Shallow Depths

I'm slightly ashamed to admit to how much I enjoy games featuring mental asylums (and similar locations). I suppose it goes with the territory when you appreciate dark themes, uncertain layers of reality, and an ominous atmosphere.

Pervasive ideas about mentally ill meaning creepy, dangerous, subhuman and so on... those aren't so cool.  I know I'm treading through problematic territory on this one.  I suppose I find creepiness here which has more to do with how patients are treated than the patients themselves.

Barbaric treatments for mental conditions are some of my top nightmarish-fears, with the additional frightening element that 'barbaric' doesn't always mean 'in the past'. Not having asylums anymore doesn't mean everything's rosy.  So, I disturb myself by playing around in virtual asylums, then worry about the treatment of (and respect for) people with mental illnesses in the real word.

One of my favourite asylum-like locations is from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (spoilers ahead). For the unfamiliar, VtM includes a whole clan of insane vampires: The Malkavians. It's that well-worn idea of insanity as a two-edged gift, balancing madness with unique insight. Bloodlines eventually sends you to the mansion of Dr. Grout, the head Malkavian who has mysteriously disappeared.

Even in Grout's absence the influence of a powerful, disturbing vampire on the mansion is tangible. He was also kind enough to leave audio logs lying around, just to add to the atmosphere. It actually makes some sense for a change, as a scientist recording his thoughts and observations. Grout's insanity doesn't make him incomprehensible, he's articulate and focused (if twisted).

Another unfortunate casualty to tide of time: insane asylums. I lament their loss not only as brokerage houses for the breadth and depth of human psychosis, but also I shall mourn the disappearance of that peculiar environment present only in an insane asylum. That palpable atmosphere of blistered brains and churning bowels, the odiferous melange of freely flowing bodily humours, that gently rolling cacophony of distant sobs and screams, the muttered cursing of perceived enemies and the blissful gurgling of the lobotomized like a new-born babe discovering the sky. I shall still find test subjects as surely as I find bloody sustenance in the night, but this climate, I fear, will never be replicated.

Dr. Grout is a psychologist from an earlier time, twisted by vampirism and the Malkavian condition. He hasn't taken too kindly to the developments made in his field. Dismissive of the new-fangled ideas of Freud, he is bitter about phrenology's fall from grace and continues his more physical approach to psychology in private.

The mansion is populated by Grout's experiments, presumably former patients who have undergone crude brain surgery. The women sob quietly in corners, but quickly pull a knife if you fall for their deception. The men are more openly violent. I wonder if Grout performed different experiments on men and women, due to some old-fashioned sensibility. But maybe I'm being too generous to the game designers.

Grout sits in that awkward place between doctor and patient as he tries to make sense of his own condition. More recently, hidden segments of The Chronicle of Arkham in Batman: Arkham Asylum were used in a similar way to Grout's audio tapes. Both look back into history to describe barbaric treatment of mental patients. Both feature a doctor who has themselves turned to madness and violence.

Amadeus Arkham is more openly malicious, dealing exclusively with the criminally insane and treating them like animals. He's fueled by revenge. Grout, for all his love of screaming and crying patients, seems oddly detached. Chillingly unemotional. And yet, he's still motivated by love for his wife.

These are tragic stories for everyone involved, without any real concept of 'good'. Just beings in various states of inflicting and receiving suffering. My Bloodlines vampire is still a vampire, motivated most by self-preservation. Batman's a hero, but treads close to the line between hero and villain.

I'll avoid a longer discussion of the inmates of Arkham Asylum or I'll be here all night.  What actually prompted this post was recently playing through the 1998 adventure game Sanitarium.  It seemed like something I had to play sooner or later, combining my virtual asylum hopping with my point-and-click adventure habit.  Good Old Games calls Sanitarium "one of the most immersive and chilling psychological horror games ever created" and describes the story as "incredibly good and enthralling". Many people seem to have good memories of it.
Playing older games means putting up with a few things, in this case particularly the awkward path-finding and shoddy voice acting.  The main character's over-acted lines tend to make me laugh rather than give me the creeps: "Oh God, it's horrible".

I take these elements in stride.  What I wasn't quite expecting was just how batshit erratic Sanitarium is.  It opens with its best trick, sending you from the run-down asylum to a delusion-induced world full of creepy, deformed children. There are hidden bodies in the boarded up school-house, and everyone's afraid of the pumpkin patch. Thus far we have the kind of atmosphere I was expecting. But it's all downhill from there.

That supposedly "good and enthralling" story jumps between insects trying to take over the planet, battles between Aztec gods, an abandoned fairground and various other locations. Admittedly fairgrounds have spooky potential (nothing is scarier than clowns), but it's garish next to everything else, highlighting the inconsistency even more.

Leaving aside any problematic ideas here about what it means to be insane, the major issue is playing with different concepts of reality while making it very clear which parts are real and which are delusion. Throwing in the likes of aliens, comic book characters, and a goddamn giant squid boy will do that. When elements of reality creep in it tends to be obvious. I was hoping to be proven wrong: a twist at the end at least to make reality murky, perhaps, but it never happened.

Without that meaningful confusion what's left is a mess with no coherent vision. It's like a bunch of short adventure games strung together with a crude plot attempting to tack everything together. This isn't even B-grade material, which might not have surprised me except for some people's raving praise. I've played worse adventure games, mind, but there's really nothing special here. Sanitarium made me question my love of asylum games.
After my disappointment with Sanitarium I could at least find a more consistent asylum in Lylian Episode One: Paranoid Friendship. It's a side-scrolling platformer, featuring a girl beating things up with the untied arms of her straight jacket. It's not my best genre, and if it were I'd be complaining about uninspired combat, but it gets the atmosphere right. I gather episode two will be more puzzle-based, which would suit it much better.

Lylian fights her way through Hacklaster Hospital armed with her heavily starched sleeves and an over-active imagination. Exploring different versions of the world never feels wrong (or only in the way it should feel wrong). The creepy asylum and reality-shifting is quirky without degenerating into stupid. Lylian herself is disturbed enough to justify her odd reality.

In Lylian reality is suitably unknown. Lylian and the protagonist of Sanitarium both provide an imperfect viewpoint, but in Sanitarium's case our own sanity lets us see past his limitations. With Lylian we're stuck with her warped view of the world, and although we can assume a lot of what we're seeing isn't real it's impossible to determine what might have some basis in reality.

There might be conspiracies going on here, or just a whole lot of delusions. Episode one was too short to say too much more, but I will be looking out for future Lylian installments.

"Do not be concerned, life is hardly as precious as one might think" - Yurt, the Silent Chief, Demon's Souls

[Post includes spoilers for the early part of the game]

Returning to Demon's Souls after a long hiatus feels like falling back into the arms of an intense lover. Part of me regrets ever leaving, but it's hard to maintain so much passion and focus. From the outside this affair might seem unhealthy, but it's a willing submission to a fair master who always encourages the best from me.

In the past I've written about the difficulty in Demon's Souls being far less than many have suggested. I still feel that way, but it was also a knee-jerk reaction to difficulty dominating the conversation. My lover is not cruel. The first word I'd choose to describe Demon's Souls isn't brutal, punishing, or (gods forbid) hardcore. I'd call it 'coherent' – every element serves the overall dark fantasy vision.

Challenge is an important part of that creation, true, but it's easily over-emphasised. Still, my claim that Demon's Souls isn't ridiculously hard is about as inadequate as throwing around exaggeration from the other side ("The hardest RPG ever made, with some of the most unforgiving rules ever to be enforced on a player", honestly?).

Besides, I'm not trying to be elitist, I just want to see more sophisticated discussion of game challenges in general. If Demon's Souls is so difficult, I want to understand the nature of its challenge. Especially given personally I find, say, God of War harder. Not the most rational assessment, maybe, but not wholly without reason either. God of War has a faster pace, more complex combos, and if I get stuck I can't just try out another level instead.

Difficulty in Demon's Souls is usually described in mechanical terms. Combat is precise, and occurs in a more considered way than your average hack-and-slash. Rushing in or making small mistakes can cost you a lot. The relatively harsh penalty for death means constantly weighing up the risk of continuing, and potentially losing the chance to spend your collected souls.

However, the difficulty in Demon's Souls is, first and foremost, not about reflexes and control-mastery. It isn't even about gathering knowledge and using smarter strategies (although that helps immensely). No, in my opinion the primary reason Demon's Souls is difficult is because it challenges optimism.

Dark fantasy is usually a matter of aesthetic and thematic style, like the blood splatters and intrigues of Dragon Age. But here darkness permeates the experience more deeply, and wants you to feel despair.

The Demon's Souls tutorial teaches basic controls, then smacks you fatally with a giant axe. Even this fight can be won, but it isn't designed with your success in mind. Thus, the tutorial teaches you to feel hopeless. This is also the point where you discover soul form, and have your hit points capped at 50%. Objectively, this isn't any different to displaying a short-but-full hit point gauge, as is common when just starting out in action games. But the psychological impact of seeing your hit points reduced by half is huge.

Much of the best survival horror can make you feel powerless, but it's rarely the intention of other action or roleplaying games. We're surrounded by so many power fantasies an alternative can come as a shock.

The first level is arguably the hardest level to face. Certainly not in terms of the layout or enemies themselves, or even the time it takes to find better equipment, but because you've just been smacked in the nose. And because you can't level your character until you've beaten the first boss. This makes the first level the most rogue-like (in the sense of losing character progress with death, although items are still retained). It's an achievable goal, but the set-up is bound to make you feel under-powered.

Beating the first demon Phalanx is a sweet moment of success. It unlocks the ability to level up, and you earn your body back so that hit-point cap disappears. (You also do less damage in body form, which is one of several reasons I often character-suicide after a boss fight, but people are less likely to mention that bit). You're a successful demon hunter now, and continue into the next part of the level with a new sense of achievement.

Success is likely to be short-lived. Clear a room, and continue on towards the castle. This is the point where many of those who haven't been forewarned will die to a red dragon, who torches them unexpectedly from the sky. If not the dragon, it will probably be something else. Your body is unceremoniously snatched away, and you begin the slow process of level mastery all over again. Swiftly taking away a reward as though to punish anyone who became too happy or complacent. Demon's Souls isn't going to let you forget that power has to be earnt.

In an information sense, Demon's Souls is very restrained, both with its story/characters and mechanics. Story is filled in by imagination. Mechanics are learnt through experience, which requires experimentation (and looking up guides, which I consider valid). Lack of information in general can make you feel inexperienced and vulnerable.

The community discussion surrounding Demon's Souls has also increased its infamy, and feeds the perception of challenge. For example, the statement "the game can get harder if you die too much." is technically correct, but gives a misleading impression without more detailed discussion of the world tendency system, especially if playing online. Word tendency is too involved to fully explain here (see the Wiki if needed), but the idea of a game that gets harder every time you die has coloured a lot of ill-informed discussion, even sometimes among those who have played the game.

Perceptions going into Demon's Souls are likely to be harsh.

The not-so-well-kept secret is that Demon's Souls' challenge can be overcome, and success feels all the sweeter for it. But tackling the difficulty curve is always an emotional challenge before anything else. That might not be comfortable thought, but to me it's what makes the difficulty most worth discussing. And perhaps why I'll persist here, while I avoid most games with a challenging reputation.

(Enslaved: Odyssey to the West's fish tank scene occurs at the end of Chapter Two, but in some ways it's worth discovering for yourself, so consider yourself warned if sensitive to spoilers.)

The scene: Monkey and Trip come across something beautiful and incredible.  A large fish tank is still thriving after approximately two hundred years in the ruins of New York.  Trip explains that it's working as a perfect closed system.  The sunlight feeds the plants, the small fish eat the plants, and the big fish eat the small fish.

I'm not going to attack that scenario, even if it does seem pretty unlikely.  Enslaved is hyper-real in general, with its oversaturated greenery and picturesque ruins.  I'll hand wave a little for the sake of fantasy, or perhaps assume they had some pretty amazing fish tanks before the apocalypse hit, to deal with ongoing oxygenation, decomposition, and so on.   Nothing in Enslaved is grimy, and the fish tank is effectively a miracle – survival against the odds.

Two hundred years is an interesting figure to me, because it's also around the time since European settlement of Australia.  And a couple of hundred years is really short in this context.  Changes might seem dramatic but, like Australian cities, Enslaved's landscape is still new and changing.

On that short time scale many things do persist.  There's a simple graph to estimate how many species are likely to occur per area of habitat.  New cities like those in Australia are likely to have more species than you would predict for the area of habitat available.  Many things are still just hanging on, like long-lived trees or small populations surviving in scattered reserves.

That is how I think of Enslaved's fish tank, and Monkey seems to agree with me.  Trip explains that her own colony functions in a similar way – a self-sustaining community cut off from the rest of the world.  Monkey says it's only a matter of time before the slavers attack again, while I doubt their ability to persist for other reasons, including the risk of disease outbreak or long-term inbreeding.  Small, isolated populations are vulnerable for a whole bunch of reasons.

You can probably guess what happens next.  The boss fight, followed by Trip crying over fish flopping uselessly on the ground.  And can't you just smell the forshadowing?  All the subtlety of a brick.

Ecology is perhaps an awkward thing to depict in media.  On a simple level many people already understand it.  It's basic ideas like plants capturing sunlight and animals eating each other.  It's watching a pair of birds hatch and raise their young.

It's a deceptive simplicity, which hides the countless variables and interactions complicating natural systems.  The happy medium between simple observations of nature and the complex reality is hard enough to get my head around while working with it regularly.  I don't exactly expect to see it in a more informal setting.

Still, somehow I can't help but feel there's room for just a touch more complexity and subtlety.  I'm also looking at you, Miyazaki.

Nier was one of the cult hits of 2010: clearly not a game for everyone, but still deserving of a place among my favourites.  Several things make Nier special, but right now I want to talk about how its towns and cities feel (to me, at least).

The unnamed village Nier calls home is a somewhat idealised rural setting.  Green fields extend to the north and south, and the marketplace is active, if not exactly bustling.  The background music in the village is tinged with sadness, but always manages to feel like coming home.  The waterwheel turns, the farmers fatten their stock, and residents share a drink at the local tavern.

Many have talked about how they felt the first time they loaded up Ocarina of Time and experienced the wonder of a green, three-dimensional landscape laid out in front of them for the first time.  I don't share those memories, so was a little surprised to see so many comparisons between Zelda and Nier, but I suppose I understand the familiarity of an idyllic, rural setting more generally.

As it turns out, this is one of many places Nier makes the most of its unoriginality.  Bucolic doesn't really do it justice.

If I pay more attention to what's going on in the lives of these villagers, the above description is quite misleading.  Life is rough for these people.  They fear the increasing attacks by shades (the game's major enemies), and start to suffer food shortages as their fields become unsafe.  The children are restless, the traders are going broke, and the tavern becomes a retreat for the desperate.

People genuinely worry about their future, and their hardships are expressed to the player frequently.  But no matter how many villagers complain about safety on the roads or struggling to feed a large family, the idyllic atmosphere of Nier's village is never threatened.  The grass is still green, the river is clean and full of fish, and the market stays open.

In other words, the villagers' difficulties are understood rather than felt.  I don't know if this was intended, but it has some interesting side-effects.

For one thing, it further emphasises that even though Nier lives in this village, he's also an outsider.  He's not well enough integrated with his community to completely share in its suffering.  Nier is welcome here: he receives expressions of sympathy and help looking after his daughter.  But he's frequently away from home, and (more importantly) not really respected.  It's easy to look down on the man who gratefully snaps up demeaning work, and throws himself into a seemingly hopeless quest for years on end.  It sets up a permanent barrier between him and the rest of the village.

Another result of being disconnected from local suffering is creating a place with layers.  One way of looking at it is  a feeling of secrets or hidden darkness.  The truth hiding behind the false perfect surface.  Personally, though, I prefer to think of it as multiple layers of reality existing simultaneously.  Each layer is a valid truth, able to co-exist here.  Without giving too much away, the mixed message is highly appropriate to Nier's premise and undercurrents.

To the south is a seafront town, which is a larger and more populous than the village but shares a similar vibe, dominated by expanses of blue sea and sky.  Instead, I'm going to move northwest, to another small settlement known as The Aerie.  It's structurally very impressive, consisting of a series of small houses and walkways built high over a deep chasm.  Breathtaking, certainly, but it feels exposed and usually looks deserted.  Aurally, it hits me with a wall of haunting choir voices.  Add dull colours and sometimes fog effects, and we're in an oppressive and unsettling environment rather than an open and airy one.

My initial reaction to The Aerie was that its people must be rather eccentric.  It would require some very determined engineering at this level of technology just to keep the place stable.  But it's highly defensible, in a short-sighted way: there's one path in, and cutting off that walkway will isolate them completely.

The Aerie residents are usually shut up in their houses, and yell at me to go away if I try to coax them out.  My main understanding of the place comes from snippets of conversation overhead through the walls.  Dealing with them means overcoming fear and prejudice.  We're not only an outsider here, but also a potential enemy.

Over time The Aerie becomes progressively more crazed, as fear gives way to other emotions.  At the extremes, people become shades themselves and are forced to turn on each other.  At one particularly memorable point, I overheard a child's voice as I passed by their house, begging their mother to stop hurting them.  I froze for a few seconds to let the wave of horror wash over me.  If I could have broken down the door I would have.

The Aerie does not set up mixed messages: it's very clear about what it is.  Its self-destructive path also gives a clearer view of some of the layers present in the village, which suffers from its own insularity, prejudice, and even child neglect.  Zelda this is not.

I would like, now, to travel to the desert-city of Facade.  But that requires a long journey, and a large cultural shift.  It's enough of a departure to tell a separate story, which may belong to another day.