#13. Hotel Dusk: Room 215

Too much traveling this past week, and not enough computer time… This slick-looking, slickly-written little detective fiction isn’t a bad game to bring on a plane trip, in theory, but I’ll admit I had some trouble with it.

I have a love-hate relationship with both classic adventure games and interactive fiction. I love the worlds, the ideas, and the general premise of “narrative first”, and I nearly always detest the execution. With Hotel Dusk: Room 215, I’m less than an hour in and I just can’t bring myself to play anymore.

It shouldn’t take this long to get to the meat of a game. There’s the germ of a good idea here: a great set-up, an engaging lead character, and there’s probably a nice, neat solution to the mystery at hand. But Hotel Dusk is hamstrung by its excruciatingly slow pacing. There’s a set-up, yes, but no hook. Characters appear at random to block my way “forward” (whatever “forward” means here) until I’ve asked them the requisite number of questions about themselves, or solved an arbitrary, gamey-game puzzle. And there are simply too many words. I’m watching slow, text-driven conversations in which characters use seventeen lines of dialogue to say what could be said in three or four – and while each line is well-written, the conversations aren’t engaging enough for me to slog through them. I’m used to reading fast, immersing myself in the words of a story. Between the speed of the text and the nagging interactions, I’m not even having fun, much less paying attention.

There’s the hint of a great art style here – I love the way that chararacters are penciled in against sketchy backgrounds, although I’d lose the faux-3D hotel set – and the hint of a decent thriller or mystery. But right now, I don’t have enough faith in either the narrative or the writers to think the eventual payoff is worth my time. Maybe this should have been a novel instead?

A good try, but I got what I wanted from the Gamefaqs forum – simply the story, without the gimmicks of the game. And I switched over to Super Princess Peach for the duration of the flight home, which has an unhealthy amount of pink and a talking umbrella. Honestly, I wanted either something to read or something to do, not the weaker parts of both in one package.

#12. Lock’s Quest

I spent the last few days at a conference discussing serious games, meaningful play, and games as a medium for change on the individual to the global scale – and I spent every spare moment playing this small piece of fluffy, juvenile,  mindbogglingly engaging entertainment.

Lock’s Quest reminds me of nothing so much as Puzzle Quest: another fantastic casual game couched in a tepid, RPG-inspired story. I defy anyone to care deeply about narrative in Puzzle Quest, but for Lock’s Quest the plot line somehow manages to feel necessary. Thin as it is, I still need a reason to go from town to town, defending against the ever-increasing hordes of clockwork monsters. I haven’t finished the game, but I can easily assume that Lock and I will save the day in the end; more interesting than that standard hero’s quest is the world itself, where buildings come and go at the will of super-architect/engineers, or Archineers, and living machines – not robots, not cyborgs, but clockwork men – ravage fields and forests alike. The style of Locks’ Quest is cute, easy on the eyes, and it fits the casual nature of the game, but a piece of me would like to see it done, harsh as this is, for real. I’m serious. Drop this world in the best tech we’ve got, let the designers from Hellboy 2 and Iron Man go at it, and really scare me with a grounded, adult treatment of intelligent scrap-metal come to life in hordes. You could do wonders with a world like that on the big screen, and not just visually (remember Terminator 2, anyone?). This handling is an adorable waste.

Still, Lock’s Quest makes for a pleasant, coherent whole. As much as I’d like to see some of its odds and ends translated up, the game works, particularly on the DS. Simple, sweet, and presented in bite-sized chunks of gameplay, it’s an easy game to fall into in terms of mechanics but not content – so when a stewardess comes by, or you reach the front of the line you’re standing in, it’s not difficult to turn the game off. Call it shallow immersion: I’m entertained but not engrossed. And sometimes, that’s all I need.

Some minor problems that would get to me if I took the game more…. well, seriously: that NPCs aren’t intelligent enough to get out of your way and can actually prevent you from achieving mission goals if you don’t realize this; that too many systems are great ideas that weren’t fully implemented, like the tedious siege stages or the fascinating but out-of-place reverse-engineering of each turret and trap; that the precision of Lock’s pathfinding, or even of the object or enemy you’ve “clicked” on, leaves much to be desired…. This isn’t a deeply flawed game, but one that could use a bit more refinement.

And yet, I’m still playing it. I wonder why the game wasn’t advertised more thoroughly. In many ways, it’s another tower defense game, yet toss a “Mario” or a “Metroid” in the title and this could have been a must-have for the season.

At the least, it’s taught me that yes, indeed, repetition can be fun. It’s no Shadow of the Colossus, but Lock’s Quest made me think, even if it was only to wonder why I didn’t feel much like thinking.

#11. LEGO Batman

I don’t know much about canonical Batman, but in mainstream popular culture I’ve at least hit the highlights. I’ve read Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, have been trying to get my hands on Batman Year One and The Killing Joke, and I worry that my memories of Burton’s 1980s films probably won’t hold up to an adult viewing, and certainly not to Nolan’s more serious reimaginings, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. (On my better days, I can also convince myself that Batman and Robin never happened.)

As a hero, I like Batman: he’s not the perfect savior from above that Superman has to be (a liability for the Man of Steel these days, given our modern preference for flawed heroes), nor is he burdened with Spiderman’s gosh-golly-it-could-happen-to-you everyman troubles. Batman is definitely flawed, but those flaws can be played much darker: he’s overbearing, obsessive, psychologically a mess…. You could make a pretty strong case for Batman as Byronic hero. And he does have the most wonderful toys.

Which makes him a perfect choice, in theory, for the Travelers’ Tales series of Lego games. The great thing about these developers is that they have so much fun with their source material – I’ve played through both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones-themed games, and both inspired me to watch the films again, good, bad, or cheesetastic (hell, I remember being scared by Temple of Doom….). But with Lego Batman, I think that working from the general comic book understanding of Batman rather than specific films hurts the game. Playing through the two previous games is equivalent to watching an homage/parody version of the films they’re based on – seriously, the acting in the Lego versions of Episodes 1, 2, and 3, is more nuanced than what Lucas’ actors pulled off – and as a player, it gave me something to look forward to. How many iconic moments are there in either Indiana Jones or Star Wars? I played the games not only because they were fun, but because they were funny, and I wanted to see what would happen in the Death Star run scene, or the “he chose poorly” scene, or the “because he’s holding a thermal detonator!” scene. That’s missing in Lego Batman. The character himself is iconic, not to mention the array of sidekicks and villains, but there’s no cinematic plotline that serves the same purpose, and no set of Batman material – film, comic book, tv-show, or otherwise – that really represents the essence of Batman, not the way that the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies did for their heroes.

So as much as I enjoy Lego Batman, there are some issues with translation.  When Lego Indiana Jones drops Indy and Marion in a bazaar with no explanation, you know exactly what’s coming next, regardless of whether the game gives you direction or not. In Lego Batman, the bad guys are doing bad, and the good guys chase them around and stop them from doing it. It looks pretty, but it’s not parody – we’re now in the realm of original content, and I think the game loses something for it. At the very least, it lacks the humor that pulled me through the other two. There are scenes intended very obviously to be humorous, but not one of them made me laugh – and frankly, it’s much harder to be funny when you’ve spent two games parodying/homaging in specific and suddenly have to do the same in general.

But the game is a lot of fun. The Batsuits are adorable. Arkham Asylum is equally adorable – true to comic book form, the game really comes to life when the villains get to be center stage, and the plot makes a whole lot more sense when seen from the villain’s perspective. It should be no surprise that carrying out a nonsensical, overengineered “evil plan” is a lot more fun than stopping it. I wonder if I’d have gotten more into the game had I been allowed to play the villains first?

In the interest of full disclosure, Tim and I play the Lego games together, so I’ve had very few problems with faulty “friend AI”. And we do intend to complete it, although I’m starting to miss the previous Lego games more than I really want to play this one.

Ah, well. It’s a shame Traveler’s Tales didn’t wait for Chris Nolan to finish his trilogy, or didn’t pull more from the gloriously campy Adam West series. Then again, someone’s got to help sell all those Batman-themed Lego sets that have been sitting around since 2006….

#10. ICO

My students joke that I am contractually obligated to mention ICO at least once a day. I can’t say that they’re too far off the mark.

I saved ICO for my tenth entry as a reward to myself, as I’ve been looking forward to writing on what is arguably my favorite game. I could write chapters on ICO alone, and still think it’s ahead of its time, light years beyond most of the current crop of commercial games. It’s the first game that I considered a piece of art first and a game second, still one of my best arguments for taking the medium seriously, and proof that the “are games art” debate has already been settled. (The question “what makes for good game art?” is far more interesting, and certainly more fruitful).

For those of you that have never played ICO – and keep in mind that the game was released about eight years ago – the set-up might seem a bit nihilistic: a boy born with horns (Ico) is taken to a castle by the adults of his village, locked in a boy-sized sarcophagus, and left to die of starvation. He escapes, quite by accident, and meets up with a girl, perhaps a princess, named Yorda, who seems to be made of light and speaks a language that Ico doesn’t understand. (Neither does the player, in fact; Yorda’s few lines are subtitled with unfamiliar symbols, not English). Together, the two attempt to escape the castle.

That’s it. And that’s all it needs. The strength of ICO is in the details, the small design elements that seem unimportant until you lay them out and look at them: that Ico moves like a real, awkward twelve-year-old boy, not the tweenaged action-hero of some fanciful RPG; that he doesn’t become a master swordsman but swings his sword awkwardly, like a kid that’s never heard of baseball trying to swing a baseball bat; that the only reason a sword is better than a stick is that it can cut through ropes. That neither character has stats, hit points, magic points, equipment, an inventory, or really anything but each other. That Yorda is silent but intelligent, and feels so human in her actions that you want to save her, unlike the stock princesses so many games require you to rescue. That the game takes place in darkness and, though you’re controlling Ico, you eye is immediately drawn to Yorda’s brighter figure, a subtle way of focusing your attention on the most important character. And a thousand other things.

The elegance of this game is remarkable, so much so that I didn’t realize on the first playthrough that I had literally saved the princess from the castle until it was all over. ICO takes full advantage of its visuals as well; I can’t think of another game that uses darkness and light so powerfully as both an aesthetic and narrative element. This is quite literally digital chiaroscuro.

It’s also one of the few games that truly has a visual vocabulary; the story is told not in text but in actions. When Yorda opens a gate with some unknown power and it hurts her, any standard actioner or RPG would immediately give her sixteen cliched lines in which to tell the player exactly how badly she feels. In ICO, she says nothing, but her body language changes so distinctly that you immediately understand that something is wrong. When Ico leaps across narrow gaps, he throws himself completely, the way a child would, and when he beckons to Yorda and she almost falls, you can see in the way he catches her how much they care for each other without saying it in words. (There’s a touching moment near the end where this situation is reversed, and it’s more powerful for the fact that you’ve seen the visual so many times before). Even playing purely for fun, you can’t help but feel how carefully the relationship between these two lost, fragile characters is built over the course of the game. The smallest of details, like the way they lean towards each other when they sit down on the small couches that serve as save points, tells you more about them than all the flash, blur, and bloom in a year’s worth of next gen titles. This is character development through animation – and it makes me wonder about the future of textual narrative for games.

Common complaints – that this is a very short, very linear game, and that it pushes the PS2’s technology a little farther than it wants to go – are, to me, not serious enough to impede either pure enjoyment or deeper readings of the game. Frankly, I’m impressed at how quiet and and simple ICO is, nearly archetypal. I haven’t even begun to discuss the folkloric elements: the dark Queen, the shadow creatures (so poignantly revealed at the game’s conclusion), that death only occurs when Yorda is lost to the shadows, that “death” means Ico turns to stone…. There’s enough substance here that I have faith in a greater artistic intent, and enough ambiguity that I never feel bludgeoned by symbolism; enough, in fact, that much of the game’s eventual meaning is open to interpretation.

The Dean of my department is fond of saying that everyone should read Homer’s Odyssey once a year, as it’s good for your soul. Whether you’re a gamer or not, the same might easily be said of ICO.

In fact, my soul could use some help this week. I’m going to go play a bit right now.

#9. Legend of Mana

I’ve recently reacquired a piano, and remembered that one of the things I taught myself to play, when I needed a break from Mozart, Chopin, and Debussy, was the intro* to this pretty, flawed storybook of a game.

Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2) is one of Squaresoft’s great classics, one of the best to come out of the mid-90s Golden Age of the 16-bit RPG. In all the “Mana” games since, they’re never managed to recapture that perfect balance of gameplay, visuals, narrative, and pure immersive fun. But they came close with this one: a beautiful experiment that had heart and ideas, and yet just didn’t hang together.

As a story-centric person, I was attracted to Legend of Mana by its promise of competing, interwoven storylines. I’ve always been a fan of collecting multiple characters into a group of adventurers; and the idea that the world and its people moved around you, rather than waiting for you to save it and them, was relatively new at the time. I was also intrigued by the complicated system of world-building, or re-building. As you adventured, you found artifacts with fun names – Jade Egg, Firefly Lamp, Trembling Spoon – that when placed on the map became a new area to explore – Meikiv Caverns, Lumina Town, and the Underworld, respectively.

What I didn’t realize was that the system didn’t work. Rather than offering choices, Legend of Mana left it up to the player to find interesting stories in which to take part, but with little to no guidance on how to find them in the first place. And while many of the stories are one-offs, there are major narrative threads that are difficult or impossible to find on your own. If you want to know, for example, what happens to Pearl and Elazul after you help them find each other, or if you want to follow Daena and Escad on another adventure, there’s simply no way to tell in-game where they are or how to find them; and given the number of areas on the ever-growing world-map, hope and random chance don’t do you much good. And once a character has made a cryptic remark and run off, if you’re lucky enough to run across him, her, or it again, you still aren’t guaranteed the next piece of the story – unless you’re also lucky enough to have fulfilled any number of hidden prerequisites to trigger the next story event in the first place.

This is one of the only games where I broke down and purchased a strategy guide – not because the game was difficult (it’s actually quite accessible), but because I wanted to see the entire narrative thread for one character or another and had no idea how to do so in the game itself. A poor excuse for strategy guide sales.

Add to this that the game’s ending is a total reset, in which the mana tree is “healed” but the world is undone in the process, and the only real result is a New Game Plus – so your efforts of the last 40 hours or so have little real effect, apart from asking you to play again to find stories you didn’t find the first time (one of the guides I followed claimed five playthroughs, with no completion in sight). And the mana tree is needy. “Remember me! Love me! Need me!” For me, it’s the beginning of my frustration with the pseudo-philosophy about love, memory, friendship, and so on that permeates too many Japanese console RPGS, even now. (I’m looking at you, Kingdom Hearts series…)

And yet, there are so many good design elements, and the world and characters are so interesting…. The structural idea here feels wasted, half-finished, and the result is that this charming little experiment of a game has wonderful atmosphere and lacks cohesion. It’s a shame that it didn’t succeed; I would have liked to see a second and third attempt with this sort of multi-threaded storytelling.

It’s still a worthwhile experience – just one that comes with caveats.

*Yes, that makes me a nerd. This should not be a surprise.

#8. Okami

This is an easy game to love.

If I had to choose one word to describe Okami, the word is beautiful. Visually stunning, elegantly designed, charmingly written, and above all cohesive: here is beauty with a purpose, an atmospheric triumph that will take a long time to dull with age. Okami is heavily rooted in Japanese mythology, not so much accurate as it is faithful to a mythos and a setting. The entire game looks as if it has been drawn with a living calligraphy brush – which makes it all the more fitting when the player is literally handed a brush with which to draw changes on the game world.

There’s something so viscerally satisfying about this mechanic: to draw a circle on the sky and make the sun rise, to cause cherry trees to burst into bloom, make rivers flow, winds blow, stones break…The player character, the white wolf Amaterasu, is presented as a sun god come to Earth, and you feel like a deity while playing this game. You’re not just saving Nippon, you’re revitalizing it, with an impressive array of creative and destructive powers at your disposal with which to do so.

More than this, Amaterasu’s power grows as the land, and the people and animals that live in it, regain belief in her (and by implication the rest of the gods in the pantheon). One of the major collectibles is Praise, gained through washing evil from the land, performing good deeds, and even by feeding the birds, deer, boar, and other animals that return to cleansed areas. In a way, it’s quite relaxing – there’s always something beautiful and simple to do. Even the combat itself, criticized for its lack of difficulty, is graphically beautiful, with a host of inventive, colorful demons for you to defeat. There’s something quite gratifying, too, about effecting a permanent change on the land. When Shinshu Field or Hana Valley is released from its curse, it stays released, and a dull, gray landscape is permanently changed to one in full, gorgeously-rendered bloom.

I finished Okami on the PS2 at release and started playing the rerelease on the Wii just this week, which seems a natural fit for control. But playing through a second time the luster seems to have faded, for me, just a little. The cutscenes take a little too long. The “voice acting,” non-syllabic sounds of a certain pitch played with each characters’ dialogue, is a little grating. It takes a little too long to get out into the world. And the Wii version requires just a little too much precision, particularly in combat. Coming to the game with certain expectations, I can see the barriers for non-gamers here; there are things that I take for granted as part of the medium, cues I pick up on and limitations I accept that a novice might find offputting. On the other hand, this is a relaxing, perhaps too-easy game, which you’d think would make it more accessible – the perfect gateway game for more challenging titles, in terms of both difficulty and meaning. I wonder where it falls on the spectrum of gaming literacy.

Ironically, one of my complaints from the first playthrough has been tempered. This is a long game, with material enough for three or more titles, and at least four false endings interspersed within Amaterasu’s adventures that don’t prepare the player for the length of game following. As an action-oriented game, I tired of its tropes long before the final battle – this is one of the few titles that I left halfway through, and returned to finish months later. It can be a bit daunting, especially on a second playthrough. But I’ve come to appreciate the way that each myth, beginning and ending, is wrapped together here, even if the seams show a bit. Rather than the clean, focused “save the world” ethic we’re so used to, Okami presents us with adventures that feel like the life story of a true mythological figure: odd adventures and chance meetings that feel strange when experienced in a linear fashion, and only make a coherent whole after the fact. Gods-on-earth should have more than one major adventure to their name, so Amaterasu’s long journey through all of Nippon feels right to me – at least, now that I don’t feel rushed to find out what happens to her in the end.

Again, and all nitpicking aside, this is an easy game to love. Personally, I find it refreshing to play a non-humanoid character – the wolf’s animation is, for lack of a better word, beautifully done. And the game boasts one of my all-time favorite boss battles, in which you get an 8-headed dragon drunk on magical sake, one head at a time, until the creature is plastered enough for you to run up its tail and smash the bell it carries on its back.

Not a demanding game in terms of difficulty, but Okami asks for a lot of time from its players, more than I’m used to from this genre of game. It’s my best argument for moving beyond photorealism in games, for creating detailed, believable worlds that can not possibly exist, and for really doing your research when gathering inspirational source material. Think of what God of War could have been, had they looked at more than the surface of Greek mythology….

#7. Bioshock

I’m Ayn Rand-ambivalent, but I love this game.

Bioshock is part of what I’m starting to consider the New Science Fiction: sci fi that’s not only worth telling in a gaming medium, but is ultimately better for it. This story needed to be a game.

I won’t say that Bioshock is at the true forefront of the revolution, but there’s something about facing down a Big Daddy that simply has to come across in play instead of words or visuals; something about the phrase “would you kindly” that only hits so hard because the actions and choices were yours, and because your only alternative to those action was to stop playing the game. (Those of you that haven’t played it, I promise that last bit makes sense). A shame that after the big reveal, you aren’t given any more or less freedom over your actions, just gentler, kinder reasons for doing so.

The increasing possibility of a Bioshock movie strikes me as not only strange, but a hell of a challenge. I can’t argue against adapting this story – most stories, really – to another medium and audience, but the original will be hard to top with celluloid. Take the Big Daddies, for instance. The first time I faced “Rosie” is one of only three* moments in games where I honestly thought, “Get me out of here, I don’t want to fight that” – the polar opposite of the usual, “bring it” response that most gaming combat inspires in me. Sure, we aim to inspire fear in games, but often hoping for the fight reflex, not for flight.

And yet, the promise of Bioshock, that ambiguous moral complexity we were primed for in the weeks before release…. That never really comes through for me. Yet again, I was rewarded for being a good person. Yet again, punches were pulled, perhaps to avoid accusations of shock value – you’re asked to not only kill little girls but to literally rip a slug-creature out of their living bellies, but all you see onscreen is a white flash and ta da! Just a slug. Not that I’m a fan of child-killing, but if you say you’re going to let players act truly depraved, you better make ‘em feel it.

There’s also no chance for redemption in Bioshock, which I’m not sure how I feel about. I don’t mind actions with permanent consequences, at least during one given playthrough; but I was bothered by the abruptness of the endings, regardless of which one I achieved.

I think the major issue I have with Bioshock is that it lives up to the hype, but not to its potential. The introduction and the first sections of gameplay are just fantastic, and everything up to Andrew Ryan fits within the same slow, tense build. Until Ryan, every cinematic moment is done in-game, while the player still has control, but the player is physically separated from the scene in some way, usually by glass. There’s a moment of real shock when, for the first time, another character crosses that barrier and stands in the same room with you; and the way that Ryan’s scene plays out…. It’s flawless in its execution, a moment I just can’t spoil for new players. But the game falters after that, and ends on a less-than-impressive note. I know game developers are worried that too many players aren’t finished their games, but Bioshock is quite definitely front-loaded.

Bioshock is also my first “Easy Game” – the first time I bit the bullet and played on easy mode, to my everlasting shame. Not God of War, which encourages it; not Metal Gear Solid 2, with the Snake/Raiden bait-and-switch; not Ikaruga; not even Ninja Gaiden Black did it. Bioshock broke me, and it did so because I have a full-time job that does not inspire patience – and because, for all my gaming experience, Ijust can’t play an FPS without a mouse and keyboard, and my beautiful computer has one of the few graphics cards that Bioshock isn’t happy with.

That last was a worthwhile experience for me. I do think there is a literacy to not only games but game genres, which can keep people who don’t consider themselves gamers at arms’ length, and out of some amazing fictional experiences. Playing Bioshock through with a dual-joystick control made me think about those hapless students of mine that are fascinated by games but don’t have the literacy level to play them – students that take three hours to find their way out of the first town in Ocarina of Time, or can’t manage to jump on that very first goomba in Super Mario Brothers. It takes time to learn games, not intellectually but physically; I have more sympathy for that than I used to.

For those of you looking for recommendations, I can’t recommend this game highly enough. Writers and academics, there’s a lot of meat here that needs looking at, flaws and all.

*I’ll cover the games in which I felt those other two moments soon – let’s say before I hit #20.

#6: The Marriage

If I had seen this game in an art gallery, I might have thought, “I don’t understand this; I must be stupid.” Had I found it online with no explanation, I might have thought, “I don’t understand this; it must be stupid.”

I don’t think The Marriage is inherently stupid, perhaps because it’s been presented to me by the artist as not only an art game but a failed art game. With that caveat, I’m suddenly far more willing to overlook the game’s weaknesses and to look for deeper meanings in its structure. I don’t know if that would be the case had I stumbled upon it without warning, or could download and play it without first having to read the artist’s statement. He even begins by saying, “This is a game that requires explanation. That statement is already an admission of failure.”

I didn’t play this game for long, but I did feel that the longer I played it, the more I began to understand the deceptively complex rules, not to mention the space I was in. My main concern was the lack of defined goals; I figured out quickly that both the blue and pink cubes needed to “survive”, but I didn’t get the sense that there was an end in sight, or a reward for keeping them “alive” for x number of minutes or turns. Does that make me a shallow player? At the least, it seems to make me a story-driven player; The Marriage is so abstract that I feel the need for constrained goals, small achievements, duly meted rewards. I’ve also become accustomed to games that explicitly teach you their rules and then let you decide what to do with them; this is the first game in a long time that has asked me to discover its rule set as I played. (In a minute, I’ll probably be driven back to the shiny simplicity of Lumines II).

I’ll also say that, watching these abstract joined cubes float by more and more dangerous objects on screen, I felt that I did better the less I interfered. On my first few playthroughs I touched, moved, or clicked on everything I could, and never lasted more than a minute; just sitting and watching, and rarely moving an obstacle out of the way of either cube, I could at least make the background change color.

I can see intent here, and a definite purpose, but so far the general meaning remains obscure. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we could use games that ask as much of their players as modern art asks of its viewers. Or maybe I’m thinking too hard about a failed experiment.

Or maybe it’s that I’ve never been married. What could Significant Tim and I possibly understand about the subject?

**Update: Having now read Rod Humble’s full explanation (and spoilers) of the game, I feel that I understood more of it than I expected to. Of course, it’s easy to agree with the “correct” definition after the fact, but it’s nice to have my random thoughts about possible meanings verified (intentionalist fallacy be damned). I do like that the game is deliberately made fragile, obscure, easy to break.

It’s also interesting that one of Rod’s players assumed – correctly – that the designer had never been divorced. I wonder what that game’s rule set would have looked like?

The Marriage can be downloaded and played here.

#5. Lumines II

Here’s another one I’m surprised to still be playing. I’ve been calling it the “anti-Tetris”, given the way it deals with individual puzzle pieces, and I’ve clocked an embarrassing number of hours on my save file.

It’s the collection angle that appeals to me, I think. I rarely play anything but the non-challenge sequences, the ones in which you can unlock new songs, “skins” and levels, and once I’ve finished a challenge sequence (there are 3) I rarely return to it. It’s possible that once I’ve unlocked everything, I’ll never touch the game again.

Mentally, it’s a great way to wind down. Lumines II takes effort but no real thinking, meaning I can mentally focus on other things while playing through a sequence. It’s an opposite effect to my experience at the symphony: there, I’m forced to sit and listen and quiet down (a rare occurrence), enough that the music has a chance to be inspiring. Lumines II doesn’t inspire me but it does relax me, something Significant Tim tells me is equally necessary. He’s been trying for years to explain to me the importance of winding down; I’ll assume he approves of Lumines II.

I’ll also say that this is one of the few games I will play while simultaneously doing something else, usually watching television. Tim’s love of cheesy scifi (oh, and my own, grudgingly) means that there’s often some fluffy, fun, but ultimately simplistic series in our queue, and at times I’d rather watch while solving timed puzzles than concentrate on a show that by itself can’t hold my interest. It’s become an unofficial benchmark – Battlestar and the Wire require my full attention, but I can’t sit through Eureka unless I’m multitasking. Is there such a thing as a Lumines snob?

#4. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None

We can do so much better than this.

I’ll freely admit that I’m an Agatha Christie junkie. I’ve read every mystery the woman wrote, and as many of her short stories and plays as I could find; and Hercule Poirot is not only my favorite fictional detective (with apologies to Sherlock and Adam Dalgliesh), but one of my all-time favorite characters. Christie novels are like comfort food for me; so I was somewhat anxious about this particular translation.

Mystery games as a genre are difficult for designers because they expect so much from their players – it’s not about timing or precision, but about intelligence of a very specific nature. You can’t depend on a player to be Sherlock Holmes without some serious guidance; you can’t expect that players will automatically make the links that Poirot or Dalgliesh would make, given the same set of clues and events. And as tempting as it is to add multiple possible endings, that seems to me to dilute the nature of mystery’s best impossible problems. I can tell you right now how Christie’s Ten Little Indians ends: who did it, how, why, and the reasons and methods by which all ten suspects die. For some author to come in and add not only multiple endings, including a love interest for the new eleventh guest, but a “brand new killer!” (as the box advertises) seems to be the most obvious way to approach the problem, and the least fruitful in the end. As a retelling of Ten Little Indians, this is a disappointment – so much of Christie’s novel is watered down, wasted, or simply lost, and so little is actually gained!

Additionally, the simplicity of the actions I’m given to work with are downright discouraging. I understand that the classic adventure game has certain gameplay staples, but this particular attempt is as story-driven as they come, and I’m constantly frustrated by searching for the arbitrary actions that will drag the story along. For example, I know Marston dies first, by drinking poisoned whiskey right after the initial accusations, but it took me ten minutes to figure out that I had to pick up a gramophone record before that event would occur. Of course, as soon as we add any truly innovative piece to the adventure game format, we classify it as something else (take Indigo Prophecy, for example), but that doesn’t change my sense that I’ve been playing through a wasted opportunity here.

The lack of decent animation, or even decent character models, means that those moments that are the most powerful or suspenseful in the book come across as bland or even silly here – how am I to know what Blore is thinking when his face and body language are completely inexpressive? In this world, an “angry” character shakes a little and the corners of the mouth turn down; that is simply not enough. Add to that the out-of-time Patrick Narracott, who shows up in jeans and a leather jacket in an era when everyone else is still dressing for dinner – not to mention that our uptight, proper governess Vera Claythorne wanders around in a revealing purple evening gown, looking like a flat cross between the Little Mermaid and Jessica Rabbit. Add to that the mostly atrocious, often lengthy expository dialogue. Without the novel’s ability to present each character’s point of view as needed, our Mr. Narracott suddenly and unbelievably becomes everyone’s personal confidant. The house and island themselves are serviceably built, but without character, and I often felt as if I was wandering through a user-created area in the Sims, not a gamespace meant to inspire paranoia in both the characters and the players.

There are a hundred little nitpicks I could focus on, from the massive oversights in terms of character and design to the small mechanical frustrations, like uninterruptable dialogue or the camera angles in individual shots. But the truth is, this game isn’t meant for me. It’s meant for non-gamers, who might not know what they’re missing, and for fans of mystery novels who will buy it on name recognition alone. And frankly, I don’t think we’ve yet found a structure for mystery games that truly works. I’ve played any number of games with a mystery at the core, but I’ve never been the one to actually solve it; my task as a player is to survive, to follow the story, to complete the requisite number of missions or puzzles, and then to watch the main character uncover the truth for my benefit. For games that are pure mysteries, like this one, I feel like I’ve been promised Poirot and am still stuck playing Hastings, all the time being told that my actions have both merit and meaning when they’re really only triggers to push me through a mostly-set plot. Other genres hide their rails far better than this; of course my actions don’t have true meaning in this fictional space, but I still need to feel like they do.

I won’t tell you who the new killer is, but I’ll say that I was sorely disappointed, and unmollified by the fact that the designers include the original ending as a bonus. Christie’s most infamously frustrating puzzler deserves better than this, as does the genre. I suppose I’ll be just as frustrated when someone releases “Romeo and Juliet the Game – now with an all-new happy ending!”