Due to travel and other distractions, it was a slow gaming month, and I didn’t have a chance to get back to finishing the last few The Last of Us 2, which I’m excited to do. There were a couple of other smaller games that I finished, however.
Wayfinder is a lovely little game created by Matt DesLauriers to evoke respect for the beauty of nature. The player takes the form of a red-robed figure wandering through pastel landscapes in different seasons, with the sounds of wind, soft soft rustling leaves, and chirping birds providing an relaxing soundscape. Exploring allows the player to discover tokens that unlock words that come together to unfold small haiku-like poetry. It’s a short (five minutes or so), but soul-soothing experience — and since the visuals and poetry are procedurally assembled, the game is able to create a unique experience for each player.
As a side note, the game was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, which has a selection of interactive projects, some more game-like than others.
I downloaded Black Mirror: Thronglets (Night School Studios) after watching the Black Mirror episode “Plaything,” because I was curious about how the game would tie into the story. Essentially the player is in the role of Cameron Walker (the game designer in the show), who opens a game and ends up connecting with the tiny Thronglets and helping them to grow their community through increased computing power. But where Cameron approached the entire game experience and the Thronglets with compassion, the player is able to approach it these characters with indifference, abuse, or kindness — as they see fit.
The challenge is that there’s a narrative disconnect. In the show, Cameron is convinced almost immediately that these creatures are sentient, while here the player is fully aware that this is nothing more than a game with an imagined narrative about sentience. Starting out as a management sim, the game introduces interaction with the creatures, shows how to care for them and help them populate — but doesn’t quite create enough of a narrative connection to care and ensure their safety.
In fact, the game system almost seem set up to encourage abuse, or at least neglect. Properly caring for the Thronglets causes them to populate into expansive numbers, and as they populate, it becomes increasingly difficult to care for them properly. Setting up systems for them to care for themselves are never quite efficient enough, and if the player is not hand feeding, washing, and playing with each of hundreds of creatures (extremely tedious and note exactly fun as a game mechanic), then they start to die off and leave their corpses lying around. The cycle led me to thought processes like, Well, if they’re just going to die off anyway, then I might as well recycle their bodies to make more gems.
As a result, I don’t think Thronglets as a game is able to ask the kind of interesting questions about sentience and life that are addressed in the “Playthings” episode. But I do think it was fun enough for the few hours that I played it.
If you’d also like to know about the books and movies that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for May.