Category Videos

Two Minute Game Crit - The Games of Sophie Houlden

 

This video is community funded. To support my work and help me make more of these, please consider visiting my Patreon and becoming a patron.

Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit, and I’m Stephen Beirne

Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, we’re going to be looking at the games of a specific developer, Sophie Houlden.

Sophie’s a one-woman indie machine, carving out these absolutely gorgeous, beautifully designed games by the dozen. Let’s look at just three from her catalogue which I think lend you a good idea of what she’s about.

Sophie has made a ton of puzzle games, my favourite being BOXGAME. You move around the faces of a box and you have to trick the camera into giving you a new direction of gravity so you can kind of… fall the right way.

Sophie’s a wizard at designing these genius mechanics that are simple to grasp but hard to master. Where you intuit solutions by playing around rather than through planning.

It’s good, so, that she’s also an incredible animator.Even just moving your wan around in BOXGAME gives this sense of elegance in motion.

This is partly why I love TheLinearRPG. It’s a stripped down mock-up of a lot of modern RPGs. You run along the line to make the mechanics happen, meanwhile the story unfolds rather detachedly as a backdrop.

The crisp aesthetic is a veneer of polish over this skeletal frame, which can be interpreted as a mockery of design priorities in the industry. But, what fascinates me most this is how it uses abstraction of form to convey its point, given it’s not actually an RPG.

When she wants to, Sophie has some hand at spinning narrative through form, as is the case in Runcible Sky, with its hub-and-branches structure.

It focuses on inspiration in one’s mortal life and the disbelief of life after death. Each vignette is a snapshot of your wan’s past, and on viewing them, the final moments in her fading life slowly gain their substance.

“Runcible” is an inkblot word, it has no meaning other than what we infer from it. And likewise, we can search each vignette for some great authorial design, but maybe we’re better off taking what we got from them and accepting that as our meaning.

Sophie’s games are many and varied, you can find most them by visiting her site. The best are on her shop though so be sure to pick something up for just a few bob.

 

Two Minute Game Crit - Drama and Composition

This video is community funded. To support my work and help me make more of these, please consider visiting my Patreon and becoming a patron.

Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit and I am Stephen Beirne.

Final Fantasy VII was a masterclass in storytelling. We’ve no shortage of dramatic, epic, expensive games these days, so the fact that a game might have Themes isn’t so unusual now as it was in 1997.

But what makes Final Fantasy VII so impressive, even by today’s standards, is how it related the drama through its broader composition, such as: its recurring motifs of a combined heaven and earth; the use of space and geometry to differentiate wealth from poverty; and the precariously attuned relationship of nature and technology.

One of my favourite things about it, though, is how it ties in themes of identity and existentialism.

There’s tons of scenes we could use to sample this but the best is probably this one here, during Cloud’s flashback to the Nibelheim Incident. Sephiroth‘s having a crisis of identity, and he locks himself in the library of the Shinra mansion while he researches his origins.

The way this scene is shot tells us that the farther he goes through the corridor, the deeper he delves into his past, and the more it affects his perception of his identity. Even though he’s kept centred on-screen, his stature diminishes, and he’s obscured by all the books piling after him.

When Cloud returns to check on Sephiroth, his whole demeanour has changed. The shot of the library’s corridor is repeated but now with reversed connotations. He strides right up to the camera, and takes a dominant position in the foreground, making good use of the Futch angle. There’s nothing this time to clutter him from view, and his trajectory brings him out from the diminished place of his existential crisis to this point here, large and emboldened.

The symmetry tells us a lot about his dramatic change in character, so this shot serves as a nice reference for when Sephiroth became a villain.

This is also matched in other structural ways on either side of the scene, like changes in his speech patterns and combat behaviour. Whereas before he used to revive people, after leaving the Shinra mansion…

[flames]

There’s no doubt he’s a villain at this point.

So the next time you come across a story-focused game, have a think about its composition and how it reflects its drama.

Two Minute Game Crit - Exoptable Money

 

This video is community funded. To support my work and help me make more of these, please consider visiting my Patreon and becoming a patron.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me in longform at Normally Rascal.

Here’s a game called Exoptable Money made by someone named Wertpol. The premise is, you’ve come across this mysterious box that churns out money – not an ATM though – and you’ve taken it home to have it do just that and make you rich.

It is the best staring-at-a-box-making-money simulator that I’ve ever played.

You can spend your money on upgrades to have it produce more money, and then things like sapphires and other unlockable things and a cat which pops up onscreen and when you hover over the cat it loves you.

Sometimes when you make a purchase you receive a letter from a couple of interested parties… who are all bastards. They’re just interested in your money. All things considered, you might not be surprised to hear it’s a game about capitalism.

Wertpol’s made another game more recently called Presentable Liberty, which is also about capitalism. You’re imprisoned in an empty cell with nothing to do but you’ve got these penpals who write you letters and tell you about the world, and gradually send gifts to help you stave off the boredom.

Before long I got this weird sense of the cell as this kind of familiar, cosy space while also being frustrated with all these shite gifts, coupled with my penpals’ paper-thin infatuation with me. Like they’re only there to endear my incarceration and flatter my ego. But their efforts to placate me made me hollow and angry.

I see some people writing how they got this profound human connection out of these penpals’ correspondence and it’s like Jesus Christ ye are probably the same people who fell in love with Yorda from Ico. They’re not characters, they’re morphine drips.

Anyway, in Presentable Liberty you’re the capitalistic idea of a consumer, whereas in Exoptable Money you’re a capitalist yourself, making money in order to be able to make more money and all that

Initially it’s great, living the fantasy of having money just trickling in and becoming richer and richer. After a while, sitting there watching cash falling out of the box becomes kind of hypnotic, the flapping of notes and the clinking of coins forms a melody together with the slow, entrancing background music.

And the game goes on and on until making money loses its fantasy and aesthetic appeal. But there’s still things to unlock so you keep plugging away joylessly, buying things to make more money to buy more things to make more money.

I won’t spoil it but there’s an exact moment when you know you’ve lost a bit of your soul in the pursuit of boundless riches. It gets more and more gruesome until by the end everything’s destroyed and your transformation into a capitalist is complete.

So support me on patreon!

I’m Stephen Beirne and you can find me at these places. Thanks for watching.

Two Minute Game Crit - Walking Simulators and Phantom Rides

Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit. I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me in longform at Normally Rascal.

Today I’m going to be talking about a genre of games like The Legacy here. In The Legacy, you walk around this deserted wasteland and eventually come across a few things of interest. It’s wonderful for a bunch of reasons I won’t get into in this video.

Now, games like The Legacy are often uncharitably called “Walking Simulators,” or “First Person Walkers,” usually by people who want to dismiss them. My gripe is, it’s a way of looking at the genre that’s stuck in a limiting mentality of what games can do and how the medium works in general.

So I want to break down some of the underlying subtext of these terms and challenge their continued use.

First there’s First Person Walker, or the alternative wanky version, First Person Experiencer. Personally I don’t like these variations because focussing on camera perspective misses the forest for the trees. It’s a common shared attribute but it’s not really What’s Going On, you know?

Anyway, they’re far more often called by the pejorative Walking Simulators, which is a name that came about through a very literal way to describe what you do in these games.

You walk.

Walking’s not seen as something especially interesting for a game to have because millions of other games feature walking already. It’s boring and normal. Most players are able to go outside and experience the joys of walking in real life. Through this logic, a game that simulates walking is connoted as valueless.

Now, this all comes from a mentality which erases anything that’s not a game’s mechanics from consideration of the medium’s formal structure. But look it, what the player does mechanically in a game isn’t always a clear indicator of what a game does in general. We’re used to this idea with horror games, so it’s weird how it’s a problem with something like The Legacy or Proteus or Dear Esther.

There’s been some effort to reclaim the term “Walking Simulator” but it’s so rooted in this backward thinking, I feel it’s still a fairly wrongheaded way to describe these sorts of games.

Instead I think we should call them “Phantom Rides,” after the genre of early films where the camera was shlapped to the front of a train.

Back when people were figuring out how cinema worked, Phantom Rides pioneered the whole idea of moving the camera on a rail to give a sense of animation to the viewer. People used to go to the cinema just to be “transported” from the theatre to a journey on a railway line. But it wasn’t just the novel sensation of movement, it was an opportunity for them to experience local sights in new ways, or to visit faraway places they’d never be otherwise able to see.

These types of movies were popular for a brief period before phasing out and being incorporated as film techniques into movies as a whole.

So rather than thinking of The Legacy and all them as “games that simulate walking” or focusing on other coincidental aspects, I think it’d be useful to reframe things to reflect what they actually do: transport us to other places for new experiences. That way, we can find better ways to express ourselves and to understand these games, without the burdensome language put there by people who, to put it nicely, aren’t really interested.

So there we are. Phantom Rides.

I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me at Normally Rascal and on Twitter, or support my work by popping over to Patreon and becoming a patron. Cheers for watching.

Two Minute Game Crit - A Mother in Festerwood


Transcript:

Hi, this is Two Minute Game Crit. I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me in longform at Normally Rascal.

I’m going to show you a small flash game on Newgrounds called A Mother in Festerwood, made in 2011 by Austin Breed. It’s a little bit buggy but I love it to death.

So here we are, we’ve got this overhead view of Festerwood with our house in the middle and monsters all surrounding it. You play as the mother, you use the mouse to move her about the clearing but you can’t go beyond the dotted lines. It’s your job to protect your adventurer son from the monsters of Festerwood by blocking him from wandering outside the clearing until he’s of a suitable age.

As time goes by he ages, grows and becomes faster and more agile. Before long he’s fast enough to dart past you and then… that’s it. It’s up to the mercy of Festerwood what’ll happen to him.

Austin Breed writes he was inspired to make A Mother in Festerwood by his sympathy for mothers who suddenly find themselves with empty nests, which is a great indication that he knows what narratives of parenthood ought to focus on: your child’s independance, rather than your own power and control.

I think part of why I love A Mother in Festerwood is because I played it around the same time as BioShock infinite and The Last of Us, which basically view parenthood the same way a general views an army. But with Festerwood, here was a game that placed importance on the role of your child as an independent entity and threw away all this nonsense about player agency being the medium’s key factor by having the mother and son share the spotlight, by not letting you supersede the narrative here.

How the game progresses depends entirely on the boy’s whim in where he wants to move to – you have to follow him around to hem him in, and then when he finally gets loose the drama of his adventuring is all in where he decides to go while you watch on powerlessly. Although it’s likely to be the longest part of the game and the mother is basically just standing there, it’s the most nervewracking part because all you can do is fret for his safety.

You don’t perform “active verbs” but you still participate with the game in a full on way, even if you never touch the mouse again for the rest of it. Basically the whole heart-wrenching gist of the game, the part that makes it so compelling, completely defies verb-orientated design analysis, and the rest of it undermines the romanticism towards player agency.

So that’s A Mother in Festerwood. I’m Stephen Beirne, you can find me at Normally Rascal and Twitter, and support my game crit through Patreon. Cheers for watching.