I like games. I like
short games, I like long games, I like easy games, I like hard games. And I spend a lot of time thinking about the
structure of games. How they tell
stories, how they use mechanics to achieve their goals. Often, games will operate on a single
wavelength of achievement wherein you accomplish your goals using a single,
static set of mechanics that never vary or change. That’s fine.
That’s better than fine: it’s consistent. Other games use a set of shifting mechanics
to do things like illustrate a character arc or advance the story. The Tomb
Raider reboot is exceptional at that.
But it’s the rare game that actually tells its story and
makes its point exclusively through mechanical changes. The genre is slowly growing, but there’s a
collection of self-aware games that form a sort of high concept commentary on
the process of playing games itself.
Inside my head, I call these “Conceptual Games,” and I want to talk
about two of them in comparison today.
The first is Evoland. Evoland
is a high concept commentary on the evolution of the RPG/action adventure
genre. Its mechanics shift consistently
from start to finish, representing changes in mechanics that allow you to
further the story of the RPG you’re sort of inhabiting. It’s fun enough, and it plays nicely on the
tropes of its genre in order to tell a mashed up, cute little nonsense story
that lovingly skewers the more groan worthy (and wonderful) tropes of
RPGs. All of this is rooted in a neat
little package that plays briskly and, when it chooses to stump you, does so
with puzzles that often demand alteration not of the game world or your
character but the mechanics governing the world.
Evoland will ask
you to do things like swap between 8 bit and 3D play, and this is when it really
starts to shine as a game. Making the
mechanics a mutable element makes statements about the evolution of genre and
showcases how puzzles functioned differently in earlier times, and how nigh
impossible puzzles by today’s standards were easy by old timey standards (and
vice versa). It’s not perfect. Pacing can be intensely uneven, and the
generic RPG story that ties everything together wasn’t solid enough to keep me
engaged all of the time, and lacked the self-aware humor you might expect out
of a game where genre is being so well eschewed. But as someone who grew up on RPGs, who literally
stood witness to the changes they’re illustrating here as he grew from a child
to a young man to an adult in a perpetual state of arrested development, it’s
delightful to see the journey re-created.
But the packaging around that experience, the way the ideas
of mutable world mechanics are internalized, is a bit weak tea, and the worst
parts of action RPGs, the grind, are reproduced without a hint or a nod of
irony. Naming your character Clink is a
cute way to acknowledge your awareness of the genre you’re in, but it doesn’t
give you a free pass to throw the worst parts of what you’re doing into the mix
for shits and giggles.
The second title I came across doesn’t really make any of
these mistakes. DLC Quest is an apt, concise piece of satire that skewers the trend
of adding various kinds of DLC to pre-purchased products. The industry, which holds that DLC is just
there to improve overall experience, often undercuts itself by producing
incomplete experiences and then using DLC to resolve them, or selling extremely
helpful or useful tools to players who would otherwise have to grind their way
through games they’ve purchased in misery.
It’s a sketchy, oft maligned prospect, but DLC Quest does a great job of skewering it, creating a world where
you are not only asked to pay for things like hats and character reskins, but
for the ability to move left, jump, access menus, see animations and hear
sounds. The end result is a game
saturated on every level with an awareness of what DLC is, what’s wrong with
it, and how it’s made games interminable.
Despite having elements of “grind” purposefully inserted for
comedic purposes, DLC Quest is
actually a pretty brisk, well constructed piece of game. It has places to explore and coins to be had,
but it moves so quickly and the platforming resolves so nicely that it’s easy
to let the game just carry you along for the ride. When it does finish, there’s even a nice
little button about how DLC kinda isn’t so great, and the horse armor joke,
while a little easy (one of the first pieces of widely criticized DLC was a set
of “horse armor” you could buy for your horse in Oblivion for about $2.50) is played to good effect.
If I did have a complaint about DLC, it’s that it’s over quite
quickly. This isn’t necessarily a bad
thing – it makes its point and gets out quick.
But if I’d spent more than a dollar on this game, I might be
disappointed, is all. The irony is apparent
to me, in light of the relatively large portion of grind that Evoland wants you to take care of.
These conceptual games take dramatically varying approaches
to making their point, and the degree to which some of them, in this case DLC Quest, might be considered games by
mainstream consumers is somewhat arguable.
I’d be lying if I said I was chomping at the bit to play DLC Quest’s expansion, Live Freemium or Die. But I am curious about it, and I might end up
booting it up by the end of the day.
Likewise, I’ve been playing Evoland
intermittently since long before I wrote this and, at time of writing, still
haven’t finished it after a month or so of dicking around. These products are something, but I might not
be the right person for them.
Still, their simple existence is reassuring. It displays an awareness of both the heritage
of games and the problems that beset them in the present day. As long as games like this exist, it proves
that we can have an intelligent, mature dialogue about these pieces of hardware
that compel us to spend such sums of money, to commit so many hours of our time
to their annals, and to debate them so passionately and incoherently on the
internet. In light of that last bit, the
dialogue afforded by conceptual games is perhaps particularly important.
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