Showing posts with label gone home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gone home. Show all posts

Thursday, September 7, 2017

On "Tacoma" by The Fullbright Company


This post spoils some of Tacoma and Sleep No More.

Tacoma is a sensible design progression from Gone Home. How do you expand upon the audio diary design and walking mechanics? The Fullbright Company decided to pair a dynamic holographic drama with some zero gravity movement. Unfortunately, the zero-G movement ended up making environmental storytelling more difficult so they had to scale it back (no tables or chairs; no objects at rest) and I also suspect it risked alienating a fan base that cares less about gamer-y traversal puzzles. So, that leaves all the focus on the holographic drama sequences.

Many commentators describe Tacoma as a virtual adaptation of the NYC immersive theater installation "Sleep No More" because both experiences involve wandering around a large dense environment and encountering short dramatic scenes of characters performing with each other... and then the characters split-off and you have to choose who to follow and listen to.

I think this is a telling comparison, because it also suggests the ways in which Tacoma's formal narrative structure doesn't work very well, despite its compelling themes and characters.

Friday, August 16, 2013

"Gone Home" and the mansion genre.


This post does not spoil any specifics of the "plot" in Gone Home, but it might sensitize you to its delivery mechanisms and some details.

A mansion means: old, rich, and scary. The most quintessential "mansion games" that emphasize these qualities might be Maniac Mansion, Thief, and Resident Evil -- these games would not work without the mansion tropes that figure prominently in their game design. Most importantly, mansions are big.

Gone Home is very aware of its place in the mansion genre, a genre that emphasizes the primacy of inventories, objects, and possessions. Here, the lightweight puzzle gating and densely hot-spotted environments evoke adventure; the first person object handling and concrete readables evoke the immersive sim; the loneliness and the shadows evoke horror. In a sense, this is a video game that was made for gamers aware of all the genre convention going on -- in particular, one moment in the library will either make you smile or wince -- but in another sense, this is also a video game made for humans. Gone Home carefully negates or omits core "gameisms" of the very genres it comes from.

The characters in Gone Home are tolerable (or even great) because they do not hesitate in doorways and stare blankly at you. It's the same trick that Dear Esther pulled: fictional characters in games develop full-bodied, nuanced personalities precisely when they're *not* constrained by fully simulated virtual bodies present in the world. (Maybe Dear Esther is actually a mansion game?)