The Stack

After Fran leaves Ithersta, things become weirdly normal for a while. Just for a while, before the final plunge into unreality. We’ve had disturbing visions of ghosts and demons, and we’ve had a full-on fantasy world, and now, at the end, we get Ditkoesque surrealism, with strangely-connected floating platforms hosting odd creatures with odd obsessions. Fran isn’t afraid of them; her capacity to feel fear has long since burnt out. Indeed, one of the more frightening beings from earlier, a very tall skeleton in a top hat, turns out to be a friend and ally. The game does an excellent job of keeping this ambiguous, too, making it seem like he’s betrayed us once we’ve come to trust him. But once Fran has been through that, she can even accept help from her doctor from the hospital. There’s a sudden emphasis on keys and unlocking in the final chapter, and it’s clearly a sign that Fran is making breakthroughs.

The thing is, though, a completely surreal environment isn’t nearly as jarring and uncanny as an only slightly weird one. And that’s what we get in the lead-up to the ending. Fran somehow makes it back to her house, as has been her goal for the last couple of chapters. It’s an ordinary house, on an ordinary street, and the break in the unreality makes us suddenly uneasy about her unrealistic expectations. Fran just escaped from a madhouse. Her parents are dead. Things aren’t going to go back to normal just because she’s in the right place, but Fran doesn’t seem to realize this.

And then… things start to get rather silly. There’s a conspiracy of sorts going on. We got some inkling of this back in the hospital, where you could find indications that the labels on the magic pills had been deliberately switched, but when we start to learn the details of what was going on, it just doesn’t seem plausible, even though five minutes ago a skeleton in a top hat threw us a birthday party. The doctor from the hospital caught wind of the truth, and is investigating, and as part of his investigation, he invites Fran to help him dig up her parents’ graves — not because there’s anything in particular that he’s looking for, but just because he feels that showing an insane little girl the corpses of her parents would be a good idea somehow. Later, Fran’s aunt matter-of-factly claims, to all appearances expecting to be believed, that Fran’s parents were murdered by the cat. (Even Fran isn’t crazy enough to buy that.) Probably none of this would bother me if the Great Wizard back in Ithersta was doing it, but in the mundane world, it stands out.

There’s a lot we have to accept by the end that we didn’t have to accept in the very beginning: that Fran is special, that her otherworlds are objectively real, that the grown-ups in her life are plotting against her. That returning to her fantasy world is a positive development, and not just a retreat from reality. But I’m here for that. I’m going to recommend this game. The puzzles are nothing to write home about, and I have some reservations about its depiction of mental illness, but it’s got style, and it’s got heart. If character motivations get weird towards the end, it’s because it’s not really trying to be realistic, even in the reality scenes. Rather, it’s trying to depict a feeling, or a series of feelings, a progression from helplessness and victimization to empowerment, from horror to peace.

I said that Fran Bow reminded me a little of Alice in Wonderland, but in chapter 3, it takes a sharp turn towards Oz. Fran has lost her horror pills, rendering the dark world inaccessible; instead, we find ourselves in the magical land of Ithersta, a brightly-lit, extremely whimsical fantasy world populated mainly by carrot people. Fran has been reunited with her cat by now, so, like Dorothy, her new goal is to return home. And to do this, she needs to enlist the aid of a Great Wizard.

Ithersta is a place of safety and healing. Fran reaches it simply by needing it to be there. When she arrives, she’s transformed into a tree, and unable to do anything for herself — you temporarily play as the cat until you can get tree-Fran to a healer, who at least restores her to humanoid shape, although she’s still made of wood and knows that this is a temporary form that she’ll have to abandon to become fully human again. This whole chapter is, to my mind, the most clearly metaphorical part of the game I’ve seen so far.

Since toggling between different worlds is a fundamental part of the game, we soon acquire a substitute for the pills: a clockwork device that lets us change the season. (“Time is just an infinite layered reality”, explain the locals.) Suddenly, we have four versions of every room instead of just two! There’s less of a contrast between them than there was with the pills, though, except perhaps in the Winter scenes, where snow covers the bright flowers and the rustic country market lies empty. This is the only time of year when the Great Wizard’s cave is accessible. It’s also the only time that the shadow creatures are seen in Ithersta.

So, for all the air of comfort, we’re not out of the woods yet. There’s still an edge to things, and it has a lot to do with forgetting. The Wizard himself has forgotten everything he knew, and needs you to fetch him things to help him remember. Elsewhere, an unreadable plaque is described as saying “what everyone learn[s] in the precise moment of birth. But we forget its meaning within the first seven minutes alive… So, we have to spend our entire life… trying to understand it.” And the theme of a great truth that needs to be discovered keeps coming up. The entire questionably-real, comparatively-paradisical environment is telling Fran that there’s something she’s forgotten, something important that she needs to know before she can wake up.

The keynote at Narrascope was delivered by Natalia Martinsson, who described how her point-and-click adventure Fran Bow was inspired by her own experiences with trauma. Fran Bow has been installed on my laptop for some time, but I never seemed to be in the mood for it. It’s a troubling game, grotesque and gruesome. But now, I’ve been inspired to make a go of it. I’m currently in the middle of the second chapter of five.

Fran Bow is a severely traumatized ten-year-old girl in a stereotypically awful mental hospital, which she spends the first chapter of the game escaping, with the aid of some magical pills. She’s first given the pills in the intro sequence, but they give her nightmarish hallucinations, so her doctor immediately orders that she never be given them again. However, in the hallucination, she hears her beloved cat, Mr. Midnight, telling her to seek the pills out again, and so she does. The hallucinations essentially form an alternate reality, Silent Hill-style: it’s the same rooms, but there’s blood and dead animals all over the place, and shadowy monsters roam about. Sometimes Fran is strangely oblivious about this given that it’s her hallucination, referring to clearly dead creatures as “asleep” and the like. Other times, she is not. Her manner is a little Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, a mixture of childish whimsy and insistent precision, which makes me think a little of American McGee’s Alice, which similarly had grotesque loony bin scenes. But those were constructed entirely out of trope. Fran Bow‘s treatment of the same theme is more heartfelt, I think, although I can’t know what I would have thought without having heard the author speak on the matter.

You can toggle between the two worlds at will, and sometimes the nightmare world has hints for real-world puzzles, usually scrawled on the wall in blood. I suppose it’s sort of shamanic, the use of hallucinogens to access the spirit realms and learn secrets of importance. In this realm, other patients at the hospital tend to have black shadow-creatures holding them, presumably manifestations of their mental illness. A couple of times, I’ve heard people say things like “You can see them, can’t you?”. The pills are, at the very least, enhancing your perceptions, showing you things that are in some sense objectively real. But more than that: there are puzzles based on bringing objects from the spirit world back to the real world with you. In the second chapter, the lines get blurred even more: there’s a couple of monstrous insects that really belong in the spirit world, but which you encounter in the real world. Maybe none of the adventure is real. Maybe Fran is still in her room in the hospital, tripping throughout.

At a different panel at Narrascope, it was pointed out how Black Mirror: Bandersnatch had a possible sub-plot about the main character going off his meds in order to regain control of himself. The consensus among the panelists was that this was a terrible lesson to teach people about psychiatric medications. Fran Bow leans in the opposite direction, but it’s still kind of the same: Fran doesn’t trust her doctor — in fact, she pretty much hates him — and so she enthusiastically takes pills that he doesn’t want her to have, and they turn out to be vitally important to her progress through the game, which I’m at the moment assuming is positive for her psychological recovery and growth. If “Go off your meds” is a bad message, surely “Take meds your doctor specifically forbids” is even worse? But I suppose it’s saved by its unrealism, as well as the sheer unpleasantness of Fran’s otherworld. Doing what Fran does outside of a game is such a clearly and obviously bad idea as to deter imitation in itself. At least, I hope so.

OK, I just said, a mere few hours ago, that I probably wouldn’t post about this. But I’ve played through the first world of Kao 2, and I’m finding it pretty engaging, especially in comparison to its predecessor. It’s different enough from Kao 1 that I could almost (but not quite) believe they’re completely unrelated, that the two games were written by different teams that just picked up the boxing kangaroo theme independently, much like Atari ¹Well, Sunsoft really. Atari was the distributor. did back in 1982. Kao 2 has camera-relative analog controls, and supports a different moveset, including rolls and double-jumps. It’s not designed so much around practicing levels until you get good at them: you get infinite lives now, and any power-ups required for advancement respawn if used up. Levels are less random in their theme and contents, and feature enemies that reasonably belong in their environments. There’s characters, and a story, and rather annoying voice acting. And, unlike the first game, it’s all about rescuing other animals. In short, it’s a lot more typical than the first game. Not as wacky and idiosyncratic. Probably less racist, although I haven’t played enough to be completely sure of that. Made in the same mold as the stuff that Yooka-Laylee and A Hat in Time look back on fondly. It reminds me of how old cartoon characters like Betty Boop that started off as borderline surrealist got remade into safer, more family-friendly versions of themselves in an attempt to compete with Disney. But I can’t definitively say it’s not an improvement.

The voice they chose for the title kangaroo is particularly revealing: he talks like a young boy. Maybe that’s how the developers were thinking of him all along, but it changes my perception of the character enormously. (Headcanon: It’s not the same character. In the first game, you may recall, the player character was really Denis. Kao was presumably off trying to rescue Denis throughout that game, that being his thing, and not having much luck because Denis had already rescued himself. This also explains why Kao doesn’t seem to have a pouch in the second game, although it’s possible the he has one but it’s concealed by the baggy boxing shorts he wears now.)

(Incedentally, now that there’s voice acting, we have a canon pronunciation for “Kao”. It’s neither like “cow”, as I had assumed, nor like “kayo”, as I had read online, but sort of like “kah-oh”.)

One thing I’ve seen that goes against my impression somewhat: In one level, there’s a crate full of dynamite, and sticks with lit fuses come out of it and chase you around, running on little legs. That doesn’t quite seem like a Kao 1 thing, but it definitely seems like something you’d see in an old Max Fleischer cartoon.

I’m flying out to the east coast shortly to attend Narrascope, an interactive fiction conference. I was hoping that I’d have Kao the Kangaroo off the Stack and out of my brain before that happened, and it looks like I’ve succeeded. I took the final set of levels in a rush. I had accumulated 25 lives, and figured that would be enough. And it was, provided at least that I reloaded instead of accepting a death when it happened very near the start of a level.

The final set of levels, once you’ve beat up the boss alien, seems to be set in Australia. That is, it looks a lot like the tropical parts of the first few levels, but it’s got crocodiles (which function as platforms rather than enemies), and more of those dark-skinned primitives I was complaining about, and some long-legged birds that I took for ostriches when I first encountered one back in the shipboard level but which could just as well be emus. It all ends in a nice little puzzle-boss confrontation with the hunter from the intro cutscene that I didn’t think I’d ever see again. I guess it wouldn’t be a satisfyingly complete story without him, but I honestly wasn’t expecting a satisfyingly complete story. There’s also a nice bit of come-full-circle immediately before that, with a level that’s basically a recapitulation of level 4 in structure, but harder. Why recapitulate level 4 instead of level 1? Probably just because level 4 is more interesting.

Apart from the racism, the game is pretty much what I thought it was before I played all the way through it. It’s certainly not the worst-designed game of its kind — it’s got a decent amount of variety of action, at least, with its vehicle sections and puzzle bosses and maze levels (where the coins act like bread crumbs, showing you the paths you haven’t taken) and switches to side-view and Crash Bandicoot-style running-towards-the-camera-from-a-rolling-boulder bits. But when you’re not running from a boulder or piloting a vehicle, it’s mainly all about being careful and taking things slow. Maybe I’ll actually give Kao 2 a try. It was free, after all. Don’t expect me to post about it here, though, unless it really surprises me in some way.

The trick for beating the third boss was obscure enough that I wound up resorting to GameFAQs to learn it. Like the first two bosses, the trick was easy to execute once I knew it, but I don’t know how anyone managed to discover it. By dint of having more free time they’re willing to devote to the game than me, I suppose. By now, I’ve gotten to that level that I thought would be set in China, because the icon for it looked like a group of people wearing conical hats, but it turns out to be set on an alien spacecraft instead. What I took for heads and hats were just some sort of fluid tank that seems to be a common component of alien technology. What can I say? The icons are small, and grayscale until they’re unlocked.

One other thing of note about that GameFAQs walkthrough. The game lets you know how many collectables there are on each level — that is, how many coins, boxing glove powerups (missile weapons that you can use to literally “throw a punch” at distant enemies, like Rayman), and extra lives. Thus, the writer of the walkthrough, one “winnie the poop”, knew that there was an extra life on level 3, but was unable to find it, and pleads with the reader “If you found it, PLEASE e-mail me and let me know!” In fact I did know. I’ve mentioned Level 3 before; it’s the hang-glider-in-a-lava-cave level where I had gotten stuck in my first attempts at the game, so I was fairly familiar with it. The extra life is in fact right above the level’s starting point, where you can’t see it unless you jump up the stairs to where the hang glider is and then turn around instead of going hang gliding. I think that my theory back in the day was that in order to reach it I’d have to find a place in the cave that was wide enough to turn the hang glider around and glide all the way back to the beginning. This turns out to be unnecessary; a big leap from atop the pillars flanking the stairs followed by a tail swipe to extend your reach just a little bit is sufficient.

Winnie the poop was a prolific contributor to GameFAQs once upon a time, but this walkthrough was fifteen years old. It seemed unlikely that they were still interested in this information. Nonetheless, I had to try, didn’t I? So I sent an email to the address in the walkthough, and was unsurprised when it bounced back, addressee unknown, a reminder that even the people who once cared about this stuff have largely moved on.

It feels like that happens more and more as I play the older games in the Stack. The more they age, the less relevant they are. It can make me question my motivations, but it also comes with a certain sense of freedom. To me, an essential part of the pleasure of playing videogames is the idea that they’re something you do even though no one wants you to. It took me two months to write a post about Hypnospace Outlaw mainly because I felt like there was a chance that someone would be interested in reading my take on it. Kao, though? No one cares about Kao. That means the pressure’s off.

I’m a bit more than halfway through Kao the Kangaroo now, having encountered, but not beaten, the the third of what I believe to be five bosses. Boss levels in this game all seem to be similar: you’re put in a boxing ring or similar small arena with an enemy. To win, you have to punch that enemy three times, but he’s normally immune to your punches. So you have to figure out a little puzzle. To spoil one of those puzzles: The second boss, who appears after a shipboard-themed level, is a sea-captain with a hook hand. When he takes a swipe at you, you have to jump backward to avoid it, causing his hook to get stuck in the floor briefly, rendering him vulnerable. This trivial once you know how to do it. The only difficulty is that it involves jumping backward, which is a move that I hadn’t ever needed before and didn’t know was possible.

In the last several levels, the world-travel premise has finally started to become visible. There’s a level themed after Greek ruins, another that’s vaguely Arabian in its architecture. And along the way, I’ve had to fight some truly unfortunate cartoon depictions of dark-skinned savages. What the heck, guys? This was released in 2000, not 1932. Is it the wacky, anything-goes cartoon vibe that made you think this would be okay? Judging by the level icons, there’s some Chinese-themed areas coming up, too, and I’m anticipating the worst there. Maybe this is the reason that they decided to re-release Kao 2 and not this one.

While I’m complaining, let me talk about the controls. This game uses tank controls — that is, character-relative controls, like Tomb Raider. And this is fine most of the time, because most of the time, the camera is behind the kangaroo, which makes them equivalent to screen-relative controls. But every once in a while, there’s a section with a fixed camera angle, be it a wide view of running towards the camera from a rolling snowball or a side view of the equivalent of a 2D platformer. And this makes it really hard to control where you’re going. It becomes very easy to run at a slightly wrong angle and off the edge of the platform you’re on. I’ve hit a groove where I’m finding most levels pretty easy, and gain lives about as fast as I lose them, except on the fixed-camera sections, which I fail again and again.

Last post, I talked about hoarding checkpoints. It turns out that I still didn’t understand fully how they work. It turns out that you don’t keep checkpoints between levels, the way you do lives; each level starts you with exactly one checkpoint, and you only get that plus any you pick up on that level. So deploying a checkpoint and then not dying doesn’t “waste” it any more than not deploying it at all before the end of the level. Understanding this is affecting how I play.

Unlike most games in the cartoon-animal-based 3D platformer its genre, Denis the Inadvertently Non-Binary Kangaroo doesn’t involve rescuing anyone. The intro movie to shows our hero being trapped and caged by a hunter, so perhaps there’s some other kangaroo out there trying to rescue you, but as far as I can tell, nothing within the rest of the game reflects or references your abduction in any way. Instead, you just get a series of levels in sundry random environments, including tropical islands, caves, and icy mountains, where your goal in each is to reach the exit and pick up as many coins as you can along the way. Occasionally there’s a boss. The readme explains that Denis escaped captivity some time between the intro and the first level, and is trying to make his way back home to Australia. I don’t know what his starting point is, but he’s taking an awfully roundabout route regardless.

The reason you want to collect coins, apart from “because they’re there”, is that every 50 coins you collect gives you an extra life. Yes, there are limited lives, but it’s not as bad as it could be. You can save your progress between levels, and there are multiple save slots. I’ve been using the topmost slot as a “This is the farthest I’ve gotten without losing any lives” slot, which I periodically return to and attempt to advance it further when I run out of lives in my more advanced runs. I wind up replaying levels a lot, but that would be the case anyway. It’s very much a practice-makes-perfect game.

The treatment of checkpoints is a little peculiar. I’m not entirely sure I actually understood how they worked back when I first got the game; this could have contributed to the frustration that led me to abandon the game at level 3. The idea is: Checkpoints are collectables. You pick them up, and then you drop them wherever you want to respawn when you die. The thing is, they’re in limited supply, so that gives you a reason to hoard them. And that gives the whole thing a press-your-luck aspect. You’ve just come through a difficult bit. Do you drop a checkpoint now, or do you wait a little longer? If you die before using the checkpoint, you have to go through the difficult section again. On the other hand, if you drop a checkpoint and then finish the level without dying, you’ve basically wasted a checkpoint. What you really want to do is, of course, practice the level until you can complete it without losing any lives, at which point you won’t need to use any checkpoints. Checkpoints are mainly useful for getting that practice.

And now, a palate cleanser. A few days ago, Kao the Kangaroo: Round 2 suddenly showed up on Steam at a temporary price of free, probably as publicity for some other upcoming game, and it reminded me that I still have the game it’s a sequel to on my Stack.

Kao is a 3D platformer, released simultaneously for PC and Dreamcast in 2000. Like in the classic arcade game Kangaroo, the hero is bright yellow and wears boxing gloves. Enemies include grinning purple spiders, panting venus flytraps, and pigs wearing party hats. Clearly aimed at children, it’s a bit like Crash Bandicoot without the nuance — it’s more polished than Bugdom or Rocko’s Quest, but it still feels like a B-list title, and did back when it was new. I picked up a copy when it hit the bargain bins, but never got past level 3 (of 30), which makes you hang glide through a lava cave. I’ve already passed that point now just by relaxing my stubborn insistence on perfectionism a little — that is, I’m skipping the optional Challenge levels, but I’m still trying to nab every collectable in the levels I play. Because, as with much of the Stack, a certain measure of bloody-minded stubbornness is necessary to motivate me to play the game at all.

Apparently you’re supposed to pronounce “Kao” as “K.O.”. At least, I’ve just seen this claimed online; I don’t think there’s anything indicating pronunciation in the game itself. Personally, I’ve been mentally pronouncing it to rhyme with “Tao” or “ciao” all this time, and don’t intend to stop. If the discrepancy bothers you, you can always call the hero “Denis” instead. That’s what the developers called him during development, and the readme file on the CD still uses that name. It also uses masculine pronouns for him even though he clearly has a pouch, but I’m willing to accept that. Cartoon kangaroos have as much right to their own pronouns as anyone else.

Heaven’s Vault is a slow, quiet game, and it has a slow, quiet ending. At least, that’s what the ending I got was like. It’s clear that there’s some branching, including a last-second binary choice. I wouldn’t describe the earlier parts of the game as branching, because it’s far more free than that — it’s more like you have a whole lot of opportunities and can follow up on them as you please. But eventually you start to run out of goals to pursue, either because you’ve completed them or rendered them uncompletable, and the story funnels you towards the Vault, one way or another. And when it does, it starts to feel like you’re going down a path to inevitability, especially when you make the trip to the final destination, knowing you won’t be able to go back home until the story is complete, if ever.

Inevitability is also suggested by the way that the narrative starts near the end in a sort of flash-forward prologue, then jumps back in time to the beginning. When you land on that final site, you recognize it, and know exactly what your robot is going to say. Weirdly, though, the prologue wasn’t quite accurate in my play-through. Avoiding spoilers, I’ll just say that my earlier choices had resulted in a visible change that the prologue didn’t reflect. Past a certain point, I felt like the game wasn’t quite anticipating that I’d do the things the way I had done them, that I was getting bits of the story out of the order the author wanted, solving problems before they were posed and finding basic explanations of concepts I was already very familiar with. Earlier parts didn’t feel like this, despite being more freeform — perhaps just because I had less personal history to get tangled up.

This feeling was largely the reason I took the final plunge past the point of no return when I did, despite still having a great many untranslated inscriptions that I probably could have resolved if I kept puttering around longer. Searching random ruins and shipwrecks while out sailing is basically this game’s version of grinding, and, as always with grinding, you eventually just have to decide you’ve done enough of it. The game did try to impel me towards the conclusion with ominous warnings about a coming darkness, but it never felt urgent. Indeed, I tended to forget about the darkness whenever it wasn’t being mentioned. It seemed a little superfluous. The prospect of learning the secrets at the heart of the world is compelling enough motivation in itself.

After completing the game, there’s a New Game+ mode, which seems very appropriate for a work so concerned with the idea that history is cyclical. In a combat-based RPG, New Game+ would typically mean starting over with the stats and/or equipment you ended the game with, but also with tougher monsters. Here, it means starting over with all your accumulated knowledge of the ancient language, but also with longer and more complicated inscriptions. This actually makes things make more sense, story-wise; the first time around, we’re told that Aliya has been studying the language, but she literally knows none of its words whatsoever. Moreover, this is a game that demands to be played multiple times. I know there are sub-plots I never even glimpsed in my first pass, as well as goals that I tried and failed to accomplish. (You can’t always revisit sites that you were forced to leave before you got what you wanted from them.) Refreshing the word-hunting in this way should help to keep replays interesting.

At any rate, it’s a lovely game, and makes me a little jealous that I didn’t get to work on it. Before moving on, there’s just one more thing I’d like to comment on, and that’s the title. Spoiler alert, because we don’t learn just what “Heaven’s Vault” really means until the very end. We’re told it’s a place, and we’re told it’s a ship, but what we ultimately learn is that the word “vault” refers to part of the ship’s functionality, that it’s “vault” not in the sense of “room for storing valuables”, or even in the sense of “chamber with arched ceiling”, but in the sense of “jump”. And that’s a step over the line into “To Serve Man” territory. “Heaven’s Vault” is a translation from the ancient language, which is made of glyphs representing semantic units, not phonemes. This particular kind of ambiguity, of words with multiple unrelated meanings, shouldn’t be possible in this writing system at all, let alone with the same specific double meanings as English. On the other hand, examining the word that gets translated as “vault” shows that the glyphs say exactly what it turns out they mean. It was always “Heaven’s Jump” all along, and you had the clues you needed to realize this. Furthermore, I don’t think anyone in the game ever actually interprets it incorrectly, however misleading it is to the player. It’s just a weird trick to pull, especially at the end of such a generally thoughtful and mature piece.