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Discord
Do you make little art games, or "game poems" to express yourself to the world? Would you like to see more videogames that tackle every aspect of human experience—the interior stuff, as well as the exterior stuff? Do you make games during the day and read poetry at night—or vice versa? Would you be interested in a cozy space where you could talk about this stuff with other game makers without being considered weird?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, join my Game Poets Discord!
I’m sorry that you had such a frustrating experience with the game Brian. I didn’t have much difficulty with solving the puzzles and fending off the shadows, but I do remember it being frustrating in a couple of places where I had to run back to save Yorda, and I can see how it might make the game too difficult for some. I’m curious, as you mention playing Shadow of the Colossus… did you find that game to be easier than Ico? Were you able to finish it?
i really enjoyed reading this review. i only played Ico once, when i rented it a few years back. i want to say this was after i owned and played through Shadow of the Colossus, but i’m no longer sure if this is the case. regardless, i’d heard many good things about Ico and I really wanted to love it. i definitely enjoyed the atmosphere and the visuals, but i gave up fairly early on out of frustration. maybe i was doing something wrong, but i simply found it exceedingly frustrating to try to solve the puzzles while also needing to constantly defend the girl from the shadow things. after too many times of almost figuring out what i needed to do or almost implementing a solution but then needing to rush back to beat off the shadows (or, even worse, failing to get back in time) i just gave up. you said in your Shadow of the Colossus review that ideally the game would be able to be easier for those who didn’t have the dexterity for it, and i had a similar feeling about Ico. i wanted to see it through to the end, but it was, sadly, just too difficult for me.
I see your point Ben, and I think it’s a good one.
Matt -
Oops, forgot about the purple section. Been a little while since I’ve played it (man, that’ll sure give my comments less reliability…). Still, the fact that it’s a much different tone obviously shows that she’s not exactly what everyone else thinks she is.
Jordan -
Perhaps it’s granted, or not. I was just saying that I feel Emily Short’s comment (unless I read it incorrectly, or failed to see the context) seems to be missing one of the points of where the supposed "saintliness" is coming from. It’s not coming from her, it’s coming from everyone else. The way she is characterized makes her seem a certain way that see probably really is not. She’s too saintly to be true, but that’s the whole point, I think. Is the game effective at making us believe the same way the people believe, but us getting deeply into the skin of the people who loved Alison? Perhaps, perhaps not. Does it matter? No. For me, the message still gets across that people place much more value on others than they really deserve, which could be good or bad. It makes me think for myself what she was really like, because the whole story isn’t told.
To be more concise… whether I cared about her or if the game made me care about her is irrelevant. I like the contrast between the way everyone sees her and the reality, which is unknown and only slightly hinted at.
I think all of this is granted Ben. The question is, how well does it work? How deep are we, as the players/readers, able to go into the skin of those people who so loved Alison?
Ben, it’s not quite true that Alison is never the viewpoint character — there’s the purple section. In which the player doesn’t have even the minimal amount of control that we have in the rest of the game, and which also is psychologically a little darker and more twisted than the rest of it — it doesn’t make Alison quite like the plaster saint she is everywhere else. Which I think makes the point that the rest of the time we’re seeing her through the eyes of people who love her, and that her inner life might be more complex.
inle, I think that’s a great insight. It seems to me as though the most natural kinds of plot for IF involves time travel, time fragmentation, and tragedy. It’s extraordinarily complicated to program a choice that has multiple outcomes, leading to further choices with multiple outcomes; the programming burden grows exponentially. Some games attain multiple endings through a single choice or a couple of choices at the end (as in the Dreamhold, and I think Metamorphoses and Floatpoint — Metamorphoses has lots of different ways to solve the puzzles but I’m not sure if they affect the endings you can get) or multiple kinds of game over (which to some extent is what happens in Slouching Towards Bedlam, and lots of games where there are different ways to die). Or the game can push you along toward a single ending. And why might you have to get to that one ending? Because what you’re trying to prevent has already happened. So IF is really suited to tragedy. And at a crucial juncture in Photopia, the player knows what’s coming, and may try to get the PC to stop it (I always do), but the PC has no reason to hit the brakes until it’s too late. [I have to say, I haven’t got far into Violet at all, and in Ramses I found myself so unwilling to play along with the PC that I quit and read the Club Floyd transcript.]
Krendil’s post remonds me of something: Secret of Monkey Island had a "win" hotkey documented in its manual. You pressed ctrl-W or something like that, and it would immediately display a message congratulating you for winning and roll the credits. This was, of course, accepted by no one as actually winning the game. Seven Minutes isn’t quite that extreme, of course — the really unacceptable thing about the hotkey victory was that it had no diegetic component whatever.
Negative criticism of Photopia often misses the true point of its telling: the concrete, unchangeable nature of the past, and our struggle to reconcile with it. That’s not to say that history or memory aren’t malleable, or even fluid - but death and time are the great irreversibles. Much of Photopia can be spent (as I did) trying in vain to avert the inevitable, despite myself. Two other IF games have had a similar effect (Violet and Ramses), where I’ve found myself knowing exactly what the game required of me to "win", yet tried absolutely everything in my power to avoid the repercussions of those actions. And that is precisely where the determinist constraints of games like Passage and Photopia find their scope - where a game "on rails" can only be just so, or it loses all meaning.
A comment on the "saintliness" of Allison:
Adam Cadre notes in his Phohtopia PHAQ that she was meant to be characterized by all the people around her that adored here and loved her. Allison is never the point of view character. We never see into her mind, how she thinks, what she’s really like. Of course she’s too saintly to be true. Other people always see us as better or worse than we really are. That’s the point. We are supposed to be experiencing the loss of Allison through the eyes of the people who thought she was the most amazing girl in the world. That’s a big loss, of course, if you think that highly of someone.
That’s why I get excited about Photopia. It’s not the story. The story isn’t really that deep. It’s not the exploration in the imagined worlds. I could do without it, really. It’s the way the story is told that interests me.
I got the feeling, playing Photopia, that this was exactly the author’s intent. The red and blue stages, with areas encountered in a preset order as the player moves, rather than placed stationary on a grid, seemed an explicit acknowledgement that this was what Alison was doing: creating an illusion of freedom while still telling exactly the story that she wanted to tell.