Tag Archives: 2019

OUTER WILDS

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OUTER WILDS
Mobius Digital
2019
Xbox, Playstation, PC, Switch

Time loop games tend to operate in one of two models. There’s the time loop that serves as a justification for clockwork gameplay mechanisms, encouraging the player to master the sequence events and execute on the “perfect run.” In some cases, this functions about the same as a quick retry button, but the narrative justification allows for a little more exploration of alternate consequences. There’s also time loops that serve as branching path narratives – if you create one chance meeting on day one and pursue that story, what’s the butterfly effect to day three when everyone else is still on script?

Outer Wilds is not quite either, though there are certainly consequential events and precise timings rewarding attention to detail. You play as a space explorer who, on the day they’re to take their little ship into the solar system, gets locked into a time loop which ends each day with supernova and armageddon. You have 22 minutes to advance from your home of Timber Hearth into the alien landscapes and prehistoric ruins of planets settled by the ancient (?) Nomai civilization. Your primary goal is to investigate the mysteries of the supernova, the Nomai’s demise, and the current status of the other Hearthian explorers. The game tracks this in a convenient journal on your ship and pins questions to your idea map, but it never offers obvious waypoints or quest markers.

The time loop primarily controls the solar system’s simulation. Weather on the oceanic planet Giant’s Deep operates on a storm cycle you can learn and, eventually, use to explore the planet’s truth. A portion of the planet Brittle Hollow breaks off at the same time each cycle and falls into a black hole that has opened at its core – to see that part of the planet, you’ll either need to arrive quickly or figure out how to navigate to it within the black hole itself. The Interloper is an icy comet that travels on the same portion of its orbit with each time cycle – that orbit affects the temperature on the comet’s surface, altering the ice pattern and your ability to navigate the surface.

Floating through the canyons on the Hourglass Twins, a pair of connected mini-planetoids which trade a desert’s worth of sand over the time loop.

You, too, exist as a part of this physics simulation. Gravity varies wildly based on your location, and your fragile little body is easy to send into the abyss and back through the loop if you’re not careful. The spaceship controls a little like the classic arcade game Lunar Lander – your body inverts the standard video game jump so that hitting the button bends your knees and releasing causes you to jump however high your body goes based on the gravitational forces near you. Learning this mobility is, for a lot of players, the brick wall that prevents interest in seeing this mystery through to its conclusion. For me, it took some practice but in the end felt natural – I was able to pick up these controls again quickly upon playing the DLC expansion Echoes of the Eye, a new mystery that builds nicely into the game’s story.

And it is that story which I think makes the game so special. The time loop, physics simulation of the game is delightful, but it is the natural science and archaeology that are so rewarding. Ultimately, Outer Wilds is a story about the end of the world – some Nomai predicted an eventual demise, others built into eternal denial. The eventual answers to the mysteries of the Outer Wilds both confront the player with futility and peace. The game’s true ending, without delving into spoilers, is a celebration of life and its ending. It’s a moving, emotional sequence that both offers outrageous spectacle and aesthetic quiet.

Special notice must be given to the game’s fantastic soundtrack. Composed by Andrew Prahlow, the score is a combination of campfire acoustica and synth majesty. It combines the Hearthian’s forest fire architecture with the unknowable mystery out in the stars. The “Main Title” and “Travelers” are songs I listen to frequently. The synth line that begins to play near the end of a loop is catchy and unmistakable without being trite or dreadful. I hope to hear more scores from him someday soon.

GEMINI MAN

Posted in Film by

GEMINI MAN
Dir. Ang Lee
2019

This is one of those rare movies where I get mad because the people who like it don’t like it enough for me. Gemini Man isn’t just “a well directed movie with a bad script.” Gemini Man fucking rocks. Gemini Man, directed by Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain’s Ang Lee, is a combination of the high-octane masterpiece action he’s still maybe most acclaimed for with the sensitive humanist sentimentality of his adaptation of Sense & Sensibility or his masterpiece Eat Drink Man Woman.

Under another director, I don’t doubt the dialogue in this film would clang left and right. There is a lot of exposition required to tell the story of Henry Brogan, ex-US government assassin and now fugitive being hunted by his own youthful clone. The most obvious comparison for this movie is to Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid, a saga about genome soldiers, crossed allegiances personal and political, and full of the same ridiculous over-the-top bullet time action you see in Gemini Man.

This film excises Metal Gear’s famous extended political diatribes (for those who don’t play games, these basically play out like Donald Sutherland’s extended monologue in JFK, complete with archival footage) and places any monologue in the mouth of either Will Smith or Will Smith, the sole exceptions belonging to Clive Owen’s villainous Clay Verris. The Verris scenes largely play out like a more standard villain from a 90s film, though there are some pleasantly disarming moments where he can’t help but actually show some affection for his favorite experiment. It’s an interesting choice, the sort other directors would probably excise so he were easier to hate. Ang Lee understands that his villains are best when they have their weaknesses.

Jr. and the villainous Clay Verris.

The dual Smith performances are honestly pretty remarkable. Younger Will as Junior put some effort into playing him closer to Bel-Air; a famous anecdote claims Ang Lee told Smith he needed to “be a little more wooden, act worse” because the maturity of his portrayal was spoiling the effect. Older Will as Henry plays the disaffected glaze of an easygoing snark in a way always betraying the pain underneath. He doesn’t play it like a violent sociopath, either – it’s represented more personally, as someone who recognizes that their life choices led them to create a bubble of alienation and excess that never really provided room for intimacy or growth. The mask falls during a confrontation with Junior, and Smith plays the growing crescendo of doubt swallowing him whole.

That scene in particular is so fascinating to me as a representation of the way therapists talk about the therapeutic dialectic. The older Smith looks at his younger self and addresses every insecurity, every trauma, every happy memory and every impulse with the neutrality of an outside observer, and both performances are forced to reckon with how it feels to both witness and be witnessed at the same time. These are simultaneously the things that make them the same and yet the expression of them inherently divides them across a mass gulf in power and experiences. How do you talk to yourself? How does the inner voice that tells you these things treat you, and how do you respond as both audience and presenter? 

Poolside meeting, waiting for a Russian bioengineer.

There are other ways to dig into the ways this film says things about concentrations of power, abusive dynamics, denial, transactional relationships. Admittedly, they largely aren’t that deep – what they do is provide a structure to what is just whip-ass action. In their first big fight scene, one Will Smith throws a grenade and the other shoots it out of the air back at him. Later, one of them roundhouse kicks the other with a motorcycle. There’s a lot of really wonderful wirework in this film, and transposing it into the modern era results in a lot of Mom’s Dead Parkour. Lee’s direction of action is just so much better than so many of his contemporaries, and I’m surprised by the dismissal of this film on those grounds alone.

I unfortunately never got to see the film in True Ang-O-Vision, 120fps 3D 4K, but in 60fps it’s still pretty breathtaking stuff. The effect of the high frame rate and 4K capture has me looking at every action scene and going “how the fuck did they do that?” It serves the more dramatic conversations well, too, as Smith is so good at playing the growing microexpressions through a scene, and it obscures some of the uncanny of the de-aging. If you don’t have access to the 4K Blu-Ray for that 60fps presentation, we’ll have to watch it sometime.

CELESTE

Posted in Games by

CELESTE
Maddy Makes Games
PC, Switch, Playstation, Xbox

I Was Born For This.

“It was her dying wish.”

“I have to do this.”

The mountain is joining the pantheon of quests in games, alongside a princess in another castle, an alien outsider threatening planetary destruction, and, yes, revenge. There is a mountain; we go to the mountain to climb it. In Journey and God of War, much of that journey is just in getting to the mountain. It is always visible in the horizon; sweeping vistas after long climbs show us that we have “gotten closer,” but not close enough to tell how far the mountain really sits. After a time underground, both games find the base entry point, the snow falling to our character’s face, tassels and scarves flowing in wind.

Celeste too is a game about a mountain. Like the prior year’s Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, it is a game that starts at the bottom of that mountain from the beginning, teaches you the base mechanics of its precision platforming, and sends you on your merry way. And I think Celeste uses that mountain as a similar concept to Foddy’s as a reflection of the player’s own potential depression, insecurity, and need for a hard fought victory. These are, I think, perhaps the two best platformers of the decade in that they introduce new platforming mechanics while using expert intentional level geometry to communicate themes and an idea.

“Introduce” is, in some ways, a tough verb for Celeste, which to an outsider familiar with Matt Thorson’s prior game Towerfall might look like an actual ROM hack of that game. Its movement and airdash were immediately familiar to me, as I’d spent hundreds of hours playing what I’ve (obnoxiously) called “the Best Smash game, bro.” (Towerfall will get one of these columns someday soon, too, when I have a chance to get everyone together and play it for an afternoon.)

Celeste then does something better, that thing our favorite platformers do. Each chapter of Madeline’s story introduces new mechanics. Elevators that move on touch, blocks of starstuff that shoot Madeline forth like she’s cutting through jelly, feathers for Dragon Ball’s nimbus flight; each is quickly explained, quickly understood, and a project to master. These mechanics are then still remixed into later stages, but carefully and thoughtfully and not “because we were afraid it would be disappointing if we left it behind.”

And then it does something even better. It tells Madeline’s story of depression and isolation, and of her willfulness to climb this mountain. It meets Theo, who is kind, aloof, and feels like a real friend, whose musical theme is cozy as James Taylor. It introduces Madeline directly to her other self, who injects the game with as much humor as she does pain. And it does this all with the lightest of touches…except for the brilliant score by Lena Raine (plus credited remixers for the truly difficult B-Sides) which is a natural, exhilarating fit for the game.

Celeste also has no trouble breaking out of its “mountain” theme to play with color.

Lastly – Celeste’s Assist Mode is a hallmark for accessibility in games. That a game so openly confident in its difficulty, so inviting to be compared to “masocore” games and ripe for speedrunning, also is so kind to its player and wants to avail itself to disabled gamers who might gain something from Madeline’s story? It’s just the whole package. They made what they wanted, and made everything they wanted.

Celeste is maybe most iconic for its creator, Maddy Thorson, using the game to come out and transition, to mild outrage from anti-woke chuds and celebration among queer gamers desperate for icons in a dude-heavy landscape. It is not the first queer game by a trans developer, nor is it the most outwardly queer game. However, prior landmark queer games are largely dialogue-heavy adventure games or visual novels, or the comedy short-form experiments of developers like Robert Yang or Nina Freeman. Celeste takes advantage of a gap in the market – a game aimed directly at the heart of the speedrunning hardcore gamer community. Anyone who’s ever watched Games Done Quick knows just how overwhelmingly queer the speedrunner demographic seems to be – Celeste manages to combine queer aesthetics with a gameplay-first design, executing a precise shot at a previously unfulfilled niche. It’s become a landmark “most important” game for that reason – thankfully, it’s a great example of where “most important” and “most fun” meet.