You play as a deaf character, Dane, and experience the world as the character does – with very little distinct audio and no subtitles: it’s up to you to make up your own interpretation of the story as your search for the masked man unfolds.
Other disclaimers clarify that subtitles will only appear at certain times, when dialogue is intended to be understood. It's intriguing, and a similar gimmick was handled well by the Inside Number 9 episode Empty Orchestra. The problem - and one reason for all the negative reviews - is that the player is not deaf in the same way the character is. That is, you'd think that gimmick would mean you understand what the main character understands. The main character clearly understands and even communicates himself, via sign language, but we don't know what he's saying or what he's replying to. We're not even given the chance to. I know some British sign language and recognised the sign for "thank you", but nothing beyond that. They're using American sign language, so British wouldn't be much help anyway, but the camera work isn't set up for you to understand even if you do know ASL. It doesn't show their hands for the whole conversation. Likewise, you can sometimes lip read and take a guess as to what the characters are saying, but the camera isn't always focused on the character's lips. This feels like cheating. They've artificially reduced our senses to create a sense of mystery, and it feels dishonest. I think the game would have been a lot stronger if we'd understood what Dane had understood and the mystery had come from what he'd missed.
The actual gameplay is basically like watching a long movie that you can't understand, interspersed with occasional fight scenes. Sometimes, at the end of a fight, you're responsible for moving Dane towards a doorway or something he needs to look at. I'd say the game - which took me about 4 hours to play through once - is fully 50-75% cut scenes, maybe more. I'm okay with that. I mean, I enjoyed Her Story and that game is entirely about choosing which videoclips to watch. There are three basic styles - filmed scenes, rendered scenes, and interactive scenes, where you can move it. The switch between the three can be quite jarring but that might be because I turned all the graphics settings down as far as possible. I do that because I bought this PC in 2013. Even then, some of the fight scenes flickered so badly they made me feel a bit ill, and the terrible camera angles didn't help with that.
Some reviews complain about the acting, but I quite liked it. I'm not overly critical about acting though. I do agree that John Anthony Wylliams - Taye - gave the best performance. I've never seen anyone pointedly close a car door with that much emotion conveyed only via only body language. It was impressive.
The fights themselves aren't difficult, and that's speaking as someone who doesn't play fighting games and didn't understand the controls. In fairness to me, no one understood the controls. The only explanation of what each button does is on the start menu, where little neon stick figures show you that X is a quick punch, Y is a hard kick, B is grab, and A is dodge. You can also use the right shoulder button to run and, as I did not discover until the sixth chapter, the left shoulder button lets you enter focus mode. I'm not entirely sure if this mode lasts for a single attack or if it affects all qualifying attacks once entered, I just kept hammering on it. You know you have a focus mode available when the lens flare on the right hand side of the screen becomes dramatically bright, another thing that's not actually explained in-game. I did actually quite like the lens flare, as an unobtrusive way of conveying information without breaking the realism, once I knew what it was.
Somehow, I managed to get nearly all of the fighting-based achievements, though I'm not even going to attempt to finish the game without getting hit. Still, like I said, the fights are pretty easy. For the first three - of six - chapters, I wasn't even sure you could lose a fight, though there were 2-3 I struggled with later on. There's one in chapter six where you're up against an unreasonable amount of opponents that took me ages, until I looked up how to do focus attacks. For me, the battles being very similar and very easy were a selling point, but, like I said, I don't like fighting games. Fighting games for people who don't like fighting games probably isn't a very big market.
Another thing that isn't made clear is how and when the game saves. It auto-saves at the end of every chapter - and a few other times - when it shows the screen below. A quality of life improvement would be to have a message flash up saying "game saved".
Once you've played through the game once, you unlock 'Answered' mode, where the sound and subtitles are turned back on. In one of the few bits of direct communication, the game explains that you can access this mode by choosing to play each chapter from the menu. Now you can finally understand what everyone was saying during those mildly intriguing video sequences! By playing through the whole game again! I don't think this is, in itself, a bad trick. I think it doesn't come off well because the deafness during your first playthrough feels cheap and artificial and because the game is just too long to play through the first time without understanding what's going on. I stuck with it because I knew, from reading other reviews, that this mode existed, but I don't think the game itself tells you that anywhere until you reach that point. From reading a few other reviews, I've learned that the "answered" mode wasn't initially included with the game and was added in a later patch, which seems bizarre to me. Did they not intend to include it initially? Did they not have the game finished in time and released it only half done?
The game does get a lot more fun on the second playthrough. I ended up really enjoying the mystery, and it was pretty interesting seeing scenes in a new light and trying to work out what future scenes might mean with the new information I had. Plus, there were some quite clever tricks that made it look like two different characters might actually be the same person or that what appeared to be two different people were actually one, which made for interesting twists. While my first playthrough took place over a week, completing 0-2 chapters per day, I finished the bulk of the second playthrough in one go. But...you should be enjoying the game that much one hour in, not five. The game takes too much time to get good, and nothing in the game even indicates that it will get good until the end of the first playthrough. Plus, the weakness of not being deaf in the same way as Dane shows up here as well. Characters confidently talk as if he can't hear them, spilling their guts while saying "You can't even hear me say this". But we know he does understand some things because he takes part in conversations. At this point, I think we're supposed to assume that Dane can lipread, so if we see their lips on screen then he heard that bit of dialogue. I'm not sure because there are a few scenes where someone is turned a bit away but he responds to what they've said. Although, that said, sometimes his response doesn't actually require him to have heard them, just to know that they were speaking. All of this would have been clearer if we'd just understood what he understood the first time round, so we'd know that any new information we get in the second playthrough is information that Dane didn't have.
The other thing we need to talk about is that this game isn't a very good portrayal of a deaf character. Firstly, lip-reading isn't as useful as the game makes it out to be, assuming that is how Dane has conversations. It's not like it's simple and magical. It's hard and unreliable. That's why sign language is a thing. On that note, if you're having a private, one-on-one conversation with a deaf person in sign language why would you also speak? If you don't know sign language, you might think it's easy to speak and sign at the same time (sim com), but it isn't. Apparently the dev team did very little consulting with deaf people, so it's not surprising they got things wrong. The review I linked to in that last sentence was written by a deaf gamer and explores the issues more than I can. The writer also touches on the unfortunate implications of linking gang signs to sign language, which I didn't know about. Plus, the fact that your "reward" for playing through the game without being able to hear is to suddenly regain that ability which, yeah, that has some unfortunate implications, especially now that we understand the one scene where Dane expresses how upset he is at not being able to hear. That might arguably be because he's been tormented over it rather than something intrinsic to being deaf, but that's a very subtle distinction. So, perhaps a better way to handle the game would be to have two characters and show different bits from different points of view. One character can still be deaf, so maybe he notices something in the room (because no one is communicating with him so he spends more time looking around) or, okay, once he's able to lip read something no one expected to be overheard. And maybe other characters sometimes communicate with him by writing, and having something in writing turns out to be important. But other stuff could just be about being in the right/wrong room or something. Then, on the second playthrough, everything you originally saw as character A you now see as character B and vice versa, and that gives you the information you need to piece everything together. I'm just spit balling, it's not an easy problem to solve.
I guess all in all...well, is it a good game? Is it a bad game? I enjoyed the process of playing it, but I don't actually disagree with any of the bad reviews. I was able to enjoy it because, for me, I thought of the game as figuring out what the plot was, which other people wouldn't go in expecting if they just went off the information in the game or the description itself. Plus, I knew most people hadn't enjoyed it, so my expectations were low in the first place. I'd also only played £2.99 for it, and I think I'd have found it a lot harder to enjoy if it had cost me £11.99. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, but I can't say I didn't have fun.
The game was very ambitious and it failed to live up to what it could have been. I think that's what happens sometimes when you fund ambitious and risky projects, and because I want studios to fund more ambitious and risky projects - because some of them are amazing - I can't say I'm upset this game was made. It had a lot of flaws, and examining those will, I hope, lead to better games in future.
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