Unravel Was Made For Me

Released on my birthday, Unravel is some kind of miraculous cosmic gift. Rarely is there a work of art so tailor-made for me, so informed by my own passions and imagination, so uncanny in the way that it keenly reflects the inner workings of my heart.

On paper, Unravel is a physics-based puzzle-platformer that stars Yarny, a tiny sentient creature made out of a single strand of red yarn, but to me it’s an incarnation of my inner childhood. As a child, one of my favorite games to play was “little character explores big world”* (*unofficial name I just came up with). Using some kind of avatar, usually a small plastic toy of some sort (the character was never really important; it could have been anything from a tiny plastic triceratops to Hamm, the piggy bank from Toy Story), I would use my imagination to transform the ordinary world around me into something extraordinary; or perhaps even more accurately, into “levels” informed by my video game-fueled brain. The Christmas tree would turn into a labyrinthine forest, the snow bank into a great mountain, the gravel walkway of my grandfather’s house into...something. It’s one of the prime reasons I loved Playmobil as a kid and making construction sites with it in my living room and backyard. It’s why I love Toy Story, The Borrowers, Pikmin, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. For as long as I can remember, I have been completely infatuated with the idea of little people inhabiting our big world, and with transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Unravel is all that. Like, that’s what this game is. It’s the epitome of that theme and it’s my childhood imagination turned into a game. It’s me. But there’s more. This is a game made by people who not only understand the beauty of nature, but the beauty of detail. Nature is not just beautiful in the obvious ways, the sunsets and the distant mountain ranges, but in so many other more subtle ways: the puddle nestled in a dirt road, the hidden grottoes full of spiders and critters beneath mossy tree stumps, the way grass grows around a forgotten boot…Unravel puts a magnifying glass on our world to find the wonders that we take for granted lying right under our noses, all around us.

 
It’s not just nature that Unravel and I find beautiful though, but rust and metal as well; even the “ugly” parts of the world are beautiful. I was surprised by the amount of industrial locales in the game, something that I feel the Pikmin series is lacking in. One level has Yarny traversing an old railroad bridge on a cliffside, its fence clamped with locks inscribed with the initials of lovers. Another sees them visiting a snow-covered junkyard filled with overturned rusted hunks of automobiles. This latter area is probably one of the most beautiful environments I’ve ever seen in a game. Wait, no, that’s not accurate…this whole game is one of the most beautiful environments I’ve ever seen in a game. The photorealistic visuals are so lifelike at times that I often had to sit back and marvel at the fact that I was interacting with this world. Yarny themselves only heightens this believability, as watching the lovingly crafted little character’s detailed animations and the way they interact with the world around them makes Unravel often feel less like a video game and more like a window into Yarny’s world. Every single location is also crammed with detail: a hedgehog bumbling through the tall grass in the background, a snake slithering through Yarny’s path, some deer grazing in the distance; the tiniest weed and mushroom is brought to life in loving detail. Then there are the grander moments, like a moose suddenly stomping through a marsh, its comparative immenseness giving the whole proceeding a delightful and magnificent sense of place and scale. Complementing all this is a beautiful dynamic soundtrack that smoothly transitions throughout a level, from slower pieces in more relaxing scenarios to higher tempo ones in tense, frantic moments.

Thematically, atmospherically, and tonally Unravel hits all the right notes, but its level design also speaks to me as well. Unravel is a side-scrolling platformer, one of my favorite genres. Something that many of my favorite platformers share in common is great context, a world that feels like a living, breathing place, that has reasons for its obstacles and goes to painstaking detail to tell a story of sorts through its level design. Unravel’s level design is borderline poetic in this regard. These aren’t levels; they’re real environments that Yarny has to travel through. The “puzzles” in the game are all merely a means to an end and they are all made of components that occur naturally in the world. They merely involve using yarn to manipulate the environment in some way so Yarny can move forward. The way Unravel turns apples bobbing in a puddle, waves rolling beneath a wooden pier, and snow-covered tree branches into level design is utter genius. Nothing feels out of place here. The game’s singular yarn mechanic is novel, creative, and put to excellent use throughout the journey, and puzzles often have a logic to them that requires real-world thinking instead of abstract “video gamey” thinking.

My other favorite video game genre is adventure, and first and foremost that is exactly what Unravel is. It starts out as a peaceful stroll through nature, but Yarny soon finds themselves leaping through tree branches, stumbling down into caves, being chased by guinea pigs, lassoing fish in a miniature boat, and running through a frost-covered field while crows try to carry them off. The game displays not only the beautiful, joyful side of life, but the dark and gruesome side as well when peaceful meadows transition into rainy toxic wastes. The amount of horrific ways Yarny can lose their life really surprised me, from falling into a trash compactor to being mauled by cockroaches. This is another reason why I love the numerous industrial areas in the game, as the construction sites and machines that Yarny is forced to tumble through provide an interesting contrast to the more pristine natural locales. I love industrial themes almost as much as natural ones, and Unravel delivers on both fronts. The ever-present danger and tradeoff between calm moments and harrowing ones makes Unravel a well-rounded journey, an odyssey of sorts, and one that could take place in your backyard.

Does Unravel have flaws? Yes. For one thing, while I love the minimalist approach to narrative and think it was absolutely the right way to go for this game, I do think some narrative context could have been better weaved into the experience. Each level plays out like a separate vignette of sorts and while there might be an overarching narrative I’m just not really seeing here, the narrative seems a bit disconnected and scattered. I like the idea of Yarny encountering the memories of humans throughout the places they travel in and piecing those memories together, but I question whether a more focused, personal story would have worked better than the game seemingly being a story of humanity as a whole. The chapters involving environmental decay by human hands particularly stuck out, not because a man vs. nature theme doesn’t seem appropriate here, but because it just came out of nowhere and doesn’t fit in with the more family and relationship-driven stories that Yarny encounters in the other levels. What I appreciate about Unravel though is that, similar to other minimalist masterpieces like Shadow of the Colossus and Journey, it never falls into pretentious, heavy-handed territory. The focus here is on the experience and the narrative is really whatever you make of it; but even open-ended narrative can have some kind of focus and I think Unravel’s lack of one does hurt the game’s emotional punch and keeps it from striking the same kind of sublime balance that those aforementioned works achieve. In other words, the level designs in Unravel have great context, but the context of Yarny’s journey itself is unclear.

Perhaps that’s ok though, because Unravel captures the spirit of a little character running through our big world so well, and brings its world to life in such stunning detail, that the experience is captivating nonetheless. Unravel is not only a brilliant concept for a game, but a game that was clearly made with love and passion.  Passion for nature. Passion for art. Passion for video games. Passion for every fiber that makes up this experience. At the end of the day, I can’t help but love Unravel. It feels very personal to me. It is just too entwined in what inspires me creatively and imaginarily. It’s simply a lovely, lovely game, and I thank Martin Sahlin and his team from the bottom of my heart for giving me this wonderful birthday gift.

That Dragon, Cancer (PC) Review

That Dragon, Cancer, which I backed on Kickstarter at the end of 2014, is a difficult game to write about. To be more specific, it’s a difficult game to critique. Part autobiographical documentary, part abstract adventure game, but mostly something entirely new, That Dragon, Cancer is the true story of young Joel Green and his four-year fight against cancer (diagnosed at age one), created over the span of several years. As a love letter from Amy and Ryan Green to their son, who passed away in March of 2014 at age five, and a meditation on that terrible dragon known as cancer that corrodes so many lives, it is powerful, beautiful, and devastating. As a piece of interactive art, it’s new and interesting, but flawed. And finally as a piece of programming, it could use some more refining. This is a work that is full of inspiration and made with endless passion. That Dragon, Cancer is a mess of emotions and it’s not an easy thing to digest and appraise. I have issues with it on a technical level in some areas. I have some issues with the way it delivers its “narrative”. But who am I to tell Amy and Ryan Green how they should deliver their tribute to their son? Obviously, That Dragon, Cancer is extremely personal, but it’s also extremely real. So what can I say? I guess I’ll begin by trying to tell you how That Dragon, Cancer made me feel.

It made me feel sad. It kind of wrecked me in some places. It was also an anxious game for me. I think new experiences like TDC are so important for video games as a medium, but I get very anxious when it comes time to play a game like this. I have anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, and games where I’m tasked with investing myself in an emotional story, judging an interesting new work of art, and that also involve a lot of looking around and examining details stress me out. All this coupled with what is already a very emotionally trying experience made TDC very difficult to handle for me.

The early moments of That Dragon, Cancer did not do much for me honestly. The game opens in a pleasant and interesting way, from the viewpoint of a duck on a pond eating bread that Joel is throwing on the water. The controls are simple and accessible, mostly relying solely on moving the mouse from side to side and left-clicking when prompted, and this is a game that definitely benefits from being accessible. Shortly after, the camera moves behind Joel and the player is prompted to hand him some bread to throw, but in the process a voice over from Joel’s family plays as well as sound effects, all recorded from an actual day at the park. I’ll say right now that the sound design in That Dragon, Cancer, from the music to the way the voice overs are mixed to other ambient noises, is very strong throughout, and is honestly where most of the emotion comes from, but more on that later. Anyway, since I didn’t want to miss anything, I waited to hand Joel the bread and simply listened to the dialogue…but as soon as the dialogue ended, the screen faded to black and the game moved on to the next scene, without me ever giving any bread to Joel.

This was jarring and distracting to me. There are several times in the game, especially early on, where I felt as though I had missed something, or to be more specific like I had missed out on parts of the story. The game is split into several “scenes” or chapters and sometimes I would inadvertently move on to the next scene or the current scene would suddenly end on me and I’d feel left in the dark. There are few if no comparison points for That Dragon, Cancer in video games, but one game that does come to mind is Gone Home, another narrative-driven adventure game that involves slowly moving through an environment. But Gone Home involved exploring a family’s home in one continuous motion, and the home was designed in such a way—locking off certain areas, subtly guiding the player towards certain things, etc.—that even though it was largely nonlinear I still felt like the story was mostly delivered in a proper way and like I didn’t miss any of it.

By comparison, That Dragon, Cancer doesn’t feel like it has that elegant kind of level design and it also often feels disjointed. It gives small snippets to me of the Greens’ and Joel’s life before snatching them away, sometimes abruptly when I know I’d missed content, and this made it hard to get invested in the emotion or the story sometimes, both because of me feeling like I’d “missed something” and also because the story’s delivery wasn’t exactly clear, and often feels fragmented.

Most of these gripes come from the earlier scenes in the game, however, and there was a point when a shift came and I began to become invested. The first scene that really got to me came maybe a little under halfway through the game. We are taken to a recovery room where Joel’s mom holds him in her arms, and we hear her talking to him about the awful ritual of waiting for him to wake up and about how someday in the future his victory against cancer will just be a distant memory and largely something his parents will cheer, how he’ll tire of hearing about it and have better things to think about and be proud of. Shortly after, we are left to explore the recovery rooms in the hospital. Several colorful greeting cards are littered around Joel’s recovery room. Upon picking one up and reading it, I realized that it was a message from one of the game’s Kickstarter backers commemorating a loved one who had battled cancer. Reading others, I realized they were all memorials of some kind. Thinking there would just be a few to peruse before the story moved on, I read all of the cards in the room and then exited. I stopped in my tracks. A sea of colored rectangles. The cards are everywhere. Hanging from the ceiling. Sitting on chairs, on tables, on the fridge. Dozens and dozens. My first thought was one of anxiety, of knowing because of my OCD and my fear of “missing something” that I’d have to pick up and read each and every one of those cards, and that I was pretty sure this game was going to take a lot longer for me than the advertised two hours. But almost immediately after this thought, I came to the tragic realization that every single one of these cards represented real human lives somehow affected by cancer. The first tears came after looking at just one or two more cards. This entire chapter of the game is nothing but reading about countless people affected by cancer.

This is where I remembered that I wasn’t playing through a fictional story like in Gone Home, that I wasn’t trying to invest myself in fictional characters, that every way I usually tune my brain to think about video games and stories did not apply here. This was all real. These were real people who lost their mothers, fathers, children, and best friends to cancer. Amy and Ryan Green actually went through this. Joel actually went through this. Joel died of cancer. The Greens lost their son.

One particular scene that comes later nearly destroyed me. It involves Ryan sitting by Joel’s hospital cribside one evening as the child begins to ceaselessly begin crying. As Ryan, I walked around the room, trying everything I could to try to stop the crying. The sound of it, to understate it, was heartbreaking. And after remembering that it was real, it became even more devastating. Finally, I (Ryan) managed to caress Joel and calm him down, but not a second later did he begin crying even more ferociously. I (Ryan) tried giving him something to drink and Joel immediately vomited it up. “He won’t stop crying,” I hear Ryan say. “I don’t blame him. He feels miserable.” Then: “I hate that we’re here. I hate that he’s sick. I just want him to feel better” as Joel’s howls tear a hole right through me. It was almost too much. My whole face tightened and quivered in tears. The scene mercifully ended shortly after, but that scene didn’t end there for Ryan. That was just one moment.

That Dragon, Cancer uses a lot of visual metaphors and in addition to the scenes that are grounded in reality, there are also several very abstract ones. Many of these “abstract scenes” left me somewhat bewildered rather than invested though and often took me out of the story. One scene involves encountering Joel undergoing some kind of procedure from an ominous-looking machine, before we are transported to space where Joel begins riding constellation animals, and the whole meaning of it left me dumbfounded. Sometimes these more abstract scenes would be juxtaposed with more grounded scenes of real raw emotion, and the switching back and forth caught me a bit off guard, and again left the experience feeling disjointed for me.

One metaphor that works exceptionally well, however, comes in the form of a more light-hearted and “fun” scene that involves the game surprisingly shifting into a side-scrolling platformer game starring “Joel the Baby Knight”, controlled with the arrow keys and spacebar. Basically, Amy and Ryan’s other three sons can’t sleep one night and so the parents begin to tell them a story, and as their narration unfolds, the adventure is created around the player as Joel. So they say something like “and then Joel went into a forest” and trees fall out of the sky and are laid out before the player. I reached an impassable gap just as the Greens were outlining Joel’s powers, including, conveniently, a super jumping ability that is suddenly unlocked just when I needed it. Quite frankly, it’s brilliant. At the end of the journey, Joel, of course, confronts a massive dragon boss that is a daunting challenge. This whole scene is so simple and effective, and it’s actually sort of ironic to me that this particular section succeeds so well given that it is the one that mimics a stereotypical classic video game (even being initially accessed in-game from an arcade machine).

I guess that latter point stands out to me because I’m not sure what to think of the way That Dragon, Cancer uses interactivity to tell its story. On the one hand, we have powerful scenes like the crying one that are partly so effective because we walk in Ryan’s shoes, the card scene where the player can walk around and read real memorials (and also a later scene where fully voice-acted letters from Kickstarter backers are read that is even more emotionally harrowing), and of course clever parts like the sidescrolling one. But then there are the numerous occasions where I felt that a simple mouse click here and there may have only served to annoy me and get in the way of my investment in the narrative. Sometimes I found the interactions cumbersome and unclear (I fumbled a bit trying to figure out how to push Joel on a swing, for example). I feel both simultaneously that TDC could have used more interactivity and that perhaps it could have benefited from less. The thing is, TDC is so barely interactive oftentimes that it feels like perhaps it should have had a lot more interaction or at least used it to tell the story more or perhaps it should have just taken it out altogether and just have been a game that involved moving around spaces and listening. In fact, a lot of times I found myself just sitting and listening, and sometimes didn’t even have my hand on the mouse.

No, this is not a critique on the storytelling capabilities of the interactive medium as a whole (nor is it a condemnation of unconventional “not-games”) and I still think there is enormous potential in this department. This is more an indictment of the way TDC does things than of the medium as a whole (there are many other interactive experiences already where the interactivity wholly benefits the narrative or reinvents the way a story is told and there is so much future potential in this area). I also don’t think That Dragon, Cancer would have necessarily been better suited to film, citing the previous handful of scenes I mentioned as strong counterarguments to that notion. Also, having me saturate myself in the Greens’ and Joel’s experience, linger there and inevitably feel some of their pain, is what makes this experience what it is. At the same time, like I mentioned way earlier, most of the emotion does admittedly come from the voiced sound clips rather than what’s actually happening on screen or what the player is doing. Perhaps the game’s simplistic, polygonal visual style also may hurt it somewhat as well, as it was hard for me to get invested in a blank-faced Joel, and sometimes these empty-faced characters came across as eerie. While That Dragon, Cancer is unquestionably an interesting game and while it is something I believe to be positive for video games as a medium, I just question how well it actually uses the interactive medium to deliver its experience. Perhaps this is just me trying to wrap my brain around something entirely novel though, because although comparisons can be made, there really is nothing else quite like TDC in video games or any other medium (that I’m aware of, at least).

Basically That Dragon, Cancer is a back and forth experience for me. Some scenes are powerful and raw and punching, while others fell a bit flat for me. The penultimate scene of the game was another that left me a bit lost. I found it clever at the start and it is also one of a few scenes where the game’s simplistic art does shine, but I eventually ended up being confused as to how to advance the scene, which took me out of the experience, and also what the whole thing was trying to represent exactly. The very final scene that followed, however, struck an appropriate chord, and the credits brought more tears streaming down my face.

It feels tacky to nitpick about technical shortcomings in an experience like this, and I probably wouldn’t do so if not for the fact that one instance had a large impact on my experience. It’s hard to explain this, but certain scenes just feel odd…almost like they are missing something or incomplete somehow, and in sections that do require a bit more movement than usual, the control is very stiff and awkward. This all lends the game a clunky feel at times, but most notable of all and the reason I even bring any of this up is the very unfortunate glitch I encountered where the game locked up on me. For those that have played the game (and a warning to those that haven’t), shortly after the “Drowning” chapter started, I backtracked a bit (while in control of the bird) because it seemed like I may have passed by a certain section of the level. Apparently the game didn’t count on the player backtracking at this part and it seemed to “softlock” at this point; I could look around and the music was still playing, but the prompts that normally appear that let the player move around would not appear anymore. I tried everything, but I was completely stuck. This obviously shattered my immersion and at a point late in the game when I was extremely invested. I was crestfallen at first at the thought of starting the whole game over (there’s no saving and it’s obviously meant to all be played in one sitting), but upon going into the pause menu, I remembered that I could select chapters individually. Luckily, I had just started a chapter so I didn’t lose any progress, but it still momentarily took me out of the experience in a large way, which is a huge shame in an experience like this.

Despite my mixed feelings on the many different facets of That Dragon, Cancer’s design and my criticism of its technical shortcomings, it absolutely left an impact. When I simply reflect on the experience overall, the way it made me feel, what it made me think, how it impacted my life, it left a scar. It had an impact. This is an experience that had me in streaming tears not once, but multiple times throughout it. I get watery-eyed a lot during games, movies, songs, whatever, but I can’t remember the last time any piece of media had tears spilling down my face like this. It made me feel depressed after finishing it, but it also makes me reflect on how much human beings can love one another. It makes me reflect on how devastating cancer is and how it has impacted my own life and the lives of my loved ones. It makes me appreciate my life more. I have several physical health issues that, while not serious, negatively impact the quality of my life in several ways, but That Dragon, Cancer threw in my face just how fortunate I actually am. It made me appreciate my life and my physical health and made me vow (or at least make a serious, focused effort) to stop complaining to myself so much about my own comparatively very minor physical health problems. It makes me appreciate my loved ones more and their physical health. It’s a disjointed experience, but an affecting one, and one full of love, and despair, and passion, and humanity. That Dragon, Cancer is full of humanity and it made me feel connected to humanity, to other people, in a way that no other piece of media perhaps ever has.

Gone Home (Spoilers)

Gone Home is a strangely personal experience. Maybe it’s the nostalgic sense of place: an American family’s home in the mid-90s, which was the golden age of my childhood. A palace full of VHS tapes, music tapes, Nintendo tapes, and gaudy colorful school folders and highlighters. There are references to Harrison Ford, Street Fighter, and those little black label message thingies. Or maybe it’s the way the main character, Sam (not to be confused with the player character, Katie) reminds me of myself. No, I’m not a teenage girl, but I was once a shy kid in high school, who frequently imagined my own characters and stories and who still has old doodles and school assignments scattered around. I also had a high school teacher who encouraged my creative writing and I ended up going to college for it. Maybe it’s other small details: the reference to one of my favorite films, Pulp Fiction, or spotting a host of books I studied in school and have fond memories of in Sam’s bedroom (Frankenstein, Treasure Island, Jane Austen’s Emma…), or that Janice Greenbriar has the same birthdate as my own mother…or perhaps Gone Home would have just felt personal anyway, even without all this, because it’s just an intimate experience by nature. When I first walked into the empty foyer of the Greenbriar home, it was just another location in a video game, but by the time I approached Sam’s journal in the attic, after opening drawers, reading letters, listening to music, picking up crumpled manuscripts, finding secret notes under the bed, looking at newspaper clippings, looking at photos, and otherwise immersing myself in a lived-in, inhabited space, I felt like I knew the Greenbriars intimately and they felt like a family as real as my own. Like Sam could have been someone I went to high school with and I just never knew about everything she was going through.

It’s this sense of discovering a family, of discovering people, via the traces of themselves and their experiences that adorn their home that makes Gone Home special. Not just learning about Sam’s experiences and her relationship with Lonnie, which is the crux of the narrative, but learning about the marital problems of her parents, the affair her mother almost had, and her father’s struggles as an author of a series of bizarre JFK time travel novels. These people feel real, and I feel like I know them personally even though I never actually met any of them face to face in the game. Especially Sam, whose characterization felt so tangible (and the music that accompanies her diary is so perfectly matched) that I couldn’t help but tear up every time she sighed or expressed her frustrations and dreams.

Ironically, the only member of the Greenbriar family I learned next to nothing about is Katie, the one who I literally stepped into the shoes of. I learn she traveled around Europe and she occasionally has some reaction text to certain objects in the house (“Gosh, Sam” she says when discovering her sister’s issue of “Gentleman” magazine, the magazine for men, and “Oh, barf” when finding a condom in her parent’s bedroom dresser), but the only personality trait I really glean from her is that she is the “straightedge” Greenbriar child: the athlete, the scholar, the “responsible” one. In other words, pretty boring. One of the funniest moments in the game comes from discovering a Sex Ed assignment in one of Sam’s school folders in which she took a hilarious amount of creative liberty with a rather simple assignment (“See Me!” was the grade she got from her teacher in bright red letters). Then later on I discovered Katie’s own take on the same assignment, which of course was done perfectly and properly and got a bright red “check plus”. But I suppose it’s unfair to call Katie boring, because I’m sure that if I had the opportunity to rummage through her own stuff (still packed away in boxes in the guest room of the Greenbriar’s new home, which was to be her room when got back from Europe), I would find a three-dimensional person with her own struggles and experiences. Gone Home makes it clear that it’s not about Katie though, but rather her family and principally her younger sister, Sam.

Sam is one of the most richly drawn people I’ve seen in a video game (or, sorry, I guess I should say in an “interactive exploration finding and reading stuff emotion story simulation experience”). I hesitate to call her a “character” because she seems so real and authentic. Her voice actress does an excellent job but Sam’s personality also shines through in the pieces of herself she’s left lying around her house: in the scattered chapters in the ongoing tale of Captain Allegra and her First Mate, in her Street Fighter cheat codes lying on her bedroom floor (repeatedly crossed-out and revised), in her angry note to her parents chastising them for not letting her go out with Lonnie in the city, in her aforementioned unique take on schoolwork and the various scraps and doodles and letters that all in all paint a very vivid portrait of a human being. Gone Home does a wonderful job of setting up a series of mini-narratives that get told through pieces of the Greenbriar’s life around their home (would Danny ever get his Nintendo tape back??) and I enjoyed following all of these, but of course the narrative I was most invested in was that of Sam and Lonnie. This is where Gone Home is also just a sweet story of young romance, one that treats Sam’s homosexuality not like a twist or a discovery, but rather a given, natural fact of her life, while still managing to address the very real issues of what it means to be a gay teenager in high school (especially in the mid-90s). This is a story that moves, but also aims to inspire empathy for a life experience that some might regard as foreign and strange. A story that might make some people realize that a gay relationship is in fact not these things, but just as relatable and human as any other romance.

That is the key word: Gone Home struck me in how human it felt. It shines a lens on one family’s, and one girl’s, personal struggles, it promotes empathy for our neighbors, for our friends, for complete strangers, for those we might regard as pariahs; it reminds us that we are all human and that we all go through shit. Speaking more personally, it allowed me, a straight man, to empathize with a gay young woman and the pain of dealing with disrespectful parents and peers; the fact that I have so much in common with Sam made it all the more easy to relate to her. I can relate to being shy around people I like (seeing that “gold star” around someone but not knowing how to talk to them), and so much of what Sam experiences and says and writes and does reminds me of myself and my own experiences, I can’t help but easily put myself in her shoes. Perhaps it is because of all this that I really did not want to enter the attic at the end of game. I felt a connection with Sam and I wanted her story to have a happy ending, but the more the game went on, the more I got the idea that the diary that I’d been hearing throughout the experience was Sam’s last words, and I was afraid of what I’d find up there. When all I found was an empty sleeping bag accompanied by a final, joyful diary entry from Sam about how Lonnie decided she couldn’t live without her and the two ran off together, I was ecstatic. A surprise happy ending, a joyful outcome when I expected a grim one, is one of my favorite discoveries in fiction, and Gone Home’s conclusion left me in happy tears.

Gone Home is the kind of experience I’ve been wanting to play for a long time. It’s simple and really nothing extraordinary, but that’s exactly what makes it special for a video game in a medium where interactive experiences so often feel the need to couple extraordinary circumstances with their pathos. In Gone Home, there are no monsters (or more specifically, no ghosts), no combat, no big dire mystery or circumstance. Why is the Greenbriar home mysteriously empty and seemingly abandoned and what happened to Sam? The big, dark, earth-shattering answer: Mrs. and Mr. Greenbriar are off at couples counseling and Sam ran off with the love of her life. I’ve played a lot of games before where much of what I do is walk around and read stuff that fleshes out a world or a narrative, but I respect Gone Home’s restraint in not shoehorning unnecessary violence or fantasy elements into its plot, and still managing to keep me interested in its characters and story through compelling writing, voice acting, and world building. This is just a patient, grounded, human experience and I appreciate it for that. There is still much room for growth when it comes to interactive narrative, and Gone Home is only one of many unique ways in which the interactive medium can deliver an interesting experience, but for now I wouldn’t mind seeing more games like Gone Home. Relaxed experiences where a character simply walks around, talks to people, look at objects, perhaps finds clues and solves a mystery…or maybe just talks to a friend, buys a hot dog, watches a sunset…stuff besides slaying monsters, going on adventures, and saving the world, stuff that doesn’t need violence or combat or even esoteric puzzle solving (as compelling, and often emotional in their own right, as those experiences can be). Of course, this kind of experience can still involve an intriguing mystery or something fantastical, but the point is that a video game can still be something compelling without shoving ten hours of gunplay in-between low-key narrative exploration sections (leers slowly in the direction of BioShock Infinite). I don’t blame someone for criticizing Gone Home’s narrative as being too small, but I think that the game is quite revolutionary for being a video game that is just about exploring a family’s home and learning about their lives. I also think it’s just wonderful that something like Gone Home and something like Shovel Knight can both exist in the same medium, or at least under the hazy umbrella term of “interactive experiences”, and I think this is a testament to the power, potential, and overall amazingness of this medium.

My Thoughts on Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: Justine

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a game in which you explore a shadowy Gothic castle full of forbidden secrets with a lantern, so naturally I like it quite a bit. But while it succeeds at creating a constantly foreboding atmosphere through an excellent mix of unsettling sound design and a great use of light and darkness, I’d be lying if I said Amnesia fully lived up to its reputation for me. Chiefly, the experience just didn’t spook me as much as I thought it would. Don’t get me wrong though, Amnesia has some great spooks and is certainly an extremely tense experience. For one thing, it does jump scares well, often staying its hand the first three times I expected to shit my pants and then turning me into a jittery, jumpy mess unable to properly function on the fourth, unexpected time. I also like the way the game’s mechanics play off of each other. For example, if the player stays in dark areas for too long, they begin to lose “sanity” which leads to vision and control problems. Staying in the light keeps one sane but also exposes them to roving monsters. In order to stay out of sight of a creeping horror, you often need to hunker down in the darkness as you slowly, unnervingly lose sanity. Neat trade-offs like this add to the overall tenseness of the experience. Speaking of creeping horrors, perhaps my favorite part of Amnesia is how it handles its monsters. You can’t fight back in Amnesia, so your only option is to run or hide. Monsters almost always appear when you least want them to and when they spot you, they shamble towards you at a deceptively quick pace. But what I really love about them isn’t actually the creatures themselves but everything that accompanies their presence. You are penalized for looking directly at them by a blurry, disorientating screen and a loss of sanity (which you’re going to want to keep in order to effectively run away and hide), which I think is just brilliant. In fact, if it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t even really know what the creatures looked like besides being vaguely humanoid monstrosities. My favorite aspect of monster encounters, however, is the brilliant, intensifying dissonance that blares into your ears as they lurch closer and closer towards you, which never failed to unravel my nerves and make me clench my teeth as I accidently hit the ‘crouch’ key instead of the ‘sprint’ one for the seventeenth time.

There’s a lot done very well in Amnesia but when going into it, I guess I expected a deeply unnerving psychological horror experience; I expected to be wandering scared and delirious and alone in the dark while being hunted by barely glimpsed horrors, never really sure what was going on. And while the game comes close to this type of experience at times, Amnesia is ultimately a lot more formulaic and “gamey” than I anticipated, especially after its introduction message sets it up as, and I paraphrase, an “immersive experience that shouldn’t be played to win”. The experience is divided up into several hub areas, or large safe zones, with several sub-areas branching off of them, and the game soon falls into a formula of getting to a new hub and going around its areas, collecting notes and items, solving puzzles, and occasionally having a monster thrown at you. There are also “interim” areas between each hub that contain some of the best moments of the game, as well as a few other curveballs that shake the formula up a bit. This all isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I actually quite enjoyed the experience’s traditional survival horror elements, but it all just felt a little too “safe” a lot of the time. And while I have a lot of love for the way the monster encounters are handled and while they are still very effective, sadly evading these eldritch abominations is often far too easy (at least the standard monsters); hiding behind a couple of boxes at a dead end was often enough to confound them and I only was caught by them once (after which the game dumped me in a random room I hadn’t been in yet, which confused me greatly…do the monsters actually kill Daniel? Or is he being revived somehow?). Once in a safe hiding place, one only needs to stay put for a few minutes until the creatures shamble off and disappear entirely.

There are other factors as well that kept Amnesia from being the scariest of scares for me. The Gothic castle setting is something I have too much affection for to be truly unsettled by (the game brought to mind both Dracula and Castlevania for me, and sometimes while skulking through a dungeon with my lantern lit, I was reminded of something out of The Legend of Zelda or some other comforting fantasy experience). The game is also very chatty; what is supposed to be a dark and lonely atmosphere is often interrupted by campy voice acting, whether in the entries of Daniel’s diary strewn about or the frequent flashback conversations between Daniel and Alexander. Besides this, Amnesia is a game composed of both brilliant scares and laughably goofy ones. Creepy statues suddenly appearing inside of bloody fountains and then being mysteriously gone the next time I look in their direction is a fantastic way of freaking me out, and dashing through a water-logged basement labyrinth being chased by loud, invisible horrors is one of the most purely terrifying moments in any game for me (along with a few other similarly tense moments in the game). But then there are the times when you turn a corner and the screen contracts accompanied by a spoooooky noise and some spoooooky dust clouds puffing about which are decent enough in the early sections of the game, but when these tame “scares” still happen occasionally even late in the game, it reminds me of a cardboard ghost popping out and saying “BOO!” in a haunted house. The sound design, for that matter, is mostly good and sometimes brilliant (mainly during monster encounters), but is also sometimes far too busy and consistent. What I mean is that while exploring some areas, the same random background combination of disembodied footsteps, fluttering paper, and soft whimpering chatters in my speakers constantly until it’s no longer unsettling but just mundane background noise. The same sound effects and musical cues are recycled throughout the game, so by the end they did little to disturb me. I suppose I’ve been spoiled by the masterful transformative sound design in the early Silent Hill games, where often you’ll hear a very specific creepy noise in one specific location and never hear it again…and never forget it again. Even though Amnesia is unpredictable on a moment to moment basis, it has a predictable nature to it in the grand scheme of things and this goes a long way in diminishing the horror for me. Ultimately, Amnesia just didn’t get under my skin the way I expected it to; it’s more of an in the moment “oh boy I’m having fun being spooked in this game” experience than a lingering kind of horror that I can’t help but ruminate on when I’m closing my eyes trying to sleep at night. In a game with a sanity meter, that is seemingly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, and subtitled “The Dark Descent”, I expected this experience to get to me more psychologically than viscerally, but the opposite is true. This is both a disappointment and a relief, if you catch my drift. Also, full disclaimer, I only played this game alone late at night with all the lights off with headphones and the sound turned up, as it should be, so I certainly made myself vulnerable to the experience’s frights.

While Amnesia isn’t the kind of horror I was expecting, and maybe isn’t even the kind of horror I feel it’s going for a lot of the time, it’s not a bad horror experience. I quite enjoy its Gothic atmosphere and its traditional survival horror/adventure game elements and while I criticized it for diminishing the fright, I also enjoy its campiness to an extent. It also undoubtedly succeeds very well at momentarily tense and terrifying moments that made me want to just give up and curl up in a ball in the corner with a blankie. And since I most often didn’t quite know what was going to be around the next corner or at the bottom of those stairs leading into a dark void, it also did a nice job of keeping me on edge most of the time even outside of those sharply intense moments. I found the narrative intriguing enough as well, if not a bit muddily delivered. Exposition is fed to the player in so many different ways (scattered notes, flashbacks, random whispers, weird memory canisters, snippets of random text thrown at the player in the game’s brief loading screens and so on) that it becomes a bit overwhelming. I also feel that the game’s writing simply does a poor job of conveying information at times; some notes are unclearly-written while others seem to contradict information presented elsewhere and even within their own text. It’s not that the text is purposefully vague, but rather it just seems awkwardly written in places, and for me at least, some pieces of the story don’t seem to add up. The game’s finale also kind of infuriated me at first as well. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling too much but basically one’s ending is decided by what they do in the last three or so minutes of the game. I sort of predicted something like this would be coming, and I knew what I wanted to do, but the ending sequence was just very unclear to me my first time encountering it and there is a very brief amount of time that decides whether all your hard work throughout the adventure will pay off or, like in my initial experience, be rewarded with the most horrible ending I could have asked for all because I stalled for a few seconds and wasn’t exactly sure what I should be doing to achieve the goal I wanted. After the credits abruptly rolled to my extreme annoyance and confusion, I was able to think clearly and figure out what I should have done. I was then able to reload my save and get the other two endings, but I was still frustrated by the first ending that I got. I can accept an “unhappy ending”, especially in a horror game, but when I have the agency to make a choice, and it’s unclear what choice I’m exactly making or rather how to make the choice that I want to make, and then something happens that I absolutely didn’t want to happen and the game frames it like it was a choice I consciously made, it’s quite frustrating. Maybe this is more on me and not entirely the game’s fault, but I feel like there could have been a little more direction in the finale at the very least, not so much that it feels like I don’t have to figure anything out, but just a bit more of a nudge so I don’t unwittingly make a huge mistake.

I realize that a lot of my issues with Amnesia are based purely on it not living up to my expectations, but that’s just the experience I had with this game. But even if I attempt to view the experience through a lens divorced from those expectations, while I feel Amnesia is a strong experience, I still don’t think it’s a remarkable one. But looking back, there is truth in the notion that I built this game up in my head for years to be some kind of horror masterpiece, and naturally, it didn’t quite live up to those lofty expectations. But it’s still a very good horror experience and a very tense one for sure. “Terrifying” as opposed to “horrifying” is the word I would use to describe Amnesia. It’s not an experience that gets inside my head too much, but it’s still a worthy, atmospheric, and terrifying experience I quite enjoyed partaking in.

But there is also the matter of Amnesia’s free DLC add-on, Amnesia: Justine. Mechanically, it’s basically the same deal as the main game, and while I haven’t managed to finish it, I find its plot (which seems to be no more than tangentially connected to The Dark Descent) to be interesting. Essentially, you play as an unknown protagonist who wakes up in a prison cell and proceeds to be subjected to what seems to be a series of psychological experiments set up by the eponymous Justine, all while being hunted by some kind of creature (or maybe just a really messed-up human being, because it coherently talks). Why haven’t I managed to finish it yet, you ask? Well that is due to what is undoubtedly Justine’s most notable feature: perma-death. There’s no saving. You have one chance. Once the “monster” catches you, that’s it. After a fade to black and some creepy squelching sounds, the game simply boots you back to your desktop. This makes Justine an even tenser experience than The Dark Descent and an almost unbearably stressful one. If you do fail, you need to get back to where you were previously, and since the game remains the same each time you play it, this can be quite tedious and also obviously drains the tension out of the familiar bits. Predictably, the perma-death approach can also lead to frustration. I’ve attempted Justine three times now and all three times have died in the same area (for those that have played it: the flooded “Dungeon” area right after the Library), which seems to harbor a sudden and steep difficulty curve (and I might even go so far as to say it just feels cheap). My most frustrating death wasn’t the first one, but the second one, where the game seemed to glitch out somehow and put me in a seemingly unwinnable situation. That’s great; why bother wasting my time slogging through a game with perma-death again and again when it might just unexpectedly screw me over, at no fault of my own? I could probably succeed if I kept trying, but I simply just don’t have the energy to keep getting to my dying point just to try again; I know exactly what to do there at this point, but actually accomplishing it is a whole other story. There are a few aspects that make replaying Justine a bit more bearable though. For one, I hear the game in its entirety is fairly brief; an hour or so seems to be the average, though in my experience it took me longer than that just to get to where I keep dying. Also, the game’s different “levels” (at least up to the point I’ve reached) each involve a puzzle that doesn’t necessarily require solving in order to proceed with the game, so going back and trying again to figure these problems out (note: I still haven’t despite my best efforts) made my replays a bit less tiresome. All the same, maybe I’ll go back to it one day, but for now I’ve given up on Justine. It’s an interesting concept, but I’m really sick of the Amnesia experience right now and I have other games to play. And yes, I’ll admit that the game is just stressful as fuck to play and I’m tired of subjecting myself to it.

BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea (PC) Thoughts

Spoiler Warning: I’ve tried to avoid major spoilers and don’t go into specific detail about any plot points, but you still might want to be wary of some vague spoilers here and there if you have not yet played this game, especially in the second paragraph.

An appropriate tagline for BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea, the DLC follow-up to BioShock Infinite, might be “Irrational Games returns to what they do best”. They tried something similar but different with the sky-high action in the sunny city of Columbia, and while I’m glad BioShock’s successor took us to a new setting, I can’t deny that there’s nothing quite like the halls of the deep-sea city of Rapture. I love the opening section of Burial at Sea: Episode One because we get the rare chance to experience a small piece of a dystopian society when it was still a utopia. Stepping out of Booker’s office and exploring a Rapture that is bright, clean, and active with citizens who haven’t lost their minds is a treat, and I love the more open nature of this starting environment as well as the environments in Burial at Sea as a whole. Walking through the populated bars and shops of Rapture, with massive windows looking out on the city’s neon-lit skyscrapers (seascrapers?) made me reflect on how cool living in a city at the bottom of the ocean would be…before it all goes to hell, of course. The transition to shooting and violence also feels much more organic and less jarring than in Infinite proper, as Booker and Elizabeth are first attacked by the mad artist, Sander Cohen, and then sent on a one-way bathysphere trip to Frank Fontaine’s massive sunken department store turned prison, an incredibly hostile environment crawling with Splicers that resembles the Rapture we know and love from the original BioShock. This was a fairly smart way to have a game that takes place in Rapture before it fell and still have a first person shooter where you freeze people and shoot them with a shotgun. Exploring the derelict clothing departments of “Sub-Rapture”, feeling on edge every time a crazed Splicer lurking somewhere out of sight would ramble into my headphones, I felt a kind of tension that Infinite lacked. Perhaps it’s the closer quarters, or the often smaller groups of enemies, or the respawning enemies that kept me on edge, but something about the combat here just clicks with me more than in Infinite; it feels easier to manage but also more impactful somehow. It’s too bad Episode One seems to enjoy withholding resources such as plasmid-powering EVE and money from the player, because the episode’s short length means plasmids and weapons will mostly go without full upgrades and I felt like I was constantly running out of EVE and ammo in the middle of a fight, which limited my options in a brawl. I would have loved to have fully upgraded the Old Man Winter plasmid, which I had a blast combining with Bucking Bronco to freeze enemies in midair before they fell to the ground and shattered into icy bits. Also unfortunately: Episode One’s narrative starts out strong, but ends with a silly twist that only serves to muddle Infinite’s already muddled narrative even more. To be fair though, this is only part one of a two-part story…

Burial at Sea: Episode Two once again opens in a unique and interesting way, in a beautiful-looking and memorable sequence that is somehow simultaneously silly and inspiring. If there’s one thing Irrational seems to nail, it’s opening its games. Immediately after the opening, the narrative becomes even more messy and convoluted though. After making a shallow effort to explain the logic behind the twist at the end of Episode One, the story then throws an even more abstruse twist into the mix that feels like a contrived attempt to explain why Elizabeth can’t use her Tear powers anymore and that just raises more questions and injects more plot holes. Despite all this, once things got rolling I felt way more connected to Elizabeth as a playable character than I ever did to Booker (although I think much of me caring a lot about Elizabeth is owed to Courtnee Draper’s great voice performance as opposed to the game’s writing). I felt close to Elizabeth after playing Infinite and Episode One and cared about where her story went. By the end of Episode Two, however, Burial at Sea seems to be much more concerned with tying into the original BioShock in neat ways than delivering a satisfactory conclusion to Elizabeth’s story, which I found to be disrespectful to her character. While I think the tie-ins to the original are, as I said, neat, I wish the original BioShock had remained something separate and the links between it and Infinite had remained tenuous; instead, Burial at Sea ends up being a straight link to the original, shoving its overt connections in the player’s face and tying everything together in a neat bow. It’s an interquel, and ultimately little more than a prologue for the original game that overall cheapens Infinite as its own distinct entity and that doesn’t do justice to the character of Elizabeth, a character that I’ve been invested in this whole saga and whose ultimate fate basically amounts to being a catalyst for the events of the first game. It could’ve been worse and the story does do a fair job of linking Elizabeth’s story with the story of Jack and the Little Sisters, as well as overall connecting Infinite with the original, but I can’t help but feel Elizabeth as a character got cheated. I’m just a bit mixed on the whole affair; I’ll admit that having all the Irrational BioShock games being one big sealed up story does feel somewhat satisfying, but this overt link certainly wasn’t needed and I question whether or not it devalues the original, rather than adds to it.

Anyway, while the narrative  and the idea of Infinite, Burial at Sea, and the original BioShock all being one seamless, connected story is a point of contention for me, I actually quite like the other aspects of Episode Two’s design, even more than Episode One. Episode Two is a much lengthier and more complete and focused experience than Episode One, and makes that previous chapter feel like simply a warm-up. This time, the player finally takes on the playable role of Elizabeth, who has basically been the main character this whole story anyway (finally playing as her just feels right), and Episode Two places a large focus on stealth, on running and hiding and sneaking up on enemies. It accomplishes this in part by giving the player new plasmids and weapons, such the ability to turn invisible and see through walls and a crossbow equipped with tranquilizer darts and knockout gas, that encourage players to go about things in a quieter, and shockingly, non-lethal way. Players still have the ability to kill foes, but the game is principally designed around stealth and right from the outset, the narrative makes this clear (the more moral way of doing things is perhaps shoved a little too much in the player’s face early on). I’m disappointed that choosing to kill or not unfortunately doesn’t seem to have much significant impact on anything in the end, but I appreciate the new options and gameplay approach and like that the less violent combat choice suits Elizabeth, who isn’t a pathological killer like Booker. Stealthily creeping through huge environments crawling with Splicers, sneaking through vents, using sneak attacks and trying to use a limited amount of tranquilizer darts puts a whole new spin on the classic BioShock design and makes Episode Two feel like a whole new experience. Trying to survive with only the crossbow and non-lethal means, which is the way I played, also makes for a much more challenging and tense experience.  All this really pays off, as the game feels incredibly fresh, despite taking place in the familiar Rapture setting. I also love the environments in Episode Two, which feel varied and include a handful of creepy lab sections that focus on building atmosphere and story rather than combat, and quite frankly, I love that shit.

Overall, Burial at Sea is a mostly welcome return to Rapture, and despite my reservations about the narrative, I overall enjoyed it quite a lot, perhaps even more than Infinite proper. Episode Two is easily the star half of the package, not only because I’m a sucker for stealth games, but because of how well the stealth elements blend with the atmosphere and tenseness of the scenario. Elizabeth is alone, stranded without her reality-bending powers and with little to defend herself in a hellish deep-sea prison filled with ranting maniacs who will kill her on sight. She’s vulnerable, but also highly intelligent and extremely capable. All of this combined with Elizabeth’s heightened sense of humanity compared to Booker invested me in her character and the experience on a more serious level than anything in the Infinite saga prior, making me carefully consider every step I took and adding a sense of weight to the proceedings that flying around as Mr. DeWitt, sawing into people’s necks and electrocuting them until their heads popped off, before eating potato chips and chocolate bars off the floor seemed to lack (though some of that latter aspect is still present, admittedly). Episode Two also rarely felt repetitive and was never boring for me and some parts will probably stick out in my mind as notable moments in any game I’ve played, such as the unique opening and one late-game sequence that is notable for how uncomfortable it made me, which was definitely the intent.

As for my final thoughts on the whole “BioShock Infinite saga” as I’ve labeled it, having completed all of it now, I’ll say that it was an engaging ride, and one worth taking, but a flawed one. I think the original BioShock still stands on its own as a fantastic experience and while Infinite and Burial at Sea weren’t needed, they’re an…interesting follow-up. I admire the ambition of the developers, but the end result is a fun, engaging, pretty-looking, but messy experience. For more thoughts on BioShock Infinite proper, check out my previous post on the subject. The BioShock series as developed by Irrational Games is sealed up now, and it’s also sealed up when it comes to my capacity for it. Sure, 2K Games will likely continue to cash in on the series, and more stories could be told in a new city, or in Columbia or Rapture, but the narrative certainly doesn’t demand it and I most likely won’t be taking the trip if that day comes. Especially if it’s another trip to Rapture. Burial at Sea pretty much opened the lid on any remaining mysteries with the city, and its story feels told.

Some Thoughts on BioShock Infinite

I’ve been tossing BioShock Infinite around in my head for the past week or so since I completed it and I just can’t seem to decide whether I think the game is annoyingly overrated, something I actually enjoyed quite a lot, or something I overall liked, but was underwhelmed by in several ways. So I thought I’d hash it out with myself here for a few paragraphs and if the game is still relevant to you, maybe you’ll find some food for thought or perhaps want to add something after reading this. I mainly want to discuss the game’s atmosphere and narrative, as those are the points which I find myself thinking about the most.

Like its predecessor (the original BioShock), Infinite excels in world-building and saturating the player with its potent atmosphere and sense of place. The floating city of Columbia is a fully-realized world full of details and its sights and sounds would often stick in my mind long after I’d stopped playing the game. To put it simply: Infinite is an engrossing experience. The opening of Infinite is reflective of the original, except instead of descending below a dingy lighthouse to a grim, murky city beneath the sea, players ascend a dingy lighthouse to a beautiful, sunlit city above the clouds. This feeling of familiar yet contrasting themes is prevalent throughout the game. While this aspect works to the game’s benefit in several ways, it’s also somewhat of a double-edged sword because I believe that much of the reason why Infinite didn’t impress me as much as it could have is because the original BioShock impressed me years ago with similar material. That said, Infinite still stands on its own much more than BioShock 2, which felt redundant and unnecessary to me.

All that said, I find the ways Infinite does differentiate itself to be interesting. For example, protagonist Booker DeWitt’s first steps in Columbia proper are not spent fending off deranged maniacs with a wrench, but simply strolling through sunlit streets and a fairground lined with gift shops, carnival games, and people relaxing and chatting jovially. I find this to be a unique strength of Infinite that sets it apart from the original: that we arrive in Columbia when the city is still living and breathing, instead of after its downfall. Indeed, many of my favorite sections in the game are the ones where you can just walk around and take in the world around you without having to shoot at anything. I think one of the smartest sequences of events in the game follows Booker as he explores the mysterious Monument Island Tower, which concludes in a thrilling escape sequence, followed by Booker waking up in a beautiful beach environment. A rosy late afternoon sun, a self-sustained “ocean” that ends in waterfalls that tumble into the sky, a Ferris wheel off in the distance, and people wearing old-timey swimming trunks (the game is set in 1912) relaxing among the sand set the scene. I was free to walk up to people and get some amusing commentary, eat stray hot dogs and cotton candy, or focus on the main task at hand of searching for Elizabeth (who Booker was sent to Columbia to find), who happens to be gaily dancing at the end of a dock nearby. Later on, as the sun further sets, Booker and Elizabeth go for a twilit stroll around a boardwalk environment complete with an ice cream shop and a bookstore, and even though there were people sitting on a bench having a contest about who could be a more racist white person, the atmosphere and visuals (the game’s luscious, stylistic art direction definitely stands out) were lovely, and I was fully immersed in the world. In these moments, I thought about how I’d like to play a game like this, where I just walk around and talk to people and further a narrative. When soon after this same area is suddenly turned into a gunfight arena, with soldiers who yelled garbled insults at me before I electrocuted them and summoned a murder of crows to pick away at their flesh before blasting their head with a shotgun into a fountain of blood, I couldn’t help but sigh a bit, even if I was having fun. Often, it felt like the combat just gets in the way in BioShock Infinite.

Of course, as pretty as Columbia looks, through its white citizens’ racist, xenophobic mumblings and their troubling devotion to “the prophet”, among other details here and there, it’s clear that this city has something ugly bubbling beneath the surface ready to pop. Earlier on in the experience, Booker’s sunny stroll through the fairground comes to an abrupt end when he jams a guy’s face into a spinning hook-blade, followed by murdering the local police force in a hail of cartoonish blood. I’ll admit, this abrupt change to ridiculously over-the-top and unnecessary violence was incredibly jarring at first and it threatened to shatter my immersion completely. And while I’m still mixed on Infinite’s portrayal and use of violence, the more the experience went on, the more I found a grim appreciation for the contrast between the ridiculous mass murdering and the colorful, almost whimsical visuals. On some level, this combination of the cartoony art direction and absurd violence works and since our protagonist is a violent man who seems to solve all his problems by bashing someone’s skull in, at least it fits his personality (and also the theme of Columbia looking pretty on the outside, but being ugly underneath). The contrast between the more calm walks around populated areas of Columbia and the wild, chaotic combat sections also lends the game an entertaining pace, even if at times it feels like the game falls into a repetitive formula of “shoot a bunch of people, loot a bunch of trash cans, rinse and repeat”. At the same time, some sections are soiled by the game’s incessant need to throw chatty soldiers at Booker, such as one of my otherwise favorite parts of the game, which is the spooky, slow-paced Comstock House environment, which didn’t need the soldiers and would have done just fine with the creepy searchlight creatures and brainwashed inmates wearing pajamas and ceramic masks.

Full Narrative Spoilers Ahead (If you read on, I’m going to assume you’ve finished the game)

Unlike its predecessor, Infinite places a great focus on a compelling central narrative that everything else seems to revolve around. In BioShock, there is a central story and it’s quite interesting, but I remember the true focus of the experience being all the smaller stories and side characters that serve to flesh out the true star of the game, the incomparable setting of the undersea city of Rapture. In Infinite, it’s the opposite: the city of Columbia and its inhabitants serve the story of the game’s central characters, and the star here feels like Elizabeth and the personalities that surround her. For me, BioShock Infinite is ultimately an experience with a lot of fascinating elements that does well enough with what it has, but fails to truly live up to the potential of any of these elements. I feel so much more could have been done with Elizabeth’s jail-keeper, the Songbird, for instance, both from a gameplay standpoint and a narrative one, and that’s where BioShock mainly falls short of its potential for me: it’s narrative.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of multiple realities and the idea that doorways could be opened between them, and Infinite does a decent enough job exploring the concept, but so much more could have been done outside of chasing a gunsmith around and making machine gun turrets appear out of nowhere. I was intrigued when the narrative first took Elizabeth and Booker into an alternate version of Columbia, but just when it really starts to have fun with the concept (introducing a reality where a different Booker DeWitt is a martyr of the Vox Populi), this idea sort of falls away. Later on, time travel of sorts is introduced into the mix as an older Elizabeth pulls Booker into a far future where Comstock succeeded in brainwashing her to be his successor, and the resulting Comstock House sequence, as I already mentioned, is one of my favorite sections in the game, but this event only served to remind me of how much more could have been done when the ability to traverse multiple realities and timelines is involved. Several of my favorite works of art have tackled time travel and multiple realities and took the concepts way further and in more interesting directions than Infinite; Chrono Cross and The Dark Tower novels to name a few.

But perhaps the reason I feel this area was underutilized has more to do with Infinite saving its most interesting concepts until the very end, and ultimately having a good story with fascinating ideas, but a messy delivery. Chrono Cross introduces the existence of two parallel realities where two versions of the same person can go down very different life paths at the very beginning of the game, and proceeds to explore the concept for the remainder. Infinite chooses to introduce us to such a concept in the last five minutes in order to produce the “gotcha!” effect and no doubt prompt the player to replay the whole thing to see how all this adds up. Perhaps there are merits to this approach, and perhaps if I do replay the game my feelings will change, but I can’t help but feel a bit cheated. I love the concept of basing a story around two versions of the same person from different realities who went down very different life paths, and who ultimately conflict with each other, but I feel that so much more could have been explored here. Furthermore, I question how much the revelation of Booker and Comstock being two different versions of the same person really adds to the story outside of “huh, well that’s interesting”. Perhaps one might argue that the multiple realities and all that jazz aren’t the focus, but just devices used to tell the heart of the story here, which is the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth. But in this regard, I feel the game also falls a bit short of its potential. I love Infinite’s themes of redemption and self-hate and the idea of Booker being a father trying to redeem himself for giving up Elizabeth puts a fascinating lens on their relationship, which given more time to sink in, may have left an incredible emotional impact. Maybe it would have been better if the revelations of Booker being Elizabeth’s father and also of Booker and Comstock being related came earlier and the narrative had some time to play with these ideas and build on them and use them to its advantage. I can think of another game (which I won’t spoil) that has a similar theme of someone with buried memories trying to redeem themselves for hurting a loved one that is much more emotionally resonate because not only is the relationship between the two parties clear from the outset, but after the big revelation the player has time to take in the weight of the truth and the ending lets it simmer, providing more emotional closure for both the game’s protagonist and the player.

Infinite ends with Booker deciding that drowning himself will wash away all his sins, but how exactly does that work again? And how exactly did Booker redeem himself? Initially, he felt guilt for committing atrocities as a Pinkerton agent and a soldier. Later, he feels crushing guilt for giving away his daughter to pay off a debt. So he atones for all this by…going to Columbia and committing even more violent atrocities and finally deciding to drown himself to cancel out Comstock’s existence (who he blames for the whole thing), but wouldn’t that also cancel out Elizabeth’s existence? And maybe I’m missing something here, but how is this one version of Booker DeWitt dying supposed to prevent other Bookers from becoming Comstocks again? Or does Booker know this won’t accomplish anything, and just wants to end his life due to his guilt and sorrow? Also, the coin flip instigated by the Luteces early in the game as well as the alternate Booker who became the martyr for the Vox Populi seem to suggest that the Luteces have recruited many other Bookers to rescue Elizabeth, but the Elizabeth that lost her finger is the daughter of only the Booker we play as, right? Are the Luteces recruiting different versions of Booker to rescue different versions of Elizabeth? And if there are other Comstocks who kidnapped other Elizabeths from other Bookers, that means there are other Luteces who created machines and if the Luteces we know are “scattered across the possibility space” then how do they reconcile with their infinite other number of selves? Or...wait! Did it ever explain why Elizabeth has reality manipulating powers? And what exactly was the Luteces’ goal again? For that matter, if they have the power to go anywhere and traverse time and space as they see fit, why do they need Booker’s help? Is doing things themselves against the “rules”? Are they just trying to help Booker? And if people get nosebleeds and remember dying in alternate realities, wouldn’t Booker have had a nosebleed in the other realities since he died in the one where he’s a martyr? How does that all work again? And what about that ghost? And what about…

Ok, I’m done now. You see, my final point is that I feel like BioShock Infinite has a compelling narrative that’s more concerned with telling an engaging story, a page-turner if you will, than it is with having any kind of consistency or holding up under scrutiny of all its rules (or lack thereof) and details. I’m not saying I’m against a story that makes me think, I’m just not sure Infinite’s narrative is worth all the thought. To the game’s credit, I was engaged all the way through and kept wanting to know what would happen next, especially during the game’s ending sequence, which I found to be both beautiful and captivating. The scene when Booker and Elizabeth are gazing out across an endless ocean at an infinite number of lighthouses with an infinite number of doors is a beautiful sight, and this coupled with the mystery and compulsion to keep wanting to know what was behind each consecutive door made me reflect on why I love video games and the unique things an interactive medium can do so much. Even still, when all was said and done, I couldn’t help but look back and think about how the game plays with several fascinating ideas, but doesn’t really go the mile with any one of them, instead gluing them all together and turning out something good, fine enough, but not great like it could have been and not, in my eyes, something truly special. I’m sure there are countless essays, videos and diagrams out there that will tell me how wrong I am, how all of Infinite’s many threads align perfectly and how its narrative is truly a work of genius, and I’m curious to check them out, but right now, all I see is an otherwise engaging narrative that fails to live up to its potential, both emotionally and intellectually.

In Conclusion (Narrative Spoilers End Here)

BioShock Infinite immersed me, entertained me, and engrossed me. I overall like it, but I don’t love it. It’s not an experience that I feel is absolute required playing, a glorious achievement for the medium, a triumph in interactive storytelling, or whatever other bombastic praise I’ve seen critics heap on it. If others consider Infinite a masterpiece on their own terms, that’s fine and I’d love to hear their thoughts, but for me it’s an overall good game with several strong points, but I guess I’ve either seen better or can imagine better or maybe both. Also, many of the game’s strong points owe a great deal to the original BioShock, which is the game that had a much greater impact on me. Perhaps it’s because Infinite followed that game six years later, and fails to really do anything as ambitious or “wow-ing” as its predecessor that I’m just a little underwhelmed by it. But perhaps it’s unfair to criticize this game so heavily based on expectations of what it could have been or might have been because Infinite is certainly worth playing and ultimately a good successor to the original that does a lot of things well; I just don’t think it’s worth peeing your pants over, and I don’t think it’s as spectacular and forward-thinking for video games as I’ve heard some claim (the original BioShock deserved such praise at the time, but what does Infinite add to that legacy that’s so significant? This is what I’m missing). Where Infinite does deserve praise, however, is in its ability to mostly successfully mix so many different components such as strong art direction, great world-building and atmosphere, a well-realized AI companion in Elizabeth who I did find myself quite attached to by the end, ambitious storytelling that is flawed but nonetheless engaging, and exciting (though repetitive) combat mechanics. Infinite does all of these things and admittedly does all of them well, just for me anyway, I suppose it ends up being an experience less than the sum of its parts.