The Patreon Letters - 14th October, 2017

Hello friends! I've been playing some games, trying to wrap up my to-do list of stuff I wanted to finish before our Game of the Year (which is a hard stop at the end of November, so tick tock for us). Which means going back to games I've been meaning to get to for a while, which means grumping about the things that always bother me in games. 

Today? The run button. Or lack thereof.  

I recently finished Night in the Woods, a game that came out earlier this year about a girl who comes home from dropping out of college to her depressed rust belt town and tries to put her old life back together. The game runs on a day-event system similar to Persona. You can explore the town, talk to NPCs, and then commit to spending time with one of two of your old high school friends. Repeat as the days advance. 

The game on the whole is interesting and mostly quite good. The writing is fantastic, and its thematic content is handled better than almost any game in this genre. But, because of this system, the game kicks you lose to explore it's 5-6 screen town every day to see what's new before you commit to spending time. Several missable story threads are tied into doing this, deepening your understanding of the space. I have been told this, because I didn't see them.

While the town might be only several screens large, they are massive backgrounds your character mostly ambles through. Outside of a few key people, many of the NPCs are non-interactive. So you're tasked with spending a good 5-10 minutes checking everywhere you've been before to see if something changed and if it didn't, moving on and doing it again the very next day. Nothing points you to what might be happening at any given time. You either find it, or you don't. This is maddening, and for me nearly capsized my entire time with the game.

The idea of this town-wandering being bad isn't even unknown. One of the developers, Scott Benson, even talked about how the ability to jump on stuff was used to try to make travelling between screens less monotonous. To which I wonder, aloud and continuously, why make me walk through them at all? Why not just let me speed up with a button press. Or, Persona style, hit a menu and warp between screens without the travel. 

This idea of travelling distance and repeating actions to see all the content is pretty common in games, and while I understand the appeal of that sort of sojourn in a big open world game, I am continually struck by how many small games also treat player travelling as a worthwhile mechanic in and of itself, forcing you to spend long minutes walking up a street to get to the content over and over. Some games (see Killer 7's pre-boss abstract hallways) make this part of the ritual, but for this game it's just that it's a pain in the ass to get Mae to where stuff might actually be, and by the time you do you just want to get on with it.

Part of this is on me, certainly. If I sit down with a smaller game, I often want to finish it in one or two evenings, and feeling like my time is being wasted really sours my mood. If I wanted to slog through tedium, I'd be playing Horizon: Zero Dawn or Destiny. When I'm looking for a small, intimate narrative experience, I expect a game that treats my interest as valid and doesn't try to pad out the experience to make it last any longer than it needs to to tell its story.

Another part of this is that this is one game in a long line of small games that do this. I don't know about you, friends, but I've played dozens of abstract or lo fi exploration games in my time. Walking simulators, is the usual term. And how many of them regularly give you a character that walks too slow, to go between points of interest that are far too far apart, leading to trudging along the vast unity plains for long stretches of nothing? None of these are too awful by themselves, but in aggregate I'm left so frustrated by how much time is spent waiting for the game to happen while I hold a direction and compulsively jump over and over, even though it almost never helps. 

I ended up really liking Night in the Woods, but I missed a lot of it in my playthrough, not to mention will never go back to see the other path I didn't choose in who to spend my time with. This is a shame, and it doesn't have to be this way, which is why I'm so mad whenever I burn out on a game for something as simple and stupid as 'I move too slow and walking between events sucks.' Games need run buttons. Characters need to move faster. Events should be easy to find and engage with. We're all going to die some day, and I don't want to spend two weeks hopping on trash cans because it's all that exists to carry me between the things I actually signed up for. 

Life's too short. Games are too long.

Until next week,
M