T
his month I reviewed The Medium (see p72), the latest
horror game I disliked from Polish developer Bloober
Team. I’ve looked forward to every Bloober game I’ve
reviewed, but never seem to get on with the final product. In
the case of The Medium, I was nonplussed throughout, but
there was a specific moment in the review process where my
indifference turned to active distaste.
It involves a puzzle in which one of the player characters
must navigate through a hedge maze. It’s a dull puzzle,
made worse by the game making you do it several times.
But what really annoyed me wasn’t the repetitiveness.
During the final iteration of the puzzle,
the player character exclaims, ‘This is
getting tedious!’
The problem isn’t necessarily the game
making the player perform a boring task.
While it may seem boring to me, that
might not be the case for other players.
It’s quite different, however, for a game
to make you do a monotonous task while making a snarky
comment about that exact monotony. The developer knew this
part of the game was boring, and not only decided to keep it, but
also hoped to mask the problem by ironically pointing it out.
Commenting upon the rubbish bits of your own game
is depressingly common in the industry. You may have
encountered an RPG forcing you to kill rats while talking
about how killing rats is boring. Meanwhile, Deadpool and
My Friend Pedro sarcastically comment about clichéd sewer
levels, before making you run through yet another tedious
sewer level.
Games can identify and engage with their own design
tropes, of course, but it should be in a way that’s interesting
and improves the experience. If Deadpool and My Friend Pedro
were creative with the tired old concept of sewer levels, that
would be different.
An alternative example is the first Fighter’s Guild Quest in
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Here, you’re notionally sent on a
mission to kill rats in a woman’s basement, but it transpires she
actually needs help protecting her pet rats from a marauding
mountain lion.
Breaking the fourth wall is a storytelling mechanic, a
counter-intuitive method of engaging the
audience in the events being depicted. It’s
not a solution to a design issue. You can’t
resolve a problem simply by pointing at
it and making a joke, otherwise surgery
would be a lot easier. It smacks of both
a lack of confidence and a dearth of
imagination in the design. Worse still,
it’s duplicitous, hoping to pull a fast one over the player by
making them think whatever poorly implemented activity
you have them doing is a setup for a joke, rather than being
poor design concealed by one.
Game development is a difficult and complex process, and
sometimes that brilliant idea in your head doesn’t turn out to
be such fun in practice. Errors are an inevitable consequence
of creativity, sometimes slipping through the net of even
the best games. But it’s important to own those mistakes.
Wisecracking about them is amateurish and does a disservice
to the players who spent money on your game.Games
Rick Lane is Custom PC’s games editor @Rick_Lane
RICK LANE / INVERSE LOOK
A JOKE OF A FEATURE
Mistakes in game design are inevitable, but don’t
then joke about them. That’s Rick Lane’s jobYou can’t resolve a problem
simply by pointing at it and
making a joke