My 2015 in games, what a meaningful year it was.
By Aska 0 Comments
OK so, let me start by saying that despite being a yearly subscriber since 2012 and having probably one of the first accounts to sign up when the site launched in '08, I don't write a lot on here or interact with the community much at all. I visit the site daily, watch damn near every livestream, and haven't missed a podcast in the 7 years this site has been around. Point is, Giant Bomb is important to me and I wanted to say that being a duder is rad.
I was going to make a GOTY list but it turns out I don't think I even played enough games this year to craft a worthwhile one. For various reasons I just didn't play the majority of 2015's new releases. However, I did play some cool stuff so before I get to the main reason I'm writing this I'd like to just shout those out, in no particular order.
- Ori and the Blind Forest - You probably know what this is. Gorgeous, atmospheric, punishing platforming, and will tug at your heartstrings. Just good videogaming.
- Snakebird - Wonderful(ly frustrating) little puzzle game where you push around and stack little birds in the shape of snakes. Nearly every level requires a lot of thought and leads to a truly satisfying "Ah ha!" moment. Deceptively simple, one hell of a melon scratcher.
- The Magic Circle - Pretty short first-person exploration game. Tells a neat little story wrapped up in the development hell of a game and the mind of its designer. Simple but interesting combat structure and not particularly good looking, it stumbles a bit but overall I enjoyed it.
- Contradiction: Spot the Liar! - If you're reading this on Giant Bomb I'm sure you're well aware of this game. \m/
With that, I wanna get to the real deal stuff I want to talk about: Three games I played this year that all had pretty profound effects on me, in increasing magnitudes, which I'll structure as my top 3 games of 2015. This will no doubt get a little personal and I'm sort of afraid of what'll happen as I keep writing but let's go. Spoilers will come fast and loose.
3. Undertale
I knew from the moment people started clamoring about this game that it was going to be something I'd love. The MOTHER series sits at the top of my list when it comes to video games I adore to death, and the inspiration Undertale takes from it show through very clearly. The game design is creative, the combat system is inventive and unique, the dialogue is downright hilarious at times, and the story resonates as both a melancholy tale of friendship and family but also a look at how we interact with video games. There are people far better equipped than I who could write all about that stuff, and they have.
So all of that aside, Undertale is most importantly, to me, as clear a labor of love as I feel there can be. It feels incredibly personal and a work that is reflective of its creator. It's really impressive and inspiring. It feels like something someone poured their heart and soul into, and what came out of it was something that is representative of a person. It's hard to put into words the feeling I have. It makes me jealous, it's the sort of work that I want to make. Something that has myself, my loves and inspirations, embedded throughout. Something that at the end I can show to people and say "this is me". Maybe that's a little too intense, maybe that's an unfair thing to throw onto a game like that, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but those are the feelings it welled up inside of me.
Which leads me to my #2 spot.
2. The Beginner's Guide
I'm an aspiring game developer. I've been programming for almost 10 years now and I only seriously started working on what could become actual games for about 3 of those. Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide is about a guy, Davey Wreden, who wants to show you the experimental game works of a friend of his named Coda. He becomes obsessed with these experiments, and begins to fear for Coda's mental well-being. Davey extracts a lot of meaning out of things in these experiments and attributes them to various aspects of Coda's personality and psyche. After maybe an hour it is revealed that Coda finds Davey's insistence on showing these personal projects to random strangers offensive, and his arm-chair psychology creepy and projective. It culminates in a plea for forgiveness and a cry out for validation from Davey. I highly recommend you watch the entire thing unfold for yourself, it's only an hour and a half tops.
What was so powerful about this to me is similar to what I said about Undertale, only more direct, or maybe that was the point he's trying to make. Wreden has written before that the success and popularity of The Stanley Parable led to a lot of turmoil for him. People judging his personality and tastes, making up for themselves the type of person he is, based solely off of his work. Reading too much into things, projecting themselves onto him through his game. You can feel his frustration yet adoration for the eyes on his work. The Beginner's Guide feels like a release of all of that, and it feels like a perfect conveyance of those feelings. Counter to what I think the game is trying to tell you, like Undertale this feels like a work that embodies its creator. Not just that it's "him" in the game, and I'm not even trying to judge if this is a true story or fiction, but it feels incredibly personal. It's a short little story he wanted to tell, like something he wanted to get off his chest, and he expressed that through a video game. It's something you wouldn't mistake as anyone else's creation. It resonated very deeply with me. It put into words a lot of feelings I have about the future and my ability to perform, to do what I love doing and doing it well, and to have people want to hear what I have to say. It's another example of the type of work I wish I had under my belt, as part of my portfolio, something people cared about and, most importantly, something truly unique and mine. Another "this is me". Incredibly inspiring.
Thanks Davey.
1. Life is Strange
Ah, shit. Buckle up, this one's gonna be a ride.
I wanna start with the basics. You play as Max Caulfield, an 18 year old girl going to a private high school studying photography. Max discovers she has the ability to rewind time at will, which you have control of while playing the game. It's a pretty typical Telltale-style adventure game with a focus on player choice, but the ability to rewind time fundamentally changes the way you interact with those choices. You're able to explore every dialogue option and get the reactions of the characters (including Max) before finally committing to a choice. It led to the difficult choices you were forced to make feeling so much more impactful because you saw bits and pieces of how it could turn out differently. And they play with your ability to rewind time in ways that lead to some truly amazing moments, by taking them away from you. It's effective in ways only a video game can be, and executed really well. Yeah the writing can be sort of cringey, the game is not a particularly great looker, and the animations are quite frankly abysmal. None of that mattered to me though, the characters shine through. That's all I really want to talk about mechanically and technically. I'll try to move on to the hard part...
I was afraid to play this game.
I was afraid to play this game because I knew its setup.
I was afraid to play this game because I knew I would project myself onto this game from the moment I heard its premise.
Max is weird (doesn't that sound familiar), she's socially awkward (doesn't that sound familiar), and she all but abandoned her childhood best friend and made no attempt to contact her for the better part of her life, the past half a decade, for no good reason (doesn't that sound fucking familiar). Max comes back to her hometown and finds herself reunited with said friend, Chloe Price, using the power to save her life. The entire game revolves around their reforming friendship. All the while Chloe makes abundantly clear the effect that distance had on her. Watching their friendship rekindle organically over the course of the game, with its ups and downs, is the reason you're here. I'm already sensitive about all the little things going on between them with their early-game interactions, Chloe's anger, and Max's regret, but my first sort of breakdown happened in episode 4. Max has gone way back in time, to when they were kids, to try and fix the death of Chloe's father. After realizing there's no way to do that without fucking everything else up, she sets things back to normal and has an emotional, tearful goodbye with kid Chloe before going back, knowing she will be leaving her for the next 5 years:
"Listen, whatever happens, I want you to be strong. Even if you feel like I wasn't there for you... because I will never abandon you"
and I broke. It was the first time in the game where it really felt like it just expressed something I'd been trying to say for a long time. A feeling I'd had inside that I couldn't give words to because it was really nebulous. This is when I started getting really scared, scared of how this game was going to wrap up.
Things go back to normal for awhile while the rest of the plot develops, until eventually it comes back to Max and Chloe. The climactic moment of the game has Max making a choice. A drastic, horrible choice. I foresaw this about 30 minutes to an hour beforehand, putting it off in my mind so I didn't preemptively lose my shit. I knew if I thought too hard about what that means I wouldn't get through it. The ending I chose was the option of unfucking everything by going back in time to the moment Max first uses her power, and not using it. Allowing Chloe to die while Max sits and does nothing. As Chloe dies for the final time, the game focuses on a sobbing Max doing nothing to stop it. At this point I'm basically breathless. I knew that whatever the other ending was, it wasn't for me, and had I chosen that the entire thing would have fallen apart. It would have been wrong. This was the ending I needed to see. I'm heartbroken but not yet losing it. As the game is wrapping up with a really effective closing montage, it briefly runs through my mind what this actually means. In this timeline, her friendship was never mended. In the canon timeline of Max's life, she's left with this dangling thread of radio silence towards her best friend.
I snap, and I snap really badly.
Chloe's out of her life for good and she made no attempt to show she cares, and it hit me like few things have. My mind is bouncing between Max and the way she's left things with Chloe, and my own life, my own shit I deal with on a near-daily basis. It happened really fast, I went from breathless and unmoving to a shaky blubbering mess in a literal second. I haven't been this emotionally affected by anything in a really long time. The game solidified itself as something I won't be forgetting. It's the first time I actually sobbed in a long time, I was a genuine mess. It was a bad scene. I didn't want to talk to anyone and basically shut off for a couple of days. Even thinking about it now in order to write this is fucking me up.
I'm doing a bad job at avoiding putting too fine a point on it, so I'll probably stop here, but the game could have only ended this way. There are too many parallels. If it ended any other way I don't know what I would even be writing right now. I eventually watched the other ending and in all honestly I think it's bad, but the lens through which I view this game is just too warped for me to think anything else. It was really the perfect ending in the worst way. It was both cathartic and heartbreaking to play through and I want to thank DONTNOD for putting it out. It really is a wonderful game, with a story worth seeing through.
It took me on a ride through my own dumb ass head, and took me down in a way I was expecting but wholly unprepared for. It was entirely my fault for projecting so much of myself onto this game, but I really think that was unavoidable.
If you made it here, thanks for reading. I'm an asshole.
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