The Stack

So, let’s talk about character creation a little, because that’s something I’ve been doing a lot of. This is something that doesn’t change at all in the first three Wizardry games, because all character creation for the first three games is done in Wizardry 1, even if you’re creating a character to use solely in one of the sequels.

Like most early CRPGs, Wizardry draws heavily from D&D. You’ve got the same four basic character classes (fighter, mage, priest, thief), and a set of six stats that are basically the same as D&D‘s but with different names — the only real difference is that Charisma has been dropped in favor of Luck. In early editions of D&D, stats ranged from 3 to 18 because they were generated by rolling three six-sided dice. Wizardry uses a point-buy system instead, but it still makes 18 the maximum out of sheer conceptual inertia.

The creation process goes like this: First you choose a name, then you choose a race, then you assign points to stats, then you choose a class, then you decide whether to keep the character or throw it away and start over. Aside from the name, which could easily have been made the last step, the mechanics pretty much dictate that it has to go in this order. You need to choose the class after finalizing the stats because the stats determine what classes are available, and you need to assign the stats after choosing the race because the race determines the base stats. Dwarves, for example, always start with Strength 10, IQ 7, Piety 10, Vitality 10, Agility 6, and Luck 6. Hobbits ¹Yes, it’s “hobbit” here, not “halfling”. This game was made before the Tolkien estate’s lawyers became the all-seeing eye of flame that they are today. have the highest total initial stats, which you might think would make them an attractive choice, but in fact it’s mostly in Luck, the least-attractive stat.

Every character class has a requirement of at least 11 in some stat: fighters need 11 Strength, priests need 11 Piety, etc. In addition to the base classes, there’s an odd assortment of specialized classes: Bishop, Samurai, Lord, and Ninja. (Yes, this means you can have dwarven and gnomish samurai, which is an entertaining thing to contemplate.) Samurai are fighter/mages, Lords are fighter/priests (in other words, paladins), and Ninjas are unarmed combat specialists who randomly do instant kills. (I have a habit of thinking of Ninjas as fighter/thieves, which would make a nice symmetry, but it isn’t really accurate.) Bishops are combination priest/mages, with the additional ability to identify items. They’re generally considered weaksauce, because they don’t gain higher spell levels as fast as the pure priests and mages, but I’m finding them tremendously useful at level 1, where they can cast four spells before running out of slots, compared to the normal caster’s two. Presumably because of this early usefulness, Bishops are the one special class you can reliably make as a new level 1 character, with stat requirements of just 11 IQ and 11 Piety. Lords and Ninjas are basically impossible to generate at level 1, and can only be produced by changing a character’s class after a number of stat increases from gaining experience levels — in particular, Ninjas require a 17 in every stat.

Samurai, now. Samurai can be produced at initial creation, but only occasionally. This is because the number of points you get to assign to stats is randomized. From the base stats for dwarves, elves, and gnomes, it takes 18 points to meet the Samurai requirements; getting this many points to spend is rare, but it does happen every once in a while. Furthermore, the randomization is oddly irregular; it usually stays between 5 and 11, but occasionally leaps to 18 or 19, and I’ve even seen a 26 come up. This is a design decision that it would be strange to see today. Random factors are all very well for transient events like combat, but for a single dice-roll to affect a character’s options from the very beginning like this is to invite the player to reroll over and over until they get what they want. This is the problem with random generation that point-buy is usually supposed to solve. So it’s very strange to see a point-buy system that goes to extra effort to bring the problem back. Maybe the authors felt that rerolling characters was an important part of the RPG experience.

Wizardry is one of the foundational CRPGs. There was a time when CRPGs were commonly described as either Ultima-style or Wizardry-style, the former referring to ones with a tile-based movement on a large map (such as Final Fantasy and The Magic Candle), the latter to ones with first-person navigation through grid-based dungeons (such as The Bard’s Tale and Dungeon Master). I myself played the original Wizardry as a child. I remember it took a very long time to complete, and seemed a monumental achievement. (I still have my official certificate of completion tucked away somewhere. I can’t imagine sending off for something like that today.) Of course, back then, the very basics of the genre were yet unfamiliar. Common practices like creating a balanced party and putting the mages in the back row had to be discovered by trial and error.

I didn’t play the immediate sequels when they were new, however. I wound up skipping ahead to Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna, which is more of a direct sequel to Wizardry I than Wizardry II or III is, and didn’t get to trying the others until they were anthologized in 1998. I made an attempt to play through the entire series in order, but got stuck in the middle of Wizardry III when I seemed to run out of dungeon to explore. (I later learned what my problem was; I’ll go into detail later.)

Wizardry II, it turned out, is more like an expansion pack to I than like what we’d recognize as a sequel today — a symptom of the infant games industry still struggling to figure things out. III altered the mechanics and UI quite a bit, but still can’t be run as a completely standalone game, as it provides no way to create characters. They have to be created in Wizardry I and imported, a process that apparently involved swapping multiple floppy disks in and out. Even just playing Wizardry I involved a fair amount of swapping on a single-floppy system, what with its separate diskettes for character and scenario data. The anthology edition was thoughtfully altered to use disk images on the hard drive instead, and to carry out the swapping automatically.

Now, I still have some of the characters that I used to play Wizardry III ten years ago. But I don’t intend to use them, except as emergency support. To get the full experience, I’m creating a brand new party, with brand new characters. And I’m getting them killed a lot. This is part of the experience. Level 1 characters stand little chance of surviving their first encounter, and it takes at least three or so encounters before they get to level 2. And getting killed doesn’t mean resetting to a save point or anything nicely forgiving like that. If your entire party gets killed, you roll up a new party. You do have the ability to recover bodies from where they fell — this is what I mean by “emergency support” — and you can can take them back to town to resurrect them for an exorbitant fee, but even the resurrection spell has a significant chance of failing and rendering them lost forever. (And you don’t get a refund when this happens.) Understand that characters are reduced to level 1 when imported; losing a certain number of your characters is simply part of the plan. So, in contrast to most RPGs today, it’s best not to get too attached to them. I gave up long ago on the idea of giving everyone a distinctive and memorable name; I name my guys in batches like “Fitt”, “Mitt”, “Pitt”, etc. (The initial letter indicates the character class, for greater ease in building a party out of the survivors.)

I really haven’t played much yet, though. Most of today’s game time was spent making preparations: digging out the graph paper, printing up a crib sheet with all the spell descriptions on it, deciding where and how to play it — the game uses a CGA graphics mode that my usual gaming rig doesn’t even support, which forced me to use DOSBox, which made me realize that I might as well be playing it on my Macbook. And of course there was the time spent rolling up all the characters, which can take a while if you’re fussy. So there’s a lot of anticipation going into this. It’s a grand thing, and also a memory of a simpler time, with simpler computer systems.

The story of Immortal Defense is told through the monologues that introduce each level. At the beginning, these serve as mission briefings, but this function drops off over the course of the game. The story and the gameplay are pretty much separate, as in most games, but few games make a virtue of it the way ID does. If you’re pushing on through the levels regardless of what you’re told is happening in the world, well, the player character is doing the same. Like you, he’s isolated from the in-fiction consequences of his actions. We’re going to be pushing deep into spoiler territory here.

At the beginning of the game, the player character, Subject K, has his mind catapulted into the psychedelic cosmic realm of Pathspace to defeat an imminent alien invasion. The game has six chapters; the invasion by the Bavakh armada is defeated at the end of chapter 1. There’s still no known way to get your mind back into your body at that point, which leaves K isolated from humanity. There’s mention of years passing between levels, time that you’re not aware of. K’s daughter, unborn at the time that he started the mission, grows up and has a daughter of her own. And how do they relate to K? There’s talk of how you’re a hero, a legend. Your alien Pathspace mentor, Pul Wat Aa, is actually worshiped as a god by his people, and it’s not hard to see that down the road. But there’s one thing they never openly acknowledge: they also regard you as a weapon. A weapon that has to be cajoled and manipulated, but still, a highly effective weapon, and one that it would be a waste not to use. And everyone, on multiple sides, wants to use you: for a while, most of the mission briefings seem to be of the form “Why did you do X? Y is more important!” By chapter 5, the granddaughter is asking K to destroy incoming vessels that haven’t been identified yet, just in case they turn out to be hostile. They naturally turn out to be a peaceful scientific expedition by your allies. Even after you learn this, you keep on destroying further expeditions from the same source. The question is raised: why do you keep on doing this?

For the player, the answer is a combination of “because that’s how you advance the plot” and “because there’s nothing else to do”. For K, it’s a bit more complicated, but probably includes the latter. At the end of chapter 2, Aa betrays you and your planet is destroyed, leaving you as a defender with nothing to defend. This begins the revenge-obsessed phase of the game, a phase that lasts for a very long time and involves a number of rash and counterproductive acts on K’s part, as he refuses to let war die down. But what else is there for him to do?

The destruction of your planet also raises a mystery: your body was on that planet. Without it, how is it that you remain in Pathspace? K’s disembodied mind is referred to on multiple occasions as a “ghost”, and that starts to seem literal here. The mystery is in fact quickly solved: a number of your people, including the granddaughter, escaped the destruction, and eventually return to bring new life to the planet through nanotechnology — the same nanotechnology that they’re using to keep themselves alive indefinitely. This gives you something to defend once more, but at the same time, it seems too good, too perfectly wish-fulfilling for K, who regrets never getting a chance to meet his daughter in person. And indeed it all turns out to be a delusion. This is the reason that K destroyed those science fleets: they threatened to discover the truth. But even once this is undeniable, the hallucination of the granddaughter (whose name we’ve never learned) intriguingly argues that the delusions of an immortal are more enduring than mere flesh, and therefore more real. And it’s hard to argue with that from K’s perspective. Everything else around him is going to spend the bulk of eternity dead no matter what he does, including his fellow Pathspace defenders who are still dependent on their physical bodies.

It all reminds me a bit of the second volume of Tezuka’s Phoenix, in which, about halfway through the story, one of the characters is granted immortality. Suddenly the story takes a step back, and all the human conflicts that drove it up to that point fade in importance, as years pass, and millions of years. Something similar happens here, with thousands of years passing between levels, and the old factions and alliances disappearing and being replaced with new things that you’re no longer even given a chance to keep track of. The only thing that remains constant is K’s tenacious and pointless defense of his dead world. By the end, he’s descended into full-bore Jack Torrance insanity, to the point that I have to wonder if the final levels, in which all the boss monsters of the past return in large quantities, are supposed to be “real” at all, or just more hallucinations. (You have to wonder when one of the last ships types introduced is called the “:P”.)

Patrick Dugan wrote of the ending:

“I love you grandpa” is a piece of text that haunted me, leaving me shaken with wonder and existential horror, for hours after I finished the game.

And while I was skeptical on reading that, I have to agree: seen in context, as the last word going into the final mission, it’s devastating. But it isn’t really the last word: at the end of every chapter, there’s a bonus round in a simulation run by Jamesh, the inventor of Pathspace technology, and the final chapter is no exception. Here at the end, his words are a return to rationality, a frank discussion of what you’ve done and his own role in making it possible. And that final step back is the really masterful touch. The author of this game has thought about what it all means, and he wants you to think about it too.

In the official FAQ, the author states:

I put [K’s obsession with goals] into gameplay terms by making the last campaign of the story a direct challenge to the player: the missions are getting harder, K is becoming obviously crazier and crazier, and the player understands that there’s no point in world of the game to what he’s doing. The player can “win” in a perfectly acceptable way by just ceasing to play in those final moments: he can set the game aside, never pick it up again, and that means that K has come to his senses and abandoned his efforts.

I have to say this is wrong-headed. From a player’s perspective, abandoning a pre-scripted story in mid-game doesn’t change what happens in the gameworld any more than stopping reading a novel before the ending changes what happens in the world it describes. Even losing a mission, which in theory could allow the Bavakh invasion to succeed, doesn’t seem like something that happens in the “real” story of the game. There are games where the sense of what really happens is flexible, but this isn’t one of them. But as the same FAQ says, “I’m still on the fence about this–which is why you can also achieve a certain kind of victory by finishing.”

Apparently there’s a seventh chapter, set in “Hellspace”, that only becomes available if you complete every mission with a 100% survival rate. I imagine I’ll try for that eventually, but I’ll be surprised if it adds anything significant to the story. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised.

It’s been a terrible year for shrinking the Stack. I did manage to complete 19 games, thanks to a burst at year’s end, but only four of them were on the Stack before the year started. The rest were, for the most part, purchased in sales on Steam, where I typically bought them in packages of multiple titles. The end result is that the Stack grew by 9 titles (plus a couple that I added because they should have already been on the list but weren’t). I think I’m developing something of a resistance to Steam sales: by now, I’ve seen enough of them pass by to know that anything I want will be put on sale again in the future. But the recent year-end event, with its week of daily special discounts, has been manipulative enough to overcome what little resistance I have.

It’s also the first year of this blog in which I failed to complete a Final Fantasy. I blame the Vintage Game Club for that one, interrupting me in the middle of FF6 by starting a group play-through of Chrono Trigger. With any luck, I’ll be able to finish them both in 2010.

For I have a plan. This is to some extent a retrogaming blog, and I haven’t been giving the older games on the Stack the attention they deserve. So, my pledge this year is to do a run through history. One game from each year on the Stack, from 1986 to the present. That’s 25 years, so if I pull out a new one every two weeks (regardless of whether I finished the last one or not), we’ll all have a new perspective on game history by year’s end.

First, I have to finish writing up Immortal Defense. But after that, we’ll turn to the oldest game currently on the Stack, Wizardry III.

I’ve known since I tried the limited demo of Immortal Defense that I wanted give the full game a try at some point, and with the author putting it on a temporary “pay-what-you-want” sale, now seemed like the time. (The sale seems to have a few more hours left as I write this, although the phrase “until January 1st” is kind of ambiguous.)

The premise is that hostile spaceships travel interstellar distances through “hyperspace”, but that a higher-order space called “pathspace” exists beyond this, in which hyperspace routes are visible as twisting lines. You send your disembodied consciousness into pathspace to place circular “points” (that is, towers) based on different aspects of your personality: Fear points temorarily stun their targets and eliminate their defense, Pride points increase in power as they kill more enemies, Love points don’t attack but increase the range and power of any other points nearby, etc. It’s more continuous than most tower defense games — the path isn’t based on a grid (except to the extent that everything on a computer screen is), and the points can be placed freely, as long as they don’t intersect with the path or each other.

It’s all very abstract. Not many of the spaceships look like spaceships; the most common ones look like organic globules encased in transparent bubbles or polyhedra. The points are glyphs, the weapon fire is a cascade of bright lights. Sometimes, especially in the more advanced levels, there’s so much clutter on the screen that it’s hard to see the cursor — and that’s important, because the cursor is actually one of your weapons. It constantly fires weakly at the nearest target, and can be used to direct the fire of certain of the Points. One of the perennial questions in tower defense games is “What does the player do while waiting to build up enough cash to buy a new tower or upgrade?”, and this is ID‘s answer. But when the cursor is difficult to see, game is played more in the setup phase.

In fact, that’s typical of the gameplay as a whole: any tactic you come to rely on is rendered less useful at some point. Take those Love points. There comes a point when you start relying on them heavily, clustering all of your points together so they can take maximum advantage of the bonuses. Then the enemy starts turning out ships that can disable nearby points. Suddenly putting all your points close to each other is a bad idea. When you get the final point type, the Danmaku point, it seems like the final ultimate invincible thing that will win the rest of the levels for you; at the stage I’m stuck at now, close to the end, I’m using it as a decoy.

Another unusual thing it does: it lets you carry over cash from one level to the next. Not always, mind you — every fifteenth level clears it — but usually. The result is, predictably, positive feedback: once you start doing well, you can afford to do keep on doing well with minimal effort, at least until you reach something that requires new tactics, such as a boss fight. It’s a classic back-and-forth dynamic: things get easy, things get hard.

But the most notable thing is the story. The author claims that it’s “the only tower defense game with a story”. This may or may not have been strictly true when the game was originally released; it certainly isn’t true today. But it’s certainly got the most interesting story I’ve seen in the genre, and one of the more interesting I’ve seen in games at all. I’ll get into that more in my next post.

After reaching the end of Mirror’s Edge‘s story, I tried the various racing modes, but I didn’t care for them. If I go back into this game, it’ll probably be to find more of the hidden messenger bags. There are three of them in every level, and they’re one of the only ways that Story Mode acknowledges the game’s supposed premise. You’d think that a professional black-market courier would get assigned a courier mission every once in a while. You could come up with all sorts of dramatic situations that fit in with the government-corruption theme: “We can expose everything they’ve done if we can just get these documents to the press!” But instead, you spend the game playing amateur detective, trying to find out who murdered a good politician and framed your sister for it.

Given that you’re in the right, that truth is on your side and your sister is innocent of any crime, it seems downright counterproductive to go around killing cops. And so I didn’t. I resorted to unarmed combat on a number of occasions, bloodlessly disarming the people who shot at me and then immediately discarding the weapons I had wrested from them, but I tried to avoid doing even that: in most cases, all you really have to do is figure out where you’re going and find a way to get there that’s mostly covered from fire. And even though I chose to play this way mostly in the name of efficiency, it seemed like the way to go in story terms too: with every gun I threw away, I was saying “I’m choosing to refrain from shooting at you, even though you’re doing your best to kill me. Are you sure I’m the bad guy here?” Not that I expected this to change anyone’s behavior, but it seemed worth saying anyway. So it was bothersome to see the player character hold off a SWAT team in a cutscene by grabbing a gun and shooting at some Doom-style exploding barrels.

And, ultimately, what’s the conflict about? OK, yes, protecting family member from lying murderers. But why does she need that protection in the first place? The player finds a scrap of paper at the crime scene (and removes it, preventing any legitimate investigation from finding it) mentioning a “Project Icarus”. Several levels later, you find out what this is: it’s a project to train special police forces in Runner techniques, so they can go leaping from rooftop to rooftop like superheroes too. Which is, on the face of it, not a bad idea. The Runners’ abilities effectively put them out of the law’s reach, and in a functioning system, that would be a problem worth addressing. But even in the world we’re given, Icarus is not the public hazard I was expecting, given how hush-hush they were about it. Icarus only threatens Runners. Imagine the headlines if the word got out: “Exposed! Secret Project To Arrest People Who Break The Law”. I understand what they were going for here, Icarus as the Runners’ equal-and-opposite, the dark reflection, the thing that kicks the conflict to a higher level. But it’s a bit of an anticlimax.

The Runners have some high-minded ideals about being the only communication channel left that isn’t under the Man’s control. But we never see any benefit to this. We don’t see anyone who’s helped by the services the Runners provide, or any injustice righted by their actions. As I pointed out, we hardly see them doing their job at all. We just see them fighting for themselves. Perhaps we’re expected to just already sympathize with their ideology, much like how we don’t need to reestablish that Nazis are bad guys in every game featuring Nazis. Apparently there was a point in the early design stages where the Runners were supposed to be less like freedom fighters and more like a street gang. (There’s a bit of unlockable concept art showing this stage.) And the final story still has something of that mentality.

Pretty, though!

Looks like I’m not finishing Story Mode today after all. The game crashed in the middle of a recent session, and has since then has refused to start up. Sometimes I just get a splash screen and nothing else, sometimes it gives me an “illegal operation” error, once and only once did it start up successfully. I don’t know why this suddenly started happening after a period of trouble-free operation. Or, well, not quite trouble-free: I had problems at the very beginning with environmental sounds — traffic noises and the like — being entirely too loud and drowning out the voices. Apparently the game was trying to do things with point sound sources that my hardware didn’t support, and the solution was to turn off hardware sound acceleration.

Anyway, I said I’d post about the interface, and I can still do that. Platforming in first person presents some difficulty, especially when the game tries to create a sense of immediacy by shaking the camera, as happens whenever you break down a door in ME. Also, one of the moves you can do to avoid damage and maintain momentum is a tuck-and-roll at the end of a fall, which is rather disorienting, because the camera actually does a quick 360-degree pitch.

The thing I most anticipated having problems with was judging exactly when to jump when running toward the edge of a roof. In part, the game solves this by doing something rare for a first-person game: if you look downward, you can actually see yourself. Most first-person games — which are mostly shooters — display, at most, an arm holding a gun. I can think of only two other first-person games I’ve played that gave the player a visible body: Trespasser (the Jurassic Park game) and Montezuma’s Return (a 3D sequel to the classic 2D platformer Montezuma’s Revenge). Montezuma’s Return did it because, like Mirror’s Edge, it’s a first-person platformer; Trespasser did it out of a misguided sense of realism, which pretty much describes every design decision in Trespasser. At any rate, if you’re really worried about jumping at the right moment in ME, you can watch your feet while you run. But honestly, I haven’t found this necessary. If I find myself missing a ledge by inches, I find it’s more productive to just get a better run-up. Running in this game means accelerating, and a few extra feet of acceleration can mean a lot.

To me, the bigger way that the first-person view affects things is when you’re climbing ladders and pipes and the like. For a game with such gorgeous scenery, you spend a lot of time facing into walls. When you reach the end of a climb, you often need to twist the view around to locate the next pipe you need to jump to, and then your vantage can make it difficult to judge if it’s close enough and whether or not you’re actually pointed in exactly the right direction to grab it. The game has a clever way around this: when something can be grabbed, the player character will reach towards it with a visible hand. It took me a while to figure this out. It’s invaluable feedback once you recognize it, but I think it’s telling that tricks like this were necessary.

It’s been pointed out before that a more traditional over-the-shoulder view allows the sight of the player character’s body to substitute for a sense that’s otherwise lost in games: proprioception, the sense of one’s own body’s position. ME gives you occasional body glimpses, but proprioception isn’t constant. The people who say that ME is immersive partly because of its first-person view really have it backward: if it’s immersive, it’s in spite of the first-person perspective, because it’s found ways to overcome the limitations of its viewpoint and its lack of normal sensory information. And sometimes it fails at that. That roll move is disorienting in part because it temporarily takes away the intuitive sense of which way is up, something provided by by the way the camera movement normally works in the game, and by the sense of balance in real life.

Ah, Mirror’s Edge, you beautiful little victim of the hype machine. Highly promoted, widely derided, deeply discounted. Having played through half the levels already, I’m not yet convinced that the basic gameplay here deserves the complaints that have been directed at it. Apparently some people have tried to treat the game like a shooter, and were disappointed, and even more people tried to treat it like a GTA-style open-world game, and were even more disappointed: you can vary your path through the levels, but not that much. But taken on its own terms, it’s not bad. (A bit unvarying, perhaps, but I expect to finish Story Mode before I get tired of it.) Basically what we have here is a 3D platformer in the mold of Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider, but in first-person perspective, and with people shooting at you to encourage you to keep moving. You can shoot back if you like, but why would you? That would just slow you down, and that’s clearly not what the game wants. Whenever I look at the mission objectives tab, I see a note in the corner stating that I have not yet fired a single shot, and this feels a lot like the “conduct” challenges in Nethack.

I should say some words about the visual style right away, because it’s the game’s shiniest feature. While the rendering is photorealistic and the world is reasonably detailed, the use of color is stylized. Everything looks like it has a fresh coat of paint: it’s all gleaming white or highly-saturated solid colors over large areas. It’s like being inside the world’s largest modernist sculpture, and it’s definitely the cleanest-looking urban dystopia I’ve ever seen.

The really interesting thing, though, is the way the colors figure into gameplay. For example, losing health causes the colors to desaturate, as if the bright look of the world is simply a function of the observer’s outlook. (Perhaps to the average man on the street it looks more like a normal city.) Also, color is often simply used to make significant items pop, particularly through what is called “Runner Vision”. Runner Vision means that special opportunities for movement, such as pipes you can climb or planks you can use as springboards, are colored red. While some things seem to be permanently red, Runner Vision is basically dynamic: white things fade to red as you approach them. If I had been told to implement something like this, I’d probably have done it through colored lighting — changing the light on specific objects, as seen in, e.g., the Thief games (where it’s done to highlight the object currently in focus), is pretty easy to do in most graphics engines. But it doesn’t seem to have been done that way here. The red things look like they’re lit the same as always, just painted red now.

Moving through this environment with a cocky swagger are the Runners, outlaw couriers who oppose the system and promote freedom of information with the power of parkour. Runners are basically superheroes, albeit ones whose main power is running away. Seriously, the way you leap from rooftop to rooftop here is something that used to be the exclusive domain of people who were explicitly superhuman, rather than just free-spirited and driven to great lengths by oppression. The first thing I was reminded of by the largely rooftop-based environment here, and the way you interact with it, was the Treyarch Spider-Man games. (Particularly the first one, which has a chase scene with the supervillain Venom that’s very similar in feel to the chase scene with another Runner in level 3.) The villains are similarly comic-bookish, clichés of corruption covering up some kind of secret project. The cutscenes between the levels emphasize this by switching to a more cartoony flat-shaded look, which is distinctly weird in context. Traditionally, pre-rendered cutscenes are more realistic than interactive content.

Anyway, it’ll probably take me only one more day to wrap up Story Mode. I’ll have some things to say about the mechanics of the first-person interface tomorrow.

I’m into the third world of Gish now, “The 7 Planes of Hehenna”. (And yes, that seems to mean that this world has seven levels.) It’s a lava world, and as usual, touching lava will kill you, which is highly unrealistic: in the real world, you’d be roasted alive long before you got within touching distance of lava, if the fumes didn’t get you first. (There’s a name for lava that doesn’t heat the air around it to hundreds of degrees. It’s called stone.) But I suppose things might be different for living tar. The real world doesn’t offer us many data points for that. At the very least, Gish wouldn’t be affected by the fumes: the water sequences prove that he doesn’t need to breathe.

This is around the point where I stopped playing during my first run, back when the game was new. That’s because it’s the point where it becomes really easy to die. The game gives you five lives to start with, and you can occasionally find more, but if you run out, you have to start over at the beginning of the world. Not, thankfully, the beginning of the whole game — it’s not that imitative of NES-era platformers. But there’s no way to save other than the autosave, which kicks in every time you quit. So if you can’t beat an entire world in five lives straight, you can’t progress.

At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But, as I said before, this game keeps crashing on me. And when it crashes, it doesn’t autosave. I’ve taken to working around this by quitting whenever I complete a level in order to force an autosave, thereby not losing my progress. But this also means that I’m immune to being kicked back to the beginning of the world. I can lose all my lives, restart the world, crash, and then jump back in at the point of my last autosave.

It’s tantamount to cheating, really. I wasn’t doing it deliberately at first, but now that I know, it’s cheating. In fact, it reminds me a lot of playing old CRPGs and pulling out the floppy disk the moment a character died so that the game couldn’t record it. Which means, I suppose, that cheating like this is in the spirit of the old-school experience that Gish aims to provide.

I finally got this running correctly, mainly by reinstalling it from scratch (the same approach that worked for Audiosurf). The framerate still suffers when there are three characters on the screen, and the opening menu has six, giving a very poor first impression, but that doesn’t happen very often: it’s mostly solitary, and even when it isn’t, it mostly involves meeting with only one other character at a time. There are only two people in the woods other than yourself: a benevolent young lady in white, and some manifestation of the eternal principle we call the Big Bad Wolf.

But I get ahead of myself. The Path is basically the tale of Little Red Riding Hood retold as a horror story. And an arty horror story at that: the graphical style has a rough quality, with crudely-drawn text and UI elements, and elements of artificial damage reminiscent of the Silent Hill games, especially as things get more nervous: the camera goes out of focus, dust and splotches appear as on badly-preserved film, etc. The path itself starts in sunshine and flowers and childish laughter, and ends in shadow and decay.

As the game begins, you’re given a choice of six sisters, ranging in age from wide-eyed moppet to sullen adolescent to overconfident not-quite-adult, to guide to Grandmother’s menacing-looking house in the darkest part of the woods. The inappropriateness of sending any of these children into the woods alone is immediately apparent, and you’re given strict instructions to stay on the path, but the woods are clearly meant for exploring, or why would the designers put them there? And anyway, if you actually do obey the instructions, you’re told afterward that you failed. You climb into bed with Grandma (who is pale and still enough that I thought she was a corpse until she opened her eyes), and you’re given a rating of “D” and an opportunity to try again. To be regarded as successful, you have to find the Wolf.

Only the youngest sister gets a Wolf that’s visibly wolf-like; the rest get metaphorical wolves, wolves in human form. Even the woodcutter from the fairy tale is presented here as a wolf in man’s clothing. There are other things to find in the woods — landmarks, collectible flowers (You have found x of 144!), oddly abandoned objects like a piano, a syringe, a television that somehow manages to remain switched on in the middle of a forest — the details vary depending on which girl you picked, and what you find can affect what happens in Grandma’s house. Pursuing such things is a fine way to delay the inevitable, but if you want to make progress, you have to seek out and interact with the Wolf. I should mention a peculiar thing about interaction in this game: it’s passive. When you’re close enough to an object to interact with it, this fact is signaled visually with a ghost-like overlay, at which point all you do is stop walking and the rest happens automatically. This means that if a character walks close enough to you while you’re already standing still, you can wind up interacting with them inadvertently. This makes for a good bit of nervousness: around the Wolf, if you feel you’re not ready, you don’t dare to stand still.

But when you feel you’re ready, you interact with the Wolf, and there’s a cutscene in which something bad happens that you don’t quite get to see, after which you find yourself lying on the path in the rain just in front of Grandma’s house. The girl’s entire demeanor and body language is changed here: she’s broken and ashamed, and moves with painful slowness. (Even the controls for rotating the camera become sluggish.) And after the Wolf, the inside of the house is transformed into a surreal living nightmare reminiscent of an old FMV title. (Some will probably interpret this as meaning that she’s already dead and in Hell when she wakes up.) I experimented with ways to avoid going inside, but there’s no other place to go at this point. Attempting to walk into the woods makes you stumble, and laboriously walking backward along the path just led to an infinite paved road, without the payphone that you could use to chicken out in the pre-Wolf section. (At one point during this attempt, I looked at what I was doing, holding a button down to make a young girl walk slowly home in the rain after being traumatized, and realized that if someone had described this moment to me, I would have though it was parody.)

After going through the house to your doom, you return to the main menu, now one girl short, and are asked to pick another. And you continue until they’re all gone. What kind of sadist repeatedly sends girls off to get killed? Well, the player, obviously. You want to “succeed”, don’t you? There’s a whole mess of audience complicity issues here. (The scenes inside the house demand that you keep repeatedly pressing the forward button rather than just holding it down, as if to make you repeatedly reaffirm that you want to keep going.) But also, we can’t take the deaths entirely at face value, because this is a game that demands to be read at a symbolic level. The whole thing is dream-like, and not in an I-can’t-be-bothered-to-make-sense way, but in a Freudian way.

Bruno Bettelheim famously interpreted Little Red Riding Hood as a parable about puberty and the dangers that follow, a thread taken up by Sondheim and Lapine in the musical Into the Woods, where the wolf brings new meaning to the term “sexual predator” with the song “Hello Little Girl”. But while several of the wolf encounters in The Path are blatantly suggestive of seduction or rape (or the sometimes-blurry line between the two), it seems to me that the point here is larger. The youngest sister, Robin, discovers her wolf in a graveyard, where her comments show difficulty understanding the reality of death. While there, she can find a baby bird lying dead on the ground near the remains of a blue eggshell — that is, a dead robin. “Not me!” she insists. For her, the wolf represents awareness of mortality, one of the earlier horrible truths about the world that a child has to learn in the process of becoming an adult. And that’s what The Path is really about: the journey to adulthood. Sex is only part of it, albeit a large one.

For what is the path but life itself? It begins in verdant fertility, ends in decay and death. Even without the Wolf’s intrusion, Grandma’s house at the end of the path is the home of a woman at the end of her life. That’s where every little girl winds up eventually. But none of the sisters can traverse the path successfully: each is locked at one particular stage of life, and lacks experience to mature. The Wolf brings this experience through unwelcome lessons, and the result is the death of innocence, symbolized by the death of innocents. You can view the sisters as aspects of one person, at different stages, which have to be superseded.

Given this analysis, the end result of passing through all the stages should be a complete person. And when we’re returned to the main menu after disposing of them all, instead of an empty room, we get one more role to play: the mysterious Lady in White, who’s been seen in the woods throughout the game. I’m not entirely sure I buy my own analysis at this point: the Lady in White appears no older than the sisters. But she definitely knows her way around the woods better than anyone else. In any of the previous chapters, it’s impossible to find the path once it’s out of sight behind you, even if you double back the way you came. But if you take the Lady in White by the hand, she will lead you back to the path. Even just following her around as she runs through the woods seems to be a good way to find the important places for your current character.

The game as a whole can be finished in a single sitting, especially if you don’t care about optional objectives. If you do, well, finding all 144 flowers will take quite some time; just stopping to pick up the ones you see will net you most of them, but I imagine the last few would take a systematic search. Even if you ignore them, though, it’s a bit of a relief that they’re there to provide an unambiguous game element. The previous “game” by Tale of Tales, The Graveyard, consisted entirely of walking an old woman down a path in a cemetery, sitting on a bench, watching a noninteractive video for a cheerful little song about death (or, alternately, interrupting it), and then walking back the way you came. (They later released a “full” version, available for a registration fee, in which the only change was that the woman would sometimes, at random, die while sitting on the bench. I was tempted to register it out of admiration for their audacity.) Now, in The Graveyard, there was only one path. There were things that looked like other paths leading off, and players like me certainly tried to take them. That’s what players do: they try to stretch the limits of the system. Perhaps The Path was, to some extent, designed in response to this, to take advantage of the player’s urge to disregard the author’s intention. Ironic, then, that my first reaction was to follow the path — not because I wanted to obey the instructions, but because I wanted to disregard the author’s obvious intention that I disobey them.