if then else

Two kinds of people walk free from the burden of doubt: Ryan Gosling and children. Gosling because, well, whatever, he’s Ryan Gosling. Children because they don’t think; they just believe. They are the perfect representation of life in an ideal world of black and white, right and wrong, life and death. If you give them a reason to believe, they surpass any level of faith and take to it as if it were simply knowledge, facts that anyone could look up and tell you that yes, you are right.

It’s not that children think that there’s a monster under their bed because that would be ridiculous. Why worry about something that isn’t there? No, they absolutely, 100% know that there is a hairy, snarling, drooling, fanged beast hiding just inches beneath them. They know that it’s waiting for them to fall asleep so it can take them away to the darkness and gobble them up.

But they also know that you can make it all better. They know monster won’t attack the one person in the world who promised to protect them. They know that their ratty old blanket is actually an impenetrable armor and as long as it’s with them, nothing bad can happen. They know all these things because they are not a question of believing and not believing but a matter of crystal clear facts, regardless of truth.

Little Clementine, a young 8-year-old girl Lee Everett finds hiding in a tree house soon after the dead learn to walk, isn’t afraid. She’s been up in that tree, hiding and staying quiet, for days now. The only thing she has with her is a walkie-talkie, and that’s how she knows it’s going to be okay. She’s not wondering if her parents are alive; she’s waiting for them to come home, to hold her in their arms and tell her everything is going to be all right. That walkie-talkie is going to crackle and sputter the words “Clementine, we’re coming home,” and no way is she going to leave that behind for anything.

The problem for Lee, then, is two-fold: he’s not a child nor is he Ryan Gosling. Pragmatically, he has to assume Clementine’s parents are dead (given the macabre voicemails) and that this little girl won’t survive without him, so he takes her under his wing, but says nothing about his assumptions regarding her parents. He knows that if you tell a child something, it doesn’t plant little seeds of doubt or inspire bouts of rabid hope. No, you will either shatter their world, demolishing the very bridge they’re walking on, or you rebuild the ramparts. So instead, Lee just promises to watch out for her until they find her parents.

It’s unfortunate, as anyone who has tried to protect someone (from the dark unknown, a shifty stranger, or just the saddening pits of loneliness) before knows, that the burden becomes yours. But it’s not a linear progression, problems simply adding up like a to-do list. These issues compound exponentially, and you are soon faced with the choices that, once simple, are now infinitely more complex. And as this clarity slowly wanders out of view, you can see the toll it takes on Lee as he encounters other survivors. You can see how he attempts to keep a scattered array of pushpins and thread sorted in his mind, how the gravity of his and her collective situation begin to weigh him down to the point of immobility. He can’t make a move because any move is going to be the wrong move, and yet standing there doing nothing could be the worst move of all, but he’ll never know.

Because you’ll never know. All these things going through Lee’s mind are also rattling around yours. In these moments where time actively and visibly passes, you shove out of your thoughts the fact that you haven’t paid your bills or that the person you met at the bar never called you back and you suddenly become enveloped in the stench of the sort of responsibility you only face in a world of undead.

Journey was a distillation of a personal relationship, its base components revealed through limited interaction. A New Day, the first episode of The Walking Dead video game, is society boiled down to its fundamental parts: action and reaction. Everything you or anyone else does is at the expense of your time, the most primary and essential resource, and forces an economy of your seconds, minutes, and hours to attain an ultimate end. But for every expense, you accrue doubt: self-doubt, doubt from others, and a general lack of faith and confidence. Was that the right move to protect Clementine? Is this the wrong bridge to burn? To what end am I expending my only and most precious resource?

I bet Ryan Gosling doesn’t have these problems.

In real life, relationships are complex. In fact, human interaction of any sort is just about the most elaborate intermingling of social, psychological, and physical frameworks you’ll ever see. This is why successful movies, books, and television shows all focus on character growth and personal relationships; people love to see the intricacies at work.

However, these relationships can be molded, contorted into being what we want and, more often, what we don’t want. Through textual mediums such as instant messenger or e-mail, the lack of vocal inflection requires you to be much more deliberate in your diction and phrasing lest you offend someone. Over the phone, facial expressions and hand gestures are lost as your intent is filtered through the wire, requiring your interjecting sighs and chortles to communicate what your physical being cannot.

Take, for (a relevant) example, Call of Duty’s multiplayer voice chat. Without a face to put to the voice, the entire framework of communication laid out by the game effectively forces you to dehumanize your opponents and teammates. To you, they are just a bucket in which you can dump your frustrations, angers, and occasional bits of jubilation. The problem is that this bucket can talk back. It can volley back retorts, obscenities, and racial slurs with the best buckets out there. The rote, mindless action of the game is wholly engrossing, leaving minimal mental faculties for maintaining human decency. This is how you end up with shouting matches and rage quits.

Which makes Thatgamecompany’s Journey’s co-op interactions altogether fascinating. Everything is carefully crafted and placed to the sandy micrometer so as to form intensely personal relationships with what are ostensibly strangers and does so by forming a single, unique combination of two types of players. Although these numbers convey a sense of simplicity, the dependence on one another is as complex as you can find outside of the game’s rutilant sun.

At the most base interpretation of this affair, one person is a follower and the other is a leader (there is the chance that both parties mutually disengage from this enterprise, but that just makes them both a bad leader and a bad follower). Distilling it to such a rudimentary chemical reaction, though, is doing it a disservice. It is symbiotic necessity for mere existence.

As a leader, you must be brave and resolute. You must never falter or doubt yourself; your follower depends on you. You may not know where you are going or what you are doing, but you move ever forward; your follower has placed his trust in you. You can never quit; your follower believes in you.

As a leader, you are the lance that can pierce the unknown. Your intrepidness is the stalwart beam coming from the lighthouse leading you home. You are not a leader because you chose to be but because it was required of you. Without you, your partner is lost, sad, and alone. You have saved him from the gutter and placed him in your warm embrace where you can be the guiding light he needs to survive.

As a follower, you are reticent and reliable. You acknowledge your leader’s strength and ferocity but never question your own; you are the foundation upon which this relationship is built. You trust your leader because he trusts you; your leader would be nothing without you. You can never quit; your leader needs you.

As a follower, you are the armor that protects from the unknown. Your unwavering commitment is the boat you two will ride to shore and safety from the dangers of the turbulent sea. You are not a follower because you chose to be but because it was required of you. Without you, your partner is lost, sad, and alone. You walk by his side as the fuel to his fire that you both cannot live without.

Journey reduces multiplayer to one of the most basic types of relationships two people can have, but they’ve rebuilt it into one of the most maddening, heart-wrenching, enigmatic examples of beautiful codependency you’ll ever see. It doesn’t matter if you are the leader or the follower; applying those labels diminishes the significance of your relationship. You are one half of a whole. Without you, this gestalt does not exist.

Every emotion I’ve ever had for a sibling, a friend, a lover, or even a stranger I have felt playing Journey. By finding the bedrock upon which all other relationships are built, the game allows you to fill in the gaps with your own experiences and desires, whether you are aware of it or not. Some of you may be turned off by the blank emotional canvas presented to you where all the brushes are already dipped in affection and fellowship, but perhaps that is because you lack the trust to be a follower or the strength to be a leader. You are not playing your role for yourself. You are playing for this unknown person, this stranger that will become your light in the underground, this stranger that will become your fire on the snowy mountaintops.

This stranger that will become a physical necessity.

I could hear the hollow bellow from above. Even over the unrelenting, roaring wind, I could hear it.

I could see the white-hot gaze just ahead. Even through the snowy, sideways haze, I could see it.

Against it all, I prayed I was safe. I prayed we were safe. “Oh god oh god,” I heard myself mutter over and over again, waiting for the terror to pass, huddled in the shadows of this rocky remnant. I turned to my companion.

But he was gone.

Tracks laid were he once stood. Following with my eye the path he now foolishly plowed, I could see him out in the distance. Darting back and forth between him and the skyward beast, my eyes could only attempt to communicate what my voice could not.

“Hey! Come back! Come back!”

It was pointless. The howling winter gusts swallowed my fevered pleas. But suddenly, the empty stare from above turns aggressive, rutilant. My words disappear. My stomach drops.

I begin to step out into the biting air. “Oh god oh god.” The feral creature begins to screech, leering back, preparing to strike. “Move faster! Faster!” I begin to run, dragging my feet through the knee-high powder. “If I can just reach him…” Unfinished thoughts rattle through my mind, unfinished because the ending unfathomable. Inevitable.

My scarf trails in the pale storm, flapping and twisting in the wind. It marks the path of a fool, a sap. Then, the fiend lurches forward, cutting through the frozen air with a searing, unknowable hate.

He collapses. I reach out.

Closer it comes.

He gives up. I refuse.

Screaming in, faster and faster.

He waits for his end. I touch his arm.

And to think, I didn’t even know his name.

Meeting strangers is like playing pachinko. Each time you meet a new one, you are dropping them into your own game of interpersonal fortune. You watch them, sometimes subconsciously, trickle down the ornate and noisy pegboard, bounding around, clinking and clanking from side to side until they come to a sudden and resolved stop.

Will they fall into your good graces and become a friend? What if they fall off the board completely and a stranger is all they will ever be? Tumbling and turning, they are as curious as you.

It’s awe-inspiring, then, when you come across an occasion where those transients you meet during your endeavors take a straight, unwavering path to a reserved and guarded place within you. They cut through the swath of pins and quickly arrive at somewhere much more intimate.

Such as it is with Journey, the latest release from artsy developers Thatgamecompany, and it is a grand experiment in pure, uncut game design. There are no spoken words, no exposition with which to tell you how to interpret the world around you. The title itself is all the instruction you need.

Everything is designed to move you forward. From the way you ski down the sandy dunes of the desert slopes to how the game has removed any possibility for negative progression, this game is about the journey. Even with the multiplayer, they have eliminated any opportunity to grief.

And I truly believe this game was made for multiplayer. Every conceit and every design minutia is put in place to foster a bond between two strangers. Communicating bolsters your flight; being in close proximity provides a warming heat of golden light; and your meditative transitions are positioned to show you are only one half of this experience.

The choice to prohibit voice and text chat while online is a bold and powerful one. You may not realize it, but just hearing how someone sounds or seeing the words they choose informs you with an immediate and everlasting impression.

Journey, however, lets you fill in the gaps for yourself. With no voice—just a melodic chirp to convey intent—you are free to turn that warble into whatever you desire. Every little peep told me a tale of joy in cooperatively conquering a puzzle or filled me with great despair as we both realize our journey has taken a turn for the worse. There is a gravitas you can create yourself that you could not do so otherwise with text and dialogue.

An intimate and familiar relationship is formed. An unqualified kinship develops universally and immediately. I had become frustrated with my companions, even hated them at points, but never did I want to leave them. Their inability to keep up was endearing, and their need to constantly move ahead before I was ready was misguided (or perhaps misinterpreted) concern for making sure the way was safe for us. The struggles we faced were our own and we would overcome them together.

Journey is altogether and simultaneously the most exhilarating, most terrifying, and most bewildering experience I’ve had in such a long time, and it is a triumph in every sense of the word. There are moments of pure, abject fear that froze me in my seat. There are moments where I felt as free and flowing as a bird on the wind.

There are moments where I knew I was playing something special.

You wake up on a train. You notice it’s not moving but neither are you. A wave of pain hits you as you try to stand. Looking down, you see blood. A lot of blood.

Your blood.

You can see outside the broken window and see that it is snowing, but something is wrong. You start to come out of your daze and sort out what you’re seeing, but suddenly, a crate and then a barrel come flying by your head toward the back of the train. As they burst through the door, revealing nothing but emptiness below, your seat begins to give way. You scramble for more solid ground, but you know you are in trouble; this train is going down with you in it.

You fall through the car, rattling around like a Plinko ball, and eventually fall through to the railing just beneath the door. You are now dangling from the rear of the train, the very end of the line at the sheer face of the cliff. The mystery of how you got there takes a backseat.

You move, but it hurts. You climb, but it’s slow. You jump, grab, and clamber about, but you are dying. You are dying, and no one is there to watch.

You are watching two men walk down a dark English street. They enter a surprisingly lively pub where there are men drinking, talking, and, by and large, looking like thugs. This is because in almost caricature-like fashion, they are thugs. English thugs in a pub drinking beer, working the thug beat to ensure an underhanded dealing goes in the favor of their employer.

This is entirely new, what you’re seeing, but it’s still very familiar: two finely dressed cohorts are lead surreptitiously by meaner-looking men to a rather dapper and well-spoken gentleman. Apologies, introductions, brass tacks: it’s all above-board in the action adventure heist genre.

In the most dramatic and fore-telling fashion, a double-cross is revealed; the fellow with the tie and the British accent is screwing these two charming fellows out of money, an ostensibly valuable ring, and their well-being. A few quips and now they’re fighting, bar-style.

Every action is game-like, just as every movement is exaggerated and almost comical; bashing a fellow’s head with a cue stick, being dragged facedown across a bar and out a window, and throwing down with three confused but equally hostile foes upon landing are almost to be expected and soon after actually happen.

There is never any real gravitas here. It’s apparent from the outset that these two men, despite one’s advancing age and the other’s cheery disposition, are more than capable of handling themselves against these pawns (and the clichéd brute). For every hit they take, they are ready to deal three more until they make their way to the back alley for their less-than-ideal escape, but not before one last encounter with the bad guy.

Some storied banter leads to two implausible deaths; implausible because these are the leads. For all their trials and labored tasks, they cannot die. Their progress is forever locked in step towards the end of this story.

You are either the hero or the spectator. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception took a step backwards from its predecessor and put you back into the role of an intervening viewer. You went from the natural reveal of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves where all your knowledge grew with Nathan’s through the game’s diegesis and the impetus of waking up on the train with a commensurate amount of confusion to simply observing another action fantasy. I’d much rather be the guy who saves the world than watch the guy who does it.

Even if I am dying.

If you aren’t familiar with Dishonored, that’s all right because I wasn’t either. All I knew heading into my QuakeCon demo was that it was a first-person shooter from Arkane Studios and there may or may not be rats. While both of those things are true, there is a whole lot more to Dishonored that just Schrödinger critters.

Indeed, Dishonored is a game that takes place in the first-person perspective, but it is less of a shooter and more of a mixed action stealth game. You play as a “supernatural assassin” and are far more capable of inflicting pain than dealing with it. The natural recourse of this characteristic is stealth, and it is here in spades.

It has been most aptly described, I believe, as BioShock meets Thief meets Deus Ex meets Half-Life. When I first heard this, I thought that sounded a bit convoluted. That’s a lot of greatness to cram into one game (unless they meant it as merely the intersection of just the bad stuff from those four games, in which case oh sweet crikey). But as I watched more of Arkane’s cofounders Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio playing through Dishonored, I got it, and boy do I want more of it.

The demo starts off pretty simple with just some minor side street exploration and explanation of the game’s story and the mission’s objectives (to find and kill a lawyer). As I said before, you are a supernatural assassin, but you, as Corvo, actually used to be a bodyguard. That is until you are accused of murdering the Empress, the person you were hired to protect. Corvo claims Lord Regent framed him, but not many people are willing to buy your story. This bit of history will be explored at some point during the game, but not in this mission.

If you can’t tell by now, there is a heavy Victorian era influence on the game. I want to call it steampunk as there are some seriously modern elements to the world of Dunwall, but as not only do the developers want to avoid that label, it also seems that Dishonored doesn’t go far back enough into the retro half of the steampunk genre to make it fully fall under that banner. Generally speaking, the visuals are where I draw the largest similarities to BioShock, especially BioShock Infinite. The colors are rather vivid and there is a lot of contrast in its palette.

The game also seems to play somewhat similarly to BioShock 2. You can dual wield weapons, though your sword is always bound to your right hand whereas your left is free to brandish firearms, blades, and spells. A power wheel comes up when you want to reassign powers and weapons and looks very much like when you want to reassign your plasmids and guns in BioShock. The way button prompts for looting and contextual actions are also very similar, but I supposed there are worse things to borrow from.

We are soon shown a dead body where a bunch of rats are munching down. This offers a chance for the developers to show off some of the new lighting tech they’ve brought into the Unreal Engine and explain that the world has come under a rat plague that has killed off half its population. Rats flee from light, so once it is introduced into the scene, they scatter and we carry on.

This is where we begin to see some of the dynamic movement available to the player which definitely reminds me of playing Thief games. You can lean around corners and mantle ledges and whatnot and that rooftop access is always an option. From what I could see, though, some actions were based on controls such as press right bumper to lean or something, but others were just button presses to climb on top of this dumpster. This was never clarified as to what was and what wasn’t organic to the controls and what were contextual sequences mapped to the action button.

We proceed to come across a lone guard on the street and quickly take cover. When in hiding, white streaks will come across a certain radius of the player’s central vision and show from which direction people might be coming from and how much—if at all—they are alerted to your presence. They quickly and quietly take him down and dump his body in a nearby dumpster so as not to alert any other people who might wander by.

Walking down an alley, they spot a woman in dire need of help. Three thugs are assaulting her and Smith explains that many things like this will happen during your missions where you can choose to accept and engage in side quests or not. Whether you succeed or fail or even try or don’t will all have an impact on the mission and possibly the entire story. In this particular case, they choose to intervene and we are shown our first taste of combat.

They equip a pistol and a sword and step into the alley. A fire flickers against the back wall and lights the scene nicely, providing very dramatic ambiance for the ensuing battle. As they maneuver Corvo around the enemies and take pot shots, it is immediately clear that the firearm is fairly sticky in its aiming; just come close to an enemy with the reticule and it will do its best to keep its sights trained on your foe. This, along with later action sequences and ammo provisions, gives the impression that certain encounters will definitely play out more favorably with close quarter’s weapons with the ability to parry and block enemy melee attacks whereas others are more geared towards fighting from a distance and using your powers to gain tactical advantage over entrenched enemies.

The final bad guy is dispatched with a brutal decapitation. The woman offers her thanks, but is soon devoured by a swarm of rats. What a rough day.

We then begin the task of actually breaking into the mansion with its inhabitants unaware. When hidden, a bit of text at the bottom of the screen will come up and say [hidden] so you won’t have to wonder “can he see me? He probably can’t see me…oh god he can see me!” Smith and Colantonio then explain the game’s use of “3D audio propagation.” What this means for you the player is that audio dissipates and bounces accurately across elements in the game world. So if someone is walking through a hallway ahead of you, you can tell if he is coming from the right or from the left and how far away he is from the entrance.

Corvo is then impeded by the mansion entrance. Rather than go in guns blazing (always an option) and giving the target a chance to escape, they choose to instead go stealth, but not in the way of crawling around and hiding in shadows. Instead, they show off a new power where you can possess other living creatures. In this case, they take control of a rat and crawl through an air duct and into an empty room.

They have to make it quick because this is not just mind control; this is full body inhabitance. This means that when the rat dies due to being stepped on or falling down a hole or something, you also die along with it. This also means, however, that when you cease possession of the rat, you are then wherever the rat is, hence the empty room.

After hiding from a couple more guards in some dark shadows, they discuss guard AI. The AI in this game is totally dynamic, so you can’t just count on memorizing patterns and counting down passes to get by. While I’m sure some of it is predetermined, there is also that element of randomness where a guard may meander a bit or get distracted by a painting or go warm himself up by the fire.

At this point, we’re told we’re approaching the guard with the key to the room that the lawyer is holed up in, and that if we were to fail to obtain the key, the mission could then branch of in several ways, including him running for it, having to find an alternative way in, or the mission turning into a firefight. In this case, they end up killing him and picking up the key and proceeding to the lawyer.

Things get physical rather quickly, but given that Corvo has several special powers at his disposal, it all ends up in his favor. First, we are shown that though the rat plague could harm the player as well, we do have the power to summon them to attack enemies. Then they use a time freeze power at which point they can freely move around the space to brutally attack the opposition at their leisure. Lastly, they use a wind blast technique that is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It actually most reminds me of the blast powers in the Infamous series (though, to be fair, it also looks like a dozen other games with this sort of power such as Skyrim).

During the battle, there are a couple things are somewhat meta to the game but totally organic to the world as well. The first is a chaos meter, which is the duality gauge of the game. It is not a morality meter like other games but rather a pure reflection of your impact on the amount of chaos in the world. If you keep killing people in an exceedingly irresponsible manner and fail to hide the bodies, you will increase your chaos meter significantly. On the other hand, if you manage to remain stealthy and keep the peace in the streets, the chaos meter will begin to drain.

Based on how chaotic you are as you complete mission, the story will change. It could be as small as certain side quests or avenues to your target are not accessible or have your mission dynamically chang objectives or could be as big as changing the outcome of the entire game. Needless to say, chaos is a very large part of Dishonored.

The second part is adrenaline, the usage for which we experienced earlier in the alley with the three thugs and the woman. Adrenaline is a constantly charging resource and can be used to great effect when you find yourself in a bind during battle. We’re only shown it being used offensively (the decapitation in the alley and here with another gruesome kill in the lawyer’s office), but it may also have other uses. They never really found time to clarify in the heat of battle.

Back to the mission, though, Corvo uses a power called blink which allows him to teleport to places ahead of him and does so to get from the upper levels of the mansion where the lawyer is down to the streets where he can make an escape. Unfortunately, a siren has sounded and guards begin to descend upon our hero.

Using some more powers and some gunplay, he eventually makes it through a portion of the guards and the courtyard to his escape point, but soon comes to a slightly more open but still hostile dock area that really makes me feel like we’re in Half-Life 2’s City 17. This feeling is soon reinforced as two large Tallboys—giant bipedal robots—come into view and begin attacking. He eventually takes them and a couple additional guards down after some ingenious usage of combined powers and weapons and the demo ends.

In the following Q&A, the developers point out some elements that were easy to miss or dismiss without knowing what they were. At some point during the demo inside the mansion, they had picked up a rune and some blueprints. Runes are collected and spent to upgrade and unlock new powers. More powerful abilities cost more runes, so it falls on the player to decide if they would rather have a wide variety of powers or utilize only a select few exceptionally powerful skills.

For the non-supernatural upgrades for your weapons, you can use the money you earn and find as you complete missions. Weapons will have their own upgrade tree where stats and abilities become more powerful and unlocked as you progress further down the tech tree.

Someone then asks about the nature of your uniqueness in the world of Dunwall. Smith and Colantonio confirm that there are indeed other supernatural characters in the game (such as the mysteriously named Outsider), but they are kept very secretive from the rest of the world. Most people are completely unaware that there even is such a thing as real magic. In fact, at some point during Corvo’s escape from the courtyard of the mansion, an enemy yells out “aggh! Witchcraft!” at the sight of you performing a wind blast.

Next comes up a question of how free players are to explore the world. As the designer for Deus Ex, Smith is all for exploration in every sense of the word. There is nothing truly off limits from the player as, if you want, you can attempt to get anywhere you can see including rooftops, sewers, or what have you. This continues into the usage of powers, too, as they all combine nicely through both design and happenstance.

During play testing, they discovered that players were combining powers in unexpected ways, like using the super jump and the blink abilities to quickly scale buildings that would otherwise prove too difficult or impossible to climb. Other players discovered that they could easily stealth into hidden paths by summoning a rat swarm, possessing one, and climbing through a gutter. A few more hostile testers even discovered that you could attach bombs to these rats before you possess them so you could hand deliver a deadly explosion to a batch of enemies before fully engaging in combat.

Next came up the topic of the game’s structure. While you do have a home base you return to between missions, there will be “absolutely no open world” as each mission (and thus environment and its accompanying predicament) is “handcrafted” to the story and the context of your plot progression. They are very much impressing the fact that while the flow of the game is open to the player and reactive to your actions, scenarios within missions are specially established beforehand to really fit the zeitgeist of the world of Dunwall and your place within its history. This, consequently, means that there will be absolutely no multiplayer in Dishonored.

After having heard so little about Dishonored and yet enough for me to feel like I wasn’t going to entirely like where it was headed, after this demo, I feel excited. You can definitely feel where the pedigree of its designers came from (Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis) and also where the influences came from (Thief, BioShock, Half-Life), but none of it feels overly done. Certainly elements here and there are very reminiscent of those games in sometimes vague, sometimes specific ways, but there’s a certain cohesive feeling to it. So far, it seems that they took all the good parts of those games, left out the bad, and are attempting to make an altogether new and impressive game. Expect Dishonored on your PC, PS3, or 360 sometime in early summer of 2012.