Where We Remain
FlxAdventure
Where We Remain and FlxAdventure are both role-playing games with a top-down perspective. The controls are similar: the arrow keys move your character (although FlxAdventure uses the same controls for more than movement). The graphics use similarly chunky 8-bit aesthetics. What's most interesting is how both games reveal the game mechanics to the player.
In Where We Remain, you play an enigmatic man trapped on an island. When you start the game, a line of text informs you to move with arrow keys. A letter elaborates your situation: a girl (your love?) is also on the island, in a cave somewhere, and you have to find her. There is danger on the island and "caves mean safety".
There's not much to know about the game beyond the cryptic letter but that is perhaps the crux of the game, the mystery that surrounds the whole premise of it. What are those blue flowers? Who is this girl you have to rescue? Who are you, for that matter? What are these purple tornadoes hunting you down? What is the island? Thankfully, it's not an alternative reality in Lost, although those purple tornado monsters do look suspiciously like the smoke monster... but I digress. Lost works the same way; it is compelling to watch because it entices the audience with mysteries. Where We Remain is mysterious not only in its story but its game mechanics. Movement is the basic play and you could complete the game without needing to know the other mechanics. As you spend more time in the game, you might discover how the monsters move or what the blue flowers do, and then you could revise your play strategy.
I'm going to explain one of the mysteries (spoiler alert!) in the game -- the purple flowers. These flowers are found throughout the entire map. A delightful sound plays when you collect them. A counter on the top left indicates the number you have collected. The point of collecting them is unclear at first but when you finally find the girl, she remarked that they make a nice gift but more flowers would be nice. Her lack of gratitude aside, the flowers actually do more than apease the girl. When you enter a cave, hitting one of the shadows take away a number of your flowers, and if you don't have any, you'll be expelled from the cave. A harmful side-effect from carrying flowers is that they attract those tornado monsters. The more you have, the better they are at detecting you from a distance.
Where We Remain succeeds at creating an atmosphere of fear. When a tornado monster is near, the sky dims, the earth starts to shake, and a strange sound (like radio static) plays. When the monster has you in its sight, it sounds a menacing mechanical growl and the screen quakes violently. The sound of the monster has an uncanny "living" quality to it which reminds me of the disturbing clicking sound from the ghost in the horror film Ju-on. Much of the island and the game is unknown to create a kind of anxiety in the player. Playing the game is a constant dance between learning more about the story through the cryptic letters littered all over the landscape, and escaping and hiding from the swirling island monsters.
In FlxAdventure, you play a generic hero crawling through dungeons, slaying monsters and looting treasure. It could be seen as the RPG genre stripped down to its core elements: battles with enemies, character growth, exploration, and a story. The battle system is simplified to four actions -- attack, defend, a more powerful attack that is prone to missing (like a gamble), and run -- mapped to the same arrow keys used for movement. It uses a turn-based system common of many RPGs.
The choice of style for the graphics is apt; the 8-bit aesthetics go with the minimalistic nature of the game. The game is tile-based which means everything on the map is placed on a square grid system. The interesting thing about the map is the fog which covers the unexplored areas. Therefore, there exists an element of surprise when you uncover new areas of the map and it's fun enough to make you want to explore the entire map. The game environment is beautifully designed with a lot of details such as tiny shrubbery, beds, bookshelves, etc. The game was actually made for the
Assemblee competition at
TIGSource. The first half of the competition are for artists and sound designers to create game art and music whereas in the second half, game designers create games with resources from the first part of the competition. Where We Remain uses the 8-bit style too but the game art felt more emotive and in a way, more effective than FlxAdventure's. Colors are picked carefully to express different moods, case in point, the mysterious purple flowers. Very little sounds are used (there is no background music) and when they are, it is also to create a kind of atmosphere, such as the impending danger of the tornado monsters.
Both games narrate their story in a similar fashion. FlxAdventure, which has hardly any story to it, uses the environment to narrate. Where We Remain has many letters scattered across the map. Some clue on the origins of the monsters, and some tell of the love between two unknown people. The narrative is optional in both games, and played a little loose in its form. The other form of narrative is similar to film and literature, where the audience is passive; they have no say in how the story turns out. A lot of games utilize a mix of both methods -- gameplay is interrupted with cut scenes, cinematic movies or lines of exposition to tell the story, and then there are multiple endings or different dialogue to give the sense of a two-way narrative. Games like Bioshock and Doom III attempts to solve the problem of overwhelming the player with story by introducing audio logs. These optional pieces of narrative fit within the context of the game and allow the player to learn more of the story (like why that demon spawn you just killed has two legs and a tentacle).
The problem with the traditional way of narrative is that firstly, it is rigid. Games are about interaction so shouldn't the player be able to affect the story as well? Secondly, film and literature are mediums that have mastered the narrative so why make a game to tell a story when a movie would tell it better? The problem with a flexible narrative (that merges more with the gameplay) is that there are numerous actions the player could take even within the rules of the game and it would be impossible (or at least very challenging) for the game designer to create every scenario.
Regardless, Where We Remain handles the trade-off between play and narrative rather well. Even without reading the letters, the player could get a sense of the story and the art and sound lend to the psychological atmosphere as well. FlxAdventure lacks in many areas but the simplified battle system and the map fog are very interesting mechanics that could be explored further.
The problem of merging narrative and gameplay is described in this article:
Gamasutra - The Uneasy Merging of Narrative and Gameplay
--Benjamin
