Unmanned

[axcho]

I just played through this little notgame by Molleindustria, same people who did Everyday the Same Dream:

Unmanned by Molleindustria

Basically an interactive story where you play the role of a character. The game-y part of it are the medals between each scene, like achievements. I didn't pay much attention to them, but I guess they're there to appeal to the more traditional gamer crowd...

Worth playing.

[God at play]

Phone Story kinda left a bad taste in my mouth. I found it useless as a game and was confused why it wasn't simply an animation. It seemed like they distilled an annoying part of videogames down to an annoying essence and combined that with a linear animation.

This, however, is a much more important experience to me! It perfectly illustrates ludo-narrative dissonance through a mechanic itself. It was like they applied directly to the forehead and took the conflict HeadOn.

Personally, I did not enjoy the experience overall, despite my loving the visuals and appreciating the mature themes. Every time I felt I was getting into the world, the scene was over and I received an achievement screen that took me right back out. It was like...the inverse of a cutscene. Why are they so afraid of abandoning the structure of the game? To me, this experience reaks of a fearful creator.

However, as someone who has made experiments that failed in a completely mediocre way, I really admire this because I consider it to be an experiment that failed in the most glorious way. In this game, ludo-narrative dissonance is so clearly both real and a problem in a way I've never seen before. Bravo Molleindustria! If only I could fail this well...

[Chris W]

I played this too over the weekend and forgot to comment.  My feelings are pretty much in line with God at play.  I was quite enjoying the experience, right up until I failed to achieve a medal, and then the entire experience took a turn for the worse as my focus changed.  Even during gameplay the mechanics started to bother me.  For example, when I was driving to work, I drove off the road on purpose to see what happened.  I hoped something interesting would happen, but instead it was just a fail state.  It was like the game was promising something, but it turned out be just game as usual.  On the other hand, I quite liked the effect achieved when you had to play a game on one screen and simultaneously keep a conversation going on the other with just your one mouse.  In a traditional gameplay manner, this would be considered really bad design, but I thought it did a good job of artificially creating a sense of tension and giving you a feeling of the distraction and divided attention that seemed to be plaguing the protagonist.

[God at play]

In a traditional gameplay manner, this would be considered really bad design, but I thought it did a good job of artificially creating a sense of tension and giving you a feeling of the distraction and divided attention that seemed to be plaguing the protagonist.

And it's all the more fitting that his job is videogame-y! This is like the one diamond in the rough of possible experiences where ludo-narrative dissonance makes sense as part of the narrative world.

It's just really too bad about the achievement screens, even if they are on purpose as irony.