7 Metro: 2033 or Last Light…or Exodus?
Baby Lenin can’t find his sickle; this is not just another fetch quest!
Metro: Last Light would be substituted for 2033 if the ranger hardcore mode had not been DLC—as a result, I am yet to play it as it ought to be played. No matter how endearingly quaint the very Russian philosophical and political ruminations of Last Light (the author of Metro novels had a greater role in the writing of Last Light than he did with 2033; eventually turning his unused ideas for Last Light into another Metro novel!) and how cutely the metaphysical themes were personified in an adorable little darkling, Last Light simply could not compete with Metro 2033 without its own version of ranger hardcore mode.
Metro 2033, played on ranger hardcore, is the greatest stealth game of the decade (MGSV may be a better action game, but it never quite reached the heights of the Metro series’ stealth). The margin for error is almost zero: stand on broken glass, miss a knife throw, or breathe too near an enemy, and you’re probably dead. To make it through a level alive, the player is forced to plan out a complicated choreography of hiding and sniping, paying careful attention to the number of throwing knives available. And yet there is still some room for improvisation, resulting in some of the most frantic moments of quick thinking in any game, let alone a first person shooter, if you are not instantly killed for exposing yourself but given a chance to fight back or flee.
2033’s use of light and shade will always be breath taking.
And as a first person shooter based on survival, it is nearly as intense an experience. Not only must all your ammo be counted and each shot made to count, if you are using a weapon with recyclable projectiles (and you will be if you want to survive until the end of the game), then you must also risk discovery by sneaking up to corpses to recover your unbroken gas gun bolts.
As often as not, whether sneaking or shooting, being equally careful not to suffocate by running out of gas mask filters; any area with irradiated air is a terrifying experience!
No other stealth game requires such meticulous planning and no other survival game is as much about memorisation and self-discipline as Metro 2033 is—two elements that really should be, but often aren’t, fundamental aspects of those two genres.
I don’t remember who the hell this is, but I do remember that painting!
While my list gives no credence to influence, it’s worth remembering that two of the most well-received triple-a narratives this decade (The Last of Us and Wolfenstein: The New Order) owe a great deal to the Metro series, or at least followed in its footsteps. 2033’s combination of stealth, action and survival to explore serious themes may not be as personal as The Last of Us, but it is a direct precursor: a stepping stone from Metal Gear Solid to TLOU. The relationship between the Dark One and Artyom is not unlike the relationship between Joel and Ellie, albeit far less deep (though deeper in terms of its effect on gameplay, and certainly more philosophically interesting!); and the relationship between Artyom and Anna—with a touch of intrusive Oriental humour—predates the romantic relationship in Wolfenstein: The New Order. In Exodus this relationship is explored in more detail, with The New Order perhaps encouraging 4A games to in turn take what they started a little more seriously!
Yet even without ranger hardcore mode, Last Light will remain with me forever as a strangely meditative experience, nearly equal to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl. The ultimate hollowness of the themes it raises and the questions it asks then fails to answer—in a typically oriental manner—allows one to project whatever one pleases into the experience in a way that other shallow explorations of deep themes do not—Blade Runner immediately comes to mind, which undercuts its meditative atmosphere by focusing on a thematically meaningless mystery whose answer, while never given, allows for no projection and is revelatory if answered by the audience only in terms of plot; this is also in stark contrast to its source material which, while also ambiguous, is not concerned with the unanswered mysteries of plot, but the unanswerable mysteries of God.
Just reach in and grab your gas gun bolts!
Fuck it, maybe Last Light should be here, after all! I’ll retract my opening paragraph and leave this as an open question: pick either Metro mentioned here—or maybe even Exodus!
Remember Me, clearly inspired by the likes of Moebius, Kubrick, Bilal and Dick was gorgeous from beginning to end; but it was in its most abstract moments where it blossomed into something truly special; albeit still borrowing heavily from Escher and Kula World! The soundtrack is also like a slightly more orchestrated, slightly more poppy version of Eufloria’s ambience, though not quite a sgood.
Life is Strange is strangest if you have played Dontod’s first game, Remember Me: a beautiful, super-polished, high-budget beat ‘em up in the vein of Batman (the combat is almost identical), taking place in a highbrow science fiction setting which nearly successfully disguises the pulpishness of the plot. This strategy is reversed in Life Is Strange: a janky, low-budget adventure game with an ostentatiously pulpy plot and lowbrow setting doing its best to make mass-marketable a weirdly authentic bildungsroman and a totally original gameplay hook—a time travel mechanic allowing you to explore all possible dialogue options, which is also written very well into the finale as the super power becomes self-destructive.
Life is Strange also inspired a lot of fan art. This example by Cassio Yoshiyaki is notable due to not being softcore lesbian porn. Kate Marsh was also one of the most interesting characters, and her subplot was excellent.
Inspired by Twin Peaks, Max returns to a seemingly idyllic yet downwardly mobile small American town to expose the rot at the core of American kitsch while also having her big city sensibilities challenged by the responsibilities and sense of community she discovers—she also witnesses the murder of the best friend from her past life, at which point she discovers her ability to rewind time and thus alter the future. While the surreal elements have, like her superhero power, some lyrical qualities, they are mostly decorative; and, unlike Deadly Premonition, the influence of David Lynch is, at best, window dressing—at worst, a cynical marketing ploy to make the low budget aesthetic easier to swallow. But, like David Lynch (and yet again unlike Deadly Premonition), the exploration of human relationships is painfully authentic.
Much has been written about the relationship between Max and Chloe, but the most interesting relationships in the game are the familial relations between Max, Chloe and her mother and father-in-law. Max, being Chloe’s bestest childhood friend, is all but the niece of Chloe’s mother, and her veteran (read: traumatised by the dehumanisation of basic and thus unable to cope without comrades to lose himself in shared victimisation and a paternalistic ruler to free him from the very same victimisation that they initiated, allowing for the total submission to another’s will and the relinquishment of all responsibilities) father-in-law has neither the social skills nor the patience to deal with Chloe who, in turn, has been unable to cope with the death of her “real” father. They’re also struggling to make ends meet—her mother a waitress, and her father a security guard at Max’s school.
Life is Strange’s menus don’t hold a candle to Papers, Please, but they do complement the main story nicely.
In spite of everyone’s best intentions, it is an inherently tragic situation and, while seemingly being but a background element, forms the bedrock of both the plot and the themes of Life Is Strange. Sure, there’s a serial killer on the loose, an incoming metaphysical storm, and Max keeps getting nose bleeds, but what really matters is whether Chloe’s step dad can find a way to show Chloe that he cares for her, that Chloe can come to terms with her father’s death, that her mother can find a way to support both her husband and her daughter who are floundering due to trauma and grief while navigating their jealousies and the trials of wage slavery, and—most important of all—that Max can find a way of gently friendzoning Warren.
With as authentically a tragic depiction of human relationships as this, the hella awkward dialogue and jankiness of the gameplay become endearing—through pity and empathy one can’t help but to love Life Is Strange not in spite of its failings and foibles, but because of them: what else does pathetic humanity have to cope in the tragedy of life but empathy and pity? Wowsers!
As well as posing to placates spirits, one also needs the help of others to burn funguses, which allows you to produce more candles to burn more fungus with. I assume the candles in Sky: Children of Light must be made of fungus, or the whole candle wax economy doesn’t make much sense.
Regular listeners of the Game Under podcast would know that I am an occasional churchgoer (and also, I hope, infer that in spite of this I am probably not religious); the very fact that one may enter and leave churches as one pleases with no one batting an eyelid makes them a strangely subversive institution in a society built on property rights. The inheritor of cultural communal property (at the discretion of the owners) is the shopping centre, and once one is in a shopping centre one is beset with even more propaganda than a church’s stained glass windows, friezes, icons and cross-inspired layout; all of which are a mesmerising, dreamy—rather than hypnotising, nightmarish—aesthetic experience.
But best of all, in my lifetime at least, one may enjoy the unique experience of being alone in a public place if one wanders into a church. Even if one has company, then it is likely to be the church’s organist practicing (Sky: Children of Light features musical instruments, and shockingly it’s not rare to run into another player improvising, in spite of the total commodification of art and thus the cultural rejection of performing music as a communal activity!), or a volunteer running the museum alcove in churches of historical importance. In a shopping centre one is drowning in a sea of stressed-out shoppers, advertisers offering free samples of things and charities begging for donations and the only musical accompaniments are the insufferable offerings of top of the pops or muzak. Unless one visits at night, in which case they are nearly as wondrous entities as churches, and blessed with many more mysteries! In silent isolation, not unlike churches, they even develop their own fascinating acoustic ambiences.*
I’m the one dancing; who the others are, I’ve no idea. Sky’s soundtrack is also every bit as good as Journey’s.
This may be why I did not enjoy Journey, at all. Jenova Chen was once interviewed by a priest who used Journey and Flower in active Christian worship exercises; on learning this, Jenova Chen commented that when he analysed That Game Company’s business model, he realised that they were working in the social service industry: Journey provided an experience in which one could trust other people; a rare feeling for gamers. However, in my own experience, while one was certainly not threatened by the presence of other players in Journey, one gained nothing from meeting them, pragmatically or personally; indeed, the mysteries of the desolate landscape of Journey became with the presence of others a church filled with people, and people filling a church obscure its architectural and, indeed, its spiritual marvels.
Sky: Children of Light is more like a shopping centre than a church. Full of useful and aesthetically pleasing things to collect, it is structured on the basis of material gain by motivating one to improve one’s status through the purchasing of expensive and/or fashionable clothing as well as useful or flashy accessories while simultaneously offering the perfect venue in which to show off the clothes one is already wearing and the accessories one is using. Hard work is rewarded in the same way it is in reality: very, very slowly; though it can eventually begin to build up (and even snowball with the right network!). Or, alternatively, if you are rich then you can skip the hardship of manual labour and buy the fanciest outfits without wasting hours of your life working your thumbs to the bone.
One way of making a candle without much effort or time invested is by hitching a ride on a random player in the Valley’s race! It’s all about the grind…
Yet this creates a strange sense of community. While one is not guaranteed to find help when one needs it, no one seems to be particularly annoyed by a player calling endlessly for assistance in opening a multi-player door so they can collect a few extra blobs of wax, and more often than not people are willing to help—at least when there is a reasonable reward on the other side of the door. The better one dresses oneself, the greater the contrast between one and newer players but, for me at least, instead of fostering a sense of superiority, one ends up feeling compassion for noobs (whose antics not based on collecting as much light as quickly as possible are often amusing to behold) and thus, unlike in many games, when a newbie appears and randomly befriends oneself (not realising the value of candles!), one might actually take them by the hand and lead them through the level, showing them where all the candles, winged lights and spirits are! And it probably isn’t just me who indulges in charitable works from time to time; when I was a newbie, savvy players in fancy outfits routinely helped me out—an experience unlike any other MMO I’ve played (though Koreans were usually surprisingly generous and helpful compared to their Japanese, European and Anglo comrades in other MMOs; perhaps because Koreans live in the closest thing to a micro-transaction economy this side of China).
That one can’t talk to other players unless one spends many candles on one’s friendship constellation or has a very expensive item that allows one to talk to random players also helps to make interaction with friends a very interesting experience. By the time one ends up talking to anyone, one is likely to have known them for some time, making talking to them for the first time an exciting experience, rather than a boring exchange of online platitudes (A/S/L?); even when one is talking to a group of people, there are usually one or two people who know each other very well, making breaking the ice a little less awkward! (Plus, friends of friends are usually very eager to befriend one another.) And even if one does talk to a stranger, it is usually a similarly exciting experience due to its rarity, although slightly more awkward and closer to A/S/L etiquette of standardised online interaction.
A relaxing, ritual suicide by drowning with randoms.
It is fascinating that, counter-intuitively, That Game Company has ended up making a much more wholesome community experience than Journey—which used the standard, less exploitable one-time payment strategy—in a game clearly structured around encouraging potentially exploitative in-game spending as its business model. But maybe it is their very exploitation and alienation that attracts teenagers to the carnivalesque horror shows of shopping centres: the desire to enrich one’s self materially and marinate in the envy and jealousy evoked by window shopping becomes the shared-suffering doorway to a spiritual connection to one’s peers**, just as, in reverse, a church’s spiritual beauty encourages the severance of one’s connection to other people and it is only in the shared punishment of a priest’s acerbic tongue that the community is put back together through a shared sense of sin.
I am reminded of another interview, this time regarding the Souls games. The inspiration for the Souls series’ strange online system—which clearly influenced Sky: Children of Life—was Hidetaka Miyazaki’s experience of adverse circumstances encouraging communities to rally together. The result was, on the contrary, one of the most immature and unhelpful communities in gaming: git gud, scrub! But, then, the Souls games are like Journey: they are churches, not shopping centres; no matter how melancholy, they are things whose architectural souls are beautiful and pure: other people merely dilute that beauty with sin. Sky: Children of Light, on the other hand, is as horrific and impure as it is beautiful: other people give it its humanity, not a god or its own aesthetic sensibilities—just as the redemptive and entrancing mystery of empty shopping centres at night is the fundamental absence of other people, and the joy in such an architectural experience is not in the architecture itself, but in observing and meeting the people stacking shelves and the tradies renovating—it is the little angels to whom we owe our heaven on earth who reveal the beauty that lies beneath the vulgar surface of shopping centres***; in Sky: Children of Light, anyone who has paid their dues for or bought a useful uniform may stack the shelves and renovate the shopfronts to improve the lives of other players.
Admittedly, I only know two of these people.
Indeed, if Sky: Children of Light has taught us anything, it is that “late-stage capitalism” needn’t be a boring “hellscape”—at least digitally; alienation, it turns out, is the key to turning strangers into friends: the immediate intimacy of social media is proof enough of that! (Or a caption above the final section? Probably a caption!)
*One night I must try singing in one!
**More likely, or in addition to, it is simply because shopping centres are the one public venue where teenagers are allowed the same freedom of movement as adults.
***Or, conversely, accentuate the conspicuous absence of others.