Video games have always involved a lot of death and I’m usually okay with that. I kill people, people kill me. It’s tit for tat. I get that. But lately it seems that games have taken on an emotional bent that ask the player to experience those deaths in a whole new way. And while I absolutely love the idea of the maturation of video games as a medium I honestly have to say that I don’t know how I feel about the new use of death as a trope or a mechanic in games. Three of the games that I have played lately and enjoyed greatly for their story have all been games that have been most guilty of pulling at the heartstrings. Those games are Minority Games’ Papo & Yo, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, and Starbreeze Studios’ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. And I’ll try not to get too spoilery with the last two as they have both come out within the last two months or so and may not have had a chance to play them yet.
I’ve blogged and talked about Papo & Yo here before, but it is a game that tells the story of a young boy’s struggle to survive his abusive, substance abusing father through a puzzle based game where the young protagonist tries to save his monster “friend” from his habit of eating hallucinogenic frogs that cause him to fly into a rage. On top of being a beautiful game with good puzzles, Papo & Yo is just a good story well told. It makes you feel for the boy in ways that one might not if they had not experienced his monster encounters (and his frustrations) right along with him. If anyone had ever told me that a video game could make me feel the tension and fear of abuse in any infinitesimal (and saying infinitesimal still feels like an overstatement) way I would have asked what they were smoking, but Papo & Yo did. For me it was not so much that I felt like the abused child, but I felt like the adult who had been charged with protecting and aiding the abused child and when I failed at it I felt as though I had failed the child. Sounds like a rip roaring good time, right? My point exactly. When did video games (discounting Games for Change type games) become the medium for such serious messages?
[SPOILER ALERT/] Papo & Yo ends even more bleakly with the child’s realization that after the monster has destroyed his friend and spirit guide that has been aiding him in his quest to save the monster the monster can not be saved and must thus be destroyed. In the most heart wrenching of moments, the monster (in a drug induced sleep) is dumped over the edge of a cliff and falls slowly through the clouds where he finally releases several pulses of light/energy/peace that rebuild the bridge between the fantasy and real worlds of the protagonist and, seemingly, will allow him to go on with his life. [/SPOILER ALERT]
And if we begin with the ending of Papo & Yo, I’ll do a bit of spoiling of the beginnings of The Last of Us and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. While a friend issued a warning on The Last of Us that I should make a drink before I started the game I, mistakenly, assumed that she was talking about the fact that the game would be requiring me to shoot baddies early and often. But no, the game started with a different kind of bang. [SPOILERS] The shooting a child. Joel’s young daughter, Sarah, gets shot and dies in the tutorial section of the game. I sat in horror as I saw (hell no, felt) a parent panic as he ran to get his daughter to safety only to have her shot and die in his arms by the very people he thought would help. A young, blonde, female child. At that point I was glad that I had that drink and I was kind of pissed at my friend for not giving me a heads up. This game had already taken me somewhere that I didn’t expect and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go and it hadn’t even started yet. [/SPOILERS] And the game doesn’t let up from there. It goes full bore for the whole ride. The narrative of the game itself was phenomenal, even if the mechanics left something to be desired from time to time (see Alisha’s earlier review of the game for more on that).
And then there was Brothers, an unassuming little puzzlers that popped up in XBLA’s Summer of Arcade lineup. It looked like a fun puzzler with beautiful backgrounds (sound familiar), but it starts with a punch in the gut and goes on from there. We learn in the opening sequence that the mother or brothers drowned while the younger of the two brothers watched and that the father is in danger of dying from some disease that has given him an irritating consumptive cough if the brothers don’t go out and find the cure needed by the medicine man. The game’s controls are frustrating, to say the least, as you control each brother with the analog sticks and triggers on opposite sides of the controller and you wonder why you can’t just play the game co-op so that you only have to control one character at a time. I have to admit that I grew really frustrated before the controls began to become familiar. I even considered quitting a couple of hours in because I was sure that the damned game was going to give me a Repetitive Stress Energy, but then I realized that Brothers could not have operated anyway other than the way that it did. The mechanics almost became the narrator. The struggles helped me to understand the struggles of the brothers and at one point in the game, when the mechanics changed, the only thing that I could think was “pure genius”. But I won’t tell you more.
While all three of these games have been awesome experiences, they have definitely not been games in the traditional sense that most folks talk about games. While there were some fun moments, I can say that all three began and/or ended with moments that were so soul shaking for me as a parent that they either caused me to momentarily take a sanity break, drink, and or think deeply about all kinds of traumatic life experiences. More than that I wonder what it is about our society and our community of gamers that is leading developers to write games and narratives that are so dark. Have we become so desensitized to shooting innocent people in airports, faceless soldiers in dessert climates, and taking out zombies with head shots that the logical next steps are causing or watching the deaths of one’s family members? How much of this can we (read I because it is all about me) take? I feel more and more like the old codger screaming “Get off my lawn!”. Perhaps it is time for me to hang up my hardcore hat for some online Parchisi?
