So I decided to play some narrative games with my girlfriend. We played through Gone Home this morning. It was great. Every room you explore in the house has a purpose, and every item builds on the story that is being told. You learn about the parents, the sister, and the old man who was living there before you. The game hooks you from the moment you step into the house. The story progresses at a steady pace and culminates at a satisfying conclusion.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is anything but that. It
seems like you have to follow a ball of light around town, but it's not quite certain. The ball of light comes and goes, sometimes doing some back and forths, leaving me confused as to what the hell I'm supposed to do. I explored off the beaten path and sometimes you find a radio or a flashback of people talking, but not always. And this is one of the many things that are frustrating. It sorta kinda feels like the game wants me to explore, but more often than not, I am not rewarded for doing so. Dead ends and uninteresting rooms/areas are aplenty. And it's made all the worse by the fucking killer slow walking speed. Oh. My.
God. And yes, I knew about holding R2, and it doesn't make anything better.
The game does not build up a satisfying narration. There is no progression in the narrative. As I was walking around, all the conversations I was coming up on were completely disconnected from each other. If each of these characters have an arc and a crescendo, it is
completely wasted on the player.
Frustration also comes in the form of confusion as to whether the game suffers from bugs or not. One time, during the Wendy "chapter" (if we can call it that), the ball of light stopped at some elevated point near the train rails. I looked around, found some conversations, listened to some radios, but the ball of light stayed there. Is there something I missed? Or is this a bug and I need to move on? My level of anger towards this game was reaching an untenable level, so I decided to leave the ball there and move further down the road in case this is what I needed to do. So I moved down the road... and then the game switches to the next chapter? The fuck? Now I'm in a chapter on Frank?
So I'm playing the game, not knowing if I'm playing "right", and that contributes to my irritation towards it. And that's on top of the disconnected conversations between the characters, which decidedly seem like a (shit) design choice.
Another thing that adds to the frustration. Some times, you come across a ball of light that needs to be "activated" by shuffling the controller sideways like old people do when they play Mario Kart. I have no fucking clue why I need to do that to listen on a conversation or what it adds to the narration, but I have to do it. But if it were just that, it wouldn't be an issue. No, there are actually two issues with this mechanic.
First, is that that fucking function is obtuse and doesn't work like it should. More times than once, I was shuffling the controller left and right, moving the ball, but nothing was happening. The worst was in the church, with pastor Jeremy. I was at the altar, trying my best to trigger the fucking fucker, but the game just wouldn't have it. It took well over two minutes of my stupid-ass of swinging the controller around so that I could finally listen to fucking pastor Jeremy cry about something about which I couldn't give two shits because of the terrible narration.
The second issue with this mechanic is that the game fails to communicate to the player when he needs to do it. So a lot of times, I found myself tilting the controller sideways to make a ball of light move, but it wouldn't. I didn't need to. But sometimes I had to.
So I suffered through this horseshit until some time through the Frank chapter, after maybe an hour and a half of playing. I looked at How Long To Beat to see how long this game was, and it read five hours. I checked on Metacritic to see what people were saying about it. There were some very glowing reviews (that were thinly articulated), and lots of negative reviews. One refrain was that the story was not satisfactory. There was no pay-off in the end.
So I closed the game and deleted it from my hard drive.
This game is so shit that I genuinely do not understand how some people can derive so much joy out of it. As I was reading some impressions, more than once I read something along the lines of "this is one of the most emotional games I have ever played", "I cried more than once", "So and so was my favorite character and I cried at his fate". Like,
what!? How the
fuck is that possible? Are these people like Brendan Frasier's character in that movie where he briefly turns into a ginger and cries at the sight of the sunset? How
the fuck can this game elicit such emotions from people? I do not understand.
And yes, I read the story online. I've read about it. I very much doubt that reaching the end credits would have changed anything.
You know which game succeeds and earns the emotion it elicits from the player? Gone Home. Another "walking simulator" (I prefer the non-pejorative term
light adventure game). Which I beat this very morning with my girlfriend. That game earns it. There is a narration. There is purpose. There is build-up. You get attached to the characters and the game's emotional attempts are
earned.
I have not played Dear Esther, but I did play all of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, when it came out. That game is one of the best-written games I have ever played. It might even be
the best. So how did The Chinese Room drop the ball so much with this game? Such a disappointment.
This game wouldn't have gotten me angry if it weren't for the shit
execution of the design. It's fine that a game doesn't adhere to a linear narrative. Games can drop players in a world and have them piece together the story by themselves. But Everybody's Gone to the Rapture fails at that. Not knowing if I need to explore some corner of the world, as in not knowing if I will be rewarded for doing so or if I'll have to suffer through the slow fucking speed while walking back. Not knowing if a ball of light has to be followed or not. Not knowing if a ball of light has to be shaken sideways for the flashback to be triggered. Not knowing if a ball of light is bugged or if I truly missed something. Not knowing if I am playing the game
as the designers intended me to.
If it weren't for all that shit, the game would be an inoffensive bore. But as it is, it is an offensive one.
Fuck this game.
