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) 

Tomb Raider - an unlikely example of gender equality

Lara and Natla - characters in their own right

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Helen Lewis, in the New Statesman, recently introduced me to the concept of the Bechdel test.

It's a way to assess the gender-equality of a piece of film and involves a fairly straightforward set of rules:
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• Does the film have two named female characters?
• Do they talk to each other?
• About something other than a man?

As the Washington Post points out, that’s a very low bar but many modern films fail the test. Helen Lewis asked the question whether video games need a test of their own. It got me thinking.

Wrote about whether games need their own version of a Bechdel test. The comments are *all* fascinating. I know. http://t.co/zSdGZJ9P7y
— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) January 7, 2014

It’s safe to say the majority of games would fail, and that even having a fully-clothed female character is a rarity. But games are varied, even within the same development studio. The Last of Us, for example, passes with flying colours while Uncharted 2, from the same studio just four years before, fails miserably.

A game that surprisingly gets a pass is the original Tomb Raider, now heading for 20 years old. Despite Core Design’s unlikely representation of the female form, the game has women in both the lead and antagonist roles.

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.

Play this: Demon's Souls revival

Image - From Software

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Demon's Souls' approach to online play was one of the most important design decisions of the generation. These days however, it can be hard to remember why.

The game allowed players to affect other people's games indirectly through their actions. And, with the use of in-game items, to get the help of other players in their single-player game.

READ MORE:
- My thoughts on Demon's Souls from 2011.

Demon's Souls' servers were first scheduled for shut-down over a year and half ago - but they're still live thanks to fan support and the success of the game's outstanding follow-up Dark Souls. They're just not as populated as they used to be.

Epic Name Bro makes let's-play videos on YouTube for Dark Souls and Demon's Souls among other games. He's calling on players worldwide to venture back into the cursed kingdom of Boletaria over the next few days with detailed times for what areas to tackle on what days to make sure that there will be plenty of others to play with - or face off against.

If you've been finding Boletaria empty recently, or if like me, you haven't set foot there since the sequal came out, this might be the week for you.

Take a look at Epic Name Bro's video for more information:

Listen Up! - Tone Control

A podcast on the design and development of Teltale's The Walking Dead that strays into the personal

Lee and Clementine - Image: Telltale, The Walking Dead

The man behind Gone Home and Minerva's Den is back with a new podcast series where he talks to other game designers about their backgrounds and how they go about making games.

First up Steve Gaynor talks to Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman, the design and story leads on The Walking Dead. The duo have left their jobs at Telltale and branched out on their own with new studio - Campo Santo.

This conversational interview looks at how they both got into gaming, and how they work together. There's an indept section on the development of The Walking Dead - it's origins and the specifics of how and why the cast took the form it did.

One particularly personal section just manages to avoid being uncomfortable - it touches on the personal investment that goes into creating a video game character.

Well worth a listen. If the rest of the series can live up to the quality of episode one, Tone Control should be of interest to anyone who wants to know how their games get made.

You can hear Rodkin and Vanaman regularly on the Idle Thumbs podcast. Tone Control is hosted on the Idle Thumbs website and new episodes will be released every two weeks.

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.

Games of the Generation - Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

The definition of a AAA Sony game - character driven and with a sense of scale designed to awe

All this talk about the next generation has me on edge - I won't be able to buy my way into the next wave of consoles for quite a while. But it also has me feeling nostalgic for the game of the past eight or so years. Uncharted 2 takes pride of place here - the first in a series looking at the best games of the generation.
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One of Uncharted 2's puzzle sequences.
Image: Naughty Dog

Uncharted 2 is the rare confluence of aesthetic, mechanical and design goals, with a team capable of executing them. 

It's one of the most successful communications of a designer's intention to a player in recent years – you'll move fluidly through almost every scene, you'll understand what your character is doing there and why, and you'll feel for Nathan Drake - root for him when he's down, cringe when he's uncomfortable and smile with him when he's happy. 

The developers at Naughty Dog set out to add depth to their roguish protagonist – a calculated move to take Drake from his roots in Indiana Jones and to recast him as Han Solo. Here he becomes a man with a past he might not be proud of, and a personality more suited to Uncharted's core gameplay mechanics of shooting and snapping necks.

Among Thieves opens with an extended heist sequence introducing a quest, and a cast of characters with varying levels of allegiance to Drake. But the heist is just the preamble to a round-the-world adventure.

The way the game renders snow is one of its
many technical triumphs
Image: Naughty Dog

Drake, we learn, has a string of past associates and has been involved in some less-than-above-board archeology down through the years. Some of those former friends are happy to see him and some are holding grudges, but none of them are to be trusted.

In this darker world, the violence of a third person shooter should feel right at home. Uncharted Drake's Fortune (2007) drew criticism for the gap between its happy go lucky tone and violent gameplay. It doesn't quite work however - you'll kill 1200-plus armed and aggressive thugs along the way.

The game has a roughly 70:30 split between combat and exploration. Normal cover-based shooting is built on with the introduction of basic stealth mechanics and a hand to hand combat system much improved from the original.

'Last year's model' - an awkward meeting
Image: Naughty Dog

The result is a range of options for the player about how to approach most situations. Combat is taken out of the traditional horizontal arenas and into a more vertical setting. Often the player needs to react to the approach of enemies while clinging to a ledge or otherwise exposed. The usual split between combat and exploration is broken down effectively.

There are problems however. Stealth is an excellent addition when used to create more options for the player. It's less useful when the game's designers force it on the player. And a couple of boss battles severely brake up the flow of the game - their simple attack and repeat gameplay structure not clearly communicated to the player. 

The sense of scale runs all through Uncharted 2
Image: Naughty Dog

There are stand-out moments here that have yet to be equaled - including by the game's disappointing sequel. There's a battle against a tank in a devastated Nepalese village and a shoot-out on a high speed moving train that spring to mind. But in many ways it's how Uncharted 2 handles its character interactions that give the game its lasting appeal.

Drake finds himself wrapped up in an awkward love-triangle and the strong bond between him and likable father-figure Sully is further developed from the first game. Uncharted 2 doesn't flinch from hard hitting scenes of violence but can just as easily deliver touching moments such as the game's ending - one that delivers a real feeling of resolution. Those moments outweigh the slightly hokey fantasy turn that the game takes towards the end.

Uncharted 2 never lets up. While the action is always ramped to eleven, Naughty Dog knows how to vary the pacing of its games in a way that keeps players wanting more. And all that is held together by a strong narrative and some of gaming's most memorable characters.

Gameplay footage in the accompanying video was captured off-screen using a digital camera. All content (other than my scripting) is copyright of Naughty Dog and Sony Computer Entertainment.