Last week was full of everything you want out of a vacation: a change of setting from urban sprawl to glorious mountain range, rancid air exchanged for clean winter wind, great food, better scotch, and the best company. Of course, there was also a smorgasbord of great portable games. Retro Game Challenge, Atlus’ under-the-radar curiosity My World, My Way, and Kirby Super Star Ultra made for marvelous palette cleansers, washing away the last traces of Epic Holiday Gaming morsels still stuck between my gaming teeth. It was restful, brief, and rejuvenating. When I returned, I knew that it was going to be time for 2009 hardcore gaming to go into high gear what with Street Fighter IV and a Killzone 2 demo waiting, but the first thing I had to spend some time with was Flower. As soon as it had finished installing, well, it felt like my vacation had just gotten an extension.
The game is exhilarating. Having grown up in rural upstate New York, the contrast of Flower’s city-bound preludes and its soaring bucolic playgrounds pulls at very specific heartstrings in me. The game is brief but I’m no less taken with it. Jenova Chen and ThatGameCompany are damn good at eliciting just this sort of emotional response with their games. Their debut Cloud was rich with the same bittersweet catharsis that characterizes Flower. Both are something like the game equivalent of a symphonic poem, their fluid flight-based gameplay replacing music as the visceral informant of a visual/audio narrative. They’re games unified in subject too; Cloud and Flower chronicle escapes to a pure, natural world from metropolitan confinement. They are concerned with beauty and simplicity.
I wouldn’t say that Chen and TGC started it, but they’re certainly poster children for what appears to be a burgeoning romantic movement in game design. As much as Jon Blow’s Braid was a commentary on play conventions, it was also a deliberately lyrical game. Trading in pastoral visuals and acoustics to inform its tale of romantic loss and redemption, it shares more than a little with Flower and Cloud. I’m wondering, though, why these new romantics have yet to explore more emotionally troubling and challenging themes. Gamers and critics are constantly citing “dark” themes as a mark of credibility in mainstream game design, but the darkness they refer to is usually tied up in angst driven narrative and violence. Where are the games that are legitimately dark, games that don’t just gain their emotional thrust from beauty or human ugliness? Braid’s ambiguous conclusion and TGC’s exploration of predatory natural selection, Flow, flirt with ugliness and dissonance but never make them their focus. (Flow’s poetic prescript “…life could be simple…” limits the game’s reach from the start.) But why can’t the lyrical style and play of these games be applied to subject matter like Procedural Arts’ Façade, a game that places you directly into a married couple’s complete relationship breakdown?
I’m excited by these creator’s efforts and, yes, moved by them. I was caught up in Flower from the start. But I am anxious and thirsty for the romantic games’ movement to find its Stravinsky, that artist who asks me to look at and hear and play something I’d rather not to make their work that much more powerful.
Related links:
Flower - A Zen de Blob?
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Far Out, Man
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming
