I don’t remember what the meta tags are, but I did find the inclusion of the old environments and the fourth wall breaking fascinating – on the one hand, they were students not long ago, and I think that being unwilling to totally discard some of their prototype concepts is kind of charming, and I think most of the meta commentary works to the extent that they know they’re two people making an indie game that not many people will play and which owes a huge debt to all this stuff that came before, so there’s no need for them to pretend they’re trying to delete the author from a timeless work of art. on the other, I guess they’re being kind of selective to be so effusively honest about their creative process as it pertains to environment modelling and side characters but totally elide talking about their many, many inspirations.
I just wrote that before your last post so it’s a response to the prior observations sorry!
I’m absolutely a fan of the author speaking in a game because the audience is engaged in such a direct way – a confrontational voice is usually the tack I take, and shifting between character and author voice.
Anodyne’s are written as…Itoi-esque half-witticisms? They refer to the authors in the third person or cloak the words behind faked flowery language and it reads as stagey.
Inaccessible: it tracks with a certain type of very internet, but this is so close to my thematic interests and inspirations that I’d like to know if I’m being grumpy or making legitimate criticisms.
you are from Earlier Times so you are doomed to be grumpy about this forever imo, just accept that you have to either soften up for all the very well meaning young people who can’t understand why you wouldn’t or content yourself to become a crank
As for the staginess – like I said, for me it was actually consistent with them understanding their place in this great big nostalgia stuffed lineage, and not trying to pretend otherwise. If you ever wanted the work to stand fully on its own (and its narrative arc is basically good enough to), then yeah, it scans as too performative and gets in the way. But I was impressed that they didn’t seem to need to pretend that was in the cards.
staginess […] consistent with them understanding their place in this great big nostalgia stuffed lineage
I think they handled this properly through everything but the performative commentary notes. The allegorical character names, the referential art styles, some of the allusions (a good half were groaning – allusions require a certain delicacy that they didn’t always manage); very good and obviously core to the project with its store-page pitch and true purpose.
Are you viewing the meta notes and levels as apologias, or explanations, for trying to work within the style? As a self-deprecating shuffle around their work in the footsteps of their reference points? Or perhaps, an affect of joking about their work standard to lower the gate for others to follow?
While I think the game is muddled about what it is actually about I also think this language is totally valid and worthy of being in the product.
I have also thought a lot about the “do you want to leave” prompt a lot and it has very little to do with what comes after it and everything to do with what comes before it. When an internet stranger knows you personally but you don’t know them and they start encrouching on your home that is very scary! That part definitely started filling me with aniexty and I thought the prompt was great.
Which I guess let’s me express what has been nagging at me the whole time with this game and I didn’t want to say it because it made me sound like an asshole. This game is very specifically talking about people that grew up a specific way in a specific environment that I found foreign to me. Instead of feeling insight into those experiences I felt like an observer (this is not helped by the wordsalad-ness.) that if resonnated with OSB, Felix, and Tigress says a lot.
While I don’t think it is a personal game, it is a game with a specific frequency and I feel like my viewpoint into what I think that frequency is would sound mean and judgemental.
The behind the scenes thing is at least partially an attempt to include an aspect of the first game that they couldn’t really do in this one, I think.
See the first game featured an extensive post game the involved glitching through environments and finding prototype assets and places only seen in cutscenes, revealing the meta construction of the game world.
The behind the scenes prototype stuff seems like them trying to include that as an aspect of this game too, but it’s way harder to have a completely open glitchfest in a 3d game.
Furthermore…I recognize the exact kind of choices I’d make myself if I was designing a game. And I genuinely think these folks are just really excited to talk up all their behind the scenes work and what they did.
So I dunno if I’m a young millennial or an old millennial. I just know how I reacted to this game. And bluntly, it reads like people who just genuinely want the folks playing this game to have a good time. Maybe they’re overcompensating? But fuck it, I love the gentelness, the kindness, exuded by the game.
It also added to the story. Mainly because this tone felt in line with what the center was seemingly doing, and a lot of what you were ‘fixing’ is the sort of stuff that you’re supposed to fix with mindfulness. It actually kind of surprised me when the game revealed you shouldn’t trust the center because of how much the agents of the center were genuinely caring and wanted you to succeed.
I also felt like it was pretty different from the worst of Nintendo! This game might want you to know you’ll be ok, but it’s telling you that so you’ll free to push the boundaries and experiment.
The world trusts you to figure it out for the most part. And gaming can be a really aggressive and alienating space, they just want folks to feel comfortable, and that’s not bad.
I think I’d feel a lot better about the meta posts if they waited until post-game. While it was important that the bounds of the world be teasable throughout, the meta posts punctured it too far and the collection detracted from the melancholy of the spaces, focusing the eyes solely on coin shadows.
On tone – I think that’s a good argument, that the game’s structure was trying to express to the player what the characters did to Nova. It makes me uncomfortable the way unearned praise does, that it rings false because I haven’t done anything but expressed minimal competence in a game.
It’s interesting to think about the earth-shattering impact of Breath of the Wild’s trust in the player next to this, a game built to a large extent on memories of Nintendo. Would this game, ten years hence, be more hands-off?
Oh I only just finally remembered what the meta notes are and yeah I agree those were probably a bit overeager by comparison.
I also just remembered one specific line from the good ending sequence that I adored too though so credit to them for actively overpowering whatever remove they were at
Funnily enough I think my response to the excessive gentleness of the tone was to read it as deliberately condescending on the part of the villains and take for granted that it was to be chafed against. it didn’t even occur to me that this response wouldn’t be a given but it’s nice that it can work on multiple levels like that!
for the record it was the bit about being leashed to a cause she can’t support, lovely literalization of metaphor vis “what can I reasonably do about the fact that I’m still wired for this behaviour?”
I did the same, actually; the villain turn for The Center was obvious and appropriately telegraphed but I was just waiting for Palisade to flip. In general the back half writing was much stronger, with some very effective stories tied to their evocative landscapes, excepting the tendency towards overly direct love dialogue that’s a level beyond stylized heart-on-sleeve writing conceits.
They turn up after the villains decide to ‘improve’ your experience by introducing the metashop. They don’t turn up in the micro areas at all, and in fact, the micro areas in general are left much more to the players imagination. The signposts are supposed to hurt the meloncholy tone. They’re supposed to undermine the game’s writing, IMO.
You literally never have to interact with the metashop if you chose not to, and I think the game wants you to feel like engaging with it makes stuff worse. Almost half the game doesn’t feature it. It changes the narrative intentionally.
I still don’t see how this game doesn’t trust you. Nearly every aspect of actually navigating the world is completely up to you, and requires you to figure stuff out on your own. The actual play of the game is yours.
As for the full on behind the scenes areas…yeah they might undermine things a bit but it’s a DVD menu feature. It’s up to you if you want to watch the special features halfway through the movie, since the first of those areas pretty clearly says what’s up.
well, they were actively interested in the mother part of ripping off mother, and while that was less to my taste tonally I don’t think they really misstepped anywhere
That’s a good point; if they were written at the level of, say, Earthbound’s Brickroad I’d probably be fine with them. But that’s the danger of doing something like this that undercuts your game – if you don’t bring the audience with you you’re hurting yourself.
I’m really impressed with how solidly the game fits into 4 different takes:
Depression - the Glandilock, the restrictive, repressive rules of The Center as the negative internal voice, the encouraging friends
Coming Out - the number of queer partners modeling for Nova, the Center as repressive authority figure cloaked in language of helping
Authority - the general framing of insider/outsider communities and the encouragement to build a new world
Game Structure - contrasting the rules and rewards of The Center with the freedom outside; empty game loops as enticements to routines; NPCs trapped in behaviors
The imagery is strong enough that it adapts well to all these readings and we could easily fit dozens of lines and moments of the game into each of them. Very good stuff.
I wish the language of the villains had the cutting tone the Mother games are so good at; the final bits would have read much more strongly if The Glandilock was getting in real barbs.
I mean the game brought me with it. And IDed pretty heavily with Nova as someone who pretty much did what she was supposed to do, completely failed at it, couldn’t fit life into her framework, and realized she had to go beyond it.
Didn’t hurt I misread her name as ‘Noa’ constantly.
I know that’s not common to everyone, but it read really true as an autistic queer trans woman who had to learn how to survive in the contemporary world.