The Stack

Open-ended games present some difficulty for deciding when to remove them from the Stack. The Gungan Frontier at least contains some optional discrete challenges in the form of those training missions, the last couple of which are more like missions that you train for by playing the main game. The penultimate mission asks you to turn around an ecosystem on the verge of collapse due to overharvesting, and get it to the point where it can support a city population of 60000. This would be most easily done by temporarily forbidding all harvesting while you get things into shape, if it weren’t for the stipulation that you lose the mission if the city population ever drops below 5000. I have now managed to pass this test (something I didn’t manage when I first bought the game), but my own best efforts at designing a stable ecosystem from scratch have been a lot closer to the losing end of that range. (Indeed, when I passed the 60k mark in the mission, it wasn’t with a stable ecosystem. Rather, I impatiently gave the city an extra population boom at the end by giving them permission to harvest as much as they wanted of everything, leaving the system in far worse shape than when I started. This is perhaps the grossest violation of the spirit of the game imaginable.)

Anyway, I’ve completed all the explicit challenges in the game, which leaves me with the implicit ones. Creating a stable ecosystem is actually quite easy: all you really have to do is throw in some plants and refrain from overharvesting them. Which raises the question of why you need animals in the system at all. There’s one species of plant that’s carnivorous, and another that supposedly uses an animal to spread its seeds, but for the most part, plants in this game don’t benefit at all from having animals around.

But adding animals to the mix is crucial to exploiting things for the city (in the same way that cows allow us to indirectly eat grass), and also for maximizing your “bio-score”, which seems to take biodiversity into account. But city population and bio-score are just numbers, and even when they’re both far from optimal, Boss Nass will regularly ring you up with effusive congratulations on your success. (I wonder if I can turn him off like Jar Jar? Past a certain point, he’s just as much of a pointless interruption as Jar Jar ever was.) More important, to my mind, is the because-it’s-there factor. The longest possible food chain seems to be five steps, with the Rancor as apex predator. Keeping a five-step chain stable would be a considerable challenge, and thus something one could pursue for its own sake. Then there are some exotic combinations to pursue. I mentioned a carnivorous plant, the Tooke Trap. It can combine with the Shiro, an herbivorous turtle-analogue, to form the Shiro Trap, a bulbasaur-like symbiote: the plant grows on the animal’s back to provide the plant with mobility and the animal with camouflage. Creating a system with a stable Shiro Trap population would require enough set-up that you’d pretty much have to pursue it as an end in itself.

The game contains a total of 85 distinct lifeforms, although the number of species is somewhat less due to multi-stage life cycles: one species of plant has spores that drift about independently, one species of animal lays eggs that you can harvest separately, a couple of animals have young with different diets and predators and terrain access than their parents. If a player really wants a thorough Gungan Frontier experience, there’s plenty of complexity to explore. The game itself contains encyclopedic data about each organism, but it’s not organized in a way conducive to big-picture planning. If I really wanted to delve into it, I’d start by making a chart of all the predator-prey relationships, annotated with observations about how much things eat and how fast they reproduce. (The game is packaged with a poster showing all the species, and I hoped at first that it would be such a chart, like the tech-tree posters often packaged with strategy games. But no, it just shows names and pictures.)

But I don’t think I want to delve into it that deeply. Self-imposed implicit challenges are never a requirement for removing something from the Stack. I’ve spent a significant amount of time fiddling with ecosystems on my own, and that’s all the game can ask from me.

A random pick from the stack today: The Gungan Frontier (released 1999, bought by me maybe six months later when it hit the bargain bins) is basically an ecosystem simulation, the sort where life forms roam about a 2D world, eating each other and dying off when they over-predate and so forth. Countless computer science undergrads (myself included) have written sims of this sort, but this one is a bit more elaborate than most, with multiple overlapping food chains and varying terrain. And, of course, it additionally allows player interaction, mainly by means of seeding the environment with organisms you’ve got in storage. By my reckoning, there’s enough interactivity to make it a game, but it’s a game like Sim City, in that it’s not essentially goal-oriented. There’s a set of training missions with explicit goals, such as raising the population of a particular creature to a certain threshold within a time limit, but in the game proper, the only goal is to keep things going indefinitely. But even though there’s no win condition, there’s definitely a lose condition: your stores are finite, so if things go extinct, you can’t necessarily replenish them.

There’s one other thing about the game that makes it particularly Sim City-like: the city. The whole premise is that you’re creating this ecosystem for the benefit of a space colony, which harvests the organisms for food and building materials. If you like, you can switch the main view from the ecosystem to the colony, watching it add pods containing classrooms and hospitals and the like as it gains the necessary materials, or, if you’re not doing so well, watching those pods gray out through disuse as the colonists move out. It really seems like the colony view was designed to provide some of Sim City‘s particular experiences and motivations, but because the only things you can interact with are over in the ecosystem view, I seldom look at it. It seems a bit of a shame, because someone clearly went to some effort to create it.

The game was marketed as an educational game, but it seems to me to have aspects of what’s come to be called “persuasive” games as well. (I suppose these things are not clearly separable.) The whole point is to teach you the importance of caring for the ecosystem, so obviously there’s a bit of an environmentalist agenda there. But it’s a very non-specific environmentalist agenda, and somewhat muddled, what with its underlying assumption that wildlife exists primarily to be exploited. But consider how the harvesting of resources works. You can set the harvest rate for each species to a few rough categories: “None”, “Some”, “Lots”, “Maintain”, “As needed”. As far as I can tell, the “Lots” setting translates to “Render this species extinct as quickly as possible”. Although that’s handy in a few of the training missions, where you don’t have to worry about lasting consequences, it’s hard to imagine it being useful in a real game. No, the “Lots” option is not there to serve a gameplay purpose, but to convey a message, that unbridled consumption yields environmental devastation.

I should probably mention that this is nominally a Star Wars Episode 1 game. This doesn’t make a great deal of difference; of all the Star Wars-themed games I’ve played, this is probably the one that has the least to do with the movies. (The closest runner-up for that honor is probably Pit Droids, a puzzle game also from the Lucas Learning line.) A few of the organisms are taken from the movies; for the first time, you get to see dewbacks, rancors, and dianogas in the wild. But the Star Wars movies don’t contain nearly enough plant or animal species to form an ecosystem, so the bulk of the critters were invented for this game. Boss Nass will occasionally send you a voice message about how the colonists urgently need more materials, and sometimes Jar Jar Binks will pop up to say something utterly pointless. Finding the option to turn off Jar Jar is one of the game’s most satisfying moments. It’s almost as if he was included for the specific purpose of allowing the player to disable him.

Before my last session, I would have said that The Final Cut is a game that has to be played twice: once to find out by trial and error what you’re supposed to do, and a second time to use your knowledge of the solutions to spot the clues that you were supposed to have noticed the first time round. But now, I have doubts that even this would be enough.

In the beginning of chapter 2, the detective finally meets his client, Robert Martin-Jordan, in person for the first time. Naturally he has a lot of questions. Some of these questions are about things that just plain haven’t happened. For example, one of the questions is about the things said on an audio tape that I had found, but had not yet found a means to listen to. (Perhaps he has the psychic power to divine the contents of audio tapes? I know there exists a man who can read the grooves on LPs…) Another of the dialog options is to tell him about how you were attacked up on the scaffolding. I had been up on that scaffolding, but there was no attack. All that happened there was a puzzlingly pointless first-person cinematic in which I pressed a button, after which the game returned me to the bottom of the now-unclickable ladder. Oh, and that somehow triggered the end of the chapter. I think I was doing things in the wrong order there.

The whole scaffolding scene had seemed incomprehensible at the time. (In retrospect, the button was probably the one mentioned elsewhere that turns the fire alarm on and off, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Unless perhaps the sound glitches prevented me from hearing the alarm. But if so, did I turn it on or did I turn it off? And either way, why?) But if I was attacked in that scene and didn’t notice, something was very wrong. So I found a walkthrough online to try to find out what was supposed to have happened there.

That walkthrough diverged from my experience of the game before it was even done with the intro movie.

After she leaves for bed, you observe a green car and have a momentary psychic flashback to the time your parents were killed in a car crash.

No I don’t! I saw the car, but there was no psychic flash, and this business about the detective’s parents is news to me. So at this point it looks like it’s just skipping over some of the cutscenes. But only some of them, which is odd. Maybe they’re using multiple codecs? Searching the web for reviews, I don’t see anyone else who had my problems. I see a lot of complaints about the story and the puzzles, but I guess my situation is like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in reverse: the more fundamental problems blind me to the surface flaws.

At least the walkthrough showed me something that I had genuinely missed on my own: I had failed to find the camera angle that lets you access the document giving all the characters’ names. This is something to be careful about, guys. If you’re going to make basic information missable, some people are going to miss it. Given that the rest of the game assumes that you have this information, it would have been a good idea to make leaving the prologue and proceeding to chapter 1 contingent on finding this document. Instead, the game makes it contingent on watching Mr. Martin-Jordan’s welcome video, which contains no information that’s useful once you’re out of the prologue.

It looks like this one is going back onto the shelf for a while, alongside Tender Loving Care. I seem to be having poor luck with technical problems in adventure games lately. You might think that adventures would be less prone to failure than big-name titles, being less technically demanding, but this also means that they’re typically developed on low budgets by small teams with tight deadlines. Also, their low replayability means that they often don’t get a lot of fan attention after release, ScummVM notwithstanding.

By now, I’ve voluntarily restarted The Final Cut several times. I’ve done this because the earlier bits don’t provide nearly enough context to understand what’s going on. You’re a detective, that much is clear. You’ve been hired to conduct an investigation. But no one tells you what you’re supposed to be investigating. The would-be filmmaker has left you a welcome-and-introduction videotape, but it fails to mention what he wants you to do, or even what his name is. The woman who hired you on his behalf goes to bed immediately after driving you to the mansion, and is mute besides, so there’s no getting information out of her. Snooping around the empty house yields a certain amount of data about various people, but at that point you still have no idea who these people are or what their relation is to the investigation; one of them may be the mute woman, but you haven’t learned her name yet at that point either. When you finally encounter a human being you can talk to, you can work out what the mystery is you’re supposed to solve: the cast and crew all mysteriously failed to show up one day. But the conversation only makes sense if the PC already knows this.

It’s as if I’m missing something I was supposed to learn all this from, possibly a manual. The only documentation I have is a jewel-case insert that explains the UI and not much else. I suppose I should search my pile of loose game manuals for something more substantial, but I remember being equally confused the first time I played the game, so I don’t think any such thing was included in the box. Maybe I’m the victim of a packaging error, or maybe the publisher decided to do without it in the American release. Still, relying on docs to deliver the premise is a mistake that few modern games would make.

The really galling thing is that the intro movie, which would be the perfect place to introduce the basics of the case, tells us next to nothing. The player character narrates how he got involved in this job, and does it in elliptic private-eye patois that evokes any number of films not by Hitchcock, but that’s all.

But then again, the lack of clarity doesn’t stop at the premise. While exploring a diner set, I was baffled by the PC suddenly writing “Sound Engineer: Fat guy” in the PDA he uses as a notebook. Only after restarting and playing the scene again did I notice that he had first glanced at one of the counter stools (there’s those subtle head movements again!), the seat of which was crushed. So, that explains the “Fat guy” part, but why did he think the sound engineer had been sitting there? Is this a manifestation of his psychic powers? Probably not; I’ve seen how his psychic powers work by now. He’s gifted with psychometry, or possibly cinemetry. When he touches objects, he sometimes gets a vision of a two-second clip from a Hitchcock film. (So there is a fair amount of FMV after all.)

Any confusion the player feels in the early parts of the game is exacerbated by the disorienting way that the camera cuts from position to position without warning as you explore the grounds. I recall getting lost and unable to find my way back to the mansion in my first session, years ago. By dint of repetition, I’ve got a better handle on the layout now — the main part is basically just two parallel roads with the mansion at one end and a large backdrop at the other, with various sets between them. It would be pretty much impossible to get lost if you could look around freely.

Fortunately, I seem to be pretty much past the initial confusion phase and into the phase of solving deliberate puzzles. This phase starts when you start finding bodies. There’s nothing like a corpse to give a detective concrete goals.

Well, the Vintage Game Club is proceeding on to its next game ¹As I write this, they’ve narrowed it down to four candidates, all of which I’ve already played. , so I think it’s about time to admit to myself that I’m not finishing up the JRPGs just yet and proceed on to something else. Something nice and quick to finish, like an adventure game. I still have a passel of obscure European graphic adventures that I was formerly unable to play due to the GeForce bug.

So, last night, I reinstalled a couple of games, feeling kind of strange about it — it’s been quite a few months since I ran an installer from physical media. First, I tried out Ring 2, the second part of Arxel Tribe’s sci-fi adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Sound issues drove me away from this; if there’s one place you don’t want the music to be skipping and stuttering, it’s in a game based on opera. My second attempt was another Arxel Tribe title, The Final Cut. This had similar sound problems, but I was able to mitigate them with some fiddling. I still get some ugliness in incidental background noises, but at least the dialogue seems to be playing without problems.

The grand concept behind The Final Cut is that it’s based on, or at least inspired by, the works of Alfred Hitchcock. An oddball premise, but adventure games can get away with such things more easily than other genres. I haven’t got far in the game yet (I’m basically at the point where I abandoned it the first time), but so far, it doesn’t strike me as a very good match to the source material. I mean, if I were going to make a Hitchcock pastiche, I’d start off with the stereotypical Hitchcock protagonist: an ordinary man who, through no fault of his own, gets caught up in events beyond his control, like in North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Not all of his films have such a protagonist; sometimes it’s a spy or a master thief or something, but those sorts of roles aren’t specifically Hitchcockian; anyone can make a film about spies or master thieves. Well, the player character here is apparently some kind of psychic detective, which seems a bit outlandish. That’s the kind of premise you’d start with if you had heard of Hitchcock but had never seen his films. Or, more charitably, if you thought players wouldn’t be attracted to playing the Jimmy Stewart role.

The game is driven by the same sort of interface seen in Grim Fandango, which is to say, it’s the Alone in the Dark interface with the addition that the player character turns his head to look at important objects (something that worked a lot better in GF, due to the PC’s freakishly elongated cranium). In this UI, you drive your avatar around with keyboard or joystick, ²The controls here are relative to the direction the character is facing, not the camera, which makes for awkward stumbling and running into walls. Grim Fandango at least let you toggle between character-relative and camera-relative movement modes. and the camera switches between fixed positions depending on your position. And this is the game’s second stumbling block as a Hitchcock imitation — that the camera is controlled exclusively by the player’s position. Hitchcock’s directorial style heavily depends on his control of the camera: I think of the way it emphasizes the separation between inside and outside in Rear Window, or creates tension by lingering on the impromptu casket in Rope, or how in Frenzy it follows a woman to the killer’s door, watches her go through, and then slowly backs off the way it came, as if abandoning her to her fate (and thus forcing the audience to abandon her as well). But here, even in noninteractive bits — which is to say, the dramatic parts — the camera just sits there. I suppose that even with an engine like this, you could give the director control of the camera in FMV sequences, but so far the only FMV bit I’ve seen is the intro.

So, if we don’t have Hitchcock-style premise or direction, what, apart from the blurb on the box, lets us know it’s a Hitchcock game? Well, there are scattered references to specific films — in particular, one of the early puzzles involves piecing together film titles from fragments. And I think the sets are probably from his films. (Note that when I say “sets”, I mean sets: the premise involves a wealthy eccentric who’s making a film on his estate.) I’m not sure of this because, frankly, most of Hitchcock’s sets aren’t all that distinctive. Maybe a real devotee would look at the hotel set and say “Aha! It’s the hotel from scene 17 of Topaz!” But people like me, who have seen a bunch of Hitchcock films and enjoyed them but didn’t rush out to buy the action figures ³On the other hand, I did buy the game, so maybe I’m just in the smallest part of the Venn diagram here., can probably recognize the Psycho house and maybe the schoolyard from The Birds, and that’s it.

In short, so far this is Alfred Hitchcock: The Game in the same sense as Batman: The Ride. Still, there’s one bit that I’ve come across that seems like it fits the spirit of the films pretty well. Standing in for a missing actor, the player character gets in front of a bluescreen and mimes shooting at a dummy. As I go through that sequence, I know full well that it’s going to come back to haunt me later — I’m basically giving the filmmakers the raw materials to fabricate evidence that I’ve shot someone. And I can only assume that I was supposed to realize this, even as the PC blithely goes through with it, because that’s how suspense works: as in the famous example of the ticking bomb, it’s enhanced if the audience knows something that the characters don’t. But in a game, it can be taken a step farther: the audience doesn’t just watch the hapless protagonist do the wrong thing, but actively participates. Step by step, you’re given directions — “Stand on the X”, “Draw the gun now and point it at the dummy”, and so forth — and you execute them, because however strong your sympathy with the protagonist, your desire to advance the plot is stronger.

Hitchcock was no stranger to audience complicity, of course: he knew full well that people would pay good money to see him take sympathetic characters and put them through the worst day of their lives. He sometimes even made his audience feel like accomplices in his virtual crimes, as in the aforementioned scene in Frenzy, or the cleaning-up scene in Psycho, where the tension depends on the audience’s desire, at that moment, for the killer to get away with it. But it’s so much more direct in a game.

After you reach the ending of World of Goo, there are two avenues for pursuing perfection. First, each level has an “OCD” ¹“Obsessive completion distinction”, according to the game. challenge associated with it — usually of the form “rescue N goo balls”, but sometimes it’s “finish in N moves” or some other variant. I managed to pass a few of the easier such challenges in the smaller levels without meaning to, but I don’t intend to make a serious effort at it. It reeks of frustration.

The other optional challenge is one I’ve mentioned before: freeform goo-tower building at the remains of the World of Goo Corporation campus. This, I spent a considerable amount of time at, both after finishing the game and during the process, mainly while progress was slow. There are in-game suggestions that there’s something to see if you build high enough, but the end cutscene seems to suggest otherwise, that no matter how high you build, you’ll still be striving at the end. At any rate, I found this challenge fairly compelling, and spent a lot of time on it when I finished the game proper.

The next day, while at work, I noticed a unexpected variant on a familiar mental phenomenon. It’s not unusual for the quick but intensive training provided by a game to cause people to see patterns from the game in real life, especially if the patterns are strong, simple patterns that one has never had a reason to notice before. Many people have reported this happening to them with Tetris, and I’ve spoken before about experiencing it with Puzzle Quest. But this was a little freakier: I started seeing the slow wobble of a large goo structure in the unmoving windows on my desktop. (Source code looked particularly unstable, because of the slanting indentations.) I don’t recall experiencing anything quite like this with any other game. Seeing patterns where they actually exist is one thing, but this was seeing illusory motion just because my mind is primed to see it, like a long, slow afterimage.

At any rate, it’s a pretty neat game. Although many of the puzzles are basically variations on building a bridge or tower, it does a good job of always approaching it in a new way. Sometimes it’s the terrain that makes it different, sometimes it’s the available goo types. New goos with different properties keep on getting introduced until very near the close of the game. There’s inflatable balloon goo that can be attached to your structure to help it resist gravity, water-droplet goo that only attaches to one vertex and hangs down (potentially forming long descending chains, if that’s what you need), highly flammable matchstick-goo — come to think of it, all it needs is an earth goo to complete the elemental tetrad. I suppose that niche is taken by the stone blocks in world 4.

The stone blocks are not goo, in that they don’t move of their own accord and you can’t attach them to a goo structure, but they have two attributes found almost exclusively in goo otherwise: you can pick them up with your mouse and reposition them, and they have eyes. Little cartoony ones. Eyes of this sort are the lazy approach to anthropomophizing: I’ve seen them applied to things as unlikely as Tetris blocks and Pong paddles, game elements that really don’t need to be anthropomorphized. And it always seems to be accompanied by incoherent chirps and squeals from the creatures made anthropomorphic. So, yeah, I’m far from a fan of this aesthetic. But then, I look at this game and I ask myself what it would be like without the eyes and the squeals, and I have to admit it would be pretty dry — it would be a lot like Bridge Builder, in fact. Perhaps 2D Boy has actually figured out how to do this style right. It remains to be seen if the secret can be articulated clearly enough to recapture it in another work.

Almost done: I’ve been through all the levels except the epilogue. The epilogue apparently has only three levels, but from what I’ve seen, they’re doozies. (The word “doozy” isn’t one I normally use, but World of Goo inspires that sort of vocabulary.)

There’s a running plot thread, communicated mainly through clickable signposts throughout the levels, about the World of Goo Corporation’s mysterious “Product Z”, which is supposed to change the world forever. It turns out to be (SPOILERS!) the Z axis: “World of Goo is now 3D!” This seemed like a really bold move: could the game really make the jump from a 2D interface to a 3D one three-quarters of the way through? It was at this point that I realized how strong my faith in the author was. I trusted this “2D Boy” (ha ha) to pull of the transition well. However, the whole thing immediately turned out to be a lie. There is no 3D, in or out of gameplay. There’s a shift to an “information superhighway” theme, with the World of Goo Corporation Headquarters (where you build your tower) temporarily turning into “My Virtual World of Goo Corporation” until you finish world 4, but unless computers are just supposed to connote 3D somehow, I don’t see why it was even mentioned. I’ll note that the next level is actually set on the ruins of a disused information superhighway, so apparently a lot of time passes between worlds 3 and 4. Maybe the entire 3D era came and went between levels — a commentary on the fate of big-studio games?

Also, the whole computer-themed world passes by without making any puns on “GUI”. I can’t decide if this is a wasted opportunity or a sign of an admirable sense of restraint. Thinking about the other jokes the signposts crack, though, I don’t think I can really believe the latter.

Over at rockpapershotgun.com, there’s a spirited dicussion of the recent PC release of Braid which turned in parts into an argument about whether or not it’s a better game than World of Goo. There is of course no real reason why a player has to pick one over the other — you can play both, for goodness sakes! — but they both occupy the “indie puzzle game” niche and were released in the same year, which means that they were up for the same awards. The Rock, Paper, Shotgun staff itself has been been a hotbed of pro-goo sentiment since before its release, periodically bringing it up in reviews of other games in an offhand “why can’t they all be this good” way.

My own feeling is that Braid is more compelling. I mean that in a simple and objectively-measurable way: Braid inspired me to keep playing until I was finished, while my WoG sessions have been relatively short. Whether that makes it a better game is a matter of opinion. It may just mean it’s an overall shorter game, and the prospect of imminent completion is enough to keep me going. (Compare my recent lack of progress on the other two games I’m in the middle of: both are JRPGs, the canonical weeks-of-padding genre.)

Beyond that, it should be noted that the two games are trying to produce different experiences. Braid aims to be thoughtful and sad, with touches of the uncanny. “Here’s a piece of your childhood”, it says to the player, “only now it’s grown up and disillusioned.” WoG‘s ambitions are in a wackier direction, with over-the-top dark humor: its message to the player is more like “Oh no! The cute little goo balls are being SOLD AS FOOD!” Braid‘s art is impressionist-influenced watercolors; WoG‘s is cartoony ink sketches with a sort of Tim Burton/Dr. Seuss look. Braid‘s music is heavily cello-oriented (even some of the bits that don’t sound like cello are cello); WoG kicks off with a polka. So to some extent, it’s a matter of taste here, of which of these two styles you prefer.

There’s one really major difference in the philosophy of the gameplay design: Braid‘s puzzles have more definite solutions than those in WoG. That is, Braid‘s puzzle-solving primarily involves leaps of intuition — what the DROD community calls “lynchpins” — whereas the WoG puzzles are more about execution: most of the time, you know what you have to do, you just have to create a structure capable of doing it. Any such structure will do, as long as it works. By contrast, alternate solutions in Braid tend to be just slight variations based on the same insight. Again, some like the one, some like the other. I’ve waxed rhapsodic before about the “moment of realization”, and how it’s one of my main sources of enjoyment in games. But puzzles based on that sensation are ones where the player gets stuck, with no idea how to proceed, until they have the crucial insight. And some people really don’t like that.

And while we’re on well-regarded indie puzzle games, I might as well pull this one out. 2D Boy’s World of Goo has gotten enough good press that I didn’t hesitate to purchase it off Steam a few weeks ago when it was on sale, but didn’t have the time to start it. That’s happening a lot lately. Every weekend, Steam puts a large and temporary discount on one or more games, and it’s going to be the ruin of my attempts to reduce the Stack.

My first impression of the game is that it’s Bridge Builder crossed with Gish. Which is unfortunate, because those are both obscure enough titles that I’m going to have to explain them now. Bridge Builder (and its sequel Pontifex) is exactly what it sounds like: a heavily physics-based game in which you have to design river-spanning bridges that don’t collapse under their own weight under various physical and budgetary constraints. Gish, which is on the Stack still, is a gothy 2D platformer about a sentient blob of tar. Coincidentally (and somewhat oddly), these two games were made by the same team. Or perhaps it’s not coincidence: I’ve detected what may be shout-outs to Bridge Builder in WoG‘s first world, suggesting that 2D Boy is a fan of theirs, or at least aware of them.

But to this a third influence must be added: Lemmings, with its chirruping doomed wee creatures that need your help to escape. The goal in each level of WoG is to help the roaming goo balls to reach an outflow pipe, usually by building a bridge to it out of their living bodies, which are most easily connected in triangular grids. Some species of goo can be detached and reused, others are effectively killed the moment you join them to your expanding structure. All survivors are sent to a special area with a competitive metagoal: build as tall a tower as you can, while clouds representing the tower-heights of other players on the net loom tauntingly overhead.

Even though I’m still in the lower ranks hieght-wise, I’m finding it gratifying to look at the details on those clouds and snicker at how much less efficient they are than mine — “He has twice as many pieces as me, and he’s only just a little way above me!” I only wish I could see their structures, rather than just their stats, because I’m curious about how other people are building their structures. (I suppose I should try Google. People must be posting screenshots.) My own best efforts are Eiffel-Tower-like: I start by making as large and as regular a triangle as I can, then when it’s thick enough, I start mining out the middle bits that aren’t needed for support any more, and put them up top. The broadness of the base, even when it’s reduced to a pair of legs, tends to minimize the structure’s wobble.

And yet it still wobbles. Wobbling is pretty much the point of goo; the whole game is built around what’s been called “jell-o physics”. For this reason, screenshots really don’t communicate the gameplay very well. You can look a picture of a nice slim tower and not realize that it’s swaying back and forth with an arc larger than the screen.

In a some ways, Braid is 2008’s Portal. Like Portal, it’s a puzzle-platformer that’s a critical hit despite being completable in a matter of a few hours (and despite being a puzzle game, for that matter), but in both cases, this is because there’s so little repetition and filler. Also like Portal, it’s a game based around grasping the unintuitive consequences of one simple idea. In Braid, that idea is control of time.

In other words, it’s the same underlying concept as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. But PoP:TSoT was an action game, and thus had a reason to limit the use of time-control capabilities, lest it make the action too easy. Braid is a puzzle game, and lets you rewind as much as you want. Ironically, this means that Braid can contain action sequences far more intense than any you find in PoP. There are bits toward the end where I was constantly doing fractional-second rewinds in order to get things just right. It’s crazy how fast you get used to that. But when you think about it, playing a conventional action game also involves frequent irregularities in the flow of game-time, in the form of quickloads and reversions to save points, and the player usually isn’t bothered by this. The difference here is just a matter of degree.

Mind you, PoP‘s rewind system wasn’t very well-suited for puzzles: it let you go back in time and change stuff, but only in the simplest and most consequence-free way. To make puzzles, you need variations on the theme. The first and simplest variation in Braid is that some objects aren’t affected by your rewinding, and keep on moving forward. The freakiest variation — and my favorite — is the series of levels where the flow of time for everything other than the player character is a function of your position: move rightward and time advances, move leftward and it rewinds. Notably, this really throws a monkey wrench into the ingrained habits of 2D platforming. You can’t just stand there and wait for things to get into the right position for you, and in particular, if something is in your way, you can’t wait for it to move. It won’t move until you do.

If you take away the temporal weirdification, it’s a 2D platformer with mechanics that greatly resemble Super Mario Brothers, and the game runs with that, giving us monsters blatantly modeled on goombas and piranha plants, a princess who’s eternally “in another castle”, and so forth. SMB references seem to have become to indie games what Winsor McCay references are to indie cartoons: a way for the artist to establish cred by showing an appreciation for the true classics of the medium or whatever. Braid plays around with the princess premise in its between-levels text, first making it mundane, portraying (the player character) Tim’s pursuit of the Princess as occurring in the aftermath of a failed relationship with her, but then after a while turning it into something more abstract. The Princess is the eternal and non-specific object-of-pursuit, the thing which will make everything better once you find it, and which you therefore take terrible risks to discover, despite the uncertainty of your success. (In the epilogue, this is linked to science, and the development of the atom bomb, leading some to conclude that Tim is a nuclear physicist and the whole game is his guilt trip about his work on the Manhattan project. But I think that’s an over-literal reading of one example, among many presented, of where the generalized pursuit of Princesses leads.) The strangest part is that there’s a point where the stories of the mundane and eternal princesses overlap, where Tim leaves his significant other because he feels driven to go and find the Princess. Some have interpreted this as simply indicating that the woman he leaves here isn’t the one referred to earlier as the Princess, but I think the idea that he leaves her in order to find her fits well with the time wackiness. Sometimes Tim does things backwards.

And besides, the whole thing is driven by dream logic. The text is very clear that Tim is confused and his memories are blurred (as you might expect from someone who keeps changing his own past). The backgrounds are blurry in an impressionistic way (which makes the parallax scrolling look really nice for some reason). The level-selection areas are clouds, for crying out loud. Apparently there’s been something of a backlash against the pretentiousness and vagueness of the story, but I think that’s taking it all too literally. Some people seem to resent what they see as the author forcing the audience to make up the story when that’s clearly the author’s job. But I don’t feel like I’m being forced to do any such thing, because this is not a story-driven game. The story fragments are there as a frame, and do a nice job of providing things for the gameplay elements to be metaphors for, but it’s clear that the game came first and the metaphors were chosen to fit it. The big exception is the final level, where the gameplay comes to comment on the story quite directly, turning the rescue its head. Well, we’re told in the very beginning that the Princess’ captivity is Tim’s fault, the result of a mistake that he spends the entire game trying to go back and correct.