2010 Retrospective - Part 4: Pigs, Premonitions, Paganism

Aside from Deadly Premonition, Shalom was probably the most original, bizarre, and funny game I played last year. The third game in the Knightmare series, it was never released outside Japan, and it's easy to see why. It's a truly weird creation. Not quite an RPG, not quite an adventure game, and nothing like its predecessors (the first was a shooter, the second a platformer) Shalom is one of the weirdest games from that wild era when game sequels often threw out everything and started from scratch: a rollicking, self-reflexive genre mash-up with a bonkers sense of humor.

Shalom begins in the "real world" where your girlfriend buys you Shalom. (Yes, really.) After some Japanese dating sim-style interactions where you can try to avoid kissing her, you are sucked through your MSX screen and into the game, where you find yourself saddled with a talking pig. While it looks like a top-down RPG there is virtually no combat. You just explore and talk to people, often with hilarious results. The goofy English translation, based on a Portuguese fan-translation, feels like a plus here, enhancing the manic state everyone seems to be in. (NPC: I don't see anything weird here. YOU: The only weird thing here is your face!)

I didn't finish Shalom, but it's not for lack of trying. The game is so obscure I couldn't find a walkthrough anywhere, which made the experience truly "retro". Before game magazines or the Internet you really were at the mercy of whatever esoteric bullshit designers threw at you. Shalom reminded me what it was like to be stuck in a game and not care — to walk around for hours, not knowing what to do, but be so thrilled by a game's weirdness you love it all the same.

I managed to avoid writing about Deadly Premonition all year, mostly because it was my favorite game of the year and I couldn't begin to imagine what I'd say about it without tripping all over myself. The game is utterly fucking brilliant, so much so that its genuinely bad aspects (interface design, technical visuals, combat) barely register after the first hour. What's left are some great characters, great dialogue, great music, wonderful simulation-based world design, and the single most ingenious conceit for dealing with player/avatar dissonance I've ever seen. Deadly Premonition may be an obvious rip-off of Twin Peaks, but not since Snatcher has a Japanese developer justified their shameless plagiarism with such clever application to the digital medium. It marks Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro as a genuine auteur, and perhaps one of the five or six people in the game industry who knows a goddamn thing about movies... or at least what Roger Corman was doing in the early 80s. Right Zach?

Lords of Shadow is a game I reluctantly picked up after a friend of mine made a convincing case that it was really about the pagan roots of Catholic mysticism. He isn't entirely wrong, but the game doesn't seem able to make these ideas as interesting as they should be, opting for a cloying Hollywood style that's not only cheesy (Patrick Stewert nearly sinks the whole game with his patronizing delivery) but disappointing coming from a European developer.

I didn't finish Lords of Shadow, but I got about 80% through it. I warmed up to the game somewhat when I realized it does have actual glimmers of Castlevania in it, primarily in terms of how it handles backtracking and false linearity within levels, a la Rondo of Blood. The rest is rote God of War imitation... which isn't badly done but rather misguided given I never felt God of War was very similar to Castlevania at all. (Castlevania was never a brawler.) Ironically Other M, in which combat is the spice and exploration the meat, was a much better contemporary approximation of Castlevania to me.

Epic Mickey was a game I played because of its association with Warren Spector, a childhood hero of mine and collaborator on some of my favorite games (Ultima VII, System Shock, etc.) Epic Mickey was seen by many as the long awaited follow-up to his critically acclaimed Deus Ex over a decade ago. In an upcoming post I will discuss how Epic Mickey relates to this legacy, specifically in how it deals with so-called "player-driven" narrative, so here I'll just give my other major impression about the game: that it is one of the most reverent bits of Disney fan adoration I've ever seen. While not surprising (the developer is owned by Disney) it does render the game's supposed darkness — its willingness to take risks with the iconic IP —  rather insincere. And I'm not speaking of the fact that the original concept art, which was far more apocalyptic and disturbing, was toned way down in the final game. I am speaking of the Stalin-like reverence with which Epic Mickey treats Walt Disney himself: as the paternal god of our collective imagination who is ever-wise, ever-loving, and beyond all reproach. "Dark" my ass.

Spy Fiction  was the last game I played in 2010. I picked it up when I heard it was by the same developer as Deadly Premonition, hoping to find some of the same originality and cleverness buried under its Metal Gear-lite exterior. Once you get past the misleading combat-intensive tutorial level, the game quickly begins to live up to its title. Its disguise mechanic, which allows you to "steal" the identities of literally any NPC by secretly taking snapshots of them, is one of the best I've seen, better in some ways than Hitman's in how it encourages and rewards experimentation. The core game, which involves finding the right disguise to eavesdrop on the right conversation, is actually built around this mechanic, making Spy Fiction one of the few espionage games that involves actual spying as its primary activity. This alone makes it worth playing, even if it lacks the clever dialogue and quirky humanity of its successor.