Proteus

I wish I understood the magical, revelatory experiences people have had with Proteus. I feel like I’m missing something and I’m very jealous. Am I a heathen, or is it just that gamers don’t relax or go outside very much and therefore a quiet moment under a pixel tree becomes blissfully mind blowing?

Don’t get me wrong, it is a beautiful thing; the colour palettes are gorgeous, watching blossom fall is enchanting, and seeing the clouds roll in from the sea is sublime. To round it all off you have the wonderful procedurally generated music and everything on the island audibly responds to your presence enhancing the dreamlike quality of the place. All of which is very lovely, but there’s nothing to actually do. Well, you can walk, sit, stare, follow wildlife around, witness shooting stars, and occasionally get sucked into a fairy circle to progress the seasons, but once you’ve done those things there’s not a great deal left.

Now, I’m not the sort of person who just plays big loud blockbusters so it isn’t the lack of excitement or explosions which bothers me. In fact, there’s one other game I can think of where all you do is walk, sit, and listen to music and I loved that game. In A Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard you play an old lady and all the game consists of is walking down a cemetery path and sit on a bench. Once you reach the bench and take a seat a song plays as the lady sits and reflects upon her long life. If you bought the full product, there are two possible ways the game ends; either the song ends and you have to walk back up the path and out of the cemetery, or there is a very small chance the lady dies during the song. Whilst interactivity is low, the power comes from putting the player in the old ladies shoes. The walk up the path is painfully slow thanks to the weight of time and agony of age, but as the din of the city fades and is replaced by bird song the respite the bench provides becomes a tiny triumph. Both possible endings are entirely bitter-sweet; repeating the walk out of the cemetery back towards the noisy city seems longer and more tiring, but gives you the opportunity to do it all again another day, whereas the prospect of dying in your favourite spot, happy in your thoughts and spared any more pain and weariness is beautiful. Even though the game is very short and interaction is limited, the impact is immense and still resonates with me five years on.

Last year too we had Dear Esther and Thirty Flights of Loving, both of which were completely linear and low on interaction but also managed to do something a bit different and play with narratives in an interesting way. I’m not saying that Proteus needs a narrative to be interesting, more that it lacks the purposeful engagement that made these games successful as an interactive art form.

The way Proteus chooses to engage the player relies on a desire to explore the beauty of the island, but it’s hard to revel in the joy of discovery when there is so little to discover. There’s some pleasure to be had finding a strange creature and hearing the noise it makes, but no sense that they exist outside of that moment. Likewise, there are monuments, stone circles, and solitary houses scattered around the landscape, but they never feel more than the sprites they are. Compare this with something like Brutal Legend, for instance, where the landscape is littered with the relics of a previous civilisation giving a depth to the world, curiosity to the player, and increasing the feeling that the place is very much alive regardless of your presence. Even something as recent and flashy as Far Cry 3 gave you a fully fleshed out island with its own history and ecosystem to explore. Actually, you can pretty much get the full Proteus experience within Far Cry 3 if you choose to just sit on a mountain top, watching the sun rise and fall, the weather change, and observe the merry frolicking of the menagerie of wildlife below. Granted, you can also paraglide from said mountain, kill every heavily armed, drug fuelled pirate using only your re-purposed spoilt rich kid skills, and turn the aforementioned wildlife into increasingly fancy wallets, but relaxation is still an option. In trying to provide such a different experience from this gaming ridiculousness, Proteus seems to have gone too far the other way.

Considering I seem intent on drawing comparisons to other games, the easiest and fairest comparison would be to Minecraft. Like Proteus, it has a blocky art style which is beautiful in its simplicity, there’s no objective other than to enjoy the procedurally generated world, you can watch the seasons change, animals roam, and generally do as little as you please. Once you’re done watching the sunrise, the snow fall, and the sheep shuffle, however, there’s still plenty left for you to do. If you like digging big holes, you can. If you want to make a nice house with a garden, that’s cool too. Prefer adventuring, then why not set sail in a boat to explore whatever’s on the other side of the ocean? Or maybe you’re the sort of person who just wants to build the biggest cock and balls monument you can muster. Put your choice of music on in the background to complement your chosen activity and, at least in my eyes, you’ve completely eradicated the need to ever play Proteus.

I guess the point of all these wayward comparisons is to illustrate that the things Proteus sets out to do can be done well. If you want to do exploration then give me a fully fledged world that I can either discover the history of, or create my own history in. If you want to give me an interactive artistic experience then make my interaction matter, make me feel something or put me in someone else’s shoes, rather than have me be a benign bystander whose presence matters little.

Ultimately, if Proteus was a screen saver and the wandering was automated, it would probably be my screen saver for life. Just having it’s soothing nature in the background whilst I pottered around doing other things would be amazing. As it stands however, forcing me to actually participate and interact with such a limited world feels like a waste of time. If I want to actually relax and contemplate life, I would much rather head outside in the real fresh air, sit under a real tree, and watch the real world go by. If I want to bask in computer generated beauty though, plenty of other games offer similar experiences to Proteus with the added bonus of an actual game on top.