The Machination

You’re 2 levels down a cave that could kill you in an instant, and you see a shiny golden object in the middle of a clear area. You stop, wary: Item or Enemy? Fight or Flight?

Your game-trained cortex ticks off  “Item” and “Trap?” and selects “Pick up” from the vast table of responses you’ve honed over the years. When you drop down and grab the idol the room starts rumbling. “Trap?” and “Boss?”, “Bad” and “RUN” shouts your cortex, and you flee. The boulder that drops from the ceiling and rolls towards you with lethal force seems both surprising and inevitable. Of course a boulder was going to roll out when you grabbed the idol, you mutter to your crushed spelunker. What else could have happened?

It’s shamefully rare for games to confront you with a mystery and force you to figure out how to handle it, but Spelunky does this constantly. It teaches you the basic mechanics, then unleashes you on an environment full of things that act according to rules you haven’t been told. Everything new you meet provokes three stages, in order. The sudden stop and careful assessment: “What is this going to do? How should I approach this?” The careful poke: “Let’s see what happens if I…”  And the discovery: “Oh! Ahahaha!”

What stops it from being frustrating trial and error is that each object is carefully covered in a varnish of tropes. A woman in a red dress, yelling “Help!”; a black altar; a pistol, a compass, and a shotgun, with an old man standing behind them. Clues. These things tap into our deepest ingrained cultural brain-bits, making our cortex scream exasperated instructions over our shoulders. A damsel – maybe I should rescue her. Ah, a shop- I should buy things here. A bloodstained altar? What happens if I put the Damsel on – oh! Ahahaha!

The Binding of Isaac fails at this by making the clues too obscure, the responses too obvious. Picking up a tube of lipstick makes your range go up – but you won’t question it, because you know to just instinctively pick up any items you find. One series of items looks nearly identical, with random effects when consumed – no need to assess, just eat it and see if it the outcome was good. The assessment and careful poking is replaced with blind stabs in the dark.

Spelunky builds itself entirely on these unspoken rules, making itself into an experience of constant experimentation and discovery. Other games- Super Mario Brothers, Majora’s Mask – put their mystery mechanics into side-quests instead, leaving the main quest clear and blatant and the unspoken rules providing mystery around the edges. Both work well, but the latter is easier on newbies; The hardcore players can tangle with the mysteries of the world, while the majority just go about their business in a world full of the strange unknown.

Filling the world with things the player doesn’t understand makes the game seem limitless, full of wonder. Every time the player finds the answer to some unexplained conundrum, they’re filled with a sense of spontaneous joy. The horizon expands. The world peels back. Every rock and item seems like it could hold the answer to an incredible mystery.

And that’s what we’re all trying to do here, right?

The final boss is

the moon.

It’s not rocket science. The game spends all it’s time hyping up this single villain/goal that acts as the centerpiece of everything in the game.

You first see it about five minutes in; It’s above the exact center of the map. After that, you can see it in almost every single level just by looking up. As time goes by, it gets closer and closer – right before the end, it takes up the entire sky. The timer at the bottom of the screen means you feel it’s presence wherever you go, even indoors.

In three days, it destroys the earth, and you are sent back in time. Which means that you have to live through the final moments of the villain winning the game over and over again a hundred times before you get the chance to defeat it. Everything you’re achieving in the entirety of this game is constantly being destroyed by this moon. You can attempt to attack it at any time during the game. You’ll fail. It genuinely feels unstoppable.

Ascending the tower to finally defeat the moon is momentous, but that’s almost beside the point. What matters is how the massive doom foreshadowing has coloured the entire game up to that point. Having your goal laid out to you in the first moments of the game and constantly overshadow you for the rest of it is fundamentally Right.

Here’s the moral of the story: Take the final moments of your game, and stretch them back until every single part of the game is leading to- or at least overshadowed by- those moments. Do this, and your game will have purpose, direction and doom.

The internet’s already covered what Human Revolution does wrong in great detail. To wit, locks you in a room with a guy who can take multiple rockets to the head. Despite that, Human Revolution has one boss encounter that it pulls off perfectly. Spoilers ahead, folks.

You’re jetting to a new level with your pilot when the chopper is suddenly shot down. You bail out and the helicopter crashes in front of you; masses of enemies emerge and start shooting at it as the pilot urges you to run. If you manage to kill them all before time runs out, she lives. If you run or fail, she dies.

Here’s why this is Right:

1. It forces you to use all the skills you’ve learnt so far to the best of your ability. Human Revolution is (at least partially) about taking out multiple enemies with maximum efficiency; this fight forces you to take out a large amount of enemies in a small amount of time.

2. You don’t have to engage with it. You can avoid the fight, or continue the game after failing. The difficulty of the fight feels self-inflicted; you’re doing this because you want to, not because you’ve been forced to.

3. There is a compelling reason to engage with the fight. If you avoid it, or fail, something bad happens to something you care about. Here, a character that the game has been spending the past 15 or so hours trying to make you care about can die.

Honestly, I think every boss fight should do these three things. When you fight the other bosses in HR- or most bosses in any videogame – there’s no tension. You’re not fighting for anything you care about, and there’s nothing at stake but your life (The most worthless thing you own). The fact that failure has a consequence beyond a reload makes it meaningful; You are genuinely fighting for something other than yourself.

I’m not going to say “Write more like Tim Schafer and Eric Wolpaw,” because that’s useless. What I’m planning to look at in this series is simple and clever thematic tricks that more games should use.

So you complete the tutorial and the front door opens to let you into the main hub world – in the fiction, it’s a summer camp. It’s big enough to get lost in, with enough secrets to feel mysterious. The exploration is fun, but the main attraction is the NPC’s; the camp is filled with kids, all having conversations with you and each other. They’re well-written enough to be charming. These same NPC’s are there every time you come back into the hub, always in a different place doing something new. It’s unlikely that you’ll hear everything they can say the first time around. The constant changing of these NPC’s makes the camp feel alive.

At a certain point – the point when a good player has found most of the secrets in the camp – the main villain makes all the NPC’s disappear. He’s stolen their brains. It’s now night-time, and the hub feels silent and empty. As you find the last secrets, it only becomes more hollow.

The inevitable late-game draining of content is played as an emotional punch to the gut. The hub that seemed alive with secrets and possibilities before is now totally mapped out, devoid of content, and dead. The villain stole the content. You have to go rescue it. There’s nothing more for you here; you have to move on, and finish the game.

You’ve fallen into your mum’s basement, and it’s obvious that the only way out is down. Standing in your way are enemies, treasures, bombs and secrets. Here’s the clever bit:

-There are flies and maggots and other annoyances, but every important enemy is a mutated distortion of your avatar. Some are identical, some abstract twists on your most basic shapes. According to the fiction, they’re your brothers.

-As you pick up power-ups, you become more mutated yourself; growing an extra head, a third eye, bulging flesh. The further down you go, the more powerful and twisted you get.

-The final boss is your mum.