Condemned 2 Bloodshot – “Condemned We Are”
Like its predecessor, “Condemned 2″ is (supposedly) a first-person survival horror game, with hand to hand combat sequences and “C.S.I.” inspired puzzles. The original “Condemned” was a moody ambiance piece; its only redeeming factor was its capacity for building up suspense, thanks to its deliberately slow pacing, and its dark, decrepit portrayal of American urban centers, in Fincher’s neo-noir style (also present in games like “Max Payne” or even “Silent Hill 2″). Not that the game really took advantage of that aesthetic – the second half of the game brimmed with visual excesses and over the top action and narrative. In other words, it was a mess that ended up ruining the carefully concocted ambiance and pacing of the first half.
The sequel is pretty much the same, but going even more overboard than the second half of the original. The brawn has been ramped up, with a clear abuse on repetitive, boring action sequences, with a heavier focus on fire-arms (almost completely absent in the prequel). The plot is the silliest piece of Hollywood wanna-be action drivel I’ve encountered in a long while – it’s a dumb application of the mono-myth, filled with angst and foul language on part of the hero, i.e. more silly “dark and mature” adolescent fantasies written by inept writers. The aesthetic does manage to keep the influences of the original, which allows the game to sometimes shine. However, it quickly becomes repetitive, with the art designers lacking subtlety, and abusing dark color palettes and graphic detail. Not to mention that there are some ridiculous references to “Saw’s” torture porn, and “Bioshock’s” art deco (which makes as much sense in “Condemned” as a renaissance painting in a modern art exhibit). There is one mild improvement over its predecessor in the “C.S.I.” puzzles, which are now, well, actual puzzles which you must solve. What is a shame though, is that they bog down to visually flattering forms of questionnaires, which don’t really conceal that much substance. You’ll never deduce anything or really be forced to think like a detective, so you’ll never feel like one, despite tremendous effort from the designers on that regard.
“Condemned 2″ is a derivative game in every sense of the word. It tries really hard to capture what made so many games great in the past, by borrowing many bits and pieces, but in the end, it simply lacks the creative nexus to make everything blend together. A great example of this flawed exercise is in the use of a subjective point of view. “Condemned’s” creators tried to use the same consistent first person view of “Breakdown” or “Mirror’s Edge”, a technique that allows greater identification with physical actions and dramatic effect on part of the player. But instead of realizing the potential of such an approach on a survival horror game, they ruin the idea by using out of body cut-scenes (poorly shot and with some horrible animations) and employing a noisy HUD with combo meters and score tally’s. They spent all that money in making interesting first person animations, only to pull you out of character in no time, with some poor, easy to fix, design choices. And everything in the game works out in that same way, as every interesting solution they come up with, only being used for the most immediate, functional, infantile form of entertainment. But if we pull back, and take a good look around, we can’t be unjust to the point of saying that “Condemned 2″ is much worse than its contemporary peers, because it isn’t. And that is the only frightening reality the game can really condemn us to feel.
score: 1/5
Project Zero II – “Dark Corners”
Japanese folklore is riddled with ghost stories, dark tales of the occult about strange rituals that occur somewhere in the long forgotten villages of the Japanese countryside, where the light of rationalism hasn’t yet shun way obscurantism. To westerners such as myself, these tales are bizarre and shocking, reveling in a paraphernalia of symbols and religious undertones of which we have but the shallowest of understandings. Their inherent estrangement to our cultural and aesthetic frame of reference makes them intriguing and fascinating, not to mention particularly effective in the conveying of fear. Thanks to the success of films such as “Ringu” and “Ju-On”, these tales have become obligatory pop-references around the world. Unfortunately, in the video-game landscape, with its regional and linguist protectionism, horror-themed Japanese works are a rarity to those who live in the left half of the globe. Even “Silent Hill“, which shares a spiritual relationship with traditional forms of Japanese Horror, dilutes it in a sea of western influenced ideas and themes. It’s for this reason, that video-game series like “Project Zero” or “Siren” are somewhat special, as they are the few glimpses of traditional Japanese horror that we have access to. In that regard, “Project Zero II – Crimson Butterfly” is as close to that specific universe as we’ll probably ever get.
“Project Zero II” is a tragic tale of horror, featuring a pair of twins who one day, wander around a forest, only to find themselves trapped in a ghost town, named “All God’s Village”, which… no longer exists. It’s similar, on many levels, to its predecessor, featuring a traditional tale about sacrifice, the upholding of tradition, the respect for higher powers, and its inevitable clash with each individual’s spirit and feelings. However, this time around, the story focuses more coherently on the relationship between the main characters (the two siblings), achieving greater emotional impact and depth in characterization. It’s post-”ICO” in that way, but whereas in Ueda’s masterpiece the love relationship was implied in narrative and deepened through interaction, “Crimson Butterfly” settles with the former. Despite that, putting emotional drive on the forefront of a game is rare, especially considering the delicate nature of “Project Zero’s” female protagonists.
Exploring “All God’s Village” is facing the dark and the oppressive: the dead silence of the surrounding woods is only matched by the decrepit nature of the ancient village, with its crumbling edifices casting their shadows over the scarce moonlight. The dirty halls of the houses pave room for an astonishing mise-en-scéne, with careful lighting patterns illuminating the dark corners of the haunted halls and traditional Japanese decoration establishing the set’s mood with consistency and attention to detail. Akira Nishimura, art designer, accomplished a real feat here, by being able to produce such an intricate set, while resorting to a relatively small budget.
However, as is so common in the means, things get fiddly on a purely interactive level. Whilst Makoto Shibata (director) and his “Project Zero” team show that they’ve come to understand how traditional Japanese horror works in literature and cinema, they fail in properly adapting its structural form and aesthetic to the interactive dimension. Though “Project Zero II” is, most of the time, a by the numbers, well paced action-adventure game, with simple puzzles and exploration sequences, its main grab comes from its combat system, implemented by the “Camera Obscura”, a camera capable of exorcising demons and other-worldly figures. Never mind the verisimilitude of such an item, the bottom line is that it works as a way of putting the player face to face with the ghosts that the game throws at him. And by using the first person perspective, the game heightens the subjective feel of the apparitions, playing with players’ tension and making them all the more conscious of the game’s protagonist’s sensation upon encountering such spirits. However, it seems the game designers thought this game mechanic to be too good to avoid exploring to its fullest, and so, to what was a natural, aesthetically unobtrusive battle system, they added a plethora of game-y interfaces and power ups, not to mention a point driven level up system, as ways to enhance the system’s ludic aspects. Suffice to say, they hurt the dramatic core of the game’s narrative, and its aesthetic cohesiveness, adding an excessively noisy design layer to what should obviously be a moody experience.
Unlike “Silent Hill”, “Project Zero” isn’t able to come to full fruition as a horror video-game, mostly due to its lack of maturity in the interactive department, with its game-y ideas breaking away the foreboding atmosphere that the art design and soundtrack so laboriously work to achieve. However, “Crimson Butterfly” can still translate to the video-game means most of what makes traditional Japanese Horror unique, by serving as the perfect embodiment of its aesthetic and narrative expression. That is what ultimately allows players to be taken to that unpleasant place to which they dare not go: the dark corners of the human mind, those dark recesses of evil, where fears take the shape of monsters and the dead shadows of the past come back to life… that frightening place where we must face our sins.
score: 4/5
Takayoshi Sato Interview
It’s not in my habit for me to link to other blogs or sites, as a way to propagate news or otherwise irrelevant pieces of information on the videogame media landscape. I simply assume people who take an interest in my blog have access to the same information as I have, and are smart enough to select their own dose of internet dailies. However, sometimes one must break his own rules, and this is that day for me. As you may or may not have noticed, I nurture a big reverence towards “Silent Hill”, a series of games which I believe to be mostly unmatched in the History of games, for the complexity of its human dilemmas, its brilliant aesthetic background, and its success as an interactive work. My dear, dear friend Dieubussy [who besides being someone I hold dear, is, hands down, the most cultured, knowledgeable individual that I have ever met, when it comes to video-game's history and art (and many other areas)] has had the pleasure of interviewing one of the geniuses behind the “Silent Hill” series, Takayoshi Sato (CG director and director of “Silent Hill 2″). Read the interview, in English, here, it’s probably the best advise I have ever given in this blog.
The Path – “Do Not Stray from the Path”
There’s a growing consensus that traditional video-game forms aren’t permeable to an adult, artistic interpretation of interactivity. Games’ design matrix, with its its schemata of objectives, rewards and penalties, and its consistent orientation towards dexterity skills, tend to transform players into a pair of highly reflexive hands, directly wired to their senses. Art, on the other hand, has stronger requisites for its audience: a reflexive state of mind, a vast range of sensory processing, as well as the willingness to embark on an aesthetic and emotional voyage. A pair of waggling hands and fingers just doesn’t cut it. The Tale of Tales studio has a strong point of view on this matter – as they state in their own manifesto – “don’t make games”, but instead “real-time art”.
“The Path” is a “real time art” piece that challenges the boundaries of what a video-game can be, making a typical game-play description very ineffective in translating the experience. Interactivity in “The Path” is framed according to an architectural interpretation, meaning, players have a predominantly spatial relationship with the environment. Essentially, it’s a matter of choice – where to go next? Embodying your surroundings, by allowing your senses to perceive the form that encompasses you, just as you would in a famous architect’s latest work. “The Path” is just that – an aesthetically cohesive, narrative rich and artistically oriented form of three-dimensional exploration. Granted, most gamers will see this as an euphemistic way of saying that you can only *move* in the game. And, in a way, that’s true; you can’t shoot, jump or solve puzzles in “The Path”, and that’s exactly what makes it work. By using a minimalist form of interaction, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn get players to willingly enter that reflexive stance that Art feeds upon. You experience “The Path”, you interpret it, you explore it, and above all, you feel it… but you never get to *play* “The Path”. In fact, it would be more correct to say that “The Path” plays you. And that’s why it makes for art in its purest form.
All of these formal nuances would be insignificant, if the aesthetic journey that lied beneath wasn’t worth it. But it is. “The Path” is a modern reinterpretation of “Red Riding Hood”, viewed through the lens of a horror aesthetic. It’s a dark and somber re-envisioning of the classic tale, brimming with sexual innuendo, heavy psychological violence and a wealth of adult themes, all captured through an extremely rich symbolic scenery, whose interpretation quickly becomes the main draw of the game. There’s no point in digressing over its exact nature, as each player’s interpretation is bound to be different, such is the depth of its metaphoric elements. Suffices to say, it’s an incredibly nuanced, complex narrative which the player must decode, but like in all good art pieces, that journey of discovery is an intricate part of the pleasure you’ll be able to extract from the game.
But despite having a rich narrative context, the game exposes it only through image, sound and a few poems, thus making it an even more provocative, personal and ambiguous experience. The aesthetic is stunning, to say the least – a mixture of Gothic, surreal landscapes, somewhat evocative of Japanese horror, but also showing traces of Lynch, Maya Daren or even Buñuel, all incarnated in the iconic figures that make up “Red Riding Hood”. The soundtrack follows the bizarre imagery’s vibe and features a strong emphasis on environmental sound effects; the ever-lurking growling of the wolf and the incessant children’s choir are particularly unsettling to hear. It’s obvious that its authors have an aesthetic sensibility that vastly surpasses the majority of games’ art designers, which in the end, is what allows them to implement their art-oriented game-design philosophy with unrivaled success.
Beautiful and enigmatic, strange and bewildering, horrifying but seductive; “The Path” is Art in its finest. It’s a bright sign saying that games can be adult and thought-provoking, just like any piece of fine Art. Because of it, developers now know that a new path for artistic video-game endeavors is, in fact, possible. Do not stray from “The Path”. Journey through it, embrace it, explore it. It may be the last path that can lead video-games into a bright future.
score: 5/5
Siren Blood Curse – “A Lighter Shade of Siren”
“Siren Blood Curse” is a remake of the original “Forbidden Siren”, intended to present a greater appeal to western audiences. Despite the series predominant Japanese style, someone at Sony apparently found that the series needed to cross the ocean to make itself more pleasing for the American public. Such foolish venture was destined to fail from the get go, as most US-based gamers are surely too occupied with the latest “Gears of War” to even care about what “Siren” is all about, eventually leaving those who have a genuine interest in “Siren” with a simplistic, compromised version of Keiichiro Toyama’s (designer of the original “Silent Hill”) latest horror piece. The question is if it’s good enough to make up for a decent survival horror game.
Even though the “Blood Curse” still takes place in a remote Japanese village, the story is now told from a westerner point of view, with its main characters being of US origin. This choice inevitably leads to some awkward cheesiness in dialogue and to the occasional critique to Hollywood cinematography, both of which end up marring the horror background, that doesn’t mix well either with comedy or parody. The story-line was also simplified, featuring less characters and dialogue; needless to say, much of the nuances and deeper meanings were lost in translation. The narrative structure in itself is detrimental to Toyama’s tale; by using a TV show / DVD episode structure (similar to that of the appalling “Alone in the Dark”), the game became much more focused on dramatic events, such as cliffhangers, instead of delving into psychological horror elements. Also, the Hollywood-like editing, which favors an economic use of time over density and characterization, makes the action go by super-fast, leaving no time for the fleshing out of the ambiance that made “Siren” unique. The surreal vibe is thus lost, and with it, much of the psychological impact of its horror mind-games. What all these flaws amount to, like in most Japanese horror movie remakes, is a work that feels like a fast-food version of the original, lacking all the subtlety that made it unique in the first place.
In terms of actual game, the crossing over to western audiences does more good than bad. Previous “Siren” games were known of their complex game-play, and their frequently obtuse level-design. “Blood Curse” alleviates some of this burden by making game-play more accessible and well balanced, and also by decreasing the number of stealth portions in favor of action-adventure segments. This makes the game easier to enjoy, and smoother in its overall experience. Which is not to say that many of the flaws of the original games aren’t present. The objective-by-objective design of each level, which forces you to explore exactly as the designers want you to, still makes the game feel like an overlong tutorial. Worse still, is when the designers don’t make their logic apparent, giving you obtuse objectives for which there are no clues on how to tackle them. But these would be small nags if the overall design worked, but sadly, even after 3 games in the series, it still misses the point entirely. Stealth inevitably leads to trial and error, which in turn, breaks pacing and mood (obligatory in the creating a good horror ambiance) and the consistently closed level design (a consequence of the Simon-says design) destroys any chance of proper exploration, which could serve to build-up tension and anticipation of danger. In the end, this third iteration of “Siren” only serves to prove that the original design was too crooked to fix in the first place, and not even a vast amount of polish, such as the one in “Blood Curse”, can fix it.
Despite its terrible, sometimes infuriating faults, “Siren” still manages to reward its players in a way that no recent survival horror game does. No matter how much the game-design gets in the way, the horror aesthetic still comes through, and that is enough to make you feel what every horror game should make you feel: terror. And the horror aesthetic is exactly where “Siren” shows the superlative artistry of its authors. From its depiction of a derelict Japanese village, so damp, dirty and moist, that you can almost smell the stench of the gruesome, nauseating monsters that prowl about, to the natural elements like rain, wind, thunder, sunlight at dawn, all captured with perfect audio-visual fidelity, the game makes every set-piece look dark and disturbing. The violence itself, is as strange and surreal as you’ve come to expect from good Japanese horror movies (though it’s a shame that outside Japan, the game is slightly censored). Simply put, every piece of art and music blends beautifully into a menacing, unsettling experience of horror that will make you shiver in fright and disgust. It’s certainly one of the finest art designs of this generation, and it takes full advantage of the processing capabilities offered by the new Playstation.
It’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with the “Siren” series. Its stealth meets survival horror game-design never made any sense, and its increasingly watered-down versions in both “Forbidden Siren 2″ and “Blood Curse”, while more pleasing, are still far from providing a good basis of interaction for the aesthetic and narrative dimensions. But on the other hand, you have to hand it down to Toyama for maintaining the survival horror spirit intact, foregoing the action non-sense that is all the rage nowadays. “Blood Curse” is a real survival horror game, and considering the genre’s current landscape, that’s the greatest compliment any survival horror game can receive.
