Weaving a Story — Heavy Rain and Ergon Logos

This year, the city of Leeds was lucky enough to host the Northern arm of the Eurogamer Expo 2009. As Leeds is conveniently located inside the jurisdiction of the provider of my bus pass, attendance was a no-brainer. I’m not what you would call a hardcore gamer, but my interests in video game theory and technology more than qualify me to leave the house for this.

Now, I’m particularly interested in the idea of the video game as a storytelling medium. (Which explains why I spend so much time and money on visual novels. The attractive female characters are just a bonus.) At the expo, I got the opportunity to play a wide variety of games, two of which caught my fancy in regards to the use of story.

One game that I was lucky enough to have a go on was the upcoming Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3, a cinematic “game noir” (if you don’t mind me coining a phrase). Many attempts have been made in the past to give one the experience of playing through a motion picture, and, by watching the following videos, it would seem like Heavy Rain, with its high-definition film-grain effect and meticulously motion-captured cast fresh from the uncanny valley, is the closest we’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, Heavy Rain works much better when someone else is playing it than it does when one plays it for onesself. The control scheme, in particular, is a large point of contention. The character is controlled by the right trigger; pulling the trigger makes him walk/run/tiptoe, and steering is accomplished via the left thumbstick. As you can see in the above video, this takes quite a bit of getting used to.

Sometimes, little icons appear on screen, corresponding to the PlayStation controller’s bizarre, unintuitive circle, square, ecks and triangle buttons or gestures to be performed by the right thumbstick. In itself, this isn’t particularly innovative: these little actions have become known as “Quick Time Events” (no relation to Apple’s QuickTime technology), and they formed the basis of early “interactive movies” such as Dragon’s Lair (a game which Heavy Rain director David Cage has downplayed similarities to). Perhaps a more apt comparison would be the Shenmue series; heavily story-driven games with a plot that develops through both interactive cutscenes and event flags scattered throughout the world. Of course, Heavy Rain’s “sets” (read: levels) are on a much smaller scale than Shenmue’s wide, open explorable environments, but that’s entirely the point: the intent is to give the player the full movie experience but still be in control.

But what really impressed me about this game was the potential for plot branches. These two videos show only one direction for the story to take. As I watched others experience the demo, I saw many other possibilities. And these are more than just changes in dialogue; in this one scene, the developers programmed many different possible ways to distract the robber, calm him down and reach the scene’s conclusion. In my playthrough, I accidentally knocked a bottle off of a nearby shelf. According to another report that I read after the event, it’s possible to pick up this bottle and knock the robber out.

In the video you see above, our hero talks to the robber, eventually convincing him to leave (I love how the shakiness of the options represents the character’s inner nervousness), but this was not one of the outcomes I saw at Eurogamer. If you can’t get him to calm down, the player must attempt to wrestle the gun from him. I managed to get shot in the shoulder, but my character seemed fine and the outcome was the same in the above video (only with a slightly broken shoulder). But if the shopkeeper is shot, a similar but significantly different scene plays out as Scott is given the vital clues with the shopkeeper’s final breath. Same outcome, but more dramatic. And though I may complain about the controls, one can’t argue that they don’t feature some interesting idiosyncrasies; in the above scene, the player must continuously hold down both shoulder buttons to keep their hands up. (If you don’t manage to keep them up, you still get the “shot in the shoulder” ending.)

It’s plain to see that an enourmous amount of work has gone into Heavy Rain. I just wonder if it’s all really worth it. Yes, it just may be a true interactive movie, with engaging characters and a plot (based on what little we know of it) that seems decent enough. But the demo that I played had significant problems that may not be fixed by release date. I speak, of course, of the controls. Even if you have full control over your character, there’s not much point if you’re going to be limited by control scheme and set (again, level) design. From a gameplay perspective, it may as well be a string of choices and dexterity tests for all the difference it makes. I’m hoping that I’ll be proved wrong, but it seems like Heavy Rain will soon join the ranks of Fable Ⅱ, Shenmue Ⅱ and every Telltale Game ever made as an experience that sacrifices gameplay in favour of its story.

Which brings me to an example on the other side of the technological scale — and, unlike Heavy Rain (with its tentative February 2010 release date and PS3 exclusivity), one that you can play right now. You see, in the building opposite the show floor, they had set up a nice little indie section, featuring developer talks, 3D gaming demos and a selection of expensive-looking computers running Flash games.

One such Flash game was Ergon Logos.

An extreme counterpoint to Heavy Rain’s high-definition three-dimensional graphics, Ergon Logos is entirely text based. (And no, it’s not what you think.) Reading through its first act, Ergon Logos clearly sets out to be a Braid-esque deconstruction of the classic Super Mario story (princess kidnapped, hero saves her) told through the medium of interactive kinetic prose, but, as creator Paolo Pedercini says, ”it fails miserably and becomes a piece of non-linear kinetic visual poetry written by a teenager obsessed with post-structuralist French philosophy. I don’t,” Pedercini adds, “know exactly what I was thinking.”

Regardless of original intent, what has been created here is, accidentally or not, a deconstruction — an interactive critique, if you like — of the visual novel medium. Let’s put aside the story and look at the delivery. The narrative is presented in a line. The line has various twists, turns, right-angles and about-faces and, every so often, the player is given a choice between two or three directions in which the story can take. All the while, the story is moving at a constant, linear pace, unbroken by pauses or mini-games of any kind. Remind you of anything?

This, I argue, is a novel game in its purest form. Along the way, the player (reader?) is given glimpses of other possibilities for the story, whether the option has already passed or has yet to be. I am reminded of Ever17 (which I admit I have yet to reach the true ending of) and its tendency to show the player shadows of the results of other plot choices within its narrative. In some cases, it is possible to get stuck in an infinite loop, and, while none of its eventualities can be considered a “true ending”, one may feel as if one has hit a dead end at times. At one point early on in the second act, you are given the same option twice at once, going in opposite directions. Just what is one to do? Only through replaying the experience can one see all that there is to see, but Ergon Logos is not designed to be “completed”. It is designed to be read, experienced and to challenge your idea of what makes a game. Even if it ends up doing something completely different.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you play it for yourself a few times. Ergon Logos is free, Flash-based and should work in most major web browsers. I recommend, however, that you close everything else and start a new browser session, if for no other reason than [SPOILERS AHEAD] one of the game’s many endings will deliberately make it (and possibly your computer) crash. But it’s art. So that’s okay. ㋼