You remind me of a friend I just unfollowed on Facebook.
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Polygon 7.5/10Gamespot 8.0/10I guess you can't be the Citizen Kane of gaming just because your game runs at 24 frames per second.
I've always had a hard time reconciling the disparate nature of a video game's narrative and it's systems. Tomb Raider with it's Deer Kill™ for instance, which implies that Lara needs to eat to survive - which would have been a narrative element expressed systemically - is just a video where Lara takes a life for the first time and cries about it to set up the two hour arc to her becoming a walking ice-pick & bow massacre machine. Then you massacre for four more hours I guess? I've always found that resource management games are very good at telling stories so I was disappointed Tomb Raider didn't bother. The Void (my avatar) does this nicely. Everything in that game is tied to expendable (and continuously depleting) resources, it gives the game a sense of this creeping need to be productive, to scour for more resources, to be careful about using them, but always press forward in fear of running out. This is supported by the narrative presented in videos and dialog and it works together wonderfully. The Void is kinda difficult to get into however, so let's use more recent, simpler games to state the same example: Cart Life let's you play as a immigrant coming to America trying to make a living running a small business. In the case of the demo you play as a dude setting up a newspaper stand. You have to pay for the stand, your rent, your newspapers, set prices, you have to small talk with customers, give them the accurate amount of change, if you want you can sell coffee which requires you to go get a coffee pot, coffee and cups at the store and of course set the price of coffee. Papers, Please is another indie game that posits you as a clerk at a border checkpoint and you have to do the menial tasks you assume a border checkpoint clerk does. It is also a great with it's narrative for the same reasons as Cart Life. All of this amounts to games where you feel much more connected to whatever it is that is going on in the game and the stories that are told there. Another note is how strange it is that Bioshock(1) was credited with this grand deconstruction of player agency, something that Half-Life 1 tackled back when I was still struggling to tell time on a analog watch. Half-Life only beats you over the head with this message a couple of times though, maybe players needed Bioshock to beat them into pulp before they figured out that video games are restrained by the design of the game, I dunno. People who play video games are dumb, I guess.
