Gunpoint is a
superlative video game. Let's get that
out of the way. It's good at being a
game, it's fun to play, if you see a copy of it, you should buy it. It's short, sure, but it's worth at least
five bucks, maybe ten. It deserves every
ounce of the uniform praise its garnered from press, from intellectuals and
from coarse gaming ruffians. It's smart puzzle game that encourages you to
avoid violence while offering achievements for punching someone in the face one
hundred times without a hint of incongruity.
It's straight up classy.
It's also a key example of the noir genre realizing itself
in video games. For the uninitiated,
noir is a genre whose meaning varies according to the context you present it
in, relating to a film movement in the first half of the 20th century, a literary
movement that proceeded and then sustained itself well beyond the film
movement, an art movement, and, in video games, a particular engagement with
theme and set pieces manifested around a tendency to focus on crime, grit, and
the streets of large American cities during the 1920s. Obviously, this last bit isn't a terribly
useful application of the noir genre, especially when you consider noir in its
literary fullness, where it can be used to apply to authors as diverse as H.P.
Lovecraft, Jonathan Lethem, Raymond Chandler, and William Gibson. The idea that a series of set pieces define
noir as a genre in video games often makes its engagements with the subject
matter reductive and pedantic: L.A. Noir
and Max Payne (or perhaps, more
aptly, Max Payne as a series,
particularly its later games) are key examples of noir being acquired to little
real use. Video games use noir because
the set pieces it provides form a sort of overarching shorthand for gritty
realism and moral ambiguity. It's a
shortcut to telling a real story, rather than an attempt to engage with and
expand an existing genre.
Not the case with Gunpoint. Gunpoint's
relationship with noir certainly draws on its artistic tropes. It's smirking as it does so, even. It blends the Chandlerian be-trenchcoated
protagonist (obviously, naturally, on the verge of bankruptcy at the beginning
of the case) with the Gibsonian futurist surveillance state/commercially
available oddly specific technological advancements. It draws from so many noirist genres and
blends them into a single entity, forming, in a sense, a tool for presenting a
survey of the noir genre.
Let me elaborate.
Cyberpunk (arguably not "pure noir," but pfaugh on
people who say that shit) is the most tangential element of noir expressed in
Gunpoint, and yet it saturates the game.
Play centers around stealth and leaping and stealthy leaping, sure, but
the bulk of my time in game was spent fiddling with electronics. Gunpoint
is first and foremost a game about rewiring security systems. Its cute stealth play is secondary. Prominently featured, to be sure, but
secondary nonetheless: missions will require that you rewire things to win, and
certain employers will discourage you from the leaping and pouncing that makes
up "the other half" of Gunpoint's
play. Between security camera footage
playing a prominent role in the story of the game and an array of gadgets that
encourage players to literally turn technology against their opponents,
allowing them to remotely trigger gunshots that wound or kill allies, or rewire
electrical outlets so that they can murder guards with the flick of a switch,
technology is at the heart of Gunpoint,
particularly in how it can be used to subvert authority structures through
guile and acquisition of place (particularly in the case of the rewiring mechanics). And I didn't even mention that the leaping
that makes up "the other half" of Gunpoint's
play is explained as the byproduct of a pair of superbly advanced technopants
that allow players to jump high and jump fast and pounce on enemies, knocking
them to the ground. Cyberpunk is at the
heart of this game.
But that's not all. Chandlerian noir considerations arguably
involve not only a tonal structure reliant on a certain moral flexibility, but
a set of power dynamics based on locations, and locative familiarity. Bluntly put, Chandler, arguably the most
prominent and influential mystery writer of the 20th century, and one of the
founding fathers of the noir genre, built worlds where the ability to
infiltrate spaces and act comfortably within them was key to power and
individual agency. If you look up above
in that previous paragraph, I dropped a little hint about Gunpoint's relationship with this aspect of noir as a genre: the
gameplay, by and large, centers around literally "acquiring" the
elements that compose the environmental structure of a given level and then
turning them to your own will, through the use of wacky cyberpunk rewiring
tech. The power dynamics of Chandler's
noir, wherein muscle is secondary to a quick wit, and the ability to navigate a
social and physical spaces is the most certain means of survival, are echoed in
Gunpoint's unevenly executed re-wire
puzzles. This is a game about moving through
spaces and becoming master of them, not just navigating them effectively. It's noir through and through - Lew Archer
would be right at home in Gunpoint.
There's also an encouragement for the protagonist to
minimize their application of violence: many employers (people who set up
missions in the context of the story) will give players incentives to avoid
killing anyone during a mission. They'll
reward players with additional money and experience if they mind their Ps and
Qs. This is echoed in a number of noir
archetypes: Chandler and Gibson tended to favor protagonists who, while not shy
about dealing with violence, only engaged with it as a last resort. They rarely reveled in it, and when they
applied it, they did so reluctantly.
There's a counterpoint to this: the hard boiled noir
subgenre, exemplified in Dashiell Hammett's writing, and later in James
Crumley's work, presents protagonists who are defined by their capacity for and
willingness to apply violence to their fellow men. While Crumley might be obscured by his
relative recentness, Hammett is indisputably seminal, and no survey of noir
would be complete without a touch of Hammett coloring it. This raises the question: how does Gunpoint engage with the hardboiled
subgenre of noir?
By giving players a gun and letting them use it later in the
game.
This might seem to be at odds with everything I just said
about violence, but Gunpoint's gun
comes at a price. Players who want to
use it will have a limited amount of time to finish a level after they fire
their first round. They'll have limited
ammunition, and the gun can be unwieldy in a fight. But, that said, the gun can also kill any
enemy in the game in a single shot. Of
course, it's not available right away. The
gun requires a substantial amount of money to be unlocked, and works best with
a pair of boots that allow the player to kick down most doors, boots that will
cost nearly all of the hard earned money you'll acquire playing Gunpoint. The macho presentation of violence provided
by these objects removes much of the nuance of Gunpoint's play up to this point, but their application, when
unnecessary, tends to mess things up more than it helps them. Even when Gunpoint
acknowledges the hard boiled noirists who loved their blood and gore, it does
so winkingly, illustrating their conflict with the rest of the genre by placing
the set pieces of masculine empowerment at odds with the rest of the game.
Mine is a roughshod analogy for sure. Noir is a diverse genre, and it's tough to
nail down, but Gunpoint does its best
to play with all the tools that noir provides.
Between a diverse form of gameplay that taps into key thematic elements
of the genre, an art style clearly aimed at evoking a mix of every noir genre
ever created, a plot centered around a combination of themes and story tropes
well at home in any noir novel from nearly any era, and a dialogue system that
presents players with a multitude of noir-y choices to use to construct a story
evocative of their noir genre of choice, Gunpoint
dispenses with the grit and grime admirably, taking what could've been a
pabulum mashup of themes and making it into a wonderful whole cloth celebration
of a diverse and oft misunderstood genre.
That it does so without ever calling attention to the fact that it's
doing so makes it all the more admirable: you could play through Gunpoint without knowing what noir is
and have a great time. I'd just
encourage anyone who likes Gunpoint to
grab a copy of Farewell My Lovely and
dig in - I think you'll find the experience enriching.
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