Braid, Greatness, and Interactive Entertainment

Braid: all lush and pretty

Braid is a promise, a tantalizing window into what could be and should be, but this does not make it great. 'Great' always has an implicit reference frame. I can say that Fargo is a great, that My Name is Red is a great, that the Kandinsky retrospective at the Met in 2009 was great. Consuming these works have been notable experiences in my life, they are Great within my overall cultural context. I can also say that Days of Future Past was a great superhero movie or that Arminn Van Buren puts on a great show. These are great within a niche, a great choice among the options afforded to me.

Braid is the second kind of great. It is a great video game. I wish that Braid wasn't great at all but rather a baseline for what is considered a publishable game. But alas, the state of video games is such that I play Braid as a happy escape from rummaging through indie detritus looking for a worthwhile review to write or a design lesson to learn. Braid is great; it delivers all the things that I thought I wanted from games. The game is a fresh puzzle platformer which relies on time manipulation as a central solution vector. You are able to play back the recent events like a VHS tape going forward and back to find the point where you want to be. Certain features of the level are immune to time manipulation and properly matching up the things that move when you rewind with those that don't is typically the crux of the challenge. This mechanic is well polished with puzzles maintaining an internal logic and are typically not contingent on chancy spacings or other unpredictable variables. The player has the full control to experiment, probe, and edge towards a solution. Braid does these things well, but really it should be unacceptable for a game to do anything less. Having polished mechanics which can be understood and manipulated by the player to achieve goals is the ground zero of games. 

Where Braid attempts to make the leap from great game to great work is with the integration of mechanics into narrative and experience. My belief is that this approach is the only way through which games will get their first masterwork. The idea of Braid is to create a world where the mechanics work to explore the nature of  the author's personal experiences. The game is about learning from ones mistakes, and recapturing a love lost. The mechanic of playing time backwards and forwards is a good way of expressing a way in which many us try to make sense of painful experiences. Going over them, again and again, trying to gain a piece of insight that can give meaning to pain. The reward for solving a puzzle in Braid, having massaged a problem every which way, is just one small (literal) puzzle piece that allows you to see a bit more of the picture of events that transpired. A picture which you slowly assemble at the end of each episode/world. To me this expressive feature of mechanics is the seam through which games can pass into art. 

Still the best example of video games as art

Where Braid does not live up to its potential is that it tries to tell rather than share. As a player I am being shown the pain the author endured. And, if I am so inclined, I can make the effort to relate the ideas that he is presenting to my own life. But within a game I want to personally experience the loss, the need for answers, and the pain of trying to make sense. The only place where the creator leans on narration is in describing the pain of losing a love and the struggle this creates. This is delivered through a series of text boxes which fail to engage the player. The narrative goal does not effect my experience and so I don't care. The big lesson for me is that a great game has to go beyond a tightly crafted rule set, a great game has to do all its work communicate within the realm of player experience. This is why a good game of chess can evoke the feeling of battle and of sparring. Or a game of Catan can make you feel like a Machiavellian Ruler while arguing over sheep. Experiences stemming from design subsume all theme and style. 

Specifically in Braid, the author wanted to tell me about his experience instead of bringing me along to feel it with him. I would have liked to have seen the player lose something in game, and not be told that he lost it, but feel it being lost. Specifically a mechanic, a rule, a power or something that I truly valued in experiencing the game world being taken from me. Then my struggle with the puzzles would have been an echo of the creator struggling with his past. 

I think Braid is in fact a high mark for games because of its ambition and commitment to ideas. But while offering a tantalizing peek at the potential of the medium it demonstrates how difficult it is to create an resonant experience for the player while keeping tight control over the path which the player can take. I suspect that while a Braid-like game that transcends its niche will come,  the first great work of gaming will come from an openly experiential direction. 

Taki Tori 2+: a chicken without a home

So cute, yet so lost and pointless

It is my belief that a tight and coherent rule set is essential for worthwhile interactive entertainment. The beauty of games - digital and otherwise - is that they create  worlds where complexity, objectives, and laws can be set to anything. For these worlds to be satisfying the player needs to be able to interact with them in a meaningful way. Beyond the rules, the world itself has to be a place where the player wants to spend their time. The world needs to peak their desire to explore, to master, or to understand. Typically I find the former task is the key stumbling block of most games. Sometimes both pieces - mechanics and setting - are a problem. But, the failure of Toki Tori 2+, surprised me with being a peculiar kind of world building failure. 

Toki Tori 2+ is smartly done game. It is part of the proud platformer tradition. The art is charming. There is a fresh conceit of the player character being under-powered (basically the Hodor of the baby chick world) unable to even jump. Instead of typical mechanics the player has to depend on calling friendly creatures towards themselves or shoving the critters away. The puzzles increment smartly with new mechanics introduced slowly and multiple variations of each mechanic explored. 

And yet, the game is not fun. Me not having fun is hardly a cause for alarm as I am a hateful and joyless creature. But I also have trouble imagining a better adjustment human enjoying this game. For the strange place where Toki Tori 2+ fails is in defining an audience - the sort of people that might want to spend time interacting with this smartly constructed world. The game is too simple and dull for the PG-13+ crowd and and too finicky for the Y crowd.  

The puzzles are very straightforward - never did a I look at a situation and wonder what it is that is expected of me. Yet executing the solution can be quite finicky with precise timings and spacing that the player can't intuit. There is never a penalty for getting a puzzle wrong as all the elements reset and death is hardly an impediment thanks to frequent check points.Those with somewhat formed pre-frontal cortexes will alternate boredom with brief bouts of frustration. Those precious ones with still growing logic centers will get frustrated as their actions can result in highly variant results which make it difficult to make sense of cause and effect. 

If only the chicken knew who it was trying to make friends with. 

Overall: It took me a little while before I realized I hated it. 5/10

Adventure puzzlers are terrible games

Goomba may be a cynical asshole

Adventure puzzlers are terrible games, yes even Monkey Island and the other nostalgia tinted Lucas Arts classics. I posit that everything positive about these games is an outcome of them trying to provide value despite the gaping sinkhole that is their core gameplay.

I recently played and reviewed Antichamber (here), the game has rave reviews. I then played The Room for Android, the game is the 15th highest selling paid game in the play store right now. The Monkey Island guy raised 3.5 mil on Kickstarter from 85k people to make another one of these things. And yet the games are still crap.

I am not so vain as to say that everyone else is a fool and only I can see that these games are over processed mush being dripped into the mouths of comatose consumers. These games do a lot of great things. Monkey Island is funny, charming, and with its humility feels very personal. The Room is a very tightly built game with minimal mechanics, minimal settings, minimal story yet evocative of mystery. Antichamber makes surrealism accessible with minimal fluff, squeezing great atmosphere and philosophy out of a limited context.

Yet everything that is good is done despite a weak core and maybe because of it. The cohesive moods and tight settings that add value to these games are there because actually playing them is a disorganized mess. In an adventure game the player has to be taken into new directions. This means that the puzzles have to change but there is no way to properly frame the puzzles in terms of mechanics. In Monkey Island there is no way for the player to know what can be combined to make the needed item so everything that can be clicked together has to be clicked together. In the Room there is no way to know when your action has changed the entire puzzle and so you have to look at every angle of the object yet again. And in Antichamber there is no way to know if the puzzle you are working with is a dead end or it has be looked at backwards, sideways, or slowly - thus devolving the game play into an equivalent click fest where everything has to be stared at in every possible way. Trying all permutations of available game choices without a way to prune the possibility set is not fun or engaging; finding the solution is not satisfying; and it does not empower the player. Mind you, these games are the best case scenario with disciplined designers who mostly avoid sprawl and self-indulgent introduction of 'clever' mechanics - I am looking at you Room with your random one time use of my phone's gyroscope.

The Room has tried to combat this frustration by staying very consistent in it's mechanics and by limiting the choice set dramatically so permutations that need to be executed are few. But as a result the puzzles are no longer compelling. The Mechanics are restricted to look at things through your alternate vision lens, finding an item, and finding a place where that item you just found fits. Repeat. I don't feel clever when I solve this.

Similarly in the Antichamber the trick is picking out what variable i need to manipulate and then the solution is trivial. It feels a little bit like the Man vs. Beast show where the key thing determining the outcome is whether the beast realizes that it's competing. Beating the puzzles in Antichamber feels as gratifying to me as I am sure it feels for a zebra to beat a human runner in a race. The task is trivial once I figured what the hell I'm supposed to do.

Overall, I think these games are an evolutionary dead end. The goal is to get the player to work through the setting, story, mood, whatever. And the way to compel the player  is with rudimentary and arbitrary challenges. It is a tempting design idea to make the feel of an interactive experience takes center stage but if the game play is a net negative to the experience it shouldn't be a game.

Go see a Magritte exhibition, read H.G Wells, watch Amélie, don't play this rubbish.

Decalcomania by Magritte, 1966

Reviewing the humble bundle (4th of july edition).

Games I purchased from the Humble Bundle: 140, Kami, Ballpoint Universe, Secrets of Raetikon, Antichamber, Cinders.

140: Minimalist platformer based around phat beats. Very simple graphics, a total of 3 textures used in the whole game (flat, white noise, transparent gradient). You solve platforming puzzles over a sparse electro track where your ability to advance will typically depend on you being able to move in time with the music. Traditional platformer challenges of timing your jumps are layered with the task of picking out the rhythm and distinguish a 3/4 beat, 4/4 beat, and a pattern that extends over two measures. The level design is almost always clever - largely sequential rifs on a single theme before moving on to a new mechanic. The game benefits from the designers willingness to keep the levels small and tight without devolving into large self-indulgent sprawl of copy and pasted challenges. The games controls are adequate though a bit sluggish and as a result movement does not feel as enjoyable as it could be. Each level ends with a boss battle which is cute but feels quite apart from the core game and is mostly a distraction. The design of the bosses is much less rhythm dependent and feel somewhat arbitrary. These battles are probably the largest stumbling block of the game.

Overall: Great concept of focusing on electro music, great execution of engaging the player with the rhythm, great puzzle design that gives the player a sense of agency. A bit light on content, poorly conceived boss mechanics, mediocre controls. Looking forward to another iteration that is bigger, more polished, and more visually engaging.

8/10 - Really enjoyable.

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Kami: A very simple puzzler where the core task is using the paint bucket tool in MSPaint to make various images a single color in a finite number of clicks. An origami theme is built around the mechanic where you fill an image of layered papers with new layers of folded paper. The texture of the paper, the organic colors, the crinkle sounds as paper unfurls, and the Suikinkutsu sound effects all combine to create a meditative and soothing atmosphere - ideal for such a simple puzzler. Kami's single mechanic is great because all puzzles feel solvable and the player can fully internalize their success and failures as there is never a feeling of being controlled by the game. However the simple mechanic can also start to creak a bit under the weight of more sophisticated puzzles where complexity can feel a bit forced and the elegance a bit distorted.

Overall: Great aesthetic, tight mechanic, great mood, level design a bit uneven.

9/10 - Delivers on its goals but could do with a bit more ambition.

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Ballpoint universe: Looks to be hobby game made with the free Unity Studio. The game suggests an artist first, programmer second, and game designer third. The art is varied, creative, and done by freehand. The aesthetic is very much inspired by Mr. Fancy Pants (a great source for inspiration). The core game mechanic is a parallax scrolling shooter with an upgradable ship which includes a melee blade. Upgrades are a great Skinner's box device but unfortunately everything else about the game is rushed and ill considered. The game play is stale, the monsters dull, the mechanics create random situations. The most compelling part of the game is a menu system that feels like a minimalist exploration game through a strange and creepily organic world. The usability of menu system suffers a great deal from adding adventure to finding game modes but it is very pretty.

Overall: Feels like a hobby project by a vain artist unwilling to edit their own work. The art is well done. I hope that the artist join a team and works on something more cohesive.

4/10 - art and scale are impressive.

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Secrets of Raetikon: This game suggests that you use a game pad to play for the optimal experience, I do not have a game pad for my PC so I played it using the keyboard options. I am hopeful that I missed a great deal of the experience. Raetikon claims to be a game of exploring a lushly drawn and open 2D world as a bird. The graphics are charming with large polygons rendered in 2D with great use of saturated greens, ochres, and golds. Beyond that, the world is incredibly restricted. Everywhere you go. There is always mountain blocking your path on the x-axis, an arbitrary glowing line on the y-axis. As you 'fly' about you are forced to hit vast expanses of foliage which drops your speed to a crawl. The world feels tiny and cramped and I would prefer to have jumped around it rather than fly 'though' it. This game feels like the designers said 'hey Sonic games cool but let's add flying' of course the two ideas are incompatible and you are forced to restrict the flight to sluggish crawl and all platformer challenges are solved by simply wrestling with the controls to fly where you need to. Oh yes, the controls. Flapping your wings to gain lift is a ponderous and slow affair with one button press rewarded with a delayed flap, and changing of direction feels right in line with the responsiveness of  a soviet tank. I looked up the antonym of whimsy and sadly the English language does not yet have a word to capture the depressing character of this game.

Overall: Terrible mechanics, terrible controls, utter lack of content, nice graphics.

2/10 - Garbage.

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Antichamber: Very clean and well executed idea. An adventure puzzlers set in stark flat white world where graphics are mostly clean lines and occasional color gradients. Very evocative and has a bit of an oppressive experimental facility of Portal.  The setting has a surrealistic feel to it with puzzles that get you stuck in infinite loops and a new perspectives can change the reality. A lot of the early puzzles are quite clever and the game does a good job of introducing mechanics with placards and subtle suggestions. However, this sort of adventure struggles with the problem of this overall genre, eventually you hit puzzles that cannot be solved with the mechanics you already learned so you are forced to wonder around aimlessly. This removal of player control, where the player feels like she lacks the tools to advance is to me a fatal flaw of the genre that goes beyond antichamber.

Overall: Clever and original. Needs greater polish on how the player experiences and navigates the challenges.

7/10 - good potential and novelty alone adds a fair bit of value

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Cinders: I am not the intended audience of this game so I cannot pass judgment on it. This is a pick your own adventure book for the Cinderella story. Text scrolls over mostly static images of characters. The writing is passable though not compelling, the art style is inspired by traditional american tattooing with heavy black outlines and rich colors. I imagine that shaping the Cinderella story for an 11-14 year old girl could be fun but I think these sort of games suffer in comparison to books, movies, and table top roleplaying games. But I acknowledge that there may be a narrow niche here that I am not part of.

Overall: Not my place to review.

My objectives

Inaugural post to be expanded upon later:

The purpose of this endeavor: To review games with a focus on game design.

My philosophy on games: game mechanics are everything. A game will never be better at narrative than a book and  never better at spectacle than a movie. But what it can do is engage the player with a dynamic world order. My interest is games that have broad appeal but I hope to mine great mechanics and inspiration from the narrowest of niches.