Guacamelee!

Why, then, does it somehow feel like its own worthwhile creation?

The game’s developer, DrinkBox Studios, obviously came to the project with real love and appreciation for the material it wanted to tackle. Videogame inspirations ranging from Metroid and Castlevania (or “Metroidvania” if you want to be like that) to Super Meat Boy and Super Mario Bros. colour the game as much as the team’s apparent affection for kitschy Day of the Dead and lucha libre wrestling aesthetics. Guacamelee! is unafraid of wearing its inspirations on its sleeve, even going so far as to incorporate videogame inspirations into its in-game parodies (a dragon-like boss is eventually defeated by jumping on an axe that sends it plummeting into lava; the next character mentions to the player that their princess isn’t in that particular castle) and peppering its backdrops with posters and stoneworks featuring visual references to Link, Mega Man, Donkey Kong, characters from Final Fantasy, Castle Crashers, Minecraft and more.

Bring this together with a propensity for Internet humour pulled from the likes of Reddit and 4Chan and Guacamelee! seems like a recipe for disaster. Borrowed jokes, visual nods to beloved games and a design less influenced than dictated by existing titles make DrinkBox’s creation sound like something cloying and unoriginal. Yet the game opens with a paradoxically humble swagger, jumping through its brief set-up and tutorial objectives with incredible confidence. By the time the player has grasped the first set of mechanics (new moves are always being unlocked) it becomes apparent that Guacamelee! is more than the sum of its parts.

The Day of the Dead imagery and luchador player character are the first elements to fall neatly into place. While garish wrestling masks, skeletal calaca imagery and poncho-sporting enemies are by no means a new invention, the game uses every bit of Mexican culture and folklore it takes as pieces of its own distinct identity. Much like how LucasArts’ Grim Fandango borrowed from familiar sources in crafting its celebrated noir story, Guacamelee! dips into cultural symbolism as a way to breathe new life into the well-trod hero’s journey it wishes to provide. That it combines these references with Internet memes (repurposed as Mexican-tinged graffiti) may not have made me laugh, but the universality of Grumpy Cat helps to offset a brand of culturally stereotypical humour that could very easily have tipped into offensive caricature while also serving to further the game’s unique identity.

In a few instances, Guacamelee! even manages to graduate from homage to originality in unexpected places. The seemingly utilitarian mechanic of instantly switching from “dead” to “living” worlds starts off as a play on the kind of light/dark gameplay affinities that have been used countless times before. Some enemies cannot be damaged unless the player jumps through a portal to change the environment and, later, this ability is turned into a power-up that allows for on-demand switch overs. The game immediately tasks the player with exploring previously visited areas where the new power is capable of changing the landscape from a vibrant, sunny Mexican village to a deserted purple-skied underworld. The most impressive uses of this ability see the player blur the lines between life and death in fascinating ways. In one instance the hero completes a sidequest where a skeletal child from the land of the dead asks for the comfort of her luchador wrestler doll. Switching to the land of the living reveals her mother, in the same spot, mentioning that she had kept the doll as a a keepsake for her dead daughter. Retrieving the object comforts the ghostly girl. Another scene shows a “living world” graveyard strewn with mementos to the departed such as garlands and food. The same scene, when switched, lets the player talk to a calaca skeleton who says that death isn’t so bad because the living have left behind the stuff he needs to throw a feast. These may seem like small things, but, through such a simple mechanic, Guacamelee! ends up highlighting the background of the Day of the Dead celebrations in a novel way.

These successes make finishing the game a little puzzling. The journey is very enjoyable, but so evocative of other works that the entire enterprise has something of a hollow aftertaste. Guacamelee!‘s ending ultimately leaves behind the lingering question of just what we want when we ask for originality. Nobody, but the emotionally stunted and terminally boring, wants their entertainment to provide a retread of something they’ve already experienced and, really, at its core that’s exactly what Guacamelee! is.

If the game wasn’t as fun or as confident about its own identity it probably would have fallen flat on its face. But it doesn’t. Guacamelee! takes every one of its myriad influences and, instead of simply putting them on display, constantly proves why we should continue to enjoy what is already so familiar. Nintendo may not be able to channel its past successes into original work anymore, but that company’s trademark iterations on nostalgic design have been picked up by others who are better suited to the work. DrinkBox is a studio that is smart enough to take real care with the delicacy of constant reference, injecting its own sense of self into every aspect of what is, when everything else has been stripped away, a videogame we’ve all already played so many times before.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for videogame site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

Please finish playing Bioshock Infinite before reading. This article contains plot details.

“Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilizations, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

- L. Frank Baum, Editor of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer/author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on January 3, 1891

In the last days of the year 1890 the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army massacred approximately 300 unarmed Lakota Natives (including some 200 women and children) in what would be one of the last in a long line of violent encounters between colonial and Native Americans. The Wounded Knee Massacre, in its encapsulation of the nascent U.S’ historic racism and unchecked brutality toward the land’s Native population, is one of the most indelible stains on the complicated tapestry of American identity.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Irrational Games, after exploring the inevitable horrors of unregulated capitalism in Bioshock, would come to another such instrumental aspect of the American psyche in their latest release, Bioshock Infinite.

Booker DeWitt, Infinite‘s protagonist, is a veteran of Wounded Knee and an agent of the notorious Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He is a man very much haunted by his past, the violent strikebreaking and indigenous slaughter that has made up his career contributing to a drinking problem and a character defined by nearly complete indifference to violence. DeWitt is also, through a deft bit of Nolan-esque dimension bending, the aged founder of Columbia: Zachary Comstock or The Prophet. The floating city — a twisted, hyper-nationalist utopia — founded by DeWitt/Comstock, welcomes every new arrival with a baptism. Just outside of the baptismal chambers are gardens adorned with statues of the Founding Fathers, three figures who are revered like gods (but not as much as the Abrahamic god who, of course, hovers above all else in the city as the ultimate authority). Right away the message is clear: Columbia is a second chance to get America “right.” Anyone who enters Columbia is able to wash their hands of the nation below, cleansing themselves of all of its historical baggage and embrace, instead, the kind of “pure Americanism” so beloved of Constitution thumpers like the modern Tea Party.

DeWitt/Comstock is obsessed with the idea of starting again, many of the audio logs he has left scattered about the city comparing Columbia to Noah’s ark and suggesting that early 20th century America has become a Sodom where perversions like constitutional amendments and social progress have distorted the vision of the Founding Fathers. Infinite, much like the original Bioshock, presents a test case for how a “renewed” America could play out, founding a city that white washes past crimes in favour of a revisionist version of U.S. history — one where the Wounded Knee that DeWitt/Comstock cannot ever forget can be turned into a military triumph rather than an atrocity. We see the inevitable failings of this attempt at national rebirth in the Vox Populi (a popular front group not unlike a militant labour force — a sort of depoliticized merger of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties) movement and the recognition that America, no matter how carefully it is constructed in favour of the white Protestant majority, will always sit atop a house of cards where the ground base of oppressed menial workers can rise up to topple even such a beautifully obscured illusion of peace and freedom.

This refutation of a clean break becomes even more clear as DeWitt, still unaware that he is Comstock, travels through the city’s Hall of Heroes — a tribute to Comstock and Colombia’s participation in Wounded Knee and the imperialist blow back of China’s Boxer Rebellion. Though the Lakota (unarmed civilians perverted here to warring savages) and Chinese are depicted as terrifying aggressors in the pop-up Disneyland version of  these conflicts found in the Hall of Heroes it is striking that even in Columbia, the land of rebirth and cleansing of past sins, the city must acknowledge its history in order to foster its own identity.

The character of Slate, a soldier who slaughtered alongside DeWitt/Comstock, in Wounded Knee is the primary threat in the Hall of Heroes, leading a band of disaffected Columbians who wish to die in battle rather than fade into old age in the peace of the floating city. For these men the only way to rectify the American past is to be killed in the kind of warfare that shaped their nation. DeWitt/ Comstock, viewing Slate and his compatriots as alien, is ultimately not so different. He is still deeply affected by the past, — by his guilt in taking part in Wounded Knee and putting down the Boxers in Peking — but suppresses his trauma by internalizing it into the vision of Columbia. For him, America can be reborn by reforming the facts of the past.

The finale of the game shows Booker DeWitt at the moment when he becomes Zachary Comstock. He comes upon a group of Anabaptist Christians performing a group baptism in a creek. DeWitt, seeking only absolution for his part in helping those in power shape America through brutality, renounces his sins and is dunked in the water. He emerges, is “born again” and believes himself free of the memories that haunt him. But we know, having seen the awful shape his life goes on to take as Comstock, that there is no way for him to ever leave the atrocities of Wounded Knee behind. Like America itself the guilt will never leave, regardless of how hard he attempts to start again. The same psychology that allowed for the systemic eradication of the Native Americans, the institutionalization of racism and blind faith in the favourable myths of the American Revolution will always inform who he is and what he will go on to do. DeWitt/Comstock is America and his guilt will make up a part of his psyche no matter what he does — or how hard he tries — to erase it.

Infinite is striking in its selection of baptism as the central theme. The horrors of the past and the belief that ignoring them through “rebirth” can make them go away is surely responsible for why Americans seem so intractably drawn toward the ecstatic, Anabaptist Christianity (the Great Awakenings of Methodist preachers caught on in the United States in a fashion unimaginable in Europe). Those who fled from the mess of 17-1900s Europe came to the “New World” with visions of a clean slate that will never exist. When a landed colonial finds the supposed purity of their new nation sullied by the inevitable guilt of oppression, imperialism and prejudice there is nothing left to do but to try to renew the soul through whatever means possible. The promise of America is freedom from the past but, like every nation, achieving this ideal of freedom has left America stained with the blood of those who must be exploited to succeed. Baptism of the kind that promised DeWitt a new life as Comstock and America a new life in Columbia offers a seductively simple (and ultimately futile) way to move forward.

That DeWitt must be drowned before he has a chance to be baptized once again during Infinite‘s finale suggests something much different than the traditional American narrative of guilt-free rebirth. Just admitting to feeling guilty over the past is not enough. Sometimes, as Lincoln knew, the only way to move forward without injustice is to accept that the darkness of the past will always remain dark and that the only way to change the future for the better is to make drastic steps to rectify previous horrors through present action.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

It did happen, though. Bulletstorm was created, marketed, released and, in its own modest way, purchased. And in its reality there are many lessons we must take away from its lack of success — from its inability to change the way that first-person shooting games were made and bought in and around the early 2010s.

Read on, savvy industry folks and ensure that you never make the same dreadful mistakes that sank the foul-mouthed shooter that could.

1. Players Do Not Enjoy Variety

Have you ever been walking through a forest during a crisp mid-winter’s day, taking in the green of the pines, the brown of the tree trunks and the overwhelming, uniform whiteness of the snow when, to your disgust, an impossibly red Cardinal or stunningly bright Blue Jay twitters across your view?

I can think of nothing more abhorrent than this disruption of an otherwise bland environment.

Bulletstorm encapsulates this problem. Everything is varied in its environments, its array of weapons and its enemy designs. It’s just awful! During one stage the player must navigate the outside of a sprawling dam — in others the battleground shifts to a futuristic theme park, tropical rainforest with a sprawling panorama of sci-fi beaches or the outside of a neon-lit, glass-paneled high rise office building. All of it is colourful, suffused with an attention to detail that, in its refusal of drab uniformity, makes the levels feel truly alive. The same commitment toward variety applies to the weapon loadout, a group of tools that are drip fed throughout the length of Bulletstorm‘s brief, expertly paced campaign. Instead of the usual line-up of hyper-realistic, arms industry licensed weaponry, Epic/People Can Fly created a bizarre series of guns that shoot cannonballs, allow for full control over the course that a long-range bullet takes, fire delayed explosive rounds and launch propulsive drill bits. The gall of this design decision is that not only does the shooting experience remain varied and exciting throughout the entire game, but it doesn’t even let players help contribute money to the manufacturers of their favourite real-life murder tools!

2. If You Must Write an Elaborate Backstory, Create an Exhaustively Detailed Codex

The people behind the most successful role-playing games know that anything that exists in a fictional world must be itemized and described in painstaking detail if the player is to invest in the narrative. There is simply no point in having a backstory if it is not Tolkeinized to the nth degree. When exploring a science fiction universe the environment should not relay information on its own and, god forbid, characters must not simply contextualize past events during in-game conversations. Videogame players do not have the intellectual muscle necessary for filling in the blanks. They must have all relevant details laid out before them in sprawling menus of text, books that can be picked up and read during pause-interrupted action sequences or, better yet, accompanying novels and animated features released before and after the videogame itself.

3. Providing More Than a Handful of Mechanics Is Confusing

The beauty of modern first-person shooters is that the vast majority of them are simple. One button zooms in a gun, the other shoots it. Shoulder buttons handle throwing grenades. Bulletstorm spits in the face of this design by introducing a dedicated buttons to kicking, sliding and “leashing.” All of these actions, when performed upon enemies, moves them into a slow motion fall that allows them to be manipulated in various (always deadly) ways. Slide across the battlefield and knock into a slavering mutant and they freefall toward a cactus, explosive barrel or carnivorous plant. Leash them from behind the cover they’re hidden behind and then, once exposed, kick them off a ledge as they come closer. The higher the finesse shown in taking down an enemy, the larger the number of points awarded to the player for use in buying ammunition. It’s all too complicated isn’t it? Why not just make the game about shooting bullets? If it’s good enough for Call of Duty it should be good enough for every action game.

When I play a videogame from exceptional franchises like Medal of Honor or Call of Juarez I can immediately tell when I’ve defeated an enemy because they fall over or, if the encounter is particularly well designed, they will get stuck in the level geometry doing a kind of quicksand breakdance. This is not the case in Bulletstorm. This game, for unknown reasons, believes that the shooter can be about more than knocking down glorified rifle range targets. Videogame players, as established above, cannot be trusted to use more than a few simple mechanics properly. Giving them more than they expect can only result in failure or frustration.

4. Only a Highly Detailed, Incentive-Based Multiplayer Component Can Encourage Replay

Once players had finished Bulletstorm‘s campaign they could either play its fairly shallow multiplayer mode, work through a score attack component or just replay the campaign. This makes the game — $60 American dollars at release — an enormous waste of money. Nowhere is the player tempted by leveling systems, gear unlocks or the ability to customize the banner that pops up on an opponent’s kill-cam. Epic and People Can Fly seem to assume that because a videogame’s core mechanics are enjoyable to play with through a campaign they will continue to be fun to explore outside of dopamine-drip multiplayer “progression” systems. Naturally, anyone who enjoys playing through a fast-paced campaign will never wish to revisit that experience. If they liked mastering the wide array of weapons and “Skill Shot” shooting tricks during a first run of the story mode they will not wish to explore these systems further in an arcade-style score tracking game component. That’s just crazy.

5. If You’re Going to Try to Be Funny, Don’t Take Yourself Seriously

Listen, the best comedies don’t have characters; they have caricatures. Bulletstorm, despite first impressions, attempts to flesh out its small cast by giving them relatable goals, motivations and personalities. It is a mistake to take jokes centred around main character Grayson Hunt’s near alcoholism during the games opening and then go on to examine just why it is that the man has a drinking problem as the story progresses. The player wants to laugh at cardboard cut-outs, not be confused as to why there may be something more going on behind a given gag. Even worse, Grayson’s seemingly homophobic ribbing of his cyborg squadmate, Ishi, are immediately contextualized as a satirical goof on military-style hypermasculinity within seconds. Can’t a game just have a laugh without asking its more close-minded players to question entrenched sociological prejudices? God, Bulletstorm. It’s almost as if the game’s writers were trying to make a subtle comment on the piles of military fetish shooters it knew it would be compared to. No one likes comedy that makes you have to think about why you’re laughing, Bulletstorm. Bad show.

At least we can take heart in knowing that a game that did so many things wrong has been given the legacy it deserves. No one has to worry about the ugly mistakes of Bulletstorm cropping up in other titles because the game that made its mistakes has been left as a rotting head on a stake outside of its developer’s and publisher’s gates as a warning to others daring to follow in its path. “Take no chances”, it cautions.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

“I’ve got wood,” the target coughs out.

47 turns away and as the screen fades to black the dying man finishes the last sentences he will ever speak before shuffling free this mortal coil.

“Why do I have wood?”

Jesus fucking Christ, IO Interactive. What are you doing?

When you fire up a game of Hitman: Absolution an elegantly designed menu screen appears, accompanied by a haunting cello melody. It’s reminiscent of the Max Payne theme. This is where the similarities between the two games stop. Max Payne deftly straddled the line between absurdity and seriousness in each of its installments, its writers being smart enough to know when a joke was appropriate and when to opt for a little bit of gravity instead. The in-game televisions may have played surreal Twin Peaks knock-offs and self-satirizing detective stories, but the murder of a loved one and the depths of Max’s melodramatic despair were treated as emotionally significant. These games are successful because they are aware of when it’s okay to laugh and when it’s better to keep a straight face.

Absolution, on the other hand, has no such common sense.

While playing the game it becomes pretty clear that IO Interactive, the studio behind Hitman: Absolution, staffs a writing team of total dirt bags. The people who wrote the scene described above are incapable of making the basic distinction between comedy and tragedy. Because of this, their videogame is targeted toward nobody but the reprehensible few who are both capable of laughing at a poorly written death/hard-on joke and weeping when a grim-faced “hero” assassin mistakenly kills his only friend in the world. Who are these people? Do they exist? It’s likely that IO wanted to couple an emotionally resonant story with some cheap gags along the way, but, by completely failing in this, they’ve created something far grosser than a simple misstep. They have made not just a bad game, but one of the vilest titles I’ve ever encountered.

None of the characters, from the wretched villains to 47 himself, are even remotely likeable. They are all skin-crawlingly sick, designed around their awfulness from the ground up. Dexter, the Southern antagonist who must be hunted throughout the bulk of the game, is a lecher with crumbling yellow teeth and a love of murder. He is constantly accompanied by a woman named Layla who, like each of the superficially sketched women in the game, is a plastic fetish doll meant to appeal to the desires of the (assumed teenage boy) player. The two of them represent the only character molds that IO seems capable of offering: perverted, greedy, violent man (like the shit-stained Birdie, small town sheriff, evil head of the assassin agency, etc.) and one-note woman defined only by her hyper-sexualization (behold the schoolgirl, nun, secretary and latex-clad BDSM lady) and subservient relationship to the game’s men.

The rampant misogyny and general love of filth should make it come as no surprise that playing Absolution is a terrible, soul-sucking experience. Two hours with it is like reading all of Bukowski’s novels in a single setting, but without any of the redeeming qualities of experiencing worthwhile literature. This game makes you feel fucked up and nauseous and all around wrong. It makes you want a brain shower. Even worse, it does all of this without imparting any kind of lesson or providing engaging gameplay. I have watched difficult films, read difficult books and played difficult games, but have left many of these experiences enriched. Absolution is not like that. It is the Saw of videogames, a torture porn movie’s atmosphere diffused over twelve excruciating hours.

A savvy editor wouldn’t have been able to make this a good game, but s/he might have been able to salvage something by sticking to either the jokey or serious approaches that Absolution is torn between. If everything in the game was done as a gag — if the design was less self-serious — then the latest Hitman could have gotten away with being offensive. It could have, like Saints Row: The Third, had its cake and eaten it too. But it hasn’t. It is, instead, a scummy little endeavor that is never able to decide if it wants laughs or dramatic pathos. If all of it is meant to be camp (and that’s the only way to contextualize the baffling “murder nuns” who make up a game mission and that awful trailer from last year) then it’s completely missed the point of how to convey a cheeky B-flick tone.

Hitman: Absolution is, at its core, an ugly game created by mean-spirited people who care little about the weight that gruesome death and violence should have. It also has terrible depictions of women, an awful sense of humour and an apparent complete misunderstanding of how to write anything like a sympathetic character.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

I was really getting baffled for a while there. I had started things up again with a strong dose of GODHAND and Arkham City. I was gettin’ my Crazy Taxi on. Shit, I was unwrapping myself some Dark Souls, downloading DmC3[1], re-acquainting myself with some Dead Rising. And the whole damn time I was wondering why I had ever left this glorious land, wondering why I would abandon such bountiful harvest. Everywhere I looked, I saw crunchy, tight gameplay. And so I got sloppy. I starting reading some IGN[2]. I skimmed some Joystiq. Yea, I walked from the path of Action Button. I mean come on, it had been almost 4 years! Things have come far right? And then this turd falls into my fucking lap.

Dishonored has you as Corvo, some protector to some empress. You get framed for her murder so it’s time to bust outta prison and GET SOME REVENGE. The core gameplay revolves around . . . well, I’m not really sure what it revolves around. I’m honestly not confident there IS any core gameplay. It just feels like some shooting here, some shitty magic stapled on the side and hey let’s throw in some stealth because assassin. We’ll Dive Deep[3] on the gameplay, but I just gotta take a second to take about the intro because, WOW. How can you make an introduction that bad? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that introductions are the hardest part of any sequential art[4]. But just . . . WOW guys. Okay, so that incoming boat sequence. You driving me through a ditch? Are you for real? The reason these ‘drive by shit’ sequences work so well in HL2[5] is cause they DRIVE BY SHIT. They let you get a FEEL for the world you’re in! It’s setting the stage. What’s the feel here? I go through a ditch, with no view, into some cave, to report some shit to some chick who’s spymaster is an obvious creeper? Did I just pass a CRATE IN THE SEWERS???[6]

But okay, okay, that’s just the first 10 or so minutes; surely it gets better right? Because after all, that’s when the game REALLY begins. Even Space Giraffe had a weak intro! Once you start the real game, dive into dat good crunch . . . that’s when things get baller, eh?

No, my fine sir/sir-ette; that’s when they get anything BUT baller. Indeed, it’s not until the game starts that you can truly appreciate how horrendously RETRO this game truly is.

To be clear, I don’t mean retro in a GODHAND way[7], or even in a ZELDA way[8]; I mean retro in a RETROGRADE way. This game gazes upon two decades of advancement in it’s genre and decides . . . ‘meh’. What’s this about effortless ability swaps? Eh, we’ll just put in programmable quick select wheel and call it a day. Fuck yeah, side missions in the middle of CRITICAL (supposedly) TIME-LIMITED (supposedly) STORY MISSIONS. Oh hey, weak-half-baked powers that our weak-non-baked level design render even MORE useless!

And I just don’t get it. How can you do that? How can you spend so much time in development, so much time thinking and scoping and delivering and slipping and failing and always sprinting always sprinting, how can you do all that and miss that omnipresent FACT that your game isn’t a REAL game? I can’t sit down, without the ‘story’ without the ‘menus’, without the ‘controller’, and just FEEL your game. I can’t SEE, in my minds eye, the heft of Corvo sliding. I can’t FEEL, in my ears skin, the sudden gasp of reality when I Blink from one shittily laid out rooftop to another. There’s just no heart here guys.

And goddamnit it just makes me sad. No it makes me MAD. Why’d I even start this all up again? Can’t these fools see how close they GOT? Can’t they just TASTE the future to which they so UNWITTINGLY came close? By barest inches they grazed past brilliance, by a HAIR they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Just structure your game cleanly! Minutes in the menus over SECONDS in the MOMENT! Kill the inventory! Gimme Levels that I can really VERB[9] at!

Oh RIGHT! That’s why I started playing videogames again!

===

[1] Holy shit, you can download, like, real titles now? Not just swag indie shit, but swag disc shit too? And damn, hard drive space!

[2] The GODHAND review, it was in the past! And hey, didn’t they put it on some top 100 list or something?

[3] Amazon Leadership Principles REPRESENT

[4] Other Hardest Part: endings, middles, the whole thing, etc.

[5] A game Dishonored copies SO HARD it’s creepy . . .

[6] IT’S THE FUTURE GUYS STOP PROVING OMM RIGHT

[7] RETRO == respect_for(&past) && !reverence_of(&past)

[8] RETRO == reverence_of((&past + SOME_RANDOM_CONSTANT))

[9] SHOUTOUTS TO ANNA

And so it is that the Mighty Magistrates of Xorflacxt have provided me, Gorflarb, with the unenviable task of reviewing your Earthling “videogames” in an effort to better understand your species’ sad attempts at creating entertainment.

Humans spend an inordinate amount of time in pursuit of the tiniest scraps of pleasure. When Gorflarb was first tasked with its mission it found itself perplexed by this fact. We Xorflacxt have long dispensed with such trivial efforts. Our broodmasters ensure a society of perfect harmony by flooding our brains with calming hum-chants that trigger the release of a steady stream of seratonin in our brains. Every waking moment for us is (to put it in crude Human terms) like a mild orgasm. The Mighty Magistrates told Gorflarb, however, that an examination of the pleasure impulse in Humans is a key aspect of understanding your species. It seems that the need to experience pleasant feelings has contributed to the construction of your misguided ideologies, sparked wars and lead to your “great” works of art.

It is for these reasons that Gorflarb was provided with a personal computer, copy of Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo III and a tentacle immersion tank able to emulate the Human “mouse and keyboard” control scheme.

Gorflarb chose to create a barbarian woman (with the culturally appropriate name of Axeface) and set out on its adventure. Having not played the previous Diablo entertainment products it was somewhat surprised to find the extremely popular videogame so transparent in its purposes. Diablo III ‘s box promised an experience filled with unthinkable monsters drawn from the deep well of your Abrahamic religions’ bogeymen, an involving combat system that properly tests a players skills and a grand quest centred on the war between angels (a widespread Earthling image that is, funnily enough, the result of young, sneezing Xorflacxts accidentally transmogrifying into your plane of galactic perception throughout the past) and demons (Gorflarb apologizes for having no anecdote here). Blizzard Entertainment’s videogame is packaged in cardboard covered with nothing more than misinformation! Gorflarb was surprised, two or three hours into the game, to discover that the only purpose of playing Diablo III was to click monsters and, occasionally, hit a key that makes a “special skill” activate. These creatures are well designed, but do not ever attempt interesting battle tactics. Gorflarb clicked and clicked and punched key after key (figuratively — its tentacles were submerged in responsive fluid) until it nearly fell into a dormant state inspired by sheer boredom. Where was the grand story? Why was Gorflarb expected to care about the trials (and predictable late story deceptions) of the game’s poorly imagined characters?

Gorflarb had to put itself into the foot coverings of a Human before it was able to understand the appeal of Diablo III.

Because we Xorflacxt exist in a state of perpetual bliss, our minds do not seek constant pleasure like the hairless apes who designed this videogame. Thus, it took time to uncover the pleasure principle that justifies the existence of this bloated, multimillion dollar mess of a product. After it became very clear that Diablo III was not concerned with telling an interesting story, offering engaging combat mechanics or creating any real sense of atmosphere the only thing left to look at was the click-click-keypunch-click-click-keypunch-click-click repetition that makes up the rest of the game. Gorflarb was unable to find enjoyment in this process and wonders if, perhaps, the Humans who receive pleasure from it don’t eventually end up feeling a bit like rodents running endlessly on tiny wheels. There is no real end in sight for anyone who chooses to play Diablo III. The game has a final boss and credits, sure, but reaching the conclusion of the game isn’t meant to be a real reward in and of itself. Instead, players are meant to delve back into the game and continue clicking on monsters until they drop quality bits of armor or weaponry that can be worn by a character or sold in the Auction House (a great place for the cynical Blizzard Entertainment to, in English slang terms, “get theirs” even after they’ve already won by selling $60 copies of their product). All of it seems like a diversion rather than an art — a timesucker meant to distract from the great whirling void that awaits all Humans at the end of their pathetically short mammalian lives.

Gorflarb certainly doesn’t want to condemn those who enjoy playing Diablo III, but it will point a tentacle at the developers responsible for it. Would it have killed this Blizzard Entertainment to spend a bit more time writing interesting dialogue? Could this enormously successful company not have spared a bit of money for decent voice actors? Gorflarb doesn’t mean to boast, but humbly submits that the waste material excreted from its manifold anuses is far more interesting than the thin veneer of narrative offered through the videogame. Just because many Humans will come to the game for its clicking action (and the tantalizing, omnipresent promise of ephemeral rewards in the shape of new “loot”) doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve a good story and well crafted characters as well. Gorflarb believes a bit more ambition could do this game a lot of good.

Enough of this. A thoughtmessage has just been received in Gorflarb’s brainmass that urges it to send this report to the Mighty Magistrates at once. The collective consciousness of the Xorflacxt grows anxious for words of Human activity and withholding information is not in Gorflarb’s nature.

So go drink your eggnogs, dream of your “Santa Clauses” and pay homage to the sundry religious icons associated with the “holiday season.” For our part, the Xorflacxt will be watching the Human species and reviewing more of your videogames in time. Perhaps this XCOM: Enemy Unknown may reveal more of your intergalactic attitudes and help determine how we decide to reach out next.

***

Gorflarb is a Xorflacxt from Sector XIX. It is an emissary of the Mighty Magistrates of Xorflacxt and has no hobbies or interests beyond serving its broodmasters. Gorflarb’s favourite foods are scrambled eggs, Human milk and cat steaks.

How do we deal with this?

There’s a decent body of Canadian literature that explores this sense of cultural entitlement and burden from both the Native and non-Native perspectives. It’s a hell of a thing to try to deal with and writing seems like one of the only ways to try to make sense of any of it. The fact of the matter is that multiple generations of colonial families now feel like North America is their home, lineage having erased memories of Native manipulation and genocide. Art attempts to bring these issues back to the forefront of our minds by forcing us to confront the idea of continental identity, though, sometimes portraying the lives of relatable early settlers+ and sometimes reinforcing the idea of North American multiculturalism as a “better late than never” type of reconciliation. Digging into these issues — re-opening the wounds that non-Natives have caused by co-opting the continent — seems like one of the only ways to assuage our collective guilt and attempt to forge a new, better identity.

It isn’t often that we see these themes explored outside of literature, visual art, independent film and music, but the unexpectedly rich portrayal of the birth of America offered up in Assassin’s Creed III looks to change this from the context of a mainstream videogame.

Assassin’s Creed III is a game about the United States, but, because it centres on the American Revolution, it’s also a game about North America as a whole. Any reasonably balanced historical fiction using the Revolution as its setting has to consider much more than the Patriot figureheads and the battles that led to independence and look at the larger context of European colonialism and Native American exploitation. ACIII could have dodged many of these issues while still creating an engaging narrative by casting a white colonial or troubled Redcoat as the Assassin hero, but Ubisoft Montreal, the game’s developer, instead chose to tackle its story with the level of complexity it warrants++.

This is done, in a brilliant bit of plotting, by forcing the player to spend a large amount of time in the shoes of both Ratonhnhaké:ton/Connor, a British-Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) man, and Haytham Kenway, his English father. We are made to see two different perspectives, to grow close to two characters who end up alternating between uneasily allying with and outright fighting against one another throughout the second half of the game. The decision to have both Connor and Haytham act as controllable characters is key because, as the larger themes of the story end up illustrating, nothing in the North American story is as black and white as it may seem.

When Haytham arrives in Massachusetts he immediately begins to seek a powerful item for the benefit of the Templars, the authoritarian secret society he belongs to. In order to find this item Haytham is willing to manipulate anyone he can find in the volatile colonies. Like Britain itself, Haytham and the Templars have come to the New World in search of a way to extend their power. The magic item the Templars desire, much like the limitless wealth represented by the Americas’ abundant natural resources, must be acquired at all costs in order to maintain control over the known world. Haytham eventually discovers that, if he is to claim the hidden item, he will have to work alongside the Native Americans. While his partnership with a Mohawk woman named Kaniehti:io (or Ziio) begins as an alliance of convenience — Ziio wants a troublesome British General eliminated and Haytham needs her to help him gain access to the item — it ends up becoming more intimate as they work together. Haytham, the power-hungry British imperialist, mixes his lineage — the future of the Empire — with Ziio and the Natives of America. Their son, Connor, is born as a mixture of the Old and New World.

When Connor is abandoned by his father he is left to find his own way in the world with the guidance of his Native community. After his mother dies in a raid on his home village he, like the American colonies, is cut off from his parents and forced to create a new identity largely disconnected from its roots. What follows is a story of the American Revolution wherein the thematic symbol of the continent, the British-American Connor, is left to navigate ideologies of absolute freedom (the Assassins) and traditional stricture (the Templars) while fighting to construct his own individual identity by piecing together his disparate roots. His only help comes in the form of an aged Black American, Achilles Davenport, who, from the hints he drops throughout the game, has obviously experienced enormous hardship while playing a part in building the New World. Connor, by the end of the game, has an identity constructed from the perspectives of Black and white colonials, British imperialists, Native Americans, Patriots, Loyalists, order-obsessed Templars and overly optimistic, freedom obsessed Assassins. In this way, the character of Connor becomes something more than the tabula rasa of Altair or Ezio’s aristocratic philanthropist, the protagonists of the first two Assassin’s Creed games. He is North America itself. His instinctive, violent reactions to injustice and his struggle to find an identity are all uniquely continental traits. His attempts to rectify his past with his present, the trappings of his lineage and his desires for a just future, see him constantly confused and guilt-ridden. When, near the end of the game, Connor must confront his father, he is America itself. Haytham, standing in for Britain and the nation’s past, is killed by the child he created. Whatever North America may be, ACIII says, it isn’t part of the Old World anymore.

Ubisoft Montreal mixes elements of everything that North America is, bringing a collection of varying ethnic groups, national cultures and competing philosophies together in their characters. Through this, the studio gives its audiences both an exciting historical adventure and a playable essay on the North American condition. Most videogame developers aim much lower than this, assuming that any audience buying an action game won’t have the patience to explore deeper themes. Assassin’s Creed III proves otherwise, offering up a thoughtful, interesting and artistic take on the birth of modern nations and asking the kind of difficult questions regarding the past, present and future of North America. None of these questions provide answers for people like me who are still troubled by the idea of calling a country like Canada or the United States home, but they at least urge more people to consider this problem and think more deeply about what it means to come from our continent.

===

+ Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush and many other examples of “frontier literature” provide detailed accounts of early, sympathetic North American immigrants unconsciously trying to “make it” at the behest of others.

++ I wonder if the developer being based out of Quebec helped to inform the subtler approach taken by the game. Quebecois are definitely not strangers to the complexities of multicultural politics, Montreal being something like the nerve centre of Canada’s century old tensions between Francophones and Anglophones. That the city is also home to a larger number of Anglophones than many other areas of Quebec (and that Ubisoft Montreal employs people from across the world, most notably Corey May, the Assassin’s Creed series’ American Lead Writer) is another factor that helped the team to create a complex look into their subject matter.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

Thankfully my horse won.

Emergent gaming is when complex situations arise from relatively simple rules. The above scene occurred while playing Skyrim, a game set in a ridiculously open-ended world that allows for spellbinding emergent gaming moments alongside equally spellbinding glitches in the game mechanics. You wouldn’t necessarily expect the same sort of situation to happen in a more linear game, but then I have also stumbled across zombie-on-zombie brouhahas in Left 4 Dead.

According to game designer Dave Braben, emergent gameplay is the “Holy Grail we are looking for in fifth-generation gaming.” If that is what game designers are striving toward, why haven’t we seen much of it yet, beyond some relatively silly examples that fall completely outside of main story arcs? The problem is that there are inherent limitations in the two major game design mindsets – open world and linear design – and how they deal with the art of telling a story.

Open World Methodology: The Endless Quest

Open world games allow you to tackle the story any way you see fit, but this approach ends up pushing the narrative towards a series of checkpoints, usually in the form of quests which must be completed before allowing you to attempt the next set of objectives. The result is a shallower story arc, although not necessarily an unsatisfying one. The primary story design challenge ends up being two-fold: maintaining interest in the main storyline and allowing for episodic plot development that can proceed at whatever pace the player chooses.

These two challenges are often at odds with each other. Maintaining interest requires you to give enough information that the next quest/challenge/plot point is still a mysterious and delightful enigma.  Usually this takes the form of forceably chopping up the story through the ol’ “now run over to this place and do this thing” type of quest, which quickly becomes monotonous as you continually traverse the world with only a dim view as to what you’re actually on about.

The job of keeping the player coming back, in this case, is then partially downloaded to the richness of the diversionary tactics that entertain, between solving the individual story elements of the game. These distractions include everything from side quests to the community-building exercises found in more successful MMORPGs. In Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), for example, these communities are called “kinships” and players may join/create kinships with their online amigos in order to pool resources, knowledge, and to help each other complete group-based quests.

Having a richly detailed extracurricular world, as it were, has its own hazards in terms of story design. In Skyrim, for example, you can just go off into the wilderness, chop wood to make your living, buy a house, marry someone, and, oh yeah, there are some world-threatening dragons that you can go fight if you have the inclination. In LOTRO you can spend all your time gathering resources found in the world (different types of wood, metal ore, herbs, arcane knowledge found in ruins, &c.) and work on your skills as a historian, bowyer, metalsmith, farmer, or a half-dozen other “careers” instead of actually caring about helping the Fellowship do whatever they’re doing with that pesky ring. In most MMORPGs you can buy a house, or two, or three, and outfit it like some medieval East Side Marios, with bric-a-brac over all of the walls and littering the hallways, everything from smoking helms to in-game artwork to an enormous fountain that just sits in your living room for no reason.

While this is all in service to something that is outside of the story, it is also the space within which emergent gaming is most likely to occur; perhaps because it is outside the rigorous definitions of the plot design.

Linear Design Methodology: Run This Way, Idiot

Linear games put you on rails. They sometimes allow for multiple methods of achieving the objective, but generally, with linear design, you accept that you are just along for the ride. Although the gameplay can be more stultifying, the stories and characters can also be that much richer for the simple fact that most plots are linear in nature anyway. The distraction element of open world game design is not necessary because you are most likely playing the for the story — the “guided experience.”

This isn’t to say that emergent gaming experiences are taboo in linear game design, just that they have to account for in the plot in other ways. Level design is really what linear games are all about, in the same way that the richness or tone of the environment often categorizes an open world game. Considering the reduced computational power required for even the most complex level design verses an entire open world map, it is surprising that there is such an inflexibility to linear game levels. For instance, in I Am Alive, you are able to jump and climb certain fences, but are unable to get over a low concrete barrier topped with barbed wire. That is just poor level design.

Games like Half-Life 2 are intriguing from a level design perspective because they have no set map. The realism of needing to find your own way through a level without that quick map-check aid is refreshing, but ultimately doesn’t change the feeling of being led by the nose at times. And while the enemies can interact with, and kill, each other — as is the case more and more often, even in linear game design — this only helps you save that first-aid kit for the end challenge of the level.

Level design has become an art in the way that the screenplay how-to guide “Story” has made an art of filmmaking. It becomes about hitting certain moments and working them into the concept of the level, as opposed to making something truly organic. There are mini-adventures within each level, sometimes called “boxes” or “gates,” where the player is forced to sit and wait and defend while some game mechanic takes its sweet time to allow you passage to the next area.

Even if these hindrances serve the story (as they do in Bioshock 2, when your Little Sister is gathering Adam and you must defend her) they are still about as organic as a robot with a typewriter. In Left 4 Dead, on the other hand, you can get blitzed by a box-type challenge at any time by getting covered in zombie-attracting bile by a “Boomer.” This mechanic adds to the fear factor, that at any moment you could be dealing with a high-speed horde of zombies while backpedaling and trying to reload your shotgun.

Solutions? No, More Like Heuristics

Neither of these options allows for a truly emergent storytelling experience. But without massive advances in AI, what possibly could? How can you deal with giving players free rein, not just of an environment, but of the actual direction of the plot? What will feel realistic, what will become a dead end, or even worse: what will become boring? Implementing a few heuristics as a part of the overall design can at least push a game toward a more emergent experience.

1. Stop Designing Open Worlds That Aren’t Open

Compare and contrast the island world of Just Cause 2 vs. Crysis. In Crysis there exist cliffs you can’t climb, and large portions of the island that you can never visit. Just Cause 2 has a game element (the grapnel) that allows you to travel virtually anywhere(not to mention the fact you can jump in a helicopter, fly up to a remote mountaintop, jump out, and parachute down through the greatest fake view of all time). It all adds up to a feeling of limitlessness, which makes the player more invested in exploration.

2. Don’t Be Afraid To Open Your Linear Game

If a character can climb over a chainlink fence, they shouldn’t be stopped by a low wall of sandbags. Not only does it not make sense, but it points out how linear the game actually is. Let players climb anything and everything. Yes, maybe it means they will get past a really tough area with surprising ease by doing something unexpected, but that has two bonus side effects: the player is rewarded for doing the unexpected, and they are encouraged to explore.

3. The Same Corner, The Same Enemy

Linear game design suffers not just from a closed-in map, but also from closed-in interactions with non-player characters. Do guards really only walk in one circuit, over and over again? Let the guards explore, let the player find enemies in different places each time they play and encourage unexpected outcomes during replays.

4. Let The Players Make Stuff, Even Story Elements

There are games that allow the player to create structures that persist within the game. Finally, you can create that high-tech space lab you’ve always wanted and invite your MMORPG friends over! There’s a limit to how much interactivity you can get from simply allowing new spaces to be added, but this type of design does alter the game landscape in fresh and unexpected ways. Allowing players to create equipment goes even further, but requires some devilishly complicated programming or a fairly restrictive set of choices. Allowing players to create new characters, new quests, or other story elements is going to be even harder,but without that creative impetus, a fully emergent experience will remain out of reach.

5. Design Interaction, Discover Emergence

Simple rules lead to complex interactions. That’s the emergent gameplay mantra, and following it to the bitter end makes games feel more responsive. Imagine a maze-like game that sometimes has boxes and barrels littered around the maze. You can blow them up, perhaps, but can you move them around? Could you block off one section of the maze so monsters/enemies from that section can’t come find you while you’re working on that vault door you need to open to move forward? Can you make your own traps, so a barrel falls from a height when pushed? Can you stack them up and climb over walls? Can your enemies follow you over those same impromptu stairs? Once you allow the mechanic to happen, players will find new ways to interact with the game, and that leads to enhanced replayability and more out-and-out fun.

The End of The Plot

Modern games have received their share of criticism for not yet achieving the mature artistry of literature or film. This criticism seems at once unfair and true, for as deep as the stories can be, that final step — the one that involves finding some transcendent moment — is still in the future of game design. As frustrating as that may be, it simply is a matter of time. Someday soon we will be able to buy a game that will blow our minds wide open by having a truly free-form plot constructed by us, the players.

Does that mean the death of the traditional story, with its Aristotelian arc, climax, and denouement? Not truly, because we all understand story structure innately — it’s part of how we communicate. The stories will remain, but the storytellers will change. The experience will be at once entirely yours and entirely out of your hands, as every controlled decision branches into a billion possibilities.

The stories we tell will be about the stories we make, and that will be all the difference.

***

Graydon James delivers your mail when he’s not making music that disappoints his parents.  He’s a tea enjoyer and a dad, therefore he only experiences video games in the most casual, between-diaper-changes kind of way.  But he has a lot of opinions and sometimes he writes them down, usually on Twitter under the handle @graydonj.

***

Ed. The header image is taken from a children’s book — Three Tales of My Father’s Dragon (R.S Gannett, R.C Gannett) — I found searching for ‘surprise dragon.’ I liked it too much not to use it.

This is an article that I originally wrote late last year, but that fell through the cracks for some reason or another and never saw the light of day. Aside from dated references to the 2011 Spike VGAs, I think it’s still relevant and worth sharing. I’ve made tiny little revisions and expanded on a few points, but left it alone otherwise.

The 2011 Spike Video Game Awards (VGAs) was a ceremony that celebrated pretty much everything awful about videogame culture. The parade of mock teabaggings, awkward celebrity endorsements and gleeful misogyny were all bad enough on their own, but what troubled me most about the VGAs was how all of this was aimed at a supposed subculture of “gamers.”

We, the people who love games, have done this to ourselves.

I really enjoy videogames. They’re fun, they can be intellectually stimulating and the medium is full of artistic promise, but I am not — and never will be — a gamer. Labeling oneself as such is one of the worst things that anyone can do. This tendency ignores the fact that everyone is made up of different parts — that no one neatly fits inside of a stereotype. I can’t call myself a gamer when loving games makes up only one small part of my identity. I’m a writer, a musician, a reader, a brother, a son, a friend, a partner, someone who loves ideas, someone who detests bigotry, and much more. None of these elements of myself fit within what the label of gamer is supposed to mean — and I suspect everyone else branding themselves as members of the supposed subculture, if they thought about it, would feel the same way.

This is because labels are now — and probably will always be from this point forward — the creation of marketers. What videogame enthusiasts consider to be “gamer culture” is an invention. It requires buying in, part and parcel, to an identity that has been assembled piecemeal by companies trying to wrap their head around how best to make money from a rapidly expanding industry.

There’s really no such thing as a gaming sub-culture anymore — there are mostly just people who believe in the value of videogames and enjoy spending time playing and discussing them. The entire concept of a gamer is a holdover from a lost time when playing electronic entertainment was a marginalized activity, when being immersed in the burgeoning “videogame culture” was an active choice requiring commitment to a group of niche enthusiasts. Sure, the general public (specifically much of the older generations) may not understand what the typical videogame player is actually like, but that’s not a problem we can solve by stamping ourselves with an easily exploitable label.

Spike executives believe “gamers” (which ends up encompassing everyone who enjoys games — not just the self-identifiers) are the kind of people who want their award shows to feature Brooklyn Decker and Felicia Day bobbing for cupcakes (complete with Day enticing cat-calls with a painfully self-aware “gamer girl” joke about having +20 agility to her mouth). We are all supposed to, by virtue of being people who are enthusiastic about videogames, be into this sort of thing. Zachary Levi, the show’s host, also has to remind us not to be racists, sexists and bigots in a monologue about “online douchebags” before a night full of, well, bigotry and sexism.

This is a show aimed at “gamers”, meant to provide the kind of jokes, cheap thrills and celebrity cameos that such a subculture would enjoy. And this is dangerous because, once outside entities begin to define a culture for marketing purposes, the nebulous culture in question will begin to be associated with, and even take on, some of the traits designed by these outsiders. The VGAs aren’t alone. Because a “gamer” identity exists, sites like Kotaku (the self-proclaimed “Gamer’s Guide”) are given free passes to exercise wanton misogyny (check out these ladies in sexy costumes!) and implicit racism (learn more about “whacky Japan!”) as part of their role as a blog “for gamers.” The people who read sites like Kotaku don’t necessarily visit the blog — or watch the VGAs — because they’re looking for this sort of material. They come to it because, like me, they want to read about videogames. What’s dangerous is how, by simply wanting to engage with game information, they’re forced to see their interests/identity as tied into an invented culture of sub-sophomoric attitudes toward sex, gender, race and violence. It’s frightening to think of all the 12 or 13 year olds, social outlook still developing, coming to these bastions of “gamer culture” and thinking that this is where they belong.

Instead of allowing this sort of thing to propagate, I propose we let the idea of “the gamer” fade back to its rightful place: the past.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.

Over time, though, the visual appeal of the X-Men couldn’t compensate for the futility of the insipid, repetitive storylines of the superhero comics and the vast amount of mental real estate that their hamster wheel narratives/character “progression” were taking up. Simply enough, like many other kids, I found myself caring a lot less about these kinds of comics as I got older and found other ways to entertain myself.

I hadn’t thought much about any of this until, very recently, I found myself turning ten years old again for several hours a day. This was because I began playing Darksiders, a videogame that, just like those comic books, was able to cover up its cotton candy fluffiness with a whole lot of flair.

The game’s visuals (the most obvious aspect of this) are a fascinatingly mixed bag of godawful overdesign and sublime technicolour. This effect is thanks to the influence of creative director/former comic book illustrator Joe Madureira, whose beefy anime-lite character design is omnipresent in the appearance of Darksiders‘ central cast. War, the protagonist, is a roided out wizard knight; his enemies and friends Judas Priest album cover demons vomited through the filter of a Saturday morning cartoon. It shouldn’t work, yet somehow the vibrant hokiness of the whole affair encourages a feeling of pure, videogame-y indulgence. It acts like soma on the unsuspecting mind.

This aesthetic — this weirdly narcotic combination of rich colours, beefy sound effects and straightforward gameplay mechanics — disguises the real trouble underlying Darksiders: the empty, nihilistic core underneath its pretty exterior.

The problem here — and its a pretty enormous problem — is that Darksiders simply doesn’t think much of its audience’s time. It assumes that the pleasure of simply playing the game is enough to cover an experience that is built solely on busywork.

This functions through every level of the game’s design. Exploring Darksiders‘ dungeons is an exercise in mental attrition: the player enters into a new level, is initially thrilled by the imaginative environmental concepts (the game is set hundreds of years after the Apocalypse and is filled with overgrown city streets, decaying, abandoned office buildings and flooded subway tunnels), begins exploring, finds a map and is then able to see exactly how much time s/he will be forced to spend unlocking door after door before gaining a new weapon/tool and, ultimately, defeat a boss. The first dungeon is exciting. Entering the second gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach akin to being asked to sift through a haystack for a needle.

Every instance of combat follows the same dull pattern. Darksiders opens up with the promise of worthwhile mechanics. The first weapon, a beefy sword engraved with big ol’ death metal skulls, comes with a handful of combo options and an accessory slot that tantalizes the player with deep skill and upgrade mechanics that are never followed through with. War finds other weapons and can buy new combos, but the game’s fights don’t require much more thought than identifying an enemy type’s weakness and simply going through the most effective motions to defeat it. A demon appears that the player has encountered before and, just like a blue dungeon door that opens with a puzzle-locked blue door key, is beaten by applying an identical pattern of moves (usually slash, slash, dodge; slash, slash, dodge; press the quick time button to initiate the canned killing animation).

Darksiders‘ other main gameplay element is the equally boring puzzle-solving. I’m not terrific with logic (insert joke about spending four years paying to study English and History), but the majority of the condundrums presented by Darksiders were pretty easy to solve+. Everything is extremely lock-and-key. Figuring out the solution to a puzzle typically takes no more than a run-through of the environment at hand and basic observation of what can be interacted with. The real work is in the tedious process of getting everything to where it should be. For instance, an engine block has to be placed on a given platform so that War can climb up to a higher ledge. The only other interactive pieces in the “level” are three elevators that ascend/descend in incremental heights. Before moving the block onto the first elevatator the game pops up a “hint” that explains how to use a brand new punch move to knock the block from one place to another. The solution is obvious: position the elevators so the block can be punched upward from elevator to elevator. The problem is that actually achieving this takes about ten minutes (longer if the block is accidentally hit off an edge and needs to be redragged and the moving pieces reset).

Unlike the breakthrough, “a-ha!” moments of discovery that constitute Portal (a pair of games that still host the only videogame “puzzles” I’ve honestly enjoyed), Darksiders approaches puzzles the same way it does exploration, combat and upgrading abilities. Everything is designed to work like a Rube Goldberg machine where input is required at every . . . single . . . step . . . of . . . the . . . long . . . and . . . complicated . . . process. Completing this process always provides a nice little piece of direct feedback (new item! new key! new weapon! new dungeon branch!) in order to encourage the player to continue wading through the boggy affair, but, at a certain point, that little Pavlovian mental twitch wasn’t enough to keep me going.

What to say, then, about why I spent around six hours playing Darksiders when I was already fed up with its design within the first two? It sure wasn’t the story (somewhat interesting, but with exposition bookended by multi-hour sequences that screech any semblance of narrative pacing to a halt). The deception of Darksiders all goes back to that candy-coated aesthetic — that colourful comic book sheen that distracts from the vapidity just below the surface of the entire thing. Yeah, it looks pretty neat when Wolverine and Cyclops and Storm are all lined up alongside each other, but do you really end up giving a shit about the minutiae of their rinse-and-repeat superhero stories after the initial pull of the aesthetic has faded away? For me, no. It ends up feeling manipulative and hollow — a series of cheap tricks where the audience is fed spectacle instead of substance — and a clear example of what videogames shouldn’t be.

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+ Granted, I did not finish the game. The puzzles may get better, but nothing I played told me they were going to.

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Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist and C&G Magazine. He maintains literature and music blog, Sasquatch Radio, and, more importantly, founded, writes and is editor-in-extremis for game site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.