Ludonarratology

Status: “150%” complete. Unlikely to put more work into it

Most Intriguing Idea: Making a 2-D platformer from projections of a 3-D world.

Best Design Decision: The rotation mechanic.

Worst Design Decision: Being indecisive about the point of the platforming

Summary:

Fez is a very nice game, with an intriguing central conceit, that doesn’t hold up against the puzzle-platformer genre’s recent classics. In part, this is because Fez can’t seem to decide whether its platforming is a puzzle, or just a traversal challenge on the way to the puzzle. The indecision turns out to be a problem. The controls feel mushy and a bit inconsistent, which works out fine when you’re just exploring the world. When Fez starts throwing more conventional platforming tests (e.g. the rising lava level) against the player, though, the inadequacy of the controls turns the game into a pointless exercise in frustration. Fez had a famously long development cycle, and some of these segments feel like artifacts that linger from an earlier iteration of the game.

As for the puzzles, there are a few magic moments, but the cryptographic component mostly fell flat. Figuring out what was going on with the numerical system gave me a great sense of discovery, but the alphabet and tetrominoes did nothing for me. In part that’s due to the tininess and low contrast of those glyphs, even on a fair-size HDTV, but even taking that annoyance into account I just didn’t find any of it very interesting. Fez is at its best when it creates its puzzles from physical perspective, and its best is very good, but the game never really gelled for me as a whole.

I Am Alive is a post-apocalyptic platforming and combat game that does a few things right and many things very poorly. My upcoming second opinion on GameCritics will cover many of the mechanical and technical issues, but I didn’t have enough space to address an additional, more subtle point about the story. I Am Alive clearly wants to be a serious, adult take on post-apocalyptic survival, and in some respects it is. Unfortunately, the game’s treatment of women, among other things, seems to devolve back to the attitudes of a teenaged boy. In I Am Alive, women are helpless objects to be fought over and protected by men.

[Trigger warning]

Part of the problem lies in the traditional “damsel in distress” architecture of the game. The unnamed protagonist starts off searching for his wife and daughter, then finds another little girl whom he must treat for a fever and then deliver to safety, then must save the girl’s mother, then must save the girl again and get her and the mother to a safe haven. Almost all of the goals in the game are oriented directly or indirectly towards “saving” women. In isolation, this would be nothing remarkable, but it forms the nucleus of a more troubling pattern.

I Am Alive denies female characters agency throughout the game world. Within the main quest, a paraplegic man provides the protagonist weapons and frequent guidance, but the principal woman character gives no material aid. Very few characters outside this quest show any ability to help themselves or others, but in these rare cases – a person offering supplies in a wrecked ship, the captain who ultimately saves the woman and child – the roles are held by men. Women have no capacity to help the protagonist or themselves.

Negative NPCs are even more slanted. Many characters will threaten the protagonist, but only attack him if he gets too close. Only few of these threatening figures are women, and all of the more aggressive thugs are men. It may seem strange to complain about that, but when the social contract breaks down, a person’s ability to use force becomes an essential part of life. In this context, excluding women from the enemy list effectively makes them lesser people. Women can’t take what they need, as men can.

I Am Alive goes even further than this in a segment where the protagonist rescues a woman from a hotel occupied by thugs. As it turns out, many women are kept in the hotel against their will, and the men running the place obviously intend to sexually assault their captives. None of the women seem able or willing to fight back, and once he rescues his target, she will not help him in combat, even though the men he’s already killed were armed with machetes that she could use. In this part of the game, women are exclusively helpless victims who rely on the male protagonist for rescue and protection from other men.

Throughout, I Am Alive demonstrates that the women of its post-apocalyptic world are dependent on men for protection and survival. Implicitly, this argues that the equality and self-determination of women is an artifact of modern society, a nicety that came crashing down along with all the buildings. In the state of nature, the game seems to be saying, women must live in fear and need of men.

Even the purest Hobbesian ought to have some trouble with this proposition, not only because it undermines a principle of equality, but also because it ignores the fact that oppression thrives on, and usually requires, institutions. The subordinate status of women for much of Western history was not some tenet carried forth in pure form from deepest antiquity, it was a consequence of social, religious, and economic institutions designed to deny women independence and self-determination. The proposition that women would end up in a state of dependence so shortly after disaster ignores this history entirely.

Here I’ve been rather critical of I Am Alive, but it’s just a particularly striking example of an endemic problem. As I mentioned, the “damsel in distress” structure afflicts many games, due to unsupportable expectations about the audience and the limited creativity of both developers and the executives who fund them. Many commentators rightly get up in arms about the over-sexualized portrayal of women in games. The structural choices that depict women as helpless and needy, however, are an equal and in some ways a more insidious danger, because they inform and develop misogynist attitudes while making the player feel entirely like a hero.

Status: Completed main quest, second quest… mehbe later

Most Intriguing Idea: Essentially eliminating “mana” and cooldowns.

Best Design Decision: The dodge/cc-regeneration mechanic.

Worst Design Decision: Pretty much everything else.

Summary:

Thanks to Tales of Legendia, Tales of Graces f is not the worst game in the Tales series, but oh how close it came. That’s through no fault of the combat design; I found the battles to be exceptionally slick and with very few exceptions very enjoyable to play. By removing the separate “mana” gauge and linking all combat actions to a single, recharging counter, the battles gained a lot of rhythm and a focus on dodging that made them feel significantly more tactical even within the series’ trademark chaos.

Unfortunately, that tight, muscular combat is buried in a metric ton of lard, including an inscrutable synthesis system and a deluge of titles. The idea of learning skills from titles appealed to me at first, but it boiled down to a second experience system that allowed for player input, which just made me wonder why the primary experience system wasn’t doing that. The Eleth mixer, which spot-cooks dishes in combat, is extremely handy, but breaks the common-sense ideas that sustained the otherwise silly cooking system, in my opinion. Also, I kind of missed looking for recipes. The Eleth mixer’s other ability, to generate raw materials, just felt like an admission that the devs hadn’t really checked to see whether the synthesis system was balanced or interesting.

Then there is the story, a stock Tales tale in which the evil but sympathetic whosiwhat is going to suck up all the jujubaba, thus destroying someplacia, starring character archetypes who have recognizably been imported from previous Tales games. The incredibly cramped world features completely de rigeur settings with practically no interesting visuals, and it’s all backed up with a score that has been competently recycled by Motoi Sakuraba from his previous works. It’s all quite gallingly lazy and I’m beginning to think I haven’t the time for it anymore.

If you can’t say something nice… Dodging at just the right moment to completely load up your gauge for a counterattack is so great.

I spent more time than I had anticipated down on the show floor at PAX, although the only thing I visited that had much of a line was XCOM, which was a theater demo and ended up in the “Panels” post. I might have gone for Assassin’s Creed, but they had a woman shouting nonsense through a megaphone and the prospect of listening to her for 30-plus minutes was more than I could bear. Also, the simple truth is that if you spend your time at PAX waiting around in line for a demo you’ll play on XBOX Live in a few months anyway, you are a chump. There are so many awesome games from smaller publishers and indies on the floor that you might not get exposed to anywhere else. So, if you were being a linefool, here’s some of what you missed.

Worst Line: The Green Line. At least there wasn’t a baseball game.

Mark of the Ninja, the next effort from Klei Entertainment, keeps the engine and visual style of Shank, but don’t be fooled: this is a stealth game through and through. Stealth is the only way to progress effectively, and the only way that you can kill. I saw a lot of people try to melee their way out of trouble, but that simply doesn’t work. I got my hands on it for a while, and I really enjoyed myself. The controls feel tight and responsive, though I had a little trouble dealing with floor vents when my conventional platforming A-jumps B-drops instincts took over. I thought the game was stellar overall, though, and this is a release I’m really looking forward to when it comes out this summer for X360 and PC.

Speaking of stealth, Monaco looks like it’s going to be exactly what I hoped for. In the stealth panel, Andy Schatz explained that he wanted to make a playable heist movie, and it seems well on its way to being that. I played a level of the single-player, a relatively simple prison break, and I thought everything played out exceptionally well. The sensation of walking into a room with a guard and trying to run back out again before he spotted me was perfect. Multiplayer seemed a bit chaotic, but no less entertaining for that. It seems like fall is the target for the PC release.

Weirdest booth: Lollipop Chainsaw’s demo schoolbus

I also scoped out the improved version of Skulls of the Shogun, a game I’ve been excited about since the last PAX East. It still played every bit as well as I remembered, and unit selection seemed a bit snappier, which addressed the only qualm I had. I was told the game is meant to launch for PC, X360, and I think Windows Phone (or maybe that was just a dream I had) alongside Windows 8, so getting cracking, Microsoft!

This wasn’t the only medieval-style warfare I saw: Paradox had War of the Roses playable on the floor, with the customary “pre-alpha” disclaimer. I hope that was accurate, because there were problems. The controls felt sluggish and unresponsive, the combat involved a lot of wandering around other players wondering why your weapon wasn’t striking, and there didn’t seem to be much of a way to counteract the tactical advantage of numbers. I didn’t mind getting slaughtered, in fact I more or less encouraged it because I wanted to try multiple loadouts, but if I were playing for real I would have been pretty frustrated by the affair. I generally think 3rd person is superior for melee combat, but this was not an encouraging go at it.

I had a better experience with Chivalry: Medieval Warfare by Torn Banner studios. The combat seemed further along, at least, and the weapons were relatively responsive. The first person perspective is very like Skyrim, with both the good and bad that implies. I found that the overly stable viewpoint made the weapons seem somewhat weightless in my arena battle. There also wasn’t a lot of visual feedback when hitting or getting hit. That will hopefully be tightened up a bit as they iterate. The representative I spoke to implied some pretty ambitious plans for the multiplayer, including an interesting siege mode with shifting objectives and defensive tactics. If they pull it off that could really be something.

Line-est line: Spec Ops: The Line: the line

Since it was PAX, I decided to try Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 3, developed by Zeboyd games. As you’d expect, it looks like a classic RPG, although combat seems to play out a little more dynamically than in Breath of Death. I enjoyed the combat, though the particular area was rehashing some of the first game’s less-funny ideas. The menu system also seemed a bit unrefined, though I expect it will be touched up before release. At least in this particular area I don’t think anything was lost in the change of aesthetic, so fans of the series should feel comfortable giving this a whirl.

Another strange hybrid was A Valley Without Wind, a side-scrolling post-apocalyptic platformer. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, and the basic controls were quite good. The combat seems like it might be a real problem, however, as it is all too easy to find yourself stuck inside a mob of robots or whatever that kill you while you can’t escape. There are a number of really interesting ideas in here, though, so I may give it a second look when it comes out in a few weeks.

That’s not everything I saw, but it’s everything I had distinct impressions about. That’s all I have to say about PAX this year. If I missed you, then hopefully I’ll run into you next year.