Rick Lane steps into some surreal game worlds that attempt to go beyond the usual fantasy and sci-fi escapism.
The aim of so many popular games is to provide escapism, a way to escape to a fantasy land or science-fiction universe that often looks and acts in a very realistic way. Achieving that realism an understandable ambition, but it's also a limiting one. After all, games can also symbolically depict our own world, visually realising abstract ideas and concepts that our own world and civilisation generate.
Moreover, when level design is decoupled from escapism, it can be used to create worlds that are truly alien, going beyond the logical constraints of realism. In this article, we’ll explore a couple of games that challenge the notion of environmental design and how it’s used.
The most striking recent example of this non-traditional approach to environment design is the puzzle game Mind: Path to Thalamus, which sees you exploring the dreams and thoughts of a coma patient. It immediately engages with its environment design, demonstrating a powerful visual experience and a deft artistic hand. Interestingly, however, Thalamus’ environments were developed in an emergent process ratherthan an intentional one.
'The first thing to understand is that gameplay should rule over all, so the story is there to provide a context for the puzzles,' says Carlos Coronado, lead developer on Thalamus. 'Not a single level was designed as a landscape or as a storytelling device before the puzzle had been already sorted out.' Coronado further explains that the coma concept didn’t come about as a way of making a point, but because it allowed the developers the most creative licence. 'We didn’t have to constrain ourselves with cliche fantasy or sci-fi environments,' points out Coronado.
Thalamus’ environments may evoke images of films such as Inception, or the work of artists such as Salvador Dali, but Coronado’s owninspiration was rather different - the novels of Stephen King. In The Dark Tower saga, he describes the landscapes as infinite and mournful, but not hellish, apocalyptic or in ruins. It's just mournfully relaxing, if that makes sense. Beautiful but desolate. I was blown away by that,' Coronado enthuses.
The sedate bleakness of Thalamus, particularly the early mindscapes, was also inspired by Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni - the world’s largest salt flat. 'The minute I saw it, I knew I wanted to recreate a similar environment,' says Coronado. This attitude is very different from those that govern most mainstream games, whichtendtowards the bombastic in terms of architecture or landscape to generate awe.
While most of Thalamus takes place in surreal environments, the introduction to the game is very much set in the real world. Indeed, the location for the game’s beginning is a real place, the Menorcan coastal village of Playas de Fomells, which again is a very unlikely setting for a computer game. It also sees the player in the path of a rapidly encroaching tornado which sets a very different tone from the rest of the game. 'I wanted an environment in which the sight of a tornado seemed as strangeand out cf place as possible,' Coronado says. 'It was tricky to get it right, since the tornado can’t actually kill you if you just stand still. Creating that sense of danger that doesn’t actually exist was all a result of playing with the lighting and objects flying around.'
Aside from its beginning, though, Thalamus never tries to convince the player that its world is real, and even in those initial stages, there’s asense of unreality to the proceedings,with thealien presence of the tornado acting as a springboard to the eerie mindscapes that follow. Ineschewing an escapistreality, Thalamus becomes a far more thought provoking experience, allowing both player and developer to dispense with the need to be convinced, and instead explore other subjects, ideas and feelings.
Many of the themes explored in Thalamus are also shared by Tangiers, an open-world stealth game set forrelease in early 2015. Created by Alex Harvey, Tangiers brings together a wide range of influences under one banner, from games such as Deus Ex and System Shock to the literary works of William Burroughs and JG Ballard. The influences are disparate, but not disconnected. 'They all inhabit a similar space,' says Harvey, with all of them being 'rooted in counter culture, aconfrontational or off-kilter approach, satirical, tongue in cheek and often part of a family tree rooted in the 1920s Dada movement'.
Tangiers’ game world changes in stark and strange ways depending on your actions, and language can be used as a weapon; words can be plucked from the environment and thrown down to make traps and distractions. The action primarily takes place in urban environments inspired by industrial brick slums of the 1940s and 1950s, and the concrete and glass structures of the later brutalism movement. These choices, Harvey observes, were inspired by their social implications - egalitarianism and architectural arrogance. 'It was a result of a lot of overarching theory on function and human use, and the goals to create a utopian society. If you look at how the various tower blocks and estates have ended up today, you can see that the goals and theory were completely and utterly wrong.'
Tangiers isn’t intended to offer a grand social message but to convey emotion, and a sense of confronting and challenging what we accept as normal in game design. At the same time, though, Harvey wants the game world to feel consistent; not necessarily believable or logical but, as he frames it, organic. His approach' parallels Frank Lloyd Wrights 'philosophy of organic architecture', he says, using 'visual and design motifs that repeat and evolve through an area, being attached to our central concepts but heading in directions attached to, sometimes contradictory, points of reference'.
Making a game that’s simultaneously organic and surreal, and that changes its level design depending on player action, is a tricky prospect. 'Our work flow starts off with asking questions about the overriding themes of an environment,' explains Harvey. 'Does it involve a heavy useof verticality, is it very forwards-movirg, or do we drop the player in the middle of an area and leave them to explore? We answerthose questions with a fairly bare bones build, the "skeleton" of the map, and let it grow out from there.'
Tangiers is an ambitious project from a small developer, but Thalamus shows what small developers can achieve now. The proliferation of indie development has been happening for years, but row we’re seeingthat diversity combine withbiggerideas and more powerful tools. The gaming universe is set to get a whole lot more complicated, with some very strange worlds indeed.