[Originally appeared Monday, December 14th 2009 at 5:08am on my crappy Blogster blog. I also posted it as a user review on the Escapist's forums. Unedited to retain powerful awesome.]
Believe it or don’t, but I’m in favor of low-key artistic games. I do not need to kill something digital to have fun. Killing things is of course very fun, in virtual reality at least, and maybe if I were a Viking and it were the Ninth Century. I don’t know for sure about the latter, but certainly virtual reality killing is quite fun, though it is not the only fun I can have in virtual reality. Low-key artistic games are pretty much defined as “fun without virtual reality killing,” and that is okay, as long as the alternative they offer to virtual reality killing is one of the many things you can do in virtual reality that is as fun as killing.
Believe it or don’t, but I’m in favor of low-key artistic games. I do not need to kill something digital to have fun. Killing things is of course very fun, in virtual reality at least, and maybe if I were a Viking and it were the Ninth Century. I don’t know for sure about the latter, but certainly virtual reality killing is quite fun, though it is not the only fun I can have in virtual reality. Low-key artistic games are pretty much defined as “fun without virtual reality killing,” and that is okay, as long as the alternative they offer to virtual reality killing is one of the many things you can do in virtual reality that is as fun as killing.
The problem is, there seems to be some debate on what exactly constitutes a fun action in virtual reality that isn’t killing. Or maybe it is a debate on the concept of “fun” itself. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that dev studio Tale of Tales is not very interested in joining that debate. Or, perhaps, it is only interested in having that debate with itself. If so, that means that Belgians Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn must have some pointless, extremely boring arguments at the office every day (and by “office,” I’m pretty sure I mean their basement. Or possibly bedroom). Here’s a glimpse of what these two self-styled digital auteurs consider “fun:” they put out a “game” in 2007 in which the player tunnels through a digital sculpture of these flabby two fucking upright. Andthe Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp (still Belgium ) loved it so much they put it on display so the whole family could pay to see it.
Perhaps I am simply not educated enough, Belgian enough, postmodern enough, douchebag gaming scenester enough to appreciate whatever it is Tale of Tales thinks it is supposed to be doing. Or maybe the problem does not lie with me, but instead with their inability to program anything with clear objectives, sensible game play, or main characters with engaging personalities or at least funny one-liners. I understand that “playable art” is going to be very different from corporate studio product, and that I have to have an open mind to appreciate it on its own terms. But I also understand that making a reasonably paced game that runs reasonably well and plays reasonably straightforward takes a lot of time and play-testing, and that churning over-boiled crap out of your basement PC (or bedroom PC) and calling it"playable art” is a very convenient way to have your cake and enough money for nachos, too. If I am simply too blue collar for Tale of Tales, that’s just the way it is, and it isn’t their fault. But if instead I am thoroughly awesome and Harvey and Samyn are a couple of douchebags, they can upright-sculpture-fuck off.
The way I finished that last sentence should make my perspective on the matter fairly obvious. To convince you that I’m right, let me tell you about some more of Tale of Tales’s “playable artwork.”
THE GRAVEYARD
You are an old lady in a graveyard. You slowly (i.e., slooooooowly ) shuffle forward along a path in the graveyard. You cannot go left. You cannot go right. You cannot stop and read the gravestones, because they have no legible writing on them. So forward you go, until you eventually (i.e., Jesus Christ finally ) reach a tiny graveyard chapel. You still cannot go left or right and there is no door directly in front of you, so you are not going in. All there is is a bench along the chapel wall. If you walk up to it, the old lady will turn around and sit down on it.
What happens next? Well, if by “next,” you mean after 40 fucking seconds of nothing , a song starts playing. It’s an alright song, if you like indie Europop. If you do not, then it is a slow, boring song. What is the song about? Well, because Tale of Tales knew we would all want to know this, they put the English translation of the lyrics on the screen as a subtitle. I use “translation” here loosely, in the sense that the song is in the language Belgians speak when they are speaking a made-up language. What sounds like German, Dutch, or Belgian is in fact none of these, but is instead Nothing. Trust me on this one. No, if you listen closely you will not figure out something I could not, because there is nothing to figure out. And because I am smarter than you, youshould know this by now. So the subtitle “translation” is in fact just crappy English poetry about dying and not being alive and no longer existing, written by a Belgian pretending to translate a made-up language spoken by possibly the same Belgian.
What is that you say? “Wow! That sounds so retarded, it must mean something artistic and profound and possibly revelatory about the human condition!” To which I say, “No, you douchebag gaming scenester, it is simply retarded. And boring.” But believe it or not, I am a progressively minded person. Maybe we’re both right. Which is to say, I think you are wrong , but I don’t care enough to write about it anymore.
The song in question, profound or not (stress on ‘not’), goes on for about 2 minutes. Sitting through it, it seems to go on for about six and a half hours, but I knew it wasn’t actually that long. This was simply the part of my brain that wanted to be entertained by this “game” reminding me that both of us were horribly, horribly misled by corporate game critics and douchebag gaming scenester blogs. Which my brain also reminded me I should have suspected while I was wasting both our time reading those damn things.
Yes, thank you brain, I get it. Now stop screwing with my concept of time and let’s finish this disaster already.
When the song finally ends, one of two things happens, and here we’ve finally arrived at the real meat of the “game.” The first thing that may happen is that the old lady stands up from the bench, turns to face the other direction, and waits for you to push the button that will make her walk back the way she came. If you do this, she will slowly (i.e., God-fucking-dammit-! ) shuffle back down the path until she gets to the end, at which point the “game” is over.
Stirring, isn’t it? Don’t you just want to restart it right away, to see if you can get the second ending? If you answered “yes,” change your answer. Because the “second ending” is not an ending. See, the only other thing that may happen (and I have no idea how the game decides when to do this) is that instead of sitting through the song then standing up, your old lady will in fact die during the song, and therefore just sort of keel over a little and stay on the bench. And if this happens, the “game” does not end. No. If this happens – if the old lady dies during the song – the game basically freezes up. It just sits there. Oh, the footage keeps looping, so you still see the swaths of sunlight rolling over the scene, you hear the birds chirping, you occasionally hear agust of wind. But you can sit there, watching and listening to this infinite loop for ten minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, 48 hours, and it will never end. No menu pops up. There are no credits. Just perpetually looping footage of a dead old lady on a bench.
And don’t you dare try to hit the spacebar or escape key to try and escape this fucking purgatory. It won’t work. The game offers no way to close it if the old lady dies. You have to Ctrl+Alt+Delete the godforsaken thing to get rid of it.
At first I thought this was a glitch so I looked around online. But no, this is not a glitch. Apparently this is a “design element” that is supposed to “give real weight to death.”
Know what else would “give real weight to death,” Tale of Tales? The Blue Screen of Death. But you didn’t program this “game” to give us one of those, for the same reason you should not have failed to give us a menu option at the death “ending” – it is fucking obnoxious.
Honestly, if this “game” had given a simulated Blue Screen of Death after the death ending, I’d actually give it a little more credit. Yes, it would have been heart attack-inducing, but at least it would have demonstrated that a pair of brassy human gonads or the metaphoric female equivalent were involved in the production of this “game.” As it is, the whole experience is just tedious, obnoxious, and completely ineffective.
And will cost you $5. Because Tale of Tales thinks The Graveyard will give you half as many hours of gaming joy as AudioSurf, a game where you collect colored blocks with a little spaceship in sync with your own mp3s .
Think about that sentence before you send Harvey and Samyn any nacho money.
Ugo and Wired talk about how “heavy” and “poignant” The Graveyard is. I’m sure the illuminati over at G4 would probably be bowled over by it too, if they weren’t too busy mining YouTube for foot-in-balls videos to fill valuable basic cable air time. Gamasutra posted an overly long and obtusely written introspective by the half of the Tale of Tales development team with a penis, in which he explains that The Graveyard is fantastic and wonderful, and can be quoted as saying that people who don’t like it are further down “the ladder of human civilization” than those who love it.
This wouldn’t be the first time a Belgian has called me unevolved. In fact, it wouldn’t be the second. But it would be the first time I’ve heard it from a Belgian who’s made a “game” in which I am expected to tunnel through a digital sculpture of him and his girlfriend going at it Russian Army-style.
It is times like these for which the cliché “consider the source” was invented. Thanks, history of the English language!
THE ENDLESS FOREST
Slowly wandering around a low-res forest with a low draw distance, with no objective, is not fun. Looking at pre-rendered 3D artifacts is only fun if those artifacts are interesting and/or interactive, and is not fun if they are illegible gravestones and low-res ruined foundations featuring zero interactivity. There is only one thing that would make this less fun, and that would be if the player character were a human-faced deer that could only communicate through a series of pre-programmed behavioral animations, that would in fact only count as actual communication if the player were using them on actual deer who actually understood what the fuck they meant.
Guess who just described the entirety of ‘game play’ in The Endless Forest? (Hint: me.)
And you are not ‘playing’ alone, because, lo!, The Endless Forest is actually an MMO-RPG. That’s right. The eight or so deer expressions allow for such a wide variety of expression that Tale of Tales naturally assumed the only way people would want to ‘play’ The Endless Forest would be if they could invite their friends to come be silent, enigmatic deer-monsters with them.
I call this assumption ‘natural’ for the Tale of Tales devs, because their previous work demonstrates their natural predilection for not understanding how everyone but themselves and douchebag gaming scenesters define ‘fun.’ And understand how honest I am being when I say that The Endless Forest is not fun . It is not fun because it cannot in actuality be played, because there is no mechanic for ‘playing’ anything. You are a deer-thing, there are other deer-things, and you deer-thing at each other for as many hours as it takes for you to realize that you’ve just wasted however many hours deer-thinging at other deer-things, and you get up and do something infinitely more productive. Like staring at yourself in the mirror, trying to remember the exact point where your life went completely off therails.
You may have noticed that I called The Endless Forest an MMO-RPG. “What makes it an RPG?” you ask. Answer: if you chance to use the right expression on the right deer at the right time – and as this is seemingly completely random, you will probably never get it to work – you and that deer can trade decorations for your antlers. And by ‘decorations,’ I mean some flowers on some vines, and some vines without flowers. And you will keep these decorations for as long as it takes for another deer to come up, make the right expression, and steal your decorations. And no, you can’t do anything to stop it.
I read on the Tale of Tales website that they are at least savvy enough to not call this thing a game, but instead a “social analysis tool” or something equally bullshit. I would just call it “a half-finished tech demo with severe framerate issues.” But again, as an actual gamer, I don’t think I was the intended audience for this “social analysis tool.”
Unlike The Graveyard, The Endless Forest is free. Which makes sense, as The Endless Forest features nothing anyone with any dignity would care to purchase. The bigger question is why The Graveyard is $5. At least in The Endless Forest you can go left and right and there isn’t a chance the game will lock up if your deer-monster dies.
Which it can’t. Because that would actually be fun to watch. Dear God, would that be fun to watch…
THE PATH
Ah, here is Tale of Tales’ piece de la resistance! By which I mean, it’s a “game” about little girls getting attacked in the woods. And you thought The Endless Forest had its deer-thing head up its own deer-thing ass…
Honestly, this is the best game Tale of Tales has ever produced, in that it’s the only thing they have ever produced that can be called a “game” with a straight face. The player is given objectives – collect 144 floating flowers, look at trash dumped in the woods, get attacked – and meeting those objectives actually impacts the outcome of the game. The fact that achieving the objectives leads to nothing but mystifying, hardly-interactive scenes at the end of the game, giving you no real sense of accomplishment or closure after several hours of game play is…worth pointing out. That’s certainly a strike against this game. But the very fact that there are objectives of any kind proves that this is in fact an actual game, so it’s also a point in favor. In favor of it being an actual game, thatis. Not in favor of it being an actual good game, which it certainly is not.
The Path begins by letting you choose to play as one of six girls, said to range in age from five to 15 (though all but the youngest two look like they could be a malnourished 20, so I don’t see why it matters). All of them are dressed in some kind of red outfit, because as you may not have gathered from my earlier paragraphs, this game is intended to be a postmodern retelling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Don’t let the amorphous word “postmodern” scare you – that just means all the little girls (but the littlest one) get sexually assaulted (she rides a werewolf which I think mauls her), and you have no fucking idea what you’re supposed to be getting out of watching any it, if anything. And that it’s okay that you don’t get it, because you’re not supposed to.
Hmm. Maybe “postmodern” is kind of a scary word.
To take the edge off, let me point out that the acts of sexual abuse (and the possible mauling) are only “shown” in the same way you “see” your Sims have sex in The Sims. Your chosen girl either sits on a bench next to a creepy guy with a cigarette, says hi to another creepy guy as he’s chopping wood near his cabin, or watches a creepy guy play a piano to no other audience in a ruined bandstand in the middle of the shadowy woods, to name three of the five out of six possible scenarios that don’t involve werewolves (certainly a missed opportunity if ever there was one). After the set up for some kind of abuse, the screen fades to black, and when it fades back up you’re watching a torrential rain soak your chosen girl as she lays in the fetal position in front of Grandmother’s House. Being that this is supposed to be aretelling of Little Red Riding Hood, Grandmother’s House is the place you were supposed to be trying to get your girl to in the first place, but which you can only get to by way of implied sexual assault (and probable mauling).
See, you can just run straight along the road the game starts you on and go right to Grandmother’s House. In fact, the only instructions you get at the beginning of the game tell you to do just that. But if you do, you’ll meet Grandmother, the game will end, and it will tell you you’ve lost. Which is pretty confusing, since you only did exactly what the motherfucking game told you to do. But the game is lying to you. What the game really wants you to do is run off the path into the creepy woods, look at trash and collect flowers for awhile, then meet some variety of strange man (or man-wolf) who will proceed to assault you off screen, then dump you in front of Grandmother’s house.
It almost seems like one of the members of the dev team, or possibly one of their underpaid interns, got confused at some point, is just criminally stupid, or had a point to prove about his or her salary. If a less angry / criminally stupid person was told to make a game about little girls going to Grandmother’s House through a pedophile / werewolf-infested forest, they would probably make a game where you have to lead the little girl to Grandmother’s House without getting assaulted. Because, see, most people would not assume that anyone would want to unlock a “The Little Girl Got Fucked Up!” achievement point. Except for those Xbox Live achievement whores, who would have to unlock it just on principle. But The Path is a PC exclusive. And a good thing too, because ever since the Hot Coffee fiasco,parents’ groups and politicians have been keeping a close eye on the Xbox. Somehow I think they wouldn’t miss the game where you only win by getting little girls attacked.
Is Tale of Tales trying to bait the mainstream media? The norms are already convinced that most modern games give you “points” for killing hookers and cops, having interracial and / or interspecies sex, and profaning the Holy Name of God. Do we really want these people to know someone made a game you can only win after a little girl has had her innocence brutally stolen from her in Blair Witch country?
The only reason The Path hasn’t led to Congressional hearings is because it’s a PC exclusive. Norms don’t know anything about PC gaming that doesn’t end with the words “Sims” or some other word after the word “Peggle.” And the reason they don’t is because very few people bought The Path. Because it’s a game that, in part, rewards child rape.
Wow. So the free market does actually censor itself. Who’d’a thunk it?
But I haven’t even gotten to the most moronic part of all this. Even after the rape / mauling, Grandmother’s House is not a safe haven where your girl can snuggle warmly in a hand-knitted comforter and try to deal with the trauma she has just suffered, while Gram phones the police and Mom. No, Grandmother’s House is actually the Hellraiser Dimension of Psychosexual Pain. Minus the razor wire, chains and pins, and double the mood lighting and not making a dick-lick of sense. When you finally walk your traumatized girl up to the house (and like The Graveyard, this purgatory of shuffling lasts about two excruciating minutes too long), she enters into a dark space of chaotic, unnerving noise. Suddenly the game goes into first person perspective and just sits there until you start tapping the movementkeys. Then your view proceeds to hover along a pre-programmed path through a serpentine labyrinth that is only less unsettling than an evangelical Hell House because there’s no scene of a botched abortion. Instead there are set pieces arranged in Escher-esqe rooms that, to repeat, don’t make a dick-lick of sense. These vary from girl to girl, and what you see is contingent on what trash you looked at in the woods, which “rooms” you’ve “unlocked.” There is a dining set at the bottom of a full swimming pool. There is a flaming car sitting in the corner of an otherwise empty gymnasium, the walls and ceiling covered with tire tracks that make it look like the car somehow drove all over it. There is a tight, quaking maze of wooden panels sprouting evergreen tree branches, accompanied by the deafening sounds of wood being chopped. And each one of these paths ends with the hovering camera that is you getting smacked to the floor, in front of thingslike a tree growing out of a bed, a bed covered with rubble that spins around on a platform, and a draped coffin behind an open grave (that you fall into, the resolution of the werewolf-mauling game.) These scenes speak for themselves in, to repeat for a third time, not making a dick-lick of sense. I guess some of them are heavy-handed rape metaphors and the grave one is about confronting death. But I don’t know for sure. Knowing Tale of Tales, that mysteriousness is probably intentional, because if there is one thing hipster doofuses are known for (other than working for Tale of Tales and liking whatever temporary band Jack White is in at the moment), it’s being intentionally vague so they can pretend they’re being deep. Because actually being deep would require talent and believing in something other than orgasms, and nothing gets in the way of a quick digital buck like actually having to know what the fuck you’re doing.
Despite how it sounds, The Path isn’t like all of Tale of Tales’ other “games,” in that it isn’t all terrible. The art direction is nice, as the forest is atmospheric and stylized without being obnoxiously overdone, unlike everything Tim Shafer has ever “creative directed”. There are some nice flickery graphical overlays that run throughout most of the game that effectively add creepiness without being too distracting. The dynamic lighting changes based on where you are in the forest and what you’ve encountered, which is a pleasant diversion in a world of games that are either always too bright (Fable II, Halo) or always too dark and dingy (Gears of War, GTA IV, everything else). And the sound design is excellent. The music is better at creating a sense of childhood nightmarishness than everything elsein the game combined. And the cues are tied to the lighting effects, creating a great, eerie atmosphere. If only they were linked to game play that didn’t destroy that atmosphere at every turn by being so tedious and bewildering (144 flowers?!, no minimap except when the game feels like quickly flashing it, the forest is huge and you don’t have markers for the trash you’re supposed to find until you find it, the scenes you see when you find the trash, every single ending).
CONCLUSION: TALE OF TALES IS STUPID
Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn are not utter hacks. But they also don’t know how to make a game. If you made them part of a dev team that was properly directed, they would no doubt contribute many good things to a game in progress. Left to their own discretion, most of what they’ve made is overpriced, barely playable crap, overpriced primarily because it’s barely playable crap. If for some reason you want to give them money, buy The Path. At least it’s an actual game. But I’d suggest saving your money for AudioSurf, or for a Tale of Tales game that may come out a few years down the road, hopefully after Harvey and Samyn get tired of jacking off for money and realize that they’d make a lot more making actual games for actual gamers.
But I wouldn’t hold your breath. Remember, these are the people that made a “game” where the player tunnels through a digital sculpture of what looks like them fucking in a closet, and the city of Antwerp put it in a museum . How much of an incentive do you have to change your business model when the international cabal of douchebag gaming scenesters is lining up to exchange cash for your digital toss rags, and then blasting the Internet with praise for it?
Maybe EA will buy them out and make them make a game about Vikings killing little girls who turn into werewolves. That would be fun.
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