Posted on: December 10, 2015
Lightwing
Possesseur vérifiéJeux: 287 Avis: 5
Cryptic Storytelling is not Depth
Who is the lady? What happened to her? Hold on.. Who is the dead man? Why is the dead man talking? Do the two of them know each other? What's the Process? What's a Passive Function and how do you activate it? What's Memory and how does it work? Who is Sybil? Who are all the other dead people? Who are the Camerata? Why did they want Red dead? But most importantly: Why should I care? Hot on the heels of Bastion's success comes Transistor, a game which takes the minimalist narrative style of Bastion and cranks it up to 11, so that during the first three hours you understand nothing. I imagine this was done for two reasons. One, because I suspect that the writer, Greg Kasavin, has fallen in love with dramatic, cryptic narration. Two, because the plot is actually incredibly simple and the dramatic, cryptic narration helps stretch the story across 7 hours and to make it look deep and complex. Here is that entire complex plot, revealed in the last few hours of the game: A terrorist group activates a cyber program that goes out of control and starts destroying everything. That's it. Other trivial details, such as why Red was chosen for assassination, are negligible. Both because they are introduced anticlimactically via info-cards and because.. what does it matter? Ico made players fall in love with its characters by conveying their emotions through animation. Transistor opts out of even this. So what are we left with? Environments are beautifully illustrated by Supergiant Games veteran, Jen Zee. Composer Darren Korb creates another wonderful soundtrack, hauntingly sung by Ashley Barrett. The combat mechanics, if you can understand how they work, are interesting in that they allow you to combine abilities in numerous ways. But in abandoning characters that speak to each other in clear human language, Transistor sacrifices characters to love, a story to understand, and a game that feels like a waste of time. Dear reader, go play Bastion.
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