When should plot justify gameplay?

A little advertisement in a PC Powerplay magazine roused my attention. An outstretched arm donning an exotic device; a grand sea liner at the mercy of this contraption as it is forced through a chronological blender as a mysterious figure, bent on revenge CHRONO-FUCKS a mind bending swath across a godforesaken Russian enclave, charmingly dubbed Katorga-9; wielding nothing but the power of PURE TIME. Singularity had my attention to a tee.

Lol jks it’s a corridor shooter.

Now I don’t have anything against a nice rounded corridor shooter, and as someone who liked Cryostasis, I shouldn’t have anything against anything. A corridor shooter is a blank slate in which elements can be added and subtracted for dramatic effect without having to deal with the wacky antics of an open, sprawling world. Naturally, you would think that something like Singularity, with its time manipulation doohickey would be right at home amongst the comfort of the corridors; a setting in which players can be funnelled through interesting puzzles without the constraints of random events and the need for multiple solutions, in the same vein as Portal. Maybe I was a little disillusioned. I always knew that Singularity would pull the guns on us, but I never thought that they would be the focus of the gameplay, rather a compliment, or a backup to the power of the Time Manipulation Device. See, when I first read into Singularity, I was thinking that it was all going to be about the puzzles, and your interaction with the world, whilst sheathing yourself in the shadows from the thugs that swarm around you, ready to pull your arms from their co-conspiring sockets.

Since that day, Singularity had ducked beneath the radar and slipped into obscurity until the moment when it was released last week. Nobody told me. But this is not important, we could hypothesise all day long as to why they may have concealed their product until its release, but I think it is important first to understand the motives behind its creation, or more so, my loud tangential inferences.

So, why not just make a clever puzzle game? If there has been one story of success relating to puzzle games, then you needn’t go further than Portal. Portal projected its style out masterfully through the gaming community; drawing even the most battle hardened souls into its puzzle-solvery. The game was mature, macabre and devilishly clever, and treated the subject matter with intelligence, knowing full well that it was trying to capture an audience who would rather solve their puzzles by shooting them in the face, yet it never excluded anyone through excessive violence, or conversely, off-putting cutesy art. From my initial impression, I was sure that Singularity would have followed in the footsteps of Portal, crafting its own brand of puzzle solving within a terrifying and bleak setting, but I am wondering if this would work at all.

There is a real issue when games try to implement a certain system that is completely functional and clever in a game sort of way, yet struggles in making itself a convincing part of the game world. Portal was a game about solving puzzles in puzzle environments, yet the fiction was very self-contained. You were trapped in a research facility under the tyrannical control of an AI as it tested you in a series of increasingly challenging test chambers. This made sense; the game gave you puzzles and justified its context through an appropriate setting, however, to do something in Singularity may have proven highly problematic.

Where Portal had its uniform structures and test-chamber context, Singularity is stuck with not a lot more than military facilities, warehouses and laboratories, meaning that their current fiction and plot would have adapted poorly to the use of the TMD as a heavily used puzzle solving device. So maybe they should have changed tack. Knowing entirely that their setting would never justify the concept of a pure puzzle game, the natural progression should have been to realise the extent of their touted resource, and develop the TMD in a way that would allow the player further, and more interesting interactions with the world around them, instead of pouring its abilities completely into the wants and needs of action gameplay. Toying with the balance between gameplay and context could have yielded much more interesting results from Singularity than the time-slowy bullet showery romp that ultimately resulted, but at least the stuck to a context, albeit in a somewhat generic fashion.

To set an understandable contrast, the perilous management of balance was glaringly obvious in Mirrors Edge. One part of Mirrors Edge suited extraordinarily well – the ability to traverse terrain with the greatest of ease – you are, after all a courier who has been raised in the methods of transporting goods from point A to point B. The problem occurs when they have you not only swinging punches, but dependent on guns. This is a situation where the gameplay does not match up to the world narrative, and in this case, the narrative of the particular character of Faith. Faith, although prepared for resistance, has never disclosed any combat training. Martial arts raises less eyebrows as Faith is athletic and presumably the couriers have undergone some kind of training to be competent in their work, so this is somewhat assumed, however, when you have Faith toting a SAW around the rooftops, it carves an inevitable fissure between gameplay and plot. To put it simply, the addition of an element arbitrary to her character has destabilised the character narrative.

So, why does this concept of gameplay being directed by narrative or themes even matter? It’s all about world building; and world building is all about consistency. Although Portal only had a relatively small, linear world; narrative furnished it richly with history and presence, but it didn’t give it soul. What the player saw and felt cast the unique and chilling feeling throughout the world not only because it was well done, but because it was consistent with the story; ultimately creating an incredibly powerful world fiction or narrative. I feel as if I have more to say on this subject, but my point on Singularity has been made. Singularity succumbed to the path of a shooter for reasons beyond me, but it is evident that taking it much further would have raised contextual challenges. The TMD, although suited to a puzzle game, would never work with the setting, meaning that a more elaborate system of play would have been devised in order for it to be not only entertaining, but for it to connect with the story context. A man can dream.

– Miles