PLUG AND PLAY

I thought it was time people used actual video art/ video works in gaming. Sure, Plug and Play is confusing and outright bizarre as a video game , but it works perfectly well as a piece of art sending a powerful message to the viewer,the player. A nightmarish meditation on connectivity and isolation where people and circumstances are sockets,plugs,coins and fingers shows us a life full of half-uttered sentences,emotional and verbal outbursts,the hurting within and outside groups, and all of that is exceptionally depicted with brilliant , hand-written animations and the sparse sound and musical accompaniment highlights.This interactive animation has come closest to a true game of art I've ever seen.

SUPERLIMINAL

Superliminal

This is a game about perspective and our perception of it that uses a lucid dream as a concept as much as it is a mockery of modern attempts to solve individual problems by exploring the depths of the subconscious. Yes, there’s a good bit of the Stanley Parable and Portal in it, but it’s to be expected since all three explore the hopelessness of the human condition. There’s so much that makes Superliminal a unique gaming experience. You manipulate perspective and objects by placing objects above or below you to make them bigger or smaller in order to solve spatial puzzles in each room. The game designers experiment with game’s mechanics and other physical aspects of its world as you progress making you confused and disoriented, and this is also part of Superliminal’s charm. No amount of stale dialogues or seemingly awkward treatment of subjects and philosophies can change the fact that you’re partaking in a unique gaming experiment treating gaming, happiness and life.

FAR FROM NOISE

Not the most perfect choice for a New Year's post , but certainly an important moment in gaming history. I was about to write something about this game yesterday when I heard that one of my 16 year-old ESL students took his own life by jumping off a balcony of his family apartment. A great kid who was far superior to me at everything he undertook and  was gracious and kind.

The game starts with all the questions a living human faces - fear, doubt, transience of one's physical existence, reality and fabrication in one's life, one's place in the grand scheme of things, the lack of purpose, the loneliness etc The idea for a game is unique - an old car with a young woman inside is balancing on a cliff overlooking the vast  ocean. Aware of the predicament she got herself in, she tries to make sense of it all and reflect on her own life, first on her own and later in a company of a wise deer.The  author gravitates heavily towards and builds the girl's character around his own philosophical views, namely those of naturalism and transcedentalism. The girl came to a place she used to visit as a kid, and you can almost see the storm that goes through her mind as she reflects on her failures and inadequacies. It takes a deer talking nature and natural phenomena such as rain and lightning and thunder to bring her round to a different understanding of life and Universe.

A high level of interaction is successfully achieved solely by using dialogue and  life story building around the main character which is close to impossible to achieve in  textual adventures. Animations liven up the  pace, every details serves the narrative.The game could do without additional intermezzos of poetry, but unlike those recorded lectures in EVERYTHING they are not that demanding and don't grab your attention that forcefully. The conscious decision to not include voice acting and limit the game to texts and background music and ambience is another brilliant way to keep the emphasis on Nature and its grandeur. The intellectual clash between the deer and the girl is reflected in their different use of language, but the rift seems to be growing smaller as the story unfolds. Or not?

Despite this being a game changing title for me, I feel the author is trying to impose his views on us and grin derisively at the world and I think it would be even more ground-breaking if he developed several different characters adhering to different philosophies the player could choose from. This way we only get to see the author's views as the story unravels and him toying with a young mind who might have had  enough. Free will, yes, but moral responsibility first and foremost.

HUMAN: FALL FLAT

Now this is what  I call gaming entertainment! This may easily be the most successful attempt at putting one's dream into a computer game.No gory details, no beheaded beasts, no visits from spectres or ancestors, just your own inadequacies, the fear of failure , loneliness and curiosity that you get punished for on a daily basis.The landscape is simplistic and stripped of  any detail that could be inconsequential  to such a dream.  Bob is naked, wearing only a protective helmet , and fears heights. Accordingly, he solves puzzles by moving different objects around and pushing buttons while walking across floating islands so that he could address his fear by jumping off the platform and falling flat onto another level.To spice the feeling of inability to run things and limited physical movement while we dream , Bob is innately clumsy. In order to get Bob through all the 12 levels you have to master the awkward mechamics (OCTODAD  comes to mind)  that's integral to the game's value and charm. Failure is awarded by laughter in the proud tradition of slapstick humour and  narration borders on misanthropy. This is the kind of dream you can easily see yourself waking up from in a pearl of sweat.
And if you want to introduce your friend to this nightmarish world, there's always the split-screen cooperative multiplayer mode. Enjoy!

THE STANLEY PARABLE

Stanley is just another nine-to-fiver living a stale life of crunching numbers and doing meaningless repetitive tasks at work, a man with no family to come home to . The sudden disappearance of all his colleagues leaves him alone in the building with just an eloquent inner voice at his side telling him what he should do. The voice is annoying, controlling , laughing at his condition, incredibly discerning and intelligent. The game is all about starting again and again, finding alternate ways to come to a meaningless end for Stanley, or sticking to a silly routine like playing the baby game and pushing a single red button for 4 hours without a single pause  until the game recognises you as a God and you come out victorious. How can you not like that? The game puts our tenacity, sense of identity, belonging, orientation, purpose, irony, obeying or disobeying our inner voice to a serious test, with an illusion of choice being the main ingredient of the game. THE STANLEY PARABLE laughs at life, games, the gaming industry, our use of time, rendering them all obsolete.

"Onward Stanley...to destiny. Wouldn't whenever we end up be our destination, even if there's no story there? Or to put it another way- is the story of no destination still a story?"