...seemed to be an exercise in folly. So here's a list of games (casual sports-games not welcome) that are not necessarily violent.. or.. at least don't encourage you to be a serial killer. You have games like Deus Ex, where it's at least possible to solve a majority of the game satisfyingly without violence. Or System Shock 2, which is not about shooting as such, but about exploring the ship you're on. Successful thriller-games like these were made - and yet, they are also about murdering things, and oriented around ways to kill things most efficiently. What games turned up that focus exclusively on different things?
1.Mirror's Edge. You are Faith. You run away. And do crazy stunts along the way. I think what appealed to me most about this game was the way the writing is part of the gameplay. The story does have some terrible moments where the animated cutscenes make no sense, and where the in-game cutscenes take over where it's not necessary. The controls also will have you skip and get stuck on a ledge where you don't want to go. And not every part of every level will make you equally impressed. You are also discouraged from experimenting too much on your first play-through as well, since the encounters are set up in a way that focuses on pushing you ahead, more or less all the time. And this unfortunately detracts from the sense of freedom of movement the game conveys in every other sense.
But when you play the game, there are moments when you really end up forgetting you play a game. And those are very few nowadays. Also the art-direction is interesting. It's a game well worth playing, if your requirements for a game isn't satisfied by having a gun thoughtfully painted in your hand on screen.
(Read the very good staff-review of Mirror's Edge :) here)
2.Heavy Rain. Dripping with.. allright, sorry. Many games have been meant to be cinematic, and have achieved that. Other games have tried to be interactive, and have achieved that as well. Combining the two is not so easy. There are bright spots in games such as Tie Fighter - you play grand battles from the view-point of a single pilot. Or Xcom - the overall pressure of the situation is as cinematic as any (successful) scene in an Alien film. Or for example Independence War, a game that easily could have been called "how you should have made a star-trek game, fools!". Particle Systems had excellent writers, they did level-design that rates off the chart, and have interactive bits that engage you with the story.
And yet, Heavy Rain does something unique. It takes the dramatic cutscenes in games, and make them into gameplay. "So it's a quick-time event", I hear you say, but it's not. Quick-time events are what you do when not playing. There are successful exceptions, such as the knife in Modern Warfare 2. But generally, quick-time events look good, and are simply there because there's no way to actually use game-mechanics to portray the events.
Heavy Rain does something different, and is largely a series of "knife events" one after the other, with adventure game exploration in between.
The writing that goes along with it also succeeds in the way that the game really does wrap a few of your choices very well. Meaning that the "quick-time events" are interactive, and also branch.
Most of the time, admittedly, there's no real choice to make. And you can make the choices very easy on your characters and suffer no real harm from it. But then again - sometimes you do. And it's all about interactivity in a limited and controllable scope. With branching happening between set pieces that can be explored narratively without causing breakage.
Has interactive games been done this way before? Yes, in limited scopes. Has it been done in such an expansive and beautiful way before? No.
(Also, the game makes nerds uncomfortable).
3.Beyond Good and Evil Jade is a journalist. Your weapon of choice for defeating the evil alien invasion is your camera. You need to get some incriminating photographs on the aliens, alert the general public, so you can be slapped with a mouth-bind order from the security general's office.
Most of the game is about sneaking, running and admiring the view. You don't constantly kick things into pieces, or kill aliens in droves - but it's still somehow a fun game. If you can ignore the perhaps slightly over the top optimistic attitude going on here. Like the people would actually care, and you wouldn't be thrown in jail..
4.Grim Fandango. Take this as the token representative for the lost Adventure game genre. Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Monkey Island also fits here, along with the later Sherlock Holmes games by Frogwares.
Grim Fandango is a mix of game-world exploration, and narrative exploration that doesn't exist as a rule in games. It is of course linear, but the puzzles you complete are inventive and part of the narrative flow in this game. It was an experiment, and no one saw the point with it at the time. Tim Schafer then went on to make action games. ..but the fans would all agree, that when the blimp exploded on the race-track, "Sandspoof was in the lead". :D
..Any other suggestions for the list?
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zippdementia - July 05, 2010 (03:06 PM) Thanks for the mention on the review for Mirror's Edge! I'm not sure I can support Mirror's Edge and Heavy Rain as non-violent games, though. Mirror's Edge features scenes of breaking people's necks and shooting them to shit just as much as it features scenes of running away. And Heavy Rain (while one of my favorite stories in gaming) has scenes of such gruesome violence that I blanched while playing it. These include a man cutting off his own finger, that same man blowing the head off of a stranger, and a woman getting a vaginal exploratory with a power drill. |
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WilltheGreat - July 10, 2010 (02:46 PM) Myst anyone? |
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Lewis - July 11, 2010 (02:18 AM) In the Heavy Rain mould, there's also Fahrenheit (a.k.a. Indigo Prophecy). Any number of excellent point-and-click adventures (and a great number of terrible ones too). The latter Penumbra games and the forthcoming Amnesia: The Dark Descent, from Frictional Games, are survival horror titles but with no combat whatsoever: you run away and hide from the enemies. Various resource management titles. Planescape: Torment is beatable (though very difficult) without killing anyone. Pathologic's beatable only killing a small handful. More. |
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scrapbuks - July 11, 2010 (11:23 PM) i personally prefer games with chibi characters.^^ |
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zippdementia - July 11, 2010 (11:27 PM) Sim City. |
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fleinn - July 12, 2010 (04:30 AM) Mm. It's pretty difficult to find. But Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit, like some other games, at least don't reward you for murdering people at random. ..liked the approach in Alpha Protocol, by the way. If you go on a killing spree, you can just defend it if you want, and the killing will give you rep with different people, and so will how you handle it afterwards. |
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scrapbuks - July 12, 2010 (09:53 PM) yea i agree with sim city.^^ |
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