This edition will be another mixture of games that were released last year and games that I just happened to play last year. I’d love to hear everyone else’s favorite games from last year because I simply did not have the time to explore as many games as I wanted. Let me know and I’ll add it to my list for post-graduation in May.
I reviewed this game back when it first came out, so I recommend read that post for my expanded thoughts. In short, Rapture is a haunting and mesmerizing indie game, in which you play as somebody sent to investigate what happened in a sleepy English village after all its inhabitants suddenly disappeared. The game is experiential, rather than puzzle oriented, which threw me off at first, but I have grown to really love this genre of games that make the player slow down and let go of self as they immerse you in a new world and story. Rapture is a spectacular example of what this genre can do, from the cinematic visuals and musical score to the complex and creative character development
Everyone has been talking about this game for the last couple months and for a great reason: Fallout 4 is truly fantastic. Somehow the developers made traipsing around in a post-apocalyptic nightmare version of Massachusetts while one fends off radioactive mutts and raiders reminiscent of The Road quite fun. Well actually, I’m not sure fun is the right word–the game can be pretty bleak, and it forces the player to work through some difficult decisions about the role that technology should play in human society. For instance, will you choose to treat sentient robots called “synths” as human or merely machine? The outcome of the game depends heavily on which post-war factions you decide to work with and subsequently what kind of missions you embark on. All of this, however, is built into a world that feels believable and open enough to keep a player occupied on side missions for many, many hours. If you are curious about what makes such a bleak world appealing, I recommend watching PBS Game/Show’s video “Why Do We Love Fallout 4’s Awful World?”.
Gone Home “Gone Home” by The Fullbright Company – http://www.thefullbrightcompany.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.After spending a few months abroad in Europe, you return to your family’s home to find it deserted. Where are your parents and your sister? What happened while you were gone? This game is a first person narrative puzzler in which you have to use what you find in the house to solve the mystery. What is remarkable is the compelling story and characters that emerge as you literally walk around an empty house. I have played many puzzlers in this vein, but I was not expecting to become so invested in that family and the events that unfolded in their lives. This is another example of a game that exhibits the power of the experiential gaming genre. It’s also available for Mac/PC, so even if you don’t have a console, you should be able to play it.
I actually haven’t finished playing this one, but I have really enjoyed it so far. It’s quite unlike any game I have mentioned in this post. The graphics are reminiscent of gaming’s early years–pixellated and flat. The story is simple, and the characters are not the kind to whom you become attached. But all of these simplified elements contribute to the stylized and quirky nature of the game, in which you play as a Scythian warrior conquering her quests by solving puzzles, battling mystic creatures, and exploring her dream world. In fact, the simple aesthetic is so evocative that it received several awards in the gaming world. My favorite part of this game, however, is the tongue-in-cheek dialogue and snarkily worded narrative observations. (Click for an example.) The game is available for iOS, so you can play this on your tablet or phone.
The Uncharted games are really familiar to most gamers, so I won’t say much here. For those who don’t know the franchise, it’s a first person adventure game where you play as Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter and pseudo-anthropologist, who traipses around the world, getting in trouble, while he tries to uncover historical secrets. It’s a bit of a modern-day Indiana Jones with lots of puzzles and an equal amount of bad guys. The Nathan Drake Collection is a rerelease of the original trilogy in which each game was remastered to match contemporary video graphic technology. Despite the many video game tropes and subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) misogyny built into these games, they’re a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the new edition coming out this year.
Special Mention: Depression Quest This is the game that sparked the whole Gamergate controversy. It’s a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game about what it’s like to live with depression. I was skeptical about the game’s efficacy (though I’m very supportive of the women targeted in Gamergate), but the game proved me wrong. It’s definitely simple, but I found it to be thoughtful and enlightening. If you know anyone battling with depression, or if you think you might be depressed, I recommend checking it out. It’s a quick game that you could finish in one sitting.
I’m cheating a little bit with these next two games, but I couldn’t remember the year in which I actually played them. And they’re just too good to ignore! Special Mention: A Dark Room This is also text-based, but in the sense that old-school video games were text-based. There’s a whole world to be explored outside of the dark room in which the game begins. I was fascinated by how quickly I became immersed in a world described but not illustrated for me. As for the narrative, well that you just have to find out for yourself. You can play on your iPhone or tablet or via this link on your computer, so it’s very accessible for all.
Special Mention: The Room series This is purely a puzzler with only the vaguest semblance of a story, but it is SO good. The visuals and music are so atmospheric, lending a gravity to the quest of breaking out of each room. I have played the first two, and now a third game is out which I’m excited to try.
I’m writing this blog post on a Metrolink train headed to Oceanside. Very soon I will be seeing the sparkling blue ocean on my right and tanks from Camp Pendleton on my left. I love train travel, so this is a treat because in California trains aren’t terribly convenient. The schedules are sparse, the routes are minimal, and the accompanying app & web technology is quite clunky. The LA Metrolink is no London Tube or NYC Metro. Nevertheless, I love trains, and I have started to discover various opportunities where the train actually works to my advantage, allowing me to be productive on my commutes and less stressed by California drivers. Talking about stress, that is precisely the topic of this week’s (belated) blog post. On Wednesday, our students returned to school for the fall semester, so the campus was abuzz and my email inbox is back to overflowing. Our society loves its digital tools like email, but we seldom are trained in how to use those tools properly. Technology is lauded if it is “intuitive”, but that merely references ease-of-use, not how a piece of technology interacts with other aspects of our lives. When it comes to email, how many times have you found yourself killing 2-3 hours wading through a sea of emails. I have spent countless days where I have wasted most of my workday just trying to stay afloat of the deluge.
That is not good use of a technology. That is enslavement to that tool, rather than mastery of a tool.
So, this year I am thoughtfully examining how to better use my resources, both digital and analog, to both maximize my productivity and create healthy habits in my life–physically, mentally, and socially. I’ll be checking in with my discoveries periodically. To begin, I recently found an amazing free course that transforms the relationship one has with their email inbox. The 21 day program is called Revive Your Inbox, and it takes about 10-20 minutes every day. I am usually fairly skeptical of these types of courses because I find them obvious and unhelpful, but the creators of Revive Your Inbox have carefully curated together a number of extremely useful tips. I’m about halfway through the program and discovering how much I need to change my email habits.
The course was created by the creators of Boomerang— another email productivity tool that you may already use. The team has rolled out a number of nifty tools related to best practices with email, and I really hope they extend their thoughtful technology development to other areas of our digital lives.
Please check it out and let me know your experience with Boomerang or Revive Your Inbox in the comment section below. And don’t forget to let people know about High and Low, as I continue to build up my readership.
P.S. I finished Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The ending was exquisite though I was slightly disappointed that not all my questions were answered. In reflection on last week’s post, I have revised my conclusion and I think that perhaps I did place unfair expectations on the game based on prior constructs of “what constitutes a video game.” Rapture makes no pretense to be anything other than what it is, and it does a phenomenal job of that. A review from US Gamer articulates the “that” well, “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture takes elements of a radio play, underpins it with a core of classic science fiction literature, and wraps it into a combination of walking simulator and slice of interactive drama to create a game, product, or perhaps even a piece of art, that’s simply gorgeous.”
I don’t know how I feel about Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture yet. On one hand, I find myself entirely drawn in by the narrative and world, but on the other hand, I find myself wishing for more. I had similar feelings towards Dear Esther, another game by The Chinese Room. While Dear Esther is beautiful, it has been the source of discussion as to whether one can truly describe it as a game. Essentially, the only mechanism bestowed on the player is the ability to move. As you move around the bleak deserted island setting, you trigger voice-overs that gradually construct the story. So it’s not a movie, but it’s not entirely a game either – it’s something in between.
Dear Esther Screenshot from K Putt, republished with CC license: http://bit.ly/1eBd9Ks
Rapture is an evolution of this concept. Once again the player finds herself exploring a new world in order to find out what has happened. In a similar fashion to Esther, walking into certain areas or rooms will trigger an audio recording and the next part of the narrative will unfold. Instead of bodiless voice-overs, however, one meets “shadows of light” – the ghosts of former villagers conversing with one another about the latest developments of their crisis (or other more mundane local gossip). It’s a haunting way to revisit the last days of a community, but once again, this methodology leaves the player in a mostly passive position being fed information. Unlike Esther, players have more freedom to open doors, climb (some) ladders, and turn off and on TVs and radios. But other than that, there are no items to pick up, no drawers to peruse, no pamphlets to flip through. You can see them, but you can’t touch. And while the same characters do keep re-appearing, without facial features to register, it is very hard to keep track of the multiple sub-storylines, the different key characters, and their relationships to each other. Figuring out how the different configurations of light function in the game also offers extra confusion.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Screenshot from PlayStation Europe. Republished with CC License: http://bit.ly/1eBd9Ks
All that being said, the story line is fascinating. All the residents of a tiny country valley in Shropshire suddenly disappear. Prior to the disappearance, the area was quarantined for a supposed influenza outbreak, so no one was allowed in or out, resulting in no external knowledge as to what truly happened to the villagers. The player is dropped into this quarantined area, left to explore a vast open world to figure out what happened. This world is incredibly beautiful, paired with an equally exquisite atmospheric sound track. Thus the exploration, while passive, is a sensory delight. But, in fact, the level of detail invested into the world-building is precisely what leaves me disappointed with the lack of interactivity. For instance, the intriguing books and personal notes strewn around beg to be picked up and studied for answers.
Playing Rapture, I was reminded of another experiential game called Gone Home. Gone Home follows the return home of a young woman who has just spent the past few months in Europe after finishing school. In her absence, her family moves, so she returns to an unfamiliar residence, which also happens to be empty. The game follows her progress as she tries to figure out where everybody is. Gone Home is lighter on puzzles, but it does manage to draw the player more intimately into the environment by allowing for more interactivity. Keys need to be located, locker codes cracked, and paperwork examined–all while certain discoveries trigger audio-recorded journal entries similar to those in Esther and Rapture. The result is a more robust experience of truly feeling responsible to find out what happened and thus more engaged. I would have appreciated some of that agency in Rapture.
“Gone Home” by The Fullbright Company – http://www.thefullbrightcompany.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
Ultimately, however, for both Esther and Rapture, though I have some disappointment, I find myself still contemplating their fictional worlds and the accompanying stories–that fact alone says something profound about a game’s efficacy. For Rapture in particular, as the narrative climaxes, I have been finding myself welded to my screen, determined to keep going until I figure everything out. Last night I was hoping to finish the full game before I wrote this review, so I spent almost 3 hours enrapt as the game’s pace quickened. (I still didn’t make it, but I’ll post something when I do.)
Maybe it is simply a question of expectations. Maybe I am looking at this all wrong. Perhaps Esther and Rapture are not passive games but rather interactive movies? For certain, The Chinese Room has developed a very effective means of storytelling. What do you think?
Thanks for reading this post! If you liked what you read, please subscribe below and tell your friends about High and Low. Please also note that this post includes affiliate links. If you purchase an item through an Amazon link on my blog, I will receive a small percentage. This does not adjust the cost of your purchase, and all proceeds go towards supporting this blog. Thank you so much for your help! The featured image is a screenshot from Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture posted by PlayStation Europe at http://bit.ly/1JjO0kA. It was republished through CC license: http://bit.ly/1eBd9Ks
is a haunting and mesmerizing indie game, in which you play as somebody sent to investigate what happened in a sleepy English village after all its inhabitants suddenly disappeared. The game is experiential, rather than puzzle oriented, which threw me off at first, but I have grown to really love this genre of games that make the player slow down and let go of self as they immerse you in a new world and story. Rapture is a spectacular example of what this genre can do, from the cinematic visuals and musical score to the complex and creative character development
is truly fantastic. Somehow the developers made traipsing around in a post-apocalyptic nightmare version of Massachusetts while one fends off radioactive mutts and raiders reminiscent of The Road
quite fun. Well actually, I’m not sure fun is the right word–the game can be pretty bleak, and it forces the player to work through some difficult decisions about the role that technology should play in human society. For instance, will you choose to treat sentient robots called “synths” as human or merely machine? The outcome of the game depends heavily on which post-war factions you decide to work with and subsequently what kind of missions you embark on. All of this, however, is built into a world that feels believable and open enough to keep a player occupied on side missions for many, many hours. If you are curious about what makes such a bleak world appealing, I recommend watching PBS Game/Show’s video “Why Do We Love Fallout 4’s Awful World?”.
games are really familiar to most gamers, so I won’t say much here. For those who don’t know the franchise, it’s a first person adventure game where you play as Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter and pseudo-anthropologist, who traipses around the world, getting in trouble, while he tries to uncover historical secrets. It’s a bit of a modern-day Indiana Jones with lots of puzzles and an equal amount of bad guys. The Nathan Drake Collection is a rerelease of the original trilogy in which each game was remastered to match contemporary video graphic technology. Despite the many video game tropes and subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) misogyny built into these games, they’re a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the new edition coming out this year.
yet. On one hand, I find myself entirely drawn in by the narrative and world, but on the other hand, I find myself wishing for more. I had similar feelings towards 
. Thus the exploration, while passive, is a sensory delight. But, in fact, the level of detail invested into the world-building is precisely what leaves me disappointed with the lack of interactivity. For instance, the intriguing books and personal notes strewn around beg to be picked up and studied for answers.
follows the return home of a young woman who has just spent the past few months in Europe after finishing school. In her absence, her family moves, so she returns to an unfamiliar residence, which also happens to be empty. The game follows her progress as she tries to figure out where everybody is. 
is lighter on puzzles, but it does manage to draw the player more intimately into the environment by allowing for more interactivity. Keys need to be located, locker codes cracked, and paperwork examined–all while certain discoveries trigger audio-recorded journal entries similar to those in Esther and Rapture. The result is a more robust experience of truly feeling responsible to find out what happened and thus more engaged. I would have appreciated some of that agency in Rapture.
