Games That Give Faith

Parker Scott Mortensen:

Summer is always an inevitably listless time for me. The consequence of three months of unrestricted free time is that there are always a few weeks where I feel directionless in nearly every area of life, and that includes gaming. My desire to sit glued to the TV wanes during these months before the holiday release schedule - not only does it seem a shame to lock myself inside during this time, but nothing I play seems to hit the spot. It’s a very “meh” period.

But it always happens, and when it does, I find myself broadening my gaming horizons, becoming a little more open to experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have time for, and that has given me some really great games I think are worth sharing. If you’ve ever found yourself in a bit of gaming rut, I’ve got a handful of reinvigorating examples to share.

Mirror’s Edge

Mirror’s Edge holds a special place in my heart. It came into my life when I was utterly bored and unimpressed by video games. I had bought a 360 in an effort to fertilize my interest in gaming, and Mirror’s Edge was just what I just happened to pluck off the bargain bin. It may very well have been one of the best quickfire decisions of my life. Mirror’s Edge is a game of simplicity, serenity, and most of all, beauty.

You probably know, but it’s a parkour/free-running game for PS3/360 in a first-person viewpoint that mainly takes place on the rooftops of an urban-paradise. I’ll assume you know the rest.

Every time I play Mirror’s Edge I’m impressed. Not necessarily by the tightness of the mechanics or how much fun I have when I play (it’s often very frustrating), but by the way I feel when I play the game. For me, Mirror’s Edge is the epitome of inspiration.

The caveat is that I’m one to be inspired by aesthetics, how nicely things look and feel, and that may not be the case for everyone. But it makes Mirror’s Edge very striking for someone like me. It’s is a game highly focused on environment and your interaction with it. You navigate a minimalist world muted in white, accentuated with drips of only the most vibrant colors that come to define particular areas: a soft swatch of green fills a massive cargo boat, hard yellows tense an ascent through a treacherous atrium, and a deep blue coats a skyscraper in the ultimate moments of the game. It’s a world that uses extreme simplicity to focus your attention.

In high school I was reading some venerated classics. The Great Gatsby, Our Town, The Grapes of Wrath, Kafka’s work, etc. And amongst those, I was playing Mirror’s Edge. This had a strange effect on me. All these works swirled in my mind and became a well of inspiration for me as I started to write my own fiction. I drew heavily from the feelings and images Mirror’s Edge swelled in me.

It was like a virus. The serene minimalist vistas infected my sense of beauty and mixed with my previous notions of what was aesthetically pleasing. I could hardly focus on tasks because I missed the simplicity of that world. It was the one time in my life when I genuinely yearned to relinquish myself to an imagined universe that seemed so much more profound, so much more a pleasure to inhabit.

That’s as much as I can comfortably describe Mirror’s Edge; there is an ineffable quality to it. Something about its design is special in a way I can’t clearly express. Something that makes me want to hang on to a copy long past its release, long into the future.

Everyday Shooter

I generally loathe twin-stick shooters. Geometry Wars and the like just make me sick - I can’t deal with the amount of challenge those games ruthlessly pile on, and I don’t like feeling like the game is trying as hard as it can to make me fail, as though it were making fun of me. I don’t play games to be pummeled with challenge just for challenge’s sake.

The exception to this distaste is Everyday Shooter, the Playstation Network exclusive. Though it plays like most others, it’s in the presentation where Everyday Shooter makes me think there’s something more to gaming than, well, your everyday shooter.

While it is definitely a video game, Everyday Shooter occasionally errs towards being a creative tool. One of the core concepts in Everyday Shooter is dynamic response: enemies are abstract geometric shapes that weave and swerve, not necessarily to destroy you (though they will), but also in rhythm to the beat and tone of the soundtrack, which is entirely guitar-based. When enemies are destroyed, guitar riffs and twangs plunk to signal victory; when combos are initiated, the riffs compound and complement each other as the combo increases. In a sense, enemies in Everyday Shooter function more as notes than hard obstacles.

It’s a fairly simple system to interact with, but it’s built with some meaning behind it, adding some genuine sense of discovery to the game. It’s not a game I zone out to, It’s a game I sit and think about while I play it. I love that.

Everyday Shooter differs from other abstract music games because it is less predicated on expression and more about the exploration of mechanics. Every level is different in its presentation of graphics, sound, and chaining system; for instance, level 4 has enemies that are more erratic, and they hide behind clouds of murk until you’re close. I kept dying on this level until I learned to be more patient in my movement and carefully hit smaller enemies, triggering smaller, quicker notes before advancing to the bigger baddies, which trigger the large, payoff riffs. This took a long time.

What does it mean in the context of creating music that I have to rub up against the enemies before I can even see them? What does it mean when the music is borderline eluding me?

Everyday Shooter is a game that reorients your motivation to play as you’re engaged in it. It gives you a taste of what it’s like to contribute to something beautiful, and then it makes you fight for that right to contribute. There’s a struggle for creation here, a gem of euphony buried in the game’s mechanics.

When you finally unearth it, it’s nothing short of precious.

Small Worlds

Since Mario 64, the notion of an open-world game has lost its novelty. In their inception, open-world games promised exploration, implying ostensibly limitless discovery. It was less a descriptor of how much freedom the game afforded you and more a promise of a world worth investigating every inch, not necessarily that you could blow up everything.

Nowadays, “open-world game” carries that connotation of wanton destruction. Games like Just Cause and Red Faction unleash players into high-octane explosive playgrounds where environment and exploration are second to unrestricted fun, which has admittedly worked well for them. But such an approach abandons one of the core pleasures of being loosed into an imagined space.

Small Worlds exemplifies that core pleasure of open-world games. It’s a flash-based indie game about a series of 2D pixelated areas with no goal other than to explore. You play as a small anthropomorphic bunch of pixels that initially finds himself (or herself) encased in a glass bubble. The only visible way out is a tunnel through the floor. You can see nothing else. Your character is mostly surrounded by darkness. Your only real option is to escape out the bottom. As you leave your hatch, you uncover more from the darkness as it gives away to a network of tunnels. The more you uncover, the more the camera pans away from yourself, showing the extent of the environment you’ve discovered. And there’s a lot to discover.

This game gives faith because it’s a small indie game that executes the ideas behind open-worlds as well as, if not better than, any proper big-budget title. This should be a learning experience: whether you’re scaling buildings, driving stolen cars, or just running around, one of the biggest joys should be existing in an open game world. There should be a persistent sense of discovery.

There are games that do touch on this sentiment today. Red Dead Redemption crafted a western landscape that wasn’t necessarily always interesting to look at but felt so legitimate that it was a pleasure to inhabit when the game required you traverse it, and it was always good to allow appreciation for a sunset or a slow, winding basin trail. Likewise, Fallout 3’s environment was depressing, but the atmosphere was distinct, complete with its own self-deprecating tone and mid 20th century motif. Even Just Cause 2, with its emphasis on explosions and naive destruction, brandished an island with hidden pockets of peace where the ability to destroy suddenly halted in favor of a few fleeting moments of serenity.

Sometimes, it takes a bare-bones approach to distill what makes something valuable. Small Worlds takes this approach and encapsulates our basic ideas of exploration and presents them equal to any element, quietly pleading game developers to take note.

Calin:

Summer is traditionally one of the few times of the year that I can truly indulge in great games, so it’s vexing to have all the time in the world to game but none of the desire to actually do so. This is my current predicament: I have plenty of time to play games, but I spend the bulk of my gaming time reading a book or screwing around with a few rounds of Puzzle Quest 2. Ennui, malaise, existential anxiety, call it what you will, but it creeps up on me every now and then, and it’s hit me hard recently. Now, before I hear cries of “sellout,” I’d like to clarify that I haven’t lost interest in gaming. I still follow the latest news with an almost religious fervor, and I’m still happy to discuss games with all of you fine folks, but I’m not interested in investing any amount of time towards actually playing them.

And it’s not like I don’t have a stack of great games to play, either. I have about a dozen of wonderful games unfinished on the PS2, and the consistently fabulous Steam sales have given me games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and The Witcher to play for far less than they’re worth. I also planned to finally finish a complete run of both Baldur’s Gate games and Deus Ex this summer, but I didn’t play either of them for longer than an hour each. The last game that truly hooked me was Alpha Protocol, and I completed the entire game in the space of about 24 hours. I only stopped playing to sleep and go to work. This is normally how large portions of my summer work out, but it’s only happened that once, and summer is now over.

However, the good news is that something always comes along to snap me out of these lulls. Sometimes I discover a long forgotten gem, and sometimes I pick up something brand new that really does it for me. Regardless of the circumstances, something always comes along and renews my interest. More importantly, some of these games renew my faith. Like a lot of us, I spend a lot of time lamenting “games these days” and reflecting on the glory days, but there’s still a lot of great stuff coming out, and a lot of these games remind me of that. Not all of these games are new, of course, but here are the games that I can look to renew my faith in our hobby, and they may do the same if you find yourself in a similar position.

Planescape: Torment

A synopsis of Planescape: Torment would be woefully insufficient to capture the intricacy of the mechanics and the narrative at work in this game. Suffice to say, this is a game to sit back and play when you want to think about whatever it is you’re playing. It’s not always the most fun game to play, particularly now that it’s almost 11 years old, but it’s a game that is infinitely rewarding if you’re willing to devote some time to it. This is one of only two games that has a single phrase that gives me chills every time I read it. If you’ve played the game, you know which one I’m talking about.

This game is here because it pulled me out of a gaming slump I was having a few summers ago. I was burned out on everything, and I was flipping through a binder with my discs for this game. I put it back in my computer, and after screwing around with it a bit, I finally got it to run. I was not disappointed, and I think I appreciated it a lot more now that I’m a bit older. This is an easy game to get lost in, and I needed something to get lost in to pull me out of the slump I’d been having.

Planescape is an intensely personal game for me, and I feel as if most people identify with various aspects of the game, because it asks a lot of hard questions and refuses to provide any easy answers. While you’re ostensibly trying to figure out who the protagonist is after waking up in a mortuary with no memory of the past, you figure out a lot of things about yourself on the way. At least, I did, and that’s why I’m comfortable putting Planescape on this list.

Silent Hill 2

This is another big game for me for a lot of reasons. While it resonates on the same emotional level as Planescape does, this game also helped me out with the transition from living with my parents to living at home. I actually ended up playing this game a year or two after it came out based on a cryptic recommendation from a friend, and I had just gotten over a bad breakup and an even worse transition from living with my parents to living at college. It turns out that I needed something that would mercilessly fuck with my emotions to get over the trauma of both of these things.

In case it was somehow unclear from my previous example, I am way more excited by a good story and presentation than I am by good play mechanics. Silent Hill 2 is no exception, and there are many moments at which I felt the game was actively working against me. I kind of like that though…

Silent Hill 2 tells the story of James Sunderland, a middle aged man who has recently lost his wife, and despite occasional combat, you always feel as if you’re controlling a middle aged guy who has no clue what he’s doing with a weapon. It’s a refreshing change of pace from most other games in which players take on the role of someone whose skills would make Rambo blush. James does not know what he’s doing, and the clunky controls make sure that players are unable to artificially inflate his skill in combat. This is a good thing, however,

In order for Silent Hill 2 to have its impact, it’s imperative that players feel helpless. As much as it sucks, we all go through periods of time in which we feel helpless, alone, and vulnerable. Silent Hill 2 deals with these feelings exceptionally well, and while fully appreciating the game requires admitting and exposing our own insecurities and vulnerabilities, the game never mishandles our emotions.

Silent Hill 2 is the game to play following a traumatic event in one’s life. It deals with issues of sexuality, psychosis, and mortality in a surprisingly mature fashion, and despite the grim atmosphere that permeates the town of Silent Hill, the game leaves us with one very clear message: it is very important to confront the demons that lurk inside our subconscious lest they get away from us.