VVVVVV is one of my favorite games, and on the surface it seems very barebones. The game doesn’t have to have a whole lot to be good, but what’s in there have to fit each other perfectly. But I think that consistency is one of the most important traits of a game to define it’s overall quality and public perception. Many would even find it’s light videogame humor to be funny. Why care? After all, LUNARK still has a solid gameplay and engaging environments. In spite of it’s own careful and thoughtful gameplay, the game attempts to be light, and funny and carefree and… gamey, and as such creates the dissonance that is very hard for me to ignore. Or magical life fruits that grow absolutely everywhere, from ancient ruins, to moving subway trains. Snarky NPCs who exist only to dish a mediocre joke or dump uncovered gameplay hint on your face. Then we fight a giant spider boss, and have to destroy Big Green Weak Spots to defeat it. We start with the characters that are frequently refer to the controls. But everything else about the game is directed to oppose them, to annihilate immersion and remind you at every minute that “hey, did you know that it’s just a game?”. LUNARK inherits the weighty animations and the slow paced gameplay. I cannot help but notice that 1992 game has better detalization than 2022 one But it was an action game more akin to Die Hard than to Rambo, with the main character who is a believable human, who is fragile and vulnerable, and who has to overcome the odds through ingenuity and clever tactics. Slower gameplay inspired a more grounded, realistic setting - it would be weird to have grounded character in a wacky setting, wouldn’t it? I cannot say that Flashback was a hardcore realistic simulator. Real humans need time to aim, they can only survive so many hits, they are slow and have terrible inertia after building up speed, and all of these limitations defined now much beloved gameplay of Flashback. As such Conrad Hart, the game’s protagonist, cannot either. A real human cannot leap 20 meters into the air, only to change his direction mid-jump and return to where he started. More realistic animations meant slower paced, tactical gameplay. What if some gameplay mechanics are really weighty and immersive, while others are intentionally gamey and immersion-breaking?įlashback’s greatness might have started merely as a desire to have more life-like animations, but everything else followed. What if RPG system is really complex and requires indepth examination to understand, but the game never uses it and instead prefers to just rush the player through? Dissonance. What if the music is really fast paced and energetic, but gameplay is slow and meticulous? Dissonance. In a general sense, any game element can contradict another, purely by the fact of having conflicting goals and purposes. It creates a disconnect within the players between the different game modes, ruins immersion and lowers engagement within the game world.īut there can be a far greater variety of dissonances than just between story and gameplay. Or maybe the player did great and impressive feats of heroism in the gameplay, but within the story, he is still treated like an unwashed street beggar. Perhaps main character killed thousands of mooks in the gameplay, but then is shocked by a single death that happened in a cutscene. Ludonarrative dissonance, to be simple, means that there is a conflict between the gameplay and the story of the game. It is one of the main criticisms towards many big budget AAA games. Ludonarrative dissonance is the hot word of gaming. But it was, in fact, a sign of things to come, a sign of my one big gripe with LUNARK that ended up spoiling my enjoyment of the game. Perhaps they decided to do the tutorial in this cutesy little way so that the players wouldn’t get too confused about controls. That was just a tiny thing, I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Huh, the characters within the world are referring to the UI elements?
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