Great things about 2016 - part three

Felicitations!

2016 is the past now. Even typing the numbers seems weirdly old and peculiar. The past! Who'd live there?

Well, I did. And some nice things happened. And here are some of them. I've talked about music here, and films here. This time - video games!

It's been a good year for games. If you don't play games, or haven't for many years, then you may well be unaware of the massive diversity and brilliance at work in video games today.

Games are really coming of age at the moment. There are still plenty that focus on shooting and killing stuff, yes. But there is an increasing number that explore weird, beautiful and worthwhile concepts.

There are six games here. Two out of the six have female protagonists. Three are male. One is made of string. They deal with love, loss, memory, freedom and transformation. They are all great and they all made my year better.


Oxenfree

 

A bunch of teenagers go to a haunted island to drink beer, fall in love and get possessed by weird alien ghost entities. You are Alex, a teenage girl, trying hard to deal with your own emotional baggage and the politics of friendship as well as all the weird supernatural spooky stuff on the island.

I love the mood and tone of the game. It is supremely creepy. You have a radio which you can tune into ghostly radio stations, picking up music from the past, or mysterious voices phasing in and out of existence. And sometimes reality itself warps and shifts, the entire screen distorting like a 1980s video cassette.

An engaging and scary experience with innovative gameplay and cool, believable dialogue.



Bound

You're a dancer, in a dreamlike world of Escher-like palaces and walkways. You flip and leap and twist around demonic entities that might represent past memories or something. Dancing frees you from the past, and the charge towards this freedom is exhilarating and wonderful.

You're also, sometimes, a pregnant woman on a beach, looking wistfully at childlike doodles in a notebook. Is this who is dreaming the dance? Are they her memories? Her hopes? The game keeps its secrets, right up until the end.

A game which inspires deep emotions while at the same time providing real kinetic joy. Beautiful.




Inside

You are a nameless boy, running though a bleak, monochrome city, pursued by masked men and carnivorous dogs. It's a David Lynch-like dream world, surreal and darkly enchanting.

Gameplay is mostly about solving puzzles thrown up by the environment. How do you get past these obstacles? How can you use these tiny, tweeping chickens to get you up onto that ledge? What do you have to do to get past this strange, murderous, underwater death child?

Inside is at once charmingly simple - the controls are basic and the solutions elegant - and fascinatingly deep. There is a complexity and strangeness to this world, and these events stayed with me long after the game was over.




Unravel

You are a little man made of string. You go on a journey through gardens, fields and beaches - ordinary places to a human but huge, magical cathedrals of wonder to someone your size. As the title suggests, you unravel yourself slowly to make bridges and swings to help you navigate your environment.

A charming, gorgeous game that's partly an ingenious puzzle game and party a moving exploration of memory and loss.




Firewatch

You are Henry. Personal tragedy has driven you into a National Park, where you now live and work alone, high up in a tower, keeping a lookout for fires.

It's a beautiful world to be in, and the focus is less on plot than it is on experiencing the solitude and wonder of the surroundings. There is story here, though, and that unfolds through conversations - via walkie-talkie - with your boss, Delilah. She works on another tower, way over on the horizon. And she knows things about these woods that no-one else knows.

Finishing this game felt like coming back from a holiday romance. Warm, wonderful and slightly sad.




That Dragon, Cancer

Bleakest and saddest of all the games I played this year, That Dragon, Cancer puts you in the shoes of the game's creators,  Ryan and Amy Green. And what shoes. Ryan and Amy's son Joel is the one facing the dragon, cancer, just as he did in real life. And for the most part, all you can do is watch.

It's a game which pushes at the boundaries of what 'playing a game' means. It seems glib to even consider it in game play terms - to engage with this game is to experience real parents' grief. But the fact that it is a game is important, and indeed crucial.

To play a game is to do something. To effect change upon the game world. To win, most of the time. This is a game where you live in a world without very much choice in how things turn out. As a way of sharing the experience of grief and loss, that's pretty powerful.

Despite this, That Dragon, Cancer is not an unremittingly bleak experience. There are moments of joy, and a playfulness in the way the world of the game is created, as if the laws of reality are governed by Joel's childlike perspective. There are surreal and inventive sequences which helped me consider that life, even a life this brief, can contain moments of joy and love and meaning.




A really good year for games. There were also some games where I just shot at mutants with space rifles, and I enjoyed them too. But these are the ones that really engaged with my emotions. I recommend them all, without reservation.

Waiting in between

Today is Christmas Eve. Well, it probably isn't for you. You live in the future, stalked by cybernetic robots and/or downloading your personalities from the sky. You look back at Christmas Eve as 'the time before the cockroaches rose up against us' and weep for lost innocence. But for me, this is Christmas Eve and I sit before a sparkling tree, Bailey's in one hand, iPad on my knee, thinking back over the year gone by. 

December 24th is my favourite day of the year. It always has been. It's not always a great day, a day where wonderful things happen, but it is a day of promise and of anticipation. Crackling with maybes and possiibility, like the whispers in the air that mean it's going to snow. Not that it generally does, these days. Snow, that is. Tonight the sky is full of rain, or, as I like to call it, 'lazy snow'.

It snowed in 1984. Or thereabouts. I sat in the front room of my parents' house, alone in the near dark, watching snow billow down through the night sky, loving it. I was very cool then, as you can imagine, so I was spending my day reading the Companion Rulebook for the popular role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. It's among the happiest I've ever been, buried in charts and tables and descriptions of mythical beasts. Which is a good thing, as I wouldn't have anything resembling a girlfriend for quite some time. 

I don't do role playing much any more, but I still think very fondly of that night and, indeed, of the whole 'role playing' thing. In many ways it's still part of my life. This year I've played a number of video games that have been up there with the best artistic experiences I've ever had, and they are rooted in the same place as that Companion Rulebook. Systems and structures that try to create meaning and significance from things that are, essentially, nonsense. Games of pretend that are at once meaningless and profound; wastes of time and works of art. Whatever fascinated me on that Christmas decades ago still ticks inside.

Here are a few of the games I've played this year. I recommend them.

This War of Mine

If you've played The Sims you'll know the pleasures of controlling the lives of a bunch of little pretend people as they go about decorating their homes and pursuing careers. It's like a Rorschach test for the  soul. Do you play the game as intended, living vicariously through their consumerist urges and buying them the best sofa on the planet? Or do you simply trap them in a swimming pool and watch in glee as they wee themselves to death? Or maybe you could make everyone have affairs, so they all end up desperately sad and weeping, until you burn their house down and kill their pets to give them some perspective on what misery really feels like.

This War of Mine is a bit like that, only this time you don't need to do anything terrible to the people under your care - it's already happened. The bunch of characters under your control live in bombed out ruins, eking out a pathetic existence somewhere in the midst of war torn Eastern Europe. Your job is to help them scavenge for food, fortify their crumbling home against violent scavengers and try to keep their spirits up against the grey relentless misery of life in a time of senseless war.

It's a good game, well balanced with strong mechanics and a distinctive aesthetic that draws you into the world. But it would be hard to describe as 'fun'. Your character will starve. Freeze. Weep. If you're not careful they'll attempt suicide. Worst of all are the things you might find yourself doing to survive. Robbing a house for food is fun, until the old couple that live there start following you sadly about, crying as you take their only belongings. Shit, video games, what are you up to? I came here to be a bastard, and now you're making me feel terrible about it.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

A beautiful and clever game. Bright and colourful, this is lots of fun and has a great central mechanic. You control the titular brothers as they venture through a fairytale land in search of a cure for their dying father. So far, so so. The clever bit is that you control them both at once, through the two sticks of the controller. Not an easy proposition, especially for someone like me who can quite easily confused when stirring milk into tea, but one which brings a real sense of connection to the two characters. 

I've become more and more interested in how gameplay techniques can reinforce theme, and here it works very well indeed. You often have to work both characters at once, your two hands working simultaneously on different aspects of a challenge. It binds the brothers together in a very real way - they are separate, yet inextricably connected. It's a clever idea with surprising emotional resonance.

Life is Strange

Probably my game of the year, unless Fallout 4 simply beats me into submission with its relentless, addictive, enthralling beauty.

Life is Strange is the story of a teenage girl - Max - who finds her college life interrupted by a David Lynch-ian series of events which are at once terrifying and compellingly beautiful. You control Max through a simple point-and-click interface, no running and shooting here, and get to choose her conversational and emotional responses to the bizarre events which confront her. 

This is a cine-literate and mature experience. It's about sex, self confidence and murder. It's about art, friendship and what it means to grow up. It's about abuse, both physical and emotional. Sometimes it is uplifting and beautiful beyond measure, but on other occasions it can be quite breathtakingly distressing. 

The central game mechanic allows Max to rewind time - to replay incidents and conversations and choose different approaches each time. At first this just seems to be an admission of what all games do - they give us the chance to try again. But this is more than that. This is about choice and consequence. Making a choice when you don't know the outcome is one thing. If it goes wrong, you can always tell yourself that you didn't know what would happen. But when Max rewinds time and gets to look at all the ways things can play out, she has to take responsibility for the results of those choices. When bad things happen - and they do happen - she has to swallow the guilt.

This is a game which deals in ambivalence and refuses to give easy answers. I felt a whole bunch of emotions while playing, not least guilt at the things I let happen to the people around me. But there's also real pleasure at the intimacy of the relationships that develop and the deep satisfaction of burrowing into a world constructed with such love and passion.

I played other games this year, but these are three which really stand out as artistic experiences which moved and delighted me. They are all fun, even though they have the ability to poke at more serious issues, and they are all worth your time.

Christmas Eve. Sitting by a tree, in the dark. Thinking about the gap between things. Between now and that Christmas in 1984, with all the snow, Between now and the noise of tomorrow, with all the wrapping paper and then noise. Between the pressing of a button on a game controller and the emotions that can result.