Botanicula by Amanita Design

Amanita Design is a small video game/art studio that I have been following for a few years now. They make beautiful games that can only really be described as creations of wonder. They use hand drawn art, photography, and immersive sound design to create an environment that invites the player to experience it. While the game mechanics are simple one-click affairs with the occasional puzzle, (which, when using this word in relation to their designs, can mean something as simple as “find the next thing to click on” just as much as “solve this brain teaser”), they require just enough of the player’s thought process to keep them engaged within the environment without being challenging show stoppers . Their game that was the closest to having true puzzles as one would normally think of them, was a small game called Machinarium, which featured a small robot trying to reach his true love after being separated from her. In it, the puzzles required some thought, a piece of paper for notes, and some patience. This new game, Botanicula is not nearly so puzzle heavy, but still gives plenty of reasons to play it through.

What I really wanted to start off saying, but feared it would be too bold of a statement was: everyone should play Botanicula. It is both an art piece and a game, something meant to create more of an experience and atmosphere than to test dexterity and fast thinking. The interface is simple so not to be intrusive, and a one-click-does-everything method means that even those with very little gaming experience can still easily interact with the creation.

The game itself is meant to bring about an emotional connection with the participant and invoke their interest through this emotion rather than trying to hook the participant through the standard gaming tropes of challenge, reward, and overcoming obstacles. While there is an element of those within the game, they are not the key force driving the player forward, but rather act as secondary supports for the atmospheric and emotional connection.

This connection is something that Amanita has done with all their products, and has continued to do here. They create these connections using a number of tools. First off, they paint with broad strokes when it comes to story. There is always an underlying narrative structure to their games, but it is always told through visual cues and a collection of singular events. Instead of having a narrator tell the audience the story, or have the characters speak to each other, they instead use images and basic animations displayed within thought and speech balloons, allowing the viewer to interpret the events within their own culturally pre-developed knowledge base. This allows the developer to forego the expenses of localizing the game before releasing it to other regions, but it also has the added benefit that it makes their game infinitely relatable and the story can surpass the usual restrictions language places on events, thus freeing it from one interpretation.

The other ways that Amanita builds emotional connections is through their sound and art design. In Botanicula the soundscape they create is both whimsical and upbeat. The sounds that each creature makes is not a pre-recorded nature sound from a sound library but created by a vocalist. Thus each hum, buzz and sound of surprise is a spoken onomatopoeia, pulling us back to the memories of young childhood when every sound could be recreated by us during play, whether it was the whirr of a helicopter or the sound of water spraying from a fire hose. The soundtrack itself is surreal mixture of fairy garden notes and joyful clapping of hands and small drums, and might be one of the most cohesive mixes of music and game that I have ever played. It’s a soundtrack that becomes part of the full experience instead of the usual droning sounds punctuated by rare moments of elation that most games seem to relish using.

Art design, as you can most likely gather from earlier, is another of Amanita’s strong points. The mellow, translucent world-scape evokes feelings of freedom, organic life and purity and the creatures that inhabit it are beautiful hand drawn creations that, while usually contrasting with the environments, also complement the world they live in superbly. The creature designs themselves, while all based on insects, fungi, small mammals, and the occasional undersea oddity, are really completely unique creatures that at first appear as if they are just stylized interpretations of the real things until you really look deeper, and see that they are wholly original and alien. 

It is this similarity to the expected while still being entirely unique that makes this game worth experiencing. You want to touch every detail of the world to see if -and how- it will interact with you and the cast of creatures that you lead along your journey. The plight of the creatures you meet and the world they inhabit will become something you care passionately about within just a brief span of time, and by the time the game has wrapped up three hours later, you will feel like you have experienced something that was worth being part of.

________

For those interested here is a video to show you what the game looks and sounds like:

Here is a link to Samorost 1, one of their earlier, free to play games to give you a feel for what kind of games the usually create.

Super Mario 3D Land by Nintendo

I should start this by saying that I am most likely going to talk about the game in its entirety, so if you are one of those people who want to know absolutely nothing about how Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach, or how Mario saves her by defeating Bowser in a heated battle of macho manliness you should most likely stop reading. Also, if you don’t want to know about the special, post-world eight game bonus stuff, you should probably just go ahead take off as well.

“So, how about that newish handheld Mario game for that newish Nintendo handheld system that is held back from being a great portable device by a terrible, less than three hour battery life?” you might ask.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s Mario, there are goombas and koopa troopers and star coins to collect. It’s all the platforming you come to expect from a Mario game, although it’s been slightly castrated by being far too easy for far too much of the time. That is my only big complaint really, so let’s get it out of the way now. The first half of the game (World 1 through 8) were dead simple, with the Nintendo gods feeling the need to rain down 1-ups for being marginally proficient at jumping atop flag poles and finding “hidden” green mushrooms. And while they handed out psychedelic, life giving fungi, they also decided to make the gauntlet of trials and tribulations Mario must overcome to save his one true -though perhaps promiscuous- love about as challenging as World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros. By the time I reached the Final Bowser boss fight, I had well over 100 lives, and never really felt threatened by anything the game threw at me. (Although, yes, I did once have the game offer me an invincible Tanooki Suit, Nintendo’s way of saying that it felt I might be incapable of completing the level because I had failed to make one irksome jump a handful of times and was worried I might give up and fall upon my Master Sword in shame and frustration). However, there are two things that balance out this complaint. First off, the levels are fun, and well designed. I liked seeing what the designers had thought up next, and it kept me playing (though at first I was bothered by the fact that each world was not a themed collection of levels, but a simple hodgepodge of gimmicks strung along, though I eventually got over that). The second thing that counterbalances the severe easiness of the first eight or so hours is that you can almost view them as a (very) extended tutorial before the real game begins. The last eight special worlds, unlocked after you defeat Bowser, feature a lot of challenges. So if you can keep yourself playing through the first eight hours, which feature well designed, easy levels, you will find a lot to like from the last half (and one or two levels where you want to throw something in anger, which is dangerous considering the streamlined, easily huckable shape of the 3DS itself).

In all honesty, I could probably stop there, since I kind of said all those little, nibbling things that I have been mulling over since beating the game. However, I guess I could quickly discuss the 3D elements of the game. First of all, the 3D effect in the game does add some depth, but doesn’t really do anything for me either way. While the first time I handled the 3DS, (at a kiosk in a Toys R Us), I was blown away by how cool the 3D was, (I wasn’t wearing glasses! The screen wasn’t a darkened mess due to the glasses! There was depth and my eyes were trippin’, man!), after playing a full game with the feature, I like it, but if it didn’t exist I wouldn’t feel like I was missing anything. The only time I really took notice of the feature and thought it added a little something was with the two top-down levels where lava rose up toward me, and Mario dropped down deep holes in the ground to collect coins before hitting a springy block and popping back up at me. Those moments were cool, but only really lasted a few short minutes. I went back and replayed those levels a number of times because they were so cool. Sadly, Nintendo didn’t feel like making more of those. What they did do instead was make a few cloud sections were a little 3D notification floated in the bottom of the screen letting you know you needed to see depth to make the jumps between clouds, so turn on the 3D screen effect if you had turned it off. These sections were boring and the 3D, while suggested by Nintendo, didn’t seem very wow to me, or very necessary to beating the sections. The M.C. Escher-esque demo screen off the start menu was more impressive. The reason for this lack of great 3D use can be traced back to one thing, I feel. Nintendo wants to include everyone, even at the expense of limiting fun for the majority, and this is one example: there is a health and safety warning that says 3D effects should only be used by those ages 7 and up. So, for that huge subset of kids ages 1 month to 6.99 years old who play video games, Nintendo has avoided doing anything where 3D is required as a portion of game design. I do understand that not everyone will be able to see 3D, and that there are lots of kindergarten aged kids that want to play Nintendo, but when the ability to include a touted feature of your system on a flagship brand is squandered you have to wonder why you felt it should be a hardware design component at all. Was it just an excuse to sell me a new handheld when the old one was treating me just fine? Regardless, I feel that Mario could have used a bit more 3D pizzaz.

In general, I had fun with the game, collecting star coins, hoping over lava pits, and trying out all the little gimmicks that Nintendo inserted into the platforming formula. The game featured a number of levels that have stuck in my mind and have enjoyed playing them over a few extra times for fun, and will be going back to every once and a while for brief forays when I start to miss Mario’s mustachioed mug.

Sam and Max: Culture Shock by Telltale Games

This is a repeat play through, so not out of the backlog. Sometimes you just need to take a break from the new stuff and have a good ol’ hit of something familiar.

Sam and Max: Culture Shock is the first episode of the first “season” of Sam and Max games by Telltale Games. It’s a short adventure game that follows the exploits of Sam and Max, freelance police, as they deal with a number of former childhood actors running amok in their neighbourhood.

Now, there may be a lot of terms and names in the above mini paragraph that needs clarification for some, and for others, you can just jump right on down to the next little blurb. So, for those that want more of an explanation, here we go. Adventure games in general are games that are almost always story driven, (or in some cases, exploration driven, such as Zork), where the player controls a character, (or is the character), that moves through the narrative by overcoming obstacles in the form of puzzles. Most of these puzzles require using items picked up throughout the course of the adventure to solve them, or by selecting the proper dialogue choices to get another character to do what is needed. As such, adventure games mostly require a player to listen/read a story and then traverse the game world picking up random objects to solve the problems placed in front of the character. It should also be mentioned that the genre is known for puzzles that occasionally expects unreasonable leaps in logic (or un-logic), and getting into the heads of the developers more than doing what would make sense to you. Telltale Games mostly specializes in making these types of games, (I can’t speak for there more recent games, which seem to be straying away from pure adventure gaming at least a little bit), and they make them in an episodic format. Basically, they announce a season worth (four to six) episodes, and release one a month, each episode being a short, (2 to 4 hour), self-contained story but part of a greater whole. One of their earlier attempts was season one of Sam and Max, which was based off of the comics done by Steve Purcell, (now at Pixar, working in story development), about an anthropomorphic dog named Sam and his sidekick Max (a psychotic rabbit-y thing). His original comics inspired a short lived cartoon and one previous videogame by LucasArts that was released in the nineties. 

Okay, so we covered that. So, why would someone want to play this game? For the simple reason that it will make you continually laugh. If the idea of freelance police isn’t funny enough, and you don’t get a kick out of thinking about psychotic rabbit-y things there are still reasons to like this game. Its biggest strength is that it is well written. The whole thing is spot on, from the overarching plot down to the individual lines spouted by our heroes. The wit is high in this game, and yet it doesn’t feel like just a bunch of individual jokes strung along to make it look like a story. The game starts in the office of Sam and Max, who are just killing time when the phone rings, offering to relieve the boredom by presenting them with a case. However, their phone has gone missing, and is being held for cheesy ransom by a rat, Jimmy Two Teeth. From there, we discover former childhood stars who are under the influence of hypnosis to do the bidding of a shadowy figure. Then there is a climax. Okay, so it sounds pretty strung along haphazardly, but it’s not, or at least it makes sense within the world of Sam and Max. What is a credit to the writing is that you accept Sam and Max’s universe and understand that the plot isn’t deranged when presented within the confines of that structure.

Culture Shock is a great introduction to the world of Sam and Max. It captures many of the elements that made all of the previous Sam and Max stories so great; witty and gut splitting one-liners, wanton mischief and comical violence are presented in a way that somehow suggests whimsical innocence instead of depravity. These are, in my opinion, hallmarks of Sam and Max.  The best part of all is that this episode is so small compared to the grandiose absurdity that the series eventually builds into. The fact that you can enjoy it just as much playing through a second time, knowing that bigger and bigger things are coming is a testament to what Telltale created with these games. 

Oh! Here is a video you can watch to see a bit of what I'm rambling on about. It's the trailer released from way back before the game came out. It's full of those witty lines I was going on about, so worth a watch: