Posts Tagged ‘ King’s Field ’

Demon’s Souls – “Aesthetics of Pain”

Like its “King’s Field” forebears, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s “Demon’s Souls” is another hardcore dungeon-crawler RPG inspired by gothic fantasy. Like the fiction it aspires to homage, it embodies the exacerbation of emotion, by hyperbolizing the emotional counterpart of the ludic experience. It’s a brutally difficult game, and therein lies its key to success: when it takes hours to go between savepoints, and even one or two hits from a weakling zombie can kill you, we assure you, you’ll think differently about a game, and well, you’ll definitely feel differently about it too. Every moment ends up feeling like a battle against an overwhelming assailant that cannot be overrun or eschewed. See, you never really ‘win’ “Demon’s Souls”, you merely survive for another second. Anxiety slowly creeps to the point of vertigo, as you’ll be painfully aware of ever-standing one step away from a bottomless pit, therefore losing all the work you’ve put into the game for the last hours. The stress is so great and exhilarating that when you do die (and you will, many, many times), all hell breaks loose… inside you, that is. Tension inevitably turns to self-centered anger and frustration, and you’ll want to smash everything around you to pieces.

Some may wonder what is the point behind all this masochistic suffering. The answer is simple, “Demon’s Souls” makes you feel something – fear, anxiety, frustration, anger… and it makes you feel them in spades. It isn’t a mindless past-time, it’s a desperately tough struggle, one which must be met with all your dedication so as to bring any minute pleasure. Playing it is not unlike betting all your hard-earned money into a game of skill or luck – hours and hours of work hang in the tip of fate, time slows down to a halt, your heart races, and you stand as in a miasma, one moment away from greatness, one moment away from utter despair. If you do manage the prowess of victory, then you’ll achieve supreme bliss, as beating even the smallest of objectives in “Demon’s Souls” leads to a powerful release of tension, an overjoyous catharsis that is as fruitful as the more sweat and tears you’ve offered as sacrifice to achieve it.

And, in its most clear evolution face “From Software’s” past titles, it is a game that incorporates online systems into its conceptual grounds. Instead of merely placing players together in artificial dungeons and then letting them compete or cooperate as MMORPG’s tend to, “Demon’s Souls” actually forces players to become part of its fictional realm, by binding them through a coherent body of rules. Players can either become vindictive souls that prey on others, or they can come together as a community, battling side by side, or sharing knowledge on how to survive the game’s dangers through its simple communication system. Either way, you’ll never feel as if inside an online game, with its chat non-sense, ridiculous emoting and mechanistic online/offline variations, instead, you’ll become integrant part of a menacing world populated with lost souls.

“Demon’s Souls” may not be a work of art, nor the most profound of experiences, but it is moving in ways that only the greatest of games can be. Whilst the gloomy anglosaxonic landscape (Makoto Satoh, Masato Miyazaki) and creepily unsettling score (Shunsuke Kida) are part of the game’s aesthetic appeal, it is only when you play the game and actually sense the ever-present eminence of death, that “Demon’s Souls” reaches its emotional apex. It is pure Gothic narrative, told as only videogames can tell: through the language of unbridled challenges and supreme skill, of pain and hardship, of unfettered emotion, fantasy, and true heroic conquest.

score: 5/5

[Part of this text was originally published in Portuguese, in Coimbra’s College Paper “ACabra”, dating 29/06/10]

2010
07/13
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Echo Night Beyond – “Space Exploration”

For quite some time now, video games have become a thrilling new means of conveying the aesthetics of subjective experiences. Nevermind video games as narrative, video games as games or video games as rules – video games adept at simulating presence in three-dimensional worlds. These dream-machines are capable of eluding senses into immersion by representation of sight and sound and interaction, conjuring the fantastical and the mundane alike. That such reality is so often forgot is the only explanation why such a long-time primordial dream of mankind and the human ego has been so mistreated in the medium. Amidst rows and rows of shooters and strategy games set in space, one would find a great deal of difficulty in chosing a game that could accurately represent the sense of being a space astronaut. Powerful and inspirational memories of the past, such as Kennedy’s famous speech or the iconic 1969 broadcast of Apollo 11 seem to have been utterly forgotten due to game designers’ strangling myopia. Herein lies “Echo Night Beyond’s” accomplishment, as more than serving as decent sequel to the horror-themed first person adventure “Echo Night”, it establishes a faint, yet palpable realization of what it would feel like to be in outer space.

Sadly, its legacy does come into place. As background scenario there’s an occult ghost-story set in space, which serves as narrative bridge to previous iterations, not to mention that the structural design follows closely on its predecessors, with exploration guided with means of quests attributed by wandering ghosts. Eventually, these awkward trappings become fully digestible because “Beyond” follows that golden rule of Japanese design which places all elements as functional complements to the establishment of an aesthetic experience. Indeed, the clichéd esoteric storyline and adventure template prove mere video game macguffins that justify players’ need to embark on a journey through an abandoned space station. The alpha and omega of the game is the voyage itself, as you wander through the cold metallic halls of an eerie, ghost-infected mining facility, encrusted somewhere on the face of the moon. And it is, as all survival horror games should aspire to be, a distressful, profoundly unsettling psychological journey.

You explore the game in first person view, with a claustrophobic helmet crushing your sight’s field of view, and a bulky space suit slowing your every move. The silence, in almost as dreadful manner as in Kubrick’s masterpiece, is ever present, with the howling trot of the space suit being your ears’ only companion for the majority of the time. Sluggishly plodding about the atmospheric surroundings, a small torch tenuously lighting the way through the darkness, you’ll feel just like a space explorer should feel: alone. The occasional metallic ringing of shutting doors and industrial machines will be the only presence you will encounter apart from the sinister (albeit somewhat lost in translation) encounters with ghosts. As they guide you through the adventure, you’ll even explore the exterior of the space station, thrust into the moon’s harsh surface, beneath the menacing black void of outer space, crawling ever so slowly, nigh standing still, or simply jumping as Neil Armstrong did, in a lethargic space twirl, flying across wide areas of white dusty terrain, only to find oneself perpetually trapped in the most desolate of landscapes.

Like its “King’s Field” brethren, “Echo Night Beyond” reminds us of how simplicity in the game design meanders and scarcity of resources are no barriers for devising superlative forms of player experience. Its technical excellence in audio-visual design make it an extremely immersive and moody game, and allow it to be a pioneer in capturing the imagination of all those who’ve always wanted to be a little bit closer to that vast dark mantle of unknown that covers the sky.

score: 4/5

2010
03/25
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King’s Field IV – “Out of the Light and into the Darkness”

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There’s a consensual, yet unspoken rule of modern game design which states that for a game to be enjoyable and entertaining, it can’t ever become hard or frustrating, lest players feel bad and lose interest. Surely, such lapallissade could only be a synonym of some obvious universal truth regarding game design, but the superficiality of such a crude assessment could only lead to a misconceived notion. The truth of the matter is, that in the realm of true games, for you to feel that warm sense of enjoyment and self-gratification, you need to overcome challenges. Challenges require skill, skill must be attained through training and trial and error, and trial and error is bound to lead to frustration, whenever the error part comes into place. The greater the challenge, the higher the sense of gratification. But big reward means big penalty, so difficult challenges come at great costs. The equation of “fun” is obviously more complex, but this small prelude should give you enough insight to understand that, while modern design may allow you a superficially more fulfilling experience, it will always lack the sense of accomplishment that difficult games can elicit. You simply can’t remove frustration from the equation without in the process removing part of the fun. Not all designers have forgotten this old truth of game design, and “King’s Field IV”, as its predecessors, comes exactly from such designers (Rintaro Yamada and Satoru Yanagi).

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Playing “King’s Field” feels precisely like playing games from your childhood. You start the game without watching lengthy cut-scenes, or playing through tutorials that help understand the game. The minute you press the start button, the game starts in the proper sense, and in “King’s Field”, that means you’re bound to die from then on. In fact, that’s precisely what happened to me in the first ten seconds of the game, as I stepped on a piece of rock that caved into a pit of hot boiling lava, killing me in the process. No checkpoint nor extra lives; the cold dark game over screen loomed only with a load-game option which I could not use for not being able to reach a save point before my first death. The process repeated with a new game. On my second try though, I could see clearly where I had died, which meant that on my third attempt I knew which path to take to avoid certain death. This is the gist of “King’s Field” – you play, you die, you play again and avoid death till you die again, and slowly but steadily, you advance in the game. As you go by, you start to play the game almost as if you were actually in the game world, desperately clinging to your life, cautiously avoiding any suspicious looking room or enemy. The game’s pace helps immensely – your character trots and attacks very slowly, forcing you to plan every step very carefully. Loneliness, darkness and anxiety will be your only companions while the game lasts. For you will fear the game-space, because at any moment, you may die and have to repeat the long, extenuating track you took since your last save. Such hardships inevitably lead to moments of sheer despair when you die, but with a good deal of patience, you can mitigate such moments to mere interludes before the conquest of the next hard earned goal. In the end it all pays out, and you’ll feel as a true hero, one capable of conquering everything… till you die again, that is.

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The game’s atrocious difficulty serves as the perfect gameplay metaphor for the story the designers are trying to convey. Fantasy stories tell of grand knights capable of epic feats of strength, agility and mind, yet modern role-playing videogames give us challenges that even a baby can overcome. That is why “King’s Field” clicks into place and you get to actually ‘play’ the part of the conquering knight – the game needs to be hard for you to feel like a hero. That being said, it never pulls your leg in cheap ways, it’s all panned out consistently in the game-world, and the game designers were even kind enough to give you sparsely placed save points (shifting the game away from rogue territory). Despite the retro appeal and a limiting budget, the game still manages to make use of modern technology. The aesthetic thoughtfully applies lighting and physics effects to establish the oppressive and gloomy dark fantasy environment, beautifully complementing the dread you feel faced with the dangerous surroundings. In a nutshell, “King’s Field IV” is precisely what it sounds like: a classic first person view dungeon crawler with a fresh coat of paint. Like the recent “Dark Spire”, it’s retro-gaming at its best, completely conscious of its appeal, inherent strengths and flaws, but with the added expressiveness that modern platforms’ technology allows. It’s tough as hell mind you, but as rewarding as only old games can be. Now, where can I get that “Demon Souls”?

2009
08/13
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