I just finished playing Bound - a beautiful, soulful, peculiar game by a company I've not come across before: Plastic. A word of warning. If you Google 'Bound Plastic game', some of the hits will not be what you want. Or maybe they will, I suppose.
Anyway. It's a lovely game and I recommend it. It's very much in the indie, alternative mould, which means you aren't likely to be doing a lot of killing, side missions or levelling up. This is the sort of game that is currently seen as kind of 'experimental' but which will, hopefully, eventually, be seen as just one more brilliant type of experience that games can offer us.
Gameplay
You start off as a pregnant woman, on a beach, near a kind of wooden house. This is peculiar, as all the promotional stuff is like the image above - dancing in a weird, outlandish world of unreal polygons. Why am I on this quite realistic beach, shuffling about in the sand?
The woman has a book of doodles. You can leaf through the pages, choose one and sort of drift into it. It's a little like the central hub of Unravel, where you explore different aspects of a story through photographs of the past. And like Unravel, each level appears to be a specific memory, ready for us to explore and understand.
The core gameplay happens in these levels. The game is more or less a 3D platformer. You control an elfin, masked dancer through a world of impossible, fractured landscapes. You must navigate a path through the shifting, chaotic world, coping all the time with the whimsical nature of gravity which, as in Monument Valley, seems to have a capricious and unstable relationship with reality.
Also causing you trouble are strange, demonic flocks of... something. Swirls of creatures rise up to entangle and distress you along the way. You shake these creatures off by dancing. As you dance, ribbons of light extend from your arms, like you are some kind of carnival version of Wolverine. The demony things do not like the dancing, and fly away, shrieking.
It's not an entirely original concept, of course. Bound is part of a slowly forming movement of games, as surely as First Person Shooters once were. There are strong traces in here of thatgamecompany's output: games like Journey and Flower. Structurally, as I mentioned, there are echoes of games like Unravel and maybe a little of Firewatch. A move away from acting upon the world, and towards enjoying the experience of being in the world.
This movement of games is coming together - like those shattered memories - from disparate, apparently unconnected fragments, to form a picture of what games might become. What they might be for.
This is starting to feel like a type of game, rather than a startling exception to what 'game' is. Only a few years ago a release like Gone Home ruffled feathers by daring to avoid the common tropes of action based game-play. Now it feels like we're getting more and more chances to experience things like this: unusual, emotional journeys that push at the edges of what's considered normal.
I liked this game a lot. If you get the chance, give it a go. If you tend to play more conventional games, you might find it weird how much control you have to give up. But that's a good thing, I think.
If you tend not to play games much, then this is an excellent place to go, to see the potential games have. There's something new here, and it's fascinating.
Dance. Remember. Explore.
And, occasionally, like I did, go shoot some stuff in the head in Borderlands 2. You can't live by bread alone.
