{"id":1117,"date":"2013-04-17T03:35:42","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T07:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/islemaster.wordpress.com\/?p=1117"},"modified":"2014-02-17T16:29:32","modified_gmt":"2014-02-18T00:29:32","slug":"thirty-flights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/thirty-flights\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirty Flights of Loving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should I be embarrassed that I did’t like Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving<\/em><\/a>?
\n
\nSpoilers ahead.<\/strong> I knew very little going into TFOL<\/em>: I knew it was stylish, award-winning, had something to do with a heist, and that it “tells a better story in 13 minutes than most games do in 13 hours.”<\/a> Maybe what I’m feeling now was a result of inflated expectations?<\/p>\n

The game seems to garner universal acclaim (see Metacritic<\/a>, Wikipedia<\/a>, Rock Paper Shotgun<\/a> and The Brainy Gamer<\/a>). After playing through the brief experience three times and reading all the developer commentary, I was a little nonplussed. I proceeded to dig through reviews, hoping to understand why everyone is so excited about it. Curiously, I found a lot of talk about how different<\/em> the game is, and a very little about why it’s good<\/em> – and a lot of emotional reactions, something I seemed to miss out on. Here are some of the features called out in the discussion surrounding the game:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Its style.<\/strong> TFOL<\/em>‘s world is colorful and minimalist in a way that embraces its hybrid game\/film heritage. It uses blockheaded characters with expressive flat-texture faces. I’ve seen a few people call its style “cubist”, which I find a little funny<\/a>. I think it would be more accurate just to say the game uses a blocky, gamey aesthetic.<\/li>\n
  2. Its use of jump-cuts.<\/strong> This is particularly unusual for a first-person game because it can be disorienting. Most critics seem to feel it works in TFOL<\/em> because it’s used to maintain an intense pace, to make the player fill in the narrative gaps, and because disorientation is one of the emotions the game wants to evoke.<\/li>\n
  3. Its nonlinear narrative.<\/strong> The way people talk, you’d think this had never been done in a game before.<\/li>\n
  4. Its expectation of an observant audience.<\/strong> The design of the game encourages a breakneck race through the story, which makes it easy to miss some important details – really<\/em> important details that allow you to understand the original sequence of events.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I’ll admit, the game is stylish. Its bold use of color and silhouette is awesome. There’s some talk of how detailed the world is, but this isn’t really true; there are details, but they’re either crucial to tell the story or carefully placed to add character. For the most part there’s just enough world there to tell the story.<\/p>\n

    The jump-cuts and nonlinear narrative are neat, but I’m not sure they impress me as much as they’re supposed to. I’ll admit, they’re pretty unique for a first-person experience. It’s just that Adam Cadre’s Photopia<\/em><\/a> did something similar with interactive text fourteen years ago, and in my opinion it tells a far more touching (and coherent) story. In fact, it tackled the additional challenge of multiple perspectives. In any case piecing together a narrative from a set of temporally disconnected scenes is nothing new to games. Several of the Myst games also do this well, but they’re longer, slower, and usually in the past tense. I agree that we should have more stories like this, but it’s not a revelation.<\/p>\n

    The coherence was a problem for me. If I hadn’t heard the word “heist” going in I never would have associated that term with this story. I love experiences that reward repeat play with unnoticed details and deeper insights, but when I don’t understand anything<\/em> on the first playthrough… or the second… I feel there’s a communication problem. I was especially bothered by my inability to sequence the car crash with the airport escape, until I saw someone post that around their sixth playthrough they noticed that Anita-pointing-a-gun-at-you had a bionic arm and leg, which apparently indicates that the heist occurs after the car crash. They also noted that in the seconds-long flashback right before the crash, the woman on the bed isn’t Anita (I hadn’t noticed). And several critics have referred to a love triangle – but I don’t recall seeing any romantic interaction between my partners in crime. I’m also still not sure why Anita points a gun at me, or why I choose to leave her behind at the airport, or who was shooting at us anyway.<\/p>\n

    It’s good that the game raises these questions for me, but the truth is I wouldn’t have made it as far as most of these questions if I wasn’t digging through reviews of the game. I’m more hooked by the surrounding hype than I am by the story, and that’s kind of a disappointment. Am I not artsy enough or smart enough for Thirty Flights of Loving<\/em>? I hope not; I suspect it’s just not to my taste. In any case, it makes me want to try and tell a cinematic nonlinear story that’s not so evasive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Should I be embarrassed that I did’t like Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[392,393,387,17,13],"class_list":["post-1117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","tag-blendo-games","tag-brendon-chung","tag-played-in-2013","tag-released-in-2012","tag-videogame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1144,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117\/revisions\/1144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bradleycbuchanan.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}