To The Moon

Game: To The Moon
Developer: Freebird Games

I had originally intended to write about the "Drawn" trilogy, as they were the next games I had played after Journey. Instead though, I played To the Moon tonight and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It was beautiful, emotional, and thought provoking, and all on such a "primitive" version of the medium. It is living proof that graphics are not all that make up a game, and that games can be used as a means to tell an intelligent story just as much as they are there for simple entertainment.

One thing I am immediately confronted with when writing these posts is the tension between describing my experience and keeping things vague so as to not spoil anything for the reader. The details are important and necessary to explain how I felt at this moment or that ...but I know I would not have had these moments if I had any inkling of what was to come. Going into a game, or any story in any medium with fresh, unassuming eyes is something very important to me. It helps you to make a much stronger connection with the story and helps you to feel the story more organically. instead of being on the edge of anticipating something you heard about already. So I sit here trying to think of how to describe this game and sing it's praises, without saying exactly what makes it great.

So I suppose, spoilers beyond this point. Please go play the game first before reading. The game is only a few hours long and well worth your time.

To start off with, I suppose, the subject matter is unique, intriguing, and deals with things I don't think I have seen dealt with in any other video game. The synopsis is, in brief:

An dying man has requested the services of a unique company. They will, in the last moments of a person's life, alter that person's memories to change something in their past. Fix a regret, achieve a life goal, grant a wish.... so in their last moments they see the life they had hoped to live in place of the one they had.

Very brief, actually. However, anyone familiar with science fiction can already see some of the issues this can bring up. However, those are far from the true focus of the game. To The Moon, while having lighthearted parts and also dealing with the some of the moral questions of memory rewriting, mainly deals with some elements of life that just aren't talked about commonly in other games. Grief, insecurities and death, as well as mental instability and learning disabilities. The last two are strongly reinforced with the alienation that they bring, the feeling of being apart from everyone else, or even apart from yourself.

The dynamic between a woman with a learning disability (I don't know my mental illnesses enough to diagnose which one) who just wants to feel normal, and a man living a life that is not his (and the ramifications) of that is absolutely fascinating! Especially when this is all learned in reverse order, in pieces and steps. The new information, the leap to conclusions only later needing to reevaluate when a new piece is revealed. Kan Gao really knows how to truly hook someone into his stories, yet does to without making it feel trivial or have twists inserted for the sake of twists. Everything feels natural, it made sense. It was wonderful to be able to connect the lines before the main characters did, but just before so I didn't have to slog through their ineptitude. The pacing was just perfect.

The moral quandary... actually, saying there is one is false. The game is filled with many difficult questions and conclusions and just things observed. There is one key one at the end, but there are also many questions that arise from how things went. A few that stood out to me:

• Young John's statement that he wanted to be with River so they could be unique together, over his friend's suggestion that perhaps River just wanted to be normal. That he wanted to use River to fix himself, regardless of what she wanted. That objectification of a mental illness, when it was first presented, felt so... uncomfortable. It was unexpectedly cold from a character I felt I knew.  Also, it felt... unusual, a concept I had never heard before but it instantly felt unclean. It was an unexpectedly string reaction to such a small statement for me. Later, when the information is revealed about his brother and how he has been basically living two lives, it became so very understandable where he was coming from... living as his brother's shadow even after his death, one can understand the strong desire to be unique, to stand out. And the pity that is felt by how that desire basically lead him to a disappointing life where he was of little note was so... tragic.
• John's mother's reaction to Joey's death, was also understandable, but disheartening. She would use John as a link to the child she had killed, while using medication to hide from John that he had ever had a brother. Her intentions were pure, and her grief understandable, but the outcome of that...
• The moral question of whether to remove River from John's life... My gut screamed no, and my head calmly said yes. It was interesting, rooting for both to the leads at the end, even though they were directly opposed at the time. Not knowing how things ended, I don't know if I could have brought myself to just "do the job", but how could anyone ever know in that situation?

There is more, I'm sure, but my head is too wrapped up in itself at the moment. I quite literally played the game after I got home from work and started writing after I beat it, not wanting to forget anything. My head, though, is in such a reflective, meditative state now though, languishing in the bittersweet emotions the game brought up. I teared up at multiple occasions while playing this, and now that that has settled, I just want to sit back with a contented sigh.

That is one of my major roadblocks with writing these posts, I think: I feel so much of the game rather than view it on a cerebral level that it is hard for me to really define what made the game work for me. At the same time, I am hesitant to start adopting a more critical eye, because I love the cathartic feeling that I can get from a well weaved story and I worry that if I become too analyical of that it may impact my ability to simply experience a story.

Before I wrap this up, I just want to point out the pictures above. A game that did all this for me, all these emotions, all this thought, was done with SNES level graphics and very little actual gameplay. I have long been of the mind that a good stroy can live without good graphics as long as the art is designed well. I also truly believe that the interactive story model has real value. It is often looked down upon as a thing of the past, or not using the medium to it's full potential, but I'd counter that by saying that is, like everything else, has a place. Not all games have to be like it, but it does have value. For all the beautiful worlds and deep lore and character choice that Skyrim had, it never pulled any emotional cords for me and had no stories I was compelled by. As much as free world and "The player as the character" have value and the potential for story telling, they will never achieve the same level as a pre-planned out, character driven story. The more variables you add, the more deluded a story become and the more of it's impact is lost. Looking back on it, that is +100 hours in Skyrim I will never get back. To The Moon is 3 hours I don't want back. It is time already spent as best as it could be.

I eagerly look forward to to the sequels.

Journey

Game: Journey

Developer: thatgamecompany

Before you read this, if you can, go play Journey with fresh eyes.

(So much of the joy in the game is from the discovery, that it would be a disservice to spoil it for you. It only takes a couple of hours to play through.)

Journey, for me, was one of those games that I was very excited about in it's conception, but lost track of since. Whenever it'd come up in conversation I'd go "Oh! That game! Where's it at now?" and then forget about it again soon after.

My fleeting interest, however, was erroneous. Once I actually picked the game up and played it, I was hooked. There was an mysterious, awe inspiring nature to the game and it's world, one that is balanced with a intangible empathy and beauty that develops once you come across another player. It is a game that left me inspired and hopeful. Wonderstruck, even.

For those that are unfamiliar with Journey, the basic premise it that a star falls from the sky and your character, an ambiguous figure draped in red robes, sets off to find it. Traveling through what, at first appears to be an endless desert filled with mysterious runes and religious markers, you eventually cross through many different environments, learning the history of this place, and of your people, as you go. Over the course of this, you may come across another figure in red, identical to you, but a different player on a different PS3 somewhere else in the world. Neither of you have any control of it, and there is no way to directly communicate. Even still, with such limitations in place, invariably you two will end up traveling together, facing the elements and and trials together in search of the star.

The controls for this game are simple but have interesting implications in their use. You can do the usual, look around and move in all directions, of course. There is only one speed of movement, a fast walk of sorts, but your speed will change due to the environment you are in. Then there are two additional commands: a spherical pulse that activates the ruins you come across, and the ability to fly, that is charged from activating those ruins.

While simple in concept, they also encourage what I believe to be the two driving forces of Journey: Exploration and Camaraderie.

Exploration:

The game opens with your figure, having just seen the star fly across the sky, climbing to the top of a sand dune. Sand as far as the eye can see greets you, with the fallen star shining in the distance. That is all the introduction you are given, no knowledge of who you are, or where you are, just the implied idea that you should seek out this star. 

Right from the start I felt a desire to explore. While the world starts as dunes after dunes, I started to notice small stone posts protruding from the sand. First a few, then almost fields of them, I surmised that they had some sort of religious significance. The whole mood of the game seems to lend itself to a more spiritual line of interpretation, which I greatly appreciate as in my experience it isn't a topic really dealt with often in games. Or, when it is, it is done from one perspective. What I found I loved about Journey was that in never concretely said "This is the story" or "This thing is a ____", it leaves nearly everything up to interpretation. As I learned more about the story, my thoughts of those markers shifted. Perhaps they were gravestones? Markers of the people lost? Perhaps what was once your people? I'll never know for certain. Nor do I really want to. It's the conjecture, the guessing and hypothesizing and changing your personal answers as you discover new information that I love. It's what really drives the desire to explore in this game, for me. The desire to know what happened. 

This only intensified as I moved into new ruins and later the remains of whole cities. Each time more of the story would be revealed, yet still not clarified. Still the desire to know solely drove me on, that is, until I met another me.

Camaraderie:

I say "Another me" because that is exactly that, not only was the figure dressed exactly the same as I was, they were on the same quest, had the same information and the same skills. Even more than that, the "other me" that I met was in fact another person in another part of world playing Journey at the same time I was. I was never prompted to go online, or asked if I wanted another player to join my world, seamlessly our worlds met. I came over a bluff, and there was someone else down there activating banners while my brief cinematic cut-scene played. At first I thought it was part of the cut-scene, but it wasn't followed up, it just was.
So, disregarding my goal for a moment, I ran to the figure. Once it noticed, it came towards me as well. There is no direct way to communicate in this game. No chat, no voice, not even a way to point. How do you communicate when you have no words. ...Then it pulsed. And I pulsed back. And we communicated. No words, barely any meaning even, but a connection was formed then and there. In this vast landscape, I found a friend. Together we continued on, pulsing to celebrate a victory, to find each other, or to ping when one of us found the path. We would "talk", in that we'd pulse without any direct point, just to remind each other that we weren't alone. It was such an unreal feeling, how quickly and strongly that sense of companionship had formed. I would wait for the other person when they fell behind, as they would for me. I'd go back and find them if they got lost. It was heartwarming.
And then it got better. We learned that the pulse actually recharges the other player's flight ability. Even simply touching recharges each other's power. I say "We learned" not because the game told us, but it felt like we both realized this around the same time. The game mechanics actively encourage cooperation and instill a desire to help your companion along.

By the middle of the game, after we had been journeying together for a bit, it wasn't exploration driving me anymore, it was the companionship, the shared adventure. For me to succeed now required my companion to succeed as well. The ending levels greatly reinforce this since, as you are traveling through an icy tundra, your scarves slowly freeze if you do not find relics to activate. However, just like in the rest of the game, you can refill the energy of another player just as a relic would and this is no different in the cold. Together you work together, traveling slowly so as to not leave the other person behind, to scale the icy mountain towards the star. I imagine this area would be next to impossible without a companion and definitely would not carry the same emotional weight. If you fail alone, you just fail, but with a companion there, there is a sense that someone else relies on you that is very powerful. In the end, when you both collapse from the snow, the loss is that much more, as is the jubilation when you are both reborn to complete your journey, due to the now shared story between you and another player. Another person whom you will most likely never meet.

The shared experience is what makes an already beautiful game truly special.

Journey is a game that is made in the details, not only in the amazing visual details, but also in the nuances of the mechanics and the subtlety of the player interactions. Simple things, such as tracking the players light power on their scarf instead of using a heads up display, removing direct communication and replacing it with your simple movements and just a visual/audio ping. It completely turns the concept of "gaming" on it's head by throwing out so many of the tropes and giving the player a completely new way to interact with a game world and other players. I would wager that it is not as much a game, but more akin to an experience.

~Rin

P.S.

As for the story itself, here is my interpretation of it. In case you are curious:

Long ago, there was once a great civilization that grew from humble roots. Through harnessing magic the civilization flourished and grew powerful. However, as is often the case, such power bread corruption and soon strife overtook the culture. Through advanced weaponry much of the civilization was destroyed and the land once converted to a arid desert. The survivors escaped to the outskirts of the city, casting off their once white robes for red ones. When the star falls, your character travels to discover what happened, thinking it is a sign. Guided by the spirits of the dead, who perhaps even created the star to draw your character to them, it discovers the lost history of its people. At the end of this pilgrimage, exhausted and frozen, your character dies. The spirits express pity on your you and your efforts, and in your final moments let you reach your goal, but it is only in your mind. Upon your passing, you become a star yourself, a gift from the ancestors for your devotion.

Of course this is very broad and the story is intentionally left in such a manor as to invite different interpretations, but that is generally what I imagine happened.

A very good place to start.

For awhile now I've been having some pretty intense ennui regarding video games. Stopped playing Mass Effect 3 half way through, Jagged Alliance isn't holding my interesting, repeatedly opening games just to stare at the title screen and then close them... nothing was interesting me.
Thankfully, a friend of mine suggested that I go through my Steam library and start playing through all those games that I haven't touched. You know, those games you get as gifts, buy in bundle packs, or pre-order because you love how it looks, but lose interest by the time you can play it. He suggested that I pick a game, and play through it even if I don't feel interested in it in the first five minutes (My usual breaking point at that point), because for him, if he makes it through the start he usually ends up really enjoying a game.

And you know what? He was right!

To further dig myself out of depression, I plan to use this blog to keep track of my reflections on the games I play, so as to both have a record and refine my critical thinking and analysis skills. Knowing that there is a goal for playing a game that lives outside the game will help me persevere, as will the feedback from the few people that come to read what I write :)

I hope that this blog will benefit both of us: You, the reader, and me, the gamer.
~Enjoy~