In-between updates on what I think about the design process in gaming, I do my own research on what constitutes good and bad game design. Of course, "research" amounts to playing the newest releases for myself, and enjoying the fruits of a developer's labor.
Every so often though, a game I play forces me to take pause...to take a moment of silent contemplation at what I have just witnessed.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is one such game.
Now, I'm not going to spoil what happens at the end; that would just be cruel. What I will say though, is that the game got me to thinking an awful lot about the nature of humanity, and what right humanity has over this world, exactly. Do we have the right to preserve our way of life, even after that way of life has long ago become forgotten and irrelevant?
Let me explain, without being all spoilerific. Enslaved is a game that takes place some 150 years after most of humanity has been killed off by an unmentioned apocalyptic event, most likely a war of some sort. Amongst the few human survivors, most of what remains of the old world of humanity are robotic sentries, or "mechs". They are old war machines that know nothing else but killing, or enslaving, what few humans are left. The human beings these machines are able to capture are fitted with slave headbands that force them to obey the machines' will, or else the headband will kill them.
A brutish loner named Monkey is captured on one of the mechs' slave ships, and is accidentally freed when a young, tech-savvy girl named Trip hijacks the ship in an attempt to escape. Monkey and Trip both escape the ship, landing in the beautiful, forested ruins of New York City. The escape leaves Monkey unconscious after their escape pod crashes into Grand Central Station, but when Monkey awakens, he finds that Trip has affixed one of the slave headbands to his head, and that he is now under her control against his will. Trip tells Monkey that if he wants the headband removed, that he will protect her, and take her 300 miles to the west, to get her back home. Thus begins the pair's "Odyssey to the West".
The game is actually based off of the old Chinese story published in the 1590's during the Ming Dynasty, Journey to the West. In that story, there is the Monkey King, his companion Tripitaka, and their pilgrimage to India. While the video game Enslaved is only loosely connected to the original Chinese story, the game itself tells such an interesting story, and wound up going into a direction I never would have expected.
The destroyed, re-naturalized landscape of an America nearly devoid of human life is captivating, haunting, and utterly beautiful all at the same time. The opening few chapters of the game depict Monkey and Trip's travel through New York City, and all around you, memories and images of the world that once was stand proud and tall, toppled and broken, but covered in life. Skyscrapers that haven't even been built yet in our present world stand emptied and covered in ivy and ferns, with trees having grown out the sides, vines connecting the ravaged buildings into an enormous, green canopy of life. It's beautiful....but sad.
And that brings me to the game's ending, which again I simply cannot spoil. Rather than being what I expected, a gigantic showoff against humanity's common enemy, the entity behind the mechanical destruction of the human race...I found something wholly different. Something that brought me pause, that stole the words from me.
I cannot look at our world, and say with any certainty that if we were to lose our chance to sustain ourselves, that we would really deserve another opportunity to correct those mistakes. What we have is beautiful, it is impressive, it is incredible that we have gotten this far at all...and yet it is all so precarious. If it is lost...then it is lost. The past will be the past, and may best be forgotten. Trying to keep that past alive is a fool's errand...and the best thing to do, perhaps, is to just put it out of its misery.
This game's ending brought that thought to me, that maybe while our present (Which is the game's past) is grand and full of wonder, that maybe it is only a brilliant flash of lightning in the cosmic sense. Maybe all we are is just a flash in the pan, a piece of the Earth's history that is fleeting, beautiful, but meant to die. Sobering...but possibly true.
Can we really sustain ourselves, without the Earth stepping back in due to our failure, to reclaim what was once its own? Do we have the right to sustain ourselves? Are we only delaying the inevitable?
....And they say video games aren't art? HAH!
Seriously, if you have a PS3 or XBox 360, go and buy this game. Now.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Wow, what a game!
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