The Stack

The background art in NyxQuest does a more advanced version of the parallax scrolling that the coin-op games of yore utilized to deliver an impression of depth. Rocks, toppled pillars, and monumental statuary in various states of disrepair dot the dunes behind the action, losing focus with distance — there’s probably a transition point where 3D rendering is replaced with bitmaps, but it’s handled so smoothly that I couldn’t tell you where that point lies. In the haze at the very back of each level lies something distant enough that it doesn’t move at all, and the implication of distance makes it easy to suggest enormous size as well.

Such objects are far enough from the action that they’re clearly just scenery. But towards the end of the game, there are two things that suddenly bring the background to the fore. First, there’s a stealth-oriented level appropriately titled “Fields of Argos”. In the extreme distance is a colossal archway supporting a gong-like circle, which, the player soon learns, bears an eye in its center, as vast as Sauron’s and potentially as destructive. It spends most of its time closed, but periodically a sound plays, warning the player that it’s about to open and you’d better find a pillar to hide behind before it spots you. It’s a bit nervous-making when this happens for the first time, because the game seems to be breaking its own rules, suddenly making the background art, formerly static, suddenly not only active but deadly.

The final two levels have a roiling oversized sun sitting on the horizon, shooting missiles at you — and by “at you”, I mean in the general direction of the camera. By this point, you’re armed with cursor-aimed lightning, and can try to shoot them down before you have to dodge them. It’s a tricky thing, though, because doing so involves paying attention to two things, first-person shooting and third-person platforming, independent and simultaneous, one with each hand. I found that most of the time I couldn’t do both effectively at the same time, and had to stop moving in order to shoot and stop shooting in order to move.

The lightning itself adds a significant sense of depth too, because it’s the only thing that suggests a space in front of the action. Lightning blasts originate at the player. This is the point that most clearly shows the game’s platform of origin. On the Wii, you’d most likely actually be pointing the physical controller at the screen, producing a sense that lightning bolts are shooting out of the controller, through the screen, and into the gameworld (albeit only manifesting as lightning bolts once they’re through the screen). Playing with a mouse, it’s much more indirect and abstract: the actual motions of my hands and mouse represent in-world action without resembling it. I kind of wonder how other people perceive this. When I play games, I don’t normally feel like the gameworld is an extension of my physical space. Being absorbed in a game is, to me, like being absorbed in a book: the real world around me is forgotten, as in a dream. But this is a geekish phenomenon, and geeks are perhaps more comfortable with thinking outside their bodies than most people. The popularity of the Wii (and now the Kinect) among people who aren’t otherwise gamers could have a lot to do with the way it lessens that abstraction, making the player into a physical part of the action.

Well, who is she?

The game’s cutscenes presents her as a sort of aerial nymph who lives in the clouds, who lives a lonely existence aside from Icarus’s visits, and who never ventures down to the surface until the start of the game. (And for good reason: her powers of flight are too limited for her to get back home.) And I assumed at first that she was just a character made up for the purposes of the game. Which she is, in this form. But, looking her up, I find that, like God of War‘s Kratos, she shares a name with a pre-existing mythological figure, and no mere cup-bearer or servant. Nyx is night. The essence of darkness. She’s one of the primordial gods, older than the gods of Olympus, older than the Titans, older even than Death. She’s Death’s mother, according to Hesiod. For once, it seems completely appropriate to use the phrase “before the dawn of time”, for what precedes dawn but night?

So far is the mythic Nyx from the angel-winged ingenue in this game that my first impulse is to dismiss it as a simple coincidence of name. There are plenty of people in the Spanish-speaking world named Jesus, but most of them don’t walk on water. But when you think about it, the game’s Nyx is an enemy of the sun. I can easily see her ultimate triumph at game’s end sending Helios away for a while, which is to say, producing nightfall. We’ll see how it goes. Regardless, it’s easy to see the story here, of Nyx’s perilous journey through the sun-scorched lands, as a reversed version of the more typical solar myth, like Ra’s barge passing through the underworld every night so he can be reborn in the east. Which, I suppose, would make it a repeating story, with Icarus falling every day so that Nyx can begin the search for him anew. Poor Icarus.

The other day, an acquaintance of mine was talking about NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits, and I figured, hey, I have that from one of my Steam bundles. I should give that a try. The fact that she had been talking about frustrations with it didn’t register with the part of my brain that forms gaming desires, apparently.

NyxQuest an indie 2D platformer rendered in 3D (a combination that seems to be fashionable right now) with puzzly bits and a Greek mythology theme. It basically has a princess plot, but gender-swapped: you play the part of Nyx, a woman with wings who lives in the sky, looking for Icarus, who flew up to visit her on a regular basis until his famous accident. Clearly they’re playing fast and loose with myth here, but what game doesn’t? Icarus’s fall to earth from flying too close to the heat of the sun is reinterpreted as him becoming the first casualty to the sun itself declaring war on Earth. The whole game seems to take place in ruins in the desert, signs of the wrath of Helios. It’s a little unusual for a 2D platformer to have this kind of consistency of setting, it seems to me. Usually the designers like to swap tilesets every few levels to produce a (somewhat artificial) sense of variety: a forest level and a factory level and so forth. Even though I recognize this kind of variation as shallow, I kind of miss it.

Anyway, the really notable thing here is the platforming mechanics. For starters, there’s the wings. You know how in some platformers you can double-jump? Nyx can quintuple-jump. She can also glide briefly. But the really notable part is the ability to manipulate objects. After a while, you get the ability to grab certain items with the mouse cursor and either pull them along one axis (usually used to slide pillars up and down) or lift them and move them around. They still have a physical presence in the world while you’re moving them, mind you, and sometimes you have to be careful not to conk Nyx with a large stone block. But this also means that you can, for example, lift a block into the air and have Nyx jump and land on it so that she can jump again from higher up.

In-story, this sort of manipulation is supposed to be a sort of telekinetic power granted to Nyx by Zeus, but to me, it feels more like something that the player applies to the gameworld from without, rather like in Samorost. It also feels a little weird because it forces me to use both hands simultaneously and independently, controlling two different things in tandem. This is especially weird-feeling when the two hands cross over. It’s easy to come to associate the left hand with stuff you’re doing on the left side of the screen and the right hand with the right side — much of the game is spent travelling from left to right, which means that the right side is where manipulable objects first come into view. But there are times when you need to move a block to Nyx’s left, and it somehow feels awkward, which is interesting. I’m told that infants, in the course of learning how to use their limbs, don’t even try at first to reach their arms across their bodies, the left arm to the right side or vice versa — that it takes them a while to figure out that this is even possible, and that it’s a bit of a personal breakthrough when they do. This game makes me feel like I’m going through something similar, my first fumbling steps towards basic motor coordination.