kill screen has been commissioning game designers to each build a game around a single piece of music. the newest is boring, santa ragione’s is neat – a driving exploring game. you can travel in any direction you like, and the music will generate an obstacle course for you. the song for this one is too short and repetitive for the hour or so that the game asks of you, though. bennet’s game is pretty, or maybe i just like the song. i think this is kill screen’s only case of the game designer also being the musician.
but jake elliot’s we were you was easily the one that most caught my interest. it’s doing stuff with its soundtrack that most games about music don’t think to do. the music and the game strengthen each other rather than merely coexist. the closest game i could compare it to is reset, but that game and jake’s game have very different tones. if you care about ways we can use music in games that aren’t as uncreative as simon-says rhythm games or as arbitrary as audiosurf, you’ll play both.
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fwiw, I don’t think Bennet was the musician on his game — he was a musician in the band cut copy, which did the song sun god, but he left well before they recorded sun god.
I think every Jake Elliott game I’ve played has had excellent use of sound, and I liked the way he smoothly worked parts of the song into the dialogue — but I kind of hated the song. Oh well.
Santa Ragione’s game has the best song but I kind of can’t tell what’s happening — what do the screens on the right side do? What does the gauge in the top middle mean?
I don’t know what I think of the song, but I found the game inexplicably moving.
SPOILERS I guesss
I loved Jake Elliot’s game — I’ve come back to it twice since this was originally posted. I don’t like M83′s music so much, but this song is now really beloved in my mind thanks to JE’s work. I love the idea that the vague metaphors so common to “Indie-Rock” are only snippets of a conversation, that they are vague because they lack context that is filled in first by Jake Elliot and then in the mind of the listener/player.
My one quibble is that out of the three endings, only the “parents” one felt narratively cohesive, while the other two felt tacked on. The narrative didn’t give the girl a reason to be loyal to the tiger or the mammoth, especially since the mammoth’s distrust of the tiger was never resolved and we never find out about what the girl thought about any of it. Also the gameplay & sound of both fantasy sections is essentially identical. You can’t make a meaningful distinction between tiger and mammoth. The real choice at the end is between fantasy and reality — and the girl could have been given more reasons to choose fantasy.
Or, if there had been some indication in the mammoth/tiger endings of the existence of the parents, that would be fine too. I guess at the end of the game, I’m searching for a resolution to the situation established at the beginning which is “girl and parents are separated”. It’s not enough just to see what happens to the girl.
What a great game to make me write so much.
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