I just spotted this exquisite little game by Adam Saltsman over on Offworld. Fathom starts with blistering chip-core-fuelled platform battling and… well, there’s a little surprise waiting in there, which I couldn’t possibly spoil. It might seem a little confusing, and it is cryptic, but all the clues are there. Oh, just go play it – and beware of spoilers in the comments, please.
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Enjoyable game, even if the mechanics were frustrating in the middle before you realized those limitations were superb foreshadowings. I love some of these better deconstructions of the gaming genre. They get you thinking about our own preconceived notions of winning and habitation in a finite existence with what we believe to be carefully defined rulesets only to take them away and give you something else to play with.
I’m more surprised I caught the relationship the Orpheus myth had on Don’t Look Back and I missed this apparent nod toward an excellent work of fiction. Thanks for some elucidating comments above.
@Xercies I’m really worried you’re being somewhat blinkered again. No matter how you hedge it, you’re looking down your nose at a certain type of game, and that isn’t constructive for anyone.
One other thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the splash screen showing the CPU thing, there are some icons showing that water means death. At first I thought this meant the sprinklers would hurt me, but when I got to the water part it was pretty clear what the level was meant to be.
The fish idea was good, but too much was just arbitrary head-scratchery.
@Lewis:
I appear to be looking up your nose.
…I’ll get my coat.
I thought it was good. A nice little interactive metaphor. You lose and then you die. You just happen to see it in a more personal way this time. Instead of watching your little guy drown, you see what he sees as he drowns.
I really don’t understand the people who are upset that it didn’t fit into their preconceptions. It wasn’t supposed to be a fun little shooter, it was supposed to be an artsy metaphor and not (strictly speaking) a game. It was a huge success in my eyes.
Nice idea but I don’t believe in a no-win situation.
I fucking hate the artsy point that this game is trying to make. No-win situations are the devil. I can accept the bad guys winning but it’s not an interactive game if I can’t find some way to beat it, or at least have my guy survive.
Actually, no, there have been situations in gamings where my character dies as part of the scripted events or plot and I’ve accepted it. I remember this one HL mod called “A night at the office”, at the end of it you have basically three choices- Die alone, die trying to save the other survivors, or live and leave everyone else to die in an explosion. The best ending is going up to try and save the other people, even if you die in the process, just because it feels right.
Also the game didn’t torture me with an aggravating gameplay sequence before going “Yeah, you died pointlessly, game over.”
Wait, you all died?
For me, the boss spontaneously exploded and then several Orion slave girls came down and the screen faded to black.
Guess I’m just awesome.
I thought he had the bends. You rise up too quick and die from the nitrogen bubbles in your blood, which causes you to have delusions about how you got into the water in the first place. In reality, youre in Corfu diving for tropical fish.
Wait, so that’s what the game was about?
Would not have gotten it if it weren’t for rob. But I figured the dead ending was the real ending anyway, considering it was the only conclusion. Going through the last section underwater was also pretty spooky and probably should’ve clued me in as to what was really going on.
But then again I’m an idiot.
The point is, indeed, obscured by the horrendous deep-sea diving gameplay.
Great point, though, if a lackluster execution. The idea of hallucinations and death-throes in gaming are really unexplored avenues for storytelling, outside of the indie world.
SPOILERS:
Another day, another pixel art flash game about the afterlife.
Let’s see, there’s Today I Die, Don’t Look Back, Fathom here, Nekogames’ Underworld Trip… am I missing anything?
Makes me wish for the days when I was sent to rescue a princess and she wasn’t OMIGODSHOCKACTUALLY DEAD!
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, of course. You didn’t really go down, collected fish and solved a puzzle, that’s just what you are imagining as you drown. Beautiful.
Except you’re not clearly having a dream in the moments before death, you’re doing bunch of completely incomprehensible actions in the moments before death.
The fish don’t really lead you anywhere, the triangle thingamajig doesn’t have any clear identity, nor is there any reason for the growing tree or the giant vine door or really anything. At the end, it doesn’t even seem like you’re escaping a watery grave, just that you’re swimming up. Furthermore, it looks like you’re a robot, and there is never any idea introduced that you’d drown anyway.
The whole thing is just rubbish. If An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was never written (or really any story in that vein), this game could not even claim to be a digital interpretation of that idea. Just terrible.
I have a word to describe my experience, and that word is ‘cocktease’. If this is supposed to be AOAOCB, then that last few seconds could be made so much clearer with just a few frames of animation, a final spasm, a fade, the tips of the drills, a different sound effect (maybe a single heartbeat, or heartbeats growing in tempo with the light then becoming arrhythmic?), some falling-spreading rock debris…something. If I have to be told what the point is, the art didn’t work on me. I read it as a non-sequitur explosion and went ‘Wha? Oh, Game You Can’t Win. Nihilism much?’ Also, the Owl Creek Bridge/Brazil twist ending doesn’t work if the things that ‘happen’ are all surreal instead of serving something the protagonist wants.
All that said, top marks for polish, I thoroughly enjoyed the play mechanics (yes, including just tooling around and spinning lazily with the light), duplicating the play area was well fucking spooky even though I didn’t catch The Meaning, and the fish-leading-you algorithm was an inspired inclusion excellently blended in. I felt so pleased when the fishes’ loops got strong enough that I noticed they were leading me, and I was terrified to go in the boss chamber because I somehow knew there would be nothing there and that would be horrific for reasons I couldn’t, er, fathom.
I love Today I Die.
Zeus – I’m sorry, but the Princess is in another castle.
I really feel Zyrxil was right on about this. It was trying to be too deep about something as simple as an old-school platformer, as if taunting, “You’re platforming is meaningless because in the end you die!” It just didn’t work and felt pretentious. I’m not knocking that many of you enjoyed it. I just wanted to say that this is not a step in the right direction for a video game that wants to be art.
That was quite fun under the water, but.. pointless?
I jumped down the first pit to see what was there, apparently an underwater area, but hey! I’ve played platformers before where there’s an underwater bit in the pits, and I’m a robot. Doesn’t hurt, don’t have to breathe (perfectly valid tactic in Hired Guns, folks).
Had a pleasant swim around underwater collecting fish for a while, and having random trees grow and holes open, entered a second underwater area, got to the end and then apparently I was dead.
Um.
Making the second underwater level the same as the above world level would be clever (and is an easy trick – get two levels out of one design), but as I’d only gone a little way in the above world before I jumped in the pit, I didn’t get to it.
Defying genre conventions? Confounding expectations? No – just putting a screen up saying ‘Ha Ha! You Lose Suxxxor’ at the end.
EDIT – Just played it again, and the second underwater level isn’t the same, as it’s missing the pit I jumped down. Also, y’know, why would I be in bits in some water? INTERNAL CONSISTENCY FAIL
So I got to an underwater bit, kept trying to go down, found some fish friends and eventually got bored and gave up.
For what it’s worth, I’m sure it’s my fault and not the game or it’s creator’s.
Yeah, I think it probably seems even more futile if, like me, you fall down the very first pit and only get to see the underwater section rather than the rest of the game…
@Xercies: You find “artsy” intention more masturbatory than a game you just play for the pleasure of playing? I would have thought that even if poorly executed, an attempt at an artsy message in a game is less like wanking than the standard revenge-fantasy plotline, twitch-gamed through to make the numbers go up…
RPS should re-post that video from TIGSource every single day. A game as good as this getting trolled for not being a standard platformer,
Yes, they should definitely have had only the one water opening.
Did anyone else notice that when you went through the opening in the watery bit you end up in a watery version of the level at which you started, and then the bit where you go up towards the light is the bit where you fought the unwinnable boss battle?
Plus, you should always follow the fishes.
All the handwaving and shouting seems to be getting the concept and the execution mixed up – most of the complaints aren’t that’s it’s something different, it’s that it’s something different, done not so well. (Interesting to me that the “standard side-scroller shooter” part is done so well, but the latter part…)
Artsy, “deeper” games with meaning are great, *if* they get across their meaning/story/point, etc. This one failed on multiple accounts. The “jet backward” mechanic was interesting, the “jet backward then rotate around wildly so you can see where the *(%# you’re going – why don’t you point your flashlight forward you twit” mechanic wasn’t. Nor were the “oh, I picked something up, wonder what it is?” and “Something’s rumbling for some reason, guess I crossed an invisible trigger, oh, a giant tree randomly appeared” and later “something rumbling again, finally, but I can’t freakin’ see anything” or the “hmm, going up toward a light, yup, I’ve been dead the whole time, this is the end….uh, I think those parts are supposed to be me? I guess I’m dead…” parts something to praise.
Title screen changes after first playthrough, and I liked the fishies. (But if they were supposed to be a navigation aid, they too, failed.)
“1. boss you can’t beat
2. find fishes
3. find item”
Guess I got bored of either 2 or 3…. didn’t care to keep sticking around swimming in circles.
At first I thought the music track was designed to be more upbeat when you were heading in the right direction, which would have been genius.
“We undermine your typical expectations that because the game hasn’t ended on your defeat, you can still win the game.”
“I see… but what’s the object of the game – what’s the point?”
“The point is that there doesn’t have to be a point.”
“… Sure, if you’re tired of trying to create a compelling object of the game, you can always spin the absence of it is a compelling point.”
“Oop! You got us.”
It was a fun trip, though. Good production all around. To a great extent, that I even found it to be a good journey is in itself a verification it was a good game. It is still a bit easier than the alternative, though.
Well, I loved it. Also, it was just the right length.
I would gauge that you probably have to be in the right mood to enjoy it, though.
I do enjoy reading comments that some gamers cannot deal with a no-win situation.
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