As the title says I’m putting this blog on hold for now. I started this blog because I love video games and storytelling and really wanted to share some of my thoughts about them. At the time I figured taking an analytical look at how storytelling in games is accomplished would do that for me.

However a combination of factors including the end of Consolevania, the rise of Zero Punctuation and the general amount of negativity and clinical dissection of games on review sites has changed my thinking about games. I don’t really want to be sat here taking apart the games I love and breaking them down to their components for dry analysis. Where’s the fun in that?

With all that in mind, I have moved on to a new project Stage Clear. This is primarily a weekly podcast I produce with freelance games journalist Rob Fahey, but we’re also going to be playing around with a lot of other stuff on there. My aim with Stage Clear is be much more about the love of games, rather than the kind of cynical sneering forums and comments threads seem to be so full of these days.

I’m sure I’ll do something else with this site at a later date, but right now you can get a much more interesting weekly dose of my thoughts on gaming over at Stage Clear.

If you’re a fan of survival horror like me then hopefully you’ll have come across Siren at some point in your gaming travels. Created by Keiichiro Toyama who was also responsible for the first Silent Hill game. As you might have already guessed he’s carried over his love of creepy air raid sirens. Thankfully though the Silent Hill connection stops there, rather than being a mere Hill clone, Siren is very much its own game packed full of ideas.

While I know many people who played the first Siren game, not very many of them finished it, myself included. The game was cripplingly difficult to play, with even the slightest mistake punished by instant death. It also didn’t help that the overly British dub jarred strongly with the Japanese settings and characters. Siren: Blood Curse is a PS3 reimagining of the original PS2 game with two key differences, firstly it’s now got a bunch of American characters in there but more importantly it’s now actually fun to play. This is essentially the game I wanted to play the first time around.

An American Zombie in Japan

Settings wise Siren finds its own niche, Resident Evil has it’s b-movie zombies, Project Zero has traditional Japanese ghosts and spirit photography, Silent Hill brings up twisted monsters from the psyche, but Siren focuses on a very japanese take on zombies and demons.

In Blood Curse an American film crew goes to investigate the site where a remote mountain town disappeared 30 years earlier. However they arrive to find the town not only still there but in the middle of enacting a strange ritual sacrifice, that is rudely interrupted by another young American running away with their sacrifice to be. From there things get really strange, it seems most of the town population has been turned into strange “shibito” zombies all to eager to hunt down and kill any living survivors, all while a blood red rain falls from the sky. From there the mystery begins, why did the town disappear 30 years ago and what has happened to the people living there?

Box of Delights

I said earlier the game was full of ideas so let’s talk about some of them:

Multiple Protagonists - The game has no single hero, instead you take control of a variety of characters over the same period of time, following their intertwining paths over the course of the game. A nice trick that is a basic ingredient in other mediums but largely avoided in games, I suspect largely due to concerns about immersion and player progression.

Non-Linear Storytelling - In the original version of Siren the gameplay was entirely non-linear. You had a grid showing characters on one axis and time on the other and could play out squares in that grid as the game unlocked them for you. Meaning you jumped back and forth through the story, trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to the town. Sadly this was lost in the remake and replaced with a more linear structure but with a big time loop in the middle to add some variety.

Stealth - Siren is also one of the only stealth horror games, instead of launching at monsters with a lead pipe screaming “have at ya” the game makes weaponry and ammunition so scarce that most of the game relies on you making it to your goal without your enemies ever spotting your presence. This is made possible through the bizarre “sight jacking” power that allows you to see what nearby monsters can see. Leading to lots of tense sequences where you hide in a cupboard and learn their movement patterns.

Episodic Content - Siren: Blood Curse also seems to have been a failed experiment in episodic gaming. The game is split up into 12 chapters, each ending on an appropriate cliff hanger, and each including the obligatory previously on Siren and next episode previews. The developers of the game seem to have done a good job splitting the game up into installments that could have been released weekly at a low price. However the whole thing was rendered rather pointless when the game was released with all episodes being available for download on the same day. Meaning you just end up downloading the whole lot and playing it like any other game. I strongly suspect a difference of opinion between the developer and the publisher led to this.

External Exposition - One element of the storytelling I wasn’t so keen on was the reliance on the built in archive. Completing missions, finding hidden items or performing optional side tasks unlocks content in your archive. Here you find snippets of information relating to the game’s story including diaries, notes, character ID badges, tape and video recordings, etc… A great way to expand the story of the game, however in reality the game featured too little exposition within its cutscenes (a rarity I’m sure you’ll agree) and explains much of the story through the archive. The upshot of this is if you play the game end to end you’ll be very confused as to what just happened and only when you sit outside of the game world in the archive can you fathom what really happened. A disconnect that didn’t sit too well with me.

Scarier than Driv3r

Siren: Blood Curse is a great game, a simplified but much more fun version of the flawed masterpiece that was the original Siren. Like all of the Siren games it’s filled with inventive ideas and different approaches to horror storytelling than you’ll see in other survival horror games. It has some flaws such as the lack of exposition I already mentioned, and the later sections not only get harder but a bit more obtuse in working our your current objective. However minor quibbles asides Siren is a horror game and the most important thing is even a seasoned horror viewer such as myself found is genuinely creepy, scary and shocking in all the right places.

You may already have seen in and around the internet that Fallout 3 is winning a lot of Game/RPG of the year awards. Put simply it deserves all this success and more. With the big glut of high profile titles released over the christmas period my copy of Fallout 3 sat on the shelf for over a month while I played through other material, and that’s definitely something I’ve come to regret as Fallout is one of the best games I’ve ever played and possibly even my favourite of all time. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so enamoured with a game that reading forum tards ripping into it actually angers me.

I’ve never really been into sandbox gaming. I love the concept of a free flowing world to explore as you like but in practice I’ve always found these worlds to be deeply hollow. Earlier this year I caved into the hype and bought GTAIV and 6 hours later I was bored to tears, sure it’s a great big city but apart from stealing cars, driving about, and shooting gangsters there is so little to do there of any consequence. Even Oblivion failed to hold me for very long because the villages and cities you found didn’t feel unique, they didn’t seem to be populated by real people but cookie cutter fantasy cliches.

All the World’s A Stage

Fallout 3 however delivers exactly what I’ve been looking for from a sandbox world. If you wander off in some random direction across the wasteland, sooner or later you’ll find something, maybe a run down settlement, a sewer entrance, or a decaying building that seem distinct from anything you’ve seen before. Then once you’re inside you’re going to find characters, people with their own stories to tell as they try to live out the post-apocalypse in their own way.

The icing on the cake is that the game then let’s you get involved in these little mini-stories, these side quests however you like. Not just like Metal Gear where you choose to be a stealthy creep, or a cheap sniper, a bloody melee fighter or an assault rifle wielding maniac. Not just like Mass Effect where you can be a goody two shoes or an utter bastard or a dull neutral generic hero. In fact it’s all of that and more. Everything you say and do effects the future of that little pocket of society struggling to survive.

The post apocalyptic retro-future setting really helps the game, because in a working society most towns and cities will be very similar but in the wasteland of Fallout 3 everyone is handling their predicament differently. You’ll come across a hotel full of rich people living in relative luxury like nothing happened, an underground cave complex full of children who’ve built a community you have to leave when you become an adult, a run down village run by a delusional leader who’s declared it an independent republic, a subway station now inhabited by noble vampire like cannibals, and so much more.

Did I Tell You About The Time…

Truth be told none of the individual stories nor the main quest are incredibly strong, and you can trace many of them as clear homages to films and books. However the sheer quantity of them, and the freedom to play them out in your own way more than makes up for having one incredibly strong storyline. The choices it asks you to make are beautifully varied often full of fantastic moral abiguity. On top of which the emergent elements of the gameplay create your own personal stories, the kind you’ll be boring anyone who’ll listen with for weeks.

When I’ve not been playing Fallout myself, I’ve been watching my housemate play through it for herself and it’s like watching a different game. The way she approaches every situation is different to what I would have done and rather than spoiling it like someone telling you the ending to a film, it’s more like sharing holiday stories and the different things you both saw in the same city. It can even be frustrating “Why didn’t you do this? Why did you say that?” but it’s up to each of you to find what you enjoy about the world.

Truth be told I’ve been playing the game like a massive arsehole selfishly and cruelly punishing anyone in the wasteland unfortunate enough to run across me. I blew up the bomb worshipping town of Megaton after I’d ripped them off for every last bottle cap I could wring out of them, partly because the view of a small nuke going off at night is beautiful but largely because the rich swine at Tenpenny Tower gave me a penthouse suite with a view and robot butler as a reward. My straight laced housemate chose to save the town, be their hero but in her attempts to be noble she still went and got the town sheriff killed and that amused me greatly. Fallout 3 never gives you a right or wrong choice and neither does it make the consequences of your choices obvious until it’s too late.

A World of My Own

Design wise Bethesda have come up with some great ideas dealing with leveling and random encounters. While areas in the game will scale in level to ensure you can explore the landscape in any order and still be challenged, once you’ve entered an area it locks to that level. So if you get hammered by the enemies and come back later you will be stronger. Also, on top of all the specifically designed areas on the map there are lots of random encounters where an area will be turned into a randomly selected piece of gameplay that will then also lock for your game if you come back later. On top of all that enemies don’t respawn, so your second trip through an area if littered with your bodies not a fresh batch of XP fodder to remind you it’s just a game. All this means you’ve got a world that is different for each person playing it but never feeling random or arbitrary.

I don’t really need to tell you to go play Fallout 3 because the game is selling by the bucket load and is getting an enormous amount of critical praise, but if like me you’re a gamer that loves interactive storytelling you’d be doing yourself a great disservice if you didn’t spend a little time with this game. By 5 hours in I was calling it genius, by 10 hours I’d told all my friends I was going to burn all the rest of my gamers as I don’t need them anymore, I’m now approaching 40 hours and fearing that I might only get another 20 hours of so before I’m done, and this is filling me with sadness. Sure not everyone is going to love Fallout 3 as much as I do but if you can’t find something in here to enjoy then you might as well forget about videogames or life in general as you have a cold dead heart. Forget the main quest, just get out there into the wasteland and find your own adventures.

If you’ve somehow not already come across Braid then you’re missing out, this is an independent game that shows everything indie gaming should be imaginative, playful and interesting in a way bigger budget titles would really struggle to match.

Mario of Persia

Braid is essentially a 2D puzzle platformer game where the puzzles are solved by manipulating time. The mechanic itself won’t be unfamiliar to anyone who’s played Prince of Persia but here the focus is on increasingly difficult and ingenious challenges. The developer promises every puzzle is unique, which I think is fair.

That alone would be enough for an incredibly solid game worthy of your time, but Braid has even more in store for you. In Braid everything is a puzzle. The levels are filled with puzzles, but solving them only leads to the pieces you need to solve the larger jigsaw puzzle for each of the worlds. Then solving each world’s puzzle is in itself part of a larger puzzle to unlock the final world.

Now that’s the gameplay which is all well and good but the story in Braid is also a puzzle. The beautiful watercolour painting style graphics and somber music help the game initially seem like a melancholy retelling of Super Mario Bros. where the princess has run away after a bad relationship. However the end game seems to reveal something entirely more interesting.

To really talk about this I am going to have to spoil the ending so if that really bothers you I suggest you come back when you’ve played through this modern classic.

Another Version of the Truth

The final level initially seems like a chase where the princess is standing on the platform above you helping you work your way through a series of caves so you can reach her and save her from a monstrous knight. However when you reach the end you are not reunited with her and are instead standing outside her bedroom window. Now you are given no choice but rewind the whole level and suddenly you realise the music is playing forwards and what you are watching is the real course of events. The princess not helping you but trying to keep you away from her as she runs away from the stalker outside her bedroom, with the knight at the end seeming more like her saviour than a monster.

Not willing to let things rest there you are sent to an epilogue room which contains a series of books explaining the story of the game. However the contents of many of the books are hidden behind another puzzle. Some call it a theory, but it’s one I subscribe to, that this final room explains that the real story of Braid is of a man obsessed with developing the atom bomb and this was the princess he had been chasing.

Brave New World

So now having thoroughly ruined all the twists to Braid, you’ve got to admit that the ambition and scope of the game is quite stunning. Most of the downloadable indie games you can buy at the moment are happy to give you a palatable short chunk of fun gameplay, Braid offers a lot more.

Storytelling wise I think brave is the best way I can describe it as all the strengths could also been seen as weaknesses. The writing in the books that tell the story takes itself so seriously it borders on pretentious, and the puzzle approach to storytelling is subtle to the point of obscurity. I think most of the people who play Braid will not see all the story I’ve explained above and will run through the epilogue room and take it to be the end.

However I’m not really condemning these choice as I and many others I know have had a great time solving both the gameplay and story puzzles that make up Braid, and whether or not you fully get or even care about the narrative the game just has an incredible sense of mood. Never has a platformer felt so sad to play.

Ultimately Braid succeeds in that it is a puzzle game where truly every aspect of it seems like a puzzle. Making the game’s story hidden is rare and possibly unique as I am having trouble thinking of any other game that takes a similar approach to interactive storytelling. I know I like many others will be very interested to see what Braid’s creator does next.