The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 9
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Here we are, back at the tower again, assaulting it in the hopes of accomplishing… something. I’m not entirely clear on what the heroes plan to actually do here. On one level, we’re sort of chasing Rubicante, or Edge certainly is; on another level, it’s one of those situations wherein the plot has stepped back to allow the player to keep moving forward based solely on what’s available to access. Since the Tower of Babil features rather prominently in Golbez’s plan, I suppose anything that involves us screwing with it is probably a good thing.
It is neat that you see this tower from two sides, though, with this run starting closer to the top while the previous one started at the bottom. Edge helpfully ninja-moves us into the tower proper, and the group can start heading toward… wherever Rubicante is now. Hey, maybe he he still has the crystals! That would be a good thing. Let’s go with that as our motivation, then.
Demo Driver 8: Among the Sleep
Standing here, with sounds coming through the house, not sure where your mother is, the world too dark to make out details… that’s scary.
At a glance, Among the Sleep is two different games, one of which is brilliant and one of which isn’t. Which is especially interesting as one of the games is only a game by the thinnest stretch of the imagination, and yet it’s the one I found more interesting; the demo lost me when it started inserting a bit more gameplay, which merited far less attention in general.
The premise of Among the Sleep strikes you as novel right from the start. Your character is a two-year-old child, and it’s played from the first-person perspective. And it’s a horror game. More than that, it’s a horror game of the sort that you become immediately familiar with mere seconds after you start up the demo. It is dark, you are young, and you are alone. Bad enough in and of itself, but then your crib tilts over, you hear a crash from downstairs… and you can get out. To find your mother.
Uniquely game-based horror
No, I’m not quite talking about the horror inherent in realizing that this is probably both the revival and the end of the Legacy of Kain franchise.
Video games have a lot of potential for horror that I don’t think we’re tapping into. I’m not just talking about transparent crap like marketing games with zombies as “survival horror” so much as obvious avenues of game design that just don’t get tapped. And part of that is preying upon the sorts of horror that don’t exist outside of video games.
Unlike most forms of horror, video games have a requirement for audience participation. You don’t watch games, you play them. There are certain tricks that implies which just can’t be pulled off when you have an entire audience sitting and watching. There are ways to make games feel more horrifying that really lean on the fact that these are games, that players are playing them, that you can hit a sense of powerlessness for the players at a more primal level. There’s stuff that’s scary without requiring big claws or teeth or any combination thereof.
So let’s talk scary, and let’s see how games can really screw with the heads of players with some simple (and kind of horrible) tricks.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 8
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The road to the Tower of Babil is a long one. Part of that is because it is not, strictly speaking, a road; it’s a layer of solid rock over rivers of magma. Another part of that is that it is not a tourist destination. Much as I like the idea of dwarven groups riding little dwarven tour buses back and forth, sending postcards that read “LALI-HO FROM THE TOWER OF BABIL,” that’s not what happens.
I keep getting my hopes up, but it’s time to face fact.
After a fairly long trek, the dwarven tanks are finally visible, opening fire on the tower as a distraction tactic. That’s enough distraction for the group to slip in on the bottom floor, rushing toward the obviously advanced facility suspended over a river of lava. The casual presence of technology feels a bit disconnected, but it’s also an interesting echo of the endgame portions of Final Fantasy I, a world far bigger than the pseudo-medieval setting that has seemed fairly stable up until now.
Hard Project: Zombies
Ironically, this genre seems almost impossible to actually kill.
I love zombie fiction. I absolutely hate most video games that feature zombies. And there’s a good reason for that, largely stemming from the fact that the two bear only the slightest connection to one another.
Let it not be said that you do not have your options for zombie games if you want them. The Walking Dead has been doing quite well for itself. DayZ is out in early testing that only asks you to, you know, purchase it before you can test it. (That seems backwards to me, but that’s a different article.) Dead Rising is a thing, State of Decay is a thing, Left 4 Dead is a thing, and hell, Plants vs. Zombies is out there. That’s not even counting the numerous games which feature zombies as a sideline – arguably the Husks of Mass Effect are close cousins.
But I don’t really like zombie games all that much, and even the games that I’m listing don’t seem to really like zombies all that much. Which is why I’m listing this as a hard project, because it turns out that making a zombie game is a very different prospect from writing zombie horror, and the two don’t go together nicely.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 