The Stack

So, let’s have some more iOS. Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor is a title that I remember being praised as innovative, early on in the short history of the platform. It’s certainly different in important ways from comparable games on other platforms, in that it’s designed from the ground up for the affordances of a touchscreen. At first thought, it may seem like a touchscreen, barring the multitouch stuff that most apps seem to support (scrunch to resize), just provides a subset of what you get from a mouse — basically, everything but hover effects. But it turns out that even the actions that both sorts of device support are significantly different. The customary way of dragging things in iOS takes a moment to lock in, and is therefore awkward to use in time-sensitive situations like games (as the iOS port of Gemcraft shows). Directional swipes, on the other hand, can be awkward with a mouse, but are one of the most natural actions in the world on a touchscreen. And so Spider uses swipes for one of its most-oft-repeated actions: jumping.

This is more natural than it sounds, because these aren’t Mario-style jumps that just give you a sudden jolt of upward velocity. You’re jumping in an arbitrary direction, and your trajectory usually doesn’t get a chance to arc very much, so it’s intuitive to think of the swipe as defining a line. This is because the player character of this game — actually, before I go into details, that’s another point worth pointing out: that this game has a player character, with an avatar that you move around on the screen, which is something that seems to be less common in touchscreen games than on platforms with keyboards or joysticks. The PC in this game is literally a spider, capable of crawling on walls and ceilings. Since the presentation is 2D and vertically-oriented, this means that you really have only two directions of movement on these surfaces. In a sense, you could consider it a 2D platformer, but it’s also sort of a territory-capture game, like Qix. Your goal isn’t to get from point A to point B, but to eat bugs, and to eat bugs, you have to build webs, ideally making them as big as you can given the constraints of the level geometry and your limited resources.

Webs are the only places where your direction of movement isn’t constrained. The way you build a web is actually pretty similar to the way a real spider builds the basic framework at the beginning of spinning. Before you swipe to jump, you can optionally tap the screen to indicate that you want to make a line of silk between your current location and the point where you land. So, it’s essentially line-drawing. When you make an approximately closed polygon of such lines, it automatically fills in and becomes a web. Consequently, most webs wind up being triangular, because that’s the easiest thing to make in an open space. More sides give you more points. There’s a limit to the length of each line, and a limit to the number of lines you can draw, so it pays to optimize. Eating bugs replenishes your line count, but you need to catch multiple bugs in each web to make a profit on this.

The bugs themselves come in various varieties. The first and most basic types fly in a set route, like a patrolling guard, which makes them easy to catch. Others have more complex behavior. Some try to avoid you, which means you can’t just sit in a web and wait for them; you have to instead approach them from the opposite side and chase them in. Some bugs can’t be caught in a web at all: instead, you have to jump on them.

Maximizing your web area is rewarded not just by making it easier to catch bugs, but also by bonus points at the end of each level. If I cared more about points, I’d be using my leftover lines to try to fill each room before leaving it. This is mimetic behavior: the whole game is set in and around a decrepit old mansion, and filling each room with cobwebs is entirely appropriate.

Speaking of scenery, there are various noninteractive background objects that hint at a story: portraits, letters with legible bits, an occasional abandoned object that’s clearly significant in some unidentifiable way. It’s a bit like some of Edward Gorey’s works in that respect. What it all means may become clearer as I clear more rooms, learning just what the secret of Bryce Manor is. And that’s narratively interesting, because the spider of course has no clue. It’s just in it for the bugs. It’s common in games for the narrative and the gameplay to be orthogonal, but usually there’s at least some notion that discoveries by the player are reflections of discoveries by the player character.

I’ve finally made it out of Valadiléne! I really thought I was going to have to use hints, but I found one difficult-to-see hotspot, and then, after exhausting what I could do from that, another. The first hotspot led to an area that belatedly gave me the motivation for certain random actions I had been performing just because I could. The second was the one that let me use that voice cylinder, so I was still looking for that right up to the end.

Syberia uses what used to be called a “smart cursor”, but nowadays generally isn’t called anything because we take it for granted. All it means is that the cursor changes according to what it’s pointing at, like how the pointer changes into a pointing hand when over a hyperlink in your web browser. Syberia‘s default cursor, indicating the action “walk as close as possible to this point”, is a ring, flattened by perspective into an ellipse. I don’t know why this shape was chosen, but most of the other cursor shapes are variations on it. Mostly they add a stem to the lower right of the ring: a simple squared-off stem turns it into a magnifying glass for the “examine” action, characters you can talk to give it a pointed stem that turns it into a speech balloon, and a gap in the ring opposite the stem makes it into a robotic pincer for a generic “use”. The subtlest change is the cursor for “exit to a different room/area/camera angle” action, which puts a glowing halo around the ring. (A halo with a halo?) This is the one variation that doesn’t change the cursor’s shape.

Now, the first hotspot I was missing was a case of two “exit” actions positioned very close to each other. There was a gap between them where the cursor would turn back to its default form, but at typical cursor speeds, this happened very quickly, and, because the cursor didn’t change shape, it was easy to not notice. Exit hotspots tend to be quite a bit larger than the doorway or whatever that they send you through, so it didn’t seem at all strange that one hotspot would extend over the area covered by the two of them. Should I have known that there were two exits from the art? The art is often ambiguous about this; there are a lot of visible openings that you can’t go through, and there are paths that you’re not able to step off of despite the area to the sides being completely open. (Which is yet more evidence that the natural environment for an adventure game is a cave.)

Actually, I don’t know how valid it is to say that I failed to notice that hotspot because it blended in with the other, given that the second hotspot, which took me longer to find, was a “use” in the middle of nothing. It was an undistinguished book in a bookcase that, when clicked, opened a secret compartment. I had swept over that bookcase multiple times over the course of my general hotspot-hunt without noticing it. I suppose my week-and-a-half pause is to blame here: when I came back to an obviously relevant bookcase and couldn’t find anything to click, I assumed that I must have already taken something from it and rendered it inert. (See previous post.) Perhaps I would have spent more time on it if it still had things to click — if, say, every book were clickable, rather than just the one important one. This would run the risk of having the hotspots blend into each other like the exits described previously, but at least it would give the player some reason to believe that the books were interactive.

And now, for once, a game in this promotion that I didn’t finish in a single day upon first attempting it. Just as well: casual stuff of this sort is best played in little bits between other things. This will be another brief post.

Tidalis, which seems to have been titled at random, is a match-3 game, with the genre’s stereotypical bright colors and elevator music. Its defining gimmick is that the three or more tiles you’re matching don’t have to be adjacent. They do, however, have to be connectable in a chain where every step is horizontal or vertical and skips over no more than three spaces. Each tile has an arrow on it, indicating where it’ll look for the next step in the chain. The arrows are not limitations: you can re-point them at will. As such, they are an indication of what you want. This means that game is a bit more thoughtful than most match-3’s. Elaborate cascading combos don’t just happen: you have to meticulously set them up, tile by tile. (The designers were thoughtful enough to streamline this: you can set all the arrows in a chain with a single continuous stroke of the mouse, and not upset other chains in the process.)

This mechanic strikes me as well suited to gameplay without time pressure, so that the player has the leisure to analyze and perfect each move. And occasionally there’s a level like that — “Zen mode”, the game calls it. But most levels either have a strict time limit, or keep on adding tiles to the board from the top and end the level when they pile up too high, Tetris-style. Maybe I’ll like the “brainteasers” section better, but the Stack demands a playthrough of Adventure mode.

Hardware failure has left me unable to continue in Prince of Persia for the nonce, so in the meanwhile, let’s find out what the big deal is with Angry Birds. I’ve had access to iOS devices for a while, but I haven’t really tried to play games on them, even though they’re dirt cheap compared to most PC and console stuff. I suppose I still somehow regard them as some how less “real” than PC games, which is an irrational prejudice that I’ll have to play a few to overcome.

So, Angry Birds. The gameplay consists of catapulting projectiles (in the form of cartoon birds) at structures made of blocks of various materials (glass, wood, stone) that have enough of a 2D physics engine behind them for them to react convincingly to all kinds of impact, weight, and pressure. Most types of bird also have some special action that can be triggered once during their initial flight, such as speeding up or exploding. As in Peggle, you control the launch angle without a lot of feedback about what the effect will be, which gives the game a substantial luck factor. This creates partial reinforcement. Although some levels definitely have specific planned solutions in which you target a series of structural vulnerabilities, there’s always the possibility that you’ll win by a fluke if you just keep trying over and over. I can see this as contributing to the game’s popularity (just as it did in Peggle), but I understand that there are a bunch of Flash games based on the same mechanics that haven’t been such monumental commercial successes. I’m not really familiar with them, and presumably neither are most Angry Birds players, but most of what I’ve described so far seems unavoidable.

Whatever the virtues of the other castle-smashers, I’ll give Angry Birds this: it handles well. It’s very responsive to the touch and supports all the most-used touchscreen operations, including wipes to scroll the playfield back and forth and scrunching the screen to resize the view. And for that reason alone, it’s probably worth playing on its original target platform, even now that it’s been ported to PC.

All that said, I have to say that I’m taken aback by how mean-spirited the game feels. First off, the goal is to crush pigs to death. The pigs, located in and around the structures you’re smashing, are ugly green creatures, stylized into just heads, which roll around if nudged. They can’t fight back. They’re utterly helpless. When hurt but not hurt enough to pop, they develop bruises and black eyes. And your motivation for crushing them — well, the ostensible reason that the birds are so angry involves stolen eggs. Goodness knows if the specific pigs you’re smashing with bricks were involved in that at all; the birds certainly don’t seem to care. But that really isn’t important; it only comes up in a cutscene once every 21 levels, and besides, it’s only the motivation within the fiction. The motivation for the player is what’s in front of you all the time: the pigs are ugly and disgusting, and they laugh at you. If you fail a level (by using up all your birds without murdering all the pigs), the survivors smile snaggle-toothed grins and guffaw piggishly. If you fail to fail, you get raucous and triumphant avian laughter from your own side. That’s the game’s mindset: the only options are to laugh at or be laughed at, to dominate or be dominated. Life is mean.

Furthermore, the birds, who are presented as being capable of emotion (or one emotion, anyway), are deliberately reducing themselves to nothing more than weapons, things to be used, and used up. I’ve seen it posited before that the birds are terrorists: they are, after all, killing their victims (not enemies, as I hope I’ve made clear, but victims) by flying into buildings. I’ve seen that suggested jocularly, but I didn’t realize until I played just how close to the surface it is. The birds are making suicide attacks: shortly after a bird comes to rest, it goes poof. As I mentioned above, there’s one type that explodes on command, which makes it specifically a suicide bomber. They even make use of their offspring this way: there’s one type of bird whose special ability is to drop an egg, which falls straight down and explodes (while the bird itself, having no other purpose than to give birth to a weapon, collapses into a flaccid husk and perishes). Remember that the birds’ whole casus belli was to protect their eggs. Either that was just a pretext, or something has gone very wrong in the execution of this war.

The real hallmark of mean-spiritedness, though, is that when it presents cruelty and dehumanization, it expects you to respond with laughter. But there are definitely people who respond to that, and they’re probably underserved by the game industry in general. So I expect that this is part of its popularity. Although honestly I suspect that it’s sold as well as it has mostly just through a positive feedback loop, with people buying it simply because it’s at the top of the charts. Which, I have to admit, is more or less why I myself chose it above all the other iOS games I could have been playing during this interlude.

The nature of Aquaria‘s end boss is hinted at early on, in the cave where you learn your first song. There, you can find an evil-looking statue of a distorted face, with some kind of horns or tentacles attached. As you approach it, you hear a chuckle from a malevolent disembodied basso with good reverb, a bit like the voice of the Guardian in Ultima VII. On the wall, a word in Aquarian script identifies this being. That word: “Creator”. You’ve been fighting mad gods throughout the game, but this one is the original, the mad god to end all mad gods — or rather, to start them. It seems that all the dead races referenced in the game are his creations, experiments that ran their course and were discarded, leaving nothing but forsaken monsters. Even in your final battle with him, his signature attack consists of spawning new creations for you to fight, including shadowy versions of Naija herself.

Like any self-respecting god, what Creator really wants is worship. But in asking for it, he comes off as a creepy stalker: “You will love me forever”, etc., with a strong undertone of “I want you to give up all hope of ever being anything other than my abject, dehumanized plaything, and if you don’t, you are my enemy and will be destroyed, just like so many others before you”. In other words, it’s the whole “God as Abuser” concept stripped bare. But in the end, after you defeat his final form, he turns out to be no Gnostic demiurge: creator of civilizations though he may be, he’s not the creator of the world. He’s just a traumatized child given way too much power. As the last of his own people, his sincere motivation for everything he’s done is simple loneliness — which is very explicitly Naija’s motivation as well. Is she less of a monster than him? She’s more sympathetic at the moment, but if the root cause of his evil is that he’s too powerful, what are we to say about someone who goes around killing gods?

But I suppose she’s at least got the loneliness kicked. Towards the middle of the game, she meets a human named Li. She immediately falls in love with him, and grants him water-breathing ability with a kiss — it’s one of those stylized folk-tale romances, as unrealistic as their unmoving faces. I didn’t mention Li before because he honestly didn’t seem all that important. He follows you around and provides a certain amount of supporting fire, like a second pet, but otherwise just kind of fades into the background. Sometimes it took me a while to notice that he had gotten stuck somewhere and wasn’t with me any more. Towards the end, you learn a song that lets you use him for a powerful and complicated attack sequence, but once you have that, the game has to come up with excuses to not let you use it, and so Li suddenly develops a habit of getting captured and requiring rescue, like a gender-swapped Princess Peach. In the end, it’s the jealous Creator’s insistence on separating them that goads Naija into direct confrontation. (Well, that and the fact that his inner sanctum is the only place in the entire world that she hasn’t explored yet.)

The approach to the end involves a fair amount of adventure-game-like puzzle-solving, where you’re thrown into unique situations and have to apply the correct song to make progress. The final boss fight itself continues this. It’s a multi-stage affair, going through four distinct phases, some with multiple sub-phases. The most affecting part, I felt, was the bit where Creator morphs into a one-eyed insect-like thing that scuttles off into the darkness, then repeatedly flees from your light like a cockroach. If there’s one thing scarier than a monstrosity, it’s a half-glimpsed monstrosity that doesn’t want you to see it. I’ll probably have more to say about that when I post about the next game.

I’m generally pretty loose with spoilers on this blog. My goal in writing is to examine games in depth and detail, and tiptoeing around the plot just gets in the way of that. And I generally trust my readers to understand that a post with the word “Aquaria” in its title will contain information about Aquaria, and leave it at that. But today, I’m going to strongly recommend that anyone who’s playing Aquaria, or who thinks they might play Aquaria in the future, stop reading now, if you derive any satisfaction from solving puzzles on your own.

I said before that the one way that Aquaria fails to fit the Metroidvania model is that it isn’t a platformer: instead of jumping on platforms, you swim freely in a water-filled vertical 2D space. This isn’t quite true. There are places where you can breach the surface, jump high into the air like a playful porpoise, and come kersplashing down again. And, this being the sort of game it is, there are places you can’t reach any other way — the simplest being sections of water that are cut off from the mainstream by a chunk of island that you can vault over. But there are also things far less accessible than that, such as completely dry vertical shafts. The in-game map shows you the entire shape of each zone you visit, including the shape of the bits you haven’t visited yet, so it’s clear that there’s stuff to be found up above, but getting there is a problem.

Naija can survive on dry land, but, despite being humanoid, cannot walk on it. She’s accustomed to letting the water support her. Without it, she can only manage crouching and salmon-leaps. And there are places where this is sufficient to navigate the land, where the ascent is either gentle enough or irregular enough to leap up in steps. It’s tricky, though, because, just as underwater, you don’t have precise control over where you’ll wind up — the direction you jump in is affected by the angle of the surface you’re clinging to. I spent a considerable amount of time today repeatedly trying to get a sequence of jumps just right. Here, the game takes on all the frustrations of a conventional platformer, such as falling all the way to the bottom and having to start over. It’s sort of an inversion of the usual platformer, where the possibility of drowning means that the underwater sections are the annoying part.

But even that doesn’t really apply to those sheer vertical shafts. It seemed like the only way to ascend those was to take them in a single superhuman leap. There are ways to extend one’s initial jump out of the water: using the Beast form (the only song-form capable of swimming against a strong current), eating soup for a temporary speed boost. But such techniques only take one so far. And so I was left with a puzzle.

And it’s a pretty good puzzle, it turns out. The solution involves a bit of lateral thinking, in that it applies old tools in new ways. I mentioned before the Nature form, the fantasy-druid version of Naija with the power to make phallic-looking thorny plants burst out of the walls, damaging any enemies too slow or stupid to dodge a plant. The Nature form isn’t a very useful one generally, but it does have a few virtues, such as immunity to damage from sea anemones and spiky things — including those thorn plants I just mentioned. And again, this isn’t usually a very useful skill. Why would you want to create a dangerous plant and then touch it?

Because you don’t want to just touch it. You want to land on it. You want to use a series of thorn plants as platforms to let you climb up the shaft. I had been focusing on the problem of how to extend the height of my leap, but what I really needed to do was divide the distance up so that I didn’t need to clear it in a single bound after all. It’s still tricky to do, and I did still sometimes wind up falling clear to the bottom and starting over, but at least it works.

And once you have the insight of using thorn plants on dry land, there are other things you can do with them. Create one right under you, and the force of it springing out of the ground will propel you upward like a rocket. So, in the end, I did discover a new way to jump higher after all, but it’s a way that isn’t much use for ascending those vertical shafts.

If there’s one thing the metroidvania format does well, it’s provoking a sense of place. You gain familiarity with the total layout of the gameworld because you spend a significant amount of time visiting the same places repeatedly — and not because the game forces you to, but voluntarily, because you want all the goodies that you couldn’t get at the first time around. It’s not like grinding in an RPG, because it isn’t about wandering the same stretch of ground waiting for random events. Your actions on revisiting are purposeful, or at least exploratory, and a monster you’ve met before is just something to be got past as efficiently as possible. Thus, revisiting places engenders mastery of technique.

Aquaria‘s cooking system adds an additional motivation for revisiting places: collecting ingredients for cooking. Specific items are dropped by specific creatures which can be found in specific areas, so when you discover a new use for an ingredient, you have a new reason to go back to where it’s plentiful. And if you do, you do in fact wind up essentially grinding, despite what I said above. This is something best pursued in combination with other goals, other reasons for backtracking.

Lately I’ve been going back for a purpose that yields no direct benefit: I’ve been deciphering the runes. There are things written on walls throughout the game in an invented script. It turns out it’s just an alternate alphabet, and that the messages are in English. The first hint of this is actually in the opening menu, which starts off showing all its text in the Aquarian alphabet, then fades to Roman. This can be used as a kind of Rosetta stone for deciphering the rest, but it’s not really necessary — the game provides enough samples of the script to make an easy cryptogram.

I’ve managed to decipher 22 letters so far — the only ones missing from my mapping are J, K, Q, and Z, which simply haven’t appeared in any of the messages I’ve seen. The messages are mostly fairly predictable: the name of a city on a sign at its entrance, the word “Beware” just before a dangerous area, etc. But there are a few that are more interesting. One of the bosses has a lengthy message that I can only make out part of, because it’s partly blocked by the boss’s body, but it says something about someone devouring their own children — which, come to think of it, is a hint for the trick to defeating that boss. Elsewhere, in the place where I learned my first new song, “The light will guide her”. Another hint? At this point, I do have the power to create light, and I played with it a bit in that area to see if it opened up a hidden passage or something. But no, I think it’s just being metaphorical.

The messages may be mostly banal, but simply by putting them in a kind of code, the game invests them with significance. When I passed them by the first time, they were mysteries, and gave a sense of the mysterious to the surroundings. Now that I’ve broken the code, they’re little bonuses, to be eagerly attacked just in case they have something important to say.

One thing I keep forgetting about the plot-crucial bosses in this game is that they’re all gods.

It’s an easy thing to forget because not all of the bosses are plot-crucial. There’s a fair number of optional ones, guarding optional but useful permanent enhancements of various sorts: some outfits with special properties; a song or two that you could get by without; in one case, the ability to cook three ingredients at a time without a kitchen (not a very useful skill so far, but I’ve got it anyway — it’s not like you know what you’re going to get before you’ve won the fight). There are four optional bosses (including the very first one you can access) that turn out to be protecting an egg bearing a smaller creature of the same species, which then becomes your pet and defends you. That’s right, it develops an attachment to its parent’s murderer, and will even help you to murder other parents so you can steal a better child to replace it with.

The important bosses, though, have backstories that you learn from an expository cutscene on defeating them. And the backstories are all more or less the same: there was an ancient race with its own special god, but something went wrong, leaving the race extinct and the god twisted into a savage, insane monstrosity. Because you only learn this after you’ve defeated it, your first impression of these beings is always their degraded form. Only after you’ve destroyed them do you get glimpses of what they used to be, provoking a reevaluation of what it meant to fight and kill them.

And then, in most cases, having destroyed them, you gain their powers. Each god-boss you kill teaches you a thematically-connected transformation song — not a direct transfer of the very attacks it used against you, as in Mega Man, but something vaguely related to what it’s supposed to be a god of. In essence, you’re slowly becoming a shapechanging (or at least outfit-changing) representative of all the dead races. There was a mention in one of the cutscenes about being destined to unite the various underwater tribes or something like that, and it looks like it means unite them in a single body. Which raises questions. There are at least two races of underwater-dwelling peoples that are still alive and thriving. Am I expected to somehow absorb them as well?

Aquaria gives the player an inventory of cooking ingredients obtained by killing stuff and/or singing at plants. Collecting ingredients gives the player something to focus on after a fight, pursuing them downward as they plummet out of reach or sometimes following them laterally as they arc ballistically overhead. Different ingredients are plentiful in different areas — it’s easy to obtain crab meat in a cave full of crabs, for example — and there always seems to be some ingredient I’m short on, although which ingredient that is varies.

All cooked foods are basically potions. They either heal you in some way (restoring hit points, curing the few status effects in the game), or they give you temporary bonuses, or both, depending on their ingredients. The most plentiful ingredients are meats and oils, and the most basic things you can prepare are Hot Soup (any oil plus any meat), Sea Cake (any oil plus any egg), Leaf Poultices (leaf plus leaf), and sushi Hand Rolls (leaf plus any meat). More exotic things like pierogies are also feasible, but those four forms are the things that seem to have the greatest number of variations, created by improving them with other items — a basic cake heals you a bit, but a cake plus a leaf yields a Veggie Cake that grants temporary regeneration. It’s notable that the order is significant here: (oil plus meat) plus leaf = Veggie Soup (regeneration), but oil plus (meat plus leaf) = Tasty Roll (healing x2).

The game keeps track of what recipes you’ve discovered, and grants an Achievement for finding them all — something I’m still substantially short of. The nice part is that when you find an item in the wild, you instantly know its recipe. In fact, that’s the chief way that you learn the less intuitive combinations. Some of them are guessable, though, if you think like the game’s creators. Trying to put together an invalid combination yields Sea Loaf, a nigh-useless item that heals a tenth of a hit point. Nonetheless, if you’re going to do experiments, it’s important to max out on Sea Loaf. Your inventory can hold only up to eight of each item, and if you have that many of something, the game doesn’t let you make any more. So if you have eight Sea Loaves already, you can try throwing any random ingredients together, secure in the knowledge that the game won’t waste them on additional Sea Loaf.

My own biggest kitchen triumph was intuiting that turtle soup was a possibility, on the sole basis that I had some turtle meat and no known use for it. I did eventually find the turtle soup recipe the other way, but only after I had used it in several boss fights: turtle soup grants the strongest defensive bonus of any food I’ve seen. Boss fights are pretty much the only place I ever use food. Occasionally I’ll admit to myself that I need to consume a healing item outside of the boss fights, but it always seems like a waste, given the number of other sources of healing in the game. But when facing a boss, I throw on as many buffs as I can, because I know from experience that it makes the difference between victory and defeat.

The thing is, boss fights only happen occasionally, and I probably have enough food on hand already to last me through all the bosses that remain. But I’m still hoarding food, scavenging anything I’m short on, trying to get as close as I can to keeping eight of everything on hand all the time. Not because I need to, but just because it’s one of the activities that the game provides.

If you ask me, the demo for Aquaria is misleading. This is because the demo is the beginning of the game, and the beginning of the game is the safe, comfortable area around Naija’s home. Brightly colored corals and anemones, shafts of sunlight streaming down, and if there are some dangerous fish about, there are also schools of harmless ones roaming about looking decorative.

Towards the end of the demo, there’s a brief glimpse of things to come, in the form of an interactive vision granted by a figure in a black cloak who appears in front of you without explanation: suddenly you’re in the shooting-stuff form and surrounded by bullets. This is your first glimpse of that form — presumably it was inserted so that the demo/beginning wouldn’t be too entirely misleading. But even there, the context made it seem like this was some kind of “Dark Naija” thing that you’d be shifting into involuntarily as the story (and level design) demanded it, like in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. But no, switching into shooty mode is a voluntary act, and in fact I tend to stay in that form by default, because that’s usually the best for reacting to surprises. What I really wasn’t expecting from the intro, though, is that I’d be using that form to kill those harmless fish I mentioned so I could use their meat and oil as crafting ingredients. Which shows how much I had misunderstood Naija’s relationship to the things around her, and also how quickly my attitude changes when I’m running low on healing items.

The thing that was really unexpected from the intro, though, was the descent into the Zerg Creep. There a certain lost city, probably once home to Naija’s ancestors, now home to aquatic ghouls. The walls sport what look like blood vessels in places, then turn into masses of exposed flesh, throbbing in places. There’s a skull-like door barred by what appear to be intestines. This is not the happy frolicking-in-the-sun-dappled-lagoon game I signed up for! I mean, I’m okay with it. But I haven’t even penetrated the deepest darkness yet; I expect there’s worse stuff to come.

I recall being taken aback by the shift in Ecco the Dolphin as well, which starts off as a story about a dolphin, and then suddenly sends that dolphin into outer space to defeat an alien invasion. Perhaps there’s just something about the undersea setting that changes my expectations. There’s nothing unusual about going to outer space in a videogame, just as there’s nothing unusual about shifting into veins-and-viscera decor as you get closer to the end boss. When a game starts off in a pleasant pastoral setting, I don’t normally expect it to stay there. But somehow, when it’s a pleasant underwater setting instead, I kind of expect it to not stray too far.