2013 in review

At the start of 2013 I wrote about the rise of successful story-driven indie releases. My examples from 2012 were Dear Esther, To the Moon and Cart Life. The Walking Dead had been a hit that year too although I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I said I hoped that it was a trend that would continue. And I couldn’t have been more right.

2013 saw the release of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Papers Please, Kentucky Route Zero, and Gone Home among others. It saw the trend move out of the indie scene and into the blockbuster space. 

Major character-centric triple-A titles launched this year. Some, like The Last of Us, excelled by creating human moments in an inhospitable world. Others, like Bioshock Infinite, struggled - aiming high with strong moral overtones but falling short of delivering a real message.

If I’ve been scrimping and saving since Hackett Out launched, 2013 was the year where I went broke. Steam sales, Humble Bundles and PlayStation Plus have provided me with the majority of my gaming time this year. 

I’ll always put aside a few pennies for new games though and so my playlist included a few triple-A games. I’m listing here each and every game that I put any real time into in 2013. But first, the five that, for me, felt like they best delivered on the intentions of their developers.

5. DMC Devil May Cry
DmC: Devil May Cry does its best to put you off. It’s bawdy and misogynistic on first impressions. For the first two hours gameplay is cut-through with too many tool-tips and interjections. It’s hard to believe that this is the developer behind 2010’s Enslaved. But stick with it. This is a character-action game and a surprisingly deep combat system reveals itself with time. DmC does a better job than most in encouraging experimentation and weapon-switching. It also provides environmental navigation that make use of the tools in your arsenal.

4. Metal Gear Rising. Revengence
Having two character action games on a list of only five titles is not what I would have expected  at the start of the year. But this is a genre where mechanics are king. When done right there’s a purity to the experience that’s unrivalled. Rising doesn’t quite live up to the quality bar set by Platinum Games with their 2010 title Bayonetta, but this game has an interesting twist with a real focus on defence - every incoming attack needs to be physically batted away with a well timed parry. Also all of the ridiculousness you would expect from a Metal Gear is here, and then some.

3. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
It’s difficult for a game to convey emotion - to capture moments of warmth, of love, of sadness. Some manage it but it’s especially difficult, for any medium, to convey the real depth of grief and loss. Brothers left me a wreck - dragging up feelings I’d forgotten I could have. And it did it by subverting expectations, by telling its story through gameplay but by telling a story other than the one it sets out from the start.

2. Gone Home
Personal stories have a place in video games. Games can be interesting without being mechanically complex or overtly fun. Gone Home single-handedly proved that games can be ‘important’, that they can tell human stories. The tale it tells has been told a thousand times - but it’s told confidently and with care here in a new medium. Gone Home immerses the player in a world that they can relate to - it tells a story about real people with grounded lives and relatable desires. And it’s a joy to experience.

1. The Last of Us
The Last of Us recovers from a difficult couple of hours towards the start, to tell one of gaming’s great stories. It’s the attention to detail in every aspect of its design, from the environmental storytelling of its buildings, to the emotion in the eyes of its characters, to the way protagonists Joel and Ellie animate as they move past each other when crouched and hiding. A great cast, excellent pacing once the game opens up and a solution to the age-old disconnect between player action and story delivered with confidence and style. My game of the year.

The Playlist - 2013
The Room (iOS)
Metal Gear Solid Revengence (PS3) review
Bioshock Infinite (PS3) comment
Ku (iOS)
Republica Times (PC)
Fez (PC)
Papers Please (PC)
Gunpoint (PC)
Hundreds (iOS)
Ridiculous Fishing (iOS)
Super Stickman Golf 2 (Android)
Knights of the Old Republic (iOS)
Catherine (PS3)
A Ride into the Mountains (Android) 
The Walking Dead (PC)
Thomas Was Alone (PS3)
The Last of Us (PS3) comment
Plants vs Zombies 2 (iOS)
X-COM Enemy Unknown (PS3)
Spelltower (Android)
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Wii) 
Dark Souls (PS3) 
Gone Home (PC) comment
Brothers (PC)
DMC (PS3) 

State of Play 2013

Prison Architect producer Mark Morris will be giving the keynote speech at tonight's State of Play at DIT Angier Street. He works with Introversion Software in the UK.

A satirical twist on business-sim games like Theme Hospital, Prison Architect tasks players with running the most efficient privatley owned prison possible. It's currently in open alpha (an early test version) for people who want to preorder the game.

State of Play is an annual event looking at the Irish game development scene. There'll be games to play from a host of Irish indies from 5PM and a range of Irish and International speakers on stage. Coverage of last years event is available here on HackettOut.

You can still register for the event on stateofplay.ie.

Here's a terrible trailer for the Alpha version of Prison Architect.

Thoughts on Gone Home

This first-person adventure has more in common with a Richard Linklater film than Call of Duty

Note: Gone Home is cheap and will only take about two hours to complete. If you have any interest in interactive fiction go play it before you read on.

Lived-in environments define Gone Home

Honest human interactions and a sense of catharsis define Gone Home. It tells the story of an American woman who's been travelling in Europe for a year. She gets home to find that life has moved on without her.

Her family has moved house while she was away and the game begins when she (and the player) arrives on an unfamiliar, rainswept doorstep. Both parents are missing and a note from her younger sister hints at an underlying issue best not discovered. But that discovery isn't just worth making – it will very likely be remembered as one of the most profound in gaming history.

Gone Home invites players to unravel its secrets by creating spaces that demand investigation in a natural way. A locked front door is the first thing you encounter. That forces you to rummage through presses to find the spare key. You know it has to be there because every family has a spare.

READ MORE:
- Blogger Austin Walker on the dark under-current of abuse in the game.
- What is ludonarrative harmony and what's it got to do with Gone Home?
- A sycophantic/interesting interview with Steve Gaynor from Brainy Gamer.
- Previously on Hackett Out: thoughts on Minerva's Den.

The dark hallway you step into forces another basic human action – hunting in the dark for a lightswitch. Imagine a game without mechanical complexity or combat. Imagine one without an outlandish setting or simple two-dimensional characters. Imagine a game the sole purpose of which is to experience its world. It's a voyeuristic tour through a family’s secrets.

This is an abandoned house with a history – with a narrative designed to draw you in. But more importantly it's a home, the sort of lived-in space so long missing from video games.

What happened in the basement of Arbour Hill?

Gone Home presents its story as a series of vignettes. Rooms - spaces both private and shared - contain artifacts - both personal and public - that hold the essence of the people who live there.

A bedroom is naturally a personal space, but the shared pizza box-strewn tv room is used by both father and daughter and tells us something about their relationship.

The game presents those stories with the brutal honesty of a Richard Linklater film. The central love-story unfolds believably. The protagonists feel like human beings, in the same way that Jessie and Celine in Linklater's Before Sunrise feel like real people. Both game and film are set in 1995 and Gone Home's mood evokes the time.

The year brings with it the music, the pop-culture, the clothes and the technology of the time. VHS tapes with hand-written labels, tape recorders, and magazines celebrating Kurt Cobain a year after his death. It's a startlingly real-world setting in a medium usually littered with sci-fi and fantasy trappings.



Gone Home was made by a four-person team at the Fullbright Company. The lead designer is Steve Gaynor - the man behind Minerva’s Den (which I wrote about last year). It’s a personal tale, grounded in the real world. The experiences of the team behind it can’t help but seep into the game.

There are parallel stories; a man wrestling with inadequate coping mechanisms he's used to deal with the abuse he suffered as a child; a woman who's fantasies about a man she barely knows threaten her marriage, and a teenager who is struggling with her sexuality. But it's the way these stories interact - with each person dealing with their own problems while struggling to deal with each other - that really elevate the game. 

And all this told through only the items and inferences you pick up along the way.

Gone Home doesn't pull its punches. But it takes each story to a fulfilling conclusion in a way that offers catharsis to you the player at the same time as it offer resolution to the character you play.

It uses pathetic falicy to create a clostrophobic atmosphere that will keep you waiting for jump scares. And it engenders a feeling of dred that grows as you progress. The peak and trough of tension and release that Gone Home achieves is expertly handled.

The game establishes some boundaries. It wrests control from the player, for example, when the character you play decides not to read a particularly personal note. For the most part Gone Home allows the player to make their own decisions. I, for example, carefully replaced the stack of books that hide a stash of porn magazines in one room. I left the room the way I'd found it. I was so embedded in the world that I felt obliged to offer the same courtesy in-game that I would in the real world.

Gone Home's greatest achievement is its positivity. The game’s authors haven’t flinched from addressing serious human problems. But they have avoided the melodrama of so many 'serious' video games in favour of the mundane drama of day to day life.

It celebrates the little things that make us who we are. It's a far cry from the power fantasy fulfillment that most games offer, and it's better for it.

Put yourself in someone else's shoes with Auti-sim

Can videogames help us understand the experience of others? A new first-person game from Canadian Taylan Kay is trying to answer that question.

Auti-sim (Photograph: Toughcellgames.com)

Videogames have come a long way. From shooting space invaders to experiencing the simulated life of a single mother fighting for custody of her daughter in Richard Hofmier's Cart Life. But a game that directly puts us in the shoes of someone else, seeing and feeling what another person sees and feels is something different.

Auti-Sim is a short first-person experience that tries to simulate auditory-hypersensitivity, which impacts the cognitive functions of some children with autism.

It's a terrifying experience, one well worth experiencing. You can play it in your browser and it will only take you a couple of minutes.

Find out more about the developer on his twitter account.
Play the game on GameJolt here. 

Thoughts on 2013

The  new year carries the promise of new consoles, Steam-boxes and big name releases. But there's an interesting new trend that emerged in 2012 that hopefully won't get lost  - the rise of successful story-driven indie releases.

Source: Freebird Games

There's been a huge growth in the indie scene since the launch of the Xbox 360. Small releases are gaining acceptance and generating financial returns on platforms from Xbox Live Arcade and Steam to a slew of indie-focused marketplaces like Desura.

Retro aesthetics and arcade mechanics defined the space for years - relegating more thoughtful works to the shadows. But 2012 seemed to change that. Small teams of indies, with the specific goal of engendering a given emotional response, popped upduring the year. The style of simple, focused design is similar to what Team Ico achieved a decade ago.

These days indies and smaller studios are just as likely to experiment with story-telling as they are with mechanics, and long may it continue. The Walking Dead may have raised some questions about what constitutes a 'game,' but it still took numerous game-of-the-year awards. 

I've already written about Dear Esther at length. Here are some of the other games that stood out: