Sometimes an experience is all something offers and in the end it’s all something needs to offer. This has been the trend with story-driven indie game walking simulators for the past few years. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter attempts to tell its story in a similar fashion while surpassing its contemporaries in certain aspects and, conversely, failing at being something more than it ought to.
Even in the grand annals of puzzle game history, some of the best games the genre has ever produced have only come about in recent years. The success of major hits like Portal and Portal 2 and deeply mature titles like Catherine have allowed for a sort of second coming in the puzzle genre, a cultural zeitgeist that allowed a game like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons to debut at the perfect time to become a hit.
The Portal series is home to Valve’s most deliberately uneven and deliriously uncomfortable of narratives. The seemingly innocent fun of cutting holes between dimensions and using them to pass tests or accomplish tasks is offset by the brutal after-effects and the havoc which they can wreak. Likewise the witty banter and amusing dialogue of characters like GLaDOS and Wheatley are immediately rendered moot by the homicidal and power-hungry psychological states that each AI shows when challenged or placed in a position of authority.
A festival the likes of Fantasia is not to be tread lightly. For a variety of evident reasons it is a behemoth of an event, lasting far longer than the vast majority of other movie festivals and offering a slew of genre features and shorts ranging from lighter fair some may deem to be mainstream to supremely hard core, provocateur material. As with any event of similar ilk, not everything showcased earns the passing grade.
Naito packages this descent into hell with black humour and disgusting, unnerving visuals that clearly denote the lengths to which Shigeo is willing to go in order to have his way with people. It isn’t just that the live recordings he dispatches are eerie for their content, but the obvious joy the antagonist reaps from putting his victims (both the kidnaped and the sorry souls lured into futile games that never end well anyways) through mental and physical torture. The director finds the oddest ways to infuse humour into proceedings that in the hands of most other filmmakers would be blanketed in an impossibly bleak tone.
It’s interesting to consider how for many of us, games have been growing up with us. Atlus’ Catherine serves as a prime example of this phenomenon. Having been developed by a team who grew and matured as games themselves did the same, it simultaneously reaches much of the gaming audience as they confront the very issues addressed within it.
Despite that fact that the competition this year underwhelmed (see Shane Danielsen’s column) there were sill some pleasant surprises and curiosities that are helping 2010 become another great year in film. Two recent releases premiered over the past couple weeks. Martin Scosesse’s Shutter Island got a mixed response, which translated the same stateside. While Roman …