Restraint? Constraint?

I'm ashamed because I haven't written about Amnesia: The Dark Descent yet. Simply, it's god damn fantastic. You should go buy it. Right now. I'll unreservedly say it's the most terrifying game I've ever played. Yes, even more than System Shock 2 or Silent Hill 2. There may be sections of other games that are more intense (i.e. Thief 3's Shalebridge Cradle level), but as a whole experience, nothing has distressed me like Amnesia. We're talking literally heart pounding, ragged breathing, sweating emotional response. It's astonishing.

And what's even more astonishing is that Frictional pulls this off by doing almost nothing at all. Amnesia demonstrates a masterful amount of restraint. Or perhaps the constraints of their very small team of five forced this minimalism. The thing is, it doesn't matter. Intentionally or not, Frictional turned a potential weakness into a tremendous strength.

Case in point, Amnesia only has three animated characters in the entire game. And believe me, it's more than enough. At first, you're just hearing noises in nearby rooms that send you scurrying back down dark hallways. Maybe you'll catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye. You think, "Dear god, what was that?!" but honestly, you really want to find out. It's hours before you're in the same room as one of these things and even then, you're immediately sprinting the other way, desperately tipping tables and slamming doors behind you. In nearly any other game, this limited palette of enemies would seem anemic. In Amnesia, it's more than sufficient.

Minor spoilers ahead. It's for a section relatively early that's also in the demo, but just in case, you've been warned.

Frictional takes this even one step further and has two sections where the enemies are fully invisible. You're in a flooded tunnel and all you can see are splashing footfalls in the water charging toward you. As a developer, I'm somewhat shocked at the audacity! No model, no texture, no rig, no animations. It's just an invisible physics object, dead-simple AI and some sound. That's it! But again, it works so, so well, you can't help but admire it. It's absolutely terrifying and was probably really cheap to make.

Again, I can't say if it was intentional or not, but clearly Frictional is embracing their constraints here. Rather than expending the resources getting the full asset treatment for another creature, they just made one invisible in an environment that not only supports, but wholly augments the experience. And this kind of beautiful (and horrifying!) minimalism runs throughout the game. Amnesia has some of the best sound design I've heard (apparently so too does Dead Space, maybe it's a horror game thing?), creating an atmosphere that seeps tension without ever needing to show a single thing. The levels might be a little small if you were blasting through them full-tilt in a shooter, but Amnesia's slow, deliberate gameplay makes them seem far too large for comfort.

This kind of restraint is essential for good horror. [REC] might be the best horror movie I've seen and it demonstrates very similar minimalism. It's presented in first person (the story is told through a late night news program) and features a lot more scared people talking than traditional "scary" moments. But those moments are brutal, fast and intense. And the movie is only 78 minutes long! But honestly, it doesn't need to be a second longer. And if Amnesia has any shortcomings it's that a few bits could probably have been trimmed down without harming the game at all. If anything, it might have made it even more tense.

Minor quibbles, however. Not only is Amnesia a fantastic game, but it shows exactly how successful a team can be if they embrace their constraints and find ways to turn those into tremendously powerful tools. Go get Amnesia, kill your lights and turn up your speakers. There's a lot to learn, if you can see through the fog of terror the game produces.

Fly Me To The Moon

A few years ago, user-generated content (UGC) was described by many as a panacea for ever-rising costs in developing content for current generation games. While there have certainly been some successes, it's hardly proven to be a guaranteed recipe for success. At least partially, this is because creating any game content is difficult, no matter how streamlined the toolset, let alone creating game content that's actually fun. The 90-9-1 rules applies, creating a Catch-22 where a game needs to be popular to have good content, but it needs good content to be popular. UGC is still being explored, notably in upcoming titles like ModNation Racers and APB, but it's clear we haven't figured out exactly where it works best yet.

Enter Moon Taxi. A coworker sent me a link, predicting it would be right up my alley. And I daresay, he was right.

Had he not sent me this link, I doubt I would have noticed Moon Taxi. It's exclusive to the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, a venue which I pay little mind. Aside from a few titles like Weapon of Choice and Flotilla (further recommended reading on Flotilla from Telltale's Sean Vanaman), XBLIG doesn't boast much of interest. Now I'd add Moon Taxi to that rare breed.

The game portion of Moon Taxi is simple- you fly a yellow and black space shuttle toward the moon. As you fly, a conversation between the passenger and driver is narrated. Certain choice words from the narration appear from the starfield. The goal is to collect these and avoid asteroids. The more words you collect, the more narratives you unlock. It looks like this:





This likely appears uninteresting, but the fascinating part of Moon Taxi is where the stories come from- the stories are entirely written and acted exclusively by the game's community. These are the only guidelines:

1) Start with "Take me to the moon"
2) The narrative is being told by one or more passengers in a taxi to the moon
3) In some way, involve why the passenger(s) are going to the moon

Beyond that, anything is fair game.

Without question, the best narrative currently in Moon Taxi is a portion of John F. Kennedy's address to Rice University ("We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"). The speech alone is inspiring and one of my favourite pieces of oratory, and it works extremely well in Moon Taxi.

Unfortunately, Moon Taxi's concept is often stronger than the execution. The writing on most of the stories is passable, at best, and the acting is almost universally poor. It far more evokes grade 10 drama class than something like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio play. What appears to be the best story hasn't been narrated.

Still, I think the idea is fantastic. I'm hoping the developer, Popcannibal, will continue to update the game with new stories. Hell, I may well take a swing at narrating the story above myself if that's the case.

I often bang on about the great power of constraints, and Moon Taxi is a powerful example of this. I've written about Jason Rohrer's Sleep is Death previously and while I think SiD is fascinating, the ability to create anything is as much a burden as it is a freedom. The blank canvas can be tremendously intimidating. But having even the small sets of constraints creates an enabling focus. It's far easier to think of an interesting story about someone in a cab to the moon than it is to think of an interesting story about "anything."

It's a bit surprising that games that rely on UGC haven't leveraged constraints more. I can easily see a game like Little Big Planet running weekly/monthly themed contests. Rather than leaving to players to simply creating levels about anything, the contest could be to create a level based on a historical event. If UGC-based games are truly going to succeed, finding ways to motivate and reward creators is going to be vital. Constraints seem an excellent way to do this.

Despite some actual weakness in content, I still find Moon Taxi fantastic. I highly recommend checking out the demo at least, and at less than $3.50, still a good deal. Especially if a few more purchases encourage the developer to keep updating it. There's a great deal of potential in games like Moon Taxi; I really hope we can find ways to make that potential a reality.