Tag: emotional

Valiant Hearts – War Stories Told Right:

Posted on by in Gaming

Fun fact about me that a lot of you probably don’t know – I’m a forces brat. To those confused, a forces brat is a kid who has one or more guardians that are in the military. This includes the air force, military, navy, and marines. In my case, it’s air force. My childhood was spent on bases, waving at the guards on the gates through my window and staring in awe at the planes as they flew above my head. It also meant that by the time I turned twenty, I had moved house ten times, and my dad had traveled to dozens of different countries. To me, moving house and being away from my family felt normal. At the time of writing this, I’m sat in a university coffee shop in Cardiff, away from my family, but it feels just as much like my home as whichever base my dad’s currently stationed at. I’ve grown up independent and I very much subscribe to the idea that home is where those you love are. I have multiple homes – the one with my parents and sister, the university with my friends, Oxfordshire with my secondary school friends and online with those who I care about. These people are my home more than any military base or plane hangar could be.

Whenever I see games about the military and those who serve in it, I tend to get nervous as it’s portrayal in media can be … Less than ideal. People recently like to point to shooters and games set in warzones as the root problem of violence in current generations, yet completely ignore games that provide brilliant representation and learning opportunities because they don’t support their argument. Valiant Hearts is a game that manages to be emotional, educational and powerful, throughout the whole experience. You genuinely love each character that you play as, with their plights becoming yours and genuine emotional impact hitting you when things go wrong.

For those who have never heard of the game, I’m not that surprised. It is quite a niche little indie game that went mostly uncovered by the YouTube gaming community. At its core, it is an adventure, puzzle game that educates its players about the history of World War One (known as The Great War). It tells the story of several people, each fighting their own battles and telling their own story, as well as facing the horrors that have left their mark on the world. From Remembrance Day to the various documentaries that delve into the unknown secrets hidden in the remains of the trenches, we as a world have not forgotten The Great War. We strive not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to make our ancestors’ sacrifice worthwhile by contributing positively to the world. In order to do that, however, we must understand what they went through over a century ago. Valiant Hearts achieves this and more.

If any game can make you think, it’s this one.

Apart from the narrator of the story, the game doesn’t have any real voice acting – apart from the occasional grunt or mumbled noises in various languages, meaning that you as the player are left to interpret the game world as you see fit. There are four main characters, five if you count Walt aka the best good dog ever. Their stories weave together in quite a clever way, with events either happening simultaneously or sequentially. Sometimes you’ll come to an area that you’ll recognize, not because you’ve already played this section but because you approached it from the opposite side of the battlefield. Let me tell you a bit about the characters you can play as:

  1. Emile – A Frenchman recruited for the French Army to fight with fellow Allied troops against the enemy. Emile is a father to his daughter Marie and grandfather to little baby Victor. Marie’s husband, Karl is a German citizen that is deported when Germany declares war on Russia.
  2. Freddie – An American soldier who has voluntarily joined the French army after his wife was killed in a bombing raid by the infamous Baron Von Dorf. He forms a strong friendship with Emile quite quickly.
  3. Anna – A Belgian nurse treating wounding soldiers across various battlefields. Before the war began, she was training to be a veterinarian but after her father was kidnapped, she set out to rescue him whilst helping as many people as she can along the way.
  4. Karl – A young German, forced to leave his wife and son, to serve in the German army, forced to fight against those he loves. Upon finding out that his son has fallen ill, he escapes the German camp and makes his way across the country to reunite with them, despite the dangers of desertion.

The gameplay mostly consists of solving puzzles using items found in the world around you, various stealth sections that involve staying out of the line of sight of gunners and enemy soldiers, plus the occasional quick-time event minigame. The collectibles that you pick up, contain various facts about The Great War and those who lived and died in it. Each character has a series of letters that tell you a bit more about their backstory, as well as their thoughts on the situation they have found themselves in. You can really feel the emotion poured into every word, with clear care and dedication having been put in by the developers to make this game as impactful as possible.

From taking lives to saving lives, Valiant Hearts makes you look at war from all perspectives, whether you believe they are the right or wrong ones is up to you.

From the entire story of Valiant Hearts, there’s one scene that never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Emile, who is still an acting soldier in the French army, is ordered to participate in the Nivelle Offensive. For those who don’t know what that is, it was a Franco-British operation on the Western Front, aiming to break through the German defenses on the Aisne Front within 48 hours. When it came down to it, the strategy was to keep throwing soldiers at the German defenses until they broke down and allowed the Allies to regain the lost ground. Thousands and thousands of soldiers were butchered, forced to run at the enemy guns or face being shot in the back by their own troops for committing mutiny. It was a horrific, wasteful loss of life that sacrificed thousands of brave people who were fighting for their country’s freedom. Although they did regain some lost land, it was not worth all that death.

Emile, when he realizes what is happening and that he and his fellow soldiers are to follow in the footsteps of their deceased fellows, snaps. After watching his uncaring commander send group after group of soldiers straight to their death, with little to no remorse, he grabs his shovel and hits the commander over the back of the head to stop the madness. Although not his intention, the blow kills his commander and he is arrested on the spot. A few months afterward, he is sentenced to death by firing squad. The last we hear from him is in his letter to his daughter, talking about his hatred for war, his grief over the friends he has lost and his hope that she and little Victor can find happiness in his absence. You watch as Emile is marched out of his prison cell, past a collection of fellow soldiers – including Freddie, tied to a post and executed in a hail of gunfire. It’s a poignant and painful moment that I think is something people don’t think about as much when it comes to war stories.

Anyways, I think everyone should give this game a go. It is a well-crafted masterpiece that deserves all the love that can be bestowed upon it. Next time, we’ll go with a much more cheerful game, aka my favorite game at the moment, the Untitled Goose Game! HONK!

Till next time,

CaitlinRC 🙂

GRIS – So Beautiful It Should Be Illegal:

Posted on by in Gaming

So, a few days ago, I had hit a bit of a writer’s block. I wasn’t sure what game I wanted to talk about, so I reached out on Twitter to you guys (@OurMindGames) for any suggestions. Out of the many awesome suggestions I got from you guys, one really grabbed my attention. It was a game called GRIS, an artistic platformer that had been on my radar for a little while. People have spoken very highly of its visuals, soundtrack and powerful message – so needless to say, it seemed right up my alley. As I’m currently prepping to go back to university for my final year, I have some free time on my hands, so I decided to dedicate an afternoon to trying out GRIS. That afternoon quickly morphed into the rest of the day, until around 9 PM that evening when the credits rolled, and I sat back in my chair – stunned into silence.

The story of GRIS isn’t clearly laid out to the player. It’s told through imagery, visualization, and symbolism that will leave you pondering it’s meaning hours after you put it down. At its core, it’s a puzzle platformer. The further you progress through the game, the more abilities you unlock, which allows you to progress to new areas. It’s a fairly linear experience so you don’t worry too much about getting lost, however, the game does encourage you to explore each area to its fullest – with the key to moving on often being tucked away in a hidden cave or up a series of complex jumps. It’s a game that rewards you for taking your time and looking around, which as a completionist is a very satisfying experience.

This is your protagonist. Though you could argue, you are the real protagonist.

When the game starts, you see a young girl lying in the hand of a statue – seemingly asleep. She awakes and begins to sing, gradually rising into the air when suddenly her voice just stops. Without her voice, the statue crumbles and you are powerless to watch as she plummets to the ground, a seemingly desolate place devoid of the beautiful colours of the sky above. To start with, she can barely walk without crumpling to the ground, gradually regaining her strength and abilities as the game goes on. You collect tiny stars that form little constellations, allowing you to cross gaps and restore colour to the world around you. Each colour you restore opens another section – e.g. unlocking blue restores water to the world, enabling underwater exploration.

Honestly, you could fill an art museum with screenshots of this game, and nobody would question it, as this game is visually stunning. The artists behind this game manage to make even the simplest of colour schemes and landscapes beautiful. When you combine that with the haunting soundtrack, this game is best experienced in a room by yourself, on a big screen. I played it on my switch but honestly, it deserves a fully equipped cinema with surround sound and a ginormous screen to truly appreciate every titbit of detail and love that has gone into crafting this game. The game itself is not very long, it took me about 4 hours on and off to finish a playthrough, including a twenty-minute puzzle section that I was just too dumb to realize the simple solution to.

How is possible to be this gorgeous a game, I’m just saying!

What I really want to talk about though, is what I feel the story behind this game is. As there are only a few little cutscenes and the closest we get to any exposition from the character herself is through song, it’s mostly about how you choose to interpret it. The achievements list gives you a hint towards the game’s true meaning – specifically those related to each “Stage” or chapter of the game. I didn’t notice this until the final chapter when I popped an achievement called “Stage 5 – Acceptance”. This achievement and its counterparts all refer to stages from the Kubler-Ross model, which talks about the five stages we go through when we are grieving. Let me explain each stage and its corresponding achievement in GRIS:

Stage 1: Denial – Often our first reaction is to deny that anything is wrong as if pretending it doesn’t exist will reduce the pain later. In the first chapter of GRIS, you start out barely able to walk – collapsing to your knees frequently and struggling to stand up again. Most players will get GRIS to stand back up, but if you leave the controller and let her stand up again on her own – this stage of the model will be fulfilled, as she herself denies that anything is wrong.

Devoid of colour and life, the world seems to be crumbling around you.

Stage 2: Anger – When we are upset, often we internalize that pain and instead lash out at others. When you are hurting, sometimes you feel like that nobody understands the pain you are in and that the only way to lessen the pain you are in is to inflict it upon others. During the second chapter of GRIS, you gain the “heavy” ability which allows you to smash through unstable objects and destroy various statues/pots scattered around the world. This ability is a clear manifestation of that second stage of grief, which the achievement emphasizes as when you destroy three specific statues, you get the “anger” popup.

When the world tries to knock you down, keep pushing on through.

Stage 3: Bargaining – “Don’t you think after all this time, and everything I have ever done, that I am owed this one?” – The Doctor in the Snowmen, Season 7 of Doctor Who. This quote sums up the bargaining stage of grief for me. We feel that we are owed something, that we deserve better than our current situation presents. That maybe, just maybe, the world will take pity on us and provide that little bit of hope. We beg for it, trying to barter with chips that have no real worth anymore, even though we know deep down that it won’t work. In GRIS’s case, this is seen when you come across a statue in the forest chapter. Her first reaction to it when you try to interact is to sing to it, despite her voice still being gone. She is trying to barter with something that isn’t there anymore.

If you don’t learn to accept things, it’ll weigh you down forever.

Stage 4: Depression – I think the use of the underwater section for this stage is remarkably clever. Often, we describe depression as sinking under the waves, falling further and further from the light that we so desperately try to cling to. In my case, it often feels like a heavyweight is attached to my ankle, slowly tugging me downwards no matter how hard I resist it.  In order to get this achievement in GRIS, you must seek out the statue hidden in the darkness. This section is pitch black and finding this hidden cavern is not easy, as its surroundings are full of creeping darkness that threatens to consume you. That statue is of a woman, seemingly sinking down into the inky depths, like how you fell from the sky at the beginning of the game.

We all sink into the darkness sometimes. We just need to keep pushing back to the light.

Stage 5: Acceptance – After retrieving your voice and escaping the shrouding darkness, you come across a tomb on the remains of the land. In this tomb is a statue, lying down, still and quiet. If you sing to it, the acceptance achievement pops. Although it doesn’t seem like much at the time, to me it reminds me of the songs you sing at funerals. In those moments, you can hear the whirling mix of emotions in everyone’s voices – grief, joy, longing and hope all mingling together as one. It’s a haunting yet powerful experience to be a part of, whether they were your close family, a good friend or just an acquaintance.

To me, this game is a tale of grief and loss. Now, this is just my interpretation, but I think that our young protagonist has just lost her mother. To me, the start of the game seems to be the moment that the loss truly hits her and her whole world crumbles around it, losing all the joy, colour and structure that her mother brought to it. Often when we lose someone, we feel like a part of ourselves has been ripped from us, like a missing limb or a hole in your once full heart. In GRIS’s case, this manifests as the loss of her abilities. She struggles to walk, to move through the world on her own, to begin with. Her voice, which can restore life to the world and heal the cracks in it, has been stripped from her. Every time she opens her mouth, nothing comes out – as if she is on one side of a one-way mirror, slamming her hands against it but getting no response.

Every colour she restores to the world, every demon she faces (looking at you, giant creepy eel thing), brings her one step closer to overcoming the grief that is threatening to consume her. The darkness and demons chasing her, seem to indicate depression and anxiety – the way they appear and disappear, how they creep up on her and force her to flee. She can’t fight it, only try to outrun it. The same is in life, you can’t outright fight mental illness. It’s always there and it always comes back. You learn to coexist with it, to lessen its hold on you, to accept it as part of you. The end of the game leans towards this, with her seemingly moving on – her voice spiraling up into the sky, harmonizing with her mother’s, shattering the remaining darkness and restoring colour to the world. It’s a powerful ending to a powerful game.

Light and darkness cannot exist without one another.

This is probably the most moving game I’ve played in the last year. Having recently lost my grandfather, it spoke to me on an incredibly personal level. Even if you can’t afford it right now, watch a playthrough of it, or even listen to the game’s soundtrack. It is, hauntingly beautiful and something I think we all understand on a primal level. Grief and loss are a part of life, yet I hadn’t played a game that really summed up that experience until I played GRIS.

I hope you all have a great week, next up is Little Nightmares! If you enjoyed this piece, remember to like it, follow the site and comment below any feedback or suggestions for future articles!

Much love,

CaitlinRC

Firewatch – Too many fires, too little time.

Posted on by in Gaming

A few years ago, an indie game called Firewatch was released to the admiration of many people online – including the YouTube gaming community. You couldn’t really take two steps without stumbling across it but somehow, I managed to avoid it. Not that I wasn’t interested, it looked like a game that was right up my alley, but I didn’t want to spoil it for myself by watching someone else play it. Yet in typical gaming tradition, it sat on the pile of games that I wanted to play but never got around to, until about this time last year, where I live-streamed it as a change of content from my usual art streams.

If you’re interested in seeing some of my reactions to the game, I made a little compilation video of some funny moments including me going “mhmm sensual paint” (it makes sense in context I swear… kind of.) You can watch that here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1KbsP7QL8E . Firewatch is the kind of game you should experience yourself rather than watching a playthrough. It’s one of those games that tells a story that we all can interpret in different ways and I’m going to talk mainly about how the various events in the game affected me, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t keep reading.

So, for those of you who are still here, let me at least explain what on earth this game is about. Firewatch is at its core, a story-driven walking simulator. You play as Henry, who has taken the job as a lookout in one of many fire towers in one of America’s national parks. He is to spend the entire summer looking out for fires, stopping people from setting off fireworks (darn teens) and generally just wandering through nature and hopefully not dying of boredom. The only person you really interact with is Delilah, your supervisor who speaks to you over the radio. You never meet her, but she is the one other voice you really grow to love throughout the game, which is one of many reasons her voice actress won an award CAUSE SHE’S BRILLIANT OK.

I cannot emphasise how beautiful this game is.

From the moment you start the game, Firewatch throws emotional turmoil at you. You constantly switch between Henry travelling to the watchtower and a series of screens telling stories from Henry and his wife Julia’s relationship – from their first meeting in a bar, to them getting a dog together and eventually, Julia is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and ends up being taken to be cared for by her family in Australia, whilst Henry stays behind. Even though it’s only a small section of the game, it’s more than enough for you to get invested in their relationship and gain an insight into why Henry has taken this job in the middle of nowhere. He doesn’t know how to cope; he needs time to process the events that have unfolded and how he might move forward. It’s something we can all relate to.

Speaking from personal experience, I think having to watch someone you love in pain is one of the worst things you can ever experience. Sure, when bad things happen to you it can weigh on you for the rest of your life, but you feel a sense of control over how you deal with it in the days that follow. Meanwhile, the sheer helplessness that consumes you when you are forced to just sit and watch those you care about suffer, cuts you to your very core. You want to help, to fight back but it’s beyond what limited powers you have and I think Firewatch touches quite well on this subject – by leaving titbits of information about Henry’s relationship with his wife, how he’s processing it all and what he might do after the summer ends.

Now, last week we talked about Alien Isolation and the profound impact that loneliness can have upon you, especially when you are in a stressful situation. With Firewatch, you instantly become attached to Delilah and her relationship with the player, as it’s the only real source of human contact you get throughout the course of the game. Apart from brief interactions with some no-good teenagers and reading the various letters sent between two of the park’s rangers, you only ever come across traces of other people. You grow to care for Delilah, quietly hoping that you’ll be able to meet her in person before the game ends. Everything you go through throughout the game’s story, she is right there by your side, giving her opinion and providing crucial context to what Henry uncovers.

Delilah, like you, wants to know what the only other person she can speak to, looks like. Because then it feels real.

One thing that Firewatch and well-produced horror games have in common, is how they build suspense and paranoia throughout their gameplay. Firewatch leans more on the paranoia aspect, as you slowly realise that it isn’t just hikers and campers in the woods around you. Someone is watching you, listening to your conversations and outright knocking you unconscious when you find the information you weren’t meant to see. An incredible example of this is when you are walking back to your tower at night, talking over the events of the day with Delilah when she casually says:

“Oh well, you’re back in your tower, I guess you need a drink too.”

At this point in the game, I was trying to find my way back and was making my way towards my tower, quietly considering the story implications of the events I had just experienced. My heart stopped momentarily in my chest when I realised, there was someone in my tower. Whether they were lying in wait to ambush me or leaving a threatening note next to my pet turtle, I had no idea. All I knew is that they were there, and I was not. (Side note, if they’d hurt Turt Reynolds I’d have burned down the entire place myself).

Throughout the game, you get to choose how you respond to Delilah over the radio. You can choose to be an ass and not respond at all if you want but anyone who does that is a monster and I’M COMING FOR YOU. This element of choice is there to help you build that relationship and to involve you more in the story, so that you are actually affected by the various events that unfold in the game, rather than just reacting by going “oh well, moving on”. This game is meant to impact you, everything from the art style to the voice acting and the soundtrack is built to involve you in this world and make you care about what is happening to it.

Cissy Jones, who plays Delilah, deserves so much credit. The game wouldn’t be the same without her.

One aspect of Firewatch you really don’t expect is your discovery in the ravine. Sure, the creepy person listening to you over the radio and throwing your typewriter out the window is a tad unexpected, but it isn’t entirely out of the blue. When you’re alone in an unfamiliar place, we all think that we are being watched or listened to. That paranoid part of our brain is screaming, considering the worst when in fact it’s probably just a squirrel. For games that have this central tension and suspense, you don’t expect them to do emotional impact well but oh boy does Firewatch punch you in the heart and brings tears to your eyes.

During your various treks through the wilderness, you occasionally come across various traces of a father and his son who used to live in the tower you now inhabit. They left after a short period of time, but Delilah got quite close to the young boy, Brian, and would lie to her superiors about his presence as children weren’t allowed to stay in the lookout towers. You find an abandoned backpack attached to a tree that contains various climbing gear that Brian presumably “lost”, as well as his hideout containing fantasy novels and role-playing games. Eventually, you venture into the ravine using the climbing gear and discover Brian. Or what remains of him.

There at the bottom of the cavern, is Brian’s decomposing body. One of his shoes had landed away from his broken form, which was nearly unrecognisable. At that moment, the music becomes sombre and you just stand there, staring at this little boy whose life was cut short. I realised what had happened the moment I saw the shoe, but I didn’t want to believe it. I stepped forward into the cavern, my eyes searching for what I hoped wouldn’t be there. When I saw him, the only thought in my mind was: “Did he suffer”. My brain saw this little boy, in agony on the cavern floor, clinging to life desperately as it seeped away from his shattered bones.

RIP Brian Goodwin. He deserved better.

You quickly realise that he fell and later discover that Brian’s father Ned has been living in the wilderness ever since his son’s death, hiding from the authorities and as a result, spying on Henry and Delilah. In the tape left to you by Ned, you hear the broken man recount the moments of his son’s death, talking about how Brian’s hook didn’t sink into the rock properly, how he was forced to watch his son fall without being able to help. Part of you wants to feel for him, as a father who lost his son but another part of you can only see that broken little boy in the dark cavern.

As you are airlifted out of the woods and away from the fire that is spreading, you just look at the credits as they roll – showing the pictures of Ned and Brian from their disposable camera, as well as the ones you took on that same roll of film. You don’t see Delilah again, with your final interaction being over the radio in a lookout tower, just like it was at the beginning of the game. A poignant end to a powerful game.

Honestly, I could probably go on about various elements of Firewatch for about a full-fledged novel’s worth of content, but I think what I’ve said in this article sums up the most powerful parts of this game. Grief, loneliness and paranoia are three of the most powerful things that can influence our choices and our memories. No-one is exempt from these feelings, regardless of whether you suffer from a mental health condition or not. You are not immune. So, reach out, there will always be someone there who is willing to listen.

I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. A bit more of a sombre tone compared to last weeks but hey, don’t worry. We’re talking about Mario Odyssey next week and how it’s worldwide journey can bring joy to our lives in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Like, comment and follow my site to keep up to date on everything I’m up to! If you want to suggest future content, use the Contact Me page or tweet me at @OurMindGames on Twitter.

Till next week,

CaitlinRC