happened to show don't tell? Why was that narrator so expressive when I felt absolutely nothing as the player character? All those heavy thoughts and feelings the narrator was relating? I was too busy just rolling around trying to smash shit and kill things. It was sort of fun. The art direction was cute.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (2011)

developer: Fuel Cell Games

I'm a little surprised this game didn't make more of a splash, seeing as it released alongside Bastion as part of the same Xbox LIVE Summer of Arcade promotion in 2011. Maybe it wasn't hip enough. It didn't come pre-packaged with a cool indie soundtrack. It offered no commentary or companionship, except for in a separate multiplayer mode that probably no one played (I sure didn't). Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet was a game that didn't talk to you. It didn't speak at all, and in that sense it was kind of like the WALL-E of video games, or a less demented Limbo. I actually enjoyed the game quite a bit.

In it the player controls a flying saucer investigating a mysterious alien planet. The game is structured like a Metroidvania—one giant level with different areas made accessible by obtaining different power-ups. As the player explores the world and solves environmental puzzles, the game adds on cool new features to the flying saucer—everything from a tractor beam to a missile launcher to a spinning saw blade attachment used to excavate through enemies and debris. Each of these can be custom mapped to the controller buttons, however, there are more attachments than buttons available—meaning proper selection at any given moment is important.

When I just said the game doesn't talk to you, that was only partially true. It's just that—opposite of Bastion—it doesn't use very many words in doing so. What it does use is mechanics and visual clues. The player's ship starts out with only one ability, a scanning device that analyzes various features in the alien environment and comes back with a pictographic description. These are the cues and clues that help you figure out how to play the game.

While the game doesn't necessarily push the boundaries set by its genre predecessors, it excels at everything it does do. The animations are superb. I love how the interior of the planet goes from organic—with black writhing tentacles for walls—to mechanical-industrial gears and conveyor systems. The sound design is even better. Every chirpy alien noise rings with subterranean echo and reverb. Most of the actual music is ambient and generally low volume. The prime instrument is the flying saucer as it quietly flits about like a Jetsons car.

Perhaps the best thing about the game, however, is the kinetic feeling of the ship itself. Its movement, controlled with the left thumbstick, is so swift and responsive. There's no fighting for control! And the way this movement integrates with the control of the ship's weapons and accessories—via the right thumbstick—is seamless (parts of the game play out like a twin-stick shooter). One of the earliest ship attachments that the player picks up is a mechanical arm, which is used to pick up and move lose debris, such as small boulders. If driving any piece of industrial equipment felt this natural and fun, we would all be lining up for jobs in construction and civil engineering projects.

Ms. Splosion Man (2011)

developer: Twisted Pixel

I enjoy a good platformer, and I trudged through the entire single-player campaign of Ms. Splosion Man about a year ago. I even searched out and found all the hidden collectible shoes (without using a guide). It's not a bad game, but I can't really say it's a shining example of the genre.

First of all, the visual style is playful but too cluttered. Yes, the game has “splosion” in the name, but all the a'splody things and their shiny particle effects sometimes add up to create an incoherent playing experience, visually speaking. This is problematic for a game built around quick timing and precision. Miss one of your marks as you're running or flying along and it's usually instant death—back to the last checkpoint.

At its heart, I think the playing experience is one of timing and memorization. To get through some of the harder levels, the player will be forced to repeat the same sequences over and over again until essentially there are no timing mistakes. I don't generally mind repeating platforming sequences in other games as long as I feel there's a good reason for it. If I'm actually getting better at the game, if I feel that I'm getting more comfortable in the skin of my little on-screen avatar, and if the game eliminates the annoying delay between failing and starting again, I probably won't mind the punishment.

Unfortunately, there is almost no room for expression in Ms. Splosion Man. There's no variable running speed. There's no figuring out better, quicker, or more interesting ways to get through the levels. There is one way to get through, and you either get the timing and spatial placement right or you don't.

That said, the multiplayer levels can actually be pretty cool. All of the same aspects of the single-player mode apply, but the challenge becomes one of teamwork and communication. While the visual incoherence persists with multiple players on screen, it actually sort of makes everything ironically enjoyable. It exacerbates the frustration of trying to cooperate to the point it becomes funny. Not that the humor lasts forever. Before long, the cooperative game becomes damn near impossible. Kudos to anyone who has managed to finish it.

By the way, dear reader, you might want to turn the sound off for this game, or at least Ms. Splosion Man's voice. It's extremely annoying.

Bit.Trip Runner (2010)

developer: Gaijin Games

Speaking of games that make you repeat failed sequences ... there's this game. Bit.Trip Runner looks like a platformer, but it's really a rhythm game. It still has a bit in common with Ms. Splosion Man, but in this game the running is automatic. The player's job is simply to jump, slide, spring, kick, and block at each of the right moments. Each level is basically a song. All of the obstacles are timed in accordance with the beat and tempo of the music; successfully performing an action triggers a tone or musical note that contributes to the soundtrack.

On the one hand, Bit.Trip Runner can be a very Zen kind of game. It's a beautiful experience just running along and becoming one with the game, falling into its rhythm and cadence. But that's only if you're good at the game.

Here's where it gets interesting. Each level lasts anywhere from about one to two minutes. If the player misses a mark and runs into an obstacle, the game goes all the way to the start of the level. Granted, there's no delay—no game over screen. The game cycles through a pattern of (1.) restart level, (2.) attempt level, (3.) fail level, (4.) restart level, etc., on an infinite loop until successfully completed. It doesn't matter how near or far the player was from finishing the level. Each failure is a restart.

Why so demanding? Why not let the player make a couple mistakes on a given run, perhaps include some kind of recovery animation that puts the player back on track after the first mistake in a given attempt? Why not make it more like the Guitar Hero games, whereby the player can advance to the next level if they hit a certain percentage of the marks? Why not include some mid-level checkpoints? I'm not saying Gaijin Games was wrong in the decisions they made. But these are fair things to consider.

What sort of effect does the actual design have on the playing experience? For me, it engenders a type of harsh discipline. If the apex of the playing experience is a state of Zen, then it only makes sense that such a state can be achieved only through constant practice and meditation—and also by being some kind of superhuman. The game becomes an interesting exercise in concentration. If I get hung up on failure, it's a distraction. If I find my brain becoming numb (which is hardly avoidable) after my umpteenth level attempt, I have to apprehend that numbness and force myself to try and refocus. There's a psychological element to it.

Playing Bit.Trip Runner could also be likened to learning a musical instrument. Instead of a solitary monk striving to subjugate the self, the player becomes a pupil under the watchful command of a strict and exacting pedagogue—one with a controversial teaching style. The player is forced to learn a song only by playing it in real-time to a steady metronome, and without making any mistakes. (The optional gold items, by the way, are the musical flourishes. For those not satisfied with merely getting the basic notes right, collecting these pieces is a surefire way to impress the teacher even more.) How will I be prepared to play the music if I don't know where it's going? The teacher (game) will gladly flip the pages of sheet music while you play. You just need to be quick on your fingers.

Regardless of whichever model I choose to frame my 8-bit adventure, I arrive at the same nagging question. At what point do I excuse myself from this punishing regiment? How much do I endure? Either I finish the game or I don't. But what is the value of enduring all those failures if I can't manage to finish the game? What's the payoff if I do?

I know I should give up, but I probably won't.

VVVVVV review — Everything in its right place

This is a game about exploration, discovery, and six characters whose names all begin with the letter “V.” It was created by independent developer Terry Cavanagh with original music by Magnus Pålsson.

I'm just going to jump right into this one, so feel free to check out the game trailer on YouTube for some audio-visual context.

The playing experience in VVVVVV is built around a simple game mechanic that replaces traditional jumping with gravity inversion. By hitting the action button, the player character flips upside down (or right side up) and gravitates toward the ceiling (or the floor). Functionally, this works similarly to a jump, but not quite. It's actually a fall. With a jump, we know that what goes up must come down. A gravity flip in VVVVVV, however, cannot be reversed until the player character's feet have touched solid ground. Therefore, each flip is a—sometimes scary—vertical commitment, although the player can move freely left and right mid-fall. Getting across an obstacle, such as a room of spikes, isn't a matter of momentum or running speed. It's about finding a safe path of alternating surfaces.

The overall structure of VVVVVV bears similarity to the early Metroid and later Castlevania games, wherein the action unfolds on a single sprawling 2D map that reveals itself only through exploration. But that's about where the similarities end. While the game, like Metroid, takes place in a mysterious space setting, the aesthetic of VVVVVV isn't one of loner-ism or desolate isolation. As the captain of a scientific research vessel trapped in a strange dimension, the player must seek out and rescue five lost crew mates. So, while the player does venture out solo for the bulk of the game, the motivation is one of friendship and reunion. There are no standard enemies in VVVVVV. The player's only foe is the dangerous environment itself, one that will require both logic and dexterity to overcome (that's another way of saying the game is a puzzle platformer).

This may sound strange and/or effusively sentimental, but the narrative framework and retro art style encompassing the action of VVVVVV is kind of adorable—the way the characters appear, like six happy little golems, identical save for their color swaps; their friendly dialogue and the manner in which they face their predicament with such positivity, such enthusiasm for the opportunity of scientific discovery. It's an attitude reinforced also in the chiptune soundtrack, with song titles that include “Passion for exploring,” “Positive force,” and “Potential for anything” (the soundtrack—available here—is titled “PPPPPP”). Again, this is almost the aesthetic antithesis of Metroid or Castlevania.

One thing that I found refreshing about VVVVVV was the way in which the entire map, although initially hidden, is completely accessible from the get go. There is no predetermined path for the player to follow. Why is this so wonderful? For one, it eliminates the need for backtracking. Progress is not incumbent on flipping switches in one part of the map to access another part of the map, only a matter of platforming skill. In this way, the game functions like one grand (but humble) experiment in asymmetrical level design, with each map section built around a particular exploit of the gravity flipping mechanic.

And Cavanagh certainly makes some interesting design choices throughout the game, one being his use of color. Each of the six characters, for example, is named after their associated color (and since each name starts with the letter “V,” this leads to some pretty creative names). These six colors are the same ones used throughout the game world, which for the player is composed of individual, interlocking screens (a method sometimes called flip-screen), kind of like in The Legend of Zelda. While a few areas of the game experiment with screen scrolling and wrapping, most of them are just your standard, static location screens.

I think one of the most profound sensations of the game happens while traversing the large, open-space areas just outside the spaceship. Unlike in the corridors that make up most of the game, these sections of the map become quickly disorienting. Out here a single flip can send the player character floating across several screens before ever touching ground. This means a player falling to the bottom of one screen will immediately appear at the top of the next screen. Because of the swift and constant falling speed, the part of the brain that processes these spatial shifts has a difficult time keeping up and making sense of the larger map. This is only further compounded by the fact that Cavanagh—through his playful experimentation with color—does not maintain color consistency between screens. In other words, a yellow surface on one screen might be a red surface on the next.

I think one reason why this setup works well is because it also reinforces the notion that each screen represents a standalone idea: a particular platforming challenge, an interesting visual layout, or an unusual flow or pattern of movement. Notice how individual screens have individual titles that comment on these very ideas. And isn't this the way more games should be designed, with meaning and expression in every detail?

Taken as a whole, VVVVVV represents a fantastic vision and a gem of a game. Playing it is like taking a leap of faith, a joyous plunge into the unknown.

Unmanned: Dissonance as Play

I wonder if the makers of Unmanned watched the same episode of Frontline that I did last year. It was an episode called “Digital Nation” that attempted to grapple with a very ambitious but important question: How is the human race changing through its relationship to and growing dependence on digital technology?

The show covered a lot of ground, from the role of computers in the public education system to the problem of video game addiction among South Korean youth. One of the most interesting segments looked at the military's use of unmanned drones and the life of the Air Force pilots who control them. Almost like any other white- or blue-collar citizen, many of these pilots depart from their suburban homes in the morning and drive across the Nevada desert to work. Only their work consists of hunting down and firing missiles on suspected insurgents halfway across the globe. They even dress in flight suits, in part to reinforce the gravity and reality of their duties. But in actually their butts never even get off the ground.

The episode was sobering, and it also brought me back to thinking about the "Collateral Murder" video that had been posted on WikiLeaks the previous year (which itself was eerily reminiscent of a particular mission I had played in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). Anyway, I ended up writing this short little story on my other blog (oh yeah, I've got another blog that preceded this one). It was sort of a brief, raw exercise in imagining the lives of three people—the first being a suburban-dwelling drone pilot—and their relationship to digital violence.

Unmanned uses the mechanics of a point-and-click computer game to examine a very similar subject: a day in the life of another such imagined drone pilot. Every activity, from shaving and driving to dropping bombs on terrorists, plays out like a short mini-game. Whether mundane or stress-inducing, they all present their little challenges, and as demonstrated through the man's own inner monologue and personal introspection, they're interconnected. His cognitive mind gives equal weight and meaning to each moment.

This would all be very interesting in and of itself, but the game goes a step further by displaying the action in parallel windows. As the player attempts to steer a car in a straight line on one screen, she or he must simultaneously cycle through a multiple-choice thought tree in the other. While guiding a drone on one screen, the player must carefully navigate a flirtatious conversation in the other. The implied anxiety of each moment becomes manifest through the mechanics of play. Turns out, it's neither easy nor comfortable trying to concentrate properly on two competing demands.

Unmanned is not so much a simulation or adventure game as it is an interactive metaphor for cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort that results when one's feelings or beliefs are at seeming conflict or opposition with one another. How does a married family man cope with his desire for his attractive coworker? How does one feel pride and honor for defeating an enemy in a way that perhaps feels dishonorable or even cowardly? What happens when all of these stresses are intermingling as a part of one’s daily routine?

What I like about Unmanned is it doesn't judge the imagined subject, at least not directly. There are different ways for the player character to think through his situation, and none of them are presented as definitive. Even if he muses about the satisfaction of killing terrorists during his morning shave, it's not apparent whether or not this is the man's genuine sentiment or a bit of coping sarcasm. It may be both.

In its swift 10 minutes or less of playing time, the game packs a wallop. It's as much a creative statement about American foreign policy and the war on terror as it is an examination of modern video games and the gamification of everyday living. It's about—dare I say—the human condition! One could argue the game is noncommittal, but I would strongly disagree. It's a game that deals in real politics without stooping toward the overtly ideological. It juggles questions of morality without resorting to didacticism. It also has a keen sense of irony, and the title of the game is brilliantly appropriate.

I'm glad there are developers such as molleindustria who are using games to tackle these kinds of issues. We don't have to be actual drone pilots—or fathers or husbands or even men—to understand what it's like to be at a moral or emotional stalemate. But good storytelling can help place us in these hyperreal situations and in turn reveal new truths or ideas not only about ourselves but the absurd world around us. Films and literary fiction have long served this purpose. Video games . . . not so much, and that's okay. But Unmanned gives me reason to believe that games can and will rise to that very challenge.

Unmanned won the Grand Jury Prize at IndieCade 2012. You can download or play it online for free.

(EDITOR'S UPDATE: I just came across some essential reading to add to this post. It's a Kotaku column by Paolo Perdercini, the very man who brought us Unmanned. In addition to clarifying the actual main source of inspiration for the game—it was actually the book Wired For War by P.W. Singer—he offers a very compelling argument for why we should be wary of the kind of black operations being seemingly glorified in the latest Call of Duty game. It makes for a great companion piece to the game. I'm left even more impressed at the ideological restraint with which Perdercini managed to approach the subject of remote warfare in his game.)

Spelunky review – Respect the game

“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.” — Edward Whymper, first person to ascend the Matterhorn

I've heard mountaineers in documentaries describe how the world's highest peaks command the respect of those who attempt to climb them. You hear people talk about Mt. Everest as if it were some cold and indifferent god. It is not there to cooperate. To those it beckons, it does so without intent. And even for those climbers who prove themselves worthy enough to reach its top, they tend to speak not so much of their own triumph over the mountain but rather of being humbled.

Like a wild nature unto itself, the world of Spelunky on the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) makes me feel insignificant as a video game player. It has no regard for my level of skill. If it rewards me with easy progress, I am happy. If it punishes me with overbearing obstacles, I try my best and am not surprised—or overly unruly—when I meet my grizzly end. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

The game has been described as a rougelike platformer. The first half of that description refers to a sub-genre of role-playing games, derived from an actual 1980 game called Rouge, in which the game procedurally (or semi-randomly) generates new maps or levels for each play-through. Also, death in a roguelike is considered permanent. When you lose, you have to go all the way back to the start. No progress is spared. The objective may be to reach a predetermined end of the game, but if not that—since such an outcome is unlikely—then to simply make it as far as possible before dying will suffice.

In Spelunky you play either as a cartoony Indiana Jones lookalike or some other equally cute alternate character. You descend your way through a series of 2D levels, past all manner of enemies, hazards, and booby traps. Each level is composed of various tiles or building blocks, algorithmically arranged in a unique manner. There are some patterns that remain the same. The entry door goes somewhere at the top. The exit door is somewhere at the bottom. And there is always an available path to that door, however treacherous it might—or rather will—be.

The way you choose to traverse the maze is determined, in part, by your initial underlying goals. Do you try to collect as much gold as possible? Happy hunting. Do you simply try to beat the game? First of all, good luck. Your journey, should you reach your goal, will follow this rough outline: Four levels in the underground mines, four levels in the jungle, four levels in the ice caves, followed by three levels in the temple and a final boss room. There's also a shortcut system that you can build by completing each of the four main areas and donating a specific resource to the “Tunnel Man” in between stages. But there can be other goals as well, such as the ones set forth in the game's insanely difficult achievements, as well as secret paths I have yet to fully discover. Insane, I tell you!

But your playing style can easily change mid-way through the game based on your current health, as well as the resources made available to you as you explore. You start each game with four hearts, four bombs, four climbing ropes, and a whip. From there you can find or buy other items, and just about everything you pick up can also be thrown as a weapon. Get your hands on a shotgun and you may decide to wipe out those jungle enemies head on. Find a pickaxe or load up on more bombs and you might try blazing an entirely new trail altogether. It all depends on what the game throws your way. If I happen to be in the jungle levels and I see that I've ended up near a nest of giant bees, you can bet that I am going to throw a proportion of my caution to the wind in favor of a more frenetic pace. Seriously, those bees can be panic-inducing! But if I likewise happen to stumble upon a trapped damsel who will reward me with an extra heart if I successfully bring her to the exit, I might put myself in the path of harm for that very chance.

Every scenario in Spelunky is a risk-reward scenario. Mostly risk. You will quickly realize that death is swift and not even a stockpile of, say, eight hearts can assure your survival. The slightest misstep can instantly end what may have been your best play-through, often in ways you hadn't foreseen. It could be as graceless as a tiki man knocking you with a boomerang into a bed of spikes or as elaborate as being thrown around like a pinball by a bunch of yetis.

And yet even as it kicks your ass, Spelunky is addictive fun. It compels you to get better. You won't memorize the levels themselves, but you will memorize patterns and situations. If you lament your untimely death in one play-through, only to succumb to a very similar type of death several play-throughs later, you will curse not Spelunky but yourself.

There seems to be a recent mini surge of these procedurally generated games like Spelunky. I've been reading about a space game called FTL. Another is The Binding of Isaac (be sure to read an excellent column about that game here). The same underlying concept drives one of my favorite games of the year, Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, which I previously wrote about. I think you can also identify it in those mobile-platform running games like Canabalt, which arrange an unpredictable path meant to keep you ... on your toes, I guess. It's that very randomness that makes those games so easy to pick up again. Every start is fresh and uncertain, but hopeful—always hopeful!

Spelunky also benefits for its attention to precision controls. For being such a game of patience and caution, the character moves paradoxically fast, especially in a sprint. Character movement carries the goofiest physics that nevertheless become better controlled through sustained practice. There are situations I can memorize. I know that when I sprint from one ledge to another ledge separated by a gap two tile spaces wide, I'll end up hanging onto that opposite ledge.

Compare this to a much older game I've also been playing, which is Super Castlevania IV on the Super Nintendo, also a whip-wielding platformer and a great game in its own right, I've determined. But in the physics and mechanics department, it's a game from a primitive era. Every jump feels accompanied by the weight of an invisible lead ball chained to the ankle. Spelunky may have its retro aesthetics, but it takes full advantage of modern mechanics.

Although I make my way down, it's as if Spelunky gives me new mountains to climb. I've finished the game once using the shortcut to the last four levels. My current goal is to beat it using no tunnel shortcuts. I've come close twice, only to be instantly killed both times by a crushing block on the penultimate level. It's frustrating, sure. But it's pointless to argue. I used to get exceedingly frustrated, for example, at the random “dark” levels. This is a scenario in which the entire level is almost pitch black outside the radius of a small halo of torchlight. The trick is to take this torch and make your way carefully to other torch beacons that help to illuminate other parts of the map. You can imagine how suddenly this random occurrence can diminish the player's likelihood of success. Enemies pop out of nowhere. Uncertain jumps can turn into health damaging free-falls or worse. But it can be done. And when it is done, it feels good.

The thing is, I've gotten to a point where I no longer fear these occurrences. I accept them like I accept a change in the weather. Is it fair? No. But Spelunky doesn't care. And if it laughs at me, I can only laugh back and face its cruel indifference like a challenge. The game commands respect because your virtual life depends on it. Just don't believe for a second that the respect is reciprocal.

The Score

• Rolling Stone Magazine gives Spelunky 3-and-a-half-out-of-5 stars.
• Pitchfork gives it an 8.7.
• Roger Ebert says games games can't be art.
• I say it's the best new game I've played this year.

Spelunky was made by indie developers Derek Yu and Andy Hull and is a remake of a free game of the same name that Yu originally developed for the PC. 

Skyrim: Does size matter . . . or perception?

When I reviewed the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic about a year ago, I described it as a game that relied on the player's either willingness or ability to suspend disbelief. I didn't really elaborate on that point, but I think it touched upon something worth thinking about. To me, the visual environments of KOTOR offered a poor abstraction of the Star Wars universe. Hence, they did a poor job conveying the sense of intergalactic, space-opera adventure they were intended to convey.

Part of the problem, I think, had to do with the Star Wars universe itself, too much a product of 1970s visual effects technology—awesome for its time, no doubt, but stifling perhaps as an aesthetic influence decades later. Drab spaceship corridors and flat desert expanses don't necessarily make for very engaging experiences when translated to the interactive medium of video game level design. The other part of the problem, of course, was the limited graphical rendering capabilities of 2003 game console hardware. It just never felt like I was exploring a living, breathing planet or space station when I moved around the 3D space. I was too fully aware of the environments as individual maps, separated not by geography but by programmed loading screens.

If The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is any indication, we've come a long way baby. I don't mean to compare apples to oranges here. I'm actually not trying to compare the two games at all. What I am saying, however, is that since first playing this game a couple weeks ago (a bit late, I know), I've never encountered a virtual environment so visually and technologically ambitious.

For those not versed in video game culture, the aesthetic style of The Elder Scrolls series is of the high fantasy variety that regards elves, trolls, and magic swords as the stuff of commonplace. If first we had J.R.R. Tolkein literature, compounded by Dungeons & Dragons role-playing, further compounded by The Legend of Zelda plus two-and-a-half decades of technological innovation, then today we have Skyrim. It's an open-world game in the truest sense of the word. In other words, there is no distinction between background art and foreground art, only a matter of simulated distance and perspective. Those distant mountains aren't just two-dimensional decorations. They represent a physical geography that you as a player are free to explore and traverse, provided you can find a path that isn't too steep for your character to climb.

The name Skyrim actually refers to the fictional region in which the game is set. Bounded by ocean and mountains, the interior landscape encompasses all manner of open valleys, craggy peaks, forests, swamps, and rivers. Skyrim is not the first open-world game. It's not the first and probably will not be the last game to wow me with its incredible scope and detail. That said, the detail in these environments astounds me. It's not just the millions of polygons that comprise both the macro and micro landscape. It's not just the beautiful HD textures that adorn those polygonal surfaces. It's in the sculpting of the geography itself, with its convincing shifts in elevation and assorted placement of boulders and vegetation. Never has a fantasy universe, in and of itself, felt so convincing. Never have I succumbed to such a grand illusion.

An Epic of Ant-Sized Proportions

Out of curiosity, I tried Google searching for an answer to how large is—in relative scale—the over world map of Skyrim. I couldn't find any kind of definitive answer, but some people were saying that the game world was roughly equivalent to the size of the game's predecessor Oblivion, and that game world was supposedly about 16 square miles. Unfortunately, I don't have any data or confirmation to really back that up, but it strikes me as a believable guesstimate. And all in all, I'd say that's a pretty impressive accomplishment, to be able to create such an enormous environment of such detail and inherent authenticity.

Oddly enough, however, I get the feeling that the game is intending to convey a world much larger than it realistically appears. How big is Skyrim supposed to feel? The size of England? The size of France? The size of Rhode Island? I really don't know. But the sheer amount of lore embedded throughout the world and its own implied grandeur—I'm talking annuls of wars and conquests—would seem laughably constricted to a mere 16 square miles. At one point while playing I ran down from an isolated monastery near the top of one of the game's tallest “mountains,” and it took me little more than a minute to get to its base, across a valley, and through the gates of a village called Whiterun. One of the reasons this Olympic-style feat was possible is due to how fast your character can sprint—straight down the side of a sheer mountain, no less. It's almost as if there's an invisible treadmill underneath my feet. But I think it's also because the game world is really not as epic in scale as it leads me to believe. In fact, I think very few game environments are actually as large as implied (Hyrule, Liberty City, etc.).

This isn't in any way a criticism. If anything, it's a testament to a game's capable art direction. The view from a 32-inch widescreen television screen is just not the same as observing the world with full peripheral advantage, and I get the impression my brain is blowing up all that virtual space to a magnified scope. What would this environment actually look like if I were able to inhabit it as a real space, I wonder?

Let's Make This Real

The first time I saw The Legend of Zelda—though it would be a long time before I played it myself—I looked on with a sense of wonder. Those simple graphics (combined with that iconic chip-tune melody) evoked a sense of adventure much larger in spirit and meaning than was contained in the individual parts themselves. I haven't played a new Zelda game since a little bit of Twilight Princess on the Wii, but it's interesting to see how Nintendo has reinterpreted the essence of that series using present-day hardware and technology. It's almost like they took those early abstractions as the real deal, and they've maintained the series as more of a brand than anything else. I do think that Ocarina of Time took the series an incredible step into the third dimension (I'm probably in the camp that ranks it as one of the greatest games of all time), and I'm sure the newest Zelda adventures make for great games as well.

But to me, it's almost as if Skyrim is a more authentic spiritual successor than anything Nintendo will probably ever put out again. It's a game more in keeping with the promises that the original Zelda made to video games as an expressive medium. While I find it hard to evaluate Skyrim for the actual game that it is (there's a lot more to talk about), as an experiment of pure immersion, it's like entering a whole new Hyrule—a vast over world with unlimited secrets and dungeons to explore. At the very least, it's as if someone took the original Zelda (itself a bit of a high fantasy adventure, by way of Japan) and decided to evolve the game's core aesthetic in the direction of photorealism (and now I realize that the first time I talked about Skyrim it had to do with photorealistic violence).

For good, bad, or for neutral, the need for suspending disbelief is becoming continually less of an issue.