The Last Candle

Over the weekend, I decided to spend a Saturday doing nothing. Nothing! Woo hoooooo—

Of course, when I say “nothing” I don’t mean those hours were spent on the floor motionless, in the midst of brain-death, pulmonary and cardiac arrest, and it definitely means that I didn’t go out and buy carpet. Saturday was the colliquial day off (and by “day off” I don’t mean…well, forget it).

Instead of singing the choir eternal for a few hours, that one Saturday afternoon was spent playing video games. (Death versus video games? The classic Cake or Death routine by the great Izzard-man comes to mind.) As much as I blather on about the state of digital gaming on this blog and with friends, my actual time spent per week in front of a monitor enjoying a game is less than or equal to five hours.

Fortunately, I think the five-hour mark of time spent gaming qualifies me to keep my self-ordained “Underground” status on Xbox Live. If I had chosen the “Pro” status and missed the weekly quota, whatever it is, I’d probably have underage thugs hired by Microsoft leaving obscene and derogatory insults in my Live messagebox. Anyone who has played Halo 2 or Halo 3 and uses the public voicechat knows what kind of insults Live’s pre-pubescent community frequently wields, and for those that haven’t ventured into that Live mire, your ears and general hope for sustaining good taste and humanity at large is magnitudes more rosy.

Half of Saturday’s game time behind the mouse was spent with Far Cry, which is perhaps the most story-bald and intensely-paced game I’ve ever played. As the pacing and actual gameplay goes, roughly 90% of Far Cry is spent sneaking through lush jungle and archipelago brush and bouncing across pristine lagoons and coral reefs in small inflatable boats. Another 8% goes towards wanton death, murder and killing, and that last two percent is banked against watching completely inept, unnecessary story and plot developments.

I like Far Cry’s action. The gameplay is almost continuously maddeningly intense: a common scenario is spent carefully at the keys, creeping through ferns and under the canopy of palm trees, knowing that the last save point is 45 minutes back and that a couple of bullets from the last two alive mercenaries, who are just a few meters ahead, would be a quick death. Such sequences can take up to a half-hour, which is usually a small part of any individual level. That’s good fun.

What’s not good fun is Far Cry’s complete lack of an engaging narrative. The developer’s complete distain for even attempting to finish penning the first sentence of a half-decent story worth the player’s time is evident right from the opening CG intro, a production that’s equal parts MTV music video, art-school senior project, personification of Attention-Deficit Disorder, and cocaine dream.

Subsequent in-game or intermediary cutscenes forgo even the art-school and cocaine ingredients and are just plain bonkers (for better, or for worse). For instance, I’m probably 30 hours into this game, on the fourth-to-last level, and my femme-fatale cohort just told me that the enemy camp in front of us needs to be cleaned of all bipedal life because it’s there. That’s it, more or less (read: less). I’m hours from the end of the game, and the story is still all, Go kill those guys. Happy to oblige.

The good news was that my gung-ho friend suggested that we use a nuclear weapon to blow up the enemy camp. Evidently the mercenaries we are about to wantonly murder have the nuke around as a table centerpiece, conversation starter, or maybe a Plan S if the previous plan involving the pike-wielding, spiked helmet-wearing, methamphetamine-metabolizing silverbacks don’t take care of any opposition.

“Don’t worry,” says my charismatic companion-in-arms, after I told her she was bark-raving nuts for wanting to detonate a nuke in our vicinity. (She is, evidently, afflicted by an especially virulent strain of malaria.) “The yield isn’t big enough to take out more than the camp.” Oh. Right. Perfect strategy, then.

And that, in a rifleshell, is why I like Far Cry. It speaks in the language of gun reports, and sometimes, at the end of a long day, a bit of the ultra-violence isn’t a bad thing.

The other time used up within Saturday’s game land was spend inside of The Museum of Broken Memories.

I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it, other than thinking it is somehow important. I guess more than a few players will want my head on a platter. But then, art isn’t about pleasing your audience, it’s about looking for the truth, no matter where the quest takes you.

That’s what creator Jonas Kyratzes has to say (in part) about his game, The Museum of Broken Memories, an independent point-and-click adventure game about…well, it’s about war, and people broken up about war, and a lot of other small things. Completing the game from start to finish — no collectibles, no additional endings, nothing — took me about 45 minutes.

Not that I’m not hoping you’ll enjoy this – quite the opposite. As I said, it is a unique game; it goes to some pretty crazy places. The only thing I ask of you is that you keep an open mind, and follow me inside…

Overall I enjoyed The Museum of Broken Memories, but my specific feelings are polarized. The narrative is too loose for my taste: Kyratzes obviously has something to say about the consequences of war, but the player within The Museum is privy only to the bad consequences. (Unrelated to my opinion the game, Kyraztes and I have very different worldviews, to put it mildly.) That in itself is not a detriment, but the actual telling is so loose that its like the game is trying to relate a story using a series of vague gestures instead of words — the player can see a general idea, and maybe a disjointed harmony among the different rooms in the museum, but an overall idea is largely lost within the fog.

Kyratzes has noted in the game’s documentation and elsewhere that this abstract, tenuous design was intentional in the name of art, but I personally would have liked to see a stronger statement, one even stronger than the individual statements given by the rooms of the Museum. This is a case where the parts are worth more than the whole.

Simultaneously, the design of The Museum of Broken Memories is brilliant and well-toned. The experience of traveling within The Museum felt very much like reading a story, and nothing like playing an adventure game, or any kind of game. Room to room, the plot, as stretched as it was, was laid out carefully and steadily like the pages in a book, except that in this book was being simultaneously written and read by me.

While I said previously that The Museum of Broken Memories thrusts the player into a post-war atmosphere, the actual individual stories being told are so much deeper and detailed, much closer to the people who lived the war. This design of having a simple-plot, but deep, compelling and intricate characters or actors is my favorite form of narrative, one I fell in love with largely thanks to the frequent employ of such a design by Kurosawa in many of his films. Museum is a bottom-up kind of story: something connects all of these characters together, but the thing is not the interesting part. The really good stuff is the characters themselves — who they are, what they do, how they are affected, how they react.

The bare interface and straight-forward gameplay progression contributes much to the intimacy of The Museum of Broken Memories — the game has no heads-up display, keeps no inventory, and does not force the player to keep track of dozens of numerical codes and passwords. (If you like collecting codes and items, try The Infinite Ocean, another good adventure game by Kyratzes with another discomforting plot and environment.) The Museum is strictly point-and-click, and does not necessitate pixel-hunting rooms for items or buttons or switches. Transitioning rooms and dialogue is obvious and easy, and consequently the pacing is brisk and unrelenting.

But there’s one scenario in the Museum where the “obvious and easy” navigation is intentionally thrown out the window, and the player character is literally stumbling around in complete darkness. When the lights go out in, say, Super Mario Bros. (or Fatal Frame 2, where a ghost really did take away the player character’s sight), it’s extremely annoying, but the usage and presentation in The Museum of Broken Memories is both appropriate and entirely effective.

That’s what I like about the design of The Museum of Broken Memories: its intent and rule-set is clear, even if its plot isn’t (intentionally, again), and the game works wonderfully within its self-picked constraints. Many things could’ve lessened the impact of The Museum of Broken Memories: having to keep track of codes and passwords, for one, or keeping an inventory, or, Thor forbid, an action sequence. There’s even a bit of spoken dialogue that’s slightly comical, but again Kryatzes, firmly holding onto the reigns, exhibits discretion about what works in his game. And it does work, very well.

I need more of these 45-minute games. Beating a couple of these short-story games every week would beat out 30 hours of Far Cry any time. Maybe it’s time for me to start tapping into the indie text-adventure circuit for future entertainment.

Or, heck, maybe I should try making one of those 45-minute games, and finally see if I can put all of my griping into a worthy product. Some day, some day.