People prefer to play violent video games than ones that ask you to explore a family's past through the trinkets of an empty house, or uncover the mystery behind a community's disappearance by following spirit trails to clue-laden locations. A new title in an established FPS series, had it come out the same week as Rapture, would have obliterated it. "Big dumb stupid shooters"-your Call of Duty, Far Cry, and Halo games at their best, your Duke Nukem Forever-style wastes of everybody's time at their worst-are the most dominant dominant power in gaming, though. And games are getting closer to that point." In the same way, when you start to read a book, you can decide what type you want, what content. Not every game has to do everything, and it's OK to have games that are just big dumb stupid shooters. I am massively obsessed with Far Cry, but I can also play Proteus, or a Tale of Tales game, and I have that choice. The greater spread of experiences available to you, the better. "More diversity can only be a good thing, in any medium. "I've never really paid much attention to the people saying how Dear Esther is 'destroying gaming' or any of that crap," Pinchbeck says. Personally, though, I enjoy these relaxed adventures, which often feel more personal, more intimate of atmosphere and lingering of impression, than anything where the sole part of "you" on screen is a hand with trigger finger primed. They've become a divisive breed of video game, and I understand where people who don't like them are coming from, especially when there is no real element of challenge to proceedings. These are everything the DOOM clones aren't-steadily paced affairs, mostly with nothing trying to kill you, and definitely no body count targets for the player to meet to guarantee progression. Head over to Steam and "walking simulator" has earned itself a category, collecting together (actually very different) games like Beyond Eyes, Sunset, and Among the Sleep. People loved the mod, so we made it as a game."ĭear Esther is a quintessential example of what some gamers like to call a walking simulator, as that's really your primary interaction-you walk your (unseen) character onwards, to interact with objects and 'unlock' more of the story, in an order that the game's makers are not determining. So it never was a conscious thing, to 'change gaming' or anything like that. " Dear Esther started as a research project: If you rip out all the traditional call-and-response gameplay, and just have a story, is that going to be something players are still into? And that was it. Dan Pinchbeck, founder of The Chinese Room, told me a little about that mod-that-became-a-game. He's a FPS fan, but when discussing the current state of independent video games-the scene, the community, that's helped to make the likes of Rapture a relative hit-he began to draw parallels between today's non-mainstream releases and what might have been had a certain other game of 1993, Cyan's danger-free first-person puzzle title Myst, been a greater influential force on what commercial gaming became in the following years than id's seminal slice of digital ultra-violence.ĭear Esther actually began as something of an experiment: a shooter without the shooting, in a way. What sort of world would we be living in, and what kind of social media circus would we be a part of, had violent shooters not become the most popular genre with the releases, in the early 1990s, of id Software's Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and, more pertinently, the same company's incredibly successful, genre-defining first-person shooter (FPS), 1993's DOOM?Įarlier in 2015 I spoke to Sean Murray, managing director at Hello Games, the Guildford-based studio currently finishing the endless outer space epic No Man's Sky. I really liked it, though I can also see its flaws (limited replay value, more unremarkable characters than not, no real puzzles to speak of, those identical boozers), and playing it made me wonder what the gaming landscape would be like if this sort of release were more the default than the exception. Rapture is a quiet, meditative game, one that doesn't force its story upon you but lets it unfold in an order the player determines, by wandering the verdant hills and village halls, lookalike public houses and abandoned homes of a small corner of rural England. A screenshot from 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture'
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