Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 160

How to Spot a Terrorist: the videogame

Don’t be a puppet. That’s the FBI’s new mantra in response to terrorists and their would-be recruits. And in light of the growing problem of terrorists trying to recruit vulnerable teenagers over the internet, the FBI has created an interactive website, adorned with a flailing wooden puppet on strings, to teach teens how to spot terrorist recruiters and better protect themselves from their brainwashing and manipulation.

The message is of course commendable, and there is nothing wrong with telling teens to speak their minds and use their intelligence. To ignore the potential dangers of the internet, in light of lurking terrorist recruiters, would be in many ways naive.

The inundation of American flags feels a bit absurd

However, the question remains whether an interactive website set in a creepy cement basement (a fallout shelter, perhaps?) is the most effective way to engage teenagers on this serious, heavy anti-recruitment message. The website background features American propaganda posters lining caged walls, thick red text that screams commands like “don’t forget the enemy” above a solemn bald eagle. The inundation of American flags feels a bit absurd, creating a near-Jingoistic mood that feels inappropriate against the website’s alleged goal of educating how to defend oneself against recruitment.   

At least the website is not without some light-hearted fun: there are interactive tests and even games. One “matching” game asks the player to “click, drag, and drop each type of violent extremist above to its corresponding distorted belief on the right.” Perhaps in using the lighthearted medium of childhood “matching” games, the FBI seeks to empower teens in an attempt to give them agency through a means that feels comfortable, natural. The ultimate goal after successful completion of the matching games is to “free the puppet,” further symbolic of the FBI’s intent of freeing teens from the bonds of brainwashing, and it’s certainly satisfying to do so in the game. But it doesn’t change the fact that the disconnect between the type of medium and the message behind it is unsettling.

Now, it may not always be the case that such games are inherently inadequate or inappropriate for the education of teens and others about serious political and human rights issues like terrorism. After all, childhood “matching” games are accessible, valid teaching methods. Just tone down the eagles and other forceful, unnecessary propaganda, FBI. Otherwise, it looks less like you’re trying to teach teens how to defend themselves and more like you’re, um, trying to recruit them.

You can play Don’t Be A Puppet in your browser.

The monstrous models that gave DOOM its human touch

DOOM (1993) is known for its hellish bravura and the legacy that followed. On the surface, we tend to think of big pink demon muscles, gnashing jaws, and bloodied grimaces. It’s a stern-faced brute that would be quicker to punch you in the mouth than hold a conversation. Somehow, that aura surrounds the game even today, 20-odd years after it was originally released. But we’re told that all hard-nosed giants have a soft side, and that is at least true for DOOM, as all you have to do is wind back the years to before it came out, to DOOM‘s somewhat goofy-looking production.

I’m talking about the fact that the demons in DOOM were conceived as physical models before they became in-game sprites. They sat on wooden surfaces around the id Software offices like grouchy icons straight from hell. This has been widely known among DOOM fanatics for a while. But the full story behind it has recently been laid out in a Develop Online interview with the man behind some of those models, Greg Punchatz.

The first round of maquettes were made by id Software artist Adrian Carmack. The reason being that the models allowed for the look of DOOM‘s cast of enemies to be more easily upgraded when compared to the team’s previous first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D (1992). The idea was to outdo that game in every respect, and scanning in stills of these sculptures (rather than hand-drawing sprites) meant that DOOM could have more intricate in-game models—something that might actually look scary—as well as incorporate stop-motion movement, which was far superior to any of the early 3D animation possible with the computers the team had at the time.

Punchatz was introduced to DOOM and its team by his uncle, artist Don Ivan Punchatz, who created the memorable box cover art and the DOOM logo. By this time, Punchatz (Greg, that is) had already created sculptures for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (1986), RoboCop (1987), and Coming to America (1988). He was a professional model maker with an impressive history behind him, yet it seems that DOOM excited him to a new degree, saying that he was blown away when he first saw the game in action. At first, Punchatz was brought on to specifically design and craft DOOM‘s gross-looking Spider Mastermind—a giant brain with a menacing face, hoisted on a large cybernetic chassis with four mechanical legs, and armed with a chaingun. It was to be the final boss in the last episode of DOOM and the game’s toughest enemy. It had to look the part.

there’s a timeless appeal in this style of production

Punchatz was told to make it “scary but over-the-top,” yet resorted to using what he describes as “rubber band and chewing gum effects.” By this, he means that the parts he used to craft the model were found as scrap and in hardware stores: bits of Tupperware, PVC pipes, a steel armature, and a plaster mold for the body. When it was assembled, the Spider Mastermind then went through another relatively cheap process, it being patched together by individual frame grabs from a video camera feed, then fed into a program called Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop to turn the 24-bit color image into a 256-color VGA graphic. This was then all cleaned up with a paint program and turned into a sprite to be inserted into the game by artists.

Punchatz says he was disappointed to see his work transformed into such a low-res form. The finer details he had put into the model didn’t come through much in the final game. However, that his work was part of DOOM at all was enough gratification for him. And so he went on to create more complex models of the Arch-Vile, Mancubus, Revenant, and Pinky demons for DOOM‘s sequels. Learning about all of this now, that one of the most advanced techniques in videogames was once using stop-motion and physical models, comes across as a quaint tale. You can add to that the fact that DOOM‘s guns were modeled on actual toy guns. Yet there’s a timeless appeal in this style of production that perhaps we understand more now than we might have before.

It’s the equivalent of looking back and appreciating Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation in a number of fantasy movies across the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, it’s very dated, but that doesn’t take away the technical mastery, the handcrafted horror of these beasts is still there in the moving rubber parts and animated plastics. But it can be more than just a distant appreciation that returns us to the achievement of these antiquated productions. It may be that we’re beginning to foster a preference for physical models and stop-motion used in both films and games over the standardized digital methods of today. Lumino City‘s (2014) model city made of wood, miniature lights, and electric motors taps into this. The hand-drawn worlds and hobbling claymation people of Jack King-Spooner’s games (Blues for Mittavinda (2013), Sluggish Morss (2013), and the upcoming Dujanah especially) does also. Each example having a tangibility to them, a delightful realness that doesn’t come through as much in digital production, only possible due to the interaction between a maker’s hand and the putty that they shape. We crave that human touch.

On a wider scale, this July will see the arrival of Godzilla Resurgence; a reboot of the series from Japan that uses a three-man Godzilla suit and, it is suggested, might feature a stop-motion battle. While this return to practical effects might be seen as an attempt at being silly or an effort to stand out in today’s crowded media markets, it is in fact totally genuine. And it seems there are plenty of people, myself included, who want to watch a cinematic creature that doesn’t have that odd CGI sheen embalming it for once. The attitude carrying this appeal is one of preferring actual plastic to the fake plastic of computer graphics. It seems that director Peter Jackson was right when when saying the following in the 2011 documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan: “There comes a point where people will reject digital effects and want movies where we actually did something in real space, and real time.” It seems we may already be approaching it.

You can read the full interview with Greg Punchatz over on Develop.

Images source

An obituary for God… the Twitter personality

God is dead. He had a good run.

He quietly passed away on Saturday afternoon, surrounded by close friends, family, and Twitter followers. God died as he lived: sending out not-at-all cryptic missives to his 2.29 million followers. He will be remembered as the leader of a major theistic cult, albeit a smaller one than the legion of Beliebers.

I come here to bury God, not to praise him. The evil that novelty Twitter accounts do lives on after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. So it is with God, who spent his final hours retweeting a young woman into his followers’ timelines. That worked out exactly as you’d imagine. Show me a God whose actions haven’t interpreted as an excuse to harass members of an out-group, however, and I’ll show you a false deity. Anyhow, God is dead and Emily Robinson is still online.

It all started out so promisingly, way back in those halcyon days of 2010. God descended to Twitter from up high, with important reflections about text boxes. He had put in the time to prepare for that day. One does not simply become God; a producing and writing gig at The Daily Show and a book deal are necessary qualifications. At least that was the case in the days of the Old Testament, before ‘favorites’ were rebranded as ‘likes’ during the great Silicon Valley conclave of 2015, and less than a year after the institutionalization of the retweet.

In the beginning, the blue rectangle was formless and empty. And I said, “Let there be text,” and there was text; and I saw that it was gd.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) October 21, 2010

Could there be a God without retweets? “Religion has always been mediated, and it is inseparable from the forms of its mediation,” argues the theologian Jeffrey H. Mahan in his 2014 book Media, Religion, and Culture: An Introduction. “To say we are studying religion and media is only to make explicit our awareness of this inevitable connection.” Much as organized religion owes a great deal to the invention of the printing press, Twitter’s God depended on the retweet. How else were adherents to spread the gospel and demonstrate their devotion? It’s all about diffusion, really.

God, it turns out, was much more suited to the Twitter of 2010

Do you remember the Gilbertine Order? For a time, it was the only all-English religious order. That time came between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, admittedly, but it was a time nonetheless. As part of the English Reformation, however, the 1563 Dissolution of Lesser Monasteries Act resulted in 22 of the order’s 26 monasteries capitulating to King Henry VII. Shortly thereafter, the Gilbertine Order ceased to exist.

All of which is to say that no higher purpose can truly isolate a religious order from the context in which it operates. God, it turns out, was much more suited to the Twitter of 2010. The intervening years have seen the rise and fall (and rise?) of “parody” Twitter accounts, which stretched the limits of humor, originality, and authenticity on the platform. Moreover, amidst rising concerns over abuse, God’s habit of retweeting dissenting voices into the timelines of his followers came to symbolize the worrying interaction of default mechanics and potentially harmful behavior. And that’s leaving out the smarm. It’s hard to imagine how one could adopt God as a sobriquet and not turn out a bit smarmy, and God offered little help to those seeking to conjure that image. He laid on the smarm so thickly that it made the Tablet of Stones look like communion wafers. His last tweet, shortly after the death of Antonin Scalia, simply read “Justice.” It was nothing if not a fitting farewell.

Justice.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 13, 2016

Also: God was a man. Of course he was a man.

God is survived by Twitter, which, contrary to recent reports, is not yet dead. Even in death, his follower count remains remarkably stable, though one might well wonder how long that might last. One day, we might look back at how this whole God thing (especially of the Twitter variety) reflected the values and failings of a media platform. Until then, God has a book and stage show (starring that guy from Will and Grace). A funeral service will be held on Facebook, where people go to discuss the Twitter news of a few days ago, later this week.

Header image:  Viktor M. Vasnetsov – Бог Саваоф, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

Beautiful African fantasy RPG Aurion comes out April 14th

In 2011, Elder Scrolls took players to the overtly Scandinavian nation of Skyrim. This week, Fire Emblem Fates will welcome Western players to the heavily Japanese Hoshido. And now we know that, on April 14th, 2016, Africa will finally get it’s due when Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan opens up its Cameroon-inspired planet of Auriona.

Aurion aims to do for Cameroon what Never Alone (2014) did for Alaska’s native Iñupiat people. It’s to be the first installment in its local developers’ planned Kiro’o Tales, which hopes to advocate for African culture through games, comics, and cartoons. Last September, Aurion earned $50,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign, no doubt due to its beautiful, folklore-influenced setting and bombastic real-time combat. Today, a new trailer sheds light on both of these elements, while at the same time explaining how Aurion differs from the classic role-playing games that inspired it.

The trailer, spoken entirely in a native Cameroonian dialect named Bassa, opens with the game’s female lead, Erine, explaining that “This is not about saving the world. This is not about good vs evil.” She is then joined by her husband, Enzo, and together they explain that this story is more personal, about a quest for identity “buried in all of us.”

It’s a note that strikes a chord for lead designer Patrick Hervé Meli, who in a 2015 interview with Polygon explained that while “American RPGs are based on conquest or saving the world,” Aurion is instead about how the game’s protagonists, who are able to channel the energy of the past into devastating martial arts prowess, relate to their ancestors. “The power in our game is mainly a consequence of an inner path” Meli explains. “To fulfill your own goal, you must count on the connection between you and your ancestors.” In other words, Aurion is a game about connecting with the culture that made it.

Aurion is a game about connecting with the culture that made it

It’s also a love letter to the type of thrilling battles found in nostalgic Japanese games like Guilty Gear (1998) and anime like Dragon Ball Z, to the point where an early build of the game even used art from Dragon Ball Z games as placeholder assets. Aurion has come a long way since then, with the flashy effects and many air-dashes in this newest trailer looking as smooth as butter, capturing the same type of speed that made games like Mega Man X (1993) so exhilarating. It’s clear Aurion is coming to us from lifelong enthusiasts who are ready to see the games they love treat their home with the same kind of respect they show other cultures.

RPGs are known for creating sprawling, imaginative worlds for players to quest through. Spira, Morrowind, and Gaia are all familiar settings for players who grew up with this genre. But each of these examples are drawn from either European or Asian roots. Aurion asserts that Africa is just as capable of creating wonder and fantasy as any other culture (perhaps even more so). As Kiro’o’s founder, Madiba Olivier, explains “At 14, when I just finished playing the 7th part of the Final Fantasy Saga for the 6th time, I started imagining a follow up of the gameplay that could integrate some elements of the African Culture…I dreamt of one day creating a video game that taps from a new raw material; a game that promotes the wealth of the African culture.”

Aurion will be launching on PC on April 14th later this year. Watch the new trailer above and check out its website.

Announcing Versions Workshops

In partnership with NEW INC, we are excited to announce a series of workshops to accompany our upcoming Versions conference.

Versions workshops offer participants a chance to learn best practices from the pros, get hands-on and investigate the practical side of creating compelling experiences for VR. Led by industry-leading experts, they’ll explore a range of approaches to VR that includes web-based, 360 video and game engine environments, as well as more cutting-edge experiments like room-scale VR.

There are two ways to attend Versions workshops. If you don’t have a conference pass, you can purchase a ticket a la carte to attend a workshop. We still have conference passes available, so it’s not too late to purchase a ticket – attendees get free admittance to one workshop with their ticket. You can learn more about our Versions conference on our website.

Make sure to secure your spot now for Versions workshops, Sunday March 5th, 2016. Session one is from 12-3PM, session two is from 4-7PM – all workshops are at the NEW INC offices in Manhattan.

 

Powered by Eventbrite

Devil Daggers is one hell of a time

To play Devil Daggers is to die again and again. Anguish is constant.

It’s never clear what the player has done to be locked in this eternal struggle. Every playthrough opens with a darkened room except for a single source of light, a floating blade. Touching it is apparently a damning offense, and that’s when the horrors begin.

Rounds can last mere seconds, missteps compounding upon each other until you’ve found yourself knee-deep in the undead, where inscrutable tentacled horrors are eager to feast on the living. Swarms of chattering skulls are belched out of tentacled turret-like floating pillars. Skull-backed spiders the size of a Volkswagen reach out to grab your face, and massive, flying centipedes crafted of bone erupt from the ground once things really heat up.

It’s never clear what the player has done to be locked in this eternal struggle

The ever-increasing wave of satanic creatures cascade on top of the player on a single platform, cloaked in darkness. Gurgling groans like the churning stomach of the underworld swirl around your ears as you dance through eldritch horrors and clattering bones, flaming daggers leaping from your fingers. This is where you’re going to die. Repeatedly.

It’s arguably the most consistent depiction of hell in videogames ever created. Never progressing, simply locked in torment against garish demons of all shapes and sizes, with tiny defenses to hold back the tide until you are eventually overcome, only to start the Sisyphean task all over again. Salvation will never come, and even beating the best player in the world would only provide a temporary respite, knowing that another sinner is on their way to dethrone you. It’s like a Bosch painting with a leaderboard.

Inspired by 90s FPS titles like Quake (1996), player movement is fast and precise, and the cacophony of death requires twitchy precision to survive even for a few seconds. A far cry from the arsenals of the games it’s inspired by, you’re stuck with a few variations on the same weapon: a rapid-fire flurry of knives, a quick shotgun-like blast, and, after slaying enough demons, homing daggers. There are no secrets, no extra lives, and no protection. The stark refinement of extraneous choices levels the playing field as players compete to save their souls in unending combat against never-ending hellspawn.

With such a small playfield, nonstop movement is the key to survival, an idea core to the DNA of first-person shooters of yesteryear. Maneuverability as defense was the only way to survive the onslaught of DOOM’s horde of imps and zombies. Far from the spatial awareness and absurd player speed required in the late 90s, modern shooters lean on providing regenerating health and cover-based tactics to create an almost entirely different experience. What we gain in “realism,” we lose in experiences we could only ever have in a digital realm. As the roving flocks of chattering skulls home in on your location, an ever-encroaching wave of enemies requires nonstop spatial awareness. Breaking up the action from the horizontal plane, a Quake-esque double jump brings movement into the vertical, if you’re skilled enough to time it correctly.

The most consistent depiction of hell in videogames ever created

Devil Daggers’ score-attack nature is brought to the forefront with a global leaderboard that serves not just as an ego boost, but a teaching tool as well. You can watch playthroughs of every player’s top score. If nothing else, it’s proof that the best players use the same tools as you, and have the same odds stacked against them. And so you learn that if you want to survive longer, it’s your job to figure out how—there’s no shortcut here. Devil Daggers has little interest in teaching you how to live; any failures are yours and yours alone.

One of the creators of Devil Daggers, Matt Bush, operating under the studio name Sorath—a demon representing “the negation of humanity” and the beast numbered 666, as if this whole “satanic” thing hasn’t been made obvious yet—previously worked on Dustforce (2012), another title focused on a continued flow of momentum. The polish in Devil Daggers is evident. A far cry from modern shooters’ reality-based trudging, it calls to mind the exciting, turbocharged movement of titles like Hexen (1995) and Doom (1993) provided. Gears of War’s (2006) Marcus Fenix may have brought down the Locust, but no amount of heavy-footed roadie-running is going to help you here.

Yes, it’s a truly frenetic bullet hell, and yet that’s what makes it a shame there’s not more to see. The level design of Doom becomes fascinating in how it requires a player to navigate space with split-second decisions. Relegating that push and pull to a single room creates an exciting, evened playing field, yet there’s the potential here for so much more. While the purity of a singular focus is admirable, here’s to hoping we can visit an expansion of this version of hell in subsequent updates.

As gaming’s nostalgia shifts from 16-bit revival to a soft spot for PS1-era early 3D, Devil Daggers and similarly-minded titles like the upcoming STRAFE demonstrate that the current late-90s retro revival isn’t simply devoted to looks alone, but the mechanics those games lived and died by. Sorath’s self-developed engine truly shines in its dedication to maintaining a frenetic pace with unrelenting challenge.

If you’re going to be damned for all eternity to fight for your afterlife, at least it’s with such a lovingly crafted homage to the shooters of yesteryear—and you don’t even need to worry about whether you’ve got the latest Soundblaster card this time around.

For more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.

Discover Sicily’s street food culture in this interactive ballad

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here!

Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section.

The Great Palermo (PC, Mac)
WE ARE MÜESLI

The two artists at videogame studio We are Müesli made a recent trip to Palermo, Sicily and, while there, turned the city into an “interactive ballad.” Called The Great Palermo, this ballad has you form stanzas by exploring the city both geographically and culturally. The street food you eat, the temples and stadiums you visit, the history you learn; it all informs the song. At the center of it all is a young, soccer-loving local boy with noodly limbs that you guide around the place as he fetches eggs for his mother every day. Similar to the cuisine in Wonderland, the food this boy eats literally transforms him into different historical figures and citizens tied to the rich heritage of Palermo. Each transformation signifies unlocking a secret of the city, it encouraging you to playfully hunt them all down, but also to discover what interactions these new identities might enable.

Perfect for: Foodies, globetrotters, Sicilians

Playtime: Less than an hour

The brilliant cruelty of Bravely Default’s nonlinear narrative

If I started this article at the end it probably wouldn’t make much sense. There’s a reason most writers put words and events in chronological order to tell a story. Some stories, however, are best told out of order.

Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) works this way as it uses the chaotic scrambling of the nonlinear narrative to explore the limits of human memory. So too does a recent episode of Doctor Who, “Heaven Sent” (2015), which uses a repeated narrative to highlight the stubbornness and fortitude of the Doctor’s character. For videogames, taking these same non-typical approaches to narrative as film and television can be much more difficult. This is due to games having to worry about player interactions in a way other forms of media do not. Bravely Default, the 2012 Nintendo 3DS title by Square Enix, tells its story using both a nonlinear and repeated narrative to increase the intensity and scale of the story far beyond the hours spent playing it.

In Bravely Default, the opening of The Great Chasm—a giant, cataclysmic event—swallows up the hometown of one of the main characters, Tiz. He then sets out to try to find a way to right the world that is now being attacked by darkness. It’s a typical start, for what ends up being a very non-typical story. Tiz meets up with Agnes, the Vestal of Wind, who is part of the Crystal Orthodoxy that worships four crystals that protect the land. These four crystals have since fallen into darkness. Tiz and Agnes also join up with three others: Airy, a crystal fairy who gives the group direction and guidance; Ringabell, a womanizer with no memory of his past; and Edea, the daughter of the head of the Anti-Crystalism movement who is out to right the wrongs of her father.

Bravely Default unfolds over the next 40-50 hours, a lengthy story by any means, as Tiz and company try to figure out what is causing the Crystals to go dark, and how they can stop it. However, when trying to play with narrative form, Bravely Default highlights both the benefits, and drawbacks that games can face when using these atypical types of narrative. After freeing all of the crystals, the group is transported to a parallel world nearly identical to their original one, the same events repeating. Everyone decides to free the crystals again in this world as well, and then the next four chapters of the game are spent re-fighting the same bosses and freeing the same crystals, over and over and over again. There are slight changes in each world, but most of the events are the same as the player travels from one parallel world to the next. It’s as exhausting as it sounds.

This repetition of these same (or parallel) events is comparable to the narrative form used in the Doctor Who “Heaven Sent” episode, in which the Doctor is stuck in a castle surrounded by puzzles and being chased by a deathly creature. The Doctor eventually realizes that the castle is a trap created to get him to confess his deepest secrets, and soon learns that the skulls surrounding the castle are none other than his own, collected over the many years he has lived through the same scenarios in the castle—each time he uses his dying energy to create a new copy of himself to continue trying to escape. The Doctor then spends four billion years slowly working his way through a wall in the prison, until he finally breaks through and makes his way out. Having the Doctor live through these events only a few times wouldn’t carry the same weight, nor would it say the same about his character, as it does having him spend four billion years working in the prison. Once the Doctor realizes that he is stuck in a loop of the same events, however, the episode doesn’t make the viewer watch the same events over and over again. Instead, it truncates them and cuts them into a montage of short clips.

the episode doesn’t make the viewer watch the same events over and over again

Bravely Default decides not to make use of the same devices in its repeated narrative. Due to its time-limited format, the TV episode uses increasingly shorter scenes to imply the repeated scenes, showing the same events with a few of the minor details changed each time. Bravely Default, instead, has the player actually re-live in full the actions, puzzles, and fights each and every time. It isn’t just telling or showing a story, it’s inviting the player to live through the repeated events the same way the characters are in the story. Due to the graces of length and time that videogames (especially RPGs) are given, Bravely Default is able to have the player live out this grueling, analogous act. By doing this, players are pushed closer to experiencing the gravity of the situation these characters live through, repeating each leg of that journey, step-by-step without much respite. If the game simply showed a cutscene of the events happening over and over, the player would never feel frustrated, and it’s important that this genuine feeling is baked into them for the story to be at its most impacting. The repetition is meant to make the player hope, with each cycle, that it’ll be the last time they’ll have to save the crystals. It’s the same hope the characters feel. And it’s the same feeling of being let down when they realize they have to start over once again. This is a big risk for the game’s creators to take but, presuming the player goes through with it, by the end they should be in tune, almost as one, with the characters’ mindsets.

Slowly, over the course of linking all these worlds, doubt starts to sink into all the characters’ heads as they fail to save the world time and again. When it’s revealed that Airy—the fairy traveling with them—was actually using them to link millions of worlds together in order to revive Ouroboros, the god of destruction, it’s not that big of a surprise. But it does turn the RPG trope of magical guides that never steer adventures wrong (here’s looking at you, Navi) on its head. It also makes the repetition of the last few chapters sting even more. Not only have the characters been stuck in the same chain of events, but their actions have been making things worse; the exact opposite of what they had hoped. All that work was not  for nothing after all—but they may wish that it was—instead it actively progressed the opposing agenda and further plunged the worlds into darkness.

But the repetition of the narrative does more than breed frustration. It also adds multiple layers and both a timely and emotional investment to the quest, as well. The severity of the situation and the fact that all of these worlds now hang in the balance of the player’s actions is only conveyed as lucidly as it is due to the time and effort they had to put in to get there. The game doesn’t just tell players that a bunch of worlds are linked together… they actually had to create these connections themselves across hours and hours of play. They are to blame—sure, they were tricked—but their actions directly caused the events that are unfolding. The player created this mess, and multitudes of worlds are now on the brink of destruction because of it. They can’t escape that fact nor the hours they spent making it happen.

Repetitive narrative isn’t the only structural storytelling device that Bravely Default experiments with. The dimension that players start out Bravely Default in is, at the end, revealed not to be the dimension where the story started. Ringabell is ultimately revealed to be Alternis, the Dark Knight from the first world, who traveled into the second parallel world where he meets up with the playable characters and the story as we know it starts. His flashbacks of failing in the first dimension reveal his character motivation, and how much he deeply cares about helping save the world(s). His failure in the first world sets the entire story into motion. Compare this to the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the first time the viewers meet the main characters is not the first time the characters themselves have met. The reason for doing this is to have the viewer confronted with a later revelation that encourages them to muse on the film’s themes of love and memory.

The player created this mess

In Bravely Default, keeping Ringabell’s roots in another world hidden for so long achieves something similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Throughout the story, Ringabell is mostly used  for comedic effect. But when it’s revealed that he’s trying to atone for being unable to save the first world, the story is graced with the added theme of redemption. Ringabell’s character—up to this point—has mostly been defined by his indefatigable attraction toward the women around him, including Agnes and Edea. But by giving this love roots in his initial failure, not just in his pants, it shifts the player’s view of the character. It’s made clear that no longer is Ringabell simply driven by physical attraction, but that he’s being driven by a need to make up for his past. Non-linearity is key here: if the player (and by extension, the characters) knew who Ringabell truly was from the start, the initial trust of him could have never been developed. Giving him this extra layer of self-redemption makes the character far from the one-dimensional and sex-crazed boy he initially seemed. Even the person playing as the group’s comic relief gets to play the part of hero.

By starting the story in a second world, after the first has failed, Bravely Default is also able to give the end-game real stakes. Other versions of these characters have taken up the same task in other worlds, and died trying. In the final fight with Ouroborus, he’ll start to destroy entire worlds both the ones the player has linked, and those that are populated by other real-world players they’ve met with the 3DS’ StreetPass feature. This adds another level of reality—a further gravitas—to the many fictional layers already stacked upon Bravely Default’s worlds. The game wants the player to feel the weight of the destruction they’ve enabled as if there was blood dripping from their hands. It isn’t just the fate of one world but all of the myriad parallel worlds that hangs in the balance. And most of all, it’s made the player live in those alternate worlds, it’s made those places tangible, part of the characters’ memories, they feel real, and now they have to witness their annihilation, or attempt to be their salvation.

The videogame tribute to Philip K. Dick is out today

Philip K. Dick may be decades-dead but the extraordinary visions that lined the pages of his fictions are more alive than ever. There is perhaps no better proof of this than Californium—a videogame that weaves Dick’s influential stories with his own drug-fueled delusions into a multi-dimensional trip. It’s out today in full for PC over on Steam. It should also become available for free over on the ARTE Creative website, but only the first episode for now, with the following three to be released in order on March 1st, 8th, and the 15th.

surrendering itself entirely to his sci-fi notions

In Californium, you essentially play an alternate world version of Dick himself. Cast as one Elvin Green after his wife and daughter leaves him, you start alone but for the pills in your cabinet and the sprawled pages of unfinished novels on the floor. As grim as the circumstances may be, Californium‘s world is brought to life thick with the exaggerated colors of sunny Orange County and a population of 2D cartoon characters drawn with rich expression. Granted, these encounters with fellow residents are mostly miserable—an angry landlady, a disappointed editor, a government agent trying to take you down—but considered strictly visually, the whole thing pops and beams out of the screen at you.

As I’ve noted before, the reason for this vibrancy may be less to please you and more to reflect the cynicism of Dick himself, who saw California as a shiny plastic wonderland of commercial products and trash. He hated it there. It seems that Elvin Green isn’t a fan either, which is probably why he rolls with the momentum when televisions start talking to him, giving him instructions to travel to alternate realities. Each of these dimensions are given their own color palette (and correspond to a chapter of the game each) and leak into each other as you rip through space-time in your travels. It’s a complete realization of Dick’s belief in a multi-dimensional existence, surrendering itself entirely to his sci-fi notions; something fans should be thrilled about.

Californium was conceived as part of the celebrations surrounding the 30th anniversary of Dick’s back in 2012. As such, it’s part of a transmedia project that also includes a documentary called “The Worlds of Philip K. Dick” to debut on March 2nd, and a 360° virtual reality experience called I, Philip that will be available on February 22nd.

Find out more about Californium over on its website. Purchase it on Steam.

The Breakfast Club adds absolute silliness to your morning routine

Making breakfast is easy. If I can regularly manage to pour myself a bowl of cereal in a half-asleep stupor after I wake up then it’s a testament to just how little brain power breakfast usually requires. However, breakfast isn’t quite as easy as it seems in The Breakfast Club, a product of the 2016 Global Game Jam. In it, you and three friends must work together to make breakfast. Sound simple enough? Well it’s not. With Surgeon Simulator-esque controls and the chaos of four-player co-operation, maneuvering breakfast items from plate to toaster and back again has never been more challenging.

what happens when you make the routine hectic

Breakfast is the antithesis of epic. It’s a narrative trope to start a story with a morning routine because it’s what establishes a base level of normalcy before things get hectic and all the world-saving happens. The Breakfast Club asks what happens when you make the routine hectic. When we’re so used to videogames presenting with larger-than-life scenarios, focusing on the mundane in itself is absurd. Making toast is decidedly boring, but even boring scenarios can be made interesting (or at least challenging) in videogames.

Though wacky physics are always good for a laugh, the difficulty of control also subverts the promise that digital makes everything easier. It’s 2016, weren’t robots supposed to be making breakfast for us by now? Isn’t that part of the vision of utopia, having the mundane automated? The Breakfast Club flips this long-standing expectation by taking a simple task and using digital restraints to make it nearly impossible. As games and gaming technology race for the better graphics, more sensitive controls, and more immersive experiences, The Breakfast Club instead embraces the sometimes clunky and broken way we control what we see on screen.

You can download The Breakfast Club on this page.