digitallydownloaded.net magazine #1: the unreliable narrator

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Issue 1 • February 2016 • digitallydownloaded.net

The Unreliable NarratorDon’t believe everything you’re told…

elcome to the first issue of Digitally Downloaded, a brand new take on the games magazine.

Sure, you’ve probably heard promises of “reinventing games journalism” before, but frankly, games journalism isn’t what we’re really about here.

Rather, we’re about games criticism.

As the games biz has become more diverse and sprawling over the years, it’s become abundantly clear that the online games press, as it exists in 2015, simply isn’t well-equipped to adequately analyse and criticise everything out there.

The timeliness and speed of coverage which the online audience has come to demand and expect doesn’t lend itself well to in-depth explorations of games – which is a shame, because there’s a growing number of titles from all over the world with as much depth as indisputable “works of art” in other media.

That’s where we come in, then.

Here at Digitally Downloaded, we’re believers in the concept of games as art. We’re champions of titles that are overlooked, misunderstood or unfairly maligned by the mainstream online press. We delight in exploring not only the games that have the biggest marketing budget and all-encompassing PR campaigns, but also those that fly under the radar, even as they tackle ambitious themes or experiment with audacious mechanics.

And if you’re reading this, you probably feel the same way.

Each issue, we’ll be exploring a specific topic in detail, through features, opinion pieces, interviews and reviews of games both old and new. We’re kicking off with a favourite of the team: the use of an “unreliable narrator” to tell a story.

On behalf of all the team, thanks for joining us on what promises to be a wild ride!

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In this issue

Letter

Editorfrom

the

Digitally Downloaded 1

The TeamLetter from the EditorThe Unreliable NarratorMeet Danica DeeReview: Everybody’s Gone to the RaptureReview: ContrastReview: Deadly PremonitionReview: Steins;GateThe Back Page

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Editor-in-chief/Publisher: Matt SainsburyPrint Editor: Pete Davison

Art and Layout: Pete Davison, Hamza Ansari

digitallydownloaded.net

For advertising enquiries, contact [email protected]

For editorial enquiries, [email protected]

2 Digitally Downloaded

UnreliableNarrator

the

by Pete Davison

o you believe everything you’re told, without question?

Of course you don’t. To do that is to encourage, at best, ignorance and at worst, disaster.

And yet when it comes to storytelling, a lot of us are inclined to take things very much at face value.

Things aren’t always that simple, though.

Sometimes people don’t tell us the whole truth.

Sometimes people lie to us.

Yes, even narrators; those people we implicitly trust to be our eyes and ears as we experience a story for ourselves.

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The use of an inherently unreliable narrator to act as the focal point and often even participant protagonist of a narrative is not a new practice.

While the term “unreliable narrator” itself was coined as relatively recently as 1961 in Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, the practice itself is much more well-established in literature – and even in other media such as film, theatre and television, too.

In fact, examples of characters acting as unreliable narrators can be found dating right back to the Classical period, with scholars such as William Riggan believing the very earliest surviving example of an unreliable narrator in literature to be Pyrgopolynices in Plautus’ comedy Miles Gloriosus: a vainglorious soldier with a habit of exaggerating his own achievements in an attempt to make himself seem more important and special than he really is.

Miles Gloriosus was itself based on an earlier Greek play called Alazon (The Braggart) in possibly one of the world’s earliest examples of a “reboot”, but no copies of the latter survive to this day. Regardless of where the first instance of this literary device actually was, it’s been around since at least the second or third century B.C.

And there’s a reason it’s still in popular use by many authors and storytellers today: it’s a fabulously engaging, interesting way of expressing a narrative. It keeps the audience on their toes, it encourages them to question and explore the things they’re told, and in many cases it can add a great deal of personality to a character. In the case of first-person narrators, the audience is in the uniquely intimate position of “riding along” inside the character’s head while they either go about their business (in the case of stories

written in the present tense) or relate tall tales of their past exploits to anyone who will listen.

Riggan, in his 1981 work Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs and Clowns, suggested that “unreliable narrator” was not, in itself, a specific enough term for the device, and instead, concentrating specifically on examples of first-person narrators for his hypothesis, posited that there were, in fact, five distinct types of unreliable narrator in common usage throughout literature.

The Pícaro is a narrator characterised by excessive self-confidence, bragging and

oftentimes outright lying about his achievements. Plautus’

Pyrgopolynices is an example of this archetype, but

characters such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull very much fit this definition, too. In the world of games, good examples include characters such as the elderly King Graham in The Odd Gentlemen’s 2015 revitalisation of

Sierra’s King’s Quest series, and at times

participant narrator-protagonist Okabe Rintarou

from Steins;Gate falls into this category, too.

It’s worth noting that the Pícaro isn’t necessarily malicious in his exaggerations and bragging, nor is he necessarily attempting to use this character trait as a means of getting something he wants. In King Graham’s case, for example, his tall tales are embellished somewhat for the sake of his excitable granddaughter Gwendolyn, though being a bright young thing, she quickly recognises what he is up to and frequently calls him on it. This leads to some entertaining banter between the pair as Graham attempts to slip obvious lies past her, though part of the joke in this instance is that Graham’s adventures are fantastic and exciting enough even without embellishment.

The Unreliable Narrator

Riggan’s second unreliable narrator archetype is the Madman. This is defined as a narrator who exhibits some manner of mental condition, often – though not always – post-traumatic in nature. Schizophrenic and paranoid characters are among the most common examples of Riggan’s Madmen, and case studies in literature include Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho alongside numerous Kafka protagonists and the deeply cynical, world-weary narrators of noir and hard-boiled detective fiction.

In gaming, we see the Madman quite often, because games make it easy to play with their audience’s perceptions, and that’s a key part of making the Madman work as a storytelling device.

There’s an inherent suspension of disbelief in games that was originally the result of technological limitations and the acceptance that it was simply impossible to replicate “real life” in interactive format, but as technology has advanced and it’s become possible to make virtual worlds look, sound and act more and more realistically than ever before, that suspension of disbelief has remained, and it allows talented writers and designers to mess with their audience, who, more often than not, find themselves inclined to take the things they’re interacting with literally.

Max Payne, a game explicitly inspired by hard-boiled and noir fiction, is a good example of this at work. Max is wracked with guilt and a veritable bevy of neuroses as a result of the guilt he carries around with him over the death of his family.

While the game starts as a relatively realistic-looking third-person shooter – albeit one where the “bullet time”

mechanic arguably pushes us slightly towards Pícaro territory through implication, since it allows Max to pull off clearly superhuman feats while appearing to be, for all intents and purposes, a “normal” human being – as the narrative progresses we find stranger and stranger things happening as a direct result of Max’s mental issues.

And yet, as players, we don’t always question what’s going on right in front of us. “Oh, so it’s a weird level where we’re following a trail of blood over a bottomless pit to the abyss while Max’s dead baby cries in the distance,” we think. “I wonder if there’s anything to shoot.” It’s clear that this sequence isn’t intended to be taken literally, but for most players, we don’t stop and question why it’s happening. We just work our way through it – and perhaps let out a few curse words every time we fall off and have to reload – before continuing on with the story. And so the Madman takes hold quietly, without us realising it, until you reach the end of the experience and, upon reflection, find yourself pondering just how much of it was “real” in the first place.

The Silent Hill series plays with this concept in various ways, too – though in a more subtle manner than Max Payne. Most of Silent Hill’s protagonists are “damaged” in one way or another, either through past trauma that they’ve suffered, or in some cases through guilt over their past actions. In each case, the very town of Silent Hill and its apparently otherworldly denizens take on forms and behaviours specifically designed to provoke and upset the characters. It can be taken at face-value as a story about demons and monsters – and indeed both

the original Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 run with this – but the series is at by far

its most interesting in its second installment, where the

town acts as a reflection of the protagonist’s personality and neuroses; we learn a lot about James from his experiences.



Riggan’s third archetype is the Naïf, a character who exhibits immaturity of some description – be it the result of mental immaturity, perhaps through illness or disability, or simply by being a child

The Naïf is by definition the least malicious of all Riggan’s unreliable narrators, since in most cases they’re not necessarily lying or omitting information – they simply don’t understand what it is they’re attempting to describe.

Examples of the Naïf in literature include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, and Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump. Their naïveté sometimes gets them into trouble, while at others it allows the audience – who, in many cases, are missing a lot of “context” regarding what is going on in the characters’ lives – to relate to them more as they learn things alongside the narrator.

The Naïf is an interesting concept to apply to video games, because in many games we’re placed in the position of a character that already has a place in the world, but it’s left up to that character to describe and explain the context of what is going on, where they are and what they’re supposed to be doing. If that character is unable to do so, we’re dealing with the Naïf almost by default.

And then some games deliberately don’t tell the player what is going on or give them any context whatsoever – even, in some cases, going so far as to make the protagonist completely personality-free. In this particular circumstance, the player themselves becomes the Naïf, particularly when recounting tales of their exploits to family and friends.

Good examples of this particular technique being used can be found in titles like From Software’s Souls series, which in pretty much every instance throw you into their worlds with very little explanation or context, and expect you to figure things out entirely for yourself..

In a more literal sense, we most commonly see more conventional examples of the Naïf as an actual narrator in Japanese visual novels and role-playing games, since many of these focus on a feeling of “coming of age” and self-discovery.

This journey the Naïf embarks on can take many forms, ranging from Tidus coming to understand his relationship with his father by battling Sin in Square Enix’s Final Fantasy X to Makoto realising the demure, sweet, innocent girl he’s had his eye on in School Days isn’t all she seems – and neither are the other women in his life.



The fourth breed of unreliable narrator, according to Riggan, is the Clown. As you might expect, the Clown is defined as a narrator that deliberately plays with the story they are telling, either for their own entertainment or the amusement of their audience.

The Clown also plays with conventions and the reader’s expectations, and indeed in some of the most well-known examples in literature – Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy being the one that springs most readily to mind – the entire work narrated by the Clown can be a bewildering experience to traverse due to how willfully it disregards established conventions of prose.

The Clown is also sometimes used as a narrative device to comment on things without fear of reprisal. In the 1881 Brazilian work The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, for example, the titular protagonist narrates his life experiences from beyond the grave, including criticism of modern Brazilian society. Essentially having all the time in the world to tell his story, he flipflops through time on a whim rather than telling the story chronologically, making for a somewhat chaotic read.

It’s perhaps a little more difficult to find outright examples of the Clown in video games, since for the most part storytelling in games remains largely linear in nature and somewhat attached to established narrative conventions. There are exceptions, of course;

David Cage’s Beyond: Two Souls flits back and forth through the chronology of its protagonist’s experiences seemingly at random, for example, though given the subject matter and overall tone, this is not really a Clown at work.

There are a few instances of the Clown being used, though; Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, for example, includes a narrator with a broad Creole accent who frequently comments sarcastically and cynically on the protagonist’s (and, by extension, the player’s) often misguided attempts to solve the mystery in which he finds himself embroiled.

Interestingly, Gabriel Knight’s narrator is not a character in the story itself, so she is able to retain a degree of detachment from what is going on, and comment on it accordingly as an “observer”. The juxtaposition between her often flippant commentary and the relative seriousness of what is happening “on stage” is very entertaining, and gives Gabriel Knight a unique feel, even among Sierra’s other interactive, narrated adventures of the era.

Perhaps the best example of this, though, is King Graham in the recent King’s Quest reboot. Deliberately playing with his narration to entertain his granddaughter, Graham acknowledges his own flaws and the inherent ridiculousness of “adventure game logic”, yet even his dry remarks about just how many times he uses the axe item in the first episode don’t feel particularly out of place in the context of the narrative: it’s simply part of his personality as a mischievous old man.



Finally, then, comes the Liar who, as the name suggests, deliberately provides the audience with misinformation. Unlike the Picaro, the Liar isn’t necessarily doing this to inflate their own ego or make themselves seem more important than they are; unlike the Clown, they’re not embellishing the truth in the name of entertainment. No, they’re just lying, more often than not to obscure something they did in the past.

A frequently cited example of this in literature is Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. In this work, the participant narrator John Dowell describes a series of events that the reader will gradually come to notice have a number of inconsistencies with what they had been led to believe in the book’s introduction.

In the case of The Good Soldier, Dowell’s lying is intended to get the reader thinking about numerous things, filling in the blanks for themselves. Did his friends really commit suicide after a complicated string of affairs and adultery, or is Dowell just saying this to cover up his own involvement in the matter? The book is never explicit about this, making it somewhat open to interpretation and debate.

It’s a little more difficult to find examples of games that

outright lie to their audience, but they do exist, with perhaps the best-known example being Silent Hill 2. Here, protagonist James Sunderland comes to the town of Silent Hill on the pretense of meeting his wife, who died

some years previously. His journey through the

town – which he seems to experience literally – is actually a metaphor for working through his own guilt at how he treated his wife in her twilight years: a truth we discover in the game’s latter hours.

Then there are games that make lying into a central mechanic. Each individual case of the Ace Attorney series, for example, hinges on the player and protagonist being able to spot inconsistencies in witness testimony based on what they know about really happened. And David Cage’s Heavy Rain can be played in a completely different way once you’ve learned the truth about one of the characters.

Deliberately misinforming the audience can be a powerful narrative device, and really, all these types of unreliable narrator are about misinformation to one degree or another – whether it’s exaggeration, obfuscation, dismissal or simple misunderstanding.

Unreliable narration forces the audience to think about what it is they’re engaging with, and to make up their own conclusions about what is going on. It can be a great vehicle for characterisation, particularly if the narrator is a participant in the narrative, and a device which can create some truly memorable experiences.

We often inherently “trust” games to tell us the right thing to do or what is happening in front of us – and indeed, up until relatively recently many game narratives have been fairly literal, intended to be taken at face value, playing by set rules. As the understanding of how to use the interactive medium as art develops, however, we’re starting to see more and more creators experimenting with how they tell their stories, with the inevitable conclusion being that we should perhaps not believe everything we’re told... DD




DanicaDee

Meet

by MattSainsbury

’d like to introduce you all to a very special someone. Danica Dee (Dee Dee to her friends) is Digitally Downloaded’s latest gun reporter, our new Japan

correspondent and she’s already whipping us into shape!

At just 18 years of age, Dee Dee’s already an expert in everything to do with Japan. She’s travelled the country from the northernmost reaches of Hokkaido, right down to the southern tip of Okinawa. As a specialist in all things to do with pop culture, she’s good buddies with Hatsune Miku and the crew at µ's. And she does a little modelling on the side. Talk about multi-talented!

She’s also right into her games, and especially loves JRPGs such as Hyperdimension Neptunia, Atelier, Final Fantasy and the Trails series. Speaking frankly here, that’s probably why we recruited her...

You’ll be seeing a lot more of Dee Dee in the coming weeks and months as she journeys around, doing her reporting thing for DDNet. She might even just kick in and do a modelling session or two for us. We hope you enjoy having Dee Dee around as much as we already are! DD

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Everybody�s Goneto the Rapture

Matt Sainsbury

The Chinese Room, 2015PS4

ust how much can you trust what you’re seeing when you have no idea who you are? This is a question core to the narrative of Everybody’s Gone to the

Rapture, and that makes it one of the finest examples of the unreliable narrator that we’ve seen come out of game development to date.

In basic principle, in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, you’re experiencing an apocalypse that has taken the entire population of an English country town. As you explore the village, you experience fragments of memories from the previous inhabitants in their final days that help you to piece together what went on. Your only guide through the world is a glowing ball of crackling energy that, should you choose to follow it, will walk you through the narrative from end to end

(you can choose to ignore the light ball and explore on your own terms, but that means you’ll either miss fragments of memory, or you’ll experience them in a different order – not that this is a problem, from the way the game is set up).

But the reality of Rapture is that you can’t be entirely certain on what you’re witnessing. The game plays out in first person, and at no point are you aware of who “you” are meant to be. “You” have no voice, no personality, cannot interact with anyone or any thing beyond following that ball of light, and there’s no real sense of physicality about “your” presence in the world – you can press a button to listen in to recordings over the radios or through the phones that are scattered about the place, but there’s no

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sense of interactivity about what you’re doing; nothing you do is reflected in some kind of manipulation of the environment.

In other words, Rapture is a fascinating case of game narrative because your experience of it happens from outside of when the narrative actually happened. The plot is the people of the village living out the final days of their lives. You’re simply experiencing that second hand and in a non-participatory manner.

It would be easy to suggest that this is simply a consequence of the game playing “you” as an omnipresent observer; not actually part of the world, but a “witness from above” or, if we were talking about a book, the authorial voice – a “God” that dictates to the audience what they see and observe.

But this raises a series of questions in itself. Firstly, it’s difficult to accept the notion that this “God” – you - have no stake or position in what is going on. The glowing ball guide is clearly a force of malevolence, crackling angrily as players draw near to it. You eventually find out what that ball of light actually is, and it’s sinister stuff.

So why are we encouraged to follow it? Or accept the fragments of memories that it leads us to as an accurate representation of

what happens? We have no other way of verifying the facts as laid out for is in those fragments. The fragments themselves tell us a story of some very flawed human beings. “Trust” is a resource we should have in short supply and we’re not meant to be taking what we see for granted; there is always the hint that there are other things going on behind the scenes that we’re not privy to.

Furthermore, the information that we need to find to understand the true nature of the glowing ball is buried away in voice recordings and radio messages that the ball does not actively lead us to. If we are the observer, and the ball is the effective story delivery mechanism, then it’s a compromised one, which in turn compromises “us” in our investigation on what is going on.

The English village itself is another clue that perhaps not all is not as it seems in this particular vision of the rapture. It’s a serene, beautiful, peaceful world that is almost completely devoid of any sign that humans ever lived here, beyond the presence of buildings, vehicles, and bridges. There are no bodies anywhere in the world, for example, which, given that everyone died, is odd. There are indications that the people were perhaps not well – bloodied tissues abound, for example, but aside from the most mild of

Everybody�s Gone to the Rapture


indicators that not everything is right, we rely almost entirely on the memory fragments to confirm for us that everyone is dead.

But, as we’ve just discussed, the fragments of memory are fragmented enough, and the reliability of our guide to them questionable enough, that that’s not a particularly reliable source. If we were real detectives we would have giant question marks sticking over the lot of it. We’d need more information to form a complete understanding of the picture. More information that we’re never provided, precisely because Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture doesn’t want us to know everything. Half the fun is in coming up with theories about it.

So, how does all this relate to the concept of the “unreliable narrator?” Beyond what we’ve discussed, Rapture makes it difficult to figure out who the narrator really is. Is it the glowing ball of light that we’re meant to follow about the place? Because if it is it’s deliberately trying to lead us in a way that obscures the whole picture and is therefore unreliable.

Is it perhaps the memory fragments that we experience along the way? They could well be seen as narrators as they are re-enacting dramatic scenes for our benefit. But these fragments, by definition, are not whole and

therefore cannot be considered reliable sources of information. At best they’re guides for us to start an investigation. They cannot be the investigation itself.

Or is the narrator of this whole game the third party “God-like” observer – us? It would seem to be the most likely candidate, given that the order in which we experience the narrative is up to us, and therefore the linear experience of Rapture is determined by what we do, and that casts us as the storyteller. But if that’s the case, how can we rely on what we are effectively telling ourselves about what is going on when at no stage are we given enough quality information to build a valid sense of the timeline and characters that we’re experiencing?

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture might well be a “walking simulator” and thus devoid of the blockbuster thrills, gunplay, and explicit narrative direction that people typically respond well to, but its subtlety, intelligence, and depth of narrative make it a game worth studying. Much like how, if you take literature classes, you’re going to be studying the most important books. Not necessarily the most entertaining ones. And the more you try and unpack and analyse Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the more insightful, engaging and rewarding it becomes. DD

Everybody�s Gone to the Rapture


Contrast

Matt Sainsbury

Compulsion Games, 2013PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One

ontrast is an appropriate title for a game in which the central motif, both in terms of visual and theme, is the deep, indistinct black of a shadow that is

placed against the bright and faintly horrific world of a classic noir fantasy.

And, because we as players control a character that exists solely within the world of the shadow, we can never be quite sure of what is going on. This is where Contrast’s mystery and fantasy comes from, as it asks the question that if we are only an observer in a story, can we really rely on the idea that we’re seeing it with any objectivity?

In Contrast, we play as Dawn, a mute mime-like being who doesn’t exist in the real world. Rather, Dawn is an imaginary friend of the game’s real (and non-playable) protagonist, Didi, and the bulk of the game involves following this little girl around and solving puzzles so that we can uncover the mysteries of her broken life.

Didi comes from a disadvantaged family, with a lout of a father that finds himself in trouble with a group of gangsters over money, and a mother that is strongly implied to be doing seedy things at a gentlemen’s club in order to make ends meet. Didi is portrayed as being almost tossed to a side, left to her own

devices and without parental support or assistance, even when desperate circumstances arise.

But we never actually see any of this happening. Just as the outside world cannot see Dawn, she cannot see the outside world. The only way she experiences events is in

witnessing shadows representing the other characters. The only other person

she sees is Didi herself; a clear demonstration that we are, in

effect, only experiencing what Didi wants us to experience, through her eyes.

This theme is further reinforced when we try and move too far from the next immediate objective that we are being driven to through Didi’s movements. Though the city environment that we’re

given to explore has all the implications of a city

the size of a metropolis like Paris from a century ago, if

we stray too far from Didi’s own movements we encounter a

twisted vision with the streets and buildings warped to the point where we

can no longer travel down them.

Similar to how Silent Hill and other horror games lock us into an area by turning the very environments against us when we try and act with free will (i.e. the “get me out of here” response), so too does Contrast punish Dawn for breaking away from Didi’s actions

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by blocking her progress and forcing us, as players to turn back.

And, while Contrast is certainly not a horror game, the core narrative is a deeply unsettling story about the impact that a broken household has on the psyche of a child. Seeing the world as Didi sees it, we’re presented with an overwhelming sense of decadence from start to finish. Following her around we witness over and over again tragic events as Didi experiences something terrible happen to her family, while the other participants continue to show minimal concern for her own wellbeing. Like a brightly coloured nightmare, we’re never meant to feel quite comfortable while we play Contrast, because the idea of this indirect child abuse and neglect is meant to tug on our own maternal or paternal instincts… even as we can’t do much about it directly, because we are only in control of an imaginary, physically powerless, mime.

This sense of unease across the game should also leave us questioning what is going on through the adventure. We rely on Didi entirely to tell us the story. We rely on her leading us to the right places and the right times to be able to help her family through their troubles. But, as a consequence, we have little understanding what is happening outside of Didi’s narrow focus on the world.

Furthermore, because we can only see what is going on in the outside world through shadows played against light, nothing we see outside of Didi herself is more than an indistinct blob of the absence of colour. Too many gaps are left unfilled and to the imagination to be certain that what we are

seeing is in any way related to an objective truth of what is going on.

Consequently the story of Contrast remains widely open to player interpretation. With most of the roles within the game being, literally, shadowy voids to be filled through imagination, it is difficult to see Didi’s story as in any way holding objective truth. Much like in Hamlet, where the narrative is so

dominated by a single character that it is impossible to understand the

reality of those around him, so too are we constantly

reminded that Didi’s perspective on events is

that of a child, looking in to an adult’s world.

Indeed, it’s difficult to even understand the character of Dawn. As a mute, and with only Didi to interact with, it’s debatable whether Dawn’s role is that of the genuine benefactor or imagined security blanket. Depending on

your interpretation, Dawn could well be

something more sinister then that, as she could

represent a sign of a degenerating mental state

within the mind of a child that is seeing things that it should not.

Contrast, then, shows us how artists can use the unreliable narrator theme to turn normality into something fantastic. By presenting the world through the second-hand vision of an unreliable non-playable character, we are invited to see a hyper-real world of perceptions. What we’re left with as a result is an invitation to question everything, and that uncertainty makes for a game that is far more engaging and lasting in the mind than the much more common literal and straightforward narratives that argue that what the player sees is meant to be interpreted as reality. DD

Contrast


Deadly PremonitionAccess Games, 2010Xbox 360, PS3, PC

Pete Davison

eadly Premonition is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing – and strong evidence that creator Hidetaka

“SWERY65” Suehiro is one of the most intriguing video game auteurs out there, taking a well-deserved place alongside Hideo Kojima and Goichi Suda.

Deadly Premonition is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least of which being the fact that it’s far from the best example of the various genres it straddles – adventure game, survival horror, open-world exploration – and yet remains compelling nonetheless.

Deadly Premonition tells the distinctly Twin Peaks-inspired tale of Francis York Morgan, an FBI agent sent to the sleepy town of

Greenvale, Washington to investigate the gruesome and apparently ritualistic murder of a young woman.

It very quickly becomes obvious that not all is as it seems in Greenvale, and that a lot of the characters know significantly more than they initially let on to York when he first encounters them.

You get your very first indication that something very strange is happening right at the outset of the game, when York is apparently pulled into a Silent Hill-inspired “otherworld” and confronted with strange and terrifying creatures. And this strangeness only continues as the case proceeds: Greenvale has a very peculiar population, and it’s going to take a lot of investigating to get to the

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bottom of what happened to the murder victim – and indeed what is still going on in the town even as York continues to explore.By far the most intriguing thing about Deadly Premonition is York himself. It’s immediately apparent that there’s something not quite “right” about York, but it’s difficult to pin down exactly what.

Most of this strange feeling comes from York’s frequent dialogues with “Zach”, whose identity isn’t revealed until the latter hours of the game. In the meantime, York’s conversations with the silent Zach, at times, appear to be addressed directly to the player, and in a somewhat unusual tonal shift from many narrative-centric games, which tend not to acknowledge real-world phenomena unless the story is explicitly based on them, York frequently has in-depth pop culture discussions about subjects like the Back to the Future series.

This huge amount of characterisation that York gets throughout the game is reason enough to not take advantage of that mainstay of open world games: the fast travel function. Indeed, the fast travel function is locked behind a series of sidequests initially, so at the outset you have no choice but to manually walk or drive to each location you need to investigate, and during the drive, York is inclined to chat with Zach. So entertaining are these exchanges that even once you unlock the ability to fast travel, you’ll still find yourself driving in real time just to hear what he has to say next.

So how does all this fit in with the concept of an unreliable narrator? Well, it’s difficult to explain without outright spoiling the plot – and for sure, Deadly Premonition’s plot is something well worth experiencing for yourself – but suffice it to say that York himself is at the centre of how all this works, and that assumptions you probably naturally made at the outset of the story will almost

certainly be proven wrong by the end of the experience.

Whether York falls into the “liar” or “madman” categories of unreliable narrator is something that can doubtless be debated for a very long time indeed, but the masterful way in which this peculiar character is handled throughout the game makes for a truly compelling experience.

As the player, you have a peculiarly intimate relationship with York, for one thing. It’s not quite the same as riding along inside the

protagonists head in a visual novel, but as you act as an unseen observer from a

third-person perspective as York goes about his business, both

professional and mundane, it’s hard not to feel a sense of attachment to him, and a feeling that you’re growing to understand him. You want to keep him safe; you want to keep him well; you even want to keep him clean and well-groomed, if only for the fact that the game actually penalises you if you don’t change your

shirt and have a shave on a regular basis.

As a game, Deadly Premonition is, as previously mentioned, far

from the best example of open-world, survival horror or adventure games, but

ultimately this really doesn’t matter all that much, because the mechanics are not the central aspect of the experience, nor is the desire to be a technical marvel. Instead, Deadly Premonition is a game about characterisation, mystery and the brilliant, twisted creative vision SWERY wanted to share with the world.

And in that regard, it succeeds admirably: it’s a work with a clear authorial voice and an atmosphere all of its own. It’s a work that will stay with you for many years after you play it, too, and one which people are still enthusiastically discussing and debating to this day. DD

Deadly Premonition


teins;Gate is an example of a game that can be legitimately referred to as a “classic” – a title that has transcended its original incarnation to become a

genuine, transmedia cultural phenomenon.

It’s particularly noteworthy and interesting when we consider its relevance to the topic of the unreliable narrator, because protagonist Okabe Rintarou very much falls into that category. So unreliable is Okabe as a narrator, in fact, that from the very outset he calls into question whether or not he himself believes the nonsense he spouts on a regular basis.

Okabe is an example of the phenomenon referred to in colloquial Japanese as chuunibyou, a term which roughly translates to “middle school second year syndrome”. This most commonly manifests itself in popular media – indeed as it does in Okabe himself – as a person’s misguided belief that they have special powers of some description: something that sets them apart from the rest of the world in some way.

Okabe believes that he is being pursued by a shadowy group known as The Organisation. At the outset of the game, we see him barking orders and updates into his cellphone – which is clearly turned off – and

expressing what can only be described as a series of escalating paranoid delusions.

Except, as it turns out, they’re not entirely inaccurate. Okabe does have special powers: a gift he comes to refer to as “Reading Steiner” for no other reason than he likes the sound of it. Through Reading Steiner, he is able to discern a shift in the “worldline” when something changes – and here’s where Steins;Gate starts to get truly interesting.

The core concept of Steins;Gate’s overall narrative is the question of what would happen to the world if you made a minor change in the past; chaos theory’s “butterfly effect”, in other words. Okabe and his fellow “laboratory members”, who indulge his chuunibyou fantasies at every opportunity rather than attempting to talk him down, discover a means of sending electronic mail messages to the past and, through these “D-Mails”, as they call them, start experimenting with manipulating the worldlines to their advantage.

Of course, it is not that simple at all. Each shift in the worldline takes Okabe further and further away from where he wants to be — a reality where he is able to save the people he cares about from being killed.

Okabe is a fascinating protagonist to ride along inside

the head of precisely because he’s so unreliable. His chuunibyou tendencies,

introduced from the very outset, immediately put the reader on their guard

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Steins;gateNitroplus, 2009Xbox 360, PC, PS3, Vita

Pete Davison

when it comes to anything that he says. This means that when things do start to get more and more strange as the story progresses, we find ourselves questioning whether or not what appears to be happening is actually happening, or if it’s just another paranoid, deluded fantasy from this rather sad individual who has chosen to cut himself off from the rest of reality for reasons that are left at least partly up to the reader’s own interpretation.

In many ways, Steins;Gate’s narrative feels rather dream-like.This feeling is further compounded by the art style, which eschews the smooth, clean lines of a lot of modern anime and visual novels – particularly that in the moe style – in favour of something decidedly more “grimy”. Each image looks like an old, battered photograph, and every character’s eyes are a swirling, hypnotic mass that you can easily get lost in. The overall effect, when combined with the narration and dialogue, is a not altogether unpleasant “otherworldly” feel, where nothing feels quite “right”, but it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly what it is that feels so uncomfortable. In this sense, the reader is given a taste of how Reading Steiner feels to Okabe.

The concept of unreliable narration is itself particularly pertinent to the visual novel medium as a whole. When there are multiple possible conclusions to an interactive narrative, there is usually one referred to as the “true” ending, but in some ways this does a disservice to the other, alternative conclusions which can give us some interesting insight into the characters involved.

In one “non-true” ending, for example, Okabe finds himself voluntarily stuck inside a

time loop in order to try and save someone’s life. He’s inevitably unsuccessful, and eventually driven to a point where he feels like he can do anything because there are no consequences to his actions. This leads him to fantasise about hurting, raping and even killing his erstwhile charge, and the story fades out on this tragic scene as Okabe’s childish chuunibyou tendencies gradually give out to something altogether more sinister.

The question, then, is which of these conclusions is the “right” one? If you only see one ending to Steins;Gate, are you seeing an incomplete narrative? Is the game itself acting as an unreliable narrator, and saying “well, this could happen, but also this completely different thing could happen; which one are you going to choose to make unfold?”

There isn’t an easy answer to that question, of course. Like the best works of art, Steins;Gate presents its narrative in a matter-of-fact manner without judgement one way or the other, and invites you, the reader, to make

up your own mind. Is Okabe the sort of person who would indulge

his darkest fantasies if there were no consequences to his actions?

Is he a heroic type who would throw himself into danger to save

someone he cares about? Or is he legitimately insane?

Even after playing through all of Steins;Gate’s

possible endings, my mind is still full of questions and interpretations, and it is, I feel, a work that will stay with me for many years. It’s

without a doubt one of the best visual novels of all time, and with its wide Western availability on

PC, PlayStation 3 and Vita – the original 360 version is Japan-only – it’s a title that

everyone interested in interactive narratives should check out when

they can. DD


Steins;Gate

e sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed this first issue of Digitally Downloaded as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together.

Next issue, we’re going to be delving into a topic close to our hearts: the concept of fanservice, particularly that seen in Japanese games.

Fanservice is an aspect of gaming that frequently comes under fire from mainstream publications, but is very rarely analysed on anything more than the most superficial level.

Is it really nothing more than objectification of cute girls, or is there something more to games with this type of material in them?

You probably already know our answer to this question already, but we hope you’ll join us on our journey to explore and highlight some of the best examples of fanservice done right – and why Asian developers seem much more willing to tackle this sort of thing than those in the Western world.

What we�ve been playing

Most recently, I’ve been playing through the Hyperdimension Neptunia games that I haven’t yet finished: specifically, Re;Birth2, Re;Birth3 and Hyperdimension Neptunia U Action Unleashed. I’ve been bingeing on Nep-Nep largely because the much-anticipated Megadimension Neptunia V-II – the series’ first installment on PlayStation 4 – is coming out in early February, and if Matt’s review on the Digitally Downloaded website is to be believed, it’s very good indeed, although not entirely immune to some of the issues Compile Heart games tend to suffer from.

I’ve also been playing a bunch of Xenoblade Chronicles X on Wii U, which despite not bearing much resemblance to its Wii-based predecessor, proved to be an excellent sci-fi experience simulating life on an alien planet, with considerable narrative depth if you were willing to explore its side content fully, and one of the most interesting, geographically diverse open worlds ever seen in gaming.

Matt was slightly less enamoured with the game as a whole, rating it four stars on the Digitally Downloaded website, but praised the game’s spectacular scope and scale, even while he would have preferred to see a bit more ambition in the main narrative.

For up-to-date gaming news and reviews between issues of the magazine, be sure to follow Digitally Downloaded on the web at http://www.digitallydownloaded.net – and we’ll see you in the next issue for some fanservice fun! DD

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