Monday, February 20, 2017

Dave Critiques - Firewatch: The player and Henry



Transcript

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Firewatch. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

I’d like to start this off with a single moment in the game. Similar to my Toren critique, I think this moment is a good springboard for what I’ve chosen to discuss. We’re deep into the story now. Henry is sure he and Delilah are being monitored, and so as a solution, Delilah suggests radio silence. The next day she contacts Henry with a coded message, to travel to a remote location and find a new walkie talkie that she has left for him. During the trek there, I swear there’s rustling in the bushes, like I’m being followed. I even look around once or twice, even though intellectually I know that nothing will be there. When you get to the location and pick up the new radio, Delilah starts to speak frankly, freaking out about what to do. There are 3 responses I can pick. I as the player am in a heightened state because I’m invested in the narrative, so in my haste to respond, I misread the options. The second choice is accusing Delilah of being in on whatever this is. I thought it was a question, Henry asking Delilah if she has anything to do with this. It didn’t take long to realise my mistake as Henry starts accusing the closest thing he has to a friend out in the Wyoming wilderness. Similar to a real conversation, I can’t take back what I said, and the rest of our discussion is coloured by the turn the conversation has taken. There’s then a significant amount of silence as the player, Henry, and Delilah get to mull over what just happened. This is also just before the revelation of Delilah filing a police report about the two missing teenagers in which she lied, and then what you find at the research station over in Wapiti meadow.

The developers behind Firewatch also worked on Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 1. The reason I bring this up right after telling that story is that I think both games work in a similar fashion. Keep this in mind, I’ll be revisiting its significance and the reason for the story a little later. A lot has been written on Firewatch since its release. There’s always a trepidation on approaching a game that has been written on so extensively, mostly by people a lot smarter and with greater insight. One reason I enjoyed looking into everything that was written is it tells me the areas of investigation and interpretation that do and don’t interest me. For instance a lot has been written on Delilah, not only as an NPC with agency, but the possibilities of Henry’s interactions with her, and mostly about her deceit. A lot of people think Delilah was either part of Ned Goodwin’s plan and she was messing with Henry while feigning ignorance, or she’s just a compulsive liar and it’s a good thing that Henry never ends up with her at the end, because why would you want to be with someone you can’t trust. This reading has so much traction because it explains away what many see as story plotholes. Now personally if I have a problem with Delilah it’s that the conversation with her undercuts the purpose of Henry fleeing to the woods to live in solitude for a while, but that’s mostly the fault of Henry / the player who feels the need to talk to Delilah about everything they come across.

There’s discussion on the concept of loneliness and that the only human contact Henry has in the whole game is grabbing the fireman’s hand at the end (something that the player can decline incidentally by walking back towards the watchtower). This ties into the metaphor of the fire and how it plays with the emotions of Henry and Delilah as the mystery they find themselves in starts to unravel. This leads towards a conclusion that many seemed to be unsatisfied with. Not only Henry deciding to go be with his wife, but not having the ability to be with Delilah. Oh, and people didn’t seem to like the revelation of what happened to Brain and Ned Goodwin. To be honest, I was among those people who thought that the ending was a big letdown when up to that point I was really enjoying my time walking through nature and furthering this mystery along.

Of course after looking into it, it’s pretty obvious that the mystery, the “plot” as it were is not that important to what Firewatch is. This is a tale of regret and running away from your problems. There is no paragon playthrough in Firewatch. Henry is a broken man, and the choice the player has is to determine just how broken, and if he can indeed work to start himself on the path of recovery. Delilah is the same. In effect, she’s a mirror to Henry. In this way I personally don’t think it matters whether or not she was working with Ned, lying to Henry, or oblivious to it all. The player is controlling Henry. Delilah is her own person, and while you can create a connection with her, her choices are not the player’s choices, and this is exemplified in them never meeting, and them parting ways at the end, possibly never to speak again.

Returning to my earlier mention of The Walking Dead, the reason I think this game is quite similar is that both play with the illusion of choice. The player is able to make a lot of decisions in both games, although the decisions in The Walking Dead seem more impactful and the stakes seem higher. Ultimately though, despite the choices, the overall story of both games is pretty much the same save for a few minor details. What’s important is the characters that the players are controlling. Who are Lee and Henry? Both have a less than ideal past, and both are obviously trying to atone for what they have done. Here’s the main difference though (aside from Firewatch’s lack of zombies), Lee sees an opportunity for redemption in looking after Clementine. Henry starts the game running away from his problems, and embroils himself in the game’s mystery to avoid having to confront and deal with that aspect of himself. The approach that these games have towards narrative decisions (an overall structure with the player filling in some details) is exactly the same to how they present the player character.

Henry is defined by our actions as players. Do you pick up the beer cans left by the teens? Do you steal their whiskey? Do you take their radio? Do you put on your wedding ring at the end of the game when you’re leaving? Incidentally I didn’t even notice the ring on my playthrough. Perhaps I wasn’t observant enough, or something I did earlier in the game made it so I couldn’t pick it up. Maybe I threw it off the lookout balcony. I can’t remember. How did you treat Delilah? Did you talk to her about everything, or did you ignore her as much as the game would allow you to do so? Did you indulge Henry’s obsessions about the mystery, or did you act like it didn’t matter? These choices do seem kind of insignificant in a big picture way. They certainly seem a lot more trivial than choosing who lives and who dies in The Walking Dead.

Ultimately they speak to our overall experience in the game. Henry took a job in a national park to escape his problems for a few months. We enter the shoes of Henry for a few hours to escape from whatever we play videogames to escape from. Just like that conversation with Delilah I talked about at the start, the wrong thing can be said and that will always stick with us. If interacting with a videogame is a conversation, the ending seemed to have said the wrong thing to a lot of people. This metaphor kind of breaks down now because unlike a conversation you can replay a videogame, and like any piece of art, more might get revealed to you on a second or third exposure. At least with the whole of the experience as a known quantity, upon a second playthrough, we can sideline the plot and just enjoy traipsing around the Wyoming countryside. Looking back, that was my favourite part of the game, and I think overall it did Henry some good. How was it for you?

Thanks for watching.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Dave Critiques - Rise of the Tomb Raider: Power fantasy



Transcript

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

It might sound a little ridiculous but the 2013 release of Tomb Raider restored a lot of my faith in AAA gaming. I had spent a couple of years at the time mainly playing indie titles due to the level of experimentation found within paired with their affordability. It was late 2013 and I became curious about a few of the year’s big titles that people were talking about. My roommate had a copy of Tomb Raider so I popped in the disc in his PS3 and gave it a try. I was blown away. The game has this beautiful balance of spectacle, streamlined pacing, and immersion that I was not expecting. The challenge tombs were a lot of fun, everything moved forward steadily, upgrades included, and some of the set pieces such as climbing the tower or coming upon the ship graveyard have stayed with me over the years.

A similar amount of time give or take a few months had gone by between the release of Rise of the Tomb Raider and when I was able to finally get a copy and play it. What I have is the definitive edition that released to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary. It includes all the DLC, but aside from the Baba Yaga storyline, I don’t think I interacted with any of it. I played through the game on normal, following the main story with a little bit of sidetracking for most of the challenge tombs and some of the ally missions. It took me around 14 hours start to finish. If you’ve played the game, then you’ll know where I’m coming from when I say that aside from some of the platforming set pieces, most of the main game isn’t exactly a Tomb Raider game. It’s a third person shooter that revolves around upgrades and crafting. Combat seems to be the focus of this game, with the majority of your time spent mowing down dozens upon dozens of highly trained mercenaries through either straight gunplay, the benefits of the upgrade system, or crafting explosives and specialised arrows to inflict as much damage as humanly possible.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t be criticizing a AAA game for indulging in a power fantasy. That’s one of the things that big budget videogames are quite good at. Take a character, throw as much violence at them as possible, and watch them persevere. It’s the medium’s own psychopathic hero’s journey. It works because videogames are about doing, shooting can be lots of fun, especially when it’s designed to feel satisfying, and the game and the player never really pays much mind to the virtual humans they’re killing by the bucketload because neither really wants to bring it up. Heck, this idea of overcoming adversity is one of the central ideas of the 2013 game. I do think that game had a better balance between combat, platforming, and exploration / collecting, but I do admit I might be misremembering it. By the end of Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara has essentially wiped out an entire army of highly trained mercenaries. Not only that, but there’s a supernatural army called the Deathless. A lot of the lead up to revealing combat against the Deathless has them butchering the same mercenaries you’re killing by the handful. Then the tables turn once Lara gets involved.

One of the final sections of the game has you fighting in the ruins of a lost city. For some reason, I got a Lordran vibe off the place and jokingly referred to it as such. Maybe it’s because this is a nexus point of city ruins, ancient undead foes, and an upgrade system at a bonfire. At this point, you’ve already had some fights with the Deathless in small waves, but in the city and especially on your way to access the trebuchets, you’ll be fighting a lot of these warriors up close. So let’s put aside Lara slaughtering a highly trained mercenary army. Let’s put aside Lara being able to kill waves of a supernatural foe that is also able to slaughter a highly trained mercenary army. By this point in the game I’d filled out most of the upgrade tree. I had dodge counters and quick time event kills for each weapon and was more deadly in close quarters combat than I was behind cover with a bow or any firearm. So what was the most efficient and easy way to take down the hulking undead monstrosities with scary melee weapons? Spam the attack button on my controller so that Lara would wail on them with her pickaxe until either the prompt to deliver a finishing blow appeared, they crumbled from too many hits, or they fell off a ledge. In the post credits cutscene, Trinity, the shadowy organization behind the mercenaries kill Anna as she’s seemingly too much a threat to them, She knows too much. However, they leave Lara alive. It’s probably for the best, at this point, she’s likely the most deadly person on planet Earth, and a sniper bullet to the head might have just pissed her off.

Let me say that this criticism about the ridiculous level of power fantasy is not because I wasn’t enjoying the combat. It’s competent third person shooting. The stealth kills are great, and my favourite encounter was early on when you have the opportunity to take out an entire camp without raising an alarm. You have this opportunity on more than one occasion, but I was never able to pull it off with this level of success ever again. I think some of my frustration is that I chose to play with a controller, and if after all these years of playing console games I can’t get used to aiming with an analogue stick, it’s likely never going to happen. If I ever revisit the game, i’m going to use the mouse and keyboard. At least then I can take advantage of the headshot experience bonuses. My issue is mainly that the combat is such a heavy focus of a game that doesn’t need it.

The story has Lara hunting for a mystical artifact in order to salvage her father’s legacy. The early game introduces survival against local wildlife, and the wonders of searching the landscape and discovering artifacts and secrets. This leads to your first challenge tomb. If you want to get technical, the expedition to Syria was sort of its own challenge tomb, but the first official challenge tomb side content is when you discover the ship frozen in ice. Now not all the challenge tombs are on the spectacle of this one. Most of them are quite short, focused around one simple puzzle. Sometimes accessing the tomb itself can be engaging, especially in cases were the tomb itself is a bit of a let down. The cave formation on the way to this short little tomb puzzle involving boats and rapids is a good example. What’s more, the tome found at the end of each tomb grants Lara a new ability. The reward of course should be the tomb itself, but it’s nice to get something a little extra out of taking the time to solve these. I just wish they weren’t side content and the main story had a lot more tomb raiding and a lot less wanton murder from Super Lara.

Thanks for watching.