I wouldn’t call it a seamless meshing of game and story, because there really is no story. The game is an allegory. The meaning is wrapped in the symbolism and imagery.

The most obvious place to start is with the three lines of poetry.

dead world

full of shades

today I die

The poem tells us three things. The first line tells us where we are. It’s not the name of the place, but rather the state of the world. In the dead world, everything is dead. The jellyfish, float to the top crumpled, lifeless.  The shades themselves do not move, they too are lifeless. The background is gray, probably the most lifeless color in the spectrum. The dark world is just that, dark. The art direction paints the world nearly black with the shades layering black figures on the black background. Incidentally, this is the only world with a ceiling, meaning there is no escape and like the darkness, the world exists only for itself. Then we have the painful world. This world has a background of red and six figures whose only purpose is to keep you there. They will not react, except to your attempts to swim away. Then they grab you and pull you down, further into the pit. At the end of the trials you are given the final world, free world. The background has changed to blue and the shades are once again inactive. The music changes to a soft hope filled melody and the game ends.

The seconds line, the only one that does not change, notifies you of the presence of shades. These shades are antagonists, obstacles and enemies. They exist and behave differently in each world, but they always exist, even in the free world.

The third and last line is about the woman herself. In gameplay terms it tells us what she is doing, but it also reflects on her state of mind. We see a woman, at the beginning of the game, in full depression. She does not move or react in anyway to the world around her. She is in a fit of depression; “today I die.” She is the same in each world so long as die remains in the third line. The other options are “shine” and “swim.” These three words are her character arc. “Shine” shows her changing and her hope. It is also her instrument of fighting back against the shades and depressing worlds around her. It keeps the darkness at bay. ”Shine” would be the transitional element in her character arc, the instigating event. It pushes back both the darkness of the world and her personal darkness. Then finally she can swim. She lives underwater, swimming is her life and she can now return to it. Though the shades wont let her go easily. With some shining help she escapes and is free.

Furthermore when one new action word is gained, we leave behind one of the worlds. When we gain “shine” we leave behind “dead.” When we gain “swim,” “dark” disappears. The game is an allegory of hope and moving forward. It’s representative of any dark time in a person’s life, when they felt there was nothing left to live for. Today I Die speaks to a spiritual vision of hope and being able to overcome the world’s shades. The shades from before remain, but no longer try to drag you down. Like in life, even in the brightest of times, the shades exist, it depends if you let them rule you or not. In a way it can also be seen as a representation of growing up. The emo poetry of adolescence soon gives way to more life affirming poetry, if ambiguous in nature.

It took a while, but I’ve played another game worthy of the Killer 7 Argument. I just finished playing through Braid for the second time after my first complete save was lost to a corrupt hard drive. The second playthrough was a huge help in getting my head around what to make of the game and figure out what I specifically thought of it.

Braid is the indie puzzle platformer by one Auteur Jonathan Blow. Regardless of what some other critics may say, he is the author of the piece and that is not a bad thing. He is not only the game designer, but did everything else save the beautiful art which was passed into the very capable hands of David Hellman.

(If you want to get nitpicky about the term Auteur, yes it is technically wrong to label him that given he’s only made one game.)

I bring up the Auteur factor, not just because of the intense control that some feel from the game designer’s hand in the text and puzzles, but also because of the intrinsic way that the game is woven and layered.

While thinking upon the game I could not help, but call it literary. It is game that works on any level you wish to examine it. On the surface it is a bunch of mind-bending puzzles that sometimes have deceptively simple solutions in a colorfully cartoon world. And if that is as far as you want to look, the game will not penalize you for it. The game works on that level. If you delve deeper into the different facets of the game you have a picture of a man trying to figure out what happened to the princess and how to rescue her in true Mario fashion. Again if you delve deeper you come into the problem of Tim being an unreliable narrator and that the puzzle worlds are not real at all. And you can continue delving deeper and deeper into the symbolism and intricate interconnectedness of the different elements to the themes and message of the game.

At no point does the game punish you for stopping your analysis. It is a work that is meaningful and can be recognized as such even without a degree in literature, philosophy or game design. Braid also doesn’t rely on a single or few elements to convey all it’s meaning, but rather uses all of them. I hesitate to bring up the comparison and please call me out on it if you feel the comparison or connotation of it goes too far, I wont fight you on it, but in this fashion Braid reminds me of Citizen Kane. Like Citizen Kane all the elements of the work come together to present a singular vision: the art, the music, the mechanics, the story, the text, the symbols, the level design and the puzzles. I cannot say I have seen this unified nature so tightly packed together in any other game.

Braid does have marks against it. The puzzles as mentioned before are mind-bending and you can spend forever trying to get your head around what you were suppose to do before you give up and check gamefaqs. The text is baffling at first when put in conjunction to the rest of the game and the epilogue throws everything through a loop. Braid invites inspection and analysis and it almost seems part of the game to do so. It is complex and can seem incomprehensible at first; hell most of us critics are still trying to figure it out.

While all of those can be counted as flaws, they can also be counted as assets to the game. They are intricate parts to the braid of meaning, twisting and wrapping each element around each other. It’s one of the few games that tie its mechanics directly to the themes of its story and vice versa.

Is Braid going to tick you off? Will it make you throw your hands up in frustration? Is the designer Jonathan Blow a big enough prick to warrant not playing the game? I honestly have no idea. But if you have the money and the time give the game a shot, it’s on Xbox Live, Steam for PC and now the PSN. I say give it at least a try and if all else fails, try a walkthrough.

Small Worlds is a simple game. It has three buttons: left, right and jump. And that’s all the game needs. You are in an environment that you cannot see until you begin to move around and explore. The more area you cover the more black pixels disappear and the camera pulls back so you can see everything at once. From the initial hub world you travel through four portals to four different worlds where you start the process again in revealing the new environment. You only go back to the hub world when you find a glowing square that is then taken back with you to the space station/ship.

That is the entire game. There are no enemies, there are no obstacles beyond the basic platforming and there is no fail state. The game’s entire focus is on the worlds around you. The five worlds are very different in setting, but evoke the same basic premise and overarching theme. I’ll go world by world.

The hub world is a derelict station or ship; it is never made clear exactly what it is. All we know is that it is heavily damaged, with collapsed ceilings, a broken glass dome and flickering lights. We also know that it is in space somewhere. It is meant to evoke the emotions and sense of danger reminiscent of Dead Space and Alien. Something terrible happened here, but we don’t know what and will never definitively find out. All we know is the facility is wrecked; possibly beyond salvage and we are alone. The more we explore the more that is made apparent. The only places we can go are through the four teleporters.

In the white world we begin in a place of caves and snow. It is someplace in the wilderness among evergreen trees and endless snowfall. We travel through a system of caves, covered in both dirt and ice, moving underground. We soon find man-made structures, large shafts made of metal stand, but appear to have to purpose for being there. Some of the ceiling has caved-in. As you travel through to the other side of the local you come upon a screen with a map on it with several yellow dots blinking. You keep going and find more shafts, two of them this time still occupied by missiles. Suddenly you realize it is not a normal winter outside, but nuclear winter and the glowing dots were the targets hit, their number corresponding to the number of empty missile shafts.

The blue world transports us to the middle of a cityscape with water streaming down endless waterfalls. The water falls and flows over a number of platforms and we once again travel downward into an underground reservoir where we see a stream of green ooze flowing and mixing into the blue water. Traveling further down you find a water elevator that will take you to the top of the world where you find this contraption is bringing the water to the top so it can once again flow down back into the reservoir in an endless cycle. Going the other way at the top we find the gears that run the system and more carved out underground shelters. The environmental poison having taken all life.

The green world is less obvious than the others. All we can see is a bunch of floating rocks on a green background. As we move around you continue to find floating rocks spread out in every direction. This time we start at the bottom and have to make our way upward. The higher we travel the more rocks we find, bigger than the ones below. The green background fades into bright white and then back into green. The white light is a white sphere exploding with all the smaller rocks around the rim and the larger rocks in the center. We are witnessing the destruction of a planet. The white light is the explosion and the rocks the shattered ruminants. This world no longer exists.

Finally the red world changes things up by having the background being a plain black. Now we are unsure at certain points if we are pushing back the veil of pixels or not. The path is narrow and creates a spiral pattern. The walls are purple and we have no idea what we are in until we hit a white rib. We are traveling through the innards of some large monstrous space creature. It’s dead now.

All five worlds evoke the dead. Each world is dead each in its own way. Which paradoxically goes against the opening line of the game “There is too much noise…” The only noise in the whole game is the ambient music and single sound effect of reaching the glowing box. The character makes no noise, and neither do the worlds.

From this I have two theories about what happened in the game and what its meaning is.

First, we have a man alone on a space ship looking for life. The noise is all in his head. He is alone in the void of space, everything he knew and loved destroyed. It has driven him mad and he wants to relieve the pain and anguish. Traveling from world to world he finds the same thing everywhere in different forms. Nuclear winter, toxic environmental disaster, an exploding planet, and a creature’s corpse. Death and destruction follows him everywhere as does the silence of worlds. He gathers the power sources to activate the pod and releases it, with himself inside, into the sun. “Silence” the ending screen tells us. In death he finds silence; he finds peace from his own madness. Maybe he was the cause that destroyed his ship, perhaps he went mad and killed everybody, or maybe he was just a survivor of the disaster and cannot bear to be alone.

My other theory is that the worlds are connected by a single story. A creature came from space and attacked our planet. We responded with nuclear force. This led to nuclear fallout (white world). However, the creature’s corpse (red world) leaked toxic like blood and bodily fluids into the city shelters, poisoning the water supply (blue world). The other consequence to such an act is the loss of nature and break up of our own planet (green world). A man on a space station orbiting Earth is the only survivor. There is no hope left and he seeks to follow his doomed world into oblivion. The noise was the war, the terrifying sound of the bombs detonating. He wishes to find solace and escape from the noise. He launches himself into the sun to join his doomed brethren. “Silence.”

A note to the future of the series. I’ve done cross concept posts between this site and Creative Fluff. I hope to make as many of the Spotlights such posts. Highlight them there and then do a critique of it here.

For the first Indie Game Spotlight I decided to use No More Fun’s Norwegian Wood. Game helped come into existence thanks to the middle circle’s own Quixotic Engineer.

As for Norwegian Wood, there’s not a lot I can say about the game itself. It has solid and challenging gameplay and the use of the song is inspired. It only uses one song, so I can’t really call it a unique new way to experience music like Guitar Hero and Rock Band were. I did notice something every interesting emerge in the community after it was released. Several people that are on twitter got a little obsessive of the game. They played the thing relentlessly trying to get the high score (which has since doubled in the last week). Even with only one song, it wasn’t the music that kept people coming over and over to the game, as good as it is. Nor was the gameplay in itself addictive to the point that it was the main draw. It was the leaderboard. Even after all these years and innovations it is still a huge motivation to play. To systematically and numerically prove that you are better than everyone else. Except now with the internet it is not longer about being the best in the arcade, it really is about being the best in the world. Though my score has since fallen off the top 30, I see many familiar faces. There are many repeats on it. Nearly all the scores there are new since I last checked about a week ago. People are still playing the game. It only lasts a little over two minutes, but since no one has mastered it the scores will continue to accumulate.

I wonder if that would have been true had they chosen a longer song. Does the briefness of the experience allow the player to be more willing to try again? People on twitter noted the fact of it being limited to a single song alters there experience. Ben Aberham noted how there would have to be multiple learderboards had there been multiple songs and even a second leaderboard would have ruined some of the competitive nature. Each arcade cabinet had only one leaderboard, because there was only one game and that what everyone was playing. Aristotle talked about unity of time and unity of place for the medium of theater. I wonder if, for critical purposes, games should add their own: unity of rules. Not just that everyone has to play by the same rules in an argument of fairness, but within the game structures themselves there should be a unity of rules, as a manner in which to fight against the complexity curve that games have fallen into.

Then again that is all well and good to talk about simplicity when it concerns a simple game about avoiding notes when it comes to song choice, but a very different one when it comes to epic RPGs or tactical shooters. Audiosurf also proved that multiple scoreboards can exist for many different modes and songs. But then the best Audiosurf stories have been about very obscure tracks being played by only two people trying to one up each other. It’s the same there. Everyone is trying to one up each other on a single track. It isn’t all about competition, but the close knit community that get formed in that competition. So in the end I’d have to say, yes the game has one song and is better for it.

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