A Step Removed from Reality

As was discussed in the lecture on Tuesday, there is, at present, a trend across mainstream gaming towards more ‘realistic’ level design. Not realistic in terms of subject matter—space marines and super-soldier projects are the go-to for any company looking to make a quick profit, after all—but in terms of style. It’s hard to find a popular game that doesn’t take place solely in grim villages, dark alleys, and shining steel corridors—or maybe the occasional desert, if you’re lucky. In the monochromatic environments that have become so standardised, it starts to become almost novel to see a flash of colour and surrealism. These flashes take the form of games such as Folklore, Psychonauts, and Dear Esther—each utilising their colourful settings to stand out from the drab crowd.

Folklore is a game set in Ireland, where a journalist named Keats and an illustrator named Ellen find their way into the Netherworld. This Netherwold is separated into a variety of smaller ‘netherworld realms’, which are depicted in different ways and form the levels of the game. The first—and arguably the most spectacular—is the Faery Realm, a technicolour forest home to both the spirits of the dead, and a selection of Irish faeries, or ‘fair folk’. 

In Psychonauts, which was mentioned briefly in Tuesday’s lecture, you play a psychic boy, Razputin, as he dives into the mind of the other game characters—one such mind being the mind of Edgar Teglee, a tortured artist, whose subconscious, ‘Black Velvetopia’, takes the form of a black and neon city, full of references to luchador wrestling and covered in beautiful patterns.

Dear Esther is the story of an unnamed man trying to reconcile with the death of his wife, Esther, as he traverses an island in the Hebrides. The island is full of lush scenery, most notably a network of caves, which are bathed in otherworldly light, and covered in glowing blue paintings of atomic symbols. 

However, despite the spectacular and varied environments of all three games, there are still elements of conventional level design in each. Folklore features a desolate world named Warcadia, which as the name implies, takes place in a bombed-out city; Psychonauts begins its tutorial level, Basic Braining, in an army-themed setting; Dear Esther dots its floral fields with rickety shacks and shipwrecks.

Is the choice to add war, destruction and desolation—themes gaming and gamers often equate to ‘realism’—to  these otherwise surreal games a necessary one? Is it simply impossible to create a mainstream game now without tying it into these themes and settings—and if so, why? Is it because the world feels games need to be tied in with our present time, and all the industrialisation and destruction in it, or is it because players simply have an expectation that these things will appear? To those who have played these games—I’m aware that these elements all factor into the plot of their matching game, but with a little innovation, perhaps they could have been avoided?