No, we have to walk to the other side of the breakfast bar to sit down and proceed. We exit and proceed to the kitchen, where we find our partner making breakfast, but we still can’t interact. Once we’ve looked in and realized these aren’t our points of interest, we continue downstairs, where we find an openable bathroom door - again with nothing to do inside. We walk down the stairs past a number of rooms with openable doors. Our character awakens on a couch in an unknown home. Virginia, unfortunately, has one notable moment of friction They continuously engage the player, and my natural response was to continuously feel engaged. You take a sip, gaze onto the horizon, look at your pal, and that’s it.Ī nice, quiet moment, shown and then done. This pacing allowed even slower moments to shine, like when your character drinks a beer with her ‘partner’ on a tower overlooking the city. I found myself somewhere, moved towards the point of interest, interacted with it, and moved on to the next beat - rinse and repeat. I believe this attention to pacing is what makes Virginia work from a design standpoint the story is told so efficiently that I remained engaged despite having nothing complex to do. However, each of these areas are connected by smash cuts, giving the player a sense of the journey without subjecting them to its monotony. An early segment of the game has players walking through a hallway, down a stairwell, and along a basement corridor to reach an office. This allows scenes to progress faster without sacrificing the illusion of time and distance. Virginia brilliantly uses film-like editing to keep the story moving. In a game whose only form of player engagement is movement through a story, I found this to be an effective way to lose my interest.Ĭontrast this with what I feel is an impeccably paced game, Virginia. Long stretches of walking are void of narrative or environmental storytelling. Fine.īut it fails to compensate for this by filling the space it takes for the player to travel from point A to B. Dear Esther does not allow the player to speed up movement, presumably because this would not fit the contemplative tone of the work. In order to appreciate this, I’d like to look at games that worked better for me.įirst, let’s look at pacing. In my opinion, these three issues form a trifecta of potential pitfalls for post-mechanical games: (1) poor pacing, (2) shoddy wayfinding, and (3) sparse environmental storytelling. This can serve to create a negatively reinforcing interaction loop - the player explores an off-track area to discover nothing of interest, loses the way forward, and slowly trudges around trying to find the arbitrary point where the narrative continues. To compound both of these problems, players are only allowed to move at a single, slow pace. While the island’s design often gives the illusion of openness, exploration into areas off the beaten path are rarely, if ever, rewarded by illuminating environmental storytelling.Īnd although the player must proceed along a linear path to progress, unnecessary dead ends and arbitrary bottlenecks end up making this frustratingly difficult. To give a quick run-down, Dear Esther is a first-person walking game in which players proceed around an island, occasionally listening to audio excerpts from the protagonist’s letters to the titular Esther. ![]() ![]() In fact, it might best be thought of as a case study of what not to do in a post-mechanical game - a sort of martyr of post-mechanical game design. While it should be praised as a pioneer, I would be loathe to hold it up as a model for the genre. Given this rich field of experiments, then, it might be useful to look past their mere experimentation, and glean whatever insights we might from their results. Upon its release in 2012, Dear Esther was considered somewhat shocking, “an experiment with the videogame form,” as one review called it now, only four years later, the “Walking Simulator” tag on Steam yields 157 results. In between the complex interaction of mainstream videogames and the pure passivity of animated film, there’s a lot of space to occupy.ĭevelopers have been toying with these possibilities since the earliest days of computer gaming - William Crowther created the first digital text adventure back in 1976 - but recent years have seen an explosion of games exploring this ‘post-mechanical’ world of design. New Cane and Rinse blog contributor Malcolm Morano considers the pitfalls and merits of ‘post-mechanical’ games including Dear Esther, Virginia, Thirty Flights of Loving and Gone Home
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