Volume

I'm pretty close to the end of 'Volume' - a cool little stealth and strategy game from Mike Bithell. That's the guy who made 'Thomas Was Alone', a super cool and funny platformer from 2012.

Thomas Was Alone is great, and you should definitely play it. It's a masterclass in efficient characteristation and storytelling. It pulls off that rare trick of merging gameplay with narrative, using brilliantly written narration to give quirky life to its characters.

Who you calling quirky?

Volume doesn't have quite the elegant simplicity of its predecessor. Thomas was a side on 2D platformer which made ingenious use of its characters - all of whom had different 'skills' - to navigate through simple but challenging mazes.

The same principle sort of applies with Volume. This time the mazes are 3 dimensional, and rather than jumping and fitting through spaces, the challenge lays in avoiding the patrolling robot guard things.

At first I felt a little let down by the game. It seemed cluttered, after the hypnotic lo-fi aesthetic of Thomas. I played through a few levels and though I was enjoying the mechanics, there seemed to be something missing.


The Sound of his Voice

After a while I realised that what I was missing was the character of the game. The narration on Thomas succeeded in making me really care about the characters, even though they were simple little blocks of colour. Robert - the protagonist in Volume - is much less engaging. He speaks in a fey, whiny voice which I find hard to love, and pontificates endlessly about his mission.

And what is his mission? I know he has one, and it seems to have something to do with stealing things. There's a definite Robin Hood vibe going on. But a lot of the story seems to be communicated through rolls of tiny text between missions. And after a while of trying to read it, I got bored and started to skip through.

Now you'd be within your rights if you now said "Well that's why you're not as engaged, then - you're not paying attention."

But I am engaged. I'm very engaged indeed.



Just Can't Stop

The thing is, the story in Volume doesn't matter at all. Once I stopped trying to follow it, and resolved to ignore the dialogue, I had an amazing time.

The level design is tremendous. Each level - and there are dozens of them - is playable in a few minutes. Or longer if, like me, you are mostly rubbish at avoiding the guards. Each level is basically a puzzle. How do you navigate this collection of rooms and corridors, avoiding guard patrols, to collect the little white diamond things that probably represent something important if I read the story?

The levels progress in complexity, teaching you as you go along. Guards increase in number and change up their behaviour patterns. Environmental features such as force-fields and keys are introduced. Cool toys appear, for use against the enemy - invisibility cloaks, sound projectors to distract the guards. One fantastic device sends a ghostly image of your character running across a room, luring the guards in pursuit.

Overall, then, a wonderful game. It has one of the most engaging sets of mechanics I've come across, and that's because everything is pointing in the same direction. The gameplay focus never changes: get the diamond things, avoid the guards, escape the level. The mechanics all facilitate interesting play along these lines, combining in ingenious and enthralling ways.

I've lost count of the number of times I've finished a level and said to myself "I'll just do one more..."

Which is the highest praise I can think of. I just don't think it needed the story. It's good enough without.

Beyond: Two Souls

I finally got round to finishing Beyond: Two Souls. It's been sitting in my library for months like the last few crisps in a screwed up bag. I didn't really want to finish it, but somehow I felt like I should.

Sometimes you just stop playing a game because something else comes along. That happens to me a lot, because I am easily distracted. My games library is littered with half completed games that fell foul of a new, shiny release.

That wasn't the case here.


It's Not Me, It's You

Beyond: Two Souls,  you have many good features. You look great. Your designers clearly had a big sign up in the office that said 'More Cinematic!', which they glanced at every few seconds.  You have real Proper Actors in it, who do Good Acting. Your plot is complex and epic, with loads of interesting themes.

But your gameplay. Oh dear, Beyond: Two Souls. Your gameplay drove me out of my mind. .

Let's start with your obsession with me swinging the controller about. It's not necessary. It's got thumbsticks on it. If I want to climb up, I can press 'up'. Why do you insist that I rhythmically jerk the controller up and down, like... well never mind what like. Needless to say, I feel foolish doing it, and I think you only want me to do it so you can feel innovative.

And why do you need my input on so many flipping things in the first place? I've no idea how long I spent staring at the screen, assuming I was in a cutscene, only to realise that you were waiting for me to tilt the thumbstick towards a door so it would open.

Which wouldn't matter if there was an option to do anything else. But there isn't. Literally nothing else I do has any effect. I can hammer all the buttons I want, but Ellen Page will just sit there, staring into space, until I press the exact thing you want.

So what's the bloody point? Why not do it yourself, if I don't have any actual choice? You're like someone who says "Oh I don't mind what we watch - you choose", and then turns down every suggestion I make until it's the one you want.


Hit Me One More Time

Very occasionally the controls feel intuitive. Which is, I expect, the idea. Tilting towards a little circular 'action' point makes me feel closer to Ellen Page, as her movements echo mine. But most of the time this laudable attempt to bridge the gap between me and my character simply doesn't work.

Worst of all is combat. You've decided that, when someone attacks me, time will slow down and I should attempt to dodge. And I dodge by pushing the thumbstick in the direction I want to dodge. Which should feel really immersive and kinetic.

But the problem is, the camera angle on my character keeps changing. So what am I dodging in relation to? The direction as I see it, on the screen? Or the direction as my character perceives it, which is not the same?

It is very unclear. And it makes no sense. Which leads to poor Ellen Page being smacked upside the head all the time, while I twich the controller about, swearing and cursing your stupid control system.

Your Ever Changing Moods


But none of that is what really made me stop playing. These were just inconveniences. What really got to me was how bloody inconsistent you were.

Your main mechanic is that I have a kind of magic demon thing attached to me, called Aiden, who helps me out. If I press triangle, my perspective shifts and I lift above Ellen Page, inhabiting the character of Aiden.

And Aiden can do all manner of cool stuff. He can zip through walls and strangle people who are in my way. He can knock things over, causing distractions that allow me to sneak past guards. He can even possess people, allowing me to control them. I like that one. Nothing delights me more than a possessed guard suddenly turning his gun on his surprised friends.

These are great game mechanics and could form the root of an interesting, emergent experience. Like in Metal Gear Solid 5, where Snake's various tactics can combine against guards in surprising and innovative ways.

But you throw it all away, don't you? Because Aiden's magic powers are only available sometimes, when you decide they are. Sometimes I can possess everyone in my way. But then I'll round a corner and, oh no. You've decided that possession doesn't work on these guys. Because you want me to do a distracty, sneaky thing in this level.

It's maddening, and it infects the whole game. Mechanics work sporadically, depending on how you want me to proceed.  And that's at the heart of everything that's wrong with you, and why I stopped playing.


It's All About You

You, Beyond: Two Souls, are obsessed with your story. You are so, so proud of it that you won't let go of it. So nothing I do will have any effect on it. I am an actor, playing my part, and you are a controlling, hysterical writer/director. Not only must I do the right things, but I must do them in the right way. There's a solution to each level, and nothing but the right solution will do.

What's weird is, you are trying so hard to make it look like I do have a choice. Options crop up all the time. At the end of each level you tell me how my choices compared to other people who've played. You look, for all the world, as if you are totally letting me do my thing.

But the real choices in games come not through tiny narrative branches, but rather through how you play, moment to moment. I didn't mind The Last of Us pushing me relentlessly towards a conclusion, because the way I played the game was mine. It allowed me to use all the mechanics at my disposal, exactly as I chose. And it was loads better because of it.

Finished

So. I finally got round to finishing you. Not because I really wanted to, but because I thought I should. And how do I feel? Like I wandered through a very interesting story, but not a very interesting game. I'm sorry. I know you tried.

Maybe you'll do better, in Beyond: Three Souls.

And so is my wife

I was watching some old Doctor Who recently. It's what I do. It's not sad. You're sad.

Anyway. This is how not sad I am. I was watching a reconstruction of an episode which was deleted decades ago. Luckily there are some photos, taken off the TV in the 60s, which someone has synchronised with the soundtrack, which someone else has recorded off their TV, also in the 60s.

Thanks to these weird people, who spent the 1960s recording Doctor Who off the telly before it was technically possible to do so, I was able to enjoy a weird and only slightly tedious slideshow of the story Fury From The Deep. And in it, there was a man who had a wife.

I know he had a wife because he kept calling her "My Wife!" Even though her name is Maggie Harris. And even though she worked in the same place as him, and everyone there knew her, he would only refer to her as "My Wife!"

"My Wife has disappeared! Where is My Wife? I think the seaweed creatures might have kidnapped My Wife! I gave the secret documents to My Wife!" It was most disconcerting. Maybe he was just very excited about having got married. But it came across as weird.


Trouble and Strife

It led  me to reflect that having a wife, in Doctor Who in the 1960s, was unusual. People tended not to be married. They just hung around in space, or in Ancient Egypt or wherever, having adventures and getting shot by Daleks.

And then I thought that actually, having a wife was a fairly unusual thing in adventure narratives, in general. I remember watching Firefly in 2002, thinking how refreshing it was that two of the ship's crew were married, and that the marriage was a good thing. It was still unusual then, 35 years after the crackly studio bound nonsense of early Doctor Who. How odd.

Soaps and dramas are full of wives, obviously. But that's because the focus is relationship and emotion. Narratives involving action tend to be uninterested in married couples. A wife is a thing you might get at the end of the story - a reward, in some respects. But also a signal that the adventure is over. Because the protagonist is "a man", obviously, and part of being "a man" is being single.


Ex Wives

Marriage is the end of story, or so popular narratives would have it. They are the opposite of adventure. That's why Wash and Zoe were so unusual, in Firefly. They continued the adventure. Even in excellent, forward looking television like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, there is a tension between the adventure the men want to go on and the fact that they are married. In fact, that's more or less the gimmick of The Sopranos, isn't it? He's a mob boss, but he's also a family man. How unusual and thought provoking. (Which, of course, it is, but why is it unusual to have such thoughts provoked?)

Uncharted 4, which I've both praised and moaned about recently, has a protagonist with a wife. Nathan Drake starts the story settled down, mucking about in suburbia with his wife, Elena. I sort of vaguely remember her from playing the earlier games, but I played 3 and 2 in the wrong order and so was utterly confused about who was who. And, to be honest, it didn't seem to matter much. All we did was run about killing people and watching temples explode.

The game does attempt to integrate Elena into the narrative, and she is clearly a capable and interesting character in her own right. But there is still an implicit tension between narrative excitement and domestic bliss. Nathan feels the need to deceive Elena in order to go on an adventure with his blokey mates. For much of the game she is a slightly nagging presence on a phone, lied to by Nathan in order to prolong the fun.

When she does turn up, she's a welcome addition to the hyper masculinity of the gameplay. Which begs the question, why wasn't she in this from the start? Why did the game feel the need to employ that tired old ideology - marriage is the enemy of adventure? They pay lip service, towards the end,  to the idea that their relationship is compatible with adventure, and I guess that's part of Nathan's arc. But that feels a little half heated when she's absent for so much of the game.

Still, at least Nathan does call her by her name. He doesn't just shout "Oh look, it's my wife!" all the time. So I suppose there's some progress.