mynameismichaelkern

[mynameismichaelkern]

When A Tree Falls In The Woods...

There are two things that stuck with me upon completion of Night In The Woods - the first is that Mae, the protagonist, is not voiced. The second is that Garbo and Malloy, as well as Sharkle, characters that are as background as characters can get, have their own audio cues for talking. The comedy duo of Garbo and Malloy show up on the television, whether that’s at the train station, at the very beginning of the game, or while Mae watches television with her father. Sharkles exists solely as a companion buddy for Mae’s laptop - akin to Bonzi, of BonziBuddy fame. While this can simply be brushed aside as a budgetary consideration - it’s a dialogue-driven game and the sheer amount of voice-over work that would need to be done would get quite expensive - there are more interesting things to derive from these characters having vocal voices at all.

Garbo, Malloy, and Sharkle are all media. Their messages are clear but that is mostly because their messages gravitate towards the realms of vital and yet completely useless. Sharkle is the only character that speaks comprehendible words with a distorted “Hi!” and “Hello!” that would fit coming out of a state-fair mascot’s mouth. The two comedians take a page from the voice of adults in the Peanuts’ cartoon show, with  “wah-wah-waaaah”s taking the place of language.

It’s something to take note of because while there are gods, cultists, and the common folk, none of them get a voice. It is only these entities that exist outside of the town that get any consideration in this way. The thing is, they have nothing of importance to say. Garbo and Malloy make a joke of their lives and a fear of failure, but the laugh track underneath undercuts it as anything serious. Sharkle is something that appears within two instances - as a hallucination when the protagonist, Mae, is unconscious, and when clicked on in the computer interface. They ultimately have nothing to say but are the only characters with audible voices. The rest of the game is filled with characters with busy lives who are, literally, silent in their suffering.

Night In The Woods is set in a rust belt town and deals with Mae Borowski dropping out of college and returning home. There is the expectation that comes with homecoming stories that the protagonist returning to their home will find that they are the mature ones and that they have outgrown their former friends and family. Night In The Woods takes this  trope and instead shows a world wherein others have grown up, leaving behind the protagonist who has, in turn, left their old world behind. Economic instability, dead-end jobs, and forgotten and downtrodden workers are the common tale of Possum Springs, the setting of this game. By turning the trope around, and showing these workers as the ones who have matured and grown, it puts the spotlight back on them. With so many characters that share poetry, their plights, dreams - only characters who are not tangible and have nothing to say get to have voices. Despite the focus of the game being upon these people - the player is still someone who is outside of this community and can not hear them. They can only hear the media that surrounds Possum Springs.

Sharkle is insignificant. Their influence on the story is a comedic hallucination wherein they tell Mae to get up. When you click on them on the desktop interface, they make a funny sound. They contribute nothing but the voice is what makes them actually stand out. It’s a paradox - they demand attention because they have a voice, but there’s nothing of note or depth to derive from what they are saying. Instead, the only thing worth analyzing of them is why they do have voices. Sharkle embodies the buzz of the internet. It overpowers the voices within these towns. The internet is simultaneously a method to communicate externally, but the sheer size and breadth of it makes actual communication impossible.

Garbo & Malloy’s is the basic double act. One character plays the straight man to let the other play the comic. Their jokes deal with their own ratings, employment, and dealing with depression and self-image. It’s fairly basic stuff in the realm of comedy. It is the program that Mae is greeted by when entering the train station upon returning to Possum Springs - the initial action of the game. It is also what Mae and her father watch at the end of her nights. Their voices lack the principles of language, just devolving into rising and falling syllables. They almost have nothing to say, except that’s not entirely true. One of the things that stands out is the closing line of their act is directly related to the next major action in Night In The Woods. For example, there is an instance wherein Malloy says they will join a cult on the next segment. Soon after, Mae encounters the cult of Possum Springs. In another instance, the two proclaim they will be going to therapy and the next day, Mae’s mother sets up an appointment for Mae to go see a therapist. In this sense, they have a predictive power. It is a vague prediction, but a prediction nonetheless.

There is a certain predictive power to comedy. Fiction and literature all point to a future, even if they’re rooted in the past. Garbo & Malloy both have this power, but it’s ultimately not as powerful as one would expect. It simply signifies the event will happen - not how to prevent it, survive it, or point to a future after the event. It gets lost in the comedy, so the dire warnings become background noise. Garbo & Malloy’s best efforts are the equivalent of telling someone a train is coming when they’re stuck in the train track.

The voices are given to the useless. These characters have nothing of worth to give to the story, but can be heard. It represents the current state of affairs - TV and Internet dominate the consciousness. Night In The Woods is not casting aspersions upon either - it simply is stating that the more important and vital conversations happen locally. The voices that are amplified are highlighted because their message can be seen as broad enough to just dive into uselessness. Media as a whole, even Night In The Woods itself, can not solve the issues of Possum Springs. It comes from work and local effort.

[mynameismichaelkern]

Mouth Moods and the Mouth Trilogy: The Dangers of Nostalgia

An auditory disaster of a mash-up album is a good vehicle for dissecting nostalgia. The Mouth Trilogy is the trio of mash-up albums by Neil Cicierega. They are notable for inducing dissociative episodes and confusion. For some it elicits pure revulsion, and for others, they’re just some dumb fun. The evolution of the trilogy is what is probably the most interesting part of the series. On its face they are simply mash up albums, but they are more than that. They are directly critiques of nostalgia and it’s values.

Mouth Sounds was a much more violent experience. It had teeth to it - it was destroying the idea that nostalgia is a comfortable thing. It used nostalgia to launch an auditory assault upon the listener. It continues to incur Smash Mouth’s “All-Star,” a song from the Mystery Men, The Digimon Movie, Rat Race, and most notably, Shrek soundtracks. It is easily recognizable and immediately incurs nostalgia of one’s youth, if one was born in the 90s. Because of the boom of the internet just as someone from that generation would begin to feel nostalgia for their youth, it’s spread is easy to see. It’s a silly, upbeat song that has lyrics that are easy to remember. It’s the perfect target to pin to the wall if one wants to skew  nostalgia. This constant reiteration of this target continues to slam home the message: “Fuck your nostalgia.”  It’s mocking those that think their past is worth celebrating.

It’s never more clear than when Imagine by John Lennon is mixed with a horrifically slowed down version of the lyrics of All-Star. The former is a song about a dream for a better world, while the latter is a song about going with the flow and being the best you can be despite a world that fights against oneself. It is synthesis of two of the most recognizable songs of their respective eras. They are both mockeries of each other and by doing so, Cicierega accomplishes the feat of skewing not just a reverence of 90s nostalgia but nostalgia in general. It mocks John Lennon’s dream of a better world in the future, by saying “This is the future we inhabit,” by slowing down All-Star’s lyrics to such an absurd degree it can only be seen as farce.

Mouth Silence, the follow-up to Mouth Sounds, deemed a prequel, is a clearer album. Mouth Sounds is furious but Mouth Silence decides to subdue it’s rage for the sake of clarity.  It relies on songs that are much slower than it’s predecessor. In the grand scheme of things it was partly a thank you for listening to Mouth Sounds, while also asking for the audience to take a clearer look at the unsaid thesis statement of these albums. Each of these album’s first minutes is full of distorted sounds as it struggles to find it’s themes and ideas. It’s as if the sounds themselves are adjusting to their shell and morphing. Mouth Silence has an almost choral sound about it. It’s a promise things are going to be a bit more clear. This can be seen in it’s splicing of using news clips. It’s firing spears not just at the music but the culture that reacted towards the mainstream. It shows the silliness of the media as it overreacts to the Pokemon trend.

While putting larger culture in its crosshairs, the album does not ignore the disgust at nostalgia and that is never more clear than in Crocodile Chop, the mash up of Crocodile Rock by Elton John and Chop Suey by System of a Down. Chop Suey is about how death is treated differently depending upon one’s cause of death, while Crocodile Rock is a song about appreciating nostalgia itself. One is obsessed with the future, the other the past. Crocodile Rock is a much more carefree song and together, they seem to simply mock the ideas of death. On a deeper level though, it can be seen as those that are obsessed with the past see the future as a joke.

The most interesting part of Mouth Silence is its relating of Death and Nostalgia. It’s My Life by Bon Jovi and Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen are lyrically featured, acknowledging death and its inevitability. These memories of the past are vital to thoughts of death - one cannot exist without the other.  These songs are not mocked in their mash ups. These three songs are actually unique in that each of them are mashed up with songs that lack lyrics. Born to Run is mixed with Alley Cat by Bent Fabric. It’s My Life is mixed with The Liberty Bell, a traditional military march that is most associated with being the theme song of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. With only the lyrics on display it emphasizes the lyrics that settle on death. In Born to Run, there is the idea that death is inevitable so it’s best to keep going and not settle on the past. In It’s My Life, the theme is that again, Death is Inevitable so live your life how you want.

There is one song on this album that cements the idea that nostalgia is a convenient distraction from death. It’s a track titled Space Monkey Mafia. It mixes the lyrics of It’s The End of the World As We Know It by REM and We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel. In the background is a polka/electronic track. (As far as I have been able to find, it’s an original track.) The inclusion of an original track on a mash up album is notable in itself - most mash ups rely upon the familiarity of pre-existing tracks to make an impact. The lyrics of the two songs clash and compete for prominence. Their ideals, one in which it's the end of the world and death is around the corner for all, and the other which is a collection of allusions to the past. In combination, “the fire” of We Didn’t Start The Fire can be seen as the cause of “the end of the world.” All of the past is what’s responsible for the end. Nostalgia - yearning for a past - is what’s going to lead to the end of the world in this album’s eyes.

Mouth Moods is notable because it is actually fun. Mouth Moods is the eyeroll, accompanied by a smirk, before finally succumbing to relative’s proddings and dancing at the family reunion, of the Mouth Trilogy. In its first minutes, it combines the notable lead ins for multiple catchy songs, Smash Mouth’s All-Star included. What it loses in pointed criticism towards nostalgia, it gains in playing with the format itself. Early on in the album, the piano intro for Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles opens up the possibility for literally any mash up. It breeds anticipation in the listener until the satisfaction of the screaming lyrics of AC/DC’s Back in Black. The subdued piano of A Thousand Miles actually acts to highlight the strangeness of Brian Johnson’s voice that seems so natural in any amount of AC/DC songs.

Nowhere is that fun more apparent in the track titled “Bustin’.” Simply re-doing the lyrics of the song to the theme song of the theme song of Ghostbusters. The song is introduced with a clip from an interview Bobby Brown did with Larry King, talking about having sex with a ghost while filming Ghostbusters II. The song then launches into the familiar tune of the Ghostbusters theme before manipulating Ray Parker Jr.’s lyrics to insinuate he exceedingly enjoys “bustin’,” specifically with ghosts. It’s a silly song made more for a joke than to actually point any sort of criticism. It’s a corruption of a familiar song to provide a joke.

This album is actually much more confident using the straight audio of commercials and reports. It is confident that the absurdity of the past can stand for itself and does not need to be enhanced as much. Instead of criticising nostalgia, it instead is criticising the sacred temples of culture. Ghostbusters is considered an institution but it reduces to sex with ghosts. Immediately following it is the lyrics of TLC’s No Scrubs with the dirge-like backing of Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin.

In one of the stranger turns on the album is Hans Zimmer’s Time scoring the lyrics to The Village People’s Y.M.C.A. It’s an inversion of the mocking of something sacred. It’s amplifying something that is an advertisement for the YMCA or as an appreciation for a gay hook up spot - whichever interpretation of Y.M.C.A  you enjoy more. This amplification acts as an act of tearing down what would be considered awe-inspiring. In this sense, institutions and what they stand for are what is put to task. There is a further inversion going on in this track :institutions, in this case, is the score of Hans Zimmer, not the YMCA which is an actual, physical, institution. Hans Zimmer’s music stands for a sort of elevated status. His music makes moments bold. Y.M.C.A. is a song you do at the family reunion because your grandmother with a weak hip can do it.

It is in this album that Neil Cicierega has mastered his craft and knows what is expected of his mash ups. All-Star, a staple of the series is withheld for the penultimate song - a mix of Under Pressure by Queen. The lyrics of All-Star are teased earlier in the album. The audience is expectant of the All-Star mash up. Using Under Pressure is acknowledging that nostalgia does have it’s use - the song is fundamentally about the pressure of society and how it can get to people, hoping tomorrow can be better, and how there isn’t enough caring and compassion in the world. The use of All-Star here is the declaration of nostalgia being the way people ignore the issues and problems of today - a warm blanket of the past - a past which has been criticized over the trilogy of being worth mockery.

The fact that there’s another track after the All-Star/Under Pressure stands as it’s own statement that nostalgia will stand regardless of criticism. It’s the album’s acknowledging remixes and mash-ups will continue on, despite the insults levied at it and at its core, it is the shrug and laugh at the end of it all.

The Mouth Trilogy stands as a counterpoint of the Mash-up genre, while being securely within that same genre. It is skillfully done from beginning to end and maintains a cohesive theme while taking different angles of attack to get to the core of what they are supposed to represent. The Mouth Trilogy has meaning in its attack - it is not merely a wild swipe into the dark. It is precise and calculated in its mash-ups. Its message is valuable, as long as you can stand those first few minutes.

[mynameismichaelkern]

Impression: That Dragon, Cancer

That Dragon, Cancer is dealing with the heaviest of material, the death of a child, and the game does not feel equipped to carry it. An autobiographical game, by couple Amy and Ryan Green, That Dragon, Cancer is the story of their infant son who was diagnosed with cancer and, eventually succumbs to his illness, and how they cope with that reality.

When I first heard of the game, I let out an audible “Oof.” Cancer sucks. I went in with an open mind. The death of anyone from cancer is tragic and couple it with the death of an infant son and it’s all the worse. I expected to feel bad when I left the game. I did not expect to leave the game feeling disappointed.

Disappointment is a tricky word when talking about something like this. It implies that there was expectation - it implies that there was something worth going into this game for - an almost excitement at the possibilities. When talking about material like this, having expectations or anything of the sort can put one out to be a monster craving a tragedy, but I was excited because it looked promising. It looked like it would take a mature look at life and death.

I’m going to be straight about this: I did not like this game. I didn’t not like it because of its subject matter. This isn’t a case of “Well, it made me feel sad, so it wasn’t fun.” I was disappointed because the subject matter is close to the Green family and I was looking for this tragedy to be explored with a deft hand or a raging fist or something more than what was actually put on display.

The art style is completely minimalist in nature. The art creates a layer of separation. A faceless child is not a child I’m looking to know, but that’s what’s in this game. It’s a distracting feature. It doesn’t seem to bring any meaning to the game or bring any element besides being the throw away art style of the game. The father, Ryan Green has his beard and glasses, and the mother, Amy Green, has her eyebrows and hair, but Joel, their son, lacks any identifying marks. It creates this layer between the player and the drama unfolding.

It’s totally understandable that they wouldn’t want to model their son’s face for this, but nothing looks well made. The artstyle instead of elevating any sensations actually puts a barrier up between the player and the game. The fantastical elements feel more like shadow plays than something to be believed. It works to cohere the magical realism and the realistic bits but at the cost of making the entire game suffer and harder to connect with.

The small interactions between the player and Joel feel more intrusive than actually revelatory, and this is the part that feels strange to mention in a game like this, but so important to highlight. A lot of progressing involved turning around and then turning back to allow the “objective” to load in. There were moments where that wasn’t clear. There was moments were it felt like I was waiting for the game to move on. The gameplay feels sluggish, when it doesn’t feel like it’s bugging out and breaking.

These interactions feel cumbersome and they intrude upon some larger moments of the game.There were moments where I had questioned if the game was making me wait, as some sort of statement towards waiting for results or waiting for the inevitable, or if I needed to restart because the actual game was broken. When given control, everything feels so floaty and “game-y”, which is to say there’s too much feedback, too much control to the player, while simultaneously, frustrating to control, using a click to move style of movement. It felt like the “game” sections were added to adhere to some strict guideline of “game-hood,” but there’s no goals to them but connection, and again, the art style gets in the way. The “games” instead of bring the player closer actually act to push them further away.

These small little hitches and frustrations continue to snowball and get in the way of the narrative, but pushing that aside, it never dug deep enough. The writing touches on questions of faith and grace and religion, but instead of plunging into them, instead it feels like it plays on the surface, while simultaneously never being subtle. It never rises to try and answer any questions, but instead just...comes to a conclusion of the son ultimately dying.

The game is split into 14 tragic little vignette of magical realism and fantastical ideas. Few seem connected enough and instead it feels like a smorgasbord of suffering. It makes it hard to make a connection. There’s special emphasis on Ryan, it seems. A lot of moments center around his suffering. His narrative arc follows the story of acceptance of their son’s death. Amy’s on the other hand, felt far more interesting. She was the one waiting out for a miracle. She was waiting for something to save the day. Her story felt caged away though and never touched upon.

It feels like it’s fumbling with itself. It introduces symbols and metaphors and seems to either reveal them too early for them to pay off, or never returns to them. The beginning of the game involves feeding ducks, but never does anything with it. It feels out of place. The landscape, if one pays attention, has the striving motif of the game, which is budding black branches, symbolizing cancer. Instead of letting that bloom, within the first three chapters, it’s obvious what they mean and instead settle into the background and lose their power for being revealed so early.

The minigames feel so out of place. There’s a point early in the game, wherein Ryan dreams of his son, soaring through space on balloons, and being bombarded by those black branches. It quickly becomes obvious there’s no end but to succumb. The problem is, the process is so long and there’s no content to revel in or any interactions to do besides dodge, that it actually becomes a game of running into them to end the section earlier, as grim as that might be when you extrapolate that metaphor.

The game’s imprecise nature is highlighted through a small little faux-cart racing segment. That Dragon, Cancer attempts to use this segment as a way to highlight the ways in which cancer can seem like a loop around a track. Each lap, you’re collecting medication, and it’s costs are shown at the end. The problem is, the game never goes into the Green’s fiscal lives. It’s the only section of the game that hints at a sort of financial struggle, if there even was one. The controls are imprecise and feels clunky and strange. There’s no objective, but the insinuation of just to collect stuff. It becomes clear though that there’s no choices, or again, any interaction, it simply goes around.

One of the final chapters, taking place in a church, went on for so long that I had to look up a video to see if there was something I was missing - if there was some puzzle I had perhaps missed. Instead, I had to just wait. But that was one of my problems throughout the game. I wasn’t sure what was intended, and what was a glitch? Was I clicking an objective too much? Or was I not turning around at the right time? Was I waiting too long or not waiting for something?

That Dragon, Cancer never focuses. The second half of the game takes on an extended metaphor of a sea of misery, but besides that, everything seems very disconnected - that sea is left fairly quickly, and constantly interrupted.  Everything seems to come together to distract the player instead of giving any enlightenment.

[mynameismichaelkern]

Impression: The Eldritch Teller

The name The Eldritch Teller stuck out to me. It’s a good name. It’s invocative, but it inspired quite a bit of apprehension in me because I’ve just grown tired of the “unknowable cosmic horror” tropes. I’ve grown tired of the unknowable because it feels like a waste of time to really concern oneself with what one can not know. Maybe that’s the point. Thankfully, The Eldritch Teller never seems to concern itself with that either.

The Eldritch Teller, by Arielle Grimes (@slimekat on Twitter), is a game with really one option and that’s what you do when you hear your phone ring. The Eldritch Teller, of title fame, is a robed, antlered, faceless entity, that simply acts as narrator. The game looks as if it’s running on a faulty CRT run through a fish-eye lens. Pixelated geometry spirals and a space-scape acts as the letter box. The distortion makes some of the text hard to read, but the actual art in the game is well made. Silhouettes are vague enough that it doesn’t bring any strict definition to the “You” of the story, leaving the story open to anyone participating. There’s no attachment - The Eldritch Teller knows what it’s audience is. The game plays like a ghost story being told to you, about you. The Eldritch Teller has no time to really consider what you do. It knows what you’d do. The story being told is a vague enough story that it feels like “your” story and doesn’t suffer from being so vague.

The screen flashes to convey small story beats and focus from high detailed figures to explosive bits of pixelated lines portraying, well, the unknowable. The art is pixel art, but it’s not overly stylized pixel art - it’s a means to create indistinction. Nothing is very clear, as something set in a cosmic horror setting should be.

I had mentioned earlier that I had a slight bit of fear - not a psychological or primal fear, but a fear of disdain. Between friends, I’ve referred to the cosmic horror tropes as “Cthulhu shit.” There’s two camps: those that have been trying to separate the roots from the mythos and concentrate on the kind of horror that is found in those stories, a pure fascination and healthy fear of the unknowable that has no time nor regard for you, and those that find delight in the lore of the Cthulhu mythos - a paradox in itself. The idea of a mythos behind something defined as unknowable is silly, or maybe it’s expected. It’s putting structure around something one can not know and adding your flairs to it. The second worst thing HP Lovecraft did, after being a terrible racist, was describe Cthulhu and inspire an unknowable amount of merchandise to spawn after his death.

The Eldritch Teller falls squarely in the first, personally, more interesting camp. It’s the camp that is more interested in what it means to interact with the unknowable. It’s friendly, it can come in contact with you, but it feels less like looking over the edge of a cliff and more like being talked down to by a teacher.

The narrator’s tone is frank and casual, toying with the player’s expectation of, well, an Eldritch Teller. It’s a character that toys with the player’s expectations of itself. My favorite line in the piece is “You’re a cool adult who definitely deserves respect.” It’s that tone that I enjoyed. It’s not a narrator that’s going to blow anyone away, but I appreciated that. It brought levity to the parts that would be dull and got out of the way when action began.

The balance of the tones creates an interesting effect. The humor leaves the player just open enough to let the turn take you. When it switches to a bit of cosmic horror it’s a slow shift, easing you into it. The harder turn is a return to normalcy and that’s where the narrative is at it’s most interesting to me - The Eldritch Teller is a tragedy. It’s a comedy that trades not in the unknown, but uses the unknown to set up it’s ultimate joke and the punchline is depression. The story being told is about waiting for a phone call. The Eldritch Teller tells you that you await this call, but you’ve always wanted to adventure, just as most kids have. Regardless of which of the three storylines you choose (to casually get the phone, spring forward for the phone, or to sit paralyzed in anxiety), you’re ultimately ending the call to adventure. The adventure is the moment of “abduction,” of being taken away, but in the end, the phone call needs to be answered and the job needs to be taken. That’s the state of the world once you leave it. The extravagance of adventure is brief, fleeting, and wouldn’t accept you, no matter how much you crave it. There is really only one path where there is a true interaction between “you” and the cosmic horrors. The great irony is they’re quite polite. They’re not lording over you the fact that they’re of some higher headspace. It’s a short little experience, it’s about 5 to 10 minutes. It’s not going to revitalize a joy for cosmic horror, but it feels like a good response to the exhaustion in those ideas. It treats it as window dressing, as opposed to the window itself. It’s the kind of way I want this setting and set of tropes to be explored. The initial idea behind the settings is a shallow well that can only sustain a few stories, or at least that’s my opinion. That’s because stories seem to want to constantly question the unknown, as opposed to interacting with the unknown. It’s limiting, narratively, when your only interactions you can have with the void are to go mad. What I liked about The Eldritch Teller is it felt like I had fallen into the void’s living room and it picked me up and asked how I was doing, sent me on my way, without any significant conversation. The Eldritch Teller is not going to change your life. It’s not going to unlock some big dark secret of the universe or lead you to an epiphany, but it’s entertaining - even if it’s whole purpose is to just let you know just how insignificant you are.

[mynameismichaelkern]

Impression: Inside

Playdead’s Inside opens on a young boy tumbling over a hill with nowhere to go but onward. There’s something so desolate about this one that makes it stick out - you start with no direction and no other characters on screen. The way the protagonist emerges into a forest, alone, with no guide. The color palette is subdued. There is no music. The protagonist is alone in some woods and the only direction to go is right. There is no compulsion to go on, there’s no arrow. To be quite honest, it just feels right. It’s a primal thing born in the history of video games to continue going in that direction.

The act of going right goes from compulsion to survival and then to questioning. There are distinct acts and each has it’s own sort of theme. In the first act of the game, it’s survival. There are men with guns that fire without mercy and there are dogs that bite and rip and snap at flesh, leaving crimson red. The second act seems to calm down and open up to exploration and experimentation. The third act is nameless escape, frantic and blunt, to not say too much of it. In essence it creates an arc of entering a machine, exploring it’s innards, only to find the horrifying truth and escaping.

The visual style is simple but lighting effects and shadows work to create their own atmosphere. There’s moments of brilliant light that show passage of time. There was a moment where the protagonist had been drenched in dark for so long it was actually a sort of shock to see that his shirt was so red in the rising sunlight. Aesthetically, it switches from cornfields and deep forests, to creeks, to old computer terminals, thick wires, and heavy designs that instill nostalgia for nuclear era technology.

Music shows up only when it’s needed to increase tension and foreshadow danger. There’s nothing high energy here; at most it’s tense bass and lurid wafting music. It’s mostly ambient noise that lingers and teases danger around the corner or exhume foreboding.

Puzzles are simple but challenging. They are just enough of a roadblock to feel rewarding when they are solved. They typically consist of moving objects in the environment to activate switches or hiding in shadows for just long enough to avoid detection. There’s an efficiency to them though - sometimes the solution to a puzzle is simply destroying the environment and finding ways to bring walls crashing down in your quest to go right. It’s things like that that elevate the question of what you are doing.

Inside is filthy and cruel. It doesn’t shy away from showing brutality both to the protagonist and to others. A sequence early on involves writhing parasitic worms and blotches of brown as the protagonist pulls the invader from a boar’s orifice to satiate the emaciated pig. It’s a moment that is gut wrenching and sickening. There’s a primal bit of humanity that should really wretch at parasites and Playdead is completely fine exploiting that. It’s not a scene played for laughs or simple gross-out factor, but a sequence that lets the player know that nothing is off limits in this world.

The control is sublime because everything has weight. It feels like the protagonist can slip free of the player’s grasp at any point, but somehow things will still be in control. He slips, slides, and tumbles over obstacles. Boards creak under his weight. Failure is met with the snapping of bone and frequently with dripping blood.

Control is vital to Inside. It gives everything importance and is vital to the plot. Everything about Inside’s plot is laid bare out in the environment and mechanics. One of the most interesting segments involves the player imitating the mindless; the protagonist has to march in time with the others, stopping when they stop.

However this is not the most interesting mechanic. This honor falls to one that is baked into the narrative, wherein mindless drones are controlled by the protagonist who emulate his movement, creating the image of a young boy leading a parade of older men. This mechanic is demonstrated early on, but not directly. In a segment with little chirping chicks that follow the protagonist, like a mother hen. It’s a clever introduction to mechanics without Playdead showing their hand.

There is no communication besides what is in the environment. There’s not a single button prompt. A simple control scheme is the main arbiter of this. Complexity comes with narrative and various interactions with the environment. There are no complicated routines to go through. Those opening moments, without direction, put you directly in the world and the only thing to really consider is what the protagonist is even doing there.

The strength of Inside is in not telling the player a single thing with words besides it’s title. It communicates everything the player needs to know through experimentation. To Inside, any other question is superfluous. The only question that seems to matter is what is control without language? It plays with things players take for granted: that they are in full control of the protagonist. There’s a question as to how you even control the protagonist - are the players to assume the controller is an analogue for the protagonist’s own control and we are to identify with that blank canvas? Or, in a much darker light, shown through a revelatory moment in a puzzle, are we yet another link in the command line - a third party that controls the protagonist?

The entire game seems to harken to elements of body horror and questions of language and communication, without saying a single word. There is an acceptance of these elements by the characters that is even more disturbing. There’s sympathy towards their lack-of-cause because of the way they stumble and hobble over one another, all under your command.

The third act raises those questions even further. A quote by Derrida, in his lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, comes to mind: “...only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.” This formless mass is shown in Inside. The third act is consumed with this idea and reframes all previous engagements. It’s not a question of right or wrong but why and what.

It doesn’t raise any questions and instead invites the player to make their own. There are just so many threads to pull at, and this game wouldn’t be successful at that if it wasn’t entertaining. It’s tricky in places in a way that’s satisfying to overcome. The driving mystery is one that the player themselves ask “What am I doing? Where am I going? What is going on?” These questions are the carrot on the stick that’s dangled in front of the player.  

[mynameismichaelkern]

Cibele - Online Romances in Cyber Space

World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 were the games that I like to blame for sucking away the most of my developmental years. In World of Warcraft, I lacked sleep because I was up all night raiding Icecrown Citadel and in Team Fortress, I stayed in on Fridays to host events on a popular server. Cibele, despite being autobiographical-ish, distills the essence of that wasted time and proves why it wasn’t wasted.

The events of this game are centered around a 19 year old Nina Freeman and her first love and the confusing things that come with it. The story of the game is told in two ways - short films to break up the days, and through an interactive desktop. You’re greeted to a cutesy anime inspired desktop, that is surprisingly sparse for a 19 year old. The player knows how a computer works, so it just drops the user in. There’s no obligation to click any of these, but it feels both expository and personal - pictures clearly from Nina Freeman’s past linger, ready to be viewed.

Every folder is a gateway, showing traces of personality and a story to be unveiled. Discovering more and more, looking through files and blog posts of abandoned blogs almost feels voyeuristic. I felt uncomfortable, especially snooping through files. Later, the pictures get more personal, until there came a moment where I stopped looking. I got the intent of the photos and, despite them being out in the open, it felt almost creepy to touch. There’s saved chat logs, complete with improper spellings and emoticon faces. You’re painted the story of a sort of nerdy teenage girl with low self esteem. It adds character to Nina and shows  Then, you get into the game-within-a-game, a fake MMO and a request for a call with a character named Ichi.

You hear Nina talk to the boy on the other end. They talk about their guild, their lives, and generally people. Ichi, his real name being Blake, chats about his distaste in people, except her. Meanwhile, you’re clicking. You’re clicking messages. You’re clicking emails. You’re clicking monsters. The conversations are happening, but the game is the background, and that’s your responsibility. They feel genuine, with players using shorthand versions of their characters names between each other. In that way, you play the role of the automatic brain. The game is exploring a romantic relationship online, but there’s brushes of all the other sorts of relationships. There’s the other guild members, there’s strokes of her relationship with them. The conversations between Nina and Blake are cringe inducing because they’re genuine. They’re the perfect conversations of the awkwardness of first love.

Blake proudly announces he’d think she’d look great in anything, and she challenges the notion, and he reaffirms. It’s the flirtation between two social outcasts trying to form their own tribe, and that’s what’s so familiar and so niche. It echoes the nights, alone with friends, hearing their voices on some VoIP server, talking shit, and hiding from isolated lives. It reverberates with a curious flirtation that exists between two bodies who can’t even see each other, just personality. There’s a part in the game wherein Nina calls Ichi, Ichi, and Ichi requests to be called Blake. The game acts as a barrier for the both of them - there’s no obligation to stick around, so one can just pull the safety cord. There’s the elements of unfamiliar ground, taking a step forward and feeling confident, and in that confidence, taking another until you’re running. Nina questions how Blake can be so anti-social, when he runs this guild, when he talks to so many people on the game, and he replies with scorn of others, except her. It’s the game that allows one to find validation and also the skills they lack in life.

Sex is important to this game, or rather, the lack of it. In a revelatory moment, it’s announced that the pair are both virgins, but the idea of sex isn’t foreign to either of them. Before this, there’s the revealing of bodies, both wanting to show as much as see and be granted acceptance and have their self deprecation sent away. Despite this though, the physical is also what is impossible in these relationships. You can talk as much as you want, but the mental stimulation is only so much. It’s Nina who drives the conversation towards these elements, with Blake acting shy, pulling back. It can be read as intimidation of her, but I read it as an intimidation of failure. Sex is the end goal of this game. Chat logs early on reveal Nina’s jealousy and insecurity at her friend’s ability to flirt with, and catch the eye of, boys.

There’s an irony to the actual interactive elements of the game. There are no choices, but there is actions - and the player is responsible for only the actions which do not affect the character's physical bodies. The repetitive MMO combat, the automatic actions I mentioned earlier, is just filler. There are short videos which represent the bodies. It’s revealing of Nina, but it’s also uncomfortable. When Blake enters the real picture, there is no game to process. There’s little to no words. There is no control for the player, there’s no branching paths, these are the events of the situation, and the sex. The Physical is the missing piece to online relationships and that’s the least video game part of this game. That’s because it’s a video game about people who play video games, not for entertainment, but for social access, before one can take that step into being comfortable with one’s self.

It’s nostalgic. It makes one embarrassed for a past of awkward flirting. It’s showing a place that can not be retraced. It’s a place we grow up from and walk away from, with confidence. You can still be awkward, you can still have issues with talking, but there’s something beautiful about the ease of forming relationships, wherein only words exist, and the complex sorrow that comes with it. Cibele is a game that captures those real relationships in snapshot. There is no need to validate them, because they existed virtually, because they exist despite that. That’s what this game does so well. It captures the genuine connections that are made with people online.