Two weekends ago I played through The Beginner’s Guide, developed by Everything Unlimited, which celebrated its fifth anniversary just a handful of days later. It was the first time I’d touched the game—a short one hour or so experience—since its initial release. It’s a game where you play as you, the player, who is being sherpa’d through a series of short video game vignettes made in Valve’s Source engine by the voice of Davey Wreden, a real person who came into prominence after the success of the 2013 remake of his Half-Life mod The Stanley Parable, a game which playfully poked fun at typical videogamey conventions, and which is sort of being remade again, or something? With new content? In 2021? If that’s a thing you want, I guess?
These tiny games present within The Beginner’s Guide were all seemingly developed by Wreden’s friend who he refers to as ‘Coda’ for the sake of their anonymity. The two met at a game jam after Wreden became transfixed by Coda’s byzantine approach to game design; works where digestible storylines, clear answers, and logical puzzles & riddles have no home. In order to allow the player to see all of the ‘content’ of the games which often in their original, completed forms would either be impossible or would take an irresponsibly lengthy amount of time to see through, Wreden will often teleport the player or unlock doors or move objects out of the player’s way just to move them along as he regales the player with stories about Coda and his interpretations of why Coda made certain design decisions in their games.
By the end of the game, Wreden suffers a sort of nervous breakdown after showing the player the truth (or perhaps the player is somehow discovering it without Wreden’s volition? It’s not super clear.); Coda resented Wreden for his ceaseless prodding into their work, off-put and disturbed by Wreden’s thirst for answers about his friend and by Wreden’s desire to show it all off to the world either against Coda’s wishes or without their consent. Wreden admits to the player having done some version of this; it is, of course, a choice he makes in order to try and fill some gap in his life. Moreover, it’s revealed that Wreden had also been adding visual iconography to Coda’s games to make them feel more like ‘proper’ art, in particular a lamppost which shows up at the conclusion of many of the games you’re shown which Wreden initially insists were placed there by Coda themself as a sort of way of linking the games together either narratively or thematically. The game ends on an ambiguous note; the player walks through a space which is sort of a portmanteau of a train station and some arcane ruins while Wreden admits to his wrongdoings and comes to the conclusion that he needs to go away and work through his various personal failings.
Due to the vague nature of the story being told, the game became the topic of much critical discussion and dissection. Some took it to be a commentary by Wreden—a game developer who after the success of The Stanley Parable had suddenly found himself the target of a ton of new fans and their adulation—on the relationship between fans and creators in an increasingly online world, a world which brought with it heightened amounts of access into the lives of others whether that level of access is necessarily owed or not. Others saw the game as an open speculation on what ‘art’ is and/or should be fundamentally be about, whether that be purely for the artist’s own catharsis or for audience engagement and the subsequent notoriety that might come as a result of opening up those experiences to others, or some mixture of the two.
Coda and Wreden’s relationship with them is of course a fabrication for the sake of the story of The Beginner’s Guide, a fact which is obvious but which didn’t stop some from believing in the veracity of it. Thus, it’s difficult to prescribe any one meaning onto the game as purely canonical, which is sort of the point; but there I go prescribing a single meaning! And that’s sort of the compelling thing about talking about the game, discussions which at the time were both tantalizing and maddening; playing it can feel like following a path laid out before you to reach some conclusion, only that conclusion ends up looking much like where you started, and you’re not quite sure whether at some point along the path you somehow ended up getting turned around in your quixotic attempt at transcending your current level of understanding The Beginner’s Guide to reach some deeper meaning about it and in turn yourself and the world around you, so you end up attempting to follow that same path again, ad infinitum.
A lot has changed about games, how they’re made, and the people who make them since 2015. More and more people are playing games, especially with the dawn of free-to-play games, and there are more free toolsets than ever which allow developers to make games on their own or in small teams. Often, it’s true that games come about as a result of developers being directly inspired by games made by others. They want to make things which allow themselves to more materially see themselves in the works of others, standing squarely on the shoulders of giants.
Genshin Impact by miHoYo cannot be written off as merely a clone of Nintendo’s classic The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game does a lot different, so much so that it ultimately ends up feeling like its own thing. But throughout my time playing it I can’t not think back to my initial experience with Breath of the Wild which, while itself was absolutely a game inspired by previous open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption, instantly dignified itself by fundamentally rethinking so many of the clichés and values of previous open world games, a genre which by 2017 for many had become exhausting and untenable. Many of the design decisions and audiovisual flourishes contained within that game are so hyperspecific that when you see an image or hear a cue from Breath of the Wild, you know it’s Breath of the Wild. And almost all of these specific details are brought forward by miHoYo into Genshin Impact, from the piano-driven direction of its music to the enemy designs to its color palette to the mob encampments to the ability to climb anything to the glider (except now it’s wings because anime), etc.; it makes me wonder what the Breath of the Wild team makes of Genshin Impact. I’m nobody, but if I saw somebody significantly incorporating distinct elements of my work into their own, honestly…just knowing who I am, I might feel a little jipped. But further psychoanalytical probing on me and my problems will have to wait for a different post on my video game blog.
Perhaps this may come off as a bit strained of a comparison to make, but I can’t help but draw a line from how the fictional Wreden treated Coda and their games in The Beginner’s Guide to Genshin Impact developer miHoYo’s relationship to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Both Wreden and miHoYo clearly see some aspect of themselves in the work which they’re elaborating upon. Where Wreden chose to populate Coda’s games with lampposts to add some strained conception of symbolism and in-depth metaphorical meaning, miHoYo of course made their own game which started with the Breath of the Wild formula as a foundation and added to it the trappings of more traditional anime fantasy, gacha mechanics—wherein players can spend money to roll the dice and possibly earn characters to their roster which they may not have earned yet—and a more typical open-world RPG progression structure a la The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt where you earn experience for your overall rank and your individual characters in addition to finding and upgrading weapons, armor, and different items, where talking to characters doesn’t just give you gameplay information but also adds to your internal understanding of the world Genshin Impact lives within. While the scenario presented within The Beginner’s Guide is clearly painted as perverse, there’s something a little bit insidious to me about what Genshin Impact and soon Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising—another game which has made it a point to bite off significant chunks of Breath of the Wild’s core design tenets, this time with Greek mythology and typical Ubisoft open-world clunkery—are doing.
And maybe I’m making the comparison between Genshin Impact and The Beginner’s Guide up because, well, I don’t really like Genshin Impact (and also because I needed something to write about this week). The combat, nuanced as it is through its emphasis on fusing the alchemical elements just doesn’t kinesthetically click with me. The ‘open-air’ structure (a term coined by Nintendo for Breath of the Wild, wherein the player is allowed to go anywhere and do anything more or less from the word go) doesn’t work as well in a game where you’re essentially gated in where you can go by virtue of the leveling system. Breath of the Wild’s implementation of this world design structure worked because since your only ‘stats’ were health, stamina, and inventory slots. As such, you could just find and pick up a level 60 sword or strong piece of armor whenever and hold your own, especially given that you’ll often find them throughout the shrines which you’re encouraged to play through at any time. In Genshin Impact, going off the beaten path might mean finding a mob of enemies that are 10 levels above your adventure rank, and this happens to me so much that I feel pigeonholed into playing it much more like a traditional RPG where I just follow waypoints and focus less on the game’s aesthetics and worldbuilding. Genshin Impact will even sometimes remark upon the player attempting to visit a location they shouldn’t yet and physically turn them around, ensuring they don’t end up in a precarious situation, which is just bananacakes to me. This sort of thing is the stuff of games! I love to transgress, to go beyond the bounds. That, to me, is part of what makes a life worth living, and games by being virtual spaces are so well-equipped to give players those sorts of experiences. And I don’t like how chatty and intellectually condescending it can be when compared to the quiet, reserved Breath of the Wild (your sidekick Paimon is just…beyond the pale), and the gacha stuff is really off-putting to me as someone who’s just never been into microtransactions in games; that stuff just ejects straight out of what otherwise can be beautiful, engaging worlds I want to get lost in.
Genshin Impact at the end of the day is absolutely not a Breath of the Wild clone or fan game. It’s trying to do its own thing, so I do feel bad for judging what it’s doing too harshly as those aspects relate to Breath of the Wild. But at the same time, since it doesn’t really shy away from the fairly obvious influence, I feel like straining myself to not compare the two is sort of a ludicrous premise. And as a person with my own subjectivity…look, Breath of the Wild is my favorite game. If I could snap my fingers and make every game Breath of the Wild, I probably would (and then regret it seconds later, but). So I sort of have this need to compare the two. Am I then, like Davey Wreden in The Beginner’s Guide, trying to mold Genshin Impact into something it looks like but also fundamentally isn’t all to fill some sort of Breath of the Wild-shaped void in my life? Are my best days truly behind me? Does the toothpaste, in fact, not go back in the tube?
Jury’s out, I guess.
In our increasingly interconnected world, I wonder: who owns an idea?
And now, time for a segue!
Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding is a game I’ve weirdly found myself sinking a significant amount of time into lately. For those who’ve found this blog and somehow don’t know what it is, it’s a game directed by notorious Metal Gear Solid director Hideo Kojima where more or less you’re given directives to bring luggage A to location B across a sprawling, Iceland-esque rendition of a post-apocalyptic America, bringing individuals living subterraneously within isolated prepper stashes onto a central distributed network, thus connecting humans both materially and symbolically. But it’s not easy, because player-character Sam Porter Bridges is a stumbling fool who will trip and fall down a mountain face’s worth of crags if your backpack stash dares to lean one whole inch too far to the left, unless of course you, the player hold the L2 and R2 triggers down together. There’s also these ghost-zombie things called BT’s, which stands for ‘Beached Things’, because there’s this place called ‘The Beach’ where they live, which is where you go after you die but before you’re sent to the real afterlife, so within our world are these echoes of people stuck in purgatory, and they’re tethered to these umbilical cords which connect them to the Beach while they’re in the land of the living, because there’s this whole paternal thing going on with Sam having a little baby in a jar full of amniotic fluid strapped to him which lets him see the BT’s, and if you die it’ll cause a voidout, which imprints a massive crater in the landscape like the one in Akira, and you also build these structures like bridges and set down ladders together with other players which will mutually benefit every player in attempting to traverse the hostile world by their lonesome, and there’s this guy with a mask who talks a lot, and this guy with a mask under a mask who doesn’t talk as much, and the president’s name is Samantha America Strand, and—
Yeah, it’s got some stuff. But I’m mostly playing it as a surprisingly calming ‘podcast game’, wherein I play the game while listening to a podcast or with a YouTube video on in the background (shouts out to Jon Bois and Tim Rogers). I actually played the first four chapters and change worth of Death Stranding back when it first came out in November of last year but bounced off of it hard when the narrative elements present within the game were really failing to land with me in a way that (sometimes) they tended to for me with Kojima’s past games, in particular Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, P.T., and Snatcher. I sort of liked the game’s mechanical structures, but at one point fell down a literal cliff and lost all the stuff on my back and was already not at all into the worldbuilding and storytelling the game was engaging in, so I got really mad and returned it to Redbox (the second to last game I rented from Redbox! The last being Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which, uh, yeah…) and then watched the important cutscenes online and thought they seemed dumb as hell so I felt vindicated in my displeasure with the game and yadda yadda yadda.
So why then have I returned to Death Stranding, knocking out each and every one of the impossibly lengthy laundry list (L) of generic standard orders that are being given to me by hologram facsimiles of B-list celebrities like Edgar Wright and Junji Ito within the game’s third chapter, of which there are four-fucking-teen? After all, there’s absolutely no shortage of games which can be played in comfortable accompaniment to a podcast, TV show, or what have you. Is it because the game’s dystopian ecosystems mixed up with a goofy adoration for transportation workers and a general vibe of positivity in community makes it a whole 2020 mood? Or perhaps it’s more the fact that writers I respect like Lewis Gordon, Reid McCarter, Blake Hester, Tim Rogers (shouts out Tim Rogers) and Caty McCarthy constantly sing its praises and I want to feel like I’m in intellectual lockstep with the smart brigade? Or better yet, is it just that I really like how Death Stranding looks a lot and want to stare at it for 800 hours of my life in some sort of ceaseless blinking contest which I absolutely will be winning, no questions asked?
Most likely a combination of those three which both reflects positively on aspects of the game I was too flustered to see last year and also reflects negatively on my vain sense of self-worth has something to do with why it’s clicking. But I also think Death Stranding is resonating more with me lately because in 2020, miles away from the zeitgeist and Sony’s marketing dollars at work, I’m more able to enjoy the game for its own merits instead of how the game holds up next to my pre-conceived notions of what I wanted it to be. No doubt Kojima himself spurred on those expectations both through his past works (I still would have liked it if this game featured some sort of Sons of Liberty-esque twist, but the plot of Death Stranding is actually pretty straightforward once you get down to it) and particularly through the game’s arduous pre-release marketing cycle which just would not quit, where trailers showed off arcane dark science-fiction concepts and imagery and a naked Norman Reedus on a beach and a guy floating upward toward a giant demon’s mouth while stabbing himself because that would be a better way to go than being consumed by the giant demon and yeah you get the point. After all, for the most part Death Stranding just doesn’t have the sort of big-hype blockbuster-but-for-smarties tendencies which could make it the target of shrewd dissecting (not that there’s nothing deeper to be mined from its well of semiotic symbols; see Reid McCarter’s analysis of the game’s overt allusions to historical wars and warcrime atrocities which America has embroiled itself in as a particularly salient example) But I still can’t help but feel as if 2019-me and much of gaming culture is somewhat indicted in having wanted Death Stranding to be anything else than what it is, even as the game’s launch neared and it became more and more clear what you fundamentally do in Death Stranding which in turn revealed more and more about what the game even is.
Death Stranding, unlike Genshin Impact, is not a game which when looked at and played naturally conjures up an immediate analog to some other game. It has shades of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes/The Phantom Pain in the chunky move and feel of its player-character, the user interfaces in both MGSV and Death Stranding are off-puttingly cluttered with greebles and doodads like a college freshman’s dorm room, and…okay, yeah, the MULE encampments (did I forget to talk about the MULE’s? So they’re literally a bunch of dudes dressed in what I guess is supposed to be hazmat suits but they remind me so much of the cleaners from Monster’s Inc. that would clean off the human sauce from the monsters. Okay, now get this: they are physiologically obsessed with the sensation of delivering packages and subsequently receiving ‘likes’ (which you get in this game from other players (but also NPC’s sometimes? So I guess they also get likes. But not from players, because players are all Sam Porter Bridges, and Sam Porter Bridges and MULE’s are enemies. And MULE’s seem objectively speaking pretty bad, so I guess when you think about it, it does sort of reflect negatively on the NPC’s giving the MULE’s likes. Food for thought.))) are basically a much worse version of the outposts from Phantom Pain, worse because let’s be honest, the combat and stealth in Death Stranding are half-baked, if we’re being charitable. The game has also been derisively compared to outside walk-em-up’s like Firewatch and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. But it feels so much closer to the sensation of dragging our shambling, tenuous husks of skin, sinew and tendons up and over a mountain, much wilder, more human than the amusement park-esque strolls of the likes of Firewatch.
Such comparisons are made in an attempt to better understand what Death Stranding is doing through the lens of things we already grok. But the game simply can’t be seen in that light, if my aside-sandwiches haven’t desperately made clear by now. I've also been on-and-off playing Super Mario Bros. 35, which is literally Nintendo taking a fangame they DMCA'd and spinning it out into a free game on the Switch which probably fits into this piece somehow and would have been smart to incorporate to build upon my thesis, but also it's not that interesting of a game at the end of the day and I don't have all that much to say about it. Death Stranding, on the other hand, is a truly unique thing to have emerged from a sea of AAA gaming also-rans. There’s your cultural commentary for the day.
To try and tie up this rambling nonsense with a neat bow: sometimes you just have be in a particular mindset to find and take something from out of a work as it wants to be seen and appreciated. Maybe in a year once Genshin Impact is built upon even further and more deeply entrenches itself into its own corner of the wide landscape of games I’ll be better equipped to simply enjoy it without needlessly contorting myself to think of it as a stepping stone along the way to Breath of the Wild’s impending sequel. Or maybe I’m like the feral beast that absentmindedly leaps toward prey (video games) without a second’s consideration; meaning that I still won’t like it (I think that’s a metaphor?). No, better yet: maybe I’ll end up like Davey Wreden (the fake one) who just wanted to see himself/myself in the things he/I invest time and emotional energy into. Nature, or nurture. Player, or played. I’d like to think that, as a critic, I won’t succumb to narcissistic self-obsessions or the critical apparatus’ Word of the Day in a year or so when I do revisit it. Art should be allowed to breathe on its own says I, the critic. But then again…
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