Manwe on 9/8/2011 at 00:00

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It's kinda funny and all, but man does it get real boring real quick. I only found three endings or so before I got tired of walking through the same hallways, listening to the same dialog, and waiting for the same damn elevator every time. That's literally all you do in this mod: move around, listen, wait, and on one or two occasions press a button.

So it's cute and all but if you're gonna make a game that should be played several times to be fully enjoyed, you'd better make it fun to play. And since it has no gameplay to speak of, it has absolutely no re-playability beyond the six endings. Once you've completed them, that's it, it doesn't work anymore, the game can't trick you, can't manipulate you and can't entertain you anymore. It becomes completely disposable.

So apparently this guy spent two years making a mod that barely lasts 20 mins (all endings included) and becomes obsolete after that ? Wow, that's some serious dedication. I can't fathom where those two years went to be honest.

I mean the level design is the most basic I've ever seen. Even I could probably create more complex levels in a week and that's including learning how to use the source sdk from scratch and testing the shit out of them.

The total playable area is ridiculously small. The interactive dialog is also ridiculously simple. Player goes through left door, dialog A plays, player goes through right door, dialog B plays, player does nothing, dialog C plays, player still does nothing, dialog C plays again only more irritated this time. Player moves too fast cause he's playing this for the third time and doesn't want to listen to the same line all over again, oops didn't think of that one, guess cutting the first line of dialog short will have to do.

Basically the player has no way to break the game since it's such a closed and controlled environment with doors that close automatically, non-interactive environments, invisible walls, inability to jump, and so on... So testing is as simple as going through each scenarios and making sure all triggers work correctly, which probably takes half an hour at most.

And the art ? Well it's standard half life 2 art assets, except maybe for a chess game so ridiculously low poly, that even I could have modeled it (actually even that might originally be from HL2). The only truly impressive part left is the voice acting which is indeed very good. Kudos to the creator for finding a real voice actor and getting him to work on his mod for free.

So all in all it's nice for a one week experimental project, but complete garbage if it took longer to create. And if you're gonna make a game, make a fucking game. This is as deep and complex as a choose your own adventure book but instead of turning pages and reading the dialog you move through bland corridors in a 3D environment and listen to the dialog.

As for the artistic meaning behind it all, fuck it, how about using the strengths of video games to get your point across instead of the strengths of other mediums ? In this case books, in the case of CoD, movies, etc...

Poetic thief on 9/8/2011 at 05:31

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The game is brilliant but in a too self-conscious way. It's too self-referential about its "brilliance" and there is little room for subtlety. It's like an actor turning to the camera and giving a wink after a moving performance. The wink just spoils the whole thing.

I also find it somewhat ironic that the author asks us to give our own interpretations when both the in-game narrator and the author himself have explicitly spelled out all the possible meanings to be gleaned from the game.


Still, I liked it because this is the kind of excusion that only indie devs do these days. Long gone are the days where people made games like Sanitarium, I have no mouth and I must scream, The Dig etc.

polytourist97 on 9/8/2011 at 18:50

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The way I've taken to describing this idea is a work "fulfilling its own purpose" (I semi-stole the wording from a book called The Timeless Way of Building which I would HIGHLY recommend for anyone interested in this discussion).

Essentially what this means, is that everything about a work (in this instance, a game) is developed, fostered and crafted all in concert with one another in the pursuit of creating the best incarnation (according to the creator's strengths) of what that medium has to offer.

Koki gives a nice example with Alpha Centauri (I've yet to play that one), in that there are apparently many wonderful details in the game, and they were there in support of other aspects within the game all with the goal of delivering a better more satisfying game experience. I'll give another more potentially polarizing example given the context of this discussion: Team Fortress 2.

I am hard pressed to find anything "wrong" with TF2. The art style, the sound and music, the "lampoonish" gameplay, the humourous characterization of the classes, they all fit together to create this fantastically fun, campy, and frantic multiplayer game experience. There is nothing in the game that works against the purpose of "fun, campy, & frantic", and it achieves that goal by having all of those elements expertly crafted together. Hence I consider TF2 to be a "beautiful" and "artistic" entry in the gaming medium.

Of course this example is not good fodder for "art-wank" because it's difficult to sound intelligent by coming up with all sorts of interpretations about what it "means" when the game itself is actively attempting to be ridiculous. And so we get people jumping all over the pretentious, self-consciously "deep" entries (a la Bioshock) because there is this sort of desperation for gaming to find an identity as a serious art form, without understanding that it's not going to come about deliberately; it's going to happen when games stop worrying about being taken seriously and instead have people making entries that are truly stunning as the medium allows. I personally think there is already a plethora of wonderful examples of the possibility of the gaming medium, but the last few years have trended towards moving against the progress that was made (mostly to do with the boom of the business as well as the perceived competition with films).

demagogue on 10/8/2011 at 23:14

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We all had similar ideas, but the thing is that interactive fiction was doing these kinds of things more than a decade ago anyway. Conniving, not-always-trustworthy narrator: check. Being self-conscious about & toying with the player's "freedom" to act in the game: check. For each one of these endings, I bet you could find the same thing happening in IF. The only thing new about it is the FPS aspect... granted a welcome addition though, but it hasn't added much to the basic forms of IF yet, or maybe it has/can but I haven't seen how yet.

Al_B on 11/8/2011 at 06:26

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I tried saving just before one of the last choices and although it appeared to save the save game list was empty. I'm sure there's a way around it but as I'd already visited all endings I wasn't too worried.